John Xiros Cooper
Minor Poetry, Major Ax to Grind
OTHER: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Eds. Richard Caddel and Peter Quarterinain. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. ($30.95 pb)
Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain's OTHER, an anthology of British and Irish poetry since 1970, brings to more general attention a group of poets, plugged as experimental and innovative, who do not usually publish with the larger trade publishers. The editors are both well known figures in neomodernist poetry circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Richard Caddel is a librarian and archivist of the Basil Bunting papers at the University of Durham in the UK and Peter Quartennain is an influential professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Quartermain is one of the senior academics in North America in the field of language poetry and poetics.
The title and introductory essay by the editors claim that these are Other voices, taking by,'the term the usual poco stance. The Other defines itself by its difference and distance from hegemonic norms. It is "oppositional" and "marginalised" and it reflects and contributes to "a different understanding of the world" (xvi).
The fact that the poets do not publish with trade houses is put forward as the warrant for their claim on our attention. They are voices silenced, supposedly, by the standardization and unifon-nity of Britain's official culture and by a compliant academy. As usual, the academy is the easy target, even though the two editors and quite a large number of the contributors seem to be 'sleeping with the enemy'.
OTHER is the latest in a long line of snarly anthologies in British poetry dating back to when the Imagists took on the Georgians eighty odd years ago. Every decade in Britain has had its war of the anthologies. Each of them gathers a tribe of neglected geniuses vexed to silence by a variety of establishment enemies and repressive attitudes. OTHER is a typical performance. Where A. Alvarez skewered the Movement's "gentility principle" as the enemy of authentic poetry in 1961 in trying to make a case for Plath, Hughes, and Gunn, Caddel and Quarten-nain tag something they call the "mainstream" as the foe of the true "what-is-to-hand in the wherewe-are" poetry of contemporary Britain and Ireland (xxi).
I'm willing to go along with the editors's otherness angle, but the otherness of these Other voices is, in some cases, a little suspect. Roy Fisher is hardly a happily marginal beatnik. He is squarely in the modemist and symbolist tradition that derives from Stephane Mallarm6, arrives in English via T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and continues in the work of John Ashbery. With the exception of Fisher and about four or five others, these OTHER poets are, on the whole, a rather disappointing bunch when read in the light of the editors's lofty claims. Rather than marking out new imaginative territories, most of them are stuck in well wom ruts. They are, pardon the expression, minor figures who display the usual virtues and vices of minor art but simply do not write poetry that is gripping or ambitious or risky enough to bring along more than family and friends.
Mind you, I'm not saying they are not worth reading. Or that they should be barred from having their work published or promoted. Not at all. I'm with Mao and the Wesleyan acquisitions editors on this one. Let a thousand flowers bloom. They deserve to be put before the poetry reading public, wherever it lurks, and allowed to make their way to wider notice. Or not. I've found some of the works anthologized by Caddel and Quartermain to be very enjoyable. The four pages (only four?) devoted to Jonathan Griffin's "ordered tones" (88) are alone worth the price of admission. That Veronica Forrest-Thomson can only be afforded two pages seems a major editorial lapse. So, yes, there are some very good things in OTHER. I'm even willing to affirm that this anthology is a necessary adomment to contemporary literary culture. There is always a place for minor poetry in a mature civilization.
Indeed where would the English Renaissance be without its minor poets? OTHER is the late twentieth century equivalent of those little anthologies of late sixteenth century Elizabethan verse - like The handful of pleasant delightes (1584) or A gorgeous gallery of gallant inventions (1576) - which very usefully provide context for the really important poetry of the age, Sidney's or Herbert's for example. Peruse Drayton, Daniel, and Davies of Hereford, but take in Donne with both hands. I was once guided around northern Italian churches by an art historian and forced to look at dozens of bad paintings from the Renaissance in order to stand breathless before the radiance ofa single Lorenzo Lotto. To sense the actual motions of the Zeitgeist, you should know what the Cris Cheek's and the Maurice Scully's are up to, the better to spot the peaks of Tony Harrison and Eavan Boland.
But let me get back to my suspicions about the otherness of these Other voices. What's really rather offensive about OTHER is not the poetry (although some of it is pretty awful), but the editors's fatuous introduction - "A Fair Field Full of Folk," the only line from Langland's Piers Plowman that anyone ever remembers. The silliness of their remarks has t le unfortunate effect of dimming and even erasing whatever charm many of these poems might have standing alone. The inanity begins in the first paragraph where the pluralism of medieval culture, "packed with chaotic overlays," is approvingly contrasted to the "unshakably monolithic and centralised" culture of our time. It hardly seems possible that anyone, even with their eyes shut tight, could possibly believe this, even of Britain. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Everyone in fourteenth century England was a Catholic. Everyone. And conformity was often enforced by methods that today would pique prosecutorial interest in The Hague.
The UK today has millions of believers in Christianity, Islam, various Indian religions, the stock market, and atheism. As for linguistic pluralism, the Englishes spoken there are just as diverse and plural as the Englishes spoken in officially multicultural Canada. Sure there were traces and jostlings of other cultures and languages in Langland's day, as there always is, but to describe this as pluralism is simply wrong, if a word like pluralism is to have any meaning. Walk down Stroud Green Road in North London any day ofthe week and look around you; that's pluralism. But I don't think the editors actually believe what they're saying. Their bright-eyed approval of Langland's imaginary pluralism is a polemical stick with which to beat the daylights out ofthe straw monster called "mainstream" culture. In order to make a case for their Other, they need to invent a monolithic official mainstream from which they can then say the Others are effectively excluded.
Is this true? Doesn't Seamus Heaney get published by Faber and Faber because people, the lay readers, are ready to plunk down ten quid for his stuff? An essentially commercial enterprise can then break even or turn a profit on his work. People do not part with their money because "major publishing houses" and "their attendant infrastructures of reviewing journals, 'literaries' and other elements of the media" tell them to do so (xv). Peter Finch gets published by the tiny Galloping Dog press because not enough people are willing to plunk down coin of the realm for
kid kid kid kootje
kid kid kid kootje
kootje
kutch
kootje
kutch kutch.
("Scaring Hens" 59)
And that's probably the way it ought to be. To dismiss poets like Heaney, or Fleur Adcock, or Geoffrey Hill for cravenly buying into the "dominant orthodoxy" and, thus, helping to prop up "wider hierarchies of power or wealth" (xvi) verges on the farcical.
"A Fair Field Full of Folk" employs the well known polemical formula, magnification-of-the-small-by-the-reduction-of-the-not-so-small. The typical "mainstream" poem "is a closed, monolineal utterance, demanding little of the reader but passive consumption" (xv). I'd very much like to see how passively any reader can take in Geoffrey Hill's "Psalms of Assize" from Canaan (1996). Responsibility for this supposed "mainstream" narrowing of the poetic is laid, weirdly, at the doorstep of "Rupert Murdoch's media empire News International" (xvi). Murdoch has plenty to answer for, but denying the British public the chance to savour Geraldine Monk's "La Tormenta" (155-7) is not one of them.
Maybe I don't know "monolineal utterance" when it smacks me in the ear, but I didn't have to turn many pages of OTHER in order to find myself passively consuming it. Indeed the very first poet in the anthology, Mr. John Agard, served up a heap.
Me not no Oxford don me a simple immigrant from Clapham Common I didn't graduate I immigrate
and so on from "Listen Mr Oxford Don" for thirty-three more lines (4-5). The politically correct editors might think I find this monolineal simply because it's written in a kind of South London dialect and is therefore not sufficiently literary for my mainstream taste. Wrong. This is monolineal because it is too archly literary, hackneyed, and forged. And it doesn't really matter that the author hails originally from Guyana. If he wants to perform these stale tricks for white, guilt-ridden liberals, that's his affair.
At best, this is the sitcom version of South London speech, complete with the kind of trite persona that keeps prime time TV audiences mildly amused. It's the contemporary Brixton or Tooting version of those offensive Kilbum Irishmen and stage Scotsmen in nineteenth century music halls. The poem opposes a cartoon Other - fashionably migratory and programmatically ungrammatical, standing in for oppressed people everywhere - to a cartoon Oxford "don" who seems to stand for certain polite proprieties, the OED, and the Queen's English. The whole thing is counterfeit from top to bottom. It's clear our editors haven't set foot in Clapham and its environs, or even Oxford, for that matter, in quite some time.
The editors invest very heavily in this notion ofthe mute, inglorious, and excluded others of literary culture. They enthusiastically endorse Maurice Scully's dubious claim thatthere is a "completelyburied'modemist / experimental' tradition" in British poetry that stretches back to "Clare, Blake, Smart, and the two Vaughans, Henry and Thomas" (xvii). Buried? A quick check of the relevant professional bibliographies on either side of the Atlantic will show that Clare, Blake, Smart, and the Vaughans have been rather happily exhumed by mainstream scholarship for quite some time now. If, however, the OTHER end of this 'tradition' is completely buried, it's probably because it's not very gripping. Even more ridiculously, this alleged burial is blamed on Anthony Thwaite whose British Council survey on thirty five years of British poetry doesn't mention certain poets the editors feel ought to get mentioned.
The editors not only endorse Scully's sense of a neglected tradition (which is at least arguable), but go one step further and advance the thought that it may have actually been "suppressed." Turn to page xvii in the "Introduction" and read it for yourself. It would do well for comfortably ensconced academics to get up out of their stuffed chairs and have a good look around the real world. Why on earth would anyone want to suppress the completely innocuous poetry of Bill Griffiths Adventure big buildings / mountains cartoons ("Fragment I" 93)
or Catherine Walsh
farts in a bath (from Pitch Part Three 258)
when they do such a good job of suppressing themselves through their own inconsequence? And in case you think I've done Ms. Walsh an injustice by ripping a line out of context, I invite you to turn to page 258, read the whole thing for yourself, and see if you can find a context.
There is much in this Introduction that is misguided and even dead wrong about the contemporary world. Who can take seriously the paragraph about "Power structures" on page xx which is laughably out of touch with the fragmenting cultural and political realities of matured market economies? Those nasty "power structures" certainly exert their dominance, but not through "unity," "transcendence," and "universalism" (xx). These dead; semi-religious notions do not rule. Not any more anyway. Power today is far more subtle and confident. It calls into being and moves through disjunction, alterity, margins, fragments, desire, and, above all, niche marketing. Just ask Calvin Klein or the people who run Benetton or Tony Blair's publicists. They love the Other.
And who can take seriously the short history of the office politics of the Poetry Society in the 1970s which concludes the Introduction? Eric Mottram, an important teacher and poet in London, was a disaster as editor of the Society's Poetry Review. His agenda - the editors call it "a poetics of dissent and dislocation" (xxiv) - had the unfortunate effect of turning off a ' lot of the Society's membership. The problem was not Arts Council Zhdanovism, but the fact that so many members quietly voted with their feet by Walking down to the end of the garden and slipping their renewal notices in the dustbin.
Again, let me emphasize, that I have no objection to the publication of minor poetry. In fact, I applaud it. But let me say also that I certainly do not believe Roy Fisher, lain Sinclair, Lee Harwood, Jonathan Griffin, and the two Toms, Pickard and Raworth are minor talents. In fact a 280 page anthology limited to generous selections of their works would be most welcome. But what I find objectionable is the fact that all these poets are being promoted by snide attacks on other writers whom the editors seem to despise. As if it's Philip Larkin's fault that hardly anyone wants to read Robert Sheppard's Empty Diaries. I know one thing, that Roy Fisher, though happy to get some notice for his work, is probably embarrassed by having his name associated with smarmy putdowns of a friend like Geoffrey Hill.
Most of the Poets in this anthology
are English, but each will,
understand this in a different
context, and most will reject the
stylised anglophilia of, say,
Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin.
(xviii)
Everything that is obnoxious about the editors's Introduction is inscribed in this little sentence. What does "stylised" mean exactly? As if Allen Fisher's pedestrian "African Boog" was not burdened with a style. Does the fact that he mentions the rooks over Tulse Hill station, anotherpolitically correct manor south of the Thames, make for a more authentic love of place than Hill's evocation of Mercia? I hope the editors aren't suggesting that the only legitimate access to England is via anglophobia.
I take it they are trying to promote the idea of the local or regional over some more generalized concept of a national identity. Fair enough. Every poet and writer has the right to imagine their own relationship to place. Larkin's country conservatism in "Show Saturday" may not be to the editors's taste. But it is no less validthan PeterRiley's England imagined in beefy, proletarian mood: "It would be specious to pretend / that any bit of British countryside is anything / but an agricultural factory marked Piss Off' (219-20). In some ways, Riley's "British countryside" - British doesn't seem right here, does it? - is more general, more vague, more abstract, more "centrist" and normative than anything in Larkin or Hill. It's just that Riley the unread can be turned into one more hapless victim of those who supposedly control the "cultural organs" of contemporary Britain and who have nothing better to do than spend their time scheming to keep him out of print.
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