About the Book
Named for a Sonny Boy Williamson song, this is a collection of interviews with 20 modern poets. The subjects are Kelvin Corcoran, Simon Smith, Michael Haslam, David Chaloner, Elisabeth Bletsoe, David Greenslade, Alexander Hutchison, Peter Manson, Harry Gilonis, Andrew Crozier, Tim Allen, Out to Lunch, Tony Lopez, Sean Bonney, David Miller, R.F. Langley, John Hall, Nick Johnson, Robert Sheppard, and Eric Mottram. The stress is on reflexive poets whose thoughts on language and artistic procedures shed new light on modern culture and on the interpretation of poems. These revealing interviews fit into a scene of historically unprecedented freedom and diversity of ideas; they shed a steady light on the diversity without bringing it to heel or setting up unified criteria; they let the poets speak, and find themselves not in chaos, but in a working practice where they follow intuitive truth for the content and internally consistent open methods for the presentation.
How naïve – to try to find out about modern poetry by getting the poets to talk about what they do. We have gone to the edge of darkness and been given the key to a linguistic hypersensitivity that comes out of the unknown steadfastly towards us.
There is an anomaly about so much reflexive poetry without a body of poetics to support it. But the British dislike of theory could be overcome by getting the producers to talk about their business as individuals. Till now there never was a book where poets from what used to be called the Underground talked at length about their own poetry. The results are surprising, and do tend to upset the theories vociferously proposed by spokesmen for groups which never showed the slightest inclination to think as a group. Perhaps the process whereby fantasy evolves into myth and myth into history can now move on a stage. Perhaps, too, the foundation tales of the black propaganda about the Underground – that it involves mindless spontaneity, mimetic dependence on American models, and inorganic application of academic “theory of literature” – can now be sent to the recycling mill of history.
The widest possible range of poets has been covered outside the lethally conventional. Special attention has been given to groups of poets sharing creative ideas with each other, and to regional scenes – much information will be found about poetic activity in Plymouth, Manchester and Glasgow. Two generations of poets have their say, running down poetic matters from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the razing of Baghdad, from The English Intelligencer to Cul de Qui.
Table of Contents:
Introduction by Andrew Duncan
Interviews
Tim Allen: Get the Lute, go up the Soak
Elisabeth Bletsoe: Homoeopathic Provings of the Cygnus Remedy
Sean Bonney: On the brink of the articulate
David Chaloner: Lime Crushing Houses
Kelvin Corcoran: What we say after `Innocence of First Inscription’
Andrew Crozier 1: From Missile Crisis to English Intelligencer
Andrew Crozier 2: How High the Zero
Harry Gilonis: He fills his head with culture; the moon shines bright on Scott La Faro
David Greenslade: Reminds me of a sweaty Yorkie Bar
John Hall: When I hear Ella Fitzgerald Sing It
Michael Haslam: The Hallowed Cloughs of Haslamabad. Time Sprites
Alexander Hutchison: Melodic Cells
Nicholas Johnson: Falls from the ceiling: intact and impetuous
R.F. Langley: Folds Pack Away
Tony Lopez: Picador, Piccolo and Pan
Peter Manson: Hold that Golem
David Miller: Nourishing and Provoking
Eric Mottram: Egoism Vanished in the Act
Out To Lunch: Pink Pong Punx Go Dingo
Robert Sheppard: The Postman Below my Window
Simon Smith: Silver Rail
About the Author :
Tim Allen lives in Plymouth, he is the editor of Terrible Work a major poetry reviews magazine. Allen is the author of two pamphlets, `Texts For A Holy Saturday’ (Phlebas ’96) and `The Cruising Duct’ (Maquette ’98) and his poetry has been featured in mags such as First Offense, Oasis and Shearsman. His essays have appeared in `Binary Myths’ (Stride) and Eratica magazine.
Andrew Duncan was born in 1956, and brought up in the Midlands, “in an atmosphere of technological optimism and class levelling which the South succeeded in reversing thereafter.” He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecomms manufacturer (1978–87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988–91).
Sean Bonney was born in Brighton, grew up in the north of England, and he now lives in London. He has published a number of pamphlets, and his poems and essays have featured in many of the leading innovative magazines. Known as an exhilarating performer of his work, he has performed in London, Cambridge, Portugal, Prague and New York. A part time lecturer, he has taught at Birkbeck College, Roehampton, and the University of Southampton.
Born in rural Cheshire in 1944 David Chaloner spent his early years dreaming of escape. As the closest city, Manchester provided a cultural and social context for his early writing, when jazz was available in clubs created from empty cotton warehouses and Granada Television struggled with the idea of a new arts programme that included poetry. Apart from `Little Press’ publication, the first published work appeared in the Tandem paperback `Generation X’, a true sociological record of the times, and the Penguin anthology, Children of Albion. In the late sixties he founded ONE, a magazine for new writing, that existed through the transitional years of a move to London in the early seventies. A continuing sense of enquiry and curiosity informs his work and helps in pushing the possibilities of language, music and image in varying and divers ways.
Alexander Hutchison brought out Scales Dog: Poems New and Selected from Salt in 2007, and earlier books include The Moon-Calf and Carbon Atom. His first collection, Deep-Tap Tree – which Richard Ellmann said was `compounded of wit and mystery’ – remains in print. Born in Buckie, Hutchison lived in Glasgow, and latterly took to singing. He liked to turn up for a kickabout on a red ash pitch on Sundays. He died in November 2015.
Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK), both published in 2000. His work is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). He is well-known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000.
Robert Sheppard is mainly a poet, whose selected poems, History or Sleep, appears from Shearsman Books, and who has poetry anthologised in Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (OUP) and Reality Street Book of Sonnets, among others. His short fiction is published as The Only Life (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), and is found amidst his 2015 autobiographical work, Words Out of Time, and in several places in his 2016 publication Unfinish (Veer Publications). He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, where in 2016 they celebrate ten years of the Edge Hill Prize.
Simon Smith, born 1961 in Redruth, Cornwall, brought up on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex. Educated at the University of Kent at Canterbury, he lived in Pennsylvania from 1984–1986 where he threw in an academic career for one in librarianship. He has worked at the Poetry Library in London since 1991, and became Librarian in 2003. He edited GRIllE (1991–1993) and was poetry editor of Angel Exhaust (1998–1999). He is one of the judges for the National Poetry Competition 2004 along with Elaine Feinstein, Ciaran Carson and chair Denis MacShane, the Minister for Europe.
