The memory of rooms - selected and new poems 1961-2000
What spurred my interest was the name of the Punch poems (of 1979) preceding Harsent’s (in 1984), opening fascinating comparative perspectives; but a check revealed that Harsent was a collaborator with the composer Birtwhistle, who produced an oratorio based on Punch in the 60s. So this didn’t show a flow of ideas. I think this is where I registered Grubb’s name – lifting it out of a host of poets whose names I can’t remember. There are constellation effects in poetry – if you’re the weakest of five poets of around the same age, you may be completely invisible. Even when people think of you, they “see” a group, not you. I obtained a Creation Records sampler which featured, essentially, 12 Oasis sound-alikes. A label signs so many bands with the same sound. They’ve got the idea but it hasn’t got them. The least successful ones get dropped and then vanish. When the 60s thing was hitting, Grubb got with it but was clearly the one who least rejected the 1950s, who least got into speed, violence, hedonism. This is also a way of evading visibility. It’s very hard to find an anthology which does include Grubb. Someone who never quite got the gigs. He was not picked up in any of the 60s anthologies. Was dropped by the overground publisher after one book & not really part of the underground scene. One of the classic responses to this occlusion is to mutate – to innovate and make the poetry revolve around the innovation, outdistancing the “elected successors” by dissimilation and triumphant improbability. Grubb though didn’t respond to any of the innovation waves which came along after 1961 – he still represents a kind of benchmark for what poetry was like before the British Poetry Revival happened, someone whose consciousness didn’t expand, man.
This might apply to several others in Stride’s stable of mediocrities. Rejecting the poetically gifted and investing awesome reserves of loyalty and patience in people whose poems refused to speak for them. If you dig up a volume like Poems in Pamphlet (1952), you see young hopefuls of the time, none of whom made it. They were elbowed out by the Oxford cabal in 1955 to 60, and were reduced to obsolescence by the new swinging poets who zoomed in after 1960. One of them (Vanson) has resurfaced in Stride volumes. The heroic period of British poetry, from say 1966 to 1980, truly does conceal forgotten works of awesome scale. Digging up the work of flawed and uninspired poets from the same period is a dutiful but pointless task. I can’t quite see the plan here.
scurrilous senators
they have tasted the urine of
history, they have sensed the ruined
membranes of
The moon
(“Owls”, p.41)
This is effective, and so is the poem on the sculptor David Smith (“A Suspension”), perhaps coincidentally close to it in the book. This is where he gets closest to real excitement. A brilliant passage, an anti-natural harmony. Perhaps he sees such expressivity as a threat to the social order.
The concept exceptionalism was developed to describe the new kind of poetry, which zoomed in on the paradoxical and tangled in order to score points against determinist sociology. It also served to reduce the typical element of poetry to the absolute minimum, so that the personalised and fantastic could expand. Tightly related to egotism in that the poem bursts out of the possibility of the poem rather than out of passages of real, untreated, experience. A fierce organisatory dynamic cutting sensations into patterns. When you become interested in a phenomenon, this rule makes it recur solidly for several hours, so you don’t have to wait a year to catch a glimpse of it again. Unlikely in the course of everyday life, this makes perfect sense from the point of view of the mind – which only wants to search for patterns. Grubb has no “special thing” which he wants to repeat and make stronger.
The volume progressively reduces expectations, so that some of the poems would have much more impact in a different context. The surrealist strand is especially pleasant. It is a kind of escape from the personality – it works, too. Other poems which work well are the ones deliberately on the theme of indeterminacy at about p.180.
Something like Christianity which weakens the ego also turns the poems grey and flavourless, like school mince. I was wondering when this happened, since 17th C Christian poetry by Donne & Herbert is full of intensity, when I noticed Grubb’s biography – a series of administrative jobs in human welfare. So perhaps it was Protestantism’s wholehearted involvement in welfare administration which made it lose its individualist edge. The withdrawal from spiritual contemplation (the withdrawal from withdrawal, I almost said) implicit in the early Protestant charge made an excessive involvement in the secular possible. He dislikes high impact writing. Every tone is faded down, every conflict resolved. He has consulted all the stakeholders before writing the poem. No-one at the meeting could object to these faded phrases. Visibly, this is a good man, patient and concerned about others. Of course, there are vehement Protestants – fundamentalists with all too close connections to the New Right. I can’t imagine them contributing to poetry – although the contribution of their floorboard-rattling style to blues and rock and roll is not exactly a secret. Grubb’s dissimilation is from bad taste streaks in the Church – not from other poets.
A development was the creation of autonomous characters within poems, in sequences such as The Falconer or The Mind and Dying of Mr Punch. This does closely resemble the enterprise which Wevill and Hughes were undertaking, developing slowly but on a solid basis. The start was with animals – for example, Wevill’s ‘Death of a Shark’, and fairly obviously the imperative was to get rid of the poetry of domestic anecdote, the crippling assumption that the poem was confined to the economically conditioned real life of the poet, excluding the reader and imagination. It’s fair to say that Grubb escaped from the 1950s – he does belong with his contemporaries (as a poet who began in 1961). The project developed into book-length fictions, of which Crow is the most famous. The point of the autonomous characters was to escape from domestic realism and from the need to be typical. Grubb was interested in an expanded length but didn’t seem interested in crossing any emotional boundaries – these poems are as sober and reasonable as the others.
One of the themes in later poems is the notion that the divinity of God is inseparable from the language in which the holy texts are stored, and that there is a mythical tenor of language which avoids reference. This was laid out rather carefully in the 1950s by Ian Thomas Ramsey (The nature of religious language). Grubb deals with this by talking about a trickster (because what he says cannot be taken at face value – and must be). Such language bases itself in a special state of the human brain, not in the physical world. His admiration for WS Graham takes the form of talking about language, with this burden. It’s not that Graham’s philosophy is especially interesting, or that Grubb’s is obtuse or devoid of implications. No, the problem is that Graham is all burning conviction, whereas Grubb doesn’t seem terribly interested by the thought. We don’t get a sense of risk, of vulnerability, of light emerging from darkness. Reaching the conclusion that poetry can be about myth takes us to the starting-point of mythical poetry – which Hughes or Wevill wrote, and which Grubb does not. Of course, Crow is the trickster god – Grubb couldn’t write the Trickster epic, in the 1980s, because Hughes had already written it (although only one third of his original design). It seems reasonable to suppose that the energy which creates an argument is parallel to that which creates an animal, as the vehicle of a poem. Both are self-contained worlds, furiously using up energy. Grubb does not seem sufficiently interested by the argument to stake the poem on its outcome; anyway, it is disappointing, because it tells us the subject of texts does not really exist. His poems are too full of real objects, visual data, to allow the argument to have its head. There is no real structure of argument here – just more pictorial data with the conclusions pasted on. Anglicans don't care about losing arguments, they are inured to losing. Blurring issues is their speciality. Every great Anglican leader since Pusey has warned of the danger of amputating the intellect if you systematically ignore its results.
For me, it follows from this reading that what we have to investigate in English poets of this period is the theological background of the way they present other people’s behaviour – being a sort of residue when theological questions have been gently removed (as irritating to the reader). The quality of this “third party perception” was the conscious study of the poets, the focus of reviewers, the subject of much discussion, etc. Quite possibly, Anglicans depicted rationalists more fairly than rationalists depicted Anglicans. Of course, personal politics then put the formation of character judgments at the centre of verbal virtue. But this arena of struggle made very little difference to the aesthetic merit of the poem – it was rather a way of disposing of some anxiety brought about by a theoretical block about how to write good poetry. The layout of English poetry can successfully be explained by exhibiting the “secularised theology” of how to present character ethically – saying nothing about artistic merit, but allowing us to explain a mass of printed paper which has no aesthetic merit. The contemporary manner is, then "post Anglican" - by which I mean "still Anglican".
My conclusion on finishing this book, and thinking about it, is that the printed poem is a resistant, even humiliating, pitch. Every line wants to slide back into tedium. To succeed, you need such formidable stores of inventiveness, drama, paradox. Some poets have such stores.