Andrew Duncan

Legends of the Warring Clans

or, The Poetry Scene in the 1990s

published by alt.pinko, 165 Coppice Road, Nottingham, Notts N5 7GX, United Kingdom
All rights reserved
© Andrew Duncan, 2019
The right of Andrew Duncan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The Poetry Scene in the 1990s
Contents

Introduction 3
Measuring up the Non-Representational: Out of Everywhere 7
The End of the 1950s 17
50 Meals at Macdonald’s 24
What Happened In The 1990s, part 1 31
What Happened In The 1990s, part 2 39
The poetic right-wing: Oxford; Mainstream postmodernism (Muldoon, Fenton, and
Motion); Christian poets: (Hill; Thrilling) 45
Born in the 60s, part 1, avant-garde neoclassicism (DS Marriott, Simon Smith, Rob
MacKenzie); part 2, reviews (David Rushmer, sand writings; Nicholas Johnson, David
Greenslade, Tim Atkins, Tim Allen, Andy Brown) 66
Real space and virtual space; the volume that sound fills (discusses Norman Jope) 87
The critique of language and everyday life: Peter Finch, antibodies; Kelvin Corcoran,
Lyric Lyric; Purple and Green; Two Women Dancing, by Elisabeth Bartlett 97
Myths of restitution: between Jung and Object Relations: David Barnett, All the Year
Round; RF Langley, Twelve Poems; Michael Haslam, Four Poems; Vittoria Vaughan, The
Mummery Preserver 116
The Talking Dead, and Caked-On Kissproof Indigo (Steve Sneyd, In Holds of Earthen
Coil; Peter Riley, Distant Points; Elisabeth Bletsoe, Portraits of the Artist's Sister; Kerry
Sowerby, The Resuscitators) 129
Fellfoot Ginstone Bazzilica: Barry MacSweeney, The Book Of Demons 144
Rhymes with Hayworth: Tom Raworth 150
Solar Implied Halo of Burial Ash: Allen Fisher and the School of London 156
London Thing, Two: Robert Sheppard’s Daylight Robbery, Empty Diaries and Twentieth
Century Blues 169
The Aberystwyth punk avant-garde 172
The tyranny of distance: essay on poetry and the Internet 175
Conductors of Chaos 190
Autocritique: or, What Else Happened in the 1990s 223

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 1

INTRODUCTION
28.3.97

A central sociolinguistic gesture in poetry is diminishing reality; there is wanting a verb whose
meaning is “I diminish your reality”, “I write off what you are about to say”. This is called
“blanking” in social contact: you say “hello” to someone who then ignores you. Of course,
selective attention is a weak phrase; all attention is this. One source is inherited class strife;
middle class people wrote off those of low income (also of low education, and low status), and
working class people wrote off middle class people out of revenge and solidarity with their
families. “Not reading” and “misreading” are local skills; people walk around with de-perceptual
equipment, 80% of the social spectrum suppressed, as if by a high-tech glass. Non-listening
sulks, tantrums, and walkouts are absolutely standard in the poetry world, as common as
amplified attention; dissimilation as violent as assimilation; people are still sulking about things
that happened twenty years ago, or fifty. What we call personality could be an array of
repressions, a unique signature of blocks dissecting an originally intact and common signal.
Harold Perkin observes, in his remarkable study of modern British society, that the
membership of both major political parties halved during the 1970s. Politicisation, at that point,
actually meant depoliticisation—withdrawing into your bedroom and re-designing a toy
universe, while leaving public and economic power structures to the unscrupulous. Poetry since
the 1970s has undergone massive depoliticisation. I like poets who want to erase the city of
oppression, not plot to live in one of the nicer parts of it. I laugh at people who accept a need for
objectivity at every level without realising that this qualifies them to make good employees who
will carry out any policy and leave the making of value judgments to somebody else.
The word fair strikes a deep chord with almost everyone here in Britain, an ambient word
spreading out to vast dimensions, even though no one can say quite what it means in aesthetics. I
have been constantly visited, when composing poetry, by an involuntary daydream in which
someone storms into my living-room, tears my hand from the word processor and says, “This is
false and partial!”, and I say “You’re wrong. Kindly leave the room”, and they say, “No, you’re
wrong. Kindly leave the room”, and I find myself in the street below, longingly looking up at the
suggestive silhouette of the Macintosh PC in the window. I cannot be balanced and impartial,
because that would imply that there is a majority group among the readers who will, at some
undisclosed date, declare themselves in broad agreement with me: such a group does not exist.
Imagine a poet who, before a reading in some provincial city, looks at the audience and thinks, I
can’t read what I planned to read, and then, I don’t know what to read because the audience is
too mixed and much of it can’t be gauged from their appearance. Should I devote energy to
disqualifying those who disagree with me? Not only poets need to be liked but also critics; my
advice is of little use to someone whose aesthetic reactions are different. It would save the time
of those who are going to disagree with my judgments if I described the boundaries of my own
position—but this would take more space than this book allows. If identity could be summed up
in a few words, we wouldn’t bother to read poetry, I think. Anyway, a great deal of the

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experience of poetry consists of becoming, temporarily, someone else, and ceasing to be me. I
am constantly being accused of unreconstructed socialism, brazen conservatism, arid
intellectuality, pop culture superficiality, pathological open-mindedness, Calvinist fanaticism,
etc., and I deny none of it.
Even the geometrical existence of a place above the plain of poetry from where one could
observe more than a few square inches is in doubt; is detachment from the overt content of the
poem an access of exciting power or simply an appalling loss of information and energy? The
claim that there is a depth to the poem—concealed and unknown to the poet, and open to the
rapacious power of the critic—is seriously in question; it may be simply an act of colonialist
violence. The speech in which a human being has diminished reality says something about both
the object and the subject. Is there a depth or is the poem all surface? What is the analogy
between this unseeing vision and the managerialism that looks through people to see their work
output and the possibilities of manipulating them?
I was touched by R. L. Mégroz’s complaint, in his excellent 1933 book on modern British
poetry, that poetry publication had by now reached such a spate that no-one could keep up with
it. (It is upsetting how few elements of the contemporary scene really can’t be found described in
Mégroz.) Faced with some 2,000 poetry publications in a single year, in this book my treatment
is rigorously selective—in other words, indulgently exclusive. I have obeyed my own
enthusiasms throughout, and where I get bored, I stop. (Accusations about representing the
official version will only evoke a sardonic sneer from me, since I wrote almost the whole of this
book while on welfare benefits.) The small circulation of almost all of those poetry publications
points to a multitude of very precisely defined, elusive, markets: broad sweeps of description are
therefore hopelessly inaccurate, and I have concentrated on a few dozen texts rather than grope
for a transcendence by blanking out all the differentiations. I can only guess at the shape of what
I didn’t read; I hope it is full of masterpieces.
Any prose summary is premature but can speed up the next step forward—which builds
on it and denies it. I am apparently unable to abandon a review until I am completely exhausted
and unable to broach the topic ever again. I have not attempted to review every book of interest.
My favourite books of this decade would include Robert Crawford and W. N. Herbert’s
Sharawaggi; Dreaming Flesh; Future Exiles (selected poems by Allen Fisher and Brian Catling);
John Seed’s Interior in the Open Air; Tom Raworth’s Eternal Sections; David Chaloner’s The
Edge; Denise Riley’s, Mop Mop Georgette; Maggie O’Sullivan’s In the House of the Shaman; R.
F. Langley’s Twelve Poems; Michael Haslam’s A Whole Bauble; Grace Lake’s, Bernache
Nonnette; Floating Capital: 15 London Poets (edited by Robert Sheppard and Adrian Clarke);
Conductors of Chaos (edited by Iain Sinclair); Colin Simms’s Goshawk Lives; Barry
MacSweeney’s Pearl; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake; Alexander Hutchison’s The Moon
Calf; and Geoffrey Hill’s Canaan. I have reviewed almost all of these in various places.
Incidentally, the best publisher of contemporary poetry is Equipage. It is annoying that this
should be so, when they don’t have a staff, don’t do publicity, don’t put blurbs on their book
jackets, don’t have a grant, photocopy their poets’ own camera-ready copy, and only do
pamphlets that bookshops won’t stock—but there it is.
While writing this Introduction, I was faced with a poem, submitted to Angel Exhaust, the
magazine I edit, which described the author’s memory of buying, in 1987, the limited-edition
special extended 13 minute 12” mix of ‘This Corrosion’, and of hearing it on the radio and
seeing it as dedicated to her. This is commodity fetishism; someone presents themselves as an
adjunct of their consumption habits, using the exceptional act of consumption as a self-

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adornment, like a very special outfit; a shimmering extension to the identity. I see the Sisters of
Mercy (from York) as a dated Goth band, and ‘This Corrosion’ (of which I do have a copy
somewhere in the archives) as the modern equivalent of ‘Johnny Remember Me’; but I think
only poetry extreme and brilliant enough to be desired, fetishised and consumed in this way can
reach a large audience.
The parameters of this book are: Britishness; poetry; modern; and so I appear as advocate
of these, if only to make my subject more interesting and compete with other books. In fact these
limits are a form of alienation, abnegation and imprisonment; specialisation is akin to being in
love with something, but isn’t quite the same thing! The single most visible factor in the area is
the lack of public interest in it; its prestige abroad is even lower than its prestige at home. This is
fact; my interpretation is that there is a tendency among the poets I have studied not to develop
their own individuality to its full potential. Too many have gone a little way and turned back
towards the centre, haunted by a nostalgia for the past and afraid of isolation.
Anyone who makes a close study of the literary process in a Communist country will
have been struck by the similarities between their literary functionaries and our own. Intelligent
people who begin by making one compromise with the truth, in the name of social solidarity, tell
lie after lie after lie in the process of proving their compromises right, achieve institutional
power, and end up controlled by their perceptual blocks. Young people smell this from a long
way off. The scene might be improved by getting rid of the 200 most prominent poetry
managers, as they are too steeped in cynicism, low expectations, connivance, dishonesty and
self-righteousness to be saved. The 1997 British general election, which threw out several
hundred Conservative MPs, was inspiring to me in this connection.
Much of first person awareness consists of representations of third persons, because
people are the most complex elements in the environment that our brain is trying to fathom.
Where a situation is being observed by several participants simultaneously, the reality of that
situation is composed by all of them; the poetic transition from the awareness of an individual to
a valid meaning, put into words and therefore shared, is fraught. If incomprehension were so
inevitable, we would abandon language and act in darkness. I see a great many statements of the
general types:

“You cannot understand me”

(i.e. I understand what you understand)

“I have a perfect understanding of myself”

(i.e. I do not need to listen to other people’s opinions)

I find both types perfectly untenable. Most contemporary artistic positions, of critics or poets,
can be disassembled by spotting erroneous statements of these two types in them, and pulling
them out. Epistemology cannot be recruited to the cause of pure self-regard, or of pure
promoting the self like a commodity. You cannot deny the validity of other people’s awareness
without denying your own; and we must do both these things, creating an empty space that we
slowly refill by conjectures and tests and dialogue. A modern poem has to include third person,
attributed, perceptions as well as first person, unmediated, perceptions. Some poets wipe out the
fraught area of feelings and ideas, leaving only bodies and objects, achieving nihilistic brutality;
some integrate by cutting out the moments of affect, leaving only what is banal, faded and

5
compromised; others express the tension and dialectic between conflicting and affective
individuals. The governance of our behaviour belongs to us but its meaning belongs to others.
The value of the share capital of listed companies went up by a factor of 15 during the
period 1979-97; the main process in these years has been the rise of the corporation, causing a
redefinition of the middle class identity towards the good corporate employee, a model or rule-
set derived from 1950s America and mediated by business consultancies. The eclipse of the
private client, the direct owner, has been reflected in literary discourse by the rise in the prestige
of impersonality; terms like “rigorous”, “analytical”, “conscious”, and “give an account of” show
the decline of interest in first person experience, displaced by a new ideal of being an employee.
The great energy of these years has been upward mobility, and all parts of the landscape reflect
its impulse. What we may be seeing is the decline of the bourgeois subjectivism defined by
historians like Arnold Hauser as marking the literary rise of the middle class market in the
eighteenth century. The striving is no longer for sincerity, but for the repression of feelings and
the possession of expensive high-tech gadgets and behaviour strategies learnt at management
seminars.
Having no money made me especially resistant to people offering me third-rate poetry on
the grounds that it would make me a better person. There seems little point in deriving social or
artistic values from a radical solution that all influential political groups have written off. We are
used to resisting the support which art in all known societies gives to the power structure and the
power elite, and to accepting it; in literature, the object of praise is not the party which chances to
hold power within a cyclical alternation of elusive significance, nor the owners of wealth, but the
possessors of cultural capital, which is simultaneously the productive material used by both
readers and writers to generate the literary experience. Literature belongs to a small class
spectrum (that which in Bourdieu’s terms possesses high cultural capital and low physical
capital), massively invested in the education industry; a field based on devastating inequality
which offers impressive material and status benefits to the successful. The attributes of the
successful are attractive to everyone caught in this field, and it is these that supply, in various
forms, the attractions of poetry. To return to my state of poverty... how attractive it is to eat in
restaurants and to have enough education to have a cultured conversation.
Researching poetry is about finding good poetry, but as a daily duty mostly involves
reading bad poetry—which makes me apathetic, unhappy and full of self-regard. I feel virtuous
for doing it. This act of self-exploitation (and people who are unemployed do tend to go through
repetitive cycles of self-punishing monotonous stressful tasks) made me receptive: my gratitude
to talented poets who relieved the monotony was piercing. I read some 300 books of poetry, not a
few thousand. (Many of the best poems of the period I inspected in manuscript, or in magazines.)
This dearly won receptivity vanished when I began recording the results—the incomplete text
swallows one up and blocks out everything else. Having a thesis to nurture, a plot of ideas to
defend, drives everything else out of people’s heads.

(27/82019 qualification) The phrase warring clans was slightly taking a rise out of factionalism.
My colleague Peter Barry also called a book Poetry Wars. This term is literary rather than
accurate – poetry was not literally in a state of war. Peter was undoubtedly referring back to a
book about clothes and adornment, Style Wars – clothing in the 1980s was also not involved in a
literal war, but that author was copying the title of a film, Star Wars. One of the features of the
decade was the attenuation of factional loyalties – so the title might have been better as
forgetting what tribe you belong to. It is obviously true that people mostly regard attention as a

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precious resource which they are going to save by ignoring most poetry, but that once past a
certain barrier they regard attentiveness as bliss and want to have a poem which takes up as
much attentiveness as possible. If you copied out those barrier lines and plotted thousands of
them on a map, you would have the geography of poetry. Most poetic theory was there as a basis
for rejecting entire cubic kilometres of poetry unread. Poets were generally unhappy about this,
but it does not fall into the category of war.

MEASURING UP THE NON-REPRESENTATIONAL

A discussion of Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North

America and the UK

‘Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures; and whatever falls in with it, will
meet with admirers amongst Readers of all Qualities and Conditions’.
—Addison

‘Go on Iggy, entertain me’. —Anon.

The covert ambience of the anthology Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by
Women in North America and the UK (edited by Maggie O’Sullivan) is of postgraduate projects
at the elite universities; where the poetry itself is insipid, this inexplicit flavour comes out onto
centre stage, and dominates the atmosphere; it is the concealed motive of the unmotivated. To be
allowed to write in this way marks you out as a high-flier in the academic corporation. It is
hopeless trying to understand this kind of writing without looking in parallel at the grant
applications which accompany it, and which sustain it and are filled by it. The fax has become a
status symbol; one hears reports of a particular institutional poet wandering through the corridors
of a certain arts college with a fax in their hand, a power object: “Look at me, I got a fax.
Someone wants me for a gig”. The CV–I have at least once received a CV of several pages as a
support for poems being sent in to Angel Exhaust–is pure self-aggrandisement; its aggressive

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thrusting of the Person which is its only referent is dialectically related to the zero-person of non-
representational poetry. The undeclared co-authors are the members of panels allocating
Foundation money, grants, creative writing fellowships, and so forth. Their values are like a
church, ethical and self-denying in aim, but also preferring monumental and classical buildings,
resonating with high-prestige projects of the past several thousand years.
There is a class difference between minding-the-kids creative writing jobs and avant-
garde creative writing. If you get stuck dealing with bored 15-year olds, you present yourself as
friendly, anti-intellectual, fun, anti-authoritarian, disliking books, etc. If you are a “creative
writing fellow” faced with supercilious and erudite and ambitious postgraduates, you have to
present yourself as controlling access to what is authenticated as the very latest thing, and
perfectly indifferent to anything which gives itself away as “out of date”. Both approaches are
careerist, but for different sources of revenue; the second pays a lot more. There must be a latest
thing, because there is a market that wants to consume it. We like to hear about the privileged,
not the poor; like to see the splendid treasures of the past, not the mean huts and crocks. We read
poetry as a leisure time task, and perhaps it is logical that the poetry itself should display leisure,
as the absence of material constraints and problems.
Within the academic milieu, one progresses through taught courses to supervised research
to independent original work. Studying the words of others precedes, and is a lower prestige
activity than, creating your own statements. Only the best and most diligent students are allowed
to proceed to the stage of original unsupervised work. The positional value of these stages affects
the way academic poetry is consumed.
The term “linguistically innovative”, clumsy and stumbling though it is, is condensed: it
is a signal to a given market, and reassures them that what is on offer conforms to their taste,
which is a complex organic thing, adequately internalised by editors in this field, but not
described anywhere. Part of its message is that “utterances are being generated which were not
permissible within the poetic grammar valid in the recent past”; this is, also, an attack on
mainstream poetry, which can claim to offer new social tones, or poetry written by members of
social groups which were not writing poetry fifty years ago, but cannot claim innovation in the
means of poetry (for example metre, connectivity, logic, ideas of reference, sentence structure).
The distinction being advanced is like that between a new film and a new kind of film, between
new utterances and a new grammar.
Being innovative is not aesthetically positive; it is a neutral adjective, one would say sub-
equipped. The phrase codes for a shared intellectual background of identifications and notions of
what is out of date, modern, chic, etc. Even the ability to base your poetry on Gertrude Stein is an
indication that you went to a top-flight university where they let the kids study “difficult modern
texts”, rather than a mass-production type university where all the set texts “tell a story” and
have “sociological relevance”. One of the ways in which elite universities maintain their
reputation is by turning to areas of study, especially theory and deconstruction, which only pre-
selected and highly motivated students can follow or understand. One of the hot spots for this
kind of performance-based differentiation is the figure of the author: autobiographical poetry, or
poetry in which you are given a character to identify with, whose personality or experiences
provide the structure into which you fit the bits of information presented in the poems, is for the
peasants. The less autobiographical your poetry is, the more acceptable it is to the elite
postgraduate English departments. The economy of prestige instructs that one has to be
conformist, in order to pick up the reflected glory of these exalted central sites, but one has to be
original, i.e. far from pop culture, to make this signal. It gets argued that the sociological

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background is invisible inside the texts, which are not about daily life; but human beings are
brilliant at organising this kind of social correlation, so the information pervades once you know
the background, and you couldn’t learn the interpretation rules for this minority poetry (or,
possibly, even find the books) without acquiring this background information on the way.
The poets included in Out of Everywhere are: Caroline Bergvall, Paula Claire, Grace
Lake, Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Maggie O’Sullivan, Denise Riley, Fiona Templeton;
Rae Armantrout, Nicole Broussard, Tina Darragh, Deanna Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Barbara
Guest, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Karen McCormack,
Bernadette Mayer, Melanie Neilson, Carlyle Reedy, Joan Retallack, Lisa Robertson, Leslie
Scalapino, Catriona Strang, Rosmarie Waldrop, Diane Ward, Hannah Weiner, Marjorie Welish.
The second group are North American, while I do not have the expertise to separate Canadian (or
French Canadian) from US citizens. Unfortunately, the inclusion of thirty different poets
precludes aesthetic discussion; only the innovative aspect offers itself to us. Denise Riley
complained, during editing, about the phrase, “Linguistically Innovative” in the collection’s
subtitle; she didn’t regard herself as a linguistic innovator and didn’t see the value of it. As a
brand label, it may be code for “appeals to an intelligent audience”, which people feel guilty
about saying outright.
The Afterword to Out of Everywhere lists, as magazines where this kind of poetry and
theoretical writing appears, Active in Airtime, Angel Exhaust, Avec, Big Allis, Five Fingers
Review, Fragmente, Object Permanence, Parataxis, Raddle Moon, Ribot and Talisman. This
could not be a complete repertory of ideas, because the whole range of ideas animating the
conceptual art community, or the academic Left, over the past thirty years, has also poured into
this mixing-bowl. A list of 200 books would scarcely be complete. I spent six years editing one
of these magazines.
It is quite easy to prove on paper that this kind of poetry cannot work, as the reader
cannot read it by interpretative rules which they already have, i.e. which already exist, i.e. are not
new, not changeable at the whim of the poet, etc. Such proofs lose their colour when the test of
contact with the text proves them wrong. Perhaps this is not surprising; human beings, after all,
are fabled for their intelligence, i.e. for a skill detached from concrete situations that provides
effective tactics in unfamiliar situations. Human ability to work out rule-based symbolic
constructions is incalculably good; mice, too, often escape from cages you would have thought
were mouse-proof. The theory of “what is incomprehensible” is no easier than the theory of how
language refers to reality, or what social structure is, or anything else impossible.
Writing poetry to an aesthetics derived from conjectural theorising is more difficult than
writing to an aesthetic based on concrete experiences. A theoretical artist may have to complete,
let’s say, 25 steps of original thought, and if one of these steps goes wrong, the end result is
depressing, puzzling and incomplete. Out of Everywhere is not exactly free of this.
An anthology like the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry offers itself to
confident generalisations; the poets follow the same rules for constructing poems, and those rules
are little different from the rules for making conversation, for social communication, etc. To
describe Out of Everywhere, one might have to write thirty lengthy essays, one for each
contributor. Daniel Dennett remarks that the HIV virus contains more genetic diversity, measured
in codons, than the whole order of mammals: avant-garde art is like a virus, it shifts to fill all the
conceptually available space of diversity, whereas other kinds of art cling to their set structure
and define anything else as failure. When someone was reviewing Out of Everywhere for Angel
Exhaust, I instructed her not to try to review the thing as a whole: because I didn’t believe there

9
was any pattern the parts converged onto, and I thought the reviewer would go mad trying to find
one.
Ninety-nine percent of the diversity in contemporary poetry is in the avant-garde. A more
listable rule-set would be this one: “Write poetry which is the negative of orthodox poetic rules,
which are these”; the “these” might be like what Charles Cantalupo has evoked as,

the more dominant, popular, contemporary award-winning modes of straight,

sentimental narrative in a blend of autobiography, dramatic monologue,
ruefulness, anecdote and bourgeois objects with a lot of weather in the perspective
of either a transparent eye or an intensely made up ethnic and/or sexual version of
this fashion.

This NOT may be poor in descriptive power; just think of the extent of the possibilities allowed
by shunning this kind of poetry. Reviewers generally exploit the redundancy of works of art in
order to summarise large numbers of them in a concise and clinching way; experimental art has
taken this redundancy as a resource to be spent and used up, so that a clinching description of it
might be as long as book. Art in an industrial age tends to be repetitive and reliable; a whole
approach to leading one’s life, perhaps. Conceptual art removes the stress on reproducing the
sensuous illusionist detail, the brush-strokes, to concentrate on the quality of decisions; insisting
on the practice of consciousness. Illusionist art flourished in particular societies and places;
directed, possibly, by a distrust of fantasy. The abdication from the honest artisanal task of
realism brought about, isostatically, a move back to fantasy.
The main influence in Out of Everywhere is probably Gertrude Stein. A more general
comparison would be euphuism, and John Lyly’s Euphues; refined people talking refined
language where material problems are remote and style in social intercourse has become of
pressing concern. A claim sometimes made for the non-referential is that it is “language
generating itself”; hence the promotional phrase “language poetry”. This is a grave error of
theory; you could put a pile of language in a room for a million years, and it wouldn’t generate
any new utterances. Only humans can utter. The point is more that of “associational chains
developing without drawing on real experience”, and of course language is shorn of its main
function here. Word associations produce new lines in the manner of ‘One, two, buckle my
shoe’, although there is no sense in which “one, two” could generate the phrase “buckle my
shoe”. Associational patterns run through the poems in Out of Everywhere like a bee blatting
around a biscuit-tin. The other main antecedent is Surrealism, and indeed most of the poetry here
could be categorized as an offshoot of Surrealism. If we go back to Roger Roughton’s poems (in
Penguin’s Poetry of the Thirties) we find that in their disconnectedness a little verbal world
emerges, with its rules defined by the flow within the poem; these verbal worlds, expanded even
to volume length, supply much of Out of Everywhere. Perhaps you may find that what is so
overwhelmingly reminiscent of the 1930s does not feel like a new sensation in 1996:

Heels unmoved in pure opposition drive the snub at various tracks.

Versions equate between patrons and liberty as an omelette of man.

(Deanna Ferguson, ‘Sisters of the Even Jesus’)

10
Great stretches of Out of Everywhere offer a kind of quaintness, like the sayings of someone who
has taken LSD for the first time. LSD is popular, and so could this poetry be. An uneducated
audience could find it funny, chatty, and dégagé:

Poppy under a young

pepper tree, she thinks.
The Siren always sings
like this. Morbid
glamor of the singular.
Emphasizing correct names
as if making amends.

(Rae Armantrout)

This is pretty, and one could grow fond of it.

As a genre arises or dies, we glimpse the fact that its inner rules are partly arbitrary, but
become naturalised as we are exposed to many examples of the style; and that the version of the
speaking self presented in a personal genre (autobiography, religious confession, lyric poetry) is
also arbitrary and “naturalised”, so that when a genre dies we see the central generative code of
the artworks suddenly, briefly, emerge into light and, simultaneously, the collapse of a speaking
self and of a favoured site of self-consciousness, so that both artificiality and a deeper, wordless,
underlying structure become visible and see and speak. The use of conjectural, artificial rule-sets
in Out of Everywhere is a capture of this experience, an attempt to recreate it under controlled
conditions. The self cannot simultaneously be authentic and pristine, and subject to conventional,
historically unstable, rules; but language is just such a set of rules. The scheme is to make such
rule-sets switchable, optional, like the key of a piece of music.
Leaving aside aesthetic assessment, I deplore a certain attempt to turn a single aesthetic
into “the modern aesthetic par excellence”, or “the only intelligent aesthetic”, or “the only
prestige object worth competing for”. The plurality of superstructures invalidates the judgments
even of recipients of major foundation grants. But such an economic context does not prevent a
poet from scaling the artistic heights.
Some light may be shed on our subject by going back to earlier veins of American poetry,
in particular those described by David Perkins in A History of Modern Poetry. He says of T. S.
Eliot:

The ancestral sense of election and of mission still lingered in such genteel
families of New England background, though the sense of election was transposed
from the religious to the moral, social and cultural spheres.

And he describes the “genteel tradition”, especially in the intellectual milieu of Boston and
Harvard as,

vestigial Puritanism in the form of excessive moral anxiousness and timidity;

vestigial Transcendentalism in the form of vague idealism, not much related to
actual life; earnest pursuit of ‘culture’ and a faith in its spiritual or quasi-religious
value.

11
No one who shares these values is unaware that they can be laughed at; and so that poetry
benefits from elements of chattiness, playfulness, frivolity, where the child of pious parents
liberates herself from ideals and simply has fun. Claiming to be “fun” is important in Out of
Everywhere; but it is infinitely different from pop poetry, or pop culture, and playfulness is a
social imperative rather than something natural and uncalculated. Perkins notes, that what was
true around 1911 was a, ‘a special deference and attraction to Europe, where “culture” was
thought to have its native home’; this is of course no longer true, but the deference to Modernist
icons like Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Theodor Adorno, Charles Olson or John Ashbery is
equally unquestioned; such assets form the wealth which distinguishes a whole class. He notes
further that the “genteel style” in poetry was ‘earnest and unequivocal, traditional, abstract, well-
bred, inspirational, and meticulous’. The transition from being impersonal and uplifted to being
anti-autobiographical was painless. If you want to attract foundation money, or NEA money, it is
a good idea to present yourself as significant rather than enjoyable; impersonal rather than self-
centred; critical rather than sensuous. The easiest way to present yourself as significant is to
flaunt connections: social, intellectual and formal, with living or dead artists who are established
as “significant”. The genteel values which Perkins so ably describes closely resemble the ones to
which award panels refer their own actions, not for choosing art for personal gratification, but for
authorising something as worthy and ethical and elevated. However, eighty years do not roll by
without a class, or a cultural elite, changing its repertoire.
In a poem that has no autobiographical or representational intent, one responds to the
rhythms and textures in a purely aesthetic way. Choice is foregrounded and becomes dominant, a
resipiscence perhaps of the personality in a restful, infantile mode; the values of the poem tend to
become those of interior design, textures detached from meaning receding away from the
urgency of consciousness into the opulent and accommodating blankness of a decor. The
evolution of conceptual (and non-representational) art was through a phase of shocking
comfortless intransigence into smooth, uncontroversial, gentle, and eventually up-market
decorative textures.
The argument of some of the nonrepresentational poets in the USA was that capitalism is
obsessed by objects, and so that, by presenting poems which are free of objects, one is criticising
object culture and so undermining capitalism. It seems unlikely that this is a threat to share
values. The inconsequentiality of the poems is buoyed up by very large amounts of argument, a
kind of shell inside which the poems exist, and which is indistinguishable from publicity material
that urges you to buy them. It is not argument in the sense that it takes on and responds to the
arguments of those who disagree with it. It is not theory in the sense that it is an attempt to
provide explanatory models for facts, and to guide empirical investigations. The poems become
objects, tradable within the status-seeking status-using status-generating game of applying for
monetary awards, being resident artists on MLA courses, teaching creative writing courses,
achieving publication, and so forth; their value is guaranteed by the amount of theory supporting
their application. Theory is, in this world, mutual sponsorship and endorsement. Only if the value
of being endorsed by any individual were equal to the value of being endorsed by John Ashbery,
Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, and Helen Vendler, would the “personality” really be out of this
game. Money and power are not objects.
The Christian mediaevalist critic C. S. Lewis wrote (with E. M. Tillyard presenting the
opposite view) a book called The Personal Heresy, where he attacks the idea that the artist’s
personality is of central interest in the work of art. The prehistory of the drive for impersonality

12
is in religion, which has been developing a critique of self-esteem, and of the validity of the
immediate data of consciousness, for two thousand years. The prehistory of the drive for big,
introspective, autobiographical narratives lies in the sinner’s confession and the saint’s life, and
so is also within religion.
The early years of the feminist movement were filled with accounts of life stories,
narrated, really, to bring the old life to an end–narrative as destruction. While these writings, or
utterances, were oriented towards the past, they tended to reproduce the behavioural rules of the
male-dominated social order, and this was the guarantee of their realism: the story was authentic
so far as it recounted an inauthentic society. Notoriously, the excitement of the story depended on
the extremity and blackness of the male crimes that it narrated and exposed; and without which
there was no story. With time, attention was bound to turn towards the future liberated state, and
the recent to now state of being half-liberated, i.e. conscious but within male-dominated
capitalist society. Orientation towards the future demands the surrender of realism, as a literary
principle, in favour of conjecture. The multiplicity of the possible futures points the literary work
of art towards the status, and the flexibility and rule-basedness, of a game. By writing poetry
based on consciously established rules, one is rehearsing for a new form of society in which, as a
first step, everyone behaves differently. Simultaneously, one is drawing attention to the existence
of buried socially-given rules which underlie and structure the experience of art and social
behaviour, as a way of uncovering the degree of convention and, hence, the true dimensions of
freedom, and bringing about consciousness as the prelude to a new society.
The transition from a state where I always have to do what other people say to one where
everyone always has to do what I say is non-dialectic; a society of millions of people making this
transition would be un-liberated and might very exactly resemble the one we already live in. The
solution is to reduce the self to a background and to foreground the possibility of shifting to a
new rule-set, which continues to regulate relations between individuals, but creates a new
pattern. Nonrepresentational poetry is not about a new rule-set, as a science fiction novel might
be, but about the characteristics of all rule-sets, the programming of the human faculty for
making rule-sets.
Where the text has no wish to attach itself to reality, builds a world of its own within
which events unfold, and adopts a playful, non-didactic tone as an encouragement to play inside
the text, it may come out like a P. G. Wodehouse novel. There are unmistakable signs of this in
Caroline Bergvall’s book Eclat. The heroine apparently leads an Arcadian, unbound existence, as
a drone. The phrases camp academicism, avant-garde neoclassicism, and dressing-up game drift
up. The proposition is that leisure and freedom from care are, as in the drinking-party of the
Symposium, the situation that predisposes one to philosophise. The novels of Aldous Huxley, also
based on Plato’s dialogues, might be a better comparison. The text evolves in a continuous
present, as recommended by Gertrude Stein, where there is no notion of character or of
consequences. It does not, then reproduce the values of society, but it does feel like a Wodehouse
novel, which is also set in a fantasy world full of inconsequential, leisured people. It can be
argued that character shows itself most in the unbound elements of behaviour; for example, more
in informal speech than in formal, impersonal, heavily conditioned speech. Non-functional
acts—the fluttering of a hand, a laugh, a hairstyle—are underdetermined and, therefore, contain
the elements of freedom, the most relevant to a new society in which, at first, all acts would be
uncertain, spontaneous and hesitant. It is claimed, for example, that fantasy is non-alienated, a
protest against alienation, and so the material for a new society, fleetingly glimpsed. The problem
here is the underdetermined relationship of fantasy to the mind or to anything else; fantasy does

13
not repay attention because it is produced ad libitum. The issue is whether dense patternedness,
informational richness, are to be found in realism, where the artist can tap into the complexity of
the universe outside herself, and where events are nuanced and modified by the pressure of
dozens of independent processes which they bump into; or in fantasy, where the complexity is
that of the brain, and the logic of pattern is unrestrained by the laws of the finite outside world.
There have been debates within the feminist camp about the poetry which is spoken by a
big self, recounting autobiography with a pathos, usually, of frustration, painting sensuously rich,
realist scenes as aids for emotional identification, presenting the expansion of the self
(acquisition of experiences, fulfilment, elimination of limits, etc.), under the ideological aegis
that getting in touch with your emotions means having bigger emotions and demanding more
from the world, and not criticising yourself in any way. Poets, and editors, readers, or reviewers,
who have invested in this form of poetry, are indignant about the kind in Out of Everywhere, and
even deny it the status of feminist. But it doesn’t seem plausible that society is a very large array
of self-realising selves, or that a life is a picture in which the Transcendental Self is reflected like
the mind of God being reflected in the universe. Neither the socialist, nor the Christian, nor the
academic strands of feminism have been able to get on with this version of events. As for self-
realisation, you can only become what you are not. The choice between the two different styles
of poetry is perhaps irrational, merely aesthetic, and not revealed by verbal justifications.
The freedom from compulsion brought about by shifting the stress onto conscious
decisions and away from recurrent surges coming out of the deep self is anti-Romantic. It does
suggest that you are going to make some attempt to accommodate to other people, forming
attachments to them as much as to your own incalculable moods. The equation that more
powerful emotions mean more power may be simply wrong. The shifting of the “thing-which-
makes-decisions” into a more external, partly socialised zone can be a way of reducing anxiety.
After all, many people are afraid of repeating the patterns of their childhood and adolescence, or
of repeating the emotional patterns of their parents’ marriage; a reduction of affect and
compulsiveness may bring a huge increase of security, and so of power. The verbalisation
process generally is a way of moving emotional processes towards the outside, further away
from the blind molten core. Higher affect might mean greater sexual dependence on someone
else, or more dominating need for approval by authority, or more extreme guilt. The appeal of a
holiday may be precisely that we are under-occupied, calmly scanning a situation that demands
little of us. Hasn’t there always been a genre of poetry that was conventional, cultivated and non-
autobiographical? And which tranquillised us by presenting emotions as conventional,
controllable, leisure activities?
One of the terms that have drifted out of poststructuralism into literary discourse is
“decentring”. This is used in, among other places, Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir, where he is
talking about turning the study of texts from history into archaeology. Since the difference
between history and archaeology is precisely that the former offers writing, and therefore a set
(of letters or hieroglyphs, words, grammar, messages and interpretation rules) that can be read, as
if the speaker were addressing you, this is a paradox. How can you retrieve more by retrieving
less? If you are presented with a history of science which is largely positive biography about the
achievements of Great Men, history as a statue park written by their pupils or even themselves,
the only way to advance is, quite clearly, to blank out the heroism and look at the peripheral
information within the sources. When Foucault talks about studying ruptures, discontinuities of
intellectual history, this is a coded reference to Thomas Kuhn’s work on “paradigm shifts” (the
phrase derives from Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions); the phrases about rupture,

14
discontinuity, became buzzwords among avant-garde poets. By carrying out a reversal of figure
and ground in the act of reading, which incidentally all historians have to do, Foucault isolated
the act of identification and pointed out how central it is to the literary process; and perhaps to
the socialisation process, where we learn how to behave by passionately identifying with other
people and striving to imitate them. To think about what identification is, you have to stop doing
it. Decentring in poetry may be partly an imitation of fashions in intellectual history, without
justification or artistic intent except to avoid the charge of being naive.
The moment of a paradigm shift proposes two conceptual systems broken, with a
bleeding edge, side by side—a perfect didactic moment. Individuals continue; the solution of
continuity is in the collective rule-set, not in individuals. Necessarily, the sources of the new
system, and the defects that allow the old system to be overset, are in the periphery of awareness,
in the ingrained unexamined assumptions. The “archaeology” of texts fails to read them, fails to
share their assumptions; treats them as objects and exposes their material nature. Any socialist
has to treat the cultural production of the capitalist society he or she lives in as objects, and blank
out the vocal and imperious and dominating identification-grammar which is their highly-
finished centre; identification and illusion are, however provisionally, identified, as they were by
Brecht and his collaborators in the 1920s. Seriality allows comparison. The serial view of the
artwork, implied by the phrase “innovative”, decentres attention, inscribing the artwork in a
series, in which the lines of attention and focus are not given by the artwork, but by the series
and its constructor or curator; it is the material technique which evolves, something not part of
the message; the shift of attention to technique defocuses the ideological and emotional message.
Perhaps all people have the same feelings; the improvement of the work of art is then won by
attention to other elements of the ensemble, facets perhaps of its material nature. Fluency in the
reversal of centre/periphery (or figure/ground, or personality/objects) relationships is demanded
throughout Out of Everywhere, where the code becomes the message and the speaking subject
becomes an element in the array of technique.
The appeal of the sequence or project has to do with grant applications. You don’t get a
grant for work you’ve already done, but you have to propose a concrete programme to the panel,
or they will have no basis for saying yes. The solution is a project, an open-ended set of traces
that possesses an external description, more or less bankable. The project allows more work to be
created more or less as you need it, or as editors and event organisers call for it, while overtly
displaying your managerial control and denying your market status as an employee. The implied
freedom from autobiographical compulsions demonstrates that you are an educated artist who
has self-control. The ability to plan a year ahead suggests that you have mastery of time;
something everyone can admire. This Apollonian balance also defines the artist’s relationship to
the seriality enshrined in the word “innovation”; decay and discontinuity are built into the
artwork, but in a managed form. There is a certain relationship between the text of a publicity
handout; the text of an arts grant application; and the set of external rules by which a
“conceptual” “project” text is composed. The project is didactic; at its inception, it offers to
gather information about a formal possibility; the artist teaches himself or herself how to write
following a rule-set, and at the end the audience learns what the combinatory possibilities of that
virtual world are. This didactic potential makes the vital link between writing and teaching
creative writing, a necessary source of income. Words like “exploration”, “experiment”,
“investigation”, “possibilities”, and “mapping”, point to an envy of science or scholarship; they
replace the dirty-words “creation” and “expression”.

15
 The sequence might resemble an exercise for a muscle set, where repetition and lack of
function (except the autotelic one of the exercise itself) are useful qualities. But this is a
notoriously didactic situation.
Newness is not an aesthetic category; what was new in 1996 will not have lost its appeal
by the time this book is published. What was new in 1396 still retains an appeal. Renouncing
autobiography has been called distancing yourself from your own impulses. The link with an
excess of ethical drive, of self-denial, as we say, was suggested above. Perhaps the most
successful writer is the one who is most at home with themselves; the different impulses (of
fantasy, conjecture, memory, denial, identification, dissimilation, imitation, appropriation,
ornamentation) not cancelling each other out, but co-existing to permit an equable flow of
variation within the work of art. Containing opposites, an internal movement, captures a virtual
time within the work of art, which repeats and is independent of external time; the artist’s rhythm
is not mere seriality. Conflict can provide the complexity within the work of art, the dialectic, but
also destroy it, leaving something polarised and homogeneous as its exhausted product. The
poems in Out of Everywhere that have most life and movement are perhaps those least directly
specified by theory.
The drive of poets or consumers searching for non-personal poetry is almost frightening,
and only to be compared with the rage and frustration of a poet who, while realising that there is
someone across the room who can give them engagements and so needs to be cultivated, finds
that the person they are talking to refuses to stop and so blocks their rightful progress. For them
this is aesthetic sophistication, for others it seems like upward mobility. Poets with other
aesthetics simply go ignored and unread; a kind of tunnel vision about what is “not important”.
Being certain about what is going to become the latest segment of the progressing history of
Western art brings a wonderful sense of security and conformity; suddenly you know what your
examiner is looking for, and you can achieve status just by applying the rules. It’s like deciding
that mentioning Derrida all the time proves you are intelligent, or that wearing T-shirts by BLIP
guarantees you are stylish and cool. Shunning any mention of your background and personal life
could also come from entry into a new social setting where everyone else has high expectations,
they seem to be more sophisticated than you, and you are ashamed of where you come from. You
want to feel you belong; you feel other people are very observant. Well, I just did mention
Derrida so obviously I am intelligent and up to date.
When I first saw Westerns, I don’t recall anyone handing out programme notes to say that
“the rules of the Western are these, and what you have to watch is this”. No, we worked out the
rules by watching the films. If I had this ability when I was seven years old, I presumably still
have it, and so can work out the inner rules of speculative poetry. Bulk of material to work on is
necessary, though, to resolve ambiguities and confirm hypotheses, and this is another reason for
“project” writing, putting the new grammar through its paces.
When Kathleen Fraser writes,

the wing is not static but frayed, fettered, furling and stoney

its feathers cut as if from tissue or stiffened cheesecloth

condensed in preparation for years of stagework

attached to its historic tendons; more elaborate

than the expensive ribcage, grieving, stressed, yet

16
 marked midway along the breastbone with grains of light

[…]

Its
likeness consists of strength, atonality, pigment, emptiness and
shafts partly hollow I put my mouth just at the opening where
a steel edge gives way to an angle from which light emerges
along its soft narrow barbs If the wing had a voice it would
open through a shaft I am not of that feather

(‘Wing’)

the object shifts continually from being real to being imaginary; we watch it evolve and
simultaneously have the feeling that the space is one where it is safe and approved to
create our own fantasy objects; and realise that many of the “real” objects which populate
our life-world are imaginary objects which have deteriorated and rusted into place, lumps
of alienated subjectivity.

The End of the 1950s

Consulting two books expressing common opinions showed that something quite central was
happening: the exit of a generation of gatekeepers, the death of a hegemony. It was nothing less
than the end of the 1950s, the exit from stage of the cultural managers who had imposed the
norms which became dominant during the 1950s. While this was a central feature of the scene, it
is hard to date: it was perhaps already happening in 1985. The books in question are dated 1995
and 1996, but given that they are written by academics it is reasonable to guess that they record a
state of affairs as it was ten years earlier. It is also reasonable to accept that most people
committed to poetry are not easily managed and do not like being dunked in the 'tank of social
direction' which the media create through magazines, radio, book blurbs, etc. However, this

17
rather tainted world of commerce and the media is also the barrier through which poetry reaches
an audience, so changes in it do matter to poetry fans.
The books in question are Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism,
ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk (1996, 414pp + index) and Poetry in the British isles: non-
metropolitan perspectives, ed. Hans-Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz (1995, 310 pp. + index).
Reading these two volumes on a neglected era of British poetry is like having the floor of
the warehouse collapse above you and bales of exotic material come cascading around your ears.
Out of roughly 80 poets whom I consider significant (!), Contemporary British Poetry manages
sketches of 14; which, in this exceptionally rich and diffracted era, is a new high. The collections
are far in advance of anything which preceded them; anyone who does not read them may find
their views becoming out of date. They converge to exhibit a new synthesis, which emerged from
the subdivision or subletting of counter-cultural hopes in their decline around 1974.
The Acheson-Huk collection offers chapters on the anti-modernism of Donald Davie;
Roy Fisher; JH Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and Andrew Crozier; Poetry and the
Women's Movement (roughly 1970-79); Ian Hamilton Finlay; Gunn and Hughes; Jon Silkin,
Geoffrey Hill, and Tony Harrison; Geoffrey Hill; Carol Ann Duffy; an attack on the introduction
to an anthology by Carol Rumens; Black men's, and then Black women's, poetry; Scottish poetry
(in fact Douglas Dunn, Liz Lochhead, and Tom Leonard); Wales and "the cultural politics of
identity" (in fact Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick, and Jeremy Hooker). So if you're English, a
man, and began publishing after 1968, you don't get a look in; the collection is thirty years out of
date for that sector, although this is still ten years better than rival treatments. The diffraction
grating breaking of the literary space into spectral components answers to the market and avoids
the charge of patronage, as each writer identifies with their subjects; but prompts the reader to
get precious and reason that their own subjectivity is slighted, in the collection's own terms, by
the mismatch with every essayist. It also offers the possibility of temporarily and blissfully
surrendering one's self-possession to try on other clothes: Nice to see you, wouldn't want to be
you; if the vertices of the Gestalt are faithfully dissected and laid out, as behavable elements in
the essays; the function which the words of poems always carry out in relation to an experience.
The cover of CBP claims the participation of Eric Homberger, who features nowhere
within the covers; he is a mere verbal icon or come-on, flashing us back to his classic Art of the
Real. This is otherwise a nonpareil collection of statements about out-groups from within. The
prospect is enticing: a narrative about British poetry which takes the remote and obscure as its
vantage point, so that every fact, every poet, is new and original. The spatial periphery stands in
for the unknown as the temporal periphery, liminal between the unknowable and the worn-out,
the alluring and imaginable future after the overset of the forces, readily identified with a centre
and common sense opinion, which keep things as they are. Identification, sorting out the problem
of observer-observed interaction, is the commercial advantage, and so the problem. You cannot
say to someone, You cannot understand me, and also buy my book. The poets often shorten social
distance from their subjects in the same way; less self-narration than communalism. Belonging
texts store a world horizon of someone who lives in Cardiff (for example), whose recognition
patterns relate to Cardiff, who expects always to be in Cardiff, who grows warm when the sun
shines in Cardiff, who has a great stock of memories and projections about Cardiff, offering a
there for the reader to soak into. Afterwards, you can regain detachment and overview, but still
you have been there. The profit urge is to be swallowed by the pride of belonging to a
community; decisions are to be taken by local people steeped in short-distance knowledge,
globalisation is to be counteracted by the concertment of parishes. The consciousness of the

18
oppressed is false because all the public information pleads for the masters, they lack self-
esteem, are excluded from sites where information is shared, their fellows hold them in low
esteem, and so their poetry is poorly informed. Is the thesis being controverted. Belonging poets
are not what W. Watson described as spiralists, i.e. people who move horizontally around the
country to advance vertically in their careers; they are spatially bound, like parish priests, to their
subjects, they relate face to face and laugh at books and ideas.
I am profoundly uneasy about the handling of the formerly excluded social groups, the
choice of which poets to describe and the quality of the discussion of them. The quality of the
writing about the male poets of the Fifties (Hughes, Gunn, Hill) is far higher; as if second-rate
nations, with no warships, no States, and no school syllabus, have to make do with half-awake
literary criticism, a flow of warm indifference. This account of the period 1968-96 is unlikely to
last; although the vision of the period 1950-68, roughly, seems very robust. Innovative women's
poetry since 1980 is, with apologies, not treated.
Edward Larrissy writes about three poets associated with Ferry Press in the late sixties
and early seventies, and quotes a 1969 poem by JH Prynne:

See him recall the day by moral trace, a squint

to cross-fire sewing of hurt at top left; the
bruise is glossed by 'nothing much' but drains
to deep excitement. His recall is false but the charge
is still there in neural space, pearly blue with a
touch of crimson.

, commenting that "It is to the practice of Prynne and Crozier that contemporary poets will turn if
they wish to seek models capable of encompassing more diverse areas of thought and experience
than can be treated in the modes that have prevailed until recently with British publishers and
reviews. (...) The results are as rich, complex, and as powerfully original as any poetry written in
the English-speaking world in this century."
One way of validating deconstruction is simply to hide the reality outside the text. Claire
Buck writes on poetry and the Women's Movement, retrieving the behaviour of a society existing
both outside and inside the poems, which exist in a language which expresses parts of a semantic
matrix which is learnt and produced inside situations; of disagreement, reflexive modification,
inconsistency, and rapid change of a behavioural code existing only in 58 million defective
copies; of dialogue generating symbolic operators which transcend and precede and organise
poetry: the poem is perhaps closer to the collective composition than would appear. Buck catches
in words a shifting set of hopes:
"the status of the personal is a touchstone of authenticity because 'we' cannot rely on existing
ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture.' (...) Every kind of day-to-day
experience, and women's feelings about the experiences, are included and explored in the poems:
work, friendships with women, domesticity and family relationships, abortion, childbirth, and
sexual relations(.)",

although she does less well at linking her chosen demonstration of raising texts (the bad
anthology One Foot on the Mountain) with her chosen good poets — Riley, Mulford, Fell —
whose work is not in that anthology and is less politically hurrah. Their work is excluded from

19
most women's anthologies because of its withdrawal from the more gratification, more me
project:
"the more effectively the poems disempower the 'self', the less they have an obligation to
the 'law of legibility'. Thus, Riley's verse is exemplary of how feminism can use avant-
garde poetry to investigate the effect of ideologies of gender and the self within a poetics
and a politics of representation. But the result is of necessity a 'difficult' poetry... (T)hese
demands, and the nature of their work's critique of experience, have also left Riley and
Mulford to an already marginal feminist poetics."

Not only the adoption of critical sociology and phenomenology, but also the socialism of all
three poets, have been interpreted as reducing gratification, and so as old-fashioned and even
authoritarian. (None of them is difficult or avant garde.) The alliance across this gap is precious,
asks for the forfeiting of principles whose assertion forfeits the chance of everyday effectiveness,
is a mere notion, and a thing to treasure. The modern poem is a temporary agreement between
writer and reader about how the world is, and about what our wishes currently are; as the poem
fulfils and also changes the latter, they and it become temporarily the most significant element of
the former. Any social situation is, it may be, structured by such unstable agreements.
Struggles have continued, elsewhere within the Left, between jolly clapalong Pop poetry,
like Adrian Mitchell's, derivative of hymn form and of the Christian youth club, and intelligent
critical poetry. Scotland and Wales failed, unlike England, to develop a new and formally modern
poetry during the euphoria of the sixties and early seventies, as nationalism and folkism crowded
out Parisian philosophy and the Counter-Culture; in England, the institutionally dominant
empirical and moralised verse traditions were swept up in the later seventies by a hateful
backlash against the new politicised formal innovation, which has produced, underground,
almost all the modern poetry worth reading. Neither volume registers the best Scottish poets born
after 1925; but their largesse fills so many other gaps.
It is comical to find Anthony Easthope at one end of CBP denouncing the transcendental
ego, the empirical self, and conservatism, while at the other end we find extended praise of poets,
from "underprivileged" groups, wallowing in exactly those sloughs and being called post-modern
because they are mending the holes punched in the self-maintaining ego by modernity. The
marketing problem of rebadging culturally conservative and nationalist writers from the
minorities with the designer labels post-modern and post-Structuralist is handled by a number of
writers here with the scrupulousness and self-denial of a Japanese manufacturer filling out an
application for EU subsidies; the kind of contortion involved will probably characterize, as a
Gadarene fit, a whole brief era. For Linden Peach, the reterritorialisation of Welsh belonging
poets is post-modern, because it comes after, and so is post, deterritorialisation, which is post-
modern. Poets who write in clichés are said to be incorporating popular forms into their work in
a knowing way: more unoriginality is more self-consciousness.
It's time we listened to naebody but oorsels, TS Law (Fife) said around 1983; words
wasted on poets. The more poetry rejects the traditional means of literature, the more literary it
is; the more aware of its relation to other poetry, and to failure, it is, the more differentiated and
refined it becomes; poetry close to conversation and jokes is conservative, narrowly repetitive,
and not fit to print. By abandoning the claim to a shared ownership of the means of production,
so as to take part in a political-semantic system where we have no part in those means, we are
released into a shared acoustic space where every cubic inch is a gobbet of vocal contention by
turgid-pressure groups who forthrightly assert the denial of each other's claims: We must throw

20
our own fish-guts to our own sea-mews. The claim not to be understood writes off and down any
attempt to represent society, even to yourself. In the ashes of the razed building, poets can either
search for new glimpses of the mind experimentally and cumulatively, or renounce writing
anything introspective, subtle, or original; as Clarke, Harrison, and Duffy have done. The bridge
between the phenomenological self-awareness of a Denise Riley and an Easthope, and the
communitarian single-issue pressure groups, is composed of friendship and false words. The
policy weakness of (post)Leftist leaders like Clinton and Blair may not be down to character but
to the mutual distrust of their conditional supporters. Because there is no principle they can
safely offer, they fall back on looks and personality: precisely this is the object of dissection of
modern-style poetry, and the source of dissensions of taste. Or, we can describe poetry as a
mature product because it is small batch, high end, low kilogram design-heavy, near-zero
turnround, highly customised into a spectral market.
The declared intent of Huk and Acheson, to arouse new interest in America in British
poetry, may hang fire, because British poets of 1966 really are thirty years behind American
poets of 1996, and fifth-rate British women poets really aren't quite as good as first-rate
American ones. Both books exclude the little magazine, as a source of information, almost
entirely, yet are decorated with sneers about the academic world; the connoisseur who does not
wish to face the frustration and misdirection of the little magazine data glut can pick up recent
history in the anthologies the new british poetry, Floating Capital, Dream State, Contraflow on
the Super-Highway, However Introduced to the Soles, Out of Everywhere, and Conductors of
Chaos.
Fietz and Ludwig's book seems more indebted to EU regional policy, and offers a scattery
fun polemic by Christopher Harvie; essays on the history of the out place; a chapter on Poetry
and Place; surveys of contemporary Welsh poetry in Welsh (1950-90), Welsh poetry in English
(roughly 1979-94), Scottish Gaelic poetry (1945-90), and Irish Gaelic poetry (roughly since
1945); poetry and place in Irish poetry in English since about 1930; and essays on George
Mackay Brown, Waldo Williams, Charles Tomlinson, Tony Harrison, and Gillian Clarke. The
Second (Anglo-Welsh) Flowering is omitted here, as already the subject of wonderful books by
Tony Conran and Jeremy Hooker. Ludwig and Fietz offer the germs of a solution to the
underdevelopment of literary thought in Scotland and Wales. Except for a startlingly weak
handling of Tony Harrison as the laureate of Leeds, they fall down on England: are we to
presume that the whole of England is a metropolitan area? This enables all concerned to sidestep
the strong stylistic resemblances between Scottish and the Welsh poetry and the English
equivalent, so that if far-flung poets stand out from the Oxford and London Hofsprache of the
present day, it is because they belong with English poetry of much older generations (for
example the hymn writers, the Georgians, the New Romantics, the Movement, and Pop), which
thrive yet in the English regions.
Gareth Alban Davies' article on poetry in Welsh describes its social milieu, for example
observing how eisteddfodic poets "traditionally, were ministers of religion (...) The decline of
organized religion means that (...) the eisteddfodic poet (...) has migrated to (...) teaching, the
law, or radio and television. In other cases, however, he remains the rural shopkeeper, or farmer,
or craftsman.' The fight for survival has promoted real awareness in the cymrophone literary
community.
Swollen with spatial information, both volumes are weak on stylistic analysis,
typification, source analysis, topic analysis, intellectual milieu, periodisation, classification,
isolation of distinctive features; the prose, instead, claims alliances for favoured poets through

21
common ancestors and positions. Accurate philology might cause these relations to break up and
wisp away. The face hidden behind all this careful misdirection is the common Protestant culture
shaping the formal speech of all three countries, replete with evolved forms on all scales which
are ancestors of modern notions of autobiography, genres, codes of sympathy, imagery, and
phraseology. The staples of Anglo-Welsh, Welsh, Gaelic, and Scottish poetry of the last forty
years correspond closely to the solutions, combining Christianity, close reading, personal
witness, and a taste for the Metaphysicals, worked out in England and America during the 1950s.
As the imagined community is the parish, so the individual life is written as a curve towards
atonement, a line away from the self signalled by irony, restraint, shunning of rhetoric, careful
listing of details, and scrupulousness of style, looking outwards with pastoral benevolence; the
traditional is admired because communal. This art-game has its combinatory potentials, but the
bad faith, signalled by the contortions of Linden Peach and K.E. Smith here, of many of the
principals in owning up to it, points to a lack of consciousness and conviction, affecting the
quality of aesthetic decisions. The poets who get most attention, across the two volumes, are
Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, and Tony Harrison. Advocacy of the sociologically weak is
ungrudgingly extended to the artistically weak.

The washing machine drones

in the distance. From time to time
as it falls silent I fill baskets
with damp clothes and carry them
into the garden, hang them out,
stand back, take pleasure counting
and listing what I have done.

— as Clarke is quoted, on p.379 of CBP, allegedly as an example of up to date British poetry.

One would have thought that the jumping-off point for modern poetry was the Counter Culture,
and that the theory underlying the play with identity was the Left conceptions of alienation and
anti-capitalism; neither the Counter Culture nor the Left come on stage here, unless in the sub-let
forms of feminism and (modified) Black awareness. The eclipse from tribal memory of the
Movement Poet cum academic seems likely to be followed by the eclipse of the socialist poet
cum white man, apparently unwished-for. The imperative to help the weak (no notion is offered
of Jewish poets, because they are assumed to be middle class) points towards the Welfare State,
but in a non-transformatory, self-effacing, receptive benignity which is only a few inches away
from the hated 1950s predecessors.
The subverted centre here is the Movement, written off, as seems likely to be the final
word, in both books; good at institutional and media warfare, accumulating enemies. They were
bad poets, not bad people: the effacing of stylistics, in favour of personality and background,
means ironically that the Movement's legitimate legacy, in the flattened and colloquial style of
Gillian Clarke, Douglas Dunn, and John Davies, for example, goes unnoticed. Easthope's attack
on Donald Davie is accurate and well put, but the Movement's grand fogey-ogre may have been
perfectly right in his descriptions of the abiding mainstream of all-British poetry, in 1996 as in
1956. If you felt hungry after Enright, Amis, and Conquest, you're going to be starving after
Clarke, Harrison, and Duffy.

22
 Repeatedly in this book, I have been talking about space, and wanting to quote that
seminal work Mental Maps in a dozen different places. The whole point of the Informationists’
use of mental maps was to criticise the way English people thought about Scotland and Scottish
poetry – as a space in the edge of invisibility and populated by bizarre projections. But this is not
really about climate and geology. It is more about social space. As a poet, the most important
thing is whether people think you are a good poet. So you walk from a room where everyone
thinks you are a good poet into a room where no-one thinks it, and your ego changes shape and
size. Your head changes shape – this is what a migraine feels like. So the interest in social space
is because your whole social identity changes as you move through space, from person to un-
person. The map is of allegiance and belonging rather than of rainfall and traffic density.
I wonder if we can define the desired place in terms of people who don’t like you not
being there. This would do as a definition of both idealism and intimacy. The subjective qualities
of poetic space may be alarmingly related to a focussing of rays which eliminates certain people
from psychological presence and interference. We can hardly define intimacy except in terms of
the company being selected. For, the deep inside would otherwise be the same as the outside.
The outside is affectively cold, accessible to anyone, and unfriendly to complex language. What
is outside is external, and poetry lives by definition in the sphere of intimacy. The feeling of
insideness is of geological force, and the full achievement in a poem of feelings of Scottishness
or leftness is a momentous impulse. I can demand that the poems be good, I can cast aside poems
which are Scottish but inept, but the insider feelings are part of what makes a poem good.
Anyway, the spatial and poetic view which Ludwig and Fietz’s book explores is of abiding
interest.

23
 4
50 meals at MacDonald's: The New Poetry, edited Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, David
Morley (Bloodaxe, 1993)

'The most salient fact about stories told by idiots is that they are not coherent. They start off as if
they were coherent stories with stages, causal connections, and overall purposes, but they
suddenly shift over and over again, making it impossible to find coherence as you go along or
any coherence overall.' – Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors we live by, 1980

The arrival of this anthology was hailed on all sides as ridiculous, absurd, and disgusting. But it's
certainly a huge advance on the cultural genocide of the Morrison/Motion anthology of 1982
(memorably cut to pieces by John Ash in Rock Drill at the time). In fact, seven of the poets
included would also have been in my imaginary anthology of modern poetry; and two of them
were in a recent Angel Exhaust. (The seven are John Ash, Frank Kuppner, Robert Crawford, Ian
Duhig, Peter Didsbury, and David Dabydeen.) Nonetheless the average quality of the poems
selected is very low, and the omissions are eccentric. The Bloodaxe version represents a
wearying narrowing of scope after the 1988 Paladin new british poetry, the best canonical
anthology since Lucie-Smith's. The exclusion of virtually all of the great generation born in the
1940s represents fanaticism and ignorance on the part of Hulse, Morley, and Kennedy.
I would like to cite the excellent poets (born since 1940) who were excluded from both
anthologies: John Seed, Michael Haslam, Penelope Shuttle, Isobel Thrilling, David Harsent,
Jeremy Reed, David Chaloner, D.M. Black, Jeffrey Wainwright. The editors' claim to have done
vast amounts of research isn't convincing – they didn't find anybody good whom I hadn't already
read, and they missed about 50 people whom they could easily have found in the Paladin book or
A Various Art. Their claim to have read 'the entire lists' of many small presses is also incredible;
the permissions list kicks off with 16 thankyous to Bloodaxe, 6 to Carcanet, and five each to
Chatto and Secker.
The one discovery of the book is Pauline Stainer. Her long poem 'The Ice-Pilot Speaks' is
strained, overwritten, and rhythmically dead, but I would not be unhappy to publish it in AE:

It is Ascension week;
the men wear black crêpe veils
against blindness
the ship's astronomer
is given four ounces
of raven
(...)
the tundra is silk-crewel work;
polar bears sweat
through upturned paws,
the ship's figurehead
warm as though from the furnace

The Fashion Machine

24
It would be curious to develop a history of the Mainstream over the past 15 years or so, from
sources like the Gregory Award anthologies, Poetry Review, Arts Council sponsored readings,
and the TLS. One would find a rapid succession of fashions; one would also find the
commercial-ideological openings – the bargains– which stimulated each attempted style. Such
research would be wearisome. I believe that the rapidity of fashions also shows an internal
instability and loss of confidence; the glamorous young people whom I saw at the Gregory
Award readings in 1981 have been forgotten and replaced – not just once but five or six times.
This attempt to retain control of the market has led to the snarling of the poetry business in its
own mechanism – the poetry's style has begun to reflect the uncertainty and instability of the
prestige market values around it. One is reminded that poets, unlike British actors, painters, or
clothes designers, do not go through a formal training which would make their accreditation
more than just august Bloomsbury bluff. The reader, too, wants assurance that they are up with
the fashion. The initial problem was not the rapidity of modern communications, or the decay of
the referent, but the low quality of the goods the makers of fashion were trying to peddle. The
poets in this book seem to be suffering from the hallucination that their faces are breaking up,
swimming away into a blur like a failing TV, even as they begin to speak.
My assumption has always been that orthodox poets were impelled by the wish to
conform and succeed, not by any inner drive at all. Since mainstream poets so dexterously
mimed deep soulful conviction in order to camouflage this, it's surprising that the majority of the
poets here parade their lack of commitment to what they're doing. (I'm not claiming that self-
belief doesn't also induce people to write terrible poetry.) This would certainly explain why so
many of them write in just the same way. This is a form of accreditation. But this shared fetish is
the claim look we're disclaiming centrality and so we must be writing from the soul.

Mental Maps

Much of the underlying motive of the anthology was summarized in Mental Maps (by two
geographers, Peter Gould and Rodney White; first edition 1974). This followed the rather simple
approach of tracing people's "mental maps" by asking them to draw maps from memory. The
themes of 'multiple narratives ... dissonance... baselessness' come from here. Bill Herbert's poem
on p.291 is almost a literal repeat of those maps. (How far Gould and White were influenced by
Situationist psychogeography I don't know.) The competition between objective space,
confirmed by instruments, and mental space, by which people actually navigate, cannot be won.
Obviously people read books in mental space, not surveyable space. This psychogeography can
easily be transferred to history; what people actually remember is history, even if they are proven
wrong by the documents. The other line of research was to map the attractiveness of places:
'ridges of relatively high desirability, and these form the eastern and western walls of a mental
cirque lying over the Midlands. Indeed, the 30° isopercept slices right through the Midlands,
separating Britain into an area of rugged desirability and an undulating northern plain of dislike.'
The attack on the idea of centre and authority is the premise of most of the book. It would be
natural for a strong poetry to use all this to construct forms of weightless grandeur in an intact
virtual space where objective and subjective meet; as indeed metaphor has always crossed
between two planes; but the affectless poets on show here produce things empty of subjectivity,
vague and slack.

25
Depoliticisation

The rhetoric of this anthology is clearly recognisable as a mutation of the jargon of handover of
the Macmillan-Wilson era; evidenced for example in European Decolonization 1918-81, by R.F.
Holland. The basic reason for squeamishness and irresponsibility is to do with decolonization.
The calculation is that, by sending everything up, one can become legally irresponsible (like an
insane or imbecilic person) and thus avoid any of the guilt for the Empire (or even for Wales). I
find this immature because it discounts everything you do and are in your own lifetime, and
accepting this is part of being an adult. The Law Latin for not responsible is non competens,
which has given us the good English word nincompoop. I would propose this as the best name
for the entire group. A Movement poem was one where you couldn't remember what the poet has
just been saying. A Nincompoop poem is one where the poet can't remember what he's just been
saying.
This brings us to a slightly difficult point. Decolonization didn't really change the world
economic system. It replaced direct administrative control (which included some responsibility
for welfare) with blunt economic relations: the relative prices of manufactured commodities and
raw materials or foodstuffs were enough to give the West what it wanted. Either you deal with us
or you don't. Last month I was on a course for the unemployed, where the teacher, Phil, said "you
don't have to come": if you don't turn up, the DSS take your dole away, but Phil isn't the DSS, he
works for a private trust working for the DSS; the person who takes your dole away is someone
you've never met, in a room you can't see. It's still a surveillance/punishment regime, but the
authority is invisible and the visible person is your mate. (There is a cogent analysis of the new
style of indirect authority in childrearing in a mid-1970s paper by Basil Bernstein, from whom I
derive all this.) Control has changed its techniques in the past twenty years. I don't really accept
that privatisation, reducing Governmental power, has given more power to the people. I don't
accept that the hysterical indecisiveness and self-subversion of these poems amounts to a
liberation of the reader, or of the work of art.
So far 'decentring' appears to mean privatisation – power is taken away from a small
centrist group (of Ministers and their managers). BT is driven by diffuse, mass pressure from the
wishes of its consumers. A capitalist corporation replaces one under democratic control; the old
equable agreement between management and workers has been replaced by total management
control and mass redundancies. Well, obviously the Ministers and the management they
employed wore suits and had high salaries and were educated, and had a great deal of power. But
I don't think this power shedding thing is as simple as Hulse, Kennedy, Morley seem to believe.
The other point has to do with political awareness. Decolonisation for Britain, launched
in 1947 or 1921, was virtually over twenty-five years ago; I can just about remember the TV
news talking about the shooting in a bunkering port called Aden (now South Yemen). Actually
the fall-out is still falling in South Africa and east Ulster. They got political responsibility in their
own country in South Yemen, Ghana, India, Jamaica. But the refusal of responsibility in your
own country is a thorough infantilism. There is no visible difference between subverting political
authority' and 'evading political issues altogether'. The erosion of the power, or right, to judge, is
depoliticisation. If you think everything is political, then these poems are political. If you are
interested in government and the workplace, there is nothing about them. Repeatedly, the
Introduction claims that some poem is political when reading it shows simply vague pessimism.
Of course these poets are 'against the system': John Major is against the system. Objectively, this
is an era when both Left and Right have uniquely low credibility; and this is depoliticised poetry.

26
The words 'political' and 'experimental' are used as go-faster stripes. (How do you market
political poetry? take the politics out of it.) Kit Wright and Peter Reading contribute identifiably
political poems.
It's not that politics is boring. Take the situation of the Labour-Militant Council of
Liverpool in April, 1986. Faced with expulsion from office if they breached financial regulations
(to build 5,000 council houses), they issued all their employees with redundancy notices. What a
drama: mobs in the street and the police waiting to arrest democratically elected leaders. Surely
great poetry could be written about this situation. But only if it gave up on indeterminacy;
because the Nincompoop or Bloodaxe poet can't say anything without subverting it and reducing
it to a game. It can't state a fact without controverting it in the next stanza; it can't narrate without
breaking up the narrative into squabbling, giggling fragments. Everywhere people are in real
situations; and poetry has abandoned the describing them.
An exception is L.K. Johnson, apparently preaching outright race war. More killing, more
burning. He, as Marxist, has apparently calculated that his fraction has no chance of winning
unless there is a breakdown of democracy; ethnic violence is just the lever he has chosen to bring
this about. This suborning of terrorism is acceptable only because of its total ineffectiveness; his
poetry appears in every anthology only because nobody ever reads it.
If you pursue this 'dispersing of authority' thing back to the New Left break of 1968 you
will find that it then meant free collective bargaining – the right of groups of workers to
negotiate and strike irrespective of Central Government guidelines on wage increases. This was
genuine empowerment. It broadened the base of the political class to include shop stewards –
which is why you've heard Horror Stories about that power-seeking group ever since you were a
child. So the decentralisation proposed by this poetry is a cultural residue whose content has
been drained away. A toy.

Oh, I'm such a featherbrain

If you looked for other cultural figures earnestly broadcasting their own lack of seriousness, I
think you would find them in the world of light entertainment; from comics and DJs to
popsingers, actors, TV presenters and magazine writers. The fizzy send-up tone is that of
advertisements. Are these subversive? The book presents the hegemony of light verse.
To understand the style of self-deflation we have to look at the speech practice of
undercutting: very common in English speech, where tags like sort of, actually, basically, sorry,
er, so far as I am concerned encourage the listener to disagree and resign an (implicit) claim to
authority. I don't think we should regard this undercutting as postmodernist or based in the flux
washing away values. Ninety per cent of the poets her indulge in this vagueness. The post-
colonial derogation is reinforced by the need to dissociate oneself from patriarchy and from class
privilege. The position is: I don't feel sexual desire; I don't understand the situation: I have no
pretensions to culture; I don't want power. It follows that: I have nothing of interest to say; I am
lying.
So they aren't Thatcherites. What do they believe in? what do they know? what do they
want? what do they feel? what do they love? the answer is, in almost every case, is nothing. I'm
not impressed by these people dancing to ukulele music and wearing smeary clown's make-up.
I'm not persuaded of its anti-authoritarian impact.

The Movement franchise

27
I experienced the Eighties as an era of neo-Movement sloth ushered in by the Morrison/Motion
anthology. The new marketing element was to incorporate pop features into the glum
Larkin/Amis formula; I could accept Sean O'Brien, Simon Armitage and Ian MacMillan as the
offspring of Roger McGough and Kingsley Amis. It's significant that The New Poetry gives a
quite different view of the Eighties. The Movement anticipated this kind of verse, for example by
the undramatic and wry narrator, who could easily develop into the embarrassed and
unrespectable narrator on show here. This lot are quite without commitment: the 1950s was an
uncommitted era as hangover after Spanish Civil War, World War and Cold War political
hysteria, while the Eighties were a jaded era after the hangover from idealism in the Sixties and
Seventies. The Movement were into parodies as a function of their general literary sophistication
(most of them were Eng Lit academics!): this could be made into the current 'post-modernism' by
a slight shift of accent, by speeding up the piano a bit. But I do say that this mainstream
anthology represents a break, a departure from the hegemony which has run since 1956.

Mapping of Alignments

Certainly not all the poets here are Nincompoops. Romer and Hartnett (for example) belong to a
vanished supercilious and courtly style used in about 1982. George Szirtes has supplied some
contemplative verse, measured and sober, which could become good poetry if he knew what he
wanted to say. Helen Dunmore is wet and sensitive and has no pretensions to consciousness.
Striking is the complete absence of New Age poetry and myth. It's not that I could name
any good poets in that category (except Iain Sinclair; Peter Redgrove falls outside the selection
rules). Also absent are: love poetry (except: Selima Hill, G Maxwell, C.A. Duffy); domestic
realism; (some exceptions); the brainless camera poem where the poet describes objects and
eliminates feelings and other people as 'inauthentic' (some exceptions). The phobia of the
Movement about exotic times and places seem to have vanished; the realist paradigm has
slackened its grip. Ian Duhig writes:

For the Perfume Contest I chose

Grape-and-Cherry brocade over simple
cotton trousers, mixed aloes
with cinnamon and tulip for wine-breath,
conch to mask the candlesmoke and sweet-pines
for memory. I won the Jīju and Genji, my Shining Prince

and this whiff of eleventh-century Japan hits the spot. Mostly, however, the exotic locales are
chosen because the poet wants to have no connection with the landscape or society, and wants to
be embarrassed and superfluous. It's the payoff for anti-imperialism, and it's very dull. Details
are built up which deliberately have no connection to each other or to any artistic intent. This is
the symbolic surrender of the artist's authority.

The Modernist franchise

The Sixties were dominated by the Movement (i.e. nobody else got promoted and distributed),
but everything artistically important came from elsewhere. The war is no longer between Eric

28
Mottram, The English Intelligencer, and those offended conservatives. The new graduate
audience have absorbed subcutaneously the belief that the most modernist art is the most
prestigious. Poetry is largely marketed and funded on the basis of prestige, of some inherited
deepness. Every mainstream book now comes plastered with quotes saying that it's modernist.
One version of these besetting 'envy fantasies' is the Introduction stating that John Ashbery is one
of the main influences on these poets. This is a caddish outrage. Everybody wants to be
compared to Ashbery (who probably did have an influence on Cambridge poetry 25 years ago),
but none of them sound in the faintest like him. Jo Shapcott 'does' Surrealism, Craig Raine 'does'
ostranenie. It reminds me of an event on Ready Steady Go which had enthusiastic English
teenage girls miming to a Brenda Lee record. This set of claims made the competition with the
kind of poetry which Mottram published and made propaganda for acute; explaining, ultimately,
why 42 of 43 poets in the modernist sections of the Paladin book are excluded here. The editors
don't mention any avant garde because that would mean admitting that they aren't it.
The elements of 'advanced' poetry as it presented itself in the Sixties: avoidance of
'emotions', distancing, sudden jumps and splices, opposition to the system, Surrealism, an
oblique presentation of the self, preoccupation with knocking over 'myths', hostility to
literariness and to organised knowledge, the wish to defamiliarise, a certain Utopian pessimism,
etc. – have now become the staple of the Mainstream. The uproar of 1968 (or did it really start in
1965?) is the legitimate forebear, not only of the poetry in Angel Exhaust, not only of New Age
poetry about runes and the Goddess, not only of poetry plus pop music, but also of the Bloodaxe
New Poetry.
This is of a very homogeneous kind, as it sputters about pluralism. The new poem in this
book is described and recommended in the Introduction. For example, "values have been in a
state of flux. In the 1980s, this flux was dramatic (…) what Terry Eagleton has termed 'the
marginal becoming central'. A multicultural society challenges the very idea of a centre, and
produces pluralism of poetic voice. The idea of a centre is particularly fraught for those who feel
marginalised. Arguably, it is now more an idea than a reality (…) ideas of a classless language
that is a liberation not only from the constraints of English but also from expectations of poetic
subject. Willingness to challenge the centre, to write poetry recognizable as social discourse, is
a hallmark of many northern English poets. (…) it's possible to read his approach to language
'politically' as a kind of revenge or guerrilla warfare on one of the instruments of authority. (…)
This is not merely a recognition of the fiction-making inherent in all poetry but also a
questioning of ideas about poetic authority, sincerity and authenticity. (…) It is a realisation that
ideas of meaning, truth and understanding are in themselves fictions determined by the
rhetorical forms and linguistic terms used to express them." It's quite illuminating to compare
this legitimating discourse to the Afterword to Floating Capital (ed. Adrian Clarke and Robert
Sheppard, 1991), definitely an avant garde anthology – and realise they're saying almost the
same things. It's like listening to a certain Fats Domino record of 1959 and realising that the band
is actually playing ska. Does the avant-garde have a separate discourse any more?

Indeterminacy? Just say no

In the fight over the Indeterminacy Franchise, it's possible not to notice that it is a hegemony; the
Irish and Scottish poets here are identical to the Northern and Southern English ones. (The two
Welsh poets are cheerful and out-of-date.) Even the poets I admire (Ian Duhig, Bill Herbert)
resemble the general line. In his Ph.D. thesis, Robert Sheppard analyses the use of indeterminacy

29
in Lee Harwood, from the early Sixties on; Floating Capital is full of indeterminacy; I'm not sure
how different Drew Milne and Andrew Lawson are from the ambience (disapproval, diffidence,
wit, embarrassment) of The New Poetry. In this cultural hegemony, the task of a reviewer is to
point out the simple commonsense reasons why indeterminacy is an incredibly bad idea.

The value of a poem is related to the amount of information it contains. Noise cuts down the
signal.

The poem does need to be the centre of your attention while you're reading it. It needs to distract
you from noises in the street, tomorrow's work, the price of beer. Most of this poetry makes no
impact on the nervous system at all. Concentration contains the concept centre. Diffuse poetry
can make your whole head diffuse, in neither one state nor another.

If there is no 'privileged discourse' then there is nothing worth reading. Why would I want to
read anyone else's poetry at all. There is nothing more boring than someone else's snapshots. It
would be remarkable if I wanted to read about someone in Ireland or South London unless their
work had compelling formal qualities which made it both superior and a continuation of literary
tradition.

Events occur in situations. These can be broken down into information, i.e. situations cannot be
verbalised except as information. If the poet refuses to give reliable information then no context
can emerge. Every fact will be isolated, irrelevant, floating, causeless, without affect.
Representation is impossible. The reader will lose alertness if the information being taken in has
no relevance to anything else; a gradual rundown of consciousness will occur. Convergence is
the thing which drives perception.

Sampling produces an 'open market' in music, where fragments fight for domination and
propagate by being stolen. This parallels the floating state of contemporary poetry. The music to
'Assault on Precinct 13' (a cult hit for director John Carpenter in 1978) was plundered both by
The Human League and by electro bimbos Bomb The Bass because it had achieved ultimate
order in its sparseness. It conquered its plunderers; recontextualised, it turned the environment
into itself. Coherence, determinacy, and pattern, are almost the same thing. Poetry is information
and its energy is a function of pattern. Tensity and signature are not dispensable.

Sell-by Date

Bloodaxe's translation programme is very creditable. It seems as if they only publish bad poetry
when it is English, Irish or American. This implies a kind of group insanity which afflicts
English people whenever thinking about English poetry. (Note the uniquely low stock of modern
English poetry in French or German translation.) The delusions come and go in fits. You don't
hear much about D.J. Enright, Ian Hamilton or Andrew Motion anymore. I don't suppose the
consensus recorded in The New Poetry will last more than three years. I don't have any view of
what the next Trend will be. (Neo-formalism? ethnographical forgery? more New Age?
sponsored Product Placement? pop-up books?) At that time, people will no doubt look at me as if
I were mad if I try to claim that people like Glyn Maxwell and Michael Hulse ever existed.

30
 5
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE 1990s, part 1

This part was written in 2019 (admittedly, redrafting older material) because in the 2003 version
I didn’t offer any overview at all. I spent every day of the 90s passionately involved with new
poetry, but I was too close to it to see any overall pattern.
The main event in the decade was the “wave breaking” of the New Right. An uninterrupted curve
of ascent finally flattened out and grandiose plans for unlimited expansion had to be cut to fit a
budget. This has led to a much more secure world. Where the prospect of government arts
subsidy being phased out altogether, in favour of corporate sponsorship with invisible banning of
radicalism, had been much talked about throughout the Eighties, it faded into the background as
the New Right advance ground to a halt. The effect of New Right hegemony on poetry was
slight, since poetry did not offer a site with access to a large stream of revenue or even of
prestige. The official poetry world seems corrupt and power-mad but in fact it is eccentric and
powerless, strongly resembling the various alternative worlds of poetry. Poetry was not
integrated into the money economy. There was no neo-con figurehead in poetry. The project
never took off, but it would have involved the complete marginalisation of living poetry in
favour of canonised classics, and a glittering array of people with the right backgrounds writing
obviously cultured and apolitical verse. A link with prestige language and the people who use it
would have been made to function.
The replacement of Thatcher by John Major led a massive reduction in levels of mutual
hatred. Major, widely expected to lose the 1992 general election, just won it – but with an
administration which could no longer rush through radical measures in favour of the rich, and a
party which was appallingly disunited and unable to manage its own long-term project. The loss
of fear of Thatcherism apparently made life less exciting, but it led to a much happier society,
where art could take an interest in matters outside politics. Polarisation and suspicion reduced,
making it (also) much easier for people within the Conservative party and the right-wing press to
express views about more social equality, less racial oppression, accepting that iniquity was
involved both in the factory system and the Empire, etc. Meanwhile, the collapse of communism
in eastern Europe, with attendant exposures of how it had maintained itself in power, destroyed
the credibility of Western Marxism; the Labour Party became electable partly by repetitive
exclusions of, and attacks on, Trotskyites secretly or openly penetrating the Labour Party. The
decade saw the disappearance of Marxism from public discourse. Strangely enough, people who
went through a phase of disillusion and repentance, in which complex abstract theories collapsed
and left feelings of depression, included both ex-Marxists and refugees from the New Right,
which had really reached a state of self-intoxicated delusion prior to 1992. As the centre became
more attractive, extremes lost credibility – perhaps also in culture.

Tortured by abundance
The first generalisation starts from the sheer number of authors, and the breadth of poetry being
written is extraordinary. By my count, some 80 authors produced significant books during this
decade. In view of this, just putting so many names into a frame would be quite an achievement.
The “history” so far as I can tell is that the innovative forces in British poetry made an
accommodation with the “official world”, and that perhaps as early as 1982 significant poets
were emerging through the “authorised channels”. This has to do both with the debilitation of the

31
Underground, and with a relaxation of a certain reactionary clenching-up by mainstream cultural
managers. So it is very important for a true picture of the 1990s to read poets like Jamie
McKendrick, Jo Shapcott, Mimi Khalvati, Pauline Stainer, Sally Feaver, Moniza Alvi, David
Dabydeen, Deryn Rees-Jones, Judith Kazantzis, Hilary Llewelyn-Williams, Jane Draycott and
Christine Saunders. (This has to be added to the list of “innovative mainstream” writers I did find
and appreciate, such as Elizabeth Bartlett, Alison Brackenbury, Robert Crawford, W. N. Herbert,
John Hartley Williams, Ian Duhig and Frank Kuppner.) It is also important to include the late
work of poets who debuted during the 1950s or even the 1940s, such as Alan Ross, Peter Levi or
Anthony Thwaite. The poetry industry has a striking focus on “youth”, which inhibits the
appreciation of a period as a whole.
Apart from the ones in this book, other poets producing significant work during the
period would be Christopher Logue, Ted Hughes, George Mackay Brown, Christopher
Middleton, Roy Fisher, David Harsent, Peter Redgrove, Daniel Lane, Tim Fletcher, Jeremy Reed,
David Harsent, Brian Catling, Michael Ayres, Robert Hampson, Kevin Nolan, Robert
Minhinnick, James Berry, Rob MacKenzie, Karlien van den Beukel, Steve Harris, Gavin Selerie,
Graham Hartill, Peter Manson, Edwin Morgan, Alexander Hutchison, John Seed, David Rees,
Nigel Wheale, Tony Lopez, Colin Simms, Adrian Clarke, Maggie O’Sullivan, Helen Macdonald
and Paul Holman. The group associated with Grosseteste Review (and with Cambridge) were no
longer running at peak capacity, but poets like J. H. Prynne, David Chaloner, Grace Lake and
Ralph Hawkins were extending their reputations.
The veterans of the waves of polarisation of the 1970s who emerged into the full absence
of light as the UK Underground may have had some experience of mainstream poetry as part of
their route march, but from 1977 they were firmly against that sort of thing. This is the basis for
their independent history. Depolarisation does not bring back a central community of taste, but
reveals an archipelago of different stylistic clusters, and societies of people supporting them. An
overview would start by identifying some of the clusters, and recovering their history, ideas,
cultural assets, etc.
I want to develop the theme of abundance a bit more. The inclusion line of anthologies
gives a convenient way of doing this. For example, let us look at two Bloodaxe anthologies,
more or less contemporary with each other. One (Poetry with an Edge) contains Bloodaxe
authors, with an emphasis on new British poets. One is The New Poetry and concentrates on new
British poets. Out of 60 (vaguely) new poets in Edge, only twelve get into The New Poetry
(which includes 55 names). Again, compare two anthologies, admittedly eight years apart,
Purple and Green (new women poets) and Sixty Women Poets. Both contain fairly new British
women poets. Out of 34 poets in Purple and Green (being, along with white, the suffragette
colours), only five made it into Sixty Women Poets. Another instance is the comparison possible
between Conductors of Chaos and The New Poetry – similar remits, but nobody made it into
both anthologies. This wire-protected boundary is familiar to most observers: what is more
interesting is the theme of a huge talent pool in which anthologists don’t repeat the decisions of
other anthologists. The issue is not aesthetic splits which you can historicise and bring into
consciousness, but the regime of abundance which means that hundreds of candidate poets are in
sight (or, hiding each other from sight).This means that no line become authorised– and that I
can’t hew to an authorised line; in that way, I can’t be right. As for uncovering dominant trends
of the 1990s, forget it – this project has no remit.
An article in Agenda 28:3 by Roy Blackman (year 1990 or 89 I guess) says that January-
April 1989 saw 480 new poetry titles, and this figure was supplied by the Poetry Library. He

32
extrapolates it to 1400 titles a year. I extracted the titles tagged “English poetry” and “1990” in
the British Library catalogue and came out with 835 books. So I think the BL figures do not
support Blackman’s essay. Unfortunately, neither figure is decisively right. I did find some titles
(five, actually) which aren’t in the BL catalogue, but my sample suggested that they did
catalogue almost anything (missing only books from publishers so uncommercial and
unconnected that they ignored the copyright laws, possibly also failing to acquire an ISBN
number). I should add that the tag “Welsh poetry” brings up 25 titles for 1990 and the tag
“Scottish poetry” brings up another 20.
The ‘executive summary’ of the Arts Council’s poetry survey counts 1797 new titles for
1994 (as quoted in the Times Literary Supplement for 5/7/1996.) This was a 23% increase on the
previous year. That implies that 1993 saw 1461 titles. Randall Stevenson gives a figure of 2700
new titles each year ‘by the end of the decade’, part of a boom which saw ‘poetry’s readership
almost doubled during the decade’ (p.266). These figures tend to suggest that the BL catalogue is
missing many titles.
Blackman estimates 6000 people writing publishable poetry. That is for 1989 −the figure
probably grew during the decade. His concept of counting people who were competent enough to
get poems printed in magazines and would get a book out if things went well might be a way of
seeing the time – you have this fleet of 6000 people sending poems out, hundreds more turn up
each year, by the end of the decade most have got a book out and some others have given up. The
story is then 6000 individual stories. Some boats reach their home haven, some sink, others sail
in circles. Just possibly, some boats have to sink because other boats were faster and more
purposeful and generated a big wake.
The number of titles being published is very impressive. Almost everyone on the scene is
bewailing the unfairness of the business side of the industry in not printing or publicising their
work: the volume of publication suggests that this complaint is unfounded. Too many titles were
being published. But, that sound of frustration is a key part of the sound of the time. It is heard
everywhere. Volume is a crude measure of success, but is hard to get around.
I have done some checking on the figures presented by the authorities cited above. Roy
Blackman says that the Poetry Library staff gave him a figure of 480 titles acquired for a 4-
month period, which he scaled up to 1400 for a year, of 1989. But the catalogue of the Poetry
Library, which you can download extracts from, only shows 1000 books being catalogued for
1989, and of these almost half were not by British poets. So his figure of 1400 is not usable.
(‘Titles’ would include things like poetry posters, postcards, etc.) Of course, the lower figure still
allows for three to four thousand poets getting books out, with a swarm of poets getting poems
into magazine and wondering about getting a book accepted, and another swarm sending out
poems and not getting them published. Naturally, I am hesitant to disagree with standard works
such as Randall Stevenson’s. However, the British Library catalogue may actually yield more
reliable (though much lower) figures. In general, it is very difficult to get reliable figures, and
hashing though large datasets line by line may not be an intelligent use of time.
I find the idea of someone printing poetry and not having heard either of ISBN numbers
or of the copyright libraries rather touching. Does isolation mean you can’t write good poetry?
hardly so. The possibility that being involved in the poetry scene corrupted your optimism and
made you less able to write good poetry is always hovering around our heads like some gnat.
Maybe being unconventional is the only way to be.

Theories of time

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I failed to find a theme for the decade and I can’t think of poems of which you could say “Wow,
that’s really Nineties”. If you pursue one style or group of poets, you get further away from the
other styles: this is not the way to win. We have to accept that the scene was fruitfully divided
into many parts. The scene does not have to simplify itself to allow some critic to identify one
patch as being central and more worthy of notice. I think one generalisation which does apply is
that the culture business was under a regime of abundance and that the consumers were saturated
and over-loaded. This records a shedding of restrictions; everything is available. For example,
this was probably the best time there had ever been for poetry translations. The economic
problems of selling poetry from abroad, and even the stylistic problems of producing a readable
translation of modern poetry, had somehow melted away, or at least clever people had found
ways around them. This connects with equal affluence and abundance for original poetry.
I drew attention to the need for a visible link between Style and Time for the historicist
narrative to sustain itself. The variety of styles, also alluded to, makes it difficult to see any style
as central to the 1990s, and this hints, too, that a notion of “out of date” and “ahead of my time”
may not be available. It is not obvious to me that there was anything on the scene, formally,
artistically, in 2000 which was not already there in 1990. I just don’t have a feeling of technique
rolling on like aerospace or computer technology. In 1970 you can certainly see a massive
advance over 1960, in 1980 you nonetheless have a massive expansion of possibilities in use in
comparison to 1970, but this upward curve seems to have flattened. So a third question would be:
what is the account of the conscious innovators, what is their narrative about themselves?’
One way of looking at the decade is by thinking about who died in its course. Some of
the memorable names would be: George Barker, Roy Fuller, Ted Hughes, George MacBeth, Eric
Mottram, Kathleen Nott, Davies Aberpennar, Glyn Jones, T.S. Law, Ruth Pitter, Lynette Roberts,
Stephen Spender, Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Charles Madge, Iain Crichton Smith, John
Wain, E.J. Scovell, Hubert Nicholson, Lawrence Durrell, Nigel Heseltine, John Holloway. This
list suggests houses decaying, over decades, with tree roots pulling walls down from beneath and
creepers starting window-frames. It may point to decaying powers in poets in their sixties,
younger than these poets, and processes of substance slumping downhill which we cannot follow
step by step. I can’t define the exact point where 50 poets lost their creative energy. Maybe that
moment is the most important one.
Looking at these names evokes obsolete forms and decayed ideas, sites buried by
drifting-in soil, effects that no longer work. People who wrote poems like theirs in the 1990s
would seem incongruous and out of date. But is that really the story? or is it just that the poets
had lost vital energies for biological reasons, over fifty or so years since their earliest
achievements? Much depends on what theory of time we assent to. If we look at the most
conventional writers, the problem may be just that they never got beyond cover versions and this
was due to apathy and lack of real engagement. That is, a conservative writer with real
engagement might make a perfect success of ancient forms. Moreover, some elements of art are
so tied to natural language that they are not subject to decay with time – the question of what is
too basic, too low, to be affected by the passage of time is unusually difficult to answer.
Perhaps Time is not impersonal but depends on who you are. A particular faction holds
that everything prior to 1960 had become obsolete with the arrival of a new style of poetry, but
this fact ceases to hold outside that faction, it is a geographically restricted truth. It gave the
owners of that overwhelming wave of innovations a charter, a claim to sovereignty, but by 1990
they were no longer innovations but a legacy. It had carried enough water with it to roll over the

34
entire visible field, so identifying innovations in 1995 which really hadn’t been around in 1975 is
difficult. In fact, the magnitude of the poets who had started out in the 1960s, like John James
and J H Prynne, overshadowed younger poets, who in an obscure way were having difficulty
occupying the innovation franchise.
Another angle is to check poets who made a debut during the decade. Robert Sheppard,
Elisabeth Bletsoe, Ian Duhig, Jamie McKendrick, Mimi Khalvati, Mark Ford, Michael Ayres,
Simon Smith, Susan Wicks, Peter Manson, Kevin Nolan, Moniza Alvi, Deryn Rees-Jones,
Robert Saxton, Sean Bonney, NS Macias, Nic Laight, Niall Quinn, Dan Lane, Graham Hartill,
Adrian Clarke, Alice Oswald, Andrea Brady, Jeff Hilson, Keston Sutherland, Giles Goodland,
Karlien van den Beukel , Andrew Lawson, Helen Macdonald, Steve Harris, Clare Pollard, Tim
Atkins, Jane Draycott, Leslie Saunders, Gwyneth Lewis, Paul Holman, Robert Smith, Khaled
Hakim, Isobel Thrilling, David Rees, Rob MacKenzie. It is really hard to see similarities
between these poets; identifying a style of the decade would seem to imply scrapping most of the
significant new poets of the time. (I have to remark that Robert Smith never actually got a book
out, although numerous poems of his came out in Alternative magazines. Khaled also never got a
book out, although material for this time came out twenty years later.)
Fairly obviously, the claim that everything else is obsolete implies that your faction will
be the one which is regarded as central and significant in the future, say after 30 years. This
implication has an ominous downside – if posterity hasn’t validated you, after 30 years, your
whole project has failed and your ship is still on dry land. This means that anthologies are key to
testing theories about style and time, and that a theory of Time can’t be right if a Consensus says
it is wrong. My conclusion from looking at a swathe of anthologies is that there is no consensus.
We may have to dismount the claim that innovation moves forward, and replace it with an idea
that innovation just moves at an angle to the main line of culture-industrial output, and that is
why the future may be quite indifferent to it. If innovative poetry becomes a periphery, we can
move on to a sociology of the periphery, with its motives of protest, personalisation, and
allegiance to foreign norms.

The Underground

One significant moment is the cultural manager who has a paranoid fear of asking an audience to
deal with even a small amount of avant-garde poetry and fervently erases such matter from any
event, anthology, magazine, or bookshop. The fear is that the audience will feel baffled and
humiliated and run away in droves. Like most fears, this one is rarely tested. The issue isn’t
really about what the managers like, just about their ideas of popularity. The contrast with the art
world is striking – the art world doesn’t have a cadre of organisers who refuse to show
conceptual art in any public space. No doubt there is a vein of opinion which vocally defines
conceptual art as not art, but conversely millions of people have attended Conceptual Art shows,
and the conversation about modern art includes it in a very big way. The poetry managers were
notably more paranoid and weaker and more conformist. That connects with poetry having very
limited commercial draw – but that is presumably a result of failing to take on modernity, which
is what the arts audience finds most magnetic and most worthy of close attention.

35
 How would you respond to overload and saturation? One answer might be an act of
emptying out. The game starts by allowing ignorance to pour in; the movement of the game is
then the process of rebuilding and restoring knowledge, and the scope of the game depends on
how great the original emptying-out was. The artist has to empty out the work of art in order to
fill it again; and this frees people from the infernal clutter of objects and over-consumption.
Discomfort is part of the journey, although only a small part. Supermarkets are full of thousands
of different objects, art has to start by separating itself and us from this stupefying abundance.
The path towards abstract thought leads through a phase of discarding objects and pervasive
sensations. The most intellectually interesting poetry of the time includes a certain loss of
comfort; exposure is akin to anxiety and what leads to intellectual activity. The game cannot
continue unless we sweep the board and restore the universe of the game to zero. Only then can
the creative forces of the non-finite, of emptiness, and of chance reveal pristine resources. A
poem cannot start with plenitude, or it will be immobile – satiated. It looks as if we restore
stability, but ideas may have been gained along the way.
Another effect of abundance is the possibility of moving art into reflexivity, where the
presence of other works of art is not erased and via that enhanced memory the reader is
encouraged to raise their own reactions to poetry into awareness and perhaps clarify and magnify
what they desire and where they want to go. So reading becomes a version of philosophical
idealism, where instead of society the life of the mind is subject to a perfection process and
magically changes its form to become what is most desirable and most open.
The ‘non trade’ publishers had a representative body called the Association of Little
Presses (ALP). I found the ALP catalogue (Small Press Directory) for 1990-1. It was organised
by writer, so I could count 1571 individual writers listed there. This figure has problems, as it
may include some prose writers and a few foreigners. The ALP is roughly the Underground,
although some mainstream poets may sneak in. I made this count a few years ago and have
referred to it, but new work involving scrutinising lists line by line has convinced me that the
count is much lower. The second count involved taking the Small Press Directory for 1997,
looking at the 40-page list of authors and estimating 1176 authors. I crawled through ten sample
pages, line by line and came up with an indicator figure of 764 poets as an overall count. (Other
names were prose writers, foreign poets, etc.) This would exclude a large number of poets who
hadn’t got a book out or whose books were not in print, but would include some poets who were
not artistically alternative or non-conservative. During the decade, the barriers around the
mainstream were shifting (as well as getting weaker).
The Underground was thus a large-scale thing. I am certainly not proposing that everyone
unconventional necessarily writes good poetry, but it does suggest how important the
Underground realm was. You have this tradition of eccentricity in Britain, and the idea of being
personal, original and nonconformist appealed to large numbers of people. The artistic rigidity of
the mainstream is permanently enough to make ardent young poets exit from it, saying farewell
to the material benefits. Although a high proportion of these exiles end up in the Underground,
we should remember that the original impulse was rejection and this does not mean that the
young poet is also attracted to the “alternative” realm. More likely, they get to the Kingdom of
the Alternative, find other poets, and then reject each other. It’s a wonder if you don’t reject
yourself.
Since I don’t want to attract incoming munitions, let me cautiously say that there was a
loose association of “alternative" poets in London in the 1970s and subsequent years. Obviously,
there are hundreds of poets in London and the phrase “School of London” is not descriptive

36
enough to pass muster. When people use that phrase, they mean the crew who turned up to
SubVoicive readings and not something else. (That series went on from about 1980 to 2000 and
something but has finally stopped. It continued a series of readings organised by Mottram at
Kings College London, where I made my debut in 1979.) The problem of defining common
ideas can be left for some other occasion. If you took an inclusive approach, and poured in
everyone who was known to hang around SubVoicive readings and Writers Forum sessions, you
could get 50 or 70 names without too much effort. There was a “group feeling” around those
events but it resists definition and anyway people are too keen to argue about it. The scene has a
measurable continuity from the early 70s (and the Poetry Centre in Earls Court) right through to
now, 2010. Obviously the progressive changes due to “flowthrough” and erosion during that time
are very complex. Peter Barry’s book Poetry Wars (2006) includes a description of his personal
experiences as part of that scene, and is highly recommended.
Much of the good poetry of the Nineties was in the Underground realm. However, not
everyone who found a place in the Underground had any noticeable artistic talent. If you look at
a publisher like Writers Forum, which poets generally avoided because their production
standards were slap-happy and their sales efforts close to non-existent, the quality is very low
and the whole avant-garde method starts to look ill-judged. There was an anthology of Writers
Forum, their 500th publication, which looked calculated to discredit the whole operation. If you
have a project of taking over the poetry world by purity of intent, maybe you get 10% along the
way; and then you become intensely attractive to a horde of parasites and copyists who have no
purity of intent and who turn your project into a new mediocrity. How to avoid that phase of
breakthrough becoming a breakdown is the strategic question. (Out of those 500 tatty releases,
maybe 20 were really important and artistically strong.)

The Mainstream
I think cultural managers now love the discourse of anything goes, everything works, everything
is possible, every culture is accepted, all lifestyles are attractive, etc. This sounds like success to
them. Of course they take it that the narrative is about them. The element of exaggeration in this
discourse is rather obvious. It is still surprisingly easy to write bad poetry. However, the strategy
of previous cultural managers, whereby they legitimated poetry very selectively, measured all
poetry and all behaviour by their own “existential moral” commitment, and took extreme pride in
putting the boot in on anything which didn’t match up to that commitment—this has faded into
the background. The managers just don’t feel they own the shop any more. As art is
unpredictable and uncontrollable, and cultural managers are hired to bring it under control, they
are structurally obliged to reject innovation and to lie in order to cover up their mistakes. So if
they back off a bit this must be good for the creative element.
The mainstream needs discussion partly because the Underground define it so clearly, as
part of their claim to territory. There is probably a reciprocal relationship between ‘m-stream’
and ‘underground’ such that all the good new poets of the 60s joined the underground, leaving
the m-stream in a comatose state; and in the 80s, when the Underground was so withdrawn into
itself, many good new poets arrived in the mainstream. It is reasonable to say that when the
younger generation had a generalised distaste for authority and the old, say 1960 to 1980, new
poets mostly rejected the mainstream poetic and accordingly were pushed out towards the
Alternative. This whole pattern broke down. A stream of new writers joined the visible poetry
world, and by their talent relieved it of the obloquy previously associated with it: the criticisms

37
ceased to hold good. If you like, this could be defined as a partial collapse of the restrictive
norms of cultural managers, not especially as a change in the kind of poetry being written. One
factor was probably that the generation born in the 1920s were flagging; their clock was running
down and their ability to repress and silence other forms of poetry was running down too. This
hollowed out the ‘alternative’ critique of the mainstream, although at the same time that critique
became the consensus, as something that applied to conservative poetry of say 1956 to 1986. An
enabling change was in the attitude of cultural managers, abandoning the view of themselves as a
‘moral elite’ fighting off the temptation of popular culture, European poetry, American influence,
etc., in favour of the ‘relativist’ who was there to keep the shelves filled and was eager to be
inclusive of all sectors of the community. This is what Sean O’Brien refers to as ‘deregulation’.
In the 1990s, the relationship of the Underground to the mainstream was as an alternative, not as
a replacement snatching up a whole generation. It represents a fracture within a generation –
which can also be divided into ten groups, rather than two.
Something building up offstage in 1980 is a line of ‘ludic’ poetry which firmly rejects the
moral preoccupations of poets attached to the 1950s. An early taste of this is in Schmidt’s 1983
anthology Some Contemporary Poets; although most of the poetry is stolidly in the wake of the
1950s, poems by Frank Kuppner and John Ash are showing a new liberation –– a new frivolity,
even. John Ash had published Casino already in 1978. An important precursor of these works is
Hidden Identities (1982), by John Hartley Williams. Older writers who had concentrated on
developing the ‘ludic’ method were Edwin Morgan and George MacBeth. The discovery of a
new world of language was in preparation in 1980, and is one of the things that made the 1980s
bearable. So, although there was a project to install the Movement as the peak of modernity, with
the poetry of the 20th C leading up to Larkin as its culmination, this project failed and the decade
saw a decisive opening towards more hedonistic and fantastic poetry. Edwin Morgan arrived in
the foreground, and poets like John Hartley Williams, Jeremy Reed, Frank Kuppner, Jo Shapcott,
John Ash, and Robert Crawford achieved mainstream success and changed the poetic
atmosphere. This kind of poetry is sometimes referred to as postmodernism, but this word has
been degraded by too many divergent uses, and is probably best avoided. It was certainly a
vogue word in the 1990s.
In 1994 there was a marketing initiative called ’New Gen’. The babble around the project
pretended that it was a change of direction for British poetry and that the poets had been chosen
on artistic grounds by some connoisseur expert in the field. This is not true, as the selection was
based on publishing firms contributing to the costs of the programme. Poets were included
because they were signed to High Street firms and because corporate funding was released for
them. No artistic scrutiny took place. It may be that a panel turned down some of the ‘new’ poets
proposed, but only corporate-backed poets even got into the selection process. Another canard
was that the poets belonged together – diversity may have been strength, but it is not possible to
write literary history in terms of a grouping that did not fit together in any way. The programme
was successful in media coverage but the idea that the processes of artistic taste could be
replaced by a marketing initiative was surprising and disturbing to most people on the scene. The
product (this language is attaching) demonstrated the recovery of the mainstream during the
1980s. Several of the poets included were very gifted. The idea that the corporate world could
get behind poetry which was neither by dead people nor dead in itself was new, this had not
happened since about 1950.

38
 This offered an opportunity to evaluate the strengths of the mainstream. Much of the
poetry on show revealed that the idea of a fatal weakness of the mainstream was therefore in
need of revision. The New Gen poets were:
Moniza Alvi Simon Armitage John Burnside
Robert Crawford David Dabydeen Michael Donaghy Carol Ann Duffy
Ian Duhig Elizabeth Garrett Lavinia Greenlaw W. N. Herbert
Michael Hofmann Mick Imlah Kathleen Jamie Jamie McKendrick
Sarah Maguire Glyn Maxwell Don Paterson Pauline Stainer
Susan Wicks.

6
What happened in the 1990s, part 2

The growth of women’s poetry

I got some data by pulling it down from the British Library’s on-line catalogue, collecting
records of books published in 1990. The catalogue interface is not designed for this kind of data
grab, so the download was bloody awkward. The BL catalogue has a tag “English poetry” which
means “English language poetry”, so I had to edit out Canadian and American poets. The figures
I came out with were 621 single-person volumes by British poets, in that year, and, if we exclude
124 anthologies, then 29.5% of the titles were by women. This compares with 18% for a time-
window in the 1970s (June 1975 to June 1976). This is a fairly rapid change for a 15-year period.
Because of the difficulties in hashing through data, these figures are not totally reliable.
The make-up of the poetry world was changing quite rapidly. Without wanting to get into
sociology (which means giving up on analysing poetry, at least temporarily), we can note that, as
new possibilities, opened up the previous dispensation came to seem restrictive and unjust. No-
one believed that the status quo as at 1990 was stable, it was obviously going to change much
further. Because the new scene was better, it was natural to think that the old scene had been
unjust, and it would follow that people, both men and women, who had internalized the values of
that scene, were themselves inauthentic and incomplete. There is a time paradox involved in
rapid change, where, after you site the regime of inauthenticity in a time only ten years ago, you
plunge most of your own biography into inauthenticity, and the credibility of your self-awareness
splits in two.
Some women writing effective poetry during the time would include: Anna Adams,
Moniza Alvi, Elizabeth Bartlett, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Alison Brackenbury, Jane Draycott, Leslie
Saunders, Menna Elfyn, Vicki Feaver, Judith Kazantzis, Mimi Khalvati, Nicki Jackowska, Grace
Lake, Hilary Llewelyn-Williams, Helen Macdonald, Maggie O'Sullivan, Sheena Pugh, Kathleen
Raine, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Penelope Shuttle, Pauline Stainer, Isobel Thrilling,
Rosemary Tonks, Karlien van den Beukel, Vittoria Vaughan, Susan Wicks.

The Right-wing and neo-conservatives

If you deny the validity of history, and the outcome of formative processes across time is the
personal consciousness of living individuals, then you are inevitably denying the right of
individuals to their responses, judgments, wishes, tastes, and so forth. How do you deal with

39
someone who fervently believes that your reactions are invalid and that she, or he, has rights of
ownership over them? This was a moment which people in the Nineties encountered thousands
of times. I don’t want to offer a pronouncement which would resolve the conflict. However, it is
worth noticing that any cultural site to the right of the centre will deny the force of any such
critiques, and that a predictable feature of the culture pages of the Daily Telegraph (for example)
would be the absence of any such critique. Belief in private property goes along with a belief in
the right of the individual to seek gratifications, and to make judgments based on what gratifies
them. If you want to find the centre of the poetological spectrum, you have to realise that one
wing of opinion regards all this post-Stalinist critique of personal awareness as mere guilt-
tripping. I did not find an articulation of the right-wing position on poetry, but obviously, in a
country where so much of the electorate votes Conservative, and that includes such a large
fraction of the educated classes, there is a right-wing position on culture, and you could recover
it from analysis of thousands of pages of the Telegraph and the Times. What they refuse to
consider might be the area you had to focus on especially.
The right-wing, or neo-con, position might be that modernism is the just line for modern
art to follow. Further, that the advent of social conscience and (in the Sixties) of infantilism were
intrusions which had arrested the progress of modernism. Their concrete activity might be
organising a massive retrospective of some ancient hero of modernism, possibly born in the 19th
century, involving huge numbers of visitors, works which were also huge lumps of capital,
lenders who owned large reaches of industry, millionaires, and a catalogue which recorded the
sober and restrained endeavours of scholars whose very stolidity implied emotional
conservatism. The revolutionary impetus of the art was as it were ejected into an off-earth orbit,
and the altered future which that impetus so irresistibly pointed to was deflected, surreptitiously
replaced by the rigid grip on a future which wealth and its supporting documents claimed.
Whereas the art had offered an idealised future in which every feature was subject to
improvement by the action of ideals, the catalogue showed fixed knowledge in which tiny
deviations from accuracy were being filed down by repetitive corrections. The value of the works
on loan would rise significantly in the wake of the exhibition and the catalogue. Meanwhile, for
someone disliking this display of power to attach the exhibition would be to woo defeat, because
the art itself was great and (after the passage of time) undisputedly great.
The right-wing position might involve prepared arguments on, say, fifty issues to do with
culture. The right would be likely to win these arguments – their position is fully rehearsed and
documented, they will win the set-pieces. There is a world of discourse outside the set-pieces,
and much depends on whether the debate is channelled into the fortified area or into this
unpredisposed area.
Trying to attack someone’s artistic experience is a step away from the evidence –
gratification is the available evidence. But that step involves a move into theory, a grammar for
dealing with experience we haven’t had yet. A reaction basic to being right-wing is a rejection of
theory itself, halting it before it could lead to consequences; the predictable outcome is that the
field of theorising about culture, as a social and public activity, should be so dominated by left-
wing thinkers that the “Right sensibility” finds it a hostile zone. Because so much of modern
poetry has to do with finding patterns in history, rejecting the idea that you can find pattern s in
history restricts literary experience; and right-wing poets have problems. Empiricism is dominant
in the Right in Britain, although obviously the Right in France is much more prone to grandiose
patterns and a theological view of history, in which St Louis or Joan of Arc are directly related to
modern politics.

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Geography

The poets and their audience are different in different parts of the island. In Wales poets writing
well include Emyr Humphreys, Raymond Garlick, Peter Finch, Nigel Jenkins, Mike Jenkins,
Tony Conran, Roland Mathias. Robert Minhinnick was still developing his full force. We can
mention Harry Guest, a poet never fitting into groups, and not acknowledged in Welsh
anthologies, but yet a significant talent. The dominant group in Anglo-Welsh literature is the so-
called Second Flowering (so named to distinguish it from the First Flowering, linked to the
magazine Wales around 1937-45). The 2F is very very similar to the English poets of the 1950s,
with the proviso that their investment is in Welsh nationalism. The rejection of ‘grand ideas’ is
extended here to a rejection of the British State and of all ideological structures attached to it.
The postulate that the small scale is authentic turns out conveniently to disqualify England. In
some ways, their prose works explaining why the poetry is important, building walls around it,
are more impressive than the poetry itself. Because the 2F was so committed to realistic moral
statements, it was not easy for them to take in Anglo-Welsh poems that were making any other
kind of statement, and an increasing amount of more modern poetry was left out of their
anthologies, magazines, and prose works. Their function as defenders makes it hard for them to
develop, and this group had reached its peak even before 1970.
‘Peripheral nationalism’ had been on the rise since the mid-Sixties, and not just in Britain.
The constitutional situation was unstable during the 1970s due to the electoral success of
nationalist parties, and this exerted a kind of gravitational attraction on writers. Radicalism in
Wales and Scotland tended to take the form of nationalism rather than a ‘counter culture’ and the
politics of the personal. Poetically, the ‘British Poetry Revival’ was much weaker in the north
and western regions of the island (although this is partly the effect of local nationalist critics
concealing the evidence). (After the devolution of powers to Cardiff and Edinburgh in 1999,
devolution became of much less interest to poets.) In Scotland, without the effort of
classification, we can mention Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Walter
Perrie, Christopher Salvesen, TS Law, David Craig. (Kenneth White is an eccentric exile, writing
in a way which is either cosmic or vacuous. Ian Hamilton Finlay is the captain of the concrete
poets, both extremely simple and notably avant-garde.) Nationalism is in eclipse in 1990, not
winning many poets, so in a withdrawn position in which the absence of power allows thought
and development.

Binary myths

There was an interesting series of talks (actually, two series) just after 1999 called ’Binary
myths’. They took place in Plymouth and were organised by Andy Brown. The idea of a binary
myth was an inaccurate generalisation which classifies the poetry I don’t read as one thing, and
claims knowledge of it without having read it. The concept did expose the fact that people have
preferences and that these build up into habits. It suggested that you could make your artistic diet
more interesting by branching out – going to a different restaurant sometimes. But the label of
‘myth’ raised doubts – it was as if the wisdom of the market was being redefined as ignorance or

41
illusion. The preferences were based on self-knowledge and knowledge of art. You may well be
suspicious if someone is asking to erase your personal preferences in favour of some theory
which is their theory (and not yours). The binary split is between “poetry I am going to ignore”
and “poetry I recognise and plan to read” – on examination, the scene might divide into a dozen
separate realms, rather than two.
What this suggests to me is a weakening of inherited oppositions. The scene was flooded
with new people to such an extent that the positions produced by many years of bitter
experience, possibly also long years of malevolence and prejudice, faded away – they were
simply incomprehensible to a very high proportion of people on the scene. They were like words
which had fallen out of use. It may be that there were significant divisions in the landscape,
reflecting differentiated poetics produced by experiment and innovation over the decades, but the
divisions inherited from the Seventies were no longer applicable as a map. The Plymouth talks
addressed the subject of depolarisation even if the lecturers generally seemed to think that this
meant the collapse of any positions opposed to theirs, rather than a critique of the divisions
which had traditionally structured the market. Something else which appeared to be happening
was a collapse of confidence of cultural critics, so that rigid positions were becoming less
prominent or natural in the culture as a whole. From this point in time, it looks as if mid-century
critics wanted a definitive position, which not only linked positions in widely different realms of
culture but also gave naïve consumers knowledge of what the right position was on culture.
Examples would be John Berger and Kenneth Clark. They may have seemed like opposing
voices, when they led TV series about art history in about 1970, but what they had in common
was an air of assurance which seems ludicrous in retrospect. Surely it was possible to dislike
both of them, as guides to the mysteries of the past, even if it seemed at the time that you had to
choose one or other. By 1995, cultural critics generally didn’t feel that they were “the voice of
the past” or “the voice of Art itself” and dreaded being accused of “authority”. A side-effect of
this was that they were no longer willing to say in poetry that “poets I don’t know about are
utterly nonsensical and pointless” or that “the kind of poetry I approve of is all you need to know
about”. No, they were puffing to reach an area which they didn’t know about, and to be
identified with openness. This was greatly to the benefit of poetry outside the mainstream, even
if the new voice was “warm indifference” rather than curiosity.
Maybe the term personal sensibility has associations with terms like prejudice,
gatekeeper, exclusiveness, power. This attenuation could also be applied to poetry, where the
dramatization of strong opinions could be old-fashioned in comparison with poems which are
detached, depersonalised, noncommittal, developing either into an objective-documentary line or
a ludic line where nothing is asserted. This could justify a manner of wafer-thin poetry,
something like a CD which has a nice package but doesn’t actually contain a CD; the poem is
slick but has no ideological content and, to be accurate, almost no content. In an older
dispensation, a body of poetry was expected to narrate processes of society and history animated
by a strong personal sensibility, and this was really the payload of the poems, even if it was also
what annoyed people most.
Clark and Berger represented, respectively, the connoisseur saturated in pleasure and
knowledge, and the Marxist intellectual who did not accept the basic values of his fellow-citizens
and had a critique for everything (and an unwavering loyalty to Stalin). Both of these types had
lost credibility almost completely, in the 90s. It was a question whether this also meant the
disappearance of the intellectual, as a character in the cultural play, and of ideas, as parts of
artistic creation.

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Looking for a central place
Another way of considering the period is to look at the poets who might be convicted of being
Top Poet. The candidates I came up with are Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Logue, Allen
Fisher, Tom Raworth, and Jeremy Reed. (I removed Sorley MacLean because his productive
career had more or less finished before 1990.) It is striking that the public reception of all these
poets – with the exception of Hill – was confused or missing. It was difficult to be a connoisseur
in a scene full of disinformation. Some critics eliminated Logue because his works were
classified as translations – not original works.
Christopher Logue was present only through his translations of the Iliad, only by a
stretched sense a translation, and emerging over six volumes. The project had begun in about
1959, with the version of Achilles’ encounter with the River Scamander; >>In 1959, Logue was
commissioned by a young producer named Donald Carne-Ross to produce a version of a passage
from book 22 of the Iliad, in which Achilles fights the River Scamander. The success of that
piece, which was broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme, encouraged Logue to undertake
further versions of Homer. << The point of the work was its scale (eventually some 600 pages),
allowing it to reflect the Western World as war-maker, perpetually intervening in the Near East
and putting expensive technology above reason or virtue. The texture of the work was fascinating
throughout. Logue returned to publishing it in 1980, and during the Nineties we saw Kings
(London, 1991) and The Husbands (London, 1994). Logue’s poem is rich in sensuous and
psychological detail, perpetually undermining his Bronze Age lords by a political scepticism as
excoriating as the deaths which overtake them as they turn out not to be battlefield lord number
one. The whole is a mirror miles long and attractive in its high polish, poised far enough back to
show an external view of the West, not coloured by its own elaborate and captivating narcissism.
Fisher's work dispenses with the traditional graces of verse, he is a visual thinker using
words – the organisation of his work deploys hundreds of juxtapositions, distributed in space,
rather than syntax and logic. Preceding it is a vast project of emptying out knowledge in order to
start a journey in which we collect knowledge. The scale of the project constitutes its greatness.
No visual work could sustain so many elements – the result is a fundamentally new thing,
unconnected to traditional English-language poetry. His second large-scale work, Gravity, is
progressing during the 1990s. (The plan was laid down in Ideas on the Culture Dreamed of,
1983.) It is hard to describe in the familiar terms of aesthetic appreciation. The implicit offer
being, after all, that one’s own cultural life is elevated to the large scale while one is grappling
with the book.
Jeremy Reed was generally omitted from anthologies (and has since been excluded from
prose histories of the time). It was Ashbery who nominated Reed as England's best poet (cover of
Heartbreak Hotel, 2002) and it was Prynne who, around 1981, caused me to seek out Reed’s
works. the decade opened with him being curated by Iain Sinclair for the Paladin volume Red-
Haired Android, a full 250 pages of poetry on science fiction themes, close to David Bowie and
JG Ballard. This heralded a journey from the respectable and even conservative style (of his
books for Cape and Penguin), towards something much more involved with pop culture, glamour
photography, and eroticism. If not everyone agrees with Ashbery, it is perhaps because Reed’s
huge output and instant reactions to the inconstant surface of everyday life left little room for
moral reflection or for developing gravitas. He was like someone taking thousands of
photographs – each is a moment of the present and there is no come-down where action stops
and the poet reflects and forms judgements. Reed apparently thinks that what individuals do is

43
never wrong, which is the complement of regarding authority and the law as irrational and
oppressive. This is his critique, in fact. Where he offers so much new information, we can rebuild
generalisations. (Sinclair also included him in Conductors).
Ted Hughes was not adding to his own fame during the 1990s, and died in 1996.
Evidently quite a section of the poetically interested would have named him as top poet, but he
was incompatible with feminist taste and, anyway, this was not his decade. Quite likely we can
consider the Nineties as being characterised, in part, by the decline of interest in Hughes: young
poets did not want to sound like him.
It was probably 1975 when I was first told, as a novice undergraduate at Caius, that the
don one saw disappearing into the next courtyard was considered by some as the best poet in the
country. At the time, I paid little heed. In the Nineties, more heed must be paid, and we have to
work out what J.H. Prynne was writing to decide whether he was better than everyone else or
just different. Part of the impact depends on how much of a pilgrimage we want to undertake; if
we devote ourselves to speculation and searching, after a long journey we shall find that the
journey changed us and that the acuteness of sensitisation brought in profound perceptions. The
message is, quite likely, that we are asleep most of the time and that our society is based on
exploitation and aimed at self-indulgence. If we choose comfort, and are willing to abandon
puzzlingly incomplete patterns, we shall come away with nothing. There is a primary moment of
dissolving all knowledge which is never executed with more radicalism than with Prynne. The
follow-up, of acute and precise factual details, is also more thoroughly executed by Prynne than
by any other. The singularity of the local details is due to a solution from explanatory
frameworks, which could only reduce their original strangeness and our acuity of perception.
Other poetry seems to have only the vaguest ideas of how the physical world, or the economic
system, is composed. Their accounts are like naïve prints. I have difficulty with late Prynne but
regard The White Stones as dominating all the landscape around it. Prynne’s poetry is like a
wilderness only one day’s travel away from the city where most poets love. It is short of shops
and cafés, but it is genuinely unassimilated to human needs and projections.
Geoffrey Hill started the decade with an apparently terminal decline into an inability to
take decisions and a critically low artistic productivity. Media stories apparently authorised by
the poet describe a change happening due to a medication regime which resolved anxiety; from
about 1994 he became incredibly prolific, and, astonishingly, all the new work was of the highest
level. This was unexpected from someone aged 63 who had always been finicky and had slowed
down over a long period. Much of the fruits of this new and bountiful phase came after 1999.
Both Hill and Logue were adults in the Fifties, and had a personal view of how individuals and
society worked, and of what was right, which was clearly the equivalent of a theological
position, even if partly secularised. Their writing actively resisted the moral amnesia which the
media were urging on us every day. People born later did not develop a moral position.
Personally, I appreciated the criticism of the Thatcher government and its million outriders of
ruthless and reckless capitalism from someone who actually had strong moral standards and did
not erase their own message with washes of hedonism and moral relativism. The sight of
someone having rigid moral restraints on action and yet being emotionally and linguistically
fertile was especially rewarding to watch. Hill wrote in an intricate style with a great range of
connections to parts of the world and a complex message: people found his work hard to read
even while they were praising it.

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 If there is an elevated area, it is the knot of poets once associated with Ferry Press and
Grosseteste Review, and referred to as the Cambridge School. I have spent my career as an editor
trying to find poetic lines which would escape from the fatal clutch of Cambridge, but all the
same that group had developed a modern poetic language. They lived in various parts of the
country, but it was fairly clear who was inside that network if you socialised enough, because
they so frequently referred to each other and had so much interest in each other’s work (and,
mostly, so little interest in work from other stylistic areas). It seems credible that the existence of
a real social group made possible the existence of a social poetic language with rules and (after
composition) with an attentive audience; this is hard to prove in detail. To be sure, people got
into the style just by reading the books, but most of these people later socialised with the
network. Of course, the idea that you can divide poetry into “the Cambridge School” and “the
rest” is one of those binary myths we try to out-run.
The poets involved definitely include Anthony Barnett, David Chaloner, Andrew Crozier,
Barry MacSweeney, John Hall, Michael Haslam, Ralph Hawkins, John James, Grace Lake, RF
Langley, Tom Lowenstein, Ian Patterson, Helen Macdonald, D.S. Marriott, Drew Milne, Kevin
Nolan, JH Prynne, Peter Riley, Denise Riley, John Seed, Simon Smith, Keston Sutherland,
Karlien van den Beukel, Ben Watson, Nigel Wheale, John Wilkinson, Martin Thom, Rod
Mengham. I spent most of the 1990s editing a magazine in which the staple work usually came
from this list of names. Does this help? It is easier navigating through the deluge of books being
published if you have a couple of dozen names in mind.

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 7
ADORNING THE OUTLINES OF POWER: CONSERVATIVE POETRY

It’s impossible to grasp the relationship of intelligent poetry to the cultural scene as a whole
unless we realise what a minority taste it is. Conservatism is the dominant voice of the age,
which is one of steadily rising property prices and ostentation. In poetry, the great fear of
radicalism (a kind of taxpayers’ revolt against the destruction of chartered intellectual property)
found an outlet in a mixture of infantile regression and stylistic regression, in which inane and
artificially irresponsible tones were mixed with a conscious and discreet return to outdated forms
fragrant of “old money”, to Auden, Betjeman, and Larkin. The Christians’ profound problems
with linguistic dating seemed to have affected the poetic culture (so recently emerged from
Anglican domination) as a whole; and poetry seemed stuck in a Christian youth club of 1955,
with teenagers sneaking puffs on cigarettes and a guitar-playing “relevant’ vicar. At the same
time, moral gravity and the surrender to the sublime seemed to offer a way out of the domination
of light verse. Adrian Mitchell, with his use of popular song forms with constant irruptions of
Christian imagery (he was raised in a fundamentalist family), offers a transition between the two
kinds of conservatism, and was one of the founders of the third—the “pop” poetry reading.
When people write about the conservatism, shallowness, and inauthenticity of English
poetry, what they really mean is Oxford poetry. The visible face, what for the general public, the
media, and readers abroad stands for poetry in this country, is largely a list of names from
Oxford. If we mention, for the period since the First World War, Graves, Prince, Betjeman,
Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, Spender, Larkin, Amis, Jennings, Hill, (John) Fuller, Adrian
Mitchell, Raine, Motion and Fenton, it might seem that few memorable names had been left out.
The 1958 anthology Modern Verse in English by Cecil and Tate, has 17 Oxford graduates out of
55 poets in its British section; Lucie-Smith’s 1970 collection of British poetry since 1945 has
about 22 out of 85. (It is harder for a number-crunching critic to do counting in recent years,
since the egalitarian temper of the times has made poets wary of admitting to a privileged
education. A number of the New Generation poets of the early 1990s basked in the anti-Oxbridge
propaganda surrounding this marketing scheme while concealing their Oxbridge degrees.)
However, the kindest examination of this list will show the domination of light verse and
the avoidance of serious subjects, innovations of language, intensity, or any kind of
experimentalism. We might well think that there is another kind of poetry, and that this crew of
genial successes are engaged in a parlour game, an ingenious and cultivated playing for time.
Almost identical sets of 18-year olds end up with such different aesthetic plans because those
hothouses have intensely powerful local poetic myths, the heroes enkhorioi speak with mighty
voices. We could term the Oxford and Cambridge myths as styles to try on, as art students might
go through a phase of doing Expressionism or doing punk; or as the loyal capitalist consumer
tries on being George Michael or Kylie Minogue or whoever it is this month. This triability is
essential to art and yet pure play, impersonal and yet able to be captured and appropriated and
loved. There is by the Isis a geographically located fantasy of tinkly, theatrical, narcissistic,
clever, artexed, showbiz poetry swanning around in seventeenth-century rhetorics, and this
gobbles up young talents and spits out their bones. After all it suits the British book-buying
public very well: in fact, part of its emptiness is its eagerness to please. In 1960, just about the
last time you could be au fait with the poetry world without reading the little magazines,
Betjeman sold 100,000 copies of Summoned by Bells (imitated by 1000 poets writing about their

46
childhood and parents, the basic model for Andrew Motion, Tony Harrison, and Hugo
Williams)—comforting, witty, nostalgic, an anti-modern narrative without introspection. I think
it’s unfortunate that Auden got closer to Betjeman, almost week by week, for the last thirty years
of his life, and worked out how to sell the commodity that Betjeman had, in almost a camp
moment of the 1920s, invented. I think the style works rather badly, stiffly, unless you’re gay,
public school and Anglican. But the tills go ting-a-ling. And it’s terribly touristy.
The conservative backlash of the 1980s used Auden as its artistic hero, and claim to
modernist legitimacy. Today, the voice of Auden is influential among a large group of well-
known poets, central for some, although for others they are a nostalgic pastiche, a bag of toffees.
The Oxford manner has spread, through the popularity of these poets; the mainstream nearly is
the Oxford style. The English acceptation of John Ashbery tends to strip out the more difficult
and mysterious elements and end up with what Ashbery got from Auden in the first place: a re-
nativisation in the garb of a stripy blazer. English attempts to be self-conscious and modernistic
tend to skimp the difficult bits and retain only a certain fluency, satirical jauntiness, and evasion
of emotional commitment.
A story told about the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan is that he delivered a speech, around
1948, at the Oxford Union where the whole front row was filled with his ex-fiancées. I don’t
know if this is true (it was part of childhood mythology, or of my parents’ myth of Oxford); if it
is, it certainly implies a concerted plan among the young women in question to make a story
worth the telling. Another part of the story is that Tynan’s middle name was Peacock, and that
there was a chain of menswear shops around Birmingham, a source of family money, which he
would never admit to. Such feats of self-display, of manipulating anecdote, define what public
success is. Tynan went on immediately from Oxford theatricals to Fleet Street and, eventually, to
the West End theatre.
Oxford is the home of a cult of success, where pressure is brought on talented
undergraduates to do successful things rather than retire into their gardens and write
experimental verse. Oxford poetry expounds the conventional desirable. If there are good
clothes, good restaurants, fast cars, good theatres, pleasant places to go on holiday, desiring them
is obvious, and a life that excludes them is, at first blush, perverse. The simplest theory of the
media is that people want to see desirable experiences which they themselves lack; the appeal of
beautiful things happening to beautiful people in poetry is so obvious that a lurch of doubt
attends attraction to poets with other schemes. If one supposes that appealing to women is
important in the success of male poets, prosperity takes on another value; poverty is unappealing
because it implies insecurity, a less comfortable house, no car, no smart clothes, no exotic
holidays, etc. The proposition that a (poet) man does not need these trappings puts a great deal of
stress on his qualities as a man; which may appear as arrogance rather than idealism. How can
poverty be aesthetic? How can constraint develop intellectual freedom? I am not sure the public
wants a poet who lives in a tumbledown house and does a low-paid job. It is simpler for poetry to
plug into the system of overt prestige.
Poetry of theatrical address puts the figure of the poet at the centre of everything; the
suggestion is that you develop a crush on the poet, as you might have a crush on Doris Day. Such
poetry puts male upper middle class narcissism on display, offers the attractions that it offers,
exhibits the shortcomings that it exhibits. Television and cinema are blatant about presenting the
most good-looking men and women; poetry is not a visual medium in that way, but can present
social privilege and its accompanying self-admiration and self-confidence. People find success
appealing because it represents freedom from anxiety. They find failure stressful to think about

47
because it represents anxiety and the lack of freedom. Success showing in a conventional and
material way is the most clear-cut. Much of this book describes problems with authority figures;
but the problems could disappear if you were the white-haired boy of the authority figure, if you
were the prize-winning poet, prefect, captain of the cricket team, etc. We tend to define success
in terms of the approval of authority figures, and undergo conflict and frustration because they
withhold approval for our actions. Naturally it’s attractive to identify with a figure that gets
validation and approval for everything he does.
Rejecting the suave aura of privilege and self-confidence is where radicalism starts. Can
you be politically radical without being linguistically radical? But of course, the hopes of a
radical potential in art may have been just a passing phase, a false alarm in a deeply conservative
market. Difficult experimental poetry doesn’t make a coup, it doesn’t exert the glamour of
success, it doesn’t get people gossiping about you and doesn’t make splendid anecdotes. It
doesn’t propel you into showbiz.
The Oxford ideal in literary self-presentation owes a lot to the great charm of certain
1920s prose writers: Waugh, Powell, Betjeman, Connolly; Claud Cockburn was a rebellious
exponent of the same quality. There are few more amusing writers. We could add Robert Byron,
Henry Green and Jocelyn Brooke. This prose was enviable because of its success with a wide
audience, as well as its literary qualities. Its comic nature predisposed students to light verse;
poetry could not exert the same prestige because of its lack of external success. Auden only
became successful when he gave up writing serious poetry; Betjeman outsold almost any other
poet by versifying light-comic nostalgia. The realistic element of Auden, so far as it was ever
there, has faded away in his progeny; John Fuller and James Fenton were bright young things
with the vaudeville manner. Jocelyn Brooke described his type of twenties Oxford man as
futilitarian; this inability to deal with the workaday world stemmed at least partly from an
excessive attraction to the good company offered by Oxford aesthetes, who brought the art of
conversation to a very high level; the appeal of books from that world is not, I would say, their
depiction of privilege, as in novels of High Society by Ouida (otherwise known as Maria Louise
Ramé), but the amusing quality of the prose. It takes a certain humility to be so witty; which
derives after all from being exposed to other very intelligent people, to the damage of one’s self-
regard.
There is a similar literary streak in Paris. That the source of a great deal of this glittering,
film-thin, satirical style is in Tarr, published in 1914, suggests that it might be modernism à
l’anglaise. Aldous Huxley’s novels, probably based on Tarr to some extent, emphasise this;
Huxley published in Wheels and was one of England’s few modernist poets during the great
period of modernism. Whatever his politics, Powell is the local heir to both Proust and Wyndham
Lewis. The style dates to the 1920s, at least as an idea, and its satire was for a while part of a
merciless critique of society as inherited from the Victorian era, loaded with revolutionary and
subversive potential. Both achievement and limitations are highlighted if we compare Aldous
Huxley to Alois Musil. Lewis’s politics were erratic; Powell and Waugh migrated back to
conservative values. Huxley anticipates later excesses of British rebels, foretells the 1960s in his
interest in sex, eastern religion, and psychopharmacology; the rock band The Doors were named
after his book The Doors of Perception. A failed modernist, he was subversive around 1915-20.
If we trace English modernism through a hundred voyages, some bizarre and elusive, of failed
and defected crews, we can see why there was such a prejudice against it by the 1960s, and why
it simultaneously seemed like something new and unexploited.

48
 The ambition and intelligence involved in A Dance to the Music of Time and The Sword
of Honour suggest to these ears that a poet who takes on the frivolity and disconnectedness
without managing the large-scale symbolic structures may end up with something unpleasant and
forgettable. There is a certain aggressive empty-headedness about much of Auden, Fenton and
Fuller, for example. We are supposed to be anxious about thought, so that brainlessness is
entertaining and relaxing. How can poetry be made intelligent? The question is still open,
whether the vacuum left by the collapse of religious faith can best be filled by sceptical frivolity
or by a seriousness, aspiration, and purposefulness as involving as religion. But a book that
systematically denounces the usefulness of the intelligence can only evoke a thousandth part of
the curiosity and alertness released by asking the intelligence to wake and act. Even if the
splendid structure of analogues and hypotheses turns out at the end not to be the structure either
of the universe or of some real thing, its demands on the memory and on the pattern-making
faculty were exalting in themselves. Frivolity is likeable, but almost everyone dislikes cynicism.
Oxford has for long been attracted to the theatre world, drawing poetry into the sphere of
the revue; we can note how close Betjeman’s early lyrics are to a song in some musical comedy,
look at much of Auden’s poetry, look at Sandy Wilson’s 1950s pastiche of 1920s musicals (The
Boyfriend), Adrian Mitchell’s career in theatre, James Fenton’s writing the lyrics for a musical in
the eighties. The revue plays a permanent role in the student world, and the Oxford poem has
been constantly affected by the song tradition; it likes to avoid anything serious or heavy. Sandy
Wilson is by far the most gifted of these; the elements of nostalgic pastiche, camp and frivolity in
his work illuminate other Oxford writers, while his commercial success influenced them.
Never far away from the voice speaking the poem is the smart actor in a revue, pushing
smartness and lightness of manner, offering the audience insouciance and success but careful
never to strike a graver tone even for a minute. The traditions of light music are old; the
involvement of intellectuals with comic music in Germany starts with a cabaret tradition around
1900, memorable for Wedekind, who leads on to Brecht; the triviality of Auden compared to
Brecht owes something to the native traditions, which had nothing like political cabaret, but,
around the same time (according to Ronald Pearsall’s interesting Edwardian Popular Music),
were making great strides in inventing the musical comedy, an adaptation of the Viennese
operetta. The musical comedy “young chap”—part silly ass, part romantic hero—was made
familiar to a mass audience. The Oxford revue tradition owed nothing either to the avant-garde
cabaret or to Weimar political satire. English song, aspiring to American achievements, has
suffered from stylistic uncertainty, corrupting poetry based on song. Irreverence, humour;
association with dance, marriage with the pop song—all are vital to twentieth century poetry; but
England has not done well in either musical or chanson.
Life as a chorus boy is unprosperous, but for a long time, probably from the later 1940s
up to the early 1980s, media jobs were very attractive as a career for graduates, and the BBC, for
example, could command the best people that Oxbridge had to offer; because of this glamorous
image (replaced in the eighties by a career in a merchant bank), qualities identified with media
people became a turn-on for members of the graduate class, who could aspire to such a world
even if they were working as teachers or managers. Poetry was drawn towards the standards of
Fleet Street, advertising agencies and light entertainment, just as in a previous set-up for the
professional classes it had been drawn towards the standards of the Church of England. The
figure of the poet as seeker after truth and critic of society was less attractive, because someone
like that was obviously not going to be popular or prosperous; intelligence and thought were a
turn-off. A certain poetry was as scared of ideas as a television programme or a disk jockey.

49
Light entertainment retained its charm by rigorous evasion. The theatre or television demand the
personality as product, alarmingly exposed to the audience yet also reassuringly in control,
assuring the situation so that moments unflattering to the star/personality do not appear.
Introspection is replaced by a cynical awareness of one’s appeal and its limits.
The revue style is not, as a matter of fact, anti-populist; although its appeal is an
insouciance that implies privilege, it still takes on popular forms. Betjeman sold so many books
because he consciously set out to please; it’s quite misleading to label the antiquarian-Anglican
interest as elitist. In fact, I was disturbed, when examining the 1960s, to pick up Summoned by
Bells as the decade’s bestseller and realise how close to the pop, song-style, unserious “new”
poetry of the time it was. A comparison of Betjeman and Adrian Mitchell is rewarding. The
specific function of rhyme in Oxford poetry is elusive: it can either represent submission to the
rules of popular song, signalling its own triviality; or be an advertisement of cleverness; or
represent adherence to the Christian religion, and its hymn forms; or, related to the Christian
witness, a testifying to conservative principles in art, a lofty attack on the twentieth century and
attempt to claim the unperished assets of the seventeenth.
Another group habit is the attack on seriousness, its lines of argument, and the scorn for
serious writers: a whole critical system for disqualifying demanding poetry. Ideas, emotions,
experiment, commitment, politics, are all defined as boring, unacceptable in the salon and on the
cocktail circuit. Do we not find these tinkly little prejudices are an important part of the English
literary system as displayed in book reviews and dust jackets? That the light entertainment ethos
has reached the national stage and captured many of the sources of influence? It is not possible
for the brain to engage very far in something that is notoriously inconsequential. But to become
consequential demands that one drops the “anyone for tennis?” West End manner, write with
effort, ask the awkward questions and project overall seriousness. Perhaps what the social
butterflies are mocking is their own works—which they were too light-hearted to write. The light
comedy manner produced masterpieces, but has not produced any significant new talents since
about 1930, and is lethal to literary endeavours of other kinds.
The other tradition in English poetry is close to the Nonconformist set of intellectual and
cultural ideals, and to what may be its twentieth century equivalent, the Left. The whole hatred of
seriousness is a reaction against theology, against serious calls. There is a latent opposition
between these two traditions when it comes to what the reader expects, although a calm
consideration will show that one would want Ronald Firbank and A. S. Byatt. Undoubtedly, hard
work and emotional integrity are valued at Oxford as much as anywhere else; but an influential
local tradition of personality cults, worldliness and light verse has made it hard for Oxford poets
to be serious or innovative, in a larger culture which, after all, favours conservatism and show
business. Significant work has, nonetheless, been created by such poets as F.T. Prince,
Christopher Middleton, Geoffrey Hill, George MacBeth, Robert Crawford, Andrew Lawson, W.
N. Herbert and Robert Smith.

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 7.1

UNSOPHISTICATED POSTMODERNISM

A discussion of Paul Muldoon’s Quoof, James Fenton’s Out of Danger and Andrew
Motion’s Selected Poems 1971-97

Paul Muldoon published the influential verse narratives Why Brownlee Left (1980) and Quoof
(1983), both slick, repulsive, and rather sick anecdotes in which the point is that there is no point.
The effect is rather comforting; life is meaningless, there is no point trying at anything, and we
can all just sit in the bar, drinking and telling anecdotes. His poems, devoid of artistic interest,
were the starting-point for a vast swathe of poetry of the last two decades, modish, pointless,
fanciful, disconnected, and inept, but not irrelevant to some excellent poetry by John Goodby or
Ian Duhig. When English poetry critics speak of “post-modernism”, what they actually mean is
Muldoon.
James Fenton worked for many years as a journalist, an environment that encourages
cynicism, smartness, compression, a know-it-all superiority, slick witticism, avoidance of
sentiment and obsession with fact. Much of his tone can be understood as the joking of a man in
a group of intelligent, sharp, easily bored males, competing to be the least emotional and the
most tough and black in humour. Legend has it that he was also a member of the Trotskyite IMG,
and repented quite sharply, veering in the opposite direction. He was a student in 1968, when
becoming a Marxist was the order of the day. Fenton dates his collected poems as starting in
1968; The Memory of War collects poems from then until 1982; it has been followed by
Partingtime Hall (a light verse collaboration with John Fuller), Children in Exile (1983) and Out
of Danger (1993).
‘Letter to John Fuller’ resembles Auden’s banal epistles, such as the quite dreadful ‘Letter
to Lord Byron’; a comic, rhyming romp through poetic characters as Fenton conceives them, it is
excusable in someone drunk and bored, but publishing it in a book is hubristic. It is shallow and
inane. At such times, Fenton seems, not only to have a low opinion of his own talents, but of the
possibilities of poetry. ‘The Manila Manifesto’, too, is petulant, snittish, and would admirably
suit a wastepaper basket.

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 Fenton seems to start afresh each time he writes a poem. This makes it hard for him to
escape his artistic models; it also points to an amazing lack of continuity of impulse; it also
contributes to a missing author feel, a separation between the writing wit and the real man, which
drains the work of its psychological impact. Most volumes of poetry by one person have a
cumulative weight, whether one likes the poet’s character or not; Fenton’s books are held
together by nothing but the glue on the binding.
The sequence ‘Out of Danger’ which opens the book of that name is frustrating, because
where the author is apparently writing personal poetry, and appearing on stage, the coldness of
technique actually squeezes out the personal element; the poems are unmemorable, banal as rock
song lyrics. The separation occurs between line and line, a lack of cumulative sense presumably
encouraged by the rhyme-based technique where the line is the functional unit, so that lines tend
to become self-contained, and continuity is missed. ‘The Mistake’ is a confessional poem, a
morbid self-revelation of guilt and regret, and yet it leaves no impression behind. None of the
confessional poets wrote in rhyme, because in rhyme it all sounds too stagy, knowing, factitious,
as here. The crushing banality and off-handedness of ‘Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an
earful’ seem more indicative.
‘Jerusalem’ might be about politics in Palestine, but is a sequence of unconnected facts,
atomistic lines, without any emotional or intellectual synthesis; and this in fact may be the key to
Fenton, his distaste—dandyish, traumatised, superior, immature, supercilious, inept, journalistic,
or whatever it is—for getting away from facts and progressing to meaning. If things don’t speak
for themselves, he refuses to speak for them; if they do, they are predictable and familiar. The
obsessively one-clause sentences, the primary unqualified nouns, of ‘Jerusalem’ are like the
speech of someone emotionally damaged: missing emotional nuances because he is cut off from
the feelings of other people, which cause situations to be nuanced, descriptions to become
complex and qualified. Perhaps this is supposed to be like the autonomy of a finished artwork,
which exists in the round and sustains endless interpretations. What it feels like is someone more
concerned with syllable counts and sound variants than with human beings. Much of the book
reads like song lyrics; perhaps this is supposed to be tough, primary, and true, like Brecht, but it
feels retarded. You can’t treat Third World politics in the style of an Oxford revue as he does in
‘On a Recent Indiscretion by a Certain Fulbright Fellow in Upper Egypt’—‘Don’t go fellating
fellahin’, he enjoins us. These poems are reminiscent of the ones that Christopher Logue was
writing in the 1950s, but presumably that is the sound of Brecht. Most of the book is a kind of re-
take of ‘Surabaya Johnny’.
The Memory of War is systematically better than Out of Danger. The component modules
of pastiche, dissociation, light verse, jauntiness, rhyme, and occasional violence are not yet so
mechanical. Between angry mocking, and pastiche of other writers, there is a thin vein where a
real Fenton might be visible. ‘A Staffordshire Murderer’, deliberately drained of feeling, almost
attracts us as a spoof, a late-1960s fantasy like some photo shoot with a pop group rigged out in
period dress: ‘By the Floral Clock, by the footbridge, / The pottery murderers in jackets of
prussian blue. / “Alack, George, where are thy shoes?”’ Fenton’s tone, here reminds us of the pop
group Procul Harum, with their lyrics by Keith Reid.
The nineteen pages of ‘Exempla’ (probably 1968-70) seize material from the outside
world, typically from a museum, which is deliberately irrelevant to the poet. This resembles the
documentary preoccupation of conceptual art, but lacks all political value; he is amused but no
more. He fights against the surplus of meaning in the human world. Other people integrate the
elements of the world supplied by their senses to make a synthesis, an integrated sensibility that

52
generates its own meanings and is the overall subject hidden and revealed behind the poems;
Fenton exhibits only a dissociation of sensibility. His poetry is observed by an eye with nothing
behind it; like a camera. He is good at framing squares of the visible world. The untouched
quality of these squares is a fear of commitment; repression of associations, fear of ideology
even where the personality is this. He is always walking away from involvement. His refusal of
mental acts higher than bare perception is lockean. He describes how a frog’s eye can only detect
movement, and does not move separately from the body; an equation of awareness with the
mechanical limits of the perceptual system as a data-gathering device which points towards
phenomenology and the critique of human awareness and perception; but Fenton seems blithely
unaware of any analogy, refuses to make any models for hypothesising, closes off the chains of
possibilities by neat metrics, and seems unconcerned by anything except a clever, detached
tournure of line endings.
Hundreds of poets have, since ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum’, written poems using the data of
science; there is surely a difference of intellectual order between those who simply accumulate
bizarre facts in a kind of cabinet of curiosities, and those who are interested in ideas, the laws of
deduction, the nature of perception, the interaction between the observer and the observed,
human nature, cognition as a series of continuously modified hypotheses, and so forth. Fenton’s
bizarreries are pre-scientific in temper, they are mere touristic curios, as a sixteenth-century
collector might exhibit them; very few British poets show any understanding of science. He
wants to be intelligent, but does not want to use his intelligence for anything.
The poem about the anthropological exhibits in ‘The Pitt-Rivers Museum’ does not
associate the artefacts with their source societies, does not look through the objects to imagine
alien mentalities and geographies, does not walk outside the banalities of an afternoon in a
museum in an English city; we seem to have found a poet who lacks imagination altogether, and
this is perhaps a more remarkable exhibit than a head-dress made of feathers. Who else could
walk through that wonderful museum without having their imagination fired? Fenton’s capacity
for cutting off associations is astounding; and conjures up the problems of excessive control,
how phobic neatness prevents the swimming and oscillation of meanings that I associate with the
poetic.
It is unfair to examine Fenton’s inability to connect things without recalling the hyper-
developed connectedness of the Marxist world-view, so prominent around 1968-75. For them,
everything meant everything else: buying American records meant condoning the actions of
American capitalism in Vietnam. History was one story, and a mysterious subject entity lived
continuously from the Stone Age to the twentieth century. All social struggles were part of one
big struggle. These connections, eye-bulging when you first realised them, did not have the
advantages of being true; or, not being wholly untrue, they were unfollowable by someone
reading a poem, who was tired at making so many leaps. Other people went into hyper-
associative states, on LSD this time. Fenton is reacting away from this, and so his work is, at a
level beneath conscious intention, a criticism of left-wing art and of counter-cultural poetry.
His best poetry is in The Memory of War, especially in the sequence ‘A German
Requiem’. The dwelling nature of this has the effect of compassion for other people’s suffering,
which he is not as usual sending up; the giggling superciliousness of his later work has tended to
flavour reception of this, turning the ambiguities into monotones. Reticence is a problem, the
details pile up but their emotional value is uncertain; perhaps it would be enough to sound
concerned to release an emotional reaction from us. Fenton feels no more need to know about the
Korean alphabet than we do. Perhaps the studied nonchalance of poems like ‘A Nest of Vipers’ is

53
like the self-disengaging paradoxes of Prince Hamlet, or of Jacques in As You Like It, an
occluded reference to melancholy and estrangement. In ‘Chosun’, a poem about mediaeval
Korea, the details are consciously exotic and deliberately point away from the poet’s self; solemn
and elaborate nonsense is perhaps meant to be a recuperation from personal problems. Perhaps
Fenton’s indifference comes from the School of Wittenberg; or perhaps he finds that mixture of
sense perception and identification or projection, which we call sensibility, repugnant.
Andrew Motion’s Secret Narratives is deliberately oblique about pointing the line of the
story, the relevance of parts. This is supposed to be sophisticated; it is in line with what the
contemporary reviewers describe as such, the textbook definition of “postmodernism”. These
poems are genuinely understated, and genuinely complete, after a second reading. But because
the texture of the poetry has not been adjusted to allow for contemplation of the unknown, the
effect is simply of nervousness, a shyness that may disguise apathy or anxiety.
Philip Toynbee’s narrative poem Pantaloon, which ran to four volumes between 1961 and
1968, starts with a framing scene (the narrator is talking, many years after the events, to a
Norwegian-American student who is researching his life), and a modal statement putting
everything else in doubt: the narrator admits he is ‘half-crazy’. This piquant aside adds nothing
to the text; it seems to me that nothing would be different if it were omitted. Presumably,
Toynbee found it easier to work with a narrative mask that was subjective and not strictly
truthful. I am not convinced that this was a novel device in 1960; it seems to me rather common
in nineteenth century fiction. Browning and Wilkie Collins used it all the time. Mention of the
latter reminds us that the detective story descends partly from his great thrillers of the mid-
century, and that the simultaneous existence of different hypotheses, only one of which can be
true, is a staple of that genre. If poetry gets into uncertainty and unreliable evidence, it may be
mutating, not towards modernist masterpieces, but towards a second-rate genre which people
read in heaps and quite inattentively. The claim is that the unreliable narrator is a new and
underlying device, which raises the poem to a new pitch by enabling us simultaneously to enjoy
the poem and to contemplate the nature of poetry; that is, to theorise. For the poets under
discussion, this claim is quite mistaken. In Volume 1 of Pantaloon, there is a scene between the
teenaged hero, Richard Abberville, in disgrace, and his father:

Let me remind you of the exact occasion. We were sitting in your pleasant drawing-room;
the great bowl enamelled with yellow dragons; satchets of rosemary; tall glass-fronted
book-cases, well-filled with the English poets; the knight’s head gleaming nobly from his
circumambient darkness, confronting the bright blue Virgin of Bellini on the other wall.

A detailed recollection; which is undermined, in the following pages, by a dialogue between the
narrator and the memory-shade of his deceased mother, where she corrects his mis-memories
while he admits the strenuous activity of self-regard in editing memories as they re-appear in
later years:

And he said, sometime afterwards, that he’d seen the Madonna on the wall behind him.
He can’t have seen it! […] For I’d moved it—oh, six weeks before!—and hung it in my
bedroom.

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Richard remembers the Bellini because he imagined his own mother’s eyes upon him during the
traumatic interview (his father is a ‘gaunt, importunate shaman […] A presumptuous and sickly
vulture’). She mis-remembers where the hyacinths were:

Quite wrong! Quite wrong!

The pink was to the left,
The blue to the right of me.
And all the time I smelt their debilitating odour.

This is far more evocative than the tenuous sketches of Fenton and Motion; yet Toynbee, an
avant-garde novelist of the 1940s, was not breaking new ground but following the far greater
effects of self-deception analysed by Proust, several decades before. The “postmodernism” of the
1980s is not, then, offering us a new literary sensation or a new idea to nourish our intellects on.
The qualities of being fashionable, by carrying out the dictates of academic books about
postmodernism, and of being intelligent, therefore cognitively critical, inclining us to
contemplation of the rules of perception, are equally prized but quite separate. Although I do not
think these writers are intelligent, I think that Toynbee was quite unlike anyone else writing at
the time, and he does make one wonder about the nature of poetry; but his work is not
aesthetically intense enough for me to evoke it at length. He is one of the genuinely marginal
figures of modern English poetry.
It has been claimed that Alfred Hitchcock, in making The Birds (1963), was influenced
by the Continental mystery film, a genre to whose rules he was, for commercial reasons,
conforming. So The Birds is perhaps a reply to L’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, and L’année dernière
à Marienbad. The vogue for these films lasted till at least Blow-Up (1967). They were the
supreme intelligent, fashionable, art film hits of their day; too popular not to have spawned many
tedious imitations, but doing so only by being classics of cinema. My taste is perfectly
conventional in admiring them; what is more in doubt is the artistic interest of reviving the
enigma narrative, the incomplete story, so many years later. I see Muldoon, Fenton and Motion
as poets who, faced with an indifference to poetry which only gives token space or attention to it,
exploit this brevity by staging artistic ideas which no one needed to have explained; their poems
are easy to talk about or review, chiefly because of their perfect banality and tenuousness. It is
clear to me that a narrative does not need to be complete, or to offer figures easy to identify with,
or to be constantly full of incident, or accountable and reassuring, in order to be great art; what I
am unhappy about is poets in the 1980s or 1990s recycling ideas brilliantly developed in the
1960s, or even the late 1950s, with an apathetic and conventional facture, and being hailed by
poetry critics as challenging and innovative. One of the rules of the literary world today is that
the most idea-free and mainstream poets are wrapped up in a critical or publicity discourse
saying that they are dissonant, subversive and post-modernist.
There is an interesting resemblance between Motion and Fenton on one point: inability to
express emotion. Emotion is supposed to be felt in the reticence—i.e. uttered by the negation of
utterance. This paradoxical and peculiarly English absence of the very thing is hardly likely to
impress the reader. Perhaps the argument is that “people in deep emotion don’t talk emotionally
(or, poetically)”, but the effect is of evasiveness, low affect, and incomplete command of
language. The most significant parts of the poems have been left out. The lack of resolution
commended for postmodernist texts may, in these cases, be an ideological mask for traditional
English diffidence. The feminist argument is that men don’t like talking about their feelings (and

55
dislike women talking about their feelings); this seems to hold true. The hope of the traditional
reading audience is that poets are supremely good at what most people find supremely difficult,
i.e. talking about intense emotions; one might expect that traditional and restorative poets would
fulfil this hope, but in fact it seems that evasiveness, diffidence, and certain compensatory
mechanisms to draw attention away from these, are prevalent in the most prized mainstream
poets. Here is the connection between the new mainstream of the 1980s and the Movement: a
central inarticulacy and inability to connect. It is only fair to say that Fenton is not connected
with the Movement style, although he probably likes being compared to Auden.
It is incorrect to say, as so many partisans have done, that Motion and Fenton are
remarkably bad poets. In fact, they stand out from the rest of the mainstream, their work is well
edited and pleasant to read. It would be truer to say that they have been weak-headed and
cautious.
One of the structuring events inside these texts is an impersonation of the avant-garde
precepts of indeterminacy (theorised, for example, by Roman Ingarden in 1964) and detachment
from plodding realism. The mainstream is, through these writers, to close the gap that had
emerged in the repressive consensus, steal the assets of the subversives, and exclude them again,
claiming that they are merely formal variants of Muldoon and Motion, but without lucidity and
showmanship. The failure of these profoundly un-intellectual artists shows, with didactic clarity,
some of the artistic rules of the modern style. The worth of emptiness, the resonant vacuity
opened by indeterminacy, is to take out the poet and allow us to possess the text in fantasy; also,
it is like the questions at the end of a chapter full of information, which let us use our brains and
memories actively. It is also like the inexplicitness of song. The worth of suspending the relation
of the poem to reality is to disrupt perceptual habits, to protect a hypothesis to the point where
the reader starts to speculate about the nature of social being, and about the effects of the initial
premise. This also resembles something that happens in education: where we are taught to
develop hypotheses. The artistic power of the conjecture is a kind of indeterminacy: the equal
possibility of both outcomes; the tension of the exercise slackens as soon as it is obvious that one
answer is right. It is not—I suggest—sufficient merely not to tell the reader what is going on. To
sample the external trappings of modernity without updating the rhythmic, psychological and
informational structure of your poem is to produce a fake composite anatomy, a kind of
phoniness never before seen. Modernity of technique is not something you can buy at an airport
and put on your mantelpiece.
The problem of mainstream poets, and their backers or publishers, is how to maintain a
presence both in schools, where the imperative is to be easy and youth-oriented, and in higher
education, where people demand a certain density of language and conformance to the most
recent update of modernist canons. The result has been a good deal of impersonation, where it
emerges that avant-garde (Left Modernist) poetics have a potent prestige, even in places where
the poets themselves are completely unacceptable.

7.2

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 CHRISTIAN POETS
(discussion of Isobel Thrilling and Geoffrey Hill)

What is at stake in Isobel Thrilling’s quite brilliant second book, Spectrum Shift (1991), is the
old-style Anglican version of the parish as long-term physical community in which every event
has long-term results, and is a result, and the poem takes place inside this huge set of
relationships. The alternative is, I suppose, the poem that takes place in a self-referential
linguistic box, whether of ideas or emotions, that may extend beyond the individual to a very
small group. The problem that put people off the Christian poem was the draining of intensity by
the vast timescales involved; or possibly it was that you can’t write this kind of a poem if you
aren’t a good person. A lot of people find people, their personalities, their quirks, their emotional
problems, their characteristic ways of moving, profoundly boring; my reply is that ideas and
textual tricks are just as boring, but I don’t have space to prove this here. Poetry is dissolved
inside the education system, which is upwardly mobile, tests people only as isolated individuals
and is competitive; in the world of work, people who carry out those values are quite unbearable,
and this ethical failure makes much poetry unreadable. So much of modern aesthetics start from
the rule that attachment is bad and sentimental, whereas in art, as in the real world, having
attachments is the most precious thing.
So many poets are spending so much effort trying to prevent A from reaching B. But the
reader knows perfectly well that actions have consequences, even if the poem is frantically
disconnected. You can reach more calm and un-touchability and balance by accepting that
actions do have them.
Three of the poems here (‘Mugger’, ‘Head Teacher’ and ‘Hostess’) are about being a bad
person. This crosses one of the basic rules of the modernist system. It also seems out of date, in
that odd convergence between low-affect aesthetics and the tone of the times. But, after all, the
main thing in poetry is to project onto the poet; and it is inevitable that you will project affection
onto someone good; and it is impossible to project onto someone who you know does not care
about other people. Language is so much part of dialogic faculties that it is impossible to achieve
moral insensitivity without reaching aesthetic insensibility at the same time. I think a lot of
feminist poets are carrying roughly this message. A poem that is beautiful like a soul is several
orders of magnitude more complex than one that is beautiful like the neck of a bottle.
Now that the socialist project has been disassembled and its parts sold off, it is clear that
it is similar to the Christian endeavour; the myths of reason and owning the future were just
appropriated power objects, unbearably rich and exciting, but evanescent. Wanting society to be
good without your being good yourself, to other real people, was at best a delusion and at worse
criminal.
I don’t know what denomination Thrilling belongs to, but it’s obvious she’s a Christian. I
also don’t know the history of Christian poetry in the past thirty years; while reviewing Geoffrey
Hill’s Canaan I became interested in the subject, but I haven’t found the right sources. As you
already know, the shift between the 1940s and the 1950s in poetry was caused by a shift of
Christian emphasis, away from the supernatural and prophetic strain which issued forth in
Apocalyptic poetry, and towards something more sober and constructive, if also more
authoritarian; the typical poetry reader of the 1950s was Anglican (as well as middle class), and
the crisis of this group was also the crisis of poetry in the 1960s. The small numbers of the
Anglicans are still vast in comparison to the headcount of poetry readers. Whether the shift of

57
poetry into live performance and simple forms was just an offshoot of the Church’s wish, in the
1950s, to go into youth clubs, and give witness among the underprivileged, and cast off its
inheritance of learning and fine language (as elitist), and be “relevant”, I’m not sure; but it
doesn’t seem that poetry led, and the Church followed. If you read a poem from the 1980s that
tries to deal with Third World cultures, it’s easy to see it as a reflex of a drive of the Church in
the 1950s, something that Paul Tillich, for example, was much involved in during the last decade
of his life. Purely formalist poetry does have a claim to be outside the shadow of the Church.
If you read De Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics, you find out that all the troop is preoccupied
with watching interactions between other troop members, and have a perfect capacity for
associating behaviour with individuals. This in fact is the basis for self-defence: because there is
a memory of bad and aggressive behaviour, individuals cannot escape the consequences of their
actions, and bad behaviour is avenged by a withdrawal of trust and support. The individual,
dissolved by various decentralising theories, is thus real as a category in which we inevitably
store our memories of behaviour. These stores, this connecting, differentiate a mind from a mere
perceptual apparatus. The Anglican concern with equity, character and the parish as the “stage”
in which equity is obeyed or abused, thus draws on ancient preoccupations. It is not artificial and
cannot get dated. The person is the central value in poetry because the world of a primate is
dominated by recognisable individuals, and the software that relates a new interactive moment to
years of other interactions with that individual is too powerful ever to be switched off.
Our skill at reading character is what allows us to translate the low-energy gestures of
poetic style into psychological facts, and so generate half of the meaning of the poem. Human
gestures do not exist without humans. We only perceive style as a consequence of our concern
with character.
Thrilling’s style is Imagist in a certain sense: short lines, precision. But it is dominated by
analogies and metaphors. I associate this with the conceit or concetto, brought within the treasury
of Anglicanism by seventeenth-century hymns. The concision of the images reminds me of
Quarles. The whole book converges into one poem, the product of deep artistic calm. This
coherence leads us to map an abiding structure of perception above the poem itself, as the
individual moments of perception it records are lower than it:

Christmas
settles over me like
a dream,
the paper-lantern spills
its shining seraph,
safely hitched
to his parachute of light.
['December 1990']

Falling, blazing; the sky; stars in the sky as a 3D space in which reactions are staged. A
spectrum shift of light is the key symbol of transformation by which outer becomes inner:

Words slipping
their colours through voices,
speak about snow.
A mighty pane of sky cracks

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 into silver,
trees ring with crashed crystal,
a death of mirrors
breaking to sharpest quiet.
['Eye-ward']

The course of a meteor through the sky, as a bright line that animates a much wider and
more passive space, is a response to another person, as the elementary unit of language:
depth of dialogue; duration and repetition. This becomes the family. Bad interactions
within the family make people unhappy. This points to what good language and good
behaviour are. The basic task of humans is to form reactions to other people; a precious
talent and skill slowed down and emphasised by many images. The person is their
reactions to other people:

Dusted with sky

we gather
pale fur of light,
gold and cinnamon
ashes from solar
fission
sift into skin.

Within,
nerve-fibres
kindle stalks of bone,
ignitions lift

heads heavy as wheat.

['Fission']

The mind is a fictile 3D space where a central object is modelled. The spectrum is the
richesse of the cognitive reaction; a mutation of “let there be light” and of the star over
Bethlehem. It is valid both at the level of what links our selves to the universe, and at the
level of theology, where we need to perceive the creation of God in order to praise him
fittingly. A cry of resentment (‘After’) at the sociologically conditioned inability of
English people to speak their deepest emotions in appropriate language is typical for an
Anglican at this moment in time; the keyword display is used. But, the fear of display is
overcome at the level of style, by conscious and tranquil ornateness:

Words are the mind arrayed,

a ghost on the page,
torn velvets and threads,
lost dusks
and darknesses spiked
on a pen,

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 sentient colours exposed,
patterns and whorls
spread wide.

['Letters']
The 1950s brought a crisis of the relationship of the living Anglican to the majestic
Anglican language of the past. The fitness of language, which is of a whole-person
ethical approach sustained through life, is warranted for us:

Flowers illumine
the borders of conversation,

the ghost of a palace floats

half-conjured,
membranes from glass,
ribs revealed against light,
skin letting in sky.

(‘Kew Gardens’)

The language that is both miraculous and wholly accurate acts out the limits and depth of
being together. A visit to the world’s oldest wooden church (she tells us), at Greensted,
may say why strident language is not the deepest; the durability of this wooden thing
(associated here with ships, that are sustained on all sides by what would mean their
destruction) is shown to have outlasted the pride and prestige of the royal panoply at
Sutton Hoo (also involving a buried ship, we may recall). The war-gear of the Suffolk
Howe is shown as barren declarative rhetoric. Frequent images of bereavement and grief
are gainsaid by images of floating, or gently falling, with a mixture of lightness and
serenity:

Some words are like stones,

conglomerations,
wounds, rifts,
edges of cliffs and hidden ranges,
nuances from clashes
ground to a fistful of sound.

['Shores']

She keeps comparing language and rock. Is this in fact gravestones and churches? The
visible imprint of the Church in a settlement, an almost coarsely palpable metaphor where
the substance attests to the durability of the Word embodied in it. More difficult is the
use, at a slant angle to this, of stone as an image for deep language gone deeply wrong:

She walked on darkness,

exits blocked in

60
 tunnels, caves

she knew the strata;

families lay fuses,

wired shocks

(‘Quarry’)

Here, feeling acquires monumental form (the lake of a slate pit, visibly the product of
human hand), and the landscape is no less than the result of ethical and selfish impulses.

Geoffrey Hill’s Canaan (1996) is more distinctive, more modern, more concerted, more
shimmering with witness, than his previous books; since there is an epigraph set over the
whole of it, we can suspect an overall scheme. If there is this unifying subject, it must be
an England where faith is kept; outside which we are wandering in the wilderness. His
political views slide home like a Stanley knife in the opening four lines:

Where’s probity in this—

the slither-frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?

['To the High Court of Parliament']

Hill was one of many Oxford poets who adopted, in the 1950s, the New Criticism, the
Metaphysicals, conservatism and civic address: formal verbal acts revealing fitness for
high office. He is difficult and intense: not qualities of any other Penguin poets, but
which are found far from the High Street in poets like J. H. Prynne, Roger Langley, Allen
Fisher, Andrew Crozier, Denise Riley; he is not only the most personal of mainstream
poets, but also the most public and straightforward of small press poets. My
contemporaries have attributed both authenticity and inauthenticity alternately to writing
for a wide public and writing in an intensely personal and meaning-rich style, which are
Hill’s practices. Recent taste has compared ‘Pavana Dolorosa’ to Prynne’s ‘Thoughts on
the Esterhazy Court Uniform’ and found Hill overshadowed by Prynne. Hill is also the
latest in a series, in disarray, of Anglican poets. In Canaan the apostolic, historicist forms
are thrown away; it has short floating lines, sometimes broken up by line breaks in the
middle, the occasional non-sentences, such as other poets adopted, along with exilic
politics, in 1970 or in 1960.
We could consider Hill’s conservatism through the terms of law and hierarchy;
equity preserves the latter, which is also iniquity, but staves off general violence.
Boundaries—to behaviour as much as of property—are defences: a shared law, moral and
commercial, makes everyone secure, as it codifies unequal access to resources. Hill is a
Christian, believing in peace, who believes that social peace perpetuates oppression; he is
a conservative, enthusiastic for the social advance of the poor and working-class. His
artistic pleasures lie in a sphere of small precise effects based on shared conventions that

61
allow great weight to very fine discriminations; they are suited to a geologically and
politically stable country. What seems to be happening in Canaan is that the measure of
oppression and iniquity has been filled to the point where someone who has spent their
life guarding the boundaries is ashamed to speak: the system has lost its mandate of
staving off the catastrophe, of all against all. He sums up Parliament with: ‘For they
know not to do right, saith the LORD, who store up violence and robbery in their
palaces’.
In other primate species, too, high rank is granted, by public acclaim, not to the
merely strongest individuals, but to the strong who are also kind and non-irascible. My
country sometimes appears like a vast refugee camp, without shared symbolic structures,
patrolled by officers alien to their subjects; any rebel who can talk convincingly for five
minutes can achieve more following and reputation than the camp authorities. Because
Hill can talk convincingly about moral issues, he is a threat to the powers that be: an
attainted prince. Because of who he is, it’s disturbing to hear him denounce as oppression
the oppression that founds us; or describe privatisation in tones of withering scorn:

England—now of genius
the eidolon—
unsubstantial yet voiding
substance like quicklime:

privatize to the dead

her memory:
let her wounds weep
into the lens of oblivion.

['To the High Court of Parliament']

This appears to refer to the selling-off of cemeteries by the Tory Council of Westminster,
London. Eidolon I take to be the tenuous phantom of genius, the national genial-
congenial spirit bringing cheerfulness, fecundity and tradition.
The peacekeeping settlement preserves the nuances of relations established in the
past. The testing of leaders is central to their ability to keep the peace; their fitness is
measured by fine discriminations, which are then preserved. If you are unfit for high
rank, you may be more contented with your low one. Hill is strong on recitation of faults
and flaws, even if this is generally what makes us miserable and traps us inside a
character instead of inside fulfilment. He isn’t perceptive of the possibility that someone
might have too little self-esteem.
When I picked up a copy of Agenda (Volume 34, No. 2; ‘A Tribute to Geoffrey
Hill’, Summer 1996), what fell out of it was a letter from two associate editors resigning
because of ‘the editor’s attempt to whitewash and justify the tyranny of Mussolini and the
Rome broadcasts of Pound’. I think it would be quite possible to have an admirable
policy while also believing in fascism; one of these two qualities is lacking in Agenda. It
was founded in 1959, just before the 1960s—not the best time for the non-populist Right.
The Agenda look has been as finicky fossils frozen in horror at modernity, mouths
engrossed by a rictus of terror and disdain. The reader hunching through the hushed sodal

62
sacrosanct catacomb is buffeted by a chill wind of disapproval for infringing countless
secret laws of aesthetic conduct; he skids on bones that may either be auratic relics of
martyrs or simply the detritus of rash left-wing poets. Not all people retain the ability to
form new aesthetic responses in adult life. Their staple still is poetry conforming to the
standards of the 1950s. The fastidiousness of Hill may coincide with that of Agenda, for
whom it is instead the symptom of palsy and nausea. It was a pleasure then, made sordid
by our clinging. The avant-garde of the (former) counter-culture may now, too, be
retreating to defend past advances made by not defending. The issue of Agenda
aforementioned, is a half-pounder of boring poetry and boring literary criticism. It is
redeemed by a few helpful pages, also by a lecture by Hill, where he suggests that with
its crudeness of public address Four Quartets may have caused the collapse of Anglican
poetry ever since. Hill is again testing leaders; the followers plunged into ruin. In an
exciting footnote, Hill disinvests the last stained rags of Larkin’s reputation, before
nimbly flicking Christopher Ricks into touch.
Hill’s ‘De Jure Belli et Pacis’ (eight poems) is a memorial to Hans-Bernd von
Haeften, a diplomat executed for his part in the 20th July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The title
is from a seventeenth-century book by Hugo Grotius, proposing to bring relations
between nations within a framework of law: a stay against megalomania in populous
nations. The recognition is that what belongs to someone else does not belong to you.
Haeften’s “Kreisau circle”, linked by Pietism and the date of their deaths, were interested
in a European Community, pressed as were the builders of the Common Market by the
need to avoid another European war. Closely related is the poem to Stefan George,
‘Algabal’; his early (1891) cycle about Heliogabalus. Losing the kingdom and the parish,
Christianity falls, in the 1940s and 1950s, with vigour onto personalism, temporal
“commitment”. The German resistance are pin-ups because they were so isolated and
outside institutions; not wonder-workers but socially relevant; above all, not communists.
The contents of Anglican doctrine and the ripeness of reason are claimed to be
one and the same. The first accounts for Thatcher in terms of Nonconformist self-
righteousness, exemplified by Bunyan at Elstow; Richard Hooker does indeed warn us
against pirate revelations not validated by ‘strong and invincible remonstrance of sound
reason’, and monetarism was one of those. ‘Private Judgment is no Safe Guide’, he warns
us, and a partial revelation, clenched and clung to though the wise and grave in consistory
are wrong, may be blinding, not only sectarians, and the religious Right, but also
Thatcher herself. Reason is strong against rage and distress, but what we find reasonable,
and reason from, is hierarchy and private property.
Canaan seems to me poetry within the terms of mere Anglicanism; the text would
be ideally realised in an annual public service, as a liturgy. ‘Rose-douched ammoniac /
arch goddess / of intimate apparel, / brutal and bijou’: Hill’s diction is like one of those
recipes of gin makers which list coriander, allspice, juniper berries, clear runnings of
distilled grain, burnt feathers, lanolin, old red sandstone, Chinese dandelions, wild
lettuce, moths’ eyes, pepper and chicken spleen; nubby and exotic, it reminds us of those
qualities in the Prayer Book and Authorised Version. We take it that the title of ‘A Song
of Degrees’ refers, not only to the steps to the altar, but to the antiphonal singing by the
laity of the psalms so labelled in our Bible: the poem concerns darkened voices outside
the Church:

63
 It is said Adonai your hidden word
declares itself
even from obscurity
through energies dispersed
fallen upon stasis
brought by strangers to interpretation,
aspirant to the common plight.

(‘A Song of Degrees’)

We owe to John Stevens remarks on the very close attention to texts which the reformed
sixteenth-century hymnody brought: ‘The ears are the only tool of a Christian’, Luther
said: lights have been driven through the walls of Canaan’s diction until stone soars and
air carries an abiding truth. Perfect intellectual attention is partway to divinity; raptness of
listening is a solution of the continuity of egoism. We take it that Thatcherism came over
this One Nation conservative like a bout of TB of the bones. ‘Concerning Inheritance’
suggests that inherited wealth is wrong, jeering at the moralists in office who,

grant inequity from afar to be in equity’s covenant,

its paradigm drawn on the fiducial stars,
its aegis anciently a divine shield
over the city.

(‘Concerning Inheritance’)
This Church owed its origin to a contract with a kingdom, an access of mighty secular
power; its crisis points have been the link with capitalism and with warfare, and the
withdrawal of the whole nation from its ecclesia; Hill is not just fighting for the soul of
the Conservative Party, but for the political and social mission of the Church thirled to:

a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.

['Dark-Land']

In ‘Scenes with Harlequins’, the speaker is Aleksandr Blok, in a Saint Petersburg,

entranced then by commedia dell’arte, where the eyes of statues are compared to the eyes
of Symbolists, dreaming of a future where the world-mind brings about harmony; they
are seen in negatives, searing flash visions as if glimpses of a new organ of sense. The
Blok-speaker refers to his poem ‘Retribution’ and to the Beautiful Lady cycle:

Begone you grave jewellers

and you spartan hoplites
in masks of foil.
Orthodox arcane

64
 interpreters of repute,
this is understood.
Why should I hear
further what you propose?

Exegetes may come

to speak to the silence
that has arisen. It is
not unheard of.

(‘Scenes with Harlequins’)

Blok and Stefan George complete, as emblematic figures, Bunyan and Thatcher; the cycle
on ‘Mysticism and Democracy’ says that some balance between the public and the
visionary must be struck, the incompatibles settling on a boundary hedge. Hill stages the
bizarre and extreme to find the liminal light where the psychotic processes give way to
reason, clearing a field for the socius. Almost all the poems here are based on prose texts;
most recount ecstatic experiences: Hill set out from the Metaphysical paradox, the
irrational as touchstone of wit, and both shows the limits of reason and its space-stringent
power to lay out symbolic order.
He disproves the words of rulers only to assert that a good society is thinkable. A
sequence is called ‘Psalms of Assize’, the titles of three poems apostrophise parliament as
the ‘highest court’: the answer sought affects guilt within a legal process which converges
on real past events in recreation, rather than facing a new situation; Hill is quite remote
from the poetry of the here and now, experimentalism as the practice of freedom.
European (but not Confucian) legal argument chops and channels the chaos of everyday
life to recognise in it valid analogies to the frozen verbal forms of a law-code: even to
name a crime is to win a convergent intellectual victory. The poems are like the brilliant
phrases of a lawyer: sensibility is subordinated to acuity within the civil duties of proof
and reproof. Religion is also a form of law, where the recognition of analogy between
scripture and our lives gives us our duty; Hill’s use of recognition and analogy typifies
him.
Hill’s dual hoarding and honing of the language of law and of the Bible
commemorates the constitutional link of Church and State, both claiming his fealty; the
beauty of art also persuades the disaffected that the society they live in is worth joining.
Being disaffected is surely one of the greatest miseries there can be. To adorn the process
is to help legitimate it, which is why Hill’s new fury at the makers of laws,

You; as by custom unillumined

masters of servile counsel.
Who can now speak for despoiled merit,
the fouled catchments of Demos,
as ‘thy’ high lamp presides with sovereign
equity, over against us, across this
densely reflective, long-drawn, procession of waters?

65
 (‘To the High Court of Parliament’)

may have lead him to throw out the soothing high-calorie isometric diction of previous
books. (The lamp is the Parliament building, just before evoked as a ‘storm-lantern’;
catchment associates the sewage-carrying quality of water, its swallowing of all dirt from
higher up, with its quality of always falling; a poem in Hill’s 1953 pamphlet also evokes
the Thames, via William Dunbar.)
In ‘Sobieski’s Shield’ (a poem for Christopher Okigbo—an Ibo English-language
poet of startling talent), final chords of forgiveness and atonement weakly assist recovery
from a diction that fuses the divine, the psychotic and the butcher’s shop. I could ask how
we can stand to see re-created an era of national history which, in its occurrence, was
unbearable. What ‘Sobieski’s Shield’ discreetly says is that the stars go on shining during
the daytime even if we can’t see them, and so too Justice and Equity are still there above
us despite the iniquity of the instated:

Brusque as the year

purple garish-brown
aster chrysanthemum
signally restored
to a subsistence of slant light

(‘Sobieski’s Shield’)

A witness of Anglican cordial geniality and hopefulness, bringing a pang of relief. Du

führst die Sache meiner Seele. Jan Sobieski is one of the godly warriors of the book, to go
with Stauffenberg, Churchill, and perhaps Okigbo. A friend suggested marketing Hill’s
Lachrimae, as a tear-shaped paste of prussic almond kernels coated in very bitter
chocolate and with a God-shaped hole in the middle, for the Christmas of Anglicans. But
he does purvey the luxuries and splendours; his curious finickiness only serves to prolong
the experience.

(2019. This account of “the poetic right wing” is unsatisfactory because it has amazingly
few data points. You can’t really delineate the realm which resists the fabulous ideas of
the Underground with half a dozen sources. The geography is just too complex. I was
unconsciously looking for a single point reason for closing out the mainstream, and this
led to a string of false successes. A hundred conventional texts do not necessarily
resemble each other. The project of exploring the conventional and conservative came
after Clans was closed – starting about 2003, I think. Hill expressed enthusiasm for “one
nation Conservatives” of the mid-19th C, but clarified later that this did not mean he was a
Conservative – just that the party of property developing a social conscience was
attractive. So this was a mistake on my part.)

66
 BORN IN THE SIXTIES, part 1

A discussion of D. S. Marriott’s Hours into Seasons and Schadenfreude, Andrew

Lawson’s Human Capital and Simon Smith’s 15 Exits

Charlie Parker grew up on the edge of the nightclub district in Kansas City, and during
his teens spent most nights hanging around the clubs, listening to jazz. Or: if you’re going
to undertake experiments, you need to have some familiarity with contemporary thinking.
Truly going into the unknown creates a negative pressure: you’re liable to disperse into a
million tiny pieces scattered over a million possibilities. So having some positive
pressure is a great help. The advantages of being part of an experimental scene are
obvious; obvious too is the anomaly of a group oriented towards the unknown that also
has continuity and relies on accumulated artistic power from the past.
Around 1966-70, with the poetry world in a state of deathlike excitement about
the new world of pop, there was a scene in England which was reflexive, critical and
innovative; the passwords were the Objectivists (and Olson, O’Hara, Ashbery), and the
key outlets included Ferry Press and Grosseteste Review. The lure of the Ferry Press-
Grosseteste (from now on referred to as FP-GR) style had led to widespread imitation by
Cambridge undergraduates around the time I was there in the mid-70s, as preserved in
copies of magazines like Blueprint and Perfect Bound. A new generation of poets were
animated by punk, and published in Equofinality; the next 15 years seem largely blank as
far as new Cambridge poets goes.
The anthology A Various Art (1987) relaunched the Grosseteste Review poets; the
institutional basis for the revived FP-GR ambience was the Cambridge Conference of
Contemporary Poetry, founded by Chris Milton, an annual fixture from 1991, which
allowed the experimental world to assemble in one room and be exposed to a barrage of
poetry. The continuity at a social level is very clear to me; what’s less clear is whether
this represents a “tradition”, instead of a “feel” which has actually changed all the time. If
I look at a copy of Resuscitator from 1965, of Grosseteste Review from 1976 and
fragmente from 1993, I perceive them as part of the same “thing”, but also they’re totally
different.
The political and poetic relapse that followed the high times of the 1970s made a
mockery of theories of devising and occupying the future. History did not move towards
the future we had laid out. It was touching to see the new group seize on existing style
modules as if by possessing them they held the keys to history; although this may belong
with the contemporary phenomenon of avant-garde neo-classicism.
The names generally identified with neo-Cambridge poetry are D. S. Marriott,
Simon Smith, Drew Milne, Andrew Lawson and Helen Macdonald. One of my motives in
getting into writing poetry criticism (from 1989 onwards) was, obviously, to argue with
this younger generation about what the recent past of British poetry was; since their
version seemed a little hasty and over-reliant on the Allardyce-Barnett republication
programme, as if nothing else had been written. My first venture was an article on
Maggie O’Sullivan for David Marriott’s magazine Archeus (named for a concept in the
writings of Paracelsus); David at that time knew a great deal more about modern poetry
than I did.

67
 D. S. Marriott (b.1963) was a leader of the revival of the Cambridge Style: Hours
into Seasons (1987); Schadenfreude (1988); Floodtide (1989); Clouds & Forges (1991);
Airs & Ligatures (1991); Lative, (1992), whose work is largely incomprehensible to me
but whose good faith I am reassured of by his furious reworking of texts, visible to me
from seeing early drafts. His relentless pessimism and obsession with the paternal power,
to which in the last instance every question could be reduced, did not at first seem
credible; time has revealed his earnestness in this, where the territorial or phallic basis of
society is taken as a fact rather than smothered in the wish to appear sensitive. Even if the
verse is reduced to a kind of textile, the control of paralinguistic elements like line-
breaks, the variation of cadence, the smoothness of syntactic direction, has been carried
to a luxurious height:

Both mud and light

archetypal transparency, carved into
tapestries & bronze vantage. Humour
laid in stone-rush, & ritual light
gilding earthly stone. Then we move
on: Strasbourg worldly, tempered by
analogy & foliage, knowing this to
be the last act. There, ripened deed
tithed to bewilderment & profound
investiture. A song of Dowland teemed
over substance, fathered time-fear.
Then to leave: furred to a cold
seasoning, scoped to an impure centre.

(‘In Darkness’)

Idle chatter uncertain now, shod

in distance & splendour. The cure
is discovery, the fender intempe
rate & expansive near the taproot.
A few days later, the sound plows
landform to a hollow bowl. Ecstasy
& fear, both games of chance hauled
up to the provinces. So they had
their meeting in Derby, cussed to
rapture as consumed longing & with
no vessel to guide them. Deciphered
it implies butter & sugar as liberal
happiness,
cruces of the sweetened
spectacle and quiet garden.

(‘Now as Always’)

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Around 1990, I was working for the London Stock Exchange (ISE, as it was then) and
Marriott was working for the Bank of England, and we used to meet for lunch in a City
pub. This situation allowed him to see the world as a place where everything was owned
by someone, and where the anomaly was that he owned nothing; the usual problems of
having no money and being at the bottom of an organisation could be translated into a set
of claims for power fatally invoking head-on duels with anyone who got in the way. Art
is a form of wealth; the artist has to think like someone rich because he is rich. A graduate
student who realises that academics have to decide you’re important before they listen to
you can rapidly size up what the coveted assets are and seize them by direct action;
unfortunately, erudition isn’t really the path to attract attention from bored and
competitive superiors.
Marriott perceived a crisis in the popularity of English poetry; the constant
impulse to social realism, to the representation of miserable lives, and to the draining of
personal style in order to be more realistic and more collective, was producing poetry
which nobody wanted to read: to attract attention, and to inveigle publishers into putting
money into printing the work, the poet had to make it impressive and desirable, and the
drama of style, of the poet’s egoistic and ambitious struggle, had to return. He devised a
show architecture, where high points of the cultural past could be seized and reduced to
trophies; Prynne’s verse style around The White Stones was the most obvious of these. In
this way poetry could be the direct fulfilment of desires; whereas social conscience
poetry could only point to their realisation in a vague and indefinite future, after the Great
Change.
The poem has become a ceremonial act of display, like parading in the main street
of the town, where everyone is watching, in a sensationally expensive Larmando suit; the
series of subliminal and primeval gestures by which a designer raises their name until
people will pay thousands of pounds for its cachet on items of personal adornment had
become the model for the conduct of the poem. Outside the confines of science, academic
reputation is largely based on manoeuvres of this kind. The pressure of so many
showdowns could induce exhaustion, to add to the original melancholia of poverty;
Lative shows the paternal power as mandating a sense of failure and guilt. His
preoccupation with mediaeval philosophy was part of a realisation that Gothic churches
were the most visible, the most admired and beautiful objects in the English landscape,
and that scholasticism offered a means of translating that fictive complexity into words;
accordingly, he read Robert Grosseteste. The effectiveness of the manoeuvre says
something about the poetic world’s latent vulnerability to someone who drapes a seizure
of assets in a mime of goodness, intelligence, and rootedness. Marriott’s insight that he
could invest himself with a mediaeval air and so persuade people that the deep English
past belonged to him and not to them, a Marquis of Carabosse effect whereby the rich
scattering of Gothic churches, castles and guildhalls suddenly came to bear the Marriott
coat of arms, was a stroke of genius. In the end, the landscape is made by the people who
own it, and the writer ends up tracing their feats and acts of possession at a delay,
faithfully.
The deconstruction of time-honoured patterns of literary value left the throne
empty for the market to seize. Property may be the product of a speech act, but speech
acts do not become property without assent from a speech community. The eighties saw a

69
great many people persuaded that they could acquire power simply by saying “I am
powerful” enough times; this solution of the link between signifier and signified merely
showed where true weakness lay. Starry-eyed politics flowed like music over a steady
exclusion and immiseration.
Poetry can never sociologise itself so long as it ignores the fundamental rules of
institutionalised knowledge, and also of poetic prestige. Obviously poetry has to do with
competition, prestige and acquisition. At least Marriott didn’t look to inherit the mantle of
the Cambridge modernists without a Frazerian assassination of the living incumbents to
prove himself worthy of the Palladia.
If we look more closely at Clouds & Forges, a pamphlet of some 700 lines and
eight poems, it offers a singular lability of site, passages following each other swiftly,
gracefully, but without falling into a pattern. This in fact is part of the point: the endlessly
moving camera is meant to imply an infinity beyond the mereness of the individual
scenes. Recurrence is a kind of surrender of movement to territorialisation. Two themes
do recur, almost as if editing had failed to efface them: transience (three times), with as
variants transiency, transient, perishable, passage, and ephemeral. The preoccupation
surely points to an investment in the past, something inevitable for someone growing up
in England, but also to philosophical aspirations; the word is a technical one, engaged to
a plane of the absolute where an elite stare out at the ‘edge of being’. Along with the
investment in Gothic architecture (perhaps why Strasbourg appears in ‘In darkness’), is
an investment in the German language, elevated because of its association, in English
universities, with philosophy and the sublime; Hegel, Hölderlin, Heidegger, Adorno and
Habermas.

Ventured into being as barren loneliness.

the white, unclean cities, wounded by
myths. It needs to be said; the Puritans
from Saxony are like rich birds inside
their solar plumage, trembling with vision
& the possibility of pure sound, high in
the fragrant courtyard.

(‘In darkness’)

The Puritans are probably the seventeenth Baroque poets of Saxony (and Silesia),
entering the cycle of canonised German culture because of their association with Pietism,
which again is associated with Tübingen, where Hegel and Hölderlin studied. I don’t
know why the cities were wounded by myths, which cities they were, or what myths, but
we need to allow the poet some leeway for pure assertion. The evocation of the Baroque
poets seems to me quite remarkable, grave and visionary, cut until every nuance of sound
is freed from noise. However difficult—or perhaps unstill and tireless—the rest of the
pamphlet appears, we can imagine that there is a substrate of sense to it, of this kind.
The other repeated theme has to do with decay and loss of form, in the peculiar
form of whiteness. The unstated preference is for order, worn by centuries into endless
significant shapes, stratified, extensive and visible; Marriott is likely to feel hungry where
the offered diet is not like this. White memory seems to relate to the white logic said to

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characterise the speech of alcoholics: blank is blanc, white, so white memory is the loss
of memory. There is a group of related phrases: white sand, White cities. It appears here
as a kind of terminal horror, but if we put it beside ‘the edge of being’, a phrase from a
passage, quoted in the text, from Emmanuel Levinas, it may be more alluring; as the note
which defines what the mind is and what awareness is. Finding this line, we could also
find the unwritten moment as the location of freedom, awareness standing always at the
edge of the known. The scantness of relation of the parts of the poem to each other could
be an over-fulfilment of the riposte to the semi-legal move by which philosophers relate
their artificial worlds to the real one, i.e. that the “real” evidence has been selected to
support the unreal theory, and therefore does not hold it upright; the poems are full of
existential generalisations and the disconnection of the other information included is
meant to counterbalance this. The parts are disconnected as if their function is to disavow
connectedness. The binding element is the self of the poet, both fascinated and cautious,
swimming through the high surf of European culture. A difficult character, certainly.
The temptation of the critics when dealing with a Black writer is to construe
everything in terms of blackness, eliminating complexity: the books are thus efficiently
reduced to the level of telephone directories, where what you take out is what you expect
to take out. The point of Marriott’s relentlessly fast movement may be to beat off this
threat; by milling through everything, he can find real intellectual affinities (Paracelsus,
Pater, Prynne) rather than being confined to “ancestry”. The market really doesn’t want a
black intellectual; if you’re a rebel beyond a certain point, everyone pretends you don’t
exist and aren’t doing the frame-breaking thing. Marriott has earnestly tried to relate
scholastic philosophy to the ambiguous surface of life in London and Brighton. However,
there is one strand of these philosophical poems which relates to the race issue; in poems
like ‘Mr Claude’ (in Schadenfreude), autobiographical and amazingly violent, and in
some recent poems (in Angel Exhaust 15 and 16), there is a streak of Black Gothic: the
family curse typical of Gothic romance is used to represent the relationship of a Black
Englishman to England, where the “family secret” is slavery, the annihilation of the other
past. In ‘Mr Claude’ (perhaps Claude Mackay?), he refers to ‘the via negativa of Ghana,
Sudan, Harlem’, where the juxtaposition of a technical term of scholasticism and a litany
recalling the diaspora of the Black race allows Marriott simultaneously to appear and
disappear. The culture’s petty obsession with the past as the source of legitimacy is a
daily affront to someone whose past, although dictated by English history as much as
anyone else’s, can never be “legitimate” in terms of descent.
This issue is dealt with terms of horror and trauma (perhaps the source of his
interest in psychoanalysis), and of paternal right and heritage. Perhaps the land, where so
many fantasies of harmony are projected by benign English literati, is really the issue of
heroic strife by patriarchal founders. Many English poets seek to gain cultural authority
by denying that they are seeking it, and so are trustworthy; this legitimation by sleepy
indirection means that the real sources of power become unmentionable; a whole social
industry is forced out of the domain of language into a suppression zone. The poet is not
supposed to use “rhetoric”, because this would forfeit amateur status and reveal that he
did not inherit cultural authority, but had to work for it. Most living poets are
spectacularly dishonest about pride and power, and the male half of the population are
vanishing from the view of poetry; this diminishes poetry, not the male population.
Marriott has never lost sight of these things, and so gives a much less filtered version of

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events. If you put an ounce of prestige into his hand and it was three grains short, he
would say, “Where’s the rest?” In a sense, Marriott doesn’t expect poets to be beautiful
people, because he recognises that the middle class is rapacious, servile and conniving;
this unsentimentality gives him a much wider range than most poets, and more access to
real narratives about society and psychic appetites that conflict-free poets can never
write. Perhaps he sees philosophers as hypostases of patriarchal authority, forms of
wealth analogous to monumental buildings; where ownership is uncertain (at the issue of
conflicts yet to be won and lost), everything is an asset, including what is ancient and
what is abstract.
Perhaps we can revisit the topic of philosophising, and inscribe it in the semantic
zone of self-possession, control, possessions, not being contradicted, power defined (and
there absolved from rivals), getting one’s way, model worlds made property. There are
connections between philosophy, speaking the law (jurisdiction) and the utterance of
spiritual and secular authority. The cult of disinterest (implying, or not, hereditary wealth
and assured status) has so far prevented thought in poetry, as it forbids thought from
being applied to everyday experience, except in a fanciful way.
The relation of philosophy to the arbitrary power that it sometimes claims for its
disciples dissolves the binding merit that is also claimed to separate, and elevate,
philosophising poets above the non-philosophising ones. How exactly does the confined
rule-set observed by poet-philosophers relate to the unconfined freedom revealed by a
schopenhauerian or nietzschean understanding of what is arbitrary?
Andrew Lawson debuted with a book, Human Capital, in 1992, which could be
positioned precisely by its distaste for the lived texture of Britain in the late Thatcher
administration, but which was not decisive in the artistic sense: the author’s lack of
commitment to what he sees ends up as a lack of commitment to what he has to say about
it. It was notable for being printed in green ink and for being favourably reviewed in
Marxism Today. I didn’t review this at the time because another editor of the magazine I
worked on, Angel Exhaust, did the review. He treated the review as an opportunity to
clear away the opposition. This was one of the regrets – I didn’t see justice done to
Lawson although I felt his work was important. You can't get involved in the scene
without acquiring regrets. Fragmente, the magazine started by Lawson and Anthony
Mellors, was one of the things which got the Alternative scene re-started, and inflected it.
They were students at the time (circa 1990), and their discovery of what had happened
twenty years before (and been buried) was a fascinating process. In a way, an amorphous
cluster of work acquired a definite shape when people arrived from the outside and began
to ask what it was. Of course, the line which attracted most attention from the participants
was the decisions of these passionate strangers of what was actually cultural history and
what could just be discarded as unworthy of a connoisseur and critical thinker. Hundreds
of long-haired Seventies poets were surprised at the idea that the value of their cultural
investments could go down as well as up. One has to take the overall attitude of Lawson
as the key structure with the poems being moments which refer back to a central truth. It
is hard to write a review when that central stance is not revealed to us – the process of
revealing it would have been the curve of his successive works, had he gone on to write
them. I never managed to discuss this with him, but my feeling is that his stance was one
of deep scepticism, allowing the intelligence to deal with a range of situations without
relapse into an “ethnographic compromise” of identifying with existing social positions.

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He later became a Whitman scholar, but the poems are at the opposite stylistic pole from
Whitman – excelling in terseness and acerbity.

eruptions of funk
this appetite for light
the speechless past
of the human infant
I was a child
when the ship went down
and grew old on an island
with a great store of words
six yards of stuff
a fine tooth comb
now a squatter
in a waste of turf and bog
stretched out retching
speechless on the holy stones

things done
do other things
in return
and with interest
the virus works
for bliss or bale
but in response
to a special code
the chain formed
by the lightest touch
bound in real acts
by written traces
the self fissured
on this hinge

(from ‘Living Powers’, published in sites magazine in 1991) It favours a stance in which
you look at society as imperfect and are willing to imagine an alternative social order. Of
course the decision to trust in your intelligence, so far as to make the journey worthwhile,
was an optimistic one. His rendering of inauthentic surfaces had developed a seal of
aestheticism, to make it palatable, which drew on the effects of the up-market advertising
that he was rejecting. Prose poems, published after the book, were a notable improvement
on it; his line of development could be towards a sophisticated and exquisite lyric in the
manner of Stephen Rodefer.

The dynamo whirs in the bought shed, the smoking earth turned by an unseen
hand. We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance,
hoary celebrants among the honest burgher writhing on the ground. The skin
converted to parchment could not bear the sum of our encumbrance, though farces

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 still play in the rotunda: I am a free human being with an independent will, which
I now exert to leave you. The natural valet is drilled to recruit an antic conceit,
live jests patched with histories: the talking mirror yarn; a gold chain and a
wooden leg, posted sphinx-like in the corporate plaza. A castellated turret, taken
by assault, left to decay, some hacked harpoons among the melancholy rigging. A
cantilevered brassiere, lashed to a chiffon vest. Lain for so long traced, lips baked,
provisions low, we've spent the time in just surviving, inkept and unknown,
singing at the tackle, in much stoical packing of junk. Through the chemistry of
time the titles disappear, hermetically calked, rudely chalked. If a volume survive
the wind and weather, it becomes known as the work of a distinct individual.
(from ‘English Intelligence’, published in Angel Exhaust)

He wrote poetry and co-edited fragmente as an unemployed post-graduate; as a lecturer at

the University of Ashton-under-Lyme, he gave up both activities. This displayed the kind
of resolution for which he was well known, and which made his poems, too, determined
and highly wrought. His silence, like David Marriott’s, points to a crisis in this line of
English poetry, partly formal and partly to do with reaching an audience, which will
perhaps be resolved by new methods.
What is sophistication? We might include in this term the advances in lyric poetry
made in Provence; the new qualities specific to literate poetry, the metropolitan touch, the
impact of university learning, the results of philosophy versus common sense, the effects
of post-structuralism, refined sexual manners versus crude directness, aestheticism versus
artless recording of real circumstances, obliquity versus crass egoism, the avoidance of
any familiar tropes and cadences, yet perversely also familiarity with the work of other
poets and the ability to integrate their techniques into the verse fabric, stylisation as
opposed to the speech of the suburbs, playfulness, understanding and anticipation of the
reader’s reactions, avoidance of any awkwardness, flatness, didacticism, rushing, or
hectoring, release of information at a rate to arouse our curiosity with an incomplete
pattern of which parts are successively revealed, being constantly unexpected yet smooth
and continuous, showing familiarity with different social circumstances, a variety of
tones and effects, constant introduction of ornaments and secondary themes to divert
from the main theme, not being partisan in conflicts but showing awareness of patterns
beyond the sight of the contestants, recognising the reality of other people’s feelings, the
ability to produce a recognisable likeness of feelings. These traits don’t converge, and the
word sophistication has a latitude that is useful because of its lack of inner content rather
than the other way around. These traits are desirable, which is why no poet can stand
being called naive. Self-conscious is an equally useless word, because the poet may have
thought very hard while producing a bad line. Conscious and unconscious decisions seem
very similar to each other in this area.
Taking a risk, let me quote an example of sophisticated poetry, or what I take to
be so:

then one fine day everything exactly

as you’ve guessed—the
sound Byzantine,
an average weekender on patrol greedy for the stuff

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 teethes prior to the feast. My love is a child and a bawd
pulled the knife on me.
Documentaries stoke up a fever till my pockets sag. The cabinet
crammed, trompe d’œil adding to torment,
but no formal suffering I’ve practiced
my survival technique for the day, deep, deep blue cleared of hinderance.
At Yalta you might, inventing countries nobody ever heard of. Idle hours
the weight a bluish hue,
sideburns dove-grey dash about the real economy, a price on your head,
ditched judgments of yesteryear
packed with solar
energy, askance to the gift I regret, the next of kin 50s style
slumped in a pink easy chair.
It reads like a book but rejects the flavour.
Maybe I’ll learn Welsh. Albeit the loops are mine.
True as the wind, true as the rain, as invisible as the blue
gas hovers above the marsh.

This is from ‘Third Hymn to Venus’, by Simon Smith (from a book of which the parts
were published as Hymns to Venus, then as The Figures, but which is now called 15
Exits). Certainly it avoids direct emotional statements, and this is part of the programme
of avoiding the predictable; emotional states are not being thrust at us head-on, and this
takes us into a different realm, that of manners: self-control is admirable as the basis for
being able to live with someone else and pay attention to their feelings. The poet shows
himself in a domestic ambience, strewn with at least one pink easy chair; unable to avoid
the banal, his ability to deal with this important aspect of life and romance is one of the
reassuring cadences of his poetry. But the sophistication of the verse may not lie in
emotional suaveness but in the distribution of meaning across time, so that sense is
always smoothly carrying on, there are no awkward or flat moments, themes never slow
down and run out, there is a movement in every line which reassures us that the pleasant
sensations will continue; this continuity suggests a sophistication about forward planning,
a part of manners because it makes conversation easy, absorbing, and enjoyable. This
planning is self-consciousness; but philosophical self-consciousness does not seem to
promise this suavity and pleasantness. In fact much of poetics seems to be deducible from
the aesthetics of conversation. The lightness may be called detachment, but is clearly the
product of serious involvement with the poem and with the idea of poetry.
It is credulous to believe that because one has studied philosophy, or art history,
the poetry one writes is elevated and august, recording the resplendent stirrings of an
enlightened awareness. One notices, while looking at the poetry of people enriched by
university educations, that this is not so. Indeed, this vein of decelerated, smooth-textured
self-regard resembles the strain of poetry written by Victorian or eighteenth-century
clergymen, which is also not always revered by posterity. Both groups are fond of making
moral pronouncements and expecting that everyone nearby should regard them as
largesse and try to pick them up. Education is a wearable asset, a thing you can take
away, which reveals itself in your tone of voice and in your self-assurance; but poetry that
presents this self and its assurance may not be either developed or complex. The

75
information imparted at universities is different in nature from the information offered by
narrating one’s manners and personality.
In a statement in 1993, Smith listed J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Riley, Roy
Fisher, John Seed, Kelvin Corcoran and J. D. Taylor as contemporary poets he admired.
Important notions would include that of beauty, a value in verse but with the special
flavour of indicting the existing political system; and juxtaposition, the montage effect
used to reveal the contradictions in the system’s political discourse and in its versions of
happiness. An allure was the stateliness of Tudor lyric and in reproducing such grace as
an essential part of expressing love of a woman. The problem has, then, been of getting
simple and sublime feelings down on paper without getting tangled up in the sarcasm and
implicit loss of innocence that the montage effect harbours. The beauty of verse is, as it
were, one of the sacred values that Thatcherism has destroyed, so that to exercise it
invalidates the project of political satire, which dialectically invalidates the tremulous and
intact precious feelings that inhabit a Spenserian flight. Night Shift (1993), a sequence of
fifteen fourteen-line poems (sonnets?) has not, I feel, reconciled these contradictory
impulses. There is already, though, a strong contrast between these poems and those of,
say, Andrew Lawson (Human Capital was published by Smith) or Drew Milne, since
Smith’s poems are animated by a speaking subject and he possesses feelings and
attachments. There is a certain emotional complex involving Smith, Marriott, Lawson,
Anthony Mellors and Drew Milne; not exactly that they were young actors eligible for
exactly the same roles and fearful that there wasn’t enough work to go round, nor that
they were a generation redefining the landscape in terms of themselves, nor that they
shared in each other’s formal advances and stormed the trench together, nor that as
Prynneschüler they resented each other and fought to demonstrate heredity; but
something of all of these.
It’s terrible to dislike someone who has just the same assets as you; every attack
you launch cuts a hole through you. Nicholas Johnson might play a role in this drama as
someone who disliked abstractions and ideas, precisely the things which the others saw as
the things which counted. Smith, married and with a job, was maturer than the others,
evaporated in the stellar reaches of doctoral dissertations, and had the unfair advantage of
actually knowing what Thatcherism meant; having worked out how to make montage
liven up the verse movement as a decorative effect that replaces rhyme or antithesis, he
produced the astounding 15 Exits (1994-6), and triumphed over the rest of his generation.
The status of Prynne’s late works is still controversial, and the fate of the young poets
who tried to follow them cannot yet be uttered; Smith’s determined reversion to the
relative bel canto, optimism, and mastery of verse movement displayed in The White
Stones (1969) was always more likely to yield artistic results. The situation which
induced someone to reject the political system was the attempt to achieve happiness,
more concretely to make the person you love happy; the step forward was to relate
primarily to a real person, so that the shadowy and bloodless combat with The
Government in fact receded; lyric poetry was better based on relating to a woman than to
rivals and nameless authority figures. A divorce seemed to free Smith from the anxiety
and tension of marriage, replacing strain with tragedy. Release from the strain of being
happy, or watching the fruit slip from his grasp for a thousand trivial reasons, allowed
him to release epoch-making energies into poetry. The breakthrough was probably
assisted by studying the poetry of Stephen Rodefer, who is quoted at the beginning of the

76
 first Exit. There had been an element of solemnity, miming depression in order to expose
the authorities who brought it about:

We are the strawmen

inhabited by meanings, the shades with stitched lips.
O, to walk across the grass again, the light’s sinews record
the shattered pavilion in kisses & bees laid out in living code.

In 15 Exits the tragic sense is concealed, being perhaps the underlying stream that makes
everything else move, while the verse moves with a relentless and precisely calculated
energy, a kind of gaiety.

12 Miles up: Rob MacKenzie, Off Ardglas (1997)

MacKenzie is the son of two Gaelic speakers, and was brought up partly on the Gaelic-speaking
island of Lewis – but he learnt it later on, as a second language. This has led to a certain tension
about the transition between languages – when the poems oscillate between two codes, this is a
release of tension, a symbolic occupation of full status and social connectedness. Although he is
an extremely reflexive poet, and the poems are staccato – he is writing about an egalitarian folk
culture, and its inexhaustible continuity is important to the poems. Lewis is in the Outer
Hebrides, right on the periphery of the British Isles – facing Greenland, as the phrase goes. Off
Ardglas is a stretch of the ocean — in the poem, 'The sky's some kind of grey off Ardglas.' It
goes on to describe the sea rising by an offshore stack, and a clachan called Ardglas ('You know
it well enough'), with cars, sheep huddling together, children sharing a cigarette in the shelter
under the roof of the manse (the priest's house). Then, collapsed raised-beds of potatoes, an
oilskin on a hook, a feeling of belonging.
Titles include 'Deleuzian fly-tipping' 'An Exact Uncertainty Principle' "A home for the
words lost by 'Contemporary' poets" '17 points of disagreement with Stephen Rodefer' 'The Surf
Zone' 'Lewis Punk bands of the early 1980s'. MacKenzie is an atmospheric physicist by trade,
and several of the poems are about philosophical problems of science. The surf zone is a
boundary at twelve miles up.
Some of the poems show a mixture of English and Gaelic, or even of Scots as well. There
are similar Welsh poems from about the same time — bilingualism is now prevalent, and the
gates where speech flows from one language to the other and back again are very interesting
moments in the life of the spoken word. The poems are full of such gates — what finally gets
onto the page is snatches, with very fine time values and frequent interruptions. Let me quote a
poem entire, bearing in mind that the line can be read either straight across or as two columns.

late classic- class- 'n' celticism not its idea in England

a a'e drive's dile reference nor in Scotland's England

disguisedly connected for form mar cleiteag 'san fhraoch

his heteroclite couture furcate in th stapled spume and cut

stymied ex-fashionable urlar of a rare craik

beard t'compendious sociality abair blipvert matricalis

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The poem is about Harry Gilonis — we could not get through a book like this one without
encountering Harry a few times. Classism is class consciousness — Left-wing politics. Celticism
— the subject is partly Welsh (although partly Lithuanian). Dile is flood, so dile reference means
a wealth of knowledge. 'Couture furcate' is trousers, 'heteroclite' is 'inconsistent'. 'Disguisedly
connected for form' probably refers to montage techniques, but possibly also to occult
connections — between politics and the forms of poetry, perhaps. The next Gaelic line means
'like a feather in the heather', or 'quill' — so the writer's pen. Urlar means 'floor' but is probably
here in the metaphorical sense of the ground theme of a piece of bagpipe music. 'Stapled spume'
is possibly about a foaming beard. 'Craik' is 'voice' (basically 'throat'), so urlar of a rare craik is
the underlying melodic range of a delightful voice. The beard is no longer fashionable. Abair
(speak) means 'oh what a', 'oh such a'; blipvert is a very brief advertisement; matricalis is the
adjective from matrix. However, I cannot construe this phrase. It may be, 'he is such an
advertisement for sociality' — a man who likes to chat.
Harry told me that the omission marks represent authenticity, because the Gaelic Psalms (of vast
importance in a fundamentalist community like Lewis) are also full of deleted syllables (for the
sake of the metre).
The note on J.T. Ferrier sheds light on a poem in Robert Crawford's book — where the
same 19th century Scottish philosopher appears. MacKenzie's engagement with Scottish
intellectual problems is close and serious — to be exact, this closeness and seriousness is
typically Scottish and is recognizable as a patriotic act by other Scots. It is perhaps the Calvinist
heritage — but the history of this people without a government is mysterious and neglected. Is
this complex of qualities really shared with the Swiss, the Dutch, the Swabians, some of the
Hungarians, and the population of south-west France? or does it come from somewhere else?
The Informationists don't really do intellectual arguments — they start from an assumption of
virtuality, spin, and parodic multiple variation. Morgan translated a Hungarian poet, Weores, who
was raised as a Calvinist — and may have influenced Morgan, hence modern Scottish poetry, a
great deal. Another poem is about George Elder Davie, who wrote two great books about the
history of Scottish education. These are central because the church and the schools were almost
the only public institutions controlled by Scots during the period of direct rule from Westminster.
I think the impact of this poetry is limited by the shortness of the units which make it up. The
rapid impact of the thoroughly denatured and futuristic surface proves limiting if it turns out that
continuity permits emotional identification and relaxation. The fantasy guiding it is that a surface
completely unlike conversation and unlike 19th C poetry is admirable and is also like (a certain)
contemporary reality. The rapidly self-interrupting texture represents the modernity, and youth,
of the 1980s, in opposition to poetry which has fullness and continuity and is an expression of
the poet's sensibility. I can see that someone writing from the Gaelic world will want to display
hi-tech attainments to preclude accusations of ruralism. This (like the mixture of Gaelic with
English) is part of a game extraneous to poetry, which the poet wins.

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 7

BORN IN THE SIXTIES, part 2

A discussion of works by Andy Brown, Tim Allen, Tim Atkins, Nicholas Johnson,
David Greenslade and David Rushmer

The world of intelligent poetry is a conservative one, always harking back to the exciting
upsets of the 1970s, and so happy with the authors established at that time that the budget
for new poets is zero in most years. But occasionally, someone new is allowed to
publish—by tradition, without being reviewed. Andy Brown and Tim Allen are into
nonsequiturs and irrational editing, taking us back to the 1960s in a move perhaps
inspired by the current fashion for weird sideslip editing in dance mixes. Both are of
interest because the starting point for their trip is the refusal to imitate a voice on the
page, or to provide an authorial figure to identify with; moments of originality that
promise new poetic sensations. Both face the revenge of the arbitrary when it comes to
making a composed poem. In Brown’s The Sleep Switch, his nonsequiturs are symptoms
of a higher detachment, founded in that other staple of the 1960s, Eastern religion. This is
that, that is this. Contradictions merely reveal the illusory nature of consciousness, or
maya; and his aesthetic aim is a neurological shift into a relaxed playfulness, seeing daily
life as a game or a dream.
This seems oddly familiar to anyone who was around in the 1960s, but also
removes any sense of urgency from the poetry. We see a display of cool vanishing behind
a method, but little is happening within the poetic frame. The details of the poems follow,
perhaps, a central purpose, of revealing games at work in social life, the bizarre nature of
the programmes our minds are trapped in (with some escape hatches), the partial
autonomy of the programmes producing consciousness from outside stimuli. The sleep
switch is at the transition between the deep subjectivity of sleep and the apparent
objectivity, mainly composed of subjective elements, of wakefulness; a threshold on
which the trappings of twentieth century life briefly seem tenuous and arbitrary. It
reminds me of Kula Shaker: that mixture of Eastern mysticism and revivalism (who
would have believed in 1968 that someone would revive ‘Hush’, by Deep Purple, thirty
years later?).
In Texts for a Holy Saturday (1995) Tim Allen has rather a puritanical style,
abrupt, un-selfconfirming, lacking legato passages. The speed of cuts, rather than a voice,
dictates the rhythm, foregrounding the faculty of sequence of ideas by quickly wrenching
it out of shape. The social order can be considered as a set of sequence rules, both
psychological and behavioural; the drive is to get behind the conventional flow of speech
and awareness, to criticise it; marking a greenfield site in which something new and
rigorous may emerge, rather than a mighty collection in itself. Allen is the editor of
Terrible Work, a magazine in Plymouth.
Tim Atkins’s debut Folklore 1-25 (1995) is one of the most promising I have
fallen for for many years. Every piece in this rural prose sequence leaves you wanting
more than it says, and the cumulative effect is quite entrancing. We are facing a poet of

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resolution and sensibility. This is truly lyric poetry in a landscape where almost everyone
else is didactic. The setting is Shropshire, resonant not only of Piers Plowman (quoted in
the colophon, about the Malvern Hills) but of AE Housman and John Masefield. Flowers,
insects, and fruit play a foreground role. However, the conduct of the text resolutely
avoids literalness to preserve a sense of absolute space, as an abstract painting wipes out
recession and numerical space but opens an edgeless plane which engulfs us and so is
space in the pure form. Like Piers, it is autobiographical and yet non-realistic. The text
becomes progressively less explicit, exploiting the cumulation of context. Piece 11 starts
like this:

Exits without darkness, without light.

When the horse chestnuts blossom in May. The clock comes to measure it by. Under
gates. Walking uphill at an angle. Were fatherless & so. Disappointment’s cars.

Bullets drift. Down from an open window. Hanging out. Burning sheets & then crying all
night. Entered her body. & came out the other side. This cry. Puddles of moisture around
her arms. Salt. The memory of. Petals on the shelf. Beneath the sealed up window. Light
falling from the tower. “It was”.

A passage through glass, through a season. “Look at this little earth”. When the body
drifts dies it flies. Flies to the mountain & it. It ascends the path of the stars. It ascends
this path of stars called the

Via Latica. (Called the) Milky Way. When the body. When the body dies it is. Gone in
June. It is so cold there is even

Cold in the dog.

Gone in June.

The theme of this poem is death — someone going where there is neither darkness nor
light. Each new phrase is unpredictable — the text is like strips rather than a continuous
canvas. Read backwards, the construction is no more convergent or clinching. We might
consider this as the new version of lyricism — the poet demonstrates emotional freedom
in the most direct way, by shifting balance from line to line. Every line arrives at the
precise angle which would avoid both falling into line and disrupting the flow of sense.
The unpredictability and intimacy of free verse has been shifted into a conceptual
unpredictability — posed as intimacy. Identifying with a poet creates a kind of
predictability — and imposes a sort of duty. Facing someone who changes direction all
the time creates a greater sense of freedom and freshness.
The most complex poem, probably, is 17, which describes the setting up of a
fairground and a visit to it. The absence of orienting words is striking — everything is
given by details, with an effect of obliquity and rapt attention. I have been trying to work
out why the name is folklore. It doesn't read like folklore. But the natural objects
described are so primeval, so much self-defining and outside defining frameworks, that

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they might come out of myths. Poem 11 does have a body after death climbing a
mountain and rising to the Milky Way. This volume was followed by To Repel Ghosts, in
which each poem is a deliberate construction of a new poet: scatty and endlessly
inventive, fluid and erudite, a metamorphic puzzle full of ease. The deliberate decalation
of self, memory, and presentation, is akin to Tim Allen. Atkins was born in 1966 and is
known as a fan of American poetry.
Nicholas Johnson published Haul Song in 1994. Johnson’s stepfather was Denis
Goacher and Tim Longville lived in their house for eight years while Johnson was a
child, which explains why he very early acquired a knowledge of recent Anglo-American
poetry. However, Rimbaud is his main admiration, offering models both for ecstatic
lyricism and for experiments with pure sound and colour; bohemian wanderings through
towns and countryside transformed by hunger took the place of an education. Johnson’s
procedures are both hit-and-miss and invested with his veneration. Thus, orthodox
evocations of nature, typically of rural Devon, are combined with ineffective experiments
in sound poetry and made-up language; political comment is combined with a kind of
pictorialism. His first book, The Telling of the Drowning (1987), is still orthodox nature
lyricism. A visit to New Caledonia produced a book, Listening to the Stones (1991), lush
but not ineffective. The announced Vortex of the Nightingale, following up The Telling,
never appeared. Haul Song is about a Devon apparently dominated by rain, alcohol, and
goose-shit:

Rain lariats cut into soil, point the spring of dance

on poised ankles perfect still on oak
perimeters; your eye would not observe the nature
some hearts would not account for this
as waterfall slips to pool
hooked redstone slides to river
no cargo bar this trawl of sodden wood
circling to frothpools
charted by chalkbanks’ obscene heraldry
in lanes bloated with doves, thru curtains of rain

This includes Eel Earth and the poems published in Ten British Poets. H is a complete
surrender to non-articulate techniques; a photographic reproduction of Johnson’s
manuscript, it contains no sentences, the operative systems are spatial layout and
proximity, repetition, and sound association. This mime on the page no doubt describes a
walk through Devon, the theme to which he reverts. It is a mapping both of a
performance, with gestures and vocal inflexions etc., and of this passage through an
external space. The text’s deficiency of characteristics can allow this greater space to
permeate. It could solve the problem of occupying, with its implication of possessing; but
also it gives way to the tenuousness that Johnson brings to everything. He prefers to
alertness a kind of diffuseness. Loup (1994) mixes lyrical and “experimental” techniques.
Perhaps because his father was absent from his childhood, Johnson has developed
fixations on a number of poets, usually born before 1920; his relationship to poetic
technique has been conservative in this sense, that he wants something solid for him to
become, rather than wanting to overthrow the past. Bunting, Sorley MacLean, Gael

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Turnbull and Sean Rafferty have all filled this role; Johnson’s exceptional grasp of the
mid-century history of British poetry qualifies him as a conservateur, and as a festival
organiser. Faith in his personal pantheon lets him use their techniques with an odd
mixture of incomprehension and pig-headedness. He has a belief in direct contact as the
way to gain wisdom, partly perhaps because his education and intellectual background
are so limited. Johnson’s general crisis of paternity, and Marriott’s dark obsession with
tradition, law, authority, the paternal power, shine an uneasy light on avant-garde neo-
classicism and on the rules for succession to high office that it assumes. This society has
not only a crisis of legitimacy, but also a crisis of the political opposition, the alternative
future that a society nourishes within its own flanks. The concept of progress is in doubt,
the young are being subjected to brutal pressures, and artistic progress is strained and
distorted as a result.
I first read David Greenslade (b. 1953) in the pamphlet Panic (1993), which was
still unsure, but promising; the tone is Welsh, and free of the bone-crushing realism of
many Anglo-Welsh poems:

They frame me in bizarre oak, in thistle stew,

in the pig run of the twilight, where bats admit
darkness into the crease of their wings—they force
the ease of jokes from my mean fury,
they squeeze the midwife from my breast.
(from 'Friends')

Greenslade's series of 53 object poems, in Each Broken Object, come directly out of the
experience of learning Welsh, and follow his poems in Yr Wyddor, where the code
emerges, impossibly, free and as an object; he works in that zone between two verbal
codes where the edges become visible, and the problems of the real nature of the outside
world, and of categorisation, become urgent. To understand the relations between hand,
eye, and symbolic knowledge is almost to grasp what human identity is. The title of Yr
Wyddor (1998) means 'the alphabet', but is very close to a word egwyddor, meaning
'element' or 'principle' (for the link, cf. Greek stoikheion). So we have the idea that
knowledge is an act of dynamically composing fixed elements, like combining sounds
into speech.
The pamphlet Pebyll (1995) was for inscrutable reasons published in Welsh with a
facing translation into Catalan. Actually, the motivation has to do with the cultural vision
of minority nationalities, looking for reflections and confirmation of themselves in other
minority nationalities. Greenslade writes Welsh as a dysgwr (learner), and as a dysgwr
myself I faced these poems with trepidation; but they are much easier than his English
poems. Pebyll means “tents” (or pavilions) and the poems are all concerned with the
textures of drapes, wrappings, floating layers of textile. Burning Down the Dosbarth is a
set of political poems about being in the language protest movement. The remarkable
series of object poems (the collection Each Broken Object, 2000) are based on gift-
poems, a staple of mediaeval Welsh poetry supplying descriptions of the prestige objects
of the princely employer, which he distributed to allies and retainers as his visible power.
The poem records this generosity in case it should be insufficiently appreciated.
Thousands of years of repetition obliged the bard to carry out this practical and

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involuntary task with great skill and energy. The ornately precise description of precisely
ornate objects—of desire, exchange, display, and alliance—gives the poems their famous
concreteness. These sources also contain the beauty and fantasy in which these new
object poems are so rich.
In Greenslade’s case, the genre may also have attracted him because of the
fascination with the match of nouns and objects induced by the process of becoming
bilingual. The poems resemble the process of memorising the distinctions between a set
of related nouns, while also penetrating into the mystery of the gap between primary
perception and language, the bizarre anomalies and defamiliarisation which moving
between two languages induces. There is a physical world to whose surface we cling, and
many of the differences in human societies depend on their objects, through which we act
on the world: the hand instructs the brain, fills in the data on its sensory sheets. Things
with hard edges hold the mystery of sense. The object is a limited stimulus field, a ruling
containing finite rules, focussing the brain enough to allow a breakthrough into truth and
mystery. To understand the relations between hand, eye and symbolic knowledge is
almost to grasp what human identity is. So we have the idea that knowledge is an act of
dynamically composing fixed elements, like combining sounds into speech. When this
book first arrived I said ‘this is the first ever avant-garde book in Welsh’, but having
sobered up I think it doesn’t really have avant-garde status, although in emphasising the
concreteness of the symbolic message it does draw one procedure from conceptual art. It
certainly doesn’t doubt its own premises.
Moreover, his work is free of soupy heideggerian clichés. In Each Broken Object,
almost every poem describes an object, in precise but almost riddling terms; titles include
'Petrol Nozzle' 'Soup Bowl' 'Oxygen Cylinder' 'Home Plumbing Catalogue' 'Objects
return in triumph from Their Exile'. The style bears a resemblance to early modern Welsh
poetry (at least some aspects of it) which I find hard to define. It is not aestheticised, but
is fluent, vivid, and genuinely strange, as in this evocation of washers:

They make an antitext,

holes in the vessel's structure,
a split confirming zero,
monads' nomadic punctures.

Taoist steel, folklore,

smoke-ring, mint, no
needle compass, earlobe for
the made thing's chiropractor
('Washers')

where it is easy to work out why a washer looks like a compass without a needle inside it,
but it is harder to see why it is Taoist (perhaps because tao means 'way' and a washer has
a way through its middle?).
A few hundred lines of David Rushmer’s poetry have now appeared, perhaps
enough to make out a basic tendency. Few enough clues are on hand. The first surface
trait is a preoccupation with silence, that is, emphasis: at its most extreme in a white page
with ‘and there is solitude’ in the middle of it. The poet is ferociously convinced of the

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value of his words. Second, the absence of explanations: flattened against the unforgiving
textual surface, reduced to savagery. This poetry has nothing to do with urbanity, with
consensual apathy. Within this group of works Sand Writings (sections a-z, 1991) is
marked by despondency, a hushed languor that slyly conceals the promise of new spasms
of passion:

gored:--------------
on emptiness

i cover my mouth (c)

Part of the technique is a deliberate renunciation of perspective and of knowledge. The

situation is never explained. Most of the means of communication—metaphors,
analogies, lexicon—have been eliminated. The only prop allowed is the human body.
This purism puts the surviving images under terrific pressure, which they adequately
sustain; the appeal of these texts is their calcined quality, the feeling that everything
secondary has been burnt away to leave something as pure and out of control as flamenco
or the Desert Fathers. In Rushmer’s calcined iconography, it’s only fair to point out the
relevance of other texts to Sand Writings: ‘hers is the voice of rain / whispers ossified /
silence drinks from her lips’ (‘Space, Sound, Desert’ from Absence) and ‘entering the
desert / to spawn her / she escapes / through my breathing’ (‘The Voice of the Desert’ in
Pen:umbra #2). Purity is artificed to return us to the logic of substances. The symbolism
is not elusive, merely inscribed in a code we already possess: the term desert is in
opposition to fertile land, fertile land is a symbol for a woman simply because it gives
life, the desert here evokes erotic devastation, sterility/aridity. Nevertheless, within our
historical culture, it also contains anakhoresis: the outland of repression and purity in
which the Baptist and Anthony the Hermit accumulate undischarged psychological forces
to shatter the social order with. Other evocative values of sand (surf music, Annette
Funicello, Ozymandias, The Terminal Beach, the Afrika Korps, arenas, foundries,
hourglasses, sandcastles, the ingredients of glass, Bedouin armies, etc.) are equally
“natural” but can be excluded by close attention to context.
In poetry with this carefully reduced instruction set, every trace needs to be
looked at ten times. One trace leads back to Hans Bellmer. Surrealism—unsurprisingly,
since its theoretical basis was Freudian—always had a strong leaning towards eroticism.
If you add the French obsession with the word as power and the poet’s power within the
text, what you get is the doctrine: “Surrealism is a dream in which the poet has absolute
power over the shapes and thoughts of women”. Very much the same idea was prevalent
after 1968, and this is probably why Paul Buck’s magazine Curtains lost its Arts Council
grant. I bring up this ancient history because of Hans Bellmer, who is probably
Rushmer’s favourite painter, but is equally No.1 on my death list. I regard Bellmer,
Bataille and that whole area of power and mutilation-fuelled pornography, as tedious and
repulsive. Even more tedious are the English epigones of that blind alley of the 1930s—
Paul Buck and David Barton first in line. Bellmer’s dolls (first one constructed in 1933)
have a fascination for Rushmer: one could easily imagine him abandoning words
altogether and simply using a human form, in whatever material, as his utterance. This
hinterland is unmistakably present in Rushmer’s magazine, Pen:umbra (Bataille:

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‘Everything takes place in a fiery penumbra, its meaning subtly withdrawn'), in his
dedications to Bellmer, and in the prehistory of his poems. (Note that Rushmer’s visual
work is Surrealist, although his poetry is not.) Why therefore do I like Rushmer’s poetry
so much? Rushmer doesn’t fit into this crimped “control complex”:

river of thirst
between bone that encircles

spine gently fracturing

where she gives me light

& in the turning of her face

the last instant of breathing

(‘Absence’)

His work, in its linear purity, closely resembles the French lyric of the past 40 years or so,
but actually figures like Jean-Pierre Faye or Lorand Gaspar rather than rehashed de Sade.
It is the prerogative of poetry that A can be followed by any letter except B, nor is the
reviewer permitted to apply FBI laws of “known associates”.
Someone once said ‘no ideas but in things’, but most symbolic activity has to do
with other people, and it is arguable that the original “space” of abstract thought is the
(imagined) zone of someone else’s body. One view (from a discussion by Jenny
Matthews of the photographer Helmut Newton) is:

Women are portrayed as models for the real world to imitate—immaculately

groomed decorative beings, mere lifeless masks. In some of the photos dummies
replace “real” women, but it’s difficult to tell who’s the dummy—the live models
themselves are only acting out a part.

(Camerawork,
September 1979)

This sums up Bellmer too, I think. In a Kleinian view, the male poet writes from within a
space which is originally female; the poet’s emotions are representations of sensations
within the woman’s body, i.e. sensations of acceptance, love, rejection, etc. Relevant is a
remarkable passage by Héloise, where she explains that she can only feel what Abelard
feels, only see what Abelard sees: such a cross-wiring of sensory surfaces underlies all of
Rushmer’s poetry.

space closing
air-tight

or a place

where even my breath

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 will turn on me

like a word

i once said
held against you (y)

utter silence,
or to utter it

,language speaks me”

(t)

This somewhat clichéd opinion could be glossed as “language is society in man; so the
memory of rejection is stored in language; therefore language is external, but, becoming
internal, persuades the poet to reject himself”. Or, with Anzieu: depression is the
sensation that the “fantasised body” of the other has been drained of love for us. Anyway,
this image is not compliant: the artist’s power is abrogated. Unlike Helmut Newton! The
I/you distinction is erased, as is conscious volition; the words well up from some contact
zone like salt deposited by the sea. The significance of playing with dolls is to make the
“fantasised image” visible: what the artist plays with, manipulates, blames for everything,
obeys, sings to sleep, makes up stories about, confides in, is oppressed by, and so on. Art
has to mediate between the real and the imaginary. Arguably, all images of other people
are like dolls. Perhaps the doll is a useful mediatory object, even though Bellmer was
obsessive and therefore monotonous.
The special edition comes in a bag of sand. This sensibly enhances the text:
‘written in sand. / or, perhaps. voices// left for dead’ (a) ‘you never left / a trace /
________________/ tongue laps / the sand’ (d) as the sand evokes the disappeared traces
of some emotionally precious event. Sand as sterility, the ultimate degradation of the
organic; a vanitas. But sand is always the record of a process, the furious battering that
created it; Rushmer’s poetry also carries the trace of some quite geophysical energy,
released in a contact zone. I am unused to reviewing conceptual art, so all I can do is
suggest some kinds of practice for domestic use:

1. Write a poem in a trance. Blot it with the sand. Try to decipher the poem by reading the
sand. 2. Measure the grains of sand and reconstruct the pulverizing diameter of the ocean.
3. Ensure locust availability. Travel out into the sand. Impetuously, baptise any passing
prophets. 4. Tether a dead fish to the sand and wait for a dead seagull to arrive.

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 9

SOUND AS A VOLUME; OR, REAL SPACE AS FICTIVE SPACE

Reportage on launch of Conductors of Chaos, June 1996

Conductors was an anthology, edited by Iain Sinclair, probably the flagship anthology of
the decade, the one that put intelligent poetry in the High Street (temporarily). Readers at
this first launch (there was another, more intimate, one, at Compendium Books in
Camden a few weeks later) included John James, Tony Lopez, Stephen Rodefer, Doug
Oliver and Brian Catling. The event was compered by Sinclair. Also present in the
audience of about 80 people were Ian Hunt, Peter Riley, Karlien van den Beukel, Ewan
Smith, Esther Leslie, Matt Ffytche, Simon Jarvis, J. H. Prynne, Lawrence Upton, cris
cheek, Simon Smith, Ulli Freer, David Sellars, Gavin Selerie and Andy Jordan. The
throng represented the overlap of radical academics, smart media types and counter-
cultural Bohemians.
The gig was held in a wine bar in Spitalfields Market, just east of the central
business district, once the fruit wholesale market and now stripped of practical functions
and turned over to leisure. A large TV screen was showing the England-Spain
international, and the overrun of this into half an hour’s extra time and then a penalty
shootout delayed the start of the readings. The nimble scheduling of a wedding reception
in an upstairs room of the bar guaranteed a brisk circulation of unconcerned people
through the area where the readings were taking place.
A sampling of conversations in the crowd scattered around the wine bar, and
subsequently The White Heart in Commercial Street, and a Bengali restaurant in Brick
Lane, suggests a lack of interest of the audience in the anthology: they were insiders, too
familiar with the kind of poetry involved to experience the anthology as a new and
internally unified space, already flying off into particular parts of it and ignoring the
whole. Could this explain the map of how conversations broke up into small groups? Not
in detail. Karlien van den Beukel appeared irritated because of Holland’s 4-2 defeat by
the French at football during the evening. Participants did not talk about issues of poetics;
people generally talk about the poetics of third parties, as their own poetics, while clearly
more intensely interesting, also threaten to close conversation by making other
conversants unable to respond. Here low risk topics preserve solidarity. But avoiding
topics of disagreement threatens the conversation with a dip into indifference and time-
filling politeness.
One of the most emotional moments for me was listening to a long talk, from
someone who had attended the Forum on Little Magazines at the recent Poetry
Conference, on how he wanted Angel Exhaust to go: into the exploration of subjectivity,
where he expected converging lines of study to reach a breakthrough, the ideas opened up
by Deleuze and Guattari, and into information theory. Thinking, on the pavement of
Commercial Street, about the magazine I edit while facing someone who actually liked it
and wanted more of what it gave was exhausting yet stimulating. He drew a link between
the Freudian-Kleinian theories of aesthetic subjectivity, which had been expounded and

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attacked in recent issues of Angel Exhaust, with Wilfred Bion’s branching out from
psychoanalysis into information theory (“Group Dynamics and Schizophrenia”); much to
my surprise, I was able to point out to him something new to him, namely that Gregory
Bateson had applied cybernetic ideas to the theory of schizophrenia already in 1946
(‘Schizophrenia and Group Dynamics’), and so before Bion’s ground-breaking paper. But
I got the details wrong. It wasn’t 1946.
The problems of conversation in a crowded Saturday night pub underlined the
need for the superior ease and lucidity of the printed page. The advantages of spontaneity
turned out to be present only when some excitement was crackling in the group ambience
to be exploited and heightened by rapid development of ideas drawing on it. Telephone
discussion afterwards produced the idea that people were talking about work—academic
gossip amounting to this—as a sign of boredom, since this topic is minimally rewarding
for anyone. Centre of emotional longing was therefore not a place, since we were already
there, nor to be with people, nor for status, but for a mood which could have animated us;
suggesting that poetry can safely avoid restating what everyone present already knows,
but has to provide new linguistic toys to play with.
The previous issue of Angel Exhaust had included a long review of a book of
Drew Milne’s by Karlien van den Beukel. Drew told Karlien that she had misrepresented
him, but refused to say how or what he had really meant. At another moment, Drew told
me that Karlien had misrepresented him, but declined to say anything when I asked him
why she was wrong and what the book really meant. Across my mind there flashed the
old Jesus and Mary Chain favourite: never understand me... never understand me yeah.
Undoubtedly this attitude is an imitation of J.H. Prynne, who reprimanded me, a few
minutes earlier, for printing an interview with the poet Roger Langley where Langley
actually explained some of his poems; he had reprimanded Langley too. Since I edit a
magazine consisting, largely, of explanations, this was a shot across my bows. Prynne
recounted his satisfaction at being close to completion of the new Caius Library building,
which he had superintended; I accused him of being like Pharaoh directing the Hebrews
on an earlier monumental building site, and he warmly agreed, remarking that the way to
succeed was to fire everyone who didn’t do what they were told. He also said that what I
really wanted to do was make money. We discussed the forthcoming publication of his
collected poems in Australia, with Salt/Folio, and he proceeded to show an encyclopaedic
knowledge of Australian mining firms and their overseas owners. (This book came out in
April 1999.)
Vital to conduct in this milieu is possession of interesting information, transient
items of verbal wealth dispersed by utterance, but attracting attention, as a primary good;
the alarm at having nothing to say directs us to the second order skill of adjusting the
rules of conversation so that more statements are allowable and interesting, which is a
function of heightened trust and attention among other things. Where possessing
information that no one else does is a source of power, self-satisfied silence becomes a
favoured game of the second-liners, and the design of their poems. A counter-theory says
that it’s personal magnetism which counts, it’s who gives you attention, people don’t
pursue items of knowledge but moments of closeness to admired individuals. So the
evening would be one of pursuing the most vital people in the room. Hormones
associated either with proximity or with novel and well-formed information both arouse
alertness. This puzzle has a bearing on poetics, as one always wants to know: do I like

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this poem because it’s interesting or because of who wrote it? Would it be better if poems
were published without the names of authors? Does a poem deliver information or
proximity? And, of course: do I dislike this poem because it’s bad or because I dislike the
author (or even because he’s a friend of someone I dislike)? Solutions to these questions
were not in sight.
Once a room is full of people dedicated to poetry it becomes the milieu of the
poem. Certainly this room was terrifyingly well-informed and so easily bored; this
present information can be used by the poet, to lighten the burden of information in the
poem and use the holy mountains of knowledge (for example Walter Benjamin, Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze) as the stage set for the poem, which thus becomes very
complex in a very few words. This is the alternative to writing about autobiography the
whole time; which would be boring in a conversation; reflecting on experience draws one
into the language of philosophy, and it is normal for this group to talk about experiences
and relationships using terms drawn from post-structuralist philosophy. Through this
refined apparatus experience acquires external reality, becomes available to the other
person to inhabit and to muse on. The vocabulary is common to academics all over the
world, but unfortunately can exclude people who are not part of this upper-middle-class
group. And poets filter out the Latinate abstractions while writing the poem: working out
the exact bearing of these predecessor texts on the poetry is supernaturally complex and
laborious.
Perhaps we can operationalise prestige in a full room like this. Prestige
etymologically implies irrationality, but if you are circling round a room trying to find the
most interesting people, you are behaving rationally, because you don’t want to be bored
or to go home feeling you’d missed out. I think currents of cultural attraction are
transformed versions of these currents of social attraction. We could only call prestige
irrational if someone misrecognised their own feelings and sought out a book, for
example, which in the end left them bored and disappointed; this might be a useful word
for people who rarely read poetry, and so have wrong ideas about their own (unused)
responses to it, but it can’t apply to people who read a lot of poetry and are smart about
what they chase after and what they dodge. We should beware of despising other people’s
aesthetic feelings, so that while they, we say, are driven by sociology and blind prestige,
we follow reason and good taste. While strong on the power of money and on tribal
loyalties, sociology doesn’t seem strong on the idea of social attraction based on someone
being conversationally brilliant, constantly interesting, full of ideas, idealistic, witty, etc.,
which is the very thing that poetry does have in common with social life.
Perhaps we get from the level of direct social intercourse, of being drawn to
someone because you want to go to bed with them, or because they like you, etc., to the
level of symbolic appetites for cultural experience and of imagining society, without a
change of basic procedures, a loss of accuracy, etc. Perhaps someone’s pattern of artistic
tastes is very similar to the pattern of who they want to be with.
Where 20 published poets, or more, were in the same room, here is the social air
that the poem inhales and speaks with; the situation where the modernist poem ceases to
be alienated and starts to be a social token like a dress or an ornamented Bronze Age belt.
Here is the reference group for the language, able to decode it and to qualify utterances as
well or badly formed; and to which one presumably assimilates by reading the poems.
The poem, detached from its origin in such a dense lake of behavioural impulses, can

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either seem rich, because of reproducing its origin, or poor, for the same reason, and
because the cinema projector fails, the poem/film remains unlit and does not unfold its
fictive space.

Reading at Plymouth, May 1997

Here’s me, in an arts centre in a massive stone building, formerly a granary or corn
exchange, in Plymouth, gawping at the white-haired ladies in the front row and realising
that my repertoire just won’t play. Since darkness generally soothes panic attacks (and
migraines), I withdraw into the darkened yard to re-plan and find someone else, Alice
Notley, already there, re-planning her repertoire. Yes, there is a sociology of poetry. No,
Alice, I don’t know what it is. London audiences are homogeneous because they’re the
product of separation and dissimilation. The Plymouth event was an offshoot of a writers’
group that meets in that extraordinary Victorian building, and where the need to keep
together enforces an avoidance of theory. Afterwards, we will go off to someone’s home
for a meal and a gathering, at which point hospitality became more important than poetry
and affability than stylistic purity. The diversity of aesthetics within that writers’ group
defies description; mutual tolerance allows the poems to be heard, walking a fine line
between frustration and a greater wing-span. If the points you disagree with someone on
are going to be repressed, then critical thought ceases; if you are not going to turn
intellectual realisations into physical ones, they become valueless, and are even social
vices. Differentiation is encouraged by a scene like London, where there are always too
many people, and splitting is always attractive. But poetry that is not differentiated lacks
the specific edge that makes it exciting to read. Poems are limited by the cultural breadth
they aim at; some want a wide audience, some want a narrow one. I am handicapped
here, because I can’t think about wide-band poems, or remember them later, and so I
can’t write about them. Mainstream poetry makes me fall asleep. In a way, that’s the
point of it.
Wandering around like this, one sees social reality, but fails to recognise it; I
know these reportages are fragmentary. The poem is part of a conversation, but the
conversation is too complicated to report, let alone to analyse: here is the link between
literature and society. The poem is a conversation about the conversation about the poem.
Poets like Steve Spence, Tim Allen and Norman Jope are in the same room with
the mainstream, talking to it; this couldn’t happen in London. The next day, Tim Allen
(also editor of Terrible Work) drove me around Plymouth, explaining to me what all the
different parts are. This seems to be a big preoccupation in Plymouth; the city is small
enough for social structure to be visible, and the geographical differentiation of suburbs
makes the class structure easily memorable, because tied to place. This must be the
physical basis for the place poetry that Jope writes. This is easier in a hilly place like
Plymouth, with its dense contour lines, than in somewhere flat and riverine like London.
However, naming a part of town, which is full of information for Plymouthites, carries no
meaning for outsiders, and the poem has to be more analytical. Place is not social
structure. Jope’s poem ‘Moon’ mentions the geographer Christaller’s theory of a
mathematical form underlying the location of market towns in Bavaria, their development
into scaled categories and their precise distance from each other and from higher nodes:

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 The windows wept. Christaller’s theories
Melted in the soft white rain, transmuted into
Moonsong particles. The meres filled up
And land untidied –scatter patterns
Blurred the faces in their scarlet seats.
Paper cup exploded in a
Druid grove. An old head rolled
From infant shoulders. Ireland stretched beyond
The darkest council houses – means-tests megaliths
On scrawny hills above the harbour.
(‘Moon’)

Norman Jope, from Plymouth, edited the magazine Memes (1989-1994), which
published Chris Bendon and David Barnett. The ambience was open to Jungian myth,
occultism (a series of articles by A.C. Evans on the Occult Revival of the late nineteenth
century), science fantasy and the New Age. The patron saint of the magazine was Peter
Redgrove. Jope locates myths, to be acted out by living people, in the rural sites outside
Plymouth:

I have walked the broken track, past Left Lake Mires,

White Barrow’s breast, to face this ziggurat.
The moon is behind me, to the south –
Polaris, smouldering upon its plinth
By ruined cottages, a caved-in power-house.
This is a place of industry returned to silence
Ten miles from any road. Remotest of this land.
It is a chapel for the skylark, buzzards’ parliament –
A place of epiphanies, but no less Here. No less for everyone.
I have walked ten miles to be here, coldness on my face [.]
(from ‘Red Lake’)

I had assumed that the concentration of archetypal writers in the South-West, identified
by Jope (he listed Redgrove, himself, Elisabeth Bletsoe and Andy Jordan) was due to
Redgrove’s long-term residence in Cornwall and myriad readings in the region, but this
has been vigorously denied by Jordan. Jope has mentioned as figures he admires
Redgrove, Iain Sinclair, Martin Hibbert, A. C. Evans and Chris Bendon. The volume of
his poetry is not in proportion to its rate of aesthetic success. There is some good work in
Tors (1990), Spoil (1989), In the Absence of a Summit (1992), Terra Fabulosa (1996?)
and For the Wedding-Guest (1997). The topic of space and the body seems central in
contemporary poetry. It’s hard to describe exactly what the difference is between the
Jungians, like Barnett and Jope, and the Object Relations School, such as R.F. Langley;
presumably Jung’s inability to devise a logical argument has left a powerful trace. But the
opposition could also be played out between Redgrove, recording every movement of
fantasy, and Tomlinson, ruthlessly eliminating fantasy; very much to the former’s
advantage.

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 The belief, actually a kind of folk taxonomy, that different parts of the city reflect
different ways of life, so that someone from part X is certainly unemployed, a drunkard
and a vagabond, is a natural mythology. Because it “means” that moving to the wrong
part of town makes you another person, it suggests a solid and generally accepted
correlate for shifting psychological states, so that you can go to the bad part of town on
Friday night and the upper middle class part on Sunday afternoon, and be different. Jope
has used this taxonomy to evoke the fluidity of identity in a form that is hard and definite.
All the discourse about German militarism ignores the possibility that British
culture might be equally militarised, just as pervasively, and for the same historical
reasons. Plymouth’s economy collapsed with the end of the Cold War because it had been
part of the Cold War. This is a garrison town, founded on doing violence to foreigners and
selling sex to strangers. The development, grotesque or heroic, of the dockyards, is like
the cellular structure of a bird’s wing: if you are looking at a dead bird, you can theorise
what flight is; but without that notion, the structure is pointless. This is where empire is
performed. You can’t work out the history of Plymouth just by looking at Plymouth; it’s a
world city, not just a topography; the pivotal base for a worldwide empire. Facing inland,
rather than out to sea, is a cognitive shock, a kind of trauma. At present, the
unemployment feels like a kind of war, waged against the inhabitants; perhaps waged by
the inhabitants.
Tim Allen describes an estate on the edge of town somewhere, facing a prison
ship; some of the fathers are warders, others frequently-absent sailors; the families are
beaten flat by an excess of male authority, military and carceral structures reproducing
themselves within the household, an engine grinding frantically on nothing. The children
are being socialised into the environments where their fathers work. This is not a middle-
class town; the invasion of the seafront by expensive leisure resorts aimed at an affluent
middle class is an affront to everyone else, including the ones who have no money
precisely because the dockyards are quiet.
Tim admitted to me that some of the poetry in Terrible Work was there because he
thought the poets needed taking up and encouraging. This is a cultural split; between a
teacher, like Tim, full of help and benevolence, and a simple aesthete, who just chooses
the best poems and discards the rest. The poem the reader wants to own is not the same
one that the poet owns. The nasty critical person puts a better product on sale. But the
amateur sector of poetry is probably more important than the “official”, or expert, sector;
the point at which you are allowed to stop being encouraging and start being accurate (i.e.
telling bad from good) is very sensitive to feel for. The over-importance of a few poets, in
this country, is related to the history of state-run wars, concentrating power and influence
with the central government, which keeps a lot of things secret from the public, and is run
by twenty thousand people in London who are drunk on power. People just perceive
centrality differently in Scotland, or Sweden. Being a leading poet is a kind of high
office, which has rules and prerogatives not set by individuals. Even oppositional poets
believe in a central mystery of state (vested in language), and see theory as a source of
power, rather than of useful facts. Local government is more important than central, but is
neglected, of low esteem, and allows terrible mistakes to happen.
The politics of art in my lifetime have been much about relations between the
centre and the regions, and about the other relation between professional art (high
expertise, the audience remaining passive) and amateur art (lots of people do it but

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without huge expertise). Terrible Work represents the four-way stresses in this
relationship, where the stability of a particular achievement is part of a long-term
instability. Cultural managers should not insist too much on the validity of their
decisions. Tim and I disagreed on Sean Bonney, the author of Marijuana in the Breadbin,
about whom Tim is enthusiastic. Tim has a longing, tied up with ideals of the 1960s, for
visionary and cosmological poetry, which Bonney represents at a very low level of
competence; but in practice reads specialised and “theoretical” American poets, and
writes poems in the same acoustic universe as theirs. However much he socialises with
other poets in Plymouth, he is artistically quite isolated. The poetological map of
Plymouth should show some parts as being close to New York or San Francisco.
The cultural existence of the south-west first struck me around 1991 through
Memes, Norman Jope’s magazine; later on, I became aware of Stride magazine, and the
books published by Stride in Exeter. Stride has published more books of poetry than
anyone else except Carcanet and Bloodaxe. Shearsman, in Plymouth, has an international
orientation, and has published a series of ambitious books: David Wevill, Roy Fisher,
Gustaf Sobin and Kelvin Corcoran. I think Sobin is a great poet. Terrible Work is the
other conspicuous magazine; and Tony Lopez, who teaches at Exeter, holds poetics
workshops there. Tears in the Fence, from Stourpaine, has a more ecological and political
angle. Odyssey, in Somerset, had some intermittent leanings towards an advanced style; it
has now stopped, but the same name publishes books, notably by Bletsoe (who comes
from Dorset). In Southampton, 10th Muse, edited by Andrew Jordan, publishes some
interesting poetry, but Jordan is more famous for the “nonist” movement, his
deconstructionist art-hoax on ‘blood and soil’ poets, releasing a flood of extremely funny
spoof pamphlets on the idea of national identity, and on the south-west’s dislike of the
North (and vice versa) for being too conspicuously poor and distracting attention from
poverty in the south-west (and the poets who write about it). Jordan’s own poetry belongs
to the genre he seems to be attacking (and is indebted to Jeremy Hooker, also from
Southampton, who has theorised about “continuity” better than anyone else); I really
can’t tell you whether his poetry is parodic or sincere, he seems to be beyond all that. The
regional-patriot archaeologist phallo-mystic hill-walking landowning poet Dr Charles
Mintern has taken on a life of his own, and sometimes makes his creator look pallid. All
this is documented in various issues of Terrible Work. Part of the strain is between,
essentially, middle-class socialists with a belief in history, and working-class anarchist
anti-motorway protesters with radical lifestyles and no belief in books. I think we have
the beginnings of a regional school here, but the nonist tide makes clear the appalling
cosiness of believing that every region has its own poetic style, which complements the
tourist attractions; in fact, people are writing pretty much the same poem everywhere in
the country, and poets who don’t set out by differentiating, and by intensively studying
poetry from outside their own region, are unlikely to be noticed. Also in Devon is Andy
Brown, who has published an interesting first book with Stride, and as Maquette Press is
putting out a series of avant-garde pamphlets.

Field Trip to Glasgow, July 1997

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A reinforced Angel Exhaust field unit visited Glasgow to hang out with the Glasgow
avant-garde, the pleiad associated with the magazine Optical Code Gantry, whom we met
in a bar called the Cul de Sac: Cantywheery, Kirkintilloch, Carnwadric, Polmadie,
Rollox, Cowlairs Chord and Awe. All seemed incredulous at the field unit’s intent to
spend an entire weekend studying the culture and institutions of Glasgow, and wistfully
produced suggestions about what wonderful exhibitions were on in Edinburgh. The group
was irritated when I said there had never been more good Scottish poets working
simultaneously, and outright scornful when I said there were now six good Scottish poets.
On challenge, Angel Exhaust produced Robert Crawford, Bill Herbert, Frank Kuppner
and David Kinloch, while peristaltic movements of a torpid memory later added Rob
MacKenzie, Alexander Hutchison, Edwin Morgan, Fiona Templeton, Drew Milne
(vigorous dissent from Angel Exhaust here) and D. M. Black. Richard Price’s name came
up (everyone likes his poetry but no one seems to think it is important)—some unfairness
here. Ian Hamilton Finlay was disqualified for being a visual artist, and Hamish
Henderson for the fifty-year gap since his last book of poems. The editors of Optical
Code Gantry seemed quite glad that it had ceased publication, and rated its achievements
very low. Enthusiasm really does not seem to be in the local linguistic repertoire. Of local
poets, Kuppner was described as moving in a poorly programmed way and having an
unusual face, Kinloch as too dominated by Robert Crawford and by the academic
treadmill to realise himself artistically.
Rollox spoke of the book he edited on Tippitina-Zwickmühle, pre-war Marxist
and leader of the Interrogatory School, later Minister of Police for Saxony during the
purges after 6th June 1956, inventor of the 3rd Degree of Dialectic. Although the book
comprises a major part of his curriculum vitae, the assertion of Zwickmühle’s negations
could not abidingly be sustained, and he is now unwilling to go on. Cantywheery
meanwhile gave up his PhD after 3 years. They complain of lack of support for students
at the English Department of Glasgow University, but engagement with emotional objects
seems very difficult for them, too: it’s either the total monumental project or else finically
reasoned negativity. This pattern resembles the Cambridge one, which is possibly why
Prynne and Denise Riley are so admired up here. The issue is partly whether the place
where the artist goes to be alone is one of contemplation of beauty or of painful and
racking austerity; the changing of the incomplete perfect project into a depressive
substance seems central to what goes on by the Clyde. The avant-garde minimises
immediate reward because most poetry audiences far prefer easy and kind-hearted poems
with sensitive references to personal relations and to real places. The full-blown avant-
garde project is both high gain if it comes off, and high risk, as it involves years of
difficult linguistic research and low rewards. It is likely to remain a heroic torso, with the
constructor exhausted by the effort, and thoroughly disillusioned with the project, whose
drab surface reflects isolation, effort, and exhaustion. The lesser policy is certainly to
become merely an entry port, a local sales rep for American poetry and Franco-German
philosophy. Windows opened by the avant-garde on populism are probably crucial to the
sustenance of its core mission. Art as glamorous heavy engineering versus art as a
consumer product, perhaps.
Any monumental project is defined with respect to other monumental projects and
so is an imitation of them. This is a kind of observation that undoes what it looks at. The
height any tall structure can reach is limited by the fine cellular structure of its fabric,

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verbal or of tubular steel. The Glasgow group are enthusiastically committed to the task
of conversation, to analysing and explaining the shortcomings of all cultural propositions
with great finesse.
Much indignation was expressed at my suggestion that Robert Crawford had
actually written some good poems, but the problem is partly due to his role as a cultural
manager, with, apparently, the firm intent of suppressing the Scottish avant-garde, which
fills its members with horror; whereas Drew Milne, with probably an even narrower
programme as cultural manager than Crawford, wins their approval. Both are staunch
moralists blissfully on the make, with a worksheet of the tasks everyone else has to carry
out, who can only see what is reflected in the sides of their own project. I believe that, if
Milne and Crawford were ever in the same room, they would simply merge. Crawford,
though, is consciously carrying out an anti-authoritarian project threatening cultural
capital; which is why his best poems have wit and grace.

Spatial narrative

Jope writes poems inspired by two painters, Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon. This choice
brings out a point usually made by critics about the line where landscape and abstraction
meet, that both have to do with sensations of space, and specifically to do with feelings of
being immersed by space, of the sublime as a state following losing the significance of
the human body as the scale of spatial perception.
Both Jope and Jordan wrote poems about West Kennet Long Barrow, in Wiltshire.
It may be time to give a shared narrative. The poetry reading offered a poet isolated from
anything except their text. This was distinct from poetic drama, the apparent predecessor
of the poetry reading, where there was scenery. The tedium of the poetry reading, as
compared to other works of theatrical art, incited the development of space and distance
as verbal traces of the transcendent. Shorn of rights to transform the physical space where
they read, poets could write about space within the poem. The human figure everywhere
is in space, and isolating the single figure of the poet actually made the space containing
them more important. In the 1980s, Chris Torrance was teaching a poetry and
performance class in Cardiff, where the formula involved a combination of performance
and writing about space. Bletsoe was in that class, and her book The Regardians
describes a series of angels (regardians for guardians) identified as belonging to parts of
Cardiff:

you move among us

intent
with polished limbs of brass
your hair a burning bush
and your voice
the voice of the crowd
smog warnings on local radio

as the laser cuts St Mary Street:

above dark vibratory horizons

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 the white Portland stone of
“one of the loveliest city centres
in Europe”
still manages to rise
casual as thistledown

immobile parklands where

baked stones carry their UV memories
into the evening
at the edge of the river where
it is no longer permitted to swim:
hanging
blunt-nosed shadows of infrequent trout
& small detonations from
the seed-pods of balsam

Jope also wrote poems dealing with a figure in a landscape.

The confluence of ideas which became known as New Age spirituality involved
an idea of the earth as subject of worship, and as personalised. This linked the individual
and space in another way. Pilgrimage was one of the esteemed ways of experiencing the
spiritual. This could be expanded to a doctrine of an “earth goddess” – as in the poems of
David Barnett.
Sinclair’s great early works (Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge) involve a principle
whereby shape conjures up events, and the building of structures with Egyptian themes
calls up Egyptian gods and the events proper to them. This connects with the Gothic idea
that ghosts inhabit old buildings, and with sacred geometry. His associate Brian Catling
created performances and made sculptures – expanding the sculptures to involve entire
buildings, made into artworks and scenes for mythic events.
So here we can bind a range of poets (David Barnett, Iain Sinclair, Catling, Jope,
Jordan, Bletsoe, Hartill) in one pattern, with a few assists. At this point it becomes clear
that the audience are sharing the same ideas and in fact that there is an element of giving
the audience what they want (and can’t otherwise get). The poetry reading always aspires
towards becoming a drama, but the fatal prestige of the Elizabethan verse drama makes
normal development impossible; the invocation of strange imaginary spaces is a
development that avoids the deathly resistance. It took poetry away from the suburban
scale of one individual in their “social cell”; we can also, perhaps, recount the history of
the symbolic places, dwarfing and outlasting the individual poet. The landscape involved
might well be Portland Bill or the older parts of London.

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 10

FROM THE CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE TO THE REFORM OF

BEHAVIOUR

A discussion of Peter Finch, Kelvin Corcoran, the Purple and Green anthology and
Elizabeth Bartlett

In 1950, there was a fuss in the Daily Worker letters column about the value of poetry,
recorded in Andy Croft’s invaluable A Weapon in the Struggle. The Communist workers
knew exactly what they wanted poetry to be: encouraging people in the struggle, being
sung to raise people’s spirits. Private reading was not valued by them. Although Croft
suggests that the correspondence was staged by workerist elements in the Party to shoot
down the potentially threatening development of Key Poets and Fore Press, which
definitely were middle-class, intellectual, and for silent reading, although Communist,
this ugly incident foreshadows what is—for me, at least—the central drama of the next
fifty years: how to combine socialist principles with the high flight of poetry. Croft
records another controversy at much the same time: an Australian jazz band came to
Britain, and was amazed that the audience didn’t dance. Their stance was physically
solemn; proud of their record collections, devoutly compiling discographies, they were
keen on drinking beer, smoking and talking to each other to display their knowledge; they
didn’t dance—and their enthusiasm didn’t involve girls. Hence an advertisement
appeared in the Young Communist League’s jazz magazine: ‘JAZZ GIRLS WANTED’.
This small-scale combat of an oral culture against a middle-class one based on sedentary
knowledge and property (both summed up in the collection) anticipates a struggle that
shows no signs of burning out; and also suggests that the solution to poetry’s problems
lay in an alliance with popular music. There is another classic and exciting form of oral
culture: one of the tests of a modern poet is their distance away from the solitary, frozen,
owned forms of fixed knowledge and closeness to the shifting, light as air, competitive
forms of the argument.

A Comment on some Books by Peter Finch

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The End of the Vision (1971)

This isn’t very good. The poems are about primal or idyllic situations, but include too
little information to let us share them. Passages like,

her breasts jutted

like islands
in a torrent
of silver foam.

and

here,
I am
at peace
with nature,
make one sleepy and fretful, but

“look at the sky”

he shouted
peering up her skirt.

is astute and well expressed, I feel. The merit of Finch’s work abidingly depends on the
balance between triviality and light heartedness in supplying less information than
amounts to a situation. One poem takes Welsh conversation to task for its repetitive and
artificial qualities.

To live in Wales,

Is to be mumbled at
by re-incarnations of Dylan Thomas
in numerous diverse disguises.

Is to be mown down
by the same words
at least six times each week.

Is to be bored
by Welsh visionaries
with wild hair and grey suits.

(‘A Welsh Wordscape’)

So at this point an artificial linguistic world strikes him as frustrating, whereas later he
spent his whole career constructing just such worlds. Maybe the artificial worlds are

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actions of regret for a Wales lost in Saxon captivity? Probably not, but this supposition
does enable him to filter into the ultraconservative clique of Welsh subsidised publishing
without being accused of irregular attendance at Chapel. Finch’s parallel worlds are
repetitive and stylised, but conventional Anglo-Welsh poetry is so repetitive and stylised
itself that Finch’s poems hardly seem simple in contrast.

Visual Works 1970-1980

I have not seen this, but evidently Finch has made a lot of concrete poems.

2nd Aeon magazine (1967-74)

This is not Finch’s poetry, but is listed as a “significant work” because it was. He edited
it, and used to write roundups where he discussed all the small press stuff he had seen,
maybe 150 objects with about 30 words each. This was heroic, but perfectly useless. The
spectacle of very long sets of very short reviews may shed light on list structures and
minimal closed units in Finch’s poetry:

[T]he conflict is not as simple as […] traditional and modern, more it is between
those who wish a written constitution and those who enjoy the flow of equity […]
2nd Aeon is opposed to polarisation.
(2nd Aeon, 18, 1973)

I’m not sure whether I’m against polarisation.

Blues and Heartbreakers (1981)

This sound work is almost completely uninteresting. A fly caught under an upturned
glass. It is probably just a related product of the tape version of the same work, which I
haven’t heard.

Selected Poems (1987)

This gives a conspectus of the early work. Or, then again, maybe it doesn’t. I couldn’t
find most of the early work. It is a mixture of visual poems, sound poems and word
poems. Techniques include:

1- Parody of factual discourses, re-presentation of found texts

2- Corruption of text so that meaningless phonetic echoes of the messages appear
3- Building of linguistic worlds according to arbitrary rules, and logical
development of their possibilities
4- Defamiliarisation (or: suspension of the rules of classification on which

99
 language is based)
5- Lists
6- Arbitrarily numerous repetitions of words or sounds
7- Dialect poems

I personally associate all these techniques with the 1950s and with the German speech-
area, with such poets as Heissenbüttel, Mayröcker, Bayer, Artmann, Jandl, Mon, Bense
and Gomringer. I think the moment of invention was more striking and exciting than the
decades of recycling, especially in England. Having achieved classic status in the
Eisenhower era, this school was still astoundingly productive and alert in the 1980s.

Finch is an oral poet—like so many who began in the 1960s. He is primary in his
approach to language; the erosion of the integrity of the word at the phonetic level, the
escape from phonetic or semantic coding into purely visual or sound poetry, the use of
inarticulated connective structures such as the list or the mantra, all point us to an early
stage of language acquisition, say between two and three years old. This does, in a sense,
take us back to before the formation of a reflexive self, but gesturally discourages us from
thinking about the construction of that self, as the works of (say) Allen Fisher, Andrew
Crozier or Denise Riley do. His appeal is direct. He claims in the Introduction to derive
primarily from the music hall, as a working-class performance art. Ernst Jandl’s 1953-4
engagement at the Alhambra, Llandaf, may have proved seminal. The stress in this self-
presentation on means of production points to weaknesses in the area of aesthetics proper,
i.e. what is the basis for artistic choices and what the effect on the reader is supposed to
be. One can see Finch’s whole oeuvre as a protest against stability: he is permanently off
balance; and, with his dislike of the printed word (and preference for other genres), we
can see this as a protest against sedentary forms of knowledge. The live nature of the
work is to be reflected in its kinetic energy, its rapid darting from one point to another;
the allusiveness points to an excited group of people, not to a clique of the erudite.
This is a charming book, with poems like ‘Rubbish’ standing out as a kind of lyric
realism reached through a fluent knockabout falsetto, in astonishment and improvisation.
Make (1990) concentrates on minimalist poems catching moments when the rhythms of
life freeze or are in contradiction with each other:

dark peat
far lakes
empty farms
waste speech
poor holding
bare walls
ruined orchard
thin grass
mountain parish
lean rib

(‘Vicar’)

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This is a lot more enjoyable than 20 volumes of R. S. Thomas, and says roughly the same
things. The Anglican parish clergyman made up a certain moral and paternal presence in
English poetry, which Finch is opposed to. The painful shrinking of the Anglican base left
poetry high and dry in the 1960s; the act of understanding other people was tied up with
moral authority and went wrong; although English poets tried to extend the same moral
gravitas from the parish to the whole country. Which didn’t work very well. Finch just
doesn’t have that moral soundtrack running through the poems.

Antibodies (1997)

I thought this was a really good book. Each poem is a tiny artificial world, but the rate at
which ideas arrive and depart is relentless, and the opening of the poem to the
disconnected elements of everyday reality gives it a substance and endurance. Finch has
by this point learnt Welsh (as the jacket announces), and drops into it here and there;
bilingualism points up the arbitrariness of linguistic form itself, which is surely a stroke
in favour of someone who never impersonates their real self, and who utters nothing but
tours de force. The balance is towards humour and away from interrogation of the
mismatches between perception, the organism, and the outside world: Finch is too light
on his feet to bring about concentration.
There is a poem about water, which has a political loading in nationalist discourse
because some Welsh water goes to England:

it is raining Wales tanks

we have had this theory better than
how it is largeness a
centralist paranoia is not
if you see the white and
these compact buy them cheap

uncoded invective

“Largeness” is a link to another discourse, as it corresponds to mawrdra, used for

example as a chapter title, the curse of largeness, in one of the books of Gwynfor Evans,
an almost unbearably stupid man and for forty years leader of Plaid Cymru. Wales is a
“tank” because of its reservoirs. The Welsh language elements attract Welsh Nats because
they permit his distortions of English (‘ingwist long English / ingwist ungwish / wishing
wist workish’ etc.) to be represented as political alienation, i.e. the misery of the Welsh
person who speaks an alien language merely because his parents and grandparents did.
The poem ‘Not Mother’ (tongue) is about English (his ‘uncle tongue’), and seems to be a
political attack on it: clearly he is a nationalist, and dislikes the way the English speak
English. The idea of a poem as vandalism on the language is such a crowd-pleaser, and so
hard for poets who really want attention and respect to achieve. A hundred people like to
see authority figures disgraced for every one who wants to design a new social system.

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 I think that the absence of a contestatory element in Finch’s work—of trying to
push out the boundaries of art, or to overthrow the classification system that underlies our
social order—is what makes it so charming and insouciant. It comes in through the first-
floor window, walks along the ceiling, makes us laugh, and goes; it is as witty and
unconcerned as an advertisement. Poetic authority attaches to the tones of social
authority—seriousness, consistency, stable inhibitions, high educational status, etc.—but
it is good to have someone who has the pop virtues instead. Someone who can’t
remember what they were doing yesterday is more amusing than someone who is still
saying the same things they were saying 50 years ago, à la R. S. Thomas.
There is an affinity between poetry devised by games and cellular automata;
Edwin Morgan, Britain’s leading concrete and sound poet, wrote a long poem already in
the 1950s about W. Grey Walter’s robots (of which some very charming 1950s
photographs were published in New Scientist). The last five poems in the book are in
prose, and offer perhaps the theory to which rule-based poetry points: the dissolution of
the unified and self-conscious and responsible self, the identification box at the core of
the poems, in favour of a kind of massively parallel processor composed of hundreds of
autonomous neurological agents, where there is nothing but periphery. Antibodies
exemplify this: the immune system is of high efficiency as a system which processes,
stores and generates information, but not even a Leavisite would claim that it is governed
by the conscious will. So these poems mention neural networks, the immune system, the
design of the self and self-regulating unconscious behaviour programs. The learning
machine is visible only because information is missing—the rule which alienates the lazy
reader, although strictly we would not continue reading unless we were missing
information. Is something revolutionary about to emerge here?:

The self is probably the most bizarre thing in nature. It can defy gravity, run up
slopes, pass back through time, replicate itself endlessly in a blinding blizzard,
invent a million tortuous justifications, dance for days on the head of a pin.
Smudges, smears, fractures, deviation, dark shift, dark shrapnel, dark side. It’s got
all these.

['Balloons']

This lacks philosophical curiosity to the extent that it is picturesque (and amusing and
frolicsome). Is Finch, as p.127 might suggest, about to open the door to the space where
Allen Fisher lives? This would offer a compelling reason for ceasing to be a music hall
act—although another compelling reason says, go on.

Useful (1997)
I’m not actually going to review this, just point to Finch’s astounding quick-wittedness in
producing two substantial books in one year. One poem appears in both books; it is called
‘Wet Singers’ and is a “fake didactic list” poem:

Water Jones
Blind Wet Jenkins

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 Bog Stitchwort Owen
The Waterstones
Foam Baby
West Glamorgan Pipe Choral
Crow Edward Rainfall
Damp Diddley Davis
The Shower Kings Oh Such Piping Hot Harmony
Tin Bath Malcolm (gtr)
The Physicians of Myddfai
Thomas The Tank Engine

This may have something to do with the pseudonyms used until recently by Welsh poets

A Discussion of Lyric Lyric by Kelvin Corcoran

Lyric Lyric (1994) was Kelvin Corcoran’s sixth collection; we will look at it briefly
before discussing at a general level the style revealed by this impressive lyrical corpus. I
suppose the first remark is that this collection pre-dates the poems he read at the
Cambridge Poetry Conference in 1992, and of which nine sections appeared in Grille 1;
poems which point to him as currently the best poet in England.
Albert Arnold Scholl distinguished, in 1955, the structure poem and the
expressive poem:

In the first example we are confronted with a pure structure poem, a lyrical figure
which does not affect our feelings, nor the intellect, but another organ on the same
level, that is the aesthetic sense, a kind of sixth sense for tectonic forms which are
made of words.

(from Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer)

I suppose Prynne and Raworth to be possessors of this sense. An actor would be unable to
give Kelvin’s poems some emotional cadence, they lack pathos in that sense; as Kelvin’s
own readings show. They lack the “melody” which we expect of poetry, and to which the
word “lyric” (i.e. recited to musical accompaniment) points us. The same is true of the
discourse of business and Government and technology, of the practical life of the country,
in fact. It is not hard to deduce that Corcoran is concerned with the latter.
One of the repeated figures is the presentation of symbols as objects and vice
versa. For example, ‘It was the time of end pieces, / the time of folding away the truth
table / from which they had eaten / and score into its surface / a name which belongs to
something else’. A truth table is something like this:

car can go ahead

red light false
green light true

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You use them for designing decision circuits or for dissecting logical implications and
exclusions in software. The idea of eating from a truth table is strictly surreal. He says
again ‘Shining Tor White Peak Manifold Track / the water table, the truth table, logic
gates / diesel wind diversions on the motorway, / oh you noticed all those old songs’. This
time it appears as if there is an underlying reservoir of truth from which the fields are
nourished and which fills the streams with joyful noise. Clearly this isn’t so; but this may
point to a definite Corcoran method, of fleeting and hallucinatory effects. By putting
‘logic gates’ and ‘Manifold Track’ in a structurally analogous segment of metrical space,
he puts them in a relationship with each other which is unique because it is hallucinatory.
(It’s literally true that the circuit etched on the back of a printed circuit board is called
tracking.) On page 8 we read:

In the turquoise mines

at Serabît-el-Khadem
our lady of turquoise
letters the first alphabet
ten years to read one word.

['in the turquoise mines']

The reference is to fifteenth century BC inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Sinai, said
to be the first known alphabetical script; the lady is possibly a specific Sumerian
sculpture decorated with lapis lazuli, a thousand years older, discussed by Peter Fuller in
Art and Biology. Kelvin is interested in the pictures, which the Semitic miners so
brilliantly converted into phonetic symbols:

I could write through the table, cursively gouge down to the hieroglyphs living in
our capitals. B, E and M are some of my favourites; house, man and water. Dusted
with logic and sand I set them right against gentleman thieves burning in the east.

['I could write through the tables']

Again, looking for pictures in the alphabet is basically surreal and pointless. They aren’t
there. You can’t jog around a printed circuit track, either. I guess that there is some kind
of relationship between the act of turning a physical object (e.g. a wooden tablet) into a
symbol, the act of projection or occupation which lets a lyric poet use an object as a
correlative for an inner state, and the surrealism which lets people use a truth table to eat
their dinner off. So why does a diagram help us to imagine logical relationships? Perhaps
there is a staining of the new (and cerebral) by the archaic and sensory.
There is a poem titled ‘Hysteresis Loop’ (misspelt in this edition). This is a term
from a discredited mathematical technique, Catastrophe Theory, devised by René Thom,
and is a point where the steady increase of a factor yields ‘a cycle of behaviour with two
smooth portions linked by catastrophes’. The classic example is the daily cycle, with
smooth areas of sleeping and waking linked by sudden changes or “catastrophes”, i.e.
falling asleep and waking. Sleep causes a steady increase of the factor (actually a

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complex of chemicals) that brings about the end of sleep; and we can detect a similarity
between this and the dialectic. ‘Sigint’ (p.39) is ‘signals intelligence’, i.e. military
intelligence derived from intercepting radio transmissions (a major industry in
Cheltenham, where Kelvin lives).
As “structure poet”, Corcoran would be someone systematically using montage
and false (surreal) analogies to produce a text that is not emotional, does not have a
strong “I” figure, and does not have a logical or didactic structure. The premise for all
this would be that the political system is held up by disinformation of a very complex and
subtle kind, an orthodox Bennite analysis, which also means that to show information
processing as an industry destroys the claims to unique legitimacy of the TV news and
Treasury pronouncements. As physically concrete organisms we can only apprehend
Society in symbolic form: ‘I ride big letters across the map, / along the branching
motorways spell / in safe dots at the foot of a Y’ [untitled poem]. Getting away from
infantile drives (for example, wanting the media to give us primarily sexual stimuli) frees
our senses for the more refined, less “catchy” information needed for our political
education. However, an important strand in Lyric Lyric points in precisely the opposite
direction: right on the first page he says ‘shattered in an obscure tongue / lyrical ballads
endure’, echoing the volume title to make a very positive claim to be direct, natural,
feely, musical. That is, writing the other type of poem named by Scholl, Ausdruckgedicht,
expression poem: ‘the human meaning / out of the dark dream/ breathing immediate
words. Lyric lyric show your hand’. Further investigation would uncover how Corcoran
fluctuates between mediate and immediate intake to produce a shimmering tension of
surface.
Other members of the class, taught by Ralph Hawkins at Essex University around
1978, recall Kelvin as being theoretically worked-out to an amazing extent: he had a
position, based on Adorno, which he could apply to everything. Perhaps this wonderful
apparatus is too rigid; perhaps its sound is too plain, too Midlands, too confident about
the alternative we glimpse behind the existing system; but the rigour is necessary if we
are to form clear apprehensions, and the gamble on the productivity of the reflexive
approach is justified every time. Perhaps awareness is something that comes inevitably
when we are steady, and unsteadiness chases it away at every second.

Discussion of Purple and Green: Poems by 33 Women Poets (1985)

It is hardly a secret that part of the point of being idealistic is to be attractive to women.
The point of exclusive games of political righteousness is partly to keep control of the
scoring completely in male hands, thus excluding women from judging men. I have
argued elsewhere that an improvement in the status of women in the 1950s, with the re-
orientation of capitalism towards leisure and household goods, led to a redefinition in the
1960s of the male figure as an object of pleasure (a leisure appliance, if you like), a
narcissistic move which ironically placed authority in the hands of women, as those most
qualified to say “yes” or “no” to these new decorative creatures. The attention given to
the critique of language presupposed that it was the high-powered politicos who were
going to have the final say, and not women, conducting a critique of the way a man talks
as a way of estimating his character and attractiveness; and was to a large extent a dead

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letter. The tenuousness of the voice of the male poet is now part of the landscape; who
speaks for himself is likely to sound merely self-styled. The external and heroic critique
of the power order now has to be combined with a domestic and intimate critique of
power and goodness within the household.
Purple and Green: Poems by 33 Women Poets was published without editor
credits by Rivelin Grapheme Press in 1985. The poets included are: Anna Adams,
Elizabeth Bartlett, Jennifer Brice, Carol Ann Duffy, Vivian French, Diana Hendry, Sue
Hodges, Ena Hollis, Liz Holmes, Charmian Hughes, Nicki Jackowska, Lenka Janiurek,
Sylvia Kantaris, Judith Kazantzis, Pauline Keith, Pauline Kirk, C. A. De Lomellini,
Lindsay Macrae, Jan Maloney, Geraldine Monk, Cheryl Moskowitz, Grace Nichols,
Dorothy Nimmo, Patricia Pogson, Carol Rumens, Deirdre Shanahan, Valerie Sinason,
Agnes Stein, Anna Taylor, Isobel Thrilling, Penelope Toff, Janet Webber and Jane Wilson.
The lack of mention of an editor is a deliberately egalitarian gesture; authority is
neither claimed nor accepted. The geographically minded will note a certain Northern
slant, due presumably to Rivelin Grapheme’s base in Sheffield. The title probably refers
to the suffragette colours. We can mention other anthologies: Cutlass and Ear-ring
(1977), the first anthology of feminist poetry, Sixty Women Poets (1994) and Out of
Everywhere (1996); the latter billed as “linguistically innovative poetry” and collecting
what I would think of as serious poetry; most of the 31 poets are Canadian or American.
Finally, there are the 30 women poets in Paladin’s New British Poetry (1988).
Even if it isn’t specified in the blurb material, the atmosphere of Purple and
Green is pervaded by the changes brought about by feminism, and would be unthinkable
without it. Someone who demanded why so, could only be rebutted by examining an
anthology of women’s poetry from the 1950s: but of course there is none such. The whole
idea of a swarm of women poets writing in a documentary way, writing about feelings
disloyal to their husbands, lovers, employers, the government, capitalism, etc., being
forthright, sometimes self-seeking, but never religious, glamorous, refined or self-
denying, didn’t exist in the 1950s. The effect is masked by the overall leftward and
democratic changes of the period: feminism is so continuous with these that its
boundaries don’t exist; after all, there is only one society. This also makes it impossible to
attack feminism unless you reject modern society as a whole.
I suppose someone might advance the idea that “inevitable” changes don’t need
theorists and agitators to hasten their coming, but I can’t believe that, since even in
business a change of methods needs gurus and consultants to work out the problems and
to spread the word via seminars and so on. Modern feminism effectively didn’t start until
1970, and when it did start a lot of people derided it and denied its right to existence. Bob
Krasnow records in an interview how, in the 1950s, he would tell people he was in the
“record business”, and they would forget the information because they didn’t appreciate
that such a business existed and employed people: after a shift of perspective, it’s hard to
recall what it was like before. It’s another question as to how much the poetics of
women’s poetry has changed since 1968, or just disseminated. I feel that most of the
techniques in Purple and Green (largely, agitprop and personal realism) are identifiable
in Jazz Poetry (ed. Anselm Hollo, 1963), a record of the Poetry and Jazz events, which
were inspired by anti-nuclear, Left, anti-business ethos, feelings.
It is because the feminist position is an attack on the whole social order, not
simply on local abuses, that the genre of anthology is so suited to it. The poems here act

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to confirm each other: we see, not only one household where bad things are happening
behind closed doors, but we see inside all the houses in the street. As in a pop song,
hearing the same thing confirmed by many voices gives it an objective reality. This factor
points oddly away from individual, differentiated experience, although at the same time
every poem is original, and most of the poets make personal experience and feelings the
centre of truth, because they are alienated from the way society is run. The critique of the
truth of personal experience, so popular in contemporary philosophy, would be
unwelcome here: this device is fired once and once only, when the poet-protagonist
makes the break from the patriarchal ideology and rebuilds her awareness of the world on
different presuppositions. This new awareness is not seen as provisional. In fact the
device is kept in the cupboard, to be deployed again when it is a question of discrediting
the whole consciousness of a man. There is a latent gap in the fabrication here: if there
are two people involved in a situation, and one of them is capable of being wrong, surely
they are both capable of being wrong; this leaves us looking for a stable, external
yardstick capable of establishing the truth, for the satisfaction of us, as the readers. It
would be unreasonable to look for this inside the poem, admittedly written by one of the
participants. But further, it opens the possibility that a great deal of consciousness,
especially in the spheres of the emotions, may not be subject to truth-testing, because it
does not correspond to anything outside itself. When two people clash, not about truth,
but about what they want to do, it may be strength that determines the outcome. The
poem may then become a vent for unsatisfied desires, one-sided language uncontrolled
by the moral resistance of another person to contradict or agree. This flaw does not
necessarily matter in the reading of particular poems. Or perhaps, on the other hand, we
gauge the character of the poet from the whole tone of the poem, and it is this composite
judgment that allows us to evaluate the story the poem tells.
The quality of convergence in Purple and Green is quite exceptional. I suppose
the typical reading experience is mixed, we find poems either in anthologies or in
magazines. And we do not wipe our recent memories down to zero on starting a new
page, no, everything in consciousness is rhythmic, the whole context of the book affects
the way we read a single page, and an anthology should be designed as a single reading
experience. Many of the worst features of mainstream poetry may be due to the plan of
fitting into a magazine composed largely of prose, an unsympathetic environment which
leads the poet into excessive obviousness, shallowness, lightness, thinking of jokes to
overcome embarrassment. Throughout Purple and Green, we have the first-person
convention, whereby one person releases her inner thoughts and feelings, but anyone else
in the room, in the scene, is silent and only explained through their silent actions or
through the occasional piece of reported speech. The convention tends to give the effect
of merging the man, who the other person mostly is, with the whole anonymous mass of
reality.
I feel a certain guilt about liking realism more than formalism. But there it is, a
large swathe of the modern poems that affect me most have nothing formally original
about them. Stylistically, several dozen of these 33 poets merge into each other. But
poetic richness is not to be found in experimentation alone; the stress here is on the
semantic elements, and on the psychology of the situation being presented. Evidently, all
the successes come from detailed linguistic effort all the same, from directness, clarity,
precision, concentration, brilliance of imagery. Experimentation is not the only way of

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dealing with experience in an honest and intellectually fascinating way. We should
consider the whole process of verbalisation, the indefinable region (a grey void? a
featureless plenitude?) it starts with, and how many dimensions the process has. It takes
understanding of all dimensions of language, to write such poems as Elizabeth Bartlett
and Isobel Thrilling publish here, even if they aren’t performing a latent criticism of the
rules of poetry.
In a project of confession and repentance, experience is here being verbalised and
recounted in order to attain a higher level of consciousness, and this therapeutically, in
order to alter one’s behaviour and train of life. It is not dead, not like property, but has a
progress ideology built into it, competes with the experimentalist version of progress. It
would be an error to reduce the project of confession to its historical roots in religious
meetings, largely those of the Dissenters and Methodists: these are not the source of the
wish to rethink one’s life in public, but only a historical form which this wish took. The
importance both of Dissenters and of women in the development of the English novel is
well known. The progress ideology implies the rejection of existing experience, as part of
the before. Poetry might fall apart along this fault line, which is between bad past and
glowing, but unrealised, future.
One way of teaching literature would be to relate the feelings and moral ideas of
the characters in the books to the feelings and moral ideas of the students. The questions
would be about what does it feel like to leave someone? Can you justify it? Can you
make your feelings more integral and durable by training them? Can you go on loving
someone for the whole of your life? Is there an element of will in being emotionally
uncommitted or split? is adultery necessary? What is the role of illusion in love? I would
have thought these questions were a great deal closer to the hearts of the students, and to
the hearts of the poems, than issues like the rules of the sonnet form or the theory of
Deconstruction. Great claims have been made for the functions of an English degree as
improving moral standards, which I suspect are fantastic lies. It can’t act as an emotional
education because your own feelings are formally excluded, after a series of institutional
compromises deep in the past, which raised uniformity and reduced risk; just the opposite
of what we expect from poetry. Getting a class to talk aloud about issues that really
mattered to them would offer appalling difficulties; the temptation just to clam up would
be too great. It’s much easier just to develop a shell self that talks intellectually about
issues at arm’s length from anyone’s feelings and beliefs; I think I’ve read all too many
poems written by such shell selves. The poems in Purple and Green are very frank, and
deserve praise for daring to be so vulnerable, in a sarcastic and protected world. Perhaps
there are some classrooms where the important side of literature is studied, rather than
neutral and peripheral issues.
Feminist editors have done an expert job of resuscitating pre-modern poets—a
foray into the desert zone—but the overall story is of cultural failure, and the women’s
poetry that has flourished since 1968 is an extremely radical departure from the norms of
women’s poetry as they existed before. Many of the names of women poets listed in
manuals of the earlier period are now completely forgotten. Perhaps some Balkanist will
one day come along and map the disappearance of earlier generations of women poets.
None of the names in the British Council pamphlets on Poetry To-day (1946, 1957, 1961)
ring a bell; the 1960s simply eliminated them. Any historian, however critical, has to
count excellent poems written by Lynette Roberts, Rosemary Tonks, Charlotte Mew,

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Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Wellesley, Frances Cornford; I am more uneasy
about approving such poets as Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Fredegond Shove, Anne
Ridler, Elizabeth Daryush, E. J. Scovell, and Patricia Beer.
Giving way to subjectivity produces a sealed autonomy; excluding it gives a grey
array version of reality, where the drives and emotions that colour it have been denied.
We know since the work of sociologists and social psychologists during the 1950s that
there is a social construction of reality; projection has a role to play in creating meaning.
The threat is that by undefining the self-process you undermine the juridical plaintiff
claims of right, which disfavours women as the underdogs who most want change and
redistribution of power. I’m not credulous that avant-garde poetry is a threat to the
feminist cause; whereas feminist poetry which is visibly lacking in intelligence is going
to discredit that cause. The more stiff, unchangeable positions a poem has, the less the
total information flow of the poem; and so the less intelligence it visibly has. The original
feminist critique was that the social order is the product of male subjectivity, inadequately
restrained, and not of objective needs; this tenet could not sustain anything but the idea
that social meaning, and social structure, are the products of the imagination. The fruits of
victory are meant to be a new way of life, not simply the relief of laying down arms;
limiting the imagination, even in order to win disputes, limits the shape a new society can
take.
One of the poets included in Purple and Green is Geraldine Monk, who is
indignant about the anti-formalist conventions of many feminist women, and wrote, with
Maggie O’Sullivan, a well-known article for City Limits defending experimental poetry.
Poetry which is going to be useful in social causes has to be realistic, since otherwise it
can be impugned as fanciful and arbitrary; the politicos, who are rather more well-
organised than the poets, have tended to reduce poetry to servile status, using for
formalism such euphemisms as “you haven’t really got into touch with your emotions” or
“you’re being self-indulgent”. If you combine the ideas of maximising self-interest
(because it has been institutionally slighted) and maximising verbal claims (in the
interests of good propaganda or promotion), you end up with a version of the self and its
wishes which is merely fetishistic; something none of the poets here is guilty of.
The feminist break is necessarily like a divorce from the established power order;
but you can’t think like a lawyer drawing up claims on property, and go on being a writer.
Just because you are engaged in a political struggle to attain your wishes doesn’t mean
that your inner life becomes totally fixed, like paving stones, in order to be the fixed
purpose of the struggle. These poets necessarily go through the phases of oppression and
conformism, struggle and polemic, and autonomy to design a life and search for pleasure.
How can you move gracefully through these three phases if you’re immobile and
conforming to external rules? This triangle corresponds to another: between realistic,
experimental, and fantasy-psychedelic ways of writing. The “realistic” mode is
ambiguously propaganda, anyway. Simple realism is avoided, because life includes
planning and reacting, not just passive attendance; and because transformation is more
interesting to the readers, who are the politically alienated, than the dull reality of
alienation. If there were no dialectic between the social order and individual
consciousness, the concept of freedom would be without content.
Re-reading a lot of the poetry of the past thirty years, one realises that the pre-
shocks of this shift of perceptions were felt well before 1968; whether it was true to life

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or not, poetry is missing that whole block of activity which includes infidelity, affectless
sexual desire, the wish to dominate, shallow emotions, seduction by deceit, egoism
sustained by fantasy. The media in general shifted towards more blatant, more luscious,
more fetishistic, more emotionless, sexuality in the 1960s; providing feminism with one
of its arguments and one of its lines of attack; but one does not find this shift in poetry, or
at least only in oblique forms. There is no equivalent in poetry of the vindictive and
boastful put-downs of women that you can find in rock music. This is partly because of
the first ripples of feminism: poets were quite well aware of the arguments about
degrading women, and their justness, in 1960 or earlier. The whole problem of the
attenuation of love poetry in the twentieth century, something we’re not going to discuss,
is linked to the awareness of the oppression of women; the solution was either
suppression or idealisation, and the latter became much more difficult with the reaction
into realism and away from the sublime which occurred around 1910. For these reasons,
the revolution in the perception of women which we might expect to have happened in
poetry since 1968 either has not happened, or has happened only in poetry by women, or
takes very fine trituration to discover. There has been no dramatic surrender of occupied
territory. Partly, this has happened at the expense of frankness in discussing personal
relations, which has changed every other branch of the media so much.
(I failed to notice back in 1997 that the cover image of the anthology, a segment of a
circle touching the sides of a square resembles a quilt motif. As quilts were mostly
designed by women, this choice is part of a feminist idea.)

A discussion of Elizabeth Bartlett’s Two Women Dancing: New and Selected Poems
(1995)

Two Women Dancing: New and Selected Poems presumably sums up the career of
Elizabeth Bartlett, (born in 1924) and crediting the earliest poems included to 1942. The
tone is one of pastoral care, stretches of human behaviour observed closely and tenderly,
yet with the non-idealistic view needed by the awareness that people make each other
unhappy, and with a sustained and substantial quality which throws the centre of gravity
away from the poet’s self-regard and into the lives of the people observed. The emotional
power of the book derives partly from various testimonies of truthfulness, convincing us
that the speaker possesses knowledge of the person being spoken about, and from a set of
breakthroughs when the quick of life is visible in a short space; and partly from the
cumulative and mutually supporting effect of so many convincing poems, so that the
situation of a character in one poem is illuminated by the other poems, suggesting her
dreams or anxieties. The technique depends on presenting ample details about each
character, persuading us that the author is entitled to speak, allowing us to make the
imaginative jump into identifying, and melodically sustaining the poem by supplying new
information sustainedly to its end; Bartlett knows a great deal about her characters and
provides a wealth of stories, rarely repeating; here is where we test the book and find its
ampleness and thoroughness positively luxurious.
The genre is gossip: the aesthetic derives immediately from conversation, but it
has the vigour of a brilliant monologist; gossip arouses our curiosity to an unpleasant
degree, and poetry which did not satisfy that curiosity would be unbearable: Bartlett sets

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up the incomplete patterns, which the run of the poem is a completion and satisfaction of,
with incomparable skill. The particular appeal, and element of modernity, is provided by
Bartlett’s rather base view of humans as creatures driven by rational appetites; and by the
social worker’s eye (literally, that of an NHS employee, first a GP’s receptionist and then
a care worker for the elderly) which sees a great deal wrong with our society and spends
much of its time examining what is going wrong. The traditional poetry reader might
regard Bartlett’s poetry as being rather sex-obsessed and dwelling too much on sordid
lives; this is the kind of person who in the 1960s was unable to watch ITV, as too
shocking. This brings up another possibility, that Bartlett’s view of human nature, as well
as her social perspective, are working-class. Bartlett does not pursue the project of being
selfless, i.e. an accurate observer, to attenuating the subjects’ selves, i.e. presenting their
desires for status, gratification, power, etc., as base and rightly to be frustrated by an
austere social authority (resembling too much the authorial voice).
Two items in the book give me pause. First, the introduction by Carol Rumens
quotes Bartlett, about the poet’s confession that she latches ‘on to what I call the neurotic
voice. It has to do with intensity and mood swings, so the language becomes infused with
this’. I can’t find any mood swings in any of the poems. Their design standard is to be
unambiguous, so as to be credible; they are level-headed and with a low centre of gravity.
The project of presenting emotion as something autonomous and active, rather than
sociological, reliable and given does not appear. Everything is nailed down. Subjectivity
is resisted because if the narrator is subjective then all her stories become suspect, and the
fabric of the poems becomes tenuous and unsatisfactory. Since style has been sacrificed
to credibility, it is hard to see why the author chose the medium of poetry. The second
item that gives me pause is a reference in one of the poems (p.128) to ‘a mainstream
poet’s collected work’. It is not clear to me how you could be more mainstream than
Bartlett. Why does everyone see themselves as a rebel? None of the innovations that have
happened since 1960 have touched her.
In a poem on page 139, the poet, or at least the I-figure of the poem, discusses her
biological father as being an Austrian musician who lodged with her mother while her
father was away on military service and unavailable to provide home comforts. One
version of this story is “she went to bed with him because she was a bad woman”, but the
version implied in the text is “she went to bed with him because he was the lodger and he
was there anyway”. The poet either has low expectations of her characters or dislikes
romantic self-idealisation. Perhaps this implies a view of men that screens out personal
characteristics and accepts anyone who is roughly the right age and size. This also has
implications about the degree of extremity or differentiation of linguistic style. The I-
figure seems most interested in the musician’s face, detecting in it the outlines of her
own. Tragedy and repining are turned right down; having a child is seen as a big triumph.
Several poems deal with the theme of young mothers in domestic difficulties and
without husbands. Version 1 is “she should have remained chaste until she had a
boyfriend economically able to equip a good home”, but the version favoured in the text
is simply “getting pregnant is inevitable at a certain stage in life and society exists to
supply good homes for babies to be happy babies in”. You can kick against this latter
theory, but it gives off a tremendously solid sound. In fact, the view of childbearing is
almost biological; the analysis is “she became pregnant because she was well-fed, in
good health, and her bones were fully formed”, in the way one might describe mice,

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rather than saying “she became pregnant because of a passionate romance with a man
whose special qualities were X and Y”. Bartlett is not anti-men, but in fact views affairs
as the high points in life, special and fascinating although fraught and compromised.
The lack of controversy and argument or questioning of ideas acts to make the
narrator more credible. There is a missing dimension. One version of Left poetry is a
calm, persuasive discourse of fact, in a richly rendered social context, but rather poor in
ideas. There is a gap between primary photographable reality and ethical standards, and it
cannot be crossed except by argument and commitment. We find an odd coincidence
between subjectivity and theorising, both being personal and the stage for furious contest
and self-assertion. Perhaps these ritualistic fights are a male thing? You can’t have
politics without ideas. Since an idea is an item of property, as “this was my idea”,
intellectuals tend to specialise their ideas to the point where what they “produce” is
unique and so has a higher exchange value; applied to political philosophy, this means
that, the less likely your system is ever to be applied to governing the country, the more
proud you are of it. The facts never speak for themselves and one hopes creative writers
will utter for them and with them.
Bartlett fits into the untendentious and egalitarian social realism of the 1940s,
exhibited a lot in Penguin New Writing, or for example in the recently republished novels
of Alexander Baron. If I list other poets born in the 1920s—Edwin Morgan, Charles
Tomlinson, Emyr Humphreys, George Mackay Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Christopher
Logue, Christopher Middleton—she seems not to fit in. Would these poems seem out of
place in a 1940s magazine? No. This manner was a regression towards the centre from
the angry and tendentious propaganda in realist style of the 1930s, with the ranting
calmed down by the wartime mixture of coalition government and full employment.
Faced with the mainly middle-class reading audience, it flowed into the radio or film
scripts and eventually, decisively, into TV drama and serials.
Bartlett belongs to a line of poetry little regarded by university courses but
prolific, traceable back to the artisan poets (usually weavers) of the mid-nineteenth
century, and discussed, for example, by R. L. Mégroz in his 1933 book as the “new
simplicity” of the late nineteenth century; W. E. Henley’s Hospital Poems is an ancestor.
The genre has as its class basis the poor; as its artistic theory, realism; as its ideas system,
Christianity of the practical and pastoral kind. I am sceptical that something new is on
offer here; although I agree that Bartlett’s poems are sociologically up to date, and
resemble the TV soap operas such as East Enders and Casualty rather than something
older and more glamorised. One of the features of this stream is its comprehensive view
of women, seen in a variety of physiological and emotional activities that don’t contribute
to glamour and romance, and can’t be cut out and edited into narcissistic, erotic fantasy.
This view was more revelatory in 1850 than it is at the present day. It is interesting that
several of the men poets in this tradition (Henley, Kipling, Housman and Owen come to
mind) weren’t interested in women, or at least put them to one side. It is hard to explain
why Bartlett is writing poetry and not prose, like the novel Union Street, by Pat Barker, or
again the telescripts for East Enders and Casualty, or some social-realist cop show. What
she is doing seems peculiarly suited to a narrative and filmed format, where lots of
information is made available and seen to be solid, and unsuited to poetry. Making the
case that people are oppressed by the material conditions of their lives seems to numb
and side-line the imagination.

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 The pattern logic of the poems is given by the logic of society; all the details are
necessary to supply our social understanding of the person being discussed. This reduces
the area of poetic freedom, does not belong to the culture of leisure, the affluent society.
It might be worth switching off the realist function to give the poem autonomy in choice
of material, connections, and design. Or is autonomy and improvisation in art an upper-
middle-class whim? People don’t really choose the situations that make them unhappy,
but they can choose how they write poetry. She includes some poems about the literary
life, usually an evening class where she is enthusiastic but feels ignorant and inarticulate:

I knew by your house you were not

my kind, and never could be,
although you were caring and good
in ways of the gentry,
a little patronising,
although not meaning to be.

[…]

Too late I saw I had come

up from the basement, knocked
at the wrong door, muddled
my grammar, been too much
above myself.
(‘Small Dole’)

Bartlett has a strong vision of the good life, as a round of parties in nice houses where
people are calm, well dressed, uncompulsive, socially at ease and understand literature;
and sees herself as excluded from all this. She detests being judged by other people, and
her poems consist almost entirely of judgments of other people—Ah, but if it’s me doing
it… Here is the implicit power struggle; and a subversive hope that, if there is a different
observer speaking, the process being observed will be destabilised and renewed.

No, the children’s father

has not married me. Studying for a degree,
you said, and twitched your skirt
over your virginal bottom as you pranced through
the hall and over the grubby Oxfam mat,
neatly dressed with your navy-blue hat.

‘Go way’, shouted the toddler, ‘go way’.

His first linked words. It was quite a day.

(‘Quite a Day’)

Yes, it’s one of those mock-the-social-worker poems. Bartlett likes to characterise people
by means of their bottoms. ‘I know her daddy got some money, I can tell by the way she

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walk’, Mose Allison used to sing, informed more by the infra-red of concupiscence than
by the rules of sociological method. Can you really describe people by describing their
bodies? isn’t this just a trade practice, a simplification that is dictated by working rules
like how long the poem is going to be? Don’t these tell-tale signs come from other art
forms, where they were brilliant showbiz stylisations worked out to get the message over
quickly, a black-avised strutting villain and a slinky vamp with a wiggle in her walk,
wooden partitions to shut out the complexity of human behaviour? Would Bartlett get
away with this kind of quick likeness if she was writing a story, say twenty pages long,
rather than a poem one page long? And finally: is her simplicity of language a kind of
barnstorming mime to show herself as innocent and truthful (“I’m too naïve to be
deceiving you”)? Can you really tell the scale of a social worker’s sexual activity from
the way she walks? These poems are carefully carpentered, but also give the impression
that, if they went on any longer, they would prove to be very flimsy.
One theory has it that the human bottom evolved as a corollary of upright gait, as
weight to stabilise the pelvis during the oscillations caused by walking. Walking possibly
does reveal to the observer important details about the state of the walker's musculature
and the quality of their neuromuscular servomechanisms; a million people have a million
different walks, and free verse came in as a similar making-visible, verse movement as a
fine scale weighing brain-muscle activity. If someone's state of alertness varies at
different times of day, the lightness of their walk varies with it, and the idea that what you
are observing at a particular minute is a sign of permanent value is an illusion. Any realist
art has to rest on the supposition that what is being observed is really there. Free verse is
supposed to fluctuate from second to second. Detecting temporary states like fatigue,
depression, or sexual readiness is more contentious; though of course trained performers
can mime these states just by walking, the observer may be projecting in other cases.
Maybe the difference between objective and subjective is that the former is
permanent, or tardy to change, and the latter is fine fluctuations that vanish when
complete and don't repeat. But guess what, what a camera with a fast shutter speed
catches is really there. And if you fix and save a very large number of fine-scale sporadic
fluctuations, perhaps you can find underlying patterns in them which are durable. So
where does personality reside: in body weight and muscle to fat ratio, or in the very
numerous patterns which emerge in differentiated behaviour, such as walking or speech?

There is love to begin with, early love,

painful and unskilled, late love for matrons
who eye the beautiful buttocks and thick hair
of young men who do not even notice them.
('Themes for Women')

Her other favoured means of characterisation is by objects, either clothes, or household

furnishings and housekeeping. This brings us back to money and power. There is partly
the implication that society doesn't let you act in a free way which would let your
personal desires and fantasies decide what you do and so what you are; that people are
inside a topology which allows them certain choices, but where each allowed path is
heavily determined by the wishes of other people, by economics, biology, the weather,
and so forth. Yes, but isn't poetry normally the uncoded space where behaviour does

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become pure? where the way you walk becomes dance? Anxious about grammar, she
possibly has a fear of poetic technique; as if poetry belonged to someone else and not her.
Removing decisions into a non-decidable area, she has a clunky technique. Disagreeing
with the social order consisting of other people's awarenesses and composed by them, she
still presents experience as completely matter of fact; neither the critique of subjectivity,
exposing other possibilities furled up within the underdetermined cinema of attention,
deductions, fabulations, and inattention we live in, nor a liberating rational process of
extracting truth, by deduction, from a morass of lies broadcast by other people, feature in
her work; where everything is what it already seems to be. Because value seems to be
singly inherent in facts, there is no need to make it verbal:

Lying awake in a provincial town

I think about poets. They are mostly
men, or Irish (…)
and edit
most of the books and magazines.

Most poets, who are men, and get to

the bar first at poetry readings,
don't like us fey or even feminist(.)
('Stretch Marks')

The poem continues, bafflingly, to talk about how poets went to either Oxford or
Cambridge. Is this the argument, familiar from a hundred Bloodaxe book jackets, that
'everyone more intelligent than me is inauthentic'? or is the burden that people who have
time to think about technique, and other people to talk to, produce wonderful writing
which other people, taking a break from exhausting jobs, can have a good time studying
at evening class? We don't find out. The book is full of envy, and of respect for literature;
but does Bartlett consider that her own poems should be subjects of envy? am I supposed
to treat Two Women Dancing as literature, or as some kind of O-level project? is talent
inherently bad and unfair because unequal? suppose someone in Gateshead is desperately
jealous of Bartlett, living on the south coast and now famous, does that fact make Bartlett
bad and inauthentic?
The title poem records a saw, 'Q. What are two women dancing? A. Bread and
bread.' and bestows on us a rather thoroughly predictable ditty about what a good thing
bread is, thankyou. (Q. What is tautology? A. Hitting a nail with the reader's head once
too often.) Her technique seems to have loosened up in recent years, tolerating ambiguity
and so becoming suggestive for the first time:

Upside-down kitchen table,

relegated fur coat and red river
met on Friday mornings.
They are like three sisters,
deploying agoraphobia, depression
and epilepsy on cardboard discs
for his eyes alone.

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 ('Working the Oracle')

11. MYTHS OF RESTITUTION: BETWEEN JUNG AND OBJECT RELATIONS:

Barnett, Langley, Haslam, Vaughan

The Jungian ideas first, I think, entered the British poetic world with Christopher
Caudwell; his Illusion and Reality(1936) is as much Jungian as Marxist; their big boom at
the end of the Sixties does not mean that they ever disappeared. (There was an even
earlier book, in 1934, by Maud Bodkin.) These ideas have influenced Edwin Muir,
Kathleen Raine, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Penelope Shuttle, David Black, Michael
Haslam, Maggie O'Sullivan, Tom Lowenstein, Norman Jope, and Elisabeth Bletsoe,
amongst others. My guess (after reading Henry Treece's magazine of the 1940s,
Transformation) is that Jung represents the natural ideology of British poets steeped in
poetry, and that these ideas creep back everywhere that the university English faculties
fall silent for a moment. Emotional projection onto natural objects is something which all
university-based groups reject, whether they are from the New Criticism or formalist and
neo-marxists, which may point to common principles. Maurice Denis said in 1890 that a
picture was, before it was anything else, a surface covered with colours arranged in a
certain order; it may be that the primary level of poetry is a set of cellular acts of
imitation, integration, repair, and growth, with logical processing occurring on a kind of
periphery. Autonomous affect in poetry would then be the equivalent of abstraction in
painting: a level which exists in all patterned surfaces.
In the work of David Barnett (1932-; Bent in Water, ?; Fretwork, n.d., 1992?; All
the Year Round, 1994) we find attachment and affection as the central topics, as well as
the central goods. His expression of their value is influenced by Jung, so that the process
of feeling is also the process of healing, and the experience of poetic truth is also a
process of right living. Titles in Fretwork include 'Dead-Nettles' 'The Three Fates' 'Tide-
race' 'Curse'. There is no jacket text, but the dedication is 'To the memory of
wildernesses'.
Barnett's poetry is pious in a personal cult – rural, benign, eccentric, visionary,
without dogma. Its central doctrine addresses damage and healing of parts of the self,
symbolised by living things that go through cycles of growth and decay; contemplating
them externalises the profound processes of the soul, allows us to look at the anxiety and
so rise above it, and reassures us by showing life to be self-renewing and eternal. Eliade
tells us that the men of the Palaeolithic era saw time as a bear, an animal which grows fat,
goes to sleep in the winter, grows thin and lean as it sleeps, and then rises again. It was
associated with the moon, which waxes and wanes, and with the Pole Star, which

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governed the year. Barnett, who has recorded that he sees time as cyclic rather than
linear, likes to write about bears.
The motives for composing and writing down poetry frequently have to do with a
frantic feeling about transience, a lack of belief that the mind is going to be around from
minute to minute. Poets dig all ten fingernails into the experience because they are afraid
of it disappearing. Barnett's reflection on transience, and his response in massive acts of
appeasement (of the Goddess "who continues to be the inspiration for all the poetry I
write") have evidently made him very calm about this issue; his work moves very fast, in
a swift wind of di- and monosyllables which is his special rhythmic virtuosity, because he
is relaxed about time. Everything will disappear, but everything will come back. The
aesthetic attitude starts only once one has accepted this.
The cover assertion (All the Year Round) that "'Now living in an isolated
farmhouse on the moors", he says 'I have plenty of time to dream, circle-dance and to
connect with the land(.)'" brings to mind the word hippy. He ran "a community
wholefood shop in Carmarthen for sixteen years." Chris Ozzard told me David Barnett
was born in 1932 – dropped out in 1967 to work for Aardwork foods – started a new life
as a hippy. Culturally a product of the Sixties, Barnett began publishing poetry in the late
eighties; one pamphlet came out through Chris Bendon's Spectrum imprint. The
westward drift of hippy and other dissident anti-materialist factions is notorious and
apparently unstoppable. The eminence of hippies (and the counter-culture in general) in
modern poetry is due partly to the soundness of the idea-set, partly to the sustenance it
gives to a soul writing poetry which nobody much wants to buy: somebody with a
success ideology would have given up and gone into advertising long since. Giving up
the struggle for status by attaining impersonality may be linked to decentralisation; the
renunciation of social power allows one to concentrate on the very small scale, aiming at
transformation by better eating, for example, or by improving the fabric of verse. It could
also fit in with the Anglican divine who studies at a great centre of learning and then goes
to a remote parish; the works of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan are simply two
versions of this among many. Reading about Edward Calvert reminded me of Barnett.
The repeating images of All the Year Round are the growth cycles of animals and
the seasonal cycle of the year, represented through the ceremonies of the Celtic ritual
round; funding a rich repertoire of seasonal time cycles, acquisition and increase, stability
spread over a cycle of successive phases, the surrender of identity to change, the diverse
living species of an idealised North European landscape.

When they put on their masks

of lion and hawk, the dance
draws them down into
their kivas where they mix
with those who in the coded
otherness of their moods,

crop their place, chyle it,

yet mark the gong for flight
or a drum-roll from winter
quarters. The dancers mime

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 the route-march of ants, a moon-
doe's strokes, glut

of herb and fur and praise.

They pull the lettuces,
of course, angle, poach.
But that's to rack her. So
they're sparing. In a beck
trout flounce. A forest

whickers. A sky budges.

Hornets bluster. It's
a cow earth these mummers
graze in their steps
upon her droppings, the trills
she ribbons across the gardens

of their fancy, gritty

with orc and a griffin's
prints, and goosy with frost.
Underfoot she fetches
combs of roe from
the waters in her breasts,

for, beside gannet

and weevil, the chimes
from her women move
her, scuff her stone
shins in the cwms
she dykes, tills, grooms.

('The dancers move her with their mime', from Memes 9)

However much one dislikes this at the outset, the movement of the verse is so neat and
unpredictable that one ends up being charmed. The "her" is presumably some earth
goddess, and the plan of miming something to her (hence the masks) hints that the poetry
may be a form of piety, bringing reconciliation and propitiating possibly malevolent
forces. The Mummers' Play is a seasonal drama, drawing such exotic things into the
English scene; Barnett simultaneously naturalises himself, as a rustic eccentric pondering
beauty, and projects himself into exotic scenes, as a shadowy initiate at the kiva. The
goddess is the land, so that the combs of roe (fish eggs) literally come from inside her.
Tearing things out of her hurts her: that's to rack her. She dykes the valleys (cwms) to
protect them, tills them, grooms them as if they were favoured animals, or part of her
own green and grey body. The figures who do the ant-dance are evidently shamans; kiva
is the 'sweat lodge' of certain Indians in the south-west USA, used for rituals. The shaman
has a map of the cosmos on his drum, to guide him during magical flights. The gong

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implies metallurgy, and sounds more like southeast Asia; Barnett's first book, many years
ago, was about a journey in Siam. The figures in this underworld (halfway between the
sunlit world and the depths of the earth) are evidently dead, but I suppose also control the
fertility of the land of which they are the tutelar spirits: they crop and chyle it, where
chyle (a digestive fluid) dramatically equates the life of the soil with the inner processes
of the human body. Inner and outer follow each other, the one standing for the other.
Barnett's projection of the line of the poem, of us in fact, into other bodies, of the gannet
and weevil, breaks the stale identity of everyday, to enact a mystery which we are well
capable of following.
A sequence of three poems from Fretwork deals with the shaman. The first one,
'Changeling', deals with crisis and initiation:

When he's harried out from

his own thorp a lad has
to snout up grubs. Fits trim
him to a changeling who will
tap for the bell eyes
of a guild that can unpick

the runes from storms. Without jeers

at a club-foot or a hare-lip
men bare him against the fire
they stoked to cauterize his soul
before they peel off to leave him
in the stoup of a hovel

where a wind's a musk-ox

and sleet slaps. From here he won't
hobble over to the flux
of gruel or rear his haunches for
leap-frog, hop-scotch, five-stones.
On an ermine flock, gorged

by the tics from his dreams,

he must stay until his makers
daub him with their nubs of grease
and clay so he may meddle
where it's his claim alone to unlace
ribs and pluck the pox of death.

The future priest is a misfit, driven out to experience hunger which makes him
hallucinate and so opens the way to spiritual power. This ordeal of isolation, recorded in
all the books on the subject, reminds us that the solitude I have posited for modern poetry
has very ancient roots. Purged, he waits for the other shamans to initiate him, through a
ceremony of mock death and rebirth. He lies on a coverlet of fur. Once graduate in this
craft, he has the power to do spirit surgery, going inside people's bodies to destroy their

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illnesses (the "pox of death") and make them whole. Then, in 'Novice', another initiation
gives him new eyes and ears. He ascends the sky on a birch ladder. Another ordeal
prepares him to be the master, one who flies with the cranes. In 'Healer', he treats sick
livers, wears a caftan sewn with snakes; rescues a woman from the shades; goes into a
trance so he can raise a dead man to "a dance to his bones' castanets".
These miraculous transformations take place in a miniature world in which
resolution can be attained, not the vast real world with its historic frustrations. Abstract
knowledge takes the form of symbolic miniature worlds. The interest then is what
scenarios we stage in these symbolic arenas, and whether their final colour is
benevolence and integration.
When you find a poet who has resolved everything into a fully plastic form and
has an aesthetic vision of how things happen in the world both natural and social, it is a
puzzle why other poets bother with their failed methods. I have a deep dislike for Jung
(dating from 1976 or so when I actually found his books), but he has provided a
stabilising medium in which the most fragile and precious and most personal visions of
poets are protected from interference until they can be written down. Barnett's work has a
rapid surface which opens onto an endless richness.

R.F. Langley (1937-) comes from Wolverhampton, did English at Cambridge in the
1950s, at the same time as Prynne, and went on to become an English teacher in
Wolverhampton. His friendship with Prynne is presumably the social link by which he
came to publish poems in Equofinality, in 1984. He began publishing in 1978: Hem, a
pamphlet from infernal methods, run by his former pupil, the poet Nigel Wheale. His
output is mostly in the book Twelve Poems, published in 1994. A pamphlet, Jack,
followed from Equipage. These are enigmatic but compelling works:

Silver moon; thatch; owl on the gable

and twelve silver instruments on the desk
for surgery. Silver moon on the desk.
Twelve silver instruments constellate
behind clouds. Ready for the straw
bird in the house of feathers. Mild
fingers set twelve silver straws on
the shining wood. There is a soft
interjection, stroboscopic starlight
and the powers realign. In another
box there are two gold rings.

(...)
White hedonism cut on blue
intelligence and laced
with silver anxiety. Bravo.
It braces milady's cortical
layer to take what could
have been trauma but now snugs
a bee in a comfort. While ants

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 silkily fidget and moderate
men press on, juddering,
grinning, being temperate
because of the price of beer.

(from 'The Ecstasy Inventories')

He likes to choose an ambiguous subject which remains outside exact definition while he
is describing numerous features belonging to it; 'Man Jack', as he explained at a reading I
attended, is about a man, or imp, reflected in a train window, who runs alongside a train
at exactly the speed of the train, along banks, over bridges, along rivers, etc. Langley's
interest in neurological agents, the separate persons that act, sometimes, within the brain,
was developed in Jack; he is more persuaded by these separate selves than by
kleinianism, I suspect. The poem remains poised between mystery and literal accuracy;
but any detail we look at is clear and fluent. However careful the explanations, he seems
to have little faith in the truth of things finally emerging; the senses are confused, and
when understanding is reached it is with a delay, so that the understood is clear but no
longer the case. 'Arbor Low' describes a Neolithic stone circle on a hill in Derbyshire
without any mention of prehistory, entirely in terms of the birds around it. 'Saxon
Landings' is apparently an account of the state-founding invasions in terms of the
hammered reliefs of Classical gods on silver vessels found in treasures deposited (and
never recovered) by rich fleeing Romano-Britons:

Once they believed it but since it

is diction, the pipes in the wood
or limber vine and the bland
country where Bacchus and Pan
defeat Hercules.

The poem is an engagement with the mystery of English culture: the absorption by a
periphery of central cultural goods, in this case Graeco-Latin ones. The treasure was
deposited in the 5th century by rich members of a society which was disintegrating and
being overrun; but fifteen centuries later, when the treasure is dug up, we can "read" all
the themes, because we were brought up on the same Graeco-Latin stories and laws of
representation.
Several of the poems are incomprehensible without contextual information,
helpfully published in an interview (in Angel Exhaust Thirteen and Fourteen). We learn
from the interview that he is much attached to Adrian Stokes as an art critic; I would
hazard that his poetry is inspired by the description of containment, where two forces
balance out and leave something stable; and of suspension, where a subject in poetry is
floated and expends its energies within the poem, without breaking out and destroying the
grounds of discourse. This all seems to relate to a kleinian ideal of maturity, where
archaic drives are bound in a cycle of desire and appeasement, repeatedly lived out where
excess is tuned out and prevented from creating a build-up of frustration and aggression
which wipe out the gratification. Klein wrote of partial objects, which are the parts of the
outside world (originally, the feeding breast) internalised as the population of the mental

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world, turned into aggressive and hated things in the rage states caused, originally by
hunger, but also by the frustration of more developed appetites. They are partial because
they are mutilated by fantasized acts of aggression; and because they are unsatisfying, i.e.
incomplete. This corresponds, in modern terms, to a state where a man sees women either
as objects of gratification or as terrifying, conspiratorial, and misshapen; whereas calm
makes women emerge as autonomous beings, with complex characteristics which are
independent of a man's projections. Creating a work of art involves manipulating inner
objects and the parts of the outside world, together; the work is also an object in the
outside world, itself. In this system, portraying nude women is a great test of a male
painter; the hours or days of work offer the possibility of relapse into primitive states of
lust and terror; the calm of the finished work, with its promise of a stable and capacious
external space, is what calms us. Langley's poems are full of calm objects, in this sense.
Not only does emotional balance allow us to perceive other people in their intact
complexity, beauty, and directedness; it has this as its inevitable result, almost as a free
gift. Once they are revealed as lovable, it is possible to love them. This theory may also
explain what Sacheverell Sitwell was trying to do; his books are catalogues of calm
objects, in this sense. The attentiveness of the artist is more important than the shape of
the object being examined; and this attentiveness arises partly from calm, from the
absence of intrusive fantasies and projections. Art enters a different kind of time, floating
on rhythms of attention which are slowed, co-ordinated, and stabilised; it is directed at its
objects, but is at the same time autonomous from these. The movement of Langley's verse
rigorously draws us away from each individual sensation, offering us a model of
separation and transience which mimics the most painful experiences but robs them of
their power to hurt. Imagism was minimally capable of any such imitation of time, which
however is the medium in which everything else forms and is destroyed. Langley's resort
to elaborate sentence structures, pointing away from the fragmentary individual chunk of
meaning or rhythm, resembles Prynne and Crozier and shows how the English response
to Objectivism threw away the obvious characteristics of the model. Langley could I
think be compared to Terence Tiller in this development of a continued sentence structure
to hold extremes in a dialectical balance; Tiller's work of the 1940s could be considered
as the foundation of the Cambridge School. This high level movement could I think be an
explosion of the paradox, as a low-level structure, which would recall originally
Metaphysical or Mannerist roots. It differs considerably from the modernist style of
unmediated juxtaposition and stacking up of small self-contained units. The point of
mediation between two forces or vectors is like engineering, the world of measurement
and real quantities, where the figures are of course limits, and the real is seized, and
controlled only by acknowledging its limitedness and resistance. This seems appropriate
for a poet from the manufacturing town of Wolverhampton, although Langley was very
unhappy when I suggested this to him.

Michael Haslam (b.1947) published Four Poems with Equipage in 1994:

Indigo floats and flashes on the green

show spectral scales of snake-shadow
left in a slack the ebb had sunk below

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 and in the thunderflash, again Indigo

Four Poems is a unity, as the subtitle 'Something's Recrudescence Through To Its

Effulgence', implies. (Another subtitle runs 'Three of my chasms (songs) and the bridge
that sings'; and the Chasms are subtitled 'Simultaneous Poems'.) It is about a period of
gloom and despair induced by domestic discord, Baby's got some new rules, baby says
she's had it with me; about recovery; followed by elation and romantic love with another
woman (named):

Three springs I've breathed with something's recrudescence

through to its effulgence. Now I finish off this formal
immaterial event, just shuddering this side of the
acceptance of the fence of full hawthorn effulgence
and the scent, Mayblossom on my heart, the
woodland cloughs' and the adjoining fields' luxuriance.

I don't think Angel Exhaust has ever reviewed a love poem before. The bridge that sings
runs between life and death.
The first Chasm is called 'Sothfastness', which means sticking to the truth. The
speaker was saved from psychic ruin by a belief in love and poetry even when their
manifestations were ruinous. Fantasy cannot be durably consoling, so the different
elements appear in the poem because they coincided momentarily with each other and
with Mike Haslam. So

The Cuckoo-Thunder broke on Spring Bank Brink

and scattered urinaceous droppings of a sudden
coming green. The zephyr
caught into a meteoric shape
here culminates, brings these, and leaves
a spectral virid trail
of amber glass and greenish vitrine

must be a real woodpecker darting around after a real thunderstorm on Calderdale. This
preoccupation with truth doesn't match up with a psychedelic aesthetic, the intrication of
shimmering sensory patterns until reason fails and the reader slides into a
hypersuggestible state. If what you imagine is true, what does it represent? Nor am I
convinced about the merits of realism. When Leslie Gore sings 'He turned around/
Walked out the door/ Out of my life/ For ever more/ And I died inside', I don't suppose
she's talking about a real incident but it's still a great record. Further, the starting up of a
series of birds, representing the revival of the poet's Anima, i.e. the female side of his
personality which is also the faculty which is able to love women, puts us firmly in the
neverland of Jung, who was by no means a fan of realism. So the great fault of poems 2,
3 and 4 is that their ideas are plucked from a book; sothfastnesse is let down by credulity.
Also, the symbols of happiness are more arbitrary than those of misery in poem 1; still,
it's very agreeable to watch these light, fantastic, flickering, flakes, whirl past, intending
healing and happiness.

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 'Father, why is that green star hovering over that old Cabin out on the Moor?' 'Be
glad, my Child, for it means that Mr Haslam is about to write another Poem.' If
everything around composes with emotional events, this asks for cosmic coordination;
and it is this which reminds me of saints' lives. Effulgens must be one of the more
common adjectives in saints' lives, glitter as they do with celestial lighting effects. The
Western interest in individual experience is surely inherited from this genre of biography.
Haslam is fascinated by the machinery of previous eras of literature. I suppose that using
only recent devices would be a simplified, almost behaviourist, version of consciousness.
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Bunyan, but also Traherne and all the more mystical end of
Metaphysical lyric, dominate Four Poems.
A repeated word which I've failed to decode is spectre, spectral. Just possibly, this
may relate to arcane lore; if you flick through sheets of white paper and see a colour
spectrum, you know you're tripping. It would be curious to relate this use of pure colour
to Denise Riley's high colour tones. You polish something originally grey and matte until
its effulgence.
Like the pop records of 1967, Haslam believes in experience full of nowness and
naturalness and yet transcending. Someone with a very intense inner life cannot be
fashionable: internality as slow reaction time. What he records, though, is moments when
senses and imagination coincide:

On offer is an instance of
encompassing phenomena:
I play the prime, the native and exemplum
witness to the song of ringing spirit
endlessness again: Cloud Wonder!
Any eggborn infant's had its head in.
Scents! the welling out blue float, blue lilac flight,
the halcyonic something on the water brights
the heart and both the heart's adjacent
blood-lymphatic swellings wing and fan
upon the gasp of laughing.

A refusal to be in separate parts gives us simultaneity. Being divided also means being
incomplete in emotional relationships. Although it's overoptimistic to hold that a poet lost
in poetry is given wholeheartedly to his or her lovers. The opposite applies. Breaking
with romantic tradition, he also plays the fool: 'she does Quince, I may say,/ exquisitely
researched upon my local self'. Robust good sense breaks up any pose. Haslam has
claimed the Lancashire comedians Ken Platt and Al Read as his greatest influences. The
giddy goat encompasses. The book ends with 'to find refreshment in the wind and find/
the spring's again a tonic. Mine's an F(.)' where the F is the psycho-acoustic symbol for
laughter in the fourth poem, and so the 'tonic' of his tune, and of his spirits. This
description within the poem of the poem's form is typical; as is the pun (My Chasm=
Mike Haslam). His persona reminds me of Susan Howe's lines 'To the glass house by
water/ hurried elf/ and bedlam beggar/lonely hellward nursery tale manner'. (The glass
house is Merlin's Ty Gwydr, cf. amber glass and greenish vitrine.) Howe also refers to
Quince.

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 Another reason why he isn't interested in modern methods is the alienation which
underlies them. In a state of devastation and depression, the outside world is meaningless;
so outer and inner cannot be bound together. Haslam is only really interested in elation.
He's also interested in cynghanedd. An opposite of depressive inertness is
hyperassociation this dislodging of normal functional patterns might signify re-
integration. His phonetic keying, associations at subrational level, gradually builds up
multiple, flickering, simultaneous patterns of events. Compare this to zaum' and to a very
frequent practice of recent Russian poets, of phonetically based sequence. It is an
extension of rhyme. The transition from acoustics to semantics is made difficult, delayed,
by multiple competing shapes; in the momentary universe of discourse, connections
linger, as their irresolubility gives rise to hyperassociation. Refusing separation, all levels
of neurological control of speech are engaged but not released, to flood the mind in
indigo floats and flashes. (Compare Green to Grey by Out To Lunch, another Yorkshire
sage and foe of reason.) The transience of those sound complexes brings urgency and
lightness. Simultaneity also animates his syntactic design, using an endlessly branching
and running-on clause structure to bind elements together and keep them spinning in the
air. Echoing, too, are a number of semantic-acoustic themes repeated throughout the
book, as a basic compositional device. The delay-effect of these patterns that refuse to
resolve is like reverb, every new line as blurred and lagged as the sounds on a 1968 LP
produced by Dave Mason. How is this psychedelic interfusion compatible with
representationalism? what is the difference between a soothfast poem about a fantasy
state and a fanciful poem? MH knows, but then he's a dizzy daddy.

To venture a generalisation, there is no separate category of “naïve art” in poetry because

the elements that attract us in the naive have not been separated out and pushed out of
sophisticated poetry. This may apply both to Haslam and to Vittoria Vaughan (1970-),
who began publishing poems around 1992, and who published The Mummery Preserver
(61pp.) in 1996. It is steeped in Jungian ideas which may have come from anywhere in
the landscape: the New Age culture has made these units of design universally available.
They represent, of course, a popular stratum of taste, unacceptable to the poet to the
extent that they have accepted the university culture, sceptical and legitimate. The poems
seem to be adventures of the body image; unstably projected onto manifold forms of the
natural world, in an exchange of parts. This is perhaps a phase which precedes abstract
thought, and abstract thought may in fact be a specialisation of this faculty. My caution
about this tumult of expressivity, captivating as it undoubtedly is, has to do with the
isolation of the central figure: the poems are the product of fantasy and introspection, not
of a dialogic principle. The fascination with trees imports the fact, mythic as well as
biological, that trees don't have a social life. This situation is brought out in the first poem
in the book, the eponymous one; where we find out that a mummery preserver is a kind
of mummy (picked up in the picture of a mummy on the jacket). Mummery, an old
English word, is dressing up, for example among mummers (old word for actors), or
mummed up (snugly, against the winter). The key theme may be this:

from earliest memory the brains were removed,

with the all internal organs, leaving remains

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 unthinkably emotional, and ice cold to touch;
pickled instead with aerosol spice, aspic scents […]
This bizarre crossover is on a good footing; mummies are mummed in rather tight
windings ('long linen swathes', the poet says), and these preserve them against the virtual
"cold" of death. The mummy, unresolved in ambiguities like a good dream image, is also
a dustless home, a woman's body growing older (looking like your mummy, in the other
sense), the perfect body which is preserved in some internal imagery, and the other
perfect body which make-up and adornment realise. The linen bands have something
important to do with the poet's mother and grandmother. The daughter is perhaps a
precious internalised image (certainly internalised, certainly "the image of you") of the
mother. The mummery is a disguise, an ornamental face and bearing inside which the real
self sits.

Pulling at this imagery tangles me in dozens of yards of linen all covered in hieroglyphs.
It has a certain affinity to Tsvetayeva's "Poloterskaya", which must be the greatest poem
ever written about housework; (the name is the form used for names of dances, like the
polonaise, and so means "Floor Polisher's Dance", and indeed there is a lot about floor
polishing being a gliding motion like dancing); it contains the words for "grandmother"
and "mummer", although the latter only in disguised form (mummers, in the disorderly
days around Christmas, are ryazhonnye, and the poem has only the compound form
naryadit'sya, which means to dress up in finery, from Lamanova's, possibly a couturier in
pre-war Saint Petersburg). The poem is full of the kind of dream doubling and coupling
of words which makes mummy into mummery: Kolotery-molotery, /Polotyery-
polodyeri,/ Kumashniy stan,/ Bakhromchatiy shtan. This quatrain is pure dream, but we
could say something like:
Ripple-skimmers-moth-skinners/ Flashwipers-floorwhippers/ Red cotton flock/ frilled
trousers.

I am not quite sure about the frills, but perhaps we could say Red cotton-rag strips /
Gleam stripes–flounced bottom. The woman trapped in housework is fulfilling a role –
this reflects social pressure rather than just being self-isolated. You could say about
feminist poetry (of the time) that it described liberated individuals rather than a liberated
society. This isn’t an artistic criticism – and an unwritten rule of poetry seemed to be that
it was dedicated to one individual. This must have expressed market wishes. The tree
poems go on for about 400 lines; for example

to start at the tip,

the cypress is the final tree
of life, the pre-elysium
maze circular an unending
corpses can't escape, its dark forest
of velvet-lined incubation chambers the wheal without a common thread.

the cypress is an evergreen robot factory,

its resurrection wires clung to by the dead
as if they were bole of last breath

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 holding procreation, as if pinnacles
of a golden, visionary gate.

the cypress is a monumental deception,

its stricta columns of historical stereotype
avenue continents, a swathing proliferation
of axe wielders, a maniac of barbarians
that carry brandons rising from the flames.
for the cypress is a burnished forum,
is a black market, is an unofficial rule of law.

The hypothesis we enter, entering the poem, is an anatomy; and is a temporary self.
(Wheal, a Cornish word, is a mine-shaft; brandon is a burning brand from a fire.) The use
of an external symbol gives a voice to parts of the self which are usually dumb; the
temporary occupation of this astonishing verbal toy can say something about more
permanent seizures, and the pure plasticity which lies behind all the captured objects. The
shape of an anatomy, imaginatively wrapped round as a mummery, is not serial like a
poem, and it is the sequencing of sense which causes problems; these poems would rather
be overall than have a line structure. The recitation of analogies and attributes can
resemble the more baffling passages of Aboriginal myth, or of the Old Testament, where
the mass of esoteric theological-taxonomic detail defies us.
I am really not sure about the thematic links between ‘Mummery’ and two poems
about wasps and bees. The wasp poem has a passage about poison:

whilst toad and snake, the blood of sows and lizard’s leg,
Dragon scales, resmethrin, hemlock, tetramethrin and tetrachoroethylene

Bubbled in cauldrons, our accomplice pumped cocaine

Through his vein

while the poet describes the mummification of her mother and herself as:

pumping anionic surfactants through a heart

instead of blood; hypochlorite fixed, should want to incubate all

that crumbles and fades with intravenous fears and

drugged-up detergents as if years and tables had been turned;

Also, the fabric of the wasps’ nest is described as “(seeing them) swaddled in mortuary
bands”, like the wrappings of the mummy. A wasps’ nest looks like paper, and the
mummy is wrapped in linen bands – sometimes with “painted inscriptions from the
magic books” painted on them. The poems aren’t completely separate from each other–
there is an underlying symbolic structure which gets more and more complex as the book
moves on. Obviously it is too interior to be made explicit. ‘The woman of Kitezh’ is

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subtitled ‘the poetry of Anna Akhmatova’. Kitezh is a town in a Russian folk-tale which
was submerged under the waters of Lake Svetloyar and which had many churches whose
bells tolled underwater. (The origin may be in a holy text from a dissident religious
group.) In one version, the town vanished just as the Mongol army of Batu was about to
take it – it is a symbol of Old Russia, saved from corruption by withdrawal from the real
world. The poem was originally published in Angel Exhaust and it was then titled ‘The
clocks of Kitezh”. The text fits the subject of clocks much better; a ‘fusee’ (“fusee’s final
jolting breath”) is a conical, sometimes spiral escapement, in a clock – hardly matching
part of a female poet. The shift from bell to clock is tacit. The clock follows time-based
processes and these are also typical of organisms and of women, also. There is a
fascinating passage on tiny quantities:

everything rests a second

spell whispers, then all ticks again,

...flea’s incisors, wing of bat, chrysalis grains…,

chattering pinions are covertly silenced,
finally, anchor escapement disintegrates,
abracadabra: all disappears,

only a face is left; alabaster,

glass and paper – not my own
and yet eternally memorable
as each day;

Metabolism stops to leave a face behind. Another poem is about Atlantis, a parallel myth.
The poet, who thanks Norman (undoubtedly Norman Jope) at the front of the
book, is in some kind of a dioscuran pair, dictated by birth and mythological partiality,
with Elisabeth Bletsoe; the kind that continues throughout life. Both published books
with Odyssey. Bletsoe wrote a series about angels, Vaughan one about trees; both have
gone in for nature study in a hard and intense way; Bletsoe writes about organisms on the
beach at Whitby, Vaughan about similar on the beach at Brighton. Vaughan refers to a
'blossoming tholus' (‘all beneath the blossoming tholus/ golden, and gleaming,/ of the
catafalque in sweet repose’) and Bletsoe to a 'tholal web'.
The trees are a single self, and the Jungian attitude presupposes a healing
situation, where the individual is isolated, self-attentive, temporarily not functioning
except to work on themselves. This withdrawal inside the borders of the body is seen,
sometimes, as privatisation, and as part of the depoliticisation which followed the
political disillusion of the mid-1970s. What is most introspective and medically,
physiologically, oriented, is also popular culture, something saleable in the way that
political poetry just isn't. Poetry, though, is about intense attention, and this is always
likely to be self-attention, without any distortion of eternal rules. Politics, moreover, is
not just about facts and figures, but also about shared symbolism which is esoteric and
arbitrary.
The Jungians look at the poem as a dynamic process in which the relations of the
parts of the field to each other shift between the beginning of the poem and the end. The

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hurling of the poet into the poem involves a drive, a realisation of psychological goals
through the material being perceived, and through the verbal material of the poem. Poetry
which does not realise psychological goals, and does not transform the perceiver via the
process of perception, is not aesthetic, although it may be documentary. We can compare
the Jungian and the Christian teleologies as they appear in poetry; the Jungian one is
based on the isolated individual, isolated because they are sick: the healing process takes
place inside one organism (mind/body) and does not involve a transformation of social
relations. The Christian plan was originally a-social and apocalyptic, but the version
available in England, where the parish and the State church are so prominent, obliges the
pilgrim to look at social relations, and not just at their soul. Poetry without teleology may
either be the expression of liberty, or of having your soul in the deep-freeze. The "Object
Relations" school treats subjects through the objects of their actions, and deals first of all
with their objects of attachment, i.e. people, and does not stray far from these; but the line
of interest in toys (analysing children through their play behaviour) and in painting and
sculpture (Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes, Peter Fuller) has imported inert but symbolic
objects into the field of attention. In all of the poets discussed, the handling of words is a
sign of freedom from rage and frustration, the infantile negative affects, and this freedom
is a gage of the aesthetic; and we can describe what is perceived, in England, as aesthetic,
in terms of this freedom: shining through benignity, the possession of calm objects,
finesse, absence of haste, recognition of the reality of other people, calm memories as the
result of forgiveness, a sense of security distributed over space, the ability to transform
the negative, the sense of being inside something much larger which is also safe and
benign.

12

THE TALKING DEAD, AND CAKED-ON KISSPROOF INDIGO

A discussion of Steve Sneyd’s In Coils of Earthen Hold, Peter Riley’s Distant Points,
Aidan Dun’s Vale Royal, Elisabeth Bletsoe’s The Regardians, and Direction Tapes No.1,
and Kerry Sowerby’s The Resuscitators

It’s impossible for me to respect the big central eminences of British poetry, and a broad
popular discursive style doesn’t seem to be possible, without complete artistic collapse. I
don’t understand this; moreover, it may be that a healthy experimental scene is only

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possible if there is a vigorous mainstream scene to provide audiences, themes and a
psychological target. I’m not sure there are any central figures today.
The current wave of resentment against the mainstream of poetry, a splash from
the explosion of hatred against various Conservative governments and its business
partners, has led to a renewal of interest in provincial traditions. This is largely an
expression of fear and confusion about technical innovation, thinking about poetry, and
personal style. In the absence of a centre for speech colours in the way that three or four
cities are a centre for fashion in clothing, regional tradition becomes an imagined saviour,
and the artistic and intellectual weakness of regional leader-figures composes a poverty
more menacing than metropolitan indifference.
Steve Sneyd published a poem in Memes 6, ‘Cool as the Watered Past’,
discussing Central Asian irrigation techniques, of some concern to me since I also had a
poem in Memes 6 discussing Iranian irrigation techniques. I was struck by Sneyd’s poem.
I found out that he had, almost contemporaneously with John Ash, written about the
Greeks in India, and hoped that we had here someone of vast and exotic reading who was
making poetry wholly permeable to information. Sneyd states:

We live in an unstoppable shockwave of externally-imposed input, often approach

information overload from its endless impact, and have little conscious control as
to what matter is accepted into memory, at what level.
[Foreword]

He is wide-open but he hasn’t really remade his sources. In the acknowledgments at the
front of his In Coils of Earthen Hold he thanks 114 small press outlets (books and ‘zines),
revealing a maze world of the untraced and uninhibited which could conceal anything.
Alas, the book is simply destroyed by technical problems. It’s true that he absorbed the
new techniques of circa 1962, but also that he has all too greedily leaned on the sub-
literary prose genres: thriller, Gothic romance, science fiction, Dark Age fantasy,
miniaturising rather than rethinking them. His technical curiosity has never gone far
enough. A whole section is about castles, the ‘holds’ of the title; it recalls Chris
Torrance’s megaliths project. He also recalls Yorkshire poet Everard Flintoff, whose long
poem, ‘Sarmatians’, about the 5th century migration of the Alans to Alençon is quite
brilliant. He cites Ambler and Chandler as important influences; the hard-boiled style
makes for terseness, which all his poems have, but tends to push out sensibility and
formal invention. The information flow never snags, but the rhythmic movement is
clumsy and inert. The Indo-Greek poem,

petals fall slow a

striptease dancer the
sacred tree

beneath in
charmed circle exclusive
royal shade

Menander descent claimed of

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 Alexander off camp
follower King here

in Taxila eats
dust preflavoured by
courtiers with

coriander pretense of
humility

shows typical slapdash lineation and underdone syntax. His career reveals the bogging-
down quality of provincial scenes, the need to be surrounded by an intellectual
community.
The only poems I can really recommend are the water poem (not included),
perhaps ‘Over the Wall is Out’ and ‘The Evidence Cannot Be Denied’,

Father, father, I never thought you would come out

one day from your fine observation tower
looking over Samarquand, farseen across the green
oasis heart of great Mawarannahr, and say
before all your court, ‘The stars have told me
my son Abd el Latif is traitor, plots against me,
plans my death’.

which is about the murder by his son of the mediaeval astronomer Ulugh Beigh (about
whom I have also written a poem, but is there anything I haven’t written a poem about).
He includes a prose memoir which is moving and illuminating:

While a student, as well as absorbing ideas of Marxism from fellow-student Mike

Adams, I was a “fringe acolyte” of the Bristol group of British Beat poets centred
on the “guru-like” Ian Vine [...] as they vied for his attention in pubs like the Three
Tuns or all-night cafés round the Centre or up St Michael’s Hill.
[Foreword]

Is this referring to circa 1961, I wonder? A mile or so further West, and three years later,
John James was writing ‘6.00 PM’:

Oh, CALYPSO
CAFE ESPRESSO
Charlotte Street, Clifton
last of the old ‘50s bars
in this quarter—

with your decor of plaster masks

as detached as
the faces of your clientèle who

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 stare at them and
the red roughcast walls
sectioned by bamboo uprights.

(in Resuscitator, No.4, 1965)

Things might have been so different for Sneyd if he’d come across Tomlinson rather
than pub Beatniks.
The current volume proposes Books One and Two of Part One of Peter Riley
(b.1940)'s project Excavations, is based on hundreds of descriptions by one J.R.
Mortimer of Neolithic and Bronze Age graves in Yorkshire, and bears a generational
resemblance to Torrance and Sneyd. The form is bits of prose, each about a numbered
grave in Mortimer's catalogue. The question one has to ask is why he doesn't write
about the living. The answer is that the surviving mortal remains are irrefutable
evidence, whereas the living Neoliths would be figments; but since the array of the
bodies is symbolic, and since we can't read the language, thousands of years before
written record, which it speaks in, the meanings are wholly invented by him. The
poetry continually bursts out of this ossature:

Red in a white matrix the fire stars, lives rendered to a point and sealed in the blue
clay dome, to hover over the theatre of memory a finely ground and polished plate
of almost transparent flint in front of the face My feerfull dreme falling angels,
hands in front of faces swirling into darkness/ to where no earth and sky or any
mortal claim has any place nevyr forgete can I love’s horror’.
(No. 273)

Its odd combination of technical detail, moral concern, and ecstasy reminds me of
Prynne, although the prose form avoids verbal echoes. It lacks the metrical elegance and
the sense of overall argument that adorn The White Stones. The text in bold comes from
Tudor poetry, song-books and so on, which the author has pointed out are partly written
by him (“feigned quotations”).
The words in italics are quotations from J.R. Mortimer. According to Barry
Marsden, “John Robert Mortimer (1825-1911), of Fimber, achieved such local fame in
his own lifetime that agricultural workers of the East Riding referred to casually found
flint and stone implements as ‘Mortimers’. The last of the great barrow diggers was a
Driffield corn-chandler by trade.” Further, “For its time his Forty Years’ researches into
British and Saxon Burial mounds of East Yorkshire was a masterpiece of archaeological
method, exceeding Greenwell’s great compilation, British Barrows.” Riley, wishing to
depict hundreds of moments of physical states, didn't choose living people, whether
Neolithic or modern; I guess because any moment in a living life is transient and
contingent, a momentary physical pose as part of an animated sequence. The rapid
repetition of skeletons stuck in their funerary layouts reminds me of House music
endlessly instructing clubbers to repeat the same stylised gesture: jack your body jack
your body. The paradox of knowledge being frozen experience, when better recording
techniques showed experience to be in constant flux, information confounding static

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knowledge, led to poetry throwing inherited “knowledge” away and searching for a
camera with a faster shutter; dead subjects apparently allow fidelity and durability. The
grid structure, whereby the poem stops and starts with each grave, is a bit like bicycling
down a stair of stone steps. This gets easier in Book Two, which has a deal more fetch
and sweep to it. The systematic repetition of inhumed bodies does allow, like other grid
systems, for relations of symmetry and fine variation; each body is frozen but the
multiple exposures allow a kind of paradoxical cinema. The range of effects possible in
this lack of movement is unfamiliar and radically original. It is solemn and subjective,
like a living body realised in stone – or like stone moving.
The sleeve note gives away some authorial wishes: ‘the most remote, obdurate,
and recalcitrant documentation […] a series of prose-poems in which any singular voice
is constantly interrupted by itself in another guise, and a whole theatre of masks jostles
for position around the central condition of meditation’. But Peter, they can’t interrupt,
they’re dead! The envy of being interrupted is really an admission that other voices—
feminism or business logic, for example—give out different views of the poem than the
one which the poet inscribes. La poupée qui fait non. Yes, the first-person witness poem
is inherently vulnerable, yes it would be good to write about group relations (even if the
TV soap East Enders already does that), but I can’t see the element of dialectic here. It’s
an elegy, the fruit of solitude, though it evokes the social:

They spiral into the pit grammarless, shelf-browsing as they fall, noting the
marmelade, hurriedly accepting concession in printed cursive, accepting the most
costly gifts and proudly. Shades in Avernus, porridge in the pot, family therapy on
the state | what the nation means is the term of centrifugal love in knowable
distances, sea shores and mountain ridges, hope wrought across transport in the
occulted rhythm where the nation evades the state. Any stranger knows it
immediately by local small-scale patterning, concentric circles and rows of
triangles on the lintel a transcending grammar of world-body negociations.
(from ‘C62’)

I don’t know what this Episcopal homily means, but I find it distinctly soothing. It does
not seem plausible that a grammar, as a set of rules, could be transcending: transcending
means going beyond the rules, surely. Nor can you negotiate with the world, as a set of
objects and substances; they cannot make offers nor stick to agreements, those are things
only humans can do. There is no proposition, really, but the words are beautiful in
themselves. “Transcending” is a high-calorie word which is more beautiful when
unqualified and freestanding. There is possibly a link between the three bands of
material: the inhumations evoke solemnity, the Tudor songs are what might be sung at
solemn moments, and the 20th C philosophical or moral material is what might be uttered
in a sermon or eulogy. So we think of a funeral. The poems do not add meaning to each
other, just as the barrows are each self-contained. People on the poetry scene general
dislike generalisations with no supporting evidence. The moral concepts are presented as
tags, as if torn out of newspapers. They are like vitrines with verbal objects but no
sentences. The phrase “what the nation means is the term of centrifugal love in knowable
distances” takes us back to the shared language of The English Intelligencer in 1966-8,
which was the newsletter of a shared project to investigate “landscape, archaeology, and

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myth” in order to found a new poetry. The words do not make sense without a context –
what are we supposed to make of ‘centrifugal love’? why centrifugal? The discourse of
love may reflect a belief that the funerary arrangements express the domestic love and
concern to be a good person uttered by the (fake?) Tudor verse, but they may express
something else altogether. The parts of each poem, joined by montage only, do not allow
a human context to emerge which would connect the moral opinions with relationships or
knowledge of another person. That line whereby love is centrifugal and advances to a
term is stylistically overloaded, as the English Intelligencer school was preoccupied with
spatial concepts and also, to a lesser extent, with moral propositions and the history of the
affections and family relations. The attraction of archaeology was in the search for a time
before boundaries, where something was fluid and where it came to rest produced the
very structures of history. So advancing to a term means reaching a halting-point and also
the arrival of a boundary as the line on one side of which conditions are different from the
other side. I would not normally associate love with geography, or hope to see it drawn
on a map. Riley is here drawing abstract propositions into the affective realm – this
normally occurs in a different way, that is by poets like Raworth snipping up managerial
discourse and recontextualising it to make it ridiculous and malign while not being
logical. Peter in contrast seems to believe everything. The animating theory seems to be a
belief in ghosts, or what Iain Sinclair once said:

Those churches are generators, what is going on is active, it’s still there, the events
occurring and occurring and occurring in a kind of time cone. Again, this re-links
in with the Death Culture thing.
[from a bootleg tape]
and

I think that the dead are the great teachers. I think that all of these sites, could be,
possible to get into some sort of meditative wisdom exchange. The dead don’t just
stop. The energies can’t possibly just stop or decay at that point.
[from the tape]
It’s rather like the idea of The Stone Tape, by Nigel Kneale. The ghost story is only an
extension of the fateful English feudal concern with stones and bones and hatchments,
poets seduced by the oldest and rottenest objects in a landscape whose ownership
structure was efficiently frozen in the sixteenth century. The ghost is really the authority
behind inherited property. Surely Iain Sinclair has stitched up the market in the talking
dead:

The dead, frozen at their event horizon, strike, like vipers, through the ring of
frost, the same crimes not quite completed; leer from behind the protection of their
elders, the oak, the beech, the hornbeam, birch, maple, blackthorn & common
crab, bird cherry, goat willow & butcher’s broom. And postulated, in eternal
opposition, is the Head of Brass, the fate of the island, buried with Bran at the
White Mount, lost. The head manufactured by Friar Bacon, whose climax was the
sole imperative, ‘Time Is’— unable to reach beyond naked description. A man-
made industrial thing, metal worked, mined, purified, animated by female

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 secretions; back of the skull resonant to Europe’s cargo, interior fed with local
knowledge.
(from ‘Beneath Brass, Bone’, in Suicide Bridge)

Now there’s a dead one you could have a good old crack with. And surely the idea of love
enduring in stone effigy was perfected by Larkin in ‘An Arundel tomb’. Lifted out of
living flow, the poem can be a fetish, a static idealised pattern. The poems do not add
meaning to each other – a vortex is not a context. We don’t actually know what Neolithic
family structure was. Surely archaeology starts with the recognition of what we don’t
know and the ”suspension” of social rules which may simply be parts of the 20th C. In
the end, few patterns are timeless.
Laid-out bones exhibit fixed gestures, that “poisoned light” which translates
impulse into image, frozen moments from the dance of life, or at least the fleeting
intention-carrying kinetic geometries which living humans do go on and on forming up.
How can a dead person express an intent or state of mind? They neither act nor reflect,
and they do not signify. There is a remarkable reading by Grekov of a Sarmatian female
burial (6th C BC?) in the middle of a cemetery, where the centrality was interpreted as
authority: a clan queen in a steppe matriarchy: ‘in many groups of burial mounds, the
central place was occupied by the burials of women-warriors and priestesses’. Formal
interments are naturally related to poetry, because they reduce a life, a social role, to a
frozen symbolic statement. They may be more readable than settlement remains, because
they are designed to be read – symbolic rather than functional. They use a developed
pattern-language even if we can’t read it. In shared graves these gestures have especially
to do with human proximity: the ideogram of a family and of attachment:

The slow succession of minutiae. A little flame inside the silex. Listening to the
yellow crystals. Pitching time. The hollowness in which music extends, the
hunger, to be paid for. The slow draining of sexual regard. Momentary safety in
the focus of landscape details as colour grade. Hexagonal morsure on the spinal
canal. Everyone suddenly burst out singing.
(from '40')

So confusingly the theme turns out to be domestic loyalty, à la High Zero. The effects of
the montage are curiously powerful and may evoke the deep, informal, and unconscious
nature of family intimacy. Riley’s problem with pace and vigour are resolved in
Excavations. It is unlike his other work. Its wholesale abandonment of the sentence, of
propositions in favour of montage, makes it close to radical poets – such as Eric Mottram.
The swatches must leak significance into each other. It is hard to qualify or classify these
slews of cross-talk. Equally, there is no person whom we can suppose to be speaking
most of the words. The interment catalogue is taken directly from J.R. Mortimer, but the
actions described must be attributed to Neolithic subjects – the psychological content is
theirs. The lack of propositions makes the poetry close to textiles rather than articulated
thought, but textiles are often part of domestic scenes. This is a necessary work. The idea
that the symbolism of the interment substances and designs is so natural that you can
recover it just by reading a description of them in late 19th C prose is profoundly
implausible. What you recover is something else, a private theatre. I feel that there is only

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one idea even if there are a hundred and three poems. (Part Two of ‘Excavations’ offers
40 pages of similar poems about William Greenwell’s excavations.)
I also wrote a poem about resurrection techniques ('From a grave-mound
overlooking the Don, regalia scavenged from among the horse sacrifices. The grave
crown a star burial invoking rotation, made of pendants, signifying the starry sky, and
hoops, the bands on which the white fires slide round. heafodbeag: the ring signifying
eternity, divided into the numbers of kingship; the long hundred of northern climes. Fine
tinkles picking up every vibration in the darkness; an external head to find the path
northwards. Noble metals uneaten by worm or earth mammal. Poor technical aids to go
through hell and come out the other side.'), which isn't set in Yorkshire. Let's cite G
Mackay Brown's 'Kirkyard': 'Pennies for eyes, we seek/ Unbearable treasure/ Through a
wilderness of skulls.' Distant Points is fine writing hindered by a mortifying conceptual
design from flow and integration. The progress I hope for in further volumes is him
starting writing about living bodies that can move and react. Finally, a tomb without
comment:

Tragedy, industrial silence a vertical gash, burns thorough the night (while they
sleep) reared to northlands where under Betelgeuse he reigns, earth Captain in
Boreal riches ǀ dust-free, ecstasy of pure cold, sings his pain tout a par moy, affin
qu’on ne me voit: and his lost arm points “Behold this harmonious pair”casts his
book and sings anyone’s pain but his own. Then ends again, and falling signs, his
heart to soil, and failing sings. The song falls to enter, Like hollow murm’ring
wind, or silver Rain.
(tomb 254)

Mortimer's graves were all on the Yorkshire Wolds; also set on wolds, this time the bleak
depopulated separatist uplands of East Leicestershire, is Uppingham, home of Goldmark
Books, publishers of Aidan Dun. (That was a terrible link, you should be embarrassed –
Ed.) This 'mystical geography of King's Cross' has a history; we are told that Dun worked
on the poem from 1973 to 1981 (rewritten 1995), but I heard significant parts of it read
aloud, under the aegis of the Order of Druids, in 1981. My mental notes at the time were
'File under Sinclair' and 'This is no good.' I was taken to the event by a schoolfriend from
the Wolds who knew Dun and lived in a squat in Calthorpe Street, near where Dun still
lives; mention of a poet who had lived there for 20 years produced scepticism in the (now
legalised) squats behind Camden Town Hall, 'He must be a fake or we'd have heard of
him', dispelled by Chris Adamson, legendary King's Cross character (he also plays Mean
Machine in the Judge Dredd movie) who has met Dun several times over the years. It
may be relevant that King's Cross is one of the Bad Drug centres of the cosmos; also, that
Vale Royal was offered to an occult publisher, Rider. The book, mainly about Chatterton
(like sequences by Sinclair and MacSweeney of around 1972-3), with a proem about
Blake, involves literary biography, alchemy, and topography. The analysis situs project
animated, around 1974, not only Sinclair but also Allen Fisher and Gavin Selerie.
Consulting the infallible Görtschacher, we find him quoting Jeremy Hilton, from 1977: "'I
do think it is significant that the five books which in my view gave our poetry the most
important push through to an exciting presence around the 1974 period' — Hilton
mentioned Allen Fisher's Place: Book One, McCarthy's Ivan12man, Temple's The Ridge,

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Owen Davis' Voice, and Torrance's Acrospirical — 'however different they were, had all
very much a geographical energy-source.'" (Hilton's new magazine Fire is a bright light;
McCarthy is the same person as Ulli Freer; Hilton had edited a special issue of Joe
DiMaggio on spatial poems, in 1974.) Vale Royal is mainly about Thomas Chatterton and
involves literary biography, alchemy and topography. The proposition is not only that
certain events once took place in Vale Royal, but that the meanings were left behind when
all trace of buildings and spatial markings had disappeared:

Ghostly travellers move in shafts of light,

Hallucinated exactly on dead horizons.
We illuminate an existence of other centuries.

This is really a belief in ghosts—which takes us back to Riley’s burials. The doctrine that
events draw us in to repeat themselves is, largely, that the audience is drawn into the
star’s story; a soul with no fixed body, or, this is me being Sinclair doing Chatterton. The
literary brilliance of other mythological romances on the border of oral legend (Geoffrey
of Monmouth for Britain, Bellenden for Scotland, the early books of Geoffrey Keating
for Ireland), should give us pause. If he could catch the hallucinatory in words, we would
applaud. While I find that the Augustan amble of Dun’s eighteenth century (almost, I said
thirteenth century) manner, solemn, bright-eyed, decelerated, shows abiding respect for
his material, it doesn’t reach any high points. The religious tone demands a simple, bright
narrative style, while being so sure of its facts as to leave no room for play or suggestion.
The manner seems to accompany imaginary pictures, and a tantalising association was
finally identified as Rupert Bear stories; Rupert’s visit to the home of an injured Star has
left its mark on most English New Age poetry. The spirits of G. Wilson Knight and C.E.M
Doughty, too, seem to hover over this venture. Dun is certainly better than Jay Ramsay or
Chris Torrance, and after all this is only a first book.
With the continuing unpopularity of poetry, it may simply be engulfed by the
rising tide of occultism, which is so much bigger a part of the small press scene.
Believing in a poet seems to be more difficult than believing in Merlin being trapped in a
cave under York Way. Also into psychogeography is Elisabeth Bletsoe. Bletsoe is
someone who has Dark Age leanings—poems about Welsh hermit saints, alas, slavering
schizos from the benighted era, schmucks in goatskins etc.. Although resident in Cardiff,
she is English, as the Dorset accent on her tape Direction Tapes, No.1 reveals. Her first
book, The Regardians, was a series of narratives about angels, reminding me of Elena
Schwarz. Some of her poems are orthodox first-person narratives leaning on Redgrove
for confidence in translating emotional events into mythic and supernatural form. It’s
remarkable that Redgrove, who published his first book in 1959, had to wait until the
second half of the eighties before acquiring any disciples; we have to mention Norman
Jope and Andrew Jordan in the same breath. The “artist” in the title is Edvard Munch,
seen in his Symbolist and High Romantic aspect. Each poem in the book is based on a
Munch painting each of a female figure, and these have been related by Bletsoe, in an
embarrassing Preface, to female “archetypes”: ‘various female mood-states, life-
situations, and “rites of passage”’. Yes, reader, that ole debbil-debbil Jung has been up to
his capers; imposing a kind of psychic bureaucracy in which there are only a few mental
states, everyone is forced to share them, and they are static. Dear Elisabeth, there is no

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such thing as an archetype. One would have thought British poetry’s flirtation with Jung
in the 1940s was enough of a battering. The collocation does tend to expose Jung as a
fifth-rate Symboliste, a kind of smallholder-bureaucrat who imposed his vague and
smeary ideas by decades of peasant inflexibility. Bletsoe has taken on the mass-media
device of the icon, of which the star pin-up is a realisation, but only as a tool to more
basic practices of identificatory fantasy and re-enactment. Much of the book is given over
to pinups (‘She-ranter, provoker of hierarchies’)—the angels again, but female and much
less chaste than before. A swatch of Biblical Symboliste sex narratives and adaptations of
the Song of Solomon calls out for Cecil B. de Mille: ‘O seraph with sadist’s eyes, your
kiss a live coal against my mouth. […] High priestess, show me the riches of the secret
places’. Wear purple lipstick when you say that. These divas are static because anatomic,
their bodies are presented for the reader to project herself into. Instead of plot they have
accessories, aids to play just as Disco Barbie has a white handbag, white court shoes, and
a water bottle (I would hope):

Sin wrinkles on her long black gloves

as easily as she changes lovers, or
tames the heavy snakes of
copper-coloured hair
that glisten on her shoulders;
pale as leprosy
she saunters through her rooms and corridors
drying her henna-stained fingernails
and grinding out the egos of married men
like half-smoked cigarettes.

(‘Sin’)

In launching these fantasy models (not ‘archetypes’), Bletsoe is taking on a contemporary

staple. The poem only supplies the raw materials for reverie; the offered kits are luscious
and the feelings which the reader is expected to be airing, like trying on clothes, are
overripe, heavy, dripping. The atmosphere is of secret resentments and yearnings,
imagined public sexual statements. A poem called ‘Puberty’ helpfully gives the
physiological basis for these mysterious emanations of temperament. The languorous,
supersensitive, psychic side of Gothic is evoked, a rich subjective world uttering itself
through legends, spirits, children’s games, spells, church ornaments, hermits, glowering
beasts and ancient country places. When its own terms change and become unstable, the
poem becomes more interesting than these rather decisively occupied and internalised
symbols.
According to The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz, the film A Fool There Was
(1914), was based on a Kipling poem called ‘The Vampire’, which was written to
accompany a Burne-Jones painting; Bletsoe’s Vampire poem thus crosses the gap
between Munch and Burne-Jones. Almost all of Bletsoe’s contemporaries deflate their
poems with cheeky asides to say that they don’t really care; well, I don’t either; into the
mouse cage with their blitherings; but Bletsoe carries the whole thing off with pride. The
erotic poetry is a wide gesture of power on the scale of a City bank’s marble atrium; and

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only resistable by those churlish enough to be indifferent to Hedy Lamarr and Victor
Mature in Samson and Delilah.
One of the things Redgrove insists on is observation; we hear also:

A clot of mica, quartz, and calcite, whelk chips, arteries, alveoli of green-mauve
weeds. A mussel, hair glued to a half inch core of blackwrack. [...] Brown strapped
laminaria, fruiting bodies of fucous, volatile with oils, mineral traces, and
mucilage. My mouth tasting salt and Helena Rubinstein’s Rose indienne.

(‘Low Season, Whitby’, from Direction Tapes, No.1)

Precision in dealing with the outside world signals that precision in dealing with the
inside world is invited; the observable world is full of other people’s feelings, building
constructions as morphologically ornate as a beach full of biotica. Working out what the
object-choice of the unconscious is saying is the primary activity of reading poetry. If
making ornament is analogous to putting out flowers, as a biological message, the
claiming of outside objects acts to show the internal; attentiveness, lit by poetic language,
also shows us a rich world of transient objects, displacing aged and glowering ones; her
exquisite alertness to Nature is an opening to our subjective experience, as bodies moving
in the world, contra organised knowledge. We are being promised a sequence of unique
transient complex states, a formula, I believe, for all good poetry anywhere. The penalty
for excess observation of one’s own feelings is to become not just pedantic but
hypochondriac.
A recent development is a move away from the first person into topographical
documentary:

The intricate hills a lament configuration. Lips of the downs I balance on, the calx
escarpment; unlocking the puzzle below in reticulate fields, symbols to work by, a
vibratory blue. Bata’s valley. Greensand & clay. The clunch tower breeding
expanded atolls of white coral. Farms scratched up from chalk. A negative beauty
in the straightness of a Roman road that rules itself out; puritanism scored on
fields of wheat. Verges bleached to blinding. The scent of coumarin from trod
grass (sweet vernal, false oat and fog), fills my head with a mess of leys and
leptons, plasma currents and turf giants.

[…]

Evershott: ‘the place of wild boars’; Frome-source. Silvergleam bark of ash

lightning its shadow. St Osmund’s gargoyles swallowed by their own mouths;
green men vomit leaves behind their hands. The four Tetramorphs, visited by
elderflower succubi, give way to creeping necrosis. Swallows shuttle mandorlas of
sound, dreamnets diverting my prayers for a softening, a break in fixation. Waiting
defines me. Also a deliberate turning away before the goal is reached. Reinventing
myself. Flowering myself inside out. A hedge of floating calices; bride-wort &
wound-wort. Broccoli in my soup and from the open mouth of The Acorn flow
songs on the forbidden colours of love.

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(‘Cross-in-hand’)

The chosen static quality of place gives rise to a startlingly swift sequence of ideas. The
1960s ideal of all-around simultaneity tended to be realised in one of two event-loci: via
identification with a moving observer, or via the immersing multi-dimensionality of
Place. Both were critically influenced by photography. The move into prose is welcome,
because what reading The Regardians after the tape demonstrates is that her lineation is
absolutely terrible: the tape is far better, because you can hear the real rhythms. Place
resembles anatomy as a subject because of its static all-over quality, bound to raise
hindrances to the flow of sequential unique points which we call rhythm. Andrew
Jordan and Norman Jope are also writing mythic-documentary works on places; in an
issue of Terrible Work, Jordan writes:

Grubbed out, the long tail of the barrow

is coiled and folded like a snake.
Five chambers in the head, one for each
sense. We stand in the demon’s skull,
our own senses oppressed by the cold.
There are processions, the unelected
bringing their unbelievably dead
children to us for resurrection again.

(‘West Kennet’)

I doubt they are aware of the movement which Jeremy Hilton identified (although I think
Bletsoe was in a class taught by Torrance, in Cardiff); the association of topography with
legend is very frequent in British mediaeval texts, preparing the torrent of printed
topographical work which is unbroken since the 17th century. The 1974 wave was
political and this lot is occult and Jungian; Jung's maximum political engagement was
being hired by Goebbels to preside over an all-German Psychoanalytical Association
purged of Jewish members (see Ernest Jones' Life of Freud for some details of this). I
suppose politics starts from the moment where it turns out that millions of people, living
in one territory and so sharing public institutions, don't have the same beliefs; you then
either get into politics and argument, or into radical privacy, total innerness precluding
argument. But the noble and unforgettable radical politics of 1974 now seems to have
shared significant characteristics with a self-referential fantasy state.
Topography always means old things, because the records of the past were set
down by the powerful and privileged groups, and what they wanted setting down was
justificatory tales. Topography in England starts with writs and charters, i.e. records of
land grants, going back to 800 AD; these are ultra-local (field names), they also name
nobles and transfer control of unnamed peasants to work the land. I would prefer to print
poetry which mentioned no object older than ten years ago. The attempt to resurrect the
past of the ordinary people is occultism, because their words and ideas didn't get
recorded; I admire EP Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, but I don't take
it seriously as history. It's bricks without straw. Conversely, the radicalism of the

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oppressed took a mystic, religious form, for example in the Welsh prophecies, bruddion,
which deal with the overthrow of the English; and there is a radical moment inside these
New Age poets, despite the formal and political conservatism which religion usually
serves.
Bletsoe is probably the most gifted poet of her generation, and was absent from
Angel Exhaust’s expansive anthology only because I couldn’t get past the other editors
butting and gouging each other on her doorstep. Her style derives from popular art, which
is typical of that age group; however, this builds-in limits: and a horrible fate lurks in wait
for those who hang around ruined chapels writing poems about Dark Age hermits. The
logical development involves a move towards group behaviour, away from the individual
psyche; greater incorporation of the objective world of physics and numbers; and
possibly an assimilation of modernist techniques alongside the Symboliste ones. A
division of motion into brief minimal units, and the interest in moments of becoming,
could supply a way out of the static equivalences of allegory:

I force the necks of wounded gamebirds,

shock of come-apart cervicals, reflex
wingjumps, (feeling)
a pulse not my heart,
the once-complete potential in
soft declensions of egg-buds

(‘Cross-in-Hand’)

This shows an affinity to Maggie O’Sullivan.

Kerry Sowerby's poems in The Resuscitators offer promise, and a glimpse of the
future, rather than finished excellence. At the same time, it is technically fluent work, and
it’s rather hard to explain why I don’t like it very much. The information curve of each
poem shows a distinctive looseness; a lack of climax and cumulative cogency, a lack of
anticipation, even a lack of complexity relative to their length. The figure of the City is a
dossier worth collecting. Sowerby spares us the concrete details of Leeds. But the typical
urban footage shown here is the view of a flâneur wandering through somewhere, making
witty remarks but not caring very much:

It was like you were going to another world:

the Rue des Belges Connus, I walk/walk
fast through Place des Clochards Hards
the Boulevard des Suèdoises Alcooliques
the église de Saint Séverin at St Michel
the must & dinge of the old Hôtel Cervix
up stairs where you are finally found coiled
in the sperm-stale sheets of the Auberge de Soi
as snug as a cockroach in a pillow-case

['Paris-Mutuel']

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The Resuscitators is made up of rapid jumps implying low involvement. If you admit to
being light-headed, people lose interest in your political opinions. They think you’re just
dancing around. But the real misery of being unemployed is the anticipated monotony,
the business environment is violently unpredictable, and I think modern conditions call
for someone light on their feet and light in the head. Being insouciant and living in a
squat is just as good a way of finding experience as working in an office and being
serious.
The technique of starting each poem with a character who apparently has no past,
who is defined entirely by what happens next, which is exclusively present-tense shots, is
reminiscent of thousands of 1960s poems: in the style of the time, it reflects youth and
low affect: ‘The river you have so long awaited has moved / away under the bridge’. The
poem quoted above goes on to say:

Slippery sliding minds

grope in the unwashed dark for cigarettes;
he nails her she loves it he hates her he
sells her a carpet, drinks raki & cold cay,
photographs Nurse & how she moves
as naked and open as the wide salt sea / One
hundred Turkish Camel One Hundreds par jour
Ere! You a Christian, Orthodox, Catholic?
do you play basketball?

This insouciance is countered by melodramatic moments,

I want cameras on the Priam

Who found his eighth strong son
Was bastard, even as Achilles’ bastard
Son minced him into abortion.

(‘Troy Again’)

I am the cruel light in the eyes

of your lover as you kick on round
& spit I am the open mouth
where the gob lands these are
aspects of me

[…]

I am the serpent of girdle round your waist

you think will protect you as the knight kneels
& flexes his pectorals I am the shudder of come
in the bowels of the Green Knight’s balls

(‘Poem Round Me’)

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which leave a gap at the wavelength of sentiments which are both deep and durable. Significance
is a function of pattern, not merely of durability, through fixed character and inexorable artistic
rules of procedure.
Sowerby is not interested in lineation, not interested in verse movement, not interested in
the development of images, not interested in the weight and sound of lines, not interested in
symmetry and pointed variation. His verse is varied and fast moving. It’s well edited but not well
written. This is where pattern could be developed. I think this poetry will crystallise when
Sowerby commits himself to something. This will also mean a loss of kinetic potentiality.
He used to edit the magazine Ramraid Extraordinaire (later edited by Christopher Brooke
and Darren Angill). This always had a good editorial attitude, and by loud optimism managed to
become visible to an array of talent. Issue 4 is full of interesting poems, even if none of them are
good all the way through. This is a good place to look for a generation of poets emerging from E-
soaked rubble.
This is not a survey of the poetry scene, but an arbitrary window on things which I have
an interest in, often inspired by Memes magazine. I just look at what I see. Somewhere out there
I hope is the poet who combines data density with semantic openness, Leftism with Modernism,
Yorkshire roots with a feel for complex machinery, psychogeography with dress sense, hi-tech
with punk — the killer small press application.

Afterword. I don’t think the link between Redgrove and Bletsoe holds true, I guess I just had
Redgrove on my mind. Also, he influenced some poets already in the Seventies, Nicki
Jackowska for example. ‘Cross-in-hand’ was published in a book called Landscape from a
dream.

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 13

FELLFOOT GINSTONE BAZZILICA: BARRY MACSWEENEY,

THE BOOK OF DEMONS

The blurb on that back cover of Barry MacSweeney's The Book of Demons tells the
whole story of the book:

MacSweeney has been an alcoholic since he was 16. Two years ago his solitary
hard drinking almost killed him, and after a series of life-threatening fits and
convulsions which ended with him on a life-support machine, he underwent
rehabilitation through detoxification in several hospitals and in an addiction clinic.
He has now recovered. The Book of Demons records his fierce fight against
addiction, the demonic visions which arose.

MacSweeney’s poetry sweeps the floor with any other poetry around it. It is amazingly
colloquial, coherent, plenary, compelling, colourful, funny, dramatic, purged of
irrelevancies, high-flown, natural in tone, shifting and self-renewing. It pours unstoppable
as a river. It is mesmerising; everything else around it falls silent to catch what it has to
say. It creates a private set of myths without being introverted:

My great hero Kazimir Malevich, how the moon the other night
was just like your Suprematist plate in 1917, when
you quietly stormed the waiting world
with your railway sidings. I wear a cap in honour of you.
Now I have my CAFE CUBANO—Tueste Oscuro, and
today, with the rosemary flowers so azure
beneath the borage heavens, I,
like you, and Sergei and Vladimir, hate
all of my replicant oppressors, double-breasted
faces, Otis lift tunes all of the way to the boardroom if you fancy.
And, Kazimir, I think of your wonderful plate, wonderful
is not too great a word to use. Indeed, it is undervalued
these very salination days, these days of liver expansion.
And Sergei, and Vladimir, I think of your guns,
and what they can eventually do. I used myself to shoot one,
but never at myself, though I have always had reason.

Yes, bless, blessure, bliss and blood, worst and wine

are my saintly, thorny words. I am crowned by them!
Not wearing fur-fringed gloves upon her flinty fingers

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 which sometimes taxed my shifting planets, she
felt my collar, for I am a drunken criminal of overspent
love, and she threw me in the jail of my terrible life.
Always in the locker of my single-minded lit-stricken cuffs
reaching for the emerald glass cylinder
cork within apertures, and the demons rampant
in their crest cockiness hands down my throat.
Hysterical psychotic drain cleansers.

(from ‘Shreds of Mercy/ The Merest Shame’)

It is highly polished; themes replace each other with the effortless generosity of perfect
art. The narrator is visited by demons in a fit of alcohol poisoning; he goes in Legless
Lonnen, down Do-Lalley Drive, Kerbcrawl Boulevard, Cirrhosis Street and Wrecked
Head Road. Later, he is in various detox units and addiction clinics, drying out, relapsing;
feverishly narrating either his delusions or his philosophy of life:

All moons waned and keeled, peeled

of sanity and treasure of esteem,
lollbonce on black plastic rim,
bottle of Hennessy and a Football Pink,
‘s’ all I need, unbuckled pants ankle-dropped,
now that the greenwood
is stacked for fire, and me the inebriate sodden slave, tree
destroyed by a legion of governments
and the studied stupidity
of the lapsed intelligence of the people of England.

(from ‘Strap Down In Snowville’)

His poetic career started with a flourish as The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His
Mother, published in 1968 when he was 20, was a hit, selling several thousand copies. He
was a star, dropped immediately by his publishers for writing complex poetry that
couldn’t be marketed under the working class-pop culture rubric. He worked on the small
press scene for twenty years, and was very badly affected by the collapse of its political
hopes (and of most of its audience) during the 1970s. He dropped out of the scene around
1985. In 1993, his work was collected and canonised in one of the huge Paladin volumes,
and pulped by Rupert Murdoch nine days (or, according to other versions, three months)
later. He went through an astonishing range of styles in those twenty years. Inability to
write, and the literal pulping of his life’s work, must have contributed to the crisis of his
illness, and subsequent hospitalisation. Hellhound Memos (1993), a return to poetry, was
followed in 1995 by his masterpiece, Pearl.
In 1995, Barry was unemployed, and when sober could barely sleep at all; he
lived only to write poetry. He also spent many hours on the phone to friends, and I heard
most of the poems here for the first time over the telephone; so I do know what they’re
about, although I’m also probably too close to them. Composition was more or less
continuous from 1994 to mid 1997.

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 Autobiographical reference, delusional allegory, and personal mythology form a
dense web, which can be difficult, although the underlying emotional states are both clear
and extreme. I must admit I can’t understand most of his work of the 1970s, although the
100-page essay in Clive Bush’s recent Out of Dissent sheds much light on this avant-
garde phase. MacSweeney is sustained by the love of his girlfriend, and the poems of The
Book of Demons are uttered through her voice. The intact self he hopes to recover to is
filled out by a projective identification with Casimir Malevich, the Suprematist painter,
partly also with Sergey Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky, seen here as innocent poets of
an innocent communist Revolution. Malevich comes in through an exhibition of his work
in Amsterdam, which Barry visited with Prynne, his chief inspiration as a poet. Robert is
Robert Johnson, who asked to be buried down by the highway side, so that his old evil
spirit could take a bus and ride. Also on board is the spirit of Anne Sexton, another drunk-
poet whose confessional style is an important source for the Demons. The Pookah comes
from a James Stewart film called Harvey, a kind of demon there moving in the form of a
six-foot rabbit. He says ‘so damned Warwickshire clearly’ (p. 75) because his girlfriend
came from Leamington. The scattered fourteenth-century spellings, starre, etc., are there
as relics of Chatterton’s fake medievalism (Barry wrote a poem about Chatterton in the
1970s).
The books cover refers to ‘his heroic fight against alcoholism’, but his struggle to
get and remain drunk must have been much more expensive and time-consuming. In fact,
the struggle to clean up is not much discussed; there is no statement that you can control
your own destiny, that you can’t have everything you want, no confession of past sins, no
visible struggle to stay sober. As a book about alcoholism, it fails for these reasons. There
are a variety of authority and hate figures, who conveniently take the blame for the bad
things which happen, and of whom the Demons are the supreme examples: not demons, I
would suggest, bought the bottles, but Barry MacSweeney. Paranoia includes the splitting
off of parts of the personality as external and hostile forces, a failure to grasp the nature
of agency that is also a classic failure to accept responsibility. I have to table the
possibility that Barry’s whole view of politics and history, of the omnipotent evil of the
ruling class, etc., is just another symptom of this paranoid projection. Throughout the
book, we see hate figures who restrain heroes from their liberty; we do not hear any
admission that self-restraint is a good thing. This fits too well into a pattern of thought
claiming that, in the 1960s, politicians gave up on telling people to be good, and defined
consumption as the only collective good; a generation of artists became famous because
they were utterly susceptible to the mood of the times, they extolled pure consumption
and fell victim, en masse, to alcohol and drug abuse. I hope this pattern is wrong: but
there is a suspicion with Barry (more in Hellhound Memos than here) that the artist’s
limitless interest in himself is not only the source of the appeal of his work, if we fall for
it, but also the characterological basis for his substance abuse. Although The Book of
Demons is not a success in its treatment of alcoholism, it is a success as a self-
dramatisation and the triumphant playing out of a personal myth. His poetry is
emotionally credible even when it is not emotionally credible.
We have to ask who Barry’s replicant oppressors are. Since the visions of demons
were a product of alcohol poisoning, we have to ask whether he has given over control of
the poems to a biochemical pollution process; and in what sense we could possibly
believe what he shows us. Are the demons his own evil desires; or personifications of his

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physical pains; or social agents who withhold from him the means of happiness; or the
staff of various storehouses of care who withheld alcohol from him and gave him advice
which he was fiercely unwilling to take? How can he refer to the medical staff who
looked after him as the Stasi (p.52), or denigrate the Stasi while extolling the revolution
of October 1917 which created the blueprint for them, and which they upheld in being?
There are various attempts (pp. 37, 60, 76, 103) to link his plight to that of the
Jews in the Third Reich; he quotes the line ‘all poets are Jews’ (vse poety zhidy) from a
poem by Mandelshtam which became known by being quoted at the head of a poem by
Paul Celan. On reflection, I think that the Jewish themes are an attempt to say to the
(Jewish) children of his girlfriend that he is a good and understanding stepfather. So the
motive has nothing to do with art, but is practical and immediate; and admirable, since he
is right to think that becoming a stepfather at forty-eight is not a sinecure or an automatic
success. But no one ever persecuted Barry; this is just paranoia again. Being an alcoholic
is voluntary, being murdered by Hitler was not. The persecution of poets was a real thing
in Rumania and the Soviet Union, but is non-existent in Britain and North America.
The most controversial poems are the ones about his father, which are intended (I
think) to make a claim that Barry’s excess drinking was due to not being loved by his
father as a child, and to his consequent hatred of his father (lived out in a terrifying, if
monotonous, fantasy of going to Ireland and killing his father). Gary Oldman’s flawlessly
great film Nil By Mouth also shows an alcoholic character who talks, in a revealing scene,
about his father’s alcoholism and lack of love. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it; I
think Barry was bored and indoors somewhere where the course leaders wouldn’t declare
you “clear” unless you found some bad-family explanation for why you behaved
compulsively. Compulsive over-indulgence is compulsory in capitalist consumer society.
You don’t become an alcoholic because some incident when you were seven years old
(p.44) petrifies part of your brain, which reproduces a static pattern; you become an
alcoholic because you drink too much.
The strength of any poetry can be tested by what we see when we pull the camera
back to show what is around it but not shown in it. What we see is two women, his
mother and his girlfriend, being violently hurt on a daily basis by his abusive drinking
and multiple relapses. Consider this: woman, seventy, makes a hot dinner every day for
her son, aged forty-eight, an alcoholic. How does she feel about that? How do we feel
about that? Perhaps it is Barry oppressing other people, neglecting responsibilities
through machismo and greed, which we are watching, through the screen of a distorted
account, and not Barry being oppressed by anybody else. The pivotal moments of the
book are, therefore, those where Barry owns up to hurting other people through his fault;
directed by feminism and evangelical Protestantism. The critic Greil Marcus argued in his
book Mystery Train that the intensity of the blues came from the Calvinist religion which
informed the popular culture around it; the greatest blues records are not light-hearted
drinking songs, but full of eschatological angst, debauchery shot through with a real fear
of losing your eternal soul: I'm a poor drunken-hearted man, and sin was the cause of it
all. 'DARK was the night and COLD the ground', at p. 60, was the name of a wordless
East Texas Baptist chant, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson, a preacher. At its best,
MacSweeney's poetry touches this religious sense of damnation, but he fails to make the
realisation of Johnson's other famous number, 'Nobody's Fault But Mine'; recorded in
1976 by Led Zeppelin, in possibly their finest moment, a howling desolation where they

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seem to walk the line between life and death. Protestantism's attempts to appeal to the
uneducated are, murkily, at the root of Western popular culture, notably of advertising.
Barry has a wonderful ability to find poetry in tabloid language:

Ten years in the same team Going Nowhere Albion sponsored

not just match days Cellar 5, Victoria Wine, Threshers, Red

Wine Rovers, Plonk Park Disunited, The Old Dysfunctionals,

Soused Spartans, Inter Chianti's chanting demons' unflagging
fandom

(from ‘Sweeno, Sweeno’)

My research indicates that the collapse around 1973-4 of revolutionary hopes saw a
switch of attention from the large, disobedient space of national politics to the small,
perhaps controllable space of the body: jogging as an alternative to revolution. Barry's
retreat into alcoholism is a variant on this, which represents a permanent crisis for idealist
politics and for the poetic movement which was so thirled to that politics. The Soviet
Union dissolves, and you drink Cuban coffee. Alcoholism provides a non-stop series of
crises, where madness and death are at stake the whole time, within this minimal zone
that is the body. We have so many people who write wholly personal poetry although
their personalities are very boring. Of course, the Book of Demons is very close to the
confessional poetry which Al Alvarez pleaded for in a famous anthology of 1962, and
which never really took off in this country.
In Demons, there are numerous references, signalled by the phrase “greenwood
tree”, to a crude anti-Tory politics:

We did not burn enough magistrates’ houses. We executed

one king but did not drag out enough Tories, and hang them
from the greenwood tree.
These forever here in the snow-laden urinal are my hysterical
historical regrets. Swan Lud, get my poster, did you?
(from ‘Strap Down In Snowville’)

As a competitive man, I am attracted by the idea of turning politics into a single spectrum
of performance, where the more Left someone is, the more moral they are; as a subject
who is ruled, I would prefer not to be governed by someone this reckless and simple-
minded. In competition, both Gordon Brown and Kenneth Clarke solved real-world
problems, which this Leninism probably couldn’t. Politics is mainly verbal, and to do
with assent; but adapting politics so as to milk it for the most simplistic and self-
dramatising speeches possible may be narcissistic and unintelligent. There are analogies
between this politics without ambiguities and excessive drinking; both block out
criticism, nuance, or doubt and create a temporary sense of mutual love and emotional
solidarity. The success of political poems often depends on how complex, and therefore
how credible, their portrayal of the Right is. Strange how the Left always wins the
argument in poems and always loses it at the polling booth. The phrase with the tree
comes from fifteenth century Robin Hood ballads.

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 The Book of Demons is essentially a family drama, retracting even further to
become the history of a soul; the references to a larger political system are inadequately
thought out. There were alcoholics in 1795 and 1895 as well as in 1995; wanton greed
and the slapdash belief that the rules don’t apply to you are retarded, but ahistorical. The
argument for the complete overthrow of capitalism deserves to be made, but cannot be
won by default when only 2% of the population agree with it; and the staging of the
argument here is blustery. His girlfriend (in the book) is a communist, and her parents
were communists; I think the political bluster may be an attempt to assert solidarity with
her and hold the family together: Our passion, darling, is pure 1917. Not only Barry
wants to write about class and writes instead about the family. Barry was a union activist,
and used to cover Newcastle City Hall for his paper, and is not stupid about politics.
Moreover, he did write a great political poem—Black Torch; he has pulled almost
everything off at some point in his career.
He incorporates, not merely figures such as Malevich and Sexton, but also the
whole Soviet Union, the whole history of England, etc.; seizing and distorting are two
key acts. History is here fetishised as part of a relationship: because he and Jackie (his
girlfriend) are in love (or: when his love for himself revives), the world falls into line
with their shared fantasy, as all the people on a street in a Hollywood musical sing the
song which the lovers (and stars) sing. A poet must have the ability to do this; poetry
which transforms nothing, is completely sober, does not move us. But this transformation
of the real world is tense and fragile: the world has not actually changed. The belief in
Soviet communism (more exactly, the ability to suppress the evidence that the capitalist
ruling elite are not sheer evil) is part of being in love, which gives pleasure by bringing a
distorted, intoxicating and unsustainable, sense of the perfection of the self. The poet
sweeps up more and more elements of the world into the vision, which makes it more
robust but more fragile too; the bubble touches more sharp objects as it swells out.
MacSweeney’s poetry includes his whole life, it has a vast, immersing depth, it is as
complex as reality; but the penalty for building a world-game which is not little,
uninvolving, and artificial, is that it can be compared with reality and lose. When it
bursts, what he loses is everything, he becomes cold and empty. The demands which
Barry puts on the bubble must be related to the need to drink too much in order to block
out the flaws in the pattern; he has no faith in reality, which is for him a kind of psychic
annihilation. This intolerance for asymmetries in the pattern equips him, however, for
making huge and incredibly perfect verbal machines.
The analysis which draws on inherent pattern preferences in the present, inability
to compromise, a dialectic of “high” fantasy states and psychological collapses, and
excessive ability to block out dissonance, which in fact depicts character as a set of
aesthetic choices, is more convincing than the explanation through traumatic events of
thirty or even forty years ago. Meanwhile, Black Torch and The Book of Demons exist in
the outside world, and retain their substance even if Barry’s moods swing to and fro;
surely these stable exteriorised objects should give him enough gravity to become stable.

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 14

RHYMES WITH HAYWORTH: TOM RAWORTH

It’s hard to write about Raworth, and there is very little sensible written about him,
because his poetry is so resistant to analysis.

thus was served

sharp edge
under control
casting
formed film’s soul
what is perceived
of life among shapes
when memory
won’t link to sense
takes dry leaves
this machine
adds the human touch
hope glides over lazy
drive under brigham
glorious heavy crimea
illuminated
no ledge jah see

(‘West Wind’)

It offers very little grip to existing terms of description. Much poetry has a shell that
allows comparison and classification, and a core that is where the serious process of
reading goes on, but which is mysterious and resistant to description; Raworth’s poetry
has no shell. He is a pure poet, and one who aims to keep us alert by reducing the
predictable elements. There is no verbal account of the music of (say) Charlie Parker,

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only anecdote and enthusiasm. I don’t think a stylistic description is necessary, I think
rather that everyone should read this poetry. Many inaccurate and unenlightened
criticisms of Raworth have been printed, and I want to counterattack; reputation is, then,
a shell. I found the easiest approach was to look at A Serial Biography (1969), a relatively
explicit prose text, and look for verbal gestures that might appear in the poetry. A diary,
more directly about poetry, probably from around 1971, called Cancer, has been
published (only) in separate parts: as Logbook, as ‘Letters to Yaddo’ in the volume Visible
Shivers, and in the magazine Acts.
The earliest record of Raworth is as editor of a magazine called Outbursts, in
1961. He was printing the new thing rather than what was left over from the 1950s. He
records getting started on modern poetry by buying, in 1958, a copy of Evergreen Review,
because it had reviews of modern jazz in it. However, his first book, The Relation Ship,
came out in 1967. Some thirty books, or pamphlets, have followed; let’s note Tottering
State: Selected Poems 1963-87. In the volumes I sampled, about half the poems have
been reprinted in Tottering State. Of course, there have been other books since that
selection. There is a tendency away from poems about personal relations to poems about
problems of perception and interpretation:

And for ten years all I have done has been an adolescent’s game, like the bright
feathers some male birds grow during the mating season. I look at the poems, and
they make a museum of fragments of truth. And they smell of vanity, like the
hunter’s trophies on the wall […] I have never reached the true centre, where art is
pure politics.

(from Cancer)

Recently, he has also begun to make and exhibit collages, Dadaist in inspiration,
organised in series.
Raworth’s notes show him preoccupied with the relationship between past and
present, and especially with the displacement of a rhythm. This love of minute
discrepancy derives from the rhythmic feel of jazz, a set of anticipations constantly
revised by their actualisation. Here, time, experienced as attention and affect, is an
artificial set of lines where the rule of music and the local rules of the piece locate
expected beats. The drummer constantly slides from under the pattern. Raworth is
constantly displacing affect to force a re-orientation:

They were taking up the paving stones along the street. The skin is so thin; the
earth and trees so powerful. With one heave the houses could all come down. So
easy to wear a groove in the brain; the same relays click each time.

(from Serial Biography)

So the problem is boredom. Raworth’s poetry always has the virtue of unfamiliarity. If
you dial a new number, it may not exist and there may be no one at the other end; poetry
also picks its combinations from the world that exists and so can be shared by the reader.
But closure would cause the associative process to shut down, insulted:

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 My life takes place from minute to minute. It expands through the gaps that people
make. If there is something warm there I sense it. If there is a weakness in the wall
I must push through. [...] The networks of lies are as deceptive as acid. The
religion behind it all. [...] To force me to build a wall, to force me to make a
second, a third secret life. That plants the seed of destruction.

(from Serial Biography)

Raworth’s poems punch through these claustrophobic walls more or less at every line.
The idea of new and arbitrary combinations leads us to another school of art: Surrealism.
In fact, I believe this French influence to have been of overwhelming importance in his
development.
The most obvious device in Raworth is the juxtaposition: almost every line ends
with a jolt as we jump to the next line. It’s like watching a landscape from the window of
a moving bus. Nothing ever starts from zero, but the popularity of the jump cut in
literature began with the Surrealists around 1920, and when Raworth uses it as a
dominant device he invokes the whole history of Surrealism. You may use the same
scissors each time, but each juxtaposition has a unique effect. It’s curious that the same
basic method should go on working for so many decades when it’s been exploited by so
many different people. But after all, surprising links are competing with unsurprising
links, which are used thousands of times more often by any count. Certainly, everyone’s
moved on from the pure Surrealism, where there is no connection between elements and
they are juxtaposed just for the frisson; but, even though I believe that logic has returned,
I can’t explain the scenario of many of Raworth’s poems. There is a lack of carry-over
from one line to the next. It is unclear what the information is going to be used for, so
storing it is a puzzle: even though this is the basic activity of reading. Arguably, prose is
organised so that we know exactly what each piece of information is for, a logical
argument flows throughout, so that carry-over is maximised, but new information has
little autonomy. In this case, Raworth’s is the most poetic of poetry. Its shape cannot be
described more efficiently by anything except itself.
Surrealism had, in addition to its essential shock tactics, a number of habits that
form a kind of tradition among Surrealist poets. Because they are recognised by a
cultured audience, they do not need to be made explicit. One of these is the humiliation of
authority. In Jacques Prévert’s famous poem, ‘Tentative de description d’un dîner de têtes
a Paris-France’, about a banquet at the Presidential Palace (1931), French dignitaries of
the time are reduced to grotesques, puppets with the tongues of parrots. So, often the
incongruity of Surrealism is scathing satire, ridiculing the conventions of a society run by
idiots. This is one of the underpinnings of Raworth’s work.
Something popular in the late 1950s, when Raworth was starting as a writer, was
the Theatre of the Absurd; a version of Surrealism. The first absurdist play, Ionesco’s La
cantatrice chauve, started from the absurdity of everyday speech, which he found in a
manual for learning English from: the small change of daily domestic conversation here
takes on a frenetic, golem, life, as the happy family self-destructs. Mercilessly, the
dramatist exposes the gap between thought and language, between desire and behaviour.
Raworth’s poems are miniature absurdist dramas, a reduction of the machine of

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discrepancy, sarcasm, startling, ridicule to the span of a few lines. We could consider his
pessimism about language alongside Beckett and Pinter; he and Pinter are of comparable
stature. Of course Pinter writes dialogues, whereas we think of poets as writing
monologues; the distinction is misleading, the thread of the poet’s voice describes a
relationship, it describes a social volume, and the features of that thread have to be
extrapolated to relationships. If a poet writes without awareness of the other person’s
reactions, he is naive; if he writes critically about a relationship, as a novelist or
playwright would, everyone is very shocked and calls him a bad person.
In his A Serial Biography we see the idea of toughness, in head-on competitions.
The ability to make fierce verbal put-downs is valued. “Don was the most generous
person I ever met. He’d give anything away, down to his last cigarette. And the most
vicious fighter. It was from him I learned to always strike the first blow when the tension
mounts... and once that’s done, to never relax the pressure’. Perhaps we should see Tom
Raworth as an opponent, his works always graced by an unseen victim. The loser
supplies the words that he intercepts and recombines. The dandy uses the elements of
clothing he finds around him, but only with the motive of showing others up, of
excelling. He takes clothes or occasions from society and does not give them back.
There’s always the possibility that Raworth is mocking the reader’s lack of intelligence.
The conflicts arise because society is a comprehensive network of areas of authority,
bounded and supervised. A Serial Biography sees that authority as malevolent. The poem
is then a contest between the poet and authority figures. Some of his prosodic gestures are
also measures for winning an argument: insistence, curtness, lack of qualification, wit,
feigned indifference to the person being insulted. A great deal of his poetry can be heard
as sarcastic. He takes other people’s words and turns them inside out. Some books may
be made up entirely of sarcastic quotes from other people, with the poet vanishing inside
the text in the same way as a playwright does, not using any character as his own voice
within the play. What triumphs, is not eliminated: Raworth’s poetry is marked by a
personality and its mood swings; but also self-description is one of his artistic vetoes.
The image of the spy is important in A Serial Biography. The style reminds me of
Len Deighton and his hero, Harry Palmer. Palmer was an expert in technology, of
working-class origin, put down by gentleman bosses. Spies trade in information,
microfilm, glimpses amounting to proof; Raworth’s poetry is also made up of snatches of
information, integrated by deductive rules of wintry rigour. He could be transcribing
snapshots from a Minolta miniature camera. Russia and the USA could also be the
authority to be resisted. This interest in secrecy and stealth could also be a clue to why
he’s so hard to analyse. There is a scene in The IPCRESS File where Palmer meets his
boss, an old-fashioned military gentleman, at a military band concert; Palmer’s disgust
for that kind of music is lip-curling, and it’s tempting to imagine the official English
poets of the 1960s as gentleman bosses, well-dressed and obsolete, governing a garden-
world of the ridiculous. Raworth always goes for technique, for applied intelligence,
rather than appealing to shared literary traditions.
The spy throws away the intended and elaborated message of propaganda, and
seizes on the unconscious, self-betraying residue that the speaker has failed to conceal.
Raworth has invested energy in cutting rather than in building sentences and other large
structures. Stress is put on control. This impulse may have started from experiences that
are overwhelming; when art offers you the means of capturing and controlling the painful

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object. Detachment—literally, cutting—brings autonomy. Cutting experience up destroys
the theatre of ideologies; it is a filtering process that clarifies the mysterious environment.
The fragments of obsolete scenery drop to the ground. ‘I’m going on the vague
assumption that if I can completely and correctly describe myself, then that self will
wither and blow away. Unless when you have created your self you die’, as Raworth say
is Cancer. And in A Serial Biography he says:

It was easy to produce clever little exercises, puns, twisting of words, while it was
nearly impossible to capture any emotion or feeling. Then when I started I had all
those years of I I I ME ME to wash out. Like the rusty water from the tap at first
in a long-empty house.

Getting rid of I is odd when mass taste demands that the poet write about the Self and
nothing else. Dismantling this theatre of the self brought speed, alacrity and the ability to
react to new events.
In A Serial Biography the protagonist (or one of them) is shut in a sensory
deprivation chamber, perhaps as part of an experiment, perhaps as part of an exercise in
cognitive disorientation such as forms the centre of The IPCRESS File, IPCRESS being
an acronym for a specific kind of torture. But the boredom is also the working condition,
the state of having a job and knowing that it will go on forever, or for as long as you do.
The cut is a way of interrupting the monotony; losing the memory of it so that when it
comes back it isn’t so recognisable as monotony.
Perhaps Raworth’s cutting the text into strips of a few words is to disguise the
sociological markers that identify speakers, once they have spoken a few dozen words, as
belonging to a social formation. This shredding deprives the reader of a habitual reaction.
The poems are like a narrative film cut up so that the rules underlying behaviour cease to
be obvious, and become unnatural.
It is paradoxical that someone who has tried to eliminate the “I” factor from his
poetry should have produced work that is completely distinctive, unmistakable, untainted
by any outside influence. I would talk about stripping away the superficial layers of the
self to find deep identity. We could point to an analogy in speech patterns; Raworth’s
writing is not a London dialect, as his speech is—this was information he chose not to
broadcast with every syllable. Pronunciation is conventional, not aesthetic. But the
cadence of his poetry reflects the way his brain works, scanning durations, reaction
speed, and his distinctive cognitive patterns, in the way that a film editor’s style is
personal and distinctive, although they do not appear on screen. This speech pattern is
deeper and more revealing. Most poetry has no style at all, it is choked and retarded by
irrelevance; but poetry offers liberation only by inviting us to shed a sociological identity
for an aesthetic one. Any reflections on the inadequacy of unreflective writing can only
distract us from the perceptible qualities of Raworth’s poetry that make it so acute and so
elegant. Two elements are the fastidiousness that polishes and purges the constituent
phrases, rhythmically and semantically, until they are perfectly smooth and light; and the
athleticism that makes the line constantly skim forward, every line presenting new
information and none saying something confused or obscure. Only a technique of
microscopic precision could allow the montage method to be built up into works of large
scale, such as Writing and Ace.

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 Raworth doesn’t have much to do with the previous exponents of Surrealism in
England, for example Barker, Gascoyne, Roger Roughton or Hugh Sykes-Davies. There
is certainly a resemblance to other poets of the 1960s (Lee Harwood, Spike Hawkins,
etc., conveniently collected in section Ten of Lucie-Smith’s anthology), making short
montage/Surrealist poems. It’s hard to separate out his influence from this general
atmosphere, but names like Alan Halsey, Kelvin Corcoran, Adrian Clarke, come to mind.
But no one comes close to the purity of Raworth’s method. Asa Benveniste, however,
does genuinely resemble Raworth, and deserves to be considered in the same breath.
Art evolves in the absence of constraint, it is in the logic of hedonism to advance
and become more abstract and profound, even if we call hedonism selfish and sensuous;
simply by listening to rock and roll enough, you lose your ability to respond to it, and
move out to jazz, which is a more information-rich, less sentimental, environment. For
me, Raworth’s trajectory, in his career and within individual books or poems, is obvious
and like thousands of other people; it astounds me that people, such as reviewers, can’t
even guess what he’s up to, and find his work empty or random. Raworth’s mature style
is easy once you get over indignation and formal nostalgia and start listening for what’s
there. Insisting that every poem fit the same criteria is linked to believing that all people
everywhere are in the same psychological situation, with only a few items changing.
Raworth isn’t writing for mass circulation, but it distresses me that people whose own
taste is for poetry, and so for small circulation commodities, should be so normative and
inflexible when it comes to a new rhythm in poetry.

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 15

SOLAR IMPLIED HALO OF BURIAL ASH: ALLEN FISHER AND THE

SCHOOL OF LONDON

Let’s start with a short sample of texts.

talk barter sleeves

no mat wary
burst ka drip beyond next breast press
snowstorm a bald smudge
in a fish-fridge duration test
clouds of balloons pliss/prease
in a creak in a brush
daub’d ring of the handles
rain thro’ the corrugated plastic
shaking its tail-feathers
let there be afternoon
(Gilbert Adair, from ‘Jizz/Rim’)

Frost An Equivalent
Indicator Rhythm Syncs With Radio Beat
What Use Is It
Managed To Minimise
Burnt Rubber
Shot On Sauce
Bronze
Bulldog Head Caught
Between Slat Of Window
Blind
A Hanger On
Cat Jumping Wall Again
The Slam
The Slam The Slam
The Slime

(cris cheek, from ‘The Canning Town Chronicle’)

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Despite her contingency plans
To remain in complete agreement
With everything that is the case
A chance suspicion
Nothing more
Precipitates her into
The warm jacuzzi
Of discovery
The fact that she has fallen ill in character
The fact that she has fallen ill in character
Merely amplifies the deviancy
Of her hitherto accommodation

Paul Brown (from ‘Nude Descending’)

the last
resort means
and ends
glues to
the product
private margins
justify consensual
gem jouissance
predicted to
scale subordinate
metonyms chastely
claustral with
scarcity value
the limited
transacts personal
matters tautologous
grounded plot
formation attending
bereft
breast
testicles carcinogen
zeroed in
the dialectic
libidinal 4
wheel drive
(Adrian Clarke, from ‘Millennial Shades’)

then a spell casts entered

a training into human

by works and days human

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 has made a transmission

whole charge flows

for a chastity so fertile

seeds begin to break husk

to live again

petrified hosts in mobile

shows hold brittle roles

to fixed flesh under wealth

but the human leaves style

a skin fades its glitter

after coil has left

(Eric Mottram, from ‘Peace Project 18’)

moor an early warning system

as wit she felt her cheeks
were burning on
safe as soap
words from his automatic jaws
tongue charred dictating
old connections
survival spite
each source plugged
or extricated
(Ulli Freer, from ‘mention’)

Slips in caked pigeon shit. Streets of mercurial wheels, of amended signatures. First out
of the taxi in a can of Tennant’s, black high heels and the flashing knife, wrapping its
weight in genital protection. Short-circuited, her fingers phallic, she wears the room in
adversative change. He hosts the decay of his erection, episodic or epic. They hold a
dialogue of frozen armaments, communicative frames of men falling from ladders into
competence.
(Robert Sheppard, from ‘Sharp Talk and Amended Agreements’)

An early reaction might be that it’s not surprising if there wasn’t a huge and avid
audience for this kind of thing. There is no USP. Another reaction might be that the
fascination of finding out what’s going on might be a big part of the project of reading
them.
The notion of a School of London may be misleading, but is vital for the new
reader, struggling to make out what poets I am talking about, and how they differ from

158
the mainstream. Is this selection typical? what is typical? Do these texts resemble each
other? is there one theory behind them, or eight different ones? My problem in deciding
how to describe them is like the problem of description which lies at the heart of the
theory. I have to decide whether the subject being discussed has a strong boundary,
separating it from other matter outside it, and guiding us towards significant consistencies
within the realm it defines. The piece I am writing has inbuilt physical limits; I suggest
that the subject has no definite boundary, corresponding to this material or economic limit
of the piece being written "about" it. Instead, the subject does not close along a specific
self-joining line in conceptual space; and the prose description will not possess a
homology with its subject matter which we could call completeness. I ask next what
procedural rules I will then follow to find out whether any sentence I write belongs in the
piece, and when I have finished it; the answer is that I invent these rules as I go along,
and that the experience, for me and later for you, is structured by arbitrary and subjective
rules, fictions governed by a kind of opportunism of pleasure. Along with a million
possible failed descriptions, there are a million possible ways of setting up a symmetry
between an object or process and a verbal action. There is nothing inevitable about this
relationship. The artistic activity of this group is animated by the awareness of
arbitrariness in what they do, hoping for the rule-sets they are following to become
visible. Where rules are found, they ask which legislature set them in place.
This was supposed to be about the School of London, but I was exhausted after
writing about Allen Fisher. However much I was fascinated by the subject matter, it
offered complexities hard to reduce to words. There was an available narrative which I
regarded as propaganda and destructive of fine detail, but to replace it with a better
account demanded a clean sweep followed by a great effort of observation. So we
observe that there is a half-way decent anthology called Floating Capital (1991), and that
a close study of Fisher will be a good preparation for addressing the others. For Fisher, as
for Prynne, the size of a prose description adequate for their works is approximately
equal to the bulk of those works. Although I enjoy writing about Fisher, I do not relish the
task of closing off any such writing and suggesting that it is true, faithful, and complete.
If we are going to think about a School, poets like Ulli Freer, Adrian Clarke, Maggie
O’Sullivan, Bill Griffiths, Tim Fletcher, Robert Sheppard, cris cheek, Robert Hampson
and Eric Mottram, would be included in the thoughts. The poets collected in Floating
Capital would probably deny being a group, but that is partly because they consider that
nothing exists outside them–important evidence of a group identity. A lot of people move
through London, and even deciding who is ‘School of London’ and who is outside (on the
edge, rebelling, evolving away?) would take an evening of agitated discussion. Since
there was a Writers Forum pamphlet from Jeff Nuttall in 1963, it is certain that there was
a continuous “London poetry scene” from then till now: given the mobility of the
population, that would mean hundreds of people. I did think of making a list – but that
could only lead to descriptions –and months of work. Let me just say they are typically
theory driven – gestalt patterns appealing to intuition and the human past may be
misleading as guides. The motive for this might be that they believe that we are trapped
in language, whose perfidy falsifies our impulses, and disassembling language can make
an opening through which we can get to the other side.
The work of the School of London continued for years and years before anything
finished, and of permanent interest, emerged; an investment that has yielded long-term

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benefits. The mention of shared results persuades us to look at the community that shares
in this sharing, both as readers and as generators of new data; a large part of its members
are in the USA, and most of what is vital for the school is recorded in the history of
Conceptual Art, as a movement that began in the USA around 1966. Lucy Lippard’s book
Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object 1966 to 1972 is essential for the
student of it. If you assembled a group photograph of 150 conceptual artists, and then
stuck the head and shoulders of a London poet into the photograph, you would get some
of the emotional and social drive urging them on. That might be helpful, but in fact isn’t
unless you know about the conceptual artists and they were driven by. Even less
helpfully, I can say that someone becomes a member of the London School if they want
to be like the members of the London School.

It is not possible to give an overall description of Gravity as a Consequence of Shape,

the project of which all the books reviewed (except Scram) form a part, although Fisher's
prose book Ideas on the Culture Dreamed of is a kind of map of it. It began around 1981;
after the end of Place. The separate poems are not numbered, but have titles drawn from
another arbitrary and capacious series of words, in fact a catalogue of dances; thus Grind,
Fish Tail, Frug. Eagle Rock, Ferneyhough, Funky Broadway, Fox Trot, etc. The order of
the poems follows the order of the alphabet. The system allows new poems to be slipped
in without disruption, and may be more memorable. One can doubt that there is a dance
called the Ferneyhough. A number of characters weave their way through it, for example
the Burglar, the Bellman, the Informer, the Badgers, the Bikeboy. Fisher already used
characters in Place V, called Unpolished Mirrors. The speaking characters of Gravity
possibly represent a move away from the belief that what any individual says or
experiences at any time can represent a satisfactory account; that is, also, a move away
from the attempt to write an integrated, authoritative, narrative which subsumes and
makes redundant all accounts by any participants. The new manner is more like Plato,
setting up philosophical masks in order to make clear arguments, without identifying
himself overtly with any speaker. The manner, so unlike modern conceptions of inventing
characters, reminds me of early modern Protestant edifying fiction, where the characters
are halfway towards allegory, but function within an argument; Pilgrim's Progress and
Law's Serious Call to a New Life are examples using such characters. Kierkegaard's
creation of a series of masks, without advancing to full-blown fiction, is a later version of
the same habit, and also reminiscent of Fisher's The Burglar, the Bellman, etc. It is not
clear to me what the function of these characters is. Fisher has said, at readings, that the
Burglar is a thief of consciousness, accounting for lapses of awareness, sequences which
are locked out or lost before reaching storage; he is thus related to multiple parallel
processing, and modern versions of the irrelevance of consciousness compared to
efficient automatic functions. It is not clear to me how such a character can walk around
meeting other characters, and saying things.
It may be that Fisher had no master-plan before starting; Documents could be that
plan, but study of it suggests that it excludes nothing except the conventional, and so that
there are no criteria for the finished work and its parts to satisfy. If one-half of our
reading a book (or observing behaviour) is wondering what the intentions and behaviour
pattern of the writer are, then Fisher has radicalized this part of the text by forswearing
any fixed programme: this meaning-element (or meant-element) is unstable, in the same

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way as rhythm is unstable in a free-verse poem. Perhaps the central (and mysteriously
shifting) element of the work is an attempt to outrun predictability, and its depressing
effects on the brain, by isolating rules and subjecting them to constant variation. Perhaps
the constant rule is to locate rules and turn them. This is like what sociologists do in
observing societies, but Fisher is mainly concerned with the rules of making texts,
although other domestic activities are similarly estranged. More exactly, Fisher started
with the achievements of sociology already on the table, and is going beyond them to
analyse the nuances of individual consciousness, an area which is deliberately excluded,
as its major limit, by sociology. If introspection is made the focus of the poem (when
elements of adventure, narrative excitement, theological revelation, etc., have been
removed), then the poem has necessarily to refine its perception of reality to the point at
which everyday awareness is unpredictable, in order to avoid repetition and regain
uncertainty. The exit from the domestic is either through the wide movements of travel,
or through the tiny movements of the microscopic, the passage from action to
introspection. This shift parallels an earlier creation of the new realm of the symbolic; the
brain as a smaller copy of the world. Language is a low-energy activity and yet central to
the way humans live. To make character the road of the poem, the source of newness on
each page, the notion of character has to be killed; psychology is now being fixed at a
level at which the personality is uncertain and non–repetitive. If the project of self-
reproduction is jettisoned, and with it the idea of a permanent and heroic and exceptional
personality, then behaviour becomes a large set of procedures, partly common, and which
we follow as if doing a drill. Also psychological behaviour becomes this–procedural,
common, learnable. Experience becomes something we do. When this is true, we also
have the possibility of revolutionising the social system: a new society can be made out
of the old people because behaviour is a set of procedures and not something permanent
and natural. Gravity cannot become a fixed structure which Fisher would "only" have to
complete, because that would deny freedom to the poet at the heart of the poem and so
deny the poem its freedom. Its structure was becoming, and its pattern is the location and
upsetting of rules. Our task in reading it is not the virtuous and clerical task of gathering
and partially memorizing its structure, but of turning its lucid gaze on our own lives, and
finding the map of rules and freedom within them. We are to form many conjectures
about the significance of the parts and the whole.
Gravity also has a subject matter, without which a mind has nothing to process
and so cannot function fully as a mind. It includes much about the London quarter of
Brixton, and about Hereford and the nearby countryside, because Fisher lived in those
places. Some passages of 'Fish-Tail' contain a great deal of information, even catalogues
of it; Fisher has never attempted to attain lucidity about the mind by portraying it in a
simplified environment in which it behaves in a stereotyped and simple way. Notoriously,
Europeans have tried to achieve clarity by sensory deprivation, in the silence of the monk
or hermit, where the mind is as dead as the cadavers which supplied the evidence for
anatomy.
If there is a theory of life under the poems, it is that the brain has a tendency to
sink into cycles of repeated states, triggered by sets of signs which the brain itself
generates, growing increasingly inescapable as they repeat; the human organism moves
towards a life of dreary routine. Similarly, the brain tends to take refuge in narrowly
repetitive series of states, emotions, which tend to lock into endless repeats rather than

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find a way out by destabilising the brain. By repeating, these cycles starve the brain of
something else towards which it is strongly drawn: variety, or new information. The
subjective result of this self-imitation is boredom and shutdown; but its effect on other
people with whom the person is emotionally intimate is equally bad, if different. The
domain in which one proposes not to repeat oneself, but to learn and improvise, is also
the domain in which the relationship has sway, if still and always bounded by egoism.
One of the weaknesses of art, in a previous generation, was that as people became
emotionally mature their states of "emotion" became weaker; one solution was to draft in
emotional primitives as subject matter, but a better solution was to lead art away from
regressive, repetitive, and partly selfish and imperceptive, emotional states, and towards a
new subject matter which remained to be discovered.

Breadboard

The text is dated 1982-86. The action involves what may be the first appearance of the
allegorical figures: the Fireman, the Painter, the Examiner and the Burglar. It includes
events on various planes: humans interacting in Brixton, topics in mechanics and
observations on aesthetics. The twisting together of these strands can be contrasted with
the separation of faculties into the allegorical figures. In ‘Break-a-leg’, the speaker is in
the United States, probably New Mexico. Stanza one describes the ridiculous quality of
any activity photographed, or which momentarily catches the gaze (the point is about the
shared semantic complexes which give any actions, and indeed any human, their
significance). Stanza two describes an experiment in cognitive psychology, about position
sensitivity and awareness of movement. Stanza three is about an aeroplane flight, and
perhaps completes stanza two by mentioning the disorientation of the ancient faculties of
spatial awareness by such a flight. Stanza four talks about ‘to describe the moon as an
opportunity’, the special language (i.e. shared semantic complexes) of the central state
apparatus of the US, which makes a flight to the moon seem reasonable, and
‘underdevelops civilian economy'. Stanza five starts with pollution, then as the aeroplane
descends we ‘question the biochemical clock’, then a new drip adds to a stalagmite. Time
is being related back to physical processes, a distinction drawn between physical and
subjective perception of time (‘the rate of beats decrease / as we descend’) which
completes the topic of physical and subjective space drawn in previous stanzas? Stanza
six is difficult, but includes ‘the manufacturer’s input of faith and Money’ and ‘burning
tumbleweed on the edge of Interstate 25’. Stanza seven continues the flight, mentioning
the navigational techniques which define the movement space of the aircraft and give it
orientation; the flattening of the landscape below is a kind of “symbolisation” (he refers
to ‘pictographs of habitation’ and is perhaps thinking of the famous flat forms of South-
west Indian art, suited to textiles. In a dizzying shift of perspective he maps the radar
navigation system onto the path finding of Indians: ‘Paths of nomads following geology
until / break natural formations’; then, caves with pictographs, possibly containing
landmark-like information ‘alternate rods of snail mucus and graffiti’. Stanza eight
describes the need for the observer to be ready for the moment of observation, ‘haematite
and / lizards spiked on barbed wire’. Stanza nine is a puzzle, with what may be vanished
New Mexican Indians, the poet listening to a heat-air acoustic anomaly, air traffic
controller messages. Stanza ten, the breakdown of rock into soil, ‘mass wasting in a

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downslope gravity’; the contrast of timescales; snow geese; activity on the missile test
range, the place becomes a cinema where we track moving aerial objects; a shift of
vision, described as ‘An aesthetics of disappearance’, or a ‘dromoscopy’, perhaps where
speed stimulates the eye but snatches away the object of sight. In Stanza eleven, an image
of a palaeo-human skull with a leopard bite in it, starting up the aged vehicle of
mythology, painted by someone called a Blockhead, in a visualisation of ideology. Stanza
twelve, irreducible images. Stanza thirteen, sinking back three thousand years into a
cavern 700 feet deep; stratigraphy as like a pictogram, a brilliant snapshot visualisation
like the Blockhead’s painting. Part two supplies another seven stanzas, which I will leave
alone except to say that they still deal with the problems of two-dimensional imaged
surfaces, and awkward inheritance; and that the whole poem may be about the limits of
abstract knowledge “known” through visualisation, an archaic technique which is tied to
the body image and to awkward rules of stylisation and obscuring. The issue is less to
disengage the influence of systems of representation on the mind than to realise that we
can only “know” the mind within these many imaging games, each of them stylised and
selective in line with its original purpose.

Civic Crime

This group of six poems is dated to 1987-8 and seems to relate to Fisher’s personal
position at that time, living in Brixton but preparing to leave it for Hereford; the poems
are lyrical and documentary in theme. The first poem seems especially tense and
suggestive, combining a textbook example of the Fisher method with features that I do
not recall in any other Fisher poem. It is written in the third person, but I hypothesise that
the “he” may in fact be the poet, in a mood of weary contemplation at a turning-point of
his life and while his quarter of the city is in the throes of riots. It consists of 53 six-line
stanzas (some have seven lines), which makes it on its own one of the longer and more
ambitious of modern poems. Themes include: the image of a woman, made by frottage,
and a meditation on beauty and physical attraction; unemployment and the flow between
economic status and psychological experience; dangerous experiments, possibly those
carried out by Alan Turing in the 1950s, and which led to his death; watching Brixton
burn; the nature of visual perception and of language; modern capitalism. I read the poem
in terms of suffering:

he chooses to ignore any digital alternatives

Speaks of life in terms of wealth:
his nerves scan the City as its temperatures
pass the red index limits lighting the Brixton horizon

[…]

All day toxics

the narrative in its transparent
cruelty in an effort
not to become what I behold

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 […]

he lives in fear of breakdown,

in sensitivity of capture.

[…]

he cannot teach himself

to ignore the
screams and riot outside
but evades approaching darkness in both

['Cakewalk']

The extreme dismantling of lyric expressions of experience into instrumentally mediated

descriptions of physiological processes is partly due to intellectual desire, intellectual
greed one could say, but also has an ethical aspect: such distancing of the voice from
psychological process suggests that the self is not a self-aggrandising one, not running
down inflexible and inevitable paths, but willing to adapt to other people and so make
true intimacy possible. In the 1960s, structuralism was breaking down the idea of a
perfectly self-aware self into a set of many internally integrated behaving machines.
We have to give some kind of explanation of why Civic Crime deviates from the titling
schema of the work It evidently is not the name of a dance. A civic crime might be one
which is carried out collectively, by the cives or citizens. That is, it might refer to the riots
as a collective crime, or to economic oppression as a crime, to which the riots are a
reaction. There is another possibility, layered beneath a passage which in fact occurs
twice in two different forms (both reproduced below):

(a) The Physicist imagines how

his world will be
before he becomes part of its process
through a recognition
of similar structures in his organs
to those of his companion’s
he projects the potential
of his capabilities’ achievement
(b) The misogynist produces now
a soiled history
before he becomes part of its process
Through inhibition
of similar structures in his organs
to those he is disgusted by
he erects the parental
crack of his hatred

(second stanza, later on:)

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 (a)
I am sensible of my crime
but cannot abhor it
Duty, honour, virtue
no longer informed
I am not yet a monster
but frail
I am not without mutation
but natural

(b) I am spent of my crime

but cannot judge
what I owe to my virtue
elongated and sawn
I am wanted amongst her
but male
I am weighed and muted
but not real
(from: ‘Chicken’ and ‘Charleston’)
This passage makes it possible that misogyny is the civic crime in question, a set of
presuppositions which deprives women of their place as citizens, in the civic fabric. I
think it is especially helpful to compare the parallel passages, because the differences
exhibit the processes which Fisher carries out to produce such an ornate result.

Fizz

Fizz was published as a photocopy and is a group of poems. A note in Fizz says:

These new poems use two series of lectures; Patterns of Connectedness, and
Global Artifacts. The first series was an inquiry into the idea of the modern in the
twentieth century. The second series surveyed artifacts from ancient China, early
East Mediterranean, Dynastic Egypt, pre-Christian Europe, Harappan Indus
Valley, Gandharan and Guptan India, meso-American Maya, North American
Anasazi, nomadic Siberia, and West Africa. Both series were delivered by the
author at the Herefordshire College of Art & Design in the period 1989-92.

So the audience is of art students, post-adolescents looking for ideas to supply their own
imagination, but who do not have a parti pris in favour of books and literate culture. The
ten subject areas are chosen presumably because they are so remote from the world of
images (variously, Italian-Catholic, capitalist, Hellenistic, modernist) that the students
have grown up with. The area of interest is the nature of human art, and the juxtaposition
of unrelated cultures is intended to see through the clutter of the historically specific and
reveal flashes of what the human artistic faculty is. The method might remind us of

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Herbert Read’s books on art, where he strings together photographs of art from different
millennia and countries and asks us to see common elements in the images.
Fisher’s 1983 volume Ideas on the Culture Dreamed of is a kind of plan for
Gravity, released when little of the work had been composed. The section on Fish Tail
has no text and the collective title Fizz is not included.
I feel closest to the poem ‘Fish-Tail’ because it deals with what might be called
Celtic cultures. I did a degree (strictly, a two-year course) in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and
Celtic; I have read perhaps a dozen accounts of the cultural sequence that Fisher is
describing. (The most compelling is by P. L. Jacobsthal.) It strikes me that his account is
a materialist one: he strips out scholarly interpretation to look only at what is genuinely
ancient, and its internal formal characteristics. It is an account with zero teleology. This is
what academics aim for—but which the general public find inhibited and off-putting, as
they prefer to have the ancient objects encumbered by sword and sorcery novels about
Celtic anarchism, primitive matriarchy, fertility rites, and what have you. Fisher avoids
all that sentimental orchestration without putting the activities of scepticism and
demystification obnoxiously in centre stage. Some stanzas refer to Caesar’s description of
Gaul, in the first century BC; while others refer to manuscripts, i.e. not before the seventh
century AD: Fisher is visibly constructing a trans-historical subject, by drawing
connections between objects of such different dates. A more purist approach would deny
continuity at the outset and try to see if it could be established from internal formal
evidence. Incidentally, some of the material in ‘Fish-Tail’ is probably drawn from the
world of the Eurasian steppes, Iranian-speaking at the time; although the continuity of
themes and artefacts between this region and Northern Europe was significant in the Dark
Ages:

Compare mirror with mirror

others pushed east
jugs with invented limbs in handle
from grave and helmet with iron and gold
mountings lost cheek-guards knobbed finial
influx from heroic ideals of tribes
sword scabbard in ceremonial prowess
left in disuse since discoveries of iron.

Fisher avoids using synthetic words like “Celts” or “Bronze Age”; his approach is
rigorous in this sense, and it eschews topic sentences, keywords which bring into play a
reliable sequence or set of ideas supplied by our common stock of representations. He,
metaphorically, gives a set of anatomical and behavioural features and waits for us to
supply the word “shark” as the cap to it all. One has to ask what the effect is, in a
museum, of not supplying labels, with dates, associative words, and so forth; the viewer
is cast into a world without recognisable features, and will either reject the experience
and move on to something more predictable, or gaze at the objects and gradually
construct names for them, through a phase of epistemological tension and uncertainty,
which could include surfacing and examining the rules by which one deduces the
meaning of objects and cultural assemblies.

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 The end step of many of the associational chains that I followed while reading
this, or also perhaps the fundamental and first step of the process which Fisher was
following, is to isolate and question the decision process of the artist. Fisher is not
imitating his voice in the poem; he is not recreating his experience. The scene on offer is
perhaps that of an artist who enters a white-painted room with a certain number of objects
and assembles them into a pattern which they do not belong in, which is not the product
of memory; which is not the recreation of past emotional states; which is not an allegory
of something. The cognitive psychologist James Gibson claimed that the brain interprets
the world using nothing but the evidence of light, not needing semantic structures to
organise it with; a theory in violent contrast with all other schools of cognitive
psychology, but nonetheless stunningly productive.
Comparison of the poems with the academic prose which must have supplied their
matter shows the systematic stripping out of causatives; this obscures the modern activity
of scholars recovering structured “knowledge” from the raw material of digs (and thus
contradicts the main thrust of the poetry, which is to foreground the observer within the
act of observation). We can compare this effacement with the parallel effacement of the
poet’s sensibility, a way of foregrounding the observer that is traditional in poetry but
which Fisher has eschewed. The causatives are the most dubious part of the papers; they
are the product of conjecture and construction, and they have been jettisoned because
those two activities are the most interesting to Fisher, the faculties which he will make
more acute in the reader.

A partial change of burial rite signals

a spread of power
an extensive network with more than one focus
linear patterning, spirals, bird shapes
in torcs, pottery, ivories and land forms
signal inspirations and migrations
from plant and foliage and
zoomorphs with winged stencils elaborate knots

This stanza does exhibit a deduction (the word “signals” admits the jump from material
evidence to interpretation). The introduction of such jumps calls on a set of positive
knowledge about human possibilities as the grammar equating matter with “meaning”, a
set which Fisher is normally happy to spotlight, in its mystery and complexity and
hiddenness from conscious processing. If trait A is bindingly associated with trait B, then
human activity is constrained to a set of unique and inevitable lines (joining features),
running on rails while most of the “space” of formal variability is impassable and left as a
peripheral wasteland; a claim which Fisher would normally be concerned to resist. The
purging of causal connectives is a feature of Adrian Clarke’s work.

SCRAM

This is a selection of poems (1971-82) with the unstated proviso that they exclude
Fisher’s large-scale work, Place, which dominates the decade as much for British poetry

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as for Allen Fisher. Confusingly, the volume does include seven pages from Place. It also
includes a prose commentary, describing each section, which I find unsatisfactory as a
version of events. In fact, the whole volume is irritatingly incomplete, as Fisher’s work
clearly does not lend itself to selection; although it is valuable to have this non-Place
work gathered in book form. It is quite possible that publication of brief snatches in
magazines, as chapbooks, etc., is unsuitable for Fisher, although he has done it endlessly
and over four decades. I cannot make a description of this book, as the various poems
belong to quite different series and provisional artistic grammars. One problem might be
that the rules for moving from one page to the next are not part of a Fisher conceptual
project, as in virtually every other of his publications; this level of design has been given
away, and looks suspiciously like that of a retrospective exhibition, indulgently showing
off the works, in mindless accumulation, with hidden principles which may be either
didactic (here is the story) or biographical (here is the image of the Man of which every
piece is a new illustration). Fisher simply does not write in set pieces.

We can return now to the attempt to form a description of London writing of this period.
We take a single theme from the world of conceptual art. Christopher Finch's book Image
as Language: Aspects of British art 1950-68 talks a lot about the interest of painters, at
that time, in creating a visual code, rather than just sensuous representations of a merely
visible reality. The theme which interests us is the construction of games in language.
Since all poems have worked inside a set of assumptions or horizons, whether in
emotional values or in rhythms, the effect of making up rules is simply to make the limits
conscious, and even to monumentalise the limits, making them prominent features of the
space, rather than ones whose repression guarantees stability. Quite simple sets of rules
could generate unexpected situations. The artwork could appear as a set of rules which
have to be followed; e.g. a poem could be "a set of instructions to form sounds" and then
'a set of instructions to retrieve certain ideas and feel certain feelings", instead of as a
report on experience, or a transformation of experience. The annexation of the arbitrary
could be a way of trying out what the "dominant" do, devising events rather than being an
object in events devised by somebody else. Game rules could, then, be like social
imperatives, and attention turns to how we learn what these imperatives are, and what the
sanctions are which prevent illicit moves. This was a fashion, but for the originators it
had a lineage in Wittgenstein's descriptions of language games, in Berger and
Luckmann's expert description of the arbitrariness and so game-ness of conscious
experience in The Social Construction of Reality, in Barthes' interest in codes, in
Huizinga's Homo ludens, an essay on games, and in the rise of computer programs (quite
recently invented by the Hungarian, John von Neumann), where the stress on self-
consistency and arbitrariness was evident. The game is a unit structure; it is helpful to
bear it in mind in reading Fisher's work, where game structures occur all the time,
although in exotic combinations with multiple games and with other means of generating
verbal sequences.
If human actions in a constrained set seem familiar, it is because we are
constrained at every point by the limits of short-term memory and of the body. We break
processes down into simple moves because otherwise they are too difficult to carry out.
The limits of this short-term memory are related to the horizon inside which a human

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being is totally subsumed, which comprises the difference between humans, and which
describes what is special in the universe of a literary character (including poets speaking
in the first person), what we briefly "possess" as we read the book, and so what the
difference is between reading a book and not reading one. The project of achieving
reflexivity drags us out of the horizon, to the "ridge above", but there are unexpected
results to be gained by dragging us the other way, into an artificially narrow horizon, the
game. The other aspect of games is collusion, and perhaps the study of shared symbolic
arrays shows us a way into conceptualising empathy, and how the model of the other
person, which we form in order to understand them, is like a game in which we create a
shell which is like a self, and ours, but not our self.

16

LONDON THING, PART 2: ROBERT SHEPPARD’S DAYLIGHT ROBBERY,

EMPTY DIARIES AND TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES

Another poet often associated with the London scene is Robert Sheppard. Sheppard, born
1955, was struck by the anthology Children of Albion at the age of 15 or so, and was
hanging around the avant-garde poetry scene even as a teenager, in the mid-1970s; he
was close to the 1960s Dadaist and Fulcrum poet Lee Harwood, who was a neighbour in
Brighton. Some pamphlets came out in the 1970s. He completed a PhD thesis on
Indeterminacy in Modern British Poetry, concentrating on Harwood and Roy Fisher. It
seems there was an aesthetic break around 1985. Early, rather conventional poems,
collected in the pamphlet Returns, had given way by the mid-Eighties to a more drastic
style based on montage and violent street imagery. Writing on arbitrarily chosen series of
photographs (‘The Cannibal Club’) or postcards from a military expedition during the
First World War (‘Mesopotamia’) provided Sheppard with a route into serial form. ‘Letter
from the Blackstock Road’ added a documentary element, viewing part of inner North
London, at a time when riots were brewing, in terms of prostitution and drugs.
Round about this time, a move to London and friendship with Adrian Clarke, then
editing Angel Exhaust in Islington, brought him into the ambit of the School of London.
In an interview in Angel Exhaust 7 (1987), Sheppard cites as sources of ideas Herbert
Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, William Carlos Williams and Allen Fisher. He
also cites Andrew Crozier attacking the idea of empirical lyricism ‘which deals with
discrete moments of experience as though they were somehow representative and
significant’. But Sheppard’s Empty Diaries consists of just such discrete moments of
experience. He shared with the other poets active on the London avant-garde scene, who
included Fisher, Ulli Freer, cris cheek, Maggie O’Sullivan, Gavin Selerie, Adrian Clarke,
Ken Edwards and Gilbert Adair, an interest in place as a subject, in eliminating syntax to
reveal a line dominated by nouns and montage, in repetitive rhythms, unformed sound,

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performance, breaking up the text with “dirty” graphics, in cutting up found texts, in
documentary, the avoidance of self-expression. This scene, caught at the end of the
Eighties, is showcased in Floating Capital, edited by Sheppard and Clarke. It was shaped
by Eric Mottram, whose formula was socialism plus American avant-garde poetry.
Daylight Robbery, a pamphlet that later became the title poem of a 1990 book
from Stride, is a long poem about video:

Whitewashed thought
Flashing articulations
Those transparencies
Into the daylight modern
Intermittent outbursts of unique
Movie mind flying skating on
Nobody’s dream.

It’s nobody’s dream because it’s actually a broadcast. The atomistic, pulsed, fragments
into which the poem is divided reflect the barrage of data coming from the TV screen:
along with the viewer’s fantasies and reactions. The mechanical action of replaying and
editing resembles the activity of consciousness. The force of the form (the consistent
refusal to continue any idea for more than a line) is to exclude the human personality; the
poem speaks from a pre-conscious level, trapping reality before a filter reshapes it into
part of the “personality”. The factor of voice is replaced by the insistent line breaks,
metering the poem like a drum machine. The intermittence also reminds me of a light
source interrupted by a ceiling fan; or, certainly, of the flicker of a TV screen, its weird
blue volumes superimposed over the volume of the room itself.
The line break is also the self-destruction of TV, its incessant escapism, its
opening of secret doors and tunnels in every wall. TV replaces awareness of social
problems, but is potentially revolutionary because it makes the streets, the home, the
workplace, seem transient, escapable, like shadows painted on a screen: ‘Reversal /
Future tilted barricades luxury / Stone hearts / The face is nobody’s / Salvage it copy /
Translation space become pulse vision’.
Empty Diaries is a travelling shot through time: a poem for each year, from 1919
to 1990, from the diary of an unnamed woman. Empty Diaries itself belongs to
Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues project. An article by Sheppard, published in the US,
describes the structure of the project in such a way that one does not find out what its
structure is:

Twentieth Century Blues is not about anything […] The generative schema allows
for a proliferation of strands and an almost cellular splitting of new sequences.

As Alan Jenkins notes, the title comes from a song in Noel Coward’s Cavalcade:

There was another scene after this apparent climax—a night-club scene in which
the harsh ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ was sung while dead-faced couples danced
mechanically; followed by a darkened stage, with special sound and light effects

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 representing chaos, while slowly a Union Jack, softly illuminated, appeared at the
back.
[The Twenties]

I hope that Sheppard’s work does not ultimately turn out to be like Cavalcade (which also
tried to incorporate history). It seems that Empty Diaries is only one part of Twentieth
Century Blues, along with Killing Boxes and Weightless Witnesses. Sheppard issues, free,
a periodically updated index to the parts of Twentieth Century Blues, which are
irrationally ordered (A is a subset of B which is a subset of A, M follows N and N follows
M) in order to evade bureaucratic labelling. Indeterminacy is meant to be aesthetically
positive, like the instances cited and sometimes praised in Empson’s Seven Types of
Ambiguity.
The question whether various lines or poems can compound to be a “long work”
without a binding structure, violating the adopted rule of “indeterminacy”, is central to
the Twentieth Century Blues project. The problem of atomisation goes all the way back to
the Imagists. Briefly, the project of subverting a dominant reality threatens to become
backwash subverting the text itself, in a long work, while in a short work it fails because
the work doesn’t have the self-sustaining ability that the “dominant reality principle”
does, and loses on points. The compression process is still active in Sheppard’s work. He
is not interested in psychological continuity, and his sequence is broken up by the very
heightening of the separate instants.
He has recorded some of his poetic theory in net/(k)not//-work(s), a typically
fugitive A4 pamphlet from Ship of Fools. I had the advantage of attending the same
poetry workshop as Robert for some two years (1991-3), which gave me rather too much
exposure to his thoughts on poetics. In discussion, Robert always responds to the word
“emotion” by saying, with a gleam in his eye, ‘But emotion is dubious’. I’ve always felt
that emotion was rather important. In Empty Diaries, he compensates for its absence by
cranking up the instant impact of his disconnected images:

a letter
we’ve just received spilling seeds of shame.
Negro dances between black sheets delivered the
lovers’ blood to pathetic mythologies, filed the
oracular valves, transmogrified their twitching voices.

The language is melodramatic, even hammy: ‘history’s tight membrane / the age’s
leaking sewer’, again: ‘stinking conduits; / eugenics’ sewer floods’. These effects are far
more obvious and strident than “emotions”. This work makes much of blast and splatter,
of composition by montage of samples, and of high-calorie images making an instant
impact without characterisation and with low affect. All of this follows from the decision
to have something exciting happening all the time; either high drive or a reduced span of
attention. The finest moment comes in 1924, when the heroine imagines herself (inspired
by The Sheik, a novel by E. M. Hull, filmed with Rudolph Valentino) being ravished by a
virile Arab:

This cigarette

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 card Empire, where an Arab
in pearls drags me to his soft
bed, collapses at my feet.
The beauty of his parted
lips: he has only to speak
and I will disappear, a
sack on a stick full of
glitter; rider on my spine.

Yes, reader, it's sex sex sex I'm afraid. The film has a plot; Cockburn provides a close
reading in terms of social psychology, class frustrations, and politics; Sheppard leaves out
both.
Apart from discontinuity, Robert’s other theoretical mainstay is indeterminacy.
I’ve never been able to distinguish this from indecisiveness. The definition of “structure”
is an array in which each element determines every other; indeterminacy means that the
parts do not interact. Equally, the idea of character implies limitation of behaviour; if
someone has no character then they offer no binding element between poems.
Indeterminacy and lack of identification go together. Consciousness, as opposed to
perception, involves the recognition of past states in present configurations; total
discontinuity drains our consciousness. Meaning is a special form of determinacy.
Consciousness, as opposed to perception, involves the recognition of past states in
present configurations; total discontinuity drains our consciousness. Meaning is a special
form of determinacy. There are doubts about Twentieth Century Blues' ability to recover
the internal signalling structures, so carefully torn out of the text by Imagists and poets
like William Carlos Williams, that would make it more than a series of disconnected
points. It’s not clear that the action of intelligence in the shape of theory can replace the
lost action of intelligence within the poem, driven out by a confidence in unprocessed
sensations and the anti-logic of montage. The theorising is anyway compromised by an
eclectic “rebadging” of foreign models, patched together without internal coherence or a
“deterministic”, descriptive adequacy to the local, English texts.
This raid into the territory of historical narrative is a challenge, like Sheffield's
fearsome avant electronic band Cabaret Voltaire taking on the 12" disco 45, in 1982's
'2x45'. The whole proposition of modernism was about the uniqueness of each second,
the transience of each specific conjunction; this logically led into an atomistic, disjunct,
method of representation, and made any so evanescent thing irrelevant. Pattern is
recurrence; I have said that consciousness only emerges with recognition. The solution of
continuity with the past disables the intellect. Poetry has to reconquer time in order to
reveal any kind of social process.

17

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THE ABERYSTWYTH PUNK AVANT-GARDE
(However Introduced to the Soles; by Nick Macias, Nic Laight, and Niall Quinn,
1995)

The methods by which philologically-oriented critics such as myself write descriptions of

texts break down when faced with texts which offer no handholds for reason. That is to
say, the unknown element, which always makes up half of any interesting poem,
obstinately retains its status, foregrounded in a way which makes it sheer excitement for
someone who is not scared of uncertainty.
Faced with an expanse of uninterpretable, shimmering, material, the qualities we
attribute to it, and to our experience of it, derive from contextual cues. Turning down the
channel of referential, carefully qualified, exactly interpretable, dimensioned language
automatically turns up the other channel, of undifferentiated feeling, sensitive to texture,
mood, and to overall configuration, weak on an internal time sense. Non-representational
poetry is not truly giving control to language, because its similarities to movements in art
like music, film, and painting are so cogent. Rather, it foregrounds suggestibility,
collusion, and the transmission of mood. These texts offer us a great freedom from effort,
since the discursive line isn't there. We don't have to remember much, but we have to
react a lot. Moving through unnamed situations throws attention onto the rules by which
we identify situations and switch on reactions to them. Perhaps we can only find
spontaneity by going through decontextualisation.
The first sign I got of all this was a flier, sometime in 1995, with an excited quote
from Iain Sinclair, and the catch-phrase avant-garde punk. Such phrases are important in
a context where mood is dominant over reference; this one is important if it signals
constructs of high energy which are assertively detached from the conceptual art of the
period 1968-75, and of its implicit "shared conversation", with its flavours of the bucolic
alongside the obsolete tragic narrative of Marxist apocalyptic. I also think of dance
music, not because of any measurable commonality, but because the new syntax of dance
music, with its rejection of the notion of the song, of a psychological realism tying the
music to an implied central character, of the familiar sound envelopes of traditional
instruments with their learnt psychological values, along with a driving energy foreign to
the traditional avant garde, is emotionally similar to However Introduced to the Soles.
The "landscape" around the book might be a Chemical Brothers record.
Fragments of "unrealisable" language are rapidly identified by some agent in the
brain as not matching either existing models of reality or the verbal context around it, but
they "fly" until that point. And, a large number of very short durations add up to a long
duration. These poets use language like glass in a stained glass window, many coloured
fragments in geometrically precise forms carefully fitted to each other. The relation
between the pieces and the overall design is fictive, bizarre, and spontaneous.

Extracting daffodils, fat seek form us

up the on, infeet all mother,
He from threw, thoroughbred daughters
big allies.
denial eyes tears, through born formed
earth the screaming, the Gold & Green,

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 evolved & friends furnished.
(Nick Macias, from a pamphlet even more obscure than Soles, and a poem called "Big
Daddies, Back to Front Allies, Black, Red, Gold & Green"). Perhaps we could call this
"pseudo-situational writing"; or perhaps it is a "true" description of a bizarre situation.
I eventually found out that the three poets were quite close to each other, and had
a shared background in a writers' group in Pontypridd. My disbelief at finding avant
garde writers in Wales was satisfied by finding out that two of them are English and one
Irish. This is probably not a useful way of talking about the poetry; if we refer to the
book, where none of the poems has the author's name attached to it, we can see how
much time we could waste by banally tracing origins and ownership. How much more
relevant to wear this material, slide across it, bounce around inside it, pour paint over it.
Once the rules of meaning have been taken out, the language is governed by
dozens of decentralised rules, propagating across the sensitized surface like vegetation
across a pond.

Form the future,

Forge a frank frontier,
Drive to develop,
Direct disclosure,
Input, kindle kin,
Aspire join just,
Dialectic express,
Eternal elysium,
Combine, enter entire
(Nick Macias, from 'Gracious Global Glory')

The procedures involved are garish, barbaric, geometrical, decorative, rippling. This
poem is based on phonetic echoing and a certain syllable count, as well as mysterious
lines of meaning. The link between one word and the next is vegetable rather than logical.
We can see that restricting shapes to the human figure disqualifies a huge set of other
possibilities for developing the line: discarding representation as a principle in language
opens up such a set of newly possible relationships. Indeed, a point in the first set
becomes a whole dimension in the latter set. The vastness of the uncoded set then
acquires an emotional value of optimism, potentiality, fearlessness, fleetness of foot,
wide-eyed alertness.
Laight is more attuned to visual poetry and graphic design, and Macias is a more
"situational" writer, who presents family melodramas with an unusual perspective which
"squashes" them and makes it appear as if they have no outside. Quinn also writes about
virtual situations, although the relationship between the situation and the poem is loose.
Graphic design uses a kind of "overall" scanning, where we ignore details; the cognitive
ability being invoked is one which scans an entire room, and finds it secure, welcoming,
exciting, loud, etc., while (temporarily) ignoring individual shapes and specific verbal
contexts. These poems are exceptionally strong at the overall, affective-configurational,
level, rather than at the local level.
The location of the self-referential is a key question for contemporary poetry. The
zone where the poet is free, and where we feel free, is the most desired point. If this is so,

174
realist reference to the physical or economic world is a slowing influence on poetry. Yet,
the essential nature of a game is to have rules: improvisation is easier if the calculations
are partly defined at the outset. Even if the experiences within a poem are "true", given
substance by their correspondence to a reality, which has already dispersed, my decision
to read the poem is self-referential and within some uncertain boundaries my reactions to
the experience-poem are arbitrarily decided by me, and afterwards become a "reality".
The procedures around temporarily entering someone else's personality are singularly
interesting; it is more rewarding to reflect on this free act than to recognise parts of reality
or to take in facts. Leaving aside the incitements of fashion and chic, foregrounding these
procedures is liberating, exciting, and maturing. The act of self-referential confirmation is
circular, but that is not the same as nothing happening: the perimeter of a circle has a
length greater than zero. The more we free the visible frame of structures, the more
attention can be given to acts of perception and choice.
The situation we are being thrown into is perhaps that of a studio in an art school,
where some students are pursuing personal projects and others are energetically
competing to seize the collective object of stylistic desire, which is an object of envy, and
which can only be acquired by acclamation, that is as a result of daring and going
beyond. This is mutual excitement, contrasting with memory and introspection. The
"blank" surface of the non-representational work is meaningful inside an intimate group,
where reflexive control of speech or visual display is taken for granted. It evokes this
situation where self-expression is instantly understood: a supremely desirable situation, it
would seem to anyone in a different situation. Being so competitive implies that you are
highly socialised, and this implies sophistication, in the form of freedom from
psychological traumas and inhibitions. Being chic demonstrates some quite vital abilities
Leaving aside shiny slogans like "avant garde punk", "the Aberystwyth sound"
"the Noumena phenomenon", and "floor-filling abstraction", Soles has left an indelible
trace on the Nineties as a solace for weary editors, a genuinely desirable artefact among
so many writers struggling with worn-out ideas or with moral exhaustion. It was bold,
energetic, sophisticated, uncompromised, fully realised, unfamiliar, and truly curious
about the incalculable ocean of possible linguistic relations.

18
THE TYRANNY OF SPACE AND DISTANCE:
poetry, intimacy, centre-periphery tensions, and the electronic transmission medium

1 The shift from paper to Internet

Internet poetry editors are usually editors of paper poetry magazines. Of course we aren't
qualified to do the new job. What we have to do is to separate the essential from the
accidental in the constitution of poetry: a basic exercise which is yet extraordinarily hard
to undertake. High-level rules will remain valid in the new medium; low-level ones will
have to be discarded.

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 The word physical occurs here: when we say that the width of a poetic line isn't
given by the width of the screen but by the rules of the English language, the temptation
is to describe the sound groups (technically, intonation groups) into which spoken
English is divided as a physical given. However, comparison with other languages tells us
that this division is not hard-wired; it is only a habit which is relatively stubbornly
ingrained. And in fact the poetic line enjoys some autonomy vis-à-vis the phoneme clause
of everyday speech. But in general the features of poetry which were inherent in the oral
or written situations can be expected to get shed in the different situation of digital
telecommunication. It seems helpful to analyse poetry as we know it into functions,
groping towards functions which will be constant in the new situation; thus obtaining a
view of the shifting layer of implementation of the functions. Some of these might be:

setting of interpretative rules

establishment of the poet's personality
genre
scene setting
arousal of expectations
attraction of the reader
selection of a poem
the act of reading
publishing; editing; rejection
reputation
recommendation
marginalisation

Separation between these is remarkably weak.

2 Critical limits on consumer uptake

If there is more help prose then there will be more reader take-up. This assumes more
reader-hours being expended on poetry. However, other sectors using the Net are also
calculating on taking up more reader-hours. Unless poetry can generate publicity as
persuasive as other genres, it may actually lose market share. If there are fewer readers,
the complex called élitism, or overshadowing, will actually get worse. The weak link is
availability of the reader's time, and this may not be improved by Net access.
For system behaviour, the function "generation of bad information" is perhaps the
most important single one. The article on the Net in Poetry Review (London; give
number) suggests that bad mainstream poetry is already being sprayed at the Net and may
prevent anyone from wading through the dung to find the real poetry. Thinking back, to
now, it's quite possible that it would be an improvement to wipe out all poetry magazines
except ten (or even six), which would be of warrantable high quality.

3 Dislike

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Since all social situations generate dislike, it seems perverse to deny this the status of an
abstract function. It would be arrogant to try to analyse unpopularity without an adequate
social theory of dislike.

4 The Train of Attention

At present one of the limits in Net publishing is the amount of data which a user can
download in two minutes, i.e. without getting bored. The Net is a continuous-on thing, if
you induce delays then people lose interest. We had to slice the magazine number up into
bits convenient for downloading. It follows that every slice has to entice the reader
enough to "reproduce itself" and get the next slice downloaded. Currently the functional
unit is a block of twenty pages; to include windows (Hypertext links) into other files.
This chain of files is not inherently closed. An obvious step is to include hypertext links
between a single poem in a magazine and the whole book it belongs to: an eager reader
picks up a Nigel Wheale poem, or our review of his book, and then downloads the whole
of Phrasing the Light. These strings can't be very long while so little poetry is on the Net.
It may become conventional for poetry files (olim books) to include Hypertext links-out
to other books (files) which they recommend as "related". This may become the standard
path of poetic shopping. It is an open question whether poets will include Hypertext links
within poems. Poems could be constructed out of HT links only. The Net is especially
favourable to sampling and montage.

5 Poetry without an audience or poetry before an audience

Small press poetry – which no-one gets paid for – could be put on the Net in its entirety,
for the cost of server storage. The term "small press" is obsolete, because it can't apply to
unpublished poetry and all poetry is written before being published. In future, most of it
may be electronically disseminated. Replacement terms: unpopular poetry, counter-
cultural poetry, intelligent poetry, specialist marketing poetry, unorthodox poetry.

6 Centre and Periphery

It is impossible to contemplate the early history of poetry in Australia without stumbling

over topics like prestige, marginalization, backwardness, peripherality. In fact, the virtual
voice which utters poetry was drawn into the world of prejudices and valuations which
affects the reception of speaking voices of English. We have to question the geographical
perceptions which meant that a listener hearing a regional accent, or a colonial accent,
projectively heard inferiority rather than just locality. If the space of which the world is
composed is uneven, it is presumably because of the existence of metropolitan centres,
where cultural interaction is more intense, creates new forms and value, and sharpens the
individuals living there. It is possible that in 1910 there were only two English-speaking
cultural metropolises, New York and London; this may be the wrong number, but the
number has been added to in probably every decade since then. However, the majority of
literary intellectuals still live outside the big cities; the Internet may offer an end to their
exclusion from up to date cultural life.

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 For Australians, the metropolis moved to Australia in the 1960s, if not the 1940s,
making this whole universe of discourse obsolete. But the problems of a small and far-
flung population scattered over a whole continent, and that very far away from other
English-speaking markets, remain; you can't cut distance to market but you can cut time
to market. It seems to me that the Internet offers more to literati in big empty spaces, such
as Australia outside the big cities, much of southwest USA, English-language writers in
Singapore, than to most people in (say) the Netherlands or England.

7 Pressure on

The sleeve notes to a reissue album (Raven RVLP01) of The Master's Apprentices, one of
the most successful Australian bands of the 1965-72 period, recalls their experiences of
coming to England in 1970 via 7 weeks as house band on a Sitmar liner: 'England shook
The Masters Apprentices to their boots. In a long letter to Go-Set, Glenn Wheatley made
plain 'As far as we are concerned, there is no originality in Australia. No group can go
straight from Australia and set the world on fire–there are groups over here decades
ahead.' [Jim] Keays concurred: 'After six weeks here we realised we were facing a crisis–
The Masters had to start all over again or split up.' Such despair had emerged after a
whirlwind gig crawl which took in performances by the likes of Free, East of Eden,
Audience and Edgar Broughton Band." Scary stuff, but if the local groups were good, in
that year of singular flamboyance and optimism, it didn't mean it wasn't scary for them
too. Maybe the London music world wasn't a pressure cooker forcing people to innovate
and research, but ask anyone if they'd rather be in the pressure cooker and find out! Even
the possibility that someone else is going through that kind of formative excitement,
while you aren't, is unbearable. If you're surrounded by other people doing what you do
only better, you not only have the best possible atmosphere to learn and imitate from, but
you also have to invent something new: a year of this will wrench more brilliance out of
you than ten years of isolation where you are your own environment and every failure of
perception repeats itself forever.
It may be academic now, but I think The Masters Apprentices were better than
Audience and the Edgar Broughton Band. The masters in their name were John Lee
Hooker, Muddy Waters, etc.: apparently records were good enough for them to learn their
whole trade from.

8 Sending status down a wire

M.A.K. Halliday remarks: "The essential characteristic of social structure as we know it

is that it is hierarchical; and linguistic variation is what expresses its hierarchical
character, whether in terms of age, generation, sex, provenance, or any other of its
manifestations, including caste and class." (Language as a Social Semiotic, 1978, p.184)
When Halliday wrote that, the unspoken codicil was 'and this will change in a better
society', whereas now we know that there is an eternal return and that status is almost as
intrinsic to speech as teeth. Whatever messages you send down the Internet will be like
other human messages; in this new and uncoded moment of technology, we have to
identify the area of decision open to us before it is open to us. The BBC radio was
notoriously given over to a specific kind of voice from its start, but redefined itself

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though modified regional accents (delivering in a standard grammar and vocabulary
choice) during the 1980s. Something similar happened in poetry – although this is hard to
analyse, as the norms of a period rapidly become unconscious and hard to notice, let
alone think about.
Some people dislike the sound of Received Pronunciation, others dislike the sound of any
dialect except the one of their own region. People don’t have the same reactions that they
did in the 1940s, but it seems likely that, for many of the poetry readers of that time, the
sound of a privileged voice was the thing which attracted them. If Betjeman's Summoned
by Bells sold 100,000 copies, this wasn't in spite of being set partly in Kensington and an
Oxford college. We should think very carefully about what context signals are being sent
in poetry. I think this taste of the old middle class dissolved in the Sixties, but also that it
was replaced by the tastes of the new middle class, adequately complacent and aggressive
despite the influx of people from working-class origins. If you don't understand the
message, you can't understand how the message system is working.

9 Zeitgeist

If one looks at the big changes in British, North American, and Australian political
opinion this century, the effect of world market changes is clear, but it also seems that the
less bound ideas are shifting in synchronization; and this has to be attributed to
individuals, also newspapers and other forms of print, and recently filmed and televisual
artefacts, moving between the three societies. What seems normal or extreme shifts from
decade to decade based on contextual cues from the people around us. The term Zeitgeist
has a very dubious origin in the mystical and spiritualist side of romanticism, where
common shifts of mood were interpreted as due to a Spirit (literally, Geist) emitting
moods through some kind of ether. I'm not persuaded that the Internet will make any
difference to politics, but something is being transmitted between cultural centres and, if
the rate of transmission is changed, it's reasonable to suppose that other system features
will change too.

10 Archaism reinforced by technology

The virtualisation of dealing on the London Stock Exchange at Big Bang, in 1986,
involved a great deal of expense and a panoply of new technology. Did this bring
anything new? It permitted the aggrandisement of a few wealthy families and their
servants at the expense of virtually everyone else. It helped to increase the inequality of
distribution of wealth, putting back the clock of recent decades. It reduced the power of
labour, because it improved the response capacity of organised capital without an
equivalent improvement in information quality and speed of response on the part of
unions or working people. The semantic patterns which the new computers were so
exactly tracing were property rights and the names of individuals owning them, kinds of
information dating back to the Neolithic if not before. Archaic functions of power and

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appropriation were being carried out more swiftly, and perhaps more nakedly and
brazenly.
Changing the message system will not change the archaic functions of poetry.
Quite plausibly, it may make the archaic patterns clearer by sweeping away obstacles
which hindered them in other systems, without adding value of their own.
Giving hi-teck to the owners of capital is like giving some Afghan warlord a
Kalashnikov. Isn't the computer industry like the forward arms market in Peshawar? only
a bit quieter.

11 Fine time intervals

The rise of vers libre and dialect poetry in England came about at the same time and for
the same reasons: to achieve precision in notating very fine variations of the movement of
the voice. This was the Georgian period, when a certain nostalgia for the body defined the
mind as the source of inauthenticity. Harold Monro, the main inspirer of the Georgian
Books, also arranged series of poetry readings, something novel in 1912; and wanted to
reach an uneducated audience. Live readings imply an anxiety that the printed word is
inauthentic because the poet isn't physically there. Decalations bring deceit; or, truth
requires time as the force which holds it together.
There isn't necessarily a connection, but let's note that the realm of reaching an
idea first and dominance also has to do with short time intervals. In fact, the dethroning
of the centre implicit in the Georgian cult of peasants, animals and the barbaric is a revolt
towards the periphery. Nominating the body as the source of authenticity (as Lawrence,
most notably, did) abruptly switches out access to Classical literature or to Parisian ideas
as the path to poetry.
Personal identity is altered by altering time relations just as selective slowing or
speeding of tapes makes a voice sound completely different.
Poetry needs a theory of subjectless action so that the influence which the poet
exerts over the reader's mood and ideas isn't simply domination. If you weaken your idea
of personality boundaries then the fact that the poet gets there first doesn't imply
dependence: you are both immersed in an ambience. Whereas the historicist belief in a
remorseless rail of time implies not only that the periphery merely imitates the centres but
also that the reader is passive and a follower.
Altering the dissemination rates alters the prestige relations between centre and
periphery. Our ideas of relations between centre and periphery may be based on the
physical qualities of existing media, so that the almost zero-delay molecular flow of the
Internet will change the rules of the literary world.

12 Phonemes and prosody

Whereas speech comprises both phonemes and prosody, our writing system barely takes
notice of prosody. That is, when we see a written text (including one that has come over
the Internet) we supply the prosody ourselves. If we can do this successfully, prosody is

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implied in the phonemic level (but not vice versa) and so the speech flow is redundant
(says things twice). It would be excessively easy, using multi-media PCs, to restore this
redundancy, and even multiply it; the first theoretical question is whether print has
benefited from its bareness and minimalism, and in fact less is more.
Sometimes, entire stretches of poetry can be described by simple terms,
containing far less information than the original and yet not misrepresenting it.
Underneath the surface changeability of a poem, or a volume there is perhaps something
much less changeable; a tone, a mood, a character, an atmosphere. It is remarkable that
this should be so. It is reasonable to connect these underlying gestures with prosodic
functions, which are also overall, sustained over entire messages (i.e. suprasegmental),
and relatively archaic and few in number.
It unnerves me that a message can contain so many elements which aren't
specified in any way. It's the less visible things which are likely to go wrong–and the
wrongness won't be invisible.

13 Printed poetry and the loss of voice

Which parts of the original speech signal does writing suppress? Volume, timbre, pitch,
intonation; some data of dialect and class; in general, all details about the physiological
means of production. I consider that these lost parts correspond to pre-human signals,
carrying data about body weight, sex, age, vigour, hormonal levels, mood. The voice,
being written down, is disembodied. People can feel starved and cut off when reading
poetry; but, out of the disappearance of the body, we can create imaginary bodies. Tacitus
describes the Germani of the 1st century AD as warming up for battle by chanting heroic
poems: asperitas soni et fractum murmur; they amplified their voices by holding up their
shields before their mouths. This boomy effect was terrifying because human
instinctively relate voice to body weight by its physical qualities: the boom created the
spine-chilling illusion of giant bodies. The illusion affected both the Germani and their
opponents; I consider that the whole history of poetry involves the creation of imaginary
body images with incalculably exciting effects on poet and reader.
Print is a 'cold medium' but it delivers much faster. You can scan a bigger area for
the patterns you want. You can move back and forth inside it much more easily. Part of
the rapidity of print is due to its elimination (non-utterance) of prosody. Poetry clings to
the oral medium by partially representing prosody: the line break, representing the
juncture of two phoneme clauses.

14 Less is more

In New Scientist for 30/5/93 p.30, John McCrone reports that "subjects were shut in a
ganzfeld, a simple sensory deprivation chamber where bright, red lights are shone onto
ping pong balls taped over the eyes and white noise is played into the ears. For subjects
the effect is much like staring into a formless fog. After a quarter of an hour or so of such
blankness, most people begin to experience brilliant dream-like images, much like the so-
called 'hypnagogic' images that are often seen on the point of falling asleep."

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There is a second world of vivid hallucination waiting outside the real one. To reach it
needs intense concentration, going under in the words.
The neurological effects of duration interest me, the required end state cannot be
reached quickly. I dislike pamphlets for this reason; I like poetry which goes on for a long
time. Something interesting has to be happening all the way through, but I like the idea
that you have to concentrate, and be absorbed, for 15 minutes before the necessary
physiological changes set in and you start to hallucinate.
If all humans have this faculty, we can see the poetic mood as an autotelic
vibratory state of the brain; and ask why it ever doesn't come about. If it's a physiological
thing, it's got nothing to do with class status, education, or living in the metropolis. We
can speak of the poet getting in the way of poetry. It becomes democratic-like alcohol.
Obviously poetry isn't a formless fog, it is full of shapes and the images it inspires
are profoundly directed by its own semantic structures. But it's hardly worth it unless it
makes the reader see things.
You can rewrite just about any difficult poem to be easy to follow; but you
shouldn't do this, because obstinately difficult work can be so suggestive and have such a
powerful effect on the imagination. The concept which minimalists are working towards
is not totally stupid, just badly achieved. The theory of demanding poetry is given by JH
Prynne in his 1962 essay 'Resistance and Difficulty', where he says among other things
(quoting Abelard): 'Where is the battle if the antagonist is away? For a contest, an
opponent is needed, not one who simply submits.'
If sensory deprivation makes you hallucinate, supplying more information will
tend to hinder and stop the hyperassociation process. So printed poetry may be more
effective than spoken and performed poetry because it is less sensuous.

15 Post-sensory data
There is no kind of information which is unique to poetry. Even the moment of
perfect (alleged) intimacy is claimed by the interview, the pop song, and even the
advertisement–in its direct address, shared jokes, its setting of domestic impromptu, sly
sharing of infantile wishes. The question of what poetry essentially is, what is its
homeland, can only be answered in unsatisfactory terms: words can describe anything at
all, what they can't be is sensuous in the way that painting or music is. No subject matter
is excluded from poetry. The more information is available in society, the more is
available for poetry.
Language is transparent, like a camera lens; it takes in everything but has no
identity of its own. It can compete only by bearing a signature so intense that the memory
of alternatives fades. A strong artificial and formal organization must be burnt into it,
down to its smallest units.
So what is the difference between words and images? Words represent (not are)
an abstract system of traces which can be scanned, excerpted, re-organised, and so forth,
by virtue of their abstraction. A revealing feature is the ability of words to be indexed; if
you have a million words on computer, you can search them automatically and retrieve
key words; this isn't so for pictures.
If poetry tries to be 'sensuous' it is partaking of the discourse of the weak, and the
sites where they are weak. I find this a quite unattractive idea. Should the poet be

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someone who knows what colour the new car is but doesn't understand that the car
factory is about to be closed down and restarted in a Third World country? Poetry
shouldn't be writing about objects, but about the way society is organized. Literature is
quite unlike (say) photography in its various forms; poetry is close to the abstract control
language in which the social structure is encoded.
The serial nature of words means that each word is foregrounded at the moment
of its occurrence. This makes the relation of foreground to background quite different
from any picture. The perpetual disappearance of the verbal string as it moves puts
weight on temporary memory; opening up the suspicion that cinema tends to drug people
by blasting them with data the whole time and numbing their minds.
The problem with primary sensuous reality is that it isn't how we apprehend the
world. There is no doubt that a cat tracks its prey by smell, sound, and sight,
simultaneously; although these senses are physiologically separate. Evidently there must
be a combined symbolic language into which these raw data are translated in order to
locate them and locate the mouse with precision; it must be "symbolic" because it is no
longer sense data. The cat successfully uses the auditory data of a mouse scrunching
through leaves to move its gaze to where the mouse is about to appear. If a cat can
integrate inputs from several senses at once, how much more can a human being do! Now
that we have posited this combined symbolic language, we can see that it is like words.
Language has got nothing to do with direct sensory input, it is an abstract totalizing
synthesis. It may in fact be not only a means of sharing information with comrades, but
also the means by which the brain talks to itself, at the highest and most powerful level of
meaning. Language is both less capacious and accurate than photography, and more
powerful: it is more handy to manipulate because it was specially designed for
manipulation. It differs from any merely sensuous representation. Perhaps a degree of
attenuation of input is needed in order to prevent flooding, and to acquire some
independence from the turbulence of sense data. This can be expressed in terms of a
familiar paradox of navigational processing: if the Analyser takes more than a second to
process a second's worth of input, then input has periodically to be suspended to let the
Analyser catch up. If where time=t the Analyser is still processing the raw data of t=100
at t=105, then it is essential to throw away the input data of t=101, 102...105. So perhaps
our intake of the world is discontinuous; if we have to think sometimes (which seems to
be subjectively true). Analysis implies freezing. So the suppressor function of
consciousness may be as important to health and survival as its analytical function. A
constant stream of sense data is not unmediated bliss, actually it's a form of psychological
discomfort and even violation. The more fecund our senses, the more it is necessary to
uncouple them and throw their information away. All models of bits of the world are less
complex than what they model; but if they were perfectly accurate, they would be quite
useless.

16 A message delivered at two different times

Printed poetry is a message delivered in two parts. The prosodic realization is inherent in
the message because you are a native speaker of the language, but not sent along with the

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message. You acquired the phonological rules during early childhood. (We can neglect
the differences between, say, Australian speech melody and middle-class English speech
melody, taking the printed version as 'definitive'; although in reality there may be a
melody of Australian poetry animating it–and missed by British and American readers.)
This situation is easily understood by comparison with computers; e.g. you download a
font and then a print file using the font, which may be much smaller, in bytes, than the
font file.
I wonder what the extent of this stored code is. I don't have a measure; although
observations on head injuries make it clear that prosody is a right-hand cortex function
and lexicon and phonemes are left-hand functions. Is there a possibility of writing to it,
changing the code as we use it? Setting words to a tune does just this.

17 A program which writes to itself

Clearly, it isn't just prosody which is unspecified within the poem, but also the rules for
reading it in general. We may become aware of these through noticing that they change
between one historical epoch and another, or from trying to explain why serious poetry is
so little understood.
If a single word implies a social context, and therefore a set of behavioural rules,
it is like the single character which pulls a whole font program with it. If you string
together a dozen characters in a dozen different fonts, the font becomes foregrounded and
the literal value of the literal sinks into the background.
A single poem from the 11th century contains explicit information–say 200
characters, for a little song. But you can also consider it as containing the whole historical
milieu around it, all the interpretative rules with which you read 11th C poems; so how
much information does that little character string contain? If you read a comprehensive
anthology of the present day, there are a dozen different literary systems contained inside
it; if you jump from one poem to another, you change your internal state, reconfigure
your reading faculty, at huge speed; it's already a psychedelic experience.
As the text itself is reduced to a serial Raworthian intermittence, coherence
migrates to subsystems, parts bound to each other by structural resistance, and
embodying interpretative regimes. If you start to make the application of interpretative
rules, and the encapsulated triggers which tell the reader which rule set to apply,
conscious, you can start writing to the rule sets rather than just generating sentences
which obey the rules of one or other of them. All writing is specifying a situation; the
writer can specify also how to read. Structure becomes narrative.
Raworth fulfils the mandate of saying a lot in a small space by context switching. This
either privileges the unconscious by foregrounding its functions, or degrades it by forcing
its functions into the conscious realm. When planning things for the Internet, don't
confuse the byte count with the complexity of the message.
What if we attempt to codify Context and devise a notation by which we could
encapsulate and transmit it? is it possible that the underlying logic of reviewing is to
encapsulate contexts and teach them to the reader, who can then read successfully (and
make their own mind up)? Note that different poets share contexts; much of our critical
vocabulary is a weak attempt to point to this. Can we describe some of the actions that

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contexts include? Perhaps descriptions of context are richer than descriptions of
incidentals.

18 C'est l'ambience

In the oral, rock-oriented culture of the post-1956 period, we can describe poetic context
as the trace of an atmosphere, the internal mood of an intimate group; a vibe. Poetry
somehow contains a virtual space into which the reader can immerse although remote in
space and time. Poetry must work in this way and we can argue that, of many thousands
of European poets, the ones who survive do so because they succeed in doing this.
Perhaps like a song capturing the atmosphere in a club.
We can compare social being and prosody because they are both affective, pre-
rational, durative, noncontrastive, relating to the body image and affective signalling and
transmission of mood. One way of changing your mood might be to go to a certain place,
but another way might be to go and spend time with a certain group. The group flavour
might be serious, sexy, religious, high, dizzy, and so on. The literal information conveyed
in the poem is obviously les important.

19 Assimilation and suggestibility

When a flock of pigeons takes off from the ground, you can watch the motion rippling
across the group; perhaps the first one actually saw a threat, but the others just followed
suit, and their perceptual environment ceased to be the outside world and became only
the field of creatures of their own kind, and behaviour consists of imitating what they do.
Art is the realm, not so much of mimesis of the physical world, as of mimesis of other
people, altering one's inner state to become like theirs. Is it information which is being
transmitted? not exactly. In this grammar of assimilation, we have to position radical art,
which defined itself by dissimilation, political, social, and cultural.
We read of the 15th century friar Capistrano that when he preached a hundred
thousand people would go into hysteria and set out on a mass crusade. This power didn't
come from his words, because he preached in Latin, which almost none of them
understood. The hysterical suggestibility was a subjectless action, transmitted by all
infectiously and originating in a nutshell. The Internet isn't there to transmit information.

20 Suggestion and fine timing

The good poet has the power of suggestion more than other people. Given that bad poets
use the same ideas, emotions, images, and rhythmic patterns as good poets, we can
suggest that goodness resides in the fine timing of intrication of events in different levels
of the linguistic signal: the signature of the poet is located within contexts which are
momentary. Success is self-same, self-confirming; parts matched. The termini are
cohesion and rapid change: if you have both, you are going to be successful. You have to
move the reader's attention along. Anticipation is another small-duration time-pipe thing:
emphasis, something archaic and subtle, moves through the text in millisecond-fine

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slices. Prosody signals emphasis in speech: but speech melody isn't notated in the print
medium.
A poem is made of information, but it is also made of information that can be
discarded, and its identity dwells in the higher levels of organisation, or simultaneously in
the micro-slices of the momentary universe of discourse (to use Jakobson's phrase).

21 Dolphins

Bateson remarks of the acoustic communication of whales and dolphins that land
mammals interact a lot by grooming, which cetaceans can't do because their skins are
poor in nerve ends, to do with insulation in cold waters. They can't huddle together and
exchange warmth as, say, rats do, building solidarity. They have no sense of smell, either.
So the sensory stimulation or emission is forced through the remaining channel of
hearing. This theory of loss and compensation assumes that there is a prior message
volume which precedes the channel by which it is, in fact, made real. This theory of
compensation is highly relevant to print or electronic transmission of words, which set
out, after all, from an initial loss of signalling channels. No embraces, no eye contact; a
spectre state. When formatting a Net message, or magazine-programme framing a swarm
of messages, you have to ask: what is the burden of the message? and: are we sending
something inherently scant, bleak, thin, and inauthentic?

22 Cultural paranoia

Speech is dialogic; we can treat dialogue as the Absent of literature. This means that
recognition of the listener's status in the speaker's speech, one of the archaic and
indispensable streaks in language, is missing from the written word; so that reassurance
and paranoia are not exactly unimportant in literary relations.
Dialogue depends on short time relations: the reply is recognizable as such only
by temporal proximity to the first move. There are obvious problems with storage of
time-based matches in the frozen form of a text. The reader can be symbolically
acknowledged via proxies: dialogue takes place within the text and you feel yourself
considered by it.
For the insecure person, everything is a metastatement about status. I have three
different dishes on the stove; someone phones me and wants to read a poem aloud over
the phone; I say I've got three dishes on the stove and he says "You don't like me". These
status conflicts are boring and exciting at the same time. The overt tautology of
statements of 'I'm me' and 'I'm great' can nonetheless lead to visible contests–the most
interesting things to watch. It seems that status is the main burden of mammal
communication.
This paranoia is like the writing to the program which we discussed above. The
message aims to rewrite the unspoken rules by which messages are read or reconstituted.
Insofar as modernism is an attack by a younger generation on their elders, or as the
poetry of the last 25 years pursues personal politics and aims to grind up and redistribute
social prestige (and economic rights), they have conflicts over status in their artistic
foreground.

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23 Stored and entrained memory complexes

Cultural experiences may not be so much discovering something new as recovering a

stored, temporarily lost, state. The work of art may induce the return of pleasurable
moods through control of cognitive boundaries. Guattari describes these repeatable
bounded moods as ritournelles, refrains. People who grew up with TV don't think in
terms of aura-indued objects, but of episodes signalled by theme tunes. These refrains can
be thought of as obdurations: the fluid substance of awareness is broken up by boundaries
and we see the emergence of objects.
The physical details of the art experience may trigger the retrieval of moods. The
moment when the front lights go down; the evocative charge of theme music; the book as
object. These signs are self-referential (more exactly, the tenth occurrence of them
arouses memories of the first nine occurrences). The Internet publication may need
something like theme music to create a mnemonic affective boundary. Part of making a
phone connection is seizure, meaning that the recipient phone can't receive other phone-
calls while you're on; the Internet magazine has to make an affective seizure.

24 The Time Rail

There is an image of a time rail, never turning back on itself and ceaselessly making
styles obsolete. This is terrifying for someone away from the cultural centres where the
next rail is being forged, because you suspect that, by the time you've heard about the
new thing and worked out how to do it, it's already the old thing. I suspect this is an
anxiety hallucination, and that it is circulated by people who are deluded into thinking
that where they are is the centre, the in place, there there, the inside of the inside, and
who have a convulsive need to regard everyone else as hicks. It's like the fashion industry
in this way. You can't simultaneously believe in 'being up to date' and in 'the pluralism of
cultural achievement'.
What we seem to have in England is a fear of thinking about technique in case
you're behind the times. This means people fail to develop their own technique, never
mind what might be happening in some glittering, imaginary, metropolitan culture
nightclub.
Some other interpretations of being 'out of date'. Perhaps a poet makes stylistic
breakthroughs when they have no job and no family; and then writes dully and
infrequently when they do have those things. So the indifference of their later volumes
might not to be to do with the inherent decline of a certain style, but with their way of
spending time. Actually, what is noticeable is the insensitivity of critics to poets younger
than themselves; typically, they go on liking the poets slightly older than themselves and
assuming that history stops just after them. Because of the career structure, the prominent
critics at any moment are therefore twenty years out of date in their enthusiasms; this
arouses deep resentment against the previous poetry generation at any time.
If style X of 1960 goes "out of date" in 1980, how is it we can still read the books
of 1960 in 1996? Doesn't this imply that someone could still write in the style of 1960 in

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1996? Perhaps the weakness of retro styles is the boredom and fatigue of the poets using
them, not problems internal to the style.
It would be wrong to repeat a stanza in a poem. But the stanza was good the first
time. Perhaps, on the larger scale too, there is a set of anticipations and possibilities at
any moment, which must be realised or forfeited. The release of information destroys the
inchoate tensions and glimpses from which it is generated.

25 A world café

Why shouldn't there be a thousand such tense states all over the English-speaking world,
rather than just one?
One answer might be the difference between a live literary milieu, and an isolated,
provincial poet, relying on print for stimuli and linguistically alienated from the society
physically around him or her. The first instance generates its own atmospheres and its
own time line. The second is dependent on the centre where the books and magazines
come from.
This is divisive, because it means only the in-group have access to liveness. In the
thirties, for example, Auden and Spender were hanging out with other up-to-date poets all
the time, while some working-class poet in Manchester wasn't, or had to hang out with
people of archaic and dissimilar poetic persuasions if they did find someone. Only the
people blessed with literary culture and the right social background were allowed to get
away from the literary culture and write poetry which belonged to the current decade.
What the Internet could offer is a live literary milieu even for people in regional
cities and with original and marginal literary tastes. If that fruit isn't too sweet to be eaten.

26 The importance of independent producers

I accept a viral competition theory that multiple small sources mean all fruitful niches are
investigated and individual loci are pushed and exploited to the maximum, creating new
value. So, not a million cans of beans, but ten thousand different cans. My view of
modern British poetic history is that access to cheap reprographic methods meant that
there were 2000 poetry magazines in the sixties (counted by Wolfgang Görtschacher).
This astonishing manyness meant the rise of equally astonishing diversity, as poets
realised they didn't have to conform to narrow Christian-academic ideals to get
published; which created a diverse audience. I say 'my view' because the official view is
still that this never happened.
The era of uncontrolled freedom gave rise to the greatest diversity that British
poetry has ever known. I take it that the optimum situation for the reader is fantasy rafts
of mutual facilitation, so that you have endless diversity and for every mood you and find
a group of poets who have taken it through to its logical conclusion. Of course, it didn't
work like that; only a few poets were really interested in experiment and development.
(Yes, but there are a hundred exceptions!) The zones of suggestibility weren't hot enough,
or the developable ideas were missing somehow.

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 Smaller unit costs mean faster evolution, more generations in a shorter time.
Pressure from the audience was missing: but the Internet's nature could make this
feedback ultimately efficient, and so speed up and direct evolution. The Internet offers
small batch, high end, highly customized production, and the revolution could happen all
over again.
The same historical shift meant that there were groups of poets in virtually every
university town (and some others). The 'live' interactions were available for thousands of
people; but there is a formal problem, since the stimuli you really need are other people
who think like you. If you're a surrealist, it's no good meeting in a pub with a lot of
domestic realists, however polite. The pressure to conform to a centre, and not to perfect
your personal, non-central style, was and is crushing. The Net potentially allows you to
contact people all over the world, making your milieu much more precise, and much
hotter and more stimulating for you as a poet. I presume what the audience needs is
finished styles rather than compromised ones.

27 Consonance and specialisation

I edit a magazine which includes very diverse poetry. I often wish it was specific and
repetitive, which would put pressure on poets to hit a specific goal and, because of the
visible competition, to hit it incredibly well. This is true of the bands of 1970, they
specialised in order to compete. But for me this would mean turning down lots of good
poetry and banking on material from a narrow spectrum which probably wouldn't arrive.
But if there was a huge mass of material, I would specialise: so if poetry becomes
deterritorialised, we might see all magazines specialising and any broad-band ones just
disappearing. There are about 215 poetry magazines in the UK, but I would say their
specialisation is minimal: there are very few which give an experience strong enough to
be remembered and repeated; to form a refrain. And this gives the poets no aesthetic
instruction; it leaves them in a blurred awareness. I don't believe in a line of artistic
progress, but any poem has to be pushed for a thousand miles to become what it needs to
be. I would like to see poetry magazines which are narrow spectrum but totally saturated.
I think at present we have loyalty groups which don't really represent sensibilities.

28 The recognitions

It's unlikely that the artist's personality will be less important in the Internet than in print.
The personality goes around the utterance and gives it its qualities. Recognisability
triggers the reader's retrieval of a responsive mood. You are attracted, you want to be
where the interesting people are. This is archaic, it goes back to the playground.
Poetry becomes completely different when you print it without the author's
names; the difference is too primal to be defined. We can't wash the personality out of
poetry, although we can notice that the preference of readers for names already popular
biases the milieu against anyone new, and editors have to add the counter-bias. We can
hope that the signature being transmitted through ultra-modern technology is a mode of
perception, a window on a larger world, rather than just a personal appearance as himself,
a thorough-bass of "I'm me and so am I".

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 I don't accept that it is a robust personality which makes art repetitive; I think it's
the self-imitation of poets. Technically incompetent artists also repeat themselves.
Searching through a file of poems to help us proof Angel Exhaust 13 on screen, I
recognized someone's typescript and visual layout through the back of the paper. Time-
lapse? a fraction of a second. As radical gestures become recognizable, innovation gets
reduced to Me-ness.

29 Acts of behavioural grace

We not only recognize poets, we are attracted to them and wish to repeat the first
encounter with them. Why we find certain faces attractive is a mystery; it's not easy to
define attraction except in a circular fashion. It's something humans do, and it's certainly
the basis of aesthetics. But what is it? Andrew Sarris identified in the films of Frank
Borzage a 'behavioural beauty'; the beautiful style of poets is (all too) human, signalling
goodness, kindness, and intelligence.
Art reduces itself to the minimal, what we would be frustrated if it were withheld,
and that minimum demonstrates something, probably the quality of someone's character.
Whatever precedes the existence of channels of communication, is conservative. And so
again we will perceive what we wanted to perceive.

30 Minstrels

Joyce Youings has written about the move of the English gentry, in the course of the 16th
century, away from expressing and acquiring social power by lavish public feasting, and
towards leading a quiet and private life, while accumulating money and land protected by
the stable rule of law rather than by pre-eminence in the district. There is a connection
between the disappearance of minstrels, hired for big parties, the rise of reading
(demanding solitude and quiet rooms), and the decline of the use by the gentry of armed
force to seize assets and intimidated judges and juries to obstruct the course of justice.
This displacement of upper-class cultural energy towards reading was one of the factors
bringing Elizabethan literature about. The gentry stopped leading their life in public, and
domestic architecture dwelt on smaller, more luxuriously furnished, rooms.
The move away from formal eulogy and visible, public display of assets, and the
rise of sobriety and rationality as, really, means of self-aggrandisement, has had a great
influence on English poetry, tending ever since to become more private and rational, and
less communal and lavish and boasting. The sixties of this century tended to reverse this
change out, with television's new visual-oral intimacy bringing new minstrels. Some of
their foppish get-ups had a mediaeval air. How the Internet will affect boasting and
display remains unclear, but this is one of the most powerful and unstable values in
poetry.
So the gentry were becoming more internalised and contemplative while thriving
on the land released by the dissolution of the contemplative orders. It's confusing. And so
will this be.

19

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Chaotic Dynamics, or, Ram Jam Bedlamarama, or You will never hear surf music
again (again), or From the heroical history of the Bohemians, or They're Justified
and they're Ancient and I wonder what they're on: Conductors of Chaos, edited by
Iain Sinclair (484pp., Picador, 1996, £9.99)
"In the field, chaotic dynamics can create difficulties that we do not fully understand, and
which may require more detailed studies than have been usual in the past." (the New
Scientist Guide to Chaos, p.88)

The scam is that Welsh underground hippie, psychogeographer, stallholder, sunstroke

victim and small press poet reincarnated as distingué High Street Gothic novelist,
topographer, and star of the London Review of Books Iain Sinclair has dredged up thirty-
six survivors of the Left modernist poetry scene which was closed down, erased from the
tape, violently abused, and generally kicked into the X-files by the poetic Right in the
seventies. The shock about coming across these names in the High Street is seeing them
as bashful yet pleased commodity gewgaws and not as severed heads dangling from some
enforcer's saddle-bow; they've all been silenced, marginalised, taunted, satirized, made
invisible or monstrous by disinformation. Heads kicked in by sonic distortion. Denise
Riley impales her co-workers on p.397, 'and as she frets the minute wars scorch on
through paranoias of the unreviewed/ herded against a cold that drives us in together–
then pat me more, Coventry/ to fall from Anglo-Catholic clouds of drifting we's high
tones of feeling down/ o microscopic horror scans of tiny shiny surfaces rammed up
against the nose/ (...) one we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets blown/ fresh drenched
and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own polymer.' This is the return of
the repressed, the future of British poetry which was deleted to make way for endlessly
looping regression; these are the living nightmares, the sons of extermination. Or as the
Ninja code says, The darkness surrounds me. I am clothed in night. This is in fact the
poetry by which the English literature of the last thirty years will be judged by any future
audience of intelligent and thrill-seeking people. The clinging heady taint which fills my
nostrils now is one of criminality: the systematically excluded, damaged and steeled by
decades of punitive confinement, aflare in a death spree of dithyrambically and
barbarically spilt energy, making fools of the law. Behold the empty hand, Edged with the
truth hard won, Becomes a sword in righteousness; out of lockdown and into a barrage of
contempt; hunted like a weasel in the corn. Beckoning to the demons of paranoia to save
ourselves from speaking the language of ghosts. The society of which this wholly
reckless speech could have been the code of ideals will now never come about: like
Peckinpah's outlaw princes of the Mexican frontier in mid revolution, the earth had
cooled. They hadn't. The land had changed. They couldn't.
'What process of mind extracting/ divers out of the sea/ hooded as gulls, the Arctic in
their wings,/ unfolds the cold and creeping lava of this tide/ into the volcanic sculpture of
the beach?/ What musselled mountain roars again/ as roots of earth are blown into the
sky?/ Trapped in their rippling mirror fish flesh hackles/ and revolutions turning on us
images of horror/ that never rise to flower upon the globe/ mornings of moon-drawn
curtains and draped wells.' 'In general, the pulse of radiation will contain many
frequencies. (...) It is hard to see how we can know the answer to these conjectures until a
great deal more is known, both about gravity waves and the conditions at the centre of
our Galaxy. Superficially at least, the experimental results seemed very compelling and

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the sidereal anisotropy was exactly the sort of effect that one would expect(.)' 'Ten and
twenty years of running into great mentalities of very slight significance. Across flawed
communities. The soil acidic is. There industries leak gas. And protected material and.
West and dank is the journey that brings me to suburban matter. That take me from here
to there. Awkwardly dry-assed. From then to now. These lines and patterns that erase
unaccountables. Doors shut and secure. Allow the growth of mirrors. More is less. Must
be. Must be must be. Pigeonshit and recreational landscapes. The family stage. The father
the mother. (...) A feat of the digressive realm. And mannered gestures. Of adjectives and
parenthesis. Stamina and prolonged action. Of the strong, supple ankle and the displaying
of feet. Toes spread out in fans might keep me safe from greed.' Swamp pot tonics.
Dithyrambic maidens of Dionysus easily eluding boorish pursuit. New family values.
'The Stumbling Block has made itself of carbon paper, sucking the increasingly
obsolescent material from offices at the centre of the city. It is compressed to become a
pivot; diamond-hard. The compacted density smoulders in the deep night blue of its
waxy, slippery layers. The tiny scar letters are thick and noisy at its centre, their
planktonic clusters bite and disengage continually, refocusing the chattering fusion. This
mute lexical friction gives the heat that powers the inflexibility of the shifting mass. It
can be heard only in the quiet times; its static, a translucent muscle pulling between
infinites. In this manifestation the block is almost organic, a writhing tank of cellular
activity, straining between two poles(.)' (and) 'The Stumbling Block is being hunted.
Extravagant books of soap, perfumed with fear, have been placed in the sunken zones.
Dews will rub their musk to bathe the causeways with heart-rending lures. Lanterns of ice
are offered to the early morning, light is stroked through their steaming chancels. These
constructed spectres are almost strong enough to catch and drain the omnipotent cryptic
grace of the block.' And now, for swinging lovers, he returns to what is, after all, home
grounds–to the happy task of singing the most enchantedly romantic songs he knows. 'a
pulse/ flicked across a backless mirror/ in the tick of blanks and slats/ motion limned but
not caught/ by a gleaming streak/ the event scratched the graphic surface of silver/ lips of
the wake parted in the deep emulsion/ ripple nuclei explode/ crests summate to fray in
light and foam/ the vortex overloads its own patterns/ the swimmer's hand pushes the
water in the swimmer's shape/ scanning of pulse peaks declares a buried star' Twice as
sweet as sugar, twice as brilliant as salt. Then for the first time he released the awesome
Ninja Kiai–it was legend that this could stun the very birds from the trees. 'There's been
more than one Caudine Forks, more/ by a long chalk and more to come/ More when we're
on the upgrade, as now/ (so they reckon)/ Still more, and internecine too/ when the
cosmocrats of the dark aeon/ find themselves/ wholly at a loss/ in the meandered
labyrinth of/ their own monopolies./ And the Celestials themselves/ begin to weary/ of
our bickering imperium and turn/ plug-eared to all our suffrages.' El tango macho. El
tango poema. El tango ternura. 'When you wake and open your eyes/ transparent days
rise to the surface,/ each part aligned on the grid/ etched on the smooth face of the
unworked block,/ today's already horizontal light.//Shares fall in the Asian morning, / fear
falls to earth and burns us;/ numberless they clamour at the glass/ cathedral clouds roll in
from the wet,/ the sky opens to drench us to the skin.' The first rule is: leave nothing
living. 'The rumours of his being everywhere/ but never seen, or nowhere, black on
black,/ proliferate, multiply to a film/ in which enigmatic footage repeats/ his visual
changes, or the camera slows// to meditation on a door/ infused with white light, or a

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lifting jet/ aimed from Kennedy to a red sunset,/ a blank frame punctuating every three/
as a phased, abstract possibility (.) ' You can't do this and you can't do that, finally after
you've understood that, what the hell can we do? Because that's what you sent us in there
to do. 'What comfort could be derived from the implosion of networks; the trade routes
go in a circle that frays and tightens on the city's rim. Cars and trucks are abandoned,
each day further from the centre with its funicular descent into the rubbish-compacting
dens of the avant-garde. A few avians sortie across the fractured energy reserves of a
secret library, where the ripples of migration deposit a film of refluxive script one of
whose characters opens a single rusted memory-valve, divulging the inception of a time-
schism: history before, and history after, the circumnavigation of value.' Freaky Deak.
Freaky Deak. Freaky Deak.(Hendry; The search for gravity waves; Bergvall; Catling;
Duncan; Jones; Corcoran; Reed; Mengham)
Maybe you don't like these quotes; well, it goes on like that; and remember the
curt words of Radio Birdman's Rob Younger, faced with an audience in rural South
Australia that wasn't into heavy metal: If you don't like it you can get out. After burning
up the stores of a conservative and long-lived cultural succession, they tried to cross the
Styx in two leaps; thirst prevails and memory will fail, as the social formations which
were the meaning of the poetry are destroyed its verbal body stiffens into place as a
deviant ossature, a sinister everted structure displaying phantom organs of sense.What
disintegrates, flies on the wind; and I foretell that Conductors will become a fetish book,
one of the die-for possessions which set starry-eyed youth in Pudsey, Motherwell, and
West Penwith on the path to la gaya scienza. Not as fiendish as the puzzle which opens
the gates to Hell in Hellraiser, bulked out with poets who are long overdue for the
phagocytes, nevertheless it contains fragments of the extraterrestrial in full ballistic
descent.
Sinclair is known as a collector of grotesques; a semi-documentary director who
needs a crew of neurologically atonal gazing-stocks, twisted visions, twisted limbs, to
animate le regard concret of his spectacle. Peckinpah, Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, also had
a stock company. Much as I detest the Andy Pandy wimps of our cherished mainstream,
Conductors is the kind of bar where the bad people go; a Café Egon Krenz. The Boris
Pugo ubegalovka. The title is surely a reminiscence of Frankenstein's monster, hauled
aloft, in the novel, in an electrical storm to become a conductor of the shock which re-
animated him. Investors are thus alerted to the risks of innovation, of decontextualisation
and the new flesh. Wilhelm, hand me the diagram! The uneasy notion arises that
Conductors represents a Sinclair-Tod Browning freak show, a brelan des dingos where
the possessed tread out their linear, insect-like dances of daftness while a swooping
camera integrates them into a kind of Mondo Cane panorama not unlike his live-from-
Bedlam prose fictions White Chappell, Downriver, and Radon Daughters. Some poets
have been included only as geeks (did you see 'Nightmare Alley'?), and it is this diapason
which gives the anthology a majestic spatial recession which the works of a single poet
could never have. The real heroes of the book are procedures forged by subjectless
action, generating take-home forms for as many as will. This restored socius is a test
range: the sight of thirty-six people running teaches the gaze in tiny differences of rhythm
and speed, a lucid saturation making possible comparative and developmental insights
which years of compulsive reading of little magazines could not afford. The effects of so
many years of rejection are awkward; one-sided language, an inside without an outside,

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either mutating into new and boundless geometries or losing its eyes to run around in
tautological and incomprehensible circles. For, what is language without a listener? Some
of the characters seem to have taken bad acid, others seem refugees from an M.R. James
story. The socius of this big anthology promises to reverse these effects of isolation.
There is no New Right in poetry. But the idea of experimental poetry was
marginalised, repressed, and very thoroughly hidden under lies by a wave of people who
didn't wait for funding from American foundations linked to the military-industrial
complex. This wave of cultural conservatism, which has shown some signs of breaking
up during the past five years, was distinguished for its belief that it was Left and populist,
and so wasn't cultural conservatism even if it did roll back the rules and artistic theory to
the 1950s. This devastated and parasitical growth is registered as the real history by other
anthologies. The past as damage, more or less. Would it be a good idea to mediate the
ideas of radical poetry to a new and young audience, who have been lied to all their lives
about the history of poetry in Britain? Exactly here is the role which Angel Exhaust has to
play. Bus Conductors of Chaos is mainly texts from the past five years; but it does
contain the history of the last thirty, as a kind of package tour. Everyone constructs the
past for themselves. The victory of the Right can't be repealed; but you'd be crazy to
ignore this large-scale return of the repressed which Sinclair has poured so much life into;
dawn of the dead, on every city street.

What is Chaos?
I am one of the Wild Bunch chosen for this death ride, qualifying I think as one of the
headcases. Unable to review my own poetry, I asked Andrew Sarris to adapt his piece on
Edgar G. Ulmer from The American Cinema (one of the decisive books of my life): 'His
camera never falters even when his characters disintegrate.' (And further: ' That a
personal style could emerge from the lowest depths of Poverty Row is a tribute to a
director without alibis.') 'But yes, Virginia, there is an Andrew Duncan, and he is no
longer one of the private jokes shared by auteur critics, but one of the minor glories of the
cinema. Here is a career, more subterranean than most, which bears the signature of a
genuine artist.' Voilà. But what is this? 'Strictly speaking, most of Duncan's films are of
interest only to unthinking audiences or specialists in mise-en-scène.' The five poems
printed here are bleak, pessimistic, and efficient; an Ulmer movie to set beside the more
florid or oscillatory material around it.
One of the omissions is Sinclair himself, whose great works of the seventies, Lud
Heat and Suicide Bridge, have just been re-released by Vintage. I can't easily evoke these
near-illegal masterpieces, but let's mention Peckinpah, Cronenberg, Coleridge,
psychedelia, Edgar G. Ulmer, Brakhage, Nicholas Pevsner, Mark E. Smith, Mulder and
Scully, and that's just scratching the surface.
Some of the poets included go up to a bursting 20 pages; the book is like twenty-
five pamphlets in one. Some notable poets might not fill so many without repeating
themselves; but many of the more baffled agonists also ramble around and miss their exit
cue. Whatever the vagaries of this weirdathon, the anthology has a dizzying bouquet of
variety, unpredictability, craziness. The dob profile runs like this:
1936 1937 1939 1940 1943 1944 1947
1 1 2 1 2 1 1
1948 1949 1950 1951

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6 1 1 2
1953 1955 1956 1960 1962 1963 1964
3 1 3 1 1 1 1

I have excluded the 5 older poets: J.F. Hendry, David Jones, N. Moore, Gascoyne,
Graham, each one active during the neo-Romantic 1940s and so assimilable to the protest
against the fruity Oxford chaps of the day. While Conductors covers poets from several
generations (born between roughly 1936 and 1964), it does not open the archives; almost
all the material included is from the past ten years. A few dozen poets deserve to be
represented by a few poems, though not the flamboyant and redundant swathes allowed
here.
Reviewing an anthology always brings one up against the problem of
generalisations. If you treat every poet as a homogeneous block you get a different result
than if you take every poem separately or if you take every line separately. In fact, the
possible variations on poetic classification are so complex that they slide into the
mathematically intractable, something like chaos in physics; we can reach stable results
by picking units of study large enough to exclude impossible complexity, but with the
knowledge that the accuracy of the results is rigorously limited by the units chosen. It is
possible to analyse the corpus of poetry in terms of what sex the poet belongs to, or what
region the poet lives in. The beckoning chaos of classification points to the double node
of over-complexity and artificial regulation: we can easily reach a degree of complexity
which would be impossible to read or remember, and which would destroy any poem it
was allowed into; but the controls must be artificial, and as they organise the phenomena
they create all kinds of false structures. The insight that this double condition underlies
many, perhaps all, cognitive processes derives ultimately from information theory and
has been much exploited in modern poetry; the drift has been to draw attention to the
conventions and so withdraw from them, creating an ironic space. Much traditionalist
effort has gone into claiming that there are no artificial structures involved in language,
so that literal truth is possible. Before the discussion, it is best if I present a few simple
ideas of Information Theory, since chaos can most easily be conceptualized in its terms. It
was originated, principally, by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, in the 1940s.
Information theory is about communication and holds that the information content
of any message, or sector of a message, is its unpredictability. The information content of
any message sent a second time is zero. Information is related to determinacy through
time: the amount of indeterminacy available in digit 7 of a message before it reaches the
receiver is the same as the amount of information contained in that digit after it has been
read. So much for information theory.
A number of less precise ideas follow. Any message is written in a code:
communication demands that transmitter and receiver share the code in which the
message is coded. Any message is a realization of one of the possibilities contained in the
code, and can also usefully be considered as an exclusion or zero-marking of all the other
messages permitted by the code. The code may have been agreed before any transmission
occurred, or may itself be transmitted. Receivers can deduce unknown parts of the code
by studying enough messages: we learn English by listening to utterances in English, not
vice versa. People often visualize determinacy in terms of a network of nodes: if there are
many legal paths at a node, this is rich connectedness and high indeterminacy, conversely

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if there is only one path. This is only a visual metaphor. People often talk about
information and thermodynamics together, because thermodynamics is also interested in
indeterminacy and the possibility of calculating past and future states from present ones.
Information is an essential component of beauty, but information theory does not
give us a theory of aesthetics. A minute of television made up of random grey fuzz
contains more information than a minute of a TV drama, because it is less predictable: if
a human figure is on screen for a whole second (or ten screen refreshes), that is more
predictable than screens generated by random numbers. Representing something from the
non-symbolic world must be a form of determinism (you are constrained by what already
exists), so puzzlingly representing anything at all reduces art's information content. This
puzzle explains why aesthetics knows something which information theory doesn't. It
may be that a very large set of random numbers, say enough to specify an hour of grey
fuzz-blare screentime, could be called chaos.
Unpredictability is one parameter of good art, though. Information theory posits
that the receiver is forming hypotheses about the remainder of the message, and updating
these constantly as new information comes in. This hypothesizing probably is something
the reader of poetry does do, and a book containing 100 very similar poems will get more
boring as one goes through it. So as one turns the page one has a poem-matrix in one's
mind of which the real poem is a realization, more exciting the more it damages that
matrix. Arguably, the pleasure of a poem in a context is that of scanning and rewriting the
matrix. In Western poetry of recent centuries, the matrix may be something like the
artist's character, and character is the other theme of our review. Information theory has
an understanding of large series of repetitive digits: for example, you can collapse a
streak of 100 7s into the string "7x100", which at 5 digits long is 95 shorter than the raw
message. This suggests that the logical complexity of a message is its incompressibility.
Arguably, the merit of a poet is partly the incompressibility of their work, i.e. the
independence of each page, stanza or line from the preceding ones. We acquire this
secondary code by learning; there may always be hidden extra predictability in the code.
Poetry loses its charm on repeated readings, which suggests that the joy of poetry may be
some feature or cluster of features within the temporally unstable curve of learning
during the first few readings. Does this poetry invite the incalculable data energies of
chaos?

scour, grouse, loses back, knows how to, chervil.

little owl. who other trust loaded who quizz loess
italian fish, poitrine. chlorine fear rests, quizzical.
having taken, was that too, meurthe-et-moselle do not
walk on air, precipitate, mon dieux prie adieu
pieds noirs crumbs holt john bull.
auxerre. cierre. du haut en bas. homberg.
cherry brandy. strapped back. large glass goblet.
yellow glass avignon mass my brother he did me lacerate.

(Grace Lake, from 'June 21st')

Rum chiming a bull by its horns through purple bushes

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 To Fields of flowers whose pinks and greens are peachy Blush.

Dusk Pushing a cart humped with woes

Through an electric storm of joy, Snaps–

Prized from physical bondage to consumer slavery

In lightning flashes prostitutes pissing above old men coughing oil
Bright crabs erupting on mushroom skins Resolve to tonic.

Of ringing changes wet and dry from sugar and salt from coffee
And tea into spray-on jeans and cocacolizing TVs and sex
Packet cassettes and this and Other Tales
Of The Remains of the richest and His Biscuits

(cris cheek, from 'Stranger')

A tape cosmography twists upon a three-ply door

extracted from that set at nothing, artfully,
not any golden strip nor mask-play of shadow
either swiped from traffic, nor the downstairs
thief accommodates, sliding there noiselessly,
no, nor merger of the government departments'
many-hued electric loom, nor cheap ecumenicism
fattens pigeon crops & spends its necky bubbles
near & far. Descendants flutter largesse, stolen
in the pantry waxing & shimmer, unpremeditated:
You two have a picnic while I do the shooting.

(John Wilkinson, from 'Crow-cage')

Your response, reader, may be "Omigod! what are they talking about?" Rest assured that I
do know. It's my trade. (Or do I?) It is fair to say that these passages show a rapid cutting
technique; the selective quoting understates the overall diversity (or incoherence) of the
poems; the unpredictable quality of the verse movement defies rational expectations and
so is analogous to chaos as a concept in physics. The passages in question offer the
following problems: the poet's personality, normally deduced from the coherent flow of
the text, as the gradient which drew it, is missing; there is a lack of connection and of
explanation; objects are presented from their least familiar angle; there is a shortage of
affect and identification is difficult; they do not offer a moral picture, in which people are
seen to be good or bad. My review will be based around these topics.
17 of the poets have been published in Angel Exhaust. The grouping follows
magazines like Grosseteste Review, Spanner, the Mottram era Poetry Review, Ochre,
Perfect Bound. I certainly don't like all the poetry presented here. But I think we have
here a different compositional technique, which is much better than the official English
poetry. By taking part in this project, one finds one's own reading habits becoming
suspended and visible: systems of feeling, identification, gratification, interpretation of

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data, social imagination. Looking back on the journey, one can see the shape of what one
has left behind: a rigorous exercise of self-alienation into which one was only lured by
the opulent decor and apparent fertility of the new linguistic space, and which permits
precious self-understanding. This understanding is not recorded in the texts, which
merely offer a set of transforms by which it can be reached; it is unique for each
individual reader, although it includes a confrontation with the collective past and its
regimes of ascribing psychological states to individuals. The new manner is thin on
beautiful moments and on the poet offered as a normalizing, reassuring, friendly voice; it
offers, frequently, not the chaotic excess of signs but a gap, a thin air lens whose
sparseness allows one to see what was formerly invisible. In 1929, D.H. Lawrence
published an essay called 'Chaos in Poetry', which expounds a belief that the cosmos is a
flow of inexhaustible and intractable variety, from which form protects people: "The
chaos which we have got used to we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of
which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilisation. (...) Man
must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his
terror of chaos he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting
whirl." "But at last our roof deceives us no more. It is painted plaster, and all the skill of
all the human ages won't take us in." "This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we
have to get back to chaos." This remarkably anticipates what information theorists were
saying in the 1950s. Because information storage always involves organizing structures
and rules for association and analysis, the perceptual event cannot properly be broken
down into impinging reality, classification structure, and rules of procedure; the
impingent constantly vanishes and changes as it is stored. "What about the poets, then, at
this juncture? They reveal the inward desire of mankind. What do they reveal? They
show the desire for chaos, and the fear of chaos. The desire for chaos is the breath of their
poetry. The fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique." Whatever the
problems of Lawrence's patterns of thought, this clearly represents the ideology which
was operative sixty years later, producing the title of Conductors of Chaos and some of
the poems in it. Lawrence's partiality for the passing second appears to mean that he is
blissfully forgetful of what he has just written, gloriously free to write it again.
Transience, repetition, simplicity, egoism, directness: this list of epithets could equally
apply to rock and roll, and certainly Lawrence came into his own in the sixties. His
opposition of form and complexity (unpredictability, rapid succession...) asks for
attention, because it seems equally plausible that an inexperienced writer, without grasp
of form, would write in a very simple, predictable way. Complexity in poetry falls into
the general succession of styles; cris cheek's rapidity of motion could just as well be a
product of a particular technique of editing as of the primary realness of reality.
The introduction to A new Anthology of Modern Poetry, 1920-1940, edited by C.
Day Lewis and L.A.G. Strong, says "For every poet, the world is a chaos which his
special gift will resolve into new patterns and combinations. (...) The world we live in has
increased in complexity more rapidly than the world at any other time of history. Both the
sense-data which are presented to us, and the scientific or philosophical theories ... have
reached a bewildering profusion and variety." This is curious, because it leads in to the
title and market image of Conductors of Chaos so exactly, and even into the technical
decisions underlying much of the work. Things don't move very fast, do they? Eric
Homberger quotes, in his brilliant Art of the Real, a fifties statement by Donald Hall: 'I

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have come to think that all human action is formal; all personality is an aesthetic
structure, a making something exist by statement: like saying a word. Symmetry becomes
the root of morality, conduct, and judgement, and reality is a terrifying chaos outside
form glimpsed only occasionally, and never, of course, understood without a translation
into form.' (Poetry from Oxford, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith, Fortune Press, 1953) This
represents the other side, but the underlying map of the cosmos, as it impinges on the
brain's peripheral sensors, is exactly the same. There is a certain continuity of
terminology; the tradition is agreed that the raw fragments of the cosmos and of other
people's psychological reality are too complex to deal with direct, they can only be
converted into meaning by mediations. The breakdown of the traditional mediations
(Christianity, positivist science, liberalism) both lets in a tantalizing flood of the
unmediated, i.e. chaos, and threatens the poet with total silence for lack of common
words. Both Strong/Day Lewis, and Roy Fuller in a 1951 symposium called The Craft of
Letters in England, discuss the lack of shared belief systems as a gap preventing the poet
from writing: "there is first this widespread change and multiplication of sense-data to
complicate modern verse, and then there is what poets call tradition– or, as we feel it to-
day, the lack of tradition. I mean that poetry to-day has no common universal
background. (...) And when poets have no such common ground with their readers, no set
of beliefs which both take for granted, some of the traditional channels of communication
are automatically closed." (Day Lewis). An important pressure on artistic thought has
been propaganda, which could be described as over-successful collective mediation, and
is quite widely understood now as an impoverishment of topology: events, characters,
and ideas lose their ambiguity and resonance, so that there are no spare possibilities, our
minds have nothing to work on, and although we learn the lesson we are artistically
frustrated because the course of the book or film is predictable. Such a system is
catastrophic, because, however rigid it is, there is always the possibility that the reader or
viewer will reject it lock stock and barrel: a dictatorship is unstable because it is rigid, it
makes no concessions but it can collapse altogether. A democracy is extremely unlikely to
collapse, it is stable because its internal structure is fluid, shifting to reflect the migrations
and re-alignments of its voters or of interest groups. Propaganda for democracy would
make this point by enriching the topology of its knowledge systems, demonstrating how
good solutions are found by passing through a series of less good ones without seizing
up. The 1950s stimulated thought about ambiguity, because the public had, after a phase
of intense political struggle which went back to 1933, become very attuned to propaganda
and dead set, mostly, against it. Because the propaganda staffs of communism, capitalism,
and indeed Fascism, were highly expert and had used every possible artistic technique,
the questioning involved every element of the work of art. If identification came in for
special curiosity, this was because hardly any work of propaganda had failed to put the
unnaturally healthy, emotionally integrated, selfless, man or woman at the centre of its
artistic machine; you couldn't move out of communism without untangling your
emotional projections onto those dynamic communist heroes, martyrs, and athletes. It
was quite apparent that even non-political artists had used these carefully designed
devices, for propaganda for the self.
This crisis really goes back to the 1920s; what Sinclair is offering us is the poets
working with the new fix which was developed in the Sixties, or even the late Fifties; a
loose system giving chaos the role which electricity plays in rock and roll, directs

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attention to the mediations themselves, which are only tentative, parts of systems for
generating hypotheses, replaces timeless knowledge with open epistemology, makes the
poem a series of existential acts outside any permanent ideology or referential system,
pushes personality out into the way successive instants of data are edited, and so forth. In
1962 all this was new, but if you still find it difficult today... where have you been? The
new scene offers us: a) poets riding the chaos rather than reducing it to suburban order
via sedate forms b) allowing indeterminacy into the system is an alternative to having
"ideological convictions" and somehow fills the same structural role.
To avoid an all too self-confirming presentation, I must point out that a) there is
really no evidence that the perceptual world is all aflow with data, and indeed the
prevalence of boredom in modern life suggests that the distribution of chaos is patchy,
like the distribution of stars in space b) statements about the prevalence of 'chaos" are
unpersuasive without a definite search pattern or a map of where reality is, or is not,
chaotic c) since chaos cannot be made available to thought except through mediations,
the claim to know what lies beyond mediations is vulnerable to all kinds of criticisms; we
don't really know what lies "before" language and so our conception of what language
really does is tendentious and subjective.
High variability is a quality of good art, but after all one of the virtues of writing
is lucidity, and there some traditions of English poetry arduously exclude the
unpredictable. How does the reader swim as the flow of sense disintegrates? Is it possible
to remain attentive to a total change of state from second to second? The proposal is that
the content of a text is its information content. Everything which makes parts of the text
predictable reduces its content. More concretely, every page of a book supplies us with an
image of what the next page is going to be like. If someone writes 200 poems to more or
less the same plan, then reading a book which collects them produces a declining curve of
interest as predictability rises and rises. This presses the poet into the counter-step of
attenuating the scene-setting, breaking down the reassuring logical structures, making
points quickly, and editing-in the purely unpredictable: even if the reader is occasionally
unable to follow what is going on. Since the details of the poem do not repeat, what the
reader learns is higher-level forms: "abstract" and generative structures such as metre,
metaphors, rhetorical figures, dynamic shape, and the poet's character. These contain
more information than the many sentences which exemplify them. Because they are
common to an era, predictability carries over from one poet to another: it is convenient to
exploit the reader's increasing competence to restore excitement and high attention. We
could propose a measure of the complexity of a book in terms of how many underlying
structures we need to acquire in order to read it, which is also how predictable each new
page is before we turn to it; I propose that JH Prynne and Allen Fisher have the highest
index of unpredictability, i.e. formal complexity, of any writers ever. If we could derive
the metastatement which gives the generative formula for a Prynne or a Fisher poem, it
would be long; whereas the metastatement describing a Larkin or an Andrew Motion
poem would be very short.
The political motive for venturing into high complexity is a hypothesis about the
variability of society, imagined as a physical system in the terms of information theory.
Clearly there are basic constraints to how far any society can be changed, and these
include geology, the weather, the state of international trade, and human nature, in some
form or other; the belief in a revolutionary transformation proposes a model of society in

200
which every element has many microstates available without violating the constraints,
and in which every element could change a great deal if the elements touching it, being
its constraints, went into new and "legal" microstates. To describe such a system (and
imagining it involves describing it) demands a language of variables, not identifying an
observed microstate with the potential of any object, and a complex and dedicated state
of mind. The vision of a society, or a small social group, with high potential implies
revolutionary paths mathematically supported within the real topology. This world-view
asks for poems in which none of the elements are fixed and none of the relations between
them are fixed: in which "everybody solos all of the time", to quote Ornette Coleman.
Both aesthetic highs and revolution are merely statistical extremes on crests of high
energy states, but still satisfying the invariant laws of the system. Such extreme outcomes
are statistical aggregations of microstates, clusters. Chaos means non-linearity: in
practice, the hope that a system which regularly produced Conservative governments,
balance of payments crises, stop-go conjunctural interventions, the eminence of the right
wing of the Labour Party, industrial crises, familial cycles of deprivation, would stop
repeating itself and shoot into a completely new state. Non-linearity is high gain.
I admit that there are poets of left-wing sympathies who write in a monotonous
and predictable style. I don't ask that Adrian Mitchell, say, be stood up against a wall and
shot; but I don't see how an unfree poem can be a plea for a free society. (Nonetheless, if
some future Ministry of Rhythm should grasp the nettle, I daresay Adrian would write a
jaunty little ting-a-ling jingle for us to sing as we loaded our Armalites.) I don't see how
you can starve the reader of information and plan to give people, i.e. also the reader,
control over the decisions which shape their lives. The future society proposed by the
Left is mathematically chaotic: because it will dissolve the constraints of the past, of
poverty and invested, hierarchical power, it will make the behaviour of millions of
individuals much less predictable, and the complexity of the resulting environment, into
which we all have to schedule our behaviour, will oblige us to dissolve more constraints.
Radical art is a form of practice for freedom. The piece on circuit design in the New
Scientist Guide to Chaos (by Jim Lesurf) remarks on non-linearity resulting from a
second component not being constrained by the first: because it can say "yes" or "no" it is
like a conscious agent. When you are dealing with someone else, unless they are
constrained and unfree, their behaviour is unpredictable, and this makes your response
behaviour, your "next move" unforeseeable to you; linking many consciousnesses
together without a binding code of restrictive rules is like designing a chaotic amplifier,
which Lesurf gives instructions for doing.
The amount of energy in a system with self-organizing capability affects its
stability. Ecosystems in northern climates are less stable, and less complex, because the
overall energy flow, controlled by the amount of energy from the sun hitting the surface
of the earth or the sea, is lower. Any given area of a tropical region will contain many
more species than the same area of a high northern region. A destructive event in north
Scotland, or by the White Sea, damages the ecosystem more profoundly, because for each
energy-processing niche there are fewer "adjacent" species waiting to occupy it when
vacant. This has implications for the effects of dumping cores from Russian nuclear subs
in the Kara Sea, as discussed in a recent Brian Catling poem. The lack of species in the
north is the result of past destructive events: winter, in the hypothesis, wipes out
promising but sub-adapted genetic variants and so inhibits the rise of new species.

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Lethality wipes out the intermediate strands, leaving only one line of flow. Evolution,
then, has largely happened in the energy-rich central climates of the earth, ruled by the
optics of solar light. Evolution is instability bringing metastability, so that the ability to
recover is linked to the energy sum of the system; as we at first asserted. The repositing
of power in the hands of a few is a threat to society because it inhibits the variety of
alternative solutions, and if the ruling group fail, there are no alternative policies to be
applied. Open debate puts ideas through thousands of generations of testing,
improvement, and retesting: their robustness, after prolonged malleability, is the result of
many energy-using cycles and so, metaphorically, points to an energy-rich system. A
dictatorship, such as Russia until 1991, has inflexible policies, which are either applied
by force or fail catastrophically, leading to a putsch or a new revolution. Discussion of
alternative ideas is prohibited, which is, metaphorically, lethality for them, also
preventing the evolution which could make them philosophically robust; the opposition
ends up with ideas which are as flaky as Marxism. If a chancellor has a hundred
intellectually mature economic policies to choose from, it may still not be enough:
because many of them will not fit the circumstances; but choice is always better than
compulsion. Real-world economic policy would be a mix-and-match from different
systematic approaches.
Modern poetry is trying to illustrate these truths of information theory, but is also
governed by them. For example, poetry has been under attack from academics and from
the public, waving a panoply of criticisms; rather than simply building up ego defences
against these, the skilled poet, plausibly, will have subjected the initial undifferentiated
mass of poeticity to a thousand generations of purging and refinement, incorporating the
criticisms; the robustness of the final product will be proportional to the number of these
generations, and the outcome will, we guess, depend on the initial "energy level" of the
system. (Note that cuts and breaks are usually thought of as bringing shape to a body;
which is a synonym for form, one of our starting terms. How is it that shape is the
outcome of applied energy while form, allegedly, implies lack of energy? Perhaps shape
is energy made visible. The initial chaos:form formulation may be quite wrong.) Poetry
which has involved no conscious thought seems to be unadapted and to mean indifference
to poetry and a deficit of stored information-energy for the reader to consume.
Around here what we are looking for is a link between thermodynamics,
information theory, personality, and aesthetics. In fact, it is only by means of such a link
that we could first state Lawrence's opposition of chaos and form so as to reveal its true
meaning, and then expound what the real situation is so as to define where Lawrence is
wrong. Perhaps we could start our quest, and simultaneously justify it, by observing the
groundless point in Lawrence's semi-inspired utterance: if you take any text or text
fragment, you cannot point to any element which is form nor any element which is chaos.
It seems hard to prove that either one exists, yet we understand his metaphor.
The interconnection seems to be indicated by the phenomenon of hot-bloodedness
and its sequelae. Mammals cannot greatly reduce their energy budget when food is
scarce; conversely, their rapid rate of internal chemical reactions makes them fast-
moving, and their curiosity lets them exploit the environment. The ability of the mouse to
find food is conditioned by its rapid metabolism, which in turn is made possible by its
ability to find food. A reptile takes a more passive view of the world, being sluggish in
cold weather: the viper, in the English climate, hibernates without eating for up to nine

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months of the year, slowing its metabolism in a mimic death. Human beings also respond
to cold weather by depression, as if something calculated that, where little food is
available, it is more efficient to stay indoors, be inactive, and burn little energy, rather
than speed up to find food. This energy budget affects all functions, including the
emotional and intellectual ones. Functions like attentiveness, eagerness, high rates of
association and speculation, all essential to poetry, are interconnected to this global
activeness, governed by archaic hormonal systems. Fortunately, the system of glands, and
the hormones they secrete, is very complex, even taken simply as a printed circuit
diagram; it has many components and many interconnections. We could define it as the
personality; but it also runs on chemical reactions which are manifestly subject to
thermodynamics, and whose rates are governed by heat.
Another hint of a link is in the functional equivalence of process rules and the
commands of the personality as instructions for writing a poem. The 29 stanzas of Allen
Fisher's 'Philly Dog', published as a pamphlet and also in First Offense Ten, describe the
self:

This work begins with the self

(...)
The work a multiplicity of works embedded
disparate and without circularity
concealed identities serious similarities frayed
assumptions organised permanence deconstructed
inserts and envelopes narration
consumer and cultural producer
without identities and without exactness
rumour and intruder

(...)
The self becomes an instantaneous apprehension of multiplicity
in a given region not a substitute but an I feel
myself become animal, animal among others
on the edge of the garden created in order
to escape abstract opposition between multiple and one
to escape dialectics and cease treatment of numerical fragment
as lost totality or as an organic element in unity
instead to distinguish between types of multiplicity

(...)
I am a homeorhetic system
of attractor surfaces of chreods, necessary pathways,
located in multi-dimensional spacetimes
in which crossovers correspond to catastrophes
Folds on the surface that suspend descriptive
referential functions and any temporal character
of my experience(.)

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The resort to rules for "facturing" the poem aimed to evade the repetitiousness of poems
based on the personality, which within the poem appeared as a set of rules and
procedures. So the "procedures" and the "personality" were interchangeable, competing,
and similar. After many years of reflecting on this relationship, Fisher has produced his
poem describing the self, in terms of general system theory and even of electronics.
Perhaps we can come to understand the personality as an information process and
character or mood as clusters of features within a data handling process. The individual is
not the unit of psychological study; because receiving and emitting messages are essential
functions, the characteristics of the event are distributed along the whole chain, including
at least two individuals and the "situation", which includes at least the code governing
their messages and the world-horizon they find themselves in. The project of applying
cybernetics to psychology goes back to a 1936 book by Gregory Bateson. If the
personality is an information process then the curve by which information loses its value
may also affect the personality; behavioural processs may simply reach satisfaction and
stop, and indeed we can see life as a series of behavioural stages in which new behaviour
is learned; the compulsions of art may reach satisfaction and stop, and indeed the
development of artistic taste through life may be a series of endings.
If excitation level is a function of personality, then the rate of edits and cuts may
express personality in the most elemental levels of the text and so allow the return of
what was apparently eliminated:

Include bars, slurred tone, tintinnabular blinkered

beyond is the coastal storm & daily telegraph man
deep green oil cloth, balancing man, finisterre grove
but... piped up the politician, there's NO geography in PROTEST
demonstrative slub linen caught tighter than a ring.
(Grace Lake)
The tone is personal because it is so distinctive, although demands for tribal loyalty are
discreetly absent.
The aesthetics of polyvalent poetry is perhaps based on the insight that depression
is a world, or metabolic state/world in which possibilities are very impoverished, there
are very few different tracks and all converge on the same outcome. The outset could be
something as simple as the terror, popular in the sixties, of a monotonous job, probably in
a factory, of being trapped in a boring life. Rock songs seem convinced that a trap exists,
in which one's movements are confined and predictable. The relief is a good place, baby
I'll take you there, where things happen all the time and predictability is evaded. A simple
way of doing this in poetry was to sever the links between each line. Junctions between
words, or between lines, can be seen as nodes in a network, possessing either rich or poor
connectivity; better syntactic labels make these nodes clearer but also more determinate.
Every sentence, every poem, generates a past, a system memory, as it progresses;
something we also call context. The handling of this temporary system memory can
depend on theories of how the older generation should relate to the young, or how the
weight of past tradition should affect political and economic decisions in the present. The
social basis for writing a single definitive line is the job with a unique relation to the boss.
If there were a workers' control setup you'd have to deal with the whole team as
individuals, horizontal relations, maybe a dozen people. This is much more time

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consuming, confusing, and changeable. A whole different psychic regime; every act
glittering with a dozen facets. Imagine that you were in an exam where, instead of writing
for on examiner with one set of requirements, you were writing for a dozen different
people each with different attitudes and demands. This after all is what writing a poem is
like. I think our ideas of concentration and coherence are founded in an artificial situation
of simple hierarchy, where power is delegated from the owners of capital in a very black
and white way.

Q. How do you measure the total informational flow through a poem? A. There is a
method, which involves a test reader being asked to guess, at every juncture, what the
next word is. The likelihood of guessing right can be translated into an arithmetical figure
for the predictability, i.e. determinacy, of the text. This is a very burdensome method, also
it doesn't really measure the informational richness of the poem, its effect on the reader.
My descriptions of information flow are subjective, a kind of metaphor; this isn't worse
than saying a poem is "brilliant", when it doesn't literally shine. I am assuming that,
because of my experience in literature and information technology, I can intuitively
gauge where a text is rich or impoverished in possibilities, and that the theorems of
information theory provide explanatory structures helpful in studying poetry. The
prediction test should really be set at each character; a poem which is unusual in lexical
choice may be conventional in spelling and word formation. Dialect texts, however, may
have a conventional choice of vocabulary and a startling way of shaping words. There are
more sophisticated ways of measuring the amount of information in a text, but I have not
applied these either.
A sign of low information flow is the use of set collocations: a recent book of
Scots poetry was called hert's bluid, a clanger which takes us back to the sixteenth
century. The deterministic attraction of rhyming pairs was satirised by Rob MacKenzie in
a very funny poem. Dissolving away all conventional language produces a more difficult
and richer landscape. The impoverishment of microstates implies a withdrawal of choice
from the reader: left at the bottom of a tier of levels of access to information where each
level filters out variation and contradiction and leaves cut and dried, mutually supporting,
judgments. The tier models a hierarchy of power. Breaking up sets of words implying
each other with fearful inevitability asks the poet also to break up pairs of lines which
imply each other.
It would be unfair to omit another way of looking at chaos. In a textbook of
psychology, we read of a sufferer saying "I can't concentrate. It's diversions of attention
that trouble me. I am picking up different conversations. It's like being a transmitter. The
sounds are coming through to me, but I feel my mind cannot cope with everything. It's
difficult to concentrate on any one sound." (Hilgard, Introduction to Psychology) This
does evoke the suspicion and discomfort which most of the reading public experience
when faced with poetry based on the rapid montage method. I suppose there to be an
analogy between the fragility of attention of someone ill in this tragic way, and the
volatility and suggestibility of the awareness of someone being whirled away by art. So
suggestibility is adjacent to hypersuggestibility. Art has to include a dose of the
surprising, bewilderingly complex, disguised, ornamental, and inexplicit. I like to
concentrate, but in art I also like there to be a dozen things going on which I wasn't
expecting and which simultaneously disperse my attention into attentive part-selves and

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make me more alert and expectant. As the title astutely hints, a conductor can listen to
polyphony without this loss of singularity representing a failure of concentration.
Dissolving as an aesthetic proposition is quite different from the inability to hold
a self together. (As a comparison, a novel normally contains more than one character. We
would not expect someone to feel disintegration and loss of boundaries while reading a
novel with several characters. Conversely, novels usually contain more characters than
poetry, which may therefore be more egocentric.) A rich network has the interesting
property of being without a past. Imagine a network of three nodes, with paths radiating
out from them in the numbers (1,1,1). Assume the last node is also the exit from the
system. When a ball bearing (imagine the net as a kind of marble run!) is at any node, we
know where it is about to go and where it has been. Now imagine a net (7,7,7,7). When
the ball is at the third node, it can have had seven immediately previous paths and 49
different paths over its last two nodes. Its position does not reveal its trajectory; it has no
past. Rich connectivity removes information in the sense of balls, or people, carrying
their past around with them. A class system is based, not just on inequality, but on a
poverty of choices available to each social actor. Describing individuals in an affluent
society is harder than in a conformist and stratified one. Lack of carry-over from one
moment to the next puts into question the value of watching the process, since the
information gathered has no predictive value; perception always tries to find higher-order
patterns, which it turns out always mean repetition and so determinacy. For what is a
pattern that does not have symmetry and repetition?
Imagine another network (1,7,0,8). The zero shows a node with no paths, i.e. an
impasse. Associational paths that break off and go nowhere are an important feature of
poetry. Perhaps all chains of excitation eventually run down. In a net (7,8,1,1,4,9) the
particle has a (detectible) past at one point and then loses it again. The term microstates
used above can now be defined more satisfactorily as rapidly succeeding nodes; a net
with many nodes allows more states than a simple one. A net with a single strand at one
point can be called convergent; where many paths become one. The term attractor is used
for an outcome that, mysteriously or not, seems to lie at the end of many different paths.
In a book of poetry, the poet's style or personality form an attractor; or rather, there is an
attractor which we label a style or personality. There is a link between the persistence of
marbles running through the course, i.e. the recognizable link between successive states,
and what we call attention.
If indeterminacy is attached to devout hopes about how public decisions are
taken, how does it relate to social conflict? doesn't that series of oppression, contestation,
conflict, and triumph generate enough excitement and indeterminacy? Strangely, this is
something almost missing from modern poetry; whose indeterminacy may be a
compensation for the loss of productive uncertainty entrained by giving up narrative and
realist representation. This moves the domain of indeterminacy from a higher level down
to a micro level. The leftism of modern poets is phantomatic, as they mostly plump for
appearing wise and above things, sine ira et studio, rather than committing the voice of
their poems to contestation and so to counter-attack. The exception is a strand of feminist
poetry, and even this has progressively moved away from attacking the enemy and into
more internal discourse, whether internal to the poet's mind or to groups of like-minded
and close people. From linguistic closeness to closedness. You can't attack a politician's
words without drawing the public's attention to the subjective and debatable quality of the

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information and attitudes in your own words; an invitation which a strong poet should not
quail at. In order to portray conflict with authority it is necessary to portray authority
figures and let them have their say; Raworth and Allen Fisher are undoubtedly bearing a
radical, anti-authoritarian message, but they decline to show who they are attacking and
so the attack is oblique and on some days invisible. Modern poets have put their political
ideals into high-level linguistic decisions, an aesthetic turn little recognized in the
literature and perhaps hard for the audience to take in. How many of the country's
committed leftists would recognize the radical intent of this poetry? Meanwhile, my
decision to exclude realist-literal leftist poets is prompted only by my indifference to their
work, not by their literal absence from the scene. The examples of Arden and Hughes pull
us up sharply about the portrayal of conflict. How is it that they portray conflicts, and
uncertain outcomes? In their works, the enemy is within the frame of the work, whereas
in most modern poets the enemy is invisible, outside the frame, and the only uncertainty
is whether the poet will pull the poem off, in his own terms.
We can suggest that the goodness of fit of the eventual solution to any question
will be proportional to the area of variations which the search has been allowed to
explore. Variation can only be generated by an incomplete pattern, a permissive one. The
argument is a formalised conflict in which ideas are sharpened and advanced. This
population of states as the results of series of experimental variations to match bounding
conditions will detain us for a while longer, because the problem with traditional artistic
procedures, with their reliable outcomes, is precisely that the known outcome has a fatal
attraction for the work and blinds the writer to the sheaving of other paths to go down;
the way to explore those paths is to throw away your preset objective and enter a state of
drift. How do you plan to reach an objective that doesn't exist before you invent it? try
everything you don't know. In an age where poetry is dominated by presenting the
personality of the poet, the predictability of the outcome, the finished poem, is guaranteed
by the stability of the personality: if this burden is what limits the variation area you
search within, it has to be ripped out. Personality can become a restrictive set of genre
rules. Real spontaneity, real improvisation, are reached by abandoning the
autobiographical project of self-documentation (and self-aggrandisement). The poem
which aims to record past experience cannot be oriented towards the future, because it
copies something fixed and dead, whose shape is not design but accident; modern poetry
tends to be based on procedures, rather than the personality, and to be performative,
generating the behaviour which it describes, rather than being generated by it. Where
memory and creativity contend over a space, the one has to give way to the other.
Being free is a strain. When the new unpopulated space is opened up, what
sustains us is the mood of the poet, playing upon us with a powerful force of suggestion,
thanks to which the space is not empty, but already coloured by an atmosphere. This is a
terrible experience unless the poet is truly energetic and intelligent. The experimental
poet who enters the zone in a lab coat, with a sanctimonious, sadistic, lugubrious, self-
righteous, vacuous air, attaches the electrodes, and says "Now ve try my liddle
experiments, ja?" is not an artist. No, the poet goes into complexity with a certain
dithyrambic gaiety, and has to be liked. If there's one thing that Angel Exhaust is based on
more than Gnostic theology, it must be rockabilly, and rockabilly legend Harmonica
Frank Floyd sang in 1951 "Play that thing, blow it, sure is good, play it like you ill.
Another half of Pike and a long cool can of beer, we'll whip them blues on 'way from

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here.' ('Rocking Chair Daddy', available on Rockabilly Rules OK, Charly Records). If
you don't play it like you ill, you can take it away, because I don't want it. Tests reveal
that to much of the poetry in Conductors you can say play it like you ill without feelings
of disappointment and incongruity.

Part 2
The title of the anthology conceals something of its content. Acoustically, it is an
echo of counter culture; the prominent DUCT block, as also the conduit element, points
us to the keyword UNDERGROUND, which is where the poets live; while the CHA of
chaos reminds us of a specific town, what conducts us over a chaos must be a bridge, and
in fact the whole phrase is a shadow of Lonductors of Cambridge.

Literary conventions; mediations

Literary form is the alleged opposite of chaos. If you converse with someone in a
language of which you both only know ten words, you have few conventions; few
common structures; but your exchanges are likely to be simplistic and repetitive. There is
a prima facie possibility that having more conventions (more shared lexical items) allows
more complex, diverse, and adequate communication. Poetry which doesn't use any
special literary language tends to come out a bit Janet and John. A hypothesis relates the
superior emotional intelligence of girls to fine discriminations acquired in childhood
years of assiduously breaking and re-forming friendships. The hypothesis also claims that
poetry readers internalise a set of discriminations and conventions which they
unconsciously apply while reading. The playing of such intense and absorbing games
develops finely branched discriminatory pathways, and the ability to guess moves several
steps ahead. Non-experts cannot follow the play; its signals are too rapid and subtle. The
concept does make it possible to think about poets who don't use the poetic conventions:
they appear impossibly self-righteous and their poems are repetitive and stultifying.
Again, the mastery of forms is what allows you to let chaos in; it doesn't exclude fertility
and indeterminacy. If these conventions exist, then what I should be doing as a critic is to
force them to surface, and verbalise them for the benefit of the new reader.
The zone of mediations finds the edge of chaos, and so defines it. The distribution
of vocables within a perceptual field is partly arbitrary, so that we (but not all languages)
distinguish between a bottle, a jug, a pan, and a basin; but objects take their value from
the intentional behaviour which manipulates and uses them. The overall classifications of
the language are permissive, they need to be filled out in any given text by local ones,
whose structure derives from intentions and purposeful behaviour. Mediation has to
include the personality as the agency which bestows meaning and pattern on things. Of
course the poet has the option of blanking out the personality, like a pop group leaving
out the vocals: a drastic act which reveals that identification is the central act of Western
lyric poetry, and does give us the chance to reflect on what that act means. Mediations in
the broad sense include all elements of a genre; in a dramatic poem the characters play
this role, in a narrative poem the events do, in a geographical poem regions, rivers, and
soils do. The opposition which Lawrence proposes between chaos and form seems to me
erroneous; any element of language capable of expressing any part of the cosmic energies

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can be described as form. Whatever is linguistic is formed; it has gone through the act of
being coded in a shared semantic structure and shaped into a series of phonemes bound to
that structure. Are we to accept that his naivety and repetition are not language, are not
rhetorical, because they are inefficient? The opposition seems to be between someone
dealing with a situation which is new, high-energy, exciting, hard to express; and
someone in a situation which is old, has failed to renew itself, which has become
colourless, worn, predictable, ritualistic. This cannot be a binary opposition, it is more of
a patchwork: one place is interesting, another is not. The latter situation (which seems to
predominate in the Day-Strong anthology) may derive, not so much from living in an
overcrowded country with a constrictive spatial layout and social system, as from
nervousness about technique, which makes you stick to tired subjects and familiar
methods. Sticking to intuition, and being afraid of thinking about technique, produce this
airless and weary effect.

The death of genre

In the 1940 Day Lewis-Strong anthology, there is what may be a poem of ostranenie,
called "Presbyopia", after a special condition of the sight: "men sweat and cry,/ I muse
and leer./ I have an eye,/ But not a tear. (...) There's beauty there,/ Solid and sad–/ A
strangled bear,/ An ape gone mad,// A boy on stilts,/ A snail-eyed god,/ Women in quilts/
And men in quod.// Elbow on knee/ I muse and blink,/ And thoughtless see,/ Or sightless
think." (by G.H. Luce). This is a very odd poem; its effects seem to rely on reducing the
visual world to a plane, and distorting that plane all over; the effect is hard to cope with,
and so may anticipate contemporary making it strange.
Defamiliarisation, ostranenie, was described by Viktor Shklovsky in 1925, not as
something he'd thought up, but as something basic to literary art. W.S. Graham used
estrangement as his favourite move: "When the birds blow like burnt paper/ Over the
poorhouse roof and the slaughter/ House and all the houses of Madron,/ I would like to be
out of myself and/ About the extra, ordinary world/ No matter what disguise it wears(.)"
(from "Clusters Travelling Out", p.220). I fear that this inspires page rage in the reader;
well, defamiliarisation is just something you're going to have to get used to!
It's common today to find one source of poetry in the riddle and the paradox. It's quite
possible to argue that all metaphors are a form of ostranenie: by breaching classification
categories, the poet makes an object seem strange, and through the strangeness emerges a
new understanding of what it is. The reverse phenomenon, normalisation and
desensitisation of language, is agreed to exist by everyone, not just the avant-garde: I
don't know how you can overcome familiarisation except by defamiliarisation. Allen
Fisher names a sequence of books Gravity as a Consequence of Shape: true enough, since
the pattern of the Earth's gravitational field derives from the spherical shape of the Earth.
Barry MacSweeney refers three times in his poem here to "maniac milk": it would be
quicker if he just said "alcohol", but if you really object to this kind of periphrasis, you
might be better off reading a newspaper. Modernity is a fine balance of conventional
shared discriminations, the rules of the game, and subversive estrangement, twisting and
invalidating the context. Each demands the other.

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 Shklovsky also says that slowing-down, zamedlenie, is basic to the literary art, all
forms of ornament aim at this same thing. So also the enjoyment of poetry has something
to do with pace; to do with making the brain work and making it play. None of the poems
in this book contain information you really need; the point of reading them is to alter your
brain state, temporarily; we can shut out the data layer and look at the more abstract
levels of linguistic organisation for the payload. Since we're going to throw the
information away, it doesn't matter if we get it quickly.
This approach can also claim an ancestry in Heidegger's poetics, where the aim is
to write about everything as if I'd never seen it before, and the poet starts by emptying out
knowledge which we already possess, trying to hypnotize us into a first-time experience.
Heidegger wrote about the earliest available etymologies of words as if (a) they
represented the temporal origin of the concept (b) by gazing at them we could lose our
acquired knowledge and be present at the dewy dawn of pristine time (c) etymological
reconstruction gave us an integral subject in a lived horizon rather than fragments
pressured and gouged by the recovery process. Since none of these three things is true,
poems based on them can be faux-naïf and pretentious at the same time. However,
because Heidegger was observing something (for example, poems by Trakl and
Hölderlin) which already existed, his proposals on poetics are tenable.
Defamiliarisation of a rule of social structure obliges us to think over its purpose;
renormalisation has a low probability of returning to the original state, so the process
raises political consciousness. Some laws of society seem right when thought over; large-
scale ostranenie separates out natural climax states from unnatural ones by simulating the
process thousands of times.
There is a prehistory of disconnection, running through surrealism; Brecht's
Verfremdungseffekt; the Absurd; the montage poetry of the sixties, like Raworth's;
psychedelia; the montage of the seventies; sampling; complexity and chaos. Mégroz
speaks in 1933 of Edith Sitwell's disruption of logical sequence, and remarks "Most
clearly revealed in Jules Laforgue is the beginning of a literary technique for making new
associations by dislocating the normal sequences of conscious thought." Laforgue was
writing in the 1880s. "In Gold Coast Customs, [her 1929 masterpiece] the discontinuity,
if we are to accept her account of the composition, is a deliberate technical device to
make the mind aware of several layers of argument simultaneously." Mégroz also devotes
two chapters to "dreamlike" poets, which points to the prevalence of irrational logic
already a hundred years ago: the shift has been in demarcation of the subjective
processes. A feature of the 1960s was the death of genre: the rules linking ideas on a
larger scale than the line were simply abolished, and the new poet had an empty space for
building designs in. We have a lack of names for the designs of poems; critics feel a huge
relief when they manage to identify a modern poem with one of the traditional genres, but
the point is that awareness of design was very weakly developed until recently, and poets
were recycling forms derived, often, from the Hellenistic and pre-Christian past, without
thinking them through. At present, conventional junctures stick out like sore thumbs.
Overall design is the most interesting aspect of the poem; an easy way out is to make the
personality the source of all decisions, so that the poem simply presents the self, and has
only to copy from nature. This, as a way of utilising an empty stage, is despair. The
abolition of genre causes the reader problems: if you don't know how the parts are going
to fit together, how do you know what to notice? People get angry because they have

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 binding expectations and the poet doesn't fulfil them. I think you just get used to this;
anyway, very similar severings of rules have been felt in cinema, pop music, painting,
etc. In the suspension of logical associations, poets are judged by the speed and style of
their irrational montages, of which there are a thousand kinds. Maybe I should sit around
and think of names for them all. Arguably, every modern poem belongs to a different
genre, because its high-level structure is unique.

Time-sense of modernity: the past as property, the past as damage

Social class is frequently invoked as an explanation for everything that happens in British
society, usually an account missing because it simply alludes to an unstated, silent, knowledge
which the listeners share. I must confess that I don't share this knowledge, I find enormous
problems in formalizing it, and I don't think any theoretical framework for class is sufficiently
advanced and error-free to be used to explain poetry. I believe the problem is a lot easier for the
pre-modern period, for example the 1930s and 1940s. I'd like to quote a 1944 piece by John
Sommerfield:

'Boy, bring me some more cakes, and jaldi karo!'

The accentuation and distortion of the vowel sounds, the assured tones of the voices, the
phraseology of the conversations, gave so clear a characterisation of the speakers that I didn't
need to see them. As an experienced hunter can tell from an animal's tracks and droppings its
species, size and condition (etc.) ... For some reason or other my mental picture was without
faces. But I knew their expressions by heart, the lines and curves and wrinkles engraved on the
mobile flesh by time and experience were shaped by the code of behaviour and thought that
governed their lives (.)

Sommerfield was a Thirties radical moving here into the wartime world of aspirations to a more
just society. The class revolutions of the 1940s and 1960s disrupted the system which guaranteed
his perceptions; social historians of the affluent society, such as Harry Hopkins, stress, from the
later fifties on, the greater choice of lifestyles available to people in Britain, so that the predictive
information contained in speech patterns simply evaporated. What disappeared was not power
relations, but the transparent link between the sound of someone's voice and the way they
behaved. Within power relations (a zone where dishonesty and disinformation are prevalent), the
emphasis has shifted from inherited patterns, who your family are, to currently existing ones: i.e.
what you own, your position in an organizational hierarchy, your income and purchasing power. I
think people tend to mis-describe economic relations even though experiencing them, because
their explanatory systems are stuck in the past and use origin as a clarifying metaphor. If the
market is all-powerful, looking at someone's culture and family past is irrelevant. If, as I have
claimed, there was a class revolution in the 1960s, this does not take us outside commodity
capitalism (outside to where some people wanted to go), but does invalidate the existing set of
prestige symbols, to produce a mismatch. The greater disposable income, and dilution of the
"old" middle class by new cadres of graduates and professionals, made status signs insecure,
inclining people to spend more on status symbols and reinforcing the commodity capitalist
system. As choice of lifestyle became diverse and differentiated in a consumer revolution, as
Hopkins and others have claimed, this diaspora dispersed the knowledge which Sommerfield
claims, the "hunter's knowledge of the game" which was presumably his stock in trade as a
writer, and threw up a crisis of representation; making a strength of unpredictability was

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certainly a solution, another one was probably evading the problem of depicting a new society by
making the writer's own consciousness the site of the text.
The issue of the past is highly involved with the relations of class. Someone
preoccupied h the past may not be consciously conservative, but preserving past relations
denies the individual the right to define who they are and to make their own way in
society. If literature is biased towards stored knowledge, it is also biased towards social
hierarchy and immobility; literature of the past was undoubtedly used by the landowners
as a tool for glorifying themselves and for disparaging those of lowly birth. The project of
a continuously present poetry is political and aims to abolish all hysteresis effects and
hangovers, to destroy the memory stores where the patterns of inequality are kept.
(Omitted 4 pages on “the past as damage”. If you scrap the realm of statements defining
successful, goal-oriented, owned, processes in the past, you scrap the idea of the present
as being a success. Turning-points in the past were, then, decisive but included a defeat
for some parts of society. Thus the past is also damage. The present is not optimised and
not unchanging.)

The critique of the personality: the future as terra nullius

Modernity involves two contradictory impulses: systematically rewriting all social
relations touching oneself so as to aggrandise oneself, effacing truths which are
disobliging and making one's wishes binding on other people; and criticising the self,
dissipating its constructions as mere cobwebs, decrying its claims to originality and
autonomy, drawing attention to its incoherence and intermittence.
This contradiction makes the self the site of major contemporary intellectual
arguments; reinforced, although not originated, by the ideological opposition between
Capitalism and Communism being expressed in terms of individual autonomy. Denying
the validity of the self and its experiences is a recipe for authoritarianism, but has
nonetheless been an (irritatingly?) fruitful line of enquiry. Where stressing individual
attainment is a way of disabling other people from saying "your success is due to your
class background (and not to your merits)", putting stress on family relations may be a
way of atoning for individualism at the symbolic level.
Much of the politics of contemporary poetry is the struggle around the importance
of the personality. Anthony Mellors, editor of fragmente, has drawn attention to: "what I
see as a general and abiding epistemological division between the largely anti-modernist
mainstream trend in poetry publication/attention and the continuing tradition of
experimental work inspired by modernism and the objectivists in particular." (Mellors
would be writing this section if things had worked out better.) I would prefer to qualify
the word epistemology: the knowledge in question is not so much of the outside world as
of the processes of consciousness, especially as governing relations between the self and
other selves. The mainstream approach is to take feelings, and awareness generally, as
sacrosanct, merely unquestionable: a great swathe of the radical and experimental wing is
pursuing a project of criticizing the immediate data of awareness, so as to find out the
truth, and so become less selfish and more authentic in behaviour towards others. If one
concedes that inner awareness is complex, oscillating, easily influenced, and partly
contradictory, it is hard to see where the consistency of mainstream verse comes from:
one must suspect that it is reached merely by following rules, and these rules are
specified by the market for the poetic product. However, if one believes that there is a

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reason set above these turbulent data, which speaks through them and can criticize and
reject them, one has a complex flow of information, laminated, qualified, reversing itself,
which can fill complex poems. Behind Mellors' comment lies a theory, expounded
notably by Andrew Crozier, that the poem as domestic anecdote is the source of the huge
tedium which surrounds us; the theory is too simple, but the ennui is real. Writing poetry
is different from being a radio personality.
A sector of the market bases its choice of identification on the premise that the
artist has bigger feelings than they do. Some girls are bigger than others, as Morrissey
sang sometime back in the eighties; a hoarding slap opposite the 82 bus stop where I
spend much of my life has about 300 square feet of underwear advertisement, all supple
curves and abandoned writhing. The starting point for elevated culture is the denial of
gratification even if the end point, the apex of the curve, is gratification of the brain
which calms your desires. The hoarding is a snapshot, a frozen point: poetry has
extension in time. The hoarding is dumb, apart from the brand name of the manufacturer,
and sensuous: poetry, as articulate intelligence, is purely symbolic and can never become
sensuous. The hoarding is wholly unambiguous, and so cannot expand beyond a pinpoint
in time without beginning to seem tawdry, manipulative, subhuman; poetry starts with
ambiguity, and, if it doesn't break up its own utterance to achieve finer discriminations,
suspend its major weights in doubt and guesses, deny its statements with dialectical
reversals, it still cannot acquire the shock effects of the megavisual tradition. Pop culture
has reached a state of perfection; it is hard for a poet, surrounded by it, to push far enough
into poetry to grasp purely poetic means. Art which relies on unqualified self-assertion is
infantile: this was fine for me as a teenager, it isn't sinful, but I have the right to enjoy
something more finely analysed and highly patterned now I am a mature man.
One of the major splits, then, within the radical camp, would be their attitude
towards the poem as a vehicle for a personality and towards identification. There are
some contributions here where critique is not the most admired act; where the poem is
more like a kind of backing band for a personal appearance by the Poet. Page 362 has
Jeremy Reed's brave interpretation, reminiscent of "Laugh at Me" by Sonny and Cher, of
why people don't like him: because he wears lipstick and mascara, allegedly. I don't care
if he wears orange silk underwear so long as he rocks the joint. He fails to mention
a) these narcissistic fantasies exclude all thought of an emotional relationship, reducing
the lover to an awed spectator and the poet to a spectator of his own fantasies. Being
immature is a different condition from loving men.
b) the chosen model since the mid-eighties has been the magazine glamour photograph, a
regressive and fetishistic genre whose sleek surfaces yield nothing warmer than a camera
lens.
c) Reed's poetry of the seventies, and at least up to 1981's Bleecker Street, a key work of
its time, was harsh, unremitting, dredged beneath the skin of its characters for their bones
and turned them inside out. His mature work not only seems like a betrayal of those
macabre and autopsy-precise early poems, but also an assertion that we cannot stand pain
in art, which must be sweet, sheer and sleek.
d) he has written far too much, and the surface of some of his late work is like cellophane
or some lamination, smooth but without organic life and warmth. Far too much of it is the
exhibition of his skill rather than the consummation of it.

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 The authority he defies to write transgressive poems is also the voice of reality,
and the fierce piercing eye which observed the poems in Saints and Psychotics or Walk
on Through; and the surrender to fantasy, to life as style acts, is an evasion of the fact that
feelings have consequences and that attachment is possible. By choosing to live out the
audience's fantasies, he may have sacrificed one level of artistic intelligence. Still, these
new poems are excellent; "Far Out" feels like a return to themes of an earlier time, like
"Floyd's Package" or "Scott Engel", parts of a mythology too precise to be obsessive and
too intricate to be merely a fantasy.
The auteur theory of cinema proposes that the director (in a variant, the
scriptwriter) returns to certain pervasive psychological patterns, transformed sometimes
in startling ways; Freudian approaches to art also fasten onto repeating patterns, with the
assumption that they reflect personal, infantile experiences of the artist, are in fact
drawings of an anatomy of the psyche. The use of versatile and highly finished linguistic
resources to evoke situations we can never get enough of is one step away from the
underwear advertisement: the poem offers exotic and flattering and enticing sensations.
This doesn't really work out. Even the gratifying repetition of the unresolved scene
(Hitchcock's preoccupation with icy blondes and detected guilt) seems old-fashioned as a
philosophy of art. The scene these poems propose is more being immersed in a situation
which is rapidly changing, and where the startling novelty of patterns makes one forget
affective states.
One of the expectations in our society is that poetry is the expression of secret and
personal feelings, the last refuge of the authentic in a world of capitalist self-
aggrandisement; while nothing except the purely personal has a place in a poem, even
though our mental processes involve all kinds of other things, for example politics,
economics, power relations, other people. This reduces poetry to something like the genre
of singer-songwriter. But the depiction of the personality is the thing most threatening to
spontaneous and indeterminate poetry: any poem will be made freer by striking out the
parts which refer to the poet, because feelings are a predictable closed system, because
the poet's experiences are a given which the poem is obedient to, because the poet's social
being takes place within a restrictive and unexciting framework of class society; and even
because the poet wants to be consistent, in order to be remembered, and because he is
vain and is only going to record experiences which show him in a favourable light. Such
poetry dwells on moments in the development of a personality: the more decisive they
are, the more deterministic their result. The motivation for giving over the poem to
arbitrary rule-based processes is to eliminate the personality, migrating towards a poetic
fabric which is 100% design. Process and personality are in competition as sets of
decision rules. If there is a rule "you cannot write this line because it didn't happen that
way", this reduces the search area to minute proportions; making the poem very easy to
write, but restricting its climb up the slope of perfection.
The poem exhibiting the direct, unmodified experience of the poet offers a
channel for exploration of secret feelings and simultaneously threatens to make the
course of events incomprehensible: it is philosophically dubious that one can record
human life, which is mainly social, by adding together series of accounts of a single
person's perceptions. It is morally dubious to wish an art which takes personality patterns
and relentlessly reproduces them, as if colonizing an empty continent. The personality
programme is flawed because it selects for behavioural acts which are consistent with an

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underlying pattern, while selecting out the acts which are inconsistent with it. The poet's
personality may end up being simply a commodity, a designer label. The Faint Object
Camera investigates the skies by screening out bright objects; it is possible that a
psychological camera which blanks out the bright foreground objects, emotions, will
make visible a new, intricate, and unsuspected world of relations hidden by their light.
The displacement of strong infantile emotions may feel like a cold bath for the romantic,
but opens up the poem to a flow of new, unfamiliar information.
This undertaking may resemble the decentring adopted by philosophers of the anti-statist
Left in France in the 1960s:

Logique du sens can be read as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology
of Perception. In this latter text, the body-organism is linked to the world through a
network of primal significations, which arise from the perception of things, while,
according to Deleuze, phantasms form the impenetrable and incorporeal surface of
bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped
that falsely presents itself as a centred organism and that distributes at its periphery the
increasing remoteness of things.
(Foucault, reviewing Deleuze's book; quoted from Schmidt, Between Phenomenology
and Structuralism, quoting from Language, Counter-memory, Practice, by Foucault,
trans. D. Bouchard; the Phenomenology is a book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

The works of Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari offer us a replacement
for the incredible central, homogeneous, conscious self in the shape of a thousand
autonomous functions, which are themselves "peripheral" because many of them exist in
object relations, with components situated outside the body. Deleuze and Guattari said
"What is the unconscious? It is not a theatre, but a factory, a site and an agent of
production. Desiring machines: the unconscious is neither figurative, nor structural, but
machinelike."
If the philosophising consciousness of the Graeco-Roman-Occidental tradition is
consistent, and therefore very simple, and, perhaps therefore, endowed with perfect self-
knowledge, this may derive from the forensic weaponry of pleading; where success is
rewarded with the tenure of estates and with the upper hand in commercial dealings. If it
was a kind of weapon, a specialized training of the mind for agonistic purposes, it was
not also an empirical account of how the mind works. Part of the project of Capitalisme
et schizophrénie was to rip out all the inherited terminology for the mind, and test the
theory that we are trapped in deceiving metaphors by building another world of
metaphor, to set alongside the first and be a measure for it. The lyric ego is a voice which
pleads for itself; it offers partiality as justice. It may not be possible to drag the intellect
out of its nesting-ground, the courtroom with its formalised antagonism, tendentiousness,
and controversion.
There is some doubt that I can even describe my own states of mind with any
completeness, and in fact it may be that my accounts are consistent only because it is a
rule that they should be so, and because when I focus my attention I create a clarity by
repressing the peripheral. If my wishes were hard and clear I should be doomed to
frustration in a social group, where things aren't always going to be the way I want them,
and it is a virtue to fall in with other people's wishes, being indeterminate and suggestible

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in oneself. The relation between central and peripheral awareness is thus a rule of
politics. What, after all, is the relation between my first-person experience and my
empathetic, second-person, experience of other people's feelings and states of mind? and
is the experience of art first person or rather empathetic and passive? Allen Fisher
undertook some experiments, reported in the magazine Spanner, into the effects of
listening to simultaneous acoustic sources, shifting in phase towards each other; a
direction of extraordinary interest to the student because it tends to break down the
central monster of modern art, the artist's Self, into many different self-organizing agents
or patterns, competing or co-existing. There is a tape, Paxton’s Beacon, of Fisher's which
displays multiple independent sources as a way of investigating the boundary between
concentration and peripheral awareness. The state of the brain at any instant, instrumental
measurements seem to tell us, is not "one" but many patterns which ceaselessly shrink or
grow, competing with each other for cellular resources. The coherent unit is not the
individual human but the individual brain activation pattern; the "desiring machine".
Subjectively, we are afraid both of monotonous experience (one pattern takes over and
repeats indefinitely) and of psychic disintegration (too many patterns oscillate and break
up without order emerging).
The personality is what is constant when outer circumstances change; but up until
the revolution, outer circumstances are largely constant, so how can you demarcate what
is permanent in the inner world? The method opens and cannot close the possibility that
the self is a series of more or less gaudy or regal garments with nothing underneath. It is
perhaps the very effort needed to make the speaking self speak without incessant
inconsistency that demonstrates the self to be fluctuating and mutable. It would, if this
demonstration is true, be a plenitude which makes everything true which the tongue
signifies. Perhaps every successful poem goes through the barrier of legal-professional
rigidity to open up the multiple world of hyperassociation underneath, a torrent of
fluctuating and affectively charged ideas which seems to be strangely similar, whatever
different routes we use to reach it. Possibly the apparent persistence, and immovability, of
the "personality", is only a reflection of the monotony of the way one lives, conditioned
by the division of labour, and the rigorous simplification of jobs in an old-style industrial
capitalism. The redesign of the job could cause the collapse and evanescence of the
personality traits that went with it. This applies, not only to jobs, but to the family, its
archaic and ossified division of tasks and of emotional patterns. Autogestion, self-
management, proposed the abolition of preset work roles; it was soon extended into the
sphere of the personal, into the household.
Rock music, the soundtrack of rebellion, seemed obsessed at the time with a
brutal tautology which turned music into a Pavlovian conditioning lab, the song repeating
a simplified module of meaning hundreds of times in a short space, as repetitive as the
advertisement with its slogans. This frenzied recursion revealed a fear of change and
liberation. It was the factory in leisure form. This explains the political hopes attached to
improvisation, something negligible in popular music up to about 1965, which
nonetheless acquired a certain importance in the years of maximum political optimism,
before moving ahead into a newly partitioned minority culture
Guattari has suggested that the linguistic distinction between I and impersonal it is
a misunderstanding of psychological process when the notion of "I" is overcoded by
temporary social rules:

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The tools brought into operation by the arrangements of individuated subjectivation will
become boomerangs. At one level, that of the individual and the person, they succeed in
nullifying desire in its relationship with material fluxes, with intensive de-
territorializations. But they cannot prevent the molecular, sub-human, semiotic escape of
a-signifying figures of expression from starting up a desiring machine at a quite different
level, and with a quite different power. The sudden, absolute de-territorialization that
broke desire up into subject and object has failed, despite its absoluteness, to abolish
itself in the paroxysm of joy of a machinic consciousness that has truly broken all
territorial moorings. ("Subjectless Action", p.136 of The Molecular Revolution).

The term molecular (in opposition with molar) refers to processes composed of very large
numbers of independent interacting agents (molecules of a gas, molecules in an organ of
the body), where events are due to statistical aggregation of behaviours, rather than to
overall control. Gas is derived from chaos, a transfer more obvious in the original Dutch.
Applied to psychology, this means the explosion of the phenomenological Ego or cogito
into thousands of competing functions. Applied to politics, it means autogestion, and
presumably this was its source. Applied to capitalism, it could mean the demise of
macroeconomics and the move to a desired state of indefinitely many small firms
traversing the economic resource surface to find peaks of optimization. Looked at
historically, the message is that, when our means of data collection, handling, and storage
were remarkably poor, we used to build very simple intellectual models, to avoid the
sensation of swamping, and its sequel of dementia; these models gave wrong results all
the time. You can't assume, for example, that 58 million people can successfully be
treated as three coagulated blocks (three parties, or three classes) rather than as 58 million
autonomous agents. If you multiply the total number of educated people by 50, if you
reward people for dismantling all the simplifications and laying bare the cheapness of the
models, if you capture endless amounts of raw data with cameras and tape-recorders and
measuring devices, and apply sub-infinite data-processing power in millions of
computers, your old models simply explode. Deleuze and Guattari are forerunners of
chaos theory.
In thinking about poetry, the notion molecular would expose the errors of lumping
a poet's works together to form a single Golem-like object, the Poet, a drip-bucket to soak
up all imprecision, to be manipulated as a token; and break down three thousand lines of
poetry into three thousand autonomous objects, each possessing its own trajectory, so that
we can trap the process of concentrating these snippets, or frames, and lumping them up
into larger entities. If we look at the units of lines, and junctures—the only immediately
visible reality on the page—we find that the attribute called ownership has disappeared,
since lines, metrical patterns, links, collocations of words, line-breaks, etc. can be shared
by many different poets. It's a bit pointless being proud of writing an original line when it
carries out generative patterns which are used by a thousand other people. If a poet's
work is homogeneous, it may also be tautologous. If good poetry characteristically varies
rapidly over a short stretch, how can large amounts of it be reduced to a term of
discourse? What can we say of the process whereby a poet's name becomes a token of a
homogeneous if interrupted speech act, and again three poets are allowed to become a

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decade of poetic history, standing in for all the others?
This was not at first a merely descriptive project:

We have to paralyse the functioning of each family, school, university, factory,

business corporation, television company, film-industry segment–and then, having
stopped it, invent mobile, non-hierarchic structures that distribute the accumulated
possessions over the whole world. These structures will become rigid in due
course because of our fearful attitude to our freedom, but if we observe the
principle of continuous revolution—the overthrowing of social structures that
after a while unknowingly invent their own death and then pretend themselves a
certain life–we shall find a way not only to survive but to never fall back into the
normal pattern of the world which is the only sense of "regression" that one can
recognize at this stage of history. (David Cooper, The Death of the Family, 1971).

Cooper's project was so-say paralysing, but is partly for that reason evocative of the
counter-culture and so of Conductors; we can hardly help seeing in this call to arms the
source of poetry which makes up all the rules as it goes along. The anomalies in any
social institution can often be traced to hidden elements of arbitrary power and eminent
domain. The fetish-saying of the time in response to any set of rules was who makes the
rules? Cooper, a sometime associate of Guattari, sees the past as damage, and this argues
for poetry which erases the past even to the point of refusing to accumulate a semantic
context, a textual past within the poem. The phobia for subordinating syntax and for the
conjunctions which mark causal relations between clauses comes from this superordinate
need to have each line start from zero. If the past is damage, portraying the personality is
reactionary, because it mortgages the work of art to the matrix which produced the
damage and was produced by it. The damage is stored in personalities rather than in, say,
buildings or objects.
Foucault uses the word phantasms, which we can break down into fantasy and
phantom: a fleeting fancy. In this model, there is no longer a polar opposition between the
Alienated Shell and the Real Self, as sealed and cased wholes; instead, the organ of the
affects consists of fluid and shifting impulses, partly imitation of pictures offered from
outside, partly arising spontaneously, a repertoire from which one selects and combines at
any moment to make a mood or a behavioural sequence. If we put together enough of
these pneumatic breezes, we might produce the volume of oyxgen we call an atmosphere
or ambience. They resemble the souls in Cave Birds, vainly suing to be granted bodies.
However strong the artist's sense of self, it cannot explain what is happening to the
reader, who can enter the text only as a phantom, parting with the body; the image of
phantoms gives us a convenient way of describing identification, literary emotion,
emotional suggestibility, and their sister, fantasy. Persistent study of propaganda reveals
that social influence is so pervasive and powerful that there is no material to be examined
when it is switched off. The socialisation of children into behavioural roles resembles the
process of identification with figures in TV, cinema, or literature. Influence and
influenced have no separate existence. The new order could not be the composite of all
the economic and emotional demands of the frustrated; instead, we should abandon all
our desires in the new formation, to make way for new and adaptive desires and for new
duties.

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 Because the path into the liberated future appeared to lie through destroying
attachments, radical art during the era of revolutionary expectations, say 1968-75, cut out
the artist's emotions and attacked the reader/onlooker's attachments, self-esteem,
sensibility, and affections. This was a notable break from the sympathy and indulgence
which art of the past had extended. Such a work of art began, as if a Hitchcock film
where the hero is accused of murder, by taking away our self-esteem, and put us through
the shocks of a thriller in menacing not to give it back to us, as citizens of a Utopia of
which the text was a magic mirror.
Cooper's project puts faith in individual freedom as a source of universally correct
decisions; the demand that the artist take responsibility for all rules operative within the
text gave rise to the line of conceptual art, which by isolating the rules would make artists
up with the running, able to talk to and about the revolution. At this point the line of time
returns, dialectically and allowing no plea or evasion: the joyful research project born
within the counter-cultural revolutionary atmosphere changed its nature when that
superordinate project collapsed, or mutated into a shower of tiny horticultural schemes,
somewhere around 1973-76. (In the Soviet Union, the tolerance extended to samizdat
literature in the 1960s was also replaced by police repression and jail sentences in 1973-
75.) The revolutionary outside which the art had fitted itself for turned out to be either the
university, or a more febrile and less safe Bohemian milieu in Camden, Brixton, and
analogous Latin quarters in all the cities of the world; this clustering, as much in Sydney
as in East Berlin, demonstrated the unnameable truth that the greater world is toxic to
these ideas. One does not say the real world, because inability to discriminate between a
specialised, optional world and a world of fantasy points to a kind of 1950s, Cold War,
CIA mentality. Anthony Powell remarks that no area of life is more real than any other.
This Bohemia Beach, reptile enclosure, or whatever, is central for the historian of art: I
agree that a lot of people went on voting Conservative, supported the Vietnamese War,
thought strikes were wrong and the City of London is fair, etc., but most of the real
excellence of the last thirty years has come out of the extremist euphoria of the sixties.
The historian of culture doesn't have to deal with the whole of society.
The anthology, with its context of assertion, accumulation, and display, cannot
describe how the countercultural poets deal with the dissolution of the counter-culture
during the inflationary crisis and consequent breakdown of the social contract with its
wages and prices agreements. Textual time involves the liberated future, but also the sign
which says that future is obsolete; the past (of optimism about the future) which has to be
worked through if only to rebadge it as bohemian glamour; the expected (real) future in
the script of merchant bankers and their political stooges; the status of the nameless
twenty years of Waiting Time since the project closed. By now, the declarative autonomy
of the poem from an Outside can appear in the balance sheet as wilful blindness—or,
confusingly, as heroic defiance of a regime where property dealers have more say in the
art world than artists.
The day after a night when in a phone-call Barry had explained over and over
again how at his appearance at the Cambridge Poetry Conference he was going to dress
all in black, like Johnny Cash, and come on stage on a motorbike, as Billy Fury did at
Newcastle Town Hall in 1963, I was walking through a square in North London and met
Jeremy Reed at a table at a pavement café. (Yes! life is this glamorous for highlife
editors! I was walking six miles to save busfare!) JR gave his usual cheerful rundown on

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the real story behind the corruption of the London poetry scene, and mentioned that he
was writing a novel about Elvis Presley. It flashed across my mind that Barry and JR
were the same person... well, no, but that they shared a set of procedures, a conception of
what art should be like, in terms of star figures tirelessly cycling through sacrosanct-
liturgical acts, bestowed with fetish objects, in solemn self-indulgence. Both owe
something to the traditions of Gothic, the hero being taken over by a personality from the
past in fatal recurrence, and of rock music. Both have accepted the genre of the pinup
photograph, delivering the Presence of the idealized creature, draped in ritual objects, as
model for the poem. They don't have anything to do with modernity as I have discussed
it, but are close to popular culture and could perhaps form a poetic bridge to it. In fact,
the opposition between high and low, in poetry, can be found in this contrast between
poems which ask for direct emotional identification (the sympathetic circularity which
Bernstein identified as a quality of restricted code speech) and ones which seize on
feelings, and identification, as things to question and repress. In art where communication
and sensibility have been reduced to zero, the claim is to objectivity and universal
validity. The contrast between Reed and MacSweeney, as emotive poets, and Wilkinson
and Milne, illustrates the principle. Impersonality, and high education, are associated with
social authority, and this is presumably the payoff for eliminating sensibility; the
repression of egocentricity is a covert claim to high public office—perhaps episcopal in
nature?
The MacS text offered here (Hellhound Memos, first published in 1991 by the
Many Press) is an odd mixture: mainly sarcastic and satirical comment on unimportant
details of daily life, some passages about drinking and unnamed distress, but also some
scenes where the poet-hero gets to hang out with famous stars, rather like singing along
to a record. This is the kind of appropriative, low-affect mélange we have learnt to call
post-modern. MacSweeney keeps the edits moving rapidly enough to make it all roll
along happily, but it doesn't reach any great heights. The resemblances to Bletsoe and
Reed are striking: the Artist is reduced to an object of fantasy. The question remains of
what makes us identify with these offered figurines: the alcoholic poet Barbie doll, or
sampling kit, scrapbook, or whatever.

Anne Sexton, Robert Johnson, Barry MacSweeney at the crossroads

swapping licks on an Olympia portable

This is an embarrassing moment. Couldn't this couplet have been lost somewhere? the
suggestion is that the poem is a kind of home-made imitation of a finished artistic-
psychological pattern happening outside it (and this poem is nothing in itself).
The idea that art can be made out of the intelligence, rather than out of narcissism,
fetishism, and gratified fantasy, is a minority view. But the printed page is merciless to
anything that isn't intelligent all the way through. If you want to be a country and western
singer, go and buy a rhinestone cutaway jacket and a skinny-jim tie. Some of the poems
in Conductors promise something more intelligent than pop culture. The poet wants to be
Anne Sexton and Robert Johnson; the poem offers the reader the chance to fantasize
about being Barry MacSweeney. We might even want that, if the poem had some
linguistic structure complex enough to appeal to us; instead of this tautologous,
regressive, bloated karaoke narcissism. At least Johnson could play the guitar.

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Hellhounds horning in the rapefields.
Paranoid detectives in the crypt of St Mary Redcliffe.
August fourth fiends nosing the members.
Me, I kick his sizzling heart around just as I like.
Devil in a pink shell-suit.

Some of the poets in this anthology are pursuing a knowledge project, of introspection
towards a greater accuracy, and so more precise feelings, deeper ability to love; attention
to the self going in the opposite direction from the narcissists. No explanation is offered
for the drunkenness except the hell-bitches, who are rather obviously a paranoid fantasy
caused by alcohol abuse. Of the five lines quoted, line one plucks dogs from a Robert
Johnson song (out of some hellfire sermon), two plucks the magnificent Bristol church
where Thomas Chatterton's father was churchwarden, and in whose muniment chest
Chatterton claimed to have found the poems of a Thomas Rowley; three and four relive
the burning of Shelley's body; five copies/remixes a line from a song made famous by
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels (once attacked on stage by feminists for singing
"Devil with a blue dress on", possibly on May Day, 1971). The syntax is primitive and
unmodified throughout. It's always the same reach and grab; what does the poem have of
its own except its inauthenticity? Chatterton and Shelley were the subjects of
MacSweeney's poetry in the 1970s. The "paranoid detectives" are presumably the critics
who pointed out Chatterton's forgery, viewed with a sample-cutout from William
Burroughs and Eric Mottram's "Interrogation Rooms". Maybe "the devil in a pink shell
suit" isn't a piece of country and western style misogyny. Bad flaunting temptresses with
bellies on fire. It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels, and I think the hellhounds are
actually bitches:

Right on time the devil's whore handmaidens rise tiptoe true

in white courts, bursting, roots showing from rhizome heads,
in furious lace and lawn, seeking Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan,
Anne Sexton and Barry MacSweeney. Those gnawing bitches

wearing ruby ankle-straps eager for pointless pleasure's

endless diversion(.)

This could be deep feeling in the mouth of a misogynist paranoid, of a type welcome in
American popular music and evangelical churches, but since it's not deep feeling it's just
a mock-up. Like gratification fantasies, the poem circles without going anywhere; there is
no detectible structure except repetition, five times for the Sexton/Johnson/Dylan riff.
The liturgical objects, the Barbie accessories, which the poet grabs from other texts, are
pressed together in a new fantasy scenario, where they all point to the same thing:
himself.
MacSweeney has gone further into inauthenticity than any other poet of his
generation, even Reed; his plunge into country and western erases all fine discriminations
but could perhaps remind us of Tindersticks' flirtation with Lee Hazelwood songs, Thin
White Rope's adaptation of CandW topoi to a hard rock idiom, Mark Eitzel's parallel

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explorations, The Meat Puppets' SST desert punk cover of Arvel Watson's "Walkin'
Boss", or even Tammy Wynette singing with those Scottish pioneer adapters of
Situationism to the hiphop idiom, montage-maestri The KLF: They're justified and they're
ancient, and they drive an ice-cream van, our beloved conservative Appalachian
housewife pin-up warbles in a post-modernist magic moment. But it doesn't.
Much of the poem lists details of ordinary domestic objects, which I presume to
be an attack on consumerism; but the star myth and the obsession with alcohol represent
the imaginary of consumerism, as opposed to integrity in personal relations, for example.
They profoundly resemble each other as acts of greed in which objectivity and
consciousness are corroded and swept away. Alcoholism puts you in a master-slave
relationship with the manufacturer, and replaces your fantasies with the manufacturer's
propaganda, while negating the value that any living person could have for you; it
negates the value of any chemicals your brain produces, any states of mind dependent on
those chemicals, in favour of a psychoactive chemical bought in the shops; it is the final
rejection and mutilation of the organic in favour of the technological. Parts of
MacSweeney's poetry offer something like a short film in which someone eats four
pounds of chocolate. Where subjectivity has been defined as consumerist excess, even the
possibility of subjectivity has been alienated, alterated, frozen to a caricature. If you find
alcoholism romantic and exciting, this is for you.
Hellhound Memos was, however, followed by the great poetry of Pearl and The
Book of Demons. Although anti-personal poetry is marked as "high" on the spectrum of
sociolinguistic choice, its aesthetic merit is not necessarily great. Indeed, its capacity to
illuminate character and situation may also be minimal. This critical style reduces
gratification. And it is trying to tell us something disagreeable about our real nature. So
why is it different from the moral and sententious poetry which it replaces? In the 1950s
English poetry was still being enacted within the framework of Anglicanism, whereas
today it is trying to apply academic phobias to private life.
Knowing other humans is the source of much of the immediate data of
consciousness; being known by other humans is one of the main factors directing
behaviour. What falls short of the status of science or technology can still be practised as
a folk skill. To behold someone else close to is to inhale a great deal of information. It
seems that normally one suppresses most of this wash of data: to observe people closely
without identifying with them is impolite and self-serving. One way out of the miasma
surrounding character judgment has been to eliminate all such utterances from the poem
and withdraw into a lofty realm where personalities are not in question. This reminds me
of someone at a party ignoring all the people and studying the instruction manual for the
dishwasher. Poetry without subjective knowledge is simply a waste of time. It is evasive
and blank; its hopes are misplaced. One does not go to poetry for information about
geography or philosophy; which indeed is not to be found there except in small
quantities.
The unfolding of lyric poetry provides simultaneously a series where the poet is
passing on information about a context and a series where the reader is collecting and
pooling information about the poet. The project of lyric poetry seems to be to effect
intimacy, where the information being passed is slight and personal, and the
psychological attitude of the reader is one of emotional closeness. Intuition is the source
of these truths; however volatile and coloured its results. Lyric poetry could be fixing and

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coordination of the subliminal signals of mood, aligning them to create a perfectly
integrated message; the effacement of the gap between voluntary and involuntary signals.
The achievement of harmony between poet and reader is also the moment where the poet
is most in control of the situation, knowing the next few moves, and so where the balance
of power has shifted in the poet's favour.
Verbal acts are essentially the translation of behaviour into information. Any
deepening of language is likely to intensify this act of exhibiting someone's behaviour,
exhibiting someone. The idea that language does anything on its own is poorly founded;
the project of investigating language without investigating people and their behaviour
towards each other is short-term and self-defeating.
There is a close relation between lyric poetry and gossip. They retail the same
kind of information. Historically, the link between the rise of modern lyric poetry, with
Guilhem IX of Poitiers, and the rise of a court culture, with its dazzling panoply of
gossip, backstabbing, factions, sulks, flattery, seems assured. We have classic descriptions
of the (Angevin) court as snake pit already in the twelfth century, from Walter Map and
John of Salisbury. Here is an autocatalytic set, the milieu of poetry. Ben Watson recently
insisted (in a bar) that great art came out of an exciting social situation, a pattern which
the artist did not create; but of course the way to complex self-awareness, the basis for
writing significant personal poetry, is to have your initial self-regard cut into many bits. If
you mix with exceptionally astute, articulate, and malicious people, who perceive you in
terrifying detail, they make you sophisticated by hurting you. The university is the
modern court milieu; the sexually overheated nature of student life, and the cerebral
concentration of the official schedule of tasks, provide a stage for intelligent lyric poetry.
It may be that the achievements of the noble courts of Provence in dance, music, and
clothes (dare I say style?) were even more significant than their achievements in poetry.
All of these reflect a high polish of narcissism; introspection coming to a resolve in
external forms. Competition and insecurity were all-present. Self-display takes malicious
curiosity and turns it, first into a pressure to stylistic research, and then into admiration.
After several weeks spent studying this anthology, I keep returning to Stephen
Rodefer, Denise Riley, and Michael Haslam, because of their conservative elements:
philosophy disassembles personal subjective experience, it flies into fragments, and
finally reassembles itself. Some of the experimental poems in the anthology seem in
contrast didactic, low-risk, one-track, and disfigured by self-regard. The fact that the
named poems are beautiful (surely a thing desired by the reader?) seems inseparable from
the fact that they describe subjective feelings, ask the reader to identify, and transmit a
mood. This information is archaic, but richly motivated for me, engaging many of my
faculties and drive structures; whereas "non-conservative" poetry has a "why are you
telling me this" flavour, asking me to memorize the movements of a particular share on
the Tokyo Stock Exchange during 1985. Back to the hacienda; to Bohemia Beach; where
beauty is a function of the whole personality and is turned into information by the act of
being observed.

20
AUTOCRITIQUE

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 The book now released as Legends of the Warring Clans is an account of the time,
made up of dozens of reviews written as the books came out, around 1992-7. This
maximised excitement, at least for the reviewer, but was not conducive to reflection or to
the kind of overview which reflection could bring. The experiences were too immediate
and too immersing; the emergence of an overall picture could only follow the
diminishing of the experiences into things slight enough to be used as objects of thought.
There was an overall picture, but the patterns have resolved only reluctantly and only
over a number of years. Also, there were very many books which I just didn’t review.
This applied even if I reviewed more books, during the Nineties, than anyone else.
Warring Clans was originally compiled in 1997 and published on the Internet in 2003. It
is part of a seven-volume series on British poetry 1960-97. The others are available in
print. There is also a book Poetry Boom, which covers the period 1990-2010.
I looked at it in 2018 and felt that it dealt with many individual books and never
got into generalisations. I therefore prepared a second edition which includes
generalisations. These come from material which I wrote for the magazine Angel
Exhaust, also during the 1990s. The period is hard to interpret, so I think some
provisional interpretations may prove useful. This edition is some 30,000 words longer
than the original version. The main addition is a review of the avant garde anthology
Conductors of Chaos, which appeared in Angel Exhaust in 1996-7. The first edition came
out on the Internet and for that reason was not reviewed by anyone – at the time the
Internet was not seen as a publishing medium. This also means that I could not benefit
from the comments of reviewers. I would admit that I did not explore why so much of
Conductors is bad poetry – I was too interested by the good stuff.
Reviewers like to make out that the non-mainstream is a personal taste to me, or
that effectively I invented it. I just want to point out that it’s part of the geography and
inhabited by thousands of people. There was a noticeable gap between what I liked
personally and what the Angel Exhaust audience liked. It was an exceptional time for
poetry magazines, and I was constantly excited by what fragmente, Parataxis, Grille,
Terrible Work, 10th Muse, First Offence, Garuda, and others were producing. In the 90s, I
was editing a magazine with quite a specialised audience, and I dwelt in that sector. A key
fact is that the UK Underground ceased to pay any attention to the “official world” after
1973 or so and that my “confidential informants” were from deep inside the
Underground. Looking back, the weakness is that I wasn’t reading the mainstream at all,
so there is a lack of material on that sector in the reviews I wrote. Conversely, the
underground sector brought frustrations and disappointments to me every day, I knew
about all sides of it because I was swallowed up by it. So while I read quite widely, and
didn’t take the Alternative version of poetry as definitive in any way, I didn’t get the
overall shape of the time. That came much later.
It is obvious that most good books coming out in the Nineties don’t appear in
Warring Clans. The industry misses 90% of the good stuff – maybe I can mop up 50% of
the 90%. To ask for more would be exaggerated. I guess there were 80 good poets in the
Nineties. The second edition includes several anthology reviews, which address the field
rather than individual poets. It still does not attempt to cover every significant book –
which might be 100 titles, fortunately for us. So a lot of things happened in the decade
which are not included. Over all seven volumes, inclusiveness is better. Due to editorial
confusion, several parts (’soft metal’, piece on Lopez, piece on O’Sullivan) were included

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in another book, The Council of Heresy – duplication. They are now omitted. A radically
rewritten essay on Peter Abbs is now in The Long 1950s.
As I worked so hard during the 1990s, I cannot resist pointing to other surveys
that shed light on the period. Notably, ‘Speculations on the Outline of a Generation Born
in the 1960s’, an essay for an issue of Angel Exhaust which found its way into a book
called The Failure of Conservatism, and the essay ‘Sirens’, written for Kevin Nolan’s
CCCP Review but now collected in The Council of Heresy. The title, adapted from
Prynne’s poem ‘News of Warring Clans‘, seemed to fit the poetry landscape, with the
lack of objective comment. I will go on to raise two unanswered questions: is there a
mainstream at all (as denied by Peter Riley)? Can we draw a map which “covers the
terrain”, or should we withdraw into separate narratives (say 80 narratives for the 80
poets just mentioned)? I think we can venture the generalisation that depolarisation was a
major feature of the decade. We cannot explain how pleasurable this was without
pointing towards the militarised landscape as it emerged during the 1970s, and which has
surely turned into a museum by now. Of course, it offered a comfortingly coherent map
of the poetic field, dividing simply into the innovators and the compromised, bourgeois,
pro-capitalist etc. This startlingly effective generalisation relied on a binding link
between time and style, which alone made the landscape readable. The first stage of
mapping would in fact be to delineate the blocks on perception that have structured any
ordered information that might reach us. We cannot criticise polarisation of taste without
being held back by the realisation that these vital energies of rejection and migration into
the void have also produced the high stylistic development of at least one sector of the
scene, which is the most rewarding feature of the present dispensation
A feature of the decade was a torrent of new arrivals – meaning, also, a dilution of
the people who had already been around in, say, 1975 or 1980. Because the library of
resentments and distrusts was mostly old, this renewal of the poetry population also
meant the eclipsing of factional stances – the new arrivals didn’t even know what the
resentments were, never mind marching into position and reinforcing them. I chose the
title legends of warring clans because I thought it was catchy and because it slightly took
a rise out of the factions and their ideologies, but maybe it would have been more
generous to call it forgiveness and abandoning fixed positions. Acts of war were not
conspicuous—people resolved conflicts by avoiding people who disliked their views, and
a large effort was exerted to avoid disagreeable conversations before they happened. I
don’t recall meeting anyone who liked m-stream poetry, during the Nineties – everyone I
knew had allegiance either to Prynne or to Mottram. I don’t recall Prynne mentioning
Mottram or Mottram mentioning Prynne. What I liked may have been a function of the
people I knew. You all get closer and closer all the time, but as you get closer to the
people in one room you get further away from people in another room.
I was struck by the definition (of an Arts Council research questionnaire, not in
fact of any individual) in which only public events were culture, which would mean that
me reading poetry on my own (in fact anyone reading a book) was not culture (but,
presumably, was bourgeois subjectivism). This does touch something key to poetry – it is
individualistic and suits people who don’t want to refer themselves to a consensus.
Cultural managers don’t approve of this kind of thing. How far it will go?
Where, in recent times, people theorised about poetry, the goal has not been to
uncover the truth, or to reconcile opposed views, but to assert the subjective demands of

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one poet or group of poets. Theory has offered the experience of autocratic power, but
under this cover of luxury has smuggled aggrandisement – the abolition (in symbolic
form) of alternative views. This sort of theory leads away from consensus. So, the scene
did not see war, but rather a stable regime of dissent. There was no argument for 4000
poets becoming more like each other – cultural wealth is differentiation.
I can see that it is hard to run a retail business when the market is dissected into
many parts – but that is telling me that the managers want consensus, not that the
consumers wants to give up racing off into private worlds and following lines of
development to the end. People in poetry want empathy and subjectivity. Arguing and
disagreement don't fit into this wish. Meanwhile, you can achieve your artistic wishes
without consensus. I don't think I need consensus – you need it for administrative acts,
but not for individuals.
Reviews don’t normally come with a bibliography, and I never developed one for
this book of reviews. Randall Stevenson’s The Last of Britain? is indispensable and is the
logical place to start. He reproduces what the commentators and cultural managers were
saying, and while this may give rise to hissing protest among antinomians, it does
describe the market and, indirectly, the community which read poetry. Don’t Start Me
Talking is a book of interviews with poets, all of whom were active in the 1990s. Useful
information is found in the last chapter of Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars (which is mainly
about the period 1976-7), and Robert Sheppard’s When Bad Times Made for Good
Poetry. Sheppard only gives a strikingly partial view of one small section of the scene,
but does give an inside view for half a dozen poets who were in mid-career in the
Nineties. Allen Fisher’s Confidence in lack (Writers Forum, 2007) is a work of theory
which may be relevant to the work of theory-orientated poets in the 1990s. Christopher
Whyte’s book Modern Scottish Poetry starts in the 1940s, but gives very convincing
descriptions of most of the prominent poets active in the 1990s.
A few comments on hostages to fortune scattered through these pieces. There is a
disparaging remark about the early work of Sean Bonney, who emerged a few years later
as one of the most significant poets in the country, with an anarchist and anti-capitalist
direction. I was wrong. So I lacked foresight there; I have to say that Tim Allen read that
early work, with its Beat-influenced scattiness, and saw the potential in its naive Blakean
impulses. I said that Bletsoe was probably the best poet of her generation. This still holds
true. Landscape from a Dream confirms the promise of those early works. The church in
Thrilling’s poem which is the oldest wooden church in the country is definitely Greensted
in Essex; something I read says that it has been mended ‘like a ship’, replacing rotten
beams, so the timbers in place are not a thousand years old, but the church as a structure
is. Equally, some of the poets discussed have died since; I have decided not to record this,
trying to recover the moment of 1997 without later changes
For the chapter on the School of London, I have to say that the caution with which
I approached the topic prevented me from reaching a statement of definition.

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