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Letter to Sao Paulo, Autumn 2006

Dear Virna

I'm writing this on a Sunday afternoon in early autumn on my way up to Edinburgh from my home in London. It’s about a five hour journey, a little more today because Sundays are “Engineering Works Days” in the UK: there’s a promise of slowness and a major diversion from the East coast to the West and back again.

I'm travelling up to do a little research at the National Library of Scotland. My study topic is the international magazine Migrant, which only ran for a couple of years, from 1959 to 1960, but published some fascinating American, Scottish, and English poets, and arguably had a significant effect on the more experimental writing of the 60s and 70s in Britain. The Migrant authors included Americans Robert Creeley, Cid Corman and Charles Olson, Scots Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the English poets Charles Tomlinson and Roy Fisher. Perhaps modern British poetry isn't very well known outside the British Isles. I'm working on an exhibition at the British Library to showcase some of the Migrant poets and display some of the more visually based books they made with artists in the years after Migrant.

The classic English authors of this time, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, have an international reputation but the poets of the 50s and 60s who were their contemporaries (not to mention the younger poets who have emerged since) are not, I think, so well known, even within the United Kingdom. The exhibition will try to help correct that.

Personally, I like a range of poetries, the avant-garde or experimental, as well as poetry which is more traditional, song-like even, and this is an attitude close to the editorial policy of Migrant. I knew one of the editors, the poet Gael Turnbull, in the last seven or eight years of his life (he died only a couple of years ago) so the exhibition has a personal motivation as well as an information-sharing imperative: in a small way, it will be carrying on the work of Migrant by showing what the magazine did, and illustrating its influence on fascinating writers who have emerged since. It will also being paying tribute to Gael who, on his own trips back up to Edinburgh, where he had made his home, would stop off at the Library for an hour or so and share with me the "blather" as he'd put it (chatter or “blether”) about new poems and the poetry gossip of the day.

Ian Hamilton Finlay is a very good example of the effect Migrant had on authors. Inspired by the magazine, this Scottish minimalist forged links to the Black Mountain and Objectivist avant-garde in America, and soon after launched his own magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (like Migrant it’s in my top twenty of great British poetry magazines of the last hundred years). A sister imprint, The Wild Hawthorn Press, also appeared under Finlay's editorship, publishing, for example, the American Lorine Niedeker and a parallel text edition of the poem Cidade by Augusto de Campos. Finlay developed a much greater internationalism - especially in his connection with Brazil and concrete poetry - and honed a minimalist aesthetic grounded in linguistic play and the visual arts, an area with which Turnbull was not especially concerned until much later in his life. Some of the last poems Turnbull wrote were actually part of 3-D structures, examples of which actually moved, "kinetic poems" as he called them (there will be an exhibition of these at the Stanza Festival next year in the university town of St Andrew’s, eastern Scotland).

It's autumn, but I'm glancing at a newspaper headline further down the carriage which declares, "Plants blossom again: nature and biologists confused." In a way this upsidedown weather is hardly news: since mid-summer our chestnut trees have been looking distinctly autumnal, stricken with a disease that has singed their leaves, a condition that the normally plentiful British rain, not managing to materialise in any quantity this year or last, has failed to assuage.

We have had such mild weather for so long the flowers and trees aren't the only ones who don’t know if they're coming or going. Hedgehogs, the animals which are our smaller prickly versions of an armadillo, typically produce only one litter a year. This year hedgehogs have typically given birth to not one, not two, but three litters. The warmer weather has tricked them and you can only hope winter, when it finally comes, will not deliver a chilling surprise to the young.

London has been on a drought warning for months, but occasional showers have never let us feel we are as close to the bottom of the collective well as in fact we are. Londoners are uneasy, yes, and the gardens and allotments that mean so much to us have been undernourished and underproductive. Perhaps some shock 'Environmental poetry' rather than "Nature poetry" would really stir us though. We do have some fine contemporary ‘Nature poets’, Alice Oswald, say, author of Woods etc (Faber, 2005) and Robin Fulton (author of Coming Down To Earth) but only the poetry of Rob Mackenzie, who is an environmental scientist at Lancaster University, springs immediately to mind as beginning to answer this particular challenge (I published some of these environmental poems in a recent issue of Painted, spoken; he is also notable for using English with a scattering of Gaelic and Scots).

It is not only the weather that is so unsettled. At Parliament the politicians of the three main parties seem either out of step with their usual electorate or with their party members, or with both. Yet the parties are remarkably similar to each other in most of their policies: this should reflect agreement across the country but to me the political consensus feels rather artificial, weighing down, rather than lifting up. Age of Terrorism gloom and jumpyness is part of this: the Parliamentary Left and Right appear very close to each other in civil policy, a civil policy where individual rights have been curtailed.

Perhaps I am out of step with the wider population (polls suggest there is popular support for heavyhanded measures), but it feels to me as if we are living in a climate of solidifying over-reaction. The dystopian film by Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men, has been showing recently: its paranoid vision of a future England that demonises immigrants while militarising its policeforce is, despite my fears, some distance from what the country is like today, but this is also the country where, as your readers will especially know, an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was killed by our security forces. In all this time (well over a year) no-one yet has faced trial. Worse, one of the officers involved has actually been promoted, to lead a section of the police dedicated to preventing Gun Crime.

There are political and non-political traditions in British poetry, and you might well ask where the political tradition has gone in current times. I was thinking this as I was listening in a small art gallery a week or so ago to the veteran American Language poet Leslie Scalapino. Scalapino, on a brief visit to England, was reading a remarkable text that uses images of disaster in Iraq and New Orleans in an oblique series of soundscapes. I suppose this might make it all sound a little precious and self-indulgent, but, if it isn't a little cheap to use a genre term such as "War Poetry", this was War Poetry of an ashamed, angry, and disturbingly beautiful kind.

I am not an overtly political poet myself. I don't have the sensibility for reacting quickly and effectively to political events, even (or especially) those that I find particularly upsetting or disgraceful. But I saw in Scalapino's oblique, pulsing text, one way of representing horrific news stories without wholly adopting the corrosive aesthetics of news presentation itself. Reading recently the latest sequence by England's best-known modernist poet J. H. Prynne, To Pollen (Barque, London), a book which also has highly refracted imagery, and again also appears to be based on incidents in Iraq, I can see that Scalapino and Prynne represent two extremely sophisticated responses in opposition to the war (of course, I have yet to read poems in support of it).

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is reported to have said that the poet is not a civil servant to the state, but I am sure that he didn't mean there should be no political poetry. I think we do need it, but it may have political messages that are too complex, or too uncomfortable, to sit well within the constraints of current party politics. Tom Leonard’s new book Being A Human Being and other poems (Object Permanence), is certainly direct in its anger against the political and media menace but it uses lean, probing registers to bring some forms of discourse up against their own 'translation' ("statehood is right to arms / statehood is control of the air"). And now I'm thinking of another poet, the late Douglas Oliver, who, instead of choosing an avant-garde approach mastered intricate formal techniques based on English Medieval poetry to dramatise political engagment. In Kind (1987) and Penniless Politics (1991; new edition 1994) he addresses the issues of globalisation and various kinds of corporate self-interest with astonishing formal facility. In his “The Infant and the Pearl” he speaks of the Houses of Parliament as a place where “glassy surfaces gleamed with fragmentary / mirrorings of all the MPs, as we peered / at a cliff-like façade like a stacked factory / for industrial ice whose cubes reared / up winking in the sun from an unseen clerestory.”

Well, this journey has been more clunky than streamlined and at times as cold as that icehouse – there is not much formal facility, trainswise, on an Engineering Works Sunday! But finally that's the train reached Edinburgh. It's time to click shut my laptop and meet the friends I'll stay with over the next few days. I hope to write about more recent British poetry in my next letter. In the meantime I raise a metaphoric glass to you with some sadly metaphoric malt whisky, a mild one, Auchintoshan, say. Slainte! – until the time that we might share a real glass of the real thing.

Richard










   
 
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