Anthony Thwaite
It is with sadness that I record the death of Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021). I wrote about his work (in The Council of Heresy and Fulfilling the Silent Rules) and I admired it a lot.
The person who broke the news to me talked about him editing the CIA Monthly. True enough – Thwaite was literary editor of Encounter for twelve years. My initial response was “...because it connects to Thwaite's links to Encounter. I have been reading Stuckenschmidt's memoirs and he mentions Nikolai Nabokov about 30 times - so a lot of his visits, conferences, etc. were funded by the CCF and so by the CIA- but Stuckenschmidt was an admirable guy. The people Henze is attacking made some amazing avant garde music happen in the Fifties. I doubt Encounter ever published any avant garde poems, but I suspect that they published a lot of good poetry.
The CIA policy behind the CCF was to strengthen the soft Left and to promote "quality" but non-political culture. This wasn't so bad and I can't detest Thwaite for being in there. what was he doing... reading poems and sending cheques to poets. not asserting falsehood.”
The fact that you have to go forth and defend him already says that he was making a terrible mistake. The Encounter job seems to have been 1973 to 1985… but the big exposure of CIA involvement in culture followed an article in Ramparts magazine – in 1967. Conor Cruise O’Brien had given a lecture remarking on why Encounter was “so congenial to the prevailing power structures” in 1966. And Spender and Kermode resigned as editors, citing the CIA link, in 1967. This is the context when we see Thwaite signing up to Encounter in 1973.
I have just been reading about the musical events organised by Nikolai Nabokov in the 50s and 60s – in Stuckenschmidt’s memoirs. Nabokov was totally involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, no debate, and he was a strong anti-communist (as Russian exiles tended to be), the funding for those concerts was coming from CIA-linked foundations. But the music wasn't anti-communist … that is a ridiculous claim. Frank O’Hara, in the 1950s, organised some European exhibitions which were equally CIA-linked and intended, by the funders, to make an argument for American freedom as opposed to communist regulation of art. Those operations involved CIA people who were quite congenial to people like O’Hara and who grasped the merit of Abstract Expressionism (as opposed to any other strand of American art).
It is fair to say that the elements of the CIA which subsidised culture, during one era, were sympathetic to the soft Left, and that the rise of the New Right led to the discomfiture of those elements and the termination of their arts policy. It has been speculated (in Lobster, I think) that the information which reached Ramparts was leaked to them by distinctly right-wing elements in the CIA with the intent of discrediting and freezing out the liberal/ Left CIA staff who liked to work with people like Stephen Spender. The articles in Encounter started out from a centre Left point of view but always seemed to regard as a grand moral triumph the decision to walk out of that position and say what was “congenial to the prevailing power structures”. “Feel proud because you abandon your principles for the sake of patriotism.” The thing which didn’t show up, when I was reading it as a student, was that it was, mostly, for the sake of the next pay-cheque. But, be fair – the Right at that time was the Monday Club and the National Front, and there was no link between those real right-wingers and the prose material in Encounter. It was a false flag operation, not a right-wing magazine. My guess would be that the poetry in Encounter was completely non-political – part of its facade as a general arts and current affairs magazine. There is an anthology of "Encounter, the first ten years", 562 pp., 1963. I don't have it but I doubt you would find anything noticeably right-wing in it.
Did the CIA give up funding Encounter? This is a story which many people have spread… none of whom have credibility as witnesses. Most probably its later funding came from anti-communist tax-deductible foundations as directed by CIA culture experts.
There may have been a political poem in Encounter. I used to see the magazine in the mid-70s, there was always a copy in the junior common room. I remember reading a poem by CH Sisson which talked about a line of Russian tanks in Thuringia. Other articles counted 27,000 Soviet tanks and remarked ominously that they were only 3 days’ march away from Paris. This was striking, but the latent message was “give up trying to make Britain a more equal and open society because you have to fight the Cold War every day”. This didn’t add up, and Sisson wasn’t ever a persuasive figure. He just wanted to make your flesh creep. It was nearly 50 years ago and I’m not even sure that poem was in Encounter.
I wrote about Thwaite’s travel book on Libya in a blog in June 2012. He didn't write political poetry, in my view, but he had a long-term interest in Libyan and Japanese cultures and wrote persistently and empathetically about them. There is a volume-length interview with him, handily titled “Anthony Thwaite in conversation with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton” (from Between the Lines). There is another serious interview by MP Ryan, included (in part) in Ryan's doctoral thesis on modern poetry.
I was sad to see (in Eric Homberger’s obituary) that Thwaite had gone through five publishers in twenty years – because four publishers dropped out. This is an aspect of capitalism you don’t hear criticised so often these days – that it produces a culture of total instability and fragmentation. Obviously, if someone writes poems (over a period of decades), the poems don’t deteriorate, and the cultural scene should preserve them and so acquire temporal depth and self-awareness. Literature needs to have books stay around, even if some people have the attitude that the past should disappear and old poets be forcibly silenced. Enitharmon added some stability. My whole career as a critic has been trying to take data in, in the first place, and to prevent the erasure of memory, thereafter.
Thwaite played a role in my career – because, when I went in for “depolarisation”, Thwaite's poetry was my way out of a dissident ghetto, and my evidence that I was sensitive to a broad spectrum of poetry. This was much to my advantage – you could say I was manipulating his work to support my own credibility. Guilt is front and centre here – for 20 years I had an opinion of Thwaite without having read his stuff. Mottram detested him, and I just took what Eric said to me as gospel. When I actually read Thwaite, starting in around 2003, I really liked his poetry. Pretty stupid of me, actually. It was suggested to me that I would like Thwaite because we were both big Browning fans. And this was a correct guess, that is why I liked his work and I am a big Browning fan. When Thwaite issued New Confessions, in 1974, I thought it was just a rip-off of Mercian Hymns. That is what it sounded like. But I didn’t know that Thwaite's Letters of Synesius preceded Mercian Hymns. So the order is Letters of Synesius – Mercian Hymns – New Confessions. Yes, all three deal with the 20th century and with late classical or early mediaeval (! take your pick) theologians. The modern aspect is only silently there in “Synesius”, it is not as radical, or as montage-led, as ‘Hymns’. But Hill and Thwaite sound like each other because they were born at the same time and belonged to the same church and studied at the same university.
There is an issue of Aquarius in tribute to George Barker where Thwaite has a long autobiographical piece recounting how he was a total Barker fan in his teens and went to London to visit the man. What he came out with was distinctly un-Barker like, but he treasured the memory.
In 1974, Thwaite published in The Listener an essay called “The Two Poetries” which sums up the whole scene. This is one of very few essays of the last 50 years which says something worthwhile about the poetry scene as a whole. A few weeks later Mottram published his “British Poetry Revival” essay for the poetry weekend at the Polytechnic of Central London and it was obvious that Thwaite’s count was wrong. He divided the scene between serious, solid academic poetry and excitable, spontaneous student or youth poetry. Eric’s essay described an intellectual and innovative poetry which was neither of those, and gave 36 examples of poets practising it. Thwaite’s point about cultural factions not talking to each other still impresses. His account of either side is remarkably fair. He points out that young people could write convincing essays about conservative poetry, for the purpose of getting good marks, while having no artistic reaction to it and certainly not enjoying it. The reason why students got so interested in thinking about how literature related to social ideology, power relations, and (even) propaganda, was that the texts they were studying left them cold. Hardly a secret!
As I went further into the “mainstream”, I looked at excellent poetry by Thwaite, Geoffrey Hill, John Holloway, Harry Guest, and Peter Levi. There was a large and over-visible stratum of “Oxbridge graduates of the 1950s”, who took a lot of flak for being boring and conservative. But you had to sweep away the foreground and look at the good poetry… and a completely different picture emerged. The stylistic values which were so irritating when people preached about them were convincing when used by highly talented poets. Eric was right to be enthusiastic about his chosen 36 poets but wrong to think that the other side had lost its artistic power decades earlier.
Thursday 29 April 2021
Monday 26 April 2021
Harry Guest
News has reached us of the death of Harry Guest (1932-2021), an enigmatic and advanced Welsh poet. There is a good selection of Guest's work (about 45 pages) in Penguin Modern Poets 16 (1970). PMP 16 is still an important book, dealing with three poets who never really got on camera and whose work remains unevaluated (the other two being Jack Beeching and Matthew Mead).
I see that he did a thesis on Mallarmé. This would have been (mainly) in Jan-June 1955, when he was a student in Paris. If we imagine what someone who was a fan of Mallarmé in 1954 could have attained by 1976, we have something unusually exciting. Actually, that is not a bad description of what Guest was like in the 1970s. I see that his first book was sub-titled ‘poems 1957-67’. His clarity of focus, a typical feature of 50s poets, is highly effective in depicting a free and multiple range of images. The 1962 autobiographical poem ‘Private View’ says it all in 400 lines:
The white bird trapped in its misshapen cage
Of spine and ribs sings and the king’s mask
Conceals some sort of answer.
You have to force to some extent the medium
Especially nowadays.
The river flows past the piano and,
Hanging from the stars that burned above Florence,
The illuminated hooves of a black stallion
Play Mozart for an ear six years have drowned.
He is already there. He made a debut in 1968, Arrangements, (although in fact that includes two earlier pamphlets starting in 1962). Arrangements is conservative compared to other debuts of the same period. It is related to Lee Harwood, but Guest never wholeheartedly accepted the innovations of the 60s. Even in the eight lines quoted, we see a torrent of arresting images whose psychological meanings are hard to identify. The hooves playing Mozart are, unambiguously, surrealist; but the imagery from modern art is not committed, the voice of the poet describes all these symbols but does not posses them – it moves on past them. I said “autobiographical” but the poem really shows the poet strolling through an art exhibition and wondering how to describe his reactions. The “white bird” is another work of art, not a real bird.
The 2002 collected, Puzzling Harvest, has 520 pages of text, defying a brief summary. Calling your collected a harvest is just a cliché. Calling a large book puzzling is almost calculated to alienate people. Wouldn't it stop being puzzling after the first 200 pages? I suggest we can rotate these words slightly. For harvest we can put flowers. For puzzling we can put ambivalent. (The preface contains the phrase “bewildered thanksgiving”, a mutation of the title.) I wrote “He sits well as someone who defines the border, by being equally acceptable as part of the mainstream and part of Mottram’s dissident band.“ This was in pursuit of classificatory success – I was piqued by Guest’s appearance in the list of 36 poets accepted in Mottram's famous troupe. (You understand that classification is a compulsion, once you have made large-scale generalisations the ways of being wrong are so many that you keep returning to them.) Eric was surely right to include Guest, who also fits in with the mainstream, and for this reason marks where the border runs. The similarity between the phrase “puzzling harvest” and “defining the border” is compelling – Guest would be between two worlds no matter where we set the boundary. We have to think about ambivalence itself to capture who he is.
Much of his best poetry is collected in Lost and Found: poems 1976-82; with the groups ‘Elegies’ and ‘Metamorphoses’ especially recommended.
Airs of summer wind their way through the empty chamber
for the skulls have gone to stare behind glass at a crude
map on the museum wall. Perhaps the bones
were removed piecemeal when the mound fell in. The sun is low
and slopes of tough grass fleeced with hazel
repeat the fragrance of the day. High stone slabs
freed from burial by five thousand years of rain
stand in the light and frost. You do not like these journeys.
(from 'Fifth Elegy')
Reading ‘Elegies’ was a breakthrough moment for me (in the 2003 anthology A State of Independence). A 1970 statement says “Lyrical analysis of personal relationships, bisexual love, landscapes, etc. Certain amount of intellectual demand; European rather than transatlantic; syllabics or stress-length lines; high premium on musicality. I admire Klee, the early Godard, Debussy's piano music.” (I guess “early Godard” means “before he acquired a Maoist girlfriend”).
He didn’t believe in an undiscovered continent floating just off the known waters, and so retained balance – he has no thesis. Living in Japan encouraged, I guess, his belief in beauty. From 1966, he spent six years teaching in Japan and so wrote poetry, then, influenced by Japanese culture, evidently delicate and without the “strong” sense of self which Western culture appreciates. He got really involved with Japanese poetry, working with Japanese poets to produce the translations in the book ‘Post-war Japanese verse’ for Penguin.
He quotes at the head of an early poem (‘Dusts’) “In Zen parlance, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought ‘defile the pure mind’. The world which we perceive like this is ‘the realm of the dust’.” Is this really the philosophy he is developing? The poetry is consistent with ambiguity, detachment, the idea of transience as the motive for recording sensations or even ideas. So “arrangements” sounds like the most neutral and tedious imaginable title for a book, but arrangements of stones, plants, etc. are highly admired in a Japanese context. He keeps alluding to Lee Harwood, and perhaps he likes a similar incompleteness. So a poem titled ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’ reveals nothing at all. The distinction between this and the political poets, in the majority in the Seventies, who saw (social) consciousness as an illusion behind which lurked the future world of a better society, is stylistic: Guest does not ever disrupt the surface of his own language, does not disturb anyone else’s, because he thinks the “hidden” world is equally illusory. His poetry is beautiful in the way that a garden or a painting is, because he is so detached: the dissipation of an imaginary depth allows the surface to develop an integral energy. The bond to Harwood may be bisexuality, and this could also be the “puzzle” – a pattern which is two things at once. The aesthetic which Guest and Harwood share, to some extent, is genuinely different, and they see different colours and so different patterns.
Was Guest changed by six years in Japan? This is not proven; I have the impression that Mallarmé had absorbed Japanese ideas, in the first craze for things from Japan, and Guest was fascinated by Mallarmé. The idea of writing poems to inscribe on fans is mallarmean, and either represents Oriental influence or else something French but so dedicated to evanescent and decorative things that it would seem utterly exotic in Britain, in 1975. After all, Guest chose to go to Japan in 1965 – he probably felt an affinity for that culture.
A trait that stands out is the wish to accumulate numerous images without adding the 'personal meaning' which would finish them off and erase them again. It is hard to characterise the moods, but also the ambiguity and density of information are autonomous features and effort to get through them is misplaced. The sequence 'Metamorphoses' is a significant example of this. It is not useful to analyse these images because their diversity is part of the point. Certainly he is not using conventional programmes – the elaborate verse patterning does not resolve down to a point we had to write an essay about in the sixth form.
There is a good celebration of Guest, published for his 80th birthday (and called High on the Downs). It includes an exhaustive analysis (by Tony Lopez) of the “O-Bon” poem included in Lucie-Smith’s Penguin Poetry since 1945. The analysis takes about 8 times as many words as the poem does. I must have read this poem but as my memory is blank I don’t think anything about it got through. Lopez’s analysis talks about Japanese ghost stories – giving us, immediately, a link to ‘Elegies’ which are really about ghosts. The reference to a festival where ghosts appear gives a key to the idea of transience – it is calendrical, in this poem, time itself shedding its shape and turning endlessly into something new. All arrangements of experience in words are like flower arrangements, formalising what is transient and about to turn to dust. The calendar ceremony itself gives the images of the day, and personality is less important than role. People are like ghosts, recurring on certain days of the year to carry out preset sequences of feelings.
You can’t be a teacher at a place like Lancing (where Guest was in the early Sixties) without being sophisticated. The job involves intuiting what is going to impress examiners, and tricking adolescents into getting interested in something outside themselves. It is for insiders. This goes against the generalisation that using a vanity publisher like Outposts, as Guest did for his two first pamphlets, was the act of outsiders who didn't realise that it was a path to nowhere. Outposts had more cultural front than other firms funded by the authors, and did get reviews occasionally. But if you look at lists of their publications (57 in the single year of 1974-5, at pp. 23-4 of Poet’s Yearbook) you see a crowd of people you have never heard of. But Guest possibly didn't want the hassle of finding a normal publisher; and did want to have something to show his friends.
The poetry world in 1962 was low temperature. I am not sure about the implications. Were there other brilliant poets like Guest among several hundred names published by Outposts in the sixties and seventies?
I am content to speak of Guest as mallarmean. That is – his poetry is never obscure, it unfolds what Mallarmé habitually compacts. But he is describing sensations which are unfamiliar – distinctions which the common vocabulary does not register. It is credible that the sceptical atmosphere of the 1950s actually made his style – the reiterated demand for lucidity and for concrete details was a pressure which he adapted to. The poems always seem clear until you try to paraphrase them. The poems seem to have been edited by an interior decorator – that sounds mocking, but really they have a great beauty of surface, everything which does not fit the patterns has been eliminated, the patterns are subtle and bewitching. They are like films directed by a set designer, always. ‘Private View’ is a poem about modern art which we can compare to Mottram – Eric was always saying “this is modern art, it is ours, and we have won!”. Guest is never saying that, he says in ‘Private View’ something more like “ah yes, modern art, it is something we can spend an evening with, how can we more precisely define the sensations which fill us as we pass by it, are these sensations too uncertain for the language we have”.
In that 1970 statement, Guest cited bisexuality as one of the things he wrote about. He did not cite it as a basis for his style – but that is what we have to think about. I doubt there is such a thing as a bisexual personality. Bisexuality may be the product of a primal rejection of polarisation and roles (as part of the “dust”). Sexual feelings are surely close to the poetic affinity which links Guest, Evans, and Harwood, but perhaps we can push them into the discreet cover of the long grass and focus instead on subtlety, ambivalence, commitment to transient sensations. Or we could talk about a cluster of masculine personality traits which don't actually help poetry very much and which people might be happy to jettison – whether biology favoured this endeavour or not. So we could think of rules like “the goal of art is to reproduce as many copies of your personality as possible” or “any sensation is better if driven to the absolute maximum of volume and sustain”, or even “the more resources I can use up the less resources anyone else will have access to so I can cut off their growth”. Part of this would be “ambiguous feelings and nuances weaken the impulse and so need to be purged”. If you have a sensation, do you build it up to its maximum intensity? Guest’s response is more “how can I tone this sensation so that it harmonises with other sensations in a whole where nothing clashes and the line of sense flows smoothly?” All this swagger, evidently, tends to limit the space available to the other person, the other half of a relationship – so it might be that self-aggrandizement is part of immaturity. Having an aversion to a distinctive and “proprietary” style might be part of this maturity – and if repeating a pattern which encodes your personality makes your art very monotonous, then giving up that project might let you produce poetry which is very subtle and which can be varied in a more fundamental way. I am just floating these ideas in case they are helpful. Another point is that doubting the merits of self-aggrandizement makes you question the process by which the outside world becomes transformed as you turn it into art – this process becomes less convincing. Of course, this is the element which allows the real identity of sensations – things like flowers, water, ceramics – to enter the art with such haunting, undiminished, faithfulness – they are not being “possessed” and so their appearance is intact. The detail allows transience to be visible – a side-effect of giving up ownership, which freezes phenomena because it does not want to admit an end to its own power. I am pointing to a very primitive model of seizure, acquisition, devouring, metabolism, crushing, as a process in male art, or macho art. We may want to think of a weak ego, Buddhism, or simply sophistication, as the context in which a more aesthetic, less aggressive, manner of approaching art might prevail. But also… I don’t know anything credible about Buddhism or Japan, nor can I define bisexuality except as something chatoyant which shifts every time you look at it. To return to 1962... perhaps Guest was happy to publish with Outposts because he just didn’t have a deep commitment to fame, hearing his own signal at loud volume, being top poet. Perhaps having those appetites turn to stillness was a path towards hearing other messages more clearly and more consistently.
In the 20th century, European artists were faced with the absence of the Christian and moralising stories which had been so satisfactory and repeated so endlessly over the previous eighteen centuries. There was no return, and in the unnerving silence which this exposed it was possible to react convulsively, unreflectively. Perhaps dedicating art to the self was a basic error, clutching at the object which was closest to hand and which could be heard clearly even when a confusion at the symbolic realm was making more complicated entities hard to see or resolve.
I am inclined to dwell on two long poems from the late Sixties, ‘Myths’ and ‘Allegories’. One, ‘Myths’ (p.86 of the Collected) includes a criticism of street demonstrations and probably of the student protest movement in general. It resembles two other poems, by Thwaite and Peter Abbs, of similar date. This was a polarising moment. Guest presents the belief of a teacher, that the Left upsurge of the young around 1968 to 1972 (it didn’t stop but that was a peak) was a gateway into the loss of all learning and a new Dark Ages. This sounds ludicrous, but that is the implication of this passage about the refuge of learning to remote areas:
illiterate, foul-
mouthed, the hordes shamble, wielding
ripped books, brandishing
sub-machine-guns
(echoing, the crash of
celadon, ormolu,
lacquer frames
chanting
the end of history, making for a
final hermitage where one
alone on the peninsula
illuminates last pages
(short saga in their wake
of sackings, torture)
Eyes empty of love
hands hating creation
The future-bringers
It is hard to accept that the students were so lost to civilising processes that they could no longer walk properly. Do we have evidence on how well the dons walked? The idea must be that Ireland preserved learning in the Dark Ages, a thesis with limited historical validity, and is remarkably close to what Peter Abbs says in his much darker and more right-wing poem of the same time. I am wondering if this story is from Spengler. Guest only wrote this one poem about a supposed attack on scholarship, and he minimised its impact by titling it “Myths”, so that you have to make an effort to connect it to British universities in 1968 (he was still in Japan in 1972). (To get technical, a Kalashnikov is not an SMG but an assault rifle, although confusingly its Russian name, avtomat, actually means ”sub-machine-gun”). (People in hermitages were not illuminating manuscripts, the materials for vellum MSS were expensive and this activity belonged in monasteries, which had numerous monks and some wealth. Anchorites are a different story.) The reference to the sub-machine-gun is one of very few moments which attaches this passage to 1968 rather than to the Dark Ages. The meeting of manuscripts and dissolute warriors could be taking place in Vietnam, or Red China, but the mention of “ormolu” locates it in Europe – ormolu was big in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Technically, the Chinese did have bronze gilt, but objects covered in it are not called “ormolu”, although it would not be literally wrong if they were.) The celadon (porcelain) and ”lacquer” sound oriental, but could be luxury imports. In line with Guest’s beliefs about transience, the passage about the enemies of culture is only one of five sections of the poem, each summed up by a half-life containing the word “bringer”. The poem itself treats this theme as transient, as it sweeps through five scenes, succeeding each other as phases or perhaps turning calendrically, in five states of being, like seasons. Political poetry implies polarisation – again, Guest is not with any polarisation. The succession of temporary states of being is what he writes about. If you abandon polarisation, the political poetry we are familiar with crumbles to dust. As follows, he is distancing his point of view from the standard anti-student poem of the time, in a way which relativises and diminishes that set reaction pattern. Another section of ‘Myths’ runs:
hawk-
headed, thighed with
plumage, gold
manacles about the arm
greaves stained by red earth
at a half-run,
fleeing, aiming
Light of
sacrifice behind them
Stench of
coiled smoke leaning on a sky
altars reeking
rivulets of blood, feathers
vertebrae, smashed by the adzes
on to rough stone
The past-bringers
This is another phase of European history, we suppose. The detailing of warrior adornment is a typically guestian focus on decorative details, reducing something kinetic and violent to an array of surfaces. We may think of samurai-aesthetes, art collectors. The burnt offering sits well with an Iron Age setting, the reason for sacrifice and burning things might be the death of a warrior in the usual activity of warriors. The lords wear plume decorations, as many warriors have done until quite recently – aigrettes, perhaps. This motif echoes the feathers of fowl employed in the sacrifice.
A summary of the poem is hard to attain, because of its structure in five sections, which add up to a myth cycle but are utterly separate in their tenor and possibly in the millennium they draw details from.
Part of ‘Allegories’ somehow echoes the passage about warriors in (bronze?) armour in ‘Myths’:
Your carved element, spray of its plume
frozen prophetically in gold;
defence; scabbard; emblazoned shield
hoarding sunlight; doffed uniform
neutrally now the colour of
certain azaleas to cast
aside, you, Adam-naked, flex,
loyal conflict done, the struggle still
to come.
This poem describes sex in terms of epic warfare. The sex apparently involves two men, which is why the metaphor of duel presents itself. It is the assertion of life against mortality.
Clearly this is a personal myth and part of a wave of personal myths which were emerging, around 1970, as a logical solution to writing poetry after theology had died and when “domestic anecdote” had been artistically discredited. Guest is not projecting his ego in the myth – this is a rationale for writing myth, but may be a misunderstanding of what art and myth are for, if individualism and ownership are just local heresies of the West. It is also possible to define desires as dust hovering in the void, of no greater weight than the data of the senses, forever distracted by transience. Guest is not interested in repeating a myth, so it does not reflect a permanent structure, such as we suppose Personality to be. The next poem, “Allegories”, is clearly related to “Myths”, they form a whole; yet it does not overlap with the poem we have been discussing. Rather, both reflect a fundamentally unstable basis – something which has no essence because it is Void. Its body is made of dust. Pause to reflect – if artistic production reflects a personality, and this is a repeating pattern, does art have to repeat, stubbornly and predictably? If we find art failing to repeat, is it reflecting something quite different from a personality?
I am just going to quote a section from a poem called “Form”, from his first book.
The pattern's disappeared, the rift
is sewn and, in the dark, the formal
escapes; enchantment having set
an abstract puzzle, all the chance
of flesh discovers will be ash.
(The poem is offset from the left margin in what might be a fan or scallop form, which I can't reproduce here.) The word puzzle may be a keyword, since it also gives us the title of the collected. The ambivalence of this stanza is, so to speak, stated without ambivalence - “the pattern's disappeared”. A great deal of Guest’s concept is stated in five lines. But I am also quoting this because of an apparent misprint – the syntax of the fifth line does not work out. I tried to emend the last line, but actually it’s correct, the issue being an unusual use of the word "chance". So a paraphrase would be "all that the risk-based and accidentally allocated nature of flesh discovers will be devoid of substance". There is a hint that the knowledge involved has been carnal knowledge, and that it is the division of the sexes which is the product of chance, at cellular level. Sexual difference is then also the content of what we found out. The "ash" points back to a fire, probably the lightning which appears earlier in the poem - illumination leading to ash.
I see that he did a thesis on Mallarmé. This would have been (mainly) in Jan-June 1955, when he was a student in Paris. If we imagine what someone who was a fan of Mallarmé in 1954 could have attained by 1976, we have something unusually exciting. Actually, that is not a bad description of what Guest was like in the 1970s. I see that his first book was sub-titled ‘poems 1957-67’. His clarity of focus, a typical feature of 50s poets, is highly effective in depicting a free and multiple range of images. The 1962 autobiographical poem ‘Private View’ says it all in 400 lines:
The white bird trapped in its misshapen cage
Of spine and ribs sings and the king’s mask
Conceals some sort of answer.
You have to force to some extent the medium
Especially nowadays.
The river flows past the piano and,
Hanging from the stars that burned above Florence,
The illuminated hooves of a black stallion
Play Mozart for an ear six years have drowned.
He is already there. He made a debut in 1968, Arrangements, (although in fact that includes two earlier pamphlets starting in 1962). Arrangements is conservative compared to other debuts of the same period. It is related to Lee Harwood, but Guest never wholeheartedly accepted the innovations of the 60s. Even in the eight lines quoted, we see a torrent of arresting images whose psychological meanings are hard to identify. The hooves playing Mozart are, unambiguously, surrealist; but the imagery from modern art is not committed, the voice of the poet describes all these symbols but does not posses them – it moves on past them. I said “autobiographical” but the poem really shows the poet strolling through an art exhibition and wondering how to describe his reactions. The “white bird” is another work of art, not a real bird.
The 2002 collected, Puzzling Harvest, has 520 pages of text, defying a brief summary. Calling your collected a harvest is just a cliché. Calling a large book puzzling is almost calculated to alienate people. Wouldn't it stop being puzzling after the first 200 pages? I suggest we can rotate these words slightly. For harvest we can put flowers. For puzzling we can put ambivalent. (The preface contains the phrase “bewildered thanksgiving”, a mutation of the title.) I wrote “He sits well as someone who defines the border, by being equally acceptable as part of the mainstream and part of Mottram’s dissident band.“ This was in pursuit of classificatory success – I was piqued by Guest’s appearance in the list of 36 poets accepted in Mottram's famous troupe. (You understand that classification is a compulsion, once you have made large-scale generalisations the ways of being wrong are so many that you keep returning to them.) Eric was surely right to include Guest, who also fits in with the mainstream, and for this reason marks where the border runs. The similarity between the phrase “puzzling harvest” and “defining the border” is compelling – Guest would be between two worlds no matter where we set the boundary. We have to think about ambivalence itself to capture who he is.
Much of his best poetry is collected in Lost and Found: poems 1976-82; with the groups ‘Elegies’ and ‘Metamorphoses’ especially recommended.
Airs of summer wind their way through the empty chamber
for the skulls have gone to stare behind glass at a crude
map on the museum wall. Perhaps the bones
were removed piecemeal when the mound fell in. The sun is low
and slopes of tough grass fleeced with hazel
repeat the fragrance of the day. High stone slabs
freed from burial by five thousand years of rain
stand in the light and frost. You do not like these journeys.
(from 'Fifth Elegy')
Reading ‘Elegies’ was a breakthrough moment for me (in the 2003 anthology A State of Independence). A 1970 statement says “Lyrical analysis of personal relationships, bisexual love, landscapes, etc. Certain amount of intellectual demand; European rather than transatlantic; syllabics or stress-length lines; high premium on musicality. I admire Klee, the early Godard, Debussy's piano music.” (I guess “early Godard” means “before he acquired a Maoist girlfriend”).
He didn’t believe in an undiscovered continent floating just off the known waters, and so retained balance – he has no thesis. Living in Japan encouraged, I guess, his belief in beauty. From 1966, he spent six years teaching in Japan and so wrote poetry, then, influenced by Japanese culture, evidently delicate and without the “strong” sense of self which Western culture appreciates. He got really involved with Japanese poetry, working with Japanese poets to produce the translations in the book ‘Post-war Japanese verse’ for Penguin.
He quotes at the head of an early poem (‘Dusts’) “In Zen parlance, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought ‘defile the pure mind’. The world which we perceive like this is ‘the realm of the dust’.” Is this really the philosophy he is developing? The poetry is consistent with ambiguity, detachment, the idea of transience as the motive for recording sensations or even ideas. So “arrangements” sounds like the most neutral and tedious imaginable title for a book, but arrangements of stones, plants, etc. are highly admired in a Japanese context. He keeps alluding to Lee Harwood, and perhaps he likes a similar incompleteness. So a poem titled ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’ reveals nothing at all. The distinction between this and the political poets, in the majority in the Seventies, who saw (social) consciousness as an illusion behind which lurked the future world of a better society, is stylistic: Guest does not ever disrupt the surface of his own language, does not disturb anyone else’s, because he thinks the “hidden” world is equally illusory. His poetry is beautiful in the way that a garden or a painting is, because he is so detached: the dissipation of an imaginary depth allows the surface to develop an integral energy. The bond to Harwood may be bisexuality, and this could also be the “puzzle” – a pattern which is two things at once. The aesthetic which Guest and Harwood share, to some extent, is genuinely different, and they see different colours and so different patterns.
Was Guest changed by six years in Japan? This is not proven; I have the impression that Mallarmé had absorbed Japanese ideas, in the first craze for things from Japan, and Guest was fascinated by Mallarmé. The idea of writing poems to inscribe on fans is mallarmean, and either represents Oriental influence or else something French but so dedicated to evanescent and decorative things that it would seem utterly exotic in Britain, in 1975. After all, Guest chose to go to Japan in 1965 – he probably felt an affinity for that culture.
A trait that stands out is the wish to accumulate numerous images without adding the 'personal meaning' which would finish them off and erase them again. It is hard to characterise the moods, but also the ambiguity and density of information are autonomous features and effort to get through them is misplaced. The sequence 'Metamorphoses' is a significant example of this. It is not useful to analyse these images because their diversity is part of the point. Certainly he is not using conventional programmes – the elaborate verse patterning does not resolve down to a point we had to write an essay about in the sixth form.
There is a good celebration of Guest, published for his 80th birthday (and called High on the Downs). It includes an exhaustive analysis (by Tony Lopez) of the “O-Bon” poem included in Lucie-Smith’s Penguin Poetry since 1945. The analysis takes about 8 times as many words as the poem does. I must have read this poem but as my memory is blank I don’t think anything about it got through. Lopez’s analysis talks about Japanese ghost stories – giving us, immediately, a link to ‘Elegies’ which are really about ghosts. The reference to a festival where ghosts appear gives a key to the idea of transience – it is calendrical, in this poem, time itself shedding its shape and turning endlessly into something new. All arrangements of experience in words are like flower arrangements, formalising what is transient and about to turn to dust. The calendar ceremony itself gives the images of the day, and personality is less important than role. People are like ghosts, recurring on certain days of the year to carry out preset sequences of feelings.
You can’t be a teacher at a place like Lancing (where Guest was in the early Sixties) without being sophisticated. The job involves intuiting what is going to impress examiners, and tricking adolescents into getting interested in something outside themselves. It is for insiders. This goes against the generalisation that using a vanity publisher like Outposts, as Guest did for his two first pamphlets, was the act of outsiders who didn't realise that it was a path to nowhere. Outposts had more cultural front than other firms funded by the authors, and did get reviews occasionally. But if you look at lists of their publications (57 in the single year of 1974-5, at pp. 23-4 of Poet’s Yearbook) you see a crowd of people you have never heard of. But Guest possibly didn't want the hassle of finding a normal publisher; and did want to have something to show his friends.
The poetry world in 1962 was low temperature. I am not sure about the implications. Were there other brilliant poets like Guest among several hundred names published by Outposts in the sixties and seventies?
I am content to speak of Guest as mallarmean. That is – his poetry is never obscure, it unfolds what Mallarmé habitually compacts. But he is describing sensations which are unfamiliar – distinctions which the common vocabulary does not register. It is credible that the sceptical atmosphere of the 1950s actually made his style – the reiterated demand for lucidity and for concrete details was a pressure which he adapted to. The poems always seem clear until you try to paraphrase them. The poems seem to have been edited by an interior decorator – that sounds mocking, but really they have a great beauty of surface, everything which does not fit the patterns has been eliminated, the patterns are subtle and bewitching. They are like films directed by a set designer, always. ‘Private View’ is a poem about modern art which we can compare to Mottram – Eric was always saying “this is modern art, it is ours, and we have won!”. Guest is never saying that, he says in ‘Private View’ something more like “ah yes, modern art, it is something we can spend an evening with, how can we more precisely define the sensations which fill us as we pass by it, are these sensations too uncertain for the language we have”.
In that 1970 statement, Guest cited bisexuality as one of the things he wrote about. He did not cite it as a basis for his style – but that is what we have to think about. I doubt there is such a thing as a bisexual personality. Bisexuality may be the product of a primal rejection of polarisation and roles (as part of the “dust”). Sexual feelings are surely close to the poetic affinity which links Guest, Evans, and Harwood, but perhaps we can push them into the discreet cover of the long grass and focus instead on subtlety, ambivalence, commitment to transient sensations. Or we could talk about a cluster of masculine personality traits which don't actually help poetry very much and which people might be happy to jettison – whether biology favoured this endeavour or not. So we could think of rules like “the goal of art is to reproduce as many copies of your personality as possible” or “any sensation is better if driven to the absolute maximum of volume and sustain”, or even “the more resources I can use up the less resources anyone else will have access to so I can cut off their growth”. Part of this would be “ambiguous feelings and nuances weaken the impulse and so need to be purged”. If you have a sensation, do you build it up to its maximum intensity? Guest’s response is more “how can I tone this sensation so that it harmonises with other sensations in a whole where nothing clashes and the line of sense flows smoothly?” All this swagger, evidently, tends to limit the space available to the other person, the other half of a relationship – so it might be that self-aggrandizement is part of immaturity. Having an aversion to a distinctive and “proprietary” style might be part of this maturity – and if repeating a pattern which encodes your personality makes your art very monotonous, then giving up that project might let you produce poetry which is very subtle and which can be varied in a more fundamental way. I am just floating these ideas in case they are helpful. Another point is that doubting the merits of self-aggrandizement makes you question the process by which the outside world becomes transformed as you turn it into art – this process becomes less convincing. Of course, this is the element which allows the real identity of sensations – things like flowers, water, ceramics – to enter the art with such haunting, undiminished, faithfulness – they are not being “possessed” and so their appearance is intact. The detail allows transience to be visible – a side-effect of giving up ownership, which freezes phenomena because it does not want to admit an end to its own power. I am pointing to a very primitive model of seizure, acquisition, devouring, metabolism, crushing, as a process in male art, or macho art. We may want to think of a weak ego, Buddhism, or simply sophistication, as the context in which a more aesthetic, less aggressive, manner of approaching art might prevail. But also… I don’t know anything credible about Buddhism or Japan, nor can I define bisexuality except as something chatoyant which shifts every time you look at it. To return to 1962... perhaps Guest was happy to publish with Outposts because he just didn’t have a deep commitment to fame, hearing his own signal at loud volume, being top poet. Perhaps having those appetites turn to stillness was a path towards hearing other messages more clearly and more consistently.
In the 20th century, European artists were faced with the absence of the Christian and moralising stories which had been so satisfactory and repeated so endlessly over the previous eighteen centuries. There was no return, and in the unnerving silence which this exposed it was possible to react convulsively, unreflectively. Perhaps dedicating art to the self was a basic error, clutching at the object which was closest to hand and which could be heard clearly even when a confusion at the symbolic realm was making more complicated entities hard to see or resolve.
I am inclined to dwell on two long poems from the late Sixties, ‘Myths’ and ‘Allegories’. One, ‘Myths’ (p.86 of the Collected) includes a criticism of street demonstrations and probably of the student protest movement in general. It resembles two other poems, by Thwaite and Peter Abbs, of similar date. This was a polarising moment. Guest presents the belief of a teacher, that the Left upsurge of the young around 1968 to 1972 (it didn’t stop but that was a peak) was a gateway into the loss of all learning and a new Dark Ages. This sounds ludicrous, but that is the implication of this passage about the refuge of learning to remote areas:
illiterate, foul-
mouthed, the hordes shamble, wielding
ripped books, brandishing
sub-machine-guns
(echoing, the crash of
celadon, ormolu,
lacquer frames
chanting
the end of history, making for a
final hermitage where one
alone on the peninsula
illuminates last pages
(short saga in their wake
of sackings, torture)
Eyes empty of love
hands hating creation
The future-bringers
It is hard to accept that the students were so lost to civilising processes that they could no longer walk properly. Do we have evidence on how well the dons walked? The idea must be that Ireland preserved learning in the Dark Ages, a thesis with limited historical validity, and is remarkably close to what Peter Abbs says in his much darker and more right-wing poem of the same time. I am wondering if this story is from Spengler. Guest only wrote this one poem about a supposed attack on scholarship, and he minimised its impact by titling it “Myths”, so that you have to make an effort to connect it to British universities in 1968 (he was still in Japan in 1972). (To get technical, a Kalashnikov is not an SMG but an assault rifle, although confusingly its Russian name, avtomat, actually means ”sub-machine-gun”). (People in hermitages were not illuminating manuscripts, the materials for vellum MSS were expensive and this activity belonged in monasteries, which had numerous monks and some wealth. Anchorites are a different story.) The reference to the sub-machine-gun is one of very few moments which attaches this passage to 1968 rather than to the Dark Ages. The meeting of manuscripts and dissolute warriors could be taking place in Vietnam, or Red China, but the mention of “ormolu” locates it in Europe – ormolu was big in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Technically, the Chinese did have bronze gilt, but objects covered in it are not called “ormolu”, although it would not be literally wrong if they were.) The celadon (porcelain) and ”lacquer” sound oriental, but could be luxury imports. In line with Guest’s beliefs about transience, the passage about the enemies of culture is only one of five sections of the poem, each summed up by a half-life containing the word “bringer”. The poem itself treats this theme as transient, as it sweeps through five scenes, succeeding each other as phases or perhaps turning calendrically, in five states of being, like seasons. Political poetry implies polarisation – again, Guest is not with any polarisation. The succession of temporary states of being is what he writes about. If you abandon polarisation, the political poetry we are familiar with crumbles to dust. As follows, he is distancing his point of view from the standard anti-student poem of the time, in a way which relativises and diminishes that set reaction pattern. Another section of ‘Myths’ runs:
hawk-
headed, thighed with
plumage, gold
manacles about the arm
greaves stained by red earth
at a half-run,
fleeing, aiming
Light of
sacrifice behind them
Stench of
coiled smoke leaning on a sky
altars reeking
rivulets of blood, feathers
vertebrae, smashed by the adzes
on to rough stone
The past-bringers
This is another phase of European history, we suppose. The detailing of warrior adornment is a typically guestian focus on decorative details, reducing something kinetic and violent to an array of surfaces. We may think of samurai-aesthetes, art collectors. The burnt offering sits well with an Iron Age setting, the reason for sacrifice and burning things might be the death of a warrior in the usual activity of warriors. The lords wear plume decorations, as many warriors have done until quite recently – aigrettes, perhaps. This motif echoes the feathers of fowl employed in the sacrifice.
A summary of the poem is hard to attain, because of its structure in five sections, which add up to a myth cycle but are utterly separate in their tenor and possibly in the millennium they draw details from.
Part of ‘Allegories’ somehow echoes the passage about warriors in (bronze?) armour in ‘Myths’:
Your carved element, spray of its plume
frozen prophetically in gold;
defence; scabbard; emblazoned shield
hoarding sunlight; doffed uniform
neutrally now the colour of
certain azaleas to cast
aside, you, Adam-naked, flex,
loyal conflict done, the struggle still
to come.
This poem describes sex in terms of epic warfare. The sex apparently involves two men, which is why the metaphor of duel presents itself. It is the assertion of life against mortality.
Clearly this is a personal myth and part of a wave of personal myths which were emerging, around 1970, as a logical solution to writing poetry after theology had died and when “domestic anecdote” had been artistically discredited. Guest is not projecting his ego in the myth – this is a rationale for writing myth, but may be a misunderstanding of what art and myth are for, if individualism and ownership are just local heresies of the West. It is also possible to define desires as dust hovering in the void, of no greater weight than the data of the senses, forever distracted by transience. Guest is not interested in repeating a myth, so it does not reflect a permanent structure, such as we suppose Personality to be. The next poem, “Allegories”, is clearly related to “Myths”, they form a whole; yet it does not overlap with the poem we have been discussing. Rather, both reflect a fundamentally unstable basis – something which has no essence because it is Void. Its body is made of dust. Pause to reflect – if artistic production reflects a personality, and this is a repeating pattern, does art have to repeat, stubbornly and predictably? If we find art failing to repeat, is it reflecting something quite different from a personality?
I am just going to quote a section from a poem called “Form”, from his first book.
The pattern's disappeared, the rift
is sewn and, in the dark, the formal
escapes; enchantment having set
an abstract puzzle, all the chance
of flesh discovers will be ash.
(The poem is offset from the left margin in what might be a fan or scallop form, which I can't reproduce here.) The word puzzle may be a keyword, since it also gives us the title of the collected. The ambivalence of this stanza is, so to speak, stated without ambivalence - “the pattern's disappeared”. A great deal of Guest’s concept is stated in five lines. But I am also quoting this because of an apparent misprint – the syntax of the fifth line does not work out. I tried to emend the last line, but actually it’s correct, the issue being an unusual use of the word "chance". So a paraphrase would be "all that the risk-based and accidentally allocated nature of flesh discovers will be devoid of substance". There is a hint that the knowledge involved has been carnal knowledge, and that it is the division of the sexes which is the product of chance, at cellular level. Sexual difference is then also the content of what we found out. The "ash" points back to a fire, probably the lightning which appears earlier in the poem - illumination leading to ash.
Saturday 24 April 2021
Volumes of publication
Let me comment on some work not included in my book about poetry in the Seventies, about overall volumes of publication and fluctuations in the intensity of publication.
If we take 3 years in the 70s, we have figures for the percentage of titles written by women, as follows: 1970, 24.1%; 1975, 19.0%; 1978, 22.6%. This does not support the narrative which we have accepted from other sources, of feminism starting in a minimal way in 1970, facing difficulties, and making good progress through the decade by putting forward undeniable arguments. We can move away from the numbers to suggest some speculative interpretations. To start with the growth of poetry from 1960 on was based on the growth in the number of graduates (to include current students). This correlation works in the long term. But, there were far more male than female students, even in the 1970s. So, if 80% of undergraduates are male, a growth in student numbers also means a growth in numbers of male poets. This is what we are seeing in 1975 or so – “male former students” from the cohort of 1960 on are writing poetry, and this effect is dominant in the figures we have for the 1970s. This does not mean that feminism is making no progress, or even that the poetry world is resisting feminism. There was a shift in the attitude of girl school pupils, such that they moved over to a belief in having a career, and so in getting a degree, and so they became more academically focussed at the age of, say, 14 to 18. 15 year olds changed their attitudes and change in the structure of student populations followed. This is feminism as a demographic, macro-economic event.
For three successive years, we have exact figures for the total number of titles published. Figures for these three years (between 1976 and 1978) are 770, 906, 709. The growth since 1970 is impressive. The short-term fluctuations are also impressive. It is hard to explain why the industry should be so unstable. As a comforting narrative, we could guess that figures were going down, in 1978, because of a wave of cultural pessimism, a loss of belief in the new ideas, which also led to the victory of Thatcher in April 1979. Culture and politics are different, but there may be a “national mood” which affects both of them. Another explanation would have to do with inflation – the cost of paper and printing was going up very steeply and, arguably, people buying books weren’t accepting of prices going up by 400% – a case of “perceptual lag”. It was easier to scale down the issue of new titles and wait for better times. If you remember the days of inflation, everyone had the idea that they could “pass on” the cost increases to someone else – but consumers were at the end of this line and they always had the power to say “no”.
These figures do not invalidate the long-term effect of the growth in the number of graduates, but they show short-term fluctuations which are not in time with that – we have to posit ups and downs which we can probably name as the effect of enthusiasm, the overall temperature of the market.
There is some consensus about a shift in cultural attitudes around 1965 – the moment of “swinging London”. That was a splash in a small group, geographically in London and involved with fashion and the media. This group is influential, and when we see sharp growths in poetry in the mid-70s, this is still probably the effect of a “long wave” rolling out from that moment in 1965. There is still the effect that if you have five times as many graduates you have five times as many people ready to commit their energies to poetry. This is the demographic aspect and the sense of liberation provides the content for the new culture. It seems likely that the Seventies saw important shifts in the cultural attitudes of women which were hard work and which formed the basis for a blossoming of women’s poetry in the Eighties. Certainly we can point to new women poets in the Seventies, such as Denise Riley, Nicki Jackowska, and Judith Kazantzis.
If we look at Lucie-Smith's classic anthology of 1970, British Poetry since 1945, we can count six women poets in 86 names. This is about 7%, and there is an obvious gap between this and the 24% which was the share of women in all the (roughly 400) titles which came out in that year. This is accompanied by an interpretative gap – we can guess what the reasons are, but the guesses are much less solid than the counts. The reasons may relate to factors in the upbringing of the poets, which for poets born roughly between 1920 and 1945 would relate to “formative years” between roughly 1925 and 1960. One explanation might be that Lucie-Smith is looking for culturally impressive poems, to fill a showcase, whereas a significant portion of mid-century women poets went for conservative, lyrical, and unambitious poems – logical behaviour for the dominated sector of a society. Thus feminism was faced with two tasks, of persuading men that domination was not a position they could defend in the long term, and of persuading (adult) women to change their attitudes towards many aspects of femininity, including the composition of graceful and forgettable poems. Is this enough to account for the 17% gap which we mentioned? (Another interesting gap is between 24% of poetry books being issued and the level of women in the adult population, roughly 52%.) Lucie-Smith’s position is complemented by Eric Mottram's statement on the ”British Poetry Revival 1960-74” where he lists 36 poets of which exactly one is a woman – less than 3%. This is an alarming figure, but may also give insight into the question of “dominant” behaviour – evidently the intellectual and innovative sector in poetry is correlated with the most autonomous and intellectual parts of society, one kind of dominance in fact. Of course this kind of poetry may not be popular, of course there are many analogies one could bring to bear, but it remains true that the innovators align themselves with the parts of society which lead, and which ignore inherited authority to think for themselves. This lets us return to the postulate that mid-century women poets were mainly conservative, dependent, personal, and lyrical – attitudes consonant with being dominated and with being conformist and well-behaved.
Another explanation would, of course, be that Lucie-Smith had missed several excellent women poets, so that his proportions are out of proportion. I am tempted to list the women poets he left out, we would all enjoy this, but if you also start listing all the male poets he left out then it is not clear that this operation really changes the demographics. Maybe if you step the list up from 86 to 200, the female share is still 7%.
The narratives I have overlaid on the figures are not wholly convincing. It is much more accurate to deal with poets one by one – where they write the story for us. Facing the overall shape is more of a struggle – it is hard to resist, though. Analysing the behaviour of 5000 people is not necessarily more accurate than analysing the behaviour of one person.
In the 1970s, the feminists are much more important than publication figures would suggest. So cultural critique is central - it is much more what we are writing history about than poems about birdsong and landscapes. The question of how society is going to change is the most significant question – although of course if you start to answer it you are claiming to be more intelligent and powerful than other people. If abstract ideas about changes that have yet to come are the core thing, the power generating station, why do we hear so much about empiricism? My guess is that writing about empirical facts makes the poem much less interesting. Reviewers are constantly asking young poets to write empirically as a way of persuading them to write unimportant poems. This is a contest over status. Feminism was important because it wasn't empirical, it was a line of radical cultural criticism.
If we take 3 years in the 70s, we have figures for the percentage of titles written by women, as follows: 1970, 24.1%; 1975, 19.0%; 1978, 22.6%. This does not support the narrative which we have accepted from other sources, of feminism starting in a minimal way in 1970, facing difficulties, and making good progress through the decade by putting forward undeniable arguments. We can move away from the numbers to suggest some speculative interpretations. To start with the growth of poetry from 1960 on was based on the growth in the number of graduates (to include current students). This correlation works in the long term. But, there were far more male than female students, even in the 1970s. So, if 80% of undergraduates are male, a growth in student numbers also means a growth in numbers of male poets. This is what we are seeing in 1975 or so – “male former students” from the cohort of 1960 on are writing poetry, and this effect is dominant in the figures we have for the 1970s. This does not mean that feminism is making no progress, or even that the poetry world is resisting feminism. There was a shift in the attitude of girl school pupils, such that they moved over to a belief in having a career, and so in getting a degree, and so they became more academically focussed at the age of, say, 14 to 18. 15 year olds changed their attitudes and change in the structure of student populations followed. This is feminism as a demographic, macro-economic event.
For three successive years, we have exact figures for the total number of titles published. Figures for these three years (between 1976 and 1978) are 770, 906, 709. The growth since 1970 is impressive. The short-term fluctuations are also impressive. It is hard to explain why the industry should be so unstable. As a comforting narrative, we could guess that figures were going down, in 1978, because of a wave of cultural pessimism, a loss of belief in the new ideas, which also led to the victory of Thatcher in April 1979. Culture and politics are different, but there may be a “national mood” which affects both of them. Another explanation would have to do with inflation – the cost of paper and printing was going up very steeply and, arguably, people buying books weren’t accepting of prices going up by 400% – a case of “perceptual lag”. It was easier to scale down the issue of new titles and wait for better times. If you remember the days of inflation, everyone had the idea that they could “pass on” the cost increases to someone else – but consumers were at the end of this line and they always had the power to say “no”.
These figures do not invalidate the long-term effect of the growth in the number of graduates, but they show short-term fluctuations which are not in time with that – we have to posit ups and downs which we can probably name as the effect of enthusiasm, the overall temperature of the market.
There is some consensus about a shift in cultural attitudes around 1965 – the moment of “swinging London”. That was a splash in a small group, geographically in London and involved with fashion and the media. This group is influential, and when we see sharp growths in poetry in the mid-70s, this is still probably the effect of a “long wave” rolling out from that moment in 1965. There is still the effect that if you have five times as many graduates you have five times as many people ready to commit their energies to poetry. This is the demographic aspect and the sense of liberation provides the content for the new culture. It seems likely that the Seventies saw important shifts in the cultural attitudes of women which were hard work and which formed the basis for a blossoming of women’s poetry in the Eighties. Certainly we can point to new women poets in the Seventies, such as Denise Riley, Nicki Jackowska, and Judith Kazantzis.
If we look at Lucie-Smith's classic anthology of 1970, British Poetry since 1945, we can count six women poets in 86 names. This is about 7%, and there is an obvious gap between this and the 24% which was the share of women in all the (roughly 400) titles which came out in that year. This is accompanied by an interpretative gap – we can guess what the reasons are, but the guesses are much less solid than the counts. The reasons may relate to factors in the upbringing of the poets, which for poets born roughly between 1920 and 1945 would relate to “formative years” between roughly 1925 and 1960. One explanation might be that Lucie-Smith is looking for culturally impressive poems, to fill a showcase, whereas a significant portion of mid-century women poets went for conservative, lyrical, and unambitious poems – logical behaviour for the dominated sector of a society. Thus feminism was faced with two tasks, of persuading men that domination was not a position they could defend in the long term, and of persuading (adult) women to change their attitudes towards many aspects of femininity, including the composition of graceful and forgettable poems. Is this enough to account for the 17% gap which we mentioned? (Another interesting gap is between 24% of poetry books being issued and the level of women in the adult population, roughly 52%.) Lucie-Smith’s position is complemented by Eric Mottram's statement on the ”British Poetry Revival 1960-74” where he lists 36 poets of which exactly one is a woman – less than 3%. This is an alarming figure, but may also give insight into the question of “dominant” behaviour – evidently the intellectual and innovative sector in poetry is correlated with the most autonomous and intellectual parts of society, one kind of dominance in fact. Of course this kind of poetry may not be popular, of course there are many analogies one could bring to bear, but it remains true that the innovators align themselves with the parts of society which lead, and which ignore inherited authority to think for themselves. This lets us return to the postulate that mid-century women poets were mainly conservative, dependent, personal, and lyrical – attitudes consonant with being dominated and with being conformist and well-behaved.
Another explanation would, of course, be that Lucie-Smith had missed several excellent women poets, so that his proportions are out of proportion. I am tempted to list the women poets he left out, we would all enjoy this, but if you also start listing all the male poets he left out then it is not clear that this operation really changes the demographics. Maybe if you step the list up from 86 to 200, the female share is still 7%.
The narratives I have overlaid on the figures are not wholly convincing. It is much more accurate to deal with poets one by one – where they write the story for us. Facing the overall shape is more of a struggle – it is hard to resist, though. Analysing the behaviour of 5000 people is not necessarily more accurate than analysing the behaviour of one person.
In the 1970s, the feminists are much more important than publication figures would suggest. So cultural critique is central - it is much more what we are writing history about than poems about birdsong and landscapes. The question of how society is going to change is the most significant question – although of course if you start to answer it you are claiming to be more intelligent and powerful than other people. If abstract ideas about changes that have yet to come are the core thing, the power generating station, why do we hear so much about empiricism? My guess is that writing about empirical facts makes the poem much less interesting. Reviewers are constantly asking young poets to write empirically as a way of persuading them to write unimportant poems. This is a contest over status. Feminism was important because it wasn't empirical, it was a line of radical cultural criticism.
Friday 23 April 2021
Notes on BL catalogue work
Notes on catalogue work
It is possible to get large amounts of data from the British library catalogue up on screen, and download it page by page to a spreadsheet. Then you can post-process it and generally do your will. I think spelunking is the technical term. The catalogue interface is not designed for this kind of data grab, so the download was bloody awkward. The BL catalogue has a tag “English poetry” which means “English language poetry”, so I had to edit out Canadian and American poets. Crawling through large spreadsheets line by line is deeply unwelcome and gives me headaches. I can't do this for the whole 40 year period which interests me (1960 to 97) but I have done an amount of sampling. The topics of interest were: overall count of poets active. Count of titles published. Changes during the period. Ratio of male to female writers.
For 1991, the figures I came out with were 835 volumes by British poets, and if we exclude anthologies then 27.5% of the titles were by women. This compares with 20% for a period in the 70s (June 1975 to June 1976). This is a fairly rapid change for a 15-year period.
Because of the difficulties, these figures are not totally reliable.
The BL catalogue has a tag “Subject”, which should help, but most poetry does not have the value “poetry” within this field, and the tagging is inconsistent. If you trawl three times using different search strings, you get a mass of data, but there is no guarantee that it is complete. The BL catalogue for publication date 1990 and tag “English poetry” shows 1551 titles. After eliminating anything which is non-British, non-20th C, in prose, etc., this comes down to 831 titles by single authors (and 124 anthologies). My impression is strongly that any retrieval based on labels like “English language poetry” will yield inflated totals, like the raw count of 1551. These do not give a credible picture of the poetry scene. I have seen various figures quoted for overall titles published which seem to be seriously exaggerated. The raw data includes academic criticism of poetry, editions of Chaucer, and so forth, and you have to correct it line by line.
A likely total for the 1970s is 6000 titles and 3000 poets. I regret that the sources are inconsistent. I have a spreadsheet of names with 2000 non-duplicate names.
Any totals would include estimates for 1970 and 1971, as I don’t have detailed data. For this reason a consistent set of data for the whole decade is not available to me. I emphasise that the BL does not produce its catalogue for the benefit of historians, but for the benefit of people visiting to consult books, and I am not criticising anyone for not fulfilling goals which they never had.
A provisional total for the period (1960-97) is 8000 poets and 23,000 titles. This is only based on a count for a few years, and I wouldn't say a “good count”. I have a good count for four years, the ones covered by the excellent “Poet’s Yearbook”.
To take an example, Lion Lion (by Tom Raworth, 1970) is there in the BL catalogue but is not labelled as 821.914 OR as 'English poetry'. And “poems” is not in the title or description. Shelfmark “General Reference Collection", no Subject identifier at all. So there is no way of catching it in a trawl. Did they not see it as poetry? Crow, from the same year, has the same issue (but does have the attribute of 821.914). Maybe the subject tags started later in life?
Has the count of male poets gone down? This is weird. Can’t have a static total and the ratio of women poets going up. The figures I have are not good enough to answer this question.
I found working through the data for 1960 depressing. Almost half the titles are from vanity presses and the wave of “small presses” has yet to start. The list is full of books I don’t want to read. It brings us back to Mottram’s position -everything started in 1960, the Fifties were a cold war against ourselves and deeply hostile to poetry and its creators. We apparently have a growth of 300% between then and 1975 – this isn’t surprising, evidently if you start from zero then huge growth is possible. A bit of additional work found more titles. ‘Lupercal’ came up only on the third trawl I did. ‘The nature of cold weather’ has “1960” printed on the title page but was issued with a slip which says “actually published in 1961”. ‘City’ part 2 shows up in 1962, but the original City is not found at all. Creatures and emblems, by Kathleen Nott, does not show up under existing searches but is in the catalogue. The Flooded Valley, by Roland Mathias, did not come up in the searches I did. So if you manage to list Hughes, Fisher, Redgrove, Nott, Mathias, the year does not look so bad. This just underlines the problems of using the BL catalogue. All the same the list is enough to make you give up. My feeling has always been that “City” and “torse 3” showed things changing, utterly. John Smith’s A Letter to Lao Tze came out in 1961. 1960 did see Songs of a mad prince, by T. Harri Jones, certainly poetry although it is too dark to be really beautiful. Still, you can’t ignore him.
The count possibly didn't grow in 15 years, from the mid 70s to 1990. I am looking at this. Maybe there was a peak which was hard to exceed. New poets arrived but not in a “human wave”. 800 titles a year is quite a lot, we are not talking about a depression or anything like that. Ten poets stalk off stage in a high-value sulk, and twenty young poets, rippling with intelligence, stroll on to replace them.
I am spelling out the problems here because I expect to use the figures a lot and I want a reference which I can point towards to explain how shaky the figures are.
Stop press. I have just discovered that the first book by someone I admire, in 1943, was from a vanity press. He had a big career after that, suppressing any memory of that 1943 book on his dust jackets. So, the generalisation that people who use vanity presses never have careers does not hold good. It is not the kiss of death, although it suggests that you are not an insider. Actually, quite a few good poets worked with Fortune Press, which had elements of extracting “guarantees” and ”undertakings to buy” from poets. They did have an element of quality control and certainly tried to sell the books, having printed them.
It is possible to get large amounts of data from the British library catalogue up on screen, and download it page by page to a spreadsheet. Then you can post-process it and generally do your will. I think spelunking is the technical term. The catalogue interface is not designed for this kind of data grab, so the download was bloody awkward. The BL catalogue has a tag “English poetry” which means “English language poetry”, so I had to edit out Canadian and American poets. Crawling through large spreadsheets line by line is deeply unwelcome and gives me headaches. I can't do this for the whole 40 year period which interests me (1960 to 97) but I have done an amount of sampling. The topics of interest were: overall count of poets active. Count of titles published. Changes during the period. Ratio of male to female writers.
For 1991, the figures I came out with were 835 volumes by British poets, and if we exclude anthologies then 27.5% of the titles were by women. This compares with 20% for a period in the 70s (June 1975 to June 1976). This is a fairly rapid change for a 15-year period.
Because of the difficulties, these figures are not totally reliable.
The BL catalogue has a tag “Subject”, which should help, but most poetry does not have the value “poetry” within this field, and the tagging is inconsistent. If you trawl three times using different search strings, you get a mass of data, but there is no guarantee that it is complete. The BL catalogue for publication date 1990 and tag “English poetry” shows 1551 titles. After eliminating anything which is non-British, non-20th C, in prose, etc., this comes down to 831 titles by single authors (and 124 anthologies). My impression is strongly that any retrieval based on labels like “English language poetry” will yield inflated totals, like the raw count of 1551. These do not give a credible picture of the poetry scene. I have seen various figures quoted for overall titles published which seem to be seriously exaggerated. The raw data includes academic criticism of poetry, editions of Chaucer, and so forth, and you have to correct it line by line.
A likely total for the 1970s is 6000 titles and 3000 poets. I regret that the sources are inconsistent. I have a spreadsheet of names with 2000 non-duplicate names.
Any totals would include estimates for 1970 and 1971, as I don’t have detailed data. For this reason a consistent set of data for the whole decade is not available to me. I emphasise that the BL does not produce its catalogue for the benefit of historians, but for the benefit of people visiting to consult books, and I am not criticising anyone for not fulfilling goals which they never had.
A provisional total for the period (1960-97) is 8000 poets and 23,000 titles. This is only based on a count for a few years, and I wouldn't say a “good count”. I have a good count for four years, the ones covered by the excellent “Poet’s Yearbook”.
To take an example, Lion Lion (by Tom Raworth, 1970) is there in the BL catalogue but is not labelled as 821.914 OR as 'English poetry'. And “poems” is not in the title or description. Shelfmark “General Reference Collection", no Subject identifier at all. So there is no way of catching it in a trawl. Did they not see it as poetry? Crow, from the same year, has the same issue (but does have the attribute of 821.914). Maybe the subject tags started later in life?
Has the count of male poets gone down? This is weird. Can’t have a static total and the ratio of women poets going up. The figures I have are not good enough to answer this question.
I found working through the data for 1960 depressing. Almost half the titles are from vanity presses and the wave of “small presses” has yet to start. The list is full of books I don’t want to read. It brings us back to Mottram’s position -everything started in 1960, the Fifties were a cold war against ourselves and deeply hostile to poetry and its creators. We apparently have a growth of 300% between then and 1975 – this isn’t surprising, evidently if you start from zero then huge growth is possible. A bit of additional work found more titles. ‘Lupercal’ came up only on the third trawl I did. ‘The nature of cold weather’ has “1960” printed on the title page but was issued with a slip which says “actually published in 1961”. ‘City’ part 2 shows up in 1962, but the original City is not found at all. Creatures and emblems, by Kathleen Nott, does not show up under existing searches but is in the catalogue. The Flooded Valley, by Roland Mathias, did not come up in the searches I did. So if you manage to list Hughes, Fisher, Redgrove, Nott, Mathias, the year does not look so bad. This just underlines the problems of using the BL catalogue. All the same the list is enough to make you give up. My feeling has always been that “City” and “torse 3” showed things changing, utterly. John Smith’s A Letter to Lao Tze came out in 1961. 1960 did see Songs of a mad prince, by T. Harri Jones, certainly poetry although it is too dark to be really beautiful. Still, you can’t ignore him.
The count possibly didn't grow in 15 years, from the mid 70s to 1990. I am looking at this. Maybe there was a peak which was hard to exceed. New poets arrived but not in a “human wave”. 800 titles a year is quite a lot, we are not talking about a depression or anything like that. Ten poets stalk off stage in a high-value sulk, and twenty young poets, rippling with intelligence, stroll on to replace them.
I am spelling out the problems here because I expect to use the figures a lot and I want a reference which I can point towards to explain how shaky the figures are.
Stop press. I have just discovered that the first book by someone I admire, in 1943, was from a vanity press. He had a big career after that, suppressing any memory of that 1943 book on his dust jackets. So, the generalisation that people who use vanity presses never have careers does not hold good. It is not the kiss of death, although it suggests that you are not an insider. Actually, quite a few good poets worked with Fortune Press, which had elements of extracting “guarantees” and ”undertakings to buy” from poets. They did have an element of quality control and certainly tried to sell the books, having printed them.
Friday 2 April 2021
Nothing is being suppressed
Nothing is being suppressed: Progressive art or subsidised freak-out?
My book on poetry in the Seventies is close to being released, and I am getting agitated.
The publisher is busy getting permissions to quote from the excessive number of quotations I have used. This is a slow process. If someone causes difficulty, I will delete the section on them and insert somebody else… this is quite stimulating for me, there is so much I had to leave out.
The book discusses 16 poets whom I have never published on before. This tidies up some outstanding lacunae, but inevitably the research phase led to me uncovering still more poets of the time, and there was no room left for them in the book. Most of these are discussed in messages on this blog, mostly during 2019. I have just realised an omission - I describe the origin of "procedures", used to make poems, in conceptual art, but I never discuss the "proceduralisation" of music, big in the 1950s but probably going back to Schoenberg in the 1920s. very hard to draw the line between art and music as source. Possibly not worth the effort. You have to omit something, in the end.
I am going to release some passages that didn’t get into the book. These are statements by other people which I found especially interesting.
A few more words on Sorley MacLean’s poem “The Cave of the Gold”, which I write about in the book.
The legend sited (also!) in Wester Ross:
"From the car park at Opinan, follow the cliff top path, north towards the headland called Sron na Carra. Some 300 yards before the headland an iron stake and a cairn mark the position of Uamh an Oir. The origin of the name has been lost, but parents in the area used to tell the children a tale similar to the Piper of Hamelin, that long ago a Piper led a party of children into the cave and they were never seen again, and if children went alone to the cave the same fate would happen to them.
It was probably a story born out of the need to keep the young and unwary away from the cave, for it is tidal and can only be reached at mid to low tide. Visitors will need to carry a light if they wish to explore the short right and longer left hand branch. It is said, if you listen quietly you can still hear the Piper far away.
There are three Caves of Gold in the area. One on the north east shore of Loch Maree [Ardlair Cave?], the third on the south side of Liathach above Torridon is said to be linked to the Cave of Gold at Opinan, for those who know the way."
An English version of the legend has been made into a poem by Mike Blackburn, ‘The Drummer Boy of Richmond” (in The Ascending Boy, 1999). Following all the variants is mind-blowing but not helpful for reading the poem, which is focussed and only uses the cluster of themes which interested MacLean. You could possibly find 1000 variants.
Eric Mottram wrote in the catalogue to a 1977 conference:
"As official British culture shrinks in response to the pressures of British economic and political decline from the raving days of Empire and Influence, the twenty-one poets of this conference expand and develop in a scene which is both local and international.
Environmental perception, then, depends on where a poet is both physically and mentally– in his cultural imagination – and where he sees himself potentially – in the past, present or future locations.
Geographers make mental maps of space preferences (the terms here are taken from Mental Maps by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Penguin 1974). We form images of place from reading, television and conversation as well as from direct contact. Romantic Nature has become perceptual geography. Scenery, climate and cultural and educational diversity determine a family man or woman’s choices, or lack of them. […] A sense of orientation is both geographical and cultural. Maps have been made of the mental topography of environments in terms of stress, fear, pleasure, security – especially in urban areas.
Information surface shows configurations of where we are: visible and invisible information environment, or what David Sten calls invisible landscape, which shapes image and behaviour (Gould and White, ibid.)—a poem moves between finding procedures for complexity and procedures for simplicity: to what extent does human behaviour seem complex because of the complexity of the information environment in which men and women are embedded; invisible stress surfaces pattern our lives. As a child, aged 5 to 12, the local area was mapped for me as two woods separated and different, the place where a dog leapt out at me from a house gate, two bus-stops, a row of shops, the library (an early Victorian house in its own grounds), school (several miles, the first by foot, the second by bus or bike), and the nearby town (a bus-journey to a street market on Saturday, and cinemas) – and further to Crystal Palace football ground, and further still, London, where father went every day and we visited as a treat. I never went abroad until, aged 18 and in the Royal Navy I travelled by cruiser to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our map of perceptions and preferences changes with age and opportunity. A poem emerges from the poet at the intersection of visible and invisible locations; of information-transmitting sources, of political and social pressures of his position and condition in historical process."
Was this actually happening? Probably not. It’s part of the music of the time.
When I was going through archived newspapers of the time, I thought Nuttall wasn’t interested by what he was reviewing, but Peter Porter was very attentive and perceptive. It was a pleasure to dig up all his reviews. he says several times that he can't follow the poetry because contextual information has been left out. This is a valid point, always, but it just tells us that there had been a long period in which poems were deadened by being restricted to what was explicit, with the implicit being distrusted as "rhetoric" or "ideology", and a feature of the Seventies was just relaxing and giving the implicit its head. Immediately, the verbal shape of the poem seems very small in a big forest of the implicit. You can't describe landscape directly - there is too much of it - but you can learn how to manipulate the implicit so that space emerges as something silent and all-capacious around the small line of verbal sounds. We are approaching the point where the difference between poetry and prose, after the practice of regular metre has been abandoned, turns out to be the manipulation of the implicit. The implicit is both silent and foregrounded.
A basic act in political activity is distrusting the unstated as a hiding-place where collusion between the rich, also between government and the rich, goes to be out of sight. So you insist on explicit criteria. This is actually very bad for poetry. 70s poetry flourished in a sheltered space where the implicit could be allowed to broadcast its signal, without disputes over rights excluding it from culture. Maybe that is what the book shoud have been about.
"Looking at the ‘public memories’ of Bloodaxe and Carcanet encourages us to think that modern taste has given up on poetry so the shopper benefits from assertive contexts which form centres of attraction and offer a net of social reinforcement. The Underground was actually one of these. The public history of poetry is possibly the history of these “identities” as literary institutions. The process of focussing and forming preferences is wrapped up with the process of selective forgetting, since every focus creates an area of dimness around it. The “identities” are not just categories, they actually contain information and can be studied as cultural objects. They replace what used to be known as genres, and they possibly offer debut poets a model for successful poems and also a way of identifying what the market likes. The substance being generated is unstable – it keeps growing. People get further and further into what they like. So parts of the cultural field move further and further apart from each other. Bearing this in mind, we can come back to the idea of style blocs, accepting that the principle of falsifiability applies to categorisation as to other proposals of fact."
Another idea which there wasn't room for:
"There is a package of (alpha male, wisdom, responsibility, experience, generalisations, ethical superiority) which older poets saw as their commodity number one and which readers reacted against. A focal problem was the poem which has some concrete information and then at the end packages it up in a moral generalisation, so something like ‘people should be nice to each other’ or ‘you can’t trust the powerful and connected’ or “isn’t he a bit like you and me" or even ‘it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels’. I am wondering whether this kind of poem really exists. Maybe the idea of the smug closing quatrain is more of a Fear Symbol and less of a real, dreadful, thing. An older generation of readers were asking moral questions of poets, and poets were giving clear and resonant answers to these questions, which since the 1960s few people have been asking. I thought to look at Poetry Dimension 2, a reliable reference source for conventional poems of the time, which was 1972. I counted 57 poems of which 15 have a lurch into generalisation and lesson drawing at the end, or close to the end."
This doesn't add so much, because it describes the 50s-style poetry which is absolutely not what we want to remember about the Seventies. I just like counting, in the end. It's interesting that it is only 15 and not the whole 57. Also, the "new poetry" was (in one view) writing about Abstract Ideas the whole time, and not waiting for a lurch into generalisation in the last quatrain. The old-style poetry comes across as far less fluent in ideas, and this is why its wisdom is unconvincing and unsatisfying. Arguably, the new poetry is making generalisations about culture throughout the poem. Anyway, the smug final quatrain was something which older poets were Very Proud Of, and they must have been indignant that it was stigmatised and ridiculed by a younger generation. However, I think it has vanished altogether - younger mainstream poets also saw it as stigmatising, and this is something you can check in the Faber "Poetry Introduction" series.
This feature can be counted, in a way which many observers could agree on. The smug final quatrain is there, it’s not a theory. But the change in poetry probably exhibits itself in 35 features at once, it is an absolute change of aesthetic. Looking at a single feature, however plain and visible it is, does not give us the historical truth we are looking for.
I want to say that the “conclusion” is important because it follows a poem of local and particular data, which connects with the poet as a body which receives sensations, and it is the connection between the empirical poem (local) and the reader (on the plane of generality). It is where the poem stops being empirical –and the merely empirical poem can be frustrating.
My book on poetry in the Seventies is close to being released, and I am getting agitated.
The publisher is busy getting permissions to quote from the excessive number of quotations I have used. This is a slow process. If someone causes difficulty, I will delete the section on them and insert somebody else… this is quite stimulating for me, there is so much I had to leave out.
The book discusses 16 poets whom I have never published on before. This tidies up some outstanding lacunae, but inevitably the research phase led to me uncovering still more poets of the time, and there was no room left for them in the book. Most of these are discussed in messages on this blog, mostly during 2019. I have just realised an omission - I describe the origin of "procedures", used to make poems, in conceptual art, but I never discuss the "proceduralisation" of music, big in the 1950s but probably going back to Schoenberg in the 1920s. very hard to draw the line between art and music as source. Possibly not worth the effort. You have to omit something, in the end.
I am going to release some passages that didn’t get into the book. These are statements by other people which I found especially interesting.
A few more words on Sorley MacLean’s poem “The Cave of the Gold”, which I write about in the book.
The legend sited (also!) in Wester Ross:
"From the car park at Opinan, follow the cliff top path, north towards the headland called Sron na Carra. Some 300 yards before the headland an iron stake and a cairn mark the position of Uamh an Oir. The origin of the name has been lost, but parents in the area used to tell the children a tale similar to the Piper of Hamelin, that long ago a Piper led a party of children into the cave and they were never seen again, and if children went alone to the cave the same fate would happen to them.
It was probably a story born out of the need to keep the young and unwary away from the cave, for it is tidal and can only be reached at mid to low tide. Visitors will need to carry a light if they wish to explore the short right and longer left hand branch. It is said, if you listen quietly you can still hear the Piper far away.
There are three Caves of Gold in the area. One on the north east shore of Loch Maree [Ardlair Cave?], the third on the south side of Liathach above Torridon is said to be linked to the Cave of Gold at Opinan, for those who know the way."
An English version of the legend has been made into a poem by Mike Blackburn, ‘The Drummer Boy of Richmond” (in The Ascending Boy, 1999). Following all the variants is mind-blowing but not helpful for reading the poem, which is focussed and only uses the cluster of themes which interested MacLean. You could possibly find 1000 variants.
Eric Mottram wrote in the catalogue to a 1977 conference:
"As official British culture shrinks in response to the pressures of British economic and political decline from the raving days of Empire and Influence, the twenty-one poets of this conference expand and develop in a scene which is both local and international.
Environmental perception, then, depends on where a poet is both physically and mentally– in his cultural imagination – and where he sees himself potentially – in the past, present or future locations.
Geographers make mental maps of space preferences (the terms here are taken from Mental Maps by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Penguin 1974). We form images of place from reading, television and conversation as well as from direct contact. Romantic Nature has become perceptual geography. Scenery, climate and cultural and educational diversity determine a family man or woman’s choices, or lack of them. […] A sense of orientation is both geographical and cultural. Maps have been made of the mental topography of environments in terms of stress, fear, pleasure, security – especially in urban areas.
Information surface shows configurations of where we are: visible and invisible information environment, or what David Sten calls invisible landscape, which shapes image and behaviour (Gould and White, ibid.)—a poem moves between finding procedures for complexity and procedures for simplicity: to what extent does human behaviour seem complex because of the complexity of the information environment in which men and women are embedded; invisible stress surfaces pattern our lives. As a child, aged 5 to 12, the local area was mapped for me as two woods separated and different, the place where a dog leapt out at me from a house gate, two bus-stops, a row of shops, the library (an early Victorian house in its own grounds), school (several miles, the first by foot, the second by bus or bike), and the nearby town (a bus-journey to a street market on Saturday, and cinemas) – and further to Crystal Palace football ground, and further still, London, where father went every day and we visited as a treat. I never went abroad until, aged 18 and in the Royal Navy I travelled by cruiser to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our map of perceptions and preferences changes with age and opportunity. A poem emerges from the poet at the intersection of visible and invisible locations; of information-transmitting sources, of political and social pressures of his position and condition in historical process."
Was this actually happening? Probably not. It’s part of the music of the time.
When I was going through archived newspapers of the time, I thought Nuttall wasn’t interested by what he was reviewing, but Peter Porter was very attentive and perceptive. It was a pleasure to dig up all his reviews. he says several times that he can't follow the poetry because contextual information has been left out. This is a valid point, always, but it just tells us that there had been a long period in which poems were deadened by being restricted to what was explicit, with the implicit being distrusted as "rhetoric" or "ideology", and a feature of the Seventies was just relaxing and giving the implicit its head. Immediately, the verbal shape of the poem seems very small in a big forest of the implicit. You can't describe landscape directly - there is too much of it - but you can learn how to manipulate the implicit so that space emerges as something silent and all-capacious around the small line of verbal sounds. We are approaching the point where the difference between poetry and prose, after the practice of regular metre has been abandoned, turns out to be the manipulation of the implicit. The implicit is both silent and foregrounded.
A basic act in political activity is distrusting the unstated as a hiding-place where collusion between the rich, also between government and the rich, goes to be out of sight. So you insist on explicit criteria. This is actually very bad for poetry. 70s poetry flourished in a sheltered space where the implicit could be allowed to broadcast its signal, without disputes over rights excluding it from culture. Maybe that is what the book shoud have been about.
"Looking at the ‘public memories’ of Bloodaxe and Carcanet encourages us to think that modern taste has given up on poetry so the shopper benefits from assertive contexts which form centres of attraction and offer a net of social reinforcement. The Underground was actually one of these. The public history of poetry is possibly the history of these “identities” as literary institutions. The process of focussing and forming preferences is wrapped up with the process of selective forgetting, since every focus creates an area of dimness around it. The “identities” are not just categories, they actually contain information and can be studied as cultural objects. They replace what used to be known as genres, and they possibly offer debut poets a model for successful poems and also a way of identifying what the market likes. The substance being generated is unstable – it keeps growing. People get further and further into what they like. So parts of the cultural field move further and further apart from each other. Bearing this in mind, we can come back to the idea of style blocs, accepting that the principle of falsifiability applies to categorisation as to other proposals of fact."
Another idea which there wasn't room for:
"There is a package of (alpha male, wisdom, responsibility, experience, generalisations, ethical superiority) which older poets saw as their commodity number one and which readers reacted against. A focal problem was the poem which has some concrete information and then at the end packages it up in a moral generalisation, so something like ‘people should be nice to each other’ or ‘you can’t trust the powerful and connected’ or “isn’t he a bit like you and me" or even ‘it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels’. I am wondering whether this kind of poem really exists. Maybe the idea of the smug closing quatrain is more of a Fear Symbol and less of a real, dreadful, thing. An older generation of readers were asking moral questions of poets, and poets were giving clear and resonant answers to these questions, which since the 1960s few people have been asking. I thought to look at Poetry Dimension 2, a reliable reference source for conventional poems of the time, which was 1972. I counted 57 poems of which 15 have a lurch into generalisation and lesson drawing at the end, or close to the end."
This doesn't add so much, because it describes the 50s-style poetry which is absolutely not what we want to remember about the Seventies. I just like counting, in the end. It's interesting that it is only 15 and not the whole 57. Also, the "new poetry" was (in one view) writing about Abstract Ideas the whole time, and not waiting for a lurch into generalisation in the last quatrain. The old-style poetry comes across as far less fluent in ideas, and this is why its wisdom is unconvincing and unsatisfying. Arguably, the new poetry is making generalisations about culture throughout the poem. Anyway, the smug final quatrain was something which older poets were Very Proud Of, and they must have been indignant that it was stigmatised and ridiculed by a younger generation. However, I think it has vanished altogether - younger mainstream poets also saw it as stigmatising, and this is something you can check in the Faber "Poetry Introduction" series.
This feature can be counted, in a way which many observers could agree on. The smug final quatrain is there, it’s not a theory. But the change in poetry probably exhibits itself in 35 features at once, it is an absolute change of aesthetic. Looking at a single feature, however plain and visible it is, does not give us the historical truth we are looking for.
I want to say that the “conclusion” is important because it follows a poem of local and particular data, which connects with the poet as a body which receives sensations, and it is the connection between the empirical poem (local) and the reader (on the plane of generality). It is where the poem stops being empirical –and the merely empirical poem can be frustrating.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)