I was amazed by the way they mixed free-form Velvets noise with conventional, sometimes delicate, song structures. They were great songs, too, Sullivan/Schneider compositions, often sounding like vintage Soft Machine, and backed by Ingrid's eery operatic tones and Larry's unpredictable, edgy playing. Make no mistake, at their peak the ZTs were a great band. Mind you, at their worst they could be just a noise, and some of this set in when Terry Silent took over the drum seat in August '76. Their approach became a lot harder, and somewhat more literal, and I once heard them do the longest, most turgid 'Louie Louie' in living memory."Actually, the ZipTones never existed, and the photo of Larry Sullivan is an NR staffer with hair altered by biro. Rather than following racket persons around and writing down their childlike prattle, Jon Romney would just sit in the office inventing bands: the ZipTones, Maureen and the Meatpackers, the Adornettes... But things were so easy then; today I have to invent the audience as well.
Mayo Thompson states in interview in that very issue, "The existence of an audience is fairly flimsy. It is at the point of being a dangerously useless term to describe a complex set of people. It seems to me that the mechanics of that relationship is impenetrable to mere phenomenology." This from the leader of a Texan psychedelic band the sleeve of whose first album states that "Silence is the ideological context into which music is published."
After listening on tape to Iain Sinclair reporting Stan Brakhage deciding, after making 'With my own eyes', that the original masks were the faces of dead people, I went into the supermarket and saw an aisle overhead sign saying FACIAL TISSUES and immediately thought 'Oh God. Catling multiples in retail franchises. Eat your heart out Paul Newman'. Reader, it wasn't so.
A new series of Pages is in progress, edited by Robert Sheppard (who was part of the original editorial team of the revived Angel Exhaust, back in 1991). Each issue covers a single poet, with new poetry and a lengthy essay which, if it doesn't exactly hit the nail on the head, at least doesn't kick it in the bottom. The series promises to treat 12 poets, mainly born between 1950-55, all of whom went through either the London experimental scene of the Seventies or the Cambridge equivalent, and almost all of whom have been published in a fragmentary or scattered fashion, and are little reviewed or discussed. Autobiography, contemplative moments of wonder, moral adages, and proper sentences are little in view.
AND magazine is covering the scuzzy end of the London poetry scene, what in fact AE was set up to do and drifted away from as we all lost interest. Edited by Clarke and Cobbing, œ4, available from Writers Forum.
I read a book by Alan Robinson called Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry (1988). This is of no interest whatsoever except as a statement of official conservatism to define oneself against. For example, he defines James Fenton and Andrew Motion as the avant-garde. To you it may seem that they are rejecting everything that happened since 1960, that their appeal is a calculated neo-conservatism; but they represent the furthest extreme to which Robinson dares to go. Some time ago, and even in Anthony Thwaite's official book on Contemporary British Poetry 1960-73, it seemed that neo-conservative critics were prepared to admit that "there are these people called Prynne and Allen Fisher and Maggie O'Sullivan and we can't make head or tail of them and, well, that's experimentalism for you". Look at the bibliography in Thwaite's book, or in the Carcanet "The Survival of Poetry (Poetry since 1970)", they list the people they dislike. Perhaps Robinson's list is now as out of date as Nigel Lawson's boom. Now the argument is "yes! do we have an avant-garde for you! James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine! yess!!" The phrase avant garde is too precious to give away; the avant garde is too politically weak to be allowed to keep possession of it. I can't even write signs pointing to unconventional poetry, because all the old guard conventional poetry claims to be unconventional.
The significance of this file for me is that the light-hearted chatter normally gets cut from the printed version of our magazine for lack of space: this badinage is for on-line readers only. Electronic space is free, and so at this point I can begin to talk nonsense.
Rooting through the books of the deceased grandfather of the former owner of my flat, of which it is full, I stumbled across George Meredith's Collected Poems. A brief check confirms that it is the 1912 edition, edited by his friend, George Trevelyan; and omitting 'Modern Love', his most significant achievement, because it mentions Ad%%tery. Some friend. Snip snip snip, that's the tip. I don't think it's good poetry, but its failure has to do in part with someone writing about things going completely wrong; and partly with trying to deal with something new.
Early plans for this issue included reviews of Stephen Rodefer, Colin Simms, Vittoria Vaughan, Grace Lake, and 'Pearl', by Barry MacSweeney. A new and more accurate tool for Capacity Planning revealed, even before Twelve went to the printers, that there wasn't room for this to happen. I am sorry, and hopeful that they will get written and appear in Fourteen. Attention must, however, go to three major anthologies which should appear at around the same time as this issue: on the (poetic) left wing, A State of Independence (ed. Tony Frazer, Stride) and Conductors of Chaos, Twenty-Six Contemporary Poets (ed. Iain Sinclair, Picador); on the right wing, The Democratic Voice, British and Irish Poetry since 1945 (ed. Robert Crawford and Simon Armitage). Bets are being placed on whether there will be any overlap between the three. Since I am in the first two, I am unable to review them; I have been trying to recruit a reviewer, without success. This coincidence of publishing dates looks like a historical confrontation, a chance to re-assess the last thirty years. Is the unofficial poetry going to vanish from view altogether? (18 months later, two of these have not appeared.)
Issue 19 of Odyssey is devoted to 'The Experimental'. Issue 7 of Terrible Work came out in March 1996 and includes some valuable work (including poems by me, in fact). There haven't been any issues of fragmente, Parataxis, First Offense, or Active in Airtime recently, but let me salute them anyway. All available from the usual dealers, e.g. Peter Riley (27 Sturton St, Cambridge, CB1 2QG, United Kingdom) and Compendium (234 Camden High Rd, London, United Kingdom).
A correspondent from Macao supplies much-needed information on contemporary Australian poetry. "The Tranter-Mead anthology (...) suffers from trying to be definitive, whereas their previous anthology The New Australian Poetry, back in 1981 or thereabouts, was didactic and consciously introducing a new wave of good writers. The figures who've appealed to me are Tranter (Selected Poems and Under Berlin), John A. Scott (St Clair and Singles), Gig Ryan (Manners of an Astronaut and Excavations), Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range and Blue Notes) & the late Martin Johnson (The Typewriter Considered as a Beetrap). (...) Clive Faust I've liked for years, but (..) so far as I'm aware has not had a book published in Australia(.)" The first Tranter/Mead anthology strikes me as a classic, just hooching with brilliant poems. I was struck by an article by Ken Godwin admitting that Australian poetry had had a revolutionary decade from 1968, but claiming that things had quietened down after 1979. This sounds fishy to me, because in Britain at just about the same time we were having the first Thatcher government, the rise of Andrew Motion, and the New Right. Sounds like Bourgeois Guardianship to me. In Britain, the rebels went right on writing even if their writings were suppressed and lied about. I can't find out about this, because the Commonwealth Institute only goes so far with its Australian poetry holdings. More info?