Nothing Is being Suppressed: footnote
I spent a morning reading up about a story which appears in ‘Place’ (pp. 253-55 of the collected edition) and have to correct my (unpublished) account of it in ‘Nothing is being suppressed’. I had supposed that there was a link between Samuel Matthews taking firewood from a wood which had owners, and him being killed. But the text does not say that, and now that I have looked up various accounts of his life (and death in 1802) I see that there was no connection.
His life as a hermit living off odd gardening jobs is connected with the enclosure of common land near Norwood, which Fisher records a few pages earlier. But that was in 1806, after his death. Also, reading the sources (for what they are worth) shows that he was not living on a common, but in a wood owned by Dulwich College. The wood is still there.
The whole passage is hard to understand because Fisher directly reproduces Matthews’ conversation (from the printed sources) and Matthews had suffered an untoward cerebral event which had partly deprived him of the power of speech, or perhaps of the power of reason. I should say that the very strange language in this section is exact quotes from Matthews, usually ones found in the sources. However, people remembered tags and scraps… not entire conversations, and contexts. He obviously had difficulties (due to brain damage after an illness, the 1803 pamphlet tells us). People were struck by his speech. The informants knew that his speech was “incoherent and sometimes quite unintelligible” and then tried to reproduce stretches of it. The problem is obvious. “stars fight stars fight I see’um” may be a prophecy of war, based on star gazing. Or it may not. These are pioneering records and we would like to know a lot more about his aphasia, if that is what it was. I think the theme may be that dropping out of society changes your language, and that the language of Place (and other underground poems of the time) is mutated because it is written by people who do not believe in capitalism. Chris Torrance is mentioned on the page before the Matthews section starts… Torrance had a job as a solicitor's clerk in the Sixties but gave it up and dropped out to live in a cottage in the Neath Valley (off the road and without electricity or running water, anyway that is the description I was given, it is not a documentary!). So the theme is “dropping out”, however distant the examples are which Fisher juxtaposes. Matthews is recorded as having an uncanny power of predicting the weather, and the same story is recounted about Torrance. A small detail… the poem on page 252 describes remains of Palaeolithic date, in Britain, and in the Matthews section he mentions a “hunter”. The sources do not show Matthews was hunting for food so my guess is that this hunter is a stray from the Palaeolithic. Matthews is in touch with the past because he lives in the wilderness.
He was a hermit, but in a wood quite near London and certainly close to densely inhabited land, with villages. He lived on his wages as a gardener and ate mutton and bread; he was not someone living off the land five miles away from Charing Cross. He went to a pub called the French Horn and drank porter. I mention this because he was quite a celebrity and this is why there are numerous stories about him which made it into print. A vagrant would not normally have a pamphlet published about his life just after he died. Local historians went round the pubs collecting stories, or something quite like that. It was the era when the Noble Savage was fashionable, and members of the gentry came to visit him possibly because they saw him as a savage who was within easy reach of Dulwich. The sources say that he was given permission to live in the wood by the Master and Wardens of Dulwich College, and the dialogue between him and one of those wardens may have connected with patronage from the upper classes, rather than eviction.
Anyway, there is time for me to fix this before the book goes to be printed. For the sources, if you google "samuel matthews norwood" you will see several of them.
Showing posts with label Allen Fisher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Allen Fisher. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 October 2021
Thursday, 9 August 2012
The Long Poem of the 1970s
The Long Poem of the 1970s
A feature of the 1970s was the migration into long poems. The semantic context of short poems appeared to the new sensibility as shallow, conventional, and frustrating. The stalls of the time were full of A4 stapled-photocopied books which always seemed to be instalments of something even larger. The magazines were full of “extracts from works in progress” which were only partial disclosures of a glimpsed but unimaginable whole, only sequences of a few frames from an energy wave running on the idea that history itself was changing all the time. The open project seemed to give the poet a better chance of controlling this rush forward – and so expressed a revolutionary faith in guiding the wave of change towards a better society. The impulse came largely from the USA, where open poems taking decades to write offered a monumental challenge that seemed to raise the standards of poetic art.
The underground came into being because the mainstream structures failed to support the way poetry was moving. It made extra demands on space and funding, and the restrictions came to be emotive issues. The difficulties which editors and publishers put in the way of long poems demonstrate that there was a huge creative pressure to write in this way, The age of long poems came to an end – but no-one has ever said to me that they got fed up with the long poems. I have the impression that the logical development of poetry into long structures was checked by the budget problems of harassed editors – the underground could not afford it all. It attracted too many writers, not enough readers.
Since reviewers were unable to judge the complete works from the instalments, it is appropriate to revisit them now seismic activity has stopped. There has been no comparative study of these impressive poems. The period is one of mystery. There are no reliable anthologies, no textbook, no consensus. Few of the poems have been reprinted since the 1970s. Their extent pushes us back from confident conclusions; this constellation of undefined relationships between poems continues the novelty and uncertainty of the relationship of parts within the poems, which offer themselves as suggestive nontransparent spaces.
We presume that the genesis of such works is slow, and so that changes to their design occur slowly; there may have been a dip in mid-century where poets were uncertain of how to write long poems, faced with the collapse of traditional genres (narrative, verse drama, sonnet sequence). The emergence of these works at this moment, 1968-75, may be simply due to an exceptional economic conjuncture, the end of the post-war “30 year boom”. This is also why works from a much earlier period, by Hendry and David Jones, came into print at this moment; Faber had not published a new book by Jones in 22 years up to The Sleeping Lord. His work came out decades after it was written. That is, the milieu could acquire work orphaned by past eras and conjure it into life.
The short poem can challenge social and semantic structures by omitting them (as pop poetry did), but cannot demonstrate new ones. The motive for the long poem was probably, therefore, a state of conjecture and uncertainty, where the organisation of personal and collective behaviour was up in the air, as part of revolutionary social change. A key factor is then the reader’s capacity (singular and collective) for dealing with incomplete forms. Perhaps they define them as improperly formed, and reject them, with a businesslike snap. Perhaps waiting for a long time amounts to despair and disillusion. And perhaps the incomplete is an object of optimism and fascination. To give up completeness is also a renunciation of authority. The reader’s rules for treating uncertainty certainly dictate the quality of their experience when reading these conjectural poems. The end of the bar line?
We can get to a common theme in very concise form by considering the notion of the liminal as described by Victor Turner in a series of works (perhaps first in a 1964 paper). In certain rites, peoples go back to a fore-time where classiifications break down and a primeval unity is restored. People partake of communitas, where social roles and classes break down. These moments often take place in wild places, where there is no ownership, no property divisions, and no marks of human labour; they are marked by pure liquids, such as water or blood. Actions in these states partake of flow, that is they are fully formed, instant, and there is no such thing as mistakes. Often, the creation and first appearance of categories is recited there - and creation myths may belong to liminal rites.
These are called liminal states because they are rites de passage, on the threshold (limen) between two social statuses.
My impression is that the short poem is an adaptation to external pressure and hostility. The idea that a shorter poem is better is a stage towards the idea that no poetry at all is best, which was the underlying drive of the mass media. People who hate poetry give you five minutes, grudgingly, to deflect criticism, and you fit into the slot irrespective of what the design of the poem itself demands. The long poem is a seizing of autonomy, a protest against the marginalised and numbered conditions of the poem in the media. But also, pop music was shifting away from the single and towards the album at the end of the sixties; it seems that poetry may have been in line with mass taste in changing to longer forms, and even that the greater subjectivity allowed by the album forced poetry to go deeper in order to compete.
The reason for the increasing innovation, depth, and complexity of art in the 1970s is not hard to find. Walter Laqueur named his book on the international politics of the period A Continent Astray: the power structure had lost its grip, basic relationships were changing, and radical groups were powerful and courageous. The proof of this is the pessimistic state of the Cold War conservatives, really anticipating shifts of power which would weaken the grip of the rich over the economy, the military build-up, the political consensus, or industrial discipline. It makes sense to talk about “the system”, because an alternative was right outside the door, and really seemed about to walk in and take over. There was an alternative everything. Poets escaped the reach of banal judgments either by involution, the development of radical styles, or by extension, giving the poem more duration, allowing more complex semantic configurations. Both of these tended to lose the reader who did not have the same level of openness and adaptability.
Precision is only a meaningful concept if you can compare the poem, or the line, with a preset, agreed, fixed idea. The idea that precision is better is a variant of the idea that poems should exactly resemble the accepted generalisations of the era, and should not be original or critical. In modern times, the question is really whether the poet’s poems match their own aesthetic, and are precise in that sense.
The interest of long poems is partly that the relationship of the parts of a length of social process is explicit in them, rather than us having to rely on construction of several texts; and partly that the taxonomical chapter was about anthologies, and so dealt exclusively with short poems.
If a social structure is not dramatised and questioned in the work of an individual poet, it may nonetheless appear around or before the book we hold in our hands, in the shape of stylistic decisions whose end result is the text. If the geometry of a cultural matrix is truly shared, then a fragment of it implies the whole; it is possible for poets to make statements about social relations within the stylistic plane. Reflexive poets attuned to this regard with contempt poets who are not. The question for us is whether any of the reflexive poets are working with more than a highly organised narcissism, the skill of a couturier, or whether they are addressing something outside themselves— the space within which language is spoken, or the rules by which social action is ordered.
Style can become a social logic, recording a social vision of short distances as a narrative records a social vision of large-scale events. Instamatic Poems (by Edwin Morgan) is a transitional point between a narrative and a poem whose subject is its own point of view; the poems in it are playing a shared game but have no unity of scene or situation. This game unity could reflect a poet's temperament, but is for the ultra-sophisticated Morgan a deliberate break with the (personal and social) past in the form of a set of rules, i.e. almost a naked social structure. We can distinguish between a style psychotope and a narrative psychotope:
style (static; self-referential; one person only; cannot engage in test and conflict; selfconscious)
narrative (changeable; deals with a shared reality; unpredictable; not self-fulfilling; exposes characters to test and conflict, to learning experiences )
Style is differentiated and unified in the same way that a narrative is, but populated not by characters but by figures or distinctive features. It reproduces its own internal memory whenever the style re-appears; this context of interpretive rules can also flow from one author to another.
High Zero, by Andrew Crozier (1978) [I have deleted this because it appears in a book called Nothing is Being Suppressed, coming out shortly] tnbp3, CC, AVA 37 pp.
My sole companion in the forest: Ancestor Worship, by Emyr Humphreys 32 pp.
removed for book publication
Change: a Prospectus, by Tony Lopez (1978) 23 pp. Angels, CC, tnbp4 [removed for book publication]
Fox Running, by Ken Smith (published 1980) 22pp. tnbp3 [removed for book publication]
[a statement in the text shows the poem was composed during 1980, so is not literally a long poem of the 70s]
Ranter, by Barry MacSweeney (published 1985) 36 pp. tnbp3, CC 3
[this was definitely composed after 1980 so is not a long poem of the 1970s. I misunderstood Barry telling me that it was a response to Thatcher- it was a response after 3 or 4 years of life under Thatcher]
The book is divided into four sections: "Ranter", "Ranter's Reel", "Snipe Drumming", and "Flamebearer".
In the first section, the character Ranter is running around parts of Britain; he is seditious; he is chasing a lost love. A string of epithets qualifying Ranter points to the timeless nature of his revolt: they are drawn from 14th C, 17th C, 19th C, and then 15th C movements of lower-class revolt, so that the enemy is disembodied and the apparent contest of wills cannot take place. The poem is then wholly liminal, taking place somewhere where the rules of time and society have been suspended. (This may correspond, physically, to the high wastes of Northumbria, unpartitioned because they are useless for agriculture: they represent the pre-human landscape.) It is difficult, for this reason, to trace changes between the first page and the last. If anything is happening, it has to do with the woman he is missing; it is hard to relate the data about revolt to this, but presumably it serves to make Ranter glamorous, as a virile and defiant rebel hero, as an argument why she should come back. Myth comes in to replace sociology here. All the love story is recent, set in the 1970s, while none of the political stories is twentieth century. The name 'ranter' seems to refer to 'ranting and raving', to a radical religious group, seeking the overthrow of the social order, in the 1650s, and to a style of folk singing in Northumbria (cf. 'The Collier's Rant', and the folk group The High Level Ranters, punning on the name of the High Level bridge across the Tyne at Newcastle). MacSweeney almost certainly wants all of these meanings simultaneously. The resurrection of the Ranters came with Christopher Hill's The World turned Upside Down, a study of the most antinomian of radical groups in the Commonwealth period which found great favour among the antinomians of the 1970s. On page 6, Ranter listens to a radio broadcast in his skull from "Bede and Cuthbert", clerics from ancient Northumbria; and to Sweeney, a figure from an old Irish tale, whose feathered pelt Ranter seems to be wearing. Some passages may correspond to the original Sweeney's nature poetry. In the scela, Sweeney went mad in a kind of 'post-traumatic stress disorder' and left human society, to live in the treetops - a kind of negative liminal. Ranter is oppressed by militiamen or by the emperor Hadrian (who campaigned in the North early in the 2nd century AD). A mention of monks on Lindisfarne, a monastery with scriptorium representing Northumbrian cultural achievement. He hopes for his bride's attitude to soften. He has the powers of animals and is owner of the wild (p.11), a liminal place. People are oppressed and do not fight back. Memories (of married life?) in Woolwich. Another run of self-praise epithets. Drunk, he falls down the stair at an Underground station. More regrets. The Norman ravaging of the North, AD 1069 - an example of peripheral revolt put down by centralised violence. French words are a bad thing. He lives out of doors, in the hedges.
In "Snipe Drumming" the situation seems to be the same. His bride speaks, how poor she found Newcastle to be. The 'drumming' is male courtship behaviour, a non-vocal acoustic display which we can easily link to 'ranting' among humans.
In "Ranter's reel", (reel, a kind of dance), he makes a journey across the Northumbrian fells. Wild things are being hunted. It is his fiefdom. The bitterness of the poor, across all history. He is a figure of resistance to the powerful, and a bird. A threat to the powerful that their reign is coming to an end or reeling. Reel has associations with drink, unsteadiness, the loss of reason, high excitement, which make it akin to ranting. The next section is called "The Flamebearer" after a character, in Welsh Fflamddwyn, who was an Angle fighting against the Britons in perhaps 600 AD; the theme of Anglo-Saxons versus Britons appears again. He appears in those old Welsh poems as an object of terror. Ranter, himself the destroyer of a household, remembers making love and regrets. Pages 37-40 are spoken by the bride, regretting how things went wrong; symbolically, the assertions fall silent and the woman's voice takes over. Her speech is more coherent and continuous than his. She refers to him as a bully. The power relations within the poem have been reversed, the boastful male central speaker is now the subject of the poem's speech, an object of judgment.
Ranter differs from the other poems discussed here in that it not only sees force as the adjudicator of history but also feels willing to take on the "ruling class" on terms of force. The local structure resembles, perhaps, the blues: simple stylised units, frequently repeated, in no particular order, without explicit links, but internally very highly motivated, so that the wholes can easily be guessed. The whole reminds one of an Irish poem "The Lament for Art O'Leary" (in An Duanaire 1600-1900, edited by Sean O'Tuama), except that the praise epithets addressed by the widow to dead Art are here addressed by Ranter to himself. (The duckdown at p.38 may actually come from the lament as translated by Thomas Kinsella, eiderdown being a more everyday way of putting it.) This boasting is another feature of blues lyrics. The bird persona can be compared to Muddy Waters' little red rooster (and to the phrase 'free as a bird'). The word cloakclasp (occurring 9 times) refers to a penannular brooch, a very prominent item of adornment of the Gaelic gentleman, of which there are many in the National Museum in Dublin and not a few in the National Museum in Edinburgh; MacSweeney has seized on the bright and showy things, to make something with an endless series of high spots. The accessibility to the poem of historical moments scattered over 2000 years shows that we are in a liminal place: no particular time, all-time. The location is essentially Northumberland. The metahistorical schema comes essentially from EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, itself a projection of Soviet schemas of history, and epic history-writing, onto stubbornly un-cooperative English source material. The poet seized the core emotional situation and discarded the clogging detail and documentation. The use of Celtic and blues schemas helps to give 'structural' material a personal, heroic, focus, miraculously restoring it to narrative and flow.
Geographical crystal: Stane (being Place book 3) by Allen Fisher, (published 1977, as 'drafted 31.12.75') 100 columns with two columns per page [Angels; CC tnbp3)
The general drift of Place is to break down the polarisation of objective and subjective knowledge. The other parts are, so far as I know, Place Book One, Hooks, Eros:Father:Pattern, Docking, "Convergences, in Place, of the Play", Unpolished Mirrors, and Becoming. The project accepts that the observer is part of the observation, and details a vast number of inner sensations, perception of the outside world, and processes which occur in both media at once. Place is considered both as an influence on awareness at many levels, but also as the product of human action, modifying the environment. Place is an 'open' project; for example, although Docking is listed in Stane as one of the 'related works', it is not credited in its own accompanying notes as part of Place: instead we are told that one part of Place (section 66) is incorporated into Docking.
A map at the beginning of Place Book I shows Stane Street, a Roman road, running from Sussex to Southwark, and presumably the main axis on which early South London grew - including the borough of Lambeth, the setting of Place. Stane is printed in landscape format. The columns are numbered from 1 to 100 at the bottom. The numbers printed at the top of the page refer to parts (listed as "45 to 81" on the title-sheet) which were interleaved and intercut to produce the final text. There are numbers at the top of the pages of Stane which refer to the Parts of Place (so that page 1 has 80 at the top). Numbered resources at the back of the book show how the text relates to its factual source material. Some page tops show, for example, (63)/74, to show that the Resources for 63 have also supplied material for part 74.
The back cover shows a street map of part of South London, partly replaced by a diagrammatic view of a texture which a note informs us 'includes photos and drawings of environments given way under stresses it was assumed they could bear'. They seem to be structural materials now showing rips. A small image on the front cover shows a map of Greater London. That is, we are being shown something at three different scales. This gesture casts the light back at the observer - it is saying something about the limits of our biological senses in the face of an environment whose processes occur on a much larger scale than our bodies. As clever mammals, we make up for this by all kinds of perceptual strategies - which sheds light on the multiple strategies of Allen Fisher. The note implies that London itself has been put under stresses too great for its materials - and has given way, failed as a community. This aspect is explored in Unpolished Mirrors and Brixton Fractals. The lettering is that of a typewriter. The text is printed in red. A note tells us that "STANE serves as a preview of Book III, Place 45 to 81, moving back into Book IV via Book II and including those parts of GRAMPIANS cut-in." This implies that there will be a later version of sections 45 to 81, but this has not been published so far as I know. The disruption of the notion of sequence is part of a new way of ordering information in word groups, pages, and books; what this draws attention to is the excess of possibilities for arranging data. It is organic - I mean, we are 'naturally' inclined to examine situations several times as new information arrives, so that viewing a kind of information once, and never being allowed to go back, is inorganic. The types of text we have are only a tiny cluster in an immense range of possibilities. Perhaps we have learnt and rigid ways of moving through fields of data - which are not the most appropriate for the part of the world we find ourselves in. We own them because they are old. Perhaps accepted sentence structures are inherited from early modern times and relate to acts of knowledge storage and retrieval which were suited to the organized knowledge of that time, for example in the law, the Church, or estate administration. Stane includes an index to the sections, which tells us for example '39 59 into 56'. Liberating the cutting and joining shows that the same piece of information can produce different results in different contexts.
I don't know of any successful exegeses of Fisher's work. I would regard a summary in prose which was longer than the poem (Stane, in this instance) as being unsuccessful - whereas taking a few themes and saying 'here, these are more important than the rest' is dishonourable. A structural value might be going to the limits of what we already know - to include the frames by which we normally constrain the speed and complexity of the information being made available at any point. If I suggest that information is normally packaged in an industrial way, in standardised and controllable units, this sheds light on Fisher's rules of procedure - he starts on the wrong side of those constraints and goes on from there. Basic techniques in this breakout are approaching from unusual angles, using subject matter usually neglected, looking at information on many different scales, and rapid cuts between different strata of material - showing new connections.
The deal offered to the reader is a speed-up in the rate of conceptual jumps in the data they are consuming. This is probably a dividing line in the audience - one faction sees the speed-up as purely desirable and exciting, one faction quickly gets bewildered and wants the poem to be normal and reassuring and just like all the other poems.
When Durer drew a rhinoceros, a beached whale, and the bones of an 18 foot giant, he chose these subjects because they were truly wondrous and unfamiliar, and because he had a means of recording. The availability of photographs, broadcasting, cheap printed matter, etc., has changed the terms on which art can be surprising. It is possible to re-analyse the history of poetry in terms of the collection of rare and interesting facts. This explains, perhaps, why so much of pre-modern poetry seems boring to us - because we already have better explanations of what it presents; and why such poets don't supply the information which seems interesting to us - because they were locked in cognitive frameworks which define what was strange and fascinating (and are different from the ones we are locked in). We could define myth in terms of anomaly, disruptions to the order of knowledge - and present poetry about myth as a collection of wonder-tales, defying sense, and recorded formally (in metre) because they were anomalous. Recent autobiographical poetry has a restricted audience because the lives recounted are not unusual enough - they adhere to sociological norms and so are too predictable; however, it is the anomalies which make the poems interesting - being autobiographical, on its own, was not interesting. Equally, readers of those times regarded religious lore as accurate information about the structure of history and the after-life. Western art since 1965 or so has had a bias towards the conceptual - this should not be understood as meaning that Western art of the previous 2000 years was not didactic and intellectually curious; instead, it expresses a new relationship between 'art' and other information media, where art lightens its load of primary information and focusses on cognitive jumps, shifts, and reorganizations. Art is a form of information and must conform to the basic physics of information. A vital factor is the information the spectator already has - art has to move into unfamiliar territory in order to acquire a unique data commodity.
In order to write a book which shows wonders and anomalies all the way through, you would today have to adopt techniques akin to Fisher's. It is not enough to find a rhinoceros.
While looking at this, I wondered about the word 'coherence'. Clearly, connection between successive sections is not necessary. We can make sense of violent shifts just as we can watch a landscape changing through a train window and disembark in another city. The rules for using the word seem to be completely subjective - it is applied when the reader is nonplussed and finds the next section not apropos. Further, 'coherence', as it is stepped up, gets ever closer to redundancy - the line which is most coherent with the previous line is one which repeats it exactly. Any line which offers new information is to some extent incoherent with the previous one. All the long poems we are looking at are very free in their construction. They do not converge on a line. I don't have a test of 'coherence' which many people could agree on. I find the poems 'well constructed' because I do not find myself confused or bored by the arrival of successive sections. But this confidence in the poets is subjective and relies partly on my identification with them.
"47" is a letter about rising damp in walls. It describes the passive-osmotic system of fluid circulating in masonry. This continues the theme, laid out in the previous section, of human life imagined as energy (a spiral) rather than as an anatomy. A human body exchanges energy all the time, and moves; anatomy is static. If you base your biology on corpses, you miss these things - and what is vital, proper to living things.
"46" shows us a voyage down the bank of the Thames. Mill pools where the water is strong and fish grow big; pent up. Chokes on the course of water considered as switches, where choices are made; (analogy with the course of fluids inside the body, the blood and lymphatic systems, affecting so much of the "sense of self"?)
A "less reduced" version of some pages of Stane was published as Fire-Place in a volume called Fire-Works, adding some more material. "Stane" is just a phonetic variant of "stone" (i.e. paved road), but may also represent a pun on stain, as a form of capillary action; the work is much concerned with buildings and the circulation of fluids in the earth and in the body, or, in fact, with the mediation between social and physiological structures and consciousness.
Any summary of Fisher's work is superficial; there are so many themes happening at once. One of the constructive rules is a pedagogic rigour whereby beliefs are constantly broken down into the experiences which found them, in the assumption that the reader has the right to judge of first and last things. We find him constantly reaching the zone of smallest form-generating differences (he refers in Necessary Business to "small initial differences"); the qualities which distinguish materials are ultimately in their molecular structure (and an exact definition of "hardness", e.g. of stone versus water, would be a molecular diagram). These slight quantities allow us to break down the sterile opposition between citizen and electorate, mind and body, person and place, will and compulsion, objective and subjective, personality and information, etc. and to tell a different story; the references to spirals imply the crossing of oppositions in mutual generation, winding eventually back to the slight differences which broke the symmetry of the apeiron and made stone different from water.
Interviews with Fisher during 2005 revealed the existence of a plan of formal symmetry organising Place. The details are explained in the interviews collected in Marvels of Lambeth (due to come out in 2012). The key concept is mirroring, which is a formal relationship between two poems or passages of poetry. To quote the 1974 book of explanations:
"In my terms then, a statement or fact laid on page five of Book I would find SHADING on page 95 of Book III. This reflecting nature brought about the structure. It is generally thematic from place I thru to XXXVII in Book I, and from LXXXI to XXXV in Book III."
Stane is thus a mirror of Place Book I. Since there are 37 parts of Stane and 37 of Place I-XXXVII, we might suspect that the parts map onto each other. It is slightly more complicated than that, since Stane is also numbered as pages 1-100, and Place Book I has a table in the back which demonstrates how it is also constituted by 100 pages (in the typescript and also in the book, although the page numbers are not printed). The symmetry is made more elusive by the fact that Stane starts with part 81 and works back to part XLV. Page 1 of Book I maps onto page 100 of Stane, and so on. The mirroring is not very obtrusive. For example, the line in Place 1 'walked the straight road in sunlight' connects with the line in Place 81 ''I walk from Balham gateway to the South/ my head from process of walking nodding', but other connections are not obvious. I understand the strategy was to allow readers to read 1 and 81 together and perceive new connections affecting the subject (of how site affects perception). Readers of a certain generation will recall a spoof travelogue recorded by Peter Sellers, in which the line 'Balham! Gateway to the South!" was heard. This scheme explains why notes are included at points which say 'GRAMPIANS cut into PLACE", and so on; the extra overlays partially hide the scheme from view. The passages about a visit to the Grampians probably do not take part in the fundamental symmetry. (Book I has an inclusion called Lakes, about the Lake District.)
The title of Unpolished Mirrors, a set of poems which is part of Place but only partially included in it, refers to incomplete symmetries: the reflection is dulled.
** Common themes have emerged in these poems, to my complete amazement. They weren't selected to resemble each other. Four of the poems discussed mention the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, generally dated to the 5th to 8th centuries AD. Perhaps there is a shared imaginary which poets go to in order to find their visions. All the poets seem interested in the "fore-time" before the rise of mediaeval civilisation; all seem interested in the origin of our customs and social structure; none shows a situation between several people, and which is altered by a series of events which it structures; all are deeply politicised and deeply angry at the way we live. All have suppressed the signposts, the "ifs" and "therefores" which lead an argument: the discourse of the poem is "before" these, and this beforeness is part of poemicity. This points to a latent theory about the ambiguity of reality, which is chopped and channelled by the social structure, which is subliminal cognitive filters distributed over the whole population; poets like Raworth and Thom have gone on to make the acts of affabulation and composition the subject of the poem.
The striking of coins is described by Lopez and Fisher, and by Thom, whose discussion of the appropriation of metals almost certainly involves their circulation and treasuring as money. Important as liminality is, it is not present in the poems by Martin Thom and Andrew Crozier.
The hope that these large-scale poems would offer symbolic statements about social structure has been proved vain. In general, they deal only with a single mind, largely freed from social bonds. Experience is not shown as emerging from interaction with other people. This requires us to look at the sociology of privatisation.
The intrication of poems with the contents of books (of radical philosophy, politics, history, etc.) depends on collective representations, expressing wishes and the need for play as much as re-arrangement of experience, which precede both, although dialectically they can be shaped by both. These long poems show us, through an exhausting effort to seize and externalise, experience itself, as it is staged by human agents, in long or short strips: what good sociology captures better than bad sociology. The search for a central, dominant arena of social reality is vain, since the efficient unit of experience is clearly the individual brain.
These shared features include the restriction of the poem to the experience of a single individual, or privatisation; the shifting of stress from factual knowledge to intellectual method in framing and highlighting the material; the move away from narrative or drama or action; the collapse of a stable system of moral norms and imperatives, to be replaced by unquiet but essentially personal intellectual curiosity and model-making; the advance of untunable noise or dissonance within the models, and the pre-eminence of doubt as a response to it.
Myth appears in these poems, as part of the palette; but they form a strong contrast to Classical mythological poems. The oppositions which are significant to them are: central versus local-communal authority; the power of money versus less impersonal social bonds; tradition versus reason; Wales versus England; alienation versus fulfilment; symbolic versus sensory experience; subjective versus objective knowledge. These are not topics which mattered to Hesiod.
Another cast back shows a dislike of what the State does; the history of England, then Britain, as a "company" is surely centred on warfare against other states, with a long intricate chain of conquests of overseas territories, tax innovations, grabs of the entrepot trade, naval battles, sieges of key bases, arms races in workshops, acts of heroism, straight shooting, and what have you. The poetry in question excludes discussion of (warfare + political struggle + economic competition + competition between poets for legitimacy) — the ways of power. The State as military machine is cut out, and history is written in terms of (ordinary) households. If we go back to the late 19th century, we find the invention of sociology was just this: a study that shut out the State and looked at the citizen body. So poetry has been competing with sociology for a niche in the spectrum; but sociology was there first, because in 1900 poetry was still dealing with naval battles. This triangular relationship (between Church, State, and poetry) is not quite clear to me; the replacement by the State of the good works formerly carried out by the Church is clear; also, fear is part of the pattern, since the possessor class were frightened by the threatened arrival of the mass franchise (and this perhaps gave rise to sociology, in England and Germany?), and the poets we are discussing are clearly afraid of the power elite (shall we say, the military-industrial complex, the Tory Party, the City, and the Pentagon). Christianity lacks a coherent theory of the State, because its early strata were formed under State persecution and did not expect the Second Coming to be delayed long enough for politics to matter; this omission may be guiding the course of modern British poetry. Poetry since 1960 seems much more aligned with Nonconformism than with Anglicanism. All the poets discussed in this chapter are political radicals, excepting Crozier; and some comments outside the poems seem to equate the media with the forms of illegitimate power, and their wish to write long poems is related to a wish to compete with the "authorised versions" of the media, by supplying their own semantic context.
The omission of power politics from the boundaries of poetry seems to resemble a previous rule of omission, namely the simplicity expected of song and lyric poetry, which were not to deal with the sordid material of human relations. The double stance of radical poetry (ignoring the State and all its works while also planning actively to infiltrate over and transform the State) is very reminiscent of the stance of the Protestant churches in our period.
The abjuring of "power" is correlated with the excision of certain kinds of emotional pressure on the reader, and of pure self-expression. How can you disagree with the military-industrial complex and still want to unleash the self-aggrandising self of the confessional poet? When we see the poem as territorial object, we see the principle of competition for space at work in literature.
My research into the writings of popular Protestantism shows a valuation of physical details as corroboration of essentially unlikely tales of spiritual achievement; based on courtroom confrontations (Foxe's Book of Martyrs brought these to their greatest ever height) in which simultaneity and entanglement provided a difficulty of invention and so showed veracity; in these modern poems, there seems to be a rule that any experience which involves several different sensory channels at once is more credible. I don't say this is good or bad as a rule, merely that it provides the specific difference between British poetry and (say) French or Russian. Concrete details mark a good witness. If Fisher recounts his spiritual experience in seven or eight channels of perception at once, this can be taken as over-fulfilment. Another rule in the early lay-spiritual literature is that lighting effects in the sky indicate divine assent, something we find in many saints' lives; if Fisher relates his preoccupation with celestial light to the pineal gland, we may believe this or not. However reluctantly, we have to concede a similarity between the serotonin/luminosity effects and the lyrics of 'Astronomy Domine'.
A preliminary reading-list of Long Poems from the 1970s
Peter Abbs, For Man and Islands
Asa Benveniste, Tabelli Linnaei
George Barker, Villa Stellar, In Memory of David Archer
Anthony Barnett, Fear and Misadventure; Mud Settles
Jack Beeching, Myth of Myself
Francis Berry, The Singing Dome
D.M. Black, 4 narrative poems (in The Happy Crow and Gravitations)
Euros Bowen, Siap rhyw profiad
George Mackay Brown, Fishermen with Ploughs
Gerard Casey, South Wales Echo
Barry Cole, Vanessa In the City
Andrew Crozier, High Zero; Pleats
Allen Fisher, Place (4 volumes); Long Shout to Kernewek; Sicily; The Art of Flight; Shorting Out
Roy Fisher, The Cut Pages
Eddie Flintoff, Sarmatians
Ulli Freer, Rooms
Raymond Garlick, Notes for an Autobiography
Paul Gogarty, The Accident Adventure
W.S. Graham, Dark Dialogues; Implements in their Places
Harry Guest, Elegies; Miniatures
John Hall, Days; Couch Grass
David Harsent, Dreams of the Dead
Lee Harwood, The Long Black Veil
J.F. Hendry, Marimarusa (composed around 1947)
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns
Jeremy Hooker, Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant
Ted Hughes, Crow, Gaudete, Cave Birds, Adam and the Sacred Nine, Prometheus on his Crag
Emyr Humphreys, Ancestor Worship
Phil Jenkins, Cairo
David Jones, various poems in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (and) The Roman Quarry (mostly pre-1970 in fact)
Judith Kazantzis, Clytemnestra
R.F. Langley, Matthew Glover
T.S. Law, Referendum
Peter Levi, Christmas Sermon; Canticum
Anthony Lopez, Change. A Prospectus
George MacBeth, The Orlando Poems; A Poet’s Life; Lusus
Hugh MacDiarmid, Direadh
Sorley MacLean, Uamha 'n Oir /The Cave of Gold
Barry MacSweeney, Black Torch
Brian Marley, Bargain Basement Sonnets
Alan Massey, Leechcraft
Roland Mathias, Madoc
Matthew Mead, The Administration of Things
Christopher middleton, Anasphere: le torse antique
Edwin Morgan, The New Divan, Instamatic Poems, Memories of Earth
Eric Mottram, Local Movement, Tunis, Elegies
Walter Perrie, Lamentation for the Children
FT Prince, Dry-points of the Hasidim
J. H. Prynne, News of Warring Clans
Kathleen Raine, On a Deserted Shore
Tom Raworth, Ace
Peter Redgrove, Love's Journeys, Dr Faust's Sea-Spiral Spirit
Jeremy Reed, The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg, Stratton Elegy
John Riley, Czargrad
Colin Simms, long poems on the American Indians, including A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-course, Parflèche, Carcajou, The Compression of the Bones of Crazy Horse, No North-West Passage
Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge, Red Eye
Iain Crichton Smith, From the Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe
Ken Smith, Tristan Crazy; Apocrypha from the Western Kingdom; Fox Running
Nathaniel Tarn, Lyrics for the Bride of God
Martin Thom, The Bloodshed, the Shaking House
Edward Boaden Thomas, The 12 Parts of Derbyshire
Gwyn Thomas, Cadwynau yn y meddwl, Craig a dwr
Anthony Thwaite, New Confessions
John Wain, Feng
Jeffrey Wainwright, Thomas Müntzer
David Wevill, Where the Arrow Falls
95 poems? There are a couple more I am in doubt about. Anyway this is a large-scale phenomenon. I have been working (2017) on a longer analysis of the genre.
We could complete this list with a number of other works which I do not greatly esteem.
'Direadh' was published in 1974 and is printed as the last poem in the 'Long poems' volume of MacDiarmid's Collected, but other evidence suggests it was written in 1937-8. I am inclined to stick with the publication date. There is a possibility of more or less endless argument about what is or isn't a "long poem", which I have tactfully suppressed.
Marcus Cumberlege needs to be on this list. 'The Ram' is a compelling poem from his 1977 volume 'Firelines'.
A feature of the 1970s was the migration into long poems. The semantic context of short poems appeared to the new sensibility as shallow, conventional, and frustrating. The stalls of the time were full of A4 stapled-photocopied books which always seemed to be instalments of something even larger. The magazines were full of “extracts from works in progress” which were only partial disclosures of a glimpsed but unimaginable whole, only sequences of a few frames from an energy wave running on the idea that history itself was changing all the time. The open project seemed to give the poet a better chance of controlling this rush forward – and so expressed a revolutionary faith in guiding the wave of change towards a better society. The impulse came largely from the USA, where open poems taking decades to write offered a monumental challenge that seemed to raise the standards of poetic art.
The underground came into being because the mainstream structures failed to support the way poetry was moving. It made extra demands on space and funding, and the restrictions came to be emotive issues. The difficulties which editors and publishers put in the way of long poems demonstrate that there was a huge creative pressure to write in this way, The age of long poems came to an end – but no-one has ever said to me that they got fed up with the long poems. I have the impression that the logical development of poetry into long structures was checked by the budget problems of harassed editors – the underground could not afford it all. It attracted too many writers, not enough readers.
Since reviewers were unable to judge the complete works from the instalments, it is appropriate to revisit them now seismic activity has stopped. There has been no comparative study of these impressive poems. The period is one of mystery. There are no reliable anthologies, no textbook, no consensus. Few of the poems have been reprinted since the 1970s. Their extent pushes us back from confident conclusions; this constellation of undefined relationships between poems continues the novelty and uncertainty of the relationship of parts within the poems, which offer themselves as suggestive nontransparent spaces.
We presume that the genesis of such works is slow, and so that changes to their design occur slowly; there may have been a dip in mid-century where poets were uncertain of how to write long poems, faced with the collapse of traditional genres (narrative, verse drama, sonnet sequence). The emergence of these works at this moment, 1968-75, may be simply due to an exceptional economic conjuncture, the end of the post-war “30 year boom”. This is also why works from a much earlier period, by Hendry and David Jones, came into print at this moment; Faber had not published a new book by Jones in 22 years up to The Sleeping Lord. His work came out decades after it was written. That is, the milieu could acquire work orphaned by past eras and conjure it into life.
The short poem can challenge social and semantic structures by omitting them (as pop poetry did), but cannot demonstrate new ones. The motive for the long poem was probably, therefore, a state of conjecture and uncertainty, where the organisation of personal and collective behaviour was up in the air, as part of revolutionary social change. A key factor is then the reader’s capacity (singular and collective) for dealing with incomplete forms. Perhaps they define them as improperly formed, and reject them, with a businesslike snap. Perhaps waiting for a long time amounts to despair and disillusion. And perhaps the incomplete is an object of optimism and fascination. To give up completeness is also a renunciation of authority. The reader’s rules for treating uncertainty certainly dictate the quality of their experience when reading these conjectural poems. The end of the bar line?
We can get to a common theme in very concise form by considering the notion of the liminal as described by Victor Turner in a series of works (perhaps first in a 1964 paper). In certain rites, peoples go back to a fore-time where classiifications break down and a primeval unity is restored. People partake of communitas, where social roles and classes break down. These moments often take place in wild places, where there is no ownership, no property divisions, and no marks of human labour; they are marked by pure liquids, such as water or blood. Actions in these states partake of flow, that is they are fully formed, instant, and there is no such thing as mistakes. Often, the creation and first appearance of categories is recited there - and creation myths may belong to liminal rites.
These are called liminal states because they are rites de passage, on the threshold (limen) between two social statuses.
My impression is that the short poem is an adaptation to external pressure and hostility. The idea that a shorter poem is better is a stage towards the idea that no poetry at all is best, which was the underlying drive of the mass media. People who hate poetry give you five minutes, grudgingly, to deflect criticism, and you fit into the slot irrespective of what the design of the poem itself demands. The long poem is a seizing of autonomy, a protest against the marginalised and numbered conditions of the poem in the media. But also, pop music was shifting away from the single and towards the album at the end of the sixties; it seems that poetry may have been in line with mass taste in changing to longer forms, and even that the greater subjectivity allowed by the album forced poetry to go deeper in order to compete.
The reason for the increasing innovation, depth, and complexity of art in the 1970s is not hard to find. Walter Laqueur named his book on the international politics of the period A Continent Astray: the power structure had lost its grip, basic relationships were changing, and radical groups were powerful and courageous. The proof of this is the pessimistic state of the Cold War conservatives, really anticipating shifts of power which would weaken the grip of the rich over the economy, the military build-up, the political consensus, or industrial discipline. It makes sense to talk about “the system”, because an alternative was right outside the door, and really seemed about to walk in and take over. There was an alternative everything. Poets escaped the reach of banal judgments either by involution, the development of radical styles, or by extension, giving the poem more duration, allowing more complex semantic configurations. Both of these tended to lose the reader who did not have the same level of openness and adaptability.
Precision is only a meaningful concept if you can compare the poem, or the line, with a preset, agreed, fixed idea. The idea that precision is better is a variant of the idea that poems should exactly resemble the accepted generalisations of the era, and should not be original or critical. In modern times, the question is really whether the poet’s poems match their own aesthetic, and are precise in that sense.
The interest of long poems is partly that the relationship of the parts of a length of social process is explicit in them, rather than us having to rely on construction of several texts; and partly that the taxonomical chapter was about anthologies, and so dealt exclusively with short poems.
If a social structure is not dramatised and questioned in the work of an individual poet, it may nonetheless appear around or before the book we hold in our hands, in the shape of stylistic decisions whose end result is the text. If the geometry of a cultural matrix is truly shared, then a fragment of it implies the whole; it is possible for poets to make statements about social relations within the stylistic plane. Reflexive poets attuned to this regard with contempt poets who are not. The question for us is whether any of the reflexive poets are working with more than a highly organised narcissism, the skill of a couturier, or whether they are addressing something outside themselves— the space within which language is spoken, or the rules by which social action is ordered.
Style can become a social logic, recording a social vision of short distances as a narrative records a social vision of large-scale events. Instamatic Poems (by Edwin Morgan) is a transitional point between a narrative and a poem whose subject is its own point of view; the poems in it are playing a shared game but have no unity of scene or situation. This game unity could reflect a poet's temperament, but is for the ultra-sophisticated Morgan a deliberate break with the (personal and social) past in the form of a set of rules, i.e. almost a naked social structure. We can distinguish between a style psychotope and a narrative psychotope:
style (static; self-referential; one person only; cannot engage in test and conflict; selfconscious)
narrative (changeable; deals with a shared reality; unpredictable; not self-fulfilling; exposes characters to test and conflict, to learning experiences )
Style is differentiated and unified in the same way that a narrative is, but populated not by characters but by figures or distinctive features. It reproduces its own internal memory whenever the style re-appears; this context of interpretive rules can also flow from one author to another.
High Zero, by Andrew Crozier (1978) [I have deleted this because it appears in a book called Nothing is Being Suppressed, coming out shortly] tnbp3, CC, AVA 37 pp.
My sole companion in the forest: Ancestor Worship, by Emyr Humphreys 32 pp.
removed for book publication
Change: a Prospectus, by Tony Lopez (1978) 23 pp. Angels, CC, tnbp4 [removed for book publication]
Fox Running, by Ken Smith (published 1980) 22pp. tnbp3 [removed for book publication]
[a statement in the text shows the poem was composed during 1980, so is not literally a long poem of the 70s]
Ranter, by Barry MacSweeney (published 1985) 36 pp. tnbp3, CC 3
[this was definitely composed after 1980 so is not a long poem of the 1970s. I misunderstood Barry telling me that it was a response to Thatcher- it was a response after 3 or 4 years of life under Thatcher]
The book is divided into four sections: "Ranter", "Ranter's Reel", "Snipe Drumming", and "Flamebearer".
In the first section, the character Ranter is running around parts of Britain; he is seditious; he is chasing a lost love. A string of epithets qualifying Ranter points to the timeless nature of his revolt: they are drawn from 14th C, 17th C, 19th C, and then 15th C movements of lower-class revolt, so that the enemy is disembodied and the apparent contest of wills cannot take place. The poem is then wholly liminal, taking place somewhere where the rules of time and society have been suspended. (This may correspond, physically, to the high wastes of Northumbria, unpartitioned because they are useless for agriculture: they represent the pre-human landscape.) It is difficult, for this reason, to trace changes between the first page and the last. If anything is happening, it has to do with the woman he is missing; it is hard to relate the data about revolt to this, but presumably it serves to make Ranter glamorous, as a virile and defiant rebel hero, as an argument why she should come back. Myth comes in to replace sociology here. All the love story is recent, set in the 1970s, while none of the political stories is twentieth century. The name 'ranter' seems to refer to 'ranting and raving', to a radical religious group, seeking the overthrow of the social order, in the 1650s, and to a style of folk singing in Northumbria (cf. 'The Collier's Rant', and the folk group The High Level Ranters, punning on the name of the High Level bridge across the Tyne at Newcastle). MacSweeney almost certainly wants all of these meanings simultaneously. The resurrection of the Ranters came with Christopher Hill's The World turned Upside Down, a study of the most antinomian of radical groups in the Commonwealth period which found great favour among the antinomians of the 1970s. On page 6, Ranter listens to a radio broadcast in his skull from "Bede and Cuthbert", clerics from ancient Northumbria; and to Sweeney, a figure from an old Irish tale, whose feathered pelt Ranter seems to be wearing. Some passages may correspond to the original Sweeney's nature poetry. In the scela, Sweeney went mad in a kind of 'post-traumatic stress disorder' and left human society, to live in the treetops - a kind of negative liminal. Ranter is oppressed by militiamen or by the emperor Hadrian (who campaigned in the North early in the 2nd century AD). A mention of monks on Lindisfarne, a monastery with scriptorium representing Northumbrian cultural achievement. He hopes for his bride's attitude to soften. He has the powers of animals and is owner of the wild (p.11), a liminal place. People are oppressed and do not fight back. Memories (of married life?) in Woolwich. Another run of self-praise epithets. Drunk, he falls down the stair at an Underground station. More regrets. The Norman ravaging of the North, AD 1069 - an example of peripheral revolt put down by centralised violence. French words are a bad thing. He lives out of doors, in the hedges.
In "Snipe Drumming" the situation seems to be the same. His bride speaks, how poor she found Newcastle to be. The 'drumming' is male courtship behaviour, a non-vocal acoustic display which we can easily link to 'ranting' among humans.
In "Ranter's reel", (reel, a kind of dance), he makes a journey across the Northumbrian fells. Wild things are being hunted. It is his fiefdom. The bitterness of the poor, across all history. He is a figure of resistance to the powerful, and a bird. A threat to the powerful that their reign is coming to an end or reeling. Reel has associations with drink, unsteadiness, the loss of reason, high excitement, which make it akin to ranting. The next section is called "The Flamebearer" after a character, in Welsh Fflamddwyn, who was an Angle fighting against the Britons in perhaps 600 AD; the theme of Anglo-Saxons versus Britons appears again. He appears in those old Welsh poems as an object of terror. Ranter, himself the destroyer of a household, remembers making love and regrets. Pages 37-40 are spoken by the bride, regretting how things went wrong; symbolically, the assertions fall silent and the woman's voice takes over. Her speech is more coherent and continuous than his. She refers to him as a bully. The power relations within the poem have been reversed, the boastful male central speaker is now the subject of the poem's speech, an object of judgment.
Ranter differs from the other poems discussed here in that it not only sees force as the adjudicator of history but also feels willing to take on the "ruling class" on terms of force. The local structure resembles, perhaps, the blues: simple stylised units, frequently repeated, in no particular order, without explicit links, but internally very highly motivated, so that the wholes can easily be guessed. The whole reminds one of an Irish poem "The Lament for Art O'Leary" (in An Duanaire 1600-1900, edited by Sean O'Tuama), except that the praise epithets addressed by the widow to dead Art are here addressed by Ranter to himself. (The duckdown at p.38 may actually come from the lament as translated by Thomas Kinsella, eiderdown being a more everyday way of putting it.) This boasting is another feature of blues lyrics. The bird persona can be compared to Muddy Waters' little red rooster (and to the phrase 'free as a bird'). The word cloakclasp (occurring 9 times) refers to a penannular brooch, a very prominent item of adornment of the Gaelic gentleman, of which there are many in the National Museum in Dublin and not a few in the National Museum in Edinburgh; MacSweeney has seized on the bright and showy things, to make something with an endless series of high spots. The accessibility to the poem of historical moments scattered over 2000 years shows that we are in a liminal place: no particular time, all-time. The location is essentially Northumberland. The metahistorical schema comes essentially from EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, itself a projection of Soviet schemas of history, and epic history-writing, onto stubbornly un-cooperative English source material. The poet seized the core emotional situation and discarded the clogging detail and documentation. The use of Celtic and blues schemas helps to give 'structural' material a personal, heroic, focus, miraculously restoring it to narrative and flow.
Geographical crystal: Stane (being Place book 3) by Allen Fisher, (published 1977, as 'drafted 31.12.75') 100 columns with two columns per page [Angels; CC tnbp3)
The general drift of Place is to break down the polarisation of objective and subjective knowledge. The other parts are, so far as I know, Place Book One, Hooks, Eros:Father:Pattern, Docking, "Convergences, in Place, of the Play", Unpolished Mirrors, and Becoming. The project accepts that the observer is part of the observation, and details a vast number of inner sensations, perception of the outside world, and processes which occur in both media at once. Place is considered both as an influence on awareness at many levels, but also as the product of human action, modifying the environment. Place is an 'open' project; for example, although Docking is listed in Stane as one of the 'related works', it is not credited in its own accompanying notes as part of Place: instead we are told that one part of Place (section 66) is incorporated into Docking.
A map at the beginning of Place Book I shows Stane Street, a Roman road, running from Sussex to Southwark, and presumably the main axis on which early South London grew - including the borough of Lambeth, the setting of Place. Stane is printed in landscape format. The columns are numbered from 1 to 100 at the bottom. The numbers printed at the top of the page refer to parts (listed as "45 to 81" on the title-sheet) which were interleaved and intercut to produce the final text. There are numbers at the top of the pages of Stane which refer to the Parts of Place (so that page 1 has 80 at the top). Numbered resources at the back of the book show how the text relates to its factual source material. Some page tops show, for example, (63)/74, to show that the Resources for 63 have also supplied material for part 74.
The back cover shows a street map of part of South London, partly replaced by a diagrammatic view of a texture which a note informs us 'includes photos and drawings of environments given way under stresses it was assumed they could bear'. They seem to be structural materials now showing rips. A small image on the front cover shows a map of Greater London. That is, we are being shown something at three different scales. This gesture casts the light back at the observer - it is saying something about the limits of our biological senses in the face of an environment whose processes occur on a much larger scale than our bodies. As clever mammals, we make up for this by all kinds of perceptual strategies - which sheds light on the multiple strategies of Allen Fisher. The note implies that London itself has been put under stresses too great for its materials - and has given way, failed as a community. This aspect is explored in Unpolished Mirrors and Brixton Fractals. The lettering is that of a typewriter. The text is printed in red. A note tells us that "STANE serves as a preview of Book III, Place 45 to 81, moving back into Book IV via Book II and including those parts of GRAMPIANS cut-in." This implies that there will be a later version of sections 45 to 81, but this has not been published so far as I know. The disruption of the notion of sequence is part of a new way of ordering information in word groups, pages, and books; what this draws attention to is the excess of possibilities for arranging data. It is organic - I mean, we are 'naturally' inclined to examine situations several times as new information arrives, so that viewing a kind of information once, and never being allowed to go back, is inorganic. The types of text we have are only a tiny cluster in an immense range of possibilities. Perhaps we have learnt and rigid ways of moving through fields of data - which are not the most appropriate for the part of the world we find ourselves in. We own them because they are old. Perhaps accepted sentence structures are inherited from early modern times and relate to acts of knowledge storage and retrieval which were suited to the organized knowledge of that time, for example in the law, the Church, or estate administration. Stane includes an index to the sections, which tells us for example '39 59 into 56'. Liberating the cutting and joining shows that the same piece of information can produce different results in different contexts.
I don't know of any successful exegeses of Fisher's work. I would regard a summary in prose which was longer than the poem (Stane, in this instance) as being unsuccessful - whereas taking a few themes and saying 'here, these are more important than the rest' is dishonourable. A structural value might be going to the limits of what we already know - to include the frames by which we normally constrain the speed and complexity of the information being made available at any point. If I suggest that information is normally packaged in an industrial way, in standardised and controllable units, this sheds light on Fisher's rules of procedure - he starts on the wrong side of those constraints and goes on from there. Basic techniques in this breakout are approaching from unusual angles, using subject matter usually neglected, looking at information on many different scales, and rapid cuts between different strata of material - showing new connections.
The deal offered to the reader is a speed-up in the rate of conceptual jumps in the data they are consuming. This is probably a dividing line in the audience - one faction sees the speed-up as purely desirable and exciting, one faction quickly gets bewildered and wants the poem to be normal and reassuring and just like all the other poems.
When Durer drew a rhinoceros, a beached whale, and the bones of an 18 foot giant, he chose these subjects because they were truly wondrous and unfamiliar, and because he had a means of recording. The availability of photographs, broadcasting, cheap printed matter, etc., has changed the terms on which art can be surprising. It is possible to re-analyse the history of poetry in terms of the collection of rare and interesting facts. This explains, perhaps, why so much of pre-modern poetry seems boring to us - because we already have better explanations of what it presents; and why such poets don't supply the information which seems interesting to us - because they were locked in cognitive frameworks which define what was strange and fascinating (and are different from the ones we are locked in). We could define myth in terms of anomaly, disruptions to the order of knowledge - and present poetry about myth as a collection of wonder-tales, defying sense, and recorded formally (in metre) because they were anomalous. Recent autobiographical poetry has a restricted audience because the lives recounted are not unusual enough - they adhere to sociological norms and so are too predictable; however, it is the anomalies which make the poems interesting - being autobiographical, on its own, was not interesting. Equally, readers of those times regarded religious lore as accurate information about the structure of history and the after-life. Western art since 1965 or so has had a bias towards the conceptual - this should not be understood as meaning that Western art of the previous 2000 years was not didactic and intellectually curious; instead, it expresses a new relationship between 'art' and other information media, where art lightens its load of primary information and focusses on cognitive jumps, shifts, and reorganizations. Art is a form of information and must conform to the basic physics of information. A vital factor is the information the spectator already has - art has to move into unfamiliar territory in order to acquire a unique data commodity.
In order to write a book which shows wonders and anomalies all the way through, you would today have to adopt techniques akin to Fisher's. It is not enough to find a rhinoceros.
While looking at this, I wondered about the word 'coherence'. Clearly, connection between successive sections is not necessary. We can make sense of violent shifts just as we can watch a landscape changing through a train window and disembark in another city. The rules for using the word seem to be completely subjective - it is applied when the reader is nonplussed and finds the next section not apropos. Further, 'coherence', as it is stepped up, gets ever closer to redundancy - the line which is most coherent with the previous line is one which repeats it exactly. Any line which offers new information is to some extent incoherent with the previous one. All the long poems we are looking at are very free in their construction. They do not converge on a line. I don't have a test of 'coherence' which many people could agree on. I find the poems 'well constructed' because I do not find myself confused or bored by the arrival of successive sections. But this confidence in the poets is subjective and relies partly on my identification with them.
"47" is a letter about rising damp in walls. It describes the passive-osmotic system of fluid circulating in masonry. This continues the theme, laid out in the previous section, of human life imagined as energy (a spiral) rather than as an anatomy. A human body exchanges energy all the time, and moves; anatomy is static. If you base your biology on corpses, you miss these things - and what is vital, proper to living things.
"46" shows us a voyage down the bank of the Thames. Mill pools where the water is strong and fish grow big; pent up. Chokes on the course of water considered as switches, where choices are made; (analogy with the course of fluids inside the body, the blood and lymphatic systems, affecting so much of the "sense of self"?)
A "less reduced" version of some pages of Stane was published as Fire-Place in a volume called Fire-Works, adding some more material. "Stane" is just a phonetic variant of "stone" (i.e. paved road), but may also represent a pun on stain, as a form of capillary action; the work is much concerned with buildings and the circulation of fluids in the earth and in the body, or, in fact, with the mediation between social and physiological structures and consciousness.
Any summary of Fisher's work is superficial; there are so many themes happening at once. One of the constructive rules is a pedagogic rigour whereby beliefs are constantly broken down into the experiences which found them, in the assumption that the reader has the right to judge of first and last things. We find him constantly reaching the zone of smallest form-generating differences (he refers in Necessary Business to "small initial differences"); the qualities which distinguish materials are ultimately in their molecular structure (and an exact definition of "hardness", e.g. of stone versus water, would be a molecular diagram). These slight quantities allow us to break down the sterile opposition between citizen and electorate, mind and body, person and place, will and compulsion, objective and subjective, personality and information, etc. and to tell a different story; the references to spirals imply the crossing of oppositions in mutual generation, winding eventually back to the slight differences which broke the symmetry of the apeiron and made stone different from water.
Interviews with Fisher during 2005 revealed the existence of a plan of formal symmetry organising Place. The details are explained in the interviews collected in Marvels of Lambeth (due to come out in 2012). The key concept is mirroring, which is a formal relationship between two poems or passages of poetry. To quote the 1974 book of explanations:
"In my terms then, a statement or fact laid on page five of Book I would find SHADING on page 95 of Book III. This reflecting nature brought about the structure. It is generally thematic from place I thru to XXXVII in Book I, and from LXXXI to XXXV in Book III."
Stane is thus a mirror of Place Book I. Since there are 37 parts of Stane and 37 of Place I-XXXVII, we might suspect that the parts map onto each other. It is slightly more complicated than that, since Stane is also numbered as pages 1-100, and Place Book I has a table in the back which demonstrates how it is also constituted by 100 pages (in the typescript and also in the book, although the page numbers are not printed). The symmetry is made more elusive by the fact that Stane starts with part 81 and works back to part XLV. Page 1 of Book I maps onto page 100 of Stane, and so on. The mirroring is not very obtrusive. For example, the line in Place 1 'walked the straight road in sunlight' connects with the line in Place 81 ''I walk from Balham gateway to the South/ my head from process of walking nodding', but other connections are not obvious. I understand the strategy was to allow readers to read 1 and 81 together and perceive new connections affecting the subject (of how site affects perception). Readers of a certain generation will recall a spoof travelogue recorded by Peter Sellers, in which the line 'Balham! Gateway to the South!" was heard. This scheme explains why notes are included at points which say 'GRAMPIANS cut into PLACE", and so on; the extra overlays partially hide the scheme from view. The passages about a visit to the Grampians probably do not take part in the fundamental symmetry. (Book I has an inclusion called Lakes, about the Lake District.)
The title of Unpolished Mirrors, a set of poems which is part of Place but only partially included in it, refers to incomplete symmetries: the reflection is dulled.
** Common themes have emerged in these poems, to my complete amazement. They weren't selected to resemble each other. Four of the poems discussed mention the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, generally dated to the 5th to 8th centuries AD. Perhaps there is a shared imaginary which poets go to in order to find their visions. All the poets seem interested in the "fore-time" before the rise of mediaeval civilisation; all seem interested in the origin of our customs and social structure; none shows a situation between several people, and which is altered by a series of events which it structures; all are deeply politicised and deeply angry at the way we live. All have suppressed the signposts, the "ifs" and "therefores" which lead an argument: the discourse of the poem is "before" these, and this beforeness is part of poemicity. This points to a latent theory about the ambiguity of reality, which is chopped and channelled by the social structure, which is subliminal cognitive filters distributed over the whole population; poets like Raworth and Thom have gone on to make the acts of affabulation and composition the subject of the poem.
The striking of coins is described by Lopez and Fisher, and by Thom, whose discussion of the appropriation of metals almost certainly involves their circulation and treasuring as money. Important as liminality is, it is not present in the poems by Martin Thom and Andrew Crozier.
The hope that these large-scale poems would offer symbolic statements about social structure has been proved vain. In general, they deal only with a single mind, largely freed from social bonds. Experience is not shown as emerging from interaction with other people. This requires us to look at the sociology of privatisation.
The intrication of poems with the contents of books (of radical philosophy, politics, history, etc.) depends on collective representations, expressing wishes and the need for play as much as re-arrangement of experience, which precede both, although dialectically they can be shaped by both. These long poems show us, through an exhausting effort to seize and externalise, experience itself, as it is staged by human agents, in long or short strips: what good sociology captures better than bad sociology. The search for a central, dominant arena of social reality is vain, since the efficient unit of experience is clearly the individual brain.
These shared features include the restriction of the poem to the experience of a single individual, or privatisation; the shifting of stress from factual knowledge to intellectual method in framing and highlighting the material; the move away from narrative or drama or action; the collapse of a stable system of moral norms and imperatives, to be replaced by unquiet but essentially personal intellectual curiosity and model-making; the advance of untunable noise or dissonance within the models, and the pre-eminence of doubt as a response to it.
Myth appears in these poems, as part of the palette; but they form a strong contrast to Classical mythological poems. The oppositions which are significant to them are: central versus local-communal authority; the power of money versus less impersonal social bonds; tradition versus reason; Wales versus England; alienation versus fulfilment; symbolic versus sensory experience; subjective versus objective knowledge. These are not topics which mattered to Hesiod.
Another cast back shows a dislike of what the State does; the history of England, then Britain, as a "company" is surely centred on warfare against other states, with a long intricate chain of conquests of overseas territories, tax innovations, grabs of the entrepot trade, naval battles, sieges of key bases, arms races in workshops, acts of heroism, straight shooting, and what have you. The poetry in question excludes discussion of (warfare + political struggle + economic competition + competition between poets for legitimacy) — the ways of power. The State as military machine is cut out, and history is written in terms of (ordinary) households. If we go back to the late 19th century, we find the invention of sociology was just this: a study that shut out the State and looked at the citizen body. So poetry has been competing with sociology for a niche in the spectrum; but sociology was there first, because in 1900 poetry was still dealing with naval battles. This triangular relationship (between Church, State, and poetry) is not quite clear to me; the replacement by the State of the good works formerly carried out by the Church is clear; also, fear is part of the pattern, since the possessor class were frightened by the threatened arrival of the mass franchise (and this perhaps gave rise to sociology, in England and Germany?), and the poets we are discussing are clearly afraid of the power elite (shall we say, the military-industrial complex, the Tory Party, the City, and the Pentagon). Christianity lacks a coherent theory of the State, because its early strata were formed under State persecution and did not expect the Second Coming to be delayed long enough for politics to matter; this omission may be guiding the course of modern British poetry. Poetry since 1960 seems much more aligned with Nonconformism than with Anglicanism. All the poets discussed in this chapter are political radicals, excepting Crozier; and some comments outside the poems seem to equate the media with the forms of illegitimate power, and their wish to write long poems is related to a wish to compete with the "authorised versions" of the media, by supplying their own semantic context.
The omission of power politics from the boundaries of poetry seems to resemble a previous rule of omission, namely the simplicity expected of song and lyric poetry, which were not to deal with the sordid material of human relations. The double stance of radical poetry (ignoring the State and all its works while also planning actively to infiltrate over and transform the State) is very reminiscent of the stance of the Protestant churches in our period.
The abjuring of "power" is correlated with the excision of certain kinds of emotional pressure on the reader, and of pure self-expression. How can you disagree with the military-industrial complex and still want to unleash the self-aggrandising self of the confessional poet? When we see the poem as territorial object, we see the principle of competition for space at work in literature.
My research into the writings of popular Protestantism shows a valuation of physical details as corroboration of essentially unlikely tales of spiritual achievement; based on courtroom confrontations (Foxe's Book of Martyrs brought these to their greatest ever height) in which simultaneity and entanglement provided a difficulty of invention and so showed veracity; in these modern poems, there seems to be a rule that any experience which involves several different sensory channels at once is more credible. I don't say this is good or bad as a rule, merely that it provides the specific difference between British poetry and (say) French or Russian. Concrete details mark a good witness. If Fisher recounts his spiritual experience in seven or eight channels of perception at once, this can be taken as over-fulfilment. Another rule in the early lay-spiritual literature is that lighting effects in the sky indicate divine assent, something we find in many saints' lives; if Fisher relates his preoccupation with celestial light to the pineal gland, we may believe this or not. However reluctantly, we have to concede a similarity between the serotonin/luminosity effects and the lyrics of 'Astronomy Domine'.
A preliminary reading-list of Long Poems from the 1970s
Peter Abbs, For Man and Islands
Asa Benveniste, Tabelli Linnaei
George Barker, Villa Stellar, In Memory of David Archer
Anthony Barnett, Fear and Misadventure; Mud Settles
Jack Beeching, Myth of Myself
Francis Berry, The Singing Dome
D.M. Black, 4 narrative poems (in The Happy Crow and Gravitations)
Euros Bowen, Siap rhyw profiad
George Mackay Brown, Fishermen with Ploughs
Gerard Casey, South Wales Echo
Barry Cole, Vanessa In the City
Andrew Crozier, High Zero; Pleats
Allen Fisher, Place (4 volumes); Long Shout to Kernewek; Sicily; The Art of Flight; Shorting Out
Roy Fisher, The Cut Pages
Eddie Flintoff, Sarmatians
Ulli Freer, Rooms
Raymond Garlick, Notes for an Autobiography
Paul Gogarty, The Accident Adventure
W.S. Graham, Dark Dialogues; Implements in their Places
Harry Guest, Elegies; Miniatures
John Hall, Days; Couch Grass
David Harsent, Dreams of the Dead
Lee Harwood, The Long Black Veil
J.F. Hendry, Marimarusa (composed around 1947)
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns
Jeremy Hooker, Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant
Ted Hughes, Crow, Gaudete, Cave Birds, Adam and the Sacred Nine, Prometheus on his Crag
Emyr Humphreys, Ancestor Worship
Phil Jenkins, Cairo
David Jones, various poems in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (and) The Roman Quarry (mostly pre-1970 in fact)
Judith Kazantzis, Clytemnestra
R.F. Langley, Matthew Glover
T.S. Law, Referendum
Peter Levi, Christmas Sermon; Canticum
Anthony Lopez, Change. A Prospectus
George MacBeth, The Orlando Poems; A Poet’s Life; Lusus
Hugh MacDiarmid, Direadh
Sorley MacLean, Uamha 'n Oir /The Cave of Gold
Barry MacSweeney, Black Torch
Brian Marley, Bargain Basement Sonnets
Alan Massey, Leechcraft
Roland Mathias, Madoc
Matthew Mead, The Administration of Things
Christopher middleton, Anasphere: le torse antique
Edwin Morgan, The New Divan, Instamatic Poems, Memories of Earth
Eric Mottram, Local Movement, Tunis, Elegies
Walter Perrie, Lamentation for the Children
FT Prince, Dry-points of the Hasidim
J. H. Prynne, News of Warring Clans
Kathleen Raine, On a Deserted Shore
Tom Raworth, Ace
Peter Redgrove, Love's Journeys, Dr Faust's Sea-Spiral Spirit
Jeremy Reed, The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg, Stratton Elegy
John Riley, Czargrad
Colin Simms, long poems on the American Indians, including A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-course, Parflèche, Carcajou, The Compression of the Bones of Crazy Horse, No North-West Passage
Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge, Red Eye
Iain Crichton Smith, From the Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe
Ken Smith, Tristan Crazy; Apocrypha from the Western Kingdom; Fox Running
Nathaniel Tarn, Lyrics for the Bride of God
Martin Thom, The Bloodshed, the Shaking House
Edward Boaden Thomas, The 12 Parts of Derbyshire
Gwyn Thomas, Cadwynau yn y meddwl, Craig a dwr
Anthony Thwaite, New Confessions
John Wain, Feng
Jeffrey Wainwright, Thomas Müntzer
David Wevill, Where the Arrow Falls
95 poems? There are a couple more I am in doubt about. Anyway this is a large-scale phenomenon. I have been working (2017) on a longer analysis of the genre.
We could complete this list with a number of other works which I do not greatly esteem.
'Direadh' was published in 1974 and is printed as the last poem in the 'Long poems' volume of MacDiarmid's Collected, but other evidence suggests it was written in 1937-8. I am inclined to stick with the publication date. There is a possibility of more or less endless argument about what is or isn't a "long poem", which I have tactfully suppressed.
Marcus Cumberlege needs to be on this list. 'The Ram' is a compelling poem from his 1977 volume 'Firelines'.
Saturday, 21 July 2012
Allen Fisher interviews book
Allen Fisher interviews book
In 2003 I was asked to produce a book of interviews with Allen Fisher. I collected existing interviews and statements, transcribed a bunch of historic tapes from the Eric Mottram Archive, and was fortunate enough to carry out a series of interviews with the poet. The whole thing was wrapped up sometime in the summer of 2005. The publisher then sat on it for 7 years, but after a reset it is now going instead to be published by Shearsman - who, true to form, are moving with incredible fluency and rapidity. The title is 'Marvels of Lambeth'. It is about 80,000 words long.
I am very excited about this. There was so much to be said and of that so much got said in the interviews which six or seven people put so much into over a 30-year period.
In 2003 I was asked to produce a book of interviews with Allen Fisher. I collected existing interviews and statements, transcribed a bunch of historic tapes from the Eric Mottram Archive, and was fortunate enough to carry out a series of interviews with the poet. The whole thing was wrapped up sometime in the summer of 2005. The publisher then sat on it for 7 years, but after a reset it is now going instead to be published by Shearsman - who, true to form, are moving with incredible fluency and rapidity. The title is 'Marvels of Lambeth'. It is about 80,000 words long.
I am very excited about this. There was so much to be said and of that so much got said in the interviews which six or seven people put so much into over a 30-year period.
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Psychoceramics, again: ley lines, dowsing, and 'Place'
Psychoceramics, again: Blake, alternative physics, artificial hills, flow blocks, etc.
Note. ‘Place’ is a long poem by Allen Fisher, first published between 1974 and 1981. I believe it to be a masterpiece and the central work of the British Underground in that period. This note is intended to recover cultural material which was very much around in the 1970s and which has become submerged since. The ‘root source’ is an admiration among poets for William Blake. One obvious aspect of Big Bill was rejecting conventional physics. In about 1968 there was an obvious strand of ‘alternative physics’ around, and it involved ley lines, spiral energies, and flying saucers. The interest in those occultist lines of thought was a symptom of a wider wish to inherit the mantle of Blake. Kathleen Raine may have thought she already had this mantle in her wardrobe.
This posting continues my discussion of the irrational (in 'Origins of the Underground') and of geometrical thinking (in Marvels of Lambeth) with extra material on ley lines. This is because I got hold of Bellamy and Williamson’s book on the subject, which brings everything into sharp focus.
1. What were 'ley lines'
The 'ley lines' notion began with a book by Alfred Watkins in 1922. It would seem that at this point (2010) it has run its course and the wider world has abandoned it. It contains not a shred of truth and my only interest in it is as a source of imagery used by poets of the British Underground.
Watkins saw ley lines (a term invented by him since the common place name element 'ley', as in Finchley, has a completely different meaning) as a network of paths covering England. They could be found on the map because they were completely straight. However, all known paths for people walking or using pack animals go in curves to avoid steep slopes and other natural features. The idea that the leys were not simply ways trodden by human foot but 'energy lines' came much later and would have amazed Watkins.
Ley Lines in Question (1986) by Liz Bellamy & Tom Williamson examined the idea from every angle and demolished it for good. They point out that Watkins located the building of the system as between 5000 and 2000 BC, i.e. in Neolithic times. However, almost no points on any identified leys pre-date 1000 BC, and most post-date the Roman invasion. The 'ley vision' involves an idyllic version of the Neolithic as Arcadia and Merrie England, with everything Bad in history arriving later, such as the discovery of metals. In this Arcadia, nothing ever went wrong. This picture was attractive to hippies, who saw the future of society (once reformed) as just such an Arcadia, and who tried to inhabit it for a few days or hours.
2. links between flying saucers and ley lines
There seems little doubt that the ley fad had died quite soon after the outbreak of war in 1939. The STC (Straight Track Club) closed in 1948 after years of decline. The fad had blown over and it was revived as a by-blow of the flying saucer craze -and specifically because of Aimé Michel's proposal in 1958 that UFOs run on straight lines. He referred to this as 'orthoteny'. (A later word for these alignments is 'isocelie'). These imaginary lines were connected to ley lines a couple of years later, as 'the straight track in the sky'. Lines on the Landscape (by Paul Devereux and Nigel Pennick) confirms this: "The great revival of the subject came in 1961 through the person of Tony Wedd. Wedd was an ex-RAF pilot[.] In 1960 a psychic, Mary Long, was visiting Wedd's home in Chiddingstone [...]" [...] 'I [Wedd] began to suppose from that date that saucer crews knew about leys.' She describes a ‘vortex’ where two leys meet. The other vital source was a contactee named Buck Nelson who spoke of 'My trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus' (book, 1956). Long combined spirits with aliens in spaceships. There was no going back. Wedd was the local rep for Flying Saucer Review (founded 1955). UFOs were seen at Keston Mark in Kent, near Wedd's home. Wedd then connected UFOs with leys and sees the name as too big a hint to miss: it is named because it is a Mark.
Information on this at
http://www.goddardmultimedia.fsnet.co.uk/tonywedd/
'Skyways and landmarks' was Wedd's 1961 pamphlet on the findings, a pioneer work. (A complete reissue is available on the Internet at http://www.leyhunt.fsnet.co.uk/lhunt61.htm .) Philip Heselton and Jimmy Goddard were schoolboys in 1961 but geographically close to Wedd, and inspired by him. Along with Goddard, Heselton founded the Ley Hunter's Club (1962) and The Ley-Hunter magazine (1965) (later edited by Paul Devereux). Heselton wrote an illustrated book called ‘Earth Mysteries’ and edited a magazine called 'Northern Earth’ and is currently a neo-pagan in Leeds. He studied some extremely long-distance leys but I am unaware of any printed sources for this (except the summary in Bellamy and Williamson).
Goddard presented Wedd’s ideas at a 1966 meeting at which Devereux was present (and Michell may have been). Michell's 1967 book The flying saucer vision: the Holy Grail restored outlines the ley-saucer theory and precedes The View Over Atlantis which is the summa of all this hippy gumbo.
Bellamy and Williamson point out that early fans of ‘alignments’, already around 1920, were also fans of theosophy, spiritualism, Atlantis, etc., so that occultism was there all along. This does not apply to Alfred Watkins. However, the audience which swallowed the ley lines piffle did tend to be the same audience which believed in the occult; they joined along with a rather different strand, of people who had no formal education (a very large number of these) and who believed in rubbish ideas because they had no critical equipment. Obscurely, this story manifested as deep resentment of educated people, notably archaeologists. The appeal of Ley Line Theory may have been partly that trained archaeologists didn’t believe in it. The correlation between what kind of person you are and the willingness to believe loopy ideas is very close. Their dislike of scholars was also because they visibly worked for their knowledge, and the Arcadian Neolithic thing involved a complete lack of need for work.
I think there is a background tune that the common people are the descendants of the Neolithic Wise Peasants and so they understand the cosmos in the same way. The hippies developed this wisdom and that is why they ate peasant food, wore peasant style clothes, etc. The scholars were ignorant by definition because they studied and used Reason. The ley hunters just wandered out into the countryside and listened to Intuition.
3. ley lines as national power grid
After reading Aimé Michel, people began to think that UFOs were actually deriving power from the lines they flew on, like trams from the power cable. This was actually the merging of Ley Theory with earlier strands of occultist thought linked to dowsing theory. Arthur Lawton's Mysteries of ancient man (1939), was based on dowsing, and develops the idea of lines of force as a basis for landscape alignments. Evans-Wentz linked fairy paths to the 'earth's magnetism' in 1911 (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries). (This anticipated the link between being abducted by the fairies and UFO abductions, first made by Jacques Vallée in about 1970 I believe. Vallée was quite a fan of Evans-Wentz.) The pattern of the past, by Guy Underwood (originally 1971), is in the dowsing tradition but theorises about spiral forces controlling underground streams, similar to the straight forces of ley theory. Allen Fisher draws on this book in ‘Place’.
‘The geodetic system’ is mentioned by Underwood, influenced by French and English dowsers of the 1930s. A dowser named Francois Peyre claimed a planetary grid of energies. (I get this from Devereux and Pennick’s book.)
4. Free power
John Michell was the least inhibited or rational of the New Age cosmologists. He identified one ‘long distance ley’ which runs for 400 miles to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, and his passage on this is quoted more or less verbatim in ‘Place’ VIII (see below). Bellamy and Williamson look at this alignment in some detail and blow it sky-high. Michell believed that all hills in Britain were artificial and that the ley power had provided the energy by which they were shaped. Slightly later this was connected up with the ‘sacred geometry’ theory of cosmically significant patterns in things like decorated manuscript pages and cathedral roofs, and the whole thing links up to show ‘self reproducing patterns’ descending from who knows where to organise everything from the flow of springs to ranges of hills. That is, it links up with something much older: neo-Platonism. The sacred geometry thing was promoted by RILKO, the research into lost knowledge organisation.
5. Place
I don’t think ley lines can be described as basic to Place, although they do crop up several times in the first volume:
who are you now that would draw the St. Michael line
from Avebury circle to the extreme southwest
Mont St Michel in Normandy, the chapel of St Michel L'Aiguille,
the hilltop church St Michel facing the stones of Carnac,
the Celtic church on Skellig Michael,
the chapel on the crag near Torre Abbey, Roche rock hermitage,
Brentor church, Gare Hill in Wiltshire, St Michael's Mount
the key lies within the contours of the landscape
that are our very soul's veins
"the veins of the countryside standing out
across the plains and hills' (Watkins)
(from Place VIII).
Most of the quoted text is a quote from a book by John Michell (as in 4, above). Place XXXIV is mainly a quote or paraphrase of Alfred Watkins. If Book III (parts 45-81) is called ‘Stane’ that refers to ‘Stane Street’ (Chichester-London), which may be there because it is very straight and has been identified by ley line crackpots as a long ley (rather than a Roman road, which would seem more likely). Belloc wrote about this even before Watkins. However, there are 100 parts to Place. There are too many strands in the book to allow anything to predominate except the idea of ‘location’ itself and the geography of Lambeth and adjacent areas. However, it is quite reasonable to suggest ‘geopathology’ as a unifying theme in Place book I (parts I-XXXVII) at least. This word refers to an idea of the earth as having organic qualities, a circulation (so "veins"), and a state of health, which can be damaged- usually by human agency. It comes out of the dowsing tradition. Place VIII goes on:
so our new roads are straight through the heart past it
to fall in line with the others
to fall in line
in a grid an "iron grip of history"
chosen by our loci bottlenecked to the chaos
out of which our pleasure comes our sexual violence
apart from our ancestors that we disown
whose song weave
between the geomantic centres of this scape
engenders the life essence
This theme underlies the whole of parts I-XXXVII of the poem. All the description of London’s underground rivers is there because their flow is seen as ‘blocked’ and pathologically impeded, and the link between this and the internal fluids of the human body, notably the body of the narrator, is made very very clearly. There is a map of London’s rivers at the back of Place I-XXXVII, the 1974 edition. The remark (in Unpolished Mirrors p.10) '1930 a map of South London showing relationship/ between buried rivers and pneumonia outbreaks' fits in with this ‘geopathic’ concept, and actions, perhaps including Place itself, are viewed as geo-healing remedies. It seems more likely that the ley motif was picked up as an illustration of this general theme, because mentions of leys are not numerous, whereas very large sections of the text are directly about this 'distortion' and obstruction of natural flow. It seems more likely that the pneumonia bacillus liked damp air and that the houses on old watercourses were distinctly damper than others. That is, the bacilli were happy and there was no ‘distortion’ of earth forces unless from a subjective human point of view. There is a faction of ley fans all for trying to ‘cure’ the Earth, notably by wandering around hammering in copper rods at points where the earth energy is felt to be ‘damaged’.
Another passage on the same page relates the watercourses to ‘plague’, not pneumonia. Again, I would think that this is because brown rats preferred living on or in the banks of rivers, and the plague was partly following their movements. Mud and rivers were part of their ‘bio-aesthetic’ as a species. I doubt they saw it as a metaphor for blockage. In general I think ‘Place’ draws more from the ‘earth energy’ line of dowsing, as in Underwood, than from ley line theory.
(Gloss. ’Song weave’ refers to the ‘song lines’ of native peoples in Australia, who used them as an aid to navigation. This was picked up by ley enthusiasts. ‘Geomantic’ refers to the Chinese practice of feng shui, a way of siting houses and settlements. This was also picked up by the same enthusiasts.)
5a "In 1929 the German researcher Gustav von Pohl introduced the concept of earth rays, where he assumes the existence of underground watercourses, which are said to emit rays damaging to humans, animals and plants, and can be sensed by especially endowed people (radio-aesthetes)." The Alembic interview mentions a dowser named 'Palen' but when editing it for republication I couldn’t trace this guy. Variant searches then produced ‘von Pohl‘. I am translating this from a German Internet page. ‘Radio-aesthete’ = someone who can detect rays, in other words a dowser. ‘(Underground) watercourses are according to radio-aesthetes - like clefts and collisions of strata - cause of deviations in the earth’s magnetic field and of earth rays and so are damaging to health.’ The page goes on to say that such water flows do not affect the earth’s magnetic field or the health of humans on the surface. However, von Pohl‘s theories are a statement of the ‘geopathic‘ thinking which appears, of course only as one theme in a great web, in ‘Place‘. (The link to ‘von Pohl’ is only a guess.)
Francis Hitching's Earth Magic (1976), another standard work on the ley-line piffle, has more on 'earth rays':
'One thing [quoting Arthur Bailey] is quite certain, and that is that people can be affected by living on top of streams; not all streams but what are sometimes called 'black' streams of earth rays[.] There are many instances of cows, horses, and other animals definitely suffering as a result of being kept over these noxious influences [.]' (p.140) He does not give a source for this Bailey character. All the same this idea is one of the more significant structural ideas underlying 'Place', and its tales of buried streams.
5b A key passage for me is:
I build a brick arched roadway
under this foul Thames
between Wapping and Rotherhithe
a phallus joining two bodies at the drilling
becomes a vagina as I sweve it
a way through my unconscious
to signify my desire
opposes my conscious knowing
my dream synthesis in bridges
a rebirth into the nerve tank
(sweve = dream)
This metaphoric treatment of the earth as being like a body explains why all the ‘engineering works’ around London are of so much concern to the poet. This does not have much to do with Alfred Watkins. (There is a tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe.)
The essay on Pound in Place Book I synthesizes the Dao, a Chinese word meaning ’way’ which was bagged up by Pound in one of his fake-philosophical moments, with the Old Straight Track as hypothesized by Watkins.
Something I missed was the primary origin of this flow theory. According to Stephen Jay Gould, "'Mesmer claimed that a single (and subtle) fluid pervaded the universe, uniting and connecting all bodies. [...] The same fluid flows through organisms and may be called animal magnetism. A blockage of this flow causes disease, and cure requires a reestablishment of the flux and the restoration of equilibrium." (Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 185)
Anton Mesmer was uttering this theory in around 1780 and all 'flow' theories are presumably indebted to it, through whatever intermediaries.
6. 'Falling leaf' appears at p.351 of the collected edition and also 'this fantastic path failing leaf' at p.223.
'Failing leaf' is a typical Fisher variation: he plays around with quotes just as he recontextualises material. The transformation is to be insisted on. It is an expression of freedom, simply. Careful comparison of the source material with the poetry in 'Place' reveals these transformations at every step. The leaf ‘fails’ possibly because it breaks off at the stalk as a start to its flight.
The UFO witnesses interviewed in France in the 1950s and reported by Aimé Michel spoke of a ‘falling leaf manoeuvre’ which the vessels executed: Michel analysed this as happening only where two of his ‘straight lines in the sky’ intersected. At a junction, then. They went into a ‘hunt’ mode when changing trajectory. If in ‘Place’ we find among material related to ley lines two references to the ‘falling leaf’, this is probably a call back to the UFO material.
Place also has this text, from a signpost: There is a Change of Priorities at Junction Ahead, (at pages 78 and 154) and this junction may well key to the ‘falling leaf’. The whole book is about a change of direction for society, the person, and poetics. It is about finding a way through.
The passage at p.351 puts the ‘falling leaf’ in the middle of material drawn from René Thom’s catastrophe theory, which is also devoted to the study of sharp transitions in systems. Fairly obviously the implication is of ‘a social system and city stressed by overload making a transit into a sharply altered state which relieves the stress’, and probably this could stand as an overall description of Place. Thom was not talking about social systems but Vaneigem (and Fisher) obviously were.
The recontextualising can be seen as a catastrophe: a block of text is torn out of its existing connections and these are bent to form a new set. There’s a détournement ahead.
The whole poem is the context within each part stands. Looking closely at passages of a few lines just emphasizes that the meaning of the whole is only to be grasped by reading the whole, in as short a time as possible: reaching a state of brief but intense absorption.
7. Mounds
Another line of occultist thought has yielded imagery recycled by Underground poets. Elizabeth Oke Gordon, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles, 1914, has an appendix by the Revd. John Griffith which talks about the alignment of mounds. Particular stones now in London buildings are there said to date back to Stone Age tracks marked by hunters. Watkins was also interested in mounds, although Gordon came first. I am not clear about the connection. Certainly Michell’s fantasy about ‘artificial hills’ follows on from this.
Gordon identifies Westminster Abbey as the site of a Temple of Apollo. I believe this appears in poems by Barry MacSweeney, where Chatterton's 'fall' is interpreted mythically through the figure of Bladud, who according to Geoffrey of Monmouth flew on wings and fell to his death at a Temple of Apollo in 'Troy Novaunt', or London. Chatterton’s fall was due to poetry and hence symbolically he too fell from the Temple of Apollo, leader of the Muses. Sinclair's mythology of London in Lud Heat also, I believe, draws on Gordon, and Bladud features in Suicide Bridge. She is also cited in the 'resources' list for Place, and the passage in Unpolished Mirrors which refers to 'London Stone' is about an ancient stone which Gordon writes about as possibly prehistoric: ‘I came to London Stone sick of Diana/ You can check the mileage‘ (’Doll‘s Second Monologue‘). Fisher also refers in the same book to a 'temple of Diana' which belongs with the theoretical temple of Apollo, as Diana equals Artemis and Artemis was the sister of Apollo. Diana’s fane however was supposedly on the site of what is now St Paul’s.
Rummaged the ground
failed to discover traces Diana and Apollo temples
found sacrificing bowls bearing Diana’s signifier
in Woodward’s cupboard
said found at St Paul’s
(UM page 54)
It was Christopher Wren who rummaged the ground, when the site was razed before building the new St Paul's. "Wren stated (according to the biography compiled by his son) that he could find no trace of Diana’s temple, nor any bones of sacrificed animals:
8. free energy, Bellman
One of the two works Allen cites as being basic to ‘Place’ is Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘The Revolution in Everyday Life’. Vaneigem, a Situationist, predicts a culture of total leisure due to automation. He wanted to solve the problem of total leisure - play takes over, basically. People who were ‘dropping out’ in around 1968 had to deal with the counter-argument that ‘you want to use the national power grid to run your record players and so you have to accept technology and capitalism in general’. This was heard every day. It strikes me that the interest in ‘free energy’ and in non-Newtonian physics could be related to this: we don’t need mains electricity because we can plug into ‘terrestrial magnetism’. When Michell claimed that all hills in Britain were artificial, he was offering proof that ‘earth energy’ could replace nuclear power stations. There is some interest in giants in Place book I (the sections titled ‘Lakes’) and this may connect with a ley-fan theory that old stories about giants throwing hills and rocks around were garbled accounts of Neolithic people building artificial hills by means of ‘linear earth energy‘.
In Council of Heresy, I quoted this passage from Place XX:
there is a sonorous architecture
overlapping the outline of streets
and buildings fields and centres
re-enforcing counteracting
the attractive or repulsive tone of
this place
but I didn't spot that it is a quote from The Revolution in Everyday Life. Oh shucks. This is presumably 'psychogeography', in its original Situationist guise.
The French title of this 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem means ‘treatise on how to live for the use of the young generation’. This is indeed a proposal for a revolution in everyday life. Related poetry is only a part of the revolution, perhaps the sound given off as cities are destroyed.
Vaneigem appears to have coined the phrase ‘radical subjectivity’. He wanted to change the basic categories of time and space as they are internalised in human behaviour. ‘Place’ tries to go back to a point where those structures don’t exist yet and to build them in a different way. The 'Bellman' is presumably the part of the psyche which institutes rhythms and the starts and ends of time, the 'internal clock'. This is related to the division between the 'aesthetic' and the 'everyday'.
As Gravity develops its vaneigemesque impact gets smaller. Progressively, its concentration on where we live, on the structures of everyday life, has become more opaque. It becomes harder to know what the emotional message of ‘Gravity’ is, as its bulk becomes ever more macroscopic and its focal zone becomes ever more microscopic. It is fair to speak also of the end of frustration and the achievement of life goals in connection with this loss of central energy.
Prynne and Fisher were both influenced by Situationism and both have spontaneity in the central place. To grasp their work one has to understand the Counter Culture and the radical mood of the later Sixties.
9. Twist again
The old English word for 'path used by pack animals' is 'worple' (or 'worple way'). This is cognate with the old sense of 'warp', i.e. 'twist'. These paths were strikingly twisty. Following the contours, perhaps. I don't know why prehistoric paths should be straight. There is no Old Straight Track because, if it's straight, it's not old.
10. Big Bill
Someone could write a book about the 'failed flight' whereby English poetry, from at least 1937 on (the origin of the Apocalyptics) to 1980, tried to make Blake the model for new poetry actually being written, and how this flight plummeted. I think that, to write that book, you would have to wade through a lot of unbearably irrational pseudo-scholarship. A lot of the poetry involved is very interesting, though. The history of poetry is a worple.
Are people still trying to write like Blake? I suspect they are, but I do not have information on this.
Resources
archive of ley line ‘believer’ material at: http://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/index.html
Search the Net using the words 'geopathic' or 'sacred geometry'.
Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground and The Council of Heresy. Pioneering work on psychoceramics.
Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past
French wikipedia article for 'Orthoténie'.
Otherwise as mentioned in the text.
There is now a collected version of 'Place'.
Note. ‘Place’ is a long poem by Allen Fisher, first published between 1974 and 1981. I believe it to be a masterpiece and the central work of the British Underground in that period. This note is intended to recover cultural material which was very much around in the 1970s and which has become submerged since. The ‘root source’ is an admiration among poets for William Blake. One obvious aspect of Big Bill was rejecting conventional physics. In about 1968 there was an obvious strand of ‘alternative physics’ around, and it involved ley lines, spiral energies, and flying saucers. The interest in those occultist lines of thought was a symptom of a wider wish to inherit the mantle of Blake. Kathleen Raine may have thought she already had this mantle in her wardrobe.
This posting continues my discussion of the irrational (in 'Origins of the Underground') and of geometrical thinking (in Marvels of Lambeth) with extra material on ley lines. This is because I got hold of Bellamy and Williamson’s book on the subject, which brings everything into sharp focus.
1. What were 'ley lines'
The 'ley lines' notion began with a book by Alfred Watkins in 1922. It would seem that at this point (2010) it has run its course and the wider world has abandoned it. It contains not a shred of truth and my only interest in it is as a source of imagery used by poets of the British Underground.
Watkins saw ley lines (a term invented by him since the common place name element 'ley', as in Finchley, has a completely different meaning) as a network of paths covering England. They could be found on the map because they were completely straight. However, all known paths for people walking or using pack animals go in curves to avoid steep slopes and other natural features. The idea that the leys were not simply ways trodden by human foot but 'energy lines' came much later and would have amazed Watkins.
Ley Lines in Question (1986) by Liz Bellamy & Tom Williamson examined the idea from every angle and demolished it for good. They point out that Watkins located the building of the system as between 5000 and 2000 BC, i.e. in Neolithic times. However, almost no points on any identified leys pre-date 1000 BC, and most post-date the Roman invasion. The 'ley vision' involves an idyllic version of the Neolithic as Arcadia and Merrie England, with everything Bad in history arriving later, such as the discovery of metals. In this Arcadia, nothing ever went wrong. This picture was attractive to hippies, who saw the future of society (once reformed) as just such an Arcadia, and who tried to inhabit it for a few days or hours.
2. links between flying saucers and ley lines
There seems little doubt that the ley fad had died quite soon after the outbreak of war in 1939. The STC (Straight Track Club) closed in 1948 after years of decline. The fad had blown over and it was revived as a by-blow of the flying saucer craze -and specifically because of Aimé Michel's proposal in 1958 that UFOs run on straight lines. He referred to this as 'orthoteny'. (A later word for these alignments is 'isocelie'). These imaginary lines were connected to ley lines a couple of years later, as 'the straight track in the sky'. Lines on the Landscape (by Paul Devereux and Nigel Pennick) confirms this: "The great revival of the subject came in 1961 through the person of Tony Wedd. Wedd was an ex-RAF pilot[.] In 1960 a psychic, Mary Long, was visiting Wedd's home in Chiddingstone [...]" [...] 'I [Wedd] began to suppose from that date that saucer crews knew about leys.' She describes a ‘vortex’ where two leys meet. The other vital source was a contactee named Buck Nelson who spoke of 'My trip to Mars, the Moon, and Venus' (book, 1956). Long combined spirits with aliens in spaceships. There was no going back. Wedd was the local rep for Flying Saucer Review (founded 1955). UFOs were seen at Keston Mark in Kent, near Wedd's home. Wedd then connected UFOs with leys and sees the name as too big a hint to miss: it is named because it is a Mark.
Information on this at
http://www.goddardmultimedia.fsnet.co.uk/tonywedd/
'Skyways and landmarks' was Wedd's 1961 pamphlet on the findings, a pioneer work. (A complete reissue is available on the Internet at http://www.leyhunt.fsnet.co.uk/lhunt61.htm .) Philip Heselton and Jimmy Goddard were schoolboys in 1961 but geographically close to Wedd, and inspired by him. Along with Goddard, Heselton founded the Ley Hunter's Club (1962) and The Ley-Hunter magazine (1965) (later edited by Paul Devereux). Heselton wrote an illustrated book called ‘Earth Mysteries’ and edited a magazine called 'Northern Earth’ and is currently a neo-pagan in Leeds. He studied some extremely long-distance leys but I am unaware of any printed sources for this (except the summary in Bellamy and Williamson).
Goddard presented Wedd’s ideas at a 1966 meeting at which Devereux was present (and Michell may have been). Michell's 1967 book The flying saucer vision: the Holy Grail restored outlines the ley-saucer theory and precedes The View Over Atlantis which is the summa of all this hippy gumbo.
Bellamy and Williamson point out that early fans of ‘alignments’, already around 1920, were also fans of theosophy, spiritualism, Atlantis, etc., so that occultism was there all along. This does not apply to Alfred Watkins. However, the audience which swallowed the ley lines piffle did tend to be the same audience which believed in the occult; they joined along with a rather different strand, of people who had no formal education (a very large number of these) and who believed in rubbish ideas because they had no critical equipment. Obscurely, this story manifested as deep resentment of educated people, notably archaeologists. The appeal of Ley Line Theory may have been partly that trained archaeologists didn’t believe in it. The correlation between what kind of person you are and the willingness to believe loopy ideas is very close. Their dislike of scholars was also because they visibly worked for their knowledge, and the Arcadian Neolithic thing involved a complete lack of need for work.
I think there is a background tune that the common people are the descendants of the Neolithic Wise Peasants and so they understand the cosmos in the same way. The hippies developed this wisdom and that is why they ate peasant food, wore peasant style clothes, etc. The scholars were ignorant by definition because they studied and used Reason. The ley hunters just wandered out into the countryside and listened to Intuition.
3. ley lines as national power grid
After reading Aimé Michel, people began to think that UFOs were actually deriving power from the lines they flew on, like trams from the power cable. This was actually the merging of Ley Theory with earlier strands of occultist thought linked to dowsing theory. Arthur Lawton's Mysteries of ancient man (1939), was based on dowsing, and develops the idea of lines of force as a basis for landscape alignments. Evans-Wentz linked fairy paths to the 'earth's magnetism' in 1911 (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries). (This anticipated the link between being abducted by the fairies and UFO abductions, first made by Jacques Vallée in about 1970 I believe. Vallée was quite a fan of Evans-Wentz.) The pattern of the past, by Guy Underwood (originally 1971), is in the dowsing tradition but theorises about spiral forces controlling underground streams, similar to the straight forces of ley theory. Allen Fisher draws on this book in ‘Place’.
‘The geodetic system’ is mentioned by Underwood, influenced by French and English dowsers of the 1930s. A dowser named Francois Peyre claimed a planetary grid of energies. (I get this from Devereux and Pennick’s book.)
4. Free power
John Michell was the least inhibited or rational of the New Age cosmologists. He identified one ‘long distance ley’ which runs for 400 miles to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, and his passage on this is quoted more or less verbatim in ‘Place’ VIII (see below). Bellamy and Williamson look at this alignment in some detail and blow it sky-high. Michell believed that all hills in Britain were artificial and that the ley power had provided the energy by which they were shaped. Slightly later this was connected up with the ‘sacred geometry’ theory of cosmically significant patterns in things like decorated manuscript pages and cathedral roofs, and the whole thing links up to show ‘self reproducing patterns’ descending from who knows where to organise everything from the flow of springs to ranges of hills. That is, it links up with something much older: neo-Platonism. The sacred geometry thing was promoted by RILKO, the research into lost knowledge organisation.
5. Place
I don’t think ley lines can be described as basic to Place, although they do crop up several times in the first volume:
who are you now that would draw the St. Michael line
from Avebury circle to the extreme southwest
Mont St Michel in Normandy, the chapel of St Michel L'Aiguille,
the hilltop church St Michel facing the stones of Carnac,
the Celtic church on Skellig Michael,
the chapel on the crag near Torre Abbey, Roche rock hermitage,
Brentor church, Gare Hill in Wiltshire, St Michael's Mount
the key lies within the contours of the landscape
that are our very soul's veins
"the veins of the countryside standing out
across the plains and hills' (Watkins)
(from Place VIII).
Most of the quoted text is a quote from a book by John Michell (as in 4, above). Place XXXIV is mainly a quote or paraphrase of Alfred Watkins. If Book III (parts 45-81) is called ‘Stane’ that refers to ‘Stane Street’ (Chichester-London), which may be there because it is very straight and has been identified by ley line crackpots as a long ley (rather than a Roman road, which would seem more likely). Belloc wrote about this even before Watkins. However, there are 100 parts to Place. There are too many strands in the book to allow anything to predominate except the idea of ‘location’ itself and the geography of Lambeth and adjacent areas. However, it is quite reasonable to suggest ‘geopathology’ as a unifying theme in Place book I (parts I-XXXVII) at least. This word refers to an idea of the earth as having organic qualities, a circulation (so "veins"), and a state of health, which can be damaged- usually by human agency. It comes out of the dowsing tradition. Place VIII goes on:
so our new roads are straight through the heart past it
to fall in line with the others
to fall in line
in a grid an "iron grip of history"
chosen by our loci bottlenecked to the chaos
out of which our pleasure comes our sexual violence
apart from our ancestors that we disown
whose song weave
between the geomantic centres of this scape
engenders the life essence
This theme underlies the whole of parts I-XXXVII of the poem. All the description of London’s underground rivers is there because their flow is seen as ‘blocked’ and pathologically impeded, and the link between this and the internal fluids of the human body, notably the body of the narrator, is made very very clearly. There is a map of London’s rivers at the back of Place I-XXXVII, the 1974 edition. The remark (in Unpolished Mirrors p.10) '1930 a map of South London showing relationship/ between buried rivers and pneumonia outbreaks' fits in with this ‘geopathic’ concept, and actions, perhaps including Place itself, are viewed as geo-healing remedies. It seems more likely that the ley motif was picked up as an illustration of this general theme, because mentions of leys are not numerous, whereas very large sections of the text are directly about this 'distortion' and obstruction of natural flow. It seems more likely that the pneumonia bacillus liked damp air and that the houses on old watercourses were distinctly damper than others. That is, the bacilli were happy and there was no ‘distortion’ of earth forces unless from a subjective human point of view. There is a faction of ley fans all for trying to ‘cure’ the Earth, notably by wandering around hammering in copper rods at points where the earth energy is felt to be ‘damaged’.
Another passage on the same page relates the watercourses to ‘plague’, not pneumonia. Again, I would think that this is because brown rats preferred living on or in the banks of rivers, and the plague was partly following their movements. Mud and rivers were part of their ‘bio-aesthetic’ as a species. I doubt they saw it as a metaphor for blockage. In general I think ‘Place’ draws more from the ‘earth energy’ line of dowsing, as in Underwood, than from ley line theory.
(Gloss. ’Song weave’ refers to the ‘song lines’ of native peoples in Australia, who used them as an aid to navigation. This was picked up by ley enthusiasts. ‘Geomantic’ refers to the Chinese practice of feng shui, a way of siting houses and settlements. This was also picked up by the same enthusiasts.)
5a "In 1929 the German researcher Gustav von Pohl introduced the concept of earth rays, where he assumes the existence of underground watercourses, which are said to emit rays damaging to humans, animals and plants, and can be sensed by especially endowed people (radio-aesthetes)." The Alembic interview mentions a dowser named 'Palen' but when editing it for republication I couldn’t trace this guy. Variant searches then produced ‘von Pohl‘. I am translating this from a German Internet page. ‘Radio-aesthete’ = someone who can detect rays, in other words a dowser. ‘(Underground) watercourses are according to radio-aesthetes - like clefts and collisions of strata - cause of deviations in the earth’s magnetic field and of earth rays and so are damaging to health.’ The page goes on to say that such water flows do not affect the earth’s magnetic field or the health of humans on the surface. However, von Pohl‘s theories are a statement of the ‘geopathic‘ thinking which appears, of course only as one theme in a great web, in ‘Place‘. (The link to ‘von Pohl’ is only a guess.)
Francis Hitching's Earth Magic (1976), another standard work on the ley-line piffle, has more on 'earth rays':
'One thing [quoting Arthur Bailey] is quite certain, and that is that people can be affected by living on top of streams; not all streams but what are sometimes called 'black' streams of earth rays[.] There are many instances of cows, horses, and other animals definitely suffering as a result of being kept over these noxious influences [.]' (p.140) He does not give a source for this Bailey character. All the same this idea is one of the more significant structural ideas underlying 'Place', and its tales of buried streams.
5b A key passage for me is:
I build a brick arched roadway
under this foul Thames
between Wapping and Rotherhithe
a phallus joining two bodies at the drilling
becomes a vagina as I sweve it
a way through my unconscious
to signify my desire
opposes my conscious knowing
my dream synthesis in bridges
a rebirth into the nerve tank
(sweve = dream)
This metaphoric treatment of the earth as being like a body explains why all the ‘engineering works’ around London are of so much concern to the poet. This does not have much to do with Alfred Watkins. (There is a tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe.)
The essay on Pound in Place Book I synthesizes the Dao, a Chinese word meaning ’way’ which was bagged up by Pound in one of his fake-philosophical moments, with the Old Straight Track as hypothesized by Watkins.
Something I missed was the primary origin of this flow theory. According to Stephen Jay Gould, "'Mesmer claimed that a single (and subtle) fluid pervaded the universe, uniting and connecting all bodies. [...] The same fluid flows through organisms and may be called animal magnetism. A blockage of this flow causes disease, and cure requires a reestablishment of the flux and the restoration of equilibrium." (Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 185)
Anton Mesmer was uttering this theory in around 1780 and all 'flow' theories are presumably indebted to it, through whatever intermediaries.
6. 'Falling leaf' appears at p.351 of the collected edition and also 'this fantastic path failing leaf' at p.223.
'Failing leaf' is a typical Fisher variation: he plays around with quotes just as he recontextualises material. The transformation is to be insisted on. It is an expression of freedom, simply. Careful comparison of the source material with the poetry in 'Place' reveals these transformations at every step. The leaf ‘fails’ possibly because it breaks off at the stalk as a start to its flight.
The UFO witnesses interviewed in France in the 1950s and reported by Aimé Michel spoke of a ‘falling leaf manoeuvre’ which the vessels executed: Michel analysed this as happening only where two of his ‘straight lines in the sky’ intersected. At a junction, then. They went into a ‘hunt’ mode when changing trajectory. If in ‘Place’ we find among material related to ley lines two references to the ‘falling leaf’, this is probably a call back to the UFO material.
Place also has this text, from a signpost: There is a Change of Priorities at Junction Ahead, (at pages 78 and 154) and this junction may well key to the ‘falling leaf’. The whole book is about a change of direction for society, the person, and poetics. It is about finding a way through.
The passage at p.351 puts the ‘falling leaf’ in the middle of material drawn from René Thom’s catastrophe theory, which is also devoted to the study of sharp transitions in systems. Fairly obviously the implication is of ‘a social system and city stressed by overload making a transit into a sharply altered state which relieves the stress’, and probably this could stand as an overall description of Place. Thom was not talking about social systems but Vaneigem (and Fisher) obviously were.
The recontextualising can be seen as a catastrophe: a block of text is torn out of its existing connections and these are bent to form a new set. There’s a détournement ahead.
The whole poem is the context within each part stands. Looking closely at passages of a few lines just emphasizes that the meaning of the whole is only to be grasped by reading the whole, in as short a time as possible: reaching a state of brief but intense absorption.
7. Mounds
Another line of occultist thought has yielded imagery recycled by Underground poets. Elizabeth Oke Gordon, Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles, 1914, has an appendix by the Revd. John Griffith which talks about the alignment of mounds. Particular stones now in London buildings are there said to date back to Stone Age tracks marked by hunters. Watkins was also interested in mounds, although Gordon came first. I am not clear about the connection. Certainly Michell’s fantasy about ‘artificial hills’ follows on from this.
Gordon identifies Westminster Abbey as the site of a Temple of Apollo. I believe this appears in poems by Barry MacSweeney, where Chatterton's 'fall' is interpreted mythically through the figure of Bladud, who according to Geoffrey of Monmouth flew on wings and fell to his death at a Temple of Apollo in 'Troy Novaunt', or London. Chatterton’s fall was due to poetry and hence symbolically he too fell from the Temple of Apollo, leader of the Muses. Sinclair's mythology of London in Lud Heat also, I believe, draws on Gordon, and Bladud features in Suicide Bridge. She is also cited in the 'resources' list for Place, and the passage in Unpolished Mirrors which refers to 'London Stone' is about an ancient stone which Gordon writes about as possibly prehistoric: ‘I came to London Stone sick of Diana/ You can check the mileage‘ (’Doll‘s Second Monologue‘). Fisher also refers in the same book to a 'temple of Diana' which belongs with the theoretical temple of Apollo, as Diana equals Artemis and Artemis was the sister of Apollo. Diana’s fane however was supposedly on the site of what is now St Paul’s.
Rummaged the ground
failed to discover traces Diana and Apollo temples
found sacrificing bowls bearing Diana’s signifier
in Woodward’s cupboard
said found at St Paul’s
(UM page 54)
It was Christopher Wren who rummaged the ground, when the site was razed before building the new St Paul's. "Wren stated (according to the biography compiled by his son) that he could find no trace of Diana’s temple, nor any bones of sacrificed animals:
‘having
changed all the Foundations of Old Paul’s,
and upon that Occasion rummaged all the Ground thereabouts, and
being very desirous to find some Footsteps of such a Temple, I could
not discover any'
(Wren
1750,266,
296) According to Ralph Merrifield, London, City of the Romans, the foundations of the London Stone may have been a pillar associated with the Praetorium, a display public building of Roman times adjacent to its site. This was the residence of the procurator. The stone may have been a pillar in the gateway. It could also be a miliarium. (Gordon has a key misprint 'military' for 'miliary'.) Fisher, writing about early roads, may take it as a 'miliary' stone, the point from which distances were calculated (hence 'you can check the mileage'). The London Stone inspectable today has no inscription at all. The link with the Roman road system is conjectural.8. free energy, Bellman
One of the two works Allen cites as being basic to ‘Place’ is Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘The Revolution in Everyday Life’. Vaneigem, a Situationist, predicts a culture of total leisure due to automation. He wanted to solve the problem of total leisure - play takes over, basically. People who were ‘dropping out’ in around 1968 had to deal with the counter-argument that ‘you want to use the national power grid to run your record players and so you have to accept technology and capitalism in general’. This was heard every day. It strikes me that the interest in ‘free energy’ and in non-Newtonian physics could be related to this: we don’t need mains electricity because we can plug into ‘terrestrial magnetism’. When Michell claimed that all hills in Britain were artificial, he was offering proof that ‘earth energy’ could replace nuclear power stations. There is some interest in giants in Place book I (the sections titled ‘Lakes’) and this may connect with a ley-fan theory that old stories about giants throwing hills and rocks around were garbled accounts of Neolithic people building artificial hills by means of ‘linear earth energy‘.
In Council of Heresy, I quoted this passage from Place XX:
there is a sonorous architecture
overlapping the outline of streets
and buildings fields and centres
re-enforcing counteracting
the attractive or repulsive tone of
this place
but I didn't spot that it is a quote from The Revolution in Everyday Life. Oh shucks. This is presumably 'psychogeography', in its original Situationist guise.
The French title of this 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem means ‘treatise on how to live for the use of the young generation’. This is indeed a proposal for a revolution in everyday life. Related poetry is only a part of the revolution, perhaps the sound given off as cities are destroyed.
Vaneigem appears to have coined the phrase ‘radical subjectivity’. He wanted to change the basic categories of time and space as they are internalised in human behaviour. ‘Place’ tries to go back to a point where those structures don’t exist yet and to build them in a different way. The 'Bellman' is presumably the part of the psyche which institutes rhythms and the starts and ends of time, the 'internal clock'. This is related to the division between the 'aesthetic' and the 'everyday'.
As Gravity develops its vaneigemesque impact gets smaller. Progressively, its concentration on where we live, on the structures of everyday life, has become more opaque. It becomes harder to know what the emotional message of ‘Gravity’ is, as its bulk becomes ever more macroscopic and its focal zone becomes ever more microscopic. It is fair to speak also of the end of frustration and the achievement of life goals in connection with this loss of central energy.
Prynne and Fisher were both influenced by Situationism and both have spontaneity in the central place. To grasp their work one has to understand the Counter Culture and the radical mood of the later Sixties.
9. Twist again
The old English word for 'path used by pack animals' is 'worple' (or 'worple way'). This is cognate with the old sense of 'warp', i.e. 'twist'. These paths were strikingly twisty. Following the contours, perhaps. I don't know why prehistoric paths should be straight. There is no Old Straight Track because, if it's straight, it's not old.
10. Big Bill
Someone could write a book about the 'failed flight' whereby English poetry, from at least 1937 on (the origin of the Apocalyptics) to 1980, tried to make Blake the model for new poetry actually being written, and how this flight plummeted. I think that, to write that book, you would have to wade through a lot of unbearably irrational pseudo-scholarship. A lot of the poetry involved is very interesting, though. The history of poetry is a worple.
Are people still trying to write like Blake? I suspect they are, but I do not have information on this.
Resources
archive of ley line ‘believer’ material at: http://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/index.html
Search the Net using the words 'geopathic' or 'sacred geometry'.
Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground and The Council of Heresy. Pioneering work on psychoceramics.
Guy Underwood, The Pattern of the Past
French wikipedia article for 'Orthoténie'.
Otherwise as mentioned in the text.
There is now a collected version of 'Place'.
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