Morris Cox

Morris Cox



Received emails from Kevin Nolan and J.E. Keery about a totally neglected poet, Morris Cox (1903-98). Cox was mainly a visual artist, a printmaker I believe, and lived in Stratford (East 15). Alan Tucker’s well-informed obituary for The Independent remarks that he went to West Ham Art School in 1916.  There was a book about his prints and his work as a printer in 1991: Gogmagog: Morris Cox and the Gogmagog Press. Roderick Cave commented “Morris Cox has been perhaps the most important, and certainly the most original private printer in Britain in the past forty years […]” (date – 1991).The poems included in this book were not then included in the Flashpoint retrospective.
The latest attributed date for a poem in Whirligig is 1945. This is from a 1940 poem about Ancient Egypt: At the foot of the mountain and getting power over the legs, walking with the legs and coming forth upon earth, on a staircase leading up to the roof with the feet tied together, changing into a lotus, changing into a phoenix, changing into a heron, changing into a serpent, changing into a crocodile, changing into the god who giveth light and not dying a second time: O golden hawk with human head! O man come back to see his home!

A whirligig is a child’s toy, a stick with a loose head which goes round in the wind. Toys are folk art. Secondarily, it means a fairground merry-go-round. That is also folk art. (The 'gig’ bit is because there was a carriage called a gig with very large wheels, rotation was very striking.) The cover design for the book, by Cox, is very beautiful. It shows what I think are whirligig heads, detached from their sticks and flying away. They look like flowers and the picture is mainly plant motifs. The lettering looks like the curved upper register, or fascia, of a merry-go-round, where the blazon goes, so “PIRELLI’S PRANCERS’ or whatever. This is from a 1967 poem, in the form of a Mummers’ Play:

 Below, tree-rods, thick budded, beaded, 
              Annie’s breasts and all 
         dot their shadowed undershed, 
              but Annie’s best of all. 

         Coddy seedlings sud and fidget, 
              Annie’s hair and all 
         blade their biddings, drive their blood, 
              but Annie’s best of all. 

(I guess ‘coddy’ refers to the codling moth, Cydona pomonella.) The 1958 British Council pamphlet on ‘Poetry To-day’ praises Cox and says “He throws words at the reader as if the reader were a coconut-shy.” (Geoffrey Moore wrote that) On page 59, he comes in between Causley and Christopher Logue, both of them interested in the language of folk song (Logue gave this up a few years later). Cox was in love with folk song, and his total declining of any moment of speaking as a 20th C human being who knows 20th C words is puzzling but surely raises the key question about his style. It gives the folk poems a certain irreducible consistency, but leaves the distance between us and the poems empty and mysterious. A brief dip into the dating of styles would tell us that in the 1960s pop music almost swept poetry away. In the 1950s, there was a Folk Boom in which Southern blues played a small part, leading up to a torrent of electrified blues in the guise of rock music, which took over everything. In the Fifties, there was a current of folk-related poetry, of which Cox is one part. My point is that this line of poetry came before the “folk boom” in music, so it was related but not an offshoot. The Fifties did not see exclusively Cold War conservatives writing formal verse. Cox was writing poetry in his folk style in the 1930s (according to the dates he supplied), and was starting from Lawrence, if anything. He considered that his break-through came in 1934. So here is his poem, dated 1934, ‘Earth’:

All• long  or• earth  ages  spin 
the  soft  to  unsoft  hardened  earthboll• 
grim  the  eggcrust•  knit  the  allwrasm 
clombond  hell . . 

all• long  or• earth  earks  and  cares 
and  drees  and  dreams• • 
while  day  by  day  by  dayred  mornlight 
eatgiver  grovels  in  the  grist 
and  awe  and  aware  hie  forth : 
to  rive  and  rise  and  reap  and  rot : 
and  tether  and  team  and  thrill  and  thrust : 
and  hulk  and  harrow  and  heave  and  heel . . 
O  evenrest  and  sleep! . .

“Erce’ is a name for an earth goddess in an Anglo-Saxon charm. This style is notable for a lack of any words whose stem is French or Latin, and in fact you can reach a sort of folkiness by deleting all those loan-words and replacing them with unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon words whose meanings are unclear but suggestive. (Allwrasm? Let me get back to you on that one.) Restricting vocabulary restricts, unsurprisingly, the range of propositions you can frame in words. He was a virtuoso in using those clanging monosyllables:


I stumbled, scrambled over bonerings,
over kneeknob, over shin,
slid the lank of rick and ricket,
trod the link of broken fingers,
ran with maggots in the marrow
and smelt the mouldy rug of hair.
I clambered, hobbled, reft and riven,
cracked with rack of rib and riddle,
(from ‘Mummers’ Fool', 1937/1955) On to 1967 -

  My one-eyed life of years no-years 
          watered the raindrops with its tears. 
          Monk-king-warriors with iron laws 
          tore the sweetness from my jaws. 
          yet I could wait while moving on, 
          die and be my new-born son, 
          scatter the limbs of the living folk, 
          cram the cock back into its yolk 
          and hide my heaven in the earth 
          until my death should give it birth. 

Now lying standing above below-stairs

         I can when I cannot unpair the pairs, 
          be together alone and sigh without breath, 
          be selfish and selfless in one living death. 
          For in day-night and howling dumb 
          you push and hold me with your thumb. 
          Brother is sister, all are kin, 
          all the children of my sin: 
          all me, all mine, though through another 
          I eat my father and beget my mother. 

          Thus truth from the hill-top bottom of a well 
          ever comes never in a heaven-bred hell. 

This is the end of the Mummers’ Play (another one, titled ‘A dialogue for National Folk Week’) and is spoken by a Fool who is presumably the spirit of fertility; he is “the old Adam” and everyone is a child of his original sin. This contains theological truths of a sort. A Fool is supposed to speak truths, but we can ask what kind of truths they are when unravelled. A fool’s bladder on a stick is quite like a whirligig. (There is also a reference to natural cycles, I guess.) The core of the above passage is, if anything, a denial of the reality of individual identity, irrelevant faced with the world of fertility and reproduction. A corpse nourishes the fields, so that you eat your ancestors. It follows that human attempts at reasoning, knowing the universe, etc., are illusory. This is a Myth, and it doesn't leave the poems with anything to say. All the paradoxes are an attack on practical reason.

The poems are mainly in a folk style, which emphasises the pagan elements of folklore – the Egyptian poem is an exception but fits in with the other poems. It is a sort of Mummers’ Play restored to high status and relieved of nonsense. The effect is an academically trained painter who consciously produces naive paintings. Cox isn’t completely alone in this – (I did a whole piece on literary poets writing folk poetry, with Tennyson leading the dance) –but it doesn't hold a conversation with us. Cox led a terribly isolated life, as a writer, but the poems sound isolated already. Folk poetry belongs to a community but this poetry does not belong to any community I can detect. We have to mention “Ritual Murder In Hyde Park”, because it’s such a great title for a poem. A footnote explains that it’s the sword-dance kind of Morris dance, which involves a pretend beheading at the climax: “where, fleeing the sword-edge, filling the cleft /his bewildered ghost untwins /with swift outflowing waft unweft.” What about “slid the lank of rick and ricket” - I find this obscure. The whole passage is about physical disintegration (prior to reincarnation), so the body is coming apart; you can ‘rick’ your neck, so ‘rick and ricket’ are both conditions of bones, and we are looking at bones here. ‘Slid’ is about bones parting, as cartilage disappears. But what is ‘lank’? Perhaps ’emaciation’? but, it’s an adjective. The syntax is a bit askew, frustrated by the monosyllables. The patterning is so powerful that it breaks some aspects of language which do not rapidly fit.  Since his publisher said No after Whirligig, (this is from Bradford Haas’ informative essay for Flashpoint) Cox set up his own press to print his poems."35 highly original, beautifully illustrated, hand-made limited edition books followed between 1957 and 1983." If the start date was 1957, this would be a very early example of small press activity in poetry. His pro-peasant attitude would have commended work he printed himself, wood, brass, paper, bodily effort, all that. This was called the Gogmagog Press, after two giants who featured in London pageants from an early date. He did a magazine called ‘Format’. I don’t detect much trace of him reading and publishing other poets, he wasn't really part of a scene. This is not unrelated to the scene ignoring him, you might think. These productions integrated visual design and text in a way which it would be hard to reproduce in digital print technology.
He used a font called Jefferson Gothic which imitates Gothic manuscript lettering and does not look like print.
I don't know why Whirligig only included poems at least nine years old. It wasn’t a reaction against the tepid Fifties scene, as Comfort thought. As Haas remarks, “by the time the book is published in 1954, the work included is already ten to twenty years old.” If we posit Cox as a novice in 1934, it becomes obvious that he is linked to Lawrence. The lawrentian strand did not do well in the 1930s, and that wasn’t just Morris Cox. Haas records Cox attending poetry readings at the Theosophical Society in the 1930s, I don’t know if he was reading magazines like The Quest or if we can connect him to any other Theosophical poets. His earliest work (in ‘Nine Nature Poems’) does have a Symboliste quality, rapturous, dreamlike, archaic, seduced by sound harmonies, which we can connect with a Theosophist ambience. One repeating theme of his work is resurrection as vegetation – the Mummers’ Plays are about the return to life of the plant world at the end of winter. The solstice is a symbol for death. He is more attracted to ‘folk ritual’, plays and dances than to songs, as sources. I think Haas is right to point to affinities between Cox and Ted Hughes – biology and death are so central to both of them. Also, both discard civilised language and use folk legends, consistently. They follow that experimental wilderness path of rejecting French and Latin words, and the cultured world which deploys them as its categories. But the “verse texture” makes them extremely distant from each other, Cox isn’t a proto-Hughes.

I looked at Harold Bayley's book, and it does seem to be a blueprint for Cox's poetry. Bayley's 18th century approach to etymology (so that Gog-Magog connects to "goggle-eyed" and no criticism is possible) prefigures the unchained sound-association which Cox built poems out of. "Archaic England" is junk, really, but you can see that it offers a world of weirdlore and interred folk knowledge, and that Cox spent his whole poetic life in such a world. subtitle "an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, placenames, and faerie superstitions." Bayley cites Hadrian Allcroft on his title page, and is perhaps linked to Allcroft in a parallel world of nutters. The index finishes on page 894, but I do not think there is one page of sound scholarship among them. Bayley at p.195 says that "whirligig" means the sun, deriving from a Hebrew word og, meaning to go round, and cognate with giant, Gog Magog, and the surname Cox. Goggle and ogle are the same word.

(weird format problems with this - the blog software just doesn't want you to adjust things and ignores your wishes. this is the third release.)

What happened in the Seventies

What happened in the Seventies

We are going to start with Eric Mottram’s lists of poets in the ”British poetry revival”, in ‘catalogues’ for two successive weekend events at the Polytechnic of Central London, in 1974 and 1977. The first point is that you can compare two lists – 17 poets in the 1987 anthology A Various Art (all of whom were publishing in the Seventies) and 46 in Eric’s list. Only 7 of the AVA poets are on Eric’s list. This must be an indicator of the depth of talent in the Seventies. Clearly, a large number of people were in love with poetry. We have to ask, at the very least, what they were in love with. This total count of poets is so large it sounds like damage. But that just makes the period interesting.

In his first, 1974, essay Mottram lists, first of all, 17 of the poets in John Matthias’ 1971 anthology as:

David Jones Hugh MacDiarmid Basil Bunting

Christopher Middleton Charles Tomlinson Gael Turnbull

Roy Fisher Ted Hughes  Ian Hamilton Finlay

Christopher Logue Matthew Mead Nathaniel Tarn

Anselm Hollo Ken Smith Lee Harwood Harry Guest Tom Raworth.

I think he got the idea from Matthias. He then adds 19 poets Matthias left out:

Tom Pickard Bob Cobbing Stuart Montgomery Jeff Nuttall Allen Fisher Dom Silvester Houédard Jeremy Hilton Elaine Feinstein Michael Horovitz David Chaloner Andrew Crozier Peter Redgrove Barry MacSweeney Jim Burns Edwin Morgan Chris Torrance John James Peter Riley John Hall

Mottram wrote another catalogue for the 1977 PCL Conference. The anthology for that event added: Peter Finch, B. Catling, Iain Sinclair, Bill Griffiths, Colin Simms, Tom Leonard, David Tipton, J.P. Ward, Eric Mottram, and John Freeman. Total: 46 poets

Actually, any historian of the Seventies is going to be filling in the negative space left around Eric’s era definition, which is complete in itself.

Eric’s list redefines poetry as being cultural criticism, with poetry about love and the intimate sphere marginalised; this does not reflect a distrust of such poetry but a distrust of the public sphere.

Mottram says the centre of his document is the catalogue of small press resources, and his opening paragraphs make the focus the use of small-scale economics and the exclusion by established editors. Mottram was powerfully encouraging young poets to experiment. His style is compulsively aggregative – he sets up 40 wonderful artistic assets and then rolls them up together, and rolls 30 or 40 poets up together. None of the poets had all 40 assets, in fact it is doubtful they had more than four or five, so there is a gap between the position statement and the poems themselves. Flattening the opposition isn’t the same as accurate description.

Poets who will migrate into the underground during the decade and are not listed by Eric include Tony Lopez, Michael Haslam, Paul Evans, Steve Sneyd, Maggie O’Sullivan, Michael Gibbs, John Ash, Jeremy Reed, Denise Riley, Anthony Barnett, Ralph Hawkins, Asa Benveniste, Robert Hampson, Grace Lake, Tom Lowenstein, Gavin Selerie, Nigel Wheale, John Wilkinson, Rod Mengham, Martin Thom, Paul Brown, Ulli McCarthy, Brian Marley, Philip Jenkins, Peter Philpott and Paul Gogarty. Roughly, Eric’s list doesn’t include poets born after 1945. He is very strong on poets born in the 1930s.

There had always been an experimental fringe. Around 1960, though, a patch of the poetry scene changed radically and was the start of what Eric Mottram called the ‘British Poetry Revival’. Over a dense couple of years, books by Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, Peter Redgrove, Gael Turnbull, Matthew Mead, and others signalled the arrival of a new experimental sector. This area involved work, complexity, montage, ideas. As this word choice implies, the doctrine is that British poetry had expired (as a precondition for its ‘revival’). The new poetry deleted the local legacy, but had an ‘elective ancestry’, transfusions of poetic DNA from the original European modernist poetry and from the American avant-garde of the 1950s. Cultural history shows a new idealistic youth culture recognising itself (in 1967 with hippies and psychedelia, in 1968 with student revolts and a new anti-capitalist consensus with a million implications), and how this equates with a stylistic rift around 1960 is quite a puzzle, one which Eric does not mention.

Vitally, Mottram is claiming that only the rejected, only those who reject the poetic centre and write in an “anti-language”, are genuinely creative. It would be surprising if all the poets favoured by “mainstream editors” were bad. It is hardly true, either, that editors did not reflect the tastes of several thousand other people in the poetry-reading audience. His is not the only view. If you look at Lucie-Smith’s 1970 Penguin anthology, he includes about half of Mottram’s poets. So this poetry was already there in the High Street. To get the decade, it is important to read also the notes in Lucie-Smith’s anthology. He includes 86 poets, and relates each one to a microclimate of opinion which views work in that style as necessary. He breaks down the separation between wish and fulfilment. The ‘impresario’ who devises the style may not be the same person as the poet. Mottram perceives a gulf whereas Lucie-Smith shows us a continuous landscape, where the extreme regions are in contrast with each other. Mottram’s version is more exciting but Lucie-Smith’s is more convincing. If you actually read the texts, it is obvious that ‘mainstream’ poets like Kathleen Raine, Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite, Alan Ross, John Wain, Peter Porter and George Mackay Brown are producing significant work.

Within Eric’s list, it is visible that Montgomery, Hilton, Feinstein, Horovitz, Burns, Hollo, Torrance, Griffiths, Leonard, Tipton, and Freeman are not hot-shots with an option on the top spot. This clears the stage a bit. Also, Eric revisited the time for a 1988 anthology ('the new british poetry'), and his section of that book includes 6 poets who were publishing in the 1970s but are not in the PCL list: Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, Asa Benveniste, Douglas Oliver, Paul Evans, Thomas A. Clark.

No generation is being described, because some of the poets named were already writing in 1930. The date “1960-74” is not quite right, because it ignores a poetic fringe in the 1950s. Mottram was inclusive but in that way did not identify a generation.

Eric does not identify features which all the 46 had in common. So it is a waste of time asking if any other poets shared these features – and it is logically false to say that “all poets who innovate are similar”. So writing the history of the “British poetry revival” is pointless. This makes it irrelevant to ask whether the “revival” continued after 1974, or whether someone belongs to it. No group was being identified, rather a perimeter of repression and an outlaw economy. If there is a lack of vocabulary for describing the “alternative wing” of British poetry over the last 45 years, that is hardly Eric’s fault. I doubt that one can speak of a tradition of the alternative, as opposed to spontaneous rejection of the conventional and ‘accessible’ poetry, affecting young poets persistently, so many people every year. I doubt that “everything which diverges then converges”. There are people who believe in the legacy and moreover that they can decide who is legitimately innovative and so on. This redefines innovation as property and themselves as the administrators of it. These claims are simply not credible. There are good reasons for scrapping the idea of legacy, of tradition, legitimacy, etc. as applied to the alternative sector.

Mottram’s essays of the Seventies were a breakthrough, at least for me (when I found them, 10 to 15 years late). But we have to allude to three omissions. First, he omits WS Graham. I have no idea why this is. Then, he omits JH Prynne. I guess this was jealousy – Prynne was a close friend and collaborator of Olson and Eric wanted to own the “Olson franchise”. Thirdly, he only lists one woman poet. This reflects Eric’s personal sensibility. No-one today finds his results on this repeatable. It is likely to be true that women were more attracted to the centre of events than to the periphery (and the “hermit/ recluse/ pioneer” role), and that the feminist cause persuaded poets to migrate to a cultural centre of events, where they could reach a large number of people and change the consensus. But feminism was part of “radical modernism” in 1974, possibly even the most important part. It was a critique of everything – making other lines of cultural critique look narrow in scope. Feminist poetry was going through an experimental phase in the early and mid-Seventies but it was quite possible to find significant women poets by 1977. Nicki Jackowska, Denise Riley, Penelope Shuttle, and Judith Kazantzis are examples. That 45:1 ratio is a disaster, I don't want to make any bones about it. Eric's cultural imagination just wasn't turned on by women (a few exceptions like Niedecker don't sew this back up). Eric was being authentic in verbalising feelings he actually had, but "authentic" can also mean blundering and unenlightened. I mean, if bypassing women poets is "authentic" then being a conservative who dislikes disturbing and innovative poetry is also "authentic". You can't define literary standards as being something internal to you - a process of debate and dialectic rightly follows that pristine and selfish experience of a poem.

Also - Matthias included George MacBeth but Eric removed that name from his PCL catalogue. Actually, MacBeth produced some terrific poetry during the 1970s and was an experimental poet. 

Mottram’s 1974 catalogue focusses on the business side: his interest is in autonomy, as part of a wider anti-capitalism and of a moment when there was an alternative everything. This replaces stylistic analysis. A key was certainly the overthrow of the system of cultural legitimation; hard as it is to recover this “soft” mechanism, a withdrawal of belief in cultural gatekeepers, a downturn in feelings of anxiety, marginality, and inadequacy, and a surging belief in the alternative and even rejected, must be part of the reason for a much greater number of people writing poetry seriously. Critics who decide at the outset that only books from major publishers need to be considered could not and cannot grasp the scene in the Seventies. However, dizzying as this expansion of activity is, we have to recall that the autonomous (or non-commercial, or zero-capitalisation) sector was not itself dominated by innovative poetry. If you are dredging up several hundred little magazines, you soon realise that most of them (90%?) were publishing poets who were quite conventional (as well as untalented); most people who wanted to write poetry weren’t skilled enough to be radical in style. I don’t want to be pedantic, but the implication that people who were working at a High Street publisher or magazine (or bookshop!) were necessarily stiff-necked and conservative is wrong; the Penguin Modern Poets series was the most important disseminator of the new poetry, and as it reached 80 poets (eventually) it hammered home the message that poetry was happening in a hundred places. (It didn't include the most famous poets, probably they just cost too much. The series was in the shops at 3/6 a volume, the only poetry books that a schoolboy was likely to buy.) I believe Tony Richardson ran the PMP series (and left after number 12 to start Paladin).

One generalisation would be that “from 1968 to 1980, talented young poets joined the alternative sector rather than the mainstream”. This would point to a gap in the history of the mainstream, a physical interruption. But no generalisations are fool-proof. In the 70s, we certainly have to reckon with Jeffrey Wainwright, David Harsent, and George Szirtes, gifted poets starting out but not swept away by “alternative” allures. I think the mainstream was in trouble (and that serious changes resolved this problem in the 1980s). 

I definitely haven’t mentioned all the people who wrote significant poetry during the 1970s, but I have set down some 80 names, so that’s enough for the moment. I feel that it is now possible to discuss the period as a whole. This is the result of prolonged effort by a number of people in wading through works straight off the photocopier that nobody reviewed when they came out (quite apart from shops refusing them shelf space). It has been a collective project. I’m not sure what the implications of this take-over by the obscurophiles and darkness lovers are, but we can recover the Seventies now – the goods are all there. That environmental quality, of unrestricted amounts of good work coming out to no fanfare, probably applies to the whole period since 1980 – it was something we were trying to get used to in the Seventies.
This only emerged after years of thinking about everything else, but by starting the “revival” in 1960 Eric wrote off the small avant garde of the 1950s, which I think deserves remembering. The fact that Poetry Review, or the universities, were promoting conservatism does not drag the Fifties to the side of the road and kill them off! So where Eric starts off his list with Bunting, MacDiarmid, and Jones, these were obviously thriving in the Fifties and didn’t suddenly come to life in 1960. Similarly for Tomlinson, Logue and Edwin Morgan. WS Graham doesn’t even get into the list. Concrete poetry was anti-linguistic but international, for that very reason Bob Cobbing (born 1920) was probably bashing away at Concrete, even if it’s hard to trace anything being published before the 1960s. Those objects (?) are scarce, were scarce even then. It’s true that, if you had searched bookshops, you wouldn’t have seen any books by these people. They were pretty marginal in the retail world. But, there is another point here. These poets were absolutely on the edge of the cultural world, well into the area where originality is redefined as eccentricity (and then low grasp of social reality and intellectual error). It’s too much to have them oppressed by the managers at the time and then written off again by the managers in the 1970s (or in 2020). We have to applaud their endeavours and support their defiance. We have just mentioned ten significant writers who were doing the avant garde thing in the 1950s. This is really too many to just be swept under the carpet to create an effect.

Obviously, there is another count, of people who would have been undertaking significant creative endeavours but were discouraged from doing anything serious by a cultural chill, the prevailing conformist atmosphere of the high Cold War. Eric Mottram is probably on this list.

Another point lost by the dating of the revival as a thing that started in 1960, like a train, is that Concrete poetry had two peaks, one after 1953 when Gomringer got it going, and one about 1972. I think there was a revolutionary feeling about the second outbreak, as if they had forgotten that Concrete internationally was a prominent feature of the 1950s (and a target for conservative culture critics). It’s a question of where you decide to point the camera.