Re Chris's questions on my sketch about Tomlinson, I could say a lot but I
only want to continue the matter if it broadens into a real topic, because
it was just a moment of the history of some people I was referring to
really. I'm not sure that naming names will help, it might just obfuscate
the matter further because there is always more to anyone's accumulated
work than these retrospective glances can cope with.  Where it becomes more
interesting is in the entire spiked question of poetical relations between
UK and USA, a subject I generally try to avoid.

Though actually I thought I was quite lucid in a non-specifying way.

So as regards say what circa 1967 seemed like an english/american contrast,
was actually a matter of why you were writing.  "we" (a surprising number
of British poets; among present company I'd say: me, John Temple, John
Hall, Ric Caddel, Doug Oliver, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher (though most of
the poets I'm thinking of seem not yet to be on e-mail which is interesting
in itself)) we "turned to America"  and in so doing rejected an english
line (though it was a line of no historical depth) and did so in terms of
why you were writing.  Which is: were you writing in order to be a poet, or
were you writing because you had discovered something about the world which
only poetry could handle?

Is that enough?  Writing to be a poet means replicating a known or endorsed
style (manner) or tone of writing, claiming admission to a recognised zone
called "poetry",  and doing it your own way. It remains important not to
depart too far from what is agreed to be poetical substance. Most British
poets of the 1950s-60s continuity were working like this, as most poets
normally do. It seemed, looking from there towards USA, that over there
there was a fresh, open, use of poetry going on, and poets were plunging
into worlds of knowledge and experience for what they could locate and make
something of, quite unhindered by the need to establish poetical
credentials by writing into a poetical decorum.  Most of the poets in
Allen's 1960s anthology show this in one way or another.  I mean if you
consider the poetry field in Britain as shown by most well published poets
mid-60s left right or centre,  well there isn't much room in those
discourses for, say,  what you've discovered from your research into
Aramaic script,  or the geology of the continental shelf, or  remarks such
as "Jasper Johns has painted me in the nude and my penis is the envy of New
York."  or "Fred just called in and borrowed a quid. So long, Fred."
Those zones, and others, were way outside "poetry" in this country, they
were totally inadmissible.

It was felt as an urgency because such a greater range of foci became
possible, as if the veil of "poetry" had been removed from life and the
world, and people were excitedly reporting what lay behind it.   A
virtuosic language-spread --i.e.,  a greatly extended vocabulary which was
your own, which you laid out before you and mastered rather than attempting
to master forms of relevance, modesty, centralising decorum....  It
remained poetry, but perhaps only because it valued poetry's power of
projection and the freedom within poetry to mix and intercalate very
different discourses.....

It would be interesting to know if others who were around at that time saw
it in this kind of way.

I don't pretend that this dramatically contrasted  view held for long, and
I know there are masses of complications (the San Francisco scene).
Especially that the opening up to diurnal realism within the "New York"
inclination was already implied in a lot of 1940s and -50s British writing.
And that the whole Transatlantic thing now looks extremely different. Any
wave of openness becomes just a new thing to replicate so you can claim to
be a poet, in five minutes flat.  I'm also aware that there are young
British poets now who are repeating this process even more radically --
rejecting all older British poets including all of "us", wholesale, in
favour of certain Americana.  It would be even more interesting if they
came clean, if there are any among us.


PR






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