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?
Showing posts with label depolarisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depolarisation. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 July 2020
depolarisation, 2: mutual respect
Depolarisation (2). Where did I put those blocks?
The urge for premature definition sweeps aside vagueness at the cost of introducing fundamental error. It is fitting for critics to struggle with areas of art that haven’t resolved yet. It is fitting to devote time and effort to artists who, in the end, turn out to have been a waste of resources.
My guess is that what people want from cultural critics is to locate the watersheds, the lines where one faction divides from another. This location would expose unconscious blocks to understanding and allow us to debate and perhaps eventually remove those blocks. It seems likely that Rosenberg has identified one of the blocks. See blog of 31 May 2020 for details on this.For Rosenberg, the avant garde wants to consign every part of existing art to landfill.
Rosenberg describes the institutionalisation of the avant garde, and wrote about it even in 1964. This institutionalisation, at one level, justifies the vangardistas in thinking that they are Superior Beings. But, at another level, it points to problems with claiming political status for innovative art. This is a different problem from the battered chronology of the modern vanguard. So, if you want to promote the new poetry of the 1970s as representing a breakthrough, it is surely a problem that this poetry is now almost fifty years old (and that its poets are hoary and venerable, if not decrepit). In fact, dealing with the collective estate of “modernism” is like trying to get agreement from a board of directors of whom some date to the 1920s, some date to the 1970s, and some to 2020. They barely understand each other, but any statement has to accommodate the relationship between those three areas. So in fact futurist art is dominated by the past. It is produced by people who have succeeded in the academic world by demonstrating expertise in the art of classical modernity. Their ability to start from zero is effectively nil. (That Partisan Review symposium on a "new conservatism" supplied one of the ideological bases for PN Review, when it was starting out.)
Arrogance is a factor in the scene subject to reform. But the problem may be in defining the splits as “blocks”. From another point of view, they are not “blocks” but “components of my personality”. You can’t have some poet say “the reason you don’t like my work is that your personality is defective and you have unconscious blocks which prevent you from realising how brilliant I am”. Because the next step is “a brief and inexpensive course of surgery will modify your personality so that you DO realise how brilliant my poetry is”. Rather, everyone has to concede that disliking a volume of poetry is everyone (else)’s civil right, and that it is not subject to being defined away by the PR of some faction or other.
Quite a lot of the discourse around culture these days is based on a deficit theory, whereby someone you disapprove of is suffering from unconscious blocks, and you can see what these are (although they’re invisible), and offer a cure. It’s great to feel that you are culturally healthy and everyone else has terrible disabilities. There is no better feeling. But this whole domain may be based on a fallacy. Just because you have a goal, of promoting the artists you approve of, does not mean that you have a valid theory of why other people find them uninteresting and not worth laying out money for in a book-shop. Indeed, if there are a thousand poetry titles on the shelves of the Waterstone’s in Nottingham (I didn’t count, so it could be fewer), then leaving almost all of them behind is going to be a feature of most trips to the book-shop. Cultural customs are going to be based on that physical fact, if on nothing else. You do have the right to say no.
I am really doubtful that you can see inside someone else’s mind and produce structures which they aren’t consciously aware of. I know a lot of “legitimated knowledge” depends on that, but it seems flawed and risky as a concept. In reading a poem, you have easy access to the conscious intent, the strands or paths which the poem is organised around. Other levels are a puzzle and may not actually be there. Under the surface, there is no light and no sound and you effectively don’t have access. All this may be a conjuring trick to cover the fact that you are suppressing the conscious message of the other person. By defining their desires, pleasures, preferences as a “binary myth” you are effectively saying that you have the right to speak for them and they don't have the right to speak for themselves.
Five thousand poets have an investment in saying that part of the market has an unreasoning block resisting their excellent work, and critics are motivated to follow in line and search for those blocks, and turn out sketches of them. But perhaps the breakthrough is in recognising that these blocks don’t exist. The reasons for not reading a volume are many, most likely that it is hidden behind all the other volumes on the stand, but may also be rooted in cognitive preferences which are part of how someone deals with the world. (5000? could be more!)
Let’s say that people's consumer choices in art are guided by the memory of past pleasure. This gets away from “deficit theory” and also identifies a domain where criticism can be useful: I record my pleasure, in a verbally explicit way, and people who read what I say then have an “acquired memory” of pleasure, and this extends their aesthetic range. Most proposals about depolarisation offer to wipe out divergence in a malign way. But we are only going to get closer to each other by being friendly and respectful.
The urge for premature definition sweeps aside vagueness at the cost of introducing fundamental error. It is fitting for critics to struggle with areas of art that haven’t resolved yet. It is fitting to devote time and effort to artists who, in the end, turn out to have been a waste of resources.
My guess is that what people want from cultural critics is to locate the watersheds, the lines where one faction divides from another. This location would expose unconscious blocks to understanding and allow us to debate and perhaps eventually remove those blocks. It seems likely that Rosenberg has identified one of the blocks. See blog of 31 May 2020 for details on this.For Rosenberg, the avant garde wants to consign every part of existing art to landfill.
Rosenberg describes the institutionalisation of the avant garde, and wrote about it even in 1964. This institutionalisation, at one level, justifies the vangardistas in thinking that they are Superior Beings. But, at another level, it points to problems with claiming political status for innovative art. This is a different problem from the battered chronology of the modern vanguard. So, if you want to promote the new poetry of the 1970s as representing a breakthrough, it is surely a problem that this poetry is now almost fifty years old (and that its poets are hoary and venerable, if not decrepit). In fact, dealing with the collective estate of “modernism” is like trying to get agreement from a board of directors of whom some date to the 1920s, some date to the 1970s, and some to 2020. They barely understand each other, but any statement has to accommodate the relationship between those three areas. So in fact futurist art is dominated by the past. It is produced by people who have succeeded in the academic world by demonstrating expertise in the art of classical modernity. Their ability to start from zero is effectively nil. (That Partisan Review symposium on a "new conservatism" supplied one of the ideological bases for PN Review, when it was starting out.)
Arrogance is a factor in the scene subject to reform. But the problem may be in defining the splits as “blocks”. From another point of view, they are not “blocks” but “components of my personality”. You can’t have some poet say “the reason you don’t like my work is that your personality is defective and you have unconscious blocks which prevent you from realising how brilliant I am”. Because the next step is “a brief and inexpensive course of surgery will modify your personality so that you DO realise how brilliant my poetry is”. Rather, everyone has to concede that disliking a volume of poetry is everyone (else)’s civil right, and that it is not subject to being defined away by the PR of some faction or other.
Quite a lot of the discourse around culture these days is based on a deficit theory, whereby someone you disapprove of is suffering from unconscious blocks, and you can see what these are (although they’re invisible), and offer a cure. It’s great to feel that you are culturally healthy and everyone else has terrible disabilities. There is no better feeling. But this whole domain may be based on a fallacy. Just because you have a goal, of promoting the artists you approve of, does not mean that you have a valid theory of why other people find them uninteresting and not worth laying out money for in a book-shop. Indeed, if there are a thousand poetry titles on the shelves of the Waterstone’s in Nottingham (I didn’t count, so it could be fewer), then leaving almost all of them behind is going to be a feature of most trips to the book-shop. Cultural customs are going to be based on that physical fact, if on nothing else. You do have the right to say no.
I am really doubtful that you can see inside someone else’s mind and produce structures which they aren’t consciously aware of. I know a lot of “legitimated knowledge” depends on that, but it seems flawed and risky as a concept. In reading a poem, you have easy access to the conscious intent, the strands or paths which the poem is organised around. Other levels are a puzzle and may not actually be there. Under the surface, there is no light and no sound and you effectively don’t have access. All this may be a conjuring trick to cover the fact that you are suppressing the conscious message of the other person. By defining their desires, pleasures, preferences as a “binary myth” you are effectively saying that you have the right to speak for them and they don't have the right to speak for themselves.
Five thousand poets have an investment in saying that part of the market has an unreasoning block resisting their excellent work, and critics are motivated to follow in line and search for those blocks, and turn out sketches of them. But perhaps the breakthrough is in recognising that these blocks don’t exist. The reasons for not reading a volume are many, most likely that it is hidden behind all the other volumes on the stand, but may also be rooted in cognitive preferences which are part of how someone deals with the world. (5000? could be more!)
Let’s say that people's consumer choices in art are guided by the memory of past pleasure. This gets away from “deficit theory” and also identifies a domain where criticism can be useful: I record my pleasure, in a verbally explicit way, and people who read what I say then have an “acquired memory” of pleasure, and this extends their aesthetic range. Most proposals about depolarisation offer to wipe out divergence in a malign way. But we are only going to get closer to each other by being friendly and respectful.
Depolarisation, 1
This is a revisit to an old theme. I more or less staked the
farm on depolarisation – it was the theme of two books I wrote, The council of
heresy (2009) and The long 1950s (2012). The response from the hypersensitive
poetry market was less “now we see!” than “you didn’t just say that so don’t
pretend you did”.
If you say “people’s taste is scattered over a vast landscape”, that sounds great, but if you then say “I do a reading in some town and most of the audience dislike the way I go about a line or a poem”, that is what the scattering actually means and that doesn’t sound so great. I am willing to read to a hostile audience. I just want to be honest about what is dividing us.
The lecture series Binary Myths (in Exeter, in roughly 1997, and published in two volumes under the same title, while a volume 2 was comments by editors on how to edit) identified the problem of polarisation. The idea was that people crudely divided the poetry world into two parts, the part which likes me and the part which doesn’t. And that individuals seldom read anything outside the area which they, factionally, identified with. This was worse for people who had been polarised for 40 years than for people who had only suffered from it for, say, five years. A corollary is the suggestion that constantly following habits in choosing what to read may lead to a decision-making paradox in which the most pleasurable sensations are to be found by challenging your own orthodoxies. If you have spent 40 years ignoring mainstream poetry, it is likely that the most exciting poetry that you aren’t aware of is hidden within the mainstream. You will find it by discarding your principle of never reading such books – a preference which was once an asset and has become a dogma. Another corollary is that a zone of dry ground from which deviations of taste could be measured is missing. That is, an anthology like “Conductors of Chaos” may in fact represent one extreme of taste, but the claim that it is not central is unprovable unless you can find what the centre is. Editors or historians who span all the factions are needed by the scene, but do not exist just because they are needed. (“We cover all kinds of music – Country and Western.”)
What do we expect from depolarisation? A large number of poets would see it simply as the proportion of the market which favours their own poetry expanding from 2% to 98%. This is banal, and by the way unlikely. It seems like a fantasy project, and is not the right answer. We might mean an abandonment of stylistic research, so that the poets who do not write like everyone else give up and start writing like everyone else, with a convulsive collapse of a differentiated landscape into one without features. This is heavily undesirable. In sum, no one expects the diversity of poetry to decrease, which would be at odds with the whole Western way of life. When we spoke (in Council of heresy) of balkanisation, the problem there was not that poetry has become so much more diverse since 1960, but that groups (or perhaps just vocal individuals?) were spreading disinformation, no doubt as a result of misunderstanding – and of malice. Depolarisation is therefore most significant when we are talking about the instruments which provide access to poetry – for example reviews, publication in books, selection for anthologies, selection for magazines, mention in surveys.
Just behind these, we find a very small number of people, a rather homogeneous group called cultural managers. Few people would disagree that in Britain modernity has been rejected and driven underground in poetry, whereas in visual arts it has strode to the forefront – in the same country, in the same period. Most probably, then, the occlusion of modernity is a debt we owe to the cultural managers. I am arguing that the poetry infrastructure has structural failings. Certainly some people who like modern poetry have also reached managerial positions; the story of how editors were dramatically removed from those positions at Stand, and at Poetry Review (in 1977 and again in 2004) may well explain why the others conform, and the story is the most important one to understand even though it is not in the public domain. I said the managers were homogeneous; this is apparently less because of a shared artistic sensibility than because of the need for alliance with each other. The absence of accountability or media interest in poetry leaves a vacuum in which these alliances become unnaturally important – and the ability of a clique to subvert and exclude deviants such as innovators is unchallenged. When we speak of depolarisation as a force that could shift the landscape, what we usually mean is the collapse of the ability of the conservative cultural managers to exclude anything but the mainstream from visibility in shops or the media. The proposal involves a second stage in which the same people are still in charge but are the cultural officers for a diverse and modern offering of poetic styles – with no more trouble than other officials experience at the Tate Britain or the Whitechapel Gallery. The corollary, of the intellectuals (the “alternative”) reading mainstream poetry, is less important because the intellectuals cannot block the mainstream from access to the market, and never have had such a capability. It is a desirable corollary but would not change the landscape. The further shifts in the multipolar geometry which the end of balkanisation would imply – Scottish poets reading English poetry, to mention one of the unlikely ones – are also desirable, but do not have revolutionary potential. These polarisations are not easily defensible, and should not just be left to rust in place, but they are not as influential.
The binary project is compatible with closing down individual wishes and imposing conformity from above. You don't have to start liking what you dislike. I was very taken with the idea of depolarisation after reading Binary Myths; but in practice a lot of people just wanted to abolish people who disagreed with them! Nobody involved intended to leave their own comfort zone. You can’t get from 20 kinds of poetry down to one kind. That is an illusory goal. The initial drive seemed to resolve into the wish of cultural managers to have a unified market, which meant that people’s preferences had to be invalidated. This was very authoritarian. So if you have someone who goes into a CD shop to buy a jazz CD, it may be that they walk straight past the rock and folk sections, but it’s authoritarian to change the labelling so that they can’t tell what the CD is until they have paid for it, and to deride their wishes. People have preferences and this is the accumulated knowledge of the market; if you try to erase it you are destroying knowledge. If people are wary of unfamiliar poetry, it’s because they have had bad experiences.
(The use of the word balkanisation could be viewed as racist, or geographically biased, but we will leave it in because it is at least a clear concept. If there are twelve factions and any single fact has at least 11 different interpretations and the area of consensus is nil, that is what we mean by balkanisation. This is the term used for the British (or English?) scene by Eric Homberger in 1972, in his classic The Art of the Real. Reading Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans is recommended and we do admit that other Europeans are probably more unrealistic about Balkan politics than Balkan intellectuals, taken as a group. Peter Handke tried to spread cultural understanding of the South Slavs in the West, and people vituperated him pretty thoroughly.)
If you say “people’s taste is scattered over a vast landscape”, that sounds great, but if you then say “I do a reading in some town and most of the audience dislike the way I go about a line or a poem”, that is what the scattering actually means and that doesn’t sound so great. I am willing to read to a hostile audience. I just want to be honest about what is dividing us.
The lecture series Binary Myths (in Exeter, in roughly 1997, and published in two volumes under the same title, while a volume 2 was comments by editors on how to edit) identified the problem of polarisation. The idea was that people crudely divided the poetry world into two parts, the part which likes me and the part which doesn’t. And that individuals seldom read anything outside the area which they, factionally, identified with. This was worse for people who had been polarised for 40 years than for people who had only suffered from it for, say, five years. A corollary is the suggestion that constantly following habits in choosing what to read may lead to a decision-making paradox in which the most pleasurable sensations are to be found by challenging your own orthodoxies. If you have spent 40 years ignoring mainstream poetry, it is likely that the most exciting poetry that you aren’t aware of is hidden within the mainstream. You will find it by discarding your principle of never reading such books – a preference which was once an asset and has become a dogma. Another corollary is that a zone of dry ground from which deviations of taste could be measured is missing. That is, an anthology like “Conductors of Chaos” may in fact represent one extreme of taste, but the claim that it is not central is unprovable unless you can find what the centre is. Editors or historians who span all the factions are needed by the scene, but do not exist just because they are needed. (“We cover all kinds of music – Country and Western.”)
What do we expect from depolarisation? A large number of poets would see it simply as the proportion of the market which favours their own poetry expanding from 2% to 98%. This is banal, and by the way unlikely. It seems like a fantasy project, and is not the right answer. We might mean an abandonment of stylistic research, so that the poets who do not write like everyone else give up and start writing like everyone else, with a convulsive collapse of a differentiated landscape into one without features. This is heavily undesirable. In sum, no one expects the diversity of poetry to decrease, which would be at odds with the whole Western way of life. When we spoke (in Council of heresy) of balkanisation, the problem there was not that poetry has become so much more diverse since 1960, but that groups (or perhaps just vocal individuals?) were spreading disinformation, no doubt as a result of misunderstanding – and of malice. Depolarisation is therefore most significant when we are talking about the instruments which provide access to poetry – for example reviews, publication in books, selection for anthologies, selection for magazines, mention in surveys.
Just behind these, we find a very small number of people, a rather homogeneous group called cultural managers. Few people would disagree that in Britain modernity has been rejected and driven underground in poetry, whereas in visual arts it has strode to the forefront – in the same country, in the same period. Most probably, then, the occlusion of modernity is a debt we owe to the cultural managers. I am arguing that the poetry infrastructure has structural failings. Certainly some people who like modern poetry have also reached managerial positions; the story of how editors were dramatically removed from those positions at Stand, and at Poetry Review (in 1977 and again in 2004) may well explain why the others conform, and the story is the most important one to understand even though it is not in the public domain. I said the managers were homogeneous; this is apparently less because of a shared artistic sensibility than because of the need for alliance with each other. The absence of accountability or media interest in poetry leaves a vacuum in which these alliances become unnaturally important – and the ability of a clique to subvert and exclude deviants such as innovators is unchallenged. When we speak of depolarisation as a force that could shift the landscape, what we usually mean is the collapse of the ability of the conservative cultural managers to exclude anything but the mainstream from visibility in shops or the media. The proposal involves a second stage in which the same people are still in charge but are the cultural officers for a diverse and modern offering of poetic styles – with no more trouble than other officials experience at the Tate Britain or the Whitechapel Gallery. The corollary, of the intellectuals (the “alternative”) reading mainstream poetry, is less important because the intellectuals cannot block the mainstream from access to the market, and never have had such a capability. It is a desirable corollary but would not change the landscape. The further shifts in the multipolar geometry which the end of balkanisation would imply – Scottish poets reading English poetry, to mention one of the unlikely ones – are also desirable, but do not have revolutionary potential. These polarisations are not easily defensible, and should not just be left to rust in place, but they are not as influential.
The binary project is compatible with closing down individual wishes and imposing conformity from above. You don't have to start liking what you dislike. I was very taken with the idea of depolarisation after reading Binary Myths; but in practice a lot of people just wanted to abolish people who disagreed with them! Nobody involved intended to leave their own comfort zone. You can’t get from 20 kinds of poetry down to one kind. That is an illusory goal. The initial drive seemed to resolve into the wish of cultural managers to have a unified market, which meant that people’s preferences had to be invalidated. This was very authoritarian. So if you have someone who goes into a CD shop to buy a jazz CD, it may be that they walk straight past the rock and folk sections, but it’s authoritarian to change the labelling so that they can’t tell what the CD is until they have paid for it, and to deride their wishes. People have preferences and this is the accumulated knowledge of the market; if you try to erase it you are destroying knowledge. If people are wary of unfamiliar poetry, it’s because they have had bad experiences.
(The use of the word balkanisation could be viewed as racist, or geographically biased, but we will leave it in because it is at least a clear concept. If there are twelve factions and any single fact has at least 11 different interpretations and the area of consensus is nil, that is what we mean by balkanisation. This is the term used for the British (or English?) scene by Eric Homberger in 1972, in his classic The Art of the Real. Reading Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans is recommended and we do admit that other Europeans are probably more unrealistic about Balkan politics than Balkan intellectuals, taken as a group. Peter Handke tried to spread cultural understanding of the South Slavs in the West, and people vituperated him pretty thoroughly.)
Monday, 29 August 2011
London School yada yada yada
London?
I have a long personal history of sitting in upper rooms of pubs somewhere in North London listening to the recital of something really, really dreadful. The managers of the London scene are very proud of being unselective. The result was the humiliation of the audience, for which the only comeback was that, years later, one could tell the truth and not sign up to some jolly collusive fantasy that it was all marvellous. It is good to rip my shirt off and get up front about how addled and deluded I thought 90% of it was, knowing that by doing this I would be telling the truth for dozens of other people as well. Now it can be told!
Two questions about 'Affluence, Welfare, and Fine Words'. Why no chapter on the London School? Secondly, why the comment in Origins of the Underground which Robert Hampson found 'unhelpful'? ("Yes Virginia, there is a London avant-garde; it is too much like people with bags over their heads banging their heads against the wall and making a lot of noise but making few articulate sounds.") I will start with Allen Fisher. This work seems to me to be of great importance. I wrote about it frequently but it resisted description. So I produced a whole book of interviews with the poet. This was completed in 2005, and the publisher has not managed to print it yet. All the same this represents the value which I place on his work and which I want others to place on it as well. I do not think that other poets have taken on much of what Allen worked out in formal terms, and of hundreds of influences he has documented other London poets seem to feature nowhere.
While I was in The Punter after a seminar in Cambridge (in August 2011), someone made this comment to me about Eric Mottram, that he was an academic who couldn't stand first-rate art and so gathered around him a bunch of second-raters, rowdies who believed that all they had to do was to create riot and revolt against the rules and create noise. This may be the real prehistory of the London School. Naturally this is not recorded in the folklore.
(addendum. The book of Fisher interviews has now come out, with a different publisher.)
Fear of reflexivity
The first reason for not writing about the London School en masse is that there were hundreds of people milling around (as documented in the anthology Verbi Visi Voco and in too many of the 1500 pamphlets published by Writers Forum) and producing dreadful radical poetry. "Look, I've broken my language!" The ethos of Writers Forum was never to criticise anything and not to be selective when it came to publishing. VVV itself was a reprint of one page each from the first 500 WF pamphlets - neatly documenting that the undertaking was a waste of time. The unwillingness to apply discrimination is itself a prime example of wearing a bag over your head - the powers of the intelligence being switched off. The idea of selecting the best poetry as a preliminary to making an anthology had not penetrated these parts. Bring your rambles to the shambles! Because the borders of the London School extended to engulf so many talentless louts, the LS as an aggregate was not interesting enough to write about. Conversely, the talented individuals who hung out on the London scene could only be given justice by being separated out from the Gadarene rout and treated as individuals.
The 'bag over the head' quality derived from simple precepts, thus:
utterances with no meaning, such as sound and concrete poetry, are better than articulate speech
consciousness is bourgeois
anything which damages language is better than anything which is articulate, coherent, refined
it is necessary to smash cultural forms in order to achieve liberation
connoisseurship, discrimination, exact knowledge, are bourgeois fantasies
disrupting patterns of association is more important than creating something clear
expressing the personality, and the differentiated patterns of perception and sensibility which show the personality in poetry, is reactionary and out of date. Operations based on chance, mechanical recombination, found texts, defacing of found texts, are inherently superior.
attentiveness is academic
noise is better than sound
new patterns are always achieved through random damage and disruption and not by study and formal insight
The result of applying these rules is adequately described by the phrases about wearing a bag over your head and jumping up and down. The abandonment of judgement is a form of blindness, putting out the eyes of reason.
The comment about wearing bags over their heads is helpful because it points up the weaknesses of the whole swarm of incoherent/ revolting poets around the London scene over the decades and clears the decks so that I can recuperate the excellent poets within that scene and pierce the defences of boredom and indifference developed over the years by exposure to the interminable third- and fourth-rate products of Writers Forum and associated outlets. The situation is like the mainstream - there are literally hundreds of poets filling the scene and blocking the light, most of it is savagely tedious, but if you sift the evidence quite a few interesting poets can be found. Writing a history of the mainstream is impossible because there is too much data.
By abandoning intelligence, reason, self-criticism, rules of verbal conduct, etc., the poets mentioned were precisely acting 'with bags over their heads'. There is no point denying this. Robert may not find this 'helpful' but the truth is always helpful. You can't go 'gubba gubba gubba bing bing bing' for 30 years and expect people to see you as an intellectual. You can’t indulge in ‘Messy Play’, print the results, staple them, and have someone come along 30 years later and say they are significant.
What happened in history
I know that Nuttall, Cobbing and Mottram were around in London in the 60s and 70s, and one version of the history is that they were all in love with garbled primitivism, inarticulate, 'subversive’ language, messy play, and that this is the ‘ground floor’ of the London scene.
I lived in London for 27 years and was active on the alternative poetry scene for 20 of those years. One of the prominent features was that people had no idea of the past of that scene. Maybe there was a central project which included an 'inherited set of assumptions' (an acquis communautaire indeed) but no one seemed to know what it was. Publicity material would declare that Bob Cobbing had begun doing sound poetry in 1953 (soon after the Continental revival of it, then, so he was up to date in 1953, if less so in 1954) but there seemed to be no memory of what that entailed or any record of what it produced. I pored over the bookstalls which were such a feature of reading events, but they seemed mysteriously blank of records of the past. I found Maggie O'Sullivan's A4 pamphlets of 1986 (I did not acquire them until about 1990, regrettably) and they seemed to be the start of continuous memory. Writing an account of the London scene from 1960, or 1953, up till then was not feasible for lack of intelligible sources. Maybe there was nothing interesting up till 1985 or so, except for Fisher?
I have to say that this is remarkably different from the milieu of poets which we associate with JH Prynne, Grosseteste Review, Ferry Press (and scenes like these). The first time I got exposure to this was in around 1982, when I met John Wilkinson, but he and many others seemed to have a clear reflexive memory of what had happened and of the reasoning involved, and of course this is analogous to the clear reflexive content of the poetry involved, which is not in damaged language.
I would have written on the history of the ‘London School’ if the folklore available had produced anything intelligible and worth writing down.
There is a strand of opinion which holds that the London scene is the real avant garde and that the poetry represented in A Various Art, Conductors of Chaos, etc. is not properly avant garde and is not at that tip of an arrow moving forth into meaninglessness. This view is limited by the loss of precision into baling up dozens of individuals into a package, and by the limits of validity in classifying X or Y as belonging to one group or another. (If you start with a list of poets you will find that many of them can't be easily 'brigaded' into a group, as a basis for reckless and exciting generalisations.)
I do not buy the idea that Cobbing, crumpling up pieces of paper, photocopying them, and publishing the results, is more advanced than ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. Of course, if you do buy that idea, things must look a lot different. This is perhaps a moment of division when form is born - a watershed inscribing itself in the whole alluvial geology downstream.
How can you put faith in innovation and not have a grasp of chronology? You wouldn't know if your poem is innovative or not. In fact the detection of originality argues a level of connoisseurship which must pre-exist it - or you might simply be marching in circles like a drunk man in the darkness. You could be deluding yourself about the innovation, and checking this requires someone with a genuine reflexive knowledge of poetic style and the delicate details of change. Comparing yourself to the norms is not something you can do without reflexive knowledge. The possibility that a whole group of people in the 1990s were stuck in the cultural atmosphere of 1953 is more substantial than we would wish it.
Hit list of significant 'alternative' work from the London environment
Gavin Selerie, Azimuth. Allen Fisher, Place. Robert Sheppard, Daylight Robbery. Paul Brown, Meetings and Pursuits. Maggie O'Sullivan, A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts. Robert Hampson, Seaport. Ulli Freer, Stepping Space. John Seed, Interior in the Open Air. Adrian Clarke, Possession. Selected poems 1996-2006.
It needs a critic to come along and throw out all the bad poetry heaped up around the London School in order to reveal the excellent poetry written within the London scene to a public which hasn't noticed it.
The dislike of thought connects to the lack of interest in distinguishing between good art and bad, and connects too to a lack of complex and differentiated sensations, and then connects to a lack of interest in changes in style over time, which is why the oral folklore of the London scene is so uninteresting.
The line of reflexivity includes much of what I value about modern British poetry and moreover allows a continuity to be traced back beyond the ‘new start’ in 1959 and 1960. It is the only real political line in poetry as it strives to understand daily life in the attempt to change it. The emptying from awareness of its primary contents is not the path to a new consciousness. Rather, consciousness needs memory and self-awareness. Freedom is the exercise of judgement - the formation of judgements is the precursor to it.
Politics belongs with reason and complex language.
The idea of a polarity (in the British underground scene) in which one end believes in using the full range of language and one believes in the random, the use of mechanical processes, the unmodulated, lets us out of the misleading geographical classifiers of folklore. When we say ‘London’ we mean ‘anti-discursive hi energy constructed in small units’; instead of saying ‘Cambridge’ we would rather say ‘reflexive and with intact access to the resources of the English language’.
The whole idea of reflexivity needs exploring, as the key to mapping part of the Underground. I did work on the ALP catalogues which suggested that the 'Underground' included 2000 poets who had published at least one book or pamphlet up to 1990. The fact that this entire area was written off wholesale by people like Ian Hamilton or Peter Forbes hardly proves that all its parts resemble each other. People interested in the subject might be looking for terms for describing divisions within this vast extent.
How does this relate to the depolarisation project, where we try to grow out of the mutual hostility of the factions which lined up against each other in the 70s?
Well, the 'truth and reconciliation' process must involve truth. The attempt to join up in one community with the poetry enthusiasts outside the 'realms of the Underground' must involve a process of owning up to how bad most of the rebel/rabble heritage is. A community has been defined as a group of people who share a version of the past (or, share a past preserved in a narratives). In order to build a larger poetic community, we go through a process of filtering which builds an ever larger stock of truth.
The disputes were originally about theories of poetry. If there are so many bad poems, the theories responsible for them must be wrong, and there is no point going to war for them. Perhaps there are better theories, which regrettably most poets have failed to understand.
Generally what poets want is attention, and the fights are about shares of that. To write with studied inattentiveness is always likely to draw the audience into inattentiveness. This destroys the asset you want to acquire. This is surely a more fundamental problem than the fights which you lose.
If there were 1400 poets publishing in the Underground, it is futile to go into the new cultural process with a banner saying that they were all good. Surely there are excellent reasons for admitting that the slack, messy, inattentive Underground boys were inattentive, messy, and slack. This is the truth and will found a society of poetry in which we can talk to each other. The theories we abandon on the way to the truth probably aren't going to be very good theories to follow as paths into a joyful future. Being delusions moves them out of the frame for shining paths. In fact, if there is a communitas based on the idea that all the inattentiveness is Great Avant Garde Art then it is unsustainable and people are likely to lose faith in it and fall out of it all the time. The lie seems to be inclusive but all the falsity it entails means that the shared thing crumbles at every step. So it's better to tell the truth.
(The figure of 1400 comes from analysis of the ALP lists of 'alternative' books in print'. It is partly extrapolation because doing a count was too complicated. The larger problem is that firms signed up to AP who were publishing rather non-radical poetry.)
Of course there are good mainstream poets, as well. Discrimination can lure good art from behind the spoil tips of the inept and inattentive. In order to get to the solid ground of truth the poets who wrote in a conservative style also have to accept just how many people wrote in that style and produced bad poetry, the flimsiness of the conventional virtues. It is a sobering up process, a de-intoxication. In the end there is nothing to go to war to defend.
The recovery of the history of British poetry from 1960 to 1997 (or other limiting dates) has to deal with one case at a time. The problems with the ‘inherited narratives’ are extreme. The whole area is likely to repay reflective study. The outcome of that study is likely to be a new poetic community with a new shared past.
I have a long personal history of sitting in upper rooms of pubs somewhere in North London listening to the recital of something really, really dreadful. The managers of the London scene are very proud of being unselective. The result was the humiliation of the audience, for which the only comeback was that, years later, one could tell the truth and not sign up to some jolly collusive fantasy that it was all marvellous. It is good to rip my shirt off and get up front about how addled and deluded I thought 90% of it was, knowing that by doing this I would be telling the truth for dozens of other people as well. Now it can be told!
Two questions about 'Affluence, Welfare, and Fine Words'. Why no chapter on the London School? Secondly, why the comment in Origins of the Underground which Robert Hampson found 'unhelpful'? ("Yes Virginia, there is a London avant-garde; it is too much like people with bags over their heads banging their heads against the wall and making a lot of noise but making few articulate sounds.") I will start with Allen Fisher. This work seems to me to be of great importance. I wrote about it frequently but it resisted description. So I produced a whole book of interviews with the poet. This was completed in 2005, and the publisher has not managed to print it yet. All the same this represents the value which I place on his work and which I want others to place on it as well. I do not think that other poets have taken on much of what Allen worked out in formal terms, and of hundreds of influences he has documented other London poets seem to feature nowhere.
While I was in The Punter after a seminar in Cambridge (in August 2011), someone made this comment to me about Eric Mottram, that he was an academic who couldn't stand first-rate art and so gathered around him a bunch of second-raters, rowdies who believed that all they had to do was to create riot and revolt against the rules and create noise. This may be the real prehistory of the London School. Naturally this is not recorded in the folklore.
(addendum. The book of Fisher interviews has now come out, with a different publisher.)
Fear of reflexivity
The first reason for not writing about the London School en masse is that there were hundreds of people milling around (as documented in the anthology Verbi Visi Voco and in too many of the 1500 pamphlets published by Writers Forum) and producing dreadful radical poetry. "Look, I've broken my language!" The ethos of Writers Forum was never to criticise anything and not to be selective when it came to publishing. VVV itself was a reprint of one page each from the first 500 WF pamphlets - neatly documenting that the undertaking was a waste of time. The unwillingness to apply discrimination is itself a prime example of wearing a bag over your head - the powers of the intelligence being switched off. The idea of selecting the best poetry as a preliminary to making an anthology had not penetrated these parts. Bring your rambles to the shambles! Because the borders of the London School extended to engulf so many talentless louts, the LS as an aggregate was not interesting enough to write about. Conversely, the talented individuals who hung out on the London scene could only be given justice by being separated out from the Gadarene rout and treated as individuals.
The 'bag over the head' quality derived from simple precepts, thus:
utterances with no meaning, such as sound and concrete poetry, are better than articulate speech
consciousness is bourgeois
anything which damages language is better than anything which is articulate, coherent, refined
it is necessary to smash cultural forms in order to achieve liberation
connoisseurship, discrimination, exact knowledge, are bourgeois fantasies
disrupting patterns of association is more important than creating something clear
expressing the personality, and the differentiated patterns of perception and sensibility which show the personality in poetry, is reactionary and out of date. Operations based on chance, mechanical recombination, found texts, defacing of found texts, are inherently superior.
attentiveness is academic
noise is better than sound
new patterns are always achieved through random damage and disruption and not by study and formal insight
The result of applying these rules is adequately described by the phrases about wearing a bag over your head and jumping up and down. The abandonment of judgement is a form of blindness, putting out the eyes of reason.
The comment about wearing bags over their heads is helpful because it points up the weaknesses of the whole swarm of incoherent/ revolting poets around the London scene over the decades and clears the decks so that I can recuperate the excellent poets within that scene and pierce the defences of boredom and indifference developed over the years by exposure to the interminable third- and fourth-rate products of Writers Forum and associated outlets. The situation is like the mainstream - there are literally hundreds of poets filling the scene and blocking the light, most of it is savagely tedious, but if you sift the evidence quite a few interesting poets can be found. Writing a history of the mainstream is impossible because there is too much data.
By abandoning intelligence, reason, self-criticism, rules of verbal conduct, etc., the poets mentioned were precisely acting 'with bags over their heads'. There is no point denying this. Robert may not find this 'helpful' but the truth is always helpful. You can't go 'gubba gubba gubba bing bing bing' for 30 years and expect people to see you as an intellectual. You can’t indulge in ‘Messy Play’, print the results, staple them, and have someone come along 30 years later and say they are significant.
What happened in history
I know that Nuttall, Cobbing and Mottram were around in London in the 60s and 70s, and one version of the history is that they were all in love with garbled primitivism, inarticulate, 'subversive’ language, messy play, and that this is the ‘ground floor’ of the London scene.
I lived in London for 27 years and was active on the alternative poetry scene for 20 of those years. One of the prominent features was that people had no idea of the past of that scene. Maybe there was a central project which included an 'inherited set of assumptions' (an acquis communautaire indeed) but no one seemed to know what it was. Publicity material would declare that Bob Cobbing had begun doing sound poetry in 1953 (soon after the Continental revival of it, then, so he was up to date in 1953, if less so in 1954) but there seemed to be no memory of what that entailed or any record of what it produced. I pored over the bookstalls which were such a feature of reading events, but they seemed mysteriously blank of records of the past. I found Maggie O'Sullivan's A4 pamphlets of 1986 (I did not acquire them until about 1990, regrettably) and they seemed to be the start of continuous memory. Writing an account of the London scene from 1960, or 1953, up till then was not feasible for lack of intelligible sources. Maybe there was nothing interesting up till 1985 or so, except for Fisher?
I have to say that this is remarkably different from the milieu of poets which we associate with JH Prynne, Grosseteste Review, Ferry Press (and scenes like these). The first time I got exposure to this was in around 1982, when I met John Wilkinson, but he and many others seemed to have a clear reflexive memory of what had happened and of the reasoning involved, and of course this is analogous to the clear reflexive content of the poetry involved, which is not in damaged language.
I would have written on the history of the ‘London School’ if the folklore available had produced anything intelligible and worth writing down.
There is a strand of opinion which holds that the London scene is the real avant garde and that the poetry represented in A Various Art, Conductors of Chaos, etc. is not properly avant garde and is not at that tip of an arrow moving forth into meaninglessness. This view is limited by the loss of precision into baling up dozens of individuals into a package, and by the limits of validity in classifying X or Y as belonging to one group or another. (If you start with a list of poets you will find that many of them can't be easily 'brigaded' into a group, as a basis for reckless and exciting generalisations.)
I do not buy the idea that Cobbing, crumpling up pieces of paper, photocopying them, and publishing the results, is more advanced than ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. Of course, if you do buy that idea, things must look a lot different. This is perhaps a moment of division when form is born - a watershed inscribing itself in the whole alluvial geology downstream.
How can you put faith in innovation and not have a grasp of chronology? You wouldn't know if your poem is innovative or not. In fact the detection of originality argues a level of connoisseurship which must pre-exist it - or you might simply be marching in circles like a drunk man in the darkness. You could be deluding yourself about the innovation, and checking this requires someone with a genuine reflexive knowledge of poetic style and the delicate details of change. Comparing yourself to the norms is not something you can do without reflexive knowledge. The possibility that a whole group of people in the 1990s were stuck in the cultural atmosphere of 1953 is more substantial than we would wish it.
Hit list of significant 'alternative' work from the London environment
Gavin Selerie, Azimuth. Allen Fisher, Place. Robert Sheppard, Daylight Robbery. Paul Brown, Meetings and Pursuits. Maggie O'Sullivan, A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts. Robert Hampson, Seaport. Ulli Freer, Stepping Space. John Seed, Interior in the Open Air. Adrian Clarke, Possession. Selected poems 1996-2006.
It needs a critic to come along and throw out all the bad poetry heaped up around the London School in order to reveal the excellent poetry written within the London scene to a public which hasn't noticed it.
The dislike of thought connects to the lack of interest in distinguishing between good art and bad, and connects too to a lack of complex and differentiated sensations, and then connects to a lack of interest in changes in style over time, which is why the oral folklore of the London scene is so uninteresting.
The line of reflexivity includes much of what I value about modern British poetry and moreover allows a continuity to be traced back beyond the ‘new start’ in 1959 and 1960. It is the only real political line in poetry as it strives to understand daily life in the attempt to change it. The emptying from awareness of its primary contents is not the path to a new consciousness. Rather, consciousness needs memory and self-awareness. Freedom is the exercise of judgement - the formation of judgements is the precursor to it.
Politics belongs with reason and complex language.
The idea of a polarity (in the British underground scene) in which one end believes in using the full range of language and one believes in the random, the use of mechanical processes, the unmodulated, lets us out of the misleading geographical classifiers of folklore. When we say ‘London’ we mean ‘anti-discursive hi energy constructed in small units’; instead of saying ‘Cambridge’ we would rather say ‘reflexive and with intact access to the resources of the English language’.
The whole idea of reflexivity needs exploring, as the key to mapping part of the Underground. I did work on the ALP catalogues which suggested that the 'Underground' included 2000 poets who had published at least one book or pamphlet up to 1990. The fact that this entire area was written off wholesale by people like Ian Hamilton or Peter Forbes hardly proves that all its parts resemble each other. People interested in the subject might be looking for terms for describing divisions within this vast extent.
How does this relate to the depolarisation project, where we try to grow out of the mutual hostility of the factions which lined up against each other in the 70s?
Well, the 'truth and reconciliation' process must involve truth. The attempt to join up in one community with the poetry enthusiasts outside the 'realms of the Underground' must involve a process of owning up to how bad most of the rebel/rabble heritage is. A community has been defined as a group of people who share a version of the past (or, share a past preserved in a narratives). In order to build a larger poetic community, we go through a process of filtering which builds an ever larger stock of truth.
The disputes were originally about theories of poetry. If there are so many bad poems, the theories responsible for them must be wrong, and there is no point going to war for them. Perhaps there are better theories, which regrettably most poets have failed to understand.
Generally what poets want is attention, and the fights are about shares of that. To write with studied inattentiveness is always likely to draw the audience into inattentiveness. This destroys the asset you want to acquire. This is surely a more fundamental problem than the fights which you lose.
If there were 1400 poets publishing in the Underground, it is futile to go into the new cultural process with a banner saying that they were all good. Surely there are excellent reasons for admitting that the slack, messy, inattentive Underground boys were inattentive, messy, and slack. This is the truth and will found a society of poetry in which we can talk to each other. The theories we abandon on the way to the truth probably aren't going to be very good theories to follow as paths into a joyful future. Being delusions moves them out of the frame for shining paths. In fact, if there is a communitas based on the idea that all the inattentiveness is Great Avant Garde Art then it is unsustainable and people are likely to lose faith in it and fall out of it all the time. The lie seems to be inclusive but all the falsity it entails means that the shared thing crumbles at every step. So it's better to tell the truth.
(The figure of 1400 comes from analysis of the ALP lists of 'alternative' books in print'. It is partly extrapolation because doing a count was too complicated. The larger problem is that firms signed up to AP who were publishing rather non-radical poetry.)
Of course there are good mainstream poets, as well. Discrimination can lure good art from behind the spoil tips of the inept and inattentive. In order to get to the solid ground of truth the poets who wrote in a conservative style also have to accept just how many people wrote in that style and produced bad poetry, the flimsiness of the conventional virtues. It is a sobering up process, a de-intoxication. In the end there is nothing to go to war to defend.
The recovery of the history of British poetry from 1960 to 1997 (or other limiting dates) has to deal with one case at a time. The problems with the ‘inherited narratives’ are extreme. The whole area is likely to repay reflective study. The outcome of that study is likely to be a new poetic community with a new shared past.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Poetry Review, 67/4
I have a stack of back issues of Poetry Review (PR) here and I took the time to read 67/4, 1978, edited by Harry Chambers. The message of this issue is the tedious mainstream, it stands as a symbol of how tedious the m-stream can be and gives an opportunity to think about this problem. For this number is full of very tedious poetry. Interest and innovation are securely locked out. To grasp the word ‘mainstream’ you have to get the tedium of moments like 67/4. Noticing this sheer badness is a chreode -a moment of rejection that thousands of people went through. Not just a crap moment but a moment embodying a whole universe of poetic crap. So many people had a bad experience in 1978 or so and never read any mainstream poetry over the next 30 years.
This is a moment of horror but not the whole m-stream. I can't reconstruct my reading in the 1970s. But I do know that I made voyages into British poetry of that time and found it searingly disappointing, much like 67/4. There were bad experiences with tired and conventional set-ups. I walked out, I just thought it was all crap. Of course the Underground wasn't visible to me, that came later. Scenes like this were so vile that they created the Underground. People reacted to dull scenes by walking out, in large numbers. It was inevitable that they would then aggregate, to some extent. Poetry split in two.
There is a miasma of mainstream. It appears as a swamp in which consciousness is impossible. Any attacks on the mainstream are bound to hit their target because it's too big too miss. Bad mainstream poetry fills entire counties. But it's crucial all the same to locate good m-stream poetry and recognise its difference. I made a big mistake by using the term mainstream without differentiating between the morass of tired poetry and the strands of good poetry using conventional methods. The m-stream has so much to hide, and we need better determinations of everything.
You have to read between the lines, always. Chambers only edited one issue. Maybe this means that someone at the Poetry Society, owners of the magazine, looked at it and decided that Chambers was too drab, too anti-intellectual, too unimaginative, too smug. If you look at other issues around the same time, i.e. after Mottram's departure and before they had someone permanent, the approach is more intelligent.
The past of PR is intricate. It is the centre of British poetry, the magazine read by the most people, the one with the most weight. It was a terrible magazine in the 1950s, and a problem up to about 1965. In the later 60s, it went through rapid change and improvement, in line with what English culture in general was doing. It became a completely different magazine. Between 1971 and 1977, Mottram was at the helm. He followed on from the issues immediately before his arrival, but took it further. In 22 issues over six years, he developed a radical magazine - innovative, ambitious, experimental, politicised. During the 70s, culture in Britain became caught up with politics and with bitter conflicts. The new came to seem a tangible threat, and the 'old' got organised and began a cultural purge. Mottram may have been a victim of this, to some extent.
In 1978, then, PR had an established audience who liked radical poetry and expected it. Chambers was facing this audience - most copies of the magazine went to members of the Poetry Society as part of their membership, so the audience were rather stable. Chambers chose to take them on head-on. He makes no attempt to reconcile the numerous people who would have read 67/4 and been affronted by its fatigue and conservatism. It has no overlap with the Mottram PR. He supplies an editorial made up of quotes which seems to offer an explanation of why the magazine has changed so much. Chambers quotes Karl Shapiro: ‘For the first time in history the illiterates have a literature of their own, op-pop-camp-kitsch-existentialist-occult-nihilist sweepings and swill.’ Presumably Shapiro is attacking the Beats here. But in context it emrges that Chambers means by this the whole set of poets published in the Mottram PR - more than a hundred of them. Of course he does not name any names. But the presumption must be that he is referring to the readers and poets who enjoyed Mottram's PR. This is like a declaration of war on them. The only concession to this problem of transition is his quote-editorial - which by denouncing the modern seems to be denouncing the existing readership of PR. This surely looks like an attempt to break off any relations with the audience which had developed since 1960, and to make the split permanent. And to get rid of the poets who had arrived since 1960. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Chambers actually wants to get rid of this audience. It is inaccurate to see splits in the poetry world as simply the products of malign acts by conservative editors. But actions like 67/4 help to explain why differences of taste became petrified oppositions. Surely Shapiro’s quote describes something which does not exist? why is it being resurrected at the masthead of Britain’s poetry magazine of record? If Mottram was a professor, why refer to him as an illiterate? This caricatural editorial is the only account offered of why PR changed policy so radically. What we apparently see is Chambers trying to get rid of about half the established readership of his magazine. This is why he is insulting them. The lack of continuity with the Mottram PR is shocking. This must have felt like a deliberate insult. No wonder people stomped off in a huff. Chambers was defining the hostile centre, guarded by wire from areas that might overflow into it.
Working through old PRs is productive but the real story is only present through silences and anonymous distortions. Negative generalisations. A dialogue of the unlistening. It is interesting to read the issue (68/1) which Douglas Dunn edited the next year. His editorial starts out by discussing how boring most conventional poetry is. Bravo! this man is right! Then he goes on to describe the old poetry and the new, and to suggest that we need poetry which mixes both streams, and that his issue is in fact filled with poems which do that. Then he kicks off with John Ash. Bravo again! So people who abandoned the mainstream altogether were making a false generalisation - the mainstream was a whole sea of poetry within which there were gifted poets and also open-minded editors. (The race of poets who combined the new styles with being accessible did not yet exist in 1979 - they arrived slightly later, as a group.)
The point of resurrecting this moment, of course, is to retrieve a moment of decision. The thesis is that the poetry scene was split in two sides by 1978 and that moments like this produced an enduring situation whereby one side ignored what the other side published and so entered a tunnel where the light was surrounded by darkness on every side.
There is a review of Charles Causley which includes a weird excursus which explains that we did not need a renaissance in the 14th century because there had already been a renaissance in the 12th century. This is bizarre to read. It is there because the reviewer is afraid of someone saying Causley was out of date. Actually – Causley was completely out of date in 1978, this is obvious. His poetry had dried up. The people who would have said this appear in the magazine, but only as ghosts. They are being slapped down throughout the issue but they never get the chance to speak. There is another weird moment in this review where the author abandons Causley altogether in order to denounce the 1975 Cambridge Poetry Festival and the 'Black Mountain' poets who read there. The denunciation seems to me factually wrong. Also, I don't think that the poets there in 1975 had more than a tiny amount to do with an American college which closed down in the 1950s. The remarks simply seem like a way of telling the reader that everything which has happened since 1960 can be ignored and actually didn't happen. I think this goes beyond thoughtful connoisseur chit-chat and is more like an attempt to define the previous readers of Poetry Review as the enemy.
It is with some reluctance that I identify anonymous caricatures as the phantom of a debate - as the only way in which critics within one faction acknowledge that other factions exist and produce poetry and have arguments sustaining their position. The bulk denunciation reflects the fact that the person speaking has not read the poetry they are denouncing. This is the landscape of miasma - you simply ignore what you don’t have allegiance to. It seems that the counter-attack on innovation in the 1970s and 1980s was not based on contemporary innovation but on the classic period of ‘high’ modernism - work from the 1920s or 1930s. The good part of this is that simply having a debate, where two or more sides had actually read the texts which the other sides like, would be a huge improvement on what we have had in the recent past. Maybe we could start simply by giving up miasma as a reaction.
Some things have changed since the twelfth century. For one thing, French stopped being the culturally dominant language in England. If poetry is subject to organic growth, an editor would not have a cut-off point after which he accepts nothing. The cut-off point in fact sets up a line of division in poetry, denying what continuity we might find for ourselves. I don’t doubt that Causley uses ‘mediaeval forms of versification’, drawn from folk songs. The question is why he couldn’t make anything of what elements had reached English poetry since the Renaissance.
The dispute at the Poetry Society in 1977 reflected a division which already existed. It cannot have been the moment when that division emerged. The split was a process, not an event. However, English society in general was politically split during the 1970s and flowed back together during the 1980s. If poetry was slow to follow suit, we must suspect that some individuals manipulated the situation in order to achieve local authority, which the disappearance of factions would have caused to vanish.
Division is natural. The strange thing is how poetic worlds achieve solidarity when they include so many disparate individuals. The answer is that solidarity is natural, poetry is all about communication and the communication brings people together. It is natural for poetry to live in diffuse, tolerant, fluently verbal, aggregates of friends. Mediation was missed at the time. We can try to do it now. We can even take it to another level. How should editors manage cultural relations?
I intend to go on reading back issues of PR. I find the improvement in circa 1965-71 especially interesting. But the issues over a couple of years after Mottram are also interesting, because they are so varied, as if the Society was headless and casting around for a policy.
Maybe you want to define 95% of the poets around as the Enemy. Even if you do that, you have to accept that producing caricatures of their work and speech, as in wartime propaganda, is not intellectually valid. Maybe this is what the advent of 'theory' has brought to us – that you cannot remove agency from people, that there are no ideas which nobody owns, and that those people have some right in the linguistic space if you are going to bring their ideas into play enough to attack them. Crushing large numbers of people down into caricatures is a habit which needs to be discarded. I believe this is what 'theory' was saying.
This comes with the usual caution, like an anti-piracy warning. This is that people involved in the 1970s during a cultural crisis became polarised, but this does not mean that everyone younger also became polarised. I suspect the whole struggle seemed less real to people who turned up from say 1983 onwards.
I suppose that organising debates is very complicated, and that by not having any debate a great deal of time has been saved over the past 35 years. Yes, but fundamentally that time had to be spent and avoiding debate has had all kinds of spreading and disastrous effects which no one could possibly want.
This is a moment of horror but not the whole m-stream. I can't reconstruct my reading in the 1970s. But I do know that I made voyages into British poetry of that time and found it searingly disappointing, much like 67/4. There were bad experiences with tired and conventional set-ups. I walked out, I just thought it was all crap. Of course the Underground wasn't visible to me, that came later. Scenes like this were so vile that they created the Underground. People reacted to dull scenes by walking out, in large numbers. It was inevitable that they would then aggregate, to some extent. Poetry split in two.
There is a miasma of mainstream. It appears as a swamp in which consciousness is impossible. Any attacks on the mainstream are bound to hit their target because it's too big too miss. Bad mainstream poetry fills entire counties. But it's crucial all the same to locate good m-stream poetry and recognise its difference. I made a big mistake by using the term mainstream without differentiating between the morass of tired poetry and the strands of good poetry using conventional methods. The m-stream has so much to hide, and we need better determinations of everything.
You have to read between the lines, always. Chambers only edited one issue. Maybe this means that someone at the Poetry Society, owners of the magazine, looked at it and decided that Chambers was too drab, too anti-intellectual, too unimaginative, too smug. If you look at other issues around the same time, i.e. after Mottram's departure and before they had someone permanent, the approach is more intelligent.
The past of PR is intricate. It is the centre of British poetry, the magazine read by the most people, the one with the most weight. It was a terrible magazine in the 1950s, and a problem up to about 1965. In the later 60s, it went through rapid change and improvement, in line with what English culture in general was doing. It became a completely different magazine. Between 1971 and 1977, Mottram was at the helm. He followed on from the issues immediately before his arrival, but took it further. In 22 issues over six years, he developed a radical magazine - innovative, ambitious, experimental, politicised. During the 70s, culture in Britain became caught up with politics and with bitter conflicts. The new came to seem a tangible threat, and the 'old' got organised and began a cultural purge. Mottram may have been a victim of this, to some extent.
In 1978, then, PR had an established audience who liked radical poetry and expected it. Chambers was facing this audience - most copies of the magazine went to members of the Poetry Society as part of their membership, so the audience were rather stable. Chambers chose to take them on head-on. He makes no attempt to reconcile the numerous people who would have read 67/4 and been affronted by its fatigue and conservatism. It has no overlap with the Mottram PR. He supplies an editorial made up of quotes which seems to offer an explanation of why the magazine has changed so much. Chambers quotes Karl Shapiro: ‘For the first time in history the illiterates have a literature of their own, op-pop-camp-kitsch-existentialist-occult-nihilist sweepings and swill.’ Presumably Shapiro is attacking the Beats here. But in context it emrges that Chambers means by this the whole set of poets published in the Mottram PR - more than a hundred of them. Of course he does not name any names. But the presumption must be that he is referring to the readers and poets who enjoyed Mottram's PR. This is like a declaration of war on them. The only concession to this problem of transition is his quote-editorial - which by denouncing the modern seems to be denouncing the existing readership of PR. This surely looks like an attempt to break off any relations with the audience which had developed since 1960, and to make the split permanent. And to get rid of the poets who had arrived since 1960. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Chambers actually wants to get rid of this audience. It is inaccurate to see splits in the poetry world as simply the products of malign acts by conservative editors. But actions like 67/4 help to explain why differences of taste became petrified oppositions. Surely Shapiro’s quote describes something which does not exist? why is it being resurrected at the masthead of Britain’s poetry magazine of record? If Mottram was a professor, why refer to him as an illiterate? This caricatural editorial is the only account offered of why PR changed policy so radically. What we apparently see is Chambers trying to get rid of about half the established readership of his magazine. This is why he is insulting them. The lack of continuity with the Mottram PR is shocking. This must have felt like a deliberate insult. No wonder people stomped off in a huff. Chambers was defining the hostile centre, guarded by wire from areas that might overflow into it.
Working through old PRs is productive but the real story is only present through silences and anonymous distortions. Negative generalisations. A dialogue of the unlistening. It is interesting to read the issue (68/1) which Douglas Dunn edited the next year. His editorial starts out by discussing how boring most conventional poetry is. Bravo! this man is right! Then he goes on to describe the old poetry and the new, and to suggest that we need poetry which mixes both streams, and that his issue is in fact filled with poems which do that. Then he kicks off with John Ash. Bravo again! So people who abandoned the mainstream altogether were making a false generalisation - the mainstream was a whole sea of poetry within which there were gifted poets and also open-minded editors. (The race of poets who combined the new styles with being accessible did not yet exist in 1979 - they arrived slightly later, as a group.)
The point of resurrecting this moment, of course, is to retrieve a moment of decision. The thesis is that the poetry scene was split in two sides by 1978 and that moments like this produced an enduring situation whereby one side ignored what the other side published and so entered a tunnel where the light was surrounded by darkness on every side.
There is a review of Charles Causley which includes a weird excursus which explains that we did not need a renaissance in the 14th century because there had already been a renaissance in the 12th century. This is bizarre to read. It is there because the reviewer is afraid of someone saying Causley was out of date. Actually – Causley was completely out of date in 1978, this is obvious. His poetry had dried up. The people who would have said this appear in the magazine, but only as ghosts. They are being slapped down throughout the issue but they never get the chance to speak. There is another weird moment in this review where the author abandons Causley altogether in order to denounce the 1975 Cambridge Poetry Festival and the 'Black Mountain' poets who read there. The denunciation seems to me factually wrong. Also, I don't think that the poets there in 1975 had more than a tiny amount to do with an American college which closed down in the 1950s. The remarks simply seem like a way of telling the reader that everything which has happened since 1960 can be ignored and actually didn't happen. I think this goes beyond thoughtful connoisseur chit-chat and is more like an attempt to define the previous readers of Poetry Review as the enemy.
It is with some reluctance that I identify anonymous caricatures as the phantom of a debate - as the only way in which critics within one faction acknowledge that other factions exist and produce poetry and have arguments sustaining their position. The bulk denunciation reflects the fact that the person speaking has not read the poetry they are denouncing. This is the landscape of miasma - you simply ignore what you don’t have allegiance to. It seems that the counter-attack on innovation in the 1970s and 1980s was not based on contemporary innovation but on the classic period of ‘high’ modernism - work from the 1920s or 1930s. The good part of this is that simply having a debate, where two or more sides had actually read the texts which the other sides like, would be a huge improvement on what we have had in the recent past. Maybe we could start simply by giving up miasma as a reaction.
Some things have changed since the twelfth century. For one thing, French stopped being the culturally dominant language in England. If poetry is subject to organic growth, an editor would not have a cut-off point after which he accepts nothing. The cut-off point in fact sets up a line of division in poetry, denying what continuity we might find for ourselves. I don’t doubt that Causley uses ‘mediaeval forms of versification’, drawn from folk songs. The question is why he couldn’t make anything of what elements had reached English poetry since the Renaissance.
The dispute at the Poetry Society in 1977 reflected a division which already existed. It cannot have been the moment when that division emerged. The split was a process, not an event. However, English society in general was politically split during the 1970s and flowed back together during the 1980s. If poetry was slow to follow suit, we must suspect that some individuals manipulated the situation in order to achieve local authority, which the disappearance of factions would have caused to vanish.
Division is natural. The strange thing is how poetic worlds achieve solidarity when they include so many disparate individuals. The answer is that solidarity is natural, poetry is all about communication and the communication brings people together. It is natural for poetry to live in diffuse, tolerant, fluently verbal, aggregates of friends. Mediation was missed at the time. We can try to do it now. We can even take it to another level. How should editors manage cultural relations?
I intend to go on reading back issues of PR. I find the improvement in circa 1965-71 especially interesting. But the issues over a couple of years after Mottram are also interesting, because they are so varied, as if the Society was headless and casting around for a policy.
Maybe you want to define 95% of the poets around as the Enemy. Even if you do that, you have to accept that producing caricatures of their work and speech, as in wartime propaganda, is not intellectually valid. Maybe this is what the advent of 'theory' has brought to us – that you cannot remove agency from people, that there are no ideas which nobody owns, and that those people have some right in the linguistic space if you are going to bring their ideas into play enough to attack them. Crushing large numbers of people down into caricatures is a habit which needs to be discarded. I believe this is what 'theory' was saying.
This comes with the usual caution, like an anti-piracy warning. This is that people involved in the 1970s during a cultural crisis became polarised, but this does not mean that everyone younger also became polarised. I suspect the whole struggle seemed less real to people who turned up from say 1983 onwards.
I suppose that organising debates is very complicated, and that by not having any debate a great deal of time has been saved over the past 35 years. Yes, but fundamentally that time had to be spent and avoiding debate has had all kinds of spreading and disastrous effects which no one could possibly want.
Friday, 2 April 2010
What is shitgaze?
Another attempt to improve the vocabulary we use: m-stream (mainstream)
What is shitgaze? In about 1992, there was a wave of bands (notably Ride, Sundial, Bevis Frond) who were known as shoegazing because their slow, dreamy, rather droning music encouraged a sort of trance in the listener. The term was popularised by a radio show called Out on Blue Six, which broadcast a lot of this music. In about 2008, there was a sub-genre which continued the droning but also paid tribute to psychedelic pioneers of around 1970 (notably 'Oar' by Skip Spence and 'The madcap laughs' by Syd Barrett) who were extremely lo-fi and technically restricted. This subgenre was therefore known as shitgaze. I am afraid that this flexibility in rock speak shows up the poetic vocabulary as shallow and underdeveloped. I'm a little bit grebo. Yep, that’s good shitgazin’. Where the collective life is so thin the problems of communicating for an individual critic are very serious. No one would claim that you can engage in accurate description where the terminology hasn't been worked out. No doubt there are terms for poetry as it was in 1850 AD, or 300 BC, but who would suppose that they are revealing or clinching in the present state of culture? We need more descriptive terms for modern poetry. The agreement embodied in those terms would grant us a stretch of dry land, raised above the tides of incommunicable subjectivity. M-stream is not such a precise term as shitgaze, all the same it is useful in mutual understanding. Let’s talk about it!
Why is there a m-stream? originally this was was just the area demarcated by the various inhibitions of poetry editors. Poetry was published inside magazines which up to a certain point were hostile to poetry. Research shows that people tend to choose newspapers which reflect their own political attitudes. This implies that there is a level at which a newspaper is not conveying information but is filled with something which, if energy tends to change things, is the opposite of energy: a dense dull layer of stability, something which bounces off a perfectly dull and plane mirror to produce a flawless mirror image of itself.
It also implies that newspapers can maximise their circulation by writing to a set of fixed rules which are fairly clear to the journalists and also to the readers. Material in a newspaper has usually gone through an impressive convergence process. In the upshot, every edition of a given newspaper bears massive resemblances to every other edition. The ‘new’ bit occurs only a tightly defined area.
Following the design philosophy of magazines (and this applied to broadcast media as well), information was chopped up into digestible chunks and homogenised by a simple procedure of taking out anything complicated or original. When applied to poems, this produced a distinctive design which could fit inside the niche allowed by editors in terms of length and palatability and could also show darwinian features that adapted to these limits. These would include a kind of smartness, where a miniaturised and showy originality is used that fits into a small space, and a braying attack on ideas, which marries wonderfully with a text hole which does not allow for ideas. If someone had a completely conventional middle-class lifestyle, and wrote poems in which the grievances and complacency of middle-class life predominated and were as it were free information, they could reach the bored audience very quickly - albeit with information they already had. This was the poetry of domestic anecdote. Insofar as poetry achieved goodness by originality, paradox, disruption of prevailing ideas, inconclusiveness, complexity, etc. it was excluded from these niches.
The limits were unconscious design features and applied at all levels of the work of verbal art. They were limits of probability - i.e. the raw material of the poem was normally stock footage from newspapers and so on and the opinions passed by the poet were normally the stock m/c opinions. As the poem deviated from this comfortably familiar pabulum, it became less likely that the editor would accept it. The limits were suppressor switches and their existence was itself suppressed. This is so even though editors thought they were looking for originality.
Newspapers have a stratum of unchanging signal but that does not prevent them from publishing news. The static energy is as it were deep water which carries the level of variance. It is easy to underrate the complexity of language. The level at which poetry simply repeats what you already know, at which it shows stock footage (and repeats the stories you have just read on the news pages of the magazine), may be pleasurable and even necessary. Poetry can involve a wandering out into idle contemplation of things you already know, with detachment, lack of explicit purpose, detachment, etc., providing the special poetic features. If you are delivering stock footage (along the lines of massacring Muslims in Bosnia is wrong, bureaucrats are conventional, hedges are rural, poverty in Africa is bad) it may not go at all badly, but if you then try to make it all more efficient by speeding up the cycle, by shortening the gap between the stock footage and the evocation of it, you may end up with - nothing.
The concept for The Long 1950s has to do with the m-stream but also to do with my own past career of attacking it. In FCon (written circa 1993, published 2003) I mounted a large-scale attack on it, which startled quite a few people who had no concept that there was anything which was not m-stream. This increased the polarisation on the scene. In Heresy (published 2009) I veered round and attacked the polarisation, saying that this lowered the quality of information available to the market and damaged the feelings of collective harmony and symbolic sharing which were essential to the poetry experience, and that we had to move on from obsolete positions. That feeling was partly switched on by reading Anthony Thwaite, circa 2005, and realising that I really liked his poetry. In 2005-08 I was agitated by a wish to repeat the win and find other m-stream poets who could actually write, which led to a lot of digging and a few positive results.
To drag myself away from my own history, the problem of the mainstream has to do with this notion of stock footage. The rejection of the poetry which is rejected is because it is seen as lacking neatness. It is sprawling and confused. Poets refuse to rewrite it to become neat because they see great value in the features which challenge the stock footage, which either make it more vivid and detailed (so making it longer) or disrupt it and smash a hole inside which something else can be imagined (causing us effort).
The difference between the situation in the 1950s and 1960s and the 19th century, or the deep past, was the business efficiency of the media in the modern phase. The degree of homogenisation of all material in a magazine to avoid bumps, the design of all the editorial content to reflect and support the advertising material, the reduction of length to avoid any engagement, were reaching a new intensity. Media design was becoming a technology on a par with, say, designing a car engine.
This designed quality was higher attention to detail rather than simply apathy, and poetry could have benefited from it. If we look at the demon pop world of the 1960s, we may notice that the key product of the time was the single, which the business prescribed as being not much more than 3 minutes long. This was a magic moment for popular music, and the deterioration of quality and universal resonance once songwriters were not completely focussed on writing the perfect 3 minute single is obvious to all. If someone in 1966 was writing compact and clear poems that took 3 minutes to read, it would be quite possible for them to be as brilliant as singles by the Beatles or the Beach Boys, whose simplicity and coherence were obviously transcendent virtues.
Equally, those 3 minute singles were highly differentiated from each other, and a m-stream poem would not have to resemble all other simple poems in order to pass the restrictions of the editorial regimes even though these had a net homogenising effect.
The nature of the conventions varies with the makeup of the magazine. For example, a lot of poems were published in Critical Quarterly or Stand rather than the Listener. It is important to recall that the central thrust of the Eng Lit academics, certainly of those who graduated in the 1940s and 1950s, was to resist the onsurge of the mass media, seen as crude and levelling. (When I mention that generational limit, I am pointing to changes in the collective views of academics which all would agree are of great importance, even if a precise definition is difficult.) What those magazines were marketing was in fact toughness and moral and intellectual aspiration, values which were seriously out of tune with the London media (and their preoccupation with advertising). The kind of poetry which they favoured can be called academic existentialism. (More discussion in 'The Long 1950s'.) In fact the noun toughness can usefully be seen in contrast with sweetness, in a mutually defining pair, where ‘sweet’ is taken to mean high sugar content and low taste, and to define the mass media. Because there were numerous magazines which published poetry, and had more than a few dozen readers, we can see the official world as being multipolar, with an element of competition by differentiation between the rival magazines. (U-stream stands for 'underground'.)
If the dividing line between m-stream and u-stream was simply what editors found acceptable, there should not be two separate worlds but a continuum in which poets might operate in both worlds according to the complexity of the particular poem they had a idea for. The notion of an empty gap separating the two domains, which would allow a clear definition of terms, would seem unlikely. It emerges - if it does - if we consider two centres of attraction which poets converge on: if two poets are streaming towards different centres at high speeds, they will move away from each other and so an empty conceptual space can open up between them. Something similar applies if you find three, seven, or fifteen different centres of attraction. The separation emerges also if you have a scheme in which mainstream poets are suppressing vital impulses in order to fit into hostile media, compromising artistic values, so that a poet changes radically as soon as they stop compromising.
Editors in magazines that have to sell to survive, in a news retailing environment which stresses the new all the time, are attuned to fashion. This heavily implies that the boundaries could not stay in the same place over 40 years and so that the m-stream itself could not remain the same over such a long time. This draws on a following question, viz. when and how did it change, and following chapters will make remarks which shed some light on this. Objects typically have shapes defined by boundaries: if the boundaries of the m-stream shifted, according to the attitudes of different editors in post and fluctuating media fashions, then you can argue that it has no shape and is not really an object. Visibly, some editors had a wide spectrum approach to poetry and dropped most of the restrictions. Also, fashion could work in favour of poetry by picking up something which was brilliant and making that flavour of the month. Editors weren’t forced to choose boring and conservative poetry all the time.
If you have very little time to make your case it is efficient to bring in preset contents which can be delivered rapidly. The classic way of doing this is to deliver a form of accepted prestige and envy, and the normal form of this in English poetry has been the Oxford manner. The concept of leisure/ privilege/ brilliance/ knowing famous people/ being cultured is familiar to everyone and can be delivered with remarkable speed by deploying signals which have been used thousands of times before. This may not be such a good idea for the poem. (There is a chapter on the Oxford style in 'The Long 1950s'). Arguments about this are potentially endless. For example, slow delivery of effects is hardly a virtue in itself. Or, prestige is evidently quite fundamental in art and is hardly separate from the economy of art even in the Bronze Age. You can’t really enact a rule which gets rid of it, but at the same time it mortgages the work of art to something outside art, and what is more it puts hundreds of poets at a strange disadvantage because they have not been to Oxford. To denounce Oxford poetry for delivering a feeling of pleasure and freedom and sociability in or near Oxford is stupid because you could equally well denounce the Beach Boys for delivering quite similar Arcadian adventures about the beaches of Southern California, which equally sold around the world and are still popular forty years later. Famously, there were surf bands in Michigan when the craze was strong. The deployment of simple strong reactions in poetry is perfectly normal - they are just one tier of possible sources of meaning, they can't be banned. However poems which deploy them and which don't have the patience and persistence to create meaning complexes which are unique to the poem and unfamiliar to the reader may die a dreadful death of gluttony and apathy.
Similar concerns of rapid delivery apply to features like the use of stock footage and the imposition of the poet’s personality. Each gets there rapidly but when you get there it may not feel like you’ve gone very far.
If we compare m-stream and u-stream it is obvious that they do not represent complementary opposites and do not represent two halves of an original whole. If you assemble a cluster of texts from each side, no kind of symmetry is to be found and so compare and contrast are actions you can scarcely carry out. I think the idea of neatness brings out far-reaching oppositions of temperament. People who like neatness behave differently, enjoy different levels of pattern, from people who like the unpredictable and complex. I think this one opposition correlates with a lot of features of poetic taste. But, to be honest, you are going to do better analysing 40 features and paired oppositions than just one.
My belief is that the concept of mainstream has no real validity until the 1950s, and was conjured into being by the ejection from public view of the New Romantic group in around 1948. This was an event taking place on many levels and involved a kind of consent from most of the poets thus ejected: they stopped writing rather than constitute an underground (although in fact a magazine like Nimbus or Nine can be thought of as an underground around 1951 or 1953). Unpublished work by poets like Charles Madge, Joseph Macleod and Lynette Roberts was a feature of the 1950s but poets rejected by serious editors- by TS Eliot in this case - usually gave up writing poetry. It is striking how few older poets were picked up by the underground when it began around 1960, or was thriving around 1965. A theorist could conjure up hundreds of conjectural divisions in the field of poetry without too much effort. The u-stream: m-stream opposition is the key one because it is one which thousands of people have believed in, it is a lived in distinction. It was a choice which large numbers of readers identified with. During the 1960s, British poetry developed an outside, an external settlement which had walked out but which hadn't given up cultural creation.
The split is very hard to project back into earlier phases of English history. Its growth into something unmistakable and long-lived is related to the intensification of the marketing discipline in the world of periodicals, with the increase of advertising revenue and the rapid technical development of the market research area which fed the advertising industry and led its clients steadily towards it. Poetry became an area of underdevelopment, of brilliant weeds and eccentricity: increasingly, the sales profiling side of the business gave poetry editors more specific restrictions, in area and ideology. Arguably, the editors and their poets of choice also went through a rapid evolution, a modernising growth towards rationality and efficient self-profiling. The boundary lines around the official media oscillate between those set by the arbitrary, aesthetic wishes of the editors, which fluctuate all the time; and the rational, accurately calculated, sales drive of the business units within magazines (and, equally, book retailers, publishers, radio producers, etc.) It is difficult to say which is more in control.
Empson argued persuasively that ambiguity was a feature of great literature, Cleanth Brooks argued that paradox was central to great poetry: but Empson wrote very clearly and Brooks made statements which were clear and not reversible. No amount of dislike of the m-stream, as represented by poets like Larkin, Harrison, or Carol Ann Duffy can wipe out basic artistic rules like the need for clarity, for rapidity to the extent that this avoids lagging, plodding, bogging down, etc. Faced with the complexity of the universe and society as givens, poetry will seek out scenes and images which are unambiguous and which exude clarity at every point and which lead to definite conclusions. If m-stream poets succeed at doing this they will have written good poems in doing so. Readers ask what the point of a passage is, and any passage whose point they can’t determine may give them feelings of frustration and blankness rather than admiration at what might be depth. The archaic literary virtues don’t walk off stage just because the public is more educated and has more leisure to take on literary complexity. It is normal to rewrite poems to make the emphases clearer and to eliminate information which does not contribute to the main flow of sense.
The breakout of rock music from the restraints of the 3-minute single and daytime radio was driven by mighty energies and has a strong relevance to the era of poetry we are considering. Most people would acknowledge that the album has a right to exist - which was an avant garde idea, within pop music, in 1965. Music got more complicated, so did poetry, which may always have stayed close to music. But the advent of the album was followed by the era of progressive music and by hundreds of extraordinarily bad albums, including many double albums. Something of the same problem may have followed poetry around. A theme of The Long 1950s will be the reaction of poetry against the combination of tendentious leftism and artistic experiment which was such a feature of the 1970s, and the advent of something more pleasant, less intellectually demanding, and sweeter in several senses.
The thesis of 'The Long 1950s' is that the limits of the generation who came to power in the 1950s dominated the scene until the 1980s and that the scene loosened up and became less repressive during the course of the 1980s. The sixties saw quite a few poets arriving who used the new pop style, and after a while quite a few poets who were using new innovative styles. However, it would be incorrect to present these as dominating the field, as after all the bulk of the poetry being reviewed and (probably) read was something much more formal and conservative, and linked in fact to the numbers and cultural power of the academic world. Eng Lit graduates were prone to write poetry and also to buy poetry books. The manner they usually chose was within the limits set by the Movement. To be sure, this line was becoming less fashionable from 1964 at latest, as shown by the development of John Wain, a key participant in New Lines. However, it was something which the poets in question absorbed in their student days and clung on to. Whatever label we assign, this was a hegemony inside which poets could write fluently and without having to think too hard. We can dig up whole rows of anthologies in which almost all the poems fit under the rim of a not very large cup, grouping together poems which seem to speak with a single voice and which perhaps derive their authority from that lack of individuality. I think it is fair to say that the strength of this poetry was more that it expressed professional solidarity among the kind of people who ran the Eng Lit world than that it reached any artistic heights.
English poetry had a continuous history of over a thousand years before 1950, so it is puzzling how a group of poets could actually invent norms which were accepted by a wide range of the public, including readers older than they were, and reach centre stage. I think we have to speculate that just as the 1960s favoured young and hedonistic and excitable people interested in clothes so the 1950s favoured conformists who liked life inside organisations, and the atmosphere of the time fostered people who could combine a very high degree of conformism with an element of ruthless careerism. The damage done by being accused of breaching the norms was so frightening that it allowed these partially hidden insiders to develop and push new norms. The norms stayed in place because the rule makers had a gift of political insight. It was like the invention of the corporation, which to a significant degree was also a product of the 1950s.
I tried to narrow down the time window for the paradigm shift which I keep talking about, but I couldn't find a tenable proxy index and to be honest the sources I tapped to track year by year changes were too boring to spend days churning through. Positive evidence for the persistence of the "long 1950s" is easier to find. I don't think this is controversial any more, but it is right to point to the evidence. Specific sources would be the Morrison/Motion anthology of 1982, the Schmidt anthology of 1983, and the 1980 anthology by Enright. Evidently the conservative/academic poetry of 'empirical lyricism' and 'domestic anecdote' was still at centre stage. Slightly earlier, there was the series of 'Poetry Dimension' anthologies, which was published through the early 70s and triumphantly excluded anything outside the mainstream conventions. We do know that there was a radical wave sweeping through English poetry, this seems like the principal thing happening in the 1970s in retrospect, but this series ignores that wholesale and shows that mainstream poetry was being published in large quantities during the decade. A magazine such as Poetry Nation was completely dedicated to extolling the Movement and neo-Movement orthodoxy against enemies who were allowed on stage only as a rumour and a spectre. The most robust and durable finding seems to be that the conventional poetry which moved to the centre in the 1950s was still at the centre in the 1980s and that its stylistic rivals were always the losers during that time. The praise for Kuppner in the 1983 anthology, before his first book had come out, seems like a herald of change. [more discussion of this 1983 anthology on this website]
The domestic anecdote and toughness are not the only components of the mainstream. If you look at an anthology like Poetry Dimension 2 (ed. Abse, 1974?), there are variations of tone even though the poets allowed entry stick within a narrow range of stylistic possibilities. In the period, there were also people imitating Housman, Tennyson, folksong, or Christian hymns. Not all poets were academics, and there were ranges of colloquial or Pop poetry which had nothing to do with the heritage of Close Reading. These lines do not seem to me especially productive.
I would like to propose a few more terms for classifying poetic productions.
proll on proll off
tedious proletarian style based on trivial sound echoes and unproductively simple semantic oppositions frequently referring to lorries and suitable for delivering at high volume while on a weekend trip to a foreign country
National Trust poem
style based on acts of solemn auto-veneration by the poet whose ego is implicitly taken to be rare, precious, and fragile, if not necessarily also small. Indeed, it may be of monumental size. The reader is supposed to spend their Sunday afternoons standing behind the red velvet ropes, venerating, refurbishing, coddling, these frail relics of a better day, in a collaborative way. Almost as a national duty.
auto exoticism
Third World poem treating the poet's experiences in meaningless decorative and infantile terms in the idiom of a travel poster advertising a beach holiday
sectarian-contrarian aka centre of insolence
Believe that they have a cluster of techniques which allows authentic living and authentic writing (this is the sect part) and that everyone else has a cluster of assumptions which makes authentic living or writing impossible. Thus happiness in this alienated state is simply an illusion. Language is supposed to communicate but never does. People never understand each other. Consciousness is laughably flawed. Buses are supposed to be big and red but really they aren’t and people only think they are because they are blinded by lazy habits of perception.
The problem with joining this school is that everyone - especially all poets and all readers of poetry - wants to be in this stance some of the time, and they hate someone trying to take it over.
The nondiscursive
Poetry without grammar (or, probably, much respect for the law)
***
This got taken out of 'The Long 1950s' because I thought it was going to annoy people, also because it wasn't directly about poems. I think the idea was to increase mutual understanding and so reduce hostility. As if that would reduce hostility. Bah.
"Shoegazing" was also so called because it tended to be based on "drones", so the guitarists were not looking at the fretboard but at the effects pedals, which were mostly on the floor by their shoes. The Spacemen Three probably led the way for the style, and their first recordings were in 1986.
What is shitgaze? In about 1992, there was a wave of bands (notably Ride, Sundial, Bevis Frond) who were known as shoegazing because their slow, dreamy, rather droning music encouraged a sort of trance in the listener. The term was popularised by a radio show called Out on Blue Six, which broadcast a lot of this music. In about 2008, there was a sub-genre which continued the droning but also paid tribute to psychedelic pioneers of around 1970 (notably 'Oar' by Skip Spence and 'The madcap laughs' by Syd Barrett) who were extremely lo-fi and technically restricted. This subgenre was therefore known as shitgaze. I am afraid that this flexibility in rock speak shows up the poetic vocabulary as shallow and underdeveloped. I'm a little bit grebo. Yep, that’s good shitgazin’. Where the collective life is so thin the problems of communicating for an individual critic are very serious. No one would claim that you can engage in accurate description where the terminology hasn't been worked out. No doubt there are terms for poetry as it was in 1850 AD, or 300 BC, but who would suppose that they are revealing or clinching in the present state of culture? We need more descriptive terms for modern poetry. The agreement embodied in those terms would grant us a stretch of dry land, raised above the tides of incommunicable subjectivity. M-stream is not such a precise term as shitgaze, all the same it is useful in mutual understanding. Let’s talk about it!
Why is there a m-stream? originally this was was just the area demarcated by the various inhibitions of poetry editors. Poetry was published inside magazines which up to a certain point were hostile to poetry. Research shows that people tend to choose newspapers which reflect their own political attitudes. This implies that there is a level at which a newspaper is not conveying information but is filled with something which, if energy tends to change things, is the opposite of energy: a dense dull layer of stability, something which bounces off a perfectly dull and plane mirror to produce a flawless mirror image of itself.
It also implies that newspapers can maximise their circulation by writing to a set of fixed rules which are fairly clear to the journalists and also to the readers. Material in a newspaper has usually gone through an impressive convergence process. In the upshot, every edition of a given newspaper bears massive resemblances to every other edition. The ‘new’ bit occurs only a tightly defined area.
Following the design philosophy of magazines (and this applied to broadcast media as well), information was chopped up into digestible chunks and homogenised by a simple procedure of taking out anything complicated or original. When applied to poems, this produced a distinctive design which could fit inside the niche allowed by editors in terms of length and palatability and could also show darwinian features that adapted to these limits. These would include a kind of smartness, where a miniaturised and showy originality is used that fits into a small space, and a braying attack on ideas, which marries wonderfully with a text hole which does not allow for ideas. If someone had a completely conventional middle-class lifestyle, and wrote poems in which the grievances and complacency of middle-class life predominated and were as it were free information, they could reach the bored audience very quickly - albeit with information they already had. This was the poetry of domestic anecdote. Insofar as poetry achieved goodness by originality, paradox, disruption of prevailing ideas, inconclusiveness, complexity, etc. it was excluded from these niches.
The limits were unconscious design features and applied at all levels of the work of verbal art. They were limits of probability - i.e. the raw material of the poem was normally stock footage from newspapers and so on and the opinions passed by the poet were normally the stock m/c opinions. As the poem deviated from this comfortably familiar pabulum, it became less likely that the editor would accept it. The limits were suppressor switches and their existence was itself suppressed. This is so even though editors thought they were looking for originality.
Newspapers have a stratum of unchanging signal but that does not prevent them from publishing news. The static energy is as it were deep water which carries the level of variance. It is easy to underrate the complexity of language. The level at which poetry simply repeats what you already know, at which it shows stock footage (and repeats the stories you have just read on the news pages of the magazine), may be pleasurable and even necessary. Poetry can involve a wandering out into idle contemplation of things you already know, with detachment, lack of explicit purpose, detachment, etc., providing the special poetic features. If you are delivering stock footage (along the lines of massacring Muslims in Bosnia is wrong, bureaucrats are conventional, hedges are rural, poverty in Africa is bad) it may not go at all badly, but if you then try to make it all more efficient by speeding up the cycle, by shortening the gap between the stock footage and the evocation of it, you may end up with - nothing.
The concept for The Long 1950s has to do with the m-stream but also to do with my own past career of attacking it. In FCon (written circa 1993, published 2003) I mounted a large-scale attack on it, which startled quite a few people who had no concept that there was anything which was not m-stream. This increased the polarisation on the scene. In Heresy (published 2009) I veered round and attacked the polarisation, saying that this lowered the quality of information available to the market and damaged the feelings of collective harmony and symbolic sharing which were essential to the poetry experience, and that we had to move on from obsolete positions. That feeling was partly switched on by reading Anthony Thwaite, circa 2005, and realising that I really liked his poetry. In 2005-08 I was agitated by a wish to repeat the win and find other m-stream poets who could actually write, which led to a lot of digging and a few positive results.
To drag myself away from my own history, the problem of the mainstream has to do with this notion of stock footage. The rejection of the poetry which is rejected is because it is seen as lacking neatness. It is sprawling and confused. Poets refuse to rewrite it to become neat because they see great value in the features which challenge the stock footage, which either make it more vivid and detailed (so making it longer) or disrupt it and smash a hole inside which something else can be imagined (causing us effort).
The difference between the situation in the 1950s and 1960s and the 19th century, or the deep past, was the business efficiency of the media in the modern phase. The degree of homogenisation of all material in a magazine to avoid bumps, the design of all the editorial content to reflect and support the advertising material, the reduction of length to avoid any engagement, were reaching a new intensity. Media design was becoming a technology on a par with, say, designing a car engine.
This designed quality was higher attention to detail rather than simply apathy, and poetry could have benefited from it. If we look at the demon pop world of the 1960s, we may notice that the key product of the time was the single, which the business prescribed as being not much more than 3 minutes long. This was a magic moment for popular music, and the deterioration of quality and universal resonance once songwriters were not completely focussed on writing the perfect 3 minute single is obvious to all. If someone in 1966 was writing compact and clear poems that took 3 minutes to read, it would be quite possible for them to be as brilliant as singles by the Beatles or the Beach Boys, whose simplicity and coherence were obviously transcendent virtues.
Equally, those 3 minute singles were highly differentiated from each other, and a m-stream poem would not have to resemble all other simple poems in order to pass the restrictions of the editorial regimes even though these had a net homogenising effect.
The nature of the conventions varies with the makeup of the magazine. For example, a lot of poems were published in Critical Quarterly or Stand rather than the Listener. It is important to recall that the central thrust of the Eng Lit academics, certainly of those who graduated in the 1940s and 1950s, was to resist the onsurge of the mass media, seen as crude and levelling. (When I mention that generational limit, I am pointing to changes in the collective views of academics which all would agree are of great importance, even if a precise definition is difficult.) What those magazines were marketing was in fact toughness and moral and intellectual aspiration, values which were seriously out of tune with the London media (and their preoccupation with advertising). The kind of poetry which they favoured can be called academic existentialism. (More discussion in 'The Long 1950s'.) In fact the noun toughness can usefully be seen in contrast with sweetness, in a mutually defining pair, where ‘sweet’ is taken to mean high sugar content and low taste, and to define the mass media. Because there were numerous magazines which published poetry, and had more than a few dozen readers, we can see the official world as being multipolar, with an element of competition by differentiation between the rival magazines. (U-stream stands for 'underground'.)
If the dividing line between m-stream and u-stream was simply what editors found acceptable, there should not be two separate worlds but a continuum in which poets might operate in both worlds according to the complexity of the particular poem they had a idea for. The notion of an empty gap separating the two domains, which would allow a clear definition of terms, would seem unlikely. It emerges - if it does - if we consider two centres of attraction which poets converge on: if two poets are streaming towards different centres at high speeds, they will move away from each other and so an empty conceptual space can open up between them. Something similar applies if you find three, seven, or fifteen different centres of attraction. The separation emerges also if you have a scheme in which mainstream poets are suppressing vital impulses in order to fit into hostile media, compromising artistic values, so that a poet changes radically as soon as they stop compromising.
Editors in magazines that have to sell to survive, in a news retailing environment which stresses the new all the time, are attuned to fashion. This heavily implies that the boundaries could not stay in the same place over 40 years and so that the m-stream itself could not remain the same over such a long time. This draws on a following question, viz. when and how did it change, and following chapters will make remarks which shed some light on this. Objects typically have shapes defined by boundaries: if the boundaries of the m-stream shifted, according to the attitudes of different editors in post and fluctuating media fashions, then you can argue that it has no shape and is not really an object. Visibly, some editors had a wide spectrum approach to poetry and dropped most of the restrictions. Also, fashion could work in favour of poetry by picking up something which was brilliant and making that flavour of the month. Editors weren’t forced to choose boring and conservative poetry all the time.
If you have very little time to make your case it is efficient to bring in preset contents which can be delivered rapidly. The classic way of doing this is to deliver a form of accepted prestige and envy, and the normal form of this in English poetry has been the Oxford manner. The concept of leisure/ privilege/ brilliance/ knowing famous people/ being cultured is familiar to everyone and can be delivered with remarkable speed by deploying signals which have been used thousands of times before. This may not be such a good idea for the poem. (There is a chapter on the Oxford style in 'The Long 1950s'). Arguments about this are potentially endless. For example, slow delivery of effects is hardly a virtue in itself. Or, prestige is evidently quite fundamental in art and is hardly separate from the economy of art even in the Bronze Age. You can’t really enact a rule which gets rid of it, but at the same time it mortgages the work of art to something outside art, and what is more it puts hundreds of poets at a strange disadvantage because they have not been to Oxford. To denounce Oxford poetry for delivering a feeling of pleasure and freedom and sociability in or near Oxford is stupid because you could equally well denounce the Beach Boys for delivering quite similar Arcadian adventures about the beaches of Southern California, which equally sold around the world and are still popular forty years later. Famously, there were surf bands in Michigan when the craze was strong. The deployment of simple strong reactions in poetry is perfectly normal - they are just one tier of possible sources of meaning, they can't be banned. However poems which deploy them and which don't have the patience and persistence to create meaning complexes which are unique to the poem and unfamiliar to the reader may die a dreadful death of gluttony and apathy.
Similar concerns of rapid delivery apply to features like the use of stock footage and the imposition of the poet’s personality. Each gets there rapidly but when you get there it may not feel like you’ve gone very far.
If we compare m-stream and u-stream it is obvious that they do not represent complementary opposites and do not represent two halves of an original whole. If you assemble a cluster of texts from each side, no kind of symmetry is to be found and so compare and contrast are actions you can scarcely carry out. I think the idea of neatness brings out far-reaching oppositions of temperament. People who like neatness behave differently, enjoy different levels of pattern, from people who like the unpredictable and complex. I think this one opposition correlates with a lot of features of poetic taste. But, to be honest, you are going to do better analysing 40 features and paired oppositions than just one.
My belief is that the concept of mainstream has no real validity until the 1950s, and was conjured into being by the ejection from public view of the New Romantic group in around 1948. This was an event taking place on many levels and involved a kind of consent from most of the poets thus ejected: they stopped writing rather than constitute an underground (although in fact a magazine like Nimbus or Nine can be thought of as an underground around 1951 or 1953). Unpublished work by poets like Charles Madge, Joseph Macleod and Lynette Roberts was a feature of the 1950s but poets rejected by serious editors- by TS Eliot in this case - usually gave up writing poetry. It is striking how few older poets were picked up by the underground when it began around 1960, or was thriving around 1965. A theorist could conjure up hundreds of conjectural divisions in the field of poetry without too much effort. The u-stream: m-stream opposition is the key one because it is one which thousands of people have believed in, it is a lived in distinction. It was a choice which large numbers of readers identified with. During the 1960s, British poetry developed an outside, an external settlement which had walked out but which hadn't given up cultural creation.
The split is very hard to project back into earlier phases of English history. Its growth into something unmistakable and long-lived is related to the intensification of the marketing discipline in the world of periodicals, with the increase of advertising revenue and the rapid technical development of the market research area which fed the advertising industry and led its clients steadily towards it. Poetry became an area of underdevelopment, of brilliant weeds and eccentricity: increasingly, the sales profiling side of the business gave poetry editors more specific restrictions, in area and ideology. Arguably, the editors and their poets of choice also went through a rapid evolution, a modernising growth towards rationality and efficient self-profiling. The boundary lines around the official media oscillate between those set by the arbitrary, aesthetic wishes of the editors, which fluctuate all the time; and the rational, accurately calculated, sales drive of the business units within magazines (and, equally, book retailers, publishers, radio producers, etc.) It is difficult to say which is more in control.
Empson argued persuasively that ambiguity was a feature of great literature, Cleanth Brooks argued that paradox was central to great poetry: but Empson wrote very clearly and Brooks made statements which were clear and not reversible. No amount of dislike of the m-stream, as represented by poets like Larkin, Harrison, or Carol Ann Duffy can wipe out basic artistic rules like the need for clarity, for rapidity to the extent that this avoids lagging, plodding, bogging down, etc. Faced with the complexity of the universe and society as givens, poetry will seek out scenes and images which are unambiguous and which exude clarity at every point and which lead to definite conclusions. If m-stream poets succeed at doing this they will have written good poems in doing so. Readers ask what the point of a passage is, and any passage whose point they can’t determine may give them feelings of frustration and blankness rather than admiration at what might be depth. The archaic literary virtues don’t walk off stage just because the public is more educated and has more leisure to take on literary complexity. It is normal to rewrite poems to make the emphases clearer and to eliminate information which does not contribute to the main flow of sense.
The breakout of rock music from the restraints of the 3-minute single and daytime radio was driven by mighty energies and has a strong relevance to the era of poetry we are considering. Most people would acknowledge that the album has a right to exist - which was an avant garde idea, within pop music, in 1965. Music got more complicated, so did poetry, which may always have stayed close to music. But the advent of the album was followed by the era of progressive music and by hundreds of extraordinarily bad albums, including many double albums. Something of the same problem may have followed poetry around. A theme of The Long 1950s will be the reaction of poetry against the combination of tendentious leftism and artistic experiment which was such a feature of the 1970s, and the advent of something more pleasant, less intellectually demanding, and sweeter in several senses.
The thesis of 'The Long 1950s' is that the limits of the generation who came to power in the 1950s dominated the scene until the 1980s and that the scene loosened up and became less repressive during the course of the 1980s. The sixties saw quite a few poets arriving who used the new pop style, and after a while quite a few poets who were using new innovative styles. However, it would be incorrect to present these as dominating the field, as after all the bulk of the poetry being reviewed and (probably) read was something much more formal and conservative, and linked in fact to the numbers and cultural power of the academic world. Eng Lit graduates were prone to write poetry and also to buy poetry books. The manner they usually chose was within the limits set by the Movement. To be sure, this line was becoming less fashionable from 1964 at latest, as shown by the development of John Wain, a key participant in New Lines. However, it was something which the poets in question absorbed in their student days and clung on to. Whatever label we assign, this was a hegemony inside which poets could write fluently and without having to think too hard. We can dig up whole rows of anthologies in which almost all the poems fit under the rim of a not very large cup, grouping together poems which seem to speak with a single voice and which perhaps derive their authority from that lack of individuality. I think it is fair to say that the strength of this poetry was more that it expressed professional solidarity among the kind of people who ran the Eng Lit world than that it reached any artistic heights.
English poetry had a continuous history of over a thousand years before 1950, so it is puzzling how a group of poets could actually invent norms which were accepted by a wide range of the public, including readers older than they were, and reach centre stage. I think we have to speculate that just as the 1960s favoured young and hedonistic and excitable people interested in clothes so the 1950s favoured conformists who liked life inside organisations, and the atmosphere of the time fostered people who could combine a very high degree of conformism with an element of ruthless careerism. The damage done by being accused of breaching the norms was so frightening that it allowed these partially hidden insiders to develop and push new norms. The norms stayed in place because the rule makers had a gift of political insight. It was like the invention of the corporation, which to a significant degree was also a product of the 1950s.
I tried to narrow down the time window for the paradigm shift which I keep talking about, but I couldn't find a tenable proxy index and to be honest the sources I tapped to track year by year changes were too boring to spend days churning through. Positive evidence for the persistence of the "long 1950s" is easier to find. I don't think this is controversial any more, but it is right to point to the evidence. Specific sources would be the Morrison/Motion anthology of 1982, the Schmidt anthology of 1983, and the 1980 anthology by Enright. Evidently the conservative/academic poetry of 'empirical lyricism' and 'domestic anecdote' was still at centre stage. Slightly earlier, there was the series of 'Poetry Dimension' anthologies, which was published through the early 70s and triumphantly excluded anything outside the mainstream conventions. We do know that there was a radical wave sweeping through English poetry, this seems like the principal thing happening in the 1970s in retrospect, but this series ignores that wholesale and shows that mainstream poetry was being published in large quantities during the decade. A magazine such as Poetry Nation was completely dedicated to extolling the Movement and neo-Movement orthodoxy against enemies who were allowed on stage only as a rumour and a spectre. The most robust and durable finding seems to be that the conventional poetry which moved to the centre in the 1950s was still at the centre in the 1980s and that its stylistic rivals were always the losers during that time. The praise for Kuppner in the 1983 anthology, before his first book had come out, seems like a herald of change. [more discussion of this 1983 anthology on this website]
The domestic anecdote and toughness are not the only components of the mainstream. If you look at an anthology like Poetry Dimension 2 (ed. Abse, 1974?), there are variations of tone even though the poets allowed entry stick within a narrow range of stylistic possibilities. In the period, there were also people imitating Housman, Tennyson, folksong, or Christian hymns. Not all poets were academics, and there were ranges of colloquial or Pop poetry which had nothing to do with the heritage of Close Reading. These lines do not seem to me especially productive.
I would like to propose a few more terms for classifying poetic productions.
proll on proll off
tedious proletarian style based on trivial sound echoes and unproductively simple semantic oppositions frequently referring to lorries and suitable for delivering at high volume while on a weekend trip to a foreign country
National Trust poem
style based on acts of solemn auto-veneration by the poet whose ego is implicitly taken to be rare, precious, and fragile, if not necessarily also small. Indeed, it may be of monumental size. The reader is supposed to spend their Sunday afternoons standing behind the red velvet ropes, venerating, refurbishing, coddling, these frail relics of a better day, in a collaborative way. Almost as a national duty.
auto exoticism
Third World poem treating the poet's experiences in meaningless decorative and infantile terms in the idiom of a travel poster advertising a beach holiday
sectarian-contrarian aka centre of insolence
Believe that they have a cluster of techniques which allows authentic living and authentic writing (this is the sect part) and that everyone else has a cluster of assumptions which makes authentic living or writing impossible. Thus happiness in this alienated state is simply an illusion. Language is supposed to communicate but never does. People never understand each other. Consciousness is laughably flawed. Buses are supposed to be big and red but really they aren’t and people only think they are because they are blinded by lazy habits of perception.
The problem with joining this school is that everyone - especially all poets and all readers of poetry - wants to be in this stance some of the time, and they hate someone trying to take it over.
The nondiscursive
Poetry without grammar (or, probably, much respect for the law)
***
This got taken out of 'The Long 1950s' because I thought it was going to annoy people, also because it wasn't directly about poems. I think the idea was to increase mutual understanding and so reduce hostility. As if that would reduce hostility. Bah.
"Shoegazing" was also so called because it tended to be based on "drones", so the guitarists were not looking at the fretboard but at the effects pedals, which were mostly on the floor by their shoes. The Spacemen Three probably led the way for the style, and their first recordings were in 1986.
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