Metronome

Metronome

I attended (2-4 September 2021) the Tears in the Fence poetry weekend at Stourpaine (Dorset) and had conversations with three genuine Seventies poets – Paul Matthews, John Freeman, and Jeremy Hilton. I didn't raise the stakes by asking searching questions, but the conversations were very informative. The bookstall had a copy of Hilton’s book Metronome (copyright 1976 but dated 1974 on the title page), on sale at the original price of 50p. I scarfed it up. Try this:

the amphetamine geometry
(partial eclipse of the moon June 4 1974, 2300 hrs)

in white of daughter
o shrouded belly
o spaced-out membrane
twilight
like a child a shy lurker
my gypsy grind my gin
my painter see this sprung sky
moon trapped
I void my whelks’-hut
summer looms
from among stars
a craft
we star-gaze we sail
o microscope ocean
coterminous tangents
contingents
herbal welsh-wind, border
-light scatter in creamy-faced
moon the last wake is the
final sleep
clear-air crustacean, clouds
are mauve islands hitch up
slow burner moon to low
antares’ scorpion
sounds of birth thrust thru
reedy notes in full-leaf ash or
poplar back against twilight
cries coral

Pretty good, actually. (I apologise that this compiler will not accept left indents.) The title page credits conversations with Ulli McCarthy and Chris Torrance, and you can see Hilton’s language merging with theirs, in some way, as part of the voice speaking these poems. Metronome has affinities to Ulli, and also to parts of The White Stones – like “Frost and Snow, Falling”, the poems about the influence of sunlight on climate, and of climate on social forms. I asked Jeremy if the title referred to the cosmos, as the source of time, and he confirmed that and said also that it referred to the seasons, part of the rotation of the earth and so of its relationship to the universe. It’s cosmic, man. Metron is “measure” and “nomos” is law (or governance), so the title means “regulation of time” (rather than referring to a sort of timer). The poems record a shift from winter and snow to summer. We don’t see a great deal of change, the emphasis is more on harmony with the cosmos as it changes. The book has a quality of lassitude; it has almost no emphases. Everything is smoothly linked, as if in a trance. It is as if the poems had no outside. This does seem to be a quality of a sector of Seventies poetry. I can’t explain all the meaning, for example I suppose there is a link between “crustacean” and “whelks’-hut” but I can't see what it is. A whelk is protected by a shell but in an ocean which is moved by the tides (and so by the gravity of the moon) – is Hilton comparing this with the situation of humans, protected by their structures but still moved by cosmic tides? I am not sure. (Scorpions are related to spiders rather than to crabs.) Key images are not isolated, emphasised, and explained – the evenness of the text is the quality sought for. The book certainly has as a theme change and connection to the Time of the cosmos, but titling or prominent words referring to this are not present. Possibly, a strategy of repelling the expected attempts of conservatives to reduce the events in the poem to recognisable categories, and so to familiarity, and so to dullness, has led to the specific style of these poems. Reviewers try to force scenes and whole poems into categories – they become describable – but also banal, just a variation on something we have already seen. Recognition means we have not got the thing we were hoping for. Metronome is unlike any other Seventies book and is not just part of a genre.
Antares, a red star, is the brightest star in Scorpio – known also as Alpha Scorpii (or Cor Scorpionis).

I guess my book (Nothing Is Being Suppressed) is getting closer to publication. I have stopped adding to it (at least a year ago) but I am still collecting information about the Seventies. The first draft was there in March 2017, but I have been working slowly on the same themes for the past four years. More Hilton:

VERNAL EQUINOX

winter is kept & broken
squalls break the upturned
red soil, mists return -
in the midnight of cold stars
frosts salt the orchards
duped to bud by
lengthened daylights. ‘the
burst or revival is over the ploughland’
rumble sound of outlaws & armies
who trudge the dull east -
the clocks are shut, the peat
is sacked, seeds of Libra sifted
into a knowledge beyond the stiff reeds
the careless friendship of virgins & children
is there but one future? the rivers
still flow the same direction
through the hawk-inhabited hills


‘in the wide silence
Andromeda westering’

I guess "burst" is the Spring bursting, so like cloudburst but made of heat and light, as days get longer. I was impressed by a CD called “English weather” which went back to around 1970-71 and recovered a group of related music makers, almost a genre – focused around flutes and mellotrons. The CD identifies a style which to my knowledge has never been described before, certainly marginal to the music scene as a whole. It is almost painfully evocative of the time. The editors (Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs from the band St Etienne) do not mention the Moody Blues, but surely they defined the flute/mellotron thing and had a huge hit in 1970 (“The Question”) which everybody in the business knew about. Anyway, I like this approach to the Seventies, of identifying a tiny area with inner coherence, and tracing the artefacts that belong inside it. I don’t have a label for the thing that Metronome belongs to, but it isn’t something completely isolated, the poet had a right to feel that the target audience would recognise the implicit gestures. Sinclair's “Red Eye” probably fits inside the same micro-genre. How many micro-genres there were, is hard to say.

depolarisation, 3: Tim Allen! Jeremy Hilton!

Depolarisation (3). Allen! Hilton!

I was enthusiastic about the depolarisation project in around 2002. 18 years later, no-one else has got involved in it, to my knowledge, so I don’t think we can still see it as charged up with high potential. Incidentally, my personal contacts with poets from the mainstream or other factions except the old “Underground”, have been minimal. Correspondence with one notably mainstream poet was an exception, rewarding though it was from many angles. I am sorry that writing ‘Council of Heresy’ didn’t bring any response from people eager to advance the depolarising project. I should note that much of my knowledge of poetry came from people who were never polarised, for example Peter Porter (whose reviews I didn’t appreciate properly until I read through them all in an on-line newspaper archive, sometime in 2020), and Edward Lucie-Smith, whose 1970 anthology was an education to me. More recently, magazines like Terrible Work (Tim Allen) and Fire (Jeremy Hilton) were firmly anti-polar and provided a whole stream of new poetry, unfiltered. This was healing the waters, and it certainly did a lot for me. (Did Steve Spence co-edit T Work? I can’t recall at this point.) Terrible Work from Plymouth and Fire from somewhere near Worcester. I am not sure that the polar split was operative until about 1972, things just seemed to get a lot more tense around then, and people became more high-handed. It was connected with the generation gap, and with academics being paranoid about their students’ attitudes and lack of respect, but it wasn’t a reproduction of that, more a sort of side-slip of certain energies.

The key moment in my project on British poetry 1960-97 (the Blair-era Grand Project, or BGP) was realising that mainstream poets were just as oppressed by the mainstream gatekeepers as the Underground poets. I had assumed that the business presented the best poets for public consumption, and that poets who offered no difficulties to a reader were going to get fair treatment. But no, the people in charge are arbitrary and not especially honest. So any number of gifted conventional poets are more or less invisible and needed research effort to locate them. (The problem was also that anthologies can focus on new poets, so that if someone has a long career then they will not appear as new poets and may be only in older anthologies, from previous decades. The retailing world wants new poets, all the time.) So the work I had done reading “showcase” anthologies was inadequate, you have to venture well beyond the showcases. This was beneficial, it did me good, but I had to add an extra volume to my project – The Long 1950s, covering poets who had not gone along with the key innovations of the 1960s. Innovations are not compulsory. I was irritated that the history of the mainstream was so neglected – big surprise. So, anyway, between roughly 2002 and 2010 I went through a long course in depolarisation.
While doing that, I was focussed on mainstream books, especially obscure ones, because that was where I could score wins. A question of search patterns – my search pattern was leading me to ignore anything Underground. Strange how powerful those patterns are! It’s all a kind of collectors’ game, where most assets don’t win you any points, but you get points by finding the ones which fulfil the pattern. It’s like searching a second-hand bookshop to find crucial books whose names you don’t know. I was pretty happy doing this. Admittedly, after a few years I hadn't really got anywhere, but I won in the end. “Depolarising means reading poetry you dislike all the time” – not quite that simple, comrades!
Writing about poets in the conventional realm, when you have a reputation for being an advocate of the Underground (which amounts to calling someone a Mafia lawyer in some circles), has a credibility problem – why would anyone take opinions about conventional poets from you? This brings us to the problem of consensus. Clearly, if you write criticism in any extended way, you believe that you are speaking for other people and expressing a consensus; even if it isn’t the consensus in 1992 it may be by 2010. I am presenting myself as a depolarised critic, someone who has completed the course and who can speak to all factions. This is where I want to be. Of course, it means I fail several kinds of loyalty test.
The title “Council of heresy” refers to a desire to find a zone of critical orthodoxy, a set of points which unifies the most people and allows the most discussion to take place before dialogue breaks down in mutual delegitimation. The wish to stand on consensual ground is risky if there is no such ground. If there is nothing that people agree about, then you can't take a stand on that shared ground, to get your verticals and horizontals. A starting-point for my BGP was an email from John Hartley Williams looking at two anthologies of recent poetry, released at more or less the same time, which had dozens of poets but no overlaps. This just brings us back to the problem of polarisation. Do we have to address it? and, if so, how can we do that if not by getting into depolarisation?