Anthony Thwaite, extra notes
I dredged out of a library sale in Nottingham a book 'The Deserts of Hesperides' by Anthony Thwaite,
a 1968 travel book about Libya which sheds light on his Libya-set poems.
The choice of Libya was because he felt very happy there. This was during his national service time there, and he went back to a university in Tripoli because he wanted to recover the happiness.
This book records the story about Thwaite being an archaeology fan with another sergeant while stationed in Cyrenaica, in 1950, and how they found a scattered hoard of Roman coins in a pool, which they brought up by diving, throughout one summer. The final count was around 7800 coins.
A whole chapter, pages 150-62, describes work on his sequence of poems 'Letters of Synesius'. Synesius was barely Christian, he was a pagan who was attracted to the new religion and became a bishop without quite giving in to it. Synesius was a native of Libya and this is really why Thwaite began writing about him while living in Libya, or shortly after he had left there. Synesius wrote some poems influenced by Neo-Platonist themes.
It looks as if Synesius was chosen because there is not much else written about Libya from Classical times. Callimachus came from there but identified too much with Alexandria for there to be a Libyan association of any strength. Synesius’ letters do not describe his death but they do describe wars with the desert tribes - and then his voice and he disappear. Synesius' letters lead naturally to a climax as the urban society of the shore is overrun by the nomadic tribes of the interior, untouched by Classical Mediterranean culture. What emerges is that Thwaite is not centrally writing about the threat to western culture from any source (presumably the young rather than any mounted nomads from inland sheep-herding areas). This thematic is found in books, near in date, by Peter Abbs and George Mackay Brown, for example. It's just that Thwaite is not writing about this theme at all. The thesis in the poems is about the recurring decay of urban civilisation in an arid land: the recurring superiority of the barbarians with their poverty, simplicity and heroism - and aggression. Thwaite is not writing moralised history but a story of 'human geography'. The idea could be compared to the 'Pine Processionary' poem.
The perspective derives from geography - in Libya you could (more so in 1950) see the past because the infertility of the land did not lead to abundant over-building and rains, bacteria, etc. are weak in effect. The ruins are so noticeable that you naturally think about the process of ruin - so much more durable than flourishing. Major public buildings are wrecked but they do not collapse. The comparison between the abandoned buildings of the Romans and the abandoned ditto of Mussolini’s failed Empire was obvious - not only because the fascists earnestly copied the Romans. Thwaite is fascinated by open-air archaeology and has no share of the ‘paranoid conservative’ in his make-up.
I was reading 'Hesperides' on the train going down to the small publishers' fair event in 2011. During a brief pub break at that event, I talked to someone who said they had bought Thwaite's Collected Poems after reading about him in my book 'Council of Heresy'. I was very happy. This is what I was trying to achieve. Maybe I can declare the project closed and have a rest.
To fake affection in the course of an argument about the 'division geometry' would be objectionable and corrupt. Partly for that reason, I can't write arguments about the divisions. But if you're a critic, you don't have to build arguments. What you have to do is explain why you like works of poetry. One relatively remote part of this might be that a latent block disappeared and although it didn't speak it was the material of division. So first it doesn't speak and then it doesn't exist. The blocks might not all be hostility but because if there are 30 stimuli calling for attention you scoff 15 of them, and throw 15 away. This is 'crowd-out". So it could also be that attachment to the figures in the cultural centre satisfies the intellectual energies which could be responding to the charms of avant garde poetry. So loyalty causes the blocks. So - I can't launch a campaign against loyalty. We are surfing on loyalty all the time - I can't reflexivise the consequences of loyalty.
(A recent blog-yob has described my work as 'patchy and incohesive' and no doubt they would get angry about this posting, too, simply shedding light on Anthony Thwaite. Well, here it is. If 50 poets wrote books which illuminated their poems I would cover them. But only one did.)
There is a very interesting discussion of Synesius and his interest in esoteric philosophy related to the Hermetica in Garth Fowden's 'Egyptian Hermes'. This would link Thwaite with the esoteric aspects which fill much of the rest of 'Council of Heresy' - but Thwaite was not interested in this aspect of Synesius, so the connection is a complete ghost.
Saturday, 2 June 2012
Thursday, 15 March 2012
The Long 1950s
Notes on “The Long 1950s”
This posting is a mess of info related directly to a book called 'The Long 1950s'. The book is now available from Shearsman Books. Obviously, the good stuff is in the book and this is just a sort of saunter in a peripheral direction. The book, put simply, is about the ‘affirmative culture’ of the 1950s and how, despite the arrival of other artistic currents, it persisted into the 1980s; and then how the mainstream gave up that line and mutated into something more interesting. The idea of a 'history of the mainstream' shines through the work, but there was too much data for that so I just took 'slide sections', moments which I could look at closely. these tend to be discrete genres. It began as a collection of chapters that didn’t fit into other books, then was devised as a set of revisionist theories, then was narrowed down to ideas about the Mainstream, and finally was qualified to be an explanation of the range of amateur poetry through descriptions of the available styles. Through the genres, we can get a glimpse of the huge mass of mainstream poetry being written. Other themes crop up, naturally. The basic rule for the book was 'don't mention alternative poetry'. If you leave out the alternative, what do you see?
11 March 2012. Am just re-doing the index as the pagination shifted slightly when some corrections were put in. So The Long 1950s will be published soon, maybe in the early summer.
I did some work on numbers which suggested that the Mainstream might include 6000 writers in my chosen period. I wasn't going to attempt to deal with them as individuals. But the book has essays on about 14 individuals.
(Roy Fuller, John Holloway, Edwin Morgan, Peter Levi, Christopher Logue, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Stainer, Jeremy Reed, Jo Shapcott, Jamie McKendrick, Robert Saxton, Alice Oswald, John Stammers).
The rule for the book was not to mention the Underground at all but I didn't quite manage that.
The posting basically includes info which wasn't interesting enough to go in the book (tied off at 112,000 words) and which is in snippets as opposed to the completed (but rejected) chapters which are also on this site somewhere. So this is aimed for people who have read the book and are still curious.
The book came out of another project, which was more simply one of trawling second hand bookshops and so on to find good mainstream poetry. This really came after work on my series of books had finished, and out of guilt that I had missed something of significance. The project had mixed results. There is just too much poetry for any search to be more than incomplete. Of course what you want is a learned guide, in which case you aren’t really searching and don’t have the same difficulties. This brings me back to what I was trying to do in writing guides to the period. Peter Levi and Anthony Thwaite were probably the main successes.
(the kidney-shaped table)
Some German book I read about 50s design had a sentence saying that 'the kidney shaped table was the Gothic Arch of the 1950s'.
This book started when I bought, in a retro shop in Nottingham, a plate (designed 1957) which has transfer prints of kidney-shaped tables as part of its design. I have an idea of the 50s and it's this. But really the precise emotion is an artefact. It’s my feeling of life before I became conscious, and when I was occupied with the details of tables, carpets and kitchenware because for me as a young child those were the immediate objects of consciousness. (The set was called ‘Homemaker’ and was designed by Edna Seeley. The Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent has one of the plates on show, with details.)
My mother bought a set of three wooden tables by Ercol, graded so that one fitted below the other. I remember them arriving in what must have been circa 1962. They weren't classically kidney shaped but a sort of long oval.
Culture in the 1950s was child-centred. This was OK with me because I was a child. ‘Affirmative culture’ tells the naive, children for example, that happiness is out there and that security is the normal condition of human beings. This is a message which is profoundly calming for the naive, for children. I didn’t want to be forced to think critically about things. That came with adolescence and predictably it brought a phase of despair and spiritual nausea.
50s cinema
There is a book called 50s cinema: a celebration, edited by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard. (British cinema, that is to say.) I found this inspiring. The writers regard these culturally lost films from the centre of those films, not adjusting them to the norms of some other aesthetic. It was easy for me to get back into that emotional position, since after all I was a child in the 1950s and that material, worn out and leached out or not, saturated my earliest cultural experience; but the culture I learnt later was overlying it and blocked it off. The book by MacKillop and Sinyard gave me a way back and was a wonderful reading experience besides. I have just read it for the second time.
(Stainer)
WHF Rivers was treating patients for shell-shock - a term which was invented by G Elliot Smith. There is a fascinating discussion of this by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady. She caused some confusion by mis-spelling Elliot Smith. This is a great book and has few flaws.
Smith with a man named TH Pear wrote Shell Shock - and its lessons. I also talk about Smith in Origins of the Underground. I bought a book about the Piltdown Man hoax which blamed Elliot Smith for arranging it - without evidence except 'being possible' so far as I could tell. See posting on 'Death Cult and Dog Star' on this site.
*
Amateur poetry
In 2007 I developed, with graphic designer Robert Baird, a diagram for Chicago Review which put, on a single page, the vertices of the poetic space in Britain. This got us away from the Underground and pushed us towards a more complete picture, even if intense identification with the parts of the picture was no longer implied. The step towards a colourless or objective rendition of cultural space opened the enticing possibility of putting ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ poetry on the same map. This is something I followed up in ‘The Long 1950s’, naturally only for a few themes within a huge landscape.
Domestic anecdote
Who invented the term 'domestic anecdote'? I said it was Crozier but on searching the text of his famous essay I can't find the phrase. So I don't know who it was.
The 1950s
My mother told me a story relating to about 1951. The new archbishop of Canterbury had a wife, who became ex officio national head of the Mothers' Union. She decreed that everyone had to renew their marriage vows or they couldn't go on being members. The local branch in Clifton was run by my grandmother (my Yorkshire grandmother). There was a member who was separated from her husband and who obviously couldn't renew her vows, although to be sure she still had the children and couldn't get rid of them and was, you would think, an Anglican mother. She was facing being expelled from the Mothers' Union - surely a blow too many. My grandmother dissolved the Mothers' Union and restarted it the next day under a different name with the same members.
It is striking that this she-bishop was a stupid stupid fascist, but rather more striking that she had no basis for assuming this authority except a sense of being God's gift and the fact that she was married to someone. The plot for mass expulsions of people she didn't approve of was part of a belief, not rare at that time, that the Church could roll back the 'secular' or 'libertarian' advances of the previous 50 years. In poetry, Christianity was winning back ground. This is related to 'metre and rhyme' coming back to the centre ground, even for young poets, in the 1950s.
In Roald Dahl's autobiography he tells of being at a school of which this archbishop man was headmaster. In that office, he revelled in beating boys excessively and took great pleasure in it. My mother was very pleased to read about this, because it confirmed her suspicions of the whole family. Arrogance, evil, and education were the triad of the ruling stratum at that time. This is the set-up that people were rebelling against.
For me the message is that Anglicanism stopped being power-obsessed and so it became possible for poets to write within it. You'd have to squeeze Rowan Williams for a long time to get a drop of evil out of him.
This is a story I didn't put in the text of 'The Long 1950s'. If people don't understand how evil the ruling class was in 1951 there is no point me trying to get it over to them.
Ewart Milne
I bought a volume of New Poems 1952 because it was edited by Roy Fuller and Montagu Slater and so I thought it would collect some left-wing poems. This turned out to be a good bet. One inclusion was ‘Elegy for a Lost Submarine’, by Ewart Milne. This was written in May-June 1951, according to the text. It is about 160 lines long. It is about the loss of a British submarine, in 1951, on peacetime manoeuvres. This is really a terrific poem. Part of my interest was the history of protest poetry - when I tried to name some protest poems for a diagram of poetic styles my mind went blank, I just couldn’t think of any. I listed Ewart Milne, as I had read this poem, too quickly, in an anthology made by Jon Silkin. The question was whether there was ever an interruption of continuity, from 1930s protest poems about the rise of fascism to poems circa 1965 about the atomic bomb and so on. There was a kind of ‘platform poem’ in the 1930s which was theatrical and oral, because of all the exciting political meetings of the period. I think that combination of ‘oral + public + protest’ poem was continuous. But the written record tends to leave it out. I think the protest poetry of the 60s has largely been written out of the record.
Milne also wrote a book called ’Time Stopped’, which Prynne recommended to students in about 1983. Again, this is a terrific work. I’m sorry to say I haven’t read most of his books, but I know that he was a Thirties radical, a Marxist who served with the ambulance corps in the Spanish Civil War. He was ‘of mixed Irish and English parentage’, according to the note, but I think he identified with Ireland, as a non-imperialist culture. There was no Communist Party in Ireland so I believe he spent a lot of his life in England, where you could get involved in that kind of thing. He did move on from all that; the interesting question is what he wrote after reaching intellectual maturity. He did a book called ’Cantata under Orion’, which again I haven’t seen.
I am sure Britain didn’t need a Communist government in 1952, but if you look at the writers who were involved with the Party around that time they are a very interesting lot.
I also haven’t get the energy to acquire all 10 volumes of ‘new poems’ for the 1950s. The anthologies were made for the PEN club. If distractions go away I will get there eventually.
I never wrote about the genre 'protest poem', it caused problems.
Alan Ross
Ross wrote some of the best poems of the 1950s. I didn’t find room for Ross in the book. The ones about being an intelligence officer for a destroyer, stationed in Germany just after the war, are especially good. The idea of being ‘tough’ worked for Ross, he could actually write tough poems. The evocation of a devastated landscape is concise, forceful, undeniable. The war had taken him to exotic places, sharpened his powers of observation, made him prefer terseness and decisiveness. But all his poems are good. He could write romantically about romantic places. ‘New Poems 1952’ has him writing about Brighton and a gypsy church on the Mediterranean, in the Camargue; the locations are slightly garish, too decorative, of diminished reality, but the poems are faultless.
There are always a few figures who evade the generalisations about any period.
Footnote to Reed essay
A quote from the Gospel of Thomas runs:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
My note on Wilson Knight's commentary (in The Christian Renaissance) shows 'When ye have trampled upon the garments of shame, and when the two have become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.' He credits this as coming from The Gospel of the Egyptians, but I could not find this in a version of that text on-line. I suspect both logia are describing chastity as the basis of holiness. For Knight the core figure of drama is bisexual figures who have a mediumistic and prophetic gift. The idea that people who became neither male nor female entered heaven provided a source for these figures. Thus the voices which speak to mediums are the dead as transfigured forms of the formerly alive.
I don't get into the androgyne thing, possibly because I was a teenager during the fevers of Glam Rock and just got overloaded with that stuff. Knight was still around in 1970 and in one of his books there is praise of David Bowie. He was watching TV around 1970 and obviously the sight of tall, willowy young men with long hair spoke to something deep in Knight. In fact, given what his major book on the history of drama (The Golden Labyrinth) says, you could say he had predicted glam rock.
Affirmative culture
What Herbert Marcuse defined as "affirmative culture" is the core of what we see in 1950s culture. The match is perfect. That affirmative quality is even what we feel nostalgia for and try to recover in surviving artefacts of 50s culture. But that’s the problem in what I have to write. Poetry is not “affirmative culture”. This is very important: poets belonged to the university elite, tiny as it was in those days, and held to an ideal of being critical and ironic. That whole line of resistance to popular culture, which seems so odd today, was in effect a deep dislike of affirmative culture. I wanted to write about it but because it doesn't feature in poetry that had to go. There had been a sublime line in poetry, and some of its practitioners were still alive in the 1950s, but it was clearly moribund and ancient by 1950 and it would not be sensible to write about it. Alfred Noyes was affirmative but he was just a reverend shadow by 1950.
I make a few remarks about the life of writers who were not making their careers in the 1950s but who in a way dominated the decade. For example, Lord Dunsany, born in 1878. I believe he was president of the Authors' Club, I think Robert Filreis says that in his wonderful book about the conservative opposition to modern poetry (in 1945-60) but I couldn‘t confirm this. Dunsany was one of the more vocal people saying that vers libre was rotten and led nowhere. There is a 1952 editorial by him in Poetry Review where he denounces modern poetry (viz. everything since 1905?) using a series of examples which turn out all to have been written by him. This is the most dishonest piece of polemic until the 1960s produced affronted conservatives. I don't even think he read any modern poetry, I think he just got a book by Stanton Coblentz which contained twisted fragments of selectively bad modern American poetry in order to justify Coblentz's outrageously anti-modern thesis. In the 1960s you had people into ‘youth culture’ and confident enough to ignore aged culture; in the 1950s that was scarcely so and the presence of poets born before 1900 loomed over everything. Young poets envied people with real religious belief and envied poets writing in repetitive and rigid metres. PR ran a set of letters agreeing with Dunsany - the other side doesn't appear.
There is a lot about Coblentz in Filreis’ book, whose subject is the organised attack on modern poetry and free verse in the period 1945 to 1960. It is set in the USA but it is such a good book that it sheds light on England and other countries too.
Optimistic Art; the box of beautiful things
My fascination with the amateur comes from an essay by Andrew Brighton in which he talks about amateur art and how because it lacks the inhibitions of professional art it can got to places where the highly educated cannot reach. Actually, I never read Brighton's essay, I was inspired by a mention of it in one of Peter Fuller's books. I tried quite hard, years later, to find Brighton's work, but Fuller did not give a citation and I never found it. [update: it was an exhibition, by Brighton and Lynda Morris, called "Towards Another Picture". The exhibition was in Nottingham, where I live, and I now have the volume of documents issued to support the exhibition. It covered the whole spectrum of art in England.] All this is coming back because of reading a fictionalised account of an art historian, who is undoubtedly Fuller, in Iain Sinclair's book Hackney, That Rose-red Empire. Sinclair's account has many literal details from Fuller's life in Graham Road but is malign and unreal. The bottom line is that I never saw the bright and decorative paintings which he wrote about and I never found any naive poetry of modern times which I could find innocent and refreshing. So writing a book about it was a vague gesture - waving benevolence to people I hadn't read and wasn't going to write about except as a symbol.
Fuller had developed a whole framework for reacting to the pessimism of the visual work that he was specifically dealing with at a certain time, which we can call the Seventies. He explained this through kenosis, a theological concept. Fuller was a fan of theology and saw 20th C art as a re-enactment of theological passions in different form, as I do. Kenosis is ‘emptying‘. He saw 20th C art as growing increasingly empty and ending up with a kind of abstract bleakness which was terrifying. This idea of there only being one kind of art, and of it developing and abandoning previous positions, also seems to go along with the increasing emptying of high art. It leaves out every other kind of painting. It could be combined - in somewhere like Hackney, in a year like 1975 - with an idea that capitalism had created sensory emptiness and alienation, and that art could bring people to realise the full sterility of capitalism by bringing them to peaks of anxiety and desolation which they had never experienced in the outside world. Quite possibly, the idea that there was a thing ‘capitalism’ separate from our own beings was a symptom of a sensory emptiness which permitted a very high degree of abstraction. Immersed in this heady and collectively managed bleakness, Fuller eventually reacted against it and came out asking for art to be sensuous and optimistic. It was in this context that he grasped at Brighton's constructive idea as a way of escape.
Another problem is to explain why, when ostensibly writing about the poets of low competence, I have entire chapters about Pauline Stainer and Jeremy Reed. This is hard to explain. A big factor was just that I wanted to write about them and that I only write prose books because it lets me write about people like that. But the other factor is that they have nothing to do with that kenosis that Fuller talks about, and with the critical alienated line in 20th C art. It is profoundly right to include them as examples of Christian myth and realisation of glamour fantasy (respectively) because by doing that they illustrate two genres which many poets, including weaker ones, write in. It is impossible to write about a genre through a poet who can't write.
I didn't explain this in the book because I wanted to leave the whole critical-alienated line out of the book. Just for once.
Both Stainer and Reed are optimistic writers and in that specific way can be identified as naive. If you talk about the 'box of beautiful things' you can see that both poets believe in that box. Even, that they want to create a box of beautiful poems. So maybe this is the optimistic art which takes us away from the heady high-altitude wastes of negation.
I am still wondering about the paintings that Brighton saw. Just now I passed an art shop, in Nottingham, just near the Nottingham Contemporary, our new museum of the modern. The shop has a very large naive painting in the window, showing a scene of ice skaters. (The Ice Arena is also not very far away.) It is brightly coloured, full of detail and realistic endeavour. There is no characterisation but it has this positivity, it is all about having a good time. It didn’t raise my mood. It struck me that it was very like an advertisement - that lack of depth, that endlessness without substance. It’s not that people don’t enjoy ice skating or that the sight of happiness makes me unhappy. But the scope of naive poetry is probably limited, in the same way as naive painting, by the saturation quality of advertising in our society. Optimistic painting has to be quite artless and poorly designed to avoid getting sucked back into the drained colour surface, from looking like a poster for the English Tourist Board or for the Ice Arena or whatever. Poetry books already have blurbs on the cover which represent Affirmative Culture in the poetic realm, and some of which are utterly mendacious. If you wrote a book of Naively Optimistic Poems the inside would just read like the blurbs around it - something already there. So maybe the only way to love naive poetry is not to read it but simply to imagine it.
Maybe Andrew Brighton was also into another dream of the Left, that there were people with intact sensibilities in the lower classes and they would walk in and replace the sophisticated urban neurotics with their art based on competition and on failed competition. I believe it is true that whatever dead ends cultured art, driven by fashion and cultural overload, finds itself in, will always be recovered from in the next generation. In a sense renewal always comes from children who come along and grow up with different ideas and with fewer acquired traumas. However, the most demanding art is the product of the most cultured people, and that doesn't seem to change very much. That style, which was based on a belief in Marcuse’s theory of ‘affirmative culture’ and tried to be ‘negation’ and then eventually, after decades of suffering ’the negation of the negation’, was peculiar to the 1970s, it is not around much now and you would have to explain to a young person today what it was or had ever been.
I do like the idea that there are people who paint the sea and ships and that they will spend their lives on the coast with an easel, indifferent to hotheads denouncing bourgeois art. The book should have been called 'the box of beautiful things' or similar but I fought shy of that. Anyway good poetry isn't simply a pile of beautiful things.
Folk style
After decades of waiting there is now a good book on the Folk Revival: Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, by Colin Harper. Actually it’s more than good, it’s wonderful. Jansch came from Leith, the port area of Edinburgh. He began playing guitar in 1960. He was one of two singer/guitarists in Pentangle, a group consciously formed to reach a large audience, which did reach a large audience and in a way ‘represented’ folk in the 1967-71 period. Harper’s book has a large amount of detail on the key period 1958-65. It is not overwhelmingly about Jansch and after all he was very much part of a Scene.
The two problems that memory wants to write out are easily summed up. Folk came out on two classic labels, Topic and Transatlantic. Topic began as the label of the Workers’ Music Association, whose membership was mainly communist. Transatlantic got started with recordings from America, folk and blues. The question is how English folk music could emerge from under these two currents of power. Or, how far is the stream of music that came out on those two labels, not all of it classic but pretty big swathes of it, either folk music or English. I have long been curious about the link between folk and communism. My intuition is that figures like Ewan MacColl thought they were running the whole thing as propaganda for the Party, but that they lost control of the craze very quickly and that only a fraction of the participants had any connection with communism. I have not found any definitive statement on this but Harper’s book does not confirm any Red dominance. He covers MacColl quite thoroughly but ties the communist thing to a group of people around him rather than to the rank and file of the Revival. The evidence is complicated and it crops up in many parts of Harper's book, so I will point you to that rather than summarise it. I keep recognising minor figures in Harper’s narrative as communists.
This craze is relevant to poetry, but - like communism I suppose - as something which everyone was attracted to and which had notable failures revealing fatal structural weaknesses. So that everyone came out the other side.
Harper cites The Weavers selling a million copies of a cover of ‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950 - in the USA. The timing of the American folk revival was completely different from the English and Scottish one. The folk thing in the USA was smashed by McCarthyism. The links many of its leaders there had to the Marxist Left probably explain why MacColl thought a ‘Red folk’ was possible in Britain. I don’t think the British thing would have taken off without influence from America, but I was only two years old in 1958 and my guesses are unreliable - especially as written sources are so few. The guitar had no role in British folk culture so the guitar orientation came from copying American styles, and later turning the learnt skills to the Anglo-Celtic repertoire.
When I say ‘smashed’, of course it came back. It just went through a bad time.
I think everyone liked Pentangle and the musicians were probably more critical of the group’s weaknesses than the listeners.
One version of the Folk thing is in Jeff Nuttall’s book Bomb Culture (1968), where a major storyline is how there was a human type who went on CND marches, was into trad jazz and folk, belonged to the Old Left, disliked pop music, and was generally contemptible. Nuttall blindly believes that “style A is JUNK and style B is WONDERFUL’. For him it’s always that everyone cool is at gig B on a certain night and everyone dismal and tedious is at gig A. Eric Mottram uses the same pressurising polemic structure. It’s exciting but finally it’s like Ewan MacColl, it’s authoritarian. I don’t accept that every folk song was dull or that every electric pop song was groovy and exciting. I suppose what this brings us to is that not every avant garde-Underground poet is interesting and not every Oxford/ mainstream/ tweed poet is dull.
Michael Brocken’s book The English Folk Revival (2003) has a great deal of information about the role of the Communist party in Topic records and the folk movement in general. Topic was the label of the Workers’ Music Association and was formed in 1939. Their pressing run was about 100 copies, it was a club thing. When the CP lost most of its members after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the subscriptions for the WMA also dried up and Topic had to think about selling to the public. This is probably when they became a significant record label - when they had to worry about shops and turnover. They now sold a lot more than 100 copies. The people who worked there kept their ideology, it was probably in the mid 1970s that it began to wear thin. Being communist meant loving the people and loving folk music went along with that rather sweetly.
Brocken has (at p.37) the story from an interview with Ewan MacColl where he says there were in the late 50s 1500 folk clubs in Britain directly expressing the ideals of the movement and of MacColl. But checking an issue of ‘Sing’, the communist-oriented folk song magazine, for 1957, shows a list of ‘What’s On’ which only lists nine folk clubs. This is probably the correct total. The rest were the product of MacColl’s imagination. (This analysis is already in Dave Harker’s Fakelore (1985), if I am not mistaken.) It is a notable example of first-hand evidence being thoroughly unreliable. It also shows Stalinist heroic propaganda values at work in Britain.
Harper gives one half of a famous story about MacColl, which is that in the club he ran English people weren’t allowed to sing American songs and vice versa. The second half (and who knows where I heard this from) is that later on this applied to regions as well, that if you came from Lancashire you had to sing Lancashire songs and if from Essex you had to sing Essex songs. People cite this as the Puritanism of the rigorous folk scene, which never reached the public. It was like Stalinism, which is the social group where MacColl got his sense of the fitness of things. I think his policy was defensible - it forced people to make an effort, to explore the hidden repertoire and research untapped sources. If you look back at 1958 from 2010 you realise that if they hadn’t expanded the repertoire of folk music, both songs and styles, the whole thing would not have survived until now, it would have died of boredom. There was a point about regional singing styles, being diverse in the same way that dialects are. I certainly think dialects and regional singing styles are precious. To my ear, English (revived) folk music is important because it eventually got beyond reproducing the Scottish singing, Scottish Traveller singing, American singing, which were so dominant at the outset. Its flourishing had a lot to do with accepting regional styles. This also had a lot to do with getting over embarrassment and accepting the sound of your own voice. MacColl had foresight but undeniably he was authoritarian.
Brocken has extensive material from folk singers on how weary they got of MacColl and how authoritarian he was. After a certain point you start to feel that he gets slagged off so much because he was important; if he hadn't been part of the landscape, people wouldn’t have got so frustrated with him. Brocken says ‘it is quite clear that the origin of the revival was indeed political for several important disciples’ and concedes the importance of the Leftists.
It’s surprising how much British Marxism achieved even with the handicaps of very small numbers and of rigidity, personality cults, delusion, and so on. A big role in the WMA was played by Alan Bush (1900-95). In 1951 he won the competition to compose an opera for the Festival of Britain, to be staged at Covent Garden. When the bosses discovered that he was a communist there was a lot of brouhaha and in the end his opera was not staged. This story is in Norman Lebrecht’s book on Covent Garden. No good telling someone like that that artists are oppressed in the Communist bloc. There is a story that when the end of communism came Bush was 90 years old and ill and his friends kept it secret from him in case it made him more ill. I don’t know if that is a true story.
(For more on folksong, see posting on ‘The unlearned and the unlearning’ on this site.)
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Hewison
I was re-reading Robert Hewison's In Anger, a standard work on culture in the 1950s. I think I have read Hewison’s book four times now. Some other books were very useful: John Press’s Rule and Energy, Eric Homberger’s Art of the Real and Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry in particular. Kenneth Allott’s prose commentary in the anthology Mid-century Poetry is useful although too grim. I found 50s films and also books on 50s films very suggestive in thinking about the poetry of the time.
John Press’ book Rule & Energy (1963) actually is a history of British poetry in the 1950s (although I hadn’t read it when I wrote my chapter). This gives a rather wider view than I do. I recommend this book. Press writes very well about the Blakean, post-Symboliste, etc. line in this. He portrays the British scene from the war up till when he was writing (in 1962) as a struggle between the visionaries and the rationalists. The visionaries are few in number. However, he’s quite right to suggest that the Oracular line was there in the 1950s and didn’t spring from nowhere in 1967, or 1965.
Hewison sees a split in the 1950s, with a different tone starting in 1956. This was a revolt against what was already there (mostly much older than 1950) and centres on 'Look back in anger'. This is fascinating but doesn't work in poetry.
Hewison quotes John Berger sounding off about the 'rule makers'. Amazing. He was making up rules and trying to shove them down people's throats more than anyone else. A Stalinist who thinks he is liberating people. Sort of Ewan MacColl without the beard.
In Anger makes major use of the idea of typicality, that there is a single literary person and a change to the role affects everyone. He pulls it off but the deadline for that kind of thing was running out, and typicality was leaking its substance in a hundred directions in the 1960s. The thing is that poems use this universal lay figure in much the same way that Hewison does. In 1955 it did feel as if every writer was a pupil at the same school, shuffling down the same chilly corridors, scared of the same headmaster, late for the same compulsory sessions of ideology, sneaking off for a cigarette in the same hidey-holes. All that's gone and I can't write poetry criticism in those terms.
In 1955, what books offered was much more like the company of a certain kind of person. If you didn't like that sort of person it just wasn't interesting to be there. Writers who adapted to that and learnt how to put their 'voice' over didn't understand why the audience wasn't interested, a few years later, when poetry had become a much wider exploration both of subjectivity and of objective knowledge. 'You have to feel the same way that I do' - and this was very close to thinking 'this poem, any poem, HAS to be written in this way'. There was a whole stock of banal but educated poetry which was like the park in your town: you have to go there because it's the only park and it's conventional to go there.
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Noel Annan : 'It also began to be recognised how much homosexuals enriched the nation's culture. Hardly surprising since by the sixties the best known English-born poet, the outstanding composer, the most famous choreographer, and the most prestigious painter - Auden, Britten, Ashton, and Bacon - were all known to be homosexuals.'
(quoted from Neil Miller's Out of the Past, a Gay and Lesbian History, p.259) Saying 'by the sixties' actually means 'during the 1950s', although Bacon's fame was ascending during that decade.
Norman Lebrecht says about the Fifties -'England's leading painter (Bacon), poet (Auden), actor (Gielgud), composer (Britten), novelist (Forster) and choreographer (Ashton) were all homosexual, an attribute that was unmentionable in studies of their lives and works.' (Covent Garden, the Untold Story, p.177)
This is in a passage set specifically in 1953, a moment of gay-bashing by the media and the police. This is a salient fact, in 1953, and must be part of the Fifties arts world. I don't have an explanation for it. Gays were not prominent in poetry, at least so far as evidence survives. In poetry, people didn't have an anxiety that you had to be gay, they had an anxiety that you had to have been born before 1900 to be a great English poet.
No one else writes as interestingly as Lebrecht about the arts world. He evokes ‘arts gays’ circa 1950 as a cosy little conspiracy, and that insider quality could have effects in allowing people to be self-indulgent (knowing they have a welcome) or to be implicit and allusive, in a private code (emptying the poem of overt meaning). But - I have just argued that literature in general at that time had the quality of letting you be with ‘certain people’, it was all a conspiracy, a fellowship of the willing. That intimacy is what the text exploits. You can trace it to Oxford University or to the Gay Fraternity, but those are false leads, because literature had that insider quality even when it had nothing to do with those two in-groups. The readers of the time were shocked by writers like Beckett or Tomlinson who offered no warmth or indulgence at all; that felt new and unattractive, in the Fifties.
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The chapter on singer-songwriters. This was added after the main text was completed. It has the problem of not being based in textual details but in the overall 'feel' of a large number of texts. Bringing in the singers is a way of answering questions like "why is modern poetry (since 1960) so flat? why is it so hopeful that the reader will be fascinated by the poet's personality? why do poets think they can produce a wholly verbal creation which makes no use of verbal style?" These questions shed light on a great deal of poetry which is not of great interest. The significant poets do not raise these questions because they addressed the problem of flatness and have solved it by developing a verbal style whose richness differentiates it from the landscape around it. The questions may not be worth raising. On the other hand, I think this style was new in the 1960s and represents what replaced the formal, literary, ethically demanding, poetry of the 1950s, itself perhaps a continuation of a long line of literary poetry. The victorious sound of the 1960s was not anything modernist or experimental but this flatness which is also conversational and also egocentric. It was not inspired by Pound and Structuralism but by Judy Collins and Donovan. Of several thousand poets who got into print, few could understand either Pound or Lévi-Strauss, but a lot of them could understand Donovan.
Equally, the vast mass of poets have given up on the stylistic elevation which marks the ‘heritage’ of English and Scottish poetry. Analysing the modernists in terms of cultural aggression and deliberate destruction of classical serenity is irrelevant unless you also consider that the mass of poets now writing also use a flat and unliterary style.
It is not accurate to call the vernacular modern style ‘Pop’, because it lacks many qualities necessary to Pop. It is more accurate to compare it to a vein of song creation which would claim to be the expression of conscience and to be opposed by its bareness and authenticity to the sugar rush of Pop culture and to its commercialism. It is too earnest to like adornment.
Of course, it is arguable that all the poets who fell in love with this musical idiom failed, because leaving out the music was simply a step too far and this kind of poem could never work, being unpoetic. It would then be a mass movement in the wrong direction. I got the feeling, when researching for The Long 1950s, that the Folk Revival had been a failure - leaving behind an archive of dullness. This possibility has to be considered.
This posting is a mess of info related directly to a book called 'The Long 1950s'. The book is now available from Shearsman Books. Obviously, the good stuff is in the book and this is just a sort of saunter in a peripheral direction. The book, put simply, is about the ‘affirmative culture’ of the 1950s and how, despite the arrival of other artistic currents, it persisted into the 1980s; and then how the mainstream gave up that line and mutated into something more interesting. The idea of a 'history of the mainstream' shines through the work, but there was too much data for that so I just took 'slide sections', moments which I could look at closely. these tend to be discrete genres. It began as a collection of chapters that didn’t fit into other books, then was devised as a set of revisionist theories, then was narrowed down to ideas about the Mainstream, and finally was qualified to be an explanation of the range of amateur poetry through descriptions of the available styles. Through the genres, we can get a glimpse of the huge mass of mainstream poetry being written. Other themes crop up, naturally. The basic rule for the book was 'don't mention alternative poetry'. If you leave out the alternative, what do you see?
11 March 2012. Am just re-doing the index as the pagination shifted slightly when some corrections were put in. So The Long 1950s will be published soon, maybe in the early summer.
I did some work on numbers which suggested that the Mainstream might include 6000 writers in my chosen period. I wasn't going to attempt to deal with them as individuals. But the book has essays on about 14 individuals.
(Roy Fuller, John Holloway, Edwin Morgan, Peter Levi, Christopher Logue, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Stainer, Jeremy Reed, Jo Shapcott, Jamie McKendrick, Robert Saxton, Alice Oswald, John Stammers).
The rule for the book was not to mention the Underground at all but I didn't quite manage that.
The posting basically includes info which wasn't interesting enough to go in the book (tied off at 112,000 words) and which is in snippets as opposed to the completed (but rejected) chapters which are also on this site somewhere. So this is aimed for people who have read the book and are still curious.
The book came out of another project, which was more simply one of trawling second hand bookshops and so on to find good mainstream poetry. This really came after work on my series of books had finished, and out of guilt that I had missed something of significance. The project had mixed results. There is just too much poetry for any search to be more than incomplete. Of course what you want is a learned guide, in which case you aren’t really searching and don’t have the same difficulties. This brings me back to what I was trying to do in writing guides to the period. Peter Levi and Anthony Thwaite were probably the main successes.
(the kidney-shaped table)
Some German book I read about 50s design had a sentence saying that 'the kidney shaped table was the Gothic Arch of the 1950s'.
This book started when I bought, in a retro shop in Nottingham, a plate (designed 1957) which has transfer prints of kidney-shaped tables as part of its design. I have an idea of the 50s and it's this. But really the precise emotion is an artefact. It’s my feeling of life before I became conscious, and when I was occupied with the details of tables, carpets and kitchenware because for me as a young child those were the immediate objects of consciousness. (The set was called ‘Homemaker’ and was designed by Edna Seeley. The Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent has one of the plates on show, with details.)
My mother bought a set of three wooden tables by Ercol, graded so that one fitted below the other. I remember them arriving in what must have been circa 1962. They weren't classically kidney shaped but a sort of long oval.
Culture in the 1950s was child-centred. This was OK with me because I was a child. ‘Affirmative culture’ tells the naive, children for example, that happiness is out there and that security is the normal condition of human beings. This is a message which is profoundly calming for the naive, for children. I didn’t want to be forced to think critically about things. That came with adolescence and predictably it brought a phase of despair and spiritual nausea.
50s cinema
There is a book called 50s cinema: a celebration, edited by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard. (British cinema, that is to say.) I found this inspiring. The writers regard these culturally lost films from the centre of those films, not adjusting them to the norms of some other aesthetic. It was easy for me to get back into that emotional position, since after all I was a child in the 1950s and that material, worn out and leached out or not, saturated my earliest cultural experience; but the culture I learnt later was overlying it and blocked it off. The book by MacKillop and Sinyard gave me a way back and was a wonderful reading experience besides. I have just read it for the second time.
(Stainer)
WHF Rivers was treating patients for shell-shock - a term which was invented by G Elliot Smith. There is a fascinating discussion of this by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady. She caused some confusion by mis-spelling Elliot Smith. This is a great book and has few flaws.
Smith with a man named TH Pear wrote Shell Shock - and its lessons. I also talk about Smith in Origins of the Underground. I bought a book about the Piltdown Man hoax which blamed Elliot Smith for arranging it - without evidence except 'being possible' so far as I could tell. See posting on 'Death Cult and Dog Star' on this site.
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Amateur poetry
In 2007 I developed, with graphic designer Robert Baird, a diagram for Chicago Review which put, on a single page, the vertices of the poetic space in Britain. This got us away from the Underground and pushed us towards a more complete picture, even if intense identification with the parts of the picture was no longer implied. The step towards a colourless or objective rendition of cultural space opened the enticing possibility of putting ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ poetry on the same map. This is something I followed up in ‘The Long 1950s’, naturally only for a few themes within a huge landscape.
Domestic anecdote
Who invented the term 'domestic anecdote'? I said it was Crozier but on searching the text of his famous essay I can't find the phrase. So I don't know who it was.
The 1950s
My mother told me a story relating to about 1951. The new archbishop of Canterbury had a wife, who became ex officio national head of the Mothers' Union. She decreed that everyone had to renew their marriage vows or they couldn't go on being members. The local branch in Clifton was run by my grandmother (my Yorkshire grandmother). There was a member who was separated from her husband and who obviously couldn't renew her vows, although to be sure she still had the children and couldn't get rid of them and was, you would think, an Anglican mother. She was facing being expelled from the Mothers' Union - surely a blow too many. My grandmother dissolved the Mothers' Union and restarted it the next day under a different name with the same members.
It is striking that this she-bishop was a stupid stupid fascist, but rather more striking that she had no basis for assuming this authority except a sense of being God's gift and the fact that she was married to someone. The plot for mass expulsions of people she didn't approve of was part of a belief, not rare at that time, that the Church could roll back the 'secular' or 'libertarian' advances of the previous 50 years. In poetry, Christianity was winning back ground. This is related to 'metre and rhyme' coming back to the centre ground, even for young poets, in the 1950s.
In Roald Dahl's autobiography he tells of being at a school of which this archbishop man was headmaster. In that office, he revelled in beating boys excessively and took great pleasure in it. My mother was very pleased to read about this, because it confirmed her suspicions of the whole family. Arrogance, evil, and education were the triad of the ruling stratum at that time. This is the set-up that people were rebelling against.
For me the message is that Anglicanism stopped being power-obsessed and so it became possible for poets to write within it. You'd have to squeeze Rowan Williams for a long time to get a drop of evil out of him.
This is a story I didn't put in the text of 'The Long 1950s'. If people don't understand how evil the ruling class was in 1951 there is no point me trying to get it over to them.
Ewart Milne
I bought a volume of New Poems 1952 because it was edited by Roy Fuller and Montagu Slater and so I thought it would collect some left-wing poems. This turned out to be a good bet. One inclusion was ‘Elegy for a Lost Submarine’, by Ewart Milne. This was written in May-June 1951, according to the text. It is about 160 lines long. It is about the loss of a British submarine, in 1951, on peacetime manoeuvres. This is really a terrific poem. Part of my interest was the history of protest poetry - when I tried to name some protest poems for a diagram of poetic styles my mind went blank, I just couldn’t think of any. I listed Ewart Milne, as I had read this poem, too quickly, in an anthology made by Jon Silkin. The question was whether there was ever an interruption of continuity, from 1930s protest poems about the rise of fascism to poems circa 1965 about the atomic bomb and so on. There was a kind of ‘platform poem’ in the 1930s which was theatrical and oral, because of all the exciting political meetings of the period. I think that combination of ‘oral + public + protest’ poem was continuous. But the written record tends to leave it out. I think the protest poetry of the 60s has largely been written out of the record.
Milne also wrote a book called ’Time Stopped’, which Prynne recommended to students in about 1983. Again, this is a terrific work. I’m sorry to say I haven’t read most of his books, but I know that he was a Thirties radical, a Marxist who served with the ambulance corps in the Spanish Civil War. He was ‘of mixed Irish and English parentage’, according to the note, but I think he identified with Ireland, as a non-imperialist culture. There was no Communist Party in Ireland so I believe he spent a lot of his life in England, where you could get involved in that kind of thing. He did move on from all that; the interesting question is what he wrote after reaching intellectual maturity. He did a book called ’Cantata under Orion’, which again I haven’t seen.
I am sure Britain didn’t need a Communist government in 1952, but if you look at the writers who were involved with the Party around that time they are a very interesting lot.
I also haven’t get the energy to acquire all 10 volumes of ‘new poems’ for the 1950s. The anthologies were made for the PEN club. If distractions go away I will get there eventually.
I never wrote about the genre 'protest poem', it caused problems.
Alan Ross
Ross wrote some of the best poems of the 1950s. I didn’t find room for Ross in the book. The ones about being an intelligence officer for a destroyer, stationed in Germany just after the war, are especially good. The idea of being ‘tough’ worked for Ross, he could actually write tough poems. The evocation of a devastated landscape is concise, forceful, undeniable. The war had taken him to exotic places, sharpened his powers of observation, made him prefer terseness and decisiveness. But all his poems are good. He could write romantically about romantic places. ‘New Poems 1952’ has him writing about Brighton and a gypsy church on the Mediterranean, in the Camargue; the locations are slightly garish, too decorative, of diminished reality, but the poems are faultless.
There are always a few figures who evade the generalisations about any period.
Footnote to Reed essay
A quote from the Gospel of Thomas runs:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
My note on Wilson Knight's commentary (in The Christian Renaissance) shows 'When ye have trampled upon the garments of shame, and when the two have become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.' He credits this as coming from The Gospel of the Egyptians, but I could not find this in a version of that text on-line. I suspect both logia are describing chastity as the basis of holiness. For Knight the core figure of drama is bisexual figures who have a mediumistic and prophetic gift. The idea that people who became neither male nor female entered heaven provided a source for these figures. Thus the voices which speak to mediums are the dead as transfigured forms of the formerly alive.
I don't get into the androgyne thing, possibly because I was a teenager during the fevers of Glam Rock and just got overloaded with that stuff. Knight was still around in 1970 and in one of his books there is praise of David Bowie. He was watching TV around 1970 and obviously the sight of tall, willowy young men with long hair spoke to something deep in Knight. In fact, given what his major book on the history of drama (The Golden Labyrinth) says, you could say he had predicted glam rock.
Affirmative culture
What Herbert Marcuse defined as "affirmative culture" is the core of what we see in 1950s culture. The match is perfect. That affirmative quality is even what we feel nostalgia for and try to recover in surviving artefacts of 50s culture. But that’s the problem in what I have to write. Poetry is not “affirmative culture”. This is very important: poets belonged to the university elite, tiny as it was in those days, and held to an ideal of being critical and ironic. That whole line of resistance to popular culture, which seems so odd today, was in effect a deep dislike of affirmative culture. I wanted to write about it but because it doesn't feature in poetry that had to go. There had been a sublime line in poetry, and some of its practitioners were still alive in the 1950s, but it was clearly moribund and ancient by 1950 and it would not be sensible to write about it. Alfred Noyes was affirmative but he was just a reverend shadow by 1950.
I make a few remarks about the life of writers who were not making their careers in the 1950s but who in a way dominated the decade. For example, Lord Dunsany, born in 1878. I believe he was president of the Authors' Club, I think Robert Filreis says that in his wonderful book about the conservative opposition to modern poetry (in 1945-60) but I couldn‘t confirm this. Dunsany was one of the more vocal people saying that vers libre was rotten and led nowhere. There is a 1952 editorial by him in Poetry Review where he denounces modern poetry (viz. everything since 1905?) using a series of examples which turn out all to have been written by him. This is the most dishonest piece of polemic until the 1960s produced affronted conservatives. I don't even think he read any modern poetry, I think he just got a book by Stanton Coblentz which contained twisted fragments of selectively bad modern American poetry in order to justify Coblentz's outrageously anti-modern thesis. In the 1960s you had people into ‘youth culture’ and confident enough to ignore aged culture; in the 1950s that was scarcely so and the presence of poets born before 1900 loomed over everything. Young poets envied people with real religious belief and envied poets writing in repetitive and rigid metres. PR ran a set of letters agreeing with Dunsany - the other side doesn't appear.
There is a lot about Coblentz in Filreis’ book, whose subject is the organised attack on modern poetry and free verse in the period 1945 to 1960. It is set in the USA but it is such a good book that it sheds light on England and other countries too.
Optimistic Art; the box of beautiful things
My fascination with the amateur comes from an essay by Andrew Brighton in which he talks about amateur art and how because it lacks the inhibitions of professional art it can got to places where the highly educated cannot reach. Actually, I never read Brighton's essay, I was inspired by a mention of it in one of Peter Fuller's books. I tried quite hard, years later, to find Brighton's work, but Fuller did not give a citation and I never found it. [update: it was an exhibition, by Brighton and Lynda Morris, called "Towards Another Picture". The exhibition was in Nottingham, where I live, and I now have the volume of documents issued to support the exhibition. It covered the whole spectrum of art in England.] All this is coming back because of reading a fictionalised account of an art historian, who is undoubtedly Fuller, in Iain Sinclair's book Hackney, That Rose-red Empire. Sinclair's account has many literal details from Fuller's life in Graham Road but is malign and unreal. The bottom line is that I never saw the bright and decorative paintings which he wrote about and I never found any naive poetry of modern times which I could find innocent and refreshing. So writing a book about it was a vague gesture - waving benevolence to people I hadn't read and wasn't going to write about except as a symbol.
Fuller had developed a whole framework for reacting to the pessimism of the visual work that he was specifically dealing with at a certain time, which we can call the Seventies. He explained this through kenosis, a theological concept. Fuller was a fan of theology and saw 20th C art as a re-enactment of theological passions in different form, as I do. Kenosis is ‘emptying‘. He saw 20th C art as growing increasingly empty and ending up with a kind of abstract bleakness which was terrifying. This idea of there only being one kind of art, and of it developing and abandoning previous positions, also seems to go along with the increasing emptying of high art. It leaves out every other kind of painting. It could be combined - in somewhere like Hackney, in a year like 1975 - with an idea that capitalism had created sensory emptiness and alienation, and that art could bring people to realise the full sterility of capitalism by bringing them to peaks of anxiety and desolation which they had never experienced in the outside world. Quite possibly, the idea that there was a thing ‘capitalism’ separate from our own beings was a symptom of a sensory emptiness which permitted a very high degree of abstraction. Immersed in this heady and collectively managed bleakness, Fuller eventually reacted against it and came out asking for art to be sensuous and optimistic. It was in this context that he grasped at Brighton's constructive idea as a way of escape.
Another problem is to explain why, when ostensibly writing about the poets of low competence, I have entire chapters about Pauline Stainer and Jeremy Reed. This is hard to explain. A big factor was just that I wanted to write about them and that I only write prose books because it lets me write about people like that. But the other factor is that they have nothing to do with that kenosis that Fuller talks about, and with the critical alienated line in 20th C art. It is profoundly right to include them as examples of Christian myth and realisation of glamour fantasy (respectively) because by doing that they illustrate two genres which many poets, including weaker ones, write in. It is impossible to write about a genre through a poet who can't write.
I didn't explain this in the book because I wanted to leave the whole critical-alienated line out of the book. Just for once.
Both Stainer and Reed are optimistic writers and in that specific way can be identified as naive. If you talk about the 'box of beautiful things' you can see that both poets believe in that box. Even, that they want to create a box of beautiful poems. So maybe this is the optimistic art which takes us away from the heady high-altitude wastes of negation.
I am still wondering about the paintings that Brighton saw. Just now I passed an art shop, in Nottingham, just near the Nottingham Contemporary, our new museum of the modern. The shop has a very large naive painting in the window, showing a scene of ice skaters. (The Ice Arena is also not very far away.) It is brightly coloured, full of detail and realistic endeavour. There is no characterisation but it has this positivity, it is all about having a good time. It didn’t raise my mood. It struck me that it was very like an advertisement - that lack of depth, that endlessness without substance. It’s not that people don’t enjoy ice skating or that the sight of happiness makes me unhappy. But the scope of naive poetry is probably limited, in the same way as naive painting, by the saturation quality of advertising in our society. Optimistic painting has to be quite artless and poorly designed to avoid getting sucked back into the drained colour surface, from looking like a poster for the English Tourist Board or for the Ice Arena or whatever. Poetry books already have blurbs on the cover which represent Affirmative Culture in the poetic realm, and some of which are utterly mendacious. If you wrote a book of Naively Optimistic Poems the inside would just read like the blurbs around it - something already there. So maybe the only way to love naive poetry is not to read it but simply to imagine it.
Maybe Andrew Brighton was also into another dream of the Left, that there were people with intact sensibilities in the lower classes and they would walk in and replace the sophisticated urban neurotics with their art based on competition and on failed competition. I believe it is true that whatever dead ends cultured art, driven by fashion and cultural overload, finds itself in, will always be recovered from in the next generation. In a sense renewal always comes from children who come along and grow up with different ideas and with fewer acquired traumas. However, the most demanding art is the product of the most cultured people, and that doesn't seem to change very much. That style, which was based on a belief in Marcuse’s theory of ‘affirmative culture’ and tried to be ‘negation’ and then eventually, after decades of suffering ’the negation of the negation’, was peculiar to the 1970s, it is not around much now and you would have to explain to a young person today what it was or had ever been.
I do like the idea that there are people who paint the sea and ships and that they will spend their lives on the coast with an easel, indifferent to hotheads denouncing bourgeois art. The book should have been called 'the box of beautiful things' or similar but I fought shy of that. Anyway good poetry isn't simply a pile of beautiful things.
Folk style
After decades of waiting there is now a good book on the Folk Revival: Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, by Colin Harper. Actually it’s more than good, it’s wonderful. Jansch came from Leith, the port area of Edinburgh. He began playing guitar in 1960. He was one of two singer/guitarists in Pentangle, a group consciously formed to reach a large audience, which did reach a large audience and in a way ‘represented’ folk in the 1967-71 period. Harper’s book has a large amount of detail on the key period 1958-65. It is not overwhelmingly about Jansch and after all he was very much part of a Scene.
The two problems that memory wants to write out are easily summed up. Folk came out on two classic labels, Topic and Transatlantic. Topic began as the label of the Workers’ Music Association, whose membership was mainly communist. Transatlantic got started with recordings from America, folk and blues. The question is how English folk music could emerge from under these two currents of power. Or, how far is the stream of music that came out on those two labels, not all of it classic but pretty big swathes of it, either folk music or English. I have long been curious about the link between folk and communism. My intuition is that figures like Ewan MacColl thought they were running the whole thing as propaganda for the Party, but that they lost control of the craze very quickly and that only a fraction of the participants had any connection with communism. I have not found any definitive statement on this but Harper’s book does not confirm any Red dominance. He covers MacColl quite thoroughly but ties the communist thing to a group of people around him rather than to the rank and file of the Revival. The evidence is complicated and it crops up in many parts of Harper's book, so I will point you to that rather than summarise it. I keep recognising minor figures in Harper’s narrative as communists.
This craze is relevant to poetry, but - like communism I suppose - as something which everyone was attracted to and which had notable failures revealing fatal structural weaknesses. So that everyone came out the other side.
Harper cites The Weavers selling a million copies of a cover of ‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950 - in the USA. The timing of the American folk revival was completely different from the English and Scottish one. The folk thing in the USA was smashed by McCarthyism. The links many of its leaders there had to the Marxist Left probably explain why MacColl thought a ‘Red folk’ was possible in Britain. I don’t think the British thing would have taken off without influence from America, but I was only two years old in 1958 and my guesses are unreliable - especially as written sources are so few. The guitar had no role in British folk culture so the guitar orientation came from copying American styles, and later turning the learnt skills to the Anglo-Celtic repertoire.
When I say ‘smashed’, of course it came back. It just went through a bad time.
I think everyone liked Pentangle and the musicians were probably more critical of the group’s weaknesses than the listeners.
One version of the Folk thing is in Jeff Nuttall’s book Bomb Culture (1968), where a major storyline is how there was a human type who went on CND marches, was into trad jazz and folk, belonged to the Old Left, disliked pop music, and was generally contemptible. Nuttall blindly believes that “style A is JUNK and style B is WONDERFUL’. For him it’s always that everyone cool is at gig B on a certain night and everyone dismal and tedious is at gig A. Eric Mottram uses the same pressurising polemic structure. It’s exciting but finally it’s like Ewan MacColl, it’s authoritarian. I don’t accept that every folk song was dull or that every electric pop song was groovy and exciting. I suppose what this brings us to is that not every avant garde-Underground poet is interesting and not every Oxford/ mainstream/ tweed poet is dull.
Michael Brocken’s book The English Folk Revival (2003) has a great deal of information about the role of the Communist party in Topic records and the folk movement in general. Topic was the label of the Workers’ Music Association and was formed in 1939. Their pressing run was about 100 copies, it was a club thing. When the CP lost most of its members after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the subscriptions for the WMA also dried up and Topic had to think about selling to the public. This is probably when they became a significant record label - when they had to worry about shops and turnover. They now sold a lot more than 100 copies. The people who worked there kept their ideology, it was probably in the mid 1970s that it began to wear thin. Being communist meant loving the people and loving folk music went along with that rather sweetly.
Brocken has (at p.37) the story from an interview with Ewan MacColl where he says there were in the late 50s 1500 folk clubs in Britain directly expressing the ideals of the movement and of MacColl. But checking an issue of ‘Sing’, the communist-oriented folk song magazine, for 1957, shows a list of ‘What’s On’ which only lists nine folk clubs. This is probably the correct total. The rest were the product of MacColl’s imagination. (This analysis is already in Dave Harker’s Fakelore (1985), if I am not mistaken.) It is a notable example of first-hand evidence being thoroughly unreliable. It also shows Stalinist heroic propaganda values at work in Britain.
Harper gives one half of a famous story about MacColl, which is that in the club he ran English people weren’t allowed to sing American songs and vice versa. The second half (and who knows where I heard this from) is that later on this applied to regions as well, that if you came from Lancashire you had to sing Lancashire songs and if from Essex you had to sing Essex songs. People cite this as the Puritanism of the rigorous folk scene, which never reached the public. It was like Stalinism, which is the social group where MacColl got his sense of the fitness of things. I think his policy was defensible - it forced people to make an effort, to explore the hidden repertoire and research untapped sources. If you look back at 1958 from 2010 you realise that if they hadn’t expanded the repertoire of folk music, both songs and styles, the whole thing would not have survived until now, it would have died of boredom. There was a point about regional singing styles, being diverse in the same way that dialects are. I certainly think dialects and regional singing styles are precious. To my ear, English (revived) folk music is important because it eventually got beyond reproducing the Scottish singing, Scottish Traveller singing, American singing, which were so dominant at the outset. Its flourishing had a lot to do with accepting regional styles. This also had a lot to do with getting over embarrassment and accepting the sound of your own voice. MacColl had foresight but undeniably he was authoritarian.
Brocken has extensive material from folk singers on how weary they got of MacColl and how authoritarian he was. After a certain point you start to feel that he gets slagged off so much because he was important; if he hadn't been part of the landscape, people wouldn’t have got so frustrated with him. Brocken says ‘it is quite clear that the origin of the revival was indeed political for several important disciples’ and concedes the importance of the Leftists.
It’s surprising how much British Marxism achieved even with the handicaps of very small numbers and of rigidity, personality cults, delusion, and so on. A big role in the WMA was played by Alan Bush (1900-95). In 1951 he won the competition to compose an opera for the Festival of Britain, to be staged at Covent Garden. When the bosses discovered that he was a communist there was a lot of brouhaha and in the end his opera was not staged. This story is in Norman Lebrecht’s book on Covent Garden. No good telling someone like that that artists are oppressed in the Communist bloc. There is a story that when the end of communism came Bush was 90 years old and ill and his friends kept it secret from him in case it made him more ill. I don’t know if that is a true story.
(For more on folksong, see posting on ‘The unlearned and the unlearning’ on this site.)
**
Hewison
I was re-reading Robert Hewison's In Anger, a standard work on culture in the 1950s. I think I have read Hewison’s book four times now. Some other books were very useful: John Press’s Rule and Energy, Eric Homberger’s Art of the Real and Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry in particular. Kenneth Allott’s prose commentary in the anthology Mid-century Poetry is useful although too grim. I found 50s films and also books on 50s films very suggestive in thinking about the poetry of the time.
John Press’ book Rule & Energy (1963) actually is a history of British poetry in the 1950s (although I hadn’t read it when I wrote my chapter). This gives a rather wider view than I do. I recommend this book. Press writes very well about the Blakean, post-Symboliste, etc. line in this. He portrays the British scene from the war up till when he was writing (in 1962) as a struggle between the visionaries and the rationalists. The visionaries are few in number. However, he’s quite right to suggest that the Oracular line was there in the 1950s and didn’t spring from nowhere in 1967, or 1965.
Hewison sees a split in the 1950s, with a different tone starting in 1956. This was a revolt against what was already there (mostly much older than 1950) and centres on 'Look back in anger'. This is fascinating but doesn't work in poetry.
Hewison quotes John Berger sounding off about the 'rule makers'. Amazing. He was making up rules and trying to shove them down people's throats more than anyone else. A Stalinist who thinks he is liberating people. Sort of Ewan MacColl without the beard.
In Anger makes major use of the idea of typicality, that there is a single literary person and a change to the role affects everyone. He pulls it off but the deadline for that kind of thing was running out, and typicality was leaking its substance in a hundred directions in the 1960s. The thing is that poems use this universal lay figure in much the same way that Hewison does. In 1955 it did feel as if every writer was a pupil at the same school, shuffling down the same chilly corridors, scared of the same headmaster, late for the same compulsory sessions of ideology, sneaking off for a cigarette in the same hidey-holes. All that's gone and I can't write poetry criticism in those terms.
In 1955, what books offered was much more like the company of a certain kind of person. If you didn't like that sort of person it just wasn't interesting to be there. Writers who adapted to that and learnt how to put their 'voice' over didn't understand why the audience wasn't interested, a few years later, when poetry had become a much wider exploration both of subjectivity and of objective knowledge. 'You have to feel the same way that I do' - and this was very close to thinking 'this poem, any poem, HAS to be written in this way'. There was a whole stock of banal but educated poetry which was like the park in your town: you have to go there because it's the only park and it's conventional to go there.
**
Noel Annan : 'It also began to be recognised how much homosexuals enriched the nation's culture. Hardly surprising since by the sixties the best known English-born poet, the outstanding composer, the most famous choreographer, and the most prestigious painter - Auden, Britten, Ashton, and Bacon - were all known to be homosexuals.'
(quoted from Neil Miller's Out of the Past, a Gay and Lesbian History, p.259) Saying 'by the sixties' actually means 'during the 1950s', although Bacon's fame was ascending during that decade.
Norman Lebrecht says about the Fifties -'England's leading painter (Bacon), poet (Auden), actor (Gielgud), composer (Britten), novelist (Forster) and choreographer (Ashton) were all homosexual, an attribute that was unmentionable in studies of their lives and works.' (Covent Garden, the Untold Story, p.177)
This is in a passage set specifically in 1953, a moment of gay-bashing by the media and the police. This is a salient fact, in 1953, and must be part of the Fifties arts world. I don't have an explanation for it. Gays were not prominent in poetry, at least so far as evidence survives. In poetry, people didn't have an anxiety that you had to be gay, they had an anxiety that you had to have been born before 1900 to be a great English poet.
No one else writes as interestingly as Lebrecht about the arts world. He evokes ‘arts gays’ circa 1950 as a cosy little conspiracy, and that insider quality could have effects in allowing people to be self-indulgent (knowing they have a welcome) or to be implicit and allusive, in a private code (emptying the poem of overt meaning). But - I have just argued that literature in general at that time had the quality of letting you be with ‘certain people’, it was all a conspiracy, a fellowship of the willing. That intimacy is what the text exploits. You can trace it to Oxford University or to the Gay Fraternity, but those are false leads, because literature had that insider quality even when it had nothing to do with those two in-groups. The readers of the time were shocked by writers like Beckett or Tomlinson who offered no warmth or indulgence at all; that felt new and unattractive, in the Fifties.
**
The chapter on singer-songwriters. This was added after the main text was completed. It has the problem of not being based in textual details but in the overall 'feel' of a large number of texts. Bringing in the singers is a way of answering questions like "why is modern poetry (since 1960) so flat? why is it so hopeful that the reader will be fascinated by the poet's personality? why do poets think they can produce a wholly verbal creation which makes no use of verbal style?" These questions shed light on a great deal of poetry which is not of great interest. The significant poets do not raise these questions because they addressed the problem of flatness and have solved it by developing a verbal style whose richness differentiates it from the landscape around it. The questions may not be worth raising. On the other hand, I think this style was new in the 1960s and represents what replaced the formal, literary, ethically demanding, poetry of the 1950s, itself perhaps a continuation of a long line of literary poetry. The victorious sound of the 1960s was not anything modernist or experimental but this flatness which is also conversational and also egocentric. It was not inspired by Pound and Structuralism but by Judy Collins and Donovan. Of several thousand poets who got into print, few could understand either Pound or Lévi-Strauss, but a lot of them could understand Donovan.
Equally, the vast mass of poets have given up on the stylistic elevation which marks the ‘heritage’ of English and Scottish poetry. Analysing the modernists in terms of cultural aggression and deliberate destruction of classical serenity is irrelevant unless you also consider that the mass of poets now writing also use a flat and unliterary style.
It is not accurate to call the vernacular modern style ‘Pop’, because it lacks many qualities necessary to Pop. It is more accurate to compare it to a vein of song creation which would claim to be the expression of conscience and to be opposed by its bareness and authenticity to the sugar rush of Pop culture and to its commercialism. It is too earnest to like adornment.
Of course, it is arguable that all the poets who fell in love with this musical idiom failed, because leaving out the music was simply a step too far and this kind of poem could never work, being unpoetic. It would then be a mass movement in the wrong direction. I got the feeling, when researching for The Long 1950s, that the Folk Revival had been a failure - leaving behind an archive of dullness. This possibility has to be considered.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Remarks on gay sensibility in poetry
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
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
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Poet's Yearbook 1977
Poet's Yearbook, reverie about the state of poetry in 1976
I have a copy of Poet's 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? (His detailed list excludes vanity presses, but I am not sure if the tally of 770 also excludes them.) He counts 176 volumes as being self-published - the volume of poetry was overflowing what the retail business could cope with.
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. Antony 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 on 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 won. 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 (just after the cut-off of June 1976) 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. mine field 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. But, some of them were filled with terific poems.
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 (many) 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 the production of feature films. Is this 'the bulk'? or is Sweet someone who watches too many movies?
I have a copy of Poet's 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? (His detailed list excludes vanity presses, but I am not sure if the tally of 770 also excludes them.) He counts 176 volumes as being self-published - the volume of poetry was overflowing what the retail business could cope with.
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. Antony 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 on 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 won. 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 (just after the cut-off of June 1976) 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. mine field 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. But, some of them were filled with terific poems.
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 (many) 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 the production of feature films. Is this 'the bulk'? or is Sweet someone who watches too many movies?
Homage to Victor Carroon
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 one 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 1987 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. For Jorn, it was one 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. After the first century or three, it had a "meaning unknown to the maker". 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 my book 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.
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 1987 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. For Jorn, it was one 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. After the first century or three, it had a "meaning unknown to the maker". 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 my book 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.
Monday, 29 August 2011
Poetry numbers, again
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 1400 underground poets (corrected from 2000) within that figure. I have been doing some work to check these and confidence is hard to obtain.
I discovered that for four 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 publishing 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 four 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 those years, up to 1979, and unfortunately its figures cast doubt on the other series we have, which run for longer. This whole area is paved with uncertainty.
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 1400 underground poets (corrected from 2000) within that figure. I have been doing some work to check these and confidence is hard to obtain.
I discovered that for four 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 publishing 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 four 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 those years, up to 1979, and unfortunately its figures cast doubt on the other series we have, which run for longer. This whole area is paved with uncertainty.
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