dubious generalisations
Generalisations about the Thatcher Era
This is part of an attempt to set up generalisations about the shared conditions of the Eighties – the public space surrounding poetry. The generalisations may seem crude, but the need is is for people to say yes or no, so that the generalisations can be confirmed or rejected. The idea is to get beyond individual experience – to reach something with fewer features but wider relevance.
The introduction is built on these generalisations, as they stand, so if people clearly object to them the introduction will be changed. Please use the Comments feature to record disagreement or agreement. ('Eighties' runs up to 1993 or so in this case!)
** (1) The central feature of the Eighties was anxiety as the New Right put through policies which entailed immiseration and insecurity for the largest part of the population, while their lack of any restraint threatened an ever accelerating level of exploitation and exclusion. There was a specific neo-conservative cultural pattern which, while it was hardly significant compared to the brute economic facts of de-industrialisation, was more scary because it was more intimate.
(2) It is rational to identify a generation defined as “debuts between 1980 and 1993” or “born (roughly) between 1950 to 1963”. But there is no agreed story of the characteristics, of style or attitude, of this generation. Arguably, they did not connect with each other – and went off in different directions.
(3) While it might not be true that the editors of Poetry Review were literally libertarian capitalists, it was true that their dislike of political poetry and of technical experiment put into practice a dislike of political change and the progress theory of history. These things reflected the anti-marxism of their paymasters. The connection was made unconsciously – the disturbing ideas caused anxiety and so came to be defined as bad taste or aggression.
(4) Non-compromise in style was a metaphor for saying no to the new Right culture. This was a response to community pressure rather than to simple indifference to classical values. Acts of artistic freedom were moments where symbolic rebellion became symbolic authority. It was half the kingdom. The authorising audience didn't want artists who fitted in.
(5) Having scrapped hierarchy, you didn‘t abolish the belief in rank. You faced two sets of laws, the official one and the radical one.
(6) The cultural temperature went down in the 1980s and the newer generation of underground poets did not have as high a cultural profile as the one which thrived in the 1970s. Indeed, many people active in the 1970s no longer followed the development of poetry, and assumed that it had stopped.
(7) There was no basis for rejecting Thatcherism unless there was a notion of behavioural beauty and beautiful interaction against which to measure it and find it horrible. Art was not simply going to protect a symmetry by reproducing the bad experiences caused by Thatcherism, essentially owned by Thatcherism, in a condition hypnotised by its malign stare and demonstrating its power.
(8) It may be that nobody born in the 1950s wrote new poems attached to the Movement idiom. Homberger says that Formalism (a metrical habit correlated with conservative literary values) was fading, and starting to seem incongruous, by 1962. (Art of the Real, pp. 86-90) So we are not looking at the original Cold War Christian academic conservatism as an option for poets finishing their first book around 1980. The mainstream of the time could be divided into perhaps ten separate groups. Several of these groups were in rapid evolution after 1970. Further, the gatekeepers were becoming more open-minded.
(9) There was some unnameable point at which the New Right wave broke. This was not a single moment, even if it was the most important moment in our lives, although the 1992 general election, in the United Kingdom, clearly marked the end of Tory hegemony (even if they were in power for another five years).
(10) The Underground in the decade was 80 or 90% male. Explanations for this are still sought. When the Paladin new british poetry came out, there was a real incompatibility between the “feminist” section and the two “alternative” sections. One way of putting this is that the feminists of that wave were linguistically conventional in order to bring a didactic message to a wide audience.
(11) In this realm poets are normally judged by the quality of their critique. They release the sociological imagination and make us see what is really there, not just what is subjective and imaginary.
(12) The poetry of the time evolved under the pressure of audience expectations, mediated by the intense sensitivity of the poets to the grandiose and exacting schemes and predilections of the underground population. So it seems that we should start with the audience.
(13) The new organs of power were too rapacious to leave art alone. Once you were in the same room with the neo-cons, they were going to strip away any moment of deviance. Someone had to create an autonomous space – one of complex fulfilment or total deviance, whichever.
(14) We have the Small Press Directory for 1997, and this has an Index of authors published by ALP members. It is 40 pages long. Analysis suggests that the ones who are “British and poets” total about 764. This may be an indicator of how many alternative poets were publishing in the 1980s. (This is not a robust figure. For example, we assume that only alternative publishers would find it useful to be ALP members. Also, micro-publishers may have put out “underground” material without being able to afford ALP membership.)
(15) Face to face interactions were important and this suggests that regional clusters were part of the cultural inventory. But abstract connections were also important, poems wrapped up in print. There weren’t any regions where every poet was “alternative”. The probability is that the “alternative” thing was distributed everywhere and bound by shared texts and values.
(16) The arrival of new magazines around 1990 (fragmente, Parataxis, Angel Exhaust) created a social setting for new poetry and reduced feelings of isolation among poets.
This is part of an attempt to set up generalisations about the shared conditions of the Eighties – the public space surrounding poetry. The generalisations may seem crude, but the need is is for people to say yes or no, so that the generalisations can be confirmed or rejected. The idea is to get beyond individual experience – to reach something with fewer features but wider relevance.
The introduction is built on these generalisations, as they stand, so if people clearly object to them the introduction will be changed. Please use the Comments feature to record disagreement or agreement. ('Eighties' runs up to 1993 or so in this case!)
** (1) The central feature of the Eighties was anxiety as the New Right put through policies which entailed immiseration and insecurity for the largest part of the population, while their lack of any restraint threatened an ever accelerating level of exploitation and exclusion. There was a specific neo-conservative cultural pattern which, while it was hardly significant compared to the brute economic facts of de-industrialisation, was more scary because it was more intimate.
(2) It is rational to identify a generation defined as “debuts between 1980 and 1993” or “born (roughly) between 1950 to 1963”. But there is no agreed story of the characteristics, of style or attitude, of this generation. Arguably, they did not connect with each other – and went off in different directions.
(3) While it might not be true that the editors of Poetry Review were literally libertarian capitalists, it was true that their dislike of political poetry and of technical experiment put into practice a dislike of political change and the progress theory of history. These things reflected the anti-marxism of their paymasters. The connection was made unconsciously – the disturbing ideas caused anxiety and so came to be defined as bad taste or aggression.
(4) Non-compromise in style was a metaphor for saying no to the new Right culture. This was a response to community pressure rather than to simple indifference to classical values. Acts of artistic freedom were moments where symbolic rebellion became symbolic authority. It was half the kingdom. The authorising audience didn't want artists who fitted in.
(5) Having scrapped hierarchy, you didn‘t abolish the belief in rank. You faced two sets of laws, the official one and the radical one.
(6) The cultural temperature went down in the 1980s and the newer generation of underground poets did not have as high a cultural profile as the one which thrived in the 1970s. Indeed, many people active in the 1970s no longer followed the development of poetry, and assumed that it had stopped.
(7) There was no basis for rejecting Thatcherism unless there was a notion of behavioural beauty and beautiful interaction against which to measure it and find it horrible. Art was not simply going to protect a symmetry by reproducing the bad experiences caused by Thatcherism, essentially owned by Thatcherism, in a condition hypnotised by its malign stare and demonstrating its power.
(8) It may be that nobody born in the 1950s wrote new poems attached to the Movement idiom. Homberger says that Formalism (a metrical habit correlated with conservative literary values) was fading, and starting to seem incongruous, by 1962. (Art of the Real, pp. 86-90) So we are not looking at the original Cold War Christian academic conservatism as an option for poets finishing their first book around 1980. The mainstream of the time could be divided into perhaps ten separate groups. Several of these groups were in rapid evolution after 1970. Further, the gatekeepers were becoming more open-minded.
(9) There was some unnameable point at which the New Right wave broke. This was not a single moment, even if it was the most important moment in our lives, although the 1992 general election, in the United Kingdom, clearly marked the end of Tory hegemony (even if they were in power for another five years).
(10) The Underground in the decade was 80 or 90% male. Explanations for this are still sought. When the Paladin new british poetry came out, there was a real incompatibility between the “feminist” section and the two “alternative” sections. One way of putting this is that the feminists of that wave were linguistically conventional in order to bring a didactic message to a wide audience.
(11) In this realm poets are normally judged by the quality of their critique. They release the sociological imagination and make us see what is really there, not just what is subjective and imaginary.
(12) The poetry of the time evolved under the pressure of audience expectations, mediated by the intense sensitivity of the poets to the grandiose and exacting schemes and predilections of the underground population. So it seems that we should start with the audience.
(13) The new organs of power were too rapacious to leave art alone. Once you were in the same room with the neo-cons, they were going to strip away any moment of deviance. Someone had to create an autonomous space – one of complex fulfilment or total deviance, whichever.
(14) We have the Small Press Directory for 1997, and this has an Index of authors published by ALP members. It is 40 pages long. Analysis suggests that the ones who are “British and poets” total about 764. This may be an indicator of how many alternative poets were publishing in the 1980s. (This is not a robust figure. For example, we assume that only alternative publishers would find it useful to be ALP members. Also, micro-publishers may have put out “underground” material without being able to afford ALP membership.)
(15) Face to face interactions were important and this suggests that regional clusters were part of the cultural inventory. But abstract connections were also important, poems wrapped up in print. There weren’t any regions where every poet was “alternative”. The probability is that the “alternative” thing was distributed everywhere and bound by shared texts and values.
(16) The arrival of new magazines around 1990 (fragmente, Parataxis, Angel Exhaust) created a social setting for new poetry and reduced feelings of isolation among poets.
Nothing, I suggest, reduced feelings of isolation among poets as much as electronic networks. 1986 saw the development of the listserv http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/history-listserv.asp; 1993 the Buffalo Poetics list, 1996 Ric Caddel's British and Irish Poetry. - Elizabeth J
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