ARCADIAN
RUSTBELT
Review by David Hackbridge Johnson
Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby, is too exciting a volume to plunge into straight away. The best thing to start with is to vigorously fan the pages of the book to get a fleeting glimpse of line justifications and a waft of paper aroma. That way you can stay on the periphery before entering into the space delineated by the included poets. It might be said that some of the poets are already on the periphery, in which case we have a periphery of the periphery. Those interested in the chemical constituents of paper might inquire of the printers at Sea View Way, Brighton. I am getting high notes of ethanol with an undertow of sandalwood, admixtured with a peaty grit. If we hope for similar intoxications upon a slow perusal of the contents of the book, that's what we get. Waterloo Press has done the editors and poets proud with this handsome volume in red, white and blue. It is dark, obscure and grainy in the poetic underground and we get a suitable cover picture from David Rees. Out of it, a poem of sorts can be created from the lists of performers appearing at the Ministry of Sound come Boxing Day, on a poster seen above the parked-up 2005 reg BMW at far right:
Katy 8
Novelist (or is
it Hovelist?)
Section Boyz
Fatima Al Qadiri
Zinc/Bok Bok
Mumdance
+ more
Research into these artistes is on-going. Suffice it to say that Section Boyz have a
fine video that sees them rapping in an HGV car park ringed by industrial silos,
their music and visuals chopped up with stroboscopic editing – it's as
underground as it gets.[1]
Back-cover blurb can be reduced on simmer
to another poem, rich in possibility:
Thatcherism
rustbelt
enforced outlets
eye-ear
prominent
Prynne may lurk.
It's up to Duncan and Goodby to delineate terms
in their ‘Introduction’. No easy job
with no easy answer. Where does the first generation of British
underground poetry end and the second begin? Really, of course, there's
too much overlap to create periods of this sort. You can only have an
arbitrary cut-off according to date or publication of a previously considered
anthological volume. You could stick with the idea of an overlap and say
that underground poets form a sort of rolling barrage over the terrain with foot
soldiers creeping behind, heads down and their feet stuck in mud.
Duncan and Goodby see A Various Art,
edited in 1987 by Tim Longville and Andrew Crozier, as a generation-defining
anthology charting an alternative to the mainstream. To get beyond that, they've chosen two dates,
1980 and 1994, as publishing boundary markers for those included in Arcadian Rustbelt. Although
describing this as a ‘crude measure’[2],
Duncan and Goodby’s implication is that poets also need to be formally
innovative, or at least radical in some way, to have hope of inclusion.
Furthermore, they speak of a type of poetry that has been disappeared by
gatekeepers they are chary of naming. This
means ‘if you're indicted, you're invited’[3].
It is also hoped that a book like this will not define itself into a backwater
but will lead to other books, just as David Rees's high street, with its
boarded up shops and greasy, much dug-over tarmac, will allow for travel out of
that deprived zone into other perhaps more fruitful areas. Unless the
underground is always underground, which it surely is.
In this review I won't talk about all the poets
as that would quickly become merely a list of horses, but I shall try to take
some characteristic points that give a flavour of the whole, or rather not the
whole but of those characteristic points. These are tasting notes of a
rather general kind, for example, there are poets who like the white space, or
in this case the cream space, of the empty page, and they are reluctant to fill
it up totally. This can be true of poets
as diverse as David Annwn, Francis Presley or Elizabeth Bletsoe. Has the
open field of Charles Olson been rolled up and put in a boat from Gloucester,
Massachusetts to land on the shores of the west coast of England and Wales? Or
are the pattern poems of George Herbert and David Jones an influence? The fields of Annwn et al. hold no burden of influence however; they are sparsely populated by
words, like wild flowers taking root but not spreading too far beyond the soil
they like. Annwn is tellingly macaronic but like Pound gives translation
hints. This is not knowledge as vain prestige but is showing how changing
words symbolise changing land-use as precious green belt land is eradicated
along with its associated ecology, thus making of Annwn a radical kinsman of
John Clare: ‘out of nahwer / out of city’s carbon pleating / settling camomile
metal sorrel fly-tip
land-fill / a small debate :
vestigial fields’.[4]
Presley can produce wit by the very spacing of words – you have to see ‘an edge
// why are you so // edgy?'[5]
to get the joke. Presley is a great walker of differing landscapes, a
diviner of sorts, who can put poetic feet into marks left by forebears. This implies a memory field, but readings
from it are unreliable, as in the prose poem ‘Withypool circle’: ‘We are back
in Howarth, and I’m not sure if we ever left.
Here it is, the white-out, the zero visibility. Mist and birdsong. Listen to the lark, I heard it on the video. Nothing has the same continuity, the lack of
pauses.’[6] The zero visibility is not just Presley’s
memory of Howarth weather but is itself a barrier to that memory. The video lark song is not the real bird
whose gapped melody has been strung together for the sake of the tape. Bletsoe stakes out in a few pages a narrow
path though the Quantocks where she finds the plants and trees she writes
about. Lyricism meets herbal remedies
but you need a particular eye to spy out the healing balm from the venomous
wort in the vast expanse of the herbivorium. This makes for both erudition and this kind
of limpid lyricism: ‘by leaf by
moss by fern / fleck
/ in aqua-/shadow’.[7]
There is a kind
of distressed, crushed lyricism to be found in some of the work of Adrian
Clarke and Paul Green. That's the Paul Green of the magazine Spectacular Diseases. Clarke, who
overlaps with poets who like a lot of blank space on the page and who I have
heard reading many times in his mesmerically forceful manner, presents poetry
of short compacted lines delivered in hammer action rhythms, like a distant
cousin of Tom Raworth. If the pistol shrimp did poetry it would be like
this. Impossible to précis, the reader is wary of unpacking what has
probably been severely impacted by the demands of metre. Interestingly,
my wife, who is Chinese, ‘recognised’ Clark at once, since Chinese classical poetry
is built from these traits, the image ruled by the severe beats of the line, as
memorised by millions of schoolchildren. An education system that cajoled
its children into reciting Adrian Clarke might be a bearable Utopia. An
aside: I sometimes read Keston Sutherland (not included here as he’s part of
the Third Generation of British Underground Poets) with a sense of this
unnerving compression, like the scene in The
Getaway when Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger are in the dumpster truck being
shunted into its bowels by a hydrologic shovel. These are the stress
positions some underground poetry invites. I have a small collection of
letters and late poems of Paul Green, received after taking ages to track him
down via various defunct mail addresses and magnifications-going-nowhere
perusals of Google Maps. Capable of a
languid insinuating lyricism, Paul Green can also do this: ‘spinal vision / carrying
the planet haemorrhage / blue gull passing south / to heat equator’.[8]
This shows at least a distant relation
to Adrian Clarke.
Does the
British Underground really connect to the American Beats and Black Mountain
poets via the Great Atlantic Seam? A whole poetic territory mapped out by
poets gathering shiftily near Compendium Books, Camden in the 1970s and 80s as
they wait for those under-the-counter American publications that managed to
dodge customs? That works well if you live near Camden. But did poets travel from far and wide, and
could reconstructing their journeys form the map of ley lines leading to the
experimental omphalos? At a pinch one might pair up certain poems
of John Goodby with those of Daniel Lane as showing a Beat echo. The Goodby extracts from his Illenneum [9]
have the unshackled bonhomie of the Beats, as every day snippets of
conversation come up against a Burroughsian jam session with a pair of
scissors. The result is a poetry centrifuge – we even get, by being
thrown out from other sentences, a veritable tongue twister: ‘like the sick
sheikh's sixth sheep shamefaced'. I am
thinking that the title is millennium without the ‘m’ – so that instead of feeling
hopeful at the start of a new thousand years, everyone actually feels ill.
Daniel Lane can start a poem like this: ‘you sung canary yellow / behind your
iron gate / while sarin hung on detonator wire / you clawed a perch’.[10]
This could be the lost lyric of an Arthur Lee song, but it isn't. The
optimism (false optimism?) of pop sent through an experimental poetry prism.
I once asked a
silly question of Harry Gilonis: how did he think his poetry compared with
Andrew Duncan's? The answer: ‘Andrew likes long lines, I like short ones.’
I had it coming. It will do as a way to pair them without saying they are
complete opposites. If Andrew Duncan edited the magazine Angel Exhaust ‘angelically’[11],
who edited it exhaustively? They are too shattered to even raise a
hand. Duncan's poems can have a lot of chemicals in them. I don't think these are the chemicals he
ingests to stimulate the poetic muse. His
is a mind roving over science and technology as much as poetry itself. He
doesn't ever, and perhaps we should here say ‘thank goodness’, write about
poetry in his poems. ‘Q-landscapes’ might be revealing the extent of the
saturation of images that Baudrillard told us would arrive. The surface
sheen can hardly hide the collusion inherent in presenting a world so glitzily
unreal: ‘How does it feel to be just a
projection? / I only start to exist when the lights go on. / Otherwise I
just rest or try on hats.’[12]
By contrast to this pertinent over-exposure, Gilonis holds the camera to
smaller spaces where someone is playing CDs of J.S. Bach or Xenakis, probably
him. The picture of the music is released in the poem. Sometimes
it's music a lot of people didn't want, that accompanying Thatcher's 3rd
election victory, for instance: ‘the sun has gone down & / now they're
drumming back there'.[13]
I didn't know the word 'harpsi-chordate'[14]
but I do now and it starts a poem about music and the plastic arts that is a
miniature Gesamtkunstwerk without
Wagner's help.
Soon I shall
run out of categories to display what a clever reviewer I am. Then it's down to individual poets that have
caught my attention on the first read-through of Arcadian Rustbelt. A second reading will mean another review.
Startling is the poetry of Khaled Hakim –
startlingly funny but also shot through with dark undertones of the colonial
harvesting of words and concepts and its associated racist scaffolding. All this, the humour and the undertones, is
present in the mock/mock serious (it's at the very least a double bluff) ‘Letter
to Peter Gidal/Kurt Kren’.[15]
Both hilarious – feeling like a fanzine interview gone wrong – and laser
accurate, as the cultural layers it seeks to peel away, to find the offending
organs, are shown to the light.
Staying in the realm of irony or bluff we have ‘World
of Interiors’ by Elizabeth James.[16]
In the flat tone of someone being interviewed for a lifestyle magazine, we hear
of the total accessorization of space in ‘a New York loft with 19 windows’. A list poem of delicious artefacts that has
the result of reducing everything contained within it to flotsam and jetsam
floating on the surface of a self-satisfied mind. The beautiful reduced
to a trivial curation that robs it of beauty.
From a commodification exposé to a bureaucratic nightmare: James’ extract
from Measures [17] features a data overspill of financial
details, urine tests, slashed prices – all presented as an impossible-to-fulfil
exhortation.
I could begin
with anybody or end with anybody. The
entire book could be recorded and looped for 24-7 listening. Why not end with the poetry of Val Pancucci?: ‘white poplars / gesture / ALARM / on the knife / ridge / of the hill, // whereunder
/ crouched over / hissing primus / spitting kettle / beiwacht / pissing ad hoc
/ in a bucket / army sur/place jacket / potato / foil / EMERGENCY / ration / ale’.[18]
These are words jumping the synapse gaps before they've delivered the
message. There is a threat defence signal operating but the wires are
loose.
25 poets then
to make an underground. Of course there'll be people who look in vain for the
poets they wanted to find here, maybe themselves. They can create their own anthologies. I am sure another 25 poets would not exhaust
the seam. The vitality is startling in this volume and it means if
nothing else that Duncan and Goodby have exquisite taste. Exquisite isn't the right word. That might be another anthology. Who would that
contain? Out of the debris of the Three Day Week, the Winter of Discontent
and the dismantling tendency of the Thatcherite experiment that followed, have
come these voices belonging to subterranean poets wearing pit helmets and with
at least one canary in a cage. That bird is breathing fine.
©David
Hackbridge Johnson 23.xi.2024
[1]
https://youtu.be/JMzyv55dx9U?si=KC6EUm3l3gGBcMdB
[2]
Arcadian Rustbelt, first page of the
unpaginated introduction.
[3]
Ibid. first page again.
[4]
Ibid. p. 3.
[5]
Ibid. p. 239.
[6]
Ibid. p. 238.
[7]
Ibid. p. 35.
[8]
Ibid. p. 110.
[9]
Ibid. p. 96.
[10]
Ibid. p. 162.
[11]
Ibid. p. 75.
[12]
Ibid. p. 76.
[13]
Ibid. p. 86.
[14]
Ibid. p. 87.
[15]
Ibid. p. 116.
[16]
Ibid. p. 154.
[17]
Ibid. p. 157.
[18]
Ibid. p. 230.