AE14
Lie Dream of a Casino Soul: Angel Exhaust Fourteen
Contents
prose141 prose part 1 (Pavlo Tychyna, John Riley)
prose142 prose part 2 (Colin Simms, Barry MacSweeney)
prose143 prose part 3 (John Seed, Ian Duhig, 'Out of Everywhere')
Poems14
About
Winter, 1996
ISSN 0143-8050
Editor: Andrew Duncan
Typographical Consultant: Ewan Smith
Virtualisation agents: Duncan Clubb and John Kozak
Cover Design by David Rees
Copyright remains with individual contributors
We gladly acknowledge the culture-bearing largesse of Eastern Arts
Editorial: poetry and the north
This issue contains fragments of the modern history of poetry in the north of England, a success story since about 1960 which seems to have started from nothing. A list of modern Northern poets of artistic stature would include Basil Bunting, Roy Fuller, John Arden, Ted Hughes, John Riley, Ken Smith, Colin Simms, Peter Riley, David Chaloner, Peter Didsbury, Michael Haslam, John Ash, Barry MacSweeney, Grace Lake, Denise Riley, John Seed, Geoff Ward, Ian Duhig. A glance suggests that northern poetry has now acquired artistic autonomy and is no longer a poor and self-conscious relation scared to do anything but retail northernness. The recent publication of Michael Haslam's collected poems, as A Whole Bauble, and of extensive retrospectives of Ted Hughes, underlines the national significance of Yorkshire. Research, wearying but protracted, into the earlier, infertile period, suggests two strands of regional development. The first is social and flattening: the association of literature with the south left space for a jovial world of songs and recitals, associated either with religion or with ale, and, however much it contributed to a new pub poetry in the 1960s, lethal to literary values: Joe Wilson's Tyneside Songs and Drolleries cannot be a forerunner. It is complemented by something completely different: a tradition of surly, feral, solitude, in which social contacts are reduced to tests of strength, ending either in triumph or humiliation. The image of beasts, mountains and moors as cruel, patriarchal fantasy-objects, charged with an ultimately sexual power, is traceable through Wilfrid Gibson, Redwood Anderson, and James Kirkup, before reaching Hughes. An unexpected result of the research was the hypothesis that the Georgian school represented the forceful entry of the northern voice into national fashion, with Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson, Gordon Bottomley, Ralph Hodgson, and Humbert Wolfe; fulfilling regional preoccupations with live delivery, physical vigour, destroying the set literary language, the irrelevance of the upper classes, and with closeness to Nature. Is it always going to be the fate of English poets to follow the rules of class struggle and write bad poetry?
This editorial has been interrupted by the arrival of militant nonists claiming that a belief in the existence of place is mere placeism, and "Effectively, we must undergo a psychogeographical course of detoxification... We must wean ourselves of belonging, for we belong nowhere. (...) Who sees a hill without knowing that it is propped up by generations of cultural engineering? We look away from the scaffolding that holds up the cathedral. We seek, in the russet view, not to notice the scenery moving."
"Lie dream of a Casino Soul" was a single by the Fall in about 1983. The cover design, "Hold Your Fire", by David Rees, referred to an incident on a rather problematic Fall tour in 1996, where the lead singer was heard to shout this plea at the audience.
chatter
Andrew Duncan
I didn't actually exclude poems from outside: I didn't have the heart to turn down the brilliant unknown stuff that constantly comes in through my front door. Some of the poetry is Northern. As for the prose, there was a whole raft of stuff about "Cambridge" poets (more exactly, poets associated with Grosseteste and Ferry Press) left over from the previous issue, which overflowed a lot. After committing all the pages of this issue, I then had to mop up this overflow, and then when I (eventually) managed to locate a vein of intelligent books about the North, and began spotting thematic links in poetry, so much material came pouring out that I couldn't process it. I hope this material will eventually surface in a book- preceding the Cultural History of the North which someone is bound to write sooner or later. (Frank Musgrove's 1990 The North of England, a history, is excellent but excludes culture with dogged rigour.) The initial, directed material (on Simms, MacSweeney, and Gibson) is sound, but the more general passages are too skimpy. Undermining them again, let me say that the culture of the North is largely an import, so that any thematic unity is shaky (and surprising); and that it has much in common with other (peripheral, mountainous, or industrial) regions, so that the themes mentioned can easily be found in Wales or Scotland.
Riley and MacSweeney, who are Northern poets, have very close associations with Prynne and the Cambridge mob. I hope our coverage of Simms and MacSweeney adds something to public knowledge. In future issues, we will print the rest of the MacSweeney interview, and hopefully Colin Simms' statement on 'The kind of poetry I want'. We published material on Mike Haslam (Hebden Bridge), Denise Riley (Carlisle), and John Arden (Barnsley) in previous issues. Brian Maidment's book The Poorhouse Fugitives is a study and anthology of self-taught poets in the 19th century: I almost fainted when I saw this, since it is of the first importance to AE Thirteen, AE Fourteen and a book on Literature and Dialect which I have been working on intermittently since 1985. Maybe it makes my writings obsolete; mum's the word, but anyone interested in the thesis that real modern British poetry descends from the working class, Chartist, Northern, industrial, Nonconformist camp of the nineteenth century, should kill to get hold of it.
Our next issue, Bizarre Crimes of the Future, will comprise an anthology of young poets, with some attempts to map the new landscape. What town are we in? what song are we playing?
"A[ndrew] J[ordan]'s animosity towards David Caddy's and Brian Hinton's attempts to delineate a 'Wessex' poetry is well known. He even distributed an obscene, satirical (quite funny too) leaflet stating his hatred of the scheme. Perhaps after 10th Muse #5, AJ became so infuriated with Caddy and Hinton that he decided to attempt an editorial hoax of almost as magnificent proportions as the one he claims to have originally planned. " (A[lexis] K[irke], writing in Terrible Work 6). What's going on? I will spare comment, except of course that a great deal of poetry activity is happening in the south-west, and it frustrates propagandists by being so diverse. Jordan edits 10th Muse; Caddy and Hinton are some of the editors of Tears in the Fence, AK edits the Net journal Brink. Is AE's attempt to trace a thematic of the North just the kind of spurious and selective bounding of poetry which AJ is satirizing?
A Bill of Turns
David Barnett lives in west Wales. books are The Mask of Siam, Bent in Water, Fretwork, and All the Year Round
Karlien van den Beukel is at Cambridge researching into Vorticism
David Bircumshaw lives in Leicester. poems recently in Terrible Work.
Chris Bendon born in Leeds, lives in Dyfed. recent books are Ridings Writings/ Scottish Gothic, A Dyfed Quartet, Jewry
Kelvin Corcoran forthcoming books are Melanie's Book and Danse Macabre: Death and the Printers, a collaboration
Andrew Duncan hard-headed and down to earth editor
Blair Ewing lives in Maryland. Is host of a cable TV poetry show. Poems published in dozens of magazines.
John Goodby comes from Birmingham and teaches at Swansea. has published Before the Flood and poems in Faber Poetry Introduction 8.
David Greenslade lives in Cardiff. Books are Burning Down the Dosbarth, Panic, Fishbone, Pebyll, and Yr Wyddor
Khaled Hakim comes from Birmingham and is a performance artist.
Peter Hughes lives in Cambridge. has published Psyche in the Gargano and Paul Klee's Diary with Equipage.
Nicholas Johnson lives in Devon. has published Listening to the Stones, Loup, and Haul Song
Ricardo Lagares born 1965. Lives in Las Palmas, Menorca. These poems belong to the book Nations of Eternal War.
Richard Makin makes installations. extracts are coming out fromForword
Eva Okwonga wrote these poems at 16, and is going up to Caius College, Cambridge, to read Law.
David Rees is an illustrator who writes poems.
Ian Robinson edits Oasis. Publications include Maida Vale Elegies and Journal (poetry), and Delayed Frames and Dissolving Views (fiction).
Stephen Rodefer American writer now living in Cambridge and Paris. books include Emergency Measures, Erasers, and Mon canard.
Maurice Scully lives in the North Strand, Dublin. has published Priority and The Basic Colours from Livelihood.
Lucy Sheerman comes from Bradford and is at Cambridge doing research into modern American women poets
Robert Sheppard books are Flashlight Sonata and Daylight Robbery. is engaged on a large-scale project, 20th Century Blues.
Simon Smith edits Grille. has published Night Shift.
R.F. Walker writes poetry
John Hartley Williams lives in Berlin. books include Bright River Yonder, Cornerless People, Double, Ignoble Sentiments