Juha Virtanen Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival - Event and Effect Juha Virtanen Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Series editor Rachel Blau DuPlessis Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14799 Juha Virtanen Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980 Event and Effect Juha Virtanen School of English, Rutherford College University of Kent Canterbury, UK Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-319-58210-8 ISBN 978-3-319-58211-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58211-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940223 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Credit line: Thom Gourley/Flatbread Images, LLC Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has already lived through a number of lives. I first began drafting its chapters for my doctoral thesis, which I completed in 2013 at the University of Kent. In the years that followed, the project underwent a number of edits and revisions until it finally arrived at its current form. As a consequence of this long process of development, there are a number of parties that deserve to be acknowledged here. My Ph.D. was funded by the School of English at Kent, and without that financial support, I would have been unable to complete the initial drafts of this text. I am also grateful for the supervisory guidance I received from David Ayers, David Herd and Jan Montefiore, as well as the encouragement and feedback from my thesis examiners, Peter Barry and Will Montgomery. I owe a great deal of thanks to both Allen Fisher and Denise Riley for their time, generosity and hospitality in answering my questions during interviews and exchanges over email. The helpful staff at the archives and special collections at The British Library, King’s College‚ London and the Templeman Library at Kent were all vital to the progress of my research. Additionally, I am grateful for the feedback from a number of poets, critics, colleagues and friends at conferences, research seminars and other events where I presented extracts from this work. I also want to thank the indi- viduals who collaborated with me on the Blood Bone Brain Re-Encounter at POLYply in May 2013: Ollie Evans, Mendoza, Robert Kiely, Daniel O’Donnell-Smith, Nat Raha and Steve Willey. Each chapter in this book benefitted enormously from the committed and detailed reading of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the anonymous reviewers at Palgrave. Rachel’s support for this project, in particular, has v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS been especially heartening. Allie Bochiccio and Emily Janakiram made the entire production process efficient and painless, and I am grateful for that. I also want to extend my thanks to Matt, Frances, Lucy, Emma and Livvie for letting me stay at their home while I wrote the bulk of the final draft. Likewise, I would not have been able to complete this project without the unwavering help and support of Eleanor Perry. Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to Allen Fisher for the permission to quote material and reproduce images from Blood Bone Brain, Ffacece and Place; to King’s College London for the permission to quote from Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record; to Denise Riley, as author and copyright holder, for the permission to quote from Marxism for Infants and Selected Poems; and to Peterjon Skelt and North and South for the permission to use extensive quotes from Eric Mottram’s interview in Prospect into Breath: Interviews with North and South Writers. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Be Kind to This Place: Allen Ginsberg and the First International Poetry Incarnation 27 3 This Blank Space from Which I Speak: Denise Riley at the Cambridge Poetry Festival‚ April 15th 1977 55 4 Memories Arrested in Space: Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record 83 5 You Are Invited to Perform: Process‚ Mutation and Participation in Allen Fisher’s Blood Bone Brain 105 6 Epilogue 141 7 An Interview with Allen Fisher 155 8 An Interview with Denise Riley 177 Bibliography 189 Index 201 vii LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 5.1 The graph from Creek in the ceiling beam 113 Fig. 5.2 Seating plans for Blood Bone Brain in London, 1974 118 Fig. 5.3 BONE VISUALS 1: Tulse Hill Potato 1965 and BONE VISUALS 9: Norfolk grass (missing) 119 Fig. 5.4 BLOOD VISUALS 1: Church, Camberwell cemetery, SE22 120 Fig. 5.5 BONE VISUALS 2: Remains of an edible book for book fair 1971 123 Fig. 5.6 BONE VISUALS 10: Sheep’s skull less lower jaw, Westmorland, 1972 131 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction In March 2011, I sat down in my bedroom to enjoy the broadcast of Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You, a radio documentary about Bob Cobbing produced by Falling Tree Productions for BBC Radio 4. The programme featured several speakers, including the poets and writers Iain Sinclair, Peter Finch, Peter Barry, Paula Claire and Lawrence Upton. The discussions alluded to Cobbing’s career as a poet, artist and composer; his role at the Poetry Society during the ‘poetry wars’ of the 1970s, where the conventional poetry establishment and the new wave of avant-garde poets competed for the control of this national arts organization; his influence as an activist within the British Poetry Revival, a term coined by Eric Mottram to describe the innovative poetries that emerged in the UK between the early 1960s and the late 1970s; and as the leader of Writers Forum, a workshop and small press that nurtured and published many of the poets associated with experimental poetry in London during the second half of the twentieth century.1 Some of these voices were already familiar to me from conferences, poetry readings or other public events. Yet the disem- bodied and uninterrupted quality of the broadcast meant that I was often unable to determine the identity of each speaker in real time. Consequently, when the latter parts of the documentary turned to reflect upon Cobbing’s legacy, and the Revival in general, I was unable to identify the contributor that raised an interesting proposition. This male speaker suggested that in recent years younger poets and academics have developed a fresh interest in this episode of British poetry, and therefore this once ‘invisible history’ is now becoming more visible. The identity of that © The Author(s) 2017 1 J. Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58211-5_1 2 J. VIRTANEN speaker remained a mystery even though I continued to ruminate over this idea long after the programme had finished. Over a year later, I attended a lecture by Iain Sinclair at the University of Kent. As I listened to Sinclair speak I realized his voice was identical to the commentator from the radio documentary. I was finally able to ascribe a name to those earlier utterances about invisible histories. The purpose behind this anecdote requires some elaboration. Event and Effect is not a book about Cobbing, although brief references to his various achievements will be made in some of the chapters that follow. Nor is it a book about Sinclair. Event and Effect is, however, deeply interested in the invisible histories of the British Poetry Revival. The optimism in Sinclair’s observations during the documentary revise his earlier comments from the introduction to the 1996 anthology Conductors of Chaos, where the Revival is described as an “off-piste, unnoticed” episode, exiled to ephemeral pamphlets and chapbooks that were untraceable without “a team of private detectives” (xiv). In 2011, Robert Sheppard also expressed similar regrets about the comparative lack of attention to this period of British poetry in the epilogue of When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry: the current scenes of innovative poetry in the UK, the essay argues, fail to embrace their own history, and consequently episodes such as “the English Intelligencer or the Albert Hall Poetry Reading” still require a firmer “pegging into history […], which means neither wilfully ignoring nor turning it into mythology, but acknowledging its specificity and evaluating it” (215).