A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

114. BB to Cid Corman, 29 April 1967, SUNY.

  115. BB to GT, 21 March 1967.

  116. BB to GT, 21 March 1967.

  117. J. Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York, 1968), 142.

  118. Isis, 1502, 26 November 1965, 12.

  119. BB to JW, 1 September 1973, SUNY.

  120. SYSB, 267.

  121. PAID, 160–1.

  122. CONJ, 156.

  123. BB to DP, Goleta, 30 May 1967, LILLY.

  124. BB to JW, 21 April 1968, SUNY.

  125. BB to TP, 17 December 1967, SUNY.

  126. BB to GT, 19 December 1967.

  127. BB to GT, 7 January 1968.

  128. BB to GT, 10 February 1968. This letter contains many typing errors which I have silently corrected as it was the first he wrote after his operation.

  129. Faranda, 150.

  130. BB to Jack Shoemaker, 5 November 1968, SUNY.

  131. CP, 21.

  132. Agenda, Spring 1969, 46–8; M. Dodsworth, ‘Sea-Town Records’, Listener, 27 March 1969; R. Holmes, ‘Poets: Bunting to Ginsberg’, Times Saturday Review, 25 January 1969 (Holmes chose Bunting’s Collected Poems as his book of the year for The Times on 27 December 1969); International Times, 1–16 January 1969, 5; Guardian, 27 December 1968; C. Connolly, ‘Profession: Poet’, Sunday Times, 26 January 1969, 60; Evening Chronicle, 4 December 1968, 8; Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1969; A. Brownjohn, ‘Craft and Art’, New Statesman, 13 December 1968, 843–4; T. Lask, ‘Each in His Own Voice’, New York Times, 8 March 1969; Library Journal, 15 June 1969, 2473; Atlantic Monthly, May 1969, 114. Horizon published Collected Poems in the US; R. Guedalla, ‘Struggler in the Wilderness’, Nation, 15 February 1971, 216–8; Queen, June 1970, 71.

  133. W. Rawson, ‘Poems of Basil Bunting’, Friend, 18 September 1970, 1123.

  134. D. Jones, ‘Basil Bunting: The Line of Succession’, Odysseus (Portland, Oregon) Oct–Nov 1971, 1–2.

  135. DESC.

  136. New Measure 4 (Winter 1966–7), 60.

  137. SYSB, 13–14.

  138. BBNL, 48.

  139. BB to LZ, 5 December 1953, HR.

  140. SSLT, 6.

  141. Postacrd, DUR.

  142. Palatinate, 24 October 1968, 14.

  143. Interview with Tom Pickard on 17 and 18 June 1981.

  144. Peter Quartermain, ‘Thinking with the poem (Zukofsky)’, Golden Handcuffs Review 1, 5, Summer–Fall, 2005.

  145. T. B. Webster, ‘Basil Bunting – A Poet in Our Time’, Courier (Newcastle University) 5 February 1969, 6.

  146. SYSB, 14.

  147. BB to JW, 1 September 1973, SUNY.

  148. T. Pickard, ‘Rough Music (Ruff Muzhik)’, Chicago Review, Spring 2000.

  149. Mike Doyle to Professor Sylvia E. Bowman, 19 January 1971, privately held.

  150. BB to Alexander Nelson, 25 November 1970, copy DUR.

  151. BB to George Quasha, 26 December 1970, copy DUR. The whereabouts of the original is unknown.

  152. Times, 3 August 1968, 19.

  153. Review 22, June 1970, 63.

  154. Review 23, September–November 1970, 68.

  155. ‘Ian Hamilton in Conversation’, The Dark Horse, 3, 1996, 34–3.

  156. BB to JW, 18 March 1970, SUNY.

  157. CP, 144.

  158. BB to JW, 12 March 1970, SUNY.

  159. Reading in February 1982, London.

  160. Listener, 8 October 1970, 484.

  161. K. Cox, ‘Basil Bunting reading Wordsworth’, Jacket, 28, October 2005.

  162. Hugh Kenner, quoted in ‘A Conversation with Stephen Logan’, Cambridge Authors, http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/conversation-with-stephen-Logan

  163. Guardian, 14 October 1970.

  164. BB to DP, 14 July 1971, LILLY.

  165. BB to DG, 19 September 1972, DUR.

  166. SYSB, 267.

  167. The others being Wyatt, Sidney, Spencer 1500/1600, Denham, Waller (especially ‘Cooper’s Hill’) and Campion 1600/1700 and Pound, Eliot, Yeats and William Carlos Williams. He expected the next great change to occur at the end of the 1900s or early 2000s (Gael Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’, unpublished manuscript in private hands).

  168. SSLT, 201–2.

  169. BB to Rodger Kingston, 25 May 1970, DUR.

  170. BB to Rodger Kingston, 1 May 1970, DUR. Lord Justice Parker was regarded as a relatively moderate Lord Chief Justice but was criticised for politicising the criminal justice system. Although Bunting does not mention it specifically he is referring here to the ‘D’Oliveira scandal’. Basil D’Oliveira was a popular member of the England cricket team. South African by birth and designated ‘coloured’ by the South African apartheid regime, ‘Dolly’ became a catalyst of the international boycott of all South African sport in 1968 when the South African cricket authorities refused to allow the England team to tour in South Africa if he was selected.

  171. BB to EP, 12 September 1970, BRBML.

  172. BB to TP, 7 September 1970, SUNY.

  173. BB to TP, 4 October 1970, SUNY.

  174. BB to EP, 14 October 1970, BRBML.

  175. DISJ, 222.

  176. BB to TP, 4 October 1970, SUNY.

  177. BB to EP, 14 October 1970, BRBML.

  178. Faranda, 236–7.

  179. CP, 198.

  180. BB to JW, 3 April 1971, SUNY.

  181. BB to EM, 1 June 1971, KCL. To be fair Bunting does praise the University of British Columbia’s beautiful campus and admirable faculty club, as well as one or two attractive people on and off site. The Ottawa reading Bunting refers to earned him $500 for three days’ readings and supplied a ‘good change of scene and voices’ (BB to JW, 19 April 1971, SUNY).

  182. DISJ, 143.

  183. CP, 161.

  184. Mike Doyle to author, 26 March 2012.

  185. BB to Mike Doyle, 4 January 1971. He wrote to Dorothy Pound about his honorary degree: ‘When I was getting that degree I told the Public Orator it was a shame not to do it in Latin, because it was embarrassing to listen to one’s own praises in one’s native tongue. I then learned that Wordsworth, the first doctor made by the university, said word for word the same thing to the Public Orator in 1838. A characteristic of Northern poets?’ (BB to DP, 14 July 1971, LILLY).

  186. B. Mackay, ‘Basil Bunting, Mentor’, DUR.

  187. Letter from Peter Quartermain to author, 21 April 2011.

  188. Letter from Doyle to author, 26 March 2012. The interviews were by Brian Butters (Victoria Daily Times, 13 October 1971, and Bill Thomas (Daily Colonist, 14 October 1972).

  189. ‘Pore ole granpa’ refers to Bunting’s status as an honorary grandfather to the Quartermains’ two children who were seven years old at the time (letter from Peter Quartermain to author, 21 April 2011). Doyle regards Bunting’s reference to his ‘war’ with Skelton as an exaggeration and says that although the two were at loggerheads for about five years, it was hardly a war.

  190. BB to GT, 31 October 1971.

  191. BB to GT, 8 January 1972.

  192. BB to JW, 14 November 1971, SUNY. He repeated his claim that the attack on him was ‘really aimed to discredit the man who got me invited here’, that is Mike Doyle.

  193. BB to DP, 1 December 1971, LILLY.

  194. Letter from Doyle to author, 26 March 2012.

  195. ‘August Kleinzahler, The Art of Poetry No. 93’, interview with William Corbett, Paris Review, Fall 2007.

  196. Paris Review, Fall 2007.

  197. PAID, 28–9.

  198. BB to TP, 13 June 1976, SUNY. It seems that Bunting was at his most acerbic when confronting poems that he felt had something good buried in them. Where he saw nothing he was merely polite. He wrote to one poet to thank him for ‘the pleasant poem. I’m too impressed to say more’ (BB to Rodger Kingston, 9 August 1969, DUR). Kleinzahler’s later success as a poet rather justifies Bunting’s assessment.

  199. B. Mackay, ‘Basil Bunting, Mentor’, DUR.

  200. BB to EM, 22 Feb
ruary 1972, KCL.

  201. BB to EM, 22 February 1972, KCL.

  202. Letter from Mike Doyle to author, 26 March 2012.

  203. BB to RBD, 10 December 1971, DUR.

  204. London Review of Books, 1 April 1999.

  205. London Review of Books, 29 April 1999.

  206. London Review of Books, 10 June 1999.

  207. Mike Doyle to author, 26 March 2012. According to August Kleinzahler another reason for leaving Victoria was Bunting’s discovery that he was being taxed by both the Canadian and British governments, which rather defeated his reason for being there in the first place (Kleinzahler to author, 4 February 2013).

  208. Conjunctions, 5, 1983, 75.

  209. BB to DP, 6 August 1971, LILLY.

  210. As he described administrators in a letter of 25 July 1944 to Louis Zukofsky, HR.

  211. The papers relating to this episode are to be found in the Victoria & Albert archive ACGB/119/27.

  212. Times, 24 June 1970, 11.

  213. Times, 25 June 1970, 9.

  214. SYSB, 14–15.

  215. BB to EM, 28 October 1972, KCL.

  216. LBB to Mike Doyle, 14 July 1973, privately held. He clearly excluded Doyle from his blanket condemnation of the Victoria faculty.

  217. BB to EM, 13 November 1973, KCL.

  218. BB to EM, 28 January 1974, KCL.

  219. BB to EM, 29 June 1974, KCL. In January 1977 he blamed the Arts Council for leaving Pickard ‘so close to starvation that it’s plausible for the police to clap him in gaol if he’s found anywhere near an offence’ (BB to EM, 8 January 1977, KCL).

  220. BB to EM, 29 June 1974, KCL. The last sentence is not typed but added in Bunting’s hand.

  221. BB to JW, 7 August 1974, SUNY.

  222. BB to JW, 27 January 1976, SUNY. He told Roudaba that he was never paid for the Skipsey book and so didn’t complete a selection from Swinburne that was planned (BB to RBD, 9 February 1973, DUR).

  223. J. Skipsey, Selected Poems, ed. B. Bunting (Sunderland, 1976), 7.

  224. MONT, 70.

  225. Skipsey, Selected Poems, 13. Bunting describes Skipsey’s pronunciation as ‘Tyneside’ here. Bunting didn’t exaggerate his relationship with Skipsey. In his preface to his selection of Skipsey’s poems he noted that: ‘His son William was inspector of schools at Durham, his eldest son, James, master shifter at the Montague colliery at Scotswood, where Joseph Skipsey sometimes visited my father, the colliery doctor there; but I was too young to have any memory of him. He died at Harraton in September 1903.’ (11)

  226. Interview with Tom Pickard on 17 and 18 June 1981, recorded at Bunting’s home near Hexham, published by Keele University, 1995.

  227. BB to VF, 23 May 1972, DUR. The image of a drop of molten silver reaches back to ‘Villon’ and, further back, to Bunting’s childhood reading of Edith Nesbit’s stories. See Chapter 1: Guilty of Spring, note 23.

  228. CP, 199.

  229. BB to VF, 23 October 1972, DUR.

  230. The Poetry Society, Poetry Gala, (London, 1969), 35.

  231. Poetry Gala, 39.

  232. BB to EM, 1 June 1971, KCL. The unfinished poem was ‘All the cants they peddle’.

  233. BB to Denys Thompson, 29 January 1972, Poetry Society.

  234. BB to EM, 13 February 1972, KCL.

  235. BB to EM, 22 February 1972, KCL.

  236. BB to EM, 28 October 1972, KCL.

  237. P. Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Cambridge, 2006), 38.

  238. Barry, 109–10.

  239. P. Skelt (ed.), Prospect into breath: Interviews with north and south writers (Twickenham, 1991), 17.

  240. Barry, 21.

  241. Barry, 56.

  242. Skelt, 37.

  243. C. Osborne, Giving it Away: Memoirs of an Uncivil Servant (London, 1986), 204–5.

  244. Barry, 109.

  245. SYSB, 270.

  246. Reading, London, 1979.

  247. Barry, 162–4.

  248. Guardian, 12 January 1976.

  249. BB to EM, 28 October 1972, KCL.

  250. BB to EM, 8 November 1972, KCL.

  251. BB to Mike Doyle, 14 July 1973, privately held.

  252. BB to EM, 29 June 1974, KCL.

  253. BB to EM, 26 March 1975, KCL. Mottram’s last issue was Volume 67, Nos. 1 and 2, 1977. The next two issues were edited by Edwin Brock, not really a booby.

  254. DISJ, 136.

  255. Stephan Chodorov to the author, 30 April 2011. The shooting of the film created quite a stir locally. Mary Dawson recalls the day the crew arrived affectionately in ‘Memories of Brigflatts’, MTBB.

  256. DISJ, 136.

  257. B. Bunting, ‘Prince of Poets’, Sunday Times, 12 November 1972, 38.

  258. H. Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), 117.

  259. Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984.

  260. BB to LZ, 17 June 1949, HR.

  261. Sunday Times, 12 November 1972.

  262. Guardian, 3 February 1973.

  263. Guardian, 6 February 1973.

  264. BB to DG, 2 February 1972, SUNY.

  265. Letter at SUNY, quoted by Tom Pickard.

  266. MT, 67–8.

  267. MT, 69.

  268. BB to JW, 4 July 1973, SUNY.

  269. Osborne, 201.

  270. BB to EM, 8 November 1972, KCL.

  271. DISJ, 135–6.

  272. BB to JW, 1 September 1973, SUNY.

  273. Mike Shayer to author, 6 February 2013.

  274. BB to VF, 11 May 1975, DUR.

  275. BB to EM, 19 February 1975, KCL. Bunting took a wry view of his predicament. Struldbruggs were denizens of the kingdom of Luggnagg in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Struldbruggs ‘commonly acted like mortals, until about thirty years old, after which by degrees they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both until they came to fourscore … When they came to fourscore years … they had not only the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but uncapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection’ (J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1975) 225–6).

  276. Barry, 48–9.

  277. Barry, 53.

  278. Reading, London, February 1982.

  279. CP, 145.

  280. Barry, 53–4. Indeed Bunting’s remarks about poems that the Poetry Society should be proud of were made two years before this.

  281. BB to JW, 16 March 1975, SUNY.

  282. BB to JW, 30 June 1975, SUNY.

  283. Turnbull, 73

  284. PAID, 141.

  285. BB to JW, 4 May 1976, SUNY.

  286. PAID, 149.

  287. PAID, 150–1.

  288. BB to JW, 4 May 1976, SUNY.

  289. G. Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’.

  290. PAID, 55. DAF has nothing to do with daffodils; it is short for Van Doorne’s Automobiel Fabriek after its Dutch, not Swedish, founder.

  291. V. Forde, ‘Background for Letters of Basil Bunting and a Remembrance of My Visits with him, March 1982’, DUR.

  292. PAID, 142.

  293. PAID, 143.

  294. PI, 46.

  295. PAID, 144.

  296. PAID, 145.

  297. PAID, 146.

  298. PAID, 33.

  299. SYSB, 262–4.

  300. DESC.

  301. Arts Council minute to Secretary-General, 26 May 1976, Victoria and Albert Museum.

  302. Presidential Address by Basil Bunting: An Artist’s view on Regional Arts patronage, 1977.

  303. BB to EM, 8 November 1972, KCL.

  304. Presidential Address by Basil Bunting: An Artist’s view on Regional Arts patronage, 1974. He didn’t have much hope that his voice would be heard. He complained to Tom Pickard that he was required to ‘spout to the Annual General Meeting of Northern Arts, pretending to be the Gr
eat Poet, pretending to think they might listen to anything I say’ (BB to TP, 1 October 1974, SUNY).

  305. Presidential Address by Basil Bunting: An Artist’s view on Regional Arts patronage, 1975.

  306. Presidential Address by Basil Bunting: An Artist’s view on Regional Arts patronage, 1976.

  307. BB to JW, 27 September 1976, SUNY.

  308. Presidential Address by Basil Bunting: An Artist’s view on Regional Arts patronage, 1977.

  309. BB to Hugh MacDiarmid, 13 November 1973, Edinburgh University Library.

  310. BB to JW, 26 February 1973, SUNY.

  311. SYSB, 276.

  312. BB to EM, 13 November 1973, KCL.

  313. PAID, 125.

  314. SYSB, 281.

  315. PAID, 127–9.

  316. BB to Roger Guedalla, 1 April 1980, DUR.

  317. BB to JW, 4 May 1976, SUNY.

  318. BB to EM, 8 January 1977, KCL.

  319. BB to JW, 12 January 1977, SUNY.

  320. T. Pickard, George Oppen Memorial Lecture, 2004.

  321. BB to RBD, 15 March 1977, DUR.

  322. BB to RBD, 5 July 1977, DUR.

  323. BB to RBD, 27 February 1978, DUR.

  324. BB to RBD, 23 June 1978, DUR.

  325. BB to TP, 21 March 1977, SUNY.

  326. BB to JW, 11 February 1977, SUNY. ‘Sima knew she was a bit off her head,’ he told Roudaba, ‘and I stayed with her a few days again before going to occupy Jonathan Williams’ cottage in Dentdale’ (BB to RBD, 5 July 1977, DUR).

  327. BB to JW, 8 April 1977, SUNY.

  328. BB to Cid Corman, 26 April 1977, SUNY.

  329. BB to JW, 8 April 1977, SUNY.

  330. SYSB, 265.

  331. SYSB, 274.

  CHAPTER 6:

  CODA

  1. BB to TP, 3 June 1978, SUNY.

  2. BB to RBD, 5 July 1977, DUR.

  3. BB to EM, 19 June 1977, KCL.

  4. G.Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’.

  5. PAID, 37.

  6. Conversation with author, 31 May 2013.

  7. DISJ, 137.

  8. BB to JW, 22 August 1977, SUNY.

  9. PAID, 38.

  10. PAID, 161.

  11. M. Doyle, Paper Trombones: Notes on poetics (Victoria, 2007), 20.

  12. CONJ, 186.

  13. PAID, 38.

  14. DISJ, 137.

  15. G.Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’.

  16. Turnbull, ‘A visit’.

  17. A. Kleinzahler, ‘Blackfell’s Scarlatti’, London Review of Books, 21 January 1999.