I agree by & large with Peter's overview but it's worth remembering that
in terms of commercial & non-commercial publishing there were non-
mainstream presses in the 30s & 40s & Fortune Press in particular was
very active - with a very mixed list, including some vanity publishing,
but nevertheless including much of the New Apocalypse poetry which
certainly lay outside the (mainstream?) Auden/MacNeice axis. (The
important exception being Dylan Thomas who always had a mainstream
commercial publisher.) Maybe the short-livedness of that particular
style created the apparent void which prompted David's original
question. The well-documented slump in poetry sales at the end of the
forties (after the boom-years of the war) saw off Fortune as a highly
active publisher and I suppose most of the smaller ones too, and it's
interesting to speculate that it also saw off the end of that
characteristically forties style. Christopher Middleton is a case in
point: his first two books from Fortune are 'forties poetry' right down
the line. He was writing a quite different poetry when he started
publishing again at the end of the fifties. Peter Russell, who also
started publishing (pseudonymously) with Fortune, filled some of the
early-fifties void, by the way, with his magazine Nine & associated
publications; very Pound-influenced but I think more or less unique for
that period in England. But I think what we now understand as small-
press publishing didn't really get off the ground here until the sixties
& was much encouraged by the American model, which again raises the
question how much the mode of publishing & the work published go hand in
hand. Gael Turnbull's Migrant was certainly the pioneer. To answer was
it David B's question I've seen work of Gael's from the early-mid
fifties, foolscap mimeos to accompany readings etc - in North America,
of course.

Now I'm going to close my computer & pack my bags & books & hope to see
some of you at the Corless-Smith/Bolton reading at SubVoicive tomorrow
night. Back Thursday, by which time I hope somebody will have identified
my mystery sentence & claimed that bottle of wine.

All best, A

In message <v01530501b57cf39ff5da@[194.112.56.19]>, Peter Riley
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>I think it's quite impossible to think in terms of mainstream and
>non-mainstream before the 1960s. There were poets who were neglected and
>sometimes this was because they connected to (mainly continental)
>"modernism"  and sometimes it was because they wrote perfectly ordinary
>good poetry which for some reason nobody wanted, and sometimes it was
>because they were absolutely terrible. Some of the most radical poets such
>as David Jones and Lynette Roberts, were published, from their first books,
>by Faber.  In fact if anything the upsurgence in the 1950s, the rebellious
>youth, came from the direction of Larkin, the Movement, all that stuff,
>which at first appeared from small presses.  This was what broke with
>tradition, because the tradition was at the time liberal and prepared to
>read poetry within the whole inheritance of "modern art", which Larkin
>hated.
>
>There were quite a lot more poets of a more-or-less radical tendency in
>45-60 and earlier who remained unknown, not, usually, because they were
>radical, but because they were extremist with it, or because they were too
>young to have established their careers before all the publicity attached
>to the Movement shoved their kind of writing out of sight, (like Burns
>Singer perhaps) or  for completely mysterious reasons.
>
>I think someone like Rosemary Tonks wrote a poetry which would have gained
>a response if the reading traditions of the 1940s which welcomed early
>Dylan Thomas had continued, but by the time she was publishing (1960s)
>people were asking different questions. Well they were mainly asking the
>same question over and over again ---- "but what does it MEAN?"----  and
>she got a lot of critical attack, and vanished.   I think that period,
>45-60 was a transitional episode which established a big divisiveness,
>which later deepened and eventually became a widespread splintering.  In
>spite of many differences there was a sense before the 60s, that there was
>room for a  great variety of writing within the central zone of poetry.
>
>There's a short anonymous piece in Parataxis No.4 (1993) called "Lost
>Precursors" which lists seventeen poets, mostly from before 45-60 but many
>of them would have  continued writing through it.  (The article seems to
>contain a number of mis-prints which garble some of the statements and
>names).
>
>/PR
>
>

-- 
Alan Halsey


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