Alternative Poetry
I posted something about alternative poetry in July 2021. I thought to add some more, because information is emerging about the overall shape of the field as it recedes into the past and the high spots fade out (and stop blinding us).
There is a single issue (labelled 19-21) of 2nd Aeon, in 1974, which has (very quick) reviews of 276 small press publications. Apart from anything else, this raises the question about just how many alternative poets were active in 1974. And, how many were active over the whole stretch from 1960 to 2010. (2010 is an arbitrarily chosen moment… 1960 is the rough location of a break, when Migrant began putting out pamphlets which didn’t fit the commercial book world at all.)
I think to get inside the underground you have first to recognise roughly what the cast of characters is. A thousand poets, quite probably, of whom say one hundred are prominent and act as landmarks. Secondly, the chronology, which as I said I am not clear about. People see the scene as a sort of mythical place which is always the same. They deny that change is taking place.
Thirdly, stylistic features. Commentators would generally mention hedonism, spontaneity, dislike of authority, political idealism, frame shifts, lack of frame markers, an inclination towards myth, interests in unusual (non academic?) knowledge, irregularity, lack of “polish”, rejection of a Christian framework and of moral generalisations as an element, preference for open situations rather than ones dominated by service and duty. Characters in the poems are not presented as dominated by economics, status, and morality. The influence of American poets of the 1950s is powerful. Beyond that, many features are important, but are certainly not universal in the population of poets we are thinking about. If you accept that the object being described includes one thousand people, you have to pull the camera back and capture overall features while ignoring fine details, which just aren't present in a large number of poems.
There used to be a trade association called the Association of Little Presses. Its members were non-commercial (unsuccessful?) poetry publishers, and in practice they published almost exclusively poetry - a few political pamphlets notwithstanding. The ALP used to publish catalogues of all available publications put out by its members; title Catalogue of Little Press Books in Print Published in the United Kingdom. In good years, someone indexed those lists by author – so that you can count the number of authors dealing with non-commercial publishers in that year. This takes us into the macro-realm of overall volumes.
I found the catalogue issue for 1990-1. It had an author index, so I could count 1571 individual writers listed there. (This figure has problems and may include only 3-400 poets.) I then looked at some ALP lists for the 1970s, although the way they are organised makes them hard to use. Then I looked at the 1974 list, which for once has an author index, and counted 488 names. I took the names beginning with S and counted the overlap with 1990. It was about 25%. It was as if the 1990 list was a completely new list of names. If we assume (on the basis of scanning these lists) five hundred 'alternative poets' in the 70s, and speculate about 500 further poets emerging after 1980, then we get to 1000 for the whole period, say 1960-1997. This is a numbingly large figure, and I am certainly not proposing that everyone in that set is worth examining or resurrecting, but it does suggest how important the Underground realm was. You have this tradition of eccentricity in Britain, and the idea of being personal, original and nonconformist appealed to large numbers of people.
I don't have a copy of the ALP lists – they charge a stiff price for them second-hand – but I have a copy of Poet's Yearbook for 1978. (It is a list of apparently all new poetry publications in a year stretching from June to June.) I extracted 70 or so names from this:
B Catling, Chris Torrance, Eric Mottram, Walter Perrie, Tom Lowenstein, Susan Fearn, Jeremy Reed, Nick Toczek, Allen Fisher, Ulli McCarthy, Phil Maillard, Alan Riddell, Glyn Hughes, Stuart Mills, Colin Simms, Steve Sneyd, Barry Edgar Pilcher, Philip Jenkins, Hugo Manning, Eddie Flintoff, Michael Haslam, John Hall, Tim Longville, Paul Matthews, Neil Oram, Nigel Wheale, Mark Hyatt, Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Dinah Livingstone, David Chaloner, Iain Sinclair, Brian Marley, Charles Ingham, Nicki Jackowska, GF Dutton, Eric Ratcliffe, Elaine Randell, Asa Benveniste, Stuart Montgomery, John Seed, Tony Jackson, Lee Harwood, Bill Griffiths, Michele Roberts, Paul Brown, Bernard Kelly, Owen Davis, Jeremy Hilton, Martin Booth, Glenda George, David Greenslade, Ken Edwards, DM Thomas, Florence Elon, Roy Fisher, Susan Musgrave, Sacheverell Sitwell, Colin Nixon, Mark Williams, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Elsa Corbluth, Jeremy Adler, Jeff Nuttall, JH Prynne, Paula Claire, Paul Green, John Welch, Martin Thom.
It is often said that the Underground went through a dip or retraction after 1977 and grand disappointments. However, if the 1990-1 list has three times as many names as the 1974 list, the existence of that dip in overall activity has to be questioned.
People who write about poetry tend to approach the Underground through a legalistic path. They define a coherent artistic or political or ideological position, elaborate that to their satisfaction, and then stand it up as a description of how small press poets really are. This is a notably unsuccessful approach. The underground world is clearly amorphous. The coherent definitions fail simple tests of descriptive accuracy. To make them pass, you always have to take out large parts of the subject matter. There may be another problem, that some critics think there are only three underground poets. This was the point of the ALP lists, to put into the public domain minimal facts about the whole of the alternative press sector. The lists describe what ALP member publishers were offering for sale, and did not apply any artistic criteria. Our definitions should match the primary evidence. The folklorist Lauri Honko has a useful statement about this: “If a fancy theory replaces or makes obsolete identity elements actually used in social interaction by the people studied, very little has been achieved. A degree of recognisability by all parties of the alleged social and cultural identities should exist as a warrant against false definitions and artificial categorisation.”
Honko identifies a speech community as empowered to make category ascriptions which we then have to accept. The first thing to say is that a large number of poets are not unambiguously Alternative. This makes the idea of a count problematic. We would need some other size measurement. Secondly, we have to take on the idea that if you could line up 1000 members of the poetry community, they would disagree with each other about category ascriptions. I think we have to give up recording every detail of this, it is just an impenetrable thicket. I can say that nobody identifies themselves as conservative and conventional, and a result of this is that many conventional poets wish to deny the radical poets the status of innovators.
This count of 1000 made me realise also how little I know. Time has gone by and I came to think this was also an opportunity to describe the small press world as an organism. The subject was too large to be passed by in its entirety – as critics used to do in the bad old days. There used to be a kind of act of oblivion whereby an establishment critic would say “all small press poets are alike and I read one of them twenty years ago (variant: 40 years ago) and he was no good therefore no small press poets are any good and I can safely ignore them except for making destructive generalisations about them which will please other establishment critics”. Even if it is true that all small press poets are no good, it is not at all true that they are all similar or that you can estimate their aesthetic value without first reading them. I wanted to establish this as a fact. Apart from that, I want to entertain an idea of a resource which would when called on give you the story of each of these thousand people: their publication, their career, their shipwrecks (if necessary), their artistic hypothesis, their affinities.
There is a package of (alpha male, wisdom, responsibility, experience, generalisations, ethical superiority) which older poets saw as their commodity number one and which readers reacted against. A focal problem was the poem which has some concrete information and then at the end packages it up in a moral generalisation, so something like ‘people should be nice to each other’ or ‘you can’t trust the powerful and connected’ or “isn’t he a bit like you and me’ or even ‘it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels’. I am wondering whether this kind of poem really exists. I thought to look at Poetry Dimension 2, a reliable reference source for conventional poems of the time, which was 1974. I counted 57 poems of which 15 have a lurch into generalisation and lesson drawing at the end, or close to the end.
This is a valid indicator. Alternative poems never have the smug concluding quatrain. But, it is not a certain marker of membership. The other 42 poems in that 1974 anthology don’t have the tedious generalisation as their triumphant climax. Moreover, we have a body of poems, in the four volumes of Poetry Introduction which appeared from Faber from 1969 up to 1980, which represents younger mainstream poets and which is also almost entirely free of the “smug conclusion”. So we are looking at a generational shift rather than something which separates two groups of poets of the same age. There is something which new poets were resisting and it was linked with certainty (about ethical truth and academic knowledge) as opposed to being new, curious, and excited. Maybe the idea of the smug closing quatrain is more of a Fear Symbol and less of a real, dreadful, thing. An older generation of readers were asking moral questions of poets, and poets were giving clear and resonant answers to these questions, which since the 1960s few people have been asking. The status of knowledge supported the status of educated individuals and the rejection of generalisations about life was an anti-authoritarian conclusion.
I also looked at frame shifts. The proposal would be that the alternative poem relies on montage, on the juxtaposition of disparate ideas – without frame markers, conjunctions and so on, which would signpost the shift and tell us what the connection between the frames was. The poem would be like a cinema in which lengths of film follow each other to satisfy the senses but without any obvious link between them. Each moment would be vivid and we would enjoy the experience without analysing it. I compared two 70s poems. Both were about the German bombing of Britain in the early 1940s. One was by Meic Stephens, one by Allen Fisher. I had Stephens tagged as mainstream because his poem was in Poetry Dimension. His poem was probably set in 1974, had a flashback to 1942 (when his village of Treforest was bombed) and inside that a flashback to a time before the war (when the siren was for an accident in a coalmine). He doesn’t actually label the shifts – with a feature like a dissolve with which a film might signal “flashback”. So the difference between the two poems is one of degree – one has more frame shifts and less insertion into an autobiographer narrative which naturalises it. But Stephens’ poem has two flashbacks, which are montage effects by any definition. And Fisher’s poem (“Morale Confusion”) sticks accurately to its theme over about 80 lines – the exception being a collaged-in piece about the Milky Way which actually fits in as a glimpse of the sky, whence the bombs fell. There is a passage I don’t understand: “moving west towards immortality/ the deer confluence/ in these measures/ in region of summation's meeting”. I have a vague feeling this is a theme from Amerindian mythology, but anyway it is about the afterlife.
I noticed that the siren, which connects the parts of Stephens’ poem (he hears an ambulance siren and flashes back to an air-raid siren) arouses diffuse anxiety. It is an ambiguous signal. I wrote (in a longer piece) “A search in Poetry Dimension 2, which I keep to serve as a reference set of mainstream devices, shows that the poems are frequently about what cannot be defined or assimilated. The choice of these themes shows that these poets like indeterminacy – although their vocabulary would say evocative, ambiguous, strange, etc. They often start from a moment of uncertainty – an unresolved sensation which arrests normal patterns of consciousness. The 'classic' Underground idea of a mainstream poem would be that “it starts with anomalous and strange things and by explanation reduces them all to complete banality, clarity being the same as loss'. In these terms, the Underground must always win. But after looking at the genuinely m-stream poems in Poetry Dimension, a not very good anthology of poems from a single year, I don't think the poems fulfil the formula.” Again it is a matter of degree. The alternative poems are more ambiguous but the mainstream poems consciously use ambiguity as part of their fabric.
Would it be a good idea to compare thousands of poems? Probably. But if you try to compare two poems which have no common elements then the operation will not work. You need a natural pair of poems as a starting point.
Stephens uses myth at one point, the dogs of Annwn and a mention of Tristan:
The dogs of Annwn barked for me then,
Trystan called without hope to Esyllt
across the black waters. Ai, it was their wail
– but Fisher also mentions mythology: “Spurt of Juno’s milk into night sky/ silver coins/ Milky Way in idealised universe”. This may be literally a description of a mantelpiece carved by Grinling Gibbons. The fact that both poems use myth may neutralise a supposed distinction: there is then no contrast to be drawn. But I feel that when the poets are making similar gestures we are seeing them very intimately and the differences are especially clear.
Another feature would be familiarity. The alternative poem is unpredictable. But another way of looking at this is to claim that the new style poem has jumps of sense, presents a pattern which is unfamiliar, and therefore is obscure. There is an issue about knowing why the author is doing something – the reader knowing what information to focus on and in fact what the expected reaction is. We could call this the separation of theme from detail. It is credible that the alternative poem is unacceptable to mainstream editors because it isn’t instantly recognisable and this is seen as being badly written – poorly organised, in fact unfinished. So a rigid idea of tidiness is part of the issue. Keywords are control, rigidity, boundaries. A poem has a schema and the reader seizes the schema as part of reading the poem. There may be a match between the rigid knowledge which we see in older poems and the knowledge of the poem which is encapsulated in the schema. This may be where we seize something vital about the differences.
A book on the subject about the underground as a whole should surely exist even if it is not clear to me what it would say. I would be especially be interested in the chronological progression – I think the scene has been constantly changing and the momentary states are actually what has been lost. It would be logical then to capture them in a book and let them be found again.
**
Monday, 30 May 2022
Monday, 2 May 2022
Orchard’s Bay
Orchard’s Bay
A charity sale turned up a copy of Noyes’ 1939 book Orchard’s Bay which I thoughtlessly scarfed up. Two pounds. A cup of coffee costs more. I was interested because I had recently read quite a lot of Noyes’ poetry in connection with a reject in English nationalism and its complete exit from poetry in about 1924. Noyes had written a large amount of significant nationalist poetry, was 40 in 1922 and had followed the exit from that whole Public Emotion along with his rivals. I didn’t like that nationalist poetry but I was curious about the apparent legislative change which meant that poetry was governed by new rules. I am now, 2022, in an era of right-wing populism where poor people are induced to vote for governments which impose low taxes and low levels of welfare. A key part of this set-up is distrust of educated elites who are also liberal and fascinated by foreign cultures. The electorate scores, in contrast, as xenophobic and nationalistic. It interests me to return to a time when the educated elite were imperialist and xenophobic, and to recover how that steady opinion changed. Everybody witnessed this, but did they record what they witnessed?
Noyes has an account of the career of Stephen Phillips (a model for his own self-perception, perhaps) which shows him as having his career wrecked by a clique of critics who were animated by jealousy. This is already an anticipation of the UKIP theory of how things have gone wrong: if you disbelieve journalists, then it follows that you can cling to your populist-right views. So, we can say that bookshops stock what they want and people buy what they want, and so events in the poetic world are spontaneous - the democracy of the market validates rule changes. Or, we can accept that changes are the result of tiny metropolitan cliques who drink together, and so that every decision since 1905 has been arbitrary and a manipulation, and so that history should be re-run – with the losers winning. It is very difficult to prove which side is right, if any. Noyes does not explain how newspaper critics could overwhelm and replace word of mouth.
Bay was published in September 1939 by Sheed and Ward, Catholic publishers. It is a set of essays about his garden on the south shore of the Isle of Wight, interspersed with reflections on literature. That doesn’t sound very exciting, and indeed there is no page of it which I enjoyed or wanted to share with anyone. It includes about 30 pages of his poetry, presumably recent. The house is now a guest house and so you can find a photograph of it on the Internet, with notes on the topography. I certainly enjoyed the photograph. A few months after publication, the house was facing a coast occupied by the German Army. It is very far south: an unusual climate and one justifying a book about a garden full of plants that wouldn’t do well closer to the middle of England. He says the garden occupies ten acres, but not how many people were employed in the gardening of it. Bay is golden and unfocussed kitsch in the way that his famous poetry is drum-beating nationalist kitsch. 1939… Britain was visibly steaming towards another world war. Noyes had written the sentimental soundtrack to the first one. Did he remember what he had done, or have thoughts about the new militarism (in Europe) and its drum-thumping bards? Apparently not. He never mentions it.
1936 had seen two key anthologies of British poetry, both of which excised Noyes from the collective record. He was facing an eclipse, however suffused with the colours of the sunset. Did he notice? he never mentions it. This is an index of kitsch – it leaves out anything that interrupts its swaddling fantasy, any splinter of the real world. How could he write 300 pages while leaving out anything which intrudes on his state of serenity and vagueness, of blossoming self-love?
This is the sound of affluence. Any significant idea would break the spell of serenity. So he writes gushingly and grammatically about trivia. Or about false ideas- there is a moment where he disproves Darwin. How stupid do you have to be to think you can disprove Darwin without being a biologist or even reading any specialist literature? But that is the proposal of affluence, that you can make unpleasant ideas go away and that you can be a great thinker without effort or study. The world of ideas is as subject to him as his garden – he can have anything that does not suit cut down.
The clouds drift over the sea, the great white clouds,
Trailing their violet shadows, all as one.
For I remember watching them, long ago
In other lands, these clouds.
They are not changed,
The sunlit sea, the green-crested waves,
The dusky shadows travelling all one way,
Expanding like dark stains, or like a breath
Vanishing into the sunlit green again.
Nothing is changed. Nothing is there but beauty;
And yet, and yet;
O, why should beauty weigh on hungering eyes
And heart, as though some deep unuttered thing
Were there sealed up in lead?
(untitled, at p.153)
This isn’t very good.
Two features of Noyes. He has that quality of self-approval... it is very attractive. I certainly wonder if anyone who has close contact with a university has quite that level of inability to doubt any idea. Secondly, his fluency with words. He is saying almost nothing, but he is always rippling with words, like some pianist who can improvise decorations and variations apparently forever. Rippling, pointless, trills.
This is so elevated. The term Edelkitsch may apply. Edel means noble and Edelkitsch is a sort of bad art which ennobles whatever it looks at. And omits anything functional and work-related, naturally. Edelkitsch relies usually on Nature, God and the Tranquillised Past. The process of cultivating the past, of dissolving it down to egocentric story lines of a comforting shape, is like cultivating a garden: removing all the plants you don’t like and aiming at flowers. Freud wrote a paper called "The ego and mechanisms of defence". Really, Bays is all about mechanisms of defence. Evidently he is trying to sound as if he were writing in 1820. One defence mechanism has locked out news of the death of Tennyson, even the death of Keats. This is not like other poems written in about 1938, by Auden or Barker. But Gascoyne is not so dissimilar -
Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and the Jura now rejoin
The furthest arctic’s desolation. All is one:
Sheer mountain: plain, mountain; country, town;
Contours and boundaries no longer show.
(‘Snow in Europe.’)
I think we could label this as Edelkitsch.
I was vaguely interested in Noyes as a believer in the occult. This followed a snippet on the internet – which is actually more to do with a Believer projecting onto Noyes than with Noyes. The snippet records that Oliver Lodge tried to convert Noyes to spiritualism and failed. This is in his 1953 autobiography. But, in fact, there is a passage in the same book where Noyes talks about the invisible world:
And now having said all this, let me add that for years I have felt quite certain that communications from the invisible world do come unpredictably in quite a different way, subtle as the language of music or the colours of an evening sky, in aid and consolation to the lonely heart of man. On some of these personal experiences, I have dwelt in The Last Voyage, but it is a matter of living experience, not of detached experiment.
This is neither Catholic nor real – it is something like spiritualism, like the deduction of a world where the spirits lived, because to have them floating in nothing would have distressed the relatives. So Noyes believed in something like Summerland, the home of recently passed spirits. He believes that art obeys the rules of an invisible world – it works because we see part of that world through the external and sensuous forms of art. This is a kind of Platonism. “The real secret of this ‘desiderium' is that it is an attempt of the heart, often unconscious of its real aim, to transcend the Time process altogether; to escape from the world of shadows and perishable things, and find the eternal world.” ‘Desiderium’ is the word from which ‘desire’ derives. Getting away from Time may be a kind of response to the realisation that the collective memory of the poetry world is going to throw you off the boat.
He uses the phrase philosophia perennis several times – this holds that all religions contain the same basic truth, which is not compatible with Catholicism. So he wasn’t quite a good Catholic. He wanted to merge Platonic ideals and the Christian Heaven in some way – perhaps the details don’t matter. He is quite close to Kathleen Raine on this topic. I was interested in measuring how new modern occultist or New Age poetry was. Evidently there was a wave of poets in the first decades of the 20th C who were influenced by Theosophy, spiritualism, neo-platonism, G.R.S. Mead, and what have you. The details are quite difficult to dredge up. There were rationalist poets too – and, to be accurate, a great many Christian poets. But spirituality obviously wasn’t confined to the Christian realm, with its bureaucracy of very intelligent and logical people exposing inconsistencies and personal fantasies and throwing them out of the window, as it were.
Noyes wrote the words to the songs for the Pageant of Empire which was performed as part of the Empire Exhibition, 1924. Music by Elgar. He was right at the centre of the shiny coloured cloud which threw a nimbus around the bloody and quite uncontrolled activities which sustained the Empire. Anybody looking at attitudes today which are white-supremacist, unfair to Black and Asian people, against equal rights, etc., and going back to find where they came from, is going to look at that Exhibition because it was on such a large scale and because it made explicit feelings (or fantasies) which were wisping in the air prior to it. I don’t think the Exhibition included a stand portraying the Amritsar Massacre… omission is the key, and maybe Noyes’ practices of omission in writing these “intimate” and domestic essays will shed light on the omissions within propaganda as a kind of “aestheticisation” of a scene where the human blood was always fresh. (John Newsinger’s book The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire was on sale at the same charity event.) But my impression of Noyes is that he wasn't truly engaged in all that… he had a very low threshold of suggestibility, he was able to write poems (used as song lyrics) with great fluency, precisely matching a public mood, and rapidly assimilated by a big audience. So he was affluent by 1939, he actually didn’t have to worry about his next bank statement. When he wrote nationalist and imperialist verse, in prodigious quantities, it didn’t leave much mark on him. It was just a job. Conversely, I think he really was interested by Catholicism, by the history of science, and by the invisible world which he thought made its presence known through art. But the fact that he hadn't written any nationalist poetry for twenty years, that he had evidently changed his mind completely and given it up, doesn't give rise to any moment of reflection in Orchard's Bay – it is as if he had just crossed the street and forgotten the shop window he had just been looking at. No chance that we can find out why opinion moved against Empire, why the Empire was given up (just a few years later), what had changed. He just never mentions it.
He makes remarks about how fatuous modernity is, but this is perfunctory. He is very happy to think that any writer younger than him is a complete idiot. It’s a great feeling!
Noyes evidently didn’t actually do the gardening. He wasn't going down on his knees in the borders, or sawing off branches of trees. In the sense of Gardeners’ Question Time, he wasn’t a gardener at all – he didn’t know anything about plants. This certainly limits the interest of a book entirely about his garden. The plants are only there to reflect a brief yet bouffant mood of self-approval, of golden wisdom, of blossoming optimism, in the poet. It is an estate made of metaphors.
We could call the book an ode to the sense of leisure that flowed joyously when wages were low and you could afford servants.
The garden contains non-European plants and so we could link this to imperialism. The plants had been collected on various continents by botanists who were at least connected to colonial endeavours, for shipping, among other things. This is not a strong link, I find. You can be a gardener without being an imperialist.
My impression is that there is a connection between the bodiless communication which is the basis of Spiritualism and the “aural” emotional sharing which is the basis of nationalism. The devisers of the Empire Pageant didn’t have a good explanation for why a crowd could share nationalist sentiments… but they thought that crowd-feeling embodied a vast and real, if invisible, world. It was “already there” and the artist just had to channel it. They were very interested in how the Anglo-Saxon race could share big but invisible emotions, and not at all interested in a global system of exchange in which nobody who wasn't White had the vote. The Big Feelings were accepted as proof that Race existed. I think the same people who doubted that Race really existed doubted that spirits really spoke through mediums.
It is only fair to say that this is a minor work in Noyes' career. Like most works about gardens, I suspect.
At one point he talks about Pontanus and says he was the finest Latin poet of the Renaissance. Pontanus came from Spoleto, lived mainly in Naples, lived in the 15th century, wrote only in Latin. Pontanus did write a poem on the cultivation of oranges and so fits into a book about a garden. He is someone the modern person has probably never read… so it would be good to learn something about him. Noyes tells us almost nothing… you get the effect of Noyes being a great connoisseur, validating his own knowledge and his own aesthetic sensations, savouring the distilled finest vintages of the past, lost in admiration and self-admiration. That is, he scores the points needed to make Noble Kitsch come off. You get to see two whole lines of Pontanus. We hear that he was “the best” and this gives us a good feeling… it makes the prose overlap with the world of advertising, but maybe that isn’t misleading. It is the idea of Gracious Living.
The absence of doubt corresponds with the ability to exclude people who would disagree with him… he knows they exist, but somehow they are kept at a comfortable distance. The discussion isn’t really a discussion, it is more like music. It is not surprising that he chose to live on an island. We started with the Empire, and the fact that he creates this homogeneity in his prose, that there is only ever one side to any argument, is inexplicably related to racial homogeneity. I can’t analyse this but if the modern thing is for writers to experience Doubt then that is related to a society in which the verbal realm acknowledges divisions and the existence of diverse groups.
Noyes' autobiography was called Two Worlds for Memory. The second one is this Platonic world, hidden from the senses but embodying memory and reaching us as a memory of the timeless world. The first one is the one of real life.
A charity sale turned up a copy of Noyes’ 1939 book Orchard’s Bay which I thoughtlessly scarfed up. Two pounds. A cup of coffee costs more. I was interested because I had recently read quite a lot of Noyes’ poetry in connection with a reject in English nationalism and its complete exit from poetry in about 1924. Noyes had written a large amount of significant nationalist poetry, was 40 in 1922 and had followed the exit from that whole Public Emotion along with his rivals. I didn’t like that nationalist poetry but I was curious about the apparent legislative change which meant that poetry was governed by new rules. I am now, 2022, in an era of right-wing populism where poor people are induced to vote for governments which impose low taxes and low levels of welfare. A key part of this set-up is distrust of educated elites who are also liberal and fascinated by foreign cultures. The electorate scores, in contrast, as xenophobic and nationalistic. It interests me to return to a time when the educated elite were imperialist and xenophobic, and to recover how that steady opinion changed. Everybody witnessed this, but did they record what they witnessed?
Noyes has an account of the career of Stephen Phillips (a model for his own self-perception, perhaps) which shows him as having his career wrecked by a clique of critics who were animated by jealousy. This is already an anticipation of the UKIP theory of how things have gone wrong: if you disbelieve journalists, then it follows that you can cling to your populist-right views. So, we can say that bookshops stock what they want and people buy what they want, and so events in the poetic world are spontaneous - the democracy of the market validates rule changes. Or, we can accept that changes are the result of tiny metropolitan cliques who drink together, and so that every decision since 1905 has been arbitrary and a manipulation, and so that history should be re-run – with the losers winning. It is very difficult to prove which side is right, if any. Noyes does not explain how newspaper critics could overwhelm and replace word of mouth.
Bay was published in September 1939 by Sheed and Ward, Catholic publishers. It is a set of essays about his garden on the south shore of the Isle of Wight, interspersed with reflections on literature. That doesn’t sound very exciting, and indeed there is no page of it which I enjoyed or wanted to share with anyone. It includes about 30 pages of his poetry, presumably recent. The house is now a guest house and so you can find a photograph of it on the Internet, with notes on the topography. I certainly enjoyed the photograph. A few months after publication, the house was facing a coast occupied by the German Army. It is very far south: an unusual climate and one justifying a book about a garden full of plants that wouldn’t do well closer to the middle of England. He says the garden occupies ten acres, but not how many people were employed in the gardening of it. Bay is golden and unfocussed kitsch in the way that his famous poetry is drum-beating nationalist kitsch. 1939… Britain was visibly steaming towards another world war. Noyes had written the sentimental soundtrack to the first one. Did he remember what he had done, or have thoughts about the new militarism (in Europe) and its drum-thumping bards? Apparently not. He never mentions it.
1936 had seen two key anthologies of British poetry, both of which excised Noyes from the collective record. He was facing an eclipse, however suffused with the colours of the sunset. Did he notice? he never mentions it. This is an index of kitsch – it leaves out anything that interrupts its swaddling fantasy, any splinter of the real world. How could he write 300 pages while leaving out anything which intrudes on his state of serenity and vagueness, of blossoming self-love?
This is the sound of affluence. Any significant idea would break the spell of serenity. So he writes gushingly and grammatically about trivia. Or about false ideas- there is a moment where he disproves Darwin. How stupid do you have to be to think you can disprove Darwin without being a biologist or even reading any specialist literature? But that is the proposal of affluence, that you can make unpleasant ideas go away and that you can be a great thinker without effort or study. The world of ideas is as subject to him as his garden – he can have anything that does not suit cut down.
The clouds drift over the sea, the great white clouds,
Trailing their violet shadows, all as one.
For I remember watching them, long ago
In other lands, these clouds.
They are not changed,
The sunlit sea, the green-crested waves,
The dusky shadows travelling all one way,
Expanding like dark stains, or like a breath
Vanishing into the sunlit green again.
Nothing is changed. Nothing is there but beauty;
And yet, and yet;
O, why should beauty weigh on hungering eyes
And heart, as though some deep unuttered thing
Were there sealed up in lead?
(untitled, at p.153)
This isn’t very good.
Two features of Noyes. He has that quality of self-approval... it is very attractive. I certainly wonder if anyone who has close contact with a university has quite that level of inability to doubt any idea. Secondly, his fluency with words. He is saying almost nothing, but he is always rippling with words, like some pianist who can improvise decorations and variations apparently forever. Rippling, pointless, trills.
This is so elevated. The term Edelkitsch may apply. Edel means noble and Edelkitsch is a sort of bad art which ennobles whatever it looks at. And omits anything functional and work-related, naturally. Edelkitsch relies usually on Nature, God and the Tranquillised Past. The process of cultivating the past, of dissolving it down to egocentric story lines of a comforting shape, is like cultivating a garden: removing all the plants you don’t like and aiming at flowers. Freud wrote a paper called "The ego and mechanisms of defence". Really, Bays is all about mechanisms of defence. Evidently he is trying to sound as if he were writing in 1820. One defence mechanism has locked out news of the death of Tennyson, even the death of Keats. This is not like other poems written in about 1938, by Auden or Barker. But Gascoyne is not so dissimilar -
Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and the Jura now rejoin
The furthest arctic’s desolation. All is one:
Sheer mountain: plain, mountain; country, town;
Contours and boundaries no longer show.
(‘Snow in Europe.’)
I think we could label this as Edelkitsch.
I was vaguely interested in Noyes as a believer in the occult. This followed a snippet on the internet – which is actually more to do with a Believer projecting onto Noyes than with Noyes. The snippet records that Oliver Lodge tried to convert Noyes to spiritualism and failed. This is in his 1953 autobiography. But, in fact, there is a passage in the same book where Noyes talks about the invisible world:
And now having said all this, let me add that for years I have felt quite certain that communications from the invisible world do come unpredictably in quite a different way, subtle as the language of music or the colours of an evening sky, in aid and consolation to the lonely heart of man. On some of these personal experiences, I have dwelt in The Last Voyage, but it is a matter of living experience, not of detached experiment.
This is neither Catholic nor real – it is something like spiritualism, like the deduction of a world where the spirits lived, because to have them floating in nothing would have distressed the relatives. So Noyes believed in something like Summerland, the home of recently passed spirits. He believes that art obeys the rules of an invisible world – it works because we see part of that world through the external and sensuous forms of art. This is a kind of Platonism. “The real secret of this ‘desiderium' is that it is an attempt of the heart, often unconscious of its real aim, to transcend the Time process altogether; to escape from the world of shadows and perishable things, and find the eternal world.” ‘Desiderium’ is the word from which ‘desire’ derives. Getting away from Time may be a kind of response to the realisation that the collective memory of the poetry world is going to throw you off the boat.
He uses the phrase philosophia perennis several times – this holds that all religions contain the same basic truth, which is not compatible with Catholicism. So he wasn’t quite a good Catholic. He wanted to merge Platonic ideals and the Christian Heaven in some way – perhaps the details don’t matter. He is quite close to Kathleen Raine on this topic. I was interested in measuring how new modern occultist or New Age poetry was. Evidently there was a wave of poets in the first decades of the 20th C who were influenced by Theosophy, spiritualism, neo-platonism, G.R.S. Mead, and what have you. The details are quite difficult to dredge up. There were rationalist poets too – and, to be accurate, a great many Christian poets. But spirituality obviously wasn’t confined to the Christian realm, with its bureaucracy of very intelligent and logical people exposing inconsistencies and personal fantasies and throwing them out of the window, as it were.
Noyes wrote the words to the songs for the Pageant of Empire which was performed as part of the Empire Exhibition, 1924. Music by Elgar. He was right at the centre of the shiny coloured cloud which threw a nimbus around the bloody and quite uncontrolled activities which sustained the Empire. Anybody looking at attitudes today which are white-supremacist, unfair to Black and Asian people, against equal rights, etc., and going back to find where they came from, is going to look at that Exhibition because it was on such a large scale and because it made explicit feelings (or fantasies) which were wisping in the air prior to it. I don’t think the Exhibition included a stand portraying the Amritsar Massacre… omission is the key, and maybe Noyes’ practices of omission in writing these “intimate” and domestic essays will shed light on the omissions within propaganda as a kind of “aestheticisation” of a scene where the human blood was always fresh. (John Newsinger’s book The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire was on sale at the same charity event.) But my impression of Noyes is that he wasn't truly engaged in all that… he had a very low threshold of suggestibility, he was able to write poems (used as song lyrics) with great fluency, precisely matching a public mood, and rapidly assimilated by a big audience. So he was affluent by 1939, he actually didn’t have to worry about his next bank statement. When he wrote nationalist and imperialist verse, in prodigious quantities, it didn’t leave much mark on him. It was just a job. Conversely, I think he really was interested by Catholicism, by the history of science, and by the invisible world which he thought made its presence known through art. But the fact that he hadn't written any nationalist poetry for twenty years, that he had evidently changed his mind completely and given it up, doesn't give rise to any moment of reflection in Orchard's Bay – it is as if he had just crossed the street and forgotten the shop window he had just been looking at. No chance that we can find out why opinion moved against Empire, why the Empire was given up (just a few years later), what had changed. He just never mentions it.
He makes remarks about how fatuous modernity is, but this is perfunctory. He is very happy to think that any writer younger than him is a complete idiot. It’s a great feeling!
Noyes evidently didn’t actually do the gardening. He wasn't going down on his knees in the borders, or sawing off branches of trees. In the sense of Gardeners’ Question Time, he wasn’t a gardener at all – he didn’t know anything about plants. This certainly limits the interest of a book entirely about his garden. The plants are only there to reflect a brief yet bouffant mood of self-approval, of golden wisdom, of blossoming optimism, in the poet. It is an estate made of metaphors.
We could call the book an ode to the sense of leisure that flowed joyously when wages were low and you could afford servants.
The garden contains non-European plants and so we could link this to imperialism. The plants had been collected on various continents by botanists who were at least connected to colonial endeavours, for shipping, among other things. This is not a strong link, I find. You can be a gardener without being an imperialist.
My impression is that there is a connection between the bodiless communication which is the basis of Spiritualism and the “aural” emotional sharing which is the basis of nationalism. The devisers of the Empire Pageant didn’t have a good explanation for why a crowd could share nationalist sentiments… but they thought that crowd-feeling embodied a vast and real, if invisible, world. It was “already there” and the artist just had to channel it. They were very interested in how the Anglo-Saxon race could share big but invisible emotions, and not at all interested in a global system of exchange in which nobody who wasn't White had the vote. The Big Feelings were accepted as proof that Race existed. I think the same people who doubted that Race really existed doubted that spirits really spoke through mediums.
It is only fair to say that this is a minor work in Noyes' career. Like most works about gardens, I suspect.
At one point he talks about Pontanus and says he was the finest Latin poet of the Renaissance. Pontanus came from Spoleto, lived mainly in Naples, lived in the 15th century, wrote only in Latin. Pontanus did write a poem on the cultivation of oranges and so fits into a book about a garden. He is someone the modern person has probably never read… so it would be good to learn something about him. Noyes tells us almost nothing… you get the effect of Noyes being a great connoisseur, validating his own knowledge and his own aesthetic sensations, savouring the distilled finest vintages of the past, lost in admiration and self-admiration. That is, he scores the points needed to make Noble Kitsch come off. You get to see two whole lines of Pontanus. We hear that he was “the best” and this gives us a good feeling… it makes the prose overlap with the world of advertising, but maybe that isn’t misleading. It is the idea of Gracious Living.
The absence of doubt corresponds with the ability to exclude people who would disagree with him… he knows they exist, but somehow they are kept at a comfortable distance. The discussion isn’t really a discussion, it is more like music. It is not surprising that he chose to live on an island. We started with the Empire, and the fact that he creates this homogeneity in his prose, that there is only ever one side to any argument, is inexplicably related to racial homogeneity. I can’t analyse this but if the modern thing is for writers to experience Doubt then that is related to a society in which the verbal realm acknowledges divisions and the existence of diverse groups.
Noyes' autobiography was called Two Worlds for Memory. The second one is this Platonic world, hidden from the senses but embodying memory and reaching us as a memory of the timeless world. The first one is the one of real life.
Thursday, 21 April 2022
undescribed overall feel
Received an email from Ralph Hawkins saying in part: "Also I think the discovery of form (alternatives) comes out of the book (the political ideas maybe (more) French than Hippy or Hopi, but the line spacings, arrangements, flows are distinctly American and with all become a different means of viewing the world and poem as construct). I can now see (today!) how some of the content is distinctly hippy, in search of the alternative past and an alternative future. But the future is always materialist and not a pipe dream! Puff of smoke."
[‘the book’ is Nothing is being suppressed]
('Hopi' - a people in the south-west USA- subject of 1000 PhDs -katsina dolls appear in a Martin Thom poem and Hopi mythology is the basis for David Wevill's great poem Fall of the Arrow. Maybe in a Nathaniel Tarn poem too, damned if I can remember. A symbol of Third World wisdom which the post-western poet can partake of.
I think this is very important and it is something which I never mention in the book. The idea of the poem changes between the ‘mainstream’ poets in ‘Poetry Dimension’ [vols 1 to 6] and the poets in 2nd Aeon. It is an overall thing and inarticulate ... and very hard to articulate. I think it involves several hundred poets in the Seventies… so, readily grasped however non-analytical and undescribed.
I am wondering how much it involves the presentation of the self… and the key thing about that self is lifestyle, a liberated lifestyle. An “affective identity”. And the self is not explicitly present in the poem, it is a schema which flows out of every line and flows over every line. it’s like the air in a room... you can’t see either the self or the air in the room.
American. I think there is a legacy problem because people have always said “American!” and not gone on to produce a description. Actually most American poets don’t have the relevant quality, we are talking specifically about the avant garde of the Fifties, the ones in Donald Allen’s anthology. The ones who re-founded British poetry. What I am thinking about is post-American but British, this is a local identity.
'Flow' is the key thing. The style would probably include (a)the American thing. (b) offering the partaking in the new generation, the one which emerged after 1965, and which includes student revolt and the summer of love. (c) free association, which includes the Self being the validation for the sensations that appear in the poem (d) intimacy (e) rejection of a previous regime in which there was "empiricism", so that intuition counted for nothing and the sense record was everything and there were no ideals because they were generalisations (f) absence of morality and the whole legacy of religion, except maybe Buddhism (g) dislike of forcing experience into existing schemas (h) lack of a work ethic (I) not describing sociology because the idea is being rejected that social status & income dictate consciousness (j) openness of the fabric to speculation, hypothesis, fantasy (k) sparseness of frame markers (l) jumps of sense… the free association… with the idea that there are many points of view and if you shift from one to another there are special benefits, maybe that if you see the edge of the frame you realise how it confines you.
This list is probably too rational and the overall feel drifts away as we start to analyse. If Peter Finch reviews 276 publications (from Britain) in one issue of 2nd Aeon (titled 19-21 to satisfy subscription contracts! 268 pages, wow), for 1974, I think all the authors in that selection had got this New Feel. So, easy to grasp, hard to analyse. 69 poets published in that one issue.
[‘the book’ is Nothing is being suppressed]
('Hopi' - a people in the south-west USA- subject of 1000 PhDs -katsina dolls appear in a Martin Thom poem and Hopi mythology is the basis for David Wevill's great poem Fall of the Arrow. Maybe in a Nathaniel Tarn poem too, damned if I can remember. A symbol of Third World wisdom which the post-western poet can partake of.
I think this is very important and it is something which I never mention in the book. The idea of the poem changes between the ‘mainstream’ poets in ‘Poetry Dimension’ [vols 1 to 6] and the poets in 2nd Aeon. It is an overall thing and inarticulate ... and very hard to articulate. I think it involves several hundred poets in the Seventies… so, readily grasped however non-analytical and undescribed.
I am wondering how much it involves the presentation of the self… and the key thing about that self is lifestyle, a liberated lifestyle. An “affective identity”. And the self is not explicitly present in the poem, it is a schema which flows out of every line and flows over every line. it’s like the air in a room... you can’t see either the self or the air in the room.
American. I think there is a legacy problem because people have always said “American!” and not gone on to produce a description. Actually most American poets don’t have the relevant quality, we are talking specifically about the avant garde of the Fifties, the ones in Donald Allen’s anthology. The ones who re-founded British poetry. What I am thinking about is post-American but British, this is a local identity.
'Flow' is the key thing. The style would probably include (a)the American thing. (b) offering the partaking in the new generation, the one which emerged after 1965, and which includes student revolt and the summer of love. (c) free association, which includes the Self being the validation for the sensations that appear in the poem (d) intimacy (e) rejection of a previous regime in which there was "empiricism", so that intuition counted for nothing and the sense record was everything and there were no ideals because they were generalisations (f) absence of morality and the whole legacy of religion, except maybe Buddhism (g) dislike of forcing experience into existing schemas (h) lack of a work ethic (I) not describing sociology because the idea is being rejected that social status & income dictate consciousness (j) openness of the fabric to speculation, hypothesis, fantasy (k) sparseness of frame markers (l) jumps of sense… the free association… with the idea that there are many points of view and if you shift from one to another there are special benefits, maybe that if you see the edge of the frame you realise how it confines you.
This list is probably too rational and the overall feel drifts away as we start to analyse. If Peter Finch reviews 276 publications (from Britain) in one issue of 2nd Aeon (titled 19-21 to satisfy subscription contracts! 268 pages, wow), for 1974, I think all the authors in that selection had got this New Feel. So, easy to grasp, hard to analyse. 69 poets published in that one issue.
Thursday, 24 March 2022
1970s book finally out
'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).
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).
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?
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