draft
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 standing next to a brazier, near a picket line, in what must have been the Firemen’s Strike of 1978. The fire was in a bucket with holes cut in the side. The person he was standing next to was Clive Jenkins, head of the firemen’s union. I think the point of this is that unions could say No at that time and actually halt the tank-like drive of capitalism. For a poet to say No to conventional structures was meaningful because there was an alternative which connected to everyday life and had in fact built essential structures of everyday life.
Tilla Brading was there both for the social and the readings, and brought a collection of unsold Odyssey books. They were left over from the early 90s, as the operation had fallen into disarray due to illness. First books by Michael Ayres, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Giles Goodland, Vittoria Vaughan, emerged into the daylight. A. bought a copy of a special issue of the magazine, ‘Unanchored in Ecumenopolis’, guest edited by Elisabeth Bletsoe, 1996. He found he was in it with a poem crucial to his development, but he had forgotten everything about the issue, including his own poem. The sounds of unanchored echo the sounds of ecumenopolis and form a quasi cynghanedd, a trace of having lived in Wales. The oikumene is the entire inhabited world, so ecumenopolis must be the world-city, the metro world which is connected by signs rather than physically. The poet is linked to every place and its ideas, by the new super-fast comms; but cut adrift from the place where they physically live, without an anchor. The editor says “she is currently working on two projects: a study of dislocation and marginalisation in Dorset and another loosely based on the experiences of Julian of Norwich.” I don’t think these ever saw the light of day. They are moments poignant because they bring into the light a cultural act that was never completed, and remained an idea.
Odyssey (in Somerset) wasn’t the only magazine, but there actually has to be a range of magazines to give a feeling of being at home. If it’s just one, you have to worry too much about what the editor really thinks of you. They can’t take every poem. If there are half a dozen, you feel much safer. That is something that had changed after 1990: there were just more magazines that you wanted to read and which you might consider being published in. Odyssey published exclusively new poets, certainly in their book series. They didn’t project the idea that it was still the 1970s and poets post-1980 were a nuisance and shouldn’t really try to speak.
Odyssey published an issue of “poets in their twenties”, 13 poets. AD, aged 40 in 1996, had an uncomfortable feeling about this. It was notice of becoming obsolete without having gone through the usual preliminary of being published and accepted. Perhaps this was the nucleus of ‘Arcadian Rustbelt’, still small at that point.
Someone described the cellar at the Jaguar Shoes cafe as being imbued with “a sort of lurid Gothic fetishist S&M dungeon feel”. The ambient red light was to make the special qualities of the floor and walls less visible. Everyone felt at home there. The acoustics were great because of the low ceiling. The premises had once belonged to Jaguar Shoes and Dream Bags, evidently bags that you keep dreams in. We looked for an archive of these, in an alcove somewhere. JG pointed out that the bar at Jaguar Shoes serves the Celanesque Black Milk Stout, both a welcoming and a monitory sign. And that while it was a joyful day, a perfect one in fact, it was also a day of ghosts.
JG recalls “I wasn't part of the 1980s/90s scene as you, Harry, Elizabeth, Frances, Simon and the rest all were (although I do now feel I almost belong, retrospectively inserted into the memories of others, like Woody Allen's Zelig).” Some people converted late to the Alternative idea.
After everyone had gone home, the two editors lurked in the bar at Jaguar Shoes and by accident began talking about politics. The warmth and good vibes flowing from a successful gig evaporated, and only depression could follow from thinking about the antics and real violence of Putin, Trump, and Elon Musk. This provided a real glimpse of Eighties life: happiness was only possible if you could forget about Thatcher and the hegemony of the financial world, yet to escape from that was to invite frivolity and forgetfulness and lack of solidarity. So, that was the condition we lived in for 13 years, if not eighteen. Happiness was only possible through harmony, achieved in the small scale. Yet the large, even grand, scale patterns were so dominant and so monolithic.
The 1980s had also moments of mutual comprehension and feeling safe. Under such pressure, a moment of realising that the people in the room with you shared your attitudes was almost blissful. This is what one sought out in culture. Inevitably, tests had to be set, to see if it was safe to be there.
Simon S recalled going to Oxford to take part in what turned out to be a fragmente audition. He had been recommended to the severe editors of the new magazine, in 1990, by Anthony Barnett. He travelled up there and they met in the freezing cold, in a pub called The Temple (?). He met Anthony Mellors and Andrew Lawson, and realised after a bit that they were sizing him up to see if he would make the grade as a fragmente reviewer. Fortunately for history, he passed the tests, which were probably extreme, and began writing for the magazine.
Some of the afternoon was spent recalling Mellors, who died in 2023. There was talk of composing a memorial volume to him, but there were grave doubts about recording such a contradictory personality without copious original documents. JG recalled that Mellors had spent some part of his teens in a young offenders institution, for what crimes we no longer know. How he got out of that and qualified for a place at Oxford, not too long after, is almost incomprehensible. It is hard to compose a narrative if everything the lead character does is improbable. We thought of how full, exact, incisive, his letters were, and then wondered if they still existed, or could be found. Mention was made of the fragmente archive being in some deposit in Cambridge. JG recalled, again, how he had a tailor’s dummy in the kitchen in his house at Hunstanton, and how he had actually become an antiques dealer at some point, because he had the eye, and could identify items which he could sell on for much more than he paid for them. When he neglected the sales side, his house silted up with irrelevant and obsolete, if highly wrought, objects. We didn’t get into his love life, which was melodramatic and full of reversals of fortune. It was hard to follow even for those who keep up with such things. M grew up in Lincolnshire and lived in Hunstanton, and was an enthusiast for walking in the Fens.
Winter Journey, his 2022 book, is a re-creation of the works and world of Daniel zur Höhe, an imaginary poet from Dessau in Saxony, born in the same year as Anthony, who had vanished in the snow (which means signal jamming). We found in it a reference to das Sandmännchen, which a recent reading of Erinnerungsorte der DDR, memory sites of the Communist East Germany, had told us was a children’s puppet, the most beloved in East German children’s TV. The puppet starred in a TV show which was broadcast from 1959 to 1990 (but then survived in the unified country, while the East TV industry was almost completely closed down, as a final operation of the Cold War). How did Anthony know about this? Had he had an unacknowledged childhood in the People’s Republic, as Anton Muller-Dieskau perhaps? Had there been an early withdrawal of citizenship, after who knows what civic crimes?
zur Höhe could not be at the social, but sent an email in which he said among other things "Hunstanton is the Prenzlauer Berg of East Anglia... England is the East Germany of Western Europe... the scenery of the Western media is a legacy of Cold War propaganda which won't stop...we travelled to the West to find it wasn't there... fragmente taught me everything I know". Elizabeth J recalled a writing workshop where people scrutinised every syllable and were rigorous and full of close attention. A. missed the beginning of this utterance but suspects that it was a mainstream shop and that the point being made was that the mainstream was also involved in thinking about poetry. Why the defensiveness? This has to be set in the context of very few magazines or readings series which tolerated avant garde poetry. Young hopefuls who wanted to enter the business often saw the avant-garde sites as moribund, easy to break into and take over. They could then be taken up-market and filled with clones, little Carol-Anne Armitages and Sean Duffys, who reproduced High Street poetry at a lower level of attainment. So the Alternative did want to defend what resources it had, and was willing to set tests which people could fail – if they were the wrong people.
Of course, the community feeling which rejection and cultural assault brought about meant that one expected a new recruit to take on everything. So, you would start to like 100 Alternative poets, at once. It was more likely that someone would like Kelvin Corcoran, for example, and nobody else. There were bound to be many more people who liked several different kinds of poetry, than people who ONLY liked Alternative poetry. A victory of the Alternative was not within the settings of the cultural structure. It was not the future. But it could win local victories, perhaps hundreds of them.
All the visible cultural managers would eliminate any alternative poems, or even original passages in poems, as part of their professional standards. They regarded such poems as a gardener regards weeds. The alternative magazines were refuge areas as much as anything else.
Simon S recalled Stephen Rodefer deciding to mark the death of John Wieners. He did this by putting on a dress and applying full-make-up. This was a homage to Wieners’ interest in cross-dressing. Stephen attended a reading in this garb, a ceremonial act. He more or less broke up the reading. Simon was struck by this, because it was Simon who was reading. When Rodefer saw someone else getting attention, he always thought it was high time for it to be brought to an end. The table recalled Rodefer as revitalising Cambridge student poetry, while adding a large number of scurrilous anecdotes which I prefer not to record. The intervention probably worked because, while Wieners was imitating Forties film stars in front of his mirror, Rodefer essentially was a Forties film star. Norma Desmond, perhaps. Or Lizabeth Scott.
Someone recalled the World’s Smallest Poetry Festival. This took place in, probably, Robert Sheppard’s front room, in about 1995. It involved 100 poets reading for 90 seconds, or perhaps 80 poets reading for three minutes. The point may have been to express non-approval of an event which belonged to the “official” world and billed itself as London’s largest poetry festival, or something. Non-approval was a big thing at the time. The event included Bob Cobbing, and no day which includes listening to Cobbing can be really a good day.
A. remembers the first CCCP weekend event, in 1992 (or was it 1991?). All the figures of the Cambridge scene were there. He had never met them before. This was a moment when a freeze broke up. He had been writing since 1977, and had published through Cambridge-type outlets, but that had never translated into a social contact. This sums up the Eighties as a period of isolation, empty channels of communication, relying on books and speculation. So, Ralph Hawkins had published his poems back in 1979 (in Ochre magazine), but the two had not met until 1991. This is the “unanchored” theme – and when poets found a community, they were eager to take part in it.
But also – several people said, during the Sunday of the 2025 event, that they had not either met or read most of the other poets who were in the anthology with them. They had just not been a “generation” until Arcadian Rustbelt defined them as one. A fragile concept, like most others in culture.
I can see that there are references here to passing tests. It would be wrong to go on without referring to what was being protected, and what people desired, the atmosphere of culture. This was thicker than smoke and when you inhaled it it was more intoxicating than air. When you submerged in it, the outside world became invisible, and you became invisible to anyone outside looking for you. It was only possible to enjoy the richness of verbal exchange if dissonant and territorialising influences were kept away. The point was not really to acquire information about culture but rather to be culture, to be part of the river which unstoppably produced it. I have to admit that some people did impoverish the quality of exchanges. In the same way, conventional poetry magazines produced exhaustion and frustration rather than enhanced sensitivity. It was perfectly rational not to spend days reading them. Also, it really wasn’t difficult to find out how to make people happy. The effort required was not very large.
I do have to emphasise that it was not only one table where this river of culture was flowing. It might be happening in ten different places on any night. No-one has ever mapped all the places.
There was a frou-frou around the opposition between London and Cambridge. What probably happened is that A Various Art came out, in 1987. It was from Carcanet, a proper publisher (sic), so reached many more shops or towns or people than the classic small press fugitive what-not. The introduction said it had the best poets of a generation. This amounted to 17 poets only, and there was some disgruntlement on the London scene that few of the poets lived in London. This manifested itself as a belief that the London scene was Terribly Important and that it was the moral duty of the Cambridge scene, or anyone else, to spend every Sunday reading London poets. A Various Art left a lot of people out, but it is not on record that any of them regarded this as the voice of taste and the occasion for autocritique. Without this, the sense of grievance wasn’t productive. The actual situation is that there is only one Alternative poetry world. People involved in it move from town to town, as is the pattern for people in the professions. The communication is more via printed matter, letters, and email, than face to face.
Simon Jenner wrote in a review (in Tears in the Fence, Spring, 2024) “it tells us far more about the moment Bunting was illuminated in, and who he was writing to. A radical British poetry that faded with the late 1970s.” So, everything closed down. That was the word on the streets, the doxa. People who went on writing radical poetry in the 1980s just hadn’t got the message. How provincial we must have been!
Simon is the publisher of Arcadian Rustbelt. So obviously he hadn’t read it, up until 2024. Most people with Expertise think that what they haven’t read is Unimportant. There is a cultural fantasy which we do not fulfil and that is not the same as being artistic failures. How does it feel to be some sort of flare-up from the fade-out? (or do I mean an uproar from the fuck-ups?)
But, like most fashion decrees, most people never heard this message.
This is a capture from an interview with Michael Schmidt:
“Carcanet did not exactly change direction in 1987 but when we took on the poetry of John Ashbery there was, as it were, a second direction running parallel to, and occasionally colliding with, the first. I became much more interested in experimental writing—not the kind that has its being wholly within the walls of universities and is the fruit of literary theory, but the kind that grew out of an experience of language at fruitful odds with convention and sometimes with itself—so there was the New York School, and some of the poets we already published began to loom larger for me—Christopher Middleton, Edwin Morgan. It was a wonderful time:[…] I know I did, too: all sort of temptations could be succumbed to with a sense of righteousness rather than sin. This did not lessen my commitment to the original direction, which still seems to me crucial; but there was a sense that the whole choir was now singing its harmonies and dissonances. The main thing has been to try to avoid the merely academic, poetry hijacked by theory, just as in early years the tact was to avoid poetry that had been hijacked by fashion.”
This records a conversion to the alternative, and probably also the release of certain almost military, and out of date, tensions between groups. Carcanet did publish poets like R. F. Langley, John Ash, and Frank Kuppner, who clearly belong to the alternative camp. Schmidt did not abandon his pre-existing tastes.
It is puzzling to hear about people whose poetry is based in academic literary theory. What is the evidence for this? Parisian theory is not a set of instructions for writing poems, so relating actual poems to it is unrealistic – it is not clear how that influence would be visible. Clearly, poets have to engage in theoretical reflection on the way to developing a style. If you have the degree zero of theory, you will end up sounding like the 1950s – this is what conventional poets perform. But poetry is not a paraphrase of prose. So, if we don’t have a memory of this sort of “hijacked” poetry, it may be because it is something that never happened.
Christopher Middleton and Edwin Morgan did not reproduce the poetry around them because they had the capacity to theorise. They were both young Apocalyptic poets in the 1940s who were notably silent in the 1950s. Presumably, they were thinking about how to exit from what was already there. Their theorising was about poems and their poems were, a bit later, realisations of theories. They returned in the Sixties. And in the early Sixties, with them and Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull, there was a new poetry.
Later, by email, JG responded to ID’s email by saying “The toxicity of CCCP ought to be in, somehow; those who were at Xing the Line had nothing but golden glow memories of it, but I've heard plenty of tales about people rocking up only to be treated with elite disdain (Cadoc ap Madoc, for one). I've had my own experience of the Cambridge I-stare-through-you-worthless-little-oik-with-my-superior-thousand-yard-stare too (thank you, Sugarbeet, Vermuyden, and Cradge Bank). This was part of what stymied the emergence and recognition of several members of the generation we try to define in Rustbelt, it seems to me.
Your career path to academia was similar in several ways to mine, though infinitely more colourful and varied. I was basically a Militant Tendency full timer for almost a decade, using the grants the state gave me for my BA, MA and PhD to fund my political work, in Yorkshire and on the National Committee of the Labour Party Young Socialists. That lasted until I was in my late 20s. But in poetry terms the trajectory is very different - and the difference is largely that between poetic traditions in Leeds and Essex Unis in the 1970s/80s I'd say.
My first poems, exceedingly conventional, though soon improved with a Duhigesque inflection, appeared in outlets like Pennine Platform, Stand, The Wide Skirt, before graduating to London Magazine, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review etc. and Faber Poetry Introduction 8 (1993). It wasn't until I was about 40 (1998) that the penny dropped about innovative stuff.
This was largely to do with visiting the US and Andrew's generosity via Angel Exhaust, for which I'm eternally grateful. (You, Ian, were a recipient of one of my very first innovative efforts. I seem to remember you being baffled, mildly encouraging, but unable to suggest anywhere for it to go - probably out of tact because it was so piss-poor ...)”
These moments of crossing the boundary into being Alternative are certainly interesting. Some people deny the existence of an Alternative poetry ("I hate the label Alternative"), but that is usually because, while the Alternative has 20 or 30 widely known virtues, the person speaking lacks them, and therefore wants to disparage their worth. In contrast, where you have people who dislike musicals, they don’t deny that ‘South Pacific’ or ‘Oklahoma’ exist. Certainly Alternative poets exist, and so does “Annie get your gun”.
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 standing next to a brazier, near a picket line, in what must have been the Firemen’s Strike of 1978. The fire was in a bucket with holes cut in the side. The person he was standing next to was Clive Jenkins, head of the firemen’s union. I think the point of this is that unions could say No at that time and actually halt the tank-like drive of capitalism. For a poet to say No to conventional structures was meaningful because there was an alternative which connected to everyday life and had in fact built essential structures of everyday life.
Tilla Brading was there both for the social and the readings, and brought a collection of unsold Odyssey books. They were left over from the early 90s, as the operation had fallen into disarray due to illness. First books by Michael Ayres, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Giles Goodland, Vittoria Vaughan, emerged into the daylight. A. bought a copy of a special issue of the magazine, ‘Unanchored in Ecumenopolis’, guest edited by Elisabeth Bletsoe, 1996. He found he was in it with a poem crucial to his development, but he had forgotten everything about the issue, including his own poem. The sounds of unanchored echo the sounds of ecumenopolis and form a quasi cynghanedd, a trace of having lived in Wales. The oikumene is the entire inhabited world, so ecumenopolis must be the world-city, the metro world which is connected by signs rather than physically. The poet is linked to every place and its ideas, by the new super-fast comms; but cut adrift from the place where they physically live, without an anchor. The editor says “she is currently working on two projects: a study of dislocation and marginalisation in Dorset and another loosely based on the experiences of Julian of Norwich.” I don’t think these ever saw the light of day. They are moments poignant because they bring into the light a cultural act that was never completed, and remained an idea.
Odyssey (in Somerset) wasn’t the only magazine, but there actually has to be a range of magazines to give a feeling of being at home. If it’s just one, you have to worry too much about what the editor really thinks of you. They can’t take every poem. If there are half a dozen, you feel much safer. That is something that had changed after 1990: there were just more magazines that you wanted to read and which you might consider being published in. Odyssey published exclusively new poets, certainly in their book series. They didn’t project the idea that it was still the 1970s and poets post-1980 were a nuisance and shouldn’t really try to speak.
Odyssey published an issue of “poets in their twenties”, 13 poets. AD, aged 40 in 1996, had an uncomfortable feeling about this. It was notice of becoming obsolete without having gone through the usual preliminary of being published and accepted. Perhaps this was the nucleus of ‘Arcadian Rustbelt’, still small at that point.
Someone described the cellar at the Jaguar Shoes cafe as being imbued with “a sort of lurid Gothic fetishist S&M dungeon feel”. The ambient red light was to make the special qualities of the floor and walls less visible. Everyone felt at home there. The acoustics were great because of the low ceiling. The premises had once belonged to Jaguar Shoes and Dream Bags, evidently bags that you keep dreams in. We looked for an archive of these, in an alcove somewhere. JG pointed out that the bar at Jaguar Shoes serves the Celanesque Black Milk Stout, both a welcoming and a monitory sign. And that while it was a joyful day, a perfect one in fact, it was also a day of ghosts.
JG recalls “I wasn't part of the 1980s/90s scene as you, Harry, Elizabeth, Frances, Simon and the rest all were (although I do now feel I almost belong, retrospectively inserted into the memories of others, like Woody Allen's Zelig).” Some people converted late to the Alternative idea.
After everyone had gone home, the two editors lurked in the bar at Jaguar Shoes and by accident began talking about politics. The warmth and good vibes flowing from a successful gig evaporated, and only depression could follow from thinking about the antics and real violence of Putin, Trump, and Elon Musk. This provided a real glimpse of Eighties life: happiness was only possible if you could forget about Thatcher and the hegemony of the financial world, yet to escape from that was to invite frivolity and forgetfulness and lack of solidarity. So, that was the condition we lived in for 13 years, if not eighteen. Happiness was only possible through harmony, achieved in the small scale. Yet the large, even grand, scale patterns were so dominant and so monolithic.
The 1980s had also moments of mutual comprehension and feeling safe. Under such pressure, a moment of realising that the people in the room with you shared your attitudes was almost blissful. This is what one sought out in culture. Inevitably, tests had to be set, to see if it was safe to be there.
Simon S recalled going to Oxford to take part in what turned out to be a fragmente audition. He had been recommended to the severe editors of the new magazine, in 1990, by Anthony Barnett. He travelled up there and they met in the freezing cold, in a pub called The Temple (?). He met Anthony Mellors and Andrew Lawson, and realised after a bit that they were sizing him up to see if he would make the grade as a fragmente reviewer. Fortunately for history, he passed the tests, which were probably extreme, and began writing for the magazine.
Some of the afternoon was spent recalling Mellors, who died in 2023. There was talk of composing a memorial volume to him, but there were grave doubts about recording such a contradictory personality without copious original documents. JG recalled that Mellors had spent some part of his teens in a young offenders institution, for what crimes we no longer know. How he got out of that and qualified for a place at Oxford, not too long after, is almost incomprehensible. It is hard to compose a narrative if everything the lead character does is improbable. We thought of how full, exact, incisive, his letters were, and then wondered if they still existed, or could be found. Mention was made of the fragmente archive being in some deposit in Cambridge. JG recalled, again, how he had a tailor’s dummy in the kitchen in his house at Hunstanton, and how he had actually become an antiques dealer at some point, because he had the eye, and could identify items which he could sell on for much more than he paid for them. When he neglected the sales side, his house silted up with irrelevant and obsolete, if highly wrought, objects. We didn’t get into his love life, which was melodramatic and full of reversals of fortune. It was hard to follow even for those who keep up with such things. M grew up in Lincolnshire and lived in Hunstanton, and was an enthusiast for walking in the Fens.
Winter Journey, his 2022 book, is a re-creation of the works and world of Daniel zur Höhe, an imaginary poet from Dessau in Saxony, born in the same year as Anthony, who had vanished in the snow (which means signal jamming). We found in it a reference to das Sandmännchen, which a recent reading of Erinnerungsorte der DDR, memory sites of the Communist East Germany, had told us was a children’s puppet, the most beloved in East German children’s TV. The puppet starred in a TV show which was broadcast from 1959 to 1990 (but then survived in the unified country, while the East TV industry was almost completely closed down, as a final operation of the Cold War). How did Anthony know about this? Had he had an unacknowledged childhood in the People’s Republic, as Anton Muller-Dieskau perhaps? Had there been an early withdrawal of citizenship, after who knows what civic crimes?
zur Höhe could not be at the social, but sent an email in which he said among other things "Hunstanton is the Prenzlauer Berg of East Anglia... England is the East Germany of Western Europe... the scenery of the Western media is a legacy of Cold War propaganda which won't stop...we travelled to the West to find it wasn't there... fragmente taught me everything I know". Elizabeth J recalled a writing workshop where people scrutinised every syllable and were rigorous and full of close attention. A. missed the beginning of this utterance but suspects that it was a mainstream shop and that the point being made was that the mainstream was also involved in thinking about poetry. Why the defensiveness? This has to be set in the context of very few magazines or readings series which tolerated avant garde poetry. Young hopefuls who wanted to enter the business often saw the avant-garde sites as moribund, easy to break into and take over. They could then be taken up-market and filled with clones, little Carol-Anne Armitages and Sean Duffys, who reproduced High Street poetry at a lower level of attainment. So the Alternative did want to defend what resources it had, and was willing to set tests which people could fail – if they were the wrong people.
Of course, the community feeling which rejection and cultural assault brought about meant that one expected a new recruit to take on everything. So, you would start to like 100 Alternative poets, at once. It was more likely that someone would like Kelvin Corcoran, for example, and nobody else. There were bound to be many more people who liked several different kinds of poetry, than people who ONLY liked Alternative poetry. A victory of the Alternative was not within the settings of the cultural structure. It was not the future. But it could win local victories, perhaps hundreds of them.
All the visible cultural managers would eliminate any alternative poems, or even original passages in poems, as part of their professional standards. They regarded such poems as a gardener regards weeds. The alternative magazines were refuge areas as much as anything else.
Simon S recalled Stephen Rodefer deciding to mark the death of John Wieners. He did this by putting on a dress and applying full-make-up. This was a homage to Wieners’ interest in cross-dressing. Stephen attended a reading in this garb, a ceremonial act. He more or less broke up the reading. Simon was struck by this, because it was Simon who was reading. When Rodefer saw someone else getting attention, he always thought it was high time for it to be brought to an end. The table recalled Rodefer as revitalising Cambridge student poetry, while adding a large number of scurrilous anecdotes which I prefer not to record. The intervention probably worked because, while Wieners was imitating Forties film stars in front of his mirror, Rodefer essentially was a Forties film star. Norma Desmond, perhaps. Or Lizabeth Scott.
Someone recalled the World’s Smallest Poetry Festival. This took place in, probably, Robert Sheppard’s front room, in about 1995. It involved 100 poets reading for 90 seconds, or perhaps 80 poets reading for three minutes. The point may have been to express non-approval of an event which belonged to the “official” world and billed itself as London’s largest poetry festival, or something. Non-approval was a big thing at the time. The event included Bob Cobbing, and no day which includes listening to Cobbing can be really a good day.
A. remembers the first CCCP weekend event, in 1992 (or was it 1991?). All the figures of the Cambridge scene were there. He had never met them before. This was a moment when a freeze broke up. He had been writing since 1977, and had published through Cambridge-type outlets, but that had never translated into a social contact. This sums up the Eighties as a period of isolation, empty channels of communication, relying on books and speculation. So, Ralph Hawkins had published his poems back in 1979 (in Ochre magazine), but the two had not met until 1991. This is the “unanchored” theme – and when poets found a community, they were eager to take part in it.
But also – several people said, during the Sunday of the 2025 event, that they had not either met or read most of the other poets who were in the anthology with them. They had just not been a “generation” until Arcadian Rustbelt defined them as one. A fragile concept, like most others in culture.
I can see that there are references here to passing tests. It would be wrong to go on without referring to what was being protected, and what people desired, the atmosphere of culture. This was thicker than smoke and when you inhaled it it was more intoxicating than air. When you submerged in it, the outside world became invisible, and you became invisible to anyone outside looking for you. It was only possible to enjoy the richness of verbal exchange if dissonant and territorialising influences were kept away. The point was not really to acquire information about culture but rather to be culture, to be part of the river which unstoppably produced it. I have to admit that some people did impoverish the quality of exchanges. In the same way, conventional poetry magazines produced exhaustion and frustration rather than enhanced sensitivity. It was perfectly rational not to spend days reading them. Also, it really wasn’t difficult to find out how to make people happy. The effort required was not very large.
I do have to emphasise that it was not only one table where this river of culture was flowing. It might be happening in ten different places on any night. No-one has ever mapped all the places.
There was a frou-frou around the opposition between London and Cambridge. What probably happened is that A Various Art came out, in 1987. It was from Carcanet, a proper publisher (sic), so reached many more shops or towns or people than the classic small press fugitive what-not. The introduction said it had the best poets of a generation. This amounted to 17 poets only, and there was some disgruntlement on the London scene that few of the poets lived in London. This manifested itself as a belief that the London scene was Terribly Important and that it was the moral duty of the Cambridge scene, or anyone else, to spend every Sunday reading London poets. A Various Art left a lot of people out, but it is not on record that any of them regarded this as the voice of taste and the occasion for autocritique. Without this, the sense of grievance wasn’t productive. The actual situation is that there is only one Alternative poetry world. People involved in it move from town to town, as is the pattern for people in the professions. The communication is more via printed matter, letters, and email, than face to face.
Simon Jenner wrote in a review (in Tears in the Fence, Spring, 2024) “it tells us far more about the moment Bunting was illuminated in, and who he was writing to. A radical British poetry that faded with the late 1970s.” So, everything closed down. That was the word on the streets, the doxa. People who went on writing radical poetry in the 1980s just hadn’t got the message. How provincial we must have been!
Simon is the publisher of Arcadian Rustbelt. So obviously he hadn’t read it, up until 2024. Most people with Expertise think that what they haven’t read is Unimportant. There is a cultural fantasy which we do not fulfil and that is not the same as being artistic failures. How does it feel to be some sort of flare-up from the fade-out? (or do I mean an uproar from the fuck-ups?)
But, like most fashion decrees, most people never heard this message.
This is a capture from an interview with Michael Schmidt:
“Carcanet did not exactly change direction in 1987 but when we took on the poetry of John Ashbery there was, as it were, a second direction running parallel to, and occasionally colliding with, the first. I became much more interested in experimental writing—not the kind that has its being wholly within the walls of universities and is the fruit of literary theory, but the kind that grew out of an experience of language at fruitful odds with convention and sometimes with itself—so there was the New York School, and some of the poets we already published began to loom larger for me—Christopher Middleton, Edwin Morgan. It was a wonderful time:[…] I know I did, too: all sort of temptations could be succumbed to with a sense of righteousness rather than sin. This did not lessen my commitment to the original direction, which still seems to me crucial; but there was a sense that the whole choir was now singing its harmonies and dissonances. The main thing has been to try to avoid the merely academic, poetry hijacked by theory, just as in early years the tact was to avoid poetry that had been hijacked by fashion.”
This records a conversion to the alternative, and probably also the release of certain almost military, and out of date, tensions between groups. Carcanet did publish poets like R. F. Langley, John Ash, and Frank Kuppner, who clearly belong to the alternative camp. Schmidt did not abandon his pre-existing tastes.
It is puzzling to hear about people whose poetry is based in academic literary theory. What is the evidence for this? Parisian theory is not a set of instructions for writing poems, so relating actual poems to it is unrealistic – it is not clear how that influence would be visible. Clearly, poets have to engage in theoretical reflection on the way to developing a style. If you have the degree zero of theory, you will end up sounding like the 1950s – this is what conventional poets perform. But poetry is not a paraphrase of prose. So, if we don’t have a memory of this sort of “hijacked” poetry, it may be because it is something that never happened.
Christopher Middleton and Edwin Morgan did not reproduce the poetry around them because they had the capacity to theorise. They were both young Apocalyptic poets in the 1940s who were notably silent in the 1950s. Presumably, they were thinking about how to exit from what was already there. Their theorising was about poems and their poems were, a bit later, realisations of theories. They returned in the Sixties. And in the early Sixties, with them and Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull, there was a new poetry.
Later, by email, JG responded to ID’s email by saying “The toxicity of CCCP ought to be in, somehow; those who were at Xing the Line had nothing but golden glow memories of it, but I've heard plenty of tales about people rocking up only to be treated with elite disdain (Cadoc ap Madoc, for one). I've had my own experience of the Cambridge I-stare-through-you-worthless-little-oik-with-my-superior-thousand-yard-stare too (thank you, Sugarbeet, Vermuyden, and Cradge Bank). This was part of what stymied the emergence and recognition of several members of the generation we try to define in Rustbelt, it seems to me.
Your career path to academia was similar in several ways to mine, though infinitely more colourful and varied. I was basically a Militant Tendency full timer for almost a decade, using the grants the state gave me for my BA, MA and PhD to fund my political work, in Yorkshire and on the National Committee of the Labour Party Young Socialists. That lasted until I was in my late 20s. But in poetry terms the trajectory is very different - and the difference is largely that between poetic traditions in Leeds and Essex Unis in the 1970s/80s I'd say.
My first poems, exceedingly conventional, though soon improved with a Duhigesque inflection, appeared in outlets like Pennine Platform, Stand, The Wide Skirt, before graduating to London Magazine, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review etc. and Faber Poetry Introduction 8 (1993). It wasn't until I was about 40 (1998) that the penny dropped about innovative stuff.
This was largely to do with visiting the US and Andrew's generosity via Angel Exhaust, for which I'm eternally grateful. (You, Ian, were a recipient of one of my very first innovative efforts. I seem to remember you being baffled, mildly encouraging, but unable to suggest anywhere for it to go - probably out of tact because it was so piss-poor ...)”
These moments of crossing the boundary into being Alternative are certainly interesting. Some people deny the existence of an Alternative poetry ("I hate the label Alternative"), but that is usually because, while the Alternative has 20 or 30 widely known virtues, the person speaking lacks them, and therefore wants to disparage their worth. In contrast, where you have people who dislike musicals, they don’t deny that ‘South Pacific’ or ‘Oklahoma’ exist. Certainly Alternative poets exist, and so does “Annie get your gun”.
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