Bill Griffiths’ Collected Poems and Sequences (1981-91) has
just come slapping through the door. I had expected this to complete the serial
Collecteds, but of course there is another decade’s work yet to be assimilated.
To celebrate I want to post the second half of my lecture All the Little Presses that Fly with the Phoenix in the Sunshine: Bill Griffiths and
the form of Book of the Boat,’ to give it its full title. It is destined
for serious revision as a chapter on book forms (and it is planned to combine
it with work on Allen Fisher’s ‘Proposals’ posted in draft form some weeks ago)
for a book on formally innovative poetry. It is on Book of the Boat which is reproduced with illustrations in this
volume in better quality than I imagined, although I had corresponded with
editor Alan Halsey on this matter. There is also a hand-coloured version of a
picture of Griffiths’
boat (of the book!) on the cover. So I’ve had to delete a few sentences about
my fear for the survival of the images. Of course, it isn’t the pamphlet
itself, but as near as we’ll get. My piece is about how the form of the book
determined the form of the poem/prose. I dedicate it to the dedicated editor,
Alan, and to the generous publisher, Ken Edwards of Reality Street. More on the book (and the
first volume here.
After part one of the lecture (a
series of speculations and ideas about poetry publishing), I got down to
business with text and Power Point images.
I want to discuss poetic form as it
manifests through the medium of poetry and in the medium of the small press
pamphlet, in the work of Bill Griffiths (while remembering that I am talking in
the middle of a revival of that publishing form, so what I say could be encouragement
for poets and publishers alike, now).
Griffiths himself
was a keen adopter and adapter of new technologies, even if he hit on the wrong
ones at times, as in his exploration of microfiche in the 1970s, but he had
assembled an impressive website by the time he died in 2007. He was an active
small press publisher (Pirate Press, mainly mimeo, followed by Amra Imprint,
mainly photocopied). The 1990-91 ALP catalogue lists 6 of his own books as Amra
Imprint publications, ranging from Anglo-Saxon dictionaries and translations
(his independent academic specialism) to poem-sequences such as Morning Lands and On Plotinus. Alan Halsey speculates that ‘It is unlikely that ALP
would have sustained its impetus … without Griffiths’ energetic contributions under the
chairmanship of Bob Cobbing’. (47). (‘Busy’ would be a better word: I think of
Bill as quietly emphatic, modestly insistent, rather than ‘energetic’.) Griffiths was also part
of the Collected Poems phenomenon: The
Mud Fort from Salt in 2004 is an undeclared Collected (or selected) Poems
1984-2004 and the posthumous 2010 Collected
Earlier Poems (1966-80) from Reality
Street is exactly what it says it is. (Now there's the new one.) One of the
editors of the latter, Alan Halsey, has described his experience of dealing
with Griffiths’
slippery oeuvre. Of the poem ‘To Johnny Prez’, he remarks, it ‘was frequently
reprinted during the next twenty years but I have yet to find two entirely
identical texts,’ yet this was common to many poems, and obviously a nightmare
for an editor or bibliographer: lines come and go through subsequent
reprintings of poems with jaunty indifference to textual stability. This was
partly because every re-printing was a potential re-writing, and some
re-printings were transpositions of text from one work to another, easily
achieved with Pirate Press mimeography. (p.45) More generally, Halsey
acknowledges of these early years, Griffiths ‘appears to have used the
possibilities – advantages – of short-run mimeo as part of his process of
composition, as part of his active poetics, his making of forms. ‘ p. 41 halsey)
[1] When
Griffiths met Bob Cobbing he recognised ‘a quite remarkable set up, not only a
Gestetner duplicator but a scanner that would make stencils from visual
material, and best of all, a great deal of experience in producing small books,
designing them and even marketing them.’ (Rowe: 174). More than this he recognised
a pragmatic and philosophic matching between the forms of poetry and pamphlet
form, both in his mentor’s work (Cobbing could write a concrete poem in the
morning, publish it, printing it as a visual poem, in the afternoon, and launch
it in the evening, performing it as a sound poem) and in his own emerging
practice: ‘I was writing poems in small groups and the small press booklet
seemed an ideal medium.’ (174)
This accurately describes Griffiths’ work, from
the early A History of the Solar System
(1978) which is a stitched folded concertina booklet through to On Plotinus (1990), the latter a
photocopied booklet, but whose contextualising commentaries, essays and
quotations are missing (and missed) when the poems are simply excerpted, as
they are in The Mud Fort, for
example. The reading experience is completely different – in fact, the poems
become more difficult, and seemingly elliptical. They are formed otherwise.
Book
of the Boat, which dates from
1988 and is a Writers Forum booklet, though using photocopying rather than
mimeo, presents a more radical version of this dilemma. Presented in Japanese
folding, with a sea-blue cover, it is subtitled ‘Inland and Blue-water texts
with illustrations by the Author’, and the sections are accounts of various
encounters with boats from the rhyming hymn of praise on the re-opening of the
Blissworth Tunnel, to a brief memorial text in Anglo-Saxon, taken from
Archbishop Wulfstan, to record ‘MY BOAT IS BURNED AT UXBRIDGE BOAT CENTRE’. One
of Griffiths’ faux naïf illustrations of the houseboat at the Centre,
records the calm before this catastrophic event in Griffiths’ life.
The longest text
is entitled ‘LOG OF THE CIMMERIAN’, which records the navigating of the barely
sea-worthy Cimmerian from London, around the
coast, through one of the busiest shipping lanes, to Brightlingsea in Essex, in July 1986. The motor is unreliable, anchorage
and its retrieval dangerous, and the crew consists only of Griffiths and his
long-term friend Alf Harman (who appears throughout Griffiths’ work). It makes Iain Sinclair’s
account of navigating the same stretch of water in Downriver a few years later look like a trip on a boating pool. I
have not yet commented upon the most obvious aspect of the making of this book:
it doesn’t just contain hand-drawn images, the text is handwritten by Griffiths. This gives it
an air of intimacy. [2] This
obviously suits the ‘log’ form described above, but it also allows Griffiths to design the
pages himself. The most notable aspect is the adoption by Griffiths of one of the most ancient
orthographic approaches to the poetic line, that zero degree determinant of
poeticality. Before printing asserted capitalised repeated lines as the
normative form for notating this poetic unit, a simple dot was often used to
mark a rhythmic unit, in continuous margin-to-margin writing. This was to save
papyrus, stone or tablet, or as here, to present an array of poems in as few
pages as possible. Griffiths’
handwriting makes him a virtual scribe, so this scriptural convention from the
days of manuscript culture is appropriate to this book’s poesis. However, for
the modern eye, used to undertaking an eye-scan of saccades to detect the
difference between poetry and prose, this may be disconcerting. But once
adapted to it, the reader is drawn into its myopic and detailed progress. In
fact, the ‘log’ consists of two texts: the chronological ‘LOG OF THE CIMMERIAN
(prose)’ as well as the numbered dot-line poems of ‘LOG OF THE CIMMERIAN
(Sea-Shanties)’. This spreads across six pages, with prose on the left folio
and ‘shanties’ on the right. As ‘shanties’ they are the tuneful accompaniment
to a job of marine work, the delivery of Alf’s boat to new moorings. The hairy
adventures on the journey in the ‘prose’, are presented in a slightly hammy,
but colloquial, rendition:
At 05 30 after a
short sleep we awoke to find ourselves quite close to Bradwell-on-Sea, that is,
on the wrong side of the Blackwater Estuary, while ahead of us was a formidable
array of tankers, fortunately riding at anchor, like us. The captain [Alf] was
surly and uncivilized, but managed to locate some blockage of the fuel-filter
and never-properly tightened or worked-loose components… At last the outboard
worked properly … and powered us ably … into the entrance of the Colne.
(20)
The matching two ‘sea-shanties’ read:
30.
Calling with the
horn in my gob, aghast at. four mamothian (sic) tankers lined up, straight at
us. till I see them riding to the tide, like us, anchored up.
31.
Spurting &
spuming, the lovely motor. steers us across the estuary, crossing. making for
the marked Colne channel. (21)
Neither is a version of the other.
The ‘sea-shanties’ narrate the events in compressed imagistic form, leaving
aside much of the social interaction and the technicalities of sailing. The
‘formidable array of tankers’ (understating the threat if they had not been at anchor) becomes ‘four
mamothian tankers lined up, straight at us’, which embodies the almost
atavistic animate, even co-ordinated threat, of the huge tankers’ presence.
(The Cimmerian is depicted as a smallish boat in one of Griffiths’ pictures, tossed and rearing, a slave
to the waves.) Tony Baker reports Griffiths
informing him: ‘Shanties is really a set of haiku in which alliteration
replaces syllable count, which doesn’t work in English, as a binding device’.
(salt 89) Alliteration, of course, is the binding device of Anglo-Saxon verse,
but the haiku form is preserved in the tripartite division of the lines. The
biggest shock is not the difference between these discourses – prose and poetry
– but the difference in form when one encounters the poems elsewhere in Griffiths’ books, lineated
and also revised, though I am not making assumptions about priority of
composition.[3]
The
prose ‘log’ ends:
34.
Alf & boat,
proud as apples. in the fine-sunned field of. Brightingsea, boat-starred.
Although the boat had passed
through the boastful ‘pride of Greenwich’,
here the image of the apples (proud in fullness and rotundity) seems apposite,
and the Anglo-Saxon-like collocation ‘boat-starred’ suggests the galaxy of sailing-craft
at the boat’s final moorings. (BB: 21) The
Mud Fort version of the poem, just
called ‘Shanties (through London to Essex)’
ends with the same words, bar an ampersand, lineated:
Alf
and boat, proud as apples
on
the fine-sunned field of
Brightlingsea,
boat-starred (MF: 42)
The line-break before
‘Brightlinsea’, the hanging preposition ‘of’ enacts the expectation of arrival.
However, in the version in Future Exiles (an
anthology of 1992), just entitled ‘Sea Shanties’, the sections are still
numbered rather than appearing as continuous verses, and carry initial capital
letters and are punctuated. The end, though, runs:
APPENDIX:
A note on the Captain:
After,
proud as an apple,
In
the fine-sunned field of
Brightlingsea,
boat-starred.
Alliteration, note, has guided the
revision: ‘Alf’ becomes ‘After’.
Separated from
the prose log, the poem in these other showings (lineated, and however numbered
or punctuated), becomes more poem-like. The Cimmerian all but disappears. The
loss of narrative context engenders poetic autonomy. The expectations that
readers carry with them to form lyric structurings during their encounters with
such a text come into play. Lineated, the lines are more easily read as
alliterative and iterative. Not just sounds but words repeat, no more so than
in the opening poem or verse or section:
Locked in in the
beauty
Locked into the
beauty
Locked in in the
beauty (MF 39)
Tony Baker testifies to the
haunting power of those opening lines but admits it takes him some time (partly
because he is not responding to the
poem as a part of Book of the Boat, which he does not know) to realise that
‘locked’ refers to the lock gates of the canals leading to the Thames. But he
misses the sinister undertone of the repetition of the word ‘locked’ from a
poet whose work is full of protest against incarceration. ‘Knock and lock my sleeping’
is the fourth line of one of his most famous poems, ‘Cycles One: On Dover
Borstal’, a poem featuring an institution where Griffiths had spent some time,
knocked about and locked up. (collected
earlier p. 64) The beauty is obviously the boat (remember it has a ‘lovely’
motor, when it works) but it is held captive by the canal banks and lock gates.
Griffiths admits of rudimentary navigational skills which means the boat beats
against its prison walls, the word ‘bound’ neatly illustrating the iterative
patterns of sound and the subtle
shading of the theme of containment:
Blundering, to
be blunt about it
in the darkest
bits of the canal, night-bound
bound into a
dark alley (MF 39)
The repeating ‘night-bound. bound’
of the unlineated version reads very strangely, without enjambment to separate
the repetition, to hold the binding of the over-arching night off from the
binding confinement of the London
canalbank. Characteristically in the ‘sea shanty’ entunement of the voyage we
do not experience our mariners running into ‘some fishermen on the way, who
slung a handful or two of maggots in retaliation’ at this point, as we do in
the prose. (p. 16 boat )
I have looked
forward to the day when the beauty of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative haiku
sea-shanties would be re-united in our reading experience with the slapstick
prose and now they are in the second volume of Griffiths’ Collected. (The orthography is
standardised in print, of course.) The original book as a whole, in its
idiosyncratic, limited form, presents not just texts for later assimilation in
various other publications, bigger and better; its careful dovetailing of form
and function of text (of various kinds) and its presentation as a whole (or at
least a complete provisional presentation as ‘book’ as its title asserts)
offers a reading (and viewing) experience that cannot be had in any other way,
that brings us (with image and text bearing the imprint of Griffiths’ own hand,
not unlike the manuscript culture that preceded and overlapped the introduction
of printing) close to a formal object that demands our readerly encounter to
form it in our making. The poesis of text and medium is handed over bodily to
the reader who is then responsible for its final form in cognition and
recognition. One of the ‘contents’ received is an expanded sense of book making
as form. Griffiths’ book is a singular and brilliant example of that, but I
suspect some of the small press pamphlets being produced now – as well as, in
their different ways, digital enterprises where medium has created the
possibility of the medium’s own new message – are engaged in small scale (and
small press) counter-enterprises against the world of the big publishers who
might (still) not recognise this work – prose as well as verse – as poetry. In
its genial scriptural resistance, Griffiths’
book is an anti-commodity, for the ‘labour which made it retains its
visibility’. (Ed 1985 alp).
WORKS CITED (in this posting and
the one on the small presses preceding this. See the full links to all posts that relate to my work The Meaning of Form here.)
Baker, Tony. ‘From Black Cocoa Out’ in Rowe, Will.
ed. The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths.
Cambridge:
Salt, 2007: 88-107.
Brinton, Ian, ‘infernal methods or
Tigers of Instruction’ (sic), Tears in
the Fence 54: Autumn 2011: 100-116
Edwards, K. ‘Writing and
Commodities’, Association of Little
Presses Catalogue, London:
1985.
Griffiths, Bill. Book of the Boat. London: Writers Forum, 1988.
Griffiths, Bill. ‘Interview with
Will Rowe’, in Rowe, Will. ed. The Salt
Companion to Bill Griffiths. Cambridge:
Salt, 2007: 171-196.
Griffiths, Bill. (with Fisher,
Allen, and Catling, Brian) Future Exiles:
3 London Poets.
London:
Paladin, 1992.
Griffiths, Bill. The Mud Fort. Cambridge: Salt, 2004.
Griffiths, Bill. eds. Halsey, Alan,
and Edwards, Ken. Collected Earlier Poems
(1966-80). Hastings:
Reality Street
(with West House Books), 2010
Halsey, Alan. ‘Abysses & Quick
Vicissitudes: Some Notes on the Mimeo Editions of Bill Griffiths’, Mimeo Mimeo 4: Winter 2010: 41-50.
(accessed 28th February
2010)
Reed, Brain M. Reed. ‘Visual
Experiment and Verbal Performance’, in Perloff, M. and Dworkin, C. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Sheppard, R. ‘Imperfect Knowledge’,
Catalogue of Little Press Books in Print
1990-1991. London:
Assocation of Little Presses, 1990.
Shields, David. Reality Hunger. London: Penguin, 2010
Wheale, Nigel. ‘Uttering Poetry:
Small-Press Publication’, in Riley, D. ed. Poets
on Writing. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
See the Special Issue on Griffiths of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry here.
See the Special Issue on Griffiths of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry here.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
[1] Each mimeo page was assembled
separately; I remember with my magazine Rock
Drill one would have enough pages left over to make incomplete copies: I
called them ‘bizzarros’ at the time. Put another way: a jamming accident on the
second side printing of a single sheet would deplete the full print run; stencils
were not easy to use again.
[2] In a
couple of the multi-voiced performance texts here, it is difficult to read what
would otherwise be italics playing off against standard type.
