Cris' piece is excellent about the overlapping set of activities in London,
the kind of empirical historicising I've always been drawn to (and
practised on the same subject), even whilst recognising limits to that: I
am reading Alun Munslow's Deconstructing History and it is acutely
arousing my scepticism about a. history IN poetry; b. the history OF
poetry. So I'll respond before I'm aroused.

There's a certain slippage of dates in Cris' account. He speaks of the
years 1978 to the early 80s. This is odd, because at the SubV Coll I
typified these as the years of "entrenchment and awe" (I think) Allen
Fisher mentions: particularly relating that to the end of the Poetry Society
saga, and before a sense of energy I felt building up by 1985.

I believe, with Cobbing's New River Project, for example, energy was
gathering, particularly amongst those of us who were "new. Ther5e
was a feeling that Mottram's King's Readings (where Patricia Farrell first
saw (and hated) me), although the same people turned up, was different
from SubVoicive: a feeling of freedom about the venue (The White
Swan), and also organiser Gilbert Adair's giving the chance to those
writers: Adrian Clarke, Hazel Smith, John Muckle, Peter Middleton, myself,
Gilbert himself, and others. He also loyally kept Lawrence Upton in
visibility with an annual reading. (I'm thinking of the period when SubV
was running alongside King's.

After that SubVoicive became the centre for me, and Floating Capital (as
Cris says) documents that "moment": 1987 seems the median year, or
whatever the statistical phrase is: and the anthology (Potes and Poets
1991) takes Allen Fisher and Bob Cobbing as its mentors, because they
(thru RASP and the WF forum workshops) kept the doors open during
yeaqrzs when it seemed there was little interest in us. These were also
the years of my Phd completion and wonderment at the denial of the
scene (which I there document up until 1977).

John Muckle's inaugeration of the New British Poetry was potentially
important, like C of Chaos a decade later, but the knack with such
anthologies is to keep them in print. With NBP that didn't happen, of
course. But John's behind the scenes evangelism for the "scene" should
be also acknowledged.

(A minor po9int: the "evenings (1990s now) were in Tooting. Tooting


also occurs in Pierre's piece and that should remind us of the relativism
of all of these pronouncements, of course. (My London begins in 1983
(when there was much talk of a London anthology that nevert
happened) and ends in 1997, of course.)

Ira asks of the politics of this thing: little I think beyond to the
perspectives revealed by the fracturing and facturing of language, the
teasing out of the naturalising process, the formal defamilirisations that at
least refuse to MEAN this world. (But I've said all that before).

But my remarks here are about the late eightiesw early 1990s, suppose.
What happened in the 90s is a lot of those evolviing poets wrote their
best work. Still too close to see.

And beyond all this: my early Brighton sense of a radical poetry 1972
onwards...

And I still think Paul Evans' Organisation of Tournies one of the best
books of that decade....


But stop, I'm going even further back.

Robert Sheppard (Aged 42 and 2 weeks)


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