Nate Dorward rises to Charles Tomlinson’s defense.

 

 

Ron – while I wouldn't exactly go out on a limb re: Tomlinson – not an author I greatly admire – I should point out that it's a bit odd to see him cast as a failed opportunity to reach out to the 1960s Cambridge school & Raworth &c. Because in many ways the "Cambridge school" was at once sponsored by & a critical response to the work of Tomlinson's close friend & peer Donald Davie in particular (many of the key figures were his students), & Tomlinson himself has a detectable imprint on the Cambridge writers too – John James for instance was a student of Tomlinson's, & they still correspond & exchange books. Andrew Crozier's critique of mainstream British poetry in "Thrills & frills" places Tomlinson in a key role.

 

I think you're also missing the point somewhat in speaking of him as a rather touristy anecdotalist. I'll toss in a paragraph Keith & I wrote on Tomlinson for a survey of British poetry 1945-70. [See below]  It's not much but at least gets at the core concerns of the verse with phenomenology – an ethics of seeing and being in the world. Not that I would especially disagree about the flaws of the verse: in particular, the fussy & clenched prosody & diction, which tend to make the poems feel like they're bolted to the page; & an irritating haughtiness of tone. For all its concern with dialectic, it's notably lacking in empathy. That said, there's some decent poems if one picks through patiently; probably as good a case as any is made for his work in Keith's selection in the OUP book, which isn't too bad, though it's too generous to Annunciations (3 selections). The basic problem is that, like so many authors, he ended up writing basically the same poem over & over again, never setting himself any real challenges beyond the very occasional influx of new subject matter (e.g. the turn to political poems in The Way of the World). I suppose this is what you're getting at via "anecdotal": the lack of serious interest in sequence-length writing, or in larger or more ambitious architectures, is notable, & ultimately is what makes me give up. – There's a smart & unsparing critique of one of Tomlinson's earlier poems, "On the Hall at Nether Stowey", in Peter Middleton's article in Gig 4/5 (the Peter Riley issue), by the way.

 

A pity that the planned public discussion with Tomlinson to be conducted by Bernstein & McCaffery (I think it was originally scheduled for the 2001 MLA) never took place – if I remember rightly, Tomlinson cancelled in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Might have been an interesting dialogue of the deaf, at least, but maybe more than that. One oddity of Tomlinson is that his earliest interests were apparently in surrealism but none of this has seen the light; with the exception of his visual work, which uses Max Ernst's decalcomania techniques.

 

all best – N

 

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From, Keith Tuma and Nate Dorward, "British Poetry 1945-1970," forthcoming in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus, Cambridge University Press:

 

..... One last example, Charles Tomlinson’s 1958 poem “The Atlantic”, whose opening sentence appears to run on directly from the title:

 

Launched into an opposing wind, hangs

 Grappled beneath the onrush,

And there, lifts, curling in spume,

 Unlocks, drops from that hold

Over and shoreward.

 

A debt to modernist styles is clear in such a passage: its forceful shifting of verbs to the start of lines is reminiscent of our example from Bunting’s The Spoils, while the device of the run-on title and the poem’s preoccupation with the shore as liminal site owe something to Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” and “A Grave”. Like many Tomlinson poems “The Atlantic” is at once an essay in the description of the natural world and a meditation on the phenomenology of perception: the syntax is rigorously mimetic in its attempt to suggest the movement of a wave toward the shore, but “a wave” is never actually named, as if to emphasize the mutable nature of both water and of the perceiving mind. There is common ground here with the Movement, however, in that such phenomenology is intended also to propose an ethics: like many a Movement poem, “The Atlantic” ends with an explicit summing-up: “That which we were, / Confronted by all that we are not, / Grasps in subservience its replenishment.”

 

[p.s.: note that interesting tense contradiction in the last lines of the poem ("were/are") – deliberate? If so, it's a lot craftier & more linguistically interesting than Tomlinson was to be later on: something he dropped from his repertoire.]