Access to culture
The Oldham Coliseum theatre closed on March 31 and the radio broadcast an interview which Chris Eccleston gave, after attending the farewell ceremony. A report said : "Eccleston said, as an aspiring actor, he secured a grant to attend a drama school with no academic qualifications which is now necessary “so there’s no more of actors like me coming through”, he said.
The former Doctor Who star claimed it would be “impossible” for somebody from his background to become an actor today.
He said: “The pathway into the arts is not there for them in the way that it was for me… now you’ve got to go to public school, you’ve got to be Oxbridge otherwise you can’t act.
“It’s a lot harder for people of my background to get in.
“It’s got worse, not better.”
“If you want to be an actor, you’re going to have to put up with the unemployment, you’re going have to put up with the rejection, and that’s going to be double if you’re from a working class background, ethnic minority.
“It’s still an elitist organisation, television, theatre, is incredibly elitist, and getting more so, which is why it’s the North West that is losing its theatres.”
I went to the RADA site and looked up their analysis of the social status, based on income, of their students:
The data dashboard shows a mixed position for RADA in relation to the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Over a five-year period, RADA’s intake of those in the two quintiles of highest deprivation has been between 62% of the student population and 25% of the student population. The trend over three years suggests that we are taking fewer students from more deprived quintiles (1 and 2).
This is a text very hard to deliver emotively and Eccleston evidently would not take it on. However, it does not support what he said. The Coliseum has lost arts council (ACE) funding but they are going to build a new theatre in Oldham to replace it. “ACE is investing £1.85 million in the borough and Oldham Council recently announced plans for a new theatre, reportedly costing £24 million, which is scheduled to open in 2026.” An Oldham Council representative said that the building had come to the end of its life. The sense of disaster is not founded on fact. I understand that Eccleston was saying he got into drama school without A-levels because he passed an audition, but (he thinks) children from housing estates never get A-levels and so (in his reasoning) they can never go to drama school.
he wrapped things up in a histrionic way. The interest for me is that social mobility is the most interesting topic and that it is attractive to make the social mobility actually happening disappear by making your language more emotive and less numerical. I just wonder if Eccleston’s mind has better data than his interviews or whether his thinking is as simplistic. If the state school system is not delivering social mobility, then our society is in a terrible state and we should march out and start again. But in reality the State schools have improved massively since inspection started and most students at our universities studied at State schools. The situation is more that the most radical voices are suppressing the evidence for the success of teachers, and (as is so often pointed out) of pupils and of parents supporting the pupils, for emotive effect. I find it unkind to erase the achievements of 100,000 teachers at comprehensives and allege that they are not delivering anything. This seems to be untrue as well as malicious.
I am not optimistic about equality of wealth. But a large part of that is perceiving that inflation in rents and in house prices is taking away the disposable income of young people who have done very well in the school system and got highly demanding jobs as the outcome of that. I think schools are delivering upward mobility, universities are delivering it, but there are other levels of the economic system which are multiplying the wealth of the wealthy and distracting the wages of the salariate. Generated wealth is going far less to salaried workers, far more to shareholders and lenders, than when I was growing up. The rules have been painstakingly redesigned to produce less fairness. I am NOT happy at someone taking the sector of public endeavour which is delivering more equality and opportunity and writing its success off to make a rhetorical point.
Equality of wealth is not increasing. Part of that is the growth in value of houses, which is so huge and so unequally shared that it outweighs anything else. Also you have de-industrialisation and deskilling. Many households are going downhill, people moving into badly paid jobs. But State education is also delivering greater equality, individuals (future households) are moving uphill and getting good jobs through education.
I find it doubtful that all the successful actors who have trained in the past ten years went to public schools. Probably there has been a shift since the advent of “austerity” and since the financial crisis of 2007-8, but it is a matter of a percentage shift, not a complete “wipe out and monopoly”.
This issue is important for poetry because it is something poets think about a lot. I am unwilling to write about sociology in poetry because the economic rewards are too slight and success does not mean economic prosperity, as it would do for a star actor. The money aspect is not very interesting because there is too little result to talk about. Clearly people who write poetry have normally had higher education, so access to that is critical to poetry, but I don’t see a collapse of that upward current in the way that Eccleston describes. A little studied subject is what aspirant poets (or actors) do while learning their craft. Surely it is beneficial for a poet to have a break between working hard at university and working hard at a full-time job... a period of practising writing without too many distractions. You need some kind of income… maybe State benefits, maybe something even more nebulous. Academic study doesn't teach you how to write poems. It is credible that a more pressurised economy removes the unmonitored free areas where someone with no money can find a space to sleep and maybe a part-time job that provides the bare essentials. Areas of low pressure are benign for people working hard at poetry. They are fragile.
Sunday, 2 April 2023
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Hittite from the north-east
Hittite from the north-east
This is a response to a recent high-powered paper based on genetic data which offers a new solution to questions about Indo-European origins and specifically the division between the Anatolian languages (such as Hittite) and the rest. The paper is “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” and it has 205 authors. It was published in Science in August 2022.
A few years ago David Reich’s groundbreaking book on ancient DNA observed that the DNA of early hunter-gatherers on the steppes included an influence from the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, from a genetic group which lived in the South Caucasus and also further south. This had the implication that the horse hunters who evolved into the early Indo-European (the 'Yamnaya' culture, referring to their pit-grave interments) were partly the product of an earlier migration from the South. This migration preceded the adoption of farming. We are talking about perhaps 5000 BC. "Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestry of the Yamnaya was, by contrast, only partly local; half of it was West Asian, from both the Caucasus and the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. Migration into the steppe started by about 7000 years ago, making the later expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
The new work follows up Reich’s work, or rather the work of the world-leading DNA lab which he heads, to say that the DNA of remains located in the area where we know the Hittites lived is different from the DNA of steppe Indo-European areas and so also of the DNA of parts of Bronze Age Europe which were invaded (! or at least settled) by people from the steppes who putatively spoke Indo-European. It follows that the Hittites, Luvians, and related groups came into Anatolia from the north-east, and not via a tortuous migration along regions to the north of the Black Sea and through the Balkans. Their history is separate from that of all other Indo-European groups. Anatolian entered Anatolia from the north-east (or conceivably had been spoken south of the Caucasus since very ancient times).
There is a very interesting paper by Craig Melchert (“western affinities of Anatolian”), following up a 1994 paper by Jaan Puhvel, which traces matches between Hittite and specific other languages which are not matches with the reconstructed Indo-European lexicon. That suggested a shared (and late) geographical history which the new work puts seriously in question. He was thinking of convergence in a shared contact zone after the migrations. This data and the pattern which it supports are now of great interest, but Melchert only saw a tentative pattern in it. “Puhvel (1994) argued for Anatolian as a western dialect sharing features with Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (plus or minus Greek and Baltic). However, his paper was both initially and subsequently universally (but wrongly) ignored.”
Since several other IE languages are known from the area of Anatolia, and points east, one has to ask if it is the Anatolian group only which missed out on a long trip around the Black Sea to end up in that region. Armenian is certainly a candidate, perhaps also Phrygian (a “rubble language”). The Science paper describes the Armenians as the product of a migration from the steppes into Anatolia. I don’t think anyone is going to propose Iranian as such a candidate, which only geographical logic (not linguistic) would suggest.
The earliest written records of Hittite are quite far south, in Kanesh, but this is an artefact of the way in which writing reached Anatolia, evidently from the south-east and originally in the Akkadian language and script, having nothing to say about where the predecessor forms of the Hittite language had been spoken or what migration routes their ancestors followed. We now have the possibility of dating the split between ancestral Anatolian and the other Indo-European stem, from archaeological data. So this may be as early as 5000 BC. The whole history of Indo-European studies has assumed that there was a nuclear area from which Indo-European spread into territories speaking (fundamentally) different languages. But what we now know about the Anatolian branch makes it possible that the area around the Black Sea was populated at least in part by peoples speaking languages related to Indo-European, as distantly as Hittite and Luvian, and even that this facilitated the rapid spread of Indo-European. It is a puzzle that all IE languages lost the laryngeals and yet they still existed just before the break-up. Substrate influences may explain this, at least speculatively.
It remains possible that Greek came to Greece from the east, along the southern shores of the Black Sea (and initially through the Caucasus?), but this has always been a minority view and the genetic data now make it unlikely. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks and they had tales of the settlements in Ionia being founded from what we now think of as Greece.
This is a response to a recent high-powered paper based on genetic data which offers a new solution to questions about Indo-European origins and specifically the division between the Anatolian languages (such as Hittite) and the rest. The paper is “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” and it has 205 authors. It was published in Science in August 2022.
A few years ago David Reich’s groundbreaking book on ancient DNA observed that the DNA of early hunter-gatherers on the steppes included an influence from the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, from a genetic group which lived in the South Caucasus and also further south. This had the implication that the horse hunters who evolved into the early Indo-European (the 'Yamnaya' culture, referring to their pit-grave interments) were partly the product of an earlier migration from the South. This migration preceded the adoption of farming. We are talking about perhaps 5000 BC. "Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestry of the Yamnaya was, by contrast, only partly local; half of it was West Asian, from both the Caucasus and the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. Migration into the steppe started by about 7000 years ago, making the later expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
The new work follows up Reich’s work, or rather the work of the world-leading DNA lab which he heads, to say that the DNA of remains located in the area where we know the Hittites lived is different from the DNA of steppe Indo-European areas and so also of the DNA of parts of Bronze Age Europe which were invaded (! or at least settled) by people from the steppes who putatively spoke Indo-European. It follows that the Hittites, Luvians, and related groups came into Anatolia from the north-east, and not via a tortuous migration along regions to the north of the Black Sea and through the Balkans. Their history is separate from that of all other Indo-European groups. Anatolian entered Anatolia from the north-east (or conceivably had been spoken south of the Caucasus since very ancient times).
There is a very interesting paper by Craig Melchert (“western affinities of Anatolian”), following up a 1994 paper by Jaan Puhvel, which traces matches between Hittite and specific other languages which are not matches with the reconstructed Indo-European lexicon. That suggested a shared (and late) geographical history which the new work puts seriously in question. He was thinking of convergence in a shared contact zone after the migrations. This data and the pattern which it supports are now of great interest, but Melchert only saw a tentative pattern in it. “Puhvel (1994) argued for Anatolian as a western dialect sharing features with Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (plus or minus Greek and Baltic). However, his paper was both initially and subsequently universally (but wrongly) ignored.”
Since several other IE languages are known from the area of Anatolia, and points east, one has to ask if it is the Anatolian group only which missed out on a long trip around the Black Sea to end up in that region. Armenian is certainly a candidate, perhaps also Phrygian (a “rubble language”). The Science paper describes the Armenians as the product of a migration from the steppes into Anatolia. I don’t think anyone is going to propose Iranian as such a candidate, which only geographical logic (not linguistic) would suggest.
The earliest written records of Hittite are quite far south, in Kanesh, but this is an artefact of the way in which writing reached Anatolia, evidently from the south-east and originally in the Akkadian language and script, having nothing to say about where the predecessor forms of the Hittite language had been spoken or what migration routes their ancestors followed. We now have the possibility of dating the split between ancestral Anatolian and the other Indo-European stem, from archaeological data. So this may be as early as 5000 BC. The whole history of Indo-European studies has assumed that there was a nuclear area from which Indo-European spread into territories speaking (fundamentally) different languages. But what we now know about the Anatolian branch makes it possible that the area around the Black Sea was populated at least in part by peoples speaking languages related to Indo-European, as distantly as Hittite and Luvian, and even that this facilitated the rapid spread of Indo-European. It is a puzzle that all IE languages lost the laryngeals and yet they still existed just before the break-up. Substrate influences may explain this, at least speculatively.
It remains possible that Greek came to Greece from the east, along the southern shores of the Black Sea (and initially through the Caucasus?), but this has always been a minority view and the genetic data now make it unlikely. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks and they had tales of the settlements in Ionia being founded from what we now think of as Greece.
Monday, 6 March 2023
Beautiful feelings two
This is further about a project which began with looking at the Poetry Book Society website to spot titles to review and expanded into downloading five years’ worth of lists and collating them into a spreadsheet with the names of 990 poets featured in their “shop window”. I was asking “who the hell are all these poets”. A book emerged.
I subscribe to an on-line text library called scribd. I have discovered that they have hundreds of volumes of recent poetry which I can read for free. The trouble with this is that they aren't necessarily the books I want to read, and there are too many of them. The stage I have reached with the book is that I have completed the text, I have too much text and I want to reduce it, but I also want to read more books so that I have more context. Right now, I have to take a break. Like, a week with no thinking about the book at all.
This morning I was dreaming of a passage in the book which I had to rewrite. When I woke up, I realised that the passage didn’t exist anyway. This is overload. I want to sleep without worrying about flaws in the book.
I have the idea of thermal sensing – that if you read 100 books of poetry from a 5 year period, then they stick together, and the information which normally wisps away as waste heat remains as evidence. This brings out the unconscious elements of style and treatment. Poets don’t always like this, but it gets you away from simply paraphrasing what they say. The light is the conscious level but the unconscious level is a trace of heat.
It also develops an idea of time and art, namely that there are collective states which animate art, especially poetry, and that these are temporary and so make up the substance of a time. A few years later they have dissipated away.
So I have read 100 books from the last 5 years. Themes do keep recurring. Three mentions of kintsugi – one was actually in a prose book (Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, fantastic) and not the poems by the same writer. But this is a sort of “ping” - kintsugi three times, I have found the edge in some way. Where the edge is, that is part of the frame. Postscript. I have now seen a fourth reference to kintsugi. Surely this is a signal to stop collecting evidence.
I talk about the mainstream of an older era (say 1952 to 1980?) disappearing to be replaced by a new central style, which I actually like. That is the big picture but clearly poets are still writing poems inside the limits of that older style, which was criticised so much. I don't want to name them, in a context which already puts them down, but the pattern is not disappearance. Instead, we have a dozen or more styles flourishing and securing their own parts of a wider public realm. It’s like plants competing in my untended garden – the losers don’t disappear altogether. Although ragwort doesn't seem to have come back since 2018. The Carcanet New Poetries 8 includes poems that hark back to the 1950s stylistically.
I have this image in my mind of 990 poets as a self-sustaining structure with no supports. It is erect, or it can't collapse any further. At any point where you are, the pressure of other poets holds you up. You don’t need economic support. If you have the esteem of your fellow poets, then it is a grand place to be. If you don’t have that esteem it is a painful place to be. Your achievements flow away like rain down the gutter. This is so vivid, but I don’t have any external evidence for it. It is just an image, like a dream. The structure is almost invulnerable to assault, but it puts pressure on all the individuals… the heat of winning, of losing, of being halfway down a field of 100, of seeing other people succeed, is too much. People who buy into meritocracy too much have a hard time because it doesn't allow for serenity.
Teaching a class where everyone assumes on day one that they are more talented than you. Maybe that is the story of our time. A poet with a pay cheque but without the will to write poetry. The class certainly aren't there to read your work. Just the opposite.
Spent a day in the South Bank poetry library basically looking for books by the people in [2013 anthology] Dear World, or about 20 of them. I used the 74 names as a proxy for saying who wasn't included in the PBS lists, but on investigation it may be that a lot of them gave up after one book or even didn’t get a book out. You go to the right spot on the shelves, and only find one slim pamphlet. You have this classic anthology, collecting a swarm of poets under 35, who haven’t reached their peak, in 2013. Did they go on after that? So my text says that the absence of 53 names from Dear World in the lists from the PBS shop window is an indicator of how incomplete the shop window is. But this may be wrong, it may be that half those 53 names had just given up writing regularly, and the PBS thing is actually a good view of who is producing serious, long, substantial books. What if the people you admire give up? I am seeing this picture of people spending ten years learning how to write poetry and then not writing it. They found lots of other things to do which had a bigger audience. There just wasn't a big splash when they got their pamphlet out. This is just a picture. Maybe the amount of poets floating around is so big that it diminishes the space each one can occupy as they write their work. Small audience, big competition. And so people drop out. I am wondering how that would apply to the 990 recent names, in the PBS list trawl which I did. Are they going to be career poets or is one book going to be it?
I have the “Salt Younger Poets” anthology, 2011, hoaching with good poems, 50 writers who hadn't had a book out at that point. A brilliantly edited book, they had done the research to an incredible degree of efficiency. So, if I do the catalogue checks, maybe 30 of them never got a book out. This is depressing; I am not sure I want to do the sociology. Writing poetry just isn’t that rewarding, it is easy to see why people give up. I am not going to do that catalogue work. (However, 24 of the 50 have a book within the PBS list I collated. Not bad.)
This crush of poets, the 990 names I culled from the PBS “shop window”, it is great for the consumer, but maybe there are side-effects which aren't so great. There is pressure because of too many poets striving to get the outlets. And maybe there is resentment of editors and panels because they can’t give young poets what they want. Pressure from below. When people are so angry with the gatekeepers, it is hard for anybody to reach a sense of legitimacy. Possibly the ones who persist are the ones who do respect the institutions and who aren’t charred with resentment.
I am interested now in the level of disillusion. I have a feeling that there were 990 poets in contention in 2010, and that quite a few of those have already quietly given up. The data section I examined in 2022 had too many people who had started in the last five years… the age spread wasn't right, it had too many young people. Someone gets a book out, even two books, and the feedback is almost inaudible. They wanted victory rather than serenity. So maybe, of these 990 now hunting for success, a third are going to give up before the next time someone does a large sample. Being turned down is just so painful, you don't want to repeat it and repeat it.
Have spent a frustrating morning trying to access annual figures for poetry publication. I subscribed to The Bookseller on-line to get these figures, but I can't find anything relevant by searching their back issues. I think they did a breakdown of titles by genre in the 1990s, but I can't find anything in the stuff available on-line. I think the ISBN agency asks publishers to categorise their titles and produces breakdowns annually based on that, but I don’t know where to find those figures. When Randall Stevenson claims 2700 titles being published annually at the end of the Nineties, I think he is using an ISBN report, but I don’t know where he obtained that figure. It's an exciting figure.
I got hold of a 2012 book from Salt, “In their own words”. Statements by 56 poets. This is really weak. It is good to know what poets think about their work, but this is unrevealing. A forgotten book. As always, there is something to be retrieved – Ira Lightman’s statement for example. In general these writers compose intuitively and have no idea what intuition is made of or how to talk about it. Very few of them published with Salt – a lack of coordination there. I would have been interested to see a book about Salt’s debut poets and what they valued as a generation. I was probably hoping for that. Instead, two editors signed up to do this prose book and didn’t have any interest in the Salt list. At a quick glance, only one of the 56 published with Salt. (real count is 3!) This is a lesson, possibly – when someone has a view of what poetry is happening, in a given decade or half decade, their view may not even overlap with yours. It is difficult to have a conversation about poetry when you don’t read the same poets. But the field of readable poets is so huge.
I have doubts about secondary commentary which is 90% about “theoretical” poets, because intuitive poets are unable to explain their processes. But really, what can you do with processes which are so defended and so buried in silence.
I subscribe to an on-line text library called scribd. I have discovered that they have hundreds of volumes of recent poetry which I can read for free. The trouble with this is that they aren't necessarily the books I want to read, and there are too many of them. The stage I have reached with the book is that I have completed the text, I have too much text and I want to reduce it, but I also want to read more books so that I have more context. Right now, I have to take a break. Like, a week with no thinking about the book at all.
This morning I was dreaming of a passage in the book which I had to rewrite. When I woke up, I realised that the passage didn’t exist anyway. This is overload. I want to sleep without worrying about flaws in the book.
I have the idea of thermal sensing – that if you read 100 books of poetry from a 5 year period, then they stick together, and the information which normally wisps away as waste heat remains as evidence. This brings out the unconscious elements of style and treatment. Poets don’t always like this, but it gets you away from simply paraphrasing what they say. The light is the conscious level but the unconscious level is a trace of heat.
It also develops an idea of time and art, namely that there are collective states which animate art, especially poetry, and that these are temporary and so make up the substance of a time. A few years later they have dissipated away.
So I have read 100 books from the last 5 years. Themes do keep recurring. Three mentions of kintsugi – one was actually in a prose book (Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, fantastic) and not the poems by the same writer. But this is a sort of “ping” - kintsugi three times, I have found the edge in some way. Where the edge is, that is part of the frame. Postscript. I have now seen a fourth reference to kintsugi. Surely this is a signal to stop collecting evidence.
I talk about the mainstream of an older era (say 1952 to 1980?) disappearing to be replaced by a new central style, which I actually like. That is the big picture but clearly poets are still writing poems inside the limits of that older style, which was criticised so much. I don't want to name them, in a context which already puts them down, but the pattern is not disappearance. Instead, we have a dozen or more styles flourishing and securing their own parts of a wider public realm. It’s like plants competing in my untended garden – the losers don’t disappear altogether. Although ragwort doesn't seem to have come back since 2018. The Carcanet New Poetries 8 includes poems that hark back to the 1950s stylistically.
I have this image in my mind of 990 poets as a self-sustaining structure with no supports. It is erect, or it can't collapse any further. At any point where you are, the pressure of other poets holds you up. You don’t need economic support. If you have the esteem of your fellow poets, then it is a grand place to be. If you don’t have that esteem it is a painful place to be. Your achievements flow away like rain down the gutter. This is so vivid, but I don’t have any external evidence for it. It is just an image, like a dream. The structure is almost invulnerable to assault, but it puts pressure on all the individuals… the heat of winning, of losing, of being halfway down a field of 100, of seeing other people succeed, is too much. People who buy into meritocracy too much have a hard time because it doesn't allow for serenity.
Teaching a class where everyone assumes on day one that they are more talented than you. Maybe that is the story of our time. A poet with a pay cheque but without the will to write poetry. The class certainly aren't there to read your work. Just the opposite.
Spent a day in the South Bank poetry library basically looking for books by the people in [2013 anthology] Dear World, or about 20 of them. I used the 74 names as a proxy for saying who wasn't included in the PBS lists, but on investigation it may be that a lot of them gave up after one book or even didn’t get a book out. You go to the right spot on the shelves, and only find one slim pamphlet. You have this classic anthology, collecting a swarm of poets under 35, who haven’t reached their peak, in 2013. Did they go on after that? So my text says that the absence of 53 names from Dear World in the lists from the PBS shop window is an indicator of how incomplete the shop window is. But this may be wrong, it may be that half those 53 names had just given up writing regularly, and the PBS thing is actually a good view of who is producing serious, long, substantial books. What if the people you admire give up? I am seeing this picture of people spending ten years learning how to write poetry and then not writing it. They found lots of other things to do which had a bigger audience. There just wasn't a big splash when they got their pamphlet out. This is just a picture. Maybe the amount of poets floating around is so big that it diminishes the space each one can occupy as they write their work. Small audience, big competition. And so people drop out. I am wondering how that would apply to the 990 recent names, in the PBS list trawl which I did. Are they going to be career poets or is one book going to be it?
I have the “Salt Younger Poets” anthology, 2011, hoaching with good poems, 50 writers who hadn't had a book out at that point. A brilliantly edited book, they had done the research to an incredible degree of efficiency. So, if I do the catalogue checks, maybe 30 of them never got a book out. This is depressing; I am not sure I want to do the sociology. Writing poetry just isn’t that rewarding, it is easy to see why people give up. I am not going to do that catalogue work. (However, 24 of the 50 have a book within the PBS list I collated. Not bad.)
This crush of poets, the 990 names I culled from the PBS “shop window”, it is great for the consumer, but maybe there are side-effects which aren't so great. There is pressure because of too many poets striving to get the outlets. And maybe there is resentment of editors and panels because they can’t give young poets what they want. Pressure from below. When people are so angry with the gatekeepers, it is hard for anybody to reach a sense of legitimacy. Possibly the ones who persist are the ones who do respect the institutions and who aren’t charred with resentment.
I am interested now in the level of disillusion. I have a feeling that there were 990 poets in contention in 2010, and that quite a few of those have already quietly given up. The data section I examined in 2022 had too many people who had started in the last five years… the age spread wasn't right, it had too many young people. Someone gets a book out, even two books, and the feedback is almost inaudible. They wanted victory rather than serenity. So maybe, of these 990 now hunting for success, a third are going to give up before the next time someone does a large sample. Being turned down is just so painful, you don't want to repeat it and repeat it.
Have spent a frustrating morning trying to access annual figures for poetry publication. I subscribed to The Bookseller on-line to get these figures, but I can't find anything relevant by searching their back issues. I think they did a breakdown of titles by genre in the 1990s, but I can't find anything in the stuff available on-line. I think the ISBN agency asks publishers to categorise their titles and produces breakdowns annually based on that, but I don’t know where to find those figures. When Randall Stevenson claims 2700 titles being published annually at the end of the Nineties, I think he is using an ISBN report, but I don’t know where he obtained that figure. It's an exciting figure.
I got hold of a 2012 book from Salt, “In their own words”. Statements by 56 poets. This is really weak. It is good to know what poets think about their work, but this is unrevealing. A forgotten book. As always, there is something to be retrieved – Ira Lightman’s statement for example. In general these writers compose intuitively and have no idea what intuition is made of or how to talk about it. Very few of them published with Salt – a lack of coordination there. I would have been interested to see a book about Salt’s debut poets and what they valued as a generation. I was probably hoping for that. Instead, two editors signed up to do this prose book and didn’t have any interest in the Salt list. At a quick glance, only one of the 56 published with Salt. (real count is 3!) This is a lesson, possibly – when someone has a view of what poetry is happening, in a given decade or half decade, their view may not even overlap with yours. It is difficult to have a conversation about poetry when you don’t read the same poets. But the field of readable poets is so huge.
I have doubts about secondary commentary which is 90% about “theoretical” poets, because intuitive poets are unable to explain their processes. But really, what can you do with processes which are so defended and so buried in silence.
Thursday, 2 March 2023
Muriel Box - again
Muriel Box – again
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
Wednesday, 1 February 2023
New book
December 2022.
am working on a new book about poetry in the 21st century. I started at the end of August and sometime around December 15th counted that I had 150,000 words and it was time to halt. I have been taking a break since then – actually still working every day, just not adding new chapters. The title is likely to be “Beautiful feelings of sensitive people”.
have been checking on early Christian vernacular literature. Heer says that the rise of this new literature in the vernacular (German) was the product of Dominican priests writing for nuns in the 70 Dominican nunneries of Germany. So, not to do with lay literacy but with a relatively un-educated part of the clergy itself. They presumably did not know Latin but could read and hence needed books. The history of lay literacy is slightly different.
The start point was looking at the Poetry Book Society website. I actually wanted to spot books I could review. I became fascinated by this as a shop window, and finally downloaded 19 quarters of their “suggested” books and turned them into a spreadsheet. I filtered out foreign poets and came up with a dataset of 990 poets and 1190 titles. I thought this proved that a survey was impossible, but after a while I felt that it was useful to take a dip into that big river and see what I could come up with. Obviously the background is “depolarisation” – about 20 years ago I began to get into a broader view of poetry than just the Alternative. After a few years of delving and pondering, I produced a book called “The long 1950s”, which still halted in 1997, but took the poets who hadn’t taken on the “innovation package” of the 1960s and had continued to write in the old styles. I found that rewarding and there wasn't much chance of me taking a narrow, Alternative only, view of the last 20 years.
Quote from an email to a friend: “at the risk of going on and on, I want to say that the figure of 990 authors does not represent a target I am going to meet... It is more like a scientific paper where you spend half your energy analysing why the data you have is so incomplete and what questions you can ever legitimately ask of it.
I looked at the classic generational (“under 35”) anthology Dear World and Everyone in it. 74 names. Of which 52 were NOT in the PBS list of 990. What I think this means is that the PBS website is just a shop window, many many powerful poets don’t feature in it at all. Wrestling with the 990 is not going to win the war... it is a battle which will not get you closer to the objective.
So, where are the others? (Dear World is 8 years old but the poets should be at the prime of their careers, roughly.)”
and another email: “I saw Martin last week and he was quite negative about the book. I don’t think he wants to read it. He was really against the subtitle “poetry in the 21st century” although it has to be called that. He did a thesis on the influence of the New York poets on English poetry and wants me to do something like that, where the content matches the title. That is no good, the central thing is that there is a deluge of new poets and the book has to deal quickly with 80 or 90 poets, not find an enclosure and sit in it. And he thinks it is just going to be me writing about poets I like… another statement of self-regard. But he isn’t allowing for me being like a camera and taking new data in, so that half the poets are poets I hadn’t heard of before I started. He is missing something there, the effect of the deluge is to wipe away the old landmarks. We can escape polarisation.”
(A further check revealed some more people who couldn't really be counted as resident in Britain, so depressed the count to 972. These checks are boring to do.)
The effect of thousands of new poets rushing onto the scene is that the past is simply forgotten, buried beneath new and fabulous layers of words. So we don’t need to continue the mainstream; alternative opposition of the 1970s. The new scene is not authentically the offspring of either side. There are just endless new possibilities. My guess is that most of the 990 poets are worth reading. The samples I have taken suggest that, but I am not going to sample every single poet. I have trouble with people who think that anything unconventional must be the product of the unconventional poetry which existed in the 1970s – this is just an act of grand cultural acquisition, although I can see it is tempting. It is “I own the wilderness” more or less. Offspring– poetry is not just the product of poetry but of a whole cultural ocean in which poetry is just one warm current. Alternative poetry was not visible enough to develop a second and third generation – people rebelled against the mainstream culture and worked out a cultural programme before stumbling across the existing Alternative. This is a pity in some ways, but it certainly encourages stylistic diversity.
Have just been reading an interview in Wolfgang Iser’s book where a Norman Holland reports work which researched “reader interpretation” by actually asking people to write down their reactions to a poem. He selects a single poem, by Denise Levertov, and reports that ten people wrote about it without any common element (except that it was about a snake and that the writer was a woman, a fact which is not in the text) in what they wrote down. I like this, but I am wondering how I can respond to it within my book. I suspect that this was quite a simple poem with a dreamlike image which was genuinely open to interpretation. Poems which include interpretation, introspection, argument, etc., are much less subject to variant interpretation. But really, anything I write may mislead someone who reads it, my reaction to a poem may be quite different from theirs. This incites me to record my reactions, not to suppress them. I like the idea of collecting ten responses to several hundred poems, but I am doubtful that I could get people to supply this material for free. I am recording my responses to poems because I can control the material and I don't have to pay for it.
To look in another direction – the responses of poets to poems are of great interest, and the way they write expresses that response. The history of poetry is a narrative of the way poets of one generation respond to the poems of the previous generation. This is a manageable way of capturing subjectivity. Of course, there may be a whole range of subjective responses which I am not capturing at all. And I can’t compose a book in which many volumes of poetry are discussed and ten responses are included for each one. I am trying to give people helpful advice rather than to record every possible reaction.
Nolan. I quote something quoted in a poem by Kevin Nolan about eisteann ri bhfuaim, and so on. I have now discovered that this is a passage from the poet Sean O’Riordain’s diaries, for February 1949. The diaries were published as “anamlón bliana” in 2014. I am unsure how Kevin came to quote from them in a book published in 2006. The quote is at page 78 of Loving Little Orlick. The sense of the whole passage is to define “the wonder and magic of life” (alltacht og druiodhiocht). The sound which we hear dying away is that of a horse’s hooves, pulling a cart, which O'Riordain heard as a child.
So, I have reached the point where the reading is continuing, and I am finding new texts I like, but I am not writing about them because there is no longer room.
I set up the book by observing, early on, that a 1962 anthology by Kenneth Allott included 39.5% Oxford graduates in its selection. Then I gesture towards a set of 990 poets retrieved from the Poetry Book Society website, and say that the theme of the whole fifty-year period is the broadening of the apex. It would be rational to give a figure for how many of the 990 had been to Oxford. I am not doing this – I just don’t want to do 990 internet searches for biographic data. Contemporary poets like to hide their educational career, because of the attention given to it, which may be hostile, and anyway bypasses what they are really saying in their poems. It would be hard to get an accurate figure. I prefer to spend my time reading poems. So this figure is missing. I just don't think anyone is going to examine the figures in print and say “the apex has not broadened”. So the extra evidence does not advance us.
Have been reading David Kynaston’s social history of the 1950s – Family Britain. Think this is the third time. I relate to that decade. He prints Gaitskell’s analysis of the 1955 general election (which Labour lost). He (HG) says that the problem was privatisation – people were more interested in the welfare of their household and less interested in the nation and the collective benefit. So my book puts great stress on privatisation, and the analysis was already there seventy years ago. This is depressing somehow, but, if you write good history, then it does sound familiar, because everyone already knows about it. Gaitskell identifies a shift of balance– so not the annihilation of the collective idea, just a shift of the centre point. Actually, both parties had lost votes since the 1951 election but Labour lost more. Not voting probably does represent a loss of interest in the collective issues, certainly in the possibility of changes to the overall shape of society. So 90% of voters didn’t change their vote in 1955. These small shifts are very interesting, but if I broke down my analysis to include them it would be too complicated. The main point is what Sennett says, that there is a polarity between private space and public space, and in the modern era this polarity has broken down and it is the public space which has lost its energy. I think the point is that the sublime or majestic style is not impossible, but that there are massive inhibitions about it, and that poets tend to do it badly because of a lack of steady long-term development. I think some contemporary poetry is sublime, for example Pauline Stainer or Nancy Gaffield. Rod Mengham delivered a lecture on Tom Raworth as the sublime – I never saw the text but it is intriguing. Raworth slips off everything personal and local in order to give a glimpse of something uncommitted and intact. All the same I hear so many jokes about someone being pretentious, and so little about how people miss the more profound and universal notes.
I think the limit to considering this is that the domestic scale is so much the norm, and if you criticise the norm you have no standpoint. You can write a history of what happened, but much less a history of what didn’t happen. I don’t see how the normal thing can fail to meet the prevailing norms, so I am not trying to define what we have, what we do, as failure. I am just pointing to how this part of history is out of balance, which is probably true of other phases of cultural history.
The sublime is still there and is part of everyone’s experience. If they play Parry’s setting of “Jerusalem” at the Promenade Concerts, that is obviously the sublime, it is an occultist figure like Blake advancing to centre stage. It is just inaccurate to say that that is not happening, or that we don’t get carried away by it. I don’t want to catalogue all such moments, because really it would take too long. We associate these moments with legacy art and not with new art, partly because the new cannot be collective and is not part of childhood memories.
We cannot become conscious of cultural norms unless they are contrasted with some other phase of culture when the rules were different.
28th January and I have reached the end of the book. I think I wrote the last bit of text yesterday. The day before, I went to the cinema (“Babylon”, by Damien Chazelle) with the idea of sitting in a bar and writing the last piece of text. It was about Nat Raha and very difficult to write. I had all the ideas on the bus... that feeling of movement, things rushing past my eyes. I wrote them in my notebook. Later on, I discovered that I had stuffed my bag with so many Raha books that the notebook had escaped from the bag and I didn’t have it any more. This was a sign. I wrote the text down from memory and that was it. Anything else in that notebook could be forgotten about.
I read (most of) a book in which the author had just written poems about insects. And maybe a month, six weeks, before that I had read a book in which there were 20 pages of poems about insects. And we could match this to Mendoza, who works as an insect librarian (storing specimens) and writes about insects, although in a very non-realistic way. So my programme was to read 100 books from a 5-year period, with the idea that minor features of style would repeat, and that you would get the unconscious of the time, the features of style which define a period because they are unconsciously accepted. And finding ideas repeated is a key step towards that. Even if it also means that the process is getting boring. So I have to read a lot more books. Although the book is complete. It is going to be a crisis if I find something else I have to put in. But I have to collect the data. I had to write the book first, because it was convulsive, I just had tons of ideas every morning and I would spend the day writing them down. So this morning I have nothing left to do, but actually it is desirable if I read another 100 books, and that is still part of the project.
Boring tasks get left to the end, and I spent a long time yesterday in a freezing cold shed going through cardboard boxes of books, some of which have collapsed due to damp in the shed. I found the reference I wanted (an essay about the Welsh language campaign in Aberystwyth with an account of a famous demo in February 1963), but also a book which I didn’t read during the project because I hadn’t catalogued it. Digon o fwydod, by Mihangel Morgan. I am not sure I like this, much as I admire Morgan's novels. But I will have to read it properly.
Popol Vuh. The story of this text is fascinating but I didn't have space to expand on it within a review which had to be essentially about Martin Thom. I think it is fair to call it “pre-Columbian” although physically any text we have is much after Columbus. There is no “Mayan codex” of it, but it was written down in Maya by people (who were possibly Maya landowners) in the Latin alphabet around 1560, and then printed in the mid-19th century from their manuscript. The Spanish crown was trying to increase its revenue and tighten up in the 1550s, and the manuscript is probably a titulo, a narrative claim to lordship of certain lands, for use in a court.
“In the 1550s, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a town constructed about a mile from the ruins of K’umarcaaj, someone wrote a compilation of the K’iche’s tzijs which were found in distinct places – not only wujs – at the moment of the Spanish invasion, composed in Western style (Latin characters, paper and ink). We do not know if this was a single and unique version, or one of many copies; we also do not know why they were written in this way. What is certain is that these texts were selected and set down in a certain sequence that did not exist as such prior to 1524; the content, however, is of the pre-colonial era“
[[tzij is narrative; not sure what a wuj is, although it is the same word as "vuh".]
"Around 1701–3, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, while at the church of San Pablo Chuilá, in Chichicastenango, obtained one of the versions of this antique manuscript, laboriously copied the K’iche’ text, and translated it into Spanish"
- this was the Popol Vuh. But what he copied was already in Latin characters. This is so obscure. Scherzer and Wagner published it in 1857, then "in Paris in 1861, the Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg published a copy of the K’iche’ text along with a French translation. Brasseur gave these texts the name Popol Vuh"
So the 1703 copy was copied from an earlier version, which however was already in Latin characters. The title means “book of counsel”. Popol Wuj is a more modern transliteration.
I asked the question if it could be a fake, like certain other “primordial” books, but this seems not to be true, and reportedly scholars collected texts from oral recitation in the 20th century, and they correspond to the 1703 Popol Vuh. (The correspondences may involve a "core" which allows all the details to differ, the modern recitals may not be Qu'iche - I have been unable to tie this down.)
Gordon Brotherston is reported to have compared several different Amerindian cosmogonies, and called them “chapters of the same book”. This is very interesting, although it is arguable whether they really correspond to each other, even being “basic books” of their respective ethnic groups. He was publishing in the 1970s and I haven’t seen his work. It sounds like the kind of thing which is so rich that I can't remember anything about it afterwards even if it seemed like a whole new world while I was reading it. His book is Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature. “Gordon Brotherston sostiene en este ensayo que las diferentes literaturas americanas pueden leerse como capítulos de un mismo libro, que él llama El Libro del Cuarto Mundo. Para ello, establece el texto americano, distribuyéndolo en las distintas regiones geográficas y según las distintas modalidades: glifos, quipus y amoxtli, entre otros.”
"These grammars can be first accessed through the great historic-cosmogonic narratives that Gordon Brotherston calls ‘the books of the Fourth World’, and include texts such as the Ayvu Rapyta (Origin of the Human Language) of the Tupi-Guarani, the Runa Indio (Huarochirí Manuscript) of the Quechua, the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) of the K’iche-Maya and the Books of Chilam Balam (‘Books of the Wizard-Jaguar’) of the Maya; the Amoxtli (painted books) produced by Nahuatl tlacuilos;"
These cosmogonic books could stand as an example of the sublime, the category which I have claimed is one pole of cultural space and which is hard to access for modern poets. I am thinking of Graham Sutherland's painting “Origins of the Land”, which at one time used to hang in the Tate; this is a great example of something which is modern and English and yet sublime, cosmogonic. It was connected with the Festival of Britain and the key point may be authorisation: the Festival was a collective and governmental cultural event, and also it came during (even if late in) an era of collectivism brought about by shared danger during the war. In fact, Sutherland approved of the government and the government approved of him… not a state of affairs which has obtained for many artists since 1951.
Martin Stannard wanted the book to be a complete account of some bounded and small subset of the scene. It was possible that I would do this by writing entirely about politicised poetry. I did say in a review, around 2014, that political engagement might be the key to the new poetry. But I didn’t do this, because it would have been too exclusive. There was a revival of political interest following the 2007-8 financial crisis, and the cuts to welfare services which followed it. But if you look at 100 or 200 poets active in the past ten years, they mainly aren't political. Or, at least, if you focus on their political ideas, you get a very distorted view of their poetry. All the same, this could have been an interesting book. My excuse for writing from my point of view is that there should be ten different books about recent poetry, which all had different views. I am inclined to ask about the unconscious pressures to conform, which mean that most poets aren’t political, or only in the safest possible way. I guess there is an unspoken piece of folk wisdom saying that “If you say something controversial, you halve your audience”. In terms of what I think about, Steve Ely, Andrea Brady, and Sean Bonney have been pretty central over the past decade or more. But if I did a book saying “this is the centre! this is the apex!!”, it would shove hundreds of other people towards the periphery and the dubious lighting conditions. Such a book would have much less about poets, and much more about contemporary history, for example the zombie economy, Austerity, global warming.
If I say “you can fail artistically by failing to write about politics”, that sounds very sensible, but it is also a sort of massacre. You take sights on everyone else and blow them away.
am working on a new book about poetry in the 21st century. I started at the end of August and sometime around December 15th counted that I had 150,000 words and it was time to halt. I have been taking a break since then – actually still working every day, just not adding new chapters. The title is likely to be “Beautiful feelings of sensitive people”.
have been checking on early Christian vernacular literature. Heer says that the rise of this new literature in the vernacular (German) was the product of Dominican priests writing for nuns in the 70 Dominican nunneries of Germany. So, not to do with lay literacy but with a relatively un-educated part of the clergy itself. They presumably did not know Latin but could read and hence needed books. The history of lay literacy is slightly different.
The start point was looking at the Poetry Book Society website. I actually wanted to spot books I could review. I became fascinated by this as a shop window, and finally downloaded 19 quarters of their “suggested” books and turned them into a spreadsheet. I filtered out foreign poets and came up with a dataset of 990 poets and 1190 titles. I thought this proved that a survey was impossible, but after a while I felt that it was useful to take a dip into that big river and see what I could come up with. Obviously the background is “depolarisation” – about 20 years ago I began to get into a broader view of poetry than just the Alternative. After a few years of delving and pondering, I produced a book called “The long 1950s”, which still halted in 1997, but took the poets who hadn’t taken on the “innovation package” of the 1960s and had continued to write in the old styles. I found that rewarding and there wasn't much chance of me taking a narrow, Alternative only, view of the last 20 years.
Quote from an email to a friend: “at the risk of going on and on, I want to say that the figure of 990 authors does not represent a target I am going to meet... It is more like a scientific paper where you spend half your energy analysing why the data you have is so incomplete and what questions you can ever legitimately ask of it.
I looked at the classic generational (“under 35”) anthology Dear World and Everyone in it. 74 names. Of which 52 were NOT in the PBS list of 990. What I think this means is that the PBS website is just a shop window, many many powerful poets don’t feature in it at all. Wrestling with the 990 is not going to win the war... it is a battle which will not get you closer to the objective.
So, where are the others? (Dear World is 8 years old but the poets should be at the prime of their careers, roughly.)”
and another email: “I saw Martin last week and he was quite negative about the book. I don’t think he wants to read it. He was really against the subtitle “poetry in the 21st century” although it has to be called that. He did a thesis on the influence of the New York poets on English poetry and wants me to do something like that, where the content matches the title. That is no good, the central thing is that there is a deluge of new poets and the book has to deal quickly with 80 or 90 poets, not find an enclosure and sit in it. And he thinks it is just going to be me writing about poets I like… another statement of self-regard. But he isn’t allowing for me being like a camera and taking new data in, so that half the poets are poets I hadn’t heard of before I started. He is missing something there, the effect of the deluge is to wipe away the old landmarks. We can escape polarisation.”
(A further check revealed some more people who couldn't really be counted as resident in Britain, so depressed the count to 972. These checks are boring to do.)
The effect of thousands of new poets rushing onto the scene is that the past is simply forgotten, buried beneath new and fabulous layers of words. So we don’t need to continue the mainstream; alternative opposition of the 1970s. The new scene is not authentically the offspring of either side. There are just endless new possibilities. My guess is that most of the 990 poets are worth reading. The samples I have taken suggest that, but I am not going to sample every single poet. I have trouble with people who think that anything unconventional must be the product of the unconventional poetry which existed in the 1970s – this is just an act of grand cultural acquisition, although I can see it is tempting. It is “I own the wilderness” more or less. Offspring– poetry is not just the product of poetry but of a whole cultural ocean in which poetry is just one warm current. Alternative poetry was not visible enough to develop a second and third generation – people rebelled against the mainstream culture and worked out a cultural programme before stumbling across the existing Alternative. This is a pity in some ways, but it certainly encourages stylistic diversity.
Have just been reading an interview in Wolfgang Iser’s book where a Norman Holland reports work which researched “reader interpretation” by actually asking people to write down their reactions to a poem. He selects a single poem, by Denise Levertov, and reports that ten people wrote about it without any common element (except that it was about a snake and that the writer was a woman, a fact which is not in the text) in what they wrote down. I like this, but I am wondering how I can respond to it within my book. I suspect that this was quite a simple poem with a dreamlike image which was genuinely open to interpretation. Poems which include interpretation, introspection, argument, etc., are much less subject to variant interpretation. But really, anything I write may mislead someone who reads it, my reaction to a poem may be quite different from theirs. This incites me to record my reactions, not to suppress them. I like the idea of collecting ten responses to several hundred poems, but I am doubtful that I could get people to supply this material for free. I am recording my responses to poems because I can control the material and I don't have to pay for it.
To look in another direction – the responses of poets to poems are of great interest, and the way they write expresses that response. The history of poetry is a narrative of the way poets of one generation respond to the poems of the previous generation. This is a manageable way of capturing subjectivity. Of course, there may be a whole range of subjective responses which I am not capturing at all. And I can’t compose a book in which many volumes of poetry are discussed and ten responses are included for each one. I am trying to give people helpful advice rather than to record every possible reaction.
Nolan. I quote something quoted in a poem by Kevin Nolan about eisteann ri bhfuaim, and so on. I have now discovered that this is a passage from the poet Sean O’Riordain’s diaries, for February 1949. The diaries were published as “anamlón bliana” in 2014. I am unsure how Kevin came to quote from them in a book published in 2006. The quote is at page 78 of Loving Little Orlick. The sense of the whole passage is to define “the wonder and magic of life” (alltacht og druiodhiocht). The sound which we hear dying away is that of a horse’s hooves, pulling a cart, which O'Riordain heard as a child.
So, I have reached the point where the reading is continuing, and I am finding new texts I like, but I am not writing about them because there is no longer room.
I set up the book by observing, early on, that a 1962 anthology by Kenneth Allott included 39.5% Oxford graduates in its selection. Then I gesture towards a set of 990 poets retrieved from the Poetry Book Society website, and say that the theme of the whole fifty-year period is the broadening of the apex. It would be rational to give a figure for how many of the 990 had been to Oxford. I am not doing this – I just don’t want to do 990 internet searches for biographic data. Contemporary poets like to hide their educational career, because of the attention given to it, which may be hostile, and anyway bypasses what they are really saying in their poems. It would be hard to get an accurate figure. I prefer to spend my time reading poems. So this figure is missing. I just don't think anyone is going to examine the figures in print and say “the apex has not broadened”. So the extra evidence does not advance us.
Have been reading David Kynaston’s social history of the 1950s – Family Britain. Think this is the third time. I relate to that decade. He prints Gaitskell’s analysis of the 1955 general election (which Labour lost). He (HG) says that the problem was privatisation – people were more interested in the welfare of their household and less interested in the nation and the collective benefit. So my book puts great stress on privatisation, and the analysis was already there seventy years ago. This is depressing somehow, but, if you write good history, then it does sound familiar, because everyone already knows about it. Gaitskell identifies a shift of balance– so not the annihilation of the collective idea, just a shift of the centre point. Actually, both parties had lost votes since the 1951 election but Labour lost more. Not voting probably does represent a loss of interest in the collective issues, certainly in the possibility of changes to the overall shape of society. So 90% of voters didn’t change their vote in 1955. These small shifts are very interesting, but if I broke down my analysis to include them it would be too complicated. The main point is what Sennett says, that there is a polarity between private space and public space, and in the modern era this polarity has broken down and it is the public space which has lost its energy. I think the point is that the sublime or majestic style is not impossible, but that there are massive inhibitions about it, and that poets tend to do it badly because of a lack of steady long-term development. I think some contemporary poetry is sublime, for example Pauline Stainer or Nancy Gaffield. Rod Mengham delivered a lecture on Tom Raworth as the sublime – I never saw the text but it is intriguing. Raworth slips off everything personal and local in order to give a glimpse of something uncommitted and intact. All the same I hear so many jokes about someone being pretentious, and so little about how people miss the more profound and universal notes.
I think the limit to considering this is that the domestic scale is so much the norm, and if you criticise the norm you have no standpoint. You can write a history of what happened, but much less a history of what didn’t happen. I don’t see how the normal thing can fail to meet the prevailing norms, so I am not trying to define what we have, what we do, as failure. I am just pointing to how this part of history is out of balance, which is probably true of other phases of cultural history.
The sublime is still there and is part of everyone’s experience. If they play Parry’s setting of “Jerusalem” at the Promenade Concerts, that is obviously the sublime, it is an occultist figure like Blake advancing to centre stage. It is just inaccurate to say that that is not happening, or that we don’t get carried away by it. I don’t want to catalogue all such moments, because really it would take too long. We associate these moments with legacy art and not with new art, partly because the new cannot be collective and is not part of childhood memories.
We cannot become conscious of cultural norms unless they are contrasted with some other phase of culture when the rules were different.
28th January and I have reached the end of the book. I think I wrote the last bit of text yesterday. The day before, I went to the cinema (“Babylon”, by Damien Chazelle) with the idea of sitting in a bar and writing the last piece of text. It was about Nat Raha and very difficult to write. I had all the ideas on the bus... that feeling of movement, things rushing past my eyes. I wrote them in my notebook. Later on, I discovered that I had stuffed my bag with so many Raha books that the notebook had escaped from the bag and I didn’t have it any more. This was a sign. I wrote the text down from memory and that was it. Anything else in that notebook could be forgotten about.
I read (most of) a book in which the author had just written poems about insects. And maybe a month, six weeks, before that I had read a book in which there were 20 pages of poems about insects. And we could match this to Mendoza, who works as an insect librarian (storing specimens) and writes about insects, although in a very non-realistic way. So my programme was to read 100 books from a 5-year period, with the idea that minor features of style would repeat, and that you would get the unconscious of the time, the features of style which define a period because they are unconsciously accepted. And finding ideas repeated is a key step towards that. Even if it also means that the process is getting boring. So I have to read a lot more books. Although the book is complete. It is going to be a crisis if I find something else I have to put in. But I have to collect the data. I had to write the book first, because it was convulsive, I just had tons of ideas every morning and I would spend the day writing them down. So this morning I have nothing left to do, but actually it is desirable if I read another 100 books, and that is still part of the project.
Boring tasks get left to the end, and I spent a long time yesterday in a freezing cold shed going through cardboard boxes of books, some of which have collapsed due to damp in the shed. I found the reference I wanted (an essay about the Welsh language campaign in Aberystwyth with an account of a famous demo in February 1963), but also a book which I didn’t read during the project because I hadn’t catalogued it. Digon o fwydod, by Mihangel Morgan. I am not sure I like this, much as I admire Morgan's novels. But I will have to read it properly.
Popol Vuh. The story of this text is fascinating but I didn't have space to expand on it within a review which had to be essentially about Martin Thom. I think it is fair to call it “pre-Columbian” although physically any text we have is much after Columbus. There is no “Mayan codex” of it, but it was written down in Maya by people (who were possibly Maya landowners) in the Latin alphabet around 1560, and then printed in the mid-19th century from their manuscript. The Spanish crown was trying to increase its revenue and tighten up in the 1550s, and the manuscript is probably a titulo, a narrative claim to lordship of certain lands, for use in a court.
“In the 1550s, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a town constructed about a mile from the ruins of K’umarcaaj, someone wrote a compilation of the K’iche’s tzijs which were found in distinct places – not only wujs – at the moment of the Spanish invasion, composed in Western style (Latin characters, paper and ink). We do not know if this was a single and unique version, or one of many copies; we also do not know why they were written in this way. What is certain is that these texts were selected and set down in a certain sequence that did not exist as such prior to 1524; the content, however, is of the pre-colonial era“
[[tzij is narrative; not sure what a wuj is, although it is the same word as "vuh".]
"Around 1701–3, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, while at the church of San Pablo Chuilá, in Chichicastenango, obtained one of the versions of this antique manuscript, laboriously copied the K’iche’ text, and translated it into Spanish"
- this was the Popol Vuh. But what he copied was already in Latin characters. This is so obscure. Scherzer and Wagner published it in 1857, then "in Paris in 1861, the Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg published a copy of the K’iche’ text along with a French translation. Brasseur gave these texts the name Popol Vuh"
So the 1703 copy was copied from an earlier version, which however was already in Latin characters. The title means “book of counsel”. Popol Wuj is a more modern transliteration.
I asked the question if it could be a fake, like certain other “primordial” books, but this seems not to be true, and reportedly scholars collected texts from oral recitation in the 20th century, and they correspond to the 1703 Popol Vuh. (The correspondences may involve a "core" which allows all the details to differ, the modern recitals may not be Qu'iche - I have been unable to tie this down.)
Gordon Brotherston is reported to have compared several different Amerindian cosmogonies, and called them “chapters of the same book”. This is very interesting, although it is arguable whether they really correspond to each other, even being “basic books” of their respective ethnic groups. He was publishing in the 1970s and I haven’t seen his work. It sounds like the kind of thing which is so rich that I can't remember anything about it afterwards even if it seemed like a whole new world while I was reading it. His book is Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature. “Gordon Brotherston sostiene en este ensayo que las diferentes literaturas americanas pueden leerse como capítulos de un mismo libro, que él llama El Libro del Cuarto Mundo. Para ello, establece el texto americano, distribuyéndolo en las distintas regiones geográficas y según las distintas modalidades: glifos, quipus y amoxtli, entre otros.”
"These grammars can be first accessed through the great historic-cosmogonic narratives that Gordon Brotherston calls ‘the books of the Fourth World’, and include texts such as the Ayvu Rapyta (Origin of the Human Language) of the Tupi-Guarani, the Runa Indio (Huarochirí Manuscript) of the Quechua, the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) of the K’iche-Maya and the Books of Chilam Balam (‘Books of the Wizard-Jaguar’) of the Maya; the Amoxtli (painted books) produced by Nahuatl tlacuilos;"
These cosmogonic books could stand as an example of the sublime, the category which I have claimed is one pole of cultural space and which is hard to access for modern poets. I am thinking of Graham Sutherland's painting “Origins of the Land”, which at one time used to hang in the Tate; this is a great example of something which is modern and English and yet sublime, cosmogonic. It was connected with the Festival of Britain and the key point may be authorisation: the Festival was a collective and governmental cultural event, and also it came during (even if late in) an era of collectivism brought about by shared danger during the war. In fact, Sutherland approved of the government and the government approved of him… not a state of affairs which has obtained for many artists since 1951.
Martin Stannard wanted the book to be a complete account of some bounded and small subset of the scene. It was possible that I would do this by writing entirely about politicised poetry. I did say in a review, around 2014, that political engagement might be the key to the new poetry. But I didn’t do this, because it would have been too exclusive. There was a revival of political interest following the 2007-8 financial crisis, and the cuts to welfare services which followed it. But if you look at 100 or 200 poets active in the past ten years, they mainly aren't political. Or, at least, if you focus on their political ideas, you get a very distorted view of their poetry. All the same, this could have been an interesting book. My excuse for writing from my point of view is that there should be ten different books about recent poetry, which all had different views. I am inclined to ask about the unconscious pressures to conform, which mean that most poets aren’t political, or only in the safest possible way. I guess there is an unspoken piece of folk wisdom saying that “If you say something controversial, you halve your audience”. In terms of what I think about, Steve Ely, Andrea Brady, and Sean Bonney have been pretty central over the past decade or more. But if I did a book saying “this is the centre! this is the apex!!”, it would shove hundreds of other people towards the periphery and the dubious lighting conditions. Such a book would have much less about poets, and much more about contemporary history, for example the zombie economy, Austerity, global warming.
If I say “you can fail artistically by failing to write about politics”, that sounds very sensible, but it is also a sort of massacre. You take sights on everyone else and blow them away.
Sunday, 18 December 2022
Souvenirs duméziliens
Souvenirs duméziliens
Bernfried Schlerath’s critique of the man (“G Dumezil und die Rekonstruktion indogermanischer kultur”, 1995-6, in the magazine Kratylos) leaves virtually nothing standing of his work (which covers 17,000 pages, as Schlerath points out). There is an exception – he says that GD produced good work on the Mahabharata, on the basis that he accepted the text in its own horizon, not smashing it apart to find doubtful tatters of a horizon a thousand years older.
In around 1976, as a student, I was intrigued by the ideas of Georges Dumézil and read at least a few of his books in order to find out what those ideas were. He was comparing highly disparate Indo-European texts in a way which was exciting even if his interest was not in the texts but in archaic scraps and tags which pointed back to some lost horizon a thousand years before the texts. When I was 19, that was possibly the only area in which I knew unusual things – things which very few people at the university knew anything about. That was actually a stimulus, it could have meant that I could write poems which people found new and unfamiliar. But at the same time it is a moment where introversion develops into obscurity – you could write a poem which people flat-out didn’t understand, even when every statement was plain! So that moment of branching out on your own, ceasing to be a schoolboy, was also a moment of fatal danger.
I never wrote any poems on dumézilian themes. That is potentially another part of disaster. Why couldn’t I shape it into poems when I was so enthused by it? But, artistic conscience prevailed. If you are seized by numerous intellectual enthusiasms, you repeatedly have the opportunity to write poems which nobody actually understands.
I think at one point I said to myself, European culture was like the culture of illiterate tribes at the Indo-European stage, whereas now it is very different; if we recover the IE stage we can re-unite Europe with the tribal stage, with myth, with whatever is non-Western. That idea on its own is great. And that is why I was interested in Dumézil when I was a student. But Dumézil’s project was deeply frustrating. And to be honest, what you can recover of paganism in Northern or Western Europe is frustrating, altogether. And the changes since the arrival of literacy, or the arrival of Greek culture, or what you will, are too total. There is no transition. You can’t go back and you can't present something deeply archaic to a 20th C audience and have them recognise it. It is alien and exotic to them. Actually the retrospective gaze produces results as fragmentary and questionable as Dumézil’s, you have the shadow of something within a text whose real organisation is different and much more modern. My belief is that all the Indo-European societies went through profound changes connected to migrating and to becoming literate. The archaic stage never had any writing and the reflections of it in later written texts are fundamentally altered, nostalgic, uncomprehending. That is true for all the IE languages that made it into writing! The route from 3000 BC to Irish people writing legends down in 800 AD is huge and involves possibly four or five complete ruptures, cultural revolutions. And the Christians who controlled literacy had no wish to record the pre-Christian society, it was a night which they were waking up from, in their eyes. The Indo-European thing doesn't give you sociology. Any ancient text gives you rags of what was there a thousand years before its own horizon. If you put these rags together you get nothing at all. They don’t knit together. Not at all. What does hold together is the phonology, but you can't write a poem about that. Or so I suspect. I think archaeology inspires much more confidence.
This was a project which was fundamentally going nowhere. But studying anthropology, naturally through the works of anthropologists and not those of Dumézil, was a transformative experience, even if I can't make explicit what I learnt or even glimpsed.
There was a key experience with Dumézil which was about two frames of reference collapsing into each other, or superimposing on each other. So he writes a book which involves Irish, Latin and Greek texts simultaneously, as if they were part of the same cultural terrain. I found this genuinely exciting each time. Actually the incongruity, the surreal moment almost, is what provides the excitement. If you actually fitted those cultures together it would stop being exciting… but where you superimpose them and they flow into each other and it doesn't make sense and is producing quite unpredicted shapes, that is exciting.
The recovery method involves destroying a text in order to see elements in it which may be a thousand years older. These elements may be what the text, in its full flourishing, was hiding, or may simply not be there at all. Analysis can mean a claim to see the invisible. To be literal, everything in a text written down in 1000 AD has the date of 1000 AD. And in a text every element is bound and grasped by every other. Dissolving the text is not realistic.
I have just come across a note with a quote from Michael Herzfeld. My note says “idealisation of Greece and the act of social anthropology are both ‘a physical location and a discourse through which the moral segregation of the West from the rest of the world was effected.’” This seems to imply that if you cast Europe as acting out the legacy of Greece then you can exclude Europe from the gaze of anthropology and continue the idealising deception which you have already carried out by subtracting Greece from any gaze but one of adoration. You are allowed to carry out anthropology as long as you don't carry it out in Europe! This does point us back towards a project in which you would recover barbarian Europe as the true history, and focus on the illiterates, and the peoples who had customs but no lawyers, as the inventors of the European legacy. The early investors in the fonds européen.
Herzfeld, a social anthropologist, has done fieldwork in Greece and written extensively on the self-deception involved in the project of gathering Greek ethnology. Persistently, scholars selected traits which reminded them of Classical antiquity and threw away traits which were common with Turkish culture, even if that meant losing most of the evidence. So you couldn't compare Greek ballads with Turkish ballads – that would be a Lose. Whereas finding a fragment of Classical memory in a ballad would be a Win. In the sentence I quote Herzfeld is linking this self-deception with a wider self-deception of Europeans about themselves. And this is a pervasive problem of turning a critical gaze on the European middle class when that class has produced the gazer and will form the market for which the gazer will, if all goes well, produce published work.
H is suggesting a realm of ethnographical knowledge which has been thrown away in pursuing the project of idealising Greece and then turning Europe into the reincarnation of Classical Greece. This realm may not exist, since the key to anthropological knowledge is field observation and that is not possible for past societies. What we have instead is documents, and what emerges from a critical gaze at documents, in archives and so on, is history – which we already have. Within works of history are chapters about “society”, that is about (relatively) unchanging structures which resemble social anthropology at a distance.
Dumézil knew a lot about Caucasian languages, including non-IE ones, and produced work on the Ossetes, a people situated in the North Caucasus, so on the edge of Europe (near the Caspian Sea) who speak an Iranian language related to Persian (Farsi) and also, it is thought, to unrecorded languages like Scythian and Alan. (Non-recorded in a relative sense, since we do have some personal names and short inscriptions that may preserve those languages, slightly.) These were the Iranian languages of Eastern Europe. D’s proposition was that the Ossete folklore, recorded in the 19th C by scholars like Vsevolod Miller, preserved narrative structures which had descended intact from the Indo-European period, say the upper 3rd millennium, closer to 3000 BC than to 2500 BC. Roughly 5000 years. This is a ludicrous proposal and one quickly realises that Dumézil needed it to be true rather than knowing it to be true. Of course it is fascinating to learn about this rather obscure people and their vivid folklore (dealing with the Narts, heroic figures who do resemble gods in legends from peoples who still had gods as opposed to being, like the Ossetes, Moslems). The idea that the most profound and undamaged European symbolic utterances are to be found among this marginal people – poor, mountain-dwelling, warlike, Moslem – is moving and touching. Dumézil needs folk-tales collected in 1880 to be unchanged since 2500 BC, and this may well remind us of the need of scholars, travelling in Greece in 1820, to find something (more or less anything) which reminded them of Antiquity and which had descended, virginal, miraculous, from 500 BC. Men who put great stock in books wanted entire communities to be like books, preserving patterns which had been recorded in them centuries ago.
I said “descended intact” but of course the idea was that the “symbolic elements” had evolved to produce a puzzle, esoteric and convoluted, which a scholar of genius could resolve and demonstrate the continuity of the familiar in the unfamiliar. Call for Professor Dumézil!
I am inclined to shift the frame slightly and to posit that the issue is about how Europe views the Balkans as a whole, with the implication that Greece is part of the Balkans even if most Greek politicians would denounce that idea. The Balkans are part of Europe and also where the self-idealisation of Europe halts and evolves into something like horror. This is mixed, as writers like Maria Todorova (as well as Herzfeld) have reminded us, with the attempt of Balkan intellectuals and “civic society” to imitate Europe and, repeatedly, to reform away customs which were not European enough. As has been argued rather convincingly, nationalism was something missing in the Balkan 18th century which reforming activists introduced to the region to make it more European (and less Asian?). So the “ethnographical gaze” might start here – and, for example, specifically in the work of Herzfeld on Greece – and move on to Western Europe. He argues that Greece since the late 18th C has been trying to create a mirror, both of Europe and of Classical Greece, in order to please Europeans. The interaction between the Greek government and the Troika, with an arsenal of figures, or fake figures, is only the latest example of this. The Greek government hires Goldman Sachs in order to facilitate its entry into the European Union, passing the tests of fiscal probity, by creating figures whose immaculate fakeness passed every test of fiscal improbity. The attempt of the EU to impose democracy on the Eastern European accession tier can be seen as a similar exercise – a clash of academic reason and unwritten customs. And Greek tax returns can be seen as colourful “magic realism”.
But the ethnographic project is still open. Tom Harrison returned from fieldwork in Melanesia to set up (in 1938) an anthropological study of Britain – Mass Observation, “the study of ourselves”. The results were extremely interesting. Perhaps one day Herzfeld will study Lancashire.
There is one thing by Dumezil which I am not sceptical about, and that is Le problème des centaures. The material he is dealing with involves quite a bit of Polish folklore… it is fascinating and he doesn't disintegrate it in analysis. So Indo-European studies are exposed as a branch of antiquities. And I had an idea that I could use folklore in poems. And in fact dumézilian ideas, from Centaures, do turn up in one poem – ‘Twelve Days’ (in Savage Survivals).
I have just been listening to radio programmes about Vaughan Williams and his collecting of simple folk material, in Yarmouth, which he could develop into orchestral music. This concerns the relationship of folklore and literature; it suggests the possibility of the enucleation of Indo-European themes, simple like any oral literature, into “modern” literary forms in periods which had states and towns. I suspect that the process, musically or otherwise, is mainly new information being added, not the repetition of archaic and bound forms. Dumézil was slightly younger than the “nationalist” composers but still old enough to have absorbed their ideas and seen simple tunes as the basis of a national music, or literature. This is the ruling idea behind his search for impossibly ancient themes crouched at the base of classical literary texts. Somehow from within Livy’s history of Rome you can recover a folk tune which is 2000 years older and which Livy was apparently unable to alter.
Bernfried Schlerath’s critique of the man (“G Dumezil und die Rekonstruktion indogermanischer kultur”, 1995-6, in the magazine Kratylos) leaves virtually nothing standing of his work (which covers 17,000 pages, as Schlerath points out). There is an exception – he says that GD produced good work on the Mahabharata, on the basis that he accepted the text in its own horizon, not smashing it apart to find doubtful tatters of a horizon a thousand years older.
In around 1976, as a student, I was intrigued by the ideas of Georges Dumézil and read at least a few of his books in order to find out what those ideas were. He was comparing highly disparate Indo-European texts in a way which was exciting even if his interest was not in the texts but in archaic scraps and tags which pointed back to some lost horizon a thousand years before the texts. When I was 19, that was possibly the only area in which I knew unusual things – things which very few people at the university knew anything about. That was actually a stimulus, it could have meant that I could write poems which people found new and unfamiliar. But at the same time it is a moment where introversion develops into obscurity – you could write a poem which people flat-out didn’t understand, even when every statement was plain! So that moment of branching out on your own, ceasing to be a schoolboy, was also a moment of fatal danger.
I never wrote any poems on dumézilian themes. That is potentially another part of disaster. Why couldn’t I shape it into poems when I was so enthused by it? But, artistic conscience prevailed. If you are seized by numerous intellectual enthusiasms, you repeatedly have the opportunity to write poems which nobody actually understands.
I think at one point I said to myself, European culture was like the culture of illiterate tribes at the Indo-European stage, whereas now it is very different; if we recover the IE stage we can re-unite Europe with the tribal stage, with myth, with whatever is non-Western. That idea on its own is great. And that is why I was interested in Dumézil when I was a student. But Dumézil’s project was deeply frustrating. And to be honest, what you can recover of paganism in Northern or Western Europe is frustrating, altogether. And the changes since the arrival of literacy, or the arrival of Greek culture, or what you will, are too total. There is no transition. You can’t go back and you can't present something deeply archaic to a 20th C audience and have them recognise it. It is alien and exotic to them. Actually the retrospective gaze produces results as fragmentary and questionable as Dumézil’s, you have the shadow of something within a text whose real organisation is different and much more modern. My belief is that all the Indo-European societies went through profound changes connected to migrating and to becoming literate. The archaic stage never had any writing and the reflections of it in later written texts are fundamentally altered, nostalgic, uncomprehending. That is true for all the IE languages that made it into writing! The route from 3000 BC to Irish people writing legends down in 800 AD is huge and involves possibly four or five complete ruptures, cultural revolutions. And the Christians who controlled literacy had no wish to record the pre-Christian society, it was a night which they were waking up from, in their eyes. The Indo-European thing doesn't give you sociology. Any ancient text gives you rags of what was there a thousand years before its own horizon. If you put these rags together you get nothing at all. They don’t knit together. Not at all. What does hold together is the phonology, but you can't write a poem about that. Or so I suspect. I think archaeology inspires much more confidence.
This was a project which was fundamentally going nowhere. But studying anthropology, naturally through the works of anthropologists and not those of Dumézil, was a transformative experience, even if I can't make explicit what I learnt or even glimpsed.
There was a key experience with Dumézil which was about two frames of reference collapsing into each other, or superimposing on each other. So he writes a book which involves Irish, Latin and Greek texts simultaneously, as if they were part of the same cultural terrain. I found this genuinely exciting each time. Actually the incongruity, the surreal moment almost, is what provides the excitement. If you actually fitted those cultures together it would stop being exciting… but where you superimpose them and they flow into each other and it doesn't make sense and is producing quite unpredicted shapes, that is exciting.
The recovery method involves destroying a text in order to see elements in it which may be a thousand years older. These elements may be what the text, in its full flourishing, was hiding, or may simply not be there at all. Analysis can mean a claim to see the invisible. To be literal, everything in a text written down in 1000 AD has the date of 1000 AD. And in a text every element is bound and grasped by every other. Dissolving the text is not realistic.
I have just come across a note with a quote from Michael Herzfeld. My note says “idealisation of Greece and the act of social anthropology are both ‘a physical location and a discourse through which the moral segregation of the West from the rest of the world was effected.’” This seems to imply that if you cast Europe as acting out the legacy of Greece then you can exclude Europe from the gaze of anthropology and continue the idealising deception which you have already carried out by subtracting Greece from any gaze but one of adoration. You are allowed to carry out anthropology as long as you don't carry it out in Europe! This does point us back towards a project in which you would recover barbarian Europe as the true history, and focus on the illiterates, and the peoples who had customs but no lawyers, as the inventors of the European legacy. The early investors in the fonds européen.
Herzfeld, a social anthropologist, has done fieldwork in Greece and written extensively on the self-deception involved in the project of gathering Greek ethnology. Persistently, scholars selected traits which reminded them of Classical antiquity and threw away traits which were common with Turkish culture, even if that meant losing most of the evidence. So you couldn't compare Greek ballads with Turkish ballads – that would be a Lose. Whereas finding a fragment of Classical memory in a ballad would be a Win. In the sentence I quote Herzfeld is linking this self-deception with a wider self-deception of Europeans about themselves. And this is a pervasive problem of turning a critical gaze on the European middle class when that class has produced the gazer and will form the market for which the gazer will, if all goes well, produce published work.
H is suggesting a realm of ethnographical knowledge which has been thrown away in pursuing the project of idealising Greece and then turning Europe into the reincarnation of Classical Greece. This realm may not exist, since the key to anthropological knowledge is field observation and that is not possible for past societies. What we have instead is documents, and what emerges from a critical gaze at documents, in archives and so on, is history – which we already have. Within works of history are chapters about “society”, that is about (relatively) unchanging structures which resemble social anthropology at a distance.
Dumézil knew a lot about Caucasian languages, including non-IE ones, and produced work on the Ossetes, a people situated in the North Caucasus, so on the edge of Europe (near the Caspian Sea) who speak an Iranian language related to Persian (Farsi) and also, it is thought, to unrecorded languages like Scythian and Alan. (Non-recorded in a relative sense, since we do have some personal names and short inscriptions that may preserve those languages, slightly.) These were the Iranian languages of Eastern Europe. D’s proposition was that the Ossete folklore, recorded in the 19th C by scholars like Vsevolod Miller, preserved narrative structures which had descended intact from the Indo-European period, say the upper 3rd millennium, closer to 3000 BC than to 2500 BC. Roughly 5000 years. This is a ludicrous proposal and one quickly realises that Dumézil needed it to be true rather than knowing it to be true. Of course it is fascinating to learn about this rather obscure people and their vivid folklore (dealing with the Narts, heroic figures who do resemble gods in legends from peoples who still had gods as opposed to being, like the Ossetes, Moslems). The idea that the most profound and undamaged European symbolic utterances are to be found among this marginal people – poor, mountain-dwelling, warlike, Moslem – is moving and touching. Dumézil needs folk-tales collected in 1880 to be unchanged since 2500 BC, and this may well remind us of the need of scholars, travelling in Greece in 1820, to find something (more or less anything) which reminded them of Antiquity and which had descended, virginal, miraculous, from 500 BC. Men who put great stock in books wanted entire communities to be like books, preserving patterns which had been recorded in them centuries ago.
I said “descended intact” but of course the idea was that the “symbolic elements” had evolved to produce a puzzle, esoteric and convoluted, which a scholar of genius could resolve and demonstrate the continuity of the familiar in the unfamiliar. Call for Professor Dumézil!
I am inclined to shift the frame slightly and to posit that the issue is about how Europe views the Balkans as a whole, with the implication that Greece is part of the Balkans even if most Greek politicians would denounce that idea. The Balkans are part of Europe and also where the self-idealisation of Europe halts and evolves into something like horror. This is mixed, as writers like Maria Todorova (as well as Herzfeld) have reminded us, with the attempt of Balkan intellectuals and “civic society” to imitate Europe and, repeatedly, to reform away customs which were not European enough. As has been argued rather convincingly, nationalism was something missing in the Balkan 18th century which reforming activists introduced to the region to make it more European (and less Asian?). So the “ethnographical gaze” might start here – and, for example, specifically in the work of Herzfeld on Greece – and move on to Western Europe. He argues that Greece since the late 18th C has been trying to create a mirror, both of Europe and of Classical Greece, in order to please Europeans. The interaction between the Greek government and the Troika, with an arsenal of figures, or fake figures, is only the latest example of this. The Greek government hires Goldman Sachs in order to facilitate its entry into the European Union, passing the tests of fiscal probity, by creating figures whose immaculate fakeness passed every test of fiscal improbity. The attempt of the EU to impose democracy on the Eastern European accession tier can be seen as a similar exercise – a clash of academic reason and unwritten customs. And Greek tax returns can be seen as colourful “magic realism”.
But the ethnographic project is still open. Tom Harrison returned from fieldwork in Melanesia to set up (in 1938) an anthropological study of Britain – Mass Observation, “the study of ourselves”. The results were extremely interesting. Perhaps one day Herzfeld will study Lancashire.
There is one thing by Dumezil which I am not sceptical about, and that is Le problème des centaures. The material he is dealing with involves quite a bit of Polish folklore… it is fascinating and he doesn't disintegrate it in analysis. So Indo-European studies are exposed as a branch of antiquities. And I had an idea that I could use folklore in poems. And in fact dumézilian ideas, from Centaures, do turn up in one poem – ‘Twelve Days’ (in Savage Survivals).
I have just been listening to radio programmes about Vaughan Williams and his collecting of simple folk material, in Yarmouth, which he could develop into orchestral music. This concerns the relationship of folklore and literature; it suggests the possibility of the enucleation of Indo-European themes, simple like any oral literature, into “modern” literary forms in periods which had states and towns. I suspect that the process, musically or otherwise, is mainly new information being added, not the repetition of archaic and bound forms. Dumézil was slightly younger than the “nationalist” composers but still old enough to have absorbed their ideas and seen simple tunes as the basis of a national music, or literature. This is the ruling idea behind his search for impossibly ancient themes crouched at the base of classical literary texts. Somehow from within Livy’s history of Rome you can recover a folk tune which is 2000 years older and which Livy was apparently unable to alter.
Friday, 16 September 2022
The hangman ties the holly
The hangman ties the holly: Canadian mythological poets in the 1950s
When we read Anne Wilkinson’s poem:
Her coral remains lie
Where fishes keep their watch by night
And move transparent fans
In hollows of her delicate drift-bones.
From ivory pelvis spring
Her strange sea changeling children;
In sockets deep with six lost layers of sight
The sea fans open.
(‘Virginia Woolf’)
- we are bound to think of Apocalyptic poetry. Wilkinson was Canadian. She wrote a book called “The Hangman Ties the Holly” (1955), a title reminiscent of 40s English poetry in its paradox and parody. Evidently there was some influence of the main Forties English style in Canada. The question is whether this affected a few poems only (so Wilkinson wrote in a mythical way about a death by drowning, without that implying that she would use the same style for any other topic) or whether the idea of personal myth affected some Canadian poets at a deeper level.
The start point is two unanswered questions from the Forties research impulse which followed David Mellors’ overwhelming 1987 exhibition. First, what echoes of the Apocalyptic thing were there in the rest of the English-speaking world? and, secondly, given that the claim about Apocalypse that it vanished like an apparition around 1950 sounds like factional propaganda, how did the movement develop in the 1950s?
The big picture of the 1940s is the detachment of the English speaking world from England as the centre of literary taste. This coincides notably with the re-facing outwards of US policy to become the doctrine of the world’s dominant power, and responds to the controversial and spookily avant garde quality of Apocalyptic poetry in England. The more emotive it was, the less it sounded authoritative and metropolitan. It is interesting that this detachment of the USA was parallelled by rapid anti-English re-orientation in Wales and Scotland – old mantles of authority had simply broken up in rags, and decolonisation was the public music that everyone could hear.
What happens if you remove the world crisis from the “world soul” which the prophetic insight of Apocalyptic poetry is expecting to be listening to? and what, further, if you remove the irrational and confusing quality of style, which so many interested people objected to during the 1940s? The outcome might be something which retains personal myth and a reliance on intuition rather than documentary, which is serene and wrapped up in its mythical world. It would be a myth of serenity and fulfilment, as opposed to paranoia, crisis, the image of Nazi power across the narrow sea. In the Ur-text, the Book of Revelations, we remember the horror-film passages, but the text itself is mainly not about those, it contains a whole range of strange scenes. If you see the course of the world, that could include a wealth of scenes which do not belong in a horror film. The 1950s were an era of returning prosperity and, outside big exceptions like Korea and Indochina, peace. Canada was at peace. The realm of poetic myth could be as diverse as the realm of the original Greek myths, or also as the world of fairy tales, which was closer to the powers of Western secular poets.
Part of the Forties scene was an interest in the ballet and Romantic painting, intact worlds which recalled an era of peace (and of wealth, at least for a few). Part of the poetry scene of the time was an approximation to this realm, a blurring of borders. James Kirkup is an example. So in the 1950s you might find that poetic myth looks like a ballet – something graceful, entranced, aestheticised. In fact, the move away from the activity of States, and so of armies, navies, and so on, could lead directly to this sort of idyllic and small-scale setting. Further, the release of the Unconscious, a move bound to bring decentralisation of art, could unleash a swarm of graceful and decorative dance-like scenes, as opposed to something from a horror film or a war film. The Unconscious contains endless variety, and that was the initial point of unclasping its lid.
We can think about this by looking at products of the early 1950s: Under Milk Wood, the dramas of Christopher Fry, Eithne Wilkins’ Oranges and Lemons. They are more to do with whimsy, decentralisation, comedy, riotous decoration, and much less to do with international politics and the twilight of the gods. But it is credible that this is the direction which the Forties scene went in, and so that we are looking at a development rather than a collapse. People were not writing war poems, full of burning buildings, in an era of peace and victory.
This is the context in which we can look at a group of Canadian poems of the 1950s and ask whether their exploration of personal myth might be part of an emotional connection to England and English poetry. One framework for this might be a wish to have a Canadian thing which moved off in a different direction from US poetry and so pioneered a territory which was not already owned by someone else. Another might be the example of Dylan Thomas. Possibly recent British poetry was acceptable as a model because British political power was evaporating so fast that dependence was not the interpretation which would occur to relevant people. The poets in question are Wilfred Watson, Daryl Hine, and Anne Wilkinson.
Northrop Frye reviewed Wilfred Watson’s Friday’s Child (Faber and Faber [British Book Service], 56 pp., $2.00) on publication, saying it “is typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical and apocalyptic, using religious language because it is impossible to avoid religious language in poetry of this kind. The expected influences are present: Hopkins (notably in “I Praise God’s Mankind”), Eliot, the later Yeats, and more particularly Dylan Thomas, the most exuberantly apocalyptic poet of our time. (There are two poems on Thomas, an “Admiration” and a “Contempt”: the latter seems to deny the apocalyptic element in him, which I find incomprehensible, in spite of the great eloquence of the poem itself.)” (Frye, in The Bush Garden)
This draws the frame inside which this essay has to navigate. Frye is clear that Watson was influenced by the Forties English (or Welsh!) thing; Watson clearly stated, on the cover of one of his books (if I am not mistaken) how much he disliked the Apocalyptic movement. It looks rather as if he had been influenced by Thomas but saw this as a weakness, a social disadvantage. That might propose that Canadian poets, maturing in a certain ten-year period, might simultaneously have been influenced by poets such as Barker, Thomas, or Raine, and have felt a need to moderate that influence and pursue their own direction quite energetically. Watson wrote:
Emily Carr
Like Jonah in the green belly of the whale
overwhelmed by Leviathan 's lights and liver
imprisoned and appalled by the belly's wall
yet inscribing and scoring the up rush
sink vault and arch of that monstrous cathedral,
its living bone and its green pulsing flesh -
old woman, of your three days anatomy
Leviathan sickened and spewed you forth
in a great vomit on coasts of eternity.
Then, as for John of Patmos, the river of life
burned for you an emerald and jasper smoke
and down the valley you looked and saw
all wilderness become transparent vapour,
a ghostly underneath a fleshly stroke,
and every bush an apocalypse of leaf
Evidently, this is an apocalyptic poem. Jim Keery included it in his Apocalyptics anthology, and this is not a puzzling choice – no matter what Watson said. John of Patmos was the author of the original Apocalypse. It does not imitate the pattern of the source because it does not adapt the myths sufficiently into a new myth. The supernatural narrative appears as a tidy comparison for the activity of a real person, Emily Carr (1871-1945). It is “personal myth” in that way. If we look at the images, we see apocalypse, but if we look at the grammar we find something organised and tidy. This is noticeably an equivalent for an Emily Carr painting which has a realistic and rather tidy depiction of a row of totem poles, products of the Canadian Pacific province which embody mythical beings and may record myths, even if their primary significance is to identify a clan and its property.
Watson also wrote:
Then nor Any day nor
Any moment neither
But now — ever and ever
It was, and the Garden of Eden was
The day before. The first
Love of the world, the curst
First marriage poured
Into my veins its heaven.
And centuries of birds sang laughter
Into my heart of rafters
Till the tomb egg broken
A bell rang and swung its thought
(‘Love Song for Friday’s Child’)
The imagery is, basically, apocalyptical, and even mandatory for an apocalyptic poet. If you don’t think an apocalyptic poem looks like this, you are wrong. I am not saying that Watson didn’t work out this poetic theology on his own, just that he reached the same field of resonating images that the English poets did. (I understand his later poetry was quite different.)
I am less interested in locating an echo of the English avant garde in Watson – if the poetry is just an echo then this is of scarce interest – than in finding how the fascinating theories of the group (initially in Leeds, we understand) worked out in a situation less marked by haste and hysteria than wartime Britain. My impression of the three core Apocalyptic anthologies is that the poetry is unfinished, disfigured by haste – people just didn’t think they were going to live very much longer, and they couldn't wait. It is quite rational to think that the movement would reach maturity in the decade 1946-56 (roughly!), and that poems from that period would be the ones of most interest for a connoisseur of poetry looking back in a more leisured era. That moment of fruition didn’t happen in Britain – enemies of the New Romantic style took over too thoroughly and hit too hard. We have evidence that editors had decided, around 1950, not to take any more poems in that style. This gave rise to the question, already mentioned, about the later development of Apocalyptic poetry as something located in a body of missing evidence. I think Jim Keery and I disagree on this, but my impression is that the style flickered out when the pressure of war and international crisis abated. There was an upsurge when Dylan Thomas died, as so many people wrote “farewell Dylan” poems in a style imitating his that you could possibly produce an anthology of them. Patrick Anderson, in Canada, produced what may be the best. People loved Thomas, and loved ‘Under Milk Wood’ (broadcast after his death), at that moment. But the 1950s went on without a School of Dylan raising its artistic level to a pitch you could call significant. The dirges were a farewell in two senses. But, this is an open question. There is a surviving problem of obscurity, poetry that got written but not published (or, published in an amazingly marginal way). Then, there is the problem of sensibility, that poetry sensitive to the state of the world (the world-soul, I almost said) would look totally different in 1955 from how it looked in 1943. Then, there is the question of the style flourishing in somewhere like Canada – free from the ideologues and hate-peddlers of the London and Oxford (Oxfordshire) hot-pots, and benefiting from serenity.
A guide to which way the wind was blowing may be Dorian Cooke’s ‘Fugue for Our Time”, which I understand was written at about New Year’s Day 1950. Cooke’s poetry is still largely unpublished, and we understand that Peter Manson is planning a collection of it. The story is that Cooke had a book ready for William MacLellan to publish, and MacLellan never managed to bring it out. Manson's search for the (possibly) surviving typescript is the stuff of literary legend. However, ‘Fugue’ did come out, in 1951, from a Communist Party front publisher called Form Books. Cooke (1916-2005) was the youngest of the original Apocalyptic group, in Leeds, and wrote some of the most extreme, and least successful, material in their group anthologies. However, ‘Fugue’ is a striking contrast to that material, being a metrically highly organised, closely argued, poem about the state of the world in 1949. I take it that this is a development of the original concerns, rather than a path out of them, and that this reformed manner was likely to be the vehicle for Apocalyptic poetry of the 1950s. Cooke ceased publishing at that point. I describe this because, if we are going to look for connections between the Canadian poets and the Apocalyptics, we should look at “Fugue for our Time” (or late Thomas) rather than the more frantic material from the time of the military build-up, the expansion of the Third Reich, and the Fall of France.
Frye remarks: “In our day, however, the primitive tendency has been reached through a further refinement of sophistication: “modern” poets use myth, metaphor, and apocalyptic imagery just as “modern” painters use abstract or stylized patterns. In Canada, the Romantic nineteenth-century traditions are reflective and representational: “modern” poets have unconsciously bridged the cultural gap with the Indians, just as the painting of Emily Carr bridges the gap in British Columbia between a culture of totem poles and a culture of power plants.”
This suggests that the drive towards the unconscious was bound, in Canada, to lead to a re-imagining of myths of the First Peoples. This was a nationalist programme which also meant turning one’s back on Europe. It follows that impulses which in the abstract precisely match the Apocalyptic idea in Britain would, in Canada, culminate in something Canadian – where the link to Surrealism or Apocalypse was only theoretical, cooled by an ocean, and not really worth investigating. (The extensive use of indigenous material, including myths, eventually led to a complaint by Indigenous writers or others that this was appropriation. Part of the appeal of myth is that it is free, it belongs to you when you deploy it in poems.)
The Apocalyptic thing involved decentralisation. The State was suspect because of its links at every level with the war machine. Rejecting the machine meant a rejection of the Enlightenment, in favour of myth; but inevitably also meant a rejection of the State and of its processes. Humans were no longer similar to each other; everything was personal. The new mythic discourse had also to reject the standard myths, being the Christian legend of salvation and the Greek mythology. Their “classicism” and Victorian aura condemned them. But folklore had bypassed the Enlightenment and was evidently decentralised. It offered a language which Forties poets could master without simply becoming neo-classicists. A key to the Apocalyptic plan to revive myth is that they were using it creatively – the Victorian apparatus and its costumes would be discarded, to be replaced by a newly invented set of symbols and events, straight from the unconscious. These new stories had not benefited from thousands of years of sophisticated polishing by such compilers as Ovid: they would be coarse. Folklore fits into this as a sort of myth without sophistication or overlay; it is a much better source for invented myth than, say, a Mannerist painting with a full range of visual rhetoric. So a title like “the hangman ties the holly”, with its echoes of popular song (of an older time) is an example of personal myth – not yet ennobled and sublimated. It is a line from a poem called 'Carol’ –
I was a lover of turkey and holly
But my true love was the Christmas tree
We hung our hearts from a green green bough
And merry swung the mistletoe
We decked the tree with a silver apple
And a golden pear
A partridge and a cockle shell
And a fair maiden
No rose can tell the fumes of myrrh
That filled the forest of our day
Till fruit and shell and maid fell down
And the partridge flew away
Now I swing from a brittle twig
For the green bough of my true love hid
A laily worm. Around my neck
The hangman ties the holly
This is a wonderful poem and its sophisticated manipulation of a folk idiom, from songs we all know, is distinctive. (The laithly worm was a loathsome dragon in a Yorkshire folk-tale, or possibly ballad.) The links with an Apocalyptic style are almost invisible, but there are moments in Wilkinson poems which do show a link, however transformed: Free from cramp and chap of winter
Skin is minstrel, sings
Tall tales and shady
Of kings of Nemi
(“The Red and the Green”)
So Spring affects us directly through the skin and our inner state is seasonally buoyant. The kings of Nemi are the subjects of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which offers a link, persistently, between myth and folklore. Folklore in fact offered a safe space where poets could work on mythical material without the oversize implications of writing myth. The theme of the poem is quite close to “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”; the red is the blood which circulates inside the body of a human, and the green is the vital force of vegetation. The poem says that the power of the natural world is inside humans, and that art can reflect this more or less boundless vitality and growth. The Golden Bough is about vegetation myth as the basis for most folklore: the king dies and is resurrected just as the wheat is harvested and yet grows again. So the skin is released from winter and metaphorically blossoms; it sings for spring, and so Spring is the motive for songs. (The tall tale is shady because it is like a tall tree, and that tree must be the one on which the Golden Bough grows. But a tall tale is also a myth.)
My feeling is that these poems show how “personal myth” could work in poetry, so shorn of wartime paranoia and of prophetic trumpet tones but coherent and integrated. The unpopular features of the Apocalyptic thing were verbal awkwardness, a lack of logic and consistency, and a tendency to exaggerate. These features could be fixed. So if we are looking for reflections of the style in the 1950s we should start by looking for poems which have shed these features. Wilkinson may be the supreme example of this, since her poems are graceful before anything else. So when Wilkinson writes about “the green artery” of plants, that is very much like “the green fuse” of the flower in Thomas’ poem, she uses imagery like Thomas’ rather consistently, but her style sounds quite different. More generally, personal myth needs to be discreet in scale, because your personality is not inherently gigantic. Another feature of the 1950s is a more oral style, where the folk manner simplifies the poem and makes it closer to an audience. This is audible in Thomas, in Fry, and in Eithne Wilkins, as we mentioned. It bestows lucidity. So we may think that the answer to how Apocalypse developed in the 1950s is work by Kathleen Raine and Anne Wilkinson.
Daryl Hine wrote a pamphlet called “The Carnal and the Crane” in which the title comes from an 18th C Christmas carol. (Several editors have supposed a 14th C original, which we don’t have.) My supposition is that the poems in this 1957 publication (he was twenty-one!) do present personal myth realised through folklore and do resemble some other poems of the time which used folk material. However, Hine was a prolific poet who had almost nothing to do with Apocalypse in the course of his career. A link with Christopher Fry is thinkable. I couldn’t find references to the carnal and the crane (two birds, one eats red meat and one eats fish) within the text, although the longest poem is about King Herod and the Three Kings, and the Carnal is a Christmas song which is about the Journey into Egypt and so partly about Herod. The Herod material is in a poem 13 pages long called “The Return from Unlikeness”. Hine does show “a lack of logic and consistency” and paraphrasing his Christmas poem would be difficult. It is irrational at some deep level, and in the irrationality is the personal element, masked and yet elaborate:
Remember that you thought me beautiful
and praised the muscled flesh above the bone,
the angle of the head, and used to call
my skill the body’s silent falconry
that could release and call the falcon home.
I’m hunter, hawk and hunted, and I shine
in the apocalyptic landscape as I shone
amid the simple views of Arcady.
(The speaker is Alexis, one of the gay shepherds from an eclogue of Vergil.)
I am really not clear what the unlikeness is and what the players return to. The whole could be gay love poetry with a New Testament nativity play superimposed on it. But the buried material resists surfacing much as the overt content resists being unwrapped and discarded.
I regret that I don’t like Hine’s later work as much as this 1957 pamphlet. Perhaps that is because I am more interested by the past. And perhaps he just liked Auden too much.
James Reaney’s A Suit of Nettles is certainly personal myth, certainly fuses entirely with folklore material, and certainly from the 1950s. Is it Apocalyptic? not for a moment. It sounded fascinating when Frye reviewed it (in his annual survey of Canadian poetry, for 1958), and is fascinating to read. It is like a comic ballet, with geese instead of swans. It is more like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (with its hoe-down) than like George Barker. It fits neatly into a pattern of Canadian poetry about Christmas – all the characters are Michaelmas geese, and Christmas is for obvious reasons the end-point. A summary I grabbed from the Internet is:
The title of A Suit of Nettles was inspired by a German fairy tale. Seven suits of nettles are woven by the sister of seven brothers who have been changed into swans. When the time comes for the seven swans to put on their suits of nettles and regain human form, the arm of one suit is not finished. Consequently one brother always has one swan’s wing instead of an arm.
The poem, like Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, is a sequence of pastoral eclogues, one for each month of the year, but here the dialogues are not between bucolic swans, they are between Ontario geese! Although the goose-eye view is bound to be somewhat restricting there is much carefully observed detail about farm houses, spring in a small pond, summer in a pasture and the small town Ontario Fall Fair. […] Here is a poet who believes in merry invective. (I don't know who wrote this. Uncredited blurb to the 2010 edition)
“The poem has a seasonal cycle, associated with a rotating children’s ride at ‘an ordinary small town fair in Ontario with its sideshows, ferris wheels, prize animals, freaks, and merry-go-rounds.’”
I enjoyed Reaney’s Ontarian pastoral.
Far away red far away
Red as fire
A fox
Flash and transpire
I met a green woman
Her feet were paths
Her eyes were bunchberries
Her arms green laths
Her tongue a mushroom
Her teeth white violets
Her nose an owl feather
Her eyes like cressets
Did I touch her?
Vanished
Twang!
Garnisheed
All pulse-wage since
And this place
Holds my heart in a bottle
Of pathpace
I suppose that pathpace is speed of movement and the speaker is trapped, so that his energy is bottled up. The garnishing refers to child support payments. Reaney’s poetry is eccentric, rural, archaic, folksy, quaint, but highly wrought and convincing. There are quite extensive references to The Golden Bough, just as in Wilkinson.
I was excited by comments in Northrop Frye’s essays on 50s Canadian poetry but on examination the connection with British Apocalyptic poetry is not really there. The use of folklore and even folk-song in poems by Wilkinson, Hine, and Reaney is interesting but has other sources and is not simply an extension of fashions on this side of the Atlantic. I found these poets fascinating.
A guess that Canadian poets reached personal myth by means of folklore proved right, although Frye’s admonition about Canadians accessing Native Peoples’ mythology to fill the gap left by Christian and Greek myth had more scope. Reaney, Hine, and Wilkinson do not show any evidence of using “First Peoples” myth, and instead we are seeing people of English (or anglophone, anyway) stock using English folklore. Evidently folk singers, and eventually folk clubs, thrived in Canada. We all know what that led to.
I subscribe to an online library which has quite a lot of Canadian poetry from The Porcupine’s Quill, including 50s poetry, and which does not display at full size on my PC. This halted the essay and it did not really recover. After efforts using the screen grabbing tool I was able to recover a text of James Reaney which I could blow up and read, but it was time-consuming. I hope to access poems by Jay Macpherson and others as time allows. The idea of personal myth in the 1950s would still repay further attention.
It is fair to mention a thread that is just lint. Robin Skelton was a genuine Apocalyptic poet (Patmos and other poems, 1955) who went to Canada. However he was not in Canada during the 1950s. And he wasn't a high-powered poet. I don’t think Canada needed Skelton, and I don’t think anyone took him, as opposed to John of Patmos, as a prophet of times to come.
Even pre-drop Jim Keery has pointed out flaws in my understanding: "I’ve got those lines by Hine, for the obvious reason (I think the second ‘shine’ should be ‘shone’) – but nothing else of his – and ‘liked Auden too much’ is a direct hit, I think – for a start the land of unlikeness is from his Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being – ‘He is the way./ Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;/ You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures’ – ugh – which is where Lowell must have got his title, though Land of Unlikeness came out in the same year, 1944, and it’s a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions: ‘I realized I was far away from Thee in a land of Unlikeness’ – it is a great phrase!"
So there we are. Further dredging reveals that the phrase was taken by Augustine ("regio dissimilitudinis") from Plato's dialogue "Politicus" (the Statesman). "Beholding it in its troubles, and being anxious lest it be racked by storms and confusions, and be dissolved again in the bottomless abyss of unlikeness, he takes control of the helm once more." The "land" has been taken to be either the captivity in Egypt or the wandering of the Holy Family to Egypt, which we see in Hine's poem.
When we read Anne Wilkinson’s poem:
Her coral remains lie
Where fishes keep their watch by night
And move transparent fans
In hollows of her delicate drift-bones.
From ivory pelvis spring
Her strange sea changeling children;
In sockets deep with six lost layers of sight
The sea fans open.
(‘Virginia Woolf’)
- we are bound to think of Apocalyptic poetry. Wilkinson was Canadian. She wrote a book called “The Hangman Ties the Holly” (1955), a title reminiscent of 40s English poetry in its paradox and parody. Evidently there was some influence of the main Forties English style in Canada. The question is whether this affected a few poems only (so Wilkinson wrote in a mythical way about a death by drowning, without that implying that she would use the same style for any other topic) or whether the idea of personal myth affected some Canadian poets at a deeper level.
The start point is two unanswered questions from the Forties research impulse which followed David Mellors’ overwhelming 1987 exhibition. First, what echoes of the Apocalyptic thing were there in the rest of the English-speaking world? and, secondly, given that the claim about Apocalypse that it vanished like an apparition around 1950 sounds like factional propaganda, how did the movement develop in the 1950s?
The big picture of the 1940s is the detachment of the English speaking world from England as the centre of literary taste. This coincides notably with the re-facing outwards of US policy to become the doctrine of the world’s dominant power, and responds to the controversial and spookily avant garde quality of Apocalyptic poetry in England. The more emotive it was, the less it sounded authoritative and metropolitan. It is interesting that this detachment of the USA was parallelled by rapid anti-English re-orientation in Wales and Scotland – old mantles of authority had simply broken up in rags, and decolonisation was the public music that everyone could hear.
What happens if you remove the world crisis from the “world soul” which the prophetic insight of Apocalyptic poetry is expecting to be listening to? and what, further, if you remove the irrational and confusing quality of style, which so many interested people objected to during the 1940s? The outcome might be something which retains personal myth and a reliance on intuition rather than documentary, which is serene and wrapped up in its mythical world. It would be a myth of serenity and fulfilment, as opposed to paranoia, crisis, the image of Nazi power across the narrow sea. In the Ur-text, the Book of Revelations, we remember the horror-film passages, but the text itself is mainly not about those, it contains a whole range of strange scenes. If you see the course of the world, that could include a wealth of scenes which do not belong in a horror film. The 1950s were an era of returning prosperity and, outside big exceptions like Korea and Indochina, peace. Canada was at peace. The realm of poetic myth could be as diverse as the realm of the original Greek myths, or also as the world of fairy tales, which was closer to the powers of Western secular poets.
Part of the Forties scene was an interest in the ballet and Romantic painting, intact worlds which recalled an era of peace (and of wealth, at least for a few). Part of the poetry scene of the time was an approximation to this realm, a blurring of borders. James Kirkup is an example. So in the 1950s you might find that poetic myth looks like a ballet – something graceful, entranced, aestheticised. In fact, the move away from the activity of States, and so of armies, navies, and so on, could lead directly to this sort of idyllic and small-scale setting. Further, the release of the Unconscious, a move bound to bring decentralisation of art, could unleash a swarm of graceful and decorative dance-like scenes, as opposed to something from a horror film or a war film. The Unconscious contains endless variety, and that was the initial point of unclasping its lid.
We can think about this by looking at products of the early 1950s: Under Milk Wood, the dramas of Christopher Fry, Eithne Wilkins’ Oranges and Lemons. They are more to do with whimsy, decentralisation, comedy, riotous decoration, and much less to do with international politics and the twilight of the gods. But it is credible that this is the direction which the Forties scene went in, and so that we are looking at a development rather than a collapse. People were not writing war poems, full of burning buildings, in an era of peace and victory.
This is the context in which we can look at a group of Canadian poems of the 1950s and ask whether their exploration of personal myth might be part of an emotional connection to England and English poetry. One framework for this might be a wish to have a Canadian thing which moved off in a different direction from US poetry and so pioneered a territory which was not already owned by someone else. Another might be the example of Dylan Thomas. Possibly recent British poetry was acceptable as a model because British political power was evaporating so fast that dependence was not the interpretation which would occur to relevant people. The poets in question are Wilfred Watson, Daryl Hine, and Anne Wilkinson.
Northrop Frye reviewed Wilfred Watson’s Friday’s Child (Faber and Faber [British Book Service], 56 pp., $2.00) on publication, saying it “is typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical and apocalyptic, using religious language because it is impossible to avoid religious language in poetry of this kind. The expected influences are present: Hopkins (notably in “I Praise God’s Mankind”), Eliot, the later Yeats, and more particularly Dylan Thomas, the most exuberantly apocalyptic poet of our time. (There are two poems on Thomas, an “Admiration” and a “Contempt”: the latter seems to deny the apocalyptic element in him, which I find incomprehensible, in spite of the great eloquence of the poem itself.)” (Frye, in The Bush Garden)
This draws the frame inside which this essay has to navigate. Frye is clear that Watson was influenced by the Forties English (or Welsh!) thing; Watson clearly stated, on the cover of one of his books (if I am not mistaken) how much he disliked the Apocalyptic movement. It looks rather as if he had been influenced by Thomas but saw this as a weakness, a social disadvantage. That might propose that Canadian poets, maturing in a certain ten-year period, might simultaneously have been influenced by poets such as Barker, Thomas, or Raine, and have felt a need to moderate that influence and pursue their own direction quite energetically. Watson wrote:
Emily Carr
Like Jonah in the green belly of the whale
overwhelmed by Leviathan 's lights and liver
imprisoned and appalled by the belly's wall
yet inscribing and scoring the up rush
sink vault and arch of that monstrous cathedral,
its living bone and its green pulsing flesh -
old woman, of your three days anatomy
Leviathan sickened and spewed you forth
in a great vomit on coasts of eternity.
Then, as for John of Patmos, the river of life
burned for you an emerald and jasper smoke
and down the valley you looked and saw
all wilderness become transparent vapour,
a ghostly underneath a fleshly stroke,
and every bush an apocalypse of leaf
Evidently, this is an apocalyptic poem. Jim Keery included it in his Apocalyptics anthology, and this is not a puzzling choice – no matter what Watson said. John of Patmos was the author of the original Apocalypse. It does not imitate the pattern of the source because it does not adapt the myths sufficiently into a new myth. The supernatural narrative appears as a tidy comparison for the activity of a real person, Emily Carr (1871-1945). It is “personal myth” in that way. If we look at the images, we see apocalypse, but if we look at the grammar we find something organised and tidy. This is noticeably an equivalent for an Emily Carr painting which has a realistic and rather tidy depiction of a row of totem poles, products of the Canadian Pacific province which embody mythical beings and may record myths, even if their primary significance is to identify a clan and its property.
Watson also wrote:
Then nor Any day nor
Any moment neither
But now — ever and ever
It was, and the Garden of Eden was
The day before. The first
Love of the world, the curst
First marriage poured
Into my veins its heaven.
And centuries of birds sang laughter
Into my heart of rafters
Till the tomb egg broken
A bell rang and swung its thought
(‘Love Song for Friday’s Child’)
The imagery is, basically, apocalyptical, and even mandatory for an apocalyptic poet. If you don’t think an apocalyptic poem looks like this, you are wrong. I am not saying that Watson didn’t work out this poetic theology on his own, just that he reached the same field of resonating images that the English poets did. (I understand his later poetry was quite different.)
I am less interested in locating an echo of the English avant garde in Watson – if the poetry is just an echo then this is of scarce interest – than in finding how the fascinating theories of the group (initially in Leeds, we understand) worked out in a situation less marked by haste and hysteria than wartime Britain. My impression of the three core Apocalyptic anthologies is that the poetry is unfinished, disfigured by haste – people just didn’t think they were going to live very much longer, and they couldn't wait. It is quite rational to think that the movement would reach maturity in the decade 1946-56 (roughly!), and that poems from that period would be the ones of most interest for a connoisseur of poetry looking back in a more leisured era. That moment of fruition didn’t happen in Britain – enemies of the New Romantic style took over too thoroughly and hit too hard. We have evidence that editors had decided, around 1950, not to take any more poems in that style. This gave rise to the question, already mentioned, about the later development of Apocalyptic poetry as something located in a body of missing evidence. I think Jim Keery and I disagree on this, but my impression is that the style flickered out when the pressure of war and international crisis abated. There was an upsurge when Dylan Thomas died, as so many people wrote “farewell Dylan” poems in a style imitating his that you could possibly produce an anthology of them. Patrick Anderson, in Canada, produced what may be the best. People loved Thomas, and loved ‘Under Milk Wood’ (broadcast after his death), at that moment. But the 1950s went on without a School of Dylan raising its artistic level to a pitch you could call significant. The dirges were a farewell in two senses. But, this is an open question. There is a surviving problem of obscurity, poetry that got written but not published (or, published in an amazingly marginal way). Then, there is the problem of sensibility, that poetry sensitive to the state of the world (the world-soul, I almost said) would look totally different in 1955 from how it looked in 1943. Then, there is the question of the style flourishing in somewhere like Canada – free from the ideologues and hate-peddlers of the London and Oxford (Oxfordshire) hot-pots, and benefiting from serenity.
A guide to which way the wind was blowing may be Dorian Cooke’s ‘Fugue for Our Time”, which I understand was written at about New Year’s Day 1950. Cooke’s poetry is still largely unpublished, and we understand that Peter Manson is planning a collection of it. The story is that Cooke had a book ready for William MacLellan to publish, and MacLellan never managed to bring it out. Manson's search for the (possibly) surviving typescript is the stuff of literary legend. However, ‘Fugue’ did come out, in 1951, from a Communist Party front publisher called Form Books. Cooke (1916-2005) was the youngest of the original Apocalyptic group, in Leeds, and wrote some of the most extreme, and least successful, material in their group anthologies. However, ‘Fugue’ is a striking contrast to that material, being a metrically highly organised, closely argued, poem about the state of the world in 1949. I take it that this is a development of the original concerns, rather than a path out of them, and that this reformed manner was likely to be the vehicle for Apocalyptic poetry of the 1950s. Cooke ceased publishing at that point. I describe this because, if we are going to look for connections between the Canadian poets and the Apocalyptics, we should look at “Fugue for our Time” (or late Thomas) rather than the more frantic material from the time of the military build-up, the expansion of the Third Reich, and the Fall of France.
Frye remarks: “In our day, however, the primitive tendency has been reached through a further refinement of sophistication: “modern” poets use myth, metaphor, and apocalyptic imagery just as “modern” painters use abstract or stylized patterns. In Canada, the Romantic nineteenth-century traditions are reflective and representational: “modern” poets have unconsciously bridged the cultural gap with the Indians, just as the painting of Emily Carr bridges the gap in British Columbia between a culture of totem poles and a culture of power plants.”
This suggests that the drive towards the unconscious was bound, in Canada, to lead to a re-imagining of myths of the First Peoples. This was a nationalist programme which also meant turning one’s back on Europe. It follows that impulses which in the abstract precisely match the Apocalyptic idea in Britain would, in Canada, culminate in something Canadian – where the link to Surrealism or Apocalypse was only theoretical, cooled by an ocean, and not really worth investigating. (The extensive use of indigenous material, including myths, eventually led to a complaint by Indigenous writers or others that this was appropriation. Part of the appeal of myth is that it is free, it belongs to you when you deploy it in poems.)
The Apocalyptic thing involved decentralisation. The State was suspect because of its links at every level with the war machine. Rejecting the machine meant a rejection of the Enlightenment, in favour of myth; but inevitably also meant a rejection of the State and of its processes. Humans were no longer similar to each other; everything was personal. The new mythic discourse had also to reject the standard myths, being the Christian legend of salvation and the Greek mythology. Their “classicism” and Victorian aura condemned them. But folklore had bypassed the Enlightenment and was evidently decentralised. It offered a language which Forties poets could master without simply becoming neo-classicists. A key to the Apocalyptic plan to revive myth is that they were using it creatively – the Victorian apparatus and its costumes would be discarded, to be replaced by a newly invented set of symbols and events, straight from the unconscious. These new stories had not benefited from thousands of years of sophisticated polishing by such compilers as Ovid: they would be coarse. Folklore fits into this as a sort of myth without sophistication or overlay; it is a much better source for invented myth than, say, a Mannerist painting with a full range of visual rhetoric. So a title like “the hangman ties the holly”, with its echoes of popular song (of an older time) is an example of personal myth – not yet ennobled and sublimated. It is a line from a poem called 'Carol’ –
I was a lover of turkey and holly
But my true love was the Christmas tree
We hung our hearts from a green green bough
And merry swung the mistletoe
We decked the tree with a silver apple
And a golden pear
A partridge and a cockle shell
And a fair maiden
No rose can tell the fumes of myrrh
That filled the forest of our day
Till fruit and shell and maid fell down
And the partridge flew away
Now I swing from a brittle twig
For the green bough of my true love hid
A laily worm. Around my neck
The hangman ties the holly
This is a wonderful poem and its sophisticated manipulation of a folk idiom, from songs we all know, is distinctive. (The laithly worm was a loathsome dragon in a Yorkshire folk-tale, or possibly ballad.) The links with an Apocalyptic style are almost invisible, but there are moments in Wilkinson poems which do show a link, however transformed: Free from cramp and chap of winter
Skin is minstrel, sings
Tall tales and shady
Of kings of Nemi
(“The Red and the Green”)
So Spring affects us directly through the skin and our inner state is seasonally buoyant. The kings of Nemi are the subjects of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which offers a link, persistently, between myth and folklore. Folklore in fact offered a safe space where poets could work on mythical material without the oversize implications of writing myth. The theme of the poem is quite close to “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”; the red is the blood which circulates inside the body of a human, and the green is the vital force of vegetation. The poem says that the power of the natural world is inside humans, and that art can reflect this more or less boundless vitality and growth. The Golden Bough is about vegetation myth as the basis for most folklore: the king dies and is resurrected just as the wheat is harvested and yet grows again. So the skin is released from winter and metaphorically blossoms; it sings for spring, and so Spring is the motive for songs. (The tall tale is shady because it is like a tall tree, and that tree must be the one on which the Golden Bough grows. But a tall tale is also a myth.)
My feeling is that these poems show how “personal myth” could work in poetry, so shorn of wartime paranoia and of prophetic trumpet tones but coherent and integrated. The unpopular features of the Apocalyptic thing were verbal awkwardness, a lack of logic and consistency, and a tendency to exaggerate. These features could be fixed. So if we are looking for reflections of the style in the 1950s we should start by looking for poems which have shed these features. Wilkinson may be the supreme example of this, since her poems are graceful before anything else. So when Wilkinson writes about “the green artery” of plants, that is very much like “the green fuse” of the flower in Thomas’ poem, she uses imagery like Thomas’ rather consistently, but her style sounds quite different. More generally, personal myth needs to be discreet in scale, because your personality is not inherently gigantic. Another feature of the 1950s is a more oral style, where the folk manner simplifies the poem and makes it closer to an audience. This is audible in Thomas, in Fry, and in Eithne Wilkins, as we mentioned. It bestows lucidity. So we may think that the answer to how Apocalypse developed in the 1950s is work by Kathleen Raine and Anne Wilkinson.
Daryl Hine wrote a pamphlet called “The Carnal and the Crane” in which the title comes from an 18th C Christmas carol. (Several editors have supposed a 14th C original, which we don’t have.) My supposition is that the poems in this 1957 publication (he was twenty-one!) do present personal myth realised through folklore and do resemble some other poems of the time which used folk material. However, Hine was a prolific poet who had almost nothing to do with Apocalypse in the course of his career. A link with Christopher Fry is thinkable. I couldn’t find references to the carnal and the crane (two birds, one eats red meat and one eats fish) within the text, although the longest poem is about King Herod and the Three Kings, and the Carnal is a Christmas song which is about the Journey into Egypt and so partly about Herod. The Herod material is in a poem 13 pages long called “The Return from Unlikeness”. Hine does show “a lack of logic and consistency” and paraphrasing his Christmas poem would be difficult. It is irrational at some deep level, and in the irrationality is the personal element, masked and yet elaborate:
Remember that you thought me beautiful
and praised the muscled flesh above the bone,
the angle of the head, and used to call
my skill the body’s silent falconry
that could release and call the falcon home.
I’m hunter, hawk and hunted, and I shine
in the apocalyptic landscape as I shone
amid the simple views of Arcady.
(The speaker is Alexis, one of the gay shepherds from an eclogue of Vergil.)
I am really not clear what the unlikeness is and what the players return to. The whole could be gay love poetry with a New Testament nativity play superimposed on it. But the buried material resists surfacing much as the overt content resists being unwrapped and discarded.
I regret that I don’t like Hine’s later work as much as this 1957 pamphlet. Perhaps that is because I am more interested by the past. And perhaps he just liked Auden too much.
James Reaney’s A Suit of Nettles is certainly personal myth, certainly fuses entirely with folklore material, and certainly from the 1950s. Is it Apocalyptic? not for a moment. It sounded fascinating when Frye reviewed it (in his annual survey of Canadian poetry, for 1958), and is fascinating to read. It is like a comic ballet, with geese instead of swans. It is more like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (with its hoe-down) than like George Barker. It fits neatly into a pattern of Canadian poetry about Christmas – all the characters are Michaelmas geese, and Christmas is for obvious reasons the end-point. A summary I grabbed from the Internet is:
The title of A Suit of Nettles was inspired by a German fairy tale. Seven suits of nettles are woven by the sister of seven brothers who have been changed into swans. When the time comes for the seven swans to put on their suits of nettles and regain human form, the arm of one suit is not finished. Consequently one brother always has one swan’s wing instead of an arm.
The poem, like Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, is a sequence of pastoral eclogues, one for each month of the year, but here the dialogues are not between bucolic swans, they are between Ontario geese! Although the goose-eye view is bound to be somewhat restricting there is much carefully observed detail about farm houses, spring in a small pond, summer in a pasture and the small town Ontario Fall Fair. […] Here is a poet who believes in merry invective. (I don't know who wrote this. Uncredited blurb to the 2010 edition)
“The poem has a seasonal cycle, associated with a rotating children’s ride at ‘an ordinary small town fair in Ontario with its sideshows, ferris wheels, prize animals, freaks, and merry-go-rounds.’”
I enjoyed Reaney’s Ontarian pastoral.
Far away red far away
Red as fire
A fox
Flash and transpire
I met a green woman
Her feet were paths
Her eyes were bunchberries
Her arms green laths
Her tongue a mushroom
Her teeth white violets
Her nose an owl feather
Her eyes like cressets
Did I touch her?
Vanished
Twang!
Garnisheed
All pulse-wage since
And this place
Holds my heart in a bottle
Of pathpace
I suppose that pathpace is speed of movement and the speaker is trapped, so that his energy is bottled up. The garnishing refers to child support payments. Reaney’s poetry is eccentric, rural, archaic, folksy, quaint, but highly wrought and convincing. There are quite extensive references to The Golden Bough, just as in Wilkinson.
I was excited by comments in Northrop Frye’s essays on 50s Canadian poetry but on examination the connection with British Apocalyptic poetry is not really there. The use of folklore and even folk-song in poems by Wilkinson, Hine, and Reaney is interesting but has other sources and is not simply an extension of fashions on this side of the Atlantic. I found these poets fascinating.
A guess that Canadian poets reached personal myth by means of folklore proved right, although Frye’s admonition about Canadians accessing Native Peoples’ mythology to fill the gap left by Christian and Greek myth had more scope. Reaney, Hine, and Wilkinson do not show any evidence of using “First Peoples” myth, and instead we are seeing people of English (or anglophone, anyway) stock using English folklore. Evidently folk singers, and eventually folk clubs, thrived in Canada. We all know what that led to.
I subscribe to an online library which has quite a lot of Canadian poetry from The Porcupine’s Quill, including 50s poetry, and which does not display at full size on my PC. This halted the essay and it did not really recover. After efforts using the screen grabbing tool I was able to recover a text of James Reaney which I could blow up and read, but it was time-consuming. I hope to access poems by Jay Macpherson and others as time allows. The idea of personal myth in the 1950s would still repay further attention.
It is fair to mention a thread that is just lint. Robin Skelton was a genuine Apocalyptic poet (Patmos and other poems, 1955) who went to Canada. However he was not in Canada during the 1950s. And he wasn't a high-powered poet. I don’t think Canada needed Skelton, and I don’t think anyone took him, as opposed to John of Patmos, as a prophet of times to come.
Even pre-drop Jim Keery has pointed out flaws in my understanding: "I’ve got those lines by Hine, for the obvious reason (I think the second ‘shine’ should be ‘shone’) – but nothing else of his – and ‘liked Auden too much’ is a direct hit, I think – for a start the land of unlikeness is from his Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being – ‘He is the way./ Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;/ You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures’ – ugh – which is where Lowell must have got his title, though Land of Unlikeness came out in the same year, 1944, and it’s a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions: ‘I realized I was far away from Thee in a land of Unlikeness’ – it is a great phrase!"
So there we are. Further dredging reveals that the phrase was taken by Augustine ("regio dissimilitudinis") from Plato's dialogue "Politicus" (the Statesman). "Beholding it in its troubles, and being anxious lest it be racked by storms and confusions, and be dissolved again in the bottomless abyss of unlikeness, he takes control of the helm once more." The "land" has been taken to be either the captivity in Egypt or the wandering of the Holy Family to Egypt, which we see in Hine's poem.
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