How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat

How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat

 I read Dominic Sandbrook’s wide-ranging political, social and cultural history, White Heat, partly to gain a sense of how the ‘British Poetry Revival’ as I understood it, had fared in the larger historical narrative, that is, beyond the specialist use of the term in specialist literary studies, as in Mottram, Juha Virtanen and myself. (There’s also a PhD in Russian on the topic if you Google hard enough.) The years Sandbrook focusses upon are 1964-70, the ‘swinging sixties’ that he proves were not at all swinging outside of a certain elite class. Might there be something there, perhaps about the June 1965 Albert Hall reading, which is a central event in the polemics and studies of Michael Horovitz, Jeff Nuttall, Barry Miles, Juha Virtanen, and – to a certain extent – in my own accounts? (See links below!) I was not looking for, didn’t expect to find, and indeed didn’t find, references to the little press world of the period, whose jaunty bibliographies offer specialist indeed speciality delights to scholars of the period. For example, the Blackburn magazine Poetmeat that included an editorial using the term ‘the British Poetry Revival’ for the first time. Sandbrook doesn’t use this term. Do any non-literary historians?

In Sandbrook’s chapter ‘Playpower’, taking its title from Richard Neville’s book, which gets a hard kicking, partly about the Oz trial, we find a lively, if ultimately dispiriting account of a supposed ‘counterculture’, which I won’t analyse in detail, since I want to pull out a few passages that deal directly with poetry and its world. The origins of this counterculture are partly literary: ‘The roots of this ‘alternative society’ went back to … students in the 1950s … [who were] keen on American beat writing and the French existentialists… they were attracted to jazz, impenetrable poetry, coffee bars, duffel coats, art-house films and CND marches’. (Sandbrook 522: 523) This accords with Lee Harwood’s account of Sam Wedges coffee bar in Soho rather well, in his piece on meeting Tristan Tzara. Note how the other items in Sandbrook’s inventory escape adjectival denunciation. The poetry is ‘impenetrable’. (Which is just what attracted Harwood when Roger Jones declaimed lines by Tzara in the jazzy coffee bar! ‘I’d never heard a poem like this before, never heard language used this freely, such leaps in what seemed a torrent of words and images. I'd never heard a poem that had this immediate force.’ 

We are reminded, as we draw nearer to the counterculture’s exemplary ‘particular moment: the International Festival of Poetry, held at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965’, that ‘the great majority of British teenagers… far more interested in … pop music, football and Jean Shrimpton than in jazz, poetry and Jean-Paul Sartre.’ (Sandbrook 523). Nevertheless, the audience was 7,000 strong for the reading. Often taken as a central event, Sandbrook says, it is over-rated. After all, you get more at a football match (which seems to me beside the point). ‘The whole thing,’ we are told, was ‘badly organised’ (true, by most accounts!); ‘there was a general air of drunkenness and anarchy (which I’m tempted to say, sounds quite genial, if I think of Bob Cobbing’s writers forum afternoons in the 1990s!’ But the man who wrote the sixties down as it happened, Barry Miles, gets the last word on the evening in Sandbrook’s account: ‘awful bullshit and made the whole thing so boring’. It was a ‘dreadful reading… one of the worst poetry readings ever.’ (524). (Compare with Virtanen’s account, which I review on the link below). Note that Barry Miles is described as ‘a stalwart champion of avant-garde poetry’. (524). I can’t help but feel that ‘avant-garde’ functions with almost the same inherence of dismissal as ‘impenetrable’ earlier. (Sandbrook is happy to quote Larkin as the summarising poetic voice of the age.)

            He is similarly dismissive of ‘happenings’. In Liverpool we like to think Adrian Henri, (a figure that, in the pubs I frequent, is referred to most nights), is the man who invented the happening as a performative extension of poetry (and art). After an account of Indica Bookshop, International Times and Oz, Sandbrook returns to the theme of the essential alienation of the working class from the aesthetic side of the British Poetry Revival:

 

It often seems that the somewhat bizarre style of the movement could have been deliberately designed to alienate working class opinion. In 1965, for example, the Cavern Club hosted a ‘multi-media anti-nuclear extravaganza’ devised by the local poet Adrian Henri. At the end of a four-minute count down the lights went out and a false ceiling made of paper came down on people’s heads, to the most deafening noise we could devise,’ he explained. ‘The cloakroom girls screamed and hid under the counter. In the darkness and confusion, strange mutant figures moved.’ This was all very well, but it was unlikely to convince most ordinary Liverpudlians that they ought to devote their weekends to marching against the bomb. (533-4)

 

      And so on and so forth. (Looking at an adjective again: how does the word ‘local’ operate with ‘poet’? I’ve always thought it a put-down.) He curiously misses the point in ways like this. He is right, in that, although he idolises the Beatles and the Stones, he acknowledges that the most popular record of the 1960s was The Sound of Music. His source for this re-evaluation is Dave Harker’s essay in eds. John Seed and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Cultural Revolution, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, in which I also had an article on ‘The British Poetry Revival’ that might usefully have fed into his account of ‘impenetrable’ ‘avant-garde’ poetry. His accounts of value (in his otherwise wonderful insightful book!) depend on popularity. (So jazz isn’t accounted for at all, even though this period is recognised as a ‘golden age’ in recent jazz criticism: a clear analogy with the ‘alternative’ poetry of the period.) Henri wasn’t trying ‘to convince most ordinary Liverpudlians’ about the bomb! The artist can only affect those that receive the art (like Harwood in Sam Widges!). Also hasn’t Sandbrook picked the wrong target? Isn’t Henri part of a genuinely popular poetry from the 1960s (onwards)? (See Andrew Taylor's book on Adrian Henri.)

            Jeff Nuttall is an important figure, but is not without his foibles and failings. (He is also remembered around the pubs of Liverpool, from his time as Head of Art here.) Bomb Culture is a useful source book on the era, but there is a lot of polemic. It was written in the moment (in contrast to Barry Miles who wrote after the events, though from having been inside the sixties, to borrow one of his book titles) and it does contain some perishable rhetoric of the time. Sandbrook focusses in on this! While Nuttall argues, ‘young people under various pretexts made war on their elders… the war continues’, Sandbrook argues, in a move that should be familiar now: ‘But this was nonsense. The vast majority of young people did not make war on anybody’. (543) They watched the telly that he prefers to analyse. However, what about that minority, those not ‘average citizen[s]’? (544) They must include the poets of the British Poetry Revival, surely? I agree ‘the spread of an ego-dissolving delirium’ and a ‘sense of health and beauty pertaining to the genitals and the arsehole’ may not be for everyone. (544).

            In Sandbrook’s words, this alternative societal thinking, was irrelevant: ‘playtime was over’. (544)

            Perhaps I could simply add ‘Poetry time has begun!’ if that didn’t afford too much valency to Sandbrook’s views!

 

23^rd August 2025

 

Other posts: An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival begin here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two. This feeds off my book The Poetry of Saying which in turn fed off my PhD.

 

I revisited the subject to write ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960-1978’, in Görtschacher and Malcolm, eds. A Companion to British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, Hoboken and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2021: 235-243, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78

 

And reflect on it here: Pages: My two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and Malcolm

 

I began to review Juha Virtanen’s book Pages: Thoughts on Collaboration 13 or: review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect.

 

   This is turning into a strand of new posts, so this will become the hub post:

PART TWO : Pages: More on the British Poetry Revival, Royston Ellis, and news of a forthcoming book

PART THREE: Pages: British Poetry Revival/New British Poetry: David Plante on Nikos Stangos' editing

Thoughts on Collaboration 13 or: review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect.

Note: All posts in the Collaboration strand may be accessed via links on the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Introduction

As part of my research for the essay on ‘collaboration’ (which I have been writing slowly, via the method of accreting posts on the subject, the same method I used to amass much, but not all, of The Meaning of Form, and which I realise now is less ergonomic than it was in the case of the book, see here: https:/rt-sheppard-meaning-of-form-in_19.html/robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/09/robe) I read the volume which is the subject of the following review. I’d seen the author read from it in Amsterdam in 2011 and thought it an excellent project. (See here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/05/amsterdam.html.) I hadn’t intended to review it, but an editor of a reputable journal of innovative poetry (whose blushes I will spare) suggested that I review it for that journal. I leapt forth – the lockdown was in its first grip of terror and it seemed a valid distraction from the rising death toll – and began reviewing the book, working chapter by chapter. The editor then emailed to tell me not to bother reviewing the book because it had already been reviewed! My brakes screeched – like the those of ambulances outside houses in the surrounding streets: this piece was written in the back yard, listening to those vehicles’ sirens – and I stopped. I did enquire of another journal if they were interested, but I heard nothing back. That journal is in a country with a government more stupid than ours in its response to the Coronavirus, so I’m not surprised I didn’t hear back. The irony of my preoccupation with collaboration and performance during the solitary lockdown period was not lost on me.

What I offer here is three quarters of that review (which I think is pretty good) and I hope Juha will appreciate it. The book isn’t about collaboration but anybody following this strand will have seen that I quote from it a couple of times, and it is worth emphasising that there is a collaborative aspect to all four of the performances treated. It is an important book. You will see that it literally ends at a point where I make a transition to the final work to be considered. I will let you read it so far as it goes, after which I shall comment on the projected missing paragraphs and present some loose writings I had prepared for the conclusion.  

(For more on ‘The British Poetry Revival’, see 1. The British Poetry Revival and here).

Events and Effects

Review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

It is customary, in discussions of innovative poetry, to make reference to poetry readings and performances as modes of ‘publication’ (if we take that term literally, as in: to make public). It is commonly agreed that the poetry reading is one of the sustaining provisional institutions of the innovative poetry world. Too many accounts of contemporary poetry turn swiftly from the phenomenon to the solidity (and safety) of the fixed printed version of the text in order to evidence substantive points about it. Its performance, or performances, seem too complex to chart, and are more easily thought of as one of the contexts of the text’s existence or transmission. To my mind, too many readings are mere book launches, so that the oral performance of a text becomes its own trailer rather than a (different) event in its own right, with specific and observable effects.

Juha Virtanen, in his short but incisive volume, wants to flip this around, so far as he’s able (as an non-attendee at four selected poetry performances during the years customarily assigned to the British Poetry Revival) to account for, relate the details of, and analyse the effects of, these events. (The book refers to itself as Event and Effect; a number of volumes in the excellent ‘Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics’ series, ably edited by Rachel Blau du Plessis, have reversed title and subtitle, so that Virtanen’s focussed title now appears as the subtitle, as though it were an afterthought, in favour of the much less elegant but easily e-searchable Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980, blazing with keywords. If more people find this book, and its separate chapters, which are also available electronically, via this contrivance, then I am pleased, though I am better pleased to possess the neat paperback.)

What happens if one analyses works which are postmodern to such an extent that they already ‘have the characters of an event’, as Virtanen says, quoting Lyotard? [1] At worst, one has an unstable event produced from an unstable text that amplifies those complex effects mentioned above. Such poems are already ‘event-like artworks’.[2] One has to negotiate, Virtanen says, the ‘parallels … between the analysis of “radically incomplete and unfinishable” innovative poetry’, whose poetics he outlines deftly in his introduction, ‘and seemingly “non-graspable” performance events’, which are his main concern.[3]   

This calls for a methodology, and Virtanen skips over both Deleuze (though he uses the rhizome as a useful analogy for this network of dynamic relationships) and Badiou (who has theorised eventness in detail, but who is not engaged with), to find both a model and an exemplar in the work of A.N. Whitehead, and he recalls it at strategic points in the book. Whitehead meditates upon Cleopatra’s Needle in its post-Imperial position on the Thames Embankment; he considers this undeniable object in terms of its event-like aspects: it changes as it is examined, and re-examined, temporally, spatially, psychologically, phenomenologically. The one thing it isn’t, under this fluxing scrutiny, is stable; it is inter-connected and fluid, formed, though unfinished, through intersubjective multiplicity. It is, though this term is not used, forever forming. This leads onto Virtanen’s marvellous, central observation upon which the book is constructed:

Applied to a poetry performance, this formulation suggests that the various audience responses can be understood as being simultaneously both unique to a particular member of that audience as well as connected to the event’s collective experience as a whole. On this understanding, the poetry performance is characterized by a kind of ‘cacophonous collectivity’ where the event is both singular (we all witness the same proceedings) and plural (we all form distinct responses to it) ... Both the performing poet and the audience author the event, and this intersubjective ‘authorship’ means that the narratives of such events are multiple.’[4]

It is odd that he uses the example of a single poet reading here, because he is clearly aware that the range of possible performances stretches from the monotext delivered in a monotone through to the kinds of multi-voice and multi-media performance he introduces us to by the book’s conclusion. He is probably keeping the issue simple at this stage. He promises the reader assaults upon the authority of a single poet in his model of collective authorship that fuses poet, performer and audience. His references to the extended and expanded techniques of Caroline Bergvall, Bob Cobbing and cris cheek leave us in no doubt of the applications of his arguments beyond the four previously ‘unexamined … events’ he has selected.[5] Despite this theoretical underpinning, his approach is both ‘archaeological’ and ‘archival’, and he wisely announces that his analyses will take the specificity of each event in its own, unique terms.[6] 

Virtanen has his work cut out for him choosing as his first occasion, the June 1965 Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, organised by a committee with Allen Ginsberg as the cultural centre, a mass event much mythologised by commentators, ranging from Michael Horovitz to Iain Sinclair (though with participants like Barry Miles trying to offer his best factual accounts). To call it a ‘site of manifold ambivalences’ is probably an understatement’.[7] I have never been quite sure who read (or didn’t), and when. Some named performers seem distinctly un-countercultural (as Ginsberg noted.) The short film of the evening, Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion, is necessarily highly selective as documentary evidence. Who were the seven thousand people who endured eight hours of poetry? The ‘carnivalesque performances’ may have advanced ‘a temporary sense of liberation’, and they may have been a boost for the British Poetry Revival, and it is treated as such in Horovitz’ Children of Albion anthology (1969), and even in Jeff Nuttall’s less utopian cultural history, Bomb Culture (1968), but it did not feature many of the writers we now recognise as its major poets. In this sense, the analogy that Virtanen draws with the star-studded 1955 Beat reading in Six Gallery is incomplete, although he makes much of the physical spaces of both environments, pointing out how the Albert Hall operates as a détourned post-Imperial space, and he uses both Situationism and de Certeau’s analysis of micro-political spaces deftly. Of course, Ginsberg’s presence was central to both events. Despite what he calls the ‘multifarious facets of the Incarnation’, Virtanen focuses upon Ginsberg’s performance, which, while not his best – he was drunk and parts of the crowd were hostile – he points to the effects of both ‘the presence of the author-poet as well as the cacophonous collectivity of a multiplicity’.[8]  

Ginsberg read two poems of his own, the mantric ‘The Change’ (published by Cobbing’s Writers Forum), to which a woman danced while Ginsberg chanted, but this is judged a failure, due to the poet’s aggravated mood, and ‘Who Be Kind To’, which Virtanen figures as a success. He outlines the balance between the poem’s negativity regarding the Vietnam War and the poet’s recent positive immersion in Liverpool’s sub-culture; Ginsberg ‘performs within a terrain that is organized by establishment culture, and seeks to create surprises in the cracks of its proprietary powers’.[9] If so, this seems a sombre and limited victory compared to the consciousness-raising hopes for the evening, though Virtanen then re-models the event as one in which the intersubjective attention of the audience, in dialogic co-authorship, moulded their responses, both during and beyond the evening, to the poet’s own enraged tenderness.

Virtanen is not blind to the gender imbalance at the heart of the British Poetry Revival, and at the Incarnation in particular. Things were not very different at the second Cambridge Poetry Festival of 1977, although there were fewer people in attendance, since this event catered for the more specialised audience (many of them writers) of the Cambridge nexus. Virtanen’s focus is the first public reading by the young and unknown Denise Riley, one of the few women to read, in the company of her co-author and associate, Wendy Mulford. If the poetry of the Women’s Liberation Movement may be characterised as ‘political committed poems of experience’, then Riley and Mulford’s were political committed poems of theory, which included feminist theory, but also political, post-structuralist and poetic theory (though the tenets of the last, poetics, are not discussed here).[10] Riley is also the anti-Ginsberg, not presenting herself in performance and publication (although the long interview appended to the chapters manifests Riley only to witness her testimony: ‘I was so sick with fear and horror and loathing of having to stand up and make an exhibition of myself.’)[11] Not surprisingly, her early work deconstructs gender markers, but liberation seems always freighted with inherited guilt, since those markers – particularly the ‘I’ of lyric poetry, but also the performative body – cannot be theorised away, despite the urge to do so.

The opening of the reading was an attention focussing Hwæt! With Mulford, with whom she had collaborated on a book of unassigned poems, carrying the unforgettable title Marxism for Infants (a famous sneer of Orwell’s), she chanted the overheard phrase, ‘Am I, she asked, going to make feminist scrambled eggs’, which mirrors the questioning of pronouns in the feminist statement then read, and in the subsequent poems themselves. With reference to Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, Virtanen traces this process: ‘If Riley’s poems in Marxism for Infants and elsewhere resist the lyric “I” as a singular heroic persona, her performance continues to transgress the social foundations and conventions that produce these singularizations.’[12] It is the social that is engaged with in the rest of the analysis, from the accidental intrusion of a vacuum cleaner as Riley reads a poem about women’s labour, through to the audience in discussion, rejecting Riley’s generous reading of one of Mulford’s poems. Although Virtanan is at pains to present the two readings analysed so far as equally co-authored with the audience, I find it odd that he does not contemplate the effects of this Q and A following the reading; does this academic convention diminish the power of performance? To me, it is also interesting how many of the traits of Riley’s later work were present, not just in the (freshly) published work, but in Virtanen’s rich presentation of its performance, since social performance is so often her theme: the paradoxical self-consciousness of not knowing from what particles the (female) self might be assembled.    

Paradoxically, a little-known text by a well-known figure of the British Poetry Revival, Eric Mottram (indeed, as a critic, he popularised the term, and identified the dynamics of performance at the heart of its practice) plays an important role in Virtanen’s argument. Mottram’s Pollock Record of around 1978 is a script consisting of ‘ “three big sheets with all kinds of materials on them, with black lines around them”; during the event, the three collaborators would “read one selection one after another”, and the proceedings were brought to an end when one of them “reread one of the sections” that had already been uttered.’ [13] An image of one of the pages of the more recently published text might have been useful here. Virtanen charts Mottram’s shifting beliefs about performance: he emphasised the presence of the poet but also the instability of the indeterminate script for performance (though this need not be a contradiction). The unifying principle of these ‘materials’ is American action painter Jackson Pollock, ‘a totemic figure’,^[14] we are told, to whom the script pays a kind of multi-voiced ventriloquial homage, by mustering quotations from Pollock and from other related sources, put into relation by the presence of Mottram; it ‘attempts to incorporate Pollock within a wider constellation of materials’.[15] Virtanen’s spatial metaphor is exact to the visual disposition of the text. But in tracing some personal contexts (not least of all the events at the Poetry Society in the mid-1970s) this text is a deeply personal one (with its stated commitment to experimentation).

Virtanen goes so far as to say, ‘Pollock Record is an arena where Mottram attempts to actively work with with Pollock as a mutual collaborator’.[16] The word ‘attempts’ alerts us that Pollock is not a collaborator like Mulford was for Riley, because he has no agency in the piece. However, ‘this interaction seemingly occurs via fusing the painter’s technique with the performance of the poem’, in ways consonant with Mottram’s most inspiring essay, Towards Design in Poetry (republished by Veer/Writers Forum in 2004).[17] As Mottram says, there were two live collaborators to assist in performance, Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths. The unrecorded performance was indeterminate in structure and vocally dynamic (I’m not sure this fully ‘fuses’ Pollock’s action painting technique) but it was less so in terms of duration. Mottram spoke afterwards of the expectant tension of performance but after twenty minutes, Griffiths repeated some material and the performance (according to its one rigid rule) ceased. ‘It WAS a mistake,’ Mottram insisted; ‘He wanted to keep going much longer.’ [18] I have my doubts (though I cannot prove them). Griffiths was a seasoned performer and improviser, with Bob Cobbing and others, and he would have known exactly the point to stop the performance, particularly if he felt it had yielded whatever complexity was possible and/or if the performance was beginning to lack energy. As Fisher says of Mottram (in the second of the long interviews included in this book), ‘His experimentation was kind of reserved.’ [19]

Allen Fisher, on the other hand, had no such reservations. His practice since the 1970s intersects many projects, several artforms, in publications and performances…

That’s as far as I’d got, when I opened the fated email. This is a shame because Virtanen goes on to consider Allen Fisher’s Blood Bone Brain, a multiply-conceived piece of work which has always mystified me, partly because I have in my possession (and have for about 45 years) the programme for one of the performances (which I didn't attend), which listed performers and the groups of 39 instances (photos, jars, objects, recordings, texts, etc) that comprise much of the work. I was pleased also to see that this work becomes central to some of the discussions in the new Allen Fisher Companion (mostly written before Virtanen published his study; see here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-essay-included-in-new.html). Anyone interested in Fisher’s work will find both of these books useful for recovering some of the conceptual schemes and frameworks Fisher utilises (and I know that I have paid them too little heed, preferring to concentrate on his two major textual projects, as I do in my contribution to the Companion).

I know that in my review I wasn’t going to be able to fully engage with one of Virtanen’s terms, ‘event’. I pasted in the following from an earlier post on this blog (see here and, more recently, here) that attempted to summarise Derek Attridge’s sense of the 'singularity of literature', particularly with respect to our aesthetic engagement with it as an act-event: art is both something that happens to us and something we do. It seemed that this formulation might answer the question of the participation of the audience to show what a limited (but fundamental) part its members have to play in the creation of the event as a whole. The passage is:  

In The Singularity [of Literature] he [Attridge] insists upon the fact that genuine literary engagement (that is when one is reading non-instrumentally) is both an event that occurs and an action that the reader does, that is both passive and active. ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art is, I’ve been arguing,’ Attridge argues, ‘both an act and an event: it’s something the artist does … and something that happens to the artist’. (220) Creation and reception are similar: ‘I use the term “act-event” in order to capture the strange duality of this process in which active and passive are not clearly separable – whether we’re talking about the work or the person responding to it. In this way, the work is remade each time it is read’. (247) … Reading is a ‘willed passivity’. (2)

I also seem, at some point of the drafting of this review, to have offered myself a conclusion that combined what I had read in Virtanen with the general literary focus of Attridge which I now use habitually. (I guess, it occurs to me now, that, as a critic, I am an Attridgean, should there be such a thing.)  

Conclusion: The ‘text’ of the total performance is a multi-systemic act-event that only the reader as witness can put together. Juha Virtanen’s Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect presents his ‘conception of performances as events of intersubjective authorship and cacophonous collectivity’. (p. 21) This occurs at exactly the point where the reception of the literary work as an act-event (in Derek Attridge’s terms) opens the whole thing out to a multiplicity of intersubjective assemblages, a co-creation of many minds beyond the two performers.

All posts in the collaboration strand may be accessed via links at the end of the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Only one more post to go. 

---

[1] Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 15.

[2] Virtanen, p. 15.

[3] Virtanen, p. 15.

[4] Virtanen, p. 19.

[5] Virtanen, p. 11.

[6] Virtanen, pp. 11 and 13.

[7] Virtanen p. 47.

[8] Virtanen p. 48.

[9] Virtanen, p. 45.

[10] Virtanen, p. 57.

[11] Virtanen, p. 67 and p. find later

[12] Virtanen, p. 72.

[13] Virtanen, partly quoting Mottram, p. 85. I would like to thank Adrian Clarke for forwarding me jpegs of the published version of Pollock Record.

[14] Virtanen, p. 91.

[15] Virtanen, p. 90.

[16] Virtanen, p. 93.

[17] Virtanen, p. 95.

[18] Virtanen, p. 98.

[19] Virtanen, p. 102.

Robert Sheppard: Thughts on Collaboration 1: Introduction

[Links to later posts in this 'collaboration' strand are at the bottom of this post.]

I am writing an article on the theme of ‘collaboration’ in contemporary British poetry. I see collaboration as being quite vital to many poets’ operations today. It seems like a good subject, and I could attack the issue academically quite well, I hope. However, as in most aspects I concentrate on in my criticism (ethics, history, form) they have a spin off into my creative practice, though the creative practice also has ‘themes’ that I do not investigate (ekphrasis, gender, Brexit) in my critical practice. Which I think is a good thing. Floating between the two is the discourse of poetics, of course. This is a subject about which I have written a great deal. (See my ‘Necessity of Poetics’ work HERE: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/04/robert-sheppard-necessity-of-poetics-1.html


I may well call the piece I am writing ‘From Dialogue Out: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Innovative Contemporary British Poetry’. By literary collaboration, I mean to delimit the exercise, so I will be excluding multimedia from the discussion (just as well because another contributor to the collection will be covering that area). I want to consider, as a way of easing myself into the discussion, and as a way of thinking back on what I have collaborated upon, both literary and extra-literary collaboration. There is a difference between writing words together with someone and mixing words with image, sound, movement. I think I will consider what I have attempted in the last category first, because it is vitally important to me (but less so for the work directly in hand). Some of that is ongoing; some it is historical (another distinction). Actually, some of it may concern the future. One of the possible futures for the ‘fictional poet’ project, (see weebly https://euoia.weebly.com/
) weighs heavily upon me, though that might be a case of ‘fictional’ collaboration. (Don’t worry about that, just yet.) The pause in my ‘English Strain’ project (see here https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html


or more fully, here:


https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html

), creates a vacuum into which all these ideas fall, abhorrently or otherwise.


Before I turn to those possibilities (the past neatly summarised on my website site on the page, notably called ‘Collaborations’, the plural suggesting the specificity of reference) I perhaps need to consider the term collaboration itself. https://robertsheppard.weebly.com/collaborations.html

 

Afghanistan by Thomas Ingmire (text mine)

I know one of my collaborators, Thomas Ingmire, doesn’t think that’s what we are doing, and others, of course, don’t like the term for its political implications. ‘Collaborators’ with the Nazis were served severely by the French people after the Second World War. Boris Johnson called people from other parties ‘collaborators’ if they communicated with the EU, though they legitimately should have, in my opinion. After all, ‘Here’s his better world that’s pure idea, unseen: / ‘collaborators’ distract us from its flames’, as I put it in ‘Bad Idea LVII’, written last August. Part of me argues that to say that you’ve ‘executed’ a plan doesn’t mean you support capital punishment (Brexecutions are the aim of Brexit, I’ve always said, by the way, but I’ve not used that term (yet)). But … but … the connotations do remain. But … but … we have to use a word for it. Co-created? That’s not too bad, and it’s one I’ve used.

'Tangled Scree' by Pete Clarke (runner up for Adrian Henri Prize 2013)

In 2013, to accompany the exhibition at Edge Hill of work by Pete Clarke (with many of our collaborations included) see here:  http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/04/manifest-exhibition-at-edge-hill.html

I hastily convened a free symposium on ‘Collaboration’ at which I’m sure this issue was discussed. Though what I remember is the ‘show and tell’ aspect of it: Andrew McMillan on the poets’ nude calendar, Scott Thurston and Steve Boyland demonstrating voice collaboration… It was a great success but none of it was documented on this blog. (Did somebody write a report of it for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry , of which I was an editor at that time? Yes: Tom Jenks did. But I won’t search out the report just now. I’ve also lost a book, photocopies of pages from, ‘Laird, 2000, Female Co-Authors (reference incomplete)’, which also has some theorizing of the subject. Well, I've just (4/2/20) recovered the line up for the Symposium. Here:


Literary Collaboration – a symposium hosted by the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group (English and History Department)

23rd April 2013 1pm-9pm E1 (afternoon) & Hub 2 (evening)

E1 is in the Education Block beyond the lake. Hub 2 is upstairs in the Hub.

To accompany the exhibition of image and text MANIFEST by Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard in the Edge Hill Arts Centre, Ormskirk, between April 8th – 26th

Schedule with 20 minute papers

1.30: 135: welcome

1.35-2.50: Session A: Processes, Texts and Artists (3 speakers)

Chair:

Speakers: Andrew Taylor ( Nottingham Trent/Edge Hill): ‘Two Poets, Two Artists, and a Person who Makes Things’. 
Richard Barrett (Salford) ‘processual work might always be considered collaborative’ 
Joanne Ashcroft (Edge Hill) Collaborating with Mina Loy

Break

3.00-4.00: Session B: Voice Text and Music  

Chair: Patricia Farrell
Judy Kendall (Salford) ‘The use of music and text in Seaming To's 'Songs for My Grandmother'
Andrew McMillan (JMU/Edge Hill) Collaborations with photographers: a 'third' voice emerges

4.00-5.10: Session C: Interdisciplinary Collaboration  

Chair:

Speakers: Rebecca Sharp: Synaesthetic Poetics: interdisciplinary collaboration in three works– ‘Unmapped’ (poems + paintings, with Anna King); 
‘The Ballad of Juniper Davy and Sonny Lumiere’ (poetry in performance, with Elizabeth Willow); and ‘Rules of the Moon’ (text + sound, with Philip Jeck). 
Eleanor Rees (Exeter): 'Arne's Progress', A Contemporary Broadside': collaborating with Desdemona McCannon

Including Pete Clarke (UCLAN) in the exhibition space, The Arts Centre.

5.30 break

Evening:

6.30-6.35: welcome

6.35-7.50: Session D: Image Text, the Graphic Novel, Collaborative Dramatic Writing  

Chair: Ailsa Cox

Patricia Farrell (Edge Hill) will speak on the collaborations of Clarke and Sheppard
Rodge Glass (Edge Hill) on writing a graphic novel
Kim Wiltshire (Edge Hill) Playwright collaborations in the Theatre

7.50-8.40: Session E: The Interface and Other Voices

Tom Jenks (Edge Hill) will speak on the human-machine interface

Steve Boyland and Scott Thurston (Salford) will speaking about voice-text-movement collaborations (30 mins max)

Final discussion until around 9.00

Post-Symposium Drink in Ormskirk

TEAM: Robert Sheppard - Joanne Ashcroft - Tom Jenks

I am currently reading Juha Virtanen’s Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect in which collaboration is discussed. What I am impressed with so far is his ‘conception of performances as events of intersubjective authorship and cacophonous collectivity’, (p. 21) which suggests (and I agree) that all literary events (he takes the term from Whitehead, I would go to Attridge) are kinds of collaborations.


I talk about act-events here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-and.html ) There will be more about that elsewhere. So far, I’ve only read chapter one, which is about The Royal Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation in 1965. Something I write about here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/09/robert-sheppard-return-to-british.html


This is also a hub post for the 'Thoughts on Collaboration' strand

This introductory part one, above, flags up the themes and surveys the territory, here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

In part two, I talk about ways I've collaborated across media here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on.html


Part three, is here. I talk more about literary collaboration, but I also try to account for my own transformative practices (in 'The English Strain' project) that are not collaborations, not translations, but are transpositions.

Part four, on some of my literary collaborations, is here.

Part five is about SJ Fowler's 'Enemies' collaborative project, in general, and my part in them (with videos). It may be accessed here.

(Here is an example of a collaboration between Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler. It is an hilariously funny guide to life after Brexit using the images from the 1980s 'Protect and Survive' booklet. It's less part of my 'Thoughts on Collaboration', and more of an interlude. I witnessed this performance.) 

Part six is a round up of my own literary collaborations in Twitters for a Lark; poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) here.

Part seven considers some of the ways female coauthors have operated and whether the term 'coauthors' isn't a better term to use to describe what's going on here. Here.

Part eight consists of two parts: my considerations of the past collaborations of Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey here. The second part is the linked review of their co-authored Winterreisen on Alan Baker’s excellent online journal Litter HERE (if you want to go straight to it). 

Part nine contains some thoughts on SJ Fowler’s Nemeses: Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019. HTVN Press, 2019 : here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on.html


There are also links there to the review I have written of Fowler’s book.  That may be read on Stride  HERE. 

Part 10 is an account of Fowler’s poetics of collaboration. Here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_3.html

Part 11 is an account of Fowler's collaboration with Camilla Nelson (as it reads on the page), here.

Part 12 continues to analyse Fowler's collaboration with Nelson, but it takes account of the extraordinary dynamics of its 'Enemies' performance (which was filmed), here.

Part 13 reviews most of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect. Here.

Part 14 contains links to all parts and off-shoots of this collaboration strand, in preparation for the writing of an article on that subject, here. 

SJ Folwer comments on all 14 of these posts, here: http://www.stevenjfowler.com/blog/sheppardoncollaboration