Dear List,

My imagination was much exercised by Doug Oliver's two communications
of 17 and 18 Nov.  He makes, if I understand aright, two points: first
that any Andrew Duncan / Eric Mottram antipathy is invalid at a
critical level because it is based on prejudices concerning Cambridge
and London.  Secondly, that it is valid, because certain poets - 
unlike certain others - have failed to react to the Thatcherist era.

Here indeed is material for a thesis or two.  Firstly, Mottram was 
educated at Cambridge, of course, and never in my experience showed
any morbid attachment to London, which he settled in for the first 
time in 1960 at the age of 35. Secondly, as Ric pointed out, those
treated in the Andrew Duncan article are not necessarily London based 
in any sense including perhaps myself.  Thirdly, the London-Cambridge 
dichotomy is in some sense a special promotion of Andrew Duncan's as 
when he adorned a cover of 'Angel Exhuast' magazine with his 
blood-stained Royston perimeter concept.  Fourthly, I have never in 
word, deed or even idea, as far as I am aware, breathed, written or 
caused to have written a word of criticism in any unkind sense 
against any Cambridge poet, and certainly not because they are 
Cambridge - and am puzzled therefore to find myself being cast as a 
supernumerary in someone else's fantasy, one with a decidedly 
G.K.Chesterton twinge and Notting Hill base.  

Enough on that score.  Under the second general heading of 
Thatcherism, I query that there is a post-Thatcherist era at all.  
We are still living, as far as my observation goes, with all the
unpleasant assumptions of the Mother Goddess:
That is, a sort of chaoticist and pseudo-Darwinian individualism 
and competitiveness that denies any assessment apart from a material one.  
The idea that poets fail to react to this is incredible - we cannot 
help but know that our lives and productions are shaped necessarily 
by and in such a context, if we live in this country.  But perhaps 
what is meant is that we have not made the correct reaction....

Yet when we look in Andrew Duncan's critical writings for evidence
of this better path, we tend to find emphasis placed on 1968 as a 
watershed.  In his essay on Bob Cobbing, after pages of megalosauric 
destructiveness, we are presented with a positive assessment: poetry 
could be either a sort of Freudian confession or part of the process 
of 'genius' - that god-touched status claim of the Romantic era.  
Anything post-Thatcherist here yet?

Less I be condemned with the same negative brush, let me say I do
have a positive view of the arts: simply, that the human is infinite,
and can be the source of any amount of new ideas, new environments,
new concepts of what the human can be and experience.  I am not keen 
on using historical jargon or critical writing or verse itself, to 
limit what a human might be or demonstrate what a human should be.  I 
find it hard to empathise with those who are trying to stop 
new writing going ahead and discredit any experimenting.  History, of 
course, can be used to create just such limiting concepts....

In Andrew Duncan's article on Mottram, the one promoted on the 
internet in 1966 as a strange kind of tribute, the spectre of 
'determinism' is raised. Though I never heard Mottram himself confuse 
the course of events or even the direction of time with any idea of 
inevitability or progress.  Yet having firstly asserted that The 
Poetry Society, before its encounter with Mottram, was 'being run by 
people who rejected all poetry since Tennyson', something that might 
place the new broom in a favourable modernistic light, Duncan goes on
to airbrush Mottram & Co out of the picture altogether: 'this 
self-exile wrote a whole generation out of history, and meant that its
influence on the British poetry emerging over the next two decades 
would be nil.'  

Alright, there is a certain breath-taking arrogance in such concepts
of nihilistic generalisation, but what of the facts? There was no 
Tennysonian block on The Poetry Society's council, it was as up to 
date as any other limb of the Establishment in the early 1970s - 
though opposition to Mottram from one or two individuals was 
expressed in practical terms long before Mottram is supposed to have 
antagonised the Arts Council into action; and the exile was in no 
sense 'self-exile'. Of course, people can always be made to resign - 
we would like to know more about the circumstances in which Adrian 
Clarke left 'Angel Exhaust' for example - but the consequences were 
not those Duncan envisaged.  With the shaking of the democratic 
structure of The Poetry Society, subsidies for poetry readings fell, 
and have never been adequately reinstated.  The loss of premises at 
Earls Court was another long-term consequence, when The Poetry Society
sold up and moved on, with considerable loss of opportunity for
international, cross-media and cross-cultural activity.  The 
printing facilities so praised by cris cheek were taken away and 
opportunities for experiments in publishing for new writers limited 
once more. A disaster scenario in almost every way except that 
claimed by Andrew Duncan.  For the poets of the time continued to be 
published and read - like Allen Fisher, who chaired the Events 
Committee of The Poetry Society, as I recall - and far from feeling 
obliterated many of us continue to live, write and even receive some 
appreciation.  There has been no inevitable historical eclipse of the 
kind Duncan imagines. It is just odd wishful thinking. Indeed, far
from applying it to Mottram, I think determinism could be used 
of the position where you insist that facts don’t matter because they 
don’t fit your view of the proper line of history.

If post-Thatcherist phenomena are to be sought, perhaps they lie in 
the construction of a critical theory on a basis of personal abuse, 
in the knowledge that the victim is unlikely to be able to make any 
defence at law. I remain unhappy, both on my own behalf and on that of 
others, that credibility is being given to such bases of criticism, 
and support being marshalled for what is in some cases the disregard 
or setting aside of fact.

Tim Fletcher of 'First Offence' has recently written to original 
objectors and to subscribers to the magazine, setting out my 
correction of fact with the rider 'If this be true'.  This is
far from the simple corrigendum I called for many weeks ago,
and that was so brusqely refused.  But perhaps it is a teeny step 
on the path to accuracy.


bill
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