angel exhaust

Remarks on gay sensibility in poetry

2011-10-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

DC Andersson wrote: Hello there, I'd been exploring the work of John Wilkinson, and hence came to your 'review' on pinko, which I enjoyed greatly. I have often thought that underlying many of the distinctions between rival schools of poetry has been the extent to which form (which demands to be recognized as such, rather than something that any coherent content has) and ego are to be aligned. Obviously there are different ways of politicizing this question - for some, left-wing ideas of the decentred self under the lights of the 1960s avant garde seem appropriate to some (whether or not these were in fact drawn from text or seemingly 'collective' practice of other art forms), or an alternate *radical* pattern would be drawn from the various mutations of feminism from the nineteen seventies onward. An alternative right-wing intellectual model for dealing with the pains and pleasures of the ego, with all of its necessary growing up and disciplining, is a sort of sympathetic engagement with institutions (a friend came up recently with the formulation that a Tory is someone who believes institutions are wiser than individuals). Other modes of social and ethical engagement being viewed as primary will naturally result in other forms or relation to the self, and one thinks of how so many great poets of friendship (from Horace to Auden to John Fuller) have also been poets of ego. I note, in a rather embarrassed way, that whenever I write of human relations in my own poetry, I tend simply to want to record accurately the stable socialized commitments that ebb and flow in and out of the networks of friendship and love and sex - a fairly obviously gay male aesthetic that privileges a combination of ego, archness and group identity and ability to ventriloquize others, yet respectfully and with honesty. As my friend Simon said of our rather more *angry* friend Mike, *You don't have to fight it, you know?*. For some this will place the muse of poetry too readily at the service of rhetorical functions (to console, to teach, to persuade into bed) that they will find are the route to the *Astleyization* (those Staying Alive anthologies) of poetry or its simplistic totalitarian aims. The range of humane warmth and the Horatian social aesthetic of course depends upon a set of material undergirdings that many will consider lead to a consumerist aesthetic - in the end, like Auden, I prefer *poems* to *poetry*. Pound wrote dismissively (was it in his ABC of Reading) of Cowper that he was simply doing in poetry what was being better done by the novel at the time, that his pastoral work would be unthinkable without the novel. By contrast, I think of that as a virtue, since I want to make poetry more expansive rather than more pure. In the same way, I rather like the novelettish autobiographical narrative poem. I am writing currently a study on Ian Caws, whose experiential underpinning of a suddenly desubstantiated self in the face of the sudden intrusions of a Christian past and Christian landscape (alas, comfortably home counties for some) seem to provide as accurate and as horrifying an account of the difficulties of identity and the dangers and consolations of form as anything in Tom Raworth, for whose integrity of purpose I have of course great respect. I never thought of myself as a conservative, always the opposite, but I think I've become one. I am about to launch my own new poetry magazine, called Tempo. Perhaps I could send you the link?'

All the very best Daniel --

aduncan@pinko.org wrote
i have been wondering about something for a number of years, which perhaps you can help me on. is there a separate market/network for gay poetry? If someone asked me about this, I would like to be able to reply (one way or another). People keep attacking me for leaving things out. Ignorance is not usually an excuse. Maybe there is something I have failed to notice (in 30 years of mooching around the poetry scene).

Alignment of ego and forms. Hmmm. The thing is with a Strong Personality that it's like having attractive performers appear in films all the time. Why watch someone more attractive than you are? In poetry, people are quite happy to identify and ride along with someone with a Strong Ego, just for as long as the trip lasts. There is something faintly comic about this. It's not quite being dominated, not quite dominating. who is Ian caws? should I read him? caws is welsh for 'cheese'. Still, weldon kees is also 'Mr Cheese'.

On 20/05/07, Daniel Andersson wrote

Is there a gay market for poetry? I think there are probably two conflicting strands in gay literary identity, looking about at my friends and their enthusiasms. One derives from the particularly American tradition of oppositionalism. It has roots in the Beats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and slides into rock and indie and to the various democratic undergirdings of performance poetry and then further slides into an embrace of popular culture and from there into some sort of (usually negative) engagement with consumerism/camp/daily life. It is also a tradition nourished by the esoteric underground (especially in the musical field - one thinks of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The The), and is not particularly engaged with christianity or, indeed, *mainstream* gay culture. Leaden, dishonest and superficial would be its chief terms of abuse. It tends not to be too suspicious of statement.

The alternative, more well-bedded down tradition (more English) derives from an obsession with density, wit and form, but nourished emotionally by love, friendship, loss and group identity, understatement, urbanity and ventriloquism and via that ventriloquism to camp. It is a tradition more concerned with syncretism, understanding of society, observation, dialogue and engagement with institutions such as families, the church, the universities. It is a tradition that is as much as home in the literary novel as the musical scene. Poise, warmth, sensitivity, form, friendship and wit are its watchwords - and it probably has closer connections with mainstream gay culture. At its most *literary* and within the poetry tradition, it shades off into coterie arch group identity poetry, which one might consider some of the Cambridge school to be. Sloppy and self-indulgent would be its chief terms of abuse. It is often rather diffident about *statement*.

My friend James Mckay, who is a performance poet, is a very knowledgable exponent of the first tradition. I will ask him what he thinks of my distinction and get back to you.

Ian Caws is one of my favourite poets of the 1980s. He is a subtle, quiet formalist, recording the problems of christian faith in the Home Counties, full of understatement, and a great commentator on the seventeenth-century tradition of Herbert and Vaughan.

All best,
DCA

Daniel wrote: The distinction is almost between Whitman and Henry James. Henry James reviewed Leaves of Grass with about as much queeny dyspepsia as he could manage. Above all, James hated the endless statements in Whitman and the absence of the comforts of form that demanded to be recognized as such, the pleasures of a game which everyone knows the rules of and which everyone is subtly changing. I remember, in particular, one very funny piece of his review: he describes the way in which Whitman writes poetry in which the line seems to "exist in joyous independence of what comes either before or after it".

The rules of the game. Ruth Padel referred to Ian Duhig's (deeply heterosexual) poetry as 'sly'. A difference between straight sly and gay sly occurred to me. In straight sly, you tell a story, and you surprise people with where you end up (and the performer takes a great pleasure in having got there). In gay sly, everyone knows where you are going to end up, the slyness is in engaging people in an unusual journey, not an unusual destination.

Just some thoughts.

Best
DCA

aduncan@pinko.org wrote

Daniel, this opens up layer after layer of basically resistant encoding. I'm just worried about being accused of ignorance and prejudice. It doesn't look like I can let myself out of the accused cell without dieting for a long time. Let's be philosophical. If I write about modern poetry, I will be accused of monstrous acts no matter what I do. People in the poetry world love to have themselves photographed striking that stance.

Even more, it doesn't sound as if this layered meaning is going to benefit from me unclipping it and rolling it out straight. It sounds more like something more Maloryan - a vision that vouchsafes itself to the pure of heart.

Dr. D. C. Andersson (http://dcandersson.blogspot.com/) wrote:

I see what you're getting it, but the best way of avoiding prejudice and accusations of ignorance is to delimit the scope of one's enquiry. Being simple-minded has much in its favour on these sorts of occasion - dico expertus! I think that the layering you refer to is a not inaccurate broadbrush distinction in gay sensibility. Simply recording it clearly, and then querying to what extent poetry markets flow from (or do not flow from) given gay sensibilities will surely benefit you and your immediate audience, especially if it's a *general* literary audience.

I think that there IS something (in your terms) Maloryish about the competitive mercuriality of some versions of gay sensibility, which, in its more leaden versions, shades into snobbery, Senior Common Room wit and accommodation with existing power structures (camp flourish where something like class flourishes, unlike kitsch).

Mere thoughts. As I said, I have emailed James and I will report back.

My very warmest best wishes,

DCA

Poetry Yearbook 1976

2011-10-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

Poetry Yearbook, reverie about the state of poetry in 1976

I have a copy of Poetry Yearbook 1977, compiled by Samuel Gardiner, which lists all poetry books published between June 1975 and June 1976. Having access to this gives me an excuse for a nostalgic trip through the poetry scene. Strolling through these pages offers the chance once more to idle away an afternoon recalling the poetry world and my life in poetry. Gazing at these pages naturally draws on my memories, useless for books I haven't read, but offers a view with a low temperature, an indifference and completeness, which no single book could offer. The story of poetry in this time is here, even though in compacted and encrypted form. I seem to know something about most of the names in these lists, although in reality that can hardly be true. I seem to find an awful lot of them familiar. Gardiner says that in this year “770 new books of poetry by individual authors were published’, along with 88 anthologies. The figure is striking, as it is roughly six times as many as the equivalent figure for 1960. The fantasy of being a poet was appealing to very many people, and the issue of legitimation must arise. Is liberation enough?

This was an era when people were expecting revolutionary change in society. In line with that, people thought that the basic rules of the poetry world were able to be reset by conscious and collective action: the scene in 1976 was, it follows, in some ways the realisation of the idealistic fantasies people had had in 1965, 1968, and so on. 1976 was clearly a moment of downward turn for the countercultural enthusiasm of 1967: the Summer of Love had not really stopped, in its course to ever new regions and strata of society, but the activist group at its centre had been affected by a disillusion with the permanent results of the 'new consciousness' and by a gnawing need to make a living and (usually) join some kind of firm or institution in order to do so. The movement acquired momentum as it permeated and spread, so that obviously much more 'liberated' poetry was published in 1976 than 1967. Yet problems had found their way on stage.

The anthologies Gardiner lists seem dominated by locality. We see endless collections of poets from Streatham, poets from Waltham Forest, and what have you. I think that the strength of local links meant that people had to throw theory away. Theory was inherently divisive, it meant that people with differing artistic ideologies had to split from each other to protect the clarity of their artistic line. Sticking together meant compromising the artistic line. We have to speak of ‘legitimation through theory’. Theory was a new elitism. By saying that ‘to be a proper poet you have to have absorbed Olson/ Pound/ Oppen/ Robert Duncan etc.’ it defined a group even smaller than the group of ‘Oxbridge graduates’, and produced an intense focus on details of style which also defined failure and success in emotionally intense ways. This process was very productive of artistic excellence. But it was not compatible with the ethos of the Underground, which insisted that it was also self-expression and that everyone’s self had equal value. Belief in ‘theory’ is just such another lottery which holds that most poets are doomed to failure and only those hit by the lightning of ‘projective verse’, or whatever it is, will succeed. It puts power in the hands of connoisseurs who adjudicate on whether someone has understood the theory properly or is just copying admired gestures. In practice, acceptance by Mottram or Prynne was significant and had a great deal to do with the young poet’s feelings of belonging to an elite, with consequent calm and determination.

The Seventies did fulfil this role of ending the wish for freedom. I wrote a blog about this when reading Matthew Sweet’s book about British cinema, Pinewood Babylon. Sweet says that the local film industry collapsed in the 70s, and output was dominated by pornography in the guise of ‘sex comedies’. It looks a bit as if the promise of complete liberation was tried out through the banal means of sex films, which really did offer the breakdown of restraint, and which created feelings of satiation and even disgust. By 1980 people had the feeling that ‘freedom has been tried out and failed’. Similarly with devolving power, the unions were very active in the 70s. It was during the inflationary era triggered by the oil price rises. The strikes only led to workers getting 20% wage rises when inflation was running at 25%. The impression that the working class was taking over was basically false. Yet again, people reached the Thatcher government, or the 1983 election, with an unquantifiable feeling that freedom had been tried out (and had failed). In reality, the whole New Left project, or the counter cultural project, were still untried ideas, they were never put into practice and never failed. This complex was frustrating at the time and still remains frustrating. We can hardly relive the seventies without re-enacting this frustration.

The sheer number of publications reflects a more optimistic set of beliefs about individual talents and possibilities, yet most of the poetry published was hardly touched either by 'the Summer of Love' or by the more political 'movement of 68. It's obvious too that most of this poetry was rather bad. No one could attempt to resurrect most of this product. The 'full picture' does not include the 90% of low-grade books because they just don't repay attention. It may be that I was drawn into the poetry scene, around 1973, partly because it seemed to have low levels of attainment and it wasn’t intimidating. Most adult things seemed to have a high threshold of abilities. The poetry I saw at that time really didn’t, its weaknesses were quite obvious. It is hard to say that the scene encouraged excellence, when most of what it encouraged was anything but excellent. The feeling is more like the brilliant poets being quite alien from the scene and having to ignore its prejudices and expectations to get anywhere. It’s hard to say what the scene was for.

The split between the innovative sector and the traditional one is scored deeply into the data. The typical poetry of the time was what I call the 'mainstream'. (Poetry Dimension 2, from 1974, is a convenient summary of what I am calling ‘the mainstream’ at around this date.) It was against rhetoric and in favour of the empirical. Being against rhetoric meant that the language couldn't be interesting and was as bare as possible. Being empirical meant being against the imagination or ideas. The payload was freeing people from the commitments which emotions or ideas had bound them to. The misery of the mainstream poets is palpable even at this distance in time. I pick up the feeling that they desperately need a way out but that the gleaming future offered by the theory of the avant garde is a delusion and in the end offers no open door but merely more wall, stretching off into the distance. The future on offer was not the future.

It occurs to me now that the empirical project was trying to erase the unconsciousness brought by unchanging cognitive contexts. The plan was to write poems in which everything was vivid because you had scrapped general ideas. Everything is evidence and you are alert to everything. This bears strong similarities to the innovative project. Both are an attempt to reach overall heightened awareness by a break with the past and its knowledge. Obviously, the problem they were both seeing must have existed.

The tedium of much of this poetry was still affected by existentialism at that time. In the late 40s and the years that followed, existentialism led educated people to believe that they were not the leaders of society and that by writing as drably as possible they would achieve virtue. By destroying ideals and not setting up figures of admiration, including poets, they would be modern and serious. This was the local vessel into which abiding Christian energies were poured, at the time. Writing depressing poems was seen as spiritual. In fact, destroying the cherished ideas of other people who relied on the imagination and on emotionally coloured speculation was seen as a virtuous act - the goal of literature. I think this whole approach was going through a big dip already in 1965 or 66, but the logic of biology meant that poets who had been students in the 1950s were still prominent in the poetry world in 1975. Their grip was lost a few years later.

The mainstream poets were proud of not glamorising their abilities and lifestyles. But by proudly writing about boring and compromised experiences they were not producing interesting poems, and large sectors of the audience simply identified this project as one of accumulating boring poems. The domestic approach was going to work best when poets were leading interesting lives and were in fact naturally glamorous and dominant individuals. Poems about typical events in the lives of unexceptional people were not going to work.

A lot of the poets writing at this time had styles very similar to each other. This was not necessarily something popular with a wide audience - it belonged to an in-group, being the English Literature academics of a certain period, who had a strong caste consciousness and approved a cluster of stylistic traits related to the study of literature. The audience that bought poetry books was, I think, much more interested in poets that explored emotions and were sensitive to feelings and details of personal relationships, more like the market for singer-songwriter records. The academic, existentialist, Christian poets did not like the retailing side of poetry, the atmosphere in High Street bookshops, because they did not thrive in it. The experts in publishing or the media had a different view of what poetry should do. George MacBeth was perhaps the most prominent of these.

The 'anti-rhetoric' thing involved an implicit critique of the means of earlier poetry. This was the precursor of some of the most radical experimental poetry, which questioned the basic structures of language and the self. Making formal devices the subject of poetry was already part of the 'anti-rhetoric' project, which came out of classroom experiences in dissecting poems.

The list allows us to consider the makeup of the scene - the failure of the past to disappear, even. Someone from the deep past who was still publishing was Sacheverell Sitwell. He had been in the Wheels anthologies of around 1917, almost the first blast of avant-garde poetry in England. He had written the libretto for a Diaghilev ballet, surely the incontrovertible proof of Modernist status. He was not though in any way on the scene for poetry in 1974 - he found the scene unbearable and was self-publishing his poetry in a way which avoided reviews and avoided sales, as it was largely distributed to friends. So we can say that there was roughly a 50 year span in the poets actively publishing in the sample year. A very young poet who published two pamphlets in this year was Jeremy Reed. Just as the official scene was unsympathetic to the new poetry of the 70s, driving it into the ‘Underground’, so also it was probably unsympathetic to poets from much earlier periods. The latter could thus also form an ‘underground’. I would guess that the publication by DS Savage, 'And also much cattle', a libretto of 16 pages, falls into this category. Savage was part of the New Romantic scene of the 1940s and it is likely that this publication passed almost unnoticed. The surviving New Romantics didn’t even have a magazine to keep their group feeling going (although Kathleen Raine provided something like that with Temenos, from 1984).

There are so many wonderful books in this single year. Poems 1955-75, by Peter Levi, High Pink on Chrome by JH Prynne, Striking the Pavilion of Zero by John James, Pleats by Andrew Crozier, Dense Lens by Asa Benveniste and Brian Marley, Catacomb Suburb by Alistair Fowler. There are quite a few other pamphlets or books of interest. However, it’s not obvious why the area of high artistic achievement needed also to have the area of low artistic achievement around it. (We could also mention Taj Express, by Alan Ross, not his best, and a book by George MacBeth which I can’t evaluate because his collected poems doesn’t identify which book things came from.) You have ‘Long Shout to Kernewek’, by Allen Fisher, written much earlier and not yet great poetry. It is clearly the predecessor of his major work ‘Place’, which was in progress at its time. Anthony Lopez published Snapshots, Anthony Barnett Blood Flow.

I picked up the book with the supposition that I am the first person who has taken on the mass of publications from this time and sifted out what is good. After reading the list through, I still think that. Most of these books did not get reviewed, the reception system effectively broke down. If anyone has sifted through this material, they haven’t made the results known. The corollary of such a high publication rate is that the process which forms collective knowledge and reputations seizes up.

If I had to sum up the pattern of these publications, I would talk about irrational generosity. There was no need for so many books and their numbers also defy all commercial logic. The typical event behind the publications is an empty act of acknowledgement: some publisher (unpaid and running at a loss, usually) acknowledges the talent of a poet, yet the poet has no talent and the acknowledgement is an empty one, something generous but also disproportionate and even unjustifiable. We hear a lot about tough gatekeepers locking people out of the buildings where they had a natural right to be, but the heart of the scene was something totally different. What was happening, in hundreds of cases, was people publishing a book of poetry by someone who didn't really deserve it, because they put the moment of gift, bestowing, recognising, prizing, above the moment of accurate scrutiny. The scene was unmistakably benevolent to the sensitive, introspective, uncertain (and even immature), and this atmosphere gave it a strength and durability which were thinly connected to artistic achievement and to connoisseurship. The affection of the publishers for their clients is the more admirable because it wasn't tied to genuine talent - it was pure and unconditional. It was impossible to stop.

The poetry world revealed in this catalogue shows a retreat away from meritocracy and commerce. This was a reversal of the values by which everyday life is conducted and this reversal is significant in typing poetry as a zone of innocence and autonomy. This is important to the scene as a place to live, a zone that offered sustenance. You can't simply ridicule it. It was a code of conduct. Of course you can't get away from the idea of excellence in art forever.

Along with a collapse of the need to hit a particular market went a collapse of the need to write interestingly or to link the poem to an experience of intense focus and awareness of which it is in part a record. Some people wanted liberation in order to achieve excellence and others wanted to write undifferentiated slush - to abolish the sense of failure.

It occurs to me that Writers Forum, rather than breaking with the inherited patterns was actually over-fulfilling imperatives present in the structure of the field. They went further out of inanity, a lack of intellectual structures that could have formed a brake or a counter-policy, so ending up with zero-effort works that could not be sold and were not on sale anywhere. Breaking with the theory that talent existed ended attentiveness.

The element of recognition was wiped out of the patronage equation. WF was totally undiscriminating so being published by them didn't mean anything at all. The scene has pulled back from the most total realisation of incomplete sets of imperatives, without really resolving the problem of quality control.

The wash of mediocre material contributed to the loss of interest in poetry by the reading public. If you have an incredible overload of poetry product, viz. the 700+ books emerging in 1975 or 1976, then you really need a whole tier of people who are coldly differentiating between good and bad, truth and fantasy or hype, and who bring back the results. If you have that then the good books come out top over the bad ones, and this is really such a desirable outcome. Another effect would be that people would be effective at resisting group imperatives and be better at looking at the evidence, i.e. the texts themselves. This is not something which was a big feature of the scene in 1976. The critical attitude, which segregated good from bad, did have positive effects. The poetry scene did seem to be realising a programme of equality which erased the reader from the equation. Applying commercial values would have closed down the poetry industry altogether. Yet getting away from commerce should not have meant ignoring artistic quality and readability. The end result was the destruction of respect for the term ‘poet’, and the loss of interest by bookshops in stocking new and unknown work. Forget about commerce, people had been ripped off too many times.

Someone who ploughed into all this stodge with real enthusiasm would end up tired. There is something fated about this. In 1976 there was still a ‘counter-culture’ hoping to replace the existing structures of behaviour and group organisation. The relevance of dropping the controls, which had certainly happened in poetry, as in the visual arts and pop music, was that it gave a foretaste of freedom in a realised Counter Cultural takeover. The conclusion which many people must have drawn was that the appallingly low quality of the cultural product which ensued was a foretaste of failure by the revolution if it ever took over. If you look at this morass of poetry as a test, the signal that comes back seems to say that people are bored by freedom, they lose focus and release frustrations in a basically uninteresting way. The ‘political dimension’ to poetry was certainly important in 1976, but the cultural message it finally came back with was not the one poets were hoping for.

The elitist argument wins. Lots of people were trying to break down the validation of central cultural agencies. If poets had marched away from the points of validation and still retained intellectual and artistic focus, still produced works of excellence, the argument would have been won. But so many people rejected ‘standards’, dropped out, found publication through thoroughly ‘unlegitimated’ publishers, and produced deeply uninteresting poetry. This is a big part of the story of the Underground. It proved that the prospect of success and recognition by the ‘authorities’ made poets reach perfect focus just as the presence of a crowd might make a cricketer reach perfect focus.

Gardiner evidently got tired typing all this stuff up. Thus, 'Edge', credited to Asa Benveniste, is surely 'Grip Edge Lay Edge'. 'Residues', by Gael Turnbull is 'Residues: Down the Sluice of Time'.

I notice two books by Eric Mottram. Evidently Eric was excited. Publishing two books within a year is rare, yet quite a few people are recorded in the Yearbook as doing this. '1922 Earth Raids' and 'Local Movement' are not artistically successful, yet they do testify to a phase of creativity and energy, optimism and release. They are intricate works. He went through a bad patch when his contract as editor of Poetry Review came to an end.

I found the same title published by two different publishers. Probably both were self-publications, the author (Bill Griffiths) toshed out a few inky copies in the print room at the Poetry Centre and declared that as publication. If Akros publishes five works by Duncan Glen in one year, it may help to recall that Akros was Duncan Glen. We seem to have three books by Brian Jones, but I think two were republications which London Magazine Editions had craftily smuggled in, and the original versions were around 1970.

There are quite a few books from what we would think of as the 'Cardiff underground'. I notice two pamphlets by Mark Williams, a figure people told us about when we were researching the Welsh underground but who proved elusive. I think he was mainly a performance poet. Anyway, I haven’t seen these pamphlets. We see also pamphlets by Barry Edgar Pilcher.

Other works of interest would include pamphlets by Asa Benveniste, Gael Turnbull, Penelope Shuttle, George Mackay Brown, Harry Guest, Paul Evans. I must admit to an interest in works by David Grubb and David Tipton, marginal figures but ones who perhaps put something good together when the weather was favourable. There is a pamphlet by Susan Musgrave which I haven’t seen but based on other work this is probably good. She is Canadian but I think living in Britain around this time. The Snow Party by Derek Mahon is probably very good, I saw his selected poems. We have by David Tipton the pamphlet Millstone Grit including the long poem of that name. I think he was writing better poems around 1972 than later on. He claimed in a later book to have been influenced by Harry Guest, which may shed light on his intentions. Here he is pulling the camera back to allow much more information in than the conventional poem with its limiting 'lyric intensity'. The narrative is complex enough to reach a real flow. Yet the aggregate is close to the banal, the lack of introspection makes it like a TV drama showing the same events and it lacks the familiar virtues of poetry. The language has been simplified to allow so much to be said. The poem is poised on the edge of excellence yet avoids it and flows on past. He differs from Guest by having no pattern of symbolism, it is all earnestly fixed on the surface of a set of social relations.

Something missing from the list is feminism. The accepted start of modern feminism is in 1970, but in 1976 this was a momentous but private literary process, rather than something which was appearing in finished works to any great extent. Minefields by Judith Kazantzis came out in 1977, the curtain is about to rise on this new sector of artistic productivity. (We do have ‘Webs on Fire’ by Penelope Shuttle, maybe this was feminist. I haven’t seen this one.)

Gardiner also lists poetry magazines. He counts 170 of them but it seems likely he missed a few. In general they were even less selective than the books, so the worthless bulk of low-grade poetry books is surrounded by an even larger bulk of low-grade poetry in magazines. It’s probably easier dealing with magazines, they are more varied and you get less worried or irritated by the incompetence of the poets. You just move on to the next thing. That Britain could fill 170 magazines with excellent poems is a claim no one would make.

It may not seem sensible to regard trivial things like sex films (and drug trips) as valid tests of a liberatory project, and as grounds for rejecting it. But that is how politics works, the victors make up the rules after the game has been played. The problems with the overall social project just lead us back to the success of individual works of art.

addendum on sex films

Sweet's version of the British film industry in the 70s is too striking for me to let it go without adding some context. A BFI publication, Seventies British Cinema, edited by Robert Shail, gives the figures. A total of 56 'sex comedies’ were filmed in the Seventies. (p.5) Meanwhile, 'During the course of the Seventies, the number of feature films produced more than halved from eighty-four to forty-one.' (p. xiv) So, OK, a lot of people employed in the industry in 1971 were out of work in 1977. Some of them must have worked on the sex comedies, but these did not 'take over' because by count other genres were always the large majority. (See table on page 67.) The sex comedies were cheap and since they didn't expand more than they did they obviously weren't making super-profits. Sweet says 'In the 1970s, sex comedies accounted for the bulk of British production[.]’, but Shail's figures show them as just on 10% of production of feature films. Is this 'the bulk'? or is Sweet someone who watches too many movies?

Homage to Victor Carroon

2011-10-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I went to the Poetry Library and borrowed a copy of 'A Book of Herne' (subtitled ‘1975-81'), by Eric Mottram. I noticed an illustration showing a drawing of a cave relief made by the Abbe Breuil. The previous day I had seen a version of the same drawing appearing as part of the decor of a laboratory in 'Quatermass and the Pit', a 1958 TV serial. Reaching page 93 of 'Herne', still on the train back to Nottingham, I discovered a reference to another Quatermass serial: the original of 1953, 'The Quatermass Experiment'. Mottram says 'Victor Caroon'. He offers no further illumination, but the context is one of pagan re-enactments and Carroon's fate was to become like a piece of fungus inhabiting Westminster Abbey, a recollection of 'Green Man' images carved in stone inside churches, representing human figures given over to vegetation. The coincidence justifies me in writing about Mottram in connection with Nigel Kneale, an author who I greatly admire.

The basic story of the film is that three astronauts go up into outer space in a rocket. The base loses control of it, and loses its signals. When it returns to earth, the hatch has not been opened but there is only one man inside it. He has the memories of one of the missing men. (I was told this part of the story in about 1961 and never forgot it.) He is Victor Carroon.

The first ‘possessed’ character in ‘The Pit’ takes up a weird and distinctive shambling posture and gait which are based on the ‘sorcerer’ as recovered by Breuil. In the Hammer film version, he is played by Duncan Lamont who, confusingly, played Victor Carroon in the 1953 BBC serial. The 'Sorcerer' drawing is one everybody must be familiar with. It is supposedly a reproduction of a really existing engraving/relief inside the Grotte des Trois Freres, near Foix, France. It shows a human figure disguised as a horned creature, either wearing a costume and mask or really being transformed into their animal equivalent, reared up on two legs in what may be a dance. It is half-crouched, adorned with big antlers and a human penis. It is the conventional 'proof' that there was shamanism in the old Stone Age and one of the most widely reproduced of all prehistoric images. Other people have examined the relief and found no antlers. Yet the drawing was produced by tracing. It is fair to say that the critique is itself controversial. Other images resembling Breuil's re-creation have not been found.

'Herne' is based on the idea that archetypal mythic images are important to our psyche and that they can be re-animated to form the central narrative of works of art. It does not work very well. 'Quatermass and the Pit' is based on a similar idea. It shows us humans as the descendants of a Martian breeding programme, in which our deepest impulses were programmed by the Martians and are ready to be amplified and brought to frightening intensity by the radiant powers invested in the semi-alive hull of an ancient space-craft, the one dug up from the 'pit' of the title. The archetypal rite in question is a 'Wild Hunt' in which human beings, losing all inhibitions, run around in troops destroying people who are 'different'. This was a feature of the Martian hive-society. Kneale built his story from the image of the Notting Hill race riots, in which for example 400 people chased one black man into a shop, threatening his life. Kneale started from the news story and from there spun his tale of the evil pooled at the base of our psyches and how it wanted to seize control. The climax of 'The Pit' shows as fantasy what had really been seen on the streets of Notting Hill, a few months before. He in fact is with the writers who saw the archetypal as evil and recognised in 'the urge to repeat' the origin of war, tyranny, totalitarian states and prison camps. Another wing saw the archetypal as liberation, and believed that the goal of art was to elicit these primal narratives and causes us to re-enact them. Posing a question - of hidden sources of actions - in this way was a feature of the cultural scene of the time.

David Mellor also draws a comparison between Victor Carroon and the Green Man (or the Burry Man), in his 1986 exhibition at the Barbican, 'Paradise Lost?", about the Neo-Romantic movement. He showed an image of Carroon at an earlier stage of his metamorphosis, when he still had the shape of a man, although the texture of his flesh had become like a plant.

Mottram as a matter of fact cites the 1956 Hammer film, 'The Quatermass Experiment', as his source, which was presumably more available than the TV series when he was writing in the 1970s. Only two of the episodes were on film, the others went out live on camera and so do not exist today. However the DVD package of the three Quatermass serials for the BBC includes the scripts of the 'lost' episodes.

The problem with it is less that the poetry is bad than that it runs out of breath too quickly:

tines/ shivered by impact and scarved neck
his feet lift lightly/ with mere memory
of gentler seasons. Lungs full of the drug, antlers
rake back, he halts the herd, his voice filled
with custom of combat and unslaked lust
Victor Caroon
(‘Notebook 3‘)

This is quite interesting but it’s just a blip, the character does not have enough substance to continue after a few lines, and the poem jumps to another theme. I do not really get a lift out of this. The moment of cut/splice, the engine room of montage, is so delicate to manage. You can jump into another dimension of analogy and higher pattern, or you can lose the thread. It is hard to catch the transition, however you try to slow it down it’s over in a flash - of failure or brilliance. (‘Scarved neck’ might be ‘scarred neck’? The ‘drug’ might be the hormone which governs the ‘rut’ which causes fighting behaviour between stags?)

If you look at a range of Mottram's work (I am slowly working through it), 'Herne' sticks out as distinctively worse than adjacent books: worse than '1922 Earth Raids', than 'Local Movement' or 'Peace Projects'. The date 1975-81 includes a period which was notably low in Eric's existence, according to the testimony of his friends. Further the subject matter of 'Herne' is almost over-ripe, romantic and barbaric, breaking out into areas of mythic liberation. The contrast with the behaviour expected of a professor and someone whose opinion was taken seriously in forming policy, academic or cultural, was too severe. 'Herne' appears more as a schematic describing an unwritten work than as a work on its own. The time inside it is crushed down, dissected into fragments, unable to move or to flow. He recognises a number of sources for a postulated romantic-mythic poem about a Stag God, but at each point the source overwhelms him and leaves him weaker. The citation of Ferenc Juhasz, whose great 1955 poem about 'The Boy Transformed into a Stag at the Gate of Secrets' appeared in 'Modern Poetry in Translation' around this time, identifies where greatness is but lacks any creative impetus of its own. Eric liked to compile reading lists and 'Herne' spends too much time acting like a reading list.

In ‘Pit’, there is a passage where Quatermass is researching the history of the area (Hobb’s Lane) where the still mysterious hull or shell has been discovered, and tracing a history of disturbances, apparitions, ghost stories, and mass fear, going back to the Middle Ages. It is a ‘ghost story’ in that the evil spirit is tied to a place. The cumulative force of the stories going back deep in time is part of the eeriness which Kneale manipulates so brilliantly. This is a short passage carried off with great precision. It resembles Mottram’s bibliophile accumulation of sources for the great poem he is unable to write. But Mottram’s rambling listings are not part of a coherent dramatic context. Another passage has Matthew Roney, the archaeologist, defining the ‘insect’ figures discovered inside a compartment in the hull in terms of visual comparisons to gargoyles, demons, and of course the horned figure in Breuil’s fanciful drawing. Roney has a frieze of cave paintings running round the walls of his laboratory. He evokes an archetype by demonstrating the common points between dozens of disparate visual creations. This also is what Mottram is trying to do, but without the dramatist’s flair for making ideas exciting. The resemblances he picks up are real but they are not exciting. The Canadian actor Cec Linder is wonderfully warm, sweepingly enthusiastic, as Roney. Kneale repeated the effect in his ‘The Stone Tape’ (1973), and dozens, possibly hundreds, of authors, have tried to repeat the effect in the decades since. ‘Herne’ quite closely resembles Roney’s montage, the pin-up board of an art historian: an excitable spill of images, a pattern to release the imagination. It has a static quality: the bits do not go in a direction, their order is irrelevant because there is no narrative line or argument. This might be true of a pin-up board or an archive. In a book-length poem it is a sign of muddle, of a design phase that has been missed out.

The Danish painter and theorist Asger Jorn was also interested in the Green Man, the stone head with leaves and branches radiating out of it. He saw this as a pagan image which had been taken over by Christian sculptors. He saw this as an example of a whole group of images: a significant cluster of elements was assembled into a binding image, once, and was then reproduced many times. The meaning could be re-invented to suit the audience, but the ‘craft expertise’ of the sculptor was retained with obstinate persistence. Arguably, the real meaning was the very first one, which had inspired the moment of origin. This re-use of images led him to invent ‘detournement’, which he imparted to the Situationists, a group he co-founded.

In the Green Man passages Mottram mentions RILKO, which is too romantic to be true. I discussed the Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation in ‘Council of Heresy’. His interest in them suggests once more that Eric was too involved in lush and romantic territory for the tastes of the formalists he hung out with. If we revisit the terrain of ‘poetic theory’ (a move which unfortunately may take us back into an era of trench warfare, but let’s just try it), the failings of ’Herne’ do not invalidate the theory he was using. Other works based on much the same theory worked much better. However, because ’Herne’ is a bad example it is obvious and undeniable that the theory does not inevitably work and so is incomplete and fragmentary in itself. This makes it doubtful that we would want to do battle for it. Conversely, the reasons why a book of poetry is bad may have to do with more subtle and uncontrollable psychological qualities like depression and desensitisation, even lack of inspiration. The idea that a set of theoretical decisions, logical and fully controllable, can solve your problems may be an act of psychic self-defence which is actually tragic. The next poem may only be reachable by forgetting the decisions that made the last one succeed.

Another step of comparison. ‘Herne’ is noticeably similar to ‘Crow’ and ‘Gaudete’. It is a march deeper into Hughes territory. It is also close to ‘Ranter’, but both follow Hughes.

The guides I used did not guide me to other 'man-stag' images from the Palaeolithic but the German archaeologist Nicholas Conard has claimed that 'the transformation between man and animal, and especially between man and felines, was part of the Aurignacian system of beliefs'. In a cave, Hohlenstein-Stadel, in the Lone Valley was found ''One such ivory figurine just a few inches long" which "depicts the hybrid features of a man and a lion'. The new ‘Lowenmensch’ figurine was not quite ‘found’ but assembled in the museum from fragments found in 1939. It was only ‘recognised‘ in 1969 by Joachim Hahn. A similar figurine was found nearby, in the Ach Valley, in 2004 (by a group led by Claus-Joachim Kind). So the class of man-animal hybrids does exist and the 'stag-man' belongs to that class. (The Lone and Ach valleys are in Swabia. One quote I found has it that ...."Figurative art began in Swabia, music began in Swabia," but we really have to move on.) (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6wenmensch, also http://www.loewenmensch.de/ )

A cave nearby, still in the Lone Valley, is called Vogelherd and Thomas Kling wrote a poem about it.

Poetry numbers, again

2011-08-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

More on a model of publication numbers, June 2010

This adds something to ‘My errors and some numbers too’, posted on this website.

I did some work in 2010 to correct figures for the overall volume of poetry publications in the period 1960-97, offered on this website. The work was based on spreadsheets with long lists of names. There are three values which the spreadsheet exercise is there to correct. One of these, the curve of the male/female ratio, is not controversial, fairly secure, and does not require exhausting scrutiny. The other two are less secure. They are the figure of circa 7000 for poets publishing in the period, and the count of roughly 2000 underground poets within that figure. I have been doing some work to check these and confidence is hard to obtain.

I discovered that for three years in the 1970s there was an annual issue of Poet’s Yearbook, a publication which on the basis of returns from over 900 publishers issued a list of all poetry publications for that year (from June to June). The first result from this was that the annual listings produced by the Poetry Book Society were hopelessly incomplete.

Using this excellent new source (PY), I typed up lists of poets publishing in successive years, 1976 and 1977, and by matching these derived a count of the overlap between the two years. 106 poets recurred between 1976 and 1977, out of 628 in the first year. So in theory the whole list would recur over 6 years. So a count of the total pool at that point is 6x628 which is 3768, less the 628 double appearances, so 3050. This would be the ‘model’ total pool of poets active in that time. Assumptions about the length of a working life would allow us to scale this up to the whole 40 year period - e.g. double 3050 or 2.4 times 3050 (depending on the assumption used).

Some poets born in the 1880s were still publishing in 1960 and 1961. Some poets were publishing for the very first time in 1997. We have to consider poets entering and leaving the pool in order to get at the count for all poets active in the period 1960-97. Assume the pool arrives in 40 exactly equal annual cohorts and each cohort leaves after exactly 40 years. This means that the pool in 1977 includes exactly 20 cohorts and therefore the set of poets active in the whole period is double the pool active in 1977. Therefore this count for the whole period is 3050x2, equals 6100.

This is an idealisation because the cohort entering in 1960 was certainly much smaller than the cohort entering in 1975. On balance this means 6100 is an overestimate and so the total in this model would be less than 6100, perhaps between 5000 and 5500. The 40 cohorts are all of different sizes and they probably increased in steps from 1960 onward. If we adjust the multiplier to 1.6x 3050 we get a count of 4875 poets.

This model is accurate to within half an order of magnitude (he said modestly). Its real value is to get a ‘fix' on the other model, where we estimated 33,000 books published and using a bludgeon translated that into 7000 poets. The two figures critique each other and give us a hint of where the true figure must lie.

The PY lists also give us information, only at a point in time but quite thorough for that point, of the balance between male and female poets. Counting entries in Poet’s Yearbook 1978 (for publications between June 1976 and June 1977) we find:

21.7% female
71.9 % male
indeterminate by name 4.9%

I don’t have comparable counts for the 1950s or 1960s, but it is clear that the scene was male-dominated in 1976. Using counts from selective sources like anthologies and the lists in British Council pamphlets, it is possible to guess that female participation in the 1950s was around 10 to 15%, and so we can suggest that this share was growing up to 1976, in line with greater access to higher education of female students, and a reduction in the rigidity of gender roles.

One thing that PY yields is a critical comparison with the lists in the Poetry Book Society lists for each year. In 1974 the PBS lists 450 books + 61 anthologies, in 1975-6 they list 859 titles. This figure is identical to the one in Poet's Yearbook so the jump from 1974 to 1975 is probably due to copying the figures from PY! It follows that the count in the PBS list is probably far too small for the entire series. The 'hike' blows their credibility. So any figures based on their count for the period 1960-75 are in doubt - as too low. My guess is they ignored little presses unless forced to include them. (Note that the PY year runs from June to June.)

It is possible that 74 to 75 was a growth year, but post the ‘oil price shock’ inflation had already taken off and this does not seem like the basis for sharp growth. So a jump from 450 to 850 titles in a single year is due probably to a better means of collecting information.

Why was I interested in these numbers? It has to do with the completeness of 'Affluence' (the overall project which includes all my books on British poetry). I covered 140 poets from the period in 'Affluence'. Selectivity was a big issue for a lot of readers. The numbers let me get at selectivity - and the answer is that everything is drowned in it. 140 poets is just a drop in the ocean. Almost everything is forgotten. Another answer is that "in all this warehouse of dead print, there are a number of poets who really count, and the cognoscenti know who they are“. So by missing out some of those poets I would be committing errors. But either the cognoscenti don't cover the terrain or they keep their knowledge to themselves.

I don’t think anyone would go and read all 850 volumes published in 1975-6. At some level, we all agree on one basic thing - that most of the poets publishing were wasting their time. Quite a few of us share the same question: how do you know which of the 850 books are worth reading?

As an aside, Poet’s Yearbook was only published for three years. It is a fabulous source but there was really no market for it. What do you with a list of 850 poetry books? ST Gardiner edited it and did all the work. It is coincidental that they cover a lot of the period in which Poetry Review stopped running reviews and so drops out as a reference source. PY is a high quality publication but it only lasted for three years and unfortunately its figures cast doubt on the other series we have, which run for longer. This whole area is paved with uncertainty.

2011-08-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

Novels about Poets

In Cargo of Eagles, by Margery Allingham (1968), a detective story with the legendary sleuth Albert Campion, a minor character is a poet named HO Wishart who keeps a pub in an Essex village, the one he grew up in. 'A genuine minor poet and a white hope at one time.' (p.19) He is about 65 in 1966 and is said to have been in a book called Georgian Poetry - which would have been when he was about 13. There is quite a complicated plot which mainly involves faded scandals, 20 years before or even 50 years. Campion himself seems like a nostalgia item by this point. What Campion works out about Wishart is that, being a brilliant lad of humble background at Cambridge, he had written volumes of poetry for three well-off friends for them to publish under their names - against a bulky payment. This is possibly the only modern example of a poet making money. (Later we find out that it was Georgian Poetry volume 5, which fits slightly better.) The story goes -
'Think of your Cambridge friends, Colquhoun, Middlemass and Swinstead. Three dull men and all of them rich. Yet each of them produced an unlikely volume with remarkable literary qualities - very flattering to their vanity. I wonder who really wrote Mosaic to machine or Mandragora Days or Oh, Mr Cromek? Odd books to keep on your shelves, Mr Wishart, yet there they are right behind your head sitting next to the fifth volume of Georgian Poetry in which you figure." (p. 138) We do not find out how Campion knew that these men born around 1900 were dull or rich. Nor do we hear any of the forged poems- instead we get more of a tedious plot about crime and stuff like that. Who was Cromek? was this the origin of the Cambridge school?
Allingham is my favourite detective story writer. Reality barely intrudes but the fantasy is always rich, subtle, and light.

A Chymical Wedding, by Lindsey Clarke
The original ‘chymical wedding’ was one of the Rosicrucian tracts of around 1615 and refers to a conjunction of two elements, a compound - not to humans.

The character is based on George Barker, who lived in Norfolk for many years.

There is a parallel plot set in Victorian times and about religious doubt. This double line was very much the fashion in the 1980s. I didn’t really see that the 19th C plot was linked to the 20th C one. The depiction of the earthy and wilful poet-figure is brilliant but the book doesn’t really add up to a whole. The connection between the supernatural idea of conjunction etc. and the 20th C characters did not arrive.

Diawl y Wenallt, by Marcel Williams
The book is full of racy stories which do not add up to what you would think of as a whole novel, the characters do not acquire depth, but the individual sketches are funny, witty, and racy. I enjoyed this a lot. The book ends up with admiration for Thomas’ sexual energy and focus on pleasure, mocking the various more classically Welsh characters who disapprove of everything in sight. The depiction of Thomas in action is much more exciting than anything in the biographies. Drama is better than documentation.

Ffenestri tua’r gwyll, by Islwyn Ffowc Elis
The rather typically 1950s plot rotates around the emotional problems of a widow who has sacrificed her own artistic talent to a dominating husband and who now expresses herself through artistic patronage. This comes to include a young and stroppy poet and all too predictably she extends her interest beyond offers of money and good taste. This is very enjoyable although dated. It is rather like a film by Douglas Sirk. It also expresses a distrust of the North Welsh for the South Welsh working class. The youth is threateningly modernist and self-possessed. I didn’t quite get why a clergyman like Elis would believe in Freud so much when it comes to psychology, but the melodramatic plotting is so effective that this doesn’t seem to matter.

Festival at Fairbridge, by JB Priestley (1955)
This large-scale fresco of English life in the 1950s includes a brief scene in which we encounter the verse drama movement. Priestley, an unfashionable but great dramatist, is putting paid to the very fashionable verse dramatists here. Fairness or benevolence are not much on show. His parody of Fry’s writing is uncomfortably good. Priestley was more intelligent than everyone else around him but no one notices this if you come from Yorkshire. Verse drama became utterly unfashionable within a year or so of this novel's being published. I don't know if his depiction of the whole thing as emanating from a rich patron, and rotating around the whims of that person, is accurate, but it is convincing when you read it. The same novel includes a tour round the documentary film movement, which he also demolishes (and which was also heading for the end of the road around 1955). Priestley actualy writes some of the poetry in question, unlike many novelists.

Enderby, by Anthony Burgess
Trilogy about a poet.

The Virgin in the Garden, by AS Byatt
describes someone who wrote verse drama during the brief boom in the early 50s. fails to produce any of his verse. Instead the book is just full of prose. set in North Yorkshire in the early 1950s, which is inherently interesting.

If pressed I would say I didn’t read novels but somehow, in bursts of inactivity, I must have done so.

London School yada yada yada

2011-08-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

London?

I have a long personal history of sitting in upper rooms of pubs somewhere in North London listening to the recital of something really, really dreadful. The managers of the London scene are very proud of being unselective. The result was the humiliation of the audience, for which the only comeback was that, years later, one could tell the truth and not sign up to some jolly collusive fantasy that it was all marvellous. It is good to rip my shirt off and get up front about how addled and deluded I thought 90% of it was, knowing that by doing this I would be telling the truth for dozens of other people as well. Now it can be told!

Two questions about 'Affluence, Welfare, and Fine Words'. Why no chapter on the London School? Secondly, why the comment in 'Origins of the Underground' which Robert Hampson found 'unhelpful'? ("Yes Virginia, there is a London avant-garde; it is too much like people with bags over their heads banging their heads against the wall and making a lot of noise but making few articulate sounds.") I will start with Allen Fisher. This work seems to me to be of great importance. I wrote about it frequently but it resisted description. So I produced a whole book of interviews with the poet. This was completed in 2005, and the publisher has not managed to print it yet. All the same this represents the value which I place on his work and which I want others to place on it as well. I do not think that other poets have taken on much of what Allen worked out in formal terms, and of hundreds of influences he has documented other London poets seem to feature nowhere.

While I was in The Punter after a seminar in Cambridge (in August 2011), someone made this comment to me about Eric Mottram, that he was an academic who couldn't stand first-rate art and so gathered around him a bunch of second-raters, rowdies who believed that all they had to do was to create riot and revolt against the rules and create noise. This may be the real prehistory of the London School. Naturally this is not recorded in the folklore.

Fear of reflexivity

The first reason for not writing about the London School en masse is that there were hundreds of people milling around (as documented in the anthology Verbi Visi Voco and in too many of the 1500 pamphlets published by Writers Forum) and producing dreadful radical poetry. "Look, I've broken my language!" The ethos of Writers Forum was never to criticise anything and not to be selective when it came to publishing. VVV itself was a reprint of one page each from the first 500 WF pamphlets - neatly documenting that the undertaking was a waste of time. The unwillingness to apply discrimination is itself a prime example of wearing a bag over your head - the powers of the intelligence being switched off. The idea of selecting the best poetry as a preliminary to making an anthology had not penetrated these parts. Bring your rambles to the shambles! Because the borders of the London School extended to engulf so many talentless louts, the LS as an aggregate was not interesting enough to write about. Conversely, the talented individuals who hung out on the London scene could only be given justice by being separated out from the Gadarene rout and treated as individuals.
The 'bag over the head' quality derived from simple precepts, thus:

utterances with no meaning, such as sound and concrete poetry, are better than articulate speech
consciousness is bourgeois
anything which damages language is better than anything which is articulate, coherent, refined
it is necessary to smash cultural forms in order to achieve liberation
connoisseurship, discrimination, exact knowledge, are bourgeois fantasies
disrupting patterns of association is more important than creating something clear
expressing the personality, and the differentiated patterns of perception and sensibility which show the personality in poetry, is reactionary and out of date. Operations based on chance, mechanical recombination, found texts, defacing of found texts, are inherently superior.
attentiveness is academic
noise is better than sound
new patterns are always achieved through random damage and disruption and not by study and formal insight

The result of applying these rules is adequately described by the phrases about wearing a bag over your head and jumping up and down. The abandonment of judgement is a form of blindness, putting out the eyes of reason.

The comment about wearing bags over their heads is helpful because it points up the weaknesses of the whole swarm of incoherent/ revolting poets around the London scene over the decades and clears the decks so that I can recuperate the excellent poets within that scene and pierce the defences of boredom and indifference developed over the years by exposure to the interminable third- and fourth-rate products of Writers Forum and associated outlets. The situation is like the mainstream - there are literally hundreds of poets filling the scene and blocking the light, most of it is savagely tedious, but if you sift the evidence quite a few interesting poets can be found. Writing a history of the mainstream is impossible because there is too much data.

By abandoning intelligence, reason, self-criticism, rules of verbal conduct, etc., the poets mentioned were precisely acting 'with bags over their heads'. There is no point denying this. Robert may not find this 'helpful' but the truth is always helpful. You can't go 'gubba gubba gubba bing bing bing' for 30 years and expect people to see you as an intellectual. You can’t indulge in ‘Messy Play’, print the results, staple them, and have someone come along 30 years later and say they are significant.

What happened in history

I know that Nuttall, Cobbing and Mottram were around in London in the 60s and 70s, and one version of the history is that they were all in love with garbled primitivism, inarticulate, 'subversive’ language, messy play, and that this is the ‘ground floor’ of the London scene.

I lived in London for 27 years and was active on the alternative poetry scene for 20 of those years. One of the prominent features was that people had no idea of the past of that scene. Maybe there was a central project which included an 'inherited set of assumptions' (an acquis communautaire indeed) but no one seemed to know what it was. Publicity material would declare that Bob Cobbing had begun doing sound poetry in 1953 (soon after the Continental revival of it, then, so he was up to date in 1953, if less so in 1954) but there seemed to be no memory of what that entailed or any record of what it produced. I pored over the bookstalls which were such a feature of reading events, but they seemed mysteriously blank of records of the past. I found Maggie O'Sullivan's A4 pamphlets of 1986 (I did not acquire them until about 1990, regrettably) and they seemed to be the start of continuous memory. Writing an account of the London scene from 1960, or 1953, up till then was not feasible for lack of intelligible sources. Maybe there was nothing interesting up till 1985 or so, except for Fisher?

I have to say that this is remarkably different from the milieu of poets which we associate with JH Prynne, Grosseteste Review, Ferry Press (and scenes like these). The first time I got exposure to this was in around 1982, when I met John Wilkinson, but he and many others seemed to have a clear reflexive memory of what had happened and of the reasoning involved, and of course this is analogous to the clear reflexive content of the poetry involved, which is not in damaged language.

I would have written on the history of the ‘London School’ if the folklore available had produced anything intelligible and worth writing down.

There is a strand of opinion which holds that the London scene is the real avant garde and that the poetry represented in A Various Art, Conductors of Chaos, etc. is not properly avant garde and is not at that tip of an arrow moving forth into meaninglessness. This view is limited by the loss of precision into baling up dozens of individuals into a package, and by the limits of validity in classifying X or Y as belonging to one group or another. (If you start with a list of poets you will find that many of them can't be easily 'brigaded' into a group, as a basis for reckless and exciting generalisations.)

I do not buy the idea that Cobbing, crumpling up pieces of paper, photocopying them, and publishing the results, is more advanced than ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. Of course, if you do buy that idea, things must look a lot different. This is perhaps a moment of division when form is born - a watershed inscribing itself in the whole alluvial geology downstream.

How can you put faith in innovation and not have a grasp of chronology? You wouldn't know if your poem is innovative or not. In fact the detection of originality argues a level of connoisseurship which must pre-exist it - or you might simply be marching in circles like a drunk man in the darkness. You could be deluding yourself about the innovation, and checking this requires someone with a genuine reflexive knowledge of poetic style and the delicate details of change. Comparing yourself to the norms is not something you can do without reflexive knowledge. The possibility that a whole group of people in the 1990s were stuck in the cultural atmosphere of 1953 is more substantial than we would wish it.

Hit list of significant 'alternative' work from the London environment

Gavin Selerie, Azimuth. Allen Fisher, Place. Robert Sheppard, Daylight Robbery. Paul Brown, Meetings and Pursuits. Maggie O'Sullivan, A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts. Robert Hampson, Seaport. Ulli Freer, Stepping Space. John Seed, Interior in the Open Air. Adrian Clarke, Possession. Selected poems 1996-2006.
It needs a critic to come along and throw out all the bad poetry heaped up around the London School in order to reveal the excellent poetry written within the London scene to a public which hasn't noticed it.

The dislike of thought connects to the lack of interest in distinguishing between good art and bad, and connects too to a lack of complex and differentiated sensations, and then connects to a lack of interest in changes in style over time, which is why the oral folklore of the London scene is so uninteresting.

The line of reflexivity includes much of what I value about modern British poetry and moreover allows a continuity to be traced back beyond the ‘new start’ in 1959 and 1960. It is the only real political line in poetry as it strives to understand daily life in the attempt to change it. The emptying from awareness of its primary contents is not the path to a new consciousness. Rather, consciousness needs memory and self-awareness. Freedom is the exercise of judgement - the formation of judgements is the precursor to it.

Politics belongs with reason and complex language.

The idea of a polarity (in the British underground scene) in which one end believes in using the full range of language and one believes in the random, the use of mechanical processes, the unmodulated, lets us out of the misleading geographical classifiers of folklore. When we say ‘London’ we mean ‘anti-discursive hi energy constructed in small units’; instead of saying ‘Cambridge’ we would rather say ‘reflexive and with intact access to the resources of the English language’.

The whole idea of reflexivity needs exploring, as the key to mapping part of the Underground. I did work on the ALP catalogues which suggested that the 'Underground' included 2000 poets who had published at least one book or pamphlet up to 1990. The fact that this entire area was written off wholesale by people like Ian Hamilton or Peter Forbes hardly proves that all its parts resemble each other. People interested in the subject might be looking for terms for describing divisions within this vast extent.

How does this relate to the depolarisation project, where we try to grow out of the mutual hostility of the factions which lined up against each other in the 70s?
Well, the 'truth and reconciliation' process must involve truth. The attempt to join up in one community with the poetry enthusiasts outside the 'realms of the Underground' must involve a process of owning up to how bad most of the rebel/rabble heritage is. A community has been defined as a group of people who share a version of the past (or, share a past preserved in a narratives). In order to build a larger poetic community, we go through a process of filtering which builds an ever larger stock of truth.

The disputes were originally about theories of poetry. If there are so many bad poems, the theories responsible for them must be wrong, and there is no point going to war for them. Perhaps there are better theories, which regrettably most poets have failed to understand.

Generally what poets want is attention, and the fights are about shares of that. To write with studied inattentiveness is always likely to draw the audience into inattentiveness. This destroys the asset you want to acquire. This is surely a more fundamental problem than the fights which you lose.

If there were 2000 poets publishing in the Underground, it is futile to go into the new cultural process with a banner saying that they were all good. Surely there are excellent reasons for admitting that the slack, messy, inattentive Underground boys were inattentive, messy, and slack. This is the truth and will found a society of poetry in which we can talk to each other. The theories we abandon on the way to the truth probably aren't going to be very good theories to follow as paths into a joyful future. Being delusions moves them out of the frame for shining paths. In fact, if there is a communitas based on the idea that all the inattentiveness is Great Avant Garde Art then it is unsustainable and people are likely to lose faith in it and fall out of it all the time. The lie seems to be inclusive but all the falsity it entails means that the shared thing crumbles at every step. So it's better to tell the truth.

Of course there are good mainstream poets, as well. Discrimination can lure good art from behind the spoil tips of the inept and inattentive. In order to get to the solid ground of truth the poets who wrote in a conservative style also have to accept just how many people wrote in that style and produced bad poetry, the flimsiness of the conventional virtues. It is a sobering up process, a de-intoxication. In the end there is nothing to go to war to defend.

The recovery of the history of British poetry from 1960 to 1997 (or other limiting dates) has to deal with one case at a time. The problems with the ‘inherited narratives’ are extreme. The whole area is likely to repay reflective study. The outcome of that study is likely to be a new poetic community with a new shared past.

Poetry Review, 67/4

2011-08-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

I have a stack of back issues of Poetry Review (PR) here and I took the time to read 67/4, 1978, edited by Harry Chambers. The message of this issue is the tedious mainstream, it stands as a symbol of how tedious the m-stream can be and gives an opportunity to think about this problem. For this number is full of very tedious poetry. Interest and innovation are securely locked out. To grasp the word ‘mainstream’ you have to get the tedium of moments like 67/4. Noticing this sheer badness is a chreode -a moment of rejection that thousands of people went through. Not just a crap moment but a moment embodying a whole universe of poetic crap. So many people had a bad experience in 1978 or so and never read any mainstream poetry over the next 30 years.

This is a moment of horror but not the whole m-stream. I can't reconstruct my reading in the 1970s. But I do know that I made voyages into British poetry of that time and found it searingly disappointing, much like 67/4. There were bad experiences with tired and conventional set-ups. I walked out, I just thought it was all crap. Of course the Underground wasn't visible to me, that came later. Scenes like this were so vile that they created the Underground. People reacted to dull scenes by walking out, in large numbers. It was inevitable that they would then aggregate, to some extent. Poetry split in two.

There is a miasma of mainstream. It appears as a swamp in which consciousness is impossible. Any attacks on the mainstream are bound to hit their target because it's too big too miss. Bad mainstream poetry fills entire counties. But it's crucial all the same to locate good m-stream poetry and recognise its difference. I made a big mistake by using the term mainstream without differentiating between the morass of tired poetry and the strands of good poetry using conventional methods. The m-stream has so much to hide, and we need better determinations of everything.

You have to read between the lines, always. Chambers only edited one issue. Maybe this means that someone at the Poetry Society, owners of the magazine, looked at it and decided that Chambers was too drab, too anti-intellectual, too unimaginative, too smug. If you look at other issues around the same time, i.e. after Mottram's departure and before they has someone permanent, the approach is quite different.

The past of PR is intricate. It is the centre of British poetry, the magazine read by the most people, the one with the most weight. It was a terrible magazine in the 1950s, and a problem up to about 1965. In the later 60s, it went through rapid change and improvement, in line with what English culture in general was doing. It became a completely different magazine. Between 1971 and 1977, Mottram was at the helm. He followed on from the issues immediately before his arrival, but took it further. In 22 issues over six years, he developed a radical magazine - innovative, ambitious, experimental, politicised. During the 70s, culture in Britain became caught up with politics and with bitter conflicts. The new came to seem a tangible threat, and the 'old' got organised and began a cultural purge. Mottram may have been a victim of this, to some extent.

In 1978, then, PR had an established audience who liked radical poetry and expected it. Chambers was facing this audience - most copies of the magazine went to members of the Poetry Society as part of their membership, so the audience were rather stable. Chambers chose to take them on head-on. He makes no attempt to reconcile the numerous people who would have read 67/4 and been affronted by its fatigue and conservatism. It has no overlap with the Mottram PR. He supplies an editorial made up of quotes which seems to offer an explanation of why the magazine has changed so much. Chambers quotes Karl Shapiro: ‘For the first time in history the illiterates have a literature of their own, op-pop-camp-kitsch-existentialist-occult-nihilist sweepings and swill.’ Presumably Shapiro is attacking the Beats here. But presumably Chambers means by this the whole set of poets published in the Mottram PR - more than a hundred of them. Of course he does not name any names. But the presumption must be that he is referring to the readers and poets who enjoyed Mottram's PR. This is like a declaration of war. The only concession to this problem of transition is his quote-editorial - which by denouncing the modern seems to be denouncing the existing readership of PR. This surely looks like an attempt to break off any relations with the audience which had developed since 1960, and to make the split permanent. And to get rid of the poets who had arrived since 1960. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Chambers actually wants to get rid of this audience. It is inaccurate to see splits in the poetry world as simply the products of malign acts by conservative editors. But actions like 67/4 help to explain why differences of taste became petrified oppositions. Surely Shapiro’s quote describes something which does not exist? why is it being resurrected at the masthead of Britain’s poetry magazine of record? If Mottram was a professor, why refer to him as an illiterate? This caricatural editorial is the only account offered of why PR changed policy so radically. What we apparently see is Chambers trying to get rid of about half the established readership of his magazine. This is why he is insulting them. The lack of continuity with the Mottram PR is shocking. This must have felt like a deliberate insult. No wonder people stomped off in a huff. Chambers was defining the hostile centre, guarded by wire from areas that might overflow into it.

Working through old PRs is productive but the real story is only present through silences & anonymous distortions. Negative generalisations. A dialogue of the unlistening. It is interesting to read the issue (68/1) which Douglas Dunn edited the next year. His editorial starts out by discussing how boring most conventional poetry is. Bravo! this man is right! Then he goes on to describe the old poetry and the new, and to suggest that we need poetry which mixes both streams, and that his issue is in fact filled with poems which do that. Then he kicks off with John Ash. Bravo again! So people who abandoned the mainstream altogether were making a false generalisation - the mainstream was a whole sea of poetry within which there were gifted poets and also open-minded editors. (The race of poets who combined the new styles with being accessible did not yet exist in 1979 - they arrived slightly later, as a group.)

The point of resurrecting this moment, of course, is to retrieve a moment of decision. The thesis is that the poetry scene was split in two sides by 1978 and that moments like this produced an enduring situation whereby one side ignored what the other side published and so entered a tunnel where the light was surrounded by darkness on every side.

There is a review of Charles Causley which includes a weird excursus which explains that we did not need a renaissance in the 14th century because there had already been a renaissance in the 12th century. This is bizarre to read. It is there because the reviewer is afraid of someone saying Causley was out of date. Actually - Causley was completely out of date in 1978, this is obvious. The people who would have said this appear in the magazine, but only as ghosts. They are being slapped down throughout the issue but they never get the chance to speak. There is another weird moment in this review where the author abandons Causley altogether in order to denounce the 1975 Cambridge Poetry Festival and the 'Black Mountain' poets who read there. The denunciation seems to me factually wrong. Also, I don't think that the poets there in 1975 had more than a tiny amount to do with an American college which closed down in the 1950s. The remarks simply seem like a way of telling the reader that everything which has happened since 1960 can be ignored and actually didn't happen. I think this goes beyond thoughtful connoisseur chit-chat and is more like an attempt to define the previous readers of Poetry Review as the enemy.

It is with some reluctance that I identify anonymous caricatures as the phantom of a debate - as the only way in which critics within one faction acknowledge that other factions exist and produce poetry and have arguments sustaining their position. The bulk denunciation reflects the fact that the person speaking has not read the poetry they are denouncing. This is the landscape of miasma - you simply ignore what you don’t have allegiance to. It seems that the counter-attack on innovation in the 1970s and 1980s was not based on contemporary innovation but on the classic period of ‘high’ modernism - work from the 1920s or 1930s. The good part of this is that simply having a debate, where two or more sides had actually read the texts which the other sides like, would be a huge improvement on what we have had in the recent past. Maybe we could start simply by giving up miasma as a reaction.

Some things have changed since the twelfth century. For one thing, French stopped being the culturally dominant language in England. If poetry is subject to organic growth, an editor would not have a cut-off point after which he accepts nothing. The cut-off point in fact sets up a line of division in poetry, denying what continuity we might find for ourselves. I don’t doubt that Causley uses ‘mediaeval forms of versification’, drawn from folk songs. The question is why he couldn’t make anything of what elements had reached English poetry since the Renaissance.

The dispute at the Poetry Society in 1977 reflected a division which already existed. It cannot have been the moment when that division emerged. The split was a process, not an event. However, English society in general was politically split during the 1970s and flowed back together during the 1980s. If poetry was slow to follow suit, we must suspect that some individuals manipulated the situation in order to achieve local authority, which the disappearance of factions would have caused to vanish.

Division is natural. The strange thing is how poetic worlds achieve solidarity when they include so many disparate individuals. The answer is that solidarity is natural, poetry is all about communication and the communication brings people together. It is natural for poetry to live in diffuse, tolerant, fluently verbal, aggregates of friends. Mediation was missed at the time. We can try to do it now. We can even take it to another level. How should editors manage cultural relations?

I intend to go on reading back issues of PR. I find the improvement in circa 1965-71 especially interesting. But the issues over a couple of years after Mottram are also interesting, because they are so varied, as if the Society was casting around for a policy.

Maybe you want to define 95% of the poets around as the Enemy. Even if you do that, you have to accept that producing caricatures of their work and speech, as in wartime propaganda, is not intellectually valid. Maybe this is what the advent of 'theory' has brought to us - that you cannot remove agency from people, that there are no ideas which nobody owns, and that those people have some right in the linguistic space if you are going to bring their ideas into play enough to attack them. Crushing large numbers of people down into caricatures is a habit which needs to be discarded. I believe this is what 'theory' was saying.

This comes with the usual caution, like an anti-piracy warning. This is that people involved in the 1970s during a cultural crisis became polarised, but this does not mean that everyone younger also became polarised. I suspect the whole struggle seemed less real to people who turned up from say 1983 onwards.

I suppose that organising debates is very complicated, and that by not having any debate a great deal of time has been saved over the past 35 years. Yes, but fundamentally that time had to be spent and avoiding debate has had all kinds of spreading and disastrous effects which no one could possibly want.

Sounds surround the icy waters underground: psychedelic coding

2011-08-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Note. This is a chapter written for the 2003 book 'Fulfilling the silent rules'. There are problems with it. The subject is important but the relationships are too subjective and 'deep' to be easily described. I feel that poetry of a certain time was composed of 'blinding signs' and that feeling has been lost. In general listening to a particular kind of music is often a way of coming round to understand a certain related kind of poetry. Which puts the critic off the bus, really.

**
The poetry of the 70s presents us with a formidable mass of difficult and intense work, to which there is no specialist guide at present. However, it is also, in the view of competent critics, the most fertile poetic decade of the 20th century. Brian Marley wrote:

With steam striking his jug-handle ears, our
new luggage, smell of old newspapers in
the hall - surely something wild must happen
without a slump in torpedoing the twentieth century
'Courage, Morris, courage... I neither neglect
to brush my teeth nor prune a handful of stars in
the early evening - as such, I know one true
particle in the mystery of bone-setting old
ceramics; the motionless dark, occultist
theorem, crumbs inevitably remaining
and I am (in my soupy way) blocking the nerves
from their coffee-veined stimulus - droning cellos!
The known-to-be-positive by reason, adjusting
a small knob - will frenzied faces appear on
our scanner? Duplicity, when peering up the
gun barrel, fingering the trigger: memories
are made of this!
(from 'Bargain Basement Sonnets #5', from Springtime in the Rockies, 1978)

Although forgotten by successive generations of poets in fierce competition with each other, this is splendid poetry. How is it possible for someone to achieve such lightness and brilliance in such a sustained way? When the style is more important than the subject, we have to qualify the style as far as possible - including tracing its external associations. All the new style poets of that vanished decade have in common the rejection of traditional genres, with their firm rules for the ordering and design of parts, which neither readers nor poets could easily get wrong. It is hard to summarise or paraphrase Marley's poem - isn't it valid to see this as virtuosity, and to see this capacity to hyperassociate, and to take over experience from the fatal cycles of memory and conventional behaviour sequences, as counter-cultural heroism? The aestheticisation of everyday life is represented by - the aestheticisation of the poem. Not by chance do 'reason' and 'memory' appear in the poem - it is telling us that consciousness has access to other processes. The poem is dominated by style - we can see this as like the lingering over ornament, at the expense of 'purposive' and busy musical structures, which parallels the songs of that time. All of their poems can be seen as interstitial to 1950s poems - they burst out into the space between the lines. They are unpredictable, unaccountable, non-functional - and, from the point of view of a critic like Allott, unnecessary. Ornamentation and hyperassociation are closely linked - the ornament breaks down the functional patterns to create an 'aesthetic', uncoded, space, which is filled with a purely subjective message, about the poet's state of mind - the hyperassociation is the message: I'm loose, I've got time, and I'm having a good time.
If we define this kind of poem as an improvised variation on moments within the traditional poem of the 1950s, with its rational account of highly conventional and involuntary behaviour sequences - we connect the new poetry to a new lifestyle of affluence, leisure and exploration - and simultaneously designate an 'out group' of poets who couldn't manage the incredible virtuosity needed to invent new structures that had an inner logic, and to get through poems without 'touching the ground', and relapsing into explaining and instructing. The new society was one of status competition, and radicalising leisure actually made things more competitive. Any loss of nerve would make the poem relapse into the familiar 50s drabness, and while the programmes of readers and editors involved evading or excluding this kind of poem, much of the ideological promotion around the texts has been an attempt to disguise the conservatism which makes the poet acceptable to the mainstream. There is a secondary question about the reader being baffled by poetry which doesn't pause for explanation. No-one likes being in the middle of a party where they don't know anyone and can't understand a word that is being said. But I feel that the youth culture of the 60s and 70s has spread, as youth got older, to become simply mass culture. The generation born in the 1920s which fought off and indicted the new poetry is marginal now; the preoccupations which blinded them seem eccentric to us.
I wonder if we can find a way of modelling this intractable material by borrowing the rock critic Sheila Whiteley's idea of psychedelic coding, in her book The Space Between the Notes. The specific 'ideal-typical' bands she names are Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Beatles, and the Pink Floyd (although hundreds of other acts recorded psychedelic material). In a complex exposition of a musical language, she points to features which had for the target audience a social meaning - referring to the counter-cultural lifestyle, to recognised 'affective identities, attitudes and behavioural patterns'. The musical conventions involved originated, she says, with the Charlatans' residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1965; the Charlatans were a San Francisco band, and because youth culture was international and fashion-conscious the style-package spread rapidly to the 'underground' in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, and other places. The music refers to hallucinogenic experience by means which 'include the manipulation of timbres (blurred, bright, overlapping), upward movement (and its comparison with psychedelic flight), harmonies (lurching, oscillating), rhythms (regular, irregular), relationships (foreground, background) and collages which provide a point of comparison with more conventionalised, i.e. normal treatment.' She talks about virtuosity - the wild exceeding of the norms of blues-rock musical structures, while essentially obeying those norms. The elaborate variations on musical form are spontaneous - they vary all the time, and are decorations of the basic form. She identifies 'tripping' as the lingering fascination for a texture, or a sound, experienced while tripping. Typically, the style uses dislocation of time - two-chord tunes where the listener cannot recognise whether the chord shift is going forward or backward; and blurring of notes which partly contradicts the 'progress message' that one note has finished and another one is now due. 'Don't know if I'm coming up or down.' She says of Hendrix's recording of 'Purple Haze': 'Whilst this is basically a pentatonic blues riff, the extremes of distortion blur the actual pitching of the notes and the discordant partials make it practically impossible to hear the pitch. ... the electronic distortion, the fuzz and the resultant discordant partials. ... For the listener, the sheer volume of noise works towards the drowning of personal consciousness. The simultaneous underlying pulsating rhythm and the heightened sensation of raw power rip through the distorted amplification of the guitar sound with its sinuous tripping around the basic notes.' Again, of 'Love or Confusion', 'The use of distortion and fuzz creates an unknown element which can suggest uncertainty. This also comes through in the way in which Hendrix tuned his guitar. The top string was often tuned to D or Eb and the excessive bending and use of the wah-wah pedal served to obscure the actual notes played.' The belief in new possibilities for social institutions was expressed musically: "Stylistic complexity, the elements of surprise, contradiction and uncertainty suggested alternative meanings which suggested the hippies' emphasis on timeless mysticism."
I wonder if we can draw lines of analogy between the songs and the poetry. The timeless effect of two chords can, very weakly, be connected to indeterminacy in syntax - lines floating without tense, etc. Although paradox was something recommended (i.e. posited for all truly significant poems) by Cleanth Brooks, in a classic of the new criticism, the use of fundamental tensions and oscillations by 'underground' poets clearly goes beyond paradox, and can be equated with the uncertainties of pitch, rhythm, etc., which Whiteley describes for the classic bands.
We need to draw our attention away from psychoactive drugs. Extensive availability of biographical data has made it quite clear that a lot of 'psychedelic' musicians never took any of the drugs. The innovations of the period 1967-70 are logical extensions of what was happening in 1964-7, and one can easily find hundreds of recordings which are 'proto-psychedelic' at dates which unconditionally didn't see any use of lysergic acid in the places concerned. It is equally valid to see the new sounds as the product of new electronic devices - the maturing of electronic instruments and studio techniques. Whiteley quotes two sociologists to the effect that 'But this culture has already been defined in this way partially because of the existence in it of this particular kind of music. The system is perfectly structured internally... but has no necessary purchase on it from without.' People who take hallucinogens see the figures and narratives in the Otherworld which their culture has taught them to expect, and indeed one of the purposes of teaching children myths is to ensure this. 'Acid rock' pleased millions of people who had never taken any drugs at all. I have no evidence that any of the poets used any chemical assistance to their purely neurological resources. The issue of drugs is a big distraction.
The most important aspect for us is the coding which relates specific linguistic traits to a view of how life should be led - liberal, exploratory, hedonistic, not preoccupied by status and possessions. This wished-for new life was political - because it inevitably led to clashes with the captains of 'bourgeois guardianship'. It was also apolitical - because it was essentially about the dominance of leisure, and pleasure, over work and duty. It lost many of its qualities when the living people who made the coding moved on to new personal interests and rules. At the time, it 'pointed' to this group (of 'concrete living people who can be loved', as we say) - and was therefore as indefinitely complex as the behaviour of those people. Because the people were three-dimensional, the 'counter-cultural' concept is too. Precise, contract-like, definition of the meaning is inappropriate. The question of what it means now (when the people are 30 years older and quite different) interests me a great deal.
Younger than the other musicians discussed were the Pink Floyd, who were able to form their style in an atmosphere already saturated with psychedelic sounds, and so with the influence of blues, with its folk/Christian framework, minimised. They were consequently able to pursue the new style for longer than the others. Whiteley discusses 'Astronomy Domine': 'the dip shapes in the guitar solo create a strong feeling of floating around the beat and this is reinforced by the lazy meandering around the notes(.) ... The chord sequence moves against any formal organisation and (...) there is no real resolution. Instead, there is a movement towards a disorientation of the norm...' The lyrics run in part:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew
Floating down
The sound resounds around the icy waters underground(...)
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten

The repeated syllable 'ound' echoes the musical sensation of time failing to run forward, and the third verse mutates one of the lines to 'surround the icy waters underground', a near-echo but with the syllable break shifted and the voiced -s- unvoiced - a 'tripping' effect of cognitive dissonance and the semantic tier being eroded. The sequence 'Miranda and Titania' sounds when sung like "Mi ran da ran dTitania', breaking up into nonsense - a later line runs 'Blinding signs flap flicker flicker blam', and this could be a description of these irresoluble, shifting phonetic patterns. The second scene is attracted by the tighten and frighten sounds below it to second sight - the psychedelic insight into a hidden and private world of symbolism, enabling you to see fairies like Oberon and Titania. It also contains the acoustic shape of (for a ) second seen - which relates to the flickering a few lines later. The vision is blinding but intermittent - as shaky as the ghost words of which these lyrics are so full. The equation between the skies above and the icy waters beneath suggests a dissolution of the observer's point of view, the loss of the human scale of a body, on a surface, as the stable ground for a mind; the hyper-vivid description of the infinite expanses through their colours (blue for the sky, green for the waters, we suppose) does nothing to restore scale. Whiteley quotes a medical source about LSD's effect of dissolving the bounds between the self and the outside world or other people; the notion of 'cosmic rock' arose from the photographs taken in outer space (universal in the media at that time), partly from the 'weightless' music dreamed up for the soundtracks of science fiction films in the 1950s, largely from the projection of this depersonalisation into a place without persons or objects: a feeling of the dissolution of boundaries was sited, mythographically, in a place that had no boundaries and was mere extension. Oberon and Titania are not stars – they mislead, they have the power of flight, and they command potions which delude reason – significant images for psychoactive drugs. Their servant, Puck, is also a will of the wisp – a light that misleads travellers (hence blinding signs). Miranda also awoke into a new world: O brave new world, that hath such people in it! - an obvious drug reference. Saturn and Titan are not names of stars, but are perhaps not randomly chosen. Both are names of mythical figures who were thrown down from heaven – the sensation of falling is a terror involved in psychedelic ‘flight’. Titan is a moon of the ‘leaden planet’ Saturn – a frozen body which may contain the ‘icy waters’. Its shining rings are a sly reference to light-shows. (Miranda, Titania, and Oberon are moons of Uranus.) The word 'Titan' sounds, ambiguously, like 'tighten' - a reference to tension which anticipates the word frighten, in the next half-line. These lines are closely packed – a product of hyperassociation, which is the main event in the psychedelic experience. Their refusal of a character to identify with, a feeling to isolate, leads to a loss of orientation. The beloved pop song vanished, replaced by a trick surface, with a slight malice or slyness. We advance onto shifting grounds and don’t know if we’re falling or ‘tripping’.
Early Floyd 'experimented with improvising around one chord used in a drone-like way, seeing how they could extend it. On March 27 [1966], Floyd played a number lasting half an hour.' This static immersion was aided by 'using electronic feedback in continuous controlled waves which added up to complex repeating patterns.' The effect was, obviously, timelessness - a loss of boundaries and orientation to complement the loss of spatial reference points. The Floyd spent the next thirty years exploring these ideas of timelessness and immensity, through varying drones, heartbeat-like bass riffs, repetition, and barely punctuated, engulfing, emptiness. Essentially in parallel to this, poetry moved into the long poem, in which the exploration of inner space, the capture of emptiness, reflexivity (=feedback), and the approach towards timelessness, were all vital.
Whiteley speaks of affective identity. Certain features of music became signs of belonging - music was not merely a pastime but the seizure of a group identity. I suggest that, similarly, there were poetic traits which readers at that time created and recognized as signs of the counter-culture. One of these is contradiction - the confrontation of two cognitive frames which don't really belong together. Along with this, is the move of flowing two levels of knowledge into each other, so that the reader is destabilised (confused?), and responds (in theory) by a reorganisation of their existing knowledge. Reversion to the origin of social forms is held to invite the question why do we do things this way - and conjecture about how things could be different. Montage suggests a rapid shift of psychological horizons - preparation for revolutionary change. It challenges the predictable structures of consciousness. The key to the style is found in the anti-functional quality of virtuosity. These poems are not simply methodical philosophical enquiries. Art as something logical, a form of work, a piece of evidence, a test of character, is being discarded - hollowed out to leave space for the rhythms of pleasure. The shifts and leaps of the poets need to be compared with the rock guitar solo to be properly understood - they are outbursts of spontaneous virtuosic display. The flouting of preset procedures is a form of hedonism - the play principle.
Defining this new style points to an elite of poets who could go far enough in abandoning traditional concepts of logical coherence: Prynne, John James, Barry MacSweeney, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Martin Thom, Brian Marley, Iain Sinclair, Eric Mottram. At a certain distance, we could add Ted Hughes and George MacBeth. Of course, there were any number of people hanging around with the underground and writing poetry which was too feeble, prudent, or inconsequential to make its mark as part of the New Thing. The reference to shoemaking external, making art a proxy contest about social ideals, can make the art collapse when the referent migrates, but also makes it plausible that the conservative hostility of critics like Davie, Grigson, Hamilton, or Thwaite was due to misplaced authoritarian politics rather than to serious artistic judgment. So many products from that era look ridiculous now the libertarian Utopia has been dissolved by its creditors, but work like Marley's which has a richness of internal organisation is a permanent now, undamaged by time. Today we complain about overkill of reissued music on CD rather than pontificating about how 'pop music' will all be forgotten in five years' time.
Let's look at particular pieces of poetry to see how far they really show the posited traits. Martin Thom wrote:

and have no shy
nervous origin. Mirrors none
the map streaked
with present joy. Jet, Iron
Amber/ from the North in
long trade across Mesopotamia
delirious in no-home, days and
weeks, a manic loop of assimilation
writing these journals to hold time
against all loss of shadow. A true
night of pale registrations
spread out coldly above
the nomadic line spilt through sand
sinking in the impossible
and no relief

Blankets burnt at the Indus source
far from any German sky-pole of the world
raw with all change in nerve and loss
of known quality
Until the moment breaks
rain to earth, valley to range of hills
rich off the dead structures they
build terraces, splint earth with kindness
and gather quiet and dark
the quiet and the dark flower
Persephone was
Not in cruelty. I do not live
to rise from sleep to strike
these birds of impossible design
held by no poem to sing in ears
sharpened to receive
below the threshold, as in that unity
spoken of in trance
The bird-dancers
all crazed in head and holy
sick with images since thirteen years old, now rich
in poetry and hidden chants
whirling their iron dress, taking blood from the ear
and waxy gold
Now we are blue with the reflected coldness
of strangeness affecting us.
In night
the glass of the world does not speak
washed out to the image of the
disappearing axe
to every sign on these hills, and no call to

and all tired herds sink in rain
to ashen valleys, lie there
to the left of your optic range
sand sweet as grass, from red and blue cinnabar, rivalling
the Linnaean geocracy
bright with dew and quick bees
all light burning, not damned or lost
in th'imagined breath
to live in the flight of shy nervous origins
loving their origin
(from The Bloodshed the Shaking House; dated 1974, published 1977)

The passage evokes the shamanism of Inner Asia - an ecstatic, irrational, practice, associated with wild dancing and repetitive drumming. The theme is also nomadism - used by these poets to get away from rootedness and its mental consequences, and the equivalent in poetry of cosmic flight in rock. The realm of anthropology was coded at that time to switch on thoughts about the function of social institutions, the possibility of changing them. The relaxation of rational boundaries acts to release impulses - both Freud and anthropology are used as windows on a hidden inner self of metaphors, analogies, wishes, fantasies, and pictures. The self dissolves its contracts with the outside world, and finds a way of grasping what reason is. This unbearably rich formal world reminds us of the undisciplined sonic world opened up by the 'free' guitar solo. It is spontaneous, improvised, led by affect, constantly shifting. This is why I find it hard to paraphrase - just as Whiteley found freestyle guitar passages hard to transcribe. Reducing it to order damages something integral and perpetually moving. The attachment of anthropological and Freudian imagery serves as a "frame opener" to key the kind of free association we are supposed to carry out while reading the poem. It is there as a window, opened through convention to show our inner selves: Now we are blue with the reflected coldness /of strangeness affecting us. This is really the opposite of didactic writing - although it is very erudite and rich in ideas. We have to mention Deleuze and Guattari, because they also wrote about nomadism, and because Thom's later career was as a translator of French psychoanalytical works - he was probably very early in reading avant-garde psychoanalysis, such as Guattari, in the early 70s. So the breakthrough in connecting free association, vagrant thoughts, with nomadic wandering, may already come from Traite du nomadisme comme machine de guerre. But - it may come from The English Intelligencer circa 1966. delirious in no-home is really a metaphor for wildness and freedom, for the boundless expanses which the new poetry is going to gallop over; the jumps between personal experience in the now and the deep time of the ethnographical descriptions evoke this wildness and are the match of psychedelic disorientation. There is also a theory of Indo-European origins (a phase before the Saxon identity) among South Russian nomads, which has lost most of its credibility over the last 60 years. The material of the poem is like soft sand - fit to record the finest ripples of the medium passing over it, passive to autosuggestion. Poetry sited boundlessness in the free reaches of Inner Asian space (or, the North Atlantic, or, the prairies of the northwestern USA) rather than in space beyond the earth's atmosphere or under the ground. Yet the dry air and flat horizons make the stars perilously close: A true /night of pale registrations / spread out coldly above /the nomadic line. The 'icy waters underground' (so close to blue with the reflected coldness of strangeness) bear a puzzling resemblance to the imagery of Northern icy waters in Malcolm Mooney's Land and Hendry's Marimarusa. The ocean was evidently chosen as the expression of 'lifting' of the body image into the boundless and weightless - which relates to 1940s radical use of the body as the source of all imagery. Eric Mottram wrote:

a helmet set on a head
for the horns reach from brain folds
to planets above towers
beyond a lens
moon light in his antlers
curl and spiral of universe
curve out of the brain
skill of mountains receptors to wind curve
from space to caves in the heart
a coil of horn around a nerve

which tunes the herb
(from A Book of Herne, 1981)

The imagery comes from Ferenc Juhasz, and no doubt Eric would connect the physiological equations to Charles Olson, but for me this fits perfectly as a piece of psychedelic cosmic poetry. Besides, the part about linking caves to space is too much like Syd Barrett's lyric about 'the stars that surround the icy waters underground'. I can't read 'moon light in his antlers' without hearing 'blue moonlight in your hair', from an old Cream song. The animal imagery comes from a shamanistic context, although mediated by Juhasz, and this echoes Thom - we can see this as the poetic equivalent of the counter-cultural interest in Asian religions. (Eric's Peace Projects also draws on the great poem, 'The Pearl', from 3rd century Syria, as discussed elsewhere on this site.) I don't like Eric's poetry, but at the same time almost everything I like in the cosmos appears in it somewhere. I counted eight radical cuts/discontinuities in the first 40 lines of 'Peace Project 5'. I see this merging of different conceptual/cognitive frameworks as intrinsically psychedelic - although Whiteley does not actually explore the use of montage, incongruity, recontextualisation, and merging in 'alternative' art. An example would be the cover design by Hipgnosis for the Pink Floyd's second album, 'Saucerful of Secrets': an uncalculable space unifies images, partly overprinted, of a real photo of space, what may be the fluid slide of a light show, a painted illustration of the planets, a row of green glass bottles (or alembics?), a photo of the band by a lake and against the sky, the Zodiac, a coloured print of a man in green (a magician?) in a forest, etc. This collage style, with its disorientation and overload, was coded as 'counter-cultural' at the time, and you certainly wouldn't have found it on record sleeves for jazz bands, family entertainers, or 'pop' groups. (Whiteley does talk of 'blurred/overlapping timbres'. The sound collages of a track like 'A Day in the Life' are a musical analogy.) Eric's manically branching associations parallel the hyperassociative state of a trip - and the stunningly rich sheafing of variations in musical improvisation. His edits are bewildering - much unlike the perfect smoothness which Martin Thom achieves. What I think is significant about the way he writes is its aestheticisation of knowledge structures. The really big revolution in poetry was the loss of anxiety about intelligence - the recognition that the boundless landscape of human knowledge was material for its own landscape poetry. The counter-culture called a mighty subjectivity to life - vigorous enough to burn away the problems of the monotony of so much of human knowledge, the exasperations of accuracy, the company of dusty and sanctimonious pedants. His poems are designed like bibliographies - but his bibliographies are incredibly exciting and pushed a whole generation of underground poets into poetry.
J.H.Prynne wrote:

A dream in sepia and eau-de-nil ascends
from the ground as a great wish for calm. And
the wish is green in season, hazy like meadow-sweet,
downy & soft waving among the reeds, the
cabinet of Mr Heath. Precious vacancy piles in
this studious form, the stupid slow down & become
wise with inertia, and instantly the prospect of
money is solemnised to the great landscape.
It actually glows like a stream of evening sun,
value become coinage fixed in the grass crown.
The moral drive isn't
quick enough, the greasy rope-trick
has made payment an edge of rhetoric;
the conviction of merely being
right, that has
marched into the patter of balance.
(from 'A New Tax on the Counter-earth', from Brass, 1971)

While this style is over-simplified by any description, and the passage is clearly rational (and even waspish), we do seem to find psychedelic traits in it: the blurred, shimmering, quality, the pastoral feel, the aspirations to shed material values, the dominance of disembodied colours, the apparent dream state of the speaker, the use of hazy textures (the delicate seed-heads of the plant meadow-sweet), the virtuosity, the sudden leaps of cognitive level. Perhaps not only musicians were sitting in meadows thinking anti-capitalist thoughts? How far is it from 'lime and limpid green' to 'sepia and eau-de-nil'?
The method of quotation neatly excludes exhibition of the effects of loss of boundaries on the duration of poems. While we can only point to exhibits here, it is clear that the 1970s saw an explosion in the number of long poems, and that this wish for new volumes was related to 'space rock' and the infinite reaches of subjective experience opened up by the counter-cultural emigration. A good exhibit here would be Allen Fisher's Defamiliarising, a volume length work (100 pages) which is itself only a part of an even vaster work. Fisher's 70s work presumably does overload, destroy, and transcend inherited structures of the poem, and the poet/self audible within it, just as the Pink Floyd destroyed the 'song' and 'the pop star' by plunging into half-hour improvisations as the audience watched the osmotic swirl of the light show.
So, how successful is this comparison as a way of describing the new feel in poetry? I think there are considerable problems with it, as exceptions press themselves urgently on my mind. The verbal art is much more informationally loaded and conceptually more sophisticated than the musical art - as is true in any period. The music comes into existence because it refers back to itself and the poetry has to contain everything outside itself in order to exist. The advantage of the comparison is that many of my readers will already be familiar with recordings by the Beatles, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, etc., and so can form a concept of the poetry by drawing on memories of the music of 1968-73. The 'era feeling' obviously changed around 1974, by when most of the bands had either vanished or mutated unrecognizably; I feel that the poetry had got going later, and went on for longer, but we are left with the questions of what happened after 1977 - and what the poets of the underground era have been doing over the last 25 years.

Poetry Shopping List (2010)

2011-07-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

updated 2010

SHOPPING OPPORTUNITY (1959-97)
Andrew Duncan

The present list began with an evening in the pub with Simon Smith and Harry Gilonis in around 1995. I think the point of making a list was to stomp on people who claimed that modern poetry does not exist in Britain and was just a fantasy of scatterbrained theorists. This is a version updated in 2010. The list has to be here as an exhibit because, finally, all the argument is about these primary texts and all the evidence needed is in them.
I have not listed pamphlets since they are too short and scratty; I can recommend just about all the Equipage pamphlets. Also, I have been selective in listing volumes by a single writer; also republication in the form of Collected Poems makes the list chronologically less satisfactory. I regret the omission of people who have written a few good poems, but not enough to fill a volume. There is really a lot of excellent poetry not on this list. It reflects the limits of my reading; I would be most interested to receive lists of additions. The start point is where Wolfgang Gortschacher places the start of a revival in British poetry, and allows us to include three important books. (Normally, poets who were established in 1960 have been excluded.) The stopping point is where my research project stopped (to avoid overload). It's only fair to point out that Gilonis (especially) and Smith were horrified by my choices and wouldn't sign up to the final list. I think Harry wanted to include Bill Griffiths.

1959 Christopher Logue, Songs; Peter Redgrove, The Collector; Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen
1960 Ted Hughes, Lupercal; Ian Hamilton Finlay, The dancers inherit the party
1961 Francis Berry, Morant Bay; Peter Redgrove, The nature of cold weather; Roy Fisher, City
1962 Christopher Middleton, torse 3
1963 Rosemary Tonks, Notes on cafés and bedrooms; Adrian Mitchell, Poems; Peter Redgrove, At the white monument
1964 David Wevill, Birth of a Shark
1965 Kathleen Raine, The Hollow Hill; George Barker, The True Confession of George Barker; Christopher Middleton, nonsequences
1966 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts; Peter Redgrove, The Force; Francis Berry, Ghosts of Greenland
1967 Rosemary Tonks, Iliad of Broken Sentences; David Wevill, A Christ of the Ice-Floes; John James, Mmm...ah yes; Ken Smith, The Pity; John Riley, Ancient and Modern; Andrew Crozier, Loved litter of time spent; Ted Hughes, Wodwo; Tom Raworth, the relation ship
1968 Alan Ross, Poems 1942-67; J.H. Prynne, Kitchen Poems; Edwin Morgan, The Second Life; Geoffrey Hill, King Log; Tom Raworth, the big green day; Barry MacSweeney, The boy from the green cabaret writes of his mother
1969 J.H. Prynne, The White Stones; Roy Fisher, Collected Poems 1968; George Mackay Brown, The Year of the Whale; David Jones, The Tribune's Visitation; Charles Tomlinson, Way of a World; D.M. Black, The Educators; Christopher Logue, New Numbers; John James, The Small Henderson Room; Christopher Middleton, Our Flowers and Nice Bones; Andrew Crozier, Walking on Grass; Spike Hawkins, the lost fire brigade

The classic anthology is Edward Lucie-Smith's British poetry since 1945, first published in 1970; later editions are of no value. Contemporary Scottish Verse 1959-69, ed. MacCaig and Scott; The Lilting House, ed. Stephens, Williams (Welsh); for the non-traditional poetry of the decade, John Matthias' anthology in TriQuarterly #21 (1971), Contemporary British Poetry, remains classic; A Group Anthology, edited Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (1963). Love Love Love, edited Pete Roche (1967).

the 1970s
1970 W.S. Graham, Malcolm Mooney's Land; Emyr Humphreys, Ancestor Worship; Ted Hughes, Crow; John Riley, What Reason Was
1971 Norman MacCaig, Selected Poems; George Mackay Brown, Fishermen with Ploughs; Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns; Roy Fisher, Matrix, The Cut Pages; J.H. Prynne, Brass; Paul Evans, February; Barry MacSweeney, Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard
1972 Ken Smith, Work, Distances. Poems; Paul Gogarty, Snap Box

1973 Adrian Stokes, Selected Poems (in a Penguin Modern Poets); Anthony Thwaite, Inscriptions; Gerard Casey, South Wales Echo; Edwin Morgan, From Glasgow to Saturn, The Whittrick; Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, The Hermaphrodite Album; JP Ward, From alphabet to logos; David Chaloner, Chocolate Sauce; David Wevill, Where the Arrow Falls
1974 David Jones, The Sleeping Lord; Anthony Thwaite, New Confessions; J.H. Prynne, Wound Response; Allen Fisher, Place (four volumes, 1974-81)
1975 Glyn Jones, Selected poems; F.T.Prince, Drypoints of the Hasidim; Peter Redgrove, Sons of my Skin (selected poems 1954-74); John James, Striking the Pavilion of Zero; Allen Fisher, Long shout to kernewek; Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat; Ulli Freer, Rooms (1975-82; never collected in volume form);
1976 Flora Garry, Bennygoak and Other Poems; George Mackay Brown, Winterfold; Peter Levi, Collected poems 1955-75; Colin Simms, No Northwestern Passage; B. Catling, Pleiades in Nine; Jeremy Reed, The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg
1977 W.S.Graham, Implements in Their Places; Edwin Morgan, The New Divan; Ted Hughes, Gaudete; Judith Kazantzis, minefield; Martin Thom, The Bloodshed the Shaking House
1978 Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae; Ted Hughes, Cave Birds; Roy Fisher, The thing about Joe Sullivan; Ken Smith, Fox Running; Peter Abbs, For Man and Islands; Philip Jenkins, On the Beach with Eugene Boudin; Andrew Crozier, High Zero; Alexander Hutchison, Deep Tap Tree; Jeffrey Wainwright, Heart's Desire; Barry MacSweeney, Black Torch, (part 1), Odes; Paul Brown, Meetings and Pursuits; John Ash, Casino; Tony Lopez, The English Disease; Change; Brian Marley, Springtime in the Rockies
1979 W.S.Graham, Collected Poems 1942-77; George Mackay Brown, Wreck of the Archangel; Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, Moortown; Iain Sinclair, Suicide Bridge; Paul Evans, The Manual for the Perfect Organization of Tourneys; Paul Gogarty, The Accident Adventure; Jeremy Reed, Saints and Psychotics

The 1980s
1980 Anthony Thwaite, Victorian Voices; Harry Guest, Elegies; Penelope Shuttle, The Orchard Upstairs
1981 David Jones (d.1974), The Roman Quarry; Adrian Stokes (d.1972) With All The Views; Christopher Logue, Ode to the Dodo (poems 1953-78), War Music; Peter Redgrove, The Apple Broadcast; David Chaloner, Hotel Zingo; Philip Jenkins, Cairo; Jeremy Reed, Bleecker Street

1982 J.H. Prynne, Poems (i.e. collected poems); Ken Smith, The Poet Reclining (selected poems 1962-80); Peter Didsbury, The Butchers of Hull; Paul Brown, Masker; John Hartley Williams, Hidden Identities; John Ash, The Goodbyes
1983 Roland Mathias, Burning Brambles: selected poems 1944-79; George Mackay Brown, Voyages; Asa Benveniste, Lay Out the Life Line, Roll out the Corse (poems 1965-85); Ted Hughes, The River; Harry Guest, Lost and Found: poems 1976-82; John James, Berlin Return
1984 Anthony Thwaite, Poems 1953-83; David Harsent, Mister Punch; Gavin Selerie, Azimuth; John Seed, History Labour Night; Frank Kuppner, A bad day for the Sung Dynasty
1985 Andrew Crozier, All Where Each Is (Collected Poems); Allen Fisher, Brixton Fractals, Unpolished Mirrors (part of Place); John Ash, The Branching Stairs; Barry MacSweeney, Ranter; Denise Riley, Dry Air; Maggie O'Sullivan, A Natural History in 3 incomplete parts; Kelvin Corcoran, Robin Hood in the Middle Ages
1986 Christopher Middleton, Two Horse Wagon Going By; Roy Fisher, A Furnace; Michael Haslam, Continual Song; Maggie O'Sullivan, From the Handbook of That & Furriery, Divisions of Labour, States of Emergency; John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh; Kelvin Corcoran, The Red and Yellow Book
1987 Alastair Mackie, Ingaitherins; Colin Simms, Eyes Own Ideas; Peter Finch, Selected Poems; Tom Lowenstein, Filibustering in Samsara; Peter Didsbury, The classical farm; John Ash, Disbelief; Frank Kuppner, The Intelligent Contemplation of Naked Women
1988 Edwin Morgan, Themes on a Variation; Tom Raworth, Tottering State (selected poems 1963-87); Maggie O'Sullivan, Unofficial Word; Kelvin Corcoran, Qiryat Sepher
1989 Christopher Middleton, Selected Writings; Ted Hughes, Wolfwatching; Peter Levi, Shadow and Bone; Iain Sinclair, Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal; David Chaloner, Trans; Allen Fisher, Stepping Out; Frank Kuppner, Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting!; Kelvin Corcoran, TCL

Anthologies include: Purple and Green (anthology, no editor, Rivelin Grapheme, 1985, 33 women poets); Angels of Fire, ed. Paskin, Silver, Ramsay (1986). A Various Art, ed. Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (1987; this is effectively the Grosseteste Review Sampler; most of it was written before 1980); The New British Poetry (Paladin anthology, 1988, includes everyone important with the exception of about 12 or 15 names); Four Fife Poets: Fower Brigs ti a Kinrik (1988).

1990 Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems 1949-87; Alexander Hutchison, The Mooncalf; Robert Sheppard, Daylight Robbery; Robert Crawford and W.N. Herbert, Sharawaggi; Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, The Book of Shadows
1991 John James, Dreaming Flesh; D.M. Black, Collected poems 1964-87; Isobel Thrilling, Spectrum Shift; Tim Fletcher, Firesong (n.d.), Derivatives; Peter Finch, Make; Ulli Freer, Stepping Space; B. Catling, Soundings (accounts of performance acts), The stumbling block, its index; John Ash, The Burnt Pages; Mimi Khalvati, In White Ink; Ian Duhig, The Bradford Count; W.N. Herbert, Dundee Doldrums; Nicholas Johnson, Listening to the Stones

1992 future exiles (selected poems by Allen Fisher and B. Catling); the tempers of hazard (for Barry MacSweeney, Selected Poems); Tom Raworth, Catacoustics; Wendy Mulford, The Bay of Naples; David Barnett, Fretwork; Pauline Stainer, Sighting the Slave-Ship; John Seed, Interior in the open air; Jo Shapcott, Phrase Book; Robert Crawford, Talkies; Andrew Lawson, Human Capital
1993 F.T. Prince, Collected Poems; Tom Rawling, Names of the Sea-trout; Tom Raworth, Eternal Sections; David Chaloner, The Edge; Ulli Freer, Sand Poles; Denise Riley, Mop mop georgette; Maggie O'Sullivan, In the House of the Shaman; Graham Hartill, Ruan Ji's Island and Tu Fu in the Cities; Jamie McKendrick, Kiosk on the Brink; Robert Sheppard, Flashlight Sonata; Caroline Bergvall, Oh strange passage
1994 Charles Madge, Of Love, Time, and Places: Selected Poems; Roy Fisher, Birmingham River; R.F. Langley, Twelve Poems; David Barnett, All the Year Round; Pauline Stainer, The Ice-pilot Speaks; Allen Fisher, Scram; Nigel Wheale, Phrasing the Light; Tony Lopez, Stress Management; Vicki Feaver, The Handless Maiden; Kelvin Corcoran, Lyric Lyric; Moniza Alvi, The Country at My Shoulder; Michael Ayres, Poems 1987-92; W.N. Herbert, Forked Tongue; David Dabydeen, Turner; Deryn Rees-Jones, The Memory Tray

1995 Alan Ross, After Pusan; Elizabeth Bartlett, Two Women Dancing; James Berry, Hot Earth Cold Earth; Colin Simms, In Afghanistan, For Basil Bunting; Allen Fisher, Dispossession and Cure, Civic Crimes, Breadboard; Judith Kazantzis, Selected Poems 1977-92; Michael Haslam, A Whole Bauble; Grace Lake, Bernache nonnette; B. Catling, The Blindings; Ian Duhig, The Mersey Goldfish; Alison Brackenbury, 1829; Niall Quinn, Nick Macias, and Nic Laight, However Introduced to the Soles; David Greenslade, Burning Down the Dosbarth; Tim Atkins, Folklore 1-25
1996 George Mackay Brown, Following a Lark; Christopher Middleton, intimate chronicles; Christopher Logue, Selected Poems; Roy Fisher, The Dow Low Drop: new and selected poems; Geoffrey Hill, Canaan; John James, Schlegel eats a bagel; Chris Bendon, Jewry; Robert Hampson, Seaport; Rod Mengham, Unsung: New and Selected Poems; Robert Crawford, Masculinity; W.N.Herbert, Cabaret McGonagall; David Greenslade, Creosote; Vittoria Vaughan, The Mummery Preserver; Andy Brown, The Sleep Switch

1997 Tom Raworth, Clean and Well-Lit, Selected Poems 1987-95; Barry MacSweeney, The Book of Demons; Grace Lake, Parasol 1 Parasol 2 Parasol Avenue; Tondo aquatique; Peter Finch, Antibodies; Useful; Alison Fell, Dreams Like Heretics: new and selected poems; Alexander Hutchison, Epitaph for a Butcher; Frank Kuppner, Second Best Poems from Chinese History; Kevin Nolan, Alar; Tony Lopez, False Memory; Gavin Selerie, Roxy; John Hartley Williams, Canada; Mimi Khalvati, Entries on Light; Kelvin Corcoran, Melanie's Book; Rob MacKenzie, Off Ardglas; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake; Helen Macdonald, Safety Catch; David Rees, The London; Ian Taylor, Ruins

Anthologies include Floating Capital: 15 London Poets, ed. Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke (1991); The New Makars, ed. Tom Hubbard (1991) is a convenient overview of some little-known poetry in Scots; Dream State: The New Scottish Poets, ed. Donnie O'Rourke (1993); Ten British Poets, ed. Paul Green (1994); Contraflow on the Superhighway, an Informationist Primer, edited Herbert and Price (1995); A State of Independence, ed. Tony Frazer (1997); Conductors of Chaos, edited Iain Sinclair (1996); Welsh issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ed. Dafydd Johnson; Out of Everywhere, edited Maggie O'Sullivan (1997)

**

comments on my own poems 3 (Savage Survivals)

2011-05-18T00:22:00.000-07:00

Schemas for poems

This post contains comments on 'Savage Survivals' and 'Alien Skies'.

Poems from SAVAGE SURVIVALS
The “schema” for the book was to avoid autobiography (again), otherwise it was just to be frivolous in comparison with “The Imaginary in Geometry”. The title comes from an already existing book, I believe one produced by the Rationalist Association in about the 1930s. I liked the phrase without wanting it to mean very much.

Acoustic Shock
A harbour at West Bay in Dorset destroyed by a storm circa 1964. the soft wrapping of the tender membranes is a quote from the ‘Chaldaean Oracles”, where the throat of someone gives an oracle, aulos meaning ‘flute’. Qualmwasser water pushed at high pressure through cracks in a dam, in a description of a dam that I read. The holes in the earthen dam were made by a kind of mouse. frame capture: the process is dynamic but if you look at it frame by frame it starts to make sense.

The Border Hills
A flight to Edinburgh and memories of walking through the Border Hills.
Malt Shovel: my supervisor, Paul Beard, gave me a list of pubs to go to in Edinburgh. “Eighty Shilling” is a grade of beer, “ninety shilling” is so rare you can’t find it.

Weapons Form With Music There is a 13th century Chinese novel called The Water Margins, of which I am very fond. Mr Brian Holton translated it into Scots. This seemed like a good opportunity to write about Chinese outlaws in Scotland. Figures from Patrick Walker’s Biographia Presbyteriana also appear. I also used some martial arts magazines.
comprising:
‘bring me an ink tablet’
‘Blue sword in white hand’
5 Elements Ninja
‘heroes in a bar’
Scathach and the Striped Ones
‘we turned the jingling horses’ heads for home’
‘a poofy bar’
‘From zenith to pupil’
In Caledonia Dysarta
The Hand of Claverhouse
Cum furca et fovea
weapons form with invective
drownings at Wigtown
land and lordship with Ronnie Laing
the reconstruction of the Crane Dance
Nomos and daily forms
a plethora of Chinese wood-kerns
Bodiless forms of the Internal Arts canon
At Castle Sweeney

Cum furca et fovea ‘with gallows and pit’. A legal term describing the powers of landlords as local officials. Executions of women were carried out by drowning, hence the ‘pit’.
‘Weapons form with music’ is a phrase from a martial arts magazine. The ‘form’ is a sequence of exercises, ‘weapons form’ when carried out with a weapon.
Scathach ran a kind of martial arts academy at which Gaelic heroes trained in Old Irish tales, or specifically Cu Chulainn in The Tain.
In Caledonia dysarta Latin ‘desertum’ becomes ‘diseart’ in Gaelic, and was applied to the ‘deserts’ where hermits lived. Hence the place-name ‘Dysart’. Being in Scotland, they were wet. I am comparing them to the ‘water margins’.

Ghost Technology: Extreme Computing Fair
Describes an idealised research engineer, the kind of person who might have been attending the Extreme Computing Fair. I wrote most of the poem while wandering through the fair, with some additions afterwards. The ‘Orion Project’ was one in the early Sixties for a nuclear-powered spacecraft, on which the physicist Freeman Dyson worked - who was at the Extreme Computing Fair. ex situ: out of (original) position. Acephalous: headless, so a pattern with meaning distributed all over it. “receding in a dapple with a clock pulse”: so, it comes and goes. confusing a simple R/C timer and a ceramic resonator clock!: R/c is ‘radio clock’. These are electronic components.
the Burgess Shale of electronics: the Burgess Shale was a site in Canada which had fabulous anomalous fossils as described by Stephen Jay Gould, part of the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, so the prototypes are the beginnings of multiple technical lines that stopped after one prototype. Red Galaxy videos: archetypal ‘hard’ science fiction, these films have apparently disappeared altogether. They were shown at the Scala during the 1980s. We are trudging through the 1950s: I found an evocative story in New Scientist which I ‘mixed-in’ to the main story about the Extreme Computing Fair, so the next 23 lines describe a techy kid in 1959 buying military surplus parts to build telescopes from. It is still about people building their own equipment from components up. Cut and strap: to modify a printed circuit board (to make it do what you want). Joshua Logan directed the film of ‘South Pacific’, with its avant-garde colour effects. The last eleven lines describe a nuclear test in the Pacific breaking a shelf of Martini glasses, I can’t remember where this came from.

My copy says Ghost Technology part 2, I think part 1 was “The Spirit Mover, Roger Spear”.

Swimming in Spirals
The observation that frogs, carried into outer space as an experiment, swam in pure spirals, suggested that their normal courses were influenced by gravity. This inspired the notion that they could be used to detect gravity and hence the presence of nearby masses, as a navigation aid. The poem describes a spaceship with frogs in floating tanks.
Because it is about gravity I think this was written as part of ‘Alien Skies’ and dates from about 1987.

Blauer Reiter at Ducketts Common
There was a Turkish festival on Ducketts Common, near Turnpike Lane in North London, with a poster which I stole by taking it off a wall. The poster shows the painted leather puppet Karagöz, who appears in the poem. I thought the style was like some paintings in Central Asian tombs, but Luci disagreed. The poem also records the end of a depression where I couldn’t think. ‘Blauer Reiter’ just because of his blue tunic. Somewhere between Turnpike Lane ABC and the New River?: The ABC was a cinema where the bus station is now, and the New River was dug to carry drinking water to London, is still there.

Andy-the-German
This deals with the build-up to the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995, and with a figure known as Andy the German, who was head of security at a camp called Elohim City Compound, and is said to have been working for the German guard of the constitution, which wanted to prevent neo-Nazi propaganda from being printed in Oklahoma and distributed in Germany. The poem starts with people who reject the mainstream media but have limited education. After rejection, they then succumb to ideas and news streams which are even more warped than the mainstream media. This is sad. Much of the information in the poem is untrue - it is the “conspiracy theory” junk which such people believe, and which Tim McVeigh believed. The poem puts forward a conspiracy theory which I do not believe in. I wanted to reproduce the language which a member of “Christian Identity” might use, and I used the style of radio ads as the basis for the poem.

Needwood and Charnwood
A “national forest” is being grown, linking the two ancient forests of Needwood and Charnwood. It starts about 3 miles from the house where I grew up. Much of the area to be covered is poisoned ground, the site of old industrial enterprises, to be healed by the trees.

Mainadik Scholia
Some friends of mine had a project for filming The Bacchae, for which I was to provide a new translation of the Greek text. The project fell through due to an excess of ideas, but we had focussed intensely on it and I wanted to recover something from the deserted site. Oreibasia: going to the mountains.

Precipice of Niches
I think this developed from a phrase by the East German painter Gerhard Altenbourg, “ich-Gestein”. This means something like “the I-mineral”. I was thinking of the ego fused with the soil, soaking up information from the geology. This became “data-fish”.
In the poem, you have four examples of a ‘honeycomb of niches’, starting with an ego as ‘data fish’, then a reef which is very irregular and rich in fish, then a sort of ‘ballistic niche’, a set of circumstances which allowed some dust to move away from the sun and coagulate into a planet, then a partially imaginary culture which has many niches. But the end of the poem starts to mix them all together. The “x-zone” features in one theory of the origin of planets, where the “x zone” is one where material whirling round the sun is thrown off rather than falling back in. The “x-wind” is not made of air but of particles, thus slung into space. ‘Chondrule insets’ are nodules of metal in meteorites, whose make-up records the temperature of the zone where the inset was formed.
The bit about ‘ibex’ is drawn from information about the Sabaean culture in the Yemen. This is a culture I know nothing about, and the poem is about ‘an imaginary culture which we know nothing about’, but which we can enter in imagination, and which is rich in niches.
The ‘Moors in Hell’ bay came from a novel by Norman Lewis.
‘Precipice of Fishes’ was a poem by Eric Mottram about Tenby (literal translation of Welsh name, “Dinbych-y-pysgod”).

Photographing the Ideal
Describes someone attempting to take film of England in about 1942, under the aegis of Jack Beddington, who controlled all stocks of film and had specific ideas about how England was supposed to look. The poem is about making ideology visible. This belongs with the research on Stephen Tallents used in ‘Anglophilia, a romance of the docks’. “We spend the afternoon asking the ash tree to look like itself”. Those Shell posters: Beddington had been head of advertising for Shell and explored a vision of Beautiful England which could be adapted as wartime propaganda.

Vertical Features Remake
The speaker is the pilot of a plane taking aerial photographs of a part of England, for archaeological reconnaissance. on a looted table with back-lighting: the individual exposures have to be joined up to recover complete landscapes.

The star temple of Sumatar Harabesi
Aby Warburg proved in 1912 that the frescoes of the Months in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara are based on the ‘decans’ in Picatrix, an astrological work written in Arabic by moon-worshippers from Harran in Syria. 36 decans of 10 days make up the year (and each has a ‘star-demon’). The frescoes were painted around 1470. In 1963 J.B. Segal visited the remains of a star-temple, with seven buildings for the seven planets, near Harran - at Sumatar Harabesi. This is in the Tektek mountains about 100 kilometres south-east of Urfa and 40-50 kilometers north-east of Harran. The site is in what is now Turkey but the inscriptions there are in Syriac so we would call it “Syria”.
The poem describes Schifanoia and the temple, and is about making ideology visible. Segal has now withdrawn this identification. ‘Schifanoia’ means ‘shunning boredom’, a place of courtly diversion; it was in use as a tobacco factory when someone realised that there were frescoes concealed beneath plaster - or partly in heaps on the floor. triplice strisciata pittorica is something like ‘triple pictorial strip’, or stripe. At some point I describe the cells of the unborn child being struck by rays of celestial influence. These are somehow like the flakes of pigment on the floor.
Rhoizos is a Greek word for the ‘sound’ that the stars make in turning, in the Neo-Platonic concept. Since stars don’t make a sound there is no English word for this. Shakespeare has “the whizz of meteors”. Whizz and rhoizos sound as if they might be related, but I don’t think they are.
Frances A Yates worked at the Warburg Institute and I was very taken with her books, like other people I suppose. Picatrix (or Ghayat al-Hakim) is a work of great importance in the introduction of Neo-Platonist and astrological ideas to western Europe. As Yates pointed out, Campanella and Bruno are dependent on it. The text claims to come from Harran, however Ronald Hutton has collected evidence making it more likely that this Arabic text was written in 11th century Spain. Like most occult books, it includes a false attribution of authorship! There was a fabula that the Harranites were great masters of magic. This may be the source of the Western occult tradition, or it may be a “cover story” for knowledge of other and more recent origin.
Coincidentally, Peter Manson published a pamphlet ‘Birth Windows’, with a poem which is also about the Palazzo Schifanoia.

Altyn-Dagh
Altyn-Dagh is a made-up name, ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish. The nucleus of the poem is the idea of the undifferentiated as the precursor of all forms - the centre in the sense of being equally close to everything. In Chinese colour symbolism, gold is the colour of the centre. There are mountains called ‘golden’ - the Altai - in Central Asia. I was interested in the idea of a place where Chinese, European, Iranian, and Siberian cultures touched, and of a language equally close to the languages of all those places. The ‘nothing’ can only survive until it becomes a ‘something’. The poem shows a child coming from the central mountain and wandering through the different cultures in the different directions. Following the story told in a poem called ‘The Pearl’ (or ‘the Hymn of the Soul’), he longs to return to his home, and finally does, dissolving into featureless gleaming, sunlight before it touches the earth.
Arche-syllable: the basic design of a syllable, schema underlying everything that is a syllable. Roshnan means ‘creatures of light’, i.e. ‘humans’, in Parthian Manichaean texts. What fell east became Chinese: if you move in any direction from the ‘absolute centre’ you acquire the features of a local culture. I was also interested in the idea of languages evolving back towards a primeval language, at least in a kind of geometrical transform. Spell for the decoying of a soul into a child: the child is taught the local culture but still has a yearning for the Pure Centre and so goes on wandering. This part repeats a tune from ‘A Virtuality/ Cyclical Polygons’.

What country is this? / how many milliseconds split one sound from another?: repeats the questions in the epigraph to the book. he ejected what he’d learnt.: he is disquiet and wanders away to another part of the world. royal luck, khvarenah: ‘royal luck’ is a gloss for khvarenah. This word also appears in ‘Three Graves’. Source is RN Frye’s The Heritage of Persia. Amita Dimita Trimita ... from a list of types of silk taken from some history of textiles. Exarentasmata, I just liked the sound of the word. Just possibly these words record names from an Asian language closer to the source of the silk. the original pearl that fell: the pearl plays a role in Manichaean texts as the soul ‘fallen’ into the body. In part 4 he goes to Europe. from piandj to pyat’ to five to pump: word for ‘five’ in various Indo-European languages, related, which is why “a sound that was heard in the Pamirs” is still heard in Europe. The languages are, roughly, Sogdian, Russian, English, Welsh. The mountains of languages: mountainous areas can preserve an extraordinary variety of old and rare languages, due to bad communications. Examples are the Pamirs and the Caucasus.
going up where the birds from the Green Sea go: a phrase from Sohravardi. To be honest I am not sure what this implies, but it is beautiful. By fires they sing a lullaby: here culture is seen as a series of tricks to lure the soul into the body of a child.
Where the marmot makes every call twice: it is a bi-lingual zone, the marmot has to say everything twice. Four red parts of the world: a phrase in a Gaelic folk-tale (in Rosg Gaidhlig). I have no idea why the adjective “red” appears in this phrase. Rowed sheep out to the grass of the summer isles; grazing sheep on islands is a feature in Norway and the Hebrides. I guess we have got to Western Scotland by this time.

Tunes for the acquisition of a body: this resembles a theme in ‘Wonders of classification’. Lines in part 8 come from a poem named ‘The Pearl’, which appears in the apocryphal ‘Gospel of Thomas’. This was identified as Manichaean, but it seems rather that Mani was very much influenced by Christian writing of the town he came from, Edessa, and that the poem is Christian but woven from the same “image-complexes” that Mani used. (More about this in my book Council of Heresy.) The poem was beloved by GRS Mead and was used extensively by Eric Mottram in ‘Peace Projects Four’.

The Twelve Days
The poem is based on the argument of Dumezil’s Le mythe des Centaures, in which the twelve days of Christmas were seen, by the Indo-Europeans or some descendant group, as days of chaos, a primal time, where everything reverts back to formlessness. Each day foretells the course of one month of the New Year. The universe is remade, within that time, by a group with the attributes of sovereignty, who play music; they have the forms of animals, and are associated with winter storms. Centaurs are a variety of these creatures, with whom hobby-horses, tricks, and the casting of lots are associated.

Acallamh Answers Without the Questions
This is an old Irish genre in which one voice poses questions and another answers them. I thought to remove the questions. The reader has to decide what they were. We have 37 answers. This is a tribute to the Informationist poets. In modern Gaelic, ‘acallamh’ means ‘interview’. The questions could be 37 words that exist in Scots but for which there is no English equivalent. Carberry Cat-head was a figure in old Irish legend, I don’t know why “cat-head”. The Cowlairs Chord is a stretch of railway track in Glasgow.

Bob Cob Bing Bong
Bob Cobbing was a ‘sound poet’ whose sound filled me with fear and loathing. His ‘photocopier art’ was not half so bad. This poem uses ‘visual’ and ‘sound’ forms, as is appropriate for the subject. ‘Jackie Leroux watch your Ps and Qs’ comes from some American song, probably from New Orleans, I can’t remember.
Bob used to scrumple up pieces of paper, put them through the photocopier, and then put the output through again. A lot of the image had no white, was pure dark, and so rich in carbon. This is “paper wraps coal and splits”, those seven lines are about the photocopies.

Visualizing Corporate Structure
I used to work as a project planner, which meant putting abstract relations into graphical form for managers to understand. When I saw illustrations of microscopic fauna called radiolaria, with an infinite vocabulary of forms, I saw it as a possibility for explaining how industry works. The poem has me walking a manager round the site trying to explain what happens there. “test” is a hard shell. Khrien: glossed in the previous as “sets of actions”. A German word from Greek for “necessary actions”, effective actions that you spend your working days carrying out. Asphradium: an organ of the micro-organisms. Malacologists: students of molluscs.
‘An exponent of less than one’ means “negative growth”, or business failure to put it bluntly.

Rhythmic Blind Spot
Based on a film I saw at the Natural History Museum of a mongoose killing a scorpion. The mongoose does not pounce without preparation, but moves rhythmically, the scorpion prepares to sting each time but is unable to predict the mongoose’s moves, so finally the mongoose finds a gap and jumps on it.

Poems unwritten, in faint exhaustion, one Sunday night
The Dressmaker
*Burning a Church
Listed but I don’t think this was ever finished.

*The Influencing Machine
Listed but I don’t think this was ever finished.

The First Household
Describes the design of the first household ever, the one from which all others are derived.
*Topic Ode to Camden
Listed but I don’t think this was ever finished.

Self-reproducing Programs, Property Regimes
*The Pageant
Something I was working on during ‘Savage Survivals’ but which was set aside so that I could finish the other poems. It was specifically a pageant in 1945 or 1946, the war was won and it was about post-war optimism.

Reichs-Denkmal-Vorlage
I had a scheme for a ‘monument to the Empire’ which would express an unpatriotic view of the process. This was never completed and I can’t remember publishing any bits of it. This almost certainly started with an exhibition by Tony Cragg in the Barbican circa 1990 which included a very elaborate bronze casting showing a machine gun in all technical details, cartridge belt, long barrel, etc. The gunner was Mickey Mouse. I kept coming back to this project over several years but never finished it. I think the problem was that I was imagining a building complex, in three dimensions, and the poem could never be that.

The Whole History of Heresy
This has three elements composed in an ABC structure. So, one is the Gnostic heresy, two is Presbyterian preachers in the time of persecution in the late 17th century, three is the world of Underground poetry. Each one is excluded from the centres of power and goes to ground among the common people. the house of rain: outdoors.

The Whole History of Shopping
Never finished and not included in the published volume.

**
From the kitchen floor (Prometheus creating mankind)
This was published as a pamphlet by Ulli Freer in about 1992. It is a creation myth, which is a familiar genre I suppose. There was a sarcophagus in Naples which showed “Prometheus creating mankind”, I couldn’t follow the iconography. In the texts Prometheus does not create mankind, but the reality of myth was a huge scatter and the versions on vases and so on are often different from all the texts we have. There are more parts than went into the pamphlet, it was an instalment. “The First Household” is part of this material, which was never completed.

In High Places
Can’t remember where this was published.
Gavrilo Princip
Published in ‘Ten British Poets’ around 1993.

There is no more society (published in 13 Wasted Years)
Alan Land
The Gram (published by Kelvin as a pamphlet)

**
Alien Skies
“The starting point was dreaming about spaceships and listening to jazz drumming. The discovery that in Welsh caeth, the term for strict metre, also means captive, led to the realization that the surrender of strict metre was equivalent to the escape from gravity implied by leaving terrestrial space. Hardly less obvious was the entrance of the heretic, Mani, whose death crushed by the weight of chains set up the opponent values of gravity and light-which he regarded as the soul substance. This dependence of emotional states on arriving radiance is discussed in terms of the physiology of an English reptile: the viper, which is in a kind of metabolic shutdown for nine months of the year. The wish for exit led to an investigation of substances -disputably or really-infalling from outside the sparse terrestrial rim: meteorites, cosmic rays, proton winds, daylight, gravity waves, omens, natal influences. The fleeting presence of the 17th century Jesuit poet Jacob Balde is called up by the poet’s being felled by sunstroke, toccado, while searching for an Oscan inscription in Pompeii in 1987. The correlation of temporary insanity, minerals, and stars is investigated via anomalies reported in Derbyshire in the 1640s.
The concept called for a poem consisting of a ring of metaphors, each one repeating the other, the whole blazing a kind of exit path, a track in thin air.
Early plans for issuing the poem scratched on plaques of burnished meteoric iron have not yet been realized. It is only available on paper.”

I can’t quite remember the dates for this, but circa 1987-92. There were two projects in parallel which in the end became ‘Alien Skies’ and ‘Surveillance and Compliance”. A lot of Alien Skies was produced by improvisation, I had the themes but the poems were written spontaneously and I went with whatever came out. This process does not leave a memory but I can identify the themes. The pamphlet series had a fixed length so I think there are poems in my copy that are not in the published version. This was my third book to be published, not the third I wrote.

The five bonds which are the Five Senses: we are held captive by the senses according to Manichaean doctrine.
You shall put on a radiant garment : I think this line comes from the poem ‘The Pearl’. I worked on a translation (adapting the English translation by AA Bevan) around this time, maybe 1990. But it crops up in other poems I wrote ten years later. And then in Eric Mottram’s ‘Peace Projects 4’ when I tried to write a commentary on that.
Caeth: this means ‘captive’ in Welsh but also refers to “strict” as in “strict metres”.
The Scanner: monologue by an electronic apparatus that is waiting to detect very specific signals.
The third part of your brain, do you know where it is?: fragment of found dialogue used on a Cabaret Voltaire record. At some point I found where it came from - an episode of ‘The Outer Limits’ named ‘The demon with the glass hand’. I think the answer is “Wrapped around the solenoid in my central body cavity.” Ingrettus os ventremque creter: quote from Jacob Balde’s ‘Poesis osca’, meaning something like “mouth fattened and belly filled”. Oscan, not Latin.
Novena formosarum mulierum: means “a group of nine beautiful women’, the Muses. Taken from some Latin texts I had, possibly 16th century. This might be Marsilio Ficino. The poem is largely a hymn to the sun (Apollo, leader of the Muses) and ‘Alien skies’ as a whole is about the radiation from stars.
Pierides: the Muses.
Leichhardt: German explorer who died on an expedition in Australia. He appears here because he was a botanist carrying seeds, the radiation of plants being one of the themes. Mendes went to the Tatar city of death: a story in the Portuguese ‘Tragic history of the sea’
The fallen stone: Balde’s foreword to his poem tells of finding a stone deep in the earth on which his poem was inscribed. the Woolwich chemical fuel experiments in ‘43: i have no specific memory of this, but the “chemical fuel” bit implies a rocket experiment with solid fuels. Vibrations, essentially sound waves, hence the “surface of sound”, tended to extinguish these fuels, and this was an obstacle in developing rockets.
asp.rez: glossed inside the poem as ’racetrack’, Iranian roots meaning ‘horse, run’. And the wolf under the Elburz breaks its chains: part of an apocalyptic myth, the end of the world. We (who are created by dry lands: dry conditions are suited to a nomadic way of life, the “we” is a nomadic group on an archetypal campaign of conquest.
The Star Catalogue of Ulugh Beg: Ulugh was a central Asian Moghul and astronomer. There are amazing photographs of his giant marble observing installations. Steve Sneyd also wrote a poem about Ulugh Beg, much to my surprise. Geomancers: ‘divining [truth] from the earth’, semi-magical landscape experts. This may be related to “the star temple at Sumatar Harabesi”, self-imitation.
IRIDIUM: iridium is formed by molten fragments (called ‘tektites) shot up from a meteorite impact, which cool and become hard as they fall back to earth. They are glassy and so like mirrors. This relates to a specific iridium pebble which I bought from a stone shop to help with the poem. I could not acquire something of extraterrestrial origin, but this was as close as I could get. If the iridium is made of the substance of the meteorite, it actually is of extraterrestrial origin.
Goddard drilled to find a buried star: Robert Goddard, looking for a giant meteor.
Time is liquid [...] in the body of the Great Bear: various peoples saw the bear, which grows fat and then thin, waxing and waning, as symbol of Time, and a star that waxes and wanes as a bear-star. influencing machines: machines that control behaviour, as devised by a patient of the Croat psychoanalyst Victor Tausk (as described in an amazing essay by Tausk). But they are just machines that influence people, in the poem. An otolith turns towards concentrations of mass.: otoliths are free stones in the ears of certain animals that can tumble, and form a “gravity organ”. I think this theme relates to a poem ‘Swimming in Spirals” that was probably originally part of ‘Alien Skies’. zenith gun: ‘zenitka’ in Russian is an anti-aircraft gun.
AT THE GLASS FELLS: the ‘glasvaellir’ or ‘glass fells’ are the place of immortality in Norse myth. Not the only place, but they feature in some texts I found. The name has also been translated as “bright plains” but I see it as “glass”. There is a fairy-tale in which the protagonists have to cross mountains made of glass, and I see these as a symbol of death. The poem is then about how to survive death, also transcending gravity.
Domhnall Astjolf Alparslan. Three who surpassed death: just three random names for three heroes on an adventure. Three is the usual number. Trees of the hawk’s perch: the with addresses them in ridding language as befits her profession. The phrase is a Norse kenning and simply means “men”, perhaps also “distinguished men”. The hawk perches in the man’s hand and the hand grows on a man. Odainsakr: ‘field of the undying’. Heafodbeag: head, bow. A crown, viz. a ring that goes around the head. Nos vieilles pellicules aux sels d’argent.: line from an advertisement for film. Means “our old films with their silver salts”. But ‘pellicules’ also means ‘fine skins’.

More on 'Council of heresy'

2011-05-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

More on “Council of Heresy”.

Note. One of the basic arguments in ‘Council of Heresy’ was that ignoring the background of ideas used by poets in poems was a way of reaching false understandings of the poems - the false opinions amounting to heresy. So, much of the book is an exposition of various ideas significant in this background. One area was the line of poetry (not the thickest line in the whole picture, to be sure) which was, in the wake of Blake and Yeats, involved in the teachings of Western occultism. Thus the book gives a commentary on Kathleen Raine in the light of what Raine believed. This note follows up what I said in the book.

The book Picatrix was, as Frances A.Yates has demonstrated, quite fundamental to the Western occultist tradition. Its internal attribution to the Sabians of Harran in Syria has been challenged recently. In the new version, scholars think the link to the Sabians is a mere fable, as they were legendary for their occult knowledge and their astronomy.

There is some kind of link between the academy at Harran and the theological & speculative creativity of Edessa, thirty miles away. Both partook of a sociology which was productive of intellectual creativity. Other centres were knocked out by various military disasters, and there was presumably a “Syrian moment” when this area (Edessa, Harran, Nisibis, Antioch, others?) was the most productive in the European/ Mediterranean world. This moment lay, I would suppose, between the 4th and 9th centuries AD. One may regret that the intellectual agenda at that time involved the entanglement of ideas with theology. What one has to admire is the “fissile” quality of the educated stratum in Syria, the astonishing proliferation of new ideas and heresies. The impression one comes away with is of an intellectual milieu where there is no wish to be orthodox. This was the centre of intellectual creativity at the time - a title no one would claim for Christian Europe.

By chance I acquired a book on changes of climate, from 1955. (C von Regel,Die Klimaanderung und die Gegenwart) It records “But gradually a change appeared, the forests in the vicinity were felled, the pastureland was exploited, and and after the invasion of foreign peoples, for instance the Mongols, the irrigation works decayed, until everything, towns and cultivated land, disappeared under the desert sand. [...] Northern Syria was once full of blooming cities, whose ruins are still to be seen. The doorsteps are several feet above the level of the earth - a proof that the fertile earth was blown out of the yards.”

This sheds a light on the quite different distribution of intellectual power in the first millennium AD and the last one BC. Europe rose because it was the land of thick forests, abundant rainfall, and thick humus. Of course the questions which the thinkers of those cities answered were meaningful mainly within those cultures, not to us; what reached Europe was material which was quite marginal, and this is why it acquired the fringe status of “the occult”. Astrology is the prime example of this.
There is an older theory that rhyme was the invention of Ephraim the Syrian (4th century), and reached Europe as an imitation of Ephraim. This is not quite as clear as it once appeared, the facts do not form an obvious pattern, but it remains a possibility. (Recent writers deny that he used rhyme.) Another legend is that Ephraim invented the Christian hymn. (Also, that he copied the idea from the Daisanites and borrowed their tunes.)
Ephraim came from Nisibis, one of the “university cities” along with nearby Harran and Edessa. In these towns, there were numerous Christians, also numerous Jews, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. Also Neoplatonists and pagans. In the 2nd century, >>Osrhoene [[Northern Syria]] was a religious melting pot, where the cult of Mesopotamian gods like Nabû and Bêl existed side by side with Syrian deities like Atargatis and Elagabal.<<
Nisibis was on the border with the Persian Empire, with its Zoroastrian faith. Even numerous languages were spoken there.

>>The most important of his works are his lyric, teaching hymns (madrāšê). These hymns are full of rich, poetic imagery drawn from biblical sources, folk tradition, and other religions and philosophies. Each madrāšâ had its qālâ, a traditional tune identified by its opening line. All of these qālê are now lost. It seems that Bardaisan and Mani composed madrāšê, and Ephrem felt that the medium was a suitable tool to use against their claims. << (Wikipedia) Mani invented his own world religion, Bardaisan also invented at least a cult, a heresy of local stature. So Ephraim read their works and wrote a “parody” of them, for a sophisticated audience which knew the originals. The competition and interaction are startling.

More difficult is gauging how the magical practices (of the uneducated, perhaps) related to the philosophical schools. The surviving texts show them intermingled and voices have been raised recently, forcibly suggesting that to divide them is to project 20th century ideas onto the milieu. This question is also tangled up with the issue of how ancient religions, for example the whole heritage of Mesopotamian religion, went on thriving and how these “irrational” conceptions were the raw material for philosophers. It seems likely that the academy of Harran involved magic and an old Moon religion as well as Greek philosophy. Next, the question of how huge drafts of Hellenistic culture were absorbed in areas like Syria, and whether the specific quality of Syrian culture of Late Antiquity was due to the combination of Hellenistic ideas and techniques with the ancient Mesopotamian material.

The idea that the “magical papyri” and so forth represent the uneducated part of the population is not based on more than supposition. We expect educated people to be critical and free of illusions, but there are huge exceptions to that. Just as educated people in the 17th century could be devout Christians, so also educated people in the 4th century may have devoutly believed in magic. In fact, the whole written tradition belongs to a minority, so where we have magical written texts (in large numbers) it is perverse to suppose that they were for the use of the illiterate. There may indeed have been a Belief, of date circa 1900, that magic is Low and belongs to savages whereas Religion is high and belongs to Europeans. This was a way of dealing with the non-Christian religions of the colonial empires. It is, rather obviously, Eurocentric. Perhaps it was no more than a fantasy, and we should see magic and religion as a continuum. The consequences of shedding this imperialist ideology may be far-reaching. Some of the most prominent occultists were super-intellectual. This connects also to the problem people have accepting that neo-Platonic magic comes from people who were top Platonists and of professorial rank.

It has been suggested that the whole body of texts in the Corpus Hermeticum was collected and preserved by the intellectuals of Harran, and that they had a “hermetic academy” between, say, 300 AD and 1000 AD. (The Mongols may have brought this to an end.) That this version of the god Hermes was developed in Harran (identifying him with Mercury in their planetary symbolism). That this knowledge reached the Arabs via Harran.

It is now suggested that ‘Picatrix’ is not named for ‘Hippocrates’ but for ‘Harpocrates’. (Thus, “the book of [har]Pcatrix”.) Harpocrates had a special association with talismans, which are very prominent in Picatrix. He was an Egyptian god of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

In ‘Council’ I deal with Anthony Thwaite’s ‘Letters of Synesius’, a 4th century bishop from Cyrene, now in Libya. I discovered by chance the other day that Synesius was a neo-Platonist. He was surely a Christian, but the language he uses in his hymns seems quite alien to us. It seems less alien if you read about Neo-Platonism - which is described in other parts of the book, but not in the chapter about Thwaite.

Council offers a rather unmediated account of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s description of noises made, formally, by members of cults in his time (1st or 2nd century AD), and points out that this “pre-verbal vocalisation” resembled the acts of 20th C sound poets. I now have more information available on this, as supplied by Wolfgang Schultz in his Dokumente der Gnosis (1910). He gives examples of ‘sound poets’ who may not have been the same ones mentioned by Nicomachus. In the text known as ‘The Mithras Liturgy’, there are seven poems which recall seven stages of the creation, each one accompanied by a different pre-verbal (and pre-human) noise. In this case, the primitive sounds recall the primitive state of the universe, before words or even shapes were fixed. Similarly in the creation myth recital known as ‘Abrasax’. (See pages 79 and 84 of Schultz’s book.) This is the theory, but my guess is that sounds of this kind had a presence in various rituals of the Low Empire without the benefit of clear theoretical underpinning. Schultz offers us a breakdown into vowel chanting, non-verbal noises, and chanting of meaningless sound strings (which quite often have a numerical symbolism built into them). These types may have different histories and distributions, but they all belong together in the world of the para-verbal.

I had not seen Schultz’s collection of sources (1910, reprint 1986) when writing ‘Council’. One of its merits is that it includes the “low” magical material and gives helpful explanations of it. Theologians and intellectuals tend to leave this material out. Schultz acutely presents a theory that Gnosticism arose from people analysing the whole glittering morass of magical spells and rites and deducing a philosophical system out of it. He rapidly says that this is a wrong theory. All the same this is the source of quite fundamental insights. Either you think that magic is sunken religion or that religion is bureaucratised magic.

I am aware of two ‘Basilidian talismans’ of the Roman period found in Britain, one in Norfolk and one in Carnarvonshire. (See Wikipedia article for ‘Thetford treasure’.) These may suggest that Gnosticism had reached Britain during the Low Empire. However, it would be possible to buy talismans without understanding the difficult theology. They were very portable and very tradable. The talismans have very brief inscriptions which do include the invocation-name IAO. This is not certainly dependent on Gnostic theology describing IAO. Written amulets are a classic way for someone illiterate to acquire the 'power' of the written word.

To close, a reminder that the project of ‘Heresy’ is not to prove the doctrines of occultism right, but simply to allow readers to understand certain books of English poetry, as a step towards artistic judgement of them. Describing any single “mythical system” distracts us from the fact that a poet may have a purely personal mythology - so, five poets mean five mythologies. I am following up what GRS Mead wrote in 1913, that the modern cultural situation reproduces the situation of the Late Empire, with energy going into cults.

commentary on my own poems (2)

2011-05-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

Schemas
Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt.

poems from 'The Imaginary in Geometry'

“Jerusalem” CR Ashbee, the arts and crafts theorist, was town planner for Jerusalem in the early days of the League of Nations Mandate. to the mullions in the scatter of stone golden cubes: Ashbee took artisans from the East End of London to a new life in the Cotswolds. with the ripple of hammer-pats to say “hand-made”: the hand-made goods were expensive but held to contain virtue; manufacturers mass-produced the goods from moulds that imitated the marks of hand-made items, thus breaking the business in Chipping Camden.
Cotton Suq: cotton market

“Wonders of Classification” The poem has a “double scheme”, about the collections which were the prehistory of museums, and about the acquisition of a body. I was thinking about the idea of “collections”.
The poem starts with the “object pouch” of an American Indian “medicine man”, because it is obvious that people were making collections of precious and rare objects before buildings were invented. (So the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ is an expansion of the medicine pouch.) Anomalous objects expose the classification system because they are exceptions to it; the early collections were of anomalies, wonders. Later “science” differs from “everyday knowledge” because the latter is sometimes wrong, at points exposed by anomalies. I was interested in the idea that a poem is a collection of objects before being a sequence of words.
Ambras: Schloss Ambras was where a Hapsburg Duke of the 16th century (Ferdinand II of Tyrol) kept a legendary collection of wonderful objects. Lhotsky wrote a book which describes it but the collection is long since dispersed. The motive for collecting may have been competition with a brother, also a collector. Tradescant: had a “hutch” for his collection of dried plants, a forerunner of a museum. Kenter? I think it may have been Johann Kentmann, actually. He had a “cabinet” of minerals around 1565. Raritätenkabinett: cabinet of rareties, or curiosities. “lesson objects” because “object lessons” were where children were shown sets of objects to familiarise them with shape and texture.
“to collect body parts”: we are still in the Natural History Museum, but the idea has now shifted, we are looking at evolution and an unnamed “collector” assembling body parts in order to acquire a body. This may hark back to the “talons” in the medicine pouch. The galvanic corpse-tensors/ Judgment Day trick riggers produced the articulated dinosaur skeletons famously on display in the museum in Kensington. missing a limb, and failing the test of pattern: a creature at this point is trying to acquire a body, for 15 lines, and repeatedly failing. ‘tetrapod’ is the four-legged creatures, descending from crossopterygian fish. lashing surf: to move on dry land you need limbs. The “surf” is also shapeless, where you try to acquire a shape. Gambas suras femoralia/ capitali centro cartilagini: from the Lorica of Laidcenn (ob. AD 661), a spell of protection involving a catalogue of body parts, in a strange sort of Latin. (variant 'cambas'). Here we are getting at the prehistoric levels of language, to go with the prehistory of acquiring four limbs, language is being nonsense but, rapidly, it evolves into something like words with their regular anatomy. The gambas suras etc. are a catalogue of body parts, almost as if we acquire limbs by naming them. a tray of birds’ legs rowed to speak: there was a case of legs from different birds showing how their anatomies differed.
Now the poem moves on to a new “collection of sensations”. A drip swelling to a sheet/ a flexible plane flaring as a wrapper/ restating a hole as an inside. records sensations on the skin. The creature is learning sensations to go with its new body. We are seeing household goods of a precious quality, because they test out fineness of perception: fine linen flows like milk. The wonders of classification applied to textiles and food. These are “lesson objects”.

My notes record, “also a female “witch doctor” burial at Maglehoj. with in belt box: two horse’s teeth, some weasel bones, the claw joint of a cat, possibly a lynx, bones from a young mammal, a piece less than 1/2” long of a bird’s windpipe, some vertebrae from a snake, two burnt fragments of bone (human?), a twig of mountain ash, charred aspen, two pebbles of quartz, a lump of clay, two pieces of pyrites, a sheet of bronze and a piece of bronze wire bent at one end to form a hook. star patterns on bronze box and belt-fastener.” This (from Denmark) gives us the end of the poem. One can imagine these objects being assembled into the symbolic structure of a Bronze Age poem. The “box” is the forerunner of the cabinet of curiosities.

“The Spirit Mover, 1854”
Roger Spear was a Spiritualist preacher and made a machine at the instruction of spirits. The poem describes this building project and then the locals destroying the machine at the end. the device of unknown purpose: the spirits did not tell Revd. Spear what the machine was for.

Anglophilia — a Romance of the Docks
This is a kind of biography of Stephen Tallents (1884-1958), indicated by the research I was doing as (unofficially) head of ideology between the wars. He was a Foreign Office official who headed the civilian part of the naval expedition to the Baltic States in 1919-20. He wrote a pamphlet called The Projection of England which is a guide to using images associated with England for advertising or propaganda. He founded the British documentary movement (at the Empire Marketing Board and later at the GPO Film Unit). He was head of the Overseas Service of the BBC, which is where the Arabic-language propaganda stations come in. I was interested in the overlap between beautiful political ideals and the Government’s version of “the good life”, and in how to put ideology into pictorial form. (That is, the imaginary enters geometry and so is caught for us.) The sequence can be seen as an essay on film criticism.

While I was researching the career of Joseph Macleod I read his memoirs, A Job at the BBC, which is full of paranoia about Tallents. Then while researching something different, namely propaganda, I came across the name of Tallents again, in almost the same week. I took this as a sign. (More about Tallents in Origins of the Underground.) Talents wrote a pamphlet called “The projection of England”, initially I used that title but then changed it to “Anglophilia”. The cover of “Projection” shows a map of England with circles of influence beaming out from it like a radio signal. This expansion can be reversed to see the position of Britain as threatened by incoming waves, for example enemy aircraft and submarines. Tallents was aware of threats from the USA, Fascism, and communism, worried about “loyalty” in the empire and in the working class. Naval power is basic but to defend Trade you also have to project an Image to the consumer. Cinema projects a “way of life” which helps your goods to sell - the actors are wearing them.

Analysing the propaganda element in culture peels away the acquired knowledge. Underneath is a self which can slip out of the conditioning, temporarily, and be naked or empty. The poem is also about this disincorporated self, looking at the pictures from outside. It wants to acquire a new society, but is hesitating, looking back at the old pictures with regret. This is offered as an interpretation of what it means to sit in a cinema. The poem is about being a child.

I can’t resist adding a quote from the head of theatrical censorship, in 1937, saying “I think we can congratulate ourselves that, of all the burning issues of the day, not one is represented in a London theatre.” This is really what the poem is about. The events in it were either prevented from happening or were removed from the record.

There were “British documentaries” from the start, even in the 1890s. The “British documentary movement” has a more restricted reference, perhaps showing an ability to manipulate public image. I looked at earlier documentaries, like the “Secrets of Nature” series, but could not write a poem about them.

Anglophilia - a Romance of the Docks:
Baltic Relief Mission
1919, British warships on station in the Baltic and helping Baltic Whites against Reds. The idea of free trade and democracy is what he will promote in his films. The ships were only observing, but “projecting power”. They are literal force, and Tallents saw film as a more modern way of projecting influence - they show commodities and freedom and so incline people towards a certain view of politics.

Precious stuffs unstopping
The idea of socialisation and the possibility that cultural texts are integrating you into a broadly based deception. The attempt to go back before conditioning, the idea that in that “before” there is only a blank receptor. Trier: ruins 1700 years old as a guarantee that the past exists.

Putting England on film
Tallents ran the Empire Marketing Board and founded English documentary film. Some of these films were made in Bolton by Humphrey Jennings. The poem alternates between three films of the period (Bolton, Jamaica, Cornwall) and someone in the audience, drinking in what England is. The poem is about acquiring behaviour norms. The things learnt are not so much objects as patterns of emotional responses, tunes, a score with timings “so many tenths of a second”. The “spherical blank fullness” is literally the eye, but is also a childish sensibility, ready to absorb everything. “The music tells us when and where to breathe”, it is teaching us emotional responses. The child is a thief because it grabs the strips of behaviour and repeats them as play.

Documentary
Two documentary films: Onimus and Martin film the heart of a dove beating, (opening a “seeing wound”). Geoffrey Bell films psychotherapy and the attempt to make traumas rise to the surface. (For the Army, hence the subject is “a soldier”). “a chemical flare to conduct us through the darkness”, the victim of combat neurosis can find a way back to the light, to be healed. The films were made as training material for Army doctors. The Mass Observation part, then, is not a film but still photographs by Humphrey Spender and William Coldstream. The poem shows the ideal of documentary film, its ability to show us true things which are normally hidden. What Tallents was trying to do was utterly different.

Darling, let’s stop pretending
Archetypal line of dialogue from a 30s drama about “sophisticated” people, it refers to the whole burden of collusion in the British endeavour. We see a filmic hero, and a film in which our emotions are cued by clever tricks of narrative. This is evidently a fiction film, against which the documentaries presented reality. The film makes “dust” to “porcelain”, eliminates diffuse reality to make an expensive product that can be sold. The scene is unspecified but it has a “look”, the sophistication which British films wanted so much to achieve. So much rotates around the way the hero dresses. Because the rest of the film is there to complement the leading man’s tailoring, it has the feel of an advertisement. The film is a servant to narcissism and cannot go any deeper. We don’t find out the plot of the film, because only the look matters. The actor could be Ronald Coleman, Herbert Marshall, Robert Donat. Is "star quality" more than narcissism?

Collusion
The poem opens with a discussion of naval power in the 1930s. Then, a scriptwriter as one of the producers of this skein of illusion, he wonders what rules he has to conform to to get his scripts filmed. The rules are never made explicit. The poem starts with a description of the vulnerability of Britain in the 1930s, for example “infinite approaches to the homeland”, the island has to be defended in the “approaches” but these are “infinite”, which is why there are fleet units from “Greenland to Ceylon”, a paranoiac overstretch. This is the background to the censorship of British films of the time. The propagandists, Tallents at their head, act to “seal off the wound”. The film producer has a modernist sculpture on his desk. 12 lines describe naval gunnery as an analogy to visual ideology - and perhaps as the subject of a film. The reach of the guns holds the Empire together. This is an imaginary power and also exercises power over the imagination. “the pale girl in a beret” is the actress in a film, unnamed. “seizing a country/ to protect a coaling station” is occupying the Aden territory to protect Port Aden and its bunkering facilities.

The moving line of capture
The acephalous as autonomy and spontaneity - as the opposite of the manipulated media industry. This is my attempt at a “documentary” on Situationist lines. Miching: skipping school. Marlocking: making a mess, disordering things. The snake appears as a symbol of chaos in Gnostic gems (a goddess who is snake from the waist down, named Echidna, who symbolises random fertility, the formless, the plebs).

Silver Threads and Golden needles
An egoistic writer/director describes his view of History. In the Thirties, writers were still acting as “mages” who could reveal the truth about history. The “silver threads” stitch the story together, perhaps as a silver screen. Grote Kraweel - “great caravel”, a Hanseatic ship, it might have sailed on the Baltic. The “Gotlandish Shore” is part of the harbour in Lubeck. Coinage was invented in Lydia. Moments to do with trade and currency. These personal symbols are raw materials for a version of history, but we don’t hear what this is. It could be diffusionism, Marxism, Theosophy, it doesn’t matter. “This is my public vision”, his version of history is personal and so cannot be true. The symbols are unfamiliar because we are used to other selective accounts of vital points in history. The more he owns the vision, the more it burns itself into his brain, the less it is there anywhere in the outside world. The tricks of editing (“this is the pot of splicing cement” for joining film together after cuts) are needed because the isolated moments do not really form a story. The first and last stanzas describe the image of an angel - imperious personal vision as opposed to truth.
“those containing noble metals...” - a catalogue description of gold thread, from a book about embroidery.

The Outlands
Describes a personality in total withdrawal from collusion in anything: ”head emptied of ideas ... detoxicated”. Symbols flicker out as “something like We stops existing”. The critical project of wiping out collusion has disastrous results, a grey blank: “what is to dust as dust is to objects”. This is a nervous breakdown, or it certainly feels like one, but we offer a way back up: “The voice written on gold leaves buried deep/ comes up flawless telling you where to go”. The pebbles might have been used in symbolic operations, like abstract thought, but since symbols have been abolished all he can do is arrange pebbles, they no longer mean anything.

Radio Wars
Mussolini had an Arabic-language propaganda station as a way of “projecting influence”. The Foreign Office responded by funding a pro-British Arabic radio station (ultimately overseen by Tallents). They were “parallel stations staging/ Roman pomp and British ships”. The poem imagines an Egyptian Arab (the lieutenant) listening to both stations and, in play, imagining himself as an Anglo-Arab and an Italo-Arab. It shows the radio signals fighting with each other. The Arab journalists writing scripts for the current affairs broadcasts did not always reproduce the Foreign Office line (not mentioned in the poem). “Maronites, Armenians, and Latins” are inhabitants of Cyprus apart from Orthodox and Muslims. “Psywar” is psychological warfare, a phrase of later date which includes propaganda. The lieutenant is possibly Nasser.

Q-landscapes
“Q ships” were submarine-destroyers disguised as helpless merchantmen, in the First World War. There was a film called “Q-planes” in around 1945… anyway I adapted this as “Q-landscapes”, something not totally unrelated to the nonist movement and their dictum that all landscapes are imaginary. “Kew” is a sort of Q person, he is the envy figure who stars in all advertisements. Thus his first job was as St Michael in a cathedral, now he works more in gents’ clothing. The poem goes through a series of advertisement scenarios. Thus we have the wonder textile invented by an eccentric boffin. ‘Chatham bullion” is the gold braid on the uniforms of naval officers.
Cantabrian oak cargo: based on a film, made outside our period, in 1951 (alas!). This showed wine cellars in the city of London, including fabulous fungi that lived off the fumes of wine from the casks. As a symbol of snobbery the fine, old wines were indispensable to the Kew mystique. The “rejoice” sequence at the end does not mean very much, it was meant to sound like a litany in church, a sort of litany to commodities. The svelte and swift in Apollinary games: the image of Britain projected by Tallents and others focussed on leisure and the weekend, with clothes for men deriving essentially from sport. (This is why the tennis shirt has to be re-invented.) There were “ludi apollinarii” in ancient Rome, but what I had in mind were sports which are Apollonian as opposed to Dionysiac, they project ease and leisure.

Trust
A story where we work in a terribly important government department and have complete faith in the work we are doing. Simply the reversal of the poems about detachment and disillusion. Mitigator Project: all government departments are trying to mitigate something or other.

13 Like spring water strained through muslin
The title describes art which has had truth filtered out of it. The Stoker is a stock character from a number of Thirties documentaries; he “gets no lines to speak”. The “objects of unconsciousness” are the lives of ordinary British people in the Depression; Prime Minister Baldwin was described as “a man who would do well by doing nothing”. The stoker is shown as appearing in an employer’s files because he is politically active, a firm has sold the employer lists of “known leftists”. ‘the ones who speak up find it written down’. Remington: a make of typewriter.

A failed collection
The speaker thinks that the rules of Britain are inside him. You would look for social structure in the minds of individuals. If it is not there, where would you look for it? Recalls a late 19th century series of cigarette cards, “Picturesque peoples of the Empire”, as recorded by JM Mackenzie in his book on British propaganda. Suggests that the knowledge of British history sold to us is as superficial as the information about the Somalis in the text on the cigarette card about them. “Collect the set”, this collection of cards fails in certain ways.

The forgetting
The operation of propaganda is shown as drowned by time, as the whole story is gradually forgotten, whether it was true or false. The Stoker is shown on a merchantman sunk by a submarine, the classic theme of Forties semi-documentary as opposed to Thirties documentary. He has a job this time but the ship goes down. The cargo of the sunken ship becomes a treasure for sea organisms, a “pelagic town”.

The Ruins of GuldursunBased on SP Tolstov’s book Po sledam drevnekhorezmiiskoi tsivilizatsii (1948). I had read about Tolstov in RN Frye’s book about ancient Persia, and was amazed when I found his book in a basement in Charing Cross Road. It was cheap (”the set of sounds at modest cost in the cellar”). Khwarezm, or Choresmia, is in Central Asia, south of the Aral Sea and east of the Caspian. The book records archaeological campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s. The poem is about one (ruined) castle specifically, Guldursun, and the wall paintings in it. Tolstov dug up villages that had a binary division in them, and related this to Zoroastrian dualism; hence much of the poem is about Zoroaster, who may have come from Khwarezm or a neighbouring province. He appears as an Oriental sage, devising the rules that make living together a happy experience. The animation/ in its virtual planes shedding cells, washing back: the imagination of a vanished culture, vivid but always prone to blur and fray, breaks like a wave. “Thraco-Cimmerian”: Tolstov’s idea of what language was spoken in the region, chosen I think to maximise its originality compared to anywhere else. This was always dubious, and what we know about Choresmian today points to an East Iranian language (“Iranian language denied”). the word kanat: a Persian word for ‘irrigation ditch’ borrowed into Russian, suggesting early cultural contacts. Some of the poem is about soil versus sand, irrigation, oasis cultures. There is some point in the book where Tolstov finds resemblances between European material culture and the artefacts he is digging up, but insists that the European ones are on a far lower cultural level, and implies that Europe is a kind of humble offshoot of Khwarezm (not in the poem). aust i kurusm: from a runic inscription on a grave in Sweden, for someone who died “east in Khwarezm”. dar zamin dur dast: traditional opening phrase of Persian fairy-tales, “in a far away land”. “where s turns to k”: the line between the two sub-families of Indo-European, compare Latin centum and Sanskrit satem. in the belts of falling white: the Avesta refers to snow, so it is believed that Zoroaster came from the north; belts, climatic belts. Nine Words of Power: a form of words that gives life, also Zoroastrian. Sinistral: northern. Ephedrine: chemical present in the plant known as haoma in the Avesta (also given to me for asthma, as a child). Propylaeon maze: a zig-zag protecting the main entrance. The Tiger and Pheasant Chamber: a painted chamber in Guldursun. Water master: a public official in irrigation cultures who allocates flow to each farmer, times here compared to the length of sounds and syllables. the eyeless disquieting roar: as the clay becomes human so it resolves sound into speech.

The Builder of Follies
While researching into the invention of museums and collections I became interested in an Earl of Arundel, identified as the first collector in England, so around 1620 or 1630. His family also pioneered the building of follies. The poem is about a fictional character, presumably a 17th century landowner disaffected from politics, and his follies. ‘Gelassenheit’ means calm and detachment, favoured by a theologian, Valentin Weigel. The lead character is truly disengaged, he can enjoy his diversions to the full. He has travelled to Prague (like Arundel) and picked up these ideas there. the hysteria of accumulation: an agent goes to Turkey to collect Classical marbles for him but the ship is wrecked on the return voyage. He engages in chemical experiments. “Glowing minerals”: scientific experiments are also seen as a form of “accumulation” of experiences. swarved ditch: swarved is said of a channel that has silted up so that water no longer flows through it (also known as an interment). stays as a derelict several: a ‘several’ is one channel of a river split into several, and a ‘derelict’ one is swarved. The irritations were all in the plat: he advises the king on architecture, a ‘plat’ or diagram, but they disagree. like tartar on a wine-cask: this is a phrase used by Paracelsus to describe how natural processes make deposits in the body of a living human. This may be an argument for simply being yourself. Deep study is part of being a melancholic.
This poem belongs with “Wonders of Classification”.

Commentary on my own poems (1)

2011-05-04T02:28:00.000-07:00

Schemas
This is meant as a reference source for people reading my poems, in case of difficulty. The poems are meant to be complete without them. I am setting out from the assumption that the poems up to ‘Alien Skies’ do not need a commentary. I thought it would be helpful to critics, translators, or interviewers to confirm some suppositions.

Poems from ‘Selected poems’
from poems of 1991-6:
At Cumae
Transparent RadiationThe ‘radiation’ is sunlight. The title comes from a song by 60s psychedelic band The Red Krayola, as covered by the Spacemen Three.

For C.
Wind and Wear at Aix en Provence

Triumph and Martyrdom of Sergei KorolevKorolev was a rocket designer who was in a prison camp for a while before rising, eventually, to be the chief designer for the Soviet space programme. The poem shows him in the camp dreaming of being free and an engineer, and has an alternative story where he never leaves the camp at all.

Chronique mondaine of the Sixth Poetry Conference in a Regional Style
This was reviewed by Peter Manson who was puzzled by it and couldn’t work out how he was supposed to respond. A ‘Chronique mondaine’ is a newspaper column which describes the idyllic experiences of the beau monde, in this case the attendants of a poetry conference in Cambridge (in 1997?). I don’t think there is a unity of mood, instead the poem is composed of dozens, even hundreds, of fragments of dialogue which “utter” an entity with hundreds of mouths, so the “autonomous poetry collective” or the consciousness of somebody wandering around the conference listening. A number of the lines are rapid responses to readings of poems; “am I that easy to remember” could apply to any poets on the scene (Jim Reeves sang “am I that easy to forget”). It is in a “regional style” because on completing the poem I didn’t think it sounded like me, but it did have the immediate and social quality of a number of poems from Cambridge. The “mood” is probably one of being carried away, of personality dissolving into a flood of sensations - a temporary identity. The parts don’t converge back on something. “Just open the door and hit him as hard as you can” is something somebody said as I was passing by them on a Cambridge street. I wrote dialogue down as I was hearing it. This is an “acephalous” poem, it has no theme but “The spontaneous wills of subjectless action”.

Three Graves
In ‘Three Graves’ you have three monuments, roughly in the same geographical space, all as symbols of tyranny; first a Scythian ‘royal grave’ with sacrificed horses and so on, then one of the Nazi monuments at Kutno in the Ukraine, then the concrete sarcophagus around the reactor at Chernobyl. Wilhelm Kreis: an architect who designed a lot of monuments to war dead in the 15 years after the First World war and was also employed by Hitler. The Scythian part also describes the Goths in the Ukraine, following Herwig Wolfram.

**
Male nude in interiorThis was published in ‘Active in Airtime’ but never collected.

Poems from THE IMAGINARY IN GEOMETRY

There was an “instruction” for Imaginary, and it was something like “nothing autobiographical, nothing pessimistic, poems have to deal with ideas that interest me but which are not already fixed as knowledge”. I remember setting this plan down, in a particular building in West London called the Pantechnicon, in about 1997. The plot was to achieve separation from ‘Pauper Estate’, then still in progress. I believed that in order to get “intelligence” inside poetry it was necessary to go where intelligence functioned, i.e. ideas on the edge of my grasp rather than ones which I could just retrieve from memory. I felt that “intelligence” was something elusive and short-lived, the brain much prefers to deploy secure and fixed knowledge. The Penguin book The Living Brain identified consciousness as something that happens for about five minutes a day. I was more interested in releasing this small “neurological melody” than in the actual objects of knowledge.

The title refers to a project of finding visual expressions of ideology. Thus, Dumezil’s three-part ideology of the Indo-Europeans, with “soldiers, priests, workers” could be expressed in visual form by a stele with three registers. The frescoes at Schifanoia are another obvious “win”, as they show a text on astrology translated into visual terms in a rather clear way. The sequence “Anglophilia” shows how ideology is represented in cinema - this didn’t arrive until two or thee years after the book was planned, but it fitted the project. The title is also the name of a book by Pavel Florovsky, a scientist-priest who had a great technical brain but was anyway put in a camp and destroyed by the Bolsheviks. (It seems that geometry relies on idealisations, it is not simply a set of measurements and observations. Real objects do not display geometry ideally.)

Coastal Defences of the Self
This is about the line between “mine” and “not-mine” from a poet’s point of view. It is about being the object of knowledge. The poem is interrupted by hostile questions from some connoisseur who has the sense he’s being cheated. “a mouse can tell one million other mice apart”: this is saying something about the ‘signature’ of a poet, how elemental it is. What mice detect in the scent of other mice is, supposedly, their genes as affecting the immune system. This information allows the mice to make better decisions about mating. “folios in the trays of the huge cabinet”: the collection is a theme of the book, here I am part of someone’s collection. “Rainy journeys through folk roots/ to find what isn’t there”: it would be nice to think that what I am writing could be recognised as a continuation of some ancient Gaelic folklore, but I don’t think it is. Aberdeenshire: home of all the Duncans. “is this a duplicate of something I’ve already got?”: being on sale is not invariably pleasant. “a flawed realisation of ten other people”: well, such is connoisseurship. Keimelia (Greek): treasures from the ground, i.e. antique and finely wrought ones. I come out of the nest to take on: the next 16 lines are a pessimistic, agonistic view of the work of art as something that only starts when you are on the brink of exhaustion; the extreme of performance is the signature and only right at the limit is shape found. The last six lines with “the machines ... engulfing and without individuality” show a vision of art that is free of personal signature.

Abundance
A simple description of the deep north. The sub-Arctic summer as a flush of abundance from the point of view of geese who fly to feast there. But the island is productive in a different way than Britain, no humus so no “thorps” (villages). Wegener was a geologist who crossed Greenland by sleigh, and who died there in the end. Actinic: Northern light is more sharply polarised. Wegener’s three-colour system: for colour photography. Instrument scales: for his observations. Lewis: the island of Lewis, off Scotland, which is facing Greenland (across the breadth of the ocean).

Deep Dish
Three glass objects, one being a “glass-acetate wafer” with music by Charlie Parker recorded on it.

Dashed
The “Salt Lake” bit is about a manager bought in from a consultancy firm who used to have meetings in the desert where their people fused into a corporate entity. Scary.

Spectrum Flight

These four poems were an attempt to write things with very few words. Briefly before writing things with huge numbers of words. I think the plan was for 14 poems 14 words long, something like that. I cannot remember anything about “Spectrum Flight”, it must have been written very fast. Improvised poems don’t really leave a trace in memory. I think it is just an illustration of the phrase “coloured by feeling”. “dual in line” is a way of packing components, presumably light detectors, in this case eyes. When I look at it I see a bar with the light shining through liqueur bottles of perfect colours. Testosterone merges with pigment, so there are chemicals in humans stored in bottles and released in doses which colour responses... ah, it’s not that simple.

On the Beach at Aberystwyth
About being in Aberystwyth, looking out at the Irish Sea, and thinking about Celtic sea-ways and Celtic geography. Mostly this is about sea contacts from the West, as an alternative to ones from the south and east, which favour England; also about decentralisation, a network without great cities. Ystwyth: river that Aberystwyth is at the mouth of. Tartessus: Bronze Age city at the mouth of the Guadalqivir, so nearly in Africa. The Tartessians are associated with trade to Britain, in tin, so with very early contacts with the British Celts. Beth ydy adeiladwaith cymdeithasol? just means “what is social structure?”. Whether Pokorny was right: Julius Pokorny had a theory that there was a substrate of a North African language formerly spoken in Britain which gave rise to the distinctive features of British Celtic. He talks about breeds of dogs and cattle among other things. It would have come via Spain. As the source languages have disappeared this theory is hard to test. On the beach at Aberystwyth, I picked up a piece of rock which had a myriad of tiny tunnels piercing it. Like surf, a lot of it was made of air. I guessed this was fossilised cold-water coral. My niece, aged about nine, informed me that they had been to a Welsh museum which had such a piece of rock and it was called “babalwbi”. (I now think the pebble may be a piece of basalt, but the coral identification is an object which is valid inside the poem. The tunnels may be air-bubbles in a boiling flow of lava.) I liked the word because it was decentralised. (Babalwbi now appears on the Internet and seems to mean lumps of white quartz. OK! The research went wrong!) In the poem, the pebble symbolises multiple routes and connections going to and fro without a centre. It is "surf".

The Ghost of Fusion
Taken from a book about the claims to have carried out “cold fusion”, a near-infinite energy source, and the brouhaha around them. This was in Utah. The catalyst outperforms the analyst: the catalyst was supposed to have accelerated the reaction to an incredible degree, thus doing better than the scientists who tried to analyse the experimental results. Zero wriggle: in order to interpret what you find, you need to set up any experiment to produce unambiguous results, thus “zero wriggle (room)”. The accuracy serves to starve “wishes”. mirror setups: to “mirror” the experiment and reproduce its results to check them.
Bengal: measurement of helium-3 released or used up confused by environmental helium-3, notably from a geological “leak” in Bengal. Tritium: would become incredibly cheap if cold fusion worked. Canard: false rumour or news story. We see only heat: more heat than light, or, heat released but no cold fusion. Foofaraw: American word meaning “big fuss”, from French fanfaron.
Shambhala: also “Shangri-la”, a sort of never-never land, also a sure source of false results.

Swanning with the Bishop
Describes being an editor of a poetry magazine and dealing with torrents of bad poetry. My co-editor came from Bishop’s Stortford.

100 Bars of Inattention
This is about paradoxes in the way different modules of brain software pass control of “attention” to each other. Something has to stage and sequence stretches of attention, but it is very difficult to make the operation of this something conscious. I didn’t want to deal with something complicated like “the software of jealousy”, but something quite at “service level”, the service that manages attention. Every cell of attention that switches on has to be switched off after it has had its share.
job control shell scripts: ‘shell scripts’ are Linux programs that relate to system actions like allocating resources. Something takes the decision to supply “100 bars of inattention”, a regular part of office life. This is a sequence I copied from Roman Jakobson/ his name still legible/ in the comment lines: when programs evolve over years you can sometimes see who first wrote them by looking in things like comment lines that are non-executable and so avoid being updated.
the ego data fish: I re-cycled this idea in “Precipice of Niches”. Oh well, no one’s perfect.
“words for three selves with different geographical ranges”: from some anthropological work I read. The ranges are something like confined to the body, able to leave the body and roam around the known territory, able to leave the terrestrial plane and visit the Otherworld. These selves had three different names. The tin dancer waiting for his music: on a musical box, no doubt.

When Myth becomes history/ When history becomes myth
Part 1 describes a period where myth is breaking down. Mythic time breaks down and the statues turn into flesh, “wings defiled by a web of pink blood. “the rain of objects full of niches”: the division of society into social roles as instructed by a divine object which falls from heaven. “their features made of damage”: the divisions have been carved, a form of damage of the original objects, just as the division of society can be seen as damage. I didn’t write about the social roles as I think that is difficult within a poem. Suppose you say “men shall look after horses, women shall look after poultry”, that seems to apply to all of Europe and is the kind of command that features on these “law objects”. If I said “men shall look after mice, women shall look after crabs”, that would show how arbitrary the whole thing is, but would be hard to follow. The “law object” might read: There shall be workers, there shall be peasants, yea, and there shall be intellectuals. he transformation of these niches returns us to the age of myth.
Music: it is hard to say exactly what music is there for. In this case, I think it’s to cheer us up. We have left the Age of Myth but now music and ritual come along to relieve us. So the nine lines of the last stanza describe a mythic system. It is not important for the poem which one it is, just that we see a bewildering and rich complexity of correlations and sensations, like an evening at a Lebanese restaurant. (In fact this is from the Sabian rites at Harran in Syria, “the hexagonal black temple” relates to the planet Saturn.)
Part 2 is a view of regional cultures which sees them as profoundly conservative of traditions and as protected from History by remoteness and obscurity. These marginal cultures are outside history, that is what Eliade says. Their narratives are cyclic, do not advance irrevocably like History. “On the margins of great cultures” is a quote from his L’eternel retour. The first twelve lines give an example of conservatism, the retention of designs using the frontality of Parthian art in folk embroidery in the Ukraine. The theory has been contested but I take it as a poetically valid object. Mitra, tall royal hat; akinakes, short sword, found in the embroideries. Alans and Ardagarantes would be two steppe tribes of Iranian language who would have used this Parthian culture. The second stanza describes the theme of the poem and mentions Campanella, as a possible embodiment of provincial culture. The third stanza describes the benefits of a provincial culture. Stanza four continues that, with some rude Bronze Age artefacts. I suppose Britain is marginal by definition, in every time. “Only what starts from zero...”: the renewing quality of pure myth.
Part 3 is an attempt to construct a myth. I had the feeling that a myth needs a number of unrelated elements in order to become a whole, also that it needs a few species in there, so “ibis and starfish”. The starting point was a photograph of a mid-19th century female Campanian rebel against the Savoy dynasty. This was instantly recognisable as my friend Luci, also Campanian and a rebel. Paladin of regional apocalyptic lore: these were ”primitive rebels” in Hobsbawm’s sense, hoping for a total overthrow of the social order. I may also have been thinking of Campanella and Bruno, also from the deep South. “Mauser rifle and a brace of Belgian pistols”: features of the original photograph. Transformation scene: something necessary for myths, in this case transforming the outlaw of 1860 into “Luciana in linen”, in Tasmania (where the Derwent is). ibis: Luci described to me how there are many ibis in Melbourne, perhaps they found Egypt unsympathetic. Emigration is a typical feature of the Italian South and related to the “apocalyptic” view of history. “sky catalogues ... at Gospel Oak”: Gospel Oak is an area in North London. Paladin: these were the warriors of Charlemagne (or palatini). The South Italian puppet dramas use tales of the paladins, descended from who knows what chansons de geste.

History of my Contemporary
The title comes from Korolenko’s autobiography, ‘istoriya moego sovremennika’ and means really “a history of my contemporaries and myself”. The poem narrates episodes from the life of two poets of my age, Tidemark and Wymeswold. Wymeswold is a village near my home town, “Tidemark” was meant as the ‘spirit of the age’, the ideal contemporary. They have experiences which were almost compulsory for that place and time but which you can't find any more. “The Roxy. The Vortex” etc. were punk clubs in 1977, where “a rage entity” met. “subjectless action” was a theme of Felix Guattari, expounded in Mille plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari. In around 1984 you could buy these books in Compendium in Camden High Street and then go and see a band in one of the venues on the same street in the evening. The “Kurdish music” was accompanying some kind of protest outside the library in Wood Green High Road.

“Les Paul’s Garage Studio”: Pfleumer was studying a way of preventing the gold leaf on high-fashion cigarettes from coming off on people’s lips; having become an expert on laying metal films on plastic, he invented recording tape. Ampex taperecorders were taken by the Americans as war reparations, and the first one, supposedly, was bought by Les Paul, who invented overdubbing. Ludwigshafen, on the Rhine, is where the major works of BASF, the tape manufacturer, is. "purposeful distortions of the recorded groove" comes from a book on the history of the recording industry. I wish I'd written this line. Pharaoh: I think the fashion for gilt cigarettes came from the fashion for gold inspired by the uncovering of Tutankhamun.

“Radio Vortex”
based on descriptions of Terence Gray’s productions of around 1930 at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, and the poems of Joseph Macleod, who acted in some of them. I was researching Macleod‘s career as an actor and trying hard to conjure up vanished theatrical events. Eventually I wrote a poem about this unfillable gap. Choliambics: Macleod had to stand on a tower declaiming verse in this metre (from a play he had written to complete an existing Greek play). The crab comes from a poem in The Ecliptic. Gray had a stock of basic aluminium shapes which were easy to construct sets from; the aluminium received colour from the lighting system, which was one of the most advanced in europe at that time. “the “helical, shimmering, bolts” are from the lighting battery, but also the “rays of influence” from the Zodiac, because Macleod wrote The Ecliptic while working for Gray. The crab comes from one section of Macleod’s poem. Ichnographic: ‘ichnos’ is ‘track (of animal)’ but the word is also used for Latin titles of works of engraving. Here it means “the image of an animal from the Zodiac”, but also the projected light carving shapes on the aluminium. thundering and screeching: Macleod as actor found some of Gray’s colour combinations shocking. Greek violence in Egyptian space/ isometric hoplite, flattening field/ in frieze perspective, to arrest recession: phrases taken from Gray’s autobiography. The ‘Egyptian space’ is the spatial organisation of (ancient) Egyptian painting. “isometric” means “without foreshortening”. ‘Hoplite’ is a greek warrior in full armour, who might appear in a play like ‘The Suppliants”.

“ A Virtuality/ Cyclical Polygons”
This is a poem about language. The notes say “a clear idea of the special network embodied in language. the net which holds you in, and which vanishes when you have a nervous breakdown. a poem about the opposite of a nervous breakdown. but how to express this in words? it’s about wanting to be loved and feeling loved. language as a way of tuning the brain, filling it with melodies.”

I think the ‘polygon’ bit came from Stalin’s essay on linguistics, where he says that “the surface of language is like the surface of geometry”. Words are thus objects of specific shapes, which fit in with words already present in an utterance and define a shape into which further words have to fit. Then ‘cyclical’ polymers are ones which repeat themselves. “Cyclical polygons” would be “words repeating in chains”.

Preceding the poem was a wish, going back to my late teens, to write a poem about the end of depression, the dawn and the return of colour after the fearful night. The poem was never written, the end of depression is undramatic, it is simply the return of the world as it is. If you look at a group of friends talking, say over four hours, the topic keeps changing: the main process is something much deeper, the “switching on” of huge areas of functionality relating to love, esteem, curiosity, pattern analysis. The language faculty involves all these. The extent of these areas is only clear when they are switched off - when there is no dialogue, when inner language is silent. ‘A Virtuality’ cycles through many examples of language to expose language itself, underneath all of them, something only visible through the totality of its fleeting creations. By defining what has been restored we define what was once lost. The theme is restitution, repletion, freedom of action.

The statements about geometry throughout the poem relate to words as shapes. By carrying out simple divisions and folds one can create thousands of words, enough to fund a language.

I suspect that the appeal of creation myths is that they stage a scenario which could be the end of depression: all the objects of sense and of reason are re-created, one by one, firmly enough to resist doubt. They falsify anxiety. So when this scenario appears (as in “Prometheus creating mankind” and “Twelve Days” among others) the theme is the return of intact objects after depression is relieved.

This poem and ‘Anglophilia’ are both about being a child, but in different ways. Both are about socialisation, the acquisition of social knowledge.
The poem takes a tour through a number of features of languages as a way of approaching the language faculty itself. Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a fundamental commentary on how a child acquires moral knowledge through acquiring language, guessing the meanings of sentences by intuition of the states of mind of the people speaking them. The poem essentially presents what Schleiermacher said.
The poem can be thought of as extents of adult language being listened to by a very young child that cannot yet understand what is being said. It has its intentness. Puzzles and riddles recur because for such a child the whole universe of language is a riddle. On solving the riddle it will have learnt to speak.
“encore une fois”: the child learns words by hearing them repeated. And the child also repeats what is said to it.

“The women in coloured woollen hoods”; painting, Oscan and from the 6th century BC, in Naples, showing women in a circular dance. Illustrates the cyclical aspect, everything “encore une fois”.

Music: we get a stanza about music because it is related to language and the kinship probably says something about both.
Beasts worsted by riddles: in some fairy-tale or other.
Take this point and extend it: this has to do with the “polygons”, language as geometry

Implexity: the complexity implied by the rules of a game (see my book Council of Heresy for more on this word).
‘shimmering helical cylinders”: line from a poem of the 1930s by Joseph Macleod. Also appears in ‘Radio Vortex’. I just liked this line a lot.

Castico Catamantaleodis: Vendryes believed there was a sound (the tau celticum) in the Celtic language of Gaul which could not be represented in the Mediterranean alphabet they borrowed, and the variation in the quoted words shows this uncaptured sound sliding. So we get nine lines of Gaulish words. Beautiful sounds. The ”underhearing” is someone trying to fit Gaulish sounds into a Latin alphabet. We see only the geometry where this missing sound might fit.
In a far country, in a long region: reflects the “dar zamin dur dast” (in a land, far region) of Persian fairy tales, but with a spin, “long region” is a typical error for “distant land”.
In Urartu the first city of squares: supposedly, this city in east Anatolia is where the grid pattern of streets started. In the poem, this is connected with the origin of the line-break as a "turn". The verse line may have been an invention of Bronze Age Anatolia, as cautious examination of Hittite tablets suggests.
Suwassunna: Hittite name with a great sound.
He reformed the n/r alternation: a feature of very archaic Indo-European. (Latin femur, genitive feminis.) If it disappeared, maybe someone reformed it. It is much more common in Hittite than in other IE languages.
the mythic forebear of the Soviet state: Urartu was in Armenia, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union. If you read official publications like Bol'shaya Sovetskaya istoriya they tell the whole of history as the growth of the strong State. Urartu is presented as stage one of this, significantly happening on Soviet territory, or at least only a few days away.

Statistics: an infant analyses the occurrences of various sounds to determine what are the phonemes of the language its parent are speaking. This is a mathematical analysis. Without this initial faculty the infant cannot learn what language means and can never acquire language. So actually we learn language though mathematics.

Irrepressible creativity on the London Scene

2011-03-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Walk right out, sit right down

Readers may be aware of stirrings around the Writers Forum Workshop series in London. This series offers a room where people without any literary reputation can read their poems aloud to an audience which is there to hear new poetry. Discussion is banned in the sessions, but as they normally take place in a pub there is plenty of opportunity for people to hear reactions, and to discuss points of art, in the outfield. One of the two organisers resigned in July 2010, upsetting the fan base. Then in September 2010 twelve people sent a letter to the other organiser announcing that they were setting up a new series of open events, as they found him hard to work with. (The letter is currently available on the web here http://www.wfuk.org.uk/blog/?paged=3). The dissident group set up forum/ reading events under the rubric of ‘Writers Forum Workshops (new series)’. The new series would not have Lawrence Upton as its director/ administrator. The letter was signed by Sean Bonney, Wayne Clements, Johan De Wit, Steve Fowler, Antony John Francis, James Harvey, Jeff Hilson, Matt Martin, Stephen Mooney, Nat Raha, Linus Slug, Jamie Sutcliffe. While the sessions were always full of people with no understanding of poetry, the persistence of the avant-garde members meant that some share of the sessions was taken up by modern-style poetry, obviously varying from year to year.
(The rest of the world uses 'workshop' in a different sense.)

There is also a Writers Forum publishing house. While the sessions have always been completely open, and dominated by students and out-patients, the pamphlet series reflected Bob ‘the Gob’ Cobbing’s view of the universe. (Policy since Cobbing’s demise in 2002 then has inclined to follow his line.) The anthology of the first 500 titles was a memorably dreadful book, full of spattering and whitterings. Of the 1500 titles now published, it is fair to say that, if you read all of them, you would die. However, of the ones I have read, there is a deposit of pure gold at the bottom of the slagberg. The production values were miles below standard (this has changed since 2002), but there are important titles by Colin Simms, Sean Bonney, David Sellars, and Adrian Clarke, for example.

It is fair to say that the indifference of WF to the arts of publishing contributed to the obscurity in which the ‘London School’ languishes when it comes to being read by people who don’t go to Writers Forum. (‘School’ doesn’t mean they all swim head to toe.) We recall that truly important work has been produced by Maggie O’Sullivan, Ulli Freer, Adrian Clarke, Harry Gilonis, Gavin Selerie, Robert Hampson, and Allen Fisher, for example. I think we have to mention Veer Books as being the most satisfactory series of books collecting classics of the London scene going back to the 1970s as well as the new work, which is at a historic peak right now.

I think keeping the WF name is a mistake and unjustifiable. The basis on which this is wrong is unfortunately bourgeois - it relies on a notion of property, and then of inheritance, which is rather distasteful in an artistic context. If Cobbing owned the name, and passed it on to two people, and Lawrence Upton is the only surviving office-holder (after Adrian Clarke’s resignation), then the name does belong to Upton. Since the assets of an open reading session are, simply, the powers of the listeners to transform the poem for the poet whom they are listening to, the name on the flier is hardly of great importance.

We do not have any photographs of Lawrence behaving badly. However, there is a long history of people feeling that he is officious, long-winded, authoritarian, dogmatic in condemnation and loyalty, uninterested by most aspects of poetry, is stuck in his ways, has a mausoleum view of the avant garde based on genealogy and obsequy, etc. He has been described as ‘the Berlin Wall of the London poetry scene’. All of this coagulates like treacle but does not solidify into fact. But the split in this writers’ group is exclusively about Upton’s personality, not about literary differences. The workshop could sustain those, its members do not have to agree with each other about what the next poem should look like. Also there was no big bad thing that anyone has been able to name - just a persistent irritation. In fact, it is not too much to say that if Lawrence promised not to undertake any more monologues, in particular ones about loyalty, the rules of art, and his holidays in Cornwall and Serbia, he would be forgiven.

The twelve names include an impressive array of talent, many of them have been significant in AE’s past and no doubt will be in its future.

Any account of Upton’s history as someone dogmatic who annoys people has to go on for long enough to admit that WF was thriving under a duo which included him, and that there were at least enough people swarming around the WF scene to form a secession and stalk out.

My feeling is that the key events in the poetic realm are irretrievable, the evidence too fleeting to be recoverable. It would be hard to construct an account which all parties would agree to. Most probably the process had to do with dynamics of personal exchange which are too subtle to be caught.

Going back almost 20 years, the planning process for Angel Exhaust (not yet called that) involved meetings between Adrian Clarke, Andrew Duncan, Johan de Wit, and Robert Sheppard, which were chaired by Lawrence Upton as he was felt to be someone who could keep control of the time factor in the discussion. (I think Gilbert Adair dropped out before the meetings started.) The objective was to find a literary programme which a magazine could implement, and the starting point was to create an outlet for the London School. The challenge of writing policy texts which the other editors could agree to was extreme. Lawrence was a good chair and I am grateful to him for facilitating this process.

I think the trouble with Lawrence is that he doesn’t want to react. He has taken on systems of values, to do with Marxism and art, and sees all questions as being solved by them. In a way, this is selfless. He does not own the opinions, he is merely the servant of the person who owns them. But if you disagree he accuses you of disloyalty. The ideas Lawrence serves are condensed and immobile, like a house. They are deeply unlike ideas, but they are like property. Lawrence has an abiding feeling that everyone else is a deviationist, but what we are supposed to be loyal to is lost in the fogs of time. It is something like ‘all art has to be non-discursive, free-form, yibble-scribble’.

This conflict may give glimpses of process. Metaphors, for example - one thinks of the title of a 2011 conference on ‘legacies of modernism’. What does this mean? it starts with something big dying, we all stand around the cadaver and try to grab bits of it? Like a turkey or something? If you go for this lethality (someone has to die before you inherit the asset), it is a story like ‘The Midsomer Modernist Murders’. I don’t accept that what is happening in 2011 is a continuation of something that was happening in 1920. This is too much like trying to prove ownership of a house (”root of title” I think you say).

The unstated word is ‘ownership’. Lawrence owns WF but doesn’t want to use that term. Cobbing owned it & Lawrence inherits. And suddenly taking direction of the London School is a breach of Lawrence’s property rights. And we are being directed by the dead. I don’t think that legitimacy is something which comes from the dead and which is posted to us through a letter-box shaped like Cobbing or Upton. The funerary urn as message box. You press a tap and out comes a handful of dirty ashes in the form of acknowledgement from Kruchonykh, Hugo Ball, or Pound. Thanks a bunch. This preoccupation with legacy and inheritance has an unfortunate alliance with the belief that all talk of creativity, talent, personal choice, is bourgeois subjectivity. Both lead to a rigidity in the decision process. People writing poems following inherited rules, observing regulations, being like an official in the Ministry of the Avant Garde. Then, in the end, an authoritarian interpersonal style.

The theory is that anything freeform like ‘sound poetry’ or ‘visual poetry’ is subjective. But the subjectivity embedded in it can become vestigial, ritual, ineffective. Dogma too is subjectivity in cadaverous form.

I think it is actually a form of weakness to want to "acquire" the 50 years of history of Writers Forum. Surely the poets at the new series have autonomy & sovereignty and don’t need a legacy title? Surely the signatories to the letter to Lawrence are talented enough to float their own ship? And surely the London Scene is happening more than ever right now, and 2011 is not thirty years too late?

The key factor on the London 'underground' scene has been the strong interpersonal bonds which override artistic differences. Occasional rifts have little effect on a geology of mutual affection.

Edenkoben Blog, Andrew Duncan

2011-03-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

Edenkoben Blog

I can’t do diary entries about the book I am trying to write because it is all too intense. But I get fifteen minutes off from time to time and i can write about that.

The first week here was lost due to migraine. I was unable to work. It was just due to moving countries i think. I like staying in one place, I find it very hard to convince myself that i actually want to go somewhere else. So at a rational level i am glad to be here, at an unconscious level I am in panic and disorientation. Or maybe it’s anxiety about writing the book.

I got a DVD-box with 50 films from the ‘Scotland Yard’ series (1955-9 I think) and was very happy watching those in England. Part of the project here is a scheme for investigating German Pulp. I was aware that in Germany 30 edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ adaptations were filmed in quite a short period after 1955 (possibly 50). I was curious about “bad German films” and by extension “bad taste in Germany”. Also, in the problem of entertainment in central Europe: the entertainment sector seems to have been colonised by American and British products. This applies especially to the old communist bloc: there was this terrible earnestness, everyone was supposed to learn classical piano, go to ballet classes,and read Pushkin, there was no communist entertainment sector. (Which isn’t quite true, as we shall see.) I got hold of a couple of the Edgar Wallace films on DVD: they aren’t bad and they don’t take themselves at all seriously. (It comes out like ‘valise’ in German.)

This doesn’t quite mean that I am trying to write a science-fiction novel in the style of 1950s B-movies. Not quite, anyway.

(March 15) We went to Wissembourg. This is in Alsace and just on the French side of the border. Alsace was annexed by France in 1648 and although it was german-speaking at that point a slow process of francisation has taken place.
I was enthusiastic about the Alsatians not being nationalists: they always wanted to be part of France even while remaining protestant and keeping their language. It shows that you don’t have to base everything on ethnic identity. I couldn’t get agreement on this. There were election posters up and some were for for a local Alsatian party: “’s Elsass unser land”. But the slogans on the poster were about bilingualism in administration and autonomy. No mention of separatism - they want to be part of France, and there have been Alsatian parties for many years who wanted to be part of France but wanted a better deal for the language.

Wissembourg has a bilingual market - some stallholders speak French and some german. The design of houses is what attracts attention. The houses look very much like houses in the Palatinate, although not identical. In the central square there are some that look more French - dormer windows, metal window-frames, curved iron ferronnerie on the balconies. But the date of the buildings was during the period when Alsace was part of Germany (2nd Reich) after 1871. We couldn’t work this out. Maybe the buildings were put up deliberately to show that the people regarded themselves as French.

It seems to be completely vines here, but in fact there are some asparagus fields if you go a few miles on, and there are some trees for almonds and figs. A notice said that people are trying to develop a Pfalzisch (Palatinate) cuisine based on figs, or at least using figs. Red Pfalzisch wine features a lot, I was surprised, I am told that it has been developed a lot in the last ten years. I drink it because it doesn’t exist in England, it’s not the best red but it is distinctive. The white is much better but then everyone knows about that.

I have a whole apartment in an old house on the edge of town. The apartment has a Kachelofen (tile stove), not in use. I can’t work out all its working parts. I think you put coal in at a stove somewhere and then pipes carry the heat to other parts of the building. I read in a book I got here that the early version had earthenware pots (‘thin unglazed pots’) because they worked out that they retained heat very well (like bricks in a storage heater) and the mutation into Kachelofen with the earthenware tiles came much later. The ones here are glazed in green and grey and look very handsome. The house was bought by the region (Palatinate) when it was ‘marod’ and done up. ‘Marod’ means ‘bashed about a bit’ or ‘derelict’. It’s what they say about a government that is about to collapse or an insolvent firm. But the earliest meaning is ‘soldier unable to march’, and hence ‘marauder’.

Email from John Kozak: “May have mentioned this, but did you ever meet my colleague Nick Bretherton, whose father was on Bomber Harris’s staff? “Bomber” was a bowdlerised sobriquet, he being known as “Butcher” to the chaps. Harris’s team built test blocks of flats and designed their incendiaries to ignite soft furnishings; aimed for working class areas to maximise the kill count, avoiding the middle-class, Hitler-supporting, districts. Max Hastings used to play the Decent Tory on the Graun’s comment page and occasionally the LRB, but is very much the Voice of Foam in the Mail: a photographer chum who worked for him at the Telegraph shudders at his memory, explains why Pte Eye call him “Hitler”.”
I read two books about the bombing campaign before coming here. It looks pretty much as if it was all ethically flawed and inhuman, illegal, and based on a complete miscalculation in military terms. I read Max Hastings on 'Bomber Command' because he is so enthusiastic about Deeds of Valour and so when he says it was all a horrible mistake you have to agree. 600,000 dead civilians. I read Martin Middlebrook’s book about the Hamburg raids (three nights, one book) and he points out that the industry was south of the harbour, and included wharves building submarines, and north of the harbour it was all residential. But Harris only planned to bomb the north, the south wasn’t even in the target zone. When I read that sentence I was just appalled. No migraine, I just went pale.
I had to get into this a bit because WG Sebald had written a book about it and I knew it would come up at some point. I don’t think it’s legal to bomb civilians. The ‘rules of war’ say you can bombard cities under siege, but that implies that you have infantry dug in around the city.
Hastings remarks that none of the English war films shows the bombing of civilians as heroic/ desirable/ intended. He cites 100 war films between 1945 and 1960, blimey, it seems like 500. ‘Cocoa, sir?’ But I think this gives us a verdict; the British people were supposed to be the force behind all this and they found it so unattractive they didn’t want to see it. There seems to be this pervasive, central lie: Harris knew he was bombing to kill civilians in maximum numbers but the paperwork never conceded that. This is where we start to think of a war crime: why cover it up if it was legal and a ‘morale builder'? (More accurately, a proportion of the British public would have been happy to watch that stuff on screen, but it wasn’t enough of the public.)

The sign in the town centre says that Edenkoben has a population of 6600. However the infrastructure is there for a much larger town. Basically it is a tourist town, on the Weinstrasse [Wine Way], and dead in winter. There are vast numbers of Weinstuben (sort of between a shop and a pub, ideally run by the owner of the vineyard) and the plan is that you go to a Weinstube run by the vintner, sample all the wines produced a few fields away, and buy a bottle of the one you like. The sign says that the earliest form of the name is ‘Zotingowen’, ‘at Otto’s farmsteads’, so the ‘koben’ is just borrowed from the word for ‘pigsty’. The town is full of wooden arches which cross the street and which have vines trained over them which will be flourishing with green leaves in the summer. I wanted to go to the Heimatmuseum [local history museum] but it is only open in season, and it is a wine museum. Every second building sells local wine. Maybe Z’Nottingowen’ means ‘at Nott’s farmsteads’.

Much fuss here about the defence minister having copied parts of his doctoral thesis on constitutional law. Could be just omissions from the footnotes but Spiegel magazine claims there is an entire thesis by someone else copied into it. This is something that didn’t come out by google searches but by the second wave of digging. Politicians aren’t meant to have detailed knowledge, but to synthesize other people’s work. OK, but taking without acknowledgement is theft, that is less ambiguous. He has already given the doctorate back, an unusual step. I wonder if there is an appropriate ceremony. Zu Guttenberg is the most popular politician in Germany, a poll showed that 78% of people thought he should play an important role. He is glamorous, his wife is glamorous and coutured up, they appear in ‘Gala’ which is like Hello magazine. He comes from a noble family which owns forests, she is Bismarck’s great-granddaughter (but doesn’t look like Big Otto). Whereas Merkel is about as glamorous as Gordon Brown. One comment here is that plagiarism is most common in law and theology, the professions of people who are supposed to protect morality. Another theory is that Guttenberg’s early nonchalance about the ‘parallel passages’ was because he didn’t know they were there, he had paid someone else to write the whole thesis. (later development: Guttenberg resigned.)

The big local supermarket has a second hand book section under the same roof. You put the money in a tin, as I eventually realised. There were two books side by side by Hans grimm and verena Stefan. Stefan’s book (“Sloughing skins”) was a primary classic of feminism, circa 1970, written when nobody knew what the word implied, when it was a sort of ‘trip’ or ‘experimental consciousness’. Grimm was a writer much-favoured under the Nazi regime and preoccupied by the need for Lebensraum and so forth. He wrote about colonists in German South-West Africa, a regime in which up to 1914 most of the natives died. It was sort of a dress rehearsal for later endeavours. It just seemed so weird that they were side by side on the shelf. I suppose if you are going to be an expert on German culture you ought to know about the literature of the Third Reich, those books are there in the supermarket, very cheap, it’s an opportunity. But I think I will just pass that one by.

Rosvitha points out that the krimi i watched on Sunday (“Notruf 110”) was a continuation of a series which began on East German TV. After the reunification, they brought in new police commissars, but it is the same series, set in Halle. Rosvitha says that the old episodes had a completely different set of manners, the police bosses just treated their underlings like dirt, and the cops were always giving criminals moral lectures. So real features of East German society were there in the TV programmes, let through because no one in charge noticed them. This is part of the “communist entertainment industry”, which really did exist.
There was a juvenile delinquent, a sort of biker plus teddy boy, such an obvious suspect that it had to be someone else. After a certain point it turned out that he was Russian: the commissar goes to a sort of club room and the kid jokes about him in Russian to all the other delinquents hanging out. The commissar turns out to speak perfect russian and gives him a real dressing-down. Calls him ‘ptichka’, which means ‘little bird’.
I suppose there was a russian garrison, the Red Army had its forward bases close to the border with East germany and not days away in Soviet territory. So there were marriages and also russian kids.
I doubt I can get old episodes on DVD, they might turn up on German TV at about 3 am.

Bought some soap powder to wash a woollen sweater by hand. Having done this I found a label which said it was polyester cotton. Dummkopf! But the label also says you can’t spin dry it. Big problem. But this was the only non-machine wash item I brought.

Much discussion about ‘The King’s Speech’ which is showing in Karlsruhe. I try hard to get it across that I would never watch a film about the royal family unless it involved decapitation. On the poster for ‘A single man’ Colin Firth and Julianne Moore are lying side by side with their heads on cushions and it is striking how well Julianne’s hair matches the cushion cover. Mmm! Tasteful! I couldn’t help thinking “gay film based around the soft furnishings”. Big cliche i know. Rosvitha asked me about Christopher isherwood, I couldn’t come up with much. I think i read three of his novels, ‘A Single man’ was so bad that i stopped. Claudia saw the film and said it was too tasteful, too much based around the decor. What did happen to isherwood? In 50 years after 'Goodbye to berlin'?

There is a poster in one of the shops here showing Lex Barker, who played the hero in a large number of Karl May Western films in the 50s. These led on to the spaghetti Westerns. There is clearly something in common with the Edgar Wallace series here. Both are lucrative examples of the German entertainment industry. But both are set in the Anglo-Saxon world. This allowed for an effect of Diminished Reality and this was part of them being entertaining and undemanding. The wallace films aren’t exactly spoofs, but there is an element of casualness and comedy about them. The thriller mechanism still works, but the dialogue involves quite light-hearted repartee.
There is concern here that other Europeans don’t read German literature or take much notice of Germany. It may in fact be true that the failure to export ‘light entertainment' limits the interest in ‘serious culture', and that producing media celebrities like Tom cruise would make people more interested in German novels. I looked at an issue of ‘Gala’ and only two of the stories were about German stars, both TV presenters. So everything else was about the US entertainment industry. Literally, that includes Australians (N Kidman) and English people (Jude law), but without American films they wouldn’t be household names in Germany. It’s easy to exaggerate how interested Europeans are in anything that come from any European country except their own. But American entertainment is big everywhere.

European substrates: interviews with Marlies Philippa

2011-02-26T01:17:00.001-08:00

Marlies Philippa interviews (excerpts)

Note. The Utrecht Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (EWN) (4 parts, 2003-9) is probably the most significant contribution to European substrate studies yet to appear. On publication, the editor, Dr Marlies Philippa, gave some press interviews, which are available on-line in Dutch. I have translated parts into English because they are so passionately interesting for the student of substrate words.

1.
Q What is the difference from other etymological dictionaries?
A Philippa: ‘The etymological dictionary of Van Dale treats more words, but apart from only going into each word briefly, it also has no claims to science. The other dictionaries are out of date in two ways. In the first place they are not based on the modern vocabulary of the 21st century, and in the second place they do not make use of the latest scientific insights.’

Thus, linguists have come ever more to believe that many very old Germanic words do not find their origin in Indo-European, the source language from which most European languages originated. The Dutch words dom, doof, leep and slim for example probably do not derive from Old Indo-European, but from a language which was spoken in our regions when Indo-European invaded thousands of years ago. Dom and doof were probably related in the old language, also called substrate language, as were leep and slim. According to some estimates some 15% of our everyday vocabulary (not counting compounds and derivations) now consists of substrate words. The new etymological dictionary is the first one that makes extensive use of this so-called substrate theory.

from interview 2.
Q. How do you explain that there are words sitting in Dutch which are much older?
Marlies Philippa: For that we must look further back in history. Europe has been inhabited for many thousand years. It is significant for language development in Europe that between 3000 and 2000 BC large groups of Indo-Europeans spread out from South Russia over the whole of Europe and a part of Asia. There are firm archaeological proofs of this. Their language, Indo-European (also called Indo-Germanic) then penetrates Europe and parts of Asia. Indo-European forms the shared basis for almost all later European languages, thus also for Dutch. I say almost, because some languages in Europe, such as Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and the now dead Etruscan remained outside the Indo-European sphere of influence. In the course of a few centuries the original languages from before the Indo-European invasion are squeezed out, but not completely. The original, pre-Indo-European languages are what we call substrate languages. And the substrate languages had a great deal of influence on Indo-European. In most modern European languages you find many pre-IE substrate words remaining. These are then more than four or five thousand years old. Words like apple, herring, thief or bakkes have thus been with us for millennia.’

Q. Just like words such as bijl, drank, hengest, and carp. These words do not sound old to my ears. How do you recognise an ancient substrate word?
A. Marlies Philippa: Without etymology you can’t explain why vader was ever pater. Such a word must, first, only be found in a limited distribution area. If the stem of a Dutch word is also found in Persian, then you can be sure that it cannot be a substrate word: Persian and Dutch are communally Indo-European languages, but they don’t have the same substrate. Further we have quite clear ideas on how IE words sounded. If you apply known laws of sound development to a word, you can define a word that has a non-Indo-European sound or form. That is another good indication. Thirdly, you can look at the meaning of a word. When the Indo-Europeans came to live in our region, they bumped into objects which they had never seen and which they didn’t have words for. Then they took over substrate words for them from the native population. Examples of that are words which have to do with plants (apple, bes, erwt, hazel) or animals (big, bee, das, herring).
A Did they only take over words for things they didn’t know or did they take other words too? We also sometimes take over English words because they sound good?
Marlies Philippa: ”Of course the Indo-Europeans mixed with the native population. You see then that they took over mainly short handy substrate words and that the ancient words can even replace Indo-European words. You must think of words that have to do with the body (bakkes, buik, darm, head) or with housekeeping (besom, board, drink, hemd, hood) or with shipbuilding or carpentry (boat, board, bolt). Also other short, frequent words landed in our vocabulary: thief, dumb, god, grip, help...
A: Did appel, haring, dief and all the other old words help to give Dutch its shape or did they just hang around unobtrusively in our language?
Marlies Philippa: “They contributed to its form. Roughly from the year 1000 BC on various Indo-European languages began to develop, under the influence of substrate languages, and among them was Germanic. Our Dutch belongs to the Germanic language family, together with among others Frisian, English, Swedish, German and so forth. You can say that our Dutch consists for 15% of the ancient substrate words, for 15% of old inherited words (deriving from Indo-European) and for 70% of relatively young loan words (from other languages, such as Latin, French, German and English).”

Note by AD. As the EWN has about 14,000 headwords it is credible that the ‘substrate’ heads, reckoned as 15%, number about 2000. The EWN can alternatively be considered as a ‘dictionary of the substrate language or languages’.

'leep' and 'slim' are both cognate with English words 'limp, lame' and show alternations which are not possible in the 'legitimate' Indo-European line of descent. The 'floating nasal' does appear in some IE contexts (English 'lick', Latin 'lingua') but not in this particular one. 'Limp' is presumably cognate with German 'links' ('left (side)') and this shows the p/k alternation which is particularly important for the substrate tier in Germanic.

Mid-century poets

2011-01-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Handlist, part 3: Mid century poets

pre-release version, contains mistakes.

Note. This is an offshoot from a research project which covered poetry 1960-97. It proved necessary to undertake operations into slightly earlier terrain in order to make the history clear. However, this does not apply to the most famous poets of mid-century, where everyone already has an opinion so I didn't need to get involved. See also
http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2009/08/metakaluptical-notes-on-1940s.html for notes specifically on poets of the 1940s, and 'Mid century women poets' at http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2010/08/edwin-morgan-and-george-mackay-brown-dm.html .
A project to recover the 'lost 1930s' is going on, after a possibly completed project to recover the lost 1940s. James Keery is a leading name in this. The mid-century is not my specialist period, but there is an abiding question of why young poets turning up in 1960 thought that British poetry was ‘dead’ and so that a revival was indeed the next step. It was more that the effective poets were totally pushed off-stage (and even this can be rephrased as ‘readers concerned with poetry didn’t want that kind of poetry’). So this information doesn’t really answer that question.
　
Wilfrid Gibson, (1878-1962) from Hexham, began around 1905 with a whole wave of innovations which rotated around taking the lower class as the suitable subject for poetry. Related to this were realism, stress on economic determinism, use of dialect, use of narrative and of poetic drama. He represents the bad conscience of English poetry insofar as everyone taking on this array of devices since 1905 has always claimed that they were the very first and no one could even have thought of doing this before us. He was a prolific writer. Some bits are worth recovering. To be accurate, the move into realism and lower-class subject matter even pre-dated 1905. He was the most serious 20th C poet to use dialect in an extended way.

Andrew Young (1885-1971) wrote during the 1950s two extraordinary long poems (published 1952 and 1958, together Out of the World and Back), both starting with the death of the narrator, who then flies through a mythical narrative as a mere spirit. This does sound a bit like an acid trip. It does also show the stirrings of something new in Christian poetry as the orthodox set-up had lost its power to inspire art, it does show the immediate involvement of the individual in the timeless, the significant moments of cosmic history. Perhaps it is not great poetry because Young actually was orthodox in theology and had no wish to create personal myth. He had previously had a long career as Georgian nature poet. Young's late-life artistic crisis is peculiarly interesting. By 1952 the main quality of a priest was how they dealt with doubt. His loss of faith, several times in life, in poetic styles, seems to track in an individual what was happening to the poetic collective.

I had seen a tree-trunk,
That hurt the ground with its dead weight, sprout leaves
Not knowing it was dead; I had caught fish,
Flounders that flapped, eels tying and untying
Slippery knots, slow to drown in our air;
Was I too living out my life’s last remnant,
Not living, only lasting? Was Death a monster,
A cat that toyed with a mouse, caught but not killed?
(from ‘Into Hades’)

Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was the public face of modernism from 1917 on and through mid-century Britain. Her poetry can only be understood through the Russian Ballet of Diaghilev which is itself usually a sophisticated variation in various Court styles of an older Europe. Ballet needs ingenuous leads and Sitwell’s work combines extreme stylisation with a line of vigour and naivety. In fact if we look for naive art in poetry we find Sitwell’s hyper-cultured costume scenes and parties. As in dance, the visual dominates the abstract realm. Sitwell re-invented herself in the 1940s with the grandiose and religious poetry which yet went back to Symboliste poetry of the 19th century. This developed with the New Romantics but was not very successful. In the 1950s, a version of modernism was set up which excluded Sitwell and with her the whole world of the ballets russes - an odd manoeuvre only possible in the dimly lit world of 50s academics. The difficulty academics have had with Edith Sitwell is partly due to a lack of visual sensibility and partly to do with her nature as a woman writer - unconcerned with the literary repertoire of the average educated poet.

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), from Orkney, was probably the first British poet to undergo a Jungian analysis (in 1919), and was the first of the long series of ‘archetypal’ Jungian poets - although Yeats was the key artistic influence here. His belief in folklore, ballads, etc. precedes the Folk Boom and represents a vote for the naive and against ‘the modern part of the brain‘ which could have fatal consequences. He was the major influence on George Mackay Brown and a significant influence on Kathleen Raine. His poetry is hampered by a kind of impersonality, lack of contact with living speech - something he gave a sociological explanation of in the difference between Scottish speech and English writing. His influence on Ted Hughes was very redirect and Hughes did better with the ideas. His best work is ‘Variations on a Time Theme’ (1934), a strange mythographical poem which is indeed a theory of Time and a theory of folklore as well. This solution, of rejecting the English of articulate and educated people while simultaneously envying it, continues to exercise minority ethnic groups. The regression to oral modes and the imitation of speech are still a fatal retreat. Muir's theoretical writings are still of great interest.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)
See Alan Bold’s classic biography for a great deal of information about his career which is almost too much to assimilate. The greatest Scottish poet since Burns, famous for combining nationalism with Communism. We have to start with the utter neglect of the Scots language in 19th C literature, so that it had retreated into humorous effects and conservative folklore by the time MacDiarmid was making his debut as a journalist. In his first style, from about 1920 on, Scots is rediscovered as a language for poetry, and restored to greatness. Poetry and daily speech come together in a magical evocation of daily reality. In his second style, from about 1938 on, this harmony is no longer possible, he writes in English and retreats into specialised knowledge and abstraction. The disintegration of language under the burden of knowledge into a more systematic and complex whole. Thus the breakdown of the sympathy which poets normally want goes hand in hand with an explosion of language. The search for authenticity has ended up by finding the opposite. His megalomania was typical of a certain generation of European writers, affected by Positivism and the theory of the Superman. It makes him peculiarly irritating, and yet the ambition frees inchoate energies, for good or ill. Although a ‘rationalist’ he had an affinity for crackpot and near-occultist ideas.
He wrote magniloquently of the ‘Lallans Renaissance’, but on examination it seems only to have consisted of him. After he stopped writing in Scots, other poets took up the idea.
Influential? everyone admires him but every Scottish poet has six or eight reasons for not writing like him.

Richard Aldington (1892-1962), It is difficult to evoke his qualities, although anyone who looks at the 'Modernist' poets of around 1920 and tries to recover their story so as to get at the big story of why modernism dried up in Britain is going to come across him. I think there is a great deal more there than critics have wanted to recover. Life Quest (1935) in particular is of great interest. He was, I think, one of many poets who had to be bundled off-stage to allow full narcissistic unfolding of the Auden clique and its chorus-line.

Grimaldi bones smeared with red ochre
That apes bright blood the life-giver
Conjured in vain as age by age
Rubble and drift and ashes built a tomb
A stiff and rocky shroud
but saved no soul
More splendid fantasy robed Osiris dead
In gold and natron under pyramids,
Furnished the palace-grave for an eternity
The Ka has never entered.
(from ‘Life Quest')

Admittedly some of his experiments came off very badly, but the lack of caution is precisely what made him ahead of his time. Even his failures were prophetic of what would happen forty years later. At some level, the revolutionary condition of the 1920s anticipated the situation of the 1960s and 1970s: the collapse of conventional wisdom.

Herbert Read (1893-1968) Read wrote, in the 1950s, some poems based on Abstract Expressionist painting. Read submitted these to Eliot who turned them down because he couldn’t understand them. A magic moment. I think there are only four or five of these poems. The story of Read is that he published his first important book at the time that ‘The Waste Land’ came out and there wasn’t much glory left to fall on the ‘other’ English modernist, and this relationship persisted for the next forty years. He wasn’t talented enough and he overworked lamentably as an administrator and presenter of culture, at which he had greatness. Culture is for people who don’t work hard. Is this what made the Sixties happen? Read was someone weak-headed who understood every current of modern art and wrote a little in all kinds of styles. Without resolving himself. The fact that he was in the right place doesn’t mean his poetry is any good. It needs re-evaluation though. He had too much sense of responsibility. He didn’t escape into the creative irresponsibility of pure form. A mixture of extreme sensibility and overwork.
He seemed more important in the period 1936-50 (roughly) because of his seriousness about politics and about war. This poetry has now lost its contemporary and urgent quality - his good judgement does not solve problems for us. An aesthete who wrote poems for civil society? A strange contradiction, also a proof of integrity. In the 1950s, he made the ICA (founded 1946) happen by compromising with arrogant and angry artists and conservative authority figures. This meant he never had tantrums himself. An equation - if I have a tantrum it forces other people to behave rationally, seizing their space. The public presence of art depends on people who are calm like civil servants. Read was a civil servant early in his career.
He titled something ‘Poem without rhetoric’. The history of this idea, not altogether a good one, is also interesting. It was productive in some ways in terms of writing poetry about modern military and political problems. The long, flat, solemn social political poems are very similar to Spender, who presumably got this whole style from Read. In fact the whole Auden clique wrote in this manner part of the time. Read’s stylised, minimal, odd modernist poems are much better. Startling and inconsistent and disconnected, but effective. His critical line that ‘modernism is better’ seems to work for his own poetry, most of which is not modernist. ‘To a Conscript of 1940’ is full of knowledge, the knowledge a First World War veteran had, but it’s not modernist. ‘Without rhetoric’ seems to mean ‘without beauty’.
I recall buying Read’s ‘European art since 1945’ (Thames and Hudson) around 1973. There were medallion-sized colour reproductions of hundreds of paintings. He had a cast-iron view of what Modernism was, and for him it was the only thing that mattered. People used to joke about Read for picking up every new trend in European art. This wasn’t accurate - his version of European culture is only about 1% of what there was. This moment of legitimation is of great interest. Mostly, posterity has agreed with Read’s selectivity. It is hard to be sure what transmitter Read was tuned in to. His book was a revelation to me. In retrospect, everything vital was there. This information was hard to come by in Loughborough, and I am grateful.
The whole word ‘Modernism’ falls apart under pressure -not the art but the category linking 1000 diverse artists. Once it falls, the fixture holding it up seems to be Herbert Read. (The resemblance to Eric Mottram, 20 years later, is apparent.) That blessed belief that THIS ONE is modernism, THIS ONE is unimportant. Which became the turnstile for the gatekeepers to sit by: X is genuinely upper middle class and Y isn’t. If you don’t have the dividing lines, you don’t have a map. Important shifts happened in the social definition of modernism. In the early Sixties, it was something for academics, for waves of newly minted experts who took it that Eliot and Pound had redefined poetry and that anything else was retrogressive. Conversely, the idea that you could draw a line between ‘modernist’ and ‘nonmodernist’ was maintained in being by the opinion of a few thousand experts that it really existed. Its sociology is more important than its contribution to art history.

Robert Graves (1895-1985). Wrote lots of love poetry which is either classical or numbingly conventional, according to your point of view. Was in some of the Georgian Books during the First World War, a Georgian poet. His prose lives on the Dan Brown side of town. Influenced Tony Conran and Norman MacCaig.

David Jones (1895-1974), the greatest English poet of the mid-century. I just don’t feel able to sum up his work because I feel overwhelmed by it.

Sacheverell Sitwell, (1897-1988) began writing poetry in 1917. His collected poems were published in 1936 and he seems largely to have given up publishing after that because of the malice of reviewers, which had reached a peak at that point. (He published 'a half-dozen' poems between 1936 and 1967.) Diaghilev produced one ballet based on a libretto by Sitwell, 23 at the time, and he remained faithful to the ideals of the ballets russes ever after. In fact, he was in the first wave of English modernism. There has been some sort of conspiracy to ignore this. Tracing his poetry after 1936 is difficult, but it was printed, mainly in some 40 pamphlets, published from the village in Northamptonshire where he lived. Some 48 poems were published in a special issue of Poetry Review (summer 1967) and another full-length volume was Tropicalia (1973). His poetry is characterised by its aestheticism, the wish to dissolve into art; and by the vast appetite which restlessly accumulates examples of visual art, of beautiful flowers and birds. So Canons of Giant Art, perhaps his most impressive work, reads like a work of art history as well as like a poem. He wrote ‘A place or a person, seen only once, and that for no more than a few moments, may affect our whole lives and be the constant subject for our thoughts. The extent to which this is true in poetry and in music can never be determined, but it must be very great. We would prefer to think of it, in symbol, as the black and white halves of the mask, both entirely different; and yet both the same. One, or both persons, from the house of the dovecote and apple tree; or even the mistaking of the red apples for red-gold oranges in the misty morning.’ His work is a complex mixture of coded autobiography and descriptions of works of art, as this passage describes. It is a mixture of flamboyance and obliquity. He sees life not as a code of moral truths, but as an endless array of forms not repeating each other, without a centre; this may have been quite unacceptable in the 1920s, but fits quite well with a modern understanding of how the species fits into the cosmos and how sensation connects to the mind.

Basil Bunting, (1900-85) Wrote two really important poems, 'Briggflatts' (1966) and 'The Spoils' (1951). Was seen around 1965 as a buried master of modernism, and as a link to Pound, but in fact he had written very little by that time. He was influenced by Objectivism. Because he was interested in stone, objects, sensuous details, and because he claimed to be interested in the sound of words (another sensuous tier) he could be assimilated to a taste which liked Georgian poetry. In fact his mature work does resemble Wilfred Gibson or Lascelles Abercrombie and an earlier version of northernness. His belief in dialect also resembles the Georgians, although it was a way of pronouncing poems he wrote in Standard English.

Joseph Macleod (1903-84), Uncontrollably fertile poet whose debut was The Ecliptic (1930). An early example of the left-wing intellectual in poetry, he produced a major modernist work at the moment when Modernism was about to go into hibernation, as economic crisis distracted everyone from the artistic sublime. During the 1980s, was widely regarded by the Underground scene as the ’good past’, as the first example of something unique and brilliant which the cultural managers wrote out of history. See my introduction to his Selected Poems, Cyclical Serial Zeniths from the Flux. His career thus resembles Sacheverell Sitwell’s in several important respects. The Depression made him shift from modernism to documentary. Raised in England, he had a strong identification with Scotland. Was also a producer at Cambridge’s avant garde theatre, the Festival, until Keynes’ conservatism and powerful connections brought it to an end in around 1933. His complete poetry is in the holdings of the National Library of Scotland. Other published works include Script from Norway, a sort of verse drama about a documentary film crew, where the politics of representation take over from what is being represented. This, in 1953.

Helical, shimmering
Cylinders of sunshine
Pour down
Slantwise
Upon the asphodel between the pylon pillars of Elysium
Cerberus smiles tricephalically
While Thammuz and Astarte complete
Their matutinal, and by now habitual, love-rites.
All is still and rain-swept in Balham,
But below there
Persephone sucks burnt-umber pomegranates,
Spitting the blood-red pips to the acanthus-bed.
(from 'Sun-Drenched Noontide')

Euros Bowen (1904-88) Welsh language poet who wrote in a very unusual and intense style, perhaps influenced by Dylan Thomas (as claimed by critic and poet Alan Llwyd). A Protestant pastor, he was involved in pacifist politics and began writing poetry, in the late 1940s, in connection with that. Developed a radically new way of writing cynghanedd, which he explained in various introductions (and in a radio lecture). Radical Christian and anti-government poetry was not, of course, much of an irritant to eisteddfod judges circa 1951. His later poetry evolved away from the intensely dylanesque-symboliste style of the 1950s and became much more relaxed and transparent.
　
　
Waldo Williams (1904-71) great Welsh-language poet. Published only one volume in his lifetime (Dail Pren, 1956). Very hard to describe and also very hard to translate into English. Like few other people, he wrote in the formal metres but had a completely 20th century sensibility. A Quaker, he was very anti-war and his nationalism depended also, in a way typical of his generation, on a view of England as a ‘war machine’ from which a withdrawal was possible into a refuge authenticity, which included both the language and the Christian religion. His poetry represents that authenticity in a remarkable way. Where English people might see Prussia or Russia as a war machine where militarism had absorbed all other qualities, many people in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland saw England as the war machine and English culture as saturated with nationalism. Waldo had visible goodness, and this quality at least briefly makes other qualities seem unnecessary.

Idris Davies (1905-53) was a miner who retired after an injury, acquired an education, and became a teacher. His work The Angry Summer is looking back slightly, to the miners’ strike of 1926. This is great poetry which is also realistic, rooted in a community, and reproducing political conflict. He was one of the first Anglo-Welsh writers, that is writing in the English which was the daily speech of the community they came from, but conscious of their Welshness. The verse form is close to popular verse but it builds up into a complex narrative. His style is unthinkable without the speech of people in the coal valleys of south-east Wales. During the depression of the 1930s, some people were writing great literature about the economic problems of the time, and Davies was one of them.

Auden, WH , everyone has a view so I will not express one

Stephen Spender (1909-95) What I feel about Spender is that his poems are so clear and complete that they leave the issues resolved and so there is little to say about them. This suits well with a theory of Time which says that everything must happen in the present moment.

Tomorrow and yesterday are pictures
Remembered and foreseen, painted within
Man’s two profiles facing Past and Future, pivoted
On the irreducible secret diamond
His Now. Past and Future, pictures only,
And all events and places distant from
The instant of perception in the brain,
Are memories and prophecies.
All distant times and places, all events
In other minds, all knowledge folded
In books, Pasts petrified in statues,
Spatial distance witnessed by telescopes,
Prehuman histories embossed on fossils,
Silent messages from star to star,
Exist only in the flash within the single flesh.
(‘Time in our Time’)

He was writing better poetry than anyone else in the mid-century. He also wrote the best Apocalyptic poems. I have muttered elsewhere on this site about how weirdly selective his ‘collected’ poems are and how important it is to get the original books and see what the great man actually wrote. The wish to edit the past can be seen as a attempt to preserve intensity. His abandonment of communism was admirable, a sign that he was taking in current events and that he was honest and responsive, but made it, again, difficult to write poetry in favour of lyric political intuition. It is obvious that a gay person who got married could no longer write great poems about commitment, having compromised up to the hilt. The belief in civic action led to a long career as art bureaucrat, which has tended to disguise from succeeding generations that he had ever been a poet.
Given how few people, by 1950, wanted to live in a Soviet-style dictatorship, communist poetry had to come to an end. So you have hundreds of anti-communist poets. But it seems impossible to write great anti-communist poetry. I don't see why this is so, but it is part of the mid-century crisis.

Kathleen Raine, (1908-2003) The work collected in the collected poems of 1956 is remarkable, as is the later book The Hollow Hill. The source is hymns, which combine theology with song and simple rhythms. She writes in a hymnic style and presents her distinctive theological ideas through natural symbolism, with beauty as the key. The key to the poetry is the human impact of spiritual intensity as the capacity to love, almost in an erotic way; the intensity of the sensitive person presents a response to another person which destabilises ordinary life. The theology is almost only some music to accompany this; as a formula for poetry, it can hardly be improved on. She represents the New Romantic poetry of the 1940s, and continued to represent it; but was not influenced by Dylan Thomas, so that her poetry is wonderfully clear, in line with hymns by such writers as George Herbert.
As a student (doing Natural Science) she was involved with the group around experiment magazine circa 1930, interested in bringing science and poetry together; along with William Empson, Richard Eberhart and Hugh Sykes Davies. She was married (serially) to poets Hugh Sykes Davies and Charles Madge. Her work can be considered as a reaction against the Cambridge intellectuals of around 1930. In the 1950s, she and some other Cambridge academics set out to recover the ‘lost’ intellectual background of Romantic poets, with Raine setting out to read ‘everything that Blake had read’. (cf. also Wilson’s book ‘W.B. Yeats and Tradition’.) This recovery of Western irrationalism followed up the New Romantic love of Blake and was one of the sources of the New Age movement. She founded the magazine Temenos (in 1981) to recover the spiritual aspect of art and the survivors of 1940s poetry.
Her late work is less good; lyric poetry does not flow forever.

Lynette Roberts (1909-95), published two volumes with Faber (1944 and 1951) Trained at art school; married Keidrych Rhys, a weak poet but editor of the magazine Wales which founded Anglo-Welsh literature. Gave up poetry around 1952, in connection with theology. The publication of her collected poems in 2005 allowed the history of Anglo-Welsh poetry to be changed. Her poetry, which is not very similar to the stable of poets in Wales magazine or to the New Romantic poets of the 1940s, has not been well understood. Roberts described her own poetry in these terms: ‘A cleansing purity and rebirth of sound, recreation refolding of the world such as we had the refolding of the various strata, Icelandic stone and bronze age etc. And ... hitting against that view which is one of isolation, severe pruning. The whole discordant universe, the cutting of teeth, one rhythm grating against another, the metallic convergence of words, heavy colourful rich and unexplored.’ The interest in visual organisation is obvious. There is a particular effect in poetry which comes from making visual arrangements of objects and colours, so that the form of words has to be hammered into place, exactingly, to fit the pre-existing (and unique) knowledge. Poems are one of the visual art forms, and Roberts had a strong visual sensibility. Light battered by the surface of things washes back with a vastly detailed flow of information from which more and more can be recovered as the brain pauses over it. The key to her poetry is to study the objects it records, since she made a ‘documentary’ study of solid objects, their three-dimensional grain, mechanical properties, history.

Norman MacCaig (1910-96), one of the dramatic processes of the 1950s was MacCaig’s move away from a New Romantic style of improvisation and unreason towards something Augustan, controlled, and in the manner of English poetry of the time. His poetry is philosophical but its philosophy seems very very old in comparison with twentieth century interests. The curiosity which drives it is limited. His work is urbane, intelligent in its way, and is an acquired taste. It can seem dry or can be very enjoyable. The poems do not record key experiences and seem to have both feet on the ground all the time. His early work synthesizes form and mood and has that romantic flight, but he suppressed it. He started again when he was middle-aged and the Cold War was on. MacCaig ‘is widely regarded as Scotland’s finest contemporary poet, whose later poetry is both accessible and popular‘; (according to the jacket of a book published 15 years after his death). Much of his reputation is due less to his poems than to his access to admired experiences: he reached a great age, he was a friend of MacDiarmid in the 50s, he had a Gaelic background. Most Scots respect these experiences and realise that they cannot share them. The suppressed work involved improvisation, loss of control, letting emotions flow. (His mother had to learn English as an adult, and possibly this ‘inchoate’ zone is what he was tapping into.) He declined to fight in the world war, and was imprisoned for this decision. On release he worked as a gardener, which counted towards the war effort. It is not known whether his refusal was due to dislike of England and its empire, or to simpler ethical grounds. Most of the New Romantics were pacifist, and the style reflects an anti-state ideology. His mature work makes no reference to this political stand, presumably because the Fifties consensus relied on shared silence about pacifism (and about the New Romantics). The return of nationalism in the mid Sixties was the end of this consensus. (Dislike of the American nuclear installations on Scottish soil was not the least source of support for the new politics.)

Sorley MacLean (1911-1996) probably the greatest Scottish Gaelic poet since the 18th century, and one of the great modern poets. One of the monumental and heroic figures of his culture. “MacLean's poetry is the answer to a riddle, namely, ‘what happens to aristocratic poetry when the aristocracy change their language and absent themselves from the scene?’ The English thought everything could be bought and sold, because the institution of the nuclear family had created a market in land, unhindered by the belief in family continuity expressed in land tenure. If the answer was 'private property', the question was the destruction of kinship. It was the English preoccupation with other people's land which made modern history turn out the way it did. The Celtic societies neighbouring the English really didn't get possessive individualism, it was like a sound they couldn't pronounce. The old 'object poems' were really about status; their occasions were the death of a lord (with a major shift of status for the heirs) and the rewarding (or purchase) of fealty, bringing an individual into a definite relationship with the gift-giver.” (AD) I looked at a website for MacLean which explained how he was ‘steeped’ in Gaelic culture. Saturated ground is called ‘bog’ and so the word for ‘steeped in’ is ‘bogaidh an’, and MacLean is ‘soaked’ in his culture. His major work was the 1943 volume Dain do Eimhir. He published little between 1945 and 1975, but significant new poems were added after that. His poetry is available in his own translations.

FT Prince, (1912-2003) one of the significant debuts of the Thirties (Poems, 1938), a dedicated and spiritual poet who had many striking achievements in his long career.

Roy Fuller (1912-91) perhaps the most significant poet of the 1950s. In order to find out whether you like the 1950s, you have to get to terms with Fuller's poetry of the time. Naturally he is against what is happening, as a committed leftist; his quality as a poet is to be saturated in the corrupt medium, and so to reveal its nature. His poetry is thus deeply unstable, always taking back what it has said. It seems that he lost belief in political change, and so in his own poetry, during the 1960s; even this loss of faith seemed typical of what led hundreds of English academics to write 'domestic anecdotes' of no interest at all. His best poetry is not beautiful and ideal, because of its critical nature; its sense of what is possible and what is being taken away is where it is profound. He wrote extensively in favour of conservative technique and so was ignored by the British Poetry Revival; he has not been recognised by later versions of the Left as a major left-wing poet. His artistic decline during the 1960s had something appalling about it.

Charles Madge (1912-96) published two volumes in 1936 and 1941. Wrote some important poetry around 1950 which was not published until the 1990s. Of Love, Time and Places (1994) is a selected poems. Madge was the other half, with Macleod, of the Good Past of the Underground, because everyone knew that a lot of his poetry hadn't been published and he was part of the radical wing of the 1930s. Has been seen as anticipating the Cambridge School because his poetry is so intellectually demanding and philosophically grounded. Co-founded the Mass Observation movement in 1937 and became a professor of sociology. MO was interested in surrealism and Madge can be seen as moving towards the subject of dreams and the irrational. He was married to Kathleen Raine and his second wave of poetry is moving into the territory of myth and religion, somewhat like hers. He once planned to write a book on dreams.

Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). He was a cultivated man who had rejected cultural convention and it seems unfair that his poetry is not better than it is. The poems in his collected which really take off are prose poems about (imaginary) modern Greek painters. These are genuinely evocative and suggestive, but also clearly lead the way out of poetry and into his fiction. He was influenced by Pater and by D H Lawrence. The burden of owning a critique of civilisation made it hard for him to write interestingly. It's not clear what it was, but presumably it was a continuation of Lawrence and Aldington. Although he took on the vitalism, his versification is much more old-fashioned than Lawrence's, which suggests a relapse and compromise. The move into prose and 'superimposed time frames' was an advance out of this problem.

JF Hendry, (1912-86) from Glasgow, was one of the theorists of the Apocalyptic school which began around 1937 and which was a radical move away from documentary and towards releasing the irrational levels of the mind into poetry. This was related to ‘biomorphic abstraction’ in painting but also to pacifism and resistance to the state as war machine.
His poetry is influenced by surrealism and has as subject the crisis of the late Thirties and the War. His wartime poetry seems hasty and confused, too stressed by the crisis, and his work whether good or bad is hard to obtain. From being a writer trying to explain everything in 1937 and following years, Hendry was little heard of between the late 1940s and the late 1970s. Marimarusa, published 1978, was written in the 1940s.

George Barker (1913-91) had a long complicated career. He represented single-handedly the lyric and passionate pole of poetry in opposition to the theologically inclined academics who made up most of the literary world. Although poorly educated, he had access to the Baroque through the devotional trappings of Catholicism, his religion. He was a necessary poet and everyone else regrets not having his powers. 'The thesis put forward in Robert Fraser’s biography of George Barker is about sexuality, randiness, logic, education. He suggests that GB is superior to rival poets because they were educated and he left school at 14; because he was highly sexed and they weren’t. Fraser also suggests that Barker represents a breakthrough, and the future. The implication is that Objectivity is the product of years of servitude, and involves submission to male authority figures – it disables you for writing poetry, which requires vigorous subjectivity. Study and office work seem to have much the same effect – Barker said no to secondary education, and resisted having a job because he thought it would cripple his poetic gifts. This thesis looks good if we compare poets with rock singers, but unimpressive if we compare modern poets with poets from past centuries.' (AD)

Dylan Thomas (1914-53) Too great for comparison, dominated the landscape around him. Became immensely popular through broadcasts of his poetry read by himself. Much of his posthumous reputation has been due to the disinformation spread by Oxford elitists who couldn't bear the fact that he was a better poet than Auden and wanted to 'garden' the landscape to make Auden the sole lord and master. Thomas made a breakthrough around 1933 through serious study, principally of Blake and Donne but also of Auden. That is, he replaced Auden. This is one of the ideas which the people in charge would not tolerate, even sixty years later. Poetry evolved nonetheless.

Francis Berry, (1915-2006) Dominated by his imagination and scattered over an immense world of the imagination. He staged his intensely dramatic poems in several different continents, two of his best poems being set in Greenland and Jamaica. He belonged with the Romantic era in his extravagance and energy, in his vast vocabulary of exotic and elaborate images. If he felt like writing a poem about Zarathustra, he wrote a poem about Zarathustra. Debuted in 1933. His early work is too psychologically scattered, and his late work is much better. Always deeply unfashionable, he never had proper recognition; I am only aware of two anthologies which include him: Glyn Jones' in 1949 and Lucie-Smith's in 1971. Books include Fall of a Tower (1943), Murdock (1947), Morant Bay (1961), Ghosts of Greenland (1966). The Galloping Centaur is poems 1933-51.

G Campbell Hay (1915-84), an English-speaker who learnt Gaelic as a teenager. A student at Oxford, he wrote in Gaelic as an aspect of nationalism and resistance to the English political order in Scotland. He was faced with the problem of a complete lack of modern Gaelic culture, and a language which faced away from the 20th century. In my view his poetry does not work at all, in its attempt to recreate the past. His early volume in Scots and English, The Wind on Loch Fyne (1948), is an exception, being strange without being destroyed by its own contradictions. He did not resolve his inner problems. Of course the social vacuum could be suggestive for poetry, allowing experiment to take place.

Roland Mathias (1915-2007) Published two volumes of very high quality in the 1940s. One of the few poets from the founding era of Anglo-Welsh literature around the magazine Wales (1937-45) who survived into the new era of the ‘Second Flowering’ in the 1960s. The nature of the atmosphere which made most of the others give up has been insufficiently defined. A great editor of Anglo-Welsh Review, in the 1960s and 1970s, where he studied almost every aspect of Welsh history and so was too intellectually sophisticated to be a nationalist in the accepted fashion. His poetry is shown in Burning Brambles: poems 1942-77. He was the last significant poet of the 1940s still writing (Kathleen Raine being the other candidate).

Sidney Goodsir Smith (1915-75), wrote in cultivated Scots, although brought up in New Zealand. Wrote in a picturesque and artificial style. Had a job as theatre critic which he lost when he got so drunk that he fell out of his box. This led to a long difficult period, at least if we can trust Edinburgh literary gossip, which I doubt. Under the Eildon Tree (1948) is regarded as his classic volume, simultaneously passionately authentic and elaborately fake. His later work is more distinctive if still not authentic. On the page he sounds theatrical and like an affable drunk. An Oxford graduate, according to Wikipedia.

David Gascoyne, (1916-2001) not very gifted as a poet but his biography exercises a fascination especially because of his recovered diaries from the 1940s. Was famous in his teens as an interpreter of Surrealism. His significant poems should not be underrated and do stand out from the English manner around them. His work of the 1940s is very much influenced by Eliot and aims to revive religious language and Romantic afflatus, but is not properly worked out. Kathleen Raine probably achieved the poetic ideals which Gascoyne was thinking about. His career from about 1938 has to be interpreted in terms of the theological ideas which he picked up in Paris, and which directed him. Obviously he was gay, but this may not be a key to who he was - as follower of Eliot and Shestov. Unrestrained use of benzedrine led to states of spiritual exaltation but in the long run robbed him of his mental stability. He spent a long time fighting with illness and his ‘resurrection‘ was a remarkable event. ‘Night Thoughts’ (1956) is a documentary poem written for radio broadcast, reliant on documentary film. This works better than his religious poems. His intuitive grasp of the greatness of the figures he admired was perhaps his real gift, and would have been interrupted if his own creative powers had been of a higher order. Translated much from French. He influenced Peter Levi, a better poet.
Kathleen Raine reviewed Gascoyne's Collected Poems 1988 in 1989: 'It is as though some angelic being were, with gravity and love, translating for us from the language of angels in which the record of this world is kept[.] David Gascoyne is at this time England's one great poet, perhaps Europe's greatest poet. At eighty I make such a judgement with the full weight of my own lifetime's experience. A great poet, as I use the word, is one who encompasses the enduring themes of man's spiritual destiny, and therefore also of history. [...] He is, I suppose, the last English poet working in the European mainstream - as were Eliot and Yeats, Edwin Muir and Humphrey Jennings, Malcolm Lowry and others of their generation. England has become provincial - not to say marginal to the point of insignificance - in terms of those values David Gascoyne is the last in this country to embody and represent.' This is possibly Raine's view of herself, rather than Gascoyne.

Terence Tiller (1916-87) one of the most significant poets of the 1940s, well known for hating New Romantic poetry. Was teaching in Egypt at the time. He wrote less poetry after becoming a producer for BBC radio but produced many programmes, including the texts. Striking for delicacy and sensitivity, for trying to deal with the complex problems of modern relationships (as Spender remarked at the time). Spender said of Tiller and GS Fraser, “They are clear, transparent, intellectual poets writing from their heads rather than from their hearts or their bodies, analysing their passions and conscious of many difficulties in problems of sex and life. Their obscurity, unlike that of the poets who are followers of Dylan Thomas, comes from a too great intellectualisation, a too minute pursuit of their own sensitive reactions, their own inner complication and subtle ideas." Poems (1941); The Inward Animal (1943); Unarm, Eros (1947); Reading a Medal (1957); Notes for a Myth (1968); The Singing Mesh (1979)

Philip Toynbee (1916-81) was a communist in the late 1930s. Wikipedia says some volumes of his Pantaloon series, a verse novel, are unpublished, which I didn’t know. Four volumes were published in the 1960s (1961-68). It is an interesting series and unlike anything else in poetry, although it connects to avant garde fiction. It is interesting because it doesn’t fit in. See brief comment at http://pinko.org/106.html It is about the cultural and political crisis of the Oxford generation of the 1930s, something which explains the whole of mid-century poetry and why poetry was dead and had to be "revived" in 1960. He published Prothalamium: A Cycle Of The Holy Graal (1947), which I haven’t seen. This is a novel. Peter Vansittart: 'Toynbee, swashbuckling, ramshackle, hands seldom far from a bottle, with an 'ugly beauty', a rich, indeed compelling, voice, and, through unsatisfactory teeth, a chuckle resembling the last gasp of a soda-water bottle...' (In the Fifties, 1995)

Thomas Blackburn (1916-77)
Blackburn seemed able, during the 1950s, to represent the pole of lyric, personal, emotive, inspired poetry, a sort of anti-1950s party. He seemed about to invent the genre of English confessional poetry. 'I would hazard a guess that the most significant post-war poetry is concerned with such an explanation of the human being. [...] A psychological standpoint implies that although it may be conditioned by economic and material factors, in the last resort it can only be understood through the inner dynamics of man himself.' (from an introduction, 1960) When that sort of poetry became more central, his name seemed to be heard less and less. I was amazed to discover that he had published twelve volumes of poetry. The key seems to lie in biographical data, only available since his death, notably a memoir by his daughter, Julia Blackburn. (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3672757/Julia-Blackburn-an-infernal-triangle.html for an excerpt) Thomas had problems with alcohol already as a student, related to the domineering influence of his father, resolved only by dropping the subject his father had chosen and starting afresh. The continuing story is complicated, but poor understanding of pharmacology seems to be a big part of it; he was addicted to the barbiturates which were supposed to keep him off the drink, and their effects when combined with alcohol were very damaging. They were first prescribed to him in 1943, before much was known about barbiturates.
Presumably because he yearned for salvation, his later poetry is often religious and about visions. Yet he had seemed closest to great artistic achievement when deploying realism and connecting emotional states back to the everyday.
He edited the best anthology of the 1950s and there is no doubt about his gifts.

Charles Causley (1917-2003)
Essential for me is that Causley's poetry becomes unreadable when taken in quantity, because of its rigidity. His rhythms are not truly personal - they go back to a time before poetry expressed personality, before the Renaissance and its new verse. I have to look now in the other direction, at its flash and impact when taken in small doses. Causley stands, at one level, for a genuine tradition of song (in long periods of inactivity, or of festive drinking) in the Royal Navy; at another, for a sort of versification which preceded the Tudor revolution and the pentameter, and which was incapable of taking in modern ideas.

On the high harbour lie six shifty daughters
Their bodies are staring, their eyes are wide
Here is the key of their burly bedchamber
I have unlocked it, I replied.

(The ‘daughters’ must be ships; the ambiguity is fundamental and genuinely archaic. The harbour can‘t be high because it would be dry land if it were not low, I think. The ‘eyes‘ may be gunports, if the ships are pre-1900. The sailor is lured by the whores of the harbour but is also lured by the ships, which may also sink beneath him. The bedchamber is the sea.) If he got to publish four books in the 1950s, this is because he fitted in with a current of sentiment expressed in the Festival of Britain, which admired the folk art of painted merry-go-round horses and painted barges. His poems appealed to people who read The Unsophisticated Arts, by Barbara Jones. This is an archaic populism untouched by left-wing thought. I think his poem on 'Prinz Eugen' shows where the folk idiom blocked attempts to extend it. It is exciting but impossible to follow:

Look said the prince at my lip and my loin.
Look at the silver that springs from my thumb,
Look for the brown blood that never will come.
Teach my beached heart the soft speech of the drum,
Feather with words the straw birds as they hum.
On my cold castle the strict sea knocks,
Butters his blade on the rim of the rocks.
Do you not hear how his ticking tongue mocks,
Slits every second and keel-hauls the clocks?

Eugen is apparently dead, yet involved in time; he is a symbol of death, as a war leader. The poem reminds us of surrealist poems of a slightly earlier period, but the symbols are conventional but closed. They make it hard for the poet to explain what is going on. We note that the pentameter is not natural but cultivated; popular verse in English always uses shorter lines. The Penguin Modern Poets volume (3) was inspired in putting him together with George Barker: these two and Christopher Logue all had the same idea, in the 50s, of taking on folk song and its gaudy and primal decoration as well as its heavy rules. This preceded the Folk Boom and already had its energy. The Folk Boom vindicated Causley but eventually made the public tired of the effects locked up in simplicity and antiquity. Causley went on writing in the 60s but his moment had passed. On reflection, I think Causley should not have been omitted by Allott (in 1960) and Tuma (2001) from their standard anthologies. The simple effects work perfectly against a naive, tuppence coloured - penny plain background. When he wrote

I have seen the white tiger,
Imagination
In the Douanier Rousseau forest:
Isosceles leaves and a waterfall of compasses

- he is writing intelligently, but to say that he writes naive poetry on a daily basis. This differs from a later wave of populist poetry because it is not dumbed-down.
There is a Causley Society website which attacks 'academics' for not writing about him, as if this was some kind of guilt. But why write an essay if there is nothing to say? People also don’t have conversations about him - it is the poetry of ideas which fuel conversations. On the other hand, most children see at least one Causley poem in their time at school.
George Mackay Brown committed himself equally to folk material but gave up the prosody altogether.

WS Graham (1918-1986)
In the conformist scene of the 1950s, three volumes by Jones, MacDiarmid and Graham tower over everything else, being at the same time completely atypical and finding few readers. Graham was a dedicated avant garde writer who prepared his course with consistent hard work and so realised his ambitions. Although he began with the 40s New Romantics, he persisted when they fell away around 1950, and charted new waters. At the present time few mid-century poets are admired as much by such a range of people. Published volumes in 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1949, 1955, 1970, and 1977.
The question is how he came to evolve from the New Romantic style, and the huge influence of Dylan Thomas, towards his later style. One approach is to this is to deny that his New Romantic poetry is in fact New Romantic, or to deny that there is any continuity between early and late Graham. These are methods of despair.
A simple view is that he wrote about the tumult of the sea in a New Romantic way and then came to write about the frozen Polar North, more philosophically. The link is perhaps that in the 40s he was writing about the mystery of the world just outside the reach of intuition and the senses, and that in his late poetry he is still writing about this, but in a way which is dominated by doubt rather than emotional tumult. He was not a studious man and presumably quarried his later work out of the mass of his early work, in organic evolution.
Malcolm Mooney's Land was published in 1970, and the title poem is about Polar exploration. JF Hendry published Marimarusa in 1978, also about Polar exploration; in interviews he described it as being written in the middle 1940s, when he was an interpreter in Vienna. The relationship between the two poems is questionable, but has a great bearing on how we interpret the New Romantic impulse and its later developments.
Graham can be described as an egocentric sublime. At that, his work is not egoistic, it lacks vanity. He did write about friends, namely the painters around St Ives who were on an artistic path that he could respect. But mostly he was not interested in personal relations and in social events - nor in close observation of nature. His friends were abstract painters. His role in the whole period 1950-70 was that reviewers acknowledged the stature of his work, but it was ignored in between publications (only two books in that period), and that it seemed outside the visible scene. Perhaps readers wanted warmth and personal relations and someone who enhanced social affability and mood. More, reading his work did not create an affective relationship with the artist - he was withdrawn too far behind a sheer or tortuous surface. See his Collected Poems and The Nightfisherman, selected letters (1999).

TS Law (1918-97) from Fife. Scots-writing figure in the working-class Marxist culture of the 1940s. Was little heard from after that until the 1970s, when the revival of Scottish Nationalism gave him new inspiration. A strongly anti-bourgeois writer with a gift for polemic and invective. As with other very anti-English writers, this tended to produce a sixteenth-century manner of writing.

Dunstan Thompson (1918-75), American, wrote two classic volumes in the 1940s which summed up the New Romantic style. see my articles on this website: http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2010/03/dunstan-thompson-revisited.html. Disappeared from the scene and lived in Norfolk. Imitated George Barker quite closely but improved on the model.

Emyr Humphreys, (1919-) mainly a novelist but has also written poetry of great importance. belonged to the 1930s generation of Welsh intellectuals, Christian, nationalist, and radical. Main poetic work is Ancestor Worship (1970). His method is related to TV techniques, as he was a TV producer.
　

John Holloway (1920-1999) haven’t read all his books. I do know about The Landfallers (1962), a sort of Eric Ambler novel in verse, some of which is really good. He was in New Lines but did not fit into the stereotypes of the Movement poet. He was of course a highly educated man, an academic, classically trained, and not opposed to the order of things. His poetry reflects all this, but he kept developing new ideas without ever writing great poetry. Wood and Windfall (1965) is travel poetry about the Mediterranean, not exactly the first occurrence of this in English history. He lived in Athens for two years in the early sixties.
Planet of Winds (1977) is a radical exit into folk and oral forms, light in tone of course, but by no means conventional.

Pebble. A steel inwardness.
The fire's flintbed capped in
This snowy flarepath edge
And the heavy hide: the rough rounded outside
My hand cups, warming.
Testimony of old waters: torrents
In gout, rainspout, icepack,
Ice crack, crash of the hill-haunting thunder.
Yet
Deriving dumbly by opposites, it accreted
This stoniness.
My hand endears it, eroding
A little of its detachment.
(from 'Weathering: near Thebes' from Wood and Windfall)

Derick Thomson (1921), from the isle of Lewis. writes in Gaelic but translations into English are available. represents a new confidence in Gaelic poetry but it is not clear that he is much of a poet. Edited for many years (fifty, according to Wikipedia) the magazine Gairm, remarkable for being all-Gaelic but not known for high cultural standards. When he began it, there was not much in (Scots) Gaelic that was not religious or oral. Had a university career as a Gaelic scholar.

George Mackay Brown (1921-96), Catholic, archaic and conservative writer stuck in a remote rural island community (Orkney). attached to folk forms, such as repetition of units according to a preset count, and to a cyclic theory of time derived from Edwin Muir. The integration of Jung and Catholicism is striking. Selected Poems 1954-83 (1991). Following a Lark; Wreck of the Archangel. Writes as a communal poet, with the central ego notably absent - or, perhaps, hidden in a cunning way. see http://www.pinko.org/30.html for more comments

Alan Ross (1922-2001) debuted in the 1940s but realised himself in the 1950s. A childhood in India and service in the Royal Navy gave the basis of knowledge needed for a travel writer, when combined with exceptional skills of observation. Equally, Ross as a naval officer (who had served on destroyers in the Arctic convoy escorts) was unable to write except concisely and directly, but the poetic core survives and works each time. His ability to evoke places is uncanny. These are travel poems, I suppose. A view of Heligoland after being bombarded into innocuousness by the Royal Navy is off the scale of most travel writers. Edited the London Magazine for some forty years, from 1961. Unfashionable in the 1950s and never taken up by the critics. Wrote retrospectively some of the best poems of the war at sea and of garrison duty in a ruined post-war Germany. Poems (2005) is a very large selected. There is one technical comment, that Ross belonged to the group whose poetry gets missed out because he was a literary insider.

　
Elizabeth Bartlett (1924-2008), Two Women Dancing (1995) is a selected-collected. combination of social realism and feminism, very solid and convincing. Published a few poems around 1940 and then nothing until the end of the 70s, presumably floated by the tide of feminism. Probably represents the acceptable end of social resentment, in poems about other people being more interesting than she is.

Alastair Mackie. (1925-95) His poetry is about the contrast between ideal and reality. This had something to do with depression, something to do with the contrast between Scots and English; he was committed to the Lallans ideal but several times had a 'conversion' and gave it up. It represented the unattainable for him. His best poems are less realistic and more to do with technological optimism.

　
Christopher Logue (1926). Legendary satirist and radical, who is a major poet because of his Homer project, which to date includes Patrocleia (1962), Pax (1967), War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1994), All Day Permanent Red (2003), Cold Calls (2005). Ode to the Dodo: Poems 1953 to 1978 (1981) collects other work, too selectively. (War Music collects Patrocleia and Pax.) His debut was in 1953, in a New Romantic style. Songs (1958) was a vital work, opening the era of intelligent popular song, using the song form to reveal a remarkable political intelligence. It more or less ended the 1950s with one blow. Virtually unique in his grasp of politics and ability to write narratives in verse. His work supports a thesis that the 1950s produced people with real moral commitment who could therefore write about politics and human relations, in a way which hedonistic generations could not do. Something changed.

Christopher Middleton (1926-), made debut in 40s but made main impact after torse 3: Poems 1949-62 (1962). intimate chronicles; Selected Writings (1989). Poems 2006-2009. His Collected Poems came out in 2008. A poet of modernist inclinations and wide culture. Taught German studies, as a profession. Stan Smith says ‘The dysfunctions, dislocations and unexpected collocations of his language, the experimental diversity of structure and theme, and a movement between extremes of abstrusity and explicitness, using the very opacity of his language to concentrate our gaze as if for the first time...” Made standard translations of many modern German-language poets, and writes as a European.

T Glynne Davies (1926-1988): His eisteddfod winner of 1951, 'Adfeilion' (Ruins), (a free-form pryddest) identifies a lost female love with the ruin of Wales. It’s like a Bruce Springsteen song, full of hometown sentimentality, with violent mood swings, between wild optimism and sombre disillusion. The emotional identification with his country, which is described as a sentient thing, capable of exaltation and degradation, is irrational but completely convincing. His poems have an astonishing emotional power. His only volumes were in 1961 and 1969. In his career, he largely gave up poetry to be a radio and TV journalist, and novelist. Cerddi (1987) collects all his poems. A note says ‘This is one of two poems I wrote for the old Fflam when it was so promising and avant garde in the hands of Euros Bowen. The date is February 1949.’

Charles Tomlinson (1927-), represented, in about 1958, an interest in modernism rare in English life, but did not also write modernist poetry. His early pamphlet, The Necklace, is the best. He did have aesthetic intensity but his subject matter vanished as he scrutinised it. He had no dealings with the radically new poetry of the 1960s. His intense aesthetic focus is impressive as a gesture but the object of scrutiny seems to wither up under the rigour of the gaze. Arguments have been made for The Way of the World (1969). Kenneth Allott said in 1960 “Pater, who made these comments, spoke of his own artistic approach as involving ‘the sacrifice of a thousand sympathies’. [...] Mr Tomlinson’s poet world is a lonely place - human beings and their awkwardnesses have been squeezed out. With his ‘calligraphy of present pleasure’ he is a serious artist; but he is also a seriously limited artist, an aristocratic ‘mutile’ of the aesthetic war."

Iain Crichton Smith, (1928-98) wrote both in Gaelic and in English. When you take children off the island to a boarding school so that they can get secondary education, the question is not just ‘will I ever get home again’ but also ‘will I ever arrive’. It can be argued that to be ‘bicultural’ is typical for a 20th century Hebridean, but the differences between Gaelic culture and an urban culture, Anglo-Scottish in nature, are so extreme that the cultural split is arguably very hard to survive. (What he disliked was effectively urban Scottish culture, although you can also argue that it was anglicised and further that it was Americanised.) Smith simultaneously embodied a very complex subject matter, the ‘cultural interface’, and had difficulty writing anything because of the split. I think some of his poetry is very important but it needs to be read in a careful selection. He was capable of lapsing both ways, into unthinking and sentimental nationalist positions and conventional Movement style poetry in English. A long poem like ‘An Canan’ thinks through the problems of Hebridean culture, even in a traumatised way, but with compelling honesty. He was not a heroic figure like MacLean. He had misgivings about his audience.

Anthony Thwaite (1930-) one of a group of Christian, Oxford poets emerging in the 1950s with a conservative poetic and an attachment to history and scholarship - cf. Levi and Hill. Developed very notably after losing Fifties inhibitions. He was part of the revival of Christian creativity in the face of the loss of political and social authority of the Church, apparently ‘challenge and response’ in a Toynbeean way. His ‘double narrative’ in 'Letters of Synesius', with a 4th C theologian in parallel with the modern poet, has been compared with Geoffrey Hill but also realises the double nature of any Christian, living in sacred time and in secular time. Mercian Hymns was four years later. (The 'Letters' are in the 1967 volume Stones of Emptiness and were followed by New Confessions, a ‘double narrative’ about St Augustine, 1974.) Thwaite is drawn to immense structures of objective knowledge, typically pots and coins; he has an abiding affinity with Robert Browning’s marshalling of facts. Victorian Voices (1980) is a direct expression of this. Collected Poems, (2007). It is interesting to compare Thwaite, not just with Levi and Hill as 'life companions' but with Pauline Stainer, another Christian poet breaking away from the forms of hymn, sermon, and psalm.
　
Arden, John (1930), wrote a small number of poems but also a poetic drama, Armstrong‘s Last Goodnight. One of few mid century dramatists to write plays in major language as opposed to thin realistic language. All his drama is close to poetry. Very important for poets looking at how to write public language again. There is a tape of him reading his poems but I am not sure if they are in print anywhere.

Peter Levi (1931-2000) Jesuit priest, classicist, and archaeologist. Stopped being a priest in 1977 and got married. Writes in a remarkably elegant, Augustan, style, mainly about the pleasures of a cultured life, but also writing stridently anti-capitalist and avant-garde poetry (based on Greek surrealism) when necessary. Represents the "suave" quality of poetry from which everything less than perfectly gratifying and smooth has been removed, something which only seems possible in Oxford. Everything he says is wonderfully clear as he says it. Is awkwardness such a virtue? This might seem obvious, but he was better at theology than his competitors. Collected Poems 1955-75 (1976); Shadow and Bone (1989).

handlist of late 20th century poets (part 2)

2010-12-25T08:09:00.000-08:00

Handlist of late 20th century poets
(born after circa 1950) (NB my project stops in 1997 so there is a cut-off there)

John Seed (1950), Marxist poet and social historian from Durham writing in a pristine neo-Objectivist style based on Oppen. History Labour Night (1984); Interior in the Open Air (1993); Pictures From Mayhew: London 1850 (2005); That Barrikins: Pictures from Mayhew 2 (2007).

In the midst of danger distance
Thinking ourselves
What the language tells us
Isn't there out of danger
A kind of half whisper
Breathing death in every place the
Face of London
Mask of a mask through a linen sheet
The dead-cart's night-errand
Spreading from that house to
Other houses
By the visible unwary conversing
Strangers dangerous
Rich and poor together
And people have it that know it not
(from 'Decision and Visibility')

Robert Hampson (1950?), from Liverpool, wrote the classic Objectivist/ documentary history of the town, Seaport (latest edition 2010); Assembled Fugitives is a selected poems 1973-98; Explaining the Colours (2010). Associated with the London School of the 1970s, co-edited Alembic.

Tony Lopez (1950?) mainly a performance artist in the 70s, also has a long term interest in bird watching - maybe the two merge from time to time? Wrote volumes in the process oriented style - 'Change' was one of the major long poems of the 70s. Moved to a more discursive style, peaked with Stress Management (1994). False Memory [1996] shows either typical overuse of a rhythm over several volumes or else having the key to relating politics to domestic circumstance. see http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2010/03/long-poem-of-1970s-feature-of-1970s-was.html

But what if all those incomplete adventures—
All those expeditions set up with the fetish
Of gleaming equipment: metal, leather, ropes,
Straps and fine boots, crampons and ice axes—
What if the whole project
Of fractured narratives, of pulp-novel collage,
Of technical idioms stripped of context
Is finally an alibi for moral collapse?
I don't mean relaxed sexual arrangements
Or even bathhouse promiscuity
But walking out on dependents,
Selling personal loyalty, integrity,
For the next fix of junk or fame.
What if the art itself is a fabrication
Of actual and terrible guilt; touched up
With sprayed-on essence of faded photo
Like a jungle-ad for choc-ice,
Snap-on Raj for upmarket snack-food
Or high camp in a panama hat?
(from ‘Northern Lights’ from Stress Management)

Adrian Clarke (1950?), long-term presence in the London avant garde scene. involved in performance poetry. edited Angel Exhaust, and edits AND and the Writers Forum series. Shadow Sector (1988). Spectral Investments (1991); Obscure Disasters (1993) are part of a trilogy called 'Ghost Measures', which consists throughout of lines of four words, with certain exceptions which are of eight words each. The preset line-model is a row of blanks, hence ghost measures, cf. also the spectre in 'spectral investments' (i.e. cultural or emotional investments). The effect of these insistent and asyntactic incisions in continuous verbal material is like a beatbox:

politics occulted pronomial freeze
frames narrative ellipsis exit
to clarify the door
slammed contextual by default
in Armorica the analogue
absolute magnitude bibliographic in
another perspective a closed
system speeds up to
proliferate the factual summary
at the event horizon

(from OD, 3); Doing the Thing; Possession, poems 1996-2006. His poetry is noticeable for its pace and can be described as dromoscopic (as described by Paul Virilio), to intensely exciting effect. It is somewhat in the manner of Raworth. Obliterating the rational tier of syntax allows a large-scale picture of contemporary politics and society to emerge in the fascinating emptiness.

Frank Kuppner (1951), labyrinthine and anti-realist poet from Glasgow. early poems emerging in 1983 saw the start of the new ludic current, sealed with his awesome debut volume of 1984, improvisations on the illustration to a history of Chinese painting. A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty was one of the classics of the new playful and hedonistic poetry which emerged, in the aftermath of over-politicisation, in the early 1980s. Has been seen as the ideal game to while away the time while you're unemployed due to a right-wing government dogma. Influenced by Edwin Morgan.

5
Observe the casements behind which lamps are shining.
It looks as if the whole city is preoccupied
On this gloomy, nondescript autumnal evening.
Why is a confused humanity wasting so much light?

6
The man slumped, dreaming, in the small pavilion
Is the same man as the one climbing the mountain path towards him.
In a minute or so, he shall pass by very close.
Although not quite close enough for recognition.

7
The scholars have gathered in a clearing in the wood.
Nervously at first, but with ever-growing enthusiasm,
They begin to discuss the insoluble problems of existence.
Soon, the forest resounds to their obscene drinking songs.

(from Second Best Moments in Chinese History)

Ralph Hawkins (1951?) Welsh poet and founder of the Essex School. edited Ochre magazine in the 70s. Early on wrote hippy pastoral poetry embodying leisure and calm: Word from the One, soft in the brain, more and more, But It May Be So. Wrote off-brand Chinese poems like so many others. Pasted up concrete and collage assemblies with Cobbing (Gloria, Pool). late work is indescribable but by far the best: The Coiling Dragon, The Scarlet Bird, The White Tiger, A Blue & Misted Shroud, The Moon the Chief Hairdresser (highlights), Gone to Marzipan.

I have not learned from experience
I have followed neither the line of fortune nor the line of desire
I have studied the imprint left upon the mattress
I have attained the possession of a shadow
I have yearned for the coming synthesis
I am unwilling to compromise with the dialectic
I reject the mechanical softening of contradiction
We could just kiss and kiss and kiss?
You could give up and live your life (!)
I take no pleasure in what the world cares for
I have built a house of osmanthus wood
I have planted an orchard of orange and pumelo
I will cross that gate when I open it
(from The Coiling Dragon The Scarlet Bird The White Tiger A Blue & Misted Shroud )

Jeremy Reed (1951-)uncontrollably prolific poet whose first pamphlet came out in 1972. represents the dominance of the 'intimacy' tradition in English poetry, permanently regarding small personal feelings as more real than anything else, and raising the feelings of bedrooms and small gigs to heroic dimensions. Has published some 30 books, more than I could track down (maybe 40?). It took four people to put his selected poems together (not finished yet). His masterpiece is presumably 'Stratton Elegy', from 1978 (printed in Black Russian. Outtake from the Airmen's Club, 2011).

a damaged mind rolled on a black marble
into an incandescent yellow flue:
the burn-back registers on my ticket
to the escalator, to fuming gaps
between the circuit of blood-stained mummies,
crooking like geese in pursuit, and the dolls,
(their features twisted), who pursued you through
the subways, wound up with aggressive teeth

67
pincering your ankles. They have returned
to feed other psychoses, to spit white lead
into the pineal. There is no space
living or dead we can retreat into
or realize with impunity
[...]
Homunculi
Floating above the Circus, no torsos,
but frog-like flippers attached to a skull
too magnified for microcosmic space.
A ka-prism through violet through orange,
and when recognized in the temporal,
it was something husking its wings at Kew,
an insect flisking on a leaf of eyes.

(from 'Stratton Elegy')

Maggie O’Sullivan (1951-) star of the London avant garde scene. writes ecstatic nature poetry in a radically primeval and non-discursive style. evacuation of syntax makes for dense, pounding, stresses, in discontinuous, constant, peaks. Interested in concrete poetry and incantations. Influenced by Barrie MacSweeney (the Odes period). Alto. London Poems 1975-84 (2009) collects earlier work. Body of Work (2006) collects pamphlets from the 1980s. Withdrew to Yorkshire and signed on at the same job centre as Michael Haslam. Seems to have written little since leaving London. House of the Shaman (1993). Palace of Reptiles (2003).

Robert Minhinnick (1952-) Most gifted poet of his generation within the Anglo-Welsh tradition. The selected poems virtually defines that line of realist and communalist writing with its sociological accuracy. Edited Poetry Wales (dates?). Developed remarkably during the 1990s and left or re-invented that tradition. Moved roughly from 'communalist' to 'rustbelt poet' to 'magic realism' and thus became the heir to Dylan Thomas. He realised he could be a world poet and not just the best Anglo-Welsh poet. One of the most important poets now writing. Selected Poems (1999); After the Hurricane (2002); King Driftwood (2008).

Robert Saxton (1952) from Nottingham. poet with an awesome inventiveness of language. seems to be preoccupied with puzzling ornate formal schemes. has no preference for themes and seems willing to dissolve into language itself. Hard to compare to anyone else but verbal games are an ancient pastime of mankind. The poems are singular and varied. The Promise Clinic (1994); Manganese (2003); Local Honey (2007). Saxton is a 'throw forward' from an era of virtuosi in rhyme. The burden, I think, is one of freedom: the unlikeliness of anyone finding so many rhymes points to an unimaginable complexity of unused possibilities which is, in itself, beautiful and soothing. The corollary, that the poem is not restricted by the urgency of unambiguous and 'significant’ experiences, is also a message about freedom: that biographical experience is not so tyrannical and unambiguous as a wave of biographical poets had it. That is, freedom again.
There is a value of rhyme which is not to do with jingling ornament but with statistics and probability. The various clauses of the mathematics which underlie language and the language faculty.

Alison Brackenbury (1953), Dreams of Power and Other Poems (1981), Breaking Ground and other poems (1984), Christmas and other Poems (1988), 1829 and other poems (1995), Bricks and Ballads (2004). impressive lyric poet of a conservative bent.

David Greenslade (1953), Welsh nationalist writing in English and occasionally in Welsh. Burning Down the Dosbarth (1992) was the only work in English published by the series of Y beirdd answyddogol. inspired by conceptual art to work in projects where fixed rules generate unique outcomes. Creosote (1996); Each Broken Object (2000), Zeus Amoeba (2009), Dark Fairground (2009).

Nigel Wheale (1953-) lives in Orkney. one of the Cambridge school, at a moment in the mid 70s when things were getting more politicised and less pastoral. Writes from a Left critique of the power order and with an interest in popular culture as something opposed to that. Has written about postmodernist culture and at one stage wrote high-tech postmodernist poems. Raw Skies. New and Selected Poems (2006).

In the high-tensity gallery case
gold foil leaves on an ancient alexandrine lover's crown
shiver to the skip of a far-down seismic beat.

Lean stealth-swallows vector thru haze
hanging at edge of the waves' teeth
on the slide, on the slip
snorting volatile chaparral oils,
keyed-up on air tone
over degrading quartzite earth,
updraughting on subalpine bliss
gifted from the color-blushed peaks above,
delicate as faded frescoes gracing a by-passed Diner.
(from 'Arroyo Real')

Jo Shapcott (1953), writes vivid poems with a prudently exact deployment of fantasy and surrealism. represents a new atmosphere in the mainstream of poetry in the 1980s, a decisive break with certain inhibitions. Phrase Book; Her Book: Poems 1988-98; Tender Axes.

Kevin Nolan (1953-), prominent member of the Cambridge poetry world who began publishing poetry in the late 90s. Loving Little Orlick (2006) is his one full-length book. An extraordinary development from 1960s Prynne.

it is the poetry of mourning
yet to come, the fold in generation we give our name
by gravity of certain apple boughs, milk and soil in
catalytic looping, to make ends new and never meet,
last resting place each second skin, each silhouette
on a filthy bench our almond, our stranger
My almond and my stranger—
since there is no shade where we end, even broad daylight
asks a whiteness to burn by its steady archive: I heard you
once speak the green months, in joy to the immanence
each wild psalm failed, whose will was light and one
with the terminal exstase of the counterlife, and
never paled or trimmed but signed at the very lip
I hear now, bloodline
of the phoenix flamed,
the entire bit-thing,
radial eternity
(from 'Broca's Fold')

Graham Hartill, (1954?) English poet who has lived in Wales for many years. Began with an interest in landscape art and moved into poetry. Was part of the Cardiff offshoot of the English Intelligencer school of interest in geography, landscape, and mythology. An interest in Chinese poetry was a side-effect of this. Ruan Ji's Island and Tu Fu in the Cities (1993); Cennau’s Bell (2005), a large selection of poems 1980-2001; A Winged Head (2007).

Ian Duhig (1954), from Leeds, a poet with a deep affinity for punk and quite unabraded radical ideals whose rare command of sophistication and cultural erudition produced some astonishing poetry. The Bradford Count (1991)is his major work. The Mersey Goldfish followed. His third book The Lammas Hireling (2003) showed a new admiration for folk styles which chased out literary interest almost altogether. The wish to be Shane McGowan needed more restraint.

It is the Night of Power and the puppeteers
are playing Karaguez, Martyr to Chastity.
Nubian grooms are breaking cameleopards.
Janissaries line their cloaks with lynx.

Sultan Mahmoud shows off his new French wife
on a caique drawn by jewelled fish.
They fan the Bosphorus like a wedding train
with an escort of heartbroken gulls.

The pirates came down upon Baltimore
like gulls to romp a bucket of fish-heads.
A traitor's black cross marked us on their maps;
they laid another black cross upon us.

(from 'The Irish Slave')

John Muckle (1954) Fire Writing and Other Poems, (2005) a searing set of social realist poems which does not fit in with anything else and is neglected because it is so isolated. Muckle studied at the University of Essex and met a number of poets later known as the Essex School. Ralph Hawkins was a significant figure in this group. He was a writer of prose fiction until circa 2003 but was in touch with advanced poetry. He devised and managed the 1988 anthology the new british poetry, co-ordinating various section editors, and completed this shortly before leaving Paladin. This anthology ended the 'exile' phase of Underground poetry.

Peter Philpott (1954-) part of the Underground scene of the 1970s and edited Great Works magazine. Published Some Action Upon the World and Nine Men’s Morris at this time. After a break, related perhaps to the political disarray of those in power and out of it, made a breakthrough into major poetry after 2000. The long elegiac and narrative poems in Textual Possessions (2003) and Are We not Drawn (2009) are astonishingly ambitious and complete, incorporating debate about poetry with contemplation of the sea and the mysteries of biology.

Moniza Alvi (1954-) debuted with The Country at My Shoulder (1993); Carrying My Wife (2000) collects earlier volumes. Drawing on ’magic realism’ modes of dealing with exotic geography. Influenced by Jo Shapcott, adapting her surrealism to the ‘double reality‘ of being of dual Pakistani and English culture.

Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, fond of deep subjectivity and New Age themes. The 1990 volume The Tree Calendar and the 1997 work Book of Shadows, which narrates scenes from the life of Giordano Bruno of Nola, are included in a collected volume, Hummadruz (2001). While the writing is unusually clear; it is like a brocaded quilt, warm and rich and saturated. Bright colours, rippling patterns. Symmetrically placed decorative elements, long sequences.

Robert Sheppard (1955) part of the London School in the 80s and like them wrote in an asyntactic manner which allowed for brief blazes of energy. Had a rock sensibility. Putting short emphatic poems together at monumental length ('Twentieth Century Blues') has not struck everyone as a good idea. The energy can lead to repetition and a lack of nuance. Followed Allen Fisher's work of the 1970s in presenting the modules as units that can be linked together in different ways, allegedly to different effects. The indeterminacy is seen as politically progressive. Has written propaganda for the spectrum slice of poetry he believes in (The Poetry of Saying, 2005).

Jamie McKendrick (1955), brilliantly gifted poet who is one of the arguments in favour of the (revived) mainstream. sophisticated and entertaining, a master of the affable spoken tone. Kiosk on the Brink; Sky Nails: Selected Poems.

Kelvin Corcoran (1956), major figure of the middle generation that followed Prynne and Fisher. Radically critical poet seeing paradoxes and self-betrayals in public life, informed by Adorno. Has been linked with the Essex School. Lyric Lyric (1993); New and Selected poems (2004); Backward Turning Sea (2008). interview in DSMT.

David Dabydeen, (1957) Comes from the Indian ('East Indian') population group in Guyana but has lived here for many years. An academic specialising in the sociology of Caribbean writing who has published a significant body of poems (Coolie Odyssey [1988], Turner [1994]).

John Goodby (1958), from Birmingham. generally seen as part of a school of far Left/ satirically oriented poets in Leeds, with Ian Duhig. Marginal politics led to a special view of history. Was one of the primary anti-thatcherite poets. Moved towards the avant garde. Illennium (2010) is probably his best work. Has lived in Ireland and Wales for long periods, and wrote a standard work on modern Irish poetry. Translated Heine's 'A Winter's Tale' and Pasolini's "Gramsci's Ashes". A Birmingham Yank (1998); uncaged sea (2008); Wine Night White (2010). Early appearance in 'Faber Poetry Introduction 8', 1993.

The vodka jelly arrived without you at the party. Pity.
It was blue! Though I would retaliate—
A sonnet one more than a baker’s dozen
undesigning gifts on your supernal grinning candour
(Yeah. Eye candy, you smoking dog!) The Westbourne
Concealed in rotten smoaks
In Frenzy, blondes wearing antique underwear
are vividly hidden, self-referentially strangeled in it.
Zephyrs, Zodiacs & Avengers cruise London streets
in sunlight, a tsunami of booze & sparklers. Was I 13 then?
(from 'Illennium')

Michael Ayres (1958), prolific and advanced poet specialising in the impact of the visual-technological. Poems 1987-92. Later work is too expansive in the tradition of extended dance mixes, luxuriating in variations (am, 2003?).

We meet almost every day now
in buildings of paper, by broken columns,
in streets of ambiguous proportions:
we meet in Fake Tombstone
where the saloon doors swing on their tarot hinges
and the origami thesis of a colt trots by
in a dust of print which covers the ground like ash
and which old tortoise eyes have secreted
dreaming their journals of tears:
we meet in a folded city and a closed town
topped by a papier-mâché acropolis.
(from 'Marshal')

Robert Crawford (1959) Christian poet, part of Informationist group in 1980s, which largely meant followers of Morgan. Sharawaggi (1990, in collaboration with W.N. Herbert) is a classic of writing in Scots and of Informationism. also functions as a literary manager not loved by all avant garde poets in Scotland. Writes avant garde poetry which escapes destructive attention from other managers because of his status as professor and Elder of the Kirk. Spirit Machines (1999).

I love my home, its lares et penates
Of broken shoe buckles, balls of green wool,
Needles, its improvisatory architecture
Feeding my work with interruptions, turns
Snatched, forty-winked; stashed seed pearls in a dish
Radiate homely, incarnational light

Sometimes the green walls glimmer, elverish,
Phosphorescent, spectrally alive,
Razorfish splay galvanized medium's fingers
Seeking burnished heads of polyps and carrageen
Brocaded with plankton, muzzled by antlered snails,
Vulval, brasslit, flecked and veined and washed

Dinner-suited Auchterlonian clubmen
Fill the fishtank windows of the R & A;
(from ‘Impossibility’)

David Kennedy (1959) published President of the Earth, new and selected poems, dating from the mid-1980s onward according to the jacket. I enjoyed this, a reception of the New York School. The book also includes a kind of avant-garde pastoral, based on programmed repetition and recombination of inherited lines, which is less effective.

***

Simon Smith (1961) part of the wave of 'avant garde neoclassicism' impacted by the huge retrospectives of the English avant garde put out by Allardyce, Barnett in the 1980s. Debuted with Night Shift (1991). masterpiece is 15 Exits (2001). Later work is more influenced by the New York School (Mercury; Reverdy Road). interview in DSMT.

then one fine day everything exactly
as you've guessed —the
sound Byzantine,
an average weekender on patrol greedy for the stuff
teethes prior to the feast. My love is a child and a bawd
pulled the knife on me.
Documentaries stoke up a fever till my pockets sag. The cabinet
crammed, trompe d'œil adding to torment,
but no formal suffering I've practiced
my survival technique for the day, deep, deep blue cleared of hinderance.
At Yalta you might, inventing countries nobody ever heard of. Idle hours
the weight a bluish hue,
sideburns dove-grey dash about the real economy, a price on your head,
ditched judgments of yesteryear
packed with solar
energy, askance to the gift I regret, the next of kin 50s style
slumped in a pink easy chair.
It reads like a book but rejects the flavour.
Maybe I'll learn Welsh. Albeit the loops are mine.
(from 'Fourth Hymn to Venus')

W.N. Herbert (1961) began with Dundee Doldrums, written entirely in the 'unfashionable' dialect of Dundee. This was ferocious satirical realism rooted in everyday experience in Dundee. Part of the Informationist group (with Crawford, Price, McCarey). Was probably at a peak in the 80s. A widespread view is that the pressure of producing endless new work to fulfil the terms of grants and so on led to a dropping-off. He began writing entirely in English. He also decided he could write comic verse and that he had similarities to the gay, colloquial and brilliantly cultured, New York poet Frank O'Hara. Not everyone agreed with this and the books written in this direction are not widely admired. Forked Tongue (1994) shows his full vigour.

I was James Young Geddes, Whitmanic in Dundee,
calling vengeance down on Cox and Baxter,
inventing Glendale as their apogee,
the terrible Jute-Lord, revealing to my public
his crab-like face, he who could be
man and factory at once;
a mausoleum-like amalgam, mounting the slopes
of the Law Hill, flexing his stalk-eyed clock-towers,
'Lit up at night, the discs flare like angry eyes
in watchful supervision, impressing on the minds
of the workers the necessity of improving
the hours and minutes purchased
by Glendale & Co.'
I did not flinch as he ate my fellows whole

(from 'Ticka Ticka Glendale', and quoting James Young Geddes)

DS Marriott, (1963) from Gedling, a borough on the edge of Nottingham. now lives in California. Family of West Indian origin, raised as a Catholic. Did a doctoral study on Prynne and began with work very deeply in the line of Prynne. Associated with the 'avant garde neoclassicism' wave of the late 1980s, which went back to the highest points of the Cambridge School and dismissed what had come in between. This can be seen as an expression of belief in the decay of the avant garde. More recent work, since the late 90s, has been more straightforward and more political and angry. Incognegro shows this later period. The Ship Called Lubek collects early work. The Lubek was the first English ship known to have carried slaves and was owned by Queen Elizabeth I.

Both mud and light
archetypal transparency, carved into
tapestries & bronze vantage. Humour
laid in stone-rush, & ritual light
gilding earthly stone. Then we move
on: Strasbourg worldly, tempered by
analogy & foliage, knowing this to
be the last act. There, ripened deed
tithed to bewilderment & profound
investiture. A song of Dowland teemed
over substance, fathered time-fear.
Then to leave: furred to a cold
seasoning, scoped to an impure centre.

(from 'In Darkness')

Tim Atkins. (1963-) author of unfailingly ingenious and self-aware and pleasurable poems. Books include Folklore. To Repel Ghosts. Horace. A Thousand Sonnets. In 'Horace' a Latin phrase about 'many winters' comes out in the English version as 'Johnny and Edgar' (Winters), so "Edgar & Johnny/ cling to the raider's spunk/ more splendid than the Starkeys'/ thin pamphlets & halitosis/ on the neck of/ translations". The debris of European culture litter a theme park with convenient cafes. Unlike anything else, or can be seen as a development of the New York School.

I was the boss of the poem when I was in it but what will all this mean in 10, 15 ears? Now that I'm here I'm not sure. But I wanted a bite. Is there nowhere? I wonder. Every little line falls out of me like fats. Pressing my mouth sounds. Pretending I'm still in. Projectile vomiting. Projective verse. I want to build a big thing that can throw everything in & when it is then I'll tell you. But what's left? Reading this. If I had started to quote what I stole from the reading I might as well have put on a dress. For us in any language. There's a reason to see how it invades the body and takes it but for the first time there are times. When I have been so much inside. That great intellect. Always in stories. What if we set up a restaurant & stopped worrying? Hose, pen, dialect. This was written with my nose. I wanted to end up happy but the saddest line is one that begins. First thought worst thought. If you ever die, never do it to hide.

(from 'To Repel Ghosts')

Elisabeth Bletsoe (1963), comes from Dorset. Was part of a group of writers in Cardiff in the 1990s who were interested in performance and in writing about landscape and myth. Early books are now collected in Pharmacopeia (2010). Moved back to England and works in a museum. Expert in herbs. Landscape From a Dream collects her classic later work, combining a radical interpretation of landscape (mainly in Dorset) with the psychological unity and dramatic unfolding of performance work. Is one of the greatest readers of poetry. interview in DSMT.

To orient: to bring into clearly understood relations, to determine how one stands. Quincunxial signs I thread along by; A's magic well, church, folly, trendle, sky-notch. Beak through stone, the one who tracks me, and the other for whom I wait. High Stoy, Dogbury Hill wave a fringe of dark, concentrate the toxin rape-fields, xanthin & arsenic yellow. One field flares and then another, under the wheel of cloud. Drunk on rare pollens I would dance on this floor of lights, finger-hoops of earth spraying, apricot-coloured and friable. Serrated with pig-huts, dry as a kex. To study the architectonics of hog-weed. To unpack the poppy-bud of its outraged silk, corolla visibly hurt to the end of its days.

I torce the necks of wounded gamebirds,
shock of come-apart cervicals, reflex
wingjumps, (feeling)
a pulse not my heart,
the once-complete potential in
soft declensions of egg-buds
(from 'Cross-in-hand')

Giles Goodland (1964), undertakes systematic poems which take on the underlying complexity of the universe, in a radically anti-personal way. Simultaneously exploits the complexity of data storage systems as ’givens’ and the power of generating language arbitrarily. One of few poets to face up to the complexity of modern knowledge and not regress within the 'personality envelope’. "Towards the end I got broadband and found it easier to simply paste my research from various databases straight into the poem.": in campaigns like this, Goodland seems to be taking on the idea of the ego as a data editing agent, highly mobile and 'trapped' in a universe of data stores. Everyone sees it something like this but 'personal poetry' has usually not caught up. Littoral (1996?), A Spy in the House of Years (2001), Capital (2006), What the Things Sang (2009). interview here: http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/11/collage-capital-interview-with-giles.html

The poetry of David Rushmer (1965) represents an unusual state of mind, and all seems to start from that point. Can be taken as a discovery of something underlying usual states of mind. Unclear if the source is personal experience or a dogma advocated by various French avant garde writers. Presents its theses in a crystalline way even if they are less than credible. spine: works (1989), Absence (1989), sand writings (1990)

Sarah Law similar to Llewellyn-Williams but within a Christian framework. Ascension Notes (2009); Perihelion (2006). language is highly coloured, too much for some people. Gothic, even. Fulfils the main theme of the era, that secularism is too hard and 'theological' religion has to be personalised and fitted into the feelings and longings of the individual. Decorative and expressive rather than logical.

Richard Price, member of Informationist school. Perfume and Petrol.

Alice Oswald (1966) nature poet representing a revival of the mainstream during the 1990s. Dart (2002) was a fascinating poem-documentary about the river.

Niall Quinn, Nick Macias, and Nic Laight, the group represented in the astounding debut However Introduced to the Soles (1995); wild and extreme avant garde poets. The collective volume seemed equally capable of bringing the whole poetry world to a halt and of being instantly suppressed from official memory. It lacks discursive meaning but is perfect on the planes of intuition and revolt. May not represent the Welsh avant garde as Laight is English and Quinn Irish. Why were they in Wales? Who knows. Form-up zone was probably Bridgend.

Extracting up,
he denial Earth,
Evolved stage
stage white upside embryo,
through venture emerald in mountain
paper mouthed, my so opened,
Daddy, makes of for serving,
in composer, me angel arms baby chain,
one crystal dream, on we, just recipes within,
womb always work,
cutting shower ahead,
here, that alive,
Daffodils, the from eyes,
The, & all, scrape earth,
in composers table,
may standing, born child,
serving all, head in ease,
(NS Macias from 'Red')

Vittoria Vaughan, (1970-) intuitive Jungian poet whose only volume is The Mummery Preserver. see http://pinko.org/13.html for a review

open to light, shadows spin
and whirr resonantly, as tongue
unhooks pendulum motes and
claws beamed clepsydra,

drive springs and spring-drives rhythmically,
forcing fusee's final jolting breath.
everything rests, a spell
girds ticking again,

'¼ flea's incisors, wing of bat, chrysalis grains ¼',
chattering pinions are covertly silenced,
finally, anchor escapement disintegrates,
abracadabra: all disappears.

only a face is left: alabaster,
glass and paper

(from 'The Clocks of Kitezh')

Paul Holman His poetry is indefinable but is laconic, occultist, and attached to the line of revolutionary and subversive yearnings. The Memory of the Drift (one volume published 2007 as 'Books I-IV') is a still continuing long-term project.

too severe to accept
some woodland king
for his model.
In delirium
the yellow waste bag
became an animal
and delicate red bird life
crackled in the harsh air
of the isolation ward.
Of course I am no better
than a déclassé market trader.
Horus: This wine is corked 　

Deryn Rees-Jones, (1968-) noted dweller in the 'third zone' which is neither mainstream nor avant garde. did a major 'recuperative' anthology of women’s poetry, Modern Women Poets, of much use to historians. The Memory Tray (1994); Signs Around a Dead Body (1998), Quiver (2004).

Peter Manson (1970?) from Glasgow. More or less encompasses the Scottish avant garde. edited (with Robin Purves) Object Permanence, the only avant garde Scottish magazine. His poetry is hard to define but is laconic, obscure, and attracted to Mallarme (whom he has translated). Birth Windows (1999). For the Good of Liars (2006). Between Cup and Lip (2008).

The walls' burden, Erato, appended
as who will speak, linear gold
Collapse thought down to the sixty
words you own, dumb in impaction
An epitaph's outflow in beeswax,
the twice-reddened wick
--
speechcraft
(from ‘Widows and Orphans (rhetorical fragment)’)

Sean Bonney (1973?) spent his early career in Manchester and Nottingham but benefited later from contact with the London scene around Writers Forum. stands for the continuing strength and integrity of English radicalism, the surviving hopes for a better social order. Blade Pitch Control Unit, is a definitive collection of his work to that point. Document (2009). Has benefited from the legacy both of Blake and of anarchism. interview in 'DSMT'.

Helen Macdonald (1973?) already a poetic prodigy as an undergraduate. had a greater natural gift than anyone around her. A volume finally came out in 2001, Shaler’s Fish. Interested professionally in ornithology, but apparently interested in everything. Has not shared the interests of her contemporaries and has appeared detached from the need to write poetry.

Pleat the grounds they have scripted
as such, plus plumage, quiet lunches
on the hotel lawns slipping forward
'til we sense some dutiful square
and stop, pulling the whole rueful shore
to a ha ha, a net around practical ankles
ah, how the hay smokes
into papaverous skies
as we address the heights of the C20th
in a poplin shirt, all declamatory and tired
with a suit that seals to rest these soft
& perfect metals. The organization
owes everything; is fit to tweak
a neuralgic scene reading Auden
beneath a naked sheet in stormy cupolas
where the coupled latch and larchlap twitter
breaks sleet print through the cigarette
dries trays of warm roses & vocable ash
as hands permitting a multiple
sleepless walk for the uninked signatory
(from 'Tuist')

Daniel Lane, pupil of John James and author of entrancing lyric poetry of the evanescent moment. Stuff Culture and Wrecks in Ultra-Sound both came out in 1995. 　

skipping along the happy surface
so you have it now to hand and
written down in your feather gloves
to bias nature's first penetrating
self-sustaining auto-erotic rule/that begins
absorbing the soft metallic impression
formed here as the imperfected gossamer of your
dress as a leaf drifts from a bird's nest and
the bird that also sweetly falls here
silent as the blown up image reflects
in damp light shows him howling while he recalls
how each job centres on escape pods little
beans flung across empty tables
(from 'Acetatae')

Khaled Hakim mainly known for partly improvised performance pieces, his published work is not extensive. Moved from the Birmingham arts scene to work at the Film Makers’ Co-Op in Camden, and his contribution to poetry was to re-introduce modern styles of narrative into it. As a performer, was provocative and specialised in exposing the audience’s inhibitions and cultural investments. Not everyone found this funny but it was certainly exciting. Family came from Sylhet. Associated with the magazines Equofinality and Angel Exhaust.

Deep personal unhappness is not a good start. How abowt mild malaize. Subsuming ideologs rancid little fuckups.
Deep personal conviction is never enow to make a curry. What we need is a job. Its nobody elses falt.
But also 'I' az an incomprehensible large part of th known univers. Everytime I look it fills it.
Cries fall from the page, iniquitus structures seep into prosody
poetry attracts the suffering fool, wile others program interactiv softwaer I am red
Now then wher are we. I have got somwere & Im no further than i started
We analyze from fundamental to randomness becuze its convenient. But in an infinitly extendable univers any point is an arbitrary set of relacions we alwayz find ourselvs in th midle of
but somwhere in this vector between Halesowen and Cradley Heath transendent meaning: sucsess
Wat we cal our lives arbitrary convencions establishd for owr habitual modes of perception—my producers let me down. Ive forgoten how old i am. Im overqualified az a secretary. Its too interesting to get an erection. Im living w/ my mom. I see haf an howr of daylite. Its dificult for relacions not to form in hyperspacial axes all concevable structurs
my life, as the saying gos, is compozd of thez tetrahedrons cubes octahedrons dodecahedrons icosahedrons rotated.
Do yu understand me too wel. Do yu understand me too wel. Ye fuckin dont yknow.
I got my langwage from TB Pawlicki. In the spirit of a raving sawcer paranoiack & dispassionat ironist of the new phyzics.
　
(from 'Letter from the Takeaway (2)')

Robert Smith In the 1990s, I saw a lot of his poems in typescript and published quite a few in Angel Exhaust. No book has followed and I think he has left not only poetry but academic life. The poems, each ten lines long, called sonnets, were quite exemplary, vivid and dream-like.

SKYBLUE LYRE BLACK THROAT
the box vibrates
& earthquakes out
into a wooden rose.
The wreaths are set,
wire twisted
round a martyr
head that hums
from heavenly crack
eyes slit upward.

Rob MacKenzie, a physicist by trade, of a Hebridean family and slightly resentful at being brought up English-speaking. Lived in Cambridge during the 90s and took part in the student poetry scene of the time. The poetry is advanced and hard to describe, the bilingual bits being the easiest to recognise. Off Ardglas (1997) is his only book.

that all meaning is solitary;
that the principal link is homophonic;
that plastic language's best found in word-lists;
that e-spell-checks save time best spent in dictionaries;
that effaced poetry is graphic art
that the temporal privileges painting
that painting poetry is more than writing it in anything but a prandial sense
that my response to my existence is necessarily dislocated, dismembered, effaced and solitary
that ((an)) analysis is privileged

(from '17 Points of Disagreement with Stephen Rodefer' from Invisible Reader)

Karlien van den Beukel, is the author so far of one brilliant book, Pitch Lake.

How I wept when it appeared
I was unequipped
to be an interpenetrative twin.

Yes, I have nothing
against the lamé underpantaloons of dawn
thrown over the Backs
whilst
taking the matitudinal interpluvium
in winsome
losesomeness.

This seems to be a critique of the Cambridge school, the ‘interpenetrative elite’. It argues some inside knowledge, we think.

Handlist of late 20th century poets (part 1)

2010-12-25T01:46:00.000-08:00

Handlist of late 20th century poets

pre-release version (part 1)

This is offered as reference sketches of careers, a few minimal details which may serve as orientation to the curious. After writing a compendious work on modern British poetry extending to 2000 pages, it occurred to me that I could do a low-calory version at about 1% of the length. Whether this is going to be helpful I do not know. For further and better particulars see http://www.modernpoetry.org.uk/nrsh.html , also http://www.archiveofthenow.com/ . For a map of which poets are discussed in which volume, see http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2009/08/map-of-7-volume-work-on-modern-british.html

This also gives me a chance to exploit the research into the Mainstream which I did roughly 2003-2010, so as to put poets from all parts of the spectrum into one frame for the first time. Poets writing in Gaelic and Welsh are included, at least marginally; my knowledge of these languages improves slowly.

This version is incomplete - I hope to add more names as I find the time. If you have other suggestions you can add comments and I will consider additions a year from now. The quotes are short enough not to give me copyright problems. This work was signed off in around December 2010.

DSMT is ‘Don’t start me talking’, a book of interviews. Ordering is roughly by decade of birth.

Poets

Tom Rawling (1916-96), a Cumbrian, published in 1993 Names of a Sea-trout, which includes some very good poems. The aesthetic is derivative of Hughes and Heaney to a remarkable degree – which makes it hard to write about him, and also reveals he was not writing poetry before 1976. His style is patient, full of physical details, without descriptions of feelings, compact, careful, vivid.

Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloe,
ignore the blood on your wrist.
Needle-prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin.
(...)
taste
silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.
('Sloe Gin')
　
　
Edwin Morgan, (1920-2010) was one of the dissidents from the dominant 50s culture who plotted the breakthrough of a new culture in the 1960s. Is widely accepted as the greatest Scottish poet since MacDiarmid, and was officially national laureate. Was developing the ludic, dizzily creative, anti-realist, wholly decorative poetry, which was hailed in the 1980s, during the 1950s. More involved with European poetry than anyone in this list, and a great translator. Has written in virtually every genre and taken on the impalpable world of the random, the anti-human, the systems generated by artificial rules. Collected Poems 1949-87 was followed by several more volumes. see http://www.pinko.org/30.html

Gerard Casey, (1921-2000) From Cardiff, published one poem, South Wales Echo (1973). He also published some translations from Greek, and the conclusion from idle searches of the Internet is that outside poetry he was interested in the esoteric and occult. In this he was close to Watkins and Kathleen Raine. As a poet, he was influenced by David Jones.

James Berry, (1924) Jamaican poet who has lived here for many years. has written a small number of intense and melancholic poems which pick up the burden of history. Hot Earth Cold Earth (1995). Has been a painstaking anthologist of other Caribbean poets in Britain (News for Babylon, 1984). has also written for children.

Eric Mottram (1924-95), not really an important poet but features here because he was such a key figure on the scene. Even though most of his poetry is so bad, exposing all the problems with the ‘open field’ style, some of his poems (‘Tunis’ and even bits of ‘Peace Projects’) are quite good.
　
after coffee in the Heliopolis Hotel 1955
under dome and propeller out to Giza
crawling night into the Great Pyramid
down the stone tube to a centre

thunder of beaten sarcophagus weight of stone measures
in that night a terror of ignorance I should have quieted
meditated on measure but framed by knowledge I lived blind
old untouched by harmonia mundi and magic techne
(from 'Homage to Denis Saurat', from the 1973 book Local Movement)

Eric coined the phrase ‘British Poetry Revival’, relating to the period 1960-74. Interview in DSMT. Also see posting elsewhere on this site.

Asa Benveniste (1925-90), Benveniste was a GI who stayed on in Paris after the war and worked on a literary magazine there. He never returned to America. His profession was as a printer and his interest was in Jewish mysticism (with some offshoots in Renaissance magic). Publisher of Trigram Press.

surmounted by butterflies sleeping asses
and thick rainwear assigning tickets
to aragonese boxes where visitors
familiar in deep religious fat tango
to the music of gematria
this is where it all fails.

Throw out the Lifeline Lay Out the Corse was collected poems 1965-83.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, (1925-2006) began as a concrete poet but is now primarily identified with the design of gardens and the construction of objects embodying symbolic schemas. Advocate of a return to the idealistic purity of the early French Revolution as summed up in the figure of St Just. Was, around 1960, actively bringing ideas from the modern art world, in fact Brazilian concrete poetry, into Scotland, which seems to have provoked rage and hostility from virtually everyone involved in the arts in Scotland. Not much as a poet but his ‘avant garde pastoral’ has its virtues when encountered in three dimensions. As a ‘service refuser’ was in a battalion of Pioneers during the war, one officered supposedly by the critic Derek Stanford ('Inside the Forties'), who pays tribute to his ability to create mass confrontation and impasses even as a student. Maybe the trees and ditches of the Pioneers gave rise to the ‘avant garde pastoral’. Wikipedia says he joined the Army in 1942, but this contradicts Stanford’s memories and he was there. What is avant garde pastoral for? does anybody know?

Anna Adams poems in the 1984 anthology Purple and Green. born in 1926, began writing seriously in about 1965. came into prominence in the 1980s, as part of a great cultural change I suppose. married to the painter Norman Adams and began as a visual artist. There is a beautiful volume of his paintings with her poems ('Angels of Soho'). Books include An Intercepted Letter, Nobodies. Likes satirical poems also about the basis of identity and social role, like many other feminist poets I suppose.

With earth-grained hands
I root in mud
to separate incestuous sibling
parsnips for the pot.

Can these be poet's hands
scrubbing the corkscrew toes
[...]
but scullion-scars,

split finger-ends,
flour makeup, onion scent
disqualify.
[...]
Hands meet in mud
lost metacarpal beads,
dust fingertips that grope for words,
ash witnesses.

(from 'Poet with Scrubbing-brush')
The more you recognise it, the less you can argue with it.

Ted Hughes, (1930-1998) more gifted than anyone else when it comes to imaginative richness and confrontational intensity but more shocking than anyone else in his relentless insistence on violence and destruction. Having achieved a fundamental liberation of the imagination from documentary or social constraint, he covered a great range of emotions but also played the same tune too many times, to numbing effect. certainly a Jungian and part of a group which made a new access to myth and the unconscious possible during the 1960s. Collected Poems gathers many individual books.

Alastair Fowler (1930-) published two volumes (in 1978 and 1982) and then fell silent as a poet. Some of the poems in those books are remarkable. His unconventional research on astronomical symbolism in Spenser influenced Allen Fisher in the 'schema' for Place.

Roy Fisher (1930), represents the good conscience of the avant garde as opposed to the 'bad past' of indifference and incoherent protest. The Dow Low Drop is a very inclusive selected poems. Birmingham River (1994); His volume of Interviews through Time (2000) is a classic of poetic theory by someone who actually likes poetry.

Rosemary Tonks, (1932) produced two brilliant books in the 1960s. according to the folklore, had a religious conversion which led to her withdrawal from the poetry scene (there are rumours of a religious epic which the authorities failed to approve).

Geoffrey Hill (1932) debuted with a pamphlet in 1952, when he was already accepted by other students as someone with command of poetry. Wrote slowly (debut volume 1959) but with results which were accepted as classic. Having seemed almost archaic in the 1950s, profited from the new poetics with the 'montage' effects of Mercian Hymns. Seemed to hit a barrier in the 80s. His temperament changed by 1996, with Canaan, the first great volume of an incomparable series of great volumes: Speech! Speech!, Scenes from Comus, Orchards of Syon, The Triumph of Love, Without Title, A Treatise of Civil Power. Hill's revival has seemed like the revival of English poetry itself. He and Logue, poets of the 1950s, seemed to dominate the early 21st century.

Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) did a degree in Natural Science but has mainly been associated with the cultivation of the imagination on the principle of Jung's theory of symbols that release the unconscious and mythical. Wrote with extraordinary vividness and fertility. Limited perhaps only by too great a belief in individual psychology as opposed to the outside world and the social. Was one of the people who revived English poetry in the 1960s. Saw poetry as an independent cosmos rivalling the real one. Too many books to mention. Was psychoanalysed by JH Layard, whose 1944 book The Lady and the Hare expounds a theory of symbolism cohering at the unconscious level which is behind a large area of the modern aesthetic.

Harry Guest (1932-), enigmatic and advanced Welsh poet. Debut in 1968. Much of his best poetry is collected in Lost and Found: poems 1976-82; with the groups ‘Elegies’ and ‘Metamorphosis’ especially recommended.

Airs of summer wind their way through the empty chamber
for the skulls have gone to stare behind glass at a crude
map on the museum wall. Perhaps the bones
were removed piecemeal when the mound fell in. The sun is low
and slopes of tough grass fleeced with hazel
repeat the fragrance of the day. High stone slabs
freed from burial by five thousand years of rain
stand in the light and frost. You do not like these journeys.
(from 'Fifth Elegy')

George MacBeth, (1932-1992) was one of the most prolific poets of the period, along with Colin Simms and Peter Redgrove. Amazing superficiality and amazing energy went hand in hand in this classic BBC producer, insider, and 'fixer' of the scene. A few poems of high quality demonstrate his talent. He was attenuated by fantasy and unable to leave it. The revival of 'ludic' poetry circa 1983 thus appeared as ‘the era where everyone does their George MacBeth book’. He had done a book of poem-games already in 1965. I found a book by George called 'War Quartet' which includes four long narrative poems of the Second World War, 'surreal' according to the jacket. As modern narrative poems they virtually re-found the genre; unfortunately they are totally without interest, it looks as if he wrote them over a weekend. He was that kind of guy.

Outside the snow falls in a mindless blank
where the downward turn
is all the hand can feel. If she lifts

her face (the girl in the glass cage)
she is old
enough to be tasting
the dipped salt on her tongue. The forgotten sea

drips into the grained skin that is ready
for it. So many crystals
of grey light in the sugar-sifter of

steel sponges! The nose hurts, it is
pressurized by the freezing-point
of anonymous water. Come in, mercy, no

other name in the black roll of
the Norse winter
challenges the moment your head rests in.

(from 'The World of the Oboe')

David Wevill (1935-), the son of Canadian diplomats, spent much of his early life either in Japan or in England, where his early work around 1960 was clearly leading in the revival of the whole scene at that time. Birth of a Shark (1963) and A Christ of the Ice-floes (1966) could be taken as 'existentialist authenticity' in the manner of the time, but yet broke free of the prevailing poetic norms.

This sea has many coasts,
And every inch and brown pool
Is a fingerprint. The gannets come
Plunging, wreck their sight; the sea-salt keeps
The crab-flesh it corrodes; and the grape-
Avenging Dog Star locks
These fiery lives to the pillows we drown on.

Firebreak, 1971 and Where the Arrow Falls (1973) show a radical departure into myth, inspired by non-European anthropology, comparable perhaps to work by Lowenstein and Thom. Departures is a 2003 Selected Poems. He has lived for many years in Austin, Texas, where there is a poetry translation unit.

Christopher Salvesen (1935), author of a few compelling poems about Scottish history. published two books presented as the history of a parish in Nithsdale. (Floodsheaf; Among the Goths).

Gwyn Thomas (1936). A Welsh-language poet of great importance. I can't explain why I like his work so much, but clearly it has to do with his personality, a combination of moral authority, belief in radical causes, and openness to new ideas. Thomas is just more credible than other poets. He began with poems about the slate quarrying community in north Wales and took advantage of the new simplicity of the 1960s. Recently he was National Poet of Wales. To achieve this popularity while rejecting the old-style rigid verse form was something almost impossible to bring off. An early critic said 'Only rarely do we find the first person in his poetry: 'we' and 'our' predominate' (John Gwilym Jones, in the introduction to Chwerwder yn y Ffynhonnau, 1962). Both the Welsh-language community and the old working-class community have been on the way out for much of his life; perhaps Thomas' strength is that he embodies the strength of those communities in his work as an individual, while being a modern person.
(Thomas does not appear in my 7-volume work ‘Affluence and Fine Words’ and is the only omission I would admit as Crippling rather than merely Stupid.)

J.H. Prynne (1936)
Prynne is, by common consent, both the most important and the most difficult poet of our era. We can loosely divide his creation into three periods: the early stage as a Movement poet, ending about 1963; the phase of clear and philosophical poetry summed up in The White Stones (1969); and the late stage where the language is a breakthrough, or a move into the cryptic, for reasons which are a matter of debate. An entire sector of English poetry can be described in terms of which period of Prynne it is imitating. Prynne identified difficulty with virtue, and with a critical understanding of life in a society where doping and deception are a major industry; this much was already accepted by the English Literature academic world of the 1950s. Like other work emerging from the 1950s, his is ‘a cold bath for the romantic’. While not a domestic poet in the usual sense, Prynne was preoccupied, in the White Stones period, with the mystery of daily life, ‘the structures of everyday life’ as in Henri Lefebvre’s book, and with experiences like shopping and walking through a town centre. It seems that Prynne and Fisher are the only poets who have really incorporated scientific insights into the structure of their poetry, as opposed to anecdotes or postcard images: “These are both obscure poets. There is no point denying this. Also, their works - the Collected Poems, Place, Gravity, Entanglement, Leans, Defamiliarisation - are so large in extent and so complicated in design that they are almost intimidating. This emotional colour was not there in 1980 but has stolen over the scene as a late effect. At the same time, the quality of newness which the poetry possessed at the outset, and still in say 1975, must have shifted as decades roll by: its originality has not diminished but the puzzles which surround it are old puzzles. Of course a community of readers has grown up around both poets, even if the salaried critics do not have a clue what is going on. The perspective shift between regarding them as scrolled up into a tiny space of precision and nuance and seeing them as of monumental scale and magnitude shimmers around them, so that they shimmer rather than staying in clear sight. Because of the complexity involved it is arguable that these two poets together make up most of the informational complexity of modern British poetry.” (AD). Prynne was professionally a ‘knowledge worker’, keeping up with very wide fields of knowledge in order to make purchase decisions for a college library. The preoccupation with the newest thing all the time may come from this need to keep up, or from an existentialist belief that the area of the immediate and the unknown is where consciousness and authenticity are to be found. It seems very likely that Prynne’s late work is spontaneous in nature, written from a borderland where the brain is most alert and least able to rely on secure knowledge assets. The language includes elaborately wrought philosophical argument but also radical montage and a kind of primitivism, a ‘year zero’ of knowledge and lexical structures.
There is a whole book on the experience of reading Prynne (edited by Ian Brinton). The Collected Poems is a desirable object, but contains almost too much; it is easier to reach close understanding of the work in much smaller sections.

John Riley, (1937-78) associated with the Grosseteste/ Ferry school and was one of a group of students in Cambridge interested in Objectivism even in the late 1950s. a convert to the Orthodox Church whose poetry is anti-rational, preoccupied with Byzantium, free of logic. Edited with Tim Longville the Grosseteste Review, perhaps the most influential of all post-war magazines. The Collected Works came out in 1980.

John Powell Ward (1937) main work is From Alphabet to Logos, a set of concrete poems published as a loose-leaf folder in 1973. These are wonderful creations, making the transcendental visible, the pulse of ideas never slowing down. Ward has since published books in a more discursive style, still inventive and free. Matthew Jarvis has drawn attention to a group of Welsh visual poets at around this time; a fragile genre I suppose, and populated by avant garde hacks. Achievements like this should not be lost to memory. Ward is technically an Englishman living in Wales.

Ken Smith (1938-2003) working-class poet from Yorkshire admired for his integrity and humanity. leading figure of the radical simplification of the 1960s, the total parataxis, which was either anti-bourgeois or pro-American. interested in figures on the margins and loss of socialisation, such as the animal metaphor hero in 'Fox Running'. Best work is in 'Fox Running' and 'Tristan Crazy'. Late work did not add to his reputation, as is often the case for the anti-literary writer. There is a volume The Poet Reclining: Poems 1962-80.

R.F. Langley (1938-2011) a friend of Prynne’s when both were students, and one of the poets of that generation who accepted modern poetry rather than nostalgia. A cultured man who had a creative late blossoming from 1990 on. Collected Poems (2000) contains precisely 17 poems, but each one is singular, philosophically open, pristine. More or Less (2002). The Face of it (2007) contains 22 new poems. Was one of the more important poets writing in the last 20 years.
interview in 'DSMT'

We slow out and curve
then the deep lawlike
structures loom and bob
through. We sway up, shut
down and open, coolly, each
small hour. Quiet. Then
quieter still. When thin
rims of rose and powder-blue
start slightly and a marble
runs down a chute.
(from ‘The Ecstasy Inventories’)

Colin Simms (1939-) has worked throughout his life as a naturalist, meaning being out of doors most of the time. His poems are typically instant grips of something that flashed and disappeared, sometimes painstakingly assembled into larger patterns clasping some part of a greater but elusive organism. In the 70s he wrote a group of long poems about the biogeography and Native Americans in the north-west USA, collected as The American Poems (2005);
Otters and Martens (2004), Gyrfalcon Poems (2007), In Afghanistan (1994), For Basil Bunting. Eyes Own Ideas (1987). The scope of his work was not visible until shearsman's publication programme made it so.

glacial-melt-water valley little into filled land so that it was forgotten by the farmer
a sinuous scar healed over by the machines except its corn grew darker in the shallow
it brought them up from the south, hirundines black arrows skimming the little clouds of midge
even if they were going east to west, here they turned north and the birds of prey already knew it
where it grades to the river there the spread of the bright green was, and the marsh-marigold yellow
in the willowgarth's annual growth so fresh green it bewildered like its birdsong the willow-warblers
leading up to something on the water cyclical yeasty bubbles showed the first sulphur-yellow wagtails
and up to something the draw led, under the skylarks, sparrowhawks had always been, in this
like so many birds of prey in two sizes.
before they had left the land egg-collecting boys knew that, but their continuity was broken
(from 'Spring: arrival' from the Gos Lives cycle)

John James (1939), from Cardiff. a great poet of sociability, affability, the vanishing moment. Essentially an oral poet; related to Apollinaire and O’Hara and like them interested in visual art and its ‘eternal present’. Collected Poems (2002). A new book (In Romsey Town) is out from Equipage.

Tom Raworth (1939), one of the major avant garde poets to emerge from the turmoil of the 1960s. This began with the dandyish poise and razor-sharp wit of sixties insouciance, wiring incompatible but pleasing things together. His collected poems revealed an oeuvre of immense ambition and dedicated purpose, perhaps like corroding away the self to reveal the operation of language and burning through a deceptive surface to reveal the deep structures of a class society, its organs of self-deception and self-reproduction. Collected Poems (2003).

*
Judith Kazantzis (1940-), records that she began writing poetry (after adolescent production, lost) in 1973 after reading The Colossus. ‘It was painting, psychoanalysis and feminism that set off my poetry in the 1970s[.]‘ She belongs to what now seems a heroic generation, facing at the start the complete opposition and disbelief of a society. She reached insights for the first time which poets have been re-finding ever since. Mine field (1977) is the first product of this, both about infantile states as the basis for a greedy political system and as innocence as always the start of a possible new arrangement of public affairs. In retrospect, this was a classic work, and in fact Kazantzis is one of the most significant feminist poets in Britain, outstanding for political maturity and for sounding natural, persuasive, and light. Selected Poems 1977-92 is a 'selected-collected'.

Peter Riley (1940). a participant de premiere heure in the English Intelligencer project and pupil of Prynne. Has resolved splits in the scene by becoming re-engulfed by the pastoral tradition. Likes to write about long walks, too long for some people's legs. Can be seen as an outlet for Prynnean methods in conservative and weatherproof dressing.

Isobel Thrilling, Christian poet writing lyric poetry of cohesion and sensitivity. The Ultrasonics of Snow; Spectrum Shift; The Chemistry of Angels; The Language Creatures (2007).

Pauline Stainer (1941-) began with Christian mysticism and developed this line through a range of miraculous imagery from other religions, science, and folklore; the impossibilism makes for poetic shock and awe. Books include The Honeycomb (1989); Sighting the Slave-Ship (1992); The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994); The Wound-dresser’s Dream (1996); The Lady and the Hare (2003) is a selected poems. Crossing the Snowline (2008)

I
No such thing
as routine death -
in ultima Thule
the shaman stretches
the throat of a walrus
over his drum
It is Ascension week;
the men wear black crêpe veils
against blindness,
the ship's astronomer
is given four ounces
of raven
Sterna paradisaea
is caught with ordinary cotton,
a number of snowy owls
are shot,
one thawing its prey
against its breast:
O terra incognita
the tundra is silk-crewel work;
polar bears sweat
through upturned paws,
the ship's figurehead
warm as though from the furnace
the sagas redden -
(from the amazing long poem, 'The Ice-Pilot Speaks')

DM Black (1941-), Scottish poet, brought up in east Africa. Began publishing circa 1965. Has published little (a few Goethe translations) since the 1980s. A Collected Poems 1964-87 came out from Canongate. Trained as a psychoanalyst. Mainly known for extraordinary narrative poems based on Jung, mythology, and science fiction. These are unlike anything else. see http://www.pinko.org/30.html

Barnett, Anthony, (1941-) Writes in a 'phenomenological' way about the mystery of being. One's rating of him depends on whether one values this 'cosmic incomprehension' as profound or as blank and disoriented. Was included in the anthology A Various Art. Has also been active in the free jazz scene as a percussionist. A three-volume retrospective set included a book of interviews which puts his view of things. The Resting Bell, collected poems, 1987. Miscanthus (2005) was a new and selected poems.

White
of the Northern bird -
What white?
White ice,
crystals,
　
besides, the
black lake, blue-gray lake,
Because of the water-dark,
May sun.
Speech-like,
beside
bleak prayers of ice
breaks, before morning;
the morning
where your voice is transmitted
is silenced.
('Drops', from Blood Flow)

Tom Lowenstein (1941-) was definitely at a peak in the 1980s (Filibustering in Samsara, 1987). Part of this work has been re-issued as Ancestors and Species. New & selected Ethnographic Poetry (2005). the most intellectual of all Jungian poets and one of the most intellectual of any poets. Notable for having a professional knowledge of anthropology as well as a scholarly knowledge of Pali and the Buddhist scriptures. Has translated Eskimo poetry related to his fieldwork in Alaska, but his reflections on what it means to be human are more valuable.

In the middle distance, then, the last routines of purely local reminiscence
with horizons uncorrupted and uncluttered:
but now on the skyline
there came cross-hatched structures, masted and then also funneled,
the scaffolding a-bristle, sketched in complicated silhouette
as though each rig were bird bone and sinew dried and lifted,
or disjointed from the meat part
in some planally disorganised arrangement,
a great wing flexing erect its exo-skeleton, and then as the ships closed, they saw marvellous
hypertrophies of skinboat and fantastication,
alive, alone, aloof and curiously peopled,
heavy with stuff indefinably desirable,
but then abruptly gone in atmospheric summer shimmer
('At Jabbertown, 1890')

John Hartley Williams (1942), taught first in Yugoslavia and then at the Free University of Berlin, where he lives. Is securely identified with English postmodernism and with the new 'ludic' poetry of the 1980s, but had already nailed this style in Hidden Identities (1976), which among other things can be defined as the best volume of English Pop poetry (which mutated into postmodernism, it would seem). An incomparable sequence of books followed: Bright River Yonder (1987); Cornerless People (1990); Double (1994); Canada (1997); Spending Time with Walter (2001); Blues (2004). Tumultuous, formally free, inventive; terms like 'magic realism' and 'folk surrealism' have been applied. Was influenced by Rosemary Tonks. The Ship (2007) is a re-issue of published and unpublished poems from the 1970s. Ignoble Sentiments (1995) gathers early poems and a memoir of his life up till 1970 or so.

When we opened the door
the corpse of cigarettes, wild music & brandy fell out.

We reeled back, put our heads down
& went in. 'Bean soup', said Steve.
We breathed pure garlic farts
& smoke from the charcoal grill.

They brought it in a tureen
full of gypsy gold teeth, smiling up at us.
The beans were hopping
to the pizzicato rhythms of a mad orchestra,

to a melody that danced them
deep into the soulful thighs of the ham,
a spice barrel full of paprika, which went
ba-boom! when we dunked kettledrums of bread in it.

We slurped the fiercest bits. It was
the choicest liquid ever tasted, & it had chosen us.
our ears pricked to jagged kolo music,
the wheel dance, so many little feet this way & that

like beans you can't get on yr spoon, so fast they jiggle,
that way & this. 'How many bean languages can you eat?'
asked Steve. 'Serbian? Hungarian? Danubian?'
The white wine sank a shaft of bliss into our smoky heads

(from Bean Soup)

Gwynne Williams (1942) Rhwng gewyn ac asgwrn (1969) was an extraordinary book, building on the ‘experimental cynghanedd’ of Euros Bowen to produce something light, musical, enchanting. Williams did not follow-up energetically, although he produced one other volume which consists of adaptations from other languages, an arrangement which allows the originality of his versification to emerge clearly.

David Barnett (1942-), Jungian poet who has lived in Wales for many years. Writes with a virtuosically quick flurry of monosyllables, describing myths and rituals of integration. Fretwork. All the Year Round. see http://pinko.org/13.html for a review. New books are expected in 2011.

Peter Abbs (1942), Has had a long career but the poetry in For Man and Islands (1978) and Songs of a New Taliesin (1979) was what struck me. See my discussion in The Long 1950s. Abbs trained to be a Catholic priest at one time and has had a parallel career attacking modern art for its lack of spiritual richness and optimism. I always find these essays convincing, but then when it comes to it the art doesn't quite do what the essays say it is going to. 'essays on the present breakdown of culture' and so forth.

Tonight, as we lie in bed, a battered moon drifts
Through the sky - it seeks a glistening eye,
It seeks a low-tide pool, a mountain lake,
In which to dip its wounded face,
Its scarred distended cheeks, its frozen mouth.
Who will return its former life? its lost being?
Its ancestral bearings? Who will lend the slack night
The great curved mirrors of his mind
To house this nomad face? We turn away.
(from 'Estranged' in For Men and Islands)
　
John Hall, (1942-) member of the early Cambridge school and participated in The English Intelligencer. Included in the anthology A Various Art. Couch Grass, Meaning Insomnia. seemed to stop publishing at some point in the 1970s. Has come back with visually oriented work more recently. There is a selected poems, Else Here (1999) but much of his work is unavailable. Days only came out in a magazine at the time (1973) but is largely in Else Here. Interview in DSMT.

& on the bright face is
all fair? how does the light
shine back from the desert spaces of
the sands & the gleaming ice-caps? I sense the green
darkness of the latitudes of my origin
as I move about now
in the clarity of these northern cities & call it
my fortune to be talking of origins
in the grasslands of my own life
which may have been the grasslands also
of this species
(from 'Lustre' from Between the Cities)

David Harsent (1942-), began as an associate of The New Review, and was a product of the 60s, operating on the borders of the tolerable in sexuality, brutality, delusion, the irrational. His early work is summed up in an important Selected Poems (1989). Mister Punch (1984) was a classic which took the polarisation introduced by radical feminism and brilliantly exploited it. It was also a rewrite of Crow. The Punch theme probably came from Harrison Birtwhistle, who had previously commissioned a Punch work from another librettist. His acceptability to influential patrons in the world of opera and theatre has led to exciting commissions and unusual prominence but also to an inflation of style. It was followed by News from the Front (1993) and A Bird's Idea of Flight (1998). A natural miniaturist, his efforts to write book-length projects (since Mister Punch) have gone badly (Marriage, in 2002, Legion, in 2005). He drew on the 'hare' imagery of the psychoanalyst JH Layard. He remains a gifted poet.

As he bent back to trawl
the page, I heard a rustle like something
stirring a fall of leaves, and a worm
came out of his head, a thin
filament, breaking the skin
of the waxy crescent
just behind his ear, nosing the air
for the hint of burning
back along the stack.
'You have wasted your life.

(from The Archivist)

Andrew Crozier, (1943-2008) wrote poetry about the philosophy of daily life. Interested in visual art and frequently worked with visual artists. Influenced by Objectivism and by conceptual art. publisher of Ferry Press, a legendary outlet for the Cambridge School, also known as the Ferry/ Grosseteste School. Was associated with this group in the key mid-60s period, also founded The English Intelligencer. All Where Each Is was a collected poems. Interview in DSMT.

Iain Sinclair (1943). from Bridgend. Wanted to make B-movies but was forced into poetry by the tricks of fate. It is the one art-form that costs less than a B-movie. Wrote two works in the 70s, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, arguably not wholly 'poetry' but at the core of the Underground scene of the time. Like Edgar G Ulmer, his camera remains steady even when his characters disintegrate. Has mainly been a novelist and psychogeographer since 1987 but has also returned to poetry, a frequent relapse. Flesh eggs and scalp metals (1989) collected early poems (1970-87). The Firewall (2006) is a selected poems 1979-2006. There is a volume-length interview with Sinclair. His artistic ideas have been recycled by several hundred people by now. Including me, possibly.

Vicki Feaver (1943) from Nottingham. slow writing poet doing work of striking sensory intensity. concerned with the violence locked up in myth and fairy tale and the feminist message of Judith and Holofernes. The Handless Maiden (1994); The Book of Blood (2006).

Alexander Hutchison (1943), from Buchan in north-east Scotland. Deep-Tap Tree (1978); Epitaph for a Butcher; Carbon Atom (2006); Scales’ Dog (2007). virtuosic, laconic, and erudite poet using basically oral forms. occasionally writes in Buchan dialect. a remarkable speaker of his own work.
interview in DSMT.

Spike Hawkins (1943) published the lost fire brigade in 1969. One can speak of psychedelia, or of an English art school adaptation of Dada, but really this sounds like it comes from another universe. This was the best product of 'Pop poetry' in England, a genre which has been erased from history. A book followed in about 2004 which I saw but didn't have time to read.

Allen Fisher (1944) is a figurehead of the Underground and one of the poets one has to read in order to grasp what has happened over the past 40 years. He began with a kind of ‘year zero’ and built up from this resonant emptiness to work of encyclopaedic completeness. Fisher took Blake as a model, and because he identified Blake as involved in a ‘deviant physics’ he also began with a variant physics and cosmology. He spent much of the Sixties involved with conceptual art, notably in the fluxshoe art movement. Between 1971 and 1980 he composed the sequence 'Place' (complete edition 2005) and between about 1982 and 2005 he composed the sequence 'Gravity as a Consequence of Shape' (published in three volumes called Gravity, Entanglement, and Leans). The preset ‘cells’ are constructivist, creating ‘set-ups’ within which the poet can improvise and invert expected positions, fulfilling an original project of subversion. Although divided into two works, there is a continuous development over the span of ‘Place’ and ‘Gravity’, and the later parts of 'Place’ are very different from the early parts. Overall the mood changes from a highly emotional hippy or Situationist, demanding the rapid redesign of society, to an intellectual wandering through the apparently endless complexity of gene technology and particle physics. The use of characters, such as the Bellman, the Burglar, Watling, Doll, etc., starts with part V of ’Place’. The early parts, such as book I of Place, show a projection of feelings onto the earth seen as an organism with ‘vitality’ and ‘disorders’, the flow of currents of fresh water and heat affecting the emotions of the poet: very subjective and metaphorical. A more abstract approach evolves gradually. It is important not to forget a number of works outside the chief cycles, notably Defamiliarisation, a ‘pure’ conceptual work which is one of his most impressive. Blood Bone Brain may only be available on microfilm.

David Chaloner, (1944-2010) leading exponent of the 'eternal present' style of the 60s. a designer by profession, was influenced by visual art. Reproduced the surface of daily life with hallucinatory vividness and with a poignant sense of unexplored possibilities. A combination of sophistication and immediacy. Was included in A Various Art. Collected Poems (2005) was followed by Beyond These Lines (2007). Interview in DSMT.

The first phrase bereft of promise
sets indifferent channels at odds.
Phantom light supplies the dawn its several hues.
Patterns of emotion trade tragic consequences.
Brightly enclosed and variously constructed
national alarm whimpers a possible variant.
Ancient discontent and forgotten motive
transferred as senseless brooding.
The day enters to close sporadically across
the lettuce patch green in my mind's eye
colour of outrage waste and abuse; theoretically.
(from ‘Art for Others’)

Jeffrey Wainwright (1944), Heart's Desire (1978) was a classic debut. This seemed for a long time to be shaping up as the author's only book. Part of the interest is that it may have defined Carcanet's "secret project", defined by Schmidt as 'neo-conservatism of the Left'; Heart's Desire is very committed left-wing poetry which is also 'critical' and unaffected by the Pop sensibility. This may well be the touchstone by which we measure that 'secret project'. He returned to the fray with The Red-headed Pupil (1994), a set of arguments for secular materialism in a curiously 19th century framework.

Mimi Khalvati, (1944) is British but from an irani family. Has been a frequent teacher at The Poetry School. A sensitive and artistically ambitious writer who became prominent during the 1990s. In White Ink (1991); Selected Poems (2000); Entries on Light.
interview at http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showdoc=30;doctype=interview

The white rooms of the house we glimpsed through pine,
quince and pomegranate are derelict.
Calendars of saint-days still cling to plaster,
drawing-pinned. Velvet-weavers, hammam-keepers
have rolled their weekdays in the rags, the closing
craft-bag of centuries. And worker bees
on hillsides, hiding in ceramic jars,
no longer yield the gold of robbers' honey.
(from 'The Bowl')

John Robinson (1945), Yorkshire poet. The Cook's Wedding (2001) is a remarkable example of 'late Pop' work which has great charm and energy and never outstays its welcome. This is apparently his first book. The jacket says "he shovelled much of the concrete in the M62".
　
Paul Evans (1945-91) Welsh poet noted on the Underground in the late 60s and 70s. student of Eric Mottram. February, published by Fulcrum in 1971, summed up a whole era of breathy, low-effort, 'underground' serenity. He filled a key role overlapping 'Pop' poetry and the 'open field' world of Mottram. A selected poems, The Door of Taldir, came out in 2010. His late work is much less interesting.

I will be reborn
as a bird,
Plotinus says
because I love music
too much

maybe I’m
already one
eye winking
from a black disk
feathers
ruffled by the wind
I‘ve launched myself on

Peter Didsbury, (1946-) Didsbury lives in Hull and has published three books: The Butchers of Hull (1982), The Classical Farm (1987), and That Old-Time Religion (1994). The first two are brilliant. The basic method is of fixing reality before interpretative frames have classified and categorized it, isolating primary features, and recording these features in a serial way, so that the interpretative framework, invisible and eliminated, paradoxically stands out starkly as if read by infra-red light.

Peter Finch (1947), Can be seen as the equivalent in Wales of Morgan in Scotland: like him he has specialised in concrete poetry, sound poetry, and generative rules. Writes with astonishing energy, abiding at the tier of language before the personality, enjoying the boundless possibilities of the inchoate and the unbound. There is a Selected Poems (1987) but also a Selected later poems (2007). His books include Make, Food, Useful, Poems For Ghosts and Antibodies. The Welsh Poems appeared in 2006, and Zen Cymru was published in 2010.

In the foothills we discussed
the rights of passage with others.
The Americans said do said do you do
you do it. Our educated peers
outran us already tried our methods
and abandoned Eliot
didn't mean this. The bloody echo
of that chiming phrase. We were
outnumbered by stone throwers. We lay down.

Ages protect themselves with grease
in the paper-mills a bloom on the
whiteness which won't take ink they
own the forests they supply the bears
Kill them. For twenty-five years
in the streets we met with
malcontents, revolutionaries, sellers of tracts.
Peace is milk. War is acid.
But the centre always holds.
(from 'Shock of the New')

Michael Haslam, (1947) from Bolton. Romantic and mythographic poet rising to sublime heights. A Whole Bauble: Collected poems 1977-94 states the case. There followed The music laid her songs in language (2001), A sinner saved by grace (2005). Mid Life (2007) is a revised version of A Whole Bauble. Friends with most of the Cambridge School, took his early themes from the Prynnean interest in geography and myth, but is unfailingly impulsive and stricken by beauty where they are philosophical and critical. interview in DSMT.

The Figure I again stand here and sees
the river run uphill and disappear
into bush of blips of light
around a molten mountain sun —
a river budding
out at spindly wells, and mouthing
rushbed issues. I can imagine
what the figure must have felt to find
the one thing that they called the source
abstracted rose in an adulterated landfill.

(from 'The Music Laid Her Songs in Language')

Susan Wicks (1947-) Writes very short poems which achieves intensity through disorientation, like extreme close-ups which plunge you into the middle of an action. Dominated by sensuous detail and urgency. The Clever Daughter (1996)

She is the consummate dancer,
her grey silk shadow on marble
as her scorpion body arches
its fountain of piercing juices.
From the floor she can almost see it,
the grey-faced prophet's sneer
from the pit, the hungry trophy
hauled between them for centuries
across desert, crying its dead message.
(from 'Three Tales' in The Clever Daughter)

Penelope Shuttle, (1947-) author of poems in a 'magical realist', radically mythical style, based on Jung, folklore, and feminism. Arguably an early poet of the New Age movement. Can be seen as writing experiments in consciousness to help the feminist experiment in social arrangements. The Orchard Upstairs (1980); Selected poems 1980-1996 (1998).

Martin Thom, an anthropologist, stopped writing poetry and vanished from the poetic scene in about 1978; his work is contained in a book and two pamphlets (Ceremonial Devices and 19 songs). He is mainly remembered for The Bloodshed the Shaking House (1977), especially its startling first poem. His work, completely free of rational structures, has a dreamlike quality remarkably sustained:

Against the ore and elements
at dead heart of earth
hollowed out in wish, desire
there is a dark stream hieroglyphic
to carry your intention high
from death to some other blazing bed
on earth face, not mine
where black beads, black wood
by the sea rolled
shining, colour of liver
so rich in assimilated forms, the hermaphrodite
is all gift
shooting
you
into a wall of dream bees. To seek you out
wherever you are
is good.
frightening above fields
the work of creatures in
exchange, their impish glow
to things unknown It is freely given as ghost
pollen to lunar child
in tidal loops already marked
all starry, to be
come. Human in her pain & blood, a little
(...)
(from The Bloodshed, the Shaking House, 1977)
　
Grace Lake (1948-2010) from Stockport. led a stormy life. on the extreme end of 1968 radicalism, Situationism, King Mob, etc., stayed with the feeling of 1968. lived much in groups for whom the revolution was the main event, full-time and yet not really there. wrote in an irrational way in accordance with libertarian ideals. Her work is hard to interpret and much of it has not been published. Bernache nonnette (1995); Parasol 1 Parasol 2 Parasol Avenue ('96); Tondo aquatique (1997). A long poem, 'Sibyls', either does or does not exist. A project is under way at Birkbeck College to publish the rest of her work.

forlorn the lost, horse chestnut leaves across their mouths
mourn the nights that stop the portuguese
from changing flowers to musak
in other tongues our futures rung
the old uneconomic songs
proclaimed pandemic.
distinctively white shorelines await
the brave, the nonchalant, the hysteric,
servants retreat into a background
(for the) prophesies of April light
are noticed to be aiming
by slow and sure control
at correct definition
held fast as half strangled elegant cats
hanging a late grape on a battered straw hat,
and a cherry glistening, and a raspberry listening,
to the cream viyella collars of vietnamese sailors
flying their crafts to mexico
where snows melting around tangerines
drift to cool the edges of horse chestnut leaves
oblivious to the forlorn's lack of imperialese.

(from ‘dour’)

John Ash, (1948-) cannot be described without mentioning the New York School and the efficiency of his work has something to do with being a second generation. Unfailingly presents his peculiar character of wit, melancholy, and impressionability, which by now we could not bear to be without. The Burnt Pages; Selected Poems (1996); The Anatolikon/To the City (2002).
The assassinated emperor disembarks
under a dome of glass and metal¼

Steam! Violins! Majolica roses!
Oiled moustaches! Braided uniforms! Saliva and kisses!

A glistening machine, all cogs and chains
and wheels (and wheels within wheels)
hauls him to the highest balcony
and the concert begins.
Poor Beethoven, poor Mozart
you are left far behind the primitive masters

your symphonies are vegetable patches or postcards
compared to these all-encompassing panoramas
swollen with tubes, bells, organs, anvils and gongs
and lasting for hours, lasting for whole evenings on end.

(from 'Without Being Evening')

Barry MacSweeney (1948-2000) began as a symbol of the new 'youth culture' with a 1966 book, suffered when the High Street publisher was not interested in his main work which was modernist and 'adult'. Joined the Cambridge School, became a friend of Prynne, was a star of the underground. Suffered with the collapse of the 'counter culture' and the rise of Thatcherism. Was overtaken by alcoholism. Returned to the scene around 1995 as part of trying to sober up, which gave him terrible insomnia and caused a rush of poetic productivity. May be the only important confessional poet from England. Wolf Tongue is a partial selected poems (1965-2000).

Ulli Freer (1948), represents the uncompromised spirit of 1968. an anarchist writing anti-rational and intuitive poems, with the lack of logical structures expressing beliefs about politics and emotional truth. had Jeff Nuttall as an English teacher at school, is associated with the London School founded by Nuttall and Cobbing.
Stepping Space (1991); Sand Poles (1993); Speakbright Leap Passwood (2003).

blue shallow breaks vermilion
where it crosses mountain ash
moon obstructed by rocks
biting ledges
and throws a marble passage
light ochre and soot
oil cloth wrenched from river
clogged the mouth
dread river dressed in a shroud
and the ice gets out
of pine and oak
their fete now great claws
night sounds
iron hearted thaw
(from Sand Poles)

Denise Riley (1948) idolised for combining emotional intensity with philosophical lucidity and socialist-feminist political commitment. Dry Air (1985) was published by Virago. has more or less withdrawn from the scene after Mop Mop Georgette (1993). associated with the Cambridge School; the poets who were students in 1968 were already different in attitudes from the poets active in 1965 and 1966. Things were changing incredibly fast in those days.

B. [Brian] Catling (1948-), from London. professor of sculpture. possibly began being interested in poetry as a student of Iain Sinclair's at film school circa 1972. Inhabits the same zone of Gothic horror as Sinclair's early and middle periods. Soundings (accounts of performance acts), The Stumbling Block, Its Index; Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes was a retrospective. another selected poems is A Court of Miracles (2009). Late Harping. Last century works (2001) collects more installation scripts. Included in the anthology Conductors of Chaos.

I have broken the mirrors of all my manifestations.

Broken them in all of my homes. The frames hanging like wrenched jaws or snapped ribs under my feet.
Glass is treacherous, burnt sand grown sleek, refusing to run, absorbing the dark,
pretending not to be here, sly.

I am concealed in brightness, homing close to its insistence. This is where you will always find me, invisible, shining my voice around
your straining senses. Suckling on the thin metallic skin of reflection,
tarnished on the wet steps of my teeth.

I speak only to remember, to nail the fleeting grey voltage, leaching its colour to fix the wound, written deep in the head. I drink only from my own skull cup, rejecting the acrid inebriation of opinion.
(from 'The Leipzig Cyclops: First Tract')

Paul Brown (1949-)one of the poets active in the 70s Underground. began with the realm of the non-discursive or non-verbal, “visual poetry” to use that term. So right in the thick of the “pure” revolutionary thing, dissociated from the social order and open to planes of experience that haven’t been defined. Was doing this in the early 70s although I can’t be precise about his path. Moved to a more verbal style, still radical and influenced by surrealism and 'process', in books such as Masker and Meetings & Pursuits. Seems to have abandoned the scene since about 1986. Parts of a work 'Landscape with Materials' have appeared in magazines, not the whole thing. Included in the anthology Floating Capital.

Almost at once the road
dipped - I lost sight

out of the wind the land
was so deep in
I took off my face and
shrugged my shoulders

something dropped onto me
and into this I fell
as softly as a hawk to
the hard soil of night

indistinct and savage
and infinitely sweet

(untitled, from 'Masker')
Despite appearances, these poems are not realist or autobiographical or naturalised. They are continuations of the purely visual and 'process' work and are about the experience of freedom. They retain their mystery.
　
Paul Gogarty, distinguished poet on the 70s Underground who is believed to have left the scene. Snap Box collects much of his work. The Accident Adventure (1979) is completely different, a mythological poem about the founding of the universe and society; it sums up the time, as it would be unthinkable at any other time. It came from X Press (which disappeared soon after) and is one of the A4 stapled/ mimeo'd productions which summed up a refusal to write those neat poems which followed the dress code, displayed linguistic status symbols, and made shy references to personal feelings. Yes, those were the days.
Works named 'Drum' and 'Why do toads eat so much' are untraced.

Philip Jenkins (1949) On the Beach with Eugene Boudin (1978); Cairo (1981). Jenkins was oen of the Weslh avant-garde poets, a short but exciting list. He was missing from the scene for a while after Cairo, but has returned with a series of pamphlets, such as Baritone Compass (2010). Boudin produced a painting called 'Princess Metternich on the Beach'. Cairo is hard to describe:

In 1964, I dreamt that I was sewn into a carcass of meat hanging in a butcher's shop. Inside, I was conscious of colour moving slowly as a succession of projected slides from rich red through purples and browns into black.

In 1977 at the Vortex, Siouxsie and the Banshees performed a song in which the protagonist mutilates himself before impaling himself on a butcher's hook anticipating new skin.

In the Serapeum at Sakkarah in the third century before Christ, Asar Hapi, the Apis bull of Memphis into whom was sewn the dead Osiris,

Called the life of Osiris
Animated by the soul of Osiris.
(from Cairo, Book 1, 5)
This can be compared with 'The Accident Adventure'.

Gavin Selerie (1949-), a prolific and enigmatic writer who has had almost no critical reception. He has been part of the London avant garde scene for possibly 30 years without being accepted by the chief ideologues as forming a key part of that scene. His poetry is mainly in long forms organised around multiple interlocking themes and drawing on a vast range of research and achieving an extraordinary documentary density. I suppose it is an extension of 'open field' poetry. Azimuth (1984) was a 400 page work of multiple themes sorted around a 'key' of orientation, navigation, and the eternal feminine. (see http://www.pinko.org/22.html) It showed the influence of Olson and of singer-songwriters. Roxy (1996, 130 pp.) again explores the eternal feminine, apparently the modern thing of theology; Le Fanu’s Ghost (2006, 320 pp.) is about the Le Fanu family, theatre and the history of horror. Days of 49 (1999, with Alan Halsey) is a re-remembering of 1949, the year of their birth, after half a century, a sort of avant-garde documentary. Music's Duel (2009) is a selected poems. Selerie has identified himself as a lover of digressions, someone who knows all the back streets of London. If we think of the antiquary as someone with an insatiable curiosity for the past, who can conjure up entire scenes from stray objects, we can define Selerie as an antiquary of the present. His intake of information is simply wider than that of most writers.

Mummy it as the Opening of the Mouth. To get back speech, sight and hearing. Two girls bend over a bundle of gold leaf wrappings. De Chirico haunts the square opposite. He's leaning into himself as the old master, when before it was What shall I love unless it's the Enigma? This parcel contains Zoser's butcher. Like his master he thinks he's with the Sun. Wrapped up in a crude arrangement of bandages. Or not so crude it it goes for seventy days. The professor in the fez would say Djoser. Three-stepped to a four stage and finally a six stage pyramid. John Soane's Garden Temple 1778. Emery's working in the sand. The French in parallel and without Napoleon after all... it would be one half of this dream of a dream. A third of the cabinetmaker's Egyptian designs are the library furnishings. George Smith: 1808. Just before the Hall in Piccadilly, demolished without the zeppelin or V2. If it wasn't glib I'd say tiredness equals war. Revival calls down enemies. It shan't live a memorial for every beggar's dust. Let all die and mix again. This is the fallout of Personal Landscape. Return to Oasis. On the word EXILE should be added a rather special limitation of meaning. Musing on the suicide—or was it—of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
(from Days of 49)

Walter Perrie (1949), from the mining community in East Fife. One of few Scottish poets to take advantage of the new formal possibilities of the 1970s. The folklore has it that gay commitment did not suit the Scottish poetry establishment. His career seemed to come to an end. Recently he has emerged in the magazine Fras. Also a philosopher. Lamentation for the Children (1977); By Moon and Sun (1980).

Menna Elfyn pioneer of feminist poetry (and criticism) in Wales. writes in Welsh but English translations are easily available. writes personalised protest poetry in a style close to singer-songwriters. feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-war. edited two key anthologies of women poets in Welsh. Eucalyptus (1995) is her selected poems 1978-94 (this is a bilingual edition).

Brian Marley, (1950?) from Newcastle. active in the 70s Underground scene and one of its leading lights. left the scene, dramatically. This is said to be because of the lack of serious discussion of poetry. believed to be working in a jazz record shop, and writing reviews of saxophone records. His 1978 book Springtime in the Rockies has classic status and stands for the 'forgotten 70s', when amazing things could happen and be virtually ignored. He can be grouped with Martin Thom and Paul Gogarty in this sense.

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