Azimuth is a vast poem, 337 pages long, 17 times as long as ‘Briggflatts’, 21 times as long as The Waste Land, 337 times as long as ‘Froggie would a-wooing go’. The nature of its appeal is quite different from that of lyric poetry; that appeal is rooted in the organization of the poem, but the first problem is to state what that organization is. Obvious motivation is missing. The organisation by places and accumulation of topographical data suggests an approach to describing places by the things that happen in them. This is close to traditional volumes of Local Antiquities and Curiosities but also an implied challenge to organised knowledge, e.g. local government, legal tenures, measured geography. This would give us both the nature of Azimuth's appeal, to a specific English sensibility, and its place within the programme of English radicalism in the late Sixties and Seventies. Much of the contents (for example, the several reports of Flying Saucers, pp. 27-9, 169, 224, 341) fit into the hippy mythology: I guess that this is not a direct statement by the author, but rather an exercise in tolerance, a demonstration that personal validity cannot easily be taken away. The author is retailing popular mythology: a way of acquiring material, but also because he finds it exceptionally hard to reject other people's ideas. As politics, Azimuth is a long contention that personal feelings and perceptions are relevant to personal life and can't be cut out of the record without losing something essential. The first poem is called 'Public domain/ private world'.
I think the real pleasure of the poem is not in any fine passages but in the fascination of spotting all the different appearances of the different themes, and fitting them together. This pleasure reminds me of re-reading A Dance to the Music of Time.
Azimuth includes different kinds of knowledge within a single framework. The book is a composite picture, but the author declines to synthesize it. A Key on p.348 apparently describes the whole book as 'Interface: Azimuth - biography of a decade'. It is important how we complete this; if we add 'of someone's life', it sounds rather egoistic, but it is hard to attach any other label. No-one but Selerie is likely to have lived in these 5 different places during precisely these years. Selerie is, then, one binding factor between all the strands; but the meaning of the book is not a self-portrait.
Inventory of types of material
1. UFOs etc
2. love poetry in archaic styles; hymns to the Goddess.
3. ethnographical forgery material
4. paraphrases from pre-modern literary sources
5. scenes from the everyday life of the Counter Culture
6. vignettes from the history of map-making and surveying. (hence the word azimuth.)
7. splices of diverse materials
8. topography and antiquities
9. poems about rock singers or jazz musicians
An example of no.5 would be on p.108:
She in green stockings
bigger than he had thought, it seemed
a gypsy visit and off
hand return; unpressed flowers
on the window ledge, illustrating a music
beneath the arc of light.
Rasputin had left, though the bottles remained -
brushes in Berlin and cabaret. Grey hooded
she came from a knife display, but the tarot
showed journeys of another kind -
from clocks and locks to rice and sand,
red clogs by the bed and jasmine breath.
A winter less barren could hardly be
it seemed the store of loss
had piled itself against their door.
But she slipped through the season,
a pimpernel that smuggled
April's rooted segments
from a street or stony field.
Clearly, if the author is associating with people who believe in fortune telling, it would be rather rude of him to disbelieve in this and cognate brands of addle-pated nonsense. Hence use of the irrational is a kind of stalking-horse. If you don't trust the testimony of the people with you, you are authoritarian and centralising in mentality. It's the kind of attitude test by which that kind of person decided whether you were acceptable as a companion.
It's unfair to define the contents in such a clean-cut way, because many of the poems involve juxtapositions of materials, and the outcome is arguably a whole set of new and fleeting relationships.
One has to accept from the outset that there is a kind of literature which is not full of mercurial shifts and crises but in which there is a broad discursive flow whose imperturbability is the cause of its literary effectiveness. We are reminded of Aksakov and Nievo; in poetry, the comparison might be some 16th C Latin epic on fishing, carefully avoiding politics and personal relations. Azimuth is didactic and reflective. It is full of love poems, but these are neither about frustration nor about conflict, but about the pleasures of living together - full, indeed, of pathetic gratitude. The narrator proposes no changes in his personality during the poem (the discoveries presented are, instead, his increasing involvement in old maps and in the 13th C chronicler Matthew Paris), but, one has to add, the poetic conventions about moments of spiritual breakthrough may be psychologically unreal, and aim at effect; perhaps people continue placidly at 40 to be what they were at 20. The priority, then, would be to avoid fashions and crazes which distort one's originally whole nature by rejecting parts of it. Such a poetry would be a victim of the ennui which predominates in the literary world; it would lack all appeal to the market makers, but would need broad spaces in which to develop its essential nature and distract the reader from transient imperatives. Azimuth does not present any passages of great intensity or brilliance, but its appeal is pervasive once you have gone on reading for long enough.
The turning-points presented in the book are in fact geographical, the sections into which it is divided being named after places. (The other crisis presented occurs in a second-hand-bookshop, where the narrator discovers a volume of Matthew Paris in English.) This implies a mysterious self-effacement: the narrative derives its atmosphere from place and therefore not from the narrator, who acts and feels in the way appropriate to the local conditions.
‘Azimuth’ is a measure of the elevation of an object in the sky; compare Binnacle Press, the name for Gavin's activities as a publisher. The cartographical theme is opened in the 7th poem (p.18): discussing Matthew Paris' map of around 1250 AD as the earliest detailed map of Britain. Perhaps the most compelling section is the one of (prose) reminiscences of the local history of Ladbroke Grove, on pp. 269-77, echoed by a passage in the later pamphlet Southam Street. The concern with navigation and location fixes is hard to dramatise; its tendency is in fact to eliminate motion, and look at people where they are as if they couldn't exist away from there. Cartography is wonderfully unnecessary to a poet, and to the characters in Selerie's poem. The narrator cannot derive anything from cartography except the reassuring knowledge that he is where he already is; one of those I look like me feelings. Well, there you are then. It legitimates the recording of tiny details with no obvious emotional relevance. The emphasis on place directs attention away from human agents; while also providing a medium gentle and receptive enough to accept all human foibles and predilections.
If the overall idea of the book is topographical, the method of organization is the promenade. It's not really possible to believe that the different parts have any relationship to each other except that of juxtaposition: like the different things you pass during a leisurely walk. The parts do seem to arrange themselves in a sort of pattern: the brain must form associations between nearby things so as to navigate, using a sense which is fundamental but also indiscriminate and diffuse. Such associations only become acute when the objects themselves are exciting or urgent. The accumulation of material, as Azimuth continues, is never organized into a higher design; it is the pleasing number of open possibilities, making endless part patterns none of which is ever resolved or eliminated, which makes the appeal of the poem. It is as if choosing and striking out along a particular line would destroy the comforting integrity and capaciousness of space. Do these collocations of objects evoke anything except themselves? If the answer is 'yes', it could only mean the domestic intimacy which we enjoyed in those places; so the whole is an oblique love poem. For example:
Memory a mosaic of sense spilling,
She's not there, she's not there.
The bed that squeaks while she is here,
our music Blue. Joni sings
drinking a case of you.
Down in the Red Lion
by the high pavement
at the bend in Fishpool Street.
(p.23)
This redefines place as the scenery which the loving couple passed through in the course of their affair. We should add to this a number of references to the sacral organisation of space, as a work of art in three dimensions. It remains to inquire what deity would be revered in this way. The answer is not hard to find if you have read a little popular archaeology: the whole poem is a gigantic paean to the female principle as symbolized by the Mother Goddess, who is addressed in various poems, and of whom various mortal women are earthly representatives. (The information is handily collected in The Mother Goddess by E.O. James.) The real give-away is on p.89, which is a writeup of material taken from Mumbo Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, theorist of the Mother Goddess and of a culture dominated by her in Neolithic South-east Europe. (The poem is dedicated to her.) She (Ishtar rather than M. Gimbutas) is responsible both for female fertility (and sexuality) and for the fertility of the earth; so that the history of maps could reasonably be said to be a way of tracing Her lineaments. (A closer mediation might be the siting of gardens for ideal use of soil and sun, see pp.164, 194.) Her role as 'space enclosing us' was represented, it would seem, by various temples, notably on Malta, which are her body: the original sacred space. This is summed up by the poem on p.345, referring to the Egyptian Nut, shown in paintings as the sky; many other poems refer to different versions of the Goddess (p.343, 325, 327, 208, 207, 185, 89). The serpent theme may refer specifically to the serpents being brandished by a goddess in certain Minoan-Cretan images; and leads us back to the idea of 'land art', the core of the book, as on p.97 where the standing stones of Avebury are equated with a serpent. Other poems, more slily, link the brewing of beer to Sumeria, the cultivation of barley, and the goddess Ishtar.
The poet has published several works since, which I find at least problematical. Most successful is Southam Street, a pamphlet of descriptive poems about a working-class street in North Kensington. Selerie has notoriously spent nine years writing Roxie, a volume-length poem about a heroine involved in the rock and fashion industry. I heard him read from this many times during its gestation and suspected the disaster which reading parts of the final text confirmed it to be. The nature of the poem required manipulation of various tones of inauthenticity, with the narrator lurking behind them emanating a sardonic sophistication; from what I have said about Azimuth it will be evident that the author's virtue is a kind of obstinate naïveté, and he is totally unequipped to be blasé, ambiguous, and sophisticated. The transition to writing entirely about a female subject prolongs a trend to goddess worship visible in Azimuth.
One of the entries in the catalogue of types is descriptions of rock music. (This may acount for 20 or 30 of the poems.) Four of these poems are about, er, chick singers Marianne Faithfull, Joni Mitchell, and Wendy Wu. These foreshadow Roxie. A comparison with Barry MacSweeney's bizarre and extreme poems about female punks (in Jury Vet, around 1983) says something about the Zeitgeist; despite all differences of temperament, both poets were writing about women while rejecting existing types of love poem. The resort to para-literary modes, from popular culture (pop records and pin-ups) and from literary traditions older than or marginal to courtly love poetry (Egyptian, even, or Irish), is common to both. It is no doubt Bill Griffiths who offers the closest equivalent to Selerie.
A first publication at the age of 32 suggests a certain slowness of temperament; compared with the eventual bulk of Azimuth, it suggests obstinate patience in a development which was neither favoured by the Graces nor distracted by external considerations. This may be set beside the hippy aspirations lovingly chronicled in Azimuth; a culture which, it is well-known, flourished for much longer in the provinces than in London (except in the Ladbroke Grove area, where indeed the last two sections of the book are set). Azimuth is a book of great obliquity: the real theme is arguing for a co-operative, non-materialistic, life, but this theme is never attacked head-on. The contempt which people living in London (many of whom need to be up-to-date in order to keep their jobs in TV, the rock business, fashion, etc.) have for people who stick with ideals which once were all the rage in London belies the point of those ideals, i.e. that they were a permanent way of living. I could contend that the failure of the metropolitan cultural activists to persist with the ideals of 1967 was despicable. A culture which gives values for life will conflict with a culture of competing novelty at every point. I could add that poets are temperamentally slow reactors, which is why they aren't pop singers or TV producers or something; they are bound to be behind the fashion. It is historical fact that two books of poetry expressing the ideals of 1967 and 1968 appeared in 1984 (Azimuth) and 1986 (Continual Song) respectively. The logic of dressing and acting as a flower person, 'head', hippy, etc. in the summer of 1967 was that you hadn't been doing it for very long (very few people were "doing it" in 1966), and so that your knowledge of its implications was superficial. But the plan was to replace the existing British way of life - a revolution of everyday life. The case for leading a less materialistic, less competitive life could only well be made by a portrait of some way of life that had gone on for a long time, and certainly wasn't a pose for the camera. This case is then the project of Azimuth. I suspect sometimes that the preoccupation with 'theory' of the cultural kind is just a displacement of social frustration; the behavioural differences between someone who reads Derrida (or whoever) and someone who hasn't are really trivial; but ideals could only be important if they did affect your behaviour, to make you a better husband or father or employee or whatever. The characterisation of the narrator (who is in effect Selerie himself) does not take place by his consumption patterns but through his verbal gestures; as someone tolerant, affectionate, self-effacing, a bit Utopian. I find this appealing. The domestic events presented in Azimuth aren't glamorous, but they are persuasive. The scale of the work suggests that there are no decisive moments, but a broad river of experience, and slow acquisition of new habits. A revolution of everyday life does not have events or battles. Everyday life, then, is what is being depicted; and the appeal is like Kilvert's Diary.
There is a coat-trailing policy statement in the last poem: about 'to keep the abstract locussed/ in athletic language/ to be both poet & historian, to move/ beyond the Western box' ('Notes for survival'). I can't see anything non-Western in the book. One should not hold this against Selerie, it was the mode of the times; a great dread of propaganda and social conditioning made it fashionable, in the Sixties, to assert that you were yourself far above all that kind of thing. The obvious way of doing this was to allege intimacy with some Third World culture. Statements like 'I failed my exams because I couldn't accommodate myself to the narrow western world-view' and 'my new record leaves the cramped conventions of the Western world-view far behind' became unbearably frequent. Pastiches of Egyptian myths (pp. 341 et seqq.) don't really amount to being 'non-Western'. More convincing is the self-description on p.337: 'Can it be an order of colours and shapes/ traced on this two-dimensional surface,/ as I try to catch the way she looks & moves? (...) O sleepy longing to come through,/ and not to collect women as stones/ like Ruskin,/ and memory: not to be/ an alcove bricked in.' We glimpse here the possibility that the 'navigation' theme acts as a metaphor for the artistic problem of depicting women in their full complexity; it is indicative that the problem is conceived as portraying Woman, and not (for example) humans in general, or group relations. I could say that there is little about the psychological content of relationships, to fill out these protracted metaphors about cartography, but in fact the content has been extrapolated into the pastiche love poems; which solemnly imitate Elizabethan poems, or Egyptian ones, because the basic model is the pop song, and urgent measures are needed to get away from this. The worshipping attitude to women is distinctly weak-kneed, but at last it is persuasive.
He has also published Tilting Square, which proves his flexibility and determination. These poems are tight and prickly in their organization, and so abstruse that it is hard to find the emotional point:
Here at the gate of the fourth rite
with your blood-road pinched by the drive to do,
you look back on cloudless July slopes,
a casual stack of particles unretrieved,
and you ponder an otherwise angle.
In a certain sense, the vices of Azimuth have all been corrected; but I cannot like any of these poems. Evidently he has been reading J.H. Prynne and John Wilkinson. Possibly, this book consists of orthodox love poems; with all the side-trips and picturesque meanders of Azimuth pared away.