Chronology of the Alternative

Chronology of the Underground

I have been pondering an anthology of the Underground. I don’t think you could do this in one volume… I am imagining a series of six volumes. I was very taken with Jim Keery’s anthology of the Apocalyptics which included 191 poets… with the Underground, you are looking at maybe 400 poets. Maybe a bit less than 400! So this raises the question of whether there were any genuine breaks in the history of this scene, or whether the volumes have to be separated by arbitrary breaks.
The question is also whether we are dealing with a single entity over a fifty year period, after the initial efforts of Migrant with Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher, Michael Shayer, etc., giving us a starting point around 1960. One version is that the population of poets shifts by about 3% a year, with new people arriving, and so changes gradually but in the end completely. Another is that critical events have meant that the scene completely changed several times so that there are several different entities and we need several terms to describe them. Actually, no one believes this. This version is not a candidate. Another version is that the scene in 2010 is still recycling procedures developed in the 1960s, in an admiration which is conservative. I am not sure anyone believes this version. Another idea is that the Underground is not focussed on poetry; in any year the new poets are influenced by radical politics, boredom with convention, post-structuralist literary theory, conceptual art, radical cinema, etc., so that their cultural DNA does not derive from poetry (which is hard to access). So, there is a pool of radicalised youth (or survivors, I guess) of whom some portion are also interested in culture; and of that portion some small minority are interested in poetry. But there is a radical scene, or market, or attitude, which precedes any poem getting written. The distinctive feature of the poetry might then be that its semantic structures reflect attitudes of that social group.

I find it very hard to define the overall changes. It is much easier to deal with poets as individuals. The idea of 3% annual change is plucked out of the air, as I don’t have a way of measuring this. Evidently every year has had at least one new poet turn up. The Underground has continuity as a community of readers, but has certainly not remained stable in the cultural preoccupations and ideas of style which animate its projects. The continuity of individual poets, pursuing their personal style over several decades of productivity, only disguises a basic process of change which may be clearer if we just block out the dominant figures. A useful historical approach would be to examine vertical sections, defining moments in the advance of a column. I looked in early 2015 at the website of Knives Forks and Spoons, a modern Underground publisher, and listed the names of authors they published then:
Tim Allen, Meredith Andrea, David Annwn, Joanne Ashcroft, Alan Baker, Richard Barrett, Jeremy Balius, David Berridge, Michael Blackburn, Mark Burnhope, James Byrne, Neil Ambel, Joel Hace, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Adrian Clarke, Wayne Clements, Mark Cobley, Rebecca Cremin, Sarah Crewe, Sophie Mayer, J Crouse, Philip Davenport, Ian Davidson, James Davies, Peter Dent, Ken Edwards, Neil Ellman, Stephen Emmerson, Matt Fallaize, Gareth Farmer, Patricia Farrell, SJ Fowler, Kit Fryatt, Andrew Gallan, Peter Gillies, Rupert Loydell, Jesse Glass, Howie Good, Giles Goodland, Gavin Goodwin, Chris Gutkind, Trevor Simmons, John Hall, Peter Hughes, Dylan Harris, Daniel Y Harris, J/J Hastain, Colin Herd, Lindsey Holland, Simon Howard, Sarah James, Tom Jenks, Joshua Jones, S Kelly, Ira Lightman, Travis MacDonald, Ann Matthews, Anna McKerrow, James Mclaughlin, Nicky Mesch, Geraldine Monk, Frederick Morley, Stephen Nelson, Bruno Neiva, D E Oprava, Ryan Ormonde, Lars Palm, Daniele Pantano, Bobby Parker, RT Parker, Peter Philpott, Stephen Pike, Evelyn Posamentier, Jay Ramsay, Kevin Reid, George Szirtes, Simon Rennie, Antony Rowland, James Russell, Ian Seed, Robert Sheppard, Marcus Slease, Ben Stainton, Paul Sutton, Todd Swift, Andrew Taylor, Nathan Thompson, Scott Thurston, David Toms, Rhys Trimble, Steven Walling, Debbie Walsh, Tom Watts, Michael Wilson, Colin Winborn, Cliff Yates. (99 names by my count)
An attentive reader has used a computer to count the commas in the above and found 95 occurrences. It surely follows that the count of names is 96 and not 99. 96 tears! 96 poets!
I hope this shows some of the fertility of the contemporary scene. KFS have a bit of a trawler approach, they take on a lot of books. Have I read all these poets? certainly not. I have read Eighteens, the KFS anthology. In this list, the only ones who featured already in the 1970s list are John Hall, Peter Philpott, and Robert Sheppard. (After weeks studying the data in Poet’s Yearbook, which came to a halt in June 1978, I can see that 12 of these names were already appearing in publication lists in the 1970s. So 88% replacement over 40 years? is that a meaningful indicator?) This could be seen as a picture of the scene in 2015. There are hundreds and hundreds of other Underground poets writing, but this is a view, something small enough to look at.
(Finding 12% retention in one publisher is not a reliable index, as if we looked at the whole field the rate of retention could be 5% or 30%. More work needed.)

My feeling is that there are no interruptions in the Alternative scene. Divisions between a posible six volumes of anthology would have to be arbitrary.
It is noticeable that there is no anthology collecting the British Poetry Revival. Everyone agrees that Eric’s 1974 essay on the BPR is fundamental to a description of the Alternative scene, that knowing those 36 poets which he listed is basic to grasping modernity in Britain, but there is no anthology putting them together and actually there never has been. This brings up another possibility, namely that becoming an Alternative poet does not imply knowing the history of the Alternative scene, and that in fact people who write unconventionally as part of a generalised dislike of authority (plus idealistic hopes for the future!) may stumble across other poets who are conventional only after key decisions have been taken. The idea that 1000 Alternative poets know what the other 1000 Alternative poets are thinking, or have thought, is untenable and even ridiculous. There is a legacy, I guess, but it is probably fragmentary, selective, and to some extent based on misunderstanding. There are deep infrastructural problems blocking visibility of what happened in the past of an anti-commodified and rather unpopular realm of art.
Proxy. I compared this list of 96 with the poets in the Alternative anthology, Dear World and Everyone in it (2013). The overlap is six names out of 72. In order to cover all 72 names, we would need a comparator of 12 times as many names. This would be (6x96) 576 names. So the small overlap suggests a total set of 576 poets in the Alternative population as at 2015. This is not a Solid Gold Count but a proxy indicator. It gives us a ball-park figure. So, if we wanted a description of the Alternative as at 2015, we could simply wave a hand towards those 576 poets, notionally formed up as a flock or herd, compactly.

Flashback. I thought to look at another yearly volume of Poetry Dimension to get a count of how many poems have that “smug concluding quatrain”. I picked up Poetry Dimension 7 and this time I came up with 25 poems out of fifty featuring a smug generalisation as its coda. Holy shit! Maybe I am being inconsistent. Anyway this time I looked more closely at the crop… variants on “looking back after thirty years”, of pious messages to take away, of pulling back the camera to reveal a Timeless Pattern. Evidently people were collecting these adages to form a collection whose ultimate outcome would be Wisdom. My impression is that the count for an anthology like Lucie-Smith’s would actually be zero. Also, that the smug end quatrain is where the conservative reader defines what they have Gained from the poem, suspicious in case there might be some aspect to it they can’t measure and define. Strange that the coda isn’t always right at the end of the poem. Hill has a stanza “Platonic England, house of solitudes,/ rests in its laurels and its injured stone/ replete with complex fortunes that are gone,/ beset by dynasties of moods and clouds” which rather depressingly extends the subject to Our Beloved Nation As a Whole, but this is actually stanza 2 of a four-stanza poem. Also, it is a generalisation but it isn’t banal, actually it is elevated and has two mood swings within its four lines. By Platonic, does he mean “an elevated Idea of England which you can’t actually touch or live in”? If there is self-deception, is it by other people or by Hill of Hill? Anyway, the Smug Concluding Quatrain was jettisoned by younger mainstream poets, during the 1970s, as well as by Alternative poets.