The Long Poem of the 1970s
A feature of the 1970s was the migration into long poems. The semantic context of short poems appeared to the new sensibility as shallow, conventional, and frustrating. The stalls of the time were full of A4 stapled-photocopied books which always seemed to be instalments of something even larger. The magazines were full of “extracts from works in progress” which were only partial disclosures of a glimpsed but unimaginable whole, only sequences of a few frames from an energy wave running on the idea that history itself was changing all the time. The open project seemed to give the poet a better chance of controlling this rush forward – and so expressed a revolutionary faith in guiding the wave of change towards a better society. The impulse came largely from the USA, where open poems taking decades to write offered a monumental challenge that seemed to raise the standards of poetic art.
The underground came into being because the mainstream structures failed to support the way poetry was moving. It made extra demands on space and funding, and the restrictions came to be emotive issues. The difficulties which editors and publishers put in the way of long poems demonstrate that there was a huge creative pressure to write in this way, The age of long poems came to an end – but no-one has ever said to me that they got fed up with the long poems. I have the impression that the logical development of poetry into long structures was checked by the budget problems of harassed editors – the underground could not afford it all. It attracted too many writers, not enough readers.
Since reviewers were unable to judge the complete works from the instalments, it is appropriate to revisit them now seismic activity has stopped. There has been no comparative study of these impressive poems. The period is one of mystery. There are no reliable anthologies, no textbook, no consensus. Few of the poems have been reprinted since the 1970s. Their extent pushes us back from confident conclusions; this constellation of undefined relationships between poems continues the novelty and uncertainty of the relationship of parts within the poems, which offer themselves as suggestive nontransparent spaces.
We presume that the genesis of such works is slow, and so that changes to their design occur slowly; there may have been a dip in mid-century where poets were uncertain of how to write long poems, faced with the collapse of traditional genres (narrative, verse drama, sonnet sequence). The emergence of these works at this moment, 1968-75, may be simply due to an exceptional economic conjuncture, the end of the post-war “30 year boom”. This is also why works from a much earlier period, by Hendry and David Jones, came into print at this moment; Faber had not published a new book by Jones in 22 years up to The Sleeping Lord. His work came out decades after it was written. That is, the milieu could acquire work orphaned by past eras and conjure it into life.
The short poem can challenge social and semantic structures by omitting them (as pop poetry did), but cannot demonstrate new ones. The motive for the long poem was probably, therefore, a state of conjecture and uncertainty, where the organisation of personal and collective behaviour was up in the air, as part of revolutionary social change. A key factor is then the reader’s capacity (singular and collective) for dealing with incomplete forms. Perhaps they define them as improperly formed, and reject them, with a businesslike snap. Perhaps waiting for a long time amounts to despair and disillusion. And perhaps the incomplete is an object of optimism and fascination. To give up completeness is also a renunciation of authority. The reader’s rules for treating uncertainty certainly dictate the quality of their experience when reading these conjectural poems. The end of the bar line?
We can get to a common theme in very concise form by considering the notion of the liminal as described by Victor Turner in a series of works (perhaps first in a 1964 paper). In certain rites, peoples go back to a fore-time where classiifications break down and a primeval unity is restored. People partake of communitas, where social roles and classes break down. These moments often take place in wild places, where there is no ownership, no property divisions, and no marks of human labour; they are marked by pure liquids, such as water or blood. Actions in these states partake of flow, that is they are fully formed, instant, and there is no such thing as mistakes. Often, the creation and first appearance of categories is recited there - and creation myths may belong to liminal rites.
These are called liminal states because they are rites de passage, on the threshold (limen) between two social statuses.
My impression is that the short poem is an adaptation to external pressure and hostility. The idea that a shorter poem is better is a stage towards the idea that no poetry at all is best, which was the underlying drive of the mass media. People who hate poetry give you five minutes, grudgingly, to deflect criticism, and you fit into the slot irrespective of what the design of the poem itself demands. The long poem is a seizing of autonomy, a protest against the marginalised and numbered conditions of the poem in the media. But also, pop music was shifting away from the single and towards the album at the end of the sixties; it seems that poetry may have been in line with mass taste in changing to longer forms, and even that the greater subjectivity allowed by the album forced poetry to go deeper in order to compete.
The reason for the increasing innovation, depth, and complexity of art in the 1970s is not hard to find. Walter Laqueur named his book on the international politics of the period A Continent Astray: the power structure had lost its grip, basic relationships were changing, and radical groups were powerful and courageous. The proof of this is the pessimistic state of the Cold War conservatives, really anticipating shifts of power which would weaken the grip of the rich over the economy, the military build-up, the political consensus, or industrial discipline. It makes sense to talk about “the system”, because an alternative was right outside the door, and really seemed about to walk in and take over. There was an alternative everything.
Poets escaped the reach of banal judgments either by involution, the development of radical styles, or by extension, giving the poem more duration, allowing more complex semantic configurations. Both of these tended to lose the reader who did not have the same level of openness and adaptability.
Precision is only a meaningful concept if you can compare the poem, or the line, with a preset, agreed, fixed idea. The idea that precision is better is a variant of the idea that poems should exactly resemble the accepted generalisations of the era, and should not be original or critical. In modern times, the question is really whether the poet’s poems match their own aesthetic, and are precise in that sense.
The interest of long poems is partly that the relationship of the parts of a length of social process is explicit in them, rather than us having to rely on construction of several texts; and partly that the taxonomical chapter was about anthologies, and so dealt exclusively with short poems.
If a social structure is not dramatised and questioned in the work of an individual poet, it may nonetheless appear around or before the book we hold in our hands, in the shape of stylistic decisions whose end result is the text. If the geometry of a cultural matrix is truly shared, then a fragment of it implies the whole; it is possible for poets to make statements about social relations within the stylistic plane. Reflexive poets attuned to this regard with contempt poets who are not. The question for us is whether any of the reflexive poets are working with more than a highly organised narcissism, the skill of a couturier, or whether they are addressing something outside themselves— the space within which language is spoken, or the rules by which social action is ordered.
Style can become a social logic, recording a social vision of short distances as a narrative records a social vision of large-scale events. Instamatic Poems (by Edwin Morgan) is a transitional point between a narrative and a poem whose subject is its own point of view; the poems in it are playing a shared game but have no unity of scene or situation. This game unity could reflect a poet's temperament, but is for the ultra-sophisticated Morgan a deliberate break with the (personal and social) past in the form of a set of rules, i.e. almost a naked social structure. We can distinguish between a style psychotope and a narrative psychotope:
style (static; self-referential; one person only; cannot engage in test and conflict; selfconscious)
narrative (changeable; deals with a shared reality; unpredictable; not self-fulfilling; exposes characters to test and conflict, to learning experiences )
Style is differentiated and unified in the same way that a narrative is, but populated not by characters but by figures or distinctive features. It reproduces its own internal memory whenever the style re-appears; this context of interpretive rules can also flow from one author to another.
High Zero, by Andrew Crozier (1978) [I have deleted this because it appears in a book called Nothing is Being Suppressed, coming out shortly] tnbp3, CC, AVA 37 pp.
My sole companion in the forest: Ancestor Worship, by Emyr Humphreys 32 pp.
removed for book publication
Change: a Prospectus, by Tony Lopez (1978) 23 pp. Angels, CC, tnbp4 [removed for book publication]
Fox Running, by Ken Smith (published 1980) 22pp. tnbp3 [removed for book publication]
[a statement in the text shows the poem was composed during 1980, so is not literally a long poem of the 70s]
Ranter, by Barry MacSweeney (published 1985) 36 pp. tnbp3, CC 3
[this was definitely composed after 1980 so is not a long poem of the 1970s. I misunderstood Barry telling me that it was a response to Thatcher- it was a response after 3 or 4 years of life under Thatcher]
The book is divided into four sections: "Ranter", "Ranter's Reel", "Snipe Drumming", and "Flamebearer".
In the first section, the character Ranter is running around parts of Britain; he is seditious; he is chasing a lost love. A string of epithets qualifying Ranter points to the timeless nature of his revolt: they are drawn from 14th C, 17th C, 19th C, and then 15th C movements of lower-class revolt, so that the enemy is disembodied and the apparent contest of wills cannot take place. The poem is then wholly liminal, taking place somewhere where the rules of time and society have been suspended. (This may correspond, physically, to the high wastes of Northumbria, unpartitioned because they are useless for agriculture: they represent the pre-human landscape.) It is difficult, for this reason, to trace changes between the first page and the last. If anything is happening, it has to do with the woman he is missing; it is hard to relate the data about revolt to this, but presumably it serves to make Ranter glamorous, as a virile and defiant rebel hero, as an argument why she should come back. Myth comes in to replace sociology here. All the love story is recent, set in the 1970s, while none of the political stories is twentieth century. The name 'ranter' seems to refer to 'ranting and raving', to a radical religious group, seeking the overthrow of the social order, in the 1650s, and to a style of folk singing in Northumbria (cf. 'The Collier's Rant', and the folk group The High Level Ranters, punning on the name of the High Level bridge across the Tyne at Newcastle). MacSweeney almost certainly wants all of these meanings simultaneously. The resurrection of the Ranters came with Christopher Hill's The World turned Upside Down, a study of the most antinomian of radical groups in the Commonwealth period which found great favour among the antinomians of the 1970s. On page 6, Ranter listens to a radio broadcast in his skull from "Bede and Cuthbert", clerics from ancient Northumbria; and to Sweeney, a figure from an old Irish tale, whose feathered pelt Ranter seems to be wearing. Some passages may correspond to the original Sweeney's nature poetry. In the scela, Sweeney went mad in a kind of 'post-traumatic stress disorder' and left human society, to live in the treetops - a kind of negative liminal. Ranter is oppressed by militiamen or by the emperor Hadrian (who campaigned in the North early in the 2nd century AD). A mention of monks on Lindisfarne, a monastery with scriptorium representing Northumbrian cultural achievement. He hopes for his bride's attitude to soften. He has the powers of animals and is owner of the wild (p.11), a liminal place. People are oppressed and do not fight back. Memories (of married life?) in Woolwich. Another run of self-praise epithets. Drunk, he falls down the stair at an Underground station. More regrets. The Norman ravaging of the North, AD 1069 - an example of peripheral revolt put down by centralised violence. French words are a bad thing. He lives out of doors, in the hedges.
In "Snipe Drumming" the situation seems to be the same. His bride speaks, how poor she found Newcastle to be. The 'drumming' is male courtship behaviour, a non-vocal acoustic display which we can easily link to 'ranting' among humans.
In "Ranter's reel", (reel, a kind of dance), he makes a journey across the Northumbrian fells. Wild things are being hunted. It is his fiefdom. The bitterness of the poor, across all history. He is a figure of resistance to the powerful, and a bird. A threat to the powerful that their reign is coming to an end or reeling. Reel has associations with drink, unsteadiness, the loss of reason, high excitement, which make it akin to ranting.
The next section is called "The Flamebearer" after a character, in Welsh Fflamddwyn, who was an Angle fighting against the Britons in perhaps 600 AD; the theme of Anglo-Saxons versus Britons appears again. He appears in those old Welsh poems as an object of terror. Ranter, himself the destroyer of a household, remembers making love and regrets. Pages 37-40 are spoken by the bride, regretting how things went wrong; symbolically, the assertions fall silent and the woman's voice takes over. Her speech is more coherent and continuous than his. She refers to him as a bully. The power relations within the poem have been reversed, the boastful male central speaker is now the subject of the poem's speech, an object of judgment.
Ranter differs from the other poems discussed here in that it not only sees force as the adjudicator of history but also feels willing to take on the "ruling class" on terms of force. The local structure resembles, perhaps, the blues: simple stylised units, frequently repeated, in no particular order, without explicit links, but internally very highly motivated, so that the wholes can easily be guessed. The whole reminds one of an Irish poem "The Lament for Art O'Leary" (in An Duanaire 1600-1900, edited by Sean O'Tuama), except that the praise epithets addressed by the widow to dead Art are here addressed by Ranter to himself. (The duckdown at p.38 may actually come from the lament as translated by Thomas Kinsella, eiderdown being a more everyday way of putting it.) This boasting is another feature of blues lyrics. The bird persona can be compared to Muddy Waters' little red rooster (and to the phrase 'free as a bird'). The word cloakclasp (occurring 9 times) refers to a penannular brooch, a very prominent item of adornment of the Gaelic gentleman, of which there are many in the National Museum in Dublin and not a few in the National Museum in Edinburgh; MacSweeney has seized on the bright and showy things, to make something with an endless series of high spots.
The accessibility to the poem of historical moments scattered over 2000 years shows that we are in a liminal place: no particular time, all-time. The location is essentially Northumberland. The metahistorical schema comes essentially from EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, itself a projection of Soviet schemas of history, and epic history-writing, onto stubbornly un-cooperative English source material. The poet seized the core emotional situation and discarded the clogging detail and documentation. The use of Celtic and blues schemas helps to give 'structural' material a personal, heroic, focus, miraculously restoring it to narrative and flow.
Geographical crystal: Stane (being Place book 3) by Allen Fisher, (published 1977, as 'drafted 31.12.75') 100 columns with two columns per page [Angels; CC tnbp3)
The general drift of Place is to break down the polarisation of objective and subjective knowledge. The other parts are, so far as I know, Place Book One, Hooks, Eros:Father:Pattern, Docking, "Convergences, in Place, of the Play", Unpolished Mirrors, and Becoming. The project accepts that the observer is part of the observation, and details a vast number of inner sensations, perception of the outside world, and processes which occur in both media at once. Place is considered both as an influence on awareness at many levels, but also as the product of human action, modifying the environment. Place is an 'open' project; for example, although Docking is listed in Stane as one of the 'related works', it is not credited in its own accompanying notes as part of Place: instead we are told that one part of Place (section 66) is incorporated into Docking.
A map at the beginning of Place Book I shows Stane Street, a Roman road, running from Sussex to Southwark, and presumably the main axis on which early South London grew - including the borough of Lambeth, the setting of Place. Stane is printed in landscape format. The columns are numbered from 1 to 100 at the bottom. The numbers printed at the top of the page refer to parts (listed as "45 to 81" on the title-sheet) which were interleaved and intercut to produce the final text. There are numbers at the top of the pages of Stane which refer to the Parts of Place (so that page 1 has 80 at the top). Numbered resources at the back of the book show how the text relates to its factual source material. Some page tops show, for example, (63)/74, to show that the Resources for 63 have also supplied material for part 74.
The back cover shows a street map of part of South London, partly replaced by a diagrammatic view of a texture which a note informs us 'includes photos and drawings of environments given way under stresses it was assumed they could bear'. They seem to be structural materials now showing rips. A small image on the front cover shows a map of Greater London. That is, we are being shown something at three different scales. This gesture casts the light back at the observer - it is saying something about the limits of our biological senses in the face of an environment whose processes occur on a much larger scale than our bodies. As clever mammals, we make up for this by all kinds of perceptual strategies - which sheds light on the multiple strategies of Allen Fisher. The note implies that London itself has been put under stresses too great for its materials - and has given way, failed as a community. This aspect is explored in Unpolished Mirrors and Brixton Fractals. The lettering is that of a typewriter. The text is printed in red. A note tells us that "STANE serves as a preview of Book III, Place 45 to 81, moving back into Book IV via Book II and including those parts of GRAMPIANS cut-in." This implies that there will be a later version of sections 45 to 81, but this has not been published so far as I know. The disruption of the notion of sequence is part of a new way of ordering information in word groups, pages, and books; what this draws attention to is the excess of possibilities for arranging data. It is organic - I mean, we are 'naturally' inclined to examine situations several times as new information arrives, so that viewing a kind of information once, and never being allowed to go back, is inorganic. The types of text we have are only a tiny cluster in an immense range of possibilities. Perhaps we have learnt and rigid ways of moving through fields of data - which are not the most appropriate for the part of the world we find ourselves in. We own them because they are old. Perhaps accepted sentence structures are inherited from early modern times and relate to acts of knowledge storage and retrieval which were suited to the organized knowledge of that time, for example in the law, the Church, or estate administration. Stane includes an index to the sections, which tells us for example '39 59 into 56'. Liberating the cutting and joining shows that the same piece of information can produce different results in different contexts.
I don't know of any successful exegeses of Fisher's work. I would regard a summary in prose which was longer than the poem (Stane, in this instance) as being unsuccessful - whereas taking a few themes and saying 'here, these are more important than the rest' is dishonourable. A structural value might be going to the limits of what we already know - to include the frames by which we normally constrain the speed and complexity of the information being made available at any point. If I suggest that information is normally packaged in an industrial way, in standardised and controllable units, this sheds light on Fisher's rules of procedure - he starts on the wrong side of those constraints and goes on from there. Basic techniques in this breakout are approaching from unusual angles, using subject matter usually neglected, looking at information on many different scales, and rapid cuts between different strata of material - showing new connections.
The deal offered to the reader is a speed-up in the rate of conceptual jumps in the data they are consuming. This is probably a dividing line in the audience - one faction sees the speed-up as purely desirable and exciting, one faction quickly gets bewildered and wants the poem to be normal and reassuring and just like all the other poems.
When Durer drew a rhinoceros, a beached whale, and the bones of an 18 foot giant, he chose these subjects because they were truly wondrous and unfamiliar, and because he had a means of recording. The availability of photographs, broadcasting, cheap printed matter, etc., has changed the terms on which art can be surprising. It is possible to re-analyse the history of poetry in terms of the collection of rare and interesting facts. This explains, perhaps, why so much of pre-modern poetry seems boring to us - because we already have better explanations of what it presents; and why such poets don't supply the information which seems interesting to us - because they were locked in cognitive frameworks which define what was strange and fascinating (and are different from the ones we are locked in). We could define myth in terms of anomaly, disruptions to the order of knowledge - and present poetry about myth as a collection of wonder-tales, defying sense, and recorded formally (in metre) because they were anomalous. Recent autobiographical poetry has a restricted audience because the lives recounted are not unusual enough - they adhere to sociological norms and so are too predictable; however, it is the anomalies which make the poems interesting - being autobiographical, on its own, was not interesting. Equally, readers of those times regarded religious lore as accurate information about the structure of history and the after-life. Western art since 1965 or so has had a bias towards the conceptual - this should not be understood as meaning that Western art of the previous 2000 years was not didactic and intellectually curious; instead, it expresses a new relationship between 'art' and other information media, where art lightens its load of primary information and focusses on cognitive jumps, shifts, and reorganizations. Art is a form of information and must conform to the basic physics of information. A vital factor is the information the spectator already has - art has to move into unfamiliar territory in order to acquire a unique data commodity.
In order to write a book which shows wonders and anomalies all the way through, you would today have to adopt techniques akin to Fisher's. It is not enough to find a rhinoceros.
While looking at this, I wondered about the word 'coherence'. Clearly, connection between successive sections is not necessary. We can make sense of violent shifts just as we can watch a landscape changing through a train window and disembark in another city. The rules for using the word seem to be completely subjective - it is applied when the reader is nonplussed and finds the next section not apropos. Further, 'coherence', as it is stepped up, gets ever closer to redundancy - the line which is most coherent with the previous line is one which repeats it exactly. Any line which offers new information is to some extent incoherent with the previous one. All the long poems we are looking at are very free in their construction. They do not converge on a line. I don't have a test of 'coherence' which many people could agree on. I find the poems 'well constructed' because I do not find myself confused or bored by the arrival of successive sections. But this confidence in the poets is subjective and relies partly on my identification with them.
"47" is a letter about rising damp in walls. It describes the passive-osmotic system of fluid circulating in masonry. This continues the theme, laid out in the previous section, of human life imagined as energy (a spiral) rather than as an anatomy. A human body exchanges energy all the time, and moves; anatomy is static. If you base your biology on corpses, you miss these things - and what is vital, proper to living things.
"46" shows us a voyage down the bank of the Thames. Mill pools where the water is strong and fish grow big; pent up. Chokes on the course of water considered as switches, where choices are made; (analogy with the course of fluids inside the body, the blood and lymphatic systems, affecting so much of the "sense of self"?)
A "less reduced" version of some pages of Stane was published as Fire-Place in a volume called Fire-Works, adding some more material. "Stane" is just a phonetic variant of "stone" (i.e. paved road), but may also represent a pun on stain, as a form of capillary action; the work is much concerned with buildings and the circulation of fluids in the earth and in the body, or, in fact, with the mediation between social and physiological structures and consciousness.
Any summary of Fisher's work is superficial; there are so many themes happening at once. One of the constructive rules is a pedagogic rigour whereby beliefs are constantly broken down into the experiences which found them, in the assumption that the reader has the right to judge of first and last things. We find him constantly reaching the zone of smallest form-generating differences (he refers in Necessary Business to "small initial differences"); the qualities which distinguish materials are ultimately in their molecular structure (and an exact definition of "hardness", e.g. of stone versus water, would be a molecular diagram). These slight quantities allow us to break down the sterile opposition between citizen and electorate, mind and body, person and place, will and compulsion, objective and subjective, personality and information, etc. and to tell a different story; the references to spirals imply the crossing of oppositions in mutual generation, winding eventually back to the slight differences which broke the symmetry of the apeiron and made stone different from water.
Interviews with Fisher during 2005 revealed the existence of a plan of formal symmetry organising Place. The details are explained in the interviews collected in Marvels of Lambeth (due to come out in 2012). The key concept is mirroring, which is a formal relationship between two poems or passages of poetry. To quote the 1974 book of explanations:
"In my terms then, a statement or fact laid on page five of Book I would find SHADING on page 95 of Book III. This reflecting nature brought about the structure. It is generally thematic from place I thru to XXXVII in Book I, and from LXXXI to XXXV in Book III."
Stane is thus a mirror of Place Book I. Since there are 37 parts of Stane and 37 of Place I-XXXVII, we might suspect that the parts map onto each other. It is slightly more complicated than that, since Stane is also numbered as pages 1-100, and Place Book I has a table in the back which demonstrates how it is also constituted by 100 pages (in the typescript and also in the book, although the page numbers are not printed). The symmetry is made more elusive by the fact that Stane starts with part 81 and works back to part XLV. Page 1 of Book I maps onto page 100 of Stane, and so on. The mirroring is not very obtrusive. For example, the line in Place 1 'walked the straight road in sunlight' connects with the line in Place 81 ''I walk from Balham gateway to the South/ my head from process of walking nodding', but other connections are not obvious. I understand the strategy was to allow readers to read 1 and 81 together and perceive new connections affecting the subject (of how site affects perception). Readers of a certain generation will recall a spoof travelogue recorded by Peter Sellers, in which the line 'Balham! Gateway to the South!" was heard.
This scheme explains why notes are included at points which say 'GRAMPIANS cut into PLACE", and so on; the extra overlays partially hide the scheme from view. The passages about a visit to the Grampians probably do not take part in the fundamental symmetry. (Book I has an inclusion called Lakes, about the Lake District.)
The title of Unpolished Mirrors, a set of poems which is part of Place but only partially included in it, refers to incomplete symmetries: the reflection is dulled.
**
Common themes have emerged in these poems, to my complete amazement. They weren't selected to resemble each other. Four of the poems discussed mention the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, generally dated to the 5th to 8th centuries AD. Perhaps there is a shared imaginary which poets go to in order to find their visions. All the poets seem interested in the "fore-time" before the rise of mediaeval civilisation; all seem interested in the origin of our customs and social structure; none shows a situation between several people, and which is altered by a series of events which it structures; all are deeply politicised and deeply angry at the way we live. All have suppressed the signposts, the "ifs" and "therefores" which lead an argument: the discourse of the poem is "before" these, and this beforeness is part of poemicity. This points to a latent theory about the ambiguity of reality, which is chopped and channelled by the social structure, which is subliminal cognitive filters distributed over the whole population; poets like Raworth and Thom have gone on to make the acts of affabulation and composition the subject of the poem.
The striking of coins is described by Lopez and Fisher, and by Thom, whose discussion of the appropriation of metals almost certainly involves their circulation and treasuring as money. Important as liminality is, it is not present in the poems by Martin Thom and Andrew Crozier.
The hope that these large-scale poems would offer symbolic statements about social structure has been proved vain. In general, they deal only with a single mind, largely freed from social bonds. Experience is not shown as emerging from interaction with other people. This requires us to look at the sociology of privatisation.
The intrication of poems with the contents of books (of radical philosophy, politics, history, etc.) depends on collective representations, expressing wishes and the need for play as much as re-arrangement of experience, which precede both, although dialectically they can be shaped by both. These long poems show us, through an exhausting effort to seize and externalise, experience itself, as it is staged by human agents, in long or short strips: what good sociology captures better than bad sociology. The search for a central, dominant arena of social reality is vain, since the efficient unit of experience is clearly the individual brain.
These shared features include the restriction of the poem to the experience of a single individual, or privatisation; the shifting of stress from factual knowledge to intellectual method in framing and highlighting the material; the move away from narrative or drama or action; the collapse of a stable system of moral norms and imperatives, to be replaced by unquiet but essentially personal intellectual curiosity and model-making; the advance of untunable noise or dissonance within the models, and the pre-eminence of doubt as a response to it.
Myth appears in these poems, as part of the palette; but they form a strong contrast to Classical mythological poems. The oppositions which are significant to them are: central versus local-communal authority; the power of money versus less impersonal social bonds; tradition versus reason; Wales versus England; alienation versus fulfilment; symbolic versus sensory experience; subjective versus objective knowledge. These are not topics which mattered to Hesiod.
Another cast back shows a dislike of what the State does; the history of England, then Britain, as a "company" is surely centred on warfare against other states, with a long intricate chain of conquests of overseas territories, tax innovations, grabs of the entrepot trade, naval battles, sieges of key bases, arms races in workshops, acts of heroism, straight shooting, and what have you. The poetry in question excludes discussion of (warfare + political struggle + economic competition + competition between poets for legitimacy) — the ways of power. The State as military machine is cut out, and history is written in terms of (ordinary) households. If we go back to the late 19th century, we find the invention of sociology was just this: a study that shut out the State and looked at the citizen body. So poetry has been competing with sociology for a niche in the spectrum; but sociology was there first, because in 1900 poetry was still dealing with naval battles. This triangular relationship (between Church, State, and poetry) is not quite clear to me; the replacement by the State of the good works formerly carried out by the Church is clear; also, fear is part of the pattern, since the possessor class were frightened by the threatened arrival of the mass franchise (and this perhaps gave rise to sociology, in England and Germany?), and the poets we are discussing are clearly afraid of the power elite (shall we say, the military-industrial complex, the Tory Party, the City, and the Pentagon). Christianity lacks a coherent theory of the State, because its early strata were formed under State persecution and did not expect the Second Coming to be delayed long enough for politics to matter; this omission may be guiding the course of modern British poetry. Poetry since 1960 seems much more aligned with Nonconformism than with Anglicanism. All the poets discussed in this chapter are political radicals, excepting Crozier; and some comments outside the poems seem to equate the media with the forms of illegitimate power, and their wish to write long poems is related to a wish to compete with the "authorised versions" of the media, by supplying their own semantic context.
The omission of power politics from the boundaries of poetry seems to resemble a previous rule of omission, namely the simplicity expected of song and lyric poetry, which were not to deal with the sordid material of human relations. The double stance of radical poetry (ignoring the State and all its works while also planning actively to infiltrate over and transform the State) is very reminiscent of the stance of the Protestant churches in our period.
The abjuring of "power" is correlated with the excision of certain kinds of emotional pressure on the reader, and of pure self-expression. How can you disagree with the military-industrial complex and still want to unleash the self-aggrandising self of the confessional poet? When we see the poem as territorial object, we see the principle of competition for space at work in literature.
My research into the writings of popular Protestantism shows a valuation of physical details as corroboration of essentially unlikely tales of spiritual achievement; based on courtroom confrontations (Foxe's Book of Martyrs brought these to their greatest ever height) in which simultaneity and entanglement provided a difficulty of invention and so showed veracity; in these modern poems, there seems to be a rule that any experience which involves several different sensory channels at once is more credible. I don't say this is good or bad as a rule, merely that it provides the specific difference between British poetry and (say) French or Russian. Concrete details mark a good witness. If Fisher recounts his spiritual experience in seven or eight channels of perception at once, this can be taken as over-fulfilment. Another rule in the early lay-spiritual literature is that lighting effects in the sky indicate divine assent, something we find in many saints' lives; if Fisher relates his preoccupation with celestial light to the pineal gland, we may believe this or not. However reluctantly, we have to concede a similarity between the serotonin/luminosity effects and the lyrics of 'Astronomy Domine'.
A preliminary reading-list of Long Poems from the 1970s
Peter Abbs, For Man and Islands
Asa Benveniste, Tabelli Linnaei
George Barker, Villa Stellar, In Memory of David Archer
Anthony Barnett, Fear and Misadventure; Mud Settles
Jack Beeching, Myth of Myself
Francis Berry, The Singing Dome
D.M. Black, 4 narrative poems (in The Happy Crow and Gravitations)
Euros Bowen, Siap rhyw profiad
George Mackay Brown, Fishermen with Ploughs
Gerard Casey, South Wales Echo
Barry Cole, Vanessa In the City
Andrew Crozier, High Zero; Pleats
Allen Fisher, Place (4 volumes); Long Shout to Kernewek; Sicily; The Art of Flight; Shorting Out
Roy Fisher, The Cut Pages
Eddie Flintoff, Sarmatians
Ulli Freer, Rooms
Raymond Garlick, Notes for an Autobiography
Paul Gogarty, The Accident Adventure
W.S. Graham, Dark Dialogues; Implements in their Places
Harry Guest, Elegies; Miniatures
John Hall, Days; Couch Grass
David Harsent, Dreams of the Dead
Lee Harwood, The Long Black Veil
J.F. Hendry, Marimarusa (composed around 1947)
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns
Jeremy Hooker, Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant
Ted Hughes, Crow, Gaudete, Cave Birds, Adam and the Sacred Nine, Prometheus on his Crag
Emyr Humphreys, Ancestor Worship
Phil Jenkins, Cairo
David Jones, various poems in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (and) The Roman Quarry (mostly pre-1970 in fact)
Judith Kazantzis, Clytemnestra
R.F. Langley, Matthew Glover
T.S. Law, Referendum
Peter Levi, Christmas Sermon; Canticum
Anthony Lopez, Change. A Prospectus
George MacBeth, The Orlando Poems; A Poet’s Life; Lusus
Hugh MacDiarmid, Direadh
Sorley MacLean, Uamha 'n Oir /The Cave of Gold
Barry MacSweeney, Black Torch
Brian Marley, Bargain Basement Sonnets
Alan Massey, Leechcraft
Roland Mathias, Madoc
Matthew Mead, The Administration of Things
Christopher middleton, Anasphere: le torse antique
Edwin Morgan, The New Divan, Instamatic Poems, Memories of Earth
Eric Mottram, Local Movement, Tunis, Elegies
Walter Perrie, Lamentation for the Children
FT Prince, Dry-points of the Hasidim
J. H. Prynne, News of Warring Clans
Kathleen Raine, On a Deserted Shore
Tom Raworth, Ace
Peter Redgrove, Love's Journeys, Dr Faust's Sea-Spiral Spirit
Jeremy Reed, The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg, Stratton Elegy
John Riley, Czargrad
Colin Simms, long poems on the American Indians, including A Celebration of the Stones in a Water-course, Parflèche, Carcajou, The Compression of the Bones of Crazy Horse, No North-West Passage
Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge, Red Eye
Iain Crichton Smith, From the Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe
Ken Smith, Tristan Crazy; Apocrypha from the Western Kingdom; Fox Running
Nathaniel Tarn, Lyrics for the Bride of God
Martin Thom, The Bloodshed, the Shaking House
Edward Boaden Thomas, The 12 Parts of Derbyshire
Gwyn Thomas, Cadwynau yn y meddwl, Craig a dwr
Anthony Thwaite, New Confessions
John Wain, Feng
Jeffrey Wainwright, Thomas Müntzer
David Wevill, Where the Arrow Falls
95 poems? There are a couple more I am in doubt about. Anyway this is a large-scale phenomenon. I have been working (2017) on a longer analysis of the genre.
We could complete this list with a number of other works which I do not greatly esteem.
'Direadh' was published in 1974 and is printed as the last poem in the 'Long poems' volume of MacDiarmid's Collected, but other evidence suggests it was written in 1937-8. I am inclined to stick with the publication date. There is a possibility of more or less endless argument about what is or isn't a "long poem", which I have tactfully suppressed.
Marcus Cumberlege needs to be on this list. 'The Ram' is a compelling poem from his 1977 volume 'Firelines'.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Saturday, 21 July 2012
Allen Fisher interviews book
Allen Fisher interviews book
In 2003 I was asked to produce a book of interviews with Allen Fisher. I collected existing interviews and statements, transcribed a bunch of historic tapes from the Eric Mottram Archive, and was fortunate enough to carry out a series of interviews with the poet. The whole thing was wrapped up sometime in the summer of 2005. The publisher then sat on it for 7 years, but after a reset it is now going instead to be published by Shearsman - who, true to form, are moving with incredible fluency and rapidity. The title is 'Marvels of Lambeth'. It is about 80,000 words long.
I am very excited about this. There was so much to be said and of that so much got said in the interviews which six or seven people put so much into over a 30-year period.
In 2003 I was asked to produce a book of interviews with Allen Fisher. I collected existing interviews and statements, transcribed a bunch of historic tapes from the Eric Mottram Archive, and was fortunate enough to carry out a series of interviews with the poet. The whole thing was wrapped up sometime in the summer of 2005. The publisher then sat on it for 7 years, but after a reset it is now going instead to be published by Shearsman - who, true to form, are moving with incredible fluency and rapidity. The title is 'Marvels of Lambeth'. It is about 80,000 words long.
I am very excited about this. There was so much to be said and of that so much got said in the interviews which six or seven people put so much into over a 30-year period.
miscellaneous on British poetry 1960-97
Miscellaneous blog August 2010
Note. This is all related to British poetry 1960-97 but it is miscellaneous. I have to point out again that the systematic work is in the seven books in the series (on British poetry 1960-97) and that the blog postings are unsystematic and round the edges.
The numbers raise questions about how the poets I choose to write about (150 or so) were selected. I may be biased but as the landscape itself is tilted in multiple ways and there are no straight lines it is very hard to measure where a bias is. Outcomes for individuals are reached through a cascade of many processes, each one of which filters people out or discourages them.
The ratio in the authors accepted should match the ratio in the authors rejected. That is, if 18% of poets in the 'rejected' pile for a decade are women, 18% of those accepted should be as well. These figures are quite hard to develop from the sources I have been able to access. Total figures require a lot of supporting data.
The shape of the 'haul' of excellent poetry is very peculiar and it is not obvious that you can map it onto 'social geography' without answering hundreds of questions about non-matches. I have not undertaken this exercise. The issue of bias arises but it's not one I am going to resolve. The resultant shape is complicated in the way suggested.
Why does the coastline go in and out like that? I am glad to have collected so much primary information and laid it out so that we can step back and see what the shape is. 'Why' comes later.
Why does Cornwall stick out like that? what happened to the rest of the land? Why are there no straight lines?
Origins of the Underground
I discussed Clive Palmer and the Incredible String Band in Origins. I have just discovered a whole book about Palmer, Empty Pocket Blues, pretty amazing for someone who never sold any records and was barely a professional musician. It appears that Palmer was in the Famous Jug Band and made some records with them. He was English, so the original ISB, on the first album, was an Anglo-Scottish collaboration, not the most frequent arrangement in our time. I say the ISB lasted circa 1965-74, but according to Wikipedia they formed in 1966. They also reformed in 1999, with all three original members, and went on playing for several years. (My error, my omission, sorry!) The book (author?) quotes some of the reviews for their 2000 tour. These are possibly the worst reviews I have ever seen of any band. It is amazing that he included them in a book presumably aimed to sell to fans of the ISB as well as of Palmer. I don't think I ever included the negative reviews of poets I wrote about. Maybe the folk crowd are more open to that, they are so anti stardom that they can have objective views of their famous musicians and they really think it's more about the ethos than about dominant individuals.
Joe Boyd wrote in his memoirs, “Mike and Robin were Clive's friends rather than each other's. Without him as a buffer, they developed a robust dislike for one another.” He was their manager. This just explains so much about what you hear on their records. With one sweep, a whole wall of puzzlement dissolves.
I also wrote about Folk in The Long 1950s and in an essay now online. This follows from a realisation that language is a recipient and so that I have to write about what the poetry is about and not just about the style it’s written in. The poem always points at something else. That something could be an entire climate of sensibility, a whole weather front enveloping England for a few days or years. So if you’re writing about poets active in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, you have to take on the Folk Movement. I think another factor was that I didn’t understand the Folk Movement, I heard folk music on TV from when I was 6 or 7 years old (‘The White Heather Club’ and many others), it was always there, but I felt ignorant about it. I had unanswered questions so it was always bothering me.
The folk ethos could be illuminating if you ever ask why poets can spend so much energy on a book that is going to sell 200 copies, 500 if they’re incredibly lucky. If you read about Palmer’s low income and attitude towards earning a high income, it doesn’t theorise what the market could have wanted, but it does shed light on how someone can spend thirty years writing poetry and not even planning to sell more than 200. What you have to grasp is that this was the admission fee, that no one was going to get involved with poetry unless they didn’t want to make money.
The Folk thing offers answers to other questions. The Georgians were very close to the ethos of what was later the Folk Movement. Suppose you ask ‘why doesn’t dialect feature in English poetry’, or, after research, ‘why does dialect play such a marginal role in British poetry’. The answer lies through the Georgians, because their ideology pointed them strongly towards dialect, and after some hesitation a lot of their writing is in dialect. It was necessary for them. But they were big enough to be an ‘institution’, a going concern, with a market valuation, a following, and so a history. If you follow that history from say 1920 to 1960 you will then know why dialect poetry is so unimportant. You have to keep up with the changes, and as it turns out the Folk Movement is a big chapter in that story. This story is also important for patois poetry, even though that comes from the Caribbean, not Great Britain. It fitted into the English speech-system, and came out of English in the first place.
It is difficult to sum up the meaning of poverty in poetry. One effect is wave after wave of people who want to take over. They reason ‘this has no commercial value so the price is zero so I can claim ownership of it without laying any money down. I take over, obviously my ideas are more important, and you have to do what I say.” This goes on endlessly. Because of the anti-success thing, the anti-power thing, the socialist thing, it doesn’t look as if poets own poetry. So there is always some politician, some academic, some authoritarian, who announces that they have taken up that role.
(rewriting the 1930s)
John Goodby visited and we talked about the 1930s. We broached the idea of an ’alternative 1930s’ and how distorted Samuel Hines’ book was calling itself ’the Auden generation’ when it was only ’the Auden clique’, and John went further by emphasizing how much of a campaign there was to set up Auden as important English modernist, and how unseating Dylan Thomas was part of this. Thomas was already a great poet by 1934 but standard line histories describe him as a Forties poet because otherwise he would get in the way of Auden being the great Thirties poet (this is what James Keery describes). There was a campaign of ‘normalising the past’ in the 1970s which involved this projection of Auden, despite all defects, and shunting Thomas off into eccentric obscurity. The organisation of this campaign is interesting, and may be in parallel with the writing off of the Underground at the same time, and an attempt to normalise contemporary poetry into a history of glory for a few rather conventional poets.
Hines’ book is very good but the idea that it covers the whole history of 1930s poetry is incredible to the extent that no one could ever have believed it. We spoke of the ‘alternative 1930s’ and how the base data have not been collected. It is said that Andrew Crozier was working on this, a book on English poetry 1930 to 1950, at the time of his death. Candidates would include, beside Thomas, George Barker, Joseph Macleod, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Muir, Richard Aldington, Sacheverell Sitwell, Ruth Pitter, Glyn Jones, David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, Hugh Sykes Davies, William Empson, Charles Madge, Francis Berry, Herbert Read, Basil Bunting, even Randall Swingler. James Keery has proved that the Apocalyptics began in the 1930s, around 1937, so they have to be written into the story as well. The story of the influence of Lawrence, who was really a contemporary as he was only 45 when he died in 1930, is one of the key issues and seems to be totally unwritten. (The Orators is very notably lawrentian.) In fact there is no coherent history of British poetry during the 1930s.
I pointed out that the Apocalyptic thing was already there in 1934, when Thomas and Barker had already mastered the style and were publishing in it. John described the evolution of Thomas in his notebooks, making a breakthrough even during 1933, writing the poems published in 18 Poems in 1934, writing them even when he was 19. John said that reviews of that first book described it as evolving out of Auden and going beyond him - so Auden was no longer ‘youngest talent’ already then, aged 26. This was a problem that Auden’s clique simply could not tolerate. That process of destruction and breakthrough was the origin of the Apocalypse, breeding the complex of devices which they were going to take on and exploit from 1937 on.
One of the photocopies John Goodby sent me had a review (1935) by Desmond Hawkins of Dylan Thomas' first volume, 18 Poems, of 1934. Hawkins says 'Mr Auden is already a landmark. His own poetry stands clear above fashion. But the Audenesque convention is nearly ended; and I credit Dylan Thomas with being the first poet to break through fashionable imitation and speak an unborrowed language, without excluding anything that has preceded him. Barker and others have promised this [.]' If you see Thomas as the successor to Auden, although his debut was only six years after Auden, then the idea of Auden as oversoaring the whole scene from 1930 to 1970, uninterruptedly, becomes strained. What also becomes strained is the projection of his reign as ending in 1970, peacefully, and with a handover and ‘coronation’ to new Oxford poets such as James Fenton and John Fuller, in a ‘legitimist’ theory of history. (The problem with accepting the existence of the Apocalyptics, circa 1937 to 1948, is that it presents a coherent and collective acceptance of Thomas the contemporary genius, equipped with theory and a world-view. As this pushes Auden out of the story, it does not fit into the legitimist textbook.) So the Auden faction of the 1970s and 1980s have followed Geoffrey Grigson's cue and striven to write off and paint out Dylan Thomas. He wasn't one of us.
Spender was greatly influenced by Herbert Read. Later, he took up the Apocalyptic style - a fact which Auden fans have consistently hushed up. If he decided that the Apocalyptic style, post Thomas and post Hendry and Treece by that time, was the sound of the time, adequate to the role of the individual in an age of totalitarianism, then that not only demolishes the idea of the ‘Auden generation’ but also drags the reviled and rejected Apocalyptic thing into the precious centre and core assets of the clique theory of history. In fact Spender has a claim to be the best Apocalyptic poet after Thomas.
John said that Thomas developed his style out of intensive study of Blake and Donne, books in his father’s library - as well as from Auden. Thomas is the first chapter in the reaction to Blake, and to the insatiable but tantalising need to imitate Blake, which was so important over the next fifty years.
In more discussion with John Goodby we came across the two ideas (a) that Modernism was in steady decline in the 1920s and that the moment of 1914 was fading before finally disappearing (b) that Modernism was a whole era which was brought to an end across the whole continent by the Depression, which meant that the intelligent audience became very interested in economics and politics and had no time for formalism in art. At stake of course is the era of non-innovation in Britain from 1930 to 1960 and the status of the revived modernism (if that is a fair description) in Britain from 1960, continuing either to 1977 or even till the present day. I definitely vote for (b). I think the poetry of the 1920s shows a whole group of modernist poets, it was the style of the time. Macleod’s ‘The Ecliptic’ (written 1928 and published 1930) comes towards the end of this era but is not after it ended!
The Apocalyptic style originated around 1931-3, because Dylan Thomas and George Barker (and even Francis Berry) were writing poems in that style in 1933 - it was complete by then. This date is obviously connected to the eclipse/arrest of Modernism in roughly 1931. Depression, ideological despair, the rise of dictatorships - all this made a complete cut in the career of poets who were in their productive prime at that time.
Hawkins: 'In a confused foreground we have glimpses of Charles Madge and David Gascoyne, the fire and mist of George Barker, the spectre of Martin Boldero glaring down from Jack Straw's Castle, and a whole rabble of sentimental - but very chic and modern - Communist dandies.'
Boldero? A quick check suggested that he existed but had never put a book out. Clearly there was a question to be answered here. Boldero, we found, featured in quite a few issues of Grigson's New Verse, but not in the anthology Grigson later put out summarising the scene. Clearly Hawkins was a close observer of the scene, if he knew about poets before their first book was out. In fact this paragraph, incidental to hailing the arrival of Dylan Thomas, could be the basis in raw intelligence for a project of recovering the Thirties poets who were written out of the story because they weren’t chums with Auden.
(I think 'Boldero' was Grigson - Ian Patterson told me this.)
Mackay Brown, Muir
I have a friend from north-eastern Scotland who reports that among the gay community in that region the presence of Mackay Brown for recreational and experimental purposes in certain public lavatories favoured by the fraternity was quite noted a few years ago. As his appearance was so distinctive this presence was unmistakable, especially to a community which valued cultural achievement so much (above all among creative figures from the north-east itself). Sympathy for someone who was so demonstrably one of their own was only very slightly tempered by the duty to gossip and so raise everyone's consciousness, if only gradually. I took this one as a highly probable fact, limited only by the hypothesis of a Mackay Brown impersonator. It is not hard fact. I record it here because I am so deeply out of sympathy with the elements in Scottish society which oblige people to disguise their sexuality. This is something of a specialist topic in the history of Scottish poetry.
If Brown was gay, he undoubtedly kept it as quiet as almost everyone else born in 1921 who had the same sexual issue. The story helps to recognise the inner meaning of his poetry in one way, that the central figure of Saint Magnus as martyr can be interpreted as an emblem of Brown’s martyrdom to the morality of his rural community. Magnus’ celibacy is an aspect of this. Magnus meant much more to Brown than he ever seems to mean to readers of Brown’s work. Symbols can be used to hide things as well as reveal them. Was the celibacy the martyrdom, or was it sanctity?
It is curious that someone who wanted, if only periodically, to engage in gay sex, should go on living on Orkney, where that kind of thing did not happen. But his relationship to urban life was stretched, and he was forever writing about how bad towns were. Brown lived in Edinburgh for at least two periods, in 1951 and 1962-4. He must have learnt the mechanics of the brief encounter at that time. There are anecdotes about Brown - first, that, as stated in his obituaries, he had never visited England. But secondly, that he had travelled on a sleeper the whole way from Caithness to Edinburgh without discovering the cord which turned the light on. His political dislike of technology was matched by a remarkable lack of grasp of it. Urban life was simply too much for him. Catholicism would have mandated a celibacy which was easier to defend in Orkney than in a big town full of the temptations of the flesh. If someone is so keen on arrested development, you have to wonder how they apply that to their personal life.
Brown wrote absolutely no personal poetry. This was pretty rare for someone born when he was. It can easily be attributed to a love of folk poetry and a belief in the importance of the community as a whole. There are other interpretations though. More like, Dont ask, dont tell. If we suppose that he had a pressing wish to avoid the topic of his personal life, then the creation of a set of patterned and stylised stories, unfolding in a fascinating and highly controlled way and not demanding his participation, was an adequate literary habitat for that. The patterning is notably archaic and decorative, and notably frozen and repetitive; it was something he could hide inside. The doctrine of timeless and ineluctable roles, adopted from his teacher Edwin Muir, can act as an explanation of being gay - it’s as natural as a horse being a horse, then. But the escape into the past can also act as an evasion of the question of becoming what you have to become, as part of an escape by postponing the whole issue, refusing to develop. The present with its burning decisions, its burning desires, its conflicts with the family or with religion, can be permanently side-lined in an aesthetic labyrinth designed not to have an exit. There is no question of Brown’s unrevealed sexual identity damaging the quality of his work. He never pretended to be anything else, to have a set of feelings that he did not truly possess. The intensity of his stylisation - closer to Walter Pater than Scottish patriots would have you believe - masks everything but also transforms it, and is robust beyond the point where mere biography could erode it.
I never wrote about the presence of homosexuality in poetry. I just didn’t have a feel for it. Information very generously supplied by Daniel Andersson (posted on this blog) has extended my understanding of the issue. Not to the point though where I could write a chapter about ‘homosexual poetry’, although I hope someone else does that and amends our ignorance and failed understanding of this subject.
Brown saw Orkney as part of Scandinavia. There must be a whole shelf of literature about the problem of homosexuality in rural Scandinavian communities, as undoubtedly many writers have engaged with that issue for urgent personal reasons. Unfortunately I do not know the names of any of these books. Quite possibly the story of Brown would be in those books.
I came across two stories at much the same time. One was Brown’s never visiting England, the other one was about a Scottish language activist and his obituaries proudly revealed that he had only been to England once. All this may be the behaviour of a genuine Scottish writer, undistracted by a wider literary world and market, but can also be the education of a genuinely bad genuinely Scottish writer.
I do not think I registered my admiration for Brown's poetry sufficiently in my writing. Let me add a footnote, which is no more than incidental. Brown's theory of human life involves repeating and static roles, and is acquired from Edwin Muir’s extraordinary poem ‘Variations on a Time Theme’, as I correctly pointed out. However, Muir’s theory is already set out in some detail in Bram Stoker’s novel Lair of the White Worm (1911), where the serpent-woman of the title explains how she had lived in the same spot in Yorkshire for 2000 years and watched the same eternal human types pass before her, so that no one had any originality, but repeated what their predecessors had done. Bram Stoker was a great talent, capable of originating permanent myths, but it is a little embarrassing to see Muir copy a Gothic novelist. I am wondering if there is another source and Stoker picked this up from another writer, in his industrious research into folklore and the occult. White Worm is not a great novel but there are some wonderful set-pieces of bizarre prose in it.
He does not divert the resources to tell the stories of the ‘forerunners’ of his early 20th C characters, but the Serpent describes how she recognises them - it is very much like ‘Time Theme’, it’s all there. The eeriness of recurrence and predestination reminds me of Nigel Kneale, these themes thrive in the genre. The ‘recurrence’ theory does not really add to the plot, it’s just an inserted page of speech which is fabulous and does not alter the basic situation.
** Writing up the short summary of poetry for this site, (‘Handlist’), I couldn’t help noticing the lop-sided balance of poets born in various decades. I do not have any poets born in the 1960s. The conclusion is simple: my take-on of the whole flow of verse, that activity like drinking a river, is weak for poets born at that time (or later). The information just hasn’t reached me. The pace at which the literary reception organs filter and evaluate the raw flow of poetry is slow, the knowledge arrives with decades of delay. Conversely, I can claim that I have taken on the generation born in the 1950s. The list of poets I have now assembled is likely to be quite good for that cohort. This was knowledge I hadn’t got when I began editing a magazine around 1991, and which has trickled through as I was doing the job.
So, on purely theoretical grounds, we have a basis for imagining another 20 important poets born during the 1960s. This is quite exciting. I wonder where I would look for them.
Roddy Lumsden identifies, for the period after 1995, roughly 50 to 90 debut volumes a year. I am not attracted to the idea of reading all these. I have to rely on the mentioned ‘organs of reception’. Which take 20 or 30 years.
Did I really ‘get’ what was happening in the 1990s? probably not.
Note. This is all related to British poetry 1960-97 but it is miscellaneous. I have to point out again that the systematic work is in the seven books in the series (on British poetry 1960-97) and that the blog postings are unsystematic and round the edges.
The numbers raise questions about how the poets I choose to write about (150 or so) were selected. I may be biased but as the landscape itself is tilted in multiple ways and there are no straight lines it is very hard to measure where a bias is. Outcomes for individuals are reached through a cascade of many processes, each one of which filters people out or discourages them.
The ratio in the authors accepted should match the ratio in the authors rejected. That is, if 18% of poets in the 'rejected' pile for a decade are women, 18% of those accepted should be as well. These figures are quite hard to develop from the sources I have been able to access. Total figures require a lot of supporting data.
The shape of the 'haul' of excellent poetry is very peculiar and it is not obvious that you can map it onto 'social geography' without answering hundreds of questions about non-matches. I have not undertaken this exercise. The issue of bias arises but it's not one I am going to resolve. The resultant shape is complicated in the way suggested.
Why does the coastline go in and out like that? I am glad to have collected so much primary information and laid it out so that we can step back and see what the shape is. 'Why' comes later.
Why does Cornwall stick out like that? what happened to the rest of the land? Why are there no straight lines?
Origins of the Underground
I discussed Clive Palmer and the Incredible String Band in Origins. I have just discovered a whole book about Palmer, Empty Pocket Blues, pretty amazing for someone who never sold any records and was barely a professional musician. It appears that Palmer was in the Famous Jug Band and made some records with them. He was English, so the original ISB, on the first album, was an Anglo-Scottish collaboration, not the most frequent arrangement in our time. I say the ISB lasted circa 1965-74, but according to Wikipedia they formed in 1966. They also reformed in 1999, with all three original members, and went on playing for several years. (My error, my omission, sorry!) The book (author?) quotes some of the reviews for their 2000 tour. These are possibly the worst reviews I have ever seen of any band. It is amazing that he included them in a book presumably aimed to sell to fans of the ISB as well as of Palmer. I don't think I ever included the negative reviews of poets I wrote about. Maybe the folk crowd are more open to that, they are so anti stardom that they can have objective views of their famous musicians and they really think it's more about the ethos than about dominant individuals.
Joe Boyd wrote in his memoirs, “Mike and Robin were Clive's friends rather than each other's. Without him as a buffer, they developed a robust dislike for one another.” He was their manager. This just explains so much about what you hear on their records. With one sweep, a whole wall of puzzlement dissolves.
I also wrote about Folk in The Long 1950s and in an essay now online. This follows from a realisation that language is a recipient and so that I have to write about what the poetry is about and not just about the style it’s written in. The poem always points at something else. That something could be an entire climate of sensibility, a whole weather front enveloping England for a few days or years. So if you’re writing about poets active in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, you have to take on the Folk Movement. I think another factor was that I didn’t understand the Folk Movement, I heard folk music on TV from when I was 6 or 7 years old (‘The White Heather Club’ and many others), it was always there, but I felt ignorant about it. I had unanswered questions so it was always bothering me.
The folk ethos could be illuminating if you ever ask why poets can spend so much energy on a book that is going to sell 200 copies, 500 if they’re incredibly lucky. If you read about Palmer’s low income and attitude towards earning a high income, it doesn’t theorise what the market could have wanted, but it does shed light on how someone can spend thirty years writing poetry and not even planning to sell more than 200. What you have to grasp is that this was the admission fee, that no one was going to get involved with poetry unless they didn’t want to make money.
The Folk thing offers answers to other questions. The Georgians were very close to the ethos of what was later the Folk Movement. Suppose you ask ‘why doesn’t dialect feature in English poetry’, or, after research, ‘why does dialect play such a marginal role in British poetry’. The answer lies through the Georgians, because their ideology pointed them strongly towards dialect, and after some hesitation a lot of their writing is in dialect. It was necessary for them. But they were big enough to be an ‘institution’, a going concern, with a market valuation, a following, and so a history. If you follow that history from say 1920 to 1960 you will then know why dialect poetry is so unimportant. You have to keep up with the changes, and as it turns out the Folk Movement is a big chapter in that story. This story is also important for patois poetry, even though that comes from the Caribbean, not Great Britain. It fitted into the English speech-system, and came out of English in the first place.
It is difficult to sum up the meaning of poverty in poetry. One effect is wave after wave of people who want to take over. They reason ‘this has no commercial value so the price is zero so I can claim ownership of it without laying any money down. I take over, obviously my ideas are more important, and you have to do what I say.” This goes on endlessly. Because of the anti-success thing, the anti-power thing, the socialist thing, it doesn’t look as if poets own poetry. So there is always some politician, some academic, some authoritarian, who announces that they have taken up that role.
(rewriting the 1930s)
John Goodby visited and we talked about the 1930s. We broached the idea of an ’alternative 1930s’ and how distorted Samuel Hines’ book was calling itself ’the Auden generation’ when it was only ’the Auden clique’, and John went further by emphasizing how much of a campaign there was to set up Auden as important English modernist, and how unseating Dylan Thomas was part of this. Thomas was already a great poet by 1934 but standard line histories describe him as a Forties poet because otherwise he would get in the way of Auden being the great Thirties poet (this is what James Keery describes). There was a campaign of ‘normalising the past’ in the 1970s which involved this projection of Auden, despite all defects, and shunting Thomas off into eccentric obscurity. The organisation of this campaign is interesting, and may be in parallel with the writing off of the Underground at the same time, and an attempt to normalise contemporary poetry into a history of glory for a few rather conventional poets.
Hines’ book is very good but the idea that it covers the whole history of 1930s poetry is incredible to the extent that no one could ever have believed it. We spoke of the ‘alternative 1930s’ and how the base data have not been collected. It is said that Andrew Crozier was working on this, a book on English poetry 1930 to 1950, at the time of his death. Candidates would include, beside Thomas, George Barker, Joseph Macleod, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Muir, Richard Aldington, Sacheverell Sitwell, Ruth Pitter, Glyn Jones, David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, Hugh Sykes Davies, William Empson, Charles Madge, Francis Berry, Herbert Read, Basil Bunting, even Randall Swingler. James Keery has proved that the Apocalyptics began in the 1930s, around 1937, so they have to be written into the story as well. The story of the influence of Lawrence, who was really a contemporary as he was only 45 when he died in 1930, is one of the key issues and seems to be totally unwritten. (The Orators is very notably lawrentian.) In fact there is no coherent history of British poetry during the 1930s.
I pointed out that the Apocalyptic thing was already there in 1934, when Thomas and Barker had already mastered the style and were publishing in it. John described the evolution of Thomas in his notebooks, making a breakthrough even during 1933, writing the poems published in 18 Poems in 1934, writing them even when he was 19. John said that reviews of that first book described it as evolving out of Auden and going beyond him - so Auden was no longer ‘youngest talent’ already then, aged 26. This was a problem that Auden’s clique simply could not tolerate. That process of destruction and breakthrough was the origin of the Apocalypse, breeding the complex of devices which they were going to take on and exploit from 1937 on.
One of the photocopies John Goodby sent me had a review (1935) by Desmond Hawkins of Dylan Thomas' first volume, 18 Poems, of 1934. Hawkins says 'Mr Auden is already a landmark. His own poetry stands clear above fashion. But the Audenesque convention is nearly ended; and I credit Dylan Thomas with being the first poet to break through fashionable imitation and speak an unborrowed language, without excluding anything that has preceded him. Barker and others have promised this [.]' If you see Thomas as the successor to Auden, although his debut was only six years after Auden, then the idea of Auden as oversoaring the whole scene from 1930 to 1970, uninterruptedly, becomes strained. What also becomes strained is the projection of his reign as ending in 1970, peacefully, and with a handover and ‘coronation’ to new Oxford poets such as James Fenton and John Fuller, in a ‘legitimist’ theory of history. (The problem with accepting the existence of the Apocalyptics, circa 1937 to 1948, is that it presents a coherent and collective acceptance of Thomas the contemporary genius, equipped with theory and a world-view. As this pushes Auden out of the story, it does not fit into the legitimist textbook.) So the Auden faction of the 1970s and 1980s have followed Geoffrey Grigson's cue and striven to write off and paint out Dylan Thomas. He wasn't one of us.
Spender was greatly influenced by Herbert Read. Later, he took up the Apocalyptic style - a fact which Auden fans have consistently hushed up. If he decided that the Apocalyptic style, post Thomas and post Hendry and Treece by that time, was the sound of the time, adequate to the role of the individual in an age of totalitarianism, then that not only demolishes the idea of the ‘Auden generation’ but also drags the reviled and rejected Apocalyptic thing into the precious centre and core assets of the clique theory of history. In fact Spender has a claim to be the best Apocalyptic poet after Thomas.
John said that Thomas developed his style out of intensive study of Blake and Donne, books in his father’s library - as well as from Auden. Thomas is the first chapter in the reaction to Blake, and to the insatiable but tantalising need to imitate Blake, which was so important over the next fifty years.
In more discussion with John Goodby we came across the two ideas (a) that Modernism was in steady decline in the 1920s and that the moment of 1914 was fading before finally disappearing (b) that Modernism was a whole era which was brought to an end across the whole continent by the Depression, which meant that the intelligent audience became very interested in economics and politics and had no time for formalism in art. At stake of course is the era of non-innovation in Britain from 1930 to 1960 and the status of the revived modernism (if that is a fair description) in Britain from 1960, continuing either to 1977 or even till the present day. I definitely vote for (b). I think the poetry of the 1920s shows a whole group of modernist poets, it was the style of the time. Macleod’s ‘The Ecliptic’ (written 1928 and published 1930) comes towards the end of this era but is not after it ended!
The Apocalyptic style originated around 1931-3, because Dylan Thomas and George Barker (and even Francis Berry) were writing poems in that style in 1933 - it was complete by then. This date is obviously connected to the eclipse/arrest of Modernism in roughly 1931. Depression, ideological despair, the rise of dictatorships - all this made a complete cut in the career of poets who were in their productive prime at that time.
Hawkins: 'In a confused foreground we have glimpses of Charles Madge and David Gascoyne, the fire and mist of George Barker, the spectre of Martin Boldero glaring down from Jack Straw's Castle, and a whole rabble of sentimental - but very chic and modern - Communist dandies.'
Boldero? A quick check suggested that he existed but had never put a book out. Clearly there was a question to be answered here. Boldero, we found, featured in quite a few issues of Grigson's New Verse, but not in the anthology Grigson later put out summarising the scene. Clearly Hawkins was a close observer of the scene, if he knew about poets before their first book was out. In fact this paragraph, incidental to hailing the arrival of Dylan Thomas, could be the basis in raw intelligence for a project of recovering the Thirties poets who were written out of the story because they weren’t chums with Auden.
(I think 'Boldero' was Grigson - Ian Patterson told me this.)
Mackay Brown, Muir
I have a friend from north-eastern Scotland who reports that among the gay community in that region the presence of Mackay Brown for recreational and experimental purposes in certain public lavatories favoured by the fraternity was quite noted a few years ago. As his appearance was so distinctive this presence was unmistakable, especially to a community which valued cultural achievement so much (above all among creative figures from the north-east itself). Sympathy for someone who was so demonstrably one of their own was only very slightly tempered by the duty to gossip and so raise everyone's consciousness, if only gradually. I took this one as a highly probable fact, limited only by the hypothesis of a Mackay Brown impersonator. It is not hard fact. I record it here because I am so deeply out of sympathy with the elements in Scottish society which oblige people to disguise their sexuality. This is something of a specialist topic in the history of Scottish poetry.
If Brown was gay, he undoubtedly kept it as quiet as almost everyone else born in 1921 who had the same sexual issue. The story helps to recognise the inner meaning of his poetry in one way, that the central figure of Saint Magnus as martyr can be interpreted as an emblem of Brown’s martyrdom to the morality of his rural community. Magnus’ celibacy is an aspect of this. Magnus meant much more to Brown than he ever seems to mean to readers of Brown’s work. Symbols can be used to hide things as well as reveal them. Was the celibacy the martyrdom, or was it sanctity?
It is curious that someone who wanted, if only periodically, to engage in gay sex, should go on living on Orkney, where that kind of thing did not happen. But his relationship to urban life was stretched, and he was forever writing about how bad towns were. Brown lived in Edinburgh for at least two periods, in 1951 and 1962-4. He must have learnt the mechanics of the brief encounter at that time. There are anecdotes about Brown - first, that, as stated in his obituaries, he had never visited England. But secondly, that he had travelled on a sleeper the whole way from Caithness to Edinburgh without discovering the cord which turned the light on. His political dislike of technology was matched by a remarkable lack of grasp of it. Urban life was simply too much for him. Catholicism would have mandated a celibacy which was easier to defend in Orkney than in a big town full of the temptations of the flesh. If someone is so keen on arrested development, you have to wonder how they apply that to their personal life.
Brown wrote absolutely no personal poetry. This was pretty rare for someone born when he was. It can easily be attributed to a love of folk poetry and a belief in the importance of the community as a whole. There are other interpretations though. More like, Dont ask, dont tell. If we suppose that he had a pressing wish to avoid the topic of his personal life, then the creation of a set of patterned and stylised stories, unfolding in a fascinating and highly controlled way and not demanding his participation, was an adequate literary habitat for that. The patterning is notably archaic and decorative, and notably frozen and repetitive; it was something he could hide inside. The doctrine of timeless and ineluctable roles, adopted from his teacher Edwin Muir, can act as an explanation of being gay - it’s as natural as a horse being a horse, then. But the escape into the past can also act as an evasion of the question of becoming what you have to become, as part of an escape by postponing the whole issue, refusing to develop. The present with its burning decisions, its burning desires, its conflicts with the family or with religion, can be permanently side-lined in an aesthetic labyrinth designed not to have an exit. There is no question of Brown’s unrevealed sexual identity damaging the quality of his work. He never pretended to be anything else, to have a set of feelings that he did not truly possess. The intensity of his stylisation - closer to Walter Pater than Scottish patriots would have you believe - masks everything but also transforms it, and is robust beyond the point where mere biography could erode it.
I never wrote about the presence of homosexuality in poetry. I just didn’t have a feel for it. Information very generously supplied by Daniel Andersson (posted on this blog) has extended my understanding of the issue. Not to the point though where I could write a chapter about ‘homosexual poetry’, although I hope someone else does that and amends our ignorance and failed understanding of this subject.
Brown saw Orkney as part of Scandinavia. There must be a whole shelf of literature about the problem of homosexuality in rural Scandinavian communities, as undoubtedly many writers have engaged with that issue for urgent personal reasons. Unfortunately I do not know the names of any of these books. Quite possibly the story of Brown would be in those books.
I came across two stories at much the same time. One was Brown’s never visiting England, the other one was about a Scottish language activist and his obituaries proudly revealed that he had only been to England once. All this may be the behaviour of a genuine Scottish writer, undistracted by a wider literary world and market, but can also be the education of a genuinely bad genuinely Scottish writer.
I do not think I registered my admiration for Brown's poetry sufficiently in my writing. Let me add a footnote, which is no more than incidental. Brown's theory of human life involves repeating and static roles, and is acquired from Edwin Muir’s extraordinary poem ‘Variations on a Time Theme’, as I correctly pointed out. However, Muir’s theory is already set out in some detail in Bram Stoker’s novel Lair of the White Worm (1911), where the serpent-woman of the title explains how she had lived in the same spot in Yorkshire for 2000 years and watched the same eternal human types pass before her, so that no one had any originality, but repeated what their predecessors had done. Bram Stoker was a great talent, capable of originating permanent myths, but it is a little embarrassing to see Muir copy a Gothic novelist. I am wondering if there is another source and Stoker picked this up from another writer, in his industrious research into folklore and the occult. White Worm is not a great novel but there are some wonderful set-pieces of bizarre prose in it.
He does not divert the resources to tell the stories of the ‘forerunners’ of his early 20th C characters, but the Serpent describes how she recognises them - it is very much like ‘Time Theme’, it’s all there. The eeriness of recurrence and predestination reminds me of Nigel Kneale, these themes thrive in the genre. The ‘recurrence’ theory does not really add to the plot, it’s just an inserted page of speech which is fabulous and does not alter the basic situation.
** Writing up the short summary of poetry for this site, (‘Handlist’), I couldn’t help noticing the lop-sided balance of poets born in various decades. I do not have any poets born in the 1960s. The conclusion is simple: my take-on of the whole flow of verse, that activity like drinking a river, is weak for poets born at that time (or later). The information just hasn’t reached me. The pace at which the literary reception organs filter and evaluate the raw flow of poetry is slow, the knowledge arrives with decades of delay. Conversely, I can claim that I have taken on the generation born in the 1950s. The list of poets I have now assembled is likely to be quite good for that cohort. This was knowledge I hadn’t got when I began editing a magazine around 1991, and which has trickled through as I was doing the job.
So, on purely theoretical grounds, we have a basis for imagining another 20 important poets born during the 1960s. This is quite exciting. I wonder where I would look for them.
Roddy Lumsden identifies, for the period after 1995, roughly 50 to 90 debut volumes a year. I am not attracted to the idea of reading all these. I have to rely on the mentioned ‘organs of reception’. Which take 20 or 30 years.
Did I really ‘get’ what was happening in the 1990s? probably not.
Saturday, 2 June 2012
more on Anthony Thwaite
Anthony Thwaite, extra notes
I dredged out of a library sale in Nottingham a book 'The Deserts of Hesperides' by Anthony Thwaite, a 1968 travel book about Libya which sheds light on his Libya-set poems.
The choice of Libya was because he felt very happy there. This was during his national service time there, and he went back to a university in Tripoli because he wanted to recover the happiness.
This book records the story about Thwaite being an archaeology fan with another sergeant while stationed in Cyrenaica, in 1950, and how they found a scattered hoard of Roman coins in a pool, which they brought up by diving, throughout one summer. The final count was around 7800 coins.
A whole chapter, pages 150-62, describes work on his sequence of poems 'Letters of Synesius'. Synesius was barely Christian, he was a pagan who was attracted to the new religion and became a bishop without quite giving in to it. Synesius was a native of Libya and this is really why Thwaite began writing about him while living in Libya, or shortly after he had left there. Synesius wrote some poems influenced by Neo-Platonist themes.
It looks as if Synesius was chosen because there is not much else written about Libya from Classical times. Callimachus came from there but identified too much with Alexandria for there to be a Libyan association of any strength. Synesius’ letters do not describe his death but they do describe wars with the desert tribes - and then his voice and he disappear. Synesius' letters lead naturally to a climax as the urban society of the shore is overrun by the nomadic tribes of the interior, untouched by Classical Mediterranean culture. What emerges is that Thwaite is not centrally writing about the threat to western culture from any source (presumably the young rather than any mounted nomads from inland sheep-herding areas). This thematic is found in books, near in date, by Peter Abbs and George Mackay Brown, for example. It's just that Thwaite is not writing about this theme at all. The thesis in the poems is about the recurring decay of urban civilisation in an arid land: the recurring superiority of the barbarians with their poverty, simplicity and heroism - and aggression. Thwaite is not writing moralised history but a story of 'human geography'. The idea could be compared to the 'Pine Processionary' poem.
The perspective derives from geography - in Libya you could (more so in 1950) see the past because the infertility of the land did not lead to abundant over-building and rains, bacteria, etc. are weak in effect. The ruins are so noticeable that you naturally think about the process of ruin - so much more durable than flourishing. Major public buildings are wrecked but they do not collapse. The comparison between the abandoned buildings of the Romans and the abandoned ditto of Mussolini’s failed Empire was obvious - not only because the fascists earnestly copied the Romans. Thwaite is fascinated by open-air archaeology and has no share of the ‘paranoid conservative’ in his make-up.
I was reading 'Hesperides' on the train going down to the small publishers' fair event in 2011. During a brief pub break at that event, I talked to someone who said they had bought Thwaite's Collected Poems after reading about him in my book 'Council of Heresy'. I was very happy. This is what I was trying to achieve. Maybe I can declare the project closed and have a rest.
To fake affection in the course of an argument about the 'division geometry' would be objectionable and corrupt. Partly for that reason, I can't write arguments about the divisions. But if you're a critic, you don't have to build arguments. What you have to do is explain why you like works of poetry. One relatively remote part of this might be that a latent block disappeared and although it didn't speak it was the material of division. So first it doesn't speak and then it doesn't exist. The blocks might not all be hostility but because if there are 30 stimuli calling for attention you scoff 15 of them, and throw 15 away. This is 'crowd-out". So it could also be that attachment to the figures in the cultural centre satisfies the intellectual energies which could be responding to the charms of avant garde poetry. So loyalty causes the blocks. So - I can't launch a campaign against loyalty. We are surfing on loyalty all the time - I can't reflexivise the consequences of loyalty.
(A recent blog-yob has described my work as 'patchy and incohesive' and no doubt they would get angry about this posting, too, simply shedding light on Anthony Thwaite. Well, here it is. If 50 poets wrote books which illuminated their poems I would cover them. But only one did.)
There is a very interesting discussion of Synesius and his interest in esoteric philosophy related to the Hermetica in Garth Fowden's 'Egyptian Hermes'. This would link Thwaite with the esoteric aspects which fill much of the rest of 'Council of Heresy' - but Thwaite was not interested in this aspect of Synesius, so the connection is a complete ghost.
I dredged out of a library sale in Nottingham a book 'The Deserts of Hesperides' by Anthony Thwaite, a 1968 travel book about Libya which sheds light on his Libya-set poems.
The choice of Libya was because he felt very happy there. This was during his national service time there, and he went back to a university in Tripoli because he wanted to recover the happiness.
This book records the story about Thwaite being an archaeology fan with another sergeant while stationed in Cyrenaica, in 1950, and how they found a scattered hoard of Roman coins in a pool, which they brought up by diving, throughout one summer. The final count was around 7800 coins.
A whole chapter, pages 150-62, describes work on his sequence of poems 'Letters of Synesius'. Synesius was barely Christian, he was a pagan who was attracted to the new religion and became a bishop without quite giving in to it. Synesius was a native of Libya and this is really why Thwaite began writing about him while living in Libya, or shortly after he had left there. Synesius wrote some poems influenced by Neo-Platonist themes.
It looks as if Synesius was chosen because there is not much else written about Libya from Classical times. Callimachus came from there but identified too much with Alexandria for there to be a Libyan association of any strength. Synesius’ letters do not describe his death but they do describe wars with the desert tribes - and then his voice and he disappear. Synesius' letters lead naturally to a climax as the urban society of the shore is overrun by the nomadic tribes of the interior, untouched by Classical Mediterranean culture. What emerges is that Thwaite is not centrally writing about the threat to western culture from any source (presumably the young rather than any mounted nomads from inland sheep-herding areas). This thematic is found in books, near in date, by Peter Abbs and George Mackay Brown, for example. It's just that Thwaite is not writing about this theme at all. The thesis in the poems is about the recurring decay of urban civilisation in an arid land: the recurring superiority of the barbarians with their poverty, simplicity and heroism - and aggression. Thwaite is not writing moralised history but a story of 'human geography'. The idea could be compared to the 'Pine Processionary' poem.
The perspective derives from geography - in Libya you could (more so in 1950) see the past because the infertility of the land did not lead to abundant over-building and rains, bacteria, etc. are weak in effect. The ruins are so noticeable that you naturally think about the process of ruin - so much more durable than flourishing. Major public buildings are wrecked but they do not collapse. The comparison between the abandoned buildings of the Romans and the abandoned ditto of Mussolini’s failed Empire was obvious - not only because the fascists earnestly copied the Romans. Thwaite is fascinated by open-air archaeology and has no share of the ‘paranoid conservative’ in his make-up.
I was reading 'Hesperides' on the train going down to the small publishers' fair event in 2011. During a brief pub break at that event, I talked to someone who said they had bought Thwaite's Collected Poems after reading about him in my book 'Council of Heresy'. I was very happy. This is what I was trying to achieve. Maybe I can declare the project closed and have a rest.
To fake affection in the course of an argument about the 'division geometry' would be objectionable and corrupt. Partly for that reason, I can't write arguments about the divisions. But if you're a critic, you don't have to build arguments. What you have to do is explain why you like works of poetry. One relatively remote part of this might be that a latent block disappeared and although it didn't speak it was the material of division. So first it doesn't speak and then it doesn't exist. The blocks might not all be hostility but because if there are 30 stimuli calling for attention you scoff 15 of them, and throw 15 away. This is 'crowd-out". So it could also be that attachment to the figures in the cultural centre satisfies the intellectual energies which could be responding to the charms of avant garde poetry. So loyalty causes the blocks. So - I can't launch a campaign against loyalty. We are surfing on loyalty all the time - I can't reflexivise the consequences of loyalty.
(A recent blog-yob has described my work as 'patchy and incohesive' and no doubt they would get angry about this posting, too, simply shedding light on Anthony Thwaite. Well, here it is. If 50 poets wrote books which illuminated their poems I would cover them. But only one did.)
There is a very interesting discussion of Synesius and his interest in esoteric philosophy related to the Hermetica in Garth Fowden's 'Egyptian Hermes'. This would link Thwaite with the esoteric aspects which fill much of the rest of 'Council of Heresy' - but Thwaite was not interested in this aspect of Synesius, so the connection is a complete ghost.
Thursday, 15 March 2012
The Long 1950s
Notes on “The Long 1950s”
This posting is a mess of info related directly to a book called 'The Long 1950s'. The book is now available from Shearsman Books. Obviously, the good stuff is in the book and this is just a sort of saunter in a peripheral direction. The book, put simply, is about the ‘affirmative culture’ of the 1950s and how, despite the arrival of other artistic currents, it persisted into the 1980s; and then how the mainstream gave up that line and mutated into something more interesting. The idea of a 'history of the mainstream' shines through the work, but there was too much data for that so I just took 'slide sections', moments which I could look at closely. these tend to be discrete genres. It began as a collection of chapters that didn’t fit into other books, then was devised as a set of revisionist theories, then was narrowed down to ideas about the Mainstream, and finally was qualified to be an explanation of the range of amateur poetry through descriptions of the available styles. Through the genres, we can get a glimpse of the huge mass of mainstream poetry being written. Other themes crop up, naturally. The basic rule for the book was 'don't mention alternative poetry'. If you leave out the alternative, what do you see?
11 March 2012. Am just re-doing the index as the pagination shifted slightly when some corrections were put in. So The Long 1950s will be published soon, maybe in the early summer.
I did some work on numbers which suggested that the Mainstream might include 6000 writers in my chosen period. I wasn't going to attempt to deal with them as individuals. But the book has essays on about 14 individuals.
(Roy Fuller, John Holloway, Edwin Morgan, Peter Levi, Christopher Logue, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Stainer, Jeremy Reed, Jo Shapcott, Jamie McKendrick, Robert Saxton, Alice Oswald, John Stammers).
The rule for the book was not to mention the Underground at all but I didn't quite manage that.
The posting basically includes info which wasn't interesting enough to go in the book (tied off at 112,000 words) and which is in snippets as opposed to the completed (but rejected) chapters which are also on this site somewhere. So this is aimed for people who have read the book and are still curious.
The book came out of another project, which was more simply one of trawling second hand bookshops and so on to find good mainstream poetry. This really came after work on my series of books had finished, and out of guilt that I had missed something of significance. The project had mixed results. There is just too much poetry for any search to be more than incomplete. Of course what you want is a learned guide, in which case you aren’t really searching and don’t have the same difficulties. This brings me back to what I was trying to do in writing guides to the period. Peter Levi and Anthony Thwaite were probably the main successes.
(the kidney-shaped table)
Some German book I read about 50s design had a sentence saying that 'the kidney shaped table was the Gothic Arch of the 1950s'.
This book started when I bought, in a retro shop in Nottingham, a plate (designed 1957) which has transfer prints of kidney-shaped tables as part of its design. I have an idea of the 50s and it's this. But really the precise emotion is an artefact. It’s my feeling of life before I became conscious, and when I was occupied with the details of tables, carpets and kitchenware because for me as a young child those were the immediate objects of consciousness. (The set was called ‘Homemaker’ and was designed by Edna Seeley. The Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent has one of the plates on show, with details.)
My mother bought a set of three wooden tables by Ercol, graded so that one fitted below the other. I remember them arriving in what must have been circa 1962. They weren't classically kidney shaped but a sort of long oval.
Culture in the 1950s was child-centred. This was OK with me because I was a child. ‘Affirmative culture’ tells the naive, children for example, that happiness is out there and that security is the normal condition of human beings. This is a message which is profoundly calming for the naive, for children. I didn’t want to be forced to think critically about things. That came with adolescence and predictably it brought a phase of despair and spiritual nausea.
50s cinema
There is a book called 50s cinema: a celebration, edited by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard. (British cinema, that is to say.) I found this inspiring. The writers regard these culturally lost films from the centre of those films, not adjusting them to the norms of some other aesthetic. It was easy for me to get back into that emotional position, since after all I was a child in the 1950s and that material, worn out and leached out or not, saturated my earliest cultural experience; but the culture I learnt later was overlying it and blocked it off. The book by MacKillop and Sinyard gave me a way back and was a wonderful reading experience besides. I have just read it for the second time.
(Stainer)
WHF Rivers was treating patients for shell-shock - a term which was invented by G Elliot Smith. There is a fascinating discussion of this by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady. She caused some confusion by mis-spelling Elliot Smith. This is a great book and has few flaws.
Smith with a man named TH Pear wrote Shell Shock - and its lessons. I also talk about Smith in Origins of the Underground. I bought a book about the Piltdown Man hoax which blamed Elliot Smith for arranging it - without evidence except 'being possible' so far as I could tell. See posting on 'Death Cult and Dog Star' on this site.
*
Amateur poetry
In 2007 I developed, with graphic designer Robert Baird, a diagram for Chicago Review which put, on a single page, the vertices of the poetic space in Britain. This got us away from the Underground and pushed us towards a more complete picture, even if intense identification with the parts of the picture was no longer implied. The step towards a colourless or objective rendition of cultural space opened the enticing possibility of putting ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ poetry on the same map. This is something I followed up in ‘The Long 1950s’, naturally only for a few themes within a huge landscape.
Domestic anecdote
Who invented the term 'domestic anecdote'? I said it was Crozier but on searching the text of his famous essay I can't find the phrase. So I don't know who it was.
The 1950s
My mother told me a story relating to about 1951. The new archbishop of Canterbury had a wife, who became ex officio national head of the Mothers' Union. She decreed that everyone had to renew their marriage vows or they couldn't go on being members. The local branch in Clifton was run by my grandmother (my Yorkshire grandmother). There was a member who was separated from her husband and who obviously couldn't renew her vows, although to be sure she still had the children and couldn't get rid of them and was, you would think, an Anglican mother. She was facing being expelled from the Mothers' Union - surely a blow too many. My grandmother dissolved the Mothers' Union and restarted it the next day under a different name with the same members.
It is striking that this she-bishop was a stupid stupid fascist, but rather more striking that she had no basis for assuming this authority except a sense of being God's gift and the fact that she was married to someone. The plot for mass expulsions of people she didn't approve of was part of a belief, not rare at that time, that the Church could roll back the 'secular' or 'libertarian' advances of the previous 50 years. In poetry, Christianity was winning back ground. This is related to 'metre and rhyme' coming back to the centre ground, even for young poets, in the 1950s.
In Roald Dahl's autobiography he tells of being at a school of which this archbishop man was headmaster. In that office, he revelled in beating boys excessively and took great pleasure in it. My mother was very pleased to read about this, because it confirmed her suspicions of the whole family. Arrogance, evil, and education were the triad of the ruling stratum at that time. This is the set-up that people were rebelling against.
For me the message is that Anglicanism stopped being power-obsessed and so it became possible for poets to write within it. You'd have to squeeze Rowan Williams for a long time to get a drop of evil out of him.
This is a story I didn't put in the text of 'The Long 1950s'. If people don't understand how evil the ruling class was in 1951 there is no point me trying to get it over to them.
Ewart Milne
I bought a volume of New Poems 1952 because it was edited by Roy Fuller and Montagu Slater and so I thought it would collect some left-wing poems. This turned out to be a good bet. One inclusion was ‘Elegy for a Lost Submarine’, by Ewart Milne. This was written in May-June 1951, according to the text. It is about 160 lines long. It is about the loss of a British submarine, in 1951, on peacetime manoeuvres. This is really a terrific poem. Part of my interest was the history of protest poetry - when I tried to name some protest poems for a diagram of poetic styles my mind went blank, I just couldn’t think of any. I listed Ewart Milne, as I had read this poem, too quickly, in an anthology made by Jon Silkin. The question was whether there was ever an interruption of continuity, from 1930s protest poems about the rise of fascism to poems circa 1965 about the atomic bomb and so on. There was a kind of ‘platform poem’ in the 1930s which was theatrical and oral, because of all the exciting political meetings of the period. I think that combination of ‘oral + public + protest’ poem was continuous. But the written record tends to leave it out. I think the protest poetry of the 60s has largely been written out of the record.
Milne also wrote a book called ’Time Stopped’, which Prynne recommended to students in about 1983. Again, this is a terrific work. I’m sorry to say I haven’t read most of his books, but I know that he was a Thirties radical, a Marxist who served with the ambulance corps in the Spanish Civil War. He was ‘of mixed Irish and English parentage’, according to the note, but I think he identified with Ireland, as a non-imperialist culture. There was no Communist Party in Ireland so I believe he spent a lot of his life in England, where you could get involved in that kind of thing. He did move on from all that; the interesting question is what he wrote after reaching intellectual maturity. He did a book called ’Cantata under Orion’, which again I haven’t seen.
I am sure Britain didn’t need a Communist government in 1952, but if you look at the writers who were involved with the Party around that time they are a very interesting lot.
I also haven’t get the energy to acquire all 10 volumes of ‘new poems’ for the 1950s. The anthologies were made for the PEN club. If distractions go away I will get there eventually.
I never wrote about the genre 'protest poem', it caused problems.
Alan Ross
Ross wrote some of the best poems of the 1950s. I didn’t find room for Ross in the book. The ones about being an intelligence officer for a destroyer, stationed in Germany just after the war, are especially good. The idea of being ‘tough’ worked for Ross, he could actually write tough poems. The evocation of a devastated landscape is concise, forceful, undeniable. The war had taken him to exotic places, sharpened his powers of observation, made him prefer terseness and decisiveness. But all his poems are good. He could write romantically about romantic places. ‘New Poems 1952’ has him writing about Brighton and a gypsy church on the Mediterranean, in the Camargue; the locations are slightly garish, too decorative, of diminished reality, but the poems are faultless.
There are always a few figures who evade the generalisations about any period.
Footnote to Reed essay
A quote from the Gospel of Thomas runs:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
My note on Wilson Knight's commentary (in The Christian Renaissance) shows 'When ye have trampled upon the garments of shame, and when the two have become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.' He credits this as coming from The Gospel of the Egyptians, but I could not find this in a version of that text on-line. I suspect both logia are describing chastity as the basis of holiness. For Knight the core figure of drama is bisexual figures who have a mediumistic and prophetic gift. The idea that people who became neither male nor female entered heaven provided a source for these figures. Thus the voices which speak to mediums are the dead as transfigured forms of the formerly alive.
I don't get into the androgyne thing, possibly because I was a teenager during the fevers of Glam Rock and just got overloaded with that stuff. Knight was still around in 1970 and in one of his books there is praise of David Bowie. He was watching TV around 1970 and obviously the sight of tall, willowy young men with long hair spoke to something deep in Knight. In fact, given what his major book on the history of drama (The Golden Labyrinth) says, you could say he had predicted glam rock.
Affirmative culture
What Herbert Marcuse defined as "affirmative culture" is the core of what we see in 1950s culture. The match is perfect. That affirmative quality is even what we feel nostalgia for and try to recover in surviving artefacts of 50s culture. But that’s the problem in what I have to write. Poetry is not “affirmative culture”. This is very important: poets belonged to the university elite, tiny as it was in those days, and held to an ideal of being critical and ironic. That whole line of resistance to popular culture, which seems so odd today, was in effect a deep dislike of affirmative culture. I wanted to write about it but because it doesn't feature in poetry that had to go. There had been a sublime line in poetry, and some of its practitioners were still alive in the 1950s, but it was clearly moribund and ancient by 1950 and it would not be sensible to write about it. Alfred Noyes was affirmative but he was just a reverend shadow by 1950.
I make a few remarks about the life of writers who were not making their careers in the 1950s but who in a way dominated the decade. For example, Lord Dunsany, born in 1878. I believe he was president of the Authors' Club, I think Robert Filreis says that in his wonderful book about the conservative opposition to modern poetry (in 1945-60) but I couldn‘t confirm this. Dunsany was one of the more vocal people saying that vers libre was rotten and led nowhere. There is a 1952 editorial by him in Poetry Review where he denounces modern poetry (viz. everything since 1905?) using a series of examples which turn out all to have been written by him. This is the most dishonest piece of polemic until the 1960s produced affronted conservatives. I don't even think he read any modern poetry, I think he just got a book by Stanton Coblentz which contained twisted fragments of selectively bad modern American poetry in order to justify Coblentz's outrageously anti-modern thesis. In the 1960s you had people into ‘youth culture’ and confident enough to ignore aged culture; in the 1950s that was scarcely so and the presence of poets born before 1900 loomed over everything. Young poets envied people with real religious belief and envied poets writing in repetitive and rigid metres. PR ran a set of letters agreeing with Dunsany - the other side doesn't appear.
There is a lot about Coblentz in Filreis’ book, whose subject is the organised attack on modern poetry and free verse in the period 1945 to 1960. It is set in the USA but it is such a good book that it sheds light on England and other countries too.
Optimistic Art; the box of beautiful things
My fascination with the amateur comes from an essay by Andrew Brighton in which he talks about amateur art and how because it lacks the inhibitions of professional art it can got to places where the highly educated cannot reach. Actually, I never read Brighton's essay, I was inspired by a mention of it in one of Peter Fuller's books. I tried quite hard, years later, to find Brighton's work, but Fuller did not give a citation and I never found it. [update: it was an exhibition, by Brighton and Lynda Morris, called "Towards Another Picture". The exhibition was in Nottingham, where I live, and I now have the volume of documents issued to support the exhibition. It covered the whole spectrum of art in England.] All this is coming back because of reading a fictionalised account of an art historian, who is undoubtedly Fuller, in Iain Sinclair's book Hackney, That Rose-red Empire. Sinclair's account has many literal details from Fuller's life in Graham Road but is malign and unreal. The bottom line is that I never saw the bright and decorative paintings which he wrote about and I never found any naive poetry of modern times which I could find innocent and refreshing. So writing a book about it was a vague gesture - waving benevolence to people I hadn't read and wasn't going to write about except as a symbol.
Fuller had developed a whole framework for reacting to the pessimism of the visual work that he was specifically dealing with at a certain time, which we can call the Seventies. He explained this through kenosis, a theological concept. Fuller was a fan of theology and saw 20th C art as a re-enactment of theological passions in different form, as I do. Kenosis is ‘emptying‘. He saw 20th C art as growing increasingly empty and ending up with a kind of abstract bleakness which was terrifying. This idea of there only being one kind of art, and of it developing and abandoning previous positions, also seems to go along with the increasing emptying of high art. It leaves out every other kind of painting. It could be combined - in somewhere like Hackney, in a year like 1975 - with an idea that capitalism had created sensory emptiness and alienation, and that art could bring people to realise the full sterility of capitalism by bringing them to peaks of anxiety and desolation which they had never experienced in the outside world. Quite possibly, the idea that there was a thing ‘capitalism’ separate from our own beings was a symptom of a sensory emptiness which permitted a very high degree of abstraction. Immersed in this heady and collectively managed bleakness, Fuller eventually reacted against it and came out asking for art to be sensuous and optimistic. It was in this context that he grasped at Brighton's constructive idea as a way of escape.
Another problem is to explain why, when ostensibly writing about the poets of low competence, I have entire chapters about Pauline Stainer and Jeremy Reed. This is hard to explain. A big factor was just that I wanted to write about them and that I only write prose books because it lets me write about people like that. But the other factor is that they have nothing to do with that kenosis that Fuller talks about, and with the critical alienated line in 20th C art. It is profoundly right to include them as examples of Christian myth and realisation of glamour fantasy (respectively) because by doing that they illustrate two genres which many poets, including weaker ones, write in. It is impossible to write about a genre through a poet who can't write.
I didn't explain this in the book because I wanted to leave the whole critical-alienated line out of the book. Just for once.
Both Stainer and Reed are optimistic writers and in that specific way can be identified as naive. If you talk about the 'box of beautiful things' you can see that both poets believe in that box. Even, that they want to create a box of beautiful poems. So maybe this is the optimistic art which takes us away from the heady high-altitude wastes of negation.
I am still wondering about the paintings that Brighton saw. Just now I passed an art shop, in Nottingham, just near the Nottingham Contemporary, our new museum of the modern. The shop has a very large naive painting in the window, showing a scene of ice skaters. (The Ice Arena is also not very far away.) It is brightly coloured, full of detail and realistic endeavour. There is no characterisation but it has this positivity, it is all about having a good time. It didn’t raise my mood. It struck me that it was very like an advertisement - that lack of depth, that endlessness without substance. It’s not that people don’t enjoy ice skating or that the sight of happiness makes me unhappy. But the scope of naive poetry is probably limited, in the same way as naive painting, by the saturation quality of advertising in our society. Optimistic painting has to be quite artless and poorly designed to avoid getting sucked back into the drained colour surface, from looking like a poster for the English Tourist Board or for the Ice Arena or whatever. Poetry books already have blurbs on the cover which represent Affirmative Culture in the poetic realm, and some of which are utterly mendacious. If you wrote a book of Naively Optimistic Poems the inside would just read like the blurbs around it - something already there. So maybe the only way to love naive poetry is not to read it but simply to imagine it.
Maybe Andrew Brighton was also into another dream of the Left, that there were people with intact sensibilities in the lower classes and they would walk in and replace the sophisticated urban neurotics with their art based on competition and on failed competition. I believe it is true that whatever dead ends cultured art, driven by fashion and cultural overload, finds itself in, will always be recovered from in the next generation. In a sense renewal always comes from children who come along and grow up with different ideas and with fewer acquired traumas. However, the most demanding art is the product of the most cultured people, and that doesn't seem to change very much. That style, which was based on a belief in Marcuse’s theory of ‘affirmative culture’ and tried to be ‘negation’ and then eventually, after decades of suffering ’the negation of the negation’, was peculiar to the 1970s, it is not around much now and you would have to explain to a young person today what it was or had ever been.
I do like the idea that there are people who paint the sea and ships and that they will spend their lives on the coast with an easel, indifferent to hotheads denouncing bourgeois art. The book should have been called 'the box of beautiful things' or similar but I fought shy of that. Anyway good poetry isn't simply a pile of beautiful things.
Folk style
After decades of waiting there is now a good book on the Folk Revival: Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, by Colin Harper. Actually it’s more than good, it’s wonderful. Jansch came from Leith, the port area of Edinburgh. He began playing guitar in 1960. He was one of two singer/guitarists in Pentangle, a group consciously formed to reach a large audience, which did reach a large audience and in a way ‘represented’ folk in the 1967-71 period. Harper’s book has a large amount of detail on the key period 1958-65. It is not overwhelmingly about Jansch and after all he was very much part of a Scene.
The two problems that memory wants to write out are easily summed up. Folk came out on two classic labels, Topic and Transatlantic. Topic began as the label of the Workers’ Music Association, whose membership was mainly communist. Transatlantic got started with recordings from America, folk and blues. The question is how English folk music could emerge from under these two currents of power. Or, how far is the stream of music that came out on those two labels, not all of it classic but pretty big swathes of it, either folk music or English. I have long been curious about the link between folk and communism. My intuition is that figures like Ewan MacColl thought they were running the whole thing as propaganda for the Party, but that they lost control of the craze very quickly and that only a fraction of the participants had any connection with communism. I have not found any definitive statement on this but Harper’s book does not confirm any Red dominance. He covers MacColl quite thoroughly but ties the communist thing to a group of people around him rather than to the rank and file of the Revival. The evidence is complicated and it crops up in many parts of Harper's book, so I will point you to that rather than summarise it. I keep recognising minor figures in Harper’s narrative as communists.
This craze is relevant to poetry, but - like communism I suppose - as something which everyone was attracted to and which had notable failures revealing fatal structural weaknesses. So that everyone came out the other side.
Harper cites The Weavers selling a million copies of a cover of ‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950 - in the USA. The timing of the American folk revival was completely different from the English and Scottish one. The folk thing in the USA was smashed by McCarthyism. The links many of its leaders there had to the Marxist Left probably explain why MacColl thought a ‘Red folk’ was possible in Britain. I don’t think the British thing would have taken off without influence from America, but I was only two years old in 1958 and my guesses are unreliable - especially as written sources are so few. The guitar had no role in British folk culture so the guitar orientation came from copying American styles, and later turning the learnt skills to the Anglo-Celtic repertoire.
When I say ‘smashed’, of course it came back. It just went through a bad time.
I think everyone liked Pentangle and the musicians were probably more critical of the group’s weaknesses than the listeners.
One version of the Folk thing is in Jeff Nuttall’s book Bomb Culture (1968), where a major storyline is how there was a human type who went on CND marches, was into trad jazz and folk, belonged to the Old Left, disliked pop music, and was generally contemptible. Nuttall blindly believes that “style A is JUNK and style B is WONDERFUL’. For him it’s always that everyone cool is at gig B on a certain night and everyone dismal and tedious is at gig A. Eric Mottram uses the same pressurising polemic structure. It’s exciting but finally it’s like Ewan MacColl, it’s authoritarian. I don’t accept that every folk song was dull or that every electric pop song was groovy and exciting. I suppose what this brings us to is that not every avant garde-Underground poet is interesting and not every Oxford/ mainstream/ tweed poet is dull.
Michael Brocken’s book The English Folk Revival (2003) has a great deal of information about the role of the Communist party in Topic records and the folk movement in general. Topic was the label of the Workers’ Music Association and was formed in 1939. Their pressing run was about 100 copies, it was a club thing. When the CP lost most of its members after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the subscriptions for the WMA also dried up and Topic had to think about selling to the public. This is probably when they became a significant record label - when they had to worry about shops and turnover. They now sold a lot more than 100 copies. The people who worked there kept their ideology, it was probably in the mid 1970s that it began to wear thin. Being communist meant loving the people and loving folk music went along with that rather sweetly.
Brocken has (at p.37) the story from an interview with Ewan MacColl where he says there were in the late 50s 1500 folk clubs in Britain directly expressing the ideals of the movement and of MacColl. But checking an issue of ‘Sing’, the communist-oriented folk song magazine, for 1957, shows a list of ‘What’s On’ which only lists nine folk clubs. This is probably the correct total. The rest were the product of MacColl’s imagination. (This analysis is already in Dave Harker’s Fakelore (1985), if I am not mistaken.) It is a notable example of first-hand evidence being thoroughly unreliable. It also shows Stalinist heroic propaganda values at work in Britain.
Harper gives one half of a famous story about MacColl, which is that in the club he ran English people weren’t allowed to sing American songs and vice versa. The second half (and who knows where I heard this from) is that later on this applied to regions as well, that if you came from Lancashire you had to sing Lancashire songs and if from Essex you had to sing Essex songs. People cite this as the Puritanism of the rigorous folk scene, which never reached the public. It was like Stalinism, which is the social group where MacColl got his sense of the fitness of things. I think his policy was defensible - it forced people to make an effort, to explore the hidden repertoire and research untapped sources. If you look back at 1958 from 2010 you realise that if they hadn’t expanded the repertoire of folk music, both songs and styles, the whole thing would not have survived until now, it would have died of boredom. There was a point about regional singing styles, being diverse in the same way that dialects are. I certainly think dialects and regional singing styles are precious. To my ear, English (revived) folk music is important because it eventually got beyond reproducing the Scottish singing, Scottish Traveller singing, American singing, which were so dominant at the outset. Its flourishing had a lot to do with accepting regional styles. This also had a lot to do with getting over embarrassment and accepting the sound of your own voice. MacColl had foresight but undeniably he was authoritarian.
Brocken has extensive material from folk singers on how weary they got of MacColl and how authoritarian he was. After a certain point you start to feel that he gets slagged off so much because he was important; if he hadn't been part of the landscape, people wouldn’t have got so frustrated with him. Brocken says ‘it is quite clear that the origin of the revival was indeed political for several important disciples’ and concedes the importance of the Leftists.
It’s surprising how much British Marxism achieved even with the handicaps of very small numbers and of rigidity, personality cults, delusion, and so on. A big role in the WMA was played by Alan Bush (1900-95). In 1951 he won the competition to compose an opera for the Festival of Britain, to be staged at Covent Garden. When the bosses discovered that he was a communist there was a lot of brouhaha and in the end his opera was not staged. This story is in Norman Lebrecht’s book on Covent Garden. No good telling someone like that that artists are oppressed in the Communist bloc. There is a story that when the end of communism came Bush was 90 years old and ill and his friends kept it secret from him in case it made him more ill. I don’t know if that is a true story.
(For more on folksong, see posting on ‘The unlearned and the unlearning’ on this site.)
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Hewison
I was re-reading Robert Hewison's In Anger, a standard work on culture in the 1950s. I think I have read Hewison’s book four times now. Some other books were very useful: John Press’s Rule and Energy, Eric Homberger’s Art of the Real and Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry in particular. Kenneth Allott’s prose commentary in the anthology Mid-century Poetry is useful although too grim. I found 50s films and also books on 50s films very suggestive in thinking about the poetry of the time.
John Press’ book Rule & Energy (1963) actually is a history of British poetry in the 1950s (although I hadn’t read it when I wrote my chapter). This gives a rather wider view than I do. I recommend this book. Press writes very well about the Blakean, post-Symboliste, etc. line in this. He portrays the British scene from the war up till when he was writing (in 1962) as a struggle between the visionaries and the rationalists. The visionaries are few in number. However, he’s quite right to suggest that the Oracular line was there in the 1950s and didn’t spring from nowhere in 1967, or 1965.
Hewison sees a split in the 1950s, with a different tone starting in 1956. This was a revolt against what was already there (mostly much older than 1950) and centres on 'Look back in anger'. This is fascinating but doesn't work in poetry.
Hewison quotes John Berger sounding off about the 'rule makers'. Amazing. He was making up rules and trying to shove them down people's throats more than anyone else. A Stalinist who thinks he is liberating people. Sort of Ewan MacColl without the beard.
In Anger makes major use of the idea of typicality, that there is a single literary person and a change to the role affects everyone. He pulls it off but the deadline for that kind of thing was running out, and typicality was leaking its substance in a hundred directions in the 1960s. The thing is that poems use this universal lay figure in much the same way that Hewison does. In 1955 it did feel as if every writer was a pupil at the same school, shuffling down the same chilly corridors, scared of the same headmaster, late for the same compulsory sessions of ideology, sneaking off for a cigarette in the same hidey-holes. All that's gone and I can't write poetry criticism in those terms.
In 1955, what books offered was much more like the company of a certain kind of person. If you didn't like that sort of person it just wasn't interesting to be there. Writers who adapted to that and learnt how to put their 'voice' over didn't understand why the audience wasn't interested, a few years later, when poetry had become a much wider exploration both of subjectivity and of objective knowledge. 'You have to feel the same way that I do' - and this was very close to thinking 'this poem, any poem, HAS to be written in this way'. There was a whole stock of banal but educated poetry which was like the park in your town: you have to go there because it's the only park and it's conventional to go there.
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Noel Annan : 'It also began to be recognised how much homosexuals enriched the nation's culture. Hardly surprising since by the sixties the best known English-born poet, the outstanding composer, the most famous choreographer, and the most prestigious painter - Auden, Britten, Ashton, and Bacon - were all known to be homosexuals.'
(quoted from Neil Miller's Out of the Past, a Gay and Lesbian History, p.259) Saying 'by the sixties' actually means 'during the 1950s', although Bacon's fame was ascending during that decade.
Norman Lebrecht says about the Fifties -'England's leading painter (Bacon), poet (Auden), actor (Gielgud), composer (Britten), novelist (Forster) and choreographer (Ashton) were all homosexual, an attribute that was unmentionable in studies of their lives and works.' (Covent Garden, the Untold Story, p.177)
This is in a passage set specifically in 1953, a moment of gay-bashing by the media and the police. This is a salient fact, in 1953, and must be part of the Fifties arts world. I don't have an explanation for it. Gays were not prominent in poetry, at least so far as evidence survives. In poetry, people didn't have an anxiety that you had to be gay, they had an anxiety that you had to have been born before 1900 to be a great English poet.
No one else writes as interestingly as Lebrecht about the arts world. He evokes ‘arts gays’ circa 1950 as a cosy little conspiracy, and that insider quality could have effects in allowing people to be self-indulgent (knowing they have a welcome) or to be implicit and allusive, in a private code (emptying the poem of overt meaning). But - I have just argued that literature in general at that time had the quality of letting you be with ‘certain people’, it was all a conspiracy, a fellowship of the willing. That intimacy is what the text exploits. You can trace it to Oxford University or to the Gay Fraternity, but those are false leads, because literature had that insider quality even when it had nothing to do with those two in-groups. The readers of the time were shocked by writers like Beckett or Tomlinson who offered no warmth or indulgence at all; that felt new and unattractive, in the Fifties.
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The chapter on singer-songwriters. This was added after the main text was completed. It has the problem of not being based in textual details but in the overall 'feel' of a large number of texts. Bringing in the singers is a way of answering questions like "why is modern poetry (since 1960) so flat? why is it so hopeful that the reader will be fascinated by the poet's personality? why do poets think they can produce a wholly verbal creation which makes no use of verbal style?" These questions shed light on a great deal of poetry which is not of great interest. The significant poets do not raise these questions because they addressed the problem of flatness and have solved it by developing a verbal style whose richness differentiates it from the landscape around it. The questions may not be worth raising. On the other hand, I think this style was new in the 1960s and represents what replaced the formal, literary, ethically demanding, poetry of the 1950s, itself perhaps a continuation of a long line of literary poetry. The victorious sound of the 1960s was not anything modernist or experimental but this flatness which is also conversational and also egocentric. It was not inspired by Pound and Structuralism but by Judy Collins and Donovan. Of several thousand poets who got into print, few could understand either Pound or Lévi-Strauss, but a lot of them could understand Donovan.
Equally, the vast mass of poets have given up on the stylistic elevation which marks the ‘heritage’ of English and Scottish poetry. Analysing the modernists in terms of cultural aggression and deliberate destruction of classical serenity is irrelevant unless you also consider that the mass of poets now writing also use a flat and unliterary style.
It is not accurate to call the vernacular modern style ‘Pop’, because it lacks many qualities necessary to Pop. It is more accurate to compare it to a vein of song creation which would claim to be the expression of conscience and to be opposed by its bareness and authenticity to the sugar rush of Pop culture and to its commercialism. It is too earnest to like adornment.
Of course, it is arguable that all the poets who fell in love with this musical idiom failed, because leaving out the music was simply a step too far and this kind of poem could never work, being unpoetic. It would then be a mass movement in the wrong direction. I got the feeling, when researching for The Long 1950s, that the Folk Revival had been a failure - leaving behind an archive of dullness. This possibility has to be considered.
This posting is a mess of info related directly to a book called 'The Long 1950s'. The book is now available from Shearsman Books. Obviously, the good stuff is in the book and this is just a sort of saunter in a peripheral direction. The book, put simply, is about the ‘affirmative culture’ of the 1950s and how, despite the arrival of other artistic currents, it persisted into the 1980s; and then how the mainstream gave up that line and mutated into something more interesting. The idea of a 'history of the mainstream' shines through the work, but there was too much data for that so I just took 'slide sections', moments which I could look at closely. these tend to be discrete genres. It began as a collection of chapters that didn’t fit into other books, then was devised as a set of revisionist theories, then was narrowed down to ideas about the Mainstream, and finally was qualified to be an explanation of the range of amateur poetry through descriptions of the available styles. Through the genres, we can get a glimpse of the huge mass of mainstream poetry being written. Other themes crop up, naturally. The basic rule for the book was 'don't mention alternative poetry'. If you leave out the alternative, what do you see?
11 March 2012. Am just re-doing the index as the pagination shifted slightly when some corrections were put in. So The Long 1950s will be published soon, maybe in the early summer.
I did some work on numbers which suggested that the Mainstream might include 6000 writers in my chosen period. I wasn't going to attempt to deal with them as individuals. But the book has essays on about 14 individuals.
(Roy Fuller, John Holloway, Edwin Morgan, Peter Levi, Christopher Logue, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Stainer, Jeremy Reed, Jo Shapcott, Jamie McKendrick, Robert Saxton, Alice Oswald, John Stammers).
The rule for the book was not to mention the Underground at all but I didn't quite manage that.
The posting basically includes info which wasn't interesting enough to go in the book (tied off at 112,000 words) and which is in snippets as opposed to the completed (but rejected) chapters which are also on this site somewhere. So this is aimed for people who have read the book and are still curious.
The book came out of another project, which was more simply one of trawling second hand bookshops and so on to find good mainstream poetry. This really came after work on my series of books had finished, and out of guilt that I had missed something of significance. The project had mixed results. There is just too much poetry for any search to be more than incomplete. Of course what you want is a learned guide, in which case you aren’t really searching and don’t have the same difficulties. This brings me back to what I was trying to do in writing guides to the period. Peter Levi and Anthony Thwaite were probably the main successes.
(the kidney-shaped table)
Some German book I read about 50s design had a sentence saying that 'the kidney shaped table was the Gothic Arch of the 1950s'.
This book started when I bought, in a retro shop in Nottingham, a plate (designed 1957) which has transfer prints of kidney-shaped tables as part of its design. I have an idea of the 50s and it's this. But really the precise emotion is an artefact. It’s my feeling of life before I became conscious, and when I was occupied with the details of tables, carpets and kitchenware because for me as a young child those were the immediate objects of consciousness. (The set was called ‘Homemaker’ and was designed by Edna Seeley. The Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent has one of the plates on show, with details.)
My mother bought a set of three wooden tables by Ercol, graded so that one fitted below the other. I remember them arriving in what must have been circa 1962. They weren't classically kidney shaped but a sort of long oval.
Culture in the 1950s was child-centred. This was OK with me because I was a child. ‘Affirmative culture’ tells the naive, children for example, that happiness is out there and that security is the normal condition of human beings. This is a message which is profoundly calming for the naive, for children. I didn’t want to be forced to think critically about things. That came with adolescence and predictably it brought a phase of despair and spiritual nausea.
50s cinema
There is a book called 50s cinema: a celebration, edited by Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard. (British cinema, that is to say.) I found this inspiring. The writers regard these culturally lost films from the centre of those films, not adjusting them to the norms of some other aesthetic. It was easy for me to get back into that emotional position, since after all I was a child in the 1950s and that material, worn out and leached out or not, saturated my earliest cultural experience; but the culture I learnt later was overlying it and blocked it off. The book by MacKillop and Sinyard gave me a way back and was a wonderful reading experience besides. I have just read it for the second time.
(Stainer)
WHF Rivers was treating patients for shell-shock - a term which was invented by G Elliot Smith. There is a fascinating discussion of this by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady. She caused some confusion by mis-spelling Elliot Smith. This is a great book and has few flaws.
Smith with a man named TH Pear wrote Shell Shock - and its lessons. I also talk about Smith in Origins of the Underground. I bought a book about the Piltdown Man hoax which blamed Elliot Smith for arranging it - without evidence except 'being possible' so far as I could tell. See posting on 'Death Cult and Dog Star' on this site.
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Amateur poetry
In 2007 I developed, with graphic designer Robert Baird, a diagram for Chicago Review which put, on a single page, the vertices of the poetic space in Britain. This got us away from the Underground and pushed us towards a more complete picture, even if intense identification with the parts of the picture was no longer implied. The step towards a colourless or objective rendition of cultural space opened the enticing possibility of putting ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ poetry on the same map. This is something I followed up in ‘The Long 1950s’, naturally only for a few themes within a huge landscape.
Domestic anecdote
Who invented the term 'domestic anecdote'? I said it was Crozier but on searching the text of his famous essay I can't find the phrase. So I don't know who it was.
The 1950s
My mother told me a story relating to about 1951. The new archbishop of Canterbury had a wife, who became ex officio national head of the Mothers' Union. She decreed that everyone had to renew their marriage vows or they couldn't go on being members. The local branch in Clifton was run by my grandmother (my Yorkshire grandmother). There was a member who was separated from her husband and who obviously couldn't renew her vows, although to be sure she still had the children and couldn't get rid of them and was, you would think, an Anglican mother. She was facing being expelled from the Mothers' Union - surely a blow too many. My grandmother dissolved the Mothers' Union and restarted it the next day under a different name with the same members.
It is striking that this she-bishop was a stupid stupid fascist, but rather more striking that she had no basis for assuming this authority except a sense of being God's gift and the fact that she was married to someone. The plot for mass expulsions of people she didn't approve of was part of a belief, not rare at that time, that the Church could roll back the 'secular' or 'libertarian' advances of the previous 50 years. In poetry, Christianity was winning back ground. This is related to 'metre and rhyme' coming back to the centre ground, even for young poets, in the 1950s.
In Roald Dahl's autobiography he tells of being at a school of which this archbishop man was headmaster. In that office, he revelled in beating boys excessively and took great pleasure in it. My mother was very pleased to read about this, because it confirmed her suspicions of the whole family. Arrogance, evil, and education were the triad of the ruling stratum at that time. This is the set-up that people were rebelling against.
For me the message is that Anglicanism stopped being power-obsessed and so it became possible for poets to write within it. You'd have to squeeze Rowan Williams for a long time to get a drop of evil out of him.
This is a story I didn't put in the text of 'The Long 1950s'. If people don't understand how evil the ruling class was in 1951 there is no point me trying to get it over to them.
Ewart Milne
I bought a volume of New Poems 1952 because it was edited by Roy Fuller and Montagu Slater and so I thought it would collect some left-wing poems. This turned out to be a good bet. One inclusion was ‘Elegy for a Lost Submarine’, by Ewart Milne. This was written in May-June 1951, according to the text. It is about 160 lines long. It is about the loss of a British submarine, in 1951, on peacetime manoeuvres. This is really a terrific poem. Part of my interest was the history of protest poetry - when I tried to name some protest poems for a diagram of poetic styles my mind went blank, I just couldn’t think of any. I listed Ewart Milne, as I had read this poem, too quickly, in an anthology made by Jon Silkin. The question was whether there was ever an interruption of continuity, from 1930s protest poems about the rise of fascism to poems circa 1965 about the atomic bomb and so on. There was a kind of ‘platform poem’ in the 1930s which was theatrical and oral, because of all the exciting political meetings of the period. I think that combination of ‘oral + public + protest’ poem was continuous. But the written record tends to leave it out. I think the protest poetry of the 60s has largely been written out of the record.
Milne also wrote a book called ’Time Stopped’, which Prynne recommended to students in about 1983. Again, this is a terrific work. I’m sorry to say I haven’t read most of his books, but I know that he was a Thirties radical, a Marxist who served with the ambulance corps in the Spanish Civil War. He was ‘of mixed Irish and English parentage’, according to the note, but I think he identified with Ireland, as a non-imperialist culture. There was no Communist Party in Ireland so I believe he spent a lot of his life in England, where you could get involved in that kind of thing. He did move on from all that; the interesting question is what he wrote after reaching intellectual maturity. He did a book called ’Cantata under Orion’, which again I haven’t seen.
I am sure Britain didn’t need a Communist government in 1952, but if you look at the writers who were involved with the Party around that time they are a very interesting lot.
I also haven’t get the energy to acquire all 10 volumes of ‘new poems’ for the 1950s. The anthologies were made for the PEN club. If distractions go away I will get there eventually.
I never wrote about the genre 'protest poem', it caused problems.
Alan Ross
Ross wrote some of the best poems of the 1950s. I didn’t find room for Ross in the book. The ones about being an intelligence officer for a destroyer, stationed in Germany just after the war, are especially good. The idea of being ‘tough’ worked for Ross, he could actually write tough poems. The evocation of a devastated landscape is concise, forceful, undeniable. The war had taken him to exotic places, sharpened his powers of observation, made him prefer terseness and decisiveness. But all his poems are good. He could write romantically about romantic places. ‘New Poems 1952’ has him writing about Brighton and a gypsy church on the Mediterranean, in the Camargue; the locations are slightly garish, too decorative, of diminished reality, but the poems are faultless.
There are always a few figures who evade the generalisations about any period.
Footnote to Reed essay
A quote from the Gospel of Thomas runs:
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."
My note on Wilson Knight's commentary (in The Christian Renaissance) shows 'When ye have trampled upon the garments of shame, and when the two have become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female.' He credits this as coming from The Gospel of the Egyptians, but I could not find this in a version of that text on-line. I suspect both logia are describing chastity as the basis of holiness. For Knight the core figure of drama is bisexual figures who have a mediumistic and prophetic gift. The idea that people who became neither male nor female entered heaven provided a source for these figures. Thus the voices which speak to mediums are the dead as transfigured forms of the formerly alive.
I don't get into the androgyne thing, possibly because I was a teenager during the fevers of Glam Rock and just got overloaded with that stuff. Knight was still around in 1970 and in one of his books there is praise of David Bowie. He was watching TV around 1970 and obviously the sight of tall, willowy young men with long hair spoke to something deep in Knight. In fact, given what his major book on the history of drama (The Golden Labyrinth) says, you could say he had predicted glam rock.
Affirmative culture
What Herbert Marcuse defined as "affirmative culture" is the core of what we see in 1950s culture. The match is perfect. That affirmative quality is even what we feel nostalgia for and try to recover in surviving artefacts of 50s culture. But that’s the problem in what I have to write. Poetry is not “affirmative culture”. This is very important: poets belonged to the university elite, tiny as it was in those days, and held to an ideal of being critical and ironic. That whole line of resistance to popular culture, which seems so odd today, was in effect a deep dislike of affirmative culture. I wanted to write about it but because it doesn't feature in poetry that had to go. There had been a sublime line in poetry, and some of its practitioners were still alive in the 1950s, but it was clearly moribund and ancient by 1950 and it would not be sensible to write about it. Alfred Noyes was affirmative but he was just a reverend shadow by 1950.
I make a few remarks about the life of writers who were not making their careers in the 1950s but who in a way dominated the decade. For example, Lord Dunsany, born in 1878. I believe he was president of the Authors' Club, I think Robert Filreis says that in his wonderful book about the conservative opposition to modern poetry (in 1945-60) but I couldn‘t confirm this. Dunsany was one of the more vocal people saying that vers libre was rotten and led nowhere. There is a 1952 editorial by him in Poetry Review where he denounces modern poetry (viz. everything since 1905?) using a series of examples which turn out all to have been written by him. This is the most dishonest piece of polemic until the 1960s produced affronted conservatives. I don't even think he read any modern poetry, I think he just got a book by Stanton Coblentz which contained twisted fragments of selectively bad modern American poetry in order to justify Coblentz's outrageously anti-modern thesis. In the 1960s you had people into ‘youth culture’ and confident enough to ignore aged culture; in the 1950s that was scarcely so and the presence of poets born before 1900 loomed over everything. Young poets envied people with real religious belief and envied poets writing in repetitive and rigid metres. PR ran a set of letters agreeing with Dunsany - the other side doesn't appear.
There is a lot about Coblentz in Filreis’ book, whose subject is the organised attack on modern poetry and free verse in the period 1945 to 1960. It is set in the USA but it is such a good book that it sheds light on England and other countries too.
Optimistic Art; the box of beautiful things
My fascination with the amateur comes from an essay by Andrew Brighton in which he talks about amateur art and how because it lacks the inhibitions of professional art it can got to places where the highly educated cannot reach. Actually, I never read Brighton's essay, I was inspired by a mention of it in one of Peter Fuller's books. I tried quite hard, years later, to find Brighton's work, but Fuller did not give a citation and I never found it. [update: it was an exhibition, by Brighton and Lynda Morris, called "Towards Another Picture". The exhibition was in Nottingham, where I live, and I now have the volume of documents issued to support the exhibition. It covered the whole spectrum of art in England.] All this is coming back because of reading a fictionalised account of an art historian, who is undoubtedly Fuller, in Iain Sinclair's book Hackney, That Rose-red Empire. Sinclair's account has many literal details from Fuller's life in Graham Road but is malign and unreal. The bottom line is that I never saw the bright and decorative paintings which he wrote about and I never found any naive poetry of modern times which I could find innocent and refreshing. So writing a book about it was a vague gesture - waving benevolence to people I hadn't read and wasn't going to write about except as a symbol.
Fuller had developed a whole framework for reacting to the pessimism of the visual work that he was specifically dealing with at a certain time, which we can call the Seventies. He explained this through kenosis, a theological concept. Fuller was a fan of theology and saw 20th C art as a re-enactment of theological passions in different form, as I do. Kenosis is ‘emptying‘. He saw 20th C art as growing increasingly empty and ending up with a kind of abstract bleakness which was terrifying. This idea of there only being one kind of art, and of it developing and abandoning previous positions, also seems to go along with the increasing emptying of high art. It leaves out every other kind of painting. It could be combined - in somewhere like Hackney, in a year like 1975 - with an idea that capitalism had created sensory emptiness and alienation, and that art could bring people to realise the full sterility of capitalism by bringing them to peaks of anxiety and desolation which they had never experienced in the outside world. Quite possibly, the idea that there was a thing ‘capitalism’ separate from our own beings was a symptom of a sensory emptiness which permitted a very high degree of abstraction. Immersed in this heady and collectively managed bleakness, Fuller eventually reacted against it and came out asking for art to be sensuous and optimistic. It was in this context that he grasped at Brighton's constructive idea as a way of escape.
Another problem is to explain why, when ostensibly writing about the poets of low competence, I have entire chapters about Pauline Stainer and Jeremy Reed. This is hard to explain. A big factor was just that I wanted to write about them and that I only write prose books because it lets me write about people like that. But the other factor is that they have nothing to do with that kenosis that Fuller talks about, and with the critical alienated line in 20th C art. It is profoundly right to include them as examples of Christian myth and realisation of glamour fantasy (respectively) because by doing that they illustrate two genres which many poets, including weaker ones, write in. It is impossible to write about a genre through a poet who can't write.
I didn't explain this in the book because I wanted to leave the whole critical-alienated line out of the book. Just for once.
Both Stainer and Reed are optimistic writers and in that specific way can be identified as naive. If you talk about the 'box of beautiful things' you can see that both poets believe in that box. Even, that they want to create a box of beautiful poems. So maybe this is the optimistic art which takes us away from the heady high-altitude wastes of negation.
I am still wondering about the paintings that Brighton saw. Just now I passed an art shop, in Nottingham, just near the Nottingham Contemporary, our new museum of the modern. The shop has a very large naive painting in the window, showing a scene of ice skaters. (The Ice Arena is also not very far away.) It is brightly coloured, full of detail and realistic endeavour. There is no characterisation but it has this positivity, it is all about having a good time. It didn’t raise my mood. It struck me that it was very like an advertisement - that lack of depth, that endlessness without substance. It’s not that people don’t enjoy ice skating or that the sight of happiness makes me unhappy. But the scope of naive poetry is probably limited, in the same way as naive painting, by the saturation quality of advertising in our society. Optimistic painting has to be quite artless and poorly designed to avoid getting sucked back into the drained colour surface, from looking like a poster for the English Tourist Board or for the Ice Arena or whatever. Poetry books already have blurbs on the cover which represent Affirmative Culture in the poetic realm, and some of which are utterly mendacious. If you wrote a book of Naively Optimistic Poems the inside would just read like the blurbs around it - something already there. So maybe the only way to love naive poetry is not to read it but simply to imagine it.
Maybe Andrew Brighton was also into another dream of the Left, that there were people with intact sensibilities in the lower classes and they would walk in and replace the sophisticated urban neurotics with their art based on competition and on failed competition. I believe it is true that whatever dead ends cultured art, driven by fashion and cultural overload, finds itself in, will always be recovered from in the next generation. In a sense renewal always comes from children who come along and grow up with different ideas and with fewer acquired traumas. However, the most demanding art is the product of the most cultured people, and that doesn't seem to change very much. That style, which was based on a belief in Marcuse’s theory of ‘affirmative culture’ and tried to be ‘negation’ and then eventually, after decades of suffering ’the negation of the negation’, was peculiar to the 1970s, it is not around much now and you would have to explain to a young person today what it was or had ever been.
I do like the idea that there are people who paint the sea and ships and that they will spend their lives on the coast with an easel, indifferent to hotheads denouncing bourgeois art. The book should have been called 'the box of beautiful things' or similar but I fought shy of that. Anyway good poetry isn't simply a pile of beautiful things.
Folk style
After decades of waiting there is now a good book on the Folk Revival: Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, by Colin Harper. Actually it’s more than good, it’s wonderful. Jansch came from Leith, the port area of Edinburgh. He began playing guitar in 1960. He was one of two singer/guitarists in Pentangle, a group consciously formed to reach a large audience, which did reach a large audience and in a way ‘represented’ folk in the 1967-71 period. Harper’s book has a large amount of detail on the key period 1958-65. It is not overwhelmingly about Jansch and after all he was very much part of a Scene.
The two problems that memory wants to write out are easily summed up. Folk came out on two classic labels, Topic and Transatlantic. Topic began as the label of the Workers’ Music Association, whose membership was mainly communist. Transatlantic got started with recordings from America, folk and blues. The question is how English folk music could emerge from under these two currents of power. Or, how far is the stream of music that came out on those two labels, not all of it classic but pretty big swathes of it, either folk music or English. I have long been curious about the link between folk and communism. My intuition is that figures like Ewan MacColl thought they were running the whole thing as propaganda for the Party, but that they lost control of the craze very quickly and that only a fraction of the participants had any connection with communism. I have not found any definitive statement on this but Harper’s book does not confirm any Red dominance. He covers MacColl quite thoroughly but ties the communist thing to a group of people around him rather than to the rank and file of the Revival. The evidence is complicated and it crops up in many parts of Harper's book, so I will point you to that rather than summarise it. I keep recognising minor figures in Harper’s narrative as communists.
This craze is relevant to poetry, but - like communism I suppose - as something which everyone was attracted to and which had notable failures revealing fatal structural weaknesses. So that everyone came out the other side.
Harper cites The Weavers selling a million copies of a cover of ‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950 - in the USA. The timing of the American folk revival was completely different from the English and Scottish one. The folk thing in the USA was smashed by McCarthyism. The links many of its leaders there had to the Marxist Left probably explain why MacColl thought a ‘Red folk’ was possible in Britain. I don’t think the British thing would have taken off without influence from America, but I was only two years old in 1958 and my guesses are unreliable - especially as written sources are so few. The guitar had no role in British folk culture so the guitar orientation came from copying American styles, and later turning the learnt skills to the Anglo-Celtic repertoire.
When I say ‘smashed’, of course it came back. It just went through a bad time.
I think everyone liked Pentangle and the musicians were probably more critical of the group’s weaknesses than the listeners.
One version of the Folk thing is in Jeff Nuttall’s book Bomb Culture (1968), where a major storyline is how there was a human type who went on CND marches, was into trad jazz and folk, belonged to the Old Left, disliked pop music, and was generally contemptible. Nuttall blindly believes that “style A is JUNK and style B is WONDERFUL’. For him it’s always that everyone cool is at gig B on a certain night and everyone dismal and tedious is at gig A. Eric Mottram uses the same pressurising polemic structure. It’s exciting but finally it’s like Ewan MacColl, it’s authoritarian. I don’t accept that every folk song was dull or that every electric pop song was groovy and exciting. I suppose what this brings us to is that not every avant garde-Underground poet is interesting and not every Oxford/ mainstream/ tweed poet is dull.
Michael Brocken’s book The English Folk Revival (2003) has a great deal of information about the role of the Communist party in Topic records and the folk movement in general. Topic was the label of the Workers’ Music Association and was formed in 1939. Their pressing run was about 100 copies, it was a club thing. When the CP lost most of its members after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the subscriptions for the WMA also dried up and Topic had to think about selling to the public. This is probably when they became a significant record label - when they had to worry about shops and turnover. They now sold a lot more than 100 copies. The people who worked there kept their ideology, it was probably in the mid 1970s that it began to wear thin. Being communist meant loving the people and loving folk music went along with that rather sweetly.
Brocken has (at p.37) the story from an interview with Ewan MacColl where he says there were in the late 50s 1500 folk clubs in Britain directly expressing the ideals of the movement and of MacColl. But checking an issue of ‘Sing’, the communist-oriented folk song magazine, for 1957, shows a list of ‘What’s On’ which only lists nine folk clubs. This is probably the correct total. The rest were the product of MacColl’s imagination. (This analysis is already in Dave Harker’s Fakelore (1985), if I am not mistaken.) It is a notable example of first-hand evidence being thoroughly unreliable. It also shows Stalinist heroic propaganda values at work in Britain.
Harper gives one half of a famous story about MacColl, which is that in the club he ran English people weren’t allowed to sing American songs and vice versa. The second half (and who knows where I heard this from) is that later on this applied to regions as well, that if you came from Lancashire you had to sing Lancashire songs and if from Essex you had to sing Essex songs. People cite this as the Puritanism of the rigorous folk scene, which never reached the public. It was like Stalinism, which is the social group where MacColl got his sense of the fitness of things. I think his policy was defensible - it forced people to make an effort, to explore the hidden repertoire and research untapped sources. If you look back at 1958 from 2010 you realise that if they hadn’t expanded the repertoire of folk music, both songs and styles, the whole thing would not have survived until now, it would have died of boredom. There was a point about regional singing styles, being diverse in the same way that dialects are. I certainly think dialects and regional singing styles are precious. To my ear, English (revived) folk music is important because it eventually got beyond reproducing the Scottish singing, Scottish Traveller singing, American singing, which were so dominant at the outset. Its flourishing had a lot to do with accepting regional styles. This also had a lot to do with getting over embarrassment and accepting the sound of your own voice. MacColl had foresight but undeniably he was authoritarian.
Brocken has extensive material from folk singers on how weary they got of MacColl and how authoritarian he was. After a certain point you start to feel that he gets slagged off so much because he was important; if he hadn't been part of the landscape, people wouldn’t have got so frustrated with him. Brocken says ‘it is quite clear that the origin of the revival was indeed political for several important disciples’ and concedes the importance of the Leftists.
It’s surprising how much British Marxism achieved even with the handicaps of very small numbers and of rigidity, personality cults, delusion, and so on. A big role in the WMA was played by Alan Bush (1900-95). In 1951 he won the competition to compose an opera for the Festival of Britain, to be staged at Covent Garden. When the bosses discovered that he was a communist there was a lot of brouhaha and in the end his opera was not staged. This story is in Norman Lebrecht’s book on Covent Garden. No good telling someone like that that artists are oppressed in the Communist bloc. There is a story that when the end of communism came Bush was 90 years old and ill and his friends kept it secret from him in case it made him more ill. I don’t know if that is a true story.
(For more on folksong, see posting on ‘The unlearned and the unlearning’ on this site.)
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Hewison
I was re-reading Robert Hewison's In Anger, a standard work on culture in the 1950s. I think I have read Hewison’s book four times now. Some other books were very useful: John Press’s Rule and Energy, Eric Homberger’s Art of the Real and Edward Brunner's Cold War Poetry in particular. Kenneth Allott’s prose commentary in the anthology Mid-century Poetry is useful although too grim. I found 50s films and also books on 50s films very suggestive in thinking about the poetry of the time.
John Press’ book Rule & Energy (1963) actually is a history of British poetry in the 1950s (although I hadn’t read it when I wrote my chapter). This gives a rather wider view than I do. I recommend this book. Press writes very well about the Blakean, post-Symboliste, etc. line in this. He portrays the British scene from the war up till when he was writing (in 1962) as a struggle between the visionaries and the rationalists. The visionaries are few in number. However, he’s quite right to suggest that the Oracular line was there in the 1950s and didn’t spring from nowhere in 1967, or 1965.
Hewison sees a split in the 1950s, with a different tone starting in 1956. This was a revolt against what was already there (mostly much older than 1950) and centres on 'Look back in anger'. This is fascinating but doesn't work in poetry.
Hewison quotes John Berger sounding off about the 'rule makers'. Amazing. He was making up rules and trying to shove them down people's throats more than anyone else. A Stalinist who thinks he is liberating people. Sort of Ewan MacColl without the beard.
In Anger makes major use of the idea of typicality, that there is a single literary person and a change to the role affects everyone. He pulls it off but the deadline for that kind of thing was running out, and typicality was leaking its substance in a hundred directions in the 1960s. The thing is that poems use this universal lay figure in much the same way that Hewison does. In 1955 it did feel as if every writer was a pupil at the same school, shuffling down the same chilly corridors, scared of the same headmaster, late for the same compulsory sessions of ideology, sneaking off for a cigarette in the same hidey-holes. All that's gone and I can't write poetry criticism in those terms.
In 1955, what books offered was much more like the company of a certain kind of person. If you didn't like that sort of person it just wasn't interesting to be there. Writers who adapted to that and learnt how to put their 'voice' over didn't understand why the audience wasn't interested, a few years later, when poetry had become a much wider exploration both of subjectivity and of objective knowledge. 'You have to feel the same way that I do' - and this was very close to thinking 'this poem, any poem, HAS to be written in this way'. There was a whole stock of banal but educated poetry which was like the park in your town: you have to go there because it's the only park and it's conventional to go there.
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Noel Annan : 'It also began to be recognised how much homosexuals enriched the nation's culture. Hardly surprising since by the sixties the best known English-born poet, the outstanding composer, the most famous choreographer, and the most prestigious painter - Auden, Britten, Ashton, and Bacon - were all known to be homosexuals.'
(quoted from Neil Miller's Out of the Past, a Gay and Lesbian History, p.259) Saying 'by the sixties' actually means 'during the 1950s', although Bacon's fame was ascending during that decade.
Norman Lebrecht says about the Fifties -'England's leading painter (Bacon), poet (Auden), actor (Gielgud), composer (Britten), novelist (Forster) and choreographer (Ashton) were all homosexual, an attribute that was unmentionable in studies of their lives and works.' (Covent Garden, the Untold Story, p.177)
This is in a passage set specifically in 1953, a moment of gay-bashing by the media and the police. This is a salient fact, in 1953, and must be part of the Fifties arts world. I don't have an explanation for it. Gays were not prominent in poetry, at least so far as evidence survives. In poetry, people didn't have an anxiety that you had to be gay, they had an anxiety that you had to have been born before 1900 to be a great English poet.
No one else writes as interestingly as Lebrecht about the arts world. He evokes ‘arts gays’ circa 1950 as a cosy little conspiracy, and that insider quality could have effects in allowing people to be self-indulgent (knowing they have a welcome) or to be implicit and allusive, in a private code (emptying the poem of overt meaning). But - I have just argued that literature in general at that time had the quality of letting you be with ‘certain people’, it was all a conspiracy, a fellowship of the willing. That intimacy is what the text exploits. You can trace it to Oxford University or to the Gay Fraternity, but those are false leads, because literature had that insider quality even when it had nothing to do with those two in-groups. The readers of the time were shocked by writers like Beckett or Tomlinson who offered no warmth or indulgence at all; that felt new and unattractive, in the Fifties.
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The chapter on singer-songwriters. This was added after the main text was completed. It has the problem of not being based in textual details but in the overall 'feel' of a large number of texts. Bringing in the singers is a way of answering questions like "why is modern poetry (since 1960) so flat? why is it so hopeful that the reader will be fascinated by the poet's personality? why do poets think they can produce a wholly verbal creation which makes no use of verbal style?" These questions shed light on a great deal of poetry which is not of great interest. The significant poets do not raise these questions because they addressed the problem of flatness and have solved it by developing a verbal style whose richness differentiates it from the landscape around it. The questions may not be worth raising. On the other hand, I think this style was new in the 1960s and represents what replaced the formal, literary, ethically demanding, poetry of the 1950s, itself perhaps a continuation of a long line of literary poetry. The victorious sound of the 1960s was not anything modernist or experimental but this flatness which is also conversational and also egocentric. It was not inspired by Pound and Structuralism but by Judy Collins and Donovan. Of several thousand poets who got into print, few could understand either Pound or Lévi-Strauss, but a lot of them could understand Donovan.
Equally, the vast mass of poets have given up on the stylistic elevation which marks the ‘heritage’ of English and Scottish poetry. Analysing the modernists in terms of cultural aggression and deliberate destruction of classical serenity is irrelevant unless you also consider that the mass of poets now writing also use a flat and unliterary style.
It is not accurate to call the vernacular modern style ‘Pop’, because it lacks many qualities necessary to Pop. It is more accurate to compare it to a vein of song creation which would claim to be the expression of conscience and to be opposed by its bareness and authenticity to the sugar rush of Pop culture and to its commercialism. It is too earnest to like adornment.
Of course, it is arguable that all the poets who fell in love with this musical idiom failed, because leaving out the music was simply a step too far and this kind of poem could never work, being unpoetic. It would then be a mass movement in the wrong direction. I got the feeling, when researching for The Long 1950s, that the Folk Revival had been a failure - leaving behind an archive of dullness. This possibility has to be considered.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Remarks on gay sensibility in poetry
DC Andersson wrote: Hello there, I'd been exploring the work of John Wilkinson, and hence came to your 'review' on pinko, which I enjoyed greatly. I have often thought that underlying many of the distinctions between rival schools of poetry has been the extent to which form (which demands to be recognized as such, rather than something that any coherent content has) and ego are to be aligned. Obviously there are different ways of politicizing this question - for some, left-wing ideas of the decentred self under the lights of the 1960s avant garde seem appropriate to some (whether or not these were in fact drawn from text or seemingly 'collective' practice of other art forms), or an alternate *radical* pattern would be drawn from the various mutations of feminism from the nineteen seventies onward. An alternative right-wing intellectual model for dealing with the pains and pleasures of the ego, with all of its necessary growing up and disciplining, is a sort of sympathetic engagement with institutions (a friend came up recently with the formulation that a Tory is someone who believes institutions are wiser than individuals). Other modes of social and ethical engagement being viewed as primary will naturally result in other forms or relation to the self, and one thinks of how so many great poets of friendship (from Horace to Auden to John Fuller) have also been poets of ego. I note, in a rather embarrassed way, that whenever I write of human relations in my own poetry, I tend simply to want to record accurately the stable socialized commitments that ebb and flow in and out of the networks of friendship and love and sex - a fairly obviously gay male aesthetic that privileges a combination of ego, archness and group identity and ability to ventriloquize others, yet respectfully and with honesty. As my friend Simon said of our rather more *angry* friend Mike, *You don't have to fight it, you know?*. For some this will place the muse of poetry too readily at the service of rhetorical functions (to console, to teach, to persuade into bed) that they will find are the route to the *Astleyization* (those Staying Alive anthologies) of poetry or its simplistic totalitarian aims. The range of humane warmth and the Horatian social aesthetic of course depends upon a set of material undergirdings that many will consider lead to a consumerist aesthetic - in the end, like Auden, I prefer *poems* to *poetry*. Pound wrote dismissively (was it in his ABC of Reading) of Cowper that he was simply doing in poetry what was being better done by the novel at the time, that his pastoral work would be unthinkable without the novel. By contrast, I think of that as a virtue, since I want to make poetry more expansive rather than more pure. In the same way, I rather like the novelettish autobiographical narrative poem. I am writing currently a study on Ian Caws, whose experiential underpinning of a suddenly desubstantiated self in the face of the sudden intrusions of a Christian past and Christian landscape (alas, comfortably home counties for some) seem to provide as accurate and as horrifying an account of the difficulties of identity and the dangers and consolations of form as anything in Tom Raworth, for whose integrity of purpose I have of course great respect. I never thought of myself as a conservative, always the opposite, but I think I've become one. I am about to launch my own new poetry magazine, called Tempo. Perhaps I could send you the link?'
All the very best Daniel --
aduncan@pinko.org wrote
i have been wondering about something for a number of years, which perhaps you can help me on. is there a separate market/network for gay poetry? If someone asked me about this, I would like to be able to reply (one way or another). People keep attacking me for leaving things out. Ignorance is not usually an excuse. Maybe there is something I have failed to notice (in 30 years of mooching around the poetry scene).
Alignment of ego and forms. Hmmm. The thing is with a Strong Personality that it's like having attractive performers appear in films all the time. Why watch someone more attractive than you are? In poetry, people are quite happy to identify and ride along with someone with a Strong Ego, just for as long as the trip lasts. There is something faintly comic about this. It's not quite being dominated, not quite dominating. who is Ian caws? should I read him? caws is welsh for 'cheese'. Still, weldon kees is also 'Mr Cheese'.
On 20/05/07, Daniel Andersson wrote
Is there a gay market for poetry? I think there are probably two conflicting strands in gay literary identity, looking about at my friends and their enthusiasms. One derives from the particularly American tradition of oppositionalism. It has roots in the Beats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and slides into rock and indie and to the various democratic undergirdings of performance poetry and then further slides into an embrace of popular culture and from there into some sort of (usually negative) engagement with consumerism/camp/daily life. It is also a tradition nourished by the esoteric underground (especially in the musical field - one thinks of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The The), and is not particularly engaged with christianity or, indeed, *mainstream* gay culture. Leaden, dishonest and superficial would be its chief terms of abuse. It tends not to be too suspicious of statement.
The alternative, more well-bedded down tradition (more English) derives from an obsession with density, wit and form, but nourished emotionally by love, friendship, loss and group identity, understatement, urbanity and ventriloquism and via that ventriloquism to camp. It is a tradition more concerned with syncretism, understanding of society, observation, dialogue and engagement with institutions such as families, the church, the universities. It is a tradition that is as much as home in the literary novel as the musical scene. Poise, warmth, sensitivity, form, friendship and wit are its watchwords - and it probably has closer connections with mainstream gay culture. At its most *literary* and within the poetry tradition, it shades off into coterie arch group identity poetry, which one might consider some of the Cambridge school to be. Sloppy and self-indulgent would be its chief terms of abuse. It is often rather diffident about *statement*.
My friend James Mckay, who is a performance poet, is a very knowledgable exponent of the first tradition. I will ask him what he thinks of my distinction and get back to you.
Ian Caws is one of my favourite poets of the 1980s. He is a subtle, quiet formalist, recording the problems of christian faith in the Home Counties, full of understatement, and a great commentator on the seventeenth-century tradition of Herbert and Vaughan.
All best,
DCA
Daniel wrote: The distinction is almost between Whitman and Henry James. Henry James reviewed Leaves of Grass with about as much queeny dyspepsia as he could manage. Above all, James hated the endless statements in Whitman and the absence of the comforts of form that demanded to be recognized as such, the pleasures of a game which everyone knows the rules of and which everyone is subtly changing. I remember, in particular, one very funny piece of his review: he describes the way in which Whitman writes poetry in which the line seems to "exist in joyous independence of what comes either before or after it".
The rules of the game. Ruth Padel referred to Ian Duhig's (deeply heterosexual) poetry as 'sly'. A difference between straight sly and gay sly occurred to me. In straight sly, you tell a story, and you surprise people with where you end up (and the performer takes a great pleasure in having got there). In gay sly, everyone knows where you are going to end up, the slyness is in engaging people in an unusual journey, not an unusual destination.
Just some thoughts.
Best
DCA
aduncan@pinko.org wrote
Daniel, this opens up layer after layer of basically resistant encoding. I'm just worried about being accused of ignorance and prejudice. It doesn't look like I can let myself out of the accused cell without dieting for a long time. Let's be philosophical. If I write about modern poetry, I will be accused of monstrous acts no matter what I do. People in the poetry world love to have themselves photographed striking that stance.
Even more, it doesn't sound as if this layered meaning is going to benefit from me unclipping it and rolling it out straight. It sounds more like something more Maloryan - a vision that vouchsafes itself to the pure of heart.
Dr. D. C. Andersson (http://dcandersson.blogspot.com/) wrote:
I see what you're getting it, but the best way of avoiding prejudice and accusations of ignorance is to delimit the scope of one's enquiry. Being simple-minded has much in its favour on these sorts of occasion - dico expertus! I think that the layering you refer to is a not inaccurate broadbrush distinction in gay sensibility. Simply recording it clearly, and then querying to what extent poetry markets flow from (or do not flow from) given gay sensibilities will surely benefit you and your immediate audience, especially if it's a *general* literary audience.
I think that there IS something (in your terms) Maloryish about the competitive mercuriality of some versions of gay sensibility, which, in its more leaden versions, shades into snobbery, Senior Common Room wit and accommodation with existing power structures (camp flourish where something like class flourishes, unlike kitsch).
Mere thoughts. As I said, I have emailed James and I will report back.
My very warmest best wishes,
DCA
All the very best Daniel --
aduncan@pinko.org wrote
i have been wondering about something for a number of years, which perhaps you can help me on. is there a separate market/network for gay poetry? If someone asked me about this, I would like to be able to reply (one way or another). People keep attacking me for leaving things out. Ignorance is not usually an excuse. Maybe there is something I have failed to notice (in 30 years of mooching around the poetry scene).
Alignment of ego and forms. Hmmm. The thing is with a Strong Personality that it's like having attractive performers appear in films all the time. Why watch someone more attractive than you are? In poetry, people are quite happy to identify and ride along with someone with a Strong Ego, just for as long as the trip lasts. There is something faintly comic about this. It's not quite being dominated, not quite dominating. who is Ian caws? should I read him? caws is welsh for 'cheese'. Still, weldon kees is also 'Mr Cheese'.
On 20/05/07, Daniel Andersson wrote
Is there a gay market for poetry? I think there are probably two conflicting strands in gay literary identity, looking about at my friends and their enthusiasms. One derives from the particularly American tradition of oppositionalism. It has roots in the Beats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and slides into rock and indie and to the various democratic undergirdings of performance poetry and then further slides into an embrace of popular culture and from there into some sort of (usually negative) engagement with consumerism/camp/daily life. It is also a tradition nourished by the esoteric underground (especially in the musical field - one thinks of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, The The), and is not particularly engaged with christianity or, indeed, *mainstream* gay culture. Leaden, dishonest and superficial would be its chief terms of abuse. It tends not to be too suspicious of statement.
The alternative, more well-bedded down tradition (more English) derives from an obsession with density, wit and form, but nourished emotionally by love, friendship, loss and group identity, understatement, urbanity and ventriloquism and via that ventriloquism to camp. It is a tradition more concerned with syncretism, understanding of society, observation, dialogue and engagement with institutions such as families, the church, the universities. It is a tradition that is as much as home in the literary novel as the musical scene. Poise, warmth, sensitivity, form, friendship and wit are its watchwords - and it probably has closer connections with mainstream gay culture. At its most *literary* and within the poetry tradition, it shades off into coterie arch group identity poetry, which one might consider some of the Cambridge school to be. Sloppy and self-indulgent would be its chief terms of abuse. It is often rather diffident about *statement*.
My friend James Mckay, who is a performance poet, is a very knowledgable exponent of the first tradition. I will ask him what he thinks of my distinction and get back to you.
Ian Caws is one of my favourite poets of the 1980s. He is a subtle, quiet formalist, recording the problems of christian faith in the Home Counties, full of understatement, and a great commentator on the seventeenth-century tradition of Herbert and Vaughan.
All best,
DCA
Daniel wrote: The distinction is almost between Whitman and Henry James. Henry James reviewed Leaves of Grass with about as much queeny dyspepsia as he could manage. Above all, James hated the endless statements in Whitman and the absence of the comforts of form that demanded to be recognized as such, the pleasures of a game which everyone knows the rules of and which everyone is subtly changing. I remember, in particular, one very funny piece of his review: he describes the way in which Whitman writes poetry in which the line seems to "exist in joyous independence of what comes either before or after it".
The rules of the game. Ruth Padel referred to Ian Duhig's (deeply heterosexual) poetry as 'sly'. A difference between straight sly and gay sly occurred to me. In straight sly, you tell a story, and you surprise people with where you end up (and the performer takes a great pleasure in having got there). In gay sly, everyone knows where you are going to end up, the slyness is in engaging people in an unusual journey, not an unusual destination.
Just some thoughts.
Best
DCA
aduncan@pinko.org wrote
Daniel, this opens up layer after layer of basically resistant encoding. I'm just worried about being accused of ignorance and prejudice. It doesn't look like I can let myself out of the accused cell without dieting for a long time. Let's be philosophical. If I write about modern poetry, I will be accused of monstrous acts no matter what I do. People in the poetry world love to have themselves photographed striking that stance.
Even more, it doesn't sound as if this layered meaning is going to benefit from me unclipping it and rolling it out straight. It sounds more like something more Maloryan - a vision that vouchsafes itself to the pure of heart.
Dr. D. C. Andersson (http://dcandersson.blogspot.com/) wrote:
I see what you're getting it, but the best way of avoiding prejudice and accusations of ignorance is to delimit the scope of one's enquiry. Being simple-minded has much in its favour on these sorts of occasion - dico expertus! I think that the layering you refer to is a not inaccurate broadbrush distinction in gay sensibility. Simply recording it clearly, and then querying to what extent poetry markets flow from (or do not flow from) given gay sensibilities will surely benefit you and your immediate audience, especially if it's a *general* literary audience.
I think that there IS something (in your terms) Maloryish about the competitive mercuriality of some versions of gay sensibility, which, in its more leaden versions, shades into snobbery, Senior Common Room wit and accommodation with existing power structures (camp flourish where something like class flourishes, unlike kitsch).
Mere thoughts. As I said, I have emailed James and I will report back.
My very warmest best wishes,
DCA
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