Lawrence Durrell wrote an essay in 1942 called ‘The Heraldic Universe’, and this seems to connect with him trying to write like George Seferis, at that time. This ‘heraldic’ thing has little meaning. I think it’s just a way of saying “I want my work to be memorable”. That points to a fear of stories being dissolved into sociology, political theories, collective stories which are very predictable. What Durrell describes is just “art”, really. Fixed, just as a detective story printed in 1930 still reads the same way that it did in 1930. I can see that the anxiety is genuine.
It is hard to say why The Waste Land or Seferis poems seem to be eternal and linger in the mind for years afterwards. Why they seem to be outside the pool of narrative generally. I just know that they possess that quality. Any art that lingers in your mind achieves a static quality and falls outside Time. The static quality isn’t something which Durrell invented. Some patterns fascinate us. We go on processing them.
I saw a mention (in Roger Bowen’s book) of an essay by an Arab critic who claimed that the Alexandria Quartet misrepresented Egypt and hadn’t got the real Egypt. I think this sums up what Durrell wanted to avoid – he totally didn’t want to tell typical stories and to be sociologically valid. This is true but I don’t think it’s true that he had a new theory of Time.
Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest. That sums up what novelists DON’T want. Poets too, I suppose.
The “heraldic” thing also reminds me of Edwin Muir and of George Mackay Brown. I think they were both concerned to evade sociology and the predictability of stories which are based in statistics and State knowledge. But I think the ‘heraldic’ word is a miss, the idea is really that stories would be like the Morte D’Arthur, so about knights but not simply heraldic. And The Waste Land has that basis in the Grail Quest and Jessie L Weston’s analysis of it.
I did read the whole Quartet, a long time ago, but I can’t remember any of the characters. Durrell knew that Cavafy and Seferis had that arresting quality, the ability to write personal myth, and he was fascinated by both of them. His theory applies to them, I suspect. It didn’t mean that he could write so strikingly. His theory describes what he wanted to achieve, not what he was actually capable of.
Saturday, 7 March 2026
Tuesday, 3 March 2026
The excluded
The excluded
The list below is a list of all the poets discussed in Herbert Palmer’s “Post-Victorian Verse”. With an exception – I took out the names of poets who feature in Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, two years earlier. The point of the exercise is to define what Roberts did, in creating the image of the first decades of the 20th century which we still own (as part of our cultural assets), by giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned (and which has usually remained jettisoned). This is part of a series of blogs, on this site, (label "history of taste") about canon formation, and readers may be aware that it all started with Kipling and his exit from the stage. What happened to Kipling?
Overlap of Palmer and Roberts is 11. So 81 excluded poets:
Laurence Binyon Edmund Blunden Siegfried Sassoon Edward Thomas Charles Williams Andrew Young J Redwood Anderson Lascelles Abercrombie A.E. Richard Aldington Maurice Baring Hilaire Belloc Wilfred Scawen Blunt Gordon Bottomley Robert Bridges Roy Campbell GK Chesterton Wilfred Rowland Childe Richard Church Austin Clarke Padraic Colum Elizabeth Daryush John Davidson W H Davies Walter De La Mare Charles Doughty John Drinkwater Michael Field James Elroy Flecker John Freeman John Gawsworth Wilfrid Gibson Douglas Goldring Lord Gorell Gerald Gould Thomas Hardy Maurice Hewlett FR Higgins Ralph Hodgson Frank Kendon Rudyard Kipling Wyndham Lewis F O Mann Edith Sitwell John Masefield Huw Menai Charlotte Mew Alice Meynell T Sturge Moore Thomas Moult George Meredith Henry Newbolt Robert Nichols Alfred Noyes Seumas O Sullivan Stephen Phillips Ruth Pitter Alan Porter Edgell Rickword Victoria Sackville-West William Kean Seymour Edward Shanks Horace Shipp Osbert Sitwell JC Squire James Stephens Muriel Stuart Edward Thompson Francis Thompson WJ Turner Sherrard Vines William Watson Dorothy Wellesley Anna Wickham Humbert Wolfe Richard Middleton THW Crosland James Mackereth Charles Dalmon AE Housman Ernest Dowson Ernest Rhys Kennneth Muir RN Currey John Betjeman Geoffrey Johnson Christopher Hassall Lionel Johnson Robert Ross Joseph Campbell Oliver Gogarty Patrick Kavanagh J D Beazley Hamish McLaren Herbert Trench Katharine Tynan Mary Coleridge Margaret L Woods Margaret Sackville Sylvia Lynd Viola Meynell Mary Webb Rachel Annand Taylor Eiluned Lewis Frances Cornford Susan Miles Blanaid Salkeld Nancy Cunard S Townsend Warner Rose Macaulay Katherine Mansfield Everest Lewin Ruth Manning Sanders Jan Struther Lilian Bowes-Lyon Robin Hyde R C K Ensor Katharine M Buck Hugh MacDiarmid Martin Armstrong Edwin Muir Gerald Bullett Henry Warren Philip Henderson Frederick Prokosch R L Megroz St John Adcock Frederick V Branford Robert Gathorne-Hardy
I don’t have the energy to read all these people. I think we can use the list as raw material without energetically reading 81 books. The subject we are thinking about is the difference between the successful poets, who get critics writing about them, and everyone else – an inchoate mass of thousands of people. I say “thinking about” because the benefits come from thinking about a process, rather than reading masses of poetry. We are not thinking only of the poets whom Palmer discusses but of the whole world of outsider poets, the ones for example who paid for publication. I am sure they were incredulous that Auden won the game and they lost because they never learnt a modern style. They did lose, and all I can do is work out the rules of the game. Roberts’ achievement was less in promoting individual poets than in offering a cultural stance, something which young people could adopt and direct their poetical ideas by. Without generalising in a rush, we can say that English teachers needed such a stance, and that quite a few of them used Roberts as a guide and then transmitted the stance to their pupils. If you were writing essays, you needed a basic position, to avoid drowning in possibilities. The pupils needed confidence, and the position which Roberts had worked out obviously made you feel confident, once you had grasped it. As I said, this is less specific than pushing a particular poet, but in fact Roberts was identified as the editor who had recognised Auden, and he derived prestige from his association with Auden and his friends (MacNeice, Spender, and Day Lewis). This was a phenomenon, and it was still enjoying that centrality in the early 1970s, when I became aware of the poetry scene. That power did not rely on asserting that everybody else was dim and couldn’t really write poetry. Readers may have assumed that – it is a silent message, if that is a kind of message.
The significant thing about this stance I mention (Roberts – modernism – close reading – science – loving Auden) is that so many people could acquire it and think it belonged to them. Somehow people reading Auden felt that they had the assets which he had, and not that the poetry was brilliant but excluding them. Cultural assets only mean something if large numbers of people feel that they have a share in them.
Within the 81 names, we probably want to remember Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, and AE Housman. Roberts had pushed things too far. Of course, you could argue that Housman and Hardy were too old, their work coming before Roberts’ rough cut-off line (for “modernity”) of 1910. In the cause of precision, I have to add that there might be poets who were not picked up either by Roberts or by Palmer, and do not feature in this list of 81. Of poets active in 1936, or soon before, I could mention Kathleen Raine, Mina Loy, and Joseph Macleod.
I admire Palmer’s efforts in recording so many poets. However, from the lookout point of 2026, it is obvious that most of the secondary poets active in 1920 or 1930 had to be forgotten. This is not something you can reproach Roberts for, the process of forgetting had to metabolise most of these poets. Roberts was not committing an act of violence.
There has been interest in Kipling as the victim of Left-wing attitudes, and in fact the thesis of a “Left-liberal bubble” was mainly based in the removal of Kipling from the stage. I think it is relevant to look at these 81 names as a group. Yes, the combination of imperialism and nationalism vanished from the stage, and neither Palmer nor Roberts like it very much. But the great majority of those 81 poets had nothing to do with imperialism and pro-war sentiments. Kipling is just one of the poets who moved into the twilight. Political poetry can go out of date. This process is much more general than the Left quietly disposing of the culture of the Right.
The current literary culture is focused on grievances. If you have a class of people writing poetry unsuccessfully, and these 81 names are just a tiny sample of those, you have to ask why they didn’t make it. Current opinion would link it to low status, as being women, working class, un-English, and so on. This may be the wrong approach. We are dealing with a market, with shops and retail, with a system of fashion. The issue may be style, rather than sociology. People don’t have a problem recognising that textile design, or interior design, or cinema films, can be out of date; they should also realise that poetry consumption is subject to quite similar forces.
I spoke of “giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned”, but there are a dozen different styles represented in the list above. I am not totally happy to describe the 81 as representing “conservative taste”. Perhaps they were not out of date until the modern style of the early 1930s had defined them as being so. Once one style has won, all the others are out of date. But did they have unused expressive force? and did they resurface later? Auden’s early style looks like something less radical than some of the Modernist writers of the 1920s. That case is still open. However, for the most part the 81 were stylistic conservatives. That is what we are looking at.
Roberts was born in 1902. That means he spent his early teens watching ex-pupils a few years older than himself go up in gilt on the Honours board because they had joined the Army, gone to the Western Front and got shot. Or blown up. Young men born in 1901, 1902, 1903 all had that experience. They never quite got to hold a rifle. But a lot of them developed a visceral dislike of Kipling, who never saw a war he didn’t like. Modernism was the reaction of the survivors.
One of the reasons that Roberts won is that he was offering a complete package. He was offering matching shoes, handbag, and hat. He always writes as part of an argument, which the poets simply are evidence for. Palmer is much less consistent – he likes many different kinds of poetry. He writes like someone who loses arguments. At the time, streamlining was the ideal, and Palmer’s lines are amorphous or baggy because he is so inclusive. Roberts offered a complete model which students or sixth-form pupils could pick up. He helps in writing essays. But Palmer comes out better, because poetry really is very diverse, and Palmer allows that. The fact that Roberts leaves out Edith Sitwell and Edward Thomas points to a basic problem.
I think I have to re-do the count. Palmer's descriptions are so banal ("depth of feeling and precision of form") that I nodded off and missed some which should probably count. Sometimes he uses a quote where he can't think of anything to say, so should I count those. A re-run has added sixty more names. Perhaps his descriptions are generic because the poetry is also generic.
The list below is a list of all the poets discussed in Herbert Palmer’s “Post-Victorian Verse”. With an exception – I took out the names of poets who feature in Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, two years earlier. The point of the exercise is to define what Roberts did, in creating the image of the first decades of the 20th century which we still own (as part of our cultural assets), by giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned (and which has usually remained jettisoned). This is part of a series of blogs, on this site, (label "history of taste") about canon formation, and readers may be aware that it all started with Kipling and his exit from the stage. What happened to Kipling?
Overlap of Palmer and Roberts is 11. So 81 excluded poets:
Laurence Binyon Edmund Blunden Siegfried Sassoon Edward Thomas Charles Williams Andrew Young J Redwood Anderson Lascelles Abercrombie A.E. Richard Aldington Maurice Baring Hilaire Belloc Wilfred Scawen Blunt Gordon Bottomley Robert Bridges Roy Campbell GK Chesterton Wilfred Rowland Childe Richard Church Austin Clarke Padraic Colum Elizabeth Daryush John Davidson W H Davies Walter De La Mare Charles Doughty John Drinkwater Michael Field James Elroy Flecker John Freeman John Gawsworth Wilfrid Gibson Douglas Goldring Lord Gorell Gerald Gould Thomas Hardy Maurice Hewlett FR Higgins Ralph Hodgson Frank Kendon Rudyard Kipling Wyndham Lewis F O Mann Edith Sitwell John Masefield Huw Menai Charlotte Mew Alice Meynell T Sturge Moore Thomas Moult George Meredith Henry Newbolt Robert Nichols Alfred Noyes Seumas O Sullivan Stephen Phillips Ruth Pitter Alan Porter Edgell Rickword Victoria Sackville-West William Kean Seymour Edward Shanks Horace Shipp Osbert Sitwell JC Squire James Stephens Muriel Stuart Edward Thompson Francis Thompson WJ Turner Sherrard Vines William Watson Dorothy Wellesley Anna Wickham Humbert Wolfe Richard Middleton THW Crosland James Mackereth Charles Dalmon AE Housman Ernest Dowson Ernest Rhys Kennneth Muir RN Currey John Betjeman Geoffrey Johnson Christopher Hassall Lionel Johnson Robert Ross Joseph Campbell Oliver Gogarty Patrick Kavanagh J D Beazley Hamish McLaren Herbert Trench Katharine Tynan Mary Coleridge Margaret L Woods Margaret Sackville Sylvia Lynd Viola Meynell Mary Webb Rachel Annand Taylor Eiluned Lewis Frances Cornford Susan Miles Blanaid Salkeld Nancy Cunard S Townsend Warner Rose Macaulay Katherine Mansfield Everest Lewin Ruth Manning Sanders Jan Struther Lilian Bowes-Lyon Robin Hyde R C K Ensor Katharine M Buck Hugh MacDiarmid Martin Armstrong Edwin Muir Gerald Bullett Henry Warren Philip Henderson Frederick Prokosch R L Megroz St John Adcock Frederick V Branford Robert Gathorne-Hardy
I don’t have the energy to read all these people. I think we can use the list as raw material without energetically reading 81 books. The subject we are thinking about is the difference between the successful poets, who get critics writing about them, and everyone else – an inchoate mass of thousands of people. I say “thinking about” because the benefits come from thinking about a process, rather than reading masses of poetry. We are not thinking only of the poets whom Palmer discusses but of the whole world of outsider poets, the ones for example who paid for publication. I am sure they were incredulous that Auden won the game and they lost because they never learnt a modern style. They did lose, and all I can do is work out the rules of the game. Roberts’ achievement was less in promoting individual poets than in offering a cultural stance, something which young people could adopt and direct their poetical ideas by. Without generalising in a rush, we can say that English teachers needed such a stance, and that quite a few of them used Roberts as a guide and then transmitted the stance to their pupils. If you were writing essays, you needed a basic position, to avoid drowning in possibilities. The pupils needed confidence, and the position which Roberts had worked out obviously made you feel confident, once you had grasped it. As I said, this is less specific than pushing a particular poet, but in fact Roberts was identified as the editor who had recognised Auden, and he derived prestige from his association with Auden and his friends (MacNeice, Spender, and Day Lewis). This was a phenomenon, and it was still enjoying that centrality in the early 1970s, when I became aware of the poetry scene. That power did not rely on asserting that everybody else was dim and couldn’t really write poetry. Readers may have assumed that – it is a silent message, if that is a kind of message.
The significant thing about this stance I mention (Roberts – modernism – close reading – science – loving Auden) is that so many people could acquire it and think it belonged to them. Somehow people reading Auden felt that they had the assets which he had, and not that the poetry was brilliant but excluding them. Cultural assets only mean something if large numbers of people feel that they have a share in them.
Within the 81 names, we probably want to remember Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, and AE Housman. Roberts had pushed things too far. Of course, you could argue that Housman and Hardy were too old, their work coming before Roberts’ rough cut-off line (for “modernity”) of 1910. In the cause of precision, I have to add that there might be poets who were not picked up either by Roberts or by Palmer, and do not feature in this list of 81. Of poets active in 1936, or soon before, I could mention Kathleen Raine, Mina Loy, and Joseph Macleod.
I admire Palmer’s efforts in recording so many poets. However, from the lookout point of 2026, it is obvious that most of the secondary poets active in 1920 or 1930 had to be forgotten. This is not something you can reproach Roberts for, the process of forgetting had to metabolise most of these poets. Roberts was not committing an act of violence.
There has been interest in Kipling as the victim of Left-wing attitudes, and in fact the thesis of a “Left-liberal bubble” was mainly based in the removal of Kipling from the stage. I think it is relevant to look at these 81 names as a group. Yes, the combination of imperialism and nationalism vanished from the stage, and neither Palmer nor Roberts like it very much. But the great majority of those 81 poets had nothing to do with imperialism and pro-war sentiments. Kipling is just one of the poets who moved into the twilight. Political poetry can go out of date. This process is much more general than the Left quietly disposing of the culture of the Right.
The current literary culture is focused on grievances. If you have a class of people writing poetry unsuccessfully, and these 81 names are just a tiny sample of those, you have to ask why they didn’t make it. Current opinion would link it to low status, as being women, working class, un-English, and so on. This may be the wrong approach. We are dealing with a market, with shops and retail, with a system of fashion. The issue may be style, rather than sociology. People don’t have a problem recognising that textile design, or interior design, or cinema films, can be out of date; they should also realise that poetry consumption is subject to quite similar forces.
I spoke of “giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned”, but there are a dozen different styles represented in the list above. I am not totally happy to describe the 81 as representing “conservative taste”. Perhaps they were not out of date until the modern style of the early 1930s had defined them as being so. Once one style has won, all the others are out of date. But did they have unused expressive force? and did they resurface later? Auden’s early style looks like something less radical than some of the Modernist writers of the 1920s. That case is still open. However, for the most part the 81 were stylistic conservatives. That is what we are looking at.
Roberts was born in 1902. That means he spent his early teens watching ex-pupils a few years older than himself go up in gilt on the Honours board because they had joined the Army, gone to the Western Front and got shot. Or blown up. Young men born in 1901, 1902, 1903 all had that experience. They never quite got to hold a rifle. But a lot of them developed a visceral dislike of Kipling, who never saw a war he didn’t like. Modernism was the reaction of the survivors.
One of the reasons that Roberts won is that he was offering a complete package. He was offering matching shoes, handbag, and hat. He always writes as part of an argument, which the poets simply are evidence for. Palmer is much less consistent – he likes many different kinds of poetry. He writes like someone who loses arguments. At the time, streamlining was the ideal, and Palmer’s lines are amorphous or baggy because he is so inclusive. Roberts offered a complete model which students or sixth-form pupils could pick up. He helps in writing essays. But Palmer comes out better, because poetry really is very diverse, and Palmer allows that. The fact that Roberts leaves out Edith Sitwell and Edward Thomas points to a basic problem.
I think I have to re-do the count. Palmer's descriptions are so banal ("depth of feeling and precision of form") that I nodded off and missed some which should probably count. Sometimes he uses a quote where he can't think of anything to say, so should I count those. A re-run has added sixty more names. Perhaps his descriptions are generic because the poetry is also generic.
Sunday, 25 January 2026
It can't be 1974 again
I was compelled by Tristram Fane Sanders’ review in the TLS of my book Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People. A fair account, I think. Several people have reacted with incredulity to his claim that I am a “working class” critic. Er, no. I have to confess to being a middle-class critic.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.
Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.
Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.
Tuesday, 30 December 2025
Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?
Maurice Elvey, scapegoat?
“Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others."
Elvey (1887-1967) was some sort of old master /wisdom figure at the film school which Sinclair attended circa 1961. In interview, Sinclair recalls with incredulity him announcing ideas which totally failed to impress the film students. So the question arises whether we can identify the whole idiocy of British film history in this one man and his lack of knowledge of how to make films.
My conclusion is that he wasn’t especially bad. I say this because the cinema here in Nottingham put on a set of 3 of the Sherlock Holmes films made in 1918, restored by the BFI. One was “produced” by Elvey, “A scandal in Bohemia”. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly wasn’t worse than the other two. So, we have to be fair to Elvey. He wasn’t a freak. He just wasn’t very talented. And the British cinema had strict genre rules which minimised the role of anyone creative, and didn’t require directors to be original or think for themselves.
I saw another film of his, circa 1932. I can’t remember its name. I thought it was OK. He just wasn’t exceptional. You have to match it up against the cinema of the time, which I have a limited knowledge of – I feel that he was competent, just not worth comparing with the talented directors, of whom there were very few in England, but quite a number in the USA and Germany.
He made his last film in 1957. The film trade union ACT interviewed Elvey in 1963. “And Elkington... we took the little theatre which was in the Adelphi, a very famous little theatre. And, of course, you could hire it then for two pounds a performance, and it was a charming theatre. I was very avant-garde, you see. I was the sort of - what shall I say - the Peter Brook of my period! I produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and all the... what were then the new dramatists of the day. Inevitably, this brought me into contact with the best sort of minds of the day.” This would be, maybe, 1911? He may have made a first film in 1912, and it was “The murder in the red barn”, an old melodrama.
The counter-view to the general distaste for British cinema up to 1943 or so (or, up to 1965?), is that it has been neglected. There are no studies on individual directors or designers, no fan write-ups. So, the guess was that there were distinctive stylists hidden in the data, hiding in the largely unviewed mass of films. An operation could be carried out by fans to recover the paths of Cinematic Masters. Auteurs would surface into view, like marble statues from beneath the sea. Or the Docks, perhaps. This operation has not been very successful. The truth seems to be that English directors were not very distinctive. In the US, people like King Vidor, Joseph Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, constructed unique, personal, films, recording the way they saw the world. In Britain, this was not the function of directors. The one exception is Hitchcock, as we know. Later, Michael Powell made films in a distinctive way. Another exception, indirectly, is Ivor Novello. He was author and star of two films, The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1926), which are actually great. I saw them because the society for British silent films held its weekends in Nottingham, at one time. He was not a director, but those films must not be shut out of history. (The director was Graham Cutts, Hitchcock’s rival at Gainsborough, who saw Hitchcock out-distance him.) (I have just realised there was a third film in the series, which I have not seen.)
I have a book of interviews with people from the British film industry, edited by Brian MacFarlane (who conducted most of the interviews). He has the actress Rosamund John, who says “He asked Maurice Elvey to finish the film. I had never heard of Elvey but everyone in the studio said, “Oh no, that terrible man!” He was a very pompous little man who had made a lot of films before the war.” Again, Q “how did you find Maurice Elvey?”, she says: “I was appalled: he had no idea of what to do or how to do it. The electricians would be shouting, “Print number three, Maurice!”. He was unbelievable.” This was in 1943. Other interviews (out of 186 in all) mention Elvey, not saying the same thing. I couldn’t work out how someone could work so much, and had been in the business for 30 years in 1943, and not have a clue how films are made. I think the answer is in everyone taking the easiest route, so that the scripts were totally unambitious and the components after that were so predictable that the crew didn’t need the director very much. In the Holmes film, a lot of the plot is conveyed through intertitles. So, it reproduces Conan Doyle’s words. And it has scarcely become cinema. It is still words. Equally, the star is Eille Wood, impersonating Holmes and putting on a star performance. Between Norwood and Doyle, there is a limited role for Elvey. Everyone knew what Homes looked like, based on the illustrations in the Strand Magazine publication and how the stories had to go. The films which Stoll made, a series of forty-seven, had to observe the formula – a classic one but a set-piece all the same. You can’t be an auteur in a context like that. (Wiki says Elvey directed all 15 of the 1921 series of Holmes adaptations. The second series was directed by George Ridgwell.)
Britain before the later 1940s did not produce megalomaniac and failed auteurs, rather it did not produce auteurs at all. Elvey is not a metaphor for collective failure, rather he was a figure without artistic identity in a business which was designed to run without artistic identity. Cinema did not create its own forms, rather it reproduced much-loved patterns from literature and theatre, without rethinking them significantly.
Postscript. I have just seen that Elvey directed a version of '"At the villa Rose", 1920, from the novel by AEW Mason. I have seen one 'Villa Rose'.... if this was the 1920 one, it is actually a good film, for the time. Another piece of evidence. with Manora Thew and Langhorn Burton, I understand.
“Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others."
Elvey (1887-1967) was some sort of old master /wisdom figure at the film school which Sinclair attended circa 1961. In interview, Sinclair recalls with incredulity him announcing ideas which totally failed to impress the film students. So the question arises whether we can identify the whole idiocy of British film history in this one man and his lack of knowledge of how to make films.
My conclusion is that he wasn’t especially bad. I say this because the cinema here in Nottingham put on a set of 3 of the Sherlock Holmes films made in 1918, restored by the BFI. One was “produced” by Elvey, “A scandal in Bohemia”. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly wasn’t worse than the other two. So, we have to be fair to Elvey. He wasn’t a freak. He just wasn’t very talented. And the British cinema had strict genre rules which minimised the role of anyone creative, and didn’t require directors to be original or think for themselves.
I saw another film of his, circa 1932. I can’t remember its name. I thought it was OK. He just wasn’t exceptional. You have to match it up against the cinema of the time, which I have a limited knowledge of – I feel that he was competent, just not worth comparing with the talented directors, of whom there were very few in England, but quite a number in the USA and Germany.
He made his last film in 1957. The film trade union ACT interviewed Elvey in 1963. “And Elkington... we took the little theatre which was in the Adelphi, a very famous little theatre. And, of course, you could hire it then for two pounds a performance, and it was a charming theatre. I was very avant-garde, you see. I was the sort of - what shall I say - the Peter Brook of my period! I produced plays by Chekov, Strindberg, Ibsen and all the... what were then the new dramatists of the day. Inevitably, this brought me into contact with the best sort of minds of the day.” This would be, maybe, 1911? He may have made a first film in 1912, and it was “The murder in the red barn”, an old melodrama.
The counter-view to the general distaste for British cinema up to 1943 or so (or, up to 1965?), is that it has been neglected. There are no studies on individual directors or designers, no fan write-ups. So, the guess was that there were distinctive stylists hidden in the data, hiding in the largely unviewed mass of films. An operation could be carried out by fans to recover the paths of Cinematic Masters. Auteurs would surface into view, like marble statues from beneath the sea. Or the Docks, perhaps. This operation has not been very successful. The truth seems to be that English directors were not very distinctive. In the US, people like King Vidor, Joseph Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, constructed unique, personal, films, recording the way they saw the world. In Britain, this was not the function of directors. The one exception is Hitchcock, as we know. Later, Michael Powell made films in a distinctive way. Another exception, indirectly, is Ivor Novello. He was author and star of two films, The Rat (1925) and The Triumph of the Rat (1926), which are actually great. I saw them because the society for British silent films held its weekends in Nottingham, at one time. He was not a director, but those films must not be shut out of history. (The director was Graham Cutts, Hitchcock’s rival at Gainsborough, who saw Hitchcock out-distance him.) (I have just realised there was a third film in the series, which I have not seen.)
I have a book of interviews with people from the British film industry, edited by Brian MacFarlane (who conducted most of the interviews). He has the actress Rosamund John, who says “He asked Maurice Elvey to finish the film. I had never heard of Elvey but everyone in the studio said, “Oh no, that terrible man!” He was a very pompous little man who had made a lot of films before the war.” Again, Q “how did you find Maurice Elvey?”, she says: “I was appalled: he had no idea of what to do or how to do it. The electricians would be shouting, “Print number three, Maurice!”. He was unbelievable.” This was in 1943. Other interviews (out of 186 in all) mention Elvey, not saying the same thing. I couldn’t work out how someone could work so much, and had been in the business for 30 years in 1943, and not have a clue how films are made. I think the answer is in everyone taking the easiest route, so that the scripts were totally unambitious and the components after that were so predictable that the crew didn’t need the director very much. In the Holmes film, a lot of the plot is conveyed through intertitles. So, it reproduces Conan Doyle’s words. And it has scarcely become cinema. It is still words. Equally, the star is Eille Wood, impersonating Holmes and putting on a star performance. Between Norwood and Doyle, there is a limited role for Elvey. Everyone knew what Homes looked like, based on the illustrations in the Strand Magazine publication and how the stories had to go. The films which Stoll made, a series of forty-seven, had to observe the formula – a classic one but a set-piece all the same. You can’t be an auteur in a context like that. (Wiki says Elvey directed all 15 of the 1921 series of Holmes adaptations. The second series was directed by George Ridgwell.)
Britain before the later 1940s did not produce megalomaniac and failed auteurs, rather it did not produce auteurs at all. Elvey is not a metaphor for collective failure, rather he was a figure without artistic identity in a business which was designed to run without artistic identity. Cinema did not create its own forms, rather it reproduced much-loved patterns from literature and theatre, without rethinking them significantly.
Postscript. I have just seen that Elvey directed a version of '"At the villa Rose", 1920, from the novel by AEW Mason. I have seen one 'Villa Rose'.... if this was the 1920 one, it is actually a good film, for the time. Another piece of evidence. with Manora Thew and Langhorn Burton, I understand.
Saturday, 8 November 2025
Great Housing Estates
My new book, On the Margins of Great Housing Estates, is now out from Shearsman. Blurb:
In central place is the long poem ‘Calendar Rite’. The speaker is faced with a cold river and has to shed every possession to get across it without being swept under. He remembers everything which must be lost, which stored heat and which generated heat. He recalls past performances along with past poems, their chains of compulsive images, and the noise burying them. Scenes of unresolved conflict play out in a dream landscape, strung out along two banks of a river; where along each arm images repeat each other in an altered or defective symmetry. The rival journeys of several hundred poets are recounted as a race between so many ships, in which almost all are wrecked, their anatomies altered by terminal stresses, their fallen spars making snags or niches on the riverbed. Irrational motives for symbolic action are re-voiced as the mineralisation of cherished objects, a personal museum of models for verbal objects. The choices leading to rejection of imposed ideas make for a history of dissidence, symbolised in a tiny 5th century papyrus codex, written at millimetric scale to be easily hidden during police raids, and read with the help of a convex lens. The hidden is boundless and space vanishes into the cracks.
“A history of shopping” was started around 2003, and following a 12-year stage of not writing, was completed around 2018. That series deals with exchange and retailing, after a prolonged interest in manufacturing and production. “The Goths as inventors of tourism”, deals with the legend of wealth and culture as the voice which leads barbarians from the world-periphery to surge towards the Mediterranean as if to a shopping mall. The flow of goods lifts people off their feet, is like a river of dreams. ‘One absolutely perfect cultural object’ describes perfection as what you can't have and which still motivates the life cultural. A local poem deals with William Hallam Pegg, a Nottingham lace designer and communist who, during the Depression, produced a monumental design for an allegory of Want and Plenty, as a pattern to be realised in Jacquard lace.
*
I live on the edge of the Plains Estate in Nottingham. The reference is of course to a previous book, "On the margins of great empires". The contents list is:
Contents The history of shopping
• Llyn Cerrig Bach
• The Goths as inventors of tourism
• Equidistant
• Shopping for Books
• One absolutely perfect cultural object
William Hallam Pegg
The Brig at Torthorwald
Who owns the river
Leabhar Balbh
Fragment 355M/636k/12
CCTV Underground
The Geology of Islands
Nottingham Alabaster (and some gypsum)
Low-Resolution
Capistranus Triumphans
Under Controlled Conditions
Calendar Rite:
X1 the cold river
X2 thematic
X3 coloured dust
X4 Performance Fear
X5 Banal Poem About Fallen Leaves
X6 Performance High: Skeleton
X7 Performance High 2: A romance of the docks
X8 Gnosis
X9 Carrion Crows
X10 A Route March in the Cultural Field
X11 The Cologne Mani Codex
X12 The Origin of His Body
X13 Inside and Out
X14 Dissident
A cold river 2
AA Calendar Rite
Y14 Poem of gofyn and diolch, being of request and thanks for a gift
Y13 Outside and In
Y12 Gnarls and Snibs
Y11 The Origin of Space
Y10 The Catalogue of Ships
Y9 Carrion Crows Stay Up Late
Y8 In a River
Y7 Performance High 3: Alien Skies
Y6 Performance High 4: Altyn-Dagh
Y5 jealousy
Y4 The North Circular Motorway at Silver Street
Y3 coloured dust 2
Y2 Theme with loss of variation
Y1 cold river 3
In central place is the long poem ‘Calendar Rite’. The speaker is faced with a cold river and has to shed every possession to get across it without being swept under. He remembers everything which must be lost, which stored heat and which generated heat. He recalls past performances along with past poems, their chains of compulsive images, and the noise burying them. Scenes of unresolved conflict play out in a dream landscape, strung out along two banks of a river; where along each arm images repeat each other in an altered or defective symmetry. The rival journeys of several hundred poets are recounted as a race between so many ships, in which almost all are wrecked, their anatomies altered by terminal stresses, their fallen spars making snags or niches on the riverbed. Irrational motives for symbolic action are re-voiced as the mineralisation of cherished objects, a personal museum of models for verbal objects. The choices leading to rejection of imposed ideas make for a history of dissidence, symbolised in a tiny 5th century papyrus codex, written at millimetric scale to be easily hidden during police raids, and read with the help of a convex lens. The hidden is boundless and space vanishes into the cracks.
“A history of shopping” was started around 2003, and following a 12-year stage of not writing, was completed around 2018. That series deals with exchange and retailing, after a prolonged interest in manufacturing and production. “The Goths as inventors of tourism”, deals with the legend of wealth and culture as the voice which leads barbarians from the world-periphery to surge towards the Mediterranean as if to a shopping mall. The flow of goods lifts people off their feet, is like a river of dreams. ‘One absolutely perfect cultural object’ describes perfection as what you can't have and which still motivates the life cultural. A local poem deals with William Hallam Pegg, a Nottingham lace designer and communist who, during the Depression, produced a monumental design for an allegory of Want and Plenty, as a pattern to be realised in Jacquard lace.
*
I live on the edge of the Plains Estate in Nottingham. The reference is of course to a previous book, "On the margins of great empires". The contents list is:
Contents The history of shopping
• Llyn Cerrig Bach
• The Goths as inventors of tourism
• Equidistant
• Shopping for Books
• One absolutely perfect cultural object
William Hallam Pegg
The Brig at Torthorwald
Who owns the river
Leabhar Balbh
Fragment 355M/636k/12
CCTV Underground
The Geology of Islands
Nottingham Alabaster (and some gypsum)
Low-Resolution
Capistranus Triumphans
Under Controlled Conditions
Calendar Rite:
X1 the cold river
X2 thematic
X3 coloured dust
X4 Performance Fear
X5 Banal Poem About Fallen Leaves
X6 Performance High: Skeleton
X7 Performance High 2: A romance of the docks
X8 Gnosis
X9 Carrion Crows
X10 A Route March in the Cultural Field
X11 The Cologne Mani Codex
X12 The Origin of His Body
X13 Inside and Out
X14 Dissident
A cold river 2
AA Calendar Rite
Y14 Poem of gofyn and diolch, being of request and thanks for a gift
Y13 Outside and In
Y12 Gnarls and Snibs
Y11 The Origin of Space
Y10 The Catalogue of Ships
Y9 Carrion Crows Stay Up Late
Y8 In a River
Y7 Performance High 3: Alien Skies
Y6 Performance High 4: Altyn-Dagh
Y5 jealousy
Y4 The North Circular Motorway at Silver Street
Y3 coloured dust 2
Y2 Theme with loss of variation
Y1 cold river 3
Monday, 7 July 2025
Serial cyclical zeniths
The original Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod has sold out, so there is going to be a small reprint. I was thinking about a new edition.
Possibly the edition can be improved. After 24 years, I think a rethink is possible. (NB I was doing the work in 2000 and 2001, although it didn’t get into print until 2009.) We know more now than we knew then.
The reprints of the plays have duplicated some of the texts. And there are so many unpublished poems I left out. It seems a bit heartless to leave them out again. And, I found more than one new poem not among the typescripts.
Overall, maybe we could remove twelve pages of (now) duplicated poems and inject ten pages of unfamiliar poems. They would be (I think) ‘Earthscape’ ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’ ‘Tristia’ and ‘The last wolf’.
However, Simon (Jenner) has advised me that the printer still has the production file of the 2009 edition, so that it is quite a lot cheaper if we reprint it unaltered. I think we could manage a 5% improvement, but I dislike the cost. The original version has reached quite a few people, and is still serviceable. Waterloo will put the resources into other Macleod books.
It seems shameless to leave the introduction unaltered. However, I think it always left most questions unanswered, and it hasn’t got worse in that sense. I can see that the introduction doesn’t even attempt an artistic evaluation of Macleod, but it is its fixed limits that make it able to stand up without being changed. There has been some very important work on Macleod since 2001, but it is reasonable to ask people to go and look for it. For example, we now have ‘Hidden sun’, James Fountain’s monograph on Macleod, and since you can’t summarise that it is sensible to ask people to go and read it.
I assumed, in 2001, that because there were 200 Macleod poems in typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, they were all there. However, later information has made it clear that, where he published a poem, the typescript usually isn’t in that archive. He kept the printed versions. You have to know which magazine the poem was in in order to go and look for it. I saw a poem on 4 July, in the university library, which I had never seen before. (in Botteghe Oscure for 1957.)
The Macleod conference was on July 5th. Even after 26 years of fairly strong interest in Macleod, I was swept away by all the new information and new ideas. It is all happening. This means that anything I write now will become obsolete rather quickly.
I think we can say that Macleod was remarkably gifted, unusually prolific, and never saw most of that prolific work published. This combination may be unique, at least in its extent. I say this to excuse myself for not grasping more about Macleod at an earlier stage. This is also why the conference threw me into a torrent of new information and new ideas.
Possibly the edition can be improved. After 24 years, I think a rethink is possible. (NB I was doing the work in 2000 and 2001, although it didn’t get into print until 2009.) We know more now than we knew then.
The reprints of the plays have duplicated some of the texts. And there are so many unpublished poems I left out. It seems a bit heartless to leave them out again. And, I found more than one new poem not among the typescripts.
Overall, maybe we could remove twelve pages of (now) duplicated poems and inject ten pages of unfamiliar poems. They would be (I think) ‘Earthscape’ ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’ ‘Tristia’ and ‘The last wolf’.
However, Simon (Jenner) has advised me that the printer still has the production file of the 2009 edition, so that it is quite a lot cheaper if we reprint it unaltered. I think we could manage a 5% improvement, but I dislike the cost. The original version has reached quite a few people, and is still serviceable. Waterloo will put the resources into other Macleod books.
It seems shameless to leave the introduction unaltered. However, I think it always left most questions unanswered, and it hasn’t got worse in that sense. I can see that the introduction doesn’t even attempt an artistic evaluation of Macleod, but it is its fixed limits that make it able to stand up without being changed. There has been some very important work on Macleod since 2001, but it is reasonable to ask people to go and look for it. For example, we now have ‘Hidden sun’, James Fountain’s monograph on Macleod, and since you can’t summarise that it is sensible to ask people to go and read it.
I assumed, in 2001, that because there were 200 Macleod poems in typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, they were all there. However, later information has made it clear that, where he published a poem, the typescript usually isn’t in that archive. He kept the printed versions. You have to know which magazine the poem was in in order to go and look for it. I saw a poem on 4 July, in the university library, which I had never seen before. (in Botteghe Oscure for 1957.)
The Macleod conference was on July 5th. Even after 26 years of fairly strong interest in Macleod, I was swept away by all the new information and new ideas. It is all happening. This means that anything I write now will become obsolete rather quickly.
I think we can say that Macleod was remarkably gifted, unusually prolific, and never saw most of that prolific work published. This combination may be unique, at least in its extent. I say this to excuse myself for not grasping more about Macleod at an earlier stage. This is also why the conference threw me into a torrent of new information and new ideas.
Monday, 30 June 2025
On the margins of great housing estates
Great Housing Estates: Sources
My new book is coming out from Shearsman Books in September.
There are notes in the book but I wanted to go into more detail about sources of moments in the poems. This has to do with accountability. There is another point about originality. If you look at the notes below, I keep using motifs from folklore. In fact this move can be seen as a “structural quote”. The use of these rich but regressive patterns is part of what is called naive art, or primitive art. By using them, I am absorbing naive art (and releasing naive parts of myself). But of course this isn’t an original idea. It is a “structural quote”. I can’t list the total set of such structures, it is not feasible. There is a pre-existing artistic language which I can use. I think someone invents a “game”, but after that every time you play it produces a unique run of events and throws of the dice.
'Controlled Conditions'. I associate this with a line from Verhaeren, l’halluciné dans la forêt de la nombre. I can’t find the line in there now, but it must have been present in an earlier draft, I think. Le cabaret du jour et de la nuit; I think this is also in Verhaeren. Somewhere.
Goths. Origo gothica has been described as “perhaps the most problematic work of the early Middle Ages”. The text is old but the title supposedly comes from Herwig Wolfram, in the 1980s. It means "origin of the Goths".
Sortes. The word means “lots”. Our word lot comes from hlutr, which is related to a root meaning “fall” and supposedly refers to small objects cast in the air to allow allocation of shares, or divination. So, a lot as a land division points to the land of a commune being shared out using chance, perhaps. By sortes gothicae I mean the celebrated division of Roman territory between barbarian warriors.
355M. As the notes say, this derives from a GPT-2 run. I looked at 100 pages of output, essentially meaningless, took one part of it, and changed it to look like a poem. The verbal structures are coherent because GPT took them from a human source, although I don’t know what that source was. It would be hard to claim ownership of this text.
(Inside and Out) Glass, claws. I got this from a volume about folklore by someone called Bernatzik.
He found a Grimms’ fairytale in which someone uses lynx claws to climb a glass mountain. He used this to interpret a Bronze Age (?) burial in which lynx claws were buried with the deceased. So, you use lynx claws to walk across the sky to the afterlife. In a Norse saga, glasvellir are the place of death, the place where dead heroes live. (That would mean glass hillsides, but the word glass may have meant glare before being attached to a substance manufactured by specialists in the Mediterranean.)
Bedesten. This is a name for market buildings, in several Turkish towns, which shelter many stalls, including antiquities dealers. The term implies a lockable building, so where relatively expensive commodities were traded. Oscar White Muscarella writes at length about bedesten objects – which he regards as unreliable, often being forged or set out with false provenances and find sites. He regards them as the raw evidence which bad archaeology is made of. Muscarella wanted to distinguish sharply between forgeries and other things, but I didn’t have this urge. I was quite excited by forgeries and by the whole patter, of dealers in antikas. I wanted to make verbal forgeries of my own.
Sacheverell Sitwell. I referred to his “Parade virtues of a dying gladiator”, which as a phrase is taken from Nietzsche. ‘Parade’ was published in the sixth number of ‘Wheels', in 1921. I think the whole of ‘Calendar Rite’ could be a re-enactment of his poem ‘The actor rehearses’. The actor is unemployed, he spends his time rehearsing parts to keep his skills strong. The theatrical illusion is projected without its proper means. ‘Rite’ is also about someone unemployed, practising their art in a private room.
12 days. The idea that the world returns to chaos at Christmas and that the following Twelve Days govern the shape of the following twelve months is described in Dumézil's Le mythe des centaures. The “December storms” play a role in this, said to represent primal cosmic forces, not yet reduced to articulate shapes by a sort of refinement process. The legend comes from the folklore of several countries, including Greece and Poland.
Altyn Dagh. The schema is that there is a mountain where on one side people speak Chinese, in the other side Indo-European, on the next Turkic, and on the next Paleo-Siberian. I like this myth and I completely invented it.
There should be a point where these so different cultures meet. Maybe there is no such point.
‘Altyn Dagh’ means ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish.
(Route march in the cultural field) Spinkel og dobbelspidse. The phrase comes from Ravn, Morten: “Guldbådene fra Nors – tolkning og datering”. It is translated in the poem, “slender and double-prowed”. The idea that the little gold ships were a spell to ensure the safety of the fleet invading England comes from Danish archaeologists. The ships are 11-12 cm long, the longest one 17 cm. They were once dated to the 3rd C AD, but the dating has been shifted so that they could be mid-5th century. They were found in Jutland, close to the North Sea.
‘that food which the living eat’. I think this came from a curse, one of those features of the high Roman Empire. Possibly from Wunsch’s Defixionstabellen. “Let him not eat that food which the living eat’. I thought the curses were like lyric poems, short and passionate. "More than 1500 curse tablets (defixiones) are now known, two-thirds of them written in Greek; of the Latin texts, over half have been found in Britain,".
My new book is coming out from Shearsman Books in September.
There are notes in the book but I wanted to go into more detail about sources of moments in the poems. This has to do with accountability. There is another point about originality. If you look at the notes below, I keep using motifs from folklore. In fact this move can be seen as a “structural quote”. The use of these rich but regressive patterns is part of what is called naive art, or primitive art. By using them, I am absorbing naive art (and releasing naive parts of myself). But of course this isn’t an original idea. It is a “structural quote”. I can’t list the total set of such structures, it is not feasible. There is a pre-existing artistic language which I can use. I think someone invents a “game”, but after that every time you play it produces a unique run of events and throws of the dice.
'Controlled Conditions'. I associate this with a line from Verhaeren, l’halluciné dans la forêt de la nombre. I can’t find the line in there now, but it must have been present in an earlier draft, I think. Le cabaret du jour et de la nuit; I think this is also in Verhaeren. Somewhere.
Goths. Origo gothica has been described as “perhaps the most problematic work of the early Middle Ages”. The text is old but the title supposedly comes from Herwig Wolfram, in the 1980s. It means "origin of the Goths".
Sortes. The word means “lots”. Our word lot comes from hlutr, which is related to a root meaning “fall” and supposedly refers to small objects cast in the air to allow allocation of shares, or divination. So, a lot as a land division points to the land of a commune being shared out using chance, perhaps. By sortes gothicae I mean the celebrated division of Roman territory between barbarian warriors.
355M. As the notes say, this derives from a GPT-2 run. I looked at 100 pages of output, essentially meaningless, took one part of it, and changed it to look like a poem. The verbal structures are coherent because GPT took them from a human source, although I don’t know what that source was. It would be hard to claim ownership of this text.
(Inside and Out) Glass, claws. I got this from a volume about folklore by someone called Bernatzik.
He found a Grimms’ fairytale in which someone uses lynx claws to climb a glass mountain. He used this to interpret a Bronze Age (?) burial in which lynx claws were buried with the deceased. So, you use lynx claws to walk across the sky to the afterlife. In a Norse saga, glasvellir are the place of death, the place where dead heroes live. (That would mean glass hillsides, but the word glass may have meant glare before being attached to a substance manufactured by specialists in the Mediterranean.)
Bedesten. This is a name for market buildings, in several Turkish towns, which shelter many stalls, including antiquities dealers. The term implies a lockable building, so where relatively expensive commodities were traded. Oscar White Muscarella writes at length about bedesten objects – which he regards as unreliable, often being forged or set out with false provenances and find sites. He regards them as the raw evidence which bad archaeology is made of. Muscarella wanted to distinguish sharply between forgeries and other things, but I didn’t have this urge. I was quite excited by forgeries and by the whole patter, of dealers in antikas. I wanted to make verbal forgeries of my own.
Sacheverell Sitwell. I referred to his “Parade virtues of a dying gladiator”, which as a phrase is taken from Nietzsche. ‘Parade’ was published in the sixth number of ‘Wheels', in 1921. I think the whole of ‘Calendar Rite’ could be a re-enactment of his poem ‘The actor rehearses’. The actor is unemployed, he spends his time rehearsing parts to keep his skills strong. The theatrical illusion is projected without its proper means. ‘Rite’ is also about someone unemployed, practising their art in a private room.
12 days. The idea that the world returns to chaos at Christmas and that the following Twelve Days govern the shape of the following twelve months is described in Dumézil's Le mythe des centaures. The “December storms” play a role in this, said to represent primal cosmic forces, not yet reduced to articulate shapes by a sort of refinement process. The legend comes from the folklore of several countries, including Greece and Poland.
Altyn Dagh. The schema is that there is a mountain where on one side people speak Chinese, in the other side Indo-European, on the next Turkic, and on the next Paleo-Siberian. I like this myth and I completely invented it.
There should be a point where these so different cultures meet. Maybe there is no such point.
‘Altyn Dagh’ means ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish.
(Route march in the cultural field) Spinkel og dobbelspidse. The phrase comes from Ravn, Morten: “Guldbådene fra Nors – tolkning og datering”. It is translated in the poem, “slender and double-prowed”. The idea that the little gold ships were a spell to ensure the safety of the fleet invading England comes from Danish archaeologists. The ships are 11-12 cm long, the longest one 17 cm. They were once dated to the 3rd C AD, but the dating has been shifted so that they could be mid-5th century. They were found in Jutland, close to the North Sea.
‘that food which the living eat’. I think this came from a curse, one of those features of the high Roman Empire. Possibly from Wunsch’s Defixionstabellen. “Let him not eat that food which the living eat’. I thought the curses were like lyric poems, short and passionate. "More than 1500 curse tablets (defixiones) are now known, two-thirds of them written in Greek; of the Latin texts, over half have been found in Britain,".
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