Speculations on the outlines of a generation born in the sixties
We can look at this group of poets only like a child running through a great darkened house, opening wardrobes and gazing at splendid clothes whose meaning we cannot yet understand and whose true outline we cannot clearly make out.
The last anthology we did of this kind, in 1993, (Angel Exhaust Nine, edited by Scott Thurston and Andrew Duncan), could not be definitive, but was a brilliant way of getting young poets to get in contact with us. We didn't know at that time that people like Robert Smith and Caroline Bergvall existed. Magazines such as Ramraid Extraordinaire, Active in Airtime, Odyssey, Terrible Work, and Memes, have won our gratitude. Books offering glimpses of this generation would include: Caroline Bergvall, O strange passage; Norman Jope, Tors; David Rushmer, sand:works; Adam Mckeown, Bound; Elisabeth Bletsoe, Pharmacopoeia; W.N. Herbert, Forked Tongue; Nicholas Johnson, Haul Song; Vittoria Vaughan, The Mummery Preserver; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake. The most finished work I have seen from this age-group is by Caroline Bergvall, Karlien van den Beukel, Simon Smith, and Robert Smith.
The modern poet would like to be the columnist talking amateurishly about public affairs, banally about the small change of everyday life, and being witty and liked and trusted; the Star as subject of wild fantasies and of energetic curiosity, whose every action is invested with sgnificance, glamorous and mysterious; the scholar encoding rare ambiences, exposing authority, releasing precise information, carrying out feats of memory and eloquence, uncovering historical series; the spiritual healer who can decode the subtle signs of temperament and guide us to the paths of new growth, releasing tangles and blocks; the experimental scientist, the designer of ambiences, manager of a club where everyone wants to go and you can meet anyone you want to, devising a ritornellised space where the rules of normal behaviour are suspended and people are filled with curiosity, playfulness, and suavity; the hip consumer in the know about restaurants, clubs, clothes, foreign cities, foodstuffs, records, and clothes, filling poems with envy objects; the revolutionary upturning the structures of everyday life and revealing their artificial and unstable nature. It's not yet clear who is going to acquire these assets, conjured up by a collective longing.
At moments the instrumental, non-human sources of information scoop up what is more complex than our experience or internal images and thus explode the narrrowness of psychological patterns instated by monotony, conflict, and depression, and hurling these aside. Then, the perceivable world seems to immerse us in its inexhaustible immediacy and patternedness and novelty. The work of art can constitute such moments or sample them from the riches of observed knowledge. Such moments of excess and flooding of consciousness are fundamental in contemporary poetry; no doubt Redgrove has written more of them than anyone else. They may resemble the trance moments of psychedelic drugs, happy dazes of the 1960s; they may take the thesis of attacks on authority, which invests in such limited cognitive systems, or on organised knowledge. Awe at the teeming of life on the foreshore and in the rock pools may resemble awe at the diversity and strangeness of poetry itself. The word mind-expanding is adequate for this state which funds so much activity.
I'm gonna tear your playhouse down: the loss of mediations
The major topic of conversation over the past twenty years has been feminism. The liberation of women (I'm gonna tear your playhouse down, Ann Peebles sang in 1975, a calm tale of annihilatory vengeance over a state of the art Willie Mitchell backing) could damage the poetry of men where this was a form of self-esteem dwelling in myths of fascinating and dominating women, so that the straight version brought them crashing to the ground.
In about 1971 Melody Maker was talking about cock rock; the conversation of the time equated basic with sexual: saw every form of power and display as external properties of the phallus. Objects reinforced the ego, were stage properties for its display routines, were soaked with its scents. This excess analysis of the subjective meaning of acquired imagery, stupid and groundless and vulgar as it seems today, led, once the phallus was also identified as Bad, to a breaking-up of the shared space, the loss of mediations. The recent history of poetry by men has been one long tale of trying to come to terms with a shattered world, trying to build up a poetic voice out of fragments, wallowing in anxiety and guilt. Poets who recede into a null-space where they are cut off from their feelings, from hopes, from other people, and from the symbolic world, generally go into a didactic stance: you're bad, I'm good. The symbolic transfer of power takes on the design of a political ceremony: the Governor-General signs political power over to the natives as if this made him generous, or as if the power welled up out of him in the first place. It's hard to see that this misery and dumbness helps the cause of feminism.
Probably, Jimmy Page was playing a guitar rather than a penis. The influence of reflexivity was parallel, the allure of the academic stance which rules that, if you have no attachments or feelings, you are the manager. Going numb and playing dumb, the lumpish and languid see-through saints were trying on the attire of authority. The lack of sensations, held to throw the whole structure of society into question, to be superior and episcopal, was insensibility. The reader was expected to admire the triad of impersonality, vacancy, self-righteousness.
The uncovering of a dual subject inside the author of English literature, dual object among the reader of English Literature, of a female population underlying and splitting the social, put into question the rules of symbol-formation: the pathways between the body and the vocabulary emerged into light as a separate component, which could be re-formulated in new and experimental ways. It seemed that an intelligent network flowed between cultural forms and the cinema of fantasy, desire, and intention, a modulator where shaping or mediating took place.
Shopping for power objects
The period saw both a rejection of the moral authority of the universities and the intellectuals by the government in power, the expansion and institutionalisation of the university as a corporation to the point where students could forget about the outside world, the sinking of the intellectual or moral credibility of government to an all-time low, the threat of unemployment and poverty for people with a degree or even two, and a fashion in the media for extolling primitive self-aggrandisement. Power was the area of crisis. Ideas became a kind of power dressing, operated in seminars and articles with the adroit cynicism of a young manager operating business theory buzz words in order to shine and rise within a corporate culture. The relapse of the sixties attack on the "whole structure of Western knowledge", to use a term of the time, was young academics losing interest in knowledge except as a means to advancement. The competitive element of intellectual debate, the duel, overrode the element of cooperation. The gesture of occupying the desired, envied and vaunted verbal styles had multiple meanings, which could include a simple claim to succession to high office, to be candidate overlords. The gesture of giving away power was combined with lavish if stealthy gestures of claims of reprise, of the type "I have here a vantage point where sexuality, class politics, and poetics all fit together" or "this shell in my hand is not merely one among millions but one from which it is possible to speak about the Seashell in general, i.e. the Poem in general". The symbolic occupation of charismatic names like Heidegger, Derrida, Marx, de Man, Freud, Lacan, Hartman, Lévi-Strauss, explains the subterfuge with which the stylistic surface of Prynne or Wilkinson was adopted and seized as a form of ostentation. Patriarchy is the keynote: the seizure of authority by occupying the awe-soaked regalia of previous authority figures, deified and drained of Time. The father's body, torn up and eaten, is used as trophies and badges of rank. This appropriation and status competition went along with the abolition of the personal speaking subject, the abnegation of secular appetites to leave a bleached, severe, acerb, sealed poetic surface. The academic left wing was disdainful of both culture and business, unfounding its own critique for lack of grist, and unable to utter communal feelings and life values. No doubt the argument is precisely that the latter don't exist any more, after Thatcherism; but since you can't have Socialism without them, this leaves little scope for poetry; and the counter-argument is that such poets are distancing themselves from their audience, emptying out their verse. Longing for an ideal of sexual authenticity, as unfulfilled as the longing for a radical Labour government, produces, perhaps, a poetry no longer about an authentic ground which is absent, but about absence. The quality of their scorn and intransigence is welcome in a society not known for its ability to say no to anything. It seems equally impossible for academics to write about literature without dragging in psychoanalysis, marxism, and the postmodern identity crisis, or to say anything intelligent and well-shaped which does scratchcard-score all those things. The discourse of sexuality, class conflict, linguistic materialism, and post-humanist epistemology seems to have been reduced to t-shirts or go-faster stripes: a cargo cult where aeroplanes are divine messengers and philosophical ideas are merely non-referential.
Scatology
I noticed post factum that issue Thirteen discussed W.N. Herbert's use of vomit, while Fourteen discussed Ian Duhig's use of shit. There is some cultural tendency towards defilement, justified by wearing baa-baa-Bakhtin t-shirts and talking about the Grotesque Body, but deriving from punk. These substances only acquire a semantic value through space: because there are social rules about where they can be, mis-locating them is a symbolic defilement of the rule-maker, an anti-authoritarian gesture. This act of scorn is related to the reduction of the individual through "scientific" sociology, where at the outset the aesthetic feelings of the "bourgeois" are assumed as wrong. The lack of an adequate theory of social agency leads to the loss of personality boundary as one refuses to identify with anybody else. The loss of external reference leads to boundless self-overrating, flights of megalomania alternate with a sense of psychic annihilation. The loss of validation from other people, reduced to ghosts, cancels out internalised subjective objects, and leads to the loss of a social tone in which things can be said.
The act of defilement is closely related to catachresis, the deliberate misuse and distortion of other people's words and cultural forms, and feelings; the bizarre forms of the avant-garde are oddly anticipated by the forms of caricature, more primitive than realism: the parody sketches of the early cabarets which were the avant-garde's first home could suspend coherence and reason because they were recognizable distortions. Punk was a collective experiment using all these styles and tactics; the influence on punk of the conceptual art of the sixties and seventies, via the art schools where so many of its creators studied, made it a crossbreed between popular culture and the radical avant-garde. The conceptual artist John Latham burnt towers of books, as a protest against the ossification of cognition into organised knowledge, the sanctification of CIA-financed critics like Clement Greenberg into dictators: I wonder if there is some element of this in late Prynne, if he is not symbolically setting fire to the wings of English verse (and moral community? and respect for the past?) and releasing it on a downbound spiral.
Two sublimes
The choice between two sublimes structures the landscape. One achieves generality by receding away from concrete instances, throws out the freight of real experience in order to disappear into a misty Before or Above; it is philosophical, gladly soaks up atmospheres from Heidegger, Adorno, or Wittgenstein; hopes that the truth may emerge from an emptied sight where we reject all the products of class society or of Western languages; asks us to speculate as fogbound marshalling sites emerge in the space left by what has been banished, whose cognitive shapes migrate into abstraction, and are suspected to migrate further into Valid Being. The other sublime is a mythical and autobiographical one; the poet projects "deep" internal structures onto the natural world, or even onto an imaginary set of symbolic structures; a difficult process of integration which is supposed to heal, as ritual completion of patterns soothes and cures the areas of damage and disorder; the timeless is supplied by archetypes, or by the level of generality of the discourse, freed from realistic detail; the reader partakes of complexity by speculations about the grounds of being, in a landscape of ultimate origins and of transformations. On one side stand W.S. Graham and J.H. Prynne; on the other, Peter Redgrove, Robert Graves, and Ted Hughes. One purifies language by striking out teleology; the other by bending poetic space till it becomes total teleology, curved air, rendering the poet's personality where objectivity is a constraint.
Identification is the division between the two, as the mythic version is dependent on it and the epistemological variant tries to leave it out. Identification is like experiment because through it you become someone else for a few hours and explore new sensations. Obviously, watching a film of the 1930s is an experimental experience for me, I learn new things from it. Fantasy and speculation are two different modes of acquiring information. Identification is a suspension of the self, a solution of barriers where the self is both attenuated and aggrandised; speculation is a similar suspension of the reality principle. Both variants desire the reader to create and modify new shapes, new associations: speculative doubt, mythical appropriation, are similar and therefore compete. The two converge in trying to recover childhood stages of becoming; a project sited on the pristine field of the new and intact which is also a recapitulation and which is also the text. Left-wing radical philosophy picked up, in the late sixties, the project of recovering the stages of socialisation, while trying both to abolish conditioning, to destroy class society within the individual brain, and to repossess it, so as to build a society of others among whom the Utopian life can be safely led; this interest in retrieving moments of beforeness, where the child was acquiring personality sub-units, coincides with a Freudian, or Jungian, wish to do the same thing in a therapeutic session.
The intellectual faction has a queasy sensitivity about: metaphor; appropriation; feelings; projection; myth; spirituality; love. The inability to identify makes it impossible to write about other people.
The periphery as the site of affect and suggestive control
John Stezaker wrote, in the catalogue to a 1976 exhibition: "(But) ideology is not communicated in the well-systematised cultural directives which we call 'ordinary' language, but in the outer periphery of unsystematised cultural directives, in connotation. Language is a system of our ordinary shared beliefs and those which are not shared are not systematised into the form of a particular culture-use, but exist in the transient zone outside syntax." (catalogue entry, British Art Today 1960-76) Whether Stezaker was right about ideology being absent from the overt content of the founding texts is an open question; anyway, the era of conceptual art subjected the inexplicit semantic framing of the cultural object/situation to searching scrutiny. Stezaker seems to offer, in a moment of heat, a division between meaning and rhetoric, as if by stripping away the latter we could begin to utter true messages to each other; a presumable re-run of the Logical Positivist project, dominant in British academic philosophy. The term rhetoric implies that not directly semantic elements of verbal emphasis and ornamentation are deceit, while the ideology of performance is that elements of ornamentation and emphasis which are carried out with the body (e.g. facial expression, suprasegmental features of speech, dance, clothing) are authenticity. The reverse would be equally convincing. This exacting process of foregrounding the unconscious, framing, elements of meaning matured, ten or fifteen years later, in the ability to manipulate them to make beautiful linguistic objects. The publication of Peter York's Style Wars (1980), which dealt with the same marginal domain of the subliminal, elusive, and non-referential, symbolically saw the recapture of minutiae and the periphery for self-adornment and self-aggrandisement. Someone working in advertising could, just as well, develop detachment from meaning and perfect understanding of the impact of details. Contemporary poetry has or wants expertise in using suggestion, implicit instructions, contextual clues, deposits of prestige. Attention has shifted, not only to the nuances of arranging parts of a line, but to the overall context, the semantic framing of the space which contains the poem, the poet, and the reader: both the smallest relationships and the largest are objects of conscious design.
The same exhibition catalogue describes installations by Tim Head which are simply light sources playing on a room: by defining space, he isolates the act of appropriation, and calls the artist's personality into question. The difference between real and symbolic space is foregrounded even as it vanishes; the identity of the room, something deeply puzzling and yet important to how we feel and behave in buildings, reaches centre stage. Appropriating space is the most elemental and the most fraught gesture of modern poetry.
The situation of the visual arts, where the avant garde entered the juries, received government patronage, got put on by the British Council, etc., is superior to that of poetry, where the sources of money and information were sealed off by a revanchist conservative group which fought a ruthless war against innovation. There is not a single book on the radical poetry of the 1970s. The discourse around the visual arts is roughly a hundred times more advanced; this lack of sophistication is probably reflected in the quality of the poets' artistic decisions. The politics behind the triumph of the mainstream await proper study.
Wanderings inside the body
As the collective and political themes of poetry of the seventies dried up, deprived not only of the real power which deprived them, but of the symbolic and conjectural space where their hopes grew and acquired features and animated art, the maximum defensible space came to be the self, explored following a map derived from New Age spiritualism and self-development psychology: the privatisation of a revolution. John Kenneth Galbraith spoke, thirty years ago, of private affluence, public squalor; the evaluation of public space as corrupt, by both Left and Right, was used by the latter to forgo collective responsibility, by the former to denounce corporate and government authority; flitting around the partial and unstable spaces of specialist markets, the artist no longer has a parish, a stable, capacious, external space where the behaviour of a community might find room. The isolation of the philosopher conforms to the narcissistic cosseting solitude of self-realisation. Each poet, then, goes through a drama of re-opening, stabilising, and marking space, as the semantic expanse where two psyches can meet and exchange signs of agreed meaning.
Didier Anzieu, as quoted in AE Eleven, suggested that "the group imaginary is a projection of the mother's body": a certain wave of poets set out from the woman's body, or body-psyche, as the landscape within which everything occurs. The space immersing a performance is teetering between private, the depiction of merely internal events with a psychoanalytical slant, and public, where an imaginary future is opened up to the audience for making and modifying models. The word selfish, heard so frequently from all sides, has been a key to taste; art which is personal and subjective can only avoid being "selfish" by being superficial and inattentive to its own subject, and this has been a popular solution. As a generalisation, the aficionados of avant garde neoclassicism are concerned with paternal power, and the poets of performance and mythic ritual are concerned with feminine potency, emanating through the female body or through the landscape. This stress on plastic values brings also a crisis of the abstract and of ideas.
A shared subjectivity is strained by the regime of competition and ownership, which also promotes differentiation and experiment. Male poets of this age-group also seem to suffer from a terrible sense of guilt at entering shared space, through public utterance or sexual advances, and simultaneously from a sense of exclusion, because they do not enter it. The medical metaphor has been popular. Attention has been directed away from work and towards leisure. You can't reform the State, but you can go jogging. The political defeat of the Left, both in national and local politics and inside the Labour Party, led to melancholia. One of the symptoms of this is hypochondria, which latched onto psychotherapy, and the new concern with the body, to produce a truly lethal boredom. Interesting conversation was simply not possible on this basis.
The terms of space and the body cannot be taken as literal or natural or permanent; their emergence into currency fills the space left by the departure of the parish, as the shared imaginary of Anglican art, and of an ethical community, as demanded by socialist art. The radical artist broke a hole in the collective verbal-affective terrain, because it was not collective enough; other social agencies then broke much larger holes. Any shared space, even a stage and its audience, threatens to become the Utopian coast, the site where our affective reunion can start.
Performance academicism
Today, a poet has to perform in public in order to have a career; in order to make any money, acquire a following, or even get a book published. In the live situation, the voice and the body and its clothes can swamp the flow of words; if unused, they can make the poet seem psychically absent and the poem attenuated and of diminished reality. If the poet chases the values of live performance too adequately, the result is showbiz. The insecurity of the naïve poet about what to do with their hands and how to speak has led to the importation of learnt techniques for reassuring the audience (and the performer), hence to performance academicism. Any performer is surrounded by space, in which the audience perceive them; and has a body, whose movements and exterior surfaces can become sign-bearing. Performance academicism teaches every student to think in terms of these two sources of meaning. This dyad resembles the confrontation of the perceiving self and external space, argued out in the terms of object relations. Actors are taught to think through their bodies, always to synchronize speech with movement, not to blank out their bodies in order to concentrate on the text, to respond to the movements of the other actors. In this way natural groupings are constantly achieved, and the absence of a link between the actor and the present moment, and the playwright and the time of composition of the text, is hidden. Theatre people are made insecure by someone reading while standing still; especially in England, where actors have difficulty with body language, and the literary tradition has tended to overwhelm the theatre. However, if you are going to write a poem you have to become totally verbal, you can't leave information out because it is still embedded in arm movements or the act of running or climbing a tree. So the whole momentum of actor training tends to damage the technique of poetry. The demands of showbiz led, during the sixties, to a massive regression of poetry; the serious live poets only fill a fraction of the available space, which is dominated by semi-showbiz characters of unutterable banality. It was possible, for a few seconds during the 1960s, to believe that the stage and the audience represented the escape of high art from its cell of solitary thought into the realm of authenticity; the communion of liveness being the good society, the stable external space, which had existed for Anglican poetry but which had seemed to dry up and fragment as part of modernity. This illusion is used as a reproach against poets who explore the full capacities of language as if their conscious thought were responsible for the disintegration of the socius and the social democratic consensus.
It is implausible that dramatic heights can be scaled by a solo performer, without scenery, who is limited in physical manœuvres by having to read a text. This bareness is imposed, equally, by economic limitations. The artistic impact of a poem may be enhanced by adding vocal and gestural inflections, but the starting-point was, after all, that its impact was diminished as uncontrolled semantic channels opened up around it.
The popularity of non-verbal techniques may be due either to the power of a world of subsidized performance, which dislikes poetry but has funding and its own internal formal debates; or to the inability of poets as readers. Bergvall and Williamson teach at Dartington Hall, where a course on Performance Writing is turning out graduates qualified to write what may be the standard average "modern" poem of the next ten years. Poetry performance practices today owe a lot to a slightly older generation, such as Brian Catling, cris cheek, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Geraldine Monk.
Sound occupies, for elementary physical reasons, a volume of space; we can tell, for elementary biological reasons, the approximate age, state of health, and body weight of a speaker from the qualities of their voice. As the latter becomes sound, it also spreads out to fill space, from which it becomes inseparable. The dyad of body and space is artificial, they permeate each other.
In Caroline Bergvall (born 1962, in Norway)'s Oblique View of a Room in Motion (1990), the twin means of a solo performer, the demarcated space of the stage and the body as signifying object, have become transformed and exalted into a charming erotic divertissement, where with insidious and old-fashioned slowness a house is described and the contact of two people evoked. A third figure, that of interfering authority, makes a phantom appearance as we discover that the lovers are two women. Bergvall works as a performance artist, both with evocative and illusionistic texts, evoking mysterious landscapes with usually erotic intent, and confrontational ones, where semantic jumps evoke, perhaps, the protagonist moving through a multicultural and partly hostile society, its teeming and cyclically incomplete codes, while the first type is intimate, undisturbed, and involves two people.
O Strange Passage (1993), a choral ode, is a strangely tranquil and even stately work. Work in Conductors of Chaos (1996) is the chaotic and largely garbled or incomprehensible In Situ, presumably about sex; and 'Hands On Catullus', something with more semantic jumps than previous works, but still effective in parts. The graphic signs of 'In Situ', perhaps instructions for a vocal performance but meaningless to the ordinary reader, are perhaps related to the difficulty of talking about the sexual act, as a set of three-dimensional spatial relationships, along with internal sensations, mapped on other real but invisible spaces, to do with blood flow in the capillaries, muscle tension, and so on. Here space has collapsed, perhaps gaining in affective intensity as the curved and darkened surface of the lover's body expands to become space altogether, and the diffuse maternality of the landscape becomes something warm and close up. Other work has appeared in the anthologies Milk of Late and Out of Everywhere, and in magazines like Raddle Moon and Angel Exhaust; a book has just come out from Sound & Language.]
(Bergvall, Williamson)
Land art
In land art the female body is expanded to be the whole landscape, the hospitable and encompassing Mother Goddess as evoked by an E.O. James or a Marija Gimbutas. Detailing her features is an act of piety and propitiation, an obeisance to the powers greater than the individual which also expands the poem to a divine magnitude; a walk gives the space a third dimension, unlike a picture from a single viewpoint, and the Land goes on engulfing the poet and mocking the limits of what perception intakes, swallowing up the ego and offering a stable external space where every desire can be enacted. Its features are enrolled in a projective scenario of the poet, an impropriation carried out by making marks, but the resistance and integrity they offer is incomparably detailed, tonally variegated, and hard to damage. Where is an inner for such an outer? The goddess's far-flung and opened body, at once dominating, vulnerable, sensual, protecting, and containing, is seen sexually through the Tantra, and documented by the poet as wanderer, who maps landmarks onto grain edges of the higher symbolic space given by personal or Oriental myth. This space is suprapolar in the theological sense. Submission is a political gesture, jettisoning autobiographical poetics along with the exploitative plan of turning natural resources into money and trying to live outside nature, having engulfed it. The schema was already carried out in Gavin Selerie's Azimuth (1984). The merit of this poetry is its scale, far larger than the human form, addressing the sublime in words; but scale, and the movement of attention, are then the problems. The issues are dealing with the psychotic (as one lover engulfs and destroys the other), and with life where forces much larger than the self reduce it to a conditional state.
I feel that Norman Jope's poetry, for example, suffers from an excessive ideological security; wrapped round in many layers of argument which seems perfectly true to the author, it is too slow and leisurely and does not do enough to fight off demons of doubt in the reader's mind. Its volume is not in proportion to its rate of aesthetic success. His campaign, with Finding Time, to re-think unemployment, recognise its permanent nature, and make civilised life more possible on it, has broken new ground and earns a particular debt of gratitude from this writer. The result of excess leisure is certainly the production of more culture, by more people, but not necessarily of art whose pacing and balance are perfect. All children are selfish towards mothers, and land art tends to eliminate other people: it can be the privatisation of imaginary space.
(Jope, Andy Jordan, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Bergvall)
The radical poem
The radical poem where by witholding sympathy and identification the agent uncovers hidden assumptions of the social field and shows unconsidered symmetries, patterns, classificatory divisions, and interventions of power. Where the reader slips wholly from the scheme of gratifying identification with a single player to perceive the shape of the game as a whole: a geometric affinity sense which makes system rules conscious and sees a new horizon of forms. Visualisations of alternative social structures, detailed, tenacious, resistant, able to be modified, shared, developed. Glimpses of the Before of all structuration. Touching the structuration, the rules, their arbitrariness, their effects. Why one person becomes different from another.
The revelation of switch points in the flow of personal experience-action where conscious intervention permits a qualitative transformation of the patterns of everyday life; like a cook's lore understanding the chemical responses to heat, time and herbs of raw stuffs from the market. Reflexivity making the flow of experience more intense. Ménagère skills of the study and the salon.
A challenge to authority. A verbal machine where the poet always wins the argument. The release of the personality by the overthrow and humiliation of those who judged and weighed it. You get to mark your own essays. Invalidating all judgments.
Perversion and hypochondria
David Rushmer (circa 1964?) is preoccupied with the Other's body as the source of space. Sand:works was reviewed in Angel Exhaust Eleven; a pamphlet, Love Letters to the Dead, came out in 1994.
unreal men have spoken of god
at such times
i have tasted his absence
in this young girls excrement
and soiled his dead face
in my own
where is the heart of man
when the cock spits
into the filthied bellies of the betrothed
(from 'The Guardians of Urine') Where the body is both the signifier and the signified, the loss of mediations no longer matters; the circuit of the communicative act shrinks down to micro level, almost without content or readership. Adam Mckeown (circa 1968?) writes about the body and the growth of identity, in an idiom close to Rushmer's. He has published Bound (1993) and the prose murder tale Further...Father (1995). We are used to poets using physicality as an external solid medium which stabilises the sentiment and action; basic to Rushmer and Mckeown is however the instability of the grounds of feeling, surrounding the surface of contact and shared experience with vast extents of white space where the psyche, losing contact with its projection into the Other, disappears altogether, falls silent. Rushmer named one of his pamphlets Absence. They are both gazing at a landscape of depression and isolation. The rules, derived from French antecedents such as Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, the painter Hans Bellmer, and Jacques Lacan, state that everything outside the body is unreal; the artist is only truthful when exhibiting and modelling heated and cyclic fantasies; perversion is strength, and dialogue or normal sex are dilutions, attenuations; the Other can only appear as a doll. The (male) artist is dependent on the female body, whose nature is only known through fantasy; symbolic thought is only possible through this desired body, which keeps withdrawing itself. Despite their, in many ways, conventional nature, these texts offer difficulties because of their extreme deletion of vocabulary; as if by purging the words by which experience is usually mediated one could discover a ground of intact purity, where communication would not be alienated and would not betray us. However, the dependence on various psychoanalytical texts mortgages the poetry to a set of predictable gestures. The formation, from internalised stores of observed and understood events in the world, of a lexicon which could be used for introspection, reassurance, relating, and writing, seems forbidden or inconceivable. Its lack makes their poetry appear monotonous as well as fragmentary. It is as despairing and frustrating as recording objects in motion with a camera nailed to the floor. At the same time the emptiness gives the reader a space to operate in.
Both in Rushmer and in Aaron Williamson we find the curious image of the book as a body: 'In the mean time the spine begins to form, congealing through its lacings of horn and nerve. A casing is thrown out, shot through with curved bolts. These ribs, curling within the pulp, are grooved through with the static of verbiage. They hold, out front as satellite to the spine, a surface of split ridges that gape and converge in the wind. The fore-edge: our sternum. Open and then close, dithering.' (Williamson, from A Holythroat Symposium) This is pedantic and overripe at the same time; hypochondriac and Mannerist. In sixteenth century Catholic religious symbolism, it was the body of Christ which was a text. The withdrawal of sensuous reality is curiously close to the groundless language of mysticism; following the image of an early book by Jeremy Reed, Saints and Psychotics. With a lyric poet like George Barker, the affective body, the temperament, affected the external world of other people displayed in the poem. There was a dyad of poet and society, of I and the staging of experience. For the poets under consideration, the demise of practical reason has destroyed the dyadic tension, and spatial paradoxes result as the outside world collapses in on the person experiencing it; it either threatens the poet with psychic annihilation, or, incarnating itself as the object of love, develops affective instability of its own, as a space containing the poet which is non-linear, buckling and withdrawing itself according to its own mysterious thermal cycles. The narcissism of the poet, offered as truth since the falsification or withdrawal of the outside world, is offered to the reader as a fulfilment, a toy: beckoning to the reader's narcissistic fantasy, as extremes of delusion are seen as merely a larger dose of the drug. The privatisation of experience which the decline of an established Church left as a bolt-hole for art has been pursued further along its own axis. From preces privatae and chamber music to adventures in your own bedroom.
To this we have however to add another strand of French literature, the ontological removal to an empty state where we are trying to piece together the language we have lost; this derives from the Catholic vision of the logos (le verbe) as creating the world, which brought the French poet to the threshold where language and the world are about to exist. Poetry then becomes the discovery of the world. This via negativa is curiously similar to Milne and Wilkinson, both motivated by an original emptiness and denial, a hysterical ejection of internalised objects, which is refilled with incomplete or affectively blank objects by means of an investigation. If none of them can represent other people in a satisfactory way, that is a by-product of being unable to represent themselves on the page except as a kind of fog. The area where objects become shared, and allow communication with other people, so that the self acquires a definite engaged outline, and can recognise other selves as real and continuous, has collapsed. We are being carried, perhaps, to an island where language is emptied out and can start again from the nameless and unmediated. The struggle of these writers for a stable and capacious external space, the one theorised by Adrian Stokes and Peter Fuller, is perhaps one that everyone engages in. Another reading of object relations theory shows how a healthy psyche can produce successful symbolic acts; the broader social space, the parish or ecclesia, remains closed or damaged.
The Exquisite poem
The exquisite poem constantly varies, can see its own shape, is never heavy, never repeats itself, prefers complicity to simplicity, offers refined and pleasurable textures, has absorbed every lesson, knows the movements of our sensibility and follows them, knows all the ways in which poetry bores or loses conviction and avoids them, is not hypnotised by realism, is not punitive and religious, is not an exercise in sensory deprivation, is like a warehouse with swatches of every textile, acts by choice and not by compulsion, sees the arriving visual and temporal patterns of the world as mysterious and dithyrambic, is more preoccupied by the reader than the writer, is not didactic, is attenuated to the point where it never stops moving, does not take hypotheses for bricks, prefers multiple entrances and exits as an architectural principle, is not dogmatic or hectoring, shows tonal shading and a fine ripple in every direction of movement, is like conversation, has gaiety and equanimity, gets carried away all the time, takes anything on, is not trying to prove that the individual is an illusion, is stylistically upwardly mobile, thinks of nothing else except metrics, has a magpie's eye for bright sounds and textures, is not home-made, lives in a world of appearances.
(K van den Beukel, Robert Smith, Simon Smith, Helen Macdonald)
Avant-garde neo-classicism
The 80s were induced by the political and poetic collapse of the radical 1970s, making a mockery of theories of devising and occupying the future. History did not move towards the future we had laid out. Another insurance against the fickleness of Time was to seize on existing style modules as if by possessing the past one could take out a claim on the future; the gesture of avant garde neo-classicism. It was around 1983 that the Fairlight made sampling big time and began the dominance of the producer within the creative team of the pop record; accordingly, what we tend to find in new poets, a few years after that, is the apprehension of the past by sampling. This is a variant of the Star Fantasy: Milne is to Prynne as Reed is to Scott Walker. Sampling at cellular level. It is hard to separate the influences of academicism (graduate students acquire styles from the past in the same spirit as reading desuete texts) and of furious competition for prestige, within the sexually tense and financially flattened society of students, which seizes on the style of Prynne, or whoever, as an asset for display. Among young poets, the avant garde, in familiar form, does not seem to exist outside the universities.
One of the great publishing enterprises of the 1980s was the Allardyce Barnett series of huge marble slabs enshrining mainly Cambridge poets of the Grosseteste-Ferry realm. The republication by Iain Sinclair as an editor (1987-92) at Paladin Books of big volumes aimed at the High Street incensed those who weren't selected and depressed those who were when the whole series was pulped after Sinclair's departure. The grant application became the key document of the time, and public manœuvres were often consciously directed at that charter of power. These slabs embodied not only splendour of objecthood but also whatever was exquisite, elegant, elevated, and intelligent in poetic style. Such assets led to one of the most striking phenomena of the last ten years, the re-appearance of the "Cambridge" style, as a magnetic stylistic attraction for ambitious postgraduate students dissatisfied with the domestic-anecdotal mainstream. These would include Drew Milne (Sheet Mettle, 1994), Andrew Lawson (Human Capital, 1992), and D.S. Marriott (schadenfreude, 1989, etc.). The style has become much more visible now people are imitating it: a moment of self-awareness, I would hope. The arrival of a new generation doesn't necessarily represent an addition to the stature of the originals so much as a hint that they're obsolete. John James' influence was felt on the poetry of Daniel Lane and Andrew Webster, his students. Others latched onto Raworth or objectivism.
Around 1976 the wave of free verse broke. Verse was no longer regular or rhyming, but an approximation to spoken rhythms was felt to be no more than civil and amenable. The new wave of the late 1980s represents a return to syntax and verse movement, as opposed to the endless stop-start of parataxis.
The institutional basis for the revived Grosseteste Review-Ferry Press ambience was the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, an annual fixture from 1991, which allowed the experimental world to assemble in one room and be exposed to a barrage of poetry. The poets were published in the pamphlet series Equipage or by publishers like Reality Street, Prest Roots, and Boldface Press.
Why use the term "born in the sixties"? Time seems a sufficiently negative concept, but may call in too much: whereas some poets believe in the railway line of the new, others believe that one reaches the timeless simply by breaking through the emptied surface deposited by secular time. It seems that, the younger the poet, the closer they are to the forms of popular culture, and the less original and contemporary in terms of poetic form.
These themes crop up in several of the poets examined and have no bearing on many others. The choice of themes is better than arbitrary and less than satisfactory.
Book publication of this age-group still gives a sporadic and unsatisfactory picture; retouched, for me, by magazine publications, readings, and unpublished poems (which reach me in various forms): each mingling chance and excess. Little magazines seem to include no prose commentaries, or to ignore anyone born after 1950. Thinking about poetry is a kind of geological process, taking place with decades of delay.
Chaotic Dynamics, or, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, or You will never hear surf music again (again), or From the heroical history of the Bohemians, or They're Justified and they're Ancient and I wonder what they're on: Conductors of Chaos, edited by Iain Sinclair, (484pp., Picador,1996, £9.99) part 1
"In the field, chaotic dynamics can create difficulties that we do not fully understand, and which may require more detailed studies than have been usual in the past." (the New Scientist Guide to Chaos, p.88)
The scam is that Welsh underground hippie, psychogeographer, stallholder, sunstroke victim and small press poet reincarnated as distingué High Street Gothic novelist, topographer, and star of the London Review of Books Iain Sinclair has dredged up thirty-six survivors of the Left modernist poetry scene which was closed down, erased from the tape, violently abused, and generally kicked into the X-files by the poetic Right in the seventies. The shock about coming across these names in the High Street is seeing them as bashful yet pleased commodity gewgaws and not as severed heads dangling from some enforcer's saddle-bow; they've all been silenced, marginalised, taunted, satirized, made invisible or monstrous by disinformation. Heads kicked in by sonic distortion. Denise Riley impales her co-workers on p.397, 'and as she frets the minute wars scorch on through paranoias of the unreviewed/ herded against a cold that drives us in together-then pat me more, Coventry/ to fall from Anglo-Catholic clouds of drifting we's high tones of feeling down/ o microscopic horror scans of tiny shiny surfaces rammed up against the nose/ (...) one we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets blown/ fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own polymer.' This is the return of the repressed, the future of British poetry which was deleted to make way for endlessly looping regression; these are the living nightmares, the sons of extermination. Or as the Ninja code says, The darkness surrounds me. I am clothed in night. This is in fact the poetry by which the English literature of the last thirty years will be judged by any future audience of intelligent and thrill-seeking people. The clinging heady taint which fills my nostrils now is one of criminality: the systematically excluded, damaged and steeled by decades of punitive confinement, aflare in a death spree of dithyrambically and barbarically spilt energy, making fools of the law. Behold the empty hand, Edged with the truth hard won, Becomes a sword in righteousness; out of lockdown and into a barrage of contempt; hunted like a weasel in the corn. Beckoning to the demons of paranoia to save ourselves from speaking the language of ghosts. The society of which this wholly reckless speech could have been the code of ideals will now never come about: like Peckinpah's outlaw princes of the Mexican frontier in mid revolution, the earth had cooled. They hadn't. The land had changed. They couldn't.
'What process of mind extracting/ divers out of the sea/ hooded as gulls, the Arctic in their wings,/ unfolds the cold and creeping lava of this tide/ into the volcanic sculpture of the beach?/ What musselled mountain roars again/ as roots of earth are blown into the sky?/ Trapped in their rippling mirror fish flesh hackles/ and revolutions turning on us images of horror/ that never rise to flower upon the globe/ mornings of moon-drawn curtains and draped wells.' 'In general, the pulse of radiation will contain many frequencies. (...) It is hard to see how we can know the answer to these conjectures until a great deal more is known, both about gravity waves and the conditions at the centre of our Galaxy. Superficially at least, the experimental results seemed very compelling and the sidereal anisotropy was exactly the sort of effect that one would expect(.)' 'Ten and twenty years of running into great mentalities of very slight significance. Across flawed communities. The soil acidic is. There industries leak gas. And protected material and. West and dank is the journey that brings me to suburban matter. That take me from here to there. Awkwardly dry-assed. From then to now. These lines and patterns that erase unaccountables. Doors shut and secure. Allow the growth of mirrors. More is less. Must be. Must be must be. Pigeonshit and recreational landscapes. The family stage. The father the mother. (...) A feat of the digressive realm. And mannered gestures. Of adjectives and parenthesis. Stamina and prolonged action. Of the strong, supple ankle and the displaying of feet. Toes spread out in fans might keep me safe from greed.' Swamp pot tonics. Dithyrambic maidens of Dionysus easily eluding boorish pursuit. New family values. 'The Stumbling Block has made itself of carbon paper, sucking the increasingly obsolescent material from offices at the centre of the city. It is compressed to become a pivot; diamond-hard. The compacted density smoulders in the deep night blue of its waxy, slippery layers. The tiny scar letters are thick and noisy at its centre, their planktonic clusters bite and disengage continually, refocusing the chattering fusion. This mute lexical friction gives the heat that powers the inflexibility of the shifting mass. It can be heard only in the quiet times; its static, a translucent muscle pulling between infinites. In this manifestation the block is almost organic, a writhing tank of cellular activity, straining between two poles(.)' (and) 'The Stumbling Block is being hunted. Extravagant books of soap, perfumed with fear, have been placed in the sunken zones. Dews will rub their musk to bathe the causeways with heart-rending lures. Lanterns of ice are offered to the early morning, light is stroked through their steaming chancels. These constructed spectres are almost strong enough to catch and drain the omnipotent cryptic grace of the block.' And now, for swinging lovers, he returns to what is, after all, home grounds-to the happy task of singing the most enchantedly romantic songs he knows. 'a pulse/ flicked across a backless mirror/ in the tick of blanks and slats/ motion limned but not caught/ by a gleaming streak/ the event scratched the graphic surface of silver/ lips of the wake parted in the deep emulsion/ ripple nuclei explode/ crests summate to fray in light and foam/ the vortex overloads its own patterns/ the swimmer's hand pushes the water in the swimmer's shape/ scanning of pulse peaks declares a buried star' Twice as sweet as sugar, twice as brilliant as salt. Then for the first time he released the awesome Ninja Kiai-it was legend that this could stun the very birds from the trees. 'There's been more than one Caudine Forks, more/ by a long chalk and more to come/ More when we're on the upgrade, as now/ (so they reckon)/ Still more, and internecine too/ when the cosmocrats of the dark aeon/ find themselves/ wholly at a loss/ in the meandered labyrinth of/ their own monopolies./ And the Celestials themselves/ begin to weary/ of our bickering imperium and turn/ plug-eared to all our suffrages.' El tango macho. El tango poema. El tango ternura. 'When you wake and open your eyes/ transparent days rise to the surface,/ each part aligned on the grid/ etched on the smooth face of the unworked block,/ today's already horizontal light.//Shares fall in the Asian morning, / fear falls to earth and burns us;/ numberless they clamour at the glass/ cathedral clouds roll in from the wet,/ the sky opens to drench us to the skin.' The first rule is: leave nothing living. 'The rumours of his being everywhere/ but never seen, or nowhere, black on black,/ proliferate, multiply to a film/ in which enigmatic footage repeats/ his visual changes, or the camera slows// to meditation on a door/ infused with white light, or a lifting jet/ aimed from Kennedy to a red sunset,/ a blank frame punctuating every three/ as a phased, abstract possibility (.) ' You can't do this and you can't do that, finally after you've understood that, what the hell can we do? Because that's what you sent us in there to do. 'What comfort could be derived from the implosion of networks; the trade routes go in a circle that frays and tightens on the city's rim. Cars and trucks are abandoned, each day further from the centre with its funicular descent into the rubbish-compacting dens of the avant-garde. A few avians sortie across the fractured energy reserves of a secret library, where the ripples of migration deposit a film of refluxive script one of whose characters opens a single rusted memory-valve, divulging the inception of a time-schism: history before, and history after, the circumnavigation of value.' Freaky Deak. Freaky Deak. Freaky Deak.
(Hendry; The search for gravity waves; Bergvall; Catling; Duncan; Jones; Corcoran; Reed; Mengham)
Maybe you don't like these quotes; well, it goes on like that; and remember the curt words of Radio Birdman's Rob Younger, faced with an audience in rural South Australia that wasn't into heavy metal: If you don't like it you can get out. After burning up the stores of a conservative and long-lived cultural succession, they tried to cross the Styx in two leaps; thirst prevails and memory will fail, as the social formations which were the meaning of the poetry are destroyed its verbal body stiffens into place as a deviant ossature, a sinister everted structure displaying phantom organs of sense.What disintegrates, flies on the wind; and I foretell that Conductors will become a fetish book, one of the die-for possessions which set starry-eyed youth in Pudsey, Motherwell, and West Penwith on the path to la gaya scienza. Not as fiendish as the puzzle which opens the gates to Hell in Hellraiser, bulked out with poets who are long overdue for the phagocytes, nevertheless it contains fragments of the extraterrestrial in full ballistic descent.
Sinclair is known as a collector of grotesques; a semi-documentary director who needs a crew of neurologically atonal gazing-stocks, twisted visions, twisted limbs, to animate le regard concret of his spectacle. Peckinpah, Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, also had a stock company. Much as I detest the Andy Pandy wimps of our cherished mainstream, Conductors is the kind of bar where the bad people go; a Café Egon Krenz. The Boris Pugo ubegalovka. The title is surely a reminiscence of Frankenstein's monster, hauled aloft, in the novel, in an electrical storm to become a conductor of the shock which re-animated him. Investors are thus alerted to the risks of innovation, of decontextualisation and the new flesh. Wilhelm, hand me the diagram! The uneasy notion arises that Conductors represents a Sinclair-Tod Browning freak show, a brelan des dingos where the possessed tread out their linear, insect-like dances of daftness while a swooping camera integrates them into a kind of Mondo Cane panorama not unlike his live-from-Bedlam prose fictions White Chappell, Downriver, and Radon's Daughters. Some poets have been included only as geeks (did you see 'Nightmare Alley'?), and it is this diapason which gives the anthology a majestic spatial recession which the works of a single poet could never have. The real heroes of the book are procedures forged by subjectless action, generating take-home forms for as many as will. This restored socius is a test range: the sight of thirty-six people running teaches the gaze in tiny differences of rhythm and speed, a lucid saturation making possible comparative and developmental insights which years of compulsive reading of little magazines could not afford. The effects of so many years of rejection are awkward; one-sided language, an inside without an outside, either mutating into new and boundless geometries or losing its eyes to run round in tautological and incomprehensible circles. For, what is language without a listener? Some of the characters seem to have taken bad acid, others seem refugees from an M.R. James story. The socius of this big anthology promises to reverse these effects of isolation.
There is no New Right in poetry. But the idea of experimental poetry was marginalised, repressed, and very thoroughly hidden under lies by a wave of people who didn't wait for funding from American foundations linked to the military-industrial complex. This wave of cultural conservatism, which has shown some signs of breaking up during the past five years, was distinguished for its belief that it was Left and populist, and so wasn't cultural conservatism even if it did roll back the rules and artistic theory to the 1950s. This devastated and parasitical growth is registered as the real history by other anthologies. The past as damage, more or less. Would it be a good idea to mediate the ideas of radical poetry to a new and young audience, who have been lied to all their lives about the history of poetry in Britain? Exactly here is the role which Angel Exhaust has to play. Bus Conductors of Chaos is mainly texts from the past five years; but it does contain the history of the last thirty, as a kind of package tour. Everyone constructs the past for themselves. The victory of the Right can't be repealed; but you'd be crazy to ignore this large-scale return of the repressed which Sinclair has poured so much life into; dawn of the dead, on every city street.
What is Chaos?
I am one of the Wild Bunch chosen for this death ride, qualifying I think as one of the headcases. Unable to review my own poetry, I asked Andrew Sarris to adapt his piece on Edgar G. Ulmer from The American Cinema (one of the decisive books of my life): 'His camera never falters even when his characters disintegrate.' (And further: ' That a personal style could emerge from the lowest depths of Poverty Row is a tribute to a director without alibis.') 'But yes, Virginia, there is an Andrew Duncan, and he is no longer one of the private jokes shared by auteur critics, but one of the minor glories of the cinema. Here is a career, more subterranean than most, which bears the signature of a genuine artist.' Voilà. But what is this? 'Strictly speaking, most of Duncan's films are of interest only to unthinking audiences or specialists in mise-en-scène.' The five poems printed here are bleak, pessimistic, and efficient; an Ulmer movie to set beside the more florid or oscillatory material around it.
One of the omissions is Sinclair himself, whose great works of the seventies, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge, have just been re-released by Vintage. I can't easily evoke these near-illegal masterpieces, but let's mention Peckinpah, Cronenberg, Coleridge, psychedelia, Edgar G. Ulmer, Brakhage, Nicholas Pevsner, Mark E. Smith, Mulder and Scully, and that's just scratching the surface.
Some of the poets included go up to a bursting 20 pages; the book is like twenty-five pamphlets in one. Some notable poets might not fill so many without repeating themselves; but many of the more baffled agonists also ramble around and miss their exit cue. Whatever the vagaries of this weirdathon, the anthology has a dizzying bouquet of variety, unpredictability, craziness.
The dob profile runs like this:
1936 1937 1939 1940 1943 1944 1947
1 1 2 1 2 1
1948 1949 1950 1951
1 6 1 1 2
1953 1955 1956 1960 1962 1963 1964
3 1 3 1 1 1 1
I have excluded the 5 older poets: J.F.Hendry, David Jones, N. Moore, Gascoyne, Graham, each one active during the neo-Romantic 1940s and so assimilable to the protest against the fruity Oxford chaps of the day. While Conductors covers poets from several generations (born between roughly 1936 and 1964), it does not open the archives; almost all the material included is from the past ten years. A few dozen poets deserve to be represented by a few poems, though not the flamboyant and redundant swathes allowed here.
Reviewing an anthology always brings one up against the problem of generalizations. If you treat every poet as a homogeneous block you get a different result than if you take every poem separately or if you take every line separately. In fact, the possible variations on poetic classification are so complex that they slide into the mathematically intractable, something like chaos in physics; we can reach stable results by picking units of study large enough to exclude impossible complexity, but with the knowledge that the accuracy of the results is rigorously limited by the units chosen. It is possible to analyse the corpus of poetry in terms of what sex the poet belongs to, or what region the poet lives in. The beckoning chaos of classification points to the double node of over-complexity and artificial regulation: we can easily reach a degree of complexity which would be impossible to read or remember, and which would destroy any poem it was allowed into; but the controls must be artificial, and as they organise the phenomena they create all kinds of false structures. The insight that this double condition underlies many, perhaps all, cognitive processes derives ultimately from information theory and has been much exploited in modern poetry; the drift has been to draw attention to the conventions and so withdraw from them, creating an ironic space. Much traditionalist effort has gone into claiming that there are no artificial structures involved in language, so that literal truth is possible. Before the discussion, it is best if I present a few simple ideas of Information Theory, since chaos can most easily be conceptualized in its terms. It was originated, principally, by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, in the 1940s.
Information theory is about communication and holds that the information content of any message, or sector of a message, is its unpredictability. The information content of any message sent a second time is zero. Information is related to determinacy through time: the amount of indeterminacy available in digit 7 of a message before it reaches the receiver is the same as the amount of information contained in that digit after it has been read. So much for information theory.
A number of less precise ideas follow. Any message is written in a code: communication demands that transmitter and receiver share the code in which the message is coded. Any message is a realization of one of the possibilities contained in the code, and can also usefully be considered as an exclusion or zero-marking of all the other messages permitted by the code. The code may have been agreed before any transmission occurred, or may itself be transmitted. Receivers can deduce unknown parts of the code by studying enough messages: we learn English by listening to utterances in English, not vice versa. People often visualize determinacy in terms of a network of nodes: if there are many legal paths at a node, this is rich connectedness and high indeterminacy, conversely if there is only one path. This is only a visual metaphor. People often talk about information and thermodynamics together, because thermodynamics is also interested in indeterminacy and the possibility of calculating past and future states from present ones.
Information is an essential component of beauty, but information theory does not give us a theory of aesthetics. A minute of television made up of random grey fuzz contains more information than a minute of a TV drama, because it is less predictable: if a human figure is on screen for a whole second (or ten screen refreshes), that is more predictable than screens generated by random numbers. Representing something from the non-symbolic world must be a form of determinism (you are constrained by what already exists), so puzzlingly representing anything at all reduces art's information content. This puzzle explains why aesthetics knows something which information theory doesn't. It may be that a very large set of random numbers, say enough to specify an hour of grey fuzz-blare screentime, could be called chaos.
Unpredictability is one parameter of good art, though. Information theory posits that the receiver is forming hypotheses about the remainder of the message, and updating these constantly as new information comes in. This hypothesizing probably is something the reader of poetry does do, and a book containing 100 very similar poems will get more boring as one goes through it. So as one turns the page one has a poem-matrix in one's mind of which the real poem is a realization, more exciting the more it damages that matrix. Arguably, the pleasure of a poem in a context is that of scanning and rewriting the matrix. In Western poetry of recent centuries, the matrix may be something like the artist's character, and character is the other theme of our review. Information theory has an understanding of large series of repetitive digits: for example, you can collapse a streak of 100 7s into the string "7x100", which at 5 digits long is 95 shorter than the raw message. This suggests that the logical complexity of a message is its incompressibility. Arguably, the merit of a poet is partly the incompressibility of their work, i.e. the independence of each page, stanza or line from the preceding ones. We acquire this secondary code by learning; there may always be hidden extra predictability in the code. Poetry loses its charm on repeated readings, which suggests that the joy of poetry may be some feature or cluster of features within the temporally unstable curve of learning during the first few readings. Does this poetry invite the incalculable data energies of chaos?
scour, grouse, loses back, knows how to, chervil.
little owl. who other trust loaded who quizz loess
italian fish, poitrine. chlorine fear rests, quizzical.
having taken, was that too, meurthe-et-moselle do not
walk on air, precipitate, mon dieux prie adieu
pieds noirs crumbs holt john bull.
auxerre. cierre. du haut en bas. homberg.
cherry brandy. strapped back. large glass goblet.
yellow glass avignon mass my brother he did me lacerate.
(Grace Lake, from 'June 21st')
Rum chiming a bull by its horns through purple bushes
To Fields of flowers whose pinks and greens are peachy Blush.
Dusk Pushing a cart humped with woes
Through an electric storm of joy, Snaps-
Prized from physical bondage to consumer slavery
In lightning flashes prostitutes pissing above old men coughing oil
Bright crabs erupting on mushroom skins Resolve to tonic.
Of ringing changes wet and dry from sugar and salt from coffee
And tea into spray-on jeans and cocacolizing TVs and sex
Packet cassettes and this and Other Tales
Of The Remains of the richest and His Biscuits
(cris cheek, from 'Stranger')
A tape cosmography twists upon a three-ply door
extracted from that set at nothing, artfully,
not any golden strip nor mask-play of shadow
either swiped from traffic, nor the downstairs
thief accommodates, sliding there noiselessly,
no, nor merger of the government departments'
many-hued electric loom, nor cheap ecumenicism
fattens pigeon crops & spends its necky bubbles
near & far. Descendants flutter largesse, stolen
in the pantry waxing & shimmer, unpremeditated:
You two have a picnic while I do the shooting.
(John Wilkinson, from 'Crow-cage')
Your response, reader, may be "f&k me! what are they talking about?" Rest assured that I do know. It's my trade. (Or do I?) It is fair to say that these passages show a rapid cutting technique; the selective quoting understates the overall diversity (or incoherence) of the poems; the unpredictable quality of the verse movement defies rational expectations and so is analogous to chaos as a concept in physics. The passages in question offer the following problems: the poet's personality, normally deduced from the coherent flow of the text, as the gradient which drew it, is missing; there is a lack of connection and of explanation; objects are presented from their least familiar angle; there is a shortage of affect and identification is difficult; they do not offer a moral picture, in which people are seen to be good or bad. My review will be based around these topics.
17 of the poets have been published in Angel Exhaust. The grouping follows magazines like Grosseteste Review, Spanner, the Mottram era Poetry Review, Ochre, Perfect Bound. I certainly don't like all the poetry presented here. But I think we have here a different compositional technique, which is much better than the official English poetry. By taking part in this project, one finds one's own reading habits becoming suspended and visible: systems of feeling, identification, gratification, interpretation of data, social imagination. Looking back on the journey, one can see the shape of what one has left behind: a rigorous exercise of self-alienation into which one was only lured by the opulent decor and apparent fertility of the new linguistic space, and which permits precious self-understanding. This understanding is not recorded in the texts, which merely offer a set of transforms by which it can be reached; it is unique for each individual reader, although it includes a confrontation with the collective past and its regimes of ascribing psychological states to individuals. The new manner is thin on beautiful moments and on the poet offered as a normalizing, reassuring, friendly voice; it offers, frequently, not the chaotic excess of signs but a gap, a thin air lens whose sparseness allows one to see what was formerly invisible.
In 1929, D.H. Lawrence published an essay called 'Chaos in Poetry', which expounds a belief that the cosmos is a flow of inexhaustible and intractable variety, from which form protects people: "The chaos which we have got used to we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilisation. (...) Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl." "But at last our roof deceives us no more. It is painted plaster, and all the skill of all the human ages won't take us in." "This is the momentous crisis for mankind, when we have to get back to chaos." This remarkably anticipates what information theorists were saying in the 1950s. Because information storage always involves organizing structures and rules for association and analysis, the perceptual event cannot properly be broken down into impinging reality, classification structure, and rules of procedure; the impingent constantly vanishes and changes as it is stored. "What about the poets, then, at this juncture? They reveal the inward desire of mankind. What do they reveal? They show the desire for chaos, and the fear of chaos. The desire for chaos is the breath of their poetry. The fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique." Whatever the problems of Lawrence's patterns of thought, this clearly represents the ideology which was operative sixty years later, producing the title of Conductors of Chaos and some of the poems in it. Lawrence's partiality for the passing second appears to mean that he is blissfully forgetful of what he has just written, gloriously free to write it again. Transience, repetition, simplicity, egoism, directness: this list of epithets could equally apply to rock and roll, and certainly Lawrence came into his own in the sixties. His opposition of form and complexity (unpredictability, rapid succession...) asks for attention, because it seems equally plausible that an inexperienced writer, without grasp of form, would write in a very simple, predictable way. Complexity in poetry falls into the general succession of styles; cris cheek's rapidity of motion could just as well be a product of a particular technique of editing as of the primary realness of reality.
The introduction to A new anthology of modern poetry, 1920-1940, edited by C. Day Lewis and L.A.G. Strong says "For every poet, the world is a chaos which his special gift will resolve into new patterns and combinations. (...) The world we live in has increased in complexity more rapidly than the world at any other time of history. Both the sense-data which are presented to us, and the scientific or philosophical theories ... have reached a bewildering profusion and variety." This is curious, because it leads in to the title and market image of Conductors of Chaos so exactly, and even into the technical decisions underlying much of the work. Things don't move very fast, do they? Eric Homberger quotes, in his brilliant Art of the Real, a fifties statement by Donald Hall: '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) This represents the other side, but the underlying map of the cosmos, as it impinges on the brain's peripheral sensors, is exactly the same. There is a certain continuity of terminology; the tradition is agreed that the raw fragments of the cosmos and of other people's psychological reality are too complex to deal with direct, they can only be converted into meaning by mediations. The breakdown of the traditional mediations (Christianity, positivist science, liberalism) both lets in a tantalizing flood of the unmediated, i.e. chaos, and threatens the poet with total silence for lack of common words. Both Strong/Day Lewis, and Roy Fuller in a 1951 symposium called The Craft of Letters in England, discuss the lack of shared belief systems as a gap preventing the poet from writing: "there is first this widespread change and multiplication of sense-data to complicate modern verse, and then there is what poets call tradition- or, as we feel it to-day, the lack of tradition. I mean that poetry to-day has no common universal background. (...) And when poets have no such common ground with their readers, no set of beliefs which both take for granted, some of the traditional channels of communication are automatically closed." (Day Lewis). An important pressure on artistic thought has been propaganda, which could be described as over-successful collective mediation, and is quite widely understood now as an impoverishment of topology: events, characters, and ideas lose their ambiguity and resonance, so that there are no spare possibilities, our minds have nothing to work on, and although we learn the lesson we are artistically frustrated because the course of the book or film is predictable. Such a system is catastrophic, because however rigid it is, there is always the possibility that the reader or viewer will reject it lock stock and barrel: a dictatorship is unstable because it is rigid, it makes no concessions but it can collapse altogether. A democracy is extremely unlikely to collapse, it is stable because its internal structure is fluid, shifting to reflect the migrations and re-alignments of its voters or of interest groups. Propaganda for democracy would make this point by enriching the topology of its knowledge systems, demonstrating how good solutions are found by passing through a series of less good ones without seizing up. The 1950s stimulated thought about ambiguity, because the public had, after a phase of intense political struggle which went back to 1933, become very attuned to propaganda and dead set, mostly, against it. Because the propaganda staffs of communism, capitalism, and indeed Fascism, were highly expert and had used every possible artistic technique, the questioning involved every element of the work of art. If identification came in for special curiosity, this was because hardly any work of propaganda had failed to put the unnaturally healthy, emotionally integrated, selfless, man or woman at the centre of its artistic machine; you couldn't move out of communism without untangling your emotional projections onto those dynamic communist heroes, martyrs, and athletes. It was quite apparent that even non-political artists had used these carefully designed devices, for propaganda for the self.
This crisis really goes back to the 1920s; what Sinclair is offering us is the poets working with the new fix which was developed in the sixties, or even the late fifties; a loose system giving chaos the role which electricity plays in rock and roll, directs attention to the mediations themselves, which are only tentative, parts of systems for generating hypotheses, replaces timeless knowledge with open epistemology, makes the poem a series of existential acts outside any permanent ideology or referential system, pushes personality out into the way successive instants of data are edited, and so forth. In 1962 all this was new, but if you still find it difficult today... where have you been? The new scene offers us: a) poets riding the chaos rather than reducing it to suburban order via sedate forms b) allowing indeterminacy into the system is an alternative to having "ideological convictions" and somehow fills the same structural role.
To avoid an all too self-confirming presentation, I must point out that a) there is really no evidence that the perceptual world is all aflow with data, and indeed the prevalence of boredom in modern life suggests that the distribution of chaos is patchy, like the distribution of stars in space b) statements about the prevalence of 'chaos" are unpersuasive without a definite search pattern or a map of where reality is, or is not, chaotic c) since chaos cannot be made available to thought except through mediations, the claim to know what lies beyond mediations is vulnerable to all kinds of criticisms; we don't really know what lies "before" language and so our conception of what language really does is tendentious and subjective.
High variability is a quality of good art, but after all one of the virtues of writing is lucidity, and there some traditions of English poetry arduously exclude the unpredictable. How does the reader swim as the flow of sense disintegrates? Is it possible to remain attentive to a total change of state from second to second? The proposal is that the content of a text is its information content. Everything which makes parts of the text predictable reduces its content. More concretely, every page of a book supplies us with an image of what the next page is going to be like. If someone writes 200 poems to more or less the same plan, then reading a book which collects them produces a declining curve of interest as predictability rises and rises. This presses the poet into the counter-step of attenuating the scene-setting, breaking down the reassuring logical structures, making points quickly, and editing-in the purely unpredictable: even if the reader is occasionally unable to follow what is going on. Since the details of the poem do not repeat, what the reader learns is higher-level forms: "abstract" and generative structures such as metre, metaphors, rhetorical figures, dynamic shape, and the poet's character. These contain more information than the many sentences which exemplify them. Because they are common to an era, predictability carries over from one poet to another: it is convenient to exploit the reader's increasing competence to restore excitement and high attention. We could propose a measure of the complexity of a book in terms of how many underlying structures we need to acquire in order to read it, which is also how predictable each new page is before we turn to it; I propose that JH Prynne and Allen Fisher have the highest index of unpredictability, i.e. formal complexity, of any writers ever. If we could derive the metastatement which gives the generative formula for a Prynne or a Fisher poem, it would be long; whereas the metastatement describing a Larkin or an Andrew Motion poem would be very short.
The political motive for venturing into high complexity is a hypothesis about the variability of society, imagined as a physical system in the terms of information theory. Clearly there are basic constraints to how far any society can be changed, and these include geology, the weather, the state of international trade, and human nature, in some form or other; the belief in a revolutionary transformation proposes a model of society in which every element has many microstates available without violating the constraints, and in which every element could change a great deal if the elements touching it, being its constraints, went into new and "legal" microstates. To describe such a system (and imagining it involves describing it) demands a language of variables, not identifying an observed microstate with the potential of any object, and a complex and dedicated state of mind. The vision of a society, or a small social group, with high potential implies revolutionary paths mathematically supported within the real topology. This world-view asks for poems in which none of the elements are fixed and none of the relations between them are fixed: in which "everybody solos all of the time", to quote Ornette Coleman. Both aesthetic highs and revolution are merely statistical extremes on crests of high energy states, but still satisfying the invariant laws of the system. Such extreme outcomes are statistical aggregations of microstates, clusters. Chaos means non-linearity: in practice, the hope that a system which regularly produced Conservative governments, balance of payments crises, stop-go conjunctural interventions, the eminence of the right wing of the Labour Party, industrial crises, familial cycles of deprivation, would stop repeating itself and shoot into a completely new state. Non-linearity is high gain.
I admit that there are poets of left-wing sympathies who write in a monotonous and predictable style. I don't ask that Adrian Mitchell, say, be stood up against a wall and shot; but I don't see how an unfree poem can be a plea for a free society. (Nonetheless, if some future Ministry of Rhythm should grasp the nettle, I daresay Adrian would write a jaunty little ting-a-ling jingle for us to sing as we loaded our Armalites.) I don't see how you can starve the reader of information and plan to give people, i.e. also the reader, control over the decisions which shape their lives. The future society proposed by the Left is mathematically chaotic: because it will dissolve the constraints of the past, of poverty and invested, hierarchical power, it will make the behaviour of millions of individuals much less predictable, and the complexity of the resulting environment, into which we all have to schedule our behaviour, will oblige us to dissolve more constraints. Radical art is a form of practice for freedom. The piece on circuit design in the New Scientist Guide to Chaos (by Jim Lesurf) remarks on non-linearity resulting from a second component not being constrained by the first: because it can say "yes" or "no" it is like a conscious agent. When you are dealing with someone else, unless they are constrained and unfree, their behaviour is unpredictable, and this makes your response behaviour, your "next move" unforeseeable to you; linking many consciousnesses together without a binding code of restrictive rules is like designing a chaotic amplifier, which Lesurf gives instructions for doing.
The amount of energy in a system with self-organizing capability affects its stability. Ecosystems in northern climates are less stable, and less complex, because the overall energy flow, controlled by the amount of energy from the sun hitting the surface of the earth or the sea, is lower. Any given area of a tropical region will contain many more species than the same area of a high northern region. A destructive event in north Scotland, or by the White Sea, damages the ecosystem more profoundly, because for each energy-processing niche there are fewer "adjacent" species waiting to occupy it when vacant. This has implications for the effects of dumping cores from Russian nuclear subs in the Kara Sea, as discussed in a recent Brian Catling poem.The lack of species in the north is the result of past destructive events: winter, in the hypothesis, wipes out promising but sub-adapted genetic variants and so inhibits the rise of new species. Lethality wipes out the intermediate strands, leaving only one line of flow. Evolution, then, has largely happened in the energy-rich central climates of the earth, ruled by the optics of solar light. Evolution is instability bringing metastability, so that the ability to recover is linked to the energy sum of the system; as we at first asserted. The repositing of power in the hands of a few is a threat to society because it inhibits the variety of alternative solutions, and if the ruling group fail, there are no alternative policies to be applied. Open debate puts ideas through thousands of generations of testing, improvement, and retesting: their robustness, after prolonged malleability, is the result of many energy-using cycles and so, metaphorically, points to an energy-rich system. A dictatorship, such as Russia until 1991, has inflexible policies, which are either applied by force or fail catastrophically, leading to a putsch or a new revolution. Discussion of alternative ideas is prohibited, which is, metaphorically, lethality for them, also preventing the evolution which could make them philosophically robust; the opposition ends up with ideas which are as flaky as Marxism. If a chancellor has a hundred intellectually mature economic policies to choose from, it may still not be enough: because many of them will not fit the circumstances; but choice is always better than compulsion. Real-world economic policy would be a mix-and-match from different systematic approaches.
Modern poetry is trying to illustrate these truths of information theory, but is also governed by them. For example, poetry has been under attack from academics and from the public, waving a panoply of criticisms; rather than simply building up ego defences against these, the skilled poet, plausibly, will have subjected the initial undifferentiated mass of poeticity to a thousand generations of purging and refinement, incorporating the criticisms; the robustness of the final product will be proportional to the number of these generations, and the outcome will, we guess, depend on the initial "energy level" of the system. (Note that cuts and breaks are usually thought of as bringing shape to a body; which is a synonym for form, one of our starting terms. How is it that shape is the outcome of applied energy while form, allegedly, implies lack of energy? Perhaps shape is energy made visible. The initial chaos:form formulation may be quite wrong.) Poetry which has involved no conscious thought seems to be unadapted and to mean indifference to poetry and a deficit of stored information-energy for the reader to consume.
Around here what we are looking for is a link between thermodynamics, information theory, personality, and aesthetics. In fact, it is only by means of such a link that we could first state Lawrence's opposition of chaos and form so as to reveal its true meaning, and then expound what the real situation is so as to define where Lawrence is wrong. Perhaps we could start our quest, and simultaneously justify it, by observing the groundless point in Lawrence's semi-inspired utterance: if you take any text or text fragment, you cannot point to any element which is form nor any element which is chaos. It seems hard to prove that either one exists, yet we understand his metaphor.
The interconnection seems to be indicated by the phenomenon of hotbloodedness and its sequelae. Mammals cannot greatly reduce their energy budget when food is scarce; conversely, their rapid rate of internal chemical reactions makes them fast-moving, and their curiosity lets them exploit the environment. The ability of the mouse to find food is conditioned by its rapid metabolism, which in turn is made possible by its ability to find food. A reptile takes a more passive view of the world, being sluggish in cold weather: the viper, in the English climate, hibernates without eating for up to nine months of the year, slowing its metabolism in a mimic death. Human beings also respond to cold weather by depression, as if something calculated that, where little food is available, it is more efficient to stay indoors, be inactive, and burn little energy, rather than speed up to find food. This energy budget affects all functions, including the emotional and intellectual ones. Functions like attentiveness, eagerness, high rates of association and speculation, all essential to poetry, are interconnected to this global activeness, governed by archaic hormonal systems. Fortunately, the system of glands, and the hormones they secrete, is very complex, even taken simply as a printed circuit diagram; it has many components and many interconnections. We could define it as the personality; but it also runs on chemical reactions which are manifestly subject to thermodynamics, and whose rates are governed by heat.
Another hint of a link is in the functional equivalence of process rules and the commands of the personality as instructions for writing a poem. The 29 stanzas of Allen Fisher's 'Philly Dog', published as a pamphlet and also in First Offense Ten, describe the self:
This work begins with the self
(...)
The work a multiplicity of works embedded
disparate and without circularity
concealed identities serious similarities frayed
assumptions organised permanence deconstructed
inserts and envelopes narration
consumer and cultural producer
without identities and without exactness
rumour and intruder
(...)
The self becomes an instantaneous apprehension of multiplicity
in a given region not a substitute but an I feel
myself become animal, animal among others
on the edge of the garden created in order
to escape abstract opposition between multiple and one
to escape dialectics and cease treatment of numerical fragment
as lost totality or as an organic element in unity
instead to distinguish between types of multiplicity
(...)
I am a homeorhetic system
of attractor surfaces of chreods, necessary pathways,,
located in multi-dimensional spacetimes
in which crossovers correspond to catastrophes
Folds on the surface that suspend descriptive
referential functions and any temporal character
of my experience(.)
The resort to rules for "facturing" the poem aimed to evade the repetitiousness of poems based on the personality, which within the poem appeared as a set of rules and procedures. So the "procedures" and the "personality" were interchangeable, competing, and similar. After many years of reflecting on this relationship, Fisher has produced his poem describing the self, in terms of general system theory and even of electronics. Perhaps we can come to understand the personality as an information process and character or mood as clusters of features within a data handling process. The individual is not the unit of psychological study; because receiving and emitting messages are essential functions, the characteristics of the event are distributed along the whole chain, including at least two individuals and the "situation", which includes at least the code governing their messages and the world-horizon they find themselves in. The project of applying cybernetics to psychology goes back to a 1936 book by Gregory Bateson. If the personality is an information process then the curve by which information loses its value may also affect the personality; behavioural processs may simply reach satisfaction and stop, and indeed we can see life as a series of behavioural stages in which new behaviour is learned; the compulsions of art may reach satisfaction and stop, and indeed the development of artistic taste through life may be a series of endings.
If excitation level is a function of personality, then the rate of edits and cuts may express personality in the most elemental levels of the text and so allow the return of what was apparently eliminated:
Include bars, slurred tone, tintinnabular blinkered
beyond is the coastal storm & daily telegraph man
deep green oil cloth, balancing man, finisterre grove
but... piped up the politician, there's NO geography in PROTEST
demonstrative slub linen caught tighter than a ring.
(Grace Lake) The tone is personal because it is so distinctive, although demands for tribal loyalty are discreetly absent.
The aesthetics of polyvalent poetry is perhaps based on the insight that depression is a world, or metabolic state/world in which possibilities are very impoverished, there are very few different tracks and all converge on the same outcome. The outset could be something as simple as the terror, popular in the sixties, of a monotonous job, probably in a factory, of being trapped in a boring life. Rock songs seem convinced that a trap exists, in which one's movements are confined and predictable. The relief is a good place, baby I'll take you there, where things happen all the time and predictability is evaded. A simple way of doing this in poetry was to sever the links between each line. Junctions between words, or between lines, can be seen as nodes in a network, possessing either rich or poor connectivity; better syntactic labels make these nodes clearer but also more determinate. Every sentence, every poem, generates a past, a system memory, as it progresses; something we also call context. The handling of this temporary system memory can depend on theories of how the older generation should relate to the young, or how the weight of past tradition should affect political and economic decisions in the present. The social basis for writing a single definitive line is the job with a unique relation to the boss. If there were a workers' control setup you'd have to deal with the whole team as individuals, horizontal relations, maybe a dozen people. This is much more time consuming, confusing, and changeable. A whole different psychic regime; every act glittering with a dozen facets. Imagine that you were in an exam where, instead of writing for on examiner with one set of requirements, you were writing for a dozen different people each with different attitudes and demands. This after all is what writing a poem is like. I think our ideas of concentration and coherence are founded in an artificial situation of simple hierarchy, where power is delegated from the owners of capital in a very black and white way.
Q. How do you measure the total informational flow through a poem? A. There is a method, which involves a test reader being asked to guess, at every juncture, what the next word is. The likelihood of guessing right can be translated into an arithmetical figure for the predictability, i.e. determinacy, of the text. This is a very burdensome method, also it doesn't really measure the informational richness of the poem, its effect on the reader. My descriptions of information flow are subjective, a kind of metaphor; this isn't worse than saying a poem is "brilliant", when it doesn't literally shine. I am assuming that, because of my experience in literature and information technology, I can intuitively gauge where a text is rich or impoverished in possibilities, and that the theorems of information theory provide explanatory structures helpful in studying poetry. The prediction test should really be set at each character; a poem which is unusual in lexical choice may be conventional in spelling and word formation. Dialect texts, however, may have a conventional choice of vocabulary and a startling way of shaping words. There are more sophisticated ways of measuring the amount of information in a text, but I have not applied these either.
A sign of low information flow is the use of set collocations: a recent book of Scots poetry was called hert's bluid, a clanger which takes us back to the sixteenth century. The deterministic attraction of rhyming pairs was satirized by Rob MacKenzie in a very funny poem. Dissolving away all conventional language produces a more difficult and richer landscape. The impoverishment of microstates implies a withdrawal of choice from the reader: left at the bottom of a tier of levels of access to information where each level filters out variation and contradiction and leaves cut and dried, mutually supporting, judgments. The tier models a hierarchy of power. Breaking up sets of words implying each other with fearful inevitability asks the poet also to break up pairs of lines which imply each other.
It would be unfair to omit another way of looking at chaos. In a textbook of psychology, we read "The confused thought processes that are the hallmark of schizophrenia seem to stem from a general difficulty in focusing attention and filtering out irrelevant stimuli.", and it quotes a sufferer saying "I can't concentrate. It's diversions of attention that trouble me. I am picking up different conversations. It's like being a transmitter. The sounds are coming through to me, but I feel my mind cannot cope with everything. It's difficult to concentrate on any one sound." (Hilgard, Introduction to Psychology) This does evoke the suspicion and discomfort which most of the reading public experience faced with poetry based on the rapid montage method. I suppose there to be an analogy between the fragility of attention of someone ill in this tragic way, and the volatility and suggestibility of the awareness of someone being whirled away by art. Art has to include a dose of the surprising, bewilderingly complex, disguised, ornamental, and inexplicit. I like to concentrate, but in art I also like there to be a dozen things going on which I wasn't expecting and which simultaneously disperse my attention into attentive part-selves and make me more alert and expectant. As the title astutely hints, a conductor can listen to polyphony without this loss of singularity representing a failure of concentration.
A rich network has the interesting property of being without a past. Imagine a network of three nodes, with paths radiating out from them in the numbers (1,1,1). Asssume the last node is also the exit from the system. When a ball bearing (imagine the net as a kind of marble run!) is at any node, we know where it is about to go and where it has been. Now imagine a net (7,7,7,7). When the ball is at the third node, it can have had seven immediately previous paths and 49 different paths over its last two nodes. Its position does not reveal its trajectory; it has no past. Rich connectivity removes information in the sense of balls, or people, carrying their past around with them. A class system is based, not just on inequality, but on a poverty of choices available to each social actor. Describing individuals in an affluent society is harder than in a conformist and stratified one. Lack of carry-over from one moment to the next puts into question the value of watching the process, since the information gathered has no predictive value; perception always tries to find higher-order patterns, which it turns out always mean repetition and so determinacy. For what is a pattern that does not have symmetry and repetition?
Imagine another network (1,7,0,8). The zero shows a node with no paths, i.e. an impasse. Associational paths that break off and go nowhere are an important feature of poetry. Perhaps all chains of excitation eventually run down. In a net (7,8,1,1,4,9) the particle has a (detectible) past at one point and then loses it again. The term microstates used above can now be defined more satisfactorily as rapidly succeeding nodes; a net with many nodes allows more states than a simple one. A net with a single strand at one point can be called convergent; where many paths become one. The term attractor is used for an outcome that, mysteriously or not, seems to lie at the end of many different paths. In a book of poetry, the poet's style or personality form an attractor; or rather, there is an attractor which we label a style or personality. There is a link between the persistence of marbles running through the course, i.e. the recognizable link between successive states, and what we call attention.
If indeterminacy is attached to devout hopes about how public decisions are taken, how does it relate to social conflict? doesn't that series of oppression, contestation, conflict, and triumph generate enough excitement and indeterminacy? Strangely, this is something almost missing from modern poetry; whose indeterminacy may be a compensation for the loss of productive uncertainty entrained by giving up narrative and realist representation. This moves the domain of indeterminacy from a higher level down to a micro level. The leftism of modern poets is phantomatic, as they mostly plump for appearing wise and above things, sine ira et studio, rather than committing the voice of their poems to contestation and so to counter-attack. The exception is a strand of feminist poetry, and even this has progressively moved away from attacking the enemy and into more internal discourse, whether internal to the poet's mind or to groups of like-minded and close people. From linguistic closeness to closedness. You can't attack a politician's words without drawing the public's attention to the subjective and debatable quality of the information and attitudes in your own words; an invitation which a strong poet should not quail at. In order to portray conflict with authority it is necessary to portray authority figures and let them have their say; Raworth and Allen Fisher are undoubtedly bearing a radical, anti-authoritarian message, but they decline to show who they are attacking and so the attack is oblique and on some days invisible. Modern poets have put their political ideals into high-level linguistic decisions, an aesthetic turn little recognized in the literature and perhaps hard for the audience to take in. How many of the country's committed leftists would recognize the radical intent of this poetry? Meanwhile, my decision to exclude realist-literal leftist poets is prompted only by my indifference to their work, not by their literal absence from the scene. The examples of Arden and Hughes pull us up sharply about the portrayal of conflict. How is it that they portray conflicts, and uncertain outcomes? In their works the enemy is within the frame of the work, whereas in most modern poets the enemy is invisible, outside the frame, and the only uncertainty is whether the poet will pull the poem off, in his own terms.
We can suggest that the goodness of fit of the eventual solution to any question will be proportional to the area of variations which the search has been allowed to explore. Variation can only be generated by an incomplete pattern, a permissive one. The argument is a formalised conflict in which ideas are sharpened and advanced. This population of states as the results of series of experimental variations to match bounding conditions will detain us for a while longer, because the problem with traditional artistic procedures, with their reliable outcomes, is precisely that the known outcome has a fatal attraction for the work and blinds the writer to the sheaving of other paths to go down; the way to explore those paths is to throw away your preset objective and enter a state of drift. How do you plan to reach an objective that doesn't exist before you invent it? try everything you don't know. In an age where poetry is dominated by presenting the personality of the poet, the predictability of the outcome, the finished poem, is guaranteed by the stability of the personality: if this burden is what limits the variation area you search within, it has to be ripped out. Personality can become a restrictive set of genre rules. Real spontaneity, real improvisation, are reached by abandoning the autobiographical project of self-documentation (and self-aggrandisement). The poem which aims to record past experience cannot be oriented towards the future, because it copies something fixed and dead, whose shape is not design but accident; modern poetry tends to be based on procedures, rather than the personality, and to be performative, generating the behaviour which it describes, rather than being generated by it. Where memory and creativity contend over a space, the one has to give way to the other.
Being free is a strain. When the new unpopulated space is opened up, what sustains us is the mood of the poet, playing upon us with a powerful force of suggestion, thanks to which the space is not empty, but aready coloured by an atmosphere. This is a terrible experience unless the poet is truly energetic and intelligent. The experimental poet who enters the zone in a lab coat, with a sanctimonious, sadistic, lugubrious, self-righteous, vacuous air, attaches the electrodes, and says "Now ve try my liddle experiments, ja?" is not an artist. No, the poet goes into complexity with a certain dithyrambic gaiety, and has to be liked. If there's one thing that Angel Exhaust is based on more than Gnostic theology, it must be rockabilly, and rockabilly legend Harmonica Frank Floyd sang in 1951 "Play that thing, blow it, sure is good, play it like you ill. Another half of Pike and a long cool can of beer, we'll whip them blues on 'way from here.' ('Rocking Chair Daddy', available on Rockabilly Rules OK, Charly Records). If you don't play it like you ill, you can take it away, because I don't want it. Tests reveal that to much of the poetry in Conductors you can say play it like you ill without feelings of disappointment and incongruity.
Literary conventions; mediations
Literary form is the alleged opposite of chaos. If you converse with someone in a language of which you both only know ten words, you have few conventions; few common structures; but your exchanges are likely to be simplistic and repetitive. There is a prima facie possibility that having more conventions (more shared lexical items) allows more complex, diverse, and adequate communication. Poetry which doesn't use any special literary language tends to come out a bit Janet and John.
I met someone at a party who depressed me by claiming that poetry readers internalised a set of discriminations and conventions which they unconsciously applied while reading, and which within the poems made them unreadable to other people. This depressed me; I think it may be true, but the conventions if any are such second nature to me, after twenty years, that I can't tell if they are there. The context was one of discussing the superior emotional intelligence of girls, developed (according to this woman, who I think is a psychologist) by acquiring fine discriminations through years of assiduous practice in friendships which break and re-form; so the added cognitive complexity is a good thing. The concept does make it possible to think about poets who don't use the poetic conventions: they appear impossibly self-righteous and their poems are repetitive and stultifying. Again, the mastery of forms is what allows you to let chaos in; it doesn't exclude fertility, indeterminacy, and chaos. If these conventions exist, then what I should be doing as a critic is to force them to surface and verbalise them for the benefit of the new reader.
The zone of mediations finds the edge of chaos, a nd so defines it. The distribution of vocables within a perceptual field is partly arbitrary, so that we (but not all languages) distinguish between a bottle, a jug, a pan, and a basin; but objects take their value from the intentional behaviour which manipulates and uses them. The overall classifications of the language are permissive, they need to be filled out in any given text by local ones, whose structure derives from intentions and purposeful behaviour. Mediation has to include the personality as the agency which bestows meaning and pattern on things. Of course the poet has the option of blanking out the personality, like a pop group leaving out the vocals: a drastic act which reveals that identification is the central act of Western lyric poetry, and does give us the chance to reflect on what that act means. Mediations in the broad sense include all elements of a genre; in a dramatic poem the characters play this role, in a narrative poem the events do, in a geographical poem regions, rivers, and soils do. The opposition which Lawrence proposes between chaos and form seems to me erroneous; any element of language capable of expressing any part of the cosmic energies can be described as form. Whatever is linguistic is formed; it has gone through the act of being coded in a shared semantic structure and shaped into a series of phonemes bound to that structure. Are we to accept that his na‹vety and repetition are not language, are not rhetorical, because they are inefficient? The opposition seems to be between someone dealing with a situation which is new, high-energy, exciting, hard to express; and someone in a situation which is old, has failed to renew itself, which has become colourless, worn, predictable, ritualistic. This cannot be a binary opposition, it is more of a patchwork: one place is interesting, another is not. The latter situation (which seems to predominate in the Day-Strong anthology) may derive, not so much from living in an overcrowded country with a constrictive spatial layout and social system, as from nervousness about technique, which makes you stick to tired subjects and familiar methods. Sticking to intuition, and being afraid of thinking about technique, produces this airless and weary effect.
(Further parts, on Lyric poetry, the problem of the personality, and the past as damage, will follow in future issues.)