The New Image of Celticity

The New Image of Celticity

 

I am looking at the editorial of British Archaeology (Sept-October 2015), greeting a lavish prestige exhibition on The Celts at the British Museum in London: “It is with Celts, however, that academic and public versions of history seem to diverge more than any other time. […] many archaeologists say Celts never existed.” The editor hedges his bets: “There may never have been Celts, but there were Celtic fashions and crafts”[.] Classical writers never apply the word “Celt” to Britain. Calling the ancient British or Irish Celts is a misnomer. Those people actually existed even if we simply call them Western Indo-Europeans. Has a historical mythology of celticity been constructed? And what elements of actuality do we have left if we blow and cause the fragile and fumy mythology to dissolve?

 

Fortunately, a great deal of very astute and fundamental and compelling work has already been done on this problem. A range of writers have demolished the notion, developed in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, of the sociological link between Celtic languages and the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures, and between those societies and the British societies which, many centuries later, spoke languages known in a classificatory way as Celtic. The genetic link between barbarian aristocrats in Central Europe and similar in Ireland and Britain has been severed.

According to Almagro-Gorbea, the new image started around 1980 and is mainly the product of British archaeologists affected by theory, i.e. by scepticism about the stories validated and written by mid-century archaeologists. The disbelief in frequent and large-scale migrations is on important part of this. It would be wrong to leave out Raimund Karl - this is not merely a British phenomenon (and there has been no committed resistance by Continental archaeologists). The volume “The Celts in Theory”, edited by Karl and by David Spitzer, is a handy anthology of the critics of the historical myth of Celtdom.

 

The older theory involved four rings which it was necessary to have slide over each other and coincide. These were the historical narrative of Classical writers, the fragmentary records of Celtic language on the Continent, and the deposit pattern of artefact styles called Hallstatt and La Tene. The fourth ring was the antecedents of the British, since the theory held that there had been a cultural river flowing westwards from the Hallstatt centre in Austria, and that this had (somehow) pushed further West to engulf Britain - where languages of the family labelled “Celtic” were found being spoken, quite abundantly, by about 600 AD. The idea that these four things could fit over each other was a breakthrough at the time. It is associated particularly with Henri Hubert and TGE Powell, although others may have held this idea rather earlier. Hubert’s book was published in 1914 and Powell’s in 1958. The new wave has not yet succeeded in finding the first statement which links the “four rings”. It was a breakthrough, in a way. A recent and unmoderated statement of the theory is in Atlas of the Celts, by John Haywood (2001).

 

One aspect of this four ring theory is as prehistoric English imperialism. In order to supply the ancestors of the people of Britain, there had to be a coherent ethnographical narrative. As Celtic languages were so well evidenced in the British Isles, where they were still widely spoken in 1900, then the Celts had to come into existence to supply the back story for those ancestors. The coherence of the legendary about the Celts resembles, therefore, the firmness of the belief of Victorian scholars in their ancestry. A variant on this was the projective nationalism of French and Irish scholars, equally willing to find ancestors for their own ethnic groups - heroic, noble, and successful, if possible. Napoleon founded an Academie Celtique whose mandate was something like promoting the military prowess of the Celts as ancestors of the French, in order to project Napoleon’s Empire into prehistory.

 

The first ring: the Keltoi of classical historians

 

It may be helpful if we go back to an older book, H. J. Massingham’s Pre-Roman Britain (1927). It is a sixpenny book from Benn’s sixpenny library, a sort of predecessor of Penguins, and HJ’s qualifications to write it were no more than a fluency with words and an amateur interest in the deep past. He was probably recommended by one of his associates in the “Children of the Sun” school, for example W.J. Perry, an unlucky link as it may seem to us now that the school has been consigned to the outer realms of Deep Time crackpottery (or psychoceramics). He says of the arriving Celts: “these men were swift-moving warriors and they broke up the megalithic civilisation of Britain, as their kinsmen did that of Spain and Minoan Crete.” (p.72)... “The Celts were deficient in constructive works […] for the very simple reasons that their energies were diverted into a different channel. Their mission was primarily a destructive one”[.] “the Celtic crematory urn is much coarser and of more careless workmanship than the “Beaker” is, […] Their system of cultivation was mean and sparsely distributed in comparison with the patient labour of the terraces.” Apart from metalwork “in every other respect their civilisation betrays a relapse into barbarism [.]” He sees the society produced by the Celtic overrunning of the megalithic civilisation as “an intermingling of idea, custom and faith between a broken civilisation and its barbarian overlords. The Celts lost certain elements of megalithic culture and retained others in a garbled, traditional, and moribund form”. Massingham was affected by the Great War in some way I can’t reconstruct. He saw the Celts as the inventors of warfare: “So for as we can gather, organized warfare, as an absorbing occupation for men, did not seriously develop in Western Europe before the last millennium BC, when the waves of Celtic invasion and intertribal conflict crumbled the stability of the megalithic period.“ At some deep emotional level he identifies them with the “Central Powers” of the time - something boastful and malevolent that came out of central Europe.  

An early appearance of the Celts (Keltoi) is in accounts of Alexander meeting, in around 330 BC, an army of them, across a river, north of Macedonia. The Greeks were likely to find a name for such a striking phenomenon as an army from central Europe appearing on their borders. But this kinetic, aggressive, and inherently unstable military entity did not straightforwardly match onto a society -something inherently stable, productive, and settled. The size of that army does not prove that its members came from one single tribe. The record of a Greek name for the mercenaries or invaders who poured down through the Balkans does not show that there was one people, of huge numbers, who were also the Celts. Still less, that there was one people which inhabited all Europe from Bohemia to Ireland.

 

Massingham was a spinner of robust fantasies rather than a thinker. It is touching nonetheless to see two ideas which he was attracted to. First, the idea that folk dances of modern times were faithful records of prehistoric events. Secondly, the association of the arrival of metals with the decline of cultural standards: something which we find among the hippy writers of the late 1960s, and which they had probably picked up directly from Massingham’s later books, still in print. Another idea is the correspondence of high cultures and peripheral ones, with the latter producing wretched and yet faithful imitations of the fabulous productions of the great cultural centres.

 

The relevance of Massingham (who had no background in research) is that he casts a side-light on the people who identified the Celts with the archaeological cultures of Hallstatt and La Tene: the evidence of that time allowed only wild conjectures. But also, that Massingham is right about the warrior aspect of what Classical historians record about the Celts: quite possibly the Celts were not a people but a phase, a state of excitement which some people enter into, forming armies and invading other countries, and the word “Celt” is not a people at all. The militarism is so prominent in all that the Classical writers record. This does not fit very well with an entire society. The people of Central Europe were an agricultural society - which does not exclude them being a militarised agricultural society. However, if there was a military identity which allowed mobile armies to form, including armies composed of individualist from any different ethnic groups, that identity might be what the word “Celt” (Keltoi, celtae) is a label for.

 

There is a classic analysis in Malcolm Chapman’s book about Celticity in which he describes the use of the word Keltoi, throughout Anna Comnena’s 12^th century Byzantine history, to refer to the Franks, who were a pest from the west afflicting Byzantium in her time. You can take this as simply a mistake (the Franks could not be Celts) or as a loyal continuation of Greek semantics and social categorisation which had persisted, in a rigidly conservative and learned society, and exactly reflected what the word Keltoi had meant in 300 BC: a military entity, of Western origins, kinetically swarming, which overflowed proper territorial boundaries and was out to cause untold damage to Greek communities. This military activity was institutionally close to the profession of being a mercenary: as mercenaries, warriors, essentially not functioning in ethnic units, acquired the knowledge of geography and tactics which were the basis for being marauders and invaders. The predatory armies were a product of the surplus wealth of southern neighbours; the temptation of loot was able to unite mobile individuals from many tribes in one unit, a shared endeavour. Massingham’s strictures might, thus, not be so far short of the mark.

 

If the Celts were just a phase of the social reality of much larger and more permanent social identities, they could not be the ancestors of Insular societies. Moreover, most people speaking the Celtic languages were not susceptible of being warriors, being female, children, or of a social status incompatible with acquiring the panoply, the equipment of costly metal and so on, which defined the warrior. In this model, the amazing geographical extensiveness of the Celtic realms resolves itself as simply a limited and incurious view of Central and North-west Europe: because armies came from that general direction, called in a classificatory fashion Celts, it seemed as if everyone living in vaguely that direction was Celtic. In fact the armies or armed bands were linked by mutual interest rather than by ethnic affiliation.

 

Another interpretation of the Celts is as an impact zone of mediation between the Mediterranean and the barbaric hinterland. That is, their behaviour would depend on geography more than ethnicity. There is a certain relationship not just between mercenaries and invasion, but between mercenaries and the import of slaves from the periphery.

 

Massingham had looked at the Classical sources and at the warrior-display nature of the artefacts most

cited by archaeologists describing Hallstatt and La Tene. The artefacts were surely useful to a particular section of society, to a function (male, warrior, mobile, “excited”) rather than to all the elements which we know those societies must have consisted of. They were not artefacts relevant to sheep and cattle, to wheat and barley, to cooking and keeping house. It followed that their distribution was not proof of ethnic relationship, instead of aspiration to a heroic ideal which could be transmitted by warfare. It could reflect the acceptance of rivalry between different families, and the mutual imitation of enemies. The splendid artefacts deposited in the graveyard of Hallstatt, and in the lake used as offering site of La Tene, were specialised and their extension to a whole society with all its inhabitants was a leap which was brilliant at establishing connections between different provinces but could also cast real social and ethnic relations into obscurity. As soon as you establish that it characterised the nobility rather than the peasantry, you have exposed the possibility that the signs of nobility drew on emulation and display which could unite families from ethnic groups which were not related, and also that the idea of the long distance was perhaps basic to aristocratic success, in establishing alliances and in acquiring artefacts - probably also in physical movement. This physical movement is encoded in the preoccupation with horse gear and chariots. The symbols of aristocracy were related to a function, that indeed of moving over long distances. The long distances explain how similar artefacts could be found over such a wide area, from Bohemia to (eventually) Ireland. This is surely a different phenomenon from ethnicity.

 

Massingham sees celticity as something disembodied from ethnic reality. If the phenomenon of militarism has such a long history in Europe, a history of success, actually, then we would not want to say that all militarised groups were ethnically related. This is a basis for arguing that the warrior nature of specific groups in Ireland and in Celtic Scotland did not necessarily reflect linear transmission from the militarism of Iron Age Central Europe: they were different kinds of military ideology, even if both shared a preoccupation with courage and with metallurgy and arms technology.

Central Europe was inhabited by Central Europeans rather than by a discrete group called Celts. The art style is not an index of ethnicity but rather of competition and aspiration to prestige. Speaking of “the La Tene area” does not imply a central political authority or similar customs and laws, still less linguistic unity.

The Classical writers do not describe any Celtic state, still less a “Celtic empire”. There was no ethnic unity spanning wide areas of Iron Age Europe, this unity is just a blur caused by inaccurate observation by outsiders. The conditions of the period did not allow for large-scale political units.

 

 

 The third ring: Celtic languages

The linguistic traces of a Celtic language family do not correlate with the La Tene or Hallstatt style areas and in fact there is no linguistic evidence of relevant date for most of those areas. The geography of Celtic languages before writing is wholly unclear. The evidence for Celtic languages in the Hallstatt area is remarkably thin. The basis for attributing Celticity to the Hallstatt geographical area was weak throughout the career of that theory. There was a total lack of evidence of appropriate date, and the evidence from a thousand years later did not show what people wished it to show. The exhibition catalogue (for Hallstatt) is noncommittal about the Hallstatt= Celts equation. The situation is different for La Tene, where we have quite good evidence for the linguistic Celticity of Northern Gaul, and northern Gaul is a key part of the geographical extent of the La Tene style. This is a momentous withdrawal. If the artefact style of Hallstatt gave rise to La Tene, and Hallstatt was not the artisanal work of speakers of a Celtic language, the basis for linking La Tene with Celticity is seriously weakened.

A major advance in 20^th century archaeology was the hypothesis that an area with a coherent set of deposited artefacts also represented an ethnic group - as in 20th century Europe. This hypothesis is no longer accepted by the majority of archaeologists, certainly in Western Europe and North America. So beside the Hubert thesis that the La Tene artefact area has the same borders as those of an ethnic group, the Celts, we can place another thesis, that La Tene represents a horizon of imitation, where elites over an extraordinarily wide area see the prestige latent in certain very showy, parade, artefacts, preciously worked, and acquire imitations of themselves - by importing artisans, importing patterns, or importing them as finished goods. The idea of a sword can spread from one tribe to another and in fact the source of the transfer may be battles caused by ethnic rivalry. So the use of a swor does not prove who your grandparents were. The archaeology of those cultures was unfortunately focused on the showy artefacts, possibly available to very few people, rather than on subsistence patterns.  This “horizon of imitation” idea itself needs testing, naturally.

 

The makers of La Tene artefacts may have spoken half a dozen different languages. Some of them certainly spoke Gaulish (P-Celtic). But that just shows that the ethnicity of those artefact styles is problematic. More probably they are exactly artefact styles and not the authentic and unfakable utterance of an ethnic ideology and self-image, which itself would have to be confined to speakers of one language, or perhaps three or four closely related ones. In fact, they were a variant on Etruscan artefacts, which themselves had strong influences from imported Greek gear.

If we give up the Celtic identity of Hallstatt, because there is no evidence for it, then we have to give up the binding link between La Tene and Celts, because La Tene clearly is the successor to Hallstatt. In this case, the westward impulse which carries the centre of La Tene to the west of the centre of Hallstatt is no longer able to sustain a “westward movement theory” whereby population groups would continue westwards and bring languages of Central European origin to the British Isles. This vector just stops working. The cultural impulses which came from central Europe to Western Europe in Iron Age times, mighty as they were, did not carry the Celtic languages. The evidence for Celtic being spoken in Central Europe is very thin. Reference to Celts in Greek sources describe a warrior life-style but have no component of linguistic evidence. The place-name evidence, late as it is, shows a concentration of celticity in Northern Gaul. Extensions into the east with Singidunum (Belgrade) and Carrodunum (Cracow) bearing the -dunum formative which everyone agrees to be Celtic and linked to well-attested nouns and verbs in Irish, are a very thin scatter and easily explicable as migrations from west to east after 300 BC. The artefact styles which moved from east to west are not equatable with linguistic Celticity.

 

La Tene and Hallstatt artefacts are rare in Spain. However, Celtiberian is definitely of the Celtic language family. This was made clear by Tovar’s work of 1946. The Celtiberians do not link to Central Europe. This is another reason why the language evidence does not convincingly link Britain to central Europe. The discovery of the Botorritos bronzes, that is significant inscriptions in Celtiberian, in the 1970s, has provided further ammunition for developing theories about Celtic origins, leaving the Central European theory high and dry.

 

If these languages did not flow, in some way, from central Europe to Gaul and then to Britain, their historical geography must follow some other pattern. One recent suggestion is “Celtic from the West”, starting in south-west Spain and spreading by a seaborne route along the Atlantic seaboard to the British Isles.

 

Someone wrote an essay on a word in a Celtiberian inscription piricantam. This is in a partly syllabic script so it is credible that the pronunciation was really brigantem. This word also appears in Gaulish inscriptions and in two Welsh words, brenhin and braint. The intervocalic -g- is lost so we have brenhin, which means king (-nt- further becoming -nh-) and braint which means privilege or right, something appertaining to a king. Indeed, copyright is hawlfraint.

This word also appears in the name of a tribe in Northern England, the Brigantes. The older translation of the tribal name as “the high ones” probably needs to be replaced by something like the ones endowed with authority or the lords. There was a variant brigantinos which is the source of brenhin and of an Old Breton word, breenhin (?).

 

  The Iron Age was big on hill-forts. Some of these evolved into towns. In this context, the Celtiberian word for hill, briga, also came to mean “town“. So this word briga, which originally certainly meant something like “high, top” is related to the brigantes word - but has developed along a different route. I have to say, as well, that we don’t know what “piricantam” really means in Celtiberian - it looks like the words in Welsh etc. but its meaning as a social term expressing relations or distinctions in a Spanish society may have been distinctly different. The proliferation of the briga root gives us insight into the powers of this language, or cluster of languages, but it is also a reproof to us when we want to assign a meaning to a word in a language we hardly know. We recognise the root but without dense context we cannot say if that root meant in this vestment a hill or a legal privilege.

 

 

The fourth ring

 

 

This link Brigantem - brenhin – braint is a win. Quite clearly there are weak connections between Celtiberian, Gaulish, and Brittonic, and probably much stronger ones between Brittonic and Welsh. The area of “Celtic studies” does not immediately have to disband itself because the idea of Celticity has dissolved. There is an object of linguistic study. Forcing a separation between Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic is hardly tenable. However, the utterly fragmentary nature of the surviving ruins of Continental Celtic languages means that correlations with Insular Celtic can never be any more than fragments of those fragments. This is not the sort of structural material on which we can found large-scale historical theses. It is fascinating but is not for that reason useful. The advances in recovery and decipherment of Spanish inscriptions has brought a set of fundamental new possibilities to cleric  linguistics, and it would be irrational to suggest that this new evidence has been assimilated yet. The Celtic nature of this new material is conceded by most scholars.

 

The arrival in the Atlantic islands of Celtic languages, ancestral to Irish and British, is undated but does not seem to have involved any large-scale invasion. There is no “interruption horizon” which shows the arrival in Britain of a new group we could label “the Celts”. In deference to this, the British Iron Age is now populated by “Iron Age Britons” and not by “Celts”. This does not preclude the arrival of new technology, in an adaptation or imitation process related to what has happened in Europe since 1300 AD. The wish for artefacts to speak a language, and to utter in that language signs of ethnic identity, is a projection of 19^th C nationalism. We want those dead but exciting humans to be our ancestors, that is extensions of us. For some reason we regard humans not related to us as not being proper objects to project imaginary emotions onto. This is not rational, since all humans are related. The imposition of boundaries, of property, is itself an imaginary act which has no sensible basis.

 

The entities with their different boundaries would have to be substantially the same, that is that people in the area of La Tene artefacts would have to be principally Celtic-speaking, and conversely that the principal area where Celtic languages were spoken would have to be within the boundaries where La Tene artefacts were found in generous quantities. To fulfil these conditions, we would have to know where Celtic was spoken in the relevant period, i.e. from BC 1000 to BC 0 for the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures. The statements asserted further that the spread of the Celtic languages was mapped by the spread of Hallstatt and La Tene, so that the theory also gives us an area of origin for the languages and a geography of their diffusion through Western Europe. All of these points were subject to testing in the light of later evidence, and all of them have failed to be substantiated.

 

There is a language group which survives, naturally, the withdrawal of the label “Celtic”. Gaelic and Welsh are real entities and the rather shadowy entities of Gaulish and Celtiberian are unmistakably related to them, as a family of Western Indo-European languages, whatever we choose to call them.

The speakers of the Insular Celtic languages were the inhabitants of the British Isles and later British prehistory is the history of those people. Labelling them, also, “Celts” may be a source of errors, given how little we know about who the Celts were. Linguistically, the Celts may just have been the western Europeans. This really is not telling us very much about sociology. This leaves us with a puzzle about how Western IE languages (referred to as “Celtic”) came to the islands. Since they are found there by 100 AD at latest, they must have come there at some date. They must have come from the east because they are related to languages spoken in Greece and the Ukraine. We may have “cumulative indo-europeanicity” to complement Hawkes’ compelling idea of “cumulative Celticity”.

  

Egocentricity

 

                    BIG people

BIG people armies MOVING VERY FAST wearing GOLD winning MATCHES ancestors of ME people LIKE ME REBEL HERO ARISTOCRATS living at ease in CONQUERED ESTATES and leaving BURIED TREASURE and yet thousands of years ago being ME and belonging to WHAT'S  MINE.

 

           

.

 

 

It is easy                  It's easy to see that narratives based on eye-grabbers like these have a popular appeal which more methodical                             evaluation of source material does not. Moreover, the primary attraction of archaeologists to the field of study, the infantile                      infantile component so to speak, may be of this greedy and starry-eyed nature, to be replaced in maturity by intellectual curiosity. Sadly, scholars are capable of nationalistic and other motives.

The relevance of this to poetry is that it displays the egocentric nature of identification, the psychological power of the in-group. When there is discussion about the reception of poetry by people from ethnic minorities, it is very plausible that not being in the in-group is a significant factor in the course of events, and that an idea of  pure interest in aesthetic form is not the most powerful factor. If you watch people spending so much energy projecting their self or their family back to 1000 BC, it is hard to avoid the feeling that when they identify with poetry they are affected by narcissism and group solidarity.

Addition. Belatedly I have found out that numismatists use the transcription birikantin for the word mentioned above. This let me find out that it appears as the only word on several coins, and that these were found in the Narbonne area of France. My recollection is that other inscriptions from this area, however few, were Iberian and not Celtiberian. So possibly this coin legend (in the Iberian syllabic script) is not Celtic at all. But I suspect that it is Celtic and corresponds to well-known place-names of the form brigantium (possibly Brigantion), ancestral to Bregenz, Briancon, and several others. I doubt it was just brigantin but coin legends habitually curtail words.
One comment – some Internet pages record the idea that “brenhin” (from brigantinos) originally meant “the Brigantian” and slid semantically to mean “lord” because the Brigantii were the top people. I find this problematic and I don’t think there is evidence that the Brigantii as a political formation had survived the Roman occupation. Since “briga” certainly means ”what is high”, and “high” is a common metaphor for people who wield social authority, it is simpler to guess that the word for “high person” meant “lord” and then “king”, and skip the Brigantii altogether. Their tribal name presumably meant “the lords”, a self-aggrandising epithet.
Since the root means “tip (of a growing plant)” in Welsh and Gaelic, it is likely that “tip, top” is the oldest meaning and that even the meaning “hill” is a secondary development. I have just been looking at an essay on folklore from Islay which gives a recipe for making tea from a local plant, saying that you boil it to extract the “briogh”, meaning “essence” (or flavour) in this case. Once you get really involved in the word-group around the root brig-, you will wish you’d never started. The point still stands that you can connect Celtiberian with Insular Celtic word-forms and celtoscepticism does not doubt these connections. The grouping of variants (so that you have briga, brigant, and then also brigantin-) found at both ends makes the link especially convincing.
Brig- is quite close to the Germanic version of the same root, i.e. berg, but we can keep them apart. Other languages may have had similar versions of the same root. An instance of that third language would be an exotic find.

 

 

 

 

 

Prynne's runic poem

Prynne's runic poem

Lunchy claimed, in his review of not-you (published as a fugitive leaflet and as part of the internet angel exhaust thirteen), that the Runic Poem in Prynne's Poems 1982 was non-semantic. My transcription of the runic poem is as follows:

BBB aelu bbb sefatorn  bbb aelu
BBB-th- ciserbeam bith beobrod
Beorhtlic s g beon beobearn w
I bearu deorc beoth lifbeag ae
BBB aelu bbb sefatorn  bbb aelu
BBB

The form of the runes demonstrates them to be Anglo-Saxon (strictly, anglo-frisian), which at once suggests that the language too is anglo-saxon. I would amend aelu to alu, a magical word much used in runic bracteates; it also means ale in AS. There is a kind of rune called, in an eddic poem, ale-runes (olrunar). New Scientist (12/8/95) tells me that 'in human chromosomes for example a 282 base sequence known as "alu" occurs in about a million separate locations, comprising about 10 per cent of the entire genome': the point is that these sequences, like magical runes, are of unknown purpose. As for BBB, it is a meaningless magical string, as also much favoured in pagan inscriptions; i am inclined to compare the swaggering evocative string xxx associated with ale. The fourth group along, sefatorn, is a quote from the right hand side of the 8th century Northumbrian whalebone object known as the Franks casket, where it accompanies a picture whose meaning is unfortunately in dispute. One commentator says, 'there are few objects from the early eighth century which are as self-consciously clever as the Franks casket.' so for the top and bottom lines i translate: bbb ale (for) grief of mind bbb ale bbb. For the body text, i translate: cherry-tree is honeycomb/ bright let bee-children be/ (? In) grove dark are life-rings
     The heavy alliteration is that used in pagan runic inscriptions on objects. The target object would be, I suppose, a wooden drinking-cup, or mazer. The model is the gnomic poems, which also use this special form of the verb to be (ll. 2 and 4), which according to Heinrich Wagner comes from the welsh present-habitual (byddaf i, fe fyddaf i, etc.), opening ethnolinguistic perspectives which i will immediately close. Certainly it seems to indicate 'present-future' and 'habitual', like the Welsh tense. The link between alu and honey is that the classic intoxicant of those days was mead (bee-brew in as), whose alcohol content comes from the sugar in honey. Bee-bairns are presumably not frisky young bees, but a kenning for the product of pollination, i.e. Cherries. The link between pollination and DNA transcription is not hard to make. Lifbeag is not in the dictionary, but presumably, on the analogy of lifdagas, means annual ring; beag is a symbol of fidelity in as poems, and treow is a homophone which means both tree and faith. Beag is associated, in one of the gnomic poems, with bunum, cups: the trees drink through their phloem rings, the drink in cups is a proof (as are conventionally rings) of the lord's generosity; drinking-cups were usually wooden for the saxons, as were the mead-halls.
     It is only fair to point out that there is one letter which comes from the Scandinavian alphabet, and some spare letters which I can't fit into words. The non-AS rune is the lightning-flash sigrune rather familiar from the insignia on the collars of ss-uniforms. It is not unknown for single runes to stand for the word which is the name of that letter, as so-called ideographic runes; reading them so, the text would run:  thorn ciserbeam bith beobrod/ beorhtlic sigel gyfu beon beobearn wenne/ is bearu deorc beoth lifbeag aesc
     Allowing some of these nouns to be in oblique cases, I construe, hazardously: (?) Cherry tree is honeycomb/ brightly let cherry-fruit be joy through generosity of the sun/ (?) (ice) grove dark are life-rings of ash(wood)

This is not a satisfactory reading; I leave the aporias for someone more experienced in runic inscriptions and more fertile of conjecture than I am.
     I will add, as an anecdote, that Prynne told me that the visit to the shield on the cover of the oval window, on army land in Cumberland, involved a detour (by the army driver) to a large runic inscription on a cliff which JHP thought hadn't been recorded by anyone. This, however, was well after Poems (1982).
     The assumption that the runic poem is non-semantic is a bit wobbligato. Lunch wanted it to be non-semantic, but if you see a poem made of letters it is not automatically true that the letters don't form words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes around ‘A Poetry Boom’

Notes around ‘A Poetry Boom’


This is a book about poetry 1990-2010 which I swore not to write but which began in 2011, while I was living temporarily in Germany, and which today (December 2013) is finished, as I struggle to push errant sentences into place and find points made twice. It is coming out from Shearsman in 2015, we hope. It was called “sugar rush ghost town” at one point, and then “partially coded sand“. The subtitle “shocked grains from a poetry boom” refers to the ‘boom’ as a crash through a sound barrier whose waves produce shocked quartz in the sand we are looking at. The ‘shifting sands’ part is an excuse for making a map that doesn’t work 3 weeks later. I understand the book has now been published (update 11/12/15). You can get it through the Shearsman website.

After writing a series of seven books about poetry 1960-97 it is almost unbelievable that I would start on something like this. The 'partially coded’ bit expresses just how thin the coverage of a huge raft of poets is, how tentative the conclusions. Yet I was so deeply involved in poetry as it was happening in these years. Someone looked at the quantity of poetry books being published in 1989, reckoned it was 1300 for that year, and speculated that this meant 5,000 poets at work producing poetry that was "fit to be published”. A documented* figure for 1999 is 2700 poetry books. This would mean 8100 books over 3 years. I suspect this means 10,000 poets at work producing poetry that was ”fit to be published”. Actually I think that figure is on the low side. Obviously you can’t do an “overview” of a field that big. So this isn’t an overview. (*Correction. Randall Stevenson gives that figure of 2700 titles, in "The Last of England?", but I don’t think this count is wholly ‘new poetry titles’, it is more likely an indiscriminate count based on some tag like ‘English poetry’. The British Library catalogue is hard to use but I did trawl up about 2000 titles for one year, the year 2000 in fact. I have lost faith in these counts, but the total number of published poets might be 5-7000.)

We were sitting on the Sun Terrace outside a Nottingham pub which happens to be the nearest one to the office where I work. Inspired by Tim Healey’s wonderful book The World’s worst movies, I had asked my companions, ex-colleagues, people of taste and discretion, what was the worst film they’d ever seen. Simon re-jigged this to the world’s most overrated movie and came up with ‘Citizen Kane’. Godfrey said also that Kane was ‘too long’. I got the feeling he’d never watched it all the way through, and was wishing it had come in 25-minute episodes. Godfrey also came up with a defence of ‘In Like Flint’, brilliantly written off by Healey, which I had discovered a copy of in a collection of DVDs I had mysteriously come by and actually watched. This is truly a terrible film. Godfrey claimed it was a spoof. No. It’s just a bad film with a lot of fantasy poured over a lot of unimaginative derivation from other spy films. So, without being distracted from my beer, my conclusion was that the party didn’t like 'Citizen Kane' and did like 'In like Flint'. This is the ground underlying Poetry Boom: it’s all based on my aesthetic opinions and the person reading it may derive no benefit because they didn’t follow Kane and really enjoyed 'In Like Flint'. There are hundreds of poets I’ve left out because they aren’t good enough. But maybe they are better than ‘In Like Flint’.

Faking it. I draw extensively on Barker and Taylor's great book Faking It but did not mention its main point, which is that the search for authenticity has privileged a relationship of music to community, then rigidly defined community as ethnic, and so attributed to music the quality of being Black or White which has actually led to segregation in terms of radio stations, charts, concert venues, and marketing. If segregation is bad in America's society in general, it must be bad in music. An original polarity of musical customs between Black and White Americans was contradicted by a much more blurred daily reality which Barker and Taylor describe at length. If cultural purity means segregation, its assumptions have to be challenged at every step.

I wrote some chapters which had to be omitted :
.-. Competitive language games
-. critique of the family: the family as ideology
-. Poetry and Science (Prynne and Fisher)
-. the Folk strand in poetry.
-. Inside the Periphery (Scotland and Wales)


This era of poetry was my era, the one my career went through its cycle in. This accounts (partly) for the difficulty of putting into words what really took place in it. I wrote four successive surveys of 'new poetry' from 1990 on. One was reprinted in my book  Failure of Conservatism. This one was originally the introduction to an issue of 'new poets' in Angel Exhaust, in 1995. In 1995 I was only aware of one sector of new poetry, so later I wasn't really happy with that as a survey. So a return to that stretch of time was likely. As you live through an era, your state of mind is dominated by the poetry from the immediately previous era, which you’ve absorbed and which is flowing through your veins in a mighty rush. A second survey was collected in  my book The Council of Heresy (pp.154-73 and 230-53). The third was 'Hillbilly Fever' (see below). The fourth is 'Poetry Boom'.

Sugar Rush. The sugar rush phrase refers to the poetry boom which began around 1994 and which has possibly not stopped. The 'sugar rush' concept is a modification of an earlier theme in a long piece I wrote in 2001 and which was published in 'Terrible Work' on-line. That essay (13,000 words of it) was called 'Hillbilly Fever' and in it I reacted to the 'second naivety' of several poets who were educated but wanted to conquer subjectivity as well by talking about Patsy Montana and 'I wanna be a cowboy's sweetheart'. I thought that, if you wanted to be successfully naive, you had to take on country and western and win. Also, I was a bit irritated by poets writing shallow poetry but expecting you to be impressed anyway because they had gone to an elite university. If a pop song has to charm you, then a naive poem has to charm you too, and if it doesn't it is no good the poet handing out a bibliography about the Learned Naive. The poetry I was reviewing wasn't especially good. When I came to design a book about 'the generation since 1990' I looked at 'Hillbilly Fever' and scrapped it because it wasn't about the vital new poetry. 'Coded Sand' is still about the Second Naivety and poetry being like pop music, but it represents an advance. Actually, I recycled about 4000 words of 'Hillbilly' here and there. When I read Faking It I was fascinated & it could be that I recognised in their praise of 'Sugar Sugar' by The Archies a taste of me pointing to 'I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart'.
There is a line in an Amy De'Ath poem ''Now I'm real nakedness some kind of hay bale girl a goofball" - the 'hay bale' seems to match up with Patsy Montana. Coincidence?
The theme can be explained via a book title, 'the goddess in the kitchen'. You can't be a goddess in the kitchen, or in the sitting room. Or a god. I think the 'potential scope' of poetry has vastly increased, not that people are getting more intelligent but that the sources of information are so much richer and more voluminous. The human personality is not getting more complicated. Because poetry is not a form of scholarship, news media, government social research, financial reports database, etc., it hangs on to its archaic human feelings, reaches a limit of complexity - and bursts. It sinks like the sun and then rises again - restored but extremely simple. It can’t be deified. I can see that poetry does draw on 'people with beautiful personalities', there is a 'line' which follows a curve of beautiful behaviour in the way that a painter might travel to stay in beautiful mountains. This is not especially prominent in the published landscape. Conversely you have poetry about people with terrible 'oversize' personality problems, à la Anne Sexton, but that isn't really centre stage either. No, the personality has not become more complex and poetry is bound to the personality, and cannot sustain a mismatch between the language it uses and the events and the personalities it is describing. Poetry used to describe gods & goddesses, via mythology, but that isn't a normal part of the game as it is now played. So no 'gods in the bedroom' 'goddess in the dining room'. Poetry can however succeed in recapturing the naive and lyrical - the Second Naivety. Creating a 'sugar rush'. This brings two structural problems. First, that it elides the 'defensive gap' between poetry and popular song, which is exceptionally strong in our culture and well able to crush 'musicless' poetry and consign it to the past. Secondly, the 'alliance' between poetry and quite complicated sets of information related to politics, which it wants to weave into its discourse. I said 'problems', these are things which don't prevent poetry from being written but which pose a threat past which poetic thought has to go to find its solutions.

The 'partially coded' project may have started when I was looking at the Chicago Review issue on new British poets in 2007, which seemed to restrict the new generation to four people. I was a bit irked by this although I also couldn't name a large number of poets who had made debuts shortly before 2007, so the book happened when I had located the poets. It may alternatively have started when Keston Sutherland asked me to write something about 'poetry since 2000' for a project which never came to anything, I never heard any more about it. This was in 2010, possibly. Then as time went by the 1997 end point came to seem more and more old and frustrating. So there was a sort of 'dull pain' for that terrain which I hadn't covered. This induced me, after many years, to do some work to fill in the missing terrain. Having written the book I could see that the terrain still wasn't filled in. An American editor produced an issue of his magazine ‘Pilot’ which included 17 young British poets and which I think was a response to the Chicago Review thing and its premature restriction. I couldn’t get hold of this, still haven’t seen it.

So you have 1100 titles come out in one year. Maybe the critics didn't read all those titles. Surprise. You have to posit a starting line where the good stuff is where you aren't looking for it and you are looking in the wrong place. The policy of following certain publishers and magazines and listening to certain people who are 'insiders' may not work. So would you have to read all 1100 titles? To put it another way: you can't judge the books you haven't read. The map may not be there.
It would be great if there were a cadre of poetry connoisseurs who read through all those books, found the good ones, transmitted the information to alert colleagues, and the result were a body of aesthetic knowledge which would name the good books and which would be available to me. But this seems idealistic. There is a 'knowledge distribution network' but its defects are obvious to all.
Less emphasis this time on ranking good and bad, more on reproducing the conversation around poetry as a way of getting the reader close to the linguistic world that poetry happens in.

Kevin Nolan wrote to me about Andrew Jordan:
>>Andrew, not at all, I really did have had to go and see […] on the 27th and I never managed to get back inside your time envelope. Also, the constant fag smoke really got to me, [...], but, even so, sorry to miss you.

That Jordan piece is good, full of demanding equivocations, for surely things really are as bad as he imagines, and he is not paying us back with the sour trickery, say, of [...], or the right-on low mindedness of [...]? I cite these two obvious points of referral just to remind myself how one-sided the debates are:  you would agree, I think and I liked your intro matter for the comic depth of its concern for local and even factional sectaries beyond the pale of identity-management. I think more of the book than you simply because of its will to stand up to the force of its own pessimism, in this a kind of complement to the really negational horror cinema of the 1960s: scream and scream again? But your Marstonian diagnosis of malcontentedness has some truth: there is something Jacobean in this kind of dark rhetoric, a deliberately premodern invocation of the muses of dread which does apply to Sinclair for confirmation but transcends him by seeing death as actual extinction and murder, not merely a Travelodge on the Spirit Path to literary celebrity. ((Some of Jordan reminds me of the dark side of you, but we can chat about all that later.). I owe you the proofs of Filament and more again, so I will write back soonest.<<

Robert Archambeau released on his blog part of a letter from Andrea Brady to him:

>>Throughout the time I did spend in Cambridge I felt distinctly female and distinctly American. I guess it was no accident that I ended up writing a chapter of my thesis on the way that 17th century literary coteries preserved the authority of patriarchal poets through agonistic self-definition and fantasies of all-male reproduction. But I didn’t see the resemblance at the time.<<

This isn't really my story but I thought I should quote it in case you haven't seen it.

The book is about a poetry boom but I don’t explain why this boom happened. I didn’t research this, but why was it? The constant increase in the number of graduates is surely part of it, and if I could give only one cause that would be it. There must be other reasons. I guess that there has been a decrease in dictatorship. Where you used, say between 1940 and 1980, to have people willing to say “there is only one kind of poetry that matters and it is written by people who have been my personal friends for 30 years”, the cultural managers today are only going to admit to pluralism. The same goes for the Marxist authorities who would tell you that all bourgeois art, which means art touched in any way by bourgeois mentality, is fundamentally bad and corrupt. I suspect this is a side-effect of the huge growth in the numbers of the educated - it has eroded the belief in Experts - but then there may well be a whole raft of reasons.
I have vivid memories of the humiliation course on the way into poetry - the ‘evil teacher’ figures who would tell you that there’s only one way of doing things and you have no idea what it is. As indicated, I associate this both with the conservative authoritarian figures like Geoffrey Grigson and Ian Hamilton but also with people who thought there was a modernist/Marxist franchise and they owned it. However vivid the memories, they aren’t time-stamped enough for me to work out when this peculiarly vile way of behaving stopped. It does seem to be an artefact of restricted consumption - you start with the idea that ‘in order for me to win everyone else has to lose’ and go on from that to ‘there is a unique winning position and I know what it is’. There is an idea, quoted here from the archaeologist Richard Bradley: “the special character of prestige items is safeguarded by regular destruction". (I think Bradley was quoting from an anthropologist named Meillassoux who had observed this when looking at ‘bride-wealth’ in West Africa.) There would be a symmetry between a social order in which 2% of people are the apex, from all points of view, and an artistic order with a prestige art which only applied to a tiny range of situations, which is demarcated from everyday language, which is exercised only by a few artists, and where ‘unauthorised’ artists are severely reproved and repressed.

In the model, it becomes possible for many people to be significant poets in the course of events that demolish the social ‘apex’ and lead to a much flatter social structure. Once people are generally aware that ‘culture flows in every direction’, the geometry changes and there is no niche that can be called Winning and the basis for putting everyone down vanishes. If your social role is to give prestige artefacts the stamp of Authentication, it is hard to accept that this authentication is a mirage and cultural creativity is everywhere. I think the flood of new graduates dissolved the elitist position - the function of de-Authentication which had worked so well for so many centuries fought its last stand and its curses lost their power to hurt. There was a paradoxical stage where the managers of prestige intensified their claims to have the monopoly of cultural assignment at the very moment when more and more people were losing faith in them. The old-style managers made terrible mistakes of artistic judgement and became incompetent and ridiculous partly because they rejected the new poetry in the interests of preserving their own central/authoritative position.
But… all that rubbish stopped. It became safer to write poetry. The rate of publication almost doubled in the Nineties - I hope someone else will research why this happened, and possibly also check the figures and see if they are counting something real. (Rate may not have increased during Nineties - indiscriminate lump-counts again. But count probably was upwards of 700 titles each year.)
I think the limit of this explanatory model is that the turning of prestige from a crystal phial held inside a fortress guarded by Geoffrey Grigson with a Bren gun into ‘a delta with hundreds of channels covering a huge area’ is so complete, the delta is so much where we live, that it is hard to think back to when things were different. The struggle to prevent it used Auden as a key symbol - conservative critics refused to read poets younger than Auden because they knew that would spoil the game. Conversely, Auden stood for poetry which was read by people outside the committed ‘poetry world’. Auden was not necessarily a cultural conservative himself. One more point - in the new world it is impossible to WIN in the sense of reaching the apex where the truly influential hang out, because there is no apex any more. Some groups on the scene may feel a hankering for this situation but it is impossible to bring it back (even by symbolic destruction of everyone else’s prestige items).
The flattening may have been identical with the process by which the number of university graduates rose from less than 40,000 to millions. As I write I hear that there are two million students in the country. We could also describe this process as ‘the apex growing by a factor of 400 or 500’ rather than as ‘the apex disappearing’.

When the ‘province of the culturally active” only included a few thousand people, the wish to be an insider was mighty. People assimilated to the central realm of culture, acquired the right accent, and didn’t want to be neglected and unfashionable. So there was a style of each era, roughly one per decade (for some reason). This really came to an end in the 1980s, and problems with describing ‘style history’ from that point on are due to the size of the elite. You have a mass elite, roughly. It is too big for one sense of poetic style to sweep the board - there are always a dozen contenders as central style. But you have clusters, and you have a time line of change within those clusters - separately. So you have “postmodernism” and there really are poets who fit the concept “postmodern” - but out of 7,000 poets (! whatever the actual count is) only a small number are writing in such a “post-modern” mode. So calling the whole era post-modern is blatantly inaccurate.
As the book says, a re-examination of the evidence finds that even the 1950s didn’t have one single style. At least three were in contention, and commentators at the time record that. But people were arguing about an “appointment to office” of a dominant “style of our time”, so there is an office of Caesar even if four people have been acclaimed Caesars in different provinces; and after about 1983 (??) people don’t do that any more.
You definitely have post-modern poets in 1983, and it seems fairly new then. But does that mean you have had 30 years of Postmodern Reign ever since then? That isn’t plausible either. But we don’t have a theologian of the postmodern telling us that it began ebbing away in (say) 1995. No, the expectation is that you throw away the rules of stylistic research in order to fall down in front of it. This is silly.


**
The book was finished but had to be prised open and reworked after I read Nathan Hamilton’s anthology Dear World, which was obviously very important.


 **

Sugar sugar. When I talk about ‘Sugar Sugar’, a huge 1969 hit for The Archies which was a symbol at the time of banality and phoniness, I describe it wrongly. I hadn’t heard it for 40 years. The point is that I could still remember it, after 40 years, and that this is a sign of how strong it was as a nagging pop song. I describe my memory with a marimba that isn’t there. (It’s an organ with a woody tone played staccato.) During the write-up I chatted to my colleague Lance, who is maybe four years younger than me. He could remember 1969 and told me that ‘Sugar sugar’ was the first record he remembered enjoying and looking out for. So he was nine - ‘Sugar sugar’ was possibly aimed at pre-teens rather than teens, and maybe this is part of how it came to be number One for six weeks and yet all the ‘talk’ about it was how bad it was. Somebody liked it, didn’t they? There was that stretch emerging between increasingly sophisticated and album-oriented music at the top end and music for people aged nine to fourteen at the ‘bottom end’, and those markets were splitting from each other.

Sampson. Fiona Sampson has published a book called Beyond the Lyric (2012) which is effectively a study of poetry since 1990, even if not labelled as that. I didn’t write a detailed response to it and I am struggling to explain why. I think where Fiona is coming from is a wish not to offend anybody. Part of this is a wish for ‘propriety of scale’, so that no-one gets praised excessively. In the upshot no-one gets much praise. It is like a bird’s eye view which gets everyone in the correct proportions but diminishes everything through distance. Then, I find her classifications unusable. It may be that hundreds of different ways of grouping poets are equally effective, and that I am buried inside my personal one, which is after all how I retrieve knowledge every day. All the same I found her grouping instantly forgettable and non-illuminating. Also, it doesn’t tie on to the debates about form which poets enter into - it doesn’t connect with the conversation in bars full of poets. Sampson never mentions any comments by poets about the choices they make and the stylistic narratives they identify with. This is a kind of ultra-fairness - but it disconnects the book from its subject matter. I was very interested in chronology and in finding what was present in 2010 which wasn’t there in 1990 - or which had sunk and disappeared between 1990 and 2010. Sampson’s book has no notion of time at all. I think the background is fear of the utterance YOU’RE OUT OF DATE - something which would demolish the building and have hundreds of poets run round in circles screaming. Sampson is determined to avoid any disagreements. The book ends up giving the impression that time is not passing at all and that the scene is exactly how it was in 1965. This is surely not true. And a lot of poets are conservative, slow, and out of date. This feeds back into the classification problem - evidently being ‘modern’, and the 50 stages of being modern over the last 50 years, are vital to classifying styles, and everyone talks in terms of them. Sampson says that political poetry is very rare - this is palpably untrue; the comment means something like “I dislike political poetry so I can ignore it”, poets’ wishes about how society ought to work are tactfully dragged out of the picture - and this is very similar to dragging poets’ wishes about how poetry ought to work out of the picture, which is something else Sampson seems to be doing. Any argument about poetry puts many many poets in a bad light - so if you shut out of camera view all the arguments people have had over 30 years or so, you are apparently saving people pain - but lowering awareness to a very dim level. By trying so hard to be fair to everyone, Sampson has given away the possibility of giving cogent or satisfying descriptions.
However - FS mentions possibly 100 poets and if you went off and and read all those poets you wouldn’t do too badly. Also I see no wrong judgements about the poets she discusses. I just couldn’t build on what she wrote.

Todd Swift is apparently editing a book for Eyewear which will describe British poetry since 1999 - we can hope that covers my deficiencies. It may also come out in 2015. (This project never completed.)

Ghost town. After the ‘sugar rush’, the ghost town. The ‘ghost town’ part is because the book is written as a retrospect. It includes the 1990s, when I was so involved in the poetry scene and when so many things were happening. The sites of that time are deserted. Everything has moved on. It is possible to think about what happened because the crush of information has faded away: both memory and abstraction are possible. There is a line where understanding stops: maybe 15 years before today, maybe ten.

I include a chapter on ‘The Maltese Falcon‘. This is odd. It isn’t even a poem. Because poetry deals so much with the individual, it doesn’t build complexes of relations between several individuals which allow the spectator to project their feelings, as they do with the Falcon. The elusive and receding space is flattened, we are very close to one person - one face. I couldn’t find modern poetry which allows discussion of modern politics. The possibility has slipped away. The poems are too much about the projection of a personality. Poets are hyper-aware of sexual politics and so forth. They don’t allow a movement between guilt and innocence. Interesting write-ups of that movement have to use something else - films for example. The poets are all hyper-aware of the Police Departments of Theory and sedulously avoid topics that might be subject to re-analysis by tough Theory Cops. This is why we have to bring in a film to explain the arguments.
Poetry is acutely limited by anxiety about being exposed to ethical and social critique. The poetry we get is only what’s left over once inhibitions have put the raw material through twenty committee meetings.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Her look of startled innocence - red hair, blue eyes, schoolgirl complexion - when Sam Spade makes her admit that she shot Miles Archer is emblematic for the reaction of the lyric poet when told that all that critique of ideology and hidden labyrinths of deceit in texts applies to Them. You can’t mean Me?
If you decide that O’Shaughnessy was innocent then maybe lyric poets are too. So that Georg Lukacs shot Miles Archer. I’ve read the book (The Maltese Falcon) and I don’t believe it. Dashiel Hammett is disguising the real story. He never even mentions Lukacs. Why not?

The problem with Theory is this. Readers are often not convinced by poems. Often poems fall apart when they make a false move. The whole history of modern poetry is of a mass audience sheering away and not being interested. There are a million ways of screwing up the poem. An explanation for this is vital. But Theory provides a set of wrong explanations. It is not based on actual audience reactions. It doesn’t even think they are important.

The concept of ‘indeterminacy’ in poetry has to be connected back to the primal moment of reduction: poetry is not ambiguous the way a narrative with several characters, like the Falcon, is. The Falcon is a mystery story, it’s all about ambiguity. So poetry restores a missing indeterminacy in different ways.


Good poets encountered since I closed the book off: Peter Davidson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Dorothy Lehane, Maria Jastrzebska, Nathan Thompson.

I began the book planning to project the thesis that the underground/mainstream opposition has disappeared, buried beneath other patterns. But that's not true. As I worked through the material this thesis became tattered, drained, finally it dissolved. Of course there are more groups in the field, the field is just larger. You have more of an opening onto the “truly modern” by the gate-keepers – Fiona Sampson gallantly tries to write something about Prynne and Raworth, for example. But there is still a huge “underworld” of poets who would never dream of opening a mainstream book, and there is still a world of the conventional where anything except direct self-presentation is just not understood. Sampson's book was published in 2012 and just about gets avant-garde poets born before 1940. The ones born after 1940 are just too modern for her. My wish for this cultural gulf to close up is too much a hope that an audience ready to read my work would slip into existence. That is, it's just a wish.

Spenser. In the book, I attribute the View of the Present State of Ireland to Edmund Spenser. Since closing the book, I have read Bruce Lenman’s England’s Colonial Wars 1550-1688 which discusses the wars in Ireland and says that the View, although published under Spenser’s name (almost 40 years after his death) was not in fact by Spenser. So we have to give this up. However, Spenser did live in Ireland for many years and did profit from imperialism by becoming owner of an estate in the forfeited and cleared province of Munster. More significantly, he was writing propaganda for Elizabeth and it was under her aegis that terrible misgovernment occurred in Ireland. All these situations ask for further analysis, more dragging in of awkward facts and unnoticed witnesses. What is the link between the Irish wars and Elizabethan court poetry?

Am spending Sunday morning checking the details in the catalogue of poets. This is where mistakes are likely to be concentrated. Exhaustion after two hours. I need a coffee. I change the date on How to make millions by Emily Critchley from 2005, as the credits in her first book say this pamphlet was published in 2004. Later, while ransacking the shelves for something else, I find the original pamphlet and the flyleaf says it was published in 2005. Right first time. Change the date back. This could go on for ever. Interesting how many of the books I want to list aren’t in the British Library catalogue. Spent 4 ½ hours just checking dates and titles. I think the conclusion is that copy-typing numbers is extremely boring.

**
The British Film Institute have issued Chris Welsby’s films on DVD: British Artists’ Films, Chris Welsby. 

(count of titles)

I have retrieved almost 2000 titles for 2000 from the BL catalogue, so the figure of 2700 a year may not be too far out. (This is the figure cited by Randal Stevenson in his book "The last of England?") However, crawling through the spreadsheets of titles has uncovered 800 anthologies from a single group of publishers in a regional city, certainly a single business. It looks as if the business model here is unorthodox, not primarily directed at selling to the public as a source of revenue. So I am not happy about defining such high figures as a boom. The pattern may be more like reality TV or Facebook, that people think the details of their personal behaviour are fascinating and don’t see any need for verbal art on their way to becoming famous and popular.

If we exclude those anthologies and just look at single-author titles, we still have a count of roughly 1100 for the year 2000. Of course, some of those would be based on the author paying the publisher, so not signs of an eager market for poetry. The figure is high compared to the 1970s, so it hasn’t doubled but may have gone up by 70%.

A note on Anthony Conran

A note on Anthony Conran (1931-2013) 


(Later books credited to Tony Conran.) He is such a fluent and brilliant poet, but he can foresee difficulties too cleverly, and the poems lack depth, conflict, self-contradiction, in some way. Does a poem need to have internal tension and twist? I can’t see why. I don’t think I’ve read all his books. I thought the Formal Poems (1960) were unsatisfactory, and Castles (1993) also didn’t work out. But there is also A Gwynedd Symphony (1996). Life Fund (1979) may be the best. It reminds me of Edwin Morgan. It has particular poems that could be anthologised; the “poems for paintings on silk” are good.
Conran has an Irish name and was partly Welsh by “origins”, if we care about those, but he grew up in Wales. Conran published an essay about Welsh civilisation (Anglo-Welsh Review, number 58) which defines it as a separate organism from Western Europe (that is - before the English conquest), and says that modern Wales is a survival of that civilisation. He was perpetually writing about Wales as a figure, an agent, capable of moving and having a biography; his poetry adheres to this as a maximum (he has no interest in Britain or Europe) and a minimum - he is always writing about Wales as a whole, and his poems all cohere in that urgent project. This 1977 essay shows the influence of Toynbee (who described “an Abortive Far Western Christian Civilisation”) on his thought; he acquired his ideas rather early in life, it seems, and Toynbee, Graves, and Buber gave him much of his framework. The Welsh mythical figures he was constantly writing about serve as ideals which show this Far Western Civilisation but are deployed to rebuke Welsh people for failing to live up to them as ideals. The sociological basis for this is weak.
He was a career nationalist, for want of a better word, a full-time one. The story of his poems is therefore the story of the fate of Wales - a great deal of frustration with the language fading year by year, but also a success story as originally ridiculed ideas came to be accepted by a large proportion of the population. His understanding of the nature of Wales grew ever more precise - simultaneously an increasing knowledge of what was going wrong and an intellectual victory. He was acutely aware of the failings of nationalism as doctrine and a logical development would have been into a critic of nationalism. He remained a nationalist true believer. He didn’t see the poems as solutions because the only real problem was how to liberate Wales.
A basic step in his poetry is the evocation of a mythical realm. He was very excited by the heroic narrative of Wales, myths about gods or about historical figures (prior to the loss of independence) projected to super-human scale. An influence on this may have been Graves’ The White Goddess, which takes place on the mythical level. Ken Etheridge’s 1943 book already includes a number of mythical poems about Welsh legends. There were absolutely radical problems with this manner of writing. An improvement was to reduce the vagueness by using a laconic style full of physical details, which after all attacked one of the main problems with the style that was drunk on mythology. So -

In the untrodden light
Come travellers
Pilgrims or refugees.

The young ones
Crowd their balconies
At the next cold
Opportunists
Draggle the heart.

Refugee camp -
Or a quality of light
Drawing us inward…
(“Incomers“)

A problem with the poems is the exclusion of process from the poem by the laconic style and its typically short lines. The lineation is odd - it lacks fluency although its terseness also seems to possess authority. However, it also punctured the exalted and elusive quality of the myths - the primary attraction. Both of these styles were deeply flawed and likely to produce unconvincing poems. However, the contrast between them produced a kind of dialectic. This would produce new combinations all the time and some of these combinations would be good poems, which also had this quality of internal tension - a way of expressing the tension of historical situations, the absence of structure which allows for freedom and for acts of consciousness.
A key thing to explain is how Conran was a fluent writer, who could write hundreds of poems and not be bothered with them later, and also use this anti-fluent, even grudging, style of writing. I liked this poem about Euros Bowen:

A thick tapering trumpet,
A rhizome of bronze
In a dark forge moulded and twisted
In spiralling rounds.

A wide bloom opens for the root -
A crater of red
Like a lake of smouldering molten stone
Erupts from its bed -
(“To ask for a Bugle”, 1969)

Conran issued a book called “formal poems” (1958), which was pretty much juvenilia. A collected poems 1951-67 was published in 1974. There is a standard Anglo-Welsh poem which Conran never wrote at all, being original from the start. He took The White Goddess and developed a notion of poems based on social exchanges - gifts, marriages, etc., which would be raised to ceremonial level by the largesse of poetry. This was also a way of incorporating the pre-modern Welsh poetry, which had very frequently dealt with such moments- albeit in land-owning families. His selected poems of 2006 (The Shape of my Country) eliminate these poems almost entirely. However, some of these poems are picked up and show his later mature style in which events of history are used as a way of commenting on and staging events of the immediate present, that is in Wales. Despite the use of myth, Conran is a serious thinker: his observation of current events is very acute, he is capable of original thought about politics and that is the basis for writing serious poetry about politics. In fact, there is a tension between the information which this acuity feeds back to his brain and the objects of poetry. It is as if that acuity and his long study of events cut a way out of the poetic and nationalist and mythological presuppositions which Conran fastened onto as a teenager or young adult. Conran has done the work of understanding social processes but the payoff is missed because the information is too complex for the design of the poem he is prepared to write. An exit into large forms was strongly indicated for him. This would for most writers also be the signal for the exit from poetry into prose. In fact, Conran was much better as a prose writer, and his essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry are among the most enlightening for the foreigner. I have to say that his laconic statements have the force of truth, they point to a knowledge won by critical thought which he genuinely had won and could draw on. The selected poems (of some 120 pages) are not completely satisfactory as a career survey - it is a cleverly designed and coherent book, but the individual volumes, something over 800 pages in all, tell a more complicated story. (Did I count 800? No, but he wrote a lot of poems.)
‘A meritocracy’ is from a 1960 sequence called ‘Invocation of Angels’:

An aristocracy of intellect
Could come - has come already
In a few displaced souls
From the lost generations.

Like all aristocracies
That of the intellect
Is a matter of breeding.

This has a theme described in his notes: “Iaith (language) rather than gwlad has been the pre-occupation of both the Welsh intelligentsias at least since the 1970s. The result, the short term, has spelt some economic disadvantage for the English monoglot majority (and consequent resentment) because the new, bilingual Wales requires bilingual officers; but its long-term effects are likely to be disastrous for both communities.” The lucidity of the prose (written in 2004) reveals that Conran had done the studying and the thinking. The poem is not exciting because its theme is depressing. He rarely found optimistic subjects in Welsh politics. (Gwlad is the Land.)

“The Sisters” is from 1993:

Both sisters had their courts. Clients gathered,
Friends, conspirators, those with a phrase to offer

Or a kindness, warmth or wildness, way of the world.
The magic of their Welshness was Mediterranean,

Bright as seagulls. Lamplit palazzos
Where the twist and savour of a good story was king.

A taste of Gwales. The singing of Rhiannon’s birds.
The Assembly of the Head these umpteen years.

But in Non’s time, the door swung open, and she knew it.
Her court was at the rainbow’s end,

Time-bound. Men of action, or men hesitant
To act. Women poised in the rigmaroles of doubt.

Time. Time. And the great space beyond. The shuffling
Seas sweeping you out through Aber Henfelin

To the gannet ways, the shark roads beyond Cape Clear.


The introduction of figures from the Mabinogion is typical. (Opening the door brought paradise, on Gwales, to an end.) The style shows how many mediaeval Welsh poems he had read, it is genuinely un-English. Conran was not a Welsh speaker but had a passionate interest in the classical Welsh poetic forms and worked out a way of translating them. The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967) consists wholly of his translations - the best ever, so far as I can see. Gwyn Williams also had that ability.

This note is a back-up to the “shopping list” of books of poetry 1960-97 which did not include a title of Conran’s. Over twenty years I have been pondering, at least intermittently, why I didn’t like his poetry enough and whether I should include one of his books. They were hard to find. Blodeuwedd (1988). All Hallows (1995). What Brings you Here So Late (2008) are three I haven’t read. I will read them, it’s just a question of finding copies.