Dear Robin,

Many thanks for bringing Hobsbaum more into focus. The linking of the poetry collections to the different phases of his career was very helpful.


Robert

-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robin Hamilton
Sent: 19 December 2013 12:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Fwd: In fairness

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

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-----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