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Biographical note:  Tim Allen lives in Plymouth, he is the editor of Terrible Work a major poetry reviews magazine. Allen is the author of two pamphlets, ‘Texts For A Holy Saturday’ (Phlebas ’96) and ‘The Cruising Duct’ (Maquette ’98) and his poetry has been featured in mags such as First Offense, Oasis and Shearsman. His essays have appeared in ‘Binary Myths’ (Stride) and Eratica magazine.

Biographical note:  Andrew Duncan studied as a mediaevalist and started writing in punk fanzines. He has been publishing poetry since the late 70s, including In a German Hotel, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Sound Surface, Surveillance and Compliance. He was one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated much modern German poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710799
ISBN:  9781844710799
Author:  Tim Allen
Title:  Don’t Start Me Talking
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Apr-07
Extent:  384pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  22 mm
Weight:  576 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 16.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Named for a Sonny Boy Williamson song, this is a collection of interviews with 20 modern poets. The subjects are Kelvin Corcoran, Simon Smith, Michael Haslam, David Chaloner, Elisabeth Bletsoe, David Greenslade, Alexander Hutchison, Peter Manson, Harry Gilonis, Andrew Crozier, Tim Allen, Out to Lunch, Tony Lopez, Sean Bonney, David Miller, R.F. Langley, John Hall, Nick Johnson, Robert Sheppard, and Eric Mottram. The stress is on reflexive poets whose thoughts on language and artistic procedures shed new light on modern culture and on the interpretation of poems. These revealing interviews fit into a scene of historically unprecedented freedom and diversity of ideas; they shed a steady light on the diversity without bringing it to heel or setting up unified criteria; they let the poets speak, and find themselves not in chaos, but in a working practice where they follow intuitive truth for the content and internally consistent open methods for the presentation.

How naïve – to try to find out about modern poetry by getting the poets to talk about what they do. We have gone to the edge of darkness and been given the key to a linguistic hypersensitivity that comes out of the unknown steadfastly towards us.

There is an anomaly about so much reflexive poetry without a body of poetics to support it. But the British dislike of theory could be overcome by getting the producers to talk about their business as individuals. Till now there never was a book where poets from what used to be called the Underground talked at length about their own poetry. The results are surprising, and do tend to upset the theories vociferously proposed by spokesmen for groups which never showed the slightest inclination to think as a group. Perhaps the process whereby fantasy evolves into myth and myth into history can now move on a stage. Perhaps, too, the foundation tales of the black propaganda about the Underground – that it involves mindless spontaneity, mimetic dependence on American models, and inorganic application of academic “theory of literature” – can now be sent to the recycling mill of history.

The widest possible range of poets has been covered outside the lethally conventional. Special attention has been given to groups of poets sharing creative ideas with each other, and to regional scenes – much information will be found about poetic activity in Plymouth, Manchester and Glasgow. Two generations of poets have their say, running down poetic matters from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the razing of Baghdad, from The English Intelligencer to Cul de Qui.

Table of contents:
Introduction by Andrew Duncan
INTERVIEWS
Tim Allen: Get the Lute, go up the Soak
Elisabeth Bletsoe: Homoeopathic Provings of the Cygnus Remedy
Sean Bonney: On the brink of the articulate
David Chaloner: Lime Crushing Houses
Kelvin Corcoran: What we say after ‘Innocence of First Inscription’
Andrew Crozier 1: From Missile Crisis to English Intelligencer
Andrew Crozier 2: How High the Zero
Harry Gilonis: He fills his head with culture; the moon shines bright on Scott La Faro
David Greenslade: Reminds me of a sweaty Yorkie Bar
John Hall: When I hear Ella Fitzgerald Sing It
Michael Haslam: The Hallowed Cloughs of Haslamabad. Time Sprites
Alexander Hutchison: Melodic Cells
Nicholas Johnson: Falls from the ceiling: intact and impetuous
R.F. Langley: Folds Pack Away
Tony Lopez: Picador, Piccolo and Pan
Peter Manson: Hold that Golem
David Miller: Nourishing and Provoking
Eric Mottram: Egoism Vanished in the Act
Out To Lunch: Pink Pong Punx Go Dingo
Robert Sheppard: The Postman Below my Window
Simon Smith: Silver Rail

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From the Introduction

Words are an archaic system, full of ambiguity. Modern poetry, rather consistently, strives to follow and enhance this ambiguity. Each line opens a number of pathways. Different readers follow different pathways. Their choice then predisposes them to certain responses to succeeding lines. Readers diverge — without failing, without breaking the rules, without missing the impact or the point. Where the evidence you collect always proves your initial suppositions right, you can, instead, move through the poetry to a world of your own. Permissiveness and suggestibility go together. Suggestive verbal patterns allow free interpretation and increase diversity. This landscape of conjecture, rapid leaps of intuition, self-reference, and shifting values, is the inside of the poems as well as the outside they swim through. Everyone follows the path which suits them.

In the 1970s, there was a great increase in the complexity of English poetry. Several dozen modern-style, ambiguous poets created a burst of unique trajectories – a real landscape to sustain the freedom designed at the start. This left much of the audience behind, and prose commentary was desirable. Prynne was against explaining anything (and in favour of resistance and difficulty), while Mottram when taking over Poetry Review got rid of the reviews and began just listing published works. This evacuation of the mediating space, of prose and instruction, by the leaders of the scene, possibly influenced everyone else away from explaining things. The brain produces this rich suggestibility – if it is held back by fatigue, or by rage and resentment, it will fail to respond to the words and lines at all. That is, the reader collaborates in the production of the text-response. The poem is inaudible until the reader creates it. It has much less sensory existence than music or painting – which may be why the institutions have not accepted modernity in poetry in the way they have, for example, in the visual arts. A number of conservative critics specialise in destructive un-readings of artistic texts. There is modern poetry, and writing which presents itself as the theory of modern literature, but the latter does not account for the former by any applicable standards. For whatever reasons, reviewing did not flourish in the underground scene. The series of interviews which Mottram carried out at the National Poetry Centre (which were published at the time in Poetry Information) were gleaming exceptions. It may in fact be that reading modern poetry in large quantities is the only effective preparation for reading any single text of modern poetry. The nucleus of prose explaining modern British poetry is, along with issues of Spanner magazine, certain interviews – read and re-read by the interested. Some which have become modern classics are ones with Roy Fisher, Peter Riley, and Ken Smith. We began to collect interviews with poets in September 2003.