Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994

Saturday 3^rd December 1994: The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World

It’s 30 years ago today that Patricia and I (with Stephen advertised as ‘domestic ambient noise’) held The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World at our tiny house in Lessingham Ave in Tooting. We were famed for holding ridiculously large parties in this confined space (on one occasion the patio doors burst), but in 1994 we wanted to hold a lengthy poetry reading as the focus for the party. The South Bank that year were holding what they were pleased to call The Biggest Poetry Festival in the World. Unable to compete, we decided to go the other way. Stephen drew a version of the big festival image for our image. Patricia silk-screened t-shirts and this remains the only ‘record’ of the event. (See below.) Nobody was photographed; nothing was audio or video recorded. We also assembled a booklet from pages provided by (most) of the participants (cover again being Stephen’s image in black and white). Copies of that are probably floating around. (I have one at least.)

Although the centrepoint of the festival was the Cobbing-Upton performance to end it, it is worth recalling and recording all the poets who read (note the paucity of women readers, typical of the era). My diary entry reads:

 ‘

The event was a great success, I feel, too much so: I fear there have been smaller.

Reading. Part 1: Me (reading The Lores book one), Harry Gilonis, Lawrence Upton, John Seed, speedy Miles Champion, Patricia Farrell, John Cayley, A.W. Kindness.

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Johan DeWit, John Welch, Scott Thurston, Martha Kapos, Ian Robinson, Robert Vas Dias, Out to Lunch (Ben Watson).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, , Robert Hampson, Ken Edwards, Adrian Clarke, Simon Smith, Ulli Freer, and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing, with the unforgettable mid-performance (anti)dedication, ‘This is for Andrew Duncan!’ who was there. (He’d written something negative about Bob.)

Went on until [w, x, y, z, and an unknown lady] were thrown out.

A good time was had by all, or most, I hope and suspect.

’

The Upton/Cobbing piece took up the warning about ‘domestic ambient noise’ (I think Stephen did try to MC the event at one point!) as the title of their collaboration, their first for some years. They'd fallen out and I forced them to talk to one another at a Writers Forum workshop. (I sent Bob upstairs where I knew Lawrence was alone - or the other way round, I can't remember - and when we all re-ascended after a refuelling break, they were chatting away!) Nobody knew at this point that this collaborative project would extend to 300 booklets! Commonly known later as DAN, it's one of the wonders of concrete and sound poetry.

‘The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’, by the way, is slated to be the final line of my new work on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

(This is an image of two houses in Lessingham Avenue, possibly ours the one on the left.) 

Completely coincidentally the anthology Arcadian Rustbelt edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby has been published, and I will post about it when the book is on the publisher's website (Waterloo Press). (But until then check out the blog of that name on my Blogroll.) In response to my contributor's copies, I wrote to the editors something which is relevant to this post: 'I have a post coming up about the Smallest Poetry In the World (which Andrew, you attended). Such a gesture of rejection (the South Bank was holding the BIGGEST at the time) now seems of a piece with your chronology: December 3rd 1994 being pretty much the end of the 'period' of the book [1980-1994!] (Some of the contributors read.) It also coincides with my The Necessity of Poetics, which in its third part, reprints a number of hidden 'poetics pieces' (not critical texts) from the period (and a little after).' (On The Necessity see here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!)

Here are some internal links to posts that contain references to some of the participants in the Festival. Presence or absence doesn’t constitute a value judgement, simply a check on what’s posted.

Part 1: Me (reading The Lores from Twentieth Century Blues) Pages: Robert Sheppard: thirty years since Twentieth Century Blues was begun, 20 since it ended, and future plans), Harry Gilonis, Pages: Ten Years of Pages: The Best Bits Lawrence Upton, Pages: Robert Sheppard: in memoriam Lawrence Upton John Seed, Pages: Robert Sheppard: Punctum, Punctuation and the Poetics of Space in John Seed’s Objectivism, Patricia Farrell: Pages: Patricia Farrell: Links to some visual work, John Cayley (right at the end:) Pages: Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other (final installment).

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Bob Cobbing 'Archive',  Scott Thurston Pages: Scott Thurston's Inaugural Lecture: KINEPOETICS March 2024 (video + my introduction), Robert Vas Dias, Pages: Robert Sheppard: article in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (my part in its downfall).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, Pages: Remembering Gavin Selerie and his laugh, Robert Hampson, Pages: Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Robert Hampson, Adrian Clarke Pages: Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links, Ulli Freer Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Adhesive Hymns (Ulli Freer) , and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing’s Domestic Ambient Noise: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Bob Cobbing: Two Sequences.  

This post, also on John Seed, has a little about Lessingham Avenue and John’s poem written after another of our famous parties: Pages: Robert Sheppard: John Seed: England’s derelict archive circa 1990. At the end of the post.  

Robert Sheppard: in memoriam Lawrence Upton

My memoir of attendances at Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshops carries a pertinent memory of fellow attendee, Lawrence Upton, extemporising a text, while leafing at speed through a paper: ‘Lawrence Upton improvising a marvellous, irrecoverable text from that day’s newspaper photos; a sly smile of success as he sits down: June 19 1994 .’ (See section 5 of the following http://jacketmagazine.com/09/shep-cobb.html.) That’s it. It was gone forever. And that, the smile suggests, is success. Instant ekphrasis.

Now Lawrence has gone. There is some fear that his work, his archive, his place in literary and performance history, might be gone with him. Just like that, as Tommy Cooper would have said. (Lawrence would have liked that.)



There is an online petition to save his archive. There are friends. There is a posthumous ghoulish Twitter feed. (I realise I am aping Lawrence’s expository prose style, by the way.)



I am amiss, I know, at leaving it so long to respond to this bad news. I have two personal resources with which to respond, my memories and his performances and publications. As my opening gambit suggests, these overlap. But I’ll try to keep them apart.



I have many memories of Lawrence, of his general affability (who else could suggest to our son, when he was only about 14, that all the brothels of England should be regulated by an organisation called Offuck?) and of his intransigent neo-Stalinist poetry warrior positions, which he would explain in meticulous detail. I can hear him now. I’d rather mute that second side. At least I managed to get him to talk to Bob Cobbing after a 20 year hiatus, over a dispute about … what?... nobody can remember. Or was it the other way round, I can’t remember? At any rate, I told one of them to go upstairs to speak to the other in the empty workshop room. When we returned, they were chatting merrily – and began to work together again on Domestic Ambient Noise, their 300 pamphlet epic …. (See here about that.)



I helped him run Subvoicive readings in my last couple of years in London. He made all the decisions. I collected the door money.



I have a large cardboard folder bulging with Lawrence’s publications, some ephemeral beyond the usual meaning of that word, others (his Reality Street book, say) less so. There is a beautiful visual poetry volume published in Canada. (Jennifer Cobbing called it, slightly un-loyally, the best book of visual poetry ever! Lawrence told me that, with some glee – or was it pride?) There never was a selected poems, though there ought to be. Still. I always thought people never quite realised how good he was. Part of the reason is that the work is so varied: the MacDiarmid-like ‘Letters’ to various folk, weird narratives, visual texts (who else would use Marmite in a concrete poem?), conceptual pieces, posters (his ‘All England is Alarmed’ hung over our front door in Tooting). I’m NOT going to open that folder now, because it will distract me from my task, and I shall never finish.



Lawrence appeared on this blog when it was more of a blogzine. See here for two wonderful texts:  http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2005/08/lawrence-upton-two-texts.html. He came to visit us in Liverpool, but after that he spent so much time in Cornwall that our paths never crossed much. The last time may have been Jennifer Cobbing’s 90^th birthday reading. He performed a brilliant vocal piece with a violinist. I know he studied at Goldsmith and collaborated with a multitude of his equals.



Oh yes, I first met him in the mid 1970s at the Poetry Society. We had already corresponded and I'd sent poems (which he wisely never published) to his early magazine Good Elf. But it was many years until we met again and we became friends, late 1980s. ‘Good ’elf!’ seems a good way to conclude this all too brief note.     



The twitter feed is here:

https://twitter.com/LawrenceJUpton

  
A detailed website is here:

http://lawrenceupton.org/

See Robert Hampson 's obit in The Guardian here.