I've been asked a few times to name the names, my ten or so worthy
neglected poets within our own camp or whatever I said....

but am reluctant because that's imposing my preferences on others, exactly
what I complain about re Duncan etc. For any ten I name there's another
twenty I exclude. Also, I always find the recommendation mechanism
difficult because people's responses to reading poetry are so... varied,
unpredictable, mystifying, programmed, etc. I read things that leap off the
page like hyperactive bunnies and other practised poetry-readers read them
and are overwhelmed with stifling boredom.

I'd rather plead for acknowledgement of the principle involved: that the
public Left in poetry as much as the Right sets up canonical hierarchies
and constantly operates to restrict the potential scope by acts of
exclusion and marginalisation. There is this need for there to be a
handful of names at the top. It's always been strong in the academic
lit-crit world but is no weaker among the poetical enragées. In a way it's
a natural personal need for any worker: you have to set your sights, etc.,
but when it becomes collective it gets tricky, it gets fixed.

I see it happening all the time on these wavelengths. Like you join a
e-mail group which offers a fresh and adventurous approach to the scene and
find everybody's dropping the same names all the time, everyone's clutching
the same constellation to their breasts(**) and fending off enemies with
the same clutch of saints' names. And just as Poetry Review journalism has
that intensely irritating habit of dropping surnames of tyro poets from
Huddersfield as globally acknowledged masters of the art... you know,
like--- "Reminiscent of O'Brien at his snappiest..." What O'Brien? we ask.
They know. The in-people know there's only one O'Brien. Well it's just
the same over here. When did someone on these circuits last say "Reminds me
of Mike Haslam"? Or how good it is to remember John Riley's work, or how
some school-leaver is approaching the expertise of David Chaloner... Not
at all, these poets have somehow got lost to us, it seems, with a lot of
others, and a small nexus of names is constantly invoked instead, tending
to represent a more extremist line tho not necessarily. And sometimes I
sense a great discord between the favoroute's name dropped and the argument
being maintained. Denise Riley's name is dropped left right and centre
whenever woman/poetry is abroad as a topic, sometimes in support of notions
which I know perfectly well she herself would abhor (she has for instance
spoken strongly against positive discrimination) (and about distrusting
male poets who are obsessively concerned about women's poetry.... ) (that's
by the way.)

        You really can't blame anthologisers of the left (or Other) for
maintaining this habit because they have to, their programmes are addressed
at a world (mainly the literature education world) which lives and breathes
hierarchies, canons, schools, major and minor figures, etc., and can't
understand a thing without them. Nor is it unexpected that extremists
should be the ones mainly elected to these positions because then the
"alternative" mirror image of text-book history makes sense.

        What seems to be going on is that a new set of "great
experimenters" is being energetically promoted on the left mainly to feed
an educational market which accepts the schoolbook line of great
('modernist') experimenters of the past without (much) question and can
thus hopefully be inveigled to cross a fence or two (students are
notoriously willing to accept the difficulty of people like Eliot while
refusing to have anything to do with the difficulty of poets who are still
upright).(Much as the difficulty of Celan troubles Poetry Review poeple not
at all, presumably because he's published by Penguin).(That also is aside).


        In real life it may not be like that. Some of us, for instance,
without considering that we have gone reactionary in middle-age, consider
that most of the "great experimenters" of this century (Joyce, Pound,
Stein, Olson, Zukofsky, Burroughs, Stockhausen, Cage, Picasso, Duchamp....)
led their own work into horrific barren wastelands which do nothing but
threaten current creative enterprise with death. I mean who can honestly
stand up and say that Finnegans Wake means more to him/her as a
life-guiding revealer, than The Honorary Consul? Such persons need to be
gently shewn the door and given a dummy dipped in moonshine.

        More importantly, I just want to say that there is a terrific
variety of poetical writing going on and for the most part we have no
programme to tell us what's worth it, we have to find out individually. The
very purpose of programmes is to exclude and delimit. To refer to Denise
Riley again, when she judged that poetry competition for STAND last year in
which she and Ken Smith were totally unable to agree on a single merit, she
awarded her prizes to three poets who belong not to Right nor to Left nor
to Centre, but were just writing in modes picked up and modified from
somewhere, to which the whole coercive orientation doesn't mean a thing.
Perhaps we'll never hear from any of them again, so what.

        But here is a list of names, of poets I myself do turn to, get off
the shelf and read again when I want to be reminded of ways of doing it,
and who, judging from the mention-rate in B-Poets discussion since I joined
it, plus the ease with which people get published or not, plus the
excitement-register as I generally perceive it in my comings and goings as
poetical bookseller and person----- are not neglected so much as completely
forgotten by the poetical left, and (a few anthology appearances etc.
notwithstanding) really wiped off the register if they were ever on it---

R.F.Langley, John Temple, Gill Vickers, Anthony Barnett, David Chaloner,
Tom Lowenstein, Peter Bland, Brian Marley, Nigel Wheale, Peter Baker,
Michael Haslam, Mark Hyatt, Tony Baker, Ralph Hawkins, John Seed, Peter
Hughes, Ian Davidson... and so on.




//PR


NB The phrase marked (**) is copyright and is being entered for the Mixed
Metaphor of the Year Competition. I'd like to add that the anthology A
State of Independence edited by Tony Frazer, more than any recent
publication redresses a lot of the imbalance I'm talking about. And that
there is only one woman's name on my list because, in fact, womens' work
has tended to be favoured and prioritized in the zones in which I have
operated. And also that some writers on the list have stopped writing or
even died, which is no reason for their being treated as if they never
wrote or breathed at all. I wasn't sure whether to add John Riley and
Andrew Crozier to the list. And also that the whole list and the whole
baloney just shows what narrow circles I have moved in and my own
ignorance, really, of what might be going on.




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