Jacket 20 — December 2002 | # 20 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
Andrew DuncanSuch that commonly each:A Various Art and the Cambridge Leisure CentreThis piece is 5,300 words or about twelve printed pages long |
What happened in British poetry in the 1950s?
Geoffrey Moore’s British Council pamphlet on British Poetry Now, for 1957, says that ‘For ten years after the war, British poetry seemed to be dead on its feet.’: a remarkable statement for an official publication of the body engaged in promoting British culture; but not necessarily an intemperate or out-of-date one. Surely the era where Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie or Philip Larkin could achieve national eminence has something of the cadaver and of blue-black skin tones about it. |
This world had few products more eminent than Grosseteste Review (1967–84), the creation of Tim Longville and John Riley. This began essentially as an English Objectivist magazine, gazing at the USA, and gradually became devoted to something much more local, unidentifiable, and unexpected, something which hadn’t really existed in 1967; and sometimes called the Cambridge Leisure Centre, although that isn’t very appropriate, and ‘English Objectivism’ isn’t wholly descriptive either. Most readers will know this group through A Various Art (1987, edited by Longville and by Andrew Crozier, the publisher of Ferry Press books, who had co-edited The English Intelligencer with Peter Riley), which is useful and widely available. It includes poems by Longville, Crozier, JH Prynne, Roy Fisher, John Seed, John Hall, Anthony Barnett, John James, Douglas Oliver, Peter Philpott, John Riley, David Chaloner, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Nick Totton, Ralph Hawkins, Iain Sinclair, and Peter Riley. The anthology represents a Timenow of about 1975. This is the British response to the generation of American poets who included Olson, O’Hara, Ashbery, John Wieners and Dorn, as well as to Carl Rakosi and George Oppen, the generation of 1931. |
What happened in British poetry in the 60s?,
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Some convergences
The most obvious mannerism is a constant reference to ‘light’ as a noun endowed with agency. The human figure is constantly reduced to an outline within a visual plane, both accepted and delimited by it. It occurs to me that this derives from Antonioni, whose characters are always dominated and deified by the space around them. Envy of visual art, seen as more opulent, classless, and free, is also a powerful spur. What we want indeed! He comes in (Peter Riley, from ‘at the café’) Our loss of courtly grace cohabits (from ‘in the pub’)
This is a crux because, although it appears to be le regard concret, immediacy, in real time, it also strongly enjoins the idea of a moral community, which would govern the design of buildings, the training of workmen, the moral standards of entrepreneurs, etc., and which becomes indignant at the exposure of built squalor. The trope of beautiful countryside being turned into third-rate housing and impoverished communities is found in Georgian poetry; the suppressed origin of English leftist poetry, of course. |
As Roy Fisher has remarked, we live in a country where every meadow, every building, are invisible beneath centuries of moral-literary allegories. It’s startling how few British poems are thoroughly free of the stock figures and design values of nineteenth-century religious prints. The arrival of the camera at least provided, via snapshots but above all through advertisements, a new commonplace imagery. The evolution of the principle optic (from High Zero, by Andrew Crozier)
This tone can be arch, infuriating, inexplicit, and baffling. It follows from the unrehearsed approach, discovering things without a preset theme, and from the montage which was mandatory in the 1960s. The idea was to bring in generalised knowledge while still remaining casual. Allen Fisher, in his important review, talks about sprezzatura as a guiding principle. This is a kind of studied negligence. Again, this casualness pervades all the new poetry of the Sixties; the poets in AVA point away from it because of their interest in ideas, which implies a certain connectedness and obstinacy in piling up data; but they would be as terrified as Brian Patten or Adrian Henri of the past-boundness, moralizing, and didacticism found in the academic poets of the 1950s. The archness, like the unruffled procession up the aisle to we, conceals the transition from the particular to the general, an operation which, like a river crossing under fire, frequently turns out badly. |
The resistance to the CLC
The ambition and high quality of the group discussed could hardly go without arousing criticisms. One mental map of poetico-linguistic space shows two significant Left Modernist groupings, one in Cambridge (inspired by Prynne), and one in London (inspired by Eric Mottram). I don’t subscribe to this identification, which is normally followed by a furious denunciation of the Cambridge end for lacking in reverence to the London boys, and being more famous than they are. In a small country with good transport, the city is too leaky to be a closed, self-similar, cultural unit. Yes Virginia, there is a London avant-garde; it is too much like people with bags over their heads banging their heads against the wall and making a lot of noise but making few articulate sounds. Their poetics are too much like someone excitedly playing you an American single they’ve just bought from the shop, and too little like someone making their own music. |
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Gents in a landscape hang above their lands. |
Lawson states that ‘Philosophical pastoral, meanwhile, flourished in the small windy city of Cambridge during the late 1960s and 1970s ... The residual desire for community in the Cambridge pastorale is itself a form of nostalgia: for small artisan cultures.’ His position is interesting, but presupposes the superiority of misery over happiness as the subject of poetry. Once you define ‘anxiety’ as a proxy proof that ‘I am intelligent’, you have constructed a game you can rather easily win. The style in question has nothing to do with nymphs and shepherdesses, but instead with 60s pop and up-to-date optimism. In fact, the fineness of Lawson’s objections is due to his proximity to the group, not to a deep gap between him and them. I imagine that his own poems are produced by a small group, of one person, and by artisanal methods, without use of heavy machinery. They are admirable, nonetheless. |
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