and here is part 2:


EM:	Let's get the tensions straight.  Youre saying that some of them were
class tensions.  Any others?

BM:	I think there were intellectual tensions as well.  John James, Nick
Waite and Peter Armstrong were really into things like Mayakovsky, Realism,
yer actual
Norris Ken from Somerset and drinking cider, going out shooting and doing
lots of manly rural things, as well as being in the urban environment.
Whereas the rest were enclosed in intellectual quadrangles, and I think,
they - the university people - thought this is a bit brash, a bit much.  It
was very difficult for me, because I knew them all and I liked them all as
friends; that’s what also created a lot of the tension for me.

EM:	Out of the Sparty Lea days, though, there was something more productive
than quarrels.  There was in fact a good deal of writing done, and a good
deal of
reading, which was taped.

BM:	Yes, that's right.  The timetable of people gettiMng up and goig to bed
was completely haywire; it was none of this going to bed at midnight arid
getting up at 7.  People
were crashing at 7 in the morning and getting up at 5 in the afternoon, and
all night there would be discussions; people were writing poems; they were
obviously getting ideas and energy off other people; people were writing
poems and then reading them immediately; they weren't going through the long
process of editing or anything, they were reading them spontaneously as they
had been written.  There were many hours of tapes from that whole ten-day
period, but the really productive thing was that it really did bring a
fairly big majority of the young English poets together.  OK, there were a
lot of hassles at first, there was a lot of hostility, but once you got out
of that enclosed situation -after all, remember, you are in the middle of
the fells and ~ nowhere to go except to the pub - everybody went away, and
all of a sudden things changed completely.  You could see a massive shift.
Ferry Press, Andrew Crozier's press, would not have published John James and
Peter Riley unless they'd been together at Sparty Lea, I think.  People like
Crozier and Prynne were included in John James's magazine and Kick Waite's
magazine, which would never have happened before.  There was physical
hostility, which I think was environment as well as the other things I
mentioned, plus there was nothing to do but drink.  You talk about rednecks
getting raunchy out in the country; it was just like that -you know: can't
beat Jeremy Prynne - lets go and fuck a chicken.  But that was great,
because Ferry Press got together - they published John James which would
never have happened; there was all sorts of connections made up t1:ere; and
all sorts of close friendships underneath the outside hostility.  It was a
really good period.  If it'd only been a weekend, it would have been a
complete flop.  It was the fact that people were entrenched in the
situation.  It ended up with people doing o6mmunal things like building dams
in the river to help the flow of the water, making collections of sheep'
skulls, sheeps' bones, lumps of quartz - everybody working together.  People
were chopping wood together, walking the 5 miles to the shop together.

EM:	Now did it change your work, personally?  Can you identify now ways in
which formal procedures in your work were influenced, specifically by what
you heard then?
Can you remember anything like that?

BM:	Definitely.  There's a section of poems in the MUTUAL SCARLET BOULEVARD
called Sparty Lea Poems.  I wrote the last of the "Nap" series up there.
There's another
S or 6 poems after that, including "Letters to Vivienne", "Borsik, the Naked
Prince", fairly long poems, where you can see a general severe move away
from that early erotic


EN:	How were you energised - by what he said?

BM:	By what he said and his way of saying it, as well.  I'd never heard
about "project] verse" before - for me it was like flinging language out
beyond the self... not
using sentences, breaking up, working with the breath, which ~ never
realised; my early poems are just complete and bad imitations of an echo I'd
caught from Carlos Williams they really are bad little lyrical-erotic stuff.

EK:	So you knew Williams' work at that stage?

BM:	I knew that via Ed Dorn's stepson, who showed me Zukofsky and Williams
and Levertov; I met him in Colchester, because I'd met Born in Colchester
when I vas at Harlow.
It really did have an effect on me.  Some of the things had a bad effect on
me - again you've got to take into account the social thing.  I was very
much in awe of people like Jeremy Prynne and Andrew Crazier because they had
very powerful academic intellects.

EN:	You mean they knew more than you did?

BM:	That, plus the fact that they had been in contact with Olson, and Prynne
had a direct link with Olson for quite a few years.  So I was getting to
some extent
first-hand information, and that is under any circumstances powerful.  I was
obviously in a very formative period when it came to my writing - I mean I
could have gone anywhere. I knew one thing: that I didn't like what the
Liverpool poets were doing.  I knew that was just too light for me.  I was
too much embedded in tthe land, the environment, the politics, from my kind
of baokground in Newcastle, and in the artistic intellectual activity that
was going on at the Mordern Tower, to be drawn by that.  I don't think
because I wanted to hear what Jeremy Prynne had said that I took notice of
it, that I had any kind of Jude the Obscure aspirations.  I don't think that
was it.  I wanted to learn about language, and I was willing to listen to
anybody.  I was 17 and I was learning.  You can imagine the difference
between that, and having first heard Ginsberg, Corso and Perlinghetti read."



________________________________________________________________
Pierre Joris			The postmodern is the condition of those
6 Madison Place		things not equal to themselves, the wan-
Albany NY 12202		dering or nomadic null set (0={x:x not-equal x}).
Tel:  (518) 426-0433
Fax: (518) 426-3722					Alan Sondheim
Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Url: <http://www.albany.edu/~joris>
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