Last Saturday, in Leicester (see here), I picked up my
contributor’s copy of Clasp: late
modernist poetry in London
in the 1970s, edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards. (Details here.)
It’s the sort of book I would review – if I weren’t in it, in two senses:
things I did and said pop up here and there, and I have my say in the short piece, ‘Took Chances in
London Traffic’. It is itself supplementary to other works of mine, as I
explain:
My critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011; see here] is really a hymn
of praise to the poetry scene in London from the
1970s to the mid-1990s, just before I came to Liverpool.
[Another] chapter ‘Informing the Nation: The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1976)’
deals with the well-documented events at the Poetry Society (and with the
poetics document mentioned in the title)…. My chapter ‘The Colony at the Heart
of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid-1980s London Creative Environment’ outlines the readings and
performances I witnessed or of which I kept evidence. It’s a fulsome but not
comprehensive account,
I state carefully, emphasing that I didn’t attend every
event, although I do have the benefit of the diaries I kept, the same used to
write my autrebiographical Words Out of Time, (e.g., see here for my diary
account of meeting Bob Cobbing for the first time, an event that is glossed in
the book in general terms).
This is a fascinating book of reminiscences of the 1970s,
although it understandably strays into the 1960s (‘The British Poetry Revival’,
see here). John Lennon's white suit is glimpsed several times, but only one contributor spilt tea over it! It also strays into the 1980s. (I was told to narrate until 1985
and I did this scrupulously; I had to: I only arrived in London in late 1983!) But it also
wanders into the 1990s: there’s anachronistic mention of the deliberately unnamed
workshop/discussion group Patricia and I organised in Tooting (and our big parties
are mentioned as well). In Valerie Soar’s wonderful piece, she remembers an
epiphanic moment of watching Bob Cobbing performing at the Smallest Poetry
Festival in the World, which was held in our very small Tooting council house
(though in December 1994). This slippage is inevitable (as is the way contributors step
outside the ring of the M25 to tell us of other matters in other places) but it might make it harder to write of the 1980s
and 1990s as distinct eras (as they were).
Of course, events around the Poetry Society are still up for
debate, with Lawrence Upton (who wants to poke me in the eye for writing stuff
like this, judging from his Basil Fawlty analogy!) on one side, Elaine Randell on the other, and Robert Vas Dias as
the Piggy-in-the Middle. But the acrimony has abated, and I think we need to concentrate
upon the creative work of that period and place.
John Muckle and I are the only two writers here who register
a sense of not belonging to the ‘London scene’: both of us
had wandered in from outside and both of us are at the end of the book, as the
youngest contributors, and we recall the exclusivity of the scene that others
don’t notice. They do register the gender bias, if that’s not a weak term for
an almost complete absence of women, although Valerie, Paula Claire and Frances
Presley offer strong accounts. It’s good to see Patricia Farrell’s role in
SubVoicive acknowledged.
So: it’s not a book I can review at all. (Also see this interview between Rupert Loydell and me which pitches two versions of London in the early 80s against one another.)
One last thing: it almost seems as though in our search for accuracy, some of us have dodged trying to reflect the necessary excitement that derived from being in the compression of 'London traffic'. It takes another outsider, Jeremy Reed in his Shearsman book I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Asa Benveniste and Trigram Press, to get it right: ‘There’s something about the stupendous momentum of London’s energies that locks you into capital affairs.’ That’s what Clasp is about!
