Unfading Memories
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 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 “Cambridge” poets sat and read.
The inclination of metropolitan poets to perform can be attributed in part to the influence of Bob Cobbing whose sound poetry was never likely to receive universal acclaim – though his freely inventive visual “scores” are still widely admired. The importance of Cobbing’s organisational activities, his workshop and press from the mid-1960s, through the anthology’s period and beyond should not be overlooked. The workshop was not of the copies circulated for dissection or misconstruction mainstream variety: it was performance-focused, discussion was left to the bar afterwards and the only advice I heard offered was, “Try it again slower and louder”. The very variable quality of the more than a thousand Writers Forum publications was in part a result of Cobbing’s openness and generosity; nevertheless, among others,as they were starting out he encouraged and published Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Scott Thurston, Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson and Doug Jones.
I think I encountered only three of the anthology contributors at the WF workshop; most of them in the 80s and 90s at the Sub-Voicive reading series. Some of the poets down from Cambridge are reported to have registered a skeptical or even hostile response to their work there. The report may be unreliable; alternatively, I am inclined to think the cause could have been expectations raised by a persistent myth.
Writers Forum published 1500 titles of which 600 were by Cobbing. (NB this count was circa 2010 and more publications may have emerged since then.)
Ian Davidson writes to say:
My life in the 80s is pretty much documented in Harsh, published by Paul Green of Spectacular Diseases. I have a few copies I could send people in return for a donation to a worthwhile charity.
I was very semi-detached from poetry after leaving Essex in 1982 and living back in the mountains of north Wales, switching my main language to Welsh and was politically involved in direct action against the British state, including support for the Miners, Cymdeithas Yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) and for Meibion Glyndwr, a nascent paramilitary, who were burning down holiday cottages at the time. I made my living doing various things on the edge of legality, with bits of building work always involved somewhere. I edited a radical political magazine called Byd-Eang (world wide) for a couple of issues. Special Branch followed me sometimes and bugged my phone, but I don't think I was ever much danger to the establishment.
I expected to die by 1987 and had made no plans beyond that. 30 years seemed enough for anyone. but in 1988 I found myself still alive and the father of two children. It seemed wrong to die then. a bad example, but i had to make a living somehow. I had been brought up in an environment without any money and knew how that excluded you from so much of society, so felt I should make enough to bring up my kids in an inclusive way. Someone I was doing some building work for offered me a job in the local technical college, preparing adult and disadvantaged students for University entrance, so I took it on. I got quite fond of a middle class income and the ability to control the temperature of your working environment, made my way into a job at the University and then took a PhD in my forties. Everyone said I was too old to become an academic but I did, teaching literature and Writing. That saved me and nearly killed me. I will retire this year as a Senior Professor. Imagine.
I had a few publications with It is Now as It Was Then written with John Muckle published in the early 80s, and then pamphlets with Open Township, Peter Riley's Poetical Histories and Bill Griffiths Amra early 90s. I wrote all the material for Harsh but didn't publish until much later. My ongoing contact with poetry was through Ralph Hawkins, John Muckle, Kelvin Corcoran and Peter Riley's listings and occasional visits. I read in CCCP in 1991 or 2. I was a lost farm boy high on something or other, and remember Denise Riley helpfully pointing me at the stage and will always feel grateful. I got a great review of the reading in some national newspaper, have the clipping somewhere. Went a few years to CCCP. Poisonous affairs full of quite nice people who turned ugly en masse. There was quite a lot of interest (relatively) in my poetry but I was completely unequipped and disinclined to follow anything up or make anything more happen. Still am. I always thought of myself as a poet, always wrote and still do, but wouldn't publish full collections until the early 2000s.
I remember Ralph Hawkins coming up to me in Square 4 in Essex University in 1979 and showing me Andrew Duncan's work and asking if I thought they should publish in Ochre. It was rhetorical as he would have done it whatever I said but it was I think the first time they published such a large selection of someone's work in Ochre, which was normally split between four poets.
(It was probably 1978.)
Paul Green edited "10 British Poets" (1993), which was a landmark and the forerunner of Arcadian Rustbelt.
(comment by AD) Some explanation of this would be through mental maps. Using catalogues, AD developed a list of Alternative poets, active from 1960 up to 1997. The list has 420 names. Obviously, nobody has read all these poets. They are just a grey mass. People generally start by reading one Alternative poet... if they get up to five, that is an achievement.
While searching for something else, AD found a programme for the CCCP weekend of 2006. This was number 15. The programme shows 17 poets, that year. The total of slots over 15 years is likely to be 200+. Obviously, some poets read more than once. And some poets were never invited.
If you are a poet, especially an Excluded one, you are the glowing centre of your own mental map. Leaving you out is then a conspicuous act. However, if you are someone trying to arrange a weekend that doesn’t leave the audience frustrated, or editing a magazine, the map is different. The 420 poets are mostly a grey mass and the excluded poet certainly isn’t the centre of the visible world. Also, if you have staged 200 readings, you have said Yes many many times, and the idea that you are peripherally saying No is not apparent to you.
Saying “I am on the periphery of the poetry industry but I am central to that periphery” is obviously problematic.
AD has a big spreadsheet showing most poets who published a book between 1960 and 1997. He filtered out of this 420 poets who were recognisably Alternative. The real total is likely to be much larger. Until you read them, they are all just blank cells. Who can lay claim to expertise in the work of Reg Dorking… Trelawney Pilchard… Raymond Vernon Skiffler… William Oxley?
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 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 “Cambridge” poets sat and read.
The inclination of metropolitan poets to perform can be attributed in part to the influence of Bob Cobbing whose sound poetry was never likely to receive universal acclaim – though his freely inventive visual “scores” are still widely admired. The importance of Cobbing’s organisational activities, his workshop and press from the mid-1960s, through the anthology’s period and beyond should not be overlooked. The workshop was not of the copies circulated for dissection or misconstruction mainstream variety: it was performance-focused, discussion was left to the bar afterwards and the only advice I heard offered was, “Try it again slower and louder”. The very variable quality of the more than a thousand Writers Forum publications was in part a result of Cobbing’s openness and generosity; nevertheless, among others,as they were starting out he encouraged and published Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Scott Thurston, Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson and Doug Jones.
I think I encountered only three of the anthology contributors at the WF workshop; most of them in the 80s and 90s at the Sub-Voicive reading series. Some of the poets down from Cambridge are reported to have registered a skeptical or even hostile response to their work there. The report may be unreliable; alternatively, I am inclined to think the cause could have been expectations raised by a persistent myth.
Writers Forum published 1500 titles of which 600 were by Cobbing. (NB this count was circa 2010 and more publications may have emerged since then.)
Ian Davidson writes to say:
My life in the 80s is pretty much documented in Harsh, published by Paul Green of Spectacular Diseases. I have a few copies I could send people in return for a donation to a worthwhile charity.
I was very semi-detached from poetry after leaving Essex in 1982 and living back in the mountains of north Wales, switching my main language to Welsh and was politically involved in direct action against the British state, including support for the Miners, Cymdeithas Yr Iaith (Welsh Language Society) and for Meibion Glyndwr, a nascent paramilitary, who were burning down holiday cottages at the time. I made my living doing various things on the edge of legality, with bits of building work always involved somewhere. I edited a radical political magazine called Byd-Eang (world wide) for a couple of issues. Special Branch followed me sometimes and bugged my phone, but I don't think I was ever much danger to the establishment.
I expected to die by 1987 and had made no plans beyond that. 30 years seemed enough for anyone. but in 1988 I found myself still alive and the father of two children. It seemed wrong to die then. a bad example, but i had to make a living somehow. I had been brought up in an environment without any money and knew how that excluded you from so much of society, so felt I should make enough to bring up my kids in an inclusive way. Someone I was doing some building work for offered me a job in the local technical college, preparing adult and disadvantaged students for University entrance, so I took it on. I got quite fond of a middle class income and the ability to control the temperature of your working environment, made my way into a job at the University and then took a PhD in my forties. Everyone said I was too old to become an academic but I did, teaching literature and Writing. That saved me and nearly killed me. I will retire this year as a Senior Professor. Imagine.
I had a few publications with It is Now as It Was Then written with John Muckle published in the early 80s, and then pamphlets with Open Township, Peter Riley's Poetical Histories and Bill Griffiths Amra early 90s. I wrote all the material for Harsh but didn't publish until much later. My ongoing contact with poetry was through Ralph Hawkins, John Muckle, Kelvin Corcoran and Peter Riley's listings and occasional visits. I read in CCCP in 1991 or 2. I was a lost farm boy high on something or other, and remember Denise Riley helpfully pointing me at the stage and will always feel grateful. I got a great review of the reading in some national newspaper, have the clipping somewhere. Went a few years to CCCP. Poisonous affairs full of quite nice people who turned ugly en masse. There was quite a lot of interest (relatively) in my poetry but I was completely unequipped and disinclined to follow anything up or make anything more happen. Still am. I always thought of myself as a poet, always wrote and still do, but wouldn't publish full collections until the early 2000s.
I remember Ralph Hawkins coming up to me in Square 4 in Essex University in 1979 and showing me Andrew Duncan's work and asking if I thought they should publish in Ochre. It was rhetorical as he would have done it whatever I said but it was I think the first time they published such a large selection of someone's work in Ochre, which was normally split between four poets.
(It was probably 1978.)
Paul Green edited "10 British Poets" (1993), which was a landmark and the forerunner of Arcadian Rustbelt.
(comment by AD) Some explanation of this would be through mental maps. Using catalogues, AD developed a list of Alternative poets, active from 1960 up to 1997. The list has 420 names. Obviously, nobody has read all these poets. They are just a grey mass. People generally start by reading one Alternative poet... if they get up to five, that is an achievement.
While searching for something else, AD found a programme for the CCCP weekend of 2006. This was number 15. The programme shows 17 poets, that year. The total of slots over 15 years is likely to be 200+. Obviously, some poets read more than once. And some poets were never invited.
If you are a poet, especially an Excluded one, you are the glowing centre of your own mental map. Leaving you out is then a conspicuous act. However, if you are someone trying to arrange a weekend that doesn’t leave the audience frustrated, or editing a magazine, the map is different. The 420 poets are mostly a grey mass and the excluded poet certainly isn’t the centre of the visible world. Also, if you have staged 200 readings, you have said Yes many many times, and the idea that you are peripherally saying No is not apparent to you.
Saying “I am on the periphery of the poetry industry but I am central to that periphery” is obviously problematic.
AD has a big spreadsheet showing most poets who published a book between 1960 and 1997. He filtered out of this 420 poets who were recognisably Alternative. The real total is likely to be much larger. Until you read them, they are all just blank cells. Who can lay claim to expertise in the work of Reg Dorking… Trelawney Pilchard… Raymond Vernon Skiffler… William Oxley?
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