Joseph Macleod, 'Earthscape'

Joseph Macleod

Work continues on Macleod. James Fountain’s work is coming out as a book from Waterloo. I read much of his archive, in Edinburgh, in the very cold first week of January 2001. I realised recently that there are some other poems which aren’t in the Macleod archive in the NLS. While looking in New Verse for something else I was disturbed to find in issue 3 a 1934 Macleod poem, 'Earthscape', which was not in the archive. It is one of his best. I think he tended to type single copies of poems and send them to magazines, so that if they were published the magazine kept the typescript and Macleod retained nothing. Slightly alarming if you want to be a Macleod expert! For the moment, it seems that the body of texts we have is incomplete.

This is the poem:

Earthscape

they are excavating under the briars of paestum

a parian fragment of an old Goddess:

tackle is hoisting

the earthy torso up.

the season is nearly over

and russet roseleaves in recognition

deserting hips and sere bedeguars

sacrifice themselves

in libation Upon her.

she is Cold as they prise her up:

they are forcing her out of season:

for spring is her time, whoever she,

spring is her time to return

not this,

unrecognised by spade or diggers

another to join many

a goddess evading collection,

her Return from death to antiquity

the fall of a crabapple is pointing

like a single bell.

on sard hard edge of a distant mountain

a drab clad man

is he sitting? standing?

too minute for a thick finger to indicate.

walls of a harem in a narrow street

are peeling open:

corner of a house on the opposite side disclosing

half a group of women, looking:

as thirsty enclosed cattle look

on boats that row up and down a river:

with large round eyes

on orientals thronging the streets

merchandising without wine

obedient to books their authors have forgotten.

the stripes on the feminine clothes

Swing to the distant rock:

but the Scale is incommensurate.

miniature parables

to the sun does he compose?

among the stars hymenopterous mysteries?

and humbly lay his forehead on the rock?

heraldic Light is quartering the escutcheon,

how Dare we call this sunlight pitiless?

tenderly it warms the chilled widowed,

only in daylight the tortured wife has peace,

gently it revives dim philosophers,

compensates exhausted gunners

moleminers and batclerks

and trousered savages knowing only

that something has changed in the world,

who cluster to carry in annual procession

a mutilated image of a virgin.

through men's provinciality

she Returned from her virginity

to fulfil herself in vain.

her open eyes are not fixed on her child any more

nor question heaven any more

but Rise to the receding mountain.

is he a Demiurge?

a steward of the heavenly bodies?

their banker, telling each how its account stands

and where at any hour it ought to be?

away from him an eagle and a fulmar

are swinging: they will cross

over the valley

hillside woods where jays fight

finches flash in honeycomb leaflight

badgers freshen warrens

bees lie crazily with careful orchids

and lonely oxlips.

over vetched fields they will cross

and jackdaws playing with rooks and performing plovers,

watermeads in which

blue herons fish and rushes flower,

just visible roofs of a country town:

too High for little eyes to se:

Uncaricatured,

for they are getting rare now

and were beautiful.

he does not see them.

to know everything he has made himself Astigmatic:

two men on two rocks

disregarding two landscapes

slightly superimposed.

where his height meets level ground

is a quiet Group.

twisted aluminium and torn matter

an aeroplane stands with its tail erect

and crushed nose

driven deep in earth.

from the silence, from the suspense

is made the recognition of Death.

the workers from the jam factory

shocked and astonished, Watch:

navvies have come to Watch

with hops and wheat in their bellies:

respectful reporters chase away

bran-fed inquisitive pullets, and Watch:

vegetable sheep and potato pigs

come up to watch:

and the sleepless sun pours down.

the bulk of the corpse-to-be

balances the bulk of the old earthgoddess.

Many goddesses, Many women,

little richness in barren Apices:

but brown Earth is an honest Plinth

that underlies

and is replenished by the sun.

I, as I painted this

becoming conscious of foliage

on my breast and back and shoulders,

paint in the bottom corner

as symbol and signature

the Hands that have touched me.

(This is on-line with the whole of that issue of New Verse at a site called modernists.com. I am not making any claim to copyright of the poem. As it is missing from the Selected Poems, it seems likely to evade notice altogether, which is why I am including it here.)

The poem makes an equation between this statue emerging from the earth and a flier crashing to his death and plunging into the earth. Like is exchanged for like in a kind of balance. It goes on to describe the state of the observer - who finally sprouts leaves in a transformation, the usual punishment for a mortal who observes a goddess too closely. The perspective bent by squinting strain mirrors the precipitous path of the aeroplane, downwards. The Virgin, carried around in procession, is a middle term between the buried statue and the pilot. the "hands that have touched me" may refer to a type of icon known as "akheiropoieton", not made by (human) hand. As I pointed out, what may be the most successful poems are scattered in magazines and don't show up if you go through all the folders in the archive. Describing the work entire is not tractable as he was simply too prolific - between the visible and the invisible. I can't wholly approve of the move into documentary. The reasons are excellent but I wish he'd gone on with the modernist style.

I located an essay by Macleod in Little Reviews Anthology for 1949. Bearing in mind that ‘Adam Drinan’ was a pseudonym for Macleod, check out what he says about Drinan: “Writing in English, George Bruce and Adam Drinan from the East Coast and the West respectively, rediscover the traditions of their people in a style that is simple, accurate, vivid and deep. George Bruce's output at the moment is small, but he is always alive and compelling […] Drinan is more graceful. He explored such relics of Celtic forms and rhythms as have survived the onslaught of the Presbyterian Church. But he is also a Marxist, and his awareness of to-day never allows him any indulgence in Celtic Twilights. He has a faculty for translating into poetry the light, colour, people and living conditions of the islands and the West Coast; and it is significant that his poems, as I have been told, have been read to and approved by Kintyre fishermen. Also significant is the rumour that his forthcoming volume of poems is about the London blitz.”

The blitz poems must be “The Macphails of London”, a typescript of which is in the National Library. The anthology reprints material from little magazines, in this case from ‘Anvil’, a miscellany edited by Jack Lindsay, which suggests a link to the Communist Party. This would explain the name Anvil, linking poetry with virtuous metal-workers. The essay is titled “Poet and People”, and despite the links with communism and Scottish nationalism it avoids dogma, even if it doesn’t really answer any questions about the nature of poetry. Macleod had close relations with both the BBC (he worked for them for eight years) and the Party, and while those relationships with authoritarian and centralized organizations were likely to crush creativity, this is not certain and he did produce some good work in that period. He wrote a whole book about his disillusion with the BBC and its loyalty tests, but I have yet to see an equivalent document about the Communist Party. Quite possibly Lindsay and the group around him weren't a pain to work with, and the BBC were more oppressive with loyalty tests, political dossiers, personnel people vetting dossiers, etc. James Fountain has detected Macleod’s name on the list of “crypto communists” which George Orwell produced in 1948. There was a BBC purge of left-sympathising employees in the later forties, although Macleod had resigned in 1945 and I don’t think he was part of a purge at all. The purge is part of oral memory but I haven’t seen anything about it in print. Released MI5 files don’t describe internal BBC procedures and probably only capture a fraction of the process.

Uaran faz

Uaran faz

I have written (this is in ‘Breach and Exit’, should it ever come out) about Eddie Flintoff’s poem, ‘Sarmatians’ (1978).

eyes on the far horizon

to still newer distribution-plains, uaran faz,

under the green edges and ridges of the Caucasus,

whose peaks we named as we passed, Elbatiy Hokh

the Squatting Mountain, Aday Hokh, Grandfather Hill

out of Asia across the lush hush of Russia,

the crane crossed Ukraine, numinous and luminous Rumania,

below the carboniferous Carpathians, across the flat Banat

westwards across the wastelands, up into polar Poland

along the long frozen strand of the cobalt Baltic.

The poem describes the migration of a tribe, of Iranian language, from the Caucasus to France, in about the 4^th C AD. I am interested in one aspect of the poem. It includes words in the language of the migrants. However, we don’t have any records of the Sarmatian language. Personal names don’t get you very far, although they do support the “Iranian” classification. I guessed that he had used the Ossete language, since the Ossetes live in the North Caucasus (within Europe, technically) and speak a language directly related to Alan and, less so, to Sarmatian. I have just spent some very idle time surfing the Net to check this. I started with Abaev’s grammar of Ossetian. At p. 9 we find khokh, mountain. So for ‘hokh’ read ‘khokh’. Both mountain names are Ossete, and further surfing uncovers an article in the Alpine Journal for 1936 where someone has visited both peaks. The names are identified as Ossetian there so it looks as if Flintoff used Ossete and my guess was right. I haven’t traced “uaran faz” but it is credible that it is Ossete.

Another atlas entry has: Gora Uilpata is a mountain in North Ossetia and has an elevation of 4646 meters. ... Russian: Гора Уилпата; El'badty-Kokh; Gora Adaykhokh; Mt'a Uilpat'a ...

So Uilpata is a more disseminated form for local (and Ossete) El’badty Khokh.

The alpinist (Heybrock) reports charnel-towers – claims to have found 3 towers still in use (and full of bones). These were for exposing the dead (“sky burial”), and it was a Zoroastrian practice (so the locals were not Moslem). It links the Ossetes to a wider Iranian world. He cites two local river names in -don. (Don means 'river’ in Ossete, according to Abaev, and philologers have linked this to rivers like Danube, Don, Dniepr, Dniestr. The names would come from a wider north Iranian speech community, not Ossetes in the narrow sense.)

I will admit to knowledge of Sarmaten, unbekannte Väter Europas by Reinhard Schmoeckel. This claims not only that Sarmatians reached western Europe (which is uncontroversial), but that their influence made the West what it is. Hmmmm. I do not buy this, but it would be great if someone found a Charnel Tower in Yorkshire and linked it to Sarmatian cavalry-units defending the Empire against the Picts. I saw a stray reference to village names in Germany recalling the Sarmatians in forms like Sormen, Sohrmen. They were near the Limes, where Roman soldiers would be settled as colonists. I haven’t checked this out so it may not be right. Another unchecked source connects French place-names, stretching north-east of Paris, Sampigny,  Sermaise,  Sermoise,  Sermiers, with Sarmatians, and Alaincourt, Alland'huy, Aillainville with Alans. This does not suggest dense settlement - a village is only called "sarmat ville" if the people in nearby villages are NOT Sarmatian.

'Sarmatians' is a terrific poem.

male-female ratios shifting in poetry?

Comments on statistical work on male-female ratios in publishing

Intro. This is an interim comment on work I am doing using spreadsheets and processing data from the British Library catalogue and Poet’s Yearbook (chiefly).

The data point to women occupying about 18% of single-author titles in 1974/5 and about 30% in 1990. This is the story we were expecting to hear and it shows the impact of feminism. Feminism has to be taken in a very broad sense, involving people who were not very politicised and very diverse areas of activity. It is hard to see that figure of 18% without analysing it in terms of frustration and an unnatural imbalance in a field of culture which was, essentially, akin to conversation and open to anyone who can talk convincingly. For context, I recently saw a figure stating that 63% of English candidates at A-level were girls. A wider cultural or educational context suggests that you would expect a high proportion of poets to be women.

Analysis of the figures for 1960 suggests that women were responsible for about 30% of titles. (Excluding anthologies and so on.) This suggests that their share went rapidly down during the 1960s.

It is possible that the new cultural world of the sixties was more male-dominated than what preceded it.

The data I am using for 1960 comes from the BL catalogue. They have a tag or label for “English poetry” but this was hardly in use in 1960 and so I have identified their holdings by other means, which are clearly unsatisfactory. This base data is not of good quality. I did find about 248 poetry titles for that year.

We are apparently seeing a downward shift in the share of women during the period 1960-75, so an era of cultural liberation. The numbers don’t account for this shift but we can make some speculations. So, we could connect it with the expansion of university education, being something like 80% male. (A classic "incomplete community".) Poetry is ecologically linked to the university world, so had scenes in university towns even if these were open to anyone interested (and many of the participants had graduated or dropped out from courses), then that would account for a growth in the male share of poetry. The increase in the share of females among students came much later (but also affected the poetry world, most likely). Alternatively, we can posit that women poets were less interested by theoretical approaches to poetry, including modernism. Also, that they were more likely to be engaged in Christian poetry, which sank in prestige very rapidly during the 1960s. Both these things are also connected to the university world, with its typical secularism and belief in the power of theory to deal with rapid change and to control it.

I suppose that the question of how to forget about the women poets of mid-century, or alternatively how to remember a small share of them who possessed qualities which were (bluntly) atypical and modern, is the most sensitive for historical work on modern poetry. I have recovered 64 titles by women from 1960, out of 214 single-author collections. I have to say that none of them is otherwise stuck in my memory – they all disappeared. (There are exceptions, a book On a Calm Shore by Frances Cornford- I do know who she is, and Creatures and Emblems by Kathleen Nott.) After spending entire days stuck in this rather grey catalogue material, I have developed a sensitivity to vanity presses – firms who regularly turn out dozens of titles but who never publish authors who (subsequently) make careers. The poetry business was allergic to this sector and it is a fair guess that titles from such firms were stigmatised, they would never get reviewed, would not get read by possible anthologists, perhaps even that bookshops were “onto them” and wouldn't stock such titles. An amazing proportion of those 64 titles are “vanity publications” (about half, in my estimation) and there is no possibility of defining 1960 as a benign period for women poets which was disrupted by male arrogance arriving in the form of existentialism, jazz poetry, structuralism, academic modernism, and so on. A yardstick is the 1960 anthology “45-60”, (edited by Thomas Blackburn), which has 5 women poets out of 40. This is an excellent anthology, hard to improve on; but it doesn’t have anything like 30% women contributors. My guess is that in 1960 women were concentrated in conservative and low-prestige genres, they were often resorting to vanity presses which were an exit rather than an outlet, they were frustrated and not insiders. This is just not benign. Feminism rejected the whole cultural system, and that included most of these rather puzzled women poets. If you consider “Poems by a singing housewife”, by Victoria Mabel Bellamy, you may suspect that it didn’t do much at the time and isn’t going to catch the eye of any retro-anthologist trying to broaden our view of the past. I counted 35 publications, in 1960, from a single press which does not have the highest reputation (and is still going).

My impression is that the Sixties (the version which started around 1965, actually) saw an eclipse of the importance of vanity presses, being replaced by “small to micro publishers” driven by enthusiasm. This activity was linked to live readings and so to an audience – it wasn’t cut off like the frustrated and provincial poets of a slightly earlier time. But this re-connection was also tied to the student world – so to youth culture, to the prizing of abstract ideas, and to modernism (which students were expected to like). This meant that the poets who had been using vanity presses in, say, 1950 to 1965, didn’t have the cultural assets which the new world wanted. They weren’t groovy enough. Their lot was to remain frustrated and without prestige.

See previous posts for discussion of women poets active in the 1950s, such as Audrey Beecham, Lynette Roberts, and Kathleen Nott, who reached high artistic standards before being effectively forgotten. They do not feature in Blackburn's anthology.

As a note to help those struggling with slippery sources - the Poetry Book Society used to issue an annual checklist of titles (some of which are on a shelf in the Poetry Library). Their count for 1960 is 131 titles. This is a quite different figure from what I dredged up from the British Library catalogue. However, if you throw out the vanity press titles, the two counts match up. So the PBS figures are good. This allows us to measure a gap - 131 titles in 1960, 906 in 1978. This looks like an explosion, doesn't it. 1960 just wasn't a very exciting cultural moment. Low output, low quality.

from the lips of a cobra

Lips of a cobra

Jim Keery sent me an unknown Peter Yates poem which includes this passage:

This dark prince triumphs on the siren coast;

And in his coiled and cobra sting

The Eve kiss haunts us

This (‘The Double Door’) dates from 1954 and so is too late to have been included in his last book, of 1951. It is also missing from his 1983 Selected. The date is significant if one recalls (as who does not?) the 1944 Maria Montez movie, Cobra Woman. The poster for the film included the phrases “Pagan witch or weird woman of Rapture? ...Temptress of Terror– quicker on the kiss than on the kill…”

Cobra, kiss, temptation. This shows yet again that New Romantic poetry overlapped with cinematic melodrama. Montez is one of few Hollywood stars to have entire films constructed around her screen persona – films which just wouldn't have got made if she hadn't been there. They are extreme films – most Hollywood films were based on existing novels and could at a pinch have substituted one of several stars. But without Montez they would never have started “Cobra Woman”. And all her films are like that. Cobra Woman has two characters played by Montez (offering value for money) but there was only one Maria Montez. Can we dream of an anthology of New Romantic poetry read by Maria Montez?

Siren coast? I see the good lady starred in a film called “Siren of Atlantis”. Dunstan Thompson wrote a poem called “Prince of Atlantis” - this is one of the ones I haven't seen, only seen the title in a catalogue. Do the works overlap? was Thompson the Maria Montez of poetry? is the film based on the Thompson poem? These are the questions that must be answered.

Thompson's poem ‘Lament for the Sleepwalker’ has these lines:

There, while jackals scream, Lord Vulture,

Wing caged in crystal, sings his subtle airs

Of praise; recalls how orchid adders hissed

Above the crypt when lion and lover kissed.

– so lord- adder- kiss. Not quite cobra. This is from his 1947 book (named after the quoted poem). As snakes have no lips, they can’t really kiss.

(This follows a previous post on poetry and 40s cinema.)

Armoured in arrogance

Armoured in arrogance

There is a collection of stray essays (and questionnaire replies) by the art critic Harold Rosenberg which includes a piece on “The avant garde”, 1969. He says “Seeing particulars in the perspective of their historic outcome, the avant-garde has brought into being the arrogant notion of the utterly worthless. Works, actions, persons, whole races for whom the future has no use are cast upon “the rubbish heap of history”, and the sooner they are gotten rid of the better. The elimination of historical discards is a necessity of sanitation, and the ability to recognize this necessity and the courage to respond to it are among the qualifications of the future-building elite. As the personification of the advanced forces of time, the avant-garde is thus obliged to adopt ruthlessness as a moral principle, the ruthlessness dramatized by Raskolnikov in eliminating the old-woman pawnbroker as a “human louse”.” (The book is Discovering the Present, 1973)

This has a lot to do with the idea of the “British poetry revival”, actually with its external history. There is no doubt that people adopted this “street cleaner” role as members of the avant garde. There is no doubt either that the momentum built by Mottram, in his 1974 “catalogue” and in other statements of the Seventies, excited people, and that individually they accepted the role of being the star actors of history. Other people, who were ascribed the role of being obsolete and irrelevant, were less convinced by the proposal. The elite were self-validating and they collectively owned a kind of camera which took photographs in which most poets did not appear. These photographs were supposed to be capturing the Future, but when the Future arrived it looked nothing like the photographs.

I have been exercised by emails (from Riley P and Nolan K) saying that the British Poetry Revival never happened. When further details arrived, it emerged that they were not denying the existence of the 46 poets whom Eric defined as the “revival”, nor their importance as creative artists, but rather that they were rejecting the momentum and specifically the self-validation of younger poets (those emerging after 1977, to put it crudely) who were encased in arrogance. So there really isn’t an issue about whether the British Poetry Revival happened. What is at issue, for them, is the validity of avant garde “street cleaner” arrogance and its consignment of everybody else to a rubbish-heap (and eventual landfill). We don’t need to investigate this in order to write a book about poetry in the 1970s.

The Rosenberg piece is useful because it proves that the “blinding arrogance” behaviour was present before Mottram got involved with publicising modern poetry and so that it was just part of an ideology which was perfectly available to students in 1969, and other times. Various books sold the idea of modernist destiny. Jeff Nuttall was much more immersed in it than Mottram was. Herbert Read published, between the 1930s and the 1960s, many books in which this idea was available, and these were the books students were likely to read. Read was not fanatical, but he was willing to publish surveys of 20^th C art in which only modernism was deemed worthy of coverage. Nuttall taught at arts colleges and had this idea, that nothing had happened in the 20th C except modernism. By the time a 19 year old could define themselves as a Dadaist and get course credits at art college for the intellectual quality of their Dadaist year’s work, something essential had changed. How many art students had defined themselves as Dadaists and surrealists in 1969?

I had a long and fruitful email exchange recently with a poet who can be categorised as ”mainstream” (broad as that term is). He remarked how, whenever he encountered inmates of the experimental scene, they always started proceedings by assuming that he was incredibly stupid, unconscious, unable to understand his own situation; whereas they were Cup Bearers of the Future. This is a long-term problem. I suppose the idea that he could read their work and point out artistic flaws in it didn’t even occur to them as a possibility. He just didn’t have voting rights.

I doubt that I need to go over the terrain trying to find out if the published poets were arrogant. I just don’t need this result to evaluate the poetry, which exists outside the limits of the personality and was always expected to do that. I have to observe that the “alternative” scene, as it has existed, not very stably, since 1977, has involved a lot of people who created very high-intensity work. You could even say that high expectations of oneself were the predisposing factor which let them execute this work. Anyway, it is the work I am interested in and not the wattage of their self-regard.

It may not be incredibly productive to pursue these questions of definition at length. However, I have produced a book about the Seventies in which the idea of the British Poetry Revival plays a central role. Obviously the descriptions of individual texts are more important, but the “overall geography” is also part of the story I tell. I am expounding this argument on my blog page because I want it to be available as a reference – and so I can leave it out of the book.

As for the landfill, I have always defined myself as a historian, so I regard landfills full of old art as the land I harvest from, not as junk. Rosenberg has a brilliant description of the difference between a museum and a junk shop, which says that they are buildings containing the same kind of commodity. (“The difference between the museum and the junkshop is reverence.”) When I started with all this, it was the “alternative poets” of the 1970s who were on the market as junk work, while numerous available critical surveys simply passed over them in silence.

The foreword makes it clear, with a rather brilliant obliquity, that Rosenberg didn’t want a collection of this kind and scarcely saw it as a book. All the same Rosenberg was a nonpareil as cultural commentator. The introduction (recycled from a 1972 symposium in Partisan Review) says “The cultural revolution of the past hundred years has petered out. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Today’s aesthetic vanguardism is being sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, by state arts councils, by museums, by industrial and banking associations[…] The art-historical media have become thoroughly blended with the mass media and with commercial design and decoration under the slogan of community art programs.” Ouch!

The British Poetry Revival - revisited

The British Poetry Revival - revisited

I wrote about the idea of a British Poetry Revival, identified as running from 1960 to 1974, in a post in March 2020. I included a list of all 46 of the poets whom Eric Mottram mentioned in his original definition, in booklets for two weekend conferences, one in 1974 and one in 1977. (The latter was more specifically about “Inheritance Landscape Location”.) It is a fundamental idea for my book (as yet unpublished), “Nothing Is Being Suppressed”. I have an investment in it. And yet -

>>The idea of a British Poetry Revival is now cast in wet cement as proto-dogma: it is a load of old malarkey of course, but you already knew that...<< (from my learned colleague, Kevin Nolan).
What’s more, Peter Riley also claims that they didn't exist. He emailed me to say “At present I am writing a section saying that the “English Poetry Revival” of the 1970s never took place.” I believe this came out in his column in the Fortnightly Review, in 2018. This doesn't match with the chosen period of “1960-74”, and it sounds like he is leaving the Sixties in play because he made a debut in the Sixties.
If you look at the list of 46 poets, it’s clear that there was an overwhelming mass of poetness in that time, 1960-77, and it was even more so if you add 30 or so who came on the radar soon after and also belong with the ”Alternative”. It’s just a fact. It would be easy to pick out the weaker poets. Seems kind of churlish. I concede that there was good poetry a-happening in the 1950s. As for the non-alternative poets, they weren't solid dreariness as Eric thought, and I have given time to explaining how good 70s poems by Peter Levi and Anthony Thwaite were.

After discussion, I think that there may be other reasons why my colleagues who reject the BPR don’t actually reject the idea that there was a huge poetic momentum from 1960 to 1974, that the 46 poets represent a huge mass of vital work, and that they were responsible for large-scale innovations. Or even, that the innovations changed the rules, and that this change was accepted by one legion of poets and rejected by another one, so that the geography of poetry was split, from then on, on those lines. Actually, the disagreement is about something quite different. It relates more to the period after 1977 (for which large-scale generalisations are missing). And, it relates to the sense of inheritance which some younger poets felt – including some, perhaps a few hundred, perhaps only a few dozen, who had very little talent. Like, the idea of Inheritance justified them in being blindingly arrogant. Like, they don't think anyone else exists. Like, it fitted them into a grand narrative in which they were inevitably the winners (and they didn’t have to engage in self-criticism or in wondering how their self-regard translated into the reactions of other people). Like, the idea, of “progressive” poets around 1974, that they were ahead and The Future, mandated a vision which was very different from The Future as it actually manifested, and in which we are all forced to live. We’ll skip the rest. I don't like the genealogy which says “there is a modernist legacy and I own it and this means I'm right all the time even if my name is Lawrence Upton.”

There is another point which Riley makes, that the “alternative” weren't very coherent or self-similar and the mainstream also weren’t very coherent or self-similar, so that you can efface the differences between them and pronounce that there Was No Difference and so the British Poetry Revival never happened. I think this is a failed line of argument dictated by a desired conclusion and not by the evidence. It is clear to me that there was an opposition between the centre of each group, and that this opposition was clearly perceived by observers at the time, and that there are quite a few statements, by anthologising or otherwise, which exclude one of these two groups in a quite consistent way. For example, Faber did four volumes of “Poetry introduction” between 1969 and 1978, showcasing 33 fairly young and unpublished poets, and of those 33 only one is also in Mottram’s list of 46. This level of coherence points to there being, really, two separate groups. You can't just make it go away. This is so even if you notice that the 33 aren’t interchangeable (and the 46 aren’t either).
I spent last night re-reading Eric’s 1974 statement. The concept is that he is describing something real and outside himself, not being a connoisseur describing personal preferences like a wine critic. So he effaces the fact that the choice of poets reflects his personal feelings. This allows him to leave out the oral poets without comment. No Adrian Mitchell, no Brian Patten. It also leaves open the possibility that the poets he liked were all unconventional but weren't similar to each other. So do all lines which diverge then converge on each other? hardly so. So, I don’t think you can find any set of features which would group all the 46 names together. But you could find four or five different sets of features which would group them into four or five different clusters.
To return (tediously): this does not equate to saying that there was no British Poetry Revival.

I can’t conceptualise that period without the BPR as an organising frame, or ‘dogma’ as Kevin would say.
Peter’s biography is that he is an “alternative” poet who has moved over a long period towards the mainstream. This could attract accusations of compromise, from the Inquisition of “avant garde poetry”. Publication by Carcanet was the climax of this. My feeling is that he moved towards the audience, and this is what artists are supposed to do. He probably has thousands of readers, via Carcanet and shearsman, and they are all happy to read him. His dislike of the BPR concept is part of a much larger cultural critique, which deserves to be read as a whole, when that is possible.

The objections to the “BPR” concept are definitely focussed on the period after 1990, and apply to the history of arrogance, the charter of entitlement, the stratosphere of self-validation, in that period, and so not in the Seventies. They completely bypass the conservative power block as it existed in 1970, and the obstacles which new-style poetry had to overcome to reach publication or legitimation. It may not be agreeable to remember those guys, but if you want historical accuracy you have to remember them – in detail.

Eric did rope in 7 people who debuted before 1960, which is kind of stupid if you think poetry was dead in 1960. But, a re-reading of his 1974 text shows that he associates ‘revival’ with ‘performance’ - the ‘viv’ bit of the word comes from live, live readings. There was a boom in poetry readings in the Sixties. He isn’t saying that poetry was dead and had to be brought back to life.
Noticeably, Eric left out WS Graham and JH Prynne. It’s striking that out of 46 names only one is female — OK, it’s fascinating to critique that inclusion list, but that just underlines how compelling the whole configuration is, how robust the generalisations. I can see that that Faber series picked up Jeffrey Wainwright, George Szirtes, Jeremy Hooker, and David Harsent – poets whose work I admire. See this blog for the details. Another email (I will leave this one anonymous) says “On the other hand, I think Peter’s gist is that the monolithic, quasi-academic notion of “progress” — i.e. one single line from A to Z with markers along the way — is also untenable. It’s untenable in the mainstream, which has a habit of leaving out swathes of good poets who don’t fit the preferred narrative; and EXACTLY the same thing happens in the Alternative scene for (these days) very similar reasons. I’d argue that there’s a bit more of a factor of being “hip”, being part of the in-crowd, with the Alternatives, though I see similar things in the mainstream.” The mainstream is a large landscape in which paths are replaced by dishonest and factional publicity releases. Certainly it produces good poets, and certainly you have to take a hike to find them. The mainstream is much stronger than I thought in 1992.

Eric didn’t like women artists very much. Or the 1950s. He was a gay guy in the 1950s, it’s a familiar story. He was in revolt. He was a very clever guy, he found vehicles for his feelings – the American avant garde and the new wave of British poetry. He built these very elaborate structures which were simultaneously part of his inner world and part of the outer world. Brilliant, really. Maybe he went too far. Actually, a lot of those poets were brilliant, too.

I heard a rumour (at the launch of his Collected) that Ken Smith disliked all the BPR poets except Pickard and Nuttall. And himself, of course. Irrespective, there was still a Critical Momentum of Pure Poet Power. I wrote that Ken Smith thing down because it seemed so screwed up. There was a pattern. Smith missed it. He wasn’t in tune with other people in Eric’s generous category. But I don't think that disproves the existence of the group. It just shows where the lines are. In around 1980, Astley was Ken Smith’s biggest fan, and it is quite likely that he talked to Smith & Smith said, forget about the poets Mottram likes, they’re too abstract and up in the air. And that is where Bloodaxe found its direction. There is a link with Jon Silkin and Stand, which Smith co-edited, there is a line which goes back to Leeds and the 1950s and Silkin, and that is the prehistory of Bloodaxe. (I spent a day in Leeds at the launch event for Smith’s Collected. It was very interesting what people said about local poetic memories.) I’m not sure this is all true, it’s a reconstruction.

The question of “female poets of the 1970s” needs a lot more work. My guess at this point is that Eric’s idea of originality involved being a follower of Olson, having modernist legitimacy – so in fact inheritance was a key factor, which must reduce originality by most reckonings. He would have had to redefine his ideas of legitimacy to include women poets – who were certainly around by 1977, if less so in 1974. Anyone coming back, in 2020 or later, is going to have to undertake that re-definition. The flip side is that radical female intellectuals who had an interest in literature were likely to regard Olson and the Black Mountain colony as ridiculous and pointless and embracing unpopularity. It would follow that they were also less likely to be excited by Mottram’s roster of New Poets and by the social / ideological atmosphere around them. This is a vital critique of the BPR, not a mode of failure. If you could wander through that weekend event in 1974, you would probably have found that 80% of the audience were male. So where were the women? Elsewhere. I think that (1977) thematic title of inheritance and landscape bears re-analysis – because men and women understand those two institutions in quite different ways. ('Location' is less emotive.) If you say "reproduction and territory" you get a glimpse of what is at issue, and why it is so divisive.
There are critiques to be made of the BPR from possibly six different directions, and these critiques would be of great interest. However, you can only get into all that if you initially accept that the British Poetry Revival was a reality.

I have just done a very slow reading of Mottram’s June 1974 text. He is reluctant to describe the poetry he favours. He attacks Anthony Thwaite’s essay, published a few weeks earlier in April 1974, about “The Two Poetries”, which is more confident about describing the two areas, as he sees them. Eric frequently describes the established poetics, the kind he dislikes, as being restrictive, authoritarian, rigid, etc. It must follow that he regards the poetry he likes as overflowing set forms, that he sees it as being spontaneous as opposed to regularising the poem by reference to the concepts of other people, and to settled artistic or behavioural norms. He sees the staff of publishers as imposing control, and feels that this inevitably imposes restrictions on poetry, and that good poetry happens in the alternative sector because it lacks such structures. If we look at Thwaite, he describes one of the two poetries as being reflexive, academic, based on close reading; and the other as spontaneous, unreflected, immediate. There is clearly a deep resemblance between what he says and what Mottram says. I don’t think Mottram's attack on him is well founded. I must say I found Thwaite's essay quite brilliant.
Where you have poetry which is austere, elaborately composed, intellectual, recording complex intellectual processes, it is unreasonable to apply the word “spontaneous” to it. It is also unhelpful. You can say that any poem which breaches conventions, traditions, and norms is breaking inhibitions. That does not also mean that it is unreflected – that it is the product of a first draft rather than an eighth draft. “Inhibited” is not a useful adjective here.
another interesting email "He’s [Riley] been kicking against the traces for a while over the pieties of the English alternative scene (and it is English, isn’t it? it’s not really a BPR….), and I think he may be disappearing too far down the track. Correctives need to be applied to some of those pieties and unchallenged assumptions. The BPR was after all something of an embattled club, in some cases deliberately embattled by a refusal to engage sensibly with anyone outside its self-appointed boundaries. Some people inside the club are over-rated, without doubt, but most of the significant figures are in print and have substantial retrospective volumes of their work." 
And a thought – there never has been an anthology of the 36 original British Poetry Revival poets. The catalogue, on sale for 3 days in 1974, included poems, I believe. But you can't pick up a book that contains all those poets. This is bizarre. My guess is that if you did one now you would inevitably add half a dozen women poets and scrap some of the less interesting list poets. To do otherwise would be to deify Mottram in a way he would have laughed at. It is bizarre that the original essay stopped being available after 3 days and that a connected anthology has never existed. I think that when people talk about the BPR they invent a personal list of the poets concerned – so that discussion between two people has been largely pointless.