The eighties saw a groundroots renewal of capitalism, although the gross abundance of cheap data made the audience more sophisticated about editing and compositional mechanisms. As montage played the dual role of capitalism's chief means of articulating illusion, and Left poetry's key device for making its tricks surface, montage guru Tom Raworth grew in influence, as well as producing major collections; the new interest in information as a commodity, delivering autonomy and control, could exploit his original absurdist interest in surface and rule-sets, revealed by stripping away self-presentation and realism. The critique of the media and interest in the social construction of reality were important to poets, while guaranteeing unpopularity with the reading public. Poets such as Adrian Clarke, Kelvin Corcoran, Maggie O'Sullivan, Robert Sheppard, W.N. Herbert, Peter Middleton, emerged to continue the critique of representations. However, repeated electoral defeats made radicalism less fashionable in this decade. The 1985 anthology Purple and Green displayed the breadth of feminist-inspired realist poetry, an apex of the style which is autobiographical and critical at the same time. The intact space left between the song tradition, reducing anything complex from the poem, and the Stalinist-philosophical tradition, proclaiming that personal awareness is an illusion, and emptying out anything felt from the poem, was racked by nausea and emaciation; closing up and being torn open in a fickle pulse. Between programmable machines and punk, popular music also gave up humanism.
Extreme Noise Cold Waveband Django il Bastardo Blink: Obscure Disasters, by Adrian Clarke (Writers Forum, 1993; 70 pp., 3.95)
OD is preceded, in this volume, by Spectral Investments: these are the latter parts of a trilogy, The Ghost Trio, begun with Ghost Measures (Actual Size, 1987, 74pp). The trilogy consists throughout of lines of four words, with certain exceptions which are of eight words each; the section headed homage to Louis Zukofsky is structured in stanzas of 4-3-3-4 words, perhaps a pattern dear to the well-known communist poet. The preset line-model is a row of blanks, hence ghost measures, but the spectre in question is more to do with a transcendental subject founding language, and like the Geist in Hegel's system. A note alerts us that it 'would be a tetralogy were the sixth stage of the multiplication that also generated Gerhard Richter's "1024 Colours" completed. - Let the missing part stand as a phantom limb.' 1024 is four to the power of five. The effect of these insistent and asyntactic incisions in continuous verbal material is like a beatbox:
politics occulted pronomial freeze
frames narrative ellipsis exit
to clarify the door
slammed contextual by default
in Armorica the analogue
absolute magnitude bibliographic in
another perspective a closed
system speeds up to
proliferate the factual summary
at the event horizon
(from OD, 3)
The lines are of course anisometric in syllable or stress count; the real rhythmic principle is not on show, although I suspect there is one, after hearing AC read: a compelling experience. Our poet was disconcerted, partway through his composition, to fi nd Tom Raworth - deified by Clarke - produce a pamphlet based on quaternity, 16 poems each of four stanzas each of four words. Leaving aside that colour-chart painting (which, since the painter worked in a photographic lab while still living in East Germany, may have an autobiographical value), let's quote a list of reference points from Clarke's important prose piece for a 1991 London seminar: 'work by Schwitters, Khlebnikov, Kharms, Zukofsky, Heissenbüttel, Sanguineti, Balestrini, Pleynet, Coolidge, Albiach, Raworth and Andrews.' This suggests how AC's poetry might be radical and boring at the same time. The two names from i novissimi point to Clarke's Triestean origins; Sanguineti is someone I just don't understand. I hope to write on Heissenbüttel in a future issue.
This poetry doesn't exactly signpost its meanings with a garland of labels and headlines. It reminds me more of a passage from Kiss Me Deadly: 'Words. They're just a bunch of crazy sounds jumbled together. Let's try a few. Manhattan Project, Fat Man, Los Alamos. Bikini Atoll.' (Hammer: I didn't know. Lieutenant Kelly [icily]: Do you imagine you'd have done any better if you had?) Such absolute clusters give us noncontrastive overall contexts rather than differentiated, pinpointed, moments. Since there are commercial text retrieval packages which summarize scientific or financial papers by excerpting keywords, stripping out sentence organization, it would be perverse to say that these texts communicate nothing. There is a traditional separation of realms between prose - hypotactic, precise as to time and person, abstract, orthogonal - and poetry: paratactic, sensuous, emotionally direct, based on an identi fi cation, whether of choral delivery or not, which blurs the gap between persons. One could, then, claim that the lack of articulation of this kind of text makes for ancient chases and coverts of poetry. It's rather well known that REM, rock's last hope and late purveyors of The Carter Family's guitar sound, used this method in their lyrics for a while in the eighties. However, Clarke includes a kind of self-reflexive commentary which takes the place of metalanguage:
syntax articulates a land
fit for generative trees
(OD, 15)
these are a kind of diagram for describing syntax.
its significance a tension in the relational copula
the verb's force triangulates a capacity that is
unspecified its field redescribed by the route of
an heuristic fiction where displeasing ornament persuades the
addressee realism designated for consensus embraced by a
temporal analogue the measure is nothing but the
words written or in theoretical terms the authorship
problematic deferred by reference to a greater obscurity
(OD 16)
an encoded
effect emotional literacy traces
back script to hieroglyphic
a drive to obliterate
schizophrenic as a last
resort through a dark
cloud of dependent clauses
(OD 1)
At moments Clarke appears to be replacing the reviewer. This style can't be impersonal, because it's very easy to recognize poetry as Clarke's - athletic, speed-obsessed, agonistic, covered with a dark gloss, scornful, low-affect - when set beside that, produced by similar generative or exclusive rules, of Tom Raworth, Ulli Freer, or John Wilkinson. However, the level at which signature emerges has been pushed back, from sociological self-labelling, to something more like the physiological self-sameness of someone's walk or the way their eyes scan. The metaphor 'back', with its set of '(more and less) primary', 'irreducible, full of potential, incorrupt', 'pristine' etc., is what underwrites the aesthetic worth of such a speech conduct. The before is the straight thing which Mark E. Smith, in his album named Perverted by Language, left unnamed. One's predisposition to this beat-jagged priority may depend on a suspicion that the glib smug awfulness of the poetry of such as MacNeice, Auden, and Day Lewis, is due to the viscous sociological attraction of being well-spoken and eloquent, and that this attraction prevented them from achieving style. Self-applause went along with self-labelling linguistic pointers and self-confirming rhetorical scenery.
Spectral Investment may refer to colour spectra, if we consider G. Richter's painting; curiously enough, this same word caused me problems when reviewing Haslam's Four Poems in the last issue. Investment (investissement) is a word dear to Deleuze and Guattari (the only common point between the two one-time editors of this magazine), and replaces older psychoanalytical words like projection, attachment, and object-choice. How can these two words fit together? if we invest in a spectrum, that implies a line of continuous variation from which we freely select a band, or wavelength, to identify with; locating our body image in these external hollows. The difference between what we identify with and what we don't is in fact spectral. This decoupure is the act of making meaning. In the form of identification, it is also the central act of orthodox British poetry: the lumpish, sensorily deprived, inert mass of the poet's self smothers the poetic realm in Me-Me-Meness. The differentiation of a physical continuum into partitioned, fixed hierarchical trees by syntax and classifying lexicon thus resembles the spectrum preferences of a poetry reduced to sociology. The ghost thus dissected out of archaic cognitive attachments becomes, no doubt, one of the spirits darting around in one of Ms O'Sullivan's shamanistic poems.
A society without identification between people is a Thatcherite neo-capitalist one. Poetry without identification is a more interesting idea, and perhaps it may exist one day. Here, it is a brilliant rhetorical trick, the voice of satire and spleen rather than life values. Clarke himself identifies with specific wavebands of culture, and indeed was partly formed by the struggle, among British jazz fans in the sixties, for and against Ornette Coleman. We may well think of the competitive and agonistic elements of jazz, its ruthless demolition of sticky pop love affairs and accepted forms, its elevation of process which at the same time invests it into adornment and display.
Disconcerting or neo-classical, The Ghost Trio may be an extrapolation, to an extremity, of an early sixties style, based on paratactic units and frequent montage or splices. Lingering ideas of singing or self-presentation have been replaced by a diction which in four features - the insistence of arbitrary rhythmic blocks as a binding element, sampling of captured textures, reliance on high-contrast juxtaposition to supply forward motion, jeering at other performers - resembles the dance music, of The KLF, Cold Cut, The Shamen, between hip-hop and techno, say 1987-92; when the text was being composed. This is the link with his vocal performance work: a physical approach, in which a faith in system is underwritten by a belief in rhythmically repetitive acts as the way to fitness, and comes out as display and competition. The encounters with other people in his poems seem to be Leone-style duels; another array of language and superiority than Auden and MacNeice's suffusing poshness. The death-from-above x-ing of syntax is a symbolic dismemberment of Donald Davie and his remarkably silly links of syntax to morality. A passage in Spectral Investments Four is literally a rewrite of a (sampled) Allen Fisher review of famed Cambridge Leisure Centre anthology A Various Art: 'joining principle extends/ the franchise project product/ "sprezzatura" capital's dependants split/ the difference "civil" adopting/ a lack of nerve', adding a sadistic edge quite foreign to Fisher's puzzled but endlessly patient and humanistic exploration; Clarke not just sprezzoso but sghignoso seems to take on a Judge Dredd persona as cold enforcer.
One can find the extent of this diction in a merely topographical way, but I don't think its aesthetic possibilities are finite; the sweeping away of a set of ultimately Hellenistic techniques merely reveals that juncture is an abstract unbound function which can be realized in an unlimited number of ways. Clarke is little interested in affective states, but instead satirical and social in orientation. Remembering his role as designer of Angel Exhaust's legendary relaunch issue (The Bloodsoaked Royston Perimeter), I would like to think that this uncontrastive overall situation -
... in summer's
gold insularised charges light
not visions beneath flowering
meadows surplus to hieratic
for Byzantine dialectical bombast
in orange metropolitan prints
such that commonly each
lurid in outline embellishment
misted between pastoral and
immensity aestheticist tribal delights
was an affectionate slap at the Justified Ancients of Fenland, several of whom have been caught fondling old churches recently. These aren't exactly wild shots. An 'orange metropolitan print' is a kind of frock worn by Orthodox bishops to garden parties, while 'such that commonly each' is a hit at the lordly didacticism known in Cambridge texts.
6 Andrew Duncan
Some Weird Sin, or Get Your Mouth out of the Gutter, Young Man: Forked Tongue, by W.N. Herbert (Bloodaxe, 1994, 128 pp., 7.95)
The setting is Dundee, a city of some 250,000 people on the Firth of Tay, close to the North Sea. Dundee is at one end of the Central Lowlands, where 80% of the Scots population lives, and, because it is in this zone of singular density, cannot be considered marginal within the British Isles. Its dialect appears, in the map printed in Chambers' Scots Dictionary, edited Alexander Warrack, as South North Lowland, which is spoken in Kincardine and Forfarshire. The latter was renamed Angus in 1926, and is now part of Tayside. The dialect has affinities with that spoken in adjacent northern counties, where it eventually becomes (in Buchan and Abderdeenshire) the deepest of all Anglian dialects in Britain. The trademark of Dundonian is said to be the diphthong rendered as eh, e.g. Eh'll hae a peh, in words where English has an ai diphthong (I, pie). I don't know how this is pronounced; I believe it is an ei diphthong (like English gay, way), but the relative length of the two components is very distinctive. We would also give a lot to know how smergh is pronounced:
I thi coabbils she fell on
she split lyk a melon
but a melon wi smergh an twa een
English spelling is notoriously inconsistent in this very graphy. The Old English word mearg (marrow) is cognate with Slavonic mozg (brain), and smergh is a collateral form of this with the s-formative (known to linguists as s mobile) also seen in sclim for climb. The bone marrow you eat is mergh. So here we have a wonderfully smeary, buttery, edible word; whether the bard took it from a dictionary or from living speech is not germane. He glosses it as 'brain' - semasiologically interesting, as it takes us back to the period of Slavo-Germanic unity. The equation between the soft contents of the spine, the brain, and the bone-marrow, and of all of them as vigour and gumption, is a folk metaphor of archaic force.
Dundee, a borough in the early Middle Ages, grew through the weaving trade, and in the second half of the nineteenth century became an industrial city, specializing in coarse textiles (jute), and sweet things (Dundee cake, jam, marmalade). This prosperity presupposed the Empire; neither sugarcane nor jute nor oranges can be grown in eastern Scotland; and part of the war effort was hurriedly building jute mills in West Bengal, where the jute grows with light-hearted eagerness. Dundee was bound to Calcutta. Dundee's economy today could generously be described as transitional. Some textbooks mention the attraction, after the war, of a major factory making watches, as a triumph of forward planning by the local authority. The complete closure of this factory by its owners, Timex, in 1993, is one of the main themes of Forked Tongue. We are singularly unused to poets who write about economic matters, still less to poets who write about factory workers as people they know and have affection for. The message is that the deal with foreign-owned industry, however carefully subsidised by grants and low rents, is not enough; the workforce in Dundee have none of the expertise needed to design and develop watches, and were vulnerable to rejection by the multi-national, against whom they have no protection.
The Dun of Dundee is ominously Celtic, unmistakably resembling the Celtic names of Belgrade (Singidunum) and Cracow (Carrodunum). It would seem that Gaelic was even in the eighteenth century spoken in parts of Forfarshire, near as it is to Dunkeld and the Highland Line; Professor Watson tells us that the name Forfar comes from a Gaelic word meaning 'watchtower' (from which to watch sheep?), or 'providence'. Dundee is marginal in this sense, that it was formerly on the edge of Anglian speech and settlement. This may have affected the dialect which Herbert is, so far as I know, the first writer to use, but there is very little detailed work on this issue; quite possibly the exchange of wh for f reflects the compromise of sixteenth-century Gaelic shepherds, eager to be up to date but bowled out by aspirated labials. The literary history of the city has been covered informatively by Douglas Dunn in an issue of Gairfish, edited by Herbert; there was an avant-garde press nearby in the twenties called Porpoise (gairfish means porpoise). Striking was the socialistic free verse of the late nineteenth-century poet James Young Geddes; Herbert has written an imitation or evocation of his poem, 'Glendale and Co.', as 'Ticka Ticka Glendale', included here. I suppose Dundee is small enough, and of recent enough growth, to allow a writer to achieve such coverage of a city, in imagination and reality. Of course, once you get back to the Gaelic period, it all becomes mysterious again. Before then, it was Pictish (the kingdom of Circinn), and Herbert has produced some inspired Pictish forgeries.
This edition loses a few points for the terrible cover painting by Alan Davie. Davie has produced many of my favourite modern paintings, but since he got religion his painting has been well-defined, conformist, and without passion. The drawing and colouring here bear an unmistakable resemblance to Babar books.
Bibliographically, this is a composite work, about a fifth of which is made up of a few poems from each of four previous books in Scots; although not enough to make those obsolete. No excerpt from The Testimony of the Reverend Thomas Dick (1994) is included. About half the poems are in English; not exactly a new departure for the poet, but new in book form. This mixed practice resembles both Robert Crawford and David Kinloch, other so-called Informationist poets now included in Contra flow on the Information Highway: An Informationist Primer. The inclusion of poems published in 1983 might have raised thematic problems disintegrating the book; but the whole work builds up with astonishing unity to the Timex strike of 1993, which postdates most of it: if you tell the truth, history cannot but validate you.
Watchmaking is precise work; we find in Herbert's poetry a peculiar impulse to get out of rationality and even out of the physical deportment of civilised life. That image in Dundee Doldrums of 'a belly full of beetles and bitumen' gets more bizarre the more I look at it. He has a peculiar attraction towards water; he finds the liberation from gravity suggestive, poetic, uninhibiting. He likes liquids to flow and wipe out boundaries; when things change into one another. Several poems here deal with flies; I can only guess that these resemble fish, because they are usually seen messing about in expanses which are at least soft, if not quite so liquid as the Tay; the appeal of dirt, and of sloppy, yielding, welcoming substances, is pervasive. He employs a rich range of words for confused, unstructured, messy, processes and activities. Perhaps he likes whales because of their (apparent) lack of anatomy:
I thi keeroch o wir lust
when we liftit wir whale
tae lig oan dust
by the strength o'ur tail,
hir jaw-hole gaped
and up she spewed
aa squeegeed up, a loit
maist glabbir-hued
wi kent wiz yet tung-shaped.
(In the wet dirt of our lust, when we lifted our whale to lie on dust by the strength of her tail, her jaw-hole gaped and up she spewed, scrunched up like a porous kitchen mop, an ejected fragment entirely the colour of dirt, which we yet knew to be the shape of a tongue; from 'The Land fish'.) The plot of this poem is: the poet is walking down by the Tay and finds on the waves a strange-looking man caught in a glass bottle. The poet gaffs the bottle, but on hearing where he is the man demands to be thrown back. The poet does so and himself rides on the bottle. The sea makes a confused multiple sound, and the man recites the mariners' call-and-response rigmarole from James Wedderburn's The Complaynt of Scotland, bouncing through the ice; this summons up a ship, caught in an iceberg. The man now tells his story: to be caught in ice is their punishment for slaughtering a school of whales, of whom the sole survivor was killed in the Tay, ending their peculiar music. Now they will toss the poet into the sea as a sacrifice to purge themselves of sin. The crew cut up and flense him like a whale. They set his head on the helm; as the last whale spewed up its tongue, which became the Tay's voice, so he can only move his tongue; the crew have lips like stone, but Tay sings unceasingly, and the poet... is a dream of the river. Outcast, only his tongue left, he washes up on the Tay bank with dead seagulls and sailors' ears. This bone-rickle Forfar psychobilly is not without deeper sense. The whale which swam up the Tay, in 1883, left its bones to Dundee Museum. It owes something to Edwin Morgan's 'In Argyll': 'We found the poet's skull on the machair./ It must have bobbed ashore from that shipwreck/ where the winged men went down in rolling dreck/ of icebound webs, oars, oaths, armour, blind air. (...) Now he needs neither claws nor tongue to tell/ of things undying.' The exchange of tongues in 'The Land fish' is so bewilderingly swift that we can barely grasp what organ goes where. In Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine (1984), pp. 185-6, the protagonist MacLeish, having taken enough sleeping pills to kill himself, throws up in a hotel basin and so sobers up and comes back to life. This is the turning point of the novel: MacLeish after this point redeems himself morally, resigns from the job which is corrupting him, and resolves to make something of his life. In The Dear Green Place, by Archie Hind (1966), on the last page, the hero Mat throws up on a ferry across the Clyde, and this too represents a turning-point in his life: as he resolves to abandon the art for which he has undergone poverty and despair, and return to the job which supported his family. 'Where did the failure of his work come from? Was it from some other source? lack of courage? Fear of risk? Or the hazards of success? Was it in the language he spoke, the gutter patois into which his tongue fell naturally when he was moved by a strong feeling? This gutter patois which had been cast by a mode of life devoid of all hope or tenderness. This self-protective, fobbing-off language which was not made to range, or explore, or express; a language cast for sneers and abuse and aggression; a language cast out of the absence of possibility; a language cast out of a certain set of feelings - from poverties, dust, drunkenness, tenements, endurance, hard physical labour; a reductive, cowardly, timid, snivelling language, a language cast out of jeers and violence and indifference; a language of vulgar keelie scepticism.' Both novelists use the Scots word 'boak' to describe this physical expulsion of substance, signifying no doubt that the man concerned can only reach unity by expelling deeply rooted parts of his own nature: 'Right between the shoulder blades he could feel a sharp grip and as he wiped the sweat from his brow he shivered all over from the cold. He felt the nausea arise which seemed to come from the very marrow of his bones, a moiling utter revulsion as if the very physical elements of his body were coiling and recoiling from each other in disgust. In his self, apart from his body, he felt this deep spiritual boke.' (The Dear Green Place, p. 228.) This revulsion fits the schema of divided selves, described so well by Karl Miller as a feature of Scottish literature, which he links to bilingualism:
What are the serrations down the tongue,
stitchings in the tissue of the language,
half-forgotten graftings of two strains
of rose, like a border between two nations
that may tear
grandfather grammar from
the noise my mother tried to make
my playground larynx take
that now my lover hears as me?
('Pictish Whispers')
Vomiting has a burlesque tone in Herbert: he is interested in playing with the idea, not in a hero who welters in deep despair or who achieves Redemption in a single hour of gloom. Detachment is based on realism. These scenes appear rather Victorian; Herbert is bilingual without guilt because his idea of identity is capacious and non-punitive. Vomiting, blurring the boundary between inside and outside, also appears in 'A Temporal Ode':
To conduct there ceremonies of my own invention
which will cause you to yield up the past
in a gaudy theatrical regurgitation of
some Pictish poets, of Wang Wei and a half bottle
of rice wine, of the partly-digested manuscripts
of James Wedderburn, and as much of Frank O'Hara
as a jealous Heaven will release ...
Could it be that residence beside the Firth of Tay, still tidal at Dundee, with its daily reversal of flow, its blithe mingling of salt and sweet, has helped Herbert to sustain a dual voice-identity without guilt? Herbert joins a short list of Scottish socialist modernist poets, post-Geddes; the theme of the sea as a mockery of the property-demarcations imposed on the land, in 'The Gairfish', was exploited by Joseph Macleod in The Cove (1940). Men of the Rocks (1943) has some plot elements common with 'The Land fish', including a glass boat. Cetaceans seem to play, in the folklore of the soft East coast, the role that seals play on the deeper but more skerry- and shoal- flecked West coast. Possibly we should treat this taste for amoebal-pinniped form, splashing liquids, wriggling motion, as the corollary of his impressive attack, in 'Ticka Ticka Glendale', on precision and self-control:
the terrible Jute-Lord ...
a mausoleum-like amalgam, mounting the slopes
of the Law Hill, flexing his stalk-eyed clock-towers,
'Lit up at night, the discs flare like angry eyes
in watchful supervision, impressing on the minds
of the workers the necessity of improving
the hours and minutes purchased
by Glendale & Co.'
(The quotation is no doubt from Geddes; the Law is an acropolis, now green, towering above all Dundee.) The stalk-eyes appear later on on crabs, 'the fattened crabs/ fell from the women's wrists/ and I could find no-one to talk to but/ the innumerable clock-faces on the crabs' backs/ as they sidled back into the waters of the Tay.' He prefers porpoises, who have no limbs, to crabs, which even have eyes on limbs. When he says 'binding the fifties to me on/ a waft of milk-froth and lard', this is a moment of genuine sensibility, outside the range of more parlour-bred poets; he physically identifies with milk-shakers and espresso coffee-makers, appreciating their analogy with the circulation of gas (oxygen) and warm fluids within the body. It might matter whether you can imagine yourself as gas and liquid, or only as the hard structure which partitions them. His verbal forms are constantly struggling to process sensations and object choices.
The praise of ice-cream parlours may possibly be a crack at Iain Crichton Smith, who at least once (Smith repeats most of his ideas) wheels on an ice-cream parlour as a symbol of Scotland's degeneration. Smith got all too close to The Movement. This error, of style and of cultural politics, made his radicalism quite harmless; the verdict is not yet in on the cultural politics of Informationism, but Herbert is quite happy to write about ice-cream parlours, amusement arcades, and Iggy Pop. He is not afflicted by disgust, and does not think that prosperity is a bad thing.
Is there a thematic link between ice-cream (said to be made emollient with whale-oil) and the omnipresent cetaceans? a kind of ride on the back of a smiling, glistening, sweet blubber-hill of sorbet? No.
I would question whether the kind of optical distortion/ phantasmagoria poem brought to perfection by Crawford and Herbert is uniquely Scottish; I think our two Caledonians are the best, but I also admire Ian Duhig and John Goodby. The force of this poem type is political: it's a send-up of the authorized version of events by which the banks and corporations govern us. It follows the Marxist stage of radical thought, now spurned because its bearers failed to grasp history as it was happening, and failed in their mission. It's already time to ask whether the Inconsequential school of poetry (and painting and etc.) will be spurned because they didn't understand history as it was happening (they thought it was all meaningless) and didn't fulfil their mission (they don't want to replace the power order, they want a laugh). One of the most admirable features of Herbert is his serious pursuit of socialism and nationalism, the most positive forces in Scottish politics today - to the exclusion of inconsequentiality.
Scottish literature is notorious for losing its own past, we ought also to encourage it to get free of its own past. There has been a historic upswing since about 1980, and it's only fair to Herbert and Crawford to point out how scant is the achievement of poetry in Lallans since MacDiarmid gigantistically blew himself up in 1938. Twenty years schooling in pure English stunted the voice of Lallans so much that poets failed to notice how awkwardly and derivatively they were writing it. The telltale sign of this is the static quality of lexical links and oppositions; the moon is white, the rain is sad, home is where the heart is, etc.; Herbert is able to transform his initial terms throughout the poem, sometimes quite startlingly. The emerging language is difficult, expressive, and transformatory, like Gawain Douglas or Hugh MacDiarmid. It can't be contained within the terms of Informationism, or of linguistic nationalism, or of a socialist realist account of a regional political economy: it accommodates those things and is not full up.
In the nineties the advancing axis of distantiation and purging of sentiment threatens to cut away the human basis of radical poetry as something that makes social bonds closer and develops compassion. Sophistication dwelt on the way the message was assembled so much as to be deaf to the radicalism of the message; the critique of identification tended to produce smart individuals sealed off from the outside world, striving to deepen their own alienation. The nineties will go down as a radical decade, but one where resentment was expressed outside electoral politics, in a private or mass but temporary way. The State and the corporations were virtually above politics. Ideas, as a consolation for lack of consensus and of legislative progress, were diverse and innovative, part of the current of cheap information. It was a time, for example, for thinking about how to enjoy being unemployed, not a topic the Left has much track record on. Other Left poets of the nineties would include Andrew Lawson (Human Capital, 1992), Simon Smith (Night Shift, 1994), John Goodby, and Michael Ayres (Poems 1987-92, 1994).