Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: On the Poetics of Community 9781472575821, 9781474219990, 9781472575845

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Preface
Introduction: Later than Late: The English Intelligencer and Modernism
1. Publishing, Community and Exchange in The English Intelligencer
2. ‘An essential structural unity’: Modernist Ideals and The English Intelligencer
3. Beyond the Whole: The Breakdown of Late Modernismin The English Intelligencer
4. ‘A relationship between the formal | & the unpredictable’: From Condensare to Détournement in the Poetry of John James
5. Displacing the Polis: The English Intelligencer and the Long Poem in the 1970s
Conclusion: ‘The proper microscope after all’: Reading The English Intelligencer
Appendix: Contents Listing of The English Intelligencer
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Reader in Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles: Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, edited by Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer On the Poetics of Community Alex Latter

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Alex Latter, 2015 Alex Latter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-7582-1 PB: 978-1-3500-2842-5 ePDF: 978-1-4725-7584-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-7583-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

For Elle

the hearth cools in the face of the distant future yet the lid of the box was lifted it smelt of wet dust after rain I think it was called hope John James, ‘October’ Debut d’une lutte prolongée Atelier Populaire slogan: Paris, May 1968

Contents Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Preface Introduction: Later than Late: The English Intelligencer and Modernism 1 Publishing, Community and Exchange in The English Intelligencer 2 ‘An essential structural unity’: Modernist Ideals and The English Intelligencer 3 Beyond the Whole: The Breakdown of Late Modernism in The English Intelligencer 4 ‘A relationship between the formal | & the unpredictable’: From Condensare to Détournement in the Poetry of John James 5 Displacing the Polis: The English Intelligencer and the Long Poem in the 1970s Conclusion: ‘The proper microscope after all’: Reading The English Intelligencer Appendix: Contents Listing of The English Intelligencer Notes Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 19 51 85 123 159 197 201 229 257 273

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Carol Watts, for the kindness and rigour with which she supervised the doctoral thesis on which this monograph is based; Professor William Rowe, for his assiduous comments on parts of that thesis; my doctoral examiners, Professor Robert Hampson and Dr Rod Mengham; Professor Anthony Bale; the School of Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, for their generous Studentship; the trustees of the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Grant at the University of Connecticut, whose Travel Grant enabled me to visit the Thomas J. Dodd Research Centre; Dr Rebecca Beasley, who encouraged this project in its earliest stages; Dr Matthew Feldman, Dr Erik Tonning and Dr David Tucker, the series editors of Historicizing Modernism; David Avital, Mark Richardson and James Tucker at Bloomsbury; my fellow students at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, particularly Dr Holly Pester; Daniel Eltringham, Vicky Sparrow and Dr Matthew Sperling, who joined me in a panel at the BAMS Modernism Now conference, 26–28 June 2014 at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London; Dr Amy Cutler; John Hall, John James, Peter Riley and John Temple, who responded with generosity and fulsomeness to my queries about their involvement in the Intelligencer; Ian Brinton; Jean Crozier; the estate of Andrew Crozier, for permission to quote from copyrighted unpublished correspondence; Melissa Watterworth-Batt, archivist at the University of Connecticut, for her invaluable guidance through the Dorn, Olson and Raworth archives. I would also like to thank my parents, Paul and Sarah; my brother, Tom; Neil Hooper and Ellis Gregory, who first taught me to read poetry at Sharnbrook Upper School; Gareth Clayton; Tom Paffard; Bea, Monty and Spike.

Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as an exemplar of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the Englishspeaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included here. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Introduction: Later than Late: The English Intelligencer and Modernism

This is a history of The English Intelligencer, a poetry worksheet printed by and circulated among a small group of young British poets from early 1966 until April 1968. The primary aim of this study is two-fold: it seeks firstly to establish a full account of the Intelligencer’s operation with a particular emphasis on the various correspondences that supported and overlapped its run before situating that operation within the history of poetic modernism in the twentieth century. It argues that the Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of poetic modernism in Britain, as alongside a number of small presses – Goliard, Grosseteste, Fulcrum and Trigram – and little magazines like Migrant, Outburst, The Resuscitator, Tzarad and The Wivenhoe Park Review, it established a vital centre of modernist practice at a time when the prevailing norms of British literary culture were supposedly marked by a shrinking away from experimental practices. This book retraces the history of that aspiration through the Intelligencer poets’ catalysing engagement with a number of the poets – most importantly, perhaps, Charles Olson and Edward Dorn – whose work had been published in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry at the turn of the 1960s, an engagement that explicitly roots the Intelligencer’s exchange into Anglo-American modernism. Yet the Intelligencer exchange also marks the limit of this particular iteration of literary modernism, and the latter half of this study explores the ways in which its breakdown was related to the tensions that were inherent in the vision of poetry and community implicit in this mode of exchange. The study concludes by considering the consequences of the Intelligencer’s dissolution for the poetry written by a number of key participants in the decade or so after its end, arguing that its vision of community and language continued to exert a decisive influence on this work, even as it moved away from the realization of that vision.

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer

Late modernism The present study considers the history of the Intelligencer in relation to late modernism. This is a term that has been used in a number of different and even contradictory ways: any critical definition that has been used with equal conviction to describe the poetries of both J. H. Prynne and Philip Larkin is clearly in need of clarification. Within the chronologies of some influential accounts of late modernism, the Intelligencer appears to be later than late. The dates of its run place it beyond the chronology of Tyrus Miller’s study, for example, which situates late modernism in the late 1920s and 1930s. Miller’s characterization of late modernist writing as the process of ‘reassembl[ing] fragments into disfigured likeness[es] of modernist masterpieces: unlovely allegories of a world’s end’ does not pertain to the Intelligencer’s poetics either, which are more concerned with reconfiguring rather than disfiguring modernism and are oriented towards a new beginning rather than the world’s end.1 The Intelligencer also falls outside the remit of Jed Esty’s account of an English late modernism located in the ‘anthropological turn of 1930–1960’;2 likewise, Esty’s identification of some residual aspects of ‘late modernism’s nativist turn’3 in Seamus Heaney’s account of the ‘continuity of communal ways’ in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Larkin suggests that this iteration of late modernism is quite at odds with the poetics of the Intelligencer.4 Esty’s account of the form that modernist writing took in post-war British poetry – or, more specifically, English poetry – resonates with a pervasive strain of critical thought about modernism’s trajectory in this period. There is a sense that, after the Second World War, modernism was defunct – ‘ready for asset-stripping’, according to John Osborne.5 Modernism is perceived as an alien other in these histories of British poetry in the twentieth century: Andrew Motion figures it as a virus, writing that Larkin’s poetry does ‘more than any other living poet to solve the crisis that beset British poetry after the modernists had entered its bloodstream’.6 Indeed, a case has been made for Larkin as the quintessential ‘late modern’ poet: Stephen Regan writes of the ‘myth that Larkin’s instincts were profoundly anti-modernist’, describing the ways in which Larkin’s poetry ‘frequently embraces the devices associated with Modernist experimentation’.7 In these accounts, modernism is identified as both a period and a style: its moment may have passed in Britain after the war, but certain formal features – ‘devices’ – are deemed to be salvageable from the wreckage. Although the heterogeneity of Hill, Hughes and Larkin is sufficiently pronounced to call into question any definition based on the grouping together of their work, this is nonetheless a definition of late modernism which has little

Introduction

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or no bearing on the Intelligencer. Modernism was more than a range of formal devices to be accommodated within the Intelligencer’s work – it was the condition of that new work. In terms of the available critical taxonomies, this book is most closely engaged with Anthony Mellors’s account of late modernism. Mellors’s account is derived from the (dis)continuities that he identifies in the work of Pound, Olson and Prynne, a tradition with which the Intelligencer is both explicitly engaged and a constituent part. Unlike those versions of late modernism situated predominantly in the 1930s and early 1940s, and in which modernism’s moment is supposed to have passed by the end of the Second World War, the chronology of Mellors’s late modernism is able to accommodate work such as The Pisan Cantos, The Maximus Poems and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson that would otherwise fall beyond the parameters of modernism. The inclusion of such work, alongside British poetry of the 1960s such as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Prynne’s The White Stones, makes clear that, rather than being irremediably vitiated in the post-war context, modernism in fact ‘continued to be the driving force of innovative art and literature’.8 In Mellors’s account, late modernism is defined epistemologically, with particular attention to its uses of arcane and hermetic knowledge; a late modernist text is one that remains ‘true to the modernist imperative that eclecticism and difficulty form a hermeneutic basis for cultural renewal’, even as its ‘belatedness involves a disavowal of the unifying and totalising gestures of modernist aesthetics’.9 Keston Sutherland goes further than Mellors to argue that, rather than exhibiting an ambivalence to the imperatives of modernist aesthetics, the work of Pound, Olson and Prynne constitutes ‘a sub-tradition resistant to complete theoretical incorporation into modernism or postmodernism, despite featuring in some accounts as the most characteristic representatives of those trends’.10 In Sutherland’s account, the sub-tradition is ‘the tradition of twentieth century philological poetry’, fashioned by each poet ‘in conscious response to his predecessor’.11 This tradition was established not through a confident teleology of progress, but through a series of renewals. Rod Mengham’s definition of late modernism speaks directly to many of the writers discussed in the present study: they have, he writes, ‘stayed in touch with the agendas of modernism’: Since the mid-1960s, the poetic avant-garde of several English language-speaking countries have depended on communication with like-minded groups in other countries far more than with the mainstream writers they are geographically lumped together with. [These writers] have been part of a process of exchanging

4

Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer ideas manifested in little magazines, in the publishing programmes of small presses, and in the sheer volume of email and internet transactions.12

Mengham’s description fits closely with the Intelligencer’s late modernism, both in terms of its internationalism and aspects of its operation. Yet this definition is offered in an anthology of ‘new modernist poems’, a recognition perhaps of the changes that have taken place in this poetics since the mid-1960s. Drew Milne has written that the term ‘late modernism’ itself is insufficient, arguing that its designated ‘lateness’ ‘shares the indeterminacy of “post” as a temporal qualification of modernism’.13 Instead, Milne proposes ‘neo-modernism’ as a descriptor that recognizes both the ‘historically informed renewal of modernism’ that this work undertook and also the ways in which this renewal was worked out ‘through resistances to postmodern paradigms’.14 The paradox of renewing modernism – which recognizes that the insistence on newness in the imperative to make it new is a ‘suspiciously repetitive and now ancient strategy of legitimation’ – itself works through the apparent paradox of ‘innovation fatigue’.15 Such fatigue cuts two ways, implying both the exhaustion of innovative practice and also weariness with the spectacle of innovation. The condition of this lateness is one in which ‘new’ work is repetitive rather than original, exhibiting in Adorno’s words ‘more traces of history than of growth’.16 Yet it was precisely this condition that informed the texts under consideration in this study, which sought to establish a poetics that was both innovative and inscribed with the traces of history – to gather, in Pound’s words, ‘from the air a live tradition’ (‘Canto LXXXI’, 170).17 Tensions between tradition and innovation, community and individuality, and trust and risk decisively shaped the history of the Intelligencer and were manifest throughout its run – in its aspirations, its disappointments, in what was printed in its pages and written in the correspondences that surrounded it. It is this sense of doubleness, of modernism’s haunting of the Intelligencer, that is more accurately described by late modernism, rather than neo-modernism, and as such it is the critical descriptor at work in this study. This understanding of late modernism is worked out from the ground up – that is, from the de facto engagement with modernism that is enacted in both the ideals and the praxis of the Intelligencer’s exchange. A key component of this engagement is the transatlantic relationship between the Intelligencer poets and the poets gathered in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry. The work of these writers offered an example of a poetic practice that marked a vital continuation and recalibration of pre-war poetic modernism. In the case of writers such as Robert Creeley and Olson, this relationship with an earlier iteration of modernism was engendered in part by personal contact. When Creeley was considering

Introduction

5

establishing a new literary magazine in 1950, he solicited advice and work from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Both men responded generously to Creeley’s letter, and although the magazine that Creeley had planned did not in the end materialize, the advice given to him by Pound and Williams and the desire to establish a continuation with aspects of their poetry would profoundly shape both his own poetic practice and, through that practice and his editorial involvement with Black Mountain Review, the contours of the American poetry of the 1950s whose example was so decisive for the Intelligencer. The relationship that took shape in the 1950s between the example of pre-war modernism and the younger generation whose work Creeley sought to catalyse is marked by both the direct continuation of some aspects of the older writers’ work and a rejection or profound reformulation of other aspects. It shared with pre-war modernism a desire to establish an alternative to the perceived stagnation of the prevailing literary culture of the time. In his second letter to Williams, Creeley criticized ‘the insular criticism, the literary tone, the “littleness” of much that they print’ of his contemporary literary journals, just as in the first issue of BLAST Pound had lambasted the ‘gagged reviewers’ objecting to newness in the Times.18 The implicit oppositionality of this writing certainly appealed to the poets associated with the Intelligencer and its milieu. Writing to Edward Dorn in 1961, Tom Raworth described contemporary British poetry as ‘still a “class” thing’; reading this work was, he writes, ‘just reading’, as though ‘they’ve sat down with a bag of assorted “poetical” words and arranged them [. . .] Nothing has the power to MOVE.’19 In the moment of the Intelligencer, too, it was back to the example of high modernism to which its protagonists looked, as when, in 1967, J. H. Prynne wrote to Peter Riley (then the Intelligencer’s editor) that ‘[i]t’s as if, for example, Wyndham Lewis had never written a line, as if BLAST now has to be done all over again’.20 The iteration of late modernism in which the Intelligencer was situated is thus an explicit renewal of modernism, both in terms of its oppositional spirit and also in the structure of the community in which this opposition took shape. Again, this is continuous with the terms of the modernist renewal undertaken in the 1950s by those American poets with whom the Intelligencer poets became involved: Pound’s advice to Creeley in 1950 that a literary magazine should be ‘a centre around which, “not a box within which”’ is key to understanding the Intelligencer’s aspirations and its function.21 Such continuities would suggest that the iteration of modernism at work in the Intelligencer might more properly be described as ‘later’, rather than ‘late’, modernism. This definition would, however, ignore the important discontinuities between pre-war modernism and its post-war iteration. In part, these discontinuities are predicated on the recognition of modernism’s failure to

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establish a lasting renewal: both the British and American poets involved in the history of the Intelligencer recognized that their countries’ literary cultures had again stagnated in the wake of modernism’s first push. BLAST would not need to have been done again if modernism’s challenge to make it new had persisted. There is also a sense that that first push had become tired. In part, this is a consequence of its association with the passing of a particular generation of writers: Pound reflects explicitly on this in the Cantos, recalling his late contemporaries James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and W. B. Yeats as ‘Lordly men to the earth o’er given’ (‘Canto LXXIV’, 267).22 This line, taken from Pound’s translation in 1912 of The Seafarer, invokes both the poet’s own sense of isolation in the D.T.C. at Pisa and also his sense of cultural marginalization. Through the allusions to the translation of The Seafarer and the opening moments of the Cantos, the terms in which Pound frames his sense of his own personal and generational exhaustion recall the germinal phase of his career and of the Cantos. Such allusion functions both to recall an earlier moment of optimism and community, and also to offset his present situation. They invoke the ‘live tradition’ gathered from the air at a time when that tradition seems to have become moribund. Pound’s own sense of what constituted that ‘live tradition’ was, of course, highly idiosyncratic and aligned with authoritarian politics. The sense of exhaustion was more generally pervasive, however. Despite Pound’s initial encouragement of Creeley’s enterprise, the younger poet soon sought to distance himself from Pound’s monomania and what the editors of Creeley’s Selected Letters describe as his ‘sycophantic, not to mention racist, retinue’ at St Elizabeth’s.23 Writing to Williams, Creeley framed the problem of Pound’s example in terms of ‘how much do the younger of us expect a right to from a tired man; it comes time for us to make some sense [. . .] To come into our own intensity.’24 The work of these younger poets was thus to make sense of the ‘live tradition’ of modernism in such a way that would bring themselves individually and collectively into their own, original intensity. It is within these parameters that the Intelligencer is situated. The lateness of its modernism is defined both as an extension of an earlier iteration of modernism, and also by its proximity to the limit of that extension. The history of the Intelligencer is the threshold at which the limits of late modernism are reached.

The poetics of community The Intelligencer sought to activate a direct relationship between the production of new work, the means of its distribution and its readership. Although this

Introduction

7

relationship was imagined in terms of community, it was always shadowed by accusations of coterie. The charge of coterie writing – that is, of writing which refuses ‘to engage a wider, would-be democratic sphere’25 – is easily levelled at the Intelligencer, given that its readership was kept so deliberately small. The restrictions placed on the size of its audience gave rise to a ‘protectionist, internecine poetry’, according to Gordon Burn, for whom the Intelligencer was essentially an exercise in intellectual self-regard.26 Criticism of the Intelligencer’s perceived insularity was voiced at numerous junctures during its run, most sharply perhaps in the spoof issue.27 Burn’s dim view of the Intelligencer resonates with his description of Prynne as ‘the Cambridge Marxist-obscurantist poet’, a charge which brings into view the shadowy figure of ‘the Cambridge school’ with which the Intelligencer has often been associated, and even described as its point of origin.28 The invocation of the Cambridge school generally insinuates a body of experimental writing ‘ultimately centred on Prynne’s Cambridge’ that: fuse[s] lyrical precision and speculative abstraction into a new objectivism, open simultaneously to the inherited patterns of the English line and a range of globally imported alternatives.29

Opinions are sharply divided on the merits of this writing: for John Wilkinson, it represents the ‘most intellectually ambitious collective poetic endeavour in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century’.30 More often, though, it is invoked pejoratively, as shorthand for a kind of egghead experimentalism.31 While there are affinities between the writers often grouped under the heading of ‘Cambridge’, especially during the moment of the Intelligencer, the notion of a ‘school’ is unhelpfully reductive: the implied dogmatism of ‘school’ elides the variousness of these poets’ art. Its relationship with the university was also ambivalent. Already a Fellow at Gonville and Caius, Prynne was closely involved with every aspect of the Intelligencer’s production, from the material manufacture of its pages to the editorial process,32 and its editors Andrew Crozier and Peter Riley were both recent Cambridge graduates, as were a number of other core participants such as John Hall, Tim Longville, John Riley and John Temple. Yet others like John James and Barry MacSweeney were not, although both were in close proximity to Cambridge – James moved there in 1966 and MacSweeney was studying a journalism course in Harlow. Although the Intelligencer’s sheets were produced on the mimeograph in and mailed from Prynne’s rooms in Caius, the stencils were produced by Crozier and Riley, who were based variously in London, Hastings and then Keele. The notices of forthcoming readings, publications and new magazines that appear throughout the Intelligencer’s run,

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assiduously reproduced in full by the Mountain Press edition of its prose, make clear how linked-in the Intelligencer was to the broader cultural field of British poetry publishing. It had readers across the country too: the geographical range of addresses on the mailing list from the ghost issue stretches from Kingsbridge to Penrith.33 (Additionally, copies of the Intelligencer were made available to Donald Davie, Edward Dorn and Charles Olson.) Far from being an insular, internecine publication, then, the Intelligencer sought to establish itself on a national scale. The mailing lists name a possible community that extends across distance, rather than an immediate and physically proximate coterie. The community named in the Intelligencer is rooted in the forms of correspondence that had arisen between the poets most closely involved with the late modernist poetics with which it was engaged. This correspondence was more than just a conduit for ideas about poetry: it was itself an extension of the poetics of the open field, and as such the community of its first readers were bound into that field. The letters between Olson and Creeley discussed earlier were something of a template for this form of correspondence, where the mutual trust between correspondents catalysed the enormous, assertive energy of their letters. The relations between these two correspondents – their friendship – formed the basis for the ideal (and idealized) social order of the polis that pertains to the ideals that shaped the Intelligencer. In his letter of 27 December 1966, Prynne bemoans the lack of an ‘initial measure of trust’ among the Intelligencer’s readers that would have enabled ‘the community of risk [. . . to] hold up the idea of the possible world’.34 In Prynne’s terms, then, the reciprocal exchange of trust and risk enables a community to sustain an alternative vision of the world. The construction of a ‘community of risk’ seems to be consistent with other late modernist accounts of community. It was explicitly invoked by Robert Creeley in a letter to the State Department in which, protesting against the Vietnam war, he declined an invitation to read his work: I am very blessed to share a community with other men in the act of writing, and it is their respect and belief that I am also much aware of. I cannot outrage the community of my own identity.35

However, ‘risk’ is a very different word from ‘identity’: it is a far less ancient word, and its origins appear to be synonymous with the advent of mercantile capitalism. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the earliest uses of the word are ‘all in commercial contexts in [the] sense [of] “hazard, danger”’, dating back to the mid-twelfth century ‘in a document from Constantinople’: the aspect of commercial hazard remains present during the word’s development

Introduction

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through Middle French, Old Occitan, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch.36 It pertains particularly to the possibility of damage to goods in transit and would, as such, appear to be a condition that is synonymous with the hurt, damage and loss of capitalism – that is, ‘the damaged life-world’ of modernity from which a community of one’s own identity would offer relief.37 The community of risk, however, is not merely an alternative to that life-world – instead, this community will be predicated on the tension between ‘risk and predictability’ that in previous iterations of modernism had been represented as the ‘endlessly irresolvable aspects of experience (and of artmaking), endlessly at war’: it seeks to contain the antagonisms of risk without ameliorating them.38 This is a different order of community from one of identity: trust and risk are activated not as equivalents, but dialectically. As a consequence, the social relations in that community become increasingly antagonized as those ‘endlessly irresolvable aspects’ of risk and predictability are brought into fraught relief. Antagonism characterizes the Intelligencer’s exchange. There are a few moments where the kind of exchange that had characterized the voluble correspondences of the preceding decade or so is achieved, but more typically the Intelligencer’s history is decidedly fractious. There are local disagreements from the outset about the viability – even the desirability – of the Black Mountain example; about what constitutes Englishness; about what can be rightfully expected of those who received its sheets for free. Increasingly, too, the Intelligencer was dogged by disagreement about its editorial procedure, which came to a head when Peter Riley was stripped of editorial control by Crozier, John James and Prynne in December 1967. The Sparty Lea festival – which although it was not ‘an English Intelligencer do’39 was closely aligned with both its dramatis personae and its modus operandi – ended amid some antipathy; the Intelligencer itself came to an end in April 1968, although its final series documents the dissipation of its energies. Neil Pattison argues that the Intelligencer’s dissolution should not be ‘looked upon as a defeat, but as the alarming fulfilment of [its] project’, as the Intelligencer ‘defined and achieved its purpose in self-sabotage’.40 Thus, the ‘schismatic fractures’ that emerge during its run are not ‘moments of failure in the group’s resolve’, but ‘evidence of its determined capability’.41 Although Pattison suggests that the Intelligencer poets were ‘strikingly disinterested in situating their work genealogically, even within the evanescent parameters of the modernist or avant-garde traditions’,42 I argue that the ‘determined capability’ that Pattison ascribes to the Intelligencer’s exchange is itself a legacy of the late modernist tradition in which it was situated. It is modernism, specifically the tradition of modernism inherited from Pound and Olson, with its promise

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of a mythically complete identity, that constitutes the self that is sabotaged in the Intelligencer. The determination of the Intelligencer poets’ capability is a modernist inheritance, implying a logic of control that the Intelligencer’s exchange consistently eludes, despite the repeated interventions such as Prynne’s letter of 27 December 1966 or the Palace Revolution Issue that sought to determine its function. This determination is itself fundamentally modernist, in that it seeks to control risk, although it does so in its late modernist iteration not through the determining intelligence of Pound’s mythic artifex but in its appeal to the ideal social order of the polis. It is precisely because of this that the Intelligencer community’s resolve fails, since its resolution is implicitly bound up in a model of community that is predicated on the irreconcilable antagonism of trust and risk. Previous iterations of modernism, even as late as the exchanges of the early 1960s, had sought to fashion a way of being in the world that was antithetical to the damaging risks of modernity. The Intelligencer can be read as a later iteration of this aesthetic, in which it was imagined that this damage might somehow be contained within the order of a community. Instead, its history shows that the Intelligencer itself became a site of social damage. By the time of its dissolution, the aspirations and aesthetics that shaped the Intelligencer’s inception had given way to a radically new poetry – some iterations of which are explored in the second half of this book. Pattison’s assertion that it is ‘hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise’ in this respect holds true: the poets involved in the Intelligencer were inevitably drawn into ‘antagonistic confrontations’ with each other along the fault lines that were embedded in its praxis from the moment of its inception.43 In another way, however, it is quite easy to imagine how it could have been otherwise. Pattison’s assertion that the Intelligencer’s antagonism is a consequence of ‘offer[ing] a treasured dream to an other, only to find that in the equivalent place to that which the dream holds in your heart lies a dream all of the other’s own making in his’ recognizes both the late modernist ideal of an equivalent social identity, and also the implicit gendering of this ideal.44 Only four women are listed as recipients on its mailing lists: the history of the Intelligencer could perhaps have been different if women had occupied a less marginal position in its exchange. The marginality of women is not local to the Intelligencer, however, but instead a manifestation of the prevailing trend of late modernism that marked a limit of its conception of the open field. The intense correspondences that shaped it were almost exclusively between men: when Creeley for instance names the community of his own identity, he refers exclusively to men. Even though it was Elaine Feinstein who initiated contact with Charles Olson in 1959, she felt obliged to sign herself ‘E.B.

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Feinstein’, to prevent him from knowing that she was a woman. Although this might in part be ascribed to the prevailing cultural attitudes of the period – it is worth remembering for instance that the admission of women into the majority of colleges at Cambridge did not begin until 1972 – it is also symptomatic of the dominant and domineering masculine ethos of late modernism. This ethos shades the Intelligencer exchange. When for instance Prynne chastises the Intelligencer for its failure to ‘hold up the idea of the possible world’, he does so in terms of its perceived impotence and emasculation: the Intelligencer’s title is ‘the most shrivelled proposition in the whole drooping matter’; as each ‘dubious effort’ of its contributors ‘sinks to its own small death’, the company of the Intelligencer ‘lives its common loyalties like a well-bred whore trying to reform’.45 Where the Intelligencer has failed to uphold the idea of the possible world, it has done so by becoming emasculated. At the same time, Prynne’s letter tacitly invokes the sanguine virility that would be capable of overcoming such torpor and bringing into existence the ‘possible world’. And yet the birth of this new world must rely on pathogenesis: within the logic of the Intelligencer, which is the working out of the logic of late modernism, it is in the figure of the brother that the new world is born. To that end, then, it is not difficult to imagine a different logic and to speculate on the effect that this difference might have had on that history, and on the history of innovative poetics in Britain more generally, although such a speculative history remains beyond the parameters of this study. Nonetheless, aspects of the Intelligencer’s praxis resonate with more recent reflections on the relative ‘dearth of women writing experimentally in Britain’ and the ‘cliquishness and vocal dominance of men at past poetry readings’,46 although events such as The Contemporary Experimental Women’s Poetry Festival in 2006 have, in Andrea Brady’s words, changed the mood: they are friendly, positive, non-exclusive events, with large audiences, and when they’re over you feel yourself emerging into new collaborations, interests and respects. They have single-handedly erased the misanthropies of which the ‘Cambridge school’ has anciently been accused (sometimes correctly, though not often).47

Researching The English Intelligencer Part of the Intelligencer’s appeal when I was putting together my research proposal in the spring of 2009 was that it seemed to be an unjustly neglected publication, and I envisaged my project as a means of bringing its achievement to light. I

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anticipated that it would be focused on reconstructing the Intelligencer through close attention to its various archival holdings, negotiating what Nate Dorward described as its ‘bibliographical minefield’, so that my work would act as a kind of critical companion to what I envisaged as a digital edition of the Intelligencer.48 There seemed to be a book’s worth of work in simply defining what the Intelligencer was, in rectifying the manifold inconsistencies of the extant critical accounts of it. There was no consensus on even the most basic features such as its name, how it functioned and the dates from which it ran: Eric Mottram refers to it as ‘the Intelligencer’, R. J. Ellis as ‘English Intelligencer’ and John Wilkinson as ‘The English Intelligencer’; Mottram described it as a ‘journal’, Wilkinson a ‘little magazine’, Robert Potts a ‘worksheet’;49 Nate Dorward and Wilkinson put its run between 1966 and 1968 but R. J. Ellis listed it as 1965 to 1967.50 There was no clear consensus on how many series there had been: the Cambridge University Library complete holding of the Intelligencer lists only two (and dates its run from 1965 to 1968), David Miller and Richard Price give it as three, whereas the bibliography of the Fales archive in New York lists four. Then there was the mystery of its circulation: John Wilkinson writes that it should not ‘go unnoticed that William S. Burroughs (then living in London) and J. G. Ballard were of the number’ of recipients, prose writers to whose name the Fales holding also adds Saul Bellow.51 And then there was the matter of the various ‘spoof ’, ‘ghost’, ‘Palace Revolution’ and ‘Final Solution’ issues indicated by bibliographical holdings but not within the material of the holdings themselves, so that in my initial contents listing I attributed to Peter Riley the rather lugubrious sounding poem ‘The Disappearance of Gravel’. These levels of uncertainty existed prior even to the consideration of the actual work of the Intelligencer, of the exchanges that took place in its pages, of the correspondences entered into and poems published. Since that time, however, there has been something of a boom in critical attention to the Intelligencer: a symposium was held at St John’s College, Cambridge, in the summer of 2011 that was devoted exclusively to it and an edition of its prose was subsequently published by Mountain Press (2012), which for the first time made some of its contents available to those without access to its various archival holdings, and made the bibliographical minefield negotiable to those that had. Neil Pattison’s introduction made an urgent claim for the importance of the Intelligencer, situating it with meticulous care in the context of British poetry in the 1960s. There has also been an attendant upsurge in attention to the work of those most closely involved with the Intelligencer. Two substantial new collections of critical writings on J. H. Prynne – A Manner of Utterance (2009) and Glossator 2 (2010) – were published, alongside The

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Salt Companion to John James (2010) and Reading Barry MacSweeney (2013); a volume of essays generated by a one-day conference run by Birkbeck and Royal Holloway on the work of Peter Riley is due out in 2015. A number of doctoral projects were also undertaken in this period that pertained to the Intelligencer and its community: Reitha Pattison’s Cosmology and Capitalism in the Writings of Edward Dorn and Ryan Dobran’s The Difficult Style: A Study of the Poetry of J. H. Prynne, as well as Justin Katko’s work on Dorn and science and Luke Roberts’s on Barry MacSweeney. More work is forthcoming in Daniel Eltringham’s work on Prynne, Wordsworth and excursus, Vicky Sparrow’s on Anna Mendellsohn and Matthew Sperling’s Leverhulme research on British small press poetry in the 1960s. This doctoral and post-doctoral interest is reflected in a more general upsurge in awareness of these poets’ work too, as their recognition in the updated Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013) and in the Oxford Handbook to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013) attests. There was also significant new and reissued work by the Intelligencer poets: Andrew Crozier’s collected poetry was brought posthumously back into print for the first time in decades in Ian Brinton’s An Andrew Crozier Reader (2012), and a generous selection of his prose was collected in Thrills and Frills (2013); Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts and Lines on the Liver were collected together as The Derbyshire Poems (2010); and the third edition of Prynne’s Poems is forthcoming in 2015. New work by many of these poets appeared: Peter Riley’s The Glacial Stairway (2011) and The Ascent of Kinder Scout (2014); John Hall’s Keepsache (2013), a companion piece to his 1999 selected Else Here; John James’s In Romney Town (2011), Cloud Breaking Sun (2012) and Songs in Midwinter for Franco (2014); J. H. Prynne’s Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats, or, On What There Is (2011) and Al-Dente (2014). New critical prose was also forthcoming from Intelligencer poets: John Hall’s two volume Essays on Performance Writing, Poetics and Poetry (2013), John Temple’s Scarlet Shadows, Lucent Shade (2013) and a number of critical pieces from Prynne, including the essay ‘Mental Ears’ (2010), a ‘specimen commentary’ on George Herbert’s Love, III (2011) and Concepts and Conception in Poetry (2014). There has been a spate of publications of work situated in the late modernist tradition with which this study is engaged: Robert Creeley’s Selected Letters were published in 2014, and there have been a number of re-issues of Edward Dorn’s work, including Two Interviews (2013), an expanded critical edition of The Shoshoneans (2013) and of course the monumental Collected Poems (2012). The collection of Dorn’s correspondence with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) in Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Correspondence (2013) also opened up the networks of

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exchange that facilitated much of these two poets’ work and more generally the open field of North American late modernism. In addition to this new material, the course of my research led me to archival material that reconfigured my initial understanding of the Intelligencer. I contacted a number of Intelligencer poets – John Hall, John James, Peter Riley and John Temple, as well as Jean Crozier – who were forthcoming with memories of their involvement with the project, of what it meant to them then and what relationship they saw between their involvement with the Intelligencer and their poetic practice. They were also very generous in supplying additional material and suggesting further points of reference and research. Furthermore, the research I conducted in the Intelligencer archive held in the Fales Library at New York University, as well as the Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Tom Raworth papers at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Centre at the University of Connecticut gave me access to a vast amount of material which provided a rich context in which to situate my understanding of the Intelligencer as an attempt to establish a poetic community and language radically counter to the prevailing norms of British poetry publishing in the 1960s. The breadth of the material made available by this research further augmented my understanding of what the Intelligencer was, and strengthened my conviction that it would not be sufficient to consider it purely as a discrete archival object. New material has continued to be made available: in the spring of 2013 Peter Riley and Andrew Crozier’s archives were placed in the Cambridge University Library, and a recording of two readings given by Prynne in Vancouver in 1971 was uploaded onto the Archive of the Now website, in which Prynne read many of the poems under consideration in this book and prefaced them, with an uncharacteristic fulsomeness, with the history of their composition. The announcement of the Cambridge Poets’ Papers project in early 2014 suggests that the availability of this material will continue to grow in future years – perhaps even including the letters from Dorn and Olson to Prynne, which are presently available only for consultation by a small number of readers specifically nominated by Prynne himself. The Cambridge University Library’s exhibition of the manuscripts of John Riley’s major poem ‘Czargrad’ – full consideration of which is regretfully beyond the limits of this book – showcased the breadth and wealth of material that this project will open up.52 Rather than thinking about the confusion in the Intelligencer archive as something to be rectified so that a correct, original version of the Intelligencer can be recovered, the proliferation of material around it – both new work and newly available archive material – suggested an alternative view of its run, one that is perhaps more consistent with its history. The Intelligencer was never intended

Introduction

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as a discrete entity: rather, it was an intervention in an historical moment, a fulcrum around which new work, contacts and forms of knowledge could turn. The continuous run of its page numbering bears this self-image out, insisting on the primary importance of process, of exchange, rather than fixity. As such, then, this study of the Intelligencer has moved away from considering its history on the terms that I began with and moved instead towards an understanding of it in relation to the wider exchange in which it was situated. The archived correspondence that this book draws on is not seen as an auxiliary form of writing to the Intelligencer’s exchange, but rather as a vital constituent part of it.

Chapter summaries As each chapter is prefaced with an extensive introduction, what follows is a capsule overview of the contents of each. Chapter 1 explores the Intelligencer in the context of both British poetry published in the 1960s and its relationship with the late modernist poetry associated with Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry. It considers why these young British poets felt compelled to look across the Atlantic for an example of a vital modernist practice, and thinks through what the Intelligencer’s bibliographical codes can tell us about its history. The Intelligencer’s relationship with the 1960s counter-culture is analysed in relation to criticism of the group’s perceived retreat from the public sphere and Bourdieu’s field of restricted production. It draws on correspondence to show how the perceived bifurcation between established commercial presses and the Intelligencer poets was in fact blurred in the years leading up to its inception, and then charts the ways in which the relationship between the two soured, considering the merging of Goliard with Jonathan Cape, Michael Horowitz’s Children of Albion anthology and the publishing history of Barry MacSweeney’s first publication, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother. The chapter then establishes the ideal of total social relations to which the Intelligencer aspired, tracing its emergence back through the late modernist tradition from which it emerged. Chapter 2 charts this modernist heritage more fully, mapping a tradition of poetic language back through Olson to Pound and Fenellosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, before exploring the ways in which this tradition was encountered and recalibrated in the correspondences that preceded the Intelligencer. The desire for a natural, integrated language that is at the heart of this tradition is then discussed in terms of the topography of the

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Intelligencer, especially its relationship with the Royal Society’s Symposium on Continental Drift that was held in October 1965. Dorn and Prynne sent a copy of the proceedings of this symposium to Olson as a Valentine’s Day present; I read Prynne’s poem, ‘The Wound, Day and Night’, in the context of its inscription to Olson, before moving on to an analysis of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ and its relationship to the Intelligencer’s late modernist poetics of community. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways in which these ideals were worked out in the practice of the Intelligencer, and the ways in which, from the outset, that practice challenged those ideals. Chapter 3 explores the dissolution of the Intelligencer’s late modernist aesthetic. It offers a reading of Prynne’s early Intelligencer poems that works to establish the kinds of coherence that these poems worked towards and how these were intimately bound up in the communal aspirations of the Intelligencer. The aspiration that such a community could be founded on the principle of fraternal love is considered at length here, through readings of Prynne’s poems that initially appear in letters to Olson, then through to the suite of poems published from page 134 of the Intelligencer. The chapter then moves on to analyse the breakdown of these aspirations, through a close reading of Prynne’s later Intelligencer poetry which bears witness to the dissipation of trust and the confidence in names that had characterized the earlier work. The Intelligencer and its attendant exchanges contextualize this dissipation, offering a nuanced account of the development of a new style through scrupulous attention to its development through the poems’ publishing history to argue that their focus shifts from a redemptive centre of love to an embattled edge of hurt. The work that these latter poems do to interrupt their own eloquence and mythic tropes works directly counter to the professed ideals of the earlier Intelligencer poems, sabotaging the worksheet’s late modernist identity. Chapter 4 traces the immediate aftermath of the Intelligencer’s dissolution as it was worked out in unpublished poetry, the private correspondence of those involved with it and in related publications such as Collection, The Norman Hackforth and The Anona Wynn. It then moves on to consider a working out of the Intelligencer’s late modernist poetics in the work John James wrote in its aftermath, arguing that this work’s relation to the Intelligencer shifts from one of embedded allusion to an intertextuality that unfixes the Intelligencer’s late modernist moorings. This leads into a reading of In One Side & Out the Other, James and Andrew Crozier’s collaboration with the artist Tom Phillips. By retracing the textual residue of the Intelligencer in these collaborative overwritings, I suggest that this text is a fundamental disruption of the modernist

Introduction

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ideals outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, contextualizing it in terms of a revaluation of modernism that had been taking place in the graphic and plastic arts in the mid-1960s. This gives rise in James’s art to a writing that aspires not to embed poetry at the centre of a social order, as James had sought to do in the Intelligencer moment, but instead to go ‘beyond literature’.53 Chapter 5 explores some ways in which the consequences of the Intelligencer continued to be worked out in the decade or so that followed its dissolution. It does so with particular attention to the long poems and sequences that many of the Intelligencer poets adopted in these years, focusing on Crozier’s High Zero, Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts and Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch and ‘Colonel B’. I argue that despite the formal and thematic variety of these poems they bear witness to a continuation of the kind of shift away from the tenets of late modernist poetry exemplified by long poems like Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus. These post-Intelligencer poems repeatedly destabilize any sense of emplacement, going even further than the Intelligencer poems themselves to resist conferring a central thetic point in their work as their structural principle shifts from one of rhythm to one of rhyme. As such, these poems work not to recover some lost original whole but to complicate any possible sense of such an origin. The texts analysed in this chapter demonstrate some of the ways in which the Intelligencer remained an active presence in the poetry written after its dissolution, even as that poetry seemed to move irrevocably away from the ideals on which it had been founded. The appendix provides a comprehensive listing of the Intelligencer’s contents: references to the Intelligencer’s page numbers throughout this study refer to those given in this Appendix. For quotations from subsequently collected poetry, I provide firstly the reference for that collection, followed by the details of the poem as it first appeared in the Intelligencer.

1

Publishing, Community and Exchange in The English Intelligencer

The desire for a publication like The English Intelligencer significantly predated its eventual inception in January 1966, and the context of its pre-history implicates a broad conspectus of late modernist writing that had taken shape both in Britain and North America after the Second World War. This desire was rooted in the perceived need to restore a lost vitality to British poetry, and it was catalysed in the main by the example of certain post-war North American writers, institutions and publications. Since the beginning of the 1960s, this North American writing had become increasingly available in Britain, through high-profile publications such as Donald Allen’s Grove anthology The New American Poetry and through a number of the small presses and little magazines that had been established in the United Kingdom in part to disseminate this work. These publications were made possible by shifts in reprographic technology: letterpress equipment had become relatively cheap and easy to obtain as the printing industry moved increasingly to offset printing, and the availability of affordable mimeograph machines made small-scale publications such as the Intelligencer relatively easy and quick to produce. This D.I.Y. aesthetic made work accessible in ways that more conventional publication procedures would have inhibited, since it allowed publication to operate on an economy of scale very different to that which was available through an established publishing house. Consequently, small press and little magazine publishers were able to print work that, by the rationale of a large-scale commercial publisher, would not be economically viable; they were able, in other words, to take greater risks in choosing what they would publish. The alternative scale that such publication procedures afforded British writers also allowed them to make their work available much more quickly, and

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significantly reoriented the conventional relationship between writer, publisher and reader, bringing them into much closer proximity with one another. The shift in relations that this engendered opened up a range of possibilities that had become increasingly occluded in British poetry during the years after the war. The turn away from modernist experiment, and the kind of little magazines and small press publishing that sustained it, was by no means absolute: Faber & Faber continued to publish new work by David Jones, Lynette Roberts and Ezra Pound after the war, for instance, at the same time that Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived was published by the independent Marvell Press. Nonetheless, Larkin and his peers rose to prominence in Britain through the 1950s, while those postwar modernists fell into near or total silence. This shift is clearly visible in the anthologies that sought to represent the best new work to have been written in Britain since the war, such as Robert Conquest’s influential New Lines, which represented a new British poetry – that is, British poetry published since the war – that was defined by its formal restraint and wry social observation. The difference between the formal and prosodic values of this poetry and the kind of work that excited the Intelligencer poets can be seen by even the most cursory flick through Conquest’s book and Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry. Writing to Charles Olson, whose work he would use to open the volume, Allen stated that his priorities in assembling the anthology were to establish a clear sense of ‘the continuation of the modern movement in American poetry during the last decade’ and ‘to show what new trends have developed, and what new conceptions of the poem have emerged during the period’.1 It is that sense of a continuing, vital modernist poetic practice which differentiates Allen’s anthology from Conquest’s; where Allen insists on the primacy of ‘the modern movement’ and its continued development in the post-war years, Conquest’s anthology strives to mitigate, or even erase, modernist poetics from the scene of contemporary British writing, suggesting an alternative and indigenous British – or more properly, English – tradition that had itself been occluded by the modern movement in the early years of the century. Andrew Motion frames this sense of competing traditions as ‘native English and modernist’: modernism, he writes, engendered a ‘crisis’ in the former when it ‘entered its bloodstream’, a crisis that it was the work of British poets of the 1950s to resolve.2 The crisis that modernism had engendered in British poetry in the twentieth century was not regretted by the Intelligencer poets; rather, it was something to be actively engaged with, to be encountered rather than resolved. As the prevailing tastes in Britain and its pre-eminent publishing houses of the time turned away from an active engagement with modernism – and by implication, away from

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modernism’s internationalism – it became necessary for those poets interested in sustaining such experimentalism and internationalism to look abroad, especially to America and the writers collected in Allen’s anthology. Of those writers, it was the group associated with Black Mountain, and particularly its notional figurehead Charles Olson, towards whom the poets involved with the Intelligencer directed most attention. A number of the key Intelligencer participants solicited work and opinion from Olson in the early 1960s, quite independently of one another: Elaine Feinstein wrote to Olson as early as 1959, and received a fulsome account of his take on poetics in reply;3 Tom Raworth wrote to him on Edward Dorn’s recommendation in December 1960, asking whether he might be able to spare something for Outburst, adding that he would be ‘[g]rateful for anything . . . poems . . . articles reviews . . . criticism’;4 J. H. Prynne began what would become an intensely involved correspondence with Olson a year later; John James wrote to enquire whether Olson might be prepared to contribute something ‘for future issues’ of The Resuscitator;5 Andrew Crozier requested a piece for Granta in early 1964, and then, when preparing to launch The Wivenhoe Park Review in the autumn of 1965, wrote again, ‘to ask for your contributions, and to offer you a regular space, of no particular limitation, if you’d like to avail yourself of it’.6 Another key figure from Black Mountain, Edward Dorn, also entered into close correspondence with Prynne and Raworth, which culminated in Prynne arranging through Donald Davie for Dorn to be given a teaching post at the newly founded University of Essex in the autumn of 1965. Crozier, Prynne and John Temple also spent time teaching and travelling in America during these years; Temple even stayed with Olson in early 1966. The transatlantic contact of the early 1960s opened up a counterpoint to the perceived privations of post-war British poetry. These privations were symptoms of what Prynne characterized as ‘Betjeman’s England’, whose failings were at once institutional and prosodic.7 This was a writing that had been ‘fenced into diffidence by Eliot and warned off the expansive gesture by Dylan Thomas’, ‘a terrible endemic meanness’ that was a renunciation of the mythopoetic ambition that had characterized certain works from preceding decades: To bring to the labour of creation such evident intelligence and capacity for response (of some kind), and then to narrow the whole issue down to politeness and discussion, the total ebb and flow of language simply the chart of discreet inner scruple – this is a debasement and a denial.8

The failing of Betjeman’s England lies fundamentally in its renunciation of the intelligence and capacity for response that was inherent in modernist

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practice and its advocacy of a greatly circumscribed understanding of the potential scope of poetry that shunned ‘the total ebb and flow of language’ in favour of ‘politeness and discussion’. The ‘labour of creation’ Prynne talks about is synonymous with modernism, a word that, in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s, had dropped out of favour, particularly with the major polemical anthologies of the period. Conquest’s introduction to New Lines had made the case for a poetry that ‘is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes’;9 in other words, a poetry explicitly counter to those poetic modes that an earlier generation of modernist writers had sought to bring to ‘the labour of creation’.10 Instead of ‘politeness and discussion’, the Intelligencer aimed to establish the terms of an exchange of critical intelligence that would allow for a meaningful ‘capacity for response’ to be sustained. Prynne’s sense of the diminution of the scope of British poetry was corroborated by Raworth in an early letter to Dorn, in which he asserted: [T]here are English poets still, over here, but ‘English’ & ‘poets’ – you know the sort of thing. Don’t know where it’s all going. It’s odd – poetry over here is, I think, still a ‘class’ thing – don’t know why. There’s no flow: no use of sort of natural language. The whole thing is so artificial & contrived. I mean you read the stuff and it’s just reading. Does absolutely nothing. Feel that they’ve sat down with a bag of assorted ‘poetical’ words and arranged them: and that’s all. Nothing has the power to MOVE.11

The equation of poetry with manners has the effect of stymieing its ‘power to MOVE’, a dynamism that was rooted in a poetic tradition that was dismissed, ignored or wilfully suppressed by that ‘faded quasi-Bloomsbury literati (rather elderly by now) for whom poetry means a kind of elegant trimming’, whom Prynne believed to ‘have England in their pockets’.12 It was this neglected tradition that remained vitally alive in ‘the newer achievement of American poetry’, with its whole view of the craft of writing, the openness to the presence of fact and the curvature of living, the readiness to shoulder the whole responsibility of making and thus to stand clear from the whole arrogant modesty of manipulation.13

The idea of the ‘whole view’ to which American poetry endeavoured to be commensurate is crucially significant for the Intelligencer, and is implicit in the sense of ‘the total ebb and flow of language’ from which post-war British poetry was deemed to have shied away.

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Both the dominant forms of poetic language that Prynne characterized as ‘Betjeman’s England’ and the institutions that supported it were culpable for this diminution: although the two issues of language and institution are deeply imbricated, I will consider the role of poetic institutions in this chapter and poetic language in the next. By poetic institutions, I mean: 1. the ideologies that underpin their cultural formation around ‘some collective public manifestation’ – in this case, the Intelligencer’s sheets14 2. how the de facto production and circulation of these sheets was implicated in wider social and poetic considerations 3. how these considerations might be recovered through attention to the sheets’ bibliographic and periodical codes15 This chapter will establish the Intelligencer as an originary exchange for the poetry written by those closely associated with it; the significance of this exchange is not limited to the sheets themselves, but extends out into the personal correspondences that contextualize it, so that the Intelligencer is read not as a fixed point of origin but as a point at which various independent forces come together, instigating a dynamic exchange out of which the Intelligencer emerges: an originary process more analogous to cloud formation than a fountainhead. This was something that came to be recognized in the Intelligencer’s relation to its thinking about origins: in his opening statement to the second series of the Intelligencer, Peter Riley wrote that it enacted the ‘search for/towards original (?primary) condition’, a position he later clarified, writing that ‘[t]here is no originary condition. Whatever you take, however far back it has its own origins [. . .] we want to grasp, the PROCESS, the workings of it.’16 Reading the work printed in the Intelligencer in this way recovers the ‘lost bibliographic and contextual codes’ that are elided in subsequent publications of these texts: such a reading does not confer some privileged original aura on the Intelligencer as an artefact, but instead firmly situates ‘the work in historical contingencies not recoverable from inspection of the mere words of text in modern editions’, so that, in George Bornstein’s words, it ultimately re-affirms ‘the original protean nature of these contingent texts as on-going processes’.17 It also roots it emphatically in the continued practice of a modernist poetics, suggesting the ways in which both the example of American post-war modernism and, through that, the wider history of twentieth-century poetic modernism were encountered in and around the Intelligencer.

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Commerce and counter-culture Despite the period’s prevailing rhetoric of counter-culture, there was a considerable amount of overlap between commercial and avant-garde practice in the 1960s, and any attempt to represent the two as neatly bifurcated, with the established commercial presses in one corner and the experimental little magazine/small press scene in the other, overlooks the complex, contestatory and increasingly fraught negotiation between the two. Dissatisfaction with the prevailing institutions and publishing venues was prevalent throughout the exchanges in and around the Intelligencer, and suggests a practical reason why such a publication was deemed necessary: The world of printers gets narrower and more mean-minded all the time; controlled by idiots who wouldn’t know a good piece of writing even if they saw it. It really amazes me how the idea of a live connection between the sources of genuine work and the means of dissemination has almost completely collapsed over here. The magazines are dead and suddenly reactionary, the publishers all tuned in to a completely vanished age.18

If the Intelligencer was inaugurated as an attempt to re-establish the ‘live connection between the sources of genuine work and the means of dissemination’ – ‘as quickly as needs be’,19 as Andrew Crozier put it in the earliest expression of the Intelligencer’s function – on the nanoscale of its restricted mailing list, it also remained ambivalent and, as I will go on to argue, sometimes overtly sceptical towards other avant-garde groupings. Its scale really was minute, even by the standards of the British little magazine scene of the time: Tom Raworth estimates that he would print about 750 copies of Outburst, whereas the Intelligencer was circulated, at its height, to little more than 60 people.20 The imposition of such restrictions on the dissemination of work is, for Robert Archambeau, symptomatic of this poetry’s retreat from an ‘appreciable public presence’ and an abnegation – despite the ‘strong public concern’ that is evident both in its pages and in the correspondence that took place around it – of an integral, functional role for poetry in society. For all the high-frequency and occasional fervour of its exchange, the Intelligencer would never have been able to establish a significant alternative to the stultifications of Betjeman’s England if its work was read only by those who, as a precondition of receiving the sheets, shared its conviction that such an alternative was both necessary and possible. As a consequence of these poets’ rejection of ‘conventional press[es] [. . . with] commercial distribution’ in favour of ‘marginal venues [. . .] rarely reviewed by

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the popular press’, the Intelligencer’s challenge to that popular press begins, in Archambeau’s words, to look less like a challenge to the public sphere than a withdrawal from it into something that is somewhere between the private sphere of family and friends and the public sphere.21

Its list was deliberately restricted and, despite specific requests, it was not made commercially available.22 Although contributors were encouraged to recommend new names for its list, it was not a free-for-all and even those recommended were sometimes denied access to it. Even within the list of poets who were admitted into the Intelligencer’s circulation, there was discontent about the perceived coterie whose work was prioritized above all others: Jim Hopwood complained to Peter Riley – shortly before the latter was relieved of his editorial duties – that the worksheet’s greatest shortcoming was its failure to consider work not written by a small coterie of writers.23 Far from looking to expand its audience, the incremental growth of the Intelligencer’s readership was openly regretted by a number of its participants at various points in its run and was given by Crozier as the first reason for its cessation: a) the size of its readership had become unwieldy, b) it had various levels of readership involvement, and c) those most closely involved felt that the pattern of exchange that had been established had become stultifying.24

It is clear that Crozier, and presumably ‘those most closely involved’ with the Intelligencer, did not see its miniscule readership as a proscription of the limits of its ambition; instead, its gradual expansion was to be regretted as it caused the pattern of exchange on its pages to diverge from the direction that their intentions and expectations had anticipated, so that it finally became stultifying. The apparent paradox of a more diverse community leading to a stultification in its exchange is a consequence of the particularly focused nature of the original aim that the key movers behind the Intelligencer had in mind for it, a consequence which would be worked out through the main period of its exchange and, as I will analyse in subsequent chapters, contribute to its demise. The Intelligencer is far from unusual in the history of little magazines in its preoccupation with the size of its audience, but its concern is an inversion of the customary desire to increase its numbers. This was in part a consequence of the fact that there was no financial imperative that required production costs to be met: the work undertaken in its production, while not inconsiderable in itself, was done voluntarily by Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley and J. H. Prynne,

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with help from John James and Jean Crozier, and it was also – crucially – produced for free on a mimeograph machine in Gonville and Caius College, where Prynne was a Fellow. In this way, the Intelligencer was exempt from at least one of the definitive features that Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker use to characterize the modernist little magazine, namely that it is ‘short-lived, committed to experiment, in constant financial difficulties, and indifferent or directly opposed to commercial considerations’.25 Its exemption from financial concerns was unusual even among publications produced and disseminated on a similarly restricted basis: The Floating Bear, for instance, makes repeated requests for financial support: ‘We need some dough/ Or the Bear must go’, it opines in issue six, attributing these lines to Hesiod.26 The Intelligencer’s freedom from such financial concerns afforded it full license to commit to experiment in a manner that seems to be wholly consistent with the predicates of Bourdieu’s field of restricted production, in that it develop[s] its own criteria for the evaluation of products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients and competitors.27

The self-reflexive and self-perpetuating terms of the field of restricted production are founded, Bourdieu writes, on the shared belief in ‘an opposition between creative liberty and the laws of the market’ – that is, the economics of mass production.28 By eschewing the rules of the mass market, the field of restricted production generates ‘a specifically cultural type of scarcity and value irreducible to the economic scarcity and value of goods in question’.29 The cultivation of a specifically cultural scarcity would again seem to be implicit in the Intelligencer’s restricted distribution and its disavowal of the conventions of publication: its unadorned presentation – with no cover, contents listing or editorial note – differentiates it even from other small magazines of the period.30 The manner of its presentation and its ‘contingent imperfections’ suggests an ‘improvised production driven by an urgent desire to communicate with its readership quickly’, and also a confidence that the value of its work will be established despite, or perhaps because of, the absence of some of the bibliographical and periodical codes that might ordinarily serve to orient a reader in relation to a text.31 In part, then, the Intelligencer relies on what Bourdieu describes as a connoisseur’s ability to recognize its inherent value, an ability that is assumed by the fact that it is disseminated only to those fellow producers who possess ‘the requisite knowledge of schemes of expression [. . .] transmitted by an

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education aimed at inculcating the allegedly appropriate categories’.32 That the Intelligencer’s editors and a significant number of its contributors had recently graduated from or were currently studying at Cambridge, and that the worksheet was mimeographed in and distributed from Caius, suggested a shared educational experience, or at least a locus for such an experience, that could establish these appropriate categories and thus ally the Intelligencer with ‘an educational system that legitimizes it’.33 It should not be understood as directly pertaining to the English Tripos at Cambridge, however, in the way that was the case with Scrutiny, for example, about which it would be ‘difficult to exaggerate the practical and symbolic significance of “Cambridge English” to the group’.34 Although Prynne had used poems from The Newly Fallen in practical criticism sessions with his undergraduate students as early as 1961, the poetics associated with the Intelligencer looked emphatically beyond the printed words on the page in a search for auxiliary materials and information that could be related to its conception of the possible scope of poetry, rather than advocating the practice of practical criticism and close reading as the definitive approach to literary texts. So although the Intelligencer was indelibly linked to an elite institution, it is not sufficient to describe it as somehow an extension of that institution, or to say that it was the product of an education system which teaches ‘a certain amount of “know-how” wrapped up in the ruling ideology’ in order to ensure that the dominant ideology is maintained.35 The absence of the kinds of bibliographical coding to which readers might be accustomed in order to situate themselves in relation to a text deliberately disrupts such habituated reading practice. The alternative set of values that are inscribed in the sheet’s bibliographical coding – the contingency of their production, the speed and frequency of their distribution – suggests a form or forms of knowledge that were predicated less on the appreciation of the cognoscenti and more on the recognition of the forces that energized the field of its production. It is these forces that instigated the Intelligencer’s sheets and established the direct and dynamic situation in which – by virtue of their inclusion on the mailing list – its first readers were implicated. This situation was not limited to these sheets, nor to those on its mailing list; rather, it was more generally the contested field of post-war Anglo-American poetry and its ongoing negotiation of modernism. Analysis of the wider nexus of archival material relating to the Intelligencer corroborates the sense that its primary orientation was out towards this wider field, rather than in towards the internal logic of a coterie. Situated in the proper extent of its context, the Intelligencer’s praxis is revealed to be far removed from an elitist disavowal of commercial avenues of publication. In

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part, the restricted scale of its production was necessary to facilitate the speed of the sheets’ distribution; it also permitted work to be made available in a way that the timescales of other means of publication – even more conventional little magazines – prohibited. Furthermore, the work that could be distributed through the Intelligencer, and this pertained to other little magazines as well, was not subject to any kind of economic rationale in terms of its sales: the Intelligencer printed what it was deemed necessary to print. Although considerable fractures opened up within the Intelligencer community about what precisely it was that constituted necessary work, at its outset it might be understood to mean, simply and loosely, the work that more established publishers would not print. There were a number of moments of contact between the writers who came to form the Intelligencer group and the extant publishing houses in this period, but these moments inevitably led to disappointment. Routledge & Kegan Paul invited Prynne to edit ‘an anthology of modern American poetry’, a project that came to nothing.36 Prynne hoped to find a British publisher for Dorn’s work which ‘might trigger off some sort of breakthrough in this dismal land’:37 these hopes were disappointed, with André Deutsch going so far as to lose the typescript of The Rites of Passage.38 This spoke of a divergence of taste – Prynne wrote to Diana Athill that ‘in any current meaning of that word [style], this work is not stylish; it’s quite without the grace of a well-contrived surface’ – and also of a widening gulf between the poets’ and publishers’ understanding of what the work of a publisher should entail.39 The amalgamation of Barry Hall and Raworth’s Goliard press into the Jonathan Cape publishing house was an example of this. When Dorn reported news of the venture to Olson – whose work the newly amalgamated Cape Goliard was printing – he made it clear that it was something of a marriage of convenience from the outset, telling him how ‘in order to get some new fonts and other equipment they have done books for Edward Lucie Smith’, who ran Turret Books (which Dorn describes as ‘uninteresting’) but had the financial resources to enable them ‘to do things they’ll take pleasure in themselves the old story of not letting your right hand know etc.’40

Raworth himself soon walked away from the operation, recalling how the partnership with Jonathan Cape would require him to do things ‘like have the cover of a book ready a year before it came out so that a marketing person could go around and try to sell it’.41 This delay was in direct opposition to the imperative to get work out quickly, which had driven Raworth’s printing work from the outset.42 As Raworth made clear in a letter to Olson, it was not that he was averse to conducting business per se; what he did object to – in no uncertain terms – was the inequality in the relationship with Cape. After Raworth’s

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withdrawal from the Cape Goliard venture, he discovered that Cape had printed only 100 copies of his book, of which he received five; the rest were left to rot in the binders, he told Charles Olson, as part of the Jonathan Cape editor Tom Maschler’s ‘backlash over my withdrawal from his scheme’: That motherfucker really thought I was some sort of fey ‘writer’ from the hills . . . when I finally got in touch with him and said what about some money for like my half of the press, my name of the press, the stock of books I’d printed, the goodwill etc. he was really astounded. Oh really, he said, I can’t really talk about that, you see, I have someone waiting downstairs for me in the car. You better talk about it was my snappy rejoinder . . . But it’s ‘allen ginsberg’ waiting for me he said . . . my parentheses indicating hushed breath, awe, etc. Then I dropped the magic word ‘solicitor’ and I think he told Allen to hold on.43

Even after invoking the magic word of ‘solicitor’, however, Raworth still felt cheated by Cape, since Barry Hall had signed contracts which obliged him to compensate Raworth, rather than Cape doing so. As such, Raworth was left without any recourse for compensation that would not have affected Hall: So that basic, and naive, sense of ‘business’ that Maschler has, works. Finally what I got was £100 from Cape (for work done on the Creeley/Kitaj poster, as they put it) £100 from Barry . . . And an agreement to pay another £150 at six month intervals. £350 in all. And those cunts stand to make something like £1000 from Bob’s poster alone.44

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this letter is Raworth’s assertion that Maschler’s business model – and by proxy, that of Jonathan Cape – is ‘basic, and naive’, predicated as it seems to be on the preconception that Raworth was some ‘fey “writer” from the hills’.45 Raworth’s savvy use of ‘the magic word “solicitor”’, and his disregard for the reverent intonation with which Maschler mentions Allen Ginsberg – a writer with whom Raworth had been corresponding for years – dispels the notion that he might be naïve, and in so doing, any notion that the work Raworth is interested in producing is conceived of as operating beyond the parameters of economic pressures and considerations. Raworth’s attitude to those pressures distinguishes his approach to publishing from Maschler’s: Raworth recalls how when Asa Beneviste looked in on the old Goliard printing house some months after Barry Hall had walked out, ‘things were still there. Cape hadn’t even bothered to go in and clean up or anything. The machines were still in there.’46 For Raworth, the work itself – and this includes the physical putting-together of a book – was the primary concern,

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and his ultimate objection to the involvement with Jonathan Cape seems to have hinged on the wastefulness of their publishing strategy driven by profit: the time wasted as the book is marketed, the physical waste of the unbound copies of his book, the rusting printing machines and the fact that, despite this, Jonathan Cape stood by his estimation to make at least £1,000 on the back of Raworth’s labour. Raworth’s frustrations with the Cape Goliard venture were similar to those experienced by other poets in and around the Intelligencer milieu in their dealings with established publishing houses: the publication of Prynne’s Kitchen Poems was delayed by six months in order to facilitate marketing.47 The contrast between this mode of publication, in which the work itself was one consideration among others, and the mode of the Intelligencer, which allowed the work to be disseminated as quickly as needs be, is marked. This basic conflict of values gives a sense of why it was deemed necessary to instigate an exchange of work ‘outside the regular system of publication’ for reasons other than the desire to keep it limited to ‘a small group of cognoscenti’.48 Although it eschewed the public sphere that was manifest in those regular systems, the work published in the Intelligencer is far from the ‘very private poetry’ that Archambeau describes, in ‘its formal qualities and in its support-culture’.49 Rather, the imbrication of the Intelligencer’s formal qualities and its support culture – to which I will return in the second half of this chapter – implicitly situates this poetry in a reconfigured public sphere which is directly shaped by personal needs. In the Intelligencer, community was re-imagined as a personal correspondence. The acrimony that Cape’s acquisition of Goliard engendered became symptomatic of the relationship between small presses and more established publishers. Perhaps the most notorious example of this came from the events that surrounded the publication of Barry MacSweeney’s first volume, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother. The book was published by New Authors Limited, a subsidiary of Hutchinson & Company. Its editor, Michael Dempsey, was familiar enough with the Intelligencer to send Andrew Crozier a Christmas card, in which he also requested copies of the Intelligencer.50 The enormous success of the Penguin Modern Poets edition of the Mersey Sound poets led other publishers to look for a similar venture, and the New Authors list attempted to market MacSweeney as a ‘1960s counter-culture personality’, ‘something like the Geordie answer to the “Liverpool poets”: consumable, “regional”’.51 MacSweeney was conscious of this comparison and sought deliberately to distance himself from it in a note published in the Intelligencer entitled ‘Kill the Bird, the Liverpool Bird’, in which he complained

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how such poets wrote ‘“poems” that cater for a scene. Those who listen and do not hear’.52 MacSweeney’s claim that those associated with the scene of the Liverpool poets could not hear the poems recalls Prynne’s sense that a true ‘capacity for response’ had been lost along with the ‘evident intelligence’ that this capacity makes possible. A deliberate lack of intelligence characterizes the work that MacSweeney dismisses as ‘triviality’, the sensibility of which demonstrates ‘a mixing of abstract with concrete in a pop-music type song (Dylan-like. i.e. Bob not Thomas)’: by comparison, MacSweeney insisted that ‘poetry (to me) is sacred, sweet, and eternal’, and the ‘only way to stop the market being flooded by this poetry, which is no poetry, is to be as hound to rat’.53 Brian Patten, the editor of Underdog, responded in the Intelligencer, writing that there ‘are some poets not concerned with making gems to be fondled in some distant future by literary critics, but concerned with offering them now, with their weaknesses and their strengths’.54 MacSweeney’s criticism of writing for a scene is turned back on him, since the Intelligencer is itself a scene, only one whose work, according to Patten, is focused on ‘some distant future’ rather than ‘now’. There is also a sense here that MacSweeney might be overstating his case, certainly in his apparent coolness towards Bob Dylan: Dylan was an important figure for MacSweeney, who named his Black Suede Boot Press after the footwear he had seen Dylan wear in Newcastle in 1966.55 Patten’s response implies that the kind of ‘eternal’ writing MacSweeney advocates necessarily removes itself from a full participation in the contemporary scene, focusing on work that is sufficiently accomplished to stand the test of time, rather than the process of creating new work and making it available with all its contingent imperfections. The Intelligencer’s restricted mailing list certainly looks out of place in a time when poetry was experiencing an extraordinary measure of popular and commercial success: Penguin had sold 30,000 copies of the Mersey Sound Modern Poets edition and, in 1965, 7,000 people attended readings at the Royal Albert Hall. The suggestion that the poetry which MacSweeney advocates was being written for the delectation of literary critics in some far distant future is, from the perspective of the present study, seemingly a prescient one, although placing too great an emphasis on this coincidence risks obscuring the Intelligencer’s complex relationship with its own contemporary circumstances. This complexity is in part a consequence of the fraught relationship between the late modernist tradition with which it was engaged and the post-war period, in which – as it sought to meet the challenge of making it new, again – the Intelligencer ran the risk of looking like a belated rather than a late modernism; it was also partly due to the enormous temporal and semantic crush implicit in

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the idea of ‘the archaic postmodern’, and the difficulty of translating that into a working poetics and praxis of community.56 In his insistence that the Intelligencer eschews full consideration of the present, Patten also overlooks the worksheet’s explicit orientation towards the here-andnow of literary production. From the outset, the Intelligencer’s emphasis on the speed of its dissemination – ‘to circulate as quickly as needs be’ – clearly orients it towards the present; the work it prints is also, for the most part, by young writers in the process of developing their own poetics – something as true of MacSweeney as it is of anybody. Nonetheless, it does explicitly claim a future, one that might be better than the present precisely by means of the high frequency of its sheets’ circulation and its promotion of young writers. Within these terms, then, and particularly in relation to its emphasis on youth, the Intelligencer bears at least superficial similarities to the prevailing and popular modes of the countercultural moment in which it was situated: Crozier’s MS addition to the original list of possible Intelligencer recipients considered ‘Bunting, Tomlinson, Hollo, Berry, F. T. Prince, W. S. Graham’ to be ‘too old’ to receive it.57 There are moments within its run that explicitly stake a claim in that moment, in its call for submissions to Michael Horowitz’s Children of Albion anthology and the notice it gives in its penultimate issue about the forthcoming anti-war protest in Grosvenor Square. Hutchinson’s publication of The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother deliberately calls attention to its situation in this moment. The book’s production values bear witness to its attempt to position MacSweeney in the popular conception of the 1960s counter-culture: a green and orange psychedelic cover with a portrait of MacSweeney staring moodily into the middle distance. The blurb seeks to consolidate the pre-eminence of MacSweeney’s poetics of personality, noting that ‘in his writing, in his personality, in his following, Barry MacSweeney is a kind of poet who is relatively new in this country.’58 It repeatedly emphasizes MacSweeney’s youth, insisting that he is a poet in the tradition of the Troubadours, ‘travelling from town to town with their songs’, a tradition that has been kept alive ‘[i]n Europe, in America’ but not in the British Isles; his poetry, we are told, ‘communicates [. . .] to a growing public [. . . of] people who are young’.59 The emphasis on youth resonates with the popular conception of the 1960s counter-culture as a movement of young people hoping for a future founded on cooperation rather than competition. ‘A note on New Authors Ltd.’, which appears on the final pages of the collection, reiterates this, describing the imprint’s publishing ethos as an attempt to reconcile the difficulties and frustrations of the new writer with something of importance to say with the harsh economic climate of publishing as it is today. There can be no complete answer to the problem facing the young

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creative writer and his potential publisher. The writer writes to be read; the publisher publishes to make – if he can – a reasonable return on what is, at least, a considerable financial investment.60

The stated objective of bringing into print ‘the new writer with something of importance to say’ in ‘the harsh economic climate’ that would otherwise prohibit the publication of such work seeks to reassure the reader that it is the writer’s interests – ‘to be read’ – that are at the core of the venture’s publishing values; the publisher’s interests in turning a profit – ‘a reasonable return’, ‘if he can’ – are presented as subsidiary.61 The reconciliation of the struggle of the writer with the economics of publishing is one that focuses not on the work, but on the publication of that work in that competitive, profit-driven environment. This kind of settlement is difficult to reconcile with the desire to re-establish the ‘live connection’ between ‘the sources of genuine work and the means of dissemination’ in Britain, since its focus is explicitly on the profit that can be derived from such a venture. By contrast, the Intelligencer was able to disseminate work without any consideration of profit. Hutchinson’s counter-cultural gestures, and the italicized tenets of its contract – ‘No option clause on any future work is requested’; ‘The Company is non-profit-making’ – both come with additional caveats.62 In the former instance, the ‘hope’ is stated that the author will not ‘succumb to the advances of another publisher’ in subsequent publications; the caveat to the assertion that it is ‘non-profit-making’ is more convoluted: That is to say, after meeting the costs of publication and contributing to the managing company, Messrs. Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., a management fee of 30% of its turnover to cover overheads, the audited profit remaining is devoted to helping any New Author whose particular circumstances may mar the achievement of further writing.63

Or, put succinctly, it emphatically is profit-making. Despite its counter-cultural pose and its appropriation of then-fashionable rhetoric, the conception of poetry publishing on which Hutchinson New Authors was predicated is revealed in the final line of the note about itself: It is, for the publisher, an investment in talent. To the new writer it gives a clear indication of the commercial problems of marketing his wares.64

The capitalized institution funds ‘talent’ on which it hopes to generate profit; the role of the writer is reduced to ‘marketing his wares’. The success of the Penguin Mersey Sound volume had shown that a poetry list needn’t necessarily be a

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culturally prestigious loss-leader, and in accordance with this business sense, MacSweeney was put on the publicity trail, was featured in Vogue and even nominated, by Hutchinson, for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry; aged 19 with three O-levels, he eventually received just three votes. This had a profound effect on him: Nicholas Johnson has written that it took him ‘half a lifetime’ to recover from the humiliation, and although Andrew Crozier suggested that this was an overstatement, writing in his obituary that MacSweeney was made of ‘a different mettle’, MacSweeney’s poetry and the manner of its dissemination fundamentally altered: he established the Black Suede Boot Press, and published exclusively through small or independent presses until his final collection was published by Bloodaxe.65 Although some of these volumes, such as the Fulcrum edition of Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard (1971), were printed in substantial numbers, none were comparable to those printed by Hutchinson;66 much of his poetry of the 1970s and 1980s was circulated in very limited editions, and a collection of his work that had been gathered alongside Thomas A. Clark and Chris Torrance, called The Tempers of Hazard, was pulped by Paladin in 1993. An album of press cuttings in the MacSweeney archive at Newcastle University bears witness to the scale of the attention that MacSweeney’s nomination for the Oxford Professorship elicited, as well as the vituperative tone that characterized much of it. The Sunday Times took a particular interest in the story, running with it on three separate weeks. The first article announced MacSweeney’s candidature under the headline ‘Dole Boy Named For Post At Oxford’ in which MacSweeney is described as ‘a 20-year-old unemployed youth living in the back streets of Newcastle’ whose ‘general appearance is predictably long-haired and scruffy’;67 the journalist also notes that ‘[h]is grandparents were navvies, dockers and pitmen’, although in this press cutting the word ‘navvies’ has been underlined in biro and labelled in capitals as a fabrication.68 A subsequent article compares his candidature with Kathleen Raine’s, who states in an interview that she is ‘a neo-Platonist and a Christian’ and believes ‘in the rule of the wise, not the rule of the mob’;69 the coverage of her candidature is overwhelmingly positive, although it does come with the caveat that ‘her approach to Blake is controversially Jungian’.70 In the New Statesman, Kingsley Amis described MacSweeney as a trendy hippie of no achievements [. . .] who means to give his main attention to the students (it being universally acknowledged that these run counter to the interests of poetry).71

When the Sunday Times eventually came to review the collection, it dismissed it as ‘stuffed not only with clichés but with half-digested lumps of poets from

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Rimbaud to Cummings’.72 In an interview given to Isis, an Oxford University literary magazine, the extent of Hutchinson’s failure to prepare MacSweeney meaningfully either for the publicity or for the role itself is manifest in his acknowledgement that he does not know what the role of Professor of Poetry really entails.73 A fascicle of the typescript of The Boy from the Green Cabaret was also circulated, for free, to the Intelligencer mailing list mid-way through the second series.74 The contrast between MacSweeney’s experience with mainstream publishing and the Intelligencer is marked, and counters Archambeau’s assertions that these poets’ exile from ‘conventional presses’ and valorization of ‘marginal venues’ of publication was an autonomous choice.75 The hostility of the commercial presses and avenues of publication to the kinds of poetry that MacSweeney and the Intelligencer poets were writing also obviates the charge that the choice of such marginal venues was a protectionist manoeuvre designed to artificially inflate the value of the poetry in its pages. To the extent that the Intelligencer embodied a field of restricted production, it is critical to recognize that the restrictions on its audience were not wilfully self-imposed; the hostility of mainstream presses and magazines, as is evidenced by the MacSweeney debacle, was sufficiently intense to limit the possibility of an alternative. Rather than positioning poetry as a commodity to be marketed and exploited for commercial gain, the Intelligencer operated as a shared forum where, as David H. W. Grubb puts it, ‘[t]he whole thing was to produce, share and participate’.76 This is not a retreat from the public sphere, but an attempt to establish an alternative that by its very existence can work counter to the machinations of the extant commercial publishing houses. Rather than presenting work as a coherent and completed entity to be read privately, the Intelligencer encouraged writers to ‘seek out interactive positions through sustained critical debate (rather than short reviews), through a sense of continuity and fraternal/sororial endeavour’.77 This model of a reciprocal relationship between reading and writing, practice and criticism, undermines the insistence on individual genius on which the operation of commercial publishers like Hutchinson operated: [Its] co-operative spirit suggests how the writer and reader as subjects might break out of the powerlessness of individual subjectivity, into re-formulation – an already implicitly disruptive possibility [. . .] set up by a little magazine’s establishment of a non-commercial community in its pages.78

Nonetheless, even among some of those most closely involved with the Intelligencer’s production, there was a sense that the writing printed on its pages

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needed to be made more visible, and to be put into the hands of more readers than the few dozen or so on its mailing list. Crozier’s mooted anthology on the lines of Michael Horowitz’s Children of Albion is a clear instance of this. Horowitz’s anthology sought to represent the writing of the ‘underground’, by which he meant a ‘“secret” generation of more or less British poets whose work could hitherto be discovered only through their own bush telegraph of little magazines and lively readings’.79 Thus, the anthology’s implicit programme was to bring this underground communication into the ambit of those without the requisite access to that bush telegraph. This ambition corresponds to a prevailing popular appetite for poetry in British culture at this time: Horowitz himself had jointly organized the Albert Hall readings in 1965, and Penguin, the anthology’s publishers, had sold 30,000 copies of their volume of Mersey Sound poetry. Aspects of Horowitz’s editorial line resonate both with the correspondences that took place around the Intelligencer and with aspects of its praxis – Horowitz’s stated desire to move British poetry on from ‘Eliot’s calligraphy of dry bones’80 recalls Prynne’s description of a British poetry ‘fenced into diffidence by Eliot’,81 for instance – and a number of Intelligencer contributors including Crozier, David Chaloner and Raworth contributed their work to the anthology. Crozier and Riley’s discussion in early 1967 of an anthology proceeded on similar terms to Horowitz’s too: Crozier even identified Penguin as its potential publisher, as it would ‘certainly do something of the sort within a few years’,82 and wrote to Riley again a few days later to say that he had seen Horowitz, who told him that Horowitz’s anthology was ‘still on with Penguin’.83 Prynne however disputed the necessity of such an anthology, or indeed a new magazine, preferring instead to explore the possibility of ‘a series of well printed pamphlets, really nicely done, not too long’, which would be able ‘to bring together enough to make a hold on a person’s new material & to get that out into the world’.84 Crozier’s enthusiasm for producing an anthology with Riley waned through 1967 too: he advocated the inclusion of Horowitz’s call for submissions, writing to Riley that he had come increasingly to believe ‘that the public publishing we might like should be done by others, & our light shine thru, if it’s kindled & fed elsewhere’.85 Prynne initially objected to the inclusion of ‘the note about Mike Horrorwitless and his Penguin fricassée’, concluding that the proposed anthology ‘will of course be terrible and wild horses wouldn’t drag me to within a mile of it’.86 He relented on the matter of its inclusion, conceding that we should let the question stand in its own terms – though they’re not my terms & I’m sure the outcome will be the kind of dangerous travesty which will actively exclude other possible versions of it.87

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The risk in such an anthology was, according to Prynne, that it would confer a supposed authority onto one version of a range of possible accounts of British poetry in this period. Horowitz’s version of contemporary British poetry emphasized a different trajectory to the one that shaped Prynne’s practice and the Intelligencer milieu more generally. Rather than looking to the example of Pound and Olson to get a sense of how to make poetry ‘new’, Horowitz looked instead towards the Surrealists and the Beats, writing that the Albert Hall readings had made visible the buds of a spreading poetry international, the Esperanto of the subconscious sown by dada and the surrealists and the beats bore fruit . . . The gathering was acclaimed by some as the greatest stimulus for poetry this century.88

At the same time that it stresses the newness of the kind of writing that was budding forth at the Albert Hall, and the emergence of the possibility of a new poetic language, there is also a double sense of belatedness in Horowitz’s claims. The first sense of belatedness is that which Dorn identified in a letter to Olson, in which he described Horowitz as someone ‘who still believe it or not reads to jazz, like stuart perkof only not so damn good as he did it, anyway it was corny, disgusting, 10 years too late etc.’89 This sense of being 10 years too late in 1966 is compounded by the fact that Horowitz’s anthology – which was being put together in 1967 – was not finally published until 1969, by which the cultural moment to which the optimism of the Albert Hall readings belonged had passed. The invocation of Esperanto also differs from the understanding of poetic language at work in the Intelligencer, the focus of which is, at the outset, towards a recovery of shared meanings of words through etymology, rather than the creation of an entirely new language. Its sense of making language new focused not on budding innovation, but on the revitalization of the roots of language. For such a revitalization to be made possible, it would be necessary to pay attention to the logopeiac resonance – that is, the ‘special relation to “usage”’ that Pound defines as one of the constituent parts of language’s ‘charge’90 – within which the question of community and social relations is necessarily implicated.

Total social relations and The English Intelligencer The desire for an institution and a community directly shaped by personal need is evident from the earliest correspondence between J. H. Prynne and Charles

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Olson. Prynne repeatedly bemoans ‘the malicious blindness’ of ‘Betjeman’s England’, especially with regard to its attitude towards American writing, opining that he would like ‘to work to a private circulation & print what needs to come out (like ORIGIN)’, but regretting that he lacked ‘the cash & a private list’ that such a project would require.91 By the time that the Intelligencer was established just over 4 years later, both obstacles had been overcome: the availability of the Caius mimeograph and the willingness of others such as Crozier, James and Riley to facilitate its production precluded the need for cash, and the emergence of young writers such as John Hall, Tim Longville, John Riley and John Temple, as well as contact with already established writers like Raworth and Lee Harwood in other parts of the country, had generated sufficient names for just such a ‘private list’. The desire for a ‘private’ list as the founding article for a community might seem to play back into Archambeau’s criticism about this poetry’s retreat from the public sphere, but such an idea had important antecedents in the history of late modernism and was a decisive factor in shaping the poetry that would be made available through it. This was a poetry that turned at once on an ideal of correspondence of forms – that is, a mythic, restorative order that inhered in certain forms of language use – and on a form of ideal correspondence, such as that embodied in Olson’s correspondence with Robert Creeley, for example. Late modernism’s ideal correspondence of forms is considered at length in the next chapter; the remainder of the present chapter focuses on the ideal forms of correspondence that played such a crucial part in shaping it. It was in the context of Olson and Creeley’s letters to one another that Olson produced much of his most important work: The Mayan Letters, for example, and ‘The Human Universe’. More importantly still for the history of the Intelligencer was Olson’s letter to Elaine Feinstein in 1959, in which he outlined the fullest sense of his poetics since the seminal ‘Projective Verse’, published nearly a decade earlier. There is a sense that correspondence is not merely the conduit for ideas or news, nor even that it merely catalyses new work; rather, correspondence is a necessary condition for the creation of new work. Prynne’s reference to Origin in this letter is a case in point, since that magazine had, in Creeley’s words, ‘[m]ore than any other magazine of that period [. . . undertaken] to make place for the particular poets who later came to be called the Black Mountain School’.92 Begun in 1951, the possibilities opened up by Cid Corman’s magazine greatly excited Olson in particular, who sent Corman a volley of correspondence by turns ecstatic, urgent, chiding and rude. For Olson, such a publication held the possibility for a

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means of publication that was an extension of the open field poetics outlined in ‘Projective Verse’: What I am urging on you is, a wholly different principle of, governance: simply, that, any given issue of ORIGIN, is, not a champ close (!) of taste alone (which rests – inevitably – on an assumption that the culture system is clear, its validities certain, and its values to be depended on: a closed system) | | that any given issue of ORIGIN will have maximum force as it is conceived by its editor as a FIELD OF FORCE93

The magazine, as Olson envisages it, is an articulation of a community, one whose ‘governance’ is ordered not by ‘taste alone’ – which is the manifestation of a closed system – but by ‘FORCE’. The insistence on force in relation to publication is an extension of the same insistence that Olson makes in ‘Projective Verse’ with regard to the kinetics of a poem, which ‘must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge’.94 This extension itself suggests that part of a poet’s ‘projective size’95 might be made manifest in the community of that poet’s readers, which by implication includes the publications in which that work is made available. By restoring an active currency to the ways in which work is disseminated, it might be possible to restore what has been lost in the process that Olson describes as ‘manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination’.96 The mode of dissemination associated with Origin and, much later, the Intelligencer, re-establishes the work in a much more direct relation to ‘its producer and reproducer’. The contours of a community, and the bonds that make it cohere, are shaped by ‘fields of force’, according to Olson, rather than an identifiable style: [A]s agent of this collective (which ORIGIN is going to be) the question is larger than, yr taste, alone: it is the same sort of confrontation as – in any given poem – a man faces: how much energy has he got in, to make the thing stand on its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us, of which we, too, are forces: to stand FORTH.97

These ideas shape not just Olson’s conceptions of what a magazine should be, nor what ideally constitutes a poem: it is also the material subject of his poetry. As Libbie Rifkin has observed, ‘[d]espite its classical concern for “polis”, The Maximus Poems is composed of letters, and it retains the sense of privacy, license, and intrigue implicit in the epistolary mode’.98 One of the striking features about The Maximus Poems is the foregrounding of the politics of magazine publishing,

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something that is especially visible in the ire that Olson directs towards Vincent Ferrini and his magazine Four Winds. Olson’s early letters to Corman insist on the first 50 pages of the first issue of Origin being given over exclusively to his correspondence with Creeley: 50 pages to be a movement, a composing fr the shifting correspondence of two writers, poems and stories coming up in the progress of that correspondence, the nature of it also representing examination of what key points on the whole front of life & work today that correspondence gets to.99

The terms of Olson’s insistence make clear that he does not envisage his correspondence with Creeley as simply an exchange of ideas between two men, but an ‘examination of [. . . the] key points on the whole front of life & work’. The terms in which Olson frames his conception of Corman’s magazine recalls Pound’s advice to Creeley that a magazine should be ‘a centre around which, “not a box within which/any item”’, in that it insists that a publication should be as open, discursive and deeply involved as personal correspondence.100 The idea that a magazine could function as a centre figures largely in Creeley’s account of editing the Black Mountain Review, a magazine that had in part been borne out of the contacts opened up by Origin. As was the case with the Intelligencer poets in the United Kingdom a decade later, Creeley and the poets associated with Black Mountain felt alienated from the established poetry journals of the day, which were perceived to be so general in character that no active centre of coherence was possible. It was only in isolated magazines such as fragmente that they sensed any ‘possibility of changing the context of writing’.101 The purpose of establishing magazines such as Origin and Black Mountain Review, then, was not simply to provide these poets’ work with a place to exist in print, but to provide an active centre around which a community, ‘absolutely specific to one’s own commitments and possibilities’, could cohere: For me, and the other writers who came to be involved, it was a place defined by our own activity and accomplished together by ourselves – a place wherein we might make evident what we, as writers, had found to be significant, both for ourselves and for that world – no doubt often vague to us indeed – we hoped our writing might enter [. . .] Therefore there had to be both a press and a magazine absolutely specific to one’s own commitments and possibilities. Nothing short of that was good enough.102

These ideas resonated with a number of other important little magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones’s worksheet The

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Floating Bear, allowing them to take shape in new and broader contexts than that immediately available in the Black Mountain Review. The Floating Bear also emphasized the importance of establishing a centre, declaring in an editors’ note: The Floating Bear has never been offered for sale. It has never been available to the so called general reading public (if there is such a thing). The Bear has been, and will be, distributed solely by mailing list, and only to persons the editors feel | | are genuinely interested in modern America writing.103

The Floating Bear’s modus operandi – mimeographed sheets, printed and circulated for free to a private list with high frequency – anticipates aspects of the Intelligencer’s own production, as does its editors’ scepticism about ‘the so called general reading public’. This gesture is not simply an arrogant avant-garde dismissal of bourgeois reading habits, however; rather, the question of what constitutes a reading public is at the core of the Floating Bear’s run. In a letter to di Prima printed in the fifth issue, Jones asks ‘what we think our roles ought to be, &c. Who we think we are. Literally, some continuous appraisal of our selves, society’: But how to get in most constantly . . . and with the most force. As the newsletter she only exist from some point where it is ultimately realized and consistently available . . . for all our thot. How to?? // It struck me also that one specific way into Life, which is what the mimeod sheet was to represent, at least for me. An attempt to get in on the very rhythms of myself . . . &, of course, in whatever blank community we aspire to, as peers (?), or at least contemporaries.104

Jones’s aspirations for Floating Bear reach towards the constitution of his own subjective being – ‘the very rhythms of myself ’ – a being that is deeply enmeshed in ‘whatever blank community we aspire to’. Jones’s phrasing of the ‘blank’ community speaks of the sense of that community not as something already coherent and identifiable, but as something in the process of becoming, whose qualities are defined by that process rather than by any form of ratiocination. The process of this community’s becoming is rooted both in bringing together ‘out-of-the-way work and unpublished poets’ and also ‘speed: getting this new, exciting work into the hands of other writers as quickly as possible’.105 It was this urgency that would define what precisely constituted this ‘blank’ community. Di Prima recalls how, on her last visit to Olson in Gloucester, he talked about how valuable the Bear had been to him in its early years because of the fact that he could get new work out fast. He was very involved in speed, in communication.

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer We got manuscripts from him pretty regularly in the early days of the Bear, and we’d usually get them into the very next issue. That meant that his work, his thoughts, would be in the hands of a few hundred writers within two or three weeks. It was like writing a letter to a bunch of friends.106

Di Prima’s likening of the Floating Bear to ‘writing a letter to a bunch of friends’ takes the form of ideal correspondence that is inherent in, for example, Creeley and Olson’s letters to one another, and extrapolates it from two people into a community: What we did have in common was our consciousness that the techniques of poetry were changing very fast, and our sense of the urgency of getting the technological advances of, say, Olson, into the hands of, say, Creeley, within two weeks, back and forth, because the thing just kept growing at a mad rate out of that.107

‘Polis | is this’:108 the deixis of the final lines of ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]’ can be understood as referring back to its title’s epistolary mode; this resonates with Jones’s ‘blank’ community, whose identity is defined by the frequency of its correspondence and contained within the moment of its communication. The mode of the work’s dissemination, and the vision of community on which such a mode of dissemination is predicated, is a constituent part of that work’s meaning. It is this mode of poetry writing and dissemination that constitutes an active centre, and it was towards its manifestation in North America that young British poets turned at the turn of the 1960s. The contact with these writers and their institutions was direct and deliberate: the fifteenth issue of the Floating Bear contains a request from ‘Prospect, a little mag out of England needs mss. Send them to J. H. Prynne, Prospect, 109 Grantchester Meadows, Cambridge, England’.109 As the editor of Prospect, Prynne went some way to establishing an equivalent exchange in the United Kingdom: he insisted that it was concerned solely with ‘quality’ – in contrast to Outburst, which he described as ‘out to shock’ – and insisted that he did not ‘want to spread it around too easily, but to keep it as an occasion of value’.110 There are clear and distinct continuities between this point and the eventual inception of the Intelligencer: even the terms in which he comes to frame this desire, as a community shaped by personal need, have clear and distinct resonance with the phrasing, nearly 5 years later, of a ‘community of wish’ (‘Moon Poem’, 37) in ‘Moon Poem’ and a ‘community of risk’ in the Intelligencer letter of 27 December 1966.111 There are also discontinuities here between the praxis of the Floating Bear and the Intelligencer: the significance of

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Prynne’s desires to define the community in relation to particular nouns is very different to Jones’s ‘blank community’, and the desire to root the community through this kind of naming has, I will argue in subsequent chapters, significant consequences for the Intelligencer’s run. Need, wish and risk are three key terms in the Intelligencer’s lexicon, an account of which I will give in Chapters 2 and 3; the community of need is also an economic and material entity, which aims to restore the ‘live connection between the sources of genuine work and the means of dissemination’ which had, for Prynne, collapsed in Britain. Indeed, such a community was in part defined by these considerations, since what made it necessary was inextricably bound up with them: it utilized the availability of new reprographic tools, it eschewed conventional manners of dissemination through book shops or subscription lists and it deliberately restricted its audience. As such, there are clear affinities between the form and function of the Intelligencer and Floating Bear and also the Open Space worksheet, which was circulated in the San Francisco area in the early 1960s and aspired to inculcate a specific mode of reading poetry in its audience. Peter Riley’s description of Jack Spicer’s relationship to the Open Space community is instructively analogous to the relationship that the core participants of the Intelligencer believed might have been established through its exchange; Riley writes that Spicer’s vatic conception of the poet’s role was a ‘burden’ that needed to be shared among a commonality – a poetic community which would provide the entire context of the activity both as audience and as participators in its creation. As the poet-self is conceived as a medium through which a totality expresses itself, there is a sense that there needs to be a plurality of poets tapping that total source, a society of poets creating a city-of-poetry which is itself a reflective medium between the actual society of man and its potential (the heavenly city).112

Riley’s description of the modus operandi of Open Space, wherein a ‘poetic community’, figured as a commonality and a plurality, is resolved in a symbiotic relationship with the ‘poet-self ’: the endeavours of the two are, according to this principle, profoundly imbricated. Riley argues that this model of community actively makes possible a poetry which aspires towards the expression of ‘a totality’ – and the kind of research described in the discussion of Riley’s ‘Working Note on British Prehistory’ might be read as an example of ‘a plurality of poets tapping that total source’ – functions as a ‘reflective medium’ of the relationship between ‘the actual society of man and its potential (the heavenly city)’. Certainly, the lexicon of cities is redolent of the Olsonian model of polis, and ‘the heavenly

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city’ fits comfortably within the parameters of an established Intelligencer lexicon. It is perhaps the relationship of the medium of poetry to that of the de facto society and an idealized potential city that is the most fraught complication in this model of poetic community: ‘reflective’ may be understood as something passive, like a mirror reflecting light, or it may be understood as a meditative or cognitive process. But the existence of the possibility of such a city-of-poetry is itself an intervention in those de facto conditions that engages not with particular features of that society, of economic injustice or political violence, for example, but with its total conditions, and on those terms, it holds out the possibility of a total revaluation of those conditions. This possibility is synonymous with the hope that a community might be reconfigured along radically different and, as R. J. Ellis stresses in his account of the period’s little magazines, emphatically noncommercial lines. The free distribution of the Intelligencer is an instance of such a revaluation, as is the example of the gift of James’s first collection mmm . . . ah yes, instigating a mode of exchange that is antithetical to the principles of market capitalism endorsed by Cape and Hutchinson, with their own (in)vested interests in recovering the capital that they have expended on the publishing process; rather, it recalls the conditions of gift exchange in archaic societies described by Marcel Mauss. Mauss describes the function of the gift in these societies as ‘total prestation’, in which gift giving and gift return ‘take place under a voluntary guise [when] they are in essence strictly obligatory’,113 in which the gift exchange is figured neither as the exchange of ‘purely free and gratuitous prestations, nor of purely interested and utilitarian production and exchange; it is a kind of hybrid’.114 In a similar way, although the Intelligencer was circulated for free, there was an editorial expectation on all those involved with its production and distribution that this gratuity should oblige its recipient to respond either with work or critical exchange, so that an exchange might be maintained: this is an exchange of quality, rather than of value, one that expressly ‘fails to conform to the principles of socalled natural economy or utilitarianism’.115 The resurgence of interest in the gift exchange is an instance of what Guy Davenport calls the ‘renaissance of the archaic’ in the twentieth century, which looked back to what it perceived to be the origins of society as a way of correcting the damage of modernity.116 Mauss makes this clear in relation to the gift: The basis of moral action is general; it is common to societies of the highest degree of evolution, to those of the future and to societies of the least advancement. Here we touch the bedrock. We are talking no longer in terms of law. We are talking of men and groups since it is they, society, and their sentiments that are

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in action all the time. [. . .] What we call total prestation [. . .] constitutes the oldest economic system we know. It is the base from which the gift-exchange arose. Now it is precisely this same type towards which we are striving to have our own society – on its own scale – directed.117

The idea of a bedrock is crucial here: it is a term that, as I discuss in my next chapter, had a particular valence in terms of the prosodic conception at work in the Intelligencer, a conception that was rooted in a tradition that reached back through Olson to Pound and Fenellosa, which looked to the substance of ‘the bedrock of metaphor’;118 the gift-exchange model is a similar originary condition for Mauss, one that is recoverable, one that would recalibrate the moral inequity of the ‘natural economy’ and, explicitly, one towards which contemporary society, ‘on its own scale’, should be re-directed. Without the financial demands of conventional publishing, and liberated from the necessary delays that were attendant on such publishing, the Intelligencer could distribute work freely. Shaped by personal needs in the same way that the various correspondences that had been taking place in the years leading up to the Intelligencer’s inception had been, it would be able to retain the particular qualities of those exchanges and extend them into a community of participant-recipients. The importance of the availability of the mimeograph machine at Caius cannot be understated in an account of the Intelligencer. Without it, the frequency with which it could be produced and circulated would have been impossible, since setting type was so time-consuming and those involved in its production were both geographically separate – Crozier and Riley, who typed the Intelligencer onto the stencils at various points in its run, were living variously in London, Hastings and Keele, while Prynne was based in Cambridge – and also doing so voluntarily at the same time as they were working to earn a living. A useful comparison might be made between the relative ease with which the Intelligencer was produced at Caius and Raworth’s and Hall’s setup. The editorial address for Outburst was ‘The Basement Flat, 26 Amherst Road’; Raworth remembers how, when he was producing it, he was ‘working for a manufacturing pharmacist in London, stealing Methedrine, which enabled you to do two pages a night’:119 the Goliard press was run from ‘an old stable in back of Finchley Road. There were cobbles on the floor and the loft was actually still full of shit’.120 In a letter to Olson, Raworth explained: Both Barry (my printer) and I work full time at other jobs, to keep families and so on. So we get to the press on our spare time, which is not a lot (it’s one hour’s journey from where I live, for example) – at most 2 days a week. Our press is

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer small (printing [rota?]) – above 11 × 9″ and it is worked by a trundle. We have to do everything ourselves, including setting the type.121

Although the setting of the stencils for the mimeograph machine was timeconsuming, it amounted to little more than typing, in contrast to the much more physical exertion involved in using a printing press. There was also an institutional difference between Outburst and the Intelligencer, which is neatly summed up by the physical sites of their production: a room in the medieval cloisters of Gonville and Caius on the one hand, and an old stable packed to the rafters with horseshit on the other. The material differences in their production were also institutional: Prynne’s fellowship at Caius gave him and those around him access to facilities that might otherwise have been beyond their reach.122 Even with access to the institutional facilities that a professional affiliation with a university afforded, however, printing remained a precarious business. Crozier was forced to cut some of the content of the first issue of The Wivenhoe Park Review – which preceded the Intelligencer by a couple of months – and have it privately printed after the university printer at Essex refused to print it at the last moment. Crozier makes clear to Olson his frustration with both the printer and Donald Davie, writing: ‘when I took the ms in to press I was told we couldn’t use the Essex facilities. Davie’d been told previously but had omitted to tell us. So I’m gonna get it printed on my own over Christmas in an abbreviated form – cutting out some of the criticism pieces.’123 Publishing in this fashion, at this scale, allowed material risks to be taken that would not have been possible at a larger, more commercial imprint. The proof stage of Olson’s review of the Vinland map for the first issue of The Wivenhoe Park Review is an instance of this: parts of the essay emerged incrementally, with part three arriving scrawled in part on the back of an envelope; Olson’s handwriting was notoriously difficult to read, but the idea of such a publication, shaped by need rather than commercial consideration, allowed for greater patience in working to get this right. It also allowed for idiosyncratic spacing and line-setting to be realized with a degree of care and attention that is afforded by this level of exchange: the typescripts of Prynne’s Intelligencer poems reveal the attention to detail that this much more localized scale of production elicited, with a handwritten margin-note: ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’, insisting, with regard to the beginning of lines 23 and 33, that ‘the “I” should come directly under the b of “but brittle” – i.e. same margin.’124 This attention to detail was a recurrent concern to these poets: Olson had written to Corman ahead of the first issue of Origin decrying the ‘modern monster, varitype’, adding that, in his

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experience, ‘printers never / believe the spaces I leave are / serious. And fuck up any no. of / effects, thereby’,125 and giving precise instructions as to how his lines should be set: (1) the spacing, that, it keep the same proportions I get fr this machine (2) [overhang] it should, any overhung line, be placed at the right margin, the end of the word or phrase coinciding with the end of the line which it is organically part (3) indentations, that is, the other spacing problem, the space I intend fr left to right: this is always being tampered with, by printers – please, here, too, see, that the relative proportions are accomplished, yes?126

Olson was delighted with the final product, describing it as ‘the fullest satisfaction I have ever had from print, lad, the fullest. And I am so damned moved by yr push, pertinence, accuracy, taste, that it is wholly inadequate to say thanks’, adding that the effect of the varitype, which Corman had decided to go with, was ‘actually (i do believe), better (in the sense of the speed of it), is damned wonderful’.127 It was a pattern of behaviour that Raworth experienced in his typesetting of Olson’s West: ‘Olson bombarded us with letters about West: move this here, move that there, do this, do that – until we stopped opening the mail, did the book the way we thought, and on publication received an ecstatic telegram of thanks.’128 For Diane di Prima, these sorts of problems were solved by the format of the Floating Bear’s pages, as you didn’t have to guess where to break the stanza if both you and the poet were using 8 1/2 × 11 paper. Almost everybody writes on typewriters, and I felt that a lot of what they were doing had to do with the shape of their page.129

There were, of course, many other mimeographed magazines that theoretically allowed this kind of attention – Migrant is a prominent example – but the manner of the Intelligencer’s production and dissemination was distinct from these publications too. This was apparent in what McGann would refer to as the worksheet’s ‘bibliographical code’: printed directly on to foolscap paper, its ‘issues’ were bound with a staple at the top left-hand corner; its dimensions (33 cm × 20.3 cm) too were considerably larger than many magazines in this milieu such as the first issue of Outburst (20.5 cm × 12.9 cm), The Resuscitator (21.2 cm × 14.3 cm) and The Wivenhoe Park Review. Although larger page sizes generally confer an additional authority to the words printed on them – the difference between folio and quarto publications is a case in point, as perhaps is the oversized edition of the Ferry Press edition of Brass (1971) – this is not the

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case with the Intelligencer, where the size of its pages, combined with the quality of its paper, typography and the fact that it is stapled, rather than bound, connotes its provisionality rather than its permanence. Its effect is, Peter Middleton writes, one of ‘unprinted informality’ that suggests ‘improvised production driven by an urgent desire to communicate with the readership quickly’ and affords it ‘an affinity with both classroom materials and political tracts’: Such facture conveys the tacit message that this is work the publishers regard as significant enough to volunteer their time and money for: poetry outside the marketplace.130

Although there were obvious continuities between the Intelligencer worksheet and the little magazines of the period that were contemporary to it in terms of the writers it published and the work it valued – and, more broadly, with the history of the modernist little magazine in its repeated insistence on (and contentious formulation of) an ‘intelligent’ readership – its disavowal of any sense of a public audience in favour of a local micro-community of readers and producers distinguishes the Intelligencer as a publication from the high modernist little magazines. If a certain ‘bibliographical aura’ had attached itself 40 years before the Intelligencer to T. S. Eliot’s Criterion by virtue of that magazine’s initial print run of ‘only 600 copies’, a scale that ‘marked the “implied audience” as fit but few: an elite of writers, critics and patrons of the arts’, an alternative aura attached itself to the Intelligencer.131 The prestige attached to Eliot’s magazine is much more in line with the form of cultural capital discussed earlier: the magazine was in part funded by Lady Rothermere and had access to (and designs upon) a public that was beyond the Intelligencer’s remit as a worksheet. This desire is manifest in features of its ‘magisterial’ physical production: [Its] beige octavo cover was dignified and sober: the title was printed in expensive red vertical type with the table of contents in black type. Unlike, say, The London Mercury, there were no advertisements: a conscious declaration of the quarterly’s high-minded principles.132

The communication of a magazine’s principles can also work through its typography, shaping its readers’ responses by means of what G. Thomas Tanselle has called ‘typographical associationism’.133 Such associations can also act as focal points around which a group or movement can cohere: Tanselle refers to Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST as an example, arguing that that publication’s use of design and typesetting ‘to symbolize rebellion from the status quo’ was both a conscious, deliberate aesthetic choice, at the same time as it carried

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within it ‘certain alterations of detail [which] may be unconscious’ on the part of the designer, alterations that work on ‘the unconscious of their readers an association between form and ideas and in the process to solidify the identity of the movement’.134 With relation to the Intelligencer, the fact that its work is presented typewritten, rather than typeset, places it within an associational field of private correspondence, as well as political tracts and educational tools, forging an identity that is both personal and public. This effect is crucial to the calibration of its sense of public, or rather, as Middleton assiduously puts it, its readership – the relative intimacy of its typesetting, alongside the fact that it was written, read, produced by and circulated among a group of associates – works counter to a prevailing, commercial sense of a public. Even by the ‘generally intimate’ standards that characterize the relationship between writers and readers in the post-war British little magazine scene, the cultural formation that took shape around the Intelligencer’s production – as writers and readers as well as producers – is unusually concentrated.135 The manner of its distribution – by post – is an instance of this: it served to reinforce the personal frequency of its message, since it was neither something that was picked up in a shop, nor even something that was sent away for or subscribed to. It was something that was received, for free; the envelope in which it arrived named its recipient, a naming that was reinforced by the list of recipients that was printed at the end of some issues. I will explore the critical importance of naming in the next chapter, but this preoccupation is manifest again at a textual level in the Intelligencer, which explicitly names its community. These lists often included the recipients’ addresses, further emphasizing the intimacy of the exchange, consolidating the sense of a cultural formation that was predicated on a personal involvement and also opening up the possibility of further exchange between its readers that would not necessarily take place in the Intelligencer’s pages. The absence of an explicit editorial line – compare the understated ‘for the island and its language, to circulate as quickly as needs be’ at the end of the first issue with the manifestoes of earlier modernist magazines like BLAST or transition – and, in the earliest issues, the guise of editorial anonymity, also contrasts with the strong and clearly visible editorial presences that shaped earlier magazines, like Eliot at Criterion or Cyril Connolly at Horizon. Nonetheless, it is to BLAST that Prynne explicitly turns at a critical juncture in the Intelligencer’s run, writing that it is ‘as if, for example, Wyndham Lewis had never written a line, as if BLAST now has to be done all over again’.136 Yet the comparative lack of explicit editorializing in the Intelligencer and – especially in contrast to the extraordinary confidence of BLAST ’s typesetting – the apparent provisionality

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of its production do not imply a lack of editorial conviction. Rather, these features are just as programmatic as those in BLAST, seeking to establish an exchange in which experimental forms could be circulated, quickly and for free, among a community of reader–writers who could be trusted to recognize the risks inherent in such writing. The history of the Intelligencer would be shaped by the accommodation of this aspiration, of its contest, its fulfilment and its disappointment. For many of its contributors, the Intelligencer failed to fulfil these ambitions, although Neil Pattison has suggested that, far from being a failure, the project ‘defined and achieved its purpose in self-sabotage’.137 This book argues that the Intelligencer’s purpose shifts through its run, a shift that is directed by the nature of the exchange in its pages and also by external factors, that sees the originary impulse of the Intelligencer redirected, away from the mythic coherence of ‘the island and its language’ at the outset towards the ‘antagonized’ relations that Pattison identifies. The Intelligencer’s failure to realize its ambitions is ultimately generative, in the way described by Pattison; but this generation is a consequence of that failure, and so it is important to recognize the failure as such. This failure is a necessary and unavoidable part of any such undertaking, as Prynne seems implicitly to acknowledge in his conviction that BLAST needed ‘to be done all over again’. This is the paradox of late modernism as it became manifest in Anglo-American poetry of the 1950s and 1960s: its examples were drawn from a previous generation of modernist experiment, but those examples themselves failed in the sense that, as Prynne acknowledges, ‘[i]t’s as if, for example, Wyndham Lewis had never written a line [. . .] That’s of course why Tarr has been allowed to go out of print’.138 The desire to revitalize poetry that is manifest in the Intelligencer and its context is predicated on the recognition of the value of modernism, and the desire to renew it. Such a desire itself implicitly recognizes the limits of modernism – if its pre-war iteration had not become exhausted, then there would have been no need to renew it. This renewal required things to be done differently, to identify why the prevailing literary culture had reached such an impasse that it seemed in some instances that modernism had almost never existed, and to mount a new challenge to that culture that was continuous with modernism’s challenge even as it differentiated itself from it.

2

‘An essential structural unity’: Modernist Ideals and The English Intelligencer

This chapter focuses on the conception of poetry being worked through at the moment of the Intelligencer’s inception. It aims to describe a particular model of late modernist poetry, in line with Anthony Mellors’s definition of that term which describes an obscurantist tradition traceable from Pound through Olson to Prynne, wherein the textual difficulties of these poets’ work are underwritten by a mythic consciousness which ‘always remains as the horizon of meaning, the point at which historical facts should cohere’, and thereby provide a counterpoint to ‘the decline of an organic, whole, concrete, centred, religious mode of being into the fragmented, alienated, abstract, and mechanised culture of modernity’.1 In addition to the epistemological and institutional framework that Mellors sets out, I will argue that there is a specific late modern prosody that can be traced through the work of Pound, Olson and Prynne; in subsequent chapters, I will explore the ways in which this prosody becomes increasingly imperilled as the terms of those epistemological and institutional frameworks on which it is predicated are altered by the nature of the exchange in the Intelligencer.

The roots of natural language At its outset, the Intelligencer sought to reinvigorate a particular prosodic model that reached back to the first generation of modernists, in particular, a tradition that was catalysed by Ezra Pound’s edition of Ernest Fenellosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. If the Intelligencer was to some extent born out of the transatlantic contact outlined in the previous chapter,

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it is instructive to note that Fenellosa’s essay is discussed by J. H. Prynne in the second letter that he wrote to Olson, where he writes: I am struck with the need to readjust parts of THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER, as a chapbook, towards some sense of the hinges in European language or its northern groupings considered in general.2

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry had some local currency in Cambridge in the years leading up to the inception of Olson and Prynne’s correspondence. In Articulate Energy, Donald Davie had emphasized its importance, describing it as ‘perhaps the only English document of our time fit to rank with Sidney’s Apologie, and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley’s Defence, the great poetic manifestoes of the past’.3 It is possible to trace his enthusiasm for that text directly to at least one of the Intelligencer᾽s progenitors: J. H. Prynne, who – together with R. F. Langley, a recipient of the Intelligencer at Prynne’s insistence – had been supervised by Davie as an undergraduate in the late 1950s.4 Prynne’s desire to ‘readjust’ the focus of Fenellosa’s book speaks of his active, questioning engagement with that work so that it could be worked with as something more than received dogma, as he made clear to Olson in his criticism of Davie’s failure, to contest Fenellosa’s curious notions about the successive patterns of Chinese thought. One has little right to an opinion, of course, but I’d chance it and say that within that continent the process is more of an implied contrast between substantives (possibly reaching as far as gerunds – named happenings) than a primary directional thrust necessitating a nominal source & termination. Thus Confucius was for cheng ming, the ‘rectification of names’ – names, one notes, not verbs or happenings.5

Pound’s translation of The Analects offers a twin gloss on cheng ming, as ‘settle the names (determine a precise terminology)’.6 The importance of cheng ming is not just linguistic: the failure to settle names in this way, to bring them into their ‘true focus’, makes the social sphere suffer: [R]ites and music do not flourish, punishments will be misapplied, not make bullseye, and the people won’t know how to move hand or foot (what to lay hand on, or stand on).7

The link between words and social order is made explicit in Pound’s version of Confucius, insisting that ‘the proper man’s words must cohere to things, correspond to them (exactly) and no more fuss about it.’8 The link between the

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‘true focus’ on names and social order is embedded in the aspirations that shape the inception of the Intelligencer too; Prynne’s recalibration of the Fenellosa thesis so that it insists on gerunds rather than nouns per se makes clear that these ideas are not received as dogma but as vital and contested forces that have an active relevance to the creation of new work. As such, the attention to this aspect of Poundian modernism is far removed from the neat teleologies of those who would seek to position modernism as historically defunct and ‘ready for asset-stripping’ by the 1960s.9 Fenellosa’s work had been decisive in Olson’s development as a poet too: he described it as ‘the damned best piece on language since when’, insisting that any consideration of language should ‘start with Fenellosa’.10 The sense of a tradition beginning with Fenellosa that also includes Pound and Olson is compounded by Davie’s reaction to his first reading of Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’: Projective Verse is wonderful!! My notes on it take the form of copying the bulk of it out longhand, as I’ve not done with any comparable document since I first read Fenellosa.11

But the terms in which Prynne discusses this tradition are not those of a manifesto to be adhered to; rather, Prynne writes of the need to recalibrate it, specifically, to reorient its focus towards ‘European language’. In part, this is an extension of, rather than a departure from, the basic tenets of Fenellosa’s essay, although the emphasis that Prynne puts on it here is emphatically within the bounds of one interpretive tradition of Fenellosa’s essay.12 In this tradition, within which Olson is a significant shaping force, The Chinese Written Character is valued for its insistence that ‘the great number of [Chinese] ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action’.13 Fenellosa’s claim that these ideograms are ‘shorthand pictures of actions or processes’, and his concomitant insistence on the kinetics and immediacy of the verbal unit, led him to articulate a theory of language founded on ‘the transferences of force from agent to object [. . .] a reproduction of [which] in the imagination requires the same temporal order’.14 This order is two-fold, entailing both the immediacy of speech and the distance of etymologies. For Fenellosa, ‘the whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrate of metaphor’: Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct actions. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself. Relations are more real and more important than the things which

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer they relate. The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half-curbing the out-pressing vitalities, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than an analogy, it is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not been full of homologies, sympathies and identities, thought would have been starved and language chained to the obvious. There would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen. Not more than a few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we can fairly well identify in primitive Sanskrit. They are, almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the intricate maze of nature’s suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor in quasigeological strata [. . .] The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.15

The reification of metaphor is the bedrock of Fenellosa’s theory of poetic language – of any language – which seeks to expunge abstraction and ‘arbitrary subjective processes’ from its working; the process of metaphor also shifts the focus from discrete objects to the dynamic ‘relations’ that determine their standing to one another. The ‘identity of structure’ that this model of language posits is that which Anthony Mellors identifies in his account of late modernist uses of obscurity, wherein a mythic horizon is bound to the local difficulty of the text, promising to resolve it; Fenellosa’s description of the accretion of metaphor as ‘quasi-geological’ takes on a specific valence in the cartographical and geological material that formed a crucial part of the Intelligencer’s exchange. His own repeated geological metaphor speaks of truth – which is synonymous with the active processes of the world – as something which is vital but embedded: the work of the poet is to recover or uncover that truth ‘along the lines of resistance’ back to the world, which is its source. In ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, Prynne suggests that resistance itself may provide ‘an alternative criterion of intelligibility’:16 ‘the exertions of mind and body that we make to become aware of the external world, through the facts of experienced resistance’, he writes, ‘may be seen as the way in which we constitute the world’.17 The lines of resistance Fenellosa identifies in his essay are thus not difficulties to be overcome in the quest for knowledge of the world, but the condition of that knowledge in and of itself, a ‘given’ condition of that world that manifests itself ‘only in the context of process’;18 difficulty itself is, in the terms of Prynne’s thesis, the ‘subjective counterpart to resistance’, that is, the experience we have when we encounter

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the given resistance of the world.19 Thus, it becomes possible to identify the lines of etymological resistance that define language change with the resistances that constitute our experience of the world, and of the world itself, its ‘rivers [. . . and] nations’. The imbrication of process and resistance leads Prynne to comment in his letter to Olson on ‘the very complete wrong-headedness of the thing [which] has precipitated some confusion (i.e. the pictographic thesis)’, and particularly ‘that dolt E.P. [Ezra Pound] whose ignorance was unsurpassed’ in the matter of Chinese syntax. The Fenellosa–Pound thesis catalysed his own thinking, which culminated in his insistence that the root image now seems to me the gerund, since all nouns imply their own continuity which is what makes them blessed. The entire ambiguity of history is within that: the gerundial scope, the named happening.20

It is perhaps not so much a mimetic theory of language as one that insists that, in their most fundamental relation to one another, language and the world are synonymous. This is recoverable through attention to the origin of language; this is, in part, the true significance of Fenellosa’s model of poetic language for Olson, in that it afforded him a model that could be directly applied to ‘all IndoEuropean language (ours)’, since it all appeared ‘to stem from the very same ground on which the original agglutinative language was invented, Sumeria’.21 Its ultimate value, Olson wrote, was to reassert [the] resistant primes in our speech, [and] to put us back to the origins of their force not as history but as living oral law to be discovered in speech as directly as it is in our mouths.22

Again, the terms of this argument iterate resistance as a condition of the origins of language’s force, a force that is discovered ‘directly’ in the speech in our mouths. Olson’s appropriation of Fenellosa’s geological metaphor reiterates that sense of the embeddedness of language, both as occlusion – we can no longer recover ‘the origins of [. . . words’] force’ without committing to an ongoing project of intellectual and poetic endeavour, pushing back along the lines of resistance – and presence, since it is on metaphor that all language is predicated, and in the process of resistance that this presence becomes manifest. The function of origins – whether they are linguistic or social – is as a point of instigation; as we get further from these origins, our sense of the force that inheres in them is weakened. To return to them is not an abstract metaphysical speculation or nostalgic attempt to recover some prehistoric vantage: we can discover it in our speech, ‘directly as it is in our mouths’.

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Poetic utterance is embedded at the most local level in the condition of ‘speech as directly as it is in our mouths’. This is manifest in the local instance of speech as the vocalization of breath to which Olson refers in ‘Projective Verse’: The line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending where its breathing shall come to, termination.23

Breath is a process; it is both the origin of the poetic line and the decisive factor in the determination of both its duration and its metric, so that a poem might be understood to be ‘ordered not so much in time (Poe’s Poetic Principle) or by time (metric, measure) as of a characteristic of time which is most profound’.24 Breath’s dual function in Olson’s conception of the poetic line – as both point of inception and termination – is bound up with the idea that the line is ‘of time’; that is, time is its constituent, which makes it possible for this poetry to assimilate prehistoric vantage with the contemporary. For Olson, this conception of the poem’s temporality is of paramount importance to the fashioning of a poem’s prosody, because, as he argues in ‘Against Wisdom as Such’: Rhythm is time (not measure, as the pedants of Alexandria made it). The root is ‘rhein’: to flow. And mastering the flow of the solid, time, we invoke others. Because we take time and heat it, make it serve our selves, our form. Which any human being craves to do to impress himself upon it.25

Breath is the basis of the poem’s rhythm and the source of the ‘flow’ of a poem. It is emphatically not equivalent to spontaneous or ephemeral utterance, since the force of this ‘speech-rhythm’ is engendered by the traction that a non-literate, non-commercial and non-historical constant daily experience of tracking any word, practically, one finds oneself using, back along its line of force to Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and out to Sanskrit, or now, if someone wld do it, some ‘dictionary’ of roots which wld include Hittite at least.26

Olson’s ‘line of force’ – echoing Fenellosa’s ‘lines of resistance’ – reiterates the vitality of this kind of etymological ‘tracking’: far from understanding dictionaries as an Enlightenment attempt to fix and classify meaning – ‘logography’, as he puts it elsewhere – Olson argues that they can allow us access to the ‘non-literate, non-commercial and non-historical’ substrate on which ‘agglutinative’ language

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is predicated. The significance of this theory of language is that it posits the existence of a mythically coherent language, one from which it is possible to read the kind of falling away that Olson, after Fenellosa, articulates. There is even a natural rhythm in the process of language change, which makes it possible to work in a coherent fashion back against the process of that change, since it is inherently orderly and derived from a coherent origin. That coherence is given by those resistant primes of speech, through an imaginative interaction with which we are able, Prynne writes in ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, to give substance to what is needed but not simply wanted, to offer both the difficulty of contrivance and also a profound assurance that this difficulty corresponds to genuine resistance in the larger context of the outside world. It is the imagination’s peculiar function to admit, draw sustenance from, and celebrate the ontological priority of this outside world, by creating entities which subsequently become a part of the world, an addition to it.27

The ‘profound assurance’ that such intellection affords is the condition that makes possible a recovery of quality in the world, and the possibility of creating imaginative worlds that at once ‘admit, draw sustenance from, and celebrate the ontological priority’ of such a world, and are themselves a substantial addition to it. Prynne’s first letter to Olson directly references such a possibility, when he writes that ‘you talked about tracking words along their lines of force, back to their roots’, which was ‘an aspect of the whole speech complex which I had hoped to see more in action in the big Grove Press anthology’.28 He goes on to suggest that the dictionary of roots that Olson describes has in fact already been written: Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, which Prynne describes as ‘sit[ting] on my shelf like a bomb, ready to explode at a touch with the most intricately powerful forces caged up inside, a storehouse of vectors’.29 The metaphor of the ‘storehouse of vectors’ once again reiterates the significance of energy and direction in these discussions of the possibilities of poetic language. Before this storehouse can be accessed, however, Prynne describes the need to identify ‘the sources of this force’: [H]ow is access to them won out of the ambient silences which surround the man on the brink of speech? From the things themselves has been the answer, and in the final reckoning must always be. Things are nouns, and particular substantives of this word order are store-houses of potential energy, hoard up the world’s available motions. But there are other energies: the compelling human necessities, the exhaling of breath, the sugar which feeds the muscles

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer of the diaphragm and lung. It seems probable that this source was channelled into speech simultaneously with, if not before, the substantive pictogram or the (derived) lexicograph.30

Prynne’s answer to his own question is to insist on the quiddity of the world and of speech, reiterating the storehouse metaphor; but this is not a quiddity of fixed, distinct objects, but rather things whose thing-ness is determined by a dynamic relation to one another that is set in motion again in language through word order. But there are also other energies that determine utterance: the ‘compelling human necessities’, exhalation of breath and ‘the sugar which feeds the muscles of the diaphragm and lung’. These energies condition language at its inception, both as it is written and as it is spoken; ‘[t]o sing’, writes Prynne, ‘is to modulate and make audible, the breathing, declare the body’s functioning, its various rhythms, like shouting or the groan of agony’.31 In Prynne’s account, poetic song is the articulation of the body’s rhythms, which are various but emanate from a coherent source. The rhythm of a line of poetry, then, is an entirely natural rhythm, one derived from the world that simultaneously takes its place in the order of the world’s rhythm: its ‘movement founds the origin and the origin impels the movement: equal and opposite reaction perhaps’.32 Prynne’s letter closes in emphatically Fenellosan terms, arguing that ‘[a]ccess to the fundament is earned by the mind’s geologers, the passions which will forge out availably valid starting points and lend them to those few others prepared to profit’: Writers have always done this, and poets have always gone deeper and more tenaciously than any into those soundless risks. [. . .] What is finally earned is place – the object – the first noun with its own weight.33

By channelling the lines of force that – according to the terms of the model of poetic language developed by Fenellosa, Olson and Prynne – inhere in all language, a language of emplacement might become possible. It is important that this condition is earned, since it is the profit of labour: specifically, a noncommercial form of labour that takes the form of ‘forg[ing] out availably valid starting points’ through ‘soundless risks’. Such risks can only be taken on the condition of trust, a trust here that seems to be predicated on a coherent, mythic fundament on which language – and, as Olson argues in his account of Sumer, community – is predicated.34 Such an enterprise predicated on risk also requires trust if it is to succeed – especially so, it seems, if those risks are ‘soundless’. The repeated metaphor of geological layering seems in part to be borne from a desire

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to establish something solid on which this trust might be securely established, a desire that, if realized, might afford access to the pressure of solid bedrock and a fixed and personal quadrant [that] lies below and behind and at the root of every outward gesture: to comprehend HERE without shouting about it is to sing over the farthest horizon.35

Prynne’s sense of the ‘solid bedrock’ that lies ‘at the root of every outward gesture’ which will allow us ‘to comprehend HERE’ is brought into still sharper focus by his reading of Olson’s Mayan Letters. Obtained ‘after much searching, from a bookshop in Spain’, Prynne writes to Olson that the major push is clear, and the great resonance of it not to be missed. That [the Mayan glyphs] should be (almost) all on stone or clay, and not on birch-bark or untreated animal skin, and thus set down as a link into a geographic field.36

The ‘gerundial scope’ of this field is paced out in ‘the rhythms of thought [that] are bound by the steady recurrence of passage as the prime idiom’; and it is this movement, or ‘recurrence of passage’, that establishes ‘the contour of a land economy [as it] mimes out the earlier voyages to the fishing-grounds or the more hopeful shores beyond’.37 The recovery of this ‘prime idiom’ is what Prynne asserts to be the ‘whole fact’ of Olson’s Maximus, a poem that asks how we might ‘“come in quite fresh from the other end” (p. 59), to the choking beauty of inaccessibly remote nouns (that they are so, and survive)?’38 This was in contrast to Pound’s Cantos, Prynne writes, wherein ‘the whole manner of thought operates against the sequential contour of the sentence & its origin in natural processes and human life’, so that the idiom of that poem was not that of the ‘prime idiom [. . .] of passage or transit’ but instead that of a ‘construct or diagram’ – that is, an abstraction from the primary energy that, whether framed as ‘amor or lux’, set ‘the universe in an order of luminous tendential movement’:39 I suspect that we may not even have lost this, having simply rendered it into an abstraction; what, after all, lies just further than the enclosed notes snatched out of the unknown? Vector as gerund, perhaps, and the universal field an interplay of intentions with the placement of proper nouns.40

The ‘placement of proper nouns’ is critical to an understanding of the prosodic work of the early Intelligencer poems, work that is inextricably bound up with the epistemological and institutional codes that Mellors identifies as late modernist. The Intelligencer itself – with its titular insistence on its Englishness – names its place, a place that is, tacitly, understood not as a self-sufficient juridical entity,

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but in terms of its geology, the (pre-)history of its communities, as well as its language, a language that is shared with the American poets whose work and influence are visible throughout. The Intelligencer also names its community in the list of its recipients. It is an active naming, rather than a taxonomy, and is consistent with the rhythmic insistence of its poetry. This chapter focuses on the earliest manifestations of this prosody: the next chapter will consider community. The shift that I indicated at the start of this chapter, which I described in terms of a shift in emphasis from rhythmic utterance to rhyme, will begin to become apparent at the end of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will chart this shift more clearly, before the final chapter considers the ways in which the Intelligencer project inflected the poetry written by its core participants in the aftermath of its dissolution.

The new topography The context of the Intelligencer’s inception was decisively shaped by a literal and metaphorical transatlantic correspondence. The literalness of this correspondence went beyond the letters exchanged between poets on both sides of the Atlantic and the visits such as Crozier, Prynne and Temple’s to the United States and Dorn’s relocation to Colchester in 1965: the Royal Society’s Symposium on Continental Drift, which took place in October 1965, suggested another far more ancient correspondence that was inherent in the ocean floor. The significance of mapping this physical and spiritual terrain is manifest in the prominence of cartography in the work of these poets: maps appeared on the covers of collections, magazines and as the ostensible subject of individual works. The individual volumes of the Maximus poems all had maps on their covers. The movement from the locale of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Alfred Wegener’s projection of Gondwana on Maximus IV, V, VI occurred on the covers of the first two volumes; a map also appeared on the front cover of Dorn’s The North Atlantic Turbine, written during his time at Essex, which represented the North Atlantic as not so much a set of established spatial relations as a space defined by the passage of time, money, exploration, history and myth, among other things. The map is not merely ‘a construct or diagram’, as Prynne had described the Cantos, but a fundamental articulation of place as it was understood by these poets. Dorn wrote to Olson on seeing the proofs for Maximus IV, V, VI to tell him that ‘it is so incredibly beautiful I’m humble almost speechless – I mean the thing gets to be a map! in such a cartographic way’.41 The prestige that attached

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itself to cartography in this work was a consequence of the desire to recover an earlier, mythic understanding of humanity’s relationship with the world around it, a desire that sought to undo ‘the disenchantment of the world’.42 The work undertaken in and around the Intelligencer sought deliberately to revoke the terms of this disenchantment, and reinstate ‘the question of origins’ as one of the utmost urgency. There are clear affinities here between the question of the origins of place and the origins of language; in his ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’, Prynne goes so far as to suggest that the two are nearly synonymous with one another. The essay reads in some ways as the realization of the desire he expressed in the early letters to Olson for Fenellosa’s method to be applied to Northern European languages. Its layout as it finally appears in the Intelligencer juxtaposes handwritten attributions and commentary with Xeroxed excerpts from source material, operating as a typographic open field. The Fales Intelligencer Archive holds an earlier setting of part one of the essay that has been typeset by Peter Riley and includes none of Prynne’s handwritten asides. Prynne wrote to Riley to inform him that, despite the latter’s confusion of the runic wynn for thorn, it was ‘quite successful’.43 The essay works with the Anglo-Saxon rune ‘wynn’ in a similar way to Chinese ideograms for Pound and Mayan hieroglyphs for Olson, opening with a consideration of The Oxford Etymological Dictionary’s gloss of ‘wynn’, which describes its function as ‘a specialised meaning’ operating within the semantic field of ‘literary language’, akin to ‘winsome’; Prynne derides this definition as a symptom of ‘our modern permafrost, of the spirit’.44 Rather, he argues, wynn constitutes ‘the name for “bliss”; it was a proper name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples’: it is also, he notes, the common root of the latinate ‘Venus’.45 It also has geographic connotations, as is reflected in the fact that it plays a component part of many English place names. Subsequent etymologies have thrown up an apparent semantic bifurcation in this respect, so that alternative definitions allow wynn to signify both a meadow (a place of repose) and a battlefield (a site of accomplishment). Prynne’s insistence on ‘the concentration of sense achieved by the runic sign’ bypasses this contradiction, since it allows the connection between language and landscape ‘to be completely direct, by displacement into the specific locus of longing and the power of love fulfilled by the attainment of happiness’.46 This specific locus is, Prynne concludes, ‘paradise’, which is a word and a world.47 As such, Prynne establishes a compositional field in which the fixed vantage point on which literary representations of landscape are predicated is radically destabilized. He goes on to add a subsequent caveat that the runic wynn signifies

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‘paradise’ not, as the Persian provenance of that word insists, as a walled garden, but instead as ‘open meadows or pasture-land, as the land of the blessed’.48 Since ‘the field is more extended than the garden’, Prynne argues, ‘it includes the whole range of love, desire, the pursuit of happiness; it is the nomadic or excursive condition of longing fulfilled and completed’.49 This inclusion is rooted in the runic sign, which accommodates both ‘the spatial & historic metaphor, in “desire” separated by exile from “fulfilment”, a literal component of the land; the ground of being and the dimension of spiritual travel’.50 It also denotes the true range of field: as open space, as site of labour and as place of repose. He concludes: The runic concentration is in each case the power of longing to include its desired end, to traverse the field without moral debate or transcendent abstraction; joy as the complete ground gathered under foot.51

The focus on origins in this work is founded not on hopeless nostalgia but on awareness of the most contemporary cartographic debates and refuses the neat taxonomy of ‘myths, maps and models’ as distinct ‘modes of discourse, that is, of thinking and communicating, which are, respectively, mainly narrative, descriptive or explanatory’.52 The use of maps on the covers of these books was imbued with great significance: Olson asked Prynne to secure Sir Edward Bullard’s permission to use ‘the lower of the two maps on p. 97 of Tuzo Wilson’s article Continental Drift (Scientific American, April 1963)’ as a cover for the second Maximus volume.53 The coherence that maps like Wegener’s posit – and, as I will discuss later, the emerging scientific consensus on continental drift – was deeply significant to Olson’s poetry, acting as a direct corollary to the kind of geological metaphors that his poetry and his conception of poetry was predicated upon. Where the use of Wegener’s map on the cover of Maximus posits a unified earth, the map of North Sea oilfields on the cover of Prynne’s Kitchen Poems – which Prynne refers to in the Vancouver reading of 30 July 1971 as ‘an horrific vision [. . .] in which England appears as a blank, white space and the sea is portioned off into tiny little packets over which about 300,000 lawyers were litigating furiously’ – illustrates instead how far we have come from that mythic whole.54 This map represents a landscape that is defined by a grid of commercial interests and industrial exploitation, constructed around a subject, oil production, that literally abstracts value from the landscape, rather than situating it immanently within it; the work that exists between its covers offers a direct commentary on this abstraction, arguing that the ‘standard’ is ‘a fear index, a measure of what (for

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ex- | ample) “natural gas” will do to a pre- | carious economy’ (‘Numbers in a Time of Trouble’, 60–3).55 The map on the cover is a symptom of the ‘perversions’ that ‘feed into the | same vicious grid of expanding prospects’ that are let through by ‘the weakness, now, | of names’ (‘Die a Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, 148–52).56 The counter-thrust to the forward march of profit is to recover the power of ‘names’, a power that is recoverable by moving back against these lines of advance, back to the Fenellosan bedrock of metaphor, at which point language and the world exist in a mythic coherence, in stark contrast to the ‘vicious grid’. The use of this map as a cover also means that it functions as a primary layer of text through which readers pass as they move on to the subtended meaning of the texts sedimented beneath it; the vertical movement of the oil drills in the North Sea is counterpointed by the lateral movement of the reader’s eye across the strata of the poetic texts, a movement that, unlike the oil drills, is towards a complex, generative encounter with the resistance of the work itself. The cover of the first issue of The Wivenhoe Park Review, which was published in late 1965, reiterates the importance of cartography and these poets’ reimagining of the nature of Anglo American poetics. The magazine, jointly edited by Andrew Crozier and the American Tom Clark, was bound in a reproduction of the Vinland map. The map had been unveiled to the world in 1965 by Yale University and the British Library – another instance of Anglo-American cooperation – as supposedly the oldest representation of the New World in existence, predating Columbus’s expedition by some five centuries. The map was thus older than anything else of its like then known and also extremely contemporary; this dual temporality was of particular interest to the poets working in the Black Mountain milieu. Crozier wrote to Olson, informing him of his intention to begin the magazine and offering him ‘a regular space, of no particular limitation, if you’d like to avail yourself of it’, with a specific enquiry as to whether he would be interested in doing for the first issue ‘The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (Marston, Skelton & Painter, Yale U.P.) perhaps compiling it with Turville Petre’s book’.57 Olson obliged with an extended response that Crozier included in the first issue, arguing that these new ‘discoveries’ emphasizing Norse occupation of Newfoundland, at the end of the 10th century, have the advantage of adding ‘Zone’ firmness to ‘Strata’, in what shall continue, increasingly, to be an interest, in both England and the United States, in basal matter of both nations as of the language called ‘English’ – and the condition or attention of poets of these two people on either side of the Atlantic.58

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Olson’s insertion of scare quotes around the word ‘English’ in this passage resonates with Raworth’s ambivalence about ‘Englishness’ in his letter to Dorn. We can infer from Olson that language exists prior to its categorization as ‘English’ or ‘American-English’ or any similar variant, and that any such categorization is in any case inadequate to that language shared by ‘these two people on either side of the Atlantic’. The geological matter of Olson’s contention in this passage is characteristically expansive as it ranges across a number of complexly inter-related points in the space of one sentence: ‘Zone’ and ‘Strata’; the ‘basal matter’ of nationality and language; and the ‘condition or attention’ of poets on either side of the Atlantic. Olson relates ‘Zone’ to ‘Strata’ through an insistence on the structural unity of the North Atlantic discussed later; the Vinland map insists that this unity is embedded not simply in the vertical strata of rock beneath the ocean, but also in horizontal zones of movement and habitation on the earth’s surface. This adds the critical vector of movement across to the excavatory movement through the rocks, reiterating the priority of active readerly engagement. The world is as such measured by both depth and extension, terms that are, Olson writes, essential components in the present critical change of affective feeling towards History altogether, and writing already, by young English and somewhat older American poets is ‘stealing’ from and up to materials (and feelings) which portend developments probably only equalled, in re-fixing and extending experience, by the ‘Teutonic Migration’.59

This re-fixing and extension of experience, which Olson frames again in terms of a migration, is carried through in the ‘basal matter’ of nation and language. ‘Basal’ functions here primarily as an adjective, relating to the ‘forming or belonging to a bottom layer or base’:60 the construction and interrogation of national identity and national languages and the relationship between the two is the primary concern of poets, Olson argues. There is additionally in ‘basal’ an auxiliary valence that arises from its phonic and typographical proximity to ‘basalt’, the rock that is the primary geological constituent of the Atlantic Ocean floor and, as such, links North America to Europe. ‘Basal concerns’ allow the concept of nationality and language to be figured not simply in terms of legal definitions of statehood and taxonomic definitions of ‘English’ and ‘AmericanEnglish’; instead, it returns us to an older and broader method of understanding how these things might be made and understood. It is also worth noting that the etymology of ‘basalt’ is derived from the Greek basanos, or touchstone, that is,

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the ultimate arbiter of quality. Consideration of ‘basal matters’, then, returns us to ‘the condition or attention of poets of these two people on either side of the Atlantic’. Olson concludes: The care anyway, in any of this, is to improve, or re-gain an attention, which offhand would seem to have been lost, for Europe and, subsequently, for the West sometime around 1225 ad, and certainly decisively by 1250. And thereafter. Of which our events, dreadfully, are still a part. No wonder poets care for finding out a better sort somewhere lower, deeper, and in more careful Zones and Strata than their quite recent counterparts.61

The currency of these concerns reached beyond the poets in question. During the month it took Olson to compose this note – its first section is dated 18 October 1965 and the last 17 November – the Royal Society convened a Symposium in London on the subject of continental drift. The discussions that took place there, which were subsequently reprinted in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, resonated with and augmented the terms of Olson’s insistence on ‘lower, deeper, and [. . .] more careful’ forms of poetic attention; they also had a profound effect on the sense of the possibilities of Anglo-American poetics at that time. Cartography lay at the heart of the work done by the Symposium. Taking it as read that the debate about continental drift was shifting from the quantitative to the qualitative, P. M. S. Blackett writes in his introduction: [T]o construct maps of the world at different geological ages, the evidence from geographical shape, geological resemblances and differences, the directions of ancient winds, etc., must all be combined together with quantitative results of rock magnetic measurements.62

As is the case with the covers discussed earlier, Blackett insists on an understanding of space as a palimpsest that is overwritten by forces; some are easily traceable – ‘rock magnetic measurements’, for example – and some – ‘the directions of ancient winds’, for instance – are not. Once the argument has moved on from a quantitative substantiation of drift to a qualitative investigation of its history, it becomes necessary ‘to determine the pattern of drift over the ages’.63 J. A. Miller’s paper, ‘Geochronology and Continental Drift – The North Atlantic’, and its appendix, F. J. Fitch’s ‘The Structural Unity of the Reconstructed North Atlantic’, seek to establish the nature of this pattern. Miller contends: Should there have been a composite landmass which underwent recent fracture it should be possible to construct a map showing the general geochronological– geographical relations of events in both continents and such relationships

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The importance of cartography is reiterated here as Miller posits the possibility of a map that is able to describe not just ‘the general geochronological– geographical relations of events’ but also how those relations might appear ‘not to be influenced’ by the orogenic fracture. Miller’s contention corroborates the duality of maps in his description of the map as simultaneously ‘construct’ and ‘a reconstruction’. In his Appendix, Fitch notes that when the pre-Tertiary North Atlantic continent is reconstructed in the manner described by Dr. Miller, it has an essential structural unity [. . .] The almost perfect ‘jig-saw’ fit of the fundamental masses suggests very strongly that their geographical fit is not accidental, and that they are the disrupted fragments of one originally continuous continent.65

Prynne brought the proceedings to the attention of the Intelligencer at the worksheet’s outset, writing that ‘The Wound’ was ‘in some sense’ a consequence of it, concluding: [T]he political and personal relevance of this volume has to be surveyed to be believed. As with the migration of peoples, the earth too has her movements.66

The reflexivity of Prynne’s note, which provides a commentary on a poem published in a previous issue, confirms the sense of how, at its outset, the Intelligencer might function: its liminal status between personal correspondence and publication allows the work to be revisited on its own terms, instigating a communal reading practice that can be shaped and re-shaped by the discussion around it. The content of the note is an extension of this practice, insisting that there can be no fixed point of subjective vantage since, for such a fixed point to exist, it would have to be on the world’s surface, a surface which is constantly in flux: the fixed, subjective point is itself in flux, the rhythm of which is the earth’s flux. Thus, articulation from any vantage on earth is necessarily conditioned by the earth’s rhythms, another instance of the coherence of landscape and language in mutual, symbiotic rhythm. The symposium on continental drift was hugely significant for the exchanges in and around the Intelligencer. It was an example of the most contemporary scientific discussion that seemed to corroborate the predicates of the worksheet’s mytho-poetic ambition; more specifically, the possibility that Europe and the Americas had once formed a single land mass would confirm Prynne’s sense of trans-Atlantic brotherhood with Olson and Black Mountain since, at the

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most ancient, fundamental level, the ground beneath their feet was the same. Responding to Olson’s initial query about the use of Wegener’s map for the cover of Maximus IV, V, VI, Prynne wrote with regard to the recent ‘very exciting symposium by the Royal Society of London on Continental Drift’, that had undertaken ‘a re-examination of the Wegener theory’ and concluded that it was now ‘held to be very close to the facts’.67 This was ‘news that STAYS news’ of the most literal kind that Prynne felt compelled to share as a matter of urgency with Olson and the Intelligencer poets: the orphic metaphor as ‘very close to the facts’. He was so keen for Olson to see it that he and Dorn went halves on acquiring a bound edition of the symposium’s proceedings, which they had shipped to Olson in America, ‘[w]ith both of our love & we hope you can come soon’.68 The edition bore a dual dedication from both Dorn and Prynne, in the form of two poems inscribed on its endpapers: Dorn’s ‘My age from a map to illustrate that the reconstructed North Atlantic Continent has an essential structural unity’, dedicated ‘to Charles’, on the verso and Prynne’s ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ on the recto, with a dedication ‘for Charles, the shades of Manilius, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, & the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics in the University of Cambridge (England)’.69 Both Prynne’s note accompanying the volume and his poem are dated to ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, a gesture of love that reiterates the ‘amor or lux’, which set ‘the universe in an order of luminous tendential movement’.70 It signifies a moment at which a complete revaluation of humanity’s understanding of the world seemed possible. This revaluation was indelibly linked to and synonymous with the shift in the field of geology, and which – like the breakthrough in that field of enquiry – insisted on a past moment of coherence that, through the process of attentive, cartographic reimagining, could restore a lost wholeness. The material positioning of the dedications in the book itself reiterate this: Dorn’s on the verso, Prynne’s on the recto, like the landmasses of America and Europe on a map, with the gutter dividing them like the orogenic fissure in the mid-Atlantic. The poems on opposing pages can be brought together of course by closing the book: mythic coherence encoded in the book’s materiality, a book that was a gift given explicitly in love – a love of which the pages themselves become the terrain. That terrain is not a stable, fixed point, but rather dynamic and relational: its names and its naming are gerundial – that is, of named happenings, a naming that enacts coherence. This is what Prynne is alluding to when he writes of the ‘personal and political’ significance of the symposium’s findings: the respective flux of subject and cosmos suggests a continuum of experience from the micro- to the macroscopic; attention to this flux is, according to Olson, the proper work of a

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poet. That the words of the poems themselves might also function in this way to insist on the ‘essential structural unity’ of the North Atlantic is suggested by Prynne’s montage of ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ onto a copy of Fitch’s map that is held in Olson’s archive, where they act as ‘the covenants that bind | into the rock, each to the other’ (‘The Wound, Day and Night’, 2–3).71 This echoes with Prynne’s assertion in his review of the second book of the Maximus poems that ‘[t]races of quite remote glotto-chronology fold into the diorite stone’, and reiterates the imbrications of land and language.72 Morris Swadesh’s glottochronological sequencing of language evolution proceeds on a similar methodological basis to the carbon dating of rocks, maintaining that languages are derived from a supposed ur-language and that the changes they undergo occur at an approximately constant rate; like the land, language too can be said to share an essential structural unity that has become fractured, which can be recovered by returning along the Fenellosan ‘lines of advance’ to the bedrock of metaphor, where the processes of language and world cohere. It also suggests that, of all Prynne’s work, this poem – in ways other than the purely formal – is the one that is ‘about as close to Olson as any’.73 The poem begins by directly addressing this form of change: ‘Age by default: in some way this must | be solved’ (‘The Wound, Day and Night’, 1–2). ‘Default’ is both the sense of ‘enfeebled history’ (27) that has defaulted on the promise inherent in the covenant of the rock that binds each to the other; it is also a punning allusion to ‘fault’ in the geological sense of the orogenic fissure responsible for the Atlantic drift. In the latter sense, this fault can be restored by reconciling the split halves and recovering ‘the whole order set in this, the | proper guise, of a song’ (9). The ‘plaintive chanting’ is latent in the rock, ready ‘for the argon dating | by song as echo of the world’ (4–5): the ‘unison of forms’ can be recovered by returning to an originary point ‘at the far end of that distance’ where the song is bound into the ‘tidings of the land’ (15, 18–19). ‘Tidings’ binds together this sense of a covenant as it connotes a sense of ‘news’ stored in the land and simultaneously evokes the literal passage of the movement of the tides which touches the coastlines of both America and Europe. As it does so, it brings its focus to a liminal zone where rock is eroded by water, so that it ‘may all flow again’ (19). The problem of ‘age by default’ can be solved by dissolving the tenets of those systems of meaning that seek to impose an artificial fixity on the world. This can be achieved through the eloquence of poetic song that promises to return us to a pre-lapsarian condition where the fruit still hangs untouched on the tree of knowledge so that we are ‘born at long last into the image of love’ (‘The Wound,

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Day and Night’, 27). Prynne’s conception of being born – not re-born – into the image of love proposes a community, framed elsewhere in the Intelligencer poems as a brotherhood that surpasses the legal fictions of individual selfhood and nationality. It is, above all, a community of language, wherein language itself is figured as a ‘mythic likeness resting on the earth, the mappemunde of man’s being’, a communality envisaged by Prynne as predicated not upon the ‘enfeebled’ ideologies of class or national identity but the language spoken by ‘these two peoples on either side of the Atlantic’.74 The thetic implications of this are immediately apparent: language and world are coterminous in a community of ‘song’. This interrelation is not fixed, however: Prynne’s description of language ‘resting’ on the earth implies something impermanent, delicate or fragile; the choice of the present continuous tense also connotes a process, of something not fixed but in flux. It is this process that is the proper object of a poet’s attention: the shifts and balances of the infinitesimally local and the infinitely cosmic, each of which can be found in the other. Prynne embodies this in the image of a medieval mappa mundi, drawn not according to the triangulations of the geometer’s sextant or satellite imagery, but in a sense of man’s proper place in a world ordered by the divine. The Hereford mappa mundi, for example, is drawn on a circular calf ’s skin with Jerusalem at its very centre, from which the rest of the world radiates out. In the terms of Prynne’s argument, such a map is the articulation of a spiritually ordered place, not merely a description of it. This conception of the world and the possibilities of articulating it resonates with lines 118–21 of the first book of Manilius’s Astronomica, which Prynne attached to his note about ‘The Wound, Day and Night’. Prynne’s translation of these lines insists on the close imbrication of ‘the very pattern of nature’ with poetic language.75 A sense of Prynne’s reading of these lines can be gleaned from comparing them with G. P. Goold’s translation, which makes no mention of either ‘order’ nor ‘the very pattern of nature’: Prynne’s rendering of these lines reiterates the sense of a natural order of song, whose order is inherent in the workings of nature itself. This rhythm inheres not simply in the movement of the earth beneath our feet, but also in the skies above our heads: it has a cosmological scope, whose order is the order of the rooted, immanent poetic language to which the Intelligencer is striving. Prynne’s note to Olson included lines 247–54 of the second book of Astronomica, the final lines of which Prynne translated as: ‘in variety of aspects the sum remains the same, one family’, which quote Prynne incorporates into ‘The Wound, Day and Night’. Again, the sense is one of wholeness: the reciprocity of ‘altera ut alterius uires faciatque feratque’ conveys a sense of equivocal exchange that resonates with Mauss’s theory of the

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gift, as described in the previous chapter. The significance of Prynne’s inclusion of these lines is two-fold: first, that Prynne chose to include the relevant passage in correspondence to Olson but omitted it from the note in the Intelligencer, and second, that it draws the poem emphatically into a cosmological whole. Its role here is essentially didactic, or at least consistent with those features of open field poetry that Kerridge and Reeve describe as Georgic: the recognition of its source, and the local exchange in which it originates, would suggest that, in this instance, the quotation does function ‘as an authoritative or oracular pronouncement, offering an unimpeachable and finally effective guarantee’ for what is being said.76 Yet the material that constitutes this guarantee is omitted from the poem’s publication in the Intelligencer, as was the dedication to Olson. These omissions have a bearing on the poem’s relationship to its readers that implicates the whole of the Intelligencer project: by omitting the dedication, it removes the poem from the private sphere of personal correspondence; by removing the Manilius quote, it denies its readers access to the contextualizing knowledge that shaped the poem’s composition and the terms of its reception in that originally private correspondence. The transition from a private exchange of poems and poetics between two correspondents, and the model of trust and risk on which such an exchange was predicated, to the circulation of work among a community of readers, is one that the format of the Intelligencer and the restrictions placed on its mailing list sought to facilitate. Such an approach to the history of late modernism’s textual provenance can develop extant critical work on Intelligencer poetry like Simon Jarvis’s account of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. Jarvis’s account of Prynne’s poem asserts that it ‘first appeared in the volume Aristeas in 1968 and was then reprinted in The White Stones in 1969’, when it had in fact first appeared in the first issue of the second series of the Intelligencer, without the appendix that was eventually printed in the eighth issue of that series.77 This has important implications for Jarvis’s assertion that the presence of the appendix at the end of the poem indicates that readers are asked to become researchers, to take purchase on the whole body of the language and the history and polity sedimented within it, rather than acquiescing in their dispossession in the name of the figment of a common readership.78

Resistance to passive modes of reading was implicit in the context of the Intelligencer community, within which readers were to some extent already researchers. Jarvis suggests that it is the presence of the appendix which

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insists ‘that reading should not be contemplatively confined to the text itself, but prepared to enquire beyond it’.79 This appendix was however deliberately withheld from the first publication of the poem in the Intelligencer: Prynne wanted to add further entries to it – specifically ‘Herodotus & Longinus’ – and also insisted that it was ‘an appendage’ that ‘shouldn’t go in until later’,80 in order to make it clear that they are ‘quite evidently subordinate to the text’: The localisms are mostly picaresque, and I think the poem ought to work even when these are taken simply as declared probabilities. But let me know if you think something more is needed.81

But the absence from the immediate situation of the initial Intelligencer printing of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ does not obviate Jarvis’s contention, since the presence of additional material in the same issue, such as Prynne’s ‘A Note on Metal’, functions in a similar way. Although ‘A Note on Metal’ does not directly address ‘Aristeas’ in the same way that the appendix does, its reference to Herodotus, its account of the development of metallurgy and the concomitant emergence of ‘the stratified functionalism of a monetary system’ resonates with some of the poem’s themes, and also with the discussion in the Intelligencer more broadly.82 Jarvis’s contention that the use of the first person plural pronoun in poems such as ‘Diamonds in the Air’, which appeals ‘as if to a community of speakers and writers, which is as yet no community but a series of markets and hierarchies’, is both confirmed and contradicted by the context of its first appearance in the Intelligencer: a community of speakers and writers is exactly the model of community to which it is appealing.83 Reading ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ in the context of the Intelligencer firmly grounds the poem in the terms of a dialectical process. Although the wanderings of Aristeas through the Asian steppe provide the archaic subject of the poem, the immediate context of the Intelligencer allows the poem’s readers to extrapolate meanings from it that are at once more local and more general. The poem appears in the first issue of the second series, shortly after Peter Riley’s ‘Working Note on British Prehistory’ had been circulated as part of the Intelligencer’s run; Riley’s essay stimulated a number of critical responses from the Intelligencer community. The essay takes as its thesis ‘that something existed in the life of man, as the life of man on this island up to about 1500 bc at the latest, that we’ve lost sight of and need to reconsider’ and goes on to outline the history of human habitation on the British Isles through the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, through the paradigm shift that Riley locates at the beginning of the Bronze Age, up to the Roman invasion in 44 bc.84 Riley contends that it is possible to

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trace the development of ‘a real civilization’ that takes ‘a turn about 1500 bc that I can only see as disastrous’.85 The crux of this shift is the transition away from a collective, semi-nomadic existence in which the community extended itself into the landscape to an individualized and acquisitive community. Riley argues that the shift away from this community is evident in the nature of the grave goods uncovered by archaeologists, which around this time show signs of becoming ‘objects of veneration [. . .] rather than fulfilling a real need’.86 The sense of life ‘belonging as it had to the community’ also disappears at this time, Riley argues, to be replaced by an understanding of life as a ‘possession’ – ‘like his dagger and his bow [. . .] eternally his’.87 Prynne’s response to Riley’s ‘Working Notes’, in which he outlines his own working theory of pre-historic population patterns, is a case in point, taking the form of one extended letter, an additional note, the essay ‘A Note on Metal’ and a poem, ‘First Notes on Daylight’. Prynne agrees with Riley that ‘[m]an extending himself into the landscape [. . . is] a crucial question for the subsequent formalities of conduct’, but shifts the emphasis entirely from the excavatory to the scopic, insisting that ‘the natural extension of man into landscape is not indicated at all, in a primary sense, by archaeological evidence. The natural extension is movement, literal passage across terrain, in response to some factors of which there are traces, and some of which there are not.’88 Prynne argues for the primacy of movement as extension into the landscape, describing it as a sacred art that, combined with memory, ensures that landscape ‘becomes acculturated by the subsistence of social memory [. . .] If both movement and memory are sacred arts, then a place which is the same place accumulates special forces, just as the body does for the variety of conditions it can reach out for (Shamanistic transport, for example, or starvation, or sexual fulfilment).’89 This kind of extension is radically opposed to that aspect of the Neolithic revolution that Prynne admits it is possible to resent, wherein land is, in Riley’s terms, ‘owned [and] possessed’, rather than moved through. According to Prynne, the development of economies based on exchange value and the desire for ‘telluric permanence’ instigates ‘the overbalance of technology [which] is clearly the genetic breakdown, the specialisation of function leading to the economy of exchange’.90 Prynne concludes by stating that he regrets this shift from transfer to exchange ‘beyond measure’.91 The understanding of this shift from transfer to exchange can be re-traced throughout the Intelligencer. The primacy of movement as extension also resonates with Olson’s dictum on prosody in ‘Projective Verse’ ‘to keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen’.92 This is clearly being worked through in the poem, ‘First Notes on Daylight’, the poem that Prynne attaches to his additional note, describing it

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as ‘a first attempt to straighten part of this out’.93 The poem asks how it might be possible to ‘decline the rhetoric | of occasion’ in order to recover ‘the history of person | as an entire condition of landscape’ (‘First Notes on Daylight’, 11–12, 14–15).94 These lines’ close resemblance to the lexicon of the letters reprinted in the Intelligencer are an example of how deeply imbricated Prynne’s work was with the Intelligencer project at this point. The final sentence of this passage clearly echoes the final assertion of Prynne’s letter of 14 February 1967: ‘We are the prize of our own landscape condition, and our quality, now, is exactly that.’95 As such, this exchange is an example of the idealized continuum of practice and criticism on which the Intelligencer was founded. The poem’s stated concern with the question of ‘How | to extend’ and what the particularities of ‘that | kind of extension’ might mean are also integral to the Intelligencer (10–11, 15–16). The concern with questions of extension might also suggest a way of thinking through a response to the crucial question of ‘what size we’re in’ (‘First Notes on Daylight’, 4). The ‘size we’re in’ is not the diminished empirical subject that speaks in the poetry of ‘Betjeman’s England’, or the authoritarian, mythic artifex of Pound’s Sigismundo Malatesta, but rather the extension into a total social relation embodied in something like ‘a poetic community which would provide the entire context of the activity both as audience and as participators in its creation’.96 Such an answer would counter Anthony Mellors’s assertion that this poetry is ‘belatedly modernist and somewhat disingenuous’ since it posits ‘a redemptive aesthetic that links poesis with occult power while disowning the reactionary politics of high modernists such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound’.97 The relationship of the poet to the kind of poetic community embodied in the Intelligencer goes beyond the authoritarian structure of legitimization on which the redemptive aesthetic of the high modernists was predicated, and a critical attention to the relationship between the work printed in the Intelligencer and the community around it allows its significance to be properly recognized. The ‘size’ of this work is the size of the community in which it is written, the strength of the trust that holds it together and the scale of the risks that this trust affords. A condition of the trust and risk on which this community is predicated is a vigilance towards the ‘danger’ of a wilfully nostalgic faith in ancient customs to restore a mythic spiritual whole that the machinations of modernity have traduced. As such it is predicated on the recognition of what ‘history’ may have done to an archaic magico-religious schema, the extent to which its spiritual content has been transformed and re-evaluated, and will continue to read some ‘primitive’ meaning into it.98

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The letter of 14 February 1967 acknowledges the manifold complexities involved in evidencing accounts of pre-historic times, describing the gradual settlement of semi-nomadic tribes in terms of the available archaeological evidence. From this, Prynne works out a meta-narrative that details the gradual substitution of tribal rites for the ‘specialization of function leading to the economies of exchange’.99 It is not that these prehistoric conditions represent an ontologically different conception of the world; rather, it is from these conditions – at countless removes – that modernity and the division of labour has arisen, and it is the proper work of the poet to pay attention to that. This is the legacy of the Intelligencer poets’ engagement with Olson, for whom ‘mythic and archaic sources are essential to resituating himself within the world after millennia of misguided philosophy’.100 These ideas have direct bearing on the passage in ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ which asserts that, ‘[p]rior to the pattern of settlement’, ‘the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor | 3 as fact’ (‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, 98, 101–2).101 This passage is not explained by reference to the letter in the Intelligencer, any more than it is by reference to the texts cited in its bibliography; rather, its context provides a working vocabulary with which to approach Neolithic history and shamanism, which in turn enables a poetry that forms a continuum with critical thought. The paradoxical demand of ‘the spirit’ for ‘the orphic metaphor’ – the flux of song – to become fixed as ‘fact’ can be read in terms of this continuum: the ‘spirit’ is both the individuated spirit of a shaman undertaking a mantic excursion and the spirit of a time or people.102 This integration of subjectivity and collectivity functions like the sought-after integration of fact and song, which is enacted in the poem’s allusive range, the substrate of sources and attributions that underpins its conviction. ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ repeatedly draws attention to those sources: both those that are traceable – like ‘the griffins, which lived close to the | mines, the gold reposed as the divine brilliance’ (‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, 229–30) – a direct allusion to ‘the griffins which guard the gold’ in the Herodotean source103 – and others that are left to hang, unattributed, as in the three bullet points between lines 161 and 168. The text is saturated with unattributed quotations in scare quotes, although it never moves towards a complete synthesis of their often-dissonant counterpoints. Crucially, though, the formal fragmentation of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ is not underwritten by a recuperative ideology like Eliot’s ‘mythical method’;104 nor does it, as Anthony Mellors suggests, ‘buy into [. . .] political evasion’.105 Mellors contends that Prynne’s representation of the singularity of shamanism in nomadic cultures is a narcissistic self-identification of ‘the romantic predicament of the

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poet’ – that is, an isolate, self-mythologizing subjectivity – which is in turn further aestheticized by Prynne’s anachronistic positioning of nomadic cultures as ‘the ideal antithesis of commodification’.106 The claim that Prynne has appropriated and distorted the figure of the shaman to galvanize his own poetic implies a fundamental contradiction in this poem: if the shaman is included symbolically, standing in for a set of values that Prynne has projected onto it, then the process of this exchange is the antithesis of the commitment to quality – where quality is singular, non-replicable and cannot be assimilated into commodity exchange – that underpins both the poem and the Intelligencer. The work that the poem does to establish and acknowledge the economic determination of both the pre-historic societies in question and also the routes by which knowledge about these societies is transmitted and, invariably, mediated challenges Mellors’s reading. ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ never loses sight of the fact that the basic term on which all knowledge of pre-historic culture is founded ‘is bone’ (105): the skeleton of the possible in a heap and covered with stones or a barrow. ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, 110–12

Rather than blindly trusting the figure of the shaman to offer some kind of redemption, this passage explicitly counts ‘the cost of such trust by recounting the material needs and desires which such motifs support and depend upon’, as Jarvis puts it.107 This counting demands a continual awareness of the unspoken conditions on which knowledge of the past is predicated, and how knowledge is always mediated by those conditions. The passage alludes to this in its acknowledgement that its truth has already ‘been pointed out’: it omits details of when, where or by whom, since it is enough to know that the poem is indebted to systems of knowledge beyond the parameters of the page on which it is printed. This is the paradox of the ‘skeleton of the possible’: it is both the residuum of what was once possible, and also the framework for what may yet be. This is implicitly the paradox of the renaissance of the archaic: the singular is repeated and that which is most remote is made immanently present, so that once occurs again. Furthermore, this kind of exogenic reference, allied to its situation in the context of the Intelligencer community, is antithetical to the ‘romantic predicament of the poet’ with its insistence on the poet’s isolate and intensified self. Rather than figuring the poet as the isolate subjectivity from

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which the poem originates, the poem’s extensive referencing expiates such an understanding of the poem’s processes of signification, since it refers to a body of knowledge that stands beside the poem, a reference that implicitly suggests a direction for further reading: the body of knowledge that precedes the poem and the direction of future research and the possibilities that lie latent within it are animated uniquely by the work of the poem. Prynne’s text is deeply embedded in discursive practice, figuring Aristeas, ‘the researcher-poet who is both the poet’s topic and his model’, in terms ‘quite otherwise than as a chronicler of the displaced from the established place of civic settlement’.108 In so doing, Jarvis argues, the poem’s ‘structural analogy between the risks taken by Aristeas in abandoning his settled community and his settled personality and those taken by the shamans’ insists that ‘the researcher-poet must attempt to give up a fixed vantage over what is to be sung or written about’.109 By eschewing this fixed vantage, the researcher-poet also gives up a sense of settled origin and fixed destination, which is analogous to the poem’s relationship to the Intelligencer community, a community which is oriented not towards a determined centre but on a concept of exchange that generates meaning; the truth-claim of this meaning is mantic or ecstatic, simultaneously denying the significance of a singular, fixed originary point and deferring its cognizance to a future point, of which the constellated community of the Intelligencer is an instance: its origin needs to be understood as an event, a named happening, that is intangible and irrecoverable because it is unfixed. The work itself and its subsequent interpretation are part of its continuum. Although the culture that existed before the emergence of ‘the economies of exchange’ is valorized by the poem, Prynne writes in the Intelligencer that he could not ‘want it back, nor any version of cultural nostalgia. We are the prize of our own landscape condition, and our quality, now, is exactly that.’110 ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ insists on the orphic metaphor as fact, too, but it also necessarily insists on the recognition of the mediation of these facts through appendices, a discursive context of publication, proliferating sources and quotes, some attributed, some not, which bear out what Prynne noted in his initial response to Riley’s essay: ‘literal passage across terrain, in response to some factors of which there are traces, and some of which there are not’. The insistence on literal passage – and this must include the literal passage of time – prevents the model of archaic communities and forms of exchange being understood as ‘a mere way of thinking which could be uncomplicatedly transplanted, like a set of attitudes, to settled industrial and agricultural society’; rather, by taking up with the ‘irreducible difference of nomadic cultures not nostalgically or recuperatively

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but dialectically’, the function of these archaic societies in the poem is not to ‘provide a plan or model for social justice’ that is transferable to the modern world, but rather, by the very fact of their ‘irremediable difference’, they enable a ‘limit and measure [of] the claims of a system of universal exchangeability to provide self-evident structure of equity’.111 The existence of such a process maintains the possibility of an alternative form of exchange, one based not on equity but on quality. The Intelligencer itself is an attempt to instigate and maintain such an exchange; the trust on which this was established would, it was hoped, allow the necessary risks to be taken with poetic form that would enable British poetry to recover what had been lost in the years after the Second World War. The ultimate object of this recovery lay in the revitalization of poetic form and language. The next chapter explores some of the ways in which the Intelligencer sought to do this. The differences between the Intelligencer and commercial practices are more than differences of economics, institution or nomenclature: they are fundamentally prosodic, and the tradition of poetic language to which they looked for inspiration was one that was antithetical to anything then available in Betjeman’s England. The question of the seemingly imbalanced relationship between the American poets and their British counterparts recurred throughout the Intelligencer: clearly, ‘Betjeman’s England’ was abhorred, but the right way to resuscitate a modernist poetry in Britain – or England – was far from clear. It is even voiced by Elaine Feinstein on the same page as ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ is printed on in the Intelligencer, where she questions the terms of Crozier’s editorial note that the worksheet was for ‘the island and its language’: But I wanted to say about the Englishness: in our present context it makes sense to put some force into the need to make things here, but I should be unhappy to give any strength to the kind of nationalism you parodied in your remarks of H-------. Surely the language of the island belongs to whoever lives here and uses it? You letting in a presumably (?) visiting African, and excluding some obvious visiting Americans I take to be a piece of deliberate illogic which answers your need to assert some independence of the prevailing American culture. I can respect this, and the value of a local work sheet; but let’s not have any fictional ‘Englishness’. What could be nastier? But I can’t believe you have any such intention finally.112

The need ‘to assert some independence of the prevailing American culture’ was registered in both the prosody of the poetry published in the Intelligencer and the critical debate that framed it, both of which were symptoms of the protracted

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and increasingly fraught negotiation with that culture, its poetry and poetics, which were, in turn, symptomatic of the particular quandary of late modernism, the vexed question of how to make it new, again.

Eloquence and idiom The question of how to negotiate a modernist poetic tradition is, as Olson wrote to Creeley, ‘intricate’.113 The foundational question of modernist poetics – how to make it new – necessarily implies innovation, yet this innovation had also implied tradition in its high modernist formulation: the ‘it’ of Pound’s famous formulation can be read as denoting tradition itself. The question of the precise calibration of innovation and tradition framed seminal modernist ars poetica such as Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: for Eliot, true innovation could only occur when a writer was fully immersed in the full tradition of ‘the mind of Europe’.114 Pound’s conception of a ‘live tradition’ was less rigidly hierarchical than Eliot’s, and decidedly less bookish: that tradition remained present in the culture of the early twentieth century, but its vitality had been etiolated by the social, economic and aesthetic conditions of modernity. Pound’s experimentalism, his poetic innovation, was always oriented towards the past, in an effort to recover and revitalize that tradition and the lost and etiolated modes of speech and social being that inhered within it. A paradox for poets like Olson who came after Pound and wanted to continue this live tradition was to find a language that was not merely imitative; the imperative to do so was especially pressing given their abhorrence of his politics. Olson wrote in frustration to Creeley: ‘It burns my ass, that, so often, these idiots cry, “Pound,” everytime they think they have a critique of my own work.’115 His conception of tradition is one in which ‘the work we value, especially when the man is alive behind us, is to be gone by’: But what burns me is, that the superficial resemblances (if there are such: myself, THE KINGFISHERS, which, time & again I have heard, ‘Pound’, feels so completely mine that, by it as a gauge, I must take it all such people are idiots, total & depraved) are used to beat me with. Fuck em.116

Olson conceived of tradition not as a linear teleology, but as something vital, immanent and usable, ‘not so much that of a chronologically based “line” marked by shared influences as of a group of poets who share an environment and a sense of poetic process’.117 This conception of a live tradition also relates to his

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subsequent contact with, and the relation of his own example to, the Intelligencer poets. Just as Olson himself stood accused of imitation, rather than innovation, so the closeness to Olson’s own work of much of the early Intelligencer poems was, for some of its readers, deeply problematic. The very first poem printed in the Intelligencer – John Temple’s ‘Thots. on Yr Postcard’ – operates within an obviously Olsonian mode, and the response that it elicited in the Intelligencer’s pages is sceptical about the value of such a poetic enterprise. Its title makes clear its allegiance to a specifically contemporary American idiom; the title given in Rothschild’s Lapwing (London: Ferry Press, 1968), ‘To a Friend on Receiving a Postcard Reproduction of the Map of Britain by Matthew Paris, Monk of St Albans’, reiterates the significance of cartography that helps to identify it within the work of a specific milieu. The fact that it is a postcard also bears witness to the social moment of its articulation: as a response to a brief, quick communication, the poem locates itself within a socialized discourse. A postcard moves, too, in that it’s both a token of a journey and does its own travelling. The shift in title from the Intelligencer version to the published version reiterates this: it is perhaps assumed that readers will be aware of the postcard in question in the Intelligencer, or at least be able to deduce from its description the map to which it refers. When the poem is collected away from the intimate environment of the Intelligencer, however, it is deemed necessary to provide a gloss on it. Such allusions were an integral part of the Intelligencer’s work to foster a sense of coherent community. Place, and the act of placing, was intricately bound up in the linguistic considerations that shaped the prosody of Temple’s poem. The poem’s opening is very specifically situated in Crossfell in Cumbria, from where it is possible to see both: the sun rising out of the German Ocean (North Sea & falling at night into the Irish Channel. I think this is the only place in the country where you can do this. ‘Thots. from yr Postcard’, 13–16118

The poem then opens out to consider the history of the place, noting that it was at the nearby Fallarstand pass that the Romans had finally defeated the Saxons. The effect is to make this space and its history zuhanden: immediate, relevant and almost tangible. The sun’s diurnal round is drawn to this one point of vantage, and the Biblical resonance of the Vale of Eden reiterates this sense of the divine in the way that the allusion to the Roman battle does the history of the place.

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These effects counterpoint the diminished meaning that modern cartographical practices ascribe to such sites by abstracting their meaning to a colour: ‘green roads’ (26), for example. The prosody is recognizably open field and its effect is similar to the one created by Edward Dorn in a passage of The Shoshoneans, where Dorn describes the topography of the Basin Plateau: Lay your right hand palm down, fingers spread, on a map of the West scaled approximately one inch to fifty miles, your little finger on Salt Lake City directly under the wall of the Wasatch, the end of your thumb on Reno by Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada, the tip of your great finger just under the mountains of Idaho, your index finger touching the south-east corner of Oregon, the heel of your hand above Las Vegas, and you will have covered the Basin-Plateau area.119

There is a shared sense of the zuhanden – literally, in Dorn’s case – and, again, the pre-eminence of maps; it is especially interesting, in terms of the late modernist tradition discussed earlier, to note that Dorn chose a map that showed Hailey, Idaho – the birthplace of Ezra Pound – for the book’s endpapers. Maps are used here as a way of situating oneself in the world rather than merely passively locating oneself; the sense of space they create is something to be used and acted upon. Diction in these poems functions in a similar way, not so much as a way of fixing a poem within a set of sociolinguistic coordinates as it is a way of actively situating it within a poetic context of a ‘live tradition’ that emphasises dynamism. Temple’s poem, and the other poems that he published in the Intelligencer, shared a distinctive Black Mountain idiom as well as a common ground of ideas. For some readers, Temple’s appropriation of this kind of idiom was derivative and to be regretted. Gael Turnbull stated in a letter published in the Intelligencer that he could not ‘see the point in such near parody’s [sic] of Olson’, and criticized some of the poetry in the Intelligencer as ‘an easy transcript into what is the currently fashionable American poetic idiom’.120 Referring back to the Intelligencer’s opening self-definition, he argued that ‘surely, somehow, there are ways of being “for the island and its language” without merely parroting what Certain Americans have done (and done very well)’.121 Turnbull’s anxiety about the disproportionate influence of the American example resurfaced at various points in the Intelligencer’s run, both in letters sent to the editor that were reprinted in its pages, and those that were not. Tim Longville wrote early on to say that he shared Turnbull’s sentiments,122 and Paul Evans also bemoaned its too close derivation from the example of recent American writing.123 Evans’s criticism came as a response to Crozier’s note – dated 15 November 1966 and addressed to the Intelligencer to maintain the guise that he was not

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the editor – which complained that it had failed to live up to the example of Gael Turnbull’s Migrant and of a lack of engagement with writers such as Roy Fisher, Michael Shayer and Turnbull himself, asking whether this was a policy of ‘deliberate exclusion’, before concluding that he hoped not, ‘for I doubt that we are yet strong enough to sustain such divisiveness’.124 Crozier’s decision to make an intervention in this manner is a curious one, not least because it is addressing the Intelligencer as though from the outside: any ‘deliberate exclusion’ would be largely his own. The question of the ‘strength’ of the intimated group, and the charge of ‘divisiveness’, also speaks a strange sense of self-fashioning, as does the implicit sense of teleology that inheres in the ‘yet’: at some point the group will be strong enough to sustain ‘such divisiveness’, even if it isn’t yet, at which point ‘the possibility of a writing in this country of the same order as that [. . .] in North America’ might be realized. But it is that relationship with the North American writers that had attracted the most divisive comments in the Intelligencer: it was deemed that, in attempting to establish a poetry that was of an equivalent ‘order’ to that of, particularly, the Black Mountain poets, it had ended up merely imitating it. Peter Armstrong dismisses the ‘modish presentation’ which some contributors have sought to pass as ‘Americanism’, arguing that it ‘seems [. . .] to be no more than a cover-up for the lack of connection between images which, even taken simply, are false coin’, an argument that is echoed in Ian Vine’s comment that ‘so many contributions [. . .] show such an unoriginally American stamp’.125 Vine criticized ‘those “thru”s and “yrs” [that] became so tiresome’ when he read back through the Intelligencer, adding that it was unclear what ‘this eccentric spelling adds to the poem’.126 This eccentricity was antithetical to the grand ‘order’ of the North American poets whose work he took it to be indebted to; writing about John Hall’s work, he states that if the poet ‘was trying something ambitious he failed completely to communicate it to me, otherwise it was so trivial as to not warrant a second glance’.127 These doubts about the validity of the Intelligencer’s direction turned on the question of authentic speech. The gist of these criticisms – ‘parroting’, ‘modish’, ‘false coin’ – dismisses the idiom of some of the Intelligencer’s poetry as imitative and inauthentic. Ian Vine’s likening of the idiom to counterfeit money suggests that verse must be ‘authentic’ to have poetic currency, where ‘authenticity’ is vouchsafed by the constructions of a recognizable self. Temple and the Intelligencer poets more generally were not interested in the authentications of such a speaking subject; rather, they sought to establish new forms of eloquence. In a private letter to John Temple, Donald Davie responded to Turnbull’s criticism of his work by drawing a distinction

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between the Olsonian idiom of Temple’s poetry and the deeper condition of its own eloquence.128 Davie’s reiteration of eloquence and idiom distances this valuation of the poetic from those who would seek to judge it by the terms of (in)authenticity. By privileging eloquence above idiom, Davie insists on the importance of ‘fluency, force, and appropriateness’ above the more local and localized ‘idiom’.129 Those idiomatic aspects of Temple’s poetic that drew criticism from Turnbull et al. are reduced to the role of a scaffolding, structurally necessary to the poem’s composition, but ultimately and deliberately expendable; a reading that reiterates an understanding of the Intelligencer as a place to risk new or unfinished work; in doing so, it reiterates the importance of eloquence. What Temple has learnt from Olson, Davie implies, is not so much the sound of a fashionable diction as a fundamental sense of poetic direction. This has a significant effect on the type of eloquence that Davie found in Temple’s poem: not simply the eloquence of an elegant well-wrought urn, but an essential eloquence of direction in poetry. An alternative defence was voiced by John Hall in the pages of the Intelligencer itself, one that located the poem’s eloquence in precisely those ‘idiomatic’ moments whose function Davie insisted was ancillary to eloquence. Responding to Vine’s letter, Hall argued that those features which so bored him were in fact crucial elements of this attempt at eloquence: yr and your are different things, different kinds of possession. Say that the vowels can let in a social idea of ownership (of the gift, acquisitiveness – sentiment, if you like all this possibly in the way an Educated Englishman uses his vowels. Over a period the situation can be completely reversed. What matters is the way the bloke writing hears it.)130

Hall contends that the kind of social questions that inhered in the Intelligencer project – of ownership, privacy and the exactness of relations between people and groups – are worked out at the level of the vowel, and the inscription of spoken words into text. This is reiterated in the gloss he gives when he refers Vine to Prynne’s early contributions, drawing attention to Prynne’s note on page 27 of the Intelligencer to argue that the movement is the line and syntax and there is also a total – /global?/ – movement that gives him authority to the word, what has to be earned, in a world like that, by the achievement of just such an honour; and honour is just such a word, as hope and love are – to get to the constant breathing of such a song – and out of the context, outside of that movement these words ought not really be mentioned.131

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Hall argues that far from acting as an easy appropriation of American idioms, the use of ‘yr’ and ‘thru’ in these poems is in fact an exact use of language to establish relations that has been ‘earned’. The effect is located not just in the poem’s lexis, but in ‘the line and syntax’, whose movement ‘is also a total – / global?/ – movement’. This movement travels along the vector of the gerund, the established course of a natural language that unifies those transposed conditions (love, desire, the open window) and the world intactly grabbed back into the silver forest: the very oldest idea of ‘nature’ (causing the wild bees to swarm & produce honey as well as eloquence.)132

The eloquence that the Intelligencer poets derived from Olson was manifest in both the way in which they put words on the page and a broader, shared sense of the scope of possible directions that British poetry might take at this point. In terms of the former, the early poetry of the Intelligencer worked towards a model of poetic utterance that strives at a prosodic level to re-connect with a metaphoric fundament, through an insistence on a poetic rhythm predicated on breath and ideas of kinesis. This model poetic was explicitly forged in a tradition of (late) modernist thought that reached back through Olson to Pound and Fenellosa. There was a shared sense among the Intelligencer contributors that this model, both as a prosody and as an institution, had been deliberately occluded from post-war British poetry, and that it needed to be recovered. This sense is manifest in the orientation towards an unbroken and cosmic whole and also in the privileging of esoteric forms of knowledge. The findings of the Royal Society Symposium are symptomatic of this: the terms in which continental drift is expressed – ‘the disrupted fragments of one originally continuous continent’ – reiterate the terms in which ‘high’ modernist poets like Pound and Williams wrote about the world. Furthermore, the very fact that these papers which were so highly valued by the Intelligencer poets are available only in the journal of the Royal Society – a journal that would require both institutional access and an adept’s knowledge of where to look – is a modernist form recognizable from, for example, Pound’s Malatesta cantos. An analogy between Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and the Intelligencer can be usefully made in the way that both act as archival repositories for communities defined by an investment in specialized forms of knowledge, and as such construct what David Trotter refers to as ‘an institutional readership’: an investment in, for example, the discourse of geology ‘indicates not simply an investment in scientific idioms, but an investment in the image of the communities which produce and are confined by those idioms’.133 Trotter writes with reference to

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Dorn that the allusions in his work to such specialized discourses and their idioms are not the sole criterion by which our reading of his poetry is to be judged. They assume the kind of acquaintance with certain subjects that would be provided by upmarket newspapers, and they are in the poetry now because they were once in the papers. At the same time, the academic community has provided Dorn with a powerful image of what the relation between a poet and his readers might be, and so freed him to pursue his line of thought.134

Like Davie, Trotter figures idiom as a constituent part of an eloquent whole, a whole that is explicitly related to the community of readers for which it is written. However, the idea that a mythic whole might be recovered through the forms of attention described in this chapter became more and more imperilled as the Intelligencer went on. The next chapter explores how the idealized construction of an exchange of poetic material within the bounds of trust and risk – an exchange that had been so enriching in personal correspondence – worked out in the de facto exchanges of the Intelligencer’s issues. I will argue that as those involved with the Intelligencer came to recognize that its exchange was not fulfilling the aspirations that had underpinned its inception, the terms of that exchange shifted and, as a consequence, so did the poetry that was closely invested in that exchange. The chapter will analyse the nature of the recalibration of the Intelligencer’s late modernism as it took shape in the work of J. H. Prynne.

3

Beyond the Whole: The Breakdown of Late Modernism in The English Intelligencer

Disagreement about the types of knowledge and forms of poetic language that should be explored through the Intelligencer was ever-present during its run. The desire for a common ground on which a reciprocal exchange of trust and risk could be worked out remained unrealized within the run of its pages. Instead, the Intelligencer became increasingly fractious, and was eventually brought to an end a few months after Peter Riley was removed from the editorship. This chapter explores that trajectory of the Intelligencer from its earliest aspirations to its end; although I concur with Neil Pattison that the antagonism engendered by its pages is its most powerful legacy, I also suggest that that antagonism needs to be read not simply within the logic of the Intelligencer’s sheets themselves, but in terms of the correspondence and personal relationships surrounding it and, more broadly, the contested nature of late modernism. It is in these exchanges that the Intelligencer’s aspirations are perhaps most clearly articulated, and the scale of the frustration felt by some of its participants, at the perceived failure of the worksheet to live up to those aspirations, becomes most apparent: the tension between hope and disillusion are, I suggest, the terms of the Intelligencer’s antagonism. And it is necessary to recognize the Intelligencer as a failure on its initial terms; in the broadest sense, Betjeman’s England was unshaken by the Intelligencer’s sheets. Rather than making the case for a continued live tradition of literary modernism on a national scale in the same way that Donald Allen’s New American Poetry had done in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s, the effect of the Intelligencer on prevailing public taste, and the cultural institutions which shaped that taste, was negligible.

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In the sense of the terms on which the Intelligencer was founded, which speaks implicitly to a broader cultural purview than the immediate and restricted context of its publication, its aspirations remained unfulfilled; this chapter seeks to explore the reasons why they remained so. Its focus is primarily on the work of J. H. Prynne, and how it relates to the Intelligencer. Prynne’s work of this period is deeply invested in both the Intelligencer project and the surrounding field of correspondence and personal exchange in which the Intelligencer was situated. Prynne’s involvement in the Intelligencer was direct and decisive from the outset: he assumed responsibility for replicating the worksheets on the Caius mimeograph, paying a scrupulous level of attention to the process of doing so. The correspondence that he had sustained with Olson and Dorn in particular had done a great deal to establish links with the New American poets whose example so catalysed the Intelligencer poets; this contact itself played a decisive role in establishing the renewal of a particular Poundian iteration of modernism in Britain, quite against the prevailing conditions of poetry publishing and public taste. Even though he never formally assumed editorial duties, the correspondence surrounding the Intelligencer’s publication makes clear how heavily he was involved in the day-to-day decision making that shaped its aspirations and its function. The contribution he made to the Intelligencer was both formative and unique; the poems that he published in its pages articulate something of that contribution, in terms of its effort, its aspirations and, ultimately, its disappointments. I argue that through a proper consideration of this work in relation to the Intelligencer exchange, it becomes possible to recover a nuanced context specific to the Intelligencer in which the much-vaunted shift between the style of The White Stones and Brass takes place, and, more broadly, a sense in which the terms of the live tradition of late modernism that had catalysed its inception became radically altered. This analysis will also situate Prynne’s work in the very specific context of the personal relationships that made up the Intelligencer’s exchange, attention to which opens up a consideration of the consequences of the Intelligencer’s cessation for the other poets most closely involved with it. An analysis of these consequences is developed in the subsequent chapters.

News that STAYS news The disparity between the ideal and the de facto in the Intelligencer’s exchange is brought into focus by Prynne’s response to Crozier’s letter of 15 November

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1966, in which Crozier regrets that ‘we are not yet strong enough to sustain such divisiveness.’1 For Prynne, the failure of the Intelligencer community to attain the strength to sustain such divisions was a consequence of the failure of those involved to recognize its function as a news sheet rather than as a more conventional magazine. Those features of the Intelligencer’s production which afford the possibility of a different mode of readership, such as its improvised appearance and the frequency with which it was circulated, have been neglected to the extent that Prynne writes, ‘it’s so completely a fact of indifference that these sheets of yours claim to carry news’: The possibility has been so tactfully allowed a minor appearance, in those envelopes, through the post (where we live, in the envelope); and, as tactfully, we have gone on with some other thing. Or gone about it some other way – how should I know, about that? Through the news? News as result as a new hold on the language of this world, not closed away into its terminal point?2

The failure of the Intelligencer’s exchange to realize its original ambition lies, Prynne suggests, in its acceptance of terminal points, with both poems and exchange held within the bounds of ‘the envelope’, a point beyond which ‘the other world’ is restored. Rather, the form of news that might be possible in the Intelligencer is one that affords ‘a new hold on the language of this world’, a radical grasp of the roots of language and the world. A note at the back of the Cape Goliard edition of Kitchen Poems advises readers that ‘these poems were first published as news items in The English Intelligencer.’3 The status of the poems themselves as ‘news items’ has implications for the functioning – both prosodic and epistemological – of that poetry, with a distinct resemblance to Ezra Pound’s dictum that literature is ‘news that STAYS news’.4 The implied facticity of Pound’s assertion has significant implications for the poetry in the Intelligencer, and the tradition of late modernism with which it was engaged. There is very little ‘news’ in the Intelligencer’s sheets as that term is understood in relation to newspapers: there is scant reference to current social and political events beyond occasional glancing references to Vietnam – in MacSweeney’s ‘Plea Poem’ for example, or the ‘march | on the pentagon’ in ‘As It Were An Attendant’5 – and it is only at the very end of its run that this is framed in terms of a direct intervention in current political discourse: We shall be at the Anti-Vietnam Was [sic] demonstration on Sunday 17 March. Anyone ignorant of the relevant circumstances could contact us individually. Andrew Crozier, Martin Goldberg, John James, Wendy Mulford, Alan Green 5 March 1968.6

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Nor can it be the case that the poems in the Intelligencer are understood to be ‘news items’ in the exclusive sense that they are information bulletins to and from its community of readers, although reading them back into the context of the Intelligencer allows this meaning to be, at least in part, recuperated. This sense of ‘news’ is exacerbated by the presence of letters and notes throughout the Intelligencer which supports Trotter’s contention that readers in the Intelligencer milieu would have been acquainted with certain subjects that underpin much of this work, although it functions less like an ‘up-market newspaper’, with its connotations of a (mass) market, than a scholarly journal like the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society discussed in the previous chapter, whose readership is, like the Intelligencer’s, limited to a group defined by a specialized field of knowledge and vocabulary and a sense of collective endeavour. The Intelligencer’s imperative to circulate ‘as quickly as needs be’, and the improvised quality of its production, seems quite unlike the stately production of the Transactions, although both are in fact directly shaped by the needs of its community: the former in response to the urgent need for communication, the latter for rigorous, peer-reviewed and authoritative work. Neither bears quite the likeness to ‘up-market newspapers’ that Trotter contends, however; as Walter Benjamin argues, the intention of newspapers is to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and the style of writing.7

That ‘lack of connection’ is directly counter to the ethos of the Intelligencer, whose sheets it was hoped would provide an ongoing exchange that could re-establish the ‘live connection between the sources of original work and the means of its dissemination’ that Prynne believed to have been lost in England: the continuous numbering of its sheets and its rejection of discrete issue numbers bear witness to this. Such connection, and the continual exchange that it invoked, sought emphatically to reintegrate its work into ‘the realm in which [it] could affect the experience of its reader’, by means of involving the reader in a way that insisted reading is not merely an act of passive consumption but an instigation for readers to become researchers – that is, to continue to work the work. There is also a telling emphasis on provisionality in the Intelligencer that reflects not so much the post facto certainties of reportage as the incremental endeavour of a research community: the prevalence of ‘notes’ and letters in its pages reiterate this. But the conceptualized facticity of poems as ‘news items’ is not restricted

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to this sense; it also operates within an extant tradition of poetic knowing. Such a mode of knowing characterizes Anthony Mellors’s sense of late modernism, which creates a dynamic field which stirs readers not only to try to make sense of formally and conceptually difficult material but also to question their own investment in the process of meaning [. . . thus enabling] a political reflexivity lacking in works that appeal to emotive directness.8

Within this dynamic field, ‘the lack of coherence at the exoteric level’ of the text ‘leads to the expectation that [. . .] it must cohere in another, esoteric way’; as such, facts in these texts are conceived of as ‘the fallen signs of a noumenal reality which acquire meaning through interpretation’.9 The desire ‘to take knowledge | back to the springs’ (‘Die A Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, 1–2)10 is contrasted with the ‘knowledge | in appliqué-work’ (61–2) that Prynne identifies in the grids such as the one on the cover of Kitchen Poems, which are ‘strangled & latticed | across the land’ (62–3). The kind of writing that these poems are undertaking moves in a completely different way, and in a completely different direction, to the ‘graphed’ movement of the ‘intangible consumer | networks’ (‘Die a Millionaire’ (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, 63–4); instead, it seeks to turn ‘back’ to ‘the | question of names’ (137–8), a movement figured as ‘the back mutation’ whose condition is knowledge (145). The imperative ‘to repose | in the mysteries’ gestures back to the Eleusinian mysteries, invoking a trust that is needed in order to ‘repose’ in mystery, a condition that is set directly against the ‘perversions’ of the ‘vicious grid’ – perversions that are themselves enabled precisely by ‘the weakness, now, | of names’ (147–52). The restitution of power to ‘names’ is synonymous with ‘the back mutation’, recalling the Confucian cheng-ming, which is both epistemological and ethical: There is no other beginning on power. Such is to elect terms, to be the ground for names. ‘The Numbers’, 76–911

The power of names is precisely the opposite of the power of grids, as it is both coherent and grounded, where grids run inevitably to abstraction, expunging the specific that constitutes place in favour of the general: ‘the ground for names’ is precisely what that model of poetic language described in the previous chapter, reaching back through Prynne to Olson and Fenellosa and Pound, sought to

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achieve. Such a movement proposes both a different mode of knowing the world, and a different way of ordering it, with those two categories being far from distinct. By returning to ‘the principal’ of names, ‘[w]e should come to the other thing, the in- | fluence of terminal systems, from there’ (‘The Numbers’, 80–1). The ‘terminal systems’ of capitalized modernity will, in this vision, be replaced by an equity, wherein ‘[o]ne is each’, and the ‘state of our own | coherence’ will be manifest in a ‘new wandering | star’ (85–92). The wandering star, ‘the decisively singular star [. . . which is] the prophetic star of Bethlehem, an arbitrary sign overridden by a divine motivation’,12 provides the point around which the ‘state of our own | coherence’ will form, with the promise of a natural order – in which the divine inheres – to lead us away from the ‘perversions’ that ‘thrust’ us forward into acquisitive and debased individualism. This insistence on the primacy of names is the implied facticity that is carried in the Intelligencer’s ‘news’, ‘since what else there is counts as the merest propaganda’ (‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, 14):13 the heart is ‘a changed | petromorph’ in which pressure is registered as a ‘social | intelligence’ that reaches back across ‘the whole distance’ (15–20). This is a knowledge that is felt at the most intimate, subjective level of the heart, with consequences that reach out into the vast space of the world, gestured towards here by the geological time frame of ‘petromorph’ (a metaphor that resonates with the ‘cavernous heart’ [‘On the Anvil’, 21]14 in ‘On the Anvil’, a poem published in the same batch as ‘Airport Poem’ in the first Wivenhoe Park Review). ‘Essential news’ (‘Airport Poem’, 18) is both news that it is essential to receive, and also news of essences, of true forms. It is a form of knowledge that is recognizable in Pound’s description of the virtue of Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi preghia’, wherein ‘motz had not yet been divorced from son’, which allowed for a clear, precise philosophic intelligence to concentrate in the writing; this is a level from which Pound asserts European writing has since fallen away: Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup. A soft terminology is merely an endless series of indefinite middles.15

In Prynne’s own account of Pound’s relationship with Cavalcanti, he contends that ‘Donna mi preghia’ became for Pound ‘an act of clear and decisive intelligence’, the root of which lies ‘close to the heart of the Italian humanists’ attempted reconstruction of a platonic psychology’ that stretched back to

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Plato’s Symposium.16 Thus, the vision of cosmic love that acts as an intermediary between the gods and men, in which the ‘object of love is the permanent possession of goodness’, begins in the local and subjective appreciation of beauty and ascends, in ‘the proper order and manner’, to the perception of beauty not as a physical feature, or as a piece of reasoning or knowledge, but as something in itself and by itself, constant and eternal, and he’ll see that every other beautiful object somehow partakes in it, but in a way that their coming to be and ceasing to be don’t increase or diminish at all, and it remains entirely unaffected.17

This condition is the ‘essential news’ that love can afford a ‘proper order’ to the world. It inheres both in the heart of a live tradition, and also in the individual’s heart, since that is where love has its genesis. This ‘news’, then, can be rightly understood to constitute the ideal form of a person, their relationship to society and poetic form, since ‘news is the person’ whose ‘musical phrase’ is shaped by love (‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, 30). The sense of being on the cusp of deliverance or liberation recurs through Prynne’s early Intelligencer poems. It seems bound up in the eschatology of grace that is implicit in the ‘new wandering star’ of ‘Diamonds in the Air’, and runs concurrently alongside the Platonic resonance of ‘love’ in these poems; Prynne’s own gloss on ‘love’, wherein the ‘love of God for man is also free and unconditional, not part of an inducement or of a trade in benefits’, is supported by the fact that ‘the word-origins of free, dear and love are all connected’.18 Love is freedom if it is unconditional, which makes it ‘dear’ in terms of the risks that such unconditionality affords. The risks that inhere in writing poetry and declaring one’s love are ‘huge’, according to Alain Badiou, since both instances are ‘dependent on language itself ’.19 Such risk is figured in the poem in terms of ‘the thinning sorrow of flight’, which is then modulated into something approaching a kind of Platonic ascension; the poem concludes with an insistence that this excursion is actually a recursion to the condition of love, right back ‘to where | we are’ (‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, 40–1). The state of love, which is where we always essentially are, insists on a state of coherence, of physical and spiritual emplacement. Its local valence to the relationship between Prynne and Olson is clear: the edition of the Royal Society’s symposium is sent on St Valentine’s Day (Prynne conspicuously opts for this designation, rather than ‘Feb 14/66’ as Dorn dates it, and ‘14 February 1967’, as he dates a letter to Peter Riley reprinted in the Intelligencer); a letter written at

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the end of 1965 gives some sense of the intensity of this sentiment, imploring Olson to come to England: No exaggeration I am weak from the fact [. . .] you must have the whole substructure of the English island beneath you, I bestow this trivial gift, and what could come of it must be raised up, now, it’s not possible for me to this held to the page [. . .] this is love & wretched affection, you must hear that and I can’t do more than hedge it across the page.20

The poem that makes up the main body of this letter – subsequently entitled ‘Lashed to the Mast’ – asserts that ‘the needful things are a sacral | convergence’ (‘Lashed to the Mast’, 28–9).21 Ian Brinton is thus correct to surmise the poem’s origin in a letter to Olson, although it is perhaps too hasty to assert that this provenance is irrelevant since ‘it now exists in its own world and isn’t even addressed to him’.22 The poem retains traces of its bibliographical history, even when clues to the exact nature of that origin are removed from subsequent reprinting of the text, so that even though the poem is no longer explicitly addressed to Olson, it does not exist discretely in its own new world. The recovery of this lost or occluded bibliographical code by examining work ‘in its original sites of production’ insists on ‘firmly situating the work in historical contingencies’, a history that also includes the most local contingencies of a private correspondence.23 Reading ‘Lashed to the Mast’ in the context of the letter to Olson augments the poem’s possible lexical and thematic range, and also suggests a specific – but not necessarily exclusive – sense of who the ‘you’ and ‘I’ of the penultimate line are. The consequences of this naming are not merely local, however, but fully consistent with a late modernist tradition of correspondence that sought to fashion an ideal relationship predicated on love: the emotional pitch of Prynne’s letter to Olson is reminiscent of moments in Creeley and Olson’s correspondence, when for instance Creeley wrote to Olson insisting that ‘Jesus/O/I ask nothing, absolutely, nothing from you but that you stay within reach: letters – let’s build this thing. To sense. I mean actual’.24 This ‘thing’ refers both to their shared sense of a new poetics and the ‘biz of publishing’, and also the ‘letters’ themselves that form the basis of their correspondence – a correspondence that is itself indissoluble from their articulation of a new poetics. The intensity of this correspondence was, as Libbie Rifkin has described it, ‘a strategic response to the forces of isolation’25 – an isolation that was both cultural, in the sense of their exclusion from the prevailing poetic culture and institutions, and also physical: the two men were, at this point, rarely in one another’s company. Its intensity also embodied the conception of the projective

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verse that took shape in and through this correspondence: Creeley’s dictum, quoted by Olson in ‘Projective Verse’, that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT’, first appears in these letters; the first version of Olson’s ‘Human Universe’ appeared in a letter to Cid Corman; within 2 years of Olson sending him his impressions of the Yucatan, Creeley had published Mayan Letters. The title of that collection denotes both the ostensible subject of Olson’s research – Mayan hieroglyphs – and also the letters themselves: the discussion framing the notional subject is opened up in such a way that the discussion itself becomes projective. The strength of the two men’s bond, however, ‘marks the limits of composition by field as a truly “open” model of community’, as their ‘homosociality’, as Rifkin puts it, ‘accords with their most exclusive and domineering tendencies’.26 The trust on which such an intense personal bond is predicated necessarily excludes others, since its focus is singular and consideration of others imperils the intensity of that focus. The possibility of extrapolating the conditions of such an ideal exchange – its reciprocity and the risk guaranteed by fraternal trust on which it was predicated – onto an exchange of more than two people is a fraught one, as the sporadic harrying of Cid Corman by Creeley and Olson testifies. Both men hoped that Corman’s Origin would establish the ideas that had taken shape in their correspondence, but the reciprocity on which that correspondence was predicated – the trust and risk that underwrote it – was not extended to those beyond the exchange itself. The value of the exchange was seen by its participants to be self-evident; within that logic, the role of others was limited to either facilitating its dissemination, or learning from it. This raises questions at the heart of the question of ‘making it new’ in the late modernist poetic that took shape in and through Creeley and Olson’s exchanges in the early 1950s onwards to the moment of The English Intelligencer. What is risked in an exchange that is completely underwritten by trust? And what is trust if it is not extended to something that could break it?

Braced to catch the recoil A shift away from the hopefulness engendered by such a community of risk is manifest in the prosodic, tonal and thematic trajectory of Prynne’s Intelligencer poems. Keston Sutherland has written that ‘Prynne’s moral anthropology of the consumerism of suffering, initiated in earnest and in violent burlesque by Brass, begins flickeringly to be tested out in the second half of The White Stones’,27 a contention that is borne out and enriched when the poems are read

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back into the context of the Intelligencer. The shifting tone of the poems in The White Stones can also be usefully considered in the context of their textual provenance and also to describe the shifting nature of Prynne’s relationship with that context. The Cape Goliard edition of Kitchen Poems acknowledges the poems’ initial appearance in the Intelligencer; there is, however, no similar acknowledgement in the Grosseteste Press edition of The White Stones (Lincoln: Grosseteste Press, 1969). This can in part be attributed to the fact that, unlike Kitchen Poems, not all of The White Stones had appeared in the Intelligencer: ten poems from the beginning of the collection had been published first in the Wivenhoe Park Review before the Intelligencer’s inception, and the final poem, ‘The Corn Burned by Syrius’, appeared in the second issue of Collection after the Intelligencer had become defunct.28 But the work in these publications is co-extensive with the ethos of the Intelligencer project, as it is deeply invested in the same questions about the possibility of a sustained, collective poetic endeavour. The Intelligencer community did not begin and end with the sheets themselves, but the terms on which it was predicated did, or rather, they were ineradicably altered by and through the nature of its run. It is this chapter’s contention that the run of the Intelligencer witnesses the disintegration of this hope – that is, the disintegration of the hope for this particular model of collective endeavour in which institutional models, such as the gift economy described in Chapter 1, and the late modernist prosodic models described in Chapter 2, were also implicated. Prynne’s poetry and his involvement in and relationship with the Intelligencer and its community is a particularly marked instance of this disintegration, in part perhaps because, unlike many of the other contributors whose work was still trying to find a voice, his contributions were more fully worked-out from the beginning. The shift that his work undertakes through the Intelligencer’s run is more pronounced and more visible, since it can be measured against the fully realized aesthetic with which Prynne’s early Intelligencer work began. The catalytic influence this exchange had on Prynne’s writing may be traced in the high volume of poems written during the run of the Intelligencer and its attendant exchanges, unmatched in terms of the volume of production by any other period in his career. Prynne gives a sense of the Intelligencer exchange’s catalysing effect in a letter to Dorn from January 1966, written just as the Intelligencer begins: I have just written another long piece, almost straight off, and can really feel the flow now beginning to be an actual thing. Like they say, strength: I begin to feel like a muscle-man, and the relief of for the first time some confidence in this profession.29

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The terms of this letter are consistent with the emphasis on energy described in the previous chapter. The chronological order of the appearance of Prynne’s poetry in the Intelligencer bears witness first to the remarkable outburst of poetry facilitated in some part by these exchanges, and also the ways in which these exchanges changed: reading the poetry as it appears in the Intelligencer is to trace a trajectory from hopefulness to disillusion with this particular model of poetic community and language inherent in the Intelligencer’s founding principles. Set against the background of the correspondence reprinted in the Intelligencer, most particularly Prynne’s letter of 27 December 1966, it becomes clear that Prynne’s growing frustration with the Intelligencer catalyses the development of a poetry which becomes increasingly averse to the forms of thetic insistence that had shaped the earlier work, and is a significant factor in determining the forms of the later Intelligencer work and that which came after it. The early Intelligencer poem ‘Moon Poem’ might be read as an articulation of these hopes at their fullest. The poem presents the idea of a ‘community of wish’ (‘Moon Poem’, 37), which has clear analogues to Prynne’s articulation of the desire for a community shaped by and responsive to need, as well as the ‘community of risk’ that he mentions in his Intelligencer letter of 26 December 1966.30 The poem returns time and again to the word ‘wish’, beginning with the opening assertion that we are ‘learning | to wish always for more’ (2–3). The function of ‘wish’ in the poem is contrasted with ‘the mercantile notion | of choice’ (22–3): it is a ‘gift to the | spirit, is where we may | dwell’ (47–9). This oscillation reflects the ambiguous relationship as it is presented in the poem between the world to come and the world as it is, between dispersal and density that is caught in the tension between the ‘mere wish to wander | at large’ (43–4) and ‘the compact modern home’ (39). This tension is provisionally resolved by the poem’s fluent modulation between the first person singular and plural pronouns, where the speaking ‘I’ speaks variously as a part of and apart from the collective ‘we’. The modulation of the pronoun, its interrelatedness, resolves the tension between singular and collective into a reciprocal mutual exchange: Olson’s annotation notes that ‘the editorial “I” doesn’t speak the real me’.31 These dual, overlapping perspectives allow the poem to articulate a subject position that is implicated in collective endeavour, much more akin to the collectivized, interpersonal ‘us: you / I, the whole other | | image of man’ (‘Lashed to the Mast’, 31–3), even where it is speaking most clearly for itself, as in the call for the ‘continuing patience’ that is necessary to meet the challenge of ‘the expanse’ in ‘Moon Poem’ (11). This injunction, which is made in the first person singular, is modulated throughout the poem, becoming imbricated with the first person plural, so that ‘we could become [. . .] A community of wish’ (‘Moon Poem’, 35–7).

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The movement from singular to plural pronoun in ‘Moon Poem’ enacts something equivalent to the ‘patience’ called for in the poem’s opening lines, as it moves from the ‘personal vacancy’ of the subject position to a community that coheres around ‘wish’; the various meanings that inhere in that word through the poem do a similar kind of work, since we cannot be too hasty in ascribing a definitive meaning to them, and thereby the poem. This form of attention is an implicit demand made by the poem that requires a special condition of attentiveness on the part of its readers. This condition might be understood to be ‘the spirit | [. . .] where we may | dwell’ (‘Moon Poem’, 47–9): as we would go over and over within the life of the heart and the grace which is open to both east and west. ‘Moon Poem’, 49–51

The invocation of dwelling in these lines, and the suggestion of belonging to a rightful place, resonates with the references made in Prynne’s other Intelligencer contributions like ‘Airport Poem’, which insists that love ‘is where we are’. And this provides a context for the penultimate lines’ insistence that ‘These are psalms’ (52): both looking beyond the local instance of the individual lyric, and also inscribing them with a sense of the divine that inheres in the condition of attentiveness. And yet, having reached this moment of seeming apotheosis, and with no change to the aureate quality of these lines, the final line turns not on attention, but ‘negligence’ (53). It would be easy enough to gloss this final line inattentively, and to follow the line of argument that brings us up to it, namely that ‘the life of the heart’ and the condition of grace is available to us, if we only pay attention. But ‘negligence’ refuses this conclusion: this poem ends on an unresolved note, and forces us to reflect on its own discourse and our practice as readers. The ‘psalms’ can then be read not as discrete arguments for the necessity of wakeful attention, but as themselves guards against negligence. This can be understood in terms of the tradition ‘derived from Christ’s unassisted watch in the garden, of regarding sleep as a weakness on a pilgrim’s part, a slackening-off from the clear march to the trusted home’:32 these psalms will keep us awake through the ‘still passion of night’ (53). This idea is returned to in ‘Love in the Air’, which begins by asserting that ‘[w]e are easily disloyal, again’ (‘Love in the Air’, 1):33 [w]hose silent watching was all spent, all foregone –

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the silver and wastage could have told you and allowed the touch to pass. ‘Love in the Air’, 7–10

The failed vigilance implicit in the ‘spent’ watching, and the reference to ‘silver’, consolidates the poem’s Biblical resonance, with the latter allusion catching with the reference to disloyalty in the poem’s first words. The wastage that is a consequence of ‘[b]eing less than | strict in our gaze’ (15–6) is counted in the poem as ‘the day flickers and | thins and contracts, oh yes and thus does | get smaller, and smaller’ (16–8) so that ‘life does lie as a broken and slanted thing’ (25). Against this, Prynne insists on asking ‘for all of it’ (36), even as he registers the tenuous grasp of trust: ‘we let loose | what we nakedly hold’ (40–1). The sense of breakage is emphasized by this passage’s indentation, which is half the length of the preceding 34 lines. The advocacy of ‘breakage’ seems to run uneasily alongside the lamented disloyalty of the poem’s opening lines, but, as with the protean senses of ‘wish’ in ‘Moon Poem’, breakage here refers not to breaking a bond of trust so much as the social ligatures and habituations by which we are ‘bound’ to keep repeating this act of disloyalty and betrayal. ‘Love in the Air’ appears in the cluster of poems printed from pages 134 to 144 in the Intelligencer: they are reproduced in the typeface of Prynne’s own typewriter, and on a different quality of paper, so we can reasonably assume that these poems appear in a deliberate order. ‘Breakage’ recurs throughout these poems: in ‘Break It’, this is registered as a wariness of ‘the acrid wavering of language, so full | of convenient turns of extinction’ (‘Break It’, 17–18),34 where ‘the final touch’ with which ‘we are sealed’ (3–4) also chimes with the ‘light touch’ of betrayal that seals our fate in ‘Love in the Air’ (2–3). It recurs again in ‘From End to End’, as something that is in the actual moment dishonest, actually refusing the breakage, and your instinct for the whole purpose again shows how gently it is all broken ‘From End to End’, 9–1335

The ‘breakage’ and that which ‘is all broken’ refers to discrete if related entities; the former refers to an attempt, predicated on honesty, to break with an extant teleology; it is perhaps this ‘infinite desire’ itself that is ‘all broken’ by that moment’s dishonesty.

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A tension between singularity, which might also be bound up in the idea of quality, and collective endeavour is implicated in these poems, and in Prynne’s relationship with the Intelligencer community. The significance of ‘trust’, on which the community’s risks might be founded, is returned to again and again in these poems through invocations of the ‘heart’ and ‘hearth’: ‘it is an open fire, a hearth | stone for the condition of trust’ (‘Just So’, 15–6),36 ‘the heart, where we | are’ (26–7). This sense of firm location is played off against the repeated images of travel and pilgrimage: in ‘Frost and Snow, Falling’ – whose title Anthony Mellors notes is taken from the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Wanderer’, a poem that Pound had translated early in his career – it is noted that ‘Gregory did not | believe in the pilgrimage of place’ (‘Frost and Snow, Falling’, 49–50),37 since Jerusalem ‘is too full of rapine and lust to be | a direction of the spirit’ (51–2); consequently, ‘the pilgrim is again quality’ (53) without which ‘the divine family is simple mockery’ (58) and the ‘whole Pleistocene exchange will come to | melt like the snow, driven into the ground’ (59–60). Against the bifurcation of the isolate, shaman-figure of the wanderer and ‘the divine family’, the poems posit the possibility of a cosmic brotherhood, in whose glow ‘the dawn thing | suddenly isn’t tenuous’ (‘From End to End’, 20–1). The poems are characteristically tentative, shying away from any ‘moral excitement’ that might distract attention, warning that ‘[y]ou are too ready, since I | know you still want what we’ve now lost’ (54–5). Again, direction of the spirit is the imperative, since it would be easy to take ‘some side step, into the house and thus [. . .] out of the world’ (‘For This, For This’, 6–7) since ‘outside the door too | we are ready in one’ (55–7).38 The idea of fraternity is a recurrent one throughout the early Intelligencer exchanges. In a letter to Dorn written at the time of the very first issues, Prynne writes that he has recently listened to Olson’s Berkeley lectures, which he describes as ‘beautiful as scripture’: ‘Some fraternity – I never even thought of that before.’39 That fraternity is repeatedly returned to in Prynne’s writing throughout 1966, as he sought to articulate the kind of bond that he felt could secure the kind of community he hoped might be forming in the correspondences around him, of which the Intelligencer was a crucial component. He wrote to Olson in the summer of 1966 with regard to the final line of ‘Diamonds in the Air’, which contains one of the few amends between the typescript and final published version in its eventual excision of the word ‘brother’, an excision that seems to have been made at the behest of Dorn: ‘Ed tells me I can’t have “brother” in the Diamonds poem (penultimate line), either by will, trust, or current decadence of language’.40

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The copy of ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ that Prynne sent to Dorn, dedicated ‘with love’ and dated August 1966, seems to imply that the poem is a riposte to this criticism and allows us to recover, in a similar way to the reading of ‘Lashed to the Mast’, the very particular set of contingencies within which this poem was composed. (Prynne notes wryly that he ‘will remember that brother is not the word he once took it to be’.)41 Its appearance in the Intelligencer is equally emphatic as it is situated at the front of a batch of poems that appear to have been Xeroxed by Prynne from his typescripts and inserted into its run from page 134. The typography is identical to the copy sent to Dorn: it fits exactly onto the page that it occupies alone, save for the initials and page number ‘T.E.I./134’. As such, the poem is presented as a discrete entity on the page, stand-alone and self-contained.42 The poem offers the figure of brotherhood as a model of social agency in which it becomes possible to trust ‘to rotten planks’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 40).43 Only by risking this can we obtain: some other version of this present age, where any curving trust is set into the nature of man ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 5–7

The risk is to trust; trust resonates throughout the poem, and is implicitly bound up in the multi-faceted figure of ‘the brother’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 11). Broadly commensurate to ‘the ready world | which waits for us’ (24–5), the brother is both the figure that we are asked to trust and also that which legitimizes this leap of faith. We are ‘led to the star’ (40), the star of sacred convergence that is present in the Intelligencer poems, but the poem does not advocate blind trust as the condition on which to proceed; rather, it is trust which is figured as ‘an agency | of surrender’ (33–4). Just as the reader – who is implicit in the pronominal ‘we’ – must proceed with caution, as the poem revisits previous lines and passages the meaning of which has been subsequently re-contextualized or undermined, so the poem suggests that it is by these means that it is possible for the community to move forwards. Without the requisite caution, that point of convergence towards which the poem moves becomes jeopardized, ‘since no more simple | presence will fade, as the dawn does’ (15–16). Commodity and quality are explicitly opposed here, but the poem articulates the fear that these hopes of a new dawn may be assimilated into extant systems of exploitation and commodity exchange. It is ultimately hopeful, however, and its hopes are bound up in the model of community that Prynne sought

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in the Intelligencer. In place of acquisitive capitalism, ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ insists that ‘the divine’ is not ‘in any sense | Full’ (’In Cimmerian Darkness’, 46–47); instead, ‘the vacancy stretches away’ (47). This vacancy is not figured nihilistically; rather, it is the element through which our lives move, both cosmically and domestically. What makes this vacancy not just bearable but the condition of revolutionary change is the possibility of reciprocity, which Prynne figures in the image of radio telescopes ‘braced to catch the recoil’ (51). Cupped like ears to the cosmos, the telescopes are poised with the hopeful anticipation of reply; they encapsulate both the poem’s imagery of starlight in the vast darkness of space, and also the repeated references to the ‘equal limit’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 41). This is the point from which the radio waves return to where we are, and to which the poem self-consciously returns us after the caesura: Focus, the hearth is again warm, again the human patch waits, glows in the slight wind ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 51–3

‘Hearth’ contains within it ‘heart’, and also echoes ‘star’, drawing together points of cosmic longing and local intimacy of ‘the human patch’ at a point where thesis as both place and proposition becomes possible. The poem ends poised and expectant, from the most local, singular instance out into the vacancy of space, waiting for the recall that will bring the moment into the condition of love, insisting: we are ready for this, the array is there in the figure we name brother, the fortune we wish for, devoutly, as the dip turns us to the face we have so long ignored; so fervently refused. ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 54–8

The similarities between these final lines and the admiring note that Prynne wrote to Dorn after reading ‘Thesis’ are striking: [T]his is then RECEIVED, taken in as it were and I have some floating accuracy not easy to locate but entirely there, in the form of some unknown plain [. . .] there is a figure of trust in the metric we now have, running down into the dark.44

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It is the ‘figure of trust’ that is critical to an appreciation of how the local contingencies of personal relations shaped this poetry: by establishing a figure that embodies ‘those whom one loves before one knows’45 – and the disagreement over the connotations of ‘brother’ is an indication of how important the accurate naming of such a figure is – and in whom such a complete trust inheres, the risk of walking ‘rotten planks’ becomes viable: nor does this figure remain strictly local, as that which is ‘RECEIVED’ maps out across the ‘unknown plain’ and ‘the tides of the ocean’, towards those cosmic distances to which the cups of the radio telescopes are turned.

Our chief loss is ourselves The vision of cosmic brotherhood articulated in ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ marks the limit of the truly open community. Its bibliographical history situates it directly in the kind of intense epistolary exchange that had sustained the live tradition of late modernism, and its title implicates the Poundian project of making it new that lay behind it, with Odysseus’s voyage to the land of the dead in the opening canto parallel to Pound’s own revitalizing encounter with the Homeric epic tradition and his rendering of it in a twentieth-century idiom. This idiom was attuned to the materiality of that tradition, to the means of its textual dissemination, rendering – in an approximately Anglo-Saxon metre – a modern version of a sixteenth-century Latin translation of what Pound believed to be the oldest passage of The Odyssey. This established the scope of the open field of modern poetry: those poets who sought to write a poetry commensurate to its challenge – such as Creeley and Olson, Dorn and Prynne – were obliged to negotiate Pound’s example even as they sought to distance themselves from the aspects of his poetics that were explicitly aligned with the travesty of his political opinions. The importance that these later poets afforded to ideas of community, fraternity and reciprocal exchange is symptomatic of this negotiation, as they sought to establish an open field whose kinetics were relational, rather than controlled by a centrifuge. Things would be held in place and movement would be directed by the equivalence of the forces at play within it, as they alternated between grasp – the return to roots, the gathering up of available energies – and thrust or push out into the world. As such, this system could govern itself without needing to resort to the point of control implicit in Pound’s poetics. The question of how and by whom control could be exerted over this field was a vexed one: control could be exerted by the terms and reciprocity of their

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correspondence. But this did not provide a solution for controlling a field of more than two persons. The difficulty of managing an expanded field is made clear from the outset of the Intelligencer’s exchanges. Although this difficulty is in part bound up in the local clashes of personality and background among the Intelligencer participants, it is also a symptom of the problem of controlling a poem’s energy that implicates the wider poetic context of its composition and reception. This problem is, in essence, the crux of late modernism, and behind that, the whole Poundian aesthetic. The implicit hope for a new orientation of poetic language towards the world, and a revitalized readerly attention to that work, has been ‘[s]o long ignored; so fervently refused’, Prynne suggests, and the poem ends in the tentative hope that this refusal may now, finally, give way to acknowledged consent. If there is hope here that the conditions of exchange in the given world may be about to give way to reciprocity predicated on trust and the recognition of quality, however, Prynne’s subsequent contributions to the Intelligencer chart its dissipation. The Intelligencer is deeply implicated in, as well as descriptive of, this change, and although it is not the sole motivating factor in the subsequent shift in Prynne’s aesthetic, it is decisive. Prynne’s attempts to articulate a thesis were dependent on the existence of a community in which to articulate it; the Intelligencer was the textual manifestation of that community. Prynne’s letter of 27 December 1966 is a crucial moment in the Intelligencer’s history, as it expresses the clearest dissatisfaction with the entire project, rather than simply a local facet of it, such as the derivative nature of its poetry.46 The letter registers Prynne’s disappointment and frustration with the Intelligencer. It also reveals his aspirations for it – aspirations which turned on the key terms of trust and risk. The lack of trust and concomitant lack of risk he sees in its pages make it impossible to realize ‘the possible world’ that is intractably bound up with the desire to ‘[g]et back to the knowledge, the purities, the lightness of language, whatever it is’.47 Those are terms which revisit the (late) modernist prosody described in the previous chapter and its insistence on the recuperation of an originary energy and movement that would be predicated upon a community of ‘active constancy’ and ‘fluency of connection.’48 The trust in such a community would allow risks to be taken, in which work that strove to ‘make it new’ could be written, since such a community could support the possibility of failure that is inherent in taking risks. The disappointment that is registered so clearly in this letter is a response to the conviction that ‘the world we, separately, live in, is theirs: don’t ask me what this entails, I just have some fixed primary sense that it is so’.49 The world ‘we [. . .] live in’ is not ours, at least

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in part because we live in it ‘separately’: this is not merely an inadequacy of the Intelligencer as an institution, Prynne writes, but of the writing itself, which ‘so lacks its own loyalty, is so easily confident about how to end: just stop, pertly, and the other world will take over again’.50 The perceived disloyalty of this writing is oriented to ‘the possible world’, and the ‘active constancy’ of exchange that would allow this possibility to be realized; such an exchange is shut off by this writing, Prynne argues, which allows ‘the other world’ – their world – to ‘take over again’ at the poem’s end.51 The kind of exchange that Prynne anticipated would be opened up in the Intelligencer, where work is situated in the fluent exchange of trust and risk, would precisely resist the return of ‘the other world’ by sustaining the possibility of an alternative. The ‘other world’ is figured not as a distant utopia, but something that might be presently realized: ‘the orphic metaphor | as fact’ (‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, 101–2). Read back into ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, this passage directly critiques that poem’s hopes. The ‘community of risk’ is central to Prynne’s conception of the Intelligencer: it is a risk to trust in the ‘rotten planks’ articulated in ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’. Although Prynne’s letter cannot quite bring itself to renounce this conviction, its angry rhetoric – ‘and who am I to care’; ‘whatever it is’ – is still focused on the power of taking ‘knowledge | back to the springs’ (‘Diamonds in the Air’, 1–2), but it is unsure of how that power may be recovered. The relationship of Prynne’s poetry to the Intelligencer begins to shift in response to this uncertainty, and the Intelligencer is figured less as an enabling context in which the poems are congruent with the terms of the debate in its pages, as it was in ‘First Notes on Daylight’, to the object of the poems’ irate address, as I will argue it is in poems like ‘Questions for the Time Being’. It is possible to ascribe the falling away of Prynne’s trust in the figure of the brother, and of the forms of correspondence on which the late modernist aesthetic was predicated, at least in part to the circumstances surrounding Olson’s visit to England in the autumn of 1966.52 According to Tom Clark’s biography, Olson was affected by ‘sleep-lack and overuse of liquor’, receiving British poets from the ‘semi-recumbent, shawl-swaddled throne of a reclining lounge chair [. . .] obviously unwell but as obsessively verbal as ever’.53 Tom Raworth recalls being ‘bored’ in his presence; although in Charles Olson at the Harbour, Ralph Maud disputes that Raworth’s response is representative of all those who visited Olson during his time in the United Kingdom, a sense of disappointment pervades other accounts of his stay. While Iain Sinclair was initially enthusiastic about hearing Olson read at the South Bank in 1967, describing the experience as ‘an excitement, heart in mouth, to listen’, in American Smoke he recalls how Olson

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‘struggled to get the phrasing he wanted’; compared with Olson’s performance at Berkeley 2 years previously, there was ‘[n]o messianic delirium. The world did not tilt on its axis. Applause was muted’.54 For reasons that are not clear from the archival material available, Olson’s visit to England a year before had been a disappointment from Prynne’s perspective, and their correspondence never regained the intensity that it had reached in the autumn of 1965: in February 1967, Prynne writes to Olson telling him not to ‘go too far away, we are as it is already too much out of touch – we should not so easily be off-set by small difference’.55 Prynne’s diminished regard for Olson was part of a more pervasive shift in feeling towards what he had once referred to enthusiastically as ‘the newer achievement of American poetry’.56 In February 1968, he refers to ‘the American collapse of the last five years or so’ in which ‘the war has finally pulled all the hips and beats and cosmic queers into speechless order. Olson/Creeley/Ginsberg in ruins, no more adventures, their ideas of history wrecked by premature & indulgent paranoia.’57 In a note to Peter Riley, Prynne refers to Olson as ‘Tithonus of Gloucester [who] never, for all his touch of Pericles, had the wit to go home, shut up, & listen for the other music’.58 In the same letter, Prynne expands on his sense that the new American poetry was ‘in ruins’, writing that ‘we are come to a fault in the world seam’ and the ‘old Americans are sealed off in what is now inescapably perpetual youth’.59 Prynne’s disappointment with Olson was mirrored by Olson’s extant antipathy towards the English. In February 1966, just a week before Prynne and Dorn sent him the inscribed copy of the continental drift symposium, Olson sent Dorn a letter – instigated in part by a poor notice that Dorn had received for Idaho Out and a piece in The Times Literary Supplement on the Vinland map that had given Olson ‘a’licking where I didn’t think I could be turned’ – that castigated the English: Well, Ed, we’ve just got to push their fuck-faces right off the road – and these Englishmen seem to me still to be so fucking much better educated – and heeled – than their pluggish American counterparts [. . .] I hate their fucking ‘ability’!60

Although the subject of this letter is ostensibly the same literary establishment that the Intelligencer was seeking to establish an alternative to, it seems the subject of Olson’s ire was more general than that: Well, they’ve got my hair up – So please keep their shit, flying, will you please: I might as well find out, while you are there, the depths of iniquity – and it’s a

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pleasure to hear youre [sic] feathering their stupid intelligences – and political helpnesses.61

The ‘stupid intelligences’ alludes to the inclusion of Dorn’s ‘Thesis’ in the Intelligencer itself: Olson certainly saw copies of it, although he neither contributed to it nor was listed in its recipients; Crozier had to write to ask for ‘my English Intelligencers back soon please’.62 The gulf between the tone of Olson’s letter and that of those which Prynne was sending to Olson at this time is so pronounced as to suggest that some of the differences may have come to a head when the two finally met later that year. The ramifications of Prynne’s loss of faith in the Intelligencer becomes slowly manifest: it is situated within a wider field of literary and personal relations, and there is no neat stylistic divide into before-and-after in its pages. There is however a broad but distinct difference between the poems that appear before the letter of 27 December 1966, and those that appear after it; this difference also directly corresponds to the difference between the first and second halves of The White Stones. The shift is manifest in the diminishing frequency with which Prynne’s poems appear in the Intelligencer: in the 188 pages leading up to the letter, Prynne contributed 21 poems, or one roughly every 9 pages; in the 501 pages subsequent to that letter, he publishes only a further 28, or one roughly every 17 pages. This can be partly, but not entirely, ascribed to the increasing number of contributors to the Intelligencer which meant that there was more material; it is also worth noting that this expansion was something regretted by Prynne and led him, with Andrew Crozier and John James, to wrest editorial control from Peter Riley, which brought to an end the second series. Over the 200 pages of the Intelligencer subsequent to the letter of 27 December 1966, Prynne’s major contribution is ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, and a set of prose expositions in the form of notes, letters and a bibliography that establish a critical context in which that poem might be read. When poems do appear, they are no longer presented in large groups, as was the case with ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, but in isolated ones and twos. It is not an immediate transition into the search for a new style: ‘Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self ’, which is printed after the letter of 27 December, is reprinted in Kitchen Poems, and ‘First Notes on Daylight’, which again comes after the letter, is collected before ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ in The White Stones: both poems belong definitively to that more confident, earlier style. Once ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ has been printed in the first issue of the second series, however, the development of the style of the second half of The White Stones begins to become manifest: all the poems published after it in the Intelligencer are reprinted in the second half of The White Stones.

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The wavering of conviction in ‘the figure we name brother’ and the attendant ‘dawn thing’ is apparent even before ‘Aristeas’. In ‘Concerning Quality, Again’, Prynne writes that ‘I draw blood whenever I open my stupid mouth | and the mark is on my hand’ (21–2); the ‘mark’, it is suggested, ‘is Abel’s price’ (40).63 This reference to fratricide is made alongside the assertion that now ‘the names are a blankness as | there are no marks but wounds’ (33–4). The ‘names’, which at an earlier point in the Intelligencer, are figured in Confucian terms as the ‘beginning on power’ (‘The Numbers’, 77) and are the principal point from which we can move, have had their potency emptied out of them here: this kind of obliteration recurs more and more frequently as the Intelligencer continues, until in his penultimate Intelligencer poem Prynne writes that ‘the ruined names fade into Wilkes’ Land’ (‘A Stone Called Nothing’, 24):64 they fade into the blankness of Antarctic waste, ‘the eloquence of melt’ (‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’, 94) frozen in icy silence.65 To the question of ‘how we can sustain such constant loss’, Prynne states that ‘the world converges on the idea | of return’, so that ‘Again is the sacred | word, the profane sequence suddenly graced’ (‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’, 24, 35–40).66 Yet the promise of this return is controverted by the sense of ‘the future cashed in, the letter returned to sender’, and our ‘music’ is now ‘in the past tense’ (43, 52): love is no longer coming back to where we are, but where we were. The possibility of ‘coming down through prepared delay’ so that ‘once again we are there’ (10–11) is diminished. The poem’s typographic resemblance to another paean to thwarted revolutionary aspirations, Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, is amplified by the similar prominence given in both poems to ‘again’ and ‘once again’, and the idea of singularity and recurrence. Badiou writes that the risk taken in the declaration of love is so great because ‘it marks the transition from chance to destiny’, that is, from an arbitrary, singular instance, to something that is necessary and inevitable that decisively shapes the contours of a life: this is the risk that is underwritten by the Intelligencer community and makes itself manifest in the assertion that ‘once’ might occur ‘again’.67 Prynne contends that ‘return’ functions not in the sense of the ‘recoil’ that ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ ends braced in readiness for, but the return of an unopened letter – analogous, perhaps, with the neglect of the Intelligencer’s envelopes. This is the return of an unfulfilled promise, the rejection of it as an unwanted gift; the auxiliary sense of ‘again’, of a future being ‘cashed in’, is return in the sense of profit, of the sacral ‘again’ being reduced to a material or financial gain. The poem acts as an attempt to come to terms with this realization that ‘[o]ur chief | loss is ourselves’ (44–9).

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The shift is visible in the poems’ appearance on the page too: gone is the wandering margin of Olsonian open form composition. In its place is a more severe form of long, unbroken blocks of verse. This typographic shift is matched by a tonal shift which moves away from the aureate symbolism of ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ towards something darker and more scabrous. These poems – ‘Foot and Mouth’, ‘Star Damage at Home’, ‘One Way at any Time’, ‘Acquisition of Love’, ‘Questions for the Time Being’, ‘Starvation/Dream’, ‘Smaller than the Radius of a Planet’ and ‘Crown’ – are scattered throughout the end of The White Stones, and appear exclusively in the final 150 pages of the Intelligencer’s run: Each one drawn in by promise recalled, just as the day itself unlocks the white stone. ‘Star Damage at Home’, 9–1168

The ‘recalled’ promise of the earlier Intelligencer poems is both something that has been ‘recalled’, in the sense of something being withdrawn, and also something that, from this present point, can only be remembered. It is this shift that Anthony Mellors describes as the later White Stones poems’ ‘increasing tendency towards a poetic that displays non-identical forms of reference’, so that there is a shift in emphasis towards ‘the conditions of being, rather than on a transcendental Being, [which] implies that the divine has already been divested of its univocal nature’.69 This divestment of univocal being – that is, of a coherent and originary point of the sort posited in Prynne’s earlier Intelligencer poems, and more broadly in the live tradition of late modernism outlined in the previous chapter which traces its lineage back through Olson to Pound – can be traced through the sidereal imagery of these poems. In the early Intelligencer poems, it is in ‘the new wandering star’ that we can assume ‘the | state of our own | coherence’ (‘The Numbers’, 87–92); that is, the star is central to what, in Mellors’s terms, could be described as an ‘identical’ form of reference, since it is constitutive of an identity. This sense of identity and cohesion persists through into ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, in which we are ‘led to the star, trusting to rotten planks’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 40): trust and risk remain terms in which we can forge a new identity. By the later poems, however, this trust has been breached, and there is instead a refusal to ‘be led’ by either the meaning of ‘my | tinsel past’ or the ‘fecund hint | I merely live in’ (‘Star Damage at Home’, 39–43). Starlight too is no longer ‘the | new wandering | star’ (‘The Numbers’, 87–9), but instead the ‘new torture, seraphic host, punishment | of the visionary excess’ (‘A Dream of Retained Colour’, 44–5).70 The notion of some form of celestial

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punishment or destruction is reiterated in ‘Star Damage at Home’, which asks whether ‘some star | not included in the middle heavens’ should ‘pine in earth’ and ‘explode its fierce & | unbearable song [. . .] like a glowing rivet’ (‘Star Damage at Home’, 16–22). This ‘unbearable song’ marks a definitive departure from the earlier ‘psalms for the harp and the shining | stone’ (‘Moon Poem’, 53–4): it shines instead with ‘embittered passion’ (‘Star Damage at Home’, 61). In place of the ‘slow change | like the image of snow’ (‘Moon Poem’, 9–10) is the assertion that ‘Destruction is too | good for it’: Fix the eye on the feast of hatred forcing civil war in the U.S., the smoke towering above the mere words splitting like glass into the air. ‘Star Damage at Home’, 43–9

In the face of ‘cosmic disaster’, a poetic song that insists on cosmic order becomes obsolete: in these lines, Prynne begins, tentatively, to work towards a form that is commensurate to such a disaster. This is visible in the enjambment between ‘the smoke towering above the | mere words splitting like glass’, which reads almost like a non-sequitur, in a poem that otherwise maintains a sometimes oblique but resolutely syntactic sense. At this moment, the poem switches to a paratactic mode: the violence that the poem describes as ‘the feast of hatred forcing civil war’ impinges on the ‘mere words’ of the poem itself, which begin to split ‘like glass’ under the pressure. This kind of rupture, I will argue later in this chapter, is the point from which the markedly different style of Brass emerges, one that exists in an antagonized relationship with the live tradition of late modernism that had catalysed the Intelligencer. The invocation that ‘we must have the damage by which | the stars burn in their courses’ (‘Star Damage at Home’, 56–7) poses a significant problem for a poetry that, at the beginning of the Intelligencer’s run, had been ‘with the least hurt’ (‘Against Hurt’, 23);71 but now, with the love for the ‘companions’ becoming more and more ambivalent, so the mode of poetic utterance that was predicated on such an idea of companionship and community becomes less sure of itself, and less capable of commensuration with the demands being made upon it. The risks that a poetry which is predicated on a reciprocal trust is able to take are significantly different from those that are taken by a poetry that cannot proceed on such solid ground: the damage that has displaced this trust in some fashion also replaces it. The ‘angelic song shines | with embittered passion’ (‘Star Damage

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at Home’, 60–1): this embittered song comes more and more to be encroached upon by the sound of cash as it ‘slides | & crashes into the registers’ (‘Crown’, 14–15).72 The ‘need’ that had once served to define the hoped-for community is now rhymed, in the short poem ‘Love’, with ‘greed’, a risk that has been latently present since the ‘mass-conversion of want (sectional) into | need (social & then total)’ (‘Die A Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, 99–100): the conversion of need into greed does not take place necessarily at the level of a mass conversion, but at the level of rhyming two monosyllables, so that the song begins to take some measure of this damage, not from the distance of recollection, but within its own operation. The ‘ethereal language of love’ persists in the ‘brilliant suspense between us and the | hesitant arc’ (‘Smaller than the Radius of the Planet’, 14–16), but it is prefaced by language of a different order, an unassimilated quotation:73 “The gradient of the decrease may be determined by the spread of intrinsic luminosities” ‘Smaller than the Radius of the Planet’, 12–14

This form of juxtaposition re-contextualizes ‘the ethereal language of love’, which can no longer be read as the place from which the song is being sung, of ‘where we are’. The break is not yet complete, however, as the poem ends with a muted affirmation of love, ‘one hand in my pocket & one in yours, | waiting for the first snow of the year’ (‘Smaller than the Radius of a Planet’, 16–18). As gradual and hesitant as the dissipation of love is in these poems, it is also inexorable. By the time of the Intelligencer’s final series, it is reckoned that love ‘is turned | by the mere and cunning front’ (‘Crown’, 30–2) – that is, turned away from any sense of ordained sequence; along its new course it leads us not to Jerusalem but instead to ‘the dark shop front at 3 a.m.’ (‘John in the Blooded Phoenix’, 5).74 This turn is so absolute that by the time of Prynne’s penultimate Intelligencer poem, he is moved to declare, ‘oh I’ll trust anything’ (‘A Stone Called Nothing’, 42).

An alien image, home deferred Anthony Mellors argues that the late Intelligencer poem ‘Questions for the Time Being’ shows Prynne ‘on the ropes [. . .] the whole diatribe is just, well, too personal’, that it shows him ‘struggling to overcome his residual allegiance to the Olsonian ethic’,75 that is, the impetus towards thetic utterance. Prynne’s

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Intelligencer poems do not end at this moment of impasse, however. As I suggested earlier, the style that became associated with Brass is present in germinal form in some of these later poems. Its evolution is complex, however, and presents a far from neat teleology: ‘As It Were an Attendant’, for example, a poem that anticipates the style of Brass perhaps more fully than any other single Intelligencer poem, was written some 6 months before the worksheet’s cessation. It was first printed in red ink on pages 548–9 of the Intelligencer, in the so-called Palace Revolution Issue that was assembled in the aftermath of Peter Riley’s deposition from the editorship of the Intelligencer and distributed in early December 1967. A version of the poem in the Fales archive of the Intelligencer is dated in Prynne’s hand as 23 October 1967, some 6 weeks before its appearance in the Intelligencer. This does not obviate any relationship between the fracas surrounding Riley’s removal by Prynne, Crozier and John James and the poem’s dissonant style, since the dissatisfaction with Riley’s editorship of the Intelligencer significantly predates his eventual removal. Prynne was vocal in expressing his dissatisfaction about the Intelligencer in the months leading up to Riley’s removal, both to Riley himself and to Andrew Crozier. As early as June 1967, he writes to Riley to inform him that ‘[t]his most recent one holds little of interest to me as far as I can see’, referring to its ‘somewhat parochial and second-hand youthfulness’.76 By September, Prynne’s reaction to the latest issue is ‘depressed: it seems a weak assemblage, mostly midget fiction or would-be lyric gestures’.77 A letter to Crozier dated 26 November 1967 describes ‘the latest EI as shockingly pedestrian & worthless, and I have written to Peter to tell him so’: he urges Crozier to take control of the worksheet, since the anaemia of its exchange ‘really is pernicious’ and he is unprepared to carry its ‘useless dead weight around my ankles’.78 There was also a brief cooling of relations between Prynne and Dorn at this time, following on from the latter’s juxtaposition of Prynne’s name with Donald Davie’s in the dedication to The North Atlantic Turbine. As Dorn wrote to Charles Olson on the same date as the Fales typescript of ‘As It Were an Attendant’, ‘Mr Prynne is cool to me because of the juxtaposition of his name and Herr Davie, Tom Raworth of course doesn’t give a shit either way’.79 A letter written a fortnight earlier is even more forthright, as Dorn claims that Prynne ‘really is an archivist in the sense that he can’t get to it anyway’, and accordingly the Intelligencer ‘wld seem to be the proper microscope’.80 The breach was a temporary one, but seems to have been no less deeply felt because of this: the sum of their correspondence through the early 1960s speaks of an intense sense of friendship – brotherhood, even. In a note tellingly published in the ‘ghost’ issue of the Intelligencer, Prynne is moved ‘to state quite

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clearly & without question, I decline the offer of assistance with the superlative vision’: in place of ‘the figure we name brother’ of ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, he now posits ‘my own figure, and the stately non-involvement of people in the street’.81 This shift would seem to be confirmed by the tone of another letter sent to Olson, in October of that year, which articulates a sense of the profound and even violent disappointment of the dream of a restored Pangaea. Prynne refers regretfully to Olson’s visit, writing that ‘we do of course both realize that we were held off, here [. . .] from what should have been the closing or reach over of a fantastic accident’.82 What was lost, or passed over, in this event looks back to the geological discussions that marked the high point of their correspondence a couple of years earlier: [T]he mid-atlantic cordilleras could have been ours, we could have stood without drowning or defeat [. . .] Instead there’s a slice of meat, severed and bleeding at both shores, and we talk of home.83

Prynne goes on to recount a recent car journey to London, during which he was struck by the impression that ‘[e]ven the rise & fall of the land surface was an alien image, home deferred’ that served only as a reminder of ‘what, by now, we uniquely should already have had’, before reflecting on the condition of some of those writers like Crozier, Temple, Creeley and Dorn who had been central to the Intelligencer’s history.84 The letter is signed simply ‘Jeremy’, where the letters of a more fruitful period of their exchange had invariably been signed ‘love, Jeremy’: this small detail stands in metonymically for the terms by which the transatlantic relationship had shifted by this time. The love that Prynne had believed could restore them to ‘the land I mean & which we should have’ has begun to pass: Keston Sutherland has argued that Prynne had loved Olson’s ideas as ‘impressive and beautiful’, and had ‘loved’ Olson himself for being ‘the person who had expressed them with such force as he did’: the letter of 16 October 1967 marks an early moment of that love’s disenchantment.85 Five times it uses the conditional perfect in relation to their relationship, three times in one sentence which describes ‘what should have been the closing or reach over of a fantastic accident: the mid-atlantic cordilleras could have been ours, we could have stood without drowning or defeat’.86 It is permeated by a sense of an opportunity or ‘a notion of what, by now, we uniquely should already have had’ that has, now, irrevocably passed, yet its allure is not yet completely diminished: ‘[t]hat’s the land I mean & which we should have, if we have to build an ark to find it’,87 a statement that has clear analogues with the assertion made in ‘Starvation/ Dream’:

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This marks a distinct break from the confidence that ‘[t]he way is of course speech | and a tectonic emplacement’ (‘The Common Gain, Reverted’, 25–6) which those kinds of geological and cartographical work discussed in Chapter 2 had underpinned: the possibility of ‘tectonic emplacement’ – and the attendant direction of speech – now seems remote, and the ground under foot consequently far less certain.89 The uncertainty that is attendant on the kinds of personal and ideological discord outlined in the correspondence earlier is manifest in ‘As It Were an Attendant’. The dating of the Fales typescript gives a clear indication that it was composed during the period that these letters were being written and that the Intelligencer was, for Prynne, reaching the end of its usefulness. Against this background, it is possible to recover some of the local urgencies that informed its composition: the scepticism about the ‘jabber’ of poetic discussion, the sense of belatedness and breakage and of the loss of love. The ‘sacred child’ (31) of ‘From End to End’ is ‘so quiet now’ (64): he is pale and beautiful he will soon be asleep I hope he will not thus too quickly die ‘As It Were an Attendant’, 67–70

By the time of ‘Love’, printed on page 651 of the Intelligencer, the child has ‘vanished’ (10), and Prynne’s final Intelligencer poem refers simply to ‘the lost child’ (38) and the passionless excursions of childhood. The small copse, water rusted in, an adventure! With which the flimsy self pivots in willful envy and lusts after its strange body, its limbs gorged & inert. ‘Chemins de Fer’, 43–690

The ‘passionless’ excursion recalls the final words of ‘As It Were an Attendant’, ‘without passion’ (72), as well as ‘the passionless table’ (39) of ‘Starvation/Dream’. This recurrent trope of a passionless condition becomes increasingly present in

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the later Intelligencer poems: this, alongside the disappearance of ‘the sacred child’ and the frequency of the word ‘pale’ – with its deathly connotations – seems to mark the distinct culmination of an extended body of work, a culmination that is refracted through the increasing stylistic distance between the desire to make it all cohere that had defined Prynne’s early Intelligencer poems and the increasing reliance on parataxis and juxtaposition of the later work. But it is not enough to identify this as simply the culmination of a style associated with The White Stones that will soon be replaced by that of Brass: this neat distinction that defines some accounts of the development of Prynne’s poetic is in part a bibliographical illusion that is consequent upon the publication of those two very different collections one after the other. By reading Prynne’s poetry of this period in the context of its appearance in the Intelligencer and the small magazines that followed it, it becomes possible to offer a much closer account of its development. Rather than a neat, deliberate and willed break between the style of The White Stones and the style of Brass, this shift is revealed to be far more complex: its development is one of multiple foldings and unfoldings. Certainly, its development is at times more accelerated than others, but the fact that ‘As It Were an Attendant’, which anticipates that change perhaps more closely than any other poem published in the Intelligencer, was printed some 6 months or so before the worksheet’s cessation suggests how, through close attention to the bibliographical history of these poems, it becomes clear that such developments are never sufficiently linear to be commensurate to the idea of a single, decisive break. Interesting continuities are carried through this shift, such as the sense of belatedness and failure to return that describes the sense of distance from the ideal of tectonic emplacement, without fully disavowing it: and late again – we can begin with the warmup about the politics of melody / that one, and please you say at once, not again. ‘As It Were an Attendant’, 13–15

The ‘beginning’ in these lines – which is the beginning of a warm-up, that is, the beginning of the preparation for action, rather than action itself – is simultaneously already belated, and something that has already occurred. The mythic consciousness that still inheres in the ‘once again’ in ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’ – which is also a mythic recurrence analogous to the Olsonian ideal – is literally broken in these lines, by the insertion of ‘not’. ‘Again’ is no longer the ‘sacred word’, but something to be avoided: we are left, it seems, with only singular and irrecoverable instances. The reference to

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discussions ‘about the politics of melody’ – couched in the dismissive tone of ‘Questions for the Time Being’ – can be read in terms of the kind of discussions that have taken place in and around the Intelligencer, in which case it becomes a sardonic repudiation of the possibilities offered by that kind of poetic community and its praxis. This sense is subsequently reinforced as the poem describes how conversation about ‘stars, starlight & their twinkle [. . .] sweetly subsides’ (17–8) into ‘jabber’ (21) until all that is left is a ‘pale & cheshire | face’ (26–7). The innovation of ‘jabber’ looks back to the earlier dismissive mention of the discussion of ‘the politics of melody’, and through that to the ‘scout-camp’ (27) ideas of revolution derided in ‘Questions for the Time Being’ as well as the praxis of the Intelligencer more broadly. At the same time, ‘this | jabber’ anticipates the moment after the Intelligencer’s cessation, which speaks to a continuity of tone and attitude that is also a point of focus for the shift between The White Stones and Brass, and condemns ‘the march of | the literary lancers’ (‘Viva Ken’, 10–11) whose ‘poetic gabble’ amounts to little more than ‘mere political rhapsody, the | gallant lyricism of the select’ (‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, 47, 62–3).91 This continuity is not a coherence but a record of the shifting terms of a relationship between, among other things, Prynne’s poetic practice and the community of readers around it. These terms shifted as the underlying principle of an organic community founded on a symmetrical relationship between trust and risk was eroded by the breakdowns and contretemps described earlier, giving way to a suspicion that such an ideal may itself have become ‘a satisfying means of compensation for what would otherwise be felt as too gaping a lack in everyday life’.92 In place of the gallant lyricism that affords such compensation after a ‘head-on’ encounter with ‘the unwitty circus’ (‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, 48), Prynne’s work offers a ‘discursive friction’ that works to displace ‘the subject of anthropological humanism’.93 The nature of this displacement is complicated by the shifted terms of the Intelligencer exchange; however, the hope that art might be threaded ‘back into the fabric of the whole, making it intrinsic to social practice’ is mitigated by the fact that the Intelligencer was itself a failed example of a ‘whole’ social practice, within which art could be intrinsic.94 Instead of seeking to reintegrate itself into the centre of a social practice, Prynne’s work after the Intelligencer moves emphatically towards the ideological edges of such practices, to the site of damage rather than a recuperative centre. The ‘particular direction and [. . .] particular purpose’ of Prynne’s displacement of recuperative humanism from this work is to establish the terms on which that work’s risk can continue when it is not underwritten by the trust of a community shaped by personal needs: it moves outwards to encounter the ‘too gaping a lack’ rather than back to the fabric of the whole.95

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The movement away from the consolation of ‘whole’ social structures is borne out by publication venues of these poems, the majority of which first appeared in publications that had their origins in the Intelligencer. Prynne refused to let Riley reprint ‘Aristeas’ in Collection because he felt that it belonged to an earlier moment in this social history: ‘I have no wish to see Aristeas in any false currency’, he wrote in the same letter that he described the ‘fault in the world seam’: ‘this is not a matter of time but of history and I would not want that piece of time [. . .] snatched up into some spurious notion of the present and its so-called temper’.96 He was, however, prepared to have new work published by him and others associated with the Intelligencer: ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ was first printed in Wendy Mulford’s The Anona Wynn, ‘Viva Ken’ and ‘The Kirghiz Disasters’ in its sister publication The Norman Hackforth, publications that were indebted both to the Intelligencer’s modus operandi, as well as to its circulation list, and were distributed within months of the Intelligencer’s cessation. Significantly, these publications were one-offs – ‘I prefer bundles & handouts every time’97 – rather than attempts to instigate and support a sustained poetic exchange as the Intelligencer itself had done; more poems that were eventually collected in Brass also appeared in the final issue of Peter Riley’s Collection, a publication whose inception came directly out of Riley’s removal from the editorship of the Intelligencer in December 1967, as Riley informed Andrew Crozier: Jeremy writes that he thinks the best thing to do now is nothing whatsoever. Instead of that, I’m going to issue from here a magazine. Which I think I’ll call Collection. About bimonthly. About 300 copies. No editorial intent. No orthodoxy. No free distribution.98

Prynne’s relationship with Collection was not without friction – Riley writes to Crozier again in October of that year to complain that ‘Jeremy has predictably refused to let me print Aristeas’ – but he continued to have work printed in its issues:99 ‘Air Gap Song’ appeared in issue three, ‘The Friday Ballad’ in issue four and a significant batch containing ‘Highest Tender’ (subsequently published as ‘The Bee Target on his Shoulder’), ‘Es Lebe der König’, ‘Royal Fern’ and ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’ appeared in Collection’s final issue. A close reading of these poems in the situation of their first appearance reveals something of the process and chronology by which the style associated with Brass took shape, at the same time as it reveals the teleology of this stylistic shift not to have been one conscious breaking with the past, so much as a series of revisions by which the earlier style was repeatedly modified and recalibrated so that it could be

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commensurate, or at least adequate, to the greatly different social relations in which it now took shape. Anthony Mellors’s characterization of this poetry as ‘overdetermined [and] schizoid’100 is particularly useful in thinking through this shift: if the earlier Intelligencer poems had sought to instigate a coherence that relied not on the authoritarian Poundian artifex but instead on the figure of the brother as a response to the question of ‘what size we’re in’, and on the trust and love that is implicit in such a relationship, these poems mark the dissolution of such confidence in that figure. Rather than the coherence with another self that is implicit in the fraternal relationship, these poems stress the impossibility of such coherence; the sacred child who becomes lost in the final Intelligencer poems is refigured here as ‘the cruel child’ in ‘The Friday Ballad’, taken up ‘into the clouds [. . .] for protection’, leaving us behind ‘with nothing that’s not our own’ (‘The Friday Ballad’, 25–6, 30).101 This approximates a sense of disinheritance, which corroborates a sense of moving away from the lineage of late modernist poetics that reaches back through Olson to Pound: the early moments in the Intelligencer exchange had worked explicitly to situate its work in this tradition, but this desire for emplacement was disappointed. The figure of the brother has been replaced by a grotesque father figure whose ‘herb-set teeth are impossible’ (‘The Bee Target on his Shoulder’, 18):102 ‘Do not love this man’ (14), the poem states, before relating how ‘[t]ogether we love him limb from | limb’ (14, 50–1) and finally imploring us to ‘[l]ove him, in le silence de nuits, l’horreur des cimetieres’ (84). Such a relation is grossly bathetic, an inversion of the significance given to mantic excursion in ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. The title of ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ is another such instance that confirms this voiding of significance, an ironic invocation of shamanic ecstasy. ‘You may have noticed’, Prynne wrote to Dorn in 1971, that the incomparably noble M. Poher, whose tragic antics in the French presidential election were so brutally mis-reported, reincarnated himself as Edward Heath and was triumphantly embraced by the British populace.103

Where once it was the healing figure of the shaman that would be embraced by the populace, now it is figures like Poher and Heath: Precious vacancy pales in this studious form, the stupid slow down & become wise with inertia ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 5–7104

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Instead of ‘the | state of our own | coherence’ (‘The Numbers’, 90–2), it is a ‘precious vacancy’ that ‘pales’ in the ‘studious’ and bathetic figure of Heath. Fragments of the Intelligencer lexicon persist, but the dream is now in ‘sepia’, and although ‘the wish is green in season’, this lyric moment breaks off unceremoniously into ‘the cabinet of Mr. Heath’ (3–5) and the dream, ‘announced by Lord Cromer’ (18): his warnings of crisis revert to hillside and the market town: ‘the great pyrotechnist who did it all, red from head to foot’ – inducing disbelief stronger even than remedies. ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 19–22

This disbelief is manifest in the movement of these lines: although Prynne used unattributed quotations in Intelligencer poems such as ‘Frost and Snow, Falling’, such instances were an integral part of the poem’s synthesis of meaning(s). There is no equivalent moment of synthesis with ‘the great pyrotechnist | who did it all, red from head to foot’, which remains resistant even to the kinds of meaning that are available in Prynne’s earlier poems. This is the condition of poetry which takes risks without the trust that underpinned – or was supposed to underpin – the work in the Intelligencer. It is a condition of disbelief that is also a condition of indiscriminate belief – ‘we trust all | that we hear’ (‘Air Gap Song’, 33–4)105 – which is itself a continuation of the ‘oh I’ll trust anything’ in ‘A Stone Called Nothing’. This is the kind of ‘schizoid’ overdetermination to which Mellors refers, that of ‘the absolute perception’ (‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 69): there can only be the condition of absolute belief, or absolute disbelief. This is a condition of ‘[e]uphoric gloom’, wherein: Comic disbelief fractures the glottis, glottal pauses, nothing is in high season & your tender looks are frankly incredible ‘Viva Ken’, 16–20

The organs of speech are shattered by this disbelief so that even the prospect of intimacy – ‘your tender looks’ – is now ‘frankly incredible’. This sense of a catastrophic impediment to language, to communication and song, is present throughout these poems that immediately follow the cessation of the Intelligencer, but it is registered bathetically in the poetry, compared with the pathos of earlier

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work such as ‘Moon Poem’. In the Vancouver reading of 1 August 1971, Prynne comments on the shift between the kind of poetry he was writing in Kitchen Poems and this later style, noting that the earlier work was ‘optimistic about the possibility of at least saying what [he] thought about [. . .] certain possibilities of the human community on the planet’.106 This optimism dissipated as Prynne came to believe that the terms used for the political ‘produced a kind of grave throttling in the speaker’s throat [. . .] an unmistakable choking sensation in the glottis’ and made it necessary, in order to go on writing a political poetry, to develop a poetic language of ‘attenuation’.107 This attenuation describes the relationship between words and meaning, too, stretching out the links between the two instead of attempting to integrate them. Just as the quotation in these later poems functions differently to these earlier ones, so does the use of numbered bullet points, as a comparison of the final lines of ‘Questions for the Time Being’ with ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ demonstrates. Where, in the earlier poem, the numbered bullet points had provided a sense of conclusion to the end of the poem, and were semantically consistent with the language that had constituted the poem up to that point, the bullet points in the later poem work explicitly against that kind of consistency, emphasizing instead the force of fracture: 1. Steroid metaphrast 2. Hyper-bonding of the insect 3. 6% memory, etc. ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, 59–61108

The force of this fracture is such that the possibility of the kind of univocal song imagined in the earlier Intelligencer poems – which, at an earlier point in the history of its community, had been imagined to be commensurate to the restoration of the North Atlantic tectonic drift – is seriously diminished. In ‘The Friday Ballad’, ‘the | birds are so witty with the green moss’ (‘The Friday Ballad’, 5–6): their ‘wit’ seems to be a deliberate diminution of the kind of ‘intelligence’ described at the beginning of this chapter, at the same time as it holds within it something of the cadence of bird-song. Its rhyme later in the poem with ‘ditty’ – ‘[t]he cinnabar moth commences his song – a | sentimental ditty devoid of malice’ (19–20) – compounds this sense of diminution: songs are now little more than ditties. The -y suffix also subtly suggests this sense of falling away, both aurally and etymologically: at the same time that it denotes ‘having the qualities of ’, it has also ‘come to express much the same notion as -ish’, that is, bearing a likeness to an original.109 There are also commonalities with other works of this period, with ‘The Kirghiz Disasters’, for instance, in which ‘the battalion

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choir make twits and observe | the coins unblemished descent’ (‘The Kirghiz Disasters’, 86–7)110 and the assertion that ‘you | shrilled unwittingly in the 3rd chorus’ (‘The Bee Target on his Shoulder’, 31–2). This effects a disruption of late modernist eloquence: such disordering is linked to the ‘formal derangement of | the species’ (‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, 3–4) and the cost of ‘some payment about time again and how | “can sequence conduce” to order’ (17–18): A patch of wanting is not singing successfully, the adverbs of a spate are too like, well, écriture fatale. ‘The Bee Target on his Shoulder’, 61–4

This marks the end of ‘the | prime order | of front and reason’ and the ‘strict order of love’ (58–60, 79): the restoration of an original condition is made synonymous with a deathly writing and disavowed. The confidence in that origin, and in the figure of trust, has given way to an emphasis on likeness, or rather, ‘too like’. To be too much of a likeness might be, in this sense, to affirm the ultimate distinction between that likeness and its original, that is, ‘the distance of being so’ (‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 55). ‘Being so’ becomes absolute, more so than ‘being right’: but what is meant by ‘being so’? I take it to function primarily in two distinct but complementary ways: first, in the sense of ‘Just So’, with its connotation of equivalence, poise and balance, so that ‘being so’ is the condition of ‘being as we are’; second, it can also function as a fractured remnant of speech, where the ‘so’ acts as a modifier, increasing intensity, in which case our ‘being so’ connotes an interrupted energy, of unfulfilled articulation, of incommensuration. This paradox – wherein a state of satisfaction is inextricably bound up with its exact opposite – is the condition of ‘the climax community | of the dream’ (53–4). Such a community is the inverse of the ‘community of wish’ (37) alluded to in ‘Moon Poem’: wish is sustained dream, climax its fulfilment, which is also its end. Its fulfilment is not the desired one or even a communal one, but rather a moment of joy self-induced as desire turned back into a globe itself infolding like a sun, or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty. ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 63–5

The ‘moment of joy’ is not consummated since it is ‘self-induced’: a possible advance is ‘turned back’ into a catalogue of cosmological likenesses. What is

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made visible by this is not the figure of the brother, in whom trust inheres, but rather ‘the man in the street’ – a tired old cipher of political rhetoric – in whom the wishes or wants of the community coalesce into a single figure that is antithetical to the ecstasy of the shaman: it is as this figure of ‘the man in the street’ becomes ‘visible again’ that ‘[t]he distance of being so reopens’, a consequence of which is that ‘the possible seems | a paltry art’ (‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 58–9). In the poems written in the early and middle period of the Intelligencer, ‘the possible’ had catalysed work of cosmological ambition; from this vantage, after the breakdown of its central exchange, the possible is now commensurate with ‘a paltry art’: The horizon is lit with the rightness of wayward sentiment, cash as a principle of nature. And cheap at the price. ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 70–2

The integrity of direction that Prynne had prized in Olson’s ideas about projective verse has turned into ‘wayward sentiment’: ‘the principal’ that would have returned us to ‘the ground for names’, ‘the voice’ (‘The Numbers’, 79, 103) is refigured in the cash that is ‘a principle of nature’. This is a deranged, mutated nature that is very far from that described in Fenellosa: elsewhere, it is ‘“nature”, the counter-earth’ (‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, 37), an idea that is recurrent in these later poems and which might be said to stretch from ‘Starvation/Dream’, where we are told that this ‘is not our planet: we have come | to the wrong place’ (13–14), to a world ‘with so | much its place removed’ that ‘[w]hat is meant | makes its own small displace- | ment’ (‘Air Gap Song’, 16–17, 26–8), finally to this ‘counter-earth’. This counter-earth was not the end point of the Intelligencer’s exchange: rather, it instigated a new, more diffuse stage of its exchange, which continued at first through the affiliated magazines that came out of the Intelligencer, like The Norman Hackforth, The Anona Wynn and Collection; it looked on the prospect of a homeland from an exilic perspective, rather than as something being moved towards. This movement in itself was not to be regretted, as it opened up new horizons for the poetry written within the shifting terms of its exchange, even as it strove to come to terms with those shifts. What had been lost was the sense of the live tradition of late modernism and the aspirant community of risk that had been figured in the Intelligencer’s earliest exchanges and the correspondence between British and North American writers in which those exchanges were so deeply embedded. The fissures that emerge in Prynne’s work in the later stages of the Intelligencer and in the magazines that

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follow it register this loss as he attempts to write a way through it. Prynne’s work is not alone in working through the exhaustion of the late modernist poetic, however: in Chapter 4, I trace the shifts in John James’s post-Intelligencer poetry, which works out the problems of late modernism in a way quite different from Prynne; in the fifth and final chapter, I explore the relationships between the long poems and sequences that many Intelligencer participants moved into in the decade or so after its cessation, arguing that these sequences continue to work out – in very different ways – the consequences of the dissolution of the Intelligencer’s particular iteration of late modernism.

4

‘A relationship between the formal | & the unpredictable’: From Condensare to Détournement in the Poetry of John James

The dissolution of The English Intelligencer was protracted. In part, this was a consequence of the personal tensions that had defined the worksheet’s run from the outset. Beneath those tensions, or perhaps running through them, was the fault line of late modernism. The particular iteration of the live tradition to which the core Intelligencer poets were committed had, by the time that it was wrapped up in April 1968, become exhausted. The model of the Olsonian open field no longer seemed to be sufficient, a perception that was in part born out of a disillusionment with those figures such as Olson, Creeley and Allen Ginsberg whose appearance in The New American Poetry at the beginning of the decade had catalysed the Intelligencer poets. This disillusionment affected the intense personal relations that had been so decisive in late modernist poetics as far back as Creeley and Olson’s voluble correspondence in the early 1950s, and undermined the quality of trust that bound together both the community and the forces in the open field of the poem. It caused a profound shift in both the constitution of the community that had constellated around the Intelligencer and the poetry written in it. This chapter traces this shift through a number of publications stemming from the Intelligencer itself: The Norman Hackforth, a one-off mimeograph produced by John James in early 1969; the seventh and final issue of Collection, edited by James and Peter Riley and In One Side & Out the Other, a collaborative text produced by James, Andrew Crozier and the artist Tom Phillips. With a particular focus on the poetry of John James, I will consider the different ways in which this work speaks to and of the Intelligencer community, especially through its use of that staple of literary modernism, allusion.

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‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’ The problems that precipitated the Intelligencer’s eventual demise characterized its entire run and were themselves endemic to the attempt made by late modernist writers to map the reciprocal exchange of trust and risk between two correspondents out onto a community of three or more people. The history of the Intelligencer bears out this contention: from its beginning, it underwent various crises, even under Crozier’s early stewardship; Peter Riley’s tenure as editor proved even more controversial and eventually culminated in Crozier, James and J. H. Prynne assuming control over the worksheet in December 1967. There was general consensus that the Intelligencer had lost its way under Riley’s guardianship, even away from its immediate core. David Chaloner and Peter Armstrong both wrote to Crozier agreeing that the presence of Levi-Strauss in particular had been inhibitive to the Intelligencer’s exchange, although Armstrong did register his disapproval over the manner of Riley’s removal.1 The first issue to be printed after Riley’s removal declared itself to be ‘a bunch of poems which constitute a beginning or an alternative, depending on what happens next’.2 Riley’s removal did not precipitate a resurgence in the Intelligencer, however: Prynne wrote to Riley less than a month later stating that ‘the whole TEI thing should stop anyway, as there’s hopelessly too much confusion about the inessentials. The broadsheet does not get things done because how to use them is a fact not known.’3 The whole enterprise was wound up a little over 3 months later: a final note, dated 5 April 1968, states that ‘[s]ince the appearance of these sheets no longer seems to be performing any discernible function, there is no reason why they should not be discontinued forthwith’.4 The precise nature of that function had become increasingly contested in the months leading up to the Intelligencer’s cessation. An unpublished statement in the Fales holding of the Intelligencer, written by Riley and dated 27 November 1967 (about 10 days before he was removed from the editorship), makes clear that this was intentional, since he had ‘lately become uninterested in the concept of “poem” and furthermore that he is bored to death with & utterly disgusted by the concept and writings based on it’.5 The emphasis of the Intelligencer should be, he argues, the dissemination of information. The ‘new beginning’ that was hinted at in the note announcing the third series clearly marks an attempt to move from Riley’s conception of the Intelligencer’s function. A few copies of Riley’s final issue were run off (as the socalled ghost issue); thereafter, the Intelligencer contained very little in the way of prose or correspondence. If the editorial putsch against Riley was the beginning of anything, it was the beginning of the end.

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Although Riley was aware of the dissatisfaction of some of the Intelligencer’s contributors with the job he was doing as editor – he wrote to Crozier days before his removal to say that ‘co-editorship as such seems a perfectly good idea. Since Jeremy has been comp[l]aining consistently & strongly to me about the quality of the thing I suggested to him he should be a co-editor himself, which as I’ll probably be going to Cambridge weekly next term should be easy [. . .] I can’t continue alone much longer under such pressure’6 – the available correspondence also suggests that he was aggrieved by the way in which his removal was conducted: as Chris Torrance wrote to Crozier, Riley had been writing him unhappy letters about the demise of the Intelligencer.7 Yet the end of the Intelligencer did not mark the end of the desire for the kind of publication that could sustain the exchange that the Intelligencer had opened up. Although this exchange began to be wound down from the time that editorial control was wrested from Riley, and eventually reached its terminal point in April 1968, a related exchange continued in the magazines most closely affiliated with its core contributors. John James edited a second series of Resuscitator, under the title 2R, which ran for four issues from January 1968 to January 1969; in February 1969, he printed a one-off magazine The Norman Hackforth, which was followed by Wendy Mulford’s The Anona Wynn a few months later. Tim Longville and John Riley launched Grosseteste Review in the spring of that year, which continued to be published until 1984. Both 2R (under the imprint R Books) and Grosseteste also published chapbooks and, in the case of Grosseteste, full-length collections too. Even more immediately related to the Intelligencer was Peter Riley’s Collection, which was conceived in the aftermath of his loss of editorial control of the Intelligencer. These publications continue aspects of the Intelligencer’s exchange, and speak of a desire to keep open the exchange that had taken place in its pages. They also recognized that the Intelligencer had not fulfilled its original aspirations, and that this failure necessarily had implications for both the community that had gathered around it and the kind of poetry that was written within it. I have suggested that the antagonism that defined much of the Intelligencer’s de facto dynamic was in part a working through of the shortcomings of the North American open field poetry that had catalysed much innovative writing in Britain in the 1960s, with its emphasis on the reciprocity of trust and risk and the possibility of a coherent community in which a thetic utterance could be embedded so that names could recover their proper place. What took shape in the publications that followed the Intelligencer reflected on this failure at the same time as it sought other forms by which it might be possible to make it new.

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Collection is a case in point: it was conceived in the direct aftermath of the Intelligencer, and ran for nearly 3 years, publishing many of the writers who had been involved with the Intelligencer. Begun as a mimeograph, it moved to perfect bound printing by the end of its run: it also collaborated with other magazines, running a joint issue with Lee Harwood’s Tzarad. Writing to Prynne in relation to the proposed magazine, Riley made it clear that he did not want ‘to go it alone, or to set up a rival to whatever Andrew’s doing’; rather, this new project – not named Collection until the New Year – was facilitated by the fact that he had, ‘coincidentally’, bought a second-hand Gestetner duplicating machine – a big one. With this next year, I would, finances permitting, be willing & able to turn out [work that had been due to be printed in his run of the Intelligencer] in editions of, say, 100. These I wd distribute free to the TEI list (& perhaps a few others whose dropping I deplore, like T. Ward, Coulthard, Martin Wright) and give about 20 to the author, the remaining 50 odd I cd attempt to sell. [. . .] They could be quite ‘nicely’ turned out, without for a moment claiming to be ‘published’. (We have talked about extending into poetry pamphlets, which I still hope to see: beautifully printed etc but not on my financial back) [. . .] The project is also extensible, I’m thinking of America (tentatively or at any rate Steve Jonas [. . .])8

The letter expresses Riley’s conviction that it was imperative that the model of exchange and community that he believed was embodied in the Intelligencer should continue; the reference to the poetry pamphlets that had already been ‘talked about’ suggests that he saw this new project as a direct continuation of aspects of the Intelligencer. As for the matter of the Intelligencer itself, he wrote: Counter-revolution is likely to be utterly uninteresting as revolution, (as such), and I absolutely do not want to contribute anything to a chain of action and reaction which has already gone too far. But I am desperately concerned that distributive channels for risk-taking should be open. You’ll appreciate of course that even in thinking of such a project as I’ve suggested, in my present financial state, I risk the well-being of my family and my own mechanical progress towards a ‘career’. Which is perhaps why I feel this need for support, that it be done in co-operation with you and Andrew [. . .] that risk is far from frivolous & I only mention it to indicate how far from frivolous I feel about it all.9

The repeated emphasis on risk-taking reiterates one of the key terms of the Intelligencer, and is shadowed by another such term, ‘trust’. The ‘distributive channels for risk-taking’ describes the material conditions of the Intelligencer’s

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production and distribution and the expressed ‘need for support, that it be done in co-operation with you and Andrew’, speaks of the continued desire for a condition of trust, that in an earlier moment had been figured in terms of the brother. The invocation of these terms at this juncture in the Intelligencer’s history however makes their reconsideration necessary, since the reciprocal relationship between trust and risk had been stretched seemingly to breaking point. Prynne’s letter of 27 December 1966 had addressed this, criticizing the absence of a measure of trust that would make a community of risk possible. Paul Evans responded to Prynne, in a letter that was unpublished in the Intelligencer, suggesting an alternative understanding of the perceived shortcomings of the Intelligencer project that insisted the responsibility for its struggles lay not with the failure of its participants to live up to the demands made by the exigencies of such a project, but with the nature of those demands themselves.10 He argued that Prynne’s writing tended towards abstraction in both prose and verse, and responded to Prynne’s question about how the Intelligencer community ‘get[s] on with it’ by asking the same of him’.11 Evans’s reservations suggest that the problem with the Intelligencer ran even deeper than Prynne’s analysis, implying that despite its insistence on etymological precision, the nouns around which it attempted to make a community cohere remained too abstract to have any validity: if there could be no agreement on this, there could be no agreement about what the proper direction in which to proceed should be. It is a problem to which Tim Longville returned in a two-part valedictory note. The first part, dated Easter Monday 1968, was written at a time when it seemed possible that the Intelligencer might continue and describes his aspirations for what form this future should take, again framing his discussion in terms of risk and the desire for a community that is strong enough to sustain it.12 By the time of the second part of his note, the Intelligencer has officially been brought to a close, and Longville reflected on the elusiveness of such common ground, and suggested that the demands that its exchange had made in terms of the level of trust and lack of self-interest that it required exceeded what the community could give.13 The sense that the Intelligencer had no future begged the question of what should come after it: was any kind of community founded on its ideals possible, or had the failure to realize these ideals rendered such a project obsolete? Peter Riley’s sense of something having been irrevocably broken is expressed in a passage from ‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’, a long, unpublished elegy for the Intelligencer, in which the ambition to form a community of the kind described in Chapter 1 that is predicated on a type of exchange that was properly alternative to the available commercial presses

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is now openly dismissed, ‘because it’d be hell’ (‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’, 209).14 It no longer represents a version of the Celestial City, or tectonic emplacement, or the old nouns won back: those hopes have dissipated in the kinds of local animosity exemplified by Riley’s removal as editor. A community that had been expressly founded on the principles of trust and risk is revealed to lack either: a reluctance to risk the worksheet being taken in ways that are at variance with those anticipated or expected will characterize such an attempt as a breach of trust; once such trust has been breached, the kind of move made against Riley’s editorship becomes possible. But it was not only at the level of the Intelligencer worksheet itself that such a model of trust and risk began to be questioned; other kinds of support that had sustained its early ambitions seemed to have collapsed, a point which Riley raises with explicit reference to the ‘utter | collapse of America’: as we slipped down into the worst of winter it became clearer & clearer that C. Olson had lost his grip completely & R. Creeley never actually read the Mayan Letters before the proof stage & Leroi Jones went off his head thinking revolution was somewhere else than in the mind & got himself arrested & we’ve all watched A. Ginsberg losing his grip for a long time the way he now interrupts all discourse w/ a badly performed monodic chant & he’s getting fat & has too many camaras & Rt. Duncan lost his hold on everything that actually was happening or ever did in the comfort of his esoteric inclusiveness & now people who get letters from C. Olson find a note attached saying this letter must be returned to him to be collected for the librarian & if that ain’t losing yr grip what is? ‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’, 142–61

If the American poets whose example the Intelligencer group had looked to throughout the early and mid-1960s had so visibly collapsed – and the fraught personal relationships discussed in the previous chapter suggests the scale of the disappointment felt by the British poets in relation to this collapse – Riley

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suggests that the British poets themselves who had been involved at the core of the Intelligencer coterie were no better placed in the wake of its dissolution: & Andrew I can’t believe you’re happy teaching Mark Twain & Bret Harte to undergraduates in the potteries & you John, driving round the S-W counties flogging pin-tables & john you teaching ‘liberal studies’ in a liberal city that’s actually an inflated (or fly-blown market town & you john, I wonder, teaching whatever it is you teach to the children of the erstwhile working-class you can’t save them from exploitation, & who’s going to do the exploiting anyway, neither you nor I for sure & Jeremy Prynne hates the Cambridge Eng. Lit Tripos & can you blame him & Barry MacSweeney’s no fonder of the Ministry of Social Security than I am ‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’, 186–98

These responses to the cessation of the Intelligencer articulate a twinned sense of present malaise and a better future that had been forfeited for reasons that were not yet clear to its participants. The attempt to restore some sense of an emplaced poetic existence of the kind described in the various cartographic, lexical and prosodic discussions that took place in, around and prior to the early exchanges of the Intelligencer had not been realized: what to make of this thwarted desire would be worked out in the poetry written in its aftermath. This chapter will focus on the development of the poetry of John James through the Intelligencer and its offshoot publications, charting its relationship to the Intelligencer’s exchange as that exchange shifts and the terms on which it is initially established break down, and arguing that rather than abandoning those ideals, James’s work reconfigures them as it moves towards a very different conception of openness from that associated with the Olsonian open field with which the Intelligencer had been identified in its early stages. In the poems written by James in the aftermath of the Intelligencer, there is a movement away from thetic place towards aporic space, with an emphasis on edges rather than centres: where Olson’s open field had insisted on the presence and instigative movement of breath, the openness of James’s later poems are marked by an absence of these qualities, turning instead on absences and lacunae that reach an apogee in James’s collaboration with Andrew Crozier and Tom Phillips – In

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One Side & Out The Other. Yet this dissolution of the Olsonian field is not an abandonment of its basic tenets, but rather a reconfiguration of them that insists on dialectical instability rather than emplacement. The work that James produces between 1969 and 1971 openly reflects on and alludes to the Intelligencer moment. This marks in some ways a continuation of aspects of the Intelligencer: as I have argued in previous chapters, the poetry printed in its pages was often deeply bound-up in the nuances of its exchange, and the Intelligencer and its community were implicitly named in allusions to the community of need and the praxis of risk and trust. In James’s poetry after the Intelligencer’s cessation, I trace a vein of continued allusion to the Intelligencer, but argue that the work undertaken by this allusion functions in a very different way and in a very different direction from the work undertaken by allusion in the poems published in the Intelligencer. Situating this change within a broader history of modernist allusion, I argue that it is itself symptomatic of the shift away from the late modernist poetics that had shaped the ambitions of the Intelligencer. The development of James’s aporic poetics is in part a response to the kind of frustrations that had brought the Intelligencer itself to an end: the movement of James’s poetry through the Intelligencer and its offshoot publications offers one possible direction out of that impasse. If Prynne is, at the end of the Intelligencer, still struggling with ‘the specialness of the lyric mode’ – and the scale of the aspirations that he continues to invest in it suggests that he is – James’s poetry works counter to this assumption in its recognition that lyricism is one of the qualities that is finally synonymous with the fiction of quality, with the idea that there is a quality – whether conceived as ontology or as effect – left over after quantity.15

James’s poetry of this period can be read as an interrogation of ‘quality’, a word that had a particular and significant valence in the Intelligencer, the entire run of which was predicated on the idea of an occasion of quality. If, as I argued in Chapter 3, the Intelligencer community initially sought to establish a thesis rooted in the dynamic presence of place, a project that reached its terminus in the kind of frustrations voiced in poems like ‘Questions for the Time Being’ and the increasingly fractious relationships that led to the project’s termination, the trajectory of James’s poetry in this period traces one possible line of flight that goes beyond the limitations of the Intelligencer community, without abandoning either the aspirant communality that inhered in it or the pursuit of innovative forms that had catalysed it.

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The post-Intelligencer texts under consideration in this chapter – ‘Ort’, ‘Forty’, ‘The Postcard Sonata’ and ‘The Dragon House’ – all appear first in publications directly linked to the moment of the Intelligencer and the Intelligencer community: In One Side & Out the Other, James’s collaboration with Crozier, was published by the latter’s Ferry Press, and advertised in the final issue of Collection, which James co-edited with Peter Riley, and ‘Forty’ first appeared as part of ‘The Postcard Sonata’ in The Norman Hackforth, James’s one-off mimeograph. There are other links between these texts and the moment of the Intelligencer too: ‘The Postcard Sonata’ incorporates allusions to Prynne’s Intelligencer poems, for example, and ‘The Dragon House’ even names The White Stones; the collaborative ‘Forty’ is itself a reworking of a passage from Büchner’s Lenz that, at Prynne’s suggestion, James had taken as the epigraph for his collection Trägheit. ‘The Postcard Sonata’ also contains allusions to other texts, from the catalogue of the Abstract ’67 show to Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’. The nature of these allusions sustains a complex textual field, one that still implies a readership sufficiently adept to recognize these allusions, but the work that these allusions undertake within that textual field is significantly different from the work that allusions to the Intelligencer community had had during the moment of its run.

Tekne and the Intelligencer James had been involved with The English Intelligencer from the outset, and moved to Cambridge in September 1966, mid-way through the first series, to take a more integral part in its community. He had 14 poems published in it, as well as two substantial letters, a couple of postcards and a note, and was closely involved in the sheets’ production and distribution. James came to the Intelligencer with a thorough grounding in the production of small magazines, having co-edited Resuscitator in Bristol with Nick Wayte since late 1963, a publication that had, even before James moved to Cambridge and the magazine began publishing work by other Intelligencer contributors, reached out to America in a bid to revive British poetry’s languishing modernist heritage: the title of the magazine alludes to the desire, expressed in Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, to ‘resuscitate the dead art | of poetry’ (‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, 2–3).16 Its first series, which ran before the Intelligencer had begun, published a number of American poets who were key influences on the Intelligencer like Charles Olson – to whom James had written, requesting work – Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as young British poets who would go on to contribute to the Intelligencer like Jim Burns,

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Paul Evans and Barry MacSweeney. After James’s relocation to Cambridgeshire, a second series was begun with a far greater emphasis on the Intelligencer poets; this second and final series ran for three issues (the final issue was a double issue) before ending in January 1969, a month before James produced The Norman Hackforth. James’s own poetry of this period was collected in mmm . . . ah yes (London: Ferry Press, 1967), The Welsh Poems (Lincoln: Grosseteste Press, 1967), Trägheit (Pampisford and Cheltenham: R. Books, 1968), The Small Henderson Room (London: Ferry Press, 1968) and, belatedly, Striking the Pavilion of Zero (London: Ian McKelvie, 1975), at the back of which is a note that describes how ‘with the exception of the first part of “Talking in Bed”, these poems were written between April 1969 and May 1971’.17 The publications of the late 1960s were inextricably bound up with the moment of the Intelligencer: the Ferry Press edition of mmm . . . ah yes was circulated for free by Andrew Crozier to all those on the Intelligencer’s mailing list, and The Welsh Poems was originally published complete at the end of the Intelligencer’s first series (pp. 211–14). Grosseteste’s editors Tim Longville and John Riley were also committed Intelligencer contributors; Longville put James up when the latter first moved to Cambridge. Trägheit was published by Resuscitator’s sister imprint R Books and notes that its title was suggested by Prynne; Prynne’s Day Light Songs was one of the few other R Books’ publications. It is possible to retrieve some of the intensity of the exchange that took shape around the Intelligencer from these bibliographic traces but the discussion of ideas that took place in conversations between the Intelligencer poets is more fully recoverable in reminiscence and in the letters that took place around these exchanges. As James wrote in an open letter to Peter Riley on 5 February 1967: [F]rom my experience I can only say that I know exchange does go on & that it is one which involves me personally in six or seven hours of letter writing a week. It doesn’t have to appear in TEI in order to exist or to be effective. The synthetic quality of the exchange we’re involved in at this moment is less interesting because of that artificiality – all that duplicating of letters and sending off of copies with little notes attached etc. Contrast that with the uncluttered joyousness of those first letters in the Mayan correspondence.18

James’s letter emphasizes that the institution of the Intelligencer should matter less than the community around it, or that the printed pages themselves have value only in so far as they facilitate prompt circulation of the community’s work, which in turn concentrates the identity of that community. The terms on

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which he sets up his argument – that the nature of the current exchange on the page is ‘synthetic’ and ‘artificial’, compared with ‘the uncluttered joyousness’ that should be its ideal – reiterate the central importance of movement to these poets, of the kinetics of the open field. What is at stake in this letter, and ever more so through the remainder of the Intelligencer’s increasingly fractious run, is the precise direction that this movement should take. In an accompanying letter, James prescribes the course he believes that the Intelligencer should follow, insisting, as earlier, on the importance of the community. He emphasizes the term tekne, glossing it as a word not so overlarded with back-associations of technique as we would perhaps give it. It was a word applied to all lively functions that gave shape to the polis, as much to that of the cobbler who enabled a citizen to walk well-shod, as to the poet.19

Again, James emphasizes the ‘lively functions’ of social discourse rather than the ‘overlarded’ discourse of technique which is, he implies, an abstraction. James describes poetry as a social function equivalent to a cobbler, which resonates with the importance of craftsmanship to earlier modernist poetry, to which the wording of Eliot’s dedication of The Waste Land to Pound bears witness: il miglior fabbro.20 James contends that poetry occupied a central place in ancient Greek society because it ‘was the vehicle of their story, their science, their teaching’, a state of affairs from which poetry has fallen to its current perceived impasse because language has become, James argues, ‘used almost universally for prevarication’, which is the consequence of poetry having ‘been allowed’ to ‘drop [. . .] out of the public sphere’.21 In its emphasis on the immediacy and urgency of its social situation, the restoration of poetry to the public sphere suggested here is imagined along implicitly Olsonian lines: the polis is placed in the moment of its articulation in poetic song. An integral part of the social function of poetry is its ability to contain all that is of most integral importance to its culture: ‘one of the reasons poetry was so integral for the Greeks,’ James writes, ‘was that they hadn’t gotten so far from its primitive beginnings when what was desired was given oral shape & hence had to be memorable to survive & so spoke itself in a shape that was memorable’.22 This ‘oral shape’ is achieved by the poet’s meditation on ‘the multifarious things which pain or delight our species’, meditation on which ‘will have a conditioning effect on his choice of diction & the tuning of his language to the projection of the objects of his contemplation’.23 The concentration of a mass of experience into a memorable shape that James sets out in this letter recalls aspects of Pound’s poetics. Its insistence

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on concentration particularly recalls the notion of condensare, especially its insistence that the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cutoff thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly and memorably.24

For Pound, these roots, associations and familiar uses are drawn from the lexicographical history of the writer’s ‘race’, which, for the purposes of this chapter, I will interpret as synonymous with a cultural community defined by shared traditions and shared linguistic use. Pound goes on to describe three categories by which these associations can be used by the poet to give language its ‘charge’: phanopoeia, melopoeia and logopoeia. It is the third category, logopoeia, that is most relevant to this kind of community; Pound writes that it operates in some special relation to ‘usage’, that is, to the kind of context in which the reader expects, or is accustomed, to find it.25

The Intelligencer community is a precise and immediate example of the ‘kind of context’ to which Pound refers: usage that occurs within it in this context acquires logopoeiac resonance. It is a relational meaning, and implicitly social since it is dependent on shared usage, but also predicated on a kind of depth of meaning, since it requires the reader to have become accustomed to the specificities of the local context in which this usage occurs in order for the expectation and attendant recognition to arise. This is particularly so in the case of allusion. Allusion is a crucial component of Pound’s art and modernist poetry more generally, and it is through particular attention to the use of allusion in James’s poetry that it becomes possible to understand the ways in which this modernist heritage was radically reconfigured during and in the immediate aftermath of the Intelligencer. For an allusion to function as an allusion, it requires a dual recognition: first, a reader needs to recognize what is being alluded to and, second, the reader needs to understand the intent that lies behind this allusion. In his account of the ‘cultural politics’ of allusion, Michael Whitworth suggests that it requires the reader to defer to the author’s intention: ‘we are allowed to be imaginative in thinking about why the author made a particular allusion at a particular point,’ he writes, ‘but we are not allowed to misrecognise it’.26 Allusion works tacitly, and requires the reader’s active, intelligent engagement with a text in order to function at all; but the reader’s engagement is also subjugated to the authorial direction that

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structures the allusion’s function: in order for the function of an allusion to be fulfilled, we must know why the author has chosen to allude to it. It is along these lines that Whitworth differentiates allusion from intertextuality: the former implies a hierarchy of meaning, in which significance is controlled and directed, whereas the latter operates across a broad, horizontal field that resists such forms of control and direction and, in doing so, ‘dissolves the special status granted to “literature”’.27 I want to suggest that James’s poetry of this period shifts from an allusive style – that is, concentrated, logopoeiac, thetic – towards something closer to intertextuality as Whitworth defines it. This is a shedding of the late modernist inflection of the ‘open field’, which – for all the heterogeneity of its materials and its use of fragmentation – had always been oriented towards a redemptive centre and towards the promise entailed by the proper recognition of that centre. It was, as such, an allusive art, one predicated on recognition. The Intelligencer was exemplary in this case in the way that it first brought to the attention of its readers a body of knowledge – plate tectonics, neolithic burial rites – that could be alluded to; in doing so, it also sought to consolidate a readership that was capable of recognizing the nature and the intent of the allusion. But as the terms on which such a community of readers was predicated broke down, the use of allusion was necessarily reconfigured in a way that afforded the reader not quite the freedom to misrecognize, but to read references to other texts in such a way that they are not oriented towards the recognition of that promised centre. The promise of that centre itself becomes just one more locus in the semantic and cultural field of the poem.

From condensare to détournement The poetry that James published in the Intelligencer repeatedly alludes to the worksheet, its aspirations and its community; in doing so, it names the Intelligencer as an originary centre. ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, for example, is deeply rooted in the Intelligencer exchange; it appeared at the end of the second series of the Intelligencer and it contains a number of allusions to what had appeared previously in its pages. Its opening, ‘The metal of the footpath is | narrow & unconfined’ (‘On Leaving the Footpath’, 1–2),28 alludes both to the particular discussions of metallurgy that were stimulated by Peter Riley’s ‘Working Note’ and found perhaps their most cogent expression in Prynne’s ‘Note on Metal’, so that the sense of a metalled pathway might allude to the development of metal technologies that moved inexorably, as Prynne argues in

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his ‘Note on Metal’, ‘by varied but in outline predictable stages, to value as a specialised function and hence as dependent on the rate of exchange’, as well as, more prosaically, to tarmac.29 It also reiterates the more general sense of the importance of movement through landscape. The ‘narrow & confined’, ‘short & crooked’ parameters of the footpath – formally embodied in the terse ampersands and alliterative ‘hideous hangars’ – give way to the openness of rest, the fields’ ‘glossy yielded ripeness’ and the curved horizon (2–7); James sets up this shift across the line break, the enjambment at the end of the fourth line functioning literally to step beyond these limits. This pause allows the speaker to reflect on the landscape, opening out into the relaxed cadence of the fields’ ‘glossy yielded ripeness’ which leads on to the reflection that it ‘really does take on its curved | quality of extension from us’ (7–9). The curved quality of extension firmly roots this line in the Intelligencer’s phenomenological vocabulary of man’s extension into landscape; James goes on to describe the effect of sunlight catching on the contours of the landscape with the ‘same aplomb of intention there is | in the cup of a radio telescope’ (13–14). The lines reiterate the sense of newfound space and openness, as well as the essential constructedness of landscape in their description of a ‘hillock-shaped surface’ (10); it is not a ‘hillock’, but the earth’s surface that, at this particular location and in the eye of the beholder, has assumed the shape of a hillock. The seemingly incongruous simile that compares the reflection of sunlight on a hillside to a radio telescope builds first on the sense of expansion and relaxation that the poem has undertaken since ‘pausing’ at the beginning of line five in its evocation of the sun’s warmth on skin and also reiterates the poem’s phenomenology in its transposition of the landscape’s surface into skin. The simile also reiterates the poem’s situation in The English Intelligencer through its allusion to the radio telescopes in Prynne’s ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ that ‘stand openly | braced to catch the recoil’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 50–1).30 It is not a prerequisite that the reader of James’s poem should be familiar with Prynne’s in order to make sense of it: radio telescopes are a part of the landscape around Cambridge, an embodiment of cosmic enquiry of the University’s astrophysics department, as well as the Wilson government’s promotion of the ‘white heat of technology’; it can also be understood alongside the ‘hideous hangars’ of the poem’s opening, which might be read as standing on one of the many disused Second World War airbases scattered around East Anglia, or the hangars at RAF Lakenheath, an airbase 20 miles northeast of Cambridge, which is sovereign American territory and was used to store nuclear weapons through the Cold War; in this context, the significance of the radio telescopes opens

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up a range of discourses from scientific enquiry to the Cold War paranoia that was the photo-negative of the kind of North Atlantic alliance envisioned at the moment of the Intelligencer’s inception. These readings are not mutually exclusive, however: by identifying the allusion to Prynne, we are able to explore an auxiliary valence that can augment our understanding of the processes at work in it, processes that can be read back into the geo-political context outlined earlier. James’s ‘aplomb of intention’ can thus be understood in terms of Prynne’s telescopes ‘braced to catch the recoil’: that is its intention, and its ‘aplomb’ is a consequence of its openness. This intention functions through the allusion; the recognition of its intention loops the reader into the embrace of the community’s exchange, an exchange that is predicated on the idea of a gift freely given. James’s poem is a response to that call for brotherhood made locally in Prynne’s poem and more generally in the Intelligencer’s ethos; it embraces the value of this fraternity, and the lines that follow resonate with Prynne’s insistence that ‘we are ready for this, the array is there in | the figure we name brother’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 54–5): Alive we hold it all, the signals separately received are poised in balance by the achieved leap we are ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, 14–18

In this context, the allusion to Prynne – and the recognition of this allusion – works to consolidate the community coalesced around the Intelligencer, and affirm the values on which it is predicated. It is this recognition that is crucial to its functioning, in that it defers part of the poem’s ‘meaning’ to a point beyond our immediate encounter with it. It is written in a social moment, but this social moment is dependent on an aptitude and awareness of the poem’s interpretative codification: in some ways, this is entirely consonant with the Intelligencer’s praxis, which insisted on a reciprocal exchange between writing and reading. ‘On Leaving the Footpath’ is firmly embedded in the context of the Intelligencer, a consequence of which is that the space of this poem is striated, or, put ‘rather crudely, [is] consonant with Place and is largely the product of a certain kind of settlement or marking out’:31 the bibliographical coding of these texts offers depths of meaning, and not just intensities of encounter. Allusion in this poem names and speaks to the Intelligencer’s community; it orders and orients the poetry towards it. In doing so, it constitutes and enacts an open field of reciprocal forces

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that extends the field of the poem out into the community and the publications that shape the context of its composition. It recalls James’s account of tekne, of poetry’s function in making memorable what is most essential to a community; this function is cohesive, as James argues poetry’s function should be. It returns poetry to the centre of social being. In the aftermath of the Intelligencer’s dissolution, however, there is a fundamental shift in both the social order to which this poetry has been related, and in the relationship of the poetry to that order. References and allusions to Intelligencer material persist in James’s poetry, but these instances begin to function differently from the way that they do in ‘On Leaving the Footpath’. Rather than shoring up the parameters and defining the contours of a shared field of knowledge, these instances gesture instead towards new and indeterminate horizons of meaning. This indeterminacy works explicitly counter to the work that is undertaken by allusion in poems like ‘On Leaving the Footpath’. Instead of ordering and orienting a poem around a cohesive and centralizing impulse, and integrating it into a community, it moves along the fault lines in any such community, taking shape beyond the limits of intention. The open field of James’s post-Intelligencer poetry is shaped not by forces of cohesion but by the field’s constituent gaps, blanks, lapses and lacunae. This shift is visible in the way in which the Intelligencer is referred to in this poetry: instead of a centre towards which allusion directs us, the Intelligencer takes its place as one among a number of similar points on a level field of reference. Rather than being a poetry of allusion, then, this is an intertextual poetry, one that arguably ‘dissolves the special status granted to “literature”’, or at least stages its indeterminacy. The shifts in James’s poetic become quickly apparent. ‘The Postcard Sonata’ was first published in The Norman Hackforth. The date stamped on its front cover is 19 February 1969, 10 months after the Intelligencer had been wound up. The majority of its contents comes from established Intelligencer contributors like Prynne, Wendy Mulford and Elaine Feinstein, as well as some younger writers like Anthony Barnett, Douglas Oliver and Ian Patterson who became influential figures in the history of this poetry. The Norman Hackforth can be read as a sister publication of The Anona Wynn, which shared similar production values and was edited by Mulford. The magazines mark a continuation of some aspects of the Intelligencer project, and also a departure from certain of its key tenets; it is also worth noting that some poems from Prynne’s Brass have their first appearance in print in The Norman Hackforth and The Anona Wynn. The Intelligencer had sought to catalyse the poets associated with it into experimenting with new forms

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by providing them with a protected space in which to test out new work; what replaced it was a more diffuse network of exchange that took place in Intelligencer offshoots like these one-off magazines, as well as more enduring enterprises like Peter Riley’s Collection and Tim Longville and John Riley’s Grosseteste Review. If it lacked the centralized impetus afforded by the Intelligencer’s sheets, the network of exchange that superseded it allowed the poets involved to develop in more diverse ways than they could perhaps have done under the Intelligencer’s aegis; the impetus of this development can be traced back to the increasingly centrifugal exchanges in the Intelligencer explored in the previous chapter. Although these poets began to develop differently, their work shared certain family resemblances and the community that first coalesced in the Intelligencer remained signally intact – although, as I will argue, very much altered – in dedications, publications and allusions. Indeed, the history of the Intelligencer itself becomes, obliquely, a point of reference in some of these poems, as they come to reflect on the project’s ultimately unrealized aspirations and those of the radical moment in which it was bound up and culminated, like the Intelligencer, in the spring of 1968. An apt and early example of this is ‘The Postcard Sonata’, which can be read as a working through of some of the ideas and themes that were central to the Intelligencer. As noted earlier in this chapter, James builds the sequence around fragments of lines from his own previous work, as well as Prynne’s Intelligencer poems, extracts from the catalogue for Abstract ’67, reworkings of the epigraph from Büchner’s Lenz with which he had prefaced his collection Trägheit, and also Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’. By reconfiguring his own work in this way – that is, alongside the work of others on an undifferentiated textual field – James both places it in an historical context and also shows how that history continues to make itself new, suggesting new poetic forms and relations. The references to other texts in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ function differently from the radio telescopes in ‘On Leaving the Footpath’ however, and it is possible, particularly in respect to the Prynne references, to trace the shifting nature of the exchange around the Intelligencer and its after-life, and its implications for late modernism. The opening line of the second section of ‘The Postcard Sonata’ splices fragments from Prynne’s ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’ and ‘Love in the Air’ – both poems from the batch beginning on page 134 of the Intelligencer, that represents something of a high-water mark for Prynne’s involvement with it – so that it begins by recalling how ‘Fluff, grit, various royal deceit de nos jours | began coming home to us in 1967 Andrew’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 2, for Andrew Crozier’, 1–2). These lines recall a sense of shared awakening, the consequence

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of which is that – and again, James refers back to Prynne, this time to ‘From End to End’, which was also included in the batch beginning on page 134 – ‘the dawn thing suddenly isn’t tenuous’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 2, for Andrew Crozier’, 5). Significantly, the tense of this poem is the past, and the inclusion of the date – 1967, just 2 years before this poem was published – suggests an additional historicity, as if the poem is also taking on a memorializing function: ‘the dawn thing’ is now only a memory. Yet this reference is not so firmly situated and clearly directed towards the special relations of its shared usage as the radio telescopes in ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, and the terms of that usage are also less clear here: the intercession of the date, and the implication of retrospection, significantly recalibrates both the sense of Prynne’s words, and also the sense of James’s repetition of them. If the earlier allusion to Prynne had sought to consolidate a relationship by answering a call to brotherhood, the allusions in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ are not so directly involved; there is a distance between origin – here, Prynne’s poem – and its recurrence. Like ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, James’s poem can be read rewardingly – but not exclusively – in terms of a negotiation with the Intelligencer, although the terms of the negotiation have altered in this later poem. Its opening line ‘so, awkward lazy & indifferent, | I mooch along no tiredness left’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 1’, 1–2)32 might be read as an ironic reworking of the opening of ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’: ‘As you drag your feet or simply being | tired, the ground is suddenly interesting’ (‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, 1–2).33 The sense of purposive direction that is integral to Prynne’s poem and leads us into ‘the prize of our landscape condition’ has been replaced in James’s poem by ‘lazy & indifferent’ mooching; direction gives way to drift, so that: If I continue on my hands the pain I carry in my legs may die, fading to nothing as the scattered galaxies & nebulae merge from their nascent places in the endless drifts of evening sky. ‘The Postcard Sonata: 1’, 9–14

The ground is no longer ‘interesting’: the depth of meaning that it possesses is supplanted by the ‘endless drifts of evening sky’ – a line that first appeared in James’s earlier poem ‘Blues and Reverie’. What the poem loses in depth, it makes up for in referential breadth, reaching back to previous moments in a way that implicates them in the present. The ‘endless drifts’ of the evening sky

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ties the poem back into its opening premise of ‘mooch[ing] along’, setting up a kind of cosmic symbiosis – I mooch, the stars drift – in which our fortunes can be read in the stars, which is at once an echo and a distortion of the stars in ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’: rather than the fervour of ‘trusting to rotten planks’ (40), we have the impression of movement without purposeful direction, an effect compounded by the comic sense of walking on one’s hands to alleviate the pain in one’s feet. Rather than ‘the faint star’ (1) of revolutionary hope in ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, which might be synonymous with ‘the dawn thing’ (‘From End to End’, 20), these stars are, by the end of this first instalment of ‘The Postcard Sonata’, evening stars, which do not ‘emerge’ into the night sky so much as ‘merge’ collectively into ‘scattered galaxies & nebulae’, suggesting the elision of their individuated ‘nascent places’, just as ‘The Postcard Sonata’ elides and destabilizes the elements of its own textual ‘nascent places’. As the sequence progresses, however, the opening motif of the dawn thing’s starry optimism is returned to and reformulated. Unlike the sonata structure of theme, exposition and recapitulation, ‘The Postcard Sonata’ works through a sequence that insists not so much on internal coherence as its différance: its repetition of certain key phrases, images and ideas is opened up by the use of that particular form’s modalities which allow meaning to be deferred through the duration of the sequence – as much as it is from the vertical movement of lines down the page. The appearance of stars at dusk is one such recurrent and modulating motif; the residual optimism that lingers in the first instalment’s ‘merging stars’ is mitigated in the sixth passage: that soft starry ‘you’ & the tawny sky receding westward where the stars will soon appear ‘The Postcard Sonata: 6’, 6–8

The scare quotes around ‘you’ resist the easy identification of an addressee, of ‘the figure we name brother’ (‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, 55); the stars too, which at the point of the poem’s opening were already merging, have been pushed forward into the future tense: their light is now just to be anticipated. This dispersal continues in the penultimate section of the sequence: & the stars will soon appear in this poem like a politic image like little hopeless words ‘The Postcard Sonata: 7 a’, 10–12

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The stars have shifted from points of light in the sky to dark figures on a page; they have been stripped of all metaphysical, etymological or social meanings, and exist now as traces of text on the page. These lines’ insistence on their textual reality precludes the political significance encoded within the sidereal imagery of the Intelligencer poems: the stars are merely ‘politic’, which amounts to no more than ‘little hopeless words’, both in the sense of being bereft of hope and being themselves hopeless or worthless. The poem ends on a reworking of the opening poem’s final line: ‘endless drifting | evening sky’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 7 a’, 14–15). The coherence of the earlier line is fractured by this final line break: ‘endless drifting’ is unmoored from its position as a modifier of ‘evening sky’, undoing in the process the cosmic rhyme established in the sonata’s first section. What the poem leaves us with is merely our own ‘endless drifting’ and the (now starless) ‘evening sky’, where – related only through juxtaposition – ‘evening’ is both the end of day and a process of evening out which entails a loss of colour, definition and attendant points of longing. The repetition and modulation of the sidereal trope in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ functions in terms of Derridean différance, wherein the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not.34

The sidereal imagery in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ is predicated not on the understanding that it is a semantically discrete unit of meaning, a figure of ‘our own coherence’, as was the case in the earlier Intelligencer poems; rather, the significance of this imagery is repeatedly deferred through the poem, until finally the stars’ presence is likened to ‘little hopeless words’. This final presence is itself a final deferral, however, since it takes place in a simile. The simile suggests both equivalence – that is, of approximation rather than metaphor – and is itself formally a deferral, since the stars’ meaning can only be expressed by likening itself to something else, in this case, mere words. If the Intelligencer’s early ambition had been to continue a late modernist tradition inherited from Pound and Olson that sought to establish an integrated poetic utterance – a project that had at its heart a desire to bring ‘language close to things’ – by the time of ‘The Postcard Sonata’, this ambition appears to have reached an impasse, far from the cosmic scope dreamt

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of in the most ambitious moments of the Intelligencer’s exchange.35 The lines of Manilius that Prynne quotes at the beginning of the Intelligencer articulate a desire for cosmic order, and the divine role of poetic song in achieving that order; James empties that significance out, limiting it to a sheer textual surface. Although it cannot be read as possessing the kind of hopefulness that Prynne articulates in his Manilius quotation or in the sidereal imagery of poems like ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, ‘The Postcard Sonata’ is far from a pessimistically quietist poem. What hope there is in the poem is articulated in a very different way to those earlier Intelligencer poems: rather than being articulated as a thesis, that is, a point that is stressed in the poem, it makes itself present paradoxically in the poem’s deliberate absences. It is a kind of writing that insists not on an integrity of direction but a subversion of that kind of impetus to direct things that takes on some of the characteristics of détournement. As such, there remains the possibility of a way beyond this impasse that leads in a very different direction from the early Intelligencer poems. If those poems had stressed the importance of avoiding the ‘royal deceit de nos jours’ (‘Love in the Air’, 67) – which I take from Prynne’s poem to mean avoiding the comfortable and lax ease of inattention – these words’ reappearance in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ appears to include the aspiration towards a meaningfully political poetry, which in the final reckoning can amount to no more than ‘little hopeless words’. ‘The Postcard Sonata’ avoids a quietism in a way that rejects the practice of ‘just reading’, as Tom Raworth had described British poetry at the end of the 1950s, whilst establishing a blueprint for a poetry that might be commensurate to ‘the dawn thing’ that is able to sidestep the kind of frustrations that characterized the later stages of the Intelligencer exchange: it avoids pessimism in the way that it ‘comes apart, both formally and thematically, to achieve a revelation of apertures rather than “condensare”’.36 Détournement works in a different manner so that, rather than insisting on assertion and affirmation, it functions instead as a way ‘of negating the negation’ of Dadaist subversions of canonical artworks.37 It is ‘contrary to any notion of private property’ at the same time that it is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-ofdate works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way.38

James’s appropriation of work from an earlier moment of the Intelligencer community’s history is not so much an appropriation of private property, nor are the works which it figures ‘out-of-date’, since that poetry was an integral part of a social moment to which this later work is oriented; instead, the détournement that it enacts on that work – both his own and Prynne’s – works both as a marker of

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the shift in the terms of exchange in the Intelligencer, and also as a way of keeping it vitally involved in that exchange: this is no Eliotic shoring of fragments against ruins. Rather, it offers the possibility that the latent energy towards which the Intelligencer’s writing is driving will be redirected, so that its meaning can be reconstituted ‘in any appropriate way’. The manner in which it achieves this is through reliance on a collective memory, which is not dissimilar to that which underpins Pound’s logopoeia; the difference in this case is that, rather than being drawn on as something fixed, definitive and reliable, the memory is distorted: The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main force of a détournement directly related to the conscious or vague recollection of the original contexts of the elements [. . .] Let us simply note that if this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one’s public before devising a détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not only détournement but also any other form of action on the world. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead.39

The idea that ‘the royal deceit de nos jours’ is something to be avoided holds true; what has shifted are the terms of the social exchange that make such a ‘pure, absolute’ statement possible; the imperative to ‘determine one’s public’ prior to action certainly holds true in the instance of the Intelligencer and its restricted mailing list. The presence of the allusions to Prynne in ‘On Leaving the Footpath’ is very much rooted in the collective memory in a logopoeiac sense: it is a presence that is predicated on the work undertaken in the Intelligencer exchange; the reference to fluff and grit in ‘The Postcard Sonata’ functions differently, so that although it signals its relationship with earlier Intelligencer poems, it does so in a way that denotes a shift in the terms of that relationship, as a reflection of and on that exchange. This shift moves away from the idea of a coherent community that is prevalent in an earlier period of the Intelligencer group; it also – and necessarily, since community and prosody are profoundly interlinked in the Intelligencer – marks a shift in the conception of poetic language, away from its roots in the late modernist tradition of Pound and Olson, with its emphasis on thetic utterance and mythic recurrence, towards a definition of the open field that construes its openness in a more radical but no less focused fashion. The allusion to Prynne in ‘The Dragon House’ functions not to close space down, but to open it up, and it does so in a way that is an extension of the changes I have described between ‘On Leaving the Footpath’ and ‘The Postcard Sonata’ that anticipates the further experiment of the collaborative In One Side & Out The Other.

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‘The Dragon House’ first appeared in the final issue of Collection in the autumn of 1970, which was co-edited by James and Peter Riley. Where the earlier poems embedded knowing allusions to lines from the work and exchange in the Intelligencer, particularly Prynne’s contributions, ‘The Dragon House’ does so with a literally throwaway ease: discard The White Stones open on the quilt at p. 71 finish the coffee & sniff the smoky November day ‘The Dragon House’, 16–1940

The allusion to Prynne here is obviously different from those already discussed, since it refers to a page number, rather than quoting Prynne’s actual words. The reference is made explicit, rather than being assimilated into the text for the discernment of the cognoscenti; second, rather than alluding to a specific line or passage, James gives just the title of the collection – a collection that, as I argued in the previous chapter, is intimately bound up in the moment of the Intelligencer – and a page number, which refers to the Grosseteste edition of The White Stones. A reference to a page number functions very differently from the kind of integrated and subtly worked allusion that is manifest in ‘On Leaving the Footpath’. Superficially, perhaps, it would seem to be a more overtly directed form of reference, in that it specifically names that to which it refers; I would suggest, however, that this direction is deliberately overdetermined in such a way that, rather than putting into play a deeper allusive textual significance, the simple reference to a page number keeps Prynne’s text on the surface of James’s own text. It is possible to read this allusion back through ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’ – specifically, the significance of the line at the top of ‘p. 71’, ‘the future cashed in, the letter returned to sender’ (‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’, 43); the sense of hope betrayed is certainly pertinent to James’s poem, coming as it does after the central impetus of the Intelligencer has receded, and the reference to ‘the letter returned to sender’ might even be read as directly analogous to the praxis of the Intelligencer’s exchange and its unrealized ambitions – but to do so would be to overdetermine the significance of the kind of gesture that James is making in these lines. Rather than the striated textual complex of ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, we are offered instead a flattened field of multiple possible reference points whose significance remains indeterminate. It is emphatically intertextual, rather than allusive.

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The effect of these procedures is immediately to abrogate the depth of meaning and rooted presence on which previous allusions have been predicated. Rather than reading this reference as something to be mined for symbolic meaning by tracing the resonance of Prynne’s poem within James’s, the very fact that James has given the page number instead of a quote suggests that this allusion is constitutive of a kind of poetic equivalent to the qualities he found in Peter Cartwright’s painting: fluid but precise, a relationship between the formal & the unpredictable ‘The Postcard Sonata: 2, for Andrew Crozier’, 7–9

The allusion is formal, acting as a marker that locates the poem within the poetic milieu of the Intelligencer poets, and also unpredictable or arbitrary. This gesture is both an abnegation of depth and a deferral of meaning. The book has been discarded mid-poem and James makes no reference to any aspect of the text on the page, or even the poem’s title, but simply to a page number instead. The presence of The White Stones in ‘The Dragon House’ is that of a bibliographical listing, which is an abstraction of its presence, or a substitution of one textual coding for another. It also recalibrates the model of reading that was implicit in the Intelligencer, of the kind of active reading that was instigated by the repeated requests in its pages for responses from its readers, to the kind of bibliographical prompts that appeared at moments in the Intelligencer exchange. The page reference reads almost as a send-up of this kind of bibliophilia, at the same time that, by virtue of the very book that is being read, it marks some kind of affirmation of and continuity with that community: its work is still being read, only in a different context. The openness of this gesture is kept in tension by the formal precision of the lines, which retain their focus through the repetition of the definite article: ‘The White Stones’, ‘the quilt’, ‘the coffee’, ‘the smoky November day’. The precision of the gestures – ‘discard’ and ‘finish’ – suggests both an end of something but also, in the context of lying in bed, the beginning of a day’s (in)activity, which begins with a ‘sniff ’ of the ‘smoky November day’, and is indicative of the way in which reading and writing is conceptualized in James’s work of this period, wherein, as Romana Huk writes: Reframings of ‘originals’ and their repetition (with ‘a certain difference’) [. . . instigates] the kind of productive ‘play’ of mutual definition and redefinition.41

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In ‘The Postcard Sonata’, James leaves an unattributed quote hanging at the end of the sixth section which alludes to a ‘weak, slothful, a voracious reader’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 6’, 14). Sloth and voracity are juxtaposed here in a way that, unlike ‘The Dragon House’, they are mutually constitutive; and so, it can be argued, are reading and writing. The books read and alluded to in these poems are constitutive of their reality, a reality that is implicitly social and ‘rejects the recession into deeply internal processes – and upholds the evanescent, social nature of conversation’.42 This is the excess of presence and absence described earlier, opening up a gap between the presence of the words ‘The White Stones’ in this poem, and the collection The White Stones that ‘exceeds the alternative of presence and absence’:43 presence, in that it foregrounds those processes that might otherwise be occluded and internalized, and absence in that a conversation is a two-way thing, of which a poem can only constitute a half. Half of the poem’s process could be described then as absent from itself and is only reconstituted in the act of readerly engagement with it. The social nature of his poetry is emphasized in ‘The Dragon House’: hunting for postcards & send one with love to: Master B. MacSweeney, 90b The High Street, Barnet, Herts. ‘The Dragon House’, 55–60

Much like the manner of The White Stones’s inclusion in this poem, there is no attempt to assimilate the social nature of this poetry into itself: it is emphatically social, its dialogism frankly apparent on the poem’s surface, which again moves against a reading invested in the quest for a depth of meaning. The correspondence with MacSweeney, which recalls the correspondence that was catalysed by the Intelligencer that James valued so highly, is present in this poem through its absence: it is here not even metonymically, but, like the title and page number that denote The White Stones, by means of a kind of taxonomic substitution, in which the processes of reading and writing are signified in the most abstracted terms possible: a page number, a postal address, a gesture towards rather than a purposeful direction.

Unrepeatable gestures The shift from an integral, purposive sense of direction to a more indeterminate, even aleatory process in James’s post-Intelligencer poetry, and of the relationship

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between that shift and the correspondent shifts in configuration of the late modernist aesthetic that had catalysed the Intelligencer, is reflected in this later work’s relationship to the visual and plastic arts. The final issue of Collection makes this point neatly, as it includes work by Peter Cartwright, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long and Tom Phillips. James’s work of this period is strikingly open in its receptiveness to the visual arts, in a way that goes beyond mere reference or allusion. The work of these artists is itself deeply imbricated in the material of his texts: Peter Cartwright, one of the artists included in the plate section of the final issue of Collection, has written of his shock at reading James’s ‘The Postcard Sonata’ and recognizing fragments of his own catalogue précis to the Abstract ’67 exhibition: ‘all menacingly fluid but | precise, a relationship between the formal | & the unpredictable’.44 The precise degree of fluidity inherent in the relationship between the formal and unpredictable is worked out most fully in James and Crozier’s collaborative venture with the artist Tom Phillips, the book-length In One Side & Out the Other. Excerpts from Phillips’s work-in-progress A Humument appeared in the final issue of Collection, at the end of which there is a note advertising the forthcoming publication of his collaboration with James and Crozier, erroneously entitled In One Ear & Out the Other; the title alludes to a colloquial expression of mental vacuity. The book consists of a series of collaborative poems by James and Crozier which were then subjected to a ‘treatment’ by Phillips, with the poems – both ‘original’ and treated versions – appearing alongside each other, verso and recto, to produce, in Romana Huk’s neat summary, [a] composite art book and collaborative venture in which acts of subjective displacement through the foregrounding and ‘obliteration’ of text reach their pictorial apogee [. . . providing a] crystal-clear example of repetition-asobliteration [that] opens up the poem as a whole.45

Huk’s description of the treated poems as an apogee is precisely right: they are both a literal manifestation of the visual emphasis that becomes increasingly apparent through James’s poetry of this period, and also in the complex reworking of allusions that develops in the book alongside this. In Phillips’s treated versions, the entire text of, for example, ‘Forty’ – a text that is itself a complex composite of reworked lines from the passage of Büchner’s Lenz that had served as the epigraph for Trägheit – appears to be that which is alluded to at the same time that, through the very process that alludes to it as an originary point, it is – partially at least – erased. In doing so, the text becomes ‘the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it

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properly has no site – erasure belongs to its structure’.46 Part of what is erased is the stable structure that enables allusion: the traces of intention are erased. We can recognize the text to which James and Crozier are referring, perhaps, but the intention that motivates this reference remains oblique. The work – or more properly, reworking – that these repetitions enact in the texts is to effect multiple dislocations in a readerly experience of it, rather than to embed us within the knowable and socially habituated practice of allusion. The treated version of ‘Forty’ enacts a structural erasure that is symptomatic of the move away from thetic emplacement that James’s poetry makes in this period. The void is no longer cancelled by our assertion: no assertion is made, and the void – the typographical gaps between the inked letters on the page – is instead manifest. This is a shift away from the late modernist aesthetic that had catalysed the Intelligencer. Analogous to this shift is the difference between the presentation of the text in Phillips’s treated versions and a version of Prynne’s ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ held in Olson’s papers in which the text of the poem has been superimposed onto a map from the Royal Society’s continental drift volume that shows the North Atlantic orogenic fissure. The overlaying of the map over this fissure realizes the desire, expressed in the poem, to ‘suppress the | breaks’ (‘The Wound, Day and Night’, 16–7): the text of the poem literally sits over the tectonic break in the North Atlantic, binding together the North American and Eurasian landmasses and restoring, through language, a mythic and literal pre-lapsarian completeness. Phillips’s treatment of Crozier and James’s poem works not to insist on the poem’s presence and the functional vitality of its language, but rather to problematize its presence at the most pragmatic, textual level: it works as much to erase the kind of mythic direction implicit in Prynne’s poem. The text is situated at the level of the breaks in Phillips’s treatments: there is no desire to suppress them. The edges become interesting as the desire for the centre diminishes. It is not a refusal or complete erasure of meaning, however: Phillips’s crosshatching may have erased most of the title so that all that remains is ‘ort’, but this erasure is in itself suggestive of a new meaning: an ort is both ‘a refuse scrap’ and ‘a fragment, esp. of wisdom, wit, knowledge’.47 This could even be read as a distant analogy for the shifted relations between the kind of work being done in ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ and In One Side & Out the Other. Contrary to the mythic geological completeness that is implicit in the work of an earlier stage of the Intelligencer’s community, the treatment of this poem insists on a vastly reduced scale that refuses any notion of completion, and in so doing, presents a work that is either the waste material of production, a by-product, or something that, though incomplete, possesses its own truth which is particular

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to its incompletion, in the manner of a Romantic fragment. Understanding an ‘ort’ to be a fragment of wisdom also corroborates this distant analogy with the Intelligencer, and a recognition of the shifted terms of its exchange: the aspiration towards ‘essential news’ (‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, 18) that had moved some of its earlier poetry, and worked the vast geological and cosmographical range into it, has given way to an understanding of a more provisional relationship between language and knowledge. Access to Fenellosa’s substrate of metaphor is no longer viable through thetic emplacement; instead, we are left with orts of that knowledge which might also work as a homophonic pun to imply ‘ought’, an imperative answered by ‘o sing | | and we meet again’ (‘Ort’).48 Similarly, ‘lucent | luttered | breasts’ makes a sensible, conventionally ‘poetic’ phrase and meaning; such a generative reading of the poem is destabilized by those fragments – orts – of the ‘original’ text that Phillips allows to show through his text however. These moments belie any rationalization of Phillips’s cuts and insist on the incommensurability of such a reading to the encounter with the text however: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the noncommensurable relations between images. It is thus no longer a lacuna that the associated images would be assumed to cross; the images are certainly not abandoned to chance, but there are only relinkages subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage.49

The ‘cuts’ that Phillips makes into the text of ‘Forty’ are themselves constitutive of what ‘meaning’ the poem has: a meaning that is ‘sensational’, rather than rational. It is the cut itself that becomes the significant aspect of the poem, and is itself ultimately irreconcilable to a fixed or originary position since ‘it is irrational and does not form part of either set beginning [. . .] the interaction of two images engenders or traces a frontier which belongs to neither one nor the other’.50 Such interstices open the text up to the possibilities of encounter and are an extension of the processes of increasing dislocation that James’s poetry has worked towards in these poems. This does not mark a departure from the early stated ambition to reintegrate poetry into society so that it might regain its valence as tekne: rather, it is a modification of it. In this way, the poem challenges the ‘lyric zone of electrification’ that Rei Terada identifies as synonymous with ‘the fiction of quality’. This poetry, with its multiple dislocations and erasures, works explicitly counter to the idea of an essential quality: Phillips’s cross-hatchings leave a textual residue that can never resolve into ‘meaning’. Attempting to construct such a meaning from the treated text would also privilege text over the other forms of inscription on the page:

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both the cross-hatching, which is far from uniform in either density or colour, and also the lacunae in it that are not embedded within the text; without denying its existence, it works instead to dislocate it, to render it as a process, something deferred rather than fixed that is enacted in the reading of the poem. This is a political gesture too, since différance is not a present being, however, excellent, unique, principal, or transcendant. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom.51

The dislocations that inhere in the idea of différance work to subvert the dominant and dominating ideology. Such a process, which does not seek to place poetry at the heart of society, as James had sought to instigate in his description of tekne in his letter of 5 February 1967, functions instead to open up spaces within it. Such a process is synonymous with ‘the substance underplayed in 1968’ (‘A Three Minute Tour of the Ruins’, 15),52 when the ‘tangible & purposeful | content’ of ‘the dream’ was to establish a ‘created fulness’ (‘Written on Beginning Georg Büchner’s Lenz & While Waiting a Return’, 5–6, 19).53 Rather than the formal desire to (re-)constitute such a tangible wholeness that had been manifest in the Intelligencer, these later poems work to expunge such qualities from their text: the absence that remains is the unpredictable substance that was underplayed in those social exchanges, like the Intelligencer, that were implicitly bound up in the revolutionary moment of 1968. The final poem of In One Side & Out the Other returns to the stars trope so prevalent in the earlier moments of the Intelligencer community. Rather than a fixed light towards which we move, as starlight is figured in ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ for example, James and Crozier’s text focuses instead on starbursts and shooting stars, which are figured as ‘unrepeatable | gestures’ (‘A Three Minute Tour of the Ruins’, 1–2). It is by such gestures that James and Crozier suggest, in an allusion to the riot shields of les évenéments, we might be able to ‘confront the atmosphere | unprotected by sheets of glass’ (19–20). The relationship between repetition and the unrepeatable is made manifest in the presentation of In One Side & Out the Other, which erases the text even as it inscribes it. But this erasure is not the erasure of hope, or the belief that poetry should properly have a social role. Rather, it is a radical reimagining of that role which reverses the insistence on thetic emplacement at work in an earlier moment of the Intelligencer. Instead of embodying a commensurate social exchange of trust and risk, these poems

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and their treatment by Phillips establish ‘noncommensurable relations’ in terms of their own textual economy and also with the social conditions around them.

Writing beyond literature Late modernism had aspired towards the modernist ideal of commensurable relations: between sign and signifier – the post-Fenellosan interest in hieroglyphs and runes bears witness to this – and between poet and community, in the formulation of mutual trust and risk. The achievement of commensurate relations between these things would establish a coherent centre wholly alternative to alienated, fissiparous modernity. It had been predicated on formal control, integrity and intent. In One Side & Out the Other over-rides these predicates, offering instead an art that insists on aleatory, unfinished process. The effect of chance operation shaped even the works’ subject material. In the Poundian tradition, the selection of texts was a willed affair – they were chosen, as is the case for example with Manilius’s Astronomica, for their commensuration with the intention of the poetry. This had been the case from the outset of the Poundian tradition. Although Pound had picked up the Andrea Divus translation of the Odyssey for a few francs on a Seine-side quai in 1906, his representation of it in the opening canto cast it emphatically in the light of that poem’s epic ambitions: he chose what he believed to be the oldest part of the poem, the nekiua, and drew attention to the process of the text’s mediation. By contrast, Phillips’s lifework – A Humument – began by chance: Phillips and R. B. Kitaj were rummaging through Austin’s Furniture Depository on Peckham Rye when, in Phillips’s recollection: I boasted to Ron that if I took the first one that cost threepence I could make it serve a serious long-term project. My eye quickly chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we found it had the fateful price.54

Pound chose the Odyssey on account of its literariness, as a way of signalling his poem’s epic ambition. By contrast, A Human Document was, in a sense, not chosen at all: rather, it had happened to be at hand, and cheap enough to meet the criteria of Phillips’s boast to Kitaj. The Odyssey is a founding epic of European culture; Mallock’s novel had slipped into oblivion within a few decades of its publication. There is no sense of establishing or orienting a tradition, other than foregrounding the operations of chance.

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This subversion of the concentrated and deliberate aesthetics of modernism had been more apparent in the plastic and visual arts in Britain than it had been in literature. It was in part a consequence of the rejection of modernism by the prevailing Movement orthodoxy: projects such as the Intelligencer sought as much as anything to sustain a vital modernist presence in Britain in the face of that hostility. James had been particularly closely associated with the visual and plastic arts from his days in Bristol, where he co-edited The Resuscitator magazine and worked in a bakery with the sculptor Barry Flanagan. James has written since of the deep affinity he felt with Flanagan’s practice, citing it as a direct influence on the form of poetry he and other poets such as Crozier wanted to write which sought ‘to step beyond the limits of the canon of poetry established largely by courses of English literature current in the academy’: There were a number of influences which helped us to do this, but we took to Flanagan’s work as an extraordinary source of restoration. With its openness, varieties of form and image and admission of the operations of chance, a model was being provided. I wanted to produce work whose features and language were as much grounded in the relationship between attitude to and recognition of the acts, objects, places and people of the quotidian and their transformation, as was Flanagan’s. I also wanted to bring his vitality of observation and way of being into play. To this day, his whole life’s work continues to be a significant part of what shapes the practice and production of poetry, wherever the quest is to make a writing beyond literature.55

In his 2011 collection, Cloud Breaking Sun, he recalls how in the 1960s copies of Flanagan’s Silâns would circulate from hand to hand among the poets his influence & practice touching & shaping the form of the work a consequence a continuum, a writing outside literature ‘Bristol Time Encore’, 25–956

The ‘form of the work’ that Flanagan’s sculpture shaped is very different from the sculptural analogies that an earlier iteration of modernist poetics had sought to establish. Pound’s essay on Brancusi illustrates this difference. For Pound, Brancusi’s sculpture represents the aesthetic achievement of a single mass whose content is sufficiently integrated into its form so as to give ‘satisfaction from no matter what angle of vision’; indeed, Pound goes so far as to claim that

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Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ (1923) is a meditation ‘upon pure form free from all terrestrial gravitation’ that is ‘as free of accident as any of the philosophical demands of a “Paradiso” can make it’.57 Those qualities that James admires in Flanagan’s work – the ‘openness, varieties of form and image and admission of the operations of chance’ – are the antithesis of those qualities that Pound admired in Brancusi’s work. Rather than the immaculate polished brass of ‘Bird in Space’, Flanagan realized his sculptures in piles of sand, hessian sacks and lengths of rope. Instead of working towards ‘pure form free from all terrestrial gravitation’, Flanagan’s work was resolutely focused on ‘the acts, objects, places and people of the quotidian’, qualities that James argues continue to exert a considerable influence on the practice of any poetry that seeks to accomplish ‘a writing beyond literature’. The movement beyond literature is not a form of idealized, aesthetic transcendence; rather, it is an implicit disavowal of that category of aesthetic idealism, of the reification of form, that took shape in Pound’s practice and continued to exert influence on the late modernist tradition. This movement seeks to establish relations that were non-commensurable, and in so doing, to subvert the aesthetics of intent. In part, it picks up on aspects of the Dadaist avant-garde, but in the 1960s it very specifically addressed the aesthetics of modernism, particularly those aspects of it that had become institutionalized. In August 1966, for instance, Flanagan had helped to arrange the Still and Chew event at John Latham’s home, in which guests were asked to select and chew a few pages of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture, a copy of which Latham had borrowed from St Martin’s College: ‘The masticated pages were then immersed in acid and fermented to form a sugar [. . .] Following an overdue notice [. . .] the liquid was distilled and returned, labelled The Essence of Greenberg.’58 The approach to text that is embodied in Still and Chew subverts the modernist imperative to make it new, parodying its desire to return to essentials. Like Phillips’s Humument, it moves away from essences, insisting on the text as a material artefact rather than the signifier of an enriched cultural tradition. Again, this is a movement away from vertical depths of meaning towards horizontal planes of significance. There is a visual aspect to this aesthetic, one that is related to the cut-up technique pioneered by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs in the late 1950s. Complaining repeatedly that ‘writing is fifty years behind painting’,59 Gysin and Burroughs’s experiments with cut-up text found new meanings by juxtaposing words and texts. This aesthetic draws attention to the edges of the texts: it is here that meaning is generated. The cut-up technique was used in Gysin and Burroughs’s collaborative The Third Mind and Burroughs’s novels; it

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also shaped Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, a text that influenced the composition of ‘The Postcard Sonata’. The disavowal of the idealized aesthetic that shaped modernist practice is not equivalent to a wholesale excision of modernist values from the work of artists like Flanagan and James; rather, it remained true to the modernist imperative to make it new even as it broke with the intentionalism on which this aesthetic had been predicated. The shift that took place in this aesthetic through the 1960s can be traced through the allusions and quotation that James and Flanagan used in their magazines. The Resuscitator had taken its name from ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, a reference that spoke of the desire to align itself with and continue the intention of literary modernism. Flanagan’s Silâns also looked to high modernism as a touchstone, taking as the epigraph to its inaugural issue a passage from Joyce’s Ulysses: Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward it flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.60

The Joycean epigraph functions in a way that is different from Resuscitator’s Poundian allusion: rather than aligning itself with readings of the book that evinced a mythopoetic schema, within which the quotidian is redeemed through the novel’s Homeric parallels (as per T. S. Eliot’s description of Joyce’s ‘mythical method’),61 the chosen passage instead foregrounds the quotidian not just in terms of its description of the machinations of a printing press (which in turn implicitly draws our attention to the constructedness of the material artefact in our hands, the book) but also in the form of that description, which the noise of the machine itself repeatedly interrupts. Joyce’s incorporation of noise into his prose is a gesture beyond the formal codifications of the kind offered by Eliot: noise is a disruption, without form in the sense of form at work in Eliot’s account of Joyce’s novel, or Pound’s account of Brancusi’s sculpture. In those terms, it cannot be made to be integral; it cannot be made to cohere. Stripped of a redemptive schema, this writing eludes the kind of control that a critical intelligence affords. As the power of that control wanes, so the suppressed aspects of the work can be more properly recognized and we come to realize that ‘everything speaks in its own way’, even if – or perhaps, especially if – that speech resists notions of cogent, directed and orderly communication. The increasing prominence of the aleatory and use of chance processes is visible in James’s poetry of this period too, reflecting both the kinds of value

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that he found in Flanagan’s sculpture and also his sense of the shifts that had taken place in the wake of the dissolution of the Intelligencer and the models of poetic community and language that were bound up in it. The process of these texts was of an order very different from the Olsonian late modernism of the Intelligencer poems. Rather than the desire to articulate a thetic utterance, these texts prefigure absence and silence, as per John Cage’s famous aphorism: ‘I have nothing to say | and I am saying it.’62 Cage’s work offered a way to accommodate those things that had been excluded by late modernism’s idealized aesthetic: his use of noise, for example, introduced elements of the arbitrary and the formless into the work that were anathema to Pound’s conception of poetic form. But it would be wrong to suggest that Cage and Olson represented two discrete traditions, between which it was the responsibility of innovative practitioners in the 1960s to choose: both regretted the ‘separation of | mind and ear’, as Cage puts it.63 The two aesthetics could be encountered productively together: in Metaphors on Vision, Stan Brakhage juxtaposes Cage’s ‘I have nothing to say’ aphorism with the passage from Olson’s insistence in ‘Projective Verse’ that ‘ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION’.64 In Brakhage’s account, the two traditions are not mutually exclusive and the most compelling work to have come out of this negotiation seeks to engage equally with both aspects: it is rather a case of finding which aspects of these traditions to stress or, as is perhaps more accurately the case in respect to these later developments, which aspects to leave unstressed. The shift is away from an understanding of the poem as a field of energetics that is ceaselessly assertive and generative – viz. Fenellosa’s assertion that in ‘nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force’65 – towards one that can accommodate doubt, uncertainty and negation. In that way, it explicitly looks back to the intense mode of the Intelligencer’s exchange, and through that, to the forms of exchange between American and British poets through the early 1960s and then, through that, back again to the modernist tradition in which writers like Creeley and Olson had sought explicitly to place their work. Yet James and Crozier’s ‘Forty’ makes use of the aleatory in a way that earlier texts in this tradition had not: the voice of this poem is not moored in breath and a person’s physiognomy, but instead aligned to the kind of speech that is at work in the extract from Ulysses with which Flanagan prefaces Silâns, in which industrial noise ‘speaks in its own way’. Even the allusion to and repetition of the lexicon of previous work confers new significance on those words as their relations – to each other and the context in which they are at work – are modified. These relations never achieve equivalence, however: instead, the

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focus of attention in the work is on its edges and on the measure of those edges’ irreconcilability. The accidental that Pound believed had been expunged from Brancusi’s work returns in these interstices, a return that is manifest in Phillips’s treatment of ‘Forty’. The shift of focus from centres to edges is also manifest in the poetics of community that persists after the Intelligencer’s dissolution. Where the focus in the early stages of the Intelligencer, and in the correspondences that shape those moments, had been on grounding poetic language in the natural rhythms of a community of risk, the poetry that was written subsequently was opened up increasingly to the structural principle of rhyme and the possibilities of the longer form of the poetic sequence.

5

Displacing the Polis: The English Intelligencer and the Long Poem in the 1970s

‘Polis is / this’:1 Olson’s deictics suggests that Maximus itself is the embodiment of an ideal social order. The poem’s epistolary structure suggests the form of exchange on which such an order would be predicated – personal, immanent, proprioceptive terms explicitly counter to an abstracted, compartmentalized modernity. The openness of its form, as it is manifest in the literal duration of the poem’s unfolding, resists the closure that makes such abstraction and compartmentalization of experience possible. The phenomenology of the polis is also therefore inherent in ‘eyes’: ‘There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only | eyes in all heads, | to be looked out of ’ (‘Letter 6’, 121–3).2 The desire to establish the terms of a polis is consonant with the desire of the Poundian tradition of poetic modernism to ‘build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars’ (‘Canto LXXIV’, 11) with which Olson was engaged in the composition of Maximus; but its insistence that there are ‘no such many as mass’ is explicitly counter to the ‘huge mass’ (‘Canto V’, 1) of Pound’s Cantos.3 If Pound’s poem was intended to proceed along a vertical axis – descent into the underworld, ascent to the paradiso – Olson’s is emphatically horizontal, moving from shore to ocean and back again, a dual motion that Prynne describes in his lecture on Maximus: ‘we are told we turn our backs on the sea. We have been right out to sea. And by sea, of course, Olson means space and means the large condition of the cosmos.’4 This account of Maximus clearly situates it within the terms of the late modernism in which the Intelligencer has its roots. Olson’s example exerted enormous influence on that moment, yet it was not until the 1970s – after Olson’s death – that those British poets most closely involved with the Intelligencer began

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to write consistently in the long form. Poems such as Peter Riley’s ‘The Antiquary’ and Prynne’s ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ that were printed in the Intelligencer had explored the possibilities of the longer form in an Olsonian manner, yet neither assumed the full extension of the open-ended work as it was realised in works such as Maximus. In the decade or so after the Intelligencer’s cessation, however, nearly all of those writers most closely involved in its exchange wrote sequences, as opposed to discrete lyrics – Prynne’s High Pink on Chrome (1975) and Down Where Changed (1979); Andrew Crozier’s Pleats (1975) and High Zero (1978); John James’s A Former Boiling, Toasting and War (all 1979); Peter Riley’s Lines on the Liver (1981) and Tracks and Mineshafts (1983); and Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch (1977–8), ‘Colonel B.’ (1978–9) and Jury Vet (1979–81) is a small selection of this work. Other poets regularly published in the Intelligencer also moved to explore the long form in this period, including John Hall in Couch Grass (1978), John Riley in ‘Czargard’ (1980) and Chris Torrance in the ongoing Magic Door (1975–present), as did those more peripherally involved in its run, such as Lee Harwood in The Long Black Veil (1970–2) and Tom Raworth in Ace (1974). Although he had returned to America, Edward Dorn continued to write Gunslinger, which he had tentatively begun in England in 1965, until its final completion in 1975. Nor was this expansion into the long form restricted to those who had immediate contact with the Intelligencer: important book-length works by poets such as Allen Fisher (Place, 1971–80) and Iain Sinclair (Lud Heat, 1975; Suicide Bridge, 1979) were also catalysed by the contact between British writing and the example of Olsonian late modernism in the middle of the previous decade. Much of this work was also published by presses who had their origins in that mid-1960s moment; Andrew Duncan recalls the ubiquity of these book-length works in the 1970s, which were only partial disclosures of a glimpsed but unimaginable whole, only sequences of a few frames from an energy wave running on the idea that history itself was changing all the time.5

Duncan’s description of these works as ‘an energy wave’ resonates with the late modernist idea of the live tradition reaching back to Pound and Olson; it is not so much that these poems contain history, as they are themselves a part of the historical flux. Duncan ascribes the long poem’s proliferation in this period to the continued working out of a mid-century late modernism, arguing that [t]he impulse came largely from the USA, where open poems taking decades to write offered a monumental challenge that seemed to raise the standards of poetic art.6

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Although the gist of Duncan’s point – that the scale of these texts influenced the size and shape of the long poems written in Britain in this period – is doubtlessly correct, this chapter will argue that the ‘monumental challenge’ of these texts is encountered and negotiated in a more various and nuanced way by British poets than a simple ‘impulse’ can allow. The contact with the open forms of certain North American poets that Duncan mentions had in an important sense catalysed the original impetus for the Intelligencer, and it is still present in these later sequences too; but the sense of what is meant by the American texts’ ‘monumental challenge’ has been recalibrated, and as such the direction that they take and the manner in which they take it is considerably, even radically, different. A crucial consideration in the development of an understanding of these texts and their relationship to the Intelligencer is the recognition of the internalization of the kind of exegetic processes that, in the Intelligencer’s textual and communal presence, was worked out in the terms of the ‘community of risk’. This marked an epistemic shift, so that, where meaning had inhered in the earlier Intelligencer poems in the recognition of the special resonances of certain load-bearing words or tropes – for example, love, trust and need – as well as forms and discourses, such as the shaman, glaciation or the city, whose significance would sometimes be elaborated in references or contextualized by the exchanges taking place in the community around them, the longer poetic sequences that were written in the wake of the Intelligencer’s dissolution were obliged to do without this substrate. As a consequence, it became necessary to develop a different mode of poetic cognition which was implicitly bound up in a different prosody. If the poetry written after the Intelligencer enacts a renewal of modernism, I want to suggest – to continue the geological metaphor – that the form of this renewal is shaped by the fault line that the Intelligencer’s dissolution had exposed in Olsonian late modernism. This is at once a continuation of the modernist imperative to ‘make it new’, in which ‘it’ is poetic tradition, the latest iteration in a series of renewals that includes Olson and Creeley’s recalibration of Poundian modernism in the early 1950s. The renewal of modernism that takes place in the long poems written in Britain in the 1970s is arguably a more radical renewal: whereas Olson and Creeley had shared Pound’s concern with the reconstruction of an original position of mythic wholeness, this concern and its ideological predicates are themselves figured as radically indeterminate in the later British writing. This shift did not mark an abandonment of late modernism, but rather one particular understanding of that tradition – work that, according to Drew Milne, is consistent with the ‘internal articulations’ of Pound and Fenellosa’s

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writings, which suggest ‘horizons for poetic practice rather than paradigms that could be institutionalized through “schools” or coteries’.7 Rather, it shifts the focus of what is being renewed away from the kind of utterance expounded in the Chinese Written Character essay, which insists on rootedness in natural processes, towards something that Pound alludes to in his work on Cavalcanti, namely the idea of rhyme as a structural principle. This is not a neat bifurcation of one reading from another but a matter of incremental re-interpretation, so that the value placed on different aspects of a writer’s work can shift over time. Poetic tradition is not a tidy teleology of improvement and modification, where each generation builds on the work of those preceding it, but a series of contestatory and provisional renewals. The use of rhyme as a structural principle opens a different dynamic from the kind that Olson evinces in ‘Projective Verse’ which insists on the primacy of rhythm that has an ultimately physiological origin. Olson’s poetic is geared towards the search for origin and emplacement: by the end of Collection, this kind of emplacement has taken on an additional, pejorative resonance, which is voiced in ‘Good Old Harry’, a poem by John James that appears anonymously on the inside back cover of the final Collection, ‘where everything is in its natural place again’ (‘Good Old Harry’, 31).8 Rather than the regenerative kinds of emplacement sought after in the earlier period of the Intelligencer’s run, this natural place belongs to ‘the natural rulers | | behaving like proper gentlemen again’ (32–3). James’s poem satirizes the questions of natural order and emplacement as synonymous with the status quo. This has consequences for the prosodic model that I have argued the Intelligencer was working towards: the virtue of emplacement is no longer self-evident, and an alternative structural principle – rhyme – begins to take shape in the work of a number of its core contributors. A poetic that takes rhyme as its structural principle is ontologically different by virtue of the fact that the very function of rhyme works insistently counter to notions of origin, emplacement and semantic integrity: a poetry that is structured on the substrate of an origin – as Olson’s is, for example – travels along a specific vector in a way that a poetry structured on rhyme, which is simultaneously present in two places, cannot. In doing so, however, it does not deny the possibilities of thetic utterance in favour of the free play of signification; these poems, as I will argue in this chapter, share the concerns of the earlier Intelligencer poems, particularly in their thinking-through of the relationship between poetic work and the community: the difference between the two poetics would be more aptly figured as a fault line rather than a neat break. Despite these (dis)continuities, however, I will argue that there is a consistent and recognizable set of characteristics shared by these poems,

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and that these characteristics articulate a fundamental reorientation towards that earlier work, the Intelligencer community and its aspirations more broadly, and, through that, a particular tradition of modernism; this reorientation is made manifest epistemically, prosodically and thematically in the long poems and sequences written in the decade after the Intelligencer’s cessation. This work might be understood in terms of Neil Pattison’s contention that the Intelligencer ‘achieved its purpose in self-sabotage’,9 arguing that the critical exchange that took place in and around the Intelligencer that had sought to establish a kind of coherent poetic community and concomitant model of language engendered instead a body of work that continually resisted such coherence. The long form is itself overwritten with the experiments of previous generations of modernist writers – Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus poems are examples that have close particular relevance to the Intelligencer. But the long poems that the Intelligencer poets wrote in the 1970s are fundamentally different even in their handling of the long form itself: they demonstrate a less certain sense of origin, and worked with a different temporal scale. If their augmented length allows them ‘ample space with which to think about origins’, the way they think about those origins is very different from the way that, for example, Olson thought about them in Maximus: rather than an ontic certainty, a mythic whole to which the work strives to return us, origin in these post-Intelligencer poems holds a far less certain status.10 Raworth articulated his own sense of this in an interview published in 1972, in which he said that, unlike Olson, ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge. At all. My idea is to go the other way, you know. And to be completely empty and then see what sounds’.11 The ‘other direction’ Raworth identifies takes his poetry away from knowledge, from emplacement and mythic return and out into the condition of sounding emptiness. Uncertainty is a condition that inheres in all these sequences, a description that, in itself, ‘obfuscates more than it clarifies, since sequence suggests an order of development nowhere evident in the poems’ compositions’.12 This observation holds true with the poems under consideration in this chapter, and reaches back to the ideas of proper sequence described in Chapter 2, where it was hoped that a language embedded in the processes of the natural world could be established. The kind of confident teleology denied at a formal level in these post-Intelligencer poems implicitly ‘demands a different kind of readerly attention from the lyric’.13 Where the Intelligencer had striven to catalyse an exchange within which these works could be read under a specific quality of ‘readerly attention’ that was necessary to legitimize its risks, thereby offering them a point of origin, the breakdown of that exchange meant that the work written after it was obliged to

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explore ways in which the terms of that exchange could be incorporated within the structure of the work, and in such a way that recognized that breakdown. Michael Whitworth, writing about an earlier period of modernist long poem, describes the open-endedness of the modernist long poem as engendering a ‘richness that exceeds that of the encyclopedia; it will embody the richness of the world of perceptions, rather than the richness of the world of organized knowledge’.14 Even this richness is complicated in these post-Intelligencer poems, which are shadowed by an equivalent paucity of relations, and the latent dichotomy between perception and organized knowledge in Whitworth’s description is systematically destabilized by the infolded ‘time-logic’ of these sequences’ language.15 The possibility of embodying richness in these poems is interrogated here: the enriched presence of an earlier generation of modernist long poem gives way, post-Intelligencer, to a poetry that ‘exceeds the alternative of presence and absence’.16 Such an account allows for a subtle differentiation between the extended poetic sequences written in the aftermath of the Intelligencer and those, like Pound’s Cathay, that were written in an earlier point in the history of modernist poetry. Tony Lopez writes that Pound’s collection of linked poems is underpinned by a language use that is ‘built as a load-bearing structure’, which opens up a possible reading of it as a sequence rather than a collection of discrete lyrics.17 He argues that this is an extension of the effect that Pound instigates in ‘The Bowmen of Shu’, in which ‘phrases with different details creates blocks of sound like weights being balanced’ so that ‘an irregular but definite measure’ is established in the poem that is able to secure ‘a partial metrical structure’.18 Lopez identifies the phrase as the basic unit of the poem that, ‘with repetition and variation’, gives the reader a ‘measure’ by which to proceed through the poem. This measure is ‘irregular but definite’ and although its insistence on the central importance of the phrase is syntactic, the measure becomes ‘a partial metrical structure’. The phrase is not merely decorative, however; it is the basic principle on which the poem’s aspiration to truthfulness is predicated. But it remains fundamentally rhythmic in that it bears the load of its truthfulness ‘like weights being balanced’ at certain stressed points in its structure and it is at these junctures that our knowledge of the poem might be determined. By contrast, by the end of the Intelligencer, there is an emerging shift away from this kind of thematic emplacement – where words or phrases bear the weight of meaning – towards the lightness of rhyme. The change is a subtle one, and it is revealing that, in the letter to Ray Crump in which he articulates his sense of rhyme as ‘the public truth of language’, Prynne refers to Pound’s Cathay as the precursor of this aesthetic.19

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Rhyme and uprooting Prynne’s letter to Crump seems to anticipate aspects of the post-Intelligencer long poem, but it does so in a way that acknowledges the work done in the main body of the Intelligencer, and through that implicates a broad conspectus of modernist poetry. It marks a continuation of some of its aspects even as it distances itself from others; the emphasis is on reworking, renewing in the sense of making new, again. Similarly, the differences between Lopez’s description of the loadbearing structure of the repeated motifs in Cathay and the post-Intelligencer long poems are instructive. Rather than functioning as stressed points – places – in the sequence’s structure, where a focused meaning inheres or is generated, the rhymes in these poems seem to insist on a fundamental instability that is precisely counter to this mode of emplaced, thetic significance. The idea of a load-bearing poetry would seem to rely on the idea of meaning being something external to but necessarily proximate with the poem, that presses down on it and makes itself manifest at certain junctures – a reading which is certainly commensurate to aspects of Pound’s poetry, and might be consistent with the idea of a community of readers prepared to trust the risks taken in the work. What is perhaps most interesting in Prynne’s letter is the suggestion that ‘sound in its due place is as much true as knowledge’.20 As such, this marks a shift away from the desire to ‘take knowledge | back to the springs’ (‘Die a Millionaire’, 1–2) that had shaped Prynne’s earlier work; it is now concerned with a different kind of truth, whose mode of cognition is different from the knowledge won from nouns in their right place. As the work written by the Intelligencer poets in the decade or so after its collapse takes shape it is not only the emplacement of sound, but its displacement, that constitutes this truth. The sense that a different mode of cognition might be both possible and necessary is a consequence of the breakdown of the kind of trust that had underwritten the Intelligencer project and the mode of knowing that I argued, at the beginning of Chapter 2, lay at its heart. Without it, the kind of risks that it envisaged taking were impossible, since there was no community equivalent to that imagined in the Intelligencer which could be relied on as commensurate to its challenge. The poetry that had prevailed in the Intelligencer relied on its readership to follow up the footnotes and be able to recognize the local and specific encodings of meaning in certain words, phrases and gestures. As such, meaning was in part constituted by the ways in which this work was read in the context of the exchange and the model of readership implicit in the Intelligencer; in the extended poetic sequences that followed in its wake, the terms on

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which the community of its readers is predicated has radically altered, and as such these new social conditions affect the poems and their meaning. Rather, meaning in these longer poems is continuously displaced within the work itself, a displacement that is enabled by the use of rhyme. If the Olsonian rhythmic model might be understood as a structure that affords ‘cognitive representations of the flow of energy in the stream of experience’, the subsequent emphasis on rhyme insistently disrupts any confidence we can have in the fidelity of such representations.21 This disruption is also a disruption of ideas such as naturalness, order and fidelity in relation to poetic language. Rather, the role of rhyme is to ‘deform [. . .] the direction of speech’, which runs explicitly counter to the lesson that the Intelligencer poets derived from Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’.22 Rhyme is not distinct from rhythm; rather, as Yuri Tynianov writes, it might be understood ‘as a particular rhythmical simile, with a partial alteration of the principal sign of the rhymed member, or with the advancement of oscillating signs within it’.23 Tynianov’s figuration of rhyme’s relationship with rhythm as a similitude is resonant with Prynne’s notion that it is capable of a mode of cognition that is like, but distinct from, ‘knowledge’: both insist on a fundamental distance. The work it does resists the notion of either a singular beginning or end: the principal is either subject to ‘a partial alteration’, or, when it is carried forward, it is only in terms of ‘oscillating signs within it’. The alternatives here insist on provisionality that is at once ‘partial’ and ‘oscillating’; the transfer is never complete, and so resists the possibility of emphatic assertion. Working in the form of the extended poetic sequence allows the principle of rhyme to be developed on a much larger scale than the local play of syllables that Prynne discusses in relation to Crump’s poems, as the enlarged space of the longer form allows the frequency and complexity of these rhymes to expand. Simon Jarvis has argued that ‘[r]hyme words come not only from the same parts of speech but also as part of repetitions of entire phrasal and melodic structures’;24 by opening rhyme up in this way to include a poem’s phrasal and melodic structures, it is able to enact the ‘disintegration of the absoluteness of the distinction between line and stanza’.25 Disintegration might also be thought to be at work in other categories of distinction at work in the long poem, such as meter and diction. Jarvis clarifies the nature of this disintegration whereby these kinds of distinction are ‘not so much severed as systematically uprooted’ – work which is ‘never done’.26 The ‘extirpation’ of the connection between ‘special language and metrical set’ enables ‘the continuous work of thinking [. . . that] happens not in opposition to melody but partially by means of it’.27

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Uprooting is both an interruptive act and also an act of disclosure, in some ways, at the same time: the effect of this on poetry is to disrupt those modes of habitualized reading practice that might have been synonymous with Betjeman’s England, a practice that is rooted in an assumed connection between ‘special language and metrical set’ that generates poetic meaning; this disruption might also reveal those kinds of poetic meaning that are occluded by the force of this habit. Rhyme can be a means of effecting this, since it is a process that is both a structural principle encoded within the text and something that can only be realized in the process of reading. It can also, within the text itself, be something that unsettles a confident, linear reading of the poem. Taken as a structural principle across the breadth of an extended sequence, ‘resolution’ – and therefore knowledge – can only be tentative: definitive resolution remains always out of reach. As such, this opens up an exilic perspective in this poetry, one that denies the consolation of an achieved poetic homeland figured in terms of, for example, a tectonic emplacement. Instead, we have the oscillation and instability of rhyme, a procedural poetics that denies the bifurcation of beginnings and endings: we are left simply to attend to the nuance of this process. This marks a shift from the forms of attention propagated earlier in the Intelligencer, which looked for depths of meaning in etymologies and the earth’s crust; instead, this new form of attention looks towards the lateral rather than the literal, towards multiple and simultaneous points of reference rather than an original principle. This marks a shift away from the kind of poetry that might be read as ‘late modernist’: the possibilities for renewal in these poems are radically different to those sought after in those earlier poems, and the attendant hopefulness of its premise that persisted in the form of the polis and the city well into the Intelligencer’s exchange is now significantly mitigated. It is not that that dream is, in Pound’s word, spezzato, since that would imply that, at some point, the dream had been whole. The possibility of this kind of mythic wholeness is denied by these later poems which recognize that the dream of a return to it remains necessarily impossible. Rather, through the new forms of attention opened up by the formal and structural shifts of these post-Intelligencer poems, it becomes possible to establish a very different relationship between poetry and the possible world. The poems under consideration in this chapter are by no means fully representative of the achievement of the Intelligencer poets in the 1970s, which would require a monograph-length study of its own. It is regrettable that there is not sufficient space here to include considerations of the long poems and sequences referred to at the beginning of this chapter. The texts under direct consideration here have been chosen because of their specific relation to the

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Intelligencer’s poetics of community, and the history of late modernism as it has been discussed in this study. Despite the very obvious differences between the poems under consideration, I argue that there is sufficient resemblance between them at a structural level, as just discussed, to link them together, and then back to the community and exchange of the Intelligencer, with a particular emphasis on the consequences of the recalibration of ‘trust’ that took place in the wake of its dissolution. I begin by exploring these ideas in a reading of Andrew Crozier’s High Zero, before looking at the construction of poetic place and exile in Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts, relating it to the controversies that surrounded Riley’s editorial tenure of the Intelligencer. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the poetry that Barry MacSweeney wrote in the decade or so after the Intelligencer’s cessation, arguing that its relationship to the historic moment – that is, Britain in the 1970s – in which it was composed marks the dissipation of the kind of collective hope of the Intelligencer, both in terms of the possibility of an interpretive community and the viability of extant modes of open field poetics, before renouncing it entirely in the shredded prosody of ‘Colonel B’.

Andrew Crozier: High Zero The orderliness of High Zero’s ‘arithmetical format’ is offset by its use of rhyme and repetition.28 The sequence, which is made up of two dozen 24 line poems, repeats lines through its duration, so that lines from the poems at the beginning and end of the poem are repeated verbatim in new contexts throughout the main body of the work.29 This repetition is an act of extirpation: in each instance of the line’s appearance, it can be read meaningfully in the context of the lines around it. In doing so, the repetition undermines the possible integrity of its first iteration. This is a different kind of repetition from those that John James employed in ‘The Postcard Sonata’, however, or in the collaborative In One Side & Out the Other, in which the repetitions became increasingly fragmentary. Here, the repetition is complete and fully integrated into the body of the poem, both semantically and prosodically: when the sequence’s opening line – ‘While the grass spoils underfoot’ – is repeated verbatim later in the poem (in the section ‘The scenario of lies . . .’), it does so in a way that continues the gardening trope of the line before – a trope that is at work elsewhere in the poem – and also repeats the stress pattern in the second and third lines. Consequently, the same line is made to operate meaningfully – and prosodically – in two separate places.

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Crozier explained the effect of this as a way of opening up the possibilities of the line: And if a line on the one hand is unique in itself and at the same time not unique in its context, then the other possible contexts in which it might play a functional role rather than remaining true to itself ought to be thought of as indefinite, without a theoretical limit to the number of possibilities.30

Crozier’s conception of the ‘functional role’ expunges the line’s authenticity – the condition of its ‘remaining true to itself ’ – opening up a potentially limitless horizon of meaning in its place. Part of this opening up is also a consequence of the provisionality of the line’s subsequent relocation: despite the work that Crozier has done to knit the line into its place here, in the wider context of the poem, it is evident that this is only a local procedure: the two lines that precede this moment – ‘The scenario of lies | Dresses up to kill’ (‘The scenario of lies . . . ’, 1–2)31 – are clearly taken from a very different semantic and metrical discourse. This juxtaposition further sharpens our awareness of the extirpatory procedure at work in the poem, wherein whole discourses are constantly uprooted in a process that Crozier likens to ‘a kind of theatre in which certain knockabout characters can be rapidly led on and rapidly led off ’.32 The description of the poem’s ‘knockabout characters’ also establishes a clear difference between its speakers and both the mythic artifex of high modernism and late modernism’s community of risk, signalling a movement away from the concern with identity: the effect of the sequence’s multiple repetitions is to uproot itself from, rather than root itself into, such forms of identity. The effect of these repetitions is to insist simultaneously on the integrity of High Zero – in other words, that the poem is organized by an underlying principle – and to deny the possibility of the fixed reading that such a principle would seem to guarantee, since no single unit can be relied upon to be ‘true to itself ’. It is an ordering principle, rather than a principal point to which meaning can be traced back. The poem itself acknowledges this and is drawn along by the twinned desire to fix meaning down – ‘Even the blue | is hard to pin a name to | preferring to describe an empty | sky in French’ (‘The scenario of lies . . .’, 18–21)33 – and the conviction that such fixity is impossible, since categories of knowledge can only ever ‘border on resemblance’ (‘The advance of happiness . . .’, 15),34 in which case, the poem’s work becomes concerned with ‘the differentia of like from like’ (‘The stems are covered . . .’, 17).35 Again, Crozier’s use of repetition compounds the paradox of the poem: there is of course no way to differentiate ‘like from like’, since ‘like’ must always tautologically be

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‘like’. Yet ‘like’ is also ‘likeness’: that is, that which ‘borders on resemblance’ but remains necessarily non-identical; so in this instance, the very impossibility of achieving a likeness that is ‘true to itself ’ makes it possible for us only to differentiate ‘like from like’. A simile is a weakened metaphor, foregrounding the provisionality of its process: in a metaphor, there is a shift in the substance of the two things being compared, so that x assumes some quality of y. In a simile, the ‘like’ or ‘as’ functions to keep these substances distinct, even as it makes clear their similarities. As such, the ‘differentia of like from like’ marks a remove from the bedrock of metaphor on which Poundian modernism, after Fenellosa, was predicated. Rather than a potential diminishment, this process instead opens up a number of possibilities ‘without a theoretical limit’. This process is apparent in both the high frequency with which similes occur in High Zero and also the manner in which a significant proportion of them defer rather than confirm a sense of likeness as recognition: as in a clouded retina in which the light is like a cataract saturated with atmosphere until it spills with emotion like a paper bag ‘Such feeling for symmetry’, 6–1036

Even though the first of the three similes in the passage seems to operate in a naturalistic way – that is, making a representational likeness of the sky at the horizon – the fact that it is made across a stanza break impels us to look forward as much as back to that which it is supposed to be a likeness of. This effect is reinforced by the lack of contextualizing information and also in the way that the likeness is to being ‘in a clouded retina’ rather than simply ‘as a clouded retina’: that is, the likeness is being situated in a dynamic rather than a static, equivalent relationship, since in what way exactly is the horizon’s edge like being ‘in a clouded retina’? The information that is withheld here seems to appear in the next two lines, although the apparent stability offered by the continuity of semantic field – here, optics – is destabilized by the second likeness, to a cataract; at this point, the simile becomes the likeness of a likeness, and becomes more a reflection of its own processes than it is in the supposed representation of an object. Such a process is both constitutive of the poem – which, as Crozier says in his interview with Duncan, is an example of ‘procedural poetics’ – and it is also an act of erasure. Repetition, reflections and likenesses abound in High Zero, as

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well as the ‘glances of sound’ that Prynne had described in his letter to Crump which enact: The echo of an echo in fugitive half-life looped into itself until the erasure made itself heard over the message. ‘Where did such sound come from . . .’, 15–1937

The echo is simultaneously decaying and persisting, in its repetitions of itself as an ‘endless fading echo’ (‘Where did such sound come from . . .’, 11). These lines play out the ambivalent relationship between repetition and erasure: even as it dies away ‘in fugitive half-life’ and is depleted, this process is being ‘looped into itself ’ like a cassette recording, at which point the erasure makes ‘itself heard’ above that which it is erasing. It does this precisely through the glances of sound that persist through sound’s depletion. In doing so, the echo’s ‘fugitive half-life’ is both erased and erasing, making audible frequencies previously occluded by the illusion of the poem’s ‘message’: ‘content is an illusion’ (‘Such feeling for symmetry’, 13). The direction of High Zero is emphatically non-linear; its simultaneity resists any attempt to read intention into the poem, despite the apparent orderliness of its arithmetical structure. Like the ‘knockabout characters’ Crozier identifies as its speakers, even the poem’s arithmetical structure is contingent. The lack of numbers for the individual sections of the poem – which Crozier provided in ‘The Veil Poem’, for instance – reiterates that sense of simultaneity, since the order in which the individual sections of the poem appear is not overpoweringly significant or determining. Rather, the process of reading the poem is like moving through a landscape in which a number of (often overlapping) possible pathways are made available and navigated not from a centralized point of departure but by points on the horizon. This process is metonymically present in the lines ‘now the object is bright and opaque | like marble in sunlight’ (‘Another tarmac scab . . .’, 12–13):38 beyond its local semantic relevance, this passage also reflects the cover design of the first edition, which uses a wrap-around reproduction from Ian Potts’s series of drawings, Sunlight in the Marble Quarries, Carrara. The effect is to expunge the possibility of an autotelic text and refer us to the limits of the text in front of us, in this instance, the book’s literal beginning and end, not as a point from which to begin to generate a coherent and all-encompassing reading of the

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text, but as another instance of reflection in the potentially limitless number of reflections at work in High Zero. One such instance opened up by the choice of cover art is the fact that the Carrara quarry is the oldest quarry to have been in continual use in the world. The significance of this for High Zero is the sense that it opens up the possibility of reading the sequence as a constituent part of a continuing process of labour and bringing-to-light, which reaches back to Classical civilization. The expanded scope of the long poem enables these reflections to be made without necessary recourse to any external factors: to this extent, the reflections in High Zero are self-generating and self-sustaining, and have no need of the kind of interpretive community in which much of the work produced in the Intelligencer was embedded. Those processes of legitimization which are deferred to a community in the earlier work are contained within the scope of longer form. This self-containment is not hermetically sealed, however; it contains reflections of things beyond its immediate parameters, such as the community that had coalesced a decade before around the Intelligencer. This is visible in the dedication of High Zero to John James and J. H. Prynne. Furthermore, the two poems at the beginning and the end of High Zero – which are presented as distinct from the main body of the text, are, as Crozier said in an interview with Andrew Duncan, based in their format on the last poem in Prynne’s book [High Pink on Chrome], which I placed first, and the first poem [sic] of James’s book [Striking the Pavilion of Zero], which I placed last.39

Crozier explained his reason for doing so as ‘a matter of engaging on a line by line basis with poems by people whom I regarded as friends and colleagues’.40 Crozier added that he could reasonably expect readers to recognize the reference, which is not made explicit, since ‘[a]nyone reading the book at the time might also have been reasonably expected to have read the books by Prynne and James’, especially with the additional ‘hint in the title High Zero to specific books’.41 Its relationship to those books – and to the Intelligencer project that lay distantly behind them – is ultimately a reflection of the hopes bound up in its exchange, the disappointment of those hopes and the working out of their consequences. The Intelligencer is not commemorated in this poem, nor is it remembered as a discrete event, confined to the past, occasionally recalled like an anniversary. It remains an active presence in the poem. Crozier writes that ‘[t]he advance of happiness | is never an anniversary’ (‘The advance of happiness . . .’, 1–2), echoing the final line of James’s ‘May Day Greetings 1971’ – ‘advance to bonheur’ (‘May Day Greetings 1971’, 7)42 – in a way that is not simply an

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unquestioning repetition of James’s sentiment, or a nod in the right direction for those who know where to look; Crozier’s modification bears, rather, the hallmarks of a rhyme in which the sound of an earlier sentiment returns with a slight but significant variation, a variation which in itself is constitutive of a kind of meaning. High Zero is not an elegy for the Intelligencer and late modernism, then, but a reflection of it from the distance of a new historical vantage. It remains – in its lexicon and its ideas – a poem engaged with the Intelligencer, even as it registers the effects of the dissipation of the energy that had built up around the Intelligencer. The trope of light – particularly fading light – is distinctly reminiscent of moments in James’s ‘The Postcard Sonata’, for instance, although here, Crozier presses its extinction further than James did, negating even the possible thought ‘of a return’ to the condition of lightness, since it is the light itself that is ‘given back’ – returned – like an unwanted gift (‘The advance of happiness . . .’, 7). This moment recalls the praxis of the Intelligencer and its gift economy, reflecting on the sense that, as Crozier expressed it at the time, this thing which was freely given was not properly received. Rather than the possibility of brotherhood, Crozier leaves us with the claustrophobic ‘atmosphere of a curtained room’ (9). The loss of light recurs throughout High Zero, even as this imagery creates possible allusions to other texts. The ‘metered stars [that] go out’ (‘Expensive dried flowers beside . . .’, 11),43 for instance, recall the stars ‘like a politic image | | like little hopeless words’ (‘The Postcard Sonata: 7 a’, 11–2) in James’s ‘The Postcard Sonata’, and also resonate with the idea of ‘consciousness raised like a | speculative loan’ (‘There they were surrounded . . .’, 22–3),44 by likening the aspirations for political change to a diminished and short-term economic expedience. Additionally, ‘metered stars’ can be read as a reference to prosodic meter which critiques the Intelligencer’s sidereal imagery as an aestheticized rather than meaningfully political discourse. The dream persists, even at the end of High Zero, although necessarily in a revised form: it is no longer to begin anew so much as to begin again. The paradox of a repeated beginning is embodied in the poem’s structure, with its multiple glancing references and reflections. The poem’s final lines – excluding those of the final James pastiche – bear this out, denying a progressive model of history, one predicated on the kind of anniversaries antithetical to ‘the advance of happiness’, since ‘[t]his time last year | was no different’ (‘Yes that’s very good’, 12–13).45 These lines suggest that the possibility of ‘turning again’ is still alive: the ‘swift recoil’ (14) that seemed to prohibit it is reconfigured here in the returning swifts; the ‘home’ reinforces the sense of ease and naturalness with which this takes place. Even the simile here is naturalistic, in contrast to many of the other

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similes in High Zero. An uncertainty is introduced by the possible dual valence of ‘way’ in the final line, which can belong either to the swifts’ homing behaviour or the process of remembering this behaviour. This ambivalence is picked up by the poem’s final lines, in which ‘recall’, ‘recur’ and ‘revive’ operate as a kind of rhyme, taking the poem from vagaries of ‘the way we remember’ to the specificity of revived colours ‘in their very locations’ but keeping each step simultaneously present in the reader’s eye and ear (18–20). The process that makes this possible is, of course, rhyme, which brings together ‘the whole spectrum | in a retained sequence’ (22–3). Again, the repetition of the ‘re-’ prefix sends us back to an origin at the same time as the lines take the poem forwards, enacting a kind of ‘retained sequence’, keeping hold of something even as it is left behind, which leads us, at the poem’s end, to a new point of departure: ‘beginning nowhere’ (24), which is the non-place from which ‘everything can start over | in another place’ (‘The cat washes audibly . . . ’, 8–9).46

Peter Riley, Tracks and Mineshafts Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts returns repeatedly to the idea of substance and its dispersal, regretting it at the same time that it tries to figure this absence in a way that might not just function nostalgically but to count its cost. It is easy enough, he argues, to ‘set absence in the text just to have it before us’, but this absence cannot be generative, as there is nothing to guarantee that there is ‘something human’ waiting for us ‘at the end of this dispersed line’.47 Instead, the work undertaken in Tracks and Mineshafts seeks to recover some possible commonality that might allow this dispersal to be recovered. This is alluded to in his preface to the 2010 reprint of the sequence, where he describes how it was ‘constructed from a lot of text written between 1978 and 1981, originally thought of as a work in the open-field mode [which] as a result of a conflict among different modes of documentation [. . .] was abandoned’.48 What was rescued from it, he writes, and what came to constitute the collection in our hands, ‘was only what was clearly poetry, or a kindred kind of prose’.49 The relationship between the abandoned ur-text, the open form and the conception of ‘a kindred kind of prose’ corroborates Peter Middleton’s description of the collection as ‘an extended reflection on the fate of modernist poetics during the 1970s in Britain’;50 by reading it in the context of The English Intelligencer and the other extended sequences written in the decade or so after it, it is possible to ascribe this reflection more particularly to the fate of the specific model of late

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modernist poetics and its attendant ideal of a polis that had coalesced, a decade or so before the publication of Tracks and Mineshafts, in the community of poets involved with the Intelligencer and its related publications. The text is the remnant of a longer, abandoned work, one that in its associations with the open field form is implicitly bound-up in the moment of the Intelligencer; although it has been abandoned, however, this project does not expunge its origins in the open field form. Rather, the abandoned project is present in the body of the text, as a kind of ruin: the relationship between what is ‘clearly poetry’ and its ‘kindred kind of prose’ is one that is contested throughout it. This contest recalls Riley’s aspirations for the Intelligencer, particularly his insistence as editor of the importance of prose to the project, an insistence that ultimately saw him removed from the editorship. If he had imagined that a truly kindred relationship could have been established in the Intelligencer, the relationship between prose and poetry in Tracks and Mineshafts explores what can be rescued of this aspiration. The Intelligencer is evident at both an institutional and a formal level in Tracks and Mineshafts. It was first published by Tim Longville and John Riley’s Grosseteste Press, a press that had its origins in the Intelligencer moment, and the prose pieces that accompanied its publication – titled ‘A Note on Vein Forms’ and ‘Theses on Dream’ – are also reminiscent of the Intelligencer’s praxis, recalling key moments in its exchange like Prynne’s ‘Note on Metal’ and Riley’s ‘Working Note on British Prehistory’. The substance of the text itself is also deliberately shadowed by the substance of the Intelligencer exchange and the late modernist poetics that catalysed it: John Hall writes that Tracks and Mineshafts evidences ‘a gathering dependence of prose’, wherein the ‘layers of prose are made the home of an errant poetic’.51 This suggests that the poetic is exiled, since it is at home not in verse but prose, a contention that brings out something of the nuance of Riley’s assertion that the two are kindred relations: the bond might be familial, but it is now estranged. That bond had been fractured in the breakdown of the Intelligencer, which was explicitly founded on such a principle of kinship. Tracks and Mineshafts does not look back to this moment nostalgically however, hoping that those terms might be recovered. Rather, it explicitly counts the cost of the loss of this moment in its repeated invocation of the dispersal of substance throughout the sequence, and the costs incurred by continued work. In this reading, the abandoned Derbyshire lead mines that these texts take as their ostensible subject can also function as metaphors for their relationship with the Intelligencer, which is both an abandoned site of unfulfilled collective labour and a source of possible material for continuing poetic work. It might be possible to

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read this volume as an allegory of exile from such a condition – an allegory in which even the process of allegorical symbolization is itself depleted. The prose passages of the Intelligencer were embedded in a social exchange that, in aspiration at least, sought to extend the reach of poetic intelligence by opening up fields of knowledge that were precluded by the limited scope of much contemporary British poetry. As I have argued in previous chapters, the practice of this exchange rarely fulfilled its aspirations. One instance from the Intelligencer’s history which might be understood to have lived up to them can be found in the exchange of letters, poems and information that followed in the wake of Riley’s ‘Working Note on British Prehistory’, which explicitly insisted on a commonality – ‘I inhabit the same ground’ – and ‘continuity’.52 The opening of the working note is shot through with a sense of immediacy that characterizes the Intelligencer’s model of exchange: it must be done ‘now’, since it is at this moment that things ‘that we can’t afford not to use’ are merging.53 In this, it also recognizes the provisionality of the project: this information is far from a settled fact, but that does not detract from its significance nor does it obviate the ‘right’ for ‘anyone’ to work with it. It is precisely these qualities on which the project’s ‘risk’ is predicated. There are moments in the prose passages of Tracks and Mineshafts that seem to reiterate this conviction, insisting in ‘King’s Field’ that ‘Earth Substance and sky energy converged at Man.’54 But these moments are increasingly destabilized as the text strives to reconfigure its optimism to the thwarting social conditions of the late 1970s, in which ‘the new star’ of late 1960s optimism becomes ‘shrouded in its own time’, its ‘true moment thwarted against unbearable extent, and in painful response echoing back the form of a spiritual figure, full of beauty’.55 This registers the ambivalent relationship of Tracks and Mineshafts to the late modernist aspirations of the Intelligencer: the true moment has been thwarted, and the response is painful but still ‘full of beauty’. The site of beauty is also the site of damage, a conflict that is inherent in the fact that the ‘sensed power’ in this figure ‘is not returned to us in the confirmations of social power’.56 Instead, it engenders a ‘lonely writing’ that ‘knows its own urgency’ but has ‘lost any easeful nonchalance about the political vacuity into which it might place itself ’.57 The loneliness of this writing is a consequence of the absence of the coherent centre of the polis in the wake of the Intelligencer community, an absence that shadows the substance of Tracks and Mineshafts as it struggles to find a replacement context in which to place itself. In the prose passage ‘(letter)’, an unnamed addressee is told that ‘[y]ou are no longer held in that relentless intensity’, since ‘you are not focused on a redemptive centre at the point of decision’; the belief that a person’s ‘state of being’ was the ‘substance’, rather than

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‘only the occasion’, of writing was ‘a 1960s confusion from which many received lasting damage’.58 The intensity that was focused on a redemptive centre that is characteristic of late modernism, and particularly the moment of the Intelligencer, had dispersed rather than extended by the time of Tracks and Mineshafts, and the focus on a ‘point of decision’ – a moment of potential, deliberate agency – has been lost. This is regretted, although Riley asserts that the conflation of such a moment with the substance of work was a ‘1960s confusion’: if such a stance was confused, however, it begs the question as to what the proper substance of work might actually be. The forms undertaken in the Intelligencer, such as the hope that we might recover ‘the plaintive chanting | under the Atlantic and the unison of forms’ (‘The Wound, Day and Night’, 14–15), are at times travestied in Tracks and Mineshafts, as in the image of ‘a whole warehouse of books [that] lies under the sea’, the texts reduced to ‘a dazzling unreadable scum, a potentiality’.59 It is these ‘cubic masses of documentation totally inert’ that made impossible the completion of the planned open field project from which Tracks and Mineshafts is salvaged. Rather than the ‘unison of forms’, all that emerges is ‘a dazzling unreadable scum’ that remains ‘a potentiality’ and emphatically not an action, a situation that Riley identifies as symptomatic of the damaging confusion of the 1960s. The social conditions that prevailed in its wake were far from generative, as ‘[c]are is elbowed aside [. . .] as ever more refined instruments of penetration release perception from direct engagement’.60 The ‘broken and rephrased’ wholeness is registered on a semantic and syntactic level as well, suggesting a process of inscription and re-inscription, of writing and over-writing, that serves to remove the work from ‘direct engagement’ with the world. This process of abstraction is the antithesis of the ‘convergence of Earth substance and sky energy’ described earlier, as the ‘work-focus becomes such complete anti-home’ and ‘everything homely is mercilessly parodied’.61 If the Intelligencer had sought to establish a kind of new poetic homeland, the work that followed it functioned consistently to establish a kind of ‘anti-home’, which would in part be consistent with Neil Pattison’s contention that the Intelligencer was fulfilled in its self-sabotage. However, Riley’s description of the ‘appalling underground’ explicitly regrets that, as it can be read in relation to the mines at hand, but also more widely in the context of modernist or late modernist poetry publishing in Britain in the 1970s, which persisted in a series of often conflicting undergrounds. If the underground was an ‘anti-home’, the alternative of mainstream, commercial publishing offered no respite. Riley explicitly relates this to the fate of modernist poetry in Britain in the 1970s: ‘few mines were ever

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able to cope with this immense variance, and rich pipe finished them off ’, he notes, which reminds him of ‘the fatality rate among small poetry publishers caused by Arts Council grants’.62 The economics of pipe working is implicated in the economics of poetry production and publication, both of which are, as Riley describes the former, processes of ‘bringing to sight’.63 But this process of bringing to sight is fraught with risk, and Riley stresses the difference between ore and the metals into which it smelted. ‘Metal is an unstable (and poisonous) substance, as the ore isn’t’, he writes: ‘[It] is an incomplete thing, a lost lover [. . . that] fosters impression and appearance’, and in doing so, forces the ‘total vision of the stone ring’ to become ‘remote’.64 To extend the analogy of poetry and mining, if ore is the raw material of poetic composition, the end product of the poem is figured here as a metal, which is itself an inherently unstable and easily manipulated and appropriated form. This has a specific resonance in terms of Riley’s involvement with the Intelligencer: ‘metal’ is a key term both in his ‘Working Note’, and in the responses it engendered, which included Prynne’s ‘Note on Metal’ and its proposition of ‘an exilic (left-wing) theory of substance’.65 If the poetic process is analogous to the smelting of ore into metal, it raises, in John Hall’s words, ‘[t]he very possibility of there being a false language [that] relates to these figures as something like counterfeit notes and coins’.66 ‘Counterfeit’ clearly has pejorative connotations, even with the context of the Intelligencer, as per Ian Vine’s dismissal of Prynne’s ‘Moon Poem’; but it is also possible to read ‘counterfeit’ or ‘false’ language as a means of articulating an exilic theory of substance from within the parameters of substance itself. This would allow articulation to take place at a point that denies its emplacement; Peter Middleton writes that Tracks and Mineshafts constantly subverts a sense of Heideggerian ousia through ‘its instabilities of tone, its varieties of form, its implosions of metaphor and its avoidance of resolution’.67 It is a language that keeps trust at a distance, exiled from its truth like ‘a lost lover’, constantly at the point of undoing the utterance into which it has been sculpted. The ‘trust’ that was inherent in the Intelligencer’s conception of a community that could take risks because it was underwritten by such trust has been stretched to a point almost beyond itself, as, in these poems, ‘the reader is figured as a distance the poet is in love with, but who can only be served as a distance; hence the infinite demands of “trust”’.68 This distancing of love and trust seems to renounce the terms of the Intelligencer project, and yet the prospect of a communality continues to tantalize, even as ‘[t]he total vision of the stone ring becomes remote’. Stone and wood, substances that, unlike chimerical metal, remain true to themselves even as they decay, are in Riley’s thesis an alternate

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form of substance on which such a shared community might be constructed, a contention that, again, can be productively read back into the exchanges in the Intelligencer. The ‘total vision of the stone ring’ that Riley writes about recalls a passage from Prynne’s letter to Riley of 14 February 1967, which formed part of his response to his ‘Working Note’, in which he speculated that the ‘disposition of megaliths rehears[ed] the interchange between accident and purpose’, so that it might function as ‘a mechanism for hanging onto sanity’.69 The stone ring that Riley describes in Tracks and Mineshafts refers to ‘the monuments still visible upon Britain’s moorlands and hillsides’,70 a presence on the landscape that has become separated from its validating social context: its persistence is a monument to an extinct social order that also holds the promise of regeneration, no matter how attenuated. From this vantage, a decade or so after the Intelligencer’s cessation, Riley’s invocation of the failed promise that inheres in these ancient stone rings is also an invocation of the failure of the Intelligencer to institute a sustainable community of risk. Poetry and place cohere in this account, insisting that, in Simon Perril’s words, ‘the place of poetry’ be conceived of ‘as a location, an intertextual field’.71 The textual traces of the Intelligencer are one significant component in this intertextual field, a stone circle that remains visible on the horizon of Tracks and Mineshafts, and towards which, obliquely, the sequence is in part oriented. Whether this orientation is towards a lost object or a possible point of arrival is not resolved in the text’s ‘reading-through of what seems to be a complex series of re-scriptings’.72 The substance of its script remains indeterminate, insisting on its readability at the same time as repeatedly disfiguring, distorting and denying its legibility, or a kindred relationship between what is said and what is meant. At times, Riley seems to call time on the entire endeavour, writing: [T]he whole band curves and storms into the valley shaking with lies and broken promises, the whole stratum scribbled and fought over and over and completely illegible, the lights below gasping supine for information-thrills, the town pulling the fringes of distance over itself, fighting for sleep. The wind battens the grass, beats and plunges about my head as the light finally slips away and the meaning of these paltry ruins is swept over the heads of the town and away, for really there is nothing to be gained from the febrile perseverance and concentration, there is no linear reward and nothing is secured until death.73

The figure of trust is now ‘shaking with lies and broken promises’, so that what once was script is now scribble, so ‘completely illegible’ that it now seems as though ‘there is nothing to be gained from the febrile perseverance and concentration’

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that are necessary in order to continue to work: the vision of the stone ring, and the bond of substance and trust that inheres in it, disperses and becomes still more remote.74 Despite this, the work continues in light of ‘the flame that gains as it disperses, consolidates and augments as it flares on the horizon the blue lettering of anyone’s few, accurate sentences’.75 These ‘few, accurate sentences’ are the sum possibility to which all continuing poetic labour is ultimately oriented in Tracks and Mineshafts, although it is beyond its scope to say how they might be written or how they might be read.

Barry MacSweeney, ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ and ‘Colonel B.’ Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Barry MacSweeney’s poetry can be characterized by an intense and restless experimentation, in which the questions that have shaped the present study – that of late modernism and the poetics of community – are brought into particularly sharp relief. The ‘damaged lifeworld’ to which late modernism sought to establish some form of communal, poetic restitution impinges more and more forcefully on this body of work;76 this struggle moves through various forms of resistance before in a sense yielding, in poems such as ‘Colonel B.’, the ‘Liz Hard’ poems, ‘Jury Vet’ and ‘Wild Knitting’, to those forms of social damage in a poetics of abjection. In its absolute abnegation of the terms of redemption, wholeness and social cohesion, MacSweeney’s poetry of the late 1970s and early 1980s constitutes an emphatic disavowal of the poetics of community predicated on reciprocal risk and trust on which the Intelligencer had been conceived. In this section, I argue that the shredded prosody of one of these late poems, ‘Colonel B.’, is a culmination of a decade’s worth of poetic experimentation. Critical accounts of the value of MacSweeney’s poetry of the late 1970s and early 1980s are marked by controversy. Some critics have argued that it represents a perversion of MacSweeney’s lyric gift, born in part out of his contact with the Intelligencer milieu. For W. N. Herbert, MacSweeney’s continued ‘engagement with the experimental agendas of the Cambridge school’ through the 1970s denied him the possibility of engaging with ‘any audience other than its own adherents’.77 Paul Batchelor corroborates this sense of MacSweeney being led astray from his true vocation by insisting that, in the work written during this decade, his continued association with Prynne in particular had led him to ‘graft [Prynne’s] priorities onto his own’.78 Although MacSweeney’s work of this period is very different from and much more rebarbative than the more conventional

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lyric modes that characterize the works that he wrote at the beginning and the end of his career, this difference is less a consequence of MacSweeney’s supposed susceptibility to the influence of the poets he met through the Intelligencer, than an attempt to work out precisely those terms – voice, community – that are assumed in Batchelor and Herbert’s accounts. The idea of a community, and what it costs to live within a community, is staged at an extraordinary pitch in these poems. Rather than taking ‘community’ to be a knowable thing, that can subsume the voice of an individual writer, it is shown instead to be something fraught and contested, a struggle in which the individual voice is necessarily a participant. This is in part a working out of the consequences of the Intelligencer, which had broken down in what amounted, in Neil Pattison’s words, to ‘selfsabotage’;79 it might also be related to the commercial construction of a wider readership that publishers such as Hutchinson had offered him. An additional and crucially important context in reading MacSweeney’s work of this period is his close involvement with Eric Mottram’s tenure (and eventual removal) as editor of Poetry Review.80 This event is crucially significant in that it marks a distinct fault line between avant-garde and mainstream modes in British poetry of the 1970s, and the deliberate marginalization of the former by the latter: as such, the kind of general readership from which MacSweeney is supposedly cut off by virtue of his association with the Intelligencer milieu is itself revealed to be a highly politicized construct predicated on its own set of entrenched exclusions. More obliquely, the Poetry Review debacle also revealed the schism that existed within avant-garde poetries of the time that supposedly ran along a Cambridge/ London axis, which was brought into relief by the perceived reluctance of those poets associated with the Intelligencer to offer their full support to Mottram’s efforts. Crozier for instance described the attempted take-over as misguided in a letter to Mottram, arguing that the proper response to the conservative hegemony was not to launch an assault on their institutions but ‘to produce one’s own institutions, directly shaped by personal needs’.81 MacSweeney was unusual in that he was equally at home on both sides of what Andrew Duncan memorably coined ‘the blood-soaked Royston perimeter’: he played a central role in both the Intelligencer and the Poetry Society takeover, assuming the role for instance of chair of the General Council until his resignation in March 1977. The letters in both MacSweeney’s and Mottram’s archives reveal a long and involved friendship that was particularly intense through the 1970s: MacSweeney dedicated his key transitional long poem Black Torch to Mottram. This suggests that MacSweeney’s relationship with experimental poetries was more complicated than the simple grafting of a Prynnean poetics onto his own can allow; it also suggests that, far

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from being the closed circle of mutual appreciation it is sometimes supposed to be, the wider avant-garde and experimental communities in Britain at this time were fraught with risk and disagreement. Peter Riley, who as an editor of the Intelligencer might be assumed to be part of the audience of Cambridge ‘adherents’ for whose approbation this work was supposedly produced, has described these works as ‘the central disaster of Barry’s career’.82 Rather than reading MacSweeney’s poetry of this period in terms of its identification with the poetics of a particular community, it is perhaps more useful to read them as staging the antagonisms of identity and community that had surfaced in the Intelligencer’s run and its aftermath. Both Batchelor and Herbert assume stable forms of identity and community, even invoking the nebulous ‘Cambridge school’ – a definition that seems to work here and elsewhere as a kind of critical shorthand for egg-head experimentalism. They also implicitly suggest a true and ‘natural’ version of MacSweeney’s poetic identity from which he was cut off by virtue of his association with these experimental agendas. Such a reading seems however to fall short of the challenge of MacSweeney’s writing throughout the 1970s, in which the fraught relationship between the individual voice and the poetic community is repeatedly returned to as MacSweeney attempts to find a poetic form that is commensurate to the forms of social damage in which the self is irrevocably implicated. MacSweeney’s struggle through the 1970s to find a poetics commensurate to this desire was explicitly related to its negotiation with modernism. The Odes were framed in modernist terms, looking back to the earliest iterations of Poundian modernism in particular. This poetry, in the wake of the dissolution of the Intelligencer and the Hutchinson fiasco, is isolate and self-possessed. In his Poetry Information interview with Eric Mottram, MacSweeney talks about his desire in the early 1970s to find a poetics that was in itself a ‘complete shape, like Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture’ that would allow him to excise ‘all sorts of descriptive shit’ from his work.83 It is possible to read this withdrawal from more open modes of writing as a development of MacSweeney’s resignation from ‘the kingdom of light’ (192) at the end of ‘The Last Bud’, an attempt to take full possession of his voice in a way that made it sufficiently strong as to be impervious to the incursions of social damage.84 Yet MacSweeney’s Odes constantly push at the limits of control, at the edges of what is shaped and what is random – the tension between which is, as William Rowe has written, pushed to an extreme in these poems. The ideal of self-possession, of the diamond-hard surface resisting external pressure, pushes up against the de facto operation of language as substance. Relations are suggested between words, semantically, phonically,

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and even occasionally syntactically, but they never resolve into meaning in the customary sense: none of these poems could be sensibly paraphrased. The substance of these poems repeatedly interrupts the possibility of a complete shape achieved by eloquence. These interruptions mark the poetry’s relationship to the forms of community around it. Although this poetry seems emphatically self-possessed, it is also emphatically social: dedications abound, to his partner and to his friends, and he repeatedly names poets and artists with whom he senses some form of solidarity, such as Jim Morrison or Thomas Chatterton. They are offered as analogues to the sense of poetic persona that MacSweeney assumes in these poems: heroic, isolated and doomed, persisting in their desire no matter what the personal cost. The evocation of these names is an attempt to write a way through the isolation, to gesture towards the possibility of shared experience. Even the apparently extreme self-possession of these poems is shaded by an awareness of the social. This directly affects the tension between shape and randomness, as it suggests – without ever fully articulating – the possibility of a social discourse in which the apparently arbitrary could be reconciled with choice. Such a discourse returns again to the Poundian ideal of logopoeia, in which a word is chosen ‘in some special relation to [its] “usage”’.85 In that interstitial moment where shape and shapelessness appear on the page, the shadow of a residual, readerly community becomes visible: but that shadow never resolves into something substantial. MacSweeney’s poetry is always turning away from the consolation of such a community, without ever quite turning its back on it completely: its creative charge is catalysed by the tension of what is being lost in so doing, without ever fully renouncing its possibilities and its consolation. The hard edge that MacSweeney invokes in his sculptural analogy is always at breaking point, just as the contradictory desires for complete self-possession and communal belonging are brought into extreme relief at this moment. The desire to articulate some form of collective poetics is manifest in MacSweeney’s shift into the long form as the 1970s went on. MacSweeney wrestled with the problem of mapping the taut kinetics of the Odes onto the longer form, with its tradition of public address, throughout the decade. The Black Torch sequence – initially intended as the first instalment of a trilogy – documents this struggle. Dedicated to Eric Mottram, it obliquely alludes to the social damage of the Poetry Society debacle, and through that, both the fraught persistence of a continued modernist experimental poetics in Britain and the erosion of other forms of collective identity through the 1970s. In a reading of the poem given at Lumb Bank in 1978, MacSweeney describes the poem’s

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subject as ‘the miners’ strike of 1844’, which establishes clear affinities between the text and the industrial unrest of Britain in the 1970s.86 The subject of mining also draws some parallels with Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts, although unlike Riley’s text, which is salvaged from an abandoned open field ur-text, Black Torch is written in an emphatically Olsonian mode, collating fragments of speech in a range of registers, plus historical facts, to narrate the history. However, the point from which this is arranged remains uninterrogated: there is a feeling that they have been arranged after the fact, like an anthropologist recording native dialects. The exilic vantage affords the poem a stability that, in Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts, is repeatedly problematized. It speaks, if not from a centre, then at least from a stable vantage: the social damage it describes does not impinge on the prevailing arrangement of the historical material within the logic of Black Torch’s open field poetics. Although it acknowledges the forms that social violence takes and how different language registers can be used variously to inscribe or erase it, Black Torch is unable to abnegate the type of fixity that, in its insistence on a stable framework of representation, works as a kind of social palliative. Its handling of the historical material of the poem is exactly that: a handling, an arrangement. The direct encounter with material that shapes the Odes, and the fraught energy that that generates, falls away in the distancing operation of Black Torch’s documentary aesthetic. For all the shifts of tone enacted through the poem’s collage of different voices and registers, the language registers remain distinctly stratified, falling into prescribed social roles and established forms of representation. Its modus operandi stands outside the narrative of thwarted political aspiration that it describes, the implication of which is that there are forms of social action, such as this poem, that can take place outside the terms of such a narrative and are not formally implicated in such a defeat – an effect instantiated in part by the stratification of its lines and registers. The analogy with the situation of the poem’s context signalled by the dedication to Mottram suggests a possible relation, but this suggestion is made by a shaping intelligence that is capable of taking an overview of the situation in order to draw the analogy. The vantage that sustains Black Torch begins to break down in the sequence’s coda, ‘Black Torch Sunrise’. In his Lumb Bank reading, MacSweeney made clear to his audience that ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ is ‘not really about coal mining. It’s about many things’.87 There are a number of different linguistic registers at work in the poem, but the relationship between them is fundamentally different from that relationship on which the main body of Black Torch is predicated. This shift

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is manifest in the poem’s prosody. The stratification of registers collapses in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, the effect of which is to create a deeply compacted poetic form. This is an effect established in the poem’s opening lines, where ‘BBC monochrome newsreel flickers | jerking on small family tv screen’ (‘Black Torch Sunrise’, 1–2).88 The lines move far more quickly than those in the main sequence of Black Torch; their tone and topic shift with an unexplained suddenness that contrasts with the earlier shifts that are clearly demarcated in their typography and prosody. The interplay between ‘flickers | jerking’ that runs across the first line-break neatly captures this shift: ‘flickers’ seems to operate as a verb at the end of the first line, but this sense is destabilized by ‘jerking’, which opens up the possibility of ‘flickers’ as a noun. This dual possibility is itself a kind of flickering, as two different readings present themselves simultaneously before the reader, refusing to resolve into coherence. The absence of articles accentuates this unsteadiness, speeding the lines up so that each word and image is telescoped into the next. The adjectives which might be read as acting in the place of the articles – ‘monochrome’, ‘small’ – function instead to anchor these lines in a mediated context – the poem opens with ‘BBC’, an acknowledgement of an official, state-owned media outlet – and also the perspective from which this broadcast is being received: on a small, black-and-white television set, denoting, even in the late 1970s, reduced economic circumstances. The poem’s success comes from the way in which it presents this material: in the bulk of Black Torch, it would have been presented as fragments shored against one another, whereas in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, the fragments lose their distinction, becoming blurred, out-of-focus, the images leaching into one another. The sociological, epistemological and prosodic predicates on which the main Black Torch sequence was founded begin to crumble away in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’. The distinct registers remain, but they are now imbricated: the Geordie colloquial ‘hoy’ (‘Black Torch Sunrise’, 3) is used in the third line without any additional contextualizing colloquialisms. It is doubly incongruous: first, in its use to describe the confrontation on ‘the sensual Paris boulevards’ (6), and second, in the fact that that confrontation is itself being mediated through a BBC news report. Unlike the report of the strike earlier in Black Torch, it is never clear who is speaking here, or from what vantage. The opening lines of ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ appear to evoke les évenéments of 1968; the lines that follow, set off in speech marks and purporting to be a quote from the BBC broadcast, make clear that this is in fact occurring at the time of the poem’s composition, in the late 1970s, stating that ‘our correspondent says there will be no | repetition of the 1968 near-revolution’ (‘Black Torch Sunrise’,

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8–9). Unlike the quotations from sources in the main body of Black Torch, there is no distancing irony at work in this quotation: it is as deeply imbricated in the fabric of the poem as any other part, functioning to mark the poem’s relationship to revolutionary desire and the disappointment of 1968. It is an integral part of the poem’s acknowledgement and realization of the necessity to move beyond the forms that the hopes of the previous decade had taken; one such form being the open field form and its attendant model of community as espoused by the Intelligencer. The obliquely political discourse that sought to establish a community shaped by personal need in which the Intelligencer was situated is rejected without a defined alternative. The ‘neat covert agents’ (13) are not simply presented as the representative of a monolithic and brutalizing state authority: they are shown to be tacitly engaged with the ‘leftists’, bribing them in a way that ensures the continuation of the status quo that simultaneously makes the insurrectionists complicit with that against which they are supposedly fighting. The following lines expand on the theme of the failing of the left: the Labour party upholds the jailing of pickets as ‘TUC inner cadres’ (19) make secret deals with the government. These traditional forms of working-class solidarity have been co-opted by market forces: their collaboration with the authorities is undertaken in order to offer the pound ‘some relief on the European market’ (20). The obviation of traditional forms of left-wing resistance by the rise of market economics through the 1970s is a form of dislocation that MacSweeney alludes to in lines that refer to: Circles broken circumferences ripped perimeters buckled facts revealed must be published because they are seditious ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, 25–9

At the same time that the ‘facts revealed’ work in the context of government secrecy and seditious disclosure, themes which are prevalent in MacSweeney’s poetry of this period, it also looks back, however distantly, to the passage in ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ which declares that ‘the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor | as fact’ (‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, 101–2). Prynne’s lines seem to articulate the desire that such a transfer can be made: that poetic language can work to the same kind of truths as the research materials on which the poem draws and about which much of the discourse in the Intelligencer seeks to raise awareness. In ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, the relationship between poetic language and

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truth, particularly political truth, is more ambiguously expressed; the dynamics of the relationship between a poetic vocation and political aspiration remain consequently unresolved, without the interpretive community equivalent to the one afforded by the Intelligencer to legitimize a particular poetics of political resistance by establishing it as ‘fact’. That the idealized ‘essential news’ that had been embodied in the Intelligencer’s sheets has given way to the debased facts of reportage – and that its orientation is towards local councils rather than a transatlantic community of risk – is made clear by MacSweeney’s explicit comparison of the relationship between poetry and truth and more quotidian methods of disclosure and dissemination in the juxtaposition of his poetry and his work as a local news reporter, dealing with ‘council Deep-throats’ (131) in order to ‘weld Press trivia | in low-key suburban rags’ (133–4): Obvious conflict for a poet in this predicament – to be worked out as it goes & as it falls to be cleaned. ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, 135–40

The comparison of his work on local papers with that done by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post on the Watergate scandal which eventually brought down President Nixon is clearly ironic; yet it is an irony that also makes a serious point in its recognition that authoritarian secrecy permeates even the very local political agenda. The ‘obvious predicament’ also recalls something of the final lines of ‘The Last Bud’, suggesting that resignation is not a viable way out of the contemporary political imbroglio: it is not that easy to exculpate oneself from it, since the situation permeates all facets of life. The kind of alternative community shaped by personal need expressed in the Intelligencer is no longer possible, since the precedence of personal need can no longer be trusted. This is the crux of the ‘conflict’ for a poet ‘in this predicament’: how to keep a sense of large-scale political ambitions without eliding the local reality of quotidian living. The predicament is glossed as what it means ‘to be worked out’, a phrase that encapsulates a sense of being worked to the point of exhaustion in an undertaking that may be very far removed from poetic production – the pursuit of ‘confidential manpower utilisation documents’ (130), for example – yet

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is financially necessary for an individual poet in MacSweeney’s position to undertake in order to get by. It also connotes the feeling of having had his own secrets solved by those whose authority he is seeking to resist, and consequently having his every move pre-empted. Resistance is futile, in this scenario; even the consolations of heroic self-detachment – of the kind at work poetically in the odes – are denied, since the self itself has been invaded by these forces, and there is no way of being certain that such a position is not one predetermined by those responsible who have ‘worked out’ his predicament. The fear of having been ‘worked out’ in this way – so that any position of political opposition is necessarily a position of complicity, since all positions have been co-opted by authority – haunts the poetry that MacSweeney wrote in the 1970s; the long poems that followed might be read as an attempt to write a way out of this impasse. These poems look back to the forms of his earlier work – ‘Colonel B.’ directly quotes from his work of the early 1970s – but in a way that acknowledges the irrevocable distance between them: their modes of resistance are denied, and even parodied. In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’, he writes that ‘[a]gents want me to yield’ (‘Far Cliff Babylon’, 15):89 ‘yield’ works in a similar fashion to ‘worked out’ in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, so that it connotes both giving in to the demands of authority, and also giving oneself, or one’s labour, up to them. In ‘Colonel B.’, MacSweeney develops a prosody that is more extreme in its dislocations than even the one adopted in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’: 1.

Orphan consorts & vipers under glass. Hair wrapped in knots, secret purple liquid in her circus fingers. Good morning day is love for you at work. ‘Colonel B.’, 1–490

The opening lines of ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ had had an ostensible subject matter – news reports of social disorder in Paris – that is conspicuously absent here: the first words seem to deny the possibility of reference. Who are these ‘orphan consorts’? What is their relation to ‘vipers under glass’? Why are the vipers ‘under glass’? These dislocations are repeated and expanded through the jarring line-breaks, across which sense is only tangentially carried, and in the cryptic imagery of the ‘secret purple liquid | in her circus fingers’. Even the most quotidian expressions – ‘Good morning’ – are unsettled through the contortions of these lines’ syntax: ‘day | is love’ reads initially like a statement, but ‘for you at work’ implies that it should be a question, an implication that is mitigated by the absence of a question mark.

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Yet through this obscurity, a patterning of sounds and images emerges that generates a meaning that is both specific to the moment of its articulation and the accumulation of a succession of such moments. It materializes neither as a fully realized image, nor as a proposition, and it is through this refusal to assume a fixed form that the poem’s prosody resists the condition of being ‘worked out’: [It] does not play an ideal lyrical language against actual degradation, the ideal freedom of nature against social bondage [. . .] Instead, it sings from within degradation, against it.91

‘Degradation’ in this account of MacSweeney’s poetics becomes itself not the consequence of being ‘worked out’ and made to ‘yield’ to capitalist economics, but a position from which to resist it. This is implicit in the political reality that MacSweeney describes in the ‘[s]hredding machines | hot with use’ (‘Colonel B.’, 16–17): these lines recall in part the state secrecy and seditious facts alluded to in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’. But in the context of their formal presentation blurs the distinction that is implied in the statement that ‘facts revealed | must be published’: there is no revelation here, nor any platform on which such a revelation might be published that would not be complicit with the situation it is supposedly uncovering. In this context, the shredding machines function as an analogy for the poem’s own shredded form, manifest in both the line-breaks and sudden shifts of tone and subject. The confidence in naming that was present in the exchanges that took place prior to and in the early stages of the Intelligencer has become as distanced from the possibility of mythic redemption as has the concept of ‘news’. What is written in stone now is not the named happenings that Prynne wrote about to Olson, but simply a name, ‘writ large in letters scraped | on Whitley Bay’s famous golden shore’ (87–8). This naming is contemporary and explicitly political, since it reveals the name of Colonel B. which was being suppressed by the authorities: it is the kind of seditious fact described in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’. As such, ‘Colonel B.’ might be read as the shredded remnants of MacSweeney’s previous poetical and political aspirations. Their form, however, insists that these are not fragments shored nostalgically against the ruins: there is no recuperative sub-structure to this poem that allows it to be rescued from its degradation. Indeed, it works deliberately to sever all such possible ties, including the ones that had previously sustained him. In keeping with its punk idiom, ‘Colonel B.’ insists, after the Stranglers, that there are ‘no more heroes anymore’: those figures that had, in the odes, provided MacSweeney with a Romanticized analogue to his own self-image are presented very differently in ‘Colonel B.’ This difference is suggested by the internal rhyme of ‘serve’ and

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‘swerve’ (93). Instead of adhering to ordained hierarchies of meaning, the writs that the writer is obliged to serve, MacSweeney instead advocates the ‘swerve’, which in sound and sense recalls aspects of other post-Intelligencer long poems, such as Crozier’s High Zero. The convulsive rhymes throughout ‘Colonel B.’ destabilize Prynne’s insistence in his letter to Ray Crump on ‘sound in its due place’: sounds in MacSweeney spark off one another almost arbitrarily, without anything so stable as a ‘place’ to underwrite their legitimacy. The effect is to create a displaced poetics as the rhymes pile up on one another: Pisspoor jackdaws bark long legged gnawed by filthy cats & stinking canine flesh. ‘Colonel B.’, 49–51

The capitalized quotations from Chatterton scattered throughout the poem do not stand proud of the devastated cultural landscape encapsulated in ‘Taj Mahals | of muttshit’ (‘Colonel B.’, 53–4), as the allusions in the Odes did: any hope of redemption, or the possibility of a coherent centre, is let out in the bathos of the lines ‘Sack the scallywag who brought me to this | fucking awful place’ (63–4). There can be no such hierarchies of meaning from which a sound’s ‘due place’ might be established since ‘[t]he writing is located on the same plane as reality, in other words at the level of production’.92 The isolate self with its distant points of longing that inhered in the odes has collapsed: ‘Colonel B.’ registers this collapse in its prosodic refusal of emplacement and its concomitant denial of the virtue of universal brotherhood espoused in the Intelligencer: this is the network, ancient brother in arms, hand by loin. I seek your groin with a stone. ‘Colonel B.’, 191–5

An additional resonance with the Intelligencer in this poem comes from its dedication, as ‘a State of the Nation bulletin’, to J. H. Prynne, to whom Brother Wolf had also been dedicated: the ‘ancient brother’ (191) of these lines might be read in this context, in which case the transition from solidarity to seeking ‘your groin | with a stone’ (‘Colonel B.’, 194–5) might be read as a travesty of brotherhood, and a representation of the impossibility of sustaining such communal ties.

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Only at the poem’s end does it gesture towards the ostensible subject of this malaise: ‘stainless bint is number 10’ (‘Colonel B.’, 204). It also invokes other members of the Tory party: the then-minister for arts, Norman St John-Stevas, and ‘Bexley Ted’, the former Tory leader Ted Heath, whom Thatcher had ousted.93 But this is not merely agit-prop, as the lines that follow cut, via the image of ‘hair on hair shirt before cameras’ (209), to St Bede and St Cuthbert, whose sandals ‘cannot walk on this land’ (211). The nod towards Blake’s Jerusalem in this line – ‘And did those feet in ancient time | Walk upon England’s mountains green’ (‘Milton’, Preface, 1–2)94 – links back into the holy places that had been so central to the late modernist aspirations of the Intelligencer and its poetics of community. Now even the hermit’s cell offers no respite from the encroachments of capitalism: His hut is cut by hand while private practice thrives. ‘Colonel B.’, 211–15

The over-determined rhymes of ‘hut/cut’, and the stressed consonance of ‘hut/ hand’, seem to complicate any straight bifurcation of the insidious reach of ‘private practice’ and the valorized self-determination of the hermit in his hut: is this kind of recidivism an appropriate response to the incursions of the market? Is this form of isolation and retreat appropriate, or is it itself just another form of ‘private practice’? This was the isolate self-possession of the Odes: these lines are as shot through with the fear of having been ‘worked out’ as the rest of the poem; the invocation of a lost spirituality is not made as a form of nostalgic validation, through which the debased present might be restored; rather, the desire to look back is itself implicitly questioned in these lines’ overdetermination. Unlike Tracks and Mineshafts, where the possibility of a collective future remains, however distantly, a prospect, ‘Colonel B.’ seems to deny such a hope: there is no possibility of a home-coming in this poem, since home has been bought out by: THE MAGGIES BEATS. THE MAGGIE BOEAST. The Maggie Beast ‘Colonel B.’, 216–18

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If The English Intelligencer had sought to fashion a new poetic homeland, which was predicated on communality and the gifted exchange of trust, its nemesis was ‘The Maggie Beast’, who declared that there was no such thing as society. A paradox of Thatcher’s politics was that this insistence went hand-in-hand with a deep-rooted and jingoistic sense of ‘Englishness’, a rhetoric that was used to give credence to the Falklands war, mass unemployment and breaking up the unions. This had the effect of countering Blake’s Albion: ‘Albion, a new geography | Albion, to be repealed’ (‘Colonel B.’, 222–3). The poem’s coda expands on this, explicitly linking Beulah to Thatcher: The moon (Beulah) walks Up. She is white torch maiden protected by blue police of the night. No frights distress her glowing garment hem. ‘Colonel B.’, 235–41

Beulah’s ‘pleasant lovely shadow’ is lost in the blinding light of the ‘white torch maiden’ and her attendant blue flash of police lights. The imagery that had sustained the Odes’ fierce concentration is registered here as something that has been co-opted by the Maggie Beast: there is no place for love here, and the figures in which it once inhered have had that protective space worked out of them. In a letter sent to Eric Mottram at the end of 1979, MacSweeney makes this sense of abnegated interiority and its consequence for prosodic form explicit: The idea of pretty form appals [. . .] our political condition goes right down to the roots. We move about in hysterical areas from one end to the other. From domestic to public life. It all stinks. I hate and love it too95

The roots are the same as the ones to which it was hoped that, by returning to them, some form of social regeneration might be achieved; now, however, it becomes clear that the current corrupt political condition runs all the way down to the roots, denying the possibility of a place from which such a regeneration might begin. The kinds of mythic form and the force of love that are valorized in the late modernist tradition of the Intelligencer are travestied in these poems: in place of the reified figure of Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi priegha’, we have the

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Maggie Beast, a political figure who has taken on mythic proportions. What was used in the earlier poems to inculcate a sense of vocation and solidarity is now, perversely, a guarantor of the Maggie Beast’s inviolability. The poem’s final lines read as a renunciation of hope, where the ‘plexiglass’ of the riot police in ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ is figured here as ‘plexistars’ (‘Colonel B.’, 242), which incorporates the sidereal imagery of the Intelligencer in such a way that its associations and connotations are expunged from it: ‘plexistars’ would be protective barriers, rather than points of useful resistance, like the ‘cloches | thrown up reflecting | dawn’ (‘Colonel B.’, 243–5). The ‘dawn thing’ that had held such promise in the Intelligencer has dissipated; its aspirations to establish a community shaped by personal need in which work could be situated in relation to its use value, rather than its abstracted exchange value, is more distant than ever: Up for sale we go, driven into roots by blood & silence of our lives. ‘Colonel B.’, 249–53

Prynne had written to Olson nearly 20 years before MacSweeney wrote these lines to describe his sense of how Pokorny’s dictionary sat on his shelves ‘like an unexploded bomb’. The work undertaken in Intelligencer essays like ‘A Pedantic Note’ sought to recover a paradisal locus through proper attention to the latent power recoverable through forms of etymological attention, a desire that was rooted in the Intelligencer community’s attempt to establish a viable, vital and sustained alternative to the etiolated publishing industry of the 1960s. But those desires remained unfulfilled: certainly, the publishing culture that had turned the writers involved with the Intelligencer towards America for an alternative was still in the ascendancy, so much so that in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion were moved to write that there was ‘a stretch, occupying much of the 1960s and 70s, when very little – in England at any rate – seemed to be happening’.96 This assertion completely elided not just the Intelligencer but the entire history of little magazine and small press production in this period. In these terms, the Intelligencer embodies a failed revolution: but in the body of work that came out of it, it attained a different kind of fulfilment,

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer

one that is perhaps self-reflexively resistant to the very idea of fulfilment, since fulfilment is synonymous with accomplishment, and revolutionary labour is never fully accomplished. What is left is simply the work itself; as MacSweeney articulated it: Thus we enter eighties. Torn from our blood, cast out, all purpose yanked from the tilth. But without solace is how the poet goes, just paying attention to every thing.97

The Intelligencer had sought to establish an exchange that would give direction – a sense of purpose – to the tilth; but the work does not stop there, nor does it look for a substitute. At this point, the poet must proceed by ‘paying attention to every thing’: like the roots into which we are driven that have been corrupted by a general social malaise, such forms of attention are analogous to that which Olson had averred to be the proper work of the poet in his Vinland essay published in the first issue of The Wivenhoe Park Review. But the attention MacSweeney articulates in this letter is no longer focused on the restitution of a mythic whole: its work now is simply to remain attentive to its own processes, which are also the processes of the damaged life-world in which it takes place. The sense of being ‘cast out’ is common to all the works considered in this chapter. It is my contention that this sense of exile is related to the Intelligencer, which had sought to establish an exchange rooted in kinship – MacSweeney’s ‘blood’ – that would lend purpose to a collective poetic endeavour. Although the exilic vantage common to all these works bears witness to the failure of that aspiration to be realized, the basic conditions that had made that aspiration necessary – that is, the desire for a poetry commensurate both to the damage of modernity and also to the scale of modernist poetry that had been written out of most accounts of contemporary British poetry – remained pressingly vital in the poetry written even after its cessation. This post-Intelligencer poetry bears witness to those basic conditions and also to the failure of the Intelligencer’s initial attempt to respond to them: in High Zero, the concept of origins at work in the Intelligencer is glancingly present and deeply problematized in its rhymes and reflections; Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts struggles to articulate the ‘few, accurate sentences’ of a true work in its rightful place; the form of Barry MacSweeney’s long poems of the late 1970s turns the Intelligencer’s ideals insideout as the social conditions in which it is written move further and further away from the moment of collective hope that seemed possible in the middle to late 1960s. As such, the Intelligencer remains implicitly bound up in that moment,

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but in the work written after its cessation, its endeavour remains pressingly vital to the persistence of a poetry that remains engaged with the tenets of late modernism even as it counts the cost of the work already undertaken in this exchange by recalibrating the terms on which it is predicated.

Conclusion: ‘The proper microscope after all’: Reading The English Intelligencer

This study has argued for an understanding of The English Intelligencer as something more than the mimeographed sheets sent out to a selected list of poets for a couple of years in the mid-1960s. Rather, I have argued that it was an attempt to establish a pattern of exchange that sought to restore poetry publishing to something more than an opportunity for publishers to make a profit. As such, the Intelligencer was emphatically social, and its work continues in the correspondence that took place before, during and after its print run. It did not realize its earliest ambitions: the pattern of exchange developed in a way that was not anticipated by those most closely involved with it, to their disappointment. An exchange that was founded on the principles of trust, risk and fraternity ended in mild acrimony: the editorial putsch on Peter Riley at the end of 1967 is perhaps the clearest illustration of this, but the tenor of many of the prose missives printed in its run share something of this disappointment. This was not the end of the Intelligencer however. Rather, the work produced in the wake of its print run continued to be influenced by the terms of its exchange. This work also crucially acknowledged that these terms had changed, that the reciprocal exchange of trust and risk had given way to something else. The second half of this study explored the possibilities of what this ‘something else’ might be. I have also sought to establish something of the variety of the Intelligencer which has been elided from accounts which describe it as ‘a key magazine of “The Cambridge School”’.1 The term ‘Cambridge School’ I take to be a generally damaging one, both in its affiliation with an elite institution to which the Intelligencer itself bore at best a tangential relationship and also with the idea of a ‘school’, with its connotations of discipline, order and hierarchy. The variousness of the Intelligencer contradicts this description at every turn: its key contributors include poets from Bristol and Newcastle and its editorial address is listed variously as London, Hastings and Keele. Although a number of its key

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Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer

contributors were graduates of the Cambridge English Tripos, many more were not – and those that were wrote and thought through a poetry that was not then an established part of the university’s teaching. Certainly, the institutional affiliation of Prynne was important to the Intelligencer’s history, not least because it afforded access to the mimeograph on which it was run off. Another aspect of the variousness to which this study has borne witness is its situation of Prynne in a context of shared endeavour and to relate the shifts in his work to it. Much valuable criticism of Prynne’s work has tended to focus on it in isolation, or in relation to the work’s cultural, linguistic and philological contexts: this study has sought to add to these accounts by providing an account of the local conditions of its production. By paying attention to these conditions, it becomes possible to form a much clearer sense of the scale of the achievement of the Intelligencer as it was worked out in the poetry of the remarkable group of writers – Andrew Crozier, John Hall, John James, Barry MacSweeney, John Riley, Peter Riley and John Temple, among others – who had been most closely associated with it. The Intelligencer meant different things to each of them and the diversity of their practices is a testament to how powerful the ideas exchanged in and around the Intelligencer continued to be. The shift in the terms of the Intelligencer exchange identified in this study is significant in the broader history of post-war British poetry. The terms on which the Intelligencer was originally predicated had been part of a concerted effort to rejuvenate the proscribed parameters of contemporary British poetry by reconnecting it to the vital example available in the work of Pound and Olson. As the exchange went on in the Intelligencer’s pages, however, it became apparent that these terms were incommensurate to the social conditions in which it took place and so, as a consequence of this, the significance attributed to the work of these poets shifted without being renounced. This might be broadly described as the terminal limit of late modernism; what it gave way to is still being defined. This study has attempted to define the particular relationship of this ongoing work to the Intelligencer and in so doing, it has itself become part of that field of labour engaged with the working-out of the Intelligencer’s consequences and, more broadly, the recovery of Britain’s neglected post-war modernist poetry. The movement away from an understanding of the Intelligencer defined entirely in relation to its archival holdings might also be understood to be a movement away from those tendencies in the Intelligencer itself that Dorn dismissed as ‘the proper microscope’.2 Rather than focusing entirely on the terms of its own internal logic – and despite the restricted readership and the comparative brevity of its run, there is sufficient material in the Intelligencer’s

Conclusion

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pages to sustain this depth of attention – this study has opened up a definition of the Intelligencer that includes correspondence and work that both came before and after its run. This broader, more discursive methodology would provide a compelling basis for further work, both on the Intelligencer itself and also on the field of post-war British poetry little magazines and small presses. Such work would offer a rich account of the exchanges that determined the nature of these fugitive publications, and to map the respective congruence and incongruity between the various publications that sustained, encouraged and promoted a body of work that might be understood to be the definitive achievement of this period. Such a project would give full consideration to magazines such as Alembic, Migrant, Outburst, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse that predated the Intelligencer, as well as Move, Once, The Resuscitator, Tzarad and The Wivenhoe Park Review, which were contemporary to and closely linked with its run and those, such as Collection, The Curiously Strong and Grosseteste Review, that came after it. Attention to the relationship of this body of work to small presses like Fulcrum, Goliard, Grosseteste and Trigram would supplement this work. This study ultimately works as a corrective to those accounts, like Blake Morrison’s and Andrew Motion’s, which insist that the 1960s was a period of comparative ‘lethargy’ in British poetry, during which ‘very little’ seemed to be happening.3 Such a claim is demonstrably false, confusing the lack of adventure that characterized ‘Betjeman’s England’ with a complete picture of British poetry in that period. Morrison and Motion’s claim itself speaks of the continued lethargy of commercial British poetry publishing in its apparent obliviousness to work that is not made available through its own means of distribution. The work of The English Intelligencer is a case in point with regard to this claim. In its prosody and its means of distribution, it is the embodiment of vitality – the absence of which Morrison and Motion claim to regret. This book is a history of The English Intelligencer. The work of this study has been to establish the terms of its vital exchange and in so doing, to afford the Intelligencer its proper place as a critical, constitutive part of the history of postwar British poetry. The publication of this study in a series called Historicizing Modernism speaks of a wider historical purview, and I have sought to map out its continuities and discontinuities within literary modernism. This historicizing is not however an act of post-bellum accountancy, even though this study’s dependence on archival materials might suggest otherwise. As was noted in the Introduction, the Intelligencer’s archive is itself still taking shape, and will continue to take shape in the months and years that follow the present study’s publication in ways that will confirm, challenge and contradict my conclusions. This book

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participates in that unfolding historical continuum, and is not a monument to a by-gone moment. While I was researching the doctorate on which it is based, I caught the train into London St. Pancras several times a week, and walked past the statue of John Betjeman as I made my way out onto the Euston Road: lines from his poems were inscribed into the platform concourse. What had the Intelligencer achieved if, more than 50 years after Prynne had written to Olson about the pernicious blindness of Betjeman’s England, Betjeman’s words literally made up the ground on which I was walking? But it’s precisely there that the Intelligencer’s value becomes clear: its work is not the pre-remembered Betjemanian heritage industry, whose notion of a public art attempts to ignore, conceal and obfuscate the cultural, historical and ideological forces that shape it. The history of the Intelligencer requires a different kind of attention, one that is alert to its own contradictions and recognizes that, as history is a vital and contested force, its conclusions are necessarily provisional. In that sense, then, this book is one moment in the history of The English Intelligencer, and far from the last word.

Appendix: Contents Listing of The English Intelligencer This appendix offers a complete contents listing of The English Intelligencer. I have omitted individual issue numbers because of the discrepancies in issuebinding between some holdings. I have however indicated the following special issues: the spoof issue (Sp), the Sparty Lea adjunct issue (SL), the ‘ghost’ issue (G), the Palace Revolution issue (PR) and the Final Solution issue (FS). This lists content only in terms of poetry, critical and creative prose and correspondence. I have omitted the various notices of forthcoming publications and readings that are an important part of the Intelligencer’s exchange: these are carefully represented in the Mountain Press edition. To repeat that information here would be redundant and make the contents listing unwieldy. I have numbered the pages continuously, with the exception of those issues like the ‘Palace Revolution’ issue, which are not numbered; I have put asterisks next to the page numbers of the spoof issue. Although this issue is part of the Intelligencer’s run, its status, alongside the ‘ghost’ issue, the Sparty Lea issue and the Final Solution issue is at somewhat of a tangent from the main flow of its exchange. As such, I have treated them as discrete issues and not numbered their pages. For the remainder of the third series, whose pages are not numbered in the Intelligencer, I have supplied an enumeration of my own.

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Appendix

Series Page Name

Title

1

THOTS FROM YR POSTCARD; SONG MEDITATION ON A LANDSCAPE; FOR JOAN GILBERT WIDE SIDEWALKS OF CORTEZ SUNDAY MORNING ALBUQUERQUE/ DEATH OF AN EMPEROR; THE ROOM STRIKE OF SUNDERLAND VAUX BEER DRAYMAN JANUARY 1966; IN BED; TREE BUILDING: FOR ANN; TO ANN MILLWALL DOCK/AT LEAST I’VE GOT A ROOF OVER MY HEAD ‘To a lady who sent me a copy of her verses . . .’/AGAINST HURT THE WESTERN GATE; PROPOSITION

1 2

John Temple John Temple

3 4

John Temple John Temple/Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney

5

6 7 8 9

Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney/ Andrew Crozier Henry King/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

10

Elaine Feinstein

11

Elaine Feinstein

12 13

Elaine Feinstein Henry Graham

14 15

Lee Harwood Lee Harwood

16 17

Edmund Waller John Temple/J. H. Prynne/Elaine (Feinstein); Lee (Harwood)

18 19

Anselm Hollo/Jim Burns Jim Burns

20 21 22 23 24

Jim Burns Lee Harwood Geoffrey Chaucer Barry McSweeny Andrew Crozier

NEW YEAR 1966; A DREAM OF SPINSTERHOOD BUYING A HOUSE FOR NOW; MOTHER LOVE DANCE FOR A DEAD AUNT from NOCTURNS (3. thank you girl); REFUGE ‘I am beautiful – ’; LONDON – NEW YORK THAT EVENING PIERRE INSISTED THAT I HAD TWO ROAST PIGEONS AT DINNER OF ENGLISH VERSE CALL IT ‘MARGARET’/THE WOUND DAY AND NIGHT/Correspondence

WHERE IS WHERE/from THREE PROPOSITIONS ONE FOR THE KIDS (eat your dinner before the dragon eats you); STORY WITH A MORAL; CLUTCHING AT STRAWS CLUTCHING AT STRAWS SUMMER from THE PARDONER’S TALE, ll. 720–38 PLEA POEM FOR TWO LOVERS IN ONE PICTURE

Appendix

Series Page Name

203

Title

25 26 26a

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Gael Turnbull

27

J. H. Prynne

28 29 30 31 32

Paul Evans Paul Evans Paul Evans Paul Evans Peter Riley

33 34 35

Peter Riley David Grubb Jim Philip/John Silkin/ Barry McSweeney

TALDIR POEMS: for the summer of 1965 TALDIR POEMS: for the summer of 1965 for RHYS for RHYS SUNDAY MORNING; BEWARE OF THE FISH BURNHAM BEECHES; FROM WHERE POEM; ABOUT DEATH NEW HAVEN; WAKING UP; THE WIND/‘fight . . .’/THE LAST READING

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward

DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT DOWN AND OUT

44

John Temple

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

THE NUMBERS THE NUMBERS The Intelligencer’s first legitimate letter in the Royal Mail A COMMUNICATION

IN REMEMBRANCE OF JOHN DILLINGER, dated 22 June 1934 John Temple A VISION; 41ST AND DEARBORN; A POEM Donald Davie; Paul Green PENTECOST; A POEM Paul Matthews DREAM SEQUENCES (1, 2) Paul Matthews DREAM SEQUENCES (3, 4) Paul Matthews DREAM SEQUENCES (5, 6, 7) Paul Matthews/Peter DREAM SEQUENCES (8)/A Letter/ Riley/Peter Torrance THINGS I FELT STRONGLY ABOUT AT THE TIME John James ‘The thoughts . . .’; TO ONE BIG ELM John James WALKING ON THE DOWNS NEAR AVON GORGE John James WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A BIRD LIKE THAT; ‘and from a letter . . .’ Peter Armstrong

THEY SAY; COIN GOING INTO SLOT

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Appendix

Series Page Name

Title

55

John Hall

56 57

John Hall John Hall

58 59 60 61

John Hall John Hall J. H. Prynne Andrew Crozier

62 63

Nick Wayte Nick Wayte/Timothy Longville John Riley/Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton/Chris Torrance

‘a first’; A PLACE A PLACE/HEAVY AS EVER

69

J. H. Prynne

70

J. H. Prynne

71 72 73 74 75 76

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

THE GLACIAL QUESTION, UNRESOLVED THE GLACIAL QUESTION, UNRESOLVED DIE A MILLIONAIRE DIE A MILLIONAIRE DIE A MILLIONAIRE NUMBERS IN TIME OF TROUBLE

64 65 66 67 68

77 78 79 80 81 82

J. H. Prynne/Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Jim Burns/John Riley Paul Green Jim Hopwood/Peter Riley Andrew Crozier Andrew Crozier/Peter Armstrong

‘such stumbling . . .’; THE SAVING; OH YES FEBRUARY; HIS FAILURE; THE WIFE RUTH AND ANN, A PHOTO; TO HIMSELF; SEASONAL (i) SEASONAL (ii); NO MAN THE WHITE KNIGHT; QUEST MOON POEM ‘As the sun sets in the west . . .’; FOR A CONSTANT LOVER

ANCIENT AND MODERN/THE POTTER’S PARTY POOR RELATIONS/AT SEVEN A SON QUARTET TRAVERSE JOURNEY; TEN IMAGININGS

NUMBERS IN TIME OF TROUBLE/ POEM FOR BILL A GOOD DAY/PENTECOST POEM LEMONADE BUBBLES/DU DOPPELGÄNGER; FOR E.B. BETWEEN THE CITIES (for J. H. Prynne) NOWHERE TO FLY TO (for Caroline Molline)/SOMETHING ABOUT POETRY

Appendix

Series Page Name 83 84

205

Title

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Peter Armstrong Peter Armstrong/Ian Vine John Hall John Hall Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley

SOMETHING ABOUT POETRY SOMETHING ABOUT POETRY/Letter: 25/5/66 Letter: 4/6/66 Letter: 4/6/66 THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY THE ANTIQUARY

95 96 97

Jim Burns Peter Riley Peter Riley

98 99 100

Andrew Crozier John Riley John Hall

101

John Hall

102

John Hall/Jonathan Bowden

103 104 105

Jim Burns David Grubb John Hall

106

John Hall

107

John Hall

108

Andrew Crozier

109 110

J. H. Prynne J.H. Prynne/Snori Sturluson

CELLS PARLIAMENT HILL HOW TO CROSS A SHALLOW RIVULET IN THE PEAK DISTRICT WITHOUT GETTING YOUR FEET WET THE FIELD MY GOD HOW SAD RUSSIA IS TO A YOUNG ART STUDENT IN LONDON TO A YOUNG ART STUDENT IN LONDON TO A YOUNG ART STUDENT IN LONDON/‘Adam, sytting in the grove, beneath an appel . . .’ TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS (1, 2) THE WIND AS ECHOES SOME NOTES FOR THE BIOGRAPHIES OF POEMS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN SOME NOTES FOR THE BIOGRAPHIES OF POEMS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN SOME NOTES FOR THE BIOGRAPHIES OF POEMS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN FADES, THE FLOWER ON THE BUSH/ STAY ON AND WHAT IS LOST Letter: 13/9/66 Letter: 13/9/66/‘King Harold Godwinsson . . .’

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Appendix

Series Page Name 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Title

119 120 121 122

Elaine Feinstein Bill Wyatt Bill Wyatt Bill Wyatt Bill Wyatt Bill Wyatt Lee Harwood Andrew Crozier/Sir Philip Sidney John Hall John Hall John Hall John Hall

123 124

John Hall John Hall

125 126

John Hall John Hall

DREAMS FROM A NEW WORLD HERE THE GOODS SONG OF ENVY, FOR THE GREAT LOVERS SHOPPING A POEM FOR A CLEAR NIGHT; WITHOUT PROVOCATION WHAT IS THERE TO SAY? NEW YORK JUMP-OFF

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney Peter Armstrong Gill Vickers Gill Vickers Gill Vickers Gill Vickers J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne/ Christopher Smart Chris Torrance

MAP; etcetera etcetera UP LATE ONE NIGHT; THIS MAN ARMCHAIR PARK-BENCHES PICNIC; THAT WORD THERE I DON’T REMEMBER IN CIMMERIAN DARKNESS BREAK IT LOVE IN THE AIR JUST SO SHADOW SONGS; FROM END TO END FROM END TO END FROST AND SNOW, FALLING A GOLD RING CALLED RELUCTANCE A GOLD RING CALLED RELUCTANCE FOR THIS, FOR THIS FOR THIS, FOR THIS/AGAINST DESPAIR THE GREEN HILL

145

MARRIAGE SONGS SONGS SONGS THREE OCCASIONAL SONGS ON RAIN THREE OCCASIONAL SONGS ON RAIN THE SEASIDE for Peter Ruppels MARRIAGE/‘Unto no body my woman . . .’

Appendix

Series Page Name 146 147 148 149 150 151

Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Jim Burns Jim Burns

152

Peter Riley

153

154

155

156

157

158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170

207

Title SECTIONS FROM A JOURNAL (iii) SECTIONS FROM A JOURNAL (iv) (untitled); I AM SO LONELY I AM SO LONELY MARRIAGE; THE WOMEN AFTERWARDS

POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (i) Peter Riley POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (ii, iii) Peter Riley POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (iv) Peter Riley POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (v, vi) Peter Riley POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (vii, viii, ix) Peter Riley/Jim POEMS WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING Hopwood A LITERARY CONVENTION IN ASHDOWN FOREST (x)/MY NAME IT MEANS NOTHING Jim Hopwood FRONT-ROOM FILM-GOER (i–iv) Jim Hopwood; Bill Wyatt SEA PRINCE/OPTICS Jonathan Bowden THE RAINBOW: Sonnets (i–iii) Jonathan Bowden THE RAINBOW: Sonnets (iv–vi) Jonathan Bowden THE RAINBOW: Sonnets (vii–ix) Jonathan Bowden/ THE RAINBOW: Sonnets (x)/WAKINGS Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton MINISCULES; READING DISTANCES ON THE DECK OF THE INNISFALLEN Jeremy Hilton; Andrew FIELDS OF DISTANCE/Correspondence: Crozier 15.ii. 66 John James DANNY’S PLAQUE John James FLOWERING SHRUB John James FLOWERING SHRUB John James RUNIC Paul Wallace MOTHS AND SPIDERS; GIRL DRINKING CIDER

208

Appendix

Series Page Name 171 172 173

Paul Wallace J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

174

Tim Longville

175 176 177 178

179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201

Title POEM FOR CATHERINE CHARM AGAINST TOO MANY APPLES CONCERNING QUALITY, AGAIN LIST OF NAMES

1. ONLY: A SNAPSHOT/2. FEELING A MOUSE/3. DESCENT Tim Longville 4. DIET/5. FAMILY FEELING Tim Longville 6. ‘out of the window’/7. OPEN/HOP Tim Longville 9. GRAVE STONE/10. BACK OUT (after Robert Walser) John Riley FRAGMENT FROM AN ARGUMENT AT THE FEAST/WALKING THROUGH LONDON John Riley GROTESQUE SONNET (for a caricaturist) Peter Armstrong NO WAY/NOTICE Barry McSweeney FOR A PALE TIME, NO MATTER (i–iii) John Hall FALL SONG, AGAIN John Hall FALL SONG, AGAIN John Hall/Peter Riley FALL SONG, AGAIN/COMMUNICATION J. H. Prynne ON THE MATTER OF THERMAL PACKING J. H. Prynne ON THE MATTER OF THERMAL PACKING J. H. Prynne OIL Barry McSweeney MAP, WHERE THE YEAR ENDS Barry McSweeney/J. H. MAP, WHERE THE YEAR ENDS/A Prynne LETTER 27.xii.66 J. H. Prynne A LETTER J. H. Prynne/Peter Riley A LETTER/From another letter Barry McSweeney KILL THE BIRD, THE LIVERPOOL BIRD Tim Longville/Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney/Jim Burns Jim Burns Jim Burns John Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley

GOING OFF/NEW TIME; GEOGRAPHY; FOR LOVE: COMMERCE REGARDLESS MAP, WALL TO WALL MAP, WALL TO WALL/MISS PENNINGTON THE FLIGHT/DOBELL’S THE POET/PIES HISTORY LESSON OF THIS UNION OF THIS UNION OF THIS UNION

Appendix

Series Page Name 202 203

204 205 206 207 208 209 210

211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225

209

Title

Peter Riley Peter Riley/Andrew Crozier

OF THIS UNION OF THIS UNION/‘About the English Intelligencer’: Andrew Crozier to Peter Riley Andrew Crozier ‘About the English Intelligencer’: Andrew Crozier to Peter Riley Peter Riley Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ Peter Riley Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ John James Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ John James Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ John James Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ and Peter Riley’s ‘Response’ John James/Brian Patten Response to ‘About the English Intelligencer’ and Peter Riley’s ‘Response’/‘Now that Mr. McSweeney . . .’ John James THE WELSH POEMS 1st exultation John James THE WELSH POEMS 2nd exultation John James HEREDITY John James/R. D. HEREDITY/extract from Collingwood R. D. Collingwood R. D. Collingwood Andrew Crozier Peter Riley Peter Riley/David Chaloner David Chaloner David Chaloner John Hall John Hall Tom Raworth Tom Raworth/John James

226

Barry McSweeney

227 228 229 230 231

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

ON ROMNEY MARSH FROM ROMNEY MARSH FROM ROMNEY MARSH/FIVE POEMS FIVE POEMS FIVE POEMS ROUTES 1: for John Hall ROUTES 2 AN ISLAND TO THE EAST OF IRELAND AN ISLAND TO THE EAST OF IRELAND/Letter: 18.ii.67, John James to Andrew Crozier Letter, 21.ii.67, Barry McSweeney to Andrew Crozier THE COMMON GAIN, REVERTED QUALITY IN THAT CASE AS PRESSURE QUALITY IN THAT CASE AS PRESSURE QUALITY IN THAT CASE AS PRESSURE SKETCH FOR A FINANCIAL THEORY OF THE SELF

210

Appendix

Series Page Name 232 233 234

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Peter Riley

235

Peter Riley

236

Peter Riley

237

Peter Riley

238

Peter Riley

239

Peter Riley

240

Peter Riley

241

Peter Riley

242

Peter Riley

243

Peter Riley

244

Peter Riley

245

Peter Riley

246

Peter Riley

247

Peter Riley

Title FIRST NOTES ON DAYLIGHT FIRST NOTES ON DAYLIGHT WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One

Appendix

Series Page Name

SL SL SL SL SL SL SL

248

Peter Riley

249

Peter Riley

250

Peter Riley

251

Peter Riley

252

Peter Riley

253

Andrew Crozier

254 255

Andrew Crozier Andrew Crozier/Peter Riley/J. H. Prynne

256

J. H. Prynne

257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 266 (sic.)

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward missing Barry McSweeney Barry McSweeney

211

Title WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One WORKING NOTES ON BRITISH PREHISTORY: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One FOUR POEMS; AS THEME: THE GOOD WOMAN SPRUNG FROM THE ROOT TIRED, DIES/Correspondence: Peter Riley to Andrew Crozier and John James/ Correspondence: J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley Correspondence: J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley; Letter, 14.ii.67 Letter, 14.ii.67 Letter, 14.ii.67 MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE MAY DAY: A LETTER FOR J. H. PRYNNE FOR ANDREY VOZNESENSKY, FOR HER FOR ANDREY VOZNESENSKY, FOR HER ROLL CALL ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’ ‘this is personal’

212

Appendix

Series Page Name

Title

2

ANNOUNCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS ARISTEAS, IN SEVEN YEARS SOME THOUGHTS ON WHERE/ RENAISSANCE FEB. 7 MORNING CAR RIDES/BATHROOM/ AGAINST WINTER A TUNE: as grace is Letter/An open reply: Peter Riley to John Hall, 9.iv.1967 Letter to Peter Riley, 1.iii.1967/Letter to Peter Riley, 1.iv.1967 Letter, 1.iv.1967 Letter, 1.iv.1967/Letter to Peter Riley, 29.iii.1967/A NOTE ON METAL A NOTE ON METAL A NOTE ON METAL A NOTE ON METAL/ANSWERS RED RICH THESIS THE LIVING EDGE HARVEST POEMS (i, ii, iii) HARVEST POEM (iii)/NAMING THE TREES BILL EVANS (pno.) MILE DAVIS (trpt.); THE POOL THE FIGHTERS; CASTLE; PAPER BALLOON ‘the trees are hard-pruned’; BOOZER; ‘strong hands need patience’ ‘from the mist, the ashkey’/ON CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE; ‘as casually’ LUSTRE; LUST LUST SONGS: the tilt (i, ii) WALKING SON ‘primrose hill’

275 276 277 278 279 280

Peter Riley Peter Riley/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Elaine Feinstein

281

Elaine Feinstein

282 283

Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein/Peter Riley J. H. Prynne/John Hall

284 285 286

294

John Hall John Hall/Ralph Maud/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne/Barry McSweeny Ed Dorn Jim Philip Jim Philip Jim Philip/Peter Armstrong John Hall

295

John Hall

296

John Hall

297

John Hall

298 299 300 301 302

Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley

303 304

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

287 288 289 290 291 292 293

BORSIK, THE NAKED PRIME THE SPARTY LEA FESTIVAL POEMS: 21 March to 30 March 1967

Appendix

Series Page Name

Sp

305

Barry McSweeny

306

Barry McSweeny

307

Barry McSweeny

308

Barry McSweeny

309

Barry McSweeny

310

Peter Riley

311 312

Peter Riley Peter Riley

313 314 315 316

Peter Riley/David Chaloner David Chaloner David Chaloner Jack Coulthard

317 318 319

Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard

320

Jack Coulthard

321

Jack Coulthard

322 323 324 325 326 327 328*

Jack Coulthard J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Chris Torrance Chris Torrance John Temple John Temple

213

Title THE DECISION (23 March); THE DECISION, FINALLY (for J. H. Prynne) 4 a.m., 24 March, Sparty Lea FOR THE HONOUR OF THINGS, UNDONE Saturday 25th March; A LETTER TO BE SAID, NOT SENT Saturday 25th March A LETTER TO BE SAID, NOT SENT Saturday 25th March; LETTER TO VIVIENNE, 30th MARCH. THE FINAL DECISION LETTER TO VIVIENNE, MARCH 30th, THE FINAL DECISION LETTER TO VIVIENNE, MARCH 30th, THE FINAL DECISION FESTIVAL CLUSTER (out of Sparty Lea, Allendale, Northumberland, March 1967): (1) for John Temple (2) for J. H. Prynne; (3) for John Hall (3) for John Hall; (4) for Andrew Crozier; (5) for Barry McSweeny (5) for Barry McSweeny/SEVEN POEMS SEVEN POEMS SCENES FROM MAKING GLASS Work in Progress: PART ONE; PART TWO PART TWO; PART THREE PART FOUR; PART FIVE PART FIVE; Eleven Poems: ‘Being a man of few words’; SHARED DESCRIBE; POEM; WARNING TO PAINTERS HATE POEM FOR DADA; 2 POEMS FOR XMAS; HARROWING MY GENERATION HEALTH FOOD; TARQUINIA AND ONLY FORTUNE SHINES HOW MANY THERE ARE: a letter lover (i, ii) lover (iii) CLEOPATRA I; II; III THE URGE

214

Appendix

Series Page Name

Title

Sp

329*

Sp

330*

Sp

331*

Sp

332*

Sp

333*

THE URGE/Letter from John James to Andrew Crozier/HALLO SUNNY; PASTORAL; CONVERSATION; CONVERSATION SCHOOL DAY/TO MOCK A KILLING BIRD (A New Look at Blaise Cendran and Apollinaire) TO MOCK A KILLING BIRD/The English Passive Voice/THE GLORY OF THE GARDEN QUEYNTE PIE; CANTO OF GRAPHIC LUMINESCENCE/THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GRAVEL WARM COD FOR ANDREW CROZIER/ POEM/CHAUCER

Sp

334* 328 329 330

John Temple/John James/Tim Longville Tim Longville/Barry McSweeney

Barry McSweeney/J. H. Prynne/Peter Armstrong Peter Armstrong/Peter Riley Gill Vickers/Erwin Klopstock*/Geoffrey Chaucer Edward Lucie-Smith/ Jim Burns

331

David Chaloner David Chaloner David Chaloner/Wendy Mulford John Hall

332

John Hall

333 334

John Hall Tim Longville

335

Tim Longville/David Chaloner/Jim Philip Jim Hopwood Paul Evans Paul Evans Peter Riley/David Chaloner David Chaloner/ John Hall/William Wordsworth/John Ruskin

336 337 338 339 340

SONNET, PORTRAITS OF MY FRIENDS/ THE DRAWING ‘relationship’ ‘relationship’ ‘relationship’/ANGER GONE; WAITING A VERSION OF DOMINION (notes for Peter Riley) April 1967 A VERSION OF DOMINION (notes for Peter Riley) April 1967; A FESTIVAL POEM (for the present company, always) ‘excerpt from a notebook, 24.i.67’ PIGEONS (for my Grandfather); REMAINS; ROCKER (after Robert Walser) EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS RECEIVED: 3.v. 1967/1.v.1967/30.iv.1967 THE poem FROM A JOURNAL: FIRE IN THE TRAIN; IN THE PARK TUNNEL EXCERPTS FROM A NOTEBOOK 19.iv.1967/letter 5.v.1967 letter 5.v.1967/letter 11.v.1967 (John Hall’s Notes of Dominion, the first 11 lines)/‘O for some soul-affecting scheme’/‘With this kind of bodily sensibility . . .’

Appendix

Series Page Name 341 342

Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard

343 344

Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard

345 345a

Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard

346 347 348 349 350 351 352

J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Paul Wallace

353

Paul Wallace/Jeremy Hilton/David H.W. Grubb Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton/Peter Riley Andrew Crozier

354 355 356 357 358 359 360

Nick Wayte

361

Nick Wayte

362

Nick Wayte

363 364 365 366 367 368

David H. W. Grubb David H. W. Grubb David H. W. Grubb David H. W. Grubb David H. W. Grubb David H. W. Grubb

215

Title A Letter A Letter/Nine Poems by Jack Coulthard Nine Poems by Jack Coulthard SARACEN’S HEAD MADRIGAL, SECOND SARACEN’S HEAD MADRIGAL MAY DAY LETTER TO HIMSELF IF OUT OF ANGER A Pedantic Note in Two Parts A Pedantic Note in Two Parts A Pedantic Note in Two Parts A Pedantic Note in Two Parts A Pedantic Note in Two Parts A Pedantic Note in Two Parts BRUEGHEL POEM 1 (for Lyn); SCULPTURE FOR KICKS SCULPTURE FOR KICKS/FROM A LETTER/A LANDSCAPE FOR HANDS SOUL MAP (1–3) SOUL MAP (4–6) SOUL MAP (6–7) SOUL MAP (viii)/A LUSTFUL PRESENT A DAY, A GARDEN, STAY AWAKE TO DREAM CIRCULATION LIST, MAY 1967 seven poems AFTER A STORM; POEM AT KINGSTON TRAVEL; SUBWAY CORSETRY; ‘the sleep of the drunk’ FOR AN OLD FRIEND AT THIS TIME; THE INHERITANCE THE DANCE POEMS (i–ii) THE MUSIC (i–ii) THE MUSIC (iii); THE DESIRE (i) THE DESIRE (ii–iii) KNOWING THE TRESS BERGMAN’S ‘7TH SEAL’

216

Appendix

Series Page Name 369 370 371 372 373

David H. W. Grubb Jeremy Hilton Jeremy Hilton Paul J. Green Paul J. Green

374

Paul Matthews

Title THREE NUNS; OLD BIRD TWO POEMS TWO POEMS WITCHES AND DEVILS (poem 2) A VARIATION OF WALT WHITMANS; SPARKLES FROM THE WHEEL; ‘To you the poems’

384 385 386 387 388

‘nine poems’: ‘on the bus (you remember)’; FOR BARBIE, A MAGIC; TREASURE HUNT Paul Matthews FOR BARBIE, I MOVE THROUGH YOU INTO A NEW BODY; ‘I was born as the war ended . . .’; ‘Rain on my face wakes me . . .’ Paul Matthews TO THE GIRL IN MY CARRIAGE; ‘my walls flash back to me . . .’; ‘the omnipresent is occupied in making marriages’ J. H. Prynne A Bibliography for Aristeas, In Seven Years Barry McSweeny Extracts from two letters David Chaloner ‘Six poems’: ‘lady’; ‘such gleanings’; ‘not that’ David Chaloner ‘Six poems’ cont: ‘alchemists’; ‘horde’; ‘an excorcism’ Jim Philip THE BIRTH POSITION J. H. Prynne THOUGHTS ON THE ESTERHAZY UNIFORM J. H. Prynne/Peter Riley THOUGHTS ON THE ESTERHAZY UNIFORM/A LUSTFUL PRESENT Peter Riley A LUSTFUL PRESENT Barry McSweeny THE LAST BUD – RESIGNATION Barry McSweeny THE LAST BUD – RESIGNATION Barry McSweeny THE LAST BUD – RESIGNATION Barry McSweeny THE LAST BUD – RESIGNATION

389 390 391 392 393

Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Chris Torrance Chris Torrance

394

Paul Matthews

375

376

377 378 379 380 381 382 383

‘bread and wine’ ‘bread and wine’ ‘bread and wine’ ‘bread and wine’ ‘green orange purple red’ (vjc); ‘how absurd it is to greet you with a formal kiss’ ‘how absurd it is to greet you with a formal kiss’/‘A woman, dying, told me’

Appendix

Series Page Name 395

217

Title

412 413

SONGS (i, ii, iii)/A POSTCARD FROM JOHN JAMES A WEDDING OF THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE John Hall A WEDDING OF THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE/THE FIGURE OF LOVE, ON THE JOURNEY John Hall THE FIGURE OF LOVE, ON THE JOURNEY; TWO POEMS FOR DREAMERS Elaine Feinstein LINES OUTWARD; TRAIN SHOT Elaine Feinstein STRINGS; ‘Been there since World War I’ Gill Vickers TO THE SOUND OF SOMETHING SAID BEFORE; WORDS ARE FALLEN; DRINKING LESSON Gill Vickers IF BOTTLED BARGAINS CAME; A NIGHT J. H. Prynne SENOR VAZQUEZ SPEAKING AND FURTHER SOFT MUSIC TO SPEAK BY/ TIME TO GO J. H. Prynne TIME TO GO Jack Coulthard ‘simultaneous’; ‘this line of trees’; ‘I don’t suppose’ Jack Coulthard ‘I don’t suppose’; NEW WAY Jack Coulthard NEW WAY; HONESTY POEM Jack Coulthard POEM; LIKE THE MADRIGALS Andrew Crozier FROM THE FIRST PLACE; MAYBE SO Andrew Crozier FOR A.P.; PIDGIN ON THE LORNE Andrew Crozier WITHOUT A NAME; OUT OF THE DEEP Tom Raworth HISTORY; LOVE POEM Tom Raworth/John Hall ‘waterloo sunset’; ‘on the highways’

414 415

Matthew Wright Matthew Wright

416 417

Matthew Wright Matthew Wright

418

Matthew Wright

419

John Mash

396 397

398

399 400 401

402 403

404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411

Barry McSweeny/John James John Hall

THREE POEMS FROM BONNARD THREE POEMS FROM BONNARD; RECEIPT ROUND PROEM: FOR ANDREW CROZIER’S JOURNEY; EMMA SUTTON DYING OF CANCER ALLEGIANCE; NEWS FROM HOME 19/1/66; PROPOSITION PECULIAR

218

Appendix

Series Page Name 420 421

Title

424

John Mash/John Hiscock PECULIAR/(for Ivor) John Hiscock A DREAM; DOUBTS ON IMPRESSIONISM Katie Ruse SUNDIAL (for Morg Earp – died 1881 – shot while playing pool, Tombstone) Katie Ruse MORGAN EARP – SOME DAYS BEFORE (Tombstone 1881); WORDS FOR MORGAN EARP (died 1881 – shot through a window while playing pool – Tombstone) Katie Ruse BISHOP AND RING; SUPERMARKET

425

Peter Riley

426 427 428 429

Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley

430

Peter Riley

431

Peter Riley

432 433 434 435 436 437

John Hall John Hall John Hall John Hall John Hall John Hall

438

Ian Vine

439

Ian Vine

440 441

Ian Vine Ian Vine/John James/ John Temple

442

David Chaloner

443

David Chaloner

444

J. H. Prynne

422 423

FOUR DREAM AND WAKING POEMS: (i) PART OF AN INFERNO 2. SUMMER; 3. THE RETURN 3. THE RETURN 4. dream 29.11.1966 4. dream 29.11.1966; ‘notes to the FOUR DREAM-AND-WAKING POEMS’ ‘notes to the FOUR DREAM-ANDWAKING POEMS’ ‘notes to the FOUR DREAM-ANDWAKING POEMS’ THE EFFORT OF BODY NARRATIVE THE UNKNOWN YOUNG; VECTOR VECTOR; THE WAY HOME LETTERS TO NO-ONE LETTERS TO NO-ONE THE JOUNREY WITHOUT HARM ‘The air moves, familiar . . .’; BRANDON HILL MESSAGE; WORCESTER BEACON (for Gael) WORCESTER BEACON (for Gael) WORCESTER BEACON (for Gael)/ another post-card from John James/ SONG 5 poems: POTT SHRIGLEY BRICKWORKS; ‘air is the nature’ ‘air is the nature’; ‘the folds’; SONG FOR STAR DAMAGE AT HOME

Appendix

Series Page Name 445

J. H. Prynne/ Peter Riley

446 447 448 449 450 451

Jack Coulthard Jack Coulthard David Grubb David Grubb David Grubb David Grubb

452

Barry McSweeny

453 454

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

455 456 457

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

458 459

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

460 461 462

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

463 464 465

Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny Barry McSweeny

466 467 468 469 470 471 472

David Grubb David Grubb David Grubb Jim Burns Jim Burns Jim Burns Peter Riley

473

Peter Riley

219

Title STAR DAMAGE AT HOME/POTT SHRIGLEY BRICKWORKS IN THE MIND ‘part of work in progress’ ‘part of work in progress’ A HOUSE FOR LIFE (i–iii) A HOUSE FOR LIFE (iii–v) A HOUSE FOR LIFE (vi–vii); JUNE POEM from PAINTINGS BY VINCENT: 3. THREE TREES AND A HOUSE THE BOY FROM THE GREEN CABARET TELLS OF HIS MOTHER and other poems by Barry McSweeny THE TRACK, FERVOUR A LETTER, THIS FAR AWAY, TONIGHT FOR LIBERTY (i–ii) SEALINE ONE YEAR OLD, WILTED HYBRID & THE LONGEST BRIDGE IS FORTY FEET LONG (i–ii) THE COPPER HEART ON THE BURNING DOWN OF THE SALVATION ARMY MEN’S PALACE, DOGS BANK, NEWCASTLE BLADDER WRACK BLUE THE AXE THE BOY FROM THE GREEN CABARET TELLS OF HIS MOTHER CITY SONG PASTORAL THE BIRD MAN THE BIRD MAN THE BIRD MAN SWINGER; THE BIG MAN THE BIG MAN THE BIG MAN; POLICE JOBS I HAVE HAD AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM THEM JOBS I HAVE HAD AND WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM THEM

220

Appendix

Series Page Name

Title

474

Ann James

475 476 477 478

Barry McSweeny David Chaloner David Chaloner Andrew Crozier

479

Jack Coulthard/Peter Riley, after Francis Ponge Peter Riley, after Francis THE YOUNG MOTHER; RAIN Ponge Missing J. H. Prynne A DREAM OF RETAINED COLOUR J. H. Prynne A DREAM OF RETAINED COLOUR/ PRICE TAG SONG Andrew Crozier/John OUT OF SLUMBER (1966–1967)/WHAT James IT IS CARRIED John James WHAT IT IS CARRIED John Temple AN EVENING WALK John Temple NIAGARA John Temple NIAGARA John Temple NIAGARA (29th August, 1967) John Temple SCENES FROM A PASSING WORLD (i–iii) John Temple ON ‘A and C’ BY W.S. John Temple ON ‘A and C’ BY W.S. John Temple ON ‘A and C’ BY W.S. John Temple ON ‘A and C’ BY W.S. John Temple ON ‘A and C’ BY W.S. Raymond Crump ON THE RIVER; THE FIRST MAP MAKER; ‘Among the crowd around . . .’ Raymond Crump THE MYSTIC MACHINE; THE SAMURAI; THE FLOWER Raymond Crump COLUMBUS; ‘The praise of death falls . . .’ Andrew Crozier TWO POEMS Unattributed ‘I am make to sow the thistle for what . . .’ Peter Riley Emilio de’ Cavalieri: Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae 23.08.1967 (i–ii) Peter Riley/John James Emilio de’ Cavalieri: Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae 23.08.1967 (i–ii); ON LEAVING THE FOOTPATH

480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502

Three prose pieces: ‘walk to grantchester’; ‘tom goes to essex’; ‘dormston names’ NOTE (3 September 1967) THE ROOM; THE PERIMETER LETTERS; BONFIRE THE KITCHEN; A NOTE TO ‘THE KITCHEN’ 26 April, 1966; I was just beginning to enjoy myself AND WHAT DID YOU SEE?/FIRE

Appendix

Series Page Name 503

J. H. Prynne

504

Brian Wake

505 506

Martin Wright Wendy Mulford

507 508 509 510 511

Wendy Mulford/Barry McSweeny John Hall John Hall John Hall Bill Vester

512

Peter Riley

513

Peter Riley

514

Katie Ruse

515 516 517

David Chaloner David Chaloner Paul J. Green

518

Paul J. Green/Tim Longville Jack Coulthard/C. H. Douglas

519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526

Jim Philip Jim Philip/Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley Peter Riley John Hall (Paul Eluard)

527

Barry McSweeny (Jules Laforgue) Barry McSweeny (Jules Laforgue)

528

221

Title THREE SENTIMENTAL TALES/A SONNET TO FAMOUS HOPES LOVE POEM (to dawn); POEM ON STOLEN THINGS THE GIVE AWAY MORNING SCENE-CAMBRIDGE; SIX O’CLOCK RETURN SIX O’CLOCK RETURN/TO PULL DOWN THE EFFETE ARTIFICE WOW MAN-PERSON WOW MAN-PERSON WOW MAN-PERSON ‘I remains yours’; ‘take it’; ‘blessing’; ‘something for forget’ A FLOCK OF BIRDS OVER CENTRAL EUROPE A FLOCK OF BIRDS OVER CENTRAL EUROPE THE BRIDGE MAKER (for John Wieners); CALIGULA ‘control is an apt word’; GIFT GIFT; ‘momentous’ THE ORCHESTRATIONS OF THE SHAMA (iii) THE ORCHESTRATIONS OF THE SHAMA (iii–iv); STATIC VIRGIL’S TOMB/extract from The Monopoly of Credit 1931, p. 163 Letter Letter/Response Response Response/NOTES IN REPLY NOTES IN REPLY NOTES IN REPLY ‘Porte ouverte’; ‘Plus Pres De Nous’; ‘Paris Pendant La Guerre’; ‘Les Petits Justes VIII’; ‘L’Unique’ GUITAR (i–iii) GUITAR (iv–v)

222

Appendix

Series Page Name 529

530

531 532 533 G G G

G G G

G G G G G G G G G 3 PR PR PR

534 535 536 537

Title

Tony Rudolf (Guilliame ‘I dreamed I was present at my own funeral’; Apollinaire; Pierre ‘Agony of remorse’; ‘I’m absent, I felt each Reverdy; Jules moment’; ‘Your nap, baser than stone’ Bernard; Jacques Dupin) Michael Grant ‘Une rose dans le tenebres’; ‘Les Stupra’ (Mallarme)/Peter Riley (Rimbaud) Peter Riley (Wace) BRITAIN UNDER CADWALADER from Le Roman de Brittania, completed in 1155 Francis Ponge L’OBJET, C’EST LA POETRIE Francis Ponge L’OBJET, C’EST LA POETRIE John James WHATEVER YOU’VE GOT, SOMEONE SOMEWHERE NEEDS IT (ii) J. H. Prynne With Regard The Matter Of Falling J. H. Prynne About Warning An Invited Audience (obliquely arising from George Downden’s Letter To English Poets) Tom Rudolf two poems Peter Riley BOOK REVIEW: A. Thom Megalithic Sites in Britain Oxford University Press. 63/– Peter Riley BOOK REVIEW: A. Thom Megalithic Sites in Britain Oxford University Press. 63/– Peter Riley i. CONCERNING ECCENTRICITY Peter Riley i. CONCERNING ECCENTRICITY; ii. OF THE STEAM-POWERED ENGINE Peter Riley ii. OF THE STEAM-POWERED ENGINE/ LOVE POEM 7/10/67 Peter Riley LOVE POEM 7/10/67 Peter Riley The king running in the fields Peter Riley FROM THE TESTAMENT OF SENNACHERIB David Chaloner/Barry 2 poems: ‘being able’; ‘as the geometric’/ Edgar Pilcher SPRING POEM 1967 Christopher Lawrence 2 poems: ‘epexegesis’; ‘DEBOUCH’ CIRCULATION LIST Cover sheet Cover sheet Cover sheet Cover sheet

Appendix

Series Page Name

223

Title

PR

538

PR PR

539 540

PR PR

541 542

PR

543

PR PR PR

544 545 546

PR PR PR PR PR PR

547 548 549 550 551 552

PR

553

PR

554

[handwritten note] The English Intelligencer, as it had been, appeared to collapse with the last issue. This is a bunch of poems which may constitute a beginning or an alternative, depending on what happens next. The next issue will be put together on December 23 Nick Wayte IMPONDERABLES Wendy Mulford LA TARD VINGUDA A SON DELIT (after Josep Carner); NADA MAS (after Pablo Neruda) J. H. Prynne ACQUISITION OF LOVE John James WITH REGARD THE MATTER OF FALLING John James/Bill Vester WITH REGARD THE MATTER OF FALLING/A MAMMAL SPEAKS Nick Wayte NIGHT-BIRDS Gill Vickers I DON’T SIT HERE TO THINK John James POEM OF INEVITABLE SEPTEMBER, OR, I’M A CITY BOY AT HEART Chris Torrance GOUACHE J. H. Prynne AS IT WERE ATTENDANT J. H. Prynne/Peter Riley AS IT WERE ATTENDANT/BURDENING Ian McElvie ‘I am riding . . .’ Ian McElvie/Nick Wayte ‘I am riding . . .’/SUBWAY CORSETRY John James/Andrew WHATEVER YOU’VE GOT, SOMEONE Crozier SOMEWHERE NEEDS IT (i)/‘The curtains hung. It was looked at’. Jeremy Mulford/John THE IMPROVED FAMILY CALOTYPE/ James WRITTEN ON BEGINNING GEORG BUCHNER’S LENZ AND WHILE WAITING FOR A RETURN Nick Wayte SO SHE IS/DISTRIBUTION LIST

555

Peter Armstrong

556 557

Peter Armstrong Peter Riley

558 559

Peter Riley Peter Riley

MON. AM. CHANT; CAPITAL APPRECIATION; THE GAMES WE PLAY GETTING TO GRIPS GETTING TO GRIPS; FIVE SERIOUS SONGS (i–ii) FIVE SERIOUS SONGS (ii–iv) FIVE SERIOUS SONGS (v); NOTE

224

Appendix

Series Page Name 560

Peter Riley

561 562

Chris Torrance Chris Torrance/Tim Longville David Chaloner David Chaloner David Chaloner/Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Jim Burns Jim Burns Jim Burns Jim Burns Jim Burns Bill Vester/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576

J. H. Prynne/Lee Harwood Lee Harwood Andrew Crozier

577

Andrew Crozier

578 579 580

Pete Bland Pete Bland Pete Bland

581 582

Pete Bland Pete Bland/Jeremy Mulford Jeremy Mulford/John James

583 584 585 586 587 588 589

Unattributed

Title NOTE; POEM; AT GROSMONT, SKENFRITH OR ANY OTHER BORDER WINTER WINTER/RESCUE; CEREMONIAL FIVE POEMS FIVE POEMS FIVE POEMS/‘REALITY IS USUALLY THEORETICAL’ FOR MARIA CVETAYEVA; VOTARR THE PROVINCIAL POEM THE PROVINCIAL POEM THE PROVINCIAL POEM THE PROVINCIAL POEM THE PROVINCIAL POEM WHOSE DUST DID YOU SAY STARVATION/DREAM/FOOT AND MOUTH FOOT AND MOUTH/THE UTOPIA THE UTOPIA SEASIDE FRAGMENTS: FAMILY CHANGE, & DISPLACEMENTS (1–2) SEASIDE FRAGMENTS: FAMILY CHANGE, & DISPLACEMENTS (2–3) HANDKERCHIEF (for John); POEM; WELT WELT; POEM ACTUALITY; POEM; MY LOVER (VARIOUS REPUGNANCIES) POEM; THIRST POEM/OCCASION AND SUBJECT OCCASION AND SUBJECT/‘Note’

[reproduction] YNGLYION/PROVERBIAL VERSES John James WAITING (i–ii) John James WAITING (iii–v) John James WAITING (vi. Letter) John Riley A SECTION John Riley/Unattributed THE ATTRACTION/MINE

Appendix

Series Page Name 590 591

Unattributed Unattributed

592

Tim Longville

593

Tim Longville

594

Tim Longville

595 596

Tim Longville Andrew Crozier/Peter Armstrong Peter Armstrong/Nick Wayte Chris Torrance J. H. Prynne

597 598 599

600

J. H. Prynne/David Chaloner/John Hall

601

John Hall

602

John Hall

603

John Hall

604 605 606

Pete Bland Pete Bland Pete Bland

607 608 609 610 611 612

Pete Bland Pete Bland Martin Wright Martin Wright Martin Wright Martin Wright

225

Title VOICES (i–v) VOICES (vi); METEOROLOGICAL; TRADITION, WORDS: a review for G.T.; PASTORAL for Sebastian James ‘BESSARION AND KEHOE’ AFTER HEARING THE SONGS OF SOME TIBETAN PRIESTS; SPAT A POSTCARD FROM WORCESTERSHIRE; IN MEMORIAM ANNA AKHMATOVA INDULGENCE; RESCUE, ABENSLIED 1964; RETREAT BLACK COUNTRY CUTS; PASSAGE LOVE POEM/JANUARY POEM; THE WAY IT WAS THE CAP/MEMBER AND EXILE ‘I don’t want anything’; SONNET ONE WAY AT A TIME/SMALLER THAN THE RADIUS OF A PLANET JOHN IN THE BLOODED PHOENIX/ TWO POEMS: ‘do we speak of metaphor’; ‘begins the voice’/A LAW OF DREAMS; TAKEN FROM PARADISE THER SHADDOWE AT MIDDAYE TOWARDE THE POLES (i–ii) THER SHADDOWE AT MIDDAYE TOWARDE THE POLES (iii–iv); A REGION OF THE DEAD A POEM IN RHYME; INVOCATION; THE WORLD IS THE AGE OF MEN PAGE WINTER; POEM YOU HAVE TAUGHT ME; COWBOYS TOYS TOYS EVENINGS EVENINGS/LIFE LIFE LIFE

226

Appendix

Series Page Name 613

(J. H. Prynne)

614

Barry McSweeny

615

Barry McSweeny

616 617

Wendy Mulford Tim Longville

618

Tim Longville

619 620

623

John Temple John Temple/Nick Wayte Peter Armstrong Andrew Crozier/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

624

Ray Crump

625

Ray Crump

626

Ray Crump

627 628 629

Martin Wright Martin Wright/Tim Longville Tim Longville

630

Tim Longville

631

Peter Armstrong/Pete Bland Pete Bland

621 622

632 633 634

Pete Bland Pete Bland/Chris Torrance

Title Extract from VOLL VERDIENST (untitled, unnamed) MISSING LUGGAGE BLUES; TO SHOW THAT ALL’S EQUAL; SONG SONG: FOR HER VICTORIES; CHANSONETTE AT 1.20; BONJOUR MA PETITE AMOREUSE PERMUTATIONS; POEM SOMEBODY UP THERE LOVES ME; AIRS AND DISTANCE; OUT; AFTER AUGUSTINE CAMPION IN WINTER; THE BETTER HALF; THESE ARE THE LADIES WHO ALWAYS; BED SPRING RELIEF; The Telegraph Witton Park/THE SNOWMAN NOTRE DAME LE NOIRE DRIVING TESTING/QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING QUESTIONS FOR THE TIME BEING NINE POEMS ‘As pale still’; ‘where is’; ‘whispers she’ ‘Rain threads me to a’; ‘wood music in the’; ‘clouds close up’; ‘old leaves’ ‘sweet light snow’; ‘Exaclibur! Sky-bright light’; ‘It is dead’ WHO WHO/IN THESE EXTREMES PART SONG; COMMUNIQUE: THE COMMONPLACE. THE RAREST FEAT/ AUBADE/THE SMALL BAROMETER EXERCISE; NORTHERLY (AFTER An Akh)/AT FIRST LIGHT/FRAGMENT, IN HONOUR OF OSIP MANDELSTAM PASTORAL; THE NEW MEN/FROM THE DEATH OF THE PAST FROM THE DEATH OF THE PAST; POEM POEM; MASONRY MASONRY/POEM (i, ii)

Appendix

Series Page Name 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646

Chris Torrance John Riley/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne Wendy Mulford/David Chaloner David Chaloner/ Andrew Crozier Andrew Crozier Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward Tony Ward

647 648

Henry Maurice

649 650

Ray Crump Ray Crump

651

Ray Crump

652 653 654

664

Ray Crump Ray Crump Ray Crump/Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Elaine Feinstein Peter Riley J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne/ Tim Longville Tim Longville

665

Tim Longville

655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663

227

Title POEM (iv. for Lee Harwood) FEBRUARY SONNET/LOVE CROWN PICTURE BOOK CHILD/‘lines to my paramour’; POEM POEM (i, ii)/FAN HEATER ALARM; SONNETS IN DAYLIGHT FROM INSIDE OUT FROM INSIDE OUT FROM INSIDE OUT FROM INSIDE OUT FROM INSIDE OUT FROM INSIDE OUT CONTENTS CONTENTS/Not full twelve months twice told, a weary breath OF THE BLACK GARTER I–III OF THE BLACK GARTER III–V; POSEIDON GOD ROT POLITICS; SPRING IN THE WOODS ALAS ALACK Poem; LONESOME BOY LONESOME BOY; Poem WAITING/ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE ONE/TWO (from a novel in progress) SONG; Two American Photographs Letter to Ray Crump 14th March 1968 Letter to Ray Crump 14th March 1968/ NINE POEMS 1. Second Feature; 2. Route Map 3. Two Versions from O.M; 4. Company Figures 5. Forte Piano: A Variation for John Field, Born Dublin 1782, Died Moscow 1837; 6. Black Feather; 7. Swans in the House

228

Appendix

Series Page Name 666

Tim Longville

667

Tim Longville/J. H. Prynne J. H. Prynne

668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 FS

J. H. Prynne/Chris Torrance Wendy Mulford John Hall John Hall John Hall John Hall/Andrew Crozier Andrew Crozier Andrew Crozier/Tony Ward Tony Ward Barry McSweeny

Title 8. Three Poems for the Form’s Sake (a) Support Live (b) Without Title (c) Par Avion; Seeing the Light A STONE CALLED NOTHING A STONE CALLED NOTHING; CHEMINS DE FER CHEMINS DE FER/poematique (unfinished) THE CLUBHOUSE ALL THESE FINE THINGS ALL THESE FINE THINGS THE POEM; TALKING OF THE SKY; ‘the place name’ ‘the place name’/FRICTION MIRROR MIRROR; NATURAL HISTORY NATURAL HISTORY/XXIV XXIV FAREWELL, MY 20 GAULOISES

Notes Introduction 1 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 14. 2 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism, and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 13. 3 Ibid., p. 225. 4 Seamus Heaney, quoted in Esty, Shrinking Island, p. 225. 5 John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 53. 6 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 16, 20. 7 Stephen Regan, ‘Philip Larkin: A Late Modern Poet’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 147–58 (pp. 148–9). 8 Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 3. 9 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 10 Keston Sutherland, ‘J. H. Prynne and Philology’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004), p. 10. 11 Ibid., p. 10. 12 Rod Mengham, ‘Introduction’, in New Modernist Poems, ed. Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2004), pp. xvii–xix (p. xviii). 13 Drew Milne, ‘Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations’, in A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 155–75 (p. 165). 14 Ibid., p. 165. 15 Ibid., p. 166. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, new trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 564–8 (p. 564). 17 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 542. 18 Robert Creeley to William Carlos Williams, 27 February 1950, in The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), p. 21. Ezra Pound, ‘Salutation the Third’, BLAST, 1 (June 1914), p. 45.

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Notes

19 Tom Raworth to Ed Dorn, 19 April 1961, ‘A Selection of Edward Dorn’s Correspondence (1960–1962)’, Chicago Review (Summer 2004), 49/50, 3–4 I, 25–84 (p. 39). 20 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 23 June 1967, Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Peter Riley Papers, MS Add. 10013/2/34, fol. 1. 21 Ezra Pound, quoted in Robert Creeley, ‘Introduction’, Black Mountain Review (New York: AMS Press, 1969), pp. iii–xiii (p. iv). 22 Pound, The Cantos, p. 452. 23 Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, Smith et al., The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, pp. xxvii–xxxviii (p. xxxi). 24 Robert Creeley to William Carlos Williams, 15 April 1950, Smith et al., The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, p. 28. 25 Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 20. 26 Gordon Burn, ‘Drunk Poets’ Society’, The Guardian, 26 August 2006, http://www. theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview (accessed 14 July 2014). 27 See pp. xxx–xxxi of Neil Pattison’s ‘All Flags Left Outside’ (in Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer, ed. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts [Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012], pp. i–xxxiv) for a detailed account of the origins of this issue. 28 In their comprehensive bibliography of little magazines, David Miller and Richard Price describe the Intelligencer as ‘a key magazine of “The Cambridge School”’ (David Miller and Richard Price, British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ [London and New Castle, DE: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2006], p. 149). 29 C. D. Blanton, ‘Transatlantic Currents’, in A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2009), pp. 134–54 (p. 150). 30 John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), p. 120. 31 Don Paterson has been a particularly vocal critic of avant-garde poetry generally, and Prynne in particular, claiming that ‘[t]he Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute.’ Don Paterson, ‘Rhyme and Reason’, The Guardian, 6 November 2004, http://www. theguardian.com/books/poetry/features/0,12887,1344654,00.html (accessed 14 July 2014). 32 A letter to Peter Riley in the Cambridge archive of Riley’s papers dated 24 April 1961 provides detailed and exacting instructions on how to produce the stencils and to compile the issues.

Notes

231

33 Louis Goddard’s BatchGeo visualization of the location of the recipients of the ghost issue gives a full sense of its range: http://batchgeo.com/map/ fb2170fff5333bcf11d16bd1d9a1cbe8. It should also be noted that it was at this point that the Intelligencer’s list of recipients was deemed to have become unwieldy. Applying the same visualization to the reduced mailing list for the next issue shows that although the number of recipients was greatly reduced, their geographical diversity remained as great: http://batchgeo.com/map/ ef368df370a563815d70db2943c33312. 34 J. H. Prynne to Andrew Crozier, 27 December 1966, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 189–91 (p. 190). 35 Robert Creeley to Bela Zempleny, U.S. Department of State, 8 April 1966, in Smith et al., The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, p. 294. 36 ‘risk, n’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2014, http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/166306?result=1&rskey=FZ4zlE& (accessed 14 July 2014). 37 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 123. 38 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 11. 39 The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 258. 40 Pattison, ‘All Flags’, p. x. 41 Ibid., p. iii. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., p. ix. 44 Ibid. 45 Prynne to Crozier, 27 December 1966, The English Intelligencer, pp. 189–91. 46 Emily Critchley, ‘Post-Marginal Positions: Women and the UK Experimental/ Avant-Garde Poetry Community, A Cross-Atlantic Forum Moderated by Catherine Wagner’, http://jacketmagazine.com/34/wagner-forum.shtml (accessed 14 July 2014). 47 Andrea Brady, ‘Post-Marginal Positions’, (accessed 14 July 2014). 48 Nate Dorward, ‘J. H. Prynne: A Checklist’, http://209.85.229.132/ search?q=cache:RoeKdAwLBIUJ:www.ndorward.com/poetry/articles_etc/prynne_ checklist.htm+the+english+intelligencer+journal&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk (accessed 14 July 2009). 49 Eric Mottram, ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960–1974’, in New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, ed. Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 15–50 (p. 38); Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch, p. 121; Robert Potts, ‘Why Jeremy Prynne Deserves Wider Acclaim’, http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2004/apr/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview30 (accessed 14 July 2014); R. J. Ellis, ‘Mapping the United Kingdom Little Magazine Field’, in New British Poetries, ed. Hampson and Barry, pp. 72–103 (p. 96). 50 Ellis, ‘Mapping the United Kingdom Little Magazine Field’, p. 96; Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch, pp. 120‒1.

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Notes

51 Wilkinson, Lyric Touch, p. 121. 52 These materials can be accessed online: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/czargrad/ (accessed 14 July 2014). 53 John James, ‘The Poet of Life and Sculpture’, http:/www.tate.org.uk/contextcomment/articles/poet-life-and- sculpture (accessed 14 July 2013).

Chapter 1 1 Donald Allen to Charles Olson, 24 September 1958, Poet to Publisher: Charles Olson’s Correspondence with Donald Allen, ed. Ralph Maud (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2003), p. 46. 2 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 12–20. 3 ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’, Collected Prose of Charles Olson, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 250–2. 4 Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 21 December 1960, The Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, Series 2, fol. 207 (hereafter CORC). 5 John James to Charles Olson, 2 December 1963, CORC, 2/164. 6 Andrew Crozier to Charles Olson, 17 January 1964 and n.d. October 1965, CORC, 2/145. 7 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 8 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 9 July 1962, Edward Dorn Papers (hereafter EDP), Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, Series 1, fol. 19:328. 9 Robert Conquest, ‘Introduction’, New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956, 2nd ed. 1961) pp. xi-xviii (p. xv). 10 Ibid. 11 Raworth to Dorn, 19 April 1961, ‘A Selection of Edward Dorn’s Correspondence (1960–1962)’, Chicago Review, p. 39. 12 Prynne to Dorn, 9 July 1962, EDP, 1/19:328. 13 Ibid. 14 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 68. 15 ‘Bibliographic codes’, as per Jerome McGann’s description of the relationship between the bibliographic features of a text’s presentation and its linguistic content, in which it is argued that the former – ‘typefaces, bindings, book prices, format’ – is as constituent of the text’s meaning as the latter (Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991], p. 13). Peter Brooker

Notes

16

17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

233

and Andrew Thacker suggest the complementary category of ‘periodical codes’, which covers features of the text’s presentation such as ‘page layout, typefaces, price, size of volume (not all “little” magazines are little in size), periodicity of publication (weekly, monthly, quarterly, irregular), use of illustrations (colour or monochrome, the forms of reproductive technology employed), use and placement of advertisements, quality of paper and binding, networks of distribution and sales, modes of financial support, payment practices towards contributors, editorial arrangements, or the type of material published (poetry, reviews, manifestos, editorials, illustrations, social and political comment, etc.)’. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1. Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–26 (p. 6). Peter Riley, ‘Announcement’, The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 275–6 (p. 275); Peter Riley, ‘Excerpts from a Notebook, 19 April 1967’, The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, p. 339. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 2, 34. J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 23 April 1963, EDP, 1/19:328. ‘Proposition’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 9. ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview Conducted by Kyle Schlesinger and Matt Chambers, Poetry Collection, Buffalo, May 22, 2006’, Mimeo Mimeo, 4 (Winter 2010), 7–18 (p. 10). Robert Archambeau, ‘Poetry and the Challenge to the Public Sphere’, Samizdat Blog, 10 May 2010, http://samizdatblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/poetry-andchallenge-to-public-sphere.html (accessed 14 July 2014). Correspondence from Asphodel Bookshop, 306 West Superior Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44113, undated, The English Intelligencer Archive, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries, MSS 12, Series A, Box 1, fol. 3. (Hereafter, The English Intelligencer Archive). Jim Hopwood to Peter Riley, 22 November 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (17). ‘About The English Intelligencer’, July 1969, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (1). Brooker and Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, p. 11. The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, ed. Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), p. 56. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 115. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid. For example, The Wivenhoe Park Review, which was edited by Andrew Crozier and published work by many of the Intelligencer poets, was printed rather than

234

31

32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48

Notes mimeographed, and bound as a magazine, with an illustrated cover, a contents listing, reviews and an explicit editorial line. Peter Middleton, ‘Institutions of Poetry in Postwar Britain’, in A Concise Companion to Postwar British Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 243–63 (p. 250). Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, p. 119. Ibid., p. 130. Sean Matthews, ‘“Say not the struggle naught availeth”: Scrutiny (1932–1953)’, Brooker and Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, pp. 833–55 (p. 851). Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 127–86 (p. 153). J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 24 April 1963, CORC, 2/206. J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 7 November 1962, CORC, 2/206. The work in question was Hands Up! J. H. Prynne to Diana Athill, 17 November 1964, EDP, 1/19:330. Prynne to Athill, 17 November 1964, EDP, 1/19:330. Edward Dorn to Charles Olson, 1 May 1966, CORC, 2/149. Raworth wrote to Olson to report that he had heard that Lucie-Smith had described himself as ‘running the english avant-garde, and how “Zukofsky is my best friend, and Olson my second”. How d’you feel about being second best then?’ (Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 19 September 1967, CORC, 2/207.) ‘Raworth Interview’, Mimeo Mimeo, p. 12. Raworth recalls how this insistence on speed was not borne of purely aesthetic considerations: ‘we used to go down after work and print the pages with whatever color ink was left on the press because there was no time, so that’s why [Outburst] was printed with different-color pages. Took too much time to clean the press just to do it, so we just put the type in to do it quickly’ (ibid., p. 7). Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 19 September 1967, CORC, 2/207. Ibid. The poster Raworth mentions is ‘A Sight’, a collaboration between Robert Creeley and R. B. Kitaj. Raworth’s scare-quotes around the word ‘writer’ echoes his letter to Dorn in which he describes the majority of British writing as ‘just writing’. My next chapter will consider its prosodic implication. ‘Raworth Interview’, Mimeo Mimeo, p. 12. Graham C. Greene to J. H. Prynne, 23 January 1968, Records of Jonathan Cape Ltd. University of Reading Special Collections, JC/CG/101/4. Robert Archambeau, ‘Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry’, The Cambridge Literary Review, 1.1 (Michaelmas 2009), 199–215 (p. 199).

Notes

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49 Ibid. 50 Michael Dempsey, undated Christmas card, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (9). There is no record of Dempsey having received the Intelligencer. 51 Andrew Crozier, ‘Obituary: Barry MacSweeney’, The Guardian, 18 May 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2000/may/18/guardianobituaries (accessed 30 September 2012); William Rowe, Three Lyric Poets: Harwood, Torrance, MacSweeney (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009), p. 81. 52 Barry MacSweeney, ‘Kill the Bird, the Liverpool Bird (from the cover of Underdog no. 8)’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 192. 53 Ibid. 54 Brian Patten, ‘Correspondence’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 210. 55 MacSweeney had enthusiastically reviewed Dylan’s famous performance. For a very full account of MacSweeney’s relationship with Dylan, see Terry Kelly’s ‘Not Dark Yet: Barry MacSweeney, Bob Dylan and the Jesus Christ Almighty’, in Reading Barry MacSweeney, ed. Paul Batchelor (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013), pp. 157–69. 56 Ralph Maud, Charles Olson at the Harbor (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2008), p. 132. 57 Andrew Crozier, note, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (1). 58 The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother (London: Hutchison, 1968), back cover. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Nicholas Johnson, ‘Barry MacSweeney: An Appreciation’, Pores, http://www.pores. bbk.ac.uk/1/Nicholas%20Johnson,%20%20’Barry%20MacSweeney%20-%20An%20 Appreciation’.html (accessed 14 July 2012). 66 According to Rathna Ramanathan, the print run of Fulcrum titles in the early 1970s ranged between 1,580 for Paul Evans’s February and 3,080 for Tom Pickard’s The Order of Chance (see Rathna Ramanathan, ‘English Little Presses, Book Design and Production: A Study of Five London Publishers, 1945–1979’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Reading, Reading, MA, 2006, p. 160). Using these figures, then, we can surmise that the size of the print run for Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard would have been far in excess of the Intelligencer’s audience, for example. 67 Anthea Healey, ‘Dole Boy Named For Post At Oxford’, The Sunday Times, 28 September 1968, Barry MacSweeney Papers, Robinson Library Special Collections, Newcastle University Library, fol. BM 6/1/1. (Hereafter, Barry MacSweeney Papers.) 68 Ibid. 69 Anthea Healey, The Sunday Times, 13 October 1968, Barry MacSweeney Papers, BM 6/1/1.

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70 Roz Morris, The Times, 9 October 1968, Barry MacSweeney Papers, BM 6/1/1. 71 Kingsley Amis, The New Statesman, 15 November 1968, Barry MacSweeney Papers, BM 6/1/1. Amis’s disdain for the students resonates with Raine’s response when asked if she supported student power: ‘Good heavens, no!’ 72 Lyman Andrews, The Sunday Times, 19 January 1969, Barry MacSweeney Papers, BM 6/1/1. 73 Interview with Anthony Holden, Isis, no. 1564 (23 October 1968). Barry MacSweeney Papers, Newcastle University Library, BM 6/1/1. 74 The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 452–65. Nor was it the only collection of work to be circulated for free to its list: Andrew Crozier also distributed gratis copies of John James’s mmm . . . ah yes (London: Ferry Press, 1967), although he added that the book cost ‘5/2 per copy to make: if you sent The Ferry Press some money in proportion to your interest it might bring others sooner’ (The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, p. 380). 75 Archambeau, ‘Public Faces in Private Places’, pp. 208–9. 76 David H. W. Grubb, ‘At the Edge of Everyday Reality’, in Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher (Salzburg: Poetry Salzburg, 2000), pp. 558–88 (p. 573). 77 R. J. Ellis, ‘Mapping the United Kingdom Little Magazine Field’, in New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, ed. Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 72–103 (p. 90). 78 Ibid. 79 Michael Horowitz (ed.), Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), back cover. 80 Ibid., p. 316. 81 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 82 Andrew Crozier to Peter Riley, 17 January 1967, Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Peter Riley Papers (hereafter PRP), MS Add.10013/2/10, fol. 4. 83 Andrew Crozier to Peter Riley, 22 January 1967, PRP, 10013/2/10 (4). 84 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 23 May 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 85 Andrew Crozier to Peter Riley, 22 August 1967, PRP, 10013/2/10 (4). 86 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 7 September 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (26). 87 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 13 September 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 88 Horowitz, Children of Albion, p. 337. 89 Edward Dorn to Charles Olson, 22 February 1966, CORC, 2/147. 90 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 36. 91 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 4 November 1961 and 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206.

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92 Robert Creeley, ‘Introduction’, Black Mountain Review: Vol. 1, 1954, Nos. 1–4 (New York: AMS Press, 1969), p. v. 93 Charles Olson to Cid Corman, 3 May 1951, Letters for Origin, 1950–1956, ed. Albert Glover (London: Cape Goliard, 1969), p. 49. 94 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose of Charles Olson, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 230–49 (p. 240). 95 Ibid., p. 248. 96 Ibid., p. 245. 97 Charles Olson to Cid Corman, 3 May 1951, Glover, Letters, p. 51. 98 Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan and the American Avant-Garde (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 41. 99 Charles Olson to Cid Corman, 9 November 1950, Glover, Letters, pp. 12. 100 Ezra Pound, quoted in Robert Creeley, ‘Introduction’, Black Mountain Review: Vol. 1, 1954, Nos. 1–4 (New York: AMS Press, 1969), pp. iii–xiii. 101 Ibid., p. vi. 102 Ibid., pp. vii–viii. 103 Leroi Jones, in The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, ed. Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), p. 41. 104 Floating Bear, ed. di Prima and Jones, pp. 156a–6b. 105 Diane di Prima, ‘Introduction: (adapted from taped interviews with Diane di Prima July 29–August 1, 1970)’, di Prima and Jones, The Floating Bear, pp. vii–xviii. 106 Ibid., p. x. 107 Ibid., pp. x–xi. 108 Charles Olson, ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]’, The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), p. 185. 109 di Prima and Jones, The Floating Bear, p. 168. Prynne also wrote an unsolicited letter of support for the Bear during its trial for obscenity, which Baraka read to the jury (Amiri Baraka to Edward Dorn, late May 1962, Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, ed. Claudia Moreno Pisano [Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013], p. 87). 110 J. H. Prynne to Robert Creeley, 21 October 1964. Edward Dorn Papers, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, Series 1, fol. 19:330 111 J. H. Prynne, ‘Moon Poem’, Poems, pp. 53–4. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 60.] 112 Peter Riley, A Commentary on the Serial Poems of Jack Spicer (unpublished MA thesis, University of Keele, Keele, 1975), p. 155.

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113 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 2. Although I could find no record of Mauss’s book either in the correspondence around the Intelligencer nor in Ralph Maud’s bibliography of Olson’s reading, it would seem unlikely, given the breadth of reading that these poets were undertaking in these fields, that they would have been unaware of it. 114 Ibid., p. 70. 115 Ibid., p. 69. 116 Guy Davenport, ‘The Symbol of the Archaic’, in The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 16–28 (p. 20). 117 Mauss, The Gift, p. 68. 118 Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 41–71 (p. 54). 119 ‘Raworth Interview’, Mimeo Mimeo, p. 10. 120 Ibid., p. 12. 121 Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 22 September 1966, CORC, 2/207. 122 In November 1965, a couple of months before the first issue of the Intelligencer, Prynne wrote to Olson to inform him that ‘we now have a xerographic copying machine installed here in college (about 10 yards distant from my room). Quick, easy to use. And I have unlimited access without charge or favour. If you have parts of the written word that you’d like in facsimile, just mail it to me and I’ll gladly at any time do the rest.’ J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 16 November 1965, CORC, 2/206. 123 Andrew Crozier to Charles Olson, 20 December 1965, CORC, 2/145. 124 J. H. Prynne, manuscript annotation. The English Intelligencer Archive, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries, MSS 12, Series A, Box 3, fol. 7. 125 Charles Olson to Cid Corman, 12 March 1951, Glover, Letters, p. 38. 126 Olson to Corman, 12 March 1951, Glover, Letters, p. 39. 127 Charles Olson to Cid Corman, 27 April 1951, Glover, Letters, p. 44. 128 Alastair Johnston, ‘A Checklist of Goliard Press (London 1965–1967)’, Booktryst, http://www.booktryst.com/2012/11/a-checklist-of-goliard-press-london.html (accessed 13 July 2014). 129 di Prima and Jones, The Floating Bear, p. x. 130 Middleton, ‘Institutions of Poetry in Postwar Britain’, p. 250. 131 Jason Harding, ‘The Idea of a Literary Review: T. S. Eliot and The Criterion’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Brooker and Thacker, pp. 346–63 (p. 349). 132 Ibid., p. 349. 133 G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 73.

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134 Ibid. 135 This concentration is not synonymous with coherence, however. In Chapter 3, I describe how the value of its exchange is increasingly doubted by the Intelligencer contributors and becomes increasingly antagonistic. 136 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 23 June 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 137 Neil Pattison, ‘Introduction: All Flags Left Outside’, in Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer, ed. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012), p. x. 138 Prynne to Riley, 23 June 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1).

Chapter 2 1 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, pp. 33, 24. 2 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 3 Donald Davie, ‘Purity of Diction in English Verse’ and Articulate Energy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 220. 4 It was also Davie who, in 1963, secured Prynne’s fellowship at Gonville and Caius, without requiring the latter to complete his doctorate. In a letter to Dorn, Prynne describes his election as ‘like getting called to the White House at the tender age of 26; it feels like death’. J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 16 June 1963, CORC, 2/206. 5 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 24 April 1963, CORC, 2/206. 6 Confucius, The Analects, XIII.3, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 249. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 53. 10 Charles Olson, ‘The Gate and the Center’, in The Collected Prose of Charles Olson, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 168–73 (p. 169). 11 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 24 April 1963, CORC, 2/206. Prynne dates Davie’s letter to 31 January 1963. 12 For a consideration of the history of (mis-)interpretations of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, see Haun Saussy, ‘Fenellosa Compounded: A Discrimination’, in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 1–40 (esp. pp. 33–40). 13 Fenellosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, p. 45.

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14 Ibid., p. 44. 15 Ibid., p. 54. 16 J. H. Prynne, ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, Prospect, 5 (Winter 1961), 26–30 (p. 27). 17 Ibid., p. 28. 18 Ibid., pp. 28, 30. 19 Ibid., p. 28. 20 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 3 April 1963, CORC, 2/206. 21 Charles Olson, ‘The Gate and the Center’, in Collected Prose, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 168–73 (p. 169). 22 Ibid., p. 169. 23 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 230–49 (p. 242). 24 Charles Olson, ‘Against Wisdom as Such’, in Collected Prose, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 260–4 (p. 263). 25 Ibid., p. 263. 26 Charles Olson, ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’, p. 250. 27 Prynne, ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, p. 30. 28 Prynne to Olson, 4 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 29 Ibid. 30 Prynne to Olson, 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Olson writes that ‘from 3378 bc [. . .] until date 1200 bc or thereabouts, civilization had ONE CENTER, Sumer, in all directions’ (Charles Olson, ‘The Gate and the Center’, p. 170). The city ‘was a coherence’ from which, in the period 3378 bc to 2500 bc, ‘men [fell] off the original impetus but [were] still close enough to the climax of a will to cohere to know what CENTER was, and, though going downhill, still keeping the FORCE, even though the SHAPE was starting even then to lose its sharpness’ (p. 170). 35 Prynne to Olson, 26 November 1961, CORC, 2/206. 36 Prynne to Olson, 3 April 1963, CORC, 2/206. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 29 May 1963, CORC, 2/206. 41 Edward Dorn to Charles Olson, 1 May 1966. EDP, 1/19:332. 42 B. De Vries and J. Goudsblom, Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Econological Perspective. Myths, Maps and Models (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), p. 17.

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43 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 8 June 1967. The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (26). 44 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’, The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 346–351 (p. 346). 45 Ibid., p. 346. 46 Ibid., p. 350. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 351. 52 B. De Vries and J. Goudsblom, Mappae Mundi, p. 20. 53 Charles Olson to J. H. Prynne, 20 March 1966, CORC, 2/206. 54 J. H. Prynne, reading at the York Street Commune, Vancover, 30 July 1971, recorded by Fred Wah. The Archive of the Now, http://www.archiveofthenow.org/ authors/?i=77&f=1764#1764 (accessed 14 July 2014). 55 J. H. Prynne, ‘Numbers in Time of Trouble’, Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2015, 3rd edition) pp. 17–18 (p. 18): hereafter Poems. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 74–76 (p. 76)]. 56 J. H. Prynne, ‘Die A Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, Poems, pp. 13–16 (p. 14). [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 71–73 (p. 72)]. 57 Andrew Crozier to Charles Olson, n.d. October 1965, CORC, 2/145. 58 Charles Olson, ‘The Vinland Map Review’, in Collected Prose of Charles Olson, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 326–335 (p. 333). 59 Ibid. 60 ‘basal, adj. and n’. OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 20 February 2015. 61 Olson, ‘The Vinland Map Review’, p. 335. 62 P. M. S. Blackett, ‘Introduction’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Vol. 258, No. 188, A Symposium on Continental Drift (28 October 1965), pp. vii–x (p. x). 63 Ibid. 64 J. A. Miller, ‘Geochronology and Continental Drift – The North Atlantic’, in Philosophical Transactions, pp. 180–91 (pp. 181–2). 65 F. J. Fitch, ‘Appendix: The Structural Unity of the Reconstructed North Atlantic’, in Philosophical Transactions, pp. 191–3 (p. 192). 66 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Communication’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 27. 67 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 11 January 1966, CORC, 2/206. 68 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 14 February 1966 (dated ‘St. Valentine’s Day’), CORC, 2/206. 69 J. H. Prynne, inscription in The Proceedings of the Royal Society: Symposium on Continental Drift, CORC, f/31.

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70 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 29 May 1963, CORC, 2/206. 71 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Wound, Day and Night’, Poems, p. 64. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 17.] 72 J. H. Prynne, ‘Review of The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI᾽, The Park, nos 4/5 (Summer 1969), 64–7 (p. 66). 73 N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), p. 53. 74 Prynne, ‘Review of Maximus’, The Park, pp. 64–6 (p. 66). 75 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 11 February 1966. CORC, 2/206. 76 Reeve and Kerridge, Nearly Too Much, p. 54. 77 Simon Jarvis, ‘Quality and the Non-Identical in J. H. Prynne’s “Aristeas, in Seven Years”’, Jacket, http://jacketmagazine.com/20/pt-jarvis.html (accessed 30 September 2012). 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 2 April 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34, fol. 1. 81 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 3 April 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34, fol. 1. 82 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Note on Metal’, Poems, 128–31 (p. 131). [The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 286–9 (p. 289).] 83 Jarvis, ‘Quality and the Non-Identical’. 84 Peter Riley, ‘Working Note on British Prehistory: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 234–7 (p. 235). 85 Ibid., p. 234. Olson identifies a similar turn to the same date in his essay ‘The Present is Prologue’: ‘the walls which have been a comfort to man in the East and West since 1500 bc’. Charles Olson, ‘The Present is Prologue’, in Collected Prose, ed. Allen and Friedlander, pp. 205–7 (p. 206). 86 Riley, ‘Working Note’, The English Intelligencer, p. 242. 87 Ibid., p. 241. 88 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 14 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 256–8 (p. 257). 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 258. 91 Ibid. 92 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose, Allen and Friedlander, pp. 239– 49 (p. 243). 93 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 1 March 1967, The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, p. 263. 94 J. H. Prynne, ‘First Notes on Daylight’, Poems, p. 69. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 232.] 95 Prynne to Riley, 14 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, p. 256. 96 Peter Riley, A Commentary on the Serial Poems of Jack Spicer (unpublished MA thesis, University of Keele, 1975), p. 155.

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97 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 24. 98 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London: Arkana, 1989), pp. 376–7. 99 Prynne to Riley, 14 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, p. 258. 100 Joe Moffett, The Search for Origins in the Twentieth-Century Long Poem: Sumerian, Homeric and Anglo-Saxon (Morgantown, VA: West Virginia University Press, 2007), p. 42. 101 J. H. Prynne, ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, Poems, 90–5. [The English Intelligencer, pp. 277–9 (p. 279).] 102 Eliade argues that Orpheus is himself a shamanic figure, with regard to ‘his healing art, his love for music and animals, his “charms”, his power of “divination”. Even his character of “culture hero” is not in contradiction to the best shamanic tradition – was not the “first shaman” the messenger sent by God to defend humanity against diseases and to civilize it’ (Eliade, Shamanism, p. 391). 103 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, further revised edn 2002 (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 246. 104 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 175–8 (p. 178). Eliot describes the mythical method as ‘a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, p. 178). 105 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 131. 106 Ibid. This claim resonates with Francois Hartog’s contention that Herodotus’s representation of the Scythians is itself idealized, since ‘the Athenian, that imaginary autochthonous being, had need of an equally imaginary nomad’ (Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in Writing History [Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988], p. 11). 107 Jarvis, ‘Quality and the Non-Identical’. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Prynne to Riley, 14 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, p. 258. 111 Jarvis, ‘Quality and the Non-Identical’. 112 Elaine Feinstein to the editor, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 17. 113 Charles Olson to Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, Vol. VII, ed. George F. Butterick (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 244. 114 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), pp. 13–22 (p. 16). 115 Olson to Creeley, The Complete Correspondence, Vol. VII, p. 244. 116 Ibid.

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117 Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 114. 118 John Temple, ‘Thots. from yr Postcard’, Collected Poems [published as ‘To a Friend on Receiving a Postcard Reproduction of the Map of Britain by Matthew Paris, Monk of St Albans’] (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2003), pp. 15–16 (p. 15). [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 1.] 119 Edward Dorn, The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin Plateau, ed. Matthew Hofer (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013, expanded edition), p. 16. 120 Gael Turnbull, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 26a. 121 Ibid. 122 Paul Evans to Andrew Crozier, 3 March 1966, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/2 (6). 123 Paul Evans to Andrew Crozier, 7 December 1966, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/2 (6). 124 Andrew Crozier, ‘Correspondence: 15 November 1966’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 165. 125 Peter Armstrong, ‘Something about Poetry’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 82–4 (p. 84); Ian Vine to the editor, 25 May 1966, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 84. 126 Ian Vine, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 84–5 (p. 84). 127 Ibid. 128 Donald Davie to John Temple, 12 May 1966. The English Intelligencer Archive, 12 A/8. 129 ‘eloquence, n’. OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 20 February 2015. 130 John Hall to Ian Vine, 4 June 1966, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 86. 131 Ibid., p. 87. 132 J. H. Prynne to Andrew Crozier, 13 September 1966, The English Intelligencer, p. 110. 133 David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 165. 134 Ibid., p. 166.

Chapter 3 1 Andrew Crozier, ‘Correspondence: 15 November 1966’, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 165. 2 J. H. Prynne to Andrew Crozier, 27 December 1966, The English Intelligencer, p. 190.

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3 J. H. Prynne, Kitchen Poems (London: Cape Goliard, 1968), n.p. 4 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 29. ‘News’ I take to mean the ‘report or account of recent (esp. important or interesting) events or occurrences, brought or coming to one as new information’ (‘news, n.’. OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/126615? rskey=FbjeUc&result=1&isAdvanced=false [accessed March 24, 2015].) 5 J. H. Prynne, ‘As It Were an Attendant’, Poems, pp. 124–5. [The English Intelligencer, ‘ghost’ issue, n.p.] 6 The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 661. 7 Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs on Baudelaire’, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 170–210 (pp. 173–4). 8 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 40. 9 Ibid., p. 67. 10 J. H. Prynne, ‘Die A Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’, Poems, pp. 13–16. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 71–3.] 11 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Numbers’, Poems, pp. 10–12. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 25–6.] 12 J. H. Prynne, Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words (London: Birkbeck College, 1993), p. 12. 13 J. H. Prynne, ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, Poems, p. 38. [The Wivenhoe Park Review, 1 (Autumn 1965), p. 42.] 14 J. H. Prynne, ‘On the Anvil’, Poems, p. 42. [The Wivenhoe Park Review, 1 (Autumn 1965), p. 43.] 15 Ezra Pound, ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 185. 16 J. H. Prynne, ‘Reading Pound: Four’, http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/ study/english/pound/pound4.pdf (accessed 14 July 2014). This is an account corroborated by Pound’s biographer A. David Moody, who writes that ‘the mystic cult of love which, in Pound’s mind at least, had its origins in the rites of Persephone at Eleusis; attained an ultimate realization in the work of Dante and Cavalcanti; enjoyed a kind of life in the Renaissance; and lapsed into decay in the modern era’ (A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work 1. The Young Genius 1885–1920 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], p. 136). 17 Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 48, 54–5. 18 J. H. Prynne, George Herbert, ‘Love [III]’: A Discursive Commentary (Cambridge: privately printed, 2011), pp. 9–11. 19 Alain Badiou, with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009), p. 42.

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20 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 9 November 1965, CORC, 2/206. 21 J. H. Prynne, ‘Lashed to the Mast’, Poems, p. 49. [The Wivenhoe Park Review, 1 (Autumn 1965), p. 48.] 22 Ian Brinton, ‘Prynne in Prospect’, Salt Magazine, 3 (March 2010), http://www. saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/03/text/Brinton_Ian.html (accessed 14 July 2014). 23 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1. 24 Robert Creeley to Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, Vol II, ed. George F. Butterick (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 39. 25 Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan and the American Avant-Garde (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 9. 26 Ibid. 27 Keston Sutherland, ‘XL Prynne’, in A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009), pp. 104–32 (p. 110). 28 ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’, ‘A Figure of Mercy, of Speech’, ‘The Stranger, Instantly’, ‘Living in History’, ‘On the Anvil’, ‘The Holy City’, ‘How It’s Done’, ‘If There Is a Stationmaster at Stamford S.D. Hardly So’, ‘Lashed to the Mast’ and ‘Song in Sight of the World’ are published in The Wivenhoe Park Review, 1 pp. 39–49. See Michael Tencer’s ‘The Bibliography of J. H. Prynne’ for a complete listing of the textual provenance of Prynne’s poems: http://prynnebibliography.-wordpress.com/ published-poems (accessed 14 July 2014). 29 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 26 January 1966, EDP, 1/19:329. 30 J. H. Prynne, ‘Moon Poem’, Poems, pp. 53–4. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 60.] An annotated copy of this poem is held with Olson’s papers in Connecticut. Although his handwriting is largely illegible, his thoughts on ‘the community of wish’ can be transcribed with some confidence: ‘A laudable ambition but not practicable under the aegis of statement as I said. The [discovered?] subjective (by the 17th century founders of modern scientific and philosophic tradition) has moved any such usefulness – and it does have human virtues – over, into [addresses?], which the evolution of energy (in the 20th century) shows we have to top even that.’ CORC, 8/375. 31 Charles Olson, marginalia, CORC, 8/375. 32 Reeve and Kerridge, Nearly Too Much, p. 82. 33 Prynne, ‘Love in the Air’, Poems, pp. 55–6. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 136.] 34 J. H. Prynne, ‘Break It’, Poems, p. 51. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 135.] 35 J. H. Prynne, ‘From End to End’, Poems, pp. 62–3. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 138–9.]

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36 J. H. Prynne, ‘Just So’, Poems, pp. 59–60. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 137.] 37 J. H. Prynne, ‘Frost and Snow, Falling’, Poems, pp. 70–1. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 140.] 38 J. H. Prynne, ‘For This, For This’, Poems, pp. 72–3. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 143–4.] 39 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 26 January 1966, EDP, 1/19:239. 40 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 12 June 1966, CORC, 2/206. 41 J. H. Prynne, manuscript addition, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/3 (7). 42 Subsequent collections of Prynne have split this poem across two pages. 43 J. H. Prynne, ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, Poems, pp. 74–5. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 134.] 44 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 12 December 1966, EDP, 1/19:330. Dorn’s notebook dates the composition of the poem – with the subtitle ‘A Change of Venue’ – to 8 December 1966. 45 Ibid. 46 J. H. Prynne to Andrew Crozier, 27 December 1966, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 189–91. 47 Ibid., p. 190. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Olson arrived in Liverpool on 28 October 1966. 53 Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), pp. 333–4. 54 Iain Sinclair, American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 122. 55 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 28 November 1967, CORC, 2/150. 56 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 9 July 1962, EDP, 1/19:328. 57 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 7 February 1968, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 58 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 12 October 1968, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 59 Ibid. 60 Charles Olson to Edward Dorn, 7 February 1966, EDP, 1/18:250. 61 Ibid. 62 Andrew Crozier to Charles Olson, 19 July 1967, CORC, 2/145. 63 J. H. Prynne, ‘Concerning Quality, Again’, Poems, pp. 82–3. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 173.] 64 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Stone Called Nothing’, Poems, pp. 120–1. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, pp. 667–8.]

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65 J. H. Prynne, ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’, Poems, pp. 84–6. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 185–6.] 66 J. H. Prynne, ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’, Poems, pp. 99–100. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 382.] 67 Badiou, In Praise of Love, p. 43. 68 J. H. Prynne, ‘Star Damage at Home’, Poems, pp. 108–9. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 444–5.] 69 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, pp. 134–5. 70 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Dream of Retained Colour’, Poems, pp. 103–4. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 482.] 71 J. H. Prynne, ‘Against Hurt’, Poems, p. 52. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 8.] 72 J. H. Prynne, ‘Crown’, Poems, pp. 116–7. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 637.] 73 J. H. Prynne, ‘Smaller than the Radius of the Planet’, Poems, p. 115. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 599.] 74 J. H. Prynne, ‘John in the Blooded Phoenix’, Poems, p. 122. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 600.] 75 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 125. An ‘Olsonian ethic’ also describes the first half of The White Stones. 76 Prynne to Riley, 23 June 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 77 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 15 September 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 78 J. H. Prynne to Andrew Crozier, 26 November 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (26). 79 Edward Dorn to Charles Olson, 23 October 1967, CORC, 1/150. 80 Edward Dorn to Charles Olson, 7 November 1967, CORC, 2/150. 81 J. H. Prynne, ‘About Warning an Invited Audience (obliquely arising from George Dowden’s Letters to English Poets)’, The English Intelligencer, ‘ghost’ issue, n.p. 82 J. H. Prynne to Charles Olson, 15 October 1967, CORC, 2/150. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Sutherland, ‘XL Prynne’, p. 114. 86 Prynne to Olson, 15 October 1967, CORC, 2/150. 87 Ibid. 88 J. H. Prynne, ‘Starvation/Dream’, Poems, p. 114. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 573.] 89 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Common Gain, Reverted’, Poems, pp. 88–9. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 227.] 90 J. H. Prynne, ‘Chemins de Fer’, Poems, p. 123. [The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, pp. 668–9.] 91 J. H. Prynne, ‘Viva Ken’, Poems, p. 154. [The Norman Hackforth, January 1969, n.p.]; J. H. Prynne, ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, Poems, pp. 161–2. [The Anona Wynn, n.p.]

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92 Rod Mengham, ‘“A Free Hand to Refuse Everything”: Politics and Intricacy in the Work of J. H. Prynne’, in A Manner of Utterance, ed. Brinton pp. 69–81 (p. 72). 93 Ibid., p. 73. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 12 October 1968, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 97 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 16 February 1969, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). 98 Peter Riley to Andrew Crozier, 10 January 1968, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (27). 99 Peter Riley to Andrew Crozier, 18 October 1968, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (27). 100 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 197. 101 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Friday Ballad’, Poems, p. 182. [Collection/Tzarad, 4/3 (April 1969), 44.] 102 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Bee Target on his Shoulder’, Poems, pp. 150–2. [First published as ‘Highest Tender’, in Collection, 7 (Autumn 1970), 24–6.] The poem’s original title suggests schizoid overdetermination where ‘tender’ functions as a synonym for a locus of pain and also as a financial offer. 103 J. H. Prynne to Edward Dorn, 1971, EDP, 1/20:334. 104 J. H. Prynne, ‘A New Tax on the Counter-Earth’, Poems, pp. 172–3. [Collection, 7 (Autumn 1970), 26–7.] 105 J. H. Prynne, ‘Air Gap Song’, Poems, p. 183. [Collection, 3 (January 1969), p. 46.] 106 J. H. Prynne, reading at the York Street Commune, 1 August 1971, recorded by Fred Wah. The Archive of the Now, http://www.archiveofthenow.org/ authors/?i=77&f=1764#1764 (accessed 14 July 2014). 107 Prynne reading, 1 August 1971, http://www.archiveofthenow.org/ authors/?i=77&f=1764#1764 (accessed 14 July 2014). 108 J. H. Prynne, ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’, Poems, pp. 161–2. [The Anona Wynn, 1 (1969), n.p.] 109 ‘-y, suffix1’. OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/231078?rskey=vkKWD0&result=8&isAdvanced=false (accessed March 24, 2015). 110 J. H. Prynne, ‘The Kirghiz Disasters’, Poems, pp. 155–8. [The Norman Hackforth (January 1969), n.p.]

Chapter 4 1 David Chaloner to Andrew Crozier, 28 December 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (5). Peter Armstrong to Andrew Crozier, undated, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (2). Peter Armstrong to Andrew Crozier, 10 January 1968, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (5).

250 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes The Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 538. Prynne to Riley, 23 June 1967, PRP, 10013/2/34 (1). The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 691. Peter Riley, ‘A Statement’. The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/3 (8). Peter Riley to Andrew Crozier, 3 December 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (27). Chris Torrance to Andrew Crozier, 5 January 1968, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (31). Peter Riley to J. H. Prynne, 15 December 1967, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (27). Ibid. Paul Evans to Andrew Crozier, 23 January 1967 (erroneously dated 1966), The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (2). Ibid. Tim Longville to Andrew Crozier, May Day 1968 (the letter dated ‘Easter Monday 1968’ is incorporated into the body of the May Day letter), The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/A/1 (20). Ibid. Peter Riley, ‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’, The English Intelligencer Archive, 12/B/3 (8). Rei Terada, ‘After the Critique of the Lyric’, PMLA, 123:1 (January 2008), pp. 195–9 (pp. 196–7). Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, Selected Poems, 1908–1969 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 98. John James, Striking the Pavilion of Zero (London: Ian McKelvie, 1975), back page. John James to Peter Riley, 5 January 1967, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 209–10. James to Riley, 4 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, p. 208. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 61. James to Riley, 4 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, p. 208. Ibid. Ibid., p. 209. Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 36. Ibid. Michael Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 84, 86. Ibid., p. 85. John James, ‘On Leaving the Footpath’, Collected Poems (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2002), p. 57. [The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, p. 502.]

Notes

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29 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Note on Metal’, Poems, 128–31 (p. 131). [The English Intelligencer, 2nd series, pp. 286–9 (p. 287).] 30 J. H. Prynne, ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’, Poems, 74–5. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 134.] 31 Jon Clay, Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 145. 32 John James, ‘The Postcard Sonata’, Collected Poems, 75–83. [The Norman Hackforth, n.p.] 33 J. H. Prynne, ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, Poems, pp. 21–3. [The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 141–2.] 34 Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 3–27 (p. 13). 35 Fenellosa and Pound, ‘The Chinese Written Character’, p. 48. 36 Romana Huk, ‘We confront the //pow // sawdust’, in The Salt Companion to John James, ed. Simon Perril (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2010), pp. 59–102 (p. 70). 37 Debord and Wolman give the example of Duchamp’s addition of a moustache to the Mona Lisa. 38 Guy Debord and Gil Joseph Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’, in Situationist International Anthropology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, Revised edn 2005), pp. 14–21 (p. 15). 39 Ibid., p. 11. 40 John James, ‘The Dragon House’, Collected Poems, 119–121. [Collection, 7 (Autumn 1970), 14–15 (p. 14).] 41 Huk, ‘We confront the // pow // sawdust’, p. 70. 42 Andrew Duncan, ‘The Long Poem of the 1970s’, Angel Exhaust, August 2012, http:// angelexhaust.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-long-poem-of-1970s-feature-of-1970s. html (accessed 14 July 2014). 43 Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 13. 44 Cartwright makes a thorough and sustained exposition on the relationship between James and the visual arts in ‘“art is a balm to the brain | & gives a certain resolution”: the impact of, and engagement with, the visual arts in John James’ writing’, in The Salt Companion to John James, ed. Simon Perril (London: Salt, 2010), pp. 40–58. 45 Huk, ‘We confront the // pow // sawdust’, p. 85. 46 Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 23. 47 ‘ort, n.’. OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/132773?redirectedFrom=ort (accessed March 24, 2015). 48 Tom Phillips, In One Side & Out the Other (London: Ferry Press, 1970), n.p. 49 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 213–14. 50 Ibid., p. 181.

252

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51 Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 22. 52 Andrew Crozier and John James, ‘A Three Minute Tour of the Ruins’, In One Side & Out the Other (London: Ferry Press, 1970), n.p. 53 Andrew Crozier and John James, In One Side & Out the Other (London: Ferry Press, 1970), n.p. 54 Tom Phillips, ‘Notes on A Humument’, in A Humument (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012, Fifth edn), n.p. 55 John James, ‘The Poet of Life and Sculpture’, http:/www.tate.org.uk/contextcomment/articles/poet-life-and-sculpture (accessed 14 July 2014). 56 John James, ‘Bristol Time Encore’, Cloud Breaking Sun (Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2011), n.p. 57 Ezra Pound, ‘Brancusi’, in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), pp. 444–5 (p. 444). 58 Clarrie Wallis, ‘The Business Is in the Making’, in Barry Flanagan: Early Works 1965–1982 (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 11–51 (p. 21). Latham’s contract was not renewed by the college. 59 Brion Gysin, quoted in Laura Hoptman, ‘Disappearing Act: The Art of Brion Gysin’, in Dream Machine, ed. Laura Hoptman (London and New York: Merrell, 2010), pp. 57–65 (p. 65). 60 James Joyce, quoted in Silâns (London: Plubronze Limited, Lethaby Press, 2011), n.p. 61 Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, p. 178. 62 John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1968), pp. 109–27 (p. 109). 63 Ibid., p. 116. 64 Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, p. 240. 65 Fenellosa and Pound, ‘The Chinese Written Character’, p. 49.

Chapter 5 1 Charles Olson, ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]’, The Maximus Poems, ed. George Butterick (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), p. 185. 2 Olson, ‘Letter 6’, The Maximus Poems, p. 33. 3 Pound, The Cantos, pp. 17, 445. 4 J. H. Prynne, ‘Lecture on Maximus IV, V, VI’, http://charlesolson.org/Files/ Prynnelecture1.htm (accessed 13 July 2014). 5 Andrew Duncan, ‘The Long Poem of the 1970s’, Angel Exhaust August 2012, http://angelexhaust.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-long-poem-of-1970s-feature-of1970s.html (accessed 14 July 2014). 6 Ibid.

Notes

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7 Drew Milne, ‘Neo-Modernism and Avant-Garde Orientations’, A Concise Companion to Postwar British Poetry and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 155–75 (p. 159). 8 John James, ‘Good Old Harry’, Collected Poems (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2002), pp. 122–3. [Collection, 7 (Autumn 1970), inside back cover.] 9 Pattison, ‘All Flags Left Outside’, p. x. 10 Joe Moffett, The Search for Origins in the Twentieth-Century Long Poem: Sumerian, Homeric, and Anglo-Saxon (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2007), p. 3. 11 Tom Raworth – an interview conducted by Barry Alpert, Spencer, Indiana, 11 February, 1972, Vort, 1 (Fall 1972), pp. 29–46 (p. 39). 12 Margaret Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1986), p. 6. 13 Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry, p. 197. 14 Ibid. 15 Dickie, Modernist Long Poem, p. 13. 16 Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 13. 17 Tony Lopez, Meaning Performance (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2006), p. 194. 18 Ibid., p. 192. 19 J. H. Prynne to Ray Crump, 18 March 1968, The English Intelligencer, 3rd series, p. 662. 20 Ibid. 21 Richard D. Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London: Longman, 1992), p. 121. 22 Yuri Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language, ed. and trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981), p. 120. 23 Ibid., p. 129. 24 Simon Jarvis, ‘The Melodics of Long Poems’, Textual Practice (24.4), pp. 607–21 (p. 611). 25 Ibid., p. 619. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Andrew Crozier, ‘How High the Zero’, in Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, ed. Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2006), pp. 111–30 (p. 115). 29 By full line, I refer specifically to the basic six syllable unit the poem is built around. When there are broken or half lines, the inserted line moves correspondingly down. This measure of apparent arbitrariness is symptomatic of the poem’s processes. 30 Crozier, ‘How High the Zero’, p. 128. 31 Andrew Crozier, High Zero, in An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), pp. 143–159 (p. 156). 32 Ibid., p. 121.

254 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Notes Crozier, High Zero, p. 156. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 154. Crozier, ‘How High the Zero’, p. 115. The poems of Prynne and James to which Crozier refers here are, respectively, ‘Now the band narrows towards . . .’ and ‘May Day Greetings 1971’. ‘May Day Greetings 1971’ is actually the final poem in Striking the Pavilion of Zero. Ibid. Ibid., p. 125. John James, ‘May Day Greetings 1971’, Collected Poems, p. 131. Crozier, High Zero, p. 158. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 151. Peter Riley, ‘Prelude v’, The Derbyshire Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010), p. 22. Peter Riley, ‘Preface’, The Derbyshire Poems, p. 9. Ibid. Peter Middleton, ‘The Substance of Tracks and Mineshafts’, in The Gig 4/5: The Poetry of Peter Riley (November 1999/March 2000), pp. 47–61 (p. 48). John Hall, ‘On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts’, The Gig, 4/5 (November 1999/March 2000), pp. 35–42 (p. 35). Peter Riley, ‘Working Note on British Prehistory: Or, Archaeological Guesswork One’, in The English Intelligencer, 1st series, pp. 234–56 (p. 234). Ibid., p. 234. Peter Riley, ‘King’s Field’, The Derbyshire Poems, pp. 27–33 (p. 27). Ibid. John Hall, ‘On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts’, p. 36. Ibid. Peter Riley, ‘(letter)’, The Derbyshire Poems, pp. 36–7 (p. 36). Peter Riley, ‘Glutton’, The Derbyshire Poems, pp. 38–44 (pp. 38-9). Ibid. Ibid., p. 42. Peter Riley, ‘A Note on Vein Forms’, The Derbyshire Poems, pp. 175–85 (p. 181). Ibid., p. 184. Ibid. J. H. Prynne, ‘A Note on Metal’, Poems, p. 131. [The English Intelligencer, p. 289] John Hall, ‘On Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts’, pp. 35–42 (p. 40). Middleton, ‘The Substance of Tracks and Mineshafts’, p. 59.

Notes

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68 Simon Perril, ‘Trappings of the Hart: Reader and The English Intelligencer’, The Gig: The Poetry of Peter Riley, 4/5 (November 1999/March 2000), pp. 196–218 (p. 215). 69 J. H. Prynne to Peter Riley, 14 February 1967, The English Intelligencer, 1st series, p. 258. 70 Perril, ‘Trappings of the Hart’, p. 203. 71 Ibid. 72 Nigel Wheale, ‘Mining the Heartfold’, The Gig, 4/5 (November 1999/March 2000), pp. 77–85 (p. 81). 73 Riley, ‘Glutton’, The Derbyshire Poems, p. 38. 74 Ibid. 75 Riley, ‘King’s Field’, The Derbyshire Poems, p. 26. 76 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics, p. 123. 77 W. N. Herbert, ‘Barry MacSweeney and the Demons of Influence’, in Reading Barry MacSweeney, ed. Paul Batchelor (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013), pp. 141–56 (p. 144). 78 Pattison, ‘All Flags Left Outside’, p. x. 79 Paul Batchelor (ed.), ‘False Fathers, Desperate Readers, and the Prince of Sparty Lea’, in Reading Barry MacSweeney (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013), pp. 107–30 (p. 118). 80 For the definitive history of this event, see Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2006). 81 Andrew Crozier to Eric Mottram, 14 July 1979, The Eric Mottram Collection (hereafter Mottram Collection), 5/53/1-13. 82 Peter Riley, ‘Thoughts on Barry MacSweeney’, in Reading Barry MacSweeney, ed. Batchelor, pp. 130–40 (p. 118). 83 Eric Mottram, ‘An Interview with Barry MacSweeney’, Poetry Information (1978), pp. 21–39 (p. 34). 84 Barry MacSweeney, ‘The Last Bud’, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2003), pp. 15–19 (p. 19). 85 Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 36. 86 Barry MacSweeney reading at Lumb Bank, 22 September 1978, Mottram Collection, 14/1/163. 87 Barry MacSweeney reading at Lumb Bank, 22 September 1978, Mottram Collection, 14/1/163. 88 Barry MacSweeney, ‘Black Torch Sunrise’, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2003), pp. 74–7. 89 Barry MacSweeney, ‘Far Cliff Babylon’, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), pp. 78–81. 90 Barry MacSweeney, ‘Colonel B.’, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), pp. 88–94. 91 William Walton Rowe, Three Lyric Poets: Harwood, Torrance, MacSweeney (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009), p. 102. 92 Ibid., p. 101.

256

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93 St John-Stevas would eventually be dismissed by Thatcher, in 1981, as part of her purge of the Tory ‘wets’. 94 William Blake, Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), p. 238. 95 Barry MacSweeney to Eric Mottram, 21 November 1979, Mottram Collection, 5/151/1-43. 96 Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, ‘Introduction’, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 11. 97 Barry MacSweeney to Eric Mottram, 21 November 1979, Mottram Collection, 5/151/1-43.

Conclusion 1 Miller and Price, British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000, p. 149. 2 Dorn to Olson, 7 November 1967, CORC, 2/150. 3 Morrison and Motion, Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, p. 11.

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Index Albert Hall Readings, The 31, 36–7 Alembic 199 Amis, Kingsley 34 Anona Wynn, The 16, 115, 120, 125, 138 Archambeau, Robert 24–5, 30, 35, 38 Armstrong, Peter 81, 124 Badiou, Alain 91, 106 Ballard, J. G. 12 Batchelor, Paul 180–2 Bellow, Saul 12 Betjeman, John 21–4, 38, 73, 77, 85, 167, 199–200 bibliographical codes 15, 23, 26–7, 47, 92, 137, 232–3 Black Mountain Review 4, 40–1 Black Suede Boot Press 31, 34 BLAST 5–6, 48–50 Bourdieu, Pierre 15, 26 Brady, Andrea 11 Brakhage, Stan 156 Brancusi, Constantin 153–7 Bunting, Basil 3, 32 Burn, Gordon 7 Burroughs, William 12, 154 Cage, John 156 Cambridge school, the 7, 11, 27, 180–2, 197 Cape, Jonathan 15, 28–30, 44 Cape Goliard 94 see also Goliard Cavalcanti 90, 162, 192 ‘Donna mi preghia’ 90, 192 Chaloner, David 36, 124 Clark, Thomas A. 34 Clark, Tom 63, 103 Collection 16, 94, 115, 120, 123, 125–6, 131, 139, 145, 148, 162, 199 community of risk 8–9, 42, 93, 95, 103, 120, 127, 157, 161, 169, 179, 187 Connolly, Cyril 49

Conquest, Robert 20–2 New Lines, ed. 20–2 Corman, Cid 38, 40, 46–7, 93 coterie 7–8, 25, 27, 162 Creeley, Robert 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 29, 38, 40, 42, 78, 92–3, 101, 104, 111, 124, 128, 156, 161 Criterion 48–9 Crozier, Andrew 7, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 24–5, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 45–6, 60, 63, 77, 80–1, 86–7, 105, 110–11, 115, 123–5, 129, 131–2, 139, 148–9, 151, 153, 157, 160, 168–74, 181, 190, 198 High Zero 17, 160, 168–74, 190, 194 In One Side & Out the Other, with John James and Tom Phillips 16, 123, 131, 148–52, 168 Crump, Ray 164–6, 171, 190 Curiously Strong, The 199 Davie, Donald 8, 21, 46, 52–3, 81–2, 84, 110 Dempsey, Michael 30 détournement 143–4 différance 142, 151 di Prima, Diane 40–2, 47 Dorn, Edward 1, 4–5, 8, 13–14, 16, 21–2, 28, 37, 60, 64, 67, 80, 84, 86, 91, 94, 98–101, 104–5, 110–11, 116, 160, 198 The North Atlantic Turbine 60, 110 The Shoshoneans 13, 80 ‘Thesis’ 100 Dorward, Nate 12 Dylan, Bob 31, 235 Eliot, T. S. 21, 36, 48–9, 73–4, 78, 133, 144, 155 Ellis, R. J. 12, 44 Esty, Jed 2 Evans, Paul 80, 127, 132

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Feinstein, Elaine 10–11, 21, 38, 77, 138 Fenellosa, Ernest 15, 45, 51–61, 63, 68, 83, 89, 120, 150, 152, 156, 161, 170 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 15, 51–61, 162 Ferrini, Vincent 40 Fisher, Allen 160 Fisher, Roy 81 Fitch, F. J. 65–6, 68 Flanagan, Barry 148, 153–6 Floating Bear, The 26, 41–3, 47 Ford, Ford Madox 6 Four Winds 40 fragmente 40 Fulcrum 1, 34, 199, 235 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 182 gift 44–5, 67, 70, 82, 92, 94–5, 106, 137, 173, 192 Ginsberg, Allen 29, 104, 123, 128 glottochronology 68 Goliard 1, 15, 28–30, 45, 199 see also Cape Goliard Grosseteste Press 1, 94, 132, 145, 175 Grosseteste Review 125, 139, 199 Gysin, Brion 154 Hall, John 7, 13–14, 38, 81–3, 160, 175, 178, 198 Harwood, Lee 38, 126, 160 Heaney, Seamus 2 Herbert, W. N. 180–2 Hill, Geoffrey 2 Hopwood, Jim 25 Horizon 49 Hughes, Ted 2 Huk, Romana 143–8 Hutchinson New Authors 30–5, 44, 181–2 irrational cuts 150 James, John 7, 9, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 26, 38, 44, 87, 105, 110, 121, 123–57, 160, 162, 168, 172–3, 198 ‘Bristol Time Encore’ 153 Cloud Breaking Sun 13, 153 ‘The Dragon House’ 131, 144–7 ‘Good Old Harry’ 162

In One Side & Out the Other, with Andrew Crozier and Tom Phillips 16, 123, 131, 148–52, 168 mmm…ah yes 44, 132, 236 ‘On Leaving the Footpath’ 135–40, 144–5 ‘Postcard Sonata, The’ 131, 138–48, 168, 173 Small Henderson Room, The 132 Striking the Pavilion of Zero 132, 172 Trägheit 131–2, 139, 148 ‘Written on Beginning Büchner’s Lenz & While Waiting a Return’ 151 Jarvis, Simon 70–1, 75–6, 166 Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka) 13, 40–3, 128 Joyce, James 6, 155 Larkin, Philip 2, 20 Lewis, Wyndham 5, 48–50 logopeia 37, 134–5, 144, 183 London Mercury, The 48 Longville, Tim 7, 38, 80, 125, 127, 132, 139, 175 McGann, Jerome 47, 232 MacSweeney, Barry 7, 13, 15, 17, 30–5, 87, 129, 132, 147, 160, 168, 180–95 Black Torch 17, 160, 181, 183–9 ‘Black Torch Sunrise’ 184–8, 193 Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, The 15, 30–5 ‘Colonel B.’ 17, 160, 168, 180, 188–93 ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ 188 ‘Last Bud, The’ 182, 187 Odes 182–4, 188–92 Our Mutual Scarlet Boulevard 34, 235 ‘Plea Poem’ 87 Manilius 67, 69–70, 143, 152 Maud, Ralph 103 Mauss, Marcel 44–5, 69 Mellors, Anthony 3, 51, 54, 59, 73–5, 89, 98, 107, 109, 116–17 Mengham, Rod 3–4 Michael Horowitz 15, 32, 36–7 Children of Albion, ed. 5, 32, 36 Middleton, Peter 48–9, 174, 178 Migrant 1, 47, 81, 199 Miller, J. A. 65–6 Miller, Tyrus 2

Index Milne, Drew 4, 161–2 Morrison, Blake 193, 199 Motion, Andrew 2, 20, 193, 199 Mottram, Eric 12, 181–4, 192 Move 199 Mulford, Wendy 87, 115, 125, 138 New American Poetry, The 1, 4, 15, 19–20, 85, 123 Norman Hackforth, The 16, 115, 120, 124–5, 131–2, 138–9 Odyssey, The 101, 152 Olson, Charles 1, 3–4, 8–10, 14–17, 20–1, 28–9, 37–47, 51–70, 72, 74, 78–83, 86, 89, 91–3, 95, 98, 101, 103–5, 107, 109–11, 113, 116, 120, 123, 128–31, 133, 142, 144, 149, 156, 159–63, 166, 184, 189, 193–4, 198, 200 ‘Human Universe, The’ 38, 93 Maximus Poems, The 3, 17, 39, 42, 59–60, 62, 67–8, 73, 159–60, 163 ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]’ 42, 159 Mayan Letters, The 38, 59, 61, 93, 128, 132 ‘Projective Verse’ 38–9, 53, 56, 72, 92–3, 120, 156, 162, 166 ‘The Vinland Map Review’ 46, 63–5 Once 199 open field poetics 8, 10, 14, 39, 61, 70, 80, 101, 107, 123, 125, 129, 133, 135, 137–8, 144, 160–1, 168, 174–5, 177, 184, 186 Origin 38–40, 46, 93 Osborne, John 2 Outburst 1, 21, 24, 42, 45–7, 199 Patten, Brian 31–2 Pattison, Neil 9–10, 12, 50, 86, 163, 177, 181, 230 Penguin Modern Poets 30–1, 33, 36 Phillips, Tom 16, 123, 129, 148–57 A Humument 148, 152, 154 In One Side & Out the Other, with Andrew Crozier and John James 16, 123, 131, 148–52, 168 Poetry Review 181 Pokorny, Julius 57, 193

275

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. 199 Potts, Robert 12 Pound, Ezra 3–6, 9–10, 15, 17, 20, 37, 40, 45, 50, 51–3, 55, 59, 61, 73, 78, 80, 83, 86–7, 89–91, 98, 101–2, 107, 116, 118, 131, 133–4, 141–2, 144, 152–7, 159–65, 167, 170, 182–3, 186, 198 ‘Canto LXXXI’ 4 ‘Canto LXXIV’ 6, 159 Cantos, The 3, 6, 17, 59–60, 83, 159, 163 Cathay 164–5 Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, The 15, 51–61, 162 ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ 131, 155 Prospect 42 Prynne, J. H. 2–3, 5, 7–14, 16, 21–3, 25–8, 30–1, 36–8, 42–3, 45–6, 49–50, 51–63, 66–76, 82, 84, 85–121, 124, 126–7, 129–32, 135–40, 143–6, 149, 159–60, 164–6, 171–2, 175, 178–81, 186, 189–90, 193, 198, 200 ‘Against Hurt’ 108 ‘Air Gap Song’ 115, 117, 120 ‘Airport Poem: Ethics of Survival’ 90–1, 96, 150 ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ 16, 70–1, 74–6, 103, 105–6, 115–16, 160, 186 ‘As It Were an Attendant’ 87, 110, 112–14 ‘Bee Target on his Shoulder, The’ 115–19 Brass 47, 86, 93, 108, 110, 113–15, 138 ‘Break It’ 97 ‘Chemins de Fer’ 112 ‘Crown’ 107, 109 ‘Die a Millionaire (pronounced “diamonds in the air”)’ 63, 89, 109 ‘Dream of Retained Colour, A’ 107 ‘First Notes on Daylight’ 72–3, 103, 105 ‘For This, For This’ 98 ‘Friday Ballad, The’ 115–18 ‘From End to End’ 97–8, 112, 140–1 ‘Frost and Snow, Falling’ 98, 117 ‘Gold Ring Called Reluctance, A’ 139–40 ‘In Cimmerian Darkness’ 99–107, 111, 136–7, 141, 143, 151 ‘John in the Blooded Phoenix’ 109 ‘Just So’ 98, 119 ‘The Kirghiz Disasters’ 115, 118–19 ‘Lashed to the Mast’ 92, 95, 99

276

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letter to Andrew Crozier 27 December 1966 8, 10, 42, 95, 102, 105, 127 ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ 114–19 ‘Love in the Air’ 96–7, 139, 143 ‘New Tax on the Counter-Earth, A’ 115–20 ‘Numbers, The’ 106–7, 120 ‘Numbers in Time of Trouble’ 63 ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’ 46, 106 ‘Pedantic Note in Two Parts, A’ 61–2, 193 ‘Questions for the Time Being’ 103, 107, 109, 114, 118, 130 ‘Resistance and Difficulty’ 54, 57 ‘Smaller than the Radius of a Planet’ 107, 109 ‘Star Damage at Home’ 107–9 ‘Starvation/Dream’ 111–12, 120 ‘Stone Called Nothing, A’ 106, 109, 117 ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform’ 106, 113, 145 ‘Viva Ken’ 114–17 White Stones, The 3, 70, 86, 93–4, 105, 107, 113–14, 131, 145–7 ‘Wound, Day and Night, The’ 16, 67–70, 77, 149, 177 Raine, Kathleen 34, 236 Raworth, Tom 5, 14, 21–2, 24, 28–30, 36, 38, 45–7, 64, 103, 110, 143, 160, 163 R Books 132 Regan, Stephen 2 Resuscitator/R2, The 1, 21, 47, 125, 131–2, 153, 155, 199 Rifkin, Libbie 39, 92 Riley, John 7, 14, 38, 125, 132, 139, 160, 175, 198 Riley, Peter 5, 7, 9, 12–14, 17, 23, 25, 36, 38, 43–5, 61, 71–2, 76, 85, 91, 104–5, 110, 115, 123–31, 132, 135, 139, 145, 160, 168, 174–80, 182, 184, 194, 197–8

‘The Antiquary’ 160 ‘For the Demise of English Intelligence’ 127–9 Tracks and Mineshafts 13, 17, 160, 168, 174–80, 184, 191, 194 ‘Working Note on British Prehistory’ 43, 71–2, 135, 175–9 Royal Society’s Symposium on Continental Drift, The 16, 60, 65–8, 83, 104, 149 Scrutiny 27 Shayer, Michael 81 Silâns 153, 155–6 Sinclair, Iain 103–4, 160 Sutherland, Keston 3, 93, 111 Swadesh, Maurice 68 Tanselle, G. Thomas 48–9 Tempers of Hazard, The 34 Temple, John 7, 13–14, 21, 38, 60, 79–82, 111, 198 ‘Thots. from yr Postcard’ 79–82 Tencer, Michael 246 Terada, Rei 130, 150 Thatcher, Margaret 191–3 Torrance, Chris 34, 125, 160 transition 49 Trigram 1, 199 Trotter, David 83–4, 88 Turnbull, Gael 80–2 Tynianov, Yuri 166 Tzarad 1, 126, 199 Vine, Ian 81–2, 178 Wilkinson, John 7, 12 Williams, William Carlos 3, 5–6, 83 Wilson, Tuzo 62 Wivenhoe Park Review/The Park, The 1, 21, 46–7, 63, 90, 94, 194, 199 Yeats, W. B. 6, 73