Silent
Rules – history of the project
(Fulfilling
the Silent Rules – another book about British poetry 1960-97 –
published by Shearsman in September 2018 – out now.)
2002-3.
I
was approached. Not by the editor but by someone she knew, who
described the kind of book they wanted. It was an American university
press which wanted to set up a London office and an English list.
They needed some titles. They don’t have to be nice to you. You
rush off and do the work anyway. The message – passed through
intermediaries – was that I had to write the whole book before
submitting a proposal. This was in June 2002.
I
was in year 10 of a long (uncontrolled?) project of writing books
about modern British
poetry and at year 10 I didn't have a book deal for any of the books.
The initial idea was to publish something in America. The design I
came up with was based on the idea that Americans have fixed ideas
about British poetry, implying that there are only a few poets active
and that there is a single
British
thing which all poets faithfully reproduce. So my concept was to give
rapid accounts of 100 books to show that all generalisations were
wrong and to list the assets which made the field significant and
irresistible. So this was the thesis. The time-span was 1960 to 1997
because that was the perimeter of my project. Because
it was meant to be a big-deal book, I felt I could ignore the prior
existence of Legends of
the Warring Clans and incorporated a dozen book reviews from ‘Legends’
into the text. (Legends
was internet-only and set up in 2003, I think.) I
didn't want to write the book. I felt I was over-committed to the
poetry project, in view of piles of unpublished books, and the lack
of rewards. I thought I was the natural victim, not being an academic
insider and having views which were not conservative and accepted. I
was probably going to get thrown out once the servants realised I was
there. But it composed itself spontaneously in my head. Writing it
down was hard, but all I had to do was write it down. So it wasn’t
voluntary. And so I ended up with a book. Of course when I had
written it the editor said she only wanted to see the contents page.
And said no after seeing the contents page. So there we were. This
was in 2003.
I
was irritated by the exchange with the publisher but the book was an
asset once written. By 2002 I wanted to get away from writing about
poetry. The writing
coincided with the build-up to publication of Failure of
Conservatism. No time to rewrite that because I was busy writing
'Silent Rules'. Various
other
arrangements
to publish the book fell through in a puzzling way. Time
went
by.
'Silent
Rules' does not have a thesis because the aim was to be the first
book that someone seriously interested in literature read about
modern British poetry. The strategy I followed was to evoke the
'whole spectrum', so going for many descriptions of very diverse
books, rather than picking a few stars or finding that one single
style was the 'solution'.
The
book does not mention chronology at all. This is because I had
already done the analysis of stylistic change in The Failure of
Conservatism.
The
focus was allover, in the overall design, the tip to tip quality.
This meant that any group of 100 high-quality books would do. I
began with a huge list of books and had great problems getting it
down to 80. I stuck at 120, that seemed just about right. Throwing
books out was a strain. The selection has no higher plan.
Sacheverell
Sitwell wrote a book called Splendours
and
Miseries,
which
I liked. It
refers to a French original, Splendeurs et chagrins militaires,
by
de
Vigny,
and at one point the pieces about 80 poets were headed “Chagrins
and splendours”. I used to refer to them as “Chagrins”. When
I was assembling the book for publication in 2009 I suddenly realised
I'd recycled all this stuff from
Legends
and
this wasn't right. The
count of Chagrins was no longer 100, I am not sure there were ever
100 sections written. I
have an old list with 75 titles and I
think it is now down to 65 individual books plus 15 anthologies.
Of
these 51 were in the oldest version. In
2009,
I also radically cut the book, so several chapters vanished
altogether. The design became much simpler. Any themes except the
major one of 'diversity' were removed. The selection was rebalanced
to include more mainstream poets and more feminists.
In
2017, Shearsman
agreed to take the book and I agreed with previous publishers that
this was the right way to go. In January 2017 I got excited by
reading back the book and devised a number of rewrites. I didn’t
actually incorporate these because the length couldn’t really be
extended and the book couldn’t be improved. It was more that I was
excited about it all.
This
is the final volume of the seven-volume set called Affluence,
Welfare, and Fine Words.
Why
has
the text not
been
updated
to
cover developments since 1997?
This would have meant throwing out material I had already written and
probably throwing out poets I was interested in. A printed book of
poems is itself frozen and so it is
rational to freeze prose that describes such a book. I
wanted to calm the past rather than calming the present. (In 2002,
1997 was “just before now”, not yet The Past.) This
leaves the other question of why the book is being published 15 years
after being written. The answer to that is obvious, the alternative
scene has almost no resources and it is a wonder if anything gets
published.
If
the book swelled up to 500 pages, nobody would be able to buy it. I
can see that people want to read about poetry after 1997, but I
couldn't add it to this volume without throwing away what I wrote
before. I prefer saturation of a predefined area – that is, the
period up to 1997. 'Silent
Rules' deals only with individual volumes and has no career surveys –
just as well, since almost all the poets have published prolifically
since 1997. The
reviews will no doubt go on about the halt line in 1997, but that
really wasn't up for negotiation. Anyway I think people are just too
territorial when it comes to the present. The poetry world is not
densely populated with dispassionate people. You are going to reach
much more acceptable conclusions if you are dealing with the 1960s or
1970s – people are more willing to listen. So is there some magic
line where the free-fire zone becomes the Past and ceases to be
territorial? I think so, and that is the purpose of writing this
series. The
scene is febrile and dissident, a steady and frozen view is a good
thing for it.
We
are now in year 26 of the project. Technically, I stopped years ago.
Maybe in 2005. 'Silent Rules' is the last part to come out. You can
ask why I needed to do a seventh book once six have already appeared.
I still want the function of “invalidating generalisations”. That
is still fun. But also, this one gives descriptions of about 40 poets
who are not in the other books. This must be a useful function.
How
does ‘Silent
Rules’ relate
to the other books in the series? The answer is that it includes a
great deal of subject matter not included anywhere else, and which
has to be covered
somewhere in order to reach a complete picture of the time. At the
same time, some poets described in ‘Silent
Rules’ also
appear in other volumes. The set discusses
140 poets all told. I suppose you could argue for adding a career
survey of all of them – what, another 500 pages? Completeness is
just a notion.
The
series of books is supposed to be 1960-97 but when I was writing in
2002 I inadvertently included work that was post-97, specifically by
poets I was extremely keen to include and who wouldn't have been in
the work otherwise. So there are some overspills.
Why
“silent rules”? Evidently poetry is made of sound, in the form of
speech, but is governed by rules which are not stated explicitly (and
which have no accepted notation in which they could be shared). There
is always an argument to be made that you don't need any prose about
poetry, just access to the poems. If prose is helpful, this is
connected to its ability to tease out and make plain the silent
rules. You have to perceive the structure of a work in order to read
it. The subtitle is “inside and out” and becoming an insider
definitely involves knowing what the silent rules are. Although, to
be honest, I didn't learn about poetry by reading prose, it was more
by hanging out with people who liked poetry and noticing their
reactions. Or, in fact, mirroring their reactions. How can you have
critical culture when the core of culture is mirroring other people's
reaction patterns? Don't know. Not my problem.
I
had a feeling that writing about famous poets in a brief extent (1000
words) was relatively ineffective. So the very celebrated poets
tended to get cut. This might give the effect of a collection of
obscure poets – a cunning way for conservative critics to trash the
whole thing. Certainly I wanted to place more figures into the
landscape. I think there was some scheme of disproving
generalisations by the avant garde as well –I was annoyed by
exclusive and preconceived schemes of merit. I didn't think the key
to artistic creation was so simple. The plan is in fact a race-course
of generalisations. The course wins, to be frank. All the
generalisations crash and their burnt-out carcasses are exhibited on
billboards around the track. The facts come out on top.
The
message is that poetic merit is scattered over the landscape and that
loyalty to a faction is not compatible with full aesthetic principles
and a thorough approach to collecting primary evidence. This message
lacks kinetic energy – it doesn't define the role of Winner, and
this is what motivates
people. They find the egocentric and one-person view natural and the
broad-spectrum view unnatural and frustrating. But really,
it is the only message I want to transmit. Each
individual poet gets a limited amount of space, but the “hero of
the piece” is the entire landscape, the awe-inspiring span from one
end of the poetry world to the other. It's
not part of the 'depolarisation' campaign, but it is remote from the
ideologies of any group of poets, because the wide spectrum wouldn't
fit with that.
Does
it follow from covering the entire scene that the report
will be accepted by the
entire
scene? This is the
problem,
you can only carry
out an effect of wiping out divisions
in the scene if your voice
is heard widely
enough to affect
the scene.
I
have rewritten the book several times. Once it exists, the temptation
to redesign it is overwhelming.
May
2018. After reading Robert Hewison's book Cultural Capital, I
rewrote parts of the book again. This is ridiculous, but the point is
to be as precise as possible. Changing something so long and so
finished is exhausting – it gave me a headache. What I had written
on arts funding and State attitudes was just not accurate. Hewison's
book gives a glimpse of a much greater whole in which my feelings are
insignificant. I can’t extend that glimpse for long, but it was
compelling while it lasted. Hewison quotes a Runnymede Trust
publication saying that out of the first £2 billion of arts funding
from the National Lottery only 0.2% went to artists from ethnic
minorities. He says on another page that the lottery funding panel
was given permission in 1998 to give out more individual grants,
which were only 2.5% at that point. If capital projects were 97.5%
then grants to individuals cannot have been more than 2.5%. So 0.2%
as a fraction of 2.5% is not so far out of proportion. Squeezing the
real story out of administrative history is like fighting warthogs
with your bare hands. If a large sum goes to repairing or converting
a building, you can't say if it has gone to one ethnic group or
another, because an arts building can be used by all kinds of people.
No arts organisation is specifically or exclusively White. Funding
panels don't like giving money directly to individuals, as
infrastructure spend is just much harder to launch glib political
attacks on.
I
spent time struggling with this area and then cut it altogether. I
bought the book which Hewison drew that fact from – he has made two
mistakes in citing. (This is 'The future of ethnic minorities in
Britain', credited to the Runnymede Trust, 2000.) What he reports is not in the source. The source says
that 0.02% of the organisations funded had ethnic minority
'representation' on their boards of directors. This isn't really a
measurement of anything. The managers don't produce any art. “Follow
the money” is good but this doesn't tell you who got the money. Hewison's book is fascinating and overwhelming in its scope.
'Silent
Rules' originally had seven more chapters, including 'Long poems of
the 1970s' 'Parataxis' and 'Coherence and exceptionalism'. Because
the book was over length, I removed these. These chapters are part of
the work but because of size constraints they are coming out on the
Internet and not in print. They are available on the
www.angelexhaust.blogspot.com website. (postscript. The chapter on 'long poems' was expanded into a whole book on the 70s which is now, 2022, published as "Nothing is being suppressed".)
There
are some more sources.
Memory
of the Drift. The
piece is about a pamphlet which was published in 2001. This now
appears as Book One of the work (overall title Memory of the Drift).
A volume from Shearsman has collected books one to four, but there is
a book five (published in Angel Exhaust 22).
Elisabeth
Bletsoe, Landscape from a Dream.
The on-line version has now been taken down but the poems are
available in a volume from Shearsman also called Landscape
from a Dream.
Toynbee.
Four volumes of the 'Pantaloon' series appeared, but according to
Wikipedia there are others unpublished.
Elfyn.
Fiona Sampson says (Beyond The Lyric
p.80) that Elfyn introduced free verse into Welsh. This is utter
piffle. The first volume of free verse in Welsh was published in 1937
(Y ddau
lais), and Elfyn began publishing in
the late 70s. Gwyn Thomas was a striking example of free verse in the
Sixties. There is an interview with Elfyn (in Welsh) in Taliesin
(volume 141, 2010).
This was published after my book was finished.
Chaloner.
Angel Exhaust 22 is a special issue on Chaloner, with some letters
between him and John Hall.
Kazantzis.
There is an author’s
statement at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/judith-kazantzis .
JF
Hendry. >>That the Cimbri spoke a Celtic language is attested
to by the reports of Pliny the Elder (circa 77 AD) who stated that
Philemon wrote that, the Cimbric word
Morimarusa means the Dead Sea, as far as the Promontory of Rubeas,
beyond which they name it the Cronian Sea (“Naturalis
Historiae”,
Libri IV, xiii, line 95). The word “Morimarusa”, referring to the
Baltic Sea, is composed of ‘muir’ and ‘marbh’ in Q-Celt
Irish; ‘mor’ and ‘maro’ / ‘marw’ in P-Celt languages such
as Breton and Welsh. Importantly, there is no Germanic word in any
dialect that would even approximate these root elements (Wikipedia
entry for “Cimbri”).<< Philemon wrote sometime in the 4th
century BC.
Unfortunately there seems to be little doubt that Hendry misspelt the
name.
The
book “Crow” is incomplete
and there
was a prose tale
which told the story of Crow and was the frame for the whole thing.
Hughes explained
this at an appearance
at the Adelaide
Festival
in 1976. The
URL goes
to a transcript
of this talk.
This
is not the framing tale but it does explain the story which the poems
radiate off from. I guess people just made up their own idea of who
Crow was. The poems went out without the frame and I think this was
just a feature of cultural life around 1970, art had gone outside the
shared frameworks but people didn't bother to make the explanations
available. Alexander Walker writes about this.
Sigmois
te.
I
quote a strange Classical text about what seems to be sound poetry in
the 2nd
century AD. I may have more information about this. This (as
mocked in the prose account by Nicomachus of Gerasa) may
be part of a ritual narrating a creation myth in which seven stages
of creation become successively more shaped and more finished. The
hissing belongs to one of the earlier stages – articulate language
is seen as the classical mark of refinement, so that pre-verbal
language-like utterances are symbolic
enactments
of the earlier stages. The hissing and so on is perhaps not such a
mystery, but part of an orderly symbolic structure which by a
surprising chance we can recover.
There
is a papyrus which includes instructions to hiss, crow, etc. at
moments in the seven-part
ritual.
At the end of the ritual we reach language. There is information
about this in Wolfgang Schultze's Dokumente
der Gnosis.
A
relative
sent me a postcard showing part of a mosaic from the Roman villa at
Brading, Isle of Wight, near
Brading Haven.
It shows a man wearing a tunic who has a chicken head. Don't get
this, but you could expect him to make crowing noises. >>The
cockerel-headed man is a unique feature of the mosaics. The mosaic
shows the cockerel-headed man beside a building approached by steps,
with two griffins beyond.
One
older opinion is that he represents the gnostic deity
known as Abraxas;
however Abraxas is usually depicted with a serpent's tail as well as
a cockerel's head, which makes this interpretation seem unlikely.<<
So
much of the theory of the period describes poems that were never
written and sensations that were never felt by any sensibility. The
results are not everywhere equally rewarding. The theories, bursts of
wild exhilaration, saw visions of cultural achievement which went
beyond the real story. As propaganda evaporates, the best
texts remain as residues and prove to be the real substance of the
era. Brushing away the ashes of fantasies, we reveal the shapes of
hard, determinate, finished objects, the abiding works of the time.
If you populate all the squares, eventually you have the map.
Maybe
the theorising can start once the substance of the time, achieved and
outstanding books, has been understood. There may be silent rules
composing the cultural field which permits poetry to be written and
read. States of mind can be recovered from allusive language because
we know what they are. Poetry can be original but cannot be
arbitrary. Works created by the reader's participation have to embody
a shared logic, unlike for example photographs.
Admission.
I write about Kathleen Nott's Poems from the North,
which was published in 1956 and so is outside our chosen time period.
Why? Nott published a book in 1960 but it is much less distinguished
than “North” and looks as if she had lost her nerve. So it has to
be the 1956 volume. Nott wrote two really important books and
absolutely had to be included in the project, so I had to throw out
another book to permit this. I was looking at the 1950s and noticed 5
female poets I liked – Raine, Nott, Eithne Wilkins, Lynette
Roberts, Audrey Beecham. Only one of these was still publishing in
the 1960s. So one theme could be “poets who found the period too
unsympathetic to write in”, and this would be a whole area of study
(which I never looked at). People are getting more and more
interested in the “silent voices”, people who never became poets
or who wrote and then fell silent. This is connected to a project for
changing society to reduce inequality, which is after all more
important than just studying literature. I just read books that
actually got written. Some of the silent rules could include “rules
that poets follow in deciding to fall silent”. I didn't get into
this and I am doubtful that you can reconstruct this emotional
pattern for the 1950s.
A
trawl of the Internet today revealed that Wilkins came from New
Zealand and was married to Austrian translator Ernst Kaiser. It says
the couple spent 11 years in Rome studying the Robert Musil archive
and translating his great novel. Wilkins was born in 1914 and died in
1975. She was publishing poems from about 1934 to 1953 but never got
a book out.
At
one point I say that only one significant woman poet was born in the
1930s. Going back many years, Rosemary Tonks had carefully kept her
age quiet, but Helen discovered a reference book which did feature
it, and said it was 1932. But the obituaries of Tonks put it down as
1928. So that would be zero women poets born in the 1930s. This is a
moment where we see the silent rules – you notice them when they
change.
The
cover of the new british poetry says it has 85 poets. After
counting several times, I make it 84. I think one guy was in the
selection, then tried to say that the poets get should get paid more
money and should go on strike, then withdrew his own poems. So the
count is wrong. This is my memory of it. He was a very very bad poet.
He used the moment to write reviews of the book for at least two
newspapers, saying it was no good and giving most of the space to
praise of his own rival anthologies. Supermarket chateau sleaze-bag
with sanctimonious notes?
'Silent
rules' uses a method of counting overlaps and non-overlaps between
anthologies to uncover
silent rules of grouping, which
allows us to guess at the assumptions that precede differentiation.
This locates nine “clusters” of poets, a way of
getting away from binary divisions. I missed the oral:written
opposition, obviously present but not really showing up in my
dataset, because I used books. Divisions like male:female and Scots:
English are real in marketing terms but too obvious to reveal much.
The really puzzling thing is the “stereo blindness” whereby the
Mainstream and the Alternative are invisible to each other. It is
good to find a count for this. For example, I used 5 anthologies to
work out a selective list of Alternative poets – 70 names. If you
take the 1998 anthology, The Firebox, it covers a 40-year
period and has 122 names. But only 3 of the 70 are allowed within
that selection of 122 names. There are clearly two different
aesthetics in play. The point of counting overlaps is to provide
objective evidence of this.
The
count doesn't tell you why the split happened. To be honest, I don't
know why it happened. It would be easy to explain why readers exploit
all available resources, and why poets use verbal forms which the
audience understands. The opposite is hard to explain.
Does
this split still exist in 2018? I don't know. I think almost
everything has been forgotten. Maybe that includes the territorial
claims and the barbed wire. As I say in the book, a lot of the
repressions of the mainstream disappeared in the 1980s. Writing a
book in which large numbers of poets from several different aesthetic
factions are included within one unifying conceptual space may not
resolve these territorial limits to vision. It's more of a cultivated
gesture, really. But that is the objective. Maybe my book will vanish
because it wants to record a consensus when in reality none exists.
In
theory, the poets who cross boundaries and appear in (say) five
anthologies should be the best. My impression is that the
most-selected poets are actually bland, featureless, smoothed down to
pap, shallow in their choice of effects. This doesn't greatly support
the project of effacing group boundaries. My impression is that poets
do well by developing their personal style/ world theory as far as it
can possibly go. You can't really have the developments without the
splits. “I write just like everyone else” – well, you needn't
bother, need you. But we could have cultural institutions, and
reviewers, whose sensors accept a broad spectrum.
I
looked at 15 anthologies which included 456 names. That may have been
about 10% of all the people who published a book of poetry in that
period, roughly 1985 to 1996. Interpreting the stylistic and
aesthetic/social differences between the “clusters” means
actually reading the poets. This was a large task and it explains why
it took me 20 years to write a study of the period. The longer you
look, the more you understand. (The count goes down to 400 if you
remove Irish and American poets. Is it legitimate to remove them? not
really, but my subject was “British poetry”.) The whole period,
from 1960 on, involves many more than these 400 poets: I write about
65 poets in 'Silent Rules' of whom 34 weren't in any of the
anthologies. There are longer discussions of some of the anthologies on this website.