Voices green and purple; or, anti-realist trends in the poetry of the 1980s
"What's the matter, reality not good enough for ya?" -script, "The Trip" (Roger Corman, 1967).
Modern poetry threatens to retract, under the pressure of a sceptical, rationalist, and businesslike public mood, to domestic anecdotes too embarrassed by their obvious truthfulness even to be revealing. The realist tradition weighs on the poet like a thousand-ton rock, a broad sector of the public thinks that poetry only has value if it is literally true and if it is personal experience. I feel that most contemporary poetry fails as art because of its adherence to stultifying domestic realism. The anti-realist approach is offered to us more empirically by four major poets: David Jones, Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Iain Sinclair. One can't uphold theories which rule out the best poets. The rule of excluding the imagination is imposed by a collective attitude; poets aiming to get round it need the psychological prop of counter-theories. There are some fractions of the public who do not share this attitude. It is this dissidence from the prevailing realist ethos which I am going to describe. Two attitudes need to be carefully distinguished: one which starts out from a belief in the complexity of psychological life to accept oblique and complex ways of representing it, that is of being realistic; and one which does not see the poet's own life as central to the poetry, but sees all the phenomena of the world as spectacles for poetry to use, as Hollywood cinema might. Other attitudes see art as a kind of therapy, or a way of exploring political possibilities.
HypERreal
Let's start out with something quite outside poetry (although it has lyrics): "Hyperreal", a 1990 record by The Shamen: "Hyperreal feeling flowing. Don't give in, you gotta keep going. Move it up till the very top tip. When you get there, you won't wanna quit. Climbing, ascending, rising, fantasizing, harmonizing. Healing, feeling. Only way to go. Let's do it." This notion owes something to Bruce Sterling's "virtual reality" (invented as science fiction but co-opted to refer to certain kinaesthetically based computer environments). Supposedly, if you wake up and you aren't sure whether what you're seeing is real or virtual, you shake your head twice quickly, because the virtual processor can't adjust reality quickly enough when your point of view shakes quickly, and you note the discrepancy. The link between VR and drug culture is close. Hyperreality is a more intense version, where the imagery and scenery change dynamically according to your fantasies, allowing great journeys and visits to other planets and times past. HR is like the state of waking dream in which you can control your own fantasies. Some doubt exists whether HR is just a mythical technology, circulating as vapourware but not available on-planet. Poetry already is hyperreality: something more vivid than actuality, which is completely under conscious control, which is autonomous from reality but offers a series of analogies to it, which is a shared hallucination, and which offers a startling profusion of kinetically self-consistent images. The Shamen use electronics to make most of their music, they've abolished the manual labour and so can devote their attention to much more high-level tasks of design and imagination. Poetry is difficult to write, and this difficulty absorbs too much of poets' energies, making them blind to the design issues. Composition is a feedback process: the inchoate poem is shaped by the wish and the wish or idea is reshaped by the stimuli of the poem gradually coming to realize and illuminate it. The poem does not exist until the second when it starts to exist. Its serial incomplete states were necessary to make the final version visible. They can be regarded as models, analogues. The poem is not based on reality, but on its own pre-versions. The process of creation is an autonomous kind of behaviour, which continues reality.
Psychedelic poetry
One of the features of the contemporary scene is the revival of psychedelic poetry. This is noticeable in magazines like Memes and Psychopoetica. Take this poem by Tony Picking:
I think my fathers and your fathers too
Remember perfumed ladies in the oily
Afternoons, paying to swim among
the blindblack fingerlings and choose
Red berries from bowls of salmon-skin
To cure their warts and syphilis
(...)
Now the Government's here and you lounge
Out, easelessly, stuffing strawberries
Into your navel by a mirror made of
Fish-scales. The sweltering, lorry-thick
Air is wringing with syrup...
Or this poem by the American, Dan Raphael, from the same issue (#6) of Memes:
truth proved through absence, an anthem without lace, floor teasing my feet,
this airs too hot to be subtle. already the police have a name for it,
red & sticky rain. asphalt with computer memory, deepfried but genetically slim,
the emerald citywater infiltrates, an elegance magnetism cant cap, shoelace mantras
taking the bounce out of concrete. weeks of forgotten vegetation so automatic
trust is aiming for the clocks inhale, readjusting the cycles of hunting & rest
with subcutaneous violins
The combination of super-vivid symbolic input and supervivid sensuous input is what makes this, at least for me, psychedelic. The quoted poems follow the logic of their images even though the images are never reducible to logic. This genre has been called "hyperdelia" (i.e. hyper-real plus psychedelia). A certain autonomy of handling derives from new data technology; complexity on the desk-top. The devices of Raphael certainly involve input from TV — the gambler's intoxication of spinning the dial to find an endless succession of dazzling colour images; plus of course the insight that the brain has more data capacity than the TV set. It's logical to integrate image processing into personal poetry, just as previous centuries integrated religious mythology, an older kind of virtual space, into personal poetry. Life takes place simultaneously in the reach of the senses and in the collective virtual space.
Consider a camera: its lens allows in anything visual, any object you point it at. Everything registers on the wet silver salts of the blank film. What about the eye? It, equally, allows in anything visual. In principle, anything which can be perceived can be remembered;and everything remembered can be turned into language. Further, the brain can re-organize experience, as an image processor can heighten, tint, blow up, edit, repeat, images fed into it from a camera. Many of the photographs we see (in advertisements or films, notably) have been largely changed or even created within a machine. So why does poetry have a so much smaller range than photography? why doesn't the brain work as a super-technology, far more powerful than a TV camera and its film cassette? Because of perceptual blocks; or blocks on utterance which relate to the personality and to social laws. This data-soaked poetry shocks because of its inconsistency, and because it departs from the "personal experience" of the writer. So the demand for consistency and for biographical realism are crucial constraints; a disastrous repression of the possibilities of the brain. This repression is cracking here and there.
Suppose we allow new objects to be conjured up by language. This means the limit is the number of technical possibilities inhering in language; the artist is free to use every combination, without restraint. Next, technology (in the shape of psychedelic drugs) gave rise in the 1960s to the insight that experience was significantly structured by the chemical state of the brain, independently of the outside world. Factors like mood, or the rhythmic nature of experience could not be related to a "rhythm" in the physical world; mood changed the relative weight given to fractions of the perceivable world. Immediately, it became possible for poetry to be quite autonomous from the outside world, made up entirely of such things as rhythm and mood, with objects etc. only featuring as scenery to make mood visible.
The notion of the Artist as hypersensitive, hypersuggestible, dominated by transient sensations and subject to exquisite refinements, has been extended by popular mythology to include the drug user. Psychedelic drugs (among others) heighten sensation and so make the user pursue pleasure; they give rise to integrated sensory environments, clubs with light shows and fantastic decors, pads (sic) laid out to make trips more enjoyable. Sensory possibilities seem to expand into the infinite. Sensation crosses a boundary, it ceases to be a way of mapping the world, and becomes pleasure-oriented; aesthetic. Illusion acquires a time dimension, it becomes social and partly under conscious control. Violent mood swings make tiny stimuli full of significance. Since other people are the biggest threat to a good time, the preoccupation with finding people who are "turned on", who are willing to take every whim and neurosis as real and sharable, may start here.
Of psychic poetry
An advertisement of this week advises us of the following: "All mystical, spiritual, and New Age subjects covered. New section devoted entirely to all aspects of Alternative medicine and Holistic living. (...) The largest selection of NEW AGE Music tapes and LPs in Britain. Also hundreds of subliminal self-hypnosis and instructional tapes." The link between such tapes and The Shamen's record is their direct manipulation of consciousness: awareness as a surface worked and shaped by the will, not numb in the face of dominating perception. But what exactly is this "new age"? At the simplest level, it means believing every single thing which is untrue. It is the fatal infection which has always accompanied and undermined the New Left; it is the reduction of Utopia to magical and Behaviourist techniques. It is the commodification of the imagination.
In 1985, Jay Ramsay published a Manifesto of psychic poetry. His intentions are close to the beneficent "Psychic switchboard" (another advertisement), offering "Our easy to understand LOVE SPELLS will enable you to attract the person of your dreams — Our MONEY SPELLS will enable you to obtain ultimate wealth —(...) Our DIAL A HEALTH SPELL contains powerful healing rituals — for you or for a loved one. (...) DIAL AN AFFIRMATION and put positivity back into your day." Ramsay says "psychic poetry is the poetry of extended experience —living experience — whereby what we lazily refer to as 'experience' re-intensifies in a re-becoming-of-the-essence— which is, literally, of your self speaking intimately through to you... your centre... little... where that mask, that 'persona', that confusion of 'I's, gradually begin to dissolve and disappear, revealing the New Face." Well, this is gobbledegook. Unlike some prose, this sentence gets less clear and more diffuse as it goes on. Fortunately, he gives many other quite different definitions of the phrase in the course of his pamphlet. For example, "Psychic poetry is, fundamentally, a studied subversion of the written by writing, the action of which is the experience of you receiving and perceiving consciousness as it expands, and in expanding, extends." Reduced to sense, this reveals the features of feedback (between art and the mind making it) and autonomous generation of images, which we have identified earlier. This approach can provide an effective cover for poets breaking out of domestic realism. Discrediting banality, it forces poets to produce work which is satisfactory at the level of images. Most importantly, it has found a resonance with a new audience. Even if this cluster of theories is wrong, it at least doesn't put any restrictions on the poet: it doesn't disqualify any poems.
I originally intended to review Jay Ramsay's spiritual poem, The Great Return (1000 pages published so far), but it's too easy putting down young and vulnerable poets, and I would enjoy it too much. I must point out, though, that The Great Return is not promising or innovatory. Adjectives like slick, trite, mainstream, purposeless, turgid, spring to mind. Ramsay has about 1% of the talent needed to achieve what he aims for. I suggest that there are about 6 pages which deserve to be salvaged.
Some of the most deeply felt portions of Return are decrying sexual corruption. These just expose Ramsay's naivety. He never gives the impression that he has any experience of what he is discussing, they are just figments. Worse, the argument seems to be: "I am a noble poet figure and so you should prefer me to these rich bourgeois types who are certainly sex degenerates." This may be a natural line of argument, but it wrecks his plausibility: "I know that wind-swept mystical air/ It means I want to see your underwear." Does he have any understanding of moral corruption, or is it merely a prop wheeled on for self-promotion of a sufficiently banal kind? Does he have any insight into how fifteen or twenty years of a certain regimented life affects anyone? or is it just callow, adolescent, speculation?
On the positive side, the book flows very well (since it is never complex), and the general mise-en-scène effectively makes one believe that the next episode is going to be "meaningful" long after experience tells you that it's going to be vague and banal. The lack of connection between parts actually makes the book more readable, as each new page comes up fresh, unhindered by plot or character. The trilogy format, as favoured by Stalin Prize winners, draws maximum attention to the-artist-as-martyr, asserting the author's struggle against time and language.
If a three-volume poem is written about the progress of a soul, one expects that the Hero will actually change his mind about something during the work. One would also have expected other people to appear along the path, to be analysed, and for the Hero to interact with them. All these expectations are disappointed. Ramsay believes in Development but is unable to imagine or depict Change. This is probably because he's trying too hard to create an Image to analyse himself. He is excellent at such things as being photographed, performing, or writing publicity, and would be well advised to give up poetry. I am concerned by such (prose) sentences as this: "the Fashion Machine, the most recent addition to which is our very own 'absolutely modern' avantgardestatusquo now reaching the peak of its own disassociated (and de-humanized) devaluation, which consists in the destruction of the psyche itself". Ramsay is an Ignorant Populist who slings a good deal of mud around. He spends much time proclaiming that anyone who criticizes him is spiritually sick and negative, while firing broadsides at every rival poet. Apparently, criticizing J. Ramsay is negative and ill, while J. Ramsay criticizing someone else is noble and visionary. The adjective "negative" is devoid of content, a piece of New Age rhetoric. In my personal opinion, he wouldn't recognize an avant-garde poem if it bit him on the nostril wing. The attitude of some of his publicity was prematurely summed up by indisputably classic acid punk band The Third Bardö: "I'm living somewhere in a new dimension/ /I'm leaving everyone so far behind/ Don't waste any time, girl, step into my mind/ I'm through caring about their right or wrong/ I've unlocked the door to life's Mystery/ Look into my mind./ Look ahead don't look behind/ I'm doing exactly what I want to/ Society can't play with my mind/ I'm moving in the right direction/ I'm five years ahead of my time". (If you want to gauge the Significance of The Great Return, ask yourself what The Third Bardö's subsequent career was.)
All the same, Ramsay speaks for a certain current of contemporary poetry, exemplified by the first Angels of Fire anthology (edited by Paskin, Silver, and Ramsay). Boiling down his maunderings, we guess he advocates:
i. growth
ii. images coming from the unconscious
iii. need to grow and develop images
iv. poetry founded in a state of mind, not in the outside world
v. art comes out of living beings moving, not out of classifying and measuring what already exists.
These precepts point in the same direction as the psychedelic music and poetry we have already discussed. Note the belief in active shaping of behaviour, as well as art, by the will in collaboration with experience (i.e. operant conditioning, or feedback, although Ramsay wouldn't use those terms). This process is consciousness; when the mind is in control, but also has a dazzlingly clear vision of reality. Because artificial (verbal) images are involved in the process he describes, I would call it hyperreal. Ramsay is wrong to think he's come up with something new: the poetry he edits doesn't have a modern feel about it, it seems to go back to the 1920s, although to poets who are not read today. The role of Prophet and Mage has always had a fatal attraction for poets. All art deals with unconscious imagery, all art acts out fantasies, and the event presumably chases away disagreeable feelings, else people wouldn't do it. It's true that existing poetry has all kinds of eccentric limitations in implementing its techniques, but boundaries produce pattern.
Note the bent, how percoursing a set of symbols is supposed to change you, to bring you power. Such quests bring one close to many kinds of religious text. If religion tells us anything, it tells us that the weak don't want power less than the strong. Transparently, the cult of self-conditioning is an imitation of the conditioning supposedly being carried out by hostile agencies, such as Church, party, corporations, parents, etc. It's an attempt to privatize the Influencing machine. An influencing machine in every kitchen.
The Angels of Fire idea, at its simplest, was to lift some of the inhibitions to verbal creation, instilled by a business culture, by writing essays, etc., and allow poetry which, like other growing things, was vulnerable, unstable, and uncertain; a sheltered space for the reader. Their first anthology (1985) put this idea in practice. Looking at Transformation: the poetry of spiritual consciousness (Rivelin Grapheme Press, ed. Jay Ramsay), three years later, one can see that the breakaway from realism has broadened the space of communication, although with high casualties. Alan Jackson writes, in "West Man":
between iron and gold still hammered,
each living one of us,
keen to jingle and cleave,
in the west, that is, that I know of,
where the wind is red.
Jackson is taking on nothing less than the West, via a string of crimes: science, thinking, rockets, pollution, etc., and especially: "The word's still: 'On',/ which means to The End", which is the effort to excel. This poem has two good things about it. First, its sheer scale: a terrific release from domestic realism. Second, its forcing together of two incommensurables. Poetry has trouble giving us completely new information, works best by mixing two known forms in a way which sparks new connections. The running-out of two lines (one of concrete perceivable events, one of impossibly abstract historical-spiritual generalization) is genuinely difficult. Well, how does Western culture affect, or how is it caused by, individual life? The West, if defined as Western Europe plus the USA, counts about 550 million people: that's a large subject. You can't have insight into that many people; unless you believe that they all have the same mind, and that this central reality is visible to the Poet. Getting from "character" to "history" is not as easy as Jackson thinks. Actually, the belief that you can link the self and History is a psychedelic experience, a "flash" which is transient and illusory. It's like an "emerald rat" ('delic lyric), the chance linking of two incommensurables.
The poem is totally indebted to prose statements about ecological disaster, something so familiar to the reader that it needs little explaining; also, it's implicitly normative, dividing the world into Good People and Bad People, and this supports a claim by the author to authority and knowledge. It's not a very good poem. By drawing a line around this materialist westerner, it forces us to envisage an alternative: this is the spiritual aspect of the poem. A catastrophic decline in material wealth would force us to live differently .
This certainty is the most deceitful and authoritarian aspect of recent poetry. Much against the grain of the whole anthology, let me recall the avant-garde artists, visual and poetic, who since (let's say) Asger Jorn in the 1940s have questioned the cognitive bases of Western industrialized society and got behind its productive gnosiological framework. Their heroic ascesis was an inquiry, sweeping away the illusionistic precepts of art in order to expose the syntax of knowledge. Jackson's certainty comes from his sources: whether it was the ecologist Barry Commoner or some TV documentary, he takes "the West-logic- imperialism- disaster" as fixed concepts, and there is no trace in his poem of how this knowledge was reached. Most of the poets published in the anthology have a childlike worldview, in which knowledge is guaranteed by an authority figure, even if their choice of figure is not (for example) George Bush or The Economist. They recite their spiritual truths with the inflexibility of a nun explaining to a four-year-old the exact difference between Limbo, Purgatory, and Heaven. This lack of interrogation process petrifies the poems they write. One wonders if anybody in this whole network has the faintest idea what Western art has actually been doing in the past 50 years. Maybe the "inquiring" style came to be the Establishment (in visual art, at least), and ebbed away, without most of the arts public knowing what it was.
Descriptions of magic mushrooms (on pages 54 and 131) suggest that "spiritual exploration" does not always take place on foot.
Fortune telling and actions revealing an inner world
Another service offered by the same shop (mentioned above) is "Psychic readings... Tarot... Runes... Graphology". It's a truism that you find out more about people from their illusions than from what they do. At some level, one writes poetry, a string of signs, in order for the personality to become visible through those signs. I, at least, find the poet's character very interesting to wonder about. I think the fortune-teller uses a mixture of knowledge of the client, understanding of the emotions, leading questions, reading prompts from clothes, verbal behaviour, unconscious gestures and expressions, etc. Although art is often a way of reprocessing memory and thinking about your (own) life, I think the idea of finding yourself through someone else's signs is rather odd. Perhaps it doesn't work for a lot of people, they find poetry too dry, or too verbal, or something. Fortune-telling may be no more "untrue" than poetry, which offers an exit from the personality. Both are illusions on a consensual basis. The point is, they are pleasurable. The future, or Unknown, or higher plane, into which clairvoyants lead their clients, is a hyperreality: a fiction shaped by feedback.
Clearly, discourse about the self has a compulsion which no other subject has; modern poetry doesn't exploit this opportunity very well. Rune-casters at least evoke an atmosphere sympathetic to self-delusion and fantasizing. Modernism was good at criticizing cognition and desire in a way which offended people's vanity. People like to be told that everything in their life is an emanation of their powerful personality ("everything means Me"), rather than of economic and class constraints, and of compromise with the wishes of everyone else around them. The elements of spiritual authority, the insinuation of occult knowledge, belief in a personal destiny, exclusion of reality to concentrate on the Me subject, accent on Development; all these are borrowed by New Age poetry directly from fortune-telling.
I think the tenet that "imagination is symbolic autobiography" is a trap; this is really the realist ethos in a compromise form. Poetry is like theatre: makebelieve, a radical extension of everyday life; writing is creation, not memory. What you become is not pre-ordained.
Drug culture is preoccupied with object choice revealing personality. Every choice you make is supposed to indicate something. The task of poets, too, is to arrange signs so as to transmit and project inner states. A sharpened alertness to physiognomy, a better understanding of how symbols work, could improve poetic technique. (Of course, most of these intuitive projections are quite wrong; reason is the faculty you need to understand other people, obstinately distinguishing true from false.)
I went to the Sibyl's cave under the acropolis at Cumae, where the sea wind blows through endlessly many natural holes in the rock, sufficiently narrow apertures to sound like human voices whispering. If you stand there, it's easy to start hearing words; your own wishes projected, perhaps. Listening to the sensations evoked by those voiceless voices, one realized how it is that humans can look at pictures and take them for places, or listen to strings of words and act as if they were situations. Human suggestibility is wired very deeply into the way we interpret reality: with tiny flashes and discontinuities of texture, tiny amounts of energy impinging on the eye, we construct a whole cosmos for ourselves. The illusion of intelligible pattern in these waste sounds reminds me of the swirls of fractal graphics and of the textures called "psychedelic", for example Paisley shirts. I suppose witches were the first drug culture. Anyway, art has to capture and exploit these naturally complex patterns, to steal their mindlessly fertile nature and consciously shape it to produce articulate, but still superhuman, messages.
One of the pervasive ideas in the New Age is that there is a historical sickness in the West, located vaguely, but often connected with the avant-garde. The "sickness" metaphor is part of an attempt to reduce reality to an emanation of the Self; thus, bad turns in history are laid at the door of Bad People. An agreed effacement of the line between emotion and reality in art is less acceptable when it is extended to history, technology, and politics. However, let's try to find some sense in this argument.
Take a classic revered by 1970s High Culture, Samuel Beckett. He is not an artist in the sense that Pushkin, Hugo or Shakespeare are. Personally, I can't stand Beckett, I find his writing draining and depressing and able to suppress mental activity altogether. He achieves control at least partly by repressing possibilities. Other, less cogent, artists have struck a stance of total negativity which is monotonous, anaesthetic, and emotionally cheap. Sartre is the other author I was forced to read at school, who was a kind of moral authority from 1944 and into the early Seventies, and who strikes me as negative and spiritually sick. That specific style of degradation, of those two men, seems to belong in France in the 1940s and 1950s, and to be a reaction to the Second World War, the weakness of the Fourth Republic, the experience of hunger and German occupation, etc. It wasn't arbitrary pessimism, and it's not contemporary.
There is a state of hope, specific to art, which is made firmer by the creativity immanent in the way the art is made. Art which is not made in this way disappoints those of us who are despairing, and who have a belief in art. This other kind of art is often accused of being "negative" or "nihilistic". The line of reasoning runs: depression, a sickness, leads to loss of sensuous awareness; modern life causes depression; abstract art is modern; therefore abstract, or conceptual, art is a symptom of spiritual illness. A variant of this is "Ideas are abstract. Abstraction is non-sensuous. Depression is non-sensuous. Therefore, thought is an illness". The whole application of medical terms like sickness to texts—not being able to examine the writer in person, not having psychiatric training—is dubious and up in the air.
Some of us may have memories of classical Marxist propaganda also saying "Western art is sick and neurotic because it is the product of a sick society. People in our novels and films are large, smily, and have good teeth. Therefore we are a healthy society." The New Age line follows the doctrine of everything meaning the self to assert that: "You write about unpleasant things because you are an unpleasant person. We write about flowers and butterflies because we think beautiful thoughts." But you can't write about healing without writing about sickness. We cannot have clear ideas on the relation of the individual to society, and on the nature of depression and marginalization, without discarding these fanciful and confused ones
The intuition may well be true, that certain artists have a poor associative capability because of a massive emotional bias towards hostility, denial of other people's worth, an inordinately high valuation of themselves, etc. I can't defend mainstream contemporary poets, because the repression of metaphor and resonance in their works may well be an expression of their hatred for the people around them. I think the tongue-tied glumness of English domestic poetry is the result of an emptying of the shared sense-world of language, which most probably started in hostility: since the effects of this are to make people insecure, defensive, prone to awkward silences. But these peculiar phobias need careful analysis. We must distinguish between the inner life (e.g. sickness and sterility), and highly specialized, conventional, external, situations, such as printed poetry. Language is specified by the audience as much as by the writer.
The case against the contemporary avant garde ("The Avant Garde is the international Home Guard of mediocrities"— Tadeusz Kantor) has been made most persuasively by Peter Fuller. Rejecting contemporary capitalism was fine, but when, after various ideals had collapsed, this rejection of representational norms was combined with a lack of belief in any other social form, something peculiarly and startlingly bad resulted. This fairly was a spiral into nothingness; as was the sheer aesthetic nullity of several generations of The Movement. The 1970s will go down as a decade of uncreative, selfreferential, non-sensuous, negative, uniform "conceptual art". It's an error to confuse non-illusionism with hatred and negativity. It is imperative to be critical of the Avant Garde — because it's so important in artistic life. We can't live without it. I must record my doubts that the "spiritual" critics (and especially Jay Ramsay) understand what artists like John Latham say or intend. I also doubt that the emphasis on fantasy and the personality is ultimately more liberating than the cognitive-critical project, with its rigour. You can't get to B without unwrapping the illusions and assumptions prevailing at A. Being critical makes you rich in ideas.
These issues had already been brought up by the Apocalyptic School of the 1940s, who so often used the phrase 'self-realisation', for example in the statements quoted by A.T. Tolley in his Poetry of the Forties. They were very keen on the Image: stated ( in the white horseman) to represent the unconscious as if projecting it on a screen. Images were the "spearhead" device of their poetry, inducing or demanding hyperassociation, for example Hendry's phrase "orchestral mountain". Metaphor is one of the things condemned by rational prose: it does not feature in university examinations or in financial analyses. Of course, all language (even prose) is constructed out of solidified metaphors; the forbidden thing is really injecting personal feelings, and creating uncertainty. Metaphor-based poetry is about creating complex re-enactments of parts of reality on the page. The act of reading a metaphor, as opposed to a foregone, preset, equivalence, involves integration of personal experience and the speaker's imagined experience, and a search for analogies. At the same time (and perhaps because of the foregoing) the Image reaches down beneath the conscious mind and activates layers of awareness previously hidden. One has to ask what the result is of using the image, not once every eight lines in a well-ordered poem, but continuously, as the substance of the poem.
If you are very thirsty, and far from a drink, you will have visions (or phantom sensations) of impossibly tall, cool, iced drinks. If image-choice relates, thus, to needs, then one is led on from image-based art to wondering about human emotional needs and about mental health and well-being. The "iced drink" was hyperbolic, and poetic sensations do tend to be hyperbolic: dealing with gods, heroes, angels, and the like. So perhaps the link is real. Something moderately dubious is that art actually satisfies the need which brought it into being: fantasizing about Carlsberg doesn't actually quench your thirst.
You can find out about your inner state by watching the images that flash up. In fact, it seems to me that this thinking in images (never images of what is actually in front of you) is earlier than conceptual thought, which is so much clearer. Reason derives part of its lucidity from exclusion. Dwelling in the world of the image makes poetry archaic, but near to hidden truths. This sheds a flattering light, but let's not be sentimental — there are only a few poets in this country who can actually write.
This welling up of images from the unconscious tells us how we relate, as one of the basic practices of reading a poem, poets' images to their internal states. We see only a surface but perceive a depth. Lloyd Cole sings about a forest fire: "Lord, it's just a simple metaphor, for a burning love". This forest is a virtual forest, and the objects in metaphors exist in virtual reality. They are only analogies to internal experience. It's surprising that we can discern inner states from these external analogies. Since we cannot see the internal state, we imagine it: insight is imagination. Since the inner world is not like the outer world, it is natural to invent non-existent objects to act as images to express the former.
Image choice can be used to read character. Fortune-tellers, at least gifted ones, can read a good deal of your emotional state by observing you carefully. If imagining lager tells us that you're thirsty, imagining tiny green lobsters on a red meadow tells us something else. Rules for interpreting these symbols are available in women's magazines, in books on astrology, in C.G. Jung, works on the occult, dream manuals, etc. Ramsay, I suspect, regards these "translations" as an important part of the poet's knowledge. It is not clear, in his theory, how this precision can apply to several people; nor, then, how a poem can be read by anyone except the writer. I would invoke, at this stage, the notion of play, and suggest that the poem is an open space which allows shared play. The poem is a consensual virtual image, and is made up at every step. But this freedom is unacceptable to a school which wants fantasy to be stably meaningful and faithful. They can't accept that the self might be fantastic, specular, and discontinuous.
I accept that a psychiatrist can study a child by watching it play, but I think most games are based on imitation, for example of TV programmes or of parents. The images don't come from "the depths", but from outside: which, actually, is why poetry is able to affect the reader's mentl state. Imitation, envy, and suggestibility are basic to art. It is because the poem is "hyperreal" that the poetic "stage set" changes when the participants wish it to change and takes whatever shape they want it to take.
Are we, as working poets, supposed to restrict ourselves to events which were significant in our (real) lives? or should we regard making images as so easy that we merely choose the most complex, colourful, and beautiful ones, and pursue them as far as they can go?
Realism and realistic language: a worn-out set of restrictions.
One has to draw a firm distinction between realism and authenticity. If you see everyday life and awareness as alienated and betrayed, you must regard everyday awareness and speech as alienated, too. But it would be a terrible thing if we took the world as it is as definitive, seeing no other possibilities. Varieties of natural language include poetry, hymns, songs, oratory, inscriptions, technical descriptions, laws, etc. each of which excels daily speech in one dimension; a hyperbolic development along a single axis. So daily speech is multiply inadequate to the needs of speakers. Why should it be totally adequate for the needs of poetry? Poetry which is adequate to the former may be vastly different from the latter, and annoy critics with a literalist view of style.
Many of the social restrictions on speech protect linguistic signals, locating the speaker in a post in the class system. Not only does venturing outside those rules induce fear and numbness, but also class loyalties are viscous: if you sound recognizably Northern working-class, or polite middle-class, you will attract an (apathetic and intolerant) audience just by that fact. But the first duty of the poet is to venture out into uncoded space, where every rule has to be invented and every experience is new. X's "verbal presence" corresponds fairly exactly to X's position in the class structure, in the work hierarchy, etc., but this position will not coincide with X's internal awareness and wishes. Altering one's verbal presence is not an act of deceit and pretension, but a step out of the system. The Personality is, at this point, a terrible liability to the poet: it eliminates 99.99% of the combinations possible in language. There is a corresponding fault of taste among many weak-minded readers, whereby they switch off as soon as they realize "oh, this isn't something that really happened".
Part of the problem is the coupling of art to social reform, so that art is supposed to be as doggedly, literally, truthful as evidence to a Parliamentary Commission. Unfortunately, the recruitment of misery to social legislation, and attendant taxes, has made the public suspicious about sentiment. Another prevalent attitude is that you aren't allowed to be unhappy unless you can propose legislation to cure it. This is ridiculous... if I'm upset I want to express my feelings, not give evidence. You can train the unemployed not to complain in public, to be personally neat and not make a fuss, but this doesn't alter their unhappiness, it just makes it more internal and deep. The pervasiveness of social struggle means that language (in England) is a starved area, from which thousands of rules have repressed most emotional content.
Hyperreality and mechanical capture and enhancement of images
The current exhibition of the works of Piero Fornasetti at the Victoria and Albert Museum prompts some thoughts about hyperreality. Fornasetti anticipated, from the 1920s, the 1960s practice of producing objects with images printed on them: for example, ashtrays, plates, chests, screens. He anticipated the cheapness and plenty of images today; based on cheap modern graphics technology, it also appears as surrealism or montage. (The relationship to Dada collages is merely mechanical, but let's recall that the invention of Pop Art around 1954 was a direct, if specialized, offshoot of Dada, as Paolozzi had begun making neo-Dada collages in about 1946.) I recall, aged about seven, having a waste paper bin with cave paintings from somewhere like Les Eyzies printed onto it; still existing are some nursery curtains with a print of Napoleonic uniforms, a vast array of male narcissism and glorified folklore, sumptuous in colour and swagger. This image glut is partly pessimistic (if supermarkets can sell Les Eyzies paintings how are poets going to find the wits and energy to equal that spate of images?) and partly optimistic: image processors are magic boxes that can take anything in and reproduce it on any flat surface (which can later be folded), but language is equally a magic box and one more inclusive and less ponderous than a photocopier. The main limit to poets' ability to plunder imagery is the figure of the personality: appearing now as an archaic rhetorical figure, a block, a set of restrictive rules. When cheapness and plenty bring choice to the forefront, one starts to see the motives for image choice.
The historicist Victorian cityscape was already a Fornasetti/Pop Art object. Architects resurrected styles of the past, imported styles from the colonies or from Classical lands, copied from exotic pattern books, to create a cityscape like a museum. The act of appliqueing a cave painting onto a bin merely extends a habit of appliqueing ornamental and symbolic schemes onto churches, stations, warehouses (pseudo-Venetian façades in Commercial Road), residences, and bridges. The museum, of course, was a fund, not only for 19th C poetry in general, but also for Surrealism: once one apprehends the Museum as a whole, it presents thousands of bizarre clashes of context, cultural shocks in an infinite montage. New technologies of reproduction (as much in engravings as in builders' materials) snapped minds off their hinges. The sculpture court of the Victoria and Albert Museum, bringing together full-scale models of all the world's monumental sculpture in a single space, may "feel" like a psychedelic vision, but is really aimed to expand trade: seeing the importance of design and decoration to objects, the authorities collected classic images from the past in order to stimulate designers. This (hyper) stimulation gives rise to the hyperreal experience; complexity. It is mechanical progress which brings psychedelic disarray to the receiving sensibility, as we find again in the 1960s, and (with computer graphics and computer-video graphics) again today. The Romantic poet lived, thanks to the invention of high-quality (lithographic) colour printing, co-acting with several improvements in presses from about 1820, in a much richer, more hyperreal, visual environment than his predecessors. The invention of art galleries, national museums, and plateglass windows helped a stunning expansion of the visual realm. An overdose of images causes the mind to over-react in specific ways; by hyperassociation, for example. I think Dan Raphael's poem (above) is a good example. One can see Romanticism as a psychedelic movement because of its hypersuggestibility, its appalling greed for images, the vast range of cultures and eras on which it drew. Arguably, Byron writing about the Cossack Mazeppa, or Gray imitating the Norse poem "The waking of Angantyr" were analogous to Fornasetti printing a Renaissance etching on an ashtray. The genre of ethnographical forgery starts, perhaps, with James MacPherson's Ossian (1769). Mediaevalism and Orientalism (and a neo-Hellenism) were just major examples of a frenetic capture and appliquing. The Romantic poet was as far-ranging and as omnivorous as a TV camera. The poet, conversely, has to compete with this phantasmagoria of visual imagery. One of my private rules about a poem is that it should be able to compete with National Geographic. This is a serious issue: if I write about astronomy, or an Eastern landscape, or Scythian jewellery, I have to write a poem more interesting than (fabulous) photo spreads of the same visible objects. I can use the photographs, but there is no point my fetching images from out there if I can't capture something unique and compelling. This is very difficult. Does it follow that domestic poems are a better bet? Are my domestic circumstances of interest to anyone else? One gives a very limited yes to this, based on the fact that other people recognize their own problems and needs in the incidents. This similarity points away from realism.
The justification for using one's own life is presumably that one make extremely vivid descriptions of it, drawing on the powers of the senses rather than on invention. So the target has been, all along, to achieve vividness. This also justifies suspending the realist principle. Is authenticity the best bet, or wouldn't the poet get much better results by freeing language? One asks if any vivid poems have been written by the "domestic" school of poets. This is fairly clear-cut. All of their poems are completely forgettable. Vividness is persistently eluded. Their theories have collapsed on confrontation with the data.
Temenos: authoritarianism in the non-shared imaginary.
Outstanding similarities link "psychic poetry" to the concerns of the magazine Temenos ('A review dedicated to the arts of the imagination', ed. Raine, Sherrard, Critchlow, Keeble), which has spent the last ten years fostering the religious outlook in poetry. Raine is a genuine survivor of the 1940s; as is a lot of what she says. It's not too hard to find similarities between her work and (say) J.F. Hendry or Ruthven Todd. Temenos' combat for the poet's autonomy and subjectivity can easily be seen as a continuation of the New Romantic poets' struggle, and against the same enemies. The flagstaff editorial in issue #1 said "it is in the Imagination that the incorporeal essences of the ultimate worlds of Mystery are made manifest in the Idea-Images that constitute the archetypal forms of the sensible world; and it is in accordance with these forms that the Imagination creates all that we perceive in the physical, sensory, and historical world." This murky absolutism suggests some cult religion, perhaps Theosophy, rather than the clarity of Plato.
But yet, what a mandate for the artist: everything is allowed, everything is expressible, the only limits to your art are defects of your imagination. Sherrard (I should point out) considers similarities between religious texts and our psychology are due to God creating the human mind along the same lines as His own; but if the invisible order of the Christian cosmos is a set of analogies for mental states, it is merely a continuation of the Image. Temenos puts art and religions in the same basket and thereby reveals the possibility of a much larger-scale symbolic organization than contemporary poets are yet prepared to take on. There is a vulgar and crass belief that "religious poets are in a higher league than other poets", and I certainly believe it's the other way around. Yet it's instructive to look at the Christian properties warehouse of saints, prophecies, wandering souls, cosmic prisons, angels, psalms, whatever, and think: these are lexical items for laying out a text, I can imagine forms as well as some schizo from the desert. Devices can be occupied and captured.
One description of religion is as symbolic activity in a virtual reality, which is to some extent a collective reality; the activity also, usually, helps obtain power. The achievements of 19th and 20th C art decisively prove that art does not need religion; but, in the absence of a shared stable cosmology, religion may give the artist encouragement. The antimodern pathos of the precept "all great art is based on religion" must be replaced by the recognition that religion is, like art, a virtual reality composed of dazzling and cheating analogues to the real one. The prominence of religion in human behaviour means that any theory of the brain also has to explain religion. Prayer, as autosuggestion, is an autonomous kind of language behaviour of great interest.
The primary meaning of "temenos" (neuter noun based on TEMNO, I cut) is a royal or noble estate, but the meaning this magazine is interested in is "the precinct set aside for a temple". One aspect is that of sheltered space, where consensual fictions can come to fruition; another aspect is that of the primary act of sign-making: the artist scratches a line in the earth, and immediately there is a symbolic order bleeding over into the real world. Pattern is impossible without boundaries. The poet's task, as Claude Roy says, is distribuer les blancs, setting gaps (caesuras, line breaks, ends of poems, even word breaks) which are the simplest elements of the acoustic pattern.
A strength of Temenos is its articles on architectural symbolism, owed to Keith Critchlow. There is a lesson in buildings. Poetry also has scale, rhythm, proportion, implied space, etc. Poetry should fulfil itself by struggling and the reaching a perfect design, not grub around in reporting events. Arranging piles of words is essentially like arranging piles of stones and beams. If the autobiographical precept clashes with attaining an effective design, then autobiography has to go.
The Christian genre of vision is certainly proto-psychedelic. Careful study of visions (there are thousands) reveals many features frequent in drug trips and psychedelic records. Maybe not "voices green and purple", or "tiny green lobsters throw spiders' eggs", but certainly lighting effects and monsters abound. There is an interesting (1st century?) text called the Apocalypse of pseudo-Peter, where the author visits Hell (which he is sometimes believed to have invented) and sees things which generally put one in mind of a Sixties horror film. He also sees sodomites and girls who have sex before marriage being subjected to torture: Christianity is too hung up on punishment, cruelty, and authority to have any appeal today. Everybody has a visionary capacity; every vision is as insubstantial as any other; there's no call to make the "otherworld" into a piece of property and a fount of authority, because it belongs to everybody and it doesn't exist.
I've just read in the paper about man-bird figurines ten thousand years old being dug up near Urfa, in Kurdistan; they are the ancestors of Angels; they also remind me of photographs of shamans of the Minussiinsk Tatars, wearing their robes of feathers; who also bear an odd resemblance to the pictures of the original costume for Papageno in 'The Magic Flute'. Closer to home, the Valkyries were probably more birdlike than we usually think, since they always, in Norse poetry, appear alongside ravens. The link between carrion-eaters and carriers of the soul to the upper sky is easy to make. The new figurines shed a light on Crow and Cave Birds, and exist in the same universe of discourse. We should use these images; we are the same kind of people as the proto-peasants (the people who invented the Village?) in Kurdistan. The distinction between "priests" and "artists" is a distraction, if both make poems or sculptures. While constantly inventing new images, we should still use the old ones. According to P.W. Joyce, the chief poet of all Ireland wore a mantle called a tuige: "Otherwise tuige is derived from tuige-en, the tuige or covering of (the feathers) of birds, for it is of skins of birds white and many-coloured that the poets' mantle from their girdle downwards is made, and of the necks of drakes and of their crests from their girdle upwards to their neck." Circumstantial evidence suggests that Jeremy Prynne owns, or once owned, one of these:
no longer settled
but settled now into length; he wore that
as risk. The garment of birds' feathers,
while he watched the crows fighting the
owls with the curving tongues
of flame proper to the Altaic
hillside, as he was himself
more than this.
When in a poetic mood, one tears all one's clothes off, puts on this cloak of birds' feathers, and begins to recite. Denise Riley has written:
Above, a flurry of swans, brothers, great wings airy
around my bowed head in rushing darkness, neatly
these bone fingers plaited their green cloaks each night
to unfeather them so now they stand upright before me
freed and gaily they leap to their caparisoned horses
as in my breathing cell I smooth down my own cloak
of nettles (...)
far rather
than know that, wear it as an owned cloak's blazing
stuck in the fine flesh of your shoulders like any
natural skin burning; so cloaked no-one sees through
to you wrapped in darkness, only a darkness pressed to
outward navy twill (...)
leap to
the crests of orange birds flickering along the long line
of shoulders, hiss, warble in gaping whistles hoarse lyre
chants of plumed and swollen throats whose glowing trills
waver and zigzag the swaying neck heavy under the flare
song of any body glittering with hard memory. Let fall
this garment with its noisy wings.
('Well All Right', from Stair Spirit). Iain Sinclair — the Peckinpah of a cinema so visionary it could only be expressed in words — quotes a poem, perhaps 16th century:
And afterwarde a fetherham he dight
To fly with wyngs as best he could discerne
About the ayre nothing him to werne
He flyed on high to the temple Apolyne
And ther brake his neck, for al his great doctrine.
This (whatever it is) derives from a passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth: "Bladud was a most ingenious man who encouraged necromancy throughout the kingdom of Britain. He pressed on with his experiments and finally constructed a pair of wings for himself and tried to fly through the upper air. He came down on top of the Temple of Apollo in the town of Trinovantum and was dashed into countless fragments." (Translated by Lewis Thorpe.) He was father of Leir, founder of Leicester. Geoffrey's brilliantly edited combination of original mythic fantasy and dense factual detail could well make him the twelfth century's answer to Iain Sinclair. We value the word fetherham, because of its link to the Norse word hamr, a cloak or skin especially in the sense of shifting one's skin, shapeshifting (cf. hamast 'to assume the shape of an animal', hamfar 'travelling in the shape of an animal', hamramr, able to change one's shape' (linked I believe to hamingja, the spirit who is the Luck of a family). Sinclair says in detail:
Bladud, the whore of wild ducks,
migrant
of the flocks, flight secrets, lusts
moon compass;
(...)
eagerly, eagerly
spine worn outside,
ribs traced on the drum of his chest
head, thorax, abdomen
antennae quivers with message
day of flight, the colourless blood,
clinging to leaf peak,
hillside,
hang glide Bladud, emasculate
queen of ants
launched by west winds,
an unknown journey
high above chalk, the Dragon
not yet taken its horse disguise;
horse surrogate, the hide tent
king mound, dew pond
damp sacrifice
Bladud afloat, in pride,
driven east
at mercy of older energies.
(from 'The Flight, the Prophecy, the Suicide', in Suicide Bridge). I seemed to get the key to all this when swimming in Finchley Open Air Pool, as a gull flew overhead I was seized by a momentary illusion that I was a bird flying through the water. The analogy between our body plan and that of a bird is such that no child can avoid projecting onto birds; the unconscious fantasy of flight is therefore so common that it almost constitutes a pre-existing landscape, a shared imaginary. But of course there is no such landscape and nobody owns it. The theme of Cave Birds is precisely the attempt to gain and occupy a body, the fearful quest of the psyche not yet admitted to corporeality at all, begging for limbs at some malign Court.
Part of the Temenos plank is that images are eternal, and (consequently) that there is a changeless "virtual place" whither poets flit to gather their visions. This is unfortunate; not only because it encourages people to pretend that this place belongs to them, and that everyone has to follow their rules. If all great poetry is really the same poem, then any new poet who comes along has to resemble the archetypes or be rejected, and innovation is impossible. Temenos is not really a poetry magazine because, while proclaiming how much they like art, their ideals exclude actually existing poets: a "punitive ideal". They put down the art which actually exists, or which is possible in a secular society. Anybody can say "I love poetry, I just don't like that terrible stuff they do nowadays". Temenos, while praising the imagination, consists almost entirely of unreadable rational and polemic prose. Their view on modern art is that it causes totalitarianism, their ideas on science and government are straight rewrites of eighteenth-century Dominican propaganda, their ideas of the Lofty and Noble seem to be merely reflected images of irrational dynastic authority.
In Raine's poetry, what is not forever is cut out as sordid: there is no sense of urgency, or indeed of things happening; every event takes place in a kind of remote-habitual tense which makes time unimportant. Th is vindicates the modern interest in fine divisions of time and quality; it is hard to care about the details of Raine's poems. All emotions, all psychological states, are time-bound; Raine's poems fail to raise a response because they do not resemble anything in human psychology. They are not about becoming, not interactive. Rhythm is time-bound; her poems are static. Warmth and emphasis have been expelled by her Platonic and ruthless denial of change. In rejecting Modernism, she lost virtually everything. Her verse is calm, orderly, symmetrical. One feels that her confidence in the might of the "eternal" forms has sapped her inclination to describe them, her language is not mimetic because we are already supposed to know what the stock emblems look like. Someone who thinks "appearances" are illusory finds it hard to describe them in words, writing then in a stately but stifling way.
Another issue is how the shared imaginary space of poetry came to close up. This could be addressed historically (the progressive loss of the collective imaginary, the "disappearing castle"), or economically (the lack of an audience destroys poets' self-confidence), or technically (modern poets can only be compared to the bad poets of the past, and everything would work if poets only had the relevant verbal skills) or rhetorically (the de-legitimization of all authority has entailed the loss of poetic authority too). I will have to leave this question open. At the crudest level, the problem is simply the "spoiling" effect of a multitude of aggressive and scornful critics. The poetry habit has gone away.
Theories of the imagination
Accounts of fantasy activity often link it to play. The developmental theory of play (developed by psychologist Susanna Millar in The psychology of play) uses the fact that animals play more to the degree that their behaviour is more acquired after birth (by operant conditioning), and less by rigid innate programs, to suggest that play is a way of acquiring cognitive and co-ordination skills. A key term here is imitation: not only does play centre on imitation (e.g. using dolls to re-enact mother-child activities), but also imitation is the basis of art. One could suggest that the faculty of imitation is related to learning, mimicry is the first step to acquiring a behaviour trait. Fantasy certainly has the two traits of imitation, repetition (part of acquisition), and perhaps a third, of progressive approximation to a model. One deduction is that fantasy is not based on "nothing", but on observing other people. Interesting adaptations have to be made to play theory to explain why a mature organism still engages in it.
Mimicry is related to close observation of other people, and to the projective activity of understanding their internal states. One can only integrate the external signs of internal state X by simulating internal state X oneself; intuition is basically an imaginative activity, which is why it is so rarely accurate. If one uses imagination in order to understand other people, perhaps this is the function of the imagination. But this imagination is clearly "imitative" in nature. Second (and this is really like the first kind), the audience has to represent or "imitate" the state of mind of the character in a work of art, in order to understand it. Identification is imitation.
Play is physical free improvisation behaviour, using the body, or objects, or other bodies, while fantasy uses non-physical symbols and is a cognitive kind of free improvisation behaviour. Although, certainly, those symbols relate to the body, objects, and other people's bodies.
The developmental theory of play and fantasy definitely links these activities to growth. This fits in well with the New Age poets, who have always associated poetry with growth and exploration. To permit this, the pressures of reality are removed; the mind produces a thousand tries, almost all of which are wrong; a feedback process lets the new pattern become gradually firmer and more precise. During this period, behaviour is incompetent — a kind of babbling or tottering; it needs to be sheltered. Finally, the learning process is complete and the individual has changed. It is not necessary to believe in all this in order to understand what the process of exploration is believed, by a certain milieu, to consist of. The very process of poetic imagination is thus given a role in the development of the personality. Assigning poetry to the realm of education and therapy may be a tactical error, may be another attempt to rationalise art on the basis of a simplifying theory; but it is certainly suggestive.
Shared mental models
Fantasy (and, perhaps, not play) refers also to other people's minds (and, indeed, their fantasies). This is a radical problem with the "it must be autobiographical" school of poetry: how can you demarcate the self at all when consciousness is constantly occupied with study and simulation of other people's awareness? If the process of the self is by nature specular, imitative, imaginative, and composed of analogies, what is real or pure about it? how can you monumentalize it? And I think the underlying concept here is one of private property. I contend that the means of poetic production are in fact owned by associations or by the public, and the domestic reality (of Movement and post-Movement poets) is fractional and alienated.
When we talk about the soaring imagination of an artist, this quality is generally associated with a sensitivity towards other people's feelings. This link should arouse our curiosity. Is the ability to imagine intensely and protractedly linked to sensitivity because the process of understanding other people is basically imaginative? If the Romantic Artist spends much of his, or her, time projecting other people's states of mind, then the story of the self is not the self, but is largely composed of representations of other people. The word "specular" is used for this, a speculum being a mirror. So clearly you can't make art about "the self", it always has to include other people.
The practice of shared, externalized fantasy behaviour might be called art. Debate between several people essentially relies on shared virtual models of events. These are apparently the ground which political arguments manuvre within. You alter the shared model and agree that the altered model is what you, collectively, want. Language, as a social tool, has to do with the emulation of reality. The use of feedback seems essential to argument: one creates a verbal model in order to find out what features of the model need to be changed. Discussion is quite separate from memory, in fact I don't think language could possibly carry out political functions if it only reproduced memories. Yet there is a belief that art should only represent things that actually happened.
I have said that no line can be drawn limiting the accurate representation of inner experience. What is certain is that the degree to which one can relax and discuss one's feelings depends on the rules of a given social situation. The poet suggests what these rules are by details of the poem's construction. The important thing in poetry is inducing suggestibility in the reader, not the poet's suggestibility. If the poetry is free about exploring feelings and discovering symbols, this may relax the reader and induce a state of vivid free associations. The linguistic process implies two people: the speaker and the listener; by implying that this moment of communication is very important, by struggling to express intimate things, by acting without constraint, the poet implies intense emotional involvement with the reader and creates a rapport, a state of heightened attention and sensitivity. Symbol formation is connected with the process of empathy, and poetry which presents its meaning in too cut and dried a way may prevent empathy. The stage of searching, therefore of uncertainty, may be the one which engages the reader's faculties most. I suspect that the use of imaginary scenes is important to the sense of sharing, since they are shared and malleable, changing with time. Reports on memory cannot have these qualities, as the reader is unable to influence them. The most off-turning thing for a reader is the suggestion that the poem is fixed and rigid. Shapes, within the poem, which grow, or show repetition with variation, attach the reader because these forms supply equivalents for the missing, dialogic, event of "locking rhythms".
Going one more step, we can say that the internal self-reinforcing rhythms of the text are more important than some "outer-directed" relation to a reality not available for inspection. Perhaps what we estimate as authenticity is an agreement of rhythms with known behaviour patterns; as we know when an animation fails to emulate the way an animal walks.
Self-development and New Left politics
The revival of radical politics which began in 1968 was never wholly separate from the equally idealistic, but irrational, revolt which was called hippydom then and has since been called New Age. The spiritual concern with personal transformation shows subterranean links with a secular belief that people are oppressed by social and economic roles and have the capacity to liberate themselves and lead quite different lives. A huge number of people began to write poetry about their experiences when they began questioning their social being in the ferment of the New Left. Initially, a documentary approach was popular: just to articulate and share experience was amazing. Later, the same writers began to regard the past as only one half of their life, and fantasy came to the fore, sometimes in a rather clumsy and conformist way. The incidents from within patriarchal, capitalist, class society were only recorded as part of a project of emigration; they were deeply saturated with a wish for something else, and this wish was later verbalized and explored more separately. In two feminist novels (Oranges are not the only fruit, by Jeannette Winterson, and The Bad Box, by Alison Fell), a realist narrative about an adolescent girl is interspersed with a pure fantasy narrative, much like a fairy tale. The fantasy is intended to express the heroine's frustrations with reality. These encapsulated narratives closely resemble "New Age" poetry. The importance of the Image is here, as before, that it reveals to the onlooker what her or his real wishes are; the Image breaks open the existing organization of life because it exposes these wishes, and you realize that they are incompatible with the way you live. In fact, it is possible that all radicalism starts from such moments of insight. In order to find a non-alienated defense zone within an alienated personality, one looks for fantasy. If fantasy is based on frustration, it is inevitably critical of reality. If it exposes those frustrations, it is a precious source of understanding. This explains why, within the Angels of Fire group, we find both realist domestic writers and New Age "psychic" acolytes. The contrast of Real and Imagined is like surreal contrasts; it is also like montage effects.
The "intact minimum" of fantasy also resembles the initial contact of writer with reader: a single poem is such a frail thing, a tissue of frozen signs. Somehow the reader is led on from the first poem to the second.
The aim of bringing behaviour under conscious control can be compared with the invention of technology, for example the invention of houses. Clearly, someone had to invent the first house; and this act was founded on human desires (for warmth, shelter, storage space, etc.). The human race is in control of its environment. Data handling aids (such as diagrams, calculations, plans, books, etc.) were important in the advance of technology; literature may play such a role in the advance of social organization.
Authenticity was a way of making a poem into an affidavit, consequently unusable in the long term. Feminism, like other revolutionary movements, actually has nothing to do with life as it is, it is motivated by a vision of life as it should be. From where could the values come, which permit one to criticize the life of a society? not, evidently, from observing reality, but from private ideals which are freely chosen, baseless, fictive, and like art. Moving out of numb representationalism into expressing desires and fantasies is an advance for political art. Moving forward into shared fantasies is another step forward. Society is a house designed by millions of people. We need good, clear, diagrams to pore over. It seems plausible that imagining as many different forms of society as possible, and discussing them together, contributes to the political process. Art goes against the order of human affairs, because it involves a conscious, pleasure-oriented, choice, and offers (fictive) imaginative choices. So art is a promising area for radicalism to work on. Realist art tends to make oppression seem normal and even natural.
The new poetry which began in 1968 gave subjective experience equal standing with the documentary, exact approach which led on to Government Blue Books and statistics. Language was being used, not only to store experience, but to formulate political choices and make decisions about the future. Words, as the lowest-energy form of behaviour, were affordable for radical experimentation, aimed at creating the nuclei of new behaviour patterns, which would eventually disperse the old reality altogether. This approach followed on from the typically New Left insight that language was a key method of social control. Language is slightly easier to occupy and alter than capitalist corporations. Shame and insecurity are so decisive that group support is crucial when reforming your life. The movement for self-development could not be satisfied with mere autobiographical narratives, however interesting these are.