Andrew Smith, "Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello, welcome to New Books and Sociology, a podcast on the New Books Network. My name is Matt Dawson and I'm a professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow. And I'm delighted to have as my guest today Andy Smith, who is also a professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow. And in addition to being a similarly titled colleague, Andy is the author of Class and the Uses of Poetry, Symbolic Enclosures,

published in 2024 with Power Grave Macmillan, which we're going to discuss today. So Andy, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Matt. And thank you for inviting me. I'm really chuffed to be here. Oh, we're chuffed to have you. So can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write this book? Yeah, so I guess my undergraduate degree was joint English literature and sociology, Matt. So

By and large, that's defined the kind of area that I've been interested in right through my career, which is the kind of borderland between literary studies or cultural studies and sociology. And I think the question I'm particularly interested in is, or have been interested in, is a question about what it is that people do with culture, with different kinds of cultures in their lives, and particularly what they do with

cultural texts of different sorts. You know, no cultural practice has meaning in and of itself. Whatever social significance or other kinds of significance it has emerges in and through the way it's used by a particular audience or how an audience engages with it. You know, that's a lesson I take, first of all, from...

Great West Indian writer, CLR James, who I know you know as well, and his writings on sport where he insists that it's the crowd that makes the meaning of the game. There's no meaning inherent in the game. It's how the crowd responds to and receives the play on the field that makes the meaning of the game. Well, that's broadly the kind of question I've been interested in in different ways. What is it that people do with cultural texts?

What are the wider forces that shape or delimit people's access to different kinds of culture? But also what do different kinds of culture make possible in people's lives? What are their affordances for different kinds of audiences? When I started off in my PhD, I did a comparative study of the reading of two novels, one about the Highland Clearances and one about colonialism in West Africa. And I looked at how those novels were read and understood by people

working class audiences here in Scotland and by audiences in Nigeria. And therefore looking at how people's responses to an understanding of the fiction could shape and inform their understandings of history in a broader sense. And I guess this project is a kind of return to that interest in

I don't know, the sociology of reading, I suppose you would call it. But in this case, in relation to poetry specifically, which is just because I've had an interest in... I'm not an expert, but I have a personal interest in poetry. And I'm just curious about the question about actually how people respond to it and to what extent it's actually a part of...

people's cultural lives in any meaningful sense um you know today yeah and i think you know you were saying there about how culture is used and how it comes to going meaning that's something that really comes out in the book and i should say before we get into the questions this is this is a really fantastic book and one i really loved reading and one i really enjoyed and it's one of those texts i was thinking about as you start reading you and you're thinking this is really interesting there's lots of really significant important things here you sort of wonder

why someone hasn't discussed the topic before because it becomes there's so so much rich stuff there but in many ways as we're going to see in our discussion we were probably quite lucky that you were the person that came along and tackled it since you do it so well um

And I'm going to start by talking about how you open the book. So you open the book talking about how sociology has or has not, and often has not, as we just mentioned, approach poetry in two ways. So firstly, as a topic for sociological study, and then secondly, as potential inspiration for how sociology could be done. So I'm going to take those in turn. Let's start with the first one, which is poetry as a topic.

And here you're critical of a tendency in some cultural sociology, often of a Borgian type, though maybe not Borgia himself, you know, to overlook the aesthetics culture. And I'm going to quote from you here, Andy. You say, quote, it would indeed be insufficient to treat poetry, for example, as if it were nothing more than the symbolic equivalent of fiat money, something which enriches those who own it and impoverishes those who do not.

but which is as practically useful in and of itself as a paper banknote. Poetry makes things possible and things can be done with it. So why then do you think this aesthetic element is so important to the sociological study of poetry? Yeah, it's a good question, Matt. I mean, I am broadly a defender of Bourdieu. You know, there's been a kind of a turn against him to some extent, I think, in cultural sociology recently, but I actually...

I think his insistence on the question about how

the opportunity to access and to use and to take pleasure from different kinds of culture are delimited by structured inequalities in our society and how they in turn reproduce those inequalities is absolutely fundamental salutary question. So in that sense, I'm very much a defender of the kind of questions that Bourdieu is asking us to think about in relation to culture.

But I am kind of sympathetic to the critique that's arisen in cultural sociology recently that says his account isn't necessarily as attentive as it might be to the different textures of different kinds of cultural practices, like the different possibilities that are inherent in them or the different affordances, as people tend to say, right?

It's not that there's nothing about that in Bourdieu. I think there is. But because he's primarily interested in the question of how our relationship to cultural practices is shaped by and in turn shapes different kinds of social inequality...

You can certainly read him and get the sense that actually the particular kind of culture at hand is kind of irrelevant, right? The same processes can be explored, whether we're talking about football or contemporary dance or, you know, gaming or whatever it happens to be. And for me, the problem with that is...

that it underplays a key part of the inequality, right? What happens when a given people are effectively denied access to a particular kind of culture is not just a question about how that marks them out within the field of culture. It's not just like how does it symbolically mark them in certain ways. They're actually being denied access

real, consequential, meaningful potentialities in those kinds of culture. They're being denied access to what that stuff makes possible in people's lives. So, you know, or what an older Marxist account of culture would have called the use values of culture, right? And that's why I think

It is important that we think about what are the affordances of different kinds of cultures, not as a way of turning our back on the question of inequality, which I think has happened in some accounts, but precisely because those affordances are integral to the question of inequality. We can't understand it unless we understand what are people being actually denied access to in being denied access to certain kinds of culture. Yeah, and I think that, and we'll come back to this later, that question of the value of

of that can be gained from accessing culture is something that comes out very strongly uh in your book or comes down we talk about some of the empirical material maybe um let's then turn to the second part you introduced in that first chapter which is the link between sociology and poetry and you know in there a recent trend of sociologists encouraging other sociologists to learn from poetry and to take the example of poetry up in a variety of different ways

But you suggest that, and again, I'm going to quote you here, quote, poetry becomes a way of saying something about how we might do sociology, but at the cost of looking past what is entailed in doing poetry. So what leads you to say that? I guess part of what leads me to it, Matt, is that I've been reading reflections by, you know, a number of contemporary poets, including people whose poetry I used in the project, and

I'm thinking particularly of a Scottish poet called John Burnside. He's a very, he passed away recently, sadly, deeply radical political figure, very committed to the idea that poetry has political significance and has political purpose.

But he also talks in his writing with quite a lot of frustration about the way in which he sees poetry being taught in things like the school curriculum now. And his sense is that it is, in as far as poetry is taught at all, it's constantly treated just as

the vehicle of a kind of sociological or political set of messages, right? So students are constantly encouraged to read poetry for what it tells us about the political state of the world or as a kind of form of political self-expression of some sort or other. And he's frustrated by that because he says what is not being attended to and what the students are not being given any way of properly thinking about

is what makes poetry a distinctive way of talking to the world, a distinctive kind of utterance? Like, what is it that makes a poem different from other ways of communicating something to an audience? Particularly, how does poetry draw on...

all of the rich material qualities of language, like rhythm and rhyme and cadence and, you know, intonation and all the rest of it, in order to speak in a different kind of way. So, you know, I had that kind of, that criticism in the back of my mind. And there have been quite a lot of calls or discussions of,

what poetry might, what sociology might learn from poetry recently in the discipline. Um, uh, and, and also a kind of growing discussion about poetry as a form of potential method for sociology in some ways. Um,

But my general sense, not from all of those interventions, but reading them as a whole, is that they tend to be using poetry as a way of, really a way of staking a claim in debates about what sociology is, right? And it's mostly...

a certain kind of romantic idea of what poetry is in order to defend the call for a more phenomenological sociology, a sociology that's more attentive to stuff in itself, less concerned with explanation, less concerned with causality, more interested in lived experience in one sense or another. So, you know, what I don't see very much of in those debates is any attention

attempt to really take poetry seriously in the way that Burnside wants it to be taken seriously. Like, what is it that makes poetry a distinctive kind of utterance in the world? Not disputing that we can think about overlaps between the poetic imagination and the sociological imagination, but

But I just think we need to be willing to think seriously about what is it that makes poetry a distinctive kind of way of talking that can't just be flattened out into a way of doing politics or a way of doing sociology without losing something about the practice itself. So that's my hesitation, I guess. And I think that's right. And one thing I was really struck when reading it was that

surely writing poetry is quite difficult. You know, why should we as sociologists be able to use those skills? You know, it's quite a challenging thing to do as all of us as teenagers who try to write poems for the test. So let's turn a bit more to the actual, the project behind this and the empirical material now. So I was quite taken with what you term at the start of chapter two as you call it a theft and you're using the term theft as

to identify how poetry comes to be seen as not for many in your case working class readers that somehow poetry has been taken away from them as you were saying they're not don't have the access so can you tell us how this influenced your approach to the work you did on this topic

Yeah, so I guess I did what all of us do when we start and work on a new kind of topic. When I first began, I started looking around to see what other empirical studies existed of the reading of poetry. And one, I couldn't find very many, really hardly any that used actual empirical research to explore how audiences engage with poetry.

And the few that I could find, which mostly came out of literary study departments rather than sociology departments, tended to base their accounts on

the testimonies and the reflections of people who already read poetry. So people who are into the stuff already and were kind of familiar with it. And on the basis of those testimonies, people would, you know, develop accounts of why it matters to people in their lives and what people do with it. And so,

Because those were the voices that were informing those accounts, understandably, the authors, you know, generally arrived at very optimistic conclusions, which, you know, tended to emphasize all the ways that poetry matters in the world and how it can sustain readers in their lives in different sorts of ways. Because those studies had absolutely no space.

For the experiences of people who don't read poetry or can't read it or won't read it because they feel like poetry hasn't been written in a way that's in any way relevant to their experiences, they end up with largely negative.

uncritical account of the agency of readers. This is what, of course, Bourdieu famously calls the ideology of cultural communism, right? The idea that culture is just out there, anyone can access it if they want to. And of course, that has a really vicious double edge because then the implication is if you don't do that, if you're someone who hasn't made yourself cultured, you've got no one to blame but yourselves. You've revealed yourself to be

you know, a kind of barbaric person in some sense. So, you know, because that idea is such a still important part of how class is articulated in our social life and because it, to my critical view, seemed to be being replicated in a rather unquestioned way in the few studies I could see of the reading of poetry, I really felt it was important to try and organise a study of

that took seriously the experiences of people who didn't read poetry, who hadn't read poetry maybe since they were at school, or who maybe were antipathetic to poetry for one reason or another, partly because that situation is a product of a real history of dispossession. I mean, I don't explore this in as much detail as I would have liked to have done in the book, but it seems to me

that the historical roots of poetry as a practice are with...

collective, communal, popular traditions of storytelling and singing and oral literature of one kind or another, but that it has been subject to over a long period to a kind of symbolic enclosure. Never unresisted, never uncontested, certainly contested in a city like Glasgow, but there is, there's a history of

sustained attacks on the institutions and the spaces which historically have supported working class culture, working class cultural endeavour. There's a growing instrumentalisation in education and there's a kind of...

emergence of an assumption as Tom the Scottish poet Tom Leonard puts it that people have to be taught to like poetry you know it's something that is given is in the gift of the elites to hand down to those below them as it were um

So I guess what I thought of the project as being an attempt to try and map out some of the consequences of that history of dispossession in the actual moment of encounter between readers and poetic texts. You know, I'd say again, that's a history that's been contested all the way through and continues to be

But nonetheless, it's a real history. And I kind of conceived of the project as being an attempt to try and just register some of the consequences of that history of dispossession. Yeah. And the way you do that is you set up these reading groups and

for readers to come together and discuss a selection of poems. And you provide the poems they read in the appendix to the book. And they're very interesting in and of themselves. I think the reader had a better mind of them. So I was curious how you chose the actual poems that you had the groups read.

And then also to foreshadow something we're maybe going to talk about later on, how did your participants end up introducing their own poems into the discussion? Yeah. So I just, I just, I chose a series of poems by living Scottish poets. I just, I just, I thought it would make it neater to have the focus on contemporary poetry in a sense, Matt. And what I tried to do was pick a selection of,

that included different kinds of poetic writing. So some are kind of formally structured, some have no formal structure, some slightly formally structured, some are rhyming, some are non-rhyming.

Some are written in standard English, quote unquote, and some are not in standard English. Because in part, I was interested in just seeing what people thought about different ways of writing poetry and how people responded to different styles of poetry. And as you've said, yeah, I got them printed up. I also had them recorded on CDs with the help of a

colleague who has the Scottish accent, which clearly I don't, and I just asked different community groups if they would take them away and either listen to them or read them and then

arranged to meet them later to talk about what they made of them. But focusing on groups of, you know, groups in the community that weren't there to read poetry already, that were there for other reasons than, you know, weren't particularly focused on kind of literature in some sense or another. But you're right. Over time, I kept meeting people or

Folk who came to the groups would introduce me or mention to me someone they knew who wrote poetry, who wrote it in their spare time, was trying to get published as a poet, or was known for writing poetry in a roundabout. And that made me realise kind of shamefully that the way I'd organised the project to begin with

was really kind of guilty of reproducing an old stereotype, which is that working class men and women are the recipients of culture, not its creators. They, you know, they get given culture, but they don't produce it for themselves. So...

But it took me a little while to realize that. But when I did, then I started to try to meet with, you know, people who were writing poetry and to talk to them about their work, about what their experiences were of trying to get published and trying to get recognized in one sense or another. Yeah.

Sometimes in the groups, people would critique the poems that I'd chosen. I mean, they wouldn't just say that they didn't like a particular poem, but they would say, why are we reading these poems? And would say that it would have been better if we'd been reading something else. Particularly a few times, people talked about song lyrics, that they would much rather it had been a discussion about song lyrics than

There was a few participants who were part of a kind of scene in Glasgow that's really into both contemporary and historical blues music. And people would, sometimes those people would say, compared to this poem, which is

They felt to be over elaborate, overextended, too complicated, too ornate. Think about the clarity of the blues. Think about how with very simple things, very powerful messages and emotions can be conveyed. So, yeah, the selection of poems I made was never, it wasn't uncontested and often people would propel

propose what they they thought would have been better options partly as a way of critiquing what they found to be problematic about the poems that they've been asked to read yeah and i think one of the things that is really good about the book is you quite often produce the exchanges that are had in these groups where you can see the sort of people arguing about what's happening with the poems and they are really interested so let's turn to the empirical material of the book

And you start in the more empirical section of the book talking about something we've already discussed quite a bit, which is the exclusion that working class readers feel from poetry or are made to feel. You talk about the fences put around it at one point, which I think is a lovely metaphor. And in doing so, you link this to Baudieu once again and his notion of symbolic violence and talk about how people do that.

or perhaps do not, as Baudieu often suggested was the case, become aware of it. So can you tell us a bit about how this sort of symbolic violence, this feeling that this was not the then, was experienced by your participants? I mean, as soon as I started to try and recruit people to take part, Matt, it became very quickly very clear just how powerfully

a form of literature like poetry can serve as the conduit for that kind of exclusion or those kinds of symbolic violences. You know, in other words, how much it can be a conduit for judgments about people and how those judgments are both ascribed, but also sometimes internalized by people. You know, so I would go to libraries, I'd go to community centers, I'd go to like other

places, organisations to see if I could find groups that might be interested in taking part and often I'd have to speak to gatekeepers on front desks or by email or whatever and it was not uncommon for people in those positions to say,

oh, it's about poetry, that's not going to be of any interest to the people we work with. You know, those kinds of judgments were made. Or it wasn't all that uncommon also for people to say on their own behalf, you know, if it's about poetry, I can't really help you with that. And that kind of exclusionary quality was also evident sometimes in the discussions that

within the groups that there's this kind of romantic ideology about poetry, which sees it as a means of spiritual uplift, you know, of all kinds of culture is the one that's most

treated as being potentially redemptive in some sense, it seems to me. But that isn't how many of the participants in the discussions responded to these poems, at least initially. You know, people very often talked about finding poems that we were talking about

hard to crack difficult to get into you know not making not making any any sense um in fact you know more that's maybe even not putting it strongly enough people often talked about a sense that the poems were kind of antagonistic right they were kind of like mocking the reader um

It's not that people thought they were meaningless, it was that they thought, "Here's a text that contains a meaning which it refuses to give to me, the reader." It keeps to itself in some sense.

That wasn't uncommon for people to talk about their initial responses to the poem in that kind of way. And I quote one older man, he says about one of the poems that we read, "As I went through it, I felt as though I had been tricked. I felt like I'd been tricked. It's very clever, but I'm not clever enough to understand it. It's over my head," he says.

Now, that wasn't the response of every reader by any means to every poem. And it wasn't very rarely where those discussions ended. That was just, that was people's often first articulation of their feelings about the poetry. But yeah, there was evidence in these discussions of the way in which the encounter with a prestigious kind of culture like published poetry can have the effect of putting people in their place, as Bourdieu said.

So that's, as I understand it, that's what he means by symbolic violence, right? The way in which culture can serve as a mechanism, sometimes internalized for putting people in their place, socially speaking. But you're right, I really came to feel that he's mistaken about one thing and he's mistaken in insisting that

that symbolic violence is invisible to the people who are on the receiving end of it. That's what he argues, right? If you remember, he says symbolic violence is a form of social domination which, because it is converted into a symbolic expression, becomes inscrutable, right? It just fades into the way things are in the world. People stop seeing it for the form of exclusion or the form of dispossession that it is.

Well, that was not what was evident in these discussions at all. You know, very often if somebody felt that the poem in front of them was not making sense, that it was written in a way that was excluding them, that it was hard to crack in some way or other,

What that led them to was a critical reflection on why that should be the case. Like, what is the nature of the relationship that is happening here between me and this text and the person who wrote that text? So, you know, that man who I just mentioned, who talked about not being able to crack that poem, very soon after saying that, you went on to say...

He's spinning it out because he can. Talking about the poet here, right? The poet is spinning it out because he can. He's spinning it out and using words and rhyming because he can. I think that's just what poets do or, you know, words closely to that effect. Right.

rather than kind of internalizing that sense of exclusion, right, rather than sort of simply taking it as a judgment on him himself, he turned it into an accusation, right? He turned it into an accusation about poetry as an expression of or as a form of cultural privilege of some sort. He's doing it because he can. It's like a little...

one-sentence summary of a Bordusian account of cultural violence, right? So it's like that move, that critical, reflexive move that went from a sense of being excluded by the poems to a questioning of how the situation comes about in which these texts are not accessible to certain readers, that happened time and time again in the course of these conversations. So I really felt...

you know, Bourdieu is perhaps a little guilty of overstating the hidden quality of symbolic violence. I just don't think that was what was evident in these, in these discussions anyway. Yeah. And I think your empirical evidence brings it out very well. It's in, since you mentioned that example, I remembered that guy saying that, you know, he's doing it because he can, you know, which I thought was, if you say a wonderful way of putting it. And I was really struck when you were talking about this, you have a quite lengthy discussion in there of the group's reading of one poem, uh,

a poem called Mrs Midas and here you in discussing this and how these readers confront this text you you did something really interesting which you return to at the end of the book again which is you recognize and contest the fences around poetry and recognize as you say the sort of the creative ways that your participants encountered these poems and sought to understand them

But yet you're also critical of what you have not fallen for what you call an occlusion, a kind of populism which sees all readings as having the same purchase on the poem. So can you tell listeners a bit about how your readers encountered that poem? Because I think it's a really good example of your argument. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, so...

For those who don't know, Mrs. Midas is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy. It's from a collection called The World's Wife, and that's a collection in which she offers a kind of feminist reimagining of a whole series of famous historical events and figures from the imagined perspective of the wives of those uniformly male protagonists of history. And Mrs. Midas is this kind of very witty woman

contemporary retelling of the Midas myth from the perspective of Midas' wife. Part of the reason it was kind of so striking in these contexts is that, of course, to make sense of that poem in the first instance, the reader has to at least know what the Midas myth is and they have to have some sense of that story.

And not all the people who took part in the research did know that myth. And so for readers who didn't know it, of course, the poem was very, very confusing because it's full of these weird moments when things are turning into gold. There's all these metamorphoses happening. And it was really felt to be kind of opaque and like puzzling. Yeah.

So in that sense, it's a striking example of the fact that, which is another point that Bourdieu makes, of course, making sense out of poetry, making meaning out of poetry, like any other kinds of culture, generally depends on the reader already being in possession of

A body of knowledge, a series of codes, a set of understandings without which it's not easy to make sense of the text at hand. You know, that is a very explicit example because the things in the title of the poem, but it happened in other ways in relation to lots of the poems that we discussed, you know, lots of poems that

involve little intertextual nods to other poems or to other bodies of knowledge and therefore part of their meaning is bound up with the question of whether the reader does or doesn't know something about a wider canon of literary and cultural material and of course access to that canon is absolutely not equally distributed in the social world um

But then that was only half the story. So that was true. There were quite a lot of readers who really initially were very puzzled by the poem, but people didn't just kind of surrender to that experience, or in general they didn't. What people tended to do then was to try to work together

to find ways of making the poem meaningful. And what they generally did in that respect was find ways of relating it to their own lived experience in some sense or other. So in the case of Mrs. Midas, many readers, especially women readers, focused on the fact that this is a poem about a relationship

And it's a relationship that's clearly breaking down. And there's something about money involved in what's happening here. And so people interpreted it completely unreasonably as a metaphorical way of describing money.

The difficulties of living with a partner who is, you know, controlling, controls household finances or is very tight-fisted or has, you know, gambles too much. And people would weave...

reflections on the poem in and through sharing their own lived experience with other people in the group and talking about, you know, either themselves or people that they knew who had been in relationships of that kind and what it had meant and how they'd responded to it and so forth. So I try and describe that in the book as...

reading through critical closeness. So instead of the kind of conventional literary critical modality, which is supposed to, which assumes you've got to be distant from the text,

detach your lived experience from the text not bring any of that to bear and whatever you do don't read the poem as if it was about real life remember it's just an aesthetic object but this is exactly the opposite kind of response and you know I tried to describe it as a reading through critical closeness um

But you're right, Matt. I mean, all the people that I met and worked with on this project were very creative, imaginative, resourceful readers. People found ways of making sense of the poems, even if they didn't initially understand them, even if they hadn't read poetry very much since they were at school. But I am sceptical about the kind of relativist argument that just says,

Each and every way of reading a given poem is equally compelling. I just think that's wrong. I think it's wrong because one...

I mean, it's attractive because it sounds so optimistic and it means we don't have to worry about social inequality, but it hides under that optimism the many real ways in which people's access to culture is limited and controlled and unequally organised. And in particular...

I think it underplays a key fact, which is that what many readers are denied, it seems to me, or what seemed to me to be the case on the basis of these discussions, what many readers didn't have access to was a language or a training that would allow them to recognize

how poetry works through playing on the material qualities of language, like rhythm, rhyme, cadence, all of those kind of material aspects of language, which is what poetry works through. And I think that's a real dispossession, people not having access to that way of interpreting poetry, not because...

we should think about poetry as a kind of set of aesthetic puzzles that we've got to decode. But because if you think about poetry in that way, it's a reminder that poetry works through our bodies, right? It works through our material self. It works by playing on the rhythms of breath and heartbeat and footfall and all the other kind of cadences of the body.

And that's a way of, that recognition is a way of opening poetry out to everybody because it speaks to our common embodied experience. So I really, I think that we do have to acknowledge that

People are not given equal opportunities to understand literary forms like poetry, and there are real dispossessions involved in that. And one of them, it seems to me, is that by denying people a sense of poetry as a crafted form,

a crafted working on the material qualities of language we just leave the door open to a view that says poetry is the product of genius right is ineffable there's no there's just some geniuses who write poetry and the rest of us we just have to try and puzzle it through um and i think that's a you know that would be a terrible place to end up you know

Definitely would. Definitely. And a very anti-Borgian place to end up as well, for that matter. So picking up on this discussion you just had about, you know, the groups making sense of the poems and how they understood them. You have this wonderful phrase in the book that you call interpretive riffing. You say the groups engaged in interpretive riffing.

on the poem. So can you tell us a bit what you meant by that? And in particular, you mentioned the ways in which with Mrs. Midas, your participants related it to life, perhaps circumstances Ed had. So how did this interpretive riffing involve that relating poetry to life? You know, thinking about it afterwards, Matt, I have a slight feeling that I may owe a debt here unacknowledged to our colleague Ali Fraser, because I

I subsequently have had a thought that I had a conversation once with Ali in which he said some very interesting things about the concept of riffing. And I wonder if I haven't just, the way you do, stored it away somewhere in a recess. And when I was trying to make sense of what was happening in these conversations, I've kind of drawn on it without realizing where it was coming from. Yeah, I use that term to try to describe what actually just happened in the discussions because...

Very quickly what emerged is, you know, even in groups of people who didn't know each other initially, where people had been brought together and they, you know, they weren't existing friends or relationships, what happened was that the process of trying to make sense of these poems became a collaborative exercise, right? So readers would, they would pick up a bit of the poem and they would sort of share some possible ideas about what it meant and they would bounce the ideas off each other and

And this would often get woven in and out of discussion about people's own lives. You know, people would often refer the poems back to lived experience in one sense or another. And sometimes as people work together like that, they would start to rewrite the poem. They would interject to point out where the poet should have stopped something. It would be much better if this line finished here.

it would have been much better if this line had been written in this way and so at working together people really you know um asserted their interpretive right to make sense of the poem in the way that you know that was compelling it was compelling to them and it was

I try in this study to include two quite long sections where you just get a bit of a sense of how it's very, very quick, rapid fire kind of back and forth between lots of different people, very dialogical and very, very, very collaborative. And also very often characterized by people being very careful about not the risk of claims,

a symbolically violent quality, like being careful not to say something that dismissed an interpretation that someone else had made. I really noticed that, that people were very aware of and attentive of the danger of symbolic violence in these discussions and were really cautious about how they handled these kinds of claims. So I really, you know, I'm really struck by this and the sort of dialogical quality of making sense of the poems. Now,

Now, in one sense, it's just that it's an artifact of the research method, because I asked people to come together and I put them in a room together, as it were, and said, would you talk about these poems? So, of course, they were being invited to have those conversations. But as I was doing the study, I was reading two very powerful accounts by the American literary critic Carrie Nelson of poems

left-wing socialist poetries in America in the early part of the 20th century, late part of the 19th century, early part of the 20th century. And he emphasizes there how those poetry scenes in America were characterized by just this kind of practice, right? A kind of assumption that

Poems didn't really belong to one person. You could take up one poem and rewrite it and repurpose it to address a different situation, a different political conjuncture that had emerged somewhere, that poems were being shared and used all the time in public settings, in communal settings. And there was the idea of a single kind of canonical version of the text was dispensed with. The texts were always being kind of

on the basis that they didn't belong to one person, they belonged to everybody collectively because partly they were an articulation of a political identity and a political struggle. So, you know, that dialogical collaborative way of reading that I really saw in practice in those groups was,

Even though in a sense it was a product of the way the research was put together, it seemed to me like it really showed a possibility, right? And it showed something that really does exist, which is that there are other ways of reading and relating and responding to literature that are not just the typical bourgeois or typical academic ideas.

idea of the solitary contemplative reader who reads and understands inwardly and in private, there are other ways of

making sense and making use of literature in our lives. Yeah, and speaking of possibility, this brings us to the discussion of the working class poets that you mentioned earlier that you met. I think you've already spoken a bit about why you considered it important to include these voices in the project. I wondered if you could speak a bit to the significance of your project being done in Glasgow and these working class poets.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that's a really good question, Matt. I mean, yeah, so as I said briefly before, you know, as I went on with the project, I started to meet people who were writing poetry, consider themselves poets, who were trying to get published as poets and started to speak to them. And

I think it happened a lot, like more than I had anticipated that people would tell me, sometimes kind of privately and sometimes people would put me in touch with folk that they were interested in writing poetry themselves. I think there absolutely is a deep...

enduring history in Glasgow of mostly self-organized, mostly autonomous spaces of working class literary production, of places and spaces and organizations where poetries and other kinds of writing are shared and discussed. And I think that's, there's a

and proud history of that in the city and in the west of Scotland more generally. And it continues despite the fact that there have been, you know, such significant attacks on some of the sorts of institutions that made those things possible, like public libraries, for example.

That said, by and large, the people that I spoke with were not really involved with those scenes, I would say, in the city. A couple of people were, but quite a lot of people weren't. And so I do think it's probably the case that...

Some of those spaces of opportunity for cultural creativity, particularly at the really local level, are not as in evidence in people's lives as perhaps they were a generation ago. And some people said this to me, you know, remember, I quote a man who told me, you know, when he was young, you know, you couldn't go into any pub down Govan Road without finding somebody in the back room reading poetry and insisting that people would listen to it. And he, you know, he...

He said that doesn't exist now. And for him, the reason why it didn't exist was because

those spaces have been so commodified, you know, that they're just drowned out by streaming of sports and stream, you know, and, and pipe music and everything. So, you know, I do, I think that I'm not in any way underplaying that depth of that history or its significance. I think it's there and it's, and it still continues today. But quite a lot of the people I spoke to who thought of themselves as poets weren't involved in those scenes particularly because I just don't think they were immediately accessible to them in their, in

their daily lives. And for a lot of those, the people I interviewed about their poetry, this struggle to try and find an audience was the really key thing. You know, the really difficult dilemma was how do I find people who will listen and take my poetry seriously? And I tell this story or repeat the story that was told to me by one man who was

He had gone along to a local writers group that was organized in a local community center, but

And he said that people were very supportive and very kind, but he didn't feel that they were really very serious about the writing. It was more a kind of context for people to come together and just to see each other. So he didn't think that they really understood what he was trying to do poetically. So then he makes the decision to go to another writer's group in

in a much more middle-class institution and area of the city. But when he goes there, he feels like he's completely being exhibited, right? He's being put on display as this kind of exotic working-class voice. And so he really felt kind of like he was in between a rock and a hard place. He was like, there's...

one potential audience that didn't really take his poetry seriously enough and another potential audience that just refused to take him seriously as a poet because of who he was. And that, you know, that wasn't the only experience. People had different trajectories and there were some people I spoke to who were very much part of the...

writing and reading communities in the city, but quite a few people weren't as well, I would say. Yeah, I think that example you just said about the guy who's sort of torn between two areas brings us to a point you make about Bourdieu. Again, that point we've discussed throughout this discussion, really, you know, how central Bourdieu was to your work, how much you want to defend him. But there are a couple of places, I think, where you want to sort of question some of his claims. We mentioned the one about symbolic violence earlier.

But here in your discussion of the working class poets, you're a bit critical of his emphasis on how the working class, or to dictate this case, the working class poet, is seen as somehow lacking in comparison to formalized cultures. So what was it that led you to be critical of Boudreau on that account? Yeah, I mean, you know, so Boudreau's got that famous passage in Distinction where he talks about the, you know, the self-taught or the self-educated culture

intellectual or artist of some kind, the autodidact. And even our colleague Bridget Fowler, who, as you will know, is a dear admirer of Porteus, says that this is a pitiless account that he provides in that passage. And what I really find insufficient about it

is that he tends to imply that people who are self-taught or self-educated are just uncritically submissive people

in the face of the expectations of whatever particular cultural field it is that they're trying to break into, you know, that they just, they accept the doxa of that field without any critical questioning or demur at all. You know, he talks about the autodidact being ignorant of the right to be ignorant. So people who are dominant in a particular cultural field are,

have all the right to play around with different expectations they can do wild experimental stuff they don't take the established ideas for granted so that leads them to do avant-garde things and that just ensconces them even further in positions of domination they become the you know the the the people who are leading the the pack in terms of whatever kind of culture um it is um

But what I found in these conversations with these poets who not all but most were trying to get published in one sense or another was absolutely not a kind of unthinking acceptance of the authority of the cultural field. You know, many of them had a really disillusioned view about how the field of poetry works, you know.

Their struggles to get published, their struggles to get themselves an audience led them to what was like a kind of Bordusian understanding of how culture operates, right? It's ruthless. It's competitive. People are out for their own advantage.

If you've got the right social capital and connections, you're much more likely to be successful. And if you've got certain class advantages, you're much more likely to be successful. People articulated these things in a completely clear-eyed kind of way. They accepted the doxil of the field in the sense that they thought poetry mattered and they wanted to be taken seriously as poets.

But they didn't have a kind of naive view about how the dynamics of the field were. They were really sceptical and in many ways kind of sociological in how they articulated their understanding of that. So, you know, as with symbolic violence, I think Bourdieu is a bit guilty of underplaying the possibility that critical insight and reflexive insight is

can be a product of people's reflections on their own experiences of dispossession of some kind or another. In living through those things and trying to make sense of them and work out how this has happened, the way it has happened in my life, people can end up with really quite penetrating understandings of what the dynamics of the social field in question might be. I think he's a little...

He's a little inattentive to that. Yeah, and I think you bring that out very well. And this brings us to the end of the book where you talk about the uses of poetry to reflect the title of the text.

And you highlight three things and you say really fascinating things about language and inspiration. You mentioned a bit of language earlier, but I was really taken with your final point, which is on finitude. And here you discuss the odd silences which follow the reading of poetry and often happened in your groups. You know, someone would recite a piece of poem and they'd be sort of awed silence.

And do you say, quote, if one wanted a sociological field guide to spotting poetry, one might well find it in that focused, resonant silence, which poems seem to gather around themselves in a wonderful phrase. So why do you think these silences are so important? Thanks, Matt. Yeah, I mean, I...

So I really wanted to end the book by trying to go back to the question of what are the affordances of poetry, what are the use values of poetry, that unless we attend to those, we aren't really understanding why

um unequal access to something like poetry really matters why it's a question of inequality um so you know i part of what i did there was i just went back to the recordings of the discussions i listened over to them a few times and um

I was really struck, and I remember being struck at the time, but listening back to the recordings helped kind of really bring it home to me, that whenever somebody read a poem in one of these groups, one of the ones that I'd ask people to read, people would often read them out before we started talking about them. Sometimes people would bring their own poetry along and read that out. And whenever that happens, there's this long...

charged silence at the end of the reading. And it really felt in the moment that the people taking part, that nobody wanted to be the first person to break the silence and to say something. And so that leads me back to, in many ways, it's an old claim about poetry. I mean, it's been made a lot in literary critical writing, which is that poems are

create this encounter with what it feels like to come to an ending, to encounter something that is ended, as it were.

And I really do think that in all kinds of ways and in ways that reflect the penetration of capitalist rationalities into our lives, that experience is increasingly rare, increasingly rare and increasingly precious. While I was writing this, I read the book 24-7 by American art critic Jonathan Crary where he makes this case that

the temporalities of a networked, globalized capitalism means that our social and cultural lives are being lived in a permanent state of being on. You know, there's no off switch. And, you know, he talks about sleep being replaced by the sleep mode, right? We don't sleep anymore. We just switch on to a state of kind of constant readiness to begin again. That's like, that's kind of, you know, for him, exemplary of

how we experience time and how we experience temporality more generally. And then it's reflected absolutely in our cultural lives now, you know, as try and just briefly sort of point to some examples in the book, like,

the way in which every successful mainstream film is immediately followed by a sequel, the sequel becomes a threequel, and then it goes on through a series until it kind of runs out of steam, and then it goes on to the streaming services where they literally never end. They're just constantly on repeat in one sense or another. And slightly pompously, you know, Cor,

coined the phrase the society of the segue to try and describe this experience. The archetypal example of it is the way in which when you're watching something on one of these streaming shows, the next program queues up and begins to play even while the credits are rolling for the one you just watched. You never get to the point of endedness. You just segue onto the next thing. So in that context, you know, one of the

profound uses of poetry is its ability to give us a sense of endedness, it seems to me. An encounter with something that is understood to be finished. Now,

There's a critique of that view that the modernist poets were deeply critical of that idea because they saw it as being much too close to the kind of idea of the self-contained bourgeois subject. It's like it's too neat, it's too closed. But for us now, right now, in the kind of, you know, social arrangements in which we live, political economic arrangements in which we live, I can't

help thinking that actually that sounds like a much more radical proposition than it maybe did to the modernists, you know, that we might really...

something that gives us some sense of what it means to be ended and that we might really want to try and cherish the kinds of culture that offers that opportunity in our lives, which is why if those opportunities are not equally distributed, there's a real form of inequality at play. Yeah, and I think that's why I was so taken with you ending the book on that because it does bring out that element quite well.

Next time I was watching Netflix after reading that, I did think, well, I shouldn't go on to the next show. There should be a break. We should stop. So I want to finish by going back to where we started our discussion. We started talking about how sociologists haven't discussed poetry, particularly the reading of poetry much. So I wondered how should a sociologist who wants to approach poetry approach

What should they take from your book? You know, how should they approach poetry after reading the book? Yes, a tricky question that one. I was like, I was thinking hard about it. I mean, I don't want I don't want to be prescriptive and I'm not any particular expert on poetry, to be honest. I'm an author, sociologist reading more poetry and taking it

more seriously. Um, but I am a bit wary of the assumption, not your assumption, but I kind of get the sense from reading some discussions recently that

sociology can just kind of lay claim to poetry. You know, Janet Wolfe talked a long time ago about sociology having an imperialistic attitude when it comes to art and literature. I do think we've got to be a bit cautious of that. And I slightly get a sense of that a little bit in some of the discussions of poetry as method, as a potential method. I just, I think if we want to engage with poetry, and I think we should, I think

either as an objective analysis or as actually a potential part of our practice in some sense,

we really do need to take seriously and we need to pay attention to the distinctive way in which poetry works and learn to understand those and not assume that we can just replicate them ourselves. You know, I'm not saying we can't, I mean, people can read to try to do whatever they want, but just to acknowledge that it's a craft and it like all crafts, it takes, it takes learning. Um, and, um,

not just to put the badge poetry on something just because it has a certain cachet i think i do worry a little bit that that could that could happen um i think as a discipline in our handling of cultural texts we're very fixated on content we immediately read what's the what's the message here like what's the political message here or whose voice are we hearing here um and we don't and

acknowledge as much as we should that actually the form of these things is also part of how they communicate and we don't learn to read and think about form as much as we might um that's why in the study i go back to the writers of the backton school who i think are just brilliant on these questions really powerfully insightful on these questions who recognize that um

literary texts are not the same as other kinds of texts. They communicate in their own kinds of ways, but the ways that they do are also sociologically significant. But we just have to pay attention to them. We don't just skip past them straight to the content or, you know, conversely, just assume that...

we can put the badge poetry on something that we're doing without having learned to think through those things. I guess that's my time. I'm just a little bit wary of that imperialistic attitude that Wolf described. I think Wolf and you're right about that imperialistic attitude. And again, your book shows that quite well. So the book's done now. So can you tell us what you're working on now, Andy? Well, I've got...

So in relation to sort of the thing about poetry, I have an idea for trying to do something that which looks at poetry written by social theorists. So I did a little kind of scoping mapping exercise where I looked through archival and biographical accounts of people

canonical social theorists, I mean a diverse group of canonical social theorists, but people who are broadly recognized as doing that, as that being their, you know, that they're known as social theorists. And there's quite a lot in the long run of the history of sociology, a lot of people who either privately or sometimes publicly wrote poetry. And I'd be quite curious to kind of just map some of that out and look at

what's what's revealed by reading the poetry of those writers as against their more theoretical interventions um to think about the affordances of different kinds of writing um and all the disjunctions between them perhaps um and uh you know just to just to explore and i

If I were able to do it, I'd be really interested in trying to put together actually an anthology of poetry by social theorists that tries to, you know, tries to collect and just give us a chance to read some of the poetry produced by those writers, which perhaps sounds a little bit like it's odds with what I...

what I just said, but I do think it would be intriguing. And what it might reveal possibly is that social theorists should never try to write poetry. I don't know. You'd have to, you know, the proof would be in the pudding, wouldn't it? I imagine it's a kind of mixed record probably in all truth. Yes, a fascinating book. I'm reminded of...

One of my heroes, Julia J. Cole, wrote poetry and his wife in a biography of him can only muster the defense that it was, quote, bad though not abysmal, which was probably the...

It might be an example of what you're talking about. Maybe we should do it. I wonder what that counts as in ref terms. Yes, I dread to imagine two-star. So as a reminder, I have been speaking with Andy Smith about his book, Class and the Use of Poetry, Symbolic Enclosures. And as this conversation has probably indicated, this is a really rich book. And one thing that I really left thinking about, and I think it's come out towards the end of our discussion there is,

the value and importance of not just poetry, but culture more generally, a culture to sociology, but also culture to people, including the working class readers you spoke to so strongly. And that's something that comes out really well, I think, from this book. So I'd really...

Strongly recommend everyone listen to this. Go out and read the book because you'll really enjoy it. It's a wonderful book. So, Andy, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I was just thinking before I came on, I think it was Vladimir Nabokov said, the best that you can hope for if you write a book is to find good readers. And I couldn't have found a better reader than you. So I'm really appreciative of both of the invitation to be on the podcast, but also you're really careful to

thoughtful questions about the books i really i really value it thanks very much and i'm sure you'll get lots of wonderful readers for this book so thanks very much cheers thanks man