It’s difficult to be writing history again, the history of
the British Poetry Revival, after a foray into the tenets of formalism although
I do know – and quote in
The Meaning of Form – Barthes’ aphorism that a little formalism takes one away from
history, but a lot brings one back to it. I’m back to it.
I’ve told the story before, in The Poetry of Saying, and I’ve told it on this blog:
My earliest series of postings on
Pages under the title ‘The History
of the Other’ was really a re-casting of the historical chapters of
The
Poetry of Saying and they can also be accessed via Peter
Philpott’s gathering of them as a set of links
here, where each is summarised. Approximate links to the pages are shown below. Link on and scroll down until you find the item under
these titles.
1. The
British Poetry Revival
2. Children of Albion
3. The Seventies:
What the Chairman Really Told Tom
4. The
1970s (Continued): Poetry of Place/Poetry of Autonomy
5.
Linguistically Innovative Poetry and Small Rooms in London
6.
Cambridge: Towards a Community of Risk
7.
Performance Writing
8. Out of
Everywhere: Be(com)ing a Woman Poet
Since then I’ve written
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry which historicises (usually later poetry
than the 1960-78ish period I’m attempting to sketch again). I’ve written there
and in
Iain Sinclair accounts of
the dangers of Sinclair’s attractive mythologisation of this period, which puts
it like this:
“Sinclair trudges the sites of the original Ranters, political
activists and religious radicals of the seventeenth century English Revolution
and asks of the years of the British Poetry Revival, ‘Was it legitimate to read
that decade of samizdat publication (1965-75), poetry wars, readings above pubs
or in disestablished chapels, as in any way analogous to the outpourings of the
Dissenters (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters) in the years of the English Civil War
…?’ (Sinclair 2002: 186) The question, like much else here, is rhetorical…. The
‘disestablished chapels’ rhetorically function as temporary locations of the
British Poetry Revival’s festivities, but suggest – but only suggest – an
actually existing continuity with radical non-conformism (which I can only find
evinced in Bob Cobbing’s radical work ethic which may have derived from his
Plymouth Brethren upbringing, but this is hardly tantamount to finding the last
Muggletonian at a Sub Voicive reading).
Peter Barry recognizes the danger of this rampant
associationalism, but also acknowledges Sinclair’s scepticism toward his own
systems, which must be borne in mind: ‘This overdetermined universe would
quickly become unbearably claustrophobic, and perhaps ultimately silly, in the
hands of any other writer.’ (Barry 2000: 178) Sinclair ‘inscribing his own mental biro-lines on the
tarmac, and then excavating and linking up the marked spots’, as Barry puts it,
is the unifying activity of his intratextual
oeuvre, in its multiple intertextuality.
[i]
However, those hoping to discover an exclusively
avant-garde ‘tradition’
– say, a singular version of the British Poetry Revival – will be disappointed
to discover, at some of his ‘marked spots’, sites pertaining to other cultural
agendas, such as the edgeland asylums that housed villains and visionaries
alike, or
J.G. Ballard’s Middlesex
stalking ground, in
London Orbital. … The lines Sinclair draws
explicitly complicate or refute existing lines of ‘influence’; they scribble
over the maps of affiliations and allegiances, official and unofficial.”
It would seem best to leave those “analyses” alone. For this
present purpose. Indeed, I intend to scour some of the good recent sources for
some new angles on this old subject.
“The British poetry revival has been long on the way but
slow under its own steam.” Dave Cunliffe and Tina Morris. (Cunliffe and Morris
1965). Cunliffe, Dave, and Tina Morris. 1965. “The New British Poetry”. Poetmeat 8: 3.
That’s the earliest use of the term (and of the title that
became the John Muckle edited volume in the 1980s! – I would be surprised if
John knew this source). I only picked this source up after my PhD was finished,
when my colleague at B-------ds College, Martin Jones, placed Poetmeat in my hands. He’d bought it at
the time. I will probably re-use one of the quotes from Ken Edwards that I used in the thesis and book,
at least in parts, because it is so suggestive and true. ... “the ‘British poetry revival’: an exciting growth and
flowering that encompasses an immense variety of forms and procedures and that
has gone largely unheeded by the British literary establishment... and it may
be that one day (probably when we’re all long gone, or our work lapsed into
repetition and genre...) some bright critic, as usual too late, will discover
this to have been a kind of golden age.” Ken Edwards, Ken. 1979.
“Reviews.” Reality Studios, Vol 2: No 1: 9.
I always saw myself as that ‘bright critic’, I suppose, but not too late. But
there are dozens of them now, better than I, who write for the journal I just
about still co-edit (I’m standing down) the Journal
of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, among other publications.
The main
essay to utilise the term is Eric Mottram's ‘The British Poetry Revival
1960-1974’, Modern Poetry Conference, 1974 (London: Polytechnic of Central London, 1974),
pp. 86-117. The revised form appears as ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960-75’,
in New British Poetries , eds. Robert Hampson and Peter Barry
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 15-50.
I often
footnote this (in The Meaning of Form for
example) but re-reading it I was surprised how man-in-a-hurry-ish it actually
was. I was amused again at his reference to the anthology Adrian Clarke and I
put together in 1991, Floating Capital,
that took a slightly different line to his; he
intuited the presence of a ‘group’ called ‘Floating Capital’, which wasn't the case. It is over this
kind of fault line that I trace a distinction (but not a complete rupture)
between the British Poetry Revival and linguistically innovative poetry…
Something did cease about 1978, even if it was only Eric’s attention. So is
there anything worth quoting in that article? It’s not so much the amassing of
names and information (useful in the original as lists and ‘poetry
information’, to use Eric’s term), nor the clodhopping attacks on the
mainstream ‘axis’ (my use of the term “Movement Orthodoxy” is open to the same
objection I know), but moments of acknowledged collective poetics, a
distillation of many kinds of processual, objectivist, projectivist, poetics, such as in this extraordinary paragraph:
“ Poetic
space need not be rigidly enclosed or shaped under hard linear dimensions,
restricted to traditional sentence logic and grammatical usage. The completion
of a poem could include a reader’s consciousness. The poet’s meeting a reader
in a formative process need not be dependent on a straight-jacketing notation
and the eyes following print on a silent page. A poem need not illustrate
dogmas but can enact with gestures flexible enough to hold potentiality as well
as ascertained experience and prior formed knowledge. A poem could be a
proposition of energies that / suggested their sources and need not terminate
them in insistent limits. Instead of being marketed as a consumerist item, a
poem could be part of the world of physics and philosophy in interaction,
requiring an attention beyond instant recognition and reaction. Instead of
being an item in a school of rhetoric, a poem could have a variety of
articulations, continuity and discontinuity, sentence and parataxis, and an
awareness of the imaginative possibilities of relationships between particle,
measure, line and paragraph, between existent and new forms…. The poets of the
Revival understood the risks of ambitious form and multiple experience.”
Mottram 1992: 27-8. (Eric Mottram: See his Towards Design in Poetry
(London: Veer Books with Writers Forum, 1977,
reprint 2005), and Peterjon and Yasmin Skelt, eds. Alive in Parts of this
Century: Eric Mottram at 70 (Twickenham and Wakefield: North and South, 1994).
That’s a
marvellous passage. And not a million miles away from the clunkier statement of
‘linguistic innovation’ that was largely my doing in Floating Capital. The point about ‘recognition’ was borrowed from
Mottram’s use of ‘recognition patterns' in a number of his essays:
Not
everybody enjoyed (or enjoyed in the wrong way!) the term BPR. Paul Evans
wrote: “I’ve always been amused by the religio-medical implications of
that term.”
(quoted in
Sheppard, Robert. 2009. “Alive in the Twentieth Century.” In Evans, Paul.
The
Door of Taldir: Selected Poems, 10. Exeter:
Shearsman. That’s a book worth buying if you haven’t already:
here.) There is, in Evans' view, a
suspicion of the tambourine and the undead. Or of both.
But, as I’ve said, there are a lot of recent sources.
Such as Rozemin Keshvani’s work on Better Books. (See above: I'm surprised at the number of women in the audience. And see Rozemin speaking about and showing relics from the shop - in English - on this German video
here.) The narrative around this shop
is complex (changes of manager, even location, I think: the dangerous and
oppressive happenings in the Basement, Ginsberg’s free reading June 1965, etc.). But
there were lots of other meetings and connections. I think I might quote this
one, which links with one of the pictures above:
“Sound artist Annea Lockwood met Cobbing when she wandered
into Better Books in search of a City Lights publication. Cobbing and Lockwood
performed the ‘sound poetry’ circuit together, eventually teeming up with Jeff
Keen to create, the disturbing, surrealistic soundtrack of Keen’s incredible Marvo Movie.” Keshvani, Rozemin. 2012. Better Books: Art, Anarchy and Apostasy.
Center for Art and Media: Karlsruhe.
(Thanks for that Rozemin!) I like the way this suggests the interart
possibilities of the 1960s, emanating from the shop, an interaction between two
major artists (one a member of staff and the other a customer), and their subsequent
collaboration and interaction with a third genius of the era. Lockwood is still
active, has new and old work out (see The
Wire every other month); her work with Cobbing is on the CD Steve Willey
edited in 2009 (NSACD 42); Keen’s film is on his BFI Box Set (GAZWRX). That sentence can stand for
huge passages elsewhere. As in Bomb
Culture.
I have just re-read Bomb
Culture (I conceive of the need to see this book back in print, spent half a morning thinking I might try to edit it, remembering the ‘academic fan-girls’ (their term) at the Bill Griffiths launch
waving a copy when Harry Gilonis mentioned it), and lo! and behold! it is
referenced in the latest Wire in the
interview with Bruce Lacey. I particularly liked this previously unrecorded
account of the Albert Hall Reading on June 11th 1965:
“I was invited to do a performance. I had a full size plaster
of Paris statue of the Venus de Milo and I wanted to do an anti-art thing, to
come on stage pulling the Venus on wheels and then smashing it with a
sledgehammer … But the poets said, ‘You can’t do that, it’s visual. And poetry
is spoken word.’ So I thought, all right you buggers! I made a radio-controlled
robot of out aluminium, and called it John Silent. It came on stage and made
farting and belching noises.” Cowley, Julian, “Quirk Strangenesses and Charm”,
2014, in The Wire 368: 30 (28-35)
The sources are curiously uncertain who actually read (like the
audience, it seems, though it is likely Neruda and Voznesensky were in the
audience, and Indira Gandhi). Nuttall has (though he ignores himself and John
Latham painted blue, setting things alight): ‘Trocchi, Corso, Ferlinghetti,
Horovitz, Brown, Hawkins, Richter, McGrath, Lacey, Esam, MacBeth, Logue, Hollo,
Jandl and Fainlight (the real star of the show), performing together but all
our separate audiences had come to one place at the same time, to witness an
atmosphere of pot, impromptu solo acid dances, of incredible/ barbaric colour,
of face and body painting, of flowers and flowers and flowers, of a common
dreaminess in which all was permissive and benign.’ (Nuttall 1970: 182-3.
Nuttall, Jeff. 1970. Bomb Culture. London: Paladin.)
Ginsberg’s ‘The Change’ and Fainlight’s ‘Spider’ were his highlights. He wrote
to a friend: ‘London
is in flames. The spirit of William Blake walks on the water of Thames. sigma (sic) has exploded into a giant rose.’
(183) Those images of floral explosiveness (benign flames) are worth examining
but it is interesting to compare this effusion to Ginsberg’s letter to a
friend: ‘There were too many bad poets at Albert Hall, too many goofs who
didn’t trust their own poetry, too many superficial bards who read tinkley
jazzy beatnick style poems, too many men of letters who read weak pompous or
silly poems written in archaic metres, written years ago. The concentration & intensity of prophesy were absent except in a few instances…’ Ginsberg
doesn’t exempt himself: ‘I read quite poorly and hysterically.’ (quoted in
Miles, Barry. 2003. Inside the Sixties. London: Pimlico, 61).
It’s worth noting, he liked Liverpool more. (I
researched his visit here, which was a week before the London gig, for an unpublished short story that begins:
“Allen
Ginsberg dangles little bells on strings – Tibetan he says they are – knocking
them against one another, making little circles in the air with his hands.
Their thin chimes accompany the flat drone he calls an ‘invocation’ to some
Goddess or other. Chet expels cigarette smoke into the slants of sunlight above
the dome of Ginsberg’s head. The jungle of the poet’s obscene beard affirms his
venerability, his promise of wisdom. It’s so unlike the clipped Beatnikery of
the men in the close room, even Chet’s. Cathy predicts a fashion. Ginsberg
coughs, adjusts his Bilko glasses, and begins to read.”
I tried to capture the sense of
exasperation you get in Ginsberg's letter in this scene:
“Pete the Beat was meant to introduce
Ginsberg at the off, but Arthur Horrobin, his double, leapt up in his hair to
tout copies of his New Arrivals
magazine, spilling them from a raffia bag, and offering a discount on damaged
copies. Cathy hadn’t bought it since the poetry and jazz issue. He’d always
rejected her poems. Pete’s mouth was still open like a cod’s, as Horrobin began
a ‘spontaneous bop eulogy’ to Ginsberg, who shrank into a corner. He scowled,
un-Zen-like, rapping his notebook.”)
We can work out (and perhaps my short story helps) who
Ginsberg meant, and it was a sharp attack on supposed avant-gardists and
mainstream poets alike. Where was Cobbing (Steve Willey seems to suggest he did read),
Harwood, John James, Tom Pickard, Bill Butler, Roy Fisher, Jim Burns, Gael
Turnbull, etc, let alone a woman, Tina Morris for example… and others who might
have? Answer: in the audience. Chris Torrance was there, for one. It was
bankrolled by Barbara Rubin, a friend of Ginsberg. It is interesting, reading
Barry Miles’ autobiography, how he quickly moves into a circle of Beatles,
Stones, Marianne Faithful, Ginsberg, Olson and away from Harwood, Cobbing and
others he’d known. (Paul Jones had a formidable collection of small press
books: how odd; I've got a a collection of harmonicas!) The switch from Better Books to Indica was a switch of worlds.
From where Bob met Annea to where John met Yoko, in fact.
History is not, after all, written by the victors, but by
the loudest (and we know what makes most noise, don’t we?) Perhaps it might be
a good thing in my piece to downplay this event (emblematic though it was) in favour of
readings at Better Books, Group H, work for Gustav Metzer’s’ ‘Destruction in
Art Symposium 9-11 September 1966… (Miles says August 31-Septmber 30th
(Miles 143)) and, of course, nationwide events… I shall use a couple of Nuttall
quotes to deal with the need to broaden out into the wider context:
“To a certain degree the Underground happened everywhere
spontaneously. It was simply what you did in the H-bomb world if you were, by
nature, creative and concerned for humanity as a whole.” (Nuttall 160) Yet that
knowledge was hidden. “When
Cobbing, Musgrove, Rowan [that’s John, the psychologist] and I were putting on
our shows in hired rooms, exclaiming our poetry in public parks, swinging the
duplicator handle throughout the long Saturday afternoons of 1963 we had no
idea that the same thing was happening all over the world.” (Nuttall 161)
I have a
theory that the fairly cheap worldwide postal services have an important part in this story.
Lee Harwood somewhere (probably in the interview with Eric Mottram) talks about
the wonder of finding magazines from all over the world arriving unannounced. Neil Pattison, Reitha
Pattison, and Luke Roberts’ Certain Prose
of The English Intelligencer has all kinds of pleasures, but one is simply
seeing the mail distribution list of this ‘worksheet’. (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2014 edition). In
The Poetry of Saying I called it
a
privately distributed poetry and discussion sheet, which was issued to a
mailing list of around 30 between February 1967 (it's actually January 1966) and April 1968, edited by poets
Peter Riley and Andrew Crozier, with Prynne’s assistance. Simon Perril has
recently described the open exchange of The
English Intelligencer as ‘the constitution of trust through the
establishment of a “community of risk”’. (Simon Perril, ‘Trappings of the Hart:
Reader and the Ballad of The English Intelligencer’ , The Gig, 4/5, November 1999/March 2000 (‘The Poetry of
Peter Riley’), pp. 196-218, at p. 197. The phrase ‘community of risk’ is Drew
Milne’s.)
This seems to me still (thankfully) accurate. The lists
indicate that it went to the ‘Cambridge School’ but also Lee Harwood, Paul
Green, Tom Pickard, Roy Fisher, Wendy Mulford, Elaine Feinstein (the oldest),
Barry MacSweeney (the youngest), and some of the Liverpool poets. It was the nearest thing
the postal service could offer to an e-discussion list in the 1960s (and it
utitlized the same duplicator technology that Cobbing was using). There was
some discussion of poetry (Lee Harwood pleads for consideration of the poems he
sent, and then seems to have given up; the changes of address indicate he had
moved from Better Books to Unicorn in Brighton (where I first bought poetry and
where I was menaced by Bill Butler's huge Alsations mentioned in Bomb Culture!).) There is not a lot of discussion of what I would
call poetics (as a writerly speculative discourse) though there is a lot of
angst about being derivative of Americans. ‘And everybody is trying hard to
cover up the fact that they’re wet through with Mid-Atlantic spray,’ as the
young Barry MacSweeney puts it. (Pattison 140) Gael Turnbull had accused the
contributors of being ten years out of date. He and most of the other
contributors seem unnervingly dismissive of their community and see no risk:
‘To write and then build little walls round it, is just fucking useless. ..
Honest, that’s what the Intelligencer is doing, NOW’, (141) though he admits it
was useful for putting people in touch (those lists again). MacSweeney is as
fierce as Ginsberg after the Albert Hall endeavour, as he attacks the ‘Liverpool poets’ and ‘all jazz-poets’ as ‘the main bad
craftsmen, unpoets.’ He blames the ‘in scene that this lives off' that 'wants
no longer the pill but the sugar that
goes with it.' (31) Living in Liverpool I have a love-hate relationship with the
Liverpool poets. They both demonstrated that
poetry was a live and vital performance and that performance often vitiated the
language. (Later today Pete Brown, the Beat, is reading some of Henri’s poems
at the Bluecoat, and maybe a couple of his own, the organiser, and editor of a new book on Henri, Bryan Biggs told me last night (at Will Holder reading Robert Ashley and Josephine Foster and Victor Herrea); shall I go? I don’t know.) In The English Intelligencer there is much Olsonian
consideration of long human histories (by Peter Riley, in what look like notes
for Excavations and by Prynne: the
famous ‘Note on Metals’ from The White
Stones. Prynne was collecting data and fact checking for Olson at this time.
I was a little disappointed by the exchanges, or lack of it,
the persistent re-appraisal of what they were doing. (Perhaps the effect of the
absence of the poems themselves from this volume?) But high praise must go to Neil Pattison (see his first published poems
here on
Pages) for an excellent introduction, with formidably detailed
footnotes, which should be read by all wishing to engage with these early years
of the British Poetry Revival. So he reminds us of the ‘Migrant coterie’ and
remarks: ‘The centrality of the Migrant coterie to the history of modern poetry
in Britain
has often been underestimated.' (Pattison xxii: but see xiv and xv for accounts
of Gael Turnbulls’ association with US poetries and the establishment of
Migrant press and magazine). In
The
Poetry of Saying I quote a wonderful insert that dropped out of a copy of
Migrant I bought for next to nothing in
a Balham bookshop; I’ve bequeathed it to the marvellous Lila Matasomoto, who is
also researching this stuff. It says:
Dear
Reader, MIGRANT will be published irregularly.... For it to pretend to be a
‘magazine’ with a ‘public’ would be absurd. There is no such public.... What
subscription rate could there be? And so, it will be sent to anyone who wishes
to receive it. That is, to anyone interested to read it. Thus our ambition will
be to have a minimal number of readers; but for those readers to be maximally
interested.( Migrant 1, July 1959, flier inserted loosely in issue.)
But of course:
Additionally,
he published an impressive list of booklets between 1957 and the mid 1960s,
including books by Creeley and Edward Dorn, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pre-concrete
poetry collection, The Dancers Inherit the Party, and in 1961, Fisher’s City,
with a foreword by Shayer, and later Turnbull’s own impressive improvisation Twenty
Words, Twenty Days, the title of which describes its time-based form and
the lexical nature of the starting material. In 1965, by which time Fisher was
helping to run the press, Migrant published Basil Bunting’s The Spoils,
in association with Morden Tower in Newcastle.
By 1965 Migrant was no longer an isolated venture, and the Americans Turnbull
had introduced were more generally well-known within the larger alternative
network.
Turnbull
said: ‘I was wanting … to create a ‘context’ that was not narrowly ‘national’
and in which I felt I might be able to exist as a writer myself. In both these
concerns .. . I succeeded.” (quoted in Pattison xv). “When Turnbull returned to
the UK
in 1964, things ‘had changed completely. I would be foolish to say that Migrant
had nothing to do with it, even as one could make a long list of other factors
which had contributed … By 1964, a lot was happening’. (quoted in Pattison xv)
But oddly, he had “created” a national literature of sorts, by
publishing Roy Fisher’s City, the
first serious book of the British Poetry Revival. I made much of this in an
editorial for JBIIP. In essence, this
read:
“City, Worcester, Migrant Press; date of publication
given as May 1961 actually appeared June 1961”: thus the first entry of Derek
Slade’s bibliography of Roy Fisher’s publications. At such a distance the extra
month the first readers of this fugitive pamphlet had to wait seems
insignificant. What should not be underestimated is the importance of this
quiet entry into the field of literary production by a writer who was already
31 years old. The 300 copies were probably distributed by the publisher, Gael
Turnbull, in his usual casual way… I’ve always thought of City as the beginning
of the BPR… This is not to downplay other events – those above and elsewhere –
the ambition at play (even in that slightly different version) set a benchmark
for others (whether they knew it or no) particularly in the development of the
long poem, the representation of the urban as an evanescent city of modernism
(our hero is a neo-modernist flaneur not a pomo psychogeographer), the
introduction of crisp documentary prose into the flow of a poetic work, and in
the rhythmic subtlty and freedom of the writing….
it sort of read.
[i] See my
monograph
Iain Sinclair. Writers and
their Work, Tavistock House: Plymouth, 2007, for a fuller account of Sinclair’s
career, and Episode Five of
When Bad
Times Made for Good Poetry, for a summary of his early career.
