Nothing is Being Suppressed

Pentimento 2021

Nothing is Being Suppressed is currently advertised on the Shearsman website as being out in October, but in fact it has been delayed by the permissions seeking process, and will not be out until April 2022.

I signed off the text late in 2020, but the delay has inevitably led to further thoughts about the period (the book is about poetry in the 1970s). I say in the introduction
Victor Turner remarks, about a tribe in Mali: "A fascinating historical and diffusionist problem is posed by the close resemblance between Dogon myth and cosmology and those of certain neo-Platonist, Gnostic, and Kabbalistic sects and 'heresies' that throve in the understory of European religion and philosophy. One wonders whether, after the Vandal and Islamic invasions of North Africa and even before these took place, Gnostic, Manichaean and Jewish-mystical ideas and practices might have penetrated the Sahara to the Western Sudan and helped to form the Dogon Weltbild. The Gnostic sequences of 'archons', arrayed as binarily opposed androgynous twins, have affinities with Fon and Dogon notions. (...) It is possible that adherents of such persuasions filtered or fled through the centuries to the Niger region and as bearers of a more complex culture exercised influence on the beliefs of its inhabitants."

The point I am making is about the counter-culture’s vision of itself as sinking out of sight and permeating the margins of a dominant media culture. However, there is an important qualification to be made about the quality of Turner’s sources. The information about the Dogon derives from the work of Marcel Griaule (and his pupil Germaine Dieterlen), and other anthropologists have shown that these myths are not part of a wider Dogon culture and are unknown to other Dogon informants. In fact, it seems that Griaule’s informants invented the myths during interviews, under very detailed prompting from Griaule. There is a detailed 1991 paper by Walter van Beek (available on the internet) which explains the problems with this material. So Turner’s proposal about mythic themes reaching West Africa carried by exiles from the eastern Roman Empire does not seem likely to be true. The point about the counter-culture still holds. I have to admit that I know nothing about the Fon, and that Griaule did not publish about them.

The idea of a mythology being invented by one or a few people, in a moment when an illiterate culture is meeting literacy, or in other conditions of breakdown and loss of boundaries, is not quite unique to the Dogon. It is likely that the narrative of the Lenne Lenape (also known as the Delaware Indians) published by Constantine Rafinesque in 1836 was invented by Rafinesque. It is true that the text is in the Delaware language and an invented Delaware script, which would have taken great effort. The situation is not clear, and is not clear for any of the remarkable texts which belong in this category (or apparent category). The Delaware were never numerous, dwindled as the British settlers gradually took over their land, and part of the picture is the almost complete absence of surviving Delawares who could have validated Rafinesque’s text. The level of creativity involved is disturbing, but we just have to accept that these powers of affabulation are present in some individuals and in some cultural contexts, and that politically valid myths are more rigid and the act of memorising them inhibits people’s ability to invent themes and persons. In fact, the context where a story is known to many people, and these other witnesses will correct you if you are wrong, is the inhibiting framework, and the creativity starts exactly where that context is missing. Macpherson's Ossian tales seem to fit into this category (his first few efforts were translations but it seems that he began inventing after that point. (Details on Rafinesque in Stephen Williams’ book Fantastic Archaeology.) Blake can also be seen as a mythological forger.
Some odd astronomical facts which appear in the responses recorded by Griaule have led to a lucrative series of Däniken-like paperbacks describing how the Dogon were visited by creatures from outer space, who imparted the astronomical knowledge to them.
It may be that information collected by social anthropologists is genuine tribal lore, shared by many people in the culture in question, but it may also be that interview subjects make things up to please the anthropologist, and that some parts of “anthropological knowledge” are more systematic and more rich in symbolic meaning than is really the case. Griaule set out to demonstrate the complexity of a “tribal” culture and pursued this goal at the expense of careful controls on the interview situation. As for the postulate that there is knowledge which is known to initiates, and not to the majority of the population in the district or the village, this is a minefield. It sounds like anthropologists claiming to understand a society better (and to recognize more layers of symbolic analogy) than the members of that society.
Just to recap, I am not saying that the mythic tales which Griaule collected are not examples of human creativity, or that they were not produced by Dogon informants. I am just saying that they did not exist in traditional Dogon lore. Creativity is the striking thing about them, and I am in favour of that. His publications are answers, not narratives, and the matching narratives (or songs?) do not exist (or have never been found). The only texts are in French.
It is only fair to say that the responses printed in Current Anthropology, the periodical which published van Beek’s paper, show that there is no consensus among anthropologists in favour of van Beek, and about the status of the interviews which Griaule carried out and the information he gleaned from them. However, Dirk Lettens had published, already in 1971, a very long book which denounced Griaule’s reports as fabrications unconnected to the culture of the area. Griaule’s publications told some of the most fabulous stories in the whole anthropological record, and it is fair to say that this fact inspired a lot of anthropologists to go and do field work in Mali and among the Dogon. It seems that none of them found stories and myths resembling the ones that Griaule reports on.

Let me post up here some material which there was no room for in the finished book.

At a late point in the project, I realised that Faber had published four volumes of Poetry Introduction in our period (dated 1969 to 1978), and that these offered a list of 33 young poets who could be read as a version of what was happening in the decade. Exactly one of these names re-appears in Mottram’s “top tips” of 46 names – already a sign that we are dealing with a different view of the world. Crudely, we can define this group as the continuing mainstream of the Seventies, a current moving forward in its own time as if the Underground didn’t exist and as if the rules hadn't changed. This would actually give us a fifth bloc (and the count of genres, or marketing concepts, is bursting its limits). Certainly these early poems are not the best way to get at what was vital in each poet, and we would do better to look at 33 first books (or, even better, second books). Two of these 33 names were Jeremy Hooker and David Harsent.

David Harsent
When Dreams of the Dead was published in 1977, Peter Porter wrote “The people in David Harsent’s new poems seem to have moved into George MacBeth’s world. There is an opulence of drinks on terraces; the silences between lovers (a Harsent speciality) are in luxury hotel suites; a great deal of travelling goes on. […] I wish I could fit plots to the assemblages of lyrics which make up [two long poems]. ‘Dreams of the Dead‘ consists of lyrics dated from 30 April to August 23, yet the progress of the story does not reveal whether it is the dead who are dreaming or whether the poet is entering the lives of dead persons. A huge plot [...] has been lost somewhere: all we have are its lyrical highlights. I am sure Harsent is going in the right direction.”
Porter says this but I think the omission of information is deliberate and part of a strategy of tension. The characters are trapped in a pipe of incomplete information. The loss of resolution means that alertness climbs and climbs; the lack of answers to basic questions about safety means that tension can never be released. It is hard to define this because we do not have access to the unedited text and because the effect of the omissions is not explicit. The sense of threat is impalpable and the plot is never explained. Anxiety and triumph are inexplicit figures. The method is profoundly original in poetry. It may resemble the specialist narrative style of cinema based in violence and risk – where editing which withholds vital information makes the sense of a present threat escalate. Speculation about risk is what sucks us into the heart of the poem. The lack of perspective traps us there. The title echoes a moment in the poem, refers to the culture of dead artists, but is not a central theme. The poem does not add a wind-down which would explain the story and dissipate all the tension. It immerses us in menace, foreboding, and a sense of fate gripping the protagonist and leading him pitilessly through a story. His conscious reactions have no effect on the story. Peripheral details develop an unnatural vividness because of hypervigilance, a displacement of anxiety into an object which offers no resolution. Dreams is something profoundly original which to my knowledge has no successors. Its scale is an exit from the poetic limits of the time, creating an entire narrative. But the narrative is reduced to its essential structure – uncertainty, the vacuum that draws us in.

Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant

Jeremy Hooker published Soliloquies in 1974. The theme is the phallic figure of a giant,180 feet tall, an outline in white chalk revealed by cutting away the grass turf hiding it. The date is sometime in the late first millennium BC, and the site is at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. The chalk ground also contains flints. Because the chalk is the product of a sea bed, and the detritus of shelly creatures on it, some of the poems are about the shore. A poem lists objects found near the hillside:

A reindeer bone carved
in the reindeer’s likeness.
Saddle-quern
Loom-weight
Spindle-whorl.
A chalk phallus.
A lump of chalk
with heavy curves
bearing the image of woman.

A necklace with blue beads
of Egyptian faience, black ones
of Kimmeridge shale.
Slingstone
Cannon ball
Cartridge.
A phallus carved on the church wall.
A statuette of the Virgin.
(‘Found Objects’)

The concept is heavily influenced by John Cowper Powys and David Jones, whom Hooker had written about. As in The Sleeping Lord, the chalk giant is not so much a person as the tutelary deity of a place. The catalogue style of this poem is notably rapid and assertive. The lumps of mineral are portable and can be held in your hand, but also continuous with the land itself. The materials are endlessly evocative and the relations between them are compelling – like a grotto set with shells and stones. Hooker sees the giant as a symbol of the common people, as opposed to the monks who lived at Cerne Abbas (means Abbot’s), and celebrates the people of the area:

This is the ship of England, carved from a single oak. Her master is the navigant of the obscure passage, a hard-headed merchant with a fabulous map. He descends into the pit, and wrestles with the furnace. His labours are wrought in iron.
(‘The Giant’s Name’)

The collocation of giant and solitude is not sociable, but it opens the way for something superhuman – something which transcends the personal and advances into the terrain of myth. The soliloquist has preoccupations beyond the human:

The rest is illusion
Illusion with talons hooked through my bones.
It is an anchor
From the bottom of the sea,
It is fixed in the floor of the sea
Like an axe-head fast in a skull.
If I could move it, the world would shift.
(from ‘The Giant’s Shadow’)

The chalk comes from the bottom of the sea, and the passage seems to be about the real nature of the chalk and the illusory one of the image which it forms. The force of the poem comes in part from eliminating the human voice – we are not being led around by a tourist, talking about scenery, but the poem is wholly given over to the giant, an irrational force whose senses are wider than and incompatible with ours. The theme could even be the whole chalk land, covering much of the south-west, the floor of the Channel, and even northern France beyond. The voice which speaks is crucial; it is nailed to the giant’s physiology like a picture painted onto the awkward surfaces of a flint. This comes out of the existentialist preoccupations of mid-century, where constricting the world of a poem to the unstable space in and around a body failed for sociological reasons – the human subjects were too sedate and conventional. As David Wevill bypassed this, in poems like ‘Birth of a Shark’, while keeping the physiological density, so Hooker’s poem retains the giant’s ‘point of view’ as its constraint, its horizon. A place could be defined as a zone from which everywhere else is invisible.
Considering two poets from the original Poetry Introduction 1, of 1969, allows us to reflect on the continuing strength of the mainstream. But it also suggests the intensity of underlying historical changes – in several key ways, these two poets resemble what was happening in the Alternative world, and have abandoned the allegiances of the Movement. Their ‘elective past’ connected them to essentially lonely and peripheral figures such as John Cowper Powys, David Jones, and Ted Hughes. They have the charge which makes the underground appeal to me. Without breaking the rules of grammar, they were writing radically unfamiliar poems, original at every point.

**
The theme of this new material is the pervasive quality of radical innovation – poets not associated with “the Alternative” in institutional terms nonetheless writing very strong poetry which was impressively innovative when compared to the still prevalent 1950s-style conservative poetry. So continuing work is weakening the basic thesis of the book (about the power of Alternative poetry) by adding evidence which points in a different direction. People would have found this confusing. Chapters discussing all 33 of those Faber young poets would have confused people, although I did think about writing them. Other work is turning up poets I hadn't read, like Jeremy Hilton, Pete Hoida, and Ian Seed. Ian has produced terrific poetry in the past 20 years, the fact that he was publishing poetry already in 1974 is unsettling and I have not been able to assess this early work. I also could not find room for this piece about a wonderful poem by George MacBeth.

Slogans, masks, astrology: Lusus

Lusus is subtitled “a verse lecture” and comes in 42 parts, or about 780 lines. Lusus means game, and the theme is play; the poem soars in minimal form over the whole extent of human culture. MacBeth was always a dandy, and this theme allows ideal scope for that refusal to step into an emotional role. Narcissistically, but entrancingly, he shows us a private gallery of game players: D’Annunzio, Isaac Babel, John Cage, Demosthenes, a film by Godard, Hemingway, Walter Raleigh, Erik Satie, Jacques Soustelle, Tyrtaeus, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lusus obviously deals with an intellectual topic which MacBeth felt close to and had a peculiarly deep understanding of. He serenely surveys the huge range of domains where the idea of a game yields propositions:

24
Areas: war-
games, game theory, role-
playing

in psychiatry (hysteria
as malingering
etc.), genetic
codes, use
of models in economics,
ritual

aggression in monkeys, Games

People Play.

The short lines are against speech contours but signal lightness of touch: the poem does not move fast because it is contemplative. We cannot derive the information waiting for us unless we slow down. As MacBeth says in section 13, the model for lineation was A.R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year, where all the lines are narrow because he was typing it on a till-roll.
The poem is a list of schemas. How much poets dislike these! They might calm down if they saw a schema as a form of game, where formalism and separateness allow lucidity and, at the right moment, withdrawal. At one point MacBeth (paraphrasing Roger Caillois) groups games, in general, into four domains: jousting; roundabouts (ilinx); roulette, or chance; and mimesis (imitation). Ilinx, Greek for dizziness, is “the most difficult”; it is “orgasms, death-throe, or rock’n’roll.” It appears as a convulsive whirling, high energy and evading the opponent’s senses, and yet not out of control. Could we apply this to poets competing with each other? It is correct to say that a computer program is like a game: it is a model, governed by rules. The phase of computing history when a calculating engine was built, by Johnny von Neumann, to run iterations of a thing called the Monte Carlo simulation, was key to developing the atomic bomb (and the computer industry). It wasn’t quite gambling but it did deal with probability. Von Neumann was later the founder of game theory.
The primary source is clearly Johan Huizinga’s Homo ludens, or “man the player” (1938), a comparative cultural study which was one of the first attempts to define general traits of human behaviour, outside a religious framework. It was published in 1972, but MacBeth had already gone a long way into ludic poems: in 1964, a play of his was produced at the Establishment, a satirical night-club, in which the characters, following a nuclear disaster, are confined in a Paris Metro station and pass their time playing a game called “Fin du globe”. Details of a play-through of the game are given in his poem ‘Fin du Globe’, published in A Doomsday Book. Politics is permeated by symbolic activities– the codes which players have to follow bring it towards the game domain. Huizinga began as a student of South Asian languages, and the permeation of daily life by ritual is what led him, decades later, to the idea of homo ludens. MacBeth takes us into an alternative universe made of glass, where things that were soft become rigid and things that were opaque became transparent. The puzzle of how, in a modern western-type society, there can be an apparent complete lack of applicable rules, and yet there are rules which people follow to structure their behaviour in complex ways, limits accurate description, including of poems. The idea of game can get us closer to this. The theme lends itself to a poem because it lacks purpose. The subject matter is already aesthetic – lifted out of function.
We can compare Lusus with set procedures in poetry. The combination of rule-sets and advancing into the unknown is curiously like games. The extent of the unforeseen in such art can be defined as risk. The odds are not well formalised. The properties of the unpredictable are of great interest. This domain asks for set procedures to avoid the no-go situation of being unable to move or even to know what the state of play is. MacBeth went to Oxford and worked for the BBC and so has been written out of the history of experimental poetry; he was in the original John Matthias anthology of 1971, but when Mottram came to draw up his extended list he struck out some of Matthias’ poets, and one of them was MacBeth. I just want to observe that this was a poor decision. There is a fairly large Collected from which Lusus was excluded. In this way Lusus has disappeared from view and is a crux for the proper evaluation of a decade in which institutional critics went into denial mode. It is quite probably a masterpiece, a moment of genuine self-awareness, evoking anthropological depths at each point without ever lapsing into technical language. It is worrying how the whole column of ludic poetry, so brilliant over the last 35 years, has debouched out while the pioneer has been buried without ceremony. To reiterate, MacBeth was writing game poems in 1964. One game in Lusus was invented by MacBeth and friends, and a play-through is described in ‘The Crab-Apple Crisis’, in his Collected Poems.
33 says:

a rule is a player
in a code, having
its role,

fulfilling it,
according to a rule
in another

code, and so on
ad
infinitum. The rule
moves at its own speed,
exists
in a vacuum. It

creates a code or
a war when
rules

merge. Collide. Out
of the rules
moving, the

atomic
structure of
possibility erects

itself.

Fuller and d’Arch Smith ran the Atlantis bookshop, and may have funded their poetry series, including Lusus, by selling fin de siècle occultist books to rock musicians.
**

I regret not finding room for this material in my book. But the process goes on. I wrote, earlier this year, a long essay about Harry Guest, a poet at his peak in the 1970s. I simply hadn't got the Guest story until this year. It’s crowd-out, there are always too many poets and the stage is over-full.

What happened in the Seventies

What happened in the Seventies

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

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

David Jones Hugh MacDiarmid Basil Bunting

Christopher Middleton Charles Tomlinson Gael Turnbull

Roy Fisher Ted Hughes  Ian Hamilton Finlay

Christopher Logue Matthew Mead Nathaniel Tarn

Anselm Hollo Ken Smith Lee Harwood Harry Guest Tom Raworth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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