II: Island Fishing and Deregulation
Ah, as Hill's heckler from The Triumph of Love might say,
isn't that a pretty fantasy. It's even a fantasy to assume that my
American reader knows the work of more than two or three of the twenty or
so poets I have alluded to thus far. That's why Keith Tuma's Fishing By
Obstinate Isles is such a necessary and timely book.
Tuma sets himself the task of reading modern and postmodern
British poetry in terms of its reception, or lack of it, by American
readers and institutions. He begins the historical section of his book
by arguing that British poetry - with a few important exceptions -
was by the late sixties and early seventies virtually erased from the
American literary consciousness by "a combination of benign neglect,
ordinary ignorance, and casual half-truths of a critical journalism
cognizant only of the narrowest field of extant poetry." Interestingly,
this was also the very moment that Prynne in Cambridge and Mottram in
London were becoming magnets for many of the poets appearing
in Other and Conductors. A very few Americans -
Donald Hall in a number of essays and reviews, M.L. Rosenthal and
Calvin Bedient, I myself in 23 Modern British Poets (1970) -
and two or three British commuters or exiles like Donald Davie and
Thom Gunn, pointed out some of what was happening or had already happened
in Britain: the late work of Jones and Bunting, the early Prynne,
Mina Loy's forgotten poems, the Stevens- and Williams- influenced
work of the early Tomlinson, Christopher Middleton, Roy Fisher's
City, and maybe the first books of Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood.
In spite of these several voices arguing for the value and interest of
certain British poets - and it's important to remember that among the
younger Irish poets who had any real affinities with the
modernist-influenced Brits only John Montague at this point was really
visible - no one, on the whole, seemed to be paying any attention.
Americans during the Viet Nam and post-Viet Nam period read North
Americans, Latin Americans and East Europeans. What little modern and
contemporary British poetry was read or taught in the universities -
Auden, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, Hughes and sometimes Gunn or Stevie Smith -
suggested very little of what was beginning to happen in London or
Cambridge or the North of England (where Neil Astley was soon to establish
Bloodaxe Books), while effectively obscuring those foundational works of
an indigenous British modernism still in the process of being rescued by
Tuma himself and the five contributors to Conductors of Chaos
who select and introduce work by their predecessors.
Tuma somehow manages to be at the same time both attractively
modest and passionate in his advocacy. Since he regards his book as
essentially a loosely-connected series of essays, it is probably best
to avoid any implication that it can be regarded as a complete account of
any kind or seeks an Archimedean point from which to survey the field.
It aims, instead, to enact the tentative probings toward both a nearly
forgotten British modernist poetry and a British postmodernist poetry
still in the process of being written by coming again and again at
its material in bits and pieces, and from first one angle and then
another. The jagged pattern achieved is intellectually stimulating and
aesthetically satisfying. While Tuma is definitely out to open up the
transatlantic route once more to two-way traffic, he pessimistically
assumes the odds are heavily against him. His strategy, however,
may in the end be more successful than he supposes. He wants "to
present enough poetries not to map the whole field but to erode
established [American] caricatures [of modern British poetry] and
prevent new ones from solidifying"; and he wants "to ventriloquize
from enough perspectives to prevent discourses of national identity
from emerging, as they have in the past, with the blunt force that
inevitably distorts and interrupts the reading of poems, or just
makes whole areas of poetic practice disappear." Writing, then,
chiefly for American readers, Tuma believes that "one reason for
reading British poetry, and for reading as widely in it as possible,
is to combat narrow views of that poetry that emerge in premature and
reified accounts of American identity." And if the typical American
characterization of British poetry is indeed "a monolithic source
of all that is obsolete, standardized, and ruled by timid conventionality,"
the most effective method of combating such a view will be through
the close examination of particular poets and particular
poems that contradict it: work that is experimental, formally
innovative, radical. While Tuma seeks to defend the academic study of
contemporary poetry in his book, he also argues that "one good reason
to study British poetry, especially British 'experimental poetry,' is
to see what happens to a poetry which more often [than American] has
had to go it alone, as it were, without being able to depend quite so
heavily on the artificial economics created by the academy and
other institutions."
Actually, I find the book a good deal less fragmentary
and impressionistic than I expected after first reading the
introduction. The literary-historical chapters are extremely thorough
and will be of enormous use to American readers who are, as Tuma
reiterates, unaware of almost everything that has happened in
British poetry for the past fifty years, while his considerations
of work by Joseph Gordon Macleod, Mina Loy, Basil Bunting, and
Edward Kamau Brathwaite are among the best I have read on these poets.
The essays are short, but they say a great deal. They involve both
analysis and advocacy. This last, again, is important. As Tuma says,
he writes about work he admires. He wants to find readers for this
poetry, and his discussions persuade us that the work will reward
our attention. He is a critic who opens books rather than one who
closes them. So I find the volume, in the end, something much more
than "a series of essays." It stakes out territory and establishes
priorities with critical insight and imaginative energy. And the
balance between the literary-historical chapters and the studies of
major figures is aesthetically very satisfying. I very much admire,
for example, the strategy of focusing sharply in Part One on the
old Hall/Pack/Simpson New Poets of England and America
anthologies in order to set up the recovery of British modernists
like Macleod, Loy, and Bunting by way of extended readings of their
best work. (I am reminded here of certain moments in M.L. Rosenthal's
The New Poets of 1967, a very useful book in its time and one
that, in its way, also tried to find American readers for British
poetry.) And I am deeply impressed, while sometimes also amused,
by the sixth chapter on "Alternative British Poetry" that manages to
maneuver through a difficult terrain - the very terrain occupied by
many among the Conductors and Others - that has never
before been mapped at all, a chapter that investigates contending
camps of the British avant-garde with the scrupulosity of a fastidious
anthropologist among newly-discovered tribes.
Because my own orientation with regard to British poetry
is somewhat different from Tuma's, I do lament the exclusion of several
important poets from his discussion. David Jones, for example, seems to
me even more central to the story he has to tell than Bunting, Loy, or
Macleod. Tomlinson and Middleton are missing. So are Jeremy Prynne and
Geoffrey Hill and Christopher Logue's versions from Homer. But Tuma's
reading both of his chosen major figures and the contexts out of which
they emerge is fascinating, authoritative, and compelling. He knows the
British poetry scene about as well as any American I can think of and
his position is independent of fashion, original, and well-considered.
Tuma's frequent interjections of the personal, and his defense of the
eclectic and the lapidary against the systemic and the theoretical,
should prepare the reader for his reluctance to sum things up. Even
without a summation, however, Fishing by Obstinate Isles is the
best possible introduction for American readers to a range of British
poetries and poetic histories long neglected here.
Sean O'Brien's The Deregulated Muse stands in
relationship to Fishing by Obstinate Isles in about the same
way the Armitage/Crawford Penguin stands in relationship to
Conductors and Other: it frames the group photograph
of avant-garde fraternity in both predictable and unexpected ways by
exploring the work of an increasingly democratized, pluralist, and
sometimes even experimental mainstream. While all thirty-six poets
discussed by O'Brien can be found in the Penguin anthology and only
one - Roy Fisher - in Conductors or Other, or discussed
at any length in Fishing by Obstinate Isles, The Dergegulated
Muse nonetheless shares certain similarities with Keith Tuma's book.
O'Brien says at the outset that he is in no position (any more than
Tuma is) to write a comprehensive account of contemporary poetry in
Britain, that his approach will be non-theoretical, and that his
notion of deregulation - a word in his title deliberately entangling
his essays with the public world of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite
history - acknowledges the notion that "it is not clear where authority
in poetic matters resides." Since Tuma laments that part of the blame for
American neglect of recent British poetry might be extended to the
British themselves for their failure to produce much serious critical
writing on their recent poets, one imagines him welcoming a book like
O'Brien's even though it privileges such a radically different range
of talents from those he himself would like us to read. Both critics,
in fact, appeal to a non-specialist reader by writing in lucid,
lively, memorable (and sometimes even aphoristic or epigrammatic)
prose. Tuma says he wants no part of "the power of systematic,
theoretical language" and feels lucky and grateful to have the reader's
attention at all. O'Brien says his essays are written "in the
conviction that criticism had better be readable" and not something
written in "the interior code of a class or professional cadre."
If Tuma's audience might be imagined as a class of bright
undergraduates or graduate students, O'Brien's is the somewhat
more endangered species of common readers who favor the tough,
argumentative pub-talk of Grub Street reviewing whose journalists
and professional writers are not much influenced by the terms of
either British or American academic criticism. O'Brien, the British
poet-journalist from Philip Larkin's Hull, argues that
"the very variousness of contemporary poetry seems to prevent the
emergence of a dominant line." Tuma, the American academic from
Oxford (Ohio!), would clearly dispute that claim, feeling that
the majority of O'Brien's thirty-six poets are the dominant line
(if that in fact means the line that has long sought to dominate).
O'Brien acknowledges that "for some readers [his] idea of variety
will be their idea of homogeneity," and looks forward to reading
their accounts of the matter.
O'Brien's account of the matter begins with essays on
Larkin, Hughes, and Hill that lean rather heavily, as does the
introduction to the Armitage/Crawford Penguin, on Seamus Heaney's
excellent essay, "Englands of the Mind," in Preoccupations.
This opening section of the book, "The Ends of England," is more or
less predicated on Heaney's notion, cited in O'Brien's later remarks
on the Irish poet's prose, that "English poets are being forced to
explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with
England." In general, O'Brien finds "the confidence of Irish poetry
of the last two generations to be "in part an oblique commentary on
the exhaustion and anxiety of Englishness." But while insisting on
the manner in which history impinges on these poets, and describing
their responses - he is harsh on Hill, ambivalent about Larkin, and
focuses rather surprisingly on Hughes's Laureate poems in Rain-Charm
for the Duchy - he would also seem to share the conviction he
attributes to Heaney "that experiences and things in themselves have
meaning and value, over and above those bestowed by institutional and
class history, when made into poetry." Indeed Heaney's short and
elegant literary essays seem in many ways to be a model for O'Brien's
approach - modified perhaps by the vitriol he finds in Tom Paulin's
prose and the concision he finds in Neil Corcoran's - and he pays one
of them the highest compliment one could well imagine when saying that
Heaney's argument "becomes the embodiment of its own justice."
Finding the Englands of Larkin and Hughes in the process
of vanishing, O'Brien in his second section, "Different Class," looks
sympathetically at a large body of work by Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn,
and Ken Smith both in terms of its working class origins and its poetic
achievement before going on to separate chapters dealing with two groups
of Irish poets - Heaney-Mahon-Durcan and Carson-Paulin-Muldoon - which
are divided by his discussion of feminist poets Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens
and Carol Ann Duffy and the first of what I think are the two most
interesting chapters of the book, "A Daft Place," which examines work
by Roy Fisher, Peter Reading, Peter Porter, and Peter Didsbury. The
work of these four poets, together with that taken up in the amusingly
titled final section - "Postmodernist, Moi?" - makes the most interesting
contrast with the poetry discussed by Tuma and anthologized in
Conductors and Other.
The first thing one notices about the poets discussed in
O'Brien's chapter on postmodernism is that not a single one in this
group warrants a mention by Tuma, Sinclair, or Caddel-Quartermain
among poets assumed to be sympathetic to postmodernism in Fishing,
Conductors, and Other, except insofar as they are perceived
to completely misunderstand it. O'Brien's notion of postmodernism is
both inclusive in a one-of-the-lads sort of way and, as the title suggests,
simultaneously skeptical. And it includes in its selection of
representative postmodern poets both those identified as such in the
Motion/Morrison Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry and
the Hulse/Kennedy/Morley New Poetry anthology which in some ways
opposed it and helped to launch New Generation poets like Armitage and
Glyn Maxwell. Most interesting of all, perhaps, it traces the postmodern
spirit in England not to Prynne at Cambridge or Mottram in London, but
to the influence of John Fuller at Oxford; and it traces Fuller's own
sources not to Charles Olson or John Ashbery, but to W.H. Auden.
O'Brien argues that postmodernism is now so ubiquitous
that definition has become increasingly difficult, especially as he
finds that attempts to theorize it are both profligate and contradictory
when both avowedly experimental and seemingly mainstream camps claim for
themselves a piece of the action. Among the mainstream postmodernists
(eux?) he discusses, the only common ground he's much interested in
establishing has to do with "a deliberate awareness of and curiosity
about poetic devices [which are] often allied to the redeployment of
familiar kinds of poem, particularly narrative." He believes,
"contrary to what some critics may claim," that "theory is always
belated," and that abstract ideas about uncertainty, for example,
are much less interesting than an impulse in any practicing poet
which "relishes flying blind across the page" or peculiarities of a
poet like Peter Didsbury which are as much innate as acquired,
leading "less to an aesthetic program [than an] inclination to write
poems." He is not willing to add much more in general terms save the
observation that "the concern of these poets is less with immutable
truth than with the means [they] employ, and by which [they] are
led, to construct ideas of it or to question the possibility of doing
so." Poets like James Fenton, O'Brien's favorite poet of the group,
may have learned from John Fuller's teaching and example "a curiosity
about the poem's status and the workings of language which makes the
frame of reference and the means of construction into part of the
subject." Although much of this could apply to just about any
poetry at all, one can also see the interest in O'Brien's attempt
to retrace the emergence of a particularly British postmodernism
emerging from Auden (whether early in The Orators or later
in The Sea and the Mirror), and the reasons for his
frustration with certain theorists' disinclination to see that
"the unwritten moment-to-moment history of poetry accommodates
mess and disorder, chance and distraction, just as much as the
determination to make it new and see the picture whole." He
complains that John Osborn, a postmodern critic of Didsbury,
reveals a paradox that troubles him: "if the old Big Picture
myths and explanations have given way to uncertainty, what
grounds has uncertainty to be so peculiarly sure of itself?"
Although one could easily imagine the answers to these
questions that Osborne or Jeremy Prynne or some of the critics O'Brien
jokingly calls Muldoonologists might put forward, it is more interesting
to look at what O'Brien says about some of the poets who appear in the
Armitage/Crawford Penguin to see if any common ground actually exists
between their work and that of the poets in Conductors of Chaos
and Other. O'Brien complains about antitheses reproducing
themselves from generation to generation - modernity versus
tradition, avant-garde versus mainstream, establishment versus
rebels - even to the point where poets who probably write from a
similar impulse but inherit these binary echoes would, if given the
chance, "go back and run each other over twice to be certain."
