Harry Gilonis (photo by Tom Raworth)

Harry Gilonis saw my link last Friday to Alan Brownjohn’s comment re the UK poetry wars & recalled that “Poetry Review both published his partisan account as if it were neutral, and in addition published no ripostes.” Here is the one Gilonis sent at the time.

 

Poetry Review
22 Betterton Street
London WC2H 9BX

29 July 2007

Dear Sirs,

I’ve recently read Alan Brownjohn’s piece on the ‘poetry wars’ in Poetry Review Vol. 97 no. 2, and it Will Not Do. We are presented, with an air of high magnanimity, with a regrettable contretemps between “the broad mainstream of modern verse” and Bob Cobbing’s chums with flowers in their hair and beer down their vests. It really wasn’t like that!
 
The Poetry Society was a membership organisation, mostly made up of amateur readers and writers, mostly non-metropolitan. The Poetry Review reflected their slightly timid tastes, and the Poetry Society was run by a Council mostly made up of minor poets with insufficient public success to keep them busier elsewhere. This was not a mainstream but a side-channel; admittedly not a backwater, but calm and safe; a Norfolk Broad, perhaps.
 
Contrariwise, the radical efflux turns out to be a bigger body of water than the self-proclaimed mainstream: the magazine Second Aeon reported in one issue at the time the publication of 400 new poetry books from avant-gardists. When Eric Mottram called this a Poetry Revival it was a statement of fact; that the Revival was too large and too variegated to be satisfactorily summed-up doesn’t alter that. Nor was all of its activity outrageously wild, of its moment, doomed to subsequent obscurity. Doubtless Bob Cobbing in full spate might frighten the unfamiliar (he did me!); but that was a small part of what Barry’s ‘radicals’ were propounding, what the Revival offered, what the Review published under Mottram.
 
This last is probably as good a test-case as one could want, given that the Review’s reach was far wider than 21 Earls Court Square, and copies are still – for the assiduous - findable. Alan Brownjohn’s suggestion that that “average readers of poetry would recognise few of the names” insults the average reader, but might be accurate about the particular provinciality of the Poetry Society pre-Revival; and again post- , as it returned to its slumbers.
 
I would hope that even if Alan Brownjohn did not then recognise most of the names below, all published by Mottram in the Review, he would now be embarrassed not to do so: John Ashbery, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Roy Fisher, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Barbara Guest, Lee Harwood, Denise Levertov, Hugh MacDiarmid, Barry MacSweeney, Christopher Middleton, Edwin Morgan, George Oppen, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, Garry Snyder… Many are obviously international figures, ornamenting the lists of major publishing-houses.
 
Nor is it the case that Mottram was as it were ‘prematurely tasteful’, running ahead of his readership; he published, throughout his editorship, conventionally mainstream poets his predecessors (and successors) at the Poetry Review would happily publish - James Berry, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Elaine Feinstein, Michael Hamburger, George MacBeth, F.T. Prince, Peter Redgrove, Penelope Shuttle, Ken Smith, D.M. Thomas. Mottram’s publishing programme does not smack of exclusivist avant-gardism, but of giving a map of what was happening.  Which was the job he was hired to do, surely; a job no editors since – save David Herd and Robert Potts, similarly side-lined – have even attempted.)
 
When Mottram’s editorship ended the Poetry Review became not merely - in my opinion - a lot duller but also, I’d say objectively, a lot less distinguished. As did the Poetry Society itself, after the Arts Council coup; Alan Brownjohn is disingenuous in saying that the Society never had its grant cut, as if that were the only way disapproval might make itself felt. As he must have known at the time, and Barry would have reminded him, the Arts Council’s chairman, Charles Osborne, was active in his opposition. Roy Fisher - as so often -- got it right: “if you take a poet / you’ll take another, and so on, / till finally you get a civilization: or just / the dirtiest brawl you ever saw.” Peter Barry’s book, which works at being scholarly when polemic would be entirely excusable, deals with the lamentable decision of the UK arts establishment to settle for brawling; and it is a considerable pity that it was handed over to Alan Brownjohn - a beneficiary of the brawl if not a brawler himself - for review. The book, and the era, deserve better.
 
Yours sincerely,

Harry Gilonis
London SW11 3NY

I would say that I’m in Dutch again for something I’ve written but, the way things have been going lately, I’d start getting all kinds of complaining email from readers in the Netherlands. The offending statement is the following, from my note on Gael Turnbull October 4^th:

There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the U.K. compared with the United States. The number of, to use Charles Bernstein’s apt phrase, island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four – Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher – whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level. But I do think it’s an enormous advantage in the pure accessibility of the work.

The offended this time are British poets. I’ve received angry emails as well as snide ones, and been treated to a general thrashing on the UK Poetics listserv. Yet as I thought, foolishly I suppose, I had made perfectly clear, this wasn’t a comment at all on the relative quality of the work of any of the poets named above, but rather on how dialect can aid or hinder reader reception elsewhere. Or perhaps, and I think this may well be part of the question, on the relationship of dialect to representation thereof upon the page. This is not an easy issue to discuss, simply because what is “transparently clear” to one reader may well be opaque, or at the least translucent, to another. I probably should have covered myself better by writing “this Yank auditory canal.” But I didn’t.

The best example I know of this issue is the writing of William Carlos Williams. Once, some 36 or so years ago, David Melnick & I were talking with Josephine Miles on the UC Berkeley campus, where she had been teaching for many decades, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department there in 1947. We were discussing Williams, who at that moment was the iconic figure of plain speech in verse form. Not only was Williams the key poet behind the Projectivist or Black Mountain writers of the New American poetries of the 1950s, he served a very similar role for the Objectivists, who at that moment where just then coming back into print & prominence after a hiatus of nearly 30 years. The New York School plainly loved the late doctor, especially Frank O’Hara, & as for the Beats, Allen Ginsberg had virtually been his neighbor as a kid in New Jersey. He’d gotten Williams to endorse Howl really before any other established literary figure had, and Ginsberg himself had appeared as a character in Williams’ opus, Paterson. Further, with the then-current release of the Frontier Press edition of Spring & All, Williams seemed to be the most avant-garde thinker then going in the area of poetry. And, over on the School of Quietude side of the playground, one whole new tendency, just then coming to the fore, of poets who rejected the formally closed Anglophilia of the Boston Brahmin poets, likewise took Williams as an avatar for what they were then calling “open,” “naked,” or (my favorite) “leaping” poetry. In short, just seven years after his death, there was nobody in American poetry (save perhaps them Brahmins) who didn’t profess love for the doctor from Rutherford, NJ.

Thus, to pick from The Wedge, the 1944 book of Williams that most directly influenced the young New American poets who were just then coming of age as readers, something like “The Yellow Chimney” was the utter apotheosis of speech itself deployed in verse:

There is a plume
of fleshpale
smoke upon the blue

sky. The silver
rings that
strap the yellow

brick stack at
wide intervals shine
in this amber

light – not
of the sun not of
the pale sun but

his born brother
the
declining season

And a poem such as “The Poem,” also from The Wedge, suggested that Williams himself knew this:

It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song – made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian – something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady’s
eyes – waking
centrifugal, centripetal

So it surprised me at least – I can’t speak for Melnick here – to hear Josephine Miles, age-wise closer to the Objectivists than to the New Americans & active in the world of poetry since the early 1930s, tell us that “we couldn’t hear him. When we started to read Williams, not just me but everybody back then, we didn’t know how to read those poems. They appeared shapeless and alien.” But to someone 15 years younger than Miles, Robert Creeley, it seemed immediately & instinctively obvious how these poems should be read, how they should be sounded aloud. And, indeed, Creeley’s own early style extends almost directly from the poems of The Wedge. Even now, I myself tend to follow Creeley’s own model for reading aloud when looking at these poems of Williams, pausing audibly at the end of each line.

Now this was at a moment relatively late in the consolidation of the New American poetry (Olson had just died, Spicer & O’Hara had been dead five and four years respectively, Blackburn & Lew Welch were soon to follow, Grenier would write “I HATE SPEECH” in the first issue of This this same year). Among other things, among the Projectivists there were disagreements as to the settled nature of the role of the linebreak as an indication of a pause, giving each poem its distinct syncopation. That same season, Denise Levertov had invited David Bromige & I to come into one of her creative writing classes at Berkeley to show the students there what “young poets” were up to, only to get into a huge argument with her when she insisted that a comma was “worth two linebreaks” when it came to a pause, whereas David & I both felt that the visual drama of line’s end & the turn back to the left margin dictated exactly the opposite conclusion – a comma inferred a small pause, a linebreak something bigger. This same year also Robert Duncan gave a reading in Berkeley over two nights of all of the sections of Passages then written, audibly counting to three at the end of each line in a whisper before reading the next.

Yet later I would hear, on more than one occasion, Creeley himself say that he was “stunned” to discover that Williams read his own poems with no particular audible annotation of linebreaks. Tape recordings of Louis Zukofsky, just seven years older than Miles, reveal him pausing at the end of every second line, treating one linebreak as a kind of a silent caesura, the next as a more audible stop.

So while we youngsters were then rebelling against some fixed & prescriptive conception of the relationship between writing & speech, our elders were sending us some very mixed messages as to what that prescription was supposed to be. No wonder Grenier concluded that the key to moving forward lay in overturning the prior paradigm.

I note that of the four U.K. poets whom I listed, three are from the north, with only Raworth having been raised in London, although what that means exactly I couldn’t tell you. Scottish English in particular fed into America’s Southern dialect, which then spread further after the Civil War wrecked the southern economy. But when I gauge my own version of American dialect, one dominant mode is “General American English” (35 percent of my responses), especially when accompanied by its closest cousin, “Upper Midwestern” (another 10 percent). Only 15 percent of my answers correspond to “Dixie,” less than half of the percentage (again 35) recognizable as “New England.” While none of my ancestors ever lived in New England, both of my maternal grandparents, who for the most part raised me, were first generation Americans, their immigrant parents having come to the North Oakland/Berkeley border more or less directly from London. Although neither showed a trace of accent that I ever detected growing up – does any parent? – they salted my vocabulary with enough of the London lexicon with which they had grown up, which is to say that I get that aspect of my language from the same city from which New England also drew many of its regional terms.

This leads me to think that it’s not so much the dialects of Bunting, Raworth, Clark or Turnbull that generate this response from me as it is the ways in which they tend to represent their language on the page. Specifically, the impulse of each is toward a shorter line. It may be as simple as that – when I look at something like Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems, I note that there some poems of his I hear much better than I do others. Almost without exception, the ones that make the most sense to my ear are those with shorter lines. But when he calls something with a longer line – maybe ten words per line – like “The Journey,” a prose poem, it makes a peculiar sense because I can’t hear it any other way. Similarly, it’s the short lines, especially in American Scenes, I can hear in Charles Tomlinson’s poetry, but when he shifts into a longer line it feels suddenly slack & unfocused. There are instances in his Selected Poems on which the two modes appear literally on facing pages (cf. “The Moment” beginning on page 144, versus “Writing on Sand,” starting on the next page). My immediate reaction is almost disbelief – how can someone who can attain the crystalline measure of

hints there
of a refusal
to bare oneself
to the elemental,
a pacing parallel
to the incoming onrush, a
careful circuiting
of the rock pools:
the desire to stay
dry to be read
in the wet dust

write on the facing page (and seemingly of the same experience) something as flaccid as

Watching two surfers walk toward the tide,
Floating their boards beside them as the shore
Drops slowly off, and first the knee, then waist
Goes down into the elemental grasp,
I look to them to choose it, as the one
Wave gathers itself from thousands and comes on:
And they are ready for it facing round
Like birds that turn to levitate in the wind.

It’s not that Tomlinson has changed his perspective – the same overblown claim of “the elemental” turns up in both poems – but when he needs to insert the pointless And at the start of the next-to-last line of the bottom passage, that poem’s puffiness passes beyond the point of no return. It’s not just that I could read “Writing on Sand” aloud & derive considerable pleasure from the experience & that I couldn’t read “The Moment” aloud at all (I’d dissolve into giggles), but rather I can’t hear its measure. It feels like so many pots & pans banging about in the kitchen.

Now I can make one of two assumptions from this experience. One would be that Tomlinson is an uneven poet, wildly so. But the other is that there are elements of language that cause him (and by inference whatever the ideal audience for that poem might be) to experience “The Moment” quite differently than I do. My guess is that at least half of the answer to this problem lies in that second assumption. And that in turn means – or at least I think it means – not that British poets who use shorter lines “are better,” but rather that there is some aural element to the language there, with all its many dialects, that I can’t get unless it’s delivered to me in relatively short lines.

If this is true for poets for whom the model of literary discourse is the spoken, it certainly should be true also for authors who are willing, a la Allen Fisher & J.H. Prynne, to expand their sampling of vocabularies & to go beyond speech itself as a template for language in their work. And that is the point I was trying to make when I got myself in trouble.

There are Words, the collected poems of Gael Turnbull, is an indispensable volume. At nearly 500 pages, it contains virtually all of Turnbull’s poetry that he wanted saved – perhaps the greatest omission are some site-specific “kinetic” poems that hint at Turnbull’s relation to one of Scotland’s other great poets, Ian Hamilton Finlay.

From the perspective of these shores, keeping in mind that Scotland itself has a population no greater than the state of Minnesota & that, in any event, Turnbull, tho he was born & raised in Edinburgh & returned there to live again upon his retirement from medicine in the early 1990s, spent most of his adult life in Canada, the U.S. & England, was unparalleled in his role as a connector of all these different literary worlds. Perhaps it was because, in the U.S. to study medicine, Turnbull came under the spell of another doctor-poet, William Carlos Williams. Or because The Migrant Press, which he founded upon his return to the isles in 1957, was one of the first there to focus precisely on contemporary poetry. But from the New American Poetry in the 1950s – you can find photos of young Turnbull in the Olson archives in Connecticut from that period – right up to his death at the age of 76 in 2004, Turnbull was a vital part of the whole post-avant scene. And he appears to have been a primary ambassador between the new modes of poetry then emerging in the U.K. & the New Americans stateside.

But most importantly, Gael Turnbull was a fine, sometimes great poet, right from the beginning, as with this poem, from the 1954 volume Trio:

Try Again

”Poetry New York” it said
On the mail box and ahead
Up three half-lit flights I groped
To the farthest door and hoped
That in New York at last I’d found
Poetry; but at the sound
Of each knock I gave, there came
Echoes only back, the same
Appropriately hollow rhyme
Answering me every time.

This delicious little piece operates on a number of different levels, particularly if you know Poetry New York – famous today mostly for having printed Charles Olson’s breakthrough manifesto, “Projective Verse,” but primarily a modest School of Quietude mainstay of the period. I can’t quite imagine – tho I could be wrong in this – that Turnbull already knew Creeley’s own work this early on, which also uses rhyme to undercut – Turnbull’s adjective hollow is marvelously apt – traditional verse conventions. But whether he did or not, Turnbull’s own attitude is no less sharp & his own wit no less cutting.

Everywhere you turn in this volume, there are these marvelous, exceptionally crafted, always clever, tightly contained poems. Such as “Spiritual Researches” from the 1961 volume, With Hey, Ho…

Let us titrate
the soul of a potato –

O taxable courage!
O bonded verity! –

the assessment of proof
by inspiration.

One could teach an entire class on the uses of sound in the poem from that, with its fabulous contrast of vowels with the hard consonants p and especially t in the first couplet to the use of those consonants again in the last couplet, this time muted (the governing consonant of this couplet are the two pair of double s sounds).

Or this, from the very end of that same decade, a section of “Walls” dedicated to Robert Duncan:

Made up (contrived,
as if a poem,
of words) to whom
often I turn
and may return and be
always at home –

wrapped in by walls
where the echoes speak,
are clear (resounding,
many men, as tides
caught in the ear,
as if a shell
held near) and dear
with remembered names
that chime
of rhyme and Rime;
and of that rime
(condensed by chill
from the void, a precipitate)
where Ymir woke,
hoar and gigantic once ( a tale
told and retold)
the source
of all that’s shaped.

Or this, from the same sequence, dedicated “For Basil Bunting”:

not words
but a man

no wall

and a voice
to shape

delight

Or this piece, from the early 1980s, entitled “The Ruin”:

Two lovers
driven by a summer storm
take refuge in the ruin of a tower
and with a kiss
would soon forget
those other lives undone
to shape their happiness.
Unseen above
in the fragment of an arch
a wild flower blooms
as it erodes the stone
to which it clings for root.

Or this set piece from the mid-1990s, entitled “The Poetry Reading Poem”:

The next poem is called.
Was written at.
Is dedicated to.
Was published in.
Is concerned with.
Was inspired by.

This poem contains.
Describes. Expresses.
Means.

This poem is.
This poem was.

This poem might.

Or this untitled prose “transmutation” from Might a Shape of Words, published in the year 2000:

TAKEN SEVERLY ILL, he is conscious only at brief intervals, enough to know that the diagnosis is as uncertain as the outcome and well beyond any treatment

until, one afternoon, he recovers enough to know that he is recovering, would live and not die, which seems a matter of great indifference except for the novelty. He finds himself weeping, in amazement at the gift of it, as if no more related to him than the pattern of clouds he can glimpse through a corner of the window.

There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the U.K. compared with the United States. The number of, to use Charles Bernstein’s apt phrase, island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four – Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher – whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level. But I do think it’s an enormous advantage in the pure accessibility of the work.

In many respects, it makes perfect sense to think of Gael Turnbull as a Scots adjunct to the Black Mountain school – if there is a single unifying influence behind all of these varied impulses, it is not so much Williams as it is Zukofsky. Many of these poems would fit comfortably into Zukofsky’s collected shorter pieces:

There is no Why

turn, the thought may
burn, the mind’s con-
cern, it will not
learn
      (it will not learn

know, that love may
go, the heart is
slow, but it is
so
      (for it so

sing, what thought may
bring, the mind may
cling, past every-
thing
      (past everything

cry, that love may
die, the heart may
lie, there is no
why
      (there is no why

it will not learn
but drift and turn
for it is so
as time must show
past everything
that time may bring
or song may try
there is no why

You could put this work alongside that of Creeley & Blackburn, Duncan & Dorn and it stands up very well.

Which is to say that it is amazing, in 2006, that Gael Turnbull is not a household name, at least in many households where such as Dorn & Snyder are common currency. I don’t know whether or not one could call him a neglectorino in his own land – my sense is not, but that may be wishful thinking on my part, given just how more ill-divided institutional resources are over there & what percent of it is in the hands of the pre- (and anti-)moderns.

Whatever, the poetry of Gael Turnbull is a revelation, beginning to end. And There are Words captures this wonderfully. The book can purchased directly from the publisher or from SPD in Berkeley. But please note that SPD is down to its last ten copies.

Gael Turnbull, site specific work
Kibble Palace, Botanic Gardens
Glasgow Scotland

It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press. Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work. At his best, Phillips is absolutely dazzling:

Seeing how
each thing

singly is –

that tree
a tree

its leaves,
leafs

Or, also untitled:

What we read
we write
ourselves
into
the text of.

Yet this work comes to us now not only decades removed from the age of Objectivism or Projectivism’s first decade, but some 40 years after the heyday of Ted Enslin & or James L. Weil as well. Indeed, in the late ‘60s & early ‘70s, there were dozens of younger poets similarly focused in their concerns. Those who went on to have significant careers – David Bromige would be an example – saw these same concerns evolve. Still, every decade sees a new group of young poets emerge insisting on this same level of precision.

My own sense is that I inherently trust this impulse, especially when I see it coming forth slightly askew, as if to suggest that the poet has a somewhat different angle on the whole thing. Graham Foust & Joseph Massey would be good recent examples of such slanting. They may well be of the tradition, but they extend it into places where it has not previously gone.

The arts in general, and poetry in particular, are quite unlike most modes of commerce in that the new doesn’t necessarily push out the old so much as it nudges it aside just slightly so as to make room for more. It’s not like, say, the PC sending typewriter companies like Smith-Corona to the corporate graveyard. In poetry, new forms mean more forms. The three major innovations of the 19^th century, for example, free verse, the prose poem and dramatic monologue, continue forward to this day. Yet so does the sonnet. And, according to Google, there are just under 18 million websites that mention haiku.

Invariably a point comes when the evolution of these forms slows and people become more interested in reduplication of the form than in pushing it further. That’s the story with haiku & a good part of the story with dramatic monolog (which hasn’t had a major push forward since Olson’s Maximus Poems, unless you consider David Antin’s talk pieces an instance of the same form) and the sonnet as well. That is a moment that will occur with every literary device over time, the real question being when & how & whether the device in question will later be able to be resuscitated, as the sestina was by the New York School.

My question, reading John Phillips, is where precisely he fits in the history of that subsector of free verse that passes through Zukofsky & Creeley & Corman et al. As well crafted, and as much fun, as these poems are – which is a lot, on both counts – it’s not clear to me that Phillips sees himself pushing the form forward. If that is not what Phillips is trying to accomplish, then his book represents a different moment from any found in the work, say, not only of Graham Foust & Joseph Massey, but Gustaf Sobin & Devin Johnston & Michael Heller & so many of the other poets who have taken this approach in years gone by.