'Nothing is being suppressed", my book about British poetry in the 1970s, is now published. You can buy it through the Shearsman website.
The booklist I included shows about 100 good poets working in the 70s, whereas I only write about 35 of them within the book.
Notes on some of the poets I left out are here:
capsule
and here: capsule
For more about the book, see entries under the label 'Nothing is being suppressed' in the column at the right of the screen.
A list of poets I have written about, in many publications, and including many 70s poets, is on this post here:
reviews list
I regret that I didn't discuss every single poet in detail, but there is only so much you can do. I have written about almost all the 100 poets mentioned, but the texts are not all collected in one place.
I should express thanks to Kevin Nolan, for insisting on the merits of some Cambridge poets roughly 1975-80. I should have known about their work, after all I was there, but I didn’t. And, to Harry Gilonis, for suggesting a few extra Long Poems to make the list more complete.
That doesn't sound very generous, so let me admit that, while I didn’t discuss the book much with other people while writing it, I have drained endless knowledge from other people over a period of 45 or so years. A number of anthologies gave me the poets to follow up, Lucie-Smith’s anthology in first place. For the book, I read Peter Porter’s pieces from the Observer, in an on-line form of the original Seventies issues, and they were all fascinating and informative. This kind of thing doesn't happen without soaking up knowledge from informants, who themselves had soaked up knowledge from many other informants, so that my debt is to a whole network of the cultured and enthusiastic.
Someone has written in to point out a mistake. "MD", in Suicide Bridge, is not Montague Druitt but Marcel Duchamp. Who knew? Offer: anyone who identifies a mistake will get a free copy of all the mistakes.
"A passage about Montague Druitt illustrates this:
prisoner of the sharpened future cone
[…]
‘orbit of the Killing vector’
old question: is there death before life
MD cut it into the accident elbow
of his glass, his black keyhole
refined into inertia
it was found
among the grinding mills, the cones
a pattern
presented to him, trace elements
of the dying molecular equation
fuel’d his insight, brought his own decay
the magnitude
of what he could not see"
- so this is Duchamp and the 'grinding' refers to "the bachelor's chocolate grinding machine". The glass is "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" (le grand verre).
Thursday, 24 March 2022
Tuesday, 22 March 2022
book on 70s finally out
Nothing is Being Suppressed; British Poetry in the 1970s
This book is a pioneering attempt to roll back misrepresentation and depersonalisation and recover one of the most high-achieving eras of British poetry. The Seventies saw the collapse of the post-war settlement amid apparently insoluble problems over inflation and profitability. Consensus broke down and a lot of things that people remember about the 1970s didn’t actually happen. The outcome for poetry was a radical attempt to write down ideas about a different society and personal lifestyle, but also a polarised climate in which one faction tried to erase others from the record. Right-wing historians like to write about the period as an error in which all trajectories led inevitably to the rise of Thatcherism and that rise corrected the error. But it is equally valid to be fascinated by the other social possibilities and to appreciate art for imaginary paths that were not followed. Is it not true that the Seventies saw styles of good poetry (maybe bad poetry too?) which have been lost to memory ever since?? The role of the implicit was destabilised in the Seventies, and we are trying to recover what was shared but unstated. A list of 100 long poems suggests the direction that poetry went in, and that the idea of extension and exploration was to mend social memory and restore a shared language. Right and Left felt equally threatened and in need of reciting ideological primal scenes. Most of the text is about the long poems, following them as they attempt to reframe seized-up arguments. A larger rhythm, a deeper scan. A wider range of voices. Returning to the unenclosed field where myth, law, and sociology are still tentative and unstable. In doing so, it dredges up unrecorded layers of a buried time. It reveals how Iain Sinclair’s Suicide Bridge develops a circular theory of time from up to the minute theories about faster than light particles and the end of black holes. This is not the only deviant theory of Time floating around. We find that “the dream is over”, but why is it that this key moment has been variously located anywhere from the death of Stalin to the break-up of Pink Floyd? Repeated bulletins announcing the decease of the counter-culture, squatland, and hippies hearing secret harmonies, just showed that those features were here to stay. Elsewhere, the narrative records that malice and distorted reporting of someone else’s speech and conduct are actually part of the social structure and not something fleeting and forgettable. It also offers tuition in the correct use of the phrase “it’s cosmic man” as part of gracious living.
Featured poets include Jack Beeching, Euros Bowen, Paul Brown, Gerard Casey, Andrew Crozier, Paul Evans, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Eddie Flintoff, Ulli Freer, Michael Gibbs, W.S. Graham, Harry Guest, Ralph Hawkins, Frances Horovitz, Nicki Jackowska, Philip Jenkins, David Jones, Antony Lopez, George MacBeth, Sorley MacLean, Rod Mengham, Edwin Morgan, Eric Mottram, Peter Porter, J. H. Prynne, Kathleen Raine, Jeremy Reed, Colin Simms, Iain Sinclair, Iain Crichton Smith, Ken Smith, Martin Thom, Gael Turnbull, John Wain, John Powell Ward.
and see this website for some of the poets I left out.
This book is a pioneering attempt to roll back misrepresentation and depersonalisation and recover one of the most high-achieving eras of British poetry. The Seventies saw the collapse of the post-war settlement amid apparently insoluble problems over inflation and profitability. Consensus broke down and a lot of things that people remember about the 1970s didn’t actually happen. The outcome for poetry was a radical attempt to write down ideas about a different society and personal lifestyle, but also a polarised climate in which one faction tried to erase others from the record. Right-wing historians like to write about the period as an error in which all trajectories led inevitably to the rise of Thatcherism and that rise corrected the error. But it is equally valid to be fascinated by the other social possibilities and to appreciate art for imaginary paths that were not followed. Is it not true that the Seventies saw styles of good poetry (maybe bad poetry too?) which have been lost to memory ever since?? The role of the implicit was destabilised in the Seventies, and we are trying to recover what was shared but unstated. A list of 100 long poems suggests the direction that poetry went in, and that the idea of extension and exploration was to mend social memory and restore a shared language. Right and Left felt equally threatened and in need of reciting ideological primal scenes. Most of the text is about the long poems, following them as they attempt to reframe seized-up arguments. A larger rhythm, a deeper scan. A wider range of voices. Returning to the unenclosed field where myth, law, and sociology are still tentative and unstable. In doing so, it dredges up unrecorded layers of a buried time. It reveals how Iain Sinclair’s Suicide Bridge develops a circular theory of time from up to the minute theories about faster than light particles and the end of black holes. This is not the only deviant theory of Time floating around. We find that “the dream is over”, but why is it that this key moment has been variously located anywhere from the death of Stalin to the break-up of Pink Floyd? Repeated bulletins announcing the decease of the counter-culture, squatland, and hippies hearing secret harmonies, just showed that those features were here to stay. Elsewhere, the narrative records that malice and distorted reporting of someone else’s speech and conduct are actually part of the social structure and not something fleeting and forgettable. It also offers tuition in the correct use of the phrase “it’s cosmic man” as part of gracious living.
Featured poets include Jack Beeching, Euros Bowen, Paul Brown, Gerard Casey, Andrew Crozier, Paul Evans, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Eddie Flintoff, Ulli Freer, Michael Gibbs, W.S. Graham, Harry Guest, Ralph Hawkins, Frances Horovitz, Nicki Jackowska, Philip Jenkins, David Jones, Antony Lopez, George MacBeth, Sorley MacLean, Rod Mengham, Edwin Morgan, Eric Mottram, Peter Porter, J. H. Prynne, Kathleen Raine, Jeremy Reed, Colin Simms, Iain Sinclair, Iain Crichton Smith, Ken Smith, Martin Thom, Gael Turnbull, John Wain, John Powell Ward.
and see this website for some of the poets I left out.
Saturday, 5 March 2022
Rules of the elite
Thinking about Allott and his anthology … again
I am revisiting Allott via a set of email exchanges with Simon Jenner and John Goodby. We started with Charles Osborne’s memoirs and discussion of the impersonal style of arts management, with objective and apparently anti-artistic criteria taking over. Osborne was writing about this in 1986, as he left the Arts Council. It takes us back to the late stage of the rule of connoisseurs, as what the impersonal style replaced. A good example is Allott’s Penguin anthology (one edition in 1950 and another in 1962) with its central decision to include 39.5% of Oxford graduates in its selection of poets. This covered the period 1918 to 1960. That one figure sums up the horror so many people have for the dominance of choice. It links in to a vision of uncontrolled elitism: an in-group owns poetry, reproduces itself, shuts everyone else out. They set standards of taste by which other groups become out-groups. In the bad vision, this elite compiles a product which drives most of the audience away. There is a whole new cultural market, but poetry can’t keep up with it and becomes an old-fashioned genre run by old-fashioned people. The impulse is to eliminate choice as a factor. The guess is that if you edit and subsidise poetry according to bureaucratic, governmental criteria then it will do much better. John disliked Allott's notes, which sometimes include more words than the poems he is supposedly presenting.
Note that if you add in Cambridge graduates it becomes 60%. We are looking at what happened to “validated” 18 year olds, but if we had more evidence we would probably see that they had already been to one of a fairly small number of “good schools” and had probably encountered English teachers who actually read modern poetry. The unfairness starts early on. People don’t like this... they want the outcome of the game to be unknown before the game is played. They do not want to observe X being given a coupon at the age of seven and cashing that coupon in, aged 30, as entry into a Penguin anthology.
I have just acquired Heath-Stubbs’ 1946 book. It is good, although I think he gave up trying to be good at a certain point in the 1950s. At this distance in time, we can say that there were objective risks… because Heath-Stubbs failed, there was evidently a risk of failure. He wrote a lot of bad poetry and people lost interest. Being in “8 Oxford Poets” was apparently a ticket, but maybe a ticket to obscurity. The malice of his immediate peers is the objective risk; this is a game that people can lose. Martin said Heath-Stubbs was “a coming man who never came”; I think they had known each other for 40 years at that point. Actually, Allott’s poetic career was pretty disastrous. Both Allott and Heath-Stubbs were clearly under a lot of strain… they knew they were losing the game. “Privilege” does not capture this situation with any precision.
John sent us a copy of a floridly Apocalyptic poem:
O antique vistas of stone sarcophagi,
Silent except for the stammer of literature
Through millennia,
Whose yellowing relics caricature and festoon the
Dropped anonymous features of this ice-era;
All plasm shaped to human symmetry
Through shell-coiled generations of incessant downpour;
Assemble backward out of charred time’s collapse.
Come,
Honeycomb each coxcomb
With drums for the dead and sea-green elegiacs,
Ring now like tinnitus in every ear.
Hands, be immersed in suffering like a surgeon,
And eyes, probe everywhere.
O agnus mundi, baa-lamb inhabiting
The inhibiting volcanic ranges of today,
Hovered over by harpies, restricted to cavities
And fissures out of the metre of time’s way,
Labyrinthine limp hero of a thousand epics,
Miles from the mild archipelagos of content,
Let these who underline your rhythms and stresses
Warn you like sirens of imminent judgement;
Sailors at sea
With their mercy of coracles and compasses,
Learn with the flashing miracle at last discernment.
Let their lives warp you away from the thinly-roofed crevasses.
You need not go astray, as they do, in the mountain passes.
Yet what heartbreak we have managed to mint between
The abstract cold that eyes us and the iron fire,
In our cage-bubble of doom barely six miles high,
Our quaking littoral with its sastrugi of pressure
Where nothing is shipshape, and time
Flares like a vesta and finds
An odour of memory like a pink keepsake.
Spreadeagled fall from your precipice of pride
Crying ‘Peccavi’,
Who futile and supine rut in the folded hills,
Wishing disasters may happen somewhere else.
The shadows are eerie,
The eyelids heavy,
The chances of flowers go out like a life on the tide.
(‘Ode in Wartime’, part of)
The strange thing is, this is by Kenneth Allott. So he wrote some audenesque poems in the Thirties... got carried away by the New Romantic style and wrote terrific poems from inside it… then joined the enemies of the New Romantic thing… and compiled a standard anthology which eliminated the New Romantic thing from the record. And lost the ability to write.
Maybe in his depressing poet-analyses Allott is doing an autopsy of the cadaver of his own talent. Those poems were reprinted – after his death. The early-50s reaction against Apocalypse was a punishment of Allott as much as anybody else. The friends he valued so much had decided that this style was Outside Good Taste and this enactment prevented him from any further creative fulfilment. This is a really interesting story.
In the notes (in his anthology), Allott is squeezing young poets like someone juicing a grapefruit… it’s horrible. But it’s not outsiders who are getting this treatment, it is insiders, young insiders. He has Thwaite and Levi on board but you get no idea of what they were going to do, he only sees flaws. He apparently knows everything about that little Insider group, and they are homogeneous and so knowable. But he totally fails to get those two, even though they are going to be the “star” Oxford poets a few years later. Relations inside the dominant group are so interesting. They certainly aren't friendly all the time. Yes there is hostility towards outsiders, they are “blanked”, excluded; but the hostility among insiders is more cogent. The Wars of the Roses were a huge series of factional struggles between members of the elite, often related to each other; they weren’t fights between the nobility and the peasants. You can't bring those fights on stage because they didn't happen.
I wrote: “Even more about Allott. Martin said about Heath-Stubbs 'a coming man who never came'. This could be like someone selling wine in an honest way… I can imagine Martin saying 'a touch of the cat-piss but excellent value for money'. In a wine-shop where you go on Friday night and he knows his stock because he is always drinking it.” This is Martin Seymour-Smith, a genuine Forties poet whom Simon and I knew well many years later. John Goodby said “I’m not saying Allott was a manager anyway - don’t know enough about him. I just don’t like the censorious, anti-pleasure, nit-picky nature of his prose intros in that anthology.” John is quite right about this. We are looking at the Oxford network as the most privileged people, ones freed from the usual controls. This does not seem to have worked for Allott. This is the most interesting thing in the story. How can you have a system where people at the apex are not free, can’t do what they want? Surely that makes the apex unattractive? So maybe the Apocalypts demanded freedom, seized it… and were punished by the real managers for doing so.
All through those Notes (skewering the poets he is anthologising), he sounds unhappy… that is being presented as the prestige behaviour. He gives away pure freedom to get into interrogation and collecting evidence. I mean, you don’t sell wine by showing people who drink it and don’t enjoy it. He doesn’t even answer the question, why did you decide to spend your life doing this.
If you think about the wine trade, the people who face the public actually enjoy wine. They even enjoy getting a bit drunk. They stimulate people to buy – that is an aspect of spreading knowledge. They can do the talk because they really know what wine is about – a taste you enjoy. The elite which Allott was part of was not hedonistic. They lost a lot of ground in the Sixties as people came along who did take a hedonistic attitude towards poetry. The strange thing is, this mixture of austerity and Close Reading is moving towards an impersonal-bureaucratic style of decision-making. If it is not based on pleasure, what is the point of personal choice? It has to be “I like this one, I don’t like that one”; if you don’t enjoy the ones you like, the whole project has run out of fuel. I mention wine because it was something which around 1930 only a tiny number of people were enthusiastic about, and it was an aspect of upper-class pleasures which made that downward journey, it was marketed and people wrote How To books about it and now a couple of million people are involved. You know, wine, Mediterranean holidays, visiting art galleries, French food. Downwardly mobile pleasures. A whole package of things which poetry somehow isn’t part of.
We need to go back to where we started, with an impersonal decision style in the arts and documents written in management-speak. It seems like a big disaster. You can’t market leisure commodities in that way. But there are unsolved problems to do with connoisseurship and personal choice. These tend to come out when people discuss anthologies. If you make an anthology with 85 poets today, you have probably a thousand poets who didn’t make the cut seething with resentment. That sort of resentment is now a big part of the conversation around poetry. I guess the conversation must be productive of something. I suspect also that it displays the spread of privatisation and the destruction of shared and public space. Is it too much to admit that the other team has won?
I am revisiting Allott via a set of email exchanges with Simon Jenner and John Goodby. We started with Charles Osborne’s memoirs and discussion of the impersonal style of arts management, with objective and apparently anti-artistic criteria taking over. Osborne was writing about this in 1986, as he left the Arts Council. It takes us back to the late stage of the rule of connoisseurs, as what the impersonal style replaced. A good example is Allott’s Penguin anthology (one edition in 1950 and another in 1962) with its central decision to include 39.5% of Oxford graduates in its selection of poets. This covered the period 1918 to 1960. That one figure sums up the horror so many people have for the dominance of choice. It links in to a vision of uncontrolled elitism: an in-group owns poetry, reproduces itself, shuts everyone else out. They set standards of taste by which other groups become out-groups. In the bad vision, this elite compiles a product which drives most of the audience away. There is a whole new cultural market, but poetry can’t keep up with it and becomes an old-fashioned genre run by old-fashioned people. The impulse is to eliminate choice as a factor. The guess is that if you edit and subsidise poetry according to bureaucratic, governmental criteria then it will do much better. John disliked Allott's notes, which sometimes include more words than the poems he is supposedly presenting.
Note that if you add in Cambridge graduates it becomes 60%. We are looking at what happened to “validated” 18 year olds, but if we had more evidence we would probably see that they had already been to one of a fairly small number of “good schools” and had probably encountered English teachers who actually read modern poetry. The unfairness starts early on. People don’t like this... they want the outcome of the game to be unknown before the game is played. They do not want to observe X being given a coupon at the age of seven and cashing that coupon in, aged 30, as entry into a Penguin anthology.
I have just acquired Heath-Stubbs’ 1946 book. It is good, although I think he gave up trying to be good at a certain point in the 1950s. At this distance in time, we can say that there were objective risks… because Heath-Stubbs failed, there was evidently a risk of failure. He wrote a lot of bad poetry and people lost interest. Being in “8 Oxford Poets” was apparently a ticket, but maybe a ticket to obscurity. The malice of his immediate peers is the objective risk; this is a game that people can lose. Martin said Heath-Stubbs was “a coming man who never came”; I think they had known each other for 40 years at that point. Actually, Allott’s poetic career was pretty disastrous. Both Allott and Heath-Stubbs were clearly under a lot of strain… they knew they were losing the game. “Privilege” does not capture this situation with any precision.
John sent us a copy of a floridly Apocalyptic poem:
O antique vistas of stone sarcophagi,
Silent except for the stammer of literature
Through millennia,
Whose yellowing relics caricature and festoon the
Dropped anonymous features of this ice-era;
All plasm shaped to human symmetry
Through shell-coiled generations of incessant downpour;
Assemble backward out of charred time’s collapse.
Come,
Honeycomb each coxcomb
With drums for the dead and sea-green elegiacs,
Ring now like tinnitus in every ear.
Hands, be immersed in suffering like a surgeon,
And eyes, probe everywhere.
O agnus mundi, baa-lamb inhabiting
The inhibiting volcanic ranges of today,
Hovered over by harpies, restricted to cavities
And fissures out of the metre of time’s way,
Labyrinthine limp hero of a thousand epics,
Miles from the mild archipelagos of content,
Let these who underline your rhythms and stresses
Warn you like sirens of imminent judgement;
Sailors at sea
With their mercy of coracles and compasses,
Learn with the flashing miracle at last discernment.
Let their lives warp you away from the thinly-roofed crevasses.
You need not go astray, as they do, in the mountain passes.
Yet what heartbreak we have managed to mint between
The abstract cold that eyes us and the iron fire,
In our cage-bubble of doom barely six miles high,
Our quaking littoral with its sastrugi of pressure
Where nothing is shipshape, and time
Flares like a vesta and finds
An odour of memory like a pink keepsake.
Spreadeagled fall from your precipice of pride
Crying ‘Peccavi’,
Who futile and supine rut in the folded hills,
Wishing disasters may happen somewhere else.
The shadows are eerie,
The eyelids heavy,
The chances of flowers go out like a life on the tide.
(‘Ode in Wartime’, part of)
The strange thing is, this is by Kenneth Allott. So he wrote some audenesque poems in the Thirties... got carried away by the New Romantic style and wrote terrific poems from inside it… then joined the enemies of the New Romantic thing… and compiled a standard anthology which eliminated the New Romantic thing from the record. And lost the ability to write.
Maybe in his depressing poet-analyses Allott is doing an autopsy of the cadaver of his own talent. Those poems were reprinted – after his death. The early-50s reaction against Apocalypse was a punishment of Allott as much as anybody else. The friends he valued so much had decided that this style was Outside Good Taste and this enactment prevented him from any further creative fulfilment. This is a really interesting story.
In the notes (in his anthology), Allott is squeezing young poets like someone juicing a grapefruit… it’s horrible. But it’s not outsiders who are getting this treatment, it is insiders, young insiders. He has Thwaite and Levi on board but you get no idea of what they were going to do, he only sees flaws. He apparently knows everything about that little Insider group, and they are homogeneous and so knowable. But he totally fails to get those two, even though they are going to be the “star” Oxford poets a few years later. Relations inside the dominant group are so interesting. They certainly aren't friendly all the time. Yes there is hostility towards outsiders, they are “blanked”, excluded; but the hostility among insiders is more cogent. The Wars of the Roses were a huge series of factional struggles between members of the elite, often related to each other; they weren’t fights between the nobility and the peasants. You can't bring those fights on stage because they didn't happen.
I wrote: “Even more about Allott. Martin said about Heath-Stubbs 'a coming man who never came'. This could be like someone selling wine in an honest way… I can imagine Martin saying 'a touch of the cat-piss but excellent value for money'. In a wine-shop where you go on Friday night and he knows his stock because he is always drinking it.” This is Martin Seymour-Smith, a genuine Forties poet whom Simon and I knew well many years later. John Goodby said “I’m not saying Allott was a manager anyway - don’t know enough about him. I just don’t like the censorious, anti-pleasure, nit-picky nature of his prose intros in that anthology.” John is quite right about this. We are looking at the Oxford network as the most privileged people, ones freed from the usual controls. This does not seem to have worked for Allott. This is the most interesting thing in the story. How can you have a system where people at the apex are not free, can’t do what they want? Surely that makes the apex unattractive? So maybe the Apocalypts demanded freedom, seized it… and were punished by the real managers for doing so.
All through those Notes (skewering the poets he is anthologising), he sounds unhappy… that is being presented as the prestige behaviour. He gives away pure freedom to get into interrogation and collecting evidence. I mean, you don’t sell wine by showing people who drink it and don’t enjoy it. He doesn’t even answer the question, why did you decide to spend your life doing this.
If you think about the wine trade, the people who face the public actually enjoy wine. They even enjoy getting a bit drunk. They stimulate people to buy – that is an aspect of spreading knowledge. They can do the talk because they really know what wine is about – a taste you enjoy. The elite which Allott was part of was not hedonistic. They lost a lot of ground in the Sixties as people came along who did take a hedonistic attitude towards poetry. The strange thing is, this mixture of austerity and Close Reading is moving towards an impersonal-bureaucratic style of decision-making. If it is not based on pleasure, what is the point of personal choice? It has to be “I like this one, I don’t like that one”; if you don’t enjoy the ones you like, the whole project has run out of fuel. I mention wine because it was something which around 1930 only a tiny number of people were enthusiastic about, and it was an aspect of upper-class pleasures which made that downward journey, it was marketed and people wrote How To books about it and now a couple of million people are involved. You know, wine, Mediterranean holidays, visiting art galleries, French food. Downwardly mobile pleasures. A whole package of things which poetry somehow isn’t part of.
We need to go back to where we started, with an impersonal decision style in the arts and documents written in management-speak. It seems like a big disaster. You can’t market leisure commodities in that way. But there are unsolved problems to do with connoisseurship and personal choice. These tend to come out when people discuss anthologies. If you make an anthology with 85 poets today, you have probably a thousand poets who didn’t make the cut seething with resentment. That sort of resentment is now a big part of the conversation around poetry. I guess the conversation must be productive of something. I suspect also that it displays the spread of privatisation and the destruction of shared and public space. Is it too much to admit that the other team has won?
Sunday, 27 February 2022
70s book coming soon
New bulletin
I have finished proofing and am awaiting a test copy of the fully manufactured book, for a final quality check. And… it arrived while I was typing this.
Meanwhile, my announcement of the book on Facebook incited an inquiry whether I had included Rivelin Press. If people want chapters on each of about 80 small presses, I am toast. What do I know about Rivelin… actually I do have ‘Tunis’ which they published. It lists some of their output around 1972: Kevin Borman, Owen Davis, John Freeman, Jeremy Hilton, AG Hill, David Tipton. Hmmm. More research needed.
Rivelin is a part of Sheffield. I looked at the 1974 defining list of the “British Poetry Revival” and counted that 5 of 36 poets lived in the north of England. Evidently there was a geography of the new poetic culture. I prefer to deal with the generational aspect, which is easier to grasp. I have just seen in Poet’s Yearbook an anthology of five Suffolk poets coming out in 1978 from Syntaxophone… including Martin Stannard. And Joe Soap’s Canoe started in Ipswich (later Felixstowe). I am tempted to interview Stannard about this, although I don’t have the materials to develop the right questions. So actually I know nothing about what was happening in Suffolk. The reality is that I have information about half a dozen “scenes” but there were scenes in every city.
The poets I am looking at now are Hilton and Houédard. It seems impossible to come to the end of reading the 1970s. I am also reading the memoirs of Charles Osborne, who was demonised by jilted grant claimants when he was chair of the Arts Council’s Literature Panel. He claims to have played Pilot Officer Foxlee in the film "The Dam Busters". Wow. I am wondering if another viewing would expose Eric Mottram and John Heath-Stubbs in even smaller roles. He also quotes an essay by Peter Porter describing how vital was the book shop which Osborne co-ran in Brisbane in 1947-9: “the once or twice I met Charles Osborne I found him dauntingly sophisticated. Charles ran the Ballad Bookshop in the city, where I often bought books… Charles was always a man of great courage, and he led the way in defying Brisbane’s puritanism and philistinism. […] All this group dared to practise a mixture of left-wing politics and high camp at a time when such notions were dangerous.”
Osborne comes out in his memoirs as a very sympathetic person. I suppose that re-personalising someone who has been depersonalised is the most unforgivable thing and you can never be forgiven by the people who did the original depersonalising. But the whole process is so central to the history of the 1970s. It is not just a matter of recovering what was repressed, but also of uncovering the act of repression. Clearly most of the things which the folklore recalls about the Poetry Society flap never happened.
I got an email from one of the poets in the book, “Hi Andrew, the grand events that I was interested in had very little to do with poetry, and more with politics. I was a trotskyist from the age of 16, selling papers down the docks in London, and having them burnt out of my hands. I was as active in that as I was in poetry. I was at the American embassy when the police first tried out their "kettling" procedure in 1968, with my pregnant wife. I was there at the New Cross/Lewisham protests in 1981, which I must admit was more like the carnival of the oppressed than I have ever seen – all the streets in Lewisham & New Cross came out to support the protestors.” This is something I would have liked to write about more – the problem with discussing political commitment is the diversity of opinions and (also) the lack of information recorded about what individual poets identified with.
I got a CD called "English Weather" which collects examples of a style in rock music which the editors (the guys from St Etienne) claim only lasted for a couple of years around 1970. I find this method of anthologising very interesting, certainly styles changed very fast during the Seventies. In the packaging is a photo of a poster for a benefit gig (on January 23, of 1972?). The beneficiary is “UCS” which I believe to be Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, a workers’ co-op set up after an occupation of the works by workers facing the loss of their jobs. This was part of the mix at the time – the idea was to have an economy composed of a myriad co-ops as an alternative to a largely discredited model of State monopoly corporations run by civil servants. This model is what a lot of people had in mind at the time – it seems to have been forgotten after 1979. In building seagoing ships, you are exposed to the world market. When the state of world trade is poor, the existing capacity of ships is enough, and there are no orders. Then, when things pick up, you have to build your ships, spending a lot of money before you receive payment. So this is a capital-intensive industry and an unlikely sector for firms without capital and relying on human assets to succeed in. At the time, Tony Benn was very keen on this model of workers’ takeover – it was a line of divisions between Right and Left of the Labour Party because the Right was against this sort of progress and was, in practice, much happier to stick with capitalism. The step before the occupations was bankruptcy – the owners were firing everybody as part of closing the business down. If you had some money to invest, a bankrupt concern is the last place you would invest it – there was a deep problem with the socialist cause pouring its energy into concerns that were not in any way “going”.
There was an analogy with the world of squats, which were generally derelict properties which had been rehabilitated by young people moving in to find rent-free homes. Again generally, they were owned by town councils which did not have the funds to fix up the houses themselves. Because the squats were self-governing (often in housing associations), they were also co-ops (and even ‘occupations’). But there was also a focus on the derelict which did not promise a hold on the future. There is a symbolic link between poets seizing and modifying source texts, to modify them, and squatting a house.
Quite a lot of Britain was derelict in 1972. One effect of this was a pulse of self-confidence (and self-regard) by the young, as the old system seemed so unable to defend itself. This does explain quite a lot of the culture at the time. It was a later time which saw everything either being modernised or closed down altogether.
Osborne says somewhere (sorry can’t find the page!) that, around 1980, everything was worse than it had been 25 years earlier, i.e. 1955. Music, theatre, novels, etc. This is an unusual judgement. Personally I think everything was better in the 1970s, and that is what I assume when writing. In the 50s Osborne was trying to work as a actor and supporting himself by writing music journalism and sleeve notes etc. I am sure that recorded music was much better at that time than in the 40s, because of the arrival of the long-playing record and of stereo. But it is fair to say that he was hearing the 19th and late 18th century repertoire being transferred to vinyl, and that was not music composed and devised during the 1950s. He wasn’t interested in Boulez, Nono, and so forth.
Am looking at Sam Gardiner’s Poet’s Yearbook for 1976. He says “Throughout this book the Arts Council emerges as by far the greatest patron poetry has ever known. As an agency whereby public money can be directed towards the arts with a minimum of state interference it is easy to imagine less desirable arrangements.” I should have quoted this.
I quoted Eric Mottram:
a helmet set on a head
for the horns reach from brain folds
to planets above towers
beyond a lens
moon light in his antlers
curl and spiral of universe
curve out of the brain
skill of mountains receptors to wind curve
from space to caves in the heart
a coil of horn around a nerve
which tunes the herb
(from A Book of Herne, 1981)
Mottram is referring to the etymological connection between keras “horn” and cerebrum “brain”. Both are curved (or convoluted) organs growing out of the head. Herne was a deer-man figure whose name is cognate with the word horn (which is itself cognate with keras). There is the symbolic image of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, which could be associated (perhaps not before the 20th C) with the fertility of the brain. The link goes back to an ancient time (the Bronze Age?) and reflects how etymology gives us a liminal zone, with ‘roots’ as primal things which mutate to develop the concepts of everyday life. The reconstruction of a world of etyma rather than of real words carries us to a realm of creation and timelessness which fits in well with a theme of my book. However, I have left it out. I find Mottram’s poem obscure – the connection between keras and cerebrum is not recognisable to most people. The horn: brain link does not work in the English language. And the whole world of etymology, fascinating as I find it, is antiquarian and not well suited to poetry. You can’t write a poem in roots, you have to use actual words.
Evidently the creativity used in a poem is a part of the collective creativity which created language in the first place, a gigantic act of creativity and blossoming analogies, lasting thousands of years.
Many poets were aware of a realm of origins, with connections which were profoundly exciting and beyond conventional associations. Etymology is a door onto such a creative realm, but may not be the best way of getting there.
Herne seems to be connected with the cosmos and in fact his horns seem to be working as antennae. The phrase about “curve and spiral of universe” is reminiscent of something else – isn’t this about the spiral force described by John Michell and Guy Underwood, and isn’t the comparison between cosmic spirals and the convolutions of the cerebral cortex?
I have finished proofing and am awaiting a test copy of the fully manufactured book, for a final quality check. And… it arrived while I was typing this.
Meanwhile, my announcement of the book on Facebook incited an inquiry whether I had included Rivelin Press. If people want chapters on each of about 80 small presses, I am toast. What do I know about Rivelin… actually I do have ‘Tunis’ which they published. It lists some of their output around 1972: Kevin Borman, Owen Davis, John Freeman, Jeremy Hilton, AG Hill, David Tipton. Hmmm. More research needed.
Rivelin is a part of Sheffield. I looked at the 1974 defining list of the “British Poetry Revival” and counted that 5 of 36 poets lived in the north of England. Evidently there was a geography of the new poetic culture. I prefer to deal with the generational aspect, which is easier to grasp. I have just seen in Poet’s Yearbook an anthology of five Suffolk poets coming out in 1978 from Syntaxophone… including Martin Stannard. And Joe Soap’s Canoe started in Ipswich (later Felixstowe). I am tempted to interview Stannard about this, although I don’t have the materials to develop the right questions. So actually I know nothing about what was happening in Suffolk. The reality is that I have information about half a dozen “scenes” but there were scenes in every city.
The poets I am looking at now are Hilton and Houédard. It seems impossible to come to the end of reading the 1970s. I am also reading the memoirs of Charles Osborne, who was demonised by jilted grant claimants when he was chair of the Arts Council’s Literature Panel. He claims to have played Pilot Officer Foxlee in the film "The Dam Busters". Wow. I am wondering if another viewing would expose Eric Mottram and John Heath-Stubbs in even smaller roles. He also quotes an essay by Peter Porter describing how vital was the book shop which Osborne co-ran in Brisbane in 1947-9: “the once or twice I met Charles Osborne I found him dauntingly sophisticated. Charles ran the Ballad Bookshop in the city, where I often bought books… Charles was always a man of great courage, and he led the way in defying Brisbane’s puritanism and philistinism. […] All this group dared to practise a mixture of left-wing politics and high camp at a time when such notions were dangerous.”
Osborne comes out in his memoirs as a very sympathetic person. I suppose that re-personalising someone who has been depersonalised is the most unforgivable thing and you can never be forgiven by the people who did the original depersonalising. But the whole process is so central to the history of the 1970s. It is not just a matter of recovering what was repressed, but also of uncovering the act of repression. Clearly most of the things which the folklore recalls about the Poetry Society flap never happened.
I got an email from one of the poets in the book, “Hi Andrew, the grand events that I was interested in had very little to do with poetry, and more with politics. I was a trotskyist from the age of 16, selling papers down the docks in London, and having them burnt out of my hands. I was as active in that as I was in poetry. I was at the American embassy when the police first tried out their "kettling" procedure in 1968, with my pregnant wife. I was there at the New Cross/Lewisham protests in 1981, which I must admit was more like the carnival of the oppressed than I have ever seen – all the streets in Lewisham & New Cross came out to support the protestors.” This is something I would have liked to write about more – the problem with discussing political commitment is the diversity of opinions and (also) the lack of information recorded about what individual poets identified with.
I got a CD called "English Weather" which collects examples of a style in rock music which the editors (the guys from St Etienne) claim only lasted for a couple of years around 1970. I find this method of anthologising very interesting, certainly styles changed very fast during the Seventies. In the packaging is a photo of a poster for a benefit gig (on January 23, of 1972?). The beneficiary is “UCS” which I believe to be Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, a workers’ co-op set up after an occupation of the works by workers facing the loss of their jobs. This was part of the mix at the time – the idea was to have an economy composed of a myriad co-ops as an alternative to a largely discredited model of State monopoly corporations run by civil servants. This model is what a lot of people had in mind at the time – it seems to have been forgotten after 1979. In building seagoing ships, you are exposed to the world market. When the state of world trade is poor, the existing capacity of ships is enough, and there are no orders. Then, when things pick up, you have to build your ships, spending a lot of money before you receive payment. So this is a capital-intensive industry and an unlikely sector for firms without capital and relying on human assets to succeed in. At the time, Tony Benn was very keen on this model of workers’ takeover – it was a line of divisions between Right and Left of the Labour Party because the Right was against this sort of progress and was, in practice, much happier to stick with capitalism. The step before the occupations was bankruptcy – the owners were firing everybody as part of closing the business down. If you had some money to invest, a bankrupt concern is the last place you would invest it – there was a deep problem with the socialist cause pouring its energy into concerns that were not in any way “going”.
There was an analogy with the world of squats, which were generally derelict properties which had been rehabilitated by young people moving in to find rent-free homes. Again generally, they were owned by town councils which did not have the funds to fix up the houses themselves. Because the squats were self-governing (often in housing associations), they were also co-ops (and even ‘occupations’). But there was also a focus on the derelict which did not promise a hold on the future. There is a symbolic link between poets seizing and modifying source texts, to modify them, and squatting a house.
Quite a lot of Britain was derelict in 1972. One effect of this was a pulse of self-confidence (and self-regard) by the young, as the old system seemed so unable to defend itself. This does explain quite a lot of the culture at the time. It was a later time which saw everything either being modernised or closed down altogether.
Osborne says somewhere (sorry can’t find the page!) that, around 1980, everything was worse than it had been 25 years earlier, i.e. 1955. Music, theatre, novels, etc. This is an unusual judgement. Personally I think everything was better in the 1970s, and that is what I assume when writing. In the 50s Osborne was trying to work as a actor and supporting himself by writing music journalism and sleeve notes etc. I am sure that recorded music was much better at that time than in the 40s, because of the arrival of the long-playing record and of stereo. But it is fair to say that he was hearing the 19th and late 18th century repertoire being transferred to vinyl, and that was not music composed and devised during the 1950s. He wasn’t interested in Boulez, Nono, and so forth.
Am looking at Sam Gardiner’s Poet’s Yearbook for 1976. He says “Throughout this book the Arts Council emerges as by far the greatest patron poetry has ever known. As an agency whereby public money can be directed towards the arts with a minimum of state interference it is easy to imagine less desirable arrangements.” I should have quoted this.
I quoted Eric Mottram:
a helmet set on a head
for the horns reach from brain folds
to planets above towers
beyond a lens
moon light in his antlers
curl and spiral of universe
curve out of the brain
skill of mountains receptors to wind curve
from space to caves in the heart
a coil of horn around a nerve
which tunes the herb
(from A Book of Herne, 1981)
Mottram is referring to the etymological connection between keras “horn” and cerebrum “brain”. Both are curved (or convoluted) organs growing out of the head. Herne was a deer-man figure whose name is cognate with the word horn (which is itself cognate with keras). There is the symbolic image of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, which could be associated (perhaps not before the 20th C) with the fertility of the brain. The link goes back to an ancient time (the Bronze Age?) and reflects how etymology gives us a liminal zone, with ‘roots’ as primal things which mutate to develop the concepts of everyday life. The reconstruction of a world of etyma rather than of real words carries us to a realm of creation and timelessness which fits in well with a theme of my book. However, I have left it out. I find Mottram’s poem obscure – the connection between keras and cerebrum is not recognisable to most people. The horn: brain link does not work in the English language. And the whole world of etymology, fascinating as I find it, is antiquarian and not well suited to poetry. You can’t write a poem in roots, you have to use actual words.
Evidently the creativity used in a poem is a part of the collective creativity which created language in the first place, a gigantic act of creativity and blossoming analogies, lasting thousands of years.
Many poets were aware of a realm of origins, with connections which were profoundly exciting and beyond conventional associations. Etymology is a door onto such a creative realm, but may not be the best way of getting there.
Herne seems to be connected with the cosmos and in fact his horns seem to be working as antennae. The phrase about “curve and spiral of universe” is reminiscent of something else – isn’t this about the spiral force described by John Michell and Guy Underwood, and isn’t the comparison between cosmic spirals and the convolutions of the cerebral cortex?
Tuesday, 18 January 2022
Daryl Hine
Daryl Hine 1936-2012
I had not heard of Daryl Hine before reading Northrop Frye’s review of his 1957 book, but I now realise that he was an ambitious poet and that his career is one of the most complex in the history of literature in North America. I do not have the plan of describing that career, and to be honest his books are hard to get hold of as well as numerous. The secondary sources suggest that he made radical breaks but they were not wholly successful. At this point I am looking at what you might call typical Hine. Hine, who came from British Columbia, produced a book in 1957 at the age of 21. This is astonishing, but as the cover reminds us he had previously published Five Poems, so he had probably released teenage poems. Over-rapid learning in the Fifties made it unlikely he would un-learn it as precocity faded into something else. We are thinking of over-internalisation, and the flowering of the time was formalism, light verse, indifference to abstractions, fascination with decoration to the exclusion of real beauty. It was a few years later that Marcuse defined affirmative culture, but it was the 1950s he was thinking of, and that un-nourishing sweetness did not go away after that unless the individuals expert in it repented and found a new tune. Hine fits into that category all too cleanly. Suave? got suave. Pretty? got pretty. Sociable? got sociable. Lighter than air? got lighter than air. Hine saw the light during the formalist era and absorbed its ideals almost too much. He continued to write formalist poetry all his life, as the poetry world moved on. The objections to his work apply to formalism in general, and reflect the thinking of the great majority of poets born after 1936. They are familiar. However, that way of writing was peculiarly suited to Hine’s talent, and arguably he took it further than anyone else – where it favoured virtuosity, he was more of a virtuoso than the others. It has been called artificial, but it was evidently natural to Daryl Hine.
The title of his 1957 book is The Carnal and the Crane. The title is that given to an English carol, 23 verses long in at least one version, which is supposedly a dialogue between two birds, one of which is a carnal (otherwise unknown but at a guess could be “corneille”, a crow). They tell a tale of the very first Christmas, and Herod is the central character. He says that if he is wrong, and what the Wise Men say is true, the cockerel which they have just cooked and served up for dinner will get up and crow. Of course it does that; the theme is resurrection (what the birth of Christ brought to mankind).
The cock soon freshly feathered was
By the work of God's own hand
And then three fences crowed he
In the dish where he did stand
(fences – times) The crowing is an echo of the cock which crowed three times for Peter to deny Christ; Christ's coming back to life is a repeat of his incarnation, in Bethlehem. The carol is raw folklore and its very creativity suggests ignorance of learned tradition (and the absence of theologians who had read all the patristic texts). One possibility is that the carnal is so called because crows eat red flesh (including that of humans, sometimes), whereas the crane eats fish; this refers to sacrifice and to purity (embodied in whiteness). But really we don’t know; the carol may be based on legends which the world had forgotten, and its text may be the product of multiple forgetting. The title excepted, I could not find any allusion to the carol in Hine’s book. The signature of ‘Carnal’ is that most of the poems are about Christian myths but Hine’s level of interest in the doctrines is sketchy. He slips into the sequence of poems about Herod and the Wise Men a gay poem. It is about Alexis and Corydon, gay shepherds in Vergil’s Georgics. That poem has long been connected to the New Testament, since a prophecy within it was connected to the birth of Jesus. “Novus ordo saeclorum”, etc. Also, at least one of the Gospels definitely has shepherds in it. But, nobody with any belief in Christianity would slip a gay love poem into the Gospel narrative about the birth of Jesus. The myths are inherently significant, if you believe in them but Hine’s poems are merely decorative because his level of sincerity is so low. It is as if the audience of the time, sophisticated and affluent, dreaded sincerity; as a threat to decorum and gracious living. This poetry is secular in the same way that a department store at Christmas is. It is hard to explain why Hine would devote 13 pages to the story about King Herod and the Wise Men if he has no sincere belief in any of it. In ‘Carnal’, the turning of heavy religious themes into mere décor is intriguing but the ability to dissolve significance away is also a trap. It may leave art as a repetitive set of theatrical decors. The threat is that the decor will be as flimsy as the costumes – and like religious motifs painted on teacups.
The lack of significance reminds us of postmodernism. This was not around in 1957, when ‘Carnal’ came out. I don’t think it helps us. The 1980s had to face some of the problems which emerged in the 1980s as people gave up on theology. A revived interest in politics, society, government, social change, made those problems go away.
It is possible that the formalist atmosphere of 1957 reflects admiration for Dylan Thomas as well as Auden. Clever metrics were apparently the way to out-compete everybody else, at the time. I mention this because Hine’s exuberance suggests a link with Thomas – that virtuosity which was the opposite of spontaneity and spasmic release of unconscious material. Hine is almost too much in control of his material; he is not compulsive. Again, we may consider Christopher Fry and Eithne Wilkins as the most direct comparisons in the world of Forties English poetry. But the echo of Auden is altogether too strong. Of course that is Fifties Auden, with no element of documentary or of interest in politics, just suavity, fluency, and a layer of generalisations that sound wise and mean almost nothing.
The poems conduct arguments but their outcomes do not seem to matter. We are not moving from dark to light. Rather we have a steady state and the exits are neatly closed off. The classical poet whom Hine resembles is Marvell – at least, this is what I seem to be detecting. That just underlines how little interest Hine has in the arguments he constructs.
Evan Jones said “I think Recollected Poems is an excellent introduction, but In and Out and Academic Festival Overtures are Daryl’s masterpieces. […] My own favorites, in addition to those noted above, include “Don Juan in Amsterdam,” “Copied in Camoes” “Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles,” “Letting Go” and “A Conceit,” poems that have moved and impressed me in equal measure.” I have not read the long poems, but three of the poems which Jones mentions are in the 1980 Selected Poems, which I do have.
I was more interested by the two poems, at the end of Carnal, about the Fat Boy entering Paradise. Their message is less obvious and their optimism more chequered. It is frustrating that he does not explain who the fat boy was when alive or what he is feeling when losing his way in Paradise.
Within his head a rank and silent fortune
Gestured slowly. On the silver screen
Papier-mâché herds of buffalo
Pursued a cowboy over endless prairie,
While down his cheeks the glittering orbs of sorrow
Ruled their separate tracks to final ruin.
What password did his virtues and his powers
Whisper, that he awoke within the gates,
Preserved against his enemies the hours,
While we who, like the vultures near the towers,
Live at the expense of those who die of boredom,
Enchained by the strait enchantment of their longing,
Must pitch our camp beneath the walls of Sodom,
Detained within the sweet preserve of time?
(from ‘A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden’)
What difference does it make that he is fat? Does that disqualify him from entering Eden? I must say that I am really not clear what this stanza means. What is the connection between Eden and Sodom? Why are they outside the walls of Sodom? Are they struggling to get in? Why is the fat boy sitting in a cinema? Is that a form of paradise, or is it somewhere else? Is a fortune gesturing within his head because his head is a misfortune, so that the sight of his face is rank and silent, part of a role which must remain silent? In the cinema, his face is invisible. Does “rank” mean “overgrown and undesirable”, like a plant, or is it a noun describing his social status, in parallel with his fortune? Rank was the biggest film company in Britain at this time, maybe not so big in Canada. Why does the sight of buffalo make him cry? Why are the buffalo pursuing the cowboy and not running away, as their allotted role as prey would seem to propose? In this way the poem seems unfinished and we don’t find out who the fat boy was. At one level, the stanza describes frozen time (as in death) versus the world of transience (which has some unclear link with Sodom). Google suggests that the name Baldar, which appears twice, is a spelling variant of Baldr or Baldur, a Norse vegetation god who was killed by a dart of mistletoe. That refers to vegetation myth, the dormancy of plants during the hard winter months. That would explain why the protagonist is dead, but why does he appear as a vegetation god? The poet seems to be so fluent that the poem fills up before it tells us what it really has to tell us. The drink turns to froth, it expands and expands but there is no wine left to drink. I like these poems but they are also a point where you realise that Hine is not properly in control of his own fecundity, that he does not focus enough on the essential point of his poems.
I started on 50s Canadian poetry because I was interested in the theme of personal myth. With Hine, it is the opposite – he takes public myths which he has almost no interest in. His next book “The devil's picture book” is almost free of Christian themes– they have just been jettisoned. It is a less interesting book than “The carnal and the crane”. His poems seem like goods shining under the high-key lighting of the department store rather than objects within somebody's home.
Hine, up to his death in 2012, represented the legacy of the 1950s. Auden had become extremely affluent in the 1950s, partly on the strength of having said farewell to communism and partly on the basis of his having access to lost and pre-modern funds of indigenous technical knowledge with regard to metrics and gracious living. This is the 1950s which the 1960s churlishly spurned. Daryl Hine never spurned it. The style had a sixty year life inherent in it once it was clarion enough to capture someone in their teens. The terms affluence and affirmative linger around him and it is only if you find them irritating that you would want them to disperse into a more cool and hi-anxiety environment. It is impressive how at 21 he has assimilated Auden, probably the most prestigious English-language style of the moment, and taken that merely as a point of departure. That might seem like a merely public ambition, but Hine has seized it with a peculiar accuracy and confidence. At that point any recovery of the 1950s is going to shed lustre on Hine. Maybe anxiety and the ways of transforming it always were the central issue. Hine certainly does transform it even if we find his result a bit like Christmas music in a department store. The verbal fluency is a form of affluence. You have to get the package – I mean, youth, effortlessness, virtuosity. It is fabulous and it really is churlish not to enjoy it. But he has difficulty with deep notes – with gravity. Marzipan is not a meal. The top film genre of the 1950s was the musical and Hine has some of the same delight in sheer skill – in the disappearance of the restraints, of realism or even of gravity. In his poems, the costume designer seems to have free hand and the dramatist to have disappeared on a long weekend.
Is this gay poetry? Well, there are 1000 ways of being gay. You can argue that a social or legal atmosphere which imposed permanent anxiety on the gay milieu elicited a response in which nothing is ever made explicit and anxiety never arrives to spoil the party. That comes out rather like a heated-up version of affirmative culture: gracious living simply expands to cover everything with its peculiar gloss and wholesomeness. It is not essentially different from any other affirmative culture – if we are going to recover the time, we have to recover the motives for that gloss, for the wish that cooking would never go wrong and that people mingling socially would always like each other. Pervasive anxiety and social rejection in adolescence could be one of the motives for wishing for sweetness in adult life. He does the generalisations about how great life is. A good example is in a poem, published under different titles, but here as “The copper maple”:
Sufficient the momentary recognition
Of the world as anomalous and perfect
As this emblematic copper maple
Alien yet rooted as we are,
Whose shade is not the green of contemplation
But imagination's fierce metallic colour,
Bronze, an aegis under which we flourish.
(from ‘The essential Daryl Hine’) The affirmative generalisation is the key message. The maple must be a reference to Canada, so this is even a patriotic poem– although another version of it was called “The copper beech”. What I miss is the transition from anxiety to freedom from anxiety. His poems don’t seem to open on anything – the threat is not allowed to be present so there is no open ground to advance into. The world it recounts has no negative side. He is interested in behavioural beauty but in terms which confine it to behavioural prettiness. I guess the anxiety might be latent in the verbal grace which might trip at any point. But we don’t really expect a formation dance in “Seven brides for seven brothers” to be interrupted by a mistake; and after a while we don’t expect emotion to interrupt Hine’s dazzling cadences. The opening of this poem is a magic moment:
After 10 am in Evanston
The leaves droop as if tired in the heat
The sky has put on that etiolated pallor
Which protests that it cannot absorb more light.
Colorless as paper. In the paper
Those who affect to predict the weather say
That it will be over 90 again today.
Evanston is where Hine lived for many years and the poem must almost certainly be taken as one about happiness in marriage, gay marriage in this case. The leaves are emblematic of a desirable suburb, an agreed symbol for settling down and enjoying life together. This is a great poem but not great all the way through. The differences between the two versions are fascinating but may also be a distraction. But, we can also offer ourselves the feeling that he could have written ten different versions, all good – that what you get with Hine is that sense of fluency, where he can go in any direction and any path he offers is going to be equally decorative, equally vivacious, equally undemanding.
I had not heard of Daryl Hine before reading Northrop Frye’s review of his 1957 book, but I now realise that he was an ambitious poet and that his career is one of the most complex in the history of literature in North America. I do not have the plan of describing that career, and to be honest his books are hard to get hold of as well as numerous. The secondary sources suggest that he made radical breaks but they were not wholly successful. At this point I am looking at what you might call typical Hine. Hine, who came from British Columbia, produced a book in 1957 at the age of 21. This is astonishing, but as the cover reminds us he had previously published Five Poems, so he had probably released teenage poems. Over-rapid learning in the Fifties made it unlikely he would un-learn it as precocity faded into something else. We are thinking of over-internalisation, and the flowering of the time was formalism, light verse, indifference to abstractions, fascination with decoration to the exclusion of real beauty. It was a few years later that Marcuse defined affirmative culture, but it was the 1950s he was thinking of, and that un-nourishing sweetness did not go away after that unless the individuals expert in it repented and found a new tune. Hine fits into that category all too cleanly. Suave? got suave. Pretty? got pretty. Sociable? got sociable. Lighter than air? got lighter than air. Hine saw the light during the formalist era and absorbed its ideals almost too much. He continued to write formalist poetry all his life, as the poetry world moved on. The objections to his work apply to formalism in general, and reflect the thinking of the great majority of poets born after 1936. They are familiar. However, that way of writing was peculiarly suited to Hine’s talent, and arguably he took it further than anyone else – where it favoured virtuosity, he was more of a virtuoso than the others. It has been called artificial, but it was evidently natural to Daryl Hine.
The title of his 1957 book is The Carnal and the Crane. The title is that given to an English carol, 23 verses long in at least one version, which is supposedly a dialogue between two birds, one of which is a carnal (otherwise unknown but at a guess could be “corneille”, a crow). They tell a tale of the very first Christmas, and Herod is the central character. He says that if he is wrong, and what the Wise Men say is true, the cockerel which they have just cooked and served up for dinner will get up and crow. Of course it does that; the theme is resurrection (what the birth of Christ brought to mankind).
The cock soon freshly feathered was
By the work of God's own hand
And then three fences crowed he
In the dish where he did stand
(fences – times) The crowing is an echo of the cock which crowed three times for Peter to deny Christ; Christ's coming back to life is a repeat of his incarnation, in Bethlehem. The carol is raw folklore and its very creativity suggests ignorance of learned tradition (and the absence of theologians who had read all the patristic texts). One possibility is that the carnal is so called because crows eat red flesh (including that of humans, sometimes), whereas the crane eats fish; this refers to sacrifice and to purity (embodied in whiteness). But really we don’t know; the carol may be based on legends which the world had forgotten, and its text may be the product of multiple forgetting. The title excepted, I could not find any allusion to the carol in Hine’s book. The signature of ‘Carnal’ is that most of the poems are about Christian myths but Hine’s level of interest in the doctrines is sketchy. He slips into the sequence of poems about Herod and the Wise Men a gay poem. It is about Alexis and Corydon, gay shepherds in Vergil’s Georgics. That poem has long been connected to the New Testament, since a prophecy within it was connected to the birth of Jesus. “Novus ordo saeclorum”, etc. Also, at least one of the Gospels definitely has shepherds in it. But, nobody with any belief in Christianity would slip a gay love poem into the Gospel narrative about the birth of Jesus. The myths are inherently significant, if you believe in them but Hine’s poems are merely decorative because his level of sincerity is so low. It is as if the audience of the time, sophisticated and affluent, dreaded sincerity; as a threat to decorum and gracious living. This poetry is secular in the same way that a department store at Christmas is. It is hard to explain why Hine would devote 13 pages to the story about King Herod and the Wise Men if he has no sincere belief in any of it. In ‘Carnal’, the turning of heavy religious themes into mere décor is intriguing but the ability to dissolve significance away is also a trap. It may leave art as a repetitive set of theatrical decors. The threat is that the decor will be as flimsy as the costumes – and like religious motifs painted on teacups.
The lack of significance reminds us of postmodernism. This was not around in 1957, when ‘Carnal’ came out. I don’t think it helps us. The 1980s had to face some of the problems which emerged in the 1980s as people gave up on theology. A revived interest in politics, society, government, social change, made those problems go away.
It is possible that the formalist atmosphere of 1957 reflects admiration for Dylan Thomas as well as Auden. Clever metrics were apparently the way to out-compete everybody else, at the time. I mention this because Hine’s exuberance suggests a link with Thomas – that virtuosity which was the opposite of spontaneity and spasmic release of unconscious material. Hine is almost too much in control of his material; he is not compulsive. Again, we may consider Christopher Fry and Eithne Wilkins as the most direct comparisons in the world of Forties English poetry. But the echo of Auden is altogether too strong. Of course that is Fifties Auden, with no element of documentary or of interest in politics, just suavity, fluency, and a layer of generalisations that sound wise and mean almost nothing.
The poems conduct arguments but their outcomes do not seem to matter. We are not moving from dark to light. Rather we have a steady state and the exits are neatly closed off. The classical poet whom Hine resembles is Marvell – at least, this is what I seem to be detecting. That just underlines how little interest Hine has in the arguments he constructs.
Evan Jones said “I think Recollected Poems is an excellent introduction, but In and Out and Academic Festival Overtures are Daryl’s masterpieces. […] My own favorites, in addition to those noted above, include “Don Juan in Amsterdam,” “Copied in Camoes” “Patroclus Putting on the Armour of Achilles,” “Letting Go” and “A Conceit,” poems that have moved and impressed me in equal measure.” I have not read the long poems, but three of the poems which Jones mentions are in the 1980 Selected Poems, which I do have.
I was more interested by the two poems, at the end of Carnal, about the Fat Boy entering Paradise. Their message is less obvious and their optimism more chequered. It is frustrating that he does not explain who the fat boy was when alive or what he is feeling when losing his way in Paradise.
Within his head a rank and silent fortune
Gestured slowly. On the silver screen
Papier-mâché herds of buffalo
Pursued a cowboy over endless prairie,
While down his cheeks the glittering orbs of sorrow
Ruled their separate tracks to final ruin.
What password did his virtues and his powers
Whisper, that he awoke within the gates,
Preserved against his enemies the hours,
While we who, like the vultures near the towers,
Live at the expense of those who die of boredom,
Enchained by the strait enchantment of their longing,
Must pitch our camp beneath the walls of Sodom,
Detained within the sweet preserve of time?
(from ‘A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden’)
What difference does it make that he is fat? Does that disqualify him from entering Eden? I must say that I am really not clear what this stanza means. What is the connection between Eden and Sodom? Why are they outside the walls of Sodom? Are they struggling to get in? Why is the fat boy sitting in a cinema? Is that a form of paradise, or is it somewhere else? Is a fortune gesturing within his head because his head is a misfortune, so that the sight of his face is rank and silent, part of a role which must remain silent? In the cinema, his face is invisible. Does “rank” mean “overgrown and undesirable”, like a plant, or is it a noun describing his social status, in parallel with his fortune? Rank was the biggest film company in Britain at this time, maybe not so big in Canada. Why does the sight of buffalo make him cry? Why are the buffalo pursuing the cowboy and not running away, as their allotted role as prey would seem to propose? In this way the poem seems unfinished and we don’t find out who the fat boy was. At one level, the stanza describes frozen time (as in death) versus the world of transience (which has some unclear link with Sodom). Google suggests that the name Baldar, which appears twice, is a spelling variant of Baldr or Baldur, a Norse vegetation god who was killed by a dart of mistletoe. That refers to vegetation myth, the dormancy of plants during the hard winter months. That would explain why the protagonist is dead, but why does he appear as a vegetation god? The poet seems to be so fluent that the poem fills up before it tells us what it really has to tell us. The drink turns to froth, it expands and expands but there is no wine left to drink. I like these poems but they are also a point where you realise that Hine is not properly in control of his own fecundity, that he does not focus enough on the essential point of his poems.
I started on 50s Canadian poetry because I was interested in the theme of personal myth. With Hine, it is the opposite – he takes public myths which he has almost no interest in. His next book “The devil's picture book” is almost free of Christian themes– they have just been jettisoned. It is a less interesting book than “The carnal and the crane”. His poems seem like goods shining under the high-key lighting of the department store rather than objects within somebody's home.
Hine, up to his death in 2012, represented the legacy of the 1950s. Auden had become extremely affluent in the 1950s, partly on the strength of having said farewell to communism and partly on the basis of his having access to lost and pre-modern funds of indigenous technical knowledge with regard to metrics and gracious living. This is the 1950s which the 1960s churlishly spurned. Daryl Hine never spurned it. The style had a sixty year life inherent in it once it was clarion enough to capture someone in their teens. The terms affluence and affirmative linger around him and it is only if you find them irritating that you would want them to disperse into a more cool and hi-anxiety environment. It is impressive how at 21 he has assimilated Auden, probably the most prestigious English-language style of the moment, and taken that merely as a point of departure. That might seem like a merely public ambition, but Hine has seized it with a peculiar accuracy and confidence. At that point any recovery of the 1950s is going to shed lustre on Hine. Maybe anxiety and the ways of transforming it always were the central issue. Hine certainly does transform it even if we find his result a bit like Christmas music in a department store. The verbal fluency is a form of affluence. You have to get the package – I mean, youth, effortlessness, virtuosity. It is fabulous and it really is churlish not to enjoy it. But he has difficulty with deep notes – with gravity. Marzipan is not a meal. The top film genre of the 1950s was the musical and Hine has some of the same delight in sheer skill – in the disappearance of the restraints, of realism or even of gravity. In his poems, the costume designer seems to have free hand and the dramatist to have disappeared on a long weekend.
Is this gay poetry? Well, there are 1000 ways of being gay. You can argue that a social or legal atmosphere which imposed permanent anxiety on the gay milieu elicited a response in which nothing is ever made explicit and anxiety never arrives to spoil the party. That comes out rather like a heated-up version of affirmative culture: gracious living simply expands to cover everything with its peculiar gloss and wholesomeness. It is not essentially different from any other affirmative culture – if we are going to recover the time, we have to recover the motives for that gloss, for the wish that cooking would never go wrong and that people mingling socially would always like each other. Pervasive anxiety and social rejection in adolescence could be one of the motives for wishing for sweetness in adult life. He does the generalisations about how great life is. A good example is in a poem, published under different titles, but here as “The copper maple”:
Sufficient the momentary recognition
Of the world as anomalous and perfect
As this emblematic copper maple
Alien yet rooted as we are,
Whose shade is not the green of contemplation
But imagination's fierce metallic colour,
Bronze, an aegis under which we flourish.
(from ‘The essential Daryl Hine’) The affirmative generalisation is the key message. The maple must be a reference to Canada, so this is even a patriotic poem– although another version of it was called “The copper beech”. What I miss is the transition from anxiety to freedom from anxiety. His poems don’t seem to open on anything – the threat is not allowed to be present so there is no open ground to advance into. The world it recounts has no negative side. He is interested in behavioural beauty but in terms which confine it to behavioural prettiness. I guess the anxiety might be latent in the verbal grace which might trip at any point. But we don’t really expect a formation dance in “Seven brides for seven brothers” to be interrupted by a mistake; and after a while we don’t expect emotion to interrupt Hine’s dazzling cadences. The opening of this poem is a magic moment:
After 10 am in Evanston
The leaves droop as if tired in the heat
The sky has put on that etiolated pallor
Which protests that it cannot absorb more light.
Colorless as paper. In the paper
Those who affect to predict the weather say
That it will be over 90 again today.
Evanston is where Hine lived for many years and the poem must almost certainly be taken as one about happiness in marriage, gay marriage in this case. The leaves are emblematic of a desirable suburb, an agreed symbol for settling down and enjoying life together. This is a great poem but not great all the way through. The differences between the two versions are fascinating but may also be a distraction. But, we can also offer ourselves the feeling that he could have written ten different versions, all good – that what you get with Hine is that sense of fluency, where he can go in any direction and any path he offers is going to be equally decorative, equally vivacious, equally undemanding.
Tuesday, 7 December 2021
A Scottish alternative?
On a lowered beach: Scottish alternatives
An email arrived suggesting an issue of Angel Exhaust about alternative Scottish poetry, to go with the issues we did on similar themes in Wales and Scotland. I have been thinking about this and also about why we didn’t do such an issue 20 years ago. The upshot is that I am going to write a blog about the matter, instead of actually producing a real publication.
The key to why there was no Scottish issue 20 years ago, after some discussions about it, was a conversation with Robin Purves and Peter Manson. I asked them how many shops in Scotland stocked Object Permanence, and the answer was “none”. It was obvious that there was no alternative sector in Scotland. Not only would no shops sell our possible Angel Exhaust, but there was no set of paths along which we could find alternative Scottish poets, so that we would probably go to press having missed significant and important people. A little magazine with no resources has to find downhill paths and this project was clearly an uphill struggle. (Another version would be that Object Permanence was the alternative sector. But they only ever published one Scottish poet.)
The reason why there is no ‘alternative sector’ corresponding to the one we found in England and Wales is mainly that the status of the Scots language is too hot a topic. The whole of Scottish literature is an ‘alternative’ compared to the anglo-american mainstream, yet the difficulties of writing in a dialect which is never used in schools are such that poetry in Scots is persistently sub-literary and reluctant to deal with abstract ideas. The result, over a hundred years now, has been an increase in the status of the language, much more interest by the primary sector of the schools system, a few academic posts, and a cluster of poets writing intelligently in Scots – but not writing something critical and innovative in the terms of Angel Exhaust readers. Like Scottish politics in general, this area is unstable and evolving.
When the email arrived, my reaction was that I knew nothing about Scottish poetry in the past 25 years. That was not a final answer, but it did suggest that we needed a native informant, or several, before such an issue could be assembled.
Clearly there is a sector of innovative poetry in Scotland. But, where John Goodby and Lyndon Davies found 38 ‘alternative’ poets for their Welsh anthology (Edge of Necessary), you obviously couldn't find 76 radical Scottish poets (i.e. for a population double that of Wales). Scotland did not have a counterpart to the deluge of formal innovation that happened in England in the 1970s, and even the second half of the Sixties. The reasons are interesting. And actually, there was an equivalent, if only on a smaller scale. Edwin Morgan, DM Black, Alan Riddell. But, it would be ridiculous to push this sector out of existence.I don’t really get the geographical basis for the poetic pattern, but I think the alternative thing was much weaker in the North of England than elsewhere, and so that it wasn’t “area-saturating” but dispersed and full of holes. Maybe the Modern thing could only capture people who weren’t already committed to something else, such as the nationalist thing or the Language Question.
I have Christopher Whyte’s book Modern Scottish Poetry. I guess I have read it three times... anyway it has classic status. I say this before noting that I jotted down in my copy a list of poets he left out: Joseph Macleod, TS Law, DM Black, WN Herbert, Alexander Hutchison, Walter Perrie, Frank Kuppner, Peter Manson, Peter Davidson. I now have to add Alan Riddell, whose work I encountered later. This list would give an outline for an alternative anthology of Scottish poetry. However, the rule is that little magazines deal with new poetry and preferably with unpublished poetry. A little magazine is inhibited from producing an anthology in which key poems are fifty years old. And the magazine-buying audience has limited interest in that sort of backward look. I should emphasise that Whyte designed a one-volume work with 20 poets, and that his omissions do not imply that he disregarded these other poets.
Some Scottish poetry of the past 20 years is exhibited in the anthologies The Smeddum Test, Aiblins, and Be the First to Like This. The first collects poems in Scots entered for a particular prize. The second is political poetry after the result of the 2014 Independence referendum; the title means “perhaps” and the theme is unused possibilities. The third is more like a generational anthology; a lot of the best poems are people who are not Scottish (but were resident there at the moment of the anthology).
I wrote about the language issue in Scottish poetry but forgot to include that chapter in my seven-volume work on poetry 1960-97. I wrote a draft of volume 1 in 1993 and that included the Scots material… the book eventually came out in 2003 with a new design which omitted that chapter. I then forgot to add it in to any of the other volumes. It is on my website www.pinko.org.
Whyte is quite critical of Sydney Goodsir Smith. There is an issue with authenticity which Goodsir Smith’s theatrical and highly coloured diction raises, not just for Whyte. The objection to English rule is that it distorts what is naturally there, in dependencies like Scotland. Something similar applies, in a more abstract realm of critique, to domination of the Scottish broadcast and print media by anglo-american commodified output. This shifts emphasis to unaltered Scottish reality, linguistic or otherwise, which is altered for the worse by processes overlaid on it. A return to the natural is success. This implies that literary processes, producing unnatural and enriched language, are a failure and to be rejected. However, if people are used to discussing adult topics in English and only mundane and domestic topics in Scots, it is unnatural to discuss serious topics in Scots. After the Reformation, Scottish priests normally preached in English, because of the prestige of the King James Bible and, before that, of reformed theologians in England. It is likely that even in the 17th century the middle class were speaking English, albeit with the well-known local accent or burr. So serious poetry in Scots is artificial and not at all naturalistic. Goodsir Smith’s diction is quite unrealistic, but it is broad enough to sweep the problem of realism aside. He worked as a theatre critic and this helps to explain his exaggerated but also expressive diction. Whyte dislikes this but we have also to ask whether linguistic naturalism allows poetry to exist at all. Nationalism bases itself on the imagination of a state of affairs which does not exist, and which is only accessible to idealistic speculation. It is credible that only exalted and non-democratic language can convey nationalist ideals. Goodsir Smith is not only involving unexplored possibilities but actually writing in a way which is unexplored and unheard-of.
As Whyte points out, the middle class in Scotland have for a long time spoken English, and Goodsir Smith’s family origins make it certain that he never spoke Scots when growing up. His exercise in writing poetry in Scots is artificial. But, this is a double-barrelled gun. If you apply rigorous naturalism, not only can you not discuss ideas in Scots, but also you cannot allow middle-class poets to write in Scots. I think we have now got the nub, of why “alternative” poetry has not done well in Scotland. Naturalistic writing in Scots is too formulaic and predictable, and artificial language meets with widespread hostility for not being authentic and for indulging in foreign practices.
The prevalence of English in Scotland is a reflection of the hegemony of the South in the last 400 years, and this is not much moderated by the related influence of American (since at least the late 18th century). This is true but it does not instantly tell us of beneficial effects from rejecting all the ideas of the last 400 years which were mediated by books written in English.
I have spent much time in the past ten years attempting to learn Scots Gaelic and, more recently, Irish Gaelic too. The collapse of the land-owning superstratum which had patronised high-grade poetry led, in both countries, to the decline of poetry into something much simpler, a folk practice with notable similarities to folk song. (The land was still owned in big estates by great families but there were large-scale shifts of ownership and the new dominant tier had limited interest in Gaelic, of either kind.) Literary Gaelic after 1750 is quite rare, and so a learner is likely to get involved in things like folk-tales. In fact, my interest in that part of the world has involved me in an interest in folk literature and so an unconscious acceptance that it is possible to have an intellectual interest in the voice of the people.
There are some similarities between the Gaelic trajectory and that of poetry in Scots and in Welsh. Having said that, I can see that it would take a book to explain exactly what the similarities and differences were. Things work differently in different societies. Hoping not to get called out on this, I want to suggest that literary and educated poetry can act as a depressant on folk and oral activity, that England has an unusually crushed and depressed tier of folklore (as collectors found in the 19th century), and that the vigour of recorded folklore in both Gaelic dialects is a thing of wonder.
This is a basis for talking about the importance of folklore in Scotland, although my feeling is that the respect for folk-song and dance, and so on) has produced crucial weaknesses in Scottish poetry, leading poets away from modernity and towards a diction which is compatible with folk-songs but not with abstract ideas. It has been a kind of warm cloud which disguises from people the fact that a poem or a volume is actually crap and sub-literary.
Note on the language problem
The decline of Scots was sociologically led, and as the upper classes of society began to speak English the semantic domains which were normal in Scots began to wither and contract. Drummond of Hawthornden may have been the first poet to write in English, but there is evidence that texts were being written in English already before the union of the two countries under one king in 1603. Over hundreds of years, Scots became a sociologically and cognitively incomplete language. It did not express the full life of society. We have to emphasise the power of sociology over speech behaviour, and of normal speech behavior over poetry; someone who sets out unilaterally to repeal the unconscious legislation of a society may end up being acknowledged as a genius, and may write poetry which is embarrassing, incongruous, off-pitch, and in the end unnatural.
The essential difference is between unambitious, oral type poetry, and ambitious, intellectual poetry which incorporates ideas and the realm of intellectual prose in general. This is what MacDiarmid insisted on. So we have to be careful in identifying what was written under the influence of M. Probably, the “Lallans renaissance” did not start until the 1940s; it had taken that long for a group of young poets, inevitably nationalists, to come along who admired M enough to take on his ideas. Poetry was being written in Scots during the 1920s, but it was banal and quite contemptible with MacD’s ideas. During the 1930s, we find William Jeffery (yes, he was David Kinloch’s grandfather) write intelligently in Scots, but only a few poems. They are collector's items. Instead, it is around 1940 that we see a group of university-educated poets (Douglas Young, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Maurice Lindsay, etc.) take up the idea.
For working-class Scottish children, the gap between the way they speak and the language they have to write school work in or read books in, is wide and confusing. This affects their performance in tests and disadvantages them in the academic struggle – the start of all the other disadvantages. This is undeniable, there is no point denying it. So it has been inevitable that the “alternative”, in Scotland, has been tied up with the language question. There is a second part to this. MacDiarmid's big argument was that the semantic range of Scots had to be extended very radically in order to produce significant literature. Poetry had continued to be written in Scots throughout, but his point was that it had been anti-intellectual, based on popular song, sentimental, and really sub-literary, ever since Drummond of Hawthornden started writing in English, around 1610. MacDiarmid lost his campaign...writing in Scots since 1950 or so has been pervasively in a sub-literary style. The poetry has followed the restriction to limited cognitive domains which the language itself is kept to. The moments when poets other than MacD used Scots in an ambitious, or 20th century, way are few but charged with vital significance. What strikes me, looking at catalogues, is how much of the recent poetry in Scots is directed at children and the school system. It connects with that traumatic moment for seven year olds when they realise that what they speak isn’t English. It favours things like nursery rhymes and folk tales which are mainly oral, are palatable for seven year olds, and are closed off from the world of literature for adults. My impression is that teachers in the primary sector are very keen on this kind of thing, and that the relevant poets spend a lot of time actually in the classroom. They can make a living in that way.
It is clear that MacDiarmid's project failed. Scots is an alternative but it is not producing poetry we can get involved with. The discourse never says that MacD failed, it is a taboo theme. People are not as interested in international importance as in the question of social mobility.
The attempt to reach out to children under 11, to encourage them to do creative writing in their own dialect, is a way of salvaging them for the system in a way which strengthens the system and actually weakens resistance. The proposal is not to have children writing exam answers in Scots, which has never happened. After winning them over, the education system offers them a complete diet of English. This pattern does not lead to a widening of the social scope of the Scots language. Instead, it stays in the playground.
The modern scene sees both poets who are under strain because they speak English but write in Scots, and writers under strain because they speak Scots but write in English.
There is that macaronic poem by Drummond, around 1610:
Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Crelia, crofta,
Sive Anstrea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant,
Per costam et scopulis Lobster manifootus in udis
Creepat, et in mediis ludit Whitenius undis :
Et vos Skipperii, soliti qui per mare breddum
Valde procul lanchare foris, iterumque redire,
Linquite Skellatas botas, Shippasque picatas,
Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate bloodaeam,
Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis
Banda Deum, quoque Nympharum Cockelshelearum,
Maia ubi Sheepifeda, et solgoosifera Bassa
Swellant in pelago, cum Sol bootatus Edenum
Postabat radiis madidis et shouribus atris.
A really creative use of language, and satire on the existence of various registers of language. But he wrote almost all his work in English.
Mike Hart used to buy the poetry for Compendium Books in Camden High Street, which was a basic resource. I used to prevent him from working by chatting to him, bad really. On one of those occasions, he told me about the poetry scene in Glasgow around 1967. People had got the idea of pop poetry from the Liverpool thing. So they read their poems in imitation Liverpool accents. Logical.
Charles Lind told me an anecdote about Sydney Goodsir Smith, as theatre critic for The Scotsman, attending a performance while drunk and falling out of a balcony into a lower balcony. Subsequently he lost that job, since the whole theatre had seen this happen. I looked on the internet and found a range of ingenious alternative explanations of this event, none of which I find credible. I don’t really like his poetry, but on reflection I find it has a theatrical quality which is low on authenticity but solves certain problems by being broad and exaggerated, and so just lurches beyond the question of linguistic authenticity.
I have quite a few issue of Lallans, the magazine of the Scots language movement. It used to annoy me by throwing out literary standards. But on re-reading I am more optimistic. There is a splendid poem in shetlandic dialect on MacDiarmid's geological threips:
On a shingly beach at Linga Grieve hed
his wilderness experience: wrat his epic
at owsed da wash o culture, da swittle o ideas.
Only da stons apö da ayre were irreducible.
Da briggistanes o Sodom man a shiggled
tae der very atoms wi da weicht o wirds:
wirds fa dae skröf o sciences, geology
an fae a teet at testaments, a nod at Norn
an odd conglomerate.
Man, I doot if dere’s a raised beach
onywhaar on Whalsa. (Da Nordern Isles were
relatively droonded i da Late Devensian,
no raised. Wis glacio-isostacy a wird too far?)
Christine de Luca declares, in her poem, that there are no raised beaches on Whalsay and MacD wasn't standing on a raised beach at all. Interesting. MacD lived in a house called Sudheim (south home) which was corrupted to ‘Sodom’, not sure I believe that. Anyway, this is Purely Fabulous and justifies the cost of the North Atlantic.
An email arrived suggesting an issue of Angel Exhaust about alternative Scottish poetry, to go with the issues we did on similar themes in Wales and Scotland. I have been thinking about this and also about why we didn’t do such an issue 20 years ago. The upshot is that I am going to write a blog about the matter, instead of actually producing a real publication.
The key to why there was no Scottish issue 20 years ago, after some discussions about it, was a conversation with Robin Purves and Peter Manson. I asked them how many shops in Scotland stocked Object Permanence, and the answer was “none”. It was obvious that there was no alternative sector in Scotland. Not only would no shops sell our possible Angel Exhaust, but there was no set of paths along which we could find alternative Scottish poets, so that we would probably go to press having missed significant and important people. A little magazine with no resources has to find downhill paths and this project was clearly an uphill struggle. (Another version would be that Object Permanence was the alternative sector. But they only ever published one Scottish poet.)
The reason why there is no ‘alternative sector’ corresponding to the one we found in England and Wales is mainly that the status of the Scots language is too hot a topic. The whole of Scottish literature is an ‘alternative’ compared to the anglo-american mainstream, yet the difficulties of writing in a dialect which is never used in schools are such that poetry in Scots is persistently sub-literary and reluctant to deal with abstract ideas. The result, over a hundred years now, has been an increase in the status of the language, much more interest by the primary sector of the schools system, a few academic posts, and a cluster of poets writing intelligently in Scots – but not writing something critical and innovative in the terms of Angel Exhaust readers. Like Scottish politics in general, this area is unstable and evolving.
When the email arrived, my reaction was that I knew nothing about Scottish poetry in the past 25 years. That was not a final answer, but it did suggest that we needed a native informant, or several, before such an issue could be assembled.
Clearly there is a sector of innovative poetry in Scotland. But, where John Goodby and Lyndon Davies found 38 ‘alternative’ poets for their Welsh anthology (Edge of Necessary), you obviously couldn't find 76 radical Scottish poets (i.e. for a population double that of Wales). Scotland did not have a counterpart to the deluge of formal innovation that happened in England in the 1970s, and even the second half of the Sixties. The reasons are interesting. And actually, there was an equivalent, if only on a smaller scale. Edwin Morgan, DM Black, Alan Riddell. But, it would be ridiculous to push this sector out of existence.I don’t really get the geographical basis for the poetic pattern, but I think the alternative thing was much weaker in the North of England than elsewhere, and so that it wasn’t “area-saturating” but dispersed and full of holes. Maybe the Modern thing could only capture people who weren’t already committed to something else, such as the nationalist thing or the Language Question.
I have Christopher Whyte’s book Modern Scottish Poetry. I guess I have read it three times... anyway it has classic status. I say this before noting that I jotted down in my copy a list of poets he left out: Joseph Macleod, TS Law, DM Black, WN Herbert, Alexander Hutchison, Walter Perrie, Frank Kuppner, Peter Manson, Peter Davidson. I now have to add Alan Riddell, whose work I encountered later. This list would give an outline for an alternative anthology of Scottish poetry. However, the rule is that little magazines deal with new poetry and preferably with unpublished poetry. A little magazine is inhibited from producing an anthology in which key poems are fifty years old. And the magazine-buying audience has limited interest in that sort of backward look. I should emphasise that Whyte designed a one-volume work with 20 poets, and that his omissions do not imply that he disregarded these other poets.
Some Scottish poetry of the past 20 years is exhibited in the anthologies The Smeddum Test, Aiblins, and Be the First to Like This. The first collects poems in Scots entered for a particular prize. The second is political poetry after the result of the 2014 Independence referendum; the title means “perhaps” and the theme is unused possibilities. The third is more like a generational anthology; a lot of the best poems are people who are not Scottish (but were resident there at the moment of the anthology).
I wrote about the language issue in Scottish poetry but forgot to include that chapter in my seven-volume work on poetry 1960-97. I wrote a draft of volume 1 in 1993 and that included the Scots material… the book eventually came out in 2003 with a new design which omitted that chapter. I then forgot to add it in to any of the other volumes. It is on my website www.pinko.org.
Whyte is quite critical of Sydney Goodsir Smith. There is an issue with authenticity which Goodsir Smith’s theatrical and highly coloured diction raises, not just for Whyte. The objection to English rule is that it distorts what is naturally there, in dependencies like Scotland. Something similar applies, in a more abstract realm of critique, to domination of the Scottish broadcast and print media by anglo-american commodified output. This shifts emphasis to unaltered Scottish reality, linguistic or otherwise, which is altered for the worse by processes overlaid on it. A return to the natural is success. This implies that literary processes, producing unnatural and enriched language, are a failure and to be rejected. However, if people are used to discussing adult topics in English and only mundane and domestic topics in Scots, it is unnatural to discuss serious topics in Scots. After the Reformation, Scottish priests normally preached in English, because of the prestige of the King James Bible and, before that, of reformed theologians in England. It is likely that even in the 17th century the middle class were speaking English, albeit with the well-known local accent or burr. So serious poetry in Scots is artificial and not at all naturalistic. Goodsir Smith’s diction is quite unrealistic, but it is broad enough to sweep the problem of realism aside. He worked as a theatre critic and this helps to explain his exaggerated but also expressive diction. Whyte dislikes this but we have also to ask whether linguistic naturalism allows poetry to exist at all. Nationalism bases itself on the imagination of a state of affairs which does not exist, and which is only accessible to idealistic speculation. It is credible that only exalted and non-democratic language can convey nationalist ideals. Goodsir Smith is not only involving unexplored possibilities but actually writing in a way which is unexplored and unheard-of.
As Whyte points out, the middle class in Scotland have for a long time spoken English, and Goodsir Smith’s family origins make it certain that he never spoke Scots when growing up. His exercise in writing poetry in Scots is artificial. But, this is a double-barrelled gun. If you apply rigorous naturalism, not only can you not discuss ideas in Scots, but also you cannot allow middle-class poets to write in Scots. I think we have now got the nub, of why “alternative” poetry has not done well in Scotland. Naturalistic writing in Scots is too formulaic and predictable, and artificial language meets with widespread hostility for not being authentic and for indulging in foreign practices.
The prevalence of English in Scotland is a reflection of the hegemony of the South in the last 400 years, and this is not much moderated by the related influence of American (since at least the late 18th century). This is true but it does not instantly tell us of beneficial effects from rejecting all the ideas of the last 400 years which were mediated by books written in English.
I have spent much time in the past ten years attempting to learn Scots Gaelic and, more recently, Irish Gaelic too. The collapse of the land-owning superstratum which had patronised high-grade poetry led, in both countries, to the decline of poetry into something much simpler, a folk practice with notable similarities to folk song. (The land was still owned in big estates by great families but there were large-scale shifts of ownership and the new dominant tier had limited interest in Gaelic, of either kind.) Literary Gaelic after 1750 is quite rare, and so a learner is likely to get involved in things like folk-tales. In fact, my interest in that part of the world has involved me in an interest in folk literature and so an unconscious acceptance that it is possible to have an intellectual interest in the voice of the people.
There are some similarities between the Gaelic trajectory and that of poetry in Scots and in Welsh. Having said that, I can see that it would take a book to explain exactly what the similarities and differences were. Things work differently in different societies. Hoping not to get called out on this, I want to suggest that literary and educated poetry can act as a depressant on folk and oral activity, that England has an unusually crushed and depressed tier of folklore (as collectors found in the 19th century), and that the vigour of recorded folklore in both Gaelic dialects is a thing of wonder.
This is a basis for talking about the importance of folklore in Scotland, although my feeling is that the respect for folk-song and dance, and so on) has produced crucial weaknesses in Scottish poetry, leading poets away from modernity and towards a diction which is compatible with folk-songs but not with abstract ideas. It has been a kind of warm cloud which disguises from people the fact that a poem or a volume is actually crap and sub-literary.
Note on the language problem
The decline of Scots was sociologically led, and as the upper classes of society began to speak English the semantic domains which were normal in Scots began to wither and contract. Drummond of Hawthornden may have been the first poet to write in English, but there is evidence that texts were being written in English already before the union of the two countries under one king in 1603. Over hundreds of years, Scots became a sociologically and cognitively incomplete language. It did not express the full life of society. We have to emphasise the power of sociology over speech behaviour, and of normal speech behavior over poetry; someone who sets out unilaterally to repeal the unconscious legislation of a society may end up being acknowledged as a genius, and may write poetry which is embarrassing, incongruous, off-pitch, and in the end unnatural.
The essential difference is between unambitious, oral type poetry, and ambitious, intellectual poetry which incorporates ideas and the realm of intellectual prose in general. This is what MacDiarmid insisted on. So we have to be careful in identifying what was written under the influence of M. Probably, the “Lallans renaissance” did not start until the 1940s; it had taken that long for a group of young poets, inevitably nationalists, to come along who admired M enough to take on his ideas. Poetry was being written in Scots during the 1920s, but it was banal and quite contemptible with MacD’s ideas. During the 1930s, we find William Jeffery (yes, he was David Kinloch’s grandfather) write intelligently in Scots, but only a few poems. They are collector's items. Instead, it is around 1940 that we see a group of university-educated poets (Douglas Young, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Maurice Lindsay, etc.) take up the idea.
For working-class Scottish children, the gap between the way they speak and the language they have to write school work in or read books in, is wide and confusing. This affects their performance in tests and disadvantages them in the academic struggle – the start of all the other disadvantages. This is undeniable, there is no point denying it. So it has been inevitable that the “alternative”, in Scotland, has been tied up with the language question. There is a second part to this. MacDiarmid's big argument was that the semantic range of Scots had to be extended very radically in order to produce significant literature. Poetry had continued to be written in Scots throughout, but his point was that it had been anti-intellectual, based on popular song, sentimental, and really sub-literary, ever since Drummond of Hawthornden started writing in English, around 1610. MacDiarmid lost his campaign...writing in Scots since 1950 or so has been pervasively in a sub-literary style. The poetry has followed the restriction to limited cognitive domains which the language itself is kept to. The moments when poets other than MacD used Scots in an ambitious, or 20th century, way are few but charged with vital significance. What strikes me, looking at catalogues, is how much of the recent poetry in Scots is directed at children and the school system. It connects with that traumatic moment for seven year olds when they realise that what they speak isn’t English. It favours things like nursery rhymes and folk tales which are mainly oral, are palatable for seven year olds, and are closed off from the world of literature for adults. My impression is that teachers in the primary sector are very keen on this kind of thing, and that the relevant poets spend a lot of time actually in the classroom. They can make a living in that way.
It is clear that MacDiarmid's project failed. Scots is an alternative but it is not producing poetry we can get involved with. The discourse never says that MacD failed, it is a taboo theme. People are not as interested in international importance as in the question of social mobility.
The attempt to reach out to children under 11, to encourage them to do creative writing in their own dialect, is a way of salvaging them for the system in a way which strengthens the system and actually weakens resistance. The proposal is not to have children writing exam answers in Scots, which has never happened. After winning them over, the education system offers them a complete diet of English. This pattern does not lead to a widening of the social scope of the Scots language. Instead, it stays in the playground.
The modern scene sees both poets who are under strain because they speak English but write in Scots, and writers under strain because they speak Scots but write in English.
There is that macaronic poem by Drummond, around 1610:
Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Crelia, crofta,
Sive Anstrea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant,
Per costam et scopulis Lobster manifootus in udis
Creepat, et in mediis ludit Whitenius undis :
Et vos Skipperii, soliti qui per mare breddum
Valde procul lanchare foris, iterumque redire,
Linquite Skellatas botas, Shippasque picatas,
Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate bloodaeam,
Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverat omnis
Banda Deum, quoque Nympharum Cockelshelearum,
Maia ubi Sheepifeda, et solgoosifera Bassa
Swellant in pelago, cum Sol bootatus Edenum
Postabat radiis madidis et shouribus atris.
A really creative use of language, and satire on the existence of various registers of language. But he wrote almost all his work in English.
Mike Hart used to buy the poetry for Compendium Books in Camden High Street, which was a basic resource. I used to prevent him from working by chatting to him, bad really. On one of those occasions, he told me about the poetry scene in Glasgow around 1967. People had got the idea of pop poetry from the Liverpool thing. So they read their poems in imitation Liverpool accents. Logical.
Charles Lind told me an anecdote about Sydney Goodsir Smith, as theatre critic for The Scotsman, attending a performance while drunk and falling out of a balcony into a lower balcony. Subsequently he lost that job, since the whole theatre had seen this happen. I looked on the internet and found a range of ingenious alternative explanations of this event, none of which I find credible. I don’t really like his poetry, but on reflection I find it has a theatrical quality which is low on authenticity but solves certain problems by being broad and exaggerated, and so just lurches beyond the question of linguistic authenticity.
I have quite a few issue of Lallans, the magazine of the Scots language movement. It used to annoy me by throwing out literary standards. But on re-reading I am more optimistic. There is a splendid poem in shetlandic dialect on MacDiarmid's geological threips:
On a shingly beach at Linga Grieve hed
his wilderness experience: wrat his epic
at owsed da wash o culture, da swittle o ideas.
Only da stons apö da ayre were irreducible.
Da briggistanes o Sodom man a shiggled
tae der very atoms wi da weicht o wirds:
wirds fa dae skröf o sciences, geology
an fae a teet at testaments, a nod at Norn
an odd conglomerate.
Man, I doot if dere’s a raised beach
onywhaar on Whalsa. (Da Nordern Isles were
relatively droonded i da Late Devensian,
no raised. Wis glacio-isostacy a wird too far?)
Christine de Luca declares, in her poem, that there are no raised beaches on Whalsay and MacD wasn't standing on a raised beach at all. Interesting. MacD lived in a house called Sudheim (south home) which was corrupted to ‘Sodom’, not sure I believe that. Anyway, this is Purely Fabulous and justifies the cost of the North Atlantic.
Friday, 3 December 2021
An Impartial collection
(part 2 of previous post)
O’Tuama quotes an account of a Great McCarthy by a “spy” (spiaire) around February 1729:
“that he has been struck and inhumanly pursued by a milesian prince of a drunken and extravagant character, commonly called McCarthy Mór… as being a person who lives extra legem and matters not indictments nor any other prosecution.”
This is memorable because it is so forthright, but it is hardly likely that the person being described would describe himself in the same terms. Being robust does not also mean that something is the last word. Are we to take it that self-awareness is always wrong, and that it is the employment of the historian to puncture and disperse this self-awareness? Indeed, O'Tuama quotes O’Rahilly’s funeral eulogy on this McCarthy, which is not much of a character sketch but does present him as the soul of the old order, which is passing out of view with his death, in 1729. (‘Milesian’ means that his family reached Ireland with the milesian invasion, in mythical prehistory, and not with any later group of ships.)
The interest is in the superimposition of two views of the same thing. Two is not the upper limit. Superimposition, and the abandonment of the single robust narrative line, are so central to what makes life interesting for a modern historian that they are not going to go away. They will continue to be the staple of historical research, and not just in Ireland. It’s just that this way of opening up the past is never likely to upset the underlying pattern of “bad government, foreign government” which is familiar to pupils in secondary school.
O’Tuama suggests that O’Rahilly’s depiction of Tadhg O Croinin was influenced by the figure of Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ novel. It is hard to avoid the reaction that this would cast the McCarthy landowners as Don Quijote figures – with O’Rahilly’s bardic poetry corresponding to the unreal and exalted chivalrous romances which Don Quijote read. It is notable that Sancho was sane and saw the world as it is.
O’Tuama quotes a 1922 history of the McCarthy family which I tried to access in an on-line version which had been scanned in such a way as to make it unusable. I did randomly pick up this bardic account of the high life at Dun Togher, around 1625:
Their strongholds were filled with beautiful women, and quick-slaying cavalry viewing them; mirth, drunkenness, playing on harps, poems, songs, bards, and the bacagh shouting and roaring, and soothsayers were at their feasts; there too were gamblers in mutual discord, and large-bodied vagrant gluttons contending.
This very castle was the building where O’Rahilly set one of his poems, ‘An file i gCaisel an Tochair’. (Bacach comes from Latin baculus, staff, and probably means beggars, unable to walk properly; although the editor is unwilling to use this translation. The poem is about generosity so the beggars are a natural part of the picture.) The bard is Donal na Tuile. This portrait probably does concur with Tadhg’s understanding of himself. By 1700 the castle was in the hands of another family. A tag of verse states that this Tadhg died sheltering in a slit of the mountain, after his lands were forfeited.
According to Colm Lennon, Togher means a causeway through a marsh.
I found some irish texts on-line and extracted this O'Rahilly poem. the translation dates from 1900, I think.
IV. GILE NA GILE. The Brightness of Brightness I saw in a lonely path, Crystal of crystal, her blue eyes tinged with green, Melody of melody, her speech not morose with age, The ruddy and white appeared in her glowing cheeks. 5 Plaiting of plaiting in every hair of her yellow locks, That robbed the earth of its brilliancy by their full sweeping, An ornament brighter than glass on her swelling breast, Which was fashioned at her creation in the world above. A tale of knowledge she told me, all lonely as she was, 10 News of the return of Him to the place which is his by kingly descent, News of the destruction of the bands who expelled him, And other tidings which, through sheer fear, I will not put in my lays. Oh, folly of follies for me to go up close to her! By the captive I was bound fast a captive; 15 As I implored the Son of Mary to aid me, she bounded from me, And the maiden went off in a flash to the fairy mansion of Luachair. I rush in mad race running with a bounding heart, Through margins of a morass, through meads, through a barren moorland, I reach the strong mansion — the way I came I know not — 20 That dwelling of dwellings, reared by wizard sorcery.
They burst into laughter, mockingly — a troop of wizards And a band of maidens, trim, with plaited locks; In the bondage of fetters they put me without much respite, While to my maiden clung a clumsy, lubberly clown. 25 I told her then, in words the sincerest, How it ill became her to be united to an awkward, sorry churl, While the fairest thrice over of all the Scotic race Was waiting to receive her as his beauteous bride. As she hears my voice she weeps through wounded pride, 30 The streams run down plenteously from her glowing cheeks, She sends me with a guide for my safe conduct from the mansion, She is the Brightness of Brightness I saw upon a lonely path.
THE BINDING. O my sickness, my misfortune, my fall, my sorrow, my loss ! The bright, fond, kind, fair, soft-lipped, gentle maiden, 35 Held by a horned, malicious, croaking, yellow clown, with a black troop ! While no relief can reach her until the heroes come back across the main.
‘the fairest thrice over’ refers to James II, the Stewart king, and the heroes over the sea are Jacobites in exile. "Brightness of Brightness" is just an intensifier, like "king of kings" in the Bible and in related Christian texts. It is there applied to concrete nouns and not abstract ones. Another poem:
THE ANSWER OF AODHAGAN.
I shall shave the bristles, I shall crop the nails Of the snub-nosed, wheezing hangman, The scarred fellow, scabbed, loud-voiced, spiteful, Shorn, sole-spotted, stumbling. 65 From the top of his head, in which droves of vermin are wont to be, Covered over, gathered together in foul lumps, To the soles of the club-footed fellow, who is stiff-necked, Aged, hollow-voiced, gnawed. I will tear the ragged wretch, who is planed, poor, 70 Vicious, into wounded bits ; The starving miser, the hangman trickster, The powerless cripple full of reptile spawn. A fellow full of vermin, of running eyes, a dirty gaunt wad, A fugitive vagabond is the liar, 75 A slender hunchback, a greasy swallower, Who swallows every rubbish into his greedy maw. I will gnaw the feet of the villain caitiff, Branching, broken, wounded ; And his two hard heels on which are chilblains, 80 Holes and scorched cavities. Crooked nails made of iron Are covering and shield for his fingers ; And his two shanks, sprained, broken, scalded, Peeled, seared, full of scars.
I shall peck at his knees and the junctions of his nerves ; Which will take from the wrong-doer his power of walking, And his two hips like a pair of bare boards And his waist tawny and feeble, His rotund belly hung above that ; 90 As a cess-pool, wide-arched ; A brutish, greasy, greedy maw, Has the curlew of the false teaching. A narrow breast, slender, bristled, yellow-skinned ; Eyes of a thief dim of sight ; 95 Hair of a he-goat ; back with two ridges, Yellow, bulging, putrid, rough. An ignorant clown, a stroller deserving of the gallows, An old burned stalk from the sea-side, A wretch of odious manners, a conceited simpleton, 100 A harsh enemy of the Irish nobility. A pecker at a small potato, a trifler about the house, A scraper of the greasy pot ; A scabby wretch, a raw-boned ragged fellow. A shameless simpleton of consumptive coughing. 105 His throat emits a storm of wind Which sickens thousands into dire pain The surly carcass from which comes a stench Through his rough open jaws.
Domhnall is he, the hated of the neighbours, no A remnant without the power of making a single poem ; Sinister son of Donnchadh, large-skulled, husky, Jealous, churlish, nerveless. Decrepit is the lean withered creature, faded of foot, Crooked, a grease-sweating object ; 115 He is deceitful, destructive, quarrelsome, vicious, Cunning, contentious, cowardly. He looks like a monkey, frightened, when it goes In anger running against the side of a wall ; Or like a rat running through a cellar, 120 Hotly pursued by strong cats. Ye poets of Munster, ban ye This yellow-skinned clod ; A noisy little bard, put cards beneath him, It is plain that it is madness he has written against me. 125 It is not proper for the learned ever to listen to Lays from a mouth which does not compose smoothly ; It is a shame for the nobles of a fair proud land To write praise of his poems or his verses. [in his black hair are strong nits, and ashes, 130 And active crooked-legged vermin ; A forked comb tears the lumps Which gobbles the guest with a noise as of a bell.
His hair may be compared to that of the demons On the brink of darkened Acheron ; 135 Brian O'Brosnaghan, a slothful churl, The worst fish on the Kenmare strand.] THE BINDING. A poor, empty, wretched miser, a withered branchlet, Starved hangman of porridge in a crooked mouth, An ill-shaped wretch, who barters his friends for a very trifle, 140 It was he who made, unawares, an attack with his tongue on Aodhagan Fionn. [Domhnall, son of Donnchadh, the long-necked fellow of grinding teeth, The corrupted sluggard of the goats, who does not speak justly ; Also, as I hear, empty was his lordship Until through the rabble of Dromann, you burst, you old remnant.]
I suppose 'ceangal', or binding, means a final stanza which ties the themes up.
(part 2 of previous post)
O’Tuama quotes an account of a Great McCarthy by a “spy” (spiaire) around February 1729:
“that he has been struck and inhumanly pursued by a milesian prince of a drunken and extravagant character, commonly called McCarthy Mór… as being a person who lives extra legem and matters not indictments nor any other prosecution.”
This is memorable because it is so forthright, but it is hardly likely that the person being described would describe himself in the same terms. Being robust does not also mean that something is the last word. Are we to take it that self-awareness is always wrong, and that it is the employment of the historian to puncture and disperse this self-awareness? Indeed, O'Tuama quotes O’Rahilly’s funeral eulogy on this McCarthy, which is not much of a character sketch but does present him as the soul of the old order, which is passing out of view with his death, in 1729. (‘Milesian’ means that his family reached Ireland with the milesian invasion, in mythical prehistory, and not with any later group of ships.)
The interest is in the superimposition of two views of the same thing. Two is not the upper limit. Superimposition, and the abandonment of the single robust narrative line, are so central to what makes life interesting for a modern historian that they are not going to go away. They will continue to be the staple of historical research, and not just in Ireland. It’s just that this way of opening up the past is never likely to upset the underlying pattern of “bad government, foreign government” which is familiar to pupils in secondary school.
O’Tuama suggests that O’Rahilly’s depiction of Tadhg O Croinin was influenced by the figure of Sancho Panza in Cervantes’ novel. It is hard to avoid the reaction that this would cast the McCarthy landowners as Don Quijote figures – with O’Rahilly’s bardic poetry corresponding to the unreal and exalted chivalrous romances which Don Quijote read. It is notable that Sancho was sane and saw the world as it is.
O’Tuama quotes a 1922 history of the McCarthy family which I tried to access in an on-line version which had been scanned in such a way as to make it unusable. I did randomly pick up this bardic account of the high life at Dun Togher, around 1625:
Their strongholds were filled with beautiful women, and quick-slaying cavalry viewing them; mirth, drunkenness, playing on harps, poems, songs, bards, and the bacagh shouting and roaring, and soothsayers were at their feasts; there too were gamblers in mutual discord, and large-bodied vagrant gluttons contending.
This very castle was the building where O’Rahilly set one of his poems, ‘An file i gCaisel an Tochair’. (Bacach comes from Latin baculus, staff, and probably means beggars, unable to walk properly; although the editor is unwilling to use this translation. The poem is about generosity so the beggars are a natural part of the picture.) The bard is Donal na Tuile. This portrait probably does concur with Tadhg’s understanding of himself. By 1700 the castle was in the hands of another family. A tag of verse states that this Tadhg died sheltering in a slit of the mountain, after his lands were forfeited.
According to Colm Lennon, Togher means a causeway through a marsh.
I found some irish texts on-line and extracted this O'Rahilly poem. the translation dates from 1900, I think.
IV. GILE NA GILE. The Brightness of Brightness I saw in a lonely path, Crystal of crystal, her blue eyes tinged with green, Melody of melody, her speech not morose with age, The ruddy and white appeared in her glowing cheeks. 5 Plaiting of plaiting in every hair of her yellow locks, That robbed the earth of its brilliancy by their full sweeping, An ornament brighter than glass on her swelling breast, Which was fashioned at her creation in the world above. A tale of knowledge she told me, all lonely as she was, 10 News of the return of Him to the place which is his by kingly descent, News of the destruction of the bands who expelled him, And other tidings which, through sheer fear, I will not put in my lays. Oh, folly of follies for me to go up close to her! By the captive I was bound fast a captive; 15 As I implored the Son of Mary to aid me, she bounded from me, And the maiden went off in a flash to the fairy mansion of Luachair. I rush in mad race running with a bounding heart, Through margins of a morass, through meads, through a barren moorland, I reach the strong mansion — the way I came I know not — 20 That dwelling of dwellings, reared by wizard sorcery.
They burst into laughter, mockingly — a troop of wizards And a band of maidens, trim, with plaited locks; In the bondage of fetters they put me without much respite, While to my maiden clung a clumsy, lubberly clown. 25 I told her then, in words the sincerest, How it ill became her to be united to an awkward, sorry churl, While the fairest thrice over of all the Scotic race Was waiting to receive her as his beauteous bride. As she hears my voice she weeps through wounded pride, 30 The streams run down plenteously from her glowing cheeks, She sends me with a guide for my safe conduct from the mansion, She is the Brightness of Brightness I saw upon a lonely path.
THE BINDING. O my sickness, my misfortune, my fall, my sorrow, my loss ! The bright, fond, kind, fair, soft-lipped, gentle maiden, 35 Held by a horned, malicious, croaking, yellow clown, with a black troop ! While no relief can reach her until the heroes come back across the main.
‘the fairest thrice over’ refers to James II, the Stewart king, and the heroes over the sea are Jacobites in exile. "Brightness of Brightness" is just an intensifier, like "king of kings" in the Bible and in related Christian texts. It is there applied to concrete nouns and not abstract ones. Another poem:
THE ANSWER OF AODHAGAN.
I shall shave the bristles, I shall crop the nails Of the snub-nosed, wheezing hangman, The scarred fellow, scabbed, loud-voiced, spiteful, Shorn, sole-spotted, stumbling. 65 From the top of his head, in which droves of vermin are wont to be, Covered over, gathered together in foul lumps, To the soles of the club-footed fellow, who is stiff-necked, Aged, hollow-voiced, gnawed. I will tear the ragged wretch, who is planed, poor, 70 Vicious, into wounded bits ; The starving miser, the hangman trickster, The powerless cripple full of reptile spawn. A fellow full of vermin, of running eyes, a dirty gaunt wad, A fugitive vagabond is the liar, 75 A slender hunchback, a greasy swallower, Who swallows every rubbish into his greedy maw. I will gnaw the feet of the villain caitiff, Branching, broken, wounded ; And his two hard heels on which are chilblains, 80 Holes and scorched cavities. Crooked nails made of iron Are covering and shield for his fingers ; And his two shanks, sprained, broken, scalded, Peeled, seared, full of scars.
I shall peck at his knees and the junctions of his nerves ; Which will take from the wrong-doer his power of walking, And his two hips like a pair of bare boards And his waist tawny and feeble, His rotund belly hung above that ; 90 As a cess-pool, wide-arched ; A brutish, greasy, greedy maw, Has the curlew of the false teaching. A narrow breast, slender, bristled, yellow-skinned ; Eyes of a thief dim of sight ; 95 Hair of a he-goat ; back with two ridges, Yellow, bulging, putrid, rough. An ignorant clown, a stroller deserving of the gallows, An old burned stalk from the sea-side, A wretch of odious manners, a conceited simpleton, 100 A harsh enemy of the Irish nobility. A pecker at a small potato, a trifler about the house, A scraper of the greasy pot ; A scabby wretch, a raw-boned ragged fellow. A shameless simpleton of consumptive coughing. 105 His throat emits a storm of wind Which sickens thousands into dire pain The surly carcass from which comes a stench Through his rough open jaws.
Domhnall is he, the hated of the neighbours, no A remnant without the power of making a single poem ; Sinister son of Donnchadh, large-skulled, husky, Jealous, churlish, nerveless. Decrepit is the lean withered creature, faded of foot, Crooked, a grease-sweating object ; 115 He is deceitful, destructive, quarrelsome, vicious, Cunning, contentious, cowardly. He looks like a monkey, frightened, when it goes In anger running against the side of a wall ; Or like a rat running through a cellar, 120 Hotly pursued by strong cats. Ye poets of Munster, ban ye This yellow-skinned clod ; A noisy little bard, put cards beneath him, It is plain that it is madness he has written against me. 125 It is not proper for the learned ever to listen to Lays from a mouth which does not compose smoothly ; It is a shame for the nobles of a fair proud land To write praise of his poems or his verses. [in his black hair are strong nits, and ashes, 130 And active crooked-legged vermin ; A forked comb tears the lumps Which gobbles the guest with a noise as of a bell.
His hair may be compared to that of the demons On the brink of darkened Acheron ; 135 Brian O'Brosnaghan, a slothful churl, The worst fish on the Kenmare strand.] THE BINDING. A poor, empty, wretched miser, a withered branchlet, Starved hangman of porridge in a crooked mouth, An ill-shaped wretch, who barters his friends for a very trifle, 140 It was he who made, unawares, an attack with his tongue on Aodhagan Fionn. [Domhnall, son of Donnchadh, the long-necked fellow of grinding teeth, The corrupted sluggard of the goats, who does not speak justly ; Also, as I hear, empty was his lordship Until through the rabble of Dromann, you burst, you old remnant.]
I suppose 'ceangal', or binding, means a final stanza which ties the themes up.
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