ON ANDREW DUNCAN’S ‘BEAUTIFUL FEELINGS’
By David Hackbridge Johnson
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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