Fluid Jewels: James Kirkup 1918-2009
Anecdote. In 1976, Kirkup published a poem in Gay News which referred to the sexuality of Christ and led to a successful prosecution of the editor for blasphemy. I was a student, and a fellow-student reported that his father could remember playing rugby with Kirkup, around 1940 possibly, and was indignant that someone gay had infiltrated the scrum. We all thought this was funny. Whether the courts should have been poring over this poem is another question. We don’t have figures about how many people in that scrum were gay.
In a previous piece I wrote: “Allott anthologised a poem of Kirkup which was a documentary: he was asked to watch a heart operation and to describe it. It is a good poem, he was accurate like a draughtsman. He could write about many different subjects but did not show a central sensibility, conceptual or linguistic. His poems remain enigmatic because they do not leave much trace. It may be that James Kirkup’s nimbleness and stylistic inconsistency were connected with his status as a homosexual, as a gay chameleon. This possibly indicates why heterosexuality is signalled by dullness and self-repetition: to show gravitas and fitness to hold power. This would give us a link between personality and style. In fact, Kirkup may qualify as a genuine outsider: that was his situation, although his poems conform in every other way to the norms of poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s.”
That leaves out his 40s poetry, and the obvious fact that his chameleon powers made him very prolific. Even in 1943, Wrey Gardiner’s firm (GWP) brought out a volume of his, a shared one with John Bayliss and J. Ormond Thomas. “The Glass Fable” was published in Poetry Quarterly in 1943 – I happen to have that issue. If he was born in 1923, then he wrote this poem when he was 20: however, all the newspaper obituaries give the date as 1918. Allott’s Penguin anthology gives 1923, which was surely supplied by the poet. Fable is said to be part of a longer poem about myth, which was published in a 1947 volume shared with Ross Nichols, future head of the Druid Order. It is influenced by Edith Sitwell. The number of male poets influenced by women is fairly low – this was a direction British poetry failed to go in. Fable reads like a ballet libretto, is full of descriptions of precious stones, has a landscape which is an emanation of subjective states, raises individuals to the level of myth, has subtle phonetic effects. This is what Sitwell was doing. “The Glass Fable” was published in 1943. Cultural controls were down in wartime, and this is closer to being an explicitly homoerotic poem than the work of poets who came before or after. The theme is of a prince and a shepherd (the staging is like a ballet or a pantomime) who have a dream about each other which leads them to meet. The shepherd boy gets over-excited
His arms are stretched, and twist
like sheets of mist
the trees at anchor swim
his chrysalis of smoke contains
his heart, shaped like a moth
or the velvet arches of his mouth.
His fingers are outsprayed, distinct
aesthetic feelers, and his antlered senses
radiate alarm
along the sinews of his waving form.
The date is in a palace made entirely of precious stones. “The crystal floors are deep, and spring/ from wells of molten glass”: so the solid level of glass that you can walk on is linked to a reservoir where the glass is still liquid. I think we are looking at precious bodily fluids here, at least something which is precious and a fluid. These lines explain the title. We seem to have a problem with adornment here, not that the jewellery is fake but that the person wearing them is not genuinely female. The liquid phase of the glass seems to take over; the palace collapses around their heads. The poem says:
I am the question
only you can answer.
He rises, slowly, in a long,
slow trance
ritual, receptive
dance
an iridescent manuscript
is buried in the tomb of his loins
This is reasonably close to gay erotica. It can be linked to Symbolisme, obviously, but can also be seen as the pole of poetry closest to opera and ballet, and furthest from documentary. Kirkup’s characters in Fable do not get dialogue, but the scenery is wholly expressive. Why classical music should have pursued specific conventions is too large a theme to open – of course dance followed all kinds of other directions after 1945 – but in 1943 there was a specific sensibility prevailing and you knew what kind of evening you were going to have if you visited the opera or the ballet. The link with gay life is well-known, even if most of the steady audience weren’t gay. Writing about precious stones at length is probably not something a heterosexual man would have done at that time. I bring this up (briefly) in order to clarify what Kirkup was about: there was an Apocalyptic style which many poets were using at that time, especially poets born between 1910 and 1920, but you can’t fit Kirkup into it. If you saw the great New Romantic exhibition at the Barbican in 1987, you may well have seen Leslie Hurry’s painted backdrop for Robert Helpmann’s production of Hamlet (the play) as the most exciting thing in the whole building. There was a style of subjective and poetic theatre at that time, summed up in Hurry’s imaginative costume and backdrop designs, which was just as much an artistic centre as the Apocalyptics, and which Kirkup fitted into. The “iridescent manuscript” looks meaningless and a lot of images in 1943 were low on meaning. Iris is rainbow, a thing which shines and has bright colours, so we could draw this back to “illuminated”, a word which does go with “manuscript”. Mediaeval manuscripts were made of skin, as loins are. Manuscripts are written by hand, and the contact of hand, eyes, and loins may be significant here. The “tomb” bit is not obvious but could refer to the repressed, hidden, etc. The passage is unclear, but at times the less integrated an image is the more motivated it is.
Kirkup became eminent, and got his Oxford UP deal, by writing documentary poems. The one Allott picked up for his standard anthology is about a heart operation, which Kirkup was present at (around 1953?) with the aim of recording it. Kirkup’s facility at making real events into credible verse was astounding. Poems like “The Observatory” have an on-the-spot feel, a cosiness, a commentary tone, which are strongly reminiscent of television. This was a new tone for poetry, back in 1955. Kirkup showed adaptability but that could also mean shedding ambitions. He wrote two poems to Queen Elizabeth, (for her birthday in 1953) and her coronation (also in 1953). The coronation was the event which made British TV. The commentator was the educated voice which was acceptable in every household. Kirkup’s willingness to achieve popularity, and to write fluently and superficially, was extreme. The coronation poem is one of the most revealing. His interest in frocks and jewels was not feigned. Personally, he seems to have started with poetry which was over-wrought and much too emotional (The Last Man, The Sleeper in the Earth) and migrated to poetry which was decorative and had far too little emotional commitment. Documentary was a key issue of the Sixties and Seventies, seen as a means of opening up parts of national life which an official view had firmly kept invisible. It was an area of excitement. But he had no interest in social issues. As documentary became more and more exciting and politically charged, he gave it up. He had no interest in sociology and was much better at visual details than at human relations. He lacked ambition after 1960.
The cover of the 1996 Salzburg UP book I have is by James Dickey and says “One is bothered as much as delighted by the cleverness of the poems, and by seeing many promising themes dissolve into conventionally pretty descriptions. You feel, not really the painful search to know and to grasp something, but that, for the bright and witty, everything is already known. These poems don’t develop well, either, they stand still and elaborate[.]” This was written in 1968, so late enough for JK’s work to be in plain sight. “Dependably and even remarkably brilliant”, Dickey says. I am amazed that the publisher put the core defects of the poetry in the cover text, but this is very good criticism. I think that JK lost interest in around 1963, and that being so fluent was not good because it led him to write very numerous poems which were almost indistinguishable from hundreds of other poems being written by published academic poets in the same year. The change may connect to being dropped by Oxford University Press, or to maturity. Perhaps he stopped writing autobiographical poems because, after 40, his biography wasn’t all that interesting. So, in the Forties the theme was romantic myth and Kirkup wrote such poems, in the Fifties empiricism was the doctrine and Kirkup wrote long documentary poems. You could see this as conformism or simply as the result of being sensitive to other people’s wishes and feelings. Either way, Kirkup gave up trying to write personal myth. His poetry made a transition to being shallow and disengaged, travel poetry which suffered from the problems of tourism. Was this part of the Sixties? It was an era of convenience, tourism for example was meant to be casual, undemanding, assured, smooth. Kirkup was writing convenience poetry, light and reliable like a modern camera. Arguably he was again reproducing the feel of an era. Salzburg University Press brought out a “selected” poems in four volumes, about 900 pages. What we need to know about centres on the long poems of the 40s and 50s, such as ‘The Glass Fable”, “The Last Man”, and “The Observatory”. In the potholing poem he writes:
Here too hang from the walls high terraced gardens
Of starry crystals, arcades, tapestries and grilles
Of candied petals, leaves and branches,
Calcite shawls, veils, laces, curtains, trophies and swags
Of stalactite, translucent fold-on-fold of mineral draperies,
Crowns, auroras and sepulchres of stony snow,
And looped lucent sheets that sound,
Drummed with the fingers, like an orchestra of tympani
In deep sub-dominant and dominant accord.
All spectral, glittering, vast and still,
Far below, the torrent, that has sought
A deeper bed, goes plundering, thundering soundlessly
Down, may be to the earth’s hot centre, there
To be ardently converted into
Fountains of boiling ash, or gulfs of steam.
(from the 24-page poem “Descent into the Cave”, printed in a 1962 volume but probably written around 1958)
This shows how good his documentary writing was. I chose this passage because it is so close to parts of “The Glass Fable”. The jewelled landscapes of that poem are visibly dependent on the Book of Revelations – Kirkup had no interest in the ideas of the apocalyptics, but did go back to Revelations. The “sea of glass” of Revelations does appear in “The Glass Fable”. Jewels do have an importance – they start out as the walls of heaven, become intensely emotional symbols speaking quite basic desires, become part of documentary scenery in a cave in Somerset, and then become decorative and shiny and unresponsive.
Kirkup gave a statement to the St James Press reference work on Contemporary Poets, in which he says that one of his themes was solitude. CP is a wonderful book, with hundreds of statements from poets in the whole English-speaking world, and of course the editors aren’t responsible for what the poets choose to say. I think Kirkup could make fluent statements of things he didn’t believe, and had spent years learning how to make gracious conversation without giving away his real feelings. (He also mentions UFOs as a theme.) Solitude is the main theme of some of his poetry but it is hardly the real story. He declined military service in the war, but took the alternative of working for the non-combatant Pioneer Corps. Derek Stanford’s memoirs describe his career as an officer in the Pioneers, where he seems to have met a large number of artists and poets. I don’t have any specific evidence on this, but in the atmosphere of the 1950s being either gay or a pacifist/ conscientious objector was likely to cause outrage and rejection. Kirkup did become very conformist in the Fifties and his Coronation poem can be juxtaposed with declining to serve His Majesty with rifle in hand. He did avoid prison on both scores. The New Romantic poets generally were anarchists and pacifists.
Kirkup wrote a Nativity play which was performed at Bristol cathedral and was, according to the jacket text, broadcast on radio and television (in 1961). He reached a mass audience with this. The link with the Coronation and birthday poems is depressing – so many English poets sought refuge with Church and Crown, the traditional patrons. Poets who stuck with the idea of the personality deserve credit for their obstinacy. As the Empire collapsed, it looks as if at least some poets sought refuge in institutions that had been around since before the Empire – Church and Crown, returning psychologically to the mid-sixteenth century. Old money in perplexing times. Kirkup wrote a historical pageant about Peterborough cathedral. Stray biographical notes show Kirkup and Robin Skelton, around 1950, organising poetry events and short-run publishing in Leeds. This is a nascent "Leeds scene", anticipating provincial poetry scenes in the 1950s. It doesn't confirm the "solitude" thesis. There may have been a shared feeling which allowed both Kirkup and Skelton to continue the mythological preoccupations of the war period – possibly. But certainly they suggested to Leeds undergraduates that poetry was still being written and had not died out in the nineteenth century.
On reflection, I think that The Last Man and The Sleeper in the Earth are mainly influenced by Baudelaire. This gives us a match – the poems about grandiose and accursed Romantic heroes come from the “maudit” part of Symbolisme and the ones set in unrealistic and balletic landscapes come from another strand of Symbolisme. This tells us what Kirkup was reading before he got going. The problem with the poems about doom is the lack of explanation in them, which makes identification incomplete or impossible. This noticeable silence is related to the problem of talking about emotions stemming either from relations between homosexual men or from solitary feelings of frustration, resentment, sadness, etc. strongly related to being homosexual. These poems are the opposite of confessional, because the psychological core has been reduced to silence. The first twenty years of his work are not "part of the history of gay consciousness" but "omit vital omissions which are part of what was suppressed and can't be recovered". Despite the silence, I am sure that anti-gay prejudice affected Kirkup’s freedom of speech and probably compromised his career. I can’t name an individual who did damage, or a concrete moment when this pressure was exerted, but I have no doubt that he was culturally victimised. This has to be made clear as part of collective self-knowledge. Because the silent rules have changed so much, we can at least say that there are silent rules and that poets are the victims of these rules. Does that mean others benefit from them? That is harder to answer. Reading Kirkup’s poetry is problematic because of what was silenced, which may be damaged again as we voice it. It is reasonable to think, both that he could not say what he needed to, and that he developed into new realms of symbolism and ambiguity in order to say it nonetheless. There are quite urgent questions about where the silent rules come from and how we can change them. The wish to hurt other people and make them shut up is not exactly mysterious. Culture expresses it, like other wishes.
Extended Breath includes two poems on flower arranging. It is reasonable to say that writing about numerous small decorative objects, capable of containing good taste and remembered affection, can be a mode of gay taste – and in fact, that Kirkup’s later poetry has a gay voice, even if without the hopes and despairs of younger years. 'Ten Pure Sonnets’ is from the 1963 volume A Refusal to Conform and has more commitment than what is around it. The labelling of the Salzburg books means you can’t work out the date of anything, but if the poems are in order you can make rough assessments.
(Extended Breath is one of two Salzburg books labelled as "Long poems", although most of the poems in it are not long.)
After a few days involved with the Kirkup case, I am not eager to read all four volumes of his
Selected. So, did I enjoy what I read? We have to leave out the question of whether he could not write clearly, in his most emotional moments, because the biographical material came from gay relationships (or gay solitude) and the society of the Forties and Fifties was not open to that. The social issue is of great interest, but you can’t rewrite the poems even if they were wrecked by silent political pressures. ‘Fable’ doesn’t work out. ‘The Last Man’ is too overwrought, it is insistent rather than having a curve of development. But ‘Descent into the Cave” and ‘The Observatory’ certainly work. He avoids psychological depths by dealing with immediate sensory data, but the poems do have a psychology – the poet’s instant, cutaneous reactions. Basically, his volumes of the 1950s (and as far as the 1962 Descent into the Cave) are the good ones. The four Selected volumes include a lot of weak material.
The jacket of A Refusal to Conform announces that he is giving up poetry. Although he issued quite a few books after that, it may well be that he slowed down a great deal and that his output from 1963 to 2009 was much slower and less committed. My project has to do with British poetry 1960 to 1997 and Kirkup’s artistic achievement after 1960 is marginal.
Thursday 14 December 2017
Thursday 9 November 2017
Hue, sodality, eremite: Jack Beeching
Hue, sodality, eremite: Jack Beeching 1922-2001
Mordant on retina as acid smoke,
Hot dreams of eremite, or prisoner,
Degrade the vigil with a Judas kiss.
Only a lover’s bodily embrace
Tattoos a never-fading cicatrice.
(from “Words and Deeds”)
–The vocabulary choice is very precise but also exotic and striking. The theme is “words and deeds”, in this stanza fantasy and real experience. The “vigil” is staying awake late, evidently due to erotic arousal. This is treacherous (Judas-like) because it promises and then lets you down. It is made of smoke. The erotic vision bites into the eye mordantly, like a tattoo, but is impermanent. Real lovers, though, make a mark on your skin (or ego) which is a scar and never fades. (Tattoos often record the loved one.) The word choice is bizarre but the idea is not original. This is part of a section of 11 stanzas within a long poem (“Long Poem in Progress” as at 1970). Earlier–
Heron and owl defy
The piety of law
And in their precinct ply
Impaling beak and class
Then, the swan–
With white companion sharing
A holy sodality,
In hue and stance declaring
Natural legality.
The lesser fowl, flown hence,
Live nervously as minions,
Wanting a swan’s immense
Limb-breaking pinions.
(from ‘Allegory”, published 1952)
This is very good. Beeching produced at least four hundred pages of poetry, over sixty years. The question is, how good is it? I had difficulty evaluating Beeching’s poetry. There was the factor of invisibility – I had the 38-page selection from a 1970 Penguin Modern Poets (#16) but apart from a couple of pamphlets in the 1950s he put no books out until 1996. I located, on the shelves of the Poetry Library, pamphlets from 1950, 1959, and 1979. PMP 16 is a terrific book, a real door onto the unknown. The Collected (Poems 1940-2000) followed in 2001 (which I don’t have). But there was also the factor of elusiveness – I just wasn’t sure how to describe this poetry. The pinion/minion rhyme is impossible to qualify – definitive, perfect, yet slightly archaic. Who talks of “minions”? The same applies to “hue” and “sodality”. The poem is “Allegory of Peace and War” and the theme that the strong can be independent but not the weak. Is this based on a real allegorical painting, or is it an imaginary painting? (Pinion appears 3 times in the 1950 pamphlet, so I guess he liked this word. I think the inherent dual meaning, wing/chain, appealed to him.)
I started with this blank feeling and have been looking for the aesthetic in the poems. The reason I didn’t have an emotional memory about the poems was that they were more technically brilliant than emotionally communicative. My other impression was that he was an extremely skilled writer. There was this feeling that he had spent years of writing all day and every day, learning how to turn 400 words into 100; the concision and clarity of his poems were just unique, they were almost intimidating for me as a writer. There are 3 poems of his in the 1952 PEN Anthology New Poems, which was silently an anthology of Left poetry. The biographical note there says that he spent his time writing Westerns – this would explain the unusual facility and self-control with words. It also connects, I think, with his expatriate status. It seems he lived abroad from 1956 until 2001 – having a steady but limited income (from writing pulp fiction, perhaps) would go well with living in an economy where exchange rates made pounds sterling go a long way. The information in two helpful essays in the on-line magazine Jacket says that he was a Catholic. So, he was in Catholic countries, and his book on the Battle of Lepanto could connect with a crusading spirit – this was a Catholic coalition fleet defeating a Turkish fleet and halting the spread of Islam to southern Europe. He wrote a history of Christian missions 1515-1914. The pattern of his history books (which were a major enterprise) is about imperialism, the overseas spread of Europeans after 1515. He edited a selection from Hakluyt for Penguin. He must have known a lot about naval affairs and voyages. It is obvious that these books are not conventional works of Marxist anti-colonialism.
There is an important text by Beeching in PN Review, issue 9, 1979, where he recalls his friendship with Edgell Rickword and says that the “critical voice” in his head when he wrote poems was Rickword’s. The text shows him as working at Poetry and the People in 1939 – when he was 17. So, “I was a teenage communist”. First pamphlet was in 1940. He moved on to Our Time, another Red magazine, edited by Rickword. I don’t want to play the McCarthyite tune, but I mention this connection because it is so important for Beeching’s early life and so unlike the rest of English literary life. He recalls his friends with tenderness and we would do well to accept that they did inspire admiration face to face, and that probably Beeching did too. He had a pamphlet out with Key Poets, who were owned by the Communist Party; Aspects of Love, 1950.
The 1952 anthology includes a poem about paintings, evidently of the 1650s or thereabouts, of Roundheads and Cavaliers. Its point is that today we have war propaganda, which is bad, whereas the paintings are realistic and unexciting. In PMP 16 we have a poem about a painting, evidently 16th century, Flemish, and by a Protestant, about a woman pinned to a wheel. It may be the cadaver of a woman. This is a display punishment. It suggests to me that Beeching likes to work from a picture, and that this gives a static quality to his poems, even though it allows for distantiation, and for the impressive level of control and precision which his poems consistently show. In the poem, there is a movement from detail to generalisation. There is not a tracking of a process in history, of history as involving process and change. There is another element here – a Catholic sensibility should use static visual images as basic to spiritual (and aesthetic) process, and would also be fascinated by the great Catholic art of the Mediterranean countries, produced by an ancient belief in “visual instruction” (for a largely illiterate flock) but then of course feeding the visual basis of those artistically favoured countries.
Two poems impressed me especially about Beeching. The second is “Weathermen in Hiding Play Jazz”, in which fugitive members of the illegal American revolutionary organisation meet to play jazz (“Their mythified explosion blew up the pathos cry/ Of all who stood nearby. They abhor a private tower/ For its long green perspective”). The first is in Truth is a Naked Lady and is about forty murdered Jewish writers. Undoubtedly this refers to the night of August 12, 1952, when thirteen ex-members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot in one night, on Stalin’s orders. Five of them were writers so I am unsure about the figure forty. More work is needed on this. But in any case, this is a devastating attack on Beeching’s former Communist Party colleagues and on the facts they so often wrote out of history. It is part of a series of anti-Stalinist poems grouped together in that 1959 pamphlet – the next one is about tanks and very clearly refers to the “fraternal intervention” in Budapest in 1956. Even in the Cold War, you can say that it was courageous of Beeching, given who his friends were, to draw up the arraignment against Stalin and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The poems very noticeably bypass the expected aesthetic patterns of the time, I mean the 1940s and 1950s. This is another aspect of Beeching’s sophistication. He certainly does not fit in as a Catholic poet, and although he was a man of the Left . There is an element which links him to many poets born in the 1920s, that is he belongs to the “Formalism” so well described by Eric Homberger (in Art of the Real) as dominant between 1947 and 1957 (when the young but visible poets were, certainly, born in the 1920s). His poems are precisely rhymed and metrically regular. They conduct an argument, which is probably connected to the Metaphysical poets. The Metaphysicals were favoured at universities in the 1950s and recognisably a model for the Formalist verse being written by academics at that time. My belief is that this is just a form, rather than an aesthetic. That style could be used for poetry of very diverse artistic contents and moods. It does not give us the answers about Beeching. It does not need to be said that he did not follow the aesthetic of modernism. I think Roy Fuller could be a comparison – both were clearly Leftists working inside the Formalist idiom. This does not seize Beeching but it highlights a contrast – he was much less animated by dramas of doubt than Fuller, and his vocabulary was much more recondite. This is a start, anyway. Beeching was much less worried about the problem of commitment, and in fact wrote much less about being political. It is almost as if the drama is in the vocabulary choice. We learn from Beeching that some of the poets who did not become visible, in the decades up to 1990, were writing in the conventional and admired manner.
He used the word love in two book titles, as well as a Naked Lady in another one (Truth is a naked lady, 1957). But these are not love poems nor personal, autobiographical poems. The subject area is moral interpretation of human behaviour, individual or social, often with character as the focal point and the thing which is being tested and judged. Evidently these statements would hold for the majority of poets using the Formalist style. This leaves as a puzzle why he did not get published more in the period, say 1950 to 1980, when people committed to this style were in charge and many books were being published which were judicious rather than lyrical and wise rather than subjective. I do not know the answer. I do not find links to the 20th C Catholic poetry I am familiar with, but on reflection his Metaphysical poetry could also be called Baroque, and he may have been reading 17th C Catholic poets, such as Crashaw. Francis Thompson and George Barker were attached to these sources, and there may be a hint of them in some of Beeching’s poems – not much, though. (‘Myth of Myself’, the later title for 'Long Poem in Progress', could have a hint of ‘The Hound of Heaven’?)
The poems often have a biographical subject. A human appears as an object of thought, and rather than external action much of the length is taken up by turning over judgements on the human. The amount of time given to the subject’s own thoughts is limited. They are reduced to theological objects much as the allegorical swan is reduced to a painted object. These are familiar structures in Formalist poem designs. The classroom analysis of the poem may be going through steps similar to those which the poet is putting the (third-person) human subject through. It is unkind to say so. If people found the classroom interesting, they should find the poem interesting too. But the payload is less artistic pleasure than a sense of being wise and judicious.
'Myth of Myself’ is partly a negative apocalypse (society is going to hell in a handcart) but also has an autobiographical element. ‘Words and Deeds’ pours scorn on the writer for using words but not deeds, but later in the poem the theme becomes the Word, the gospel saving souls. The first part is set in what must be an Orthodox church, though we do not find out which country it is in. A boy has a strange moment when he is in love with the Virgin, in a painting in the church. The poet is also present and as he turns his head the church spins – an apparent motion. The version in PMP is 175 lines long (the version in Collected Poems is 40 lines shorter).
Gold particles, in spectral saraband,
Throb an erotic motion all day long,
Dust in the sun, this flesh like gossamer.
Add word to word, since words, perhaps, are deeds,
As, knelt in dust, another planted seeds.
We are made of “dust”, which in erotic charge shines, as real dust shines in the sun like gold. The flesh is transient (like cobwebs, archaically called gossamer). The dust is light and dances (a saraband) in slight currents of air. The section opens with a line (actually line 6) “Word was a deed, but all the doing’s done”, in a noticeably 17th century and Metaphysical tenor. The line appears to mean that a declaration of love is an action, but is now inactive: the rest of the stanza describe the disappointment of lovers. This section portrays a series of perverse and disastrous states of love, brought about in ways that are far from clear. The situations are heightened, in the manner of anxiety visions, to a state like characters in some Jacobean tragedy; 'Is that the chilling face his lovers saw,/ An English mask, its every lust held tight?’ Just before the end we hear that by love “Annihilation may be nullified”, another paradoxical and metaphysical phrase. Salvation brings about redemption. George Herbert could have written this. His social criticism is closer to Christian poetry than to the Left.
Jim Keery didn’t like Aspects of Love. It is difficult to evaluate Beeching’s work across time – my impression is that the majority of the poems date from after 1970 (based on the count of pages after the poems which we can date to 1970, in the Collected) but I am not clear how his style changed. I am enthusiastic. The poems are in a conventional style, but as if to counter that are refined and stretched, so that they are both hard to follow and pleasurable.
As Jim Keery has pointed out, the Key Poets pamphlets are very good. The editor (Jack Lindsay) really understood the scene, the poets in the series were where it’s at for 1950. But Cold War was followed by destalinisation in the Soviet Union, the Korean War saw communists as the enemy fighting British soldiers, the Party was in trouble and the market of sympathisers was insecure and dispersed by events. This group was not short of talent, with Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword, and so on, but they never caught a wave. His problems with publication were linked to his having a group of friends who did not keep control of publishing and other resources. Beeching sharply criticised the Party (in astonishing poems in his 1957 pamphlet) and broke away, even as the Party was losing its energy and even the ex-communist market was confused and in dissidence. Beeching has a poem in The New Reasoner (Autumn, 1957), a collector for ex-Stalinists. The ex-Party group involved thousands of people and was rich in talent, but did not cohere as a market. Anyway, its loudest members distrusted poetry. The history of that group, say 1956 to 1980, is very important to the history of English (and Scottish?) poetry, although the course it followed is not obvious. It was an area of opinion rather than a group, I suppose.
The unused title for the poems in PMP 16 was The Polythene Maidenhead. This is a terrible title. I am obliged to Robert Hewison for quoting a tag from Richard Hoggart: ‘sex in bright packages’. The shift from packaging to polythene is quite easy, I think. What Hoggart was talking about was objects of popular culture which he regarded as degrading it. (These could be the covers of paperbacks, magazines, advertisements, or even films.) This could be used to locate Beeching’s later poetry: as in favour of emotional authenticity, so anti-capitalist but socially conservative.
(addition)
Mordant on retina as acid smoke,
Hot dreams of eremite, or prisoner,
Degrade the vigil with a Judas kiss.
Only a lover’s bodily embrace
Tattoos a never-fading cicatrice.
(from “Words and Deeds”)
–The vocabulary choice is very precise but also exotic and striking. The theme is “words and deeds”, in this stanza fantasy and real experience. The “vigil” is staying awake late, evidently due to erotic arousal. This is treacherous (Judas-like) because it promises and then lets you down. It is made of smoke. The erotic vision bites into the eye mordantly, like a tattoo, but is impermanent. Real lovers, though, make a mark on your skin (or ego) which is a scar and never fades. (Tattoos often record the loved one.) The word choice is bizarre but the idea is not original. This is part of a section of 11 stanzas within a long poem (“Long Poem in Progress” as at 1970). Earlier–
Heron and owl defy
The piety of law
And in their precinct ply
Impaling beak and class
Then, the swan–
With white companion sharing
A holy sodality,
In hue and stance declaring
Natural legality.
The lesser fowl, flown hence,
Live nervously as minions,
Wanting a swan’s immense
Limb-breaking pinions.
(from ‘Allegory”, published 1952)
This is very good. Beeching produced at least four hundred pages of poetry, over sixty years. The question is, how good is it? I had difficulty evaluating Beeching’s poetry. There was the factor of invisibility – I had the 38-page selection from a 1970 Penguin Modern Poets (#16) but apart from a couple of pamphlets in the 1950s he put no books out until 1996. I located, on the shelves of the Poetry Library, pamphlets from 1950, 1959, and 1979. PMP 16 is a terrific book, a real door onto the unknown. The Collected (Poems 1940-2000) followed in 2001 (which I don’t have). But there was also the factor of elusiveness – I just wasn’t sure how to describe this poetry. The pinion/minion rhyme is impossible to qualify – definitive, perfect, yet slightly archaic. Who talks of “minions”? The same applies to “hue” and “sodality”. The poem is “Allegory of Peace and War” and the theme that the strong can be independent but not the weak. Is this based on a real allegorical painting, or is it an imaginary painting? (Pinion appears 3 times in the 1950 pamphlet, so I guess he liked this word. I think the inherent dual meaning, wing/chain, appealed to him.)
I started with this blank feeling and have been looking for the aesthetic in the poems. The reason I didn’t have an emotional memory about the poems was that they were more technically brilliant than emotionally communicative. My other impression was that he was an extremely skilled writer. There was this feeling that he had spent years of writing all day and every day, learning how to turn 400 words into 100; the concision and clarity of his poems were just unique, they were almost intimidating for me as a writer. There are 3 poems of his in the 1952 PEN Anthology New Poems, which was silently an anthology of Left poetry. The biographical note there says that he spent his time writing Westerns – this would explain the unusual facility and self-control with words. It also connects, I think, with his expatriate status. It seems he lived abroad from 1956 until 2001 – having a steady but limited income (from writing pulp fiction, perhaps) would go well with living in an economy where exchange rates made pounds sterling go a long way. The information in two helpful essays in the on-line magazine Jacket says that he was a Catholic. So, he was in Catholic countries, and his book on the Battle of Lepanto could connect with a crusading spirit – this was a Catholic coalition fleet defeating a Turkish fleet and halting the spread of Islam to southern Europe. He wrote a history of Christian missions 1515-1914. The pattern of his history books (which were a major enterprise) is about imperialism, the overseas spread of Europeans after 1515. He edited a selection from Hakluyt for Penguin. He must have known a lot about naval affairs and voyages. It is obvious that these books are not conventional works of Marxist anti-colonialism.
There is an important text by Beeching in PN Review, issue 9, 1979, where he recalls his friendship with Edgell Rickword and says that the “critical voice” in his head when he wrote poems was Rickword’s. The text shows him as working at Poetry and the People in 1939 – when he was 17. So, “I was a teenage communist”. First pamphlet was in 1940. He moved on to Our Time, another Red magazine, edited by Rickword. I don’t want to play the McCarthyite tune, but I mention this connection because it is so important for Beeching’s early life and so unlike the rest of English literary life. He recalls his friends with tenderness and we would do well to accept that they did inspire admiration face to face, and that probably Beeching did too. He had a pamphlet out with Key Poets, who were owned by the Communist Party; Aspects of Love, 1950.
The 1952 anthology includes a poem about paintings, evidently of the 1650s or thereabouts, of Roundheads and Cavaliers. Its point is that today we have war propaganda, which is bad, whereas the paintings are realistic and unexciting. In PMP 16 we have a poem about a painting, evidently 16th century, Flemish, and by a Protestant, about a woman pinned to a wheel. It may be the cadaver of a woman. This is a display punishment. It suggests to me that Beeching likes to work from a picture, and that this gives a static quality to his poems, even though it allows for distantiation, and for the impressive level of control and precision which his poems consistently show. In the poem, there is a movement from detail to generalisation. There is not a tracking of a process in history, of history as involving process and change. There is another element here – a Catholic sensibility should use static visual images as basic to spiritual (and aesthetic) process, and would also be fascinated by the great Catholic art of the Mediterranean countries, produced by an ancient belief in “visual instruction” (for a largely illiterate flock) but then of course feeding the visual basis of those artistically favoured countries.
Two poems impressed me especially about Beeching. The second is “Weathermen in Hiding Play Jazz”, in which fugitive members of the illegal American revolutionary organisation meet to play jazz (“Their mythified explosion blew up the pathos cry/ Of all who stood nearby. They abhor a private tower/ For its long green perspective”). The first is in Truth is a Naked Lady and is about forty murdered Jewish writers. Undoubtedly this refers to the night of August 12, 1952, when thirteen ex-members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot in one night, on Stalin’s orders. Five of them were writers so I am unsure about the figure forty. More work is needed on this. But in any case, this is a devastating attack on Beeching’s former Communist Party colleagues and on the facts they so often wrote out of history. It is part of a series of anti-Stalinist poems grouped together in that 1959 pamphlet – the next one is about tanks and very clearly refers to the “fraternal intervention” in Budapest in 1956. Even in the Cold War, you can say that it was courageous of Beeching, given who his friends were, to draw up the arraignment against Stalin and the Communist Party of Great Britain.
He used the word love in two book titles, as well as a Naked Lady in another one (Truth is a naked lady, 1957). But these are not love poems nor personal, autobiographical poems. The subject area is moral interpretation of human behaviour, individual or social, often with character as the focal point and the thing which is being tested and judged. Evidently these statements would hold for the majority of poets using the Formalist style. This leaves as a puzzle why he did not get published more in the period, say 1950 to 1980, when people committed to this style were in charge and many books were being published which were judicious rather than lyrical and wise rather than subjective. I do not know the answer. I do not find links to the 20th C Catholic poetry I am familiar with, but on reflection his Metaphysical poetry could also be called Baroque, and he may have been reading 17th C Catholic poets, such as Crashaw. Francis Thompson and George Barker were attached to these sources, and there may be a hint of them in some of Beeching’s poems – not much, though. (‘Myth of Myself’, the later title for 'Long Poem in Progress', could have a hint of ‘The Hound of Heaven’?)
The poems often have a biographical subject. A human appears as an object of thought, and rather than external action much of the length is taken up by turning over judgements on the human. The amount of time given to the subject’s own thoughts is limited. They are reduced to theological objects much as the allegorical swan is reduced to a painted object. These are familiar structures in Formalist poem designs. The classroom analysis of the poem may be going through steps similar to those which the poet is putting the (third-person) human subject through. It is unkind to say so. If people found the classroom interesting, they should find the poem interesting too. But the payload is less artistic pleasure than a sense of being wise and judicious.
'Myth of Myself’ is partly a negative apocalypse (society is going to hell in a handcart) but also has an autobiographical element. ‘Words and Deeds’ pours scorn on the writer for using words but not deeds, but later in the poem the theme becomes the Word, the gospel saving souls. The first part is set in what must be an Orthodox church, though we do not find out which country it is in. A boy has a strange moment when he is in love with the Virgin, in a painting in the church. The poet is also present and as he turns his head the church spins – an apparent motion. The version in PMP is 175 lines long (the version in Collected Poems is 40 lines shorter).
Gold particles, in spectral saraband,
Throb an erotic motion all day long,
Dust in the sun, this flesh like gossamer.
Add word to word, since words, perhaps, are deeds,
As, knelt in dust, another planted seeds.
We are made of “dust”, which in erotic charge shines, as real dust shines in the sun like gold. The flesh is transient (like cobwebs, archaically called gossamer). The dust is light and dances (a saraband) in slight currents of air. The section opens with a line (actually line 6) “Word was a deed, but all the doing’s done”, in a noticeably 17th century and Metaphysical tenor. The line appears to mean that a declaration of love is an action, but is now inactive: the rest of the stanza describe the disappointment of lovers. This section portrays a series of perverse and disastrous states of love, brought about in ways that are far from clear. The situations are heightened, in the manner of anxiety visions, to a state like characters in some Jacobean tragedy; 'Is that the chilling face his lovers saw,/ An English mask, its every lust held tight?’ Just before the end we hear that by love “Annihilation may be nullified”, another paradoxical and metaphysical phrase. Salvation brings about redemption. George Herbert could have written this. His social criticism is closer to Christian poetry than to the Left.
Jim Keery didn’t like Aspects of Love. It is difficult to evaluate Beeching’s work across time – my impression is that the majority of the poems date from after 1970 (based on the count of pages after the poems which we can date to 1970, in the Collected) but I am not clear how his style changed. I am enthusiastic. The poems are in a conventional style, but as if to counter that are refined and stretched, so that they are both hard to follow and pleasurable.
As Jim Keery has pointed out, the Key Poets pamphlets are very good. The editor (Jack Lindsay) really understood the scene, the poets in the series were where it’s at for 1950. But Cold War was followed by destalinisation in the Soviet Union, the Korean War saw communists as the enemy fighting British soldiers, the Party was in trouble and the market of sympathisers was insecure and dispersed by events. This group was not short of talent, with Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword, and so on, but they never caught a wave. His problems with publication were linked to his having a group of friends who did not keep control of publishing and other resources. Beeching sharply criticised the Party (in astonishing poems in his 1957 pamphlet) and broke away, even as the Party was losing its energy and even the ex-communist market was confused and in dissidence. Beeching has a poem in The New Reasoner (Autumn, 1957), a collector for ex-Stalinists. The ex-Party group involved thousands of people and was rich in talent, but did not cohere as a market. Anyway, its loudest members distrusted poetry. The history of that group, say 1956 to 1980, is very important to the history of English (and Scottish?) poetry, although the course it followed is not obvious. It was an area of opinion rather than a group, I suppose.
The unused title for the poems in PMP 16 was The Polythene Maidenhead. This is a terrible title. I am obliged to Robert Hewison for quoting a tag from Richard Hoggart: ‘sex in bright packages’. The shift from packaging to polythene is quite easy, I think. What Hoggart was talking about was objects of popular culture which he regarded as degrading it. (These could be the covers of paperbacks, magazines, advertisements, or even films.) This could be used to locate Beeching’s later poetry: as in favour of emotional authenticity, so anti-capitalist but socially conservative.
(addition)
I still haven’t read the Collected Poems, I can't take it away so I
photocopy parts of it and take those away.
He didn't have a job. One brief bio note says he writes historical fiction, another says he wrote Westerns. I guess "Cold-cocked in Dead Dog Gulch" is historical fiction.
I compared two
versions of two poems, from the 1957 pamphlet and the 2001 Collected.
I found that the two linked poems, anti-Stalinist poems, one on the
shooting of the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1952
and one on the tanks (evidently the tanks of Budapest in 1956). I
found that they had been
re-edited, making them shorter. Also, they had
lost context: the title no longer identified that the poem about 1952
(and the shootings of one night) was about Jewish writers. So it
ceased to be an anti-Stalinist poem. The same thing applied to the
tanks poem: by abolishing any date, the new edition lost the fact
that it was anti-Stalinist. The poems had disappeared into a no-place of generality. My conclusion was: the process of editing
is crucial to why Beeching
is unlike other poets, and may go too far; the versions in the
Collected, are not the best versions, and this could apply to the
previously unpublished ones (maybe 75% of them); by eliminating
date and context, and advancing
into timeless and serene
wisdom, he erased the real meaning
of the poems and thinned down their sense.
When
you morally disapprove of modern society, there is a risk that your
poems will veer off into a comfortable nowhere, with no friction with
the real world. However admirable your principles, the poems may
collapse into a cavern as no information
is being transmitted and nothing really changes between the beginning
of the poem and its end. The repetitive shortening of the poem by
editing
may not lead to something small and rapid
in the sense of a projectile, high-impact and brilliantly polished,
but to something which shrinks because it is not doing very much.
A
useful biographical piece on the Net records that “He resigned from
the Party in early 1957.” (This piece is an off-shoot from research
into Jack Lindsay, another Communist writer who had trouble in the
1950s.) The writer seems
to think that Beeching simply went on being a Marxist. Because
the Collected ignore any chronological line, they give the impression
that nothing changed over sixty years. This stagnation of history,
perhaps the serenity or even maturity of a social order, suggests that the mind has no
function to carry out: if nothing changes, we did not change anything
by thinking and arguing. This is actually the opposite of communist
belief; but people who absorbed the lessons of 1956 and the Twentieth
Congress, and did not abandon Marxism, were led to regard the
twentieth century as a sort of failed piece of theatre, while real
change might come 200 or 500 years later.
You can point your lens at short-term changes. The
mature Beeching was interested in expressing his moral objections
via detailed examination of everyday life – this brought him close
to Peter Porter. Inevitably, the everyday things are banal. Porter
just wrote in a much more animated way, his generalisations may not
be exactly a new philosophy but his level of serenity, or resistance,
is very low and so the fabric of his verse is wonderfully alive, they
are like some beautiful music in the time before “wisdom”
re-asserts itself, and then the music starts again.
Wednesday 8 November 2017
Summit Meeting 2004
Candy Talking: Cambridge Poetry Summit, 9th-11th January 2004
An event in Cambridge on January 9th-11th assembled a large number of young (officially, "youngish") English and American poets for an exchange of ideas. The ish English poets reading were:
Tim Morris
Keston Sutherland
Marianne Morris
Chris Goode
DS Marriott (replaced on the day by Rob Holloway)
Mark Mendoza
Leo Mellor
Helen Macdonald
Dell Olsen
Jeff Hilson
Sean Bonney
Stu Calton
Tom Jones
The 'summit' phrase is a sardonic reference to the Blair-Bush summits, and not some kind of flag-planting in ice-goggles. The goggles of the weekend showed a new generation. The background to this is the inherent bias of print culture towards the past, inclined even more by the excellence of radical poetry produced in the 1970s. The classic pose for a poetry fan is to have very strongly internalised norms based on the classics – for example Adorno, for example Prynne – within which they are very happy, where things are very clear, they have a lot of memories of being happy, there is a great richness of data, they can have shared conversations with their friends. This is a benign situation, but it tends to build over the empty space where new poetry, new names, new cognitive norms, would be visible. It is healthy to speed up the assimilation slightly by insisting that poets under 40 exist. Not always to the total rapture of poets over 40.
This was a collection of poets who have complex inhibitions and are looking for innovative solutions to them. The poetry seems to be animated by a generalised sense of apprehension, tending to assume a form like George W Bush. Which could be a projection of the hostility shown by the immediate social group, of Cambridge literati, to anything which shows signs of weakness.
By entering world politics the poem increases vastly in scale. An attempt to seize objectivity, likely to draw the poem towards the discourse of corporations and government departments, a gravitational acceleration deftly paralleling the path followed by everyone else who is intelligent and who uses their intelligence for objective business matters. It is an odd calculation, whose result is that small-scale interpersonal feelings are perplexing and insoluble, while the problems of world politics are simple, straightforward, and emotionally unifying.
The ability to make every line unpredictable is impressive, and can be adapted to depicting situations full of non sequiturs. It reminds me of 70s Cambridge poetry, as in magazines like Perfect Bound and Blueprint.
(A)
come fly there is room for your ghost with us two in the bunker
there is and fly putting down chips as kind against the operation
reliable wood money can't shoot when everyone is watching the green
light blue on the deep blue here come down with lead in your floats
there is no bar to the magnanimity of rounds or imaging tiny souls
when they've been scratched and hunker round an oil drum gambling
(B)
Each subtle request brings out the most important
facts at the birth of Universal Man Organus Cadellium
strong waves break over the headland we request
leave of absence to fulfil the lofty heights of science
fiction the invincible 'we' moreover several writings later
each ingot slides out the furnace ready by Fort Knox
the insufferable aliens have developed this ray which
others have reached the interior
chamber ensembles bring each meeting to a close
Which one comes from 1974 and which from 2004? Adorno still seems to be the local deity – has anything changed? This is an era of cheap data, and in the face of the circular spectacular glut poets seem to have abandoned the elder tasks of putting the visible into words in favour of attitudinal variation: the tilt of the head, the quality of partial rejection and disbelief of it all. This tilt seems not to be recorded in the text, and working out what it is – the point of the whole poem – is perplexing and difficult. This is not simply cerebral; if someone cuts up a Blair speech about the moral benefits of the 2nd Iraq war, the act of cutting is certainly very emotional, indeed these attitudinal scans are highly personal and subjective.
Many of the readers use an inexpressive tone of voice, without any obvious speech melody or expressive inflection at all. Perhaps the point of departure is to eliminate the legacy signals carried by these little tunes, admittedly Stone Age in date – the ripples of human sensibility, if you like. A variant is to read fast and loud, but inexpressively, or to inject expressive pitch patterns which are unrelated to the words and are a form of blank logic. Locally, people are eager to attack feelings and unwilling to attack lack of feeling. Another interpretation is that such poets are nervous about reading, and inexperienced. The melody will emerge in the end. Just possibly, the same is true about the way they write.
Admiration for detachment and objectivity, for discourse which lacks reassuring emotional signals, belongs with a certain sector of the population, the most educated sector. Identifying with other people is a general human quality, while a specific tier need to unlearn it in order to run complex organisations. Removing poetry from the realm of expressivity – into that of government or philosophy – begs the question of why poetry has a discourse separate from government or philosophy. If I work for the government all day, maybe I want a differently rich language in my leisure hours.
The weekend was a crowded one, but it would be incorrect not to mention other poets of this generation who weren’t on the programme. Nic Laight, Nick Macias, and Niall Quinn, the authors of However Introduced to the Soles, spring to mind. Writers Forum poets like Scott Thurston, Douglas Jones, Peter Manson, Wayne Clements, also. Although some of the poets have established reputations (in my household, at least), most of them are unfamiliar. This might be a new equipe edging onto the stage. What's up? You can form your own opinion by reading the book of the spectacle – Sam Ladkin collected poems by the participants and put them in a book, Some Evidence (from Barque Press, at www.barquepress.com). This, along with Cul de Qui (magazine), is a pivotal moment, a haul to be pored and argued over many times. Critics out of prehistory may prefer to wait for the crossover hit – the one that talks to someone from outside the group. Which has a tune, in fact. As for the cognoscenti, Sam Ladkin writes "I'm working out all your statistics for a collection of poetry Top Trumps based on the usual five categories: Density of Syntax, Density of Thought, Left Lean, Enunciation, and Glamour/Hygiene."
I spent most of the weekend engaged in detailed contextual research, in the pub. At one point, someone said “Adorno said that we shouldn’t give in to the mass-consumption leisure industry” and I heard this as “Madonna says that…”. Go back to London, fool! The weekend was about the arrival of a new generation, but no-one talked about new sounds and styles being launched, or about a change of direction from the older generation (of intellectual poets). My dominant impression of the 3 days is of benevolence. No factions. Everyone keen to listen to each other. Benign language washing around everywhere.
Ben Watson gave a brilliant paper about the evasiveness of poets who ignore time and the dialectic, starting with a description of how a poem by Ric Caddel asks you to gaze at Caddel’s noble soul across a depopulated & timeless universe, but is really smug and malign. Afterwards, an American poet approached him and said how moved he had been by honouring the late Caddel, what a fine poet he was, etc. The paper was only 20 minutes long but he hadn’t stayed focussed for more than 2 or 3 minutes. Cambridge really is the home of listening skills, and these skills really do give you a chance of understanding the world which mass-media numbness doesn’t. Maybe attention has other functions than simply the solemn & honorific exchange of prestige.
My other impression of the weekend is that Jeff Hilson, Sean Bonney, Helen Macdonald, and Marianne Morris gave wonderful readings. This is what I was expecting before I went – fulfilment being almost a disappointment, in this case. No revelations, but a happy feeling. Go home on the train with a lot of other happy poetry-binge people. And so to bed.
Top Tips
Things not to say;
“Fwor! I don’t half fancy that young poet who just read!”
“I read Jargon of Authenticity in 1976 and thought it was witty but exaggerated and not wholly serious.”
“I think the Essex School has been seriously underrated.”
“What on earth does this poem mean?”
Things OK to say:
“I know this café which is open on Sunday morning and does proper breakfasts.”
“Of course, he has no idea how to frame a proper philosophical inquiry, specially not in syllabics.”
“Meet me in the Bun Shop.”
“There is an essential distinction between naïve ironic avant-garde pastoralism and philosophically grounded ironic avant-garde pastoralism.”
“Olson was interested in Situationism.”
“There are two kinds of vulture. The American kind is descended from birds of prey and the European kind is descended from pigeons.”
**
Note 2017. This was written for Angel Exhaust but got cut. It stands for feelings of crushing nostalgia. You had the whole Underground in one room at that event. I haven’t been to a gathering like that since 2004. I’m sorry that stuff stopped happening. I don’t meet people and they don’t meet me.
An event in Cambridge on January 9th-11th assembled a large number of young (officially, "youngish") English and American poets for an exchange of ideas. The ish English poets reading were:
Tim Morris
Keston Sutherland
Marianne Morris
Chris Goode
DS Marriott (replaced on the day by Rob Holloway)
Mark Mendoza
Leo Mellor
Helen Macdonald
Dell Olsen
Jeff Hilson
Sean Bonney
Stu Calton
Tom Jones
The 'summit' phrase is a sardonic reference to the Blair-Bush summits, and not some kind of flag-planting in ice-goggles. The goggles of the weekend showed a new generation. The background to this is the inherent bias of print culture towards the past, inclined even more by the excellence of radical poetry produced in the 1970s. The classic pose for a poetry fan is to have very strongly internalised norms based on the classics – for example Adorno, for example Prynne – within which they are very happy, where things are very clear, they have a lot of memories of being happy, there is a great richness of data, they can have shared conversations with their friends. This is a benign situation, but it tends to build over the empty space where new poetry, new names, new cognitive norms, would be visible. It is healthy to speed up the assimilation slightly by insisting that poets under 40 exist. Not always to the total rapture of poets over 40.
This was a collection of poets who have complex inhibitions and are looking for innovative solutions to them. The poetry seems to be animated by a generalised sense of apprehension, tending to assume a form like George W Bush. Which could be a projection of the hostility shown by the immediate social group, of Cambridge literati, to anything which shows signs of weakness.
By entering world politics the poem increases vastly in scale. An attempt to seize objectivity, likely to draw the poem towards the discourse of corporations and government departments, a gravitational acceleration deftly paralleling the path followed by everyone else who is intelligent and who uses their intelligence for objective business matters. It is an odd calculation, whose result is that small-scale interpersonal feelings are perplexing and insoluble, while the problems of world politics are simple, straightforward, and emotionally unifying.
The ability to make every line unpredictable is impressive, and can be adapted to depicting situations full of non sequiturs. It reminds me of 70s Cambridge poetry, as in magazines like Perfect Bound and Blueprint.
(A)
come fly there is room for your ghost with us two in the bunker
there is and fly putting down chips as kind against the operation
reliable wood money can't shoot when everyone is watching the green
light blue on the deep blue here come down with lead in your floats
there is no bar to the magnanimity of rounds or imaging tiny souls
when they've been scratched and hunker round an oil drum gambling
(B)
Each subtle request brings out the most important
facts at the birth of Universal Man Organus Cadellium
strong waves break over the headland we request
leave of absence to fulfil the lofty heights of science
fiction the invincible 'we' moreover several writings later
each ingot slides out the furnace ready by Fort Knox
the insufferable aliens have developed this ray which
others have reached the interior
chamber ensembles bring each meeting to a close
Which one comes from 1974 and which from 2004? Adorno still seems to be the local deity – has anything changed? This is an era of cheap data, and in the face of the circular spectacular glut poets seem to have abandoned the elder tasks of putting the visible into words in favour of attitudinal variation: the tilt of the head, the quality of partial rejection and disbelief of it all. This tilt seems not to be recorded in the text, and working out what it is – the point of the whole poem – is perplexing and difficult. This is not simply cerebral; if someone cuts up a Blair speech about the moral benefits of the 2nd Iraq war, the act of cutting is certainly very emotional, indeed these attitudinal scans are highly personal and subjective.
Many of the readers use an inexpressive tone of voice, without any obvious speech melody or expressive inflection at all. Perhaps the point of departure is to eliminate the legacy signals carried by these little tunes, admittedly Stone Age in date – the ripples of human sensibility, if you like. A variant is to read fast and loud, but inexpressively, or to inject expressive pitch patterns which are unrelated to the words and are a form of blank logic. Locally, people are eager to attack feelings and unwilling to attack lack of feeling. Another interpretation is that such poets are nervous about reading, and inexperienced. The melody will emerge in the end. Just possibly, the same is true about the way they write.
Admiration for detachment and objectivity, for discourse which lacks reassuring emotional signals, belongs with a certain sector of the population, the most educated sector. Identifying with other people is a general human quality, while a specific tier need to unlearn it in order to run complex organisations. Removing poetry from the realm of expressivity – into that of government or philosophy – begs the question of why poetry has a discourse separate from government or philosophy. If I work for the government all day, maybe I want a differently rich language in my leisure hours.
The weekend was a crowded one, but it would be incorrect not to mention other poets of this generation who weren’t on the programme. Nic Laight, Nick Macias, and Niall Quinn, the authors of However Introduced to the Soles, spring to mind. Writers Forum poets like Scott Thurston, Douglas Jones, Peter Manson, Wayne Clements, also. Although some of the poets have established reputations (in my household, at least), most of them are unfamiliar. This might be a new equipe edging onto the stage. What's up? You can form your own opinion by reading the book of the spectacle – Sam Ladkin collected poems by the participants and put them in a book, Some Evidence (from Barque Press, at www.barquepress.com). This, along with Cul de Qui (magazine), is a pivotal moment, a haul to be pored and argued over many times. Critics out of prehistory may prefer to wait for the crossover hit – the one that talks to someone from outside the group. Which has a tune, in fact. As for the cognoscenti, Sam Ladkin writes "I'm working out all your statistics for a collection of poetry Top Trumps based on the usual five categories: Density of Syntax, Density of Thought, Left Lean, Enunciation, and Glamour/Hygiene."
I spent most of the weekend engaged in detailed contextual research, in the pub. At one point, someone said “Adorno said that we shouldn’t give in to the mass-consumption leisure industry” and I heard this as “Madonna says that…”. Go back to London, fool! The weekend was about the arrival of a new generation, but no-one talked about new sounds and styles being launched, or about a change of direction from the older generation (of intellectual poets). My dominant impression of the 3 days is of benevolence. No factions. Everyone keen to listen to each other. Benign language washing around everywhere.
Ben Watson gave a brilliant paper about the evasiveness of poets who ignore time and the dialectic, starting with a description of how a poem by Ric Caddel asks you to gaze at Caddel’s noble soul across a depopulated & timeless universe, but is really smug and malign. Afterwards, an American poet approached him and said how moved he had been by honouring the late Caddel, what a fine poet he was, etc. The paper was only 20 minutes long but he hadn’t stayed focussed for more than 2 or 3 minutes. Cambridge really is the home of listening skills, and these skills really do give you a chance of understanding the world which mass-media numbness doesn’t. Maybe attention has other functions than simply the solemn & honorific exchange of prestige.
My other impression of the weekend is that Jeff Hilson, Sean Bonney, Helen Macdonald, and Marianne Morris gave wonderful readings. This is what I was expecting before I went – fulfilment being almost a disappointment, in this case. No revelations, but a happy feeling. Go home on the train with a lot of other happy poetry-binge people. And so to bed.
Top Tips
Things not to say;
“Fwor! I don’t half fancy that young poet who just read!”
“I read Jargon of Authenticity in 1976 and thought it was witty but exaggerated and not wholly serious.”
“I think the Essex School has been seriously underrated.”
“What on earth does this poem mean?”
Things OK to say:
“I know this café which is open on Sunday morning and does proper breakfasts.”
“Of course, he has no idea how to frame a proper philosophical inquiry, specially not in syllabics.”
“Meet me in the Bun Shop.”
“There is an essential distinction between naïve ironic avant-garde pastoralism and philosophically grounded ironic avant-garde pastoralism.”
“Olson was interested in Situationism.”
“There are two kinds of vulture. The American kind is descended from birds of prey and the European kind is descended from pigeons.”
**
Note 2017. This was written for Angel Exhaust but got cut. It stands for feelings of crushing nostalgia. You had the whole Underground in one room at that event. I haven’t been to a gathering like that since 2004. I’m sorry that stuff stopped happening. I don’t meet people and they don’t meet me.
Monday 30 October 2017
The madness of Tristan: Eric Mottram
unintentional duplicate - see April 2019 for the surviving version of this post.
Sunday 30 July 2017
Initial R- in Hittite
INITIAL R- in HITTITE
I had read that Indo-Europeanists knew that Hittites had come to Anatolia from outside. I was unimpressed by this. How could the shape of a language record a past migration?
I was rereading Benjamin Fortson’s masterly short sketch of the Anatolian languages recently and the penny dropped. Indo-European undoubtedly has initial r- and Hittite does not. However, a whole range of early languages of Anatolia are missing initial r-. This is highly compatible with Hittite having arrived from outside with a wave of immigrants who mixed biologically – familiarly, with the locals to give a massively bilingual community which re-normalized the old language with certain features of the local language – such a “negative rule” banning r- in certain positions. Since we know that the language ancestral to Hittite had initial r-, in the REX/RICH word for example, that would make Hittite an immigrant language which had come from outside.
The Net, again, reveals that 3000 tablets were found at the Hittite palace-complex of Sapinuwa (Ortaköy). The dig began in 1990 but apparently only 3 tablets have been published. Something has gone seriously wrong here. The find is quite close to the main tablet archive at Boghazköy and from the same time-span, so we do not have the hope of a variant dialect and information of a new kind. However, the new tablets should complete our information and strengthen the state of several hypotheses. They include bilingual vocabulary lists, surely a treasure.
Anatolia is a big place. However, the range of evidence for languages related to Hittite in the so-named Anatolian group covers a vast area, and it would seem that unlikely that the jump off point for the Hittite language was elsewhere in Anatolia and the journey was from, let’s say, Cilicia to the north-central area around Ankara. We have hieroglyphic Luwian from the Syrian border area (Carchemish) and Lidyan from the Aegean coast. It would appear that this branch of Indo-European immigrated into the region from outside.
Robert Beekes points out that there are only 700 legacy IE words in Hittite. We could hope that wider source material, such as the Sapinuwa archive, would bring a few more. For comparison, Welsh has 800 Latin loan-words dating from the Roman Empire. Anatolian is the first IE family to be recorded (maybe in 1800 BC), but had by then moved farther from the ancestral model than almost any other. We could reconstruct rather little of IE if we only had Hittite and Luwian to work from. This marginal status is hard to combine with a theorised central or source position.
The info on the Net indicates that 600 of the Sapinuwa tablets are in other languages, i.e. non-Hittite. That would include Hurrian, widely used by the Hittite polity in rituals.
As Fortson points out, Greek has no (original) initial r. Rhota only occurs, at the start of words, as aspirated. This goes back to an older s- which was reduced to a breathing. Thus the form rhei “it flows” (as panta rhei) goes back to the sr- root (English stream, Irish sruth). In older Greek there was no initial r-, just sr-. There is a word for darkness, in the Norse Ragnarök, twilight of the gods (ragna “of the gods”, rök “darkness”). This matches Greek Erebos (a dark place), Armenian erek ‘evening’. In each case the older initial r has been covered up by a kind of glide vowel. This is complementary to the Hittite evidence and gives us further knowledge of the geography of this sound-shift. Evidently, Armenian has spent most of its history in the Anatolian area, and it should be Anatolian in areal characteristics. Greek is historically, adjacent to the Anatolian languages. It belongs in the same “south central” square of the Indo-European map. The loss of initial R parallels Hittite/Luwian and would perhaps indicate that the Greeks crossed the Aegean from the east or that the peoples who lived on the Aegean before the Greeks had the same phonology as the people of Anatolia, so the Hurrians, Urartians, and so on. All this has a bearing on a well-known theory whereby IE was found in Anatolia – maybe even the Konya Plain – 7000 years ago and spread through Europe with the first Neolithic farmers, being carried in fact by the same humans, who gradually spread out taking farming skills with them. This does not fit very well with the Anatolian IE languages having come into the region from outside, evidently from the Balkans and probably originally from north of the Black Sea. Nor does it fit with the Anatolian group having the most degraded (! or most evolved/ innovated, works either way) version of the original language – which is preserved so faithfully in Lithuanian and Vedic. The “Neolithic = Indo-European” theory is in deep trouble.
Beekes (again) rejects this theory, pointing out that the slow expansion model would imply a long shared distinctive development of Celtic and Germanic, as adjacent language groups in Western Europe. In fact they have no shared history that we know of. The pattern of the IE families is compatible with a “yeast bubbles in bread” pattern, where pastoral groups spread rapidly and opportunistically through a densely populated peasant landscape, settling mainly where the inhabitants were few or the terrain was very suited to pastoralism. They leapfrogged opposition. So the success of the IE speakers as mobile invaders was also the catastrophe of the IE speech community, which broke up into widely separated enclaves, covering a huge diameter but also parted from each other by the peasant regions which had been bypassed and not swamped.
Renfrew’s theory emphasises slow pace, steadiness, continuity, even tranquillity. This process would have given a dialect continuum within Europe and Anatolia, but since we have gaping gaps between the language families we need rather to explain the discontinuities. India may offer a dialect continuum and may have been Aryanised through a different process. The shatter lines between the “families” may reflect the gaps between the original patches of intrusive steppe pastoralists in the early and mid-3rd millennium BC. Some areas are more suited to herding than others. What we seem to see is the farmer languages disappearing to leave an IE sea. This process is unexplored – those languages disappeared and have no history at all. We know about large “islands” of unrelated speech – Basque, Iberian, Etruscan.
The first written Indo-European language is found where writing already was and so where there was a dense farming population, rich enough to support a state superstructure and a profession of clerks. So it was fore-ordained that the first records of IE would capture a language which had not replaced the local population, numerous and thriving, but been absorbed by them in massive bilingualism, and so damaged. Its original structures had been extensively remodelled, metabolised, broken down. Hittite is a not a good source for the archaic stage of Indo-European. We don’t have a sociology of how Hittite died out, or indeed how Luwian, a related language which seems to have replaced it, died out itself. There was a social dynamic in Anatolia, as in Europe.
I would like to know more details about the fate of the legacy r- words. Did they acquire glide vowels? Were they replaced by local words? Or by near-synonyms? What is the replacement pattern? The scholars were right to say that Hittite came from outside. I just hadn’t known the reasons.
Sunday 16 July 2017
Angel Exhaust legacy issues
Ever worried that you have missed an issue of Angel Exhaust? This is a sheaf of fliers for issues of Angel Exhaust still available for sale.
***
Angel Exhaust 22
The false, heroic head he once lifted above more or less the same crowd as that to which Captain Fuller and the anarchist Aldred proclaimed the new aeon has become cumbersome, monstrous. In the dim stale light it resembles nothing so much as the skull of a horse, but is sealed, lacking all seven apertures.
At length he becomes too irked by my pursuit to ignore it further and makes as if to summon me, but no power resides in him now, and when he swivels to claw at my shirt, the effect is merely comic. So he turns and brushes his fingers against the hedge wall afresh, flustered.
AE is overwhelmed by the wealth of material in this issue. First, we print book V of ‘The Memory of the Drift’ in its entirety. Next, a David Chaloner memorial. By singular good fortune AE has been given access to the archive of his letters. We chose a time of dialogue with John Hall. David's poems take place in a 'permanent present' and these remarkable letters are meant to recover a 'deep present', the Now in which the poems were written. This feature presents a moment of time preserved like a crystal, a formative moment for poetry. It is 1969 and: & just abt to begin Jeremy Prynne's book The White Stones have you seen that at all What have you been doing since our last letter & where are your poems appearing I've not seen any for such a long time Did you see the last copy of collection & the last resuscitator I thought you'd've been there
Then, we open the window on a new generation with an anthology of Ninerrors poems. This field is so new that it can't be described. The concept is ‘Twin Peaks': two moments, one of around 1969 and one of 2010. There is a 'continuity of the unknown' and the course of brilliant innovation which David was embarking on resembles the course of the poets around Freaklung.
as the freedom of information act failed to demand a
supposed ‘transparency of normal speech’, it turns upon
us to decolonize rhetoric & the wider sphere of language,
syllable-by-syllable. we are to start with ‘radical’, ‘fairness’,
‘social’ & it’s derivatives, ‘rhetoric’, ‘free’ & words used in
justifying a notion;
there is now animal fat in the extinguishers; we have begun to
bribe refuse collections;
we have deduced the frequencies of sound that enact violence
on private property, we
are counting heads
Maybe the comparison allows us a sense of deep time, the experience at levels beneath consciousness of a ‘group identity’, always dissolving in time but sustained by the linguistic or symbolic net of shared poems.
The third strand is what magazines are signed up for, a display of new poems and some information.
Poems by: Colin Simms, Rhys Trimble, Paul Holman, John Powell Ward, Graham Hartill, David Barnett, Harry Godwin, Nat Raha, Alan Hay, RTA Parker, SJ Fowler, Linus Slug, Gareth Durasow, Stephen Emmerson, Owain Lee, James Harvey, Michael Zand.
When we subtract the certain and the possible, there is the new poetry. What will they think of the poetry of the recent past?
160 pp., cost £7.00 including postage. cheques payable to Andrew Duncan. at 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX.
***
Angel Exhaust 20 ‘You just rang Anne Widecombe?’– out now
material whose polished
surface becomes you
its character and interpretation
an exact technology
of tribal celebration
nut-brown warp thread
gold and indigo weave
you speak a tongue made
fluent by its origin
sensitised to the composition
of tectonic plates
(David Chaloner, from Void Heaven)
Awesome new poetry by John Kinsella, Kelvin Corcoran, Jeff Hilson, DS Marriott, John Goodby, David Chaloner, Jesse Glass, Rita Dahl, Jason Wilkinson, Michael Haslam, Charles Bainbridge, Chris Brownsword, Colin Simms, Out To Lunch, Carrie Etter. 144 pp.
PLUS the results of a survey where contemporary poets explain what’s wrong with the poetry scene. A fearless analytical exposé of the moral gutter where the sleaze flows night and day. We toss those bastards into the big wok of repentance. We rake the muck and rack the mopes. It’s twilight for the deep pigs.
Q So are you going to put an end to all this nonsense in poetry? To abstract ideas, subjectivity, experiment, modernity, complicated technique, radical politics, all those up in the air things which the ordinary housewife doesn’t understand?
A Essentially, no.
In an intense options auction conducted by satellite, Charles Bainbridge and Andrew Duncan won control of the “Charles Bainbridge” and “Andrew Duncan” contracts and so Angel Exhaust is still being run by the original editors applying the same artistic policy based on beauty and tranquillity. The only magazine which has used three five-year silences to improve the structure of the literary field. Buy Angel Exhaust and say goodbye to those sub-prime cultural investments.
Price: £7.00 including postage. Address: 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX. Cheques payable to ‘Andrew Duncan’ please.
This issue is being published late as a tribute to Britney Spears. The missing years “are part of the magnitude of what I’ve become.”
ANGEL
EXHAUST 23
PERIMETER
THRALLS
In
issue 23 we run poems by Iain Sinclair, John Hartley Williams, Colin
Simms, Kevin Nolan, Anthony Mellors, Ken Fox, AND Luke Roberts.
As
the eerie carmine light of burning shopping malls revealed a new
subjective landscape, John Hartley Williams was so transfixed by the
uprising of 2011 that he translated the Illuminations
of Rimbaud in a post-modern and thoroughly convulsive manner,
turning the paint splashes into a labyrinthine clarity which we
present here in its entirety. We include the whole of Paintsplashes.
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.” it
was an illuminated moment:
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.
Elsewhere
in an urban scenography corroded by money and metaphors, Iain
Sinclair was moved to recover three unpublished books of his great
work Suicide
Bridge,
of which we present two at their full extent. The original scheme, of
presenting the new adventures of all twelve of the Sons of Albion,
emerges now in its full infamy. Was Blake writing like HP Lovecraft
or was Lovecraft writing like Blake?
We
have a long essay by Simon Jenner on John Goodby, an interview with
Gavin Selerie and some poems to celebrate his selected poems
(‘Music's Duel'). Also reviews of 'Certain Prose of the English
Intelligencer',
of 'Blake in Cambridge' by Out To Lunch, and of forgotten jazz
poet's Pete Brown's memoirs. An editorial on naive poetry & naive
art identifies the strand of primitivism and naive subjectivity in
the 'modern' wing of poetry.
The
reforgotten return in altered form, and the 40-year career of Paul
Green can now emerge into the daylight via James Keery’s
rich synthesis of science, cabbala, and theology, in disengaging the
precious minerals of Communicator.
Is this Peterborough’s
laconic counterpole to Alan Moore’s
glyconic prevalence in Northampton?
Hardly
less heroically, Angel Exhaust hurls itself into the Somerset-like
flood plain of 7 anthologies of young poets, containing at least
literally the call-sign of 194 names. A slow camera picking out basic
features of a new landscape. What is the nature of the new era? Have
another ten years of history surfaced from the silty waters like a
gleaming causeway? Has the old guard met its Dien Bien Phu? Has
anyone under 40 even heard of the Underground? Do we know what’s
going on? Surf’s
up, everybody!
Plus
the usual forays into Gaelic folklore and Egyptology.
200
pages
Price
£6. Orders to 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX. cheques payable to Andrew Duncan, please.***
Angel Exhaust 22
The false, heroic head he once lifted above more or less the same crowd as that to which Captain Fuller and the anarchist Aldred proclaimed the new aeon has become cumbersome, monstrous. In the dim stale light it resembles nothing so much as the skull of a horse, but is sealed, lacking all seven apertures.
At length he becomes too irked by my pursuit to ignore it further and makes as if to summon me, but no power resides in him now, and when he swivels to claw at my shirt, the effect is merely comic. So he turns and brushes his fingers against the hedge wall afresh, flustered.
AE is overwhelmed by the wealth of material in this issue. First, we print book V of ‘The Memory of the Drift’ in its entirety. Next, a David Chaloner memorial. By singular good fortune AE has been given access to the archive of his letters. We chose a time of dialogue with John Hall. David's poems take place in a 'permanent present' and these remarkable letters are meant to recover a 'deep present', the Now in which the poems were written. This feature presents a moment of time preserved like a crystal, a formative moment for poetry. It is 1969 and: & just abt to begin Jeremy Prynne's book The White Stones have you seen that at all What have you been doing since our last letter & where are your poems appearing I've not seen any for such a long time Did you see the last copy of collection & the last resuscitator I thought you'd've been there
Then, we open the window on a new generation with an anthology of Ninerrors poems. This field is so new that it can't be described. The concept is ‘Twin Peaks': two moments, one of around 1969 and one of 2010. There is a 'continuity of the unknown' and the course of brilliant innovation which David was embarking on resembles the course of the poets around Freaklung.
as the freedom of information act failed to demand a
supposed ‘transparency of normal speech’, it turns upon
us to decolonize rhetoric & the wider sphere of language,
syllable-by-syllable. we are to start with ‘radical’, ‘fairness’,
‘social’ & it’s derivatives, ‘rhetoric’, ‘free’ & words used in
justifying a notion;
there is now animal fat in the extinguishers; we have begun to
bribe refuse collections;
we have deduced the frequencies of sound that enact violence
on private property, we
are counting heads
Maybe the comparison allows us a sense of deep time, the experience at levels beneath consciousness of a ‘group identity’, always dissolving in time but sustained by the linguistic or symbolic net of shared poems.
The third strand is what magazines are signed up for, a display of new poems and some information.
Poems by: Colin Simms, Rhys Trimble, Paul Holman, John Powell Ward, Graham Hartill, David Barnett, Harry Godwin, Nat Raha, Alan Hay, RTA Parker, SJ Fowler, Linus Slug, Gareth Durasow, Stephen Emmerson, Owain Lee, James Harvey, Michael Zand.
When we subtract the certain and the possible, there is the new poetry. What will they think of the poetry of the recent past?
160 pp., cost £7.00 including postage. cheques payable to Andrew Duncan. at 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX.
***
Angel Exhaust 20 ‘You just rang Anne Widecombe?’– out now
material whose polished
surface becomes you
its character and interpretation
an exact technology
of tribal celebration
nut-brown warp thread
gold and indigo weave
you speak a tongue made
fluent by its origin
sensitised to the composition
of tectonic plates
(David Chaloner, from Void Heaven)
Awesome new poetry by John Kinsella, Kelvin Corcoran, Jeff Hilson, DS Marriott, John Goodby, David Chaloner, Jesse Glass, Rita Dahl, Jason Wilkinson, Michael Haslam, Charles Bainbridge, Chris Brownsword, Colin Simms, Out To Lunch, Carrie Etter. 144 pp.
PLUS the results of a survey where contemporary poets explain what’s wrong with the poetry scene. A fearless analytical exposé of the moral gutter where the sleaze flows night and day. We toss those bastards into the big wok of repentance. We rake the muck and rack the mopes. It’s twilight for the deep pigs.
Q So are you going to put an end to all this nonsense in poetry? To abstract ideas, subjectivity, experiment, modernity, complicated technique, radical politics, all those up in the air things which the ordinary housewife doesn’t understand?
A Essentially, no.
In an intense options auction conducted by satellite, Charles Bainbridge and Andrew Duncan won control of the “Charles Bainbridge” and “Andrew Duncan” contracts and so Angel Exhaust is still being run by the original editors applying the same artistic policy based on beauty and tranquillity. The only magazine which has used three five-year silences to improve the structure of the literary field. Buy Angel Exhaust and say goodbye to those sub-prime cultural investments.
Price: £7.00 including postage. Address: 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts NG5 7GX. Cheques payable to ‘Andrew Duncan’ please.
This issue is being published late as a tribute to Britney Spears. The missing years “are part of the magnitude of what I’ve become.”
***
ANGEL EXHAUST NINETEEN: INVEST IN YOUR ARCH-ENEMY
*pronounce: devastate your Aunt Jeremy
available now
poetry by:
Joseph Macleod Adrian Clarke Alison Croggon
Kevin Nolan Peter Philpott Peter Manson
Chris Brownsword Paul Holman Jesse Glass
Kelvin Corcoran Philip Jenkins Brian Hardie
David Chaloner Wayne Clements John Muckle
Giles Goodland Ralph Hawkins
Colin Simms Harry Gilonis
Andrew Duncan Marianne Morris Elizabeth James
Editors: Charles Bainbridge Andrew Duncan
Methan Beerlight, postmodern viral marketing consultant, talks to Manly Bannister, Angel Exhaust's Head of Ideology, about product conformance issues for AE 19.
Methan: So why is there no blurb?
Manly: We favour calm and serenity. Our contributors look on public image as like having a 13-year old version of yourself following you around talking egocentric nonsense.
Methan: Why did the last issue take 6 years to produce?
Manly: We had trouble finding a cafe to meet in.
Methan: Why is it called Invest in your arch-enemy?
Manly: We believe the unity of the poetry world is more important than quarrels about fine points of verse regulation. If you can't kill your neighbours, you have to intermarry with them.
Methan: Did you call for the government to withdraw grants from magazines which published reviews not totally favourable to the poets you publish?
Manly: No, that was someone else.
Methan: Why is it called Devastate your Aunt Jeremy?
Manly: It was a misunderstanding between the two editors.
Methan: Could we just describe the individual poets?
Manly: Let me go as far as I can. Corcoran is like Corcoran. Glass is like Glass. Holman is like Holman. Holman is more like Holman than like Morris. Poets like Philpott and Nolan are too overwhelming and intricate to be described in a few words.
Methan: I've never heard of them.
Manly: Maybe you should read Angel Exhaust.
ANGEL EXHAUST 19 available for £7 from 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, NG5 7GX
Cheques payable to "Andrew Duncan", please
***
think these issues were 2005 to 2015 roughly
The magazine started in 1977 and was founded by Adrian Clarke and Steven Pereira. The title refers to a shop near The Angel, Islington, which sold exhaust pipes. The goal of the magazine is an England where there are more poetry bookshops than tattoo parlours.
Perimeter Thralls are the raised shelf around the edge of the cellar of the traditional Nottingham pub, for holding barrels.
think these issues were 2005 to 2015 roughly
The magazine started in 1977 and was founded by Adrian Clarke and Steven Pereira. The title refers to a shop near The Angel, Islington, which sold exhaust pipes. The goal of the magazine is an England where there are more poetry bookshops than tattoo parlours.
Perimeter Thralls are the raised shelf around the edge of the cellar of the traditional Nottingham pub, for holding barrels.
Sunday 25 June 2017
Tuesday 20 June 2017
Suicide Bridge - list of sources
Moon Burial: A Skeleton Key to Iain Sinclair's Suicide Bridge
Intro. I wrote about Suicide Bridge in about 1994 (see Origins of the Underground, published 2006) and the build-up to that involved looking at a lot of esoteric and fringe literature. That is really where I got going on 'psychoceramics', the scientific study of crack-pots. In 2013 I wrote a review of the second edition of SB, with the new material, which made me think how bad my first analysis was. This is really a very complicated text and describing it takes a long time. There wasn’t room for a source analysis in the review, but afterwards I thought that tracking down some (most?) of the sources would be useful, even if the use cannot be named. This is not a commentary although it supports the two short commentaries I have already published. To sum up, Sinclair has marshalled a lot of freaks in the way that a horror director might marshal magi, mermaids, and mad scientists. You don't need to read the crackpot stuff in order to enjoy Sinclair's great work. The concept of SB is to write adventures for each of the Twelve Sons of Albion named by Blake, and it is a follow-up to Blake. The differences between Sinclair and Blake are vast, but still this was the starting point.
The use of a list of this kind is mainly to allow conversations in the pub, where genuine leisure prevails. (Thanks to John C. Kozak for finding some of the more obscure references.)
Secondarily, I suppose, to neutralise certain ideas – that is, to show that there is no political or even occult system behind Sinclair’s 70s books, rather that he uses pulp mythology in the way someone scripting a horror film might use it. SB is not a documentary or an attack on the ruling class. Its sources are, for the most part, junk and pulp. He does not believe in the truth of the esoteric sources in the way, for example, that Raine came to believe that Neoplatonism was the truth of the universe. He is not much interested in truth (not in Suicide Bridge, anyway).
-Andrew Duncan
Page numbers are for the 2013 edition from Skylight Press. William Blake is quoted throughout so the many quotes are not separately identified.
p.9 quote from Michael Ondaatje book as listed in the text
p.16 quote from Kenneth Grant book as listed in the text
p.16 'causality breakdowns' – quote from Hawking book as cited in the text on pp. 18-20. The black hole material may signify that the “suicide bridge” is through a black hole: you can go back in time at the expense of disintegration to the sub-particle scale. p.160 “his birth is out of willed suicide”. The link with “suicide bridge” in Archway is probably not there.
p. 18 “MD” – this is Marcel Duchamp and the reference is to both "nude descending a staircase" and "The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even". The successive steps of the stair which Duchamp's schematic nude descends correspond to the levels of the gravity well in the black hole. The element common to both works is time, of which movement is an aspect.
p.18 'orbit of the Killing vector: a vector defined by Wilhelm Killing. >>Killing tensor fields are symmetric tensor fields T such that the trace-free part of the symmetrization of T vanishes. Examples of manifolds with Killing tensors include the rotating black hole and the FRW cosmology.<<
- this is part of the black hole imagery
p. 19 “pale lunar figures” – Rimbaud, Nocturne Vulgaire?
p.23 'the material world and finite time' didn't get exact source but cf. “Two theologians (Zātspram 3.23 and the author of the Škand Gumānīg Vičār 4.63-79 [ed. J. de Menasce, Fribourg en Suisse, 1945]) have seen clearly that the world was created by Ohrmazd as a trap and snare for Ahriman: “By his very struggles in the trap and snare the beast’s power is brought to nothing.”
This is a Zoroastrian doctrine which explains the existence of the material world in terms of a trap to lure the evil principle out into materiality. >>Ohrmazd's strategy is that the good creation will act as a trap to capture Ahriman and neutralize his evil. Ahriman being aggressive, rash and ignorant (he "does not know the final outcome"), as against the thoughtful and prudent Ohrmazd, certainly the ultimate result will be the triumph of good; undoubtedly creation will be restored.<< - Wikipedia on Shikand-gumanig_Vizar, 9th C text. (variant for Vičār)
a translation of the text is in Mary Boyce's Textual Sources for the study of Zoroastrianism, p.103.
MD played cricket against the Parsees' team, in 1888. The Parsees won.
p.21 Richard Cavendish – as cited in detail in the text
p.21 “death posture” – theories of Austin Osman Spare as written up by Kenneth Grant.
“The illustration entitled The Death Posture, which forms the frontispiece to The Book of Pleasure, contains, in an allegorical form, the whole doctrine of the New Sexuality.”
That Book was 1913. The exegesis is probably from Cults of the Shadow by Grant.
p. 30 “aggression can be generated...” unidentified.
p.34 Thomas Browne letter to a friend:
And therefore I could not but take notice how his Female Friends were irrationally curious so strictly to examine his Dreams, and in this low state to hope for the Fantasms of Health. He was now past the healthful Dreams of the Sun, Moon, and Stars in their Clarity and proper Courses. 'Twas too late to dream of Flying, of Limpid Fountains, Smooth Waters, white Vestments, and fruitful green Trees, which are the Visions of healthful Sleeps, and at good distance from the Grave.
Most of the text of the Letter is incorporated in the text of Christian Morals.
So could be either?
p. 29 contracting into worms:
Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect integrity,
At will Contracting into Worms or Expanding into Gods,
And then, behold! what are these Ulro Visions.
-Blake
34 "evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is ..."
-Blake
p. 36 Spicer- American poet, details in the text
p. 38 Wilson – Colin Wilson
p. 39 “O Anubis” (and) “The four altars”
-from the Cantos, no. 92. Farfalla in tempesta is butterfly in the storm.
p.42 Guirdham: Arthur Guirdham, author of books on the Cathars and resurrection
p. 47 "leagued himself": “our brother Albion is sick to death.
He hath leagued himself with robbers! he hath studied the arts
Of unbelief!
- Blake, Jerusalem
p.41 “too small to hold its blood” – Keats, The Fall of Hyperion
p.48 two Egyptian texts. “Ah helpless one” is Coffin text 74 (“The Revival of Osiris (Resurrection)” as printed by Rundle Clark in Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. Translation probably by Adriaan de Buck.
I am Atum...
is also translated by Clark, same book page 80, credits unclear but seems to be the Coffin Texts, as translated in Coffin texts, (vol. 4, Spell 321), edited A. de Buck (Chicago, 1939). This cluster of texts was a legacy of the Pyramid Texts, i.e. they are versions of the same amassment of spells and both are written on vessels of the dead (and designed to lead the soul through death).
P. 50 “the spiritual in all”: unidentified but as it does not make sense it may be Charles Olson.
“Whiteheads simplest statement”.
p.50 “taozer babbling of the elixir” - Pound, Canto 55 or thereabouts. silly name for a Taoist.
P 54 “they went without shields” - Eliade, From Primitives to Zen, p.294 – extract from the Volsunga Saga describing berserkir.
55 “London stone” <<London Stone was a well-known landmark in medieval London, and when in 1450 Jack Cade, leader of a rebellion against the corrupt government of Henry VI, entered the city with his men, he struck his sword on London Stone and claimed to be "Lord of this city". Contemporary accounts give no clue as to Cade's motivation, or how his followers or the Londoners would have interpreted his action. There is nothing to suggest he was carrying out a traditional ceremony or custom.<<
- probable match
>>Upon entering London, Cade stopped at the London Stone. He struck the stone with his sword and declared himself Lord Mayor in the traditional manner. By striking the stone, Cade had symbolically reclaimed the country for the Mortimers to whom he claimed to be related. (Not a likely explanation.) <<
55 “peachy clotted tide of sound” - Wyndham Lewis, BLAST 1, 1914
56 'in self hood' – Blake
p.61 Casualty Report: book, Robert Soma, 1971
p. 66 quote from The Daily Telegraph, date unknown
p. 70 “oh my grief” (=mo chreach) – Synge, Playboy of the Western World
73 the moon in a hood story. This is printed as “The Buried Moon” in More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs. The match is not identical so Sinclair may be using a variant.
>>so off he went; spent and gasping, and stumbling and sobbing with joy, flying for his life out of the terrible bogs. Then it came over the Moon she would main like to go with him. <<
Jacobs' source was: “Mrs Balfour's 'Legends of the Lincolnshire Cars' in Folk-Lore, ii, somewhat abridged and the dialect removed. The story was derived from a little girl named Bratton, who declared she had heard it from her 'grannie'. Mrs Balfour thinks the girl's own weird imagination had much to do with framing the detail"
Theme parallels the “buried sun” described at page 14. Car is a sort of swamp, not a motor-car: "the Lincolnshire Carrs (or Cars in her spelling), the wetlands of north Lincolnshire that lie between Lincoln Edge and the Wolds." According to Maureen James, "The excessive use of opium within the Carrs (and other malaria afflicted parts of Britain) may also have contributed to the inclusion of some of the darker elements within the tales."
81 “shat into the plastic bag” - Kray story from Pearson, The profession of violence?
p.84 Chambers: from Guide to London, the Secret City, Michael Chambers, published by Ocean Books, 1974.
p. 81 Jack Spicer – US poet, exact source not identified.
p. 90 “in breaking traditional ties” - unidentified but probably Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, or a related text. Could be Jung's 1959 essay on Flying Saucers.
p. 92 Ixtab as goddess of suicide
source unidentified."Although Ix Tab is not recognized as a deity in Maya scholarship today, her origins can be found in the archaeological knowledge produced by early Mayanists such as Paul Schellhas and in the contributions of ethnohistorians such as Alfred M. Tozzer“.
p.97 “She has to...” Ben Bradlee (of Newsweek) describing Joseph Kennedy post-stroke. In Conversations with Kennedy.
“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946.... We went out on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.”
: Source: character Stephen Rojack, reminiscing in Ch. 1 of An American Dream (1965), novel by N Mailer.
p. 99 “Men are most free...” “Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. (chapter 'spirit of place')
p. 100 Ludvig Prinn - De vermis mysteriis
>>The tome first appeared in Bloch's short story "The Shambler from the Stars" (1935), in which a character reads a passage from the book and accidentally summons an extradimensional horror. <<
So Robert Bloch, working in the world of HP Lovecraft (for a magazine edited by Lovecraft). Title means “On the mysteries of the worm”.
101 from The Gemstone File by Bruce Roberts, a fake conspiracy theory/ secret government text, not now widely regarded as being the key to modern politics. Roberts supposedly invented a kind of synthetic ruby (hence gemstone). It was never a file.
103 Howard Hughes. Source is James Phelan, Hughes the Hidden Years.
p.103 Dorn: Ed Dorn, The whole of the material on Howard Hughes is a tribute to Dorn.
104 "heroin from the golden triangle" – from The Gemstone File: “The dope trade routes are: Golden Triangle to Taiwan to San Francisco. Heroin coming from the Golden Triangle was sometimes smuggled into S.F. in the bodies of American G.I.s who died in battle in Vietnam. One body can hold up to 40 pounds of heroin, crammed in where the guts would be.
Some dope gets pressed into dinner plates, and painted with pretty patterns. One dope bust in S.F. alone yielded $6 billion in heroin "china plates" - the largest dope bust in history - quickly and completely hushed up by the S.F. press Mafia. The dope sat in the S.F.P.D. for a while, then was removed by FBI men, and probably sent on its way - to American veins.
All this dope processing and shipping is controlled and supervised by the Mafia, for the Mafia. Dope arrests and murders are aimed at independent pushers and maverick peddlers and smugglers who are competing with, or holding out on, the Mafia. While Nixon was conducting his noisy campaign against dope smuggling across the Mexican border, his dope officer in charge of protecting the Mafia dope trade was E. Howard Hunt.
Lots of heroin gets process in a Pepsi Cola factory in Laos.”
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_sociopol_gemstone.htm
The Skeleton Key is attributed to Stephanie Caruana “then a contributing editor at Playgirl magazine." 'Gemstone' is a grade E source even among conspiracy texts. The author claimed that intelligence services could infect people with cancer, and one suggestion is that brain cancer was responsible for his delusions. The Key is a help.
p.105 “Relieving himself...” - James Phelan
109 Philostratus from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a wonder-worker. Also at p.38
109 'those long vistas sacred catacombs where mighty minds'...
'darkness before and dangers voice behind'
- from The Prelude Book 3
Yea,
our blind Poet, who in his later day,
Stood
almost single; uttering odious truth--
Darkness
before,
and danger's voice behind,
Soul
awful--if
the earth has ever lodged
An
awful
[...]
The
thirst of living praise,
Fit
reverence
for the glorious Dead, the sight
Of
those
long vistas, sacred catacombs,
Where
mighty
'minds' lie visibly entombed,
Have
often
stirred the heart of youth, and bred
A
fervent
love of rigorous discipline.--
Alas!
such
high emotion touched not me.
Also Book Three.
111 'looking forth by light' also The Prelude
small quotes probably also The Prelude
“punish thee in thy members “– not identified
114
felt Incumbencies more awful, visitings Of
the
Upholder of the tranquil soul, ...
-
more Prelude
p.112 'an ear that could measure' :
from Milton, Apology for Smectymnuus. “"For this good hap I had from a carefull education to be inur'd and season'd betimes with the best and elegantest authors of the teamed tongues, and thereto brought an eare that could measure a just cadence, and scan without articulating; rather nice and humorous in what was tolerable, then patient to read every drawling versifier.”
p. 112 "stylistic situation on the world periphery": unidentified
114 “a small chamber hung with dusty green”:
Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses – as Wood thought that Milton had been given an MA by Oxford. he cites a certain Richardson:"An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire (Dr. Wright) found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green,
sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black, pale but not cadaverous,
his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk stones."
p.119 “Holmes at Caius” Unidentified. Says freshman so must be an American writer.
119 “devildom first poetising afterwards”:
The book is Goblin Tales of Lancashire, Author:James Bowker, and the tale is THE
UNBIDDEN GUEST:
'Jeremiah,' said this personage, 'devildom first and poetising afterwards.' There was an unpleasant tone of banter in this speech, which did not seem in ...'
This contains a concealed joke: “In a little lane leading from the town of Clitheroe there once lived a noted ‘cunning man’ to whom all sorts of applications were made, not only by the residents, but also by people from distant places, for the fame of the wizard had spread over the whole country side. If a theft was committed, at once the services of 'Owd Jeremy' were enlisted”
- the tale is about the Devil and a 'cunning man' named Jeremy. The Devil asks for his soul but offers in return “'Twenty-two years of such success as thou hast not even dared to dream of! No opposition--no exposure to thy miserable dupes’ readily answered Satan.” This is a mythical account of the ascent of Prynne.
120 Pennick, Mysteries : from The mysteries of King's College Chapel, by Nigel Pennick
(Wellingborough : Thorsons, 1978) The link between Gothic architecture and DNA is already made by Janet and Colin Bord, Mysteries of Britain, p.149 "A vertical line of lozenge shapes with their points touching is a symbol of etheric energy, and has been likened to the double helix of the DNA molecule, a basic carrier for subtle life energies." This is in Durham cathedral.
120: peiste. This is an Irish Gaelic word meaning “beast”, usually a monster, Latin bestia. But in Modern Gaelic it just means “worm” and this is the sense here because it runs “worm drives down into the buried mystery/ fenland peiste”.
p.120 "From out his secret Altar toucht with hallow'd fire". The Hymn. I. It was the Winter wilde, While the Heav'n-born-childe, [ 30 ] All meanly wrapt in the rude manger" ... the phrase appears in “On the morning of christs nativity” but the full quote is in so it's The Reason of Church Government, Book 2:
>> "not to be raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist or the trencher-fury of a rhyming parasite - nor to be obtained by invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughter, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."
121 'Land's end... Crows an Wra'... a Ley line. Crows an wra is Cornish for "cross of the hag", dictionary form gwragh.
122 "The Vegetative Universe, opens like a flower from the Earths center:
In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell"
- Blake, 'Milton'
p. 123 “Plain called Ease”: Then CHRISTIAN and HOPEFUL, outwent them again, and went till they came at a delicate plain, called Ease, where they went with much content; but that plain . - Pilgrim's progress
127 “beware” - quote from Prynne lecture as credited.
p. 128 Had & hands: "Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark /Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off, In his own temple..." Paradise Lost, book 1, referring to Dagon, the fish god. Dagon also starred in some HP Lovecraft stories. In PL, the Ark destroyed the idol of Dagon when it was placed in Dagon's temple
p 131 “First Reggie...” Kray story, maybe John Pearson again?
p.133 shabti: tomb servant for a dead person (Egyptian)
137 Bladud: cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth
"before I was..." one of the Taliesin poems? in the Llyfr Taliesin.
“I have been a multitude of shapes,
Before I assumed a consistent form” - one version of lines in "Cad Godeu": Bum y lliaws rith/ cyn bum disgyfrith. This does not mean “I was everywhere” but it may be behind Sinclair's text. Oh well. (= I was a host of shapes/ before I was dissolved)
139 “Chief ensign of druids was a ring”
from John Wood the Elder A Description of Bath, 1765
This was the reason for designing a Circus in Bath – echoes ring of stones, Stonehenge.
>>First though must come the story of Bladud, the founding father of Bath, an exiled prince because of his leprosy, whilst out herding pigs one day happened to notice that the pigs loved to roll in the hot muds of the spring. Bladud also tried this and was cured, and then went on to found the city of Bath on the spot. Our mythical King Bladud is given a date of 480 BC, and as Wood saw it Bladud created the city about the size of Babylon. Bladud was a descendant of a Trojan prince, a high priest of Apollo and a ‘Master of Pythagoras’. Therefore this high priest was a devotee of the heliocentric systems of the planets from which the Pythagorean system was derived. That the Works of Stantondriu (Stanton Drew) form a perfect model of the Pythagorean system of the planetary world<<
So Wood was a pioneer pyramidiot.
p. 139 "as big as god but not so wicked" - unidentified
140 “I copulated with my fist” – Rundle Clark, p.44, source not very clear. But it may be Coffin texts, vol 3, 334j. Edited A de Buck (Chicago, 1939)
"venomous vegetables": Some commendably affected plantations of venomous vegetables, some confined their delights unto single plants, and Cato seemed to dote upon cabbage
-Sir Thomas Browne, the Epistle Dedicatory to The Garden of Cyrus
141 “passion to face the west” : D H Lawrence, letter to Gordon Campbell 20/12/1914
143 fetherham:
John Hardyng, Chronicle (1470 version). An obscure text but presumably quoted by some author on the Bladud legend. Fetherham is a cloak of feathers or pair of wings. Hardyng says the Temple Apolyne is now St Paul's.
145 “cave of the Pythian God”: the temple of Apollo, again, but this time in Delphi. Presumably Wood's Description of Bath.
>>However according to Pausanias, Pteras, the founder of the second temple of Apollo at Delphi, gave its name to the city.<<
>>They say that the most ancient temple of Apollo was made of laurel, the branches of which were brought from the laurel in Tempe. This temple must have had the form of a hut. The Delphians say that the second temple was made by bees from bees-wax and feathers, and that it was sent to the Hyperboreans by Apollo. [10] Another story is current, that the temple was set up by a Delphian, whose name was Pteras, and so the temple received its name from the builder. After this Pteras, so they say, the city in Crete was named, with the addition of a letter, Apterei. The story that the temple was built of the fern (pteris) that grows on the mountains, by interweaving fresh stalks of it, I do not accept at all. [ << - shortened quote from Pausanias. Pteras looks like the word for "flying" so would match with Bladud.
we get a lot about bees, ants, and flies in this book
146 “curve line”:
unidentified but sounds like a ley writer. Camulodunum is Colchester.
148 EF Stringer: >>star people (also known as starseeds) is a New Age belief and fringe theory. Introduced by Brad Steiger in his 1976 book "Gods of Aquarius", it argues that people originated as extraterrestrials and arrived on Earth through birth or as a walk-in to an existing human body. It is a variant of the belief in alien-human hybrids. The term "star people" was taken from an existing Native American spiritual concept.<<
I could not locate an EF Stringer.
149 “contour values...”
unidentified but it describes a graphic representation of anomalous magnetic force readings. Earth magnetism is mentioned in SB so this could (wild guess) be a text on magnetic anomalies from Flying Saucer Review (ed. Charles Bowen). Flying saucers used “magnetic propulsion” in Ray Harryhausen's 1956 film “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers”.
151 “degradation destruction revocation infamy”
>>A disdainful man looks after two retreating and dejected figures. Their swords lie upon the ground. He carries two others on his left shoulder, and a third sword is in his right hand, point to earth. He is the master in possession of the field. Divinatory Meanings: Degradation, destruction, revocation, infamy, dishonour, loss, with the variants and analogues of these. Reversed: The same; burial and obsequies. <<
commentary on the 5 of Swords from a text on Tarot, by AE Waite. >>"The following year, a small guide by A.E. Waite entitled The Key to the Tarot was bundled with the cards, providing an overview of the traditions and history behind the cards, texts about interpretations, and extensive descriptions of their symbols." << - so 1911
153 “do not allow even an insect”
- unidentified (but an alchemist)
155 Namagiri:
from a Penguin hist of maths, check source (Hollingdale, makers of mathematics?)
The quote relates to Srinivasa Ramanujan 1887-1920
155 'Enemy of the Stars" 1914 Vorticist drama by Wyndham Lewis
156 tags are from HP Lovecraft
158 maths-insects
-from the same Penguin book?
159 “burst death's membrane through”
- Wyndham Lewis, Enemy of the Stars
165 “worthwhile to destroy myself”
unidentified
169 “Magic Door”
poem in instalments by hippy ruralist Chris Torrance
170 “dead go the way of the sun”
unidentified
170 vaginal vibrations
unidentified
about prophecy, possibly Crowleyite
172 “west is the body”
unidentified
172 "the snake path": the paths along the side of Glastonbury Tor were seen as the trail of a coiled dragon (by John Michell) and as the route of an initiatory maze-path by Geoffrey Russell (put into print by Geoffrey Ashe). >>According to a theory put forward by Geoffrey Russell, they are the principal remains of a maze: not in the sense of a puzzle, but in the sense of a long, twisting, devious approach to a centre - a labyrinth. Made in the remote past for ritual purposes, it spirals round the Tor seven times, and ends - or may be supposed to end - at the summit where the tower now stands.
It is argued further that the spiral is not a simple one, but a three-dimensional adaptation of a more complex pattern which is found in antiquity and in widely separated places<< (accessed from http://www.glastonburytor.org.uk/tor-maze.html) Ashe linked it back to a sacred mountain equivalent to Mount Meru. (see also Ashe, Avalonian Quest, 1982) Anyway, this is a hill at Glastonbury. Was it made by a sleeping dragon cuddling up? no.
177 “enjoyed the process of temptation”:
unidentified biography of John Cowper Powys
182 “Oppenheimer tasting sin”
unidentified but O is more likely to have said 'The physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.'' not clear he said this.
183 "limestone tape" - latent pointer to "The Stone Tape", 1972 TV play by Nigel Kneale, in which the stones of a house contain a "tape" of events they had seen
187 “ghost of a flea”: John Varley (1778-1842)
painter and friend of Blake. This quote is from a book on the zodiac.
188 Botches:
it is the plagues of Egypt, source text unidentified
“Botches and blains must all his flesh imboss.” -Milton
189 “bathing suits”
unidentified
193 “a country surrounded by water” - unidentified but is Britain seen from the point of view of an Amerindian.
194 Sign of the Angel, Lacock – this is a pub rather than a book. Lacock is a village near Bath. The pub building is 15th century. It is said to have a ghost. >>The inn is said to be haunted by the ghost of an elderly woman, who has been frequently seen over the past 15 years or so. She is believed to be one of the previous owners who just refuses to leave. A friendly soul by all accounts, who has been spotted several times by staff and diners patiently sitting at one of the tables in the lounge bar. <<
196 “Maldoror”
book by Lautreamont
196 'highest form of criticism':
"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”
Wilde, preface to Dorian Gray
list of component books
punk vortex x file
bone-muscle
victims
the older hidden powers; the secret minds
westering
brerton, the darkness
bowen, his journey
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