During the 1990s the clumsy term ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ began to be used of much of the alternative British work of the era. It encompasses a poetic of increased indeterminacy and discontinuity, the use of techniques of disruption and of creative linkage, though its differences with the creative work of the British Poetry Revival do not constitute an absolute break. However, the increased willingness of emerging poets to operate theoretically, in terms of post-structuralist and other theory, to even expound poetics more coherently, was in marked contrast to an earlier lack of such discourse. Ultimately, the definition of ‘linguistically innovative’ is not to be found in the terms of its name. If anything, it is a term to constellate overlapping practices in the British alternative poetries from the 1980s onwards, which operated under less propitious conditions than its predecessors.
‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ had humble origins in the March 1988 issue of this magazine during its first series. Using the phrase to specify work ‘for which we haven’t yet a satisfactory name’, it was the way poet and critic Gilbert Adair described the kinds of British poetry he believed had been ‘operating since 1977’ in ‘fragmentation and incoherence’. The choice of date is decisive; it marks the Arts Council's takeover of the Poetry Society and the atomizing of the community of British Poetry Revival writers. Adair, possibly looking at it with a London bias and from the perspective of one who had not been a member of the British Poetry Revival, declared that there had been a ‘public invisibility of the poetry’ and ‘ditto of a theorizing discourse’.
Adair’s identification of the post 1977 (post-Poetry Society) conditions of the poetry include ‘decreasing publishing opportunities; wide gaps in continuations of public ... discussions’, and, looking towards the Movement Orthodoxy and the broader literary world, ‘a one-way “dialogue” with oppositions that largely expunge us from more public discussion, ... movement in a less visible, less real poetic community’. This contrasts with Eric Mottram's already discussed survey ‘The British Poetry Revival 1960-1975’, which celebrates reputations, achievements and opportunities. Yet as republished in Hampson and Barry’s volume New British Poetries in 1993, it carries an appendix, dated 1978, which narrates the end of the Poetry Society adventure. (This doesn’t, of course, mean that the narrative of the Poetry Society adventure is at all over; there is a book already written on this subject, I’m reliably informed.) This was the ‘fragmented and incoherent’ backdrop to the despair of the early 1980s, one echoed by Allen Fisher's identification, in the introduction to his 1985 Necessary Business essay, of those years as ‘a period of entrenchment and awe ... speaking in a considerably small room’. Politically, a bumbling 1970s social democracy had been replaced by a right wing ideology that wanted to change human consciousness, and nearly succeeded, ‘a culture fascinated with change, ruthless curtailment of job reliabilities, share-owning, and the legitimating professionalism’, as Adair put it in language redolent of common anti-Thatcher rhetoric of the era. (I notice that in a recent interview I say that she did change consciousness; at least she changed mine.)
The gesture of the 1988 anthology The New British Poetry to separate a section of British Poetry Revival work edited by Eric Mottram, entitled ‘A Treacherous Assault on British Poetry’, from the section ‘Some Younger Poets’, simultaneously acknowledges the proximity and difference of the two strands. Yet Ken Edwards, the editor of the latter section, notes both the sense of a revolution having been lost in the late 1970s, and the sense that his poets
have the previous generation’s work to refer to: a body of specifically British but non-parochial writing that has remained, thanks to the small presses, available and alive. Many of the poets at the younger end of this selection have started by discovering the work of Prynne, Mottram, Raworth, Harwood, Cobbing or RoyFisher
before American or European works.
Cris cheek recalled these troubled years, and again, taking a specific London perspective, noted:
Rapid deterioration began. For the best part of a decade from 1980 there was only really occasional Kings’ readings (put on by Eric Mottram), the Sub Voicive series curated by Gilbert Adair, and Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshops. Allen Fisher ran workshops at Goldsmiths’ College which generated a focus and produced the Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke axis, and there were occasional programmes such as the RASP session in South London put together by Reality Studios and Spanner [the presses of Ken Edwards and Allen Fisher respectively]. But really the scene, which had been a steaming scene, went flat.
While cheek saw these years as an interregnum between the British Poetry Revival and the rise of ‘performance writing’ (to be analysed a couple of months time), I believe that these London based activities (and I was a participant, as the above suggests) were important for consolidating Linguistically Innovative Poetry, and were not as flat as cheek suggests. (And what an axis of ‘evol’ we were!) The scene was notable for including poets who had either not been bruised by the affairs of the 1970s, or who recognized that the entryism of the Poetry Society could only have ever been temporary. Cheek ignores a vigorous though admittedly smaller nexus of magazines than there had been in the 1970s; Hampson and Barry itemize the following:
Rod Mengham and John Wilkinson’s Equofinality, Tony Baker’s Figs, Martin Stannard’s joe soap’s canoe, John Welch’s The Many Review, Tony Frazer, Ian Robinson and Robert Vas Dias’s Ninth Decade, Robert Sheppard’s Pages, Ken Edwards’ Reality Studios, Paul Green’s Spectacular Diseases, and Ric Caddel’s Staple Diet.
To which may be added, for the 1990s: Drew Milne’s Parataxis, Anthony Mellors’ (and Andrew Lawson’s) Fragmente; a revitalized And, edited by Adrian Clarke and by Bob Cobbing (who had edited its first issue in 1954); Angel Exhaust (edited mainly by Andrew Duncan, but with serial co-editors including Adrian Clarke, Scott Thurston and Simon Smith, and recently revived,2005); Object Permanence, edited in Glasgow by Robin Purves and Peter Manson; Tony Frazer’s Shearsman and Ian Robinson’s Oasis, both slim regular magazines after their collaborative effort. Even slimmer but more regular (though short-lived) was Tom Raworth’s In Folio, which miniaturized the little magazine to a single folded A5 card, which was sometimes published daily! The fugitive nature of this last publication should remind us of the rebellious and contentious nature of small press publishing.
King’s Readings (based at Mottram’s college, where he became professor of American Literature) ran between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, dovetailing on alternate Tuesdays with Gilbert Adair’s and Patricia Farrell’s Sub Voicive readings which began in 1980 and continued under different convenors. Adair was a research student of Mottram’s, but Sub Voicive was developing a new set of poets. There was a tendency for the British Poetry Revival poets to read at King’s, for example: Allen Fisher, Wendy Mulford, Cobbing and the not to be forgotten late Paul Evans, all of whom were in the ‘Treacherous Assault’ section of The New British Poetry, whereas Edwards’ ‘Some Younger Poets’ – for example, Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Kelvin Corcoran, Gavin Selerie, and Edwards himself, tended to read at Sub Voicive. While both were literally ‘small rooms’, King’s Readings took place in an austere lecture theatre, whereas Sub Voicive was located in a series of hired rooms above pubs. It could be argued that the smaller audiences at Sub Voicive fostered a stronger community of writers, and newcomers were given a chance to read; often they took the opportunity to extend reading into performance. Writing in 1991, Adrian Clarke and myself stated that many Sub Voicive poets
have at one time performed their texts rather than simply read them, whether this has involved tapes, music, multiple voices, elements of drama and performance art, the creation of environments or the use of visual art.
Clare Buck describes The New British Poetry as ‘the first (anthology) to map the challenges in the 1970s and 1980s to the myth of a new postwar cultural consensus’. It was general edited by John Muckle, who himself read his fiction and poetry at Sub Voicive (Check out The Cresta Run from Galloping Dog and Cyclomotors as well as the new Shearsman book of poems). Muckle saw the opportunity to produce an anthology containing the alternative British poetries: black, feminist and two generations of experimental writers. The strict division of the work in representative sections reflected a moment when there was no crossover between poetry ‘scenes’ and no critical work to make such links.
While Mottram, as a former editor of the Poetry Review, was an obvious choice to edit a section of British Poetry Revival work, Edwards was selected because he was by the mid 1980s editing what was the most important magazine publishing Linguistically Innovative Poetry, Reality Studios. Beginning in 1978 as a few stapled sheets, distributed with another magazine, Hampson and Barry’s Alembic, it developed into a perfect bound paperback magazine with a print run of 500. The last volume appeared in 1988.
Reality Studios was important as a vehicle for poetics. The May-June 1980 issue, entitled ‘the death of a referent?’ was the first attempt to introduce the most recent American avant garde, the language poets, to a British audience. Edwards himself explained the poetry in a typically British politicized way as ‘reacting effectively to cultural/political enforcements ... by exposing the mechanisms whereby language is employed to naturalize historical determinations’. The use of the term ‘naturalization’ suggests that Edwards was attempting to rearticulate language theory using Forrest-Thomson’s British poetics, a move which predates Charles Bernstein’s own recasting of the theory by nearly a decade.
In the final issue of Reality Studios, Gilbert Adair reviews language poet Bruce Andrews’ poetry, and writes with a political edge that matches Edwards, but with an attention to Andrews’ awareness of language as an element of social control: ‘The proliferation of Andrews’ writing’ (and Adair names a group of both US and British writers who share this sense of proliferation, and it seems reasonable to assume this poetics for his own work)
is, it seems, a capitulation to the overproduction of message, commodity and rhythm in the consumerist urban environment, which nevertheless resists that by coupling quantity with the quality of each linguistic unit. It apes but contests the shit machine.
That a younger London writer was assimilating language poetry, and speaking of it in terms borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari to describe what they would call a ‘machinic’ mode of literary production, is emblematic of a dual interest around the mid 1980s in the theory of language poetry and the more radical edges of critical theory.
The British connection with language poetry seems obvious because ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ could be a synonym for this term. But Bruce Andrews, in his introduction to the anthology Floating Capital: new poets from London (1991), demands we should forget national differences and speak of ‘this more inclusive field of so-called English language writing’, which shows the ‘same barriers being dismantled’. However much this is desirable, I have always expended my critical energies (perhaps at the expense of my academic career) on the specificities of the British context. (A new book is brewing, I can feel it in my postmodern waters!)
It has become common to remark the influence of the Vietnam War on the Post-War baby boom generation of North American language poets. Questions of ‘ideology, discourse, social rules, & epistemological paradigms or opacity or “sense”’ raised by Bruce Andrews’ academic work on US foreign policy found a place in his poetics. Protest at this War had been present in British Poetry Revival work but1980s Thatcherite Britain afforded a different situation. A foreign policy dominated by a fortuitous war in the South Atlantic and by a frantic last minute cold war before the Berlin Wall fell, was combined at least with an anti-nuclear official opposition in parliament, however unelectable. Outside of parliament inspirational protest, such as the Women’s Peace Camp at the American nuclear base at Greenham Common, bred a grim optimism in direct action. To be engaged in leftist politics in Britain in the 1980s was not the act of despair it was in 1970s America. The enemy and the evil were identifiable in all their absurd manifestations, as Tom Raworth noted in the poem West Wind, which might be thought typical of the combative political work of the 1980s, with its attacks on a ‘colourless nation/sucking on grief’. Linguistic innovation still held to the utopian resistance to the reality principle.
When Adrian Clarke and I edited the anthology Floating Capital in 1991, this anger formed its political background, although the aesthetic aim was to bring ‘linguistically innovative work’ into focus, and to foreground its utopian resistance.27 Its opening section contained the work of two poets, Bob Cobbing and Allen Fisher.
We celebrated Cobbing’s ‘exemplary journey of discovery and innovation’, the inspiration of Writers Forum and New River Project publications and performances. The project met in a large railway shed, the headquarters of the London Musicians’ Collective, whose members trickled over into some of the performances: the free jazz singer Phil Minton performed with Clive Fencott, and worked with Cobbing (as did David Toop and Paul Burwell, and – later - Lol Coxhill, from the same experimental grouping). The Interface issue of Reality Studios 6 (1984) featured visual poetries and non-linear poetries, much of it showcased in performance for one or more voice at venues like the New River (and SubVoicive). This included a framed set of still images from Maggie O’ Sullivan, and pages from Gilbert Adair’s Frog Box, a work later published by Writers Forum as a box of pages, most of which combine text and design, in which ‘frog’ acts as a kind of empty sign in a process of aping and contesting the shit machine. Fencott and Steve Moore’s The Manual of the Permanent Waver, a visual performance text generated by computer program from phrases of a hairdressing manual of the 1930s, is an early example of cyberpoetics. (This is just a slice of life cut through a particular publication, of course.) One of the first poems from Allen Fisher’s Gravity project, ‘African Twist’, appeared too, parts of which Fisher read to slides of his own paintings at Sub Voicive.
‘Allen Fisher is ... prolific and extraordinary,’ Clarke and I wrote of our second chosen poet, adding that the ‘extensive project called GRAVITY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF SHAPE ... has been of some importance to a number of writers reaching maturity in the mid 80s.’ Our introduction pointed to one differentiation with British Poetry Revival work, made visible in the shift in Fisher’s poetry and poetics, from the notional poetry of place to the creative linkages of the Gravity as a Consequence of Shape project. The appearance of this project
both confirmed and accelerated a shift away from ideals prevalent in the 60s and 70s in favour of approaches that attend more closely to the paving slabs than to ‘open field’ poetics ... and the ... deadening ... obsession with ‘place’.
Clarke and I affirmed a Lyotardian postmodern poetics, with its ‘willingness to deal with the materials that are readily to hand or impose themselves in the act of writing’. Fisher’s interview-essay Necessary Business is crucial in its attempt to articulate a poetics of a new pertinence that emphasizes activating readers through habit-breaking unpredictability and plurivocal structures. It was the best example of the theorizing discourse that Adair had demanded:
Allen Fisher calls attention to art as ‘necessary business’.... Cutting across formations categorized as discrete, ‘discontinuity’ is so only if it makes other relations; or else it is mimesis of actual informational chaos.
The work of Adair and Edwards in Floating Capital may be contrasted in terms of technique. In Edwards’ texts from Drumming and Poems (1982), a collection which prefigures many of the developments of the 1980s, ‘Notation and narrative are combined with experiments with chance procedures, phrasal permutations ... sudden changes of direction ... [they] produce a ... disrupted, unsettled poetic surface’. The effects of creative linkage, achieved through collage techniques, such as cut up, are surreal.
2 pints of lager
was laughing in your sleep,
flutes of your bones
picking the ball out of the back of the net,
introduces us to the dream-world of the ‘down & out’ who addresses ‘the Daily Mail lady’ on the ‘Poster, Walworth Rd, winter ’80’ of its title: ‘In autumn you bathe in oatmeal’.
Adair is more theoretical in his text Hot Licks (1987), more likely to court informational chaos in the service of his analysis, to both ape and contest the social reality, to create discontinuity so that new connections may be made in its creative linkage. Yet what is striking is the same political anger; the reader, too, is out on the streets, courting the sinister hidden order amongst the social discontinuities:
it’s a bus queue
too drunk to form up
chamber of tongue
eyes hold from holes hold
held by a fury body-lens
militarisation of entire culture
joy of plague reasons mob interior
de-educate contain the unoccupiable for use
police the wastes
Paul Virilio waits for the night bus, it seems, as the mob internalizes its own repression, as hopelessly as the down and out peering at a society that attempts to totalize control insidiously through its billboards. These poems, in different ways, replicate the constrained paranoia of the left during the Thatcher years, as well as demonstrating the technical resources of London’s Linguistically Innovative Poetry of those years.
Page 469
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Monday, May 30, 2005
Adrian Clarke: from Muzzle
cries rise
card-backed;
imbricate cyphers
brick-boxed
properties god-sent;
electric silhouettes'
inverted framework
this zone strung out
tactics translate stars exchange
cattle trick
rimless
Christmas remix
Mistletoe
Astarte
bird-bride
brain-dead
neighbours too many
inner shrines
roister allotment double-booked pastoral
solstice
trite siren
risers heard the cry
Lexical hide her;
tail-end
alternative
mislaid
lame fingers index
descending order
*
grey bay
suffocate
light flake migrant
iron-rust frigid
surveillance twisted
change line at ice tank
nails it
easterly
subzero pre
-dawn terminal
non
-aligned smoke
-logged tableaux erupt
*
insulate Latino market range
naturalised
panoramic solar rental
kudos unreal
Capricorn
lunate plaza
knelt entering
culture specific cinema prescript
import apart
adobe dusted
torpid disadvantage
fictive version
vertex
server class
interpose
(barefoot)
congruent monochrome
long shot
exotic deferral
errata degree
globally
call it loaded
Adrian Clarke is one of the most important poets around. Most of his books have been published by Writers Forum, and he and I edited the anthology Floating Capital. See a poem of his, 'Possession: snapshots from the war on terror' on Great Works. And watch out for my Poetry of Saying which has a chapter on his work.
Clarke's response to Chris Emery's account of the state of British poetry in 2008 may be read here, and Robert Sheppard's later piece on Clarke's poetics may be accessed here. And an essay, 'Collossal Fragments' from Far Language and first published in the print version of Pages is re-published here.AND my review of his 2019 book, Austerity Measures, along with more on Clarke, may be accessed here.
Clarke's response to Chris Emery's account of the state of British poetry in 2008 may be read here, and Robert Sheppard's later piece on Clarke's poetics may be accessed here. And an essay, 'Collossal Fragments' from Far Language and first published in the print version of Pages is re-published here.AND my review of his 2019 book, Austerity Measures, along with more on Clarke, may be accessed here.
Page 468
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Marianne Morris: from Easter Poems
seven
It is a position from which to write. To right the undone. To take apart the unwritten.
WAKE THE FUCK UP
The limp prance arranged the wires,
to cross. He was then
crowned. Then he made a
crowing sound. Then, drowned. Bonus, now
super-bonus work
to be wakened, lifting from
peasantry along the open road of no
pathos; swivelling the merchant wildness with its
finger in its
tax computation. Welds flesh to kiss up to the lightness
of likeness, to up it
breeze off. I clamp between the two; spark plug, not
as good as the lights over Fallujah when they wrought
into democracy bodies
plummy as jam and the splinter vocation.
A grand welcome to
what you’ve done again, clap on you. Bitter
lamped body-parts clutching themselves, poring
the wounds bright ‘solidarity’ the demeaned ethic the
demeaned ethic. You pine and beckon for and can
only react to you. A way of articulating
a private bitterness, murky with infected
rhythms, the first the most natural is to
shot at. Love opening the spoon for her throat jammed
in. The mechanics are sultry
body parts; forgotten those
jammy fireworks, have you already. Well, love
got you bad. Throw your back up. His fissure was
limited by the account boundaries,
preventing overspill. Worse
still flirting with militia in pillboxes who hone
in on the aura we’ve lit upon, pool
out to recover the serene of green
smoke or park. Park where
no one lives. Park the medic’s toy for textures in
the things we spend on the stretch of
back she upturns. How to speak
of the urinary tract in its chord of feminine
mystique but the circus wire some
one is taking balance
sheets. They are
flattered by your switched attentions
as you sprawl into elegies of state
you can’t pin to. You can’t
make a spool
of feathers but you can make
a plastic septum. Wake the fuck up.
Crow’s beak had always been open to sex, beak beak, it was the sheer regularity of its openness that threw. We have not taken him seriously enough, have not considered possibilities they have been hidden from us. As waking from belittling dreams the veil lifts only slowly; in pieces you merge with the past and those quiet, haunting images, you remain haunted. You are the dreamer. Position: to dream. As in you are allowed and entitled fully to your role. In the call overhead, which varies not from continent one to continent two – past 2 I can not really verify, it would be on no grounds, I had not the ears to listen – the veil lifts only slowly. Don’t be quick to judge it; it has been cantankerously present in history thus far, which however you look at it can’t be gotten away from. In some way it is all that some of us have. His face, altered from the only bone – it is not only bone, but a violence in its nearness to your dreaming eye. Now jelly comes to mean more to you. It would mean more were it true, plucked and stabbed into one fat, glib mess of a former eye. But this crow is not going to say this and has never said it, nor does this crow think it. Only that blackened presence. I can see nothing but the pinprick of one black eye, which the light has caught. I believe it is moon light, because it is not bright white, and he is muted at the all. And if I wake from this, the veil is slow to lift. What must it do with death. There is in that a responsibility to uphold. To have traveled both light and heavy through scenes beyond your control, the dreamer. They are yours and beyond your control. And yet the vast chance of them is diminished by you, either in desperation for the sleep that forgets or the wakefulness that does not wait to hear them back from beyond. No, not until you are dizzy with it. Remaining pressed to that sweat. The eye is evil – another word been dragged through relentless shit, but what else is left? That history contains shit and cannot be denied. Evil it goes. Will have no other. Will be poisonous; also kept in the home. Sweet delicious rot it enjoys. By the word here I might retain for the benefit of the language an unwanted pressure, you discern this in the word, an unwanted pressure that cannot be easily got away from, except by a shutting-down of the mind to its full nature, which you may partly be capable of intuiting, depending on your love of shit; of the word. This is really all I mean; please believe me. That dark envelope has given up its option to unfold, and I find, from what I see, that I am inside, I am flat, papered in but being no more than paper unstable in the course of escaping.
WAKE THE FUCK UP TOO
I’ll swing it in from far. Textual
admissions in purple fish light.
Soft blue accordion, winter’s
shy. Today but in all the day’s
blanched to talk about you in
violence removed from the pith
of slow waltzing through traffic
to be less stunned about injustice.
Pink stickiness comes off the watch
word, someone’s been busy
paying for shit. Eloping with a big
mac into the tiny rat’s anus of
that saw-edge, loose hunger of
a full day of no exception. Bulge
and swollen mouthfuls, the metal
hallway swallows. Tiny little
skeletons of birds made of discarded
syringes. Who’s got the time.
CALCIC
If then swaying
along the passion bluntly, charge to survive the ether-swing. Its
cool title blocks the balm of slippage, on the dusky lap of mother,
who burned you in submission. That your open, to be again another,
it’s calm. It cries now for its past action only minutes prior to the
arrangement of objects at the right moment, the right place. It
can be either impulsive or measured, the two are not one right. Sickness
of injuries that the self tries to inflict. That’s a try. He has ballooned
from the back to the front. Snug under the ivory down the western
line is that which makes up the east, eventually. Get on your map and
ride. I am more like fish than you, I found
in the bath a pleasance which pleats along the stunned vibe of mentions
in the press or office, which are both the same irritated sameness they
clue up, and wanting you, to believe, in butter. Your mystery truly
is a stop-valve gapped to save fume, and your face feeds outwards into
angry cement. The cold balms its right to stiffen and go on. The language
plays itself into strings, over the absence of something to record it with.
The ellipses are stunning in their drive to repeat. Nothing counts. I still
try with numbers. The home is weekly infested with t he slat of appointment
allocated allotment slotted in, large pinned through the body of you where
soft you are rekindled into youth, pleasure and promise. Though that
wasn’t so, or just.
You eloped in
a hurry is the fashion. Mudded through her fact of not minding about
the scabs, or the drive past the reticence that keeps us there, on that
button. Pride in that let-gap, falling right and tidy away the mention,
earlier. Still there on that button, the glass zipped in to make eyes, still
visions of impressions of connections that need making, as much as
wine. It’s water you need up faster and lucid. Brine enough for two be
that sullen and snowed under when he hots up the way with thick morals,
hot burns your throat from the outside, threaded in black sticks
of loose wire your own skin to fry up. After all, there’s nothing better
to do than be studded all over
with your own remaining tissue, hardening against the fact of your
fixation. There is a better world, over there, on the slab rolled up into
metallics for you, polish me properly with the this way the that way and
slackening grasp against wind into violence, brewing against me and
through the covering. Jobs up her losses into banknotes for handingthe fuck over. Have prepared the following speech:
EVENING PARALYSIS
Blubberous attitude of the wrist in stops
stops to pause. Merges blondely
with cartels. Elopes perfectly. The
ruse is randy. Fuse looms. Pittance in
flesh envelope. Now bend to dis
cover. Mural of paint wash
mural to up. Mush up. Trash
nuance of noise on the off. Plush
tarmac to meet you in the face,
bicycle. And circular sectors of
ring. Say bone there. Trot up.
The beautiful illumination of
aluminium, luminous. Breaks for a
record. Nice pustule of wicker, long.
Get objects on inwards. With the
utmost of pleasure yrs sincerely.
Marianne Morris’ work includes Fetish Poems (Bad Press (?), 2005 (?)), Cocteau Turquoise Turning (Bad Press, 2004, 2005), Gathered Tongue (Bad Press, 2004). Other work may be may be found on her friend’s journal, Firefly. Her own website should also be consulted.
I first noticed her critical work, and excellent account of Barry MacSweeney in
Quid.
Page 467
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Robert Sheppard: Looking Back at Place and Open Field Poetics
Looking back at Allen Fisher’s Place, now published in full by Reality Street (and my copy received today, as I’m extracting these notes) it exemplifies, formally speaking, a method of connecting and juxtaposing materials that almost became a privileged style of the British Poetry Revival of the 1970s: the field of patterned energies, with nodes, or notes, of facts disposed upon the page in a primarily spatial disposition (the resultant white space being often performed as silence), a mode loosely derived from the work of Charles Olson, and from a face-value reading of his poetics essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), as well as nodding towards the ideogrammic method of juxtaposition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. As I’ve partly outlined in ‘A History of the Other: Part four, Page 465, Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and Lee Harwood’s The Long Black Veil (1970-2) – which both have the added heteroglossic dimension of prose discourses - Barry MacSweeney’s more or less suppressed volume Black Torch (1977), or Eric Mottram’s Elegies (1981) are typical of this. The Olsonian proselytising of Mottram himself, a crucially important figure for Fisher in many ways is essential here. Mottram’s densely allusive exposition, ‘Open Field Poetry’, published in the magazine Poetry Information, probably influenced many writers to adopt this style, approach, or assimilative improvisational activity - ‘the poem could now use whatever material in whatever form that comes into the process of composition’ - but also to follow Olson, in exploring the petites histories of geography (as Fisher did). (Mottram 1977a, p. 6) For example, Mottram’s keynote paper for the Polytechnic of Central London conference, ‘Inheritance Landscape Location: Data for British Poetry 1977’ was premised upon the primacy of the otherwise obvious statement that ‘a poet works at the intersection of his time and his place’, and a plethora of British Poetry Revival poets are read in this light. (Mottram 1977b, p. 85) The dominance of a poetic mode placing itself at the centre of a supposed Pound-Olson tradition, and the privileging of the investigation of ‘place’, led Adrian Clarke and I, writing in 1991, to question ‘a concern with alternative “traditions” and “bodies of knowledge” – the most deadening being a 70s obsession with “place”’. (Clarke and Sheppard, 1991, p. 122; I confess to being the reckless author of that last phrase.) The oracular dramatic monologues of Unpolished Mirrors, which were published monthly as a serial from Spanner, (they were fun to receive through the post) suggest that Fisher, too, was trying to find a new way to articulate his interest in the matter of London in this last part of Place, separate from the presentation of factual quotations and lyrical caveats in paratactic utterances on the spatialised page. When one of his characters, Christopher Wren, remarks, ‘I have been the historian too long/immersed in wreckage hurled at my feet’, he might also be speaking for Fisher. (Fisher 1985c, p. 57)
The final Spanner instalment of Unpolished Mirrors, serial H, not collected in the 1985 Reality Studios volume of the same title, nor in the splendid new collected from Reality Street, presents a number of ‘map(s) of approaches’ to the Place project, along with a prospective diagram of it, dated 1971 and clearly indicating 1980 as the year of its abandonment/completion. (Fisher 1981, pp. 92-4; 99-101) The proffered reading strategies demonstrate that the role of the reader, facing the resistance and interference of various ‘cut-ins’, and of a variety of ‘mirroring’ texts that demand to be read against one another, favours a non-linear passage through the one hundred page parts of the project’s five main books. (Only one ‘approach’ is ‘considered void’: a chronological reading of these published books. (Fisher 1981, p. 99)) This global structural complexity does much to offset the accusations of inertness and spatial flatness in Place at a localized reading level; we are being instructed not to dwell on any single part. Fisher’s contention that in the act of reading any passage one is positioned as ‘the loci of a point on a moving sphere’ with relation to the entire project, is found handwritten onto the 1971 diagram. (Fisher 1981, p. 101) This is almost an affirmative answer to the self-doubt he reveals in ‘a map of approaches: six’: ‘readers have asked … whether an arbitrary page selection would offer sufficient readability’. (Fisher 1981, p. 100) Readers need to navigate and keep moving across the territory of the text, armed with these ‘maps’, wherever they begin. The problem for the reader is that the extrinsic motivators to move through the text are not matched well by intrinsic motivators to move across the page. The eye is in danger of slipping from word cluster to word cluster. If the page is spatialised, and particularly if grammar is relaxed too much, it arguably lessens the temporal aspects of syntactic or rhythmic flow in favour of white space silences. Derek Attridge writes that the ‘distinctiveness of poetry’ demands that ‘the verbal singularity that is performed by the reader includes a sense of its real-time unfolding’. (Attridge 2004, p. 71)
However, the real problem with open field poetics was not rhythmic, since there exist vital non-linear and visual poetries, but the paucity of content, as poems trail off into ‘notes’, or exist in a field clogged with factual data. Fisher often avoids both. Indeed, the most generous way to conceive of the Place work, and one which introduces a readerly dimension into the process (a dimension that will prove crucial to Gravity as a Consequence of Shape) is to follow Peter Barry and rationalise Place as a ‘content-specific’ work. He argues, with some conviction, that readers
"need to reactivate a body of reading in order to enter the poem. It is important to realise, though, that doing this isn’t just a preliminary to the reading of the poem: a reciprocal process takes place in which we read the sources in the light of the poem and the poem in the light of the sources…. So the text is … readerly in two senses: firstly, it is about reading, and secondly, it demands the reader’s sustained participatory engagement with its materials as well as with ‘the words on the page’. The kind of reading required is thus an active … process like study. "(Barry, 1993, pp. 199-200)
This reminds us that Place was itself a conceptual response to readings about place, rather than of improvised field-notes or site-specific spontaneous jottings, but some of the most effective passages of the project are where the past and present are juxtaposed, as in the amusing and instructive contrast of ‘1583 When we went our perambulation at Vicar’s Oke in Rogation Week £0.2.6d’ with: ‘1973 Bus fare back from search for Vicar’s Oak £0.60p’. (Fisher 1976, n.p.) Developed in the poetry, fiction, and later documentary, of Fisher’s acknowledged contemporary, Iain Sinclair, and filtered through the novels of Peter Ackroyd, narrative modes of this ironic temporal juxtaposition would define a literary sub-genre in the 1980s and 90s. Where Fisher is at his most original is where he intuits the psychosomatic condition of the present city-dweller in terms of pollution and influences that are geographical, historical, economic and political. Even though Alfred Watkins, the ‘discoverer’ of ley lines is listed in the resources to the 1976 Place, there are no Sinclair-like forces at play, no malign lines of influence between (arbitrarily selected) sites. Fisher prefers to divine, the lost (but real) rivers of London, vanished tributaries that he uses both as ‘a metaphor for thought’ and as the presentation of the physical causes of present-day impediment and ill-health. (Barry, 1993, p. 201) One page reads entire (though I cannot, it seems, reproduce the disposition of the words upon the page) :
our health is failing
already the potions of Epsom & sea salts
at Balham Hill and Brixton Causeway wells
through a bed of oysters
is stagnant
feeding our bodies with the stench of its yawn
from the beds of sexless oysters
our fingers retract
smelling of cigar smoke (Fisher 1976, n.p.)
The sudden lyrical outburst about the ‘yawn’ of fatigue gripping ‘us’ – the text is emphatically civic in its concerns – and the image of both polluted fingers and contaminated oyster beds (sexless beds suggest an associated human infertility) are neatly poised against a history of Epsom’s famously restorative salts, yet it does not require contextualising ‘information’ as recommended by Mottram and partly validated by Barry, although it may be possible to read afresh the ‘sources’ in the light of the poem. And now, thanks to Reality Street, we can all re-read the entire project, and read every part in the light of its mirroring, shading, others. There will be some who will say how sad it is to see the whole, what a loss there is in not being able to experience the irregular formats and printing methods of the original volumes. I have testified to the fun of receiving the monthly serials of Unpolished Mirrors. But there is something confirmatory about the bulk of this book that, now I’ve received it, sends me back to re-consider those open field days about which I remain ambivalent, and to let Allen Fisher’s work (along with Harwood’s The Long Black Veil) stand out as the best.
But did I tell you what it was like to hear Fisher read from Gravity as a Consequence of Shape for the first time? No? Stay tuned. (Or check out Page 450: Robert Sheppard: New Memories: Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, archived under February 2005.)
Page 466
The final Spanner instalment of Unpolished Mirrors, serial H, not collected in the 1985 Reality Studios volume of the same title, nor in the splendid new collected from Reality Street, presents a number of ‘map(s) of approaches’ to the Place project, along with a prospective diagram of it, dated 1971 and clearly indicating 1980 as the year of its abandonment/completion. (Fisher 1981, pp. 92-4; 99-101) The proffered reading strategies demonstrate that the role of the reader, facing the resistance and interference of various ‘cut-ins’, and of a variety of ‘mirroring’ texts that demand to be read against one another, favours a non-linear passage through the one hundred page parts of the project’s five main books. (Only one ‘approach’ is ‘considered void’: a chronological reading of these published books. (Fisher 1981, p. 99)) This global structural complexity does much to offset the accusations of inertness and spatial flatness in Place at a localized reading level; we are being instructed not to dwell on any single part. Fisher’s contention that in the act of reading any passage one is positioned as ‘the loci of a point on a moving sphere’ with relation to the entire project, is found handwritten onto the 1971 diagram. (Fisher 1981, p. 101) This is almost an affirmative answer to the self-doubt he reveals in ‘a map of approaches: six’: ‘readers have asked … whether an arbitrary page selection would offer sufficient readability’. (Fisher 1981, p. 100) Readers need to navigate and keep moving across the territory of the text, armed with these ‘maps’, wherever they begin. The problem for the reader is that the extrinsic motivators to move through the text are not matched well by intrinsic motivators to move across the page. The eye is in danger of slipping from word cluster to word cluster. If the page is spatialised, and particularly if grammar is relaxed too much, it arguably lessens the temporal aspects of syntactic or rhythmic flow in favour of white space silences. Derek Attridge writes that the ‘distinctiveness of poetry’ demands that ‘the verbal singularity that is performed by the reader includes a sense of its real-time unfolding’. (Attridge 2004, p. 71)
However, the real problem with open field poetics was not rhythmic, since there exist vital non-linear and visual poetries, but the paucity of content, as poems trail off into ‘notes’, or exist in a field clogged with factual data. Fisher often avoids both. Indeed, the most generous way to conceive of the Place work, and one which introduces a readerly dimension into the process (a dimension that will prove crucial to Gravity as a Consequence of Shape) is to follow Peter Barry and rationalise Place as a ‘content-specific’ work. He argues, with some conviction, that readers
"need to reactivate a body of reading in order to enter the poem. It is important to realise, though, that doing this isn’t just a preliminary to the reading of the poem: a reciprocal process takes place in which we read the sources in the light of the poem and the poem in the light of the sources…. So the text is … readerly in two senses: firstly, it is about reading, and secondly, it demands the reader’s sustained participatory engagement with its materials as well as with ‘the words on the page’. The kind of reading required is thus an active … process like study. "(Barry, 1993, pp. 199-200)
This reminds us that Place was itself a conceptual response to readings about place, rather than of improvised field-notes or site-specific spontaneous jottings, but some of the most effective passages of the project are where the past and present are juxtaposed, as in the amusing and instructive contrast of ‘1583 When we went our perambulation at Vicar’s Oke in Rogation Week £0.2.6d’ with: ‘1973 Bus fare back from search for Vicar’s Oak £0.60p’. (Fisher 1976, n.p.) Developed in the poetry, fiction, and later documentary, of Fisher’s acknowledged contemporary, Iain Sinclair, and filtered through the novels of Peter Ackroyd, narrative modes of this ironic temporal juxtaposition would define a literary sub-genre in the 1980s and 90s. Where Fisher is at his most original is where he intuits the psychosomatic condition of the present city-dweller in terms of pollution and influences that are geographical, historical, economic and political. Even though Alfred Watkins, the ‘discoverer’ of ley lines is listed in the resources to the 1976 Place, there are no Sinclair-like forces at play, no malign lines of influence between (arbitrarily selected) sites. Fisher prefers to divine, the lost (but real) rivers of London, vanished tributaries that he uses both as ‘a metaphor for thought’ and as the presentation of the physical causes of present-day impediment and ill-health. (Barry, 1993, p. 201) One page reads entire (though I cannot, it seems, reproduce the disposition of the words upon the page) :
our health is failing
already the potions of Epsom & sea salts
at Balham Hill and Brixton Causeway wells
through a bed of oysters
is stagnant
feeding our bodies with the stench of its yawn
from the beds of sexless oysters
our fingers retract
smelling of cigar smoke (Fisher 1976, n.p.)
The sudden lyrical outburst about the ‘yawn’ of fatigue gripping ‘us’ – the text is emphatically civic in its concerns – and the image of both polluted fingers and contaminated oyster beds (sexless beds suggest an associated human infertility) are neatly poised against a history of Epsom’s famously restorative salts, yet it does not require contextualising ‘information’ as recommended by Mottram and partly validated by Barry, although it may be possible to read afresh the ‘sources’ in the light of the poem. And now, thanks to Reality Street, we can all re-read the entire project, and read every part in the light of its mirroring, shading, others. There will be some who will say how sad it is to see the whole, what a loss there is in not being able to experience the irregular formats and printing methods of the original volumes. I have testified to the fun of receiving the monthly serials of Unpolished Mirrors. But there is something confirmatory about the bulk of this book that, now I’ve received it, sends me back to re-consider those open field days about which I remain ambivalent, and to let Allen Fisher’s work (along with Harwood’s The Long Black Veil) stand out as the best.
But did I tell you what it was like to hear Fisher read from Gravity as a Consequence of Shape for the first time? No? Stay tuned. (Or check out Page 450: Robert Sheppard: New Memories: Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, archived under February 2005.)
Page 466
Friday, May 13, 2005
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other, Part four
The 1970s (Continued): Poetry of Place/Poetry of Autonomy
Charles Olson provided a theory and practice that was influential upon a wide range of British Poetry Revival poets. His theories of projective verse emphasized a kinetics and improvisatory way of writing that appealed to Tom Raworth and others. Treating the page as a compositional open field has been widely practised. However, writers as different as JH Prynne, Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair seemed drawn to Olson’s Maximus Poems for the way they articulate rich information and documentary sources concerning geography and history. The poem is focused upon Gloucester, Massachusetts, a site important in early North American settlement history, but which, by the 1940s, was a run-down fishing port. Olson took the pre-Socratic Heraclitus’ maxim, ‘Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar’ as axiomatic and named Whitehead's process philosophy as his guide.
Such work appealed to poets during the withdrawal from the oppositional politics of the 1960s, in that it could be used as a model for a re-articulation of Britain from less immediately political perspectives. The poetry of place, after the particularities of Roy Fisher’s City and Harwood’s ‘Cable St’, seemed to offer a local univeralism. Olson’s fellow Black Mountain poet, Edward Dorn, resident in England, advised young British poets in ‘Oxford’ in The North Atlantic Turbine, published by Fulcrum in 1967, to define themselves against geographical structures ‘naming themselves and the rocks’ as a way both larger and intimate than concerns with nationality, and this was taken up by JH Prynne in The White Stones, published by Cape Goliard in 1969, in various attempts to avoid humanistic and accepted socio-historical representations of Britain. In ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’, he uses a variety of cited geological and archeological sources to ask, to open, the question whether the Pleistocene Epoch is over. On such an enormous timescale, Prynne works through his persistent verbs of knowing and being, to hyphocize about the effect of the Epoch’s process upon ‘us’, how ‘we’ are its sentient residues:
We know where the north
is, the ice is an evening whiteness.
We know this, we are what it leaves:
the Pleistocene is our current sense, and
what in sentiment we are, we
are, the coast, a line or sequence, the
cut back down, to the shore.
Allen Fisher’s Place, a project undertaken between 1971 and 1979, was published in four volumes of approximately 100 pages each. (As I post, the re-publication of the entire project by Reality Street arrived this morning! I’ve recently written a piece of fiction in which I receive a copy through a space-time wormhole, but in reality I’d not seen it. I have now. It’s a substantial, proud, book. I will also review it separately, though the paragraphs following also may be also thought of as one. {See also Page 450: Robert Sheppard: New Memories: Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape and Page 449: Allen Fisher: Mezz Merround, both archived in February 2005}.) They are the Olsonesque and notational Place (1974), the more polemical and analytical Stane (1977), the lyrical Becoming (1978) and Unpolished Mirrors, a series of Blakean monologues, published in 1985. (They are all in the new book.) Early on in Place, Fisher identifies with, and dissociates himself from, Olson’s persona: ‘I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth’. Fisher’s commitment to procedure and system distinguishes his work from Olson’s theory of kinetic process, and draws him nearer to the chance procedures of Jackson MacLow, although the writing in Place often shares Olson’s notational urgency and his use of juxtaposition. The project’s central concern is Fisher’s own reading about, experience of, locality and history, particularly focusing upon London. Its considerable resources – it has been called a ‘content-specific’ work by Peter Barry – are not offered as evidence of a single argument, a thesis on place, but are parts of the work’s ‘shading’, Fisher’s term to describe correspondences and contradictions that can be traced between the intricately numbered sections of its open system. The work constitutes not a totality but an expansive presentation of various meanings and perspectives.
Fisher acknowledges the influence of Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life upon his thinking, and of the Situationists, who were influential both upon the underground movements of 1968 and, more lastingly, upon the European avant-garde. They suggested a politics or a re-location of politics, within everyday experience, one again suited to a post 1968 failure. The Situationists engaged in work ‘where the exploration of the city reveals the psycho-geography created by the physical and mental conditions of twentieth-century society’.
In ‘Place 48’, from Stane, Fisher goes further than the Situationists and presents interconnected instances of cosmic, ecological, biological and political forces to acknowledge the complexity of ‘everyday life’. It shares an impulse, in its borrowings from Olson and Whitehead, but not a language, with Crozier’s The Veil Poem. Fisher’s language is more akin to Bill Griffiths’, in that its linguistic re-orderings of experience work through juxtaposition and collage: ‘The fly on its food route’, for example, displays its ‘thrust & parry of energy’ while the self intervenes in the food chain, by small-scale gestures, suitably notated in an utterance as incomplete as the apprehension of this process.
I break the web silks
the fly escapes
lands on food in kitchen
its legs coated with
Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) is another book which charts a palimpsest London, one which Fisher goes so far as to acknowledge within his own project as part of its reading, in Stane, in a note entitled ‘To Iain Sinclair, on the publication of his book Lud Heat in 1975’. Fisher registers both Lud Heat’s similarities to, and differences from, Place, but points to an essential shared recognition that ‘there are subtle mechanisms at work subjugating our psyches, trying to keep ... our senses, awareness at a lower level than they need be’.
Lud Heat mixes open form poetry and tightly written prose that combines scholarly discourse with the style of the New Journalism (along with line drawings and Sinclair’s own photographs). Its initial premise is that Hawksmoor’s London churches emanate psychic energies which affect the population’s actions. (This thesis is used in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, for which he has been satirized in later books by Sinclair; the tedious evidence for this will be charted in my forthcoming monograph on Sinclair. See also page 256 (March) for my review of Sinclair’s latest.) Fisher is quick to sense the subjective element of this pattern-making: ‘Lud Heat assumed the kind of symbolic value particular architectural forms possess: what associations they are capable of evoking in individuals .... It is from these buildings that the energies of the area are – I was going to say ‘generated’’. Fisher baulks at the very term that Sinclair uses, and in which he believes, and this marks the difference between them. However sceptical Sinclair can sound – like Yeats with his strategic mysticism – one takes Sinclair’s work less than seriously if one rejects outright the structures and meanings of his pattern-making. As in Place, theory is grounded in the everyday; Sinclair charts his own life as a council grass cutter, working between the talismanic churches, in journals and poems. He also bears witness to the autopic films of Stan Brakage and the sculpture of his friend the poet (and later performance artist) Brian Catling as artists making similar patternings, and superimposing them upon his own concerns. Whereas Fisher uses theory and his reading to create a divergent, contradictory patterning of self and place, Sinclair is drawn to converging combinations of esoteric wisdom and mysticism, which makes his text more monologic than Fisher’s, and more certain of its allegiance to materials: ‘the scientific approach a bitter farce/unless it is shot through with high occulting’. The danger is that the totalizing fiction that develops will amount to a paranoiac sense of interconnectedness, something Sinclair recognizes. Although the conspiracy theory seems cosmological, Sinclair does share with Fisher an apprehension of the psychosomatic resonances of place. In Sinclair’s case, this is particular and oracular, as he presents hay-fever and sunstroke as solar viruses in prose which is as startling in its comparisons as the poetry is in its spare juxtapositions:
‘As the ego breaks I am host to another being, who pushes through and not with the pink tenderness of new skin – but with old flesh, hard as wood’.
This abandonment of the human perspective might seem open to charges of fascist mysticism, but this is refuted by noting not only that Sinclair often weaves his pattern-making into the fabric of everyday life but, like Fisher, he can recognize the darkest possible contemporary attachments to place beneath the social democratic surface:
here: Hackney South & Shoreditch where
Mr Robin May polled the National Front’s
best result 2,544 votes.119
As in Fisher , the ballot box is both dangerous and a diversion from real, complex energies.
The presence of Blake as a guiding spirit in both Fisher’s and Sinclair’s work is not just a fashionable hangover from the sixties’ children of Albion. Blake, another ‘citizen of Lambeth’, developed, in his similarly self-published ‘Prophetic Books’, a mythology to articulate his ambivalence towards an earlier radicalism, in a way not dissimilar to the 1970s withdrawal from social radicalism.
Prynne, Fisher and Sinclair were not alone in developing what has become known as a poetry of place. A whole issue of Joe Dimaggio magazine in 1975 was dedicated to the theme. The Polytechnic of Central London British Poetry Conference 1977 featured 21 poets constellated around the notions of ‘Inheritance Landscape Location’, the title of the accompanying essay by Eric Mottram, who clearly marshals theories of place as delineators of a special knowledge and perception, ‘both local and international’, operating in opposition to ‘official British culture’ which Mottram represents as having shrunk ‘in response to the pressures of British economic and political decline from the raving days of Empire and Influence’. Far from simply withdrawing from politics, after the collapse of the literary underground examined in earlier parts of this History, the poetry of place enabled poets to expand the notion of politics beyond both parliamentary and purely personal articulations of it.
*
JH Prynne’s work of the 1970s, published in eight books or pamphlets and collected in 1982 in Poems (and again in an expanded edition of 1999, and again in 2005), is a by-word for difficulty and enigma. Prynne had abandoned the Olsonian human universe for a writing that encouraged the invasion of the poetic text by non-poetic discourses – usually identifiable ones – and a textual compactness that is all the more complex for the survival of traditional lyric and rhetorical effects.
Peter Ackroyd – better known as a novelist, as I’ve mentioned, and as a biographer – published a provocative cultural history, Notes for a New Culture, in 1976. Ackroyd attempts to demonstrate that language has become the only content of literature. The resultant formal autonomy of the text, a kind of windowless monad, marks its final victory over the attempted annexations by aesthetics, the self and humanism. For Ackroyd, Prynne’s work is important both for having admitted non-poetic discourses and for having expunged the poetic voice, leaving only ‘written surface’.
Prynne uses technical discourses and changes their function by inserting them into a poem, and, as Ackroyd points out, the utterances seem coldly anonymous, rather than double. The readers are ‘not asked to participate in the lucidity and harmony of the poetry, we can only recognize its exterior signs’.
Ackroyd senses a tension between the poem as an historically determined entity and its invasion by language in its rich varieties; so that pastoral and chemistry assist the text’s linguistic complexity, amounting not to a thematic resolution but to the affirmation of its very autonomy, its ultimate non-utility.
This absolutist argument is supported by a precocious use of post-structuralist theory – applications of the work of Lacan and Derrida, for example – which is peculiarly out of step with its later uses in Britain as an element of a radical critique. Neither does autonomy operate as a critique as it does in the thinking of Adorno. He claims Prynne’s poetry in the name of an essentially conservative formulation of autonomy which sees this difficult work as a deliberate and necessary withdrawal from the ‘dispirited nation’ to which Ackroyd refers, and from the ‘call for personal “liberation” which became fashionable in the sixties’ as well as the ‘humanistic kitsch’ of its popular poetry. History and politics are thus denied a role, reduced simply to serving autonomy as pure discourses on a poem’s surface: an aestheticism without aesthetics.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice has been vital to the theoretical argument of this study; her notion of suspended naturalization, her concept of artifice, and the relation between the two, have been crucial to my thinking (in this history and elsewhere; see Page 463). However, it also possible to historicize this attempt to develop an ambitious theory of twentieth century poetry, one which would account for the poetic devices which create the autonomy that Ackroyd values. Like Ackroyd, she had absorbed French theory, yet so thoroughly that it does not surface in her text, for which the guiding spirit is William Empson. Published in 1978, her theory in Poetic Artifice was arguably influenced by, and had some influence upon, the Cambridge poets; her work is published alongside theirs in A Various Art. Her theory elevates artifice over poetry’s referential function but offers a model of reading that presents naturalization – the reading of a text as a statement about the external world – as a process that is best suspended to encourage concentration upon the poem’s artifice, which she itemizes as levels of conventional, phonological/visual, syntactic and semantic devices. Most readers of poetry ignore this exacting route, preferring to move rapidly from text to paraphrase. She is scathing of ‘the general dreariness of English verse’ in the Movement mode, which works in complicity with bad naturalization, which does not dwell upon the levels of artifice. Prynne’s work may not be read via this short cut. Its ‘tendentious obscurity’ makes this necessarily impossible; for Forrest-Thomson, Prynne’s work represents the supreme exemplar of the theory: it recaptures ‘the levels of Artifice, of restoring language to its primary beauty as craft by refusing to allow its social comprehension’.
Forrest-Thomson rejects the absolutism of Ackroyd. ‘It is only through artifice that poetry can challenge our ordinary linguistic orderings of the world, make us question the way in which we make sense of things, and induce us to consider its alternative linguistic orders as a new way of seeing the world.’ Naturalization may be suspended to enable this challenge, but eventually the poem must have sense made of it by an active reader. Good naturalization is a reading that accounts for poetic devices, that wades through the thickness of artifice until it is absorbed before extracting itself and daring to say what a poem simply ‘means’. It was a theory influential in the 1970s, but arguably of greater influence since. (See Alison Mark’s Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry for an account of her theory, her own poetry and translations and its subsequent influence.)
Page 465
Next month we reach the 1980s.
Charles Olson provided a theory and practice that was influential upon a wide range of British Poetry Revival poets. His theories of projective verse emphasized a kinetics and improvisatory way of writing that appealed to Tom Raworth and others. Treating the page as a compositional open field has been widely practised. However, writers as different as JH Prynne, Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair seemed drawn to Olson’s Maximus Poems for the way they articulate rich information and documentary sources concerning geography and history. The poem is focused upon Gloucester, Massachusetts, a site important in early North American settlement history, but which, by the 1940s, was a run-down fishing port. Olson took the pre-Socratic Heraclitus’ maxim, ‘Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar’ as axiomatic and named Whitehead's process philosophy as his guide.
Such work appealed to poets during the withdrawal from the oppositional politics of the 1960s, in that it could be used as a model for a re-articulation of Britain from less immediately political perspectives. The poetry of place, after the particularities of Roy Fisher’s City and Harwood’s ‘Cable St’, seemed to offer a local univeralism. Olson’s fellow Black Mountain poet, Edward Dorn, resident in England, advised young British poets in ‘Oxford’ in The North Atlantic Turbine, published by Fulcrum in 1967, to define themselves against geographical structures ‘naming themselves and the rocks’ as a way both larger and intimate than concerns with nationality, and this was taken up by JH Prynne in The White Stones, published by Cape Goliard in 1969, in various attempts to avoid humanistic and accepted socio-historical representations of Britain. In ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’, he uses a variety of cited geological and archeological sources to ask, to open, the question whether the Pleistocene Epoch is over. On such an enormous timescale, Prynne works through his persistent verbs of knowing and being, to hyphocize about the effect of the Epoch’s process upon ‘us’, how ‘we’ are its sentient residues:
We know where the north
is, the ice is an evening whiteness.
We know this, we are what it leaves:
the Pleistocene is our current sense, and
what in sentiment we are, we
are, the coast, a line or sequence, the
cut back down, to the shore.
Allen Fisher’s Place, a project undertaken between 1971 and 1979, was published in four volumes of approximately 100 pages each. (As I post, the re-publication of the entire project by Reality Street arrived this morning! I’ve recently written a piece of fiction in which I receive a copy through a space-time wormhole, but in reality I’d not seen it. I have now. It’s a substantial, proud, book. I will also review it separately, though the paragraphs following also may be also thought of as one. {See also Page 450: Robert Sheppard: New Memories: Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape and Page 449: Allen Fisher: Mezz Merround, both archived in February 2005}.) They are the Olsonesque and notational Place (1974), the more polemical and analytical Stane (1977), the lyrical Becoming (1978) and Unpolished Mirrors, a series of Blakean monologues, published in 1985. (They are all in the new book.) Early on in Place, Fisher identifies with, and dissociates himself from, Olson’s persona: ‘I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth’. Fisher’s commitment to procedure and system distinguishes his work from Olson’s theory of kinetic process, and draws him nearer to the chance procedures of Jackson MacLow, although the writing in Place often shares Olson’s notational urgency and his use of juxtaposition. The project’s central concern is Fisher’s own reading about, experience of, locality and history, particularly focusing upon London. Its considerable resources – it has been called a ‘content-specific’ work by Peter Barry – are not offered as evidence of a single argument, a thesis on place, but are parts of the work’s ‘shading’, Fisher’s term to describe correspondences and contradictions that can be traced between the intricately numbered sections of its open system. The work constitutes not a totality but an expansive presentation of various meanings and perspectives.
Fisher acknowledges the influence of Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life upon his thinking, and of the Situationists, who were influential both upon the underground movements of 1968 and, more lastingly, upon the European avant-garde. They suggested a politics or a re-location of politics, within everyday experience, one again suited to a post 1968 failure. The Situationists engaged in work ‘where the exploration of the city reveals the psycho-geography created by the physical and mental conditions of twentieth-century society’.
In ‘Place 48’, from Stane, Fisher goes further than the Situationists and presents interconnected instances of cosmic, ecological, biological and political forces to acknowledge the complexity of ‘everyday life’. It shares an impulse, in its borrowings from Olson and Whitehead, but not a language, with Crozier’s The Veil Poem. Fisher’s language is more akin to Bill Griffiths’, in that its linguistic re-orderings of experience work through juxtaposition and collage: ‘The fly on its food route’, for example, displays its ‘thrust & parry of energy’ while the self intervenes in the food chain, by small-scale gestures, suitably notated in an utterance as incomplete as the apprehension of this process.
I break the web silks
the fly escapes
lands on food in kitchen
its legs coated with
Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) is another book which charts a palimpsest London, one which Fisher goes so far as to acknowledge within his own project as part of its reading, in Stane, in a note entitled ‘To Iain Sinclair, on the publication of his book Lud Heat in 1975’. Fisher registers both Lud Heat’s similarities to, and differences from, Place, but points to an essential shared recognition that ‘there are subtle mechanisms at work subjugating our psyches, trying to keep ... our senses, awareness at a lower level than they need be’.
Lud Heat mixes open form poetry and tightly written prose that combines scholarly discourse with the style of the New Journalism (along with line drawings and Sinclair’s own photographs). Its initial premise is that Hawksmoor’s London churches emanate psychic energies which affect the population’s actions. (This thesis is used in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, for which he has been satirized in later books by Sinclair; the tedious evidence for this will be charted in my forthcoming monograph on Sinclair. See also page 256 (March) for my review of Sinclair’s latest.) Fisher is quick to sense the subjective element of this pattern-making: ‘Lud Heat assumed the kind of symbolic value particular architectural forms possess: what associations they are capable of evoking in individuals .... It is from these buildings that the energies of the area are – I was going to say ‘generated’’. Fisher baulks at the very term that Sinclair uses, and in which he believes, and this marks the difference between them. However sceptical Sinclair can sound – like Yeats with his strategic mysticism – one takes Sinclair’s work less than seriously if one rejects outright the structures and meanings of his pattern-making. As in Place, theory is grounded in the everyday; Sinclair charts his own life as a council grass cutter, working between the talismanic churches, in journals and poems. He also bears witness to the autopic films of Stan Brakage and the sculpture of his friend the poet (and later performance artist) Brian Catling as artists making similar patternings, and superimposing them upon his own concerns. Whereas Fisher uses theory and his reading to create a divergent, contradictory patterning of self and place, Sinclair is drawn to converging combinations of esoteric wisdom and mysticism, which makes his text more monologic than Fisher’s, and more certain of its allegiance to materials: ‘the scientific approach a bitter farce/unless it is shot through with high occulting’. The danger is that the totalizing fiction that develops will amount to a paranoiac sense of interconnectedness, something Sinclair recognizes. Although the conspiracy theory seems cosmological, Sinclair does share with Fisher an apprehension of the psychosomatic resonances of place. In Sinclair’s case, this is particular and oracular, as he presents hay-fever and sunstroke as solar viruses in prose which is as startling in its comparisons as the poetry is in its spare juxtapositions:
‘As the ego breaks I am host to another being, who pushes through and not with the pink tenderness of new skin – but with old flesh, hard as wood’.
This abandonment of the human perspective might seem open to charges of fascist mysticism, but this is refuted by noting not only that Sinclair often weaves his pattern-making into the fabric of everyday life but, like Fisher, he can recognize the darkest possible contemporary attachments to place beneath the social democratic surface:
here: Hackney South & Shoreditch where
Mr Robin May polled the National Front’s
best result 2,544 votes.119
As in Fisher , the ballot box is both dangerous and a diversion from real, complex energies.
The presence of Blake as a guiding spirit in both Fisher’s and Sinclair’s work is not just a fashionable hangover from the sixties’ children of Albion. Blake, another ‘citizen of Lambeth’, developed, in his similarly self-published ‘Prophetic Books’, a mythology to articulate his ambivalence towards an earlier radicalism, in a way not dissimilar to the 1970s withdrawal from social radicalism.
Prynne, Fisher and Sinclair were not alone in developing what has become known as a poetry of place. A whole issue of Joe Dimaggio magazine in 1975 was dedicated to the theme. The Polytechnic of Central London British Poetry Conference 1977 featured 21 poets constellated around the notions of ‘Inheritance Landscape Location’, the title of the accompanying essay by Eric Mottram, who clearly marshals theories of place as delineators of a special knowledge and perception, ‘both local and international’, operating in opposition to ‘official British culture’ which Mottram represents as having shrunk ‘in response to the pressures of British economic and political decline from the raving days of Empire and Influence’. Far from simply withdrawing from politics, after the collapse of the literary underground examined in earlier parts of this History, the poetry of place enabled poets to expand the notion of politics beyond both parliamentary and purely personal articulations of it.
*
JH Prynne’s work of the 1970s, published in eight books or pamphlets and collected in 1982 in Poems (and again in an expanded edition of 1999, and again in 2005), is a by-word for difficulty and enigma. Prynne had abandoned the Olsonian human universe for a writing that encouraged the invasion of the poetic text by non-poetic discourses – usually identifiable ones – and a textual compactness that is all the more complex for the survival of traditional lyric and rhetorical effects.
Peter Ackroyd – better known as a novelist, as I’ve mentioned, and as a biographer – published a provocative cultural history, Notes for a New Culture, in 1976. Ackroyd attempts to demonstrate that language has become the only content of literature. The resultant formal autonomy of the text, a kind of windowless monad, marks its final victory over the attempted annexations by aesthetics, the self and humanism. For Ackroyd, Prynne’s work is important both for having admitted non-poetic discourses and for having expunged the poetic voice, leaving only ‘written surface’.
Prynne uses technical discourses and changes their function by inserting them into a poem, and, as Ackroyd points out, the utterances seem coldly anonymous, rather than double. The readers are ‘not asked to participate in the lucidity and harmony of the poetry, we can only recognize its exterior signs’.
Ackroyd senses a tension between the poem as an historically determined entity and its invasion by language in its rich varieties; so that pastoral and chemistry assist the text’s linguistic complexity, amounting not to a thematic resolution but to the affirmation of its very autonomy, its ultimate non-utility.
This absolutist argument is supported by a precocious use of post-structuralist theory – applications of the work of Lacan and Derrida, for example – which is peculiarly out of step with its later uses in Britain as an element of a radical critique. Neither does autonomy operate as a critique as it does in the thinking of Adorno. He claims Prynne’s poetry in the name of an essentially conservative formulation of autonomy which sees this difficult work as a deliberate and necessary withdrawal from the ‘dispirited nation’ to which Ackroyd refers, and from the ‘call for personal “liberation” which became fashionable in the sixties’ as well as the ‘humanistic kitsch’ of its popular poetry. History and politics are thus denied a role, reduced simply to serving autonomy as pure discourses on a poem’s surface: an aestheticism without aesthetics.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice has been vital to the theoretical argument of this study; her notion of suspended naturalization, her concept of artifice, and the relation between the two, have been crucial to my thinking (in this history and elsewhere; see Page 463). However, it also possible to historicize this attempt to develop an ambitious theory of twentieth century poetry, one which would account for the poetic devices which create the autonomy that Ackroyd values. Like Ackroyd, she had absorbed French theory, yet so thoroughly that it does not surface in her text, for which the guiding spirit is William Empson. Published in 1978, her theory in Poetic Artifice was arguably influenced by, and had some influence upon, the Cambridge poets; her work is published alongside theirs in A Various Art. Her theory elevates artifice over poetry’s referential function but offers a model of reading that presents naturalization – the reading of a text as a statement about the external world – as a process that is best suspended to encourage concentration upon the poem’s artifice, which she itemizes as levels of conventional, phonological/visual, syntactic and semantic devices. Most readers of poetry ignore this exacting route, preferring to move rapidly from text to paraphrase. She is scathing of ‘the general dreariness of English verse’ in the Movement mode, which works in complicity with bad naturalization, which does not dwell upon the levels of artifice. Prynne’s work may not be read via this short cut. Its ‘tendentious obscurity’ makes this necessarily impossible; for Forrest-Thomson, Prynne’s work represents the supreme exemplar of the theory: it recaptures ‘the levels of Artifice, of restoring language to its primary beauty as craft by refusing to allow its social comprehension’.
Forrest-Thomson rejects the absolutism of Ackroyd. ‘It is only through artifice that poetry can challenge our ordinary linguistic orderings of the world, make us question the way in which we make sense of things, and induce us to consider its alternative linguistic orders as a new way of seeing the world.’ Naturalization may be suspended to enable this challenge, but eventually the poem must have sense made of it by an active reader. Good naturalization is a reading that accounts for poetic devices, that wades through the thickness of artifice until it is absorbed before extracting itself and daring to say what a poem simply ‘means’. It was a theory influential in the 1970s, but arguably of greater influence since. (See Alison Mark’s Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry for an account of her theory, her own poetry and translations and its subsequent influence.)
Page 465
Next month we reach the 1980s.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Ken Edwards: from BARDO
1 And I am very tired
The first person said: “And I am very tired. My achilles tendons can barely support me.”
The second person: “But now it’s peaceful here, as we sit in our living room, barely furnished, the sky darkening over the West Hill outside the window and the occasional scream of a seagull drifting in. This was the closest I’d felt to tears, since … when?”
And the third: “Suppose we were not really here?”
It may be that that person was not, in fact, present. How do we know these things actually happen? You wake up to the light, and the images. The light coming back off the sea, which is out of sight. There was a bit of business phoning and emailing, and racing around in blind fear stuffing last minute things into last minute containers as the men marched in rapid rotation carrying cardboard and everything became glorious. The seagulls stood regally on the roofs, and music was introduced. It says in this book that there will be a sudden understanding. A contract was concluded. The colour is white.
2 Talking to the dogs
The sea glittered. They went from Christmas to about the middle of April, trawling. You shouted at me, and I was filled with remorse for my behaviour. On the Stade then, wandering among the beached fishing boats, abandoned tackle and rusting tractors, only a short distance from the bustle of crowds on the seafront. Then you cleaned the boats out, because you had about 300 shovelfuls of ballast in them when they had no nets in – they were empty, you had to put some ballast in to trim them. The breeze was very stiff near to the waves. You took me to the clifftop, where the cloudscape was magnificent. Jackdaws strutted in the grass.
They returned via woodland path and twitten. That the transit of Venus had occurred – you took it on trust. White clouds vanishing fast, renewed breeze via the stairs, past gorse and bracken. I blew my top at the guy on the premium rate support line. The two big dogs. They didn’t seem so alienating when we got to speak to them.
3 The house
The first person and the second person lived in a house near the sea. Like a great teenager, it stood awkwardly tall between the other buildings, weatherboarding on the gable end, its late 17th century ribs fashioned from ship’s timbers.* Its glass doors were darkened, so that it was a surprise to open them and come out into brilliant sunshine that fit the space perfectly. The house was filled with flourishing things: plants on a long windowsill, with the weeping fig right by the entrance, a great, black, crooked beam crossing the space, nestling alcoves, an apple mobile and a wooden parrot hung where they got a share of the light on the landing, a winding flight covered in oatmeal, kindlier spotlights installed in troughs by the white party wall. To the left of the piano, on the wall facing the front door, two of their tall bookcases had been placed, and these were quickly stocked. Lemon trees lined the patio.
The second person: “That business about ‘your life flashing before you’. It’s about making sense of it, making a structure of it before it’s too late. But if you look at it that way, it’s always too late. Just as you realise, ‘Ah, that’s what it was …’”
The first person replied with a few impromptu words. I can’t remember what they were.
The third person smiled, but said nothing – perhaps sipping reflectively from a wineglass. Semillon Chardonnay.
* There is in fact no evidence for this.
4 The sea
At the edge, the sea’s margin; the sea, and the things and beings in it. Their type, location and quantity, which vary dramatically according to the season of the year and the weather.
The themes were sea, fishing; margins, edges, boundaries; the boundary that defines; the passage from one to the other. “But we are all dying.”
Dover sole and plaice, and other flat fish such as dabs, flounders, lemon soles, brills, turbots, cod and the various types of dogfish. All can be taken by by trawling or trammelling.
Hard to keep your footing in the wind whipping in as you watched a group of surfers nestling and waiting under the harbour arm, or was it the eastern groyne, in the huge brown, grey & white waves that rolled in relentlessly from a long way off under a brightening sky. Choosing the wave to go with. Repeatedly, the gulls hovered over the waves, using the wind to remain motionless, hoping to pick up the odd stray fish flung up by the rough water. They waited, and then they took the opportunity. Skimming on the surface, and what’s under it. Breakfast, lunch and tea. Rushing of the shingle.
Large shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats, lobsters, shrimps and whelks.
5 Day after day
Yesterday, and the day before, and tomorrow, which is always another day, which begins and ends, never to be retrieved, which is always dawning and dusking for the first and last time, you will find the first person, lacking a broadband connection; the second person, doing practice. Crushed and fragmented boxes, heavy duty holes drilled in the brick of the chimney. Fairly fruitless activity, s/he said (the third person), but perhaps socially useful. It’s about space, going the distance, and keeping tight at the back, only to succumb to two goals in injury time. Or did they say it’s time for brandies in the garden at the back? Three cats inhabit it; you also get a good view of the herring gulls, which fly about constantly making a fearful noise and spotting the decking with their guano. “You’re such a chimp!” you said (the second person). I (the first person) was encumbered with a pair of heavy speaker stands. Five-finger exercises, it’ll come. They get up to a great hysterical kerfuffle in the early hours of the morning. I hate this computer, its touchpad is too touchy. This morning, to my horror, I lost it for a while, but got it back. In Courthouse Street, another stood in the middle of the road looking bemused, not flinching when the first person passed. The alcove is superb, and suddenly that L-shaped room looks homely.
6 The house (2)
The first house was the progenitor of the second house. Like a phantom on the far side of the mirror, it stood beyond the first, creaking in the weather, late in another century.
Its interior space was darkened, so that it could not be fathomed. The second house was filled with things that were dying, sentimental songs, cacti, the evil mother, a Mynah bird, ghosts of trees, the early hours of a morning.
Under the high eaves, between the rafters that spanned that unfathomable space, rich piano chords had been placed, and these quickly modulated. Reverberations limned the co-ordinates. They revealed the decay of time that we call the future. The house would not be made sense of, you’d fall asleep long before you could.
But look at it, and it goes away. Just as you realise, “It wasn’t that …” The second house was the dream of the first house. You can’t remember where you saw it. The second house was the mind of the first. Semi-transparent, charged with electricity.
7 In space
Under the high eaves, the darkness, and above the eaves, the light. And above that, more light. The weather is banded; there is self-similarity. There are no verbs or nouns in it. The house is a vast process, or series of processes, in which we (its inhabitants) play a small part, appearing and disappearing in it as characters do in a story; but, just as it grew and changed for centuries before our first arrival, so it will continue after we have gone, its timbers slowly decaying, until at some point in the future it, too, will fail. The space it encloses will no longer be enclosed. We drift in the sun, we drift in the lights of the moon. Drifting, long-lining, seining, trammelling, trawling.
Yoh!
Yip!
The first person entered into a journal: “After we had visited the caves, pale sunshine started to come through while we walked down to the old town through the twittens.” The first person was as dissatisfied with this sentence as s/he (I) had been with any other. Always s/he had wanted to capture that illusion of interiority, the idea that there is someone or some entity in there. But the words s/he entered into the laptop captured nothing, and perhaps could never capture anything, not even white space.
Ken Edwards is the author of the sequence of 14 liners 8 + 6 from his own press Reality Street. He lives in Hastings where it is good to see that he's picked up good old Sussex words like 'twitten'.
http://freespace.virgin.net/reality.street/editor.html
Page 464
The first person said: “And I am very tired. My achilles tendons can barely support me.”
The second person: “But now it’s peaceful here, as we sit in our living room, barely furnished, the sky darkening over the West Hill outside the window and the occasional scream of a seagull drifting in. This was the closest I’d felt to tears, since … when?”
And the third: “Suppose we were not really here?”
It may be that that person was not, in fact, present. How do we know these things actually happen? You wake up to the light, and the images. The light coming back off the sea, which is out of sight. There was a bit of business phoning and emailing, and racing around in blind fear stuffing last minute things into last minute containers as the men marched in rapid rotation carrying cardboard and everything became glorious. The seagulls stood regally on the roofs, and music was introduced. It says in this book that there will be a sudden understanding. A contract was concluded. The colour is white.
2 Talking to the dogs
The sea glittered. They went from Christmas to about the middle of April, trawling. You shouted at me, and I was filled with remorse for my behaviour. On the Stade then, wandering among the beached fishing boats, abandoned tackle and rusting tractors, only a short distance from the bustle of crowds on the seafront. Then you cleaned the boats out, because you had about 300 shovelfuls of ballast in them when they had no nets in – they were empty, you had to put some ballast in to trim them. The breeze was very stiff near to the waves. You took me to the clifftop, where the cloudscape was magnificent. Jackdaws strutted in the grass.
They returned via woodland path and twitten. That the transit of Venus had occurred – you took it on trust. White clouds vanishing fast, renewed breeze via the stairs, past gorse and bracken. I blew my top at the guy on the premium rate support line. The two big dogs. They didn’t seem so alienating when we got to speak to them.
3 The house
The first person and the second person lived in a house near the sea. Like a great teenager, it stood awkwardly tall between the other buildings, weatherboarding on the gable end, its late 17th century ribs fashioned from ship’s timbers.* Its glass doors were darkened, so that it was a surprise to open them and come out into brilliant sunshine that fit the space perfectly. The house was filled with flourishing things: plants on a long windowsill, with the weeping fig right by the entrance, a great, black, crooked beam crossing the space, nestling alcoves, an apple mobile and a wooden parrot hung where they got a share of the light on the landing, a winding flight covered in oatmeal, kindlier spotlights installed in troughs by the white party wall. To the left of the piano, on the wall facing the front door, two of their tall bookcases had been placed, and these were quickly stocked. Lemon trees lined the patio.
The second person: “That business about ‘your life flashing before you’. It’s about making sense of it, making a structure of it before it’s too late. But if you look at it that way, it’s always too late. Just as you realise, ‘Ah, that’s what it was …’”
The first person replied with a few impromptu words. I can’t remember what they were.
The third person smiled, but said nothing – perhaps sipping reflectively from a wineglass. Semillon Chardonnay.
* There is in fact no evidence for this.
4 The sea
At the edge, the sea’s margin; the sea, and the things and beings in it. Their type, location and quantity, which vary dramatically according to the season of the year and the weather.
The themes were sea, fishing; margins, edges, boundaries; the boundary that defines; the passage from one to the other. “But we are all dying.”
Dover sole and plaice, and other flat fish such as dabs, flounders, lemon soles, brills, turbots, cod and the various types of dogfish. All can be taken by by trawling or trammelling.
Hard to keep your footing in the wind whipping in as you watched a group of surfers nestling and waiting under the harbour arm, or was it the eastern groyne, in the huge brown, grey & white waves that rolled in relentlessly from a long way off under a brightening sky. Choosing the wave to go with. Repeatedly, the gulls hovered over the waves, using the wind to remain motionless, hoping to pick up the odd stray fish flung up by the rough water. They waited, and then they took the opportunity. Skimming on the surface, and what’s under it. Breakfast, lunch and tea. Rushing of the shingle.
Large shoals of mackerel, herring, sprats, lobsters, shrimps and whelks.
5 Day after day
Yesterday, and the day before, and tomorrow, which is always another day, which begins and ends, never to be retrieved, which is always dawning and dusking for the first and last time, you will find the first person, lacking a broadband connection; the second person, doing practice. Crushed and fragmented boxes, heavy duty holes drilled in the brick of the chimney. Fairly fruitless activity, s/he said (the third person), but perhaps socially useful. It’s about space, going the distance, and keeping tight at the back, only to succumb to two goals in injury time. Or did they say it’s time for brandies in the garden at the back? Three cats inhabit it; you also get a good view of the herring gulls, which fly about constantly making a fearful noise and spotting the decking with their guano. “You’re such a chimp!” you said (the second person). I (the first person) was encumbered with a pair of heavy speaker stands. Five-finger exercises, it’ll come. They get up to a great hysterical kerfuffle in the early hours of the morning. I hate this computer, its touchpad is too touchy. This morning, to my horror, I lost it for a while, but got it back. In Courthouse Street, another stood in the middle of the road looking bemused, not flinching when the first person passed. The alcove is superb, and suddenly that L-shaped room looks homely.
6 The house (2)
The first house was the progenitor of the second house. Like a phantom on the far side of the mirror, it stood beyond the first, creaking in the weather, late in another century.
Its interior space was darkened, so that it could not be fathomed. The second house was filled with things that were dying, sentimental songs, cacti, the evil mother, a Mynah bird, ghosts of trees, the early hours of a morning.
Under the high eaves, between the rafters that spanned that unfathomable space, rich piano chords had been placed, and these quickly modulated. Reverberations limned the co-ordinates. They revealed the decay of time that we call the future. The house would not be made sense of, you’d fall asleep long before you could.
But look at it, and it goes away. Just as you realise, “It wasn’t that …” The second house was the dream of the first house. You can’t remember where you saw it. The second house was the mind of the first. Semi-transparent, charged with electricity.
7 In space
Under the high eaves, the darkness, and above the eaves, the light. And above that, more light. The weather is banded; there is self-similarity. There are no verbs or nouns in it. The house is a vast process, or series of processes, in which we (its inhabitants) play a small part, appearing and disappearing in it as characters do in a story; but, just as it grew and changed for centuries before our first arrival, so it will continue after we have gone, its timbers slowly decaying, until at some point in the future it, too, will fail. The space it encloses will no longer be enclosed. We drift in the sun, we drift in the lights of the moon. Drifting, long-lining, seining, trammelling, trawling.
Yoh!
Yip!
The first person entered into a journal: “After we had visited the caves, pale sunshine started to come through while we walked down to the old town through the twittens.” The first person was as dissatisfied with this sentence as s/he (I) had been with any other. Always s/he had wanted to capture that illusion of interiority, the idea that there is someone or some entity in there. But the words s/he entered into the laptop captured nothing, and perhaps could never capture anything, not even white space.
Ken Edwards is the author of the sequence of 14 liners 8 + 6 from his own press Reality Street. He lives in Hastings where it is good to see that he's picked up good old Sussex words like 'twitten'.
http://freespace.virgin.net/reality.street/editor.html
Page 464
Friday, April 29, 2005
Robert Sheppard: TEXTintoTEXT
TEXT intoTEXT
As an accompaniment to my reading - just back from it - at Bury Art Gallery on the evening of 28th April, I offer (via links) some examples of the class of work I dub ‘text and commentary’, mostly written between 2001-3. (Most of them will be published as Hymns to the God in Which my Typewriter Believes.) By this I mean that, although such works are responses to, writings through, alongside, against, out of, other works of art (on the whole), they are intended to be read independently as well as in relation to. They are as textual as much as they are intertextual.
TEXT intoTEXT One
I read ‘Parody and Pastoral’ which makes use of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poem ‘Pastoral’, in On the Periphery (Street Editions, Cambridge, 1976); see also her Poetic Artifice (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1978), Chapter Five, ‘Pastoral and parody’, pp. 112-63, which reprints the poem on page 125.
TEXTintoTEXT Two
I read the third part of ‘Reading The Reader of Bernard Schlink’ attempts exactly that, one of my paragraphs for each of its chapters (excepting the independent ‘Prologue’). It is published in English, the edition I used, by Phœnix, London, 1997.
I read with Mark Novak and Carolyn Thompson.
Mark is a poet, political activist, and trade union militant, organiser of the Union of Radical Writers and Workers (URWW) and editor of the poetry journal 'Cross Cultural Poetics' (Xcp). He has recently published Shut Up Shut Down with Coffee House Books (2004), a collection of poetic sequences focussing on US union struggles and the effects of their defeat on local communities as well as other labour issues. Jolly good it is too. I read it on the train back. Patricia helped him read some of it.
Carolyn Thompson is a text artist, no, she said she wasn't a text artist. Check out the Text Festival site.
Page 463
As an accompaniment to my reading - just back from it - at Bury Art Gallery on the evening of 28th April, I offer (via links) some examples of the class of work I dub ‘text and commentary’, mostly written between 2001-3. (Most of them will be published as Hymns to the God in Which my Typewriter Believes.) By this I mean that, although such works are responses to, writings through, alongside, against, out of, other works of art (on the whole), they are intended to be read independently as well as in relation to. They are as textual as much as they are intertextual.
TEXT intoTEXT One
I read ‘Parody and Pastoral’ which makes use of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poem ‘Pastoral’, in On the Periphery (Street Editions, Cambridge, 1976); see also her Poetic Artifice (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1978), Chapter Five, ‘Pastoral and parody’, pp. 112-63, which reprints the poem on page 125.
TEXTintoTEXT Two
I read the third part of ‘Reading The Reader of Bernard Schlink’ attempts exactly that, one of my paragraphs for each of its chapters (excepting the independent ‘Prologue’). It is published in English, the edition I used, by Phœnix, London, 1997.
I read with Mark Novak and Carolyn Thompson.
Mark is a poet, political activist, and trade union militant, organiser of the Union of Radical Writers and Workers (URWW) and editor of the poetry journal 'Cross Cultural Poetics' (Xcp). He has recently published Shut Up Shut Down with Coffee House Books (2004), a collection of poetic sequences focussing on US union struggles and the effects of their defeat on local communities as well as other labour issues. Jolly good it is too. I read it on the train back. Patricia helped him read some of it.
Carolyn Thompson is a text artist, no, she said she wasn't a text artist. Check out the Text Festival site.
Page 463
Monday, April 25, 2005
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other, part three
The Seventies: What the Chairman Really Told Tom
In 1966 the Association of Little Presses was formed as a self-help organization for those involved in non-commercial publication, usually of poetry. Until his retirement as chairman in 1985, Bob Cobbing was a key figure in the organization. Founder members included both large and small presses, for example, Fulcrum and Writers Forum. The AGMs held discussions on practical matters, such as grant aid. At the 1968 AGM there were still only 14 members, but this doubled within a year. Other activities included book-fairs, regular catalogues, for which members printed their own pages, and in 1973 ALP published its guide, Getting Your Poetry Published, written by poet Peter Finch, for the assistance of aspiring writers in submitting work to magazines and presses. By 1996 its fifteenth edition had sold 37,500 copies; Finch has expanded it into several handbooks. By 1980 ALP had 122 paid-up members, all of whom were receiving a regular magazine, plus a newsletter containing information, contacts, press profiles and practical advice on everything from sources of cheap ink to bookshop outlets. Underground magazines, known again as little magazines, were more drawn to regular deadlines, standardized formats and quality production standards. A little of the spontaneity of these anti-commodities was lost in the process but the sense of community remained. Allen Fisher has written that part of the desire to run a press is ‘to engage with the “communities” of artists similarly involved’; most of the presses were run by practising poets.
The importance of poetry readings – particularly when the poetry demands performance – continued; the smaller venues ran regular readings above pubs. Yet there was also a move in the 1970s toward large-scale conferences, such as those organized by poet Paul Evans at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1974 on the British Poetry Revival and followed by the 1977 one on Place; and the biennial Cambridge Poetry Festivals, begun in 1975, and organized by Peter Robinson and others. Funding of poetry readings was assisted by the establishment of the London, and National, Poetry Secretariats, thus ensuring the poet received a reasonable fee. These schemes had been one of the principal aims of a short-lived organization convened in 1970, Poets Conference, a ‘trade union’ for poets.
Another of Poets Conference’s demands, for a radical poetry centre, and ALP’s desire for a permanent base, were both realized, then abruptly forfeited, in the 1970s. During the late sixties, the Poetry Society, and its sizeable Victorian property in Earls Court, were in decline. Its general council consisted largely of non-poets, and Stuart Montgomery was invited to stand on the council – though as a doctor. He was successful and, after he had secured a position for Cobbing, one nomination followed another until, by 1975, British Poetry Revival poets were in the majority: Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Jeff Nuttall, Barry MacSweeney, Tom Pickard, as well as emerging writers, such as Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher and Elaine Randell. There were plans for reform: to open the building to the public, to establish a print-room, to run both conventional and experimental poetry workshops, and to open a viable bookshop. Among the events there were readings, performances and lectures. Bob Cobbing encouraged younger performers such as Lawrence Upton, cris cheek and Clive Fencott, who formed their group jgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjggjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjg (etc) about this time; and Eric Mottram’s Poetry Information evenings, public interviews with Roy Fisher, Harwood, MacSweeney, Pickard, Cobbing, Ken Smith, and others, some of which were published in Peter Hodgkiss’ critical review magazine, which took Poetry Information as its title. Harwood lectured on ‘Surrealist Poetry Today’, insisting that Dada and Surrealism offered an energy and an attitude of mind, rather than a set of techniques; he pointed to the work of Raworth and Roy Fisher. Fisher’s own lecture praises the ‘sheer closeness of linguistic activity’ in the work of Bunting, and refers generally to the Cambridge poets as having exceeded narrative and anecdote, and particularly to the work of Andrew Crozier (see below) for demonstrating how ‘consciousness is charted’ – a concern of his own work at this time.
Between 1971 and 1977 Eric Mottram, then Reader in American Studies at King’s College, London, edited the society’s journal, The Poetry Review, and in his 17 issues featured over 200 poets, ranging from well-known Americans, such as Oppen and Ashbery, to senior British poets, such as MacDiarmid and Bunting (both of whom had been elected President of the society). The magazine was largely an ongoing anthology of the work of the British Poetry Revival. He generously published long works, such as Tom Pickard’s Dancing Under Fire, which weaves dream imagery into a texture of post-industrial realism and Northumberland folk tradition.
However, these vital activities were threatened by literary politics. There was tension between the new general council members and some others, ‘who can only be called reactionary and narrow’, in the words of MacSweeney. These members disliked the work Mottram was publishing and pressured the Arts Council Literature Panel to commission the Witt Report, which recommended more direct Arts Council control over the Society, including the appointment of one Arts Council representative onto the general council. There was the promise of increased funding ‘and solid approval of the magazine’, The Poetry Review, ‘so long as Mottram was ousted’, according to MacSweeney. Accounts vary, but many members of the council resigned in protest in 1977. (That last sentence formed a part of my PhD years ago; Eric Mottram, who was my external examiner, responded: 'Accounts don't vary!', but I don't think he'd spoken to some of the people I had.) Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, for example, remained on the council for some time, hoping to effect some compromises, but were eventually made to feel uncomfortable by the new regime and resigned. Whether or not mass resignation or negotiation was the correct strategy – and the vilification on both sides lasted decades – the British Poetry Revival lost an essential power-base that has not been replaced. While the Poetry Society has become an active organization with a popular poetry magazine, it only has occasional links with British Poetry Revival or linguistically innovative writings (as proved by the recently curtailed incumbency of David Herd and Robert Potts, which some hailed as the breakthrough we’d all been waiting for since the 1970s!). Following this incident many poets and publishers boycotted the organization; many of those previously associated with the Poetry Society were frequently and repeatedly refused Arts Council grant-aid, as the now homeless ALP was quick to document conclusively via its newsletter. Meetings would have to switch again to individually organized events, which at least decentred activity from London: Durham and Newcastle were vibrant again, thanks largely to Richard Caddel, as was Cambridge with its Poetry Festivals. Perhaps the British Poetry Revival escaped a stultifying institutionalization, but at the time it demoralized many of the participants, with lasting effects.
Blake Morrison, in the essay ‘Young Poets in the 1970s’, offers a view of contemporary poetry which, while it carefully prepared the way for the retrogressive Penguin anthology he would edit with Andrew Motion in the 1980s, does acknowledge non-mainstream poetries (and the Poetry Society must have at least made these alternatives visible for a while); he documents the so-called London-Cambridge split, to which I shall return in future months, for the first time and lists, as catalysts, Eric Mottram and JH Prynne.
'One vociferous set of opponents has been associated with and promoted by Eric Mottram, who as deposed editor of Poetry Review knows to his cost the ‘establishment’ line.'
However, Morrison’s contention that ‘there is little sign yet of an important new poet emerging from under’ Mottram’s ‘wing’ can be refuted by examining the work of two young writers, Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths, who shared the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for 1974. Morrison, with his sense of the poem as a small-scale crafted artefact, could not be expected to value their extensive intermedial and avant-garde practices. In 1975, Fisher listed involvement in 34 such projects, including collages, found texts, mail art, experiments in process music and conceptual art, as well as performances. Such works were often generated by fixed procedures and evolving processes, and interactions between the two, as well as often humorous interventions in his systems with personal ‘impositions and invitations’.
Bill Griffiths’ exemplary use of disruptive technique, which re-shapes his particular concerns with prison as a representative repressive institution and with urban deprivation, as well as his interests and expertise in Anglo-Saxon and Romany literatures, were demonstrated in Cycles, Griffiths’ first sustained sequence, published in 1976. It opens, appropriately, with ‘Dover Borstal’. As Nuttall points out: ‘Syntax and experience are so manifested as to compel the poem to be read as poetry (as art) – not as a news report’. Its heteroglossic nature is unsettling and unstable. The juxtaposition of the Latin and the demotic with which it opens is a characteristic procedure to avoid transparency, to break through limitations of discourse which are implicitly as real as the prison which is the poem’s apparent focus.
Ictus!
as I ain’t like ever to be still but
kalieidoscope,
lock and knock my sleeping
The poet’s measure of time – the beat of ‘Ictus!’ – complements the prisoner’s rhymed rhythm of incarceration, as he ‘does time’. The commitment to kaleidoscopic experience pitches dream against reality.
Do you know it’s sea?
the speaking sound
and I wake like a dragon’s dream
taut-limb around and my teeth were avid
in wonder
This almost heroic self prefers alertness and action to meditation as the dream dissolves a social reality that is pervasively sadistic and repressive:
The ships, turquoise,
cutting open the sea
smiling killing
OK
It is a landscape and seascape of cuts. Dover, ‘kinging the blue’, is replete with imperial war-histories and the modern ironies of the borstal: ‘the barbwire is German/it is made with razorblades’; the modern prisoners are defined, like their lives, by repetition and inescapably by the ‘screws’: ‘thief you’re a thief you/hey you thief come on’.
Redemption is figured in a discontinuous statement that suggests, at least that financial or verbal exchanges can be altered by re-stamping, by violence: ‘I think on the pattern of an action/till the gold of the answer I can beat anyway’. This meditation on theft in a violent poetry – a ‘beat’ – of stolen discourses is neither ‘news’ nor revolutionary tract. Its open syntax re-forms the world as text; it both refers to, and evades, social reality.
Blake Morrison, dismisses the Poetry Review poets by noting, ‘alongside Mottram’s polemical theorizing – poetry as revolution and poetry as research – the poems themselves look wan’; and conjectures:
'A more feasible alternative may come from the work and teaching of JH Prynne, who in Cambridge at any rate has a considerable reputation; but again there is no clear sign of what his following amounts to’.
That the editors of the Ferry Press and Grosseteste Press, Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, later edited the Carcanet anthology A Various Art to document this period, confirms the existence, and strength, of this group, although one of its members, Peter Riley, emphasizes that Prynne and Crozier were merely the originators of an ‘impulse’, and that ‘certain people worked together to a greater or lesser extent from about 1966 to 1970’. Perhaps the most typical work belongs to the 1970s, when the influence of American projectivist verse, largely derived from Charles Olson, fused with the resources of the English lyric.
The work of Andrew Crozier in the 1970s is a clear example of this mixture. The Veil Poem, published in 1974, opens with a deliberately unfinished fragment; it is the record of perception in language, not a description, and is indebted to the commitment to process found in Olson’s work:
and the storm I hear wind and rain
raging is an effect of bathwater
emptying into the drain.
The philosophic ease, which owes equally to Wordsworth, is trenchantly domestic, even when determining ‘What hides in darkness and what truths/it veils’. The world reveals itself, not as a given, but through acts of slow perception; a garden tree is ‘flowing smoothly through its changes’ and the shadowy narrator realizes, ‘I cannot dominate it’, an attitude of reverence towards the autonomy of the world, unlike the Movement Orthodoxy’s use of empirical details (and Crozier was one of the first to criticize them as such). One of the sections quotes, without irony, Wordsworth’s invocation to the ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe’ which ‘giv’st to forms and images a breath/and everlasting motion’, and this traditional Romantic theme is elsewhere restated in terms derived from A N Whitehead, the twentieth century philosopher who rescued and redefined a holistic cosmology that Wordsworth might have applauded. Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of mind and nature – which Olson had drawn on before – is elaborated in perceptual and phenomenological terms, not too distant, as one might expect from Roy Fisher’s Poetry Society lecture, from the terms of Fisher around this time:
This is
the ordinary world, naturally incomplete and
is no wise to be verbally separated
from your picture of it.
The punning on ‘wise’ and ‘naturally’ introduces the question of language as a mode of thinking, hence the echo of Wittgenstein in the passage. A household fireplace provides a domestic image of process; stasis engenders collapse, as coals
settle slowly
into themselves and something slips ...
You should never stop.
The poem ends with a description of the careful building of this fire to preserve it; this action is emblematic of the wisdom that nurtures process and which returns the narrator to human relationships:
The dust beneath my
fingernails is all the wisdom I have
to take with me upstairs to my wife.
Both Griffiths and Crozier offer inclusive discourses and ambitiously emphasize the role of language in mediating, and acting upon, the world. While Crozier absorbs literary tradition, Griffiths is a writer who takes an anarchist stance towards a received past, including literature itself. In a later text he rhetorically overstates the case: ‘What better disguise for evil/than sonnets?’ Yet Griffiths’ involvement with Anglo-Saxon sources – his translations and dictionaries, often self-published, away from the world of academic scholarship – suggests an openness to the past, not mediated by the repressive mechanisms of a selective history; he possesses an ability to juxtapose a remarkable range of materials. I agree with Clive Bush: ‘Griffiths’s greatest ability is to combine the severest of ethical judgements without losing a sense of open intellectual, social and historical curiosity.’
Page 462
Coming up next month, part four : The 1970s Continued: Poetry of Place/Poetry of Autonomy. Read more on 'The British Poetry Revival' here.
In 1966 the Association of Little Presses was formed as a self-help organization for those involved in non-commercial publication, usually of poetry. Until his retirement as chairman in 1985, Bob Cobbing was a key figure in the organization. Founder members included both large and small presses, for example, Fulcrum and Writers Forum. The AGMs held discussions on practical matters, such as grant aid. At the 1968 AGM there were still only 14 members, but this doubled within a year. Other activities included book-fairs, regular catalogues, for which members printed their own pages, and in 1973 ALP published its guide, Getting Your Poetry Published, written by poet Peter Finch, for the assistance of aspiring writers in submitting work to magazines and presses. By 1996 its fifteenth edition had sold 37,500 copies; Finch has expanded it into several handbooks. By 1980 ALP had 122 paid-up members, all of whom were receiving a regular magazine, plus a newsletter containing information, contacts, press profiles and practical advice on everything from sources of cheap ink to bookshop outlets. Underground magazines, known again as little magazines, were more drawn to regular deadlines, standardized formats and quality production standards. A little of the spontaneity of these anti-commodities was lost in the process but the sense of community remained. Allen Fisher has written that part of the desire to run a press is ‘to engage with the “communities” of artists similarly involved’; most of the presses were run by practising poets.
The importance of poetry readings – particularly when the poetry demands performance – continued; the smaller venues ran regular readings above pubs. Yet there was also a move in the 1970s toward large-scale conferences, such as those organized by poet Paul Evans at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1974 on the British Poetry Revival and followed by the 1977 one on Place; and the biennial Cambridge Poetry Festivals, begun in 1975, and organized by Peter Robinson and others. Funding of poetry readings was assisted by the establishment of the London, and National, Poetry Secretariats, thus ensuring the poet received a reasonable fee. These schemes had been one of the principal aims of a short-lived organization convened in 1970, Poets Conference, a ‘trade union’ for poets.
Another of Poets Conference’s demands, for a radical poetry centre, and ALP’s desire for a permanent base, were both realized, then abruptly forfeited, in the 1970s. During the late sixties, the Poetry Society, and its sizeable Victorian property in Earls Court, were in decline. Its general council consisted largely of non-poets, and Stuart Montgomery was invited to stand on the council – though as a doctor. He was successful and, after he had secured a position for Cobbing, one nomination followed another until, by 1975, British Poetry Revival poets were in the majority: Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Jeff Nuttall, Barry MacSweeney, Tom Pickard, as well as emerging writers, such as Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher and Elaine Randell. There were plans for reform: to open the building to the public, to establish a print-room, to run both conventional and experimental poetry workshops, and to open a viable bookshop. Among the events there were readings, performances and lectures. Bob Cobbing encouraged younger performers such as Lawrence Upton, cris cheek and Clive Fencott, who formed their group jgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjggjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjgjg (etc) about this time; and Eric Mottram’s Poetry Information evenings, public interviews with Roy Fisher, Harwood, MacSweeney, Pickard, Cobbing, Ken Smith, and others, some of which were published in Peter Hodgkiss’ critical review magazine, which took Poetry Information as its title. Harwood lectured on ‘Surrealist Poetry Today’, insisting that Dada and Surrealism offered an energy and an attitude of mind, rather than a set of techniques; he pointed to the work of Raworth and Roy Fisher. Fisher’s own lecture praises the ‘sheer closeness of linguistic activity’ in the work of Bunting, and refers generally to the Cambridge poets as having exceeded narrative and anecdote, and particularly to the work of Andrew Crozier (see below) for demonstrating how ‘consciousness is charted’ – a concern of his own work at this time.
Between 1971 and 1977 Eric Mottram, then Reader in American Studies at King’s College, London, edited the society’s journal, The Poetry Review, and in his 17 issues featured over 200 poets, ranging from well-known Americans, such as Oppen and Ashbery, to senior British poets, such as MacDiarmid and Bunting (both of whom had been elected President of the society). The magazine was largely an ongoing anthology of the work of the British Poetry Revival. He generously published long works, such as Tom Pickard’s Dancing Under Fire, which weaves dream imagery into a texture of post-industrial realism and Northumberland folk tradition.
However, these vital activities were threatened by literary politics. There was tension between the new general council members and some others, ‘who can only be called reactionary and narrow’, in the words of MacSweeney. These members disliked the work Mottram was publishing and pressured the Arts Council Literature Panel to commission the Witt Report, which recommended more direct Arts Council control over the Society, including the appointment of one Arts Council representative onto the general council. There was the promise of increased funding ‘and solid approval of the magazine’, The Poetry Review, ‘so long as Mottram was ousted’, according to MacSweeney. Accounts vary, but many members of the council resigned in protest in 1977. (That last sentence formed a part of my PhD years ago; Eric Mottram, who was my external examiner, responded: 'Accounts don't vary!', but I don't think he'd spoken to some of the people I had.) Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, for example, remained on the council for some time, hoping to effect some compromises, but were eventually made to feel uncomfortable by the new regime and resigned. Whether or not mass resignation or negotiation was the correct strategy – and the vilification on both sides lasted decades – the British Poetry Revival lost an essential power-base that has not been replaced. While the Poetry Society has become an active organization with a popular poetry magazine, it only has occasional links with British Poetry Revival or linguistically innovative writings (as proved by the recently curtailed incumbency of David Herd and Robert Potts, which some hailed as the breakthrough we’d all been waiting for since the 1970s!). Following this incident many poets and publishers boycotted the organization; many of those previously associated with the Poetry Society were frequently and repeatedly refused Arts Council grant-aid, as the now homeless ALP was quick to document conclusively via its newsletter. Meetings would have to switch again to individually organized events, which at least decentred activity from London: Durham and Newcastle were vibrant again, thanks largely to Richard Caddel, as was Cambridge with its Poetry Festivals. Perhaps the British Poetry Revival escaped a stultifying institutionalization, but at the time it demoralized many of the participants, with lasting effects.
Blake Morrison, in the essay ‘Young Poets in the 1970s’, offers a view of contemporary poetry which, while it carefully prepared the way for the retrogressive Penguin anthology he would edit with Andrew Motion in the 1980s, does acknowledge non-mainstream poetries (and the Poetry Society must have at least made these alternatives visible for a while); he documents the so-called London-Cambridge split, to which I shall return in future months, for the first time and lists, as catalysts, Eric Mottram and JH Prynne.
'One vociferous set of opponents has been associated with and promoted by Eric Mottram, who as deposed editor of Poetry Review knows to his cost the ‘establishment’ line.'
However, Morrison’s contention that ‘there is little sign yet of an important new poet emerging from under’ Mottram’s ‘wing’ can be refuted by examining the work of two young writers, Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths, who shared the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for 1974. Morrison, with his sense of the poem as a small-scale crafted artefact, could not be expected to value their extensive intermedial and avant-garde practices. In 1975, Fisher listed involvement in 34 such projects, including collages, found texts, mail art, experiments in process music and conceptual art, as well as performances. Such works were often generated by fixed procedures and evolving processes, and interactions between the two, as well as often humorous interventions in his systems with personal ‘impositions and invitations’.
Bill Griffiths’ exemplary use of disruptive technique, which re-shapes his particular concerns with prison as a representative repressive institution and with urban deprivation, as well as his interests and expertise in Anglo-Saxon and Romany literatures, were demonstrated in Cycles, Griffiths’ first sustained sequence, published in 1976. It opens, appropriately, with ‘Dover Borstal’. As Nuttall points out: ‘Syntax and experience are so manifested as to compel the poem to be read as poetry (as art) – not as a news report’. Its heteroglossic nature is unsettling and unstable. The juxtaposition of the Latin and the demotic with which it opens is a characteristic procedure to avoid transparency, to break through limitations of discourse which are implicitly as real as the prison which is the poem’s apparent focus.
Ictus!
as I ain’t like ever to be still but
kalieidoscope,
lock and knock my sleeping
The poet’s measure of time – the beat of ‘Ictus!’ – complements the prisoner’s rhymed rhythm of incarceration, as he ‘does time’. The commitment to kaleidoscopic experience pitches dream against reality.
Do you know it’s sea?
the speaking sound
and I wake like a dragon’s dream
taut-limb around and my teeth were avid
in wonder
This almost heroic self prefers alertness and action to meditation as the dream dissolves a social reality that is pervasively sadistic and repressive:
The ships, turquoise,
cutting open the sea
smiling killing
OK
It is a landscape and seascape of cuts. Dover, ‘kinging the blue’, is replete with imperial war-histories and the modern ironies of the borstal: ‘the barbwire is German/it is made with razorblades’; the modern prisoners are defined, like their lives, by repetition and inescapably by the ‘screws’: ‘thief you’re a thief you/hey you thief come on’.
Redemption is figured in a discontinuous statement that suggests, at least that financial or verbal exchanges can be altered by re-stamping, by violence: ‘I think on the pattern of an action/till the gold of the answer I can beat anyway’. This meditation on theft in a violent poetry – a ‘beat’ – of stolen discourses is neither ‘news’ nor revolutionary tract. Its open syntax re-forms the world as text; it both refers to, and evades, social reality.
Blake Morrison, dismisses the Poetry Review poets by noting, ‘alongside Mottram’s polemical theorizing – poetry as revolution and poetry as research – the poems themselves look wan’; and conjectures:
'A more feasible alternative may come from the work and teaching of JH Prynne, who in Cambridge at any rate has a considerable reputation; but again there is no clear sign of what his following amounts to’.
That the editors of the Ferry Press and Grosseteste Press, Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, later edited the Carcanet anthology A Various Art to document this period, confirms the existence, and strength, of this group, although one of its members, Peter Riley, emphasizes that Prynne and Crozier were merely the originators of an ‘impulse’, and that ‘certain people worked together to a greater or lesser extent from about 1966 to 1970’. Perhaps the most typical work belongs to the 1970s, when the influence of American projectivist verse, largely derived from Charles Olson, fused with the resources of the English lyric.
The work of Andrew Crozier in the 1970s is a clear example of this mixture. The Veil Poem, published in 1974, opens with a deliberately unfinished fragment; it is the record of perception in language, not a description, and is indebted to the commitment to process found in Olson’s work:
and the storm I hear wind and rain
raging is an effect of bathwater
emptying into the drain.
The philosophic ease, which owes equally to Wordsworth, is trenchantly domestic, even when determining ‘What hides in darkness and what truths/it veils’. The world reveals itself, not as a given, but through acts of slow perception; a garden tree is ‘flowing smoothly through its changes’ and the shadowy narrator realizes, ‘I cannot dominate it’, an attitude of reverence towards the autonomy of the world, unlike the Movement Orthodoxy’s use of empirical details (and Crozier was one of the first to criticize them as such). One of the sections quotes, without irony, Wordsworth’s invocation to the ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe’ which ‘giv’st to forms and images a breath/and everlasting motion’, and this traditional Romantic theme is elsewhere restated in terms derived from A N Whitehead, the twentieth century philosopher who rescued and redefined a holistic cosmology that Wordsworth might have applauded. Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of mind and nature – which Olson had drawn on before – is elaborated in perceptual and phenomenological terms, not too distant, as one might expect from Roy Fisher’s Poetry Society lecture, from the terms of Fisher around this time:
This is
the ordinary world, naturally incomplete and
is no wise to be verbally separated
from your picture of it.
The punning on ‘wise’ and ‘naturally’ introduces the question of language as a mode of thinking, hence the echo of Wittgenstein in the passage. A household fireplace provides a domestic image of process; stasis engenders collapse, as coals
settle slowly
into themselves and something slips ...
You should never stop.
The poem ends with a description of the careful building of this fire to preserve it; this action is emblematic of the wisdom that nurtures process and which returns the narrator to human relationships:
The dust beneath my
fingernails is all the wisdom I have
to take with me upstairs to my wife.
Both Griffiths and Crozier offer inclusive discourses and ambitiously emphasize the role of language in mediating, and acting upon, the world. While Crozier absorbs literary tradition, Griffiths is a writer who takes an anarchist stance towards a received past, including literature itself. In a later text he rhetorically overstates the case: ‘What better disguise for evil/than sonnets?’ Yet Griffiths’ involvement with Anglo-Saxon sources – his translations and dictionaries, often self-published, away from the world of academic scholarship – suggests an openness to the past, not mediated by the repressive mechanisms of a selective history; he possesses an ability to juxtapose a remarkable range of materials. I agree with Clive Bush: ‘Griffiths’s greatest ability is to combine the severest of ethical judgements without losing a sense of open intellectual, social and historical curiosity.’
Page 462
Coming up next month, part four : The 1970s Continued: Poetry of Place/Poetry of Autonomy. Read more on 'The British Poetry Revival' here.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Neon Highway interview with Robert Sheppard
This interview first appeared in Neon Highway, and was conducted by Jane March (an electronic emanation of the editor Alice Lenkiewicz (see Page 460)). Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an interview, but a questionnaire, but the fiction of dialogic communication was preserved. It was undertaken during 2003, and some of the projects described in answer to the penultimate question have been either realised, abandoned, or are in progress still (and I’ve added links here to some of the works or their sources). Thanks to Alice for permission to republish. RS
'Jane' began by speech-bubbling me the following:
Hi there Robert, can I ask you a few questions? Thank you.
Before beginning her bold questioning, thus:
Could you describe the kind of poetry that interests you and why this is? Where do you situate yourself in terms of contemporary poetry?
If you mean ‘kinds’ of poetry, not kind, then let’s say that I am interested in all kinds of poetry. Poetry’s delight is its variety across space and through time, rather than its supposed universality. Its particularity: Ovid to Ulli Freer, Basho to Pope, Petrarch to Klebnikov, Herbert to Celan. (Which is why I am so antagonistic towards the Movement Orthodoxy in Britain, and its narrow notions of what poetry might be.) One is adrift in the imaginary museum as a reader, while one is still positioned in terms of the current field of literary production as a writer, to borrow the terminology of Bourdieu. For example, I appear in the Tuma Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry as a representative of British ‘linguistically innovative poetry’, which I suppose will suffice, although I’ve been as much responsible (as a commentator and publisher) for that cumbersome term’s currency as I have been its passive recipient. But then in certain moods, I feel I don’t fit this or that label, or that there are qualities in the work that are simply not recognised or recognisable by the act of being situated in such a field. Is that another way of saying that it is not entirely in the writer’s control where he or she is pigeonholed? Don’t my Empty Diaries have more in common with Tom Paulin’s The Invasion Handbook than with many books in ‘our’ corner of the field?
Why do you think it is that innovative poetry has not caught on with the education system? Why do some children study Simon Armitage and not Allen Fisher for instance?
That children – or adults, for that matter – are allowed to study poetry (or literature) at all in an increasingly instrumentalist education system is semi-miraculous. Though perhaps it is best not to enquire too deeply about what good it is supposed to do. Why some poets are taught, while others aren’t, has to do with the inherent ‘teachability’ of certain writing practices, and I suspect that some writers actively produce work in collusion with the way it is consumed in the classroom and examination hall. Other writing practices (those you dub ‘innovative’) do not fit so well in this paradigm, indeed actively counter commonly taught reading practices. As such they do not appeal to over-worked teachers who are often themselves not readers of poetry in any sense other than the classroom. That some of us who teach take on those writers is a different issue, of course. And the teaching of writing adds another dimension, one where I think innovative practice needs defining and defending.
What are your views on the contemporary education of poetry? How would you define the difference between experimental and non experimental poetry?
Teachers are scared of poetry and they all too often pass this fear on to their students. I can’t answer your unrelated question about the difference you perceive, because your terms are partly not ones I would use. I would counter a poetry of saying, which attempts to avoid thematisation and stasis, and achieve something like ethical openness, with a poetry of the said, which risks inertia and immediate naturalisation (which is the demand of every exam question, of course). At most, it is an ethical issue about making a text maximally open to the reader, while recognising the impossibility of the act, because the saying as an ethical gesture must always be concretised in an actual fixed text. Raworth’s Eternal Sections seem about as near as we’ll get to it. It is also to recognise, with Vološinov and Bakhtin, that language use, even in heavily distanciated and defamiliarised forms, remains dialogic. But that’s a book length argument in a couple of sentences: bits of Levinas rubbing shoulders with Veronica Forrest-Thomson.
The techniques that one uses to achieve this aim may vary. It certainly isn’t a question of pursuing stylistic brinkpersonship (‘experiment’, if you like) for its own sake. Some ‘experimental’ work can be bogged down in the said.
How do you think these differences are portrayed to and perceived by the public?
Since I partly refute your premise, this is difficult to answer. What the public perceives at all about poetry I couldn’t say. The ‘Romantic’ paradigm of self-expression prevails, it seems to me. While a small minority will recognise Armitage from their schooldays, nearly nobody would recognise Allen Fisher as a name, or even necessarily recognise what Fisher produces as poetry. Which is, to come back to an earlier question from a different angle, why education is crucial here. And I do my bit as a poet, academic, teacher and big-mouth.
What would you say to someone who said, “I can’t understand ‘experimental’ poetry. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
‘Sign up for private tutorials at £38 an hour!?’ You would then get that person to analyse every noun and verb in his or her statement (especially ‘experimental’). If he or she did say ‘seem’, by the way, you’d be in with a chance, wouldn’t you? You are more likely to hear something completely dismissive, i.e., ‘It doesn’t make sense’. So: what does ‘making sense’ mean? And who makes sense in the aesthetic relations between text and reader? All these questions open up the issues. Then you can go back to particular poems.
6. How would you describe your own process of writing poetry?
I don’t think I have a single process. I have used various techniques of accelerated collage, which I call ‘creative linkage’, at certain times. More recently I’ve been writing kinds of shadow ‘texts or commentaries’ based on other texts, in an act of intertextual critique. I have written strictly neo-formalist works (using word count) as well as writing a kind of free prose, or lineated prose. I’m playing a lot with sentence boundaries at the moment, stretching or collapsing syntax. I seem to swing from one extreme to the other, but the common factor is to generate works that are different. That was almost a working principle of ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, but is less so now. There is no separation of acts of writing and editing for me.
It’s probably not for me to decide whether I achieve a poetry of saying, but that’s the aim.
What would you say to the budding writer/poet to encourage and inspire them with their work? What books would you recommend them to read?
Read. A writer is a reader who writes. Reflect. Develop a poetics.
Can you list five poets before the 20th century that you admire?
Can you list five poets during the 20th and 21st century that you admire?
Milton Marvell Rochester Byron Blake. George Oppen, Roy Fisher, William Carlos Williams, Bob Cobbing, Robert Creeley. Whoops, I’ve run out of names.
How would you define ‘good’ poetry versus ‘bad’ poetry.
These are morally inflected terms, aren’t they? Better to think in terms of adequacy to the perceived necessary poetics of the time. So Williams was adequate to his age, whilst WE Henley wasn’t, we could say (or not, depending on our standards of adequacy).
You are well known for your interest in writings on poetics. Why do you feel poetics are important? How would you define poetics in your own words?
Whether or not I’m well-known for this interest or not, I define poetics, quite precisely, as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively casting into the future. Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible one, but more importantly it is a discourse, though an intermittent mercurial one. (The unwritten history of the discourse suggests this.) In the pedagogic sense, poetics is a writer-centred, student-centred, self-organising activity. It is a way of letting writers question what they think they know, a way of allowing creative writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection. Poetics exists for oneself and for others, to produce, to quote Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in the best definition: “a permission to continue”.
Do you have any forthcoming publications?
Yes: Tin Pan Arcadia from Salt, a large collection from my long time-based project ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ which spans the years of its composition from December 1989 to 2000, from its ‘Preface’, ‘Melting Borders’, through various other strands – some ‘Empty Diaries’, some ‘Killing Boxes’ – through to the final ‘The Push Up Combat Bikini’, which is also the last ‘Empty Diary’. Creative work produced since then, the ‘texts or commentaries’ that take on a set of deliberately distant materials – Anne Sexton’s drafts, Bernhard Schlink’s novel, Charlotte Saloman’s visual opera, Jiri Kolar, Marvell, Sephardic songs, none of these particularly associated with ‘me’ – will appear from Stride as Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes. That book also contains a writing through of my own journals written in the aftermath of September 11, the September 12 we are all living through. That suggests another collection, unwritten as yet, just a few poems that follow on from the ‘Killing Boxes’ strand of ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, and a free prose essay that answers Adrian Clarke’s reading of my poetics, ‘Rattling the Bones’. (Soon to appear in Softblow.) I teeter on the precipice of launching into a pre-determined sequence of 96 poems to accompany them, the sort of mad formalism I’ve avoided since completing ‘Twentieth Century Blues’.
Recently I’ve been doing some writing as visiting researcher to Sudley House in Liverpool, and that should see the light of day as both performance and text. Then there’s a short story about the Esperanto writer F Tropp. I’d like to write something connected with jazz. I’m fascinated by the close connection between poetry and jazz. Weird things: like Charlie Parker carrying a copy of the Rubáiyát around with him! I had plans to write a critical work on this relation but I’m not sure I’ve got the musicological knowledge to pursue it as an academic study, but I’ve amassed all this material and perhaps will extend the ‘text or commentary’ technique of Hymns to these materials: texts, recordings, anecdotes.
Critical works forthcoming include The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000 – its title is self-explanatory, and its thesis I’ve outlined above. Indeed, your oppositional pair, Armitage and Fisher, are both treated in that work, Armitage appearing as a soft version of the persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy, and Fisher being one of the discontents, who approximates the poetry of saying in his work Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. See February Page 450) And at the moment I’m working on a short monograph on the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of Iain Sinclair. (See March: Page 456) Articles on Sinclair and Maggie O’Sullivan. I need to write something extended on poetics. And probably publish or make available a rather different kind of creative writing manual, working with Scott Thurston.
But my primary focus is on the creative work.
Finally, Are there any questions you feel I should have asked you and didn’t?
Yes.
Thank you for your time Robert.
Page 461
There's a later interview on this blog, conducted in the same 'questionnaire' way from 2019, HERE.
'Jane' began by speech-bubbling me the following:
Hi there Robert, can I ask you a few questions? Thank you.
Before beginning her bold questioning, thus:
Could you describe the kind of poetry that interests you and why this is? Where do you situate yourself in terms of contemporary poetry?
If you mean ‘kinds’ of poetry, not kind, then let’s say that I am interested in all kinds of poetry. Poetry’s delight is its variety across space and through time, rather than its supposed universality. Its particularity: Ovid to Ulli Freer, Basho to Pope, Petrarch to Klebnikov, Herbert to Celan. (Which is why I am so antagonistic towards the Movement Orthodoxy in Britain, and its narrow notions of what poetry might be.) One is adrift in the imaginary museum as a reader, while one is still positioned in terms of the current field of literary production as a writer, to borrow the terminology of Bourdieu. For example, I appear in the Tuma Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry as a representative of British ‘linguistically innovative poetry’, which I suppose will suffice, although I’ve been as much responsible (as a commentator and publisher) for that cumbersome term’s currency as I have been its passive recipient. But then in certain moods, I feel I don’t fit this or that label, or that there are qualities in the work that are simply not recognised or recognisable by the act of being situated in such a field. Is that another way of saying that it is not entirely in the writer’s control where he or she is pigeonholed? Don’t my Empty Diaries have more in common with Tom Paulin’s The Invasion Handbook than with many books in ‘our’ corner of the field?
Why do you think it is that innovative poetry has not caught on with the education system? Why do some children study Simon Armitage and not Allen Fisher for instance?
That children – or adults, for that matter – are allowed to study poetry (or literature) at all in an increasingly instrumentalist education system is semi-miraculous. Though perhaps it is best not to enquire too deeply about what good it is supposed to do. Why some poets are taught, while others aren’t, has to do with the inherent ‘teachability’ of certain writing practices, and I suspect that some writers actively produce work in collusion with the way it is consumed in the classroom and examination hall. Other writing practices (those you dub ‘innovative’) do not fit so well in this paradigm, indeed actively counter commonly taught reading practices. As such they do not appeal to over-worked teachers who are often themselves not readers of poetry in any sense other than the classroom. That some of us who teach take on those writers is a different issue, of course. And the teaching of writing adds another dimension, one where I think innovative practice needs defining and defending.
What are your views on the contemporary education of poetry? How would you define the difference between experimental and non experimental poetry?
Teachers are scared of poetry and they all too often pass this fear on to their students. I can’t answer your unrelated question about the difference you perceive, because your terms are partly not ones I would use. I would counter a poetry of saying, which attempts to avoid thematisation and stasis, and achieve something like ethical openness, with a poetry of the said, which risks inertia and immediate naturalisation (which is the demand of every exam question, of course). At most, it is an ethical issue about making a text maximally open to the reader, while recognising the impossibility of the act, because the saying as an ethical gesture must always be concretised in an actual fixed text. Raworth’s Eternal Sections seem about as near as we’ll get to it. It is also to recognise, with Vološinov and Bakhtin, that language use, even in heavily distanciated and defamiliarised forms, remains dialogic. But that’s a book length argument in a couple of sentences: bits of Levinas rubbing shoulders with Veronica Forrest-Thomson.
The techniques that one uses to achieve this aim may vary. It certainly isn’t a question of pursuing stylistic brinkpersonship (‘experiment’, if you like) for its own sake. Some ‘experimental’ work can be bogged down in the said.
How do you think these differences are portrayed to and perceived by the public?
Since I partly refute your premise, this is difficult to answer. What the public perceives at all about poetry I couldn’t say. The ‘Romantic’ paradigm of self-expression prevails, it seems to me. While a small minority will recognise Armitage from their schooldays, nearly nobody would recognise Allen Fisher as a name, or even necessarily recognise what Fisher produces as poetry. Which is, to come back to an earlier question from a different angle, why education is crucial here. And I do my bit as a poet, academic, teacher and big-mouth.
What would you say to someone who said, “I can’t understand ‘experimental’ poetry. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
‘Sign up for private tutorials at £38 an hour!?’ You would then get that person to analyse every noun and verb in his or her statement (especially ‘experimental’). If he or she did say ‘seem’, by the way, you’d be in with a chance, wouldn’t you? You are more likely to hear something completely dismissive, i.e., ‘It doesn’t make sense’. So: what does ‘making sense’ mean? And who makes sense in the aesthetic relations between text and reader? All these questions open up the issues. Then you can go back to particular poems.
6. How would you describe your own process of writing poetry?
I don’t think I have a single process. I have used various techniques of accelerated collage, which I call ‘creative linkage’, at certain times. More recently I’ve been writing kinds of shadow ‘texts or commentaries’ based on other texts, in an act of intertextual critique. I have written strictly neo-formalist works (using word count) as well as writing a kind of free prose, or lineated prose. I’m playing a lot with sentence boundaries at the moment, stretching or collapsing syntax. I seem to swing from one extreme to the other, but the common factor is to generate works that are different. That was almost a working principle of ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, but is less so now. There is no separation of acts of writing and editing for me.
It’s probably not for me to decide whether I achieve a poetry of saying, but that’s the aim.
What would you say to the budding writer/poet to encourage and inspire them with their work? What books would you recommend them to read?
Read. A writer is a reader who writes. Reflect. Develop a poetics.
Can you list five poets before the 20th century that you admire?
Can you list five poets during the 20th and 21st century that you admire?
Milton Marvell Rochester Byron Blake. George Oppen, Roy Fisher, William Carlos Williams, Bob Cobbing, Robert Creeley. Whoops, I’ve run out of names.
How would you define ‘good’ poetry versus ‘bad’ poetry.
These are morally inflected terms, aren’t they? Better to think in terms of adequacy to the perceived necessary poetics of the time. So Williams was adequate to his age, whilst WE Henley wasn’t, we could say (or not, depending on our standards of adequacy).
You are well known for your interest in writings on poetics. Why do you feel poetics are important? How would you define poetics in your own words?
Whether or not I’m well-known for this interest or not, I define poetics, quite precisely, as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively casting into the future. Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible one, but more importantly it is a discourse, though an intermittent mercurial one. (The unwritten history of the discourse suggests this.) In the pedagogic sense, poetics is a writer-centred, student-centred, self-organising activity. It is a way of letting writers question what they think they know, a way of allowing creative writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection. Poetics exists for oneself and for others, to produce, to quote Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in the best definition: “a permission to continue”.
Do you have any forthcoming publications?
Yes: Tin Pan Arcadia from Salt, a large collection from my long time-based project ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ which spans the years of its composition from December 1989 to 2000, from its ‘Preface’, ‘Melting Borders’, through various other strands – some ‘Empty Diaries’, some ‘Killing Boxes’ – through to the final ‘The Push Up Combat Bikini’, which is also the last ‘Empty Diary’. Creative work produced since then, the ‘texts or commentaries’ that take on a set of deliberately distant materials – Anne Sexton’s drafts, Bernhard Schlink’s novel, Charlotte Saloman’s visual opera, Jiri Kolar, Marvell, Sephardic songs, none of these particularly associated with ‘me’ – will appear from Stride as Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes. That book also contains a writing through of my own journals written in the aftermath of September 11, the September 12 we are all living through. That suggests another collection, unwritten as yet, just a few poems that follow on from the ‘Killing Boxes’ strand of ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, and a free prose essay that answers Adrian Clarke’s reading of my poetics, ‘Rattling the Bones’. (Soon to appear in Softblow.) I teeter on the precipice of launching into a pre-determined sequence of 96 poems to accompany them, the sort of mad formalism I’ve avoided since completing ‘Twentieth Century Blues’.
Recently I’ve been doing some writing as visiting researcher to Sudley House in Liverpool, and that should see the light of day as both performance and text. Then there’s a short story about the Esperanto writer F Tropp. I’d like to write something connected with jazz. I’m fascinated by the close connection between poetry and jazz. Weird things: like Charlie Parker carrying a copy of the Rubáiyát around with him! I had plans to write a critical work on this relation but I’m not sure I’ve got the musicological knowledge to pursue it as an academic study, but I’ve amassed all this material and perhaps will extend the ‘text or commentary’ technique of Hymns to these materials: texts, recordings, anecdotes.
Critical works forthcoming include The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000 – its title is self-explanatory, and its thesis I’ve outlined above. Indeed, your oppositional pair, Armitage and Fisher, are both treated in that work, Armitage appearing as a soft version of the persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy, and Fisher being one of the discontents, who approximates the poetry of saying in his work Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. See February Page 450) And at the moment I’m working on a short monograph on the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of Iain Sinclair. (See March: Page 456) Articles on Sinclair and Maggie O’Sullivan. I need to write something extended on poetics. And probably publish or make available a rather different kind of creative writing manual, working with Scott Thurston.
But my primary focus is on the creative work.
Finally, Are there any questions you feel I should have asked you and didn’t?
Yes.
Thank you for your time Robert.
Page 461
There's a later interview on this blog, conducted in the same 'questionnaire' way from 2019, HERE.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Alice Lenkiewicz: Poems from Maxine
pale ovals are rotating storms shaped by powerful jet her hand waves although she sees nothing a fine tube of glass floats outside her cubicle like some kind of shuttle a fine ocean greenish blue maxine’s cubicle floats above a free and easy petal fish touch the silver surface with their tails icarus falling maxine sleeping as he plunges through the air he floats outside her window like a man whose parachute never opened twirls somersaults and drops to his death skeletal torn wings leaving a residue of gold upon water maxine awakes the people are silent
Floating 2
She has been sailing the blackness of space now for a decade: a silent sentinel, watching near light speed collide with fluorescent blue wave light, the afterglow from the silent song. The floating is nothing on the wayside where nothing flies. Particles rotate the slip-sliding of re-floating igniting those that reunite. A nothing is a something inside glass thoughts rotating on a thought, thought to be nothing on the wayside. The thought that says it is nothing reunites the something to create floating.
Floating 3
No time scheduled to the time. I have no time visually. Don’t ask me in my head because I’m somewhere else where it is. Nor female scheduled to the time. I have no time in which I live. It doesn’t matter. Don’t ask me in my head. Don’t ask me where it is. Because, Besides. I’m somewhere else. It doesn’t matter
Floating 4
eyes open eyes shut
in space (someone i once knew)
darkness empty void
head rotates
mechanism of distant tears
key floats away towards
shimmering wet pavement
casting remains of blindness departed the empty room gliding an area base towards the emptiness to store things precious to cast and bury the surface a clear stone of greyness covered all six through doors the greying sleeps through spades greying further in-between myself falling frames avoiding edges gliding an area base un-watered mutilated flow seeks kindness since walking to store things burns the cast mixture with sadness since that is the red of it so it furthers itself placed inside the tide within the inner pulling the edges beyond the darkness
Maybe I can float now
There inside blue waves of wonder
Though knowing it was all about to
Happen. Within the silent paintings of
Spring another time or schedule floats
Through the window yelling stethoscopes!
Maxine on a bridge reaches for the newest
Dress suspended from shopping trolleys on
Wire hooks. Jealousy of friendship hopes the
Meteorite hits the right person clasping a red rose
Belonging to the checkout girl.
It’s yours if you really want it
Fluid mental spaces. Nothing to yell about
except the blindfolding beneath
Bludgeoned Bigots. Flatter the nightclub
Girls and wear fire arms for deep relaxation.
Pull out the light sockets and mask the Venus
Of hatred in her underwear.
Very suitable today you are.
Bosses mug us. For a bit more yelling time
Except the cubicle floats away.
On a dying tapestry made for astronauts dropping
Feathers in space. Geared to make trust-funds. Forget
Mumsy whimsical; much too bedridden.
Float the bypass on the motorway escape
Route heading for Texas. Beep the mind
Worriers forgetful on sunny afternoons
Sleeping with maids of honour who trust the
Untrusting. Make room for the squires who
Want to own the artists pretending they are
No longer real.
Meet the Mona prima sleuth.
She’s in a raincoat designed by rain on top
Of inky papers. Never before suggested towards
The capital fashions of love brands. She knows the
Masterpiece hidden in the closet.
Slash it before the queen on Sunday after the
Meeting. There is nothing left except oranges in a fruit
Bowl. Take a deep breath and prepare for the upset
Towards the red lipstick on
The side of the packet.
It’s easy when you don’t think about.
Keep going.
You are floating…
Alice Lenkiewicz is editor of Neon Highway poetry magazine, and she organises readings under the same name in Liverpool, where she lives. She is a former student of the MA Writing Studies at Edge Hill College of Higher Education. Maxine is her first novella (containing prose and poetry) and is due for publication by Bluechrome.
Alice writes of the book:
The novella explores a brief lapse in the life of Maxine, a bored housewife living in the 1950s. Realising that her life is uninteresting and lacking in meaning she strives to astral travel back in time where she encounters the muses from famous ancient masterpieces.
While her life tends to parallel that of the past she realises she is faced with perplexing and challenging adjustments in her life. Unable to come to terms with these changes, she seeks help from Poets A-F who encourage and inspire her to travel beyond her own conformist boundaries.
Maxine’s journey aims to look beyond the traditional western value system. She is a person who refuses to align herself with reason and truth. Instead she is seeking something interchangeable. In this way she seems to exist neither in the past nor in the present. The book is concerned with challenging notions of reality as well as traditional notions of what a person must do to achieve happiness.
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