Nothing is being suppressed: Progressive art or subsidised freak-out?
My book on poetry in the Seventies is close to being released, and I am getting agitated.
The publisher is busy getting permissions to quote from the excessive number of quotations I have used. This is a slow process. If someone causes difficulty, I will delete the section on them and insert somebody else… this is quite stimulating for me, there is so much I had to leave out.
The book discusses 16 poets whom I have never published on before. This tidies up some outstanding lacunae, but inevitably the research phase led to me uncovering still more poets of the time, and there was no room left for them in the book. Most of these are discussed in messages on this blog, mostly during 2019. I have just realised an omission - I describe the origin of "procedures", used to make poems, in conceptual art, but I never discuss the "proceduralisation" of music, big in the 1950s but probably going back to Schoenberg in the 1920s. very hard to draw the line between art and music as source. Possibly not worth the effort. You have to omit something, in the end.
I am going to release some passages that didn’t get into the book. These are statements by other people which I found especially interesting.
A few more words on Sorley MacLean’s poem “The Cave of the Gold”, which I write about in the book.
The legend sited (also!) in Wester Ross:
"From the car park at Opinan, follow the cliff top path, north towards the headland called Sron na Carra. Some 300 yards before the headland an iron stake and a cairn mark the position of Uamh an Oir. The origin of the name has been lost, but parents in the area used to tell the children a tale similar to the Piper of Hamelin, that long ago a Piper led a party of children into the cave and they were never seen again, and if children went alone to the cave the same fate would happen to them.
It was probably a story born out of the need to keep the young and unwary away from the cave, for it is tidal and can only be reached at mid to low tide. Visitors will need to carry a light if they wish to explore the short right and longer left hand branch. It is said, if you listen quietly you can still hear the Piper far away.
There are three Caves of Gold in the area. One on the north east shore of Loch Maree [Ardlair Cave?], the third on the south side of Liathach above Torridon is said to be linked to the Cave of Gold at Opinan, for those who know the way."
An English version of the legend has been made into a poem by Mike Blackburn, ‘The Drummer Boy of Richmond” (in The Ascending Boy, 1999). Following all the variants is mind-blowing but not helpful for reading the poem, which is focussed and only uses the cluster of themes which interested MacLean. You could possibly find 1000 variants.
Eric Mottram wrote in the catalogue to a 1977 conference:
"As official British culture shrinks in response to the pressures of British economic and political decline from the raving days of Empire and Influence, the twenty-one poets of this conference expand and develop in a scene which is both local and international.
Environmental perception, then, depends on where a poet is both physically and mentally– in his cultural imagination – and where he sees himself potentially – in the past, present or future locations.
Geographers make mental maps of space preferences (the terms here are taken from Mental Maps by Peter Gould and Rodney White, Penguin 1974). We form images of place from reading, television and conversation as well as from direct contact. Romantic Nature has become perceptual geography. Scenery, climate and cultural and educational diversity determine a family man or woman’s choices, or lack of them. […] A sense of orientation is both geographical and cultural. Maps have been made of the mental topography of environments in terms of stress, fear, pleasure, security – especially in urban areas.
Information surface shows configurations of where we are: visible and invisible information environment, or what David Sten calls invisible landscape, which shapes image and behaviour (Gould and White, ibid.)—a poem moves between finding procedures for complexity and procedures for simplicity: to what extent does human behaviour seem complex because of the complexity of the information environment in which men and women are embedded; invisible stress surfaces pattern our lives. As a child, aged 5 to 12, the local area was mapped for me as two woods separated and different, the place where a dog leapt out at me from a house gate, two bus-stops, a row of shops, the library (an early Victorian house in its own grounds), school (several miles, the first by foot, the second by bus or bike), and the nearby town (a bus-journey to a street market on Saturday, and cinemas) – and further to Crystal Palace football ground, and further still, London, where father went every day and we visited as a treat. I never went abroad until, aged 18 and in the Royal Navy I travelled by cruiser to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our map of perceptions and preferences changes with age and opportunity. A poem emerges from the poet at the intersection of visible and invisible locations; of information-transmitting sources, of political and social pressures of his position and condition in historical process."
Was this actually happening? Probably not. It’s part of the music of the time.
When I was going through archived newspapers of the time, I thought Nuttall wasn’t interested by what he was reviewing, but Peter Porter was very attentive and perceptive. It was a pleasure to dig up all his reviews. he says several times that he can't follow the poetry because contextual information has been left out. This is a valid point, always, but it just tells us that there had been a long period in which poems were deadened by being restricted to what was explicit, with the implicit being distrusted as "rhetoric" or "ideology", and a feature of the Seventies was just relaxing and giving the implicit its head. Immediately, the verbal shape of the poem seems very small in a big forest of the implicit. You can't describe landscape directly - there is too much of it - but you can learn how to manipulate the implicit so that space emerges as something silent and all-capacious around the small line of verbal sounds.
We are approaching the point where the difference between poetry and prose, after the practice of regular metre has been abandoned, turns out to be the manipulation of the implicit. The implicit is both silent and foregrounded.
A basic act in political activity is distrusting the unstated as a hiding-place where collusion between the rich, also between government and the rich, goes to be out of sight. So you insist on explicit criteria. This is actually very bad for poetry. 70s poetry flourished in a sheltered space where the implicit could be allowed to broadcast its signal, without disputes over rights excluding it from culture. Maybe that is what the book shoud have been about.
"Looking at the ‘public memories’ of Bloodaxe and Carcanet encourages us to think that modern taste has given up on poetry so the shopper benefits from assertive contexts which form centres of attraction and offer a net of social reinforcement. The Underground was actually one of these. The public history of poetry is possibly the history of these “identities” as literary institutions. The process of focussing and forming preferences is wrapped up with the process of selective forgetting, since every focus creates an area of dimness around it. The “identities” are not just categories, they actually contain information and can be studied as cultural objects. They replace what used to be known as genres, and they possibly offer debut poets a model for successful poems and also a way of identifying what the market likes. The substance being generated is unstable – it keeps growing. People get further and further into what they like. So parts of the cultural field move further and further apart from each other. Bearing this in mind, we can come back to the idea of style blocs, accepting that the principle of falsifiability applies to categorisation as to other proposals of fact."
Another idea which there wasn't room for:
"There is a package of (alpha male, wisdom, responsibility, experience, generalisations, ethical superiority) which older poets saw as their commodity number one and which readers reacted against. A focal problem was the poem which has some concrete information and then at the end packages it up in a moral generalisation, so something like ‘people should be nice to each other’ or ‘you can’t trust the powerful and connected’ or “isn’t he a bit like you and me" or even ‘it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels’. I am wondering whether this kind of poem really exists. Maybe the idea of the smug closing quatrain is more of a Fear Symbol and less of a real, dreadful, thing. An older generation of readers were asking moral questions of poets, and poets were giving clear and resonant answers to these questions, which since the 1960s few people have been asking. I thought to look at Poetry Dimension 2, a reliable reference source for conventional poems of the time, which was 1972. I counted 57 poems of which 15 have a lurch into generalisation and lesson drawing at the end, or close to the end."
This doesn't add so much, because it describes the 50s-style poetry which is absolutely not what we want to remember about the Seventies. I just like counting, in the end. It's interesting that it is only 15 and not the whole 57. Also, the "new poetry" was (in one view) writing about Abstract Ideas the whole time, and not waiting for a lurch into generalisation in the last quatrain. The old-style poetry comes across as far less fluent in ideas, and this is why its wisdom is unconvincing and unsatisfying. Arguably, the new poetry is making generalisations about culture throughout the poem. Anyway, the smug final quatrain was something which older poets were Very Proud Of, and they must have been indignant that it was stigmatised and ridiculed by a younger generation. However, I think it has vanished altogether - younger mainstream poets also saw it as stigmatising, and this is something you can check in the Faber "Poetry Introduction" series.
This feature can be counted, in a way which many observers could agree on. The smug final quatrain is there, it’s not a theory. But the change in poetry probably exhibits itself in 35 features at once, it is an absolute change of aesthetic. Looking at a single feature, however plain and visible it is, does not give us the historical truth we are looking for.
I want to say that the “conclusion” is important because it follows a poem of local and particular data, which connects with the poet as a body which receives sensations, and it is the connection between the empirical poem (local) and the reader (on the plane of generality). It is where the poem stops being empirical –and the merely empirical poem can be frustrating.
Showing posts with label Sorley MacLean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sorley MacLean. Show all posts
Friday, 2 April 2021
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
Further notes on “Nothing is Being Suppressed”
Further notes on “Nothing is Being Suppressed”
These are some more peripheral notes to a book on British poetry in the 1970s, which is going to come out in 2021.
I found some notes (from 1994 maybe?) on Martin Booth’s Driving Through the Barricades. It is a history of British poetry from 1964 to 1984. I didn’t reproduce Booth’s argument because I regard his book as necessary – I don’t need to repeat it. His story focuses on live performances – they were what made poetry writing come back to life, so that written poetry became interesting again. Small magazines amplified this because they had a very quick turn-round and were super open to new work – they were “almost live”, and dialogic, and social. So he has a vast network of readings sites as his subject, and he describes many of them, and the kind of person who would go there. He must have been giving dozens of readings himself, exciting experiences which make you hypersensitive to audience mood. He describes a boom. Things were good. He wanders the land being applauded. More than that, he applauds the audience. He’s right. But he has a tragic view of how it developed: he refers to "the end of the exciting era from approximately 1964 to 1974" and, "In Britain, poetry has gone from being largely sterile to immensely virile and has returned to sterility within a decade and a half." - that would cover 1964 to 1979. He names a turning point: “It [Second Aeon] stopped and the decline and rot set into British verse soon after. It is justified to feel that the demise of Finch's astounding enterprise led to the slowdown of the art.” This in early 1974. Crucially, the readings circuit collapsed in the mid-70s. And, there is a 1974 MacSweeney interview where he also discusses the collapse of the readings circuit as an established fact. Finch probably was the most talented editor of the entire period.
I have a feeling that Booth regarded what he saw and heard as being History Itself. But, every Friday night when he was at a reading getting into the ambience, there were a dozen other readings happening elsewhere which he wasn't at. So he wasn’t seeing history. But, other people may also have mistaken their direct experience for being the whole story, over the whole country. We can’t use their results.
I think Booth’s own career may have hit a ceiling – not crashed and burnt, just hit a ceiling. He couldn't get a deal with a major publisher. And he began writing much less.
If you look at the row at the Poetry Society in the first months of 1977, this is three years after Booth says the scene had crashed into the kerb. So it may be that the row, with Eric losing his job as editor of Poetry Review, 14 people resigning from the Poetry Society committee, may not have been a significant moment. It was emotional for those 15 people and some more who were their entourage, their bag-holders and advisers, but if Booth is right it came within a cultural comedown which was already at full bore, and it probably didn’t change the situation for poets or audiences everywhere else – except at the noise-filled Earls Court building. Conflict around one magazine does not scale up into a historical turning point.
Did it all go wrong at that point? Well, possibly it didn’t all go wrong at any point. I have yet to hear someone say that their ability to work collapsed after March 1977. So I am waiting for evidence that anybody’s work collapsed. And if the work kept on pouring out, what was there to complain about? that the Arts council doesn't love you?
My feel is that there was a collapse. But, this represents the 'plot curve' of someone getting high in the foreglow of a future of total liberation, the overflow of equity, pure self-expression, transformed personal relations. It was actually too much. But a high is followed by a comedown – a physical necessity. The bigger the high, the bigger the comedown. But I don’t think this happened simultaneously to everybody, in every city, on the banks of every river. I think getting politicised, or getting poeticised, was like falling in love – people were falling into it all the time. Everyone is 18 once and there are always more 18 year olds coming along, with stars in their eyes. The Comedown is one of the big stories of the Seventies– but it didn’t happen in a particular month. The Poet's Yearbook counts 706 new books for the 1977-8 year (June to June). That is a dip from 906 in their previous count year. Yes, there is a dip. The temperature of these complete statistics is much lower - nothing so dramatic as Collapse or Comedown shows up in them. Maybe the dip was just the effect of inflation, out of control at this point. Consumers felt the products were over-priced, even if that was just a perceptual lag. 706 titles is still a lot of activity – and much more than the figure for 1970. If you list the books that came out in 1979 and 1980, the list looks great, the joint is jumping. The heat goes up and down, it doesn’t go down and stay there. Every individual goes up and down. The publication figures zigzag up and down – there is just too much data. It’s all real but it doesn't play a tune.
I find it hard to evaluate Booth’s poetry. He did get a full-scale book out with Bloodaxe in 1983 – but then he wasn’t included in their flagship anthology, Poetry with an edge. (At least the edition I have.) So he had a gift but something went wrong. I read several of his books for ‘Suppressed’ but I didn’t think he had got there. I am sure he did lots of readings, but the problem with the poems may be that he simplified to make maximum impact in the live situation, so that the work seems shallow and obvious on the page. It is almost terrific, yes.
A question which puzzled me is, Why isn't 70s Alt poetry political? I took out a lot of stuff about politics because I couldn’t find evidence linking it to poetry.
I think the sense that everything was arbitrary was conducive to a conclusion that the present state of society was infinitely arbitrary and so infinitely unstable.
Also, at some level the belief in free association as the core condition of the poems must have equated to a belief in social and moral freedom.
The lack of discussion of current affairs in poetry (or at least in the poetry I find interesting to read) is a sign that poetry was looking at other scenes than the churn of day to day politics. I asked if you could find out about the 1976 governmental resort to the IMF, for an emergency loan, and couldn't find any mention. Similarly, you can’t find out from poems that there were four prime ministers during the decade. Poetry may be interested in variant ways of organising society, but it is not interested in what the government or the balance of payments is doing. So it was pointless for me to write several chapters about politics.
I think we have to imagine a hidden stratum A which contained ideas of transformation and widened experience, and of which poetry and radical politics were two separate developments. A9 and A27, we could call them. The two developments didn’t contradict one another, but the politicos didn’t necessarily have anything interesting to say to poets (or even understand 20th C poetry). The goal of radical political change was to reach a new state of mind, and this state would have been vacuous and useless if it hadn't already existed in the here and now. Representing it was what 70s poetry was doing, I think, but to be enjoyed rather than, primarily, as a call to arms. Politicos tended to want people to think the same thing and feel the same thing, at the same moment, and poets weren’t into this in any form. If the project is to make your own life unpredictable to you, so that consciousness will be switched on at every moment, it doesn't make sense to imagine uniformity, and this undermines the sociological knowledge which accepts that people are predictable, as the basis for generalisations which then become the charter for political theories. All that knowledge dissolves if people are acting in a liberated way.
A “figure” common to much of Alt poetry is the experimental landscape, in which the reader/ candidate is dissolved out of their everyday self and put through a series of tasks, or perhaps tests, which call on unused talents and unused areas of psychological knowledge. The nature of the tasks is not obvious, and the nature of the solutions has to be worked out. By going into an environment like this, the reader gains the sense that where they are is not binding on them, and acquires strength in dealing with the unknown. This relates rather directly to the way daily life is conducted, and to transformation and liberation. Groups can change but individuals can also change on their own – in the “society of the artwork”. I suspect some readers feel that they fail the tests – or do not want to start them in the first place.
I think that 70s poetry aimed for a stable state of high association, the mind ringing as if a musical instrument. It was a stable state even if the pattern of symbolic links was changing all the time. This state was the goal, instead of a set of preset outcomes in some didactic programme. It is the same for all the poems (and this is a notion of what the Era Style was).
If you compare the alternative poetry of the time to the traditional poetry, it becomes clear that being anti-authoritarian, and challenging knowledge structures which support authority, are two vital features of the former, distributed throughout the entire text. This is clear without being explicitly said, for the most part. But it connects to dissolving your own acquired and repeated reactions, rather than to the case of a specific strike, a specific factory closure, or whatever real issue is being argued about in the political world. The “thrill” of modern poetry was missing from the legacy poetry, and it feels like this thrill was, therefore, to do with the anti-authoritarian thing. Something I didn’t bring up in the book was how the new poetry could seem like a mockery when in your own life was, due to functioning in a job which demanded repetition and predictability as parts of efficiency, free consciousness was unavailable and even dangerous. For me, writing poetry made endless freedom to create patterns available, but daily work entailed the opposite and was clearly going to be an abiding necessity. It would have been, still is, ridiculous to renounce artistic freedom because economic success means becoming functional. My suspicion is that effective patterns in government and law follow the line of economics in demanding simplicity, predictability, efficiency. They are not the domain of freedom.
I found it difficult to chisel out specific political messages from the poetry I looked at. I concluded that if I described a great deal of poetry, at length, then the reference of each poem to political ideas, possibilities, contradictions, or even (exceptionally) facts, would reveal local facts from which the overall pattern would emerge; and I didn’t have to engage in tortuous explications of symmetries between complex shapes in either sphere of activity.
Peter Porter’s poetry reviews in the Observer turned up a lot of names I hadn't heard of – he had a wide intake. He refers at one point to someone not in the book he was reviewing – VC Horwell, he wonders what she’s doing. Horwell was “Veronica Horwell”, and she was in Faber Poetry Introduction 1, in 1969. She stopped then, I mean she may have published some poems decades later, but she wasn’t a full-time poet. She was, or is, a lifestyle journalist, you can actually make a living at that. Take this poem ‘The Jug’:
The jug squatted on the table:
Given by a girl from Bethnal Green
With three lovers and an analyst.
But the jug was found on a farm.
In its melon belly
Pregnant by generation of windowsills
Hummed June afternoons in lazy basses;
Whistled the crystal skylark of ice;
Danced the syncopated patter of rain.
An adman stole my jug
Or bought it
Spilt its liquid on his cigarettes,
Poured out its glories on dairy ice cream.
A frugal man who wasted nothing.
When empty he used it for a prop
For a pine kitchen selling prime pork pies.
This is such vivid writing. If a jug can be so interesting, a poem can too, but only if written by someone intelligent. She is fascinated and detached about the jug, and that is certainly more than most poets can manage. It is irritating to think that she stopped then. But it’s not tragic – people only write poetry because they have nothing better to do.
That Faber series includes 4 issues between 1969 and 1979, and they contain 33 poets. Born in the 1940s, roughly. They could stand as a “new generation of the mainstream”. It is usual to compare young Alternative poets with middle-aged mainstream poets, but you get different results if you drag that younger generation of the mainstream onto stage. There is a technical problem, that Faber captures them at the start of their careers – the Introductions are not their best work, you would have to locate their first book, or perhaps their second book. Still, it’s clear that in the 70s you have a generation of Alternative poets and a generation of new conventional poets, and they don’t overlap – and maybe their readerships don’t overlap. David Perkins speaks of the pessimistic 50s generation as dominating British poetry for thirty years (he was writing in 1987) – well, maybe the industry didn’t want to make room for younger poets. I am doubtful about “dominating”, but I would concede that part of the history of the time is a progressive crumbling of the eminence and credibility of poets like Larkin, Tomlinson, or Gunn. The Faber series shows a stage in that – their poets just aren't interested in the Fifties style. (Or, 80% of them aren't.)
Having written about Sorley MacLean's poem "The cave of gold", I feel obliged to cite Ronald Black's review of it, which yields all kinds of ideas I hadn't seen at all:
"MacLean’s ‘Uamha ’n Òir’ (‘The Cave of Gold’) appears at first to have been one of his late poems. It was written, or at least reworked, in the 1970s. It refers to a very old legend which was found in pretty much every part of the Highlands and Islands where a cave on one side of a hill or mountain was believed to connect with a cave on the other. The legend always has it that a piper marched into the cave at one end, that he could be heard playing his pipes far underground, and that the sound stopped halfway, but that his dog appeared out of the cave at the other end with its hair singed off, revealing that his master had come off the worse in some encounter with evil. In this case the cave is explicitly stated to be in Dùis MhicLeòid, ‘MacLeod’s Land’ in Skye, and the people involved are MacCrimmons. There are basically three sections — one which describes the original legend, one which tells how another piper tries his luck in the same way, and one which draws a conclusion. The poem may be approached as history, as biography, as autobiography, or as a combination of these. As history, the first section presumably describes some early MacCrimmon, and the second describes Dòmhnall Bàn, who was killed in the Rout of Moy in March 1746. As autobiography, the first section presumably describes the poet as a young man, the second the poet in his maturity. In Dòmhnall Bàn’s case the cave becomes a metaphor for foretold death, suicide even: chaidh a’ ghalla ’na cheann / ’s ’na chridhe, ‘the bitch went into his head / and his heart’.
The poem is extremely difficult, and in this we are not helped by the poet, who was habitually economical with punctuation and whose translations were notoriously over-literal. As an experiment, I will present five stanzas of the poem, all except the fifth in three different forms: first the original, with my own punctuation added; then MacLean’s translation; then my own translation, done in my usual style, which I would describe as offering a modicum of rhythm and explanation. I have chosen these stanzas because they contain almost the only hard evidence for the subject-matter in the form of two references to the blind catechist Donald Munro (1773–1830), a one-time fiddler who not only gave up playing the instrument after his conversion but is said to have gone around making bonfires of bagpipes and fiddles wherever he found them. I begin in the middle of the first section, in which the poet expresses wonder that anyone should wish to leave such a paradise as the old Land of MacLeod, but admits that the motive is greed for the gold rumoured to be in the cave[.]"
What other things did I leave out?
I can’t record a debate about poetics which didn’t occur. But, in the cause of nostalgia, let’s pick up a few voices from the time. Nuttall was reviewing “alternative” (then called “small press”) poetry for the Guardian from 1979 to 1981, and I was able to pick up some of these reviews from on-line copies of old Guardians.
Jeff Nuttall: “If there is one characteristic which indicates a main line of development in contemporary British poetry it is the technique of making a poem from disparate material. Poems made thus derive their impact from contrasts built into the structure of the poem itself rather than from references to other things. The effect of the poems springs not from what is being said but from the way in which the various things being said react on each other. The dynamic achieved may be muted as in Paul Brown or it may be violent as in Barry MacSweeney’s Odes. […] The power of perception underlying political conviction and impeccable professional accuracy in this work is stunning[.] The technique of disparity has its roots in Zurich rather than in Black Mountain College. In a sense, to give the poem’s structure pre-eminence over its subject is exactly the opposite course from allowing what is to be said to find its own form spontaneously as it does in speech.[…] The “breath line” as Olsen called it ranges from athletic rhetoric to asthmatic squibs of observation to artfully tailored work in regular stanzas.” [September, 1979]
Nuttall, again: “Art is misunderstood in this century because what is its main aspect, cultural sabotage, is treated as entertainment. The fireworks are Molotov cocktails. Uneasy applause follows the burst of machine gun fire from the podium. […] Delirium, real, emulated, or contrived, is a main tool of the poet. Syntax is dismantled either as a result of, or as a means to, delirium. Paul Matthews' essay, The Grammar of Darkness, ranks with […] as a statement of the reason for this. “If I define the universe as meaning we must realise the paradox in this: a poetry of hints and riddles, no longer just in the sounding. The silence too is recognised. 'A frog jumps in', and we listen to the ripple of it long after the words have died away. A poetry with hollows in it, pause and hiatus, to admit the universe. Form always merging, never fixed, formed and chaotic at the same time, allowing for interventions. A language turning into music, playing between sense and nonsense, (they both limit the language). A poetry which has come to the end of itself (and so come close to its beginnings). Thrown back into the crucible.“ (November 1979)
The gap between what Matthews says and the gloss that Nuttall puts on it is very surprising. My impression is that Nuttall had little interest in the poetry he was reviewing. Sometime in 2019 I went to an exhibition about the influence of the Bauhaus, at the Contemporary gallery here in Nottingham, and there was a section on the art course at Leeds Polytechnic which mentioned Nuttall, whose day job was as a teacher there. This may advise us. He was a teacher of rather arrogant late adolescents, very alert about stylistic distinctiveness and daring, and he had to compete with them to avoid being written off as a “compromised adult teacher” figure. And he did compete with them. They regarded Modernism pre-1930 as a gold standard, especially the more anti-bourgeois element of it. So he had a set style of extremism. His descriptions, just quoted, are heroic, but they have little to do with English poetry. His view of the time is not worth writing up, as one of the competing versions, because his interest in what he was reviewing is so limited. He is remembered as a good teacher of “general culture” for art students. The Telegraph did an article on this course headed “Progressive art or subsidised freak-out?”
I don’t think 70s poetry was “cultural sabotage”. Is culture the sabotage of culture? I met Paul Matthews in 2019 and he promised to send me a copy of The Grammar of Darkness. I knew he wasn’t going to send it to me. I didn’t try to ask him “what was it like in 1974”, because it was obviously a major effort to roll back 45 years. It was one of those moments in Dorset when you don’t get a breakthrough for your book. That quote from his essay sounds like hippy language. Students in 1979, still in the punk era, would have hated that. But the quote is very interesting. The tone is serene and empathetic, and this is what I like in 70s poetry. Nuttall's reviews were my first glimmering that small press poetry existed. It was something the media didn't cover. But since the publications he described were not in the bookshops, or in the Poetry Library, I couldn't access them. I really reached that poetry about ten years later.
These are some more peripheral notes to a book on British poetry in the 1970s, which is going to come out in 2021.
I found some notes (from 1994 maybe?) on Martin Booth’s Driving Through the Barricades. It is a history of British poetry from 1964 to 1984. I didn’t reproduce Booth’s argument because I regard his book as necessary – I don’t need to repeat it. His story focuses on live performances – they were what made poetry writing come back to life, so that written poetry became interesting again. Small magazines amplified this because they had a very quick turn-round and were super open to new work – they were “almost live”, and dialogic, and social. So he has a vast network of readings sites as his subject, and he describes many of them, and the kind of person who would go there. He must have been giving dozens of readings himself, exciting experiences which make you hypersensitive to audience mood. He describes a boom. Things were good. He wanders the land being applauded. More than that, he applauds the audience. He’s right. But he has a tragic view of how it developed: he refers to "the end of the exciting era from approximately 1964 to 1974" and, "In Britain, poetry has gone from being largely sterile to immensely virile and has returned to sterility within a decade and a half." - that would cover 1964 to 1979. He names a turning point: “It [Second Aeon] stopped and the decline and rot set into British verse soon after. It is justified to feel that the demise of Finch's astounding enterprise led to the slowdown of the art.” This in early 1974. Crucially, the readings circuit collapsed in the mid-70s. And, there is a 1974 MacSweeney interview where he also discusses the collapse of the readings circuit as an established fact. Finch probably was the most talented editor of the entire period.
I have a feeling that Booth regarded what he saw and heard as being History Itself. But, every Friday night when he was at a reading getting into the ambience, there were a dozen other readings happening elsewhere which he wasn't at. So he wasn’t seeing history. But, other people may also have mistaken their direct experience for being the whole story, over the whole country. We can’t use their results.
I think Booth’s own career may have hit a ceiling – not crashed and burnt, just hit a ceiling. He couldn't get a deal with a major publisher. And he began writing much less.
If you look at the row at the Poetry Society in the first months of 1977, this is three years after Booth says the scene had crashed into the kerb. So it may be that the row, with Eric losing his job as editor of Poetry Review, 14 people resigning from the Poetry Society committee, may not have been a significant moment. It was emotional for those 15 people and some more who were their entourage, their bag-holders and advisers, but if Booth is right it came within a cultural comedown which was already at full bore, and it probably didn’t change the situation for poets or audiences everywhere else – except at the noise-filled Earls Court building. Conflict around one magazine does not scale up into a historical turning point.
Did it all go wrong at that point? Well, possibly it didn’t all go wrong at any point. I have yet to hear someone say that their ability to work collapsed after March 1977. So I am waiting for evidence that anybody’s work collapsed. And if the work kept on pouring out, what was there to complain about? that the Arts council doesn't love you?
My feel is that there was a collapse. But, this represents the 'plot curve' of someone getting high in the foreglow of a future of total liberation, the overflow of equity, pure self-expression, transformed personal relations. It was actually too much. But a high is followed by a comedown – a physical necessity. The bigger the high, the bigger the comedown. But I don’t think this happened simultaneously to everybody, in every city, on the banks of every river. I think getting politicised, or getting poeticised, was like falling in love – people were falling into it all the time. Everyone is 18 once and there are always more 18 year olds coming along, with stars in their eyes. The Comedown is one of the big stories of the Seventies– but it didn’t happen in a particular month. The Poet's Yearbook counts 706 new books for the 1977-8 year (June to June). That is a dip from 906 in their previous count year. Yes, there is a dip. The temperature of these complete statistics is much lower - nothing so dramatic as Collapse or Comedown shows up in them. Maybe the dip was just the effect of inflation, out of control at this point. Consumers felt the products were over-priced, even if that was just a perceptual lag. 706 titles is still a lot of activity – and much more than the figure for 1970. If you list the books that came out in 1979 and 1980, the list looks great, the joint is jumping. The heat goes up and down, it doesn’t go down and stay there. Every individual goes up and down. The publication figures zigzag up and down – there is just too much data. It’s all real but it doesn't play a tune.
I find it hard to evaluate Booth’s poetry. He did get a full-scale book out with Bloodaxe in 1983 – but then he wasn’t included in their flagship anthology, Poetry with an edge. (At least the edition I have.) So he had a gift but something went wrong. I read several of his books for ‘Suppressed’ but I didn’t think he had got there. I am sure he did lots of readings, but the problem with the poems may be that he simplified to make maximum impact in the live situation, so that the work seems shallow and obvious on the page. It is almost terrific, yes.
A question which puzzled me is, Why isn't 70s Alt poetry political? I took out a lot of stuff about politics because I couldn’t find evidence linking it to poetry.
I think the sense that everything was arbitrary was conducive to a conclusion that the present state of society was infinitely arbitrary and so infinitely unstable.
Also, at some level the belief in free association as the core condition of the poems must have equated to a belief in social and moral freedom.
The lack of discussion of current affairs in poetry (or at least in the poetry I find interesting to read) is a sign that poetry was looking at other scenes than the churn of day to day politics. I asked if you could find out about the 1976 governmental resort to the IMF, for an emergency loan, and couldn't find any mention. Similarly, you can’t find out from poems that there were four prime ministers during the decade. Poetry may be interested in variant ways of organising society, but it is not interested in what the government or the balance of payments is doing. So it was pointless for me to write several chapters about politics.
I think we have to imagine a hidden stratum A which contained ideas of transformation and widened experience, and of which poetry and radical politics were two separate developments. A9 and A27, we could call them. The two developments didn’t contradict one another, but the politicos didn’t necessarily have anything interesting to say to poets (or even understand 20th C poetry). The goal of radical political change was to reach a new state of mind, and this state would have been vacuous and useless if it hadn't already existed in the here and now. Representing it was what 70s poetry was doing, I think, but to be enjoyed rather than, primarily, as a call to arms. Politicos tended to want people to think the same thing and feel the same thing, at the same moment, and poets weren’t into this in any form. If the project is to make your own life unpredictable to you, so that consciousness will be switched on at every moment, it doesn't make sense to imagine uniformity, and this undermines the sociological knowledge which accepts that people are predictable, as the basis for generalisations which then become the charter for political theories. All that knowledge dissolves if people are acting in a liberated way.
A “figure” common to much of Alt poetry is the experimental landscape, in which the reader/ candidate is dissolved out of their everyday self and put through a series of tasks, or perhaps tests, which call on unused talents and unused areas of psychological knowledge. The nature of the tasks is not obvious, and the nature of the solutions has to be worked out. By going into an environment like this, the reader gains the sense that where they are is not binding on them, and acquires strength in dealing with the unknown. This relates rather directly to the way daily life is conducted, and to transformation and liberation. Groups can change but individuals can also change on their own – in the “society of the artwork”. I suspect some readers feel that they fail the tests – or do not want to start them in the first place.
I think that 70s poetry aimed for a stable state of high association, the mind ringing as if a musical instrument. It was a stable state even if the pattern of symbolic links was changing all the time. This state was the goal, instead of a set of preset outcomes in some didactic programme. It is the same for all the poems (and this is a notion of what the Era Style was).
If you compare the alternative poetry of the time to the traditional poetry, it becomes clear that being anti-authoritarian, and challenging knowledge structures which support authority, are two vital features of the former, distributed throughout the entire text. This is clear without being explicitly said, for the most part. But it connects to dissolving your own acquired and repeated reactions, rather than to the case of a specific strike, a specific factory closure, or whatever real issue is being argued about in the political world. The “thrill” of modern poetry was missing from the legacy poetry, and it feels like this thrill was, therefore, to do with the anti-authoritarian thing. Something I didn’t bring up in the book was how the new poetry could seem like a mockery when in your own life was, due to functioning in a job which demanded repetition and predictability as parts of efficiency, free consciousness was unavailable and even dangerous. For me, writing poetry made endless freedom to create patterns available, but daily work entailed the opposite and was clearly going to be an abiding necessity. It would have been, still is, ridiculous to renounce artistic freedom because economic success means becoming functional. My suspicion is that effective patterns in government and law follow the line of economics in demanding simplicity, predictability, efficiency. They are not the domain of freedom.
I found it difficult to chisel out specific political messages from the poetry I looked at. I concluded that if I described a great deal of poetry, at length, then the reference of each poem to political ideas, possibilities, contradictions, or even (exceptionally) facts, would reveal local facts from which the overall pattern would emerge; and I didn’t have to engage in tortuous explications of symmetries between complex shapes in either sphere of activity.
Peter Porter’s poetry reviews in the Observer turned up a lot of names I hadn't heard of – he had a wide intake. He refers at one point to someone not in the book he was reviewing – VC Horwell, he wonders what she’s doing. Horwell was “Veronica Horwell”, and she was in Faber Poetry Introduction 1, in 1969. She stopped then, I mean she may have published some poems decades later, but she wasn’t a full-time poet. She was, or is, a lifestyle journalist, you can actually make a living at that. Take this poem ‘The Jug’:
The jug squatted on the table:
Given by a girl from Bethnal Green
With three lovers and an analyst.
But the jug was found on a farm.
In its melon belly
Pregnant by generation of windowsills
Hummed June afternoons in lazy basses;
Whistled the crystal skylark of ice;
Danced the syncopated patter of rain.
An adman stole my jug
Or bought it
Spilt its liquid on his cigarettes,
Poured out its glories on dairy ice cream.
A frugal man who wasted nothing.
When empty he used it for a prop
For a pine kitchen selling prime pork pies.
This is such vivid writing. If a jug can be so interesting, a poem can too, but only if written by someone intelligent. She is fascinated and detached about the jug, and that is certainly more than most poets can manage. It is irritating to think that she stopped then. But it’s not tragic – people only write poetry because they have nothing better to do.
That Faber series includes 4 issues between 1969 and 1979, and they contain 33 poets. Born in the 1940s, roughly. They could stand as a “new generation of the mainstream”. It is usual to compare young Alternative poets with middle-aged mainstream poets, but you get different results if you drag that younger generation of the mainstream onto stage. There is a technical problem, that Faber captures them at the start of their careers – the Introductions are not their best work, you would have to locate their first book, or perhaps their second book. Still, it’s clear that in the 70s you have a generation of Alternative poets and a generation of new conventional poets, and they don’t overlap – and maybe their readerships don’t overlap. David Perkins speaks of the pessimistic 50s generation as dominating British poetry for thirty years (he was writing in 1987) – well, maybe the industry didn’t want to make room for younger poets. I am doubtful about “dominating”, but I would concede that part of the history of the time is a progressive crumbling of the eminence and credibility of poets like Larkin, Tomlinson, or Gunn. The Faber series shows a stage in that – their poets just aren't interested in the Fifties style. (Or, 80% of them aren't.)
Having written about Sorley MacLean's poem "The cave of gold", I feel obliged to cite Ronald Black's review of it, which yields all kinds of ideas I hadn't seen at all:
"MacLean’s ‘Uamha ’n Òir’ (‘The Cave of Gold’) appears at first to have been one of his late poems. It was written, or at least reworked, in the 1970s. It refers to a very old legend which was found in pretty much every part of the Highlands and Islands where a cave on one side of a hill or mountain was believed to connect with a cave on the other. The legend always has it that a piper marched into the cave at one end, that he could be heard playing his pipes far underground, and that the sound stopped halfway, but that his dog appeared out of the cave at the other end with its hair singed off, revealing that his master had come off the worse in some encounter with evil. In this case the cave is explicitly stated to be in Dùis MhicLeòid, ‘MacLeod’s Land’ in Skye, and the people involved are MacCrimmons. There are basically three sections — one which describes the original legend, one which tells how another piper tries his luck in the same way, and one which draws a conclusion. The poem may be approached as history, as biography, as autobiography, or as a combination of these. As history, the first section presumably describes some early MacCrimmon, and the second describes Dòmhnall Bàn, who was killed in the Rout of Moy in March 1746. As autobiography, the first section presumably describes the poet as a young man, the second the poet in his maturity. In Dòmhnall Bàn’s case the cave becomes a metaphor for foretold death, suicide even: chaidh a’ ghalla ’na cheann / ’s ’na chridhe, ‘the bitch went into his head / and his heart’.
The poem is extremely difficult, and in this we are not helped by the poet, who was habitually economical with punctuation and whose translations were notoriously over-literal. As an experiment, I will present five stanzas of the poem, all except the fifth in three different forms: first the original, with my own punctuation added; then MacLean’s translation; then my own translation, done in my usual style, which I would describe as offering a modicum of rhythm and explanation. I have chosen these stanzas because they contain almost the only hard evidence for the subject-matter in the form of two references to the blind catechist Donald Munro (1773–1830), a one-time fiddler who not only gave up playing the instrument after his conversion but is said to have gone around making bonfires of bagpipes and fiddles wherever he found them. I begin in the middle of the first section, in which the poet expresses wonder that anyone should wish to leave such a paradise as the old Land of MacLeod, but admits that the motive is greed for the gold rumoured to be in the cave[.]"
What other things did I leave out?
I can’t record a debate about poetics which didn’t occur. But, in the cause of nostalgia, let’s pick up a few voices from the time. Nuttall was reviewing “alternative” (then called “small press”) poetry for the Guardian from 1979 to 1981, and I was able to pick up some of these reviews from on-line copies of old Guardians.
Jeff Nuttall: “If there is one characteristic which indicates a main line of development in contemporary British poetry it is the technique of making a poem from disparate material. Poems made thus derive their impact from contrasts built into the structure of the poem itself rather than from references to other things. The effect of the poems springs not from what is being said but from the way in which the various things being said react on each other. The dynamic achieved may be muted as in Paul Brown or it may be violent as in Barry MacSweeney’s Odes. […] The power of perception underlying political conviction and impeccable professional accuracy in this work is stunning[.] The technique of disparity has its roots in Zurich rather than in Black Mountain College. In a sense, to give the poem’s structure pre-eminence over its subject is exactly the opposite course from allowing what is to be said to find its own form spontaneously as it does in speech.[…] The “breath line” as Olsen called it ranges from athletic rhetoric to asthmatic squibs of observation to artfully tailored work in regular stanzas.” [September, 1979]
Nuttall, again: “Art is misunderstood in this century because what is its main aspect, cultural sabotage, is treated as entertainment. The fireworks are Molotov cocktails. Uneasy applause follows the burst of machine gun fire from the podium. […] Delirium, real, emulated, or contrived, is a main tool of the poet. Syntax is dismantled either as a result of, or as a means to, delirium. Paul Matthews' essay, The Grammar of Darkness, ranks with […] as a statement of the reason for this. “If I define the universe as meaning we must realise the paradox in this: a poetry of hints and riddles, no longer just in the sounding. The silence too is recognised. 'A frog jumps in', and we listen to the ripple of it long after the words have died away. A poetry with hollows in it, pause and hiatus, to admit the universe. Form always merging, never fixed, formed and chaotic at the same time, allowing for interventions. A language turning into music, playing between sense and nonsense, (they both limit the language). A poetry which has come to the end of itself (and so come close to its beginnings). Thrown back into the crucible.“ (November 1979)
The gap between what Matthews says and the gloss that Nuttall puts on it is very surprising. My impression is that Nuttall had little interest in the poetry he was reviewing. Sometime in 2019 I went to an exhibition about the influence of the Bauhaus, at the Contemporary gallery here in Nottingham, and there was a section on the art course at Leeds Polytechnic which mentioned Nuttall, whose day job was as a teacher there. This may advise us. He was a teacher of rather arrogant late adolescents, very alert about stylistic distinctiveness and daring, and he had to compete with them to avoid being written off as a “compromised adult teacher” figure. And he did compete with them. They regarded Modernism pre-1930 as a gold standard, especially the more anti-bourgeois element of it. So he had a set style of extremism. His descriptions, just quoted, are heroic, but they have little to do with English poetry. His view of the time is not worth writing up, as one of the competing versions, because his interest in what he was reviewing is so limited. He is remembered as a good teacher of “general culture” for art students. The Telegraph did an article on this course headed “Progressive art or subsidised freak-out?”
I don’t think 70s poetry was “cultural sabotage”. Is culture the sabotage of culture? I met Paul Matthews in 2019 and he promised to send me a copy of The Grammar of Darkness. I knew he wasn’t going to send it to me. I didn’t try to ask him “what was it like in 1974”, because it was obviously a major effort to roll back 45 years. It was one of those moments in Dorset when you don’t get a breakthrough for your book. That quote from his essay sounds like hippy language. Students in 1979, still in the punk era, would have hated that. But the quote is very interesting. The tone is serene and empathetic, and this is what I like in 70s poetry. Nuttall's reviews were my first glimmering that small press poetry existed. It was something the media didn't cover. But since the publications he described were not in the bookshops, or in the Poetry Library, I couldn't access them. I really reached that poetry about ten years later.
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