Sound as a volume; or, real space as fictive space
Reportage on launch of Conductors of Chaos (22nd 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 eighty people were Ian Hunt, Peter Riley, Karlien van den Beukel, Ewan Smith, Esther Leslie, Matt ffytche, Simon Jarvis, JH Prynne, Lawrence Upton, cris cheek, Simon Smith, Ulli Freer, David Sellars, Gavin Selerie, 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, until recently 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 winebar, 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 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 attacked in recent issues of AE, 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 AE 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 JH 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.)
Absent from the throng was Denise Riley, occupied fetching her daughter from an afternoon session at stage school. Riley, aged nine at this time, complained that the teacher wouldn't explain the dance steps to her.
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 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 operationalize 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 misrecognized 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 which 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 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 replan and find someone else, Alice Notley, already there, replanning 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 which 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 which is not differentiated lacks the specific edge which 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 which 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.
Norman Jope (1960-), from Plymouth, edited (1989-1994) the magazine Memes, which published Chris Bendon and David Barnett. The ambience was open to Jungian myth, occultism (a series of articles by AC 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; 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 of admiration Redgrove, Iain Sinclair, Martin Hibbert, AC 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); also Spoil (1989), In the Absence of a Summit (1992), Terra Fabulosa (1996?), 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 RF 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.
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 which 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 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 TW 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 which 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 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. We 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. At some point during the morning, Tim negotiated to publish some of my poems as a pamphlet; a deal which three years later (June 99) has just finally been nixed, after long attempts to raise the money. I must admit I gave a very bad reading. What had seemed on paper to be a brilliant externalisation of inner states turned in that room to psychotic excess, and I swallowed my own voice.
Later, I got much of the material out through another Plymouth publisher. 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 have 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, Kelvin Corcoran, etc. 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, a mainstream magazine, has an ecological 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 southwest (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 97
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, AE 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 AE here), and DM 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, 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.
Luci observed that Glasgow was like Melbourne, which presumably also dates to the late 19th century, and where purchasing power was, we hear, largely in the hands of Scots. My brother observed that Glasgow architects always seemed to go a little too far; a compulsion which mirrors the decades of Glasgow's miraculous growth (which paid for it), and which was most potently asserted in grandiose Protestant churches; the rises of Glasgow's low but steep hills have been exploited as visual approach paths to many towers, notably those of the former college for Presbyterian missionaries. Towers reach for the sky, point to higher things, are visible and vainglorious power, and compete with each other. Many parts of Glasgow are named after similar parts of London, and certain houses imitate the 19th century dwellings of London, with sunken areas surrounded by railings and so on; the city, as "the second city of the Empire", was psychologically oriented towards London (if also towards America, and away from Edinburgh) which, with its greater range of engineering skills, more painstaking attention to detail, and higher civic morality, it could hope to overtake. The twentieth century has been one of setbacks for the city, with a secular decline of the Atlantic trade and of heavy engineering exports. Consumer products seemed too fanciful, too easy, and not virile enough, to this great engineering culture.
It's shocking to see the Clyde and think how it could have become the biggest shipbuilding zone of the world; it's shallow and mud-rich, and can have supplied deep-water anchorages only by dint of ceaseless effort, ceaselessly swept away. Pride, foresight, effort, and insecurity seem to be the local spirit. A strath is not a fjord.
The project of municipal relocation of the 60s and 70s was one of the biggest slum clearance projects in the world; old Glasgow (evoked in Jeff Torrington's wonderful Swing, Hammer, Swing) ceased to exist. By choosing empty-out over infill, deporting the populations of inner city slums to new estates on greenfield sites, it reduced population density by four-fifths, reversed the usual drift whereby the suburbs become middle class and centres proletarian, dense, and decayed, and made buses the big problem of the working class. It also moved class problems well out of the sight of tourists like me. We can say that the monumental project of the Empire was followed by the monumental project of socialism, and that the fatal arrest of both has led, pessimistically, to apathy and exhaustion, optimistically to a new spatial scale of transcendence, the domestic one where, in the new home put up by previous projects, people can explore education, physical development, personal relations, sex, and, not least, art. The excision of the old hyper-dense working-class neighbourhood (the Gorbals now has one-ninth of its former population) makes community invisible, destroys an older kind of socialism and togetherness, but, by making the dwelling unit pleasant (for the first time) makes the household the new dominant site of life and of cultural experience.
The gap between art-poetry and jiggety-jig I'm You pub doggerel, related to the luxury of solitude in a room of one's own, or the snug collectivism of pubs, clubs, and football terraces, is exceptionally wide in Scotland, reflecting, no doubt, housing conditions. The former is dependent on State grants which are themselves dependent on a belief in cultural quality which is tenuous both among Labour and Nationalist paymasters. Living off the government and inherently authoritarian grant bestowers prolongs the student condition of irresponsibility and dependence indefinitely; the most critical art is the most dependent on the belief of politicians that it sustains the values of the system, and the most up-against elected politicians; logically, its subversive project can shrink into a tray of criticisms of grants panels for not funding it. Curiously enough, it might be detailed oppositional pressure from external authority which turned the too-great project back into something animated and completable: where cultural oppositions are dramatized. Impending measures of national independence produce an inert pressure to suppress differences within Scottish culture; even if everyone admits in theory that this suppression of variety is one of the telltale signs of a colonial mentality.
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 CV, the assertion of Zwickmühle's negations could not abidingly be sustained, and he is now unwilling to go on. Carnwadric is close to the legal deadline for his PhD, after six years, and seems to have little chance of finishing it. Cantywheery meanwhile gave up his PhD after 3 years and has been unemployed ever since. They complain of lack of support for students at the English Department of Glasgow Uni, 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 minimizes 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 which undoes what it looks at. The height any tall structure can reach is limited by the fine cellular structure of its fabric; 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 AD's suggestion that Crawford had actually written some good poems, but the problem is partly due to RC's 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 RC, 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. AD believes 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.