Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960–1980 : Event and Effect

212 Pages·2017·2.837 MB·English

by  Juha Virtanen

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Poetry and Performance
During the British
Poetry Revival -
Event and Effect
Juha Virtanen
Modern and Contemporary Poetry
and Poetics
Series editor
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues
topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical
and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes
social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of
authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination
(groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry
and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of
writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the
poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14799
Juha Virtanen
Poetry
and Performance
During the British
Poetry Revival
–
1960 1980
Event and Effect
JuhaVirtanen
SchoolofEnglish,Rutherford College
University ofKent
Canterbury,UK
Modern andContemporaryPoetry andPoetics
ISBN978-3-319-58210-8 ISBN978-3-319-58211-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58211-5
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A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thisbookhasalreadylivedthroughanumberoflives.Ifirstbegandrafting
its chapters for my doctoral thesis, which I completed in 2013 at the
University of Kent. In the years that followed, the project underwent a
numberofeditsandrevisionsuntilitfinallyarrivedatitscurrentform.Asa
consequence of this long process of development, there are a number of
partiesthatdeservetobeacknowledgedhere.MyPh.D.wasfundedbythe
SchoolofEnglishatKent,andwithoutthatfinancialsupport,Iwouldhave
beenunabletocompletetheinitialdraftsofthistext.Iamalsogratefulfor
thesupervisoryguidanceIreceivedfromDavidAyers,DavidHerdandJan
Montefiore, as well as the encouragement and feedback from my thesis
examiners, Peter Barry and Will Montgomery.
I owe a great deal of thanks to both Allen Fisher and Denise Riley for
their time, generosity and hospitality in answering my questions during
interviews and exchanges over email. The helpful staff at the archives and
special collections at The British Library, King’s College‚ London and the
Templeman Library at Kent were all vital to the progress of my research.
Additionally,Iamgratefulforthefeedbackfromanumberofpoets,critics,
colleagues and friends at conferences, research seminars and other events
where I presented extracts from this work. I also want to thank the indi-
viduals who collaborated with me on the Blood Bone Brain Re-Encounter
at POLYply in May 2013: Ollie Evans, Mendoza, Robert Kiely, Daniel
O’Donnell-Smith, Nat Raha and Steve Willey.
Each chapter in this book benefitted enormously from the committed
and detailed reading of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and the anonymous
reviewers at Palgrave. Rachel’s support for this project, in particular, has
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
been especially heartening. Allie Bochiccio and Emily Janakiram made the
entire production process efficient and painless, and I am grateful for that.
IalsowanttoextendmythankstoMatt,Frances,Lucy,EmmaandLivvie
for letting me stay at their home while I wrote the bulk of the final draft.
Likewise,Iwouldnothavebeenabletocompletethisprojectwithoutthe
unwavering help and support of Eleanor Perry.
Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to Allen Fisher for the
permissiontoquotematerialandreproduceimagesfromBloodBoneBrain,
Ffacece and Place; to King’s College London for the permission to quote
from Eric Mottram’s Pollock Record; to Denise Riley, as author and
copyright holder, for the permission to quote from Marxism for Infants
and Selected Poems; and to Peterjon Skelt and North and South for the
permission to use extensive quotes from Eric Mottram’s interview in
Prospect into Breath: Interviews with North and South Writers.
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Be Kind to This Place: Allen Ginsberg and the First
International Poetry Incarnation 27
3 This Blank Space from Which I Speak: Denise Riley at the
Cambridge Poetry Festival‚ April 15th 1977 55
4 Memories Arrested in Space: Eric Mottram’s Pollock
Record 83
5 You Are Invited to Perform: Process‚ Mutation and
Participation in Allen Fisher’s Blood Bone Brain 105
6 Epilogue 141
7 An Interview with Allen Fisher 155
8 An Interview with Denise Riley 177
Bibliography 189
Index 201
vii
L F
IST OF IGURES
Fig. 5.1 The graphfrom Creekin theceiling beam 113
Fig. 5.2 Seating plansforBlood Bone Brainin London,
1974 118
Fig. 5.3 BONEVISUALS 1: TulseHillPotato 1965
andBONE VISUALS9: Norfolk grass (missing) 119
Fig. 5.4 BLOOD VISUALS1: Church, Camberwellcemetery,
SE22 120
Fig. 5.5 BONEVISUALS 2: Remainsofanedible book
forbook fair1971 123
Fig. 5.6 BONEVISUALS 10:Sheep’s skullless lowerjaw,
Westmorland,1972 131
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
InMarch2011,IsatdowninmybedroomtoenjoythebroadcastofMake
Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You, a radio documentary about Bob
Cobbing produced by Falling Tree Productions for BBC Radio 4. The
programme featured several speakers, including the poets and writers Iain
Sinclair, Peter Finch, Peter Barry, Paula Claire and Lawrence Upton. The
discussions alluded to Cobbing’s career as a poet, artist and composer; his
roleatthePoetrySocietyduringthe‘poetrywars’ofthe1970s,wherethe
conventional poetry establishment and the new wave of avant-garde poets
competedforthecontrolofthisnationalartsorganization;hisinfluenceas
anactivistwithintheBritishPoetryRevival,atermcoinedbyEricMottram
to describe the innovative poetries that emerged in the UK between the
early 1960s and the late 1970s; and as the leader of Writers Forum, a
workshop and small press that nurtured and published many of the poets
associated with experimental poetry in London during the second half of
the twentieth century.1 Some of these voices were already familiar to me
from conferences, poetry readings or other public events. Yet the disem-
bodied and uninterrupted quality of the broadcast meant that I was often
unable to determine the identity of each speaker in real time.
Consequently, when the latter parts of the documentary turned to reflect
uponCobbing’slegacy,andtheRevivalingeneral,Iwasunabletoidentify
the contributor that raised an interesting proposition. This male speaker
suggestedthatinrecentyearsyoungerpoetsandacademicshavedeveloped
a fresh interest in this episode of British poetry, and therefore this once
‘invisible history’ is now becoming more visible. The identity of that
©TheAuthor(s)2017 1
J.Virtanen,PoetryandPerformanceDuringtheBritishPoetry
Revival1960–1980,ModernandContemporaryPoetryandPoetics,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-58211-5_1