cris -- excellent, I think description of "this London school thing."
& as you kindly mention me I wanted to add my two pees, toupees,
tipis, whatever. When I arrived from New York in late 1970, there was if
not a sense of a "London school," at least a sense of a London poetry
community, in fact a very strong art/poetry avant-garde scene that I see
as an ur-thing on which the later 70s built. The two slightly elder
(than me) poetas who had just left or were roaming abroad were Tom
Raworth & Lee Harwood -- and there was clearly a sense of something
"native" to London in the air, a scene, maybe on the wane at that
moment, that had included those two, but also the likes of Nathaniel
Tarn & Anselm Hollo, who had just moved to the States, Bill Butler, Asa
Benveniste, Stuart Montgomery, etc. Mottram was still in vicarage gate,
but already a hub. Cobbing too. Claude Pelieu & Mary Beach moved into a
flat I found for them in the building I lived then, & Burroughs would be
over for dinner once a week or so. So would Miles. (There were all those
very active remains of the sixties underground scene, including Trocchi
& Nuttall & moult others -- & there were other traces of even older
avant-garde writing scenes, such as Gaberbocchus -- wait, that's
mispelled -- & the Themersons). ((There was also already then a strong
difference between London & Cambridge -- because of US Olsonite
connections, I knew of Prynne & went up to visit & talk & met a number
of others up there, & the difference was obvious & in the air)).
My own first sense of the first stirrings of what we now call the LS
had to do with meeting, or rather being contacted by Opal L. Nations,
who sent over the then inseperable couple, Dick Miller & Allen Fisher
who on that first occasion dragged me to a famous ancient pub under
Waterloo station which disappeared a few months later -- this must have
been in late 1972 or early 1973. ((& oddly enough, Miller called two
days ago, will be coming through & hang out Monday, here in Albany)).
Opal's Strange Faeces Press & Allen & Dick's Edible / Aloes presses were
beginning to churn things out.
I started SIXPACK in early '72 -- the first issue has mainly
americans, a few French, a couple Germans, the usual lone Luxembourger,
and Jeff Nuttall as the one Englisher. #2, which came out in august '72
had a similar international/ beat set but also included, besides
Nuttall, Allen Fisher, Dick Miller, Eric Mottram & Bill Butler. #3,
spring '73, added from the new London scene, the just-arrived Bill
Griffiths plus Doug Lang & Bill Sherman, as well as Peter Finch from
Cardiff. From 73 to 76, after I'd settled in Tooting, there would be
nearly weekly open readings/ gatherings at my house, where all the above
plus moult US visitors, such as Ken Irby, Clayton Eshleman, Jackson Mac
Low wld be coming through. So that's, in a way, my memory of those early
days. Other events would of course include Berrigan & Notley coming
through in 73 & spending a year at Essex, Dorn often in London, & then
the Famous Polytechnic poetry conferences.
An essential hub — whose importance cannot be overstated — of those
early years was the poetry section at Compendium Books, as curated by
Nick Kimberley — it was simply the best poetry section anyplace, better,
for example, then the eighth street bookshop in NY at that time, or
Grolier's in Cambridge, Mass, or even, I wld venture, City Lights in San
Francisco.
Impossible to quickly sum up the poetics -- cris' message has much
of it. To me the most exciting element was the heterogeneity of the
thing: there was no one line, no one possible right way (& that may be
the main difference with Cambridge, at least in my sense of things, as
in relation to the latter place I always felt a certain tense belief
that there was one way to cook the poem right and only one -- well, not
really true either, thinking now of John James work -- but it felt
certainly like a much less open scene)). London at that time -- & more
so than Paris or New York where I had lived before coming to England
-- was a bright permission to explore without being limited by a
"school"-thing -- so that Allen Fisher & I could talk nights away about
Olsonian concerns with place that may wind up with walking Blake's South
London, or argue all evening with Mottram re Robert Kelly's alchemical
poetics, & then Allen could go and do a fluxshoe conceptual performance
& I could enjoy that before going back to reading Heidegger & working
out the hermeneutics & poetics of Paul Celan, and discuss the latest
frog-thinkings & -droppings with Paul Buck, before rushing to hear
Cobbing or Chopin, then back to translate Kerouac & other beats into
French before Mac Low showed up & we'd talk procedure vs. process all
day, while already looking forward to Berrigan telling me about the
cheap tricks you can learn from Auden or picking up the latest
ALCHERINGA from Nick to see what Rothenberg & the ethnopoetics gang had
been up to.
Well, at least that's a micro-version of as seen through my own eyes
-- one set of eyes busy doing their doing between tooting & chalk farm
those early years 70-75. Obviously I'm missing a lot of hits from those
early days, both in London and on forays beyond, such as leaving London
for the weekend to visit Somerset & make books with Carolee Schneeman &
Felipe Ehrenberg & others, or going down to Brighton to have a US
Thanksgiving with Lee Harwood, & thinking about that reminds me that
there's much turkey left in the fridge from 2 days ago & it's lunchtime
here, so
abrazos,
Pierre
--
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pierre joris 6 madison place albany ny 12202
tel/fax (518) 426 0433 email:[log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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Adding music to a good poem is like using a stained-glass
window to light a painted picture. — Paul Valéry
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