How I wrote some of my books
How I wrote some of my books
recalled 2021
I seem to have written some of this down before, but I can’t locate it. I have incorporated texts from the jackets of various books. This deals with my early books.
Early days
At my school, there was a remedial class in the 6th form for scientists, who were perceived as being weak in use of English. I was in it because I was a linguist. The teacher was Neil Curry, a poet, and he taught us poetry. He used MacBeth's poetry 1900 to 1965 (? title). This was a breakthrough for me. We did ‘The Waste Land’, and I especially liked that. So this was from September 1972 on, going on until maybe April 1973, when classes stop to allow for A-level revision. Neil was an inspiring teacher and he actually understood modern poetry. So at some point early in 1973 I decided that writing poetry was for me. I wanted to write like Eliot or David Jones, which is the last thing that a 17 year old is going to bring off! So I was looking for a way of writing my own poetry. This actually started at some point in 1977. In 1977... I still knew nothing. The key decisions got taken on a basis of ignorance.
I should add that the school had a series of poetry readings, which I was attending from maybe 1972 on. This worked really well for me, less because the poets were good than because I was treated like an adult by both the poets and the masters involved in the events, somehow poetry meant a complete relaxation of rules and I felt completely different inside the invisible frame of that situation. I remember George MacBeth, Adrian Henri, Jon Silkin. Henri’s poetry certainly wasn't very good, but he had bonhomie, he was willing to talk to us. It’s hard to document that vibe around poetry, but it’s certainly important and people certainly do comply, they start acting much more reasonably and less rigidly inside that frame than outside. Why do they behave unpleasantly in other contexts? Hard to answer, but I can tell you that this feeling of harmony and sensitivity to other people's wishes is part of what keeps poetry going.
So I had a clear idea of what it meant to be a poet, people travelling the country giving readings, audiences being polite. It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have the popular touch and wasn't going to get gigs at schools! I was happy to think that I was much more intelligent than Adrian Henri, and was going to write poems much more intelligent than his, but I didn't make the connection that he was published in Penguin precisely because his poems were shallow and self-satisfied.
Threads of Iron. After three years of punk I wanted something softer and more expansive. This wasn’t exactly an original idea. “The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour.”, I wrote. 1978, move to London and suffer from homesickness. From 1978 to 1987 I was working at the New Southgate works of Standard Telephone and Cable. [...] it came out in two parts (Cut Memories and False Commands in 1991 and Switching and Main Exchange in 2001) after a brief delay. I wrote “attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one.”
I was not in a good mood for some time after leaving university with very poor exam results. Actually, I was in a confused state of mind even before that. There was a gap, one of several I suppose. The key was to my recollection the summer holiday in 1980… so there was a gap roughly June 1978 to August 1980? something like that. I was in Venice and reading ‘The Hermaphrodite Album’ was a stimulus. I found a 9 to 5 job very hard to get used to. Being a writer in the evenings while bashing away at STC during the day didn’t seem like a strong plan… even less strong if I couldn't write anyway. So I was in dire need of some poems. I then wrote ‘Threads’ incredibly quickly… it came to an end in January 1981, to my recollection I couldn't think about anything else. The idea of quantity came over me, which is never a good thing. I was shocked by an emotional collapse in the January, which as I recall came to a head when I was stuck on a bus which was firmly not moving while I was already late for work and not happy about being late for work again. There was a binding concept for the book, of describing me. Not all the poems are autobiographical, some were there to describe my sensibility, things I was interested in as opposed to events in my life. The poems have a coherence at that level, a self portrait with props, personalised objects. It didn’t strike other people that the book was a single thing as opposed to a binding of 80 unrelated poems. I think the mass at early 1981 was 6000 lines… far too much. It would have been organic to rewrite it in preparation for publication, but because I was depressed this couldn't happen.
Around this time I had a long-term plan. This arose from waves of anxiety – that central process for late adolescence, or whatever you call that phase. The anxiety summoned up positive plans as a counter-measure. So I had a theory about what had happened in the past 30 years and what was going to happen and how poetry should be written. And of how my career should look. It would have seemed very immature and feeble not to have a view of things. To some extent, you can't write a single poem without making decisions about some more basic questions of style and address. Unfortunately I can’t remember what this plan was. It got replaced in detail by actual poems, which absorbed all my energy and which effaced all memory of the planning stage. I made my decisions… inevitably I didn’t have the knowledge base appropriate for doing this. I didn’t mysteriously start 1980 knowing what had happened in poetry between 1950 and 1979… just the reverse, really.
There is a moment around that Prynne letter. I sent JH the whole sheaf of Threads, rather badly typed as I recall. Word processors made a huge difference to amateurs putting books out on the waters. He felt concerned about me, more than anything else, concern that someone who would expose their feelings in this elaborate way was vulnerable in a grand way and was subject to grand humiliation and trauma. There was a welfare issue. So he sent copies of the TS to Barnett and Crozier, as the active publishers on the small press scene, or rather the corner of it that he was involved with. To accompany it, he sent this letter, formally addressed to me, which is the one that was published in Grosseteste Review a few years later. Neither of them was inclined to publish Threads! Not even in a pamphlet excerpt, or whatever. But some of the poems did fetch up in Grosseteste Review, so there was a concrete benefit. Prynne was arguably better at picking up the weaknesses in Threads than its strengths… the weaknesses were obvious because I was only 23 and 24 when I wrote it. In fact, young poems appeal to young people, and that is where we get with Threads. The fact that it was buried in the literary twilight doesn’t mean that it was intellectually grave, or innovative, or animated by a Thesis. No, it is all about feelings. Twenty years of delay in getting the text into print did not make the poems more complex. It didn’t take 20 years to write.
In 1986, Iain Sinclair was working at Paladin developing a series of modern poets. I was one of the people he approached. This wasn't going to happen, because all the other people had had careers and were picked up in the form of retrospectives. An unpublished book wasn’t going to support such a high-profile publication. So it got turned down and I didn’t emerge even in a volume of three poets. I found the process unnerving. Anyway, I had to retype everything and as an aspect of that I also recomposed the book. So the surviving version of Threads is the 1986 revision. It is about 4000 lines long, so I just chucked out a large number of poems (and simplified the rest). One poem (“Black pane and décor”) comes from an even later date. Indecision.
A correction. I pulled out a folder of notebooks from the time and found one relating to the Threads rewrite and it says ‘1987’. So that was the right date. There was a time sequence, Sinclair wrote to me, I rewrote Threads, then later it was John Muckle and John set up the ‘new british poetry’ anthology and that involved two poems of mine. My first appearance in a book. I remember spending a long time doing the rewrite, but in reality it was probably only a few weeks. Iain had seen the Prynne letter but not Threads as a whole. As mentioned, I cut it by 2000 lines. In the original writing, I had dredged up everything I had. It was irrational to write 200 pages of poetry but I couldn't stop. In a strange way writing that intensely was good, even if the product was repetitive and badly organised, and it was good to face such a long and personal text and analyse it critically. Being published by Paladin at that time was a really big deal. I had the equivalent of stage fright, I didn’t think the deal was going to go through, and I was rewriting under pressure, looking at a huge breakthrough and losing confidence in my own poetry, every line seemed flawed and I had to fix every one. This was the hardest thing I ever did. But that is how you get good; it was an intense learning experience, and I learnt a lot about how poems are put together and how they work. This put me ahead of other people. Naturally you don't want to learn by having bad experiences, but that is what happened. This is why I became a better writer and was able to write difficult projects like “Alien skies” and “Surveillance”. So after several months, I think, Iain wrote back and said that he couldn’t get Paladin to take it on. I wasn’t going to argue the toss. Strangely, the experience of rewriting under such pressure, and of finding solutions for the most part, was very beneficial, and it wasn't a bad time overall.
I have to point out (a) it wasn't true that I was making progress in the business, it was more plausible that I would be just outside the lit area for forty years, for ever (b) I wasn't doing readings or having contact with readers, that is a good way to develop, just listening to yourself, but in fact it was just me and my notebooks.
The Prynne letter relates to the 1981 version, so it doesn't match up with the eventually released text and of course I had Prynne’s strictures in mind when producing the revised versions in 1987. No point arguing with Barnett and Crozier, at this distance; they weren’t even wrong.
While pawing through old correspondence, I found a letter from James Lasdun dated November 1981, a response to reading “Threads of Iron”. He didn’t like it at all, but he did give some attention to it. He was a publisher’s editor at the time and used to seeing typescripts which weren't going to get published. I didn’t get any specific ideas from this exchange, but I did get the realisation ”99% of this stuff isn’t getting through”. This strongly influenced what I did for the rest of the Eighties, and for example the second edition of ‘Threads’, the one that actually got published. At roughly this time, James was also involved with Jeremy Reed, essentially giving him advice on how to get a book out with a mainstream publisher. This wasn’t external, managerial pressure, more telling Reed how to achieve something which he profoundly wanted to achieve. James (and Robin Robertson) did publish one of my poems in their magazine ‘Straight Lines’. It was almost disturbing to think that what I did could be acceptable in a mainstream context. I was so naive at that time… for example, I wanted a whole personality to get across and that is why I wrote a large number of poems for ‘Threads’, to give a verbal frame with depth. Realising that the outlet might only exhibit one poem, that you had to get everything into that single poem, was a shock but also a line on how to improve technically. After this letter, I was busy writing ‘Skeleton’, which is is obviously mainly non-autobiographical (so no problems with context) and disconnected, each poem being a separate thing.
I had just forgotten about this letter. I have to observe that the “underground” was doing nothing for me at the time – it really wasn't like “the mainstream rejects you and the Underground is a welcoming home”. James really disliked Redgrove and Hughes– a shock for me because I regarded them as the top of the profession and was hoping to get more like them as I got better at writing. But this is where you learn – when people fundamentally disagree with you and articulate it clearly.
The publication pattern was really confusing. “A comment on time sequence to avoid confusion. I wrote a group of poems, in 1980-1, called Threads of Iron. For format reasons the book was divided. Part came out as a book in 1991 (Cut Memories and False Commands) and the rest in 2000 (Switching and Main Exchange). They are now put together for the first time. The poems are not all related to each other except that they came out of the situation of one time in one stretch of time. They are designed to complement each other. The poems are presented in the form that they reached slightly later, around 1986 when Paladin were interested in the book for their poetry series (about to be discontinued).“
pause to insert an except from a letter. (1994)
(Long tedious polemic in which I try to deny being influenced by the New Paralytics.)
(fragment) grubbing through back files (the externalized inanimate body of the bureaucrat) while writing "Sound surface", I found a letter to you of July 1982, in which I was already denying being influenced by George Barker. So there's no point repeating it. Examination suggests that, rather than being influenced by something profoundly archaic of 40 years ago, I was influenced by something much older; I think I was influenced much more by Lamartine, Claudel, and Verhaeren, also by Crashaw, 17th C English poetry in general, and especially "A satyre entitled the witche" and a folksong (of circa 1690 I think) called "Here's farewell to all judges and juries". "Here's farewell to all judges and juries, To justice and Albany too. Seven years he's transported my true love, Seven years he's transported you now. (...) How hard is the place of confinement, That keeps me from my heart's delight. Iron bands and chains all wound round me, A plank for my pillow at night."
There's no doubt that I was trying to cross the gap between analytical consciousness, derived (as much as anything) from having numerous relatives expert in educational psychology argue over my cradle and every step of rearing, and the verbal form of the rural blues, of punk rock, and also of songs like The Carter Family's "Worried Man Blues" (I went across the river, lay me down to sleep, when I woke up, there was shackles on my feet.) (possibly mediated by my mother's real beliefs about child psychology, from my Sheffield grandmother, in rather saltier language). I mean, I've always been aware that there were very simple things going on inside me. However, this gap goes back at least to the 17th century (there is an explanation of this in Marxism and Poetry), and the way back together doesn't lead through the New Apocalyptics. Although I prefer them to all later factions of English and Scottish poetry, I regard them as global failures, renouncers. They stopped dead before the point where they could generate any solutions to their deep and appalling problems. (This unless Peter manages to dig up any decisive new evidence.) I have always seen myself as a folk artist, because I am one of the folk. Learning is not inauthenticity. The only question is emotional integrity.
I'll tell you why I'm a fucking folk artist– because I don't make any money out of it! stitch that!
I'm quite glad to see me being accused by Prynne (now repeated by Parataxis, without having seen the poems) of "linguistic impoverishment", because a return to the simplest possible forms is one of the most cherished strands of my work. Differentiation... is an attempt to evade the primitive qualities of emotion and the material laws of being. Having renounced what you have in common with the millions, you inevitably find yourself alone and rarefied.
The gap actually features in my work as the space around which everything else is structured; not simply as a vacuum, or as an inconspicuous frame outside the artistic space.
One of the reasons I put hundreds of direct lifts from folk songs in Threads is so I could catch people out: some of what appears to be me is folk song, some of what appears to be folk song is me. wealth and impoverishment; two strands.
One way of analysing Threads is by listing the Spoglien, i.e. "parts looted from other artistic works". This, of course, is much more common in folk art than in cultured art, but is nonetheless decisive in cultured art. "Shades of Callimachus and rites of Coan Philitas, Let me please into your grove..." I don't find anything from Barker or Thomas or JF Hendry, I do find The Carter Family, farewell to all judges and juries, Canidia still drawes on, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Crashaw, Lamartine, Claudel, Saint-John Perse, the Bible, the Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein), Taliesin, Catullus, Neruda, various Scottish ballads, Celan...
The Apocalyptics had got hold of Surrealism, theology (in Barker's case), traditions of European "art poetry", and elements from folklore or at least hymns, but they didn't fuse them. They didn't even use vers libre. The "solution zone" for any modern British poet would include several of those elements (as is true for me); but there are purer sources available.
(letter to John Wilkinson)
I should confess at this point that getting patronage from Prynne and Sinclair was astonishingly kind to a rather lost and surly young poet. People who did not get that level of support have reasons to be resentful. As if poets needed reasons. But there is another point, I am afraid, that I was not getting published, and the interventions did not lead to that outcome. This is a rather basic factor for a poet. All the same it is plausible that without that kind of support I would have given up altogether, and plunged into who knows what darkness.
In retrospect, I am not sure why Threads was not acceptable around the poetry trade. It just isn't avant garde… not that I had any idea what modern avant garde poetry was, in 1980. I felt quite isolated, there in Southgate/Enfield, and I was eager to make psychological contact with people. I certainly didn’t want to write anything esoteric or obscure, that would not have fulfilled my emotional needs. I wanted poetry to be a way out of obscurity. So my silence in terms of publishing is not a reason for concluding that I was part of an avant garde. I had no wish to prove, or disprove, any literary theories. Also, I had that background as a linguist… I was used to encountering esoteric poems in French or German and feeling excluded and repelled. What I perceived was superciliousness. It doesn't matter if that was really present or not. My feelings about the avant garde were negative; I didn’t want to write that kind of poem.
Skeleton. “In 1983-87 I wrote Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, which was my concerted attempt to be a mainstream poet.” I had a sort of collapse in January 1981… there was a break when I couldn't write poetry, maybe for 18 months. My record says that “Skeleton” began in 1983, so things picked up. It wasn’t convulsive creativity as with ‘Threads’, but I had one idea at a time. The published version has 38 poems, no doubt there were others which I liked but couldn't finish. These poems did not address problems directly… so they weren't about the opposition between rich and poor or about my personal problems. There was an atmosphere of forgiveness... perhaps of forgiving myself for not being successful. You stop asking the question of why you’re unhappy or why life in Southgate and adjacent parts of London is so screwed up; and somehow the question stops being important. And an aesthetic life opens up. Perhaps the loss of intensity is because writing the poem is no longer going to solve the problems; you no longer have the feeling that writing hundreds of poems is going to change your life and bring about a new society. But this is what makes the poems attractive – they are autonomous, and they are no longer insistent. They no longer confront people with their own fundamental problems.
It hardly bears thinking about how few of these commercial poems I ever published. I didn't even send them out. I was content to write them. Being turned down was too much of a hassle for me, likely to end a productive streak. The incentives were missing… I had a theory about becoming successful, but publishing in magazines didn’t feel like part of that. This is hopeless idealism; but at the same time small scale publication is only significant if you have an ardent imagination, fed totally by idealism. I didn’t have a plan for getting into the alternative scene, because I wasn't aware it was there. It was only at the end of the Eighties that I became interested in all that, really because DS Marriott had a strong belief in it. Under his influence, I came to accept that it was a Thing. These poems don’t add up to an overall design; there is no autobiographical story. The poems are better because there is not that pressure, they are more aesthetic.
There was a moment around 1984 when I became tired of political polarisation. Everything was about Left versus Right. I had just made the same emotional analysis too many times. I had a great wish, possibly from a dream, to deal with something that was outside all that. And this was a story about the emperor, Charles V of Hapsburg. This didn’t get very far… I did lots of research but the poems I wrote didn’t connect up to make a project. So we have some survivors. My wish was for something with a labyrinthine interior into which we could vanish, so a way of perseverating some time from the general run of time, which was felt as compromised. Something ornate and decorative but not simply aesthetic and anti-social. (The poems ‘Swiss’ ‘Spectacle’ ‘Hic jacet Borbonius Heros’ came out of this project. There was going to be a poem called ”The Burgundian Hunt”, but I never acquired the historical details I wanted to write it.)
In the 80s, I wrote 300 poems and got fourteen published. Can this really be true? I didn’t hustle to get published, I was too busy. Working 9 to 5 didn’t suit me, I was tired all the time. And writing was amazingly time-consuming, I didn't want to spend time studying magazines and marketing as well. Maybe I could have got more poems out in avant garde magazines which nobody read – it didn’t seem important. But writing the poems was the real way of acquiring assets. The poems belonged to me and weren't conditional. I got poems in Straight Lines, Equofinality, and Grosseteste Review. Quite positive, but I was more impressed by how few people read those magazines. It is hard to recover now just how isolated they seemed in a thriving and even aggressive world of cultural output which seems much more able to seize the attention of my contemporaries. In fact, the change has possibly been that I lost all perspective and forgot how marginal the poetry world is. I shrank down to a tiny volume and so I was able to swim in a small pond. In 1980, I had broader views, and felt that selling 200 copies was rather unimportant. That is, although I was a tiny fraction of the poetry trade, I didn’t feel that it was much bigger than I was. Instead, I felt that it was objectively small. Really, I was writing without any pressure from the outside… the ideal state. I was disconnected but I also didn’t feel I had to please anyone except myself. This may comment on my relationship to the Cambridge School; I failed to join them because I wasn't really aware of them, I just wasn’t reading the same map that they were. So, from about 1990 I began to get involved with the small press scene, face to face. I began hanging out.
Working on that script for Paladin really was time-consuming, it just took over my life for months. Dealing with publication is not just a question of a couple of letters. I still think that I was right to spend my time writing rather than hustling to get published.
Sound Surface. In 1992 I wrote Sound Surface, which was a follow-up to Threads and came out in 1993. I had cut vast swathes of Threads. While thinking about a rewrite, which I was just unable to get to during the 1980s, I had this stack of cut poems. In 1992, I picked up a part of one of the cut poems. This was set off by meeting the girl I was in love with, had been in love with, again, so a relapse, if you like. Sound Surface is a more or less continuous poem of 1000 lines which develops that fragment of ‘Love and Work’. The date of composition is quite illogical compared to the biographical foundation. There was this temporal dislocation, whereby I had unpublished books, my visible face was disconnected from my writing progress, and also I was permanently stuck in long poetic projects which dated back to a much earlier phase of my life. I was not living in the present. As a poet, I wasn’t living at all.
The “surface” is the noise coming off the North Circular… I lived on that road, motorway really, for four years, although fortunately in a back room. The noise was like a physical substance, so it had a top, a surface which things could have walked on. It was a big part of the environment. It symbolises poverty, being unable to afford a better place to love, crushed at the edge of the ‘urban fabric’ and its harshness. These are bedsit poems... the classic thing of being a migrant to London who has no connections and no resources, living in minimal living units that never amount to home. You become consistently self-aware because your life has stopped, there are no events so nothing to distract you. (It is a term from rocketry; sound waves threaten to blow out the fuel, so you have to smooth the burning to avoid this. The edge of the sound wave, as a vibration, is called ”sound surface”.) The noise symbolises anxiety. It is like a message within your brain, preventing consciousness in the way that a radio, running endlessly and unable to be turned off, would do. It represents the unfulfilled urges and the undiverted threats. It has a surface... you are submerged in it. But it does have a surface. The whole thing is the mind as a radio which is overwhelmed by interference, a quasi “signal” which has high amplitude but no data content, it is not really a signal although it is made of electricity and maybe if you could break it down into variations of pitch a signal could emerge, the image of a transmitter and its changing states. But it is not varying at all, not detectably.
So Threads came in three parts. It wasn't such a great idea to come back to that whole state of mind, in 1992, to re-create a state of oppression which I was really out of by that time. But you deal with what is there on your desk each morning, what the sea throws up on the strand (as it were); Sound Surface was immediately present and I could write it. So I wrote it. The bit about the flash… literally, a light bulb blew, the flash of unusual light gave me a migraine, I dreamt that it was a message, a command stating that I was of supreme importance as a poet, the celestial signs were pointing at me. This was simultaneously mocking, of myself, and a statement about determination, about purpose and feelings about how the future was going to turn out. A complex image, a sort of stage lighting effect which exposes a set of relationships.
I put out Surface myself, as a photocopy held together by a plastic spine. ‘Five eyes’ refers to a Pre-Cambrian creature from the Burgess Shale, which had five eyes. Hallucigenia? recent reconstructions give it only four. This was the name of my self-publishing label, Five Eyes of Wiwaxia. Actually the Wiwaxia creature didn’t have five eyes, but I didn’t want to call the label Hallucigenia. Too Sixties. I did the photocopying at a shop in Store Street. Later, I found copiers wouldn’t process the thick cardboard which I used for the covers, so I couldn’t print any more.
After “Main exchange” a whole stream of books came out. Being secluded just stopped being a problem. It released my problems as a young adult... of course they seemed less important once they were dissolved, no longer demanding attention. This was a basis for serenity in middle age – and for serene poems. I was no longer in a death struggle to start leading my own life.
I can't say why there wasn't a third project, I guess you just run out of available processing time. After the end of ‘Savage’, in 2005, I didn’t start another project. I was trying to write a novel, but that is another story. I halted for about twelve years but when I had to do another Selected it stimulated me to start writing poems again. I was less compulsive, that is the advantage from achieving what you wanted to achieve. This is the advantage from doing what you had to do. It seemed strange to people that I worked so hard at writing poems, when there was so little external interest in them, so little material benefit, but there is a point, you take on fundamentally difficult things and struggle with them and after winning the struggle you can find a deep peace.
Pauper Estate
Tim Allen asked me for a book (or maybe something shorter?) and I began writing something about the exit from depression. I think I started in March 1996. I chose to write something autobiographical, and there was a long sequence of events before I got anywhere. Roughly, the relationship ended in 1994, I was very sad and depressed for a long time, and then I began to feel better. I had paranoid moods from about 6 to 8 am. It felt as if my brain were tearing my body into sheds. Then I got up, had some tea, started the day. I liked the feeling of being in touch with reality, free from paranoia, not subject to besetting illusions. I liked the feeling of being alert and in touch with reality. I was simply unemployed and depressed, but I had a feeling of relief and irresponsibility. The plan was to write about this return to daylight, to full possession of my faculties. I was keen not to repeat the emotional pattern of works like Surveillance, which I thought had covered the material to satisfaction. I didn’t want to re-live the paranoia on the page.
I am trying now to remember now what the content of the paranoia was. I think it was the loved object making terrible accusations about me. I was unhappy because the truth about what X said was being blurred and this blurring meant a loss of ethical standards. The content was self-accusation and it was inevitable that I should spend six months accusing myself because what I had lost was all my fault. In P Estate, there is a series of self-accusations which are spoken in my voice, but which logically come from the paranoid passages.
I wrestled with the material for about three years. The point of sobriety which I had returned to was just not exciting. I wrote a lot of stuff but it didn’t do much for me. I had spent so much time walking around the streets, a natural therapy for depression which involved a mild release of energy and gentle exposure to changing incidents and sights. I didn’t have any joy to recount, my life hadn't really re-started because I was still unemployed and in the same flat, alone. I was really happy to retreat into the senses and escape from bitter affective twists and spirals. But I didn’t think the verbal record of that was that interesting. Part of the lost material is this recollection of a piece of sense data.
A flourish of heat and dryness
accessed stored patterns used on this day only
queen ants in dozens on the pavement of High Road Finchley
offers the mortar as exits into free flight, passages for The Call. Kilos
of sand brought up grain by grain, forces of clump adhesion broken.
Three-millimetre circles of white shell fetched up from the sand fill bedding.
Four miles of pavement, a hundred nests. Where stars and vegetation prosper
with big boomy signals to tiny sensors, socially boosted,
Summer calls up its dust of filmy sexual wings, cavalcade
of hop perfume saying, it's time. We say Yes. Neither learnt nor perceived
nor imitated. Sealed instructions. My mission now.
This was a very early part of the book and one of the parts I liked. But I cut it from the final version. I was spending endless time walking, it is good for depression, but the idea that you could find interesting poem subjects just by walking around the streets was a mistake. The flying ants were an exception, but I would have needed 30 things like that. The recession into objects is only really satisfying if you think your affective life is hellish. I think the context was also rejection by everyone else, a feeling that I would never get a job again or be able to write poetry again. The work evolved to focus on things going wrong, and to sad memories of the lost love, because those subjects could generate interesting poems. So the plan evaporated. There is really a lot of material from the original plan which didn’t make it into the final version.
The work as it emerged is about someone walking around a lot, reflecting on lost love, and unable to escape poverty by getting a job. In the end it has 21 poems. No turning-point is described because I didn’t feel a turning-point, the recovery wasn’t dramatic.
Tim didn’t have the funding in the end, or something happened. But Shearsman put the work out in 2000. So the wait was very short, by that time I had a connection and books weren’t waiting around for ten years. I think it took 3 years to write, maybe 4.
‘Looks like luxury’ is titled after a line from Elvis Costello which refers to unemployment, so that the idleness looks like luxury but what you feel about it is like a disease. The generative form “he begs...” comes from a 16th C Gaelic poem which was a satire on someone, Lachlann, who asked for things all the time, the point being that the Job Centre was paying for everything. In the Gaelic, the successive quatrains may have been written by different people, so it was a shared game. The poet it is credited to in the manuscript was called Duncan, so I figured I could take it over. So the poem is a catalogue of all the magnificent things which the welfare funding has paid for, an inversion of a Gaelic catalogue of the lands and feats of a great nobleman or of the goods in the advertising section of a Sunday newspaper. It was built as a lament, so “who now shall beg for menial things, since Lachlann has gone”. The second half gives up the catalogue structure but goes on discussing life without money. The ‘silver foil as snug ticking’ is a recommendation by the relevant government department that you could wear a foil blanket to insulate yourself and so turn the heating off at night, saving money. I think there are still some lines from the Gaelic original hiding in the poem, but the process was of starting with a finished poem, leaving the structure in place, and gradually replacing all the parts with details from the 1990s. The second half of the poem becomes comic because you just can’t be self-important on the dole. But the Gaelic poem was comic to start with.
‘Definition of a Word‘ is not part of the narrative but is a break, I suppose. The word might be ‘defensible perimeter’ according to an early printout, or ‘collapse inwards’– an industrial worker's thoughts on industrial decline. ‘Least heat structures’ is more thematic, a sort of death fantasy about becoming a sea creature and coming back to life.
‘instructions to an actress’ – Luci was attending drama school and studying to be a Method Actor. This was later, so while I was writing the poems but years after the experiences they are about. She was developing physical memory of emotional situations by asking me very detailed questions. So I remembered something and then she would ask to focus more and more and recover more and more details. It was obvious to me that there was a “horizon” beneath which I just hadn’t noticed things and they weren’t in my memory at all. I found this utterly exhausting and my reaction after a few steps was “Luci, don’t ask me any more questions!” They don’t tell you about The Method that the actor’s boyfriend has to do a lot of the work. It was obvious to me that if I had noticed more throughout my life I would be a better writer.
It is possible that those memory exercises contributed to ‘Pauper Estate’.
I see the whole book as being about politics. It doesn’t explicitly attack the government, or advance a thesis, but the big emotional message is about misery caused by poverty, and this is the ground on which the whole book is built. So the reader can make up their own minds about the causes of poverty. I don’t say that being unemployed isn’t my fault, or that the end of the relationship wasn’t my fault, because I didn’t think that I was free from blame, I thought it was largely my fault. I don’t think you can write about being on the dole with terrific self-assertiveness and confidence, because part of the core of the experience is losing your nerve and feeling you’re in the wrong all the time. The book is about saying goodbye to paranoia, and that means seeing causal links everywhere; the poems are full of causal links and this suggests that there are concrete reasons why you’re unhappy and why you haven’t got a job and so that there are concrete steps you can take to get out.
The poems describe all kinds of causal processes. The movement between different planes stimulates ideas, this is the charge and it doesn’t sit with pleading specific theses, like bad government is at fault for unemployment or the DWP should change rules at the job centre in this way or that way. The ideas still work after 20 years but the detailed theses would not. It’s saying there is no personalised, omnipresent, malevolent, force, because if you believe that then you have no defence against paranoia.
The book doesn’t describe me getting a job and abandoning pauper status. Inconsistent, but because I was writing the poems years after the events there were things happening which I didn’t write about. The book ends with a moment of joy, the camaraderie of people without economic substance but with emotional insight.
Timetable of “Imaginary in geometry”
1995? 96? At the Pantechnicon in Paddington; devised rules for new and intellectual poetry
1999 probably summer? - devised concept. Still rewriting ‘Pauper Estate’. Guldursun; The Bishop; Dished; dashed; Spectrum Flight; Greenland; Ghost of Fusion
2000 started at Ofsted; diverted to ‘Weapons Form’; Andy-the-german; A Virtuality; Visualising corporate structure (?); Wonders of classification; CR Ashbee poem ending with Jerusalem;
2001 Les Paul; started Anglophilia (wrote most of?); radiant vortex (glass cubes and aluminium cylinders) ; HandM rewrite
2002 Coastal defences of the self (On the distinction between shared arrays and personal style); Frame switching; completion of ‘Anglophilia’; The Spirit Mover, 1854; On the beach at Aberystwyth; When myth becomes history ; Extreme computing
2003 History of my contemporary (elaborate rewrite); sign-off of book (I took out 'coastal defences' because it wasn't finished at the sign-off); cut a string of unwritten poems
I want to make a comment about the “objet” poem. If you take that poem ‘The fallen stone tells the poet how to write”, it refers to a poem of around 1650 by Jacob Balde, called Poesis Osca. The poem is written in a mock-up of the Oscan language, a thing spoken in south Italy which barely got recorded, in ancient times. I found a copy of this in the London Library, the original print (which is probably the only one). They had a section for Latin Literature (modern). I was very taken with this text and its avant garde implications. The esoteric nature of the object contributes to the poem. This is exciting but it also has a note of indulgence; the object is old and precious, not part of the 20th century. And of course it is a source of weakness: suppose somebody else has uncovered this object and written about it, you are not first on the scene, you are recycling material. Or, suppose a dozen people have uncovered it. How many scholars are looking for neglected texts! it surprises me that I have to find an original to work from, I can’t create the subject for myself. This is just part of my background, my relationship to ancient cultural objects. The wish is for authenticity. The resistance of real objects. So, I wrote about 50 poems which start from a “rare object” in some way. And I dedicated my whole time to searching for strange subjects so that I could write about them. ‘Wonders of classification’ is about cabinets of curiosity as the early form of museums, a good subject but I get a twinge every time I see a book about Cabinets of Curiosity; because I turn out to be just one of a mob of people. Does a poet need unique material… because this may not instantly include the reader, they may find the theme hard to recognise or get into.
Part of this is a weariness with committed art. After struggling with intellectual rivals for years, you get tired and you want calm objects that don’t involve any fighting at all. And this was much wider than me, it was part of the Eighties cultural scene for a very large number of people, seeking serenity and a holiday. If the fighting stops then the Past becomes serene… and social relationships can be sustained, defended from destruction and denial. And this means that your poems too can survive, no longer tangled up in a substrate of conflict and mutual denial which guarantees that they will not survive, the feelings which sustained them will vanish, as heat that fades. This is the residue that sifts out from forty years of writing… as if, once you engage in denial of other people’s feelings then they are bound to deny your feelings, and that means your poems will turn to ashes, an object with no inside. With time leaking out of them.
Unwritten poems
I have remembered part of the Twenty Year Plan for becoming a poet, which is “Wheat of Song”. I mentioned this, possibly at the end of ‘In a German Hotel’, but I was never able to write it. It was going to be a praise poem, the exact opposite of the depressed poems in ‘Threads’ and elsewhere. So this was something I used to fantasise about when things got hard. There are probably numerous attempts to start it, in the filing cabinet somewhere, but I never had an idea how to write it. I guess I clung to autobiographical poetry because it gave me a pre-existing structure of sensations and ideas. ‘Wheat’ would have started from nothing. There is a very early Welsh poet, mentioned in a Latin chronicle along with Aneirin: Gwenith Gwawd, translation “wheat of song”. Wheat probably means “rich crop, abundance”. No poems by him survive. “gwawd” in modern times means “scorn, satire”, but it probably wasn't so specific in the 6th century, just “poetry” in general. Prompts might have been Claudel, ‘Zarathustra’, creation myths.
I haven’t thought about this for about 30 years. At this moment, it occurs to me that “Light”, in ‘Skeleton’, is a sample of what “Wheat of Song” would have been like if I had been able to write it.
Ethnographical Forgery
I have talked about this in other bits of prose in this folder, so just a mention. The term came from a set of recordings (mainly in the 70s) by the German rock band CAN. They listened to ethnographical music on a short wave radio and produced their own music in direct imitation of the strange sounds which they were hearing. I loved the idea, and it connected with me reading about anthropology as a student, in the fabulous Cambridge libraries which were all on open shelves, you could just acquire a ticket and wander around. I was loving this phrase at the time of ‘Threads’, but only a few poems in Threads have anything to do with it. It only worked in a small number of poems, but I kept on going back to it over decades. To be honest... it’s just a variant on Browning writing poems about history. What in 19th C terms you would call “historicism”. Since I was a linguist, and what a linguist does after a certain point is internalise foreign cultures, it was an extension of what I was doing even at school. It doesn't represent a rejection of Western values. It was like being a painter travelling to paint fabulous landscapes, except that what interested me was not strictly visual, but linguistic and cultural “objects”, clusters of signs, which I could somehow create an equivalent of in English.
recalled 2021
I seem to have written some of this down before, but I can’t locate it. I have incorporated texts from the jackets of various books. This deals with my early books.
Early days
At my school, there was a remedial class in the 6th form for scientists, who were perceived as being weak in use of English. I was in it because I was a linguist. The teacher was Neil Curry, a poet, and he taught us poetry. He used MacBeth's poetry 1900 to 1965 (? title). This was a breakthrough for me. We did ‘The Waste Land’, and I especially liked that. So this was from September 1972 on, going on until maybe April 1973, when classes stop to allow for A-level revision. Neil was an inspiring teacher and he actually understood modern poetry. So at some point early in 1973 I decided that writing poetry was for me. I wanted to write like Eliot or David Jones, which is the last thing that a 17 year old is going to bring off! So I was looking for a way of writing my own poetry. This actually started at some point in 1977. In 1977... I still knew nothing. The key decisions got taken on a basis of ignorance.
I should add that the school had a series of poetry readings, which I was attending from maybe 1972 on. This worked really well for me, less because the poets were good than because I was treated like an adult by both the poets and the masters involved in the events, somehow poetry meant a complete relaxation of rules and I felt completely different inside the invisible frame of that situation. I remember George MacBeth, Adrian Henri, Jon Silkin. Henri’s poetry certainly wasn't very good, but he had bonhomie, he was willing to talk to us. It’s hard to document that vibe around poetry, but it’s certainly important and people certainly do comply, they start acting much more reasonably and less rigidly inside that frame than outside. Why do they behave unpleasantly in other contexts? Hard to answer, but I can tell you that this feeling of harmony and sensitivity to other people's wishes is part of what keeps poetry going.
So I had a clear idea of what it meant to be a poet, people travelling the country giving readings, audiences being polite. It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have the popular touch and wasn't going to get gigs at schools! I was happy to think that I was much more intelligent than Adrian Henri, and was going to write poems much more intelligent than his, but I didn't make the connection that he was published in Penguin precisely because his poems were shallow and self-satisfied.
Threads of Iron. After three years of punk I wanted something softer and more expansive. This wasn’t exactly an original idea. “The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour.”, I wrote. 1978, move to London and suffer from homesickness. From 1978 to 1987 I was working at the New Southgate works of Standard Telephone and Cable. [...] it came out in two parts (Cut Memories and False Commands in 1991 and Switching and Main Exchange in 2001) after a brief delay. I wrote “attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one.”
I was not in a good mood for some time after leaving university with very poor exam results. Actually, I was in a confused state of mind even before that. There was a gap, one of several I suppose. The key was to my recollection the summer holiday in 1980… so there was a gap roughly June 1978 to August 1980? something like that. I was in Venice and reading ‘The Hermaphrodite Album’ was a stimulus. I found a 9 to 5 job very hard to get used to. Being a writer in the evenings while bashing away at STC during the day didn’t seem like a strong plan… even less strong if I couldn't write anyway. So I was in dire need of some poems. I then wrote ‘Threads’ incredibly quickly… it came to an end in January 1981, to my recollection I couldn't think about anything else. The idea of quantity came over me, which is never a good thing. I was shocked by an emotional collapse in the January, which as I recall came to a head when I was stuck on a bus which was firmly not moving while I was already late for work and not happy about being late for work again. There was a binding concept for the book, of describing me. Not all the poems are autobiographical, some were there to describe my sensibility, things I was interested in as opposed to events in my life. The poems have a coherence at that level, a self portrait with props, personalised objects. It didn’t strike other people that the book was a single thing as opposed to a binding of 80 unrelated poems. I think the mass at early 1981 was 6000 lines… far too much. It would have been organic to rewrite it in preparation for publication, but because I was depressed this couldn't happen.
Around this time I had a long-term plan. This arose from waves of anxiety – that central process for late adolescence, or whatever you call that phase. The anxiety summoned up positive plans as a counter-measure. So I had a theory about what had happened in the past 30 years and what was going to happen and how poetry should be written. And of how my career should look. It would have seemed very immature and feeble not to have a view of things. To some extent, you can't write a single poem without making decisions about some more basic questions of style and address. Unfortunately I can’t remember what this plan was. It got replaced in detail by actual poems, which absorbed all my energy and which effaced all memory of the planning stage. I made my decisions… inevitably I didn’t have the knowledge base appropriate for doing this. I didn’t mysteriously start 1980 knowing what had happened in poetry between 1950 and 1979… just the reverse, really.
There is a moment around that Prynne letter. I sent JH the whole sheaf of Threads, rather badly typed as I recall. Word processors made a huge difference to amateurs putting books out on the waters. He felt concerned about me, more than anything else, concern that someone who would expose their feelings in this elaborate way was vulnerable in a grand way and was subject to grand humiliation and trauma. There was a welfare issue. So he sent copies of the TS to Barnett and Crozier, as the active publishers on the small press scene, or rather the corner of it that he was involved with. To accompany it, he sent this letter, formally addressed to me, which is the one that was published in Grosseteste Review a few years later. Neither of them was inclined to publish Threads! Not even in a pamphlet excerpt, or whatever. But some of the poems did fetch up in Grosseteste Review, so there was a concrete benefit. Prynne was arguably better at picking up the weaknesses in Threads than its strengths… the weaknesses were obvious because I was only 23 and 24 when I wrote it. In fact, young poems appeal to young people, and that is where we get with Threads. The fact that it was buried in the literary twilight doesn’t mean that it was intellectually grave, or innovative, or animated by a Thesis. No, it is all about feelings. Twenty years of delay in getting the text into print did not make the poems more complex. It didn’t take 20 years to write.
In 1986, Iain Sinclair was working at Paladin developing a series of modern poets. I was one of the people he approached. This wasn't going to happen, because all the other people had had careers and were picked up in the form of retrospectives. An unpublished book wasn’t going to support such a high-profile publication. So it got turned down and I didn’t emerge even in a volume of three poets. I found the process unnerving. Anyway, I had to retype everything and as an aspect of that I also recomposed the book. So the surviving version of Threads is the 1986 revision. It is about 4000 lines long, so I just chucked out a large number of poems (and simplified the rest). One poem (“Black pane and décor”) comes from an even later date. Indecision.
A correction. I pulled out a folder of notebooks from the time and found one relating to the Threads rewrite and it says ‘1987’. So that was the right date. There was a time sequence, Sinclair wrote to me, I rewrote Threads, then later it was John Muckle and John set up the ‘new british poetry’ anthology and that involved two poems of mine. My first appearance in a book. I remember spending a long time doing the rewrite, but in reality it was probably only a few weeks. Iain had seen the Prynne letter but not Threads as a whole. As mentioned, I cut it by 2000 lines. In the original writing, I had dredged up everything I had. It was irrational to write 200 pages of poetry but I couldn't stop. In a strange way writing that intensely was good, even if the product was repetitive and badly organised, and it was good to face such a long and personal text and analyse it critically. Being published by Paladin at that time was a really big deal. I had the equivalent of stage fright, I didn’t think the deal was going to go through, and I was rewriting under pressure, looking at a huge breakthrough and losing confidence in my own poetry, every line seemed flawed and I had to fix every one. This was the hardest thing I ever did. But that is how you get good; it was an intense learning experience, and I learnt a lot about how poems are put together and how they work. This put me ahead of other people. Naturally you don't want to learn by having bad experiences, but that is what happened. This is why I became a better writer and was able to write difficult projects like “Alien skies” and “Surveillance”. So after several months, I think, Iain wrote back and said that he couldn’t get Paladin to take it on. I wasn’t going to argue the toss. Strangely, the experience of rewriting under such pressure, and of finding solutions for the most part, was very beneficial, and it wasn't a bad time overall.
I have to point out (a) it wasn't true that I was making progress in the business, it was more plausible that I would be just outside the lit area for forty years, for ever (b) I wasn't doing readings or having contact with readers, that is a good way to develop, just listening to yourself, but in fact it was just me and my notebooks.
The Prynne letter relates to the 1981 version, so it doesn't match up with the eventually released text and of course I had Prynne’s strictures in mind when producing the revised versions in 1987. No point arguing with Barnett and Crozier, at this distance; they weren’t even wrong.
While pawing through old correspondence, I found a letter from James Lasdun dated November 1981, a response to reading “Threads of Iron”. He didn’t like it at all, but he did give some attention to it. He was a publisher’s editor at the time and used to seeing typescripts which weren't going to get published. I didn’t get any specific ideas from this exchange, but I did get the realisation ”99% of this stuff isn’t getting through”. This strongly influenced what I did for the rest of the Eighties, and for example the second edition of ‘Threads’, the one that actually got published. At roughly this time, James was also involved with Jeremy Reed, essentially giving him advice on how to get a book out with a mainstream publisher. This wasn’t external, managerial pressure, more telling Reed how to achieve something which he profoundly wanted to achieve. James (and Robin Robertson) did publish one of my poems in their magazine ‘Straight Lines’. It was almost disturbing to think that what I did could be acceptable in a mainstream context. I was so naive at that time… for example, I wanted a whole personality to get across and that is why I wrote a large number of poems for ‘Threads’, to give a verbal frame with depth. Realising that the outlet might only exhibit one poem, that you had to get everything into that single poem, was a shock but also a line on how to improve technically. After this letter, I was busy writing ‘Skeleton’, which is is obviously mainly non-autobiographical (so no problems with context) and disconnected, each poem being a separate thing.
I had just forgotten about this letter. I have to observe that the “underground” was doing nothing for me at the time – it really wasn't like “the mainstream rejects you and the Underground is a welcoming home”. James really disliked Redgrove and Hughes– a shock for me because I regarded them as the top of the profession and was hoping to get more like them as I got better at writing. But this is where you learn – when people fundamentally disagree with you and articulate it clearly.
The publication pattern was really confusing. “A comment on time sequence to avoid confusion. I wrote a group of poems, in 1980-1, called Threads of Iron. For format reasons the book was divided. Part came out as a book in 1991 (Cut Memories and False Commands) and the rest in 2000 (Switching and Main Exchange). They are now put together for the first time. The poems are not all related to each other except that they came out of the situation of one time in one stretch of time. They are designed to complement each other. The poems are presented in the form that they reached slightly later, around 1986 when Paladin were interested in the book for their poetry series (about to be discontinued).“
pause to insert an except from a letter. (1994)
(Long tedious polemic in which I try to deny being influenced by the New Paralytics.)
(fragment) grubbing through back files (the externalized inanimate body of the bureaucrat) while writing "Sound surface", I found a letter to you of July 1982, in which I was already denying being influenced by George Barker. So there's no point repeating it. Examination suggests that, rather than being influenced by something profoundly archaic of 40 years ago, I was influenced by something much older; I think I was influenced much more by Lamartine, Claudel, and Verhaeren, also by Crashaw, 17th C English poetry in general, and especially "A satyre entitled the witche" and a folksong (of circa 1690 I think) called "Here's farewell to all judges and juries". "Here's farewell to all judges and juries, To justice and Albany too. Seven years he's transported my true love, Seven years he's transported you now. (...) How hard is the place of confinement, That keeps me from my heart's delight. Iron bands and chains all wound round me, A plank for my pillow at night."
There's no doubt that I was trying to cross the gap between analytical consciousness, derived (as much as anything) from having numerous relatives expert in educational psychology argue over my cradle and every step of rearing, and the verbal form of the rural blues, of punk rock, and also of songs like The Carter Family's "Worried Man Blues" (I went across the river, lay me down to sleep, when I woke up, there was shackles on my feet.) (possibly mediated by my mother's real beliefs about child psychology, from my Sheffield grandmother, in rather saltier language). I mean, I've always been aware that there were very simple things going on inside me. However, this gap goes back at least to the 17th century (there is an explanation of this in Marxism and Poetry), and the way back together doesn't lead through the New Apocalyptics. Although I prefer them to all later factions of English and Scottish poetry, I regard them as global failures, renouncers. They stopped dead before the point where they could generate any solutions to their deep and appalling problems. (This unless Peter manages to dig up any decisive new evidence.) I have always seen myself as a folk artist, because I am one of the folk. Learning is not inauthenticity. The only question is emotional integrity.
I'll tell you why I'm a fucking folk artist– because I don't make any money out of it! stitch that!
I'm quite glad to see me being accused by Prynne (now repeated by Parataxis, without having seen the poems) of "linguistic impoverishment", because a return to the simplest possible forms is one of the most cherished strands of my work. Differentiation... is an attempt to evade the primitive qualities of emotion and the material laws of being. Having renounced what you have in common with the millions, you inevitably find yourself alone and rarefied.
The gap actually features in my work as the space around which everything else is structured; not simply as a vacuum, or as an inconspicuous frame outside the artistic space.
One of the reasons I put hundreds of direct lifts from folk songs in Threads is so I could catch people out: some of what appears to be me is folk song, some of what appears to be folk song is me. wealth and impoverishment; two strands.
One way of analysing Threads is by listing the Spoglien, i.e. "parts looted from other artistic works". This, of course, is much more common in folk art than in cultured art, but is nonetheless decisive in cultured art. "Shades of Callimachus and rites of Coan Philitas, Let me please into your grove..." I don't find anything from Barker or Thomas or JF Hendry, I do find The Carter Family, farewell to all judges and juries, Canidia still drawes on, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Crashaw, Lamartine, Claudel, Saint-John Perse, the Bible, the Triads (Trioedd Ynys Prydein), Taliesin, Catullus, Neruda, various Scottish ballads, Celan...
The Apocalyptics had got hold of Surrealism, theology (in Barker's case), traditions of European "art poetry", and elements from folklore or at least hymns, but they didn't fuse them. They didn't even use vers libre. The "solution zone" for any modern British poet would include several of those elements (as is true for me); but there are purer sources available.
(letter to John Wilkinson)
I should confess at this point that getting patronage from Prynne and Sinclair was astonishingly kind to a rather lost and surly young poet. People who did not get that level of support have reasons to be resentful. As if poets needed reasons. But there is another point, I am afraid, that I was not getting published, and the interventions did not lead to that outcome. This is a rather basic factor for a poet. All the same it is plausible that without that kind of support I would have given up altogether, and plunged into who knows what darkness.
In retrospect, I am not sure why Threads was not acceptable around the poetry trade. It just isn't avant garde… not that I had any idea what modern avant garde poetry was, in 1980. I felt quite isolated, there in Southgate/Enfield, and I was eager to make psychological contact with people. I certainly didn’t want to write anything esoteric or obscure, that would not have fulfilled my emotional needs. I wanted poetry to be a way out of obscurity. So my silence in terms of publishing is not a reason for concluding that I was part of an avant garde. I had no wish to prove, or disprove, any literary theories. Also, I had that background as a linguist… I was used to encountering esoteric poems in French or German and feeling excluded and repelled. What I perceived was superciliousness. It doesn't matter if that was really present or not. My feelings about the avant garde were negative; I didn’t want to write that kind of poem.
Skeleton. “In 1983-87 I wrote Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, which was my concerted attempt to be a mainstream poet.” I had a sort of collapse in January 1981… there was a break when I couldn't write poetry, maybe for 18 months. My record says that “Skeleton” began in 1983, so things picked up. It wasn’t convulsive creativity as with ‘Threads’, but I had one idea at a time. The published version has 38 poems, no doubt there were others which I liked but couldn't finish. These poems did not address problems directly… so they weren't about the opposition between rich and poor or about my personal problems. There was an atmosphere of forgiveness... perhaps of forgiving myself for not being successful. You stop asking the question of why you’re unhappy or why life in Southgate and adjacent parts of London is so screwed up; and somehow the question stops being important. And an aesthetic life opens up. Perhaps the loss of intensity is because writing the poem is no longer going to solve the problems; you no longer have the feeling that writing hundreds of poems is going to change your life and bring about a new society. But this is what makes the poems attractive – they are autonomous, and they are no longer insistent. They no longer confront people with their own fundamental problems.
It hardly bears thinking about how few of these commercial poems I ever published. I didn't even send them out. I was content to write them. Being turned down was too much of a hassle for me, likely to end a productive streak. The incentives were missing… I had a theory about becoming successful, but publishing in magazines didn’t feel like part of that. This is hopeless idealism; but at the same time small scale publication is only significant if you have an ardent imagination, fed totally by idealism. I didn’t have a plan for getting into the alternative scene, because I wasn't aware it was there. It was only at the end of the Eighties that I became interested in all that, really because DS Marriott had a strong belief in it. Under his influence, I came to accept that it was a Thing. These poems don’t add up to an overall design; there is no autobiographical story. The poems are better because there is not that pressure, they are more aesthetic.
There was a moment around 1984 when I became tired of political polarisation. Everything was about Left versus Right. I had just made the same emotional analysis too many times. I had a great wish, possibly from a dream, to deal with something that was outside all that. And this was a story about the emperor, Charles V of Hapsburg. This didn’t get very far… I did lots of research but the poems I wrote didn’t connect up to make a project. So we have some survivors. My wish was for something with a labyrinthine interior into which we could vanish, so a way of perseverating some time from the general run of time, which was felt as compromised. Something ornate and decorative but not simply aesthetic and anti-social. (The poems ‘Swiss’ ‘Spectacle’ ‘Hic jacet Borbonius Heros’ came out of this project. There was going to be a poem called ”The Burgundian Hunt”, but I never acquired the historical details I wanted to write it.)
In the 80s, I wrote 300 poems and got fourteen published. Can this really be true? I didn’t hustle to get published, I was too busy. Working 9 to 5 didn’t suit me, I was tired all the time. And writing was amazingly time-consuming, I didn't want to spend time studying magazines and marketing as well. Maybe I could have got more poems out in avant garde magazines which nobody read – it didn’t seem important. But writing the poems was the real way of acquiring assets. The poems belonged to me and weren't conditional. I got poems in Straight Lines, Equofinality, and Grosseteste Review. Quite positive, but I was more impressed by how few people read those magazines. It is hard to recover now just how isolated they seemed in a thriving and even aggressive world of cultural output which seems much more able to seize the attention of my contemporaries. In fact, the change has possibly been that I lost all perspective and forgot how marginal the poetry world is. I shrank down to a tiny volume and so I was able to swim in a small pond. In 1980, I had broader views, and felt that selling 200 copies was rather unimportant. That is, although I was a tiny fraction of the poetry trade, I didn’t feel that it was much bigger than I was. Instead, I felt that it was objectively small. Really, I was writing without any pressure from the outside… the ideal state. I was disconnected but I also didn’t feel I had to please anyone except myself. This may comment on my relationship to the Cambridge School; I failed to join them because I wasn't really aware of them, I just wasn’t reading the same map that they were. So, from about 1990 I began to get involved with the small press scene, face to face. I began hanging out.
Working on that script for Paladin really was time-consuming, it just took over my life for months. Dealing with publication is not just a question of a couple of letters. I still think that I was right to spend my time writing rather than hustling to get published.
Sound Surface. In 1992 I wrote Sound Surface, which was a follow-up to Threads and came out in 1993. I had cut vast swathes of Threads. While thinking about a rewrite, which I was just unable to get to during the 1980s, I had this stack of cut poems. In 1992, I picked up a part of one of the cut poems. This was set off by meeting the girl I was in love with, had been in love with, again, so a relapse, if you like. Sound Surface is a more or less continuous poem of 1000 lines which develops that fragment of ‘Love and Work’. The date of composition is quite illogical compared to the biographical foundation. There was this temporal dislocation, whereby I had unpublished books, my visible face was disconnected from my writing progress, and also I was permanently stuck in long poetic projects which dated back to a much earlier phase of my life. I was not living in the present. As a poet, I wasn’t living at all.
The “surface” is the noise coming off the North Circular… I lived on that road, motorway really, for four years, although fortunately in a back room. The noise was like a physical substance, so it had a top, a surface which things could have walked on. It was a big part of the environment. It symbolises poverty, being unable to afford a better place to love, crushed at the edge of the ‘urban fabric’ and its harshness. These are bedsit poems... the classic thing of being a migrant to London who has no connections and no resources, living in minimal living units that never amount to home. You become consistently self-aware because your life has stopped, there are no events so nothing to distract you. (It is a term from rocketry; sound waves threaten to blow out the fuel, so you have to smooth the burning to avoid this. The edge of the sound wave, as a vibration, is called ”sound surface”.) The noise symbolises anxiety. It is like a message within your brain, preventing consciousness in the way that a radio, running endlessly and unable to be turned off, would do. It represents the unfulfilled urges and the undiverted threats. It has a surface... you are submerged in it. But it does have a surface. The whole thing is the mind as a radio which is overwhelmed by interference, a quasi “signal” which has high amplitude but no data content, it is not really a signal although it is made of electricity and maybe if you could break it down into variations of pitch a signal could emerge, the image of a transmitter and its changing states. But it is not varying at all, not detectably.
So Threads came in three parts. It wasn't such a great idea to come back to that whole state of mind, in 1992, to re-create a state of oppression which I was really out of by that time. But you deal with what is there on your desk each morning, what the sea throws up on the strand (as it were); Sound Surface was immediately present and I could write it. So I wrote it. The bit about the flash… literally, a light bulb blew, the flash of unusual light gave me a migraine, I dreamt that it was a message, a command stating that I was of supreme importance as a poet, the celestial signs were pointing at me. This was simultaneously mocking, of myself, and a statement about determination, about purpose and feelings about how the future was going to turn out. A complex image, a sort of stage lighting effect which exposes a set of relationships.
I put out Surface myself, as a photocopy held together by a plastic spine. ‘Five eyes’ refers to a Pre-Cambrian creature from the Burgess Shale, which had five eyes. Hallucigenia? recent reconstructions give it only four. This was the name of my self-publishing label, Five Eyes of Wiwaxia. Actually the Wiwaxia creature didn’t have five eyes, but I didn’t want to call the label Hallucigenia. Too Sixties. I did the photocopying at a shop in Store Street. Later, I found copiers wouldn’t process the thick cardboard which I used for the covers, so I couldn’t print any more.
After “Main exchange” a whole stream of books came out. Being secluded just stopped being a problem. It released my problems as a young adult... of course they seemed less important once they were dissolved, no longer demanding attention. This was a basis for serenity in middle age – and for serene poems. I was no longer in a death struggle to start leading my own life.
I can't say why there wasn't a third project, I guess you just run out of available processing time. After the end of ‘Savage’, in 2005, I didn’t start another project. I was trying to write a novel, but that is another story. I halted for about twelve years but when I had to do another Selected it stimulated me to start writing poems again. I was less compulsive, that is the advantage from achieving what you wanted to achieve. This is the advantage from doing what you had to do. It seemed strange to people that I worked so hard at writing poems, when there was so little external interest in them, so little material benefit, but there is a point, you take on fundamentally difficult things and struggle with them and after winning the struggle you can find a deep peace.
Pauper Estate
Tim Allen asked me for a book (or maybe something shorter?) and I began writing something about the exit from depression. I think I started in March 1996. I chose to write something autobiographical, and there was a long sequence of events before I got anywhere. Roughly, the relationship ended in 1994, I was very sad and depressed for a long time, and then I began to feel better. I had paranoid moods from about 6 to 8 am. It felt as if my brain were tearing my body into sheds. Then I got up, had some tea, started the day. I liked the feeling of being in touch with reality, free from paranoia, not subject to besetting illusions. I liked the feeling of being alert and in touch with reality. I was simply unemployed and depressed, but I had a feeling of relief and irresponsibility. The plan was to write about this return to daylight, to full possession of my faculties. I was keen not to repeat the emotional pattern of works like Surveillance, which I thought had covered the material to satisfaction. I didn’t want to re-live the paranoia on the page.
I am trying now to remember now what the content of the paranoia was. I think it was the loved object making terrible accusations about me. I was unhappy because the truth about what X said was being blurred and this blurring meant a loss of ethical standards. The content was self-accusation and it was inevitable that I should spend six months accusing myself because what I had lost was all my fault. In P Estate, there is a series of self-accusations which are spoken in my voice, but which logically come from the paranoid passages.
I wrestled with the material for about three years. The point of sobriety which I had returned to was just not exciting. I wrote a lot of stuff but it didn’t do much for me. I had spent so much time walking around the streets, a natural therapy for depression which involved a mild release of energy and gentle exposure to changing incidents and sights. I didn’t have any joy to recount, my life hadn't really re-started because I was still unemployed and in the same flat, alone. I was really happy to retreat into the senses and escape from bitter affective twists and spirals. But I didn’t think the verbal record of that was that interesting. Part of the lost material is this recollection of a piece of sense data.
A flourish of heat and dryness
accessed stored patterns used on this day only
queen ants in dozens on the pavement of High Road Finchley
offers the mortar as exits into free flight, passages for The Call. Kilos
of sand brought up grain by grain, forces of clump adhesion broken.
Three-millimetre circles of white shell fetched up from the sand fill bedding.
Four miles of pavement, a hundred nests. Where stars and vegetation prosper
with big boomy signals to tiny sensors, socially boosted,
Summer calls up its dust of filmy sexual wings, cavalcade
of hop perfume saying, it's time. We say Yes. Neither learnt nor perceived
nor imitated. Sealed instructions. My mission now.
This was a very early part of the book and one of the parts I liked. But I cut it from the final version. I was spending endless time walking, it is good for depression, but the idea that you could find interesting poem subjects just by walking around the streets was a mistake. The flying ants were an exception, but I would have needed 30 things like that. The recession into objects is only really satisfying if you think your affective life is hellish. I think the context was also rejection by everyone else, a feeling that I would never get a job again or be able to write poetry again. The work evolved to focus on things going wrong, and to sad memories of the lost love, because those subjects could generate interesting poems. So the plan evaporated. There is really a lot of material from the original plan which didn’t make it into the final version.
The work as it emerged is about someone walking around a lot, reflecting on lost love, and unable to escape poverty by getting a job. In the end it has 21 poems. No turning-point is described because I didn’t feel a turning-point, the recovery wasn’t dramatic.
Tim didn’t have the funding in the end, or something happened. But Shearsman put the work out in 2000. So the wait was very short, by that time I had a connection and books weren’t waiting around for ten years. I think it took 3 years to write, maybe 4.
‘Looks like luxury’ is titled after a line from Elvis Costello which refers to unemployment, so that the idleness looks like luxury but what you feel about it is like a disease. The generative form “he begs...” comes from a 16th C Gaelic poem which was a satire on someone, Lachlann, who asked for things all the time, the point being that the Job Centre was paying for everything. In the Gaelic, the successive quatrains may have been written by different people, so it was a shared game. The poet it is credited to in the manuscript was called Duncan, so I figured I could take it over. So the poem is a catalogue of all the magnificent things which the welfare funding has paid for, an inversion of a Gaelic catalogue of the lands and feats of a great nobleman or of the goods in the advertising section of a Sunday newspaper. It was built as a lament, so “who now shall beg for menial things, since Lachlann has gone”. The second half gives up the catalogue structure but goes on discussing life without money. The ‘silver foil as snug ticking’ is a recommendation by the relevant government department that you could wear a foil blanket to insulate yourself and so turn the heating off at night, saving money. I think there are still some lines from the Gaelic original hiding in the poem, but the process was of starting with a finished poem, leaving the structure in place, and gradually replacing all the parts with details from the 1990s. The second half of the poem becomes comic because you just can’t be self-important on the dole. But the Gaelic poem was comic to start with.
‘Definition of a Word‘ is not part of the narrative but is a break, I suppose. The word might be ‘defensible perimeter’ according to an early printout, or ‘collapse inwards’– an industrial worker's thoughts on industrial decline. ‘Least heat structures’ is more thematic, a sort of death fantasy about becoming a sea creature and coming back to life.
‘instructions to an actress’ – Luci was attending drama school and studying to be a Method Actor. This was later, so while I was writing the poems but years after the experiences they are about. She was developing physical memory of emotional situations by asking me very detailed questions. So I remembered something and then she would ask to focus more and more and recover more and more details. It was obvious to me that there was a “horizon” beneath which I just hadn’t noticed things and they weren’t in my memory at all. I found this utterly exhausting and my reaction after a few steps was “Luci, don’t ask me any more questions!” They don’t tell you about The Method that the actor’s boyfriend has to do a lot of the work. It was obvious to me that if I had noticed more throughout my life I would be a better writer.
It is possible that those memory exercises contributed to ‘Pauper Estate’.
I see the whole book as being about politics. It doesn’t explicitly attack the government, or advance a thesis, but the big emotional message is about misery caused by poverty, and this is the ground on which the whole book is built. So the reader can make up their own minds about the causes of poverty. I don’t say that being unemployed isn’t my fault, or that the end of the relationship wasn’t my fault, because I didn’t think that I was free from blame, I thought it was largely my fault. I don’t think you can write about being on the dole with terrific self-assertiveness and confidence, because part of the core of the experience is losing your nerve and feeling you’re in the wrong all the time. The book is about saying goodbye to paranoia, and that means seeing causal links everywhere; the poems are full of causal links and this suggests that there are concrete reasons why you’re unhappy and why you haven’t got a job and so that there are concrete steps you can take to get out.
The poems describe all kinds of causal processes. The movement between different planes stimulates ideas, this is the charge and it doesn’t sit with pleading specific theses, like bad government is at fault for unemployment or the DWP should change rules at the job centre in this way or that way. The ideas still work after 20 years but the detailed theses would not. It’s saying there is no personalised, omnipresent, malevolent, force, because if you believe that then you have no defence against paranoia.
The book doesn’t describe me getting a job and abandoning pauper status. Inconsistent, but because I was writing the poems years after the events there were things happening which I didn’t write about. The book ends with a moment of joy, the camaraderie of people without economic substance but with emotional insight.
Timetable of “Imaginary in geometry”
1995? 96? At the Pantechnicon in Paddington; devised rules for new and intellectual poetry
1999 probably summer? - devised concept. Still rewriting ‘Pauper Estate’. Guldursun; The Bishop; Dished; dashed; Spectrum Flight; Greenland; Ghost of Fusion
2000 started at Ofsted; diverted to ‘Weapons Form’; Andy-the-german; A Virtuality; Visualising corporate structure (?); Wonders of classification; CR Ashbee poem ending with Jerusalem;
2001 Les Paul; started Anglophilia (wrote most of?); radiant vortex (glass cubes and aluminium cylinders) ; HandM rewrite
2002 Coastal defences of the self (On the distinction between shared arrays and personal style); Frame switching; completion of ‘Anglophilia’; The Spirit Mover, 1854; On the beach at Aberystwyth; When myth becomes history ; Extreme computing
2003 History of my contemporary (elaborate rewrite); sign-off of book (I took out 'coastal defences' because it wasn't finished at the sign-off); cut a string of unwritten poems
I want to make a comment about the “objet” poem. If you take that poem ‘The fallen stone tells the poet how to write”, it refers to a poem of around 1650 by Jacob Balde, called Poesis Osca. The poem is written in a mock-up of the Oscan language, a thing spoken in south Italy which barely got recorded, in ancient times. I found a copy of this in the London Library, the original print (which is probably the only one). They had a section for Latin Literature (modern). I was very taken with this text and its avant garde implications. The esoteric nature of the object contributes to the poem. This is exciting but it also has a note of indulgence; the object is old and precious, not part of the 20th century. And of course it is a source of weakness: suppose somebody else has uncovered this object and written about it, you are not first on the scene, you are recycling material. Or, suppose a dozen people have uncovered it. How many scholars are looking for neglected texts! it surprises me that I have to find an original to work from, I can’t create the subject for myself. This is just part of my background, my relationship to ancient cultural objects. The wish is for authenticity. The resistance of real objects. So, I wrote about 50 poems which start from a “rare object” in some way. And I dedicated my whole time to searching for strange subjects so that I could write about them. ‘Wonders of classification’ is about cabinets of curiosity as the early form of museums, a good subject but I get a twinge every time I see a book about Cabinets of Curiosity; because I turn out to be just one of a mob of people. Does a poet need unique material… because this may not instantly include the reader, they may find the theme hard to recognise or get into.
Part of this is a weariness with committed art. After struggling with intellectual rivals for years, you get tired and you want calm objects that don’t involve any fighting at all. And this was much wider than me, it was part of the Eighties cultural scene for a very large number of people, seeking serenity and a holiday. If the fighting stops then the Past becomes serene… and social relationships can be sustained, defended from destruction and denial. And this means that your poems too can survive, no longer tangled up in a substrate of conflict and mutual denial which guarantees that they will not survive, the feelings which sustained them will vanish, as heat that fades. This is the residue that sifts out from forty years of writing… as if, once you engage in denial of other people’s feelings then they are bound to deny your feelings, and that means your poems will turn to ashes, an object with no inside. With time leaking out of them.
Unwritten poems
I have remembered part of the Twenty Year Plan for becoming a poet, which is “Wheat of Song”. I mentioned this, possibly at the end of ‘In a German Hotel’, but I was never able to write it. It was going to be a praise poem, the exact opposite of the depressed poems in ‘Threads’ and elsewhere. So this was something I used to fantasise about when things got hard. There are probably numerous attempts to start it, in the filing cabinet somewhere, but I never had an idea how to write it. I guess I clung to autobiographical poetry because it gave me a pre-existing structure of sensations and ideas. ‘Wheat’ would have started from nothing. There is a very early Welsh poet, mentioned in a Latin chronicle along with Aneirin: Gwenith Gwawd, translation “wheat of song”. Wheat probably means “rich crop, abundance”. No poems by him survive. “gwawd” in modern times means “scorn, satire”, but it probably wasn't so specific in the 6th century, just “poetry” in general. Prompts might have been Claudel, ‘Zarathustra’, creation myths.
I haven’t thought about this for about 30 years. At this moment, it occurs to me that “Light”, in ‘Skeleton’, is a sample of what “Wheat of Song” would have been like if I had been able to write it.
Ethnographical Forgery
I have talked about this in other bits of prose in this folder, so just a mention. The term came from a set of recordings (mainly in the 70s) by the German rock band CAN. They listened to ethnographical music on a short wave radio and produced their own music in direct imitation of the strange sounds which they were hearing. I loved the idea, and it connected with me reading about anthropology as a student, in the fabulous Cambridge libraries which were all on open shelves, you could just acquire a ticket and wander around. I was loving this phrase at the time of ‘Threads’, but only a few poems in Threads have anything to do with it. It only worked in a small number of poems, but I kept on going back to it over decades. To be honest... it’s just a variant on Browning writing poems about history. What in 19th C terms you would call “historicism”. Since I was a linguist, and what a linguist does after a certain point is internalise foreign cultures, it was an extension of what I was doing even at school. It doesn't represent a rejection of Western values. It was like being a painter travelling to paint fabulous landscapes, except that what interested me was not strictly visual, but linguistic and cultural “objects”, clusters of signs, which I could somehow create an equivalent of in English.
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