Foil: defining poetry 1985-2000
Edited by Nicholas Johnson
Etruscan exhibition, 28 Fowler’s Court, Fore Street, Buckfastleigh, S. Devon TQ11 0AA [Distributed in USA by SPD, 1341 7th street, Berkeley CA 94710]
[£6.95. $19.95. 393pp. Pub.2000 ISBN 1-90153-828-1]
The largest and most talked about anthology of the ‘other’ British poetry since Conductors of Chaos. Foil is already two years old but the writing of this review was delayed for a number of reasons and though some of those reasons might have been silly the waiting has paid off because certain impulsive responses, both pro and anti, were not helpful. Initially the problems and issues arising from Foil were so complex that I had to let this exotic doorstop sandwich settle in my consciousness. Things were getting in the way of the actual material and it is the material, not the presentation box or spiel, which should be paramount in any evaluation, so it was principally for that reason that I waited, to get in a frame of mind where the material could float free of its published context. Distance has enabled the Foil poems to do that, to exist in alternative histories and maps, and though, as Andrew Duncan has shown in his waspish inter-disciplinary essay on Foil (http://www.greatworks.org.uk), from an important perspective there is no deep difference between the poems and their ‘book’ I could nevertheless fantasise some separations.
To get a grip on the contents I followed a fantasy of separation resembling my most subjective response to the poems, not only ignoring the package but also previous encounters with the poets involved and, reversing natural chronology, gave time for the texts to become fresh. The result was that I found most of Foil very much to my liking and my concerns and some went even further, achieving a rare eminence. I enjoyed it, a lot; if this work had been sent to Terrible Work it would have been published by Terrible Work (indeed some of it was, but more on that later). I didn’t go overboard on everything but it is surprising how little there was to be negative about. I wasn’t too impressed by Rajiv C. Krishnan’s familiar prosody and my response to Brigid McLeer remains neutral. I wasn’t enthused by ‘however introduced to the soles’ either; there’s something in their tone resembling avant spoofing. Treating those as the exceptions that prove the rule though, the consistency of quality is amazing. However, there is also a joker in the pack, Aidan Dun*, but I am simply going to bracket our troubadour friend, then this review might get written.
In order to put this subjective response to use I have split the work (minus that mentioned above) into three sections: Group 1: the work I like. Group 2: the work I like a lot. Group 3: the work that knocks my socks off. (This applies strictly to the material within the anthology as reference to outside it would shuffle the results.)
Group 1: Shelby Matthews, Tracy Ryan, John Caley, Danielle Hope, David Amery, Ira Lightman, Andrew Brewerton, John Kinsella, Adrian Clarke, Klaled Hakim.
Group 2: Harriet Tarlo, Rob MacKenzie, Nicholas Johnson, Richard Makin, Kevin Nolan, Jennifer Chalmers, Meg Bateman, Aaron Williamson, Peter Manson, Caroline Bergvall, David Rees.
Group 3: Helen MacDonald, Alison Flett, Tim Atkins, Tertia Longmire, Drew Milne, Karlien Van Den Beuke.
What follows is a survey, poet by poet. It sticks to my planned subjectivity, or tries to. It is followed by some thoughts arising from the resulting gap between a highly enthusiastic and positive reading of the material and doubts concerning its presentation.
*
Group 1.
Of all the material in Group 1, Shelby Matthews’ work here is the most challenging – the muse is out to lunch and in her place she has left various cryptic messages delivered to us by a secretarial machine.
Tracy Ryan’s poems are tightly packed vibrations of spiky conceits. They have a restless intelligence which seems to suspect everything they touch; the references are scholarly and the contention is feminist but the result is polychromatic.
A four-page contribution from John Caley consists of a token example of his computer generated text treatments and two of his translations from the ancient Chinese. The example of his digital work (island 01 – oilean 01) is particularly beautiful, both visually and lyrically.
The short lyrics by Danielle Hope, on the surface the most normal poems in the book, enlarge themselves in the mind and insist on being returned to again and again. Poems such as ‘Phone Call’ and ‘Anger’ (from Lament Diary) capture moments of emotive courage through a language of lustrous effusion and objective clarity. They remind me of the early modernist appropriation of oriental aesthetics in the way they act as ‘concrete impressions’ but they are also slices of internalised discourse; in this case the discourse of Grief/Love, and as such they masquerade.
David Amery’s ‘Virtual Garden’, in which the poet recreates a scene-in-movement from childhood memory, is as disturbing as it is delightful. The poem works, both mechanically and texturally, like one of those dreams in which we appear to be able to move freely of our own will while conjuring up the material of the world we are to move through. It has the same feel of exhilaration, panic, wonder, fear, guilt and desire. It is also the experience upon which the very idea of virtual reality is actually based but there is, ironically, nothing of the computer in this very cleverly constructed poem.
Three of Ira Lightman’s poems here are literary self-referencing exercises: an update of Baudelaire, ‘The Orchestration of Unhappiness’; a ‘Homage to Caroline Bergval’, which can be read as being ‘about’ her as well as ‘for’ her – at least by imposing that sort of meaning on the piece it gives it resonance - and a rather fine untitled poem (Who do? New) which deals with the act of writing: “…squint into the distance as a long line travels / sometimes so smoothly through the rhyme barrier // that one cannot hear it pierce the rhyme barrier, one did not, / one thinks, as the effort thunks / into a thud sound ready for it // on the ground…” Lightman can be sarcastically comic – consider the title of his concrete poem, ‘Square Rocks’.
Andrew Brewerton’s prose piece, ‘Sirius’, set amid the heat and banter of a glass blowing factory, is one of those rare successful attempts at transcribing the enclosed climate of industrial labour and craft without boring the pants off its reader. By concentrating heavily on the workers’ conversations Brewerton produces a cracking opener to the more intense descriptions which follow where everything borders on the metaphorical while staying so close to its subject you can almost feel the heat, “… what molten glass remains is scooped all orange-honey in the heavy ladles”. It is this interface of the overriding physical reality and chemical processes with the language needed for mimeses that gives Sirius its power and the alchemical associations that come from that are an essential ingredient.
A bright little selection from John Kinsella representing the more mainstream side of his writing, all concerned with rural antipodean subjects where people, the outback poor and the aboriginal, interact with unforgiving nature and don’t seem to forgive each other that much either. The sparseness of some of these poems fits perfectly with the arid landscapes they are talking about but this makes the occasional burst of colour and accompanying flashing insight stick out all the more, as in the wonderful, ‘Pantoum’. The desolation in the poem ‘Where Soul Birds Sit’ is dished out with a relish: “Where the wind cuts between two fires / burning towards each other… / … sparking over / firebreaks ashen and the colour / of pumice, cockeyed bobs spiralling / flame from one side into the other / until all fuel is drained and the scene / looks pale and defeated…”
The dilemma presented by the extracts from Adrian Clarke’s ‘Spectral Investments’ are overcome the moment you make the decision to read yourself into the text, to follow it as syntactically as you would your own value-laden thought trains. This enables the political meanings to disclose themselves from the apparent disconnectedness because it brings into play an emotional push – the political is political because it embodies an emotional response to the world as we see it. Without such emotional play things such as, “the culture bottomed out / demotic predicates fog an / option covered by the / theme business as usual / where x cannot be / without y units combine / the legend…” remain parched ghosts of the personal and moot. Once you join in however the text comes alive with purpose and melody. The reward is not an illusion either, it simply means that you have pleasurably engaged with the poem in the spirit intended by its use of, what we might call, ‘intellectual matter’ as axis for streamed observation. The world (such as Stratford Station Platform 3) invites language to join it but once, via a poetic medium so inclined, the invitation is taken up the results are always going to be both pin-point and slippery. Adrian Clarke utilises the tension of that opposition to turn this out as poetry.
Klaled Hakim’s ‘letters’, particularly his ‘Letter to Antin’ (David Antin, that is, the American ‘talk poet’) are exasperating exaggerations of competing complexes of which the ‘inferior’ takes dialectical pride of place. A nakedly psychotic engagement with the clash of high and low culture – in situ and in the body – and the parallel clashes of language and race drag this beaten up prose out of Hakim, so painfully at first that it is embarrassing to read. Yet return visits to the pieces show us that it is the ‘pain’ of the lead-swinger and we find ourselves laughing instead of crying – the effect of the work increases – it is raw and pliable – it swells into an unresolved integrity that exhausts and bewitches. Hakim comes across both as fanatic and joker, in other words there is something of the ‘addict’ in these texts, a desperation not to speak but to consume language, to have it change him even though the effect wears off, for him, the moment the words have been ‘performed’. The effect on the reader though is permanent and extraordinary, I feel as if I am been given the experience of an instinctive postmod mall but through a literary approximation of Neue Wilden expressionism. Hakim’s ‘epistolary’ method, as he calls it, this “thauwt in the mouth” form, grounds what would otherwise remain disembodied, fleeting and alienated.
Group 2.
Harriet Tarlo’s ‘Brancepeth Beck’ was reviewed in Terrible Work when it appeared in a Reality Street 4pack so I’ll limit myself to saying that this exquisite poem, written in the objectivist concrete lyric tradition, still possesses a magic freshness.
Rob MacKenzie was one of the few names who were new to me and what a revelation his work is – vigorous and politically predispositioned black humour that cuts through the layering of Global and national (Brit/Scot) cultures. His language has anger and edge but his poetic intelligence always takes control.
Nicholas Johnson has amply anthologised himself with extracts covering his entire spectrum from the coldly emotive localised lyric to the reflexively hot experimental. Realism and romanticism strike each other out within the place-bound libretto of his rural immersions in a style that is sound based and expansive. His poems are stubborn dilations of Olson’s ‘field’, gritty environmental engagements.
What Richard Makin produces could easily qualify as the most dense and difficult to read texts in the English language – and that is, naturally, a compliment. He writes prose, not prose poems, but it is a prose so calculatingly rich and syntactically excessive that it forces a reader to reinvent their reading strategies. The richness, both linguistic and semantic, gives us history and science in the form of mellifluent sugars.
Kevin Nolan’s set comes across as uneven and clumsy but there is a deliberation about this maladroit writing that speaks of dissent and tenacious insurgency. For example his poem,’ She Moves Through the Fair’ – remember that the original song deals with encountering the ghost of a lover – negotiates the familiar rhetoric of questioning a ‘you’ while recounting a ‘she’ but everything is twisted out of kilter producing an effect that is entirely original and of itself.
Jennifer Chalmers is represented by a single long poem, ‘Peat’. It is one of these scarce breed of poems that get stranger and more opaque the more you read it as what is going on beneath the surface begins to influence what at first seemed familiar. It has a mysterious Delphic quality (Caledonian Delphic that is) that builds-up in response to its more descriptive and narrative aspects before washing back through the poem, which is in itself concerned with death and what might be referred to as ‘spiritual change’.
Meg Bateman’s poems are unique in that they have emerged through a rewinding process and though you need to access her bio to see how her life initiated that, it manifests itself within her Gaelic poems with English translations through a crystalline treatment of language. The emotional form of her poems is produced through a learnt instinct. On one level they come across as traditional folk lyrics but they have an ineffable polish and they strike direct at the heart in a way that the simple reproduction of such lyrics could not, not now. They have an excess of effect which cannot be immediately accounted for and as such they are rare and beautiful.
A generous and comprehensive selection from Aaron Williamson which begins with the hard-boiled pastiche of “I was in a taxi ride with Hank Williams…” carries on through more familiar Williamson territory with his centred word-scores (My favourite piece here begins, “FREEDOM / LIBERTY / and TINSEL”.) and finishes with the strange internalised asymmetries of a series of prose paragraphs named after obscure saints. All of it is disquieting and magnificently overwrought but at the same time the humour and honesty involved in his struggle to turn language into speech are always smack-bang in the middle of every utterance. This work is fascinating.
Peter Manson had me puzzling over his use of the word ‘after’ as in the ‘after Philip Hobsbaum’ that amends ‘The Ice Skaters’ and the use of the word ‘from’ as in the ‘from Malarmé’ amending ‘Summer Sadness’. It seems, by comparing these two treatments, that ‘after’ is negative, an opportunity for a hearty linguistic laugh, and ‘from’ is positive: “I’ll lick the shadow from your lidded eyes / To see if it will lend the heart you batter / The insensibility of the stones and sky.” His Jarryesque ‘Sarin Canasta’ is the funniest and most directly enjoyable treat in the whole book. Done in the form of an absurd play script it has the characters Clock’s Dog, Mrs. Tungsten Loop and King Ilona verbally battling out a pataphysical tussle.
Although the presence and example of Caroline Bergvall lies behind much of Foil she is represented here succinctly by just four texts. Each is ‘Flèsh according to…St. Teresa of Avila, Unica Zürn, Hannah Weiner and Kathy Acker’. Staring at the titles I couldn’t help thinking that these four women could be said to represent the four points of the cross that Bergvall carries, each in turn acting as a talis/wo/man. Each of the four short blocks of writing are prefaced by an italicised sentence which could be quotes from the respective owners of the titles – if not then they are very aptly imposed (e.g. Acker: I write in the dizziness that seizes that which is fed up with language and attempts to escape through it: the abyss named fiction).
‘The London’, a long poem in rhymed quatrains (alternate stanzas rhyme a,b,a,b and a,a,a,a) by David Rees is a poem I had already read on a number of occasions with much enjoyment. All in The London is strange yet deadpan. Like certain other avant works that deal with the city (Sinclair of course and within this volume Dun and Makin) it is about the relationship of place to history but such relationships for Rees seem to be contingent only with the play of language: Tower Hill – “The singing head, the different metal head. / With his hood nailed to the back of his head, / he was burned until he was nearly dead. / The burns on his arms were beautiful red.”. We become aware with a kind of anxious amusement that the form, dominated by the discretion of the stanzas and the strict rhyme scheme, is doing the research for us. The statements are arbitrary discoveries, delighting in themselves and teasing us with archaeological possibilities. There is a democracy of perception manifest in the poem which is diametrically opposed to the hierarchical tosh of Aidan Dun*.
Group 3.
Helen Macdonald writes a fastidious poetry of cerebral minutia and optic observation which displays a wonderful tension between the breath/breadth of the open elemental world and the narrowing environment of words. Every new line is an experiment in thinking, a way of dealing with ideas in such a way that they can never become ‘ideal’ because the patterning disclosed by such attention to detail – of something happening to ‘things’ – mentally pricks and numbs; yes, a poetic pins and needles. And some twat on the Britpo list said she had no idea what a poem was. (More on Macdonald in my review of her book, ‘Shaler’s Fish’ – Etruscan 2001.)
Alison Flett’s phonetic transcriptions of the colloquial Scottish; superficially similar to Tom Leonard’s example, especially in its short unpunctuated lines; are moving and demonstrative vignettes which present us with a simultaneous event and the poet’s reaction to the event. These utterances are immediate and warm in the same way that some ‘beat’ poems used to be. They disarm with their simplicity but when you reflect on what the poems are ‘saying’ it becomes apparent that the establishment of the relationship between the event and the humour of its depiction in the emotional inflexions registered in its syntax is as highly skilled as it is highly effective.
The most delightful surprise within Foil was the work of Tim Atkins, whose material I’d only glimpsed before. The extracts here, from ‘Folklore’, referred to in the introduction as ‘eerie, disembodied Shropshire sci-fi’, present us with the dislocated shards of some almost forgotten intense experience in which the normal flow of life becomes dammed up against itself in macabre revelation and fixation. The setting is rural England, modern and medieval. A narrative of poverty and waste is intersected by the mythological but this is done through a form of poetic card sharping – ungrammatical shifts in tense, drifting clauses and other derangements of syntax all of which surprise, disorientate and utterly convince.
Tertia Longmire’s extract from ‘The Table Leaks its Object’ (what a title!) is my favourite piece in the whole of Foil. This harrowing and compulsive slice of social history is constructed from, I quote the subtitle, ‘transcriptions from graffiti found on thirty school examination desks abandoned in south London during 1996’. What we have here are the carved messages to the void of the self, to everyone and no one, by the desperate and the bored kids in their mid-teens trapped in the examination room, trapped in the existential cusp between unbearable present and impossible future. Their writing, and that is what it is, THEIR WRITING, screams and hungers and carries pathos so far that it becomes exuberant excess, a testament to the truth of droll human energy. The poet/artist/worker achieves this through the simple method of copying the graffiti en masse into continuous blocks of text with all its original spelling and punctuation. ‘The Table Leaks its Object’ was published in its entirety by Magpie Press in 1998 and I recommend it as one of the finest and most rewarding poetic projects recently attempted.
What can one not say about the work of Drew Milne that hasn’t not been said before. His synthesis of the coolly intellectual with the manically inspired is not unique but it has few rivals. He makes me laugh, but it is a dark laughter. He is perhaps the most politically conscious poet in the whole damn country but like others from the knowing academic world the politics becomes part-and-parcel of the medium itself: commitments become almost invisible except the commitment to write out of habit and trade in a peculiar version of Brecht’s alienation strategy until it is time to physically stop – however, watch for some brutal passing swipes at the managerial dickheads who rule modern Britain and Scotland. But Milne is never directly satirical, even though he points always towards a satirical dimension. One difference is that he is dealing with himself as much as he is dealing with any third party establishment or suspect ideology because both have been cut from the same cloth, language, so Milne’s writing is pushing back, squeezing meaning to make it reveal its sources in a sort of reverse torture. There is a cruel relish there and it is in the ‘relish’ that the poetry contrives to succeed and it is his formal adventures which give shape and palpability to this discursive jouissance.
Karlien Van Den Beukel’s poems are something of a conundrum for me. This is not because I don’t understand them but because I seem to understand them only too well – I understand them to excess but this leaves me with no distance from which to perspect. It is as if the poems were growing on a common ground but hidden from the road. On one level it does not appear too difficult to talk about lines such as: “How I wept when it appeared / I was unequipped / to be an interpenetrative twin” – the movement from ‘wept’ to ‘unequipped’ to ‘interpenetrative’ with its various and dizzying dispersals of meaning and developments of sound – but any attempt at saying why this is so important (i.e. how it builds and becomes mature poem) founders on the lyrical cordiality and perfection of the text. Is this a rare example (in modern Britain) of ‘poetry’ doing its own thing, living out its own unique life in the way of a Hölderlin or a Rilke? There is something about Beukel’s work that is comfortable with itself, internally confident while externally unassuming, but you need to see through the seeming assumption of the erudite play first or at least negotiate its style. One you have done this it becomes clear that the poems find their own way in a more traditional manner than much of Foil; they are less hung-up on the dilemmas of theory and therefore, because they are free of self-conscious reflexivity, can lyrically secure the advent of surprise. The ‘obscurity’ of her poems is only relative, it is not an intrinsic element. I rate these poems highly – another way of saying I must be as nuts as she is.
*
Needless to say the contents of the three groups would have been different if I had written this after first reading the anthology when, for example, Meg Bateman’s work seemed quite ordinary and Alison Flett’s seemed derivative. It is also the case that my latest rereading would revise the categories yet again (it would involve a general movement up leaving a very small first group including what I previously excluded, a very large middle group and an extended top group) but none of that is really the point, which is that clues to the relationship between promotion and reception should be given by ‘any’ subjective reading for if a pattern emerges from a subjective response then it has to be asked what is the relationship of that response to the editor’s objectives for the anthology. Does a fault-line appear between an open reading of the content and the editor’s enclosing commentary?
To be honest however, no real pattern emerges: a fluidity of styles and approaches traverse the three categories along with various levels of surface simplicity or complexity; the six poets of Group 3, for example, are all different to each other. The English and Scots contributors remain evenly positioned too, in other words whatever polarities you arbitrarily impose on the Foil contents my own particular responses do not seem to be hedged by them unduly. The only things of any consequence are that the ‘like’ list of ten contains five of the seven that could be considered straighter writers than the others (Kinsella, Brewerton, Amery, Hope and Ryan - the other two being the aforementioned Bateman and Flett) and the fact that four of the six in Group 3 are women. It is then possible to locate the bulk of the most consciously ‘avant garde’ work within the middle ‘like a lot’ section. All-in-all though I think I can safely say that there is nothing much to be read into any of this which points to the fact that Foil’s particular eclectic take is genuine; and knowing Nicholas Johnson that is not surprising.
Genuine but idiosyncratic? – it is of course a ‘take’ whose colours are not too difficult to identify: within a range of work that goes from examples that could grace the pages of The Rialto (David Amery and Danielle Hope) to dense post-structural musings (Adrian Clarke) and computer generated texts (John Caley) there are noticeable preoccupations with the aural dimensions of poetry on the one hand and the conceptual aesthetic on the other that push these works in the way of Johnson’s attention. It seems then that it is not so much idiosyncratic as fortuitous. For example his drawing in of so many Scots is not just a personal predilection (when Nick reads he is Scottish) on his part but is a result of a shared focus on the musical abstraction of language (i.e. emerging in the interface of aural and conceptual) that arises not just from Gaelic bardic legacies but also from experience of the opacity of language which often comes to those who speak/live more than English - due to roots that is and not mere polyglottony. The same applies to other contributors, twin or even triple language people, such as Caroline Bergval (French Norwegian), Khalad Hakim (British Bangladeshi), Rajiv C. Krishnan (Indian), Aidan Dun (spent youth in West Indies), Karlien van den Beukel (Dutch but raised in Trinadad and S. Africa), etc – and not forgetting Aussies Ryan and Kinsella. All I am saying here is that it is not a coincidence: there are connections between this genealogy and the nature of much of the work in Foil and the fact that this should be picked up by an editor with parallel concerns is to be expected.
However, this takes on more import when we consider that these connections are deeper and a priori to the art-academic performative axis that so many of the poets here work within and around which they form their socio-alliances; a slotting which though providing a shelter for the homeless also ensures exclusion from more centralised clubs. In addition, and particularly relevant to my argument, this traceable natural history that can explain so much about these poets’ use of language in their art-making means that Foil is not, in fact, purely representative of newer developments in the British avant garde, and is certainly not comprehensive, but is preciously representative of certain of its aspects which in addition to the above mentioned aural and conceptual would have to include the lyrical – no surprise again, especially when we consider Johnson’s own writing. Yet it is the ‘lyrical’, where it emerges, as heavily mediated by the other characteristics – though I think the material of Karlien van den Beukel, Harriet Tarlo and Helen Macdonald contradicts this trend. Ironically other avant strategies and methodologies are not so noticeable despite the heavy hints given of them in the introduction: even the visual-concrete, for example, is not particularly evident and neither are the much vaunted multi media facets (admittedly this is partly down to the flattening of some of the work by being lifted from its original textual context). So while the editor’s introduction makes all kinds of loud but unspecific claims as to what the Foil contents signify, and done so in that hyperbolic rebel-speak come advertising copy mode, it glosses over, or more correctly, treats as ‘gloss’, the particularising reality of the biographical which could simplify and make accessible what Nicholas Johnson wants to make complex, mystifying and glamorous. In short, a good 80% of Foil is a lot more comprehensible and its focus a lot more singular than its editor actually seems to be aware of.
One immediate result of this is that Foil is slated by its brain dead establishment critics - though you can’t really blame them for believing the anthology’s own editor – without the contents even having to be read; or at least it sets up the parameters by which it is going to be impossible for the work to be read generously. In other words, in one way of looking at it, the individual poets have not been given any favours by inclusion in Foil; the anthology has entered them into a game that takes more than it gives. To recoup losses the poets are then forced further into the game, accelerating an unnecessary polarisation. There IS therefore a fault-line between content and form (package) and it has been produced by the editor himself, not unwittingly, but through a rather self-conscious exposition of an amateur cultural study that is quite simply an extension of his blurb writing and promotional skills into an area where, though becoming thinned and stretched, they take on the appearance of serious intellectual polemic. The problem is not that the work is polemicised but that it is done so shoddily and transparently and though this might have a superficial appeal to certain quarters, and get a few sales that would not otherwise materialise, in the longer term the prospects of this work being read both more seriously and more widely are damaged.
There is a sense of inevitability about this. The more some people talk about inclusion and the withering away of old dichotomies the more current marketing strategies incline them towards resurrection of them and often this results in a mismatch between what is said and what is done because instead of the wake of poetical opposition being followed for its original ‘reality’, its relationship-come-distance to artificially constructed centres, it is followed for its iconic stature, its sellable (in imagination) aura. This propels discourse into fragmentation so that, depending on which social outfit the speaker is addressing, he/she can be all things to all people. Therefore, at any one time as only one social outfit can be addressed it follows that ‘exclusion’, not ‘inclusion’, is the norm because the parameters of ‘difference’ are not determined by difference itself but by the much more slippery imperatives of fashion and power. This happens despite the good intentions of those involved (in this case the editor) or however weak, or unconscious, the fashion/power involvement may be. Because this discourse can be socially mobile within and between quite restricted social outfits (e.g. literary academia, Brit-art, media establishments etc) it takes on the mantle of ‘inclusion within freedom of choice’ whenever it addresses itself to or from a group but this is at the expense of every grouping (and any possible discourses between them) not involved at that point. This is what enables many of the most privileged personages within the arts to talk about themselves in terms of underprivilege without batting an eyelid and it is the root of the fault line running through Foil, or at least through Foil as the iconic event presented to us…
…This is the source of what Andrew Duncan is concentrating upon in his much maligned review but he does it not by being unfair to the individual work but by ignoring it. I find what Andrew says there valid, despite the negative implications it gives, because he is treating the work in Foil as pre-programmed for the scenario I am referring to, or at least predisposed to it. The nature of the work of intelligent people is not going to be uninfluenced by the psychological geography they are working within and though on a small scale [an individual poet’s work] such a relationship will probably not be of prime importance for a reading of their work – which is why I approached reading Foil the way I did – when the poems of some 33 like-minds are squeezed together and highlighted the relationship will exponentially grow until it reaches a point where it becomes impossible to ignore. It then reflects back upon its parts giving a different reading; in this case an interpretation informed by the notion of cultural behaviourism locates the collective within the apparent text. And people don’t tend to like that very much especially when, as in this case, what the publisher would like them to believe is rebellious and exploratory could in fact be shown to be as petit-bourgeois as Pop Idol etc. This is why the fault line in Foil between form (editor, book, cultural share) and content (poet, poem, difference) is not just a circumstantial occurrence or a one-off accident that can be attributed to its editor’s wish to promote it and therefore dismissed as irrelevant: the fault line is already there prior to the anthology. (This is not something that has happened with other Etruscan books simply because they have lacked an introduction by Johnson. Within the protocol of flyer blurbs he can get away with it.)...
In a sense this lets Nicholas Johnson off the hook: just as his mainstream detractors cannot be blamed for believing him so he cannot be blamed for believing the discourse as it has reached him. I am very pleased to have been able to say that because I have a very high regard for Nick, primarily as a poet but also as a brave and tireless champion of material whose brilliance seems to forever lie in proportion to its marginalisation – Etruscan publications are not only heroic, they are among the finest independent literary publications in Europe. He is also a friend but our friendship wobbled when Foil appeared because of his failure to include Terrible Work in his list of magazines that had promoted the work of Foil contributors despite the fact that we had published many of them and had supported many others in our review pages etc. My usual thick skinned acceptance of the continual ignoring of Terrible Work by some parties did not protect me in this instance because I thought then, and still do, that this was one occasion where Terrible Work should have been given its due, by someone who was in a position to see that, but it wasn’t. He also, more pointedly, failed to acknowledge Terrible Work as being the first publisher of his own Gillows Mohr – careless or strange? These personal issues were part of my reasons for delaying writing this review; they seemed petty but I also felt that they were not unrelated to the cultural issues I mention above, a further complication that needed unpacking. Ironically Foil appeared too, in its mix, to be very close to the editorial project of Terrible Work, a lot closer in fact than the usual suspects, but that, combined with our sudden invisibility, only went to reinforce my suspicion that the jacket of Foil was what Nick was really into, or had been seduced into, not the flesh underneath (and I am not referring here to the design or excellent production values). This seems to put him back in the frame: as editor he is responsible for what Foil ‘does’. As the author of spiel such as, “Foil represents a long overdue survey of a submerged high risk culture” he opens himself to ridicule because then instead of being able to walk away, proud that he has put together a magnificent collection, he has to stick around and defend the ridiculous – the contents of Foil are no more ‘high risk culture’ than learning the Japanese tea ceremony at night school and there is something seriously wrong both with anyone naïve enough to think this true or cynical enough to think that it is OK to say that in order to sell it, thus initiating a vicious circle between naïve and cynic that appropriates the contents of Foil to itself, reducing the substance and depth of the contents, their individual reality and life, to a thin proto adolescent scream for attention, thrusting the tired foot of British innovation bravely forward only to shoot it off before it can land on solid ground.
If you haven’t got your copy yet then I suggest you take a mild risk and buy one. Then I suggest you bypass the editorial and read the poets’ chunks of material in glorious isolation from each other – take your time – no rush as it will be years before the next tome. Finally, if you have to, put on your dark glasses, similar to those you used on the day of the eclipse, and read the editorial.
[* Any attempt to discuss Aidan Dun and his work, especially its relationship to Foil, would be opening a can of worms. I happen to think that Vale Royal (Goldmark 1995) is a brilliantly conceived and executed poem but I also think it is flawed. The problem however is not that it is ‘flawed’ in any purely literary sense but in an ontological sense. Yet even that is not the complication, not what puts him into brackets. The real problem lies in the way that the ‘flaw’ has been used by those who have promoted him. As I said, a can of worms, and worse, postmodern worms.]
© Tim Allen