Fifty Fifty

Dear Michael,

Guess what? I’ve retired!

Took early retirement at Christmas, after thirty-five great years and one miserable one – ended happily, though, with a nice send-off.

I’m 59 in February, so the reduction isn’t much, and though

it’s all a bit bewildering, I think I’ve done the right thing.

For the obvious reason, I’ve been cracking on with the anthology – more progress in a month than the last six – January of all months, the Monday of the year – strange to be out of the workaday world, at least for the time being, but not complaining.

I’ve got over 320 pages of actual text already – I mean typed up – but with 12–20 poems each by the core Apocalyptics, there’s plenty of scope for thinning it out if – as I hope to – I find many more poems amongst the ‘undergrowth’ as Larkin calls it – never happier than when tangled up in it – Poetry Quarterly in particular I just love, for some reason, partly because I’ve got copies, though I like my Kraus reprint of Poetry London, too. Finding ‘Cain’ by Burns Singer in a beautiful red copy in the UL – predating the earliest published poem I’d come across – is another reason.² Then, too, permissions may mean a cull – a Muriel Spark love poem to Howard Sergeant might be a no-no,³ though Skelton printed a poem from Far Cry in Poetry of the Forties, so I may be wrong to fear the worst from the MacCaig estate, but I aim to have more than enough to replace any non-runners, for whatever reason. What about Kathleen Raine, for example? Scary: [‘Invocation’ follows].

She means every word of it – she always does. According to Kenneth Allott, ‘she can express an apocalyptic element in feeling without inflation’ – as he no doubt recalled from her thirties New Verse days – found this in Now – not in Collected Poems, though I find it was in Stone and Flower, the PL collection illustrated by Barbara Hepworth, which I haven’t seen:

Spain and China – must be circa 1937 – one of only two or three modernist poets to use the word before the Apocalyptics reminted it ...

I know you won’t want to be briefed on every raid, but anything you would like an update on, anything, do let me know.

If you want to hedge your bets, incidentally, you might commission Rob Jackaman to edit a rival anthology of Apocalyptic Shockers – get this:

‘I’ve never met anybody in my years specialising in the poetry of this period who would argue with the opinion that the New Apocalypse (with the possible exception of some of Dylan Thomas’s work, always assuming that it fits under the umbrella term) was anything but a pathetic failure’.

Bit harsh? [more quotations follow]

Nuts. I wouldn’t mind, but his books are good value – New Zealander – one on Surrealism and this one, A Study of Cultural Centres and Margins in British Poetry Since 1950: Poets and Publishers (Edwin Mellen Press, 1995). You probably know it – you’re in it – in fact you’re the subject of a paragraph that would make a cat laugh, which I will share with you:

‘Certainly in some respects Booth and Schmidt are working at separate ends of the spectrum. Booth remains the champion of the small press, the underdog, the outsider; whereas Schmidt seems to have been seduced into the big time, accepting the overdog, and moving towards the centre’.

Wait till he gets a load of Overdogs of the Apocalypse!

I’ll be in touch.

Dear Jim

RETIRED??? You could knock me over with a feather! Why, you’re only about 30…. I’m sure you have done the right thing so long as you have some way of being in touch with young heads.

We must meet around the anthology soon, in March? Let’s make a date. And tell me please: would you be willing to put together a Julian Orde Abercrombie?⁴ David Wright loved her work, and the few things we did in Poetry Nation really appealed to me…

More soon. I have to eat dinner or die. But congratulations on retiring and let’s give a shape to your afterlife as soon as possible!

Dear Michael,

There’s a name – I came across several poems by Julian Orde in Poetry Quarterly – quirky, quicksilvery, all about wings – ‘And into birds they were all startled’ – and creatures of ‘earth and river’ - ‘the athletic flesh’ of fish is fine, I think, imagining a fish as a swimming muscle – with a constant sense of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’: [quotations] and [‘The Awaiting Adventure’, from Poetry Quarterly] is immediately followed, I was delighted to find, by ‘The Day and Night Craftsmen’ by Graham, who was her partner for a while in the forties – as Wrey Gardiner was no doubt aware. They all dedicated poems to each other, and even put each other in, which is half the scene and I hope an intriguing thread in the book. ‘The Lonely Company’ recalls Stevie Smith at her least skittish – and ‘the day of wrath’ seals her an Apocalyptic poet, if anyone were minded to quibble.⁵ ‘The Flying Child’ is wonderful, so is ‘In the Holidays’, in fact all Wright’s picks – even ‘The White Sofa’, more like Stevie Smith at her most skittish – are appealing, and he’s right about ‘Conjurors’, too, which I take to be very late – I haven’t seen the Greville Press pamphlet – I like the way the caterpillar ‘In his carpet coat’ takes flight on ‘her early wings’, after negotiating its metamorphosis in that ungainly adverb ‘Unbalancedly’ – even the capital letter adds to a lopsidedness that the rhythm then so beautifully redeems. The allegory of her own imago or ship of death – ‘She walks like a boat on the beach/ Dragging her drying sails’ – is so unforced as hardly to occur to you, but the ‘indistinguishable’ ending reminds of Muchafraid crossing the river singing, though ‘none could hear what she sang’.

Rexroth put her in The New British Poets – almost as good an eye as Wright – ‘The Changing Wind’, the last poem in the book, as it happens, so she is a card-carrying, anthologised neo-romantic into the bargain, for adherents of the distinction – but bees in bonnet aside (I have incriminating credentials for every poet who put pen to paper during the forties with the exception of Betjeman and a handful of school-of-Auden burn-outs) – and though you can see what Geoffrey Hill was driving at – ‘It’s she/ The courage has’ seems unaccountably clumsy in such a cobwebby, ‘gossamer’ poem – she’s better than half the poets in New Lines!⁶ Or The Crown and the Sickle, to be fair – my great grief at the moment is that the Ulster contingent of the Apocalypse – John Gallen, Robert Greacen, Roy McFadden – they turned The Northman at Queens into an Apocalyptic rag, and McFadden edited Rann from Lisburn – Lisburn, where we spent every six-week summer holiday – are unanthologisably miserable.⁷ McFadden and Gallen have their moments, but to get them to sustain even a short poem without disaster is going to be tricky.

Incidentally, her husband, Ralph Abercrombie, was a tart reviewer for Time and Tide, with little time for ‘Mr Treece and the other horsemen of the Apocalypse’, but ‘Esyllt’ is an excellent spot – a stone ginger for the anthology [quotations follow] ‘Esyllt’ is – with Lawrence – the inspiration of Larkin’s marvellous ‘Wedding Wind’:

James Keery is the most energetic and sure-eared reader I have ever encountered. His patience with the Apocalyptics is exemplary: he is a reader, not an academic; his interest is in bringing good and possibly useful poetry back to the table. Ever since we met in the 1980s he has been an important contributor to PN Review, and he has shared my enthusiasm for Julian Orde Abercrombie, Burns Singer, late George Barker and much else. We also both rate the editorial and anthologising work of David Wright very highly. His first critical contribution to PN Review (88, 1992) includes this about the fissured nature of the then contemporary poetry scene (and how much more fissured it may appear today, without the critical focus it had then):

2017