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High Late-Modernists Or Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative British Poetries Since 1960

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High Late-Modernists Or Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative British Poetries Since 1960 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by De Montfort University Open Research Archive 6 SIMON PERRIL High Late-Modernists or Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative British Poetries since 1960 Permissions Recounting a two-day visit in 1956 to Worcester to visit poet Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher lists modernist luminaries and associates of the New American Poetry he was suddenly exposed to, and explains ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it, nor had I seen it treated as so vital an activity. These people were behaving with all the freedom and artistic optimism of painters. Decidedly un-English’. 1 Fisher’s sense of the abiding importance of permission as the force that underwrites creative endeavour is a salient alternative to more vexed models of infl u- ence. And yet the drive to fi gure innovation as a question solely of modern- ist heritage is too simplistic. The binary options within the question ‘high late-modernists or postmodernists’? ignores so many of the English tribu- taries that swell contemporary vanguard practice: Maggie O’Sullivan’s debt to the material-yet-visionary nature of John Clare and a much earlier Celtic heritage, the reconfi gured syntax Bill Griffi ths shapes from his immersion in Old-English, the sonic licence Geraldine Monk takes from Hopkins, Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair’s debt to the autodidactic mythological ‘systems’ of Blake, Barry MacSweeney’s fascination with the faux-medievalism of Chatterton, Sean Bonney’s appropriation of the apocalyptical egalitarian- ism of ranters like Abiezer Coppe, Keston Sutherland’s re-contextualisation of vanguard language use through Pope’s eighteenth century fi guring of bathos. Indeed, such is the scope of British poetry since the ‘mimeograph revolution’ of the 1960s that attempts to contain it within labels that have academic currency is to risk acts of reductionist positioning. The anthology Cusp is a very useful counter to such tendencies. Its editor, Geraldine Monk, dubs it a ‘collective autobiography’ 2 that sets out to explore the nature of ‘the poetic insurgence that began in the 1950s/60s’ as a ‘provincial one ema- nating from the industrial cities of the North and Midlands’ rather than the 82 99781107090668book_pi-272.indd781107090668book_pi-272.indd 8822 88/21/2015/21/2015 22:17:52:17:52 PPMM High Late-Modernists or Postmodernists? exclusive preserve of ‘those two strongholds of poetic power . London and Cambridge’. 3 Monk invited upwards of twenty poets to write about their journey into poetic activity, noting ‘it would take a social historian to explain why so many young, working-class people took to poetry at this time, espe- cially the more experimental areas of expression’ in an era witnessing ‘the after-effects of two world wars . and the Cold War hotting up’. 4 What emerges in the recollections Monk gathers is how the ‘very real diffi culty of fi nding kindred spirits in small provincial towns’ was mitigated by the ‘small press publishing network and the alternative or specialist bookshops’. 5 The latter might be in decline as I write this, but the former is still very much the life pulse of the area of poetry being discussed here. The Challenge of the Long Poem American long poems such as Williams’s Paterson , Pound’s Cantos , Zukofsky’s A and Olson’s Maximus Poems form a major legacy for British poets. Bunting’s Briggfl atts defi ned the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, but since the 1970s UK poets have reached for other formal logics for the assemblage of long poems. In his 1973 collection Act Tom Raworth posed a signifi cant question: ‘The connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long poem everyone is straining for’?6 His answer in the mid to late 1970s is exemplifi ed in poems like Ace and Writing that unfold in very short lines that resemble the outpourings of a ticker-tape machine. Where the New American Poetry privileged measure propelled by breath, Raworth explored a dislocatory syntax ambiguating the relation- ships between lines with a kinetic dynamism that far outpaced projective verse. Elsewhere I have written of how Raworth’s short poems ‘often gesture to a world beyond the grasp of the poem’ whereas his long poems ‘seem more concerned to enter into the pattern of a world whose wider design is acknowledged to be inaccessible’. 7 By the time of West Wind , written during Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands war, the poetry dramatises a scepti- cism towards the reader’s urge to establish a pattern: ‘later fragments / we assume / are one with those before / a sad dance’. 8 And yet the sadness of this dance relates to the imposition of more politically dubious imperial narratives upon the nation as ‘puffs of unrelated news / restore / our former glory / which apparently / was a global servant class / too poor / to see the crown jewels’ (Raworth p. 127). Geraldine Monk’s work offers an ongoing interrogation of the ‘emo- tional geography of place’, most especially her native Lancashire. Her habi- tats are haunted by a sense of inequalities and injustices that the landscape has preserved as its own memory, and that charge the language with both 83 99781107090668book_pi-272.indd781107090668book_pi-272.indd 8833 88/21/2015/21/2015 22:17:53:17:53 PPMM Simon Perril neologistic verve and a sense of regional historical witness. The long poem Interregnum manages to fuse place and character in its exploration of the so-called Pendle Witches, ten women tried and hung in East Lancashire in 1612. It closes with an incantatory occupation of the nine-year-old Jennett Device’s ‘possession’: ‘I weird sang. / High trilled and skirled . / Rhymed thing with thing with string /. Word buntings. / Wildways’. 9 Monk rein- vents language to re-orient her relationship to place and history in ways that calls upon her working class heritage of ‘playing . on cobbled streets, us girls doing our handstands and crab walking and our endless reciting of rhymes & chants . Political satirical rhymes turned nonsense playground chant’. 10 Her sequence ‘Hidden Cities’ was a performance work commis- sioned by the Ruskin School of Fine Art as part of a series of ‘alternative’ bus tours around fi ve English cities. She was allotted Manchester, and takes a less-than-scenic route through the fl uidity and menace of ‘Funchester . Gunchester . Madchester’. 11 On this trip we are ‘X-ing territorial mem- branes. // Unseenable’. Through a punning discourse we witness the ghost- liness of the hidden city, its ‘Unguest terrors. / Hexing. Unguessed traces’. Robert Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues is a long poem that has learnt from the politicised discontinuities of Raworth and the polyvocality of Monk. Sheppard was part of the London poetry scene in the 1980s and co-edited, with Adrian Clarke, an important anthology Floating Capital . It gathered work from a generation of ‘linguistically innovative’ poets embark- ing upon work subtly different from the ‘Open Field’ poetry of the seventies, and the afterword noted ‘if there was less evidence of varieties of overtly uto- pian poetics through the 80s, there was an expanded range of critical strate- gies in texts whose writers have relinquished claims to proprietorial control of meaning’.12 Written between 1989 and 2000, Twentieth Century Blues is a vast ‘network’ of poems built around a sense that ‘Bunting was right, that the world changes too quickly in the twentieth century for a long poem. All that can be sketched out in advance are generative schema’. 13 Despite its page-based publication, the formal logic is closer to the multi-linearity of digital hypertext work. Sheppard not only conceived the work as time-based, designed to end with the century, but in the fi nal ‘complete’ edition of the poem he also gives individual pieces a complex numbering which allows such pieces to belong to several ‘strands’ at once; a simultaneity that enables and urges the reader to chart different paths through the collection rather than necessarily opt for a linear ‘chronological’ path. As he explains it ‘The long poem’s ambition towards inclusiveness, its grasping for totality, with all its attendant drifts into dogmatism as well as stale repetition, has been, at least in this [20th] century, its most negative condition’ (Shepard p. 84). 84 99781107090668book_pi-272.indd781107090668book_pi-272.indd 8844 88/21/2015/21/2015 22:17:53:17:53 PPMM High Late-Modernists or Postmodernists? Agoraphobia and the Tyranny of Labels It would be easy to reproduce here what Roy Fisher has called an ‘idiot bipartite map’ of mainstream versus modernist/postmodernist/experi- mental poetry (Fisher, p. 121). A more nuanced account can be found in Drew Milne’s ‘Neo-Modernism and Avant-Grade Orientations’, and David and Christine Kennedy’s ‘Terms of Engagement: Experimental Poetry and Its Others’. Milne stresses that what is meant by modern- ism is less a movement, or canon, more ‘an experimental orientation developed through cosmopolitan networks’. 14 The Kennedys quote Chris Hamilton-Emery’s sense that bipartite distinctions between vanguard and mainstream no longer function as ‘what we have now is a multiplicity of practices and readerships and no real framework for understanding their trajectories, outside of consumption’. 15 The applicability of postmodern- ism is no less contested; the phrase ‘postmoderns’ is already tainted with caricature in the wake of Don Paterson’s ill-tempered preface to the New British Poetry . 16 And this is far from the only objection to the term. When, in 2004, Rod Mengham and John Kinsella edited an impressively geo- graphically diverse anthology, Vanishing Points , it was explicitly subtitled New Modernist Poems ; and claimed the writers gathered have ‘stayed in touch with the agendas of modernism; they are not postmodernist, but late modernist writers’.
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