An afternoon delving

An afternoon in the Poetry Library

I ventured out of Nottingham to spend an afternoon (4/8/22) in the Poetry Library, in the South Bank Centre in London, looking at texts missed out of my Blair-era Grand Project, or BGP, on British poetry 1960 to 1997.

First, E.P. Thompson's long poem ‘A Place Called Choice’. This is a great poem and it was published in an American magazine in 1951 and did not see the light in this country until 1985. I had received a copy (of two different versions) by email, which I found confusing. 1950 is before my start date but given the publication dates I should have known about this. Back at base, I collated the two versions and found one amendment:
Across the Piltdown gravel,/
Over the Swanscombe skull, crunched among ammonites and shells,/
Over the tiny Crustacea, the bric-a-brac of chalk,/
First cousins to our father/
Who lies crouched in the abandoned road of memory/
Clutching in his stone fist a charm against the centuries:/
Trawling the turfs of Fosberry with a net of shadows,/

- part of the first line is changed to “alluvial gravel”. In 1951 the Piltdown hoax had not been exposed (Oakley and Weiner did this in 1953) and Piltdown Man was still the first humanoid in Britain. 1953 - it is hard not to see the link with Stalin, another intellectual hoax, whose fall would restart Thompson's intellectual biography.
There is a whole section which dropped out of the version published in 1985 (and in the 1999 Collected Poems, an admirable project by Bloodaxe, which is what I borrowed from the library). It goes like this:

Here on this black hurst above Halifax, bare/
Except for the refuse of an old slum-clearance,/
Standing on this old track, the cobbles and setts/
Sunken and worn by the labourer, the hardy pack-horse/
And the weavers hunched under their pieces, recalling/
The cold spell setting in (the masters called it “progress”)/
  Chilling my father’s knuckles in the frostblue rushlight,/
And I, on a torn blanket by the hearth, lay watching/ 
His limp clemmed fingers threading the last warp,/
Until the clock struck five, my seventh birthday,/
And he stood over me, cursing, shaking salt from his eyes,/
Calling me out for my bit of parkin and cold porridge,/
Setting me off to the new mill in the valley farmland,/
The clatter of my clogs on the track with an hour to dawn ...//

Recalling my return, some ten years later,/
With my skin like paper, the curious crick of my shoulders/
Rucking my jacket up, the daughters of the parson/
Staring and dropping their eyes, and the jolly vicar/
Giving his heartiest greeting, the girl at the farm/ 
Laughing in my face, and turning back to her guardsman ...//

I note the black apple trees by the disused canal,/
The lime eaten out of the farmland, the smoke/
Hung like a heavy ball of phlegm in the valley/
 Soaking the walls, the whitethorn, the poor grass,
/ But lug the usual loads, tread with my thoughts/ 
The Great North Road of acceptable consciousness/
(How science has got out of hand, and man disengaged/ 
From nature, devouring himself, and all that trap),/ 
Catching sight – always too late – from the side of my eye/
  Some figure, abandoned, thumbing a lift, shouting ...//

In the thicker evening more vocal, and at night/
Possessing me at last with large excitements/ 
And various voices, heard, though hardly understood,/
As the textile villages litter and foal their lights/
From here to Lancashire and Blackstone Edge –/
 Sensing within that interthreading of workshops,/
In the intricate by-ways and slips between the Palace,/
The speedway, the Lyric, and the accountant’s offices/
Some human bond more strict than the bonds of money,/
Warmer, it may be supposed, but more exacting.//

Beneath those yellow airlanes of steam in dispersal,/
There, in that thicket of evacuating smoke-stacks/ 
Is the place where mankind is knotted together,/
The place of engagement among whale-backed moors
Under the pretty fairylights of heaven:/
The place where humanity is knotted into matter,/
  The brain to the skull, and the skull to the planet./ 
Threading a road through the inner thoughtways/
One within me, thrusting for speech/
In the breast of this bonebox beating aloud,/
Marker of the vaunts of man in his earthdays/
Of the folk of this woolstead thirsting to sing://

“First in the fire age, foremost in the firemist,/
 Beyond all forethought master of matter:/
Thick in the hallways of a thousand windows/
Thunder of looms and throng of folk

Next, I borrowed a copy of Kenneth Allott’s Collected Poems. I have already blogged about this, but the key point is that Allott had written Apocalyptic poetry in the 1940s and these are really very good poems. Again, it was Jim Keery who made me aware of this. Allott’s creative biography is quite complicated. Next, a copy of a 1973 long poem by Patrick Fetherston. Peter Finch reviewed this in 2nd Aeon and after reading that issue I realised I had to pursue Fetherston. He published under the imprint tetralith, I wonder what that means. It means “four stones” so maybe just a rebus for “feather stone”. “Fethwar” is a possible prehistoric form of “four”. I took this one home.

Next, some work on Heath-Stubbs. I glanced at his verse play “Helen In Egypt”, a “romantic comedy”. More work left out of someone’s collected poems, I doubt it is any good. His work went off very badly in the 1950s but there was something there in the 1940s. I read the issue of 'Aquarius' on him, made for his 80th birthday, not bad but no-one even mentioned the fact that he was gay. My problem is that the printed record is so dishonest on this theme, considering hundreds of poets, that I can't write an accurate account of British poetry in my selected period. Most of the tribute pieces are nice but don't say anything memorable - which is true of the majority of Stubbs' poetry.
Then looking at non-verbal works by two poets active in around 1970, Andrew Lloyd and Neil R Mills. Mills did “City Zen” (pun for “citizen”, good grief), a set of b/w photos of signs (shop signage and similar) with characters missing. A wonderful collection of dilapidated and even pre-war walls and premises. I guess part of the point is that there is no individual utterance by the poet – he is just directing our attention. The interest in “damaged patterns” is specific to the era – a preference which at its final extension expresses a hope that there is a gap in the whole social pattern and we can slip out through it. Is that saying too much? Both Mills and Lloyd are indescribably laid-back and yet there is that idyllic quality. The first casualty of apathy is belief in the system. I looked at Lloyd’s typed/mimeo’d pamphlet from 2nd Aeon (1970?), “twelve lyrics and liu”. It has almost no propositional content, being almost sound poetry but based on distortions of actual words and patterned layout. I am reluctant to describe it... it is almost purely subjective, and possessed of great charm. It is difficult to come back 50 years later and produce a formal statement, almost a consecration, for such work. Maybe the anti-meritocratic feel is the key thing… experiencing a Cool Groove and not wishing to write an effortful poem. Maybe there was an effect of abandoning words – getting rid of them as a safety rail, as a shield. Giving much greater scope to a simpler energy coming out of the self – the way you move, your silhouette. And being more aware of the gestural level affected the verbal poem, slightly later, so that it was less hung up on words and more attuned to gesture and space.
I also got a pamphlet by Gill Vickers, “an untitled first collection of poems by Gill Vickers”, 1969. So much better than just “poems”. This was published by “R”, the shorter title for “resuscitator”, a Bristol magazine edited by John James. I have one issue, from 1964. I located the Library's copy of this tucked up inside another book... I couldn't borrow it but I did photocopy part of it.

I don’t sit here to think

yet I thought again in the pub that the longest walk is inward with no fear of walking, which I thought I recognised

yet I know of a street where on the corner there's a mirror set in the wall there's this guy walks right up to it before he goes in the pub next door looking, to find out how much space he has inside to fill, trying to see into the potency of what he’s going to say

inside, there beneath my wine glass I‘m feeling kind of shut, so don't look him in the eye, better bust his thoughts up or disappear to someplace I know about.

There’s no space in one set of lips to see all their motives, I hoped I recognised a few, yet all I saw was this guy talking to himself more often than he looked in the mirror.

Each day’s much the same, you get made? But a lot of things get made. You take some and a whole lot gets given while you let some person take you in their giving.

How many is it possible to stand before and ask quite coolly, please don’t be cold?

Or when asking feel the texture of 5 senses together, not becoming tired, yet with a silently older ability to confront?
(untitled poem at page 7)

It is reasonable to say that this also has limited propositional content. his connection with James might be an indirect indication that Vickers’ poems, while understated and so ambiguous, are part of a lyric and domestic mood which James appreciated and which expressed feelings about social life rather than about the self as a separate thing producing language for itself. Actually the way you write might express something about the person you are talking to. Its open texture soaks up an atmosphere from the surrounding space... detached and yet full of affection and even joy. It deals with the immediate present and allows that an infinite depth by not categorising and implicitly diminishing and concluding the threads of a group relationship. Time has passed but we still live in the present because there is nowhere else to live.
I can't remember where I heard her name… anyway I don’t think she published anything else. I have a feeling that this open attitude towards social interaction was more possible in 1969 than a few years later, when economic crisis (inflation and the collapse of most people’s real income) brought something tougher, more purposive but also more authoritarian. So unprovable, because the lazy and almost blissful late Sixties mood is not explicit – it’s in the space between the lines. The work by Andrew Lloyd asks for more subjective response because there is more space between the lines, in fact it’s all space. It offers me a possible world where I can feel purely subjective. The entrance into it is narrow because I have to catch a train and go back to where I live.

This sounds like quite a lot for a four-hour session. It just underlines how many poets there are in the margins of my BGP – marginal because of the limits of my effort, not because their work is opaque. I just get overwhelmed when I visit that library. It is so full of bad poetry and yet there is so much gold ore. The main thing I was there to do was do some error checking for a list of all the books which Poetry Review ran during that 1960-97 period. I thought there were some holes in the net, possibly. Just under 800 British poets were reviewed in that time, possibly a statement of the core of poetry in that time, even if most of the poets I looked at don’t feature in that list. A spreadsheet now gives me figures for the percentage of women poets in the complete set of reviews, like this:

1960-64 15.36
1965-9 14.16
1970-9 11.03
1980-4 23.22
1985-9 24.36
1990-4 27.22
1995-7 34.22

This gives quite a good fit to a simple upward line – although there is a bit of a bump in the 1970s. An era where norms collapsed, but still a puzzling anomaly. The fact that women poets collectively fit that line suggest there is a collective identity, but that must be a “low level signal” compared to the differences between individuals. Gill Vickers just isn’t the same person as Ruth Fainlight. Quoting myself, “Where I think all this fails is in the equivocation of one person with another. Clearly if you count something you are giving the impression that it is a homogeneous quantity. No two poets believe they are interchangeable so a count involving a lump of several hundred of them must be flawed.”

I also copied a few more pages of Eric Mottram’s Elegies, which I am gradually reading. There must be more poetry I haven’t read; it’s just a quest that has no end point. Elegies was finished around 1981 and is like a pin-up wall, Eric writes about 35 or so cultural figures who have heroic status for him. The poems are not “about”, he regards that as outdated; they are very subjectively edited and leave out what would be prosaic. You need to know quite a lot about each of the figures to understand the poems. So when I read

you musick-loving lights
made visible by water
entry after entry
toki no ge awakened
“all’s harmony all separate
once confirmed it is your mastery
long have I hovered on the Middle Way
today the ice shoots flame”
the justification of alone
is radiance of discovery
inventions shape daylight
mount lights shade volume by surface
now black rain may beat
black rain bends the homestead
(p.38)

I know the whole poem is about an American poet (one I have never heard of) and so about his poems, and so the scenes may come from within his poems. But I can’t follow what the scenes are. All the same the fragments that chase each other are evocative.