I am listening to Police’s Greatest Hits, after a long time and find that my pleasure in this tape is as strong as it had been when I heard it first, some years ago. Sting, I think, is one of those rare and natural musicians who in his music managed to capture the ambivalence of the Gen X. I know we are now into Gen Y and perhaps Gen Z is in the works (I wonder what they will call the generations after Z? I would suggest we adopt the Donald Knuth’s numbering scheme of pi; 3.0, 3.1, 3.14 and so forth) but I can only write about my generation.

The songs on this tape; Roxanne, So Lonely, Every Breath You Take etc are full of mixed messages; both fascination and revulsion served up in the same pill. Take “Every Breath You Take” with its stalker’s obsessions. Passion seems to drive the singer to declaim that he will watching “you”: every breath you take/ every move you make/ every bond you break. However beneath such earnest lines regarding “being lost with a trace” there seem to be hints of revulsion in the song, especially, in lines such as “every smile you fake”.

This then is wrong woman to be obsessed about obviously. But rarely do we get to choose our obsessions. Obsessions choose us.

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On reading an essay by David Lehman (DL is the chap who edits the Best American Poetry series) on “postmodernism”, I am stuck by the fact why the contemporary American novel seems to hold no attraction for me. The thesis of DL posits that irony and the tools of irony (puns, hoaxes, parodies, false bottomed stories etc) form the main part of a post modernist’s literary arsenal.

The reasons he gives to justify this (over?) use of irony are: “reality in the United States so far outstrips the inventive capacity of any satirist”, “there is something fundamentally unserious (equals immaturity?, the mythical “innocence” of the American?, the culture of “denial”?) about our culture” and “because you can’t write a love scene the same way when the divorce rate approaches 50%”.

Is the last one of those reasons behind the disappearance of the rare beast of love poetry from the American Poetry Scene? It now sounds quite possible because after Theodore Rotheke and Edna St Vincent Millay, I haven’t recent come upon one of those dazzling love poems that can, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson “take the top off my head”.

Also speaking personally, while some of my poems have tended to taste of bitterness and anger, there is only one specific case (Nursery Rhyme Opera) where I had used, failingly, irony. To be an effective ironist, one has to be effective cynic a la Bogart in Casablanca. And I suppose I am too much of an idealist to turn cynic, at least quite this soon. One recent poet who manages the cynicism to a great effect is Mark Doty.