Hi,

well i'm 'back' although Dave (a legend in his own ellipses) probably
wishes i'd been mashed in that motor city machine. It was simply being
polite to say i was going away but i had no idea he'd cut up so rough
about it. As if i was jet-setting. In fact it's a five hour drive from
here and i had a big weekend of showing work there, so just wanted to
let you know that i'd be back to try to make some small inroads into a
response to your question regarding differences (beyond the obvious)
between British and USAmerican poets ranged around this pond. Ain't
that the business of an avant-garde (a term i only buy into out of
accusation, not personal selective comfort), to get out the work and
circulate its generative potential? O groan, o woe is me, o empty and
alienated ivory tower o abject pub of jealousy!

Anyway Tim. Partly i'll stroll back through those pointers i mentioned
earlier about the character of the mesh of interests that are
pertinent, even peculiar, to those 1970s - 90s London poets as distinct
from the USAmerican counterparts. I am once more being ludicrously
general, partly due to time and partly down to just moving along one
step at one time. I'm sticking with that broad London lot as I believe
that its characteristics break down far more forcefully when applied
more widely - although many if not most of those (not quite all) I
cited have since left London. That's another story and of note in
itself - that spreading and realignment and de-centering.

There was transatlantic traffic. No doubt about it. There was also
conversation with continental europe, in particular France through a
magazine such as Curtains (edited by Paul Buck) - one of the most
important of the 1970s in England imho. Look at the contents for the
1997 Split Curtains issue:

alejandro, bernard noel, maurice blanchot, paul buck, jacques derrida,
georges bataille, geraldine monk, colette deble, ulli mccarthy, jeff
nuttall, jean pierre faye, edmond jabes, eric mottram, roger ely,
vladimir velickovic, lydia davis, COUM transmissions, pierre joris,
brian marley, glenda george, clayton eshelman, agnes rouzier, juliet,
philip corner, gad hollander . . .

or 1978's bal: le: ed Curtains:

ulrike meinhof, rod mengham, allen fisher, peter riley, iain sinclair,
cris cheek, jean pierre faye, pierre joris, glenda george, brian
catliing, danielle collobert, elaine shemilt, jean-luc parant, michael
haslam, monte cazazza, alison wilding, john james, gina pane, jed
rasula, bill griffiths, mitsou ronat, ulli mccarthy, bernard noel, paul
buck . . .

or look at the supplement i assembled for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine,
it's on the Princeton ECLIPSE site as supplement 2 and read through
soome of the connections implicit therein:
http://www.princeton.edu/eclipse/

This presents a high-octane mixture of interdisciplinary local and
translocal engagement(s). Performance Artists, Fluxus eventists,
essayists, Visual Artists, Composers and Poets. The presence of Mottram
in London as editor, organiser and practitioner-critic (an essayist
praxis) carried with it the inception of American Studies as an
academic pursuit, direct contacts with the Beats, with Black Mountain,
with Open Field verse practices, with Deep Image poets, with emergent
discourses around ethno-poetics (Rothenberg-Tedlock's Alcheringa . .).
That was hardly a narrow influence. Mottram was also acutely attuned to
new music and brought US and UK comedians into the frame at every
opportunity alongside erudite histories of technology and cultural
studies. The presence of Bob Cobbing always carried the map of visual
spatialised textualities and sonic projections with it. I've written a
little on his Writers Forum workshop at that time elsewhere and here's
a snatch of that. It's a highly personal account but would i know ring
kinship resonances by others at the workshops through that time:

I first witness--participated the interpretative community that was the
Writers Forum workshop in 1975 after a chance invitation from poet Bill
Griffiths. At that time it was being held on the premises of the
National Poetry Centre in Earls Court Square. The workshop was a
welcoming gathering and the performances of writing there were received
without undue judgement. That is, although conversation after sessions
was robust and broadly discursive, these poets and Bob Cobbing’s
position as their convenor and presiding energy were positive and
encouraging influences. Cobbing’s presence and contribution was one of
generosity being put to the use of creating space for others to be
creative in.

One of the dominant tropes of poetry that was being openly tested at
these workshops was the unitary voice of epiphanic glibness. The lyric
Icountered by, or mobilised through, polyphonic compositions or at the
very least multi-tasking attentions. Writing was frequently read by
more than voice, two or three voices (or more), reading in close
interaction, with syncopation, with overlapping stresses, with partial
erasure, foreground and background scripting, staccato narrative
assemblages and dialogistic interjection. Texts were sometimes
arraigned across the floor or cascading from the ceiling or fluttering
loose in the hand. Listening with attentive vision was at a premium.
Spatial placement of sound became an area of investigation and
spatiality of paginated notations, both placement of pages in the room
and spatialisation of writings on the page, were consequent.
Interruption and distraction of both the scripted and the unscripted
were qualities considered delicious rather than screened out; I
referred at that time to such displacements and noise in a performance
of writing as exquisite interference. Consequently attention was full
on and wide open. A dynamic interchange ‘between’ improvisation and
composition often presented itself. The potential of a writing giving
rise to consecutive versions in which two or three different
possibilities were offered. Writings were thereby explored through
out-loud readings as being subjects for revision, a direct result of
having been aired. A performance of writing, in the majority of these
cases intended to be in conversation with the possibilities for the
poem, was an occasion of a moment. One occurring ‘between’ the body of
giver and the body of receiver, belonging to neither one nor the other,
a signal, even secretion, of mobilised liminal exchange. Also ‘between’
the writing on the page and the writing off the page, projected through
the bodies of its temporary operators as sonic orientation and
propulsive gesture.

This workshop, which had the qualities of a research group; indeed
collaboration was encouraged by dint of the enquiries conducted as
already mentioned. Material mark-making, whether linguistic or
extra-linguistic, was treated as material for potential transformation
and adaptation upon adaptation. A sounding was an occasion for a
visible mark becoming a sound.

Working at the potentials ‘between’ artform boundaries and ‘between’
traditions and cultures of poetry, his writing was a performance of
adaptations, adaptation to context and adaptation to audience. He could
render the same basic poem as a humorous commentary, an excoriating
critique or a childlike song of nonsense. Cobbing’s work (for example)
was subjected to variation upon variation through performances of print
and through public performances of representation. 

I made texts for the workshop, I made texts through the workshop, I was
left with texts after the workshop, I made texts in collaboration. I
developed a keenness for not knowing what would happen when I, and
often others when the text suggested pluri-vocal occurrences, began to
‘read’ a text. I wanted to work to develop a tension between sufficient
composition and necessary improvisation, certainly a tightrope that
Cobbing himself encouraged enquiry into.

  ___________

Live readings by visiting poets were also very diverse. One might hear
Robert Duncan once week, Jackson MacLow the next, John Giorno the next
and Ed Dorn the week after that. But there was also the sense of
English translocallity through Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Colin
Simms, Tom Leonard, Barry MacSweeney, Gael Turnbull lots and lots of
blokes (another issue of note). The point is, i think, that the lyric
was also in full swing of investigation as much as there was an
interest in poetics of materiality (concrete and sound shorthands yes,
but also Clark Coolidge's 'Polaroid', 'The So' 'The Maintains' 'Space'
the minmalist aesthetics of Aram Saroyam) and work by the early Lang-po
communities. A heady mixture. The transatalantic traffic went both ways
with many of those in London reading and taking part in festivals in
Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, France and the USA. Raworth
was also in Italy and Switzerland and South Africa. It was an energised
mesh - despite the seeming impoverishment of the scene in the wake of
the Poetry Society debacle.

My sense remains that those in and around London also more often than
not had another disciplinary perspective than simply poetry; painting,
film-making, music, performance art and dance for example. This
pertained more distinctively than for many counterparts in the US
(exceptions would be Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman,
Steve Benson, Marshall Reese . . . at that time [mid 1970s -1990s]).
Again I am doing this with a BIG brush, there are many ways of
depicting exceptions.

It *could be argued that taken together with opening itself to this
plethora of influences the poetries in and around London between
1970s-1990s retained a lyric proclivity, that is the sense of language
as integral to, going hand in hand along with, constructions of demotic
and larger political and social experience(s). The dynamic in the work
consequently produced and circulated (in whatever form and to whatever
degree of longevity) is an intimacy of micro-macro particularity that
often readily engages in reciprocity with its context
(psycho-topographically, socially, politically, linguistically . . .)
through fierce explorations of syntax, cadence, enjambment, spatiality,
performativity . . . in respect of expectation and thereby of
convention. What a reader senses, I reckon, from any immersive approach
to these writings is the milling of a grouping (not limited to but
intent upon contributing to that group milling) as much as the milling
of individuals. That is the discussion appears ragged and inviting of
input, rather than shut and automous. The resultant gaps are ones into
which one plunges, rather than across which one idly sails?

well, that's all a bit rich i must say but hopefully will stimulate
further thoughts . . .

love and love
cris













On Dec 6, 2004, at 8:21 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> altered terms etc. Most British poets seem to me to be very British.
> In most cases there are clear differences in texture and tone, let
> alone other things, between British and American innovative poets. I
> admit it is not a difference that has got much of an airing and I
> recently asked cris to say what he thought the difference was, before
> he flew off to Detroit, ha ha. If there has been a change in this it
> has been quite recent with the rise of a kind of Anglo Saxon
> Internationalism of the Academy style of writing.
>