Crozier was extremely busy when he started at the University of Essex in the autumn of 1965. Not only had he already set up his own press, Ferry Press, a year earlier, but also he now began the Wivenhoe Park Review at Essex, co-edited by Tom Clark. Both of these ventures were an expression of Crozier’s high regard for what was happening in America. The earliest volumes to appear from Ferry Press were underwritten by the subscriptions of a few dozen interested individuals and the first book was a prose piece, Thread, by the Black Mountain artist and writer Fielding Dawson. This was followed soon afterwards by two volumes of poetry by the Boston writer Stephen Jonas, as well as by work by John James, Jeremy Prynne, Peter Riley, Douglas Oliver, John Temple and Chris Torrance. The importance of Ferry Press in establishing new voices in England was long-lasting, and its significance continued as it became merged with Jean Crozier’s own Silver Hounds Press. With the Wivenhoe Park Review Crozier placed into even sharper relief the influential importance of American poetry. The first issue contained work by Olson, Dorn, Jack Spicer and John Wieners, as well as the first publication of a series of poems by Prynne that were to be later collected in The White Stones. Unlike the carefully designed and printed books from Ferry Press, the first issue of Wivenhoe was a hurried affair:
Tom Clark & I started Wivenhoe Park Review when we went to Essex in 1965. Initially this was to be with the university’s patronage: I think copy for the first issue was typed in the English department, & it may even have been printed in house. In any event it was a disaster, inadequately perfect bound because the cover didn’t include a spine, and copies quickly disintegrated.
(letter from Crozier to Ian Brinton, 12 September 2006)
In January 1966 Crozier began editing The English Intelligencer, which ran until 1968, as well as extending the range of his own work with poems that were to be published in his next volume, Walking on Grass. Thirty-six issues of The English Intelligencer were published between January 1966 and April 1968 – roughly one every three weeks – and it was circulated by mailing list to a varying number of English poets (ranging from 25 to 65 names at different times). There was always a hard core of a dozen or so and these were the poets who gave the magazine its consistency. This intensity of activity was in itself an important fact of English poetry in the 1960s, since this core of contributor-readers included many of the most active and interesting younger English poets, whose work continued to develop and who found the regular correspondence of ideas and presentation an important part of the growth of their own poetic consciousness. The magazine was originally conceived as an attempt to draw together various English poets whose work was thought of as avant garde and who were strongly aware of contemporary American influences. The poets included those who were variously associated with other magazines of the time, such as Migrant, the Resuscitator, Prospect, and Outburst, as well as more isolated individuals such as Lee Harwood, Jim Burns and Tom Pickard; The English Intelligencer provided these poets with a common meeting-place. There was no initial editorial line beyond the selection of poets to whom to circulate the sheets of the magazine. Since Crozier was involved in editing the first issue of Wivenhoe Park Review he became aware of the peculiarly ‘English’ project of the Intelligencer, and was concerned to produce this second magazine with an entirely different character to the trans-Atlantic Essex University journal. The free availability of a mimeograph machine gave him the means to do this, and it is quite feasible to see the Intelligencer as part of the inspiration for Tom Clark’s Once series of magazines: both were produced on the same mimeograph machine and were closely similar in format. In a note dated July 1969 Crozier commented on the history of the Intelligencer:
The function of the Intelligencer as it had been originally conceived was never realised; its real achievement on the other hand is still in the process of fruition. The magazine was actually run-down and brought to a halt between December 1967 and April 1968 when it became apparent that a) the size of its readership had become unwieldy, b) it had various levels of readership involvement, and c) those most closely involved felt that the pattern of exchange that had been established had become stultifying.
The relationship between The English Intelligencer and the development of Crozier’s own poetry can perhaps be best traced in the two letters sent to him by Prynne in 1966, both of which commented on the poems that would go to make up the collection From the Root. Dating from 1966–7, some of these poems were published in the Intelligencer before being included in Walking on Grass (Ferry Press, 1969).
In his first letter, Prynne wrote:
…I did very specifically like the Two Loves even though in some ways I can see it’s easy to do. And I would guess that I know why the other long piece is important, since as I read it you are trying to slide without breaking anything back into the continuity of this side of the Atlantic. There is that rational introspection about mode which, having been trained to, we must be careful in setting down: I know that, you may be sure. It was there in the Roof poem as well and I do respect that, since in a tighter social conspiracy it looks bourgeois and may for all I know even be so. The domestic is not in violation of the preferred forms of knowledge, and so, here, it will have to supersede them. I think that’s as you say quite wildly hard and as yet is quite unknown, almost. Thus, I am proud of the delicacy & adjustment of our touch with the past and will in no sense buy any of that moan about Europe’s fabled shore etc. It’s no polemical fact that there is no threat we may not envisage, if the forms are discreetly exercised. I don’t expect such a matter to be interesting, though: just so long as the drab stain isn’t there as well. The cast of it in my case is to get into something else – i.e., not society which is doomed but the community of uncertain lovers. And don’t take that as wild because I am very sane in this question of who we really are, accurate as a needle, I know quite enough about the supposed banality of Sunday morning & the radio on for lunch. Given that problem I would go for purity, in the most strictly ethical sense, fairly like the architect: something provisional but we are so rich we will die of gout & affection if we don’t move, we must learn to float & to love the water, to disclose the knowledge we needn’t even ask for. All right, I know what you’re doing you may be sure, & I admire it as well (sometimes to a quite extraordinary extent). The time will come and pour down like a libation, it will flow like oil into the ground.
(J.H. Prynne, letter to Crozier, 2 March 1966, Cambridge)
The second letter, dated 13 September 1966, was published in the Intelligencer, an open document recording some thoughts about these recent poems of Crozier’s:
Thanks for sending the poems. The apple poem needs no direct comment, but I think I do have some feeling about the others which I simply note. It has to do, I think, with the pathos of distance, which you take on rather too often I would say. This gives you a rich vein of sentiment and even those delicious gestures, just the suggestion of a catch in the voice, but at the same time an intensely literary option on whether to pursue it or not, as a figure in one of Puttenham’s counterfait modes. Now pathos and even poverty may truly be one of our present conditions, but the flower on the bush is a glide into poignant suggestion, which is not pathos at all but a kind of court device: ‘Or is it not perchance more requisite our courtly Poet do dissemble not onely his countenances & conceits, but also all his ordinary actions of behaviour, or the most part of them, whereby the better to winne his purposes & good advantages, as now & then to have a iorney or sicknesse in his sleeve?’
Even if it’s a fantasy, the sequel is a painful separation of assertions which now at this time ought especially to be kept close. Astrophil in the mirror is a Figure of Fortune, and his lament was properly both fluent and gilded. But here the movement of the lines is removal, poetic licence in the other sense of ‘sweet’. Nor even hermaphrodite, the moon shines over like some argent coverlet. Where is the true metal in all this, and sorrow proud to be advanced so. You must begin to know what I mean, Andrew, this piece like nowhere to fly to earlier, is so discreet as to be painfully dull. We do know that sentiment has to do with touch, is intimate as well as public, that the language too has its pulse and can be moved ‘delicately’ (another Shakespearian pun). And I’m not advancing any case for mortification, but you are so much the opportunist, which casual & discreet ornament you then claim for some urgency of form: O sweetness.
It’s also technical. The words are easy because also light. The occasional promise of event is just a spread over your abstract nouns: tenderness, bar, difference, what. I might even refer to a continuing hint of derision towards the subject – the very exposure of it a kind of priggish excitement to the reader. If a set of language is to need and deserve confidence it must keep its own kind of fidelity: it must be true to its purpose. And what is I sit alone at my window. True to an occasion, you try not to be at all artificial, but nowhere true to any degree of purpose. My argument is in some kind of vice here, because the purpose is of course the retrospective formalism of the occasion. Your nostalgia is very artful, the reader is left carrying about the abandoned tones of this world. It’s accomplished, and for a lutenist that would maybe draw the whole listener back into play.
But not any more: our ambiguities now are quite different, and have little connection with the authentic. The scales have been repeatedly forced. I don’t know how the true ease would sound, but we can’t go back to hurt as a refinement of nonchalance, with all the elisions of sweetness put against an impartial notion of the public art. Your language is no more than arch inasmuch as it invokes those assumptions – that’s no longer a rack on which anyone is stretched. As a way of life it’s even more uninteresting. What is the difference, and how does it then set (as you passingly refer to it)? In one degree at least, the private purity of a life held entirely by occasion sacrificed to the ‘exigencies’ of the public conspiracy (called world). So that the heart is again a walled garden, only this time this is not allegory but exile – you never live there, on any terms except sufferance. Thus pathos in this mode is actually another wedge between those transposed conditions (trust, desire, the open window) and the world intactly grabbed back into the silver forest: the very oldest idea of ‘nature’ (causing the wild bees to swarm & produce honey as well as eloquence).
It’s easy to be dissatisfied with this poem, easier to feel absurd for taking it as more than a shifted dalliance. But I do think it inflicts on our shared language a shine it cannot use, and that you ought to be doing something else. Is that unfair?
-o0o-