Seed's text may represent a momentous step forward. His work has always had the problem of presenting a theory of historical change, centrally governed by the dialectic and by mankind's conscious effort, in the static epiphanies of neo-Objectivist technique. His well-known poem on the Thames shipping lovingly details the ships visible on the Thames one day in October 1849; we know he is thinking about the Empire and about the decline of London as a port, but those dynamic processes defy the pictorial technique which he has brought to such perfection. Transit Depots is an experiment in long form, a rehearsal (using other people's words) for a radical change in technique, to expand the scope of his poems and re-integrate change, energy, and time into the poetic texture. A long poem (which we hope to publish in the next Angel Exhaust) may be part of this expansion of scale.
The case of Sheppard is somewhat different. The compression process is still active in his work. He is not interested in psychological continuity, and his sequence (about an unnamed woman whose 'diaries' we read) is broken up by the very heightening of the separate instants.
In discussion, Robert always responds to the word 'emotion' by saying, with a gleam in his eye, 'But emotion is dubious'. I've always felt that emotion was rather important. He compensates for its absence by cranking up the instant impact of his disconnected images:
a letter
we've just received spilling seeds of shame.
Negro dances between black sheets delivered the
lovers' blood to pathetic mythologies, filed the
oracular valves, transmogrified their twitching voices.
The language is melodramatic, even hammy: 'history's tight membrane/ the age's leaking sewer', again: "stinking conduits;/ eugenics' sewer floods'. These effects are far more obvious and strident than 'emotions'. This work is close to the aesthetics of rock music; particularly the notion of sampling, of composition by montage of samples, and the rock video style of high-calory images making an instant impact without characterization and with low affect. All of this follows from the decision to have something exciting happening all the time. Either high drive or a reduced span of attention. The finest moment comes in 1924, when the heroine imagines herself (inspired by The Sheik, a novel by E.M. Hull, filmed with Rudolph Valentino, described in Claud Cockburn's Bestseller) being ravished by a virile Arab:
This cigarette
card Empire, where an Arab
in pearls drags me to his soft
bed, collapses at my feet.
The beauty of his parted
lips: he has only to speak
and I will disappear, a
sack on a stick full of
glitter; rider on my spine.
Yes, reader, it's sex sex sex I'm afraid.
Robert's other theoretical mainstay is indeterminacy. I've never been able to distinguish this from indecisiveness. The definition of 'structure' is an array in which each element determines every other; indeterminacy means that the parts do not interact. Equally, the idea of character implies limitation of behaviour; if someone has no character then they offer no binding element between poems. Indeterminacy and lack of identification go together. Consciousness, as opposed to perception, involves the recognition of past states in present configurations; total discontinuity drains our consciousness. Meaning is a special form of determinacy.
This raid of two modernist poets into the territory of historical narrative is a challenge, like Sheffield's fearsome avant electronic band Cabaret Voltaire taking on the 12" disco 45, in 1982's 2x45. The momentous failures of Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, and Lowell litter the field, absurd yet frightening. The whole proposition of modernism was about the uniqueness of each second, the transience of each specific conjunction; this logically led into an atomistic, disjunct, method of representation, and made any so evanescent thing irrelevant. Pattern is recurrence; I have said that consciousness only emerges with recognition. The solution of continuity with the past disables the intellect. Poetry has to reconquer time in order to reveal any kind of social process. How does this poetry match up to C.L. Mowat, The Long Weekend, and Claud Cockburn? an away draw for our two wizard strikers, I fear.
There is another issue, that of the reader complaining that the writer is recording a biased view of life and co-operating with the social conditioning of more devoutly repressive institutions; this accusation, to which certain modern poets have been acutely sensitive, points to, or unconsciously stems from, the notion of a perfectly unbiased account of events, what in physical terms we might call an isotropic record. Or, with reference to the distorting agency of teleology, we might call it a surface of zero teleology. The anthropological vision has usually been expressed in terms of primitive art, in fact shamanism; the analytical possibilities of anthropological thought have been resistant to treatment in poetry, although presumably they have provoked conceptual thought even among poets.
In New Scientist for 30/5/93, p.30 John McCrone reports:
"subjects were shut in a ganzfeld, a simple sensory deprivation chamber where bright, red lights are shone onto ping pong balls taped over the eyes and white noise is played into the ears. For subjects the effect is much like staring into a formless fog. After a quarter of an hour or so of such blankness, most people begin to experience brilliant dream-like images, much like the so-called 'hypnagogic' images that are often seen on the point of falling asleep."
Sparse art doesn't always mean a psychologically scant experience for the consumer, it's reductive to apply the kind of arithmetic that says the complexity of the art is directly related to the complexity of the experience. Perhaps this is too obvious to be worth saying; but still I'd like to point to examples like film music, which can be extremely complex in polyphony, in the variety of instruments and colorations used, in the density of notes, and yet be uninteresting even to its originator. There are far too many poets writing simplistic nonsense (the bird/ hops// off the branch// plump!) and belting out propaganda to justify it: e.g. that the reader dislikes this poetry because the reader is greedy/ selfish/corrupt/ materialistic/ spoilt etc. This type of bad poetry reached a peak, no doubt, at about the time in 1968 when all four Beatles were visiting the Maharishi Yoga on his landed estate in India, but it has missed the news of its own death and gone on flourishing, in its way. It certainly isn't true that the most advanced poetry differs from the most obvious by greater complexity. This might be true in many cases, but the notion of artistic complexity gets very slippery very quickly. Radical simplicity has been adopted by doubly cunning practitioners like Anthony Barnett, Tom Raworth, and late Prynne.
Poetry does not deal with passive drift of associations, but with purposive, shaping, imagination. The path to intense contemplation, intense intellectual experience, lies through maximum strain on the links between self and society. Detachment may be the result, but this leads to passivity; instead, it is when the self is strongly bound to society, but dramatic events make those bonds alive and conscious, that the maximum of ideas surfaces in personal awareness. Such moments must be transient, because ideas which have been fully understood cease to be conscious, dropping beneath the surface again. It is important that the bonds should have been cast in doubt, as if they were about to disappear or radically change their nature. Such moments can happen at the beginning of a depression; depressive art is important, but we are concerned with an optimistic revelation of truth, a Utopian vision. Such moments can be classified. There is the anthropological vision, where someone looks at non-European societies and has a glimpse of the artificiality of society, and of its possibilities for inner change. There is the epistemological, or Baconian, vision, where someone sees the intellect stripped back to a set of perceptual faculties, rejecting all available knowledge, ready to rebuild itself from zero, free of deceptions and errors of deduction this time. There is the Socialist vision, where someone perceives a Utopian social order without poverty, inequality, unemployment, or exploitation. There is the vision based on sexual liberation. There is the feminist vision where women cease to be an oppressed class pushed into menial labour by tightly integrated social control. There is the religious vision. There is the vision, specific to artists, in which someone sees the limits of personality processes transcended by the application of a Method which raises the outcome to objective status. All of these have inspired poetry, however difficult it is for poetry to take on the all-involving, hyperassociative, immersing quality of such experiences. I would even say that poetry which never takes on these radical extensions of personal experience is a little disappointing.
Graham, born in Greenock in Lanarkshire, and apprenticed to a shipbuilder's, began as an imitator of Dylan Thomas, in the manner of the times. Most of his first two books, of 1942 and 1945, are vitiated by this, and the Collected Poems does not really get going until about page 45. (Another book, The Seven Journeys, of 1944, was excluded from the collection; this is discussed by Tony Lopez in his book on Graham.) His reflective attitude, in the later poems, developed out of the fey, prophetic tone of his early poetry. He likes to gaze into the middle distance, at a shape which is intricate but yet puzzling and unrevealed; his procedures are oriented towards bringing about this sense of wonder and attentiveness towards the unknown. It is perhaps a little too obvious that he has this in mind.
Graham was living in London during the war, but then moved to Cornwall, where life was much cheaper. The Saint Ives area on the north coast had a flourishing colony of visual artists, where he could find friends, but very few writers, bringing a certain isolation. He wrote elegies for three of these painters, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, and Roger Hilton. With The White Threshold, of 1949, he reached full maturity. By this time, the New Romantic style was on its last legs, and it was necessary to start again. To a certain extent, Graham stopped writing poetry after this, and began writing poetry about writing poetry. To this phase belong The Nightfishing (1955), Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970), and Implements in their places (1977).
Two stylistic twitches are typical of much of Graham's output. These are, first, the wondering attitude: why is a stone a stone; and second, the trope of personalising language, as if it had a will of its own. 'What is the language using us for?', he asks, without answering. The volumes Malcolm Mooney's Land and Implements in their Places are dominated by this question. This second trope was typical of an era which I now declare closed: language doesn't exist outside the human brain and everything it 'does' is a function of the human brain. I agree that many of the processes taking place in the mind are unconscious, but as something becomes writing it also becomes conscious: poems can't be attributed to any agency except the poet. It's bizarre that it was the intelligent poets who subscribed to this solemn myth about language doing things; the opposite case would be easy to explain.
The reason why the mind does unexpected things is not that language is autonomous, but that the mind has different agents or layers, and consciousness is a kind of court which attempts to reconcile conflicts between these. A common reason for conflicts is the relation of the self to others: for example, when bonds to another person conflict with our self-interest. This isn't exactly uncommon or hard to understand. Language has to do with social nexuses, and acquires its characteristics and its latent purposes from them; it's unacceptable if someone is slicing away its social origins to leave a mist-wreathed mystery. Language serves most of all for debate, for representing different interests and opinions. Perhaps the mystery springs into being from the suppression of causal links, and this gives the poem a false autonomy: the poet's voice emerges uncontradicted and other voices are faded out.
The formula for an English poem of mid-century was the description of the sensuous particulars of a place, for example a landscape, followed by a moral or philosophical apopthegm which was supposed to be linked, mnemonically, to the landscape. Graham fails to fulfil the formula, not for lack of descriptions of places, since descriptions of Greenock and Lanarkshire occur frequently throughout his work, but because there is no link between the sensuous and the philosophical elements of his work, no parallelism.
Other important themes in his work are his family and friends, the town of Greenock and the countryside around, drink, ballads (which he had a nostalgia for), and the sea. The last comes up in dozens of poems; the repeated imagery of shipbuilding, Greenock's staple industry at that time, fits into constant imagining of the sea as the environment of the ship, the force to which the fastness of every rivet is a counter-force. The sea is the theme of two of his most ambitious poems, 'The White Threshold' and 'The Nightfishing', which are perhaps his best.
This deep time, scaling broadside the cannoning sea,
Tilting, cast rigged among galloping iron vesselwork,
Snapped wirerope, spitting oil, steam screamed out jets,
Bomb drunkard hero herded by the hammerheaded elements,
Loud raftered foamfloored house, a waved scorched hand
Over final upheaval and the decked combers.
The filling limpet shell's slow gyre round the drowned.
The cairns of foam stand up. The signed sea flowers.
('Men Sign the Sea', from The White Threshold.) It acts as a meeting point between Greenock and Cornwall, his home in adult life. Perhaps there is an afterimage of this theme in his theme of being lost in language, envisaged as a huge hostile environment in which lost poets painstakingly navigate:
Today, Friday, holds the white paper up too close to see
Me here in a white-out in this tent of a place
And why is it there has to be
Some place to find, however momentarily
To speak from, some distance to listen to?
Out at the far-off edge I hear
Colliding voices, drifted, yes
To find me through the slowly opening leads.
Tomorrow I'll try the rafted ice.
Have I not been trying to use the obstacle
Of language well? It freezes round us all.
In this poem, Malcolm Mooney's Land is seen as an Arctic territory and also a psychological state of the poet. The leads are channels opening in thawing ice. (Mooney's bars were an Irish chain, stocking Guinness, which Graham used to frequent. There is a bar in Dublin which has an old illuminable sign saying Mooney's above its door, although the bar is no longer called that.) Why is it that language is part of sociability for everyone else, and a symbol of isolation and severed communications for Graham? It could be to do with his intellectual isolation, in a remote and largely rural peninsula. This would be the empirical approach to how language works, opposed to the metaphysical approach, taking words as absolutes, beyond and above individual life. I feel that his departure to Cornwall calmed him down a lot, freeing him from the pressures of the densely-populated London scene: his style become less compulsive and more measured. But at the same time his late poetry gives the impression that nothing exists outside itself; the outside world has receded to a fearful and optically treacherous remoteness; the result is monotony and lack of incident, even though this allows reflection.
A certain ideology is common today whereby an artist who is being conscious and critical the whole time is more important. This is meaningless in itself; it doesn't matter what searching questions you ask yourself unless you can find artistic solutions; what matters is the quality of your decisions. The work of art which reaches a satisfying and stable quality can then be examined in all manner of ways without collapsing. Today, paradox and irony are held to be a way of giving the literary work more depth and more ability to resist demolition. Graham, in poems like 'Approaches to how they behave' 'Wynter and the grammarsow' and 'Implements in their places', is seen as a precursor to this. It's curious to see where he got this from, and how enigma, question, and paradox were adapted from the artificial confusion, surrealism, and miracle of Apocalyptic verse.
"'I shall have to do research', Dougal mused, into their inner lives. 'Research into the real Peckham. It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.'A central idea in explaining Fisher's technique has been ostranenie, a term introduced by the Formalist and former student at the Saint Petersburg Oriental Faculty, Viktor Shklovsky. 'In order to restore to us the perception of life, to make things sensuous, to make stone stony, there is something we call art. The aim of art, to give us a sensation for the thing, a sensation that is seeing and not just recognition. In this art uses two devices: defamiliarisation of things and complication of form, to make perception more difficult and to prolong its duration. For in art the process of perception is an aim in itself and must be prolonged.' The idea should be related to surrealism and montage, where objects or scenes are thrown into a drastically new context. One could argue that they are all concerned with the faculty of association, which is being upset and disconcerted. The artist is opening up an empty space in which the work of art can take its course; if the reader simply imposed their already existing associations, they would perceive nothing new and the art would be stifled. The danger is that the disconcerting art will prove to be a chain of empty paradoxes, like Mannerist poetry, which succeed in invalidating themselves, and being predictable, in short order. Defamiliarisation (a translation of ostranenie, which literally means 'making strange', from stranniy, strange) shears away the predictable run of plots (and metre, inevitably associated words, trains of ideas, etc.) but has rapidly to refill the razed space with an ample flow of perceptions. This might be the associative process itself, foregrounded by the demonstration that it is wrong and conservative, made into an object of study. It might be of consuming interest to study the procedures of perception and memory, which are usually hidden by the tranquillizing flow of information. But in Fisher's case the plenitude which refills the razed, and latent and charged, space is the city of Birmingham, made visible once the scenography of sentiment, contempt, and myth has been demolished. Fisher has said his home town is "like a science fiction empire, and when I wrote about it I hardly ever called it by its name." English literary sensibility is insensible to Birmingham, and the country's second largest city is virtually undiscussed in literature; Fisher enthusiastically lists the feeble evidences of novels by Walter Allen and a poem by Louis MacNeice. We have methods for dealing with large industrial cities, but they are unrevealing. (It is curious that this prejudice applies also in the mass media; dramas and comedies are not set in Birmingham, its accent is disliked and therefore little used by actors, it lacks an image.) The drama of Fisher's life is that of someone painting a pre-Raphaelite picture of a mediaeval scene, with models in authentic garb, which he is painting in minute detail, who by chance looks out of his window and sees a modern industrial city spread out, and wonders what would happen if he looked at that and painted only what he could see. The mediaeval painter was not Fisher himself, but the English poetry scene as it was in the mid-1950s, or slightly earlier, which had a problem with source material, because it found the real England unaesthetic and improper. It may be unfair to call rhyme a mediaeval device, but it's literally true.
Mr Druce betrayed a little emotion. 'But no lectures on Art', he said, pulling himself together. 'We've tried them. They didn't quite come off.'" (Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960)
Thirty-five years later, I'm sure it's still true that many people regard Birmingham as unaesthetic. I think you have to have a strong interest in how English society, especially in its buildings, machines, and town lay-outs, works, in order to enjoy Fisher. You show what's there and find the cultured audience would prefer it wasn't there. If my informants are correct, there are remarkably few poets in Birmingham, few poetry magazines, few readings.
Shklovsky wasn't trying to invent something, but rather to analyze something which he thought of as an artistic universal. I have a record by Johnny Cash, a performer using traditional genres with rather strict rules, where he exhorts his guitarist, Luther Perkins, 'Play it strange, Luther!' Art has to be strange, this isn't some whim of a disaffected minority. Any poetry is riddled with devices for making its surface puzzling, glimmering, ornate, original, and so attractive.
Fisher's approach is related to the insights about the difference between primary perception and awareness which are laid out in books like The social construction of reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and The intelligent eye, by R.L. Gregory. In a normal poem, there are warm rhetorical devices which instruct the reader how to interpret what is happening; Fisher cuts these out, in order to demonstrate that they are there: he gives us glimpses of what the world might be like before verbalization. These glimpses may be illusory - how on earth could we recognize a shot of a pre-verbal world? - but they are the modern sublime. We are cast back to the beginning of things; we hold as it were an object from millions of years ago, or from very far away, in our hands; and we are inside the object. The specific experience of Fisher's poetry is not what he tells us but the range of hypotheses which we form in reaction to his dissipation of convention and context. It would be misleading to say that work such as Berger's or Gregory's - and much like it - supplies an argument for Fisher; their rigorous separation, of the irreducibly real from what is interpretation and socially agreed fiction, washes away most of the justification which exists, and opens a million possibilities for art. His exposure of meaning as collusion is also an attack on the cultural and political discourse of London, which by social collusion reduces Birmingham to a fixed emotional flavour, and silences its voice. You can't get back to a pre-verbal self, but you can wander around Birmingham and destroy a particular set of cultural myths about a place.
Fisher has said, in an interview with Robert Sheppard, that his work is "political in the sense that - and this is the didacticism I suppose - the world is made particularly in its social manifestations, in its economics, by mental models. (..) the human mind makes the world. The investigation of this organism that makes the world is of paramount interest. If we do not know how our minds work, and how our appetites work, and how our senses and our rationalizations are interactive (...) we're very poorly equipped to interpret the forms by which we live, i.e. the political dimension of the world. All I ask for is to have the imagination regarded (...) as politicized because the imagination will make the world. And if it isn't my imagination, it is Margaret Thatcher's imagination. She is a deeply imaginative woman. Rhodes Boyson is a deeply imaginative man. They have visions of the world. They have interpretations, rationalizations. (...) I am, if anything, a specialist in those processes." There is a certain irony in this, because the imaginative processes of Thatcher or Boyson (a ludicrous Far Right educationalist and politician) are, clearly, saturated by obsolete and kitsch sets of imagery, and investigating them is to project an unwavering beam onto some pretty ancient artistic properties. It's like using a very modern camera full of intelligent chips to photograph some 1930s semi-detached house which only had forlorn reminiscences of real architecture.
Fisher goes on to say more about these means of interpretation: "You can see the extraordinary range of collocations or combinations that can be made. I don't think that it matters whether you turn the prism so as to give many colours or you turn the prism so as to produce optical chaos. What you have is a prism. What you have is a brain, or language. You can do any bloody thing. (...) And I don't think you're under any moral injunction to make only convergent patterns."
Fisher's external career has been one of slow progress from a start in the 1950s where he was very frustrated with the English literary scene, and couldn't get published, apparently because he wasn't writing in rhyme. The small press and unorthodox scene that was getting going in the late Fifties was designed for poets like him, and he emerged in the light of day with City, in 1961 (this is a different text from that included in the 1968 Collected Poems). Three books followed from the classic small publisher Fulcrum, then one from Carcanet, followed by apotheosis around 1980 with a Collected Poems from Oxford University Press, who still publish him. There were no belated apologies; it's so expected that professional makers of taste will get everything wrong that it seems unnecessary for anyone to apologize. Conversely, in fact, one should recognize that publishers like Carcanet and OUP do publish some important books. Perhaps it would be arrogant of me, too, to expect to spot the significant poets before they turn fifty.
Eric Homberger's interesting treatment of the formalism of the fifties (in The Art of the Real) sheds light on the origins of Fisher's formulations. He quotes Donald Hall at p.87:
"'I have come to think that all human action is formal; all personality is an aesthetic structure, a making something exist by statement: like saying a word. Symmetry becomes the root of morality, conduct, and judgement, and reality is a terrifying chaos outside form glimpsed only occasionally, and never, of course, understood without a translation into form.'" (Poetry from Oxford, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith, Fortune Press, 1953.)Hall is isolating form and using it as a window to look out into the Unnameable with; this is comparable to Fisher's interest in conceptual tools, also assuming a certain autonomy between the world and human pictures of the world. But Fisher does not find it terrifying. Monsters are rare beasts (unless in a poem by Ted Hughes). The argument that metre has to do with primary categorisation and perception is distinctly odd. The belief that symmetry is the basis of morals is so startling that it might be the subject of a Fisher poem.
"'If art is a window, then the poem is something intermediate in character, limited, synecdochic, a partial vision of a part of the world. It is the means of a dynamic relation between the eye within and the world without. If art is conceived to be a door, then that dynamic relation is destroyed. The artist no longer perceives a wall between him and the world; the world becomes an extension of himself, and is deprived of its reality. The poet's words cease to be a means of liaison with the world; they take the place of the world. This is bad aesthetics - and incidentally bad morals.
The use of strict poetic forms, traditional or invented, is like the use of framing the composition in painting: both serve to limit the work of art, and to declare its artificiality: they say 'This is not the world, but a pattern imposed upon the world or found in it, this is a partial and provisional attempt to establish relations between things.'" Richard Wilbur, quoted by Homberger at p.86. (from: Mid-Century American poets, ed. John Ciardi, 1950).
Fisher was by no means a wild man, an isolate. These are the poets of the formalism, with rhyme and strict metre, which Fisher was violently hindered by and reacting against at the outset of his career; yet what they are saying, in these two examples, seems remarkably close to what Fisher believes about poetry. They wish to freeze the artificial relationship of concepts to perception; Fisher wishes to radically draw attention to it, his "turning the prism" round every way corresponds to their "window", fixed in place. It's ironic that, while Fisher's American influences turned English conservatives against him (but got him published in Origin in the 1950s), the chefs de file of the formalism around him were also American.
Something else contemporary with Fisher's debut was Pop Art, as executed by Hamilton and Paolozzi. The kitsch structures which Pop painters were ostentatiously putting into their paintings correspond to the structures which Fisher was carefully filtering out of his poems in order to produce something mysterious and unadorned. Both techniques show the artist surrounded by highly integrated systems of interpretation and dramatisation with which he is quite at odds, and which serve to hide the real nature of the world. Fisher's rigorous interrogation is the successor to poets, of the 1930s for example, who opposed this corrupt scenography of the everyday with a finished oppositional politics, equally scenographic. Fisher, unbeholden to any faction and its iconography, is quietly dismantling the story of the everyday as if it were a motorbike he wished to strip down. The problem, no doubt, is the lack of obvious gratifications for the reader.
Anthropologists are accustomed to study the behaviour of illiterate tribes in terms of cosmology, that is, as a complement to their material culture and their practical relationship to Nature, their attribution of symbolic values to the world, and the system of associations and categories which ties phenomena to those values. It interested people, a few decades ago, to ask how the irrational, religious world view of pre-literates had become the rationalist, scientific world view of the West; an early answer to this was to study the pre-Roman, or Dark Ages, cultures of northwest Europe - giving us the interest in celticity and shamanism. Another response was to single out the irrational elements of Western thought and behaviour. Fisher is trying, by obstinately identifying elements of the physical world and social behaviour, to isolate the cultural process by which social reality is composed. What is the English cosmology? Look at the tabloid newspapers to identify it. Class and religion and saucy sex must be uppermost. The diversity of events can easily be fitted into these repetitive stories, which the public buys every day. Fisher has spoken of moralizing as an English trait: everything gets a moral fable attached to it, which disguises its real nature and restores the onlooker to satisfaction and indifference. Yet this is an artificial literary system, it may be more dramatic than the verified facts, but it is as unreal as the apparatus of Classical mythology. Its stock components might be found in finished form as far back as Wesley, perhaps even earlier.
The reason why anthropologists are sent off to the Philippines or New Guinea to do fieldwork is that any society in Britain is too complex. Anthropologists give up: is there any ground for believing that anybody understands British society, a thing with 58 million moving parts? Discourse builds boxes which can be dealt with because they are protected from the complexity of reality; occasionally someone has to come along and demolish one of the walls, to let the puzzling, diffuse grey mass of reality flood in. In such a populous society, the first question is what evidence to ignore; the answer being, at first, to ignore what contains the maximum of interpretation, and the least of unfiltered primary data. Moralizing is a distraction; the attempts, both Left and Right, to make a link between literary style and ethical or moral goodness, are largely false; the parallelism does not exist.
"What I resist (...) is the connotation of what is for me bourgeois - the social democratic outlook of bourgeois guardianship. (...) that there was an arena of informed debate about the true nature of British culture and that it might be found in the New Statesman or an Encounter article (...) on the whole you'll find me to the left - or further out - of those people. Not so much in terms of any programme but in terms of distrust of elites and those who constitute them. And I believe that the British forum of articulate culture-bearers is a self-deluding group." (from the interview with Sheppard). There is an acceptable way of reducing social events to a verbal form; Fisher is saying that it's not a true account, it's a self-referential verbal form, which serves to efface possibilities and restore the mind to calm and apathy; Victorian public opinion ran on sentiment, but contemporary public opinion runs on something more up to date but essentially similar. The empirical project hasn't yet managed to model the chaos of reality, because it has been arrested by a more powerful current of control and fabulation. What Richard Wilbur says, above, about the artificiality of verbal forms, is memorable here; if these systems are artificial, how can they also be accurate accounts of the motives, and the effects, of the behaviour of real people? The Pharisaism of the cultural moralists is their criminal impersonation of goodness and knowledge. The opinionators couldn't wait for the nature of society to be properly understood, because they had to carry out the function of defining who was bad, and who was good, beforehand. This premature assignment of moral values is important, because it accounts for a great deal of literary criticism, of discourse about poetry, and of the poetry which I don't write about: because it is part of "bourgeois guardianship". Perhaps the thing we most look for - or I most look for - in a book is the goodness of the author; the methods of conventional English verse are striving to signal decency, that is their function; their failure is that the methods are too self-protective, insufficiently analytical, to decide whether the poet is a good person or not. Perhaps imposing a moral test is a way of reducing the diversity of the world to monotony. Perhaps, if there is no moral test, there is also no need of a judge, of authority, or of tradeable forensic knowledge.
The question of goodness resolves itself, in prose, into the way the writer conducts an argument; fairness will stand for goodness. This is where Fisher's character comes out: in the massive fairness of his interrogative method, in the scrupulousness of his procedures.
Fisher's course, as described in his interviews, has involved a constant exit from romanticism; emotional rebellion is edited out and only cognitive criticism is allowed to stand. His rhythm has to do with the speed at which information can be assimilated, it is didactic, as free of superfluity as a bicycle frame, but dispassionate. This marks him as a transitional generation; although a major poet, he solved his own contradictions in too ruthless a fashion, and the romantic tendency must now have its head.
All his work has the same simplicity of syntax; I annoyed the poet by comparing this to rock and roll, but the real reason is that the pattern of causal and associative links, assumed by syntactic relations, does not exist in this 'primordial' landscape, but comes about only as the result of experience, and represents recognition, or naturalisation, which is what the poet is trying to escape from. When a large number of very simple stanzas are connected together, they do acquire complexity and life. The problem with the poet gazing at a stone as if he'd never seen one before is that the reader actually has seen one before. At this point the whole situation depends on very delicate unconscious prompting, the suggestiveness of the poet's linguistic means. Dissociation - the dazed look - may have quite different psychological meanings. At worst it is a voulu feyness, as the poet intones 'Stone. Rain. Mist. Tree.'; at best it is the poet discovering twenty new things about a stone, or a wave, and evoking their undiscovered being without even giving them their right names.
Barnett at least points us at the mystery without introducing premature rationalisations or even abundant details to distract us from the central point, giving us an apparent wealth to secure and dull us. Barnett's work needs protecting from those who too brutally ask "what does it mean", of something like 'The history of theatre/ is that of absence./ It is unsound./ It is not wanted in this,/ where climate would be displaced.' (from Fear and Misadventure), since after all it is pretty clear what his procedure is getting at, and he's hardly alone in trying to go back to the beginning of the mind and of naming. No, the poems don't need specific meanings. I don't find Barnett's turn of phrase gripping or evocative, but I also couldn't explain what 'Song for Marina' actually means, or why its phrases are so infinitely haunting.
(Note. I have been working on a project of documenting modern British poetry. I am finishing off volume three; this piece is part of volume four, which exists only as a draft and must have incredibly low chances of ever being published. So I may as well release it on the Internet. There is some chance of volumes 1 and 2 seeing the light of day. This project lasted from 1993 to 1997, and I think I can't go on. Even at this point, there are plenty of poets I haven't written about who deserve it. After initial assessment, I wanted to write simultaneously about all the eighty or so contemporary British poets I considered to be significant. This section was chosen because I wanted to publish something on Asa Benveniste. Here is another draft, on Barker. AD)
There is a depressing similarity between the weary Classical architecture in the paintings of Di Chirico and Delvaux, and the religiosity of poems by Jouve and Barker. I guess the crux in Barker's poetry, for most of us, has been its limited lexical set, implying that the hyperassociation which his lavish style offers is crimped by too frequent recurrence of the same restricted set of ideas. His conviction brings on a lack of fluency with ideas. Predictability abolishes the sense of risk. Any wildly passionate style-in poetry as much as in acting, painting, or music-has to be backed up by a fertility and fluency of ideas, since after all excitement does generate many ideas. This limitation is compounded by his use of Christian imagery, since that is some 2000 years old and is also under central control, not susceptible to Barker's creativity beyond a certain point. (He was a Roman Catholic.) This area brings us the complication that B. was a non-intellectual, who however was able to put his total world-view and cosmology into verse for that very reason; his cosmology actually was Catholicism, so that this conceptual field has the double problem of potentially either making him the poet of the whole temporal and supernatural order, or of burdening the poetry with mediaeval thought whose relation to the real emotional events in question is remote and feeble. One has the suspicion that his religion was also a literary effect. The passionate tone and limited lexical range brought a problem of exposition; he likes to write long poems, and to put the protagonist in a situation requires an expounding voice which is informative and reliable, quite unlike the lyric voice; B. solved this after a fashion, but was not strong at verse architecture, one is not always sure what is going on, which does cause the attention to flag in a long poem. He did a lot of obituary poems, a situation which neatly combines Eternity with concrete details about a named person; even this was by no means ideal, since the situation is closed and certain even before the poem starts. He liked to use words which carry their own teleology about with them, gobbling down the fix of cheap energy, little considering that this turned the text into a hostage and disabled him from any attempts to assert his own organisational pattern on it. His revolt against society is carried, or crippled, by his heroic revolts against the predictable courses of a text set up by himself.
It seems to me that there is a typical Irish, and a typical British, way of writing Catholic poetry, sacrosanct by the traditions and feelings of the audience; look at writers like Saunders Lewis, David Jones, and George Mackay Brown. Barker wrote in the typically and traditionally French manner of Catholic poetry.
Barker's reputation is now likely to depend on his location within the Soho milieu of the forties and fifties now made famous by such writers as Jeffrey Bernard and Dan Farson. This marketing ploy presupposes that the audience are more convinced by biography and legend than by poetry. If I thought poetry was obsolete, I wouldn't be writing this.
Almost all the anecdote about Barker is scurrilous. The story about Faber editors over 30 years telling him "we don't like your books, we can't sell them, but we can't drop you because you were signed by Eliot" is unconfirmable and probably fantasy. B. in youth looked very striking in photographs; of course, good looks usually empty out a poet's work, because the poet is not dependent on verbal form and is not socially insecure enough to go through the punishing self-criticism which is the only path to style. Dan Farson's book Fabulous Monsters tells a story about Brian Deakin photographing Barker in a patch of nettles next to a public lavatory in Soho; as Farson narrates it, this is a skit on B's invincible narcissism, he was so convinced that he looked sultry and lean and saturnine that he had no sense of the ridiculous and didn't notice the irritated and malicious Deakin setting him up. B's later poetry is on the same territory as Deakin's photographs, Farson's reminiscences, and other Soho legendaries: it has strong biographical and realist bias, and the test is whether he could alter his style enough to show the characteristics of other people. Of course, D. was doing what every photographer does: using props to characterise the subject. There is a lot of Barker writing 'from the outside in' to complement his earlier writing from the inside out. Writing obits is an ageing poet's way of marking time. Graham also did a lot of obituary poems, sometimes about the same people as B. "I had a letter from my home, Most of my friends are dead and gone, This life, this old sporting life, is killing me", as Brownie McGhee sang. Here we are inside the Soho legendary; it's useful, when reading In memory of David Archer (1973) to know who Archer was. Much information will be found in Farson's Soho in the Fifties about this poetry publisher and bookshop owner.
B. was not an intellectual-which is why he was ignored by a generation of educated poetry readers; however, the structure of abstract ideas underlying his work is dense, because it is theology-his Catholicism pervades throughout. Readers who find complex non-empirical systems sleep-inducing (I count myself as one) will react badly to this. He was not a curious man and had relatively little information to vary and adorn poems with. Invocation of Christian poets of the past merely suggests that his themes are antique. B.'s belief in damnation makes each second potentially decisive in the battle for his soul, but occasionally provokes resistance to his semantic labelling: no, we say, your soul is not at stake, this is not a decisive instant, this is not a moment of pure excitement. What is repetitive, cannot be decisive; unless it was monotony that was being fought out and decided on. His social isolation then makes his poetry closed and useless. Perhaps the fate of the poem turns on its ability to reach genuine unpredictability; when it does, we believe that the fate of his soul is in the balance. When he stumbles through his usual themes in a ham-fisted and obvious way, no uncertainty is possible.
It seems possible that his exaggeration of phrase is based on boredom. The pan is too hot, everything burns up before it can be cooked. His rhetoric is on fire, its terrifying certainty contradicted by the cosmic uncertainty and risk he is proclaiming by means of it. If he is locked in a body and its drives, and construing the world within the terms of a Christian system 2000 years old, boredom is a constant risk. At another level, this is the stress in leading a life without a job; between the daily freedom and the possibility of economic poverty being more constraining than a bourgeois profession. B. was nothing but a poet; the function of a job is precisely to reduce risk and autonomy, which is why the poems of his tenured contemporaries are so shallow. Barker's direction came from inside, not from the corporation. He appears as an athlete and gambler; constantly raising his body to a pitch of performance to outrun risks, incurring a rapid loss of energy which brings on new risks. I take it we would rather watch an animal chasing for its life than one sleeping in a zoo or an office.
All of Barker's work is flawed; all of it is interesting. I would recommend Calamiterror, Goodman Jacksin and the Angel, Two Plays (radio plays, 1958), and The True Confession of George Barker. Certainly this leaves out a good many very interesting poems; but no-one should try to read the Collected without medical assistance. Given the longueurs of his individual volumes, it is possible that his publishers' failure to bring out a selected until 1995 (some 60 years after their first dealings with the poet) was responsible for the obscurity which engulfed most of his life. He wrote in the 1930s several lyric, even mystic, novels, Alanna Autumnal , the texts in Janus, and The Dead Seagull, in a French style much influenced by Jouve's Paulina 1880, les aventures de Catherine Crachat, etc. They aren't very good, but they do shed light on the domestic scene within which the furious arias of the poetry do their emoting.
B.'s personal problems must have grown less pressing when he passed 50. The question then became whether he could expand into other areas without losing his furious drive, so achieving artistic maturity, or whether he would write occasional poems, full of the old tricks but desultory because his original fury had been so sexual and narcissistic. He obstinately went on writing: after the 1955 Collected came The View from a Blind I, the second part of The True Confession, The Golden Chains, Poems of Places and People, In memory of David Archer, Dialogues etc, Villa Stellar, Anno Domini. Even after the 1987 Collected, there came Street Ballads.
Only three of the poems in David Archer are actually about this patron, although the poems are numbered as a sequence; the unifying theme is an argument about metaphysics of striking dullness, like being stuck on an overnight train with a drunken and loquacious priest.
The crisis of the word,
the defeat of simply rational speech, is what
the poem takes off in flight from (...)
the intellect
of Europe sits on the banks of rational aggrandisement
disbelieving all things, and repeats the same word.
(...)
There is no crisis of the word. There is a crisis
of the intellect and of the intellectual.
It is the crisis that precedes the acknowledgement
of the imperative of veneration.
So we hear endless turgid rational argument contending that reason does not work. Part of the tenuity of this discourse is its generalization-as theology tends to make life itself uninteresting by dealing with the Eternal. Barker's poem editorials are dull because he does not evoke the drama of ideals and domestic life in the individual existence: mentioning editorials reminds me that Cyril Connolly could write such things and make them literature. Connolly's sketches were at last psychologically convincing; Barker wasn't good at evoking other people's characters; as his scope as a love poet is limited by his inability to write about women; so that we get declamations about love, but no poems about living together. In memory of DA really takes off when he describes people's actions concretely, without the theological blither. Poems 27 and 44 are excellent examples. 27, addressed to 'my poor Higgins' (presumably Brian Higgins) says
Then as hesitating you stood
there, red-handed, caught alive, on went the flood-
lights of Hammersmith Hospital and we saw the black book
the perspex mask and oxygen tube and we knew
it was the old cold bed for you.
This also reminds us that the young Jeremy Reed took up this part-medical, part-hagiographical way of writing about fantasists and losers, in his poems of the early seventies (Saints and Psychotics, for example). I would like In memory of DA if it were ten pages long rather than 68 pages, which is pretty much true for the rest of his late volumes. Recalling Connolly's taste for the moralistes points us to Barker's failure to advance from the archetypal (the system of artistic psychology upheld by Christianity from, say, the 3rd to the 16th century) to the empirical and differentiated (the artistic system which was beginning to take over in the seventeenth century). Moves away from the empirical in recent decades are partly based on the surviving strata of the stylised and dramatic which lurk within it; criticising art for not being purely empirical implies that this is a sufficient principle. A plural move away from the intact observed towards the observed-observer interaction, so that most of the interest lies in investigating the inherent rules of the mind and of systems, structuring the observation, has undercut realism; without putting Barker's pre-modern techniques in a stronger position.
Barker's manner is based on thermodynamics: heat forces humans into frenetic activity which is also high-risk; they indulge in risks to acquire enough energy to stay in uncontrolled, dangerous motion. Calamiterror is based on an image of the salamander as psychic anatomy: this lizard lives in fire, which in the poem exists within the human breast; the fire forces destructive, irrational, and erotic behaviour on the human, who is faced with psychic death if the fire slackens. The cynical reader may ask if this heat is simply alcohol, taken to in boredom and despair. The allegorical view of physiology explains why B. can so rarely catch a likeness; he is stuck with a kind of thirteenth century medicine. The salamander image is static, and this explains his inability to set up a series of mental states differentiated along the time axis; this failure to deal with temporal series brings on a failure to differentiate successive pages of a long poem, and the chaotic structure of his long poems such as the Confession. You can't undertake naturalistic observations of allegorical animals. The autobiographical poems may be about various love affairs, but you can't disengage anything like a sequential account of what happened in the affairs. Women were involved, love makes you perceive them vividly, but you don't get anything like a character sketch of a woman, in flesh and time. Since the detached activity of catching a likeness was essential to the Soho painters, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Michael Andrewes, as the robust pictorial basis underlying their emotional effects, one can guess that Barker's failure to set up a realist-psychological framework limited his work. The Confession could easily be a Bacon painting.
The fervour of his poetry, if it is about anything outside poetry, is about physical attraction, tempestuous and rapidly repented acts of fornication in between uproarious drunken conviviality in the glitter and smoke of pubs. In fact, he may have spent much of his life in marriage, or at least in stable domestic cohabitation, and he had many children; but the poems are not about that, their tempo records liaisons which are fiery, shatter quickly, and are endlessly repeated. The history of his reputation is irrevocably tangled up with the theories held by other agents within the literary world about marriage and virtue. Sexual attraction in his poetry seems to be something that wears off, like drink, but then there is so much sexless English poetry which is too soggy even to burn. It is possible to view tumescent sexual attraction flaring up between two near-strangers in a bar as authenticity. This combination of high affect and short duration made the fortune, a few years later, of rock and roll. Barker's presentation of male sexuality in poetry evoked massed repressive forces, established to put down exactly that; the pioneering stance of him and Logue laid the way for a general upsurge of poetical male sexuality in the sixties, itself to some extent the groundwork for an upsurge of poetical female sexuality. Different people appear to live in different timescales, their vital substance stretched out along different lengths of time; Barker's poetic world may seem flashy and shallow, but an attachment lasting for five years may have little event to show in the exact time which a poem looks at.
The underlying contention is that I'm such a highly-sexed bloke that I can't help chasing all these women and having all these children and all of us being poor. B. doesn't state this outright, but in any case it asks for a feminist reading that would turn it inside-out. Once you make your moral incompetence the basis for your poetic licence, you are asking for the reader to redesign your life for you. Of course, Barker saw this argument as a corollary of Original Sin and so as part of a pious illuminated legend of pride, sin, gin, bed, and eventual contrition. In a funny way, it was his claim to be like Baudelaire and like the lives of the saints, or even the Tristan and Iseult story. As perversely, the velocity and ardour of his style slily offers his sex drive as a form of behavioural beauty, the vigour of an untamed animal, and this is the claim to artistic beauty on which his work is staged and which draws our attention. A masculinist reading of this would be pretty angry; his success with women in real life, or in pubs, resembles his success in presenting a romantic sex object to readers; unfortunately, this claim is too well staged, too densely fabricated, too virile and fascinating, to be easily cut down by scholarly austerity.
Come, sulking woman, bare as water,
Dazzle me now as you dazzled me
When, blinded by your nudity,
I saw the sex of the intellect,
The idea of the beautiful.
(True Confession, I, 3) The masculinist objections to other men engaging in sexual display reek too much of envy and frustration to be advanced any longer. A more qualified reflection is that this thesis isn't present throughout Barker, and, even where it is (in the Confession and Calamiterror) it is mixed with contrition and a pessimistic anthropology (in the theological sense), not boasting at all. The rest of his early poetry, however lavishly it draws cheques on the poet's personal energy, has a different staging under it; he experienced the thirties not only through sexual urges, but also through hunger, and through the sick excitement of visualising how much society was blocking him from satisfying either one. Barker wrote the best English political poetry of the time; recording direct experience until its sheer directness wiped away any interest in society, and drove him back to morality as the way out, with theology as its science and law-code.
Barker belongs with the Apocalyptics even if he began publishing in 1930; he is a melancholy example of the failure of that group to produce a second wave of mature art after the first wave of wild and confused originality. Barker and Dylan Thomas were born in successive years; they came between the Auden group and the Movement, both of whom came to occupy the Establishment and to impose their orthodoxy over decades. One could suggest that the Movement followed in the footsteps of the Auden clique, which eliminated personal subjectivity in favour of putatively ethical observations of public affairs, garages, bridges, and so forth; the Movement was equally opposed to emotions and imagination, but had further eliminated political enthusiasm, so that the depiction of dead reality had lost its purpose. (The point of transition would be the anti-ideas, anti-hope position of Auden's post -1939 poems.) But a more artistic, less inhibited, subjective kind of poetry had gone on flourishing. After realising how uninteresting Auden, Larkin and their playmates are, one comes round to a clear-eyed disillusioned view of Barker, Thomas, Davies, Lynette Roberts, David Jones, and (in the earlier years) Edith Sitwell as the most important poets of the mid-century period. The selection of four of them by Eliot at Faber's was hardly eccentric. Perhaps their problem was partly that they weren't university educated and so didn't belong to the political class; a longstanding confusion between poetic art and social authority means that the reading public persistently grants a place to people with the social manners of the most prestigious class, and the confidence that goes with it.
One of Barker's books is called The Golden Chains, and although he credits this to a 'Cambridgeshire folksong' we can recognise in it an ancient Classical trope: the aureae catenae are the snares of rhetoric, irresistibly beautiful, binding the hearers.This wrapping up of a metaphor in a pictorial emblem is important in his work, and we can point also to the emblematic objects of a saint, devices dating to perhaps the sixth century AD, an era of declining Classical traditions but when the Western folk tradition of piety was aggregating and being made ready for mass production. Pious prints and the Breviary spoke a lot to Barker. Another period of importance to his imagery is Mannerism, a peak period of Catholic rhetoric and painting, especially in Italy, leading in the Baroque, which gives him a vocabulary of paradoxes, cosmic combats, gravity-defying contradictions, rhetorical flowers, purple patches. The fourth period is, as we have mentioned, French Surrealism, especially its florid Catholic end. We could mention poets like Francis Thompson (of 'The Hound of Heaven'), but I feel that they and he are merely local adaptations of Mannerist conventions, and unlikely sources for what Barker drew from Catholic literary tradition, which is of course cumulative. In 'A Vision of England 1938' he speaks of 'O London, magnificent monster (...) I saw you astride the South in coils/ of insatiable economic appetite (...) Where is the Cappadocian for that throat/ To cut the health and wealth of England loose?' The Cappadocian is Saint George ("Then a saint walked up out of the sea,/ Dragging his death behind him like a boat') , and so B. is trying to deal with the problems of the world economy of the 1930s in terms of a Christian myth of the Late Empire, which in fact picks up a figure ('the Horseman who slays the Dragon of drought) of Bronze Age antiquity. B. uses this hoary machinery to get over the essentials- rage and distress- without error, but is handicapped in dealing with 20th C reality. The rest of the poem is kitted out with allegories. Supposing that the attributes which Barker gives his tormented voluptuaries (and himself) are like emblems, and the sinners are like saints in torment, points to the limitation of Barker's technique: lack of the virtues of empirical observation, which of course had been in dispute with allegorical and mannerist writing ever since the seventeenth century. The pictorial clarity (like the smooth surface of a Delvaux) works against any psychological precision; in this picture-language:
I find
The voluptuous flamingo undulating and
Coiling in its female neck
The stringent flame the salamander.
My masculine salamander consume
The feminine flamingo of desire
(from Calamiterror)
it is as if sexuality refusing to allow any deeper psychological contact were like the physical objects of allegory refusing to allow more precise observation. The imagery of physiological organs closes in on the poem and stifles it. Justifications from such as Freud and Jung, to the effect that the unconscious thinks like a sixteenth-century painting, arouse the retort that the unconscious absorbs artistic conventions of the past because they are available in our visual world.
Keith Jebb's ludicrous contention in a review of AE Thirteen that Logue was a bad poet and Mitchell a good one provokes me to release this survey of Mitchell, which I also don't expect to be published anywhere.)
Mitchell is the heir to John Betjeman; his jolly jingle metrics, predictability, basis in popular song forms, constant regression to the amusements of childhood, casual-wear clericalism, dislike of modern life, and avoidance of ideas, should have guaranteed him the same audience.
AM was involved, from around 1958, with the Jazz and Poetry live events, proving the law for our time that 'poetry which gets too close to music loses its intelligence.' Logically, the participants should, on examining the results, have burnt the tapes, thrown the poems into the sea, and killed themselves; but this kind of thing refuses to go away, it persists with increasing degrees of self-righteousness and incongruity. Marxist cultural politics at this time homed in on the folk and jazz scenes as anti-American and so putatively free of commodity-capitalist corruption; since both folk and jazz were massively American-influenced, the decision was more to ignore the forms of music which the working masses preferred. The position adopted on folk culture was that it was free of middle-class influence; in poetry, it was perceived that the middle-class were involved in education and thought, so that the elimination of knowledge and thought from the poetic text were supposed to have the same effect and restore it to a pristine folkly purity. Mitchell's poetry is trying to run against the 'dominant ideology' and provoke thought, but the effacement of the processes of inquisitiveness, comparing alternatives, testing hypotheses, criticising, making conceptual advances, reflecting, etc., from his poetry is wellnigh complete. A set of power relations where the ordinary employees are denied access to information and intervention in decision processes until they are irrevocably fixed would be logically represented by such a poetic technique as Mitchell's. His reliance on repeating his own techniques proves that most people don't want to begin a new life. Conversely, the long wait, throughout For Beauty Douglas, for some kind of historical shift or autocritique, is a parable of the long queuing-up for the demise of capitalism and advent of a new society. It is curious to go back to his 1953 pamphlet for the Fantasy Press, in a series reserved for people associated with Oxford or Cambridge, and think of the differences between him and his peers, who were the younger elements of The Movement. It includes a poem where the imagery is of the fox as human freedom under threat in urban society - so much like Ted Hughes' 'Thought-Fox', which had not yet been written. The agit-prop came later. He records disagreeing with his family, who were Scottish and intensely religious; his deepest moments come when he flashes back to childhood religion, and sinks into Biblical imagery: his vision of nuclear war is clearly Apocalyptic. The project (as in "Nostalgia-now threepence off') of depicting people as trapped inside simplified, fictional models of the universe around them (how much this poem resembles Betjeman) is connected to the later Left project of studying popular mythology as a prop of capitalism which is, successively, produced by a highly-financed sector within capitalism. It's a long way from Adorno to Poems (1964). M. was not interested in the initial equality of world-models, which would have put his own system on all fours with the people he was mocking; conversely, his own poetry is regressive, it slips back into an explanation of the world, and into poetic devices, which are palpably infantile and nostalgic. His pantomime version of politics oddly resembles the belief of other poets, Jungians, Freudians, and so forth, that there are only infantile feelings and that everything real can be expressed in simple, bold, safe, repetitive, pre-Renaissance forms. Is this the typical vice of modern English poets? or was it just a phase of the fifties?
The belief that you trust political information coming from someone unintelligent is strange; would you trust business advice from someone unintelligent? The lack of journalistic curiosity (getting close to officials and politicians, going to sites and investigating, poring over documents and figures, being on the spot) removes one of the staples of political writing, and tends to reduce the scope of the poem to emotional interactions within the audience: the poet recites simple ideas and you feel a glow because everyone in the room feels the same way as you. Detailed poems would be divisive. This emphasis on the here and now leads on to kinds of radical poetics where response to a concrete situation, and improvisation, are given a pentecostal value.
It is only fair to point out that Mitchell is on the side of the just; and that he is theatrically competent, as was seen in his adaptation of Gogol's Revizor (The Government Inspector), staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1974.