• Foreword: Andrew Motion
• Preface: Robert Hampson
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Chronology
• 1. The back story and moving in: 1951-1972
• 2. Editing under pressure: 1972-1975
• 3. The empire bites back: 1976
• 4. The Witt investigation: 1976
• 5. Endgame and aftermath: 1977-2005
• THEMES
• 6. The ‘British Poetry Revival’: some characteristics
• 7. Eric Mottram as critic, teacher, and editor
• 8. The Poetry Society transformed
• 9. Taking a long view
• Documents
• Eric Mottram’s ‘Editor’s Note’ (1975)
• Manifesto for a Reformed Poetry Society (1975)
• The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1977)
• Eric Mottram, ‘Editing Poetry Review’ (1979-80)
• Mottram’s appointment and extensions at Poetry Review
• Data on issues of Poetry Review edited by Mottram
• Outline Chronology of ‘The Battle of Earls Court’
• The Structure of the Poetry Society
• Membership of the General Council of the Poetry Society
• Relevant UK Poetry Organisations in the 1970s
• Alphabetical Who’s Who
• Sources
• General bibliography
• Index

Poetry Wars fills a major lacuna in the annals of twentieth-century British poetry. For a brief period in the seventies, the National Poetry Society, the emblem of the Establishment, was taken-over by a cadre of “radicals” led by the late Eric Mottram, a cadre that not only introduced the American avant-garde (from the Objectivists to Black Mountain and the San Francisco school) to British readers, but noted that its British counterpart had been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. By 1980 or so, normalcy had reasserted itself, but the “poetry wars” had merely gone underground, and today, on the Anglophone scene, their impact is being felt everywhere. Peter Barry has done a masterful job in telling what is an absorbing and important tale. His richly documented history is one anyone interested in 20th Century British Poetry will want to read.

Poetry Wars fills a major lacuna in the annals of twentieth-century British poetry. For a brief period in the seventies, the National Poetry Society, the emblem of the Establishment, was taken-over by a cadre of "radicals" led by the late Eric Mottram, a cadre that not only introduced the American avant-garde (from the Objectivists to Black Mountain and the San Francisco school) to British readers, but noted that its British counterpart had been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. By 1980 or so, normalcy had reasserted itself, but the "poetry wars" had merely gone underground, and today, on the Anglophone scene, their impact is being felt everywhere. Peter Barry has done a masterful job in telling what is an absorbing and important tale. His richly documented history is one anyone interested in 20th Century British Poetry will want to read. -- Marjorie Perloff Vanity, paranoia, booze and petty corruption: they are all here. As a warning to future poets. Never mix with bureaucrats. Destroy your correspondence. And count your fingers after shaking hands with the Arts Council. -- Iain Sinclair

Introduction

The UK poetry scene is smaller than its US counterpart, so the ‘poetry wars’ there must be like a knife fight in a phone booth. (‘A Reader’, reviewing New British Poetry, ed. Don Paterson and Charles Simic, on Amazon.com)

An odd thing happened in British poetry in the 1970s, but the full story has never been told. A small group of ‘radical’ or ‘experimental’ poets took over the Poetry Society, one of the most conservative of British cultural institutions, and for a period of six years, from 1971 to 1977, its journal, Poetry Review, was the most startling poetry magazine in the country. Some revered it, others reviled it, but nobody in the 70s who was seriously interested in poetry could ignore it. Then, in the summer of 1977, it was over, almost as suddenly as it had begun. Of course, when looked at closely – which is the business of this book – these events neither began nor ended as suddenly as all that. But the conflict at the Poetry Society was a key moment in the history of contemporary British Poetry, polarizing the rift between the ‘neo-modernists’, who sought to continue the 1960s revival of the early twentieth-century’s ‘modernist revolution’, and the neo-conservatives, who sought to further the ‘anti-modernist counter-revolution’ of the 1950s. Echoes of this conflict continue to reverberate today, and the deposed radicals of the 1970s were effectively written out of the record of contemporary British poetry, and have only recently been restored. They feature, for example, in the Oxford University Press Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, edited by Keith Tuma in 2001. Tuma remarks elsewhere that the 1970s Poetry Society episode ‘remains one of the first object lessons British “alternative” poets refer to when speaking of negotiations with a mainstream.’ So the present book is, among other things, a case study of the inevitable frictions and tactical struggles between an avant-garde and a ‘mainstream’.

British poetry in the 1970s had been through a long post-war period in which there was a keenly-felt sense of inferiority to the poetry of the United States. Poetry from the States, epitomised by the work of Ezra Pound and the early T. S. Eliot, had been the predominant poetic influence in the period of high modernism, and American poetry was indisputably the major body of contemporary poetry in English in the 1950s and 60s. In the polemical introduction to his 1962 anthology The New Poetry, A. Alvarez famously accused British poets of turning away in genteel distaste from the full-frontal impact of the modern world, and he held up the model of the American ‘confessional’ poets – Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman – as poets who registered the trauma of modernity in their own addictions, obsessions, and breakdowns. The radical poets associated with the Poetry Society in London in the 1970s also looked across the Atlantic for models, but they regarded the ‘confessionals’ as the conservative ‘Establishment’, and instead felt strong affinities with the dissenting voices of American poetry (the poets assembled in 1960 in Donald Allen’s definitive Grove Press anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960), such as the Black Mountain poets – Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn – the New York Poets – Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, James Schuyler – and the ‘Beats’ – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Elsewhere in Britain, poets loosely linked to the Cambridge lecturer and poet J. H. Prynne were interested in a different branch of the American poetic ‘anti-establishment’, namely, the ‘Objectivists’ of an earlier generation – Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky. By the 1970s, a major resurgence of British poetry was taking place among poets who looked to these various ‘dissenting’ American poets for inspiration and example when the British scene seemed moribund. In 1974 Eric Mottram, a lecturer in American Literature at King’s College, who had become the controversial new editor of Poetry Review, christened this movement the British Poetry Revival (which I abbreviate to the ‘BPR’ in this book), and sought to display its fruits – along with the work of the related American dissenters – in that journal. Since Poetry Review had declined in the 50s and 60s into settled mediocrity, the result was the outbreak of civil war at the Poetry Society, as related in what follows.

But the frictions of the 1970s were not completely without precedent at the Poetry Society. The novelist Muriel Spark was editor of Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949, and in the Spark Archive at the National Library of Scotland is the notebook she kept at the time, containing ‘the only surviving record of the increasingly tempestuous meetings of the Poetry Society, when [her] policy of encouraging new writers caused problems for some of the long-standing contributors to the journal.’ Spark discusses the Poetry Society in her autobiography Curriculum Vitae (especially pages 165 – 180), and draws upon her experiences there in her novel Loitering with Intent. Indeed, the conflicts she experienced at the Poetry Society, and the period in the Society’s history documented in the present book, are hardly aberrations. Rather, they are typical and necessary occurrences in the life-cycles of cultural institutions. On the day I began this introduction, in December 2004, I read in the paper that the Royal Academy of Arts has just been ‘plunged into turmoil’ by ‘the resignation of its controversial Secretary’, who says that ‘frustration with the arcane structures of the RA has forced her out.’ The report speaks of ‘tensions between the members and the [paid] administration’, with the former seeing the growth of the latter as a threat, and of ‘wrangles over finances’. All these are familiar elements from the Poetry Society affair of the 1970s, in which differences of opinion between, on the one hand, officers elected by the membership, and, on the other, the organisation’s paid officials and its grant-awarding body, were at the heart of the matter. Indeed, we could go further and say that these tensions are similar to those often seen, not just in cultural politics, but in politics at all levels, where distrust and conflict between elected representatives and professional administrators are endemic.

The two main figures in the Poetry Society struggle of the 1970s were Charles Osborne, Literature Director of the Arts Council, and, as already indicated, Eric Mottram. Both were poets with a parallel professional life as (respectively) a civil servant and an academic. Both were persuasive and charismatic figures, both temperamentally inclined to a certain intellectual arrogance and impatience. The fierceness and bitterness of the struggle in the 1970s was partly due to this head-on clash between two powerful and influential figures both accustomed to persuading others that they were right. Furthermore, both the ‘radicals’ and the ‘conservatives’ of the period were (for some of the time, at least) well organised, deeply committed, and capable of concerted collective action. It is partly this ‘fearful symmetry’ between the personalities and dispositions of the two camps that attracted me to the idea of telling this story, although I will not give these two key figures equal attention, since Charles Osborne has already put his own account of these events on record in his memoir Giving it Away: Memoirs of an Uncivil Servant (1986).

As well as claiming to tell the full story of these events for the first time, I should also state clearly what this book does not do. It has not been my aim to write a comprehensive history of the Poetry Society in the 1970s. Rather, I have concentrated on one major aspect of it, which is the editing and publication of Poetry Review, and on the struggles and conflicts which took place in committees, campaigning, and correspondence between the radicals and the conservatives. This means that Eric Mottram is a central figure, even though (as a full-time academic) he was only a marginal presence in the day-to-day running of the Poetry Society. In terms of what happened on a daily basis at the Poetry Society’s headquarters at 21 Earls Court Square, the key figure was Bob Cobbing, a poet who was at the centre of the international movement in ‘sound texts’ and ‘visual poetries’ (also known as Concrete Poetry), and a major figure generally in the London ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s and 70s as a performer and small-press publisher. He was the driving force behind the most radical aspects of the Poetry Society in these years, such as the Society’s basement print-shop, and its involvement in the quasi-trade-unionisation of the poetry scene. He had been among the first of the radicals to be elected to the Poetry Society’s governing Council, in the late 1960s, and he was at the centre of most of the key developments, such as the link-up with his organisations Writers Forum, Poets Conference (no apostrophes in either), and the ALP (The Association of Little Presses), which together brought a form of 1960s left-wing collectivism to the highly individualistic business of writing and publishing poetry. Cobbing’s recent death (in 2002) meant that his papers had not yet become available while this book was being written, but when they are, they will be a principle resource for the history of that strand of British experimental writing. Cobbing’s fellow sound poet and performer, and fellow tactician, Lawrence Upton, as well as the poet and performer cris cheek, and the poet and artist Allen Fisher, were also important parts of that history. But I have not attempted to write that history here. I look forward to reading it in due course, when another researcher has undertaken the major task of filling that important gap in the cultural history of late twentieth century British avant-garde writing. Other aspects of the Poetry Society’s operations in the 1970s which I make no attempt to cover here include the National Poetry Secretariat, which assisted in the organisation of poetry readings nationally, and offered subsidy to pay the reading fees of registered poets. The NPS was based at the Poetry Society’s premises in Earls Court, and for most poets and local groups outside London it was in many ways a more important organisation than the Poetry Society itself. It was a highly successful and widely praised aspect of the Poetry Society, and helped to ensure that the work of poets who were not big stars continued to be disseminated. Its history is an important part of the sociology of recent poetry, and this history too awaits its historian. The same is true of the Education Section of the Poetry Society, which also operated in a state of quasi-autonomy within the organisation. The NPS and the Education Section make occasional appearances in this account, but, to repeat, this book is not a comprehensive account of the Poetry Society in the 1970s. I should also emphasise here, though it will be apparent to anyone who knows anything at all about the topic, that this is not a comprehensive account of the British poetry avant-garde of the 1970s: it is almost entirely confined to what was happening in London, with some references to the ‘Cambridge’ poets against which the London group is often defined. But there is nothing here about (for instance) Newcastle, Liverpool, Hull, and Belfast, all of which had lively and innovative poetry ‘scenes’. A great deal of that activity is yet another history which still awaits its historian.

Muriel Spark writes that ‘After leaving the Poetry Society I became aware of the value of documentary evidence’ (Curriculum Vitae, page 185), and investigating these events has had the same effect upon me. Numerous anecdotes and myths about the Poetry Society in the 1970s have been in circulation for many years, but I have restricted this account to what can be documented. I resolved, therefore, not to repeat such stories as the one about Charles Osborne denying to the press that he had referred to ‘those rag-bags down at the Poetry Society’ and then issuing a correction saying that the word he used was ‘rat-bags’. However, I then found documentary evidence for this story, so I do repeat it, in the appropriate place. When I sat down at the V & A’s Archive in November 2004 to look at the Arts Council’s 1970s files on the Poetry Society, the elastic bands often snapped as I took them off the folders, suggesting that they had not been touched since the 70s. Often I could look at the same crucial meeting as documented in several different sources, for instance, as minuted on the day, as described a little later in private letters, as reported by the Arts Council assessors, and as represented by newspapers at the time. In some cases there were also retrospective accounts in interviews and memoirs. One of the persistent anecdotes about the period (which I should not repeat) is that some of these meetings were secretly taped, but I have not come across any of these hot, and probably mythical, boot-leg recordings.

However, using only documented material does not mean that I have striven for complete and inert neutrality – if I did not believe that the work of the radicals had some interest and importance, there would have been no point in writing at such length about these events. I was taught by Eric Mottram as an undergraduate student at King’s College, London, and as a postgraduate at London University’s Institute of United States Studies, and I was very much on the ‘radical’ side as a regular audience-member at Poetry Society events in the 1970s. But this is not a partisan account, and I have made no attempt gloss over self-evident faults and failings, whichever side they belong to. Both sides, I anticipate, will find much to dislike in the book, but as Iain Sinclair has said, the avant-garde poetry of the 1970s is not a topic one would choose to write about if simply looking for a few quiet years of academic calm before picking up a bus pass.

In relating these events of the 1970s, my conscious generic affiliation is to a form of prose narrative, recently popular, which is known as the ‘event history’. Works of this kind seek to explore and explain the nature of a specific era in cultural history – or a specific aspect of that era – by focusing on the causes and effects of a single key event or occasion. The culminating ‘event’ on which this one focuses is the Poetry Society’s General Council meeting of 26th March 1977 when the avant-garde group, which had been the dominant influence at the Society since 1971, walked out en masse. Investigating these poetic conflicts of the 1970s can help us to understand a significant epoch in recent British cultural history, when the relationship between high culture and popular culture in the visual and verbal arts was shifting rapidly, and Humanities academics were increasingly seeking a voice within contemporary culture, rather than being content just to comment on and evaluate the writing of the past.

One problem I have not solved is what best to call the two opposed groups, and I doubt whether any ideal solution exists. The various possibilities are pairings of opposites such as: (1) large press poets v. small press poets: this is potentially confusing because small presses published more poetry in the 1970s than ‘large’ ones. The large presses are sometimes called ‘commercial’ presses, but this, again, is a potentially misleading designation. (2) ‘centre’ v. ‘margins’: a dichotomy expressed like this, of course embodies a self-fulfilling prophesy about the exclusion of the ‘marginal’. (3) neo-conservatives v. neo-modernists: I find this quite a useful way of formulating the grounds of the conflict; the implication of this way of expressing the dichotomy is (as suggested earlier) that the former group continued the ‘project’ of the Edwardian and 1950s anti-modernists, while the latter continued that of the 1920s modernists. (4) the ‘Axis’ v. the British Poetry Revival (‘BPR’) poets: these are the terms used by Eric Mottram in his polemical writing (beginning with his 1974 essay in the programme book for the British Poetry Conference of that year at the Polytechnic of Central London), but they are clearly not suitable for a general chronological account of these events (though I do use the abbreviation ‘BPR’ poets, and find this a useful short-hand designation). (5) Mainstream v. ‘Other’ poets: these terms are used by Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain, the compilers of the anthology Other British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan University Press. 1999) and by Nicholas Johnson, compiler of the Foil anthology subtitled Defining Poetry, 1985-2000 (Etruscan Books); again, the self-exclusion explicit in the notion of ‘other’ poetry makes this an unsatisfactory term. (6) The Mainstream v. the parallel tradition; the latter term is used today by the BEPC, the British Electronic Poetry Centre (a consortium of Southampton, Birkbeck, and Royal Holloway poetics groups); I use the term ‘the parallel tradition’ occasionally in what follows; its intention of avoiding self-marginalisation is apparent, but ‘parallel’ is still essentially a negative definition of one thing in terms of something else, and in any case, this late 1990s term has an anachronistic feel when applied to the events of the 1970s. (7) Empirical or ‘Lyrical I’ poetries v. ‘LIP’ poetries (that is, ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetries’); the term ‘LIP’ was first used by Gilbert Adair in Robert Sheppard’s on-line journal Pages: It was also the subtitle of the anthology Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women (ed. Maggie O’Sullivan, Reality Street Editions, 1996). It distinguishes British work in this field from American ‘Language Poetry’, and is, I feel, a useful term, though again, it seems to me somewhat anachronistic when back-dated to designate work of the 1970s. (8) Mainstream v. Disjunctive Poetics: the latter term is from the book of this title by Peter Quartermain (Cambridge University Press, 1992); it is an attractively expressive term, but again it feels anachronistic when applied to the poets of the 1970s. (9) conservatives v. radicals: this is my default solution, though it is complicated in the account which follows by positing such important sub-groups as: ‘conservative conservatives’, ‘radical conservatives’, ‘radical radicals’, and ‘conservative radicals’; the second and fourth of these played a crucial role in the events. In general, I have used (9), conservative v. radicals as my shorthand designation, while well aware of its limitations.

The book is divided into three sections: the first section, ‘Chronology’, gives a chronological account of the events as they unfolded: the second, ‘Themes’, contains a series of ‘thematic’ chapters, each considering a specific theme, issue, or aspect of the situation, or the characters involved, in a more reflective way. Removing these from the basic narrative account helps to avoid blurring the account of how the events unfolded, and separates the retrospective ‘placing’ of the events from the events themselves. Readers could (if they wished to break up the uniformity of the chronological account) read a couple of chronological chapters and then dip into the thematic chapters, before returning to the chronological account, thereby giving themselves a ‘non-linear’ reading experience of the kind approved by Eric Mottram. The third section, ‘Documents’, presents a series of background documents, the first four being from the period itself, while the remainder are new compilations of relevant data. The new data should make the story easier to follow: there is a summary of the circumstances of Mottram’s initial appointment to Poetry Review and his four subsequent re-appointments (or ‘extensions’, as it might be more accurate to call them); then a summary in diagram form of the basic characteristics of the twenty Mottram issues of Poetry Review, and a summary of the governance and committee structure of the Poetry Society; the next item is a list of the shifting year-to-year membership of the governing General Council of the Poetry Society in the 1970s, followed by a basic list of the most relevant poetry organisations of the period; the last and longest document is the ‘Alphabetical Who’s Who?’ which identifies all the participants in these events on whom information could be found, listed in a form which I hope is more convenient than a footnote-on-first-mention would have been (well-known writers like Ted Hughes, B. S. Johnson, and Dannie Abse are omitted). All the material in the ‘Documents’ section is designed to avoid the need for lengthy quotation and citation in either of the other two sections, while at the same time enabling the reader to view at first-hand some of the material in the primary sources.

Peter Barry, Aberystwyth, June 2005