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In my last talk I mentioned J.H. Prynne’s contribution to The English Intelligencer. I would now like to say a few words about literary connection in the context of Andrew Crozier, who collated and edited the first series of The English Intelligencer. Crozier, who died in April 2008, is a much less well-known figure than he might be and left a substantial and lasting legacy as a poet, editor and teacher. He was instrumental in recovering some of the forgotten history of Modernism through his retrieval of the works of John Rodker, (Poems and Adolphe 1920 Carcanet 1996) J.F Hendry and others.
The idea of literary connection is full of potential difficulty and complication as we lack words for the different types of relationships and connections. Moreover critics tend to label poets together by dint of association and essential differences can be lost. Connection is closely attached to selling a particular poet or book, regardless of whether an underlying connection exists or not and again can be used loosely.
Literary connection is also associated with place and tourism. Thus Derbyshire and the Peak District advertise their connection with the Elizabethan historian, William Camden, who wrote about the Wonders of the Peak in Britannia (1586), and other writers and poets throughout the centuries. Camden’s work, of course, was central in forming the concept of a unified nation. The Peaks are sufficiently distinctive and attractive to become part of the national identity, and the issues around its constitution, so that they are at once local, regional and national as reinforced by Thomas Hobbes in his poem De Mirabilibus Pecci (1636) that celebrated Chatsworth House, Peak Cavern, St Anne’s Well, Buxton, Eldon Hole and Tideswell. The Peak District is the loci of Crozier’s friend and editor of the second series of The English Intelligencer, Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts (Grosseteste 1983). A work that meditates on the significance of ‘abandoned mines, standing out like sores through the rough mingling pastoral surface’ (page 23) and engages with Seventies cultural politics through a reading of the ideology of English landscape poetry and insists on digging deeper into ‘the message that exceeds us, the concept not grasped, the emptiness of total being, pure sign of itself to which such substances as metal, poetry, history, can only be tools of an interim script’ (page 27).
Connection, the action of connecting or joining together (OED 1 a) was first used in the 1609 edition of the Bible. From Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) we have (OED 1 b) of immaterial union or joining together and (OED 2 a) the linking together of words or ideas in speech or thought. From the base of the action or condition of being joined together the idea of connection has been added so that it has eleven meanings that cover links without specification. There is a gap in the English language that allows a simple notion of linkage to be employed that denies individuality and difference in favour of easy labelling and obfuscation. Smaller and deeper underlying contextual links are often unread and dormant as a result.
Issues around national identity, what constitutes ‘Englishness’ and whether we should have connections with foreign poets and poetry have dominated the struggles within English poetry since the 1900s especially between Modernism and the Movement and their successors and reaching a crisis from 1956 to 1963 and subsequent battle during the mid-1970s. (See Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court Salt 2006) Thus Robert Conquest in his New Lines – II (1963) introduction could write of a return to the cardinal traditions of English verse and warn against poetry that is written from new or different attitudes and state that ‘the human condition from which the poetry of one country springs cannot be readily tapped by that of another.’
In 1961 Andrew Crozier won an exhibition to Christ’s College, Cambridge to read English, having won a scholarship to Dulwich College, south east London in 1954. He was arrested twice for civil disobedience on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston demonstrations. As an undergraduate, Crozier edited an American supplement to Granta magazine and included work by Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley and John Wieners. At the end of this publishing adventure which was prepared to rattle the status of the Movement poets, he added a letter from Charles Olson to George Butterick that included the phrase ‘freshen our sense of the language we do have’ adding that the ‘spirit of Olson informs this whole collection’.
Amongst his friends were the American poet and The Paris Review poetry editor, Tom Clark, studying English at Gonville and Caius on a Fulbright Scholarship, who would later write critical biographies of Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Edward Dorn, and John Temple, Peter Riley and John Riley, with whom his work shares an affinity. (See Andrew Crozier ‘The World, The World: A Reading of John Riley’s Poetry’ in For John Riley edited by Tim Longville Crosseteste 1979 pp. 97-104.)
In 1964 he studied at the State University of New York, Buffalo on a Fulbright Scholarship, publishing the broadsheet series Sum and the journal, The Ant’s Forefoot, and was tutored by Charles Olson. Whilst in America, Crozier contacted the Objectivist poet, Carl Rakosi, who had changed his name to Callman Rawley and stopped writing. Rakoski later acknowledged that Crozier’s determination to find him had persuaded him to return to writing poetry. Crozier’s discovery of Rakosi led to a much wider awareness of the Objectivists. The impact of Olson on Crozier’s thought can be gauged by the use of a line from Olson as the title for his Collected Poems: All Where Each Is (Allardyce, Barnett 1985).
On returning to London in January 1966, Crozier began The English Intelligencer before joining Donald Davie at Essex University, where he wrote his Doctorate thesis Free Verse as Formal Restraint, and founded The Wivenhoe Park Review with Tom Clark. This in turn became The Park when he moved to teach at Keele University in 1967. J.H. Prynne’s introduction to Crozier’s first book of poetry, Loved Litter of Time Spent (1967) refers to a central quality in the writing ‘the possible as it really comes over, day by day’.
The English Intelligencer rejected the received modes of established Movement poetics in favour of a new, modernist poetics of diversity that shifted attention away from the insular towards a broader field of activity. The newsletter was distributed for free to interested individuals and encouraged an open forum for exchange and was clearly looking to develop a new English poetics. Crozier insisted early on that ‘the Intelligencer is for the island and its language, to circulate as quickly as needs be.’ (see Drew Milne ‘Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos’ Jacket 20 page 11)
This is curious language. ‘The Intelligencer is for the island and its language’. The immediate context of this statement is the Movement’s wholesale rewriting of the history of modern poetry and the suppression of part of that history and its claims to speak for the nation. Donald Davie, one of the theorists of the Movement, famously wrote in Granta 68 in 1963 that ‘I think that everyone knows, really, that Philip Larkin is the effective laureate of our England’ annexing poetic quality and national culture in an uncomplicated and empirical alignment. The thrust of this annexing and suppression was reinforced in polemical anthologies and histories, such as Robert Conquest’s New Lines – II (Macmillan 1963), Blake Morrison’s The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction in the Fifties (OUP 1980), Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (Penguin 1966) and Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Penguin 1982). Crozier brought a return to what Robert Conquest in his 1956 New Lines anthology wanted to remove from English poetry that is to say, intellect, strong emotion and ‘social pressure’. Crozier brought intellectual rigour to his editorial work as explained by an early contributor, Chris Torrance, in a private conversation in March 2006. It was Crozier’s advice and support that led Torrance to Olson and the much wider world of American music, painting and writing.
Through Torrance’s work and teaching one can follow the Olson line to a new generation of contemporary poets such as Elisabeth Bletsoe and Rhys Trimble.
Crozier founded Ferry Press in London in 1964, first publishing Thread by Fielding Dawson, the painter and poet, who had studied at Black Mountain College. The Press becoming, with John Riley and Tim Longville’s Grosseteste Review, an important outlet for J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, John James, John Hall, John Temple, Chris Torrance, Doug Oliver, Wendy Mulford and others that had contributed to The English Intelligencer. This connection, however much forgotten or ignored, is real enough. That many of the poets involved lived and worked in Cambridge is also undeniable but not particularly useful to know until you question their social and work situation. Moreover, Crozier and his friends were frequent visitors to London in the mid-Sixties and in particular, Better Books, where the poets, Bob Cobbing and Lee Harwood worked and a lot of networking and readings took place. The frequent denial of a so-called Cambridge School has much to do with an understanding of connection and process. Yes, Cambridge is an early focus point but so is Better Books, and later, Compendium Books, and Essex University. The denial can be read therefore as a deflection to persuade the reader to look deeper. The document that most clearly articulates Crozier’s position is his introduction, written with Tim Longville, to the anthology A Various Art (Carcanet 1987).
Here the introduction emphasised ‘the degree of difference that existed between individual poets, and the extent to which each poet had accomplished a characteristic and integral body of work, with its own field of interest and attention,’ and claimed ‘both the possibility and presence of such variety, a poetry deployed towards the complex and multiple experience in language of all of us.’ (A Various Art page 14) It is noteworthy for refusing any collective stance, its advocacy of diversity and for producing the clearest denunciation of Movement poetics.
It begins by refusing the notion that it is an anthology of English poetry (page 11), referencing the history of perceptions of English poetry since the 1950s and polemical anthologies that lay claim to pre-eminent achievement within the inclusive reference of national representation. Crozier and Longville refuse the exclusivity of fashion by a sectional view of change and difference so as not to be seen as covering the social divisions and otherness implicit in our national culture. They accused the Movement poets of employing a common rhetoric that foreclosed the possibilities of poetic language as well as the scope and character of poetic discourse in relation to the self, to knowledge, history and the world. Moreover, language was always to be grounded in the presence of a legitimating voice of an impersonally collective tone that was subsumed within a closed cultural programme.
They further lay claim to the Movement’s wholesale rewriting of the history of modern poetry and the exclusion of parts of that history, the line from Pound and William Carlos Williams, and beyond to Olson, Oppen, Dorn and so forth. (A Various Art page 12) This being a unifying connection between the contributors to the anthology, many of whom had been English Intelligencer contributors.
The title of the anthology aptly summarises Crozier and Longville’s ethos that poetry is an art in relation to language with various artifice and rules that apply to specific rather than to general occasions. Another unifying connection between the contributors that the editors cite was that many had established their own publishing houses and journals. I think, though, that there is an absence in their account and that is the impact of The English Intelligencer. It is the big connection. Firstly, it established the idea of exchange between interested individuals, often friends, although not exclusively, and a community of risk and possibility. The model for The English Intelligencer was the San Francisco journal, Open Space, initiated by Stan Persky in 1964 to provide a regular forum for a community of North Beach poets that included Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Joanne Kyger. The idea of Open Space had been to provide a context to the poetry and politics of the group and immediacy to the writing. Secondly, despite the difficulties of overcoming preconceived notions of publication, The English Intelligencer eventually became a communal forum of exchange, exploration and criticism that opened up new areas for many of its prominent contributors. As such, it underwrites the direction of many of its contributors and holds them a distinct relationship.
Crozier identified the period from 1956 to 1963 when critics, such as Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and Al Alvarez, moved the focus of attention away from the achievements and interests of the Forties poets to the Movement and confessional poets.
That shift can be said to start with the death of Dylan Thomas in 1953 and his literary executors, especially Kingsley Amis, who became a prominent Movement novelist and critic, doing much to detract from the achievement of Thomas and Forties poets generally.
The Forties had seen a great revival in poetic activity, as the archival work of A.T. Tolley (The Poetry of the Forties Manchester University Press 1985) and others (e.g. Andrew Sinclair’s War Like A Wasp Hamish Hamilton 1989) has shown, and a growing interest in European and American poetics through Wrey Gardiner’s Grey Walls Press, Tambimuttu’s Poetry London and Poetry London Editions and John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing. It was a period, partly due to the Second World War, when the cultural exchange between London, Paris and New York was at a peak.
Thus the New York poet, Edward Field was first published in Wrey Gardiner’s Poetry Quarterly in London in 1946 and during his time as a fighter pilot in England he met many literary and artistic figures that were criss-crossing between London and Europe at the Gargoyle Club in Soho. Similarly, David Gascoyne, Rayner Heppenstall, W.S. Graham, Ruthven Todd, Norman Cameron, Nicholas Moore, Charles Madge, Kathleen Raine, Humphrey Jennings and Dylan Thomas to name a few all utilised London’s Zwemmer’s Bookshop for the latest artistic, literary and philosophical developments to arrive from Europe.
Crozier’s interest in Forties poetry led him to contact, J.F. Hendy, a survivor from that period and write an introduction to his work in Iain Sinclair’s anthology Conductors of Chaos (Picador 1996), a poetry anthology where other Forties poets were introduced, for example Nicholas Moore by Peter Riley, and given space. Crozier was instrumental in reviving interest in Hendry, the ‘New Apocalypse’ and Forties poetry more generally, through his essay, ‘Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism’ in Society and Literature 1945 -1970 edited by Alan Sinfield (Methuen 1983).
I thought about connection in relation to Crozier because of his attention to context and historical placement. In my dealings with him, I found him to be modest and self-effacing. He effectively helped create a context and thus readership for the English Intelligencer contributors, the poets that he published with Ferry Press and in A Various Art. He was clearly not prescriptive about any one approach or orthodoxy of intent and was at pains to point readers towards a diversity of achievement and fields of interest. In these more dogmatic times that is a salutary lesson.
Crozier’s own poetry attempted to remove the lyrical self so as to enact a closer encounter with the particularity of things in the world. Here’s ‘(i.m. Rolf Dieter Brinkman)’ from A Various Art page 82:
Already the ducklings resemble their aunts and uncles
free of all obvious maternal bond
the brood moves in and out of itself
involuted and explosively bobbing
in each other’s wake
their movement appears haphazard
and even elegantly natural they all
look the same and know what they want
when we appear under the shadowy leaves
with our bags of bread
it is a sign for them to
come to the edge and when it stops
and the last crumbs are shaken out
into the dirty water they move off
together again while you and I
set off round the pond talking
about ducks and the volume of foliage
on a summer branch which dips
toward the water to be reflected
in words that condense like the image
of each leaf shifting over the others
while unreflected light flickers through
in a web of shining brevity
that glows all night long
as air moves and water rises
within those immense columns
echoing : all language is truth
through a bed of dry leaves when evaporation
ceases and our words turn and fall
flickering with our life upon the earth
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Letter 14
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In February 2004, Randall Stevenson writing in The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12 1960-2000: The Last of England? (OUP 2004) inadvertently sparked a media controversy by suggesting that the achievements of experimental poets, such as J.H. Prynne, would be of more lasting significance than that of the Movement poets. The value of J.H. Prynne’s poetry was debated in newspapers and on the radio but not seriously engaged with. As I regularly get asked about the value of Prynne’s poetry, I thought that I might offer some contextualising notes as a preliminary to reading his Poems (Bloodaxe 2005).
The arc of Prynne’s poetry over the past forty years may be said to have broadly moved from a metaphorically based open field lyricism towards a metonymic and etymological challenge to the reader. It is, above all, concerned with encouraging the reader on a journey, involving a reading process that avoids closure. It is about the journey, that is a continual process, towards meaning and comprehension rather than finding answers. It places utterance within the political and socio-economic predicament of the individual in relation to its historical and geographical landscape. One might say that it is one journey of utterance that acknowledges the boundaries and thresholds of the individual, through and across the nuances and shifts of language and historical time. It draws upon specific discourses and their appeal to knowledge, both provisional and substantive, within the languages of criticism and human sciences and beyond. It is a poetic utterance that looks back to the earliest epic and founding literature and forward beyond any postmodernist position. It has enlarged the focus of the poet beyond the reference frames registered by Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. It appeals to a community of speakers, readers and writers, cognizant of the fact that all are in a series of markets and hierarchies of language and discourse outlays, without privilege.
This work is substantially supported by critical essays, such as ‘Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words’ (The William Matthews Lectures 1992 Birkbeck 1993), where Prynne reassessed the arbitrariness that Ferdinand de Saussure famously attributed to the signifier and signified and emphasized a set of secondary relations through which meaning developed such as historical contexts and usages, accumulated layers and aspects of association, social function and usage codes, and practical criticism, such as They That Haue Powre To Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Cambridge 2001) and Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper And Others (Cambridge 2007 distributed by Barque Press) that shows an exceptional regard to determining the fullest context and meaning of a poem. Each word and phrase in a poem has a philological and etymological base that returns the reader to things and the world of which they are a part. The words used enact and sustain the relations and forces between language and the world.
Two words invariably used to describe the initial experience of reading the Poems are ‘arid’ and ‘difficult’. ‘Arid’, as if it were written in a desert. That is to say that it is often missing the props of mainstream metaphorical poetry that enables a quick grasp of meaning, intention and the scope of the poem under review. It is what is called ‘difficult’ poetry. It is, as it were, poetry of the desert. I shall now pursue these two notions as a way of locating the literary context to the Poems.
Poetry written from the desert, of whatever order, may be seen as poetry of exile. One thinks of Ovid, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the post-holocaust poetry of Edmund Jabés and Paul Celan. The critic. T.W. Adorno wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, we can no longer write poetry’. It was Jabés who wrote that after Auschwitz, we must write poetry, but with wounded words’ and in conversation with Mark C Taylor, who said: ‘It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey into the desert. You do not go into the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. And something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak’. (Edmund Jabés The Book of Margins: Translated Rosemarie Waldrop Chicago 1993) Further exiled or self-imposed exiled poetry has a social position and literary effect. By dint of being outside the social-literary mainstream, it is more able to comment inwards on the prevailing socio-political conditions. One thinks of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry ability to comment upon Stalinist Russia and the purges and so on. Prynne’s poetry, like Jabés and Akmatova, may be seen in broad moral and literary terms as a profound reaction to the historic events of the twentieth century and beyond.
J.H. Prynne’s social-literary position can be seen as a self-imposed exile. He has been, for example, excluded from such literary reference books as The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Margaret Drabble (OUP 2000) and taken moral decisions on the integrity of how and where his poetry and criticism appears.
His exact social-literary position is complex, given its predominantly exile status. Born in 1936, Jeremy Prynne was raised in Kent and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. His mother ran a private nursery school for boys and girls and his father was an engineer. At Cambridge he met the poet and critic, Donald Davie, who supported his early intellectual direction. Like Davie, this was a move away from the insular concerns of the Movement to the richer intellectual concerns of new American and European poetry. Davie’s study, Thomas Hardy And Modern Poetry (1973) offers an early account of Prynne’s poetry. A Life Fellow, College Librarian and University Reader in English Poetry until his retirement at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he works on all aspects of the English poetic tradition, including writings of American, European and Far Eastern origin. In his teaching capacity, his enthusiasm for sharing and generosity of spirit towards many students is well known and helped to develop a wide readership base. However, this is only part of the story. Prynne’s poetry emerged as part of an avant-garde discussion and readership outside of the literary market place. This began with Prynne’s editorship of Prospect magazine in 1964 and continued with his mimeographing and distributing The English Intelligencer, a literary newsletter, between January 1966 and April 1968.
The English Intelligencer was an attempt to organise a new collective poetics that focussed upon producing ‘quality’ work. Drawing upon a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, it was distributed for free to an expanding mailing list. Poems, essays and comments were shared without cost and exchange value. The Intelligencer occupied a space between a private letter and public book and embodied a shared community opposition to market commodification.
J.H. Prynne was a key figure in its articulation of the language and poetics of ‘quality’ in opposition to the language of commodity. Essentially he wanted to rescue a concept of ‘quality’ from its financial meaning to make it viable outside of a purely market lexicon. In the poem, ‘Sketch For A Financial Theory Of the Self’ (Poems pp 19-20), which first appeared Series 1 no.17, Prynne probes the relationship between word (name) and object within the economic field and suggests the ways it impacts on the self. He writes of how words and poems and quality, as habit, have been reduced to monetary objects by which we define ourselves. He notes that we are duped into a reductive cash flow nexus: ‘The absurd trust in value is the pattern of / bond and contract and interest -’ and ‘Music, / travel, habit and silence are all money; purity / is a glissade into the last, most beautiful return.’ He extended his thinking on quality and money with ‘A Note On Metal’ (The English Intelligencer second series June 1967, appended to Aristeas (1968, Poems pp.127-132). Here quality is seen in terms of property (strength) and substance. He looks back to the origins of money as coin (gold) and Western alchemy, defined as ‘the theory of quality as essential’. He differentiates between early Asiatic socio-economic formations where coins were the ornament of power rather than currency of value and early Greek economies where it is the substance governing transfer as exchange. This thinking is brought historically up to date in the poem, ‘Die a Millionaire’ from Kitchen Poems (1968), where the ‘twist-point / is “purchase” – what the mind / bites on is yours’ … ‘we are the social strand / which is already past the twist-point & / into the furnace’ … so that what I am is a special case of / what we want, the twist-point missed exactly / at the nation’s scrawny neck.’ (Poems pp 13-16)
The English Intelligencer by removing a formal ownership and exchange value thus produced a newsletter divorced from the literary market. In so doing, they showed that words and poems, as objects, have properties beyond their meanings and exchange value within the community. This move can be seen as an extension of the work and thinking of the Objectivist Press and poets, such as George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsy, who searched for a language outside of the ideology and practice of commodification.
The English Intelligencer fostered intense interest in a wide range of poetries and philosophy. These included Ezra Pound and the Imagists, William Carlos Williams and the poetry of things, the Objectivist poets, the Black Mountain College poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School poets, such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and the European post-holocaust poets, such as Jabés and Celan. Beyond that widening flux of alternative poetries, Prynne continued his readings within the English tradition, especially the Romantic and Elizabethan poets, and within modern European philosophy, including Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the issues of language, being and the phenomenology of perception raised by their work. Amongst the questions that this reading raised would be the notion of the autonomy of the text and whether there is a singleness and moral structure to immediate knowledge. (For a discussion of these issues see ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview’ by Kevin Nolan Jacket 24 www.jacketcom November 2003 pp 1-37)
Against a backdrop of growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War, civil disobedience in relation to women’s, gay, environmental issues, industrial strife, a balance of trade deficit that led to the devaluation of the pound and student ‘revolt into style’, structuralism moved across from linguistics and anthropology cutting into sociological, historical, philosophical, psychiatric and critical thought, with the concept of the de-centred subject and de-centring of the structure impacting upon thinking within European human sciences. Doubtless buoyed by E.P. Thompson’s articulation of the impact of literary, satirical and political presses in the early nineteenth century in The Making of the English Working Class (1968) and Jeff Nuttall’s overview of more recent oppositional publishing and culture in Bomb Culture (1968), several English Intelligencer contributors became small press publishers. It was through these regional activists that J.H. Prynne chose to publish most of his early work. (e.g. Day Light Songs Resuscitator Books, Pampisford 1968, Aristeas Ferry Press, London 1968, The White Stones Grosseteste Press, Lincoln 1969) and Fire Lizard Blacksuede Boot Press, Barnet 1970)
Prynne’s early readership then consisted of friends, the avant-garde poets, intellectuals and critics associated with The English Intelligencer, his colleagues and students. The nature of his communication with that growing audience took the form of his poetry and a contribution to the thinking and reading of that audience. It always already posits a literary-social position in relation to a mode of poetic communication that involves questioning before and beyond any current ideology of text, authorship, intention and process of marketing and entails a wandering across and through both language and the literary canon. Over time he deepens and widens that range, by attempting not to suppress variable meaning and knowledge that impinge upon a thing, so that the reader might question various knowledge thresholds, in particular such concepts as ‘totality’, ‘immediate experience’ and ‘textual autonomy’.
Turning to the notion of ‘difficulty’. This familiar notion in the poetry world is encountered in the first line of the first poem, the magically sonic, ‘The Numbers’: ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’. A note to the 1982 edition of Poems (Allardyce Barnett Books) referred to ‘difficulty as being the ardent matter and accompanying breadth of imaginative and political reference’. In other words, it is inherent in the matter addressed as the forces and relations of production and consumption already taint the nuances of languages and knowledge. There is no impartial discourse. ‘Difficulty’, though, is not misleading, that is to say the reader is either able to grasp something or not. It perhaps implies that the conflicting and impartial knowledge at work is beyond the reach of one reader and some of these poems are beyond comprehension, through the uncertainty of variable meaning. However, it should, at least, be seen as relative and in relation to ‘simplicity’. A seemingly transparent and simple poem, such as Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, may require considerable critical work in disentangling the complexity of discourses, method and intentionality and possible effects registered, in the same way as a ‘difficult’ poem as so much of its sub-text is out of view. This can perhaps be described as ‘subtlety’ in all its guises. Both ‘difficult’ and ‘simple’ poems demand intellectual work and are initially conditioned by prejudicial readings and the disposition towards response and effect. In other words, some poems produce effects and reference knowledge that are unseen or unread by certain readers and that is governed by reading history and preferences as much as ability of the reader. An awareness of that history, conditioned as it is by ethnic, social, educational, psychological and other factors, and its prejudice, may help dissolve some of the weariness generated by poems that refuse to be read. At the macro-level, it might help reader appreciate the divide between those who read poems as language only and those who read poems as social process only and show the need to resist closure on either side of the fence. ‘Difficulty’ can be distinguished from ‘subtlety’, meaning that which is not obvious in any way, possessing small and important data, often implying cleverness through its ability to withhold and disguise. Subtlety, then, wants to be acknowledged rather than seen. Difficulty, in contrast, has intrinsic value in the sense that a poem retains its vitality over time, as in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, and implies an openness or opening towards the complex. It is potentially much less elitist than a work of subtlety.
The arc of Prynne’s poetry may be seen as moving further into exile, a deepening of the challenge to the reader, as a method of registering wider referents, on the basis that might be a focal point of social and ethical or literary change. Consider the examples of Blake and Kafka, as psychological exiles, self-imposed or not, and the ways their work has entered the language. Now consider, at the micro-level, the individual forced by exceptional circumstances, e.g. the loss of several high school friends to suicide, into self-imposed exile, who returns and begins to campaign for social change. Consider also a woman who is sexually abused, attacked and raped or the female vagrant. This is the possible territory called into reference by Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994), see Poems pp. 412-416, where there are a series of explicit journeys out and back by the poem’s implied participants. What happens in these examples is a journey out to exile and a journey back, in altered state, with its concomitant changes. Of course, the exiled do not return to exactly the same place as time has elapsed since they left. In a way this is akin to the experience of reading Prynne’s poetry.
Interestingly Prynne has spoken of a poetry that journeys out and back. It is a poetic and critical example that clearly informs Prynne’s method of composition and reading. Prynne reads Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI as having set ‘the literal founding of history and its local cadence into speech extend outwards by feeling into the sacral and divinised forms of presence upon the earth’s surface’ and established as primary writing, ‘with a lingual and temporal syncretism, poised to make a new order’. In other words it places language as a mythological likeness resting on the earth through geological time and the monogene which ‘reaches back into two entwined histories: the geochronology of land-formation and cytochronology of biochemical evolution’. (Charles Olson, Maximus Poems IV, V, VI: J.H. Prynne The Park 4 & 5 Summer 1969 pp. 64-66)
In his 1971 Simon Fraser University lectures on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, Prynne equates the homecoming of Maximus with the homecoming of The Odyssey and argues that the poem brings in the cosmos, that is knowledge of the universe considered as whole. At the beginning of Maximus IV, V, VI the narrative turns back from the sea, by which the narrator, for Prynne, means space and the large condition of the cosmos. For Olson to look from the Gloucester coast out into the Atlantic is to look into the whole economic support of early New England settlement and to look back to the mid-Atlantic ridges, that is to the residues of the birth of the earth. Olson then has an outward journey and inward journey, stretching lyricism into epic through the folding back of the voyage out. Prynne argues that each of the Maximus fragments participates in the whole so that it is literal and not an insistence of something else and therefore escapes metaphor. As such this leads to a condition of being, which is beyond the condition of meaning. The arc of the Maximus Poems is a singular journey to the limits of space and back to local historical roots achieved as a curvature that moves beyond the lyric into the condition of myth. (See Minutes of the Charles Olson Society No 28 April 1999 pp. 3-13 for J.H. Prynne’s 1971 Simon Fraser lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI)
Olson provided Prynne with a modern epic template, of the journey out and back, and of poetry that places language on earth in geophysical time through the monogene. Prynne has extended this model into a reading experience that is uniquely his own, redolent with acute vocabularies and terse energy points. He offers encounters with language and the various discourses that impinge upon the individual showing how the individual is formed by processes that are outside immediate perception and cognition. His movement beyond metaphorical language seems to be entirely consistent with the scope of his initial enquiries and an attempt to find a more adequate measure of discursive pressures. Recurrent figures and sound patterns replace normative narratives. The use of juxtaposition and enjambment to move seamlessly from one thought or perception to another is done, as Olson advised in his 1950 ‘Projective Verse’ essay, at speed so as to bring seeming disparate discourses or elements of discourses into the sphere of activity being registered. Olson’s impact on Prynne is most noticeable in his early work, especially The White Stones, which can be read, in part, as an investigation of the transfer of language to the human account. It is Olson’s 1959 ‘Human Universe’ essay that forms a backbone to the collection’s frame of reference. In this essay Olson saw all post-Socratic philosophy as a false discourse of logic, classification and idealism, as opposed to a discourse that takes language as an action upon the real. ‘We have lived long in a generalizing time, at least since 450BC’ he wrote and went on to distinguish between ‘language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant’. (See A Charles Olson Reader: Ralph Maud Carcanet 2005 page 113) To Olson, Aristotelian logic and classification have fastened themselves on habits of thought so that action is absolutely interfered with. In other words, the habits of thought are the habits of action, collapsing language from an instrument into an absolute with the Greeks declaring all speculation as enclosed in the ‘universe of discourse’. Olson calls for a writing that does not fall back ‘on the dodges of discourse’, a demonstration, a separating out, a classification. ‘ For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare’. (A Charles Olson Reader page 114) This could surely stand as a preface to the work of Prynne’s Poems. Olson further notes that a thing impinges upon us by self-existence, without reference to any other thing, by its particularity that is to be found beyond reference and description and wants to bear in rather than away from a thing so as to discover and reveal.
Olson’s Maximus and ‘Human Universe’ essay, combined with Homer’s epic The Odyssey, leads Prynne and the reader to consider the exile in terms of the founding moment of historical self-awareness and, at the same time, as the site of various philosophical and individual splits and boundaries. It is the exile posited on the material foundation of historical change or reinstatement and displaced from any singular viewpoint. By challenging our ordinary linguistic ordering of the world, beginning with an analysis of concept formation in the financial world, Prynne’s poetry makes us question the way in which we make sense of things.
SoHereWeAre
In February 2004, Randall Stevenson writing in The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12 1960-2000: The Last of England? (OUP 2004) inadvertently sparked a media controversy by suggesting that the achievements of experimental poets, such as J.H. Prynne, would be of more lasting significance than that of the Movement poets. The value of J.H. Prynne’s poetry was debated in newspapers and on the radio but not seriously engaged with. As I regularly get asked about the value of Prynne’s poetry, I thought that I might offer some contextualising notes as a preliminary to reading his Poems (Bloodaxe 2005).
The arc of Prynne’s poetry over the past forty years may be said to have broadly moved from a metaphorically based open field lyricism towards a metonymic and etymological challenge to the reader. It is, above all, concerned with encouraging the reader on a journey, involving a reading process that avoids closure. It is about the journey, that is a continual process, towards meaning and comprehension rather than finding answers. It places utterance within the political and socio-economic predicament of the individual in relation to its historical and geographical landscape. One might say that it is one journey of utterance that acknowledges the boundaries and thresholds of the individual, through and across the nuances and shifts of language and historical time. It draws upon specific discourses and their appeal to knowledge, both provisional and substantive, within the languages of criticism and human sciences and beyond. It is a poetic utterance that looks back to the earliest epic and founding literature and forward beyond any postmodernist position. It has enlarged the focus of the poet beyond the reference frames registered by Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. It appeals to a community of speakers, readers and writers, cognizant of the fact that all are in a series of markets and hierarchies of language and discourse outlays, without privilege.
This work is substantially supported by critical essays, such as ‘Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words’ (The William Matthews Lectures 1992 Birkbeck 1993), where Prynne reassessed the arbitrariness that Ferdinand de Saussure famously attributed to the signifier and signified and emphasized a set of secondary relations through which meaning developed such as historical contexts and usages, accumulated layers and aspects of association, social function and usage codes, and practical criticism, such as They That Haue Powre To Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Cambridge 2001) and Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper And Others (Cambridge 2007 distributed by Barque Press) that shows an exceptional regard to determining the fullest context and meaning of a poem. Each word and phrase in a poem has a philological and etymological base that returns the reader to things and the world of which they are a part. The words used enact and sustain the relations and forces between language and the world.
Two words invariably used to describe the initial experience of reading the Poems are ‘arid’ and ‘difficult’. ‘Arid’, as if it were written in a desert. That is to say that it is often missing the props of mainstream metaphorical poetry that enables a quick grasp of meaning, intention and the scope of the poem under review. It is what is called ‘difficult’ poetry. It is, as it were, poetry of the desert. I shall now pursue these two notions as a way of locating the literary context to the Poems.
Poetry written from the desert, of whatever order, may be seen as poetry of exile. One thinks of Ovid, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the post-holocaust poetry of Edmund Jabés and Paul Celan. The critic. T.W. Adorno wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, we can no longer write poetry’. It was Jabés who wrote that after Auschwitz, we must write poetry, but with wounded words’ and in conversation with Mark C Taylor, who said: ‘It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey into the desert. You do not go into the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. And something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak’. (Edmund Jabés The Book of Margins: Translated Rosemarie Waldrop Chicago 1993) Further exiled or self-imposed exiled poetry has a social position and literary effect. By dint of being outside the social-literary mainstream, it is more able to comment inwards on the prevailing socio-political conditions. One thinks of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry ability to comment upon Stalinist Russia and the purges and so on. Prynne’s poetry, like Jabés and Akmatova, may be seen in broad moral and literary terms as a profound reaction to the historic events of the twentieth century and beyond.
J.H. Prynne’s social-literary position can be seen as a self-imposed exile. He has been, for example, excluded from such literary reference books as The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Margaret Drabble (OUP 2000) and taken moral decisions on the integrity of how and where his poetry and criticism appears.
His exact social-literary position is complex, given its predominantly exile status. Born in 1936, Jeremy Prynne was raised in Kent and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. His mother ran a private nursery school for boys and girls and his father was an engineer. At Cambridge he met the poet and critic, Donald Davie, who supported his early intellectual direction. Like Davie, this was a move away from the insular concerns of the Movement to the richer intellectual concerns of new American and European poetry. Davie’s study, Thomas Hardy And Modern Poetry (1973) offers an early account of Prynne’s poetry. A Life Fellow, College Librarian and University Reader in English Poetry until his retirement at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he works on all aspects of the English poetic tradition, including writings of American, European and Far Eastern origin. In his teaching capacity, his enthusiasm for sharing and generosity of spirit towards many students is well known and helped to develop a wide readership base. However, this is only part of the story. Prynne’s poetry emerged as part of an avant-garde discussion and readership outside of the literary market place. This began with Prynne’s editorship of Prospect magazine in 1964 and continued with his mimeographing and distributing The English Intelligencer, a literary newsletter, between January 1966 and April 1968.
The English Intelligencer was an attempt to organise a new collective poetics that focussed upon producing ‘quality’ work. Drawing upon a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, it was distributed for free to an expanding mailing list. Poems, essays and comments were shared without cost and exchange value. The Intelligencer occupied a space between a private letter and public book and embodied a shared community opposition to market commodification.
J.H. Prynne was a key figure in its articulation of the language and poetics of ‘quality’ in opposition to the language of commodity. Essentially he wanted to rescue a concept of ‘quality’ from its financial meaning to make it viable outside of a purely market lexicon. In the poem, ‘Sketch For A Financial Theory Of the Self’ (Poems pp 19-20), which first appeared Series 1 no.17, Prynne probes the relationship between word (name) and object within the economic field and suggests the ways it impacts on the self. He writes of how words and poems and quality, as habit, have been reduced to monetary objects by which we define ourselves. He notes that we are duped into a reductive cash flow nexus: ‘The absurd trust in value is the pattern of / bond and contract and interest -’ and ‘Music, / travel, habit and silence are all money; purity / is a glissade into the last, most beautiful return.’ He extended his thinking on quality and money with ‘A Note On Metal’ (The English Intelligencer second series June 1967, appended to Aristeas (1968, Poems pp.127-132). Here quality is seen in terms of property (strength) and substance. He looks back to the origins of money as coin (gold) and Western alchemy, defined as ‘the theory of quality as essential’. He differentiates between early Asiatic socio-economic formations where coins were the ornament of power rather than currency of value and early Greek economies where it is the substance governing transfer as exchange. This thinking is brought historically up to date in the poem, ‘Die a Millionaire’ from Kitchen Poems (1968), where the ‘twist-point / is “purchase” – what the mind / bites on is yours’ … ‘we are the social strand / which is already past the twist-point & / into the furnace’ … so that what I am is a special case of / what we want, the twist-point missed exactly / at the nation’s scrawny neck.’ (Poems pp 13-16)
The English Intelligencer by removing a formal ownership and exchange value thus produced a newsletter divorced from the literary market. In so doing, they showed that words and poems, as objects, have properties beyond their meanings and exchange value within the community. This move can be seen as an extension of the work and thinking of the Objectivist Press and poets, such as George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsy, who searched for a language outside of the ideology and practice of commodification.
The English Intelligencer fostered intense interest in a wide range of poetries and philosophy. These included Ezra Pound and the Imagists, William Carlos Williams and the poetry of things, the Objectivist poets, the Black Mountain College poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School poets, such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and the European post-holocaust poets, such as Jabés and Celan. Beyond that widening flux of alternative poetries, Prynne continued his readings within the English tradition, especially the Romantic and Elizabethan poets, and within modern European philosophy, including Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and the issues of language, being and the phenomenology of perception raised by their work. Amongst the questions that this reading raised would be the notion of the autonomy of the text and whether there is a singleness and moral structure to immediate knowledge. (For a discussion of these issues see ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview’ by Kevin Nolan Jacket 24 www.jacketcom November 2003 pp 1-37)
Against a backdrop of growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War, civil disobedience in relation to women’s, gay, environmental issues, industrial strife, a balance of trade deficit that led to the devaluation of the pound and student ‘revolt into style’, structuralism moved across from linguistics and anthropology cutting into sociological, historical, philosophical, psychiatric and critical thought, with the concept of the de-centred subject and de-centring of the structure impacting upon thinking within European human sciences. Doubtless buoyed by E.P. Thompson’s articulation of the impact of literary, satirical and political presses in the early nineteenth century in The Making of the English Working Class (1968) and Jeff Nuttall’s overview of more recent oppositional publishing and culture in Bomb Culture (1968), several English Intelligencer contributors became small press publishers. It was through these regional activists that J.H. Prynne chose to publish most of his early work. (e.g. Day Light Songs Resuscitator Books, Pampisford 1968, Aristeas Ferry Press, London 1968, The White Stones Grosseteste Press, Lincoln 1969) and Fire Lizard Blacksuede Boot Press, Barnet 1970)
Prynne’s early readership then consisted of friends, the avant-garde poets, intellectuals and critics associated with The English Intelligencer, his colleagues and students. The nature of his communication with that growing audience took the form of his poetry and a contribution to the thinking and reading of that audience. It always already posits a literary-social position in relation to a mode of poetic communication that involves questioning before and beyond any current ideology of text, authorship, intention and process of marketing and entails a wandering across and through both language and the literary canon. Over time he deepens and widens that range, by attempting not to suppress variable meaning and knowledge that impinge upon a thing, so that the reader might question various knowledge thresholds, in particular such concepts as ‘totality’, ‘immediate experience’ and ‘textual autonomy’.
Turning to the notion of ‘difficulty’. This familiar notion in the poetry world is encountered in the first line of the first poem, the magically sonic, ‘The Numbers’: ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’. A note to the 1982 edition of Poems (Allardyce Barnett Books) referred to ‘difficulty as being the ardent matter and accompanying breadth of imaginative and political reference’. In other words, it is inherent in the matter addressed as the forces and relations of production and consumption already taint the nuances of languages and knowledge. There is no impartial discourse. ‘Difficulty’, though, is not misleading, that is to say the reader is either able to grasp something or not. It perhaps implies that the conflicting and impartial knowledge at work is beyond the reach of one reader and some of these poems are beyond comprehension, through the uncertainty of variable meaning. However, it should, at least, be seen as relative and in relation to ‘simplicity’. A seemingly transparent and simple poem, such as Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, may require considerable critical work in disentangling the complexity of discourses, method and intentionality and possible effects registered, in the same way as a ‘difficult’ poem as so much of its sub-text is out of view. This can perhaps be described as ‘subtlety’ in all its guises. Both ‘difficult’ and ‘simple’ poems demand intellectual work and are initially conditioned by prejudicial readings and the disposition towards response and effect. In other words, some poems produce effects and reference knowledge that are unseen or unread by certain readers and that is governed by reading history and preferences as much as ability of the reader. An awareness of that history, conditioned as it is by ethnic, social, educational, psychological and other factors, and its prejudice, may help dissolve some of the weariness generated by poems that refuse to be read. At the macro-level, it might help reader appreciate the divide between those who read poems as language only and those who read poems as social process only and show the need to resist closure on either side of the fence. ‘Difficulty’ can be distinguished from ‘subtlety’, meaning that which is not obvious in any way, possessing small and important data, often implying cleverness through its ability to withhold and disguise. Subtlety, then, wants to be acknowledged rather than seen. Difficulty, in contrast, has intrinsic value in the sense that a poem retains its vitality over time, as in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, and implies an openness or opening towards the complex. It is potentially much less elitist than a work of subtlety.
The arc of Prynne’s poetry may be seen as moving further into exile, a deepening of the challenge to the reader, as a method of registering wider referents, on the basis that might be a focal point of social and ethical or literary change. Consider the examples of Blake and Kafka, as psychological exiles, self-imposed or not, and the ways their work has entered the language. Now consider, at the micro-level, the individual forced by exceptional circumstances, e.g. the loss of several high school friends to suicide, into self-imposed exile, who returns and begins to campaign for social change. Consider also a woman who is sexually abused, attacked and raped or the female vagrant. This is the possible territory called into reference by Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994), see Poems pp. 412-416, where there are a series of explicit journeys out and back by the poem’s implied participants. What happens in these examples is a journey out to exile and a journey back, in altered state, with its concomitant changes. Of course, the exiled do not return to exactly the same place as time has elapsed since they left. In a way this is akin to the experience of reading Prynne’s poetry.
Interestingly Prynne has spoken of a poetry that journeys out and back. It is a poetic and critical example that clearly informs Prynne’s method of composition and reading. Prynne reads Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI as having set ‘the literal founding of history and its local cadence into speech extend outwards by feeling into the sacral and divinised forms of presence upon the earth’s surface’ and established as primary writing, ‘with a lingual and temporal syncretism, poised to make a new order’. In other words it places language as a mythological likeness resting on the earth through geological time and the monogene which ‘reaches back into two entwined histories: the geochronology of land-formation and cytochronology of biochemical evolution’. (Charles Olson, Maximus Poems IV, V, VI: J.H. Prynne The Park 4 & 5 Summer 1969 pp. 64-66)
In his 1971 Simon Fraser University lectures on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, Prynne equates the homecoming of Maximus with the homecoming of The Odyssey and argues that the poem brings in the cosmos, that is knowledge of the universe considered as whole. At the beginning of Maximus IV, V, VI the narrative turns back from the sea, by which the narrator, for Prynne, means space and the large condition of the cosmos. For Olson to look from the Gloucester coast out into the Atlantic is to look into the whole economic support of early New England settlement and to look back to the mid-Atlantic ridges, that is to the residues of the birth of the earth. Olson then has an outward journey and inward journey, stretching lyricism into epic through the folding back of the voyage out. Prynne argues that each of the Maximus fragments participates in the whole so that it is literal and not an insistence of something else and therefore escapes metaphor. As such this leads to a condition of being, which is beyond the condition of meaning. The arc of the Maximus Poems is a singular journey to the limits of space and back to local historical roots achieved as a curvature that moves beyond the lyric into the condition of myth. (See Minutes of the Charles Olson Society No 28 April 1999 pp. 3-13 for J.H. Prynne’s 1971 Simon Fraser lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI)
Olson provided Prynne with a modern epic template, of the journey out and back, and of poetry that places language on earth in geophysical time through the monogene. Prynne has extended this model into a reading experience that is uniquely his own, redolent with acute vocabularies and terse energy points. He offers encounters with language and the various discourses that impinge upon the individual showing how the individual is formed by processes that are outside immediate perception and cognition. His movement beyond metaphorical language seems to be entirely consistent with the scope of his initial enquiries and an attempt to find a more adequate measure of discursive pressures. Recurrent figures and sound patterns replace normative narratives. The use of juxtaposition and enjambment to move seamlessly from one thought or perception to another is done, as Olson advised in his 1950 ‘Projective Verse’ essay, at speed so as to bring seeming disparate discourses or elements of discourses into the sphere of activity being registered. Olson’s impact on Prynne is most noticeable in his early work, especially The White Stones, which can be read, in part, as an investigation of the transfer of language to the human account. It is Olson’s 1959 ‘Human Universe’ essay that forms a backbone to the collection’s frame of reference. In this essay Olson saw all post-Socratic philosophy as a false discourse of logic, classification and idealism, as opposed to a discourse that takes language as an action upon the real. ‘We have lived long in a generalizing time, at least since 450BC’ he wrote and went on to distinguish between ‘language as the act of the instant and language as the act of thought about the instant’. (See A Charles Olson Reader: Ralph Maud Carcanet 2005 page 113) To Olson, Aristotelian logic and classification have fastened themselves on habits of thought so that action is absolutely interfered with. In other words, the habits of thought are the habits of action, collapsing language from an instrument into an absolute with the Greeks declaring all speculation as enclosed in the ‘universe of discourse’. Olson calls for a writing that does not fall back ‘on the dodges of discourse’, a demonstration, a separating out, a classification. ‘ For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare’. (A Charles Olson Reader page 114) This could surely stand as a preface to the work of Prynne’s Poems. Olson further notes that a thing impinges upon us by self-existence, without reference to any other thing, by its particularity that is to be found beyond reference and description and wants to bear in rather than away from a thing so as to discover and reveal.
Olson’s Maximus and ‘Human Universe’ essay, combined with Homer’s epic The Odyssey, leads Prynne and the reader to consider the exile in terms of the founding moment of historical self-awareness and, at the same time, as the site of various philosophical and individual splits and boundaries. It is the exile posited on the material foundation of historical change or reinstatement and displaced from any singular viewpoint. By challenging our ordinary linguistic ordering of the world, beginning with an analysis of concept formation in the financial world, Prynne’s poetry makes us question the way in which we make sense of things.
Thursday, 29 May 2008
Letter 13
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio.
SoHereWeAre
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position.
Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward.
I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work.
Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America.
Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral?
His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority.
This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context.
Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one.
By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed.
The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language.
The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think.
William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are clear. By implication he rejects two recent ideas that seem to me to be misleading. One that the pastoral is solely a discourse of retreat and two that its age has ended, as suggested in Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (Routledge 1999) and elsewhere. He sees the radical pastoral as occupying the fringe areas between the rural and urban and between speech / writing and thought. (p.67) Although the pastoral is a discourse of ideological accommodation the anti-pastoral can be read as breaking new ground and making us think anew as Ralegh, Shakespeare, Milton and Courbet, the painter, have shown. I would like to suggest though that the response to the pastoral, and that arguably includes the anti-pastoral, is to do its opposite that is as Elizabeth Cook has written of my work ‘to repeatedly unpack the simple to examine the latent complexity of implication and relationship’ (Elizabeth Cook ‘Man In Black: David Caddy’ The Use of English Vol. 60 No. 2 Summer 2008) within the context of a localised and deeper social history.
Coming to The New Arcadia after reading Disclosed Poetics, it is surprisingly orthodox and simple. Promoted as a response to Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1580) it employs irony to present the ‘new’ Arcadia not in a ‘feigned’ or fantasy realm but in modern rural Western Australia with all the downsides of rural life being used to present the anti-pastoral.
The Old Arcadia, a prose romance with poems and Eclogues, is a virtuoso performance of French and Italian forms transposed into English verse. Sidney wrote this way for the music and passions that the words could excite. The Eclogues are largely songs and recitations on such themes as marriage, melancholy and death presented during singing competitions that provide the pretext for the metrical complexity and experiment introduced by each singer. The work’s success is derived from the tension between the formal experiments and thematic exploration involving enormous inventiveness and a full command of English.
The New Arcadia is divided into five acts, each beginning with
a narrative drive poem that provides a temporal snapshot and ending with an Eclogue, and employs a range of registers characterised by a modulated musical language. It has a graceful flow with flourishes of higher pitched narration depicting the Avon Valley, east of Perth, beset with unsettling relationships between people, animals, birds and plants.
Compared to the Old Arcadia, it is not a dramatic literary construct designed to advance thinking about moral and emotional behaviour. There is plenty of death and invention and a relative lack of love poems. It is written at speed as if there is a need to cover a wide region rather than localised space and consequently the speakers have more neutral than dialect voices. The lack of rough edges to the poetry somewhat mitigates against seeing this as a true opposite to the Old Arcadia where all the characters portrayed are good poets. The narrator explains that ‘People measure lives by the miles / they’ve chewed up’ and that there’s ‘a lot of bad poetry here’.
The New Arcadia is best seen as anti-pastoral rather than radical pastoral. Anti-pastoral has a long tradition at least going back to Ralegh’s ‘The Nymphs Reply To The Shepherd’ (1600) satirical riposte to Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ (1600) and would include Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1736), Mary Collier’s reply The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck (1739). Interestingly, these and other anti-pastoral poems became read as pastoral poems and that may eventually happen to Kinsella’s work. Indeed rather than seeing the touchstone of the break with the pastoral in Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ there is an alternative tradition provided by Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794, which involves a much different use of language. The anti-pastoral satirical tradition of Ralegh and Milton is relevant to this tradition and I was surprised not to see reference to this work in Kinsella’s largely autobiographical chapter on ageing in Disclosed Poetics. Briefly the Arcadian world of conventions and cycles of conflicting judgements about country and city, male and female, and the contrary states of youth, maturity and old age, are brought under great strain from within. As Ralegh says in ‘The Nymph’s Reply To The Shepherd’
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckonong yields:
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, -
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
It may be then that Ralegh and Milton were interested, as Kinsella is now, in undoing the mechanics of the pastoral from within. However, the anti-pastoral should move forward and explore the tensions and contradictions between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine selves, the country and city, the workings of globalisation as it impacts upon rural economies, landowner and tenant and farm worker, tenant and farm worker.
One of Kinsella’s strengths is his eagerness to be open about his various subject positions and an ability to acknowledge his own prejudices. As he writes in Disclosed Poetics (p. xi), ‘Ploughing a field on Wheatlands when I was eighteen is every bit as important to me as first reading Deleuze and Guattari, and being a vegan as essential as enjoying the poetry of Shelley. In my adult life, the teaching of poetry has become inseparable from my poetics: I teach what and how I have learnt so others can learn for themselves. I am interested in offering approaches and processes, not end results. The unfinished intrigues me.’
Although his family and farm, Wheatlands, are mentioned in The New Arcadia, his exact relationship to the land is not examined or presented. Although it is possible to infer that parents within the range of large landowner to smallholder raised him, the exact conditions and status are excluded. The value of this information is relevant to questions concerning who worked and originally lived on the land.
His ‘Eclogue Of Presence’ (pp. 96-101) does though raise the question of ownership and land access.
Farmer
Everything you see stretched between river and hills
is mine, and you need my permission to cross even the
gullies
that run along the fenceline - I’ve see you hanging
around in the scrub,
looking the place over – well. I’ll warn you, I hear a noise
and shoot first …. you think being up so early in the
morning
will keep me from knowing, think again – and my eyes see
into the evening.
Young Bloke
This scrub is for anyone to walk through, unna? And when
evening
comes we don’t hang around anyway, there’s spirits that
come of the hills
that’ll get even a bloke like you. In the early morning
we come from town to watch the roos leap the gullies
and escape from your farm before machine-noise
makes them afraid, before they vanish into the scrub.
Farmer
If a kangaroo has a go at my crops and takes to the scrub
I’ll go straight after it, or waiting until evening
where I’ll catch it on a trail with a spotlight, and the noise
they hear will be the sound of death come down from the
hills,
down from my house where guns are loaded, no gullies
will protect them, and they’ll never see morning.
Young Bloke
My dad says your family brought mourning
to my cousins, unna? And though the mallee scrub
hides your killing, and though the gullies
are choked silent with wire and sheep carcasses, evening
brings a light that shows the dead the way up to the hills
where they fill the darkness and occupy every noise.
The Eclogue continues giving voice to the Farmer and young
Aborigine and effectively contrasts their different views of the land as an unresolved debate. Many other poems perform the same function of presenting unresolved tensions and conflicts.
White Cockatoos
Spectres inverting sunlit
paddocks after late rain
field into quadrature out
of blind-spots, raucous
it’s said, like broken glass
in a nature reserve
but that’s no comparison;
cowslip orchids’ yellow parameters
curl like tin, or cowslip orchids’
yellow parameters reflect clusters
of white feathers from canopies
of wandoos or sheaths of flight,
down in deep green crops
ready to turn when rains are gone,
beaks turned back toward
whereabouts unknown,
but almost certain to appear,
at least as atmosphere. (p. 56)
Disclosed Poetics provides the poem’s context by explaining the role and function of parrots in Australian poetry and culture as political and environmental symbols. The poem plays on the knowledge that white cockatoos are pests that eat crops and fruit and the paradox between its familiarity as an object of splendour and derision. The poem’s own acknowledged failure in the ‘broken glass’ simile thus leads to the larger realisation that the poem only partially grasps the actual impact of such birds on the psyche.
Given the way that the pastoral ideology works to incorporate its opposite within its own dialectic The New Arcadia, despite its flourishes in poems such as, ‘Extreme Conditions Occasion The Fox’, ‘Dead Wood And Scorpions’ and the Reflectors poems, does lack in linguistic disobedience. It is to Kinsella’s enormous credit that he has produced a most unusual book that more than questions the foundations of his critically successful poetry.
Saturday, 19 April 2008
Letter 12
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio
SoHereWeAre
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.
SoHereWeAre
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.
Friday, 14 March 2008
Letter 11
Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio
SoHereWeAre
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.
SoHereWeAre
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.
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