Ian Brinton

Figures of Outward

Desire Lines, Unselected Poems of Barry MacSweeney, ed. Luke Roberts, Shearsman Books, 2018, pp. 342, £16.95 (paperback)

The Oval Window, J.H. Prynne, Bloodaxe Books, 2018, pp.160, £12.00 (paperback)

Iain Sinclair told us the tale of Barry MacSweeney’s selected poems, The Tempers of Hazard, which had been launched at Compendium Bookshop in London and then rapidly pulped: ‘Rupert Murdoch’s accountants saw no reason to tolerate low-turnover cultural loss leaders.’ In 1993 the book had become what Sinclair also described as ‘an instant rarity’, a book that had begun life ‘as a remainder and was now less than a rumour.’ In his introduction to this new collection of MacSweeney’s poems Luke Roberts takes up the story:

In 2003, his selected poems – overseen by MacSweeney before his death and edited by Neil Astley – were published by Bloodaxe as Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems, 1965-2000. There’s no question that this book contains some of his most important work: the serial poem Brother Wolf, which takes the life of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) as a mysterious parable about poetic vocation; the obscure, anxious, and compressed music of Odes; the delirious and violent political satire Jury Vet; the plaintive and mythic Ranter; the late masterpiece Pearl. But any selected poems is a compromise, and the story Wolf Tongue tells is partial and incomplete.

Desire Lines, Unselected Poems 1966-2000 draws heavily on work published by small independent presses and its enormous range and vitality testifies, as Roberts puts it, to the sheer commitment with which MacSweeney and his friends ‘attempted to change the literary landscape

of British poetry’. This volume is going to be the nearest we get to a completed story until an edition of Barry MacSweeney’s Collected Poems appears at some future stage although, as the editor again stresses, this is unlikely to happen because ‘he simply wrote too much, experimented too much, published too frantically too young.’

MacSweeney’s connection with the world of publishing was itself an astonishing story. Hutchinson marketed his first volume, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother, in an extraordinarily energetic fashion for a young poet’s first book. They were perhaps eager to make capital out of the Beat explosion and the success of Penguin’s Modern Poets 10, The Mersey Sound in 1967. The book sold 11,000 copies and appeared in an American edition in 1969 whilst MacSweeney was nominated for the Chair of Oxford Professor of Poetry and was reviewed, interviewed and satirized in the broadsheet press. After this extraordinary debut MacSweeney settled for small poetry presses for his next volumes and started one of his own along with Elaine Randell, Blacksuede Boot Press.

It is hardly surprising, given this beginning at the age of nineteen, that MacSweeney’s life as a poet should become haunted with rumour and he did little to dispel this sense of le poète maudit that he had inherited perhaps from his immense respect for the work of Rimbaud, Chatterton and Shelley. In 1967, at the age of nineteen and only one year before the Hutchinson publication, he had organised the now almost legendary Sparty Lea Festival of poets in the Northumberland Allen Valley at which a number of young poets gathered for readings and other convivial activities such as exploring lead mines and trips to the pub. Many of the poets there were to become central figures in the British Poetry Revival: Jeremy Prynne brushed shoulders with John James, Peter Riley with Andrew Crozier, Tim Longville with Tom Pickard (friend and colleague of Basil Bunting). One of the things MacSweeney learned from Sparty Lea was talking and listening to Prynne refer to the American poet Charles Olson and he told Eric Mottram in an interview some seven years later that ‘I knew one thing: that I didn’t like what the Liverpool poets were doing. I knew that was just too light for me. I was too much embedded in the land, the environment,

the politics, from my kind of background in Newcastle, and in the artistic intellectual activity that was going on at the Morden Tower, to be drawn by that.’ MacSweeney recalled Prynne playing a tape of Olson’s 1965 reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and ‘suddenly a massive vista opened up, projective verse, and I studied it for a long time and read all the Olson I could get hold of, and read about Black Mountain. The figure of outward is a phrase, but for me it means like taking a language outside of the ego, the self, one’s own personal relationships, and suddenly realising that all that land is out there.’

Having left school at seventeen MacSweeney started work as a trainee reporter for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle where he shared an office with Basil Bunting, friend of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukosky. What he learned from Bunting was concision, writing poems in words that ‘burst on your consciousness in a way in which the poem has not explained to you.’ Referring to his poem ‘Just Twenty-Two and I don’t Mind Dying: The Official Poetical Biography of Jim Morrison, Rock Idol’, (The Curiously Strong Press, 1971) MacSweeney told Mottram ‘The style is compressed, paratactic…the facets of a diamond, like the facets of a stone, like complete shape, like Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture…the high force energy, the compressed centre.’ This was a world that had learned something very valuable indeed from Bunting and his connection with the American Objectivists of the 1930s.

Another effect of working with Bunting may well have been a growing awareness of that Northumbrian’s poet’s interest in the poetry of Joseph Skipsey, the Allendale miner and poet of the mid-nineteenth century who had been employed as a trapper at the age of seven to regulate the ventilation by opening and shutting a door when the coal wagons passed through for sixteen hours a day. MacSweeney’s most sustained experiment with open-form composition, using the space of the page to maximum effect, was ‘Black Torch’ and Desire Lines brings this entire sequence of important political poems back into print. Much of the thirty-five page poem deals with the 1844 Durham Miners’ Strike and following on from MacSweeney’s comment about the facets of a diamond it comes as no

surprise to read the closing line of the first section: ‘each word a kerbstone’. Having begun work on the poem during the strike of the National Union of Journalists in December 1974/January 1975 MacSweeney completed the bulk of the writing by 1976 although he continued to research and read extensively in English labour history before the whole sequence was published by Allen Fisher’s New London Pride in 1978. Basil Bunting edited Skipsey’s Selected Poems in 1976 and suggested in the introduction that the coal owners were ‘much too thrifty to supply candles to trapper boys’ who ‘sat in the dark. Except towards midsummer they never saw light at all except on Sundays (for they started before dawn and ended after sunset) unless a passing hewer or putter might spare one of them a candle-end.’ MacSweeney’s ‘Black Torch’ brings a Northumbrian voice and vividness to that mining world of the Victorian age:

wor bairn leaves the hoose at half past 3 13 yor owld gets yem at five at neet he gets 1 and 3 a day his little bit meks aal the difference he gans to the rantors school the kids should be trained by wor folk to lorn the proper things for working people.

Jeremy Prynne also started his career with one of the mainstream publishing houses when Routledge printed his substantial first volume, Force of Circumstance, in 1962. After this early venture into one of the large publishing houses he also turned to the small independent poetry presses with his next few volumes appearing from Ferry Press, Grosseteste Press, Albion Village Press and, in 1970, MacSweeney’s Blacksuede Boot Press. Although Prynne’s first collection of Poems appeared from Anthony Barnett’s Agneau 2 in the early 1980s he, like MacSweeney, turned to Bloodaxe for the three increasingly large later editions. Prynne had certainly been an important and acknowledged early influence on MacSweeney and had directed him towards reading Chatterton and Shelley before lending

him a copy of Death’s Jest Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes in 1973 and inviting him up to Cambridge to meet George Oppen.

Bloodaxe’s beautifully produced recent reprint of Prynne’s The Oval Window, edited with extensive and illuminating notes by Neil Reeve and Richard Kerridge, continues that connection between MacSweeney and Prynne and the earlier privately printed sequence of poems is now accompanied by seventeen black-and-white photographs of a number of rough stone huts at Tinkler Crags, on Askerton North Moor, a desolate area near the village of Gilsland, in Cumbria, not far from Hadrian’s Wall. The original photograph cover of the 1983 edition had shown a window-like opening in the wall of such a ruined ‘shield’ or shieling, a rough stone hut built by medieval farmers to house themselves and their families during the summer transhumance:

It is not quite a cabin, but (in local speech) a shield, in the elbow of upland water, the sod roof almost gone but just under its scar a rough opening: it is, in first sight, the oval window. Last light foams at this crest. The air lock goes cold

in hot sun, blue streak under lines swarming there, dung on all fours. The blur spot on both sides gives out a low, intense hum, sharp-folded as if to a feral rafter.

The photographs, taken on the poet’s father-in-law’s camera in the early 1980s, capture a sense of the landscape which is about a mile to the south of another ruin: the remains of what was to have been a silo to house Blue Streak ballistic missiles, the United Kingdom’s only attempt to develop its own independent land-based nuclear weapons programme. This was a project scrapped by the Macmillan government in 1960 on account of the place being geologically problematic. As Reeve puts it ‘the bedrock was so close to the surface that it would have been prohibitively expensive and

time-consuming to drill deep enough for the entire 150-ft launching tube to be concealed below ground’. Nowadays the whole area lies within the domain of RAF Spadeadam and is used for electronic weapons training.

In the first of the two essays which go to make up this re-issuing of a major poem, Kerridge reminds us that the oval window refers also to the inner ear, ‘with its flakes, the otolith crystals, shifting and heaping with the body’s movement so as to stabilise the individual’s orientation and sensory intake’. This reference to the auditory seems to touch on another element which threads its way throughout the twenty-seven sections of Prynne’s poem: his longstanding interest in pastoral and transhumant cultures, the belief that lyric poetry itself developed from earlier traditions of communal singing which would be performed at least in part as offering relief from the strains and exertions of collective labour, in work songs or marching songs. As Reeve puts it this exercise of voice would in part ‘help organise that labour as collective, by setting strict rhythms for it.’ With this in mind we might trace one aspect of the poem back to that Spartylea conference organized by MacSweeney in 1967. In the Allen valley over that Easter weekend Tim Longville encouraged and led group chantings of his own recently-written short poem ‘Back Out’ and, as he recalled it many years later, ‘Jeremy was an enthusiastic participant’. Indeed Prynne took a phrase from Longville’s poem to place in his own 1994 sequence Her Weasels Wild Returning. Prynne’s The Oval Window is partly centred upon the actual physiology of listening, itself a central tenet of Prynne’s book-length account of Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’. There in 2007 he suggested that to ‘the startled poet she must surely be a primal muse-figure, as Ceres herself, because her song is the basis of lyric and its original roots in the life and work of a human community’. Prynne’s 1983 poem at Tinkler Crags concludes with an echo of Matthew Arnold standing at a window overlooking Dover Beach whilst he contemplates bleak reality with a stoical awareness:

Standing by the window I heard it while waiting for the turn

One of Prynne’s familiar ways of working is to embed quotations from his own reading within the body of his poems and the extensive notes offered by the editors of this new edition of The Oval Window reveal the fascination of very close reading. Also of course, as Kerridge points out, since the poem’s publication in 1983 ‘a transformative development for the practice of reading has occurred: the availability of the internet and of search engines such as Google’. He goes on to highlight the importance of this development for readers of this kind of text that includes ‘a wider variety of specialist language than any reader is likely to understand without research’. Within the lyric intensity of Prynne’s poem readers will come across phrases from financial columns in newspapers and the language of computer programming. Many of these references are in turn presented in such a way in the editors’ notes as to prompt the reader back to the poem itself. In the later pages of the sequence we are also directed to quotations from Lois Fusek’s translations of a tenth-century anthology of Chinese lyrics, Among the Flowers, and one can appreciate the merging of the lyrical voice with the drier analysis of finance:

The clouds are white in a pale autumn sky. Looking at the misty paths I see this stooping figure seeming to falter, in a thick compound of adjustments, sublimed in white flakes.

The reference to clouds is from a poem written around A.D. 920 where a woman ‘sits alone by the window looking at the misty paths’. The clogging sense of compound of adjustments appears in an article from The Times in 1983 in which the level of social security payments to the poor and unemployed cannot be considered as a principle ‘in and of itself’ but consists of an amount currently paid as a consequence of ‘a thick compound of adjustments for inflation over the years’.

MacSweeney’s Black Torch poems had also reflected a deep lyrical awareness of the political landscape surrounding him in the year preceding the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government:

I deal in secret financial reports confidential manpower utilization documents council Deep-Throats with secrets to tell I must protect my sources to weld Press trivia in low-key suburban rags.

Obvious conflict for a poet in this predicament –

to be worked out

as it goes & as it falls

To be cleaned.