When Two Tribes Go to War: Dan Barrow on Essays and Experiments

Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, ed. Tim Allen & Andrew Duncan (Salt Publishing, 2006). ISBN: 9781844710799. £16.99.

Andrew Duncan, The Council of Heresy – a primer of poetry in a balkanised terrain, (Shearsman Books, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610071. £14.95.

A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Shearsman Books, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610439. £12.95.

It started with a book. I first came into contact with the current of poetry known as ‘experimental’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘underground’, ‘linguistically-innovative’ or ‘neo-modernist’ through Iain Sinclair’s 1996 anthology Conductors of Chaos, found in my local library. I returned it after two days. Any attempt to read it felt like a particularly vigorous arm-wrestling bout. I suspect this is a common experience for readers first encountering this poetry: bafflement, perhaps a sense of resentment at the poem for resisting interpretation.

But, as Andrew Duncan suggests in The Council of Heresy, the problem would appear to be, on the one hand, the application of the wrong reading model to texts, and, on the other, the negative publicity given to experimental poetry. Indeed, it has arguably been subjected to an official erasure – it is absent from curricula, broadsheets, libraries and bookstores. This, in comparison to the period 1971-77, when, under Eric Mottram’s editorship, every kind of underground work (gathered under the umbrella of the ‘British Poetry Revival’) appeared regularly in Poetry Review. Whilst, as Duncan admits, this ‘hyperliterate’ poetry is only likely to appeal to a small segment of the reading public – in the same way that not that many people enjoy cryptic crosswords – to systematically wipe it from public view (as in Morrison and Motion’s revisionist Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982), which excluded the BPR group) deprives readers of the choice to engage with it or not.

As co-editor of Angel Exhaust, Duncan has been one of the underground’s most vocal and forceful proselytisers, and this is the fourth in a series of books by him interrogating the critical position of, and approaches to, the underground. Its declared aim is to counteract the processes of “misunderstanding”, “disinformation” and “malice” that have deformed and “balkanised” the terrain of poetry. Duncan’s thesis – that there are no central aesthetic movements in contemporary poetry, merely a conglomeration of competing tribes, splintered apart after the suppression of the 60s and 70s avant-garde – is undeniable, and the intention – to “establish a set of shared artistic facts about the period, not to continue warfare” – is admirable.

This involves, first, a staking-out of the landscape, and then a ‘primer of the avant-garde’. This is undoubtedly the most useful section in the book: understanding how avant-garde texts can operate makes them more approachable and corrects erroneous tendencies in reading. Duncan argues that the sense of shock many readers encounter when reading experimental work – “A grey feeling of the air being sucked out of our lungs as the text offers no goal, no explanations, no comforting texture of lived experience” – is the allergic reaction of those only trained in a mainstream reading style. In conventional poetry, a single meaning is “reinforced at every level”, guiding the reader down a single narrow path; avant-garde poems, on the other hand, are characterised by an “overabundance” of information, with readers given their own choice of movement through the text. “[A]s soon as you stop thrashing around in the search for structures which aren’t there”, it becomes palpable and enjoyable. Experimental poetry “has a direct assault on the brain, offering a mass of urgent but unresolved information, withholding the conventional pathways of verbal association which would make it palatable (and forgettable)”. Experimental poets are not trying to bamboozle the reader – they are communicating through alternative and untested models of linguistic meaning, to which one simply has to adjust one’s brain. “The naïve reader gets agitated by… gaps, whereas the experienced reader simply relaxes”.

Much of the primer is concerned with the relationship of both mainstream and experimental poetry with the phenomenal world. Duncan argues that experimental work, in its mimetic processes, and its decentring of focus from the poet’s ego, is actually more true to experience than the mainstream lyric of ‘personal response’. His characterisation of conventional poets as total narcissists, complicit with the capitalist cult of individualism, is perhaps something of a distortion, and somewhat undermines his message of peace between poetic camps, but does at least help him outline the peculiar charms of the avant-garde.

The ‘primer’ is followed by essays on a variety of issues and poets. A number of the latter prove very interesting. The touching essay on Barry MacSweeney places his work back into the context of 70s experimentalism; the one on Maggie O’Sullivan highlights her explosive, linguistically-sundered poetry as one of the most under-rated oeuvres in contemporary poetry. Further essays on a variety of topics follow tangential thoughts like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, sometimes turning up matters of interest, and sometimes ending in strings of inconclusive speculation. His thoughts on the psychological basis and cultural resonances of the gurgling phonemes of Russian Futurist sound poetry, links between avant-garde poetry and the ecstatic and esoteric cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, and between abstract art and mystical experiences, all make for stimulating reading; his contention (to reduce a complex argument) that avant-garde poetry perhaps impacts something buried, unplaceable and primitive within us will be familiar to anyone who has read David Keenan’s writings on experimental music (within which bracket he includes the likes of The Stooges). These essays provide reinforcement for the primer, demonstrating how the processes of experimental poetry play out, and, in doing so, help us learn to become more independent, thinking readers. In spite of the book’s flaws – Duncan’s icy, blanket dismissal of the mainstream, its decidedly peculiar stop-and-start style, its lack of ultimate coherence – this certainly makes it worth the entry fee.

Don’t Start Me Talking aims to supply some of the information necessary for such a process of learning and becoming: as it is necessary to have some knowledge of the poetics behind avant-garde work, the blurb notes, it should be useful to have the producers telling us about it. And a good many of the twenty poets interviewed here do exactly that: there are particularly illuminating conversations with Robert Sheppard, the late Andrew Crozier, R.F. Langley, Tony Lopez and Simon Smith, which provide useful insights into the underlying procedures in their work; for example, the use of collage by Lopez and Peter Manson to create their radically de-personalised work, or the time-limited process of redrafting that resulted in Simon Smith’s Fifteen Exits. In some instances their patient and casual breakdowns of what is going on within their work happily gives the lie to the idea that avant-garde poetry is a priori ‘obscure’ and ‘meaningless’. They also give intriguing accounts of the process by which one becomes an experimental poet (or ‘where it all went wrong’): David Chaloner and Kelvin Corcoran happily discuss the reading and learning (Corcoran was at Essex University when Ed Dorn, Douglas Oliver and Ralph Hawkins were among the staff) that shaped their younger minds; Harry Gilonis recalls trawling Camden’s Compendium bookshop and listening to free-improvisation records. There is even a smattering of pleasant bon mots and anecdotes – including a couple of quite moving ones from Langley about the act of observation amongst nature: “I stood for an hour and a half by a track and no-one came near me… A lot of rabbits came up and sat on my feet. And moths were whipping about within inches of me” – if that’s your sort of thing.

The book serves a double function as an (incomplete) account of the formation and history of the poetic underground of the last thirty years: we get to hear all about the tributaries of influence flowing in from America in the late 1960s (Olson and the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), the catalytic effect the likes of Peter Riley, Crozier, Allen Fisher and J.H. Prynne had on the next generation, the ‘poetry wars’ of the 70s. The sheer excitement of that formative period for those involved – the thrill of “making it new”, to borrow Pound’s phrase – comes across powerfully, as does the extent to which the poetic underground was a self-created independent culture, relying on self-publication and small magazines. Such a culture was also, by necessity, one infused with political radicalism: Michael Haslam discusses his relationships with the English branch of the Situationist International, King Mob and the Angry Brigade; the poets’ attitudes towards mainstream publishing can be quite accurately summed up by Mottram’s remarks about “the mob of poetasters who publish each other in the capitalist publishing houses”. This book will prove a very useful resource for whoever eventually writes that history.

This is not to say it doesn’t have problems. One becomes a little incredulous about its subtitle when ‘contemporary’ can stretch to include two deceased subjects, one of whom (Mottram) died nearly fifteen years ago. Moreover, the editors’ decision to restrict their interviews to ‘underground’ poets removes a measure of its legitimacy; their justification that conventional poets “do not have conversation, they practice networking and validation”, whilst gratifyingly spiteful, rings hollow. Certainly, some mainstream poets are bores who, as Mottram puts it, are “content simply to imitate and slightly shift Victorian and Edwardian British poetics”, but it seems unfair to tar everyone with the same brush. Robert Sheppard takes what seems the most accurate and equitable position: “the contemporary mainstream poets… write a considered poetics which is speculative, reflective, and, on occasion, illuminating – but contestable”.

It may seem churlish at this point to also mention some of the dreaded PC terms – gender and race – but one can’t help noticing the presence of only one female poet – Elizabeth Bletsoe, whose interview is certainly one of the most intelligent and interesting – amongst the subjects, and the absence of any non-whites. There is certainly no shortage of good female experimental poets (Claire Crowther, Melanie Challenger and Helen Macdonald all spring immediately to mind) and a greater racial diversity available among experimental poets who might have been amenable to being interviewed.

Ben Watson (a.k.a. Out To Lunch), in his Don’t Start Me Talking interview, cites J.H. Prynne’s The White Stones (1969) as the road-to-Damascus moment in his conversion to the avant-garde. Although Duncan hardly mentions him – he’s written on him elsewhere – Prynne’s work has had a catalytic effect on the neo-modernist current as a whole. His involvement with the English Intelligencer group places him at the very origin of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’; the publication of his revised and expanded Poems by Bloodaxe in 2005 confirmed his stature. A Manner of Utterance is a rather various anthology of ‘personal… reactions’ to his work; the editor, Ian Brinton, has put especial effort into avoiding another anthology filled with the usual academic suspects – the majority of those contributing critical pieces on Prynne are also poets; two composers contribute, and there is an interview with the artist Ian Friend, who has drawn on Prynne’s work for a number of years, conducted by art-critic Richard Humphreys. This diversity is wholly necessary: the frequent impenetrability of Prynne’s work demands a variety of possible approaches, to find the weak points in its armour. This is not to suggest that Prynne’s work is wilfully obscure, but it is undoubtedly hard work. The composer John Douglas Templeton reports that “I have a certain ritualized behaviour with the poems”, repeatedly reading poems from differing angles, investigating different possible levels of meaning each time, from the general structure of a piece, down to the meanings of individual words (Prynne is well-known for his use of recondite technical and scientific vocabularies), until “little constellations of significance [form] around certain words and phrases”.

That it does have significance can’t be denied – if Prynne were just an agent provocateur attempting to hoodwink readers, it’s unlikely he would have continued to plough his particular furrow for over forty years now. Some of the essays in A Manner of Utterance – especially David Caddy’s ‘Notes Towards a Preliminary Reading of J.H. Prynne’ – prove very useful in illuminating his strategies for coagulating possible meanings, and some of the themes he investigates: the use of the word-hoards of economics, chemistry, physiology, anatomy, etc., interests in the nature of what underlies human economy (as in the early prose essay ‘A Note on Metals’ and the collection Brass (1971), whose title puns on the alloy, ‘brassiness’, and cash – ‘muck and brass’), and so on. One wonders, as always, to what extent these ideas are mere critical impositions, but Prynne’s work is almost wholly open-ended, bled dry of any trace of the poet’s ego or intention. The reader is obliged to construct the poems’ ‘meanings’ themselves, piece by piece. We get a demonstration of such a process in Nigel Wheale’s reading of the pamphlet-length sequence Red D. Gypsum: he traces the possible significance of the ‘D’ signature, the thematic resonances of gypsum, the economic discourses that thread through the book, etc. This approach of ultra-close reading recurs throughout the collection: Prynne is, perhaps, a figure more known more by reputation than actually read; this collection corrects that, telling us that, if we wish to understand the poems, the only thing to do is read them – again and again and again.

As it is, some of the critical articles may well send the reader scurrying to the poems simply in order to get away. Keston Sutherland and Simon Perrill’s pieces are, at times, too much of a slog to continue reading, and Li Zhimin’s essay on Prynne’s relation to Chinese poetics only rarely touches on its ostensible subject. Oddly, it is the pieces by artists that are most interesting. This is, perhaps, because they provide a fresh perspective on Prynne, proving that anyone (within reason) can read his work. In the case of John Douglas Templeton, it is heartening to read him describe a process of autodidacticism and revelry in the wholly new order of verbal experiences the poems offered: “It was only later that I discovered that this poetry was supposed to be difficult”. As Friend puts it, for enquiring minds, “Maybe ‘hard’ is the wrong word. Perhaps ‘multi-layered’ or ‘complex’ are more appropriate”; his citations of some of his favourite phrases from Prynne are refreshingly unencumbered by attempts at critical thinking.

This collection is, the editor notes, “not a Reader’s Guide; it does not provide answers”; it is certainly not for the absolute newcomer to Prynne – and precisely what level of use it will be to academic specialists is questionable. What it does provide is an active example of exactly the kind of open-minded, multi-channel reading that Andrew Duncan and the poets in Don’t Start Me Talking advocate – approaches that reveal a world of interest awaiting the inquisitive reader of contemporary poetry.