My last post (yesterday) mentioned the Liverpool pub Ye Cracke (and its associations
with poetry). I believe it is re-opening tonight at 6 o’clock after its refurb.
I don’t think I’ll go along today, but will pop in in the next few for a few,
as it were.
I move now to examine Poetmeat, a magazine co-edited by Dave Cunliffe
and Tina Morris (both ‘Children of Albion’ as it happens). This magazine, from Blackburn,
was part of a scene documented in Bruce Wilkinson’s book Hidden Culture
Forgotten History: A Northern Poetic Underground and its Countercultural Impact
(which I’ve lent to a friend, unpropitiously!). Interestingly, nearly all of
the names that I didn’t identify yesterday in David Plante’s list were
contributors to Poetmeat. Douglas Hill was a Canadian poet. (See the
publisher’s description of issue 8 below.)
As I said on another post Tina Morris and I have been in correspondence
(she found me). She has supplied pages from the magazine written by Lee Harwood
(for the Selected Prose Kelvin Corcoran and I are editing; early days). Here’s
something she sent:
But the issue I’m interested in, is number eight. Here’s a bookseller’s description:
Poetmeat 8: The New British Poetry: First
Edition. Wraps. 4to. pp 114. Contributors include Lee Harwood, Gael Turnbull,
Jim Burns, Tina Morris, Roy Fisher, Anselm Hollo, Alan Jackson, Michael
Horowitz, Ignu Ramus, Pete Hoida, Pete Brown, Don Bodie et al. Important eighth
issue of this British poetry journal edited by Cunliffe and Morris. They
attempt to address a diverse group of rising young British poetry stars in this
issue. Published circa April 1965. Very good condition in thick side-stapled
illustrated wrappers. Loosely inserted correction.
Some important names there, and some lesser figures, and some unknowns.
I referred to the editorial of this issue in my The Poetry of Saying because
a colleague at B-----ds College had a copy of it, and I scribbled out some
parts of it. I now have the whole introduction. I’m not sure where it may have
come from, but I suspect not from Tina, who sent old-school photocopies. Let me
post it so you may read it, the first reference (that I have found) to the term
usually associated with Eric Mottram, the ‘British Poetry revival’ as it is
here, and ‘The New British Poetry’, obviously derived from the anthology The
New American Poetry but 20 years ahead of the Paladin anthology The New
British Poetry. You might have to click on both of these to be able to read them clearly.
The editors’ ‘Explanation’, of course, suggests this is not a ‘generation’
of poets, but clearly it was. They don’t, here, make extraordinary claims. They
are modest about the claims they make, despite some distinguished names here,
but are clear they are collecting an ‘avant guard’, as they spell it. Of
interest to me is the inclusion of Paul Evans, then 20, recommended not by Lee
Harwood, as one might imagine, but by the Brighton-residing American poet
George Dowden. Dowden was still there decades later and certain members of the
Brighton School tried to avoid him if they spotted his cultishly-costumed
figure on the Promenade (I’m pretty sure I saw him once!). The editors quote
his ridiculous characterisation of concrete poetry as ‘anti-poetry’ and ‘academic’,
yet they seem quite happy to quote the leading concretist Dom Sylvester Houedard
on the solidity of a British scene though I doubt he would have approved of
their ‘romantic and emotional’ bias (as against the Movement poetry, I assume,
though that is unnamed). Poor old (young) Roy Fisher and Turnbull and others
are called ‘the intellectual school’ and it would be easy to see this grouping
as the true British Poetry Revival of its time, if it were not for Jay’s
basic put-down of the ‘avant-garde’ (yet it can be argued that those poets –
Harwood and Evans, say – were still developing (and, I’ve noted, it always
takes longer for a poet outside an easily assimilable ‘mainstream’ to develop).
He himself is recognised as one of these ‘technical’ writers.
Against the ‘technical’ writers there are (and they oddly quote another
concrete poet in their defence) the ‘English beat’ writers, ‘oralists’ as Chris
Torrance (who would (then) be considered of their number))…
INTERPOLATION Now, as I scope the document, I
see that I have pdfs of the first and last pages of the ‘Editorial’, but there
are intervening pages missing, tantalisingly quoting Harwood and Shayer (though
both from documents found elsewhere). It also means we don't have the passage I quoted years ago using the term 'British Poetry revival'. There’s nothing I can do about it but to jump
to the ending…
… we find a plea for internationalism, and a sense of a global ‘movement’,
though they are careful not to promote such a thing in so many words. I am reminded
of Lee Harwood, speaking to Tristan Tzara, at the end of 1963, only a year or
so before this editorial:
LH: There's no new movement in England.
TZ: But you're the new movement.
LH: We're not really a movement.
TZ: Friends?
LH: Yes, a group of friends, all sympathetic to one another.
Though earlier in the interview, he seems, in words much relevant to this
Blackburn-based magazine, to admit community – and indeed, he mentions Cunliffe:
TZ: How
old are you?
LH: Twenty
three.
TZ: You’re
very young still.
LH: But
you were only twenty when you founded dada.
TZ: Ah yes.
Are you mostly students?
LH: No,
none of us are students. (Tzara smiled and seemed pleased at this.) We’re
mostly workers. Neil Oram is a gardener. He’s done many things – owned a café, [Obviously
he’s left Sam Widges by this time], Art gallery, and now a gardener. Dave
Cunliffe is a nurse. Bal Parr a factory worker. I've done lots of jobs too. It
doesn't matter at all. What I want to do is write.
TZ: Yes,
but it's necessary to work.
LH: Yes.
TZ: Still,
you're all very young.
And they were. That’s probably revealed in the last paragraph which is a
kind of manifesto or poetics for an anarchic, ego-based revelatory poetry, that
refuses the kind of poetry Harwood explained to Tzara: ‘The only poets that are
published [by big presses] aren’t poets. They're just intellectuals who write
clever lines. The only poet we've had this century is Dylan Thomas.’ Cunliffe and Morris reject the poetry of the
academy, also, and see that the lack of manifestos is perhaps a good thing, so
long as ‘group voices’ emerge.
That could be that. But it isn’t. The note after the essay explains why
no ‘statements on poetics’ are included. They are again suggesting that the
English scene is as yet too weak. They are surely thinking of the New
American Poetry which contained such statements, including Olson’s essay on
Projective Verse, which they praise here for being ‘jumping off points’ for British
poetics.
They were right, I think, but that poetics may have taken the work in
another direction, in the work of poets they have anthologised, in Fisher and
Harwood and Turnbull, and in poets they haven’t. What impresses one is the
mobility and indeterminacy of the ‘scene’, of British Beats beating it out,
while other strands were developing. Later in 1965 Harwood would write a poem
like ‘As You Eyes are Blue…’ Also in 1965, Roy Fisher would write ‘For ‘Realism’.
(Riches enough!) Of course, to most of us, that’s where the direction of travel
was going, or seems now to have been going, but it has been interesting to try
to look at other ways in. It has been edifying not to take a sheer academic
review, and not to fall into a Horovitz-centred recollection, even while I acknowledge
his presence in Poetmeat’s contents and in the Editorial.
*
PS Just to end with a fragment of a piece the photographer Tricia Porter sent to me some while ago.
An article by David Porter in the ‘arts alive merseyside’ free magazine March 1973
`
In 1962 Love me do was released, and Liverpool emerged as a Swinging City. After most
people got rich and went to London, a second wave of poetry and paint pushed the city
back into the news, and once again the popular press was full of photographs of mild poets
staring out of a strange Northern landscape of bus-stops, crumbling Georgian facades,
gravestones, cathedrals and decay; Penguin Poets No. 10 became a best seller, Pevsner
liked the Albert Dock, and a lot of people who didn’t know they could write poetry met up
with a lot of people who didn’t know they could listen to poetry. Each encouraged the
other, the buildings kept on decaying, the Albert Dock was scheduled for demolition, and
the journalists wrote the whole thing into a respectable grave.
(Seems an appropriate ending for the day Ye Cracke is reopening in about four hours!)
This is the fourth (but not the last) of a series of posts on the
British Poetry Revival, which begins here: Pages:
How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic
Sandbrook’s White Heat
Here's the next attempt: Pages: The British Poetry Revival again: 11 June 1965: Lee Harwood and John Ashbery write a poem together
An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival from some years
ago is sampled here: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two.
My selection of Paul Evans’ poems may be read about here: Pages:
Paul Evans' Selected Poems and Lee Harwood's Collected
Read about the Cunliffe Archive: Rylands
BlogIntroducing the Dave Cunliffe Collection
