D.S. Marriott, Hours into Seasons, Schadenfreude; Andrew Lawson, Human Capital; Simon Smith, 15 Exits
Charlie Parker gew up on the edge of the night club 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 which 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 GR-FP 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 GR-FP 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 which 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 DS Marriott, Simon Smith, Drew Milne, Andrew Lawson, and Helen Macdonald. One of my motives in getting into writing, from 1989 on, poetry criticism 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.
D.S. Marriott (b.1965?) 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.
(from 'In Darkness' from Clouds & Forges)
Idle chatter uncertain now, shod
in distance & splendour. The cure
is discovery, the fender intempe
rate & expansive near the taprooot.
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.
(from 'Now as Always' from Hours into Seasons)
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 manœuvres of this kind. The pressure of so many show-downs 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 manœuvre 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 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 sociologize 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 8 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, 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.
The Puritans are probably the 17th C 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 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 not 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 Negro intellectual; if you're a rebel byond a certain point, everyone pretends you don't exist and aren't doing the frame-breaking thing. Marriott, of Catholic family, 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 recent 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 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, which 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 which it sometimes claims for its disciples dissolves the binding merit which 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 (1963?-) 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. 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 which 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. 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, stylization 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, recognizing the reality of other people's feelings, the ability to produce a recognizable likeness of feelings. These traits don't converge, and the word sophistication has a latitude which is useful because of its lack of inner content rather than the other way around. These traits are desirable, which is no why poet can stand being called naive. Selfconscious 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
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 selfconsciousness; but philosophical selfconsciousness 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 which presents this self and its assurance may not be either developed or complex. The information imparted at universities is different in nature from the information offered by narrating one's manners and personality.
A statement in 1993 listed JH Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Riley, Roy Fisher, John Seed, Kelvin Corcoran, and JD 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 which the montage effect harbours. The beauty of verse is, as it were, one of the sacred values which thatcherism has destroyed, so that to exercise it unfounds the project of political satire, which dialectically unfounds the tremulous and intact precious feelings which 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 Simon) 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, David 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 a kind of idiot of the family. 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 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 Exits the tragic sense is concealed, being perhaps the underlying stream which makes everything else move, while the verse moves with a relentless and precisely calculated energy, a kind of gaiety.
[How soft - see modified version (as review for Chide's Alphabet, on-line)]
How soft was my Metal: debuts of the nineties
Cultural managers lose their looks. One advances into the 1990s with a cultural tool-kit formed in the 1970s: I don't have the vocabulary to describe what has changed on the scene with the arrival of David Greenslade, Robert Smith, Simon Smith, Rob MacKenzie, Helen Macdonald, Karlien van den Beukel, Tim Atkins, DS Marriott, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Michael Ayres, Andrew Lawson, Grace Lake, Kevin Nolan, Khaled Hakim, Nick Macias, Nic Laight, Niall Quinn, Ian Duhig, Paul Holman, Vittoria Vaughan, Dan Lane, Steve Harris, David Bircumshaw, Andy Brown, and Scott Thurston. Yet, there they are, and it's me who's losing definition and wisping away. However Introduced to the Soles, by Nic Laight, Nick Macias, and Niall Quinn was undoubtedly the most dazzling debut of the decade. Personally, my fear is of missing things, so my wish is to get everything right first time, which precludes writing about first books. My whole critical technique is based on the career review: on recording characteristics made firm by multiple recurrence. But reactions to a first book are a shimmer-chimaera, an aura flickering over the visual field which may turn out to mean that you are falling in love or that you are about to have a migraine. I like situations where I can't talk sensibly. Take Helen Macdonald, for example. I am quite unable to describe the poems in Safety Catch. There are telltale traces from other discourses, such as the linnet in 'Tuist' who comes from an experiment on the line between inherited and learnt behaviour where a hatchling acquires the song of another species to which it has been exposed; the accessibility of such moments should not mislead us into thinking they are central. A passage in 'Parallax' discusses the influence of Newton's Optics on how we think, thus moving the latter into the realm of temporal change, as a set of linked cognitive behaviours which we acquire uncritically as children (but can shift consciously as adults), and the "idées reçues ou idées en l'air, lieux communs, codes de convenance et de morale, conformismes ou interdits, expressions admises, imposées ou exclues" which for Philippe Ariès (p.188) characterise and divide periods; perhaps linked to a passage in 'Tuist' which I believe to be about the 1930s and why they are mysterious; Helen seems to regard period-mentalities a puzzle, perhaps because of a dissociated and detached nature which finds the unconscious rules of the period she lives in difficult to follow. "the beautiful insulatory/ qualities of the English Channel" likewise seems to problematise Englishness, seen as a package on offer rather than as "second nature". We could even link this to the linnet in the experiment: we are thrown at birth into a family which equips us with a behaviour set whose arbitrariness we can see but not quite reach. Perhaps this fleet-footed recession explains why the Macdonald poem is uninvolving, free of silent commands to feel and to identify? But this only covers a few isolated passages within a complex which I find quite elusive. Even these sketches are probably projective on my part, since even if Helen is interested in innate behaviour controls she is unlikely to have the same angle on them as I do, even if she is interested in le non-conscient collectif (Ariès) she probably doesn't have the same (structuralist) angle on it as I do. Its fondness for subtle, evanescent, and unusual sensations is not the key to this graceful poetry, a fluent and alien sight for which no name or response set yet exists.
If we look at Dan Lane's poem on p.60 of AE Fifteen, he says 'soft metallic impression', while at p.133 Kevin Nolan refers to 'clamour of soft metals' (in 'Baion with soft metals to come', quoted from his pamphlet Alar), while at p.27 of AE Nine Helen Macdonald refers to "soft/ and perfect metals" ('Tuist', now reprinted with two new sections in Safety Catch). Clearly we have entered a new dispensation in which hard metals are pas chic. I find this phrase quite indefinable, and any sense I do find in it is as a sweet acid blur, something which is like a paradox but yet more ambiguous. It is irresoluble and yet evokes subtle substances, the relaxation of set patterns, delicacy and the removal of strain, the blurring of categories and the lifting of mere functionality. I associate it with oripeau et clinquaille (one of Prynne's books in French, and two words eminently meaning pliant and unreliable metals), and with 'A Note on Metal', but mainly with a new era and my inability to comment on it.
While drawing up this list, I realised that a lot of the work I valued most had never been printed—this is the effect of being a magazine editor, you are up to your neck in unpublished scripts. The next realisation has to do with generational politics; elementarily, it's easier to sell poets who have been doing it for twenty years and have an acquired audience than new ones; the competition between someone aged 25 and one aged 50 always favours the latter, when resources and readers are scarce. It seems to be very difficult to get a book out unless you're a JH Prynne covers band (or else in the mainstream). The bottleneck of resources for serious poetry became serious in 1977-8 and has never mended. So my version of the nineties includes some unpublished books, especially: Sibyl, by Grace Lake; Sonnets, by Robert Smith; Wrecks in Ultrasound, by Dan Lane; The Other's Side, by David Greenslade; 15 Exits, by Simon Smith; Poems 1991-8, by Paul Holman; 'Solipsism', a long poem (in fragmente 7) by Andrew Lawson. It is hard to understand the atmosphere of the decade unless you appreciate regional rivalry, rivalry between the sexes, and generational rivalry; much of the discourse coursing the scene is simply waves of indignation, based on the feeling that "if you give attention to that, you won't give enough attention to ME". Poets feel that the giving of attention is too important to be left up to the individual, and to the vaporous aesthetic sense. The aesthetic sense doesn't have enough tanks. It's strange how people of generous political views can start sounding like workhouse managers when they discuss why it's morally better that young poet X, who can't get their book out, should shut up and stop complaining. The people who make opinion are the same ones who want the few unorthodox publishers to concentrate on getting their books out. There is also homeopathic openness, where managers pick the younger poets who are clones of the older generation and praise their work; this selective attention to the aged has a purely conservative function; it is a castrating form of legitimating someone. It is the clones who have some kind of reputation now, and whose books pour out. Nostalgia for the era of radical politics, shall we say 1968-74, is still the dominant factor even in 1999. On the other side, there is a kind of cultural stalking, where someone becomes a fan of an elder figure, writes like them, pours praise on them, offers to publish them. Why is this youthful poet trying to climb into this senior poet's trousers? in order to wear them and shine with an aura of legitimacy. Some fairly large-scale cloning has been taking place; what seem to be poems are simply acts of stalking (and courting). This doesn't seem to be worse in the academic milieu than among "town" poets. We can weigh it off against the self-repetition of older and wearier poets—it is the same thing. X is more likely to write an enthusiastic comment which can be quoted on a book jacket (and so make the book more likely to be published) if the book is actually a clone of X's work of 1973; the sincerest form of flattery is the one most likely to be requited. People without cultural assets must pursue strategies in order to gain them; performance, with its timeless needs for ballyhoo and brass, has produced the most corrupt simulation and touting of assets. Possessing culture does tend to be paraphrased as "demonstrating command of the style used by someone quite famous and 30 years older than you". To be recognised as legitimate, one has to be recognisable; something really new isn't accepted as new because it is strange and perplexing. If you aren't a clone, you don't get the patronage.
The scene has probably been more affected by the release of monumental retrospectives from Paladin and Allardyce, Barnett than by the arrival of new poets, published grudgingly and in small amounts. Almost all the reviews I published during the decade (maybe 300 pages) were about poets who were already writing in the 1970s; I can talk almost endlessly about that period. I agree this is weak, but no-one was doing better; I except publicity scams of the usual sort (which, when aimed at a graduate or student market, always take the form of claiming possession of "theory" and "nextness"). However many elements of the scene have changed (due to changing technology and styles in public events), there has not been a shift of rule-set; we are waiting for a new paradigm, but most of the things which vex or excite were palpably around in the 1960s. It is irritating for young poets that the poets of the 1960s are still around, getting in the way of decisive seizure of montage, Marxism, pop, performance, conceptualism, confessionalism, Jungianism, and so many other things which could be the vehicles of a splendid reputation. This dominated status also seems to have implied that younger poets are not very interested by each other, and, when they edit magazines, want to publish the veterans of the seventies. There is no showpiece anthology of the new generation, but I can immodestly recommend the two anthologies I was involved in, being Tyranny and Mutation (edited with Scott Thurston, AE Nine), and Bizarre Crimes of the Future (as AE Fifteen). Issues of Terrible Work, Memes, Fire, First Offence, and Ramraid Extraordinaire, are also recommended.
I appreciate relativising arguments which state that these are not the "best" new poets but only the best within a certain segment of the spectrum, locating which would also locate me, as a partial observer —a hot eye desensitized by its own emissions. I think "modernist" "avant garde" "experimental" and 'small press" are quite inadequate as labels, while analysis would reveal a dozen different styles gathered in one set of magazines only out of tactical convenience. I do not think the overall stylistic map of poetry exists—available accounts are at least 20 years out of date.
I think that classifying these poets in terms, familiar to us and so "lucid", which derive from previous conformations of the overall cultural field, may be a serious mistake, and that there is a new conformation already out in the field, which appears as anomalous, a shimmer, because we haven't taken it in yet. Reviews of the poetry of the seventies placed it all, at the time, in a stylistic map, loosely of American poetry of the 1950s, which gave the reviewers confidence (they'd read the script), but which contained predictions about the future which didn't come true, and which missed everything new about that poetry. At present the audience (a segment of it) is confident about classifying Lawson, Milne, Marriott, and Macdonald as followers of the "Cambridge" style showcased in A Various Art and Grosseteste Review, but this impression may seem completely stupid in ten years' time, and now smacks strongly of normalisation, a confusion (in the cause of intellectual security) of the new with the familiar.
The problem of placing the new may be connected to the disappearance of magazines in "my" market segment, which may follow them as a whole: the erasure of boundaries, the diffusion of its special qualities which could either be expansion or simply spilling and dispersal. Perhaps a future reader will regard this wavelength as "a hangover from the 1970s", while the new conformation was misrecognised and ignored. The negative or inverse of the reader assimilating (and so de-estranging) the poetic line is the poet discerning what his or her true direction is, and focussing a great deal. Mostly, closer acquaintance exposes what seemed interesting as flashy and short of breath, which I am afraid accounts for some of the other debuts of the decade.
I have the habit of deleting what is uncertain, but my problems in saying anything about such poets as Macdonald and Robert Smith are worth setting out, because my state of haze, oscillation, and conjecture is indicative. The new landscape awaits its Greil Marcus. Meanwhile, it might be a good thing if the British Poetry Revival finally kicks the bucket, breaks up, and scavenges itself back to life as multiple autonomous units. The seventies are over.
Andy Brown, The Sleep Switch (Odyssey; 16pp., œ2.50); Tim Allen, Texts for a Holy Saturday (Phlebas, 1995, 59 pp., œ4); Tim Atkins, Folklore 1-25 (Heart Hammer, 25 pp., possibly œ7.50)
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.
The first two poets are into nonsequiturs and irrational editing, taking us back to the sixties 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 which promise new poetic sensations. Both face the revenge of the arbitrary when it comes to making a composed poem. Brown's nonsequiturs are symptoms of a higher detachment, founded in that other staple of the sixties, 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 sixties (Everything's really utterly simple, Dave Mason sang in 1967), 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?).
Tim Allen has rather a puritanical style, abrupt, un-selfconfirming, lacking legato passages. The speed of cuts, rather than a voice, dictate 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' debut is one of the most promising I have fallen for for many years. It's not clear to me what the overall shape is of the sequence of which these rural prose pieces are parts, but at this point every piece leaves you wanting more than it says and the cumulative effect is quite entrancing. We are facing a poet of 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) but of AE Housman and John Masefield, 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 runs 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.
This 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.
Nicholas Johnson (1963-)
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 (1994) 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 (1996) 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 which 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 Turnbull, 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 which it assumes. This society has not only a crisis of legitimacy, but a crisis of the political opposition, the alternative future which 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')
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 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. 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 memorizing 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. Greenslade's object poems come directly out of the experience of learning Welsh, and follow his poems in Welsh, Yr Wyddor (the alphabet, 1998), 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. Gwyddor, in Welsh, means not only alphabet but also element or rudiment of knowledge; translating, it seems to me, the Greek stoikheion, which has the same combination of meanings. 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 emphasizing the concreteness of the symbolic message it does draw one procedure from conceptual art. It certainly doesn't doubt its own premises.
David Bircumshaw, known to me only from a few poems in magazines like Angel Exhaust and First Offence, has perhaps a similar talent to Greenslade's, mysterious and elaborate.
Dawn Andrews is only known to me from a few poems in magazines, (Active in Airtime and Ramraid Extraordinaire) but seems to have developed an authentic modern style. She lives in Powys, but information is lacking on her ethnic origins.