Patrick Fetherston

Patrick Fetherston (born 1928).

Natures of all sorts. (Tetralith, 1973). [57 pages in double column, so 114 columns] Fetherston is an interesting figure because he was already doing something avant garde in the 1950s and persisted into a new world. But actually that continuity is deserted, nobody inhabits it. I never heard his name mentioned although I saw his name in catalogues and possibly saw him at ALP book fairs. Fetherston's book is a (non-)translation of a poem of the 1st century BC, De rerum natura, [on the nature of things] by T Lucretius Carus. Lucretius is writing about what we would now call science. (He does not credit this very clearly.) I should record that my father was a historian of science so my childhood left me with some knowledge of that history and with feelings about how terrific good popular science was and how badly written much science writing was. I would recommend The Fabric of the Heavens [1961], by Toulmin and Goodfield, as an account of what early science found and what questions it was asking. I read “Natures” because I read a review in a 1973 issue of 2nd Aeon which said it was good. (“massive poem that takes a cosmic view of the world, creation, death, nature itself. Mimeo format.”) Finch seems not to have noticed that it is a translation of a poem from the 1st century BC or that its ideas are very very old.

Fewer elements
in mind than in body
and fewer still
with mind-with-body symmetry.
Not always experienced:
the slack on the skin of a miner
after a day at the face;
the pulchrific dust on a woman's cheek;
mist,
even nightmist (the heaviest kind).
Where the plexus of neural fibre
doesn’t always respond
to periscopic follicles,
should the stimulus to faint
be transmitted?
Your mind wants to live
more than your temper does.
Were I to prove
self was (in agony) subject to death
I‘d prove at the same time
mind was dying and temper dying
- for all that WANTING. (s.70)

There is something here. But the sum is a book in 128 parts of which none works as a poem. (Temper must mean physical body. This is not very clear.) The passage is firstly about the difference between the world being perceived and what the mind succeeds in perceiving. The last few lines pursue the disobedience of the body: the body wants to die and the mind does not. So the poem includes also perception and the human body.

Fetherston uses a simple vocabulary. The attitude is that if we are dealing with direct sense experience and removing myth then using the simplest possible language is appropriate and will yield the truth. However, when one observer shares knowledge with other people the vocabulary they use is crucial, and the more shared terms they have the more knowledge they can transfer. F’s primitive lexicon limits what he can record and certainly destroys most of the information in Lucretius. Lucretius was writing for an audience which was certainly familiar with the terms he used (Latin translations of Greek philosophical vocabulary, to a large extent) and that shared background is not only central but is what Fetherston destroys. Take the word “clinamen”, which Toulmin and Goodfield write so helpfully about. This records the early idea that there was an original body of water which was the cosmos; that it flowed; and that in the flow a swerve caused some part to separate out and become solid matter. This speculation is based on someone watching a flood and seeing silt fall out of the water and imagining that matter originated from such a process. The Idea explains why there are many different substances which compose the cosmos. They have differentiated out. Fetherston does not get this idea over intelligibly. (“Fractionally, a body in motion/ may, deprecating its motion,/ swerve.”) He has lost the original poem while stubbornly building a book built of unlearned language.
F seems to have no notion of the verse line. I can't see even one good line in this book. Another approach might have been to say “if I can write one good line then at some distant point I might be able to write a second one”. F does not seem to have the notion that a section of 30 lines might be made up of 30 good lines. In a sense he isn't writing poetry at all. Isn’t even planning to do that. Lucretius’ original Latin poem is written in rather sonorous and magnificent hexameters. If someone saw a page of Fetherston, it is hard to see why they would want to read another one. The language is wooden and its texture is unpleasing.
I can see that the rule of going back to the simplest language and building up knowledge from the elements is related to other avant garde projects. But F’s poem is very generalised and its rather basic vocabulary use limits the amount of information that is being delivered – and traps the poem in generalisations. The rule is to feign ignorance – there is so much information available, in 1973, in New Scientist for example, which he just scraps to go back to the basics. The choice of De rerum natura is not an obvious one, but we can compare Mottram's poem Local Movement (reviewed in the same issue of 2nd Aeon) which starts from a 17th C text, written in Latin, by William Harvey, about the movement of animals and so about what desire is, as shown by what a creature moves towards. It is fair to say that Fetherston departs from his source and introduces some 20th C ideas.
I understand that F published with Stefan Themerson (Gaberbocchus Press) in the 1950s (Day Off, 1955). I am doubtful that this twilight world of 50s avant garde affected what happened after 1965. It was not forceful or attractive. There never was a point where nobody in England was interested in the avant garde. Their main interest might be receiving new work from Paris or Milan or Berlin, but they didn’t vanish or turn into cats or something. Galleries had shows of modern art and there were people in England who bought the paintings. There was Herbert Read. But the good stuff was hard to find – cultured teenagers in England might encounter modernism in the form of something which didn’t work properly and which put them off. There was a typical moment, I think, where one of these teenagers encountered, later, perhaps aged 25 or 30, abundant modernism, in the form of a Paris museum perhaps, and saw their notions of art collapsing. This was good, but one after-effect might be a dislike of being English, in fact a whole theory of what englishness meant, which cast the Island as a fortress of ignorance and reaction. Fetherston was Scottish, possibly (he uses the word “havering”), but anyway this distrust meant that the local connoisseurs just weren't interested in a local avant garde. “English wine, English modernist painter. Just say no”. Basically his work is unattractive and although he was eager and persistent he just didn’t enthuse people.

1928 was a bad time to be born as a British avant garde poet. However, partly thanks to Eric’s milestone collection of names as the “British Poetry Revival”, we can see that there were modern-style poets who had been born in the 1920s: Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton, Christopher Logue, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Charles Tomlinson, Matthew Mead, Gael Turnbull. And Eric himself, of course. They were closed out in the 1950s.

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”.

If you want to know about the universe, I recommend Carl Sagan's TV series, “Cosmos”. This covers most of what Lucretius was writing about. The pictures are helpful, we find.