A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  He enclosed thirty lines of a sonata that, had it been completed, would perhaps have been even more powerful than Briggflatts, such was its promise:

  Such syllables flicker out of grass:

  ‘What beckons goes’; and no glide lasts

  nor wings are ever in even beat long.

  A male season with paeonies, birds bright under thorn.

  Light pelts hard now my sun’s low,

  it carves my stone as hail mud

  till day’s net drapes the haugh,

  glaze crackled by flung drops.

  What use? Elegant hope, fever of tune,

  new now, next, in the fall, to be dust.

  Wind shakes a blotch of sun,

  flatter and tattle willow and oak alike

  sly as a trout’s shadow on gravel.

  Light stots from stone, sets ridge and kerf quick

  as shot skims rust from steel. Men of the north

  ‘subject to being beheaded and cannot avoid it

  of a race that is naturally given that way’.

  ‘Uber sophiae sugens’ in hourless dark,

  their midnight shimmers like noon.

  They clasp that axle fast.

  Those who lie with Loki’s daughter,

  jawbones laid to her stiff cheek,

  hear rocks stir above the goaf;

  but a land swaddled in light? Listen, make out

  lightfall singing on a wall mottled grey

  and the wall growls, tossing light,

  prow in tide, boulder in a foss.

  A man shrivels in many days, eyes thirst for night

  to scour and shammy the sky

  thick with dust and breath.228

  The image of light that ‘stots from stone’ is precise. Bunting almost certainly has the Scots word for ‘bounce’ in mind but not far beneath the surface is the stotting gait of gazelles, which flash their brilliant white rumps as they flee.

  By October, however, he was losing heart: ‘A whole host of interruptions, trivial at first, but now becoming really serious, have prevented me doing real work for months; and it looks as though I will have to try to find a job again, if anybody will employ me at my age, thus making poetry not far from impossible for a long time to come; and I haven’t got a long time to come (though I’m healthy for my age).’229 Little of his work from the 1970s survives.

  THE BATTLE OF EARLS COURT

  In 1972 Bunting became President of the Poetry Society, founded in 1909 and by 1969 boasting ‘1,500 members, many Affiliated Societies and Centres, Examinations for adults and in the schools in Spoken Poetry and Drama, and a journal of world authority, The Poetry Review [sic]’.230 Poetry Review had a distinguished record, having ‘sponsored the emerging Ezra Pound and also T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies and Rupert Brooke’ from the outset. In the same pamphlet in 1969 Poetry Society Council member G. B. H. Wightman declared that the mission of the society was to ‘bridge the gap between the traditional and the “avant garde”: to remind people of the value of the poetry of the past (including that of the recent past which tends to be obscured in the dust of fashion) and to introduce the work of new poets beginning to raise the dust’. And then in a passage of astonishing prescience and lyricism Wightman turns his eye to the future and the society’s role in it:

  It will be a frighteningly overpopulated world dominated by a technological culture in which analytic thinking is supreme. Moreover, not only the media of information but also the media of education will be increasingly centralised and vested in fewer hands. The Early Bird satellite is a beginning of the universal direct broadcast system we can expect in the future. There will therefore be a growing need to know the minds of men who consider the effects of the age upon the individual, who recall the values we require to employ our technical resources sensibly, who speak with a private voice, who state their impressions in an original way and who thereby communicate to the human pulse rather than to the system analyst’s computer. Such men we term poets.231

  In spite of this apparent commitment to eclecticism Wightman was to pay an important part in the events which tore the Poetry Society apart in the 1970s.

  Bunting privately despaired of Poetry Review, writing to Mottram in June 1971 that he had never heard of the people who ran it having done anything sensible before they appointed Mottram as editor, but lamenting the fact that he couldn’t contribute any new work: ‘you catch me unprovided. I’ve not a line unpublished except one tiny poem which I cant get right. It’s been hanging around for a year and a half because of one word in the last line, and I dunno whether I can get it fixed in time for you.’232

  By the beginning of 1972, however, he was becoming very aware of the people who ran the Poetry Society because he had been invited to become its President. His acceptance is characteristically larded with cavils:

  I was much astonished by your letter of January 20th, which reached me two days ago, saying that the Council of the Poetry Society wanted me to be president. I feel the honour; yet I must also consider that I am an old man, not fit for many duties, and not able, perhaps, to attend many of your meetings, and that I am not a member of your society and know very little about its activities.

  However, I think I remember that you are partly concerned with encouraging people to read poetry aloud, which is something I thoroughly approve of; so, if you can put up with the disabilities I have mentioned, I am content to accept the society’s offer.233

  Classic Bunting: I’m too old, I can’t do anything, I won’t attend your meetings, I’m not a member and I don’t know anything about you, but, if you want …

  Mottram’s first edition of Poetry Review was the Autumn 1971 issue, which introduced a radical cover redesign. Bunting was impressed by Mottram’s improvements. He singled out Tom Pickard’s contribution for particular praise and, while recognising that any editor of a poetry magazine needed ‘secondary stuff to fill it out’ he inveighed against contributing poets he considered sub-standard: ‘All the same, say it aloud, listen to the wild shamble of Gary Snyder, the dislocated echo of [Robert] Nichols, the record player running down of Miss [Elaine] Feinstein: and then turn to our Tom, hard and sharp (though he still stumbles here and there). Jonathan [Williams], of course, is himself, out of their class, not too familiar, and yet, essentially small stuff. Tom’s voice seems to me like that of a great poet – if they’ll let him get on with it long enough and not starve him into compromises.’234 He received an immediate and doubtless huffy riposte from Mottram and a few days later sent a hurried corrective: ‘Don’t get the idea that I am running down your other poets: it’s only by contrast with Tom Pickard that they look so woolly. There aren’t many of us who could come out of that confrontation at all well.’235

  Looking at Mottram’s second edition of Poetry Review one can sympathise with Bunting’s frustration. The concrete and sound poetry that was so prevalent at the time seems as fatuous now as it did to many then, but Mottram’s task was to ‘bridge the gap between the traditional and the avant garde’, as Wightman had said, and he needed to include progressive, experimental verse even if the quality was questionable; and in any event Mottram was undoubtedly aligned with the radical wing of contemporary British poetry. Bunting wasn’t happy with the balance of Mottram’s selection and told him about a Poetry Society member who had written to him ‘in violent expostulation’ against the concrete and sound poetry in the most recent issue, demanding that Bunting, as President, denounce it publicly as ‘the nonsense which I do, in fact, think it is’. He refused to comply however because: ‘I think such a society can only function by complete inclusiveness – everyone who says he’s a poet is, so far as such a society is concerned; concretists to one side, the muttering zombies to the other; and the genuine poets, whoever they may be, must stand their chance amongst the crowd of frauds.’236

  He continued to praise Mottram’s editions, in public and privately. He opened the Poetry Society’s Annual General Meeting on 16 June 1973 with a
n expression of his appreciation of Mottram’s work; there were poems in recent editions, he thought, which the Society would be ‘proud in the future to have published’.237 But privately he urged Mottram to pay more attention to work the majority of members would consider ‘respectable’, to promote inclusiveness while ‘keeping a certain technical standard’. He acknowledged that Mottram was under conflicting pressures from different factions but encouraged him to resist any influence that would make the Poetry Society even smaller than it already was.

  In fact at the age of seventy-two Bunting found himself caught up in another war, the British Poetry Wars and, particularly, the Battle of Earls Court. The idea of a poetry war is so impeccably ludicrous that, forty years later, it seems astonishing that its combatants didn’t laugh themselves into a ceasefire. But in 1970s Britain it was possible to apply the word ‘militant’ to the most inoffensive occupation and immediately find oneself confronted by the bitterest of enemies. This was a decade when, whatever your interest, if you didn’t take an extreme position in it you didn’t count, a point wistfully made by Roger Guedalla in a letter to Eric Mottram after the war, from his point of view, had been lost: ‘I have taken it all very seriously but have been constantly reduced to being forced to make puerile gestures to prove that I am more radical than somebody else.’238 This was the year, after all, when the British Royal Navy dispatched warships to Iceland in an argument about fish. In the Poetry Wars it was the very soul of the Poetry Society, and the expression of that soul, Poetry Review, that was at stake. This bizarre episode in twentieth-century British cultural history is recorded in Peter Barry’s even-handed Poetry Wars: British poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court. A brief sketch of the war and Bunting’s small role in it will suffice here.

  The Poetry Society was one of Britain’s most conservative cultural institutions and by 1970 a radical counterculture had developed around a small group of poet activists that included Bob Cobbing, Anthony Rudolf, Mottram, and Bunting’s publisher, Stuart Montgomery. All, as members of the General Council, were Poetry Society insiders who were determined to challenge the status quo. In Mottram’s words the Poetry Society before the revolution was ‘then exemplary in being a non-entity. It was dead. It had been dead for centuries. It was establishment dead – as it is now.’239 In 1971 this small group of radicals seized control of the Poetry Society, installed Bunting as President and Mottram as editor of what became the most exciting, innovative and controversial poetry magazine in Britain, and started six years of rancorous and aggressive internal politics that tore the British poetry establishment apart and severely tested the patience of many genuine poetry lovers.

  Mottram, a combative type, took an antagonistic stance towards the Poetry Society as soon as he was appointed as editor of Poetry Review.240 But it was his editorial strategy, rather than his hostility to the poetry establishment, that turned the conservative element of the Poetry Society against him. George Wightman who, as we saw, had proposed a balanced presentation of traditional poetry and the radical poetry of Mottram’s British Poetry Revival, quickly turned against the new editor. As early as the General Council meeting in April 1973 Wightman proposed an alternative editor, Gavin Ewart. Although Mottram won the ensuing vote comfortably Wightman was to remain his most vocal opponent throughout the 1970s.

  Mottram was confrontational but he had more than enough reason to be so. An embarrassed Chair of the General Council, Laurence Cotterell, wrote to him in November 1975: ‘An apology is due and overdue for the offensiveness to which you were subjected when taking the chair at a recent meeting here. This sort of thing on our premises shames us all … I am told that you soldiered on and rode it all out admirably.’241 The ‘offensiveness’ got much worse despite Cotterell’s apology.

  Other members of the General Council resented the coup, as did the Arts Council, which emerges as one of the real villains of the saga. (Iain Sinclair’s comment on Barry’s book would have had Bunting cheering: ‘a warning to future poets. Never mix with bureaucrats. Destroy your correspondence. And count your fingers after shaking hands with the Arts Council.’) In 1973 the Arts Council, in the person of Charles Osborne, was preparing to declare war on the Poetry Society. (Mottram claimed that Osborne had ‘declared himself at one point to be the “undertaker” of British poetry.’242) When Osborne announced a full internal enquiry into the workings of the Poetry Society headed by Sir John Witt, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council, the radicals refused to co-operate. Witt found that the Poetry Society was underfunded but entirely dysfunctional and that any improvements in the former should be dependent on improvements in the management and organisation of the society and an ending of the factionalism that had split it asunder. The General Council meeting of 13 November 1976 was a disaster for the radicals who themselves split into two factions in yet another suicidal act of tribalism. Three officers in the radical faction resigned, setting the stage for meltdown of the radical cause at the General Council meeting of March 1977 when fourteen radical officers resigned in protest at Arts Council interference and walked out of the society to begin a series of ineffective boycotts against it and publicly flay those who stayed. This effectively ended the revolution. Osborne, who manages to seem obnoxious even in his own account of the meeting that ended the revolution, boasted that:

  One Saturday afternoon, I found myself yet again at a meeting, waiting for it to begin … They were nearly half an hour late in starting, because they were too busy shouting accusations at one another about the Chairman’s desk being removed without permission, or something equally ridiculous. Finally, having had enough of this, I took a deep breath, projected my voice as though I were declaiming at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and managed to make myself heard above the clamour. ‘For Christ’s sake pull yourselves together and start the bloody meeting,’ I yelled. ‘I have better things to do than waste my weekends here.’

  What the Arts Council’s investigating team had failed to achieve in months I accomplished in seconds. One of the poets, Jeff Nuttall, stood up. ‘I am not going to bow down to this kind of official censorship,’ he exclaimed. ‘I resign in protest.’ ‘So do I,’ said another, Bob Cobbing. And one by one, their followers did the same. They marched out of the room, and I asked the Secretary to be certain to record their resignations in the minutes, for fear they should come to what senses they possessed and march back in again. But they didn’t return.243

  Anyone who remembers Britain in the 1970s may have some doubt as to whether any of this actually had much to do with poetry. A letter to Mottram from Bunting’s bibliographer, Roger Guedalla, written on 20 April 1977 reveals a context that permeated every aspect of British society at the time:

  I am also very depressed at what has happened at the Society … We have handed the Society back to the most reactionary elements and it seems that all the efforts of the past five or eight years have come to nothing and Osborne and his friends have achieved exactly what they wanted. I did think, and I continue to think that we had a great chance to break their stranglehold but I never thought it would be easily or quickly achieved. I thought it was a serious and continuing struggle and I never thought we would give in so easily … I have read a great deal and thought a great deal about the role of the radical artist in a capitalist society struggling in just the ways we have been doing. I have discussed the problems at length, in particular with friends at the I.M.G., the I.S. and the W.R.P. as well as with Tribunite members of the Labour Party and associates of the Militant Faction. I have always seen it as a political struggle, and thus as a question of tactics and organisation.244

  Not a mention of poetry. The I.M.G. is the International Marxist Group; the I.S. are the International Socialists; the W.R.P. is the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The Poetry Wars and the Battle of Earls Court were never about poetry; it was about who controlled the soul of the Left. No wonder Bunting despaired. He had no time for propaganda, let alone poetry as propaganda. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in Decem
ber 1979:

  I am infuriated by the unshakeable naivety of people (Tom Pickard is one) who will believe any propaganda which looks as though it came from the left, and would sign their own death warrants if asked in the name of Humanity or the Proletariat. The success of the Persian priests and landlords with their anti-Shah stuff is a case in point. Whatever the Shah is, he is far further to the left than the present regime or its supporters; but who is to persuade students and such?245

  He had made the same point, more publicly and more personally, earlier in the year at a reading in London:

  Poetry hampers itself when it undertakes advocacy, however indirectly. I would have maintained that even against my much-loved Hugh MacDiarmid, whose advocacy was mostly against unreason, for thought and tolerance and renewal. But poetry that advocates obscurantism, or on the other hand advocates naïve slogans of liberalism is a nuisance to everybody who can read. What I have tried to do is to make something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be propped by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself. Something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their dues to the party or say their prayers, without implying the stifling deference so many people in this country still show to a Cambridge degree or a Kensington accent. It’s brought me just what I expected from the first … nothing.246