Philip Hobsbaum ...  Oh, well, here goes nothing.

The three groupings, only the first of which was formally called The Group 
(and which was nothing whatsoever like the [later] Movement) with which 
Philip Hobsbaum was involved were quite distinct.

As an undergraduate at Cambridge and a pupil of F.R.Leavis, he was part of a 
set of writers who included Peter Redgrove (who I think Philip was 
personally closest to), Peter Porter, David Wevill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath 
... the list goes on.  A subset of the writers, who probably more than 
anything else happened to be at the same place at the same time sort-of 
cohered (around Edward Lucie-Smith as well as Hobsbaum) as the Group, and 
the methodology which Jamie drew attention to in an earlier post, 
essentially a self-selecting group of writers coming together to pay 
sustained attention to each others' work.

The Group methodology was carried on by Lucie-Smith in London and Hobsbaum 
in Belfast where again there seems to have been an unusually large 
conglomeration of writers in the same place at the same time.  My own 
feeling would be that it was more the general interests of the writers 
involved rather than Philip's own predisposition which formed the character 
of the association.

Part of Philip's destiny seems to have been that he was so often mentor to 
writers better than himself.

He arrived at Glasgow in 1966, as the first appointee of Peter Butter, who 
had been his professor at Belfast before he moved to Glasgow, drawing Philip 
in his wake.  The first Glasgow group was already in existence when Philip 
arrived, mostly composed of undergraduates who had arrived at Glasgow 
University in 1965, and cohered around a magazine called _NiK_  When Philip 
arrived in 1966, the NiK writers would meet at his flat.  The major text 
which emerged from this first Glasgow group was Tom Leonard's "Six Glasgow 
Poems".  When Tom read it out at Philip's flat, Philip promptly dragged out 
a reel-to-reel tape recorder (state of the electronic art at the time) and 
insisted that Tom record the poem immediately in case he was run over by a 
bus on the way home.

This group(ing) mostly broke up in 1969 when virtually everyone graduated at 
the same time and dispersed.  The Group was reformed in (I think) 1971, much 
more diverse than the earlier one and drawing heavily on writers whom Philip 
had encountered in the course of running an adult education class in 
creative writing.  These included Liz Lochead and Jim Kelman, and that 
second group also drew in Anne Stevenson, Alasdair Gray (chapters from 
_Lanark_ were discussed, years before the novel appeared in its full form), 
and Angus Nicolson's _Rock and Water_, as well as the various texts 
mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

Philip's own collections of poetry reflected these situations -- _Coming Out 
Fighting_ drew on the Belfast years, while _Women and Animals_ is Glasgow. 
Extrapolating backwards, _The Place's Fault_ would be Cambridge.  The next 
collection was to be a sequence of long poems, _The Day's Disasters_, but I 
think only one of this sequence ever appeared, "Lear's Shadow", which if 
memory serves was read on the Third Program ...

To partially answer Peter's query:

"I myself might begin to see him as something other than
a capable social scientist who should have steered clear of poetry, if
I were offered some account of what his beliefs specifically about
poetry were. A lot of the resentment here is about scale, I think,
that Hobsbawm's insistence was not so much on a particular style, as
on keeping poetry small-scale (social/personal)."

Philip felt strongly that the central line of English poetry *should* have 
run from Jonson to Hardy.  Whether this would have made him sympathetic to 
the Movement is perhaps open to doubt.

It may be an index of his response to poetry that two writers whom he 
(unsuccessfully) championed were D.M.Black and Francis Berry, neither of 
whom were or are conspicuously small-scale.

There's more to be said -- including, god help us, an ongoing struggle 
against various forms of censorship -- mostly by the actual printers of 
magazines and books rather than any editorial control.  The shenanigans 
around the initial printing of Tom Leonard's "Six Glasgow Poems" were 
positively baroque, and Jim Kelman's first story to be printed in England 
(he'd already had work published in America) only appeared after the 
magazine in which it was to be included, _Yorick_ of York, finally managed 
to find a sympathetic printer.

There's probably more to be said -- the place of Concrete Poetry in all 
this, and the presence of Edwin Morgan at Glasgow University at the same 
time that Philip was there.  Kenneth White (who was teaching in the 
Philosophy Department) didn't quite overlap with Philip as he left for 
France the year before Philip arrived.  And the least said about Alexander 
Scott, the better ,...

Oh yes, there's a transcript of one of the Cambridge Group Meetings as one 
of the chapters on Philip's first critical work, _A Theory of 
Communication_, to show what actually happened then and there.

Robin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message----- 
From: Peter Riley
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2013 10:18 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fwd: In fairness

We are rather old to be doing this, all of us. I have noticed that
young British poets these days are increasingly willing to site
themselves neither here nor there, not to join in any hostilities, but
to view the entire ensemble as a possible field of action. The reason
we cannot do this is that however much we are willing to tolerate,
however liberal, we are still talking about the same dozen poets we
have always talked about and what they chose to write in itself
divides us. What Prynne and Heaney wrote in itself proposes inimical
and absolutely unreconcilable responses. We can pride ourselves in
"enjoying" both but the antagonism is there, in the poetry and in the
beliefs. There are a lot more poets even of the same generation, who
were more independent or less aggressive, but we stick with our heroes.

In this talk about Hobsbawm there is no definition offered,--  if he
pushed a certain line in poetry, exactly what it was, or what were at
least the broad principles of it. If that emerged we could begin to
talk about it. I myself might begin to see him as something other than
a capable social scientist who should have steered clear of poetry, if
I were offered some account of what his beliefs specifically about
poetry were. A lot of the resentment here is about scale, I think,
that Hobsbawm's insistence was not so much on a particular style, as
on keeping poetry small-scale (social/personal).

But it does not necessarily matter if we do not see eye to eye. We
don't have to, the field of poetry is not one which demands
quiescence, it is much happier seeing some action. We can keep our
heroes because they are personal. Sean's career and opinions, for
instance,  the whole story of them, constitute a phenomenon of late
20th Century poetry which can't be got rid of by mere disagreement.

As for ad hominem, we have seen nothing like the viciousness with
which this has been pursued on the past, such as D. Holbrooke on
Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas on whom he went to the trouble of
writing two books of personal attack (infantile, masturbatory,
neurotic etc.) or the attack on Keats (I think the word 'onanistic'
was preferred). But never in my long life have I seen any suggestion
that "beady-eyed" is anti-Semitic, it is a perfectly common English
term, about as anti-Semitic as "size 12 shoes" or "lives in Salford".
Although the general principle holds, it has to be admitted that there
is, in my experience anyway, some correlation between bad poetry and
unethical behaviour which we are sometimes entitled to point out,
without making it into a formula.

pr