POETRY IN REVIEW

1 5 7 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W W E S D A V I S In a short story called ‘‘Career Move,’’ published in The New Yorker in 1992 and later collected in Heavy Water and Other Stories, the novelist Martin Amis conjured up an improbable world in which poetry is Hollywood’s stock in trade, and screenwriting merely the preoccupation of a literary fringe. When Amis’s fictional poet whips o√ a new piece of verse, he doesn’t have to flog it on the literary circuit. He simply faxes a copy to his agent and heads for the gym. Lucrative o√ers start rolling in before he has time to finish his post-workout fruit juice. Within days the poet finds himself jetting from Heathrow to LAX for meetings with studio bosses at a posh hotel on the Avenue of the Stars. Everything about the enterprise is first class. ‘‘First class was no big thing. In poetry, first class was something you didn’t need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory. First class was just business as usual.’’ On the other side of the literary tracks, screenwriters toil away in T h e A t l a n t i c Tu n n e l : S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by Paul Farley (Faber and Faber, 160 pp., $25) 1 5 8 D A V I S Y obscurity, mailing their closet-drama scripts to little magazines and waiting endlessly for replies that arenearly always negative. Acceptance is almost past the limit of hope, and Amis’s screenwriter is delighted just to receive a handwritten rejection in place of the usual form letter. (‘‘I was really rather taken with two or three of these,’’ the editor of one journal tells him, ‘‘and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stu√.’’) In this alternate reality even a successful screenplay reaches only a small, cultish audience, made upmostlyofotherscreenwritersandwannabes.Poetry,ontheother hand, has blockbuster potential – ‘‘Opening in four hundred and thirty-seven theaters, the Binary sonnet ‘Composed at — — Castle’ did seventeen million in its first weekend’’ – and a poem that does well can bankroll a life of splendid excess. ‘‘Career Move,’’ in other words, reads like a wish-fulfillment dream for neglected poets. But I don’t think that’s why Paul Farley – whose volume of selected poems, The Atlantic Tunnel, was published in May – remembered Amis’s story in the keynote address he gave at the Gri≈n Trust awards ceremony in 2008. Farley’s third book of poetry, Tramp in Flames, had appeared on the short list for the Gri≈n Poetry Prize in 2007, and the flurry of attention he saw poets receiving at the awards banquet that year brought the story to mind. (‘‘Did that really happen?’’ he remembered asking himself on the way home. ‘‘Was there a film crew following poets around? Did your faces stare down from banners onto a dance-floor while we threw ambitious shapes into the small hours?’’) What’s more, the plight of Amis’s fictional screenwriter, languishing in obscurity whether his work is published or not, illustrated a point Farley wanted to make about poetry: ‘‘One thing I can say – and this is the secret that isn’t really a secret – is that poems want to be read. Wherever we go to get them, they need to come into the light. It completes them. . . . All of our verbal contraptions want to be switched on, to feel the current of attention flowing through them.’’ But the story’s deeper resonance with Farley’s own work rings out on a level he did not mention in the Gri≈n speech. In Farley’s mind the two enterprises Amis makes antithetical – poetry and filmmaking – look more alike than di√erent. ‘‘Poetry and cinema ,’’ he wrote in the Guardian several years ago, ‘‘can both be P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 5 9 R said to share a...