ON JEREMY REED’S ‘COLLUSIVE STRANGERS’

By David Hackbridge Johnson

(Please scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘older posts’ to find articles on Andrew Duncan, Denis ApIvor, Jerome Rothenberg, Avrohom Leichtling, Frances Cornford, Iain Sinclair, Javier Marías, John Gawsworth, and many more)




Poet, novelist, flâneur of London, of Paris, of minds stretched to breaking point in hostile cityscapes and underground dives, Jeremy Reed, is now in his sixth decade of writing.  The word is out the his renegade status is to be renewed with the publication of a selection of new verse, Collusive Strangers, published by Shearsman, with an excellent introduction by the editor, Grevel Lindop.  Reed has a season ticket as poète maudit of Soho backwaters – his initial poetic vision, passed via a cup from which Blake and Rimbaud supped in equal measure, has helped sustain a fecundity hardly matched by his peers. 

Curious to note – I first thought of Reed as a nature poet, even a sea poet, taking the air on Jersey where he was born and lived until a young adult – this mainly due to the fact that By the Fisheries was the first book of his I read.  Yet upon moving to the mainland he was able to transpose the sight, sound and salt of marine-orientated life to the suitable interval required for city dwelling – becoming the beachcomber of Charing Cross Road and Old Compton Street, the florid muse of the original Patisserie Valerie, to be found poemising in purple ink on foolscap sheets amid the hissing of coffee machines and the iridescent glow of jam-toppings on cream cakes.  If the purple isn't exactly imperial it might denote an affinity with the high priests of decadence – Wilde, Dowson, Count Stenbock, even Ronald Firbank for his late decadent prose, as hilarious as it is razor sharp – Reed’s uncanny incisions into observations are Firbankian in wit.  Englishness as of the shires is banished, academe shunned; what he sees as the dry parochialism of much mid-to-late twentieth century British poetry is anathematized with unashamed vituperation – hear him on Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion if you dare.  Aside from Blake and Rimbaud, his work is moored by friendships struck with Kathleen Raine and David Gascoyne, both poets suffused with the real presence of a world beyond the material.  There is a further transposition – for there is a conjuration of the nation's capital that is more Parisian than one might guess.  Reed seeks the London equivalents of the ateliers of impoverished artists, the vast Thames is bottlenecked into the more intimate Seine with its bridges traversed in a few dozen strides from one side to the other.  There is also an attempt to trace and retrace that part of London that existed before the big money makeover that has seen the East End invaded by office blocks and whole quarters of niche retail abolished – most notably Denmark Street, formerly the place for music retail, now a remnant drowning in CGI slabs of stick-on bricks and plate-glass.  Reed wants a London infested with the very smell of the rooms at 34 Howland Street where Verlaine and Rimbaud fought, scrounged, loved.  He makes gay bars and small-hours dens sing with Parisian liqueurs, the faces of lost revellers illuminated in the ‘green fairy' glow of absinthe.  This is Iain Sinclair territory but he doesn't have the monopoly – Reed is a lyric antenna picking up the sawn-off lives of pop divas, doomed poets, rent boys, drug-dependent savants, and reassembling them – he ventures less directly into the slipstream of psychogeography with its evoked political bent.  Whereas Sinclair often takes a reading from within the maelstrom of his obsessive walking, Reed wants a certain tranquillity before his voices utter – although to be sure, there are poems revealing a sense of desperate attempted flight from city demons.  There is no nostalgia for a never-lived past, since Reed’s work has a directness of feeling that is as up to date as a pop hit, yet one capable of achieving classic status; his tracks can be remixed for each new generation, whether it be the fashionista poseurs of Carnaby Street or the dead-ringers for Comte de Lautréamont.  Reed's poetic machinery is never running on empty even if the lives he enshrines are.  Ultimately, a tenderness sings from his words, best felt at readings of his work, either solo or with the hypnotic synthesizer backing of Itchy Ear, the other half of the duo The Ginger Light.  Reed, together with Adrian Clarke and Gavin Selerie are the finest readers this reviewer has heard – Reed the most flamboyant, extending his sibilants like a cross between Marc Bolan and a kitsch Egyptian priest from a Hollywood history epic – he is in fact an extension of the snake-like patterns of the synth-wash.  New Romantic glitz meets that rougher-hewn sense of danger all too easily realised in the nightmarish pop of Alan Vega and Martin Rev of Suicide.  The Ginger Light give the full Reed experience, which is imbued with high rhetorical flights into lyricism within the trance incantation of the whole.  Petals and room-spray might be sprinkled over the audience who are invited to the ritual.  Treating this elaborate performative stance as mere camp devalues the poet's unspoken but heavily implied message, that all types of lives and living have worth, however far from accepted norms they might lie, forlorn, occluded, shunned.  And furthermore, that the emotional connectivity of beings is something forged in spaces felt out by Blake, Raine, and in the surreal terrain of Gascoyne.  This might push Reed into religion but doesn't really, unless it be that of the like-minded, clinging to the ruins of a city ravaged by vacuous capital projects and hoping for redemption through poetry.  This means the opposite of Auden's poetry that ‘makes nothing happen’ and gives Reed's work a ringing optimism even as he elegises the lost.  His is a demi-monde twilight that can still smile as mascara melts down sallow cheeks.

I'm particularly happy to see a generous selection from Jeremy Reed's 1984 collection By the Fisheries.  His nature poetry can be as organically convoluted as that of Edmund Blunden but there are always jarring human elements that ruffle the surface of otherwise placid waters.  From the title poem: ‘I stand fishing that pooled serenity // for mullet, and watch sunlight make a star / on the shards of a broken gin bottle.’[1]  And how about this from his poem ‘Conger’: ‘A conger’s world is tubular, it means / seeing things thinly through a gun-barrel / from the point of view of the bullet-head / that's primed to fire, the fist-sized, clam-tight jaws // more deadly in their lock than a bulldog's.’[2]  This is as muscular and powerful as any of the animal poems of Ted Hughes. And then there is ‘The Storm’ from the same volume: ‘A wasp's vibration in a gorse flower, / that orange flame belling the wings’ motion, / was how it seemed miles distant, the tremor / of a needle-head dropped from a great height / into the uncorked bottle-neck we cooled / in a sea-pool’.[3]  This has many of Reed's characteristics: colour, a primary igniter of his muse, tiny motions of things, suggesting that Reed's poetic eye is microscopic, and always the idea of tension in movement between the things described and the images within which they are encapsulated. 

Of course, we want Jeremy Reed for his kaleidoscopic and pinpoint forays into the heart of fashionable London, where his hyperrealism brings the most garish colours directly before one's eyes.  This is poetry to be read with sunglasses on.  From ‘Edith Grove’, a poem from his 2006 collection Orange Sunshine: ‘Max factor eye-shadows, a blue, a green / left open on the basin, Quant powder / skid-marking the rim with a dusty sheen… // Nobody loves you when you're down and out.’[4]  The glamour and associated hopes of a good night out, end in the discarding of a painted face in a sink – and the lonely soundtrack kicks in.  

Reed's poetical and musical icons can find themselves altogether in a poem like ‘Swinging London’ from the same collection, regardless from which century they belong: ‘The Waste Land’s synchronised to catchy pop, / Eliot and Hendrix panned through one speaker. / Kit Marlowe waits at the 14 bus stop.’  And all this triggered by a poem that begins: ‘Two gay boys slip out of a Soho loo.’[5]  Here is sex, pop, drugs, fashion and metaphysical poetry all rolled into one with no respect given to chronology – centuries can be concertinaed into the narrowest alleyways of Soho as glorious anachronisms rub together.  Despite the surface sheen, or one might say glitter, of many of these poems, they are the opposite of shallow in that they plunge the reader into a psychedelic vortex of colours, ideas and people.  Reed digs under the surface hyperrealism – lying beneath is his tenderness for the voices he captures, voices often of long-lost people, their lives curtailed by drugs, cancer or mental illness.  If a manically swinging London is a kind of asylum, Jeremy Reed has access to everyone's notes. 

From his beautiful 2007 volume of elegies, This is How You Disappear, we have poems that commemorate Asa Benveniste, Mary Absalom, Paula Stratton and John Berger.  There is an even finer elegy, again to Paula Stratton, from an early volume that was lost to sight and then miraculously found.  It is ‘Junkie Tango Outside Boots Piccadilly’ and there are a few stanzas from this much longer poem on display here.  The book from which it comes, Black Russian, Outtakes from the Airmen's Club 1978-79, was only published in full by Waterloo in 2010.   Readers should seek this out at the earliest opportunity.  Grevel Lindop, regards ‘Junky Tango’ as one of the greatest 20th century poems.  And with achingly painful lines like these, who can blame him?: ‘Days in bed, without / medication, while a brown-eyed night wind / felt in the ash tree for your body's parts: / waited for the distribution of bones.’[6]  

Reed must be the most painterly poet writing in English today.  He has the aquamarine tints of David Hockney, he has the acrylic splashes and swipes of Howard Hodgkin, and perhaps most talismanically of all, there is a sense in which some of the London poems are viewed askance by Francis Bacon, who we find in the title poem of Reed's collection Piccadilly Bongo from 2010: ‘I recognized as the louche Grand Guignol / of pigment, the gangsterish, street-wired / Francis Bacon, taking time out / as a quizzical spectator / leaning above the subway gate.’[7]  Here is poetry that mixes the urban flâneur’s nonchalant stance with a sense of imminent violence, the setting of the subway gate an indication that getting out is always an option but one not likely to be taken, since too many thrills and temptations await the solitary walker of the capital.  Reed writes as if an absinthe-tinted elixir of Baudelaire had been preserved in a phial, from which he regularly takes sips as he spins the city deliriously around the axis of a late-night bus stop. 

I first met Jeremy Reed literally at floor level as we squinted at rare volumes on the lowest shelves in the basement of Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road.  We met quite often subsequently, most especially for the readings On Blake Steps organised by the late Niall McDevitt, that fierce protest poet but warm, gentle man.  Did something go out of the scene with Niall's death?  Lockdown severed many ties and Jeremy has been little seen in public recently.  One hopes that he is writing, adding to the extraordinary body of work created over a more than 50 year period.  Collusive Strangers is a testament to his endless creativity, his love of words and his deep empathy for the many people that populate his poems.  I can't imagine there will be a more compelling or essential volume of poetry published this year.

©David Hackbridge Johnson 18.xi.2024



[1] Jeremy Reed, Collusive Strangers, p. 59.

[2] Ibid. p. 71.

[3] Ibid. p. 79.

[4] Ibid. p. 213.

[5] Ibid. p. 220.

[6] Ibid. p. 32.

[7] Ibid. p. 260.

 

ON ANDREW DUNCAN’S ‘BEAUTIFUL FEELINGS’

By David Hackbridge Johnson

 

(scroll down to ‘older post for other articles)




A brief word on my own taste-formation which will help to explain why I like this book.  I date my introduction to the lesser known highways and byways of poetry to my meeting with Barry Tebb, poet and publisher at Sixties Press.  As a student at Leeds, Tebb sat at the feet of many a Gregory Fellow, imbibing unusual voices as they emerged from behind the tightly trimmed shrubs of the Movement poets.   One couldn't help but have one's taste formed by Tebb's forceful views which, like my composer friend Denis ApIvor’s, were often violently pro or con.  In were original voices like Martin Bell, James Simmons, the early work of James Kirkup, and the kaleidoscopic extravaganzas of Jeremy Reed.  Out was anything that smacked of the smug, the entitled – disdained were the all too lightly won, self-awarded accolades of those masquerading as the continuation of some great tradition that was really an ossified remnant, wilfully complacent in narrowness and parochialism.  Tebb has an allergy to the vain.  He named names.

 

My next taste-former was Marius Kociejowski, poet and writer of non-travel travel books, by which I mean he does travel to places but largely disappears behind other voices as soon he gets somewhere, and there is no tedium about the best hotels.  Marius introduced me to many Central and Eastern European poets, not least those sharing his Polish heritage; Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert.  He has shared perceptive thoughts on his friends Geoffrey Hill and Christopher Middleton.  Like Tebb, Kociejowski has the inside track on poets and is also happy to name names in private – those to be praised or damned, or praised and damned simultaneously.  He won't thank me, but I merely record here the time when poet George Barker launched himself at Marius in one of the old waterholes of Fitzrovia, an unprovoked enragement. 

 

A third candidate exists for my aesthetic formation, such as it is, someone who, through a series of remarkable books, has erected a scaffold of British poetry from the 1940s to the present day: Andrew Duncan.  The scaffold has a lot of big name mainstream poets missing – they turned up with pre-cut concrete panels that didn’t fit.  Some get in by being recut, like Anthony Thwaite, always more original than his modesty would allow.  Duncan is the man who, as he has said somewhere, ‘reads all the books so that you don't have to’.  This might be as much as a thousand books a year.  Just about possible if most of them are slim volumes and a supply of caffeine drinks is on tap.  And someone gets your groceries.  But I'm probably exaggerating – even if it's a quarter of that number, it makes him the George Borrow of poetry reading.  He walks the terrain with a stout walking stick clearing the path of thickets, only to find that in those thickets unusual beasts lie that distract him from the distant town which he never gets to.  In his nine or ten volumes of poetry exploration and criticism, Duncan has always tended towards the forgotten, the experimental and the marginal.  His latest book, Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen Grabs of British Poetry in the 21st Century, published by Shearsman, is no exception.  The title would appear to be a red herring in that in describing the poems of sensitive people, generally represented by the more mainstream poetry publishers and magazines, he proceeds to ignore them.  Instead, as a cursory look at the bibliography will show, he has chosen work as published by smaller independents like Shearsman, Salt, Equipage and Veer.  Some poetry volumes are blink-and-you-miss-them publications, some are never to last more than the life of a website – to wit the much missed Barque Press, others might not survive the change of a new policy, as in the case of Salt.[1]  This is not to say that Duncan doesn't respond to beautiful feelings, or sensitive people.  It means that he distrusts the cosying-up-on-the-sofa type of writing with anecdotes in minuscule and bon mots of shy virtue.  Such work often irritates by trying to deny an ego that is hiding hugely behind self-deprecating politeness – net curtain poetry for people who don't want to be seem to be seen but are forever turning up on the boards of judges for PoBiz competitions.  Ever polite to the point of scrupulousness, Duncan never names names.  He appears as enthusiastic about poetry as he was when he started his odyssey into British writing, remaining true to an idea that the poetry scene is always too big to survey and that hidden flowers and small creatures often contain true gems of unsung life.  Thick layers of the mainstream can bury more awkward voices – finding them is the first task.  This isn't really archaeology since most of the poets in this latest volume of these poets are still alive, although giving the appearance of being buried under dull strata.  Neither is it truly anthropology, although Duncan is attracted to poems that seem to reflect ancient ways of life and the landscapes that supported them – it was thanks to Duncan that I was able to track down a copy of Eddie Flintoff's beautiful book Sarmatians, a work he has much praised.  And hence his approval of Martin Thom writing about Guatemalan coffee growers in Cloud, and the astute probing in the landscape of Essex and Suffolk as laid out in Victor Tapner's Flatlands.  Some of these types of poems can contain brazen political messages but in the case of Thom’s, don't stoop to didactic finger-pointing.  The unerring rhythm of Thom’s long rhyming lines is measured by a subtle hammer.  


Duncan also perceives that poems are carriers of information.  This doesn't mean that they are printouts of facts, nor does it mean that such poems deny feeling.  Feelings can feed on information; they are too thin otherwise and evaporate into the ego space where no one can follow.  We don't want the series ‘me, me, me, me, me’ drifting into nothingness.  This means Duncan is attracted to poems that are quite heavily populated.  He prefers a density of voices, often cutting across each other, as in Kevin Nolan's remarkable poem, Loving Little Orlick.  In Winter Journey by Daniel zur Höhe, translated with extended notes and commentary by Anthony Mellors, we get a veritable fugue of voices. The reclusive East German poet zur Höhe (quite possibly made up by Mellors) has channelled Wilhelm Müller's poems as set by Franz Schubert in his song cycle Winterreise of 1827.  Duncan writes tellingly about the withdrawal into intimacy shown by the works of Schubert as suggesting a tactical retreat from the police state atmosphere that pertained in Austria at the time.  This in turn relates to the vice-like grip that the people of East Germany had to endure amid the post-war wreckage left by Nazidom.  Mellors creates the linkage.  Müller and Schubert are not conjured by the jitterings of a Ouija board, but live again as simple if claustrophobic tragedians in a grey world where public expression is brutally monitored by the booted servitors of Metternich and Honecker.  Thus is found the location – a small room filled with the like-minded – where a self-conscious folk art explodes into transcendence.  This kind of information you don't find in account books or bucket lists; here it is put to remarkable usage, providing a cross-current of sound and feeling that resonates between both ends of the chronology – the early-1800s and the mid-1900s.

 

The idea of intimacy in poetry interests Duncan, but I don't think he means the sort of intimacy that makes poets write solipsistic things about themselves.  He shuns the anecdotal as a form of narcissism. Duncan's intimacy is populated and it has the required tension to make poems live beyond the ego of their creators: ‘Poetry is, strikingly, an activity which creates a social interior with much intimacy and yet which is concerned with outsiders, the rebellious, the non-conformists, the underachievers.’[2]  To achieve the required intimacy implies a withdrawal, not to a safe space, but to a solitary space which may admit terrors of its own.  This becomes a true form of meditation, not the one you practice to achieve the shallows of bliss but where you find yourself in the depths of all the fears that rush towards you in waves.  The state of intimacy can be where contemplation of deserted spaces happens: ‘Poetry may be what was abandoned, its only location in realms from which we have withdrawn.’[3]  Without wishing to reignite the embers of the poetry wars, it seems that British experimental poetry was perforce inveigled into retreats by cultural and social pressures, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.  In purely English terms, or rather we should say Anglo-Saxon terms, this is like King Alfred retreating to Athelney.  With the equivalents of Ivar the Boneless ravaging the shires who could blame poets from seeking solace in the Somerset levels?  Perhaps experimental poetry does this, a regrouping exercise before another parrying thrust into the body of conformity, complacency and arrogantly asserted power.  The abandoned sites are revisited for fresh data before the security forces prosecute the next eviction.  Is poetry then a type of commons from which rights of pasturage have been removed?  The verses springing from the areas of expulsion?  If so, it explains why John Clare is a kind of rebellious precursor, and why not a few writers have taken him as an ever-present exemplar.  If a poet can tell us exactly which hedges have been removed so that he gets lost in his own village, this is not rural nostalgia but radical pastoral.

 

Lest it be thought that Duncan's chosen poets are suffering too harshly under the effects of the societies they live in, he is able to provide, in his unique way, light touches along the way – in any case he is attracted to voices maverick and sidestepping in character.  Duncan is fond of accessorising his books on poetry with his own disquisitions on pop music, politics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and more.  Here a fair bit of intellectual glamour is to be found but it’s so lacking in pomposity as to make these diversions both entertaining and pertinent to the poetry under discussion.  I am sure some of his chapter titles have been taken from obscure albums by Captain Beefheart or The Fall that I haven't come across: ‘Splendours and Chagrins’, ‘Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet’, for example.  As usual, his cultural references are all embracing, as he trips lightly between Heidegger and Rockabilly, between Stan Brakhage and Granada crime dramas.  He manages to do this without stooping to journalistic soundbites; he is ultimately an intellectual whose modesty forbids his mounting the high horse.  And thank goodness, at no point does he describe his book as being in any way representative.  Poets and poems, after all, can only represent themselves. This is probably the only point of agreement Andrew Duncan has with Geoffrey Grigson.  Neither does the book claim to contain the ‘greatest’ poets of the period under scrutiny.  Duncan prefers to take readings like a weatherman and, as in the case of the chapter on poets published by Salt, this leads to disparate responses, some positive and some negative, the latter often based on grounds of the inconsequentiality of the poems under view.  Even if narratives are distorted or cut up cinematically, Duncan likes them to get somewhere rather than merely treading water in images of stasis or modish triviality. 

 

Duncan likes to examine trends in the diversity of voices available to readers, hence his fascinating chapter on British South Asian poets.  In reading these poems, Duncan is distrustful of genealogies that might suggest what sorts of poems British writers of South Asian heritage ought to be writing, focusing rather on what makes individual poets and their works striking.  This lies essentially in the variety of radical approaches they are prepared to take, ranging from the startling anti-colonial and anti-capitalist poems of Nuzhat Bukhari, to the seemingly domestic poems of Mona Arshi, in which something else is being told about family life other than its day-to-day mundanities. 

 

Not unusually, given that Duncan is, I believe, fluent in Welsh, there is a generous survey of poems both in Welsh and in English translation.  The key text here is The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018, edited by John Goodby and Lyndon Davies.  There would seem to be some urgency in having Dewi Stephen Jones’ work englished.  The extracts of his poems reveal a beauty only matched by Colin Simms.  Welsh, and Scots also – there is a fascinating segment on Shetlandic verse (a Scots/Nordic language), in which Christine de Luca appears as a vital force.  If a poet can include the lines ‘Da briggistanes o Sodom man a shiggled / tae der very atoms wi da weicht o wirds’, in a poem having a dig at Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetical misuse  of science, then all is not lost with us.

 

Is there room for more?  Of course.  Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People could have been ten times as long and still only charted certain aspects of the field in view, let alone other fields beyond in poetic landscapes undiscovered.  Duncan himself admits that there are thousands of books that he hasn't read within the time frame covered by the volume.  This is inevitable given what can only be described as the publishing explosion of the digital age.  This fact pushes back against special interest groups and gatekeepers of what might be perceived as an heritage product thought once to reside in that province guarded solely by Oxbridge graduates.  In a telling anecdote, Duncan tells of the tiresome effort needed to find out the educational backgrounds of poets included in a certain anthology – tiresome in that the Oxbridge alumni now seek to hide their gold-plated credentials.  The democratising aspect of publishing is both liberating and somewhat terrifying.  Anyone can now write a poem and see it in print over the weekend.  I'm about to do that right now.

 

It's never too late to start on Andrew Duncan's multi-volume screen grabs of poetry.  So if you haven't read any of the previous volumes, start here and work backwards.  And happy tunnelling for the mineral-rich ore that awaits.

 

©David Hackbridge Johnson xi.2024



[1] Salt has recently restarted its poetry list.  Alleluia.

[2] Duncan, Beautiful Feelings, p. 128.

[3] Ibid. p. 130.