These Things Are Like Buses

Poems come to me in batches, like buses.  You’d think that after all these years I would have learned how to turn the taps of creativity to make them spread themselves out like real work, like a job, a 9 to 5.  Get up, write the poem, then get on with other parts of your life.   But poems are not really like that like that.  All too often they come in darts and crashes with gaps as long as a country mile in between.

When I edited a literary magazine I regularly chased the late Dannie Abse for a contribution.  He was from Cardiff originally and strode large on the UK literary stage.     As a fan of Cardiff City football club he regularly returned to the Welsh capital and was well disposed to what I was trying to do with Second Aeon.  He’d suggest people I could ask, commented on the quality of what I’d already included and generally enthused.  But when I asked him to contribute a poem of his own he always found some excuse for not doing so.  “I’ll send you some at the end of the summer”.  But he never did.

Eventually I cornered him at a launch at Lears bookshop at the end of the Royal Arcade and he admitted that as poets go he was an incredibly slow composer and simply didn’t produce enough new material.  Demand always outstripped supply.  “I’ll try”, he said.  After the passage of what had to be a good six months he finally gave me The One Prayer, a poem about god and that perennial for poets, death.  I included it in issue 16.  Dannie Abse at last in there, in the company of William Burroughs, John Ormond, William Wantling, Edwin Morgan and Pablo Neruda.  It was an eclectic mix.

I used to worry about my own output.  Was I writing enough?  Why hadn’t I manage a new piece this week.  In the days of the weekly performance poetry explosions in Cardiff during the 1980s this need for a regular supply of new material became acute.  The stage was such a critical place.  If you were on it with any regularity then reciting your greatest hits simply wouldn’t hack it.  Your audience expected to be constantly entertained anew and not simply given reruns of stuff they’d already heard. 

I’d sit in my room banging hard the keyboard of my Alan Sugar Amstrad  for hour after hour in the hope that something worthy would eventually emerge.  Occasionally it did, too but what a stretch of dross lay in between.  The key is to own an Ernest Hemingway built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector.  Shove everything into it and expect most of it never to re-emerge.

These days now that the world’s poetry fury has subsided and to a degree I have less to prove I worry less.  If the page is blank and there’s nothing arriving to fill it then I move on to something else.  Psychogeography.  Essays about music.  Reviews of new books.  Blogs about the NHS.  Cleaning the car.  Rebuilding that falling down wall.

There are plenty of techniques for making yourself write when you don’t want to or don’t think that day you have anything significant to say.  They should be used with care.  My view is that the world   is now oversupplied with poetry.  Production has been on the increase steadily since Victorian-era publishing for the masses brought verse to the wider world.  What we don’t need this morning is yet another new volume  that will languish on the bookshop shelves unsold, unselling, unlooked at until stock check stock clearance consigns it first to the bargain bin and then the pulpers.  Who reads this stuff?  Admittedly more now than did decades back but never enough for the bestsellers.  Verse remains a Cinderella art.

How many digital copies of your latest book of shouting poetry have actually been downloaded? Does your poetry-filled blog get consumed by thousands of fans?  Probably not.  And while we are on the subject why does everyone interested in poetry also seem to write it?  I paint a dark picture. The poetry world is often brighter than this. 

If you are sitting there and want to poem to come but it won’t you could try automatic writing.  You could cut up some great work and see where the joy of random discovery will take you.  Will the banging together of words and phrases that previously never sat anywhere near each other now draw fruit?  If not then you could try intertextuality, the taking of the work of another and using it as the base for something of your own.  The problem here is ensuring that what eventually emerges is your own and not simply a retread.  Many poets including some of the famous have run foul dabbling here.

Failing everything then a walk in the stiff air and a look at the shape of the clouds is often enough to set the spark flaring.

I sometimes revisit my earlier books, the ones that are more than 20 years old and lost to me now back in the swirls of time and wonder  how  on earth I ever composed like that.  Did those things happen?  How did they?  What motivated me?  Was it all a fluke?  How could I ever do this again?  I puzzle.  I worry.  Then after a while I don’t.  Instead I look out the window at those clouds, still up there in glory, moving, not moving, full of colour, all dark, all white.    

zeeeyooosshhhhhh

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.  

Foxed, Dust Marked, and Staples Rusted, But Still Hanging On.

I’ve got myself into the dark far reaches of the loft now.  The place where the flickering of the strip-light doesn’t quite reach.  It’s full of dust and that particularly black Cardiff soot that sticks to your hands, fills your hair and gets inside the collar of your shirt.  This soot is an echo of the city’s industrial past,  from the days when down the road they made steel and shifted coal and the air was dark with rolling smoke.  We might be clean post-industrial now but in Cardiff’s aged lofts what was still exists.

The box I open dates from the early 1970s.  It’s got an ancient Cyngor Llyfrau address label on the outside with my Maplewood Court address hand written on it.  Originally used, I guess, by the Books Council to return unsold Second Aeon Publications from the shelves of their Aberystwyth distribution centre.  William Wantling.  Typewriter Poems.  Bob Cobbing.  Found poetry.  T L Kryss.  J P Ward’s concrete verse.  The Second Aeon Travelling Circus’s rambling mash.  Twentieth century avant garde poetry never really went down that well in Ceredigion and Gwynedd.     Europe never was  Welsh.

The journal I edited between 1966 and 1974 was called second aeon.  Its name permanently, as the Bauhaus suggested,  in lower case.  In those pre-internet days there was a great information gap.  The world might have been full of poetry but finding it was a task.  Second aeon took upon itself the job is filling the gap.  Its large Small Press Scene, run at the end of each issue, tried to detail what was going on.  Magazine name, address and some information about the kind of material it contained. 

Back at Maplewood Court, my flat which doubled as an editorial office, I was deluged with booklets, books, journals, broadsheets and poetry newspapers.  At first from the UK and then as the name second aeon became better know, from the wider world.  Material flooded in.  Big fat yellow envelopes form America.  Bright packages form Europe.  Shabby bags from India.  Stuff from South Africa, Japan, Hong Kong, South America.  Argentina, in particular, seemed to be in publishing overtime.

And it’s all still here, part of it, that ancient echo.  It’s in the box, aged, bent, foxed, dust marked, staples rusted, but still hanging on in  all its edge-pushing, counter culture glory.  Atlantis magazine out of America’s Midwest, full of the  Upanishads, Khalil Gibran-recycled,  articles on reincarnation, Open Letters to Man – I am a Woman, and poetry from mystic Christians.  Peter Cash’s Gong from Nottingham with poetry by Jon Silkin, Owen Davis, Michael Lenihan, William Oxley and an editorial that promotes Joni Mitchell as the goddess she once was.  The Occasional Parish Butterfly, from Cardiff, a cyclostyled, set by typewriter multi-coloured thing  which managed to omit the names of most of its poets.  An Andrei Voznesenski  poem lifted for the back cover.  “There is no editor, bias, affiliation and no immediate policy” it says inside.  Ah the freedom of that vanished age.

I open a large yellow envelop which has the words CONCRETE KONGLOMERATI 5 LB.NET in red on its outside.  This is from Gulfport, Florida and contains a magazine, some stickers and a set of booklets.  The poets are Gerard Malanga, Richard Kostelanetz, Clark Coolidge and others.   They all flash their pre-LANGUAGE visual muscles.  Many once worked this way.  Now, mostly, they don’t.

Deeper in are editions of Lawrence Upton’s Good Elf, R&B Monthly, Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, the super-hippie Oz, Arthur Winfield Knight’s beat generation reviver The Unspeakable Visions of the Individual (this issue devoted to Herbert Huncke), Alex Hand and Alan Turner’s Durham-based Iconolatre rich with the poets of that time – Charles Bukowski, George Dowden, Andrew Lloyd, William Wyatt, Michael Horovitz, Jeff Nuttall, Chris Torrance.  All men, you’ll notice.  Quark with its translations from the Spanish by Cid Corman and Clayton Eshleman.  Beneath this are some of Ruthi Blackmore’s Cardiff-based second aeon precursors Mainly, Cutley and Nicely.  Little hand-made magazines of local verse. Dust comes up in gouts and gushes. The magazines shine.

None of this happens now.  The small mag has gone, all but.  Replaced by geographically indistinct internet grab-alls that roll on for endless pages.   Editing a matter of putting everything in.  Reading something most people don’t.  For the publishers there are no more distribution hassles, visits to the post office with arms breaking under the weight of the envelopes.  No standing outside the library in the rain trying to sell the magazine to reluctant readers.  No hunting for the cash to pay the print bills.  No painful dealing with the rejected.  Poetry, who wants that. 

Poetry was a mystery back then.  It came from the skies, most thought.  Today it’s chanted in pubs, shouted by TV comedians and rapped into places where the written word would never penetrate.  Poetry is commonplace.  No longer the province of the fey and the limp wristed.  Poetry has conquered the western world.   And, of course, to do that, there has had to be a certain amount of dumbing down and an almost total abandonment of adventurous creation.  Like what you see?  Thought not.

I stick my head back in my dusty box.

      

A Shelf Full

When you start out as a collector of books you just have a few. You put them on a shelf. And in the way of things that shelf soon becomes full. After that it’s only a short jump to owning several shelves, all of them packed. You don’t throw anything away or pass it on. It may become useful at some indeterminate time in the future. You may need to check that reference. Remind yourself of just what it was that author said. The books multiply. They arrive in floods. They flow around the room.

You can hold the catalogue in your head too. You know just where everything is. Then, after a further few years of book collecting, you find you no longer can. The stacks and piles surround you. Things you want disappear. Something must be done.

When this happens, and it has happened to me many times in my life, decisions need to be made. Keep, chuck, donate, sell – which?

I always believed that books were an investment. I was brought up that way. Books held intellectual, cultural and economic value. You could use them, in hard times, as a means of barter. You could exchange them at second hand shops for cash. You could sell your rarities for high sums. You could, if you were Richard Booth, the self-styled King of Hay, donate the dross to poor pensioners who could heat their winter rooms by burning burn them in their stoves. Truth is it hasn’t worked out like that.

Books today appear to have a rapidly decreasing intrinsic value. No one wants them anymore. The second hand shops have all closed and the market for rarities is shrinking fast. Where once a decent hard-backed ex-review copy could be resold for a few pounds you are now lucky if you can find a jumble sale willing to take it for nothing. Charity bags shoved through your letterbox want clothing not paper. At Amazon you download the digital rather than delight in the smell of print on paper. Well, a lot of people do.

But to hell with all that. I come from an older world. I’m back in the study where my new Ikea Billy Bookcases now line the walls. I’m engaged in the big job. Reorganising the home library. The pamphlets, those unwanted nuisances even when they were new, are mostly now in a box. Or several boxes. When they first came out they were only visible when you held them in your hand and you only did that for a few brief moments. Then they were consigned to the literary past. Instant gratification before dissolution. The early Anglo-Welsh Triskel pamphlets of John Tripp and Leslie Norris, the wonders of Bob Cobbing’s seemingly endless Writers Forum, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s cards, booklets and folded sheets, Topher Mills’ Red Sharks with their bindings still intact. My own second aeon delights, D M Thomas, Thomas A Clark, Will Parfitt, JP Ward, William Wantling, Geraint Jarman, David Callard, all with their staples rusting and their glue coming undone.

There’s a shelf of Beat Generation originals that I hold extremely dear. My early paperbacks of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. My City Lights first editions. My hardback obscurities. Norman Mailer’s The White Negro. Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Howl. Below them the books by the Angry Young Men. John Wain. Kingsley Amis. And the fellow travellers. B S Johnson. Alexander Trocchi.

Next I’ve set out my collection of concrete poetry. All embracing when it arrived and flourished between the early 50s and the late 70s. Reduced to three and a half shelves now. I’ve all the major anthologies, books by the masters, European material, American stuff. In the centre are my books by Jackson Mac Low. The genius of repetition and process, of system writing, of variations driven by mathematics, of permutation and alignment and chance. His was a poetry that challenged the whole idea of what could be poetry. Verse’s Alban Berg, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, poetry’s John Cage.

He came to Cardiff. I got him to read at No Walls in the Marchioness of Bute pub where Boots now stands in the centre of the city. He gave us the works: chants, murmurings, declarations, repeats, glorious showers of verbiage that may have held no inherent narrative but thrilled the audience nonetheless. What Mac Low was presenting us with was idea rather than emotion, light bulb moments rather than sentiment, poetry that worked not because of what it did but because of what it was.

I check my titles. I’ve half a dozen. None of them signed. I rarely remembered to ask. Jackson came back to the flat and slept on the couch. I presented him with a copy of my own early visual stuff. I’ve no idea if he read it or not. He never wrote to say.

After a while he worked out that having heard how words arrived at by process often sounded one could create them anew, avoiding process all together, right out of the middle of the head. Abandon the process and write as you imagine process to be. Read his Twenties (Roof Books,1991) Here are 100 separate poems “that were written intuitively and spontaneously”. Although he does qualify this when he says that “it might be misleading, however, to call these poems ‘intentional’, in that each word, etc., was written as soon as it came to mind or (in some cases) when I saw or heard it. I hardly ever revised..” Jackson Mac Low died in 2004.

How much Mac Low is there out there free forever on the net? Copious amounts at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/ as it turns out. But as much as I have on my shelf? I doubt it. Let’s keep it that way.

Editing

Any idea what this word means? There have been an array of editors appearing recently at the Leveson Enquiry. What do these people do? Do they go through texts with blue pencils removing that which they do not like? Or are they primarily selectors – the ones who read through the stack of submitted material and decide what’s worth using and what is not? Maybe they are commissioners of the material to be used in the first place. The ones who ask for stuff to be done.

On the other hand they may just copy edit. Correct loose grammar, bad spellings, difficult punctuation, imprecise word choices, remove ambiguity, check facts. Nope, from what we’ve all seen on TV they certainly don’t do too much of that.

I got into literary editing at an early age. I had no idea what I was really supposed to do. The editor was the one who chose. That’s how I decided in the end to pitch it. I was running a small poetry magazine at the time – second aeon. The name was all in lower case. Spirit of the age.

Poetry magazine editors, I soon learned, might be well able to decide what went in and what did not. What they could not do, however, was change anything. Correcting text was absolutely forbidden. The editor was not allowed to add or subtract punctuation or suggest stylistic alterations possible infelicities of thrust or meaning to his or her writers. This was mainly because these creatives were poets rather than prose writers. When a poet put it down then there it stayed.

I once tried to remove an expletive from a poem by Chris Torrance and was told, very firmly, no. The poem went in with **!**!! included or it stayed completely out. I’d already had a few run ins with the PostOffice who were on the verge of stopping me from using Her Majesty’s Mail anymore if I continued publishing linguistically offensive stuff. “We have women working here,” the supervisor told me. “We can’t have you pushing such crude through their hands.” “But they won’t be able to read it,” I protested. “The magazines all go out in sealed envelopes.” “Doesn’t matter,” the man said, hat pulled hard over his forehead, “the fact that the words are there is enough.” Shades of Marcel Duchamp, I thought. Deep Modernism at work in the GPO.

So I let the Torrance poem stand. And in the event no one noticed. Lucky that time.

Later I heard how other editors operated. The famous tale of the compiler of an early anthology of Anglo-Welsh poetry who by mistake left off the second page of a poem by Glyn Jones. The book went to press (and stands uncorrected today) with half the text missing. No one noticed until the poet himself got to see it. Glyn was upset but nothing was done.

Nearer home I learned how the newspaper trade did things. Differently from the literary trade that’s for sure. “It’s all copy,” John Osmond told me. “Copy you cut to fit the space. Usually you just slice a bit off the end to make the text fit.” A bit like sawing a bit off the leg of a table to make it balance. In action this boiled down to stories being sliced up as if John Cage was authoring them. If you work in the newspaper business then you learn to live with this. But I didn’t. And when it happens to pieces I’ve written – and it still does - then I find it hard to manage.

But I have emerged with a sense of the text being text. Once it leaves your hands then it’s gone. The best work is always the latest work. The past work is in the past. But poetry, of course, is full of echoes and has a Zen-like staying power. It’s always there, as it were. You can abandon it but you can never let it completely go. It can come back to you when you least expect it, snarling at you in its unadulterated from for the long past, last week, or wherever else it’s been.

Anyway, editors are a dying breed. In these days of access and digital over supply who needs them? Everything is everywhere for everyone every time, as Gertrude Stein might have put it. I once believed this. But now **!**!!

You are the man, Torrance, of course, you always were.

Refurbishing the Avant Garde

One of the good things to come out of 2010 has been the refurbishing of the Welsh avant garde. Avant garde! We don’t do that in this country I hear some of you say. And for decade after decade in Wales that’s largely been true. Anyone operating even slightly outside the straight line of the artistic straight and narrow has been derided. Eisteddfods celebrating maps made from mud have been declared a total waste of public money. Painters who don’t actually paint have been laughed at. Musicians making music without instruments have been silenced. Conceptual artists who sit in fields thinking have had their grants cut to the bone.

When Gwyneth Lewis’s now massively famous poem was first installed on the front of the brand new Wales Millennium Centre it took a bit of persuading some people that this wasn’t a giant size bilingual cut up in the style of William Burroughs. Yes, like many an avant garde piece of verse you could read the thing in multiple directions. Yet underneath there was a traditional, potent and appealing message. In These Stones Horizons Sing. The past pointing at the future. What we are moving towards what we will be. Beautifully done.

Most of the performance poets, with an honourable exception or two, have spent the past ten years roaring their articulate in-your-face verses much in the style of the pioneers who did the same thing before them. Energising, entertaining, and enjoyable - but rarely really new. Even the liberating possibilities of sampling have somehow found themselves side-tracked into hip hop. Rhys Trimble aside most Welsh-based stand-ups take the old fashioned route. I’m not knocking them, far from it, but offering poetry as a form of bar room entertainment is not at all new. Maybe new is not what we now need to be. Perhaps good would be sufficient enough.

But in Wales, at the end of the new millennium’s first decade, things are waking. It’s taken us forty years but now that we’ve opened our ears we are reborn.

In the past months I’ve spoken with at least four teams of researchers from literary magazines, university departments and media companies – all bent on uncovering Wales’s contribution to twentieth century literary modernism. Angel Exhaust has a special issue devoted to The Welsh Underground, edited by John Goodby and Andrew Duncan. “Each Aeon free after the first one”, it proudly announces. Zoe Skoulding’s Poetry Wales, filled with risk takers and contemporary boundary pushers, is now the magazine I’d always wished it could be.

Pretty soon the critical studies will appear and the barren and straight-jacketed Welsh past I lived through will appear instead to have been a liberal and prolific period, populated by dozens of Welsh experimenters playing to insatiable audiences. History is malleable. It’s always been so.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail #181