Letter 12

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I thought that I might approach the idea of celebrity and issues around that cultural phenomenon in relation to English poetry.

Initially I thought of Barry MacSweeney’s brush with celebrity in 1968 when his publisher, Hutchinson, nominated him for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry at the age of nineteen, following the success of his first book, The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells Of His Mother (1968), and of how he turned away from the marketing plans of a large publisher to embrace the small and independent presses and a more profound approach to poetry. MacSweeney maintained a sharp eye on public events and language culminating in his unpublished Mary Bell Sonnets. The fact that these remain unpublished put a scupper on sketching how celebrity impacted upon his work.

Secondly I thought of John Clare’s direct experience of the impact of Lord Byron’s celebrity as he watched Byron’s funeral cortége of sixty four carriages travel through London in July 1824 and of Clare’s own short-lived time as an object of curiosity as a rural poet and how he mangled his own identity with that of Byron’s celebrity in those extraordinary poems written when he was hospitalised in Epping Forest. In July 1841 having been at High Beach Asylum for three and a half years, Clare’s explorations of identity and experience culminated in his mixing of Byron’s identity and birthday with his own. He had been constantly shifting from his versions of Don Juan to Childe Harold, from Bryon’s model of sexual freedom to his own sexual losses, and finally united his inner and outer worlds by walking out of the hospital and back to his home in rural Northampton.


The heavens are wrath – the thunders rattling peal
Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky
Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel
Nor chills with fear eternal destiny

My soul is apathy – a ruin vast
Time cannot clear the ruined mass away
My life is hell – the hopeless die is cast
& manhoods prime is premature decay

That from Childe Harold is followed by this Don Juan rendering

Give toil more pay where rank starvation lurches
& pay your debts & put your books to rights
Leave whores & playhouses & fill your churches
Old clovenfoot your dirty victory fights
Like theft he still on natures manor poaches
& holds his feasting on anothers rights
To show plain truth you act in bawdy farces
Men show their tools - & maids expose their arses

Now this day is the eleventh of July
& being Sunday I will seek no flaw
In man or woman – but prepare to die
In two days more I may that ticket draw
& so may thousands more as well as I
To day is here – the next who ever saw
& In a madhouse I can find no mirth pay
- Next Tuesday used to be Lord Byron’s birthday

Lord Byron poh – the man wot rites the werses
& is just what he is & nothing more
Who with his pen lies like the mist disperses
& makes all nothing as it was before

(John Clare The Living Year 1841 Ed Tim Chilcott Trent Editions 1999 pp.50-51)

The conflation of Byron’s identity and freedom with his own situation and that of the rural poor is complete and he musters the necessary will to attempt to break free.

Byron was arguably the first modern celebrity. He played, to quote Marilyn Butler, ‘a larger part than any other single artist in shaping the stereotype soon recognised throughout Europe, the passionate, rebellious Romantic Poet.’ (Romantics, Rebels & Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 OUP 1981) Greece declared a day of national mourning upon his death. News of his gallant death spread across the major towns and cities of Europe. The cult of Byron impacted upon artists, composers, musicians and writers throughout Europe reaching Russia and Scotland. Many people who had never known him were saddened by the loss. The fourteen year old Alfred Tennyson never forgot the day when he heard the news, remembering it as ‘a day when the whole world darkened for me’.

John Clare noted the impact of Byron’s death upon ordinary people in contrast to the scoffing at his fame.

‘…. the Reverend the Moral and fastidious may say what they please about Lord Byrons fame and damn it as they please - he has gained the path of its eternity without them and lives above the blight of their mildewing censures to do him damage – the common people felt his merits and his power and the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophecy of futurity …. they are the feelings of nature’s sympathies unadulterated with the pretensions of art and pride. They are the veins and arteries that feed and quicken the heart of living fame.’

(John Clare By Himself Ed. Eric Robinson & David Powell Carcanet 1996 p. 157)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), celebrity emerged as a word in the seventeenth century meaning ‘due observance of rites and ceremonies; pomp, solemnity (OED 1), ‘a solemn rite or ceremony, a celebration’ (OED 2) and ‘the condition of being much extolled or talked about; famousness, notoriety (OED 3).
OED 1 is obsolete and OED 4, ‘a person of celebrity; a celebrated person; a public character’ emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with a reference in Miss Mulock’s novel The Ogilvies (1849).

To attempt a definition, poetic celebrity can be read as a historical-cultural structure involving relations between a poetic self, the publishing industry and audience that impact upon public life. Lord Byron’s public persona of ‘being mad, bad and dangerous to know’ was intricately bound up with people reading his actions as if he were one of own poetic heroes. He was the subject of constant newspaper speculation. People would study his engraved portraits for clues to his inner self. By writing about the condition of Europe at a time of Revolution he helped popularise the idea that liberty was a universal ideal. He was seen to lead by example, as John Clare thought when he wanted to return to ‘his two wives’. Opposition to tyrannical government and numerous radical artisans and printers publishing cheap editions of his work fed the enormous popularity of Byron, the popular hero. (See E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class 1968) William Wordsworth might have had more lasting impact upon English poetry and life than both Byron and Tennyson but his public persona was less than both.

To sharpen our working definition of poetic celebrity let us say that it is a collaborative social process involving a self interacting with an audience through the publishing industry and other media. Byron certainly used his overnight fame for artistic, social and political ends and interacted with his own celebrity whilst building it at the same time. Whereas Barry MacSweeney, notwithstanding their different historical and social situations, by not collaborating with the development of his celebrity after 1968 did not develop a public persona. Echoes of his brush with celebrity and the blurring between public and private occur throughout his work. His fascination with the figure of ‘celebrity’ can be seen in part in his admiration of Thomas Chatterton and Anne Sexton and some of his late poems, such as Postcards From Hitler (1999) and the Mary Bell Sonnets, address the relations between confession, psychic disturbance and publicity. His own death produced some lurid journalism emphasising his drunkenness and long fall from stardom. (See Gordon Burn – ‘Message in a bottle’ The Guardian Thursday 1 June 2000.) MacSweeney’s interest is in precisely the direction that his work did take outside of the public arena.

Byron’s celebrity in London built upon the example and experience of Mary Robinson (1757-1800), a relatively neglected figure in the twentieth century and the subject of three recent biographies (Paula Byrne’s Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (Harper Collins 2004), Hester Davenport’s The Prince’s Mistress (Sutton 2004) and Sarah Gristwood’s Perdita (Bantam 2005). Feminist scholars began resurrecting Robinson’s life and career in the 1990s when identity and celebrity were becoming key cultural words. This was also the time when ‘celebrity novelist’ was coined for the first time.

Robinson’s first book of poetry, Poems (1775), written in Fleet Prison to get out of debt, gained her access to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the social ‘ton’. Her flamboyant free spirit, her portrayal of Perdita in David Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, subsequent affairs with the Prince of Wales and politicians, her career as a courtesan and ability to use the press to her own advantage led to the creation of an intriguing and fascinating personality. She used public knowledge of her exploits for her own ends and to reinvent herself as a courtesan and then as a writer. She became a popular Gothic novelist and poet. Her outstanding beauty was much talked and written about. This was surely a reason for Sheridan employing her as an actress and bringing Garrick out of retirement to tutor her. Her complexity and beauty were such that Thomas Gainsborough, who painted her in 1781 and Joshua Reynolds, who painted her as Perdita in 1782, were both criticised for failing to do her justice. Her choice of clothing, increasingly risk-taking, was also much discussed. Thus adding to her enigma and allure. She was, like Byron, on the radical wing of the Whigs, welcoming the French Revolution, and active in politics. By 1796 her friends included William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose views on marriage, sexuality, slavery and education, she shared. Her sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon, (1796) and pamphlet, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), were read and studied by intellectuals. In the preface to Sappho and Phaon, she pointedly noted that Sappho’s readership idolised the Muse and not the woman. In 1799 she became poetry editor of The Morning Post, a newspaper that had written about her since 1775, publishing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Her Lyrical Tales (1800), ‘written in the manner of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads’ and poems such as, ‘The Haunted Beach’, which inspired Wordsworth, and ‘Golfre’, with its echoes of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, are now accepted as part of the early Romantic movement. Her literary relationship with Coleridge is the subject of on-going research and debate. The journal, Women’s Writing Vol. 9, No.1, (2002) devoted a special issue to her work.

Whilst Robinson’s Gothic novels and poetry were bestsellers amongst the aristocratic ‘ton’, her audience was not as large or as socially diverse as Byron’s. The emergence of poetic celebrity is linked to the growth of the number of London newspapers from 12 in 1720 to 52 in 1820. There are dozens of references to Perdita and Robinson in many newspapers from the 1780s onwards. After 1774 the end of perpetual copyright allowed a growth in book production and increased readership. Byron’s celebrity is more linked to advances in printing press technologies between 1785 and 1815 when presses could make 1100 impressions per minute and print both sides of a sheet and the fact that he allowed cheaper editions of his work to be published in large numbers. There was a similar growth in the reproduction of engraved portraits. This was also the period when journals began to be selective about what they reviewed and more books appeared with the author’s name than ever before. It is in this period that the author’s name becomes linked with publicity and promotion as in Mary Robinson in The Morning Post. There were other short-lived poetry celebrities, such Letitia Landon (1802-1838), promoted as L.E.L in the Literary Gazette and invariably associated with vague sexual scandals, Anne Yearsley (1753-1806), promoted as the ‘milkmaid poet of Bristol’ and James Woodhouse, the shoemaker poet. Byron, Robinson and Landon aroused sexual tension and interest. Reading their works and studying their portraits became associated with intimacy and gaining access to their underlying identity. Byron, above all, was able to use that intense interest following the overnight success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) especially in his epic satire, Don Juan (1819-24) with its subtle play around the theme of identity that appealed to his female following and attack on social and sexual hypocrisy that appealed to his radical support. This work more than any other in Europe became associated with personal freedom. Don Juan, according to William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (CUP 2005), was read by more people than any previous work of English literature thanks to cheap pirate editions produced by radical London publishers such as William Benbow, William Hone, Richard Carlile, William Sherwin and William Dugdale. They also published Shelley’s Queen Mab, Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler and other works useful to the libertarian reform movement in great numbers. Don Juan and The Corsair (1814) were available in many abbreviated and cheap editions. The pirate editions of the scandalous Harem cantos of Don Juan were also integrally involved in the emergence of the obscene press as well as the underground, radical press. The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the day of its publication and like Don Juan exceeded 100,000 sales in all versions of the book.

One of the key aspects of Byron’s poetic identity is that it each new instalment of Childe Harold and Don Juan added to his celebrity by creating a new ingredient to his life story. This satisfied his female following who wanted to know more about the man that seemingly challenged and broke social taboos. When Don Juan attacked the hypocrisy of married life it raised the level of mystery and sexual titillation to a higher level and made Byron’s private life the object of intense speculation. The Thomas Phillips portraits of 1814 added to the possibility that Byron was writing about his own life and inner self. By June 1818 reviewers such as John Wilson in the Edinburgh Review were convinced that the poet was writing about his private self ‘as secrets whispered to chosen ears’. Byron, though, became aware of the marketing around his work and offers the beginnings of a critique of poetic celebrity. Don Juan rejects belief in orderly developmental subjectivity and the narrator refuses notions of a unified self, preferring to be contradictory and inconsistent.

Patient – but not enamoured of endurance;
Cheerful – but, sometimes, rather apt to whimper:
Mild – but at times a sort of ‘Hercules furens’:
So that I almost think that the same skin
For one without – has two or three within (Canto 17, 11)

By highlighting marginalised individuals and their social setbacks culminating in punishment and social marking, Don Juan draws attention to the cultural uses of developmental subjectivity as a source of power reliant upon the incremental story of a self’s development. (See Tom Mole’s Byron’s Romantic Celebrity Palgrave 2007 pp.130-153)

The marketing process needs poetic personae that are in some way fascinating, difficult or controversial. It calls for critics to occupy subject positions in relation to the celebrity poet’s behaviour as in the example of Ted Hughes in relation to the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Weevil. Hughes was left with little room to manoeuvre away from such speculation and pointedly did not use his position as Poet Laureate to illuminate his past. Indeed he gave the impression that he was somewhat indifferent to the Laureateship and wanted to keep his private space thus adding to his allure. More recent revelations of extramarital affairs have added to his fascination and continued to blur the poet’s private and public personae.

In recent times then the celebrity poet has become a commodity with a distinct and carefully arranged poetic persona, an intimacy with a possible self. This is reinforced in the criticism, biographies, documentaries and films of the celebrity, adding to the mystery and fascination of the poet. This commoditisation involves critics defending or accusing the situation and persona of a particular celebrity poet and pays dividends when the poet collaborates, as in the recent example of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998), which sold more than 150,000 copies in the first year of its publication. (See Randall Stevenson The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12 1960-2000: The Last of England? OUP 2004 p. 267.)

However it is necessary to read beneath this process and to research the history of the construction of the poetic persona.
Dylan Thomas, who emerged as a public figure through his Forties radio broadcasts and the impact of Under Milk Wood, a radio play for voices broadcast two months after his premature death in November 1953 in New York, was promoted in a way that emphasised his simpler work and heavy drinking. Thomas’s literary executors held quite different poetic ideals to that of the poet and were well prepared to lessen his anti-Movement tendencies in any ways they could. James Nashold and George Tremlett have started work on the exposure of the myth of Thomas’s heavy drinking in their book The Death of Dylan Thomas (Mainstream 1997) but we are still in the strange situation where understanding of his poetic impact has been lessened and he almost appears like a forgotten figure.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) cultivated an austere figure as a Welsh poet-priest in remote parts of north Wales writing about Welsh speaking, Nonconformist hill farmers. His early work from The Stones of the Fields (1946) focussed on the starkness of farm labourer’s lives and the narrator’s feelings for Wales, albeit a Wales of the historical imagination. He wrote of the hill farmers at a distance from their real conditions, their speech and wit, and seemingly wanted them to return to some pre-technological idyll. From H’m (1972) onwards his work is also concerned with an apprehension of God, who is seen as an absence, ‘the empty silence within’ and the concepts of space and time. His final work is concerned with trying to find a meaning for existence and is characterised through some stunning poems about the death of his wife and their relationship.

Cold hands meeting,
the eyes aside
as vows are contracted
in the tongue’s absence.

Gradually
over fifty long years
of held breath
the heart has become warm.

After an admission that this was a marriage not based on romantic love, the narrator writes:

She left me. What voice
colder than the wind
out of the grave said:
“It is over?” Impalpable,
invisible, she comes
to me still, as she would
do, and I at my reading.
There is a tremor
of light, as of a bird crossing
the sun’s path, and I look
up in recognition
of a presence in absence.
Not a word, not a sound,
as she goes her way,
but a scent lingering
which is that of time immolating
itself in love’s fire.

It is the underlying coldness of the relationship that shocks and raises questions about Thomas’ calculating personality.

Thomas attacked modern urban life, especially technology, the English encroaching into Wales and the Welsh responsible for the decay of their own culture and language. He preached to his congregation on the evils of fridges, washing machines and televisions. His anti-consumerism was linked to the loss of God and the worship of wealth and physical comfort instead of finding fulfilment elsewhere. His late books sold more than 20,000 copies each with poems that have an immediate emotional impact and through their simplicity resonate quietly. In films, photographs, interviews and poems, he appears to be an extreme Welshman. Indeed he wrote an autobiographical essay where he described himself as ‘a Welsh-speaking Welshman in a thoroughly Welsh environment.’

He was, in fact, as Byron Rogers’ biography (The Man Who Went Into The West: The Life of R.S. Thomas Aurum 2006) shows a Holyhead man who spoke English without a trace of a Welsh accent, who married an English woman and sent his son to an English boarding school. He spoke with all the coldness of an English bureaucrat and was an outsider to the Welshness that his early poetry seems to espouse and to the Welsh poetic tradition. Although a priest, he was neither devoted to his parishioners nor was he charitable. His poems indicate that he didn’t like Welsh clergymen either. He even introduced the Aberdaron youth club to croquet, the sport of English colonialists. He was such an extreme Welsh nationalist that he could not support Plaid Cymru because it recognised the English parliament. Instead he publicly supported the Sons of Glendower, who took their name from Owen Glendower, a fifteenth century Welsh rebel leader. This group led an arsonist campaign against English owned property in Wales throughout the Eighties. They blamed the influx of middle class English people, who were taking advantage of cheap Welsh homes at a time of property boom in southeast England, for diluting the Welsh language and culture and inflating house prices beyond the reach of locals. There is a photograph of Thomas as a craggy old man leaning menacingly from the hatch door of a cottage. The implication is that he is a danger to English visitors and yet this same man accepted the Queen’s Medal for Poetry and needed an editor to write in Welsh.

Letter 11

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I first encountered the poetry of Tom Raworth in Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain (Penguin 1969) anthology and Penguin Modern Poets 19 (1971) when I was at school. I was struck not only by the various art of the poetry but also by its comic touch. It immediately signalled a playful inventiveness that has been subsequently developed over more than forty years.

Briefly, Raworth was born in south-east London in 1938. He became a mature student at the University of Essex’s Literature Department in 1967. Prior to this, he had a variety of clerical jobs and taught himself to set type and print. Between 1959 and 1964 he produced Outburst magazine and books under the Matrix press imprint. From 1965 he ran the Goliard Press, with Barry Hall, until Jonathan Cape Limited bought it in 1967. He published work by Edward Dorn, Anselm Hollo, Elaine Feinstein, Ron Padgett, Tom Clark, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and his own first book of poems, The Relation Ship (1966), which won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize in 1969. He also printed books by Louis Zukofsky, Ted Hughes, Dom Moraes and Basil Bunting for other presses. He was thus at the centre of the Renaissance in English Poetry in the Sixties.
At Essex, under the aegis of Donald Davie, Raworth consolidated friendships with Dorn, John Barrell, Ted Berrigan, Creeley and Olson. All of these connections are evident in his Collected Poems (2003) through a rich intertexuality of naming and dedication. After being Poet in Residence at Essex in 1970, he began giving regular reading tours in North America. From 1972 he lived in the US until returning to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King’s College, Cambridge, the city in which he still lives. Since then he has made his living from writing books, residencies and reading tours in Europe, Africa and North America. He belongs to that tradition of English poets that are essentially and necessarily internationalist. His graphic work has been shown in France and Italy, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians, painters and other poets around the world. In 1991 he became the first European writer to be invited to teach at the University of Cape Town for thirty years.

Raworth’s early work has a philosophical and comedic eye that produces poignant two-liners such as:

i cannot prove a second ago to my own satisfaction (Collected Poems p. 105)
trust marginal thoughts some like shoes will fit (Collected Poems p. 51)
puff! i’ve put it out with my hand and you all understand (Collected Poems p.108)

Avoiding the Movement’s parochialism, Raworth explores within, rather than through, language. The early poems often compress a number of discourses into a succinct form, marked by the use of fragmented short lines and a multiplicity of word play within free verse forms. The social certainties of post-War Britain lose focus and slide rapidly into a newer, fresher world in this poetry.

now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear in the eaves of houses I ask whose land it is
an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field where I sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of glass
there is no air the sun shines and under me you’ve planted a quick growing cactus
(Collected Poems p. 31)

I want to take a look at the possible sources for Raworth’s comedy: the sudden juxtapositions, comments, asides and disrupted narratives that are infused with comic twists and turns that are a hallmark of his poetry. The connections between Raworth, the New York School, Black Mountain and Pop Art have been examined elsewhere. (See for example Peter Robinson ‘Tom Raworth And The Pop Art Explosion’ in Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations OUP 2005) However, in the 1972 Barry Alpert interview, Raworth tends to underline his independence from such influences. Knowing of course that those movements were built on older ones and that the non-literary can impinge upon poetry as much as the discursive. By taking a different angle we may contribute to a wider contextualisation of his early work.

In Act (1973), a title redolent of meaning and yet self-consciously mocking at the same time, the act of re-writing is signalled from the start in the first section, ‘Nine Poems’ where ‘nine’ is crossed out and ‘mine’ hand written above the typeface. Other interruptions follow and the reader is forced to think differently through omission, unexpected juxtapositions and an unpredictable playfulness.

Raworth’s early work from 1963 to 1980 was surely informed by the gradual liberalisation of post-War Britain, the creation of the welfare state, Imperial decline and the erosion of the ideals of the optimistic Sixties counter-culture. As a child he would have memories of the Second World War and post-War shortages and austerity. As a teenager he would have been part of the first generation of youngsters to have surplus income for pleasurable pursuits. He would have heard the Tory leader, Harold Macmillan, say in 1959 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’ when the growth of consumer capitalism was under way. He would also have experienced the tremendous growth in new technology during that and the subsequent period. These events saturate the frames of his poetry. He would know the echoes of ‘winds / of change’ that ‘shift / if that’s / what reality is’. (Collected Poems p.220)

Raworth would have also listened to the radio as a teenager and surely would have encountered Spike Milligan’s The Goon Show (1951-60). The writing procedures employed by Milligan in The Goons and the Q5 television series that contributed new words to the vernacular and so inspired the creators of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74) were a development out of BBC radio comedy dating back to It’s That Man Again (ITMA), 1939-49, written by Ted Kavanagh.
Ted Kavanagh’s ITMA played with the sound and meaning of words, employed puns, alliteration and bursts of comic rhyme within unusual narratives. Thus from ITMA No. 28 Fourth Series April 1942:

CECIL Will there be swings and things?
CLAUDE There’ll be coconut shies I surmise.
HANDLEY Yes, and merry-go-rounds, you hounds.
CECIL There’ll be side-shows, Mose –
CLAUDE Aye, and fan-dancers, Francis.
HANDLEY You’ll see many a worse ‘un Sandy Macpherson.
CECIL Then we’ll have a dekko Sir Echo.
CLAUDE We’ll have a penn’orth Sir Kenneth.
HANDLEY Yes, you’ll get a shock Sir Cock – now away you go.

ITMA mercilessly attacked officialdom and officiousness, the Office of Twerps, and the opposing axis powers through the absurdly sinister and creepy voiced Funf character. It was a trend that was continued by Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch’s Much Binding in the Marsh (1944 -54), which subverted and stretched the conventions of radio comedy in what started as a complaint against Royal Air Force (RAF) bureaucracy. The word ‘binding’ being RAF slang for complaining. Like, Kavanagh they were habitués of the Fitzroy Tavern and the BBC pub, the George Inn, at 55 Great Portland Place, where they mixed with other actors, poets, radio producers, musicians and composers. After the Second World War, these pubs and those in between in Fitzrovia and Soho were not only places to socialise but also to find work and develop new literary and comedic ideas. For example, the main instigator and creative force behind Kenneth Horne’s Beyond Our Ken (1958-64) and Round The Horne (1965-68), Marty Feldman, lived in Soho Square in 1949, and was encouraged to write poetry and comedy by Dylan Thomas. Ted Kavanagh and Thomas were also associates and planned to write film scripts together in spring 1951. Feldman followed the bohemian path to Paris where he became immersed in existentialism. He returned to Soho intent on becoming a scriptwriter. Like Milligan, he would later read poems in his television comedy programmes as another layer of absurdist self-revelation. Milligan also presented Muses With Milligan, a poetry and jazz television series in 1964. Feldman and Milligan famously worked together on the award winning Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in 1971 where the visual comedy in sketches such as the Auto Mechanic, the Bomb Squad and Undertaker are clearly existentialist. The absurdist and existential writing of self-educated bohemians such as Milligan and Feldman should be distinguished from the early Sixties satire boom that was largely written by Oxbridge educated public school boys inspired by The Goons. Incidentally, J.H. Prynne features Kenneth Horne in his poem ‘Viva Ken’ (Collected Poems 2005 p.154).

Written by Spike Milligan against the backdrop of the atom bomb, the Cold War and a post-War Britain of shortages and Imperial illusions, The Goons subverted the language of authority, bureaucracy and the military with funny voices, broken and interrupted narratives and a private vocabulary of new words, army slang, grunts, squeals, giggles and a wide range of bizarre sound effects. It was a comedy that employed sound poetry and absurdist humour in quick-fire avalanches of associated word play. This can be read as a comedic equivalent to poetic enjambment and juxtaposition. It is widely read as surrealistic as the scripts are multi-layered where each line is an event often involving more than one intention and meaning and conventional narrative is subverted by elision, the intrusion of extraneous concerns and sidetracks that become dominant.
Both Raworth’s poetry and The Goons employ fast, free form word play.

Read Me
thanks (Collected Poems p.138)

Marley is dead.
No, I’m not.
BANG
Yes you are.
(Goon Show A Christmas Carol 24 December 1959)

It is not just the speed that is similar but it is also the freedom of association and disassociation that enables Raworth and Milligan to explore beyond or disrupt any simple narrative. Both are quickly distracted and move on to the next thing. There is more than a possibility that different voices may be present in each line. They wander off in and around absurdity and use quick-fire humour to mask an anger and disgust at what they observe. The comedy has its roots in protest. They are both surely pushing the bounds of their art form.

In the Goon Show Call Of The West 20 January 1959, the script purports to be a television western on ‘your radio screen’ where the sound effects call for ‘the whole audience [to] scream and run for the exits’. The first narrator unable to read more than ‘The Pling-plang toof noppity nippity noo, plita. Omnivirous, plethora. Platty plong plong to te to ti tue … fnit, poll. Tong, tang ting, putt putt …’ stops and says ‘I say, I can’t read this rubbish I … Ooo!’ and is killed off. His falling in the water receives the riposte from Seagoon, ‘Yes sonny, it’s a tradition among drowning men’, who takes up the narrative. Milligan uses Seagoon in the next line to attack the myth of America as the ‘land of plenty’ and has him hit a bum. The con man Grytpype-Thynne and his downtrodden sidekick Moriarty, who is also heading west and wants to be let of a ‘retired wooden fish-crate’, join him in the next line.

Raworth’s Act (1973) contains poems that could have been written by Milligan’s character, Eccles. Raworth and Milligan’s comedy of disjunction and fast flowing word association are joyful explorations from the constraints of a coherent self. Both excel at blurring the boundaries between one voice and another, one narrative and another, and cut across their own work with drawings and asides as if their work were boundless.

Surgical Names: John
every home has a sharp knife where’s the sharp knife? you had it in the garden
(Collected Poems p.93)

Surgical Names: Frank
heads tails (Collected Poems p.95)

Taxonomy
the albatross drawer this is the drawer where we keep the albatrosses
(Collected Poems p.97)

Each line and sound in The Goons has an event that forces the action forward and outwards to an extreme of language use or an irreverent joke or both.

Here’s some more from Call Of The West 20 January 1959:

GRAMS: NIGHT. DISTANT CRICKETS.
DISTANT HOWL OF A PRAIRIE
DOG
SEAGOON I say, will those prairie dogs never
stop howling?
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE They’re always howling, no trees
on prairie.
SEAGOON Listeners who recognise that gag
please keep their traps shut …
Well, I’m going to bed …
Goodnight.
GRAMS: GREAT SQUEAKING AND
COMPRESSING OF BED
SPRINGS. BREAKING,
CREAKING, ETC
SEAGOON Eighteen-stone, gad I’m a heavy
sleeper.
MORIATY (muffled) Let me outtt …
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE Shh, quiet in that crate.
MORIATY Is it night or day?
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE Fool … that sort of thing is only for
the rich.
MORIATY Let me out.
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE I’ll let you out, when you’ve made
enough saxophones to sell to the
Indians.

Raworth is in essence the poetic equivalent of Spike Milligan. Both are easily distracted with continual tangents off any perceived narrative. In both cases rhythms weave in and through a series of narrative selves that are primarily mechanisms of forward movement. This is particularly evident in Raworth’s long thin poems, most notably Ace (1974) and Writing (1982). The poems are a natural development from earlier work, such as Act (1973) and The Mask (1976). Here, as in Olson’s dictum that ‘One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’, the poems incorporate a wider range of perceptions, from overheard conversations, bits of autobiography, references to new technology and scientific equipment, pop lyrics to more discursive materials and are more fragmentary.

Here are two extracts from the Science section of Writing (1982):
science is as interesting as poetry said the fascist insect preying in the mud carried from place to place by wheel. science stands back while history siesta’d
do you think this is really how it happened mister swindley why Pasteur tried cleaner air how vain our comfy knowledge
*
not as they say as you say anything for publicity ‘if a sucker don’t want to be capital punished they shouldn’t put the death penalty on him’ (Collected Poems pp. 262-63)

My experience of listening to Ace and Writing and other poems read at Birkbeck College, London in May 2003, was not unlike listening to The Goons. The poems are read in performance as quickly as the eye falls upon the word. Members of the audience laughed at odd times as the sudden jokes and quirky word play of the narratives filtered through. I recall Will Rowe, the presenter, mentioning the half time break and Raworth joking, ‘You can have a break whenever you want’ and members of the audience following the reading with copies of the Collected Poems losing their way and sitting back with wide grins. It was a joyous and celebratory occasion. Raworth is adept, like Milligan in his use of gags, at placing a deft two-liner when the reader / listener may be lagging behind the speedy narrative.

put your money where your eyes are (Collected Poems p. 264)

‘have you a headache?’ ‘no I’m looking out of my right eye’ (Collected Poems p. 301)


Both Raworth and Milligan ultimately register the primacy of the act of writing and employ similar fragmentary approaches involving forms of erasure, omission, unexpected layering and movements off and unprecedented levels of energy.

Letter 10

Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio.

SoHereWeAre

I want to say a few words about the second part of Basil Bunting’s poem Briggflatts (1966), which begins:

Poet appointed dare not decline
to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate
the mission imposed, despised
by toadies, confidence men, kept boys,
shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores,
touching acquaintance for food and tobacco.
Secret, solitary, a spy, he gauges
lines of a Flemish horse
hauling beer, the angle, obtuse,
a slut’s blouse draws on her chest,
counts beat against beat, bus conductor
against engine against wheels against
the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes
thunder, scans
porridge bubbling, pipes clanking, feels
Buddha’s basalt cheek
but cannot name the ratio of its curves
to the half-pint
left breast of a girl who bared it in Kleinfeldt’s.
He lies with one to another for another,
sick, self-maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born.

According to his biographer, Keith Alldritt (The Poet As A Spy 1998), Bunting, a Quaker and conscientious objector from Scotswood-on-Tyne, near Newcastle, may have found refuge in this part of London having been imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for 112 days, after refusing agricultural work on the grounds that it would send another man to kill in his place, and absconded from Winchester Civil Prison in June 1919.

Subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, Briggflatts employs a variant sonata form to evoke the shape of a life from childhood to maturity. At the risk of simplification, it has five parts with stated themes moving from innocence with nature and culture in harmony through crisis to resolution. Part one sees youthful love abandoned in the Northumbrian fells in search of a poetic style equal to the mason’s craft and wider experience. Part two, mirroring Bunting’s own life, sees Fitzrovia, travels to Italy and exile elsewhere. The central part is a Dantesque nightmare concerning Alexander the Great falling off a mountain top at the edge of the world and how peace may be achieved through contemplation and resistance. There is then a move to the Dales and final return to Northumbria with a reflection upon past love and a celebration of skilled labour and other aspects of Northumbrian cultural life. The arc then is from innocence to experience with the Quakerism of part one seen afresh at the end. The poem is imbued with symbolism, Pound’s insistence on pruning the inconsequential and a neo-Wordsworthian pastoral. It is also distinguished by a rare sound patterning that is based on the earliest Welsh poetry. The symbolism is not fixed over time. The bull of part one becomes the poet appointed of part two. The riverbed pebbles, slowworm, the beat, and the singing voices of the young lovers recur, slightly changed, throughout the poem and take on new meanings. The symbolism is rather like musical riffs altered by the frame in which it is placed. This use of symbolism is not entirely removed from that of Mary Butts or John Cowper Powys, where function is changed without alerting the reader. And like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a key source was Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), with its study of the Holy Grail stories and argument that the ultimate object of ritual was initiation into the secret of life, both physical and spiritual.

What interests me in this passage is the gloss over significant experience that leads from a Quaker pacifism to the melting pot of Modernism in London and Paris to involvement in the Second World War and a return to home and the fact that we don’t know much about this man and his entry into and departure from Poundian Modernism.

Fitzrovia, bordered by Soho to the south and Bloomsbury to the east, comprises Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Street and the surrounding area north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road, has come to denote a Bohemian enclave where cultural difference was tolerated between the 1910’s and 1950’s. The name derives from the fame of the Fitzroy Tavern as a meeting place for writers, artists, musicians, actors, music-hall artistes and outsiders in the 1920s. If you add on its borders you are within the area where the melting pot of Modernist thinking was born in London in the 1910’s.

From the nineteenth century Fitzrovia was associated with furniture making and selling; cheap accommodation and entertainment. Successive waves of French, German, Swiss and Italian immigrants, mostly radicals looking for a new beginning, settled there and contributed to the campaigns for the right to vote, to free education and for women’s rights. They also opened shops and restaurants, specialising in their own cuisine, adding to the large number of coffee houses and inns in the area. The proximity of art schools in Bloomsbury meant that this was an attractive place for artists, art students and artist’s models. The immigrant-led business community quickly realised that they could cultivate the bohemian avant-garde and that both would prosper.

The Austrian chef, Rudolf Stulik, made the Restaurant de la Eiffel Tower fashionable by encouraging Wyndham Lewis, Nancy Cunard and their literary friends to become regulars. It was here in 1909 that T.E. Hulme’s Poet’s Club, including the subsequent founders of Imagism, F.S. Flint and Ezra Pound, met, and where Wyndham Lewis launched the Vorticist magazine, Blast, in 1914. In March 1919 the naturalised Polish-Jew, who had made greatcoats for the army, Judah Kleinfeld, converted the German Tavern, The Hundred Marks, into the Fitzroy Tavern and cultivated musicians and artists. These and other proprietors helped nurture and cultivate a climate of religious, political, class, and racial and sexual difference. Aristocratic bohemians intermingled with dancers from the Windmill Theatre and petty criminals on the streets of Fitzrovia. This social and cultural mix was particularly conducive to literary and artistic endeavour as a bolthole where they could be anonymous. The Wheatsheaf pub near the Fitzroy became the meeting-place for Surrealists in London in the 1930s. It is quite clear that Bunting is drawing attention to the role of this place in his life and in Modernist poetics.

The lines ‘Poet appointed dare not decline / to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate’ might indicate that a higher authority has assigned the narrator the post of poet within a group or society and that this appointment ‘to walk among the bogus’ is on a level playing field of authenticity, suggesting that all are equally inauthentic or as authentic as one another. For a Quaker authenticity is at the heart of holiness and so the ‘nothing to authenticate’ might indicate that the poet-narrator is no longer a believer, holy or equally unholy. Holiness for a Quaker involves humility, self-giving, and a movement towards self-knowledge. Thus, the ‘mission imposed’ is not merely the mission to find a suitable poetics, it is also one to achieve self-knowledge. The passage end indicates that the narrator uses sex to get from one person to another and is sickened by the self-maiming. All of this leads to a ‘still-born’ poetry.

Given that Fitzrovia would become a playground for displaced intellectuals and spies, such as Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Mcclean, and that Bunting worked in Intelligence in Iran, the reference to ‘Secret, solitary, a spy’ certainly implies the narrator as observer as well as active agent. Indeed Bunting would eventually receive patronage; become ‘a kept boy’ and go to jail in Paris, an experience that galvanised the writing of Villon (1925), and doubtless be ‘cleaned out by whores’. The description of these lines though, more generally, evokes the bohemian life of a struggling Twenties Fitzrovian poet. An inhabitant of a floating population of tricksters, con men, salesmen, would be artists and writers. I am reminded of the artist, Nina Hamnett, the former lover of Modigliani and Anthony Powell, after the Second World War, at the Fitzroy Tavern ‘touching up acquaintance for food and tobacco’. An object of pity adored by Dylan Thomas and ridiculed by Francis Bacon, she perhaps has become synonymous with Fitzrovia’s downside and mated ‘beauty with squalor’.

Re-reading the passage in comparison to others, it uses a rational language of measuring and calculation, ‘he gauges / lines’, ‘the angle, obtuse’, ‘counts beat against beat’, ‘the ratio of its curves / to the half-pint’ and so on that leads to a description of alienation, self-disgust and artistic sterility. Note the use of ‘lines’ as in poetic line and ‘counts beats’ as in musical time, a recurring theme within the poem. This may indicate that the passage concerns Modernism as a poetics of exile and urban rootlessness reflected by juxtaposition and alienation. The subsequent stanzas echo this concern with ‘calculation’ and ‘elucidation’ indicating that a measuring of the poetic line and poetic course is being questioned.

The ‘half-pint / left breast of a girl who bared it in Kleinfeldt’s’ is a reference to Nina Hamnett, who allegedly gave Bunting a copy of Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). This poem impressed Bunting with its use and variety of rhythm more than its critique of empire. It was the movement away from Victorian sentimentality and rigid poetic line that caught Bunting’s senses. Whilst the passage is clearly pointing to Fitzrovia and to the narrator’s experiences, unlike Alldritt, who provides little supporting evidence, I have been unable to find compelling evidence to place Bunting at Kleinfeld’s before October 1925. Indeed one of the problems is that Kleinfeld’s does not really become a regular bohemian meeting-place until 1926 when Nina Hamnett and her circle decided that it would be a place to meet away from the tourists that were observing them at the Eiffel Tower restaurant, Café Royal and elsewhere.
Hamnett’s circle included composers Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Cecil Gray, writers, Mary Butts, Jack Lindsay, Wyndham Lewis, poets Tommy Earp, Roy Campbell, artists, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Christopher Nevinson and their various friends and lovers. Hamnett was also connected to the Socialist group that met in Charlotte Street, through artists, Jacob Kramer, William Roberts and the New Coterie magazine, edited by anarchist, Charles Lahr between November 1925 and 1927, that published D.H. Lawrence, T.F. Powys, Robert McAlmon, Hugh MacDiarmid, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E. Bates and Nancy Cunard. It was a circle that was imbued in Symbolism as much as Vorticism and clearly tolerant of a divergent Modernism.
From 1926 the composers, Constant Lambert, who lived in nearby Percy Street, and E.J. Moeran, Hamnett’s lover from spring 1927, used to play their compositions on Kleinfeld’s electric pianola. Philip Heseletine, founding editor of The Sackbut, music journal, who shared a love of bawdy limericks with Hamnett, was often to be found at a table with two or three young women. Cecil Gray, Michael Birkbeck, and other composers also went to Kleinfeld’s to enjoy the liberal atmosphere and make connections. Bunting’s extensive knowledge of early and contemporary music would certainly not be out of place within this environment. Kleinfeld allowed his customers to behave as they wished, tolerating unconventional dress and homosexuals of both sexes. Sketches by artists and short scores by composers that fill Kleinfeld’s daughter, Annie’s autograph book enable us to date their presence with some certainty. Bunting’s presence at this time coincides with his writing for The Outlook magazine in 1927 and his becoming music critic in October 1927. This is after the writing of Villon and gives rise to serious doubts about Alldritt’s and other accepted versions of the chronology of events, relations and influences.

The ‘left breast of a girl that bared it in Kleinfeld’s’ is close to the description given by Hamnett when Dylan Thomas introduced Ruthven Todd to her in 1935, ‘You know me, m’dear – I’m in the V & A with me left tit knocked off!’ A reference to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s statue Torso of Nina, the French Vorticist sculptor, Hamnett’s former lover and subject of a biography (Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir 1916) by Ezra Pound, who was killed in the First World War. Bunting is thus making several references in one line. Reading Hamnett’s two memoirs, Laughing Torso (1932) and Is She A Lady (1955) reveal a fondness for name-dropping aristocratic bohemians and parties as well as not revealing identities and of obscuring events by hiding people. A Fitzrovian tradition continued by John Arlott, Daniel Farson and others in their memoirs. There is no mention of Bunting. Indeed Bunting is absent from all of the Fitzrovian memoirs and biographies that I have read. Hamnett though reveals a bohemia that veers from erotic encounters to anonymous identities wanting to live outside the law. Bohemianism is a state of mind that is outside of the usual time, work and discipline ethos. Idleness, pleasure seeking, creativity and living precariously without conventional employment are the norm. Neither Bunting nor Hamnett had the independent wealth of a Nancy Cunard, Mary Butts or Philip Heseltine and there’s the rub. Hamnett failed to find new outlets for her art and eventually spent more time drinking and talking about her Parisian past than creating. Hamnett’s gradual fall into alcoholism began at Kleinfeld’s when she resorted to drawing visitors for money and eventually drinks. In the end, she would do anything for money.

The fact that Bunting’s early life in London and Paris is essentially still unknown and that we still do not have an edition of his Letters hinders our understanding of his subsequent life and his poetry. Hamnett or Mary Butts may have introduced him to the world of the erotic during the post-War revelries. Briggflatts is an eroticised poem, infused with desire, through the pebbles and slowworm and use of verbs that echo that play. It is also suspicious of the sublime or transcendental, of the kind of occult concerns that fascinated Heseltine and Butts when Bunting probably met them at Kleinfeld’s. However, it is close to Butts in its ‘magic of naming’. Butts, the great-granddaughter, of William Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, had attended Pound’s Soho gatherings that replaced the ones originally started by T.E. Hulme, was married for a short time to the poet and publisher, John Rodker, and was featured in Louis Zukofsky’s An Objectivists Anthology (1932) with Bunting. Rodker, also a conscience objector who had been imprisoned during the War, published Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919), The Fourth Canto (1919), Eliot and the Vorticists, replaced Pound as foreign editor of The Little Review and worked with James Joyce in Paris. He was someone that Bunting might have met in the early twenties in London and through him met Pound. Moreover, his poetry, like Briggflatts, employs no masks, no self-censor or ironic distancing. Butts’ novels, Ashe of Rings (1925) and Armed With Madness (1928) combine stream of consciousness with a complex symbolism. She had similar magical and mythological preoccupations to that of Yeats and John Cowper Powys and was championed by Pound long after her death in 1937. Butts and Rodker offer a different methodology to Pound and a challenge to the kind of Modernism that he represented and to which Brigglatts is knowingly moving away from. Butts left Rodker for a succession of affairs, a short-lived obsession with Aleister Crowley and the occult, and developed a neo-pagan spirituality. Butts was also part of Ford Madox Ford’s circle in Paris, a close friend of Stella Bowen, and visited Pound in Rapallo in 1923. There are plenty of unknown relationships and untouched correspondences to give rise to the thought that this passage holds more than on the first few readings. How, for example, do we respond to ‘Buddha’s basalt cheek’ and who ‘shopped’ the narrator? Bunting is certainly drawing attention to this place and these people and his role as a poet in that bohemian environment. The key concept to me is authenticity, involving for a Quaker the movement towards self-knowledge, and that in Briggflatts is to be found in the Northumbrian localism and its vocabulary that the poem espouses.

Letter 9

Click here to listen to So Here We Are on miporadio.

So Here We Are

A great variety of absorbing poetry is obscured by its omission from mainstream publishing, newspaper reviews and the critical narrowness of national poetry awards. There is, at least, a lack of balance dating back to the late 1970s and the changes at the Poetry Society, as described by Peter Barry in Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). National poetry awards are essentially judged by a small coterie of friends who give each other awards, as delineated by Private Eye magazine in July 2002 and as Tom Chivers reminded us earlier this year in Tears in the Fence 45. They are essentially unrepresentative of what is and has been happening in English poetry, incredibly safe and unchallenging. There is a tame parochialism and narrowness that has its roots in notions of nation and identity forged between the World Wars and reinforced by the Movement in the Fifties and its apologists in the Eighties. ‘English decency’ as Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion wrote in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). There is an antagonism towards the discovery of meaning and form in language and to reading widely and deeply that flares up in spats about what constitutes poetry and who should control the field. (See for example Don Paterson’s 2004 T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Neil Astley’s 2005 StAnza Lecture, ‘Bile Guile and Dangerous to Poetry’ and their responses. Conversely there is the predominantly modernist line of thought that seeks to avoid any market taint. Friends refusing to review friends work for fear of selling out.) The New Generation Poets of the Nineties and its marketing machinery similarly adopted a cosy world of vernacular spontaneity and simplistic forms of connection between poetry and life. This strategy involved an acceleration of the critical deterioration heralded by Morrison and Motion. This was not always the case and there are signs that younger readers, thanks to new technology and a greater awareness of disparate writing, are having no truck with this narrowness.
I would like to discuss an example of this absorbing poetry that encourages openness and takes the reader off the beaten track and to indicate why there may be signs of change.

I first encountered Allen Fisher’s Place in literary magazines at Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town, London in the mid 1970s. This was an exciting time to visit Compendium and buy such magazines as Grosseteste Review, Curtains, The Park, Poetry Information, Aggie Weston’s, Joe Dimaggio, Reality Studios, Sixpack, Spectacular Diseases and Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review. Scattered amongst such magazines were extracts from Place by the poet and painter, Allen Fisher. It seemed like samizdat literature. It was inspirational in the sense that it allowed itself the privilege of drawing upon a wide range of sources that impinged upon South London, where Fisher was born and raised. Place Book One, for which Fisher jointly won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Poetry Award, appeared in (Aloes Books) 1974 and was followed by other parts of the project, culminating in Unpolished Mirrors (Reality Studios 1986) and finally appearing as one book, Place (Realty Street Editions) in 2005.

In common with J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier and Iain Sinclair, Fisher drew upon Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1960), Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) and his ‘Projective Verse’ essay (1950) to articulate a rich seam of sources and information from archaeology, history and geography. I don’t think that you can discuss Olson’s impact in England without mentioning Ed Dorn’s enthusiasm and encouragement to English poets, whilst he was a Fulbright Fellow at Essex University, to follow this path. Raised and educated during the Depression, his poetry was concerned with limits and thresholds of place and identity. Dorn had been taught by Olson at Black Mountain College, lived at Gloucester, the location of the Maximus Poems, and clearly was an inspirational figure.

Like the Maximus Poems, Place is a sprawling work, although not an epic work in the sense of a journey out and in. It is more about process and contemplation than journey. It has a relentless and flat movement forward. The book’s organisation is Olsonian, with five main books: Place Book One, Eros:Father:Pattern, Stane, Becoming and Unpolished Mirrors. Place Book One is subtitled in roman numerals 1-XXXVII, and contains within it an internal sequence ‘Lakes’ and a section subtitled ‘Making an Essay // Out Of Place’. Stane, the Scottish word for stone, is subtitled Place Book III: XLV-LXXX1 and so on. There is a complex numbering system at work for each poem or section of the project. There is also a series entitled ‘Grampians’ that appears in Place Book One and Stane as well as letters to friends, a response to the publication of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and direct quotations from fellow poets Anthony Barnett and Pierre Joris. There are poems with lines and stanzas at different angles and poems that use horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines to connect bits of text and to allude to other connections. However defamiliarising this might be, it is clearly a development out of Olson, with its shared emphasis on the complexity and plurality of cognition, rather than an imitation. There is no immediately assimilated narrative, Place requires the reader to become immersed in the conflicting range of references and readings that constitute its object. The preface states:

this set takes the form of an essay
in fragments that brought together
bring about their own symmetry
their own chaos

and later,

I await the day when this book will lose & find itself
in a general movement of ideas.

Place begins by peeling away layers of history and settlement along the Lambeth causeway to the City of London. Through mostly unidentified historical, literary, philosophical and documentary sources the Lambeth people are shown standing on the sites of battlefields bridging the City banks with cattle fields. Fisher’s fragments highlight indices of nineteenth century poverty, submerged pathways and streams, lines of migration and waste, ley lines and boundaries. He seldom attempts to prioritise one fragment over another but rather teases out possible underlying structures and association through juxtaposition. In contrast to the stable identity and formal restraint of Movement and New Generation poets, open field produces polyphonic and fragmented perceptions. On one level there is a kind of levelling of sources and ideas, reminiscent of Eric Mottram’s essays, that can engender a less than engaged response. Sometimes the conflicting energies are dissipated, or need to be held in suspension, as other perceptions and lines of enquiry enter the poem. Yet on another, one could argue that Fisher’s play on the binaries of the visible and actual, of giving and taking, of sources and deposits, of underlying and artificial divides is an example of an attempted Tao, with its allusiveness intact.

Fisher’s achievement in this initially bewildering and subsequently compelling poem is to seek out processes and possibilities and to encourage his readers to embrace this as a work in progress that involves their active participation. In many ways, it was the experience of reading and not understanding Place that forced me to make linkages between the concept of place and other discourses that impinge upon any place. In my experience that involved linking with Foucault’s discourse analysis and thinking about process and on a practical level realising that a knowledge of place required a full understanding of natural and human sciences as well as social, economic, legal and historical processes. Place Book One is entitled Place rather than Lambeth or South London and that surely suggests Fisher is attempting to move beyond Williams’ Paterson and Olson’s Maximus.

the loci of a sphere i have seen it
I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth
cyclic on linear planes

Here the narrative self, with small and large I to indicate selves, is located in a specific place in the manner of Paterson and the ‘not Maximus’ indicating that this is not an imitation.

This is a long poem with a Shelleyan scope for poetry built upon American models with an English philosophical hinterland. The fifth book, Unpolished Mirrors, employs a Blakean flourish with the gardener’s, Watling’s and Wren’s monologues within an enquiry into memory, perception and consciousness that includes references that extend beyond London’s literary and scientific history, John Dee and the theatre of memory, to the specialist language of scientific research. Fisher has clearly absorbed Pound, Oppen, Olson, Rukeyser, Reznikoff, Zukofsy and so on. The arrangement of fragments can be seen as both strength and weakness. The strength comes from the emphasis on process, which Fisher develops in later work, such as Brixton Fractals (1985), and the weakness comes from the failure to elaborate the interconnectedness of all through linkages. I suspect that an underlying resource that Fisher draws upon is A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), a work that was introduced to me by John Cowper Powys’ brother in law, Gerard Casey, in the early Eighties. Although not listed in the bibliographical resources, the work has resonance with the Taoist methodology. Whitehead’s central metaphysical idea identifies reality with process. He saw the universe as being in constant flow and change and rejected the dualisms of mind and body, of knowing subject and transcendent object, of man and nature, believing in the interconnection of all things. Another feature is that Fisher includes within the poem some of the background thinking to his work in progress as a kind of estrangement in the Brechtian sense. It can be disconcerting for readers to encounter passages of philosophy with brackets closed and opened. However, this is Blakean in the knowledge that ‘without contraries there is no progression’ and similarly works to keep Place outside of the poetic mainstream and inside a broader avant-garde of poetry as process.

Place’s Taoist approach is combined with aspects of late Sixties esoteric research and thinking. These are specifically English sources such as The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones (1925) by Alfred Watkins and The View Over Atlantis (1969) by John Michell, both of which present ley-line theory, and The Patterns of the Past (1969), research into underground water systems and ancient sites, by Guy Underwood, a pioneer of earth-energy dowsing. Fisher uses this speculative material on the underlying lines and patterns detected by dowsing to great effect as the Lambeth walker seeking out hidden sources of energy. His contemporary, Iain Sinclair, was similarly divining the past in Hackney, East London, in Lud Heat (1975), which along with Andrew Crozier’s The Veil Poem (1974), is similarly fragmentary and concerned with showing that the world reveals itself, not as a given, but through perception and process.

Place involves much more than I have indicated here. It is the thinking behind a work such as Place that is as important as the range and uses made of the content. The poetry may not be as quotable as T.S. Eliot or be as linguistically hinged as Andrew Crozier or as formally elegant as Peter Riley, but it is very effective and works on the reader with repeated readings. Multifaceted long poems such as Place are rare and challenging. They are not elitist per se as time and scholarship wear them down to manageable tenancies. They are adult and awake, moving forward. There are many ways in and out of their ingenuity. Parts of Place Book One echo the connections between the psychogeography of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem and sexuality. There is a sense of fully exploring the relations between the narrator’s body and the body of Lambeth. Place also contributed to the popularisation of pyschogeography in Britain through its emphasis on walking London and its connection with the large body of work produced by Iain Sinclair. One could also examine the way individual poems mark the extent, through fragmentation, to which the narrative self interjects within certain discourses. Place implicitly encourages moral and political thinking, of the need to break out of confined dogmas, peer groups and idioms. It shines as a beacon to show possible ways forward in that endless movement from the natural landscape to the cultural and back again. It makes you consider citizenship, moral responsibility and what it is to live in a place. It makes you think about the limits and thresholds of place, speech, identity and audience.

Time has moved on since Place first appeared and we are now a more fragmented and multinational nation, although you would not know this from our national poetry prizewinners. The post-Wordsworthian critique of the pastoral is not merely localised anymore, it is contextualised globally as poetry itself is becoming increasingly contextualised globally. The Australian globetrotting poet, John Kinsella, has a useful introduction to this in Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (2007). Based in Gambier, Ohio, Kinsella is a remarkable poet of birds and the beach concerned with issues of nation, place and self that reverberate internationally.

Younger poets and critics are more aware of the twentieth century English modernist tradition these days thanks to new technology developments. Literary websites, such as John Tranter’s Jacket magazine, have led the field in essays, articles and new poems within an international modernist aesthetic. Individual poets, such as Ron Silliman, have used blogs to discuss a wide range of modernist and other poetries. There are also sites that actively encourage the sharing of wide reading, such as Goodreads and Stumble Upon, and networking sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, used by younger people where older poets have made contacts and found a new audience. Younger poets and critics have started their own blogs, such as Edmund Hardy’s Intercapilliary Space, and display their knowledge and interests. The Internet fosters wide reading through its search engines and, although the information is not always accurate or reliable, there is a great opportunity to discover those marginalised poets of substance that have been almost written out of existence. Combine this with the success of non-mainstream English publishers, such as Shearsman and Salt, and it is broadly possible to say that there may be an underlying change in emphasis under way in English poetry that will eventually see an end to the current ridiculous situation.

Letter 8

Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio

So Here We Are

Thomas A. Clark, born in Greenock, Scotland in 1944, writes an attentive poetry, giving space to each word and statement so that it can breathe and linger with the reader. His poetry is also attentive to walking, to the necessity of slow deliberation, and to words and their resonance. I would like to explore walking as a poetic theme using Clark’s work as a starting point to weave backwards and forwards.

The first poem in Thomas A. Clark’s Sixteen Sonnets (Moschatel Press 1981) begins:

as I walked out early
into the order of things
the world was up before me

This neatly situates the narrative self within a prior world of phenomena and perceptions. The ‘order of things’ carrying the phenomena and ‘the world was up’ denoting the ongoing activity. That phrase ‘the order of things’ is recognisable as the English title of Michel Foucault’s study of the epistemology of the human sciences (Les Mots et les Choses 1966 translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences 1970) and alerts the reader to questions of the ordering of knowledge and of the interaction between the self and the world. Clark’s narrative self walks out into the order of things, that is to say, assuming that things are out there and moving with a sense of attentiveness and becoming. It is therefore a knowing self and walking becomes the act of that knowing self.

The poem continues

as I stepped out bravely
the very camber of the road
turned me to its purpose
it was on a morning early
I put design behind me
hear us and deliver us
to the hazard of the road
in all the anonymous places
where the couch grass grows
watch over us and keep us
to the temper of the road

Here discovery and the world with all its terrors are already active and the narrative self steps out to build with the hazardous ground as it is. The line ‘here us and deliver us’ invokes the dissenting tradition of Piers the Plowman, Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton and Blake and of being delivered from oppression to the promised land. Here explicitly defined as ‘in all the anonymous places / where the couch grass grows’ and enveloped within the echoes of a prayer that is conditioned by temper, with all its variant meanings implied.

For Wordsworth and others walking was seen as an aid to the recovery of memory, creative expression and connecting to the divine. Wordsworth’s walking poems, such as ‘An Evening Walk’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Michael’ connected walking with poetic labour, poverty and the rural poor. Walking then carries within it a subversive content through its associations with poverty, necessity, wandering, awareness and discovery.

From Hazlitt’s 1823 essay ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’ we learn that the young Coleridge liked ‘to compose over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’.

The Romantics set a vogue for walking that was fuelled by guide books and institutionalised by anti-enclosure associations, open spaces and footpath societies and linked to the making of the self. The walking ideology, though, fixes upon walking as an educational experience rather than the cognitive processes of perception, memory, judgement and reasoning that were central to Wordsworth and Hazlitt.


One of my fondest memories of the 1998 Wessex Poetry Festival was Thomas A Clark’s reading early on a Sunday morning, which culminated in a reading of In Praise of Walking (1988), a poem consisting of forty statements about walking that weave across the nineteenth century ideology of walking.

In Praise of Walking begins:

Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least
possible baggage, and discover the world.

It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence,
property, triviality, to simply walk away.

That something exists outside ourselves and our
preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest
blessing.

Walking is the human way of getting about.

Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth
with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering.

There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others,
walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.

A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be
consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every
point along the way.

This deceptively simple poem interjects into an expansive realm of discursive poetics that has been the main path of English poetry and dissent since the nineteenth century.

Clark, in common, with J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Geraldine Monk and others, has begun to move beyond the Wordsworthian rupture with the pastoral into new territory.

Following the poem then we note that the world is reached by setting out, again implying ordering, and is there to be discovered, suggesting our knowledge of the world is partial or incomplete and implying an action and a process. The use of ‘we’ suggests that it is possible for us all to discover the world. The ‘least possible baggage’ suggests that closure of thought and emotional response hinders discovery of the world. Discovery, here, implies making connections as we walk and possibly reconnecting with the physical world and human life before or outside of mechanisation.

The second statement acknowledges the possibility of walking away from the world of ‘coercion, violence, property, triviality’. It does not imply withdrawal as such but rather choice. Triviality recalls John Gay’s Trivia, Or The Art of Walking The Streets of London (1716), an important poem in the history of walking poems. Trivia here refers to the Roman goddess of crossroads, the three ways. This public poem takes the form of a narrated walk through London’s streets with a mock classical overlay that advises the reader on the city’s perils and the walker on how to dress. There is a lot of waste, sewage and incipient violence. It presents a distorted image of beggars and urban poverty as Tim Hitchcock points out in a new edition of the poem, edited by Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (OUP 2007). So ‘triviality’ here might signify after Gay an element of frivolity and distortion from the underlying conditions as well as implying a movement away from the unimportant to the important.

The third statement registers the connections between the visionary and the primacy of immediate experience. Note the absence of interest in the self and use of the plural in this clear espousal of an undefined world of discovery and visions. Walking is seen as part of the visionary tradition rather than any specific elaboration of a self. This is Wordsworthian then without the self as object. A walk is its own measure.

I am reminded here of John Ashbery’s poem ‘Just Walking Around’ where he writes

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.

In other words it is the journey that is important and that may involve opening into ‘light’ (vision), ‘mystery’ (the unknown) and ‘food’ (sustenance and thought).

Clark’s poem’s insistence on the connections between walking and humanness clearly is in contradistinction to those elements of social and economic life where humans are under the constraints of ‘time, work and discipline’ and of an infrastructure that is eroding those places where it is still possible to walk.

John Barrell in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (CUP 1972) points out the insularity of local transport systems in that period and travellers’ perceptions of the pre-enclosure landscape as mysterious and hostile. Once in a network of paths it was not easy for a traveller to find a way out unless they had local knowledge.

The poem invokes those hidden paths as a reminder of how far the earth has been transformed by transport systems, networks and motorways and how it is still possible to find new ways of doing things.

Kim Taplin has explored the history of footpaths in The English Path (Perry Green Press 2000) through the writings of John Clare, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and contemporary poets such as David Caddy, Jeremy Hooker, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Barry MacSweeney, Iain Sinclair and John Welch. She shows how the network of footpaths connects humans with the natural world as well as place with place and how walking has and still does set boundaries.

Iain Sinclair has developed the London literary walk into a mode of creation, echoing that other London walker, David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955), in works such as Lights Out For The Territory (1997), where he writes:

‘Time on these excursions should be allowed to unravel at its own speed, that’s the whole point of the exercise. To shift away from the culture of consumption into a meandering stream.’

The poem continues with the powerful line:

There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.

When I visited the childhood home of the writer, poet and broadcaster, John Arlott (1914-1991), at Basingstoke, I was astounded to find a tall and pin-thin Gothic building near a cemetery. The cramped living room was seemingly impossible for a family to use. It seemed to be devoid of light. Within and without exuded a distinct aura. There was both a joy and a sadness. This beguiling place began to make sense in relation to Arlott’s determination to become a writer, his involvement in the literary world, of the BBC and pubs of Soho, and resonated again with the personal tragedies of his later life. The ‘Voice of English Summer’ indeed had always been surrounded by darkness. In sum, this peculiar house made sense in relation to the life of the poet, cricket commentator and wine connoisseur and I felt that I knew more about Arlott as a result of walking there.

Clark’s poem is in argument with or contradistinction to Wordsworth’s and other earlier walking poems.

What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.

To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.

The most distant places seem accessible once one is on the
road.

Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than
sensible shoes.

In the course of a walk we usually find out something about
our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.

Clark’s emphasis upon discovery is quite distinct from T.S.Eliot’s lines from Little Gidding (1942):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at where we started
And know the place for the first time.

For Clark, walking is not so much about knowing as discovering. ‘A dull walk’, he writes, ‘is not without value’. The emphasis is on slowness as opposed to the speed of modern communications and those things we share outside of commercial and monetary value. Making connections, discovery, in this sense concerns reading the landscape encountered. This can take different directions from the materialist to the mystical. From J.H. Prynne through Sinclair to the novelist, John Cowper Powys, who used walking as a way of reaching the elemental and magical world of sensation and transformations. By the way, Jeremy Noel-Tod has written an excellent introduction to the figure of walking in the poetry of J.H. Prynne, in Necessary Steps: poetry, elegy, walking, spirit edited by David Kennedy (Shearsman 2007). There is a sense in which walking serves, in all these writers, as a means of reading, of stimulating connections by motion across the path, the past and present.

The poem continues:

Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all
contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self interest.

Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.

The most lonely places are the most lovely.

Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become
experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as
another.

Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.

Here a differentiation is being made between a tourist and a local walker and I take reason to be allied to discovery. It thus implies a movement beyond a Wordsworthian interest in self to a sense of logic as survival. In other words, as a way of discovering how to save the earth from further destruction.

The poem ends:

To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we
can have.

There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return
me to myself again.

Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the
clear air?

‘To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we
can have.’ thus reminds the reader that, regardless of difference, we are all part of the universe. This is quite close to Gary Snyder’s idea that ‘walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.’ Clark though moves the terrain to the question of value and venerates walking per se as a step towards radical and alternative value. It is, as it were, a movement attendant to the discovery of the world as it is and outside of self interest. Walking connects us with the physical earth and the distant unknown through the motion of moving forwards. It is also a movement from the actual to the possible in cognitive and human terms.

Letter 7

Click below to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio.

So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England

I would like to say a few words about the poet and translator, Bill Griffiths, who died in September, aged 59, and briefly sketch the context and scope of his work. He produced more than two hundred books and pamphlets and translated from Old English, Welsh, Romany, Latin, Norse and other languages. He was in the tradition of Radical pamphleteers, concerned with planting the Liberty Tree, and wrote with commitment to make you think about the words and materials under review. He was concerned with the discourses of power and their effects and with the erosion of local democracy. He had a great ear for music and quickly assimilated speech patterns. Some of his works are beautiful artworks, such as A History of the Solar System / Fragments: A History of the Solar System (Writers Forum / Pirate Press 1978). This consists of A4 sheets folded to A5 and machine stitched into a concertina format within green covers. It is a work that literally opens out the world of cosmology, alchemy and belief to show that the universe is multiple and diverse. I have always kept this on my desk to remind me of Bill’s inventiveness and that poetry should open out to another place. His passing leaves a large gap in English poetry.

He was born Brian Bransom Griffiths at Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 August 1948. His father was a teacher and mother had been a civil servant. When I first met in August 1973 he was known as Billy Griffiths. He arrived at the Windsor Free Festival poetry event, which I had instigated, with his mentor, sound poet, Bob Cobbing, and read with him prior to another double act, Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock. He was an impressive reader using cut-up direct speech and intense syntactical compression in poems about bikers and Vikings. He was like the reading, moody and provocative.

I met him several times that autumn and kept in regular contact, receiving most of his Pirate Press editions and subscribing to his various books. He was an inquisitive and supportive, albeit argumentative, character. Bearded, with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers, he was part of London’s anarchist squatting community and mixed with bikers, Hell’s Angels, gypsies, renegade Irishmen and other outsiders. Although he squatted in inner London, writing about the dispossessed in Whitechapel (Whitechapel: April & May, End, & Start Texts (Pirate Press 1977), he returned to live at his parental home until he moved into a riverboat at Cowley, near Uxbridge, in the mid 1980s.
Private and irascible, I had no idea that he had a degree in Medieval and Modern History from University College, London. He was independent and radically, non-conformist. We argued incessantly about the usefulness of education and how to develop alternative poetic strategies and readership. I was writing and giving away poems at the time and he urged me to not go to University so that I would think more in alternative ways. This was a time of social and industrial unrest, of fragmentation and protest, and such a proposition was not so fanciful if you had private means, which I did not.

I went to University and this upset Bill, who was committed to the ideals of an alternative society. He made poetry his life, placing it above all other concerns, and was continually producing new work. He employed disparate materials often prefaced by notes based upon his etymological and historical research that alerted his readers to the direction of his thinking. He used juxtaposition and narrative disjunctions to allow other discourses and voices into his poems to add another dimension to the subject under review. Typically, his endings refuse any closure to indicate a situation or event is continuous.
I recall seeing him in spring 1977 when he was strung out and not in great health. He gave a blistering reading at Portsmouth Polytechnic Fine Art Department. It was a provocative exposure of the mid-Victorian civil service’s handling of criminal justice and prisons using found and cut-up texts and documentary evidence. Some of these poems appeared in Poetry Review Volume 67 Nos. 1 and 2. He was cleverly using found texts from the past to comment on the present. It was his riposte to my decision to study History and to engage in post-graduate literary study, all part of an argument about theory and practice. His analysis was similar in scope to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). That night we discussed the Annales School of historiography and the difference in approaches between historians such, the Marxist, George Rudé and the anarchist, Richard Cobb. The methodological argument between them comes down to the importance attached to the document. Bill’s eyes lit up as he extolled the virtues of the document, archives and proper systems of storage and access. Bill later worked as an archivist on several project, including cataloguing Eric Mottram’s Archive at King’s College, London, and became a member of the Society of Archivists. Bill was, in essence, writing a history of power ‘from below’ to use the Annales School term.

Bill was an associate of Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press and workshop, a regular contributor to Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review, a stalwart of the Association of Little Presses (ALP), producing the newsletter (PALPI) and Print Shop Manager at the Poetry Society from June 1974. As such, he was an integral part of the London hub, along with such poets as Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Lee Harwood, Gilbert Adair, Ken Edwards and Jeff Nuttall, of what Eric Mottram termed the English Poetry Renaissance or Revival. Bill used the Association of Little Presses book fairs to sell his hand printed books and pamphlets and developed his own independent ways of reaching a loyal readership. He was produced many publications in the Poetry Society basement and several works, including War w/ Windsor (Pirate Press 1973), Idylls of the Dog, King and other Poems (Pirate Press 1975), Cycles (Pirate Press 1975) and The Song of the Hunnish Victory of Pippin the King (Earthgrip Press 1976), went into multiple editions. This was a golden age of little press activity and it was hurting the larger poetry presses. Eric Mottram at Poetry Review was accused of publishing too many foreign poets and lost his job. The Poetry Society print shop where Bill printed his and other London based publications was closed down. The whole apparatus of support, including the National Poetry Secretariat, wonderfully administered by Pamela Clunies-Ross, for little press poets outside London, was taken away. A documentary account of this is given in Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006).

His early work includes War w/ Windsor, which appeared in several editions, and Cycles, distinguished by their disruptive use of language and radical scope. It is in marked contrast to the conventional poetry of that period and takes prison and urban deprivation as its main themes in a sustained study of the manifestations of repression. War w/ Windsor explores the social parameters of bikers and the law at a time when the stop and search laws were in frequent use by the police on any individual that appeared to be vaguely outcast. Stop and search was based on sections 4 and 6 of the Vagrancy Act (1824) and became a contributory factor in the 1980 St Paul’s, Bristol and 1981 Brixton, riots. Incidentally, his poem, ‘The Toxteth Riots’ (in The Mud Fort: Selected Poems 1984-2004 Salt 2004) quotes the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee emphasising ‘police harassment over a long period’ as the main cause of the disorder. War w/ Windsor gives voice to the biker’s world, the Windsor Chapter and Uxbridge Nomads war against each other and the police, of prison and social control, employing broken syntax in linked sets of sound poems that catch their speech patterns in terse narratives.

Here’s the opening of ‘To Johnny Prez Hells Angel Nomads’

1. Christmas straight-
Jacket kid
Packet of light fields
Eye
2. With no lamps, roads
Without airforce or Angels, wd you jin Ruislip?
A lion in you
In a law-shop
3. The motor-bike is acorn yellow
Johnny Bev Bob
White my mind
Gonna pick up of
Pepper is day yep
4. Bev as the sea wave wake
See this this is Angels getting the booting of their life in
Scrubs
This is Johnny
This is me picking up snout bits in Brixton
5. Johnny begot, beading of black Jack-club
Dance kick at drums, can-banging
Death-douce
6. And love
Works to mix to mix you up miscates the soul
Love
Shooting blood out; all
Red-laking; well
Shut in the breasts of her.

Bill shared the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for 1974, with Allen Fisher, for such work. Bill augmented his interests in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Romany, Norse and other languages into his work.

Cycle 1 (On Dover Borstal) begins:

Ictus!
as I ain’t like ever to be still but
kaleidoscope,
lock and knock my sleeping

‘Ictus’ being Latin for a physical hit or strike, also signifying the first or regular beat in Latin verse, although there is historical confusion over this (see Oxford English Dictionary OED 1) and in medicine the beat of the pulse (OED 2 a), implies impact, stress and a sense of confusion and physicality. The exclamation mark emphasises and raises the pitch of utterance, echoing Romantic exclamatory usage in terms of outcry and suspense. That impact is implied is reinforced by line four’s ‘lock and knock in my sleeping’ and that the narrative self is under review is achieved by the switch from the ‘I’ of line two to the ‘my’ of line 4.

It continues:

Within
the complex of the fort against the French, Dover,
‘s mighty imperfection: fits to the sea,
the moat (and ported, kinging the blue, closed, so built-made
and the salty grass and rubble of chalk growing
writing the chalk-kid
shout for separation

Here the writing shows an educated, disorientated narrator aware of the war machinery at work, ‘the barbwire is German / it is made with razorblades’ and employs alliteration and disjunctions that dazzle and surprise.

You’re you
and I ain’t any one but you

The bright crazy rings in agate
spring is.

It is an intensely physical poem, alert to historical knowledge, with a narrator self awake to a landscape and seascape of cuts and bruises and wanting to break free ‘to think on the pattern of an action’. It is this tension of wanting and needing to escape that he dramatically captures.

Bob Cobbing’s sound and visual poetry workshops at the Poetry Society from 1969-1977 were a formative and continual inspiration. Bill’s concern with the materiality, and ways of scripting, utterances led him back to Old English literature and other languages with traditions of cryptic utterances and runic signs. He also acknowledged in an interview with Will Rowe the impact of Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred (1968), with its global ethnopoetics and concern with archaic poetry. The book provided his introduction to works, such as The Nine Herb Charm (1981), that he would later translate himself.
Bill regularly toured with Cobbing and Paula Claire as Konkrete Canticle, the sound and visual poetry group, from 1974 until 1979, from 1984 -1988 and again from 1990 until 1992. They toured Canada, Sweden, Germany and the U.K. Here Bill developed different uses for the voice in poetry, fragmenting vowels and consonants, and explored the edges of utterance. As Paula Claire has written in The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths (Salt 2007), Bill continually worked on texts and left behind a whole range of poetic experiments in hypergraphics spanning the repertoire of communication signs in their broadest sense. This is deposited in her Archive.

Through Eric Mottram, who taught English and American Literature at King’s College, London, Bill encountered the wide range of poetries published in the Poetry Review and returned to study Old English at King’s, gaining a Ph.D. in 1987. His translation work began, with John Porter, working on the late medieval Icelandic texts in Gisli’s Saga – The Verses (Pirate Press 1974) and then Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon Text with Modern English Parallel (Pirate Press 1975). In these and later works, Bill emphasises the rhythmic and would often produce the original text, a literal one and poetic version. His poetic versions though were in marked contrast to standard translations. It was if he was scraping away the Victorian gloss and returning to older traditions through rhythm and sound and placing them in the context of music and dance. His connections at King’s College led to a fruitful relationship with Anglo-Saxon Books in Norfolk, who published The Battle of Maldon (1991, revised 2000) and Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic (1996, revised 2003).

In 1990 he moved to Seaham in Durham and became involved in the collection and archiving of dialect materials. His selected poems 1969-1989, introduced by Jeff Nuttall, appeared in Future Exiles: 3 London Poets (Paladin 1992). He became Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University. He published A Dictionary of North-East Dialect (Northumberland University Press 2005), several collections of dialect literature and wrote some ghost stories, set in the baroque world of English local government.
Pitmatic, his last book, concerns North East coalminers and their dialect and clearly has a social-political dimension. He remained a political and campaigning poet as later books such as, A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan 1999) and Durham and Other Sequences (West House Books 2002) show. Although he also wrote extensively on Plotinus, Darwin and Seaham, it is his consistent writing about struggles between the dispossessed and the police that stand out. See for example such late poems as ‘Detective Notes’ and ‘Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken in Caravan Town at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear With Helicopter and Film Back-Up at Saltersgate Near Tow Law in Co. Durham on the Sixth of March 1996’ from 1997.

10.
We have babies ‘n births
sometimes secessions; burials; communities are moved,
demolition eases the feral-search for ground for housing
the kings of the dock-weed be warned.
and the opulent win the shadow-box,
choose the puppets on show for hands with legs ‘n wages
we are subliminated into tokens ‘n riddle-stanzas
or left a road march

(see Worlds of New Measure: An anthology of five contemporary British Poets Edited by Clive Bush Talus Editions 1997)

Bill’s poetry has a difficult, edgy surface that is oppositional. It employs an array of languages, often in the same poem or set of poems. Colloquial or spoken English, Anglo-Saxon, local dialects collide with Latin, French and Standard English, the written language of power. It his work on the procedures of law and bureaucracy, on prison; his commitment to a locality and its linguistic culture as a base for poetry; his use of ordinary people’s lived experience through a musical ear and cut-up disjunctions; his efforts to write polyphonically and to remove the obfuscation of Victorian language over archaic poetries and his continual movement to offset the structures of power with citizenship and the dialect of poetic language that will survive. Bill G