FISHING FOR TUMA: Revisiting Anglo-American Modernists    

By David Hackbridge Johnson




 

Over 25 years ago, Keith Tuma’s book Fishing By Obstinate Isles,[1] presented the way in which British poetry of the 20th century had been portrayed as the poor relation of American, as reflected in the lack of interest shown in British poetry across the Atlantic.  Tuma challenged this idea by expanding out from an easy premise in order to examine what connections actually existed between poets: between Pound/Macleod, Zukofsky/Bunting, Dorn/Tomlinson, for example, and also tracing evidence of Anglo-American co-operation in poetry journals and anthologies.  Tuma’s book also posited an alternative modernist trend visible from the Pound Era onwards but largely occluded in Britain by forces of reaction that held firm for most of the century.  His recoveries were, in the terms of his target audience, important for the way in which American poetry lovers could participate in this new landscape by becoming readers of Mina Loy, Basil Bunting, Joseph Macleod, and John Rodker, to name four modernist authors he sought to reclaim as part of an expanded or revised canon – but these very authors were hardly well-known in their country of origin either.

In Britain the modern/anti-modern trends were typified by The Movement’s reaction to the perceived excesses of the Apocalyptic or New Romantic poetry as practiced by Henry Treece, J.L. Hendry, G.S. Fraser and others.  Like Andrew Crozier in his essay ‘Thrills and Frills’, Tuma saw the reactive power of The Movement as dominant, as further waves of modernisms sweep over it, only for the impervious granite to remain, only momentarily soggy, but before long, as dry as it ever was.  Throughout, Ted Hughes stood mid-river in wading boots, waiting for a bite.

America had its conservative alternative to the post-Poundian modernism of the Objectivists,[2] in poetry that preferred the well-turned rhetoric, the local, and the ironic observer, to the poem as an object ‘of thinking with the things as they exist’.[3]  Later, after Objectivism dispersed with several of its exponents falling silent for many years, one can chart as Tuma does, the tepid ocean of American conservative poetry of the 1950s as an Eastern Seaboard equivalent of The Movement, and we wonder whether at some point a mid-Atlantic poetic voice might emerge, as irritating as a British DJ trying to imitate Johnny Cash or Ronald Reagan.  Mercifully, I don't think it ever happened. 

Moving forward in time: has the stock of British early 90s New Gen poets risen for Keith Tuma? – those like Don Paterson whom he couldn't bring himself to quote from at any length back in 1998, perhaps feeling that by turning the pages of that author’s books his fingers might become sullied by the glib and faux-modest tone of a cocksure epigone.  The standing joke on the Barque Press website was that poets wishing to submit, in determining whether their work was suitable for the press, should note that it didn't publish Don Paterson.

Alliances and recovered moderns then.  What has changed in the last quarter of a century?  I must fail to answer the question with regard to cross-Atlantic alliances, other than by a redundant retelling of the ones that Tuma mentions, as I simply have no data, or have read the wrong books.  As for expansions and recoveries there is something to say that helps flesh out the picture of British modernism – to reverse further the perception that British poetry had been ‘reduced to molehills of festering decline.[4]  In 2020, Carcanet brought out Apocalypse: An Anthology, edited by James Keery and this was something of a revelation.  Admittedly Keery bled out at the sides of the Apocalyptics’ catchment area to include poets not normally associated with the official movement, as laid out in The New Apocalypse (1939), The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1943).  For Keery part of the purpose was not dissimilar to Tuma’s: an act of reclamation.  The generous selection of work was in some ways shocking, since Keery had tracked down in the manner of a literary sleuth powerful poetry by poets to whom the only reaction of most readers upon hearing their names was probably, ‘who?’  It is to be expected that Keery’s work will continue as those obscure poets come in to focus and more of their poems are found in forgotten wartime journals on austerity stock paper.      

Starting in the mid-90s Andrew Duncan began his massive survey of British poetry of the second half of the 20th century, with a determined focus on what was missing from official histories.  Here is the full list to date (have I missed any out?) of Duncan's prose publications:

The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2003)

Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry (2005)

Origins of the Underground: British Poetry Between Apocryphon and Incident Light, 1933-79 (2008)

The Council of Heresy: A Primer of Poetry in a Balkanised Terrain (2009)

The Long 1950s: Morality and Fantasy as Stakes in the Poetic Game (2012)

A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 (2015)

Fulfilling the Silent Rules: Inside and Outside in Modern British Poetry, 1960-1997 (2018)

Nothing is being suppressed: British Poetry of the 1970s (2022)

Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century (2024)

Read them out like your favourite albums by The Fall or your favourite neglected British symphonies, you know: Rubbra's Fourth, Grace Williams's Second, Peter Racine Fricker's Fifth, the one with the cracking organ part, etc.  Duncan's work has a bewildering reach, not only in the number of poetry books that he seems able to digest, but also in his willingness to attempt an in-depth cultural context for each of the books he reads.  Not for him the closeted world of the close reader; he is anxious to locate poems within their political and social environment as if they were part of it, not some sort of hived-off lump to be examined every time the world stops turning.  This means a scattergun of politics ranging from the history of the labour movement to the dismantlings of Thatcherism.  It means rules laid out like red rags to bulls.  It means Schubert gazing at disco glitter-balls.  It means delving into the exposed sediments where ancient peoples from the 1950s can be seen to have burnt to death by the tell-tale appearance of a long, thin, black line.  The entertainment value should not blind us to the seriousness of the project.  So fecund is Duncan’s writing on poetry that having started at about 1938, he has already reached the first decades of the 21st century.  His next book must surely race ahead of poets as he writes about books that have yet to be written.  By this token he has only reached the halfway point of his journey; he has the next 70 or 80 years of British poetry marked out with sticks in quicksand.  It looks like none of these books was started before Tuma’s book was published, but I suspect Duncan had been collecting specimens for many years prior to the launch of his first, The Failure of Conservatism.   

Despite Eric Mottram's bitter disappointment at having been effectively elbowed out of his role as editor of Poetry Review, (I think Peter Barry has shown that his contract simply came to an end)[5] those short years of work and his subsequent books have fed an on-going legacy dedicated to his view of a truly symbiotic relationship between British and American poetry.  That this legacy started with photocopiers in basements producing stapled samizdat-like productions, and occasional bids for power via mainstream reviewing or the production of doomed anthologies, should not belittle this legacy.[6] 

Ian Sinclair has spent a lifetime dodging waves that might overcome his poetic, which is a unique mixture of Blakeian vision, the anthropology of gangsters, and large doses of the psychogeographer's feeling of the damp bricks as he make his way along a forgotten alleyway.  Despite some notable successes with mainstream publishers, Sinclair remains in and out of that world, still often producing very slim volumes on whichever ream of fancy paper stock has been discovered in a charity shop by a blink-and-you-miss-it publishing concern.  In doing so, he has remained loyal to his roots as a bookstall owner in Camden Passage and as the publisher of Albion Press where his own works first appeared, one of the more notable ventures that sprung up, as if in the wake of Eric Mottram’s demise at Poetry Review. Sinclair remains wary, therefore, of the mainstream's desire to package and commodify writers.  Throwing money won't do, and I think it was Sinclair who told the anecdote about Tom Raworth, who, when asked by a potential backer what the nature of the relationship might be going forward, said, ‘Give us your money and fuck off.’ 

The starting point for Andrew Duncan's odyssey was bafflement at two schools of poetry that had sunk beneath the waves: the Apocalypse poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s and the British Poetry Revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Beyond their peak years, both types of poetry did occasionally send bubbles up to the surface, but if their heads broke water, they were pushed down by means of those fishing spears manipulated deftly by the gatekeepers of a more conservative minded poetics.  This essentially means that the short-lived moment of The Movement actually sent out genteel shockwaves into the poetic world for the next 50 years at least; there are arguably still exponents of what Andrew Crozier characterised as the ‘wryly deficient’.[7]  Roughly a quarter of a century after Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines, came the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, which gave The Movement the shot in the arm it needed to leapfrog over the looming barrier of a new century.  There are still plenty of poets creating ‘occasions’ in their poems showing great verbal ingenuity and powers of description as they determinedly remain aloof from the very writing they seem to be so committed to.  The message seems to be, ‘look how clever I am at juggling abstracts dressed up in fancy metaphors, yet I'm really not invested in this stuff any more than you are.’  Even the epiphanies, and they always come, shine no brighter than a forty-watt bulb in a garden shed as the poet tinkers with a few rusty tools.  No wonder some British poets reacted in such a horrified manner as American boors turned up on the threshold having trampled the dahlias and kicked over the garden gnomes.  For Americans did come to the obstinate isles – carting all before them, one is tempted to say.  Witness Allen Ginsberg effectively headlining at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 11th June 1965.  More modest were the visits of Jonathan Williams and Ronald Johnson, who headed for Northumbria where Basil Bunting was to be found, almost forgotten.  The receiving antenna for many poets was Tom Pickard who organised readings of both British and American modernist poets at Morden Tower, Newcastle.  He has been posting on social media some of the posters advertising these events, and the roster of poets is mouth-watering. 

I can't speak with much authority on the health of American literature classes or creative writing classes in the US.  It might be noted that American universities benefit enormously from private patronage, even when the National Endowment for the Arts seems to be a hollowed out shell since Trump I.  It probably dies under Trump II.  However, in Britain, creative writing is under a sustained attack by those who want pounds, shillings and pence to be the impact of any course sponsored by the all-powerful accountants that run so-called educational establishments.  Humanities courses are crumbling at the touch of vice chancellors all too eager to asset strip them and bulldoze their tiny classrooms in order to make way for a shining edifice in plate glass that is immediately filled up with eager students of business.  The sort of business they have in mind is not that of Po-Biz, sad to say.  As writer after writer, some of them, colleagues of mine, pick up their final pay check, having had their slim volumes packed into cardboard boxes by security guards, the impression given is of an all-out attack against the production of mere texts as opposed to the production of cash money in a ghastly marketization of what universities are thought to be.  At PhD level there is some subtlety around what is thought to be new knowledge and whether creative works can be so described.  My own work in this area had to endure a vigorous attack from an external examiner, which I parried by saying that we could say that the arts produce knowledge even by the phrases we use to describe them, for example, ‘I know Bartok's six string quartets’.  Thinking this a facile argument, I was surprised to find that it did carry a little bit of weight, much to the credit of my examiner.  But subtlety is not on hand when entire departments are destroyed by university managers determined to crush the creative in favour of their messianic vision for a world entirely dominated by STEM subjects.  As a former sixth form student of mine said to me, ‘we are sick of having STEM rammed down our throats when we say we want to go and study Music or Art at university.’  This was actually an A-star student of A level physics and maths, but did not want this to discount her creative side, implying that science of all things needed creative input.  My own role in university life seems to have been to precipitate the closure of music departments; Roehampton's excellent department was closed not long after millions had been spent on an entire wing devoted to it, this happening within weeks of me passing my Master's degree. Similarly, after having finally achieved a PhD, Kingston's wonderful music department was drastically reduced in size, it becoming a catchy rump devoted to TV and pop music.  I should state here now that I wasn't a paid stooge of a mysterious STEM cabal sent to seek out and destroy anyone who hummed Brahms in the corridor.  In becoming anecdotal I am merely concealing my lack of expertise, but stories in sufficient number can build up at least a grainy picture of what's going on, and it's not good for the arts.  There have been attempts to set up private universities, common in the United States, but less so in England.  A.C. Grayling set up the New College of the Humanities (now Northeastern University London) in 2011, although I'm not aware that it has a creative writing program or a music program.  In America, one recent phenomenon is the opening of the University of Texas at Austin, whose founding seems to constitute a bid to head off the perceived woke dominance of mainstream American universities.  It remains to be seen whether Texas at Austin will adopt an all-embracing arts programme or whether it will merely form a writing club devoted to the poems of Kingsley Amis.  For both these establishments, I am available to run avant-garde glee clubs.  All of this barely digested information requires a referring back to Stefan Collini's book What Are Universities For?, published in 2012.  Since then, things having got much worse, it's hard to resist the tempting conclusion that universities, at least in Britain, are an invitation for students to enter an elaborate Ponzi scheme where levels of collusion in forced pass rates and ‘student satisfaction’ breed the destruction of critical thinking and the narrowing of what constitutes knowledge.  Within such unhallowed halls it is not surprising that poets are not welcome and must be banished as dud chips in the game.  The stakes are high for those that seek to pull the wool over the eyes of bankrupt students and their zero-hours professors.  Excessive cologne hides boardroom stink.

I can speak with even more vanishing authority on the world of publishing since 1998.  It would seem that digital publication and self-publication have caused an explosion of poetry that makes it impossible to survey the scene.  This is one of Andrew Duncan's main contentions.  There would appear to be a divide between a small number of main publishing houses and a significantly larger grouping of independent presses with or without Arts Council funding.  Carcanet is a halfway house, able to dispense with equal enthusiasm and conviction large volumes of C.H. Sisson and Tom Raworth, never knowingly present in the same room, together with a staggeringly eclectic roster of new writers.  The situation as regards funding for publications with a modernist slant would seem to be much improved compared to the period known as the Poetry Wars and the active suppression of poets deemed too modern for the sensibilities of those who expected their charming vignettes about garden ponds to be published every month in Poetry Review.  My impression, again inexpert, is that there has been an explosion in the diversity of voices available to the reader.  This means a dramatic increase in the number of women poets and poets from different ethnic backgrounds writing in all styles.  There might now be something called gay poetry, although it probably would never want to call itself that.[8]  Is class-specific poetry dead as it moves over to admit voices that feel repressed under a different set of descriptors: new categories of gender, sexuality – a sliding scale of identities pre-bristled to defend themselves? There is an entirely genuine way in which having an internal revelation about oneself can immediately destabilize the personality within accepted bounds of societal behaviour.  These voices should not be automatically disdained by those made uncomfortable by them.  Was Barque Press the cradle of Sexual Marxism, or have I done damage to Keston Sutherland by making that up?  I can't say.  But similarly vital work has been continued by the excellent Pilot Press, as it not only publishes new work but reveals again the exquisite if fragile sensibilities of poets like John Wieners and Jack Spicer, significant but partially-buried American voices ruined by mental health collapse and alcoholism.  I think the new British poets of Pilot Press, Timothy Thornton and Verity Spott among them, are reading their dead stablemates, older American voices, now republished.  In this way, the generations overlap. What is remarkable about so much experimental American poetry is that it has remained experimental; like the permanent avant-garde of composers like Robert Schumann or Charles Ives, who seem familiar, but never are.  Much the same could be said of Basil Bunting, Maggie O'Sullivan and Tom Raworth, to remember three poets covered by Tuma.  They can't lie down quietly. The words will always find them out. 

The publishing of later generations outside the mainstream has a somewhat fraught history.  Finding a complete set of the Paladin poetry series (editorial duties: John Muckle and Iain Sinclair) requires much ferreting.  The volume you want is $173 plus postage (exorbitant) from Tucson Arizona.  Rumour has it that Rupert Murdoch personally operated the Fourdrinier paper machine that saw these books pulped.  He found more meaning in the resulting mush than in the poetry, it is said.  This wave of allegedly gleeful cultural annihilation was as shockingly bullish as Charles Osborne's stuffing of the Poetry Society committee with side kicks in the mid 1970's, a manoeuvre that saw the en block resignation of Bob Cobbing's modernist axis.  There must have been a time when modernist poets huddled in an alleyway off Charing Cross Road, their teeth chattering, as they enacted a parataxic fantasy of King Alfred in Athelney, watching their soggy pamphlets float into storm drains.  The levels and their lowest ebb.  I sensationalise only because I was too young to be there, so must pre-haunt those empty spaces.  Thank goodness for Ken Edwards at Reality Street who kept so many vital titles in print from the early 90s to this day – books by Denise Riley, Maggie O'Sullivan, Allen Fisher, and Bill Griffiths, to name but a few.  And just days ago came Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby from Waterloo Press.  It's possible to describe this book as lavish.  Hens' teeth and poetry pamphlets gathered between red, white and blue covers – it is a remarkable collection of survivors.  A quick back and forth chat with John Goodby confirms an American influence in his own work – not so much the Beats as I first thought, but the beguiling Sonnets of Ted Berrigan.  He's not the only Rustbelt poet looking out over New York or Black Mountain skylines.  

Reclaiming fugitive American poetical texts has been easier thanks to the enormous Norton Anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover. The first edition from 1994 has 701 pages, the second from 2012 has well over a thousand.  A far cry from the vexed history of British experimental poetry publishing.  I realise this is a very sketchy outline based on the books looming over me in my airless study.  There is plenty to mine, not least the rich seams of the little magazines, for which a permanent berth is needed amid the National Poetry Library's bulging stacks. 

My impression is that a sort of Mandarin poetry best expressed in the finely modulated work of Peter Scupham, died with him.  Yes we can lament this.  I once reviewed a Scupham volume and I found it too good to be true.  The discursive Personism of Frank O'Hara seems to have a longer reach into the poetic sensibilities of modern British writers than the late, late Baroque of Scupham, together with the happenstance poetry of John Ashbery finding in mid-poem the equivalent of Thoreau's trout in the milk pail, or perhaps pretending to write a poem to go with Cecil Taylor's Excursions on a Wobbly Rail I notice I am piling up American influences on British poetry, not the other way round.  In this sense, nothing much has changed in the last quarter of a century.  There has been no British Invasion.  Neither have the champions of the two nations met midway in the Atlantic Ocean to hack out a treaty.  To use Keith Tuma's word, the ‘static’ between the two countries has now become deafening, so that any entente between the different layers upon which poetry operates simply cannot be heard.  Turn the dials on the radio and it's the same screeching noise.  Does it matter?  Does Academe matter as it retreats from poetry's shark-infested waters to polish the glass of its ziggurats devoted to the gods of MBA and HR?  Is the true poet always banished as Plato desired?  In failing to answer these questions I can only appeal to Professor Tuma, hopefully well-armed against the powers of darkness that I hysterically invent – might he give us an update as poetic data runs wild around him?  Are there any levers operable that will unlock recalcitrant doors to consensus?  America, can you hear us?

I want to end on a less frenzied note by returning to Eric Mottram.  In March 2022, there was a two-day conference based on his idea of cross-Atlantic inspiration running both ways, organized by Valerie Soar and Geoffrey Browell at King's College London.  Here were Jerome Rothenberg, Charlie Morrow and Charles Bernstein, sharing a platform with Ken Edwards, Allen Fisher, Gavin Selerie, and Robert Hampson, just to name some of the participants.  Soar has continued the work begun jointly with her husband on the Mottram archive, consisting of books, pamphlets, essays, letters, lecture notes, and sundry ephemera that make up a vivid picture of cultural interactions.  Having tried to read Mottram's poetry many times and having come to the conclusion that he had a tin ear, I was completely bowled over by the revelatory readings of his work given by Selerie, Edwards and Fisher – people who had known him and knew how his poetry worked and that it had to be read aloud for his long lines to find their breath and span.  I was quick to empty my pockets in order to purchase the series of beautiful Mottram books for sale from Peterjon Skelt’s North and South press.  If this is English poetry, it is filtered through the open field of Charles Olson and the clotted spirituality of Robert Duncan.  It turns out that Mottram, who was a lover of classical music, could sing in the long-limbed manner of Hugo Wolf and Arnold Schoenberg.  Noticeable was the age of most of the participants at this conference.  It didn't feel like a nostalgia trip, how could it with Rothenberg, in his mid-nineties, intoning deliciously in the manner of the direst prophet?  But it is sad to note that since the event, Rothenberg and Selerie have passed away.  The latter was at work until his last days on a large prose work on the year 1968, which he spent in the States, living in the very moment of the counter culture as it happened across politics and the arts.  Selerie had a lifelong engagement with American culture stemming from that pivotal trip and he increasingly seems a vital figure in any discussions about the connections between American and British culture.  He was one of the few poets that didn't exclusively rely on illegally imported books of American poetry to be had from Compendium Books in Camden, since he had already bought them in the States and kept his dog-eared copies to the last.  His own work, developed over the course of large and intensively researched projects, is erudite but playful, paratactical but lucid, especially when read by the poet himself.  Albeit perhaps owing his structural imperatives to American models such as Louis Zukofsky's “A’’ and Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, Selerie is strikingly original, a dedicated lecturer of English, writing mainly through Irish, Caribbean or American lenses – Sheridan Le Fanu (Le Fanu’s Ghost, 2006), Joe Harriott (Hariot Double, 2016), Bob Dylan (an essay nearly every year) talking across the din of the ocean. 

In their different ways, Mottram and Selerie can be seen to embrace the energetic generosity of large-scale American poetry.  These poets, ‘habituated to the vast’,[9] are meeting on ground that is less contested.  There are no poetry wars happening in these richly wrought works; there are greater things at stake: the reimagining of lost experience, the turbulent shifting landscapes of history, and the forces deciding which voices get thrust onto peaks or plunged into troughs.  That American and British poets can meet and not churn out perfectly formed anecdotes about their little domestic failings, is a sign that in so meeting, a real context can be found for genuine and mutual address, not dependent on the imprimatur of universities or established organs of cultural production.  Ambition can produce hubris and there are many that will decry the huge structures of the big beasts in American poetry and regard their influence as baleful – see Alan Brownjohn’s hostile critique of Olson and Duncan.[10]  But if poetry wants to be little, it can be, but it may be wasting opportunities and not seeing the seething forest beyond its little courtyard of certainties.  There, risk is certain, but none taken is retirement to a safe distance.  Swathes of British poetry seem to indicate happy retirement.  I don't think I'm arguing that British and American poetry can ‘help each other’ in the way that Eliot suggested in 1953,[11] since the breach has been too wide.  But I think on certain levels of poetic discourse there is room for nourishment, the purpose being far from trying to claim that the poetry from the two different countries could ever be a perfect match, more that there are broad spaces to be mapped out together far beyond the authoritative self with its metaphors and plain-style writing. Here there is room for much vigorous interplay.

Whether Tuma wishes to answer my call for a renewed survey of cross-Atlantic sites of modernism and conservatism in poetry or not, I wonder if the project has become ever more diffuse in terms of data capture alone.  In mentioning Joseph Macleod's characterisation of poetry consisting of a ‘dozen rival schools’,[12] I wonder if now those dozens might be multiplied a dozen times.  When does a plethora finally resist any attempt at analysis?  Tuma's book is part analysis, part recovery, and he provides a useful model to be emulated; to put it in admittedly crude terms: discover the conflict sites where poets are thrown into the arena, examine the victors, and inspect the wounds of the vanquished.  His resurrection for American readers of Loy and Macleod is as much a spur in Britain to explore the voices that for whatever reason became marginal.  Mottram, Duncan, Carcanet and other independent presses show the way.

 

©DHJ 2024



[1] Northwestern University Press, 1998.  The title is taken from Ezra Pound’s ‘E.P. Ode Pour L'election De Son Sepulchre’, part 1 of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

[2] (the Americans Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi, and the British Basil Bunting)

[3] Zukofsky, An Objective, 1931.

[4] Tuma, p. 7.

[5] See Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, Salt Publishing, 2006.

[6] I have seen photographs on social media of what was Bob Cobbing's photocopier, now in a place of rest in Hugh Metcalfe's front garden.  Due homage has been paid by Jeff Hilson and Tim Fletcher.

[7] Andrew Crozier (ed. Ian Brinton), Thrills and Frills, Shearsman, p. 24.

[8] But Andrew Duncan does have a sub-section on it on his website: https://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/search/label/gay%20poetry

[9] Coleridge.

[10] Tuma, p. 64.

[11] Ibid. p. 108.

[12] Ibid. p. 126.