Arcadian Rustbelt

The Jaguar Shoes post is quite long now, so we have located longer memories in this new post, like this. David Annwn wrote to remember: Black police vans speeding through evenings towards pickets. The Sheffield sound. All the patriot furore over the Falklands. People at college talking about ‘yomping’, Meetings in London/designing books/ publishing poets, Being with Eric Mottram, Lee Harwood, Jonathan Williams and whisky-fuelled evenings at Corn Close, The endless round of lecturing/marking. Going out for meals and being in my 30s but falling asleep over my food so exhausted. Spending twelve hours with Gyorgy and Marianne Gordon in their Joiner’s Shop house at Heath and never stopping the conversation on and on /hearing about Fascism and Communism they knew first hand. Jazz and Tom Verlaine. 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 dism...

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...