Consensus?
Consensus?
The files have gone to the publisher and we have chosen this moment to send parts of the same files to the poets, for checking. This includes the biographical snippets and this was inherently likely to provoke the poets. To recall, the project didn’t have these and the initial editor didn’t think they were helpful. More like a DJ talking over a record, so why not get straight into the poems. He was overruled by the other editor and the publisher, so we now have Bios, but it turned out that the person who thought they were a bad idea had to write them all. Mysterious. Anyway, we expect the files to go to the designer/ typesetter soon. Correspondence about the proofs has produced some interesting material, of which we give some excerpts below.
“as for huddersfield, there was indeed a period there of synergy, or perhaps synergies, plural, would be more accurate, when we made a lot of noise in an effort to get attention for poets in the area, and in the north more generally, and we were part of a network, of a sort, of like minds in the small press stratum of society. it all faded, as things do, and seems to have left no discernible legacy.“ - Keith Jafrate. This is really interesting and exposes a whole situation we didn’t consider when planning the anthology. I think why this conversation came about is that we had “people who all knew each other”, so not one group, actually, but about three groups “who all knew each other”. The idea arose that this might be hiding a more complex situation and that there might be “alternative nuclei” which we didn’t know anything about. We knew about Keith because of poems in Tears In the Fence, a boundary-crossing magazine, but a moment of thought showed that we could have missed his existence and so, by extension, that we could have missed lots of other people.
Kelvin: “I think the introduction is forensically accurate. The perception of that strange cultural hypnotism with regard to Thatcher and co is exactly the case - I think. Those mind forged manacles came with a very particular design. Robert hits this in his note as well. And Andrew Crozier is an endless source. This form is curious - and I go back to it.
‘The outside has failed
not us but in itself. I want the inside
to know it and not be tainted.'
Also, punk was a bomb that went off at the right time for me, with ripples way beyond noisy songs. It wasn't just flared jeans and long hair that disappeared over night.
Personally, I suppose I was caught up in the history you describe - I didn't really realise how lucky I was to be at Essex University when I was there. (1975-78) It was unselfconsciously liberating. Some of these people teaching me had written books - and you could read the books in the library - and you could write books! And Ralph Hawkins photocopied the whole of the first volume of The Maximus Poems so I could read it. I heard poets read - Bunting, Ed Dorn, Crozier, Doug Oliver. I was the son of an unskilled labourer, making up less than 1% of the undergraduate population then - and all this was just given to me.
Your introduction also reminds me that I can see those times far more clearly now than I did then.”
So the Intro doesn’t even mention the Essex School. It didn’t affect most of our contributors, but the experience of meeting fans of modern poetry face to face was key for this one, and may have been key for all of them. And ideas may have been mainly local – there was no master set of theories which everyone was converging on. Faced with the idea of local scenes which didn’t get wide exposure because the means of marketing and publicity rejected anything unconventional, we have to plunge ahead and publish what we know about. This is the right way to proceed and no doubt people will let us know what we missed.
Graham Hartill: “I'm happy with the poems but have some issues with the introductory blurb, which is factually inaccurate and doesn't, I feel, capture the appropriate vibe. Calling the Cardiff scene in the 8os 'an offshoot of the English Intelligencer school' is just not the way it was. Chris T may have been influenced by the EI as he was by many things, Open Field, The Beats, Jazz, Jung etc etc but the EI stuff was NOT primary - in fact, almost everyone active on the scene, as far as I was aware, knew little or nothing about the poets associated with EI, except in so far as they may have picked up some knowledge through, say, Chris or Peter Finch. The other thing that is a problem for me is the notion of us being an 'offshoot' of anything! Let alone anything so specifically English. This was Wales, and although we spoke and wrote in English and probably voted Labour rather than Plaid (if at all!) we were proud to be not working in England! I think I can make that generalisation.”
- I disagree with the analysis but it may be productive to have positive statements so that people have something concrete to argue about. An early component of the project was the idea of influence – one person said that we should frame the book in terms of who poets were influenced by. The editor felt that this wouldn’t sell even one copy, and just pointed interested readers away from our poets, and towards older poets (generally American ones, in fact). So the next idea was to identify poets who had been influenced by our poets. This proved problematic. The flow of ideas since 1980 has yet to be mapped, but one possibility is that later generations of “alternative poets” missed out on the English (or Welsh?) Underground because it just wasn't visible. Instead, they were turned on by lots of other radical ideas, which actually were freely available on campus and in the shops, but which weren’t usually poems or locally produced. So the source of coherence might be anti-capitalism. Well, nobody owns THAT as a commodity.
Frances Presley writes : ‘The absence of experimental women poets was not just because feminism was associated with mainstream poetry, but because searching out the ‘other’ requires an active commitment. This is true of anthologies, such as Floating Capital: new poets from London, edited by Clarke & Sheppard (1991,) with its small number of women poets, such as Hazel Smith and Virginia Firnberg, some of whom might be ignored in a token selection for another anthology (Kathleen Fraser has written about this). Nevertheless, it was an exciting time to be a young woman poet in London, with a rare opportunity to meet other poets, even though socialist feminism and experimental poetry would not be an obvious choice until the 1990s’.
This was supposed to be added to the Introduction but it also criticises the editors, suggesting that the relatively low share of women poets is due to the lack of “active commitment” by the editors, and not to other reasons. So a slightly edited version, implying that the editors might be sane and human after all, has been used.
We weren't sure if this was a criticism of 'Floating Capital' or the reverse.
From an email (an editor to a Poet): “I feel bad, because you did a lot of work assembling your version of The Generation and we didn’t use any of it. It would be interesting to have similar lists from another two dozen people. I think you would just find that they had completely differing views of what the cultural context was.
I fear that I had, early on, a feeling that there was a Consensus and that if we had enough discussion with enough people it would emerge In Shining Letters and we could simply write it down. But the inputs we have suggest that nobody agrees about anything.
I have a scheme whereby each of the 28 poets gets two votes, which they can use to vote either for or against other poets in the list. People with less than 1 vote disappear. I think after three rounds you would be down to two or three people. But it would be democratic.
Editors could cover their expenses by selling extra votes to people.
It would be legal to vote against yourself. People have their rights.”
Poets do have a sense of belonging to a group. But the 28 poets in the book probably belong to two dozen different groups. Every time you start to talk about details, the sense starts to move further away from most of the poets, not closer to them. They don't like that.
The files have gone to the publisher and we have chosen this moment to send parts of the same files to the poets, for checking. This includes the biographical snippets and this was inherently likely to provoke the poets. To recall, the project didn’t have these and the initial editor didn’t think they were helpful. More like a DJ talking over a record, so why not get straight into the poems. He was overruled by the other editor and the publisher, so we now have Bios, but it turned out that the person who thought they were a bad idea had to write them all. Mysterious. Anyway, we expect the files to go to the designer/ typesetter soon. Correspondence about the proofs has produced some interesting material, of which we give some excerpts below.
“as for huddersfield, there was indeed a period there of synergy, or perhaps synergies, plural, would be more accurate, when we made a lot of noise in an effort to get attention for poets in the area, and in the north more generally, and we were part of a network, of a sort, of like minds in the small press stratum of society. it all faded, as things do, and seems to have left no discernible legacy.“ - Keith Jafrate. This is really interesting and exposes a whole situation we didn’t consider when planning the anthology. I think why this conversation came about is that we had “people who all knew each other”, so not one group, actually, but about three groups “who all knew each other”. The idea arose that this might be hiding a more complex situation and that there might be “alternative nuclei” which we didn’t know anything about. We knew about Keith because of poems in Tears In the Fence, a boundary-crossing magazine, but a moment of thought showed that we could have missed his existence and so, by extension, that we could have missed lots of other people.
Kelvin: “I think the introduction is forensically accurate. The perception of that strange cultural hypnotism with regard to Thatcher and co is exactly the case - I think. Those mind forged manacles came with a very particular design. Robert hits this in his note as well. And Andrew Crozier is an endless source. This form is curious - and I go back to it.
‘The outside has failed
not us but in itself. I want the inside
to know it and not be tainted.'
Also, punk was a bomb that went off at the right time for me, with ripples way beyond noisy songs. It wasn't just flared jeans and long hair that disappeared over night.
Personally, I suppose I was caught up in the history you describe - I didn't really realise how lucky I was to be at Essex University when I was there. (1975-78) It was unselfconsciously liberating. Some of these people teaching me had written books - and you could read the books in the library - and you could write books! And Ralph Hawkins photocopied the whole of the first volume of The Maximus Poems so I could read it. I heard poets read - Bunting, Ed Dorn, Crozier, Doug Oliver. I was the son of an unskilled labourer, making up less than 1% of the undergraduate population then - and all this was just given to me.
Your introduction also reminds me that I can see those times far more clearly now than I did then.”
So the Intro doesn’t even mention the Essex School. It didn’t affect most of our contributors, but the experience of meeting fans of modern poetry face to face was key for this one, and may have been key for all of them. And ideas may have been mainly local – there was no master set of theories which everyone was converging on. Faced with the idea of local scenes which didn’t get wide exposure because the means of marketing and publicity rejected anything unconventional, we have to plunge ahead and publish what we know about. This is the right way to proceed and no doubt people will let us know what we missed.
Graham Hartill: “I'm happy with the poems but have some issues with the introductory blurb, which is factually inaccurate and doesn't, I feel, capture the appropriate vibe. Calling the Cardiff scene in the 8os 'an offshoot of the English Intelligencer school' is just not the way it was. Chris T may have been influenced by the EI as he was by many things, Open Field, The Beats, Jazz, Jung etc etc but the EI stuff was NOT primary - in fact, almost everyone active on the scene, as far as I was aware, knew little or nothing about the poets associated with EI, except in so far as they may have picked up some knowledge through, say, Chris or Peter Finch. The other thing that is a problem for me is the notion of us being an 'offshoot' of anything! Let alone anything so specifically English. This was Wales, and although we spoke and wrote in English and probably voted Labour rather than Plaid (if at all!) we were proud to be not working in England! I think I can make that generalisation.”
- I disagree with the analysis but it may be productive to have positive statements so that people have something concrete to argue about. An early component of the project was the idea of influence – one person said that we should frame the book in terms of who poets were influenced by. The editor felt that this wouldn’t sell even one copy, and just pointed interested readers away from our poets, and towards older poets (generally American ones, in fact). So the next idea was to identify poets who had been influenced by our poets. This proved problematic. The flow of ideas since 1980 has yet to be mapped, but one possibility is that later generations of “alternative poets” missed out on the English (or Welsh?) Underground because it just wasn't visible. Instead, they were turned on by lots of other radical ideas, which actually were freely available on campus and in the shops, but which weren’t usually poems or locally produced. So the source of coherence might be anti-capitalism. Well, nobody owns THAT as a commodity.
Frances Presley writes : ‘The absence of experimental women poets was not just because feminism was associated with mainstream poetry, but because searching out the ‘other’ requires an active commitment. This is true of anthologies, such as Floating Capital: new poets from London, edited by Clarke & Sheppard (1991,) with its small number of women poets, such as Hazel Smith and Virginia Firnberg, some of whom might be ignored in a token selection for another anthology (Kathleen Fraser has written about this). Nevertheless, it was an exciting time to be a young woman poet in London, with a rare opportunity to meet other poets, even though socialist feminism and experimental poetry would not be an obvious choice until the 1990s’.
This was supposed to be added to the Introduction but it also criticises the editors, suggesting that the relatively low share of women poets is due to the lack of “active commitment” by the editors, and not to other reasons. So a slightly edited version, implying that the editors might be sane and human after all, has been used.
We weren't sure if this was a criticism of 'Floating Capital' or the reverse.
From an email (an editor to a Poet): “I feel bad, because you did a lot of work assembling your version of The Generation and we didn’t use any of it. It would be interesting to have similar lists from another two dozen people. I think you would just find that they had completely differing views of what the cultural context was.
I fear that I had, early on, a feeling that there was a Consensus and that if we had enough discussion with enough people it would emerge In Shining Letters and we could simply write it down. But the inputs we have suggest that nobody agrees about anything.
I have a scheme whereby each of the 28 poets gets two votes, which they can use to vote either for or against other poets in the list. People with less than 1 vote disappear. I think after three rounds you would be down to two or three people. But it would be democratic.
Editors could cover their expenses by selling extra votes to people.
It would be legal to vote against yourself. People have their rights.”
Poets do have a sense of belonging to a group. But the 28 poets in the book probably belong to two dozen different groups. Every time you start to talk about details, the sense starts to move further away from most of the poets, not closer to them. They don't like that.
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