Soon after Andrew Crozier’s death in April 2008 the Independent published an obituary by Nicholas Johnson, himself a prominent poet and founder of Etruscan Books. Subtitled ‘Poet and poet’s champion’, Johnson’s piece pointed to the extraordinary way in which Crozier had fostered the world of poetry in England from the mid-1960s to his premature death soon after his retirement from the University of Sussex:
At just 20 years old, the poet Andrew Crozier began to nurture and revitalise – through his small-press publishing – a rich terrain of first American, then British, modernist poetry. This had a rapid effect for his peers, principally those associated with the Cambridge School. Crozier disseminated, circulated and, with what became an increasingly anonymous generosity, encouraged and stimulated countless writers and visual artists. If he partly achieved this as an editor, archivist, publisher and teacher, it was quietly reflective of his precise gift as a poet.
Now his poetry is out of print.
In the two years before his death this last point was a matter of some serious debate, and there was some important correspondence between Andrew Crozier and Michael Schmidt about the possibility of producing a ‘Selected Writings’ which might include both poetry and some prose. In his response to one of Schmidt’s letters, Crozier, who had only recently retired from academic life, provides some interesting insights into what he was working on right up until the end:
2nd May 2006
Retirement itself will, surely, have consequences for writing of any sort, although I have no strong sense of what is likely. This is relevant to my perplexity about how to respond to your invitation. Hitherto I have responded to expressions of interest in publishing a new collected edition of my poems by saying that to do so seemed premature while I had rather little to add to All Where Each Is, and difficult to justify. (Indeed, difficult to justify to myself although that book has been out of print for some while.) What I’ve separately thought is that the situation requires the publication of a further separate collection, including ‘Free Running Bitch’ (previously published in Conductors of Chaos), before anything else.
I’ve made these points to other publishers more tersely than I do here, hence my responses have, reasonably enough, as well as correctly, been taken as refusals. I don’t think, however, that this response is either appropriate or sufficient when the expression of interest comes from you and Carcanet. Hence my perplexity about how to respond; you will appreciate, I do hope, that the perplexity is with reference to my situation.
Since your invitation is couched in terms of ‘writings’ perhaps I should say something about critical writings, not the least because some pieces of critical writing are foremost in my mind at present. I have in hand essays on John James (for a collection on him) and on Basil King’s Mirage. Looming over both these, and most of all else, is a long essay on Harry Roskolenko, a minor but symptomatic poet of the 1930s and 1940s. (He began as one of Zukofsky’s ‘Objectivists’, and by the end of the 1930s was the American arm of the New Apocalypse. Add to this that he was part of the Left Opposition – i.e. Trotskyish – working undercover in the CPUSA and, from my point of view, he has everything going for him.) I give this detail in order to point out that my critical writing is miscellaneous, as it stands, but also, notionally at least, some of it preliminary to separately developed monographs on the ‘Objectivists’ and the New Apocalypse.
A few days later I received a letter from Andrew which again discussed the possibility of his work being put back into the public eye:
11th May
Your point that my work is unobtainable is not lost on me, indeed it is one I can’t avoid as an emphatic consideration whenever (unfrequently) I contemplate my position qua poet. It doesn’t outweigh, in the balance of wishes and intentions, my hesitancies about republication tout court. I don’t want to appear, not the least to myself, as resting on my laurels. Were I to abjure poetry, or were I dead, the work could be left to make its own way as helped by others. The second of these circumstances is not an otiose form of words: publication can seem like a symbolic death, a book like a monument, with damaging as well as painful effects.
There is another side to this, of course, connected with the vanity of not wishing to appear an historical figure. Enough said the better!
In an article for the London Review of Books in July 1997, Jeremy Harding highlighted some of the essential ingredients of a Crozier poem and made it abundantly clear why this poetry most certainly should be back in print:
In his easy vernacular, Crozier tamps down language with the skill of a painter achieving a rare equivalence of terms on the canvas. Often, too, we find an observed action or a local detail quickly entailed to something larger and simpler: the pattern of day and night, seasonal change, or the slippage of light and shadow. This has the effect of ascribing thought and emotion not to the speaking subject (the poet) but to the processes of the poem. A deceptively shambling manner, with its cat’s cradles of clauses, promiscuous participles and other equivocations of grammar spreads the load of the bigger themes and adds to a sense of forms thinking aloud, in a number of voices. Once again, the approach is painterly: the figurative elements of a typical Crozier poem are briefly acknowledged and then abstracted by the momentum of its composition into the broadest space it can construe. The result is extraordinary.
This collage-like inventiveness was noted in Peter Riley’s Guardian obituary from July 2008, as was Crozier’s proposition that ‘a poem should be constantly and freshly conceived as a construct of language which achieves beauty through a fidelity to the actual’. His meditations on landscape and on the intimacy of the domestic world are ‘expressed in a bared honesty which is the result of considerable discipline’. Riley went on to present a vivid picture of that ‘historical figure’ Andrew Crozier had wryly abjured:
From the outset, Crozier worked to bring practitioners together. In 1966 he founded The English Intelligencer, a ‘worksheet’ circulated among some 30 poets to exchange knowledge of their current activities without worrying too much about finished poems, and from 1964 onwards ran The Ferry Press, which published first or early books of many important British poets in carefully designed editions, frequently with covers designed by then little-known artists, including Patrick Caulfield and Michael Craig-Martin. He collaborated further, in special illustrated editions of his own poetry, with artists such as Ian Tyson, Tom Phillips, and his own brother, Philip Crozier.
His criticism was important, but remains as yet scattered in periodicals and anthologies, and some of his projects were never completed. The stress was again on sweeping the board clean and examining the history afresh: what took place, what was produced and what its value might be, and this naturally resulted in reversals of received positions, and the rescuing of forgotten poets, which became almost a speciality of his.
In a letter Michael Schmidt wrote to Crozier in July 2006 he emphasised the importance of this critical work:
I have the highest regard possible for your critical essays. They dig far deeper and uncover far more than most of the critical writings of writers I admire in our generation. It is the carefulness with which the argument proceeds, the almost Ridingesque insistence on precision, that makes your work such a tonic (fortunately the style is much more readable than hers!).
The evidence of Andrew Crozier’s commitment to the setting straight of records is to be found in the immense amount of work he left unfinished, the pulling together of which will become an interesting and important task for future scholars. A brief outline of the sort of material he was involved with was presented in the May 2006 letter to Schmidt quoted above, and some further details were given in the letter to me, in which he talks of his commitment to finishing three pieces of work:
Two of these are no more than occasionalistic, but the other one, on Harry Roskolenko, raises the possibility of a unified treatment of the Objectivists and the New Apocalypse. Roskolenko isn’t an important poet, but he opens a number of issues that might otherwise seem irrelevant, in particular the connections between Objectivism and Proletarian writing, and the implications of Zukofsky’s negative, but very carefully weighed verdict on Hart Crane. Crane’s influence elsewhere, specifically on Dylan Thomas and his imitators, then becomes the antithesis of Objectivism’s occlusion/collapse during the 1930s.
This is time-consuming stuff, partly because it means pecking away at the contemporary significances of such events as the Reichstag fire trial, partly because Roskolenko left a massive, but dispersed archive. There are a few paragraphs to add to what I’ve already written, but my presentation of him so far is as someone who passed through different sets of circumstances, and doesn’t address the possibility of drawing them together.
The purpose of this Andrew Crozier Reader is to bring back into the public eye the gifted poet and the untiring promoter of poetry’s importance, to allow readers to judge for themselves the extraordinary range of work spanning forty years. Nicholas Johnson’s term, ‘poet’s champion’, refers not only to the central importance of the anthology, A Various Art, edited by Crozier and Tim Longville in 1987, in which the exciting new world of what was happening in poetry found a decisive and attractive presentation, but also to the fact that Crozier contributed an anthology of ‘Ten English Poets’ to New Directions 32, ‘An International Anthology of Prose & Poetry’.
When Andrew Crozier retired after some thirty years at Sussex he made it abundantly clear that it was in order to start new ventures:
Have I mentioned that I took early retirement at the start of the academic year? The effect is of a protracted intellectual spring clean, a mixture of exhilaration and remorse.
Two months later he referred to ‘the abundant reading time’ afforded to him by retirement:
I am under the necessity of disposing of a lot of books, and there are cases where it becomes necessary to reread (even to read) before reaching the fateful decision. In many more cases, of course, the decisions are easy and with a sort of jubilation at no more of authors x, y, and z.
What is undoubted here is the continuation of his work of discrimination and judgement, a refusal to slide along with the readily accepted, an angularity of quiet determination which is a reflection upon a lifetime’s achievement.