Jeff Nuttall spends much of his 1969 book Bomb Culture deriding left-wing folkies for trying to pretend that rock music wasn't there; he has also remarked in passing that the poetry and jazz movement, starting in music played for Aldermaston protest marches, was run by Young Communists. Because rock was seen as American, ergo capitalist, the extreme Left would not brook it and sought out the folk musics of 'the oppressed peoples of the world', which they could buy in the communist-run Collet's Folk and Jazz Shop: the expertise gathered in this quest gave rise, three decades later, to World Music. The Springfields were singing African as well as traditional material ('Golden Threads and Silver Needles') in the late fifties. Dusty Springfield's later move into Memphis-style RnB was an extension of this project; the Springfields were a very political family. But largely folk music was music of the masses listened to by middle-class students; a historic error which contributed a certain cringing self-righteousness to the appalling genre of singer-songwriter. A generation grew up expecting that, if it didn't swing, it was probably a social conscience record. Meanwhile, everyone cool was getting into rock; what would have happened if the Left, in 1960, had realised that this was the future music of the working class, and adapted it to left wing ideas, is just a missed opportunity. Even if you are on the side of the angels, it is a help if you think sometimes. MacMillan opened the sixties as an era of affluence when the political debate could only be won by offering a more attractive lifestyle; Socialism, stripping off the duffle-coat of miserabilism, redefined itself around the working-class dandy. Names like Raworth, Prynne, MacSweeney, James, Mulford, Chaloner, Ken Smith arrive; the most significant poetic generation of the century. And the best-dressed; as we check out for James and Chaloner here. The poets of the sixties had listened to rock music as teenagers; so that their poetry was shaped by that, into being anti-didactic, anti-moralistic, hedonistic, stylish, and direct. The new directness was mediated also by the device of parataxis, perhaps derived from working-class speech. A new lucid radical formalism is being developed in Scotland by Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The fruits of victory also made the struggle obsolete; Harry Hopkins' 1963 suggestion that the New Left was a shift from economics to sociology as master-knowledge parallels capitalism's new focus on the demand side and the household. Registering millions of small units brought complexity on stage while defining victory as almost unimaginable. Pinter, anticipating Laing and Esterson, fragments the image of the household, pointing the critique of language at it; the disquiet about identification becomes ever deeper. The household-stage is set for the return, post 1968, of feminism, as the new radicalism; the voice of the voiceless and upsetter of basic assumptions.
Out To Lunch
Getting the session into SFX with candy-striped techno grunge: Not-You, by J.H. Prynne, (Equipage, 1993, 32 pp, £2)
The first thing to confront Not-You's 'reader' is the symbol on the cover. Prynne has used non-signifying symbols before. In Poems, p.244, he published five lines of runes. These were surely meant to operate like surrealist script (compare Max Ernst and Paul Klee and, more recently, A.R. Penck and Keith Haring) rather than gnomic utterance requiring the Cambridge University Guide to Druid Symbology. Conscientious lyric has in Prynne reached a point of occlusion: code to which we have lost the key. When writing refuses to give off meaning, it is like a commodity without exchange value; we become archaeologists sifting the royal midden, A.J. Webermans poring over Bob Dylan's garbage.
Rubbish is
pertinent; essential; the
most intricate presence in
our entire culture: the
ultimate sexual point of the whole place turned
into a model question.
(Poems, p.161) But we can trace certain lineaments in this rubbish. In the runes, first and last lines repeat each other and, unlike the three lines they sandwich, are symmetrical (apart from a central 'word' in which an upright arrow is flanked by three non-symmetrical characters). In the centre, middle of the middle line, sits 'X'; it is preceded by the eye-catching sequence 'S::', suggesting some kind of join-the-dots sexual crux: draw an 'E' in the box and it will read 'SEX'. Prynne's hostility to Joyce is on record (Stars, Tigers, and the Shapes of Words, p.35 n.160), so any resemblance to the diagram at the centre of Finnegan's Wake is probably accidental, but striking enough for all that.
picture(omitted for aesthetic reasons)
Clive Hart argues for a Wake patterned like an infinity sign, with the protagonist twins traversing in opposite directions. Frivolous and pompous marginal annotators (Shem and Shaun) cross sides at the moment of the diagram, making it the crux of the book - as well as a diagram of Anna Livia's vagina, mother's anatomy being discussed by the kids. According to Wyndham Lewis, 'commonsense' and needing to 'draw the line somewhere' dictated that the language of Finnegan's Wake was doomed to fail. This opinion is derided in the Wake by reference to Lewis's Public School/Nazi politics and drawling accent: 'lurking down inside his loose Eating S.S. collar is gogoing of whisth to you stermly how you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhawre' p.292). Joyce then answers Lewis by literally drawing lines, making his book still more outrageous. A marginal note cheekily connects this diagram to the Vorticist aesthetic: 'The Vortex. Spring of Sprung Verse. The Vertex.' To make the vortex a cunt is sexual reductionism at its best: Pound and Lewis become little boys with hard-ons willing the world to be a vagina swirling around their dckhead egos.
Prynne's 'S::X' works as a portmanteau version of Joyce's mother-vulva-geometry, suggesting that Prynne's poetry - despite its formidable intimations of seriousness both scholarly and moral - might evince the kind of sexual geometry Melanie Klein discovered in children's games. To treat late Prynne as if he was still rehearsing the Eliotic meditations of Kitchen Poems is to confuse him with D.S. Marriott (a somewhat grave error).
Not-You's cover mandala (apparently the result of misloading fonts in a word processor) is a mask of terror: compare the dragons on Tang bronzes or Aztec parchments, where, in the absence of a lower jaw, the underside of the face is represented by a row of teeth. The grid forms a series of tiny portcullises, an image of exclusion and vagina dentata. So different from the vignettes a la Elizabeth David favoured by our nature-poets! It implies that, instead of expecting Not-You to share our language and fondness for walks in the country, we should be alert to symmetry and system in the booklet as a whole. The book as literal object; an insight Andrew Duncan's denial of concrete poetry in favour of 'human' expression would have us abandon.
'Not You' inverts a Beckettian figure - Not I being a famous slim text from 1973. Instead of seeking to articulate the suffering subject, Prynne thrusts the problem straight at the reader, in the manner of Blast or the Sex Pistols. The 'tragedy' of a booklet called 'Not-You' being that, despite your gasps and enthusiasms, the words inside will not constitute your subjectivity, so much as reflect it back on you, a theme taken up in the lines:
As a flat offer, we are bid for the gilt
rim on a supper tray; not half by choice
the flush deepens to ingot words under
killed steel, still curved to a glance.
(p.21)
This parallels the artworks of Jeff Koons - for example his casting in chrome of the inflatable bunny-rabbit of an earlier 'period' - 'rather than displaying their contents they coldly reflect us and our desires' (John Caldwell). Lest it be thought that Koons beat Prynne to it, consider the title of the volume that directly followed the runic poem: High Pink on Chrome (1975), or, 'your subjectivity's blush reflected in mirrorshades.' Elsewhere, Prynne relates the cluster of associations round 'twinkle' to diamonds and imperialism, which gives an historical gloss to the popular association of 'gilt' with 'guilt'. The slogan 'Not You' indicates that this artwork is no 'objective correlative'; it refuses to recognise a social structure in which it may be placed as an ouvrage bien moral: a gesture of political refusal at a level below representation: Not-You becomes knot you: get entangled, ensnared, bewildered, placed in bondage. In short - get knotted!
Counting inwards from the last poem to the first reveals a 'sandwich' reminiscent of the runes: the book begins and ends with a sequence of eight poems, each nine lines long. The first of the two 'middle' poems is thirteen lines long, p.19 (the same as the number of gaps in the mandala), but does not constitute the 'climax' which is provided by the thirty-two line poem on page 18.
picture(omitted for technical reasons)
This graph reveals a familiar sequence. It variously resembles: a transcendent experience (drug triggered, psychic, or sexual) followed by a period of depression before resuming 'normality'; the computer 'blip' of a heartbeat; the lie detector's response to the voice calling Carlsberg 'the best lager in the world'. Using this graph as a map, the language of the poems becomes less discursive efflorescence than wordplay under duress, commenting on the structure as it both forms it and beats against its limits. As Prynne says elsewhere: 'The poet makes an allegoric imitation of the frame he presumes and questions. It is done with words, and made of them.' (Stars, p.30)
At the start of Not-You 'hands set to thread out/ a dipper cargo' (p.7) establishes the horizontal trajectory of the first eight pages, while 'lithium grease enhanced to break under heat stress' (p.7) intuits the eruption between pages 14 and 19. 'Dipper' has five meanings in the shorter OED, all of which work here: it initiates the relentless polyguity of Not-You, the keeping of every semiotic possibility in play. 'Blandly the announcer cuts to length' (p.9) registers a certain lack of tension in keeping to the nine-line rule (at first), while
...lifting a cover
over black swilled albumen. Regaining
altitude next to each mouth perching, whose
fluid attends to both if on the low side
unfailing: there are plagues intent on this.
(p.10)
implies the old slogan of those up to their chins in sewage: 'don't make waves!' And of course it's precisely a wave that will sweep across the book.
Frank Zappa's album title 'One Size Fits All', along with its early anticipation on the back cover of 'Absolutely Free' 'Buy a Fydo - fits swell!', surfaces three times.
where just one fit rises to break this impasse
(p.12)
The cosmic-sexual wisdom of Zappa's phrase (coined because 'the universe fits itself', but also a reference to the 'anything more than a mouthful is wasted' adage of 'Penis Dimension' and the elasticity of sexual organs) applies to the structure of the book itself: the 'climax' of pages 14 to 18 is a single 'fit' or spasm.
...no thought
can swell a fear to rise
up to early missing parts
(p. 24)
at actual
size past reason's deposit
(p.27)
Both recall the suspension of consciousness during sex: 'actual size' emphasizes the reductive materialism of sexual arousal, its focus on the literal body, its by-pass of reified abstractions ('reason's deposit').
The eruption at the centre of the book (pp.16-19) is anticipated by a single twelve-line poem which predicts a 'shoot up' (p.15). The centre of the physical volume (where the staples are: pp. 16-7) opens up like blossom or a spreadshot centrefold in a porn magazine, a confetti spray of innuendo, heavy with the quaintness of stray thoughts during sex. The top poems on both pages are striated with diagonals like a candy-stripe barber's pole; the lower poems start out the same way but degenerate towards the end (the fact that they both do so suggests this is on purpose). The last poem concludes:
ex bond
fitting the latch
her lit him
up as mute
sap recall.
(p.17)
The last three words describe instinctual urges, another statement of by-passing 'reason's deposit'. Like the 'S::X' at the centre of the runes, these diagonal stripes are (hetero)sexual and materialist rather than mystical: the poems copy the double-helix shape of DNA. This reading is re-inforced by the reference to DNA at a key point in the Stars essay, where Prynne compares (p.7) the feedback of poetic endeavour into the semiotic system to the effect of retroviruses on genes.
The book's climax in terms of lines-per-page occurs on page 18, just after the physical centrefold, a stonking thirty-two lines, 'from the spicy bed/ of a rising vertical trust' (p 18), where 'vertical' echoes 'vortical' (the twists of pages 16 and 17 are of course vortices too). Standing in the midst of Not-You like a lithomorph in Death Valley - or indeed like the mandala on the cover - scrutability is at a minimum.
Each says the same, applying to take
out of this bruised event the frame of provoked
aversion.
(p 18)
This is the modernist anticipating the distaste of the respectable consumer, Prynne's version of a classic defence. As the penultimate poem has it: 'darkness shades the witless question/ in the count-ahead breastwork' (p. 31).
The longest poem employs a word highlit, like femur in the first poem, by its unusualness: astragal. It is a term in Greek architecture: the name for the moulding of a capital (another indication of the non-signifying blockishness of these texts). It also means a knuckle bone, and by extension, dice used in divination ('astragalomancy'), a continual theme for lyric poets who register social strains and stresses yet are condemned to social powerlessness.
On page 19 the climax has resulted in sporing: 'seed spread out', 'sway of a little dust/ marked by cloud', and detumescence (the word 'bend' appears twice). Careful 'allocation' is carried out, the pleasure of verbal dexterity expressed in images of farming, ('in the field'), coiffure ('parting with the left/ hand') and carpentry ('plane'), with some of the subverbal immediacy of thoughts during incipient sleep. After the exhilaration of page 18, the tone is sombre - dusty, dark, scary. There follow four pages of depressive post-whatever-it-was. The trough poems are a mere eight lines each, beginning 'Their catch-up is slow and careful', (p. 20), as if the language is catching its breath, acknowledging limits once more: 'this once beaten frame/ will permit next to now/ some indrawn spine' (p. 22). A rhyme scheme (ABCB DEFE) on pages 20, 22 and 24 is further evidence of low spirits; (for Prynne's low opinion of critical affirmation of rhyme, see Stars, p.31, n.143).
When we arrive at the concluding sequence of eight nine-line poems, it is like an aeroplane at the landing strip: 'Lights go forward to flight assessment checks/ up to roof limit' (p. 25). Despite 'incessant/ false alerts at re-entry' (p. 25) the sense is of relaxation and unwind, though there is enough subliminal bickering about value (Duty Free? Business as usual? Politics?) - to prevent any self-congratulation.
The mention of rainforest in the second poem initiated a reverie about paper and waste that is echoed by the penultimate poem:
...causing the forest
to fail softly by watching leaves turn
(p. 31)
This is the crime of poetry, its substitution of turning over leaves in a booklet for real life in the Edenic rainforest. A rainforest (or a perch) could not be complete without a parrot, a common name for which duly appears, though spelt in a way that suggests chemical bonding and the polyguous method itself: 'poly' (p. 8). As so often, 'the dear one' makes a return at the end of the booklet - Prynne's 'militant domesticity'. His claim is to have pursued polyguity to the point where his poetry can at least do no harm.
So full
of open sets why not say, leave the side
to suit no less either than just bearing.
(p. 32)
This 'just bearing' is a tense conclusion, though, parallel to the 'don't push me/ I'm close to the edge' stance that has characterised rap since its inception. Prynne's 1992 Stars essay began and ended with attention to the term 'bearing' - William Matthews is quoted on language's 'obbligato of gesture and bearing' and the lectures concluded by describing poetry as 'inscribing new sets of sense-bearing differences upon the schedule of old ones': Not-You therefore ends in a word that summarises Prynne's view of the place of poetry in language - but the polyguity does not stop there. Such a quietistic conclusion is subverted by the homophone 'baring': a naked lunch, the bride stripped bare, critique, a much more political claim for verbal activity. And there is also the mundane function of the ball-bearing, the chrome spheroid whose resistance to outside forces makes it a pivotal asset - which Not-You, despite and because of its disclaimers, actually is.
2 John Wilkinson
Mexican Stand-Off in Practical Bondage Gear: An appreciation of the seventies poetry of John James
In the late 1970s I was there when John James read at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge; could anyone in the audience have forgotten the exquisite antagonism betwen the poet and the place or failed to reflect on the frustrated sympathy between the two, out of which their antagonism was born? For the art of Kettle's Yard chimed with the elegant verse of John James' past and future, and John James wanted its domesticated artworks to be re-animated in him and in his verse, released from their con fi nement at his yelp; yet also Kettle's Yard wanted his belligerence which harked back to its founding myth and that of its modernism. And at this time, in poems casually reproduced or unprinted, James could rail against the painting and sculpture he loved as 'the preoccupation of dull and stupid women' or wrench them into an improbable dialect (Richard Long and Howard Hodgkin in cod patois) - artworks descending politely from those which lived out their days at Kettle's Yard in the keeping of a dull cult of the madman domesticated and advertised. Yet wasn't the myth of the possessed artist, tracing his deliberate line at the onset of delirium tremens and selling drawings for an absinthe into museum servitude, paraded before us in this poet raging for Cambridge's connoisseurs of transgression? Here was the dialectic of modernism in all the contradictions of its relationship with the collection/home/museum, embodied in the offensive, licensed poet, in the audience which was the poet's support and appreciative clique relishing the shock delivered by this spectacle of modernism alive and snorting vigorously in the very mortuary of modernism. Here was the poet who loved art but was disgusted by its commodification, who dreamed to Scriabin and Debussy but woke to Iggy Pop and The Sex Pistols, detourning the fan magazines and the most strenuous high art
on the Bean Time line
on the Bean-Sidhe line
on the line out line
on the rising line
JHP and Siouxsie-Sioux make the feathered jump to Hyper Space
Pure Chainsaw feeling in the Vat of TLP
The Enemy of TV/The Enemy of Slow Decay
the hard line on the fall-out line
(A Former Boiling)
into lines that railed against cold-warism, colonialism and the H-blocks and the stagnation of British culture; here was the poet who appropriated the rhetoric of resistance from Irish republicanism and Rastafarianism for a stuttering and fragmented sound-collage which concluded
wear it short but loose & full off your head
but strip your neck to the nape
not for my sake
but as a gift
(War)
so making the hood of sensory-deprivation torture at once a fashion statement, a wet dream and an ethical, political and aesthetic symbol. Such an assault upon taste and its categories as War/A Former Boiling (the latter being the high-rant Mayakovskian insert to the former 1978 text as punk itself became commodi fi ed) could hardly have been staged more pointedly than at Kettle's Yard where the machinery of earlier such revolts - and its factitious by-blows - had been beached for contemplation. Contemplation was shattered by this performance whose jarring notes rescued artefacts from their long slumber and remobilised time (whose movement is felt only in clash, contradiction, or more despairingly in accumulation) within the durance of the long-stay ward.
Kettle's Yard had become the hushed, bleached and polished preserve of a dainty modernism exemplified in the painting of the Nicholsons - of taupe, cream and carefully wavering incisions, of 'natural' hues should nature have been restricted to earth and chalk; that art where work co-operates with 'natural processes' as it were meditatively, as if a peasant ploughed for the aesthetic pleasure of it or yet more philosophically were himself ploughed by the land. It is a place of 'surfaces' rather than shelves or fl oors, where pebbles and driftwood are arranged in heaps or swirls to gladden the eye beside a neutered Gaudier-Brzeska, where natural is also native and folkish and Alfred Wallis' paintings are as much an outgrowth of place as a Brancusi materialised as a product of stone through some 'respect for the material'. Place in this aesthetic means a relationship between artist and an unspoiled and timeless visual setting, mediated by the work of art - the setting may be Mediterranean or Welsh or Cornish, but never suburban or light-industrial. Material means a substance which the artist has been the first man or woman to transfigure, or can feign to be so - hence the restricted palette, as though paint were applied from the naked earth rather than a mahogany Windsor and Newton case - or again, as though earth had urged its trace through the artist. Respect requires careful arrangement rather than anything suggesting manufacture, the considered, craftsman's mark or the cut along the grain rather than a routing, stamping, slashing or spattering which does the material violence. Honesty demands an even light, the eschewal of showiness; the artefacts must not be cluttered so compromising their individual authenticity, yet neither should they be isolated so as to dominate or compel. Some Buddhist trappings instruct the viewer in the correct frame of mind, contemplative, letting go of all desire, and resolutely avoiding vulgar considerations of value or of celebrity. The exhibits then were unlabelled, and surely a shell is as much an outcome of nature's artistry as that constructivist mobile.
Students could recline in low chairs to browse art catalogues, once admitted on tugging the bell-pull of weathered cork, the flotsam float of a fishing net. This is a so-English variant of modernism which creates a space even further sunk into vacuity than the English natural round of peasant and paternalistic proprietor. The coincident release of Ken Russell's film on Gaudier, its posters proclaiming 'All Art Is Sex', was a ludicrous but apt violation of this modernism so drained of desire, void of passion; where the only movement could be the turn of a delicate mobile but for the awkward padding of visitors scared to knock some winsome arrangement of seed-cases or of slipping on a thick white rug across the buffed floor, to crash into the grand piano and send a priceless figurine crashing. The ne plus ultra of such vacuity is of course the Tate Gallery in St Ives, whose touristic 'natural' setting has prompted the construction of a vast plein-air backdrop for an art which pales, sputters and sinks in the face of the sky's grand designs.
John James lurched into the withdrawing-room sanctum in a black bondage suit of synthetic material, some petroleum by-product, improbably strapped to make every movement unpredictable, stocky, hair brushed up black and spiky with Corimist no doubt, and he delivered lines like a flame-thrower: War/A Former Boiling. This was the most thrilling poetry reading I have sat through; Kettle's Yard was filled with tensely breathing flesh, and I felt fortunate to be sewn up into this literary cusp, when the famously mandarin art of 'Cambridge poetry' met a radical popular art and was set to break modernism out of the enclosure into which it had been designed for rainy-day idlers or to provide raw material for the research mills about. I should have remembered, looking about me, how any modernist movement needs its roustabouts, how the myth of the Dionysiac artist guarantees the human depth of the most hieratical art, as Gaudier-Brzeska's life-myth serves at Kettle's Yard to charge severe abstraction or merest whimsy with the sign of emotional and sexual revelation.
But this is to suggest that what was flung from the mouth might for a less partial listener have found its place easily amidst the furniture and ornaments as one more appurtenance, and this would not have been so. Much of the conceit of Kettle's Yard was the pretence that this was a home into which the visitor was received by the resident conservator, a home whose contents were artlessly arranged according to love and intuition and convenience. John James' poems of the time were as rough and informal, as 'street' as poetry could be while still bearing the traces of such a European-literary sensibility as his earlier writing had conveyed if not contrived to the lengths of pastiche. The poems would be neither commodified nor domesticated; they contained and traduced commodities; they bellowed and stammered out of a body made more telling and threatening by its constriction, located as male, Welsh and working-class, and from which they would have to be detached to exhibit as literary art. This was a physical performance art let loose on the mummified art objects about and shocking in reproach, demonstrating what James had learnt in his collaboration with the artist Bruce MacLean; anything but home entertainment.
The puzzle is that nothing discernible followed, for this was a performance which could and should have travelled. The puzzlement is not mine alone; in a Radio 3 broadcast of highlights of a previous Cambridge Poetry Festival, the commentator had heard in the thunderous applause which greeted John James, the advent of the poetry of a new generation, and at this reading James had hit the Zeitgeist, that relationship with a wider than literary cultural shift which is the precondition for poetry extending its reach beyond its few votaries. Yet his poems remained firmly shut out from both the institutions of literature and the Late Show counter-cultural circuit which serves those assiduous for what is happening wherever. Perhaps the poems had neither the laughs nor the straightforward constituency politics necessary for the gigging poet, although (unlike most Cambridge writing) they certainly had the punch-lines. As for dissemination from the audience, this was a time at which Theory enraptured the young and before Cultural Studies made it hip to attend to shifts in popular culture; it was one of those caesuras in the line of Cambridge Poetry, when readings were attended by an unchanging group and tuned-in students were elsewhere, competing in seminars. This group was augmented by the gratifyingly anxious and bewildered Friends of Kettle's Yard. The thrill was held and restricted to the energy line running between Panton Street and Gonville & Caius.
In keeping with punk aesthetic, James' writing of the time appeared in duplicated and xeroxed editions of a casualness which makes a Writers Forum pamphlet look like a major production - A Former Boiling could hardly be termed a publication at all; my copy doesn't bear James' 'Avocado' trademark or any publication data, but is signed and dated 'London July '79'. Neither War nor A Former Boiling was collected in James' next retrospective, Berlin Return (1983), although much earlier poems are included; 'Craven Images' starts with a sampling of the punk manner, and 'One for Rolf' (originally published in 1975) and 'Narrative Graffiti' feature the choppiness and pop culture borrowings of the Kettle's Yard material, but engrossed into a longer perspective and bookended by poems in which the extended, zip gun line is dominant. The rumoured de luxe edition of Toasting, the third major extended poem of the late seventies (dated 1st May 1979), never appeared; its only outing was in the duplicated catalogue to the exhibition of the same name at the University of Sussex from May to June of that year, John James being poet in residence. True, the hectic improvisations of Toasting would have worked better as a headphone commentary to the paintings; the poem's loose recycling and relocation would have been belied en face with reproduced artworks, binding both. But if none of these poems was to have been exhibited as text, where are the tapes, and what an opportunity missed for video!
Was there also something of the reluctant rock-star in John James, a congenital tendency to withdraw whenever success outside the familiar and supportive constituency beckoned; or did he come to feel these poems too much of their time? The signs change; by the time of Berlin Return David Bowie had postured as a Nazi, and The Human League (to whom A Former Boiling is dedicated, the title borrowed from an early single) shifted foot from anger to irony and found a mass market as the true precursors of The Pet Shop Boys. More generally, the impact of these poems would have been buffered by the Cambridge trademark and the long stand-off between a Cambridge disdain for publicity in the literary and cultural fashion pages where publicity might have broken. This is a great pity, since James is a considerable poet whose work could be popular - a rare thing in Britain - and is unusually conscious of image. Neither is image supererogatory to his writing, as I hope to indicate. It is hard to think of another British poet of any affiliation who might have been a fashion leader; but later on James was in tweeds and slicked hair well before Mulberry and today's City floor-traders.
Punk was the perfect have-it-both-ways aesthetic for a poet who had always shown ambiguity towards his talents and anything which might be categorised as art, 'supine art & supremely useless poetry'. Nostalgia for art tempered by aggression against art is the very manner of James, and his poems yearn to be anything but poems - they are 'letters', a 'theory', 'toasting' and engaged in a permanent struggle against lyric grace as though it were the siren call of sensual abandon. Having discovered John James' poems as an undergraduate I was bewildered that a writer possessing mastery of the swagger line any young male poet would mug for, perversely should campaign against such a gift, strapping his lines into stumble, lurch and indignity. I now think of such perversity as emerging out of a discomfort similar to that felt by the poets of the Movement, also proclaiming working-class origin, at the institutions of art and literature in the wake of the Second World War. James is of a younger generation, one which still knew rationing but whose anger was directed not only at such institutions but also the meritocratic reaction against them which the Movement exemplified. A Former Boiling can be read as a tirade against the boredom of the fifties with its nagging assertion that you've never had it so good, and as a hymn to fifties discontent and rebellion into style - all coming round again.
In James the appeal of the more louche and romantic continental strain of modernism is marked as a turning from Anglo-American cod-classical and politically-reactionary modernism, and as a fifties dream of Mediterranean sensuality which occasionally makes him sound like the Elizabeth David of British poetry. The disgust at anachronistic class barriers to advancement evident in the poems and novels of the Movement is paralleled in this poet of the next generation by rage at class betrayal allied to the appeal of abroad as a place where working-class solidarity, good food and painting drenched in light and heat would not be a compound oxymoron. Just as the dadaists and surrealists strove to arrogate Stalinism to their aesthetic as a kind of social mobilisation of the Id whilst at the same time seeking discipline from the Party for their hedonistic tendencies, so James' membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain might be seen as both romantic and a curb on individualist excess - which also was a way of staying true to the political and social verities of South Wales whilst rejecting its cultural parochialism.
But for a poet to make such a political commitment in the Britain of the sixties and seventies bore a meaning very different from Eluard and Breton joining the French Communist Party. In Cambridge the CP was divided between a club of Left intellectuals and trade union activists in a way which could be caricatured as a split between Marxism Today designer communists and tankies - and James decidedly was on the tanky side. This had much of a town/gown divide, and teaching at an FE college in Cambridge must have done much to exacerbate and keep in good fettle a sense of exclusion:
working away in a miniature Babylon in the muddy lowlands
north of the city can be hard you know/ the indications:
slow rural Tory pull in a mixed gig dimension of town
& gown aggression/ heavy discipline over flank the people
under Jesus and the Redevelopment Corporation/ the old
Eastern Association long ago sunk deep into the land/
1,000 slum dwellers & reveries of a quick come profit
hidden behind the running façade of the members room
at County Hall/ no Red Stripe at the Midland either
(Toasting)
James' poetry teaches, if it weren't obvious in the history of youth culture since the fifties, that the contradiction between attitudinising and a seriousness and consistency of critical engagement is a productive one; in this relationship attitude can drive cultural change, without it, it can only be a media event (no, the media cannot separately construct reality - that monism of our days). All the same there is something of the deep-dyed sinner's attachment to Catholicism about the politics of this poet who celebrates French food, wine, beer and sun and the pleasures of sex. Whilst selling the Morning Star might be anti-hedonistic, the materialism is filtered through the strain of romantic revolt; punk, after all, was regarded with grave suspicion by the hard Left as the politically naive expression of lumpen elements. As the translation of Tristan Tzara in Letters From Sarah produces a kind of sepia fin-de-siŠcle nostalgia and the punk phrasing of the poems at Kettle's Yard harked back to Club Dada, so communism becomes intensely evocative in James' poems of an outsider role sustained with style and preserving the rituals of lost community - both of working-class solidarity and its style revolts:
reading the Star in the space left after the round
then I harden my heart & polish my DMs
gather my shirt from the line & press it
sizzling black to the board
with pointed strokes
brush the old hair with Corimist a bit
before we hit the local ready to kill
an hour or two with gawping at the wealthy
strangers in the pier-glass an empty space
that fills up gradually with denim
or elusive unintelligible crackle
('Variations on "Today Backwards"', Berlin Return)
James' verse is instinct with an active and resented nostalgia, personal, political, literary and filmic, the trademark firm and rising line turned both to arraign and to celebrate the persistence of the past in the present. This is stridently so in the most furiously charged of his seventies poems, A Former Boiling, whose head-on impact shunts periodically into lyric sidings dangerously close to Liverpool:
but the stars burn above & below her head on habershon street
As Pat Kisses the Blistering Cheek Of The Acolyte
under the enamel pelican that tears its own breast
black pudding again for tea
tears & dripping & milky balm
the hard-on against your soft brown pleated skirt
in the alley your shaking fingers over the purple head line
on the spurting arc line
the little cries of ah line
on the middle finger line
the scar of dried semen on your brown stocking line
they caned us on the hand line
What saves this from Liverpool winningness is that the nostalgia for a Catholic childhood embodied in Pat links to the most politically virulent expression of nostalgic hangover and cultural persistence in recent British history, the Irish republicanism which the poem both affects and believes in; what saves it from laddishness is Cousin Pat's sheer power as 'bleeding Celt flesh' surviving physical pain and cultural persecution as witnessed by the voices James hears calling from the H-blocks. Reading A Former Boiling it is not hard to understand why James may have winced away from its publication; it is a poem in which attitude becomes hard, and where the logic of aggressive nostalgia leads to that of the Armalite. Was this the point where the disjuncture between the Cambridge professional loving the good things in life and the life of the poem became insupportable, much as Auden came to find 'Spain'? I think A Former Boiling stands with 'Sister Midnight' as one of James' greatest poems, and it is the most indefensible because attitude seizes occasion by the scruff and gives no quarter - because it believes that to have a line is an equivalent virtue in poetry and politics.
Generally the line does not so govern context. The characteristic and effective device of an embodying persistence which both holds and tests what is loved is the undying echo, whereby phrases recur throughout James' mature work and confer a personal consistency. Indeed, given the number of translations, versions and direct quotations both literary and out of popular culture including song and graffiti, James' poetry might seem dependent on echoes. In one sense this is so, since any of us is dependent on these returns, wherever once acquired, which are arbitrary, circumstantial, and the heart of our being. But echo as a literary device might suggest a diminution of power and substance, a diffusion, whereas much of the warmth in the writing derives from this personal and loved quality of what might return involuntarily or be returned to as talismanic, so often attached to sensations of pleasure. The effect of this is paradoxical in the way that nostalgia is, inducing both rootedness and a sensual surrender. It both draws attention to the materiality of language and implies the persistence of experience (as its analogues, its markers) which language is unable quite to capture, either as involuntary memory states - moods reinduced by widely different settings - or as furniture, artefacts which recall the time and place of their discovery. To this extent when in the delivery of War loved phrases return ('creatures of an easy recognition' or 'our casual blas‚ mean & cocky/ how-would-you-like-a-punch-in-the-nose/ attitude') the smash and grab of the poem is arrested and something of the aesthetic of the pebble collector and arranger becomes apparent. But the difference from Jim Ede's curacy is in the disposition; the domesticity of Kettle's Yard is a sham because even where precious objects are disposed with seeming casualness or abandon, this has designs on admiration - it anticipates the viewer moving through and happening on the object during a passage which institutionally is made alert to surprise. In James' writing well-loved phrases are the repository of character, enabling the negotiation of the streets or of domestic and social life with some degree of poise and to others' - and his own - recognition. This is quite other than a self-consciousness which monitors the processes of response. It is striking that this writing's phrasal creature is so complete, that such a repertoire constructs rather than deconstructs a presence, powerfully suggesting that a materialist practice of poetry lies in exactly the reverse direction to that most commonly now avowed.
Phrasal repetition and variation shuttle across the poems from Letters From Sarah onward as large-scale rhyme, tightening a discursive universe which draws on otherwise heterogeneous ingredients and substantiating the sense of a person moving through specific time and place while retaining identity. This poet has style which verges on glamour. It is interesting to compare his personism with that of Frank O'Hara, the poet on whom James most evidently draws as a model - an unlikely model for a communist Welsh heterosexual poet. James' poetry is simply more phallic than O'Hara's, being line-driven rather than fluently stanzaic, and while O'Hara is of his milieu (which is in finitely extensive) James is located in it or against it, and the milieu is less elastic than a series of settings. James' theoretical bisexuality, which is a subject of 'Sister Midnight', is that 'hanging over / of the woman in the man' introjected from his relationships with women and which makes his phallicism an object of contemplation, reflected back at him and admired.
This nostalgia for the phallus is refracted and multiple and even ironic, and the poems eddy about its stakes and are boundaried by its pale - within which the swoon is a delightful threat. The multiplication and dislocation of the phallus allows James within its delimited zone a sassy gorgeousness and look-at-me appearance of ease, unaffected by phallic anxiety, which is the heterosexual analogue of O'Hara's yield to his multiple selves' discursivity repealed (or at least mitigated) in the eyes and verbal responsiveness of friends. James did not need that particular guarantee, having his successful (his well-received) lines, as present and reassuring as Bill or Ashes at gallery opening or nightclub. But for both poets these jostling and responsive half-creatures, the others who make one's efficient self, are a provisional and perilous stay. The disintegration evident in O'Hara's late verses, their clutching at straws 'for your information' (for the poem's, for his own) which can but make him a man of straw, is answered by James' increasing reliance on a fixed lyrical persona, a phallocentrism, in Dreaming Flesh (1991). What indeed is dreaming flesh but a release from bondage? James' bondage was less a leather sheathing of the body as phallus than a bodily disarticulation, leg-straps effecting the disjunction of purposeful movement and its scatter.
The long poems of the seventies were a turning point for James, as 'Biotherm' was for O'Hara: both pushed to the limit a capacity for survival, tested through ungainliness, ugliness, chaos and rage in poems which seemed to leave them exhausted, such achievements as follow being dependent on the reader's acquaintance with the drama from which they have been rescued - and movingly so. The sense of exhaustion is manifest in Toasting, the last of James' poems in the series and written after I saw and heard him at Kettle's Yard: A Former Boiling had spat out every line in his locker while Toasting cast about for a decade's hook-lines, tasting and letting go. Toasting ends with
a ritual of quiet entry
into the prior & continuing existence of place some time
no vegetation no path no road no boat no crop no goat
no sheep/rock in the little pigeon river
drifting slowly out of Africa
walking is a time consuming process
in which the distance is continually marked
a ritual of conviction & care involving skill
a thin scarf protects the children from the sun
This is beautiful, but with its sense of the increasing tenousness of place and restatement of the aesthetic of care it hangs the photographic records of Richard Long's land art where they indeed belong, in Kettle's Yard, and it heralds the reconciliation of John James with the English modernist tradition, modest, craftsmanlike and respectfully appropriative. As we depart, the arrangements are unaffected and await the attentions of the next group of visitors, between 2.00 and 4.00 p.m. But years later this long-departed audience member asks John James to give us War/A Former Boiling as a poem which re-read in the late nineties still asks urgently, divorced from the imperative of one time and place:
What's Your Game
What's Your Number
What's Your Line
3 Andrew Duncan
An elaborate but two-dimensional backdrop: The Edge, by David Chaloner (Equipage, 1993; 23pp., œ2)
Duane Eddy in the yellow light of late summer. First sight of Chaloner's poems was in magazines of the north-west (poetmeat, 1966), part of that mid-sixties scene of open forms and a cool manner. He represents in poetry the working-class fop, a typical figure of the era; selfcon fi dence expressed itself here not as swagger or bluster, but as comprehensive refinement and languor. He appeared in Children of Albion, along with John James and Andrew Crozier, underlining the point that the Ferry Press group, as collected in A Various Art, were the most skilled users of the period combination of coolness and direct address, which doesn't yet come off in Albion, but was smoothed and deepened to reach perfection in the seventies. The first book publication credited in his own list is in 1973; the seventies produced several pamphlets, climaxing with the full-length Hotel Zingo (Grosseteste Press, 1981). Chaloner brought off the rock and roll obsession with style and cool, recording the charm and malaise of English summer afternoons and the melancholic poise of the pop dandy:
the surrounding area prepares itself
summer lifts over our heads
like an unrehearsed speech
here again
chorused from ascending flashes
milky light polishes
the ornaments of pretence
removing the matter of degrees
of this and thatness
of yes we do and no we can't
to forget and continue
as though nothing has happened
(from 'Hotel Zingo')
The view from the window
dilates the fluid stages of first light,
the handsome and compelling hours
where birds forage and invent a sky
in the filigree of tangled shrubs
(from 'Sitting on the Side Lines', in Hotel Zingo)
As in other writers linked to the Grosseteste name, light appears as an independent agent; in Chaloner, as a peculiarly wayward and sulky one, a kind of rival fop:
you cannot tell the time by the grey light
in the window
the frame outlines a response
tempting permutations of coincidence
it would seem that someone has forgotten
to switch off the light
the underside of the yellow lampshade
a white ellipse of proof
in order to belong to what exists
both elements
light, therefore lampshade, and window
thus time, extend the dimension
that is our sense of dawn anticipated
an uneasy not working, but content
you observe the static lucidity of crystal sky
cool air pressed flat against the eye
('Interior: Morning', from Projections)
Chaloner, who works as an interior designer, is preoccupied with style and detail, as if he were designing and drawing himself: 'The fundamental ease of a firm line/ meticulously detailed, perfectly terminated,/ existing within the boundaries of shrinking days'. He seems unconvinced that the shadows and irregularities which suggest the visual world to be three-dimensional are in fact anything more than hatching by a supernal Designer: 'an elaborate but two-dimensional backdrop/ rises slowly into the fly-tower.' This preoccupation with marks signifying the edge of planes is perhaps really directed at the markers at the edges of a social frame, things of peculiar importance in an England apparently being led away, in the 1960s, from 'matters of degrees' to unenclosed free openness (espace lisse) by class mobility, where the rules of the game were becoming conscious to the players. New leaders of fashion did not bring about a new socioeconomic order. Inventive attention to clothes and hair give the dandy an autonomy, which is illusory or accessory when he is enclosed in a much larger picture, full of objects and rules right outside his control. Control over the generation of meaning cannot be seized by individuals. How aching the swell of optimism:
bending cutting and glueing the cardboard scenery
for the systematic fabrication of a landscape
where we will settle down to solve the logical
sequence of all that is imposed
on the pattern of so much we have yet to
fully understand
the openings are within our range
by the time we are prepared and aware that
to go back to our former selves is to remain
and the chance to rework destiny with clear headed
abstraction
('14 April 1971', from Chocolate Sauce)
An important influence in the eighties has been what I would think of as postmodernism, possibly in fact the American LANGUAGE poets, as an interest in foregrounding the rules of the form being used, making the artistic illusion conscious. Chaloner published a pamphlet with the Rhode Island avant-garde press Burning Deck as long ago as 1977. It seems that the detached, stylized self-adornment of the Pop era has flowed on into an unquiet self-awareness; the poet is no longer in control, but sees his own figure reduced and constrained by genre rules. The poet is in a situation, physical or artistic, which is increasingly run-down and in poor taste:
No further action abandoned.
The leak in the lean-to roof, abandoned.
The cracks in the ceiling that spread while
you are away, and I'm not looking, defying
the plasticity of vinyl paint, abandoned.
The Edge is a revelation, an advance into radically different subject material, which however amplifies and continues the themes of all his poetry. The edge in question is Alderley Edge, a scarp in Cheshire. A note at the end says: 'The events and experiences that inform this work are interpretations of my father's anecdotal recall. After a short period in a cotton mill he worked as a farm labourer through the 1920s and 30s. (...) The underlying dissatisfaction and frustration with conditions that he accepted as unalterable, in an archaic and feudal system, remained with him into old age. He maintained that landowners and tenant farmers exercised choice preference for non-union men who would not cause trouble. This suited his migrant nature but certainly contributed to exploitation.' Chaloner's concern with silent commands, frame markers demarcating paths of social appropriateness, now extends to the organisation of space by boundaries and property rights, not just recession and luminosity. He evokes the order of farms in terms of geological origins, of space being sucked out of nothingness:
Land economics confound
The transient labour force
Whose trade is erased
Farms surrendered to ruin
Signify audacious outposts of failure
Erosion wounds exposed through ground cover
Reveal their millstone grit
And glacial junk united
Beneath a tangled shawl of barren excess
Low cloud delivers fine rain
Anointing Three Shires Head
Upper Swineseye, Red Brook, Spittle House
The narrative element has been reduced almost to a painful extent: the domain of this long poem is the search for meaning, disquieted by a glimpse of the origin of meanings - the invention of private property. What's done cannot be unsaid. A projection of the wish for allegiance and security into the past uncovers a primal erasure, his father was an illegitimate foundling, expelled from the order of succession to suffer the groundless being of the landless. Chaloner's gaze into the English rural order is steady enough to reveal a central horror:
Glistening rush of boundless light
Where recurrent images laden with truth
Continually move away
Tracking the flawed course of unnatural lineage
In the seventies poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright, Denise Riley, Allen Fisher, Nigel Wheale, Tony Lopez, John Seed, Martin Thom, Grace Lake, John Wilkinson and Rod Mengham emerged in a new radicalism and a broadly left counter-culture. The location of the continuing argument with the voices of capitalism had shifted away from matters of fact to the terms in which argument was conducted; a critique of language erased also the terms in which poetry could describe social reality. The Before (the social generation of meaning) appears as a modern form of the sublime, dizzying but not quite imaginable. A collective conceptual research project could take place on the fragile ground between conformism, and subjectivity and pessimism. Vexation at being distorted by context pointed attention away from the message and towards all the scene-setting which framed it, permitting a new logical depth to poetry. French philosophy animated by the ideas of May 68 provided a new theory of revolt. Critique diverted exclusive attention away from the State and the Corporation to take on the Family and social roles: the personal is political. The rise of feminism marked the decade, producing little poetry until after 1976, but altering the whole literary context. The degree of certainty usually adopted by feminist poets, to make their point, contradicted the corrosive scepticism which they were applying to existing institutions and systems of knowledge; there was a taboo about directing this scepticism towards the contents of the poet's own consciousness and feelings. When the critique of the personal questioned the truth of lyric poetry, deep problems arose of making the result beautiful, or even of preventing it from breaking up and dissolving altogether. The youthful shared dream of 68 collapsed at latest in 1976; the hedonistic, optimistic, strain had disappeared; in the second half of the decade, punk rede fi ned the language of cynicism, squalor, and revolt.