Blakean ballyhoo

Children of Albion: a moment of national humiliation?

After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.

I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.

Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.

None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)

The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:

stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:

has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.

Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to. “Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.

'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!