Fulfilling the Silent Rules

Silent Rules – history of the project

(Fulfilling the Silent Rules – another book about British poetry 1960-97 – published by Shearsman in September 2018 – out now.)

2002-3.

 I was approached. Not by the editor but by someone she knew, who described the kind of book they wanted. It was an American university press which wanted to set up a London office and an English list. They needed some titles. They don’t have to be nice to you. You rush off and do the work anyway. The message – passed through intermediaries – was that I had to write the whole book before submitting a proposal. This was in June 2002.

I was in year 10 of a long (uncontrolled?) project of writing books about modern British poetry and at year 10 I didn't have a book deal for any of the books. The initial idea was to publish something in America. The design I came up with was based on the idea that Americans have fixed ideas about British poetry, implying that there are only a few poets active and that there is a single British thing which all poets faithfully reproduce. So my concept was to give rapid accounts of 100 books to show that all generalisations were wrong and to list the assets which made the field significant and irresistible. So this was the thesis. The time-span was 1960 to 1997 because that was the perimeter of my project. Because it was meant to be a big-deal book, I felt I could ignore the prior existence of Legends of the Warring Clans and incorporated a dozen book reviews from ‘Legends’ into the text. (Legends was internet-only and set up in 2003, I think.) I didn't want to write the book. I felt I was over-committed to the poetry project, in view of piles of unpublished books, and the lack of rewards. I thought I was the natural victim, not being an academic insider and having views which were not conservative and accepted. I was probably going to get thrown out once the servants realised I was there. But it composed itself spontaneously in my head. Writing it down was hard, but all I had to do was write it down. So it wasn’t voluntary. And so I ended up with a book. Of course when I had written it the editor said she only wanted to see the contents page. And said no after seeing the contents page. So there we were. This was in 2003.

I was irritated by the exchange with the publisher but the book was an asset once written. By 2002 I wanted to get away from writing about poetry. The writing coincided with the build-up to publication of Failure of Conservatism. No time to rewrite that because I was busy writing 'Silent Rules'. Various other arrangements to publish the book fell through in a puzzling way. Time went by.

'Silent Rules' does not have a thesis because the aim was to be the first book that someone seriously interested in literature read about modern British poetry. The strategy I followed was to evoke the 'whole spectrum', so going for many descriptions of very diverse books, rather than picking a few stars or finding that one single style was the 'solution'.

The book does not mention chronology at all. This is because I had already done the analysis of stylistic change in The Failure of Conservatism.

The focus was allover, in the overall design, the tip to tip quality. This meant that any group of 100 high-quality books would do. I began with a huge list of books and had great problems getting it down to 80. I stuck at 120, that seemed just about right. Throwing books out was a strain. The selection has no higher plan. Sacheverell Sitwell wrote a book called Splendours and Miseries, which I liked. It refers to a French original, Splendeurs et chagrins militaires, by de Vigny, and at one point the pieces about 80 poets were headed “Chagrins and splendours”. I used to refer to them as “Chagrins”. When I was assembling the book for publication in 2009 I suddenly realised I'd recycled all this stuff from Legends and this wasn't right. The count of Chagrins was no longer 100, I am not sure there were ever 100 sections written. I have an old list with 75 titles and I think it is now down to 65 individual books plus 15 anthologies. Of these 51 were in the oldest version. In 2009, I also radically cut the book, so several chapters vanished altogether. The design became much simpler. Any themes except the major one of 'diversity' were removed. The selection was rebalanced to include more mainstream poets and more feminists.

In 2017, Shearsman agreed to take the book and I agreed with previous publishers that this was the right way to go. In January 2017 I got excited by reading back the book and devised a number of rewrites. I didn’t actually incorporate these because the length couldn’t really be extended and the book couldn’t be improved. It was more that I was excited about it all.

 

This is the final volume of the seven-volume set called Affluence, Welfare, and Fine Words. Why has the text not been updated to cover developments since 1997? This would have meant throwing out material I had already written and probably throwing out poets I was interested in. A printed book of poems is itself frozen and so it is rational to freeze prose that describes such a book. I wanted to calm the past rather than calming the present. (In 2002, 1997 was “just before now”, not yet The Past.) This leaves the other question of why the book is being published 15 years after being written. The answer to that is obvious, the alternative scene has almost no resources and it is a wonder if anything gets published. If the book swelled up to 500 pages, nobody would be able to buy it. I can see that people want to read about poetry after 1997, but I couldn't add it to this volume without throwing away what I wrote before. I prefer saturation of a predefined area – that is, the period up to 1997. 'Silent Rules' deals only with individual volumes and has no career surveys – just as well, since almost all the poets have published prolifically since 1997. The reviews will no doubt go on about the halt line in 1997, but that really wasn't up for negotiation. Anyway I think people are just too territorial when it comes to the present. The poetry world is not densely populated with dispassionate people. You are going to reach much more acceptable conclusions if you are dealing with the 1960s or 1970s – people are more willing to listen. So is there some magic line where the free-fire zone becomes the Past and ceases to be territorial? I think so, and that is the purpose of writing this series. The scene is febrile and dissident, a steady and frozen view is a good thing for it.

We are now in year 26 of the project. Technically, I stopped years ago. Maybe in 2005. 'Silent Rules' is the last part to come out. You can ask why I needed to do a seventh book once six have already appeared. I still want the function of “invalidating generalisations”. That is still fun. But also, this one gives descriptions of about 40 poets who are not in the other books. This must be a useful function.

How does ‘Silent Rules’ relate to the other books in the series? The answer is that it includes a great deal of subject matter not included anywhere else, and which has to be covered somewhere in order to reach a complete picture of the time. At the same time, some poets described in ‘Silent Rules’ also appear in other volumes. The set discusses 140 poets all told. I suppose you could argue for adding a career survey of all of them – what, another 500 pages? Completeness is just a notion.

The series of books is supposed to be 1960-97 but when I was writing in 2002 I inadvertently included work that was post-97, specifically by poets I was extremely keen to include and who wouldn't have been in the work otherwise. So there are some overspills.

Why “silent rules”? Evidently poetry is made of sound, in the form of speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly (and which have no accepted notation in which they could be shared). There is always an argument to be made that you don't need any prose about poetry, just access to the poems. If prose is helpful, this is connected to its ability to tease out and make plain the silent rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read it. The subtitle is “inside and out” and becoming an insider definitely involves knowing what the silent rules are. Although, to be honest, I didn't learn about poetry by reading prose, it was more by hanging out with people who liked poetry and noticing their reactions. Or, in fact, mirroring their reactions. How can you have critical culture when the core of culture is mirroring other people's reaction patterns? Don't know. Not my problem.

I had a feeling that writing about famous poets in a brief extent (1000 words) was relatively ineffective. So the very celebrated poets tended to get cut. This might give the effect of a collection of obscure poets – a cunning way for conservative critics to trash the whole thing. Certainly I wanted to place more figures into the landscape. I think there was some scheme of disproving generalisations by the avant garde as well –I was annoyed by exclusive and preconceived schemes of merit. I didn't think the key to artistic creation was so simple. The plan is in fact a race-course of generalisations. The course wins, to be frank. All the generalisations crash and their burnt-out carcasses are exhibited on billboards around the track. The facts come out on top.

The message is that poetic merit is scattered over the landscape and that loyalty to a faction is not compatible with full aesthetic principles and a thorough approach to collecting primary evidence. This message lacks kinetic energy – it doesn't define the role of Winner, and this is what motivates people. They find the egocentric and one-person view natural and the broad-spectrum view unnatural and frustrating. But really, it is the only message I want to transmit. Each individual poet gets a limited amount of space, but the “hero of the piece” is the entire landscape, the awe-inspiring span from one end of the poetry world to the other. It's not part of the 'depolarisation' campaign, but it is remote from the ideologies of any group of poets, because the wide spectrum wouldn't fit with that.

Does it follow from covering the entire scene that the report will be accepted by the entire scene? This is the problem, you can only carry out an effect of wiping out divisions in the scene if your voice is heard widely enough to affect the scene.

I have rewritten the book several times. Once it exists, the temptation to redesign it is overwhelming.

May 2018. After reading Robert Hewison's book Cultural Capital, I rewrote parts of the book again. This is ridiculous, but the point is to be as precise as possible. Changing something so long and so finished is exhausting – it gave me a headache. What I had written on arts funding and State attitudes was just not accurate. Hewison's book gives a glimpse of a much greater whole in which my feelings are insignificant. I can’t extend that glimpse for long, but it was compelling while it lasted. Hewison quotes a Runnymede Trust publication saying that out of the first £2 billion of arts funding from the National Lottery only 0.2% went to artists from ethnic minorities. He says on another page that the lottery funding panel was given permission in 1998 to give out more individual grants, which were only 2.5% at that point. If capital projects were 97.5% then grants to individuals cannot have been more than 2.5%. So 0.2% as a fraction of 2.5% is not so far out of proportion. Squeezing the real story out of administrative history is like fighting warthogs with your bare hands. If a large sum goes to repairing or converting a building, you can't say if it has gone to one ethnic group or another, because an arts building can be used by all kinds of people. No arts organisation is specifically or exclusively White. Funding panels don't like giving money directly to individuals, as infrastructure spend is just much harder to launch glib political attacks on.

I spent time struggling with this area and then cut it altogether. I bought the book which Hewison drew that fact from – he has made two mistakes in citing. (This is 'The future of ethnic minorities in Britain', credited to the Runnymede Trust, 2000.) What he reports is not in the source. The source says that 0.02% of the organisations funded had ethnic minority 'representation' on their boards of directors. This isn't really a measurement of anything. The managers don't produce any art. “Follow the money” is good but this doesn't tell you who got the money. Hewison's book is fascinating and overwhelming in its scope.

'Silent Rules' originally had seven more chapters, including 'Long poems of the 1970s' 'Parataxis' and 'Coherence and exceptionalism'. Because the book was over length, I removed these. These chapters are part of the work but because of size constraints they are coming out on the Internet and not in print. They are available on the www.angelexhaust.blogspot.com website. (postscript. The chapter on 'long poems' was expanded into a whole book on the 70s which is now, 2022, published as "Nothing is being suppressed".)

There are some more sources.

Memory of the Drift. The piece is about a pamphlet which was published in 2001. This now appears as Book One of the work (overall title Memory of the Drift). A volume from Shearsman has collected books one to four, but there is a book five (published in Angel Exhaust 22).

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream. The on-line version has now been taken down but the poems are available in a volume from Shearsman also called Landscape from a Dream.

Toynbee. Four volumes of the 'Pantaloon' series appeared, but according to Wikipedia there are others unpublished.

Elfyn. Fiona Sampson says (Beyond The Lyric p.80) that Elfyn introduced free verse into Welsh. This is utter piffle. The first volume of free verse in Welsh was published in 1937 (Y ddau lais), and Elfyn began publishing in the late 70s. Gwyn Thomas was a striking example of free verse in the Sixties. There is an interview with Elfyn (in Welsh) in Taliesin (volume 141, 2010). This was published after my book was finished.

Chaloner. Angel Exhaust 22 is a special issue on Chaloner, with some letters between him and John Hall.

Kazantzis. There is an author’s statement at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/judith-kazantzis .

JF Hendry. >>That the Cimbri spoke a Celtic language is attested to by the reports of Pliny the Elder (circa 77 AD) who stated that Philemon wrote that, the Cimbric word Morimarusa means the Dead Sea, as far as the Promontory of Rubeas, beyond which they name it the Cronian Sea (“Naturalis Historiae”, Libri IV, xiii, line 95). The word “Morimarusa”, referring to the Baltic Sea, is composed of ‘muir’ and ‘marbh’ in Q-Celt Irish; ‘mor’ and ‘maro’ / ‘marw’ in P-Celt languages such as Breton and Welsh. Importantly, there is no Germanic word in any dialect that would even approximate these root elements (Wikipedia entry for “Cimbri”).<< Philemon wrote sometime in the 4th century BC. Unfortunately there seems to be little doubt that Hendry misspelt the name.

http://ann.skea.com/THHome.htm 

The book “Crow” is incomplete and there was a prose tale which told the story of Crow and was the frame for the whole thing. Hughes explained this at an appearance at the Adelaide Festival in 1976. The URL goes to a transcript of this talk.

This is not the framing tale but it does explain the story which the poems radiate off from. I guess people just made up their own idea of who Crow was. The poems went out without the frame and I think this was just a feature of cultural life around 1970, art had gone outside the shared frameworks but people didn't bother to make the explanations available. Alexander Walker writes about this.

Sigmois te. I quote a strange Classical text about what seems to be sound poetry in the 2^nd century AD. I may have more information about this. This (as mocked in the prose account by Nicomachus of Gerasa) may be part of a ritual narrating a creation myth in which seven stages of creation become successively more shaped and more finished. The hissing belongs to one of the earlier stages – articulate language is seen as the classical mark of refinement, so that pre-verbal language-like utterances are symbolic enactments of the earlier stages. The hissing and so on is perhaps not such a mystery, but part of an orderly symbolic structure which by a surprising chance we can recover. There is a papyrus which includes instructions to hiss, crow, etc. at moments in the seven-part ritual. At the end of the ritual we reach language. There is information about this in Wolfgang Schultze's Dokumente der Gnosis.

A relative sent me a postcard showing part of a mosaic from the Roman villa at Brading, Isle of Wight, near Brading Haven. It shows a man wearing a tunic who has a chicken head. Don't get this, but you could expect him to make crowing noises. >>The cockerel-headed man is a unique feature of the mosaics. The mosaic shows the cockerel-headed man beside a building approached by steps, with two griffins beyond.

One older opinion is that he represents the gnostic deity known as Abraxas; however Abraxas is usually depicted with a serpent's tail as well as a cockerel's head, which makes this interpretation seem unlikely.<<

So much of the theory of the period describes poems that were never written and sensations that were never felt by any sensibility. The results are not everywhere equally rewarding. The theories, bursts of wild exhilaration, saw visions of cultural achievement which went beyond the real story. As propaganda evaporates, the best texts remain as residues and prove to be the real substance of the era. Brushing away the ashes of fantasies, we reveal the shapes of hard, determinate, finished objects, the abiding works of the time. If you populate all the squares, eventually you have the map.

Maybe the theorising can start once the substance of the time, achieved and outstanding books, has been understood. There may be silent rules composing the cultural field which permits poetry to be written and read. States of mind can be recovered from allusive language because we know what they are. Poetry can be original but cannot be arbitrary. Works created by the reader's participation have to embody a shared logic, unlike for example photographs.

Admission. I write about Kathleen Nott's Poems from the North, which was published in 1956 and so is outside our chosen time period. Why? Nott published a book in 1960 but it is much less distinguished than “North” and looks as if she had lost her nerve. So it has to be the 1956 volume. Nott wrote two really important books and absolutely had to be included in the project, so I had to throw out another book to permit this. I was looking at the 1950s and noticed 5 female poets I liked – Raine, Nott, Eithne Wilkins, Lynette Roberts, Audrey Beecham. Only one of these was still publishing in the 1960s. So one theme could be “poets who found the period too unsympathetic to write in”, and this would be a whole area of study (which I never looked at). People are getting more and more interested in the “silent voices”, people who never became poets or who wrote and then fell silent. This is connected to a project for changing society to reduce inequality, which is after all more important than just studying literature. I just read books that actually got written. Some of the silent rules could include “rules that poets follow in deciding to fall silent”. I didn't get into this and I am doubtful that you can reconstruct this emotional pattern for the 1950s.

A trawl of the Internet today revealed that Wilkins came from New Zealand and was married to Austrian translator Ernst Kaiser. It says the couple spent 11 years in Rome studying the Robert Musil archive and translating his great novel. Wilkins was born in 1914 and died in 1975. She was publishing poems from about 1934 to 1953 but never got a book out.

At one point I say that only one significant woman poet was born in the 1930s. Going back many years, Rosemary Tonks had carefully kept her age quiet, but Helen discovered a reference book which did feature it, and said it was 1932. But the obituaries of Tonks put it down as 1928. So that would be zero women poets born in the 1930s. This is a moment where we see the silent rules – you notice them when they change.

The cover of the new british poetry says it has 85 poets. After counting several times, I make it 84. I think one guy was in the selection, then tried to say that the poets get should get paid more money and should go on strike, then withdrew his own poems. So the count is wrong. This is my memory of it. He was a very very bad poet. He used the moment to write reviews of the book for at least two newspapers, saying it was no good and giving most of the space to praise of his own rival anthologies. Supermarket chateau sleaze-bag with sanctimonious notes?

'Silent rules' uses a method of counting overlaps and non-overlaps between anthologies to uncover silent rules of grouping, which allows us to guess at the assumptions that precede differentiation. This locates nine “clusters” of poets, a way of getting away from binary divisions. I missed the oral:written opposition, obviously present but not really showing up in my dataset, because I used books. Divisions like male:female and Scots: English are real in marketing terms but too obvious to reveal much. The really puzzling thing is the “stereo blindness” whereby the Mainstream and the Alternative are invisible to each other. It is good to find a count for this. For example, I used 5 anthologies to work out a selective list of Alternative poets – 70 names. If you take the 1998 anthology, The Firebox, it covers a 40-year period and has 122 names. But only 3 of the 70 are allowed within that selection of 122 names. There are clearly two different aesthetics in play. The point of counting overlaps is to provide objective evidence of this.

The count doesn't tell you why the split happened. To be honest, I don't know why it happened. It would be easy to explain why readers exploit all available resources, and why poets use verbal forms which the audience understands. The opposite is hard to explain.

Does this split still exist in 2018? I don't know. I think almost everything has been forgotten. Maybe that includes the territorial claims and the barbed wire. As I say in the book, a lot of the repressions of the mainstream disappeared in the 1980s. Writing a book in which large numbers of poets from several different aesthetic factions are included within one unifying conceptual space may not resolve these territorial limits to vision. It's more of a cultivated gesture, really. But that is the objective. Maybe my book will vanish because it wants to record a consensus when in reality none exists.

In theory, the poets who cross boundaries and appear in (say) five anthologies should be the best. My impression is that the most-selected poets are actually bland, featureless, smoothed down to pap, shallow in their choice of effects. This doesn't greatly support the project of effacing group boundaries. My impression is that poets do well by developing their personal style/ world theory as far as it can possibly go. You can't really have the developments without the splits. “I write just like everyone else” – well, you needn't bother, need you. But we could have cultural institutions, and reviewers, whose sensors accept a broad spectrum.

I looked at 15 anthologies which included 456 names. That may have been about 10% of all the people who published a book of poetry in that period, roughly 1985 to 1996. Interpreting the stylistic and aesthetic/social differences between the “clusters” means actually reading the poets. This was a large task and it explains why it took me 20 years to write a study of the period. The longer you look, the more you understand. (The count goes down to 400 if you remove Irish and American poets. Is it legitimate to remove them? not really, but my subject was “British poetry”.) The whole period, from 1960 on, involves many more than these 400 poets: I write about 65 poets in 'Silent Rules' of whom 34 weren't in any of the anthologies. There are longer discussions of some of the anthologies on this website.

Indo-European 'slippery'

Slippery

I have been looking at the Indo-European family of words for the quality slippery, English slip and slide. I got into this because there is a Welsh word sglefrio, slide and I wondered if this had an English source. This is conformed by the standard dictionary. I found this rather disappointing. There is another Welsh word llithro, which is purely Celtic (from sglib-tro according to the reference work by Walde and Pokorny).

They list a substance as the primary element of meaning, so smooth mud, slime, etc., with slip as a verb following the presence of this substance.

Something surprising is that the same root describes smooth things and sharp things. These qualities are very different for an English speaker. But this does not show a fault in the proposed set of relationships. Schleifen in German means 'grind', both to remove roughness and make a surface smooth and to remove extra material and make a blade or point sharp. The action of removing tiny pattern-affecting burrs of material can make a given object either smooth or sharp.

The dictionary article for *lei (or *slei) starts with slime and goes on through Gaelic sleamhann, 'smooth', ὀλιβρόs 'slippery', λείμαξ 'snail', schleifen, schlűpfrig ('slippery)', Latin litura 'erasure'. There are other entries for “extensions” of this minimal root (which rarely appears without extensions). Latin lino ('smear') has a nasal infix like hundreds of other verbs, in the present stem only. The perfect and supine are livi litum (interesting variant levi) and here we see almost the naked root. Lei genuinely is the basic root and these forms display it.

In modern Gaelic, liofa means fluent in a language but is actually sharp, not literally 'fluent'. Liofa should be the past participle of a verb liomh or liobha, and in fact there is a verb liomh, which means 'sharpen'. Liofa is common in talking about the Gaelic language, where the shrinking number of fluent speakers is a constant cause of concern. This is a distinctive assignment of symbolism in Gaelic and perhaps in Welsh. (The 1927 dictionary spells this liobha, which is pronounced the same way. Liobha is related to schleifen and presumably Latin limare.)

O'Huigin describes a word in Old Irish rind, which means blade but also mouth. The idea is that language is sharp and the mouth as the location of language is therefore like a blade. In Welsh, min means 'lip' but miniog means 'sharp'. This may not be a phonetic coincidence, it may be the same metaphor as in Old Irish.

Another word for sharp has an important range of applications to language: geur. Geur-cainnte is used to describe bardic ability, in a famous historical description of the situation in Scotland. Sharpness is the metaphor for a highly desired quality of language. It is not as simple as hostility, it means acuity as well.

Looking at 100 cognates within the posited *lei root shows a beautiful pattern. The strength of the IE idea is reinforced as one looks at the overall similarities across many languages. Quite clearly this pattern becomes simpler as we go back in time. But the point of origin of the pattern looks increasingly blurred. It is like an old photograph which is mainly damage to the substrate – within which real information is hidden. This follows directly from the path that was followed – the posited “Ursprache” is the last stage before knowledge vanishes completely, so inevitably part of the Ursprache is not known, a blur.

Walde-Pokorny defines the root as *lei and suggests that the real words we know about are built up by suffixes, variously -b(h) (slip), -dh (slide), -m (sleamhann), -t (litura). Besides this, most derivatives also add an s- as an affix; so that slide corresponds to Latin lubricus. The most naked form of the root shows in Latin lino and litura.

If I am correct, the reconstruction of the “*lei” root involves five different root suffixes. It is hard to avoid the impression that these are being made up ad hoc to account for original inconsistencies within the posited language. That would mean that the reconstruction method had failed – and perhaps that its object frustrated logic because it is irregular and disunited. We are applying a perfectly logical method to a subject which does not answer consistently; perhaps the efforts of scholarship have shown that Indo-European is not a solid object – perhaps a dialect continuum, perhaps a language in which different patterns were co-present with different frequencies. So the language of 3000 BC was complex – much of it was lost – what survives is simpler than the original – but has diversified while spreading through Europe to produce a new, secondary complexity.

I could not find the Russian word skolzkiy, (or verb skol'znut') in W-P, surely related even if that shows an irregular process of development. The real pattern may be even more irregular than they allow for. The root appears to include a -g- which gives rise to the k in skolz and the g in glide. (And the k in Norwegian sklie.)

We don't have any IE words, so the roots are the substance of our patiently acquired knowledge. It would be better if the roots were more clearly demarcated, or if the extensions which turn them into words were better understood or more regular.

There is a core problem which surfaces in the W-P entries for roots connected to slip. They list roughly ten separate roots but then admit, in remarks within the article, that some of these roots are extensions of other ones. So it comes back down to one or to two or three, in a frustrating way. The problem is that these variants do not fit together by sound processes which we can sustain by analogies, and also that they are too close to each other to be totally separate. The gaps can be made up by positing root extensions, but this has the fault of being arbitrary. For an English speaker, the idea that “slip” and “slide” are really the same word, is attractive and natural; but is there any other pair of words that shows the same alternation? The reality of the imagined suffixes depends on the frequency with which they show up; otherwise they are just invented solutions to a problem which has not actually been solved. The material is at once too rich, an excess of related forms; and too poor, as the relationships are not validated – even though there are so many IE relationships which we can validate, so many times. Walde-Pokorny does not admit that slip and slide relate to the same root. It seems likely that they are from one root, and that this is blurred or branching within Indo-European, and also that the words slick, sleek (and cognates) are yet another variant on the same root. Obviously, a slick surface is one on which you are likely to slip. Why don't these forms converge? Is the convergence we do accept partly the product of rules invented by scholars? What does half-convergence mean?

The three-letter (trilitère) theory about the rules of the Indo-European root eliminate *lei as a possibility. However, the consensus is that Ce roots do exist and the triliteral ideal is just a norm. Walde-Pokorny dates from before laryngeal theory was the standard model and takes no account of laryngeals at all.

Struggling through the examples reveals that there are almost none from Indo-Iranian, although quite a few from Slavonic. This gives another way of testing the kinship between the ten or so roots which W-P separate, so slip and slide. If they follow the same geography, it is more likely that they are indeed the same root. Without doing the number-crunching, I nonetheless suggest that they have very similar geography and are European as opposed to something older. One way in which a word pops up with many very similar forms, which are hard to relate to each other, is that it is a loanword from another language in which phonology and word-formation are strange from the point of view of the accepting language.

The big Welsh dictionary gives sglefrio as a derivative from English sclither (for slither). Sclither is a Scots form and I don't think it exists in the parts near Wales. So, a problem. I believe that sl- is Anglo-Saxon and the group of forms in scl- are Scandinavian loan-words. The OED gives sklither as a obsolete form of slither. I have much used a book called Sglefrio ar eiriau, 'slipping on words', i.e. getting words wrong, a book about Welsh poetry not written by Methodist clergymen.

I can't resist citing two Scots dialect words omitted by W-P. This is in the context of the basic element of the root being 'soft mud' and a collateral form in sleug-, sleuk. Scots has sleek 'mire, slime; miry clay in the bed of a river, the seashore'. Further, sleech 'silt; sea-wrack; the oozy, vegetable substance found in river-beds; slime; in pl. foreshores on which silt is deposited by the tide, 'slob-lands'.' OED says that slob comes from Irish slab, mud. English cognates of sleech would be slough and slack, a dialect word meaning swamp or soft ground (Gordale Slack and so on). We read that “much of central Belfast is underlain [...] by a deposit of soft grey mud, silt and fine sand with numerous sea shells, in particular oysters” known as Belfast Sleech. It sounds as if slob-lands have matured into high-quality sleech.

I read about these stray consonants in Szemerenyi's standard work of 1990. Szemerenyi says that the best work on them is still by Per Persson (1857-1929). I found Persson's book of 1912 – a thousand pages long, of which half is about the root-determinatives. He had published another book on the same subject in 1891, and the 1912 one adds a crushing level of detail and retorts to his critics. It looks as if Persson's tenacity and command of facts had killed the question – a century later, one can conclude that nobody was able to improve on him, and wonder how many people have read the book in the intervening century.

The issue is well summed up by James Clackson. He compares Greek kheo with Latin fundo and German giessen (noun form Guss) and points out that these look like the same root except that the expected d is missing in Greek. The d is called a Wurzeldeterminativ, or root extension. (German also has schütten, the same root with an s- prefix which we see in hundreds of roots.) We have 3 options here:

(a) kheo is not related to fundo

(b) the Greek word is damaged in some way (perhaps by vandals)

(c) the -d is a separate element which (like the s-) was attached in some cases but not all and whose meaning we do not know

Obviously, these root extensions have a bearing on the relationship between slip, slide, and slick. Persson piles up hundreds of roots in which these extensions sometimes appear. He says that virtually every consonant can appear in this role – which suggests that they are not elements of specific meaning (as -n- generally makes a root into a present stem) but more generalised. Thus, slip slide and slick are not differentiated by meaning (and the possible -p -d -k extensions are not signs which restrict or refine the meaning). Persson says that there is no known explanation for the extensions – they are simply there, like the endings for noun cases or persons of the verb. He believes they once had meanings. He does not comment at all on geography. Apparently all parts of the Indo-European world use the extensions in the same way. (Persson wrote before Tocharian or the Anatolian languages had been uncovered.) This could suggest that the phenomenon is very old, in fact primordial. The variation between slip slide slick looks like a geographical variation, but all the variants appear in English, which shows the contrary. Hypothetically, the source of Germanic could be a migratory war-band which had drawn recruits from different parts of the Indo-European dialect area, so that geographical variants all became established within one new speech community (which then separated from the source population). This would be like the captain:chieftain dualism, where a dialect variation in Old French produced two traces in English. There is no evidence for this, though. More geographical analysis is possible, but Persson did not stumble across any geographical patterns in his exhaustive work. This is a basic problem with any idea based on geographical variation. (Strike war-band, insert “migrant labourers in the sheep industry”.)

The unmoved validity of root-extensions makes it difficult to count Indo-European roots. What appear as ten articles in Walde-Pokorny could represent one root with interestingly oscillating extensions.

The s-mobile also appears in a root *ker, variant *sker-. This shows up in English as shear (as in shear through). This is obviously (obviously?) related to sharp. The -p is unexplained and so looks like a root extension.  

catalogue

catalogue of this site is: here

Michael Ayres and The New Pictorial Economy

Flower, yarrow, and the starry thistle: Michael Ayres and The New Pictorial Economy; a Premature Review

[this was written in 2003 for a website which has now taken it down – so I am putting it up here. It accompanied some of Ayres' poems)

It is sometimes best to view artists from a standpoint at an angle to their own standpoint. Texture becomes visible when the light falls at a slant. We see all kinds of detail we weren't supposed to. But often, it is good to view an artist from exactly the same angle at which they stand – to capture the data as a primary act of apprehension, the acquisition which will later enable us to think or talk about it.

I have decided to associate Ayres, Kelvin Corcoran, and Robert Sheppard, all born 1956-59, as a group. The name I have given to this group – as a handle – is poets of the New Pictorial Economy. Discussion need not be distracted too much by the fact that this group would logically include me, as well; something which needed to be declared, in order to lighten our load. We could possibly associate Jeremy Reed (b.1951), who exhibits tantalisingly varied developments of the same themes. Reed is the only one of this named group to have engaged with High Street success, the most prolific, the most artistically wayward (in the eyes of many) – and the most involved with pictorial glamour.

These poets had in common that they missed the revolutionary cultural upbeat of the 1970s, except as students and consumers of art; were sorely at odds with the New Right hedonism of the 1980s; have largely been ignored by criticism; became very prolific, perhaps reacting against rejection; explored large-scale forms; do not perceive a vital 'high-low' difference between poetry and rock music, and were formed by rock culture; and that they are fascinated by the new pictorial economy which fills streets and homes with images – and by the processes which developed those images, as cultural messages with overt and covert content. I often associate this sensibility with Tony Benn's two books of the early Eighties, Arguments for Democracy and Arguments for Socialism, where he swept the economy of information to the foreground of politics, arguing against the whole ownership structure of the information media, and exposing the political bias which subjected the content of the owned media. This is the pictorial economy – the system of mills and pulleys by which images are assembled, transformed in a lavish and highly capitalised way from their dull and dumb originals in the real world. Once you see an image as an idea (which means something visual, etymologically), you then ask whose idea is it - whose vision.

The poets in question often seem to be writing from inside a system of pictures – Corcoran's Our Thinking Tracts being an example of this. They also have a private and self-confident set of internal images as a basis for acute criticism of social reality and of the shallow images of affirmative culture.

This may not be the best name. Any name would have done in order to study Ayres in a landscape in which he is at the centre, rather than one where the centre is Black Mountain in the 1950s, or Cambridge in the 1970s, or Huddersfield in the 1980s, and the poet's essential traits register as amusingly deviant. Other names might work better. I first thought of Young Marble Giants, after a line of Kelvin's which appears just before one of Ayres' poems, in Angel Exhaust 10:

Young marble giants sleep inside us,
that virtue which fills the body with itself,
limbs and head emerging from stone
if only I could, as if to take a step.
O you islands of men and women.
(from Melanie's Book).

The line comes of course from the name of a band, one who appeared on Rough Trade records, were Welsh marxists (roughly), made the wonderful 'Final Days' in 1981, and vanished. I heard a rumour that they are still playing (and live downstairs from someone I know?), but in practice someone who knows their name belongs to a specific generation – the generation, of course, of the poets we are discussing. (The band took it from some guide-book about Greek sculptures standing on a headland somewhere.) I rather liked the link of visual art, politics, and rock and roll. However, the "young" bit is by now misleading. I liked the "giant" bit, too. I toyed with the phrase "lost marble giants". Oh well. The giants suggested a drama of idealism: a recognition that the created visual world expressed ideals rather than an actuality able to reproduce itself. The drama confronted the capitalist Utopia fervently promoted by the owners of the media with the socialist and humanist Utopia desired by the poets.

Part of the Ayres legend is as someone under-published, impassively ignoring the tasks of literary networking in order to spend the largest possible amount of time writing the largest possible number of poems. Art is wealth. This situation, the external aspect of which will be dramatically transformed by [releases imminent in 2003], is profoundly comparable to the other New Pictorial Economy poets at a certain stage of their careers. It was a formative environment which disappears – built over, but leaving its trace in the physiology of the inhabitants.

"The plump sun of a segmented tangerine burns on the saucer by the side of the pool: that taste is fire slowed and synthesized, stored in batteries of sugar, and the rays bend now into Lexington handmade paper 622 x 800mm, burns later in the suicide's blaze, where one dies of life, unable to continue: one, water dripping down back, buttocks and thighs, feels the bones enter the terrifying medium of cancer, now watches lover whipping a tethered dog with a leather lash, the greyhound eyes, the shivering physique, eyes of a Mary, a suffering Madonna, watches and does not intervene.
(...)
One pounds a piano, a hefty grand, a lacquered beats, beauty from blood, sonata from carcass, the smile of teeth, pounds pounds pounds, titillates, pounds, caresses, a rippling smile, moral grandeur with a yellow label, Deutsche Grammophon, a cubist crocodile fed on fingers of Schoenberg, and opens the jaws like a yawning patron on the void of boredom, one's private disease, an ivory throat yawning, and yawning – first fear, then fury, then melancholia, then despair."

'Deposition' goes on like this for 5 A4 pages (of Grille, #3, 1994), imitating the visual imagination of advertisements, taking on the MegaVisual tradition (in Peter Fuller's phrase) and excelling it. The poem stages a self-love-nest of commodity fetishism and climaxes with a quote from the Sex Pistols, a flashback to Situationism.
There seems to be a connection, in the atmosphere of German Idealism, between the ideal visual forms of Greek sculpture, and the behavioural and intellectual ideals discussed by the leisured heroes of Plato’s dialogues. In modern radical thought, there is a way leading from a dispassionate consideration of visual creations to the ideal forms towards which they strive; and on from this visualisation of the ideal to an emotional withdrawal from the forms of law and social life actually obtaining. Because of Marx’s classical background and enthusiasms, the whole line of Marxism has remained soaked in this line of German idealism, as we realise when we look at Soviet architecture and painting, or consider the Soviet bloc’s preoccupation with athletics in terms of its origins.

Looking, thus, at the Soviet realm’s visual order of ideal bodies and stone-enveloped ceremonial spaces is bound to remind us of the idealised world which saturates our streets. This is peculiarly an era when architecture is ignored or covered over by flat photographic images. When, too, the three-dimensional reality of oranges is felt to be less stimulating than the 2-dimensional, artificially staged and lit, image of oranges on the label. These images are also ideals – a visual economy as the satisfaction of desires. Commodity praise art is a shallow Utopia offering a model for each grouping of humans, which is more concentrated and significant than those formed by the real humans around them, and can act as a model for them. The wonderful technology of pictures draws us into a state of dependence, brings us the temptation of immersion, and teaches us to use the off switch of detachment. The street of pictures shows us the society we desire as a didactic refrain to the actual scenes and groupings. Its frames are a social grammar for forming social utterances or acts.
The poetry of the new pictorial economy has been far-reachingly oriented to take on this visual grammar – to seize it and sequence it. The poets of the group have taken on this interconnected, self-repeating, false yet lush visual world, in a struggle so intimate that it turns into a relationship. The lag between retinal perception and the formation of a model in the brain, with its star-burst of neural activity, has been prolonged, to become the site where poets excel, where poetry has its special place. As a side-effect, it is the location where the artist deviates from the merely objective and common, to create an impossibly rich and personal world, as mandated by Symbolisme. When the visual is so detached from its own archaic grounds in the physical, it gives us information about what is no longer archaic but actually timeless – our own biological desires; and, consequently, a state in which those desires would be satisfied – and we, replete.

The invasion of the offered public imagery by pressure-groups can also be interpreted as a wish to enter those images – by pushing to the centre of them, you tacitly accept that they are central. Contest over what too many people desire to have shows us, nonetheless, what desire is animated by. Love that hurting thing y'all. In the new visual economy, litigation takes place over images rather than over land ownership. The insubstantial is thus made fundamental. The projection of intact wish images is then a restitution for a new population, as transcendentally beautiful landscape images were restitution for a displaced rural population, which lived in cities and wished to live in the country. The litigation process damaged the images, in which we were then forced to live. The intellect perpetually seeks an intact visual plane, full of clear relationships as the basis for its struggles to model the truth, and perpetually shatters it, realising conflict in order to collapse into a domain of concepts.

A 1955 essay by David Sylvester remarks that "The most obvious difference between the art of today and art of the inter-war period is that rough surfaces have taken the place of smooth ones." He speaks of "the growth of moss or lichen which is suggested by the textures of certain English neo-Romantic painting, the wear and patination undergone by archaeological relics". This distinction is probably crucial for how we take to Ayres' work. It is extremely smooth, it has a mighty depth of field which requires perfect lighting conditions and a suitable self-arrangement of objects; it advances irresistibly, like a bus. As Sylvester indicates, painters of the existentialist era saw damage as the sign of authenticity. But why should the authentic not be intact? is that not why it is authentic? Surely rough textures can quite well be projective, subjective, fashionably predictable. "Two decades ago", the English critic wrote, "the current ideal was a streamlined finish, clean, precise, immaculate(.)" This is Ayres' current ideal, swimming in a world of techno music, steadicams, and mathematically generated films.

Naturally, the clash between the overall nature of the optically available world-surface and the linear, punctual nature of language causes problems at the level of metre. The posing and solution of these problems – of perpetually turning a plane into a string of points which recompose as a plane – is the project which Ayres has given his workshop over to. 

It is premature, no doubt, to write at length about Ayres' work when so much of it has not been published. He strikes me as someone almost totally uninfluenced by modern poetry. The influences we do detect go all the way back to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme; influences dissolved, to be sure, in the workings of contemporary awareness, but which do concretize and converge as a "New Symbolisme". The key form-element is the Symbol, a visual image integrating various objects or parts. The origin of the image is within the artist's psyche, and it is not being corrected by reference to a physical original. Something essential is the way in which it is developed. We could speak of images that obey the laws of music. We should consider other Symbolists such as Paul Claudel, Leconte de Lisle, St Pol Roux, Verhaeren. His endlessly expanding pictures are carefully programmed; this is not quite surrealism.

Let's look for a moment at a passage from 'The Symbolic Church of the Red Truth':

John puts the grey stone into the cold box
In the cold box there is a grey stone
In the cold box there is a stone there is greyness
In the cold box is the grey stone John put there
John puts aluminium into the cold box
Jeff puts a yellow crayon into the cold box
In the cold box a yellow crayon rests beside a grey stone
In the cold box a yellow crayon rests beside aluminium
They are safe in the cold box – the grey stone, aluminium and the yellow crayon
They are there in the cold box
They are things in the cold box
Sometimes the cold box is the eye
Sometimes the cold box is 'memory'
Sometimes  the cold box is mind
Sometimes  the cold box is language
Sometimes the cold box is a flamingo
Sometimes  the cold box is an instant
Sometimes  the cold box is 'there'

The same phrase appears in 18 successive lines. This is a striking technical device. It may represent the poet's generation of fictive space: by a process of cellular doubling and variation, repeated indefinitely. We are bound to be reminded of Spiritualised – a band who use two-chord structures to produce an effect of shimmering and hovering, as we lose a sense of musical 'forward' and 'back': forward is the same as back. Something else we are bound to be reminded of is House music, with its dervish-like repetition of nuclear phrases, stored in a sequencer. The endless symmetry with its rippling, shifting breaches puts the centre of the work inside itself: it is convergent, which is the first requirement for any artificial world. This sounds like the self-teaching program of an automaton, acquiring cognitive structures through a minimal vocabulary and untiring procedures. By a slight shift, this could be the program which generates a digital landscape in a film – or in the code of a video game. The same doubling, splitting, and shifting gives, just further on, the lovely
the azure acid of melancholia the rook acid of foreboding.

'Marshal' is my favourite Ayres poem and is, we now learn, one of five poems, planned as a book, from the early 90s, the other four of which were 'Pool' 'Idyl' (published in Angel Exhaust 16), 'Sad Captain' and 'Nosferatu'. 'Marshal' was published in Angel Exhaust 10, and concerns a US marshal, a cattle town gunfighter from some classic and forgotten Western, come to face down and seize the poet for an unnamed crime. The scene is one from some lost Surrealist film, of lovers chased by malign authority. The Marshal is Tom Mix as the 'taxonomic loco' who reduces the wild lands of the West and the psyche to miserable, apathetic order. Of all Ayres' poems, this has the most brilliantly changing images, like shards of glass flying apart just slowly enough for us to see:

Then you come as a china dog tied with a morphine bow,
you come as lacunae, in senile pools,
you bring us what we forget in sacks of crushed wheels,
with clocks dipped in lard;
you come as a tiny barking dog,
a tiny ornamental dog from off a mantel,
an Anubis smaller than the eye
of a Lilliputian, tinkling needle.

In rooms of dishevelled memory,
a Jacob's angel of dirt and throwing winds on through,
a localised hurricane, diminutive then suddenly vast,
centreless, but perfumed,
trailing anxieties and desires:
I have passed close by you,
have reached and lost you

The openness to imagery is as if his studio were built with one glass wall. A poet who writes visually has to compete with other visual artists and to provide an adequate answer to the problems of visual thinking. The benefit is this purling fluency – you wade into the river and can then scoop what you want out of it. Correlatively, the poems offer themselves to our acoustic "scoop" with few or no retrieval problems. They are not cryptographic, paradoxical, violating the code they are written in. They reflect an imagined and experienced serene phase of existence, not frantic uncertainty in some hellish transit zone lost between two states of true being.

The more the image evolves and expresses process, the less it is surreal. Surrealism is of course present, mediated no doubt through Neruda, but we recall that is in fact a mutation of Symbolisme, and the objects which populated its oneiric scenes were largely left over from the warehouse of Symbolisme. Ayres is not interested in the momentary and contradictory montage, his key values are the abiding nature of the image conjured up from nowhere, its autonomy visavis the psyche which created it. These are not scribbled sketches but as it were built in brass and marble.
Symbolisme instructs a defection from the levelling world of the rational, shared, and legalistic. A refusal to adjust the lens to a shared norm – a portrait of the behaviour of the lens rather than of the visible, real, world. The dominance of personal style was defined by Arnold Hauser as bourgeois subjectivism, something which arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. That was the start of the era we are still in. Maybe we start with a library of shared images and acquire personality by inducing differentiation in them.

As someone else influenced by the French, who adopted surrealism but did not want to surrender expressive control, we could name J.F. Hendry – a predecessor. His concept of the expanding image seems relevant:

Flower, yarrow, and the starry
Thistle throughout her temporal death!
Flower and flowering doubly, bear
This supersession of breath
Into the dreamless kingdom where
All substance, shape and motion
Find fulfilment of conception.
(from 'the orchestral mountain')

Let us break into blue music, like the sea,/ This hour-glass shivering at the wind's note. Hendry could devise brilliant lines but has none of Ayres' mastery of organisation in depth – his power to throw in violent shifts of direction which strengthen the cumulative image rather than interrupting it.

Whether rough or smooth, the boundary between the voluntary (gratifying) and involuntary (images that fly of their own accord) seems a vital boundary in this animated world. Jeremy Reed's recent work has accepted glamour photography as the authentic visual skin of the ideal in our time, and adopted the schemas of glossy magazines as the production values of the poem: a step too far for his peers. The step forward into kinky erotica was in its way a move into optimism, away from the corrosive revelations of observation of flesh and temperament taken from life. The contest with such a fulsomely multiplied world of scenes made possible a linear maximisation of impact, sheer and flawless as the chassis of a new car. In its extremism, and acceptance of media values, this work sheds a light on more complex work – for example the Ayres of 'Deposition', for example Barry MacSweeney's Jury Vet. The cynical isolation and valorisation of assets at least allows us to hazard a guess that the avant-garde's single-minded focus on one set of assets – those of a discredited historicism and formalism – represents a kind of tunnel vision rather than a choice which art will forever stay with. Art has always danced with the prized assets of the society around it, and the more this attraction is forbidden the more it will stand for temptation and transgression.

Very early appearances were in First Offence 5 ('Raw Materials') and Angel Exhaust Nine (1993; 'The Age of Drift'). An interesting moment in the struggle was the anthology Ten British Poets (edited by Paul Green, 1993), which showcased Ayres along with DS Marriott, Rod Mengham, Nigel Wheale, and others. Green’s knowledge was ahead of the game, and the milieu should have taken advantage of this. The anthology was both timely and of high quality. It repays looking at today. Maybe the problem was as simple as putting Peter Larkin’s share at the front – the reader was bleeding and unconscious before they ever got to the second contributor. This was a book which the whispering gallery of literary opinion never started whispering about. I do recall seeing two reviews, which were animated by jealousy and resentment, and didn’t bother with any description or evaluation. On such chances, entire periods of someone’s career may depend. Compounding the problems, no anthology with the same chronological lens has followed. This gallery serves as an exhibition of Ayres’ work, which can usefully be set beside Kelvin’s selected poems (to come from shearsman in 2004), and Robert Sheppard’s gallery (planned for 2003). It would be simpler if there were a magazine we could name the group after. In fact, all the New Pictorial Economy poets have some connection with shearsman.

Andrew Duncan
April 2003

Bibliography. Ten British Poets. Michael Ayres, Poems 1987-92; a.m. Robert Sheppard, The Lores, Daylight Robbery. Jeremy Reed, The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg, Saints and Psychotics, Walk on Through, Bleecker Street. Kelvin Corcoran, The Red and Yellow Book, Lyric Lyric, When Suzy Was, Their Thinking Tracts or Nations.

**

John Hartley Williams

Eight and a Half, or, A Crush of Golden Femininity: John Hartley Williams 


Williams lived from 1942 to 2014. He lived in Berlin from 1976 but a valuable memoir, in his 1995 book, Ignoble Sentiments, describes his earlier experiences as a teacher in Belgrade. One of his most celebrated poems is ‘Lament for the Subota-Palic Tramway’ (in Hidden Identities), which describes the negative effects of modernisation in some unspecified Balkan town and deep nostalgia for the pre-modernised version.
A book-list may help. This is roughly it. Hidden Identities, 1982. Bright River Yonder 1987. Cornerless People 1990. Double 1994. Ignoble Sentiments 1995 (this was the one with a prose autobiography and some early poems). Canada 1997. Spending time with Walter, 2002. Blues, 2004. The Ship (picks up 11 poems from his first book but adds many more from the period 1960 to 1980), 2007. Café des Artistes, 2009. There followed pamphlets of which I can list 4: The Golden Age of Smoking (2014), None of that W or I'll Z you, A Poetry Inferno, Hex Wheels. This may not be the full count. Assault on the Clouds is 56 pages long, so a book.

I am going to keep it short because there is a problem with scaling up – if someone does ten terrific books, do I need to write 10,000 words about each of them? All the same I was sorry to reach the end of my project on modern British poetry (not so modern, by the time I’d finished) and see that there was no career survey of Williams in it. There is a literary problem here. Towards the end of his life, Williams just could not agree with High Street publishers any more, and dropped out – releasing his work through penniless publishers (like Shoestring Press, here in Nottingham). Small publishers – ones who listen to the poet, likely. As follows, there is no Selected and no Collected. It looks to me as if he was doing a vanishing act. I was asked to do a review of his 2004 book because no reviews were happening – a magazine editor thought this was wrong and used me as a resource, but there evidently was a problem. To sum up, Williams was a highly gifted poet, and with broad popular appeal, who was on the map but has been moved off the map. It is necessary to write about him.
Williams’ career has an odd distribution: his first book, Hidden Identities, came out when he was forty (in 1982), but was followed with amazing vigour; I believe Assault on the Clouds, 2012, is his eleventh book. What The Ship makes visible is the emergence of postmodernism out of an earlier form: he was directly linked to the most fashionable avant garde genre of the 1950s, the theatre of the absurd, which was a local form of surrealism, creating situations out of pure fantasy guided by the contours of language and by the opulent and rotting conventions of legacy art. This took up a quicker, almost 'transistorised' form in the 1960s, as Pop poetry. The first poem in his first book mentions Tarzan – so typical of the Pop poem, with a hero narrative straight out of popular fiction, cheap and quick. It is set in a cinema. For me, this poetry has a Sixties feel and retained it up to the end. If we ask what happened to that Pop poetry, the answer is that although most of it died inhaling its own banality the visible development of it was in Hartley Williams and was there in his first, 1982, book:

Sipping white syrup and cane rum
Glancing through the eyepiece of his ten million magnification telescope
At the edges of the known universe
While his pets strip to their appendix scars
And play brutalising games on the tender swing
And the ex-chef of the French Republic
Made Baked Beans à la Piscine Municipale on toast
And over each other’s bloombright bodies a lot of extras are smearing tomato sauce
While the cheetah is eating the Japanese petunias.

(from ‘Money’)

The passage is a moment in a more complex context. The poem is about money and describes how a poet needs endless wealth in order to write undisturbed, in a monologue delivered by a monkey who belongs to the poet. The monkey is both a figure of imitation, as what writers do, and a reference to the celebrated statement about stochastic processes, that a hundred monkeys with typewriters will after millions of years produce the works of Shakespeare. In the poem, a poet has far too much money and is faced with a beautiful woman who walks out on him because he is not poor and neglected, or again because he wants to know her soul and not her body. It is simply the reverse of a conventional situation, but it is also a brilliant new creation. There is some relationship between the mathematics of the typewriting monkeys and the mathematics of the earth’s position in relation to the whole known universe – something about decay and big numbers, maybe. This ten-line passage is, strictly, an ornament – you could get to the end of the poem without it. Williams mostly writes poems in which ornaments spring up, like themselves, and take over the stage. That goes with a liking for jazz improvisations, giving rise to new melodies, but is not an imitation of that.
This rich poet comes home from a film set to watch a crowd of extras smearing each other with tomato sauce. A memory that flashes up often, for me, is the 1941 film Hellzapoppin. There is a handy sketch of this on Wikipedia:
Shemp Howard begins the film as the projectionist of a cinema, displaying on its screen what appears to be the start of a song-and-dance number whose classily dressed performers walk down a staircase – which collapses as in a fun-house ride, sliding them all straight to hell, where they are tortured by demons. Ole and Chic arrive in the midst of the mayhem by taxi, and after a bit of funny business step back to reveal that it's a movie sound stage. They work for Miracle Pictures, a company using the slogan "If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!" A mousy screenwriter outlines his script for the screen adaptation of Hellzapoppin', and the rest of the movie depicts Cook's script. Among the topical humour is Johnson picking up a sled named "Rosebud" and saying "I thought they'd burnt that" […]
The film has a frenetic pace, and often breaks the 'Fourth wall', including inner 'fourth walls' introduced by its nonlinear, metafictional narrative.

It is a film about a film about the stage show Hellzapoppin. The film closes with Elisha Cook completing his reading, and the director saying the script is ridiculous, and shooting him numerous times. Cook remains calm and explains that he always wears a bullet-proof vest around the studios. He drinks a glass of water and is surprised to see jets of water pouring out of the holes in his chest. Is this like Hartley Williams? It is certainly like several poems in Hidden Identities. Like the surrealists, Williams relies on the apparatus of an older art; he seems to be always in the middle of some film or opera of extravagantly ornamental visuals and milling action, which somehow is running at the wrong speed and with its inner logic damaged. His camera captures intricate if pointless action everywhere; there is something melancholic about his relationship to this continuous choreographed action, yet he is one of the most energetic of writers. He has found the way to harness the naive energy of the source material, its gorgeous and even barbaric ornament. He has broken into some cinema, with décor lavishly copied from some 17th century ducal theatre, where all the plots ever invented are still running. He shows some old Cecil B. de Mille film, his actors walk into it and continue the action with improvised dialogue. (Shemp Howard got promoted to be one of the Three Stooges, which is pretty hard to believe.)
The Sixties was an era of TV makers with endless libraries of legacy footage which could be cheaply recycled – and recontextualised. If I say that Williams had access to the history of vaudeville, that is also saying that he belonged to the audio-visual world of the Sixties (as I remember it). The Theatre of the Absurd had shed its colouring of anxiety and pointlessness and had acquired a new tone of hedonism, irrational energy, and lack of guilt. Williams describes a pointless universe but he never feels depressed about it. So far as I know, he didn’t publish any poetry at all in the Sixties– but look at the chronology. He was 28 in 1970. A lot of key developments happened to him during that decade of Pop and parties. Being young when youth culture was everything was an experience most people never got over. So, what is the relationship between Surrealism and crazy comedies of the style of Hellzapoppin? This was much discussed even in the 1930s, but I don’t think any conclusion was reached. It is unlikely that the writers of Hellzapoppin were reading André Breton. But, look at Jacques Prévert, one of the two or three most significant Surrealist poets. He made a living as a writer of films. He wrote Voyage surprise (which I saw at school, part of the regime) and especially Drôle de Drame. These were French crazy comedies and they were an attempt to copy the success of this American style. Great films, too. Veteran cultural critics have investigated this question and simply disappeared. It may be true that Oswald Spengler spent his last years as the man in a bear suit who rides a bicycle through the corps de ballet dancing Swan Lake. And Prévert:

Let us trace in our turn

on the wet sand

let us trace as a sign of friendship

a momentary monument to Alphonse Allais

like a chalk cliff

as a souvenir of the sea traced on a café slate

Let us erect this monument to the memory of Alphonse Allais

kind cage attendant of the grand menagerie

where the human beasts, learned and cultivated

devour each other with fine horrified and carious teeth

Acrobatic fairground monument where each acrobat fittingly stylised represents a component of the human pyramid erected to Alphonse Allais

First acrobat: Adam's rib

second acrobat (smaller) : the Adam's apple

third : the thigh of Jupiter

fourth : Achilles' heel

fifth : Moses' rod

sixth : Venus' ankle

seventh : Prometheus' liver

eighth: the sacred heart of J-C

ninth: the head of Medusa

tenth: the ears of Midas

eleventh: the tongue of Aesop

twelfth: Cleopatra’s nose

thirteenth : Lucifer's cock

fourteenth : the finger of God

This menacing moving finger imparts a small wobble to the ensemble of the monument

The number finishes and everyone will jump to the ground and run away uttering cries

and this constantly to the music of Erik Satie

(from “A Alphonse Allais” in La pluie et le beau temps, 1955)

Williams' poetry is in the same key as this. If you inserted this into Hidden Identities, it would fit right in. Williams was much more original than the tired m-stream poetry around him, but he wasn’t writing something which had never been heard of before. I have quoted Prévert, but other Surrealists would do as well. Besides, as I have said, the direct connection to Williams is the theatre of the absurd, and even then the hottest link is to Hollywood films (and TV) of the Sixties which absorbed the most attractive qualities of the Absurd and popularised them. The Absurd revitalised the surrealist line (entering its fourth decade by then), but Ionesco didn't invent something new, he was just writing a surrealist text in a particular form, of a stage sketch. (cf. Prévert's "La famille Tuyau de Poêle", 1935)

The Ship picks up quite a few poems from Hidden Identities, and gives them a dating of “from 1960 to 1980” – this chronology is confusing, it’s hard to keep it straight. Anyway, he won a national poetry prize in 1983 and this was sort of the official arrival of postmodernism in this country, his poem, “Ephraim Destiny’s Perfectly Utter Darkness”, (a sort of parodic Western in which the poem ran away with the initial situation in an obviously fictitious and autonomous way) impressed everyone and made it dazzlingly clear that you could be at the forefront and still win national prizes. It obviously continued HI, which in its turn obviously continued the theatre of the absurd, but it also had a modern tone. Everyone could use the word “ludic” and show that they knew what it meant. Perhaps there was something unexpected, a deeper commitment to a logic developing within the unmotivated literary text, the wish to let the hypothesis develop rather than applying surrealist longings for disconnection and subversion repetitively. You could even say it wasn’t subversive. It was a moment when the poetry managers felt proud of themselves.
The Western fits into an absurdist setting where people take the costumes already present in the costume warehouse of a theatre and pull them on along with the characters, so that the conventions, the same old refrains, of past dramas are present and the expectations are rolling on their own, as a prelude to doing disconcerting and disconnected things, where genres clash and the old plots don’t work. Williams noticeably has mastery of the costume drama, the visual logic is always satisfying even if there is no other logic. The stage orchestra always know what kind of music to play, to illustrate the actions. I think he did help English poetry, which was waiting for a new idea at that moment, to develop something new. Bright River Yonder (1987) was the book, and fits neatly into a teaching whereby postmodernism entered British poetry in the early 1980s via works by Williams, Robert Crawford, Jeremy Reed, Frank Kuppner, John Ash, and Edwin Morgan, and it represented a triumph of hedonism and fantasy, an escape of a million stories from the inhibiting final directions of moral lessons, and it was made possible by the artistic and biological defeat of the 1950s generation and their shared attitudes of bourgeois guardianship and Cold War rigorism. Ambiguously, the return to aesthetic pleasure could also be seen as a protest against the left-wing dogma which had been widespread in the counter-culture, although hardly in the High Street, for a few years after 1968. His exciting productivity over several decades breaks out of this category.
Pop poetry had already been ludic, and the new poetry around 1983 was a deep game, a demonstration of how simple artificial rules could produce unexpected and alluring possibilities.

Thermodynamics

The first poem in his first book is titled “Chance in Fiction”, and this prominent site may be a message. We have to ask whether the whole project emerges out of theorizing about literature, and whether the idea of chance, made objectively visible through features like montage, is his message. The second poem in Hidden Identities also refers to chance and predictability as mathematical features of texts. It starts out with a joke about the famous monkeys with typewriters who would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, and rapidly goes on to describe the plots they would generate, standard moments from cinema or the novel: “Lurking behind dark glasses he found the almost inanimate führers of commerce/ coughing up timetables, facts, money, nylons, in their sputum.” It is called “Literature”. It is possible to see this as a philosophical basis for his poetry in general – once you get the idea that a class of texts, not every text of the 19th century but a good chunk of them, represent uncertainty running down, in the demonstration of something which needed to be proved. Preset views, organized knowledge, and texts that run down, all were tied up together. Arguably, all his poems are still moments from inside the room with the monkeys generating plots. Right at the core of Williams’ texts, as a category, is unpredictability – the knobs are turned to settings where plot possibilities are going to expand, as time increases, rather than sink towards a focus, in a possibility cone where lines converge on a single point. Thomas Pynchon is a writer who certainly resembles Williams and is roughly the same age, and who certainly knows about functions that diverge and ones that converge, over time. Is this really about information theory? I don’t think it is. First, the unpredictability is aesthetically motivated rather than an argument which leads to fixed knowledge (or the dispersal of untruth). Secondly, this aesthetic purpose applies also to the leading of life, and a more visible theme of Williams’ poems is a dislike of bureaucratic and predictable people who exercise authority to make life unpleasant for everybody else. A predictable social situation is unpleasurable because without a constant flow of novelty the brain simply switches off. So, once you slot pleasure in as the desired value of a poem, unpredictability follows, as the quality of an ambience which makes pleasure possible. Much the most visible message of Williams’ poetry is dislike of people who inflict boredom on others by devising simple, data-starved, boxes inside which to shut them, and arranging society so that they are unable to get out of these boxes. Locked into simplicity, you become a simple set of reactions –and it follows from that that the grand simplicities of invested knowledge become true. This knowledge is a charter for state bureaucracies, for managers and corporations, but also for religions, for an older notion of Science, and, probably, for a certain kind of writer who wants to be the heir to religious authority and solemnity. Williams’ poems are perpetually attacking this knowledge. He is more focused on pleasure than on protest and subversion, but this is the effect anyway. I think the managers at High Street publishers twitched every time he attacked convention – no names named, they knew it was their pet poets who were in the frame. Let’s see an actual poem ‘The Cat Up the Tree’ (in HI):

In the grand outside they met the following:
Thin, mealy-mouthed people with seborrhea;
Big, friendly, knife-you-in-the-back moralists;
Bulgarian lady academic expert sociologists with V.D.;
Cautious, reserved, intelligent people who were monuments to avarice & pride;
Radically intellectual wives who’d cut off your balls before they lost a point;
Men who knew about the levels of meaning in Donne;
Diplomatic representatives who had been to Oxford & Cambridge simultaneously;
Women who said “O.K. but hurry up”;
People who were always in a hurry but not OK;
Women who thought not being a woman was it;
Men who thought women were it;
Writers who had published books and thought this was it;
Very few who had looked into
The quietly orbiting eye of the nothing cat [.]

The “outside” refers to life after university and so to the freedom and free socialising which they had enjoyed as students. The passage quoted is a catalogue (12 entries, not unlike the 16 acrobats) of the repressors – not unconventional, it reminds me of Logue’s book Devil, Maggot, and Son, where the free man is afraid of being caught by the devil, or the maggot (of death), or the birth of a son who would tie him down to supporting the household and so on. The people named are concrete problems in life, not restrictive practices in texts. The catalogue structure is typical – the ability to pin so many rays to one centre is virtuosic. It brings delight. It is extravagant. We are seeing a moment of discovery: the poetry emerges from a logical structure which the poet is working through – but as each step is taken we experience pleasure and surprise. Rather than talking about style history, it might be simpler just to say that Williams is a better poet than his contemporaries. He plays a million notes at the critical moment and slides past the tedious moments without ever touching them. The poem is about pointlessness, its last line is “most foregather in the presence of an absent god”. It’s the Theatre of the Absurd, the actions of the characters are repetitive and frantic and ritual because there is no deeper purpose in life. He rarely returned to this theme, but this poem reads like a manifesto, and its doctrine is that the Muse, or goddess, is a cat stuck up a tree: “She’s deaf. She’d like /to see our stuff. She’s blind. Her pink, / refulgent yawn contains/ the possibility of a disappearing trick.” But you can’t read the poem without noticing that it offers the possibility of a good life which involves pleasure, sociability, etc., and that the poem itself is pleasurable and not to be revoked by the failings of a blind and deaf cat as the ultimate judge.
Does this poetry come out of literary theory? The key is to take a moment of a possible landscape and devise a dozen possibilities for it. Certainly, some people who theorise can speculate in this way, certainly the point of going away from specific texts into the nebula of Theory is to reach moments of unrestricted possibility. But Williams did not necessarily get into his landscape of multiple possibilities by reading post-structuralists, as opposed to listening to jazz musicians define possibility as the condition of music. Or by encountering surrealism in whatever form.
A key-film for these poems could be La Dolce Vita (and its follow-up, 8/12, (otto e mezzo)). The young people retreating into the grand outside correspond to the young men in I vitelloni. Quite a few of the poems have an Anita Ekberg lolling somewhere in them. Fellini fielded a large number of attractive actresses in those films – but you can’t simplify them by passing over the fact that they centre on an actor attractive to women, Mastroianni, and the setting was scenes where attraction and exploration and fantasy were eminently possible. La dolce vita isn’t really about work. Its hero wanders through a series of out of control parties where people go through behavior routines which are condensed, irrational, compulsive, and highly direct. The plot might be that Mastroianni is lost and frustrated, but what grips the audience is the spectacle of the party-goers. The West was crashing into a new era of total leisure – self-realisation where fantasy replaces the real. This is the scenario which Williams’ poems take place inside.


Blues
This is a review of Blues (Cape Poetry, 2004, 85 pp.), recycled. In 'Dan Dare at the Cosmic Ballroom', the clean-cut English space hero (from a strip in the Eagle comic which I used to read in the 1960s) lands on Venus and meets his arch-enemy The Mekon, only to find that this is the planet of love:

Welcome to the planet
humans dream of on their cold blue ball.
Welcome to the temperature of pleasant being.
Dispel colonial ideas.

He goes through a door into a lurching ground of a million false perspectives, a labyrinth-maze above a fall:

From vertigo, the chorussing abyss
reiterates its roundelay of little death:
La-la again. La-la again. La-la again.

Next, he has a close encounter with Venusian green tea. The next adventure involves the waitress, and breaking the most basic rule of his spaceman training – no alien sex. 'She puts out tentacles. They slide between my ribs,/ Dote upon the organs they encounter./ My pump begins its agonising pump./ She slips a duct into my sac of seed/ and instantly replenishes my emptying./ Once the circuit's made, she whispers,/ it's unbreakable(.)' He lies back and thinks of Earth, and there he is– in a simulation run by The Mekon's IT. In the virtual planet (or is it the real one?), which turns out to be a park where Time is the theme, midget dinosaurs sniff at his boots, a million quantum-entangled Dan Dares hop around. At the bottom of the mountain, Dare breaks into a dance with the Dionysiac corps de ballet there, strips, plunges into the sea, and feels the perfect sensation of home.
Williams is radically original, and constantly remaking himself. But we could float an idea of him as an Eastern European poet, one of the heroic breed who have abandoned hope in causes and instead are always interesting, relying on individuality and on the vigour of folklore. Fellini got out of neorealismo through the comic strips (fumetti) of Lo Sceicco Bianco, and haunts this comic strip poem – but Fellini may have influenced modern Eastern European styles, especially in cinema. A closer equivalent might be the films of Emir Kusturica. (There is a hint that J.H. Williams in Serbia may have been a try-out for Dan Dare on Venus.) Looking at Kusturica, we can perhaps class him as a folk surrealist:

let us eat cabbage soup in
the unearthly light of fat women‘s
eyes, the fire & the clock will stroke
us. let chimney-tops fall. I am
wrapped to a gradual understanding
(from 'Lübeck' in Hidden Identities).

Williams has a complete grasp of cutting to action and never decelerating. It's like the technique of painting on a bowl – once you've got it, the rhythm never comes to an end. This is the folklore aspect – heroes in folklore never pay the bill, never run out of adventures, never stop for a seminar. It's not unlike the Endless Highway rambling of the Blues – and makes most of the poetry I review look didactic and bureaucratic.
Baroque painting is not totally absent from the worlds of Fellini and Central European cinema, and the notion of trick perspective may help us to grasp Williams' prodigious technique, its combination of dislocated verticals and legend. Poems on the elbow, the ankle, and the sneeze (or, forcible lyric ejaculation) show a distortion of normal proportions – a super-realism. Translated to the topology of a plot, this simply means – the ability to suggest a thousand paths.
'Not Till the Last Saxophone' offers an explanation of the title:

Snowflakes big as tongues
feel with a blur for your eyes
(...)
onward, friend,
to the town where eternity becomes fashionable,
where trains have not been seen in weeks
This is it boy. The blues
Hoist your bag better on your shoulders
(...)
These are the long, cold deepwalking drifts.

– where the protagonist trudges through a world of pain into folklore, into an unbreakable circuit, into vagrancy and a music where 'Stars are a Hammond organ,/ solo hailstones,/ hard on the roof of your head.' Every tonal value is vivid, heightened, naive. The camera can be a documentary tool, or the channel for dreams – and Williams has mastered the quality of dream where everything flows and everything makes sense even in the middle of panic fear, erotic cloudbursts, losing your handhold on the sky and falling.
'Sarajevo Dancing' is an account of collective violence in Bosnia, rendered through tags from Serbian heroic songs and through the image of the kolo, the circle dance. With arms linked, you have to go as fast as everyone else. This loss of individuality is a poetic equivalent for hysteria. The kolo is the triumph of community, and the community in question massacred its neighbours. The poem starts serenely and gradually accelerates into delirium, voices from heaven, fantasies of mutilation. 'Lazar, the choice is yours/  a heavenly or an earthly kingdom'. Amazingly, the poem matches its material.

Paint Splashes
One of his last works was a work called Paint Splashes which is in some way a translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (a kind of manuscript painting amongst other things). The poet has said this was a response to the riots and disaffections of summer 2011, which followed the police shooting of a man named Mark Duggan. “In London, where I was at the time, a mob was destroying the quartier a few streets east of where I sat. By chance I had come across a new 'translation' of this very work and contemplated it with scorn.” But, what a translation:

The little deaths were taking place behind the rose bushes. Pregnant mothers had climbed on top of the clowns. The cheated cradles wept over the sand. A devilish fraternity of voyeurs, growling like brass bands, had crouched down in an oily field. We buried the elderly upright in memory of their gloves.
A crush of golden femininity was trying to break out of the general's house. We ran down the red road to the asylum; it was up for sale – torture chambers included – and the Iranian owners had all been arrested. The rehabilitated were making egg boxes out of clay and zombies were cruising the delphiniums with open macs. They'd put high fences round anything worth seeing. No gasping targets were anywhere to be found.
We sent prayers up and down our legs. What was the point of the poultry then? We stayed buttoned up. Windmills were being crucified for milking the pudding. We could see the noses of the ill-bred moles.

This is an astonishing re-imagining of a classic text of the avant-garde which also folds back the riots of 2011 back onto the Commune. Typical of this poem is simultaneous action, as in any riot I imagine. If we go back to “Money”, in the passage I quoted there are four lines of simultaneous action. Hartley Williams sets parallel scenes in train and pulls his camera back to capture a depth where all are visible. So many poets have one line moving, the Ego, and everything else is frozen, passive, inert. Each of Williams’ poems deals with expanding possibilities. Proof seems to require the depopulation of the linguistic space, where at the end only one possibility survives. And this condition is truth. Williams proves nothing and is in a sense not dealing with ideas. But perhaps the thesis is more of the nature of a geometrical shape; one which expands from its point of origin. This curve is the idea he makes plain.


Note on influences
Exile in Berlin may explain why he does not fit in with the style chronology of poetry back in the Homeland. He had radical originality, but this also brings the possibility of not being in anyone’s party and so mysteriously not being there when it comes to retrospectives and anthologies. The High Street editors are nervously attuned to shifts of fashion, and if you as a poet don’t know what those shifts (petulant, mostly vacuous, born out of boredom) are, you can’t adapt to them. I can’t detect any German influence in the poems. Of course, absurdist dramas were written by German writers like Wolfgang Hildesheimer and Günter Grass, but that isn’t a hot trail. Williams has affinities with Eastern European poets, as I indicated. (There is a slight resemblance to the Austrian poet Hans C. Artmann, I suppose.)
I am going to dwell for a moment on Pop poetry, because people don’t remember it clearly. A key source is Pete Roche’s 1967 Corgi anthology, Love Love Love. I am going to quote two poems from this.

Isis searching in the rushes
for her murdered lover … small girl with a fishingrod
in a rushing valley full of ferns … the last supper
followed by the Four Just Desserts … watching the 
white mocking figure at the edge of the Dark Forest
… beating naked blondhaired girls with
longstemmed purple flowers… Osiris judging
the dead mist rising up the valley seaweed tangled
in her moonlight hair

(Adrian Henri, from “Holcombe Poem”)

But it can be done and thank Blake it is done,
Making good love, making good good love.
In houses built of fly-turds, in fly-turd feasting mansions,
Fly-fear insurance offices even,
Fly-worshipping cathedrals even,
Even in murder offices just off the corridors of fly-power

(A. Mitchell, from “Peace is Milk”)

(Getting rid of hyphens was seen as modernistic in 1967. Wild!) In these moments we see the elements of Williams’ style. In each case, an image makes itself autonomous and expands. Mitchell makes an initial image stretch to 200 lines. Two points raise themselves. First, the question of what happened to this style, which seemed about to take over in, say, 1967 to 1972. One answer is that someone came along and did it a thousand times better, and the original style was forgotten. Secondly, how Williams fits into this simple style, practised by an unusually large number of people born within 5 years of him, and linked to song lyrics of the time. As pointed out, he was just so much better a writer. I suspect that most of the contributors to Love Love Love weren’t even writing poetry by 1982. Williams was far more skilled and ambitious than those forgotten teenagers and deserved to replace them. Compare this passage from Williams’ first book:

I knew the Bailiff had invented her,
Remarked the Count, a flight
To an outlying farm, her simplicity:
Back to business, back to foolishness.
I sipped a new wine from the vineyard,
Of ice, it tasted, and of elder-leaf.
There were accounts to do and mail to read.
His face came
Close to mine, his misinterpreter.
If I could give some help, you understand?
And he, implicit in my good discretion,
Who knew no boundaries of talk himself.
(When I ride out alone, a rainy afternoon
You can be sure
The world will not be deaf about it.)
Would a woman find him attractive?

Many were waiting for an interview,
Loafing in the corridor outside,
But Gabriel had sent me proofs.
I could not help imagining his shop,
The browsers leafing through the stock.
Now, would they murder for the latest verse?
(from “Five Anecdotes of The Count”)

(NB this passage isn’t in the 2004 version of the poem.) The Count is a figure clipped out of some film, an Eastern European feudal aristocrat with interesting vices, a sort of George Sanders turn, Ingrid Pitt as milkmaid, Mischa Auer as the village balalaika-tuner and Theosophist, but just look how much more real he is than the thin dreams of Henri and Mitchell. Mitchell is a slave to dogma and is plodding along earnestly until he has made his rather obvious point. We don’t get much chance to get away from the group while he is in charge. How many times does he repeat himself in just five lines? Henri believes in fantasy but once he has found his sensation (normally remembered from a painting or a film) he gets tired very quickly. The italics and the dots show the image breaking up, it will never emerge out of vagueness. beaten with long-stemmed flowers, give me a break! Williams is staging a whole film while Henri has a clandestine few seconds of liberty and then gives up. (NB Osiris judging the dead mist, there may be a line missing here. Or Henri is being less pedestrian than we have a right to hope. Possible amendment, Osiris judging the dead … mist rising up the valley …seaweed tangled in her moonlight hair.) More interesting is a comparison with Brian Marley, someone else close to surrealism and to jazz. Let’s quote Marley.

(his body flashes around
the sun – concept disapproved by the church;
plenum ventilation surging through the bones)
You must know it this magnetic nihilism
has ceased leaving a warm passionate air
that tickles my sex to a strong feather
Or the seasons snap across like brittle twigs:
ghost of an author researching his double-
negative for evidence of implied amour
his lobes pincered calm used as a buttress
with the black soul of a pimp cleaning up
presenting a hopeful edge as he travels south

(from ‘Little Heart Clusters’)
That is from his 1978 book Springtime in the Rockies. The comparison shows why Williams belongs in 1000 bookshops and Marley doesn’t. They are drawing on the same stylistic ideas; Marley’s work is more patterned but not as lucid.
We saw Williams spin off a catalogue of 12 variations on one theme – and there are 800, maybe even 1000, pages of his poetry. Detailed description is not the way to go. So far as I am concerned, all the books are brilliant. They are also quite similar. So we can halt here. But not before I quote from one of the pamphlets, in some ways lost works. This is from a 2011 pamphlet and a poem called ‘Casino’:

Poverty drags Vallejo shoes through leaves
It piles autumns on autumns in the vineyard of the owl
The murmuring of mice in the greetings betrays it
The stillness of fishermen reveals it
The silhouette of language grimaces through a mirror

Fading, the strangeness is always fading…
Onto the bare boards of a room without casualties
Nurses are brought to the sparkling wine
And the crouching artist in his attic reveals
A Ligurian map of freckles on the suntanned belly of a girl