Arcadian Rustbelt

The Jaguar Shoes post is quite long now, so we have located two longer memories in this new post, like this. Adrian Clarke wrote to us to say this. - ​ In the period covered by the anthology there was much discussion of a Cambridge/London divide. Its existence seems to have been forgotten or dismissed since, perhaps as a result of the increasing visibility of other areas of activity, or the non-partisan tendencies of some of the poets who were supposedly in one way or another responsible. ... And yet it did have a place for the geographers of alternative poetries for some time, though it might be hard to assemble a selection of texts that would clearly illustrate the distinctive features. Perhaps it was a matter of different levels of extraversion rather than aesthetic incompatibility. I recall a day of readings from poets published by Rod Mengham’s Equipage and Ulli Freer’s Microbrigade in Cambridge in 199? The “London” poets stood and in some manner performed; the “...

Eighties moments Before the London launch of the anthology, Arcadian Rustbelt , we had a social for the poets, in a pub in Hoxton. The point of the gathering was to collect memories of the era which the anthology reflects, as part of the memory exercise involved in a retrospective anthology. The planning involved a summoning of all 28 poets in one place to reach a critical mass, which would make the truth emerge from under the ground as if by divine command. We actually got as many as seven (rising to eight at the reading itself). The recovery really got going in the evening, after the readings had taken everyone back to a lost time, after a journey through strata of intervening experience. In the end it was all flowing, and the experience was more one of taking part in an avid memory conversation at one end of the table and being aware that another, equally crucial, one was taking place at the other end of it, unseizable and actually vanishing for a second time. H remembered stand...