David Caddy

David Caddy
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So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England with David Caddy

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  1. 29.05.2008

    Letter 13

    Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. SoHereWeAre John Kinsella teaches at Cambridge University and Kenyon College and is very much a global poet of place. Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1963, he arrived on the English poetry scene with a thud on the doormat in the form of Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (Arc 1997), Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Hunt & other poems (Bloodaxe 1998). More books followed and his prolific output was consolidated in Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W.W. Norton 2004). Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom and praised on the back cover by George Steiner, this book was followed by The New Arcadia: Poems (W.W. Norton 2005). He has now produced Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press 2007), which represents his developing critical position. Kinsella has consistently situated his poetry within the pastoral, yet his critical work is attempting to move beyond that tradition. In essence, there is a tension between his mainstream pastoral work and his more adventurous attempts at what he terms ‘linguistic disobedience’, as exemplified in his work Graphology (Equipage 1997) and a new lyricism. Disclosed Poetics is divided into four chapters on the pastoral, landscape and place; spatial lyricism; manifestoes; ageing, loss, recidivism, with some appendices at the end. It is less a study than a series of explorative approaches in notebook form or as he writes ‘a stretching out of the poetic line’ designed to open out discussion on possible ways forward. I want to examine some of these ideas around the pastoral and anti-pastoral in the context of Kinsella’s recent creative and critical work. Disclosed Poetics is concerned with what constitutes place and why and how we write about it. As he writes, ‘Landscape is part of time, and the lyric is a representational grounding of time. The singing of a poem, the rhythm and intonation of a poem, are also inseparable. This is a work that out of its disparate parts suggests a synthesis is possible, even desirable, but recognises the decay, pollution, and destruction of not only natural environments but the markers of place itself.’ He goes on, ‘The poem is either complicit with or resistant to the status quo, the state-sanctioned version of literature that feeds a stultifying nationalist and hierarchical agenda.’ This is the issue that drives his poetry and poetics and he is able to draw upon experience in Australia, England and America. Kinsella poses two questions. Can the pastoral have any relevance in the age of factory farming, genetic modification, pesticides and the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities, and can there be a radical pastoral? His answers are affirmative and involve challenging and dismantling the building blocks of the pastoral’s modes of presentation and representation. This linguistic disobedience involves writing within the rural space and the undoing of the mechanics of the pastoral. He cites Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ poem as marking the break with the pastoral idyll but gives us no history of the subsequent displacement of the pastoral. Instead he concentrates on the Elizabethan court wits idea of ‘arcadia as a playground for aristocratic or landowning sensibilities’ … ‘firmly grounded in the hierarchies of control – of the divine right ‘ … ‘and the ladder of authority that entailed using this as a vehicle for Christian hierarchies’ (p.1) and links this with the world-view of chemical companies that claim to improve the pastoral whilst establishing a hierarchy whereby they gain and the consumer and land face health risks. He thus sees the moral side of the Arcadian ideal as continuing through agencies, such as chemical companies, and being vehicles of hierarchy and authority. This clearly then was the motivation and thinking behind The New Arcadia, although of course it has a wider and deeper context. Pastoral poetry presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rural life. Dating back to the third century BC when Theocritus wrote his Idylls of Sicilian shepherds, the genre deals with shepherds and rural life. Virgil added a new dimension to the pastoral by making his Latin Eclogues a vehicle for social comment and setting his poems in a beautiful location, Arcadia, a Greek province, where plain speaking and death occurred. The shepherds are depicted with time on their hands and their thoughts turn to the erotic. Themes include love and seduction, mourning, the corruption of the city or court, invocation of the Muse, the purity of country life and complaints. The eclogues of the title are dialogues between shepherds. Arcadia for Virgil is not a heavenly condition but an earthly one. By the time of the revived fashion for the pastoral during the Tudor and early Stuart period, Arcadia holds within it the prospect of a radical dimension. The English Arcadians were fiercely Protestant, anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and attempting to give roles to love, poetry, land and estate management, their own place as a bulwark between an over-arching monarch and the threat of tyranny. This involved attitudes to common law and the protection of ancient customs and statutes and a balance between the crown and court. They saw the manor as the model for the workings of Arcadia on earth. Here the lord needed to love his tenants as the shepherd needed to love his sheep. There was then a sense of honour involved in running a good estate that looked after its local population. This was the way to happiness and perfection. There was though a contradiction to be overcome. There was continuing protest against land enclosure and this radicalism was linked to an understanding in the Old Testament that saw all men as equal in the sight of God. This tension then is the site of the early radical pastoral. So within the writing there has to be space for old English radicalism in the form of the complaint. Thus in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherdes Calender (1579) dedicated Sir Philip Sidney, which sets the template for the English pastoral, there are twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, written in different metres and including four on love, two laments, one on the neglect of poetry, four allegories and two complaints. The complaint here is a pointer for the Arcadian towards matters that need to be addressed. It represents as it were the social tension between the movements from communality to individuality in land arrangements. English Arcadia came from a world in gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism and is such is looking backwards to communal custom as the font of English law in opposition to court corruption. The pastoral complaint is clearly an anti-pastoral convention that transforms the landscape of innocence into one of conflicted experience. This is clearly where Kinsella’s work should be placed. The affectation of rustic life creates a distancing effect that allows the Arcadian poet to step back and criticise the court and comment on deeper matters. A good example is Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1600), which contrasts court corruption with the idealised Forest of Arden and invites the viewer to meditate on what constitutes natural behaviour, the nature of love and gender, the connections between language and truth and the abuse of language. The threat of State power during this period is ever present as writers and poets are imprisoned and murdered and there is also the potential threat of the landed aristocracy, the courtier and lord of the manor as alluded to in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets 94’ They that have power to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: Performed at Wilton House, the home of Will Herbert and his mother the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister, in 1603 in front of James I, at a time when Ralegh, a banished courtier like those in As You Like It, was imprisoned nearby at Winchester, the play contains echoes of Marlowe’s poetry (‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’) and death, as in Touchstone’s speech in Act III Scene iii, and with its happy ending perhaps calls on divine intervention in favour of love and goodness from a benevolent lord or monarch. It clearly draws the viewer into another world where characters can try on different identities and this openness and its unresolved debates create the space for the audience to probe. It is one of the best examples of the pastoral process being used to make readers think. William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) famously saw the pastoral process of ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (p. 23) and that the pastoral has a unifying social force and is a means of bridging differences and reconciling social classes. In his rapid sketch of the pastoral, Kinsella is against the construction of new pastoral idylls and sees the pastoral as a genre of closure, which perhaps forgets the achievements of As You Like It, and yet he also sees that the pastoral has moral, spiritual and gender aspects in our time. In a moving passage, he writes about his teenage years spent shooting and trapping parrots in Western Australia and his writing about parrots, symbol of the destruction of beauty, as an act of atonement. I find that Kinsella is far more effective in this writing than in his unstructured thinking on the pastoral. Disclosed Poetics essentially records the progress of his own thinking about the pastoral and linguistic disobedience, making use of his own poems and recent examples of the radical pastoral by Peter Larkin, Andrew Duncan and Lisa Robertson. The spatial lyricism and manifestoes chapters are full of provocative notes and thoughts that draw upon a wide range of recent poetics and theory. However, there is no underlying coherent overall approach, although the possible directions are

  2. 01.01.2008

    Letter 9

    Click here to listen to So Here We Are on miporadio. So Here We Are A great variety of absorbing poetry is obscured by its omission from mainstream publishing, newspaper reviews and the critical narrowness of national poetry awards. There is, at least, a lack of balance dating back to the late 1970s and the changes at the Poetry Society, as described by Peter Barry in Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). National poetry awards are essentially judged by a small coterie of friends who give each other awards, as delineated by Private Eye magazine in July 2002 and as Tom Chivers reminded us earlier this year in Tears in the Fence 45. They are essentially unrepresentative of what is and has been happening in English poetry, incredibly safe and unchallenging. There is a tame parochialism and narrowness that has its roots in notions of nation and identity forged between the World Wars and reinforced by the Movement in the Fifties and its apologists in the Eighties. ‘English decency’ as Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion wrote in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982). There is an antagonism towards the discovery of meaning and form in language and to reading widely and deeply that flares up in spats about what constitutes poetry and who should control the field. (See for example Don Paterson’s 2004 T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘The Dark Art of Poetry’, Neil Astley’s 2005 StAnza Lecture, ‘Bile Guile and Dangerous to Poetry’ and their responses. Conversely there is the predominantly modernist line of thought that seeks to avoid any market taint. Friends refusing to review friends work for fear of selling out.) The New Generation Poets of the Nineties and its marketing machinery similarly adopted a cosy world of vernacular spontaneity and simplistic forms of connection between poetry and life. This strategy involved an acceleration of the critical deterioration heralded by Morrison and Motion. This was not always the case and there are signs that younger readers, thanks to new technology and a greater awareness of disparate writing, are having no truck with this narrowness. I would like to discuss an example of this absorbing poetry that encourages openness and takes the reader off the beaten track and to indicate why there may be signs of change. I first encountered Allen Fisher’s Place in literary magazines at Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town, London in the mid 1970s. This was an exciting time to visit Compendium and buy such magazines as Grosseteste Review, Curtains, The Park, Poetry Information, Aggie Weston’s, Joe Dimaggio, Reality Studios, Sixpack, Spectacular Diseases and Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review. Scattered amongst such magazines were extracts from Place by the poet and painter, Allen Fisher. It seemed like samizdat literature. It was inspirational in the sense that it allowed itself the privilege of drawing upon a wide range of sources that impinged upon South London, where Fisher was born and raised. Place Book One, for which Fisher jointly won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Poetry Award, appeared in (Aloes Books) 1974 and was followed by other parts of the project, culminating in Unpolished Mirrors (Reality Studios 1986) and finally appearing as one book, Place (Realty Street Editions) in 2005. In common with J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier and Iain Sinclair, Fisher drew upon Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1960), Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) and his ‘Projective Verse’ essay (1950) to articulate a rich seam of sources and information from archaeology, history and geography. I don’t think that you can discuss Olson’s impact in England without mentioning Ed Dorn’s enthusiasm and encouragement to English poets, whilst he was a Fulbright Fellow at Essex University, to follow this path. Raised and educated during the Depression, his poetry was concerned with limits and thresholds of place and identity. Dorn had been taught by Olson at Black Mountain College, lived at Gloucester, the location of the Maximus Poems, and clearly was an inspirational figure. Like the Maximus Poems, Place is a sprawling work, although not an epic work in the sense of a journey out and in. It is more about process and contemplation than journey. It has a relentless and flat movement forward. The book’s organisation is Olsonian, with five main books: Place Book One, Eros:Father:Pattern, Stane, Becoming and Unpolished Mirrors. Place Book One is subtitled in roman numerals 1-XXXVII, and contains within it an internal sequence ‘Lakes’ and a section subtitled ‘Making an Essay // Out Of Place’. Stane, the Scottish word for stone, is subtitled Place Book III: XLV-LXXX1 and so on. There is a complex numbering system at work for each poem or section of the project. There is also a series entitled ‘Grampians’ that appears in Place Book One and Stane as well as letters to friends, a response to the publication of Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and direct quotations from fellow poets Anthony Barnett and Pierre Joris. There are poems with lines and stanzas at different angles and poems that use horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines to connect bits of text and to allude to other connections. However defamiliarising this might be, it is clearly a development out of Olson, with its shared emphasis on the complexity and plurality of cognition, rather than an imitation. There is no immediately assimilated narrative, Place requires the reader to become immersed in the conflicting range of references and readings that constitute its object. The preface states: this set takes the form of an essay in fragments that brought together bring about their own symmetry their own chaos and later, I await the day when this book will lose & find itself in a general movement of ideas. Place begins by peeling away layers of history and settlement along the Lambeth causeway to the City of London. Through mostly unidentified historical, literary, philosophical and documentary sources the Lambeth people are shown standing on the sites of battlefields bridging the City banks with cattle fields. Fisher’s fragments highlight indices of nineteenth century poverty, submerged pathways and streams, lines of migration and waste, ley lines and boundaries. He seldom attempts to prioritise one fragment over another but rather teases out possible underlying structures and association through juxtaposition. In contrast to the stable identity and formal restraint of Movement and New Generation poets, open field produces polyphonic and fragmented perceptions. On one level there is a kind of levelling of sources and ideas, reminiscent of Eric Mottram’s essays, that can engender a less than engaged response. Sometimes the conflicting energies are dissipated, or need to be held in suspension, as other perceptions and lines of enquiry enter the poem. Yet on another, one could argue that Fisher’s play on the binaries of the visible and actual, of giving and taking, of sources and deposits, of underlying and artificial divides is an example of an attempted Tao, with its allusiveness intact. Fisher’s achievement in this initially bewildering and subsequently compelling poem is to seek out processes and possibilities and to encourage his readers to embrace this as a work in progress that involves their active participation. In many ways, it was the experience of reading and not understanding Place that forced me to make linkages between the concept of place and other discourses that impinge upon any place. In my experience that involved linking with Foucault’s discourse analysis and thinking about process and on a practical level realising that a knowledge of place required a full understanding of natural and human sciences as well as social, economic, legal and historical processes. Place Book One is entitled Place rather than Lambeth or South London and that surely suggests Fisher is attempting to move beyond Williams’ Paterson and Olson’s Maximus. the loci of a sphere i have seen it I, not Maximus, but a citizen of Lambeth cyclic on linear planes Here the narrative self, with small and large I to indicate selves, is located in a specific place in the manner of Paterson and the ‘not Maximus’ indicating that this is not an imitation. This is a long poem with a Shelleyan scope for poetry built upon American models with an English philosophical hinterland. The fifth book, Unpolished Mirrors, employs a Blakean flourish with the gardener’s, Watling’s and Wren’s monologues within an enquiry into memory, perception and consciousness that includes references that extend beyond London’s literary and scientific history, John Dee and the theatre of memory, to the specialist language of scientific research. Fisher has clearly absorbed Pound, Oppen, Olson, Rukeyser, Reznikoff, Zukofsy and so on. The arrangement of fragments can be seen as both strength and weakness. The strength comes from the emphasis on process, which Fisher develops in later work, such as Brixton Fractals (1985), and the weakness comes from the failure to elaborate the interconnectedness of all through linkages. I suspect that an underlying resource that Fisher draws upon is A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), a work that was introduced to me by John Cowper Powys’ brother in law, Gerard Casey, in the early Eighties. Although not listed in the bibliographical resources, the work has resonance with the Taoist methodology. Whitehead’s central metaphysical idea identifies reality with process. He saw the universe as being in constant flow and change and rejected the dualisms of mind and body, of knowing subject and transcendent object, of man and nature, believing in the interconnection of all things. Another feature is that Fisher includes within the poem some of the background thinking t

  3. 02.12.2007

    Letter 8

    Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio So Here We Are Thomas A. Clark, born in Greenock, Scotland in 1944, writes an attentive poetry, giving space to each word and statement so that it can breathe and linger with the reader. His poetry is also attentive to walking, to the necessity of slow deliberation, and to words and their resonance. I would like to explore walking as a poetic theme using Clark’s work as a starting point to weave backwards and forwards. The first poem in Thomas A. Clark’s Sixteen Sonnets (Moschatel Press 1981) begins: as I walked out early into the order of things the world was up before me This neatly situates the narrative self within a prior world of phenomena and perceptions. The ‘order of things’ carrying the phenomena and ‘the world was up’ denoting the ongoing activity. That phrase ‘the order of things’ is recognisable as the English title of Michel Foucault’s study of the epistemology of the human sciences (Les Mots et les Choses 1966 translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences 1970) and alerts the reader to questions of the ordering of knowledge and of the interaction between the self and the world. Clark’s narrative self walks out into the order of things, that is to say, assuming that things are out there and moving with a sense of attentiveness and becoming. It is therefore a knowing self and walking becomes the act of that knowing self. The poem continues as I stepped out bravely the very camber of the road turned me to its purpose it was on a morning early I put design behind me hear us and deliver us to the hazard of the road in all the anonymous places where the couch grass grows watch over us and keep us to the temper of the road Here discovery and the world with all its terrors are already active and the narrative self steps out to build with the hazardous ground as it is. The line ‘here us and deliver us’ invokes the dissenting tradition of Piers the Plowman, Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton and Blake and of being delivered from oppression to the promised land. Here explicitly defined as ‘in all the anonymous places / where the couch grass grows’ and enveloped within the echoes of a prayer that is conditioned by temper, with all its variant meanings implied. For Wordsworth and others walking was seen as an aid to the recovery of memory, creative expression and connecting to the divine. Wordsworth’s walking poems, such as ‘An Evening Walk’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, ‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Michael’ connected walking with poetic labour, poverty and the rural poor. Walking then carries within it a subversive content through its associations with poverty, necessity, wandering, awareness and discovery. From Hazlitt’s 1823 essay ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’ we learn that the young Coleridge liked ‘to compose over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption’. The Romantics set a vogue for walking that was fuelled by guide books and institutionalised by anti-enclosure associations, open spaces and footpath societies and linked to the making of the self. The walking ideology, though, fixes upon walking as an educational experience rather than the cognitive processes of perception, memory, judgement and reasoning that were central to Wordsworth and Hazlitt. One of my fondest memories of the 1998 Wessex Poetry Festival was Thomas A Clark’s reading early on a Sunday morning, which culminated in a reading of In Praise of Walking (1988), a poem consisting of forty statements about walking that weave across the nineteenth century ideology of walking. In Praise of Walking begins: Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world. It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away. That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing. Walking is the human way of getting about. Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering. There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves. A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way. This deceptively simple poem interjects into an expansive realm of discursive poetics that has been the main path of English poetry and dissent since the nineteenth century. Clark, in common, with J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Geraldine Monk and others, has begun to move beyond the Wordsworthian rupture with the pastoral into new territory. Following the poem then we note that the world is reached by setting out, again implying ordering, and is there to be discovered, suggesting our knowledge of the world is partial or incomplete and implying an action and a process. The use of ‘we’ suggests that it is possible for us all to discover the world. The ‘least possible baggage’ suggests that closure of thought and emotional response hinders discovery of the world. Discovery, here, implies making connections as we walk and possibly reconnecting with the physical world and human life before or outside of mechanisation. The second statement acknowledges the possibility of walking away from the world of ‘coercion, violence, property, triviality’. It does not imply withdrawal as such but rather choice. Triviality recalls John Gay’s Trivia, Or The Art of Walking The Streets of London (1716), an important poem in the history of walking poems. Trivia here refers to the Roman goddess of crossroads, the three ways. This public poem takes the form of a narrated walk through London’s streets with a mock classical overlay that advises the reader on the city’s perils and the walker on how to dress. There is a lot of waste, sewage and incipient violence. It presents a distorted image of beggars and urban poverty as Tim Hitchcock points out in a new edition of the poem, edited by Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (OUP 2007). So ‘triviality’ here might signify after Gay an element of frivolity and distortion from the underlying conditions as well as implying a movement away from the unimportant to the important. The third statement registers the connections between the visionary and the primacy of immediate experience. Note the absence of interest in the self and use of the plural in this clear espousal of an undefined world of discovery and visions. Walking is seen as part of the visionary tradition rather than any specific elaboration of a self. This is Wordsworthian then without the self as object. A walk is its own measure. I am reminded here of John Ashbery’s poem ‘Just Walking Around’ where he writes The segments of the trip swing open like an orange. There is light in there and mystery and food. In other words it is the journey that is important and that may involve opening into ‘light’ (vision), ‘mystery’ (the unknown) and ‘food’ (sustenance and thought). Clark’s poem’s insistence on the connections between walking and humanness clearly is in contradistinction to those elements of social and economic life where humans are under the constraints of ‘time, work and discipline’ and of an infrastructure that is eroding those places where it is still possible to walk. John Barrell in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (CUP 1972) points out the insularity of local transport systems in that period and travellers’ perceptions of the pre-enclosure landscape as mysterious and hostile. Once in a network of paths it was not easy for a traveller to find a way out unless they had local knowledge. The poem invokes those hidden paths as a reminder of how far the earth has been transformed by transport systems, networks and motorways and how it is still possible to find new ways of doing things. Kim Taplin has explored the history of footpaths in The English Path (Perry Green Press 2000) through the writings of John Clare, William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and contemporary poets such as David Caddy, Jeremy Hooker, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Barry MacSweeney, Iain Sinclair and John Welch. She shows how the network of footpaths connects humans with the natural world as well as place with place and how walking has and still does set boundaries. Iain Sinclair has developed the London literary walk into a mode of creation, echoing that other London walker, David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts (1955), in works such as Lights Out For The Territory (1997), where he writes: ‘Time on these excursions should be allowed to unravel at its own speed, that’s the whole point of the exercise. To shift away from the culture of consumption into a meandering stream.’ The poem continues with the powerful line: There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them. When I visited the childhood home of the writer, poet and broadcaster, John Arlott (1914-1991), at Basingstoke, I was astounded to find a tall and pin-thin Gothic building near a cemetery. The cramped living room was seemingly impossible for a family to use. It seemed to be devoid of light. Within and without exuded a distinct aura. There was both a joy and a sadness. This beguiling place began to make sense in relation to Arlott’s determination to become a writer, his involvement in the literary world, of the BBC and pubs of Soho, and resonated again with the personal tragedies of his later life. The ‘Voice of English Summer’ indeed had always been surrounded by darkness. In sum, this peculiar house made sense in relation to the life of the poe

  4. 03.11.2007

    Letter 7

    Click below to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I would like to say a few words about the poet and translator, Bill Griffiths, who died in September, aged 59, and briefly sketch the context and scope of his work. He produced more than two hundred books and pamphlets and translated from Old English, Welsh, Romany, Latin, Norse and other languages. He was in the tradition of Radical pamphleteers, concerned with planting the Liberty Tree, and wrote with commitment to make you think about the words and materials under review. He was concerned with the discourses of power and their effects and with the erosion of local democracy. He had a great ear for music and quickly assimilated speech patterns. Some of his works are beautiful artworks, such as A History of the Solar System / Fragments: A History of the Solar System (Writers Forum / Pirate Press 1978). This consists of A4 sheets folded to A5 and machine stitched into a concertina format within green covers. It is a work that literally opens out the world of cosmology, alchemy and belief to show that the universe is multiple and diverse. I have always kept this on my desk to remind me of Bill’s inventiveness and that poetry should open out to another place. His passing leaves a large gap in English poetry. He was born Brian Bransom Griffiths at Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 August 1948. His father was a teacher and mother had been a civil servant. When I first met in August 1973 he was known as Billy Griffiths. He arrived at the Windsor Free Festival poetry event, which I had instigated, with his mentor, sound poet, Bob Cobbing, and read with him prior to another double act, Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock. He was an impressive reader using cut-up direct speech and intense syntactical compression in poems about bikers and Vikings. He was like the reading, moody and provocative. I met him several times that autumn and kept in regular contact, receiving most of his Pirate Press editions and subscribing to his various books. He was an inquisitive and supportive, albeit argumentative, character. Bearded, with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers, he was part of London’s anarchist squatting community and mixed with bikers, Hell’s Angels, gypsies, renegade Irishmen and other outsiders. Although he squatted in inner London, writing about the dispossessed in Whitechapel (Whitechapel: April & May, End, & Start Texts (Pirate Press 1977), he returned to live at his parental home until he moved into a riverboat at Cowley, near Uxbridge, in the mid 1980s. Private and irascible, I had no idea that he had a degree in Medieval and Modern History from University College, London. He was independent and radically, non-conformist. We argued incessantly about the usefulness of education and how to develop alternative poetic strategies and readership. I was writing and giving away poems at the time and he urged me to not go to University so that I would think more in alternative ways. This was a time of social and industrial unrest, of fragmentation and protest, and such a proposition was not so fanciful if you had private means, which I did not. I went to University and this upset Bill, who was committed to the ideals of an alternative society. He made poetry his life, placing it above all other concerns, and was continually producing new work. He employed disparate materials often prefaced by notes based upon his etymological and historical research that alerted his readers to the direction of his thinking. He used juxtaposition and narrative disjunctions to allow other discourses and voices into his poems to add another dimension to the subject under review. Typically, his endings refuse any closure to indicate a situation or event is continuous. I recall seeing him in spring 1977 when he was strung out and not in great health. He gave a blistering reading at Portsmouth Polytechnic Fine Art Department. It was a provocative exposure of the mid-Victorian civil service’s handling of criminal justice and prisons using found and cut-up texts and documentary evidence. Some of these poems appeared in Poetry Review Volume 67 Nos. 1 and 2. He was cleverly using found texts from the past to comment on the present. It was his riposte to my decision to study History and to engage in post-graduate literary study, all part of an argument about theory and practice. His analysis was similar in scope to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). That night we discussed the Annales School of historiography and the difference in approaches between historians such, the Marxist, George Rudé and the anarchist, Richard Cobb. The methodological argument between them comes down to the importance attached to the document. Bill’s eyes lit up as he extolled the virtues of the document, archives and proper systems of storage and access. Bill later worked as an archivist on several project, including cataloguing Eric Mottram’s Archive at King’s College, London, and became a member of the Society of Archivists. Bill was, in essence, writing a history of power ‘from below’ to use the Annales School term. Bill was an associate of Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press and workshop, a regular contributor to Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review, a stalwart of the Association of Little Presses (ALP), producing the newsletter (PALPI) and Print Shop Manager at the Poetry Society from June 1974. As such, he was an integral part of the London hub, along with such poets as Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Lee Harwood, Gilbert Adair, Ken Edwards and Jeff Nuttall, of what Eric Mottram termed the English Poetry Renaissance or Revival. Bill used the Association of Little Presses book fairs to sell his hand printed books and pamphlets and developed his own independent ways of reaching a loyal readership. He was produced many publications in the Poetry Society basement and several works, including War w/ Windsor (Pirate Press 1973), Idylls of the Dog, King and other Poems (Pirate Press 1975), Cycles (Pirate Press 1975) and The Song of the Hunnish Victory of Pippin the King (Earthgrip Press 1976), went into multiple editions. This was a golden age of little press activity and it was hurting the larger poetry presses. Eric Mottram at Poetry Review was accused of publishing too many foreign poets and lost his job. The Poetry Society print shop where Bill printed his and other London based publications was closed down. The whole apparatus of support, including the National Poetry Secretariat, wonderfully administered by Pamela Clunies-Ross, for little press poets outside London, was taken away. A documentary account of this is given in Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006). His early work includes War w/ Windsor, which appeared in several editions, and Cycles, distinguished by their disruptive use of language and radical scope. It is in marked contrast to the conventional poetry of that period and takes prison and urban deprivation as its main themes in a sustained study of the manifestations of repression. War w/ Windsor explores the social parameters of bikers and the law at a time when the stop and search laws were in frequent use by the police on any individual that appeared to be vaguely outcast. Stop and search was based on sections 4 and 6 of the Vagrancy Act (1824) and became a contributory factor in the 1980 St Paul’s, Bristol and 1981 Brixton, riots. Incidentally, his poem, ‘The Toxteth Riots’ (in The Mud Fort: Selected Poems 1984-2004 Salt 2004) quotes the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee emphasising ‘police harassment over a long period’ as the main cause of the disorder. War w/ Windsor gives voice to the biker’s world, the Windsor Chapter and Uxbridge Nomads war against each other and the police, of prison and social control, employing broken syntax in linked sets of sound poems that catch their speech patterns in terse narratives. Here’s the opening of ‘To Johnny Prez Hells Angel Nomads’ 1. Christmas straight- Jacket kid Packet of light fields Eye 2. With no lamps, roads Without airforce or Angels, wd you jin Ruislip? A lion in you In a law-shop 3. The motor-bike is acorn yellow Johnny Bev Bob White my mind Gonna pick up of Pepper is day yep 4. Bev as the sea wave wake See this this is Angels getting the booting of their life in Scrubs This is Johnny This is me picking up snout bits in Brixton 5. Johnny begot, beading of black Jack-club Dance kick at drums, can-banging Death-douce 6. And love Works to mix to mix you up miscates the soul Love Shooting blood out; all Red-laking; well Shut in the breasts of her. Bill shared the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for 1974, with Allen Fisher, for such work. Bill augmented his interests in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Romany, Norse and other languages into his work. Cycle 1 (On Dover Borstal) begins: Ictus! as I ain’t like ever to be still but kaleidoscope, lock and knock my sleeping ‘Ictus’ being Latin for a physical hit or strike, also signifying the first or regular beat in Latin verse, although there is historical confusion over this (see Oxford English Dictionary OED 1) and in medicine the beat of the pulse (OED 2 a), implies impact, stress and a sense of confusion and physicality. The exclamation mark emphasises and raises the pitch of utterance, echoing Romantic exclamatory usage in terms of outcry and suspense. That impact is implied is reinforced by line four’s ‘lock and knock in my sleeping’ and that the narrative self is under review is achieved by the switch from the ‘I’ of line two to the ‘my’ of line 4. It continues: Within the complex of the fort against the French, Dover, ‘s mighty imperfection: fits to the sea, the moat (and ported, kinging the blue, closed, so built-made and the salty grass and rubble of chalk growing writing the chal

  5. 07.10.2007

    Letter 6

    Download mp3 and link here. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England Travelling on the Damory Bus from my home to Salisbury is an event in itself. The bus company’s website and bus stop timetables offer no reliable information on the Service. We rely upon memory that there is a bus leaving the village some time between 9.20 am and 9.40 am and the hope that it continues. So here we are on the bus filled with retired professionals looking out at the summer landscape. There are plenty of horses and sheep in fields, signs of turf cutting and wheat ripening. We see deer, pheasant, buzzards and no one in the fields. We pass by Ashmore with its iconic dewpond, ill-kempt wood and no indigenous population, not far from Society photographer, Cecil Beaton’s old home, Ashcombe House, now occupied by Mr & Mrs Ritchie. The bus falters going up hill as we leave Fontmell Magna and descend deeper into Cranborne Chase, a downland with dense woodland vestiges, Neolithic and Bronze Age earthworks that straddles parts of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. The name refers to the land as a place of hunting and has been sparsely populated since Saxon times. It is easy to see the contours of history here. There are houses and entrances designed by the dramatist and architect, John Van Brugh, and humbler buildings that carry with them the association of bloody struggles between landowners, with their retinue of keepers, foresters and verderers, and poachers. Open an OS map and you will see that struggle in location and place names around the Chase. Dominated by the Cathedral, with its tall spire and chapter house holding one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, Salisbury is a compact, lively city on the edge of the Plain, a barren chalk plateau to the north west of the Chase. In recent years it has suffered from an overdose of literature development officers and writers in residence who visit and leave little behind. This has been happening throughout the country and does not produce local literary communities. In fact, they can be counter-productive. The idea of introducing outsiders as experts, often people at the beginning of their career and without much literary experience, is fatally flawed and a waste of public money. It is a fragmented poetry scene, with people travelling in a thirty-mile radius to attend poetry events, lacking in leadership and direction. There are no magazines or poetry publishers to support the local scene. Yet it has an International Arts Festival and a vast literary history from Sir Philip Sidney, William Browne through George Herbert, Henry Fielding, to Hazlitt, Trollope, Hardy, W.H. Hudson, William Golding and David Gascoyne. John Constable’s painting The Cathedral From The Bishop’s Grounds (1825) is often cited as one of England’s best views. It is an extraordinary confluence of place, spirit and identity and is worth investigating in terms of how poets have used the confluence to probe history, identity, and the georgic. It was in March 1913 that poet, Edward Thomas, crossed over Harnham Bridge, near the Cathedral, ‘where the tiled roofs are so mossy, and went up under that bank of sombre-shimmering ivy just to look where the roads branch’, on his literary pilgrimage by bicycle from Clapham in London to the Quantock Hills and Coleridge’s home at Nether Stowey. Thomas’s journey, with the Other Man, who eats brown bread and monkey-nuts, the status of whom is uncertain, has a potent relevance. Although, on the surface, it is a journey searching for signs of spring and observing what is present through earlier poetic responses, it is also a journey of self-discovery, written against the threat of a World War, and a probing of identity, the unconscious, spiritual purpose and landscape looking for rebirth. In Pursuit Of Spring (1914), is a search for poetic understanding with Coleridge the dissenter, the man in black as Hazlitt called him, as a figurative destination, that is to say it is a journey that extends from the superficial to the dark and disturbing. Thomas was moved to have the Other Man quote in full and with relish George Herbert’s sonnet on Sin on his way to St Andrew’s Bemerton, where Herbert was rector and died in 1633. It is a chilly, tiny Low Anglican church, with a strong atmosphere of piety, a stained glass portrait of Herbert, and well worth a visit. The adjacent old rectory, rebuilt by Herbert, is now in private hands. My phone call asking to visit was declined. Thomas cycles on through the Plain, with its five river valleys, interrupted only by a railway line and military camps, noting in this remote and treeless landscape the rooks, pewits and larks. Like Coleridge, Thomas has a fondness for birds (he notes that there are more birds than people in Salisbury that Sunday morning) and is less godly than his alter ego, the Other Man. Just outside Erlestoke he meets two ex-sailors, vagrants, who mention the Titanic, bless him and appear to be asking for money, which he refuses to give, and cycles on. He is more concerned with his uneasy conscience than whether the beggars ‘slept dry and ate enough’. Thomas is arguing with himself about the Christian idea of charity so beloved by Herbert. He is struck by seeing the whole through the inner and outer nature of small things, through the particulars of place, through oppositions, the mildness and wildness of nature, those defining imaginative characteristics he also saw in Coleridge. Salisbury, its river confluence, the Plain and Stonehenge feature in Song Three of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Or A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, With intermixture of the most remarquable Stories, Antiquites, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodies of the same (1612), a curious work written in rhyming couplets of twelve syllable lines and engraved maps decorated with goddesses and allegorical figures. Here the traveller-poet uses the marriage and competition between rivers as a unifying symbol. Drayton was part of the Sidney–Spenser literary grouping that came to nearby Wilton House, where Sir Philip Sidney had written most of The Arcadia (1590), a prose romance, that later so outraged Hazlitt that he called it ‘one of the greatest monuments of abuse of intellectual power upon record’ and A Defence of Poetry (1595), which defends poetry as the highest art and equal of nature under God. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, preserved and published her brother’s work after his death in 1586, completed his translation of the Psalms and made Wilton into a college of learning, poetry and alchemy. It was the spiritual centre of the Sidney-Spenser movement in English poetry, with many links to poets and writers associated with the Mermaid Tavern in London. Mary was patron to Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Drayton and William Browne. Shakespeare is thought to have attended the 1603 royal performance of As You Like It at Wilton. Donne is said to have visited. Ralegh’s half brother, Adrian Gilbert, was her resident advisor and Fulke Greville, as elder statesman of the group was Mary’s most trusted ally. Drayton’s attempt to preserve Albion’s history through topography and to forge a national identity was inspired by William Camden’s Britannia (1586). The ‘chorography’ of the book’s title refers to the physical and historical description of a single locality. These included written itineraries and routes across a territory with particular histories, points of interest and local lore. The controlling image of the river stems from Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596). This idea and image fuels Poly-Olbion’s celebration of national diversity, with rivers, as loci of conflict and song, serving to unify the country. Drayton essentially produces a map of England based upon rivers and ancient monuments that is linked to ideas of visual memory and national identity. The final part of Book One ends with a celebration of Kentish independence and liberty against Norman yoke and placing Kent as the foremost English shire. William Wordsworth echoes this in ‘To the Men of Kent’, one of the ‘Sonnets dedicated to Liberty’, in Poems (1807). Ye, of yore Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath; confirm’d the charters that were yours before. This patriotism is rooted not in Westminster but in the tradition of local defence of liberty. Wordsworth’s debt to Drayton is evinced by the many references to rivers and can be read as a kind of up-dated sense of history through topography. Wordsworth as a public poet helped the idea of history through topography further permeate English culture and identity. Tony Blair’s New Labour Government in 1997 somewhat incoherently tried to produce a national brand with its slogan, ‘Cool Britannia’, based on one of Ben & Jerry’s ice-creams, using pop musicians as symbols of youthful vibrancy and referring to a transient fashionable London scene. It completely misread how national identity comes to be ingrained as an image and viewpoint as well as the politics behind such images and viewpoints. Here’s E.M. Forster in The Longest Journey (1907): ‘He saw how all the water converges at Salisbury; how Salisbury lies in a shallow basin, just at the change of soil. He saw to the north the Plain, and the stream of the Cad flowing down from it, with a tributary that broke out suddenly, as the chalk streams do: one village had clustered round the source and clothed itself with trees. He saw Old Sarum, and hints of the Avon valley, and the land above Stonehenge. And behind him he saw the great wood beginning unobtrusively, as if the down too needed shaving; and into it the road to London slipped, covering the bushes with white dust. Chalk made the dust white, chalk made the water clear, chalk ma

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So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England with David Caddy

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  • Автор
    David Caddy
  • Годы выхода
    2007 - 2008
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    5
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    Без ненормативной лексики
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    © David Caddy
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    David Caddy