Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry - some thoughts

Some comments on Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2024: See details for purchase here:

: https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/arcadian-rustbelt-2024/

The publisher or the editors describe the book thus, and list its contributors:

Rolling back the Motion/Morrison-Poetry Review-Faber clampdown, Arcadian Rustbelt operates on the principle that ‘if you’re indicted, you’re invited’, collecting formally innovative and radical poets who emerged after 1980 but before 1994: David Annwn, Michael Ayres, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Adrian Clarke, Kelvin Corcoran, Ian Davidson, Andrew Duncan, Harry Gilonis, John Goodby, Paul Green, Khaled Hakim, Graham Hartill, Nicki Jackowska, Keith Jafrate, Elizabeth James, Daniel Lane, Andrew Lawson, D.S. Marriott, Anthony Mellors, Rod Mengham, Kevin Nolan, Val Pancucci, Frances Presley, David Rees, Robert Sheppard, Simon Smith, Vittoria Vaughan, and Nigel Wheale. 

Passing over the mildly inappropriate Mid-western Hellenism of its title, I pass to its subtitle to find out where I’m being placed now: ‘The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry’. Grandchildren of Albion, then? This is not the first time. In 1988 I’m represented (by passages that ended up in Twentieth Century Blues) in the ‘some new poets’ section of the anthology The New British Poetry and in 1991 in the anthology I co-edited (with Adrian Clarke), Floating Capital: new poetry from London. Both anthologies are mentioned (with others) in the introduction to Arcadian Rustbelt as anthologies of the era. The era. This anthology is not like those old Penguin anthologies Poetry of the Thirties and – more grudgingly –Forties in attempting to present the poetry of the era, but poetry by poets who ‘emerged’ (how can you emerge into an Underground?) between the years 1980 and 1994. (My idio-temporality calls 1979-1997 ‘The Drowning Years’, a corruption of Thatcher’s autobiography The Downing Street Years.) My contribution was written 1994, bang on. The ‘Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’, which was held in December 1994, featured some of the London-based contributors, and represents neatly the end of the period, even down to a symbolic chucking out in the early hours of a couple of the anthology’s contributors! Wild times! Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994.

If we take the 1969 Penguin anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, edited by Michael Horovitz as a cornucopia of the first generation, or Eric Mottram’s term ‘British Poetry Revival’ as indicative, where does that leave Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Denise Riley, or others? Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78 . I suppose I’ve always thought of them as a second generation, and ‘us’ as the third. I’ve always thought 1996 the beginning of another generation, marked by the development of ‘Performance Writing’. In other moods, I have less interest in these ‘generations’ and prefer to trace continuities of formal practices across these quite short periods of time. I should say that I’m pleased to be here, and in some good company, though not always the company I’d imagined at the time under the smaller umbrella ‘linguistic innovative poetry’, but no matter; most of us were a generation (ish).

It is ‘a world whose very existence influential people denied’; I tried to do my bit, writing reviews for New Statesman and the TLS, entryism of a radical kind (though I principally reviewed poetry of the first generation). Eric Mottram told me that they’d get rid of me: and they did (but not before I supplied this Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Commitment to Openness (Roy Fisher, Harwood, Raworth) and this, Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Timeless Identities (Roy Fisher), and (one day) my splendidly satirical ‘They Fuck You Up’ from the New Statesman about post-Larkin poets will be rolled out again). Andrew Crozier’s seminal ‘Thrills and Frills’ essay on what I later called ‘The Movement Orthodoxy’ (and which is a cornerpiece of an opening chapter of The Poetry of Saying (2005, but based on my 1979-1988 PhD); see here Pages: Cliff Yates: The Poetry of Saying) is offered as evidence of the club that people were refusing to join. I think this is largely true. Which constitutes a real difference with the first Underground. I was always impressed that Lee Harwood, for example, just didn’t bother with these ‘mainstream’ writers; perhaps the second generation were wiser to need to define against, more manifestly manifestic (as it were). Even so, did ‘young poets leave the mainstream’, or did they never go near it?

I’ve often thought the occurrences at The Poetry Society in 1977 presented a sad backdrop to the 1980s, and often said so, as here, in my review of Peter Barry’s excellent Poetry Wars: Jacket 31 - October 2006 - Robert Sheppard: «Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court» by Peter Barry. The 1980s Poetry Review (journal of the Society) is derided for its safeness, for its retreat into the orthodoxy. This is presented as analogous to Thatcherism, which seems, at this distance, to be fair, and I said so at the time. My ‘statement’, published in Arcadian Rustbelt begins: ‘In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when asked about the “greatest influence” on my poetry, I would answer “Margaret Thatcher”; it was only partly a joke.’ These were the Drowning Years indeed. ‘The great silence’ of being outside the mainstream, we are told by the editors in their introduction, ‘allowed something fragile, almost inaudible, to achieve a spectacular growth’, which is one of their more utopian formulations.

 My ‘statement’ continues: ‘I carried this mash-up of the poetics and theory of Forrest-Thomson, Shklovsky, Adorno, Marcuse, Barthes, and others, around as a prophylactic against both “The Movement Orthodoxy” in poetry and “Thatcherism” in politics. It was both an anticipatory poetics for my own writing, and the sketch of a theory of the poetry of the era. This is its clearest, tight-arsed form, as it appeared in Floating Capital in 1991:  

 

Poetry must extend the inherited paradigms of ‘poetry’; that this can be accomplished by delaying, or even attempting to eradicate, a reader’s process of naturalisation; that new forms of poetic artifice and formalist techniques should be used to defamiliarize the dominant reality principle in order to operate a critique of it; and that poetry can use indeterminacy and discontinuity to fragment and reconstitute text to make new connections so as to inaugurate fresh perceptions, not merely mime the disruption of capitalist production. The reader thus becomes an active co-producer of these writers’ texts, and subjectivity becomes a question of linguistic position, not of self-expression or narration. Reading this work can be an education of activated desire, not its neutralisation by means of a passive recognition.’

 

This statement within my statement also appears (more than once!) in the third part of my recent book The Necessity of Poetics, which collects some documents from the 1980s and 1990s, which make interesting reading placed alongside the anthology (I even comment on my poem included there). (See here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry) It includes ‘Took Chances in London Traffic’ (a memoir of the London poetry scene of the 1980s), ‘Negative Definitions: Talk for the SubVoicive Colloquium, London 1997’, ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, ‘Working the Work (poetics)’, ‘Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry: SubVoicive Colloquium, July 1991, University of London (a cautionary examination of linguistically innovative poetry), and net/(k)not-//work(s), a 1992 booklet of short pieces offered with interpollations, including ‘New British Poetry in the Eighties’.

Apparently, there was a ‘poetry boom’ in the 1990s that brought all this to an end. While it is true that most of the poets here began to publish books in that decade, the ‘boom’ must have passed me by, and there is no recognition of this in the 1990s pieces published in The Necessity of Poetics.

The editors rightly criticise the absence of women writers (reflected in the anthology).

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I have yet to read the contents cover to cover, but I will, and it might very well open up that decade in a way quite contrary to my formulations above, and in the documents referred to above, though it’s more likely to modify my view of the era in its details. I have a friend who is urging me to write a lyric essay of my memories (I am quite useful, in that I was on to the first generation of the British Underground quite early, while still at school, and that does serve me well in reminiscences.)

A few comments on my contributing poem, just for the record. I was surprised at the choice of ‘Living Daylights’. It appeared in History or Sleep, my selected poems, and also as part of Twentieth Century Blues. It was a 1994 remode of a 1987-1988 poem ‘Daylight Robbery’, published in my first book of that title, from Stride in 1990. (It had appeared as a Ship of Fools pamphlet in 1989.) It wasn’t written 1991 as the anthology claims. I’ll also pass over the health warning that ‘the depersonalised may not be the true’. This enigmatic formulation appears in the introduction to my poem, but also in the main body of the book’s introduction.

 

It seems so long ago (and the controversy, such as it was, is narrated in ‘Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry’) but I remoded the long, difficult poem ‘Daylight Robbery’ into another difficult, but not so long, poem called ‘Living Daylights’, that was presented in isoverbalist (word count) verses (derived arbitrarily from a verse of another contemporary poem). The rhythm that imposes slows the poem down, I thought, and still think – and improves readerly reception. You’ll have to buy the anthology or History or Sleep to read the poem, and to buy The Necessity of Poetics to read ‘Incite! and Ignite!’, which traces my (temporary) loss of faith in the poetics expounded in my ‘tight-arsed’ statement above.

Yes, buy the anthology and slot these poets back into literary history (something I have been trying to do in my critical work for decades, of course).

And check out the ‘Arcadian Rustbelt’ blog (see my blogroll to the right of this post) for Andrew Duncan’s takes on rustbelty matters and arcadian follow-ups!