Walleah Press         Famous Reporter 33 (Jul 2006)

 

ESSAY
Laurie Duggan — 'Discovering the Islands'


Possibly the first poetry book I bought with a volition that was entirely my own was the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties, edited by Robin Skelton. Skelton was, as far as I knew, Canadian (and there’s a significance to this which I didn’t grasp until much later). In that anthology, and Skelton’s further volume Poetry of the Forties, I discovered a range of writings I would go on to investigate, in particular both the Auden crew and the Surrealists. I was not initially fond of Auden himself; instead the ‘Macspaunday’ poet who appealed most to me was Louis MacNeice, particularly his Autumn Journal and the very idea of a poetry of reportage or at least an ‘impure’ poetry. I saved up my pocket money and bought MacNeice’s Collected Poems on the strength of what I’d seen in the anthology.

MacNeice was easy enough to obtain, but British and Irish poetry not of the ‘mainstream’ was difficult to access (even to know about) in the Australia of the late sixties. The first inkling I had that there were other poetries about came with another Penguin, the much criticised Children of Albion anthology. In it I came across the work of poets like Gael Turnbull, Andrew Crozier and David Chaloner. Not long after this, or maybe even a bit earlier I stumbled across books (then, remarkably, on the shelves of a Melbourne bookshop) published by Fulcrum. My Poundian friends at Monash University had known about Basil Bunting and now, at last, here he was. I discovered for myself the work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, even Pete Brown whom I’d known as the lyricist for Cream. Around the same time I bought Gael Turnbull’s two Cape Goliard volumes, A Trampoline and Scantlings.

Meanwhile an English poet, Kris Hemensley, had moved to Melbourne. By the late 60s he was involved in an inner-city poetry scene that was quite different to the one I inhabited twelve miles out at Monash University. Although both groups were involved in post-Poundian poetries, mutual suspicion meant there wasn’t much contact until the early seventies when I actually met Kris. He had been editing stapled, gestetnered magazines, first Earthship, then Ear in a Wheatfield: the first local sources of current innovative British poetries. For some Australians this was the first time their work could sit alongside that of poets from elsewhere without the sniff of condescension. I published some early poems in The Ear and around this time ‘loosened up’ considerably. I don’t think Kris’s contribution can be overrated. The Ear’s contents ranged widely across ‘postmodern’ anglophone poetries and delved deeply into translation (it was where I first saw the work of Jabes).

A decade later, Scripsi, another magazine based in Melbourne (edited by an old University friend Peter Craven, together with Michael Heyward) moved in on the high end of all this. Though it tended to go for the authors who were already famous (i.e. canonized by the TLS and LRB) and though its ambition seemed to be to replicate Granta, there were some interesting writers on its list. Through this magazine I began to correspond with Gael Turnbull. I also met the American poet August Kleinzahler who, along with Christopher Logue, took part in a Melbourne literary festival that was more exciting than any before or since (the Scripsi editors had called on Kleinzahler at short notice due to John Ashbery’s illness). With these people I exchanged books and ideas and with Collected Works, the bookshop that Kris and others set up, it finally became possible to keep up with some of the current British and Irish work. I especially owe to Scripsi my attempts to translate Martial which they published as a small volume with an issue of the magazine. Some of these poems also appeared in a special translation issue of the English little magazine Figs, edited by Tony Baker.

It still wasn’t easy to know what was going on in the Northern Isles and anthologies were an important if belated source. Distance had its problems: when Carcanet brought out A Various Art I found myself out of sympathy with the characteristic Cambridge tendency to omit information that was considered extra-poetic. As an Australian I wanted biographical details (photographs even) though I broadly shared the editors’ feelings about ‘personality’.

Of course the ‘mainstream’ Australian poets already had their British and Irish connections. When I was asked to submit material to an Australian issue of Verse magazine I sent them a book from which to choose work. The editors published the shortest poem (three lines) and in an unsigned introductory article warned their readers not to bother with my poetry. Even since then, Australians of non-‘mainstream’ persuasion, on publication in the UK, have to run the gauntlet of reviewers (expatriates themselves often enough) who see themselves as gatekeepers.

Strangely, many of the critics who supported post-Poundian poetries were unaware of the ‘other’ British poetry. Hugh Kenner, normally astute, wrote what is perhaps his worst book, A Sinking Island, about English writing and managed to avoid mention of any of the poets who might have belied his thesis: that Auden, Larkin and their ilk were simply not worth the attention of adult readers. Beyond Bunting, Kenner seemed blind to any possible poetries from the ‘island’; this when even the TLS and LRB were starting to write about Roy Fisher and one or two others. Perhaps the paranoia of ‘post-avant’ writers didn’t help. More than is the case with the Americans there has been a tendency among British poets in particular to shield their own work from the uninitiated, so that the Cambridge scene could be viewed from a distance as a ‘closed shop’, nouveau Apostles if you like. There was certainly, through the seventies and eighties, a perceived need for the outsider to show credentials. This may explain a tendency of some poetries to present themselves, John Forbes astutely noted, as ‘endless prolegomena to the subject’.

What has finally altered the shape of the poetry world (the ‘avant’ and ‘post-avant’ world at least) has been the advent of the internet and of print-on-demand technology with its associated ordering methods. I was finally able to obtain the books of poets who had been writing for as long as or longer than I had like Allen Fisher, Geraldine Monk, Denise Riley and Trevor Joyce to name a few. The new modes of production and distribution have also taken the preciousness out of the British ‘avant’ poetry world. It has become clear enough that there are people out there in cyberspace who might actually want to read the work; all that was necessary was the existence of an efficient system of distribution and storage.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece the significance of a Canadian (Robin Skelton) editing the Penguin books of Thirties and Forties poetry. At the time I awaited the appearance of a Fifties volume, though now I can understand why Skelton just might not have been interested in doing it. In retrospect it’s hard to imagine an English editor of the time taking on such a task since the legacy of the Fifties had all but obscured the interesting writing of an earlier period (pretty much until Peter Riley excavated Nicholas Moore’s work). It’s significant too that one of the more interesting general anthologies of modern British and Irish poetry should be edited by an American, Keith Tuma, and that, though published in the States by Oxford, the English division simply didn’t bother. It was an interesting exercise, not least for the anomaly of birthdate placing Philip Larkin next to Bob Cobbing. This is the Phillip Larkin who, as Roy Fisher amusingly (and amazingly) noted, almost appeared in Cid Corman’s Origin.

[Laurie Duggan's 'Discovering the Islands' appeared originally as a contribution to the British-Poets mailing list on 14th June, 2006.]


Laurie Duggan, born in Melbourne and later a resident of Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, moved from Australia to the UK in 2006, and returned to Australia in 2018. His recent books include Selected Poems 1971–2017 and No Particular Place To Go (both published by Shearsman in the UK), and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattman). He is also the author of Ghost Nation (UQP), a history of modernist tendencies in Australian art. Homer Street, published in August 2020 (Giramondo) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry for 2021. From 2008—2018 he blogged at Graveney Marsh.