metal detectorists

Metal detectors snouting and snuffling

I was very impressed by the story of the Staffordshire Hoard (of Mercian goldwork) being found by a metal detectorist, and archaeologists subsequently saying that they should co-operate more with detectorists and give them more credit. I saw a magazine for detectorists in WH Smith’s. OK, I thought, this should be interesting. They have limited education, they didn’t get free education at university, they work for a living, maybe they should be accepted as part of a wider intellectual community interested in the past.
Then, I saw a copy of this magazine on-line, on a site I subscribe to which has lots of books uploaded by people. 60 million documents, according to their write-up. So it’s like You-tube, only for books and papers. Anyway, I downloaded this issue of “Treasure Hunting”. I was expecting it to be full of articles about archaeology, and I was interested to see what questions they asked which made it different from a mainstream archaeology magazine. WH Smith has 3 of those, so you can buy those just by walking into Smith’s. But, I was amazed by what I found. The detectorist magazine has no interest in archaeology. The articles are about the first-person experiences of people who use metal detectors, and have no discussion of the meaning of the finds. It is completely about finding treasures, that is where the interest stops. So you would expect reviews of books and exhibitions ...but they don’t run any of those at all. This implies that their readership don’t want to read books, or even visit museums showing large numbers of “treasures”. No, they are too busy walking up and down muddy fields. It follows that the magazine has no actual archaeologists speaking in its pages at all – not even as book reviewers. One corollary is that the hobbyists are not attracted by how much professional archaeologists know, and they don’t. They don’t have to feel themselves as a sub-cultural minority, defined by ignorance. Another one is that there is no trickle of academic ideas into this anti-academic world – they are not even reading reviews of the books, let alone the books. But they don’t feel inferior to the academics. Their focus is incredibly egocentric – they aren't much interested in objects which other people own, because the focus is unswervingly on objects which they own.
It is important to read Paul Barford’s blog with its critical view of detectorists and other looters: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com

Barford refers several times to “object-centred archaeology”, which sadly exhausts itself detailing the history of objects rather than the history of a past society. This is also a way of thinking about the people who read ‘Treasure Hunting’ – they can focus on objects but their interest vanishes when you address any other topic, because they have no interest in abstractions at all. Barford is interested in using physical evidence to think about symbolic behaviour. A potsherd is part of a pattern. So, if someone asked “we have the very first coins in Britain, made for kings of south-eastern tribes and following Gaulish models, what does this tell us about social changes, moving from a society which doesn't need coins to one which needs thousands of them?” – but they wouldn’t be able to pose a question like that and wouldn’t understand the answer if someone pronounced it. As a consequence, they don’t feel that a Renfrew or a Hodder is superior to them. They aren’t interested in the things which intellectual archaeologists can do. They are playing a game in which developing ideas doesn’t count as winning – but finding Tudor coins certainly does. Detecting and collecting isn't even archaeology, it is several levels below “object-centred archaeology”. A coin is primarily a symbolic object, you would think. Or is it primarily a shiny thing?

OK, some of the people who buy “Treasure Hunting” might also buy “British Archaeology”, so their limits are not the same as those of the magazine.
The detectorist set seem to dislike abstraction. They are really happy talking about the details of their ground scanners, and like the objects they dig up – while becoming uncomfortable whenever the discussion moves away from solid objects. It is not simply distrust of the people who own abstract ideas, it is actual discomfort in dealing with ideas at all. So they don’t overlap with the ley-line gang, who have limited interest in physical evidence but are in love with imaginary ideas, and the spirituality of past ages. So they are both against “official archaeology”, but they possibly don’t overlap at all – they just don’t have the same interests. There must be a difference between people who believe everything, no matter how untrue, and people who don’t believe any abstract ideas at all, even if they are true. I couldn't find even one mention of an archaeologist – but there was a photo of a table where someone sat to identify finds, obviously an archaeologist but not named, he was there only to act as scorer, recording that a detectorist had won, and their find was really old.
I was impressed by a photo of finds. They included a broken part of a “Celtic” (Iron Age?) terret ring, in La Tène style – something incredibly beautiful even if it was only an inch across. The patterns just aren't ones you would find today. And there were several pages of photos from an antiques auctioneer, so paid for as ads but still worth looking at. I don’t know why the same ads don’t appear in British Archaeology, maybe their readers don’t want to own artefacts. So there was a photo of a La Tène sword – crunched into a sort of Z shape, but a real one, you could have it for about £5000. Amazing.

This looks to me like two completely different ways of consuming information. The cognitive practices which let someone process a largely abstract story, or data pattern, and enjoy it, are communicated by education, and there is a large pool of non-educated people who don’t share those practices, who regard them as effortful and unrewarding. They become pleasurable because you are fluent in them, you have a smooth experience with few stumbles. This is the “take away” for thinking about poetry – there are many different ways in which people consume information, and modern poetry is divided into factions based on the preferred cognitive patterns. If you don’t wish to own ancient artefacts, maybe you are parting company with a large number of other people. And maybe they can’t enjoy modern archaeology.

I have been reading about the early history of the Mormons, in particular Joseph Smith’s early career as a treasure finder. He had a kind of lens or mirror which would look through all the layers of the earth and find treasure hidden beneath them. So – an early model metal detector. His device came from German folk culture, the so-called “Erdspiegel” which was allegedly used by “Venetians” coming to South Germany to look for ores (or treasures?). Treasure hunting is actually older than archaeology.

The label here may breach rules about how to label. I have labelled this as "exclusion", because it belongs to a theme of which other parts deal with cultural exclusion. But the area involves also people who don't participate in culture because they dislike reading books and don't want to acquire abstract knowledge. The issue for poetry is "willing non-participants", isn't it, less than "failed participants". Even if low-prestige poetry has a physical existence and is easier to write about. I am interested by the distinction between "people who believe irrational ideas about the Past" and "people who don't read books or go to museums". I am not writing "a history of cognitive practices" but I can see that you can't write the history of poetic taste without getting into that area, big time.

Origins of Germanic

When writing arrives, we find Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, as discrete language groups. Since they undoubtedly started out as being the same, the question is what breaches of structure and origins of structure brought about the divisions. If you look at a page of German and a page of Russian, as they are today, they are certainly very different. Since there are three Indo-European groups in Northern Europe, we are entitled to ask why it is exactly three, and not one or eight. Peter Schrijver, a professor at Utrecht, has published Language contact and the origins of the Germanic languages (2014). This contains a set of radically original theories on the influence of bilingualism and phonetic interference, which I expect we will be debating for the next hundred years. For him, the breach between Indo-European and Germanic is the impact of a phase of bilingualism in which a Balto-Finnic language influenced local Indo-european.
Indo-European has no double-length (geminate) consonants but Germanic does have them. This is an innovation. Schrijver describes in Finnish a set of alternations in consonants depending on the level of stress of the preceding syllable. This can affect which consonant is heard, but is often also an alternation between a sound and zero. Finnish has in fact two sets of rules affecting consonants, rhythmic grading and syllabic grading. (The first affects odd syllables, so first and third ones.) Thus it has a rich set of variations in the consonants of syllables other than the first one. Schrijver takes this arrangement and points out that in Germanic we have some alternations which can be explained as grading:
*dūb- Old Norse dúfa ‘to immerse’
*dubb- Norwegian dubba ‘to stoop’, Middle Dutch dubben ‘to immerse’
*dūp- Dutch duipen ‘to hang one’s head’
*dupp- High German düppen, Norwegian duppa ‘to nod’
*duff- Faeroese duffa ‘to bob up and down (of a ship)’
*dump- Norwegian, English, Danish dump ‘hole, pit, pond’ East Frisian dumpen ‘to dive’

This word-group will be familiar to those who read substrate studies, in the journal NOWELE and elsewhere. (If I am not mistaken, this table was compiled by Frans Kuiper.) It is popular in discussions of the so-called “geminates language” and some of the words show geminates. The study of it was rather frustrated by the fact that it was definitely an Indo-European root (meaning “deep”, and instanced in Sanskrit) although its final consonant behaved in ways which were, strikingly, non-Indo-European. Schrijver has offered a good explanation for this – Germanic arose as the product of Indo-European being spoken, 3000 years ago, by a population which had Balto-Finnic speech habits. That means they had “old stock” words which were, however, subject to Balto-Finnic patterns of variation as concerned consonants at the end of syllables.
The other “geminate” group which keeps cropping up is (in English) stub-stump – stock (and, probably, “stem”). I don’t have a view on the rather puzzling variations within this group, but consonantal gradation seems to offer a solution.
The variation in consonants in Finnish is correlated with syllabic stress, and there is a biomechanical reason why unstressed syllables coincide with weakened consonants. This means also that vowel gradation would be, in an Indo-European language, occurring in the same pattern, so that different ablaut grades would appear with different consonant grades, in words from the same stem.
It is not instantly clear to me why the same word, in the same case, should end up in different (but related) languages with different grades and conditioned by different syllabic grades. I do not get why the words would not all have the same consonantal grade. However, this is a genuinely new idea and I feel that it will open up new routes for Germanic etymology. As appears from the back catalogue of substrate studies, this class of words is rather small. (Although one scholar claims the total is several hundred words, while denying that there is any substrate influence involved in the first place.) I would like to mention at this point the word dumble. This refers to the low ground around a stream and is used locally to me – for example, Lambley Dumbles, two miles away from me. It appears that this means deep in the sense of a hollow stream, which has worn a deep bed between high banks. (Or, low-lying pasture which is flooded seasonally.) Thus dumble actually means deep (or low). Dump is originally a pit – again, it means a “deep place”, and originally often meant a pit in a river bed, a patch of deep water. The contrast in the word ending between dump and dumble is the kind of thing which Schrijver is talking about.

Schrijver’s book also deals with Insular Celtic languages, as part of the structure within which he explains the shifts which differentiate Old English from closely related Continental dialects of Germanic. He states that Irish was identical with proto-Welsh as late as 150 AD and was the speech of migrants from Britain to Ireland at that date. “it seems safe to say that an Irish arrival in Ireland close to or in the first century AD is much easier to unite with the linguistic evidence than an arrival around, say, 500 or 1000 BC.”

Thus he posits Gaelic as the product of a late migration from Britain. As follows, the language which the Anglo-Saxons encountered, on disembarking, resembled Gaelic (as well as Welsh). But recently, Ranko Matasovic posited that there was a period of bilingualism around 400-600, connected with Irish invasions of Western Britain, which produced an assimilation between the two languages, so that the most obvious shared features between the languages (lenition and compound prepositions) are actually late, and their separation was much earlier. I am having difficulty balancing these two views. Matasovic does not propose a social mechanism for the spread of these features outward from the bilingual zone, on the Western shores of Britain, to the whole of Ireland (and the whole of Wales and Cornwall). It is certain that these features are not part of the inheritance of the Insular languages, so it must follow that the two languages innovated in parallel – attaching this to a bilingual zone is perfect. Since we actually have a credible bilingual zone, connected with Irish settlements on the “yonder” side of the Irish Sea, the theory is rather robust.

I am attracted to elements of Schrijver’s idea. If you look at the map, it seems unlikely that anyone would colonise Ireland directly from Spain, Aquitaine, Normandy, Holland, etc. Further, the Atlantic is a large and stormy sea. But, migration from England to Ireland looks easy, even for people with limited sea technology. Meanwhile, we have exactly two Celtic languages in the British Isles. It is attractive to link this duality with two large islands, separated by the Irish Sea. So, a pattern in which speakers of an ancient Celtic language started in Gaul, colonised Britain, and then colonised Ireland from there, and their language community split into two parts, separated by the sea, and the two parts evolved from unity into exactly two languages, sounds pleasing even if it is hard to find concrete evidence that it was like that.

Schrijver’s method is based on the shapes of phoneme structures. This reduces any language to 30 or 40 phonetic elements, which occur in rows and can be conveniently recorded or memorised. The sound which change in any period of history are even fewer. Patterns can be recognised in these simple datasets which are distinctive and rather objective. He relies absolutely on this method. Of course language contact also shows up in vocabulary, but he barely uses this as evidence. So, someone else will have the task of seeking the postulated chronologies in vocabulary, and seeing whether the ideas are confirmed by it. Of course vocabulary is very extensive and demands much more time and more pages.
He states that Irish is uniform in early manuscripts, whereas Welsh is dialectally differentiated. This is a basis for arguing that Irish was homogeneous in 600 AD (when manuscripts start), and so a recent arrival from overseas. I am very surprised to hear that there are dialect differences in the scant records of mediaeval Welsh, so far as I know the opposite is true and there is a “national” language for literature which blanks out any regional differences. To be sure, Wales is not all that large a place. The poems supposedly written by Taliesin and Aneirin, in a sub-Roman 6th century, have come down to us in a form indistinguishable from standard Welsh, although archaic; linguistic differences would be pure gold, to a scholar, but the editors of these texts do not point to any such differences. Of course we only have late and normalised manuscripts. No, my suspicion is that Old Irish is standardised because scribes were taught to apply rigid standards, and this is connected with the wish of the Church to see holy texts transmitted in a way which did not even suggest that human fallibility applied to them. They learnt to write Latin without personal variation and Irish without such variation. Of course literacy spread outwards from the Church, which initially used writing for Latin texts. It does not follow from consistency in spelling and vocabulary that Ireland was a linguistically uniform space.

Nothing is Being Suppressed

Scottish and Welsh poetry in the Seventies

I realise that having got to the end of a book about Seventies poetry I haven’t included a section on either Welsh or Scottish poetry. I am not clear why this is. Nor does anything clever occur to me now. I may owe the reader for this chapter. I haven’t written it. I have been working on a spreadsheet which shows 100 people writing good poetry during the 1970s-irritating because it just isn't possible to manage a book which marshals 100 different characters.

I am going to start with a comment about the geography of taste. Poetically, the ‘British Poetry Revival’ was much weaker in the north and western regions of the island (although this is partly the effect of local nationalist critics concealing the evidence). If you take the 46 names in Eric’s two statements on the “Revival”, then in 1974 24 were resident in the South and five in the North. (This needs qualifying – it is based on my personal knowledge, which may be wrong in one or two cases.) Similar figures, still for 1974, show Wales, four; Scotland, four. You rapidly come up with the conclusion that Modernity was mainly happening in the South. Game over. If you apply the values of Eric Mottram to Scotland and Wales, you find them to be backward – plucky amateurs who lost the game. My feeling is that we need to look at this a bit differently if we want to recover the real story of poetry in the Atlantic regions. There is a celebrated quote by Hans-Werner Henze where he reports a German music critic saying “Henze puts the clock back” about his new composition, and Henze is asking forcefully where is this clock and can it be put back at all. I am sure there is a clock – more accurately, dozens of clocks for different elements of the linguistic structure of poetry. And I do think poetry can be out of date, we can rapidly find poetry which is out of date and there is no appeal possible. But I also think that the direction of modernity has been different in different parts of the island, so that there is a geography of taste. That is even before we start to find out that the political basis, in terms of what the electorate cares about and wishes for, is different, and that the elements of language which poetry is, after all, based on, are different in Wales and Scotland from what they are in southern England. I just don't like this “game over” sound. To complicate matters, I don’t think that modernity was equally present in the North of England. I know there are famous exceptions, but they are thinly spread. I realise why people prefer not to discuss this – it is likely to arouse rage and resentment. You are talking about deprivation, about wonderful things being available to some people and not others. This is divisive. And, I can’t get very far with this because the spadework has not already been done, the data isn’t in order. But, if you accept that the “outlying“ areas were also the most Labour voting, and the most opposed to the ruling class as embodied in the city of London (and Whitehall and Westminster), then you might guess that dissidence was being expressed in the “periphery” – but that it was taking a different poetic form, and probably not the one sanctified by Eric and by influential commentators in the USA. So actually we are going to do better if we use a different clock, a different set of standards, in different regions of the country. Maybe I should have described the literary scene in half a dozen cities – evoked the conversations those people were having, the things they saw as threats, the issues they argued about and explored in compulsive detail.
One way of describing the radical surge of the 1960s is that nationalism moved from being a student craze, in Wales and Scotland, to become credible to the whole electorate, and mainstream in electoral politics. So it was much more successful than the counter-culture or New Left in England. This transition was taking place quite rapidly during the 1970s. There was a radical current throughout the Western world in the ten years 1965-75, connected with the collapse of European empires among other things. ‘Peripheral nationalism’ had been on the rise since the mid-sixties, and not just in Britain. The constitutional situation was unstable during the 70s due to the electoral success of nationalist parties, and this exerted a kind of gravitational attraction on writers. Radicalism in Wales and Scotland tended to take the form of nationalism rather than a ‘counter culture’ and the politics of the personal. Decolonisation was on the minds of students, if not of the political elite. The current among Welsh students and literati took the form, quite often, of linguistic nationalism which affected the Welsh university quite strongly. The experience of losing identification with the existing power structure, of no longer feeling protected by it, of becoming aware of collusion and malice and self-preservation as the classic behaviours of an elite at the top of society, of seeing economic interest behind canonised texts including works of history, of feeling illusions lose their grip, was felt by apprentice nationalists as well as by apprentice socialists or feminists. The basic course of learning how a modern society, essentially capitalist and more or less militarist and imperialist, works is one which could be followed in Bangor as much as in Camden or Leeds. It’s wrong to think that the peripheral nationalism of the 70s was simply an unreflective continuation of positions acquired in childhood, or that it did not involve intellectual excitement or genuine analysis. (After devolution, devolution became of much less interest to poets.)
Because the radicals were electorally successful in the “associated nations”, the gap between them and the average voter was not wide. The wish not to alienate the voters had the effect, arguably, of making the nationalist thinkers cautious about any more radical critique. Also, success was likely to resolve the problems which were inspiring people –devolution could be attained and so sink down to the level of fact. It may sound perverse to say that attachment to impossible ideals had a benign effect on the “outside” Left in England, but we may be seeing at this when we look at the most radical poetry in England. It did not necessarily have any counterparts in the ”associated nations” or even in the provinces. It could arrive at a point of rejecting society as it stands but being “autonomous” and removed from any really possible social order or social reform. Thus “politics” would be an element wholly inside the autonomous art work, to be manipulated in a way similar to rhythm or semantic fields.

Scotland

Scottish poets working in the Seventies would include WS Graham, Alexander Hutchison, TS Law, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, David Black, George Mackay Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Christopher Salvesen, Alistair Fowler, Alastair Mackie, Alan Riddell, Walter Perrie. I might have to list Kenneth White, Tom Leonard, and Liz Lochhead as well, although I would be happy not to read their poetry. I tend to forget Riddell, but when I got hold of a copy of his book of concrete poetry, Eclipse, I just said “wow”. Hard to anthologise but very high on the slopes of the poetic mountain. D.M. Black is on a high point, writing the mythical narratives which will peak with Gravitations. Kenneth White is an eccentric exile, writing in a way which is either cosmic or vacuous. Ian Hamilton Finlay is the captain of the concrete poets, both extremely simple and notably avant-garde. George Mackay Brown is at the peak of his powers, writing poetry which is naive and artificial at the same time, using the real Orkneys as a setting for his highly imaginative narration of an ‘archetypal’ view of history derived from Edwin Muir. Peter Davidson did a couple of pamphlets, embarrassingly enough I have never read them, but we have to mention them. JF Hendry published a book (Marimarusa), although it is doubtful that he was writing poetry. We should also mention the five poets selected in Macaulay’s anthology Nua-bhardachd Ghaidhlig: Donald MacAulay, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, Derick Thomson, George Campbell Hay. This list of poets is overwhelming, and maybe that explains why I can’t make meaningful generalisations. At this point I will give up and quote parts of an essay called “Iodine and fish-boxes: an alternative theory of Scottish poetry”. This dates from roughly 20 years ago and would have accompanied an anthology, which after some effort simply veered off the road. Peter Manson and Rob MacKenzie had vital inputs into the project.

Being committed to the Scottish tradition is not uniformly a source of joy. Often it involves getting a parcel of books, by post, from the Scottish Poetry Library, and reading on to find all the books brain-damagingly bad: timid, monotonous, arrogant, predictable, populist, an insult to reason, sentimental, bullying, conservative, and in all humiliating for a patriot. […] We want to say that even if Gaelic culture has been oppressed it is still possible for someone writing in Gaelic to be artistically corrupt, milking the applause from the kind and indifferent audience. We want to say that a society which reduces its own symbolic realm to reality is losing one dimension of culture, and is eroding the possibility of freedom. That restricting the songs to the ones that everyone can sing is not the best thing for everyone. That there is a flavour of Blairism in Scottish cultural managers, saying: everything to the Left of me is immoral and has no right to speak.

We find a common reliance on limited-stimulus fields and on boundary-free spaces. A simple test of success would be the ability to combine these, and to produce something which simultaneously has a three-dimensional reality and embodies an abstract idea and the possibilities of thought. [...] An example of a limited-stimulus field would be an object, on which focus is kept, preventing camera movements. This might apply to one of Finlay's art objects, with its ultra-simple text. The field without boundaries could be the sea, moorland, the sky, virgin snow, falling snow, or the polar ice, for example. […] The boundless space is part of a "pair" with bounded space, it carries a memory of the political; in which its existence points to the alienated nature of daily division and struggle.

[…] With such a small literary audience (and no interest from outside Scotland), the Scottish poet suffers a pressure to converge on secure and identified tastes, to avoid disappearing altogether.
Every starting poet is faced with a landscape which is only apparently infinite (since it is full of objects which represent limits and powers of attraction), and only apparently frozen and fixed (since language and human psychology conceal immense possibilities).
A lot of the support for Scottish poetry has been predicated on nationalist positions. That is, the reader is doing the poet a favour by reading something he or she doesn't really enjoy, wants to use the poem as a weapon (to replace English influence?), and wants the poem to include "typical events" which are recognizably Scottish, which demonstrate Scottish superiority (to England), distinctiveness, and abidingness. It is a bonus if the poet uses no words or ideas which have arrived since 1707. Needless to say, no-one who follows these sullen imperatives has the slightest hope of artistic success or sociological truth. […] This border of the unstable and uncontrollable is a searching test for poets: they either switch the noise out, and turn inwards, or take it as a torrential source of information and therefore of verbal possibilities.

The concept of the avant-garde, and the whole theory of history, change, and prestige which accompanies it, fails to meet Scottish conditions.
The use of folksong in Scottish poetry has been uniformly disastrous; it's hard even to remember a time, back in 1800 or so, when the two could speak to each other. There are resources hidden in the folk culture. [...]We say this to give a context for saying that the folksong is the deadliest enemy of the Scottish poem, and that no-one who fantasises themselves back into a previous century is going to create anything worthwhile. There is room for a writer both to be Scottish and not an imitation folk artist. We wanted to exhibit the unused resources of the folk culture, and in particular to show its amorality, its preoccupation with sexuality and communal violence, its phantasmagorias, its word-plays, its liking for horror, the splendours of its language; but the material is too familiar, and too overlaid by orthodoxy and sentiment.
Prolonged contemplation of the simple, pure, and non-discursive forms of concrete poetry raises alarming memories of the simple, pure, and non-discursive forms of the folk song. It is unreasonable to define the one as sheer authenticity and the other as sheer inauthenticity (with the two exchanging places for different readers). Both are 'limited-stimulus fields'. Scottish concrete poetry has had a lot to do with the sea and fishing-boats. Owing to the deformations of national culture, modern Scottish poems are often missing a dimension–or even two.

MacAulay's Gaelic anthology includes five literary poets, sometimes known as the ”famous five” (an coignear cliuiteach). Arguably, one could describe the ‘modern’ poets as literary rather than oral. Donald Meek said ‘We need to remember that the traditional culture (dualchas) was behind everything, and that there were spiritual bards in the neighbourhoods all though the century: poets like Eachann MacFhionghainn in Bernera, and Catriona Domhnallach in Stamhain.’ The ground rule for the anthology we just mentioned was therefore that only poets who wrote in modern, 20th century, ‘European’ ways were included. Another anthology, An Tuil (The Wave), much more recently, ignores this rule and includes a mass of work by the poets of traditional or folk style. It is a large-scale book and is edited by Ronald Black. This may indicate a growing acceptance of folk arts by the reading audience. It is obvious why MacAulay (and others) picked out those five and left the “village bards” behind, but defining what the difference is is not at all straightforward.

Wales

I think we have to make the basic point that Wales is a country where poetry is important and England is one where poetry is unimportant. In Welsh-language poetry, we have the rise of several currents. First (and I did cover this in the book) you have the revival of classical meters, made institutional in the magazine Barddas and the society Cymdeithas yr Iaith. This is important, but we also have to notice the colloquial-sloppy-youth line, also made official by a series, Y Beirdd Answyddogol, from the nationalist press Y Lolfa. Thirdly, you have the line of Welsh free verse which is the most experimental thing around, and which although it tended to lose out to the nationalist-conservatives and to the colloquial students, produced a lot of the poetry which we find interesting and valuable today. It is baffling that there are three different currents to look at, but this is just a symptom of Welsh-language poetry being in an exceptionally vigorous state. I looked at one annual anthology, Cerddi 77, and is just a very good book. So none of the currents was, really, central.
For the Answyddogol, let me quote from a review (translated) of the retrospective anthology of the series, in 1998:
“The origins of the series, anyway, carry us back to the sunny days of 1976, the world of contemporary song in Wales was one infectious boiling and the national movement was facing the challenge of the referendum and the broadcasting campaign with eagerness. Truly, the poems chosen for the first volumes of the series are full of 'Lifeitis', that period Robat Gruffudd talks about, with the train of the revolution rushing past along the slopes:

Do you remember that night
when we raised two fingers to the world?
when we swore an oath
we would never confess...

But in the shadow of the explosion of 1979 the thick of the series is to be located. From the melancholic studies of Sion Aled (1979), to the challenging élan of Ifor ab Glyn (1991), we hear the echo of the painful attempt of Iwan Llwyd in his collection Gwreichion (sparks) to sing the new Wales into being in the face of the bankruptcy of the old Wales. And perhaps that one sign of the process reaching high tide is the decision of Robat Gruffudd to wind the series up? On the literary level, in any case, we have gone past the polarisation of standpoints which was so noticeable in the discussions of the seventies. Indeed, if polarising opinion, responses and standpoints was the effect of the series in the first place, there is no doubt that one of its chief after-effects immediately was leading to the destruction of poles of that sort in the world of poetry.” …
“After all, the series was militating all through its life against conventions like 'standards' and 'taste'. For this reader, it shows that a good number of striking poems have been dispensed with, especially so in the case of Lona Llywelyn Davies and Steve Eaves.“
(I couldn't determine who wrote this piece.) This makes the interesting point that the “centre” for these young poets was the lyrics of Welsh-language pop music (of the time), something which the English audience is unlikely to have a grasp of. This description evokes among other things why this movement is not to be described as avant garde or underground – although it was clearly a breach with inherited poetic values. The jacket of the anthology says “In the period 1976-1996 Y Lolfa published 25 volumes of “answyddogol” poetry, all of it raising two fingers to the Establishment in Wales: the KKK (the Welsh Arts Council, initials CCC) the royal eisteddfod, Barddas, the joint education council, and the Kremlin of Books. Not to mention the Labour party and the Tories, and the University of Wales – and many a trendy member of Plaid Cymru.” A spontaneous response might be that these are people who find adult life boring and comprehensible. (I think ‘Kremlin’ refers to the Books Council, Cyngor llyfrau.)
Llwyd's book on the sixties doesn't even see this movement coming. Answyddogol means 'unofficial' but is also a genuine mediaeval term, as the books on poetics refer to bards who have not passed all the bardic exams and so have not qualified. For the 1980s movement, the implication that metrical poems were official was close at hand even if inaccurate. Rather more basically, swydd means 'a job', as well, and the series could also mean the unemployed poets.  Y Lolfa represents changes in the scene but stands for a kind of poetry closely related to Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Danny Abse, Liz Lochhead, Adrian Mitchell, etc., rather than modernity of style. The assertion about ignoring literary standards is not merely a gesture but a literal summing up of what the series was intended to be.

The structural contradiction of the unofficials was that the only market which was interested in reading in Welsh was devoted to nationalism, but that the informal verse threw away the most distinctive feature of Welsh poetry and in so doing lost the feature which would allow it to compete with informal verse from England or America. Thus, these poets were writing against globalisation in a form which was unmistakably the product of globalisation.
I am having difficulty in talking about modernity in Welsh-language poetry, partly I suppose because the domain of freedom is so extensive once you wander into it. The major figure was Euros Bowen, with his highly complex and experimental variant on the traditional cynghanedd, and he is the single figure who is likely to attract international attention, with the experimental quality being the air travel ticket. However, it is noticeable that Welsh people are not wildly enthusiastic about his poetry. It is ambitious and in a way inorganic. He was moving to a simpler style during the 1970s. There was a group of non-traditional poets who were very productive during the decade.

There is a comment by Alan Llwyd on the formal renaissance of the 1970s, in the foreword to Trafod Cerdd Dafod Y Dydd, written 1982:
“This period is an exciting one in the history of the poetic art and in the history of Welsh poetry. Plenty is heard about the formal renaissance, excessively much indeed, until some of us have begun to hate the term. Since some critics and poets want us to be in the middle of a formal renaissance, at once people went ahead to put the 'new movement' to the test, for the sake of making it scarce. After all, if I may cynghaneddu a proverb, 'There is a reaction to every movement'. Wales is not fond of success, or splendour, or excellence; she is practised of old in being inferior, servile, and the pride and dedication of the poets of the renaissance are not at all to her liking. She is too fond of grumbling and complaining, often in the name of nationalism. Fake nationalism, or perverted nationalism, milk and water, is what this nationalism is that wants to drag everything good in Welsh down into the depths.“

What we seem to see is that the dumbed-down verse of the unofficials has, over time, been defeated and pushed aside by the neo-conservative revival poetry. What is reported is that the polarisation of the 1970s has died down considerably, and that Wales is unlike every other country in western Europe in the dominance of highly formal, regular verse.

Anglo-Welsh verse
Conventionally, Welsh poetry in English is divided into the First Flowering (connected to the magazine Wales as edited roughly between 1937 and 1945 by Keidrych Rhys) and the Second Flowering (starting around 1962 and supported by the newly arriving flow of arts subsidies). Doubts have been raised that this second wave actually produced good poetry. Certainly the political impetus was more significant than the artistic talent. They wanted ”typical” poetry which would promote nationalist views by praising truly Welsh values and yet showing that Wales under English influence was a degraded place full of diminished people. Unsurprisingly, this wish to be typical produced a literary dogma in which anybody who wrote differently was simply pushed off microphone. In the 1970s, you have a fairly distinct new generation of Anglo-Welsh poets who have nothing to do, artistically, with the Second Flowering. We could cite Peter Finch, John James, Paul Evans, Iain Sinclair, Ralph Hawkins, Phil Jenkins. You have survivors of the 1940s – Glyn Jones (b. 1905) and Roland Mathias (b. 1915) are no longer at their artistic peak. They do have formidable back catalogues, though. You have Emyr Humphreys, who produced Ancestor Worship, a really fascinating long poem which is not, I would say, behind the implication of worshipping ancestors, that you are following ancestral ways in a stupefied daze. Humphreys was a veteran of the 1940s but was a novelist who took to poetry late. You have the “second flowering” guys like Meic Stephens, Tony Conran, Raymond Garlick. They have limited artistic firepower. You have Robert Minhinnnick, a much younger poet who is writing at this time in a realistic and ”regionalist” style which he is very skilled at but which has built-in artistic limits. There is a wave of younger poets in a mainstream style, of whom we need to mention also Sheenagh Pugh, Mike Jenkins and Nigel Jenkins. You also have the magazine Second Aeon, edited by Finch, which is the top counter-cultural magazine in Britain. Also, you have a cluster of concrete poets, encouraged by Finch and published, often, by Second Aeon.
There is a Glyn Jones interview where he reports a count of the poets active in Rhys’ magazine Wales and says that by the 1970s only one third of them were still writing. (Or was it, one third still continued in the 1950s?) The point was about the dearth of resources and the simulating effect which an ambitious magazine had on people. I can't remember the details, it may have been MP Ryan’s interview. I suspect that the people who had given up are part of literary history, part of the evidence we have to collect to get the real picture. We can just mention Lynette Roberts as one of the poets who wasn't writing poetry in this decade. Conran produced a volume called Spirit Level which is very mixed, he was going through radical changes in his style and only parts of the book are successful. (Confusingly, this is credited as selected poems 1956 to 1968.) I do admire his willingness to experiment, but it is frustrating trying to describe a book like this. He produced another book called Life Fund which unfortunately I haven’t read. [I bought it and realised I actually had read it before] I suppose the fairest description is that he had a basic idea of what to write, which was poems for events like weddings, and this didn’t work; he abandoned it after roughly 20 years; and while he was having difficulty expressing what mattered to him, he got fascinated by ideas which were really peripheral, and put a lot of formal energy into them because he had spare energy. He had a cultural critique but didn’t at this time write culture-critical poems. One of the poems is called ‘Space’, and deals with the contrast between the equable grid of space with recession and perspective, linked by him with the Renaissance, and the space of folk art, in which each object has its own space (and there is no recession to show distance).

I LOOK THROUGH THE GRID. BLACK SPACES POUR INTO ME.
AND RIPPLE. SPIN. GLINT. DISAPPEAR INTO ME.
PEDANTRY EATS THE WORLD BETWEEN SLICED STEEL.
URGENCY IS A HOLE KEPT IN PLACE BY BARS.
OTHERWISE I SHOULD BURST. MY SIDES WOULD COLLAPSE.
TOO MANY SPACES POUR INTO ONE SWOLLEN EYE.
VERY WELL, I PARTITION MY EYE INTO TEN LEGION GULLETS.

The idea of writing a poem about this is intriguing, and his poem can be compared with Edwin Morgan. His poems are genuinely unpredictable. Take this poem about an ‘Hourglass’:

In the mutable sand
Where may hands build?
Palace and tower
Headlong topple,
Gulf and vortex
Ebb at the altar
Furnace and forge
Rust and flake,
Drilled to a gap
Of inflexible stars;
The loom is a cobweb world.
The cogwheel spins
In seething tides;
The bales are spilt,
The bullion taken
To coral banks
And lobster's yard.


This is clearly linked to Metaphysical poetry, it is not wholly modern, but it goes through twists. It may date from the 1950s – the labelling is not clear on that.

End
I seem to be owing the scene a chapter about Wales and Scotland, possibly also about cultural activity in the north of England. I can see that adding Northern Ireland to the story would give a fuller picture. I never started to do this, because I am doubtful about my ability to grasp Irish poetry (for various reasons I don’t have that feeling about either Scotland or Wales).

Sydney Goodsir Smith

Lost texts

I was looking recently, and found that my old website, pinko.org, has disappeared.[this was a temporary blip "An automatic security update has banged the doors shut." not sure whose security was threatened, but it is now back up] It contained really a lot of texts about British poetry, some of which I have copies of and some of which I don’t. A good moment to say farewell, really. Some of the texts relate to a chapter about Scottish poetry which was part of the original 'Failure of Conservatism' in 1993, when it was not yet called that. I cut it when I rewrote the book (in 1997?) and somehow it never floated into any of the later volumes. I had spent a lot of time studying Scottish poetry at a time when I did not know how to write criticism, and when I did learn how the Scottish material belonged to an older stratum of my mind and was not at the surface. This is a flaw in the “Affluence” work. So I am releasing here two sections, only, of that mid-90s work. Dare I say that I got better at literary criticism after this?

Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-75)

After doing the linguistic work to get through the surface of his poems to the artistic conception, one is bewildered to find so little. Under the Eildon-Tree (1948) is the first book of the Scots Revival other than MacDiarmid's which one can call excellent. Eildon-Tree can be seen as a regression to sixteenth century modes, that is before Scottish literature was taken over by the English language, with an ideological covering taken from Graves. It writes in archetypal terms to express total preoccupation with a situation, with the story, and distance from mere reason. It is wonderfully effective. It can be compared to Sorley MacLean's great lyrics, in Gaelic, from about the same time.
Smith, with his themes of world politics, Scottish social morality, love, and dissipation, his glittering style and braid Scots, looked like a major poet. Close examination reveals otherwise. The English-Scots divide has often been a divide between respectable and uproarious: Smith, although from an educated family, and an academic by trade, was exceptionally keen to associate himself with the latter. His belief in the charm of the unrespectable life is quite misguided; in poem after poem he describes drunkenness, low company, and joviality, as if they had some intrinsic fascination. Peter Trudgill identified, in analysing his research on the use of dialect in Norwich, negative prestige: speakers saw the use of socially lower forms as something desirable, a way of asserting virility, sturdiness, or solidarity; Goodsir Smith is relying on negative prestige in this sense, writing from the howff. The effect of this palls very quickly, because the poetry lacks other levels of expression and development to keep our interest ablaze. Since he was not a native speaker of Scots, but acquired it in adult life, it may perhaps express a fantasy for him, a persona rather than a whole man. He comes on in the character of a larger-than-life roisterer such as Richard Harris or Richard Burton have been labelled by their publicists:

Ah, stay me wi flagons, dochter o'Sharon, comfort me,
Hain me, compass me about with aipples!
Cool this fevered spreit with seven-frondit docken,
Flagons, marjoram, green fields, Salome!
Belling beakers, let them be til my hand! Dance!
The corn be orient and immortal barley greit
Stay me, shore me up thir rue-I-ends, ye cedars o'Lebanon!
(Seceders o'Raasay, what say ye?)
Slocken my drooth with pippins, Hebe!
Rosemary, bed me, sort my place of biding, sain me,
Entreat me kindly, temper this tuneless carillon,
This cracked and untrue campanile, O Venezia, greenest isle!
- Black Rose of Shalimar, white hands, come cherish me
And hap me haill, my soul, with hairtsome companie,
Licht unflichtering of this lichtless airt!
Fetch tumblers, dear buffoons, carnalitie
And Mammon's blythsome Bridal-Sang...
-Venus Merrytricks, mix you the drinks!

(from: 'Kynd Kittock's Land')
[hain: hedge. spreit: spirit. docken: dockleaves. thir: those. rue-I-ends: possibly ruins? regret later? slocken: quench. sain: bless, cure. unflichterin: unfluttering. airt: place. hap: wrap.]
This is flavoursome, rollicking, yet it lacks movement, and it's too much of a cento, the ad lib blustering of a drunken actor recalling Falstaff's lines, an exercise in pastiche following rules we all know already. This character goes back, not to Villon, but much further, to the Goliardic poems. Kynd Kittock was a giant in a poem by the 16th century poet Dunbar. The swollen torrent of words feels like largesse and relish for life. The periphrases are not truly modern, but do not lack in force: Merrytricks is Latin meretrix, a whore (hence Mammon's bridal). A young girl, indeed, is being debauched. No doubt she is wearing Shalimar perfume. The campanile (bell tower) in Saint Mark's Square, Venice, is high and thin and must stand in for a phallus here, although this one seems 'untempered' and off the vertical. The campanile collapsed altogether in 1902 -'the atmospheric disturbance almost capsized a steamer on the lagoon'. It was raised up again, and the reference is evidently to an erection being revived by the efforts of the poet’s companion. The seceders are fundamentalist Protestants, abstainers. Bell beakers, swelling outwards, were Bronze Age vessels, quite likely filled with beer. He simultaneously attributes to the rough life qualities, of degradation, sexual exploitation and cynicism, and fundamental, unhealing despair, which destroy its appeal: he cannot persuade himself that Edinburgh Bohemia is carefree and brilliant in the way that Montmartre, at least in mythology, was. This coarseness of low life must rub off on Scots itself, which he seemed to be proud of. He believes that sex and alcohol (perhaps, too, being working-class) yield moments of higher truth, but just what is this truth? Short of turning into an Abstinence Tract, concerning repentance and redemption from the Pit of drunkenness, his work becomes an explanation of how his wastrel ways prevented him from eventually writing his great works. He died young after what one can only describe as a slow decline. One must admit that the language of the passage quoted, in its sheer remoteness from real speech, is a triumph of the imagination. The pastiche was inseparable from the revival of a language not used for 'high' poetry since Jacobean times. Claims that Scots was the authentic language for Scottish poetry seem to bounce off this language which is blatantly inauthentic, the product of alcohol and literary memories.

(I was told a story about Goodsir Smith's 'long decline'. He had a good job as theatre critic for a reputable paper, which kept him in funds without an excess of effort. One night he was so drunk he fell out of a box onto the floor below. This would not have gone so badly if he hadn’t been recognized, a cultural prominent. He lost his job. Naturally this is not Hard Fact. There is a good treatment of Smith in Christopher Whyte’s book Modern Scottish Poetry.
Black Rose of Shalimar, white hands is probably a reference to a long forgotten “kashmiri Boat Song”: pale hands I loved, beside the Shalimar. I have a recording of this sung by Rudolf Valentino.)

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006)

Finlay's contribution to poetry as such is slight, but attention should be drawn to it nonetheless: The Dancers Inherit the Party is an engaging volume, wholly unpredictable, exploring new ideas and cutting short the instant they cease to be interesting. His career as a maker of objects and graphics falls outside our strict limits, but despite that represents a possible way out, of both paper and public invisibility, for poetry.

Finlay first crosses our field of vision in 1945, in the memoirs of Derek Stanford, in whose company of conscripted, but non-military, labourers he served. At that time he was more interested in painting than writing poetry; Stanford records him having organized a student revolt at his art school — something ahead of its time in 1944. Fascinatingly, Stanford reports Finlay's enthusiasm at that time for Le rappel a l'ordre, by Jean Cocteau, a 1926 book promoting the neo-classicism which was such a feature of the French scene in the 1920s, and after; it was variously associated with homosexuality, stage design, Picasso, the resistance to Picasso, Surrealist painting, etc. Subtitle, "pour un classicisme vivant". Finlay later produced a postcard pack called Rapel. Finlay's vision, as developed in the 1960s, is specific, if ramified: a Classical garden whose ornaments recall the stern Republican virtue of the early years of the French Revolution, of Robespierre and Saint-Just; themselves massively influenced, in their oratory and legislation, by the idealized virtues of Republican Rome, codified by the Senatorial opposition to the 2nd century BC rise of dictatorship, a form of monarchy and arbitrary rule; a political theory taken fully fledged from an even older tradition, that of Greek civic virtues, brought to a rhetorical peak in the cult of Tyrannicides, men of exemplary virtue who assassinated, even at the cost of their own lives, the destroyer of republican freedoms. The most martial, traditionalist, ascetic, and indeed communistic of the Greek republics was Sparta. This was thought of as rustic and archaic, as well as being Doric, which is why we associate the tribal name Doric with those qualities: rusticity is also central to Finlay's project. We can see that his discourse is one of considerable complexity, even though it uses graphic and very familiar symbols, such as the Doric column.
Various scandals have attended his career; a strike organized at art school; one with his attack, in the late Fifties, on the repressive attitude of aged and distinguished Scottish poets who controlled literary patronage in Scotland; one with the local tax authorities, who assessed his Little Sparta garden at a generous rate, and then presented him with a thumping and annual rates bill; they refused to classify it as an art gallery, which attracts rates exemption. Later there was a feud with the Scottish Arts Council, leading him to the slogan 'the Arts Council must be destroyed', I'm not sure what the casus belli was; his allies are called the Saint-Just Vigilantes, after a notoriously pristine, inflexible and purely idealistic orator of the French Revolution. Then there was the scandal about his contribution to the centennial of the French Revolution; an employee of his demanded top billing, the inclusion of his own work in the show, maximum publicity for himself, etc., and when this was not forthcoming, he denounced Finlay as a pro-Nazi because various weapons and machines of World War II featured in his interpretation of recent history, as well they might. Amazingly, the French authorities were frightened by this puerile piece of gangsterism, and Finlay was removed from the celebrations. (Details of this are in relevant issues of Art Monthly, and in PN Review no. 62, for 1988).

In the 1960s (1961-7), he edited Poor.Old.Tired. Horse., a magazine of Concrete poetry, which in his hands had a certain daft wit and charm; the genre appears to have produced memorable work in Scotland, and Germany, but not in England, where it fell victim to egomania and Messianism. So far as I can tell, Finlay got involved in the Concrete thing very early in the 1960s. Görtschacher, in his wonderful book, gives an account, based on letters from Finlay, of some of Finlay's designs, for the cover of a poetry magazine in 1972: "The area on the cover [of Littack 2] is set out like a page in a herbal book. On the lexical level, there are, with the exception of the magazine's name (...) only two words. The 'Gourd' is in fact an aircraft carrier [cucurbita meaning 'vessel' and also 'gourd']. The left-hand shape is the aircraft carrier, which is based on the WW2 Japanese carrier Shinano, seen from above. The curly growths are the curious configurations of the oceans, which become growths of the 'gourd'. The sectional illustrations show the interior of the 'gourd', and the aircraft are depicted as seeds. (...) The cover for Littack 3 consists of three black tanks with green camouflage, with which the magazine is equated. The immediate idea is that beauty or order is something which rests upon a willingness to fight for their survival. The word 'Arcadia', printed in green, relates to [Poussin,] Arcadia has always been associated with the idea of death. (...) For Littack 4 Finlay adapted the idea of 'Kill Rings', (the title of the cover), that tanks carry a record of their kills in the forms of rings painted on the guns, by treating each issue as a 'kill'. (...) The cover 'Tribals', i.e. the plural of 'Tribal Class Destroyers', for Littack 5 acknowledges the visual pun on the relationship between the way that certain native tribes ornament themselves, and certain warships 'camouflage themselves'. (...) On the V2 rockets, which the Germans used to bombard London with, are messages (...) for Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council at the time, and Ronald Mavor, the former Scottish Arts Council Director. The idiom Finlay availed himself of refers back to the WW2 habit of chalking personal messages to the recipients on the bombs. (...) 'Ya bass', a Scottish version of the French 'à bas', is the best known of the Scottish gang warfare slogans and could be encountered on walls in Glasgow." (WG p.628). We may recall that the origins of Concrete work were in industrial design, which is what Max Bill was really interested in; it was to do with putting information on tin cans and packages in the most effective and economical way; logograms were invented, in Vienna, for a very similar purpose, and the aircraft markings which interest Finlay so much are an excellent example of this theory put to practical use. Advertisements, and magazine layouts, certainly resemble the best examples of Concretism, because the people who design them went on the kind of course which Bill designed. Finlay differs totally from most Concrete poets in having something to say: not a gobbledegook know-nothing antinomian, he wants a rational and perfectly formed message to reach us, and realizes that mixing visual and verbal means, and drastically simplifying wherever possible, is the most effective way of doing this. Finlay has chosen the end of the eighteenth century as his special period, but still his is basically an Enlightenment project: he does conceptual art because he is capable of conceptual thought. His designs, indeed, use the methods of propaganda: because this is a language developed by the best brains in Europe, over thousands of years, for maximum efficiency in getting information across to large numbers of people; repossessing this wealth is a first step to repossessing other kinds of wealth.
(I think Finlay designed the covers but got someone else to draw them.) (sources: Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A visual primer; Stephen Bann, exhibition catalogue; special issue of Chapman, circa Oct. 1994.)

At the time, I probably saw the difficulties of both poets as part of the language problem in Scotland. Finlay could barely write sentences, Goodsir Smith wrote essentially in pastiche. Today I am guessing that the difficulties were due to their personalities, not a vast collective destiny. I should have learnt a lot more about Concrete poetry before writing off the English version. On the other hand, the point that people designing aircraft markings were also graphic designers, and solving some of the same problems that Concrete poets were, still holds true. We live in a visual environment saturated with the work of graphic designers. Actually, the display inside a cockpit is also a piece of graphic design – an answer to the problem of putting complex 3D information into indicators which the brain can absorb very quickly. And we now live in front of computer screens which are instances of graphic design even if they can also put up texts or films.
Whyte’s book does not even mention Hamilton Finlay – his verbal poetry is not strong. But his work in ideograms, or graphics, however you care to put it, is a form of poetry. Why Finlay was incessantly involved in rows, starting in 1944 as Stanford recalls, is unclear, but he wasn't someone you would want as an ally.
Lucie-Smith’s anthology does not include any concrete poetry – a decision which remains surprising, since he had produced at least one anthology of visual poetry. Maybe somebody said no. He says at p.321 that visual poetry needs a different rhythm from verbal poetry and does not fit well into the same book. No doubt he is right, there is a different "scanning pattern" needed, and no doubt this applies also to criticial appreciations. Visual poetry needs a different set-up from verbal poetry (and no doubt works well with graphic design books or exhibitions).
Littack [lit + attack] was a waste of time, a movement which attacked everyone else for not being vitalist enough but had no cargo. It was frantically carrying nothing to and fro. Anybody can be bored and resentful. That doesn't produce the culture which we want to remember decades later. The suggestion in issue 2 (at p.84) that everything had gone wrong in the past 20 years, this in 1972, was ludicrous but did convey a sense of brutality and self-regard which summed the magazine up. If they missed all the 36 poets surveyed by Eric Mottram two years later (as the Revival), that shows a truly remarkable lack of knowledge and ability to respond. The heir to this legacy was the magazine Acumen.

farewell to Anthony Thwaite

Anthony Thwaite

It is with sadness that I record the death of Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021). I wrote about his work (in The Council of Heresy and Fulfilling the Silent Rules) and I admired it a lot.

The person who broke the news to me talked about him editing the CIA Monthly. True enough – Thwaite was literary editor of Encounter for twelve years. My initial response was “...because it connects to Thwaite's links to Encounter. I have been reading Stuckenschmidt's memoirs and he mentions Nikolai Nabokov about 30 times - so a lot of his visits, conferences, etc. were funded by the CCF and so by the CIA- but Stuckenschmidt was an admirable guy. The people Henze is attacking made some amazing avant garde music happen in the Fifties. I doubt Encounter ever published any avant garde poems, but I suspect that they published a lot of good poetry. 
The CIA policy behind the CCF was to strengthen the soft Left and to promote "quality" but non-political culture. This wasn't so bad and I can't detest Thwaite for being in there. what was he doing... reading poems and sending cheques to poets. not asserting falsehood.”
The fact that you have to go forth and defend him already says that he was making a terrible mistake. The Encounter job seems to have been 1973 to 1985… but the big exposure of CIA involvement in culture followed an article in Ramparts magazine – in 1967. Conor Cruise O’Brien had given a lecture remarking on why Encounter was “so congenial to the prevailing power structures” in 1966. And Spender and Kermode resigned as editors, citing the CIA link, in 1967. This is the context when we see Thwaite signing up to Encounter in 1973.
I have just been reading about the musical events organised by Nikolai Nabokov in the 50s and 60s – in Stuckenschmidt’s memoirs. Nabokov was totally involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, no debate, and he was a strong anti-communist (as Russian exiles tended to be), the funding for those concerts was coming from CIA-linked foundations. But the music wasn't anti-communist … that is a ridiculous claim. Frank O’Hara, in the 1950s, organised some European exhibitions which were equally CIA-linked and intended, by the funders, to make an argument for American freedom as opposed to communist regulation of art. Those operations involved CIA people who were quite congenial to people like O’Hara and who grasped the merit of Abstract Expressionism (as opposed to any other strand of American art).

It is fair to say that the elements of the CIA which subsidised culture, during one era, were sympathetic to the soft Left, and that the rise of the New Right led to the discomfiture of those elements and the termination of their arts policy. It has been speculated (in Lobster, I think) that the information which reached Ramparts was leaked to them by distinctly right-wing elements in the CIA with the intent of discrediting and freezing out the liberal/ Left CIA staff who liked to work with people like Stephen Spender. The articles in Encounter started out from a centre Left point of view but always seemed to regard as a grand moral triumph the decision to walk out of that position and say what was “congenial to the prevailing power structures”. “Feel proud because you abandon your principles for the sake of patriotism.” The thing which didn’t show up, when I was reading it as a student, was that it was, mostly, for the sake of the next pay-cheque. But, be fair – the Right at that time was the Monday Club and the National Front, and there was no link between those real right-wingers and the prose material in Encounter. It was a false flag operation, not a right-wing magazine. My guess would be that the poetry in Encounter was completely non-political – part of its facade as a general arts and current affairs magazine. There is an anthology of "Encounter, the first ten years", 562 pp., 1963. I don't have it but I doubt you would find anything noticeably right-wing in it.
Did the CIA give up funding Encounter? This is a story which many people have spread… none of whom have credibility as witnesses. Most probably its later funding came from anti-communist tax-deductible foundations as directed by CIA culture experts.
There may have been a political poem in Encounter. I used to see the magazine in the mid-70s, there was always a copy in the junior common room. I remember reading a poem by CH Sisson which talked about a line of Russian tanks in Thuringia. Other articles counted 27,000 Soviet tanks and remarked ominously that they were only 3 days’ march away from Paris. This was striking, but the latent message was “give up trying to make Britain a more equal and open society because you have to fight the Cold War every day”. This didn’t add up, and Sisson wasn’t ever a persuasive figure. He just wanted to make your flesh creep. It was nearly 50 years ago and I’m not even sure that poem was in Encounter.

I wrote about Thwaite’s travel book on Libya in a blog in June 2012. He didn't write political poetry, in my view, but he had a long-term interest in Libyan and Japanese cultures and wrote persistently and empathetically about them. There is a volume-length interview with him, handily titled “Anthony Thwaite in conversation with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton” (from Between the Lines). There is another serious interview by MP Ryan, included (in part) in Ryan's doctoral thesis on modern poetry.

I was sad to see (in Eric Homberger’s obituary) that Thwaite had gone through five publishers in twenty years – because four publishers dropped out. This is an aspect of capitalism you don’t hear criticised so often these days – that it produces a culture of total instability and fragmentation. Obviously, if someone writes poems (over a period of decades), the poems don’t deteriorate, and the cultural scene should preserve them and so acquire temporal depth and self-awareness. Literature needs to have books stay around, even if some people have the attitude that the past should disappear and old poets be forcibly silenced. Enitharmon added some stability. My whole career as a critic has been trying to take data in, in the first place, and to prevent the erasure of memory, thereafter.

Thwaite played a role in my career – because, when I went in for “depolarisation”, Thwaite's poetry was my way out of a dissident ghetto, and my evidence that I was sensitive to a broad spectrum of poetry. This was much to my advantage – you could say I was manipulating his work to support my own credibility. Guilt is front and centre here – for 20 years I had an opinion of Thwaite without having read his stuff. Mottram detested him, and I just took what Eric said to me as gospel. When I actually read Thwaite, starting in around 2003, I really liked his poetry. Pretty stupid of me, actually. It was suggested to me that I would like Thwaite because we were both big Browning fans. And this was a correct guess, that is why I liked his work and I am a big Browning fan. When Thwaite issued New Confessions, in 1974, I thought it was just a rip-off of Mercian Hymns. That is what it sounded like. But I didn’t know that Thwaite's Letters of Synesius preceded Mercian Hymns. So the order is Letters of Synesius – Mercian Hymns – New Confessions. Yes, all three deal with the 20th century and with late classical or early mediaeval (! take your pick) theologians. The modern aspect is only silently there in “Synesius”, it is not as radical, or as montage-led, as ‘Hymns’. But Hill and Thwaite sound like each other because they were born at the same time and belonged to the same church and studied at the same university.

There is an issue of Aquarius in tribute to George Barker where Thwaite has a long autobiographical piece recounting how he was a total Barker fan in his teens and went to London to visit the man. What he came out with was distinctly un-Barker like, but he treasured the memory.
In 1974, Thwaite published in The Listener an essay called “The Two Poetries” which sums up the whole scene. This is one of very few essays of the last 50 years which says something worthwhile about the poetry scene as a whole. A few weeks later Mottram published his “British Poetry Revival” essay for the poetry weekend at the Polytechnic of Central London and it was obvious that Thwaite’s count was wrong. He divided the scene between serious, solid academic poetry and excitable, spontaneous student or youth poetry. Eric’s essay described an intellectual and innovative poetry which was neither of those, and gave 36 examples of poets practising it. Thwaite’s point about cultural factions not talking to each other still impresses. His account of either side is remarkably fair. He points out that young people could write convincing essays about conservative poetry, for the purpose of getting good marks, while having no artistic reaction to it and certainly not enjoying it. The reason why students got so interested in thinking about how literature related to social ideology, power relations, and (even) propaganda, was that the texts they were studying left them cold. Hardly a secret!
As I went further into the “mainstream”, I looked at excellent poetry by Thwaite, Geoffrey Hill, John Holloway, Harry Guest, and Peter Levi. There was a large and over-visible stratum of “Oxbridge graduates of the 1950s”, who took a lot of flak for being boring and conservative. But you had to sweep away the foreground and look at the good poetry… and a completely different picture emerged. The stylistic values which were so irritating when people preached about them were convincing when used by highly talented poets. Eric was right to be enthusiastic about his chosen 36 poets but wrong to think that the other side had lost its artistic power decades earlier.

Harry Guest

News has reached us of the death of Harry Guest (1932-2021), an enigmatic and advanced Welsh poet. There is a good selection of Guest's work (about 45 pages) in Penguin Modern Poets 16 (1970). PMP 16 is still an important book, dealing with three poets who never really got on camera and whose work remains unevaluated (the other two being Jack Beeching and Matthew Mead).
I see that he did a thesis on Mallarmé. This would have been (mainly) in Jan-June 1955, when he was a student in Paris. If we imagine what someone who was a fan of Mallarmé in 1954 could have attained by 1976, we have something unusually exciting. Actually, that is not a bad description of what Guest was like in the 1970s. I see that his first book was sub-titled ‘poems 1957-67’. His clarity of focus, a typical feature of 50s poets, is highly effective in depicting a free and multiple range of images. The 1962 autobiographical poem ‘Private View’ says it all in 400 lines:

The white bird trapped in its misshapen cage
Of spine and ribs sings and the king’s mask
Conceals some sort of answer.
You have to force to some extent the medium
Especially nowadays.

The river flows past the piano and,
Hanging from the stars that burned above Florence,
The illuminated hooves of a black stallion
Play Mozart for an ear six years have drowned.

He is already there. He made a debut in 1968, Arrangements, (although in fact that includes two earlier pamphlets starting in 1962). Arrangements is conservative compared to other debuts of the same period. It is related to Lee Harwood, but Guest never wholeheartedly accepted the innovations of the 60s. Even in the eight lines quoted, we see a torrent of arresting images whose psychological meanings are hard to identify. The hooves playing Mozart are, unambiguously, surrealist; but the imagery from modern art is not committed, the voice of the poet describes all these symbols but does not posses them – it moves on past them. I said “autobiographical” but the poem really shows the poet strolling through an art exhibition and wondering how to describe his reactions. The “white bird” is another work of art, not a real bird.
The 2002 collected, Puzzling Harvest, has 520 pages of text, defying a brief summary. Calling your collected a harvest is just a cliché. Calling a large book puzzling is almost calculated to alienate people. Wouldn't it stop being puzzling after the first 200 pages? I suggest we can rotate these words slightly. For harvest we can put flowers. For puzzling we can put ambivalent. (The preface contains the phrase “bewildered thanksgiving”, a mutation of the title.) I wrote “He sits well as someone who defines the border, by being equally acceptable as part of the mainstream and part of Mottram’s dissident band.“ This was in pursuit of classificatory success – I was piqued by Guest’s appearance in the list of 36 poets accepted in Mottram's famous troupe. (You understand that classification is a compulsion, once you have made large-scale generalisations the ways of being wrong are so many that you keep returning to them.) Eric was surely right to include Guest, who also fits in with the mainstream, and for this reason marks where the border runs. The similarity between the phrase “puzzling harvest” and “defining the border” is compelling – Guest would be between two worlds no matter where we set the boundary. We have to think about ambivalence itself to capture who he is.

Much of his best poetry is collected in Lost and Found: poems 1976-82; with the groups ‘Elegies’ and ‘Metamorphoses’ especially recommended.

Airs of summer wind their way through the empty chamber
for the skulls have gone to stare behind glass at a crude
map on the museum wall. Perhaps the bones
were removed piecemeal when the mound fell in. The sun is low
and slopes of tough grass fleeced with hazel
repeat the fragrance of the day. High stone slabs
freed from burial by five thousand years of rain
stand in the light and frost. You do not like these journeys.
(from 'Fifth Elegy')

Reading ‘Elegies’ was a breakthrough moment for me (in the 2003 anthology A State of Independence). A 1970 statement says “Lyrical analysis of personal relationships, bisexual love, landscapes, etc. Certain amount of intellectual demand; European rather than transatlantic; syllabics or stress-length lines; high premium on musicality. I admire Klee, the early Godard, Debussy's piano music.” (I guess “early Godard” means “before he acquired a Maoist girlfriend”).

He didn’t believe in an undiscovered continent floating just off the known waters, and so retained balance – he has no thesis. Living in Japan encouraged, I guess, his belief in beauty.  From 1966, he spent six years teaching in Japan and so wrote poetry, then, influenced by Japanese culture, evidently delicate and without the “strong” sense of self which Western culture appreciates. He got really involved with Japanese poetry, working with Japanese poets to produce the translations in the book ‘Post-war Japanese verse’ for Penguin.
He quotes at the head of an early poem (‘Dusts’) “In Zen parlance, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought ‘defile the pure mind’. The world which we perceive like this is ‘the realm of the dust’.” Is this really the philosophy he is developing? The poetry is consistent with ambiguity, detachment, the idea of transience as the motive for recording sensations or even ideas. So “arrangements” sounds like the most neutral and tedious imaginable title for a book, but arrangements of stones, plants, etc. are highly admired in a Japanese context. He keeps alluding to Lee Harwood, and perhaps he likes a similar incompleteness. So a poem titled ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’ reveals nothing at all. The distinction between this and the political poets, in the majority in the Seventies, who saw (social) consciousness as an illusion behind which lurked the future world of a better society, is stylistic: Guest does not ever disrupt the surface of his own language, does not disturb anyone else’s, because he thinks the “hidden” world is equally illusory. His poetry is beautiful in the way that a garden or a painting is, because he is so detached: the dissipation of an imaginary depth allows the surface to develop an integral energy. The bond to Harwood may be bisexuality, and this could also be the “puzzle” – a pattern which is two things at once. The aesthetic which Guest and Harwood share, to some extent, is genuinely different, and they see different colours and so different patterns.
Was Guest changed by six years in Japan? This is not proven; I have the impression that Mallarmé had absorbed Japanese ideas, in the first craze for things from Japan, and Guest was fascinated by Mallarmé. The idea of writing poems to inscribe on fans is mallarmean, and either represents Oriental influence or else something French but so dedicated to evanescent and decorative things that it would seem utterly exotic in Britain, in 1975. After all, Guest chose to go to Japan in 1965 – he probably felt an affinity for that culture.

A trait that stands out is the wish to accumulate numerous images without adding the 'personal meaning' which would finish them off and erase them again. It is hard to characterise the moods, but also the ambiguity and density of information are autonomous features and effort to get through them is misplaced. The sequence 'Metamorphoses' is a significant example of this. It is not useful to analyse these images because their diversity is part of the point. Certainly he is not using conventional programmes – the elaborate verse patterning does not resolve down to a point we had to write an essay about in the sixth form.
There is a good celebration of Guest, published for his 80th birthday (and called High on the Downs). It includes an exhaustive analysis (by Tony Lopez) of the “O-Bon” poem included in Lucie-Smith’s Penguin Poetry since 1945. The analysis takes about 8 times as many words as the poem does. I must have read this poem but as my memory is blank I don’t think anything about it got through. Lopez’s analysis talks about Japanese ghost stories – giving us, immediately, a link to ‘Elegies’ which are really about ghosts. The reference to a festival where ghosts appear gives a key to the idea of transience – it is calendrical, in this poem, time itself shedding its shape and turning endlessly into something new. All arrangements of experience in words are like flower arrangements, formalising what is transient and about to turn to dust. The calendar ceremony itself gives the images of the day, and personality is less important than role. People are like ghosts, recurring on certain days of the year to carry out preset sequences of feelings.
You can’t be a teacher at a place like Lancing (where Guest was in the early Sixties) without being sophisticated. The job involves intuiting what is going to impress examiners, and tricking adolescents into getting interested in something outside themselves. It is for insiders. This goes against the generalisation that using a vanity publisher like Outposts, as Guest did for his two first pamphlets, was the act of outsiders who didn't realise that it was a path to nowhere. Outposts had more cultural front than other firms funded by the authors, and did get reviews occasionally. But if you look at lists of their publications (57 in the single year of 1974-5, at pp. 23-4 of Poet’s Yearbook) you see a crowd of people you have never heard of. But Guest possibly didn't want the hassle of finding a normal publisher; and did want to have something to show his friends.
The poetry world in 1962 was low temperature. I am not sure about the implications. Were there other brilliant poets like Guest among several hundred names published by Outposts in the sixties and seventies?
I am content to speak of Guest as mallarmean. That is – his poetry is never obscure, it unfolds what Mallarmé habitually compacts. But he is describing sensations which are unfamiliar – distinctions which the common vocabulary does not register. It is credible that the sceptical atmosphere of the 1950s actually made his style – the reiterated demand for lucidity and for concrete details was a pressure which he adapted to. The poems always seem clear until you try to paraphrase them. The poems seem to have been edited by an interior decorator – that sounds mocking, but really they have a great beauty of surface, everything which does not fit the patterns has been eliminated, the patterns are subtle and bewitching. They are like films directed by a set designer, always. ‘Private View’ is a poem about modern art which we can compare to Mottram – Eric was always saying “this is modern art, it is ours, and we have won!”. Guest is never saying that, he says in ‘Private View’ something more like “ah yes, modern art, it is something we can spend an evening with, how can we more precisely define the sensations which fill us as we pass by it, are these sensations too uncertain for the language we have”.

In that 1970 statement, Guest cited bisexuality as one of the things he wrote about. He did not cite it as a basis for his style – but that is what we have to think about. I doubt there is such a thing as a bisexual personality. Bisexuality may be the product of a primal rejection of polarisation and roles (as part of the “dust”). Sexual feelings are surely close to the poetic affinity which links Guest, Evans, and Harwood, but perhaps we can push them into the discreet cover of the long grass and focus instead on subtlety, ambivalence, commitment to transient sensations. Or we could talk about a cluster of masculine personality traits which don't actually help poetry very much and which people might be happy to jettison – whether biology favoured this endeavour or not. So we could think of rules like “the goal of art is to reproduce as many copies of your personality as possible” or “any sensation is better if driven to the absolute maximum of volume and sustain”, or even “the more resources I can use up the less resources anyone else will have access to so I can cut off their growth”. Part of this would be “ambiguous feelings and nuances weaken the impulse and so need to be purged”. If you have a sensation, do you build it up to its maximum intensity? Guest’s response is more “how can I tone this sensation so that it harmonises with other sensations in a whole where nothing clashes and the line of sense flows smoothly?” All this swagger, evidently, tends to limit the space available to the other person, the other half of a relationship – so it might be that self-aggrandizement is part of immaturity. Having an aversion to a distinctive and “proprietary” style might be part of this maturity – and if repeating a pattern which encodes your personality makes your art very monotonous, then giving up that project might let you produce poetry which is very subtle and which can be varied in a more fundamental way. I am just floating these ideas in case they are helpful. Another point is that doubting the merits of self-aggrandizement makes you question the process by which the outside world becomes transformed as you turn it into art – this process becomes less convincing. Of course, this is the element which allows the real identity of sensations – things like flowers, water, ceramics – to enter the art with such haunting, undiminished, faithfulness – they are not being “possessed” and so their appearance is intact. The detail allows transience to be visible – a side-effect of giving up ownership, which freezes phenomena because it does not want to admit an end to its own power. I am pointing to a very primitive model of seizure, acquisition, devouring, metabolism, crushing, as a process in male art, or macho art. We may want to think of a weak ego, Buddhism, or simply sophistication, as the context in which a more aesthetic, less aggressive, manner of approaching art might prevail. But also… I don’t know anything credible about Buddhism or Japan, nor can I define bisexuality except as something chatoyant which shifts every time you look at it. To return to 1962... perhaps Guest was happy to publish with Outposts because he just didn’t have a deep commitment to fame, hearing his own signal at loud volume, being top poet. Perhaps having those appetites turn to stillness was a path towards hearing other messages more clearly and more consistently.
In the 20th century, European artists were faced with the absence of the Christian and moralising stories which had been so satisfactory and repeated so endlessly over the previous eighteen centuries. There was no return, and in the unnerving silence which this exposed it was possible to react convulsively, unreflectively. Perhaps dedicating art to the self was a basic error, clutching at the object which was closest to hand and which could be heard clearly even when a confusion at the symbolic realm was making more complicated entities hard to see or resolve.
I am inclined to dwell on two long poems from the late Sixties, ‘Myths’ and ‘Allegories’. One, ‘Myths’ (p.86 of the Collected) includes a criticism of street demonstrations and probably of the student protest movement in general. It resembles two other poems, by Thwaite and Peter Abbs, of similar date. This was a polarising moment. Guest presents the belief of a teacher, that the Left upsurge of the young around 1968 to 1972 (it didn’t stop but that was a peak) was a gateway into the loss of all learning and a new Dark Ages. This sounds ludicrous, but that is the implication of this passage about the refuge of learning to remote areas:

illiterate, foul-
mouthed, the hordes shamble, wielding
ripped books, brandishing
sub-machine-guns

(echoing, the crash of
celadon, ormolu,
lacquer frames
chanting
the end of history, making for a
final hermitage where one
alone on the peninsula
illuminates last pages

(short saga in their wake
of sackings, torture)

Eyes empty of love
hands hating creation

The future-bringers

It is hard to accept that the students were so lost to civilising processes that they could no longer walk properly. Do we have evidence on how well the dons walked? The idea must be that Ireland preserved learning in the Dark Ages, a thesis with limited historical validity, and is remarkably close to what Peter Abbs says in his much darker and more right-wing poem of the same time. I am wondering if this story is from Spengler. Guest only wrote this one poem about a supposed attack on scholarship, and he minimised its impact by titling it “Myths”, so that you have to make an effort to connect it to British universities in 1968 (he was still in Japan in 1972). (To get technical, a Kalashnikov is not an SMG but an assault rifle, although confusingly its Russian name, avtomat, actually means ”sub-machine-gun”). (People in hermitages were not illuminating manuscripts, the materials for vellum MSS were expensive and this activity belonged in monasteries, which had numerous monks and some wealth. Anchorites are a different story.) The reference to the sub-machine-gun is one of very few moments which attaches this passage to 1968 rather than to the Dark Ages. The meeting of manuscripts and dissolute warriors could be taking place in Vietnam, or Red China, but the mention of “ormolu” locates it in Europe – ormolu was big in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Technically, the Chinese did have bronze gilt, but objects covered in it are not called “ormolu”, although it would not be literally wrong if they were.) The celadon (porcelain) and ”lacquer” sound oriental, but could be luxury imports. In line with Guest’s beliefs about transience, the passage about the enemies of culture is only one of five sections of the poem, each summed up by a half-life containing the word “bringer”. The poem itself treats this theme as transient, as it sweeps through five scenes, succeeding each other as phases or perhaps turning calendrically, in five states of being, like seasons. Political poetry implies polarisation – again, Guest is not with any polarisation. The succession of temporary states of being is what he writes about. If you abandon polarisation, the political poetry we are familiar with crumbles to dust. As follows, he is distancing his point of view from the standard anti-student poem of the time, in a way which relativises and diminishes that set reaction pattern. Another section of ‘Myths’ runs:

hawk-
headed, thighed with
plumage, gold
manacles about the arm

greaves stained by red earth
at a half-run,
fleeing, aiming

Light of
sacrifice behind them
Stench of
coiled smoke leaning on a sky

altars reeking

rivulets of blood, feathers
vertebrae, smashed by the adzes
on to rough stone

The past-bringers

This is another phase of European history, we suppose. The detailing of warrior adornment is a typically guestian focus on decorative details, reducing something kinetic and violent to an array of surfaces. We may think of samurai-aesthetes, art collectors. The burnt offering sits well with an Iron Age setting, the reason for sacrifice and burning things might be the death of a warrior in the usual activity of warriors. The lords wear plume decorations, as many warriors have done until quite recently – aigrettes, perhaps. This motif echoes the feathers of fowl employed in the sacrifice.

A summary of the poem is hard to attain, because of its structure in five sections, which add up to a myth cycle but are utterly separate in their tenor and possibly in the millennium they draw details from.

Part of ‘Allegories’ somehow echoes the passage about warriors in (bronze?) armour in ‘Myths’:

Your carved element, spray of its plume
frozen prophetically in gold;
defence; scabbard; emblazoned shield
hoarding sunlight; doffed uniform
neutrally now the colour of
certain azaleas to cast
aside, you, Adam-naked, flex,
loyal conflict done, the struggle still
to come.

This poem describes sex in terms of epic warfare. The sex apparently involves two men, which is why the metaphor of duel presents itself. It is the assertion of life against mortality.
Clearly this is a personal myth and part of a wave of personal myths which were emerging, around 1970, as a logical solution to writing poetry after theology had died and when “domestic anecdote” had been artistically discredited. Guest is not projecting his ego in the myth – this is a rationale for writing myth, but may be a misunderstanding of what art and myth are for, if individualism and ownership are just local heresies of the West. It is also possible to define desires as dust hovering in the void, of no greater weight than the data of the senses, forever distracted by transience. Guest is not interested in repeating a myth, so it does not reflect a permanent structure, such as we suppose Personality to be. The next poem, “Allegories”, is clearly related to “Myths”, they form a whole; yet it does not overlap with the poem we have been discussing. Rather, both reflect a fundamentally unstable basis – something which has no essence because it is Void. Its body is made of dust. Pause to reflect – if artistic production reflects a personality, and this is a repeating pattern, does art have to repeat, stubbornly and predictably? If we find art failing to repeat, is it reflecting something quite different from a personality?

I am just going to quote a section from a poem called “Form”, from his first book.

The pattern's disappeared, the rift
is sewn and, in the dark, the formal
escapes; enchantment having set
an abstract puzzle, all the chance
of flesh discovers will be ash.

(The poem is offset from the left margin in what might be a fan or scallop form, which I can't reproduce here.) The word puzzle may be a keyword, since it also gives us the title of the collected. The ambivalence of this stanza is, so to speak, stated without ambivalence - “the pattern's disappeared”. A great deal of Guest’s concept is stated in five lines. But I am also quoting this because of an apparent misprint – the syntax of the fifth line does not work out. I tried to emend the last line, but actually it’s correct, the issue being an unusual use of the word "chance". So a paraphrase would be "all that the risk-based and accidentally allocated nature of flesh discovers will be devoid of substance". There is a hint that the knowledge involved has been carnal knowledge, and that it is the division of the sexes which is the product of chance, at cellular level. Sexual difference is then also the content of what we found out. The "ash" points back to a fire, probably the lightning which appears earlier in the poem - illumination leading to ash.

Volumes of publication

Let me comment on some work not included in my book about poetry in the Seventies, about overall volumes of publication and fluctuations in the intensity of publication.
If we take 3 years in the 70s, we have figures for the percentage of titles written by women, as follows: 1970, 24.1%; 1975, 19.0%; 1978, 22.6%. This does not support the narrative which we have accepted from other sources, of feminism starting in a minimal way in 1970, facing difficulties, and making good progress through the decade by putting forward undeniable arguments. We can move away from the numbers to suggest some speculative interpretations. To start with the growth of poetry from 1960 on was based on the growth in the number of graduates (to include current students). This correlation works in the long term. But, there were far more male than female students, even in the 1970s. So, if 80% of undergraduates are male, a growth in student numbers also means a growth in numbers of male poets. This is what we are seeing in 1975 or so – “male former students” from the cohort of 1960 on are writing poetry, and this effect is dominant in the figures we have for the 1970s. This does not mean that feminism is making no progress, or even that the poetry world is resisting feminism. There was a shift in the attitude of girl school pupils, such that they moved over to a belief in having a career, and so in getting a degree, and so they became more academically focussed at the age of, say, 14 to 18. 15 year olds changed their attitudes and change in the structure of student populations followed. This is feminism as a demographic, macro-economic event.
For three successive years, we have exact figures for the total number of titles published. Figures for these three years (between 1976 and 1978) are 770, 906, 709. The growth since 1970 is impressive. The short-term fluctuations are also impressive. It is hard to explain why the industry should be so unstable. As a comforting narrative, we could guess that figures were going down, in 1978, because of a wave of cultural pessimism, a loss of belief in the new ideas, which also led to the victory of Thatcher in April 1979. Culture and politics are different, but there may be a “national mood” which affects both of them. Another explanation would have to do with inflation – the cost of paper and printing was going up very steeply and, arguably, people buying books weren’t accepting of prices going up by 400% – a case of “perceptual lag”. It was easier to scale down the issue of new titles and wait for better times. If you remember the days of inflation, everyone had the idea that they could “pass on” the cost increases to someone else – but consumers were at the end of this line and they always had the power to say “no”.

These figures do not invalidate the long-term effect of the growth in the number of graduates, but they show short-term fluctuations which are not in time with that – we have to posit ups and downs which we can probably name as the effect of enthusiasm, the overall temperature of the market.
There is some consensus about a shift in cultural attitudes around 1965 – the moment of “swinging London”. That was a splash in a small group, geographically in London and involved with fashion and the media. This group is influential, and when we see sharp growths in poetry in the mid-70s, this is still probably the effect of a “long wave” rolling out from that moment in 1965. There is still the effect that if you have five times as many graduates you have five times as many people ready to commit their energies to poetry. This is the demographic aspect and the sense of liberation provides the content for the new culture. It seems likely that the Seventies saw important shifts in the cultural attitudes of women which were hard work and which formed the basis for a blossoming of women’s poetry in the Eighties. Certainly we can point to new women poets in the Seventies, such as Denise Riley, Nicki Jackowska, and Judith Kazantzis.
If we look at Lucie-Smith's classic anthology of 1970, British Poetry since 1945, we can count six women poets in 86 names. This is about 7%, and there is an obvious gap between this and the 24% which was the share of women in all the (roughly 400) titles which came out in that year. This is accompanied by an interpretative gap – we can guess what the reasons are, but the guesses are much less solid than the counts. The reasons may relate to factors in the upbringing of the poets, which for poets born roughly between 1920 and 1945 would relate to “formative years” between roughly 1925 and 1960. One explanation might be that Lucie-Smith is looking for culturally impressive poems, to fill a showcase, whereas a significant portion of mid-century women poets went for conservative, lyrical, and unambitious poems – logical behaviour for the dominated sector of a society. Thus feminism was faced with two tasks, of persuading men that domination was not a position they could defend in the long term, and of persuading (adult) women to change their attitudes towards many aspects of femininity, including the composition of graceful and forgettable poems. Is this enough to account for the 17% gap which we mentioned? (Another interesting gap is between 24% of poetry books being issued and the level of women in the adult population, roughly 52%.) Lucie-Smith’s position is complemented by Eric Mottram's statement on the ”British Poetry Revival 1960-74” where he lists 36 poets of which exactly one is a woman – less than 3%. This is an alarming figure, but may also give insight into the question of “dominant” behaviour – evidently the intellectual and innovative sector in poetry is correlated with the most autonomous and intellectual parts of society, one kind of dominance in fact. Of course this kind of poetry may not be popular, of course there are many analogies one could bring to bear, but it remains true that the innovators align themselves with the parts of society which lead, and which ignore inherited authority to think for themselves. This lets us return to the postulate that mid-century women poets were mainly conservative, dependent, personal, and lyrical – attitudes consonant with being dominated and with being conformist and well-behaved.
Another explanation would be, of course, that Lucie-Smith had missed several excellent women poets, so that his proportions are out of proportion. I am tempted to list the women poets he left out, we would all enjoy this, but if you also start listing all the male poets he left out then it is not clear that this operation really changes the demographics. Maybe if you step the list up from 86 to 200, the female share is still 7%.
The narratives I have overlaid on the figures are not wholly convincing. It is much more accurate to deal with poets one by one – where they write the story for us. Facing the overall shape is more of a struggle – it is hard to resist, though. Analysing the behaviour of 5000 people is not necessarily more accurate than analysing the behaviour of one person.
In the 1970s, the feminists are much more important than publication figures would suggest. So cultural critique is central - it is much more what we are writing history about than poems about birdsong and landscapes. The question of how society is going to change is the most significant question – although, of course, if you start to answer it you are claiming to be more intelligent and powerful than other people. If abstract ideas about changes that have yet to come are the core thing, the power generating station, why do we hear so much about empiricism? My guess is that writing about empirical facts makes the poem much less interesting. Reviewers are constantly asking young poets to write empirically as a way of persuading them to write unimportant poems. This is a contest over status. Feminism was important because it wasn't empirical, it was a line of radical cultural criticism.