what was Alternative poetry?

Alternative Poetry

I posted something about alternative poetry in July 2021. I thought to add some more, because information is emerging about the overall shape of the field as it recedes into the past and the high spots fade out (and stop blinding us).

There is a single issue (labelled 19-21) of 2nd Aeon, in 1974, which has (very quick) reviews of 276 small press publications. Apart from anything else, this raises the question about just how many alternative poets were active in 1974. And, how many were active over the whole stretch from 1960 to 2010. (2010 is an arbitrarily chosen moment… 1960 is the rough location of a break, when Migrant began putting out pamphlets which didn’t fit the commercial book world at all.)

I think to get inside the underground you have first to recognise roughly what the cast of characters is. A thousand poets, quite probably, of whom say one hundred are prominent and act as landmarks. Secondly, the chronology, which as I said I am not clear about. People see the scene as a sort of mythical place which is always the same. They deny that change is taking place.
Thirdly, stylistic features. Commentators would generally mention hedonism, spontaneity, dislike of authority, political idealism, frame shifts, lack of frame markers, an inclination towards myth, interests in unusual (non academic?) knowledge, irregularity, lack of “polish”, rejection of a Christian framework and of moral generalisations as an element, preference for open situations rather than ones dominated by service and duty. Characters in the poems are not presented as dominated by economics, status, and morality. The influence of American poets of the 1950s is powerful. Beyond that, many features are important, but are certainly not universal in the population of poets we are thinking about. If you accept that the object being described includes one thousand people, you have to pull the camera back and capture overall features while ignoring fine details, which just aren't present in a large number of poems.

There used to be a trade association called the Association of Little Presses. Its members were non-commercial (unsuccessful?) poetry publishers, and in practice they published almost exclusively poetry - a few political pamphlets notwithstanding. The ALP used to publish catalogues of all available publications put out by its members; title Catalogue of Little Press Books in Print Published in the United Kingdom. In good years, someone indexed those lists by author – so that you can count the number of authors dealing with non-commercial publishers in that year. This takes us into the macro-realm of overall volumes.

I found the catalogue issue for 1990-1. It had an author index, so I could count 1571 individual writers listed there. (This figure has problems and may include only 3-400 poets.) I then looked at some ALP lists for the 1970s, although the way they are organised makes them hard to use. Then I looked at the 1974 list, which for once has an author index, and counted 488 names. I took the names beginning with S and counted the overlap with 1990. It was about 25%. It was as if the 1990 list was a completely new list of names. If we assume (on the basis of scanning these lists) five hundred 'alternative poets' in the 70s, and speculate about 500 further poets emerging after 1980, then we get to 1000 for the whole period, say 1960-1997. This is a numbingly large figure, and I am certainly not proposing that everyone in that set is worth examining or resurrecting, but it does suggest how important the Underground realm was. You have this tradition of eccentricity in Britain, and the idea of being personal, original and nonconformist appealed to large numbers of people. I don't have a copy of the ALP lists – they charge a stiff price for them second-hand – but I have a copy of Poet's Yearbook for 1978. (It is a list of apparently all new poetry publications in a year stretching from June to June.) I extracted 70 or so names from this:

B Catling, Chris Torrance, Eric Mottram, Walter Perrie, Tom Lowenstein, Susan Fearn, Jeremy Reed, Nick Toczek, Allen Fisher, Ulli McCarthy, Phil Maillard, Alan Riddell, Glyn Hughes, Stuart Mills, Colin Simms, Steve Sneyd, Barry Edgar Pilcher, Philip Jenkins, Hugo Manning, Eddie Flintoff, Michael Haslam, John Hall, Tim Longville, Paul Matthews, Neil Oram, Nigel Wheale, Mark Hyatt, Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Dinah Livingstone, David Chaloner, Iain Sinclair, Brian Marley, Charles Ingham, Nicki Jackowska, GF Dutton, Eric Ratcliffe, Elaine Randell, Asa Benveniste, Stuart Montgomery, John Seed, Tony Jackson, Lee Harwood, Bill Griffiths, Michele Roberts, Paul Brown, Bernard Kelly, Owen Davis, Jeremy Hilton, Martin Booth, Glenda George, David Greenslade, Ken Edwards, DM Thomas, Florence Elon, Roy Fisher, Susan Musgrave, Sacheverell Sitwell, Colin Nixon, Mark Williams, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Elsa Corbluth, Jeremy Adler, Jeff Nuttall, JH Prynne, Paula Claire, Paul Green, John Welch, Martin Thom.

It is often said that the Underground went through a dip or retraction after 1977 and grand disappointments. However, if the 1990-1 list has three times as many names as the 1974 list, the existence of that dip in overall activity has to be questioned.

People who write about poetry tend to approach the Underground through a legalistic path. They define a coherent artistic or political or ideological position, elaborate that to their satisfaction, and then stand it up as a description of how small press poets really are. This is a notably unsuccessful approach. The underground world is clearly amorphous. The coherent definitions fail simple tests of descriptive accuracy. To make them pass, you always have to take out large parts of the subject matter. There may be another problem, that some critics think there are only three underground poets. This was the point of the ALP lists, to put into the public domain minimal facts about the whole of the alternative press sector. The lists describe what ALP member publishers were offering for sale, and did not apply any artistic criteria. Our definitions should match the primary evidence. The folklorist Lauri Honko has a useful statement about this: “If a fancy theory replaces or makes obsolete identity elements actually used in social interaction by the people studied, very little has been achieved. A degree of recognisability by all parties of the alleged social and cultural identities should exist as a warrant against false definitions and artificial categorisation.”
Honko identifies a speech community as empowered to make category ascriptions which we then have to accept. The first thing to say is that a large number of poets are not unambiguously Alternative. This makes the idea of a count problematic. We would need some other size measurement. Secondly, we have to take on the idea that if you could line up 1000 members of the poetry community, they would disagree with each other about category ascriptions. I think we have to give up recording every detail of this, it is just an impenetrable thicket. I can say that nobody identifies themselves as conservative and conventional, and a result of this is that many conventional poets wish to deny the radical poets the status of innovators.
This count of 1000 made me realise also how little I know. Time has gone by and I came to think this was also an opportunity to describe the small press world as an organism. The subject was too large to be passed by in its entirety – as critics used to do in the bad old days. There used to be a kind of act of oblivion whereby an establishment critic would say “all small press poets are alike and I read one of them twenty years ago (variant: 40 years ago) and he was no good therefore no small press poets are any good and I can safely ignore them except for making destructive generalisations about them which will please other establishment critics”. Even if it is true that all small press poets are no good, it is not at all true that they are all similar or that you can estimate their aesthetic value without first reading them. I wanted to establish this as a fact. Apart from that, I want to entertain an idea of a resource which would when called on give you the story of each of these thousand people: their publication, their career, their shipwrecks (if necessary), their artistic hypothesis, their affinities.

There is a package of (alpha male, wisdom, responsibility, experience, generalisations, ethical superiority) which older poets saw as their commodity number one and which readers reacted against. A focal problem was the poem which has some concrete information and then at the end packages it up in a moral generalisation, so something like ‘people should be nice to each other’ or ‘you can’t trust the powerful and connected’ or “isn’t he a bit like you and me’ or even ‘it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels’. I am wondering whether this kind of poem really exists. I thought to look at Poetry Dimension 2, a reliable reference source for conventional poems of the time, which was 1974. I counted 57 poems of which 15 have a lurch into generalisation and lesson drawing at the end, or close to the end.
This is a valid indicator. Alternative poems never have the smug concluding quatrain. But, it is not a certain marker of membership. The other 42 poems in that 1974 anthology don’t have the tedious generalisation as their triumphant climax. Moreover, we have a body of poems, in the four volumes of Poetry Introduction which appeared from Faber from 1969 up to 1980, which represents younger mainstream poets and which is also almost entirely free of the “smug conclusion”. So we are looking at a generational shift rather than something which separates two groups of poets of the same age. There is something which new poets were resisting and it was linked with certainty (about ethical truth and academic knowledge) as opposed to being new, curious, and excited. Maybe the idea of the smug closing quatrain is more of a Fear Symbol and less of a real, dreadful, thing. An older generation of readers were asking moral questions of poets, and poets were giving clear and resonant answers to these questions, which since the 1960s few people have been asking. The status of knowledge supported the status of educated individuals and the rejection of generalisations about life was an anti-authoritarian conclusion.
I also looked at frame shifts. The proposal would be that the alternative poem relies on montage, on the juxtaposition of disparate ideas – without frame markers, conjunctions and so on, which would signpost the shift and tell us what the connection between the frames was. The poem would be like a cinema in which lengths of film follow each other to satisfy the senses but without any obvious link between them. Each moment would be vivid and we would enjoy the experience without analysing it. I compared two 70s poems. Both were about the German bombing of Britain in the early 1940s. One was by Meic Stephens, one by Allen Fisher. I had Stephens tagged as mainstream because his poem was in Poetry Dimension. His poem was probably set in 1974, had a flashback to 1942 (when his village of Treforest was bombed) and inside that a flashback to a time before the war (when the siren was for an accident in a coalmine). He doesn’t actually label the shifts – with a feature like a dissolve with which a film might signal “flashback”. So the difference between the two poems is one of degree – one has more frame shifts and less insertion into an autobiographer narrative which naturalises it. But Stephens’ poem has two flashbacks, which are montage effects by any definition. And Fisher’s poem (“Morale Confusion”) sticks accurately to its theme over about 80 lines – the exception being a collaged-in piece about the Milky Way which actually fits in as a glimpse of the sky, whence the bombs fell. There is a passage I don’t understand: “moving west towards immortality/ the deer confluence/ in these measures/ in region of summation's meeting”. I have a vague feeling this is a theme from Amerindian mythology, but anyway it is about the afterlife.
I noticed that the siren, which connects the parts of Stephens’ poem (he hears an ambulance siren and flashes back to an air-raid siren) arouses diffuse anxiety. It is an ambiguous signal. I wrote (in a longer piece) “A search in Poetry Dimension 2, which I keep to serve as a reference set of mainstream devices, shows that the poems are frequently about what cannot be defined or assimilated. The choice of these themes shows that these poets like indeterminacy – although their vocabulary would say evocative, ambiguous, strange, etc. They often start from a moment of uncertainty – an unresolved sensation which arrests normal patterns of consciousness. The 'classic' Underground idea of a mainstream poem would be that “it starts with anomalous and strange things and by explanation reduces them all to complete banality, clarity being the same as loss'. In these terms, the Underground must always win. But after looking at the genuinely m-stream poems in Poetry Dimension, a not very good anthology of poems from a single year, I don't think the poems fulfil the formula.” Again it is a matter of degree. The alternative poems are more ambiguous but the mainstream poems consciously use ambiguity as part of their fabric.
Would it be a good idea to compare thousands of poems? Probably. But if you try to compare two poems which have no common elements then the operation will not work. You need a natural pair of poems as a starting point.
Stephens uses myth at one point, the dogs of Annwn and a mention of Tristan:
The dogs of Annwn barked for me then,
Trystan called without hope to Esyllt
across the black waters. Ai, it was their wail

– but Fisher also mentions mythology: “Spurt of Juno’s milk into night sky/ silver coins/ Milky Way in idealised universe”. This may be literally a description of a mantelpiece carved by Grinling Gibbons. The fact that both poems use myth may neutralise a supposed distinction: there is then no contrast to be drawn. But I feel that when the poets are making similar gestures we are seeing them very intimately and the differences are especially clear.
Another feature would be familiarity. The alternative poem is unpredictable. But another way of looking at this is to claim that the new style poem has jumps of sense, presents a pattern which is unfamiliar, and therefore is obscure. There is an issue about knowing why the author is doing something – the reader knowing what information to focus on and in fact what the expected reaction is. We could call this the separation of theme from detail. It is credible that the alternative poem is unacceptable to mainstream editors because it isn’t instantly recognisable and this is seen as being badly written – poorly organised, in fact unfinished. So a rigid idea of tidiness is part of the issue. Keywords are control, rigidity, boundaries. A poem has a schema and the reader seizes the schema as part of reading the poem. There may be a match between the rigid knowledge which we see in older poems and the knowledge of the poem which is encapsulated in the schema. This may be where we seize something vital about the differences.
A book on the subject about the underground as a whole should surely exist even if it is not clear to me what it would say. I would be especially be interested in the chronological progression – I think the scene has been constantly changing and the momentary states are actually what has been lost. It would be logical then to capture them in a book and let them be found again. **