Here is Andrew Duncan's response to A. C. Evan's article:



A Reply by Andrew Duncan to A. C. Evans’ essay, ‘Voices in Denial: Poetry and Post-Culture’. 


This essay by A.C. Evans is a kind of satellite photo which overviews a vast scatter of individuals and tries to make out a definite form. Which came first: the point or the field? Although we have to welcome this attempt at seeing the whole cultural field, all the same the essay claims that individual poets are central. They realised their designs, but failed the demands of an overarching imperative of which Evans holds the definition. We cannot, then, do less than bring back the data points and see if the curves so smoothly drawn are actually a fit to them. This is an act of memory that will unloose many voices.
 
1. About British poets missing the chance of plugging into popular culture. This is acceptable if amended to “Apart from about a thousand of the best-known poets, British poets did not plug into popular culture, soak in it, exploit its mythology, etc.”
 
2. So poets missed an opportunity by regarding culture as precious. Hmm. If we began to list the British poets who wrote bad poetry because they dumbed down and wrote as if for 15 year olds about to fail GCSE English, we could name a couple of hundred within minutes. Would this not make the picture fuller?
 
3. We re-opened a magazine (called Angel Exhaust) last year and opened the parcels that had piled up, somewhere in Essex, during 5 years of peaceful closure. One of them contained a book by John Robinson called The Cook’s Wedding (2001), which turned out to be a work of Pop poetry. I read this one. It was an absolutely brilliant book. Amazing! I hadn’t seen a decent book of Pop poetry for decades. This was such a good book that it raised lots of questions about the history of Pop – and especially its decline. This is a complex issue involving up to a thousand individual poets. I have written quite extensively about this issue – in parts that describe stations along the path of Pop poetry, but leave out many others. I think someone should write a book specifically on the history of Pop poetry, and I do not think that intuitive analysis is going to lead us to convincing results.
 
4. A.C. Evans published a series of articles in around 1990 called “Angels of rancid glamour”. These were about the occultist and decadent end of Symbolisme, but it’s obvious to an insider that they follow an enthusiasm for Glam Rock and for the occultism favoured by e.g. Marc Bolan. “My people were fair and had stars in their hair”. There is a connection with Goth and heavy metal as well. Evans’ investment in popular culture is genuine. My point is that the nature of print as a medium encourages the development of Pop themes along a path, through the injection of more information and the mutation of the basic forms, which makes them unrecognizable. 1965 was when England became aware of Bob Dylan and when it became normal for intelligent people to buy pop albums. As a rule of thumb, poets who reached the age of 18 after that have been soaked in popular culture. The exceptions might be interesting. As I said, the logic of print makes this influence something you have to recuperate by source analysis.
 
5.This remark about poets wanting to abolish the centrality of the individual artist. It is a quote from an American, or from an American school. Why is the evidence not from Britain? Did any single British poet ever want to do this? Where is the evidence? Even if such poets existed, they probably came from a tier that has a couple of dozen readers – they don’t belong in centre stage. As marginals, they are right to exercise certain liberties, and evade a verdict of history. I am afraid this passage is explaining something that didn’t happen.
 
6. The idea that there was a period 1968-89. I am enthusiastic about periodization. We need to get much better at this, and at developing specific terminology, in order to make public discussion work. I am willing to be persuaded about this. But I didn’t notice anything changing in 1989. 1989 is a split in the history of East German poetry. There is an empty space waiting for generalisations about the differences between poets born in the 50s, born in the 60s, and born in the 70s. These generalisations should be shared by the poetic community, if they are accurate. But maybe we need to think not of one route through the imaginary museum, through rooms that include everyone and follow each other chronologically, but of maybe a dozen routes that wind through an endless series of rooms. Maybe you can sneak through a secret hatch from one to another, unperceived?
 
7. The focus on periodisation, so that a whole period stops in 1960 or 1989, is incompatible with the idea that individual personality is the important thing in poetry. Personality did not change in 1950, or 1800, or AD 700. If you focus on the influences from shared assumptions, shared symbolic structures, literary conventions, then the individual artist loses centrality while you are doing that.
 
8. I can enjoy pop poetry without enjoying pop history.
 
9. In 1967, Penguin published The Mersey Sound, with three Pop poets – Henri, McGough, Patten. It sold a million copies. This was the perfect Pop book. Teenagers read it. It was the culmination of something probably 5 to 8 years old by then. It was a forgettable book. Pop culture is immediate, cutaneous, once-only. If you think about it, or discuss it reflexively, you destroy it. Because it evaporates, it is hard for a person to fix the history of it. I think that what Evans says about it is very bad history. But also – this kind of poetry does not sustain discussion between intelligent people, and that is what we are going to do, we must do it willy-nilly.
 
10. The BBC’s recycling of Top Twenties of the past, on Sunday afternoons, recently allowed us to compare July 1966 with July 1974. I could remember every single record from 1966 and almost none from 1974. Why? Because the ability to write perfect 3-minute songs had abandoned the innocent pop world. Albums were far more prestigious by 1974. There were no good singles. How did Pop poetry fare when pop itself went all freaky? I think this is why Pop poetry disappeared. But also, pop became ‘rock’, protracted, involved, and cryptic. So we can suggest that when poetry became protracted and self-involved in the 70s, it was actually pursuing popular culture rather than moving away from it.
 
11. I think the key background fact is a dumbly statistical one: that the British Council bibliography of poetry (1960-95) lists 900 individual poets. An essay that tries to wrap up so many writers in 1400 words is bound to be irritatingly schematic.
The switching of viewpoint to the USA from time to time makes this even worse. So 1945-60 was the Beat Era? This has no relevance to Britain at all. So is this an article about 900 British poets or 4000 US poets? Or what?
 
Careful writing about this field can swell to great length. Modern life has space for fast food or soundbites.
 
12. We did an issue of Angel Exhaust ‘Bizarre Crimes of the Future’, which included A.C. Evans’ poem:

(…)

Now even
        pale angel Aemyrge
                                                   winged

hope far cloudless horizon
where mist rises now
away
oblique opaque strange transit
not planetary motion
not white fire
not cold ocean shoreline
drift lattice stone bird faint tremor
stifle desire may erupt
out to culminate tryste residual
cyclamen petal a wing
last ember
residue
we become un-dead marble mutant


I think this is rather good.  (‘Transit and Culmination’) Ah, those marginals of acid grammar! Lunches of elusive murmur!