I have been reading the very welcome collection of essays on
Barry MacSweeney, edited by MacSweeney scholar Paul Batchelor, Reading Barry MacSweeney (Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2013), an important supplement to the work of William Walton Rowe in Three Lyric Poets (Tavistock: Northcote
House, 2009) and the essays in John Wilkinson’s The Lyric Touch (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), (though Marianne Morris’ essay ‘The
Abused Become the Abusers’ in Quid 14
(October 2004) must also be acknowledged, and the long 100 page chapter in
Clive Bush’s volume Out of Dissent
which I read last night).
The oscillation of views on MacSweeney’s work is extreme,
which is not surprising, given its range. The by turns precocious and
derivative early work, uneasily dominated by father-figures like Bunting and/or
Prynne contrasts with the Vorticist impaction of Odes which followed. The either hopeless or aspirational
mythologizing of Ranter gives way to the
violent abjection of middle period political work like ‘Liz Hard’, which is
either enthusiastically embraced as the central work of the oeuvre or dismissed
as its ‘central disaster’ (Peter Riley’s phrase, I think). In one volume, The Book of Demons, readers face either
the pastoral richness or sentimental poverty of the ‘Pearl’
poems, and the execrable or exemplary un-palatability of ‘The Book of Demons’
(depending on one’s views towards the idyllic and the alcoholic). The
collaborative celebration of Apollinaire in his final book Horses in Boiling Blood – a marvellous book I fully recommend to
those who stopped with Wolf Tongue – presented the last in a long line of ventriloquised heroes
and avatars, from Chatterton to Robert Johnson, a strategy which raises various
objections, subtle excuses and lengthy supporting expositions, from his
critics.
In another posting (here) I deal with some of the views of
MacSweeney (the canonisation of him, to be precise) but I don’t offer my own.
MacSweeney (who I met only a couple of times) pops in and out of my
autrebiographical texts (to be published whole as Words out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings (see some excerpts here and here). I fish these four direct
references out of the texts that make this up.
I don’t remember buying Barry MacSweeney’s poem about Jim
Morrison.
Why is there no news from Barry MacSweeney?
I came over but he was deep in MacSweeney and Rimbaud.
Barry MacSweeney recites his Mary Bell sonnets.
To contextualise: Just
22 and don’t mind dying came in a 7 inch square sleeve; I know I had a copy,
probably bought in Norwich
at the underground bookshop that was closing down. There was ‘no news’ because
I had invited him to do a reading in the early 1980s in Norwich, no reply. I too (‘he’) indulged in
the equation of MacSweeney and other doomed heroes, you can see. The last
quotation refers to the last gig I saw him do, in Southport
with Lee Harwood in about 1998 or 99 at which he read the notorious and
unpublishable ‘Mary Bell’ poems about the Tyneside child-killer who was herself
a child at the time of the murder.
MacSweeney haunts past and present. I have two copies of his
Hutchinson volume The Boy from the Green
Cabaret Tells of his Mother (see note 137 below): one signed and dated by
me: ‘robert g sheppard august 1974’, by which time I’d met him, having recorded
a London poetry reading with Tom Pickard (who read his brilliant ‘Dancing Under
Fire’) in 1974 for my tape magazine 1983.
I still have the blurred cassette on which I am surprised he read early poems.
The second is signed ‘All best wishes Barry MacSweeney Nov 1968 Liverpool,’ which I bought in the Oxfam shop a few years
ago. There’s something totemic about having two copies.
As a ‘linguistically innovative poet’, for me, the central MacSweeney
book has always been The Odes. I
reviewed this in Reality Studios in
1981, and this review is republished in Far
Language, whose title comes from MacSweeney, but I also beefed it up for the end of my ‘British Poetry
Revival’ chapter in The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool
University Press, 2005). It ran like
this (pp. 68-70):
With their celerity,
and condensation, Barry MacSweeney’s Odes
offer a tough view of politics in the late 1970s. Having made a
precocious beginning in the late 1960s, even being picked up by a major
publisher as a possible Geordie complement to the Liverpool Poets, and having
mixed with a broad range of poets, from Bunting and Pickard, to Prynne and
Mottram, who steered him away from such celebrity, MacSweeney developed a range
and authority that remained in his writing until his death in 2000.137
Pound had approvingly quoted
Bunting’s bilingual equation ‘Dichten = condensare’ in his ABC of Reading
(1951), to demonstrate that condensation is the essence of writing,138
but in Odes, whose title might suggest a debt to Bunting’s own two books
of Odes, ‘the style is compressed, paratactic.’139 This is not the economy that comes of careful
revision but is an economy built into the compositional process. Condensation
is so acute, its resultant autonomy frustrates the processes of naturalization.
Perhaps learning from the increased impaction found in the work of Prynne at
this time, as he too moved from the Olsonian inheritance, MacSweeney has said,
I’ve worked towards this
condensing of language, this cutting across meaning, not having words next to
each other which are supposed to be there … I think they are shocking. 140
By squeezing metaphoric language
into this indeterminacy MacSweeney, like Bill Griffiths, has ensured that the
poems stay poetic. Celerity is a guerilla tactic against
a language that belongs increasingly to the controllers of our society. In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ MacSweeney can adopt a
persona that declares with frightening simplicity in lines that are parodied
throughout the piece:
I
am 16.
I
am a Tory. My
vision
of the future represents
no
people.141
The Babylonian exile of the
reggae of the era (‘I have no people/They represent me’) merges with the
sinister tones of Igy Pop’s lyric, ‘No Fun’, that operates as a resistant echo
of the other NF, the National Front, which, as we have seen from Lud Heat,
was a small but potent force throughout the 1970s.142 More positively, ‘No Fun’ counterpoints
another slogan: ‘No more apartheid’. 143
The poem is what
MacSweeney would ironically call a number of his angry poems of the 1980s: a
state of the nation address. The sceptre of unemployment hovers in the surreal
image of
your
natty dread future is a dole card
stamped
with asteroids exploding
across
the city of my
birth.144
The reader is forced to
join in the mechanics of language, cannot rest in too many of the familiar
notions of space/time, social detail, idea, or traditional image, most of the
comforting impedimenta of ‘poetry’. In ‘Far Cliff Babylon’ there comes the
stark realization that ‘I have died every day since I gave up poetry./Dangerous
condescending humans lapped it up.’ 145 Despite this, the real
triumph of these poems is that they ‘move’ the reader - in both senses of the
word. Yet the ‘movement’ of the poems,
the celerity of the text, resists that static aestheticization of the feeling,
that comforting, introspective notion, of having been ‘moved’. It recalls what
Forrest-Thomson said of the alternative linguistic orderings evoked by poetic
artifice. That the lines ‘I am 16/I am a Tory’ quote the young William Hague,
leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 until 2001, makes the poem seem
prophetic, a bridge to the poetry of the 1980s and 1990s.
*
And beyond, I think, into
the 2000s and 2010s: Mr Hague’s now shiny skull is thought a useful target for
a nail in Sean Bonney’s Happiness published
two years ago. (Look it up.) It’s a cogent enough account, it still seems to me
(and I note how the hero-worshipping and the mythical aspects are strategically
ignored).
When The Tempers of Hazard appeared in 1993 (I got my copy pretty quick
and avoided the notorious pulping) I was surprised to see the anarchic and
typographically wild ‘Liz Hard’ and ‘Jury Vet Poems’, but I’d always found them
‘difficult’ in a different way, a less-guarded way, than Odes, and I don’t mention them here (though to be fair I was
writing a history of the British Poetry Revival, whose dating generally ends in
1978). Looking at them now, and wondering if I am up to writing about them, I
realise that they should be formally regarded as a continuation of the
impaction of the Odes, despite the
scatological and sexual violence of the content (Bush refers to them as the
‘Jury Vet Odes’, which encourages me in this identification). As readers of
these posts will have noticed, FORM is what I am interested in with my current
critical project. But before I turn to that, I recall another debt to
MacSweeney in my creative work. I am making this clear to myself (and others)
before moving on.
The apparently
non-parenthetical remark above ‘until his death in 2000’ was added at a late
stage in the preparation of the manuscript of The Poetry of Saying (as were the references to Hague, it seems;
MacSweeney himself confirmed the quote but I have seen the odious video of the
infant Hague uttering these words through his Giles cartoon chin). But this
wasn’t the only reference to the sad fact of MacSweeney’s death in my work. (I
found out about it by picking up a copy of The
Guardian in The Willow Bank in Liverpool
and read Andrew Crozier’s obituary. It was quite a shock.) The last poem of my
long intratextual project TwentiethCentury Blues was the millennial ‘Empty Diary 2000’. The character ‘Pearl’,
who appears in a kind of semi-Beckettian comic-tragic pairing with ‘George’
throughout the project, and is the narrator of this poem, is of course not the
same Pearl as the one eulogised by MacSweeney in his searing pastoral ‘Pearl’
poems. (They are both based on different real people.) Here is the poem
(revised from the unsatisfying prose version in Tin Pan Arcadia). The dedication to MacSweeney, which seemed
inevitable at the time) is only at the end because of the terrible rhyming
couplet it would make if placed just after the title. (Try it.) It’s not
‘about’ MacSweeney, but seems appropriate to him; there’s as much from Noel
Coward (‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ rather than ‘Twentieth Century Blues’), Kiki of
Monparnasse, Roland Barthes, Harryette Mullen, even Angela Carter, and it’s a
farewell to the entire project and the
‘Empty Diary’ strand that runs through it like the legendary ‘Fuck You’ supposedly
printed through miles of Brighton Rock that had to be destroyed. There exists,
however, an Empty Diary 1327 (coincidentally written in the last few days, a
Petrarch 3 variation) and an Empty Diary 2055 (a homage to cyberpunk in the Blues itself) as well as the complete 1901-2000
series (though I have it in mind to extend it into this century at some point:
2001-2014 perhaps, 14 fourteen-liners).
The Push Up Combat Bikini
Coda 4
Empty Diary 2000
IM 11
Such turned out to be the eternity the
poet promised me, the bastard
Angela Carter
You’re
coming over all female.
Your
conceit’s too clean. Out
of the push
up they’re a let down,
deposits
that won’t quite register,
banked on
your looking. You sniff
eroticism
off dirty shifts, smudges of pelt.
I slip an
ought, drop a stitch or two
Hot gushes
signal your retreat. Every
time I open
my mouth out comes
a manifesto
of a new literary movement!
Was that a
poem, curling round you,
your nerves
ajangle at syntax’s opening?
It takes me
and takes me
for somebody
else, as you
push me out
between its lines.
What might a
poem be, elsed?
You dunk
your aching, lived-in balls in ink
and roll
them across the page.
I’m your shagged
out Muse.
Take me over
you this last time.
Whisper me Pearl, whistle me off.
I’ll be a big register on
your retina,
breathlessly weaving love for
a puppet prick
that can be
choreographed. I’m
pegged on that
line to George’s stuff
and nonsense. ‘I’m
only an instance of a fuck
fucking (he says (she says (who says?
The
ventriloquist tongues my clitoris and it
speaks.
dedicated to
the memory of Barry MacSweeney
2000;
revised 2007
*
For the sake of completion, I took a look at my When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (Shearsman,
2011), a book I thought did not include much on Barry MacSweeney. In fact there
are a string of references, on one occasion countering the mythologising of him
by Iain Sinclair. But more germane to my current theme, his role at the Poetry
Society during the years covered by Peter Barry’s The Poetry Wars is outlined and I compare his more assertive
political poetry to that of Lee Harwood, but introduce it with sound-bites from
Marcuse’s 1977 book The Aesthetic Dimension … :
‘In its autonomy art both protests [the prevailing social
relations], and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the
dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience’ and its ordinary language
which, one might add, the manifesto [ of the Poetry Society] also questions.
(Marcuse 1979: ix) Marcuse sees the ‘logic’ of art – via its distanciation, and
other techniques hinted at in the manifesto – as culminating in ‘another
reason, another sensibility’, which defy prevailing conditions, with its own
‘categorical imperative: “things must change”’. (Marcuse 1979: 13) The critical function of the work of art
re-establishes the emancipatory dreams of the 1960s in a new 1970s formalism….
Barry MacSweeney, at one time chair of the Poetry Society, in a public mode of
poem he would call later ‘a State of the Nation bulletin’ (MacSweeney 2003:
138) … delivers a public address in a
clipped shorthand that may owe as much to his journalistic training as it does
to the example of Allen Ginsberg’s public ‘Poems of these States’, an excerpt
of which provides the epigraph to his 1977-78 poem, ‘Black Torch Sunrise’.
MacSweeney offers images of potential insurrection, or of ‘1968 failure’:
Whipped legs
of
left-bank women students
blur
on the shimmered screen
625
line consciousness (MacSweeney 2003: 75)
The public scene is mediated through the latest televisual
technology but the language is ‘direct’. It is a public discourse that
disarmingly answers its own questions: ‘Will the Labour Party uphold the
jailing of pickets?/ Of course.’ (MacSweeney 2003: 74).
*
Of course.
Footnotes
137. The early book was The Boy from the Green Cabaret
Tells of his Mother (London: New Authors, Hutchinson, 1968). MacSweeney had
published in Vogue as well as The English Intelligencer so one
can imagine that he was confused enough when, at the age of 20, he was
nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. MacSweeney turned to the
small presses for the next 25 years until he was anthologized by Iain Sinclair
in The Tempers of Hazard (with Thomas A. Clark and Chris Torrance)
(London: Paladin, 1993), pp. 133-285 and
in The Book of Demons, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1997. He is well
served by Clive Bush, ‘Parts in the weal of kynde, Barry MacSweeney’, Out of Dissent,
pp.304-416.
138. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1951), p. 152.
139. ‘MacSweeney’, p. 36.
140. Ibid., p. 37.
141. Barry MacSweeney, Odes (London: Trigram Press,
1978), p. 57.
142. Ibid., p. 58.
143. Ibid., p. 58.
144. Ibid., p. 57.
145. Ibid., p. 60.
(All my posts on form, MacSweeney and other writers building up to create the project The Meaning of Form may be accessed here.)
(All my posts on form, MacSweeney and other writers building up to create the project The Meaning of Form may be accessed here.)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
