"For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative"
About this Quote
Peter Davison lands the complaint like a wry stage aside: polite on the surface, devastating in implication. He starts with the kind of modest concession you make when you want to sound fair ("it's a little better now"), then drops the number - "70%" - to give his irritation the authority of a weather report. The joke is that the statistic is almost beside the point; what matters is the sense of creative monotony so overwhelming it can be quantified.
The target is the "present indicative", a grammatical term that sounds technical but functions here as a shorthand for a bigger aesthetic gripe: poems that narrate in a flat, continuous now, as if immediacy were automatically intensity. Subtext: contemporary writers mistake proximity for urgency, confession for craft, and a camera-like description of the moment for emotional movement. The present tense becomes a default setting, not a deliberate choice - and Davison hears that default as laziness, trend-chasing, or workshop homogeneity.
Coming from an actor, the jab carries extra bite. Acting is built on the illusion of presentness; every night you perform as if the events are happening now. Davison knows how hard that trick is to earn. His critique suggests many poems are trying to borrow that same "liveness" without building the dramatic spine that makes liveness matter: shifts in time, perspective, consequence. It's not anti-modern; it's anti-unvaried. The line reads like someone who wants poems to take responsibility for their tense - to decide what time is doing to the speaker, not just hang everything on the thin thrill of "right now."
The target is the "present indicative", a grammatical term that sounds technical but functions here as a shorthand for a bigger aesthetic gripe: poems that narrate in a flat, continuous now, as if immediacy were automatically intensity. Subtext: contemporary writers mistake proximity for urgency, confession for craft, and a camera-like description of the moment for emotional movement. The present tense becomes a default setting, not a deliberate choice - and Davison hears that default as laziness, trend-chasing, or workshop homogeneity.
Coming from an actor, the jab carries extra bite. Acting is built on the illusion of presentness; every night you perform as if the events are happening now. Davison knows how hard that trick is to earn. His critique suggests many poems are trying to borrow that same "liveness" without building the dramatic spine that makes liveness matter: shifts in time, perspective, consequence. It's not anti-modern; it's anti-unvaried. The line reads like someone who wants poems to take responsibility for their tense - to decide what time is doing to the speaker, not just hang everything on the thin thrill of "right now."
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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