Hi Tim,
I missed the programme but have just looked at the interview Jeffrey Side
did with Adrian Henri on the Argotist, in which Henri comments quite
acutely, among other things, on performance and the differences between
writing songs and poems (an old discussion here that soon went sour).
I'd be willing, as ever, 'to go through all this again', well
semi-willing, but I have a feeling that the questions you're asking have
already been steered into a set of binaries - 'the generous and open thing'
and 'the closed and mean thing' - which will make it very hard to discuss
without having to adopt embattled and entrenched positions. I think that's a
shame because, as the interview shows, even late in his life, Henri
maintained a playful openness to poetry, for all his acerbic tones.
Maybe it's that I don't survey the whole scene, as you seem to here, as
being adequately characterised by 'a hatred of anything that broke the
boundaries of the immediately accessible'. Or at least I'd like to know who
we're talking about. The Liverpool poets were all 'immediately accessible',
and I think they wanted to be so, but that in itself may well have been an
anti-elitist stance but not a philistine one. (Of their generation, there
was also Matt Simpson, at that time published in small local presses, who
worked in a different and less popular style that appealed to me more as I
was growing up, and probably still does.)
Perhaps I should watch the programme, at least for some civic nostalgia.
Not just Henri holding court in the Everyman cellar/pizzeria, but a great
sense of possibility in the whole city...
Best,
Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Allen
Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2017 12:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The Liverpool Poets
Hi - I don't suppose anyone wants to go through all this again but watching
the programme about the Liverpool Poets on BBC 4 the other night (which
wasn't too bad) brought back to me all those issues to do with the sociology
of Brit poetry that I have been grappling with since I seriously started to
think about them back in 1993 when I started Terrible Work - the high/low
culture thing, the class thing, the generous and open thing against the
closed and mean thing, the street/academia thing, the Brit/American thing
and heaven help us all - the mainstream/avant thing through which all the
other things twist and knot.
I loved the Liverpool Poets, yes, they were an eye-opener, in just the way
the programme talked about, especially for those such as myself, young
working class interested in poetry. I especially loved Adrian Henri. So what
happened? How did such generosity of spirit and openness to excitement and
experience turn upside-down? At what point did their legacy split into two
such opposed camps. One lot (of which I was definitely one) saw what they
did as a starting point, not an end in itself, took notice of Henri's 'If
you weren't you who would you like to be' and went out to find poetry in all
its different colours. The other lot did the opposite, clung to the
limitations and negatives by turning the healthy anti-establishment stance
into a distrust and finally a hatred of anything that broke the boundaries
of the immediately accessible - a path that led them within a handful of
years straight to the door the actual establishment and their middle class
workshop circuit.
Also putting this out on facebook.
Cheers
Tim=
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