ANDREW DUNCAN

Siren Furnaces Blow Infirm Metals: debuts of the nineties


Cultural managers lose their looks. One advances into the 1990s with a cultural tool-kit formed in the 1970s: I don't have the vocabulary to describe what has changed on the scene with the arrival of so many new poets, unreviewed and uncollected. Yet, there they are, and it's me who's losing definition and wisping away. However Introduced to the Soles, by Nic Laight, Nick Macias, and Niall Quinn was undoubtedly the most dazzling debut of the decade. Personally, my fear is of missing things, so my wish is to get everything right first time, which precludes writing about first books. My whole critical technique is based on the career review: on recording characteristics made firm by multiple recurrence. But reactions to a first book are a shimmer-chimaera, an aura flickering over the visual field which may turn out to mean that you are falling in love or that you are about to have a migraine. I like situations where I can't talk sensibly. Take Safety Catch, by Helen Macdonald, for example. I am quite unable to describe these poems. There are telltale traces from other discourses, such as the linnet in 'Tuist' who comes from an experiment on the line between inherited and learnt behaviour where a hatchling acquires the song of another species when played it; the accessibility of such moments should not mislead us into thinking they are central. A passage in 'Parallax' discusses the influence of Newton's Optics on how we think, thus moving the latter into the realm of temporal change, as a set of linked cognitive behaviours which we acquire uncritically as children (but can shift consciously as adults), and the "ides recues ou ides en l'air, lieux communs, codes de convenance et de morale, conformismes ou interdits, expressions admises, imposes ou exclues" which for Philippe Aris, in an essay on concepts, characterise and divide periods; perhaps linked to a passage in 'Tuist' which I believe to be about the 1930s and why they are mysterious; Helen seems to regard period-mentalities as a puzzle, perhaps because of a dissociated and detached nature which finds the unconscious rules of the period she lives in difficult to follow. "the beautiful insulatory/ qualities of the English Channel" likewise seems to problematise Englishness, seen as a package on offer rather than as "second nature". We could even link this to the linnet in the experiment: we are thrown at birth into a family which equips us with a behaviour set whose arbitrariness we can see but not quite reach. Perhaps this fleet-footed recession explains why the Macdonald poem, full of fascinating objects, is uninvolving, free of silent commands to feel and to identify? But this only covers a few isolated passages within a complex which I find quite elusive. Even these sketches are probably projective on my part, since even if Helen is interested in innate behaviour controls she is unlikely to have the same angle on them as I do. Its fondness for subtle, evanescent, and unusual sensations is not the key to this graceful poetry, a fluent and alien sight for which no name or response set yet exists.
If we look at Dan Lane's poem on p.60 of Angel Exhaust Fifteen, he says 'soft metallic impression', while at p.133 Kevin Nolan refers to 'clamour of soft metals' (in 'Baion with soft metals to come', quoted from his wonderfulpamphlet Alar), while at p.27 of AE Nine Helen Macdonald refers to "soft/ and perfect metals" ('Tuist', now reprinted with two new sections in Safety Catch). Clearly we have entered a new dispensation in which hard metals are pas chic. I find this phrase quite indefinable, and any sense I do find in it is as a sweet acid blur, something which is like a paradox but yet more ambiguous. It is irresoluble and yet evokes subtle substances, the relaxation of set patterns, delicacy and the removal of strain, the blurring of categories and the lifting of mere functionality. I associate it with oripeau et clinquaille (one of Prynne's books in French, and two words advertising pliant and unreliable metals), and with 'A Note on Metal', but mainly with a new era and my inability to comment on it.
There is a faction which freezes out everything which has happened since 1977. This is a mixture of self-satisfaction, historical pessimism, and of projection onto the "counter culture" so shiny that anything else seems tenuous and unglamorous by contrast. This school consumed, during the 1990s, only books by those who were "on scene" during the 1970s. (Of course, it's questionable that the radicals of '68 now believe in the counter-culture, which may have been put to sleep in 1975.) This is the kind of purity, and fear of outside elements, which made the political movement of the 1970s unsuccessful. This point of view is past its sell-by date. The publication of Foil (edited by Nicholas Johnson, 394 pp., 33 poets), as an "exhibition anthology" of the new generation, gives us an excuse to argue about the recent past. A few answers to questions about this generation: the London-Cambridge split is meaningless; no-one believes in the counter-culture and there is very little interest in politics; self-expression and the recall of deep emotional experience are out of fashion; virtuality is the chic ideal; there is no large-scale poetry being written. A lot is happening in the south-west. The overall cultural field has shifted, experience is a poor guide.
Elementarily, it's easier to sell poets who have been doing it for twenty years and have an acquired audience than new ones; the competition between someone aged 25 and one aged 50 always favours the latter. It is irritating for young poets that the poets of the 1960s are still around, getting in the way of decisive seizure of montage, Marxism, pop, performance, conceptualism, confessionalism, Jungianism, and so many other things which could be the vehicles of a splendid reputation. It seems to be very difficult to get a book out unless you're a JH Prynne covers band (or else in the mainstream). It's strange how people of generous political views can start sounding like workhouse managers when they discuss why it's morally better that young poet X, who can't get their book out, should shut up and stop complaining. The people who make opinion are the same ones who want the few unorthodox publishers to concentrate on getting their books out. On the other side, there is a kind of cultural stalking, where someone becomes a fan of an elder figure, writes like them, pours praise on them, offers to publish them. People without cultural assets must pursue strategies in order to gain them; performance, with its timeless needs for ballyhoo and brass, has produced the most corrupt simulation and touting of assets. To be recognised as legitimate, one has to be recognisable; something really new isn't accepted as new because it is strange and perplexing. Mostly, closer acquaintance exposes what seemed interesting as flashy and short of breath, which I am afraid accounts for some of the other debuts of the decade.
Reviews of the poetry of the seventies placed it all, at the time, in a stylistic map, loosely of American poetry of the 1950s, which gave the reviewers confidence (they'd read the script), but which contained predictions about the future which didn't come true, and which missed everything new about that poetry. Confidence about classifying may be conservatism at the conceptual level.
The negative image of the reader assimilating (and so de-estranging) the poetic line is the poet discerning what his or her true direction is, and focussing a great deal.
I have the habit of deleting what is uncertain, but my problems in saying anything about such poets as Macdonald and Robert Smith are worth setting out, because my state of haze, oscillation, and conjecture is indicative. The new landscape awaits its Greil Marcus. Meanwhile, it might be a good thing if the British Poetry Revival finally kicks the bucket, breaks up, and scavenges itself back to life as multiple autonomous units. The seventies are over.

I suppose the act of consumption to be central to us, and so I offer a list of indispensable books. These are objects, but in fact we cannot discuss ideas unless the evidence is, to some extent, shared. My list runs: Kevin Nolan, Alar; However Introduced to the Soles, by Nic Laight, Niall Quinn, and Nick Macias; Helen Macdonald, Safety Catch; Adrian Clarke, Spectral Investment; Peter Manson, Birth Windows; Simon Smith, 15 Exits; Karlien van den Beukel, Pitch Lake; Robert Smith, Sonnets; Paul Holman, The Memory of the Drift; DS Marriott, Clouds & Forges; David Kinloch, Paris-Forfar; Dan Lane, Stuff Culture; Michael Ayres, Poems 1987-92; Rob MacKenzie, Off Ardglas; Tim Atkins, To Repel Ghosts; David Greenslade, Each Broken Object; Vittoria Vaughan, The Mummery Preserver; Scott Thurston, Statewalk; Caroline Bergvall, Glimpses of a Room in Movement; Grace Lake, Bernache Nonnette; David Barnett, All the Year Round. We are following Foil's rule of "having emerged since 1986". I appreciate relativising arguments which state that these are not the "best" new poets but only the best within a certain segment of the spectrum, locating which would also locate me, as a partial observer -a hot eye desensitized by its own emissions. I assume that you agree with me-after all, you are an intelligent person.

Foil itself is a book one inevitably has to read. No doubt the limits of the anthology are situated at its limits. Certainly I would like to see a follow-up volume. I was pretty glad to see this one. The Informationists, the Jungians, and the group influenced by A Various Art (i.e. Gairfish, Memes, and fragmente, in magazines) are absent. If you read all of Foil, you may die. Most of it is rather bad. Thrill to the instantly forgettable New Age kitsch of X, the sloppy, hysterical, Burgerking-Gothic Catling pastiche of Y, the Carry on Lacan sex yibble of W. Bring a thermos of tea and a transistor radio.
Of the poets omitted from Foil, we could mention: David Kinloch, Richard Price, Ian Duhig, Patrick Gasperini, Andy Brown, Tim Allen, Robert Smith, Simon Smith, Andrew Lawson, David Greenslade, Vittoria Vaughan, Elizabeth Bletsoe, Norman Jope, Paul Holman, Scott Thurston, Fiona Templeton, Dan Lane, David Bircumshaw, Michael Ayres, Steve Harris, David Barnett, DS Marriott, John Goodby, Chris Bendon, David Rushmer. How everyone hates my lists! But the polygon of qualities is too hard to draw.
The reader may well ask what the difference is between Foil and the anthology The New Poetry (edited by Hulse, Kennedy, and Morley, 1993), which covers the same ground but has no overlaps with Foil. Neither one overlaps with the Stride anthology of younger poets, The Stumbling Dance (ed. Rupert Loydell, 1994). Two volumes of "The New Poetries" from Carcanet didn't reveal anything you would want to look at twice. The non-overlaps suggest that the dots haven't resolved into a picture. The five books mentioned may represent four vertices of a new literary space. Does this show the abolition of the difference between "underground" and "mainstream'? no, but the oppositions have changed configuration. If we take TNP and Foil as the significant sites, the difference between them has to do with surface strangeness; the poetry in Foil is at first glance puzzling, unsignposted, hard to relate to a self which might be speaking, or to a situation. The poetry in TNP is welcoming, has a way in, seems comfortable, even if it sidesteps into originality thereafter. Nick Johnson, although missing some forms of intelligence which other people have got, has certainly scored some successes as a poet.
The gap between the two streams needs to be questioned. My attention was drawn to David Pople and Maggie Hannan as unconventional poets within the mainstream's embrace. Their poetry isn't really very good. But it might develop into something. The gatekeepers aren't as dull as they were; but they do not tolerate the artistically realised originality of a K. van den Beukel or a Robert Smith, and so the concept "alternative" will retain its usefulness. Alliance is of little worth unless it is sharply bounded; it is not a binding principle, as alliance at point A implies hostility at point B; alliance means slowing down, the fatigue of identification. There is no alternative "scene". Splits are the landscape. Shifts in the site and number of the divisions in the poetic field may be the changes to mark over the last 20 years. They may have changed even though no real horizontal division, and rebellion, is visible within the rather friendly flow of the "experimental scene". The problem of placing the new may be connected to the disappearance of magazines in "my" market segment, which may disappear itself: the erasure of boundaries, the diffusion of its special qualities which could either be expansion or simply dispersal.
There was formerly a polarity like this:

poetry essay
highly subjective reflexive & objective

which has vanished as poetry bought into reflexivity. The new polarity is:

poetry essay
reflexive reflexive
realisation of arbitrary rules about something and limited to what is true

To this we have to add a spectrum split within poetry, roughly:

culturally "high" culturally "low" or old-fashioned
reflexive highly subjective
realisation of arbitrary rules expressive, reveals character
self-referential refers to the self

This would, tentatively, explain the omissions from Foil. The atmosphere of the sixties redefined the 50s poets as drab and too concerned by morality. At this moment, we can see that the new set has gone further down this axis, and that it redefines the poets of the 60s and 70s as, relatively, moralistic and concerned with character and duties towards others. They had ideas which were about the world; they used the poet's character as a guarantee of the truth of the poems, which was part of their claim to interest. The poetry which originated in the 60s was hedonistic and relaxed: but the new poetry is tense, striving, status-oriented. There seems to be less leisure for anything except the agreed terms of competition.
Personal politics appear here only in the form of winning status competitions. The "chic charged" procedures carry a whiff of (elite) social contacts, of 'networks', but also of a new version of the good place: the exciting scene where the charging occurred. I don't know where but it takes me there. I do agree that ideas possess prestige, among other qualities. But using ideas except to explain something is somehow ludicrous. The need for poetry of ideas to go to the edge of what the writer understands (to find consciousness) has often meant confusion and hysteria being offered as verbal art. The (brain) pan has boiled over, and that strange sound is the panful burning up on the stove.
The underlying teleology is to cultivate one's ability to concentrate on an abstract idea, which is also the teleology of education. All that perplexes is not complex. Taught performance starts out with the idea that presenting a character whom the audience can recognise and identify with is old hat and un-chic. The figure who speaks has to be denatured. This nullity makes audience inattention likely, so the performer has to project intense concentration and sense of purpose. Non-psychological procedures are applied inexorably. This has produced a certain detachment from the reader's organic waves of attention; a new and uncollected form of boredom. Simply going on for a long time is not cultivated, it reeks instead of dullness and blankness, and heavy going. The pedagogy of the imaginary makes possible a pedantry of the unreal.
The opposition between "art about reality" and "virtual art' can be bypassed if we look at the depth and relatedness of the information encoded in the rules of the work. I have to remind the new poets that new forms of art imply new ways of failing. Even complexity is not interesting unless it has transparency. We can take any work of art as the realisation of a set of rules taking the form of a game. The new term implexity (cf. implicit, complexity, complicit) describes the power of simple rules to generate long series of complex and different game-situations. This quality is found, so to speak, four or five layers deep in the unfolding of the rules, and this is why artistic quality is so shakily related to the "assets" which book jackets and similar propaganda so brazenly bray out. Not all rule-sets have high implexity. Critical classing must surely care for this quality and not for the surface aspects of style.
The modern poet is in effect building a musical instrument in order to find out what it sounds like; each poem demonstrates some of the properties of the formal space thus opened, without flooding it all to the edges. So much follows from the curve in a brass tube. One can produce shapes either by copying them from the world, or by implementing formulae which describe surfaces, corners, curves, etc., and which we could generate ad lib or accidentally. Think of the interiors of a thousand buildings, generated by construction procedures rather than by reproduction of a pre-existing reality.
The new poem is desirable above all else. The objects on sale in the shops at the Design Museum or the Craft Centre do have that quality: a kick for the eye. Its structure aims to maximise, in quantity and fascination, information available at any point, in order to throw the reader back into early states of curiosity and playfulness. It is like a shop full of wonderful textiles - 268 chenilles. It thinks like a recording engineer, more concerned by textural depth than by the emotional logic of the song. It is more important to suggest this ripple of available textures than to realise them.

My command of Welsh is eccentric and sketchy. I studied mediaeval Welsh as part of a rather odd mediaeval degree, and when I went to a Modern Welsh evening class, the first time I was allowed to translate some sentences the teacher looked dumbfounded for a bit and said "I've never heard anyone say that.' This should be borne in mind as I discuss Yr Wyddor (1998), by David Greenslade, which may possibly be the first avant-garde book written in Welsh. The title means 'the alphabet', but is very close to a word egwyddor, meaning 'element' or 'principle' (for the link, cf. Greek stoikheion). A visual artist had done an exhibition of burnt letters on cloth (as a symbol of oppressed culture and lost language) which had been presented as a kind of collective nationalist ritual, and the texts were produced to illustrate it. None of this sounds like uncertainty, or criticism, or anything we know as "avant garde". We should mention Hunllef Arthur here, since a quote on the cover of Yr Wyddor (by Simon Brooks) names Bobi Jones, along with Greenslade, as the only two unconditional modernists (modernydd digymodredd) in Welsh. This is a 1986 work about King Arthur, dreaming (hunllef is actually nightmare) the whole course of Welsh history. It is 21,000 lines long, and has also been described as post-modern. It is surely, Arthurian Christian poetry of the 1950s, at unchecked length.
There is a physical world to whose surface we cling, and many of the differences in human societies depend on their objects, through which we act on the world: the hand instructs the brain, fills in the data on its sensory sheets. Things with hard edges hold the mystery of sense. The object is a limited stimulus field, a ruling containing finite rules, focussing the brain enough to allow a breakthrough into truth and mystery. Greenslade's object poems, in Each Broken Object, come directly out of the experience of learning Welsh, and follow his poems in Welsh, The Alphabet, where the code emerges, impossibly, free and as an object; he works in that zone between two verbal codes where the edges become visible, and the problems of the real nature of the outside world, and of categorisation, become urgent. To understand the relations between hand, eye, and symbolic knowledge is almost to grasp what human identity is. Greenslade is also paying tribute to the gift exchange genre of Gaelic and Welsh poetry, where the bard's ornately precise description of precisely ornate objects-of desire, exchange, display, and alliance-gives the poems their famous concreteness. These sources also contain the beauty and fantasy in which these new object poems are so rich.
Menna Elfyn was recently published in a parallel-text version by Bloodaxe (Eucalyptus). The Welsh side of the page seems to me lively, dancing, playing with language, altogether charming; in translation, it loses these qualities; she appears merely as a cheerful and kind-hearted housewife. Perhaps a more frivolous translator could do better.
There is a fantasy element in the public perception of Gaelic; an effacing sublimity. Anyway, the Lallans-speaking community is roughly 30 times as large as the Gaelic community. There is an anti-artistic sentimentality now projected onto third-rate Gaelic poets; although, mind you, there is a similar sentimentality projected by and onto pub-level Lallans poets. Tom Leonard on your shortbread tin, maybe.
The Mummery Preserver (1996; 61pp.) is by Vittoria Vaughan (1970-), who began publishing poems around 1992, is steeped in Jungian ideas which may have come from anywhere in the landscape: the New Age culture has made these units of design universally available. They represent, of course, a popular stratum of taste, unacceptable to the poet to the extent that they have accepted the university culture, sceptical and legitimate. The poems seem to be adventures of the body image; unstably projected onto manifold forms of the natural world, in an exchange of parts. This is perhaps a phase which precedes abstract thought, and abstract thought may in fact be a specialisation of this faculty. My caution about this tumult of expressivity, captivating as it undoubtedly is, has to do with the isolation of the central figure: the poems are the product of fantasy and introspection, not of a dialogic principle. The fascination with trees imports the fact, mythic as well as biological, that trees don't have a social life. This situation is brought out in the first poem in the book, the eponymous one; where we find out that a mummery preserver is a kind of mummy (picked up in the picture of a mummy on the jacket). Mummery, an old English word, is dressing up, for example among mummers (old word for actors), or mummed up (snugly, against the winter). This bizarre crossover is on a good footing; mummies are mummed in rather tight windings ('long linen swathes', the poet says), and these preserve them against the virtual "cold" of death. The mummy, wound in ambiguities like a good dream image, is also a dustless home, a woman's body growing older (looking like your mummy, in the other sense), the perfect body which is preserved in some internal imagery, and the other perfect body which make-up and adornment realise. The linen bands have something important to do with the poet's mother and grandmother. The daughter is perhaps a precious internalised image (certainly internalised, certainly "the image of you") of the mother. The mummery is a disguise, an ornamental face and bearing inside which the real self sits. Pulling at this imagery tangles me in dozens of yards of linen all covered in hieroglyphs. It has a certain affinity to Tsvetayeva's "Poloterskaya", which must be the greatest poem ever written about housework; (the name is the form used for names of dances, like the polonaise, and so means "Floor Polisher's Dance", and indeed there is a lot about floor polishing being a gliding motion like dancing); it contains the words for "grandmother" and "mummer", although the latter only in disguised form (mummers, in the disorderly days around Christmas, are ryazhonnye, and the poem has only the compound form naryadit'sya, which means to dress up in finery, from Lamanova's, possibly a couturier in pre-war Saint Petersburg). The poem is full of the kind of dream doubling and coupling of words which makes mummy into mummery: Kolotery-molotery,/Polotyery-polodyeri,/Kumashniy stan,/Bakhromchatiy shtan. This quatrain is pure dream, but we could say something like:
Ripple-skimmers-moth-skinners/ Flashwipers-floorwhippers/ Red cotton flock/ frilled trousers.
I am not quite sure about the frills, but perhaps we could say Red cotton-rag strips / Gleam stripes-flounced bottom.
The tree poems go on for about 400 lines; for example

to start at the tip,
the cypress is the final tree
of life, the pre-elysium
maze circular an unending
corpses can't escape, its dark forest
of velvet-lined incubation chambers
the wheal without a common thread.

the cypress is an evergreen robot factory,
its resurrection wires clung to by the dead
as if they were bole of last breath

holding procreation, as if pinnacles
of a golden, visionary gate.

The hypothesis we enter, entering the poem, is an anatomy; and is a temporary self. (Wheal, a Cornish word, is a mine-shaft.) The use of an external symbol gives a voice to parts of the self which are usually dumb; the temporary occupation of this astonishing verbal toy can say something about more permanent seizures, and the pure plasticity which lies behind all the captured objects. The shape of an anatomy, imaginatively wrapped round as a mummery, is not serial like a poem, and it is the sequencing of sense which causes problems; these poems would rather be overall than have a line structure. The recitation of analogies and attributes can resemble the more baffling passages of Aboriginal myth, or of the Old Testament, where the mass of esoteric theological-taxonomic detail defies us.
The poet, who thanks Norman (undoubtedly Norman Jope) at the front of the book, is in some kind of a dioscuran pair, dictated by birth and mythological partiality, with Elisabeth Bletsoe; the kind that continues throughout life. Bletsoe wrote a series about angels, Vaughan one about trees; both have gone in for nature study in a hard and intense way; Bletsoe writes about organisms on the beach at Whitby, Vaughan about similar on the beach at Brighton.
One of Helen Macdonald's poems in Foil is called 'Morphometrics', which refers to the grid projections used by the Scottish theoretical biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (in chapter 9 of On Growth and Form, 1917) to demonstrate that all the bones of a certain fish species could be subjected to the same transform to be turned successfully into the anatomy of a different fish species. The graphics he used to demonstrate this give you a "wow" feeling, in fact they are one of the upscale "wow" feelings. Of course, the transform is commutative: you can turn species B into A as well as A into B. He was translating anatomy into topology, giving access to the power of matrices. Part of the reason why he was 50 years ahead of his time is the abiding mathematical under-qualification of biologists; sternly dedicated to observation, recording, and memorising, they were averse to the freedom from reality which makes mathematics (and of course our mathematically-based economic system) so powerful. Grasping the pattern which relates a group of species must be deeper knowledge than factual memory of the visible features of those species: more virtual, more manipulable. You might retort, what kind of knowledge is knowledge of species that don't exist? This is closely related to virtuality in poetry, and constructed poems that describe experiences that don't exist. One of Thompson's remarks was that symmetry in animal bodies may be related to the frequency in physics of symmetries as stable states of dynamic systems, an observation he took from the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. Mach wrote about mental models and the fictions by which we deal with unknowable reality; he declared both the atom and the self to be fictions (in The analysis of sensation). das unrettbare ich, the unsaveable self, was his phrase, a founding idea in Austrian modernism. We might well ask, who is trying to save it? what reads poetry? what writes poetry? Mach's ideas led on, not only to logical positivism (the investigation of mental models as revealed in language), but also to Deleuze and Guattari and their radically atomised and multiple theory of the self, l'inconscient machinique. The symmetry proposition tells us that parts of anatomy are not design but results of the laws of physics; the study of how the fertilised cell, with small intelligence, builds an organism which does have intelligence, tells us something about the growth of consciousness. That is, it may be made up of (many) small-scale sealed automatisms, completing processes and so seeming "purposeful", prior to a central self characterised by intention and power. Both the regulation of the growth of the embryo and the nature of consciousness are outside the knowledge we actually possess. Thompson's work is quite close to complexity theory, a part of science which hasn't yet arrived. (Stewart Kaufmann even proposed replacing Darwinism with Thompsonian effects. We cautiously propose that, whatever replaces Kaufmann, will be fitter than Kaufmann.)
Mach's scattered and dissolved self is somehow related to ornament, maybe even to the luxuriance of Viennese baroque. Could we relate this to neural Darwinism? She does mention memetics. Doesn't the quality of a picture have to do with its distribution in space, the relative autonomy of its parts? The visual pattern is analogous to the pattern of attention in the brain perceiving it. The balance between dominant and subdued lines in a design, indeed the need for a dominant shape at all, point to the dominance of one "agent" in the brain, and its relationship with other, minor, agents. The relationship of a wrought visual surface to the viewer's ideal of the balance between different psychological agents is a source of anxiety. "Ornament is crime" is related to "the unrescuable self", perhaps a denial of it.
Morphometrics may not be of primary importance to the poem. The poems do not describe "thinking about birds to the exclusion of all else" but a variety of conscious processes in which thinking about birds is common. Actually, bird evolution is only one of the topics which flashes up. Experience is multiplanar; the shifting between quite different planes of experience may be essential to the design of the poems. Perhaps the simultaneity of thoughts about bird anatomy, of the sensation of being in a boat on a lake, and thoughts about another person, is probative of experience which is real and satisfying. A series, then, of singular aggregates of components in several planes which barely resemble each other, which change from second to second, and which are quite different from their parts. This might be a description of the self. The incommensurability of the separate parts of experience may be the heart of the matter. Since they are not attached, the aggregate changes all the time. An ich which is real but which serially dissolves. In traditional poetry, the linking of a sentiment to an object, known by touch and handling, by means of metaphor, was essential: the poem existed in two planes at once; it is this principle which we are seeing extended. Judging by some previous Cambridge poetry, unrelatedness is integrity: a quality bespeaking real experience as opposed to fantasy. In this local framework, the sublime is located in uncertainty, and in the projection of a third dimension out of lines on a flat surface.
These poems could be called lyric or documentary, but really both of those mistake what it is.

I could mention, as figures nearly in sight, whose work I have barely seen, Rob Holloway, Dell Olsen, Wayne Clements, or Val Pancucci.
**
Bibliography
Wunberg, ed., Die Wiener Moderne; Fearful Symmetry (Stewart and Golubitski); D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form; Safety Catch published as part of Etruscan Reader I
The strange design of this piece is partly due to an essay, 'Speculations on a Generation Born in the Sixties', which appeared in Angel Exhaust 15, and whose remarks I have tried not to repeat. Angel Exhaust also published reviews of Clarke, Ayres, Duhig, Nolan, Rushmer, and Lake, at various times.