Azimuth and Digression: Gavin Selerie interview part 4
January 7 2013 (1)

The interview was captured to a laptop as sound files of about 20 minutes each. There was a break of about 20 seconds as the operator saved one file and created the next one. These gaps have been filled from Gavin Selerie’s recording, in some cases, or reconstructed.

starting with : section 46 of Roxy
‘Are these words to act, printed in the mind/ as a building' - the theatre of memory. The Globe was a theatre recalled to memory, by memory. The use of a building and its parts as a figure in which to store memories was written about by Giordano Bruno.

AD: ‘Roxy 46’. ‘are these words to act printed in the mind/ as a building’?

GS: It’s an interesting choice to select because as you’ve just said it’s one of the more complex sections of Roxy and involves a lot of layered detail, which I would argue is essential to the progress of the poem. It’s one of the very last sections I wrote. I think this and 47 were the last, and actually after an interval. So it was coming back to the book, and again we indicated it’s densely allusive and probably telescoped but my attention is always to have a sound texture that’s readable and accessible, so I hope it attains that. The background to this is that I’d been revising a section of Strip Signals for Music’s Duel [the selected poems which came out in 2009]. The intention with Music’s Duel was originally that it would be published in the 1990s, so I was actually doing quite a bit of work on it. Revising. Quite a while ago. And I’d been reading Giordano Bruno and various books by Frances Yates, and that pitched me into doing a memory section of Roxy - the memory theatre being very relevant to the whole coverage of performance in Roxy. Investigation of performance.

AD: So ‘read it at a glance, a single glyph/ that calls down worlds’, does that relate to the theatre of memory?

GS: Absolutely. The memory theatre is relevant to the performance dimension of the book, it’s also relevant if you like to the structure of the book. In the sense that from that point of time, I suppose it would have been 1995, I’d been writing the book for ten years, and I was literally having to recover and develop motifs which had come into the poem a looking time before. So it’s got a thematic relevance to the book but it’s also literally structural in terms of surveying what one has done. As well as Bruno I’d recently been reading Charles Nicholls, The Creature in the Map, his book about Raleigh and El Dorado. Actually, I’d been reading Thomas Harriott again and Marlowe, this is the background, before I plunge into the text in some detail. For instance, I’d been reading Muriel Rukeyser's The Traces of Thomas Harriott again, actually for the second time. I'd acquired it long before that. Maybe that’s interesting, that what I’m now doing links up. No doubt most writers experience such patterns of repetition and variation. You ask about the opening. It’s an interrogative opening suggesting the procedure of feeling one’s way back, and these parts of the building are examples of features used in memory theatre, which of course goes back to Quintilian and Cicero, and in Renaissance England is diffused through Thomas Wilson and Sidney and other writers. I experienced that through the classical writers and through the Renaissance ones. At the risk of stating the obvious, the whole idea of memory theatre is that in order to recall things you have concrete physical properties which stand for the things you want to recall. A particular room like a bathroom would stand for some inner private thing that you want to remember. I should mention one other main feature that’s going to be persistently relevant. In earlier sections of the book I’m much engaged with the Rose Theatre, which was a big issue in the early 1990s. I would probably need to look up the exact date for when the Rose site was exposed, but the Rose theatre, not very far away from the Globe, was equally important and should have been preserved in a form that would enable performance to take place. But as so often happens the company that bought the land and obtained development permission could only countenance a commercial space with some retention of the original features in the basement. And there are these horrific pictures of piles - well, I went down to the site, actually, they had a staged reading of, probably, Dr Faustus, there. And so the reason that so much of Dr Faustus comes into this is that there was that controversy during the time that I was writing the poem. Over quite a long period there was debate over how that site could be developed. Memory theatre by virtue of its, the word theatre implies an area for performance. So performance is a kind of review of what happened before. These questions and I suppose dramatic statements, ‘demand of a statue what is pitched to the stars’ relate to ideas that I found in Frances Yates that link memory theatre to ancient Egyptian (Hermetic?) ritual, so that a statue is somehow capable of soaking in an aura from the heavens and features of a building or a monument can touch off strong forces. It’s like a science fiction film or some cult English horror film, isn't it? I remember last year I saw ‘Penda’s Fen’, having missed it the first time round.

AD: David Rudkin?

GS: That’s also relevant, that whole strain of English romantic mysticism is also relevant to what I’m doing here. Or towards my poetic enterprise in general.

AD: ‘rouse the demon from black diamond doors’?

GS: That’s the same thing. This is the demon as a threatening thing, but it depends on how you see it. It might be capable of good. It may be a more Manichaean perspective. Egyptian statues animated by celestial influences. Frances Yates links that to the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale, where Hermione comes to life again. Actually that’s relevant to Roxy, there’s a heroine figure re-appearing. ‘When we’re afraid we forget’, that’s an example of me incorporating a quotation. It’s from Alain Resnais’ film Muriel, otherwise called ’le temps du retour’.

AD: It’s the one about the Algerian War. Muriel was a suspect they tortured.

GS: This is all leading up to Doctor Faustus. More tragic and darker forces I’ve summoned or dealt with elsewhere in the poem. I’m talking about this in a rational way. I can’t say in an absolute way what is intended. I can remember what I might have intended, and I can remember some definite things, like the fact that’s a quotation. But the language has a momentum that is above or below the logical. I think that whole first stanza is to do with summoning forces, but in order to work out what is happening...

AD: ‘let the stiffs unroll’?

GS: Dead bodies maybe come alive again like a mummy being exposed?

AD: Because we have an Egyptian scene with statue-based magic.

GS: And also there’s a lot of Egyptian stuff in Roxy. Antony and Cleopatra is the big influence, and John Fletcher’s play about Cleopatra, the name of which escapes me. The film with Burton and Taylor and the one which...

AD: The Shaw play? Merle Oberon?

GS: We can look that up later.

AD: Caesar and Cleopatra.

GS: We come to Doctor Faustus and it’s relevant here not just because of the Rose theatre controversy at that time but also because I had seen a very interesting production of Faustus in a kind of Grotowski black box setting at the Lyric, Hammersmith. That was relatively fresh in my mind. Faustus is I suppose quintessentially a play about, it’s a quest, a quest for power, and maybe a way of reading the play could go beyond the conventional division of good and evil with Mephistopheles simply being a tempter figure leading you into a false idea of power. There might be a way in which Faustus’ nemesis is brought about by a failure of nerve. So I’m keeping this theologically open. So that the Faustus story is partly to do with belief and definition of the world that surrounds you. And with capacities for invention. And also much to do with the temptation involving this other figure who has this other power. Can you see how that’s relevant to memory theatre?

AD: ‘When you gravel the scoffing /is there ever a blue skies option’?

GS: We need to go back a fraction because the second stanza I haven’t said that is actually to do with the books that Faust has as stage properties, in the first scene of Marlowe. Faustus opening various books in order to sound their depths. This part, sleeves, just before the one you mentioned, that is to do with the speech which Bruno gave at Oxford, in which he was described by a hostile witness as having stripped off his sleeves like a juggler, and that’s meant to mean that Bruno’s ideas are suspect. Coming on to when ‘gravel the scoffing is there ever a blue skies option’, I suppose this is literally to do with what’s going to happen to The Rose (theatre), but also with those who disapprove of a kind of risky adventure in philosophy and defining the world. The scoffing would be scoffing at ambition, so it’s relevant to Faustus. ‘Blue skies’ could also record the image of flight in the previous stanza. Marlowe often uses images of flight to indicate aspiration.

AD: “the blue skies option”. Is that Total Recall, the film?

GS: I can’t say. Often when I’m using references that seem to be antiquarian they have a modern equivalent that I may be aware of - or half aware of. That’s relevant to my current project Harriot Double. The next stanza, ‘Uncover, measure out the chalk’, this is to do with the site of the Rose theatre. It was very close to the river’s edge. As you probably know the reconstructed Globe isn’t actually where the original Globe was. If you can imagine Southwark Bridge, the reconstructed Globe is on the south-west side of it. But the original Globe was just beyond the bridge. Obviously still on the South Bank. So the Rose wasn’t that far from where the reconstructed Globe is and one of the background features of this whole text, as well as the property company being against it as a performance base, it is very likely that the people behind the Globe reconstruction didn’t want a rival theatre very close!

AD: You have to eliminate one. The arts scene in England isn’t going to benefit from having two early 17th century theatres in a short space. One is probably the right number.

GS: I felt very strongly there should be two at the time but maybe I’m capable of being more realistic now! The bare bones of the geometry, the little base of the wall that you can see, it’s a polygon that can pass itself off as a circle. That’s obviously literal. ‘Flower bounded by/ a ditch and sewer’. ‘Flower bounded by/ a ditch and sewer’ is definitely relevant to the whole poem because of the idea of the fertile and innocent also being inevitably linked to the dirty and the... I can’t remember the exact quotation but it is... What I’m doing now in commenting is in a way what I’m talking about in this poem, the difficulty of recalling and finding one’s way back to some context. ‘Love is pitched in the mansion of excrement’, that’s the Yeats quotation. In terms of layout much of Roxy is fairly conventional in having a regular left hand margin and not too much scattering of words on the page. Although there’s obviously variation within that basic pattern. But what strikes me in looking at this now is it does have some resemblance to theatrical speech, not that it’s a dialogue as such or even a monologue, but ... We’re mainly looking at meaning aren’t we, at the moment. I would say in passing that the line breaks are important. I’m just looking up at the next page as it’s laid out in Music’s Duel. The way I’ve broken the lines, ‘moves/ invisible’, on the opposite page. But maybe I’m going too fast. We’ve got “Money behind money scoops in mud/ for a renegotiated view, lines where/ ‘they’ won’t tread” That is all about the company and its need to protect its investment. But maybe it’s also to do with plotting worlds as a thinker, when I say “lines where/ ‘they’ won’t tread”, it’s not just wanting to keep people out, in the 1980’s and Nineties, particularly protesters wanting to retain this theatrical possibility, but it’s also relevant to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus in terms of lines of demarcation and thinking. Could I say in passing that theatre for me is crucial not just as an art form that I find useful and interesting but beyond that it’s a dimension of performance which is everywhere around, beyond the theatre. It’s I suppose a kind of paradigm or emblem of private behaviour. Although I might seem at times buried in particular information and reference to do with this art form it’s coming out of a broader concern with how people relate to each other. Do you by any chance know Arthur Marwick’s history of the 1960s?

AD: Yes, I think that’s a tremendous book. I thought his book on culture wasn’t nearly so impressive.

GS: It's much better than Dominic Sandbrook’s which I think has a very conservative agenda with a small c. One of the things Marwick says is that in the Sixties the arts lab, with its activities particularly theatrical activities in the arts lab, had an influence on British society that permeated far beyond the little network of people who actually performed in those events. I think that’s a very fair point. Instances which seem quite particular and maybe are witnessed by a minority develop a momentum and there are ripples that move out way beyond. So what I’m saying about the Rose theatre here is to do with aspects of behaviour generally and also to do with the commercial agenda of the Thatcher era generally. The company riding roughshod over other people’s needs. And of course we can’t forget the glory of the garden, as William Rees-Mogg termed his document on the future of the Arts Council. The Arts Council took a decidedly narrower view during the Thatcher era, did it not.

AD: So that was a policy document on what the Arts Council should be doing? and the government went in a different direction?

GS: I think Rees-Mogg was more enlightened to a degree, but not actually that far. I think he had already suffered, becoming more conservative than he later became.
The ‘flying crane’ that’s a kind of William Empson type image that has symbolic and literal dimensions. They are flying cranes over the building site, But also they’re flying cranes that are birds, as in Faustus... “Don’t say the joke isn’t part of the scheme.” This is to do with Faustus and whether the farcical bits are primarily later additions or whether they’re essential to Marlowe’s vision, and I would argue that the comedy is essential and it is necessary to the working out of essentially a tragic process. These things - “mean and grovelling a meal vanishes -/ chickens and pudding with ‘This is mine’.” - that’s that bit in Faustus which I think many people regard as a later addition. Where the pope, it’s in Rome, isn’t it, the dishes are pulled away, it’s a bit of possibly Protestant satire on Roman Catholic excess. For me it’s an essential part of the exploration of possibility.

AD: It’s a magic trick that Faust pulls, and this one’s comic? That must be some of the oldest material in the chapbook Faust as published.

GS: I should have said I’m drawing on the chapbook as well. The ‘Damnable Life’, it’s actually in ‘The Damnable Life’ that Faust says ‘this is mine’ before snatching away the pope’s dish of meat.
I’m reading from my notebook here. “In Orson Welles’ 1937 production, two chickens and a pudding flew up from their dishes and disappeared into the back velvet drape.”

AD: That’s good acting!

GS: ‘paid for a slice’ also works on more than one level, because it’s to do with writers of Renaissance plays being paid for their slice in a collaborative effort. For example, “In November 1602 William Byrd and Samuel Rowley were paid four pounds for their additions in ‘Doctor Fostus’”. These presumably included the banquet scene. So these things are agglomerative, but I believe there is a logic to the way an acting text develops out of things that are written in a private study. I mean there are whole traditions of acting, aren’t there, particularly with a thing like Hamlet, where there are things that are done that are still done today and which go back to very early productions. I talk about this in Le Fanu’s Ghost. Actual mannerisms that have been passed down though the centuries.

(In the film Total Recall, one character says ‘Do you want the blue skies option?’. ‘Total recall’ is what the theatre of memory promised.)

AD: ‘the demon came out of a black diamond door;’ now.

GS: We’ve come as far as ‘a phrase out of the charred leaves/ says make the moon your plot’, haven’t we.

AD: What was ’all the perfumed verge’?

GS: I think this is to do with the whole strand in Roxy of the erotic possibility and the beautiful always, or so frequently one step away. It’s there in Faustus, his urge to have Helen - Helen of Troy being a kind of Roxy figure. And in the next section, 47, I do actually move into talking about possessing the new world, maybe drawing on some of Stephen Greenblatt’s argument about the ravaging of native territory - actually foreign territory. Obviously there’s a sexual connotation to that. I think some of the background to this, one of the layers here, is, as well as Marlowe’s play in its various manifestations, the English Faust book, Murnau’s film Faust (1926), in which Faust starts to burn his holy books and then his eyes fall on the phrase, ‘get ye to the crossroads beneath the moon and invoke Him thrice', and you get a depiction of the charred book leaves. So that comes out of the film, actually.

AD: So what is ’the perfumed verge’?

GS: This other territory that seduces or which one wants power over.

AD: It’s perfumed because it’s full of natural vegetation that hasn’t been damaged or razed yet?
GS: Exotic. But also it’s sexual in terms of the desired other. The searching eye is always looking beyond - ‘an eye runs on the ridges, stretches across/ lead-in-white’ and it becomes particularly sexual, ‘brimming her quiet thin thickness’. I think ‘thin thickness’ is a phrase from Du Bartas, actually. I’ve got a feeling it is.

AD: The Protestant 17th century French writer?

GS: It’s Silvester’s. I obviously mean Silvester’s version. It’s I think to do with layers of the heavens as they perceived it, within a Ptolemaic framework. Not a net - a sphere I suppose. Because Faustus is always looking at the heavens, wanting to step beyond. And it’s in Tamberlaine as well, the urge to step beyond, always questing. 'To click an icon and go over’, well that’s to do with present technological context. On one level is perhaps to do with memory theatre but also to do with computing I suppose. On an Apple Mac you can use a series of icons to summon aspect of text. So this is the electronic world and the promise of other worlds through technology. The back box in the next section could on one level be that performance space I was talking about. ‘dread the spotlight in a black box’. You dread it but ‘it sleeks the scene to a fine devise’. I can’t really analyse that logically I’m afraid. It still has a resonance for me whatever. ‘Seen and allowed’ is to do with the censor.

AD: So the black box is another production of Faustus?

GS: Yes, at the Lyric Theatre. It may have been some years before I was writing. But it stayed in my mind. The sweep of events being as it were played out in the head, in the skull almost. An example of that would be many of Beckett’s plays. Maybe particularly Krapp’s Last Tape. Within a contained space. Sensing, having access to, a panorama. Much of Faustus could almost be played out inside the man’s head. Even though he’s dealing with other figures. A fight between forces in the man’s head, if you like. A conflict between forces. So what’s ‘seen and allowed’, that’s the phrase that the censors used at the time, for checking the text. Giving permission. That’s relevant to Faustus because certain things were transgressive in terms of the prevailing moral and religious ethic. And the middle here must be partly to do with middle spirits, the intermediate spirits that seem to be an aspect of Marlowe’s play, at least in William Empson’s reading of the play. I think I’d recently read Empson’s book Faustus and the Censor, which offers a very interesting perspective on the play. Middle voice is also coming into play here. Witnessing the possibility of its own voicing. It’s important to stress that throughout Roxy there’s this self-reflexive quality, so not just talking about film and theatre and fashion magazines in subject terms, but I’m also building commentary on how you perceive, and a kind of aesthetic assumption into the text itself that it’s self-reflexive, and it may be that these middle spirits and middle voice are relevant to this question of perception and assumptions that feature throughout the poem - particularly gender politics I suppose. In terms of the female star and is that empowerment for women or merely a way of containing female power. Empson argues that Helen of Troy in one tradition is a middle spirit, that she’s a kind of illusion. Which may relate to the play, it’s a Euripides play -

AD: Helen in Egypt?

GS: - which HD draws on for her poem Helen in Egypt, which I think is her most interesting work, actually. Can we move over the page? Now all this, I’d recently been to that big de Kooning exhibition at the Tate Gallery. I remember JH Prynne gave a talk at it -

AD: Rosy-fingered dawn at Louse Point.

GS: Yes. Anyway, it was the series of paintings called Woman that interested me. ‘wet emulsions and stand oil’. And stand oil is a highly viscous medium that De Kooning liked for its slow-drying properties. A very evocative phrase, actually. Stand Oil. It’s a contradiction actually because oil suggests something fluid.

AD: If it doesn’t flow it might be fat. Like olive oil when it freezes.

GS: That’s why you shouldn’t keep it in the fridge I suppose. I’m shifting from the Renaissance play to thinking of - shifting from Marlowe’s portrayal of Helen - which even though Helen only appears briefly in Faustus she’s still a far-reaching presence there- so I’m shifting from that to modern contexts of seeing. Particularly men seeing women, here. De Kooning’s representation of female genitals and mouth such as the one called ‘Lipstick’ from the early Fifties. Elaine de Kooning said ‘Bill asked me to put on lipstick and kiss this drawing, carefully picking the exact spots where I should press my lips, each one fainter, ending finally with the mid section, going counter-clockwise.' What is going on here? Is it a mark of affection? Apparently Elaine de Kooning would often sign notes to de Kooning with lipstick kisses. But he’s grudging the pattern. You could say the collage mouth emphasizes the fluctuating nature of identity. The images are built up in layers and that’s very relevant to memory theatre. Shoes, lipstick, eyes, being privileged female features in these paintings. And also I suppose popular culture of that time. The genitalia at times look like wounds in these paintings - “a wound-like wine/ on crusted shelves”.

AD: The westering is going from the right hand of the painting towards the left hand?

GS: Exactly. But also there I’m referencing Renaissance exploration of North America.

AD: Really? So that’s what de Kooning did, he went West.

(break) AD: Rolling on One.

GS: I’d just like to say a bit more about my interpretation of Helen of Troy here, if you like, Helen as a Roxy figure. I’d been reading a book called The Fortunes of Faust by Elsie Butler, who was a friend of HD. A very gifted academic at London University.

AD: EM Butler.

GS: But very interested in Magic. In talking about the second part of Goethe’s Faust she says of Helen, “Feeling and thinking as a real woman, she is but a shade and one perhaps who has never had a real existence except in the minds of men. A strange beautiful mythological being.” So that is part of the context, when I was speaking of whether Helen has substance or not, whether she is fully physically there or just an image or spirit. Just going back to ‘westering’ again, I probably had in mind Spengler’s idea of vaulting relentless aspiration.

AD: Which he also called ‘Faustian’.

GS: Faust is left holding Helen’s empty robe after she embraces him and vanishes in Goethe’s Faust Part II. And that’s the last time he touches her. So “she smiles/ a range of selves, proffers/ the isolate clasp or scarf/ that set off blood-rushes’. I think this is all to do with that offer of possibility but the danger of it disappearing, of that promise vanishing. I think all of this must be to do with that. ‘Suppose she comes back to cloud./ Beasted, he holds an empty robe.’

AD: Beasted?

GS: That may be a play on ‘bested’ actually, in the sense of overcome, but also beasted because he is brought down to a level of degradation, with his darker nature exposed.

AD: “petals of a name that pleases.”

GS: Well, yeah. I can’t offer any commentary on that at the moment I’m afraid. Other than the fact that petal might be the petals of a rose. ‘raising a city’ again seems to take us back to the beginning of this section with the memory theatre. But raising obviously can mean demolishing as well as summoning.

AD: This could be the atomic bomb. Not Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus by any chance?

GS: Which I used in Days of '49. Going to the last part of this section, the “subplot” relates to what I was dealing with earlier, in terms of jest material. I suppose the subplot equalises things. Reducing the grand possibility of the main plot but also actually making it grounded. The comic would ground that more highbrow material. ‘There are still wings rising/ in alabaster.’ Maybe wings of the theatre.

AD: The theatre must have been bombed?

GS: I would think so. or maybe burnt down as so many theatres did. The “hell’s teeth and a tapering tongue/ the beer and bread”. This is imagining how performances occurred at The Rose and the audience reception of the material. I have a note here - “Thomas Middleton in the Black Book 1604 refers to a performance of Doctor Faustus when the old theatre cracked and frighted the audience by some kind of devilish disturbance in the fabric.” It would have been quite frail, but it would have been one of those rather wonderful moments where something happens literally with the elements and adds to the artistic material being dealt with. It’s all being levelled. Beer and bread being consumed while “the poet pleads for Indian silk”. And they have found things like “old clay pipes and orange pips”. I think I would be sufficiently literal to be talking here about what was found on the site of the Rose Theatre. And the section ends ‘watching a lyric face/ one class sweats into the armpits of another’. You’ve got this high art being presented but you’ve got the groundlings sweating into the armpits of those more privileged, or maybe into the armpits of the actors. Certainly a kind of levelling again. The groundlings and the lords absorbed in the same process of taking in the fight for a questing man’s soul.

AD: What is a middle spirit?

GS: It’s an under-spirit who doesn’t have the authority of a main spirit but is not a completely insignificant spirit. I think middle spirits had the ability to impersonate. Empson comments “Faustus must have a scheme to escape Hell. He hopes that Mephistopheles is himself a middle spirit merely pretending to be a devil.” That’s the point of it. Mephistopheles may not actually be a devil. Uncertainty of status.

AD: So he is an actor in the role of a devil?

GS: Which of course literally he is! I’ll just say that this is section 46 out of 52 sections so we’re moving towards the end of the book here. And this links up with section 47 which is much to do with discovery of exotic territory, but also to do with memory.

(‘Stromboli’, a poem from Days of 49) There are continuities there as well. The English tendency would be to stress on that second syllable but Italians tend to voice it ‘Stromboli’. Would you like me just to start talking about it? Why did you pick this piece?

AD: (searching the theatre of memory for an icon which isn’t there) Why did I pick it? Oh, you picked it.

GS: In this text I was juxtaposing film reality and life reality. The personal lives of the actress Ingrid Bergman and the director Rossellini, on the one hand, and the matter in the film itself. Stromboli is one of Rossellini’s neo-realist dramas, which means it wasn’t scripted in advance very much, and a lot of it was allowed to just happen. Ingrid Bergman had been a conventional Hollywood actress in a number of film before that and had become very disillusioned with that stale way of working, and she had the inclination to act in a more natural way, and therefore took this role. It was filmed on the volcanic island of Stromboli, in the Mediterranean. She got involved with Rossellini romantically and eventually had children with him and this caused extreme scandals back in the States, partly because she was still married to the Swedish, was he a brain surgeon?, I can’t remember but anyway she was a married woman having an affair in the public eye. Structurally this text uses lines from the film and descriptive elements, as well as juxtaposing the life with the film, and also using different kinds of language here. At times there’s a kind of telegrammese type framing of language. The words in small capitals are her own words, the phrases in brackets in lower case are descriptive, so I’m setting up a dramatic tension there.

CANT HEAR the water churning
CANT UNDERSTAND (the boarded door)
CANT SPEAK (the smoking cone)
ARRIVE ROME SUNDAY NIGHT (fiesta)

She is the first lady of the screen in the film world at that time, and had played a nun, I forget which film now. Anyway she goes off with this love pirate. Which film was it? It wasn’t The Nun’s Story? I think that’s another one with Deborah Kerr.

AD: It probably wasn’t a very good film. (It was "Bells of St Mary's").

GS: I’m setting that out that she goes off with this love pirate, with a daring Italian director given to flexible working methods. ’Sends fire and ashes to the Legion of Decency.’ I think the Legion of Decency was one of these moral majority type things. So I’m recalling or imagining the circumstances of making the film, mixing in actual things from the film with the basic circumstances of making the film, like “start of film blank, try to start. Fault.” ‘Vene this is bad room’. The room, that’s when she ... Have you seen this film? You remember that she is a sophisticated middle-class Italian from I think Northern Italy who comes down to the tip of Italy. And she becomes involved with this basically peasant, and he’s a fisherman. And she becomes his wife. I’m condensing the film into a few lines. I’m picking out key images like “she is a rabbit seized by a ferret, she is a tunny fish speared in the heaving sea” - That’s the most famous sequence in the film, isn’t it, the tunny-fish expedition. I’m imagining that she is being speared as it were. It’s so different from the poem we were just looking at, isn’t it?

AD: It’s a lot simpler.

GS: You can’t make everything complex. There’s a layer of complexity here in the juxtaposition. But I certainly wanted this to be accessible in what it says about the period and maybe the scandal of the time and the contradictions. I think I’m trying to write this in a film-like way though. So it’s a bit like a filmstrip but it’s a dramatized filmstrip which involves description as well as speech. And as I said life as well as film. “Reality is a matter of intent.”

AD: Making a film where you start with no script, because it is less premeditated, is controlled by fewer people, it’s more real.

GS: And actually generates or occurs in parallel with Bergman’s own release, personality wise or romantically. It turned out to be quite a difficult relationship, but I think she did get a lot of things from it. Certainly the films she made during that middle period are among her best work.



AD: “NO ALIEN GUILTY CAN SET FOOT ON AMERICAN SOIL”? She wasn’t guilty of anything? Is this a paper clipping?

GS: I think that must be a newspaper headline that I’m either adapting or quoting, yes. She can’t go back because she’s had this affair and become an adulteress! She certainly can’t go back to Hollywood and work there with the same respect.

AD: Because of the Legion of Decency and the newspapers. They would ban her films.

GS: I suppose Howard Hughes must have had some part in the funding of this film or maybe in the distribution, in the American distribution. He writes to defend the heart. Reality is a matter of intent.” Got aesthetic resonance, doesn’t it, in the way you make a film.

AD: A script being a form of domination exercise of one individual over the others.

GS: Absolutely. At times I’m trying to get the Italian intonation in, “you ave-a no modesty”. To register that context. I think why I suggested this was as a contrast to parts of Roxy. Although it has a continuity in focusing on female glamour, a female star and heroine, but this is more actively dramatised.

Gavin Selerie interview, part 3

Azimuth and Digression, part 3: Gavin Selerie interview 28 January 2012

AD: Tell us about the Riverside interviews.

GS: As I recall this came out of going to poetry events at the Riverside Studios. There was a woman there whose name I forget, the literary director? manager? What would the term be? Anyway she was in charge of putting on the poetry readings and she was extremely helpful not only in terms of my getting access but also stocked the books after I’d published and indeed the few other Binnacle publications I did. Initially it was just hearing the poets but then I would follow that up and it became a rolling program. It [title] was not just the studios but had for me a blues connotation. There was I think a blues label. Blues/jazz label. I forget the exact sequence but I think initially I did the Beat poets. I did Lawrence Ferlinghetti who complimented me by saying it was the best interview with him that had ever been done. A slight exaggeration I think. I did interviews with Ginsberg, massive lengthy session with Ginsberg. I think quite a bit of that recorded in Miles’ house near the Post Office Tower. We did various follow-up sessions. I did Gregory Corso. Now that was done at Jay Landesman’s house in Islington, lovely terrace near the canal. I went across one evening and Corso was there listening to Lully, some piece of wonderful baroque, on a ghetto blaster at full blast and then we got on to doing the interview. Then either he or I suggested going to the pub called The Bluecoat Boy. He after a few drinks got increasingly aggressive and quarrelsome and pulled the tape recorder from my bag and tried to confiscate it. We came to blows but I eventually got the tape back from him. And then I had to deal with the people at New Directions. A lovely woman called Griselda O something. She acted as an intermediary in getting the text sorted out further. When he finally received the book he claimed not to have had final say over the contents. But it was well received. I also interviewed Ed Dorn. It was potentially the most successful of them but it never came out. He wanted to revise it and continue it by post. I don’t know. There were various delays. I got very busy and after another couple of Riverside volumes I ran out of money and space and the series collapsed. But it finally is going to come out in a book I’ve edited with Justin Katko, from shearsman. I did a lengthy introduction explaining where I think the interview would have gone, basing that not just on my memories but what Dorn said to me. And checking various things with Jenny Dunbar Dorn, his widow. Of all the people I interviewed the person I had most kinship with was Dorn. One of the biggest regrets I have that it never turned into a book of the length of the Ginsberg one, or the Tom McGrath book. The Dorn book and my introduction to it are germane to what we were talking about, the Cambridge empathy with that American poetry and development of those procedures. I have quite a bit to say there about Donald Davie. With luck that will all come out in the next year. Did you see I gave you a copy of my Olson paper? I became friendly with George Butterick in I suppose 1980 and he was very supportive of my project. He certainly helped me gain access to the archive in Connecticut where they were already gathering material. (They held material on?) Tom Raworth. Obviously a huge amount of Olson stuff. University of Connecticut at Storrs. They’ve got a mass of Black Mountain material there. They’ve got all Prynne’s letters to Olson. Butterick lived in Willimantic. He and his wife Colette were very supportive of what I was doing. The bookshop in Willimantic, Ziesing Brothers, were very helpful. The Ziesing brothers actually published my first book, which some of the poems in Azimuth come from. Playground for the Working Line.
I did a very long interview with Ted Ensslin whose work I was very interested in then although I confess I can only appreciate the shorter lyrics these days. I still admire the ambition of Ranger and Synthesis and so on. I went up to where he was living, up in Maine nearly on the Canadian border. We did the interview in bizarre circumstances because there was a power cut and we had to use oil lamps. He was very much a back to the land person. The battery on my tape recorder was getting slower and slower. I did capture a huge amount though. That has never come out and I don’t have the time to deal with that now. A part of the tapes has been transcribed. I do want to get those onto some digital medium and likewise I did a fairly long interview with Cid Corman and I think that is quite important as the record of what went down, particularly in terms of Corman’s relationship with Olson. I must say that Corman is one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever met. Despite being a very interesting poet.

AD: I’ve got mixed feelings about delving into that.

GS: I must say he did come up with the goods in term of discussing his work. He was very self-centred in his perspective but nevertheless was willing to talk at length about his literary contacts. Obviously I was very interested in the magazine Origin and he talked at some length about editing Origin. He also talked about his own poetry and living in Japan and so on. His wife was running this Japanese restaurant in Boston. It’s like those stories about Wyndham Lewis and Froanna only appearing at the hatch to serve meals. I think Froanna was by no mean as downtrodden as those apocryphal stories suggest. The last Riverside book which came out and which broke my project was the Tom McGrath book. Tom I had known for quite a while through Michael Horovitz’s circle and through Barry Miles, Tom having been editor of IT and at the centre of so much that was going on in London even though he was a Glaswegian. He was an interesting poet himself as well as a playwright. His play 'The Hard Man' had been a big success. I interviewed him over a two-year period, first in London at the ICA and elsewhere, then in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Some phone conversations also fed into the final text. This became a book of 300 pages, including a critical introduction and illustrations. I’d consulted Tom about many points of detail, trying to get everything right. We were committed to a ‘deep soak’ approach. Then he freaked out when he saw the book, which seemed to him too revealing. I laid it all out. Even though I thought I’d made it plain for him that I wanted all the detail. He had a kind of breakdown at the time. I don’t know how much it had to do with my book. It probably wasn’t primarily to do with the book. But he pulled out of a launch in Edinburgh. I’d printed a thousand copies or something partly because of the restaging of ‘Animal’ at the National Theatre and of course it was quite hard to sell the book and I had masses stored and it was quite depressing actually. I had a grant from the Arts Council that was meant to cover the printing costs. But the book came out bigger than envisaged so it didn’t even cover the printing costs. I was quite pleased with the book because of its circuitous progress through various aspects of the arts, theatre film dance poetry. And Tom talked quite a bit about Scottish poetry. And Scottish literature in general. That was a nightmare for me, that book. I overreached myself completely. I was also trying to finish Azimuth which I think came out the year after that.
I’d forgotten Jerome Rothenberg. It was Eric Mottram who introduced me to Jerry. I intersected with Jerry in various contexts. Through Eric, who was enthusiastic about ethnopoetics and that whole project that Rothenberg had, but also through various performances that Rothenberg did, probably at the instigation of Bob Cobbing, at places like the London Musicians’ Collective. What happened with the Rothenberg interview was that, again it was a case of misfortune for me. Initially. I turned up at Kings College for the interview and I’d been teaching through the day and I had the most terrible migraine so I didn’t feel able to contribute very much. But actually everything worked out because Jerry and I agreed to do a further separate interview and we later continued the interview, possibly by post, I can’t remember. So there are two parts to the book. And I have nothing but praise for Jerry in supporting me, he was the complete reverse of some of the others I’ve mentioned. He was a consummate professional in editing and revising and insisting that certain things be done. I should acknowledge that Ginsberg was as well. Actually, a little bit as I was saying about Michael Horovitz, against what people might assume Ginsberg was extremely precise in his editorial methods, and indeed eloquent about poetry, going way back. I should acknowledge that Ginsberg and Rothenberg were supportive to the nth degree. And I interviewed Joseph Chaykin at Riverside Studios, where we spoke for an hour or maybe more and there was something wrong either with my head or with the equipment and neither side had recorded. And he very generously agreed to do it again. I don’t think it was as comprehensive second time around. But the same day he continued and I did capture that. That is on tape but again I haven’t got it out. I must get this stuff transferred digitally. I don’t have the resources to publish that kind of thing now. After my experience doing the Dorn book last year, I don’t have the time or the inclination, it’s shameful, but it was extremely time-consuming and it took me away from my own writing, the creative writing.

AD: It strikes me that you were chronicling American poets of the 1950s. When I first heard about the series I thought it would be English poets of the 1970s because that was what I most wanted. There is a great lack of source interviews for those people. I think it’s right to get people a certain way into their career, you capture much more that way.

GS: You’ve put your finger on another major regret, that I didn’t do an equivalent number of interviews with British poets in whom I was at least equally interested. I did ask Tom Raworth whether he would do a book-length interview but he very kindly declined, saying that he’d said everything necessary in the interview with Barry Alpert in Vort, but this was further down the line, he would have had other things to say. I can remember him doing things at SubVoicive which enthused me. This was a long way after the Vort interview which admittedly does cover the Olson and Dorn connection quite well. I found in talking to Dorn that things would come out that weren’t in equivalent interviews. Justin Katko has confirmed that he believes there is stuff in there not covered anywhere else.

AD: Pretty irritating to do someone densely interviewed, they’ve already done it for someone else.

GS: I tried to persuade Basil Bunting to do a book-length interview, and Tom Pickard was a helpful link person there. But that never happened. Tom Pickard himself I wanted to do. Lee Harwood I wanted to do. I don’t know that I was even in touch with Lee other than seeing him at the odd reading. Who else... of course Barry MacSweeney I would have loved to have done.

AD: My bet is that it would never have seen the light of day, whatever you did. Barry wanted to control how he seemed to the outside world, but every time he spoke at length he said things he couldn’t control.

GS: Have you ever heard that reading followed by discussion with comments by Barry which was recorded at...a college in South London. I can dig it out for you a bit later and tell you what’s on it. What struck me about it was the precision of Barry’s comments about the poetic art.

AD: He must have been sober. It had to be the right time of day. I spent three days interviewing Barry once and he nixed the whole thing.

GS: It is a risky business doing interviews. It’s regrettable for instance that Sidney Graham wasn’t interviewed at length. But you can imagine what might have happened.

AD: If you have someone so finicky about words then the need for control isn’t going to just switch off when they turn to prose. The likelihood is that they either want to rewrite it and that gets very complex, it turns into poems and you never get it back, effectively. Or they realise that they really want to write poetry and talking prose is just not how they want to be seen and listened to.

GS: I did one with Robert Creeley in the company of Peter Middleton and Tom Pickard.

AD: You had a mike that would pick up four voices?

GS: We were sitting on a rug in a garden somewhere in north-east London, Dalston or somewhere. I think it came out perfectly clearly. Most of the interviewing was done by me or Peter. Who is a good friend of mine. He was still living in London at that point.

AD: I just get more excited about the English end.

GS: Roy Fisher is someone else I would have loved to have done. There are some very useful interviews with Roy. So I don’t think that was quite as crucial as Barry or Tom Raworth. Roy Fisher reading ‘paraphrases’. To remind us for later on.

AD: I think we’re going to talk quite a lot about the London School.

GS: Before we get to that, could I just add a PS on the Riverside interviews? I wouldn’t want the reader to think that there isn’t quite extensive coverage of the English scene at certain moments in the series, where it dovetails with the American scene, and the Tom McGrath interview definitely has quite a lot within the sphere of what you were defining just now.
I was quite keen on combining live interview with written revision/addition. Which could well have parallels with my method of composition in Azimuth. I was quite keen on a composite method that had the spark of live conversation but also had deeper quiet rumination, so that you had a balance between spontaneity of expression and precision of thought. I was keen on doing that with Ed Dorn but through the vagaries of communication and so on it never came about.

AD: There is quite a casualty rate, isn’t there? It’s quite ambitious. OK. Die Londoner Schule. (reads from a paper)
I wanted to acquire more info on the London School. I am sure that if we look at the scene in 1968 1978 1988 1998 and 2008 we see totally different cultural objects, but the lack of documentation makes this very difficult. Writers Forum supposedly began in 1963, and is still going, but most of that history is very hard to recover. The London scene is like a bus station, open on all sides. People blow in and out the whole time. So several hundred people could claim to be members of it. I found that most people offering wares there pretty much had a cardboard sign round their necks saying SCHMUCK. So identifying with all of them was unthinkable. Being there is quite different from identifying. I realised recently that whenever I was taking part in events there there was at least one person who invisibly had decided that four or five people were The London School and everyone else, notably me, wasn't registering and, in their memories, wouldn't appear. It was hard to avoid concluding that really the whole scene did not belong to them, and to plan memories in which they didn't appear except disguised as waste paper baskets or pillars. So, even if you define the London School as a tacitly shared sensibility, it seems more like a set of four or five sensibilities which linked different knots of people and excluded others. So I wondered what you felt about the silently shared ideals.
To get concrete, I wondered if we could locate followers of Olson, mainly via Mottram, and followers of Cobbing, and find that they have nothing in common. Perhaps the tensions in the public moments were due to a kind of gang warfare.

GS: I think gang warfare is putting it too extremely unless you want to go back to the Poetry Society wars. Certainly there were different coteries. But my abiding memory is of the intersection of scenes rather than of demarcation in the hostile sense. There were different groupings, and veiled and open tension or hostilities, but I really found that it was like a continual series of doors that opened, a bit like that cardboard thing where...

AD: Advent calendars?

GS: No... no. I don’t know what I’m thinking of

AD: I think you’ve just invented something!

GS: lt was like a series of windows or doors. The way in which one meeting would lead on to another.
I think you’re right that there were a group of people who were predominantly into Olson rather than into Continental European sound poetry at the other end. Those were two poles. On the other hand, Eric Mottram, who I suppose for most people would typify a consciousness that displays the influence of Pound and Olson but is remoulding that in a British context, he represents that, but Cobbing equally drew on American models. Allen was saying to me after the paper I gave at that conference in the University of Kent ...

AD: The Olson conference?

GS: Yeah in November 2010.
I just wonder maybe I could say a couple of things about Strip Signals. We got onto that somewhere.

AD: What is the title Strip Signals?

GS: It refers primarily to a German term, I think it's Wellensalat. Wave salad. It’s a technical term, a radio term referring to the crossing of stations. As you twist the dial on the radio so you’ve got intermediate stations. I love that term ‘wave salad’. Strip signals has so many association, it obviously conjures up fragmentary experience, but also suggests a sinister technology whereby through chips or whatever your life is being monitored and controlled. Actually I have on the cover of the book a bar code symbol to indicate the recording of a transaction or of the existence of an artefact. Also it’s reflective of the juxtaposition of different kinds of writing in that text, which is a loose personal experience on the one hand, not necessarily my experience, and analytical technical language on the other. A lot of that is about finance initiatives and at that time, I wrote it in 1985, a lot of that was still fantasy, like accounts of going to the Moon before the moon landing. A lot of that has actually come true. We don’t yet have barcodes on our wrists but it won’t be long. They are talking about doing away with plastic card technology and doing it through your skin or fingerprints or something.

AD: Or your retina.

GS: So Strip Signals, the first performance just had a couple of other participants beside myself. The more elaborate performance was the year afterwards, 1986. We had just done one rehearsal before and one or maybe two of the people there hadn’t been at that rehearsal. So it was pretty improvised and not pre-planned. I selected texts for that performance. This performance has now come out on a 2-CD set. There were two master tapes from different parts of the audience and the engineer had to marry those two tapes.

GS: (explains how he came to London in 1978) I worked for the extra-mural department of Birkbeck for all those years and they were very unsupportive of poetry. John Muckle was another key figure, he was the main force behind the Paladin poetry series, he should get the credit for that much more than Iain Sinclair.

AD: Let’s just pause on that. John was working for Paladin, to do with editing horror novels I think. He told them, do some contemporary poetry. It was completely his idea, they failed to say no, I think that was about the size of it. John set up the Paladin new british poetry thing and devised the four categories of what the mainstream didn’t like. But then he moved on from the job and that is why Iain was managing it when it actually came out.

GS: I didn’t mean to be critical of Iain. His input later was important. I had a little bit of input into that anthology. John was unhappy in a couple of cases about material that had been selected and I acted, to suggest some other material, and managed to get that accepted by Eric.

AD: That was a milestone of a book.

GS: It’s a curious anthology. The women’s poetry section which was edited by my friend Gillian Allnutt is a lot more conservative formally but I’m glad it’s there nonetheless. It could have been different, it could have been better perhaps. That’s probably the way those things had to be presented then.

AD: I think it was a trailblazer, I don’t think there was a model. It’s sad it wasn’t followed up more. You could point to it and say, here it is, here’s what we are talking about. Whereas quite a few influential people were denying that that kind of poetry actually existed. They were saying, yes, there’s a theory that you could do this kind of poetry but no-one’s actually ever done it. When you have a book with 88 poets in it it saves that kind of argument.

GS: I suppose the (Paladin) series of three poets is a kind of successor to the tnbp anthology, and if that series had continued many other people from that anthology and indeed other poets would have received further exposure. The great thing about those books, at a time when most of the publication for the poets we’re talking about was A4 stapled booklets they were being presented in a way which meant they could potentially have been received in a more serious way with more serious attention. Although that didn’t really happen even with the smarter format.

AD: OK, it’s like a radical government that’s in power for six weeks. I think it did move things on. It’s surprising how many people picked up those books before they were pulped.

GS: There were several individual volumes, weren’t there. Lee Harwood.

AD: Across the Frozen River?

GS: There was a John Ashbery.

AD: I am still wondering about the people who go to poetry events at the Royal Festival Hall. How to explain to them why they would want to go to SubVoicive or whatever.

GS: It has to do with integrity of space. I don’t mean clinging to territory. A poet feeling they can read experimental work and be tolerated. And an audience which is receptive to that. I think on the whole the less formal the nature of the venue the more powerful the performance will be. Poetry readings in the Queen Elizabeth Hall will always seem staged.

AD: I’ve never bothered to go along to them.

GS: Pound used to mix with half the people he was castigating. I don’t think it would happen now. I think that’s one of the things that’s changed. I can’t imagine me meeting with Andrew Motion. Not that I ever have. I couldn’t imagine having a drink with... I suppose I could imagine having a drink with Andrew Motion. I could do. But what would I say?

AD: Possibly that’s why the literary divides are so wide.

GS: I could have a decent conversation with Andrew Motion, I’m sure. Comforting in a way.

AD: It’s hard to think about overturning it. It’s easy if you avoid the areas of shared interest. If you’re going to change the map you’re going to have to have an event which explores the differences and tries to reach some kind of agreement.

GS: And the danger of course of mixing with people you find alien, or at least their literary allegiances unsympathetic, is that you just sit in the territory that you do have in common. By talking about areas of shared enthusiasm - with Andrew Motion we could just end up talking about Bob Dylan. I know he’s another fan.

AD: It’s quite easy to have civilised chat about recent films or Wordsworth or something. What I’m talking about is a project, which certainly wasn’t invented by me, for truth and reconciliation. Part of that would be developing some kind of agreement about the shared past. That might involve Andrew Motion reading JH Prynne.

GS: Seriously. With patience.

AD: And JH Prynne reading Peter Levi. And not coming out with simple condemnation - communist subversion or whatever.

GS: Who do they wheel on in these breakfast time Radio 4 debates? They had Iain Sinclair defending Prynne and someone else against him. Was it John Sutherland.

AD: It was indeed John Sutherland. He didn’t know what was going on.

GS: He doesn’t know anything about contemporary poetry, as far as I know.

AD: I actually heard that exchange on the radio. It’s not a very serious hour of the day, you’re buried in toast and marmalade. You want something quite digestible. It wasn’t going to produce anything at all, it wasn’t designed in that way.

GS: It would have to be Night Waves or something to generate any serious discussion.

AD: I feel tantalised about this project. OK I feel guilty about various aspects of the division, that makes me want to contribute to relieve the guilt, but it would be quite hard to set it up so that it succeeded. It would be quite easy to have an event like that where the two sides simply denounced each other and became more polarised by Sunday evening than they were on Friday night.

GS: Frances (Presley) went to an event in Oxford recently to shape a project about John Clare. She was talking with Paul Farley. Found it very difficult to converse with him because their views of poetry were so different.

AD: I read one of his books. It wasn’t altogether bad but I wasn’t very enthused by it. I did read it to the end. Do you want to get into a particular poem?

GS: I’ve thought of something that would be relevant to our discussion of poetry scenes. It’s a long poem that I wrote between 2007 and 2008 and in Music’s Duel it starts on page 300.

AD: ‘Proxy Features’?

GS: This is a verse letter to Alan Halsey. It started with just some jottings I made in the Tube on after going to one of the London venues in December, and thinking of the very line of venues and scenes which we’ve been discussing today, and on the way it turned into a poem about poets and poetry. There are some specific references poets here, and a lot of general musing on what’s involved in a poetry world. And it involves other aspects of cultural and artistic endeavour. What I had in mind as a model once I really got going on it was poems which deal with the subject of poetry and the poetry scene such as Drayton’s “Epistle to Henry Reynolds” and Suckling’s 'A Session of the Poets". There’s also Jonson’s “At the Mermaid Tavern” and a poem by Herrick, possibly two poems by Herrick, that deal with the world of poets, or maybe in that case it would be a coterie. So rather like a Sydney Graham verse letter it starts dear Alan, and I’m saying that all the poets are wearing t-shirts and trainers and this in December. That’s partly about global warming isn’t it, but it’s also to do with choice of dress and there is a certain connection between dress and voice which I think I addressed in Roxy, and the whole debate about style. Does it matter if you wear a jacket or a cardigan to a poetry event, especially if you’re reading?

AD: Did you get dragged up? No we just wore casuals.

GS: This is just internal debate. I haven’t prejudged any situation. But I do think there has been a loss of style in masculine dress over the past decade, maybe 15 years. There is a fashion for rather ugly casual wear including sports wear, which I find rather alienating.

AD: Men are getting less vain possibly.

GS: At what cost! I’m not saying that if you’re giving a reading you should necessarily dress formally.

AD: It's like folk singers dressing differently to rock singers.

GS: As well as global warming I am addressing the way people present themselves for an evening at a poetry reading. It strikes me that particularly in the North people still dress up to go out on a Saturday evening. They don’t do that so much down here.

AD: In Nottingham on Saturday night you get vast numbers of people all wearing the same fancy dress. It’s quite intimidating actually.

GS: I can see that this is quite provocative on my part to even raise the question of dress.

AD: The scene is completely unselfcritical so you have to be critical in some way. What are proxy features?

GS: I’m not sure I can remember!

AD: (aware of his rights as an interviewer) You selected this poem!

GS: It could be things that stand in for other things. I think it might be a pun on Roxy. Also you see faces reproduced which are just a cartoon version of a face or a mesh of dots. So maybe I was thinking of features which are interestingly different from what you normally see. I shall have to think about this title more. Maybe even go back to my notebook. There are aspects of the grumpy old man about this. I go on to talk about Rob Cowan who is my current bete noire. He is that dreadful presenter who has too jolly a voice for that time of day and who chooses very middlebrow music to play, often too up-tempo. He’s a bit like John Carey, who always has to consult the ordinary man to determine the correct position. So from Rob Cowan I reference Radio 3 30 years before with Francis Wilford-Smith’s Aspects of the Blues, which was a tremendous analysis of blues music in about 8 episodes. Francis Wilford Smith ran Magpie Records, a great blues label based on the South Coast. Cormac Rigby was a presenter. He became a Catholic priest eventually. I don’t know if you remember him?

AD: I think he might appear in a poem by Nigel Wheale.

GS: He had a wonderful voice. Quite theatrical, not really camp but old-style BBC. He had a very discriminating sense of what is interesting and worthy in music. He presented the programme “Byrd at Ingatestone”, a concert of consort music at Ingatestone Hall. So I talk about them speaking ‘in the crevice’ or back time. I then combine blues imagery with consideration of William Byrd. Byrd I think did a setting of Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe’, so I’m combining Ingatestone Hall and the song there.

AD: Booker is?

GS: Bukka White.

AD: It’s not normally spelt that way.

GS: These are external references which I want to make central. They are as it were detachable references but I want to make them part of the argument. Or dialectic because I see these as emblematic of a BBC which still retains something of the Reith ethos. A time for the BBC which maybe was too autocratic and organising but which was also more highbrow. By highbrow that is including blues music. Now you have Late Junction which is fine but...

AD: That’s a late night, non-classical music programme on Radio 3.

GS: You might get blues music on that but you would never get a serious analysis of blues music on Radio 3 now. Not a documentary. Thinking about ways in which the poetry world has become more casual leads me to think about other cultural references there. That leads me back to what must be a particular moment in the reading I’d just been to. 'Someone checks his mobile, another pings away to get a picture.' ‘The buttons I see /get smaller’. I’m quite fond of that play on words there because it could either be as you get a bit older your eyesight deteriorates, but also the Japanese do seem to make smaller machines. Take this recorder compared with my previous recorder, they promise so much in terms of extra capacity and extra operations but actually they are far more awkward to handle and fraught with danger. When my recorder cut out twice during the last session, I didn’t notice it had cut out. It didn’t give me any alarm. Quiet. I was talking a lot about poetic craft before and the linebreak here is an example of this.

AD: The ‘see’ functions in two different ways?

GS: It throws the emphasis onto ‘see’ doesn’t it. I could just make a general point about the form of this poem. It’s quite carefully crafted and possibly is a bit stiff as a result of that. On the other hand I felt like doing that at the time so I think that’s justification enough. I’ve written in much looser modes at other moments. I’m very aware that people tend to imitate others sometimes in a very slavish way. So I think there’s satire of that in what follows. People who feel they need to do something because it seems the way to go.

AD: Which lines are we looking at?

GS: ‘There’s only one speedo on the scene holds his heart and why be him’. That’s specifically Tom Raworth.

AD: Because he reads very fast?

GS: I don’t in any way wish to denigrate what he does. I think it’s extraordinary. He’s one of the five or ten major major poets in our time.

AD: ... (inaudible) reads very rapidly and indifferently presumably because he wants to be Tom but actually sounds like he was bored by his own work.

GS: Obviously I’m not just talking about people imitating a single individual. Probably ‘the heart’ would be a clue that I had Raworth in mind.

AD: So ‘the purple heather’... is that a folk tune? Mimi Farina recorded it?

GS: The wild mountain thyme is sometimes known as the purple heather. They are interchangeable, actually. That probably is something that drifted up from the bar downstairs during the reading.

AD: I see. At an upstairs room in a pub.

GS: Then I start talking about memory and the ways memory is preserved, such as readings and music on tape. The ‘little cases’ are cassettes but I didn’t want that word, it’s too literal, I wanted cases to suggest other things as well as cassettes. so I said ’little cases’. All that stuff is quite technical, ‘the oxide print’ on recorded tape.

AD: It’s on metal oxide. Chrome or ferric.

GS: The chinagraph is that instrument that was used to cut or splice tape. There are kind of generalisations about literature or poetry in this poem that might be doctrinaire but I didn’t mean them to be absolute. When I say ‘you remember and expect’ and ‘the one over your shoulder is somewhere ahead’ I didn’t want it to come over too absolute. And then the ‘Martin’ is Martin Corless-Smith who I‘d recently talked to, and heard again this past December. We were talking about Auden and Auden does tend to represent a closed mode that we don’t find useful and which stands in the way of other things. On the other hand he is still a force to be reckoned with and I don’t think he should be left out of any university course. Martin told me he does still teach Auden, when I say a snatch of Auden, maybe one poem of Auden. In this stanza I’m putting forward the possibility that what modernism threw out can now be reclaimed partially. In the slipstream of modernism with less danger of getting stuck, or less danger of oppression. The ‘childword depends’ probably a play on Francis James Childe and also child language.

AD: As if child’s play was the ballads collected by Childe.

GS: It’s very difficult to explain a poem logically, isn’t it. I’m finding it quite difficult. I can give you a general sense but getting down to specific commentary is quite difficult even for me as the writer. It’s probably that I want to let it go. When you’ve finished writing something you want to let it go.

AD: (encourages more commentary) GS: as long as there’s that rider that A, I may not be able to remember what I intended, B I don’t want to close off meanings. In section 2, which starts on p.301, remember this is a verse letter to Alan Halsey and we were both born in 1949, in this part of section 2 talks about a generation of poets born in the 40s, or maybe early 50s as well. You could say between 48 and 54, I don’t know. I’m talking about what it feels like to have come ‘out of war or the next heroic, We bear a dual stamp, doomed to kick against the harsh stead/ that gives us a measure of ease, and driven despite to build a glassy frame which all can climb/ green in lingering dirt.” I think I’m musing there about the way in which if you were born in that period, most of us were brought up very strictly, so we were rebellious, doomed to kick against that, but that we were driven despite that desire for ease to build alternative radical structures, counter-cultural equivalents if you like. The dream of a freer society.

AD: So that’s the glassy frame?

GS: I wonder if that might be a reference to the exhibition of 1951, you know, on the South Bank?

AD: The Festival of Britain?

GS: Or primarily I might be talking about something in the 1960s.

AD: Somehow modern buildings have much more glass and concrete.

GS: Then I’m talking about the process of writing and the conversion to books. ‘our history is walking on the page’, print culture. The wire lines- I think are literally a term to do with paper aren’t they, the semi-invisible criss-cross lines, McKerrow talks about it in his book on printing. Laid paper, where you get them...

AD: It’s the frame you press the pulp into so the frame isn’t part of the page but there would be a trace of it.

GS: Some of this reminds me of Roxy, actually. The timbre of statement where I’m providing epigrammatic statements about culture which in an 18th century poem might be absolute but I hope in a post-modern poem or whatever, I hate the term post-modern, I was going to say modernist but, a poem of our era has to be treated to a degree as open-ended. They’re maybe in inverted commas, the epigrammatic generalisations. ‘Any marvel drawn up on wire lines has a force to survive.’ That might be equivalent to what I was saying about tape. There’s wear and decay but aspects of survival. Then the next stanza returns to the ecological theme - “can’t get careless in a lane smothered by plastic/ or a thorium-steeped stream’.

AD: The thorium would be radioactive spill from a nuclear waste container or a power station maybe?

GS: I think here I’m suggesting that if you’re writing you must have a moral sense at some level. It’s all very well to dismiss absolutes and pursue a kind of path of adventure. Actually I’m juxtaposing possibilities here, considering shades of endeavour. ‘Don’t like to fix/ what is right for health”, don’t like to lay the line down, but there are things that we have to care about. There’s another generalisation here, there’s a way to behave which allows adventure, and doesn’t tie the lurching spirit - ‘a feel for the scapeless things’. Birds. Scape in the sense of landscape but also scope, seeing, measuring. This is all to do with being of a certain generation, feeling the contradictions, largely between form as an arranged or precise thing and form as discovery. You can say the whole poem is about that, actually. This is a lot about nature isn’t it, a lot about landscape. Was I thinking... No, this would have been before the Olympics site was developed, but maybe such equivalent things happening, the exploitation of land for supposedly grand civic purposes but actually destructive of a certain wilderness. An allowed wilderness.

AD: Do we have a year for this?

GS: I’ve put 2007 to 2008. I actually wrote this in about 3 phases over a year. It was actually begun in December 2007.

GS: Section Three. I’m again talking about form and the nature of words and sounds. And actually I refer to two poets in detail here. Maggie O’Sullivan and Geraldine Monk, both reading in the same room. On separate occasions. I’ve tried to imitate Maggie’s sense of language, but when I say imitate, it’s not at all imitative of her,. I’ve tried in my own way to create a kind of equivalent to describe her use of language. No, it doesn’t look like a Maggie O’Sullivan poem at all, and anyway I’m sticking to a sort of regular, left hand margin throughout this. So the words are not dispersed and behaving like creatures the way she makes them do. And similarly with Geraldine, in my description of Geraldine’s work. This might need explanation. I talked about nursery rhymes last time. The Maggie stanza here draws on nursery rhyme. I thought this might need comment. Geraldine in the same room. Pendle, her text ‘Interregnum’ is based around the Lancashire witch trials which were held in Pendle in Lancashire, so I’m turning that into a verb. Playing on Thelonius Monk, ‘mysterious so’ as in ’Misterioso’, and ‘ivories and vibes jangling talk’. Because the poem is for Alan, I think he had already in a poem made a play on Thelonius and Geraldine.

AD: The two Monks, eh?

GS: So it’s a kind of hommage to Alan as well as Geraldine there. In section Four I get critical again. Can’t tell you who on earth I was thinking of, I literally can’t remember. ‘Now a happy proser pulls the drape, his movie might be adverts’.

AD: So he’s pulling the curtain back before he appears to perform?

GS: Actually performing in a drab uninteresting way. ‘The April scroll’ is Kerouac’s scroll for On the Road. “Wouldn’t wish to smear the April scroll”- wouldn’t want to smear the spontaneous way of writing. ‘To sound like yourself is a strange meander. And yet that’s just/ how the blacktop score evolves’. Er...

AD: The black top would be ‘on the road’? Asphalt...

GS: You see, I need you to prompt me there.

AD: Look, I’m supposed to ask the questions around here!

GS: Now I come back to music because I say, “it’s a good for nothing ear/ that’ll not hear how a dance is done/ before any instrument. Bare instinct/ prods the nerve and bone into play. Later grunts /will tally.” Trusting instinct there. So that actually goes back to Byrd and blues. Renaissance airs and blues music. The poems come slower these days as "a body of years tiered deep/ settles into focus’. Actually that comes out of a conversation I had with Maggie O’Sullivan about the fact that we both seem to write slower than in the past. ‘Inside the Noughties’ this is all about what was going on then, “wars are buried while feel on demand / piles goods into the arena’, the excess of consumer access including print on demand books, there are so many that it disperses one’s attention. It’s great as possibilities but you don’t get time to read it all even if you can afford to buy it. What I’m doing there with that alternate line sequence, the of short and long lines. I must have done it for a couple of lines and then thought, that’s interesting, I’ll continue that, to create some structure. I suppose actually it’s in... Really taking a middle path here suggesting that you need the looseness but also the layers of experience to ... Ah! You know what I forgot to tell you. I started writing this on an envelope and the next day I got an invitation from Rupert Loydell to write something for his manifesto book. [Rupert Loydell edited Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh] By the time I’d finished he’d given up on me and said, I’ll use a section of Roxy instead. As well as it being a verse letter for Alan, I call it an anti-manifesto because it’s a meditation as well, it’s a meditation which implies an agenda.

AD: I’ve read that book.

GS: Well, this should have been in it. We were told we could only submit two pages.

AD: It’s hard for an editor to turn something down that they really like. He invited a very large number of people and if they’d all done ten pages it would have been a millstone.

GS: So it was partly written for an anthology titled ‘Manifestos’. But it’s a manifesto that debates. I call it an anti-manifesto. Rather as in Roxy, when I make an absolute statement it’s then undercut by something else. Section 5 has a lot of detail about pub readings. ‘A beer-ring on the table shows how writers relate.’ I’m talking about people playing billiards or pool here. ‘Good company’s a baize surface where balls shoot into the net.” I’m talking about comradeship here but also competition. That persists inevitably in the poetry world, going back to those 17th C times.
I may be referencing something there. I think it may also be adapted from an image that Byron uses in Don Juan. I can’t remember what that is. Because Don Juan has a great deal about the poetry world, doesn’t it. And Don Juan is a text I taught at Birkbeck. So I know it quite well, not well enough to quote you the exact line, but I think that might be adapted from. Maybe at some moments Byron would be a guide for my mode of writing. But equally those Renaissance figures I was talking about are not primarily satirical. Not Drayton. But they’re more affectionate examinations of the social world of poetry. I come back to winter here, ‘So much is staked’. It was an incredibly mild winter. A poet might become fraught with anxiety, they might not want to relate anything to the world, like a brave peeking bud that gets a nip. ‘Worlds on a pinhead’. To mix metaphors, that kind of tightrope walk to get things right. Butchers Row, there’s a reference there, John Florio. I think it might be the French Ambassador’s residence. “There’s a fleur de lys on Butcher’s Row. Every banjaxed ink-slinger will hug an impish figure.”

AD: Every writer who’s been hit by something will hug the devil?

GS: Or even the person who’s criticised them at some stage.

AD: So the banjaxing is someone criticising your immortal work? When you’ve drunk enough you embrace them?

GS: I say in a more positive and gracious way, ‘What lyric feasts have gone down’.

AD: Goster?

GS: It’s gabble. Kind of crowded talk. This is relevant to what we were saying before about SubVoicive... "So often we’ve ventured the newest fare,/ breathed, warmed, ignited. Given or bartered etc."

AD: So it hasn’t been printed yet?

GS: I was definitely thinking of reading unpublished material there, passing things round. The last section, as it says ‘It’s time to sign off.’ Obviously there’s a play on fit ‘stanza’ and fit ‘things that fit’. And then I start talking about ways in which craft and associations are passed on almost without one realising it through personal contact. ‘beaming through generations.’ Graves, that’s Robert Graves who met Swinburne. He must have met Swinburne on Wimbledon Common when he was very young.

AD: Johnson. Was he alive when Queen Anne was on the throne?
GS: Johnson Landor Swinburne Graves. Then I refer to ACS, Swinburne again, meeting Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, and Wordsworth grudgingly admitting that he had written some decent stuff.
Most of the rest of this last section refers to Alan Halsey’s Lives of the Poets, having heard parts of it, before it was published. It seemed likely it would be published by Five Seasons Press, that’s why it’s ‘crave a fifth season of store’. But remember the poem begins in winter.
‘I’ll clear the stockpile now and just say/ Spirits coming up the stairs like bees’. I know that’s from a book by Aubrey, not Brief Lives, one of his miscellaneous pieces.

AD: There’s a book called ‘Miscellanies’. It’s about X-files, really, inexplicable events. So there would be spirits in it.

GS: And I almost end by saying “no truck with any -ite or -doxy”.

AD: Like ortho-doxy?

GS: Talking to Alan, who’s such an old friend, and I think he believes this as well, that one shouldn’t align with any group, or indeed absolute perspective on poetry. And then the last stanza returns to the question of costume.

AD: "Staves the range" is like “don’t fence me in”?

GS: The language here is quite Metaphysical. Like those 17th century poets. And indeed Martin Corless-Smith, who writes in a quite similar mode I think to the 17th century. So right at the end of this poem I come back to the aspect of manifesto. But it’s tentative rather than absolute with the image of a poetic agent whispering in the glass of red, wine obviously. 'Over and out.' Maybe this is a ‘proxy’ manifesto, not a real manifesto, standing in. but I don’t think it can be, because I’m putting my heart into it, in layers of experience and shared...

AD: I got the general drift of the poem when I read it but I didn’t get the title at all. I think it’s about 250 lines long. Quite complex.

GS: Do you think it could have fitted into Rupert’s anthology?.

AD Oh, sure. It would have... The book didn’t come off all that well. The people who wanted to contribute didn’t... they were a bunch of people I hadn’t heard of, to be quite honest. I don’t think he tried hard enough, if you want to produce a good book you have to fight with people who are reluctant to commit themselves. If you get a bunch of people who are under-publicised that’s a symptom of something, unfortunately. So this would have been quite an asset for that book.

GS: I think it’s fairly unusual in the world we inhabit for someone to produce a formal discussion of poetry in that way.

AD: What people tend to do is wheel on theory instead, pulled down from canonical texts. Deeply evasive.

Gavin Selerie interview, part 2

Azimuth and Digression: Gavin Selerie interview, part 2.
November 2011

AE: Am I not right in thinking that the essential feature of the sonnet sequence was that it was amazingly egocentric and that was part of a Renaissance revolution which was, I suppose, minimising the power of religion. There was no earlier equivalent for extensive poetic works with that degree of egocentricity.
GS: It was highly subjective in terms of romantic experience but that is distanced somewhat by convention, isn’t it, as the tropes of Petrarch are recycled endlessly. But Wyatt did something very individual in the sonnet. However dependent he is on Italian sources, and maybe in some poems French sources there's an absolutely unique forging of language there and a refusal to be limited by convention.
AE: You could say that being revolutionary was linked to being individualist...
GS: We are back with the Romantic and the Augustan. You might think there is a generalising tendency in Augustan verse as against Romantic but once you start rereading the work you find those assumptions are only true to a point. I should put it on record that there was a third book of sonnets which I never finished. I think four of them appear in Music's Duel. I have other poems from that third sequence but I was never quite happy with it and I didn't finish it. It is something I've worked at quite a bit over the years. Although those three books were written in close succession actually, even the third one dates from the 1990s. In a way there's an attempt to do it again in a sequence I started writing which involved what I call the blues sonnet. 'Short Takes', that's what I called it, but having written about four of them I decided to draw a line. It wasn't quite working.
AE: Four examples isn't bad for a new genre.
GS: In Music's Duel page 294. Robert Hampson asked for poems for an issue of Purge to mark the passing of the Blair era and I sent him these two poems but I don't think that issue was ever published.
AE: No. People found it hard writing about Blair because he was so slippery he was barely there.
GS: So they're kind of blues sonnets. I decided really that they were rather convoluted. But I didn't want to disown them so they're here. But they might mystify people because there's so much piled in there. It might be fun one day to do a detailed explication of them because they're very dense indeed.
AE: 'Policy Blues'. Does the policy refer to Blair?
GS: At the political level, yes. But as the note at the bottom says ..."Policy: a daily lottery in which participants bet that certain numbers will be drawn from a lottery wheel."
AE: Hence numbers runners.
GS 'Policy Blues' is the title of a blues song. As well as being very interested in folk song, I am heavily into the blues. [lurches over to a shelf containing rare and weighty books] I am the proud possessor of this amazing series. They are in fact the transcribed lyrics of blues songs as collected and put out on Document Records.
AE: Exhibit. Large Bible-like cloth volumes.
GS: There are about ten or twelve volumes I think. I was in correspondence with this chap. Unfortunately he never finished. Robert Macleod.
AE: Robert 'Honeyboy' Macleod.
GS: He was based in Edinburgh and the transcriptions of songs are more accurate than other versions. These Macleod volumes are the real Macleod. As well as being heavily influenced by listening to LPs and the CDs of blues music, I also have recourse to these marvellous transcriptions. He reckoned he'd located a way of slowing down the listening experience so that words which were sung very fast became clearer. It was some kind of Heath Robinson device.
AE: So he could vary the speed of the motor on the turntable? I'm wondering if this is linked to other Scottish folklore projects like Hamish Henderson.
AE: You said to me, I've lost the details because it was in the pub, but you pointed out that you had a link to the 1940s which wasn’t in my book about the links between the Forties and the Sixties.
GS: And I didn't say what it was?
AE: You did but I've forgotten.
GS: Anyway, to go back to those sonnets, I was using the blues idiom to analyse or describe a cultural era. There is reference to the Millennium Dome, which was a Heseltine/Major project before being taken up by Blair & Co. It’s a rather emblematic overlap of grandiose fluff, faith in a hollow shell.
AE: One of the important themes we have to tackle this afternoon is the cultural scene in York in the 70s.
GS: This brings me to theatre and the intersection between the various arts in the 1960s and 1970s. I moved up to York in, I think it must have been, 73 and was there until the end of the summer in 78. It was an interesting period in terms of my Oxford education, encountering a department almost entirely populated by ex-Cambridge people. In fact I used to refer to it as 'Cambridge in the North'. But that isn't what you were asking me about, I suspect. In terms of poetry... I mentioned theatre because, I had two girlfriends in my time in York, the second one was Jill and she accompanied me back to London in 1978.
Jill knew Richard Drain very well. Richard Drain was a lecturer whose main specialism was modern drama, everything right through to Robert Wilson and Living Theatre and so on. Richard directed various plays in which Jill appeared. Some of them involved jazz musicians as well. Jill had been taught by Frances Horovitz, Michael Horovitz's wife and poet, and through that network I got to meet people like Lol Coxhill and Jeff Nuttall, whom I'd probably encountered reading prior to that, but this was more of a revelatory encounter, particularly a gig they did at Theatre Royal, York, after which they came back and stayed at a big communal house I had in a village four miles outside York, Haxby. The house was called Ash Tree House and it was famous for miles around. It was one of a number of communes throughout the country which were linked on the grapevine, where people would come and stay and vice versa. That encounter was enormously fruitful even though it was short-lived, it was a 24 hour encounter in fact. We talked a great deal about poetry and music. I think that fed into my visits to London. I think I first went to Compendium way back, around the time it started, which is where I picked up Archaeologist of Morning for instance. Maybe 1970? I'm a bit hazy on dates. It was perhaps through some of those contacts at York that I went forward in my pursuit of what was happening over here and re-engaged with Barry MacSweeney and so on. But there's an Olson connection because Tony Ward was one of the lecturers at York at that time. I got on extremely well with him and also Nicole Ward Jouve, his wife. He lent me tapes of Olson reading at Berkeley and Vancouver. The Berkeley tape featured readings by Duncan and Spicer and so on as well. And this was an enormous revelation to me. These reel to reel tapes which came from the copies held at Essex University. Tony obviously had contacts with Essex University. I transferred them, I borrowed a reel to reel recorder and did a link and transferred them to cassette. And not only did these tapes prove absolutely revelatory to me in terms of the voicing of words on the page and bringing that poetry alive to me, but it created links for me in terms of other people in the decade following that. I got hold of those tapes in 1974 or possibly 75. And I used to sit on the floor in the middle of, I had the biggest room in the house, it went from the front of the house to the back in a very large farmhouse, I used to sit on the floor with headphones on listening to these things, and I became the laughing-stock of the household. although I'm sure people were appreciative in a way. But subsequently this opened up a network, I met people who didn't have these tape, and did copies for them, and this enabled me more easily to mesh with the London scene that I immersed myself in when I came back to London in autumn 1978, and rapidly became involved with. The King’s College scene and SubVoicive and the rest is history.
I might mention in passing because I've mentioned drama and the connection we felt at the time between all these activities, and how they were interlinked, in a way that I don't think is true now. The other thing I should mention is that I did a week's series of workshops with the Living Theatre in London in I think it was 1978, when we did for instance a restaging of Prometheus at the Winter Palace, which was a reworking of the original Living Theatre Storming of the Winter Palace but with an added dimension. As well as doing these workshops at the Roundhouse, we went to all night vigil cum poetry events, poetry drama events outside Holloway and Pentonville prisons. Walking along the streets of London and staging happenings. In summoning back my York days, I still haven’t said a lot about contacts in the British poetry world but my goodness they came in a very intense and energised way in 1978 and I feel maybe I lived my life backwards for a time, but I was discovering things, and discovering when and where things happened, and I filled in all the slots. Some of the Fulcrum and Trigram books by British poets that I'd acquired in the 1970s, in 1978 I was able to feel my way back to them, almost imagine that I'd been in certain places with them. I remember Indica bookshop and Better Books, but I didn't go to many events there, not most of the things that people talk about, in the 70s and late 60s, but I feel almost ... I don’t know.
AE: Sort of an injection of memory? a DNA transfer? This does seem to be the classic thing on the British poetry scene. Apart from the ones who were already there, in say 1965, people coming along later have had this kind of flashback, backstory, catching up, so that there is a shared history even though they weren’t really there. This was certainly true for me, seems to be true for people much younger than me. There should be a word for it.
GS: There is a word for it... which I can’t remember. Absolutely, my experience is yours in that respect. I think I was writing in something of a vacuum in the 1970s, when I was in York. A lot of the poems that went into Azimuth of course come from that date. some of them were rewritten and some of them were created retrospectively. The poem for Alan Halsey within the book comes earlier than '78. I met Alan for the first time at the Whitechapel Book Fair. It was in the building next door to Whitechapel Art Gallery. Perhaps it was the library next door. And there's a poem in Azimuth for Alan, which deals with 17th C Dissenter activity, Diggers and Ranters, and references St George's Hill. I think that poem probably existed in an earlier form but it was rewritten with a dedication to Alan, further investigation of that territory, the Ranter-Digger activity, which Alan and I both shared an enthusiasm for. The other filler I wanted to insert, my experience of poetry other than traditional, in the 1960s. When I went to boarding school I discovered a small core of people who had a kind of secret knowledge of blues and folk music. Also Bob Dylan, actually. I went to boarding school in 1962 and started listening to Leadbelly and Dylan and so on, comparatively early compared to other people I know. I came back to the Leadbelly thing in Days of '49. In terms of my experience of alternative poetry, or a different kind of tradition, there was a whole paradox about being at this very militaristic school, Haileybury, which had the CCF tradition and sports tradition, and so on.
AE: Combined Cadet Force.
GS: Some of the activities were very scary. I was injured for life playing rugby, was nearly paralysed in fact by a kick in the spine, and I've had back problems ever since. The assault courses and the expeditions we went on in Northumberland for instance, were extremely arduous. But the school had a strong classical tradition, musical tradition, that was where I first heard madrigal. It also had an extremely good classics department. My first Headteacher there was a classics teacher who wrote me an extraordinary letter when I got the scholarship. Within this maverick tradition were particular maverick figures. There was this English teacher I had for three years, which was until the end of O-level, called Basil Edwards. I think Basil says it all really! Who encouraged us from a very early age to go and see Continental films in London, at the Academy ...
AE: Oxford Street.
GS: Bergman, Antonioni, and so forth, but also encouraged us to get into Beat poetry. Maybe it came through my interest in Bob Dylan, but anyway it says here, it says in 1966, I acquired this little book called Beat Poets published by Studio Vista, and amazingly it features Ed Dorn. Not a very representative selection of poems or poems by, but nonetheless an eye-opener. Let's see, what does it include. There is 'A fate of unannounced years' and 'When the fairies', which begins 'When the fairies come to Santa Fe, they sit in dark caverns, called taverns'.
AE: He may have been right about that!
GS: Which sense was he using the word fairies? I probably might not have known. There's Paul Carroll here... but also Leroi Jones, Kerouac. It was through this that I got 'Mexico City Blues'. Although it's a tiny book, it's a very all-encompassing short take. I was very energised by that.
In 1967 I was given the second prize, the Le Fanu History Prize. This is one of the paperbacks I was buying. Penguin Modern Poets 5. Corso Ferlinghetti Ginsberg. One of the other ones was the Liverpool Poets. I can't find that one so I may have sold it. I shouldn’t have done that really but it's no longer one of my priorities. And progressed from that volume to acquiring a bit later on the David Gascoyne, WS Graham, Kathleen Raine volume, that's PMP 17. I think that may have been published a little bit later, it's got a glossy cover for instance. 1970, this is, and it was the Graham stuff which appealed to me in this volume. There's just so much here. ‘Malcolm Mooney's Land‘, ‘The Constructed Space‘. ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallace‘. ‘The Thermal Stair‘, almost my favourite poem.
AE: About Peter Lanyon?
GS: Yes. ‘Hilton Abstract‘. ‘The Fifteen Devices‘. ‘Clusters Travelling Out‘. That's where he was getting very heavily involved in the analysis of language, even though that had always been a theme of his. What appealed to me so much about 'Thermal Stair' was the direct address, almost disembodied, 'I called today Peter and you were away', yes because he was dead. It's such a beautifully casual opening. It's so poignant. I could cry about this poem. It reminds me about people I care about and who are no longer here, especially painters and poets. The image of the thermal which was literally the gliding activity that Peter Lanyon was involved with and then used as a device in his painting, or a way of approaching painting. This just bowled me over, and Graham is still a big person for me. Funnily enough in the kitchen at the moment I've got a tape which Kelvin Corcoran gave me of Graham reading. I understand there are a number of bootleg tapes in circulation. This is just Graham and his wife, Nessie Dunsmuir, and I think Ronnie whose surname escapes me, someone who did interviews with him. It's a very moving tape. He does 'Approaches to How They Behave' which is still I think one of the most extraordinary investigations of language and how you get from your perceptions to recording and adventuring in language. After that he reads, is it 'To Bryan Wynter', which I think is also an elegy in the sense of direct address. 'Lines on Roger Hilton's Watch'. And I think it's after the Bryan Wynter poem that Graham suddenly has anxieties about it being too much of a performance and says No, it was too emotional, too rhetorical. And Nessie responds by saying, No, it was true to your feeling. It's kind of massaging him, calming him, no, you did it in a way that is true. Graham hit me very early on and then I came back to him in the 1980s when he was getting quite fashionable again, partly through Tony Lopez's book. Presumably it was Jeremy Prynne who suggested the subject to him.
AE: I'd forgotten. Yes it's Edinburgh University Press, but Tony did his thesis at Caius, actually. I imagine he turned up with a thesis subject all ready.
GS: I don’t want to give someone credit if they're not due it.
AE: This raises the possibility that the Forties British poets are the generation before the Beats.
GS: In terms of Fitzrovia especially. But obviously you meant it in a further sense...
AE: Would the Beats have happened without Dylan Thomas? I don’t think so.
GS: You mean Dylan Thomas in New York in particular, rather than Fitzrovia?
AE: Dylan Thomas roaming the countryside drinking a great deal and reaching big audiences.
GS: I'd love to talk about the 1940s in more detail. You just said to me over lunch that there was some connection with the 1940s in my life which I told you about... and which I've forgotten. This probably isn’t it, but my father was in the Eighth Army with Keith Douglas and read Douglas and even had the biography by Desmond somebody. I still have a fair amount of time for Keith Douglas even though he's not typical of the 40s. I've felt for years and years that the war poetry of the Forties is more successful than the poetry written at the front during the First World War. Having defended rhetoric an hour ago, I would qualify that now by saying that Wilfred Owen for me is too rhetorical, even though they're great poems in their way. And I can understand why Yeats left Owen out of his Oxford Anthology of Modern Verse. It was an oversight. He shouldn't have put in all the minor poets that he did, instead.
AE: It's a crazy book, it's a personal statement but it doesn't really have that solidity of chronicling what was really happening.
GS: I like the comparative quietness of the Second World War poetry and the greater feeling of the ephemeral. it just seems much les forced. That's more a Cambridge than an Oxford tradition, going back to what we were saying. Keith Douglas. 'The Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea-garden' is a poem I love. It's a highly organised poem. The way he uses enjambment here. The way he progresses from the first stanza to the second. 'Wily red lip on the spoon// slips in a morsel of ice-cream.' It's an exercise, types of person as fishes or fishes as types of person. Carefully observed, I think. Because my father had served there, I could vicariously identify with it, I could identify with it. I am handling the Robin Skelton anthology Poetry of the Forties. For me this is a much more satisfactory anthology than the Thirties one, although they're both skilfully constructed. I'm looking at this poem, 'London Before Invasion, 1940', by JF Hendry:

Walls and buildings stand here still like shells
Hold them to the ear

Other than Graham who I've mentioned, all sorts of people interest me here. These are people who I might normally rule out of my Parnassus of important figures. Alun Lewis. Did he write this when he was with Lynette Roberts, I wonder? When I say with, I mean illicitly so.
Of those people who've written about boats, I think Bernard Spencer wrote interestingly about boats. I was born in the Forties but I was born in 1949 and, do I have a memory of 1949? no not in the literal sense. My earliest memories are from age three, probably. But I can’t really remember them, although you could say vicariously I can. This is what Alan and I did in Days of ‘49, we re-investigated the decade that we were the product of, with the important qualification or you could call it an extension, that we were looking through the lens both ways. We would look back... I suppose we began writing the book in 1997 or 98, we were looking back, but also we were very aware of the position we were in to get that insight, we were thinking about all the things that had happened in between, in writing about the Forties. It was a time when my mother was in London, during the war, a time when my father was abroad in the Eighth Army and subsequently in the Normandy invasions and so on. But it’s also a time of romanticism as well as of hard turmoil. It’s a curious paradox of writing from that war period. There was the assault from without and the sense of being besieged, civilisation disappearing and culture being eclipsed, and then on the other hand the glorious celebration of that culture: core aspects of landscape and custom. It’s a defensive reaction, involving recovery of potential, and this continues in altered form for a few years after the war. Of course the poetry dovetails with the art of the period, people like John Minton, Michael Ayrton... Sutherland to a degree. That exhibition 'A Paradise Lost?' which I saw at the Barbican At Gallery. (brings out catalogue)
AE: It could be Lesley Hurry? the backdrop to the Hamlet ballet that Helpmann did?
GS: Other figures that we didn't mention. Craxton. The Craxton family lived around here when my mother's family were based here. My mother was great friends with the Craxtons.
(discussion of Hurry painting pinned up in Selerie kitchen) (looking at catalogue of David Mellors' exhibition at the Barbican)
GS: It's that one, the self-portrait. I know this painting so well. It's Hamlet, disguised, with that hand out of proportion looking up at that female figure. No, it's a couple. An entwined couple, almost like limbs, like a third pair of hands. And there's that poster there for 'Dead of Night' that Hurry did.
AE: He was mainly a stage designer.
GS: So many painters were involved in stage design.
Commentator: inaudible cultural processes taking place here.
GS: It's almost got... these are like roots emerging from roots that turn into limbs and branches. and there's a hand going up the side. Is this the kind of deus ex machina at the side? (talking about Hurry's backdrop for Hamlet). Ah, there’s that hand again, with a dagger. The arms emerge like columns. You have this sense of twining forms arising from roots, and there’s a kind of energy current running across the picture, one thing turning into another. So typical of Forties imagery. The eye is led towards a fireplace, doorway or a proscenium stage on the right. It’s actually a parallel form to the arm-columns on the left. There's a fireplace... or is it a proscenium stage.
AE: It must be where the actors came on stage.
GS: So it is a proscenium stage. It has all those associations for me. I tend to see always more than one thing in an image I'm presented with. Does that go back to my experience of acid?
AE: I was just thinking about that!
GS: How do you feel about the 1940s decade as a time of producing poetry?
AE: Giving it an acceptable cultural weight is very difficult because it produces so much arguing which I find very tiring. A lot of it's very important.
GS: Do you like Lynette Roberts' work?
AE: Yes.
GS: She seems to be coming into her own again. They even had a TV programme about her. Not that it was very good - I could hardly bear to watch it. You didn't miss much. The fact that more of her work is out there and is able to come through with its quiet procedures. Interesting the way South American themes influence her work. [...] There are poems from that third volume that are very powerful.
She's so different from Kathleen Raine for instance from the same period [...] and also she has that, rather fatal in her case, Neoplatonic take on things. Actually I think Neo-Platonism is extraordinary and I've derived a great deal from it, but it can lead to an empty generalisation, a too abstract take on things.
AE: I think it led to her successes as well as her failures.
GS: It was interesting the way some 1940s work was recovered in a new context for Iain Sinclair’s anthology Conductors of Chaos. The implication being that, whether conscious or incidental, contemporary poets have drawn on that earlier phase of activity.
AE: I don’t really see it. It was crucial to that anthology but did one really go from David Jones to Andrew Crozier and think Aha, there’s a continuation here. I don’t think there was.
GS: Well, some poets must have been more conscious of this heritage than others. Crozier must have thought about it because it was one of his areas of interest. [...] That looser flowing line came through to the 1960s, or returned in the 1960s. Some of that 1940s poetry would have been read by Robert Duncan.
AE: Yes, he was involved with Phoenix in the late 1940s. He was certainly aware of British New Romantic poetry.
GS: Gael Turnbull was a very important link man in the dialogue between British and American poetry. Particularly some of those Black Mountain poets, British publishing contexts. Telling them about what had been going on here. OK, this is later on. 59 or whenever, I'm talking about. To an extent there was a two-way stream. Robert Duncan was certainly very alert to the possibilities.
AE: It's difficult to relate your work to British poetry as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Connection with poets of the 1970s and especially those working in long poems is easier. I wanted to talk about the discontinuity in British poetry. There are various versions of this - the 'mid-century death', the unexpected and inspiring flourishing of American poetry in the 1950s, the unprecedented innovation of the decade after 1965, the return to experiment after an era which forbade it...
GS: I think all those theories are tenable really in terms of explaining that. Certainly in British poetry publishing there was a failure of nerve, wasn’t there, that forced people to work outside the mainstream. But you could say, twas ever thus. Perhaps the 1940s were unusual in that respect - those publishing editions may have been generated by the war as much as by anything else. With regard to how I fit into that, I would readily concede that for a long period I was working in a vacuum as a writer, in the Seventies. Writing poems alongside writing a thesis was a bizarre thing. On the other hand, I had models on the page, so I wasn’t entirely isolated. But I have remained my own man, or to put it a different way I've been reluctant to identify myself with any particular grouping within the British scene. I'm most obviously a London poet, but I spent five key years in Yorkshire in the 1970s, I spent a year in Sussex -which was deeply influential as well. Geographically I am primarily a London poet and I got to know Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths and people very well. Griffiths came from Kingsbury which is just north-west of here. I visited him there [...] He was fiddling with some bizarre bit of equipment- I can’t remember what it was now. Robert Sheppard- I was close to both Sheppard and Patricia Farrell, Gilbert Adair I knew. Bob Cobbing. Eric Mottram. Mottram was a great source of support to me after I had the falling-out with my supervisor at York and never submitted my thesis. Which was a major crisis in my life, I'd spent five years writing this thing. Eric understood where I was coming from in terms of trying to write an interdisciplinary thesis. He was a great source of consolation but also an important link-man in terms of doing the Riverside interviews, enabling me to make contact with various poets, and just providing that forum at King's College. I heard so many wonderful people there. It seems that I heard just about everybody there.
For some reason I was thinking of a performance I saw by Paul Buck and Glenda George involving a piece of matting I think. It was very performative. I heard Iain Sinclair read parts of Suicide Bridge there and that was another great reading. And the Subvoicive scene I was even more involved with, and read there many times, and I think that precipitated the writing of certain texts as well. Even though I’m heavily immersed in London and its various layers of history and its poetry scene or scenes, I've always retained my own independent take and not wanted to get too restricted by being part of a card-carrying group.
AE: It does seem to me after being involved with all this for thirty years that there is a sort of gang culture in London. There is a line of division so that there is one group who really think they are the London School. The fact that you have been writing experimental poetry for several decades doesn’t make you part of that group unless you write the same way that they do. This has caused quite a few problems of perception. So I think it's worth underlining that in London, apart from the sort of hardcore Cobbingites, you also have you and John Seed and me for example, and many other people. As you say, we're not card-carrying.
GS: I was always very drawn to people who were considered part of other scenes. David Chaloner, who is associated with the Cambridge School but lived for much longer in London, in North London. John Welch, who is a good friend of mine and whose work I respect. My view of London poetry would be less exclusive than the normal definition and would embrace all kinds of other poetries. During my time in Ladbroke Grove I was close to Michael Horovitz, for example, who most people would write off.
AE: Good heavens, yes.
GS: When I say 'write off' I mean would see him as a kind of organising force. A mad kazoo player. But I've had deep conversations with Michael. He is well informed. When you get him talking about Jeff Nuttall's work, or almost anyone, he is good company and he is well informed. You shouldn’t just write him off as some sort of Poetry Olympics, mad, pay a ticket and get in, person. I'm interested by his links with Stan Tracey, for example.
AE: There are these almost mnemonic rhymes- people find it easy to remember a classical Cambridge line or a classical London line, and several hundred other people who are slightly more differentiated or more compromised, whichever it is, just don't feature in the folklore.
GS: (unfolds map of northwest London showing personal associations somewhat like Gloucester Mass.)
AE: Cricklewood isn't actually at the centre.
GS: You have 184 Wardour Street where my grandfather's restaurant was- Seleri's Oriental Restaurant. But it was an Italian restaurant. Any kind of cuisine in those days, other than British, was called oriental.
(exposé of north west London history, omitted)
I get teased about this, I hate main roads and always go by back routes to places I’m going to. Anyway my father taught me the backstreets of London as a child, so I’ve got a very in-depth knowledge of back roads, and maybe this fits in with my love of marginalia, footnotes, glossaries, and accounts for some of the digressions in my work?
AE: Down those mean streets a poet must go!
(mentions the Musicians’ Co-Op and going to see the building being demolished)
GS: I went to so many interesting events there. And also used to go to the Film-makers’ Co-Op next door. I met various people involved with the underground film movement through City Limits. It goes back way beyond that to the New Cinema Club and things. Jo Comino is a name that comes to mind.
So as well as voyaging at sea I’m also a considerable voyager on foot and am very interested in maps and alignments, including mystical aspects, although I would now put more of a fence between myself and that whole mystical way of looking at things. I don’t know whether you noticed but there’s a poem in Music’s Duel which I left out of Azimuth, about Arthur Machen. Machen lived in Clarendon Road ...It’s called ‘Dreads and Drolls’ which is the title of one of Machen’s lesser known books
AE: (reading) A room at the top, a very small room, not even a monastic cell.
GS: The point of my referencing Arthur Machen there was that we were discussing the potential for literary use of mystical thought. Actually I’m probably most interested in Machen because of the structure of the language, these days. But obviously he did see the landscape in a highly mystical way. Hill of Dreams - which is Wales, obviously, but is also Notting Hill.
AE: Notting Hill of Dreams? There’s quite a lot of stuff related to ley lines, flying saucers and so on in Azimuth. It’s embedded in the structure of the book. For me it evokes the time, it’s part of the idealism of the time, and it evokes Ladbroke Grove as well, I guess. You seem to have moved a long way from that in the interim.
GS: It was still the Counter-Culture in those days. It was part of the Sixties. It’s a truism, I think, that the 1960s lasted from 1964 to 1974, really. You know, when the miners’ strike and so on really caused a major shift. Although I don’t things really changed until 1979, it was Thatcher who changed things. I’m evoking that Counter-Culture in which the ideas of John Michell, for instance, were considered of major validity. You mentioned just now Alfred Watkins and the Old Straight Track. During that period I was more committed to believing in it literally than I am now. Maybe this is the reason why I’m no longer writing about stone rings and things. Although I could. We are creatures of our time and I think, even though I regard myself as independent to a degree, inevitably I’m influenced by the era and the larger culture we live in and that mystical take on things doesn’t seem so possible now, not so urgently relevant. I suspect Iain Sinclair would agree with that.
AE: It’s very big in Allen Fisher’s poetry of the 1970s, too. It’s quite an odd thing. I guess there is a rhyme between Azimuth and Place and Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It’s a cluster. I’m interested in this partly because all that has disappeared so thoroughly and so the need for explanations, to get over to someone around today what it was all about.
GS: There are revisitings I suspect in my work but I would need to think about what those are. There is a section in Roxy where I am talking about the house as the head. The kind of emblem of the house as consciousness. I think that involves a degree of a more mystical approach to things. I suspect that I can kind of latch back into that world a bit. It is a different poetic climate, a different cultural climate.
AE: That is part of what gives Azimuth its flavour. It was extremely open to currents in a wider specialised community.
GS: Even though I subscribed to that mystical mode of thought more at that time, as I think you say in your review of Azimuth the texts have their own space, their own validity within their local situation in the book. I think you say that things stand in opposition to each other or exist as separate units with a validity that it’s up to the reader to determine. I would agree with you, and say again I hold Keats’ idea of negative capability as very important. I think it’s very relevant to a playwright because almost inevitably you have to write different points of view through different characters and letters and monologues. Even Krapp’s Last Tape has a degree of negative capability I would think. Letting things stand with their own validity rather than imposing some unity from above. Tom McGrath kept on saying to me in that long interview he did with me, the interview-book, one of the Riverside interviews, that what he learnt from Olson was how to live in contradiction.
AE: If you have a poet who is hanging out with hippies and anarchists and so on, and that poet is reading The Economist every day and just not believing a word they say, that poet might well have few things where they’re proven wrong, but they’re not writing poetry. I think the political record of modern poets may not be very good, but it is poetic politics and not predicting the swing at the next election.
AE: Alan Halsey?
GS: I wanted to say a little bit more about Alan Halsey in relation to the poetry scene I‘ve moved in. and in terms of the development of my craft if you like. It's been a two-way thing over the years but Alan is so well-informed about many aspects of literature and literally at the book face, dealing with literature. Reading things that came into the shop. And no doubt many of those were chance discoveries. We talked a lot about Pound from the beginning, discovering that we both had an enthusiasm for Pound, both the early lyric work but also particularly the Cantos. I feel that we both learnt a great deal about the fitting-together of words, things that work and don’t work, from Pound. Pound's Selected Letters. I think I learnt more about poetry from this than from ABC of Reading or other more formal books that Pound wrote which involved the craft of poetry. The inside back cover has a little index constituted by me in addition to the actual index. Here we have 'poetry, style etc.' Pages 48-50, letters to Harriet Monroe, 'Poetry must be as well written as prose.' 'No tennysonian mess of speech'. Although Pound was equivocal about that. He gave his treasured copy of Tennyson to one of his grandchildren. I’ve got in brackets here 'pentameter starting anew and retouching' 'be loose as often as you can'. The fabric of poetic language, obviously I learnt from reading Pound and seeing what worked and what didn't work in his earlier poetry. Another writer that Alan and I talked about a great deal was Charles Doughty. There's a trunk at Gonville and Caius, isn’t there, containing Doughty's notes on philology. It's a bit like the chits, the cards that were used initially for building the OED, which were in these huge wooden sheds off the house in Banbury Road. Cards or pieces of paper with definitions of words and maybe selections of words, groupings, they're in this huge chest. [...] told me about this. Jeremy Prynne had shown them. Nobody can work out how to arrange it and nobody has tried to edit it. I think Prynne's a little reluctant to let anyone get going with it. It would need an expert to get his trust.
AE: Maybe all Prynne's poetry is really written from what's in the trunk.
GS: These word notes connect with Doughty's poetry, A Dawn in Britain and so on, and also Arabia Deserta. I think Alan and I learnt from Doughty for instance the power of the Anglo-Saxon. Like you I studied Anglo-Saxon as an undergraduate and that’s rubbed off on me. Let's think of an example. Ring-road has such force as a noun. If you wanted to be adventurous, but probably mistakenly adventurous, you could use the noun circumferential. It is a noun as well. But it's an awkward word, it's long and abstract and it's hard to handle in a line and as a single word in a poem. There might be a place for it. I might go out on a limb now and say I don’t see enough care for language in a lot of the work I hear these days, and that craft is important. Obviously it can become too stultifying. The use of the letter S, and I say this as someone whose surname begins with s, is the most tricky letter in the alphabet in terms of sound. I always try to avoid plurals in my work. Even though in the broader sense I encourage plurals, in terms of multi-layers, multiplicity of perspective. I hate it on the radio now when the announcer says the Tubes rather than the Tube. It's quite a noticeable development, it's as if younger people don't understand that you can use the singular to be collective. So I've always been very conscious of using S in a restrained way, and that’s possibly something I learnt from either Pound or Doughty. I used to sit at the back of Alan Halsey's house with him after they closed the shop, or while Bridget or Rosy were running the bookshop, giving him a break. We would talk at great length about the fabric of the language, being adventurous but not crazily awkward. Gothic words, strange words. I suspect that, in fact I know that Bunting is on record in his interviews as dissuading poets from using unusual words. But if you look at his poetry it's full of unusual words. This idea of sifting everything down to basics. I like using unusual words, I like recovering bizarre words. Another person I learnt a lot from is Geoffrey Grigson. I've long been an admirer of his poetry. I mainly like the poetry from the 1930s and the early 1940s. I think his poems and Bernard Spencer's are the strongest in that Poetry of the Forties anthology. Beside the poetry there is The Private Art which I believe is the favourite book of Peter Riley. On the one hand it's terribly conservative, and intolerant of, for instance, Charles Olson. He's always saying what you can do and what you can’t do. I suspect he breaks those rules himself. But here’s one reflection: ‘Poems do depend on the unpoetic. The poetic, in the sense of the decayed popular matter of a previous mode, gets in the way, though there are cunning poets who use it in a slightly disguised form.’so actually that's quite relevant. I think that's full of wisdom. I love this book. It's got a great picture of Grigson on the front.
AE: The bleaching or overexposure works very well. He was very good at writing about poetry but he didn’t really like anything that came along after 1938.
GS: This is the paradox. I say I love reading him and have learnt a lot from him but I have to take it all with a grain of salt because he's so intolerant of much of the stuff that I find fascinating. He writes off Blake’s "Prophetic Poems", for instance, which have been hugely influential on my writing.
AE: If we're talking about the mid-century death, and how the people who ran poetry publishing and reviewing at least up until 1980, prolonged it, Grigson had a lot to do with that. He embodied it. It's like, every time something brilliant came along, he said "No, no, no. Five years in jail for that." He was just so intolerant and brutal. Actually he was a gifted guy, I'm saying this in the cause of reconciliation. In the Counter-Culture you have people who have terrific gifts and also glaring faults, who treat other people badly and so forth. If you read someone like Grigson, if you look at what he liked as opposed to what he failed to like, it's very interesting. He loved poetry.
GS: Grigson did the Centaur Press edition of Landor's verse. It shows a much more open side to Grigson. (digression on Landor) Landor had an influence on Pound, they were both backward-looking historians who wanted to be new. Digression. Aha! I talked about them earlier. I'm always hammering on about that (pulls weighty book off shelves) (digression about Arber's An English Garner) This is grist to my mill in terms of going down back-streets, and side-avenues, I love miscellanies. [...] That’s probably relevant to what Alan and I were doing in Days of '49. Aberrations really. When I was studying for my thesis I read a mass of fugitive material including Du Bartas’ Divine Week, translated by Sylvester.
(digression about Du Bartas)

I would want to resist any kind of commentary which put an impediment in the way of someone’s interpreting something, but I love having another text to read beside.
AE: This does relate to memorising all the backstreets.
GS: The danger of writing in that way is you get quite scattered. Maybe I was getting quite close to the edge with Le Fanu’s Ghost. I decided I wanted to write each text in a different way. There is no repetition in terms of form. Each text is different. Also I had this huge area to deal with. But I find that all of those texts work well, so they’re not just bookish cupboard texts, they seem to lend themselves to performance.
I’ve been talking a great deal about poetry from past eras but, for me, it’s all potentially in the present. Even where I’m using texts with old spelling, as in parts of Hariot Double, the distance is part of an immediate effect—or at least intended to be so. But the current work is less exhaustive, perhaps in reaction to what I did before. What my books have in common is the habit of working simultaneously across a span: I mean a text that appears early or in the middle may have been produced alongside something that appears much later on. You could see this as part of an Azimuth co-ordinator effect. The connections are as much random as planned.
I wish I could comment more on your main line of inquiry. I can see that it hasn’t been satisfactorily explained or described. It’s something that by implication comes into Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars. By implication for what happened later on, and why the shutdown of the more experimental poetry stuff happened. It must be part of residual conservatism that existed from a previous phase.
AE: The poetry Eric was promoting really pissed a lot of people off. I think it’s very difficult going deeper. Like saying why English poetry went into such a flat and uncreative condition in mid-century. I’m not sure an explanation is available.
GS: That’s what I meant by your main level of inquiry.
AE: I’m looking for a witness who would say, No, it didn't die off in that way, there was no breach of continuity. But everyone I speak to says the same thing.
GS: You did a very interesting interview with Seymour-Smith but I can’t remember if you got him commenting on that phenomenon.
AE: No, because he was on the wrong side really. He really didn’t like the literary establishment very much but he never read what we think of as modern poetry. When he saw Angel Exhaust and began to read some of it he really liked it, it was exciting. It was even more striking that he could be a professional critic from sometime in the 1950s to 1995, when he died, and never have encountered what we think of as modern poetry. It wasn't Trade. He was never going to be asked to review it because it wasn't seen as commercial. It wasn’t in the High Street shops. He reviewed probably thousands of books, that’s not an exaggeration, but he was never asked to review Prynne or Allen Fisher or anybody.
GS: In conversations with Nathaniel Tarn years ago, I would complain to him. This was often when he came back to London from, was it Princeton he taught at, and I would complain about the block to the dissemination of experimental poetry, whatever you call it, the Faber and Faber wall and there were other walls, particularly with the reviewing system, the TLS post-1970s. Nathaniel would say, 'twas ever thus, even in the heady days. First of all he would talk about publishing at Cape Goliard and say that was never accepted as much as one might assume. But also he would refer back to his youth, and he would argue that it was just a continual series of blocks. Something leaks out which is interesting and then gets clamped down again. Is it true that Pete Townshend saved Faber from folding? I think he injected a lot of money into them. That was around the time when an even more conservative editorial policy of poetry emerged. They were becoming more relentlessly commercial. You are determining the reception of things by publishing certain things. You are partly determining what is going to be considered useful and valuable.
AE: The problem with Tarn saying that is that it removes the possibility of choice by editors inside the machine, so that they are absolved from guilt but also they don’t achieve anything. So it’s simply an inevitable process, like a huge building with no windows that just looks at you. I don’t really buy that. For me some editors have achieved great things. I’m thinking of Lucie-Smith and George here, and Penguin Modern Poets, and Eric at Poetry Review, and Potts and Herd at Poetry Review. Then again there are the actions of someone like Grigson as a reviewer from about 1938 on, which I think were unacceptable and in fact criminal. I see this huge difference between different editors. So I don't really believe it’s all one homogeneous thing.
GS: It does perhaps come back to a contradiction at the heart of English culture, in the sense that England is a nation of shopkeepers and has that very material engine. It’s different in America. Is that to do with an anti-intellectual and a materialist streak in the culture, that privileging of a kind of residual conservatism in writing?
AE: People involved in culture in Britain have an antibody to that. So many people in Britain have written terrific poetry although surrounded by people who were very suspicious of that.
GS: It is interesting just how many poets have had to publish their own first books. Byron did for instance. Shelley I think. The way in which the productions reflected so well the content, if you think of those early Allen works. I would include Unpolished Mirrors [the A4 serials] in that. There was a sense of getting it on the hoof, at times primitive but there was an integrity to it. Asa Benveniste was a much better typesetter than whoever Stuart Montgomery employed. Trigram books are ultimately more satisfying than Fulcrum. The projection of the poetry in print.
AE: Something did come to an end in round about 1980. People living through that divide led their lives in a continuous way, so they weren‘t aware of it as a divide. Which brings us to what the nature of the era is.
GS: I think some poets solved the situation for themselves by moving out of London. Obviously there was lots of activity going on outside London before that, I’m well aware of that. A core of counter-culture poets living in the capital did disperse. But I think there was obviously a national malaise and a shift of priorities. I had a bit of a disagreement with Michael Haslam at the Grace Lake memorial reading, as we left he was just dismissing London as tinsel. I said, You have to remember there are other things beside Oxford Street. There are pockets of tremendous activity. I went to a lovely private view of an art exhibition off Brick Lane the other day. A painter called Irma Irsara. There was a real feeling that this was a pocket of other endeavour. There are still lots of those around London. It would be wrong to write off London as totally destroyed by consumerism and Thatcherist values.
AE: I just can’t agree with Michael for ten seconds there.
GS: He probably felt overwhelmed and weighed down coming out of the Anna Mendelsson event. Maybe it was to do with what had gone on earlier in the day with him. I think he was just very happy to get back to Hebden Bridge and some residual core of creativity going on there.
AE: Can you say more about Du Bartas?
GS: He was a Calvinist who tried to base religious conviction on science or what was taken as such. He’s mainly memorable for The Divine Weeks, an encyclopedic history of the world, unfinished. I was intrigued by the structure of Weeks, with its condensing of history into segments, and used this as an inspiration for Roxy which has 52 sections of, as it were, current history and aesthetic debate from classical times to the present.

Annex Email containing more material possibly of interest Reply |Gavin Selerie gavin@selerie.wanadoo.co.uk to me show details 6 Nov (2011)

Andrew,

Many thanks. I've just got back from a film fair (part of my endless pursuit of mainly British B films from the 30s through to the 60s). Can't resist saying that I finally got my hands on the British original 'They Drive By Night' (1938) which is usually ignored in favour of the later American noir.

Your essay, which I've quickly scanned, contains much which we could discuss. Including the 'stiffening' in Tilting Square. Perhaps Elizabethan Overhang, the first book of sonnets, somewhat avoids this. But it was part of the cultural landscape of that 80s decade, stretching a little in the 90s.

A thing that might surprise you: I keep on finding that many of the texts in Le Fanu's Ghost are very performable.

Where did this essay appear then?

Coincidentally, yesterday I tracked down the origin of that quote re. Azimuth. It's from your review of Days of '49 in Terrible Work.

On the question of music, I'd like to speak about the influence of various genres on my whole attitude to writing and the structure of books. I took on board what Bunting said about the musical structural analogy for Briggflatts. I had a fondness for what would now be called Early Music, down to early 18th century. And understood what he suggested about the sonata form in particular. But alongside that I was very influenced by what is now often dismissed as the concept album. E.g. I appreciated the Who's sequence 'A Quick One' (1966), sometimes regarded as a precursor of Sergeant Pepper, and then zanier things like Jefferson Airplane, After Bathing at Baxter's. But also Jazz suites and the whole fluency that you get in, say,
Coltrane's performances at the Village Vanguard. Also very relevant to Azimuth: the climate in which one night you would go to Cousins (Les Cousins) in Greek Street to hear Bert Jansch and then the next night go to hear John Mayall, with Clapton and later Peter Green, at Klook's Kleek in West Hampstead. Then another week to Tiles in Oxford Street to hear Steampacket (Long John Baldry with all kinds of people that later became famous such as Rod Stewart) or Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, the Yardbirds at the Marquee, and then another night some jazz or blues at the Flamingo. I saw John Surman, who I still listen to frequently. I saw Joe Harriott with John Mayer (Indo-Jazz Fusion) at the Isle of wight Festival, the afternoon before Dylan came on, in the rain. Oh and lest I forget many female performers such as Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs, Jo Ann Kelly—I mean at venues around the country.

One record I played to death was Anthems in Eden, the Shirley & Dolly Collins album, where they collaborated with David Munrow, Christopher Hogwood, the Skeapings etc. This had an enormous influence on me.

And, dare I say it, as a Floyd fan from the beginning (67 at least), I went to one of the 1972 Rainbow concerts where they unveiled Dark Side of the Moon, much more fluid as I recall than the album released 6 months later. Which has become such a cliche. Frances says she remembers it as the album always put on in bed! Or, as she puts it, music to make out to. By which to make out. But there was ambition there in making that sequence and some interesting bits of happenstance. Tape loops and people wondering in and putting stuff down. Anecdotes, confessions. Abbey Road where I spent the first five years of my life (literally).

How to sort that alongside my devotion to more genuinely experimental work by Soft Machine and Kevin Ayers/David Bedford. The LATE David Bedford much missed. Ian Carr's Nucleus, Lol Coxhill, who stayed in my big communal house in Yorkshire after a gig. Pete Brown's Battered Ornaments. Mike Taylor, who also collaborated on Cream stuff. Almost forgot Jack Bruce, who I saw on numerous occasions, one of which at Oxford Town Hall with Tony Williams's Lifetime, nearly destroyed my hearing.

This was all part of the mix in thinking about writing, or at least doing it. The point here: not just the music as music but as a way of being/working, making sense of the world. A moment when all kinds of artistic endeavour were linked. Have you read J. Maclaren-Ross's film reviews? Quite revealing, I think, but he was thinking a little more in a vacuum. Fitzrovia anticipates the 60s explosion??

Well, I better stop.

I'll probably see you next Saturday at the book fair. I think it would be good to talk both days for the weekend of the projected interview. Frances seems reconciled to just seeing me on Saturday night!

Yours,

Gavin