Sometimes people just vanish. They are in focus for a time and then you
stop looking. When you look again they’re
gone. It happened to Cavan McCarthy . Concrete poet, literary innovator, small press
publisher with a mission to fill the little magazine information gap. He lived in Bristol from where he published
his experimental small mag, Tlaloc
and its attendant LOC sheets of magazine information listings. He also made rings in which were embedded
concrete verse. He came across to Cardiff
to visit and travelled by hovercraft.
You could do that then. The
sixties were full of roaring and the sense that the walls that surrounded our
worlds were falling down.
When I looked again forty years had passed and Cavan had vanished. His publications lingered deep within a few
specialist collections. Most of his
poetry had turned to dust.
What had endured was the anthology I published in 1972. Typewriter
Poems. A Second Aeon co-publication
with that leader of the American avant garde Dick Higgins. At
Something Else Press Higgins had welcome the idea with enthusiasm. There would be two editions – a UK version
and a second with $2.95 marked on the back cover. Several thousand were printed and bound by Browns of Burnley. The bulk of the American edition were shipped
direct to Vermont.
For reasons I’ve never understood and now won’t (Higgins
died in 1998) the man took a dislike to the finished work. In his introduction he says “And since one of
the most interesting of serious magazine editors is Second Aeon’s Peter finch, he was in a position to make up one of
the most exciting collections. The
ultimate, universal collections it is not – it makes no pretence at
internationalism. But a constellation
from an epicentre of the whole concrete earthquake it is. And it’s in that spirit we are proud to
present it.” But the American edition
was poorly distributed, unaccountably kept in boxes, and then finally pulped.
Cavan’s contribution is zeeeyooosshhhhhh
where a rocket of typewritten words zooms across the page to crash in a
blackened woomph against the right hand margin. Hhhh h h h h h and then a deep stack of ns - nnn n n
nnnn. It isn’t as good as his landmark plurble poem but almost.
As a writer Cavan sits somewhere in that arc formed by John
Cage, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Yoko Ono. All of these artists whose largely
post-modernist ideas came to focus in the sixties have repetition in
common. Warhol films the Empire State
building in one take 485 minutes long. The
lights come on and go off again. Yoko’s
1966 Film No 4 runs for 80 minutes
and consists of 365 naked bottoms of the famous all shot from the same angle. Cage composed pieces of silence presented as
sonatas. Stockhausen pioneered musique
concrete where the electronic modulation of sound became more important than
the sound itself.
The great constants
were chance and repetition, the sub-text, the surface and minutiae found deep
deep inside.
Henri Chopin, France’s greatest sound poet fled the country
during the riots of 1968. His Le déjeuner sur l'herbe delves into what he calls language’s micro
particles. The atoms deep inside a given
sound that make up what we eventually
hear. Chopin would find them by slowing
down tape recordings, interfering with the erase head and speeding up the
results. You can hear the world inside
his productions but it isn’t quite the one you know.
George Perec, a member of the Oulipo Group, hidden from the
Anglo-Saxon world by the complexities of the French language, wrote the ground-breaking La Disparition, a 300 page novel in which the letter e makes not a
single appearance. It took until 1995
for this 1969 masterwork to appear in English (brilliantly and painstakingly translated
by Gilbert Adair as A Void).
If there are seeds for Cavan’s work then these are they.
In the notes at the back of Typewriter Poems Cavan declares “I have never published a separate book
of verse, apart from an exhibition catalogue, and have never made an unsolicited
contribution of poetry to a magazine.” He
was reticent even then.
Recently there has been a revival of interest in Typewriter
verse. Down the years I’ve kept copies
of the original anthology in print and more recently made it available on Amazon. Suddenly it has started selling again. Its slim white spine refixed with new century
carpet glue, padded-bagged and mailed to addresses across the globe.
At least two editors are now hard at work preparing new
anthologies. Marvin Sackner of the
Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Florida is working on The Art of Typewriting for Thames and
Hudson. Barrie Tullet of the Caseroom
Press is editing Typewriter Art for
Laurence King. Big books with hard covers and dashes of
colour. Cavan is in both.
I’ve tracked him down too.
Louisiana. Via Brazil. Librarianship
and teaching. Although he has retired
now. His 1700
pamphlets plus supporting materials went to the Prussian Cultural
Institute in Berlin. I suggested to him that after all this time he
should really consider putting together a book of what’s he’s done. Taciturn as ever he said he’d think and see how it went.
