Interview
Interview without questions by Peter van Stuyvesant
Intro. There was an interview for Litter magazine with someone who became vexed and vetoed the interview. Since the answers may be useful to readers or reviewers, we are putting up the answers here, while removing the questions. Fake questions have been added to make it flow. Another interview did appear in Litter, and Billy Mills quoted from it in his review of Rustbelt.
Q1 What are the editors’ favourite biscuits?
Andrew: Let me do the honours – In about October 2015, I was in a bar with Simon Smith, and he explained the idea to me. He had already worked it out. The core was Simon and me, and the leading idea was that there had been a cultural winter during the 1980s, and that the generation which included us had missed out on publication, and subsequently missed out on finding an audience, or a legend. We both produced lists of names, and a book was put together about six months later. Simon dropped out. I put the idea to Shearsman, and Tony Frazer said that he couldn’t do it because nobody would buy it. So I shelved the project. But the feeling of something missing, and the desire to find it, just got worse. Eventually, I got Waterloo interested, and then recruited John Goodby as a sheet anchor, reality check, or technical expert. Ian – I feel guilty about this. Ian is an important poet, but the ‘branding’ of the book says it is under-exposed poets, and you can’t call Ian under-exposed. It’s not a question of how good a poet he is. Underrated, yes.
While researching a book about 1970s poetry, I went through all (or, some?) of Peter Porter’s Observer reviews, via a scan. He reviewed Ian’s first book – in 1980, from Carcanet. Very positive review. “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” Carcanet, Observer, Radio 3? This is the attention that everyone else didn’t get.
Elizabeth James summed the project up back in 2016 as being people too young to have experienced the student revolt of 1968 and old enough to have been aware, and probably to vote, in the 1979 election, which changed everything. I find that a convincing frame, unifying and limiting. Of course people went on developing, and writing, after 1979 – it is just a shared moment.
Q2 What do you think about Rishi Sunak?
Andrew: The Chronology on the website has a purpose, which is to show how much time passed before each (any) of our poets got a book out. This has to do with a thesis about a “cultural winter”. The thesis says, X spent 15 years writing before getting a book out, and was then passed over in favour of younger poets who were more photogenic (the New Gen marketing campaign– 1994 – and its successors). It doesn’t also cover the entire cultural field. And it stops at 1994 because our poets had finally emerged into daylight by then. The point is that our poets didn’t get books out.
John: Yes, there was a northern alternative scene, a zone between mainstream and the kind of more formally innovative poetry we're interested in, that emerged in the early 1980s, with outlets in The Wide Skirt and Mike Blackburn's Sunk Island Review. A Yorkshire revival of certain aspects of the New York School; Frank O'Hara goes to Rotherham, Kenneth Koch hangs out in Maltby. A mild, but socially alert and critical zaniness as a way of dealing with / fending off the traumas of deindustrialisation and structural collapse. One precedent for this – perhaps in reaction against Larkin, the big local presence – was Pete Didsbury, whose The Butchers of Hull (1982) is a classic text. Something comparable can be seen on the other side of the Pennines in the early work of John Ash. Dilute, dreamy surrealism, Laforgue as source rather than Breton, was a crucial component. The problem being that the twin threats of whimsy and derivativeness were never too far away. Dilute the formula a bit more and you get Simon Armitage. This formation is still important; the Yorkshire poetry scene has been sustained by Peter and Ann Sansom's The Poetry Business which has heroically been in operation since the 1980s and has done an untold amount of good things, even if the cost of longevity may have taken the shine off the irony of its name somewhat. But even to include the best of this would have taken us off-piste and stretched the book beyond bursting-point.
Q3. Issue Eight of "Angel Exhaust", in 1992, referred to “lit rooms and fuzzy sets”. Does this mean sociability and weak borders?
John: Not really, although I can see why you might ask this. Keith Jafrate is located in Huddersfield. Me and Khaled Hakim are from the West Midlands. Vittoria Vaughan is Brighton-based. Kelvin Corcoran is from Worcestershire – and writes out of his encounter with Greece. And Wales isn't just the single place with singular identities you seem to assume, any more than England is. Torrance is a South Walian blow-in from Carshalton via Bristol, Annwn was at Aberystwyth University but grew up in and writes a lot about Cheshire, and has lived in Wakefield since the 1980s, while Ian Davidson is from North Wales and is a Welsh speaker, unlike the others. All very different kinds of Wales and Welshness. And Torrance was influential only in a limited way, and for a limited time, in Cardiff – on Graham Hartill (another West Midlander) and Elisabeth Bletsoe (who, apart from some early work, firmly roots her work in her native Dorset). More important than Torrance in Wales as a whole for the kind of work we anthologised would be John James and Peter Finch. But it would be true to say that the paths of many of the poets passed through places which might be considered marginal by spokespeople for the acceptable poetry brands of the era. Wales is a special case, because it was both incredibly conservative in its mainstream orthodoxy – but that orthodoxy was shallow and insecure – and a place where the experimental tradition was stronger and more difficult to occlude than in England (David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts), and hence could have more free rein. The openness to experiment of a succession of editors of Poetry Wales until recently – Robert Minhinnick, Zoë Skoulding, Nia Davies – as compared with, say, those of Poetry Review, shows where this led in practical terms.
Andrew: I think there was an ecology of the poem. Most of our participants were involved with about a dozen magazines, back in the day. The main factor in those magazines was the taste of the audience who bought them. And there was a collective legislation about how poems should be written – a kind of “common law”. You can’t separate a language from the people who speak it. So, alternative poems fit into that ecology. I think print and postal links were as important as face to face processes. There were about 15 or 20 hip editors and I just sailed along in their slipstream. If you know what all the hep cats know, you just need a notebook.
Q4. What happens when you reach the other side of the Erewash Valley?
John: Good question, but I think the Introduction answers it if you read it carefully. What we're saying is that the 1980s acted as the incubator of a certain poetic sensibility which never had the chance of an airing in the decade itself. During the decade itself it was easy to develop as a politically radical / experimental writer – we mention the opportunities, long since removed, for a semi-subsidised existence in which one might manage to survive financially and immerse oneself fully in the developing culture. Remember, the poetry outlets were very limited in number compared with today. Things have changed enormously in the last twenty years with the advent of the web, print on demand, the plummeting cost of quality publication, etc. There were only a few gatekeepers back then and they were hostile to the kind of work these poets wanted to write and publish. It was inhibiting, and very difficult to find an outlet unless you were connected to the older avant-garde groups in London and Cambridge. It was only from the mid-1990s that the poetic backlog started to get shifted.
Andrew: I think a lot of poems were written in the 1980s but didn’t get published until much later. That was the initial bonanza for Salt and Shearsman, that they could collect and publish a huge range of material which had never been seen (or, was barely seen) before. Incidentally, the copyright statements refer to selected or collected poems, mostly, not the date of composition.
New poets linked to Cambridge and London didn’t get books out. Not in the 1980s. That is what the chronology pinpoints.
Q5 I think it’s time for a cup of tea.
Andrew: I’m glad the poems aren’t so irritating!
I had a copy of Hans Ulrich Obrist's History of curating, and I was impressed by an interview with Johannes Cladders. He said “I always looked at art as the solitary effort of individuals who make works. I found it important to present these works as purely as possible, which was only possible in a solo presentation. I never thought much of exhibitions in which 20 artists are shown with three works apiece.” So, he liked exhibitions with a single artist, and found a second voice as a disturbance. I like anthologies, actually. But what I came away with was a sense of concentration and acoustic baffling. As an editor, you don’t write the poems. But you can isolate them and remove distractions. Those quantities are in your control. If you give them away, you may have no power at all.
A book is physically limited. The publisher told us that his set method of manufacturing had a spine which would work with 300 pages, not more. So, maybe you start with a sense of restrictions, of large bodies of sound billowing around outside what you can hear, that may be loud enough to prevent you from hearing it properly. You can follow the physical limits to put a wall around the book, to protect it from distractions. And in this way you can create a level of attention for the poems which you include. And setting chronological limits follows from that.
In a painting, you might have partial symmetries, shapes which are modifications of each other and suggest collusive meaning. In an anthology, the poems can also be partial symmetries, partial reflections or transforms of each other. This yields subtle effects which are only possible in a restricted perceptual field. Where the implicit is not dispersed and buried. The analogies might expose shared experience – the colour of a time, maybe of a cultural winter and a hangover after a period of political activism. The other poets are also the context for any given poet. So, you are controlling context. The other poets provide depth of field, a way of making the other parts of the 20th century disappear.
John: Ditto what Andrew says. Why isn't it about the poetry? Because of course that's all it can be about. We think the work we showcase is more ‘important or significant' than other kinds of 'alternative' 1980s poetry because that's the job, the prerogative of any anthologist. We think there's a need to make the case for this particular, previously undefined and under-represented strain of poetry, which developed under the unique circumstances of a particular time, and we make it. Arcadian Rustbelt is the result. If anyone disagrees with our definition of 'alternative' poetry in the 1980s, and thinks, for example, that the McMillan-Didsbury-Sansom-Stannard-Armitage-Hattersley-Ash strain which was contemporary with it is more important, they're welcome to make their own anthology. It would make a good book, I think, and I'd welcome it and buy it. But it would be very different from ours.
Q6 Geoffrey Grigson. Old Geoffrey. Where did it all go wrong?
John: You're not the 'Enemy'! (But perhaps you're being rather defensive in saying this?) We agree with you about those involved in the 1977-78 Poetry Society kerfuffle. It was a conservative coup, but in some crucial senses those involved brought it on themselves (and we do say this in our Introduction). We're not cheerleaders for the minor talents involved in that brouhaha and we reject the mantle of unfair victimhood some of them have since assumed. Your 'whether or not' seems to be a way of saying that none of the innovative poets who lost out in 1977-78 were as good as they thought they were, but just as some were, others weren't. There were very fine poets who were thereafter unreasonably excluded from the platforms and outlets over which the Poetry Society had control.
Andrew: People always want to find Events to tie poetic history to, and there is always a problem finding central events. Every book that gets published is a micro-event, that is secure.
I looked at the 1977 rave-up, and couldn’t find anybody who gave up writing as a result of the defeat. So, it didn’t affect the writing process. And it wasn’t central –it affected maybe 20 or 30 people who hung around the Poetry Centre at Earls Court. Most of them had little discernible talent. Since the London scene was very productive during the 1980s, it wasn't paralysed by external, business events.
I think you have to allow for how crushingly conservative the English poetry scene is. I admire people who set out by saying No to all that. They have an irrational self-belief from which almost everything flows. Including a trance-like stupidity, in individual cases.
Intro. There was an interview for Litter magazine with someone who became vexed and vetoed the interview. Since the answers may be useful to readers or reviewers, we are putting up the answers here, while removing the questions. Fake questions have been added to make it flow. Another interview did appear in Litter, and Billy Mills quoted from it in his review of Rustbelt.
Q1 What are the editors’ favourite biscuits?
Andrew: Let me do the honours – In about October 2015, I was in a bar with Simon Smith, and he explained the idea to me. He had already worked it out. The core was Simon and me, and the leading idea was that there had been a cultural winter during the 1980s, and that the generation which included us had missed out on publication, and subsequently missed out on finding an audience, or a legend. We both produced lists of names, and a book was put together about six months later. Simon dropped out. I put the idea to Shearsman, and Tony Frazer said that he couldn’t do it because nobody would buy it. So I shelved the project. But the feeling of something missing, and the desire to find it, just got worse. Eventually, I got Waterloo interested, and then recruited John Goodby as a sheet anchor, reality check, or technical expert. Ian – I feel guilty about this. Ian is an important poet, but the ‘branding’ of the book says it is under-exposed poets, and you can’t call Ian under-exposed. It’s not a question of how good a poet he is. Underrated, yes.
While researching a book about 1970s poetry, I went through all (or, some?) of Peter Porter’s Observer reviews, via a scan. He reviewed Ian’s first book – in 1980, from Carcanet. Very positive review. “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” Carcanet, Observer, Radio 3? This is the attention that everyone else didn’t get.
Elizabeth James summed the project up back in 2016 as being people too young to have experienced the student revolt of 1968 and old enough to have been aware, and probably to vote, in the 1979 election, which changed everything. I find that a convincing frame, unifying and limiting. Of course people went on developing, and writing, after 1979 – it is just a shared moment.
Q2 What do you think about Rishi Sunak?
Andrew: The Chronology on the website has a purpose, which is to show how much time passed before each (any) of our poets got a book out. This has to do with a thesis about a “cultural winter”. The thesis says, X spent 15 years writing before getting a book out, and was then passed over in favour of younger poets who were more photogenic (the New Gen marketing campaign– 1994 – and its successors). It doesn’t also cover the entire cultural field. And it stops at 1994 because our poets had finally emerged into daylight by then. The point is that our poets didn’t get books out.
John: Yes, there was a northern alternative scene, a zone between mainstream and the kind of more formally innovative poetry we're interested in, that emerged in the early 1980s, with outlets in The Wide Skirt and Mike Blackburn's Sunk Island Review. A Yorkshire revival of certain aspects of the New York School; Frank O'Hara goes to Rotherham, Kenneth Koch hangs out in Maltby. A mild, but socially alert and critical zaniness as a way of dealing with / fending off the traumas of deindustrialisation and structural collapse. One precedent for this – perhaps in reaction against Larkin, the big local presence – was Pete Didsbury, whose The Butchers of Hull (1982) is a classic text. Something comparable can be seen on the other side of the Pennines in the early work of John Ash. Dilute, dreamy surrealism, Laforgue as source rather than Breton, was a crucial component. The problem being that the twin threats of whimsy and derivativeness were never too far away. Dilute the formula a bit more and you get Simon Armitage. This formation is still important; the Yorkshire poetry scene has been sustained by Peter and Ann Sansom's The Poetry Business which has heroically been in operation since the 1980s and has done an untold amount of good things, even if the cost of longevity may have taken the shine off the irony of its name somewhat. But even to include the best of this would have taken us off-piste and stretched the book beyond bursting-point.
Q3. Issue Eight of "Angel Exhaust", in 1992, referred to “lit rooms and fuzzy sets”. Does this mean sociability and weak borders?
John: Not really, although I can see why you might ask this. Keith Jafrate is located in Huddersfield. Me and Khaled Hakim are from the West Midlands. Vittoria Vaughan is Brighton-based. Kelvin Corcoran is from Worcestershire – and writes out of his encounter with Greece. And Wales isn't just the single place with singular identities you seem to assume, any more than England is. Torrance is a South Walian blow-in from Carshalton via Bristol, Annwn was at Aberystwyth University but grew up in and writes a lot about Cheshire, and has lived in Wakefield since the 1980s, while Ian Davidson is from North Wales and is a Welsh speaker, unlike the others. All very different kinds of Wales and Welshness. And Torrance was influential only in a limited way, and for a limited time, in Cardiff – on Graham Hartill (another West Midlander) and Elisabeth Bletsoe (who, apart from some early work, firmly roots her work in her native Dorset). More important than Torrance in Wales as a whole for the kind of work we anthologised would be John James and Peter Finch. But it would be true to say that the paths of many of the poets passed through places which might be considered marginal by spokespeople for the acceptable poetry brands of the era. Wales is a special case, because it was both incredibly conservative in its mainstream orthodoxy – but that orthodoxy was shallow and insecure – and a place where the experimental tradition was stronger and more difficult to occlude than in England (David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts), and hence could have more free rein. The openness to experiment of a succession of editors of Poetry Wales until recently – Robert Minhinnick, Zoë Skoulding, Nia Davies – as compared with, say, those of Poetry Review, shows where this led in practical terms.
Andrew: I think there was an ecology of the poem. Most of our participants were involved with about a dozen magazines, back in the day. The main factor in those magazines was the taste of the audience who bought them. And there was a collective legislation about how poems should be written – a kind of “common law”. You can’t separate a language from the people who speak it. So, alternative poems fit into that ecology. I think print and postal links were as important as face to face processes. There were about 15 or 20 hip editors and I just sailed along in their slipstream. If you know what all the hep cats know, you just need a notebook.
Q4. What happens when you reach the other side of the Erewash Valley?
John: Good question, but I think the Introduction answers it if you read it carefully. What we're saying is that the 1980s acted as the incubator of a certain poetic sensibility which never had the chance of an airing in the decade itself. During the decade itself it was easy to develop as a politically radical / experimental writer – we mention the opportunities, long since removed, for a semi-subsidised existence in which one might manage to survive financially and immerse oneself fully in the developing culture. Remember, the poetry outlets were very limited in number compared with today. Things have changed enormously in the last twenty years with the advent of the web, print on demand, the plummeting cost of quality publication, etc. There were only a few gatekeepers back then and they were hostile to the kind of work these poets wanted to write and publish. It was inhibiting, and very difficult to find an outlet unless you were connected to the older avant-garde groups in London and Cambridge. It was only from the mid-1990s that the poetic backlog started to get shifted.
Andrew: I think a lot of poems were written in the 1980s but didn’t get published until much later. That was the initial bonanza for Salt and Shearsman, that they could collect and publish a huge range of material which had never been seen (or, was barely seen) before. Incidentally, the copyright statements refer to selected or collected poems, mostly, not the date of composition.
New poets linked to Cambridge and London didn’t get books out. Not in the 1980s. That is what the chronology pinpoints.
Q5 I think it’s time for a cup of tea.
Andrew: I’m glad the poems aren’t so irritating!
I had a copy of Hans Ulrich Obrist's History of curating, and I was impressed by an interview with Johannes Cladders. He said “I always looked at art as the solitary effort of individuals who make works. I found it important to present these works as purely as possible, which was only possible in a solo presentation. I never thought much of exhibitions in which 20 artists are shown with three works apiece.” So, he liked exhibitions with a single artist, and found a second voice as a disturbance. I like anthologies, actually. But what I came away with was a sense of concentration and acoustic baffling. As an editor, you don’t write the poems. But you can isolate them and remove distractions. Those quantities are in your control. If you give them away, you may have no power at all.
A book is physically limited. The publisher told us that his set method of manufacturing had a spine which would work with 300 pages, not more. So, maybe you start with a sense of restrictions, of large bodies of sound billowing around outside what you can hear, that may be loud enough to prevent you from hearing it properly. You can follow the physical limits to put a wall around the book, to protect it from distractions. And in this way you can create a level of attention for the poems which you include. And setting chronological limits follows from that.
In a painting, you might have partial symmetries, shapes which are modifications of each other and suggest collusive meaning. In an anthology, the poems can also be partial symmetries, partial reflections or transforms of each other. This yields subtle effects which are only possible in a restricted perceptual field. Where the implicit is not dispersed and buried. The analogies might expose shared experience – the colour of a time, maybe of a cultural winter and a hangover after a period of political activism. The other poets are also the context for any given poet. So, you are controlling context. The other poets provide depth of field, a way of making the other parts of the 20th century disappear.
John: Ditto what Andrew says. Why isn't it about the poetry? Because of course that's all it can be about. We think the work we showcase is more ‘important or significant' than other kinds of 'alternative' 1980s poetry because that's the job, the prerogative of any anthologist. We think there's a need to make the case for this particular, previously undefined and under-represented strain of poetry, which developed under the unique circumstances of a particular time, and we make it. Arcadian Rustbelt is the result. If anyone disagrees with our definition of 'alternative' poetry in the 1980s, and thinks, for example, that the McMillan-Didsbury-Sansom-Stannard-Armitage-Hattersley-Ash strain which was contemporary with it is more important, they're welcome to make their own anthology. It would make a good book, I think, and I'd welcome it and buy it. But it would be very different from ours.
Q6 Geoffrey Grigson. Old Geoffrey. Where did it all go wrong?
John: You're not the 'Enemy'! (But perhaps you're being rather defensive in saying this?) We agree with you about those involved in the 1977-78 Poetry Society kerfuffle. It was a conservative coup, but in some crucial senses those involved brought it on themselves (and we do say this in our Introduction). We're not cheerleaders for the minor talents involved in that brouhaha and we reject the mantle of unfair victimhood some of them have since assumed. Your 'whether or not' seems to be a way of saying that none of the innovative poets who lost out in 1977-78 were as good as they thought they were, but just as some were, others weren't. There were very fine poets who were thereafter unreasonably excluded from the platforms and outlets over which the Poetry Society had control.
Andrew: People always want to find Events to tie poetic history to, and there is always a problem finding central events. Every book that gets published is a micro-event, that is secure.
I looked at the 1977 rave-up, and couldn’t find anybody who gave up writing as a result of the defeat. So, it didn’t affect the writing process. And it wasn’t central –it affected maybe 20 or 30 people who hung around the Poetry Centre at Earls Court. Most of them had little discernible talent. Since the London scene was very productive during the 1980s, it wasn't paralysed by external, business events.
I think you have to allow for how crushingly conservative the English poetry scene is. I admire people who set out by saying No to all that. They have an irrational self-belief from which almost everything flows. Including a trance-like stupidity, in individual cases.
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