Poetry, utopias and ranting
The article linked to here is a fascinating, if frustratingly incomplete, look at the rise of the punk poets and ranters. Below is a brief response to it.
All power to Apples and Snakes, who did, and still do, really great work, but my father Michael Horovitz’s Poetry Olympics shows (from 1980 on) played a big part in bringing many of these voices into the poetry fold, putting LKJ and JCC on the same bill as Anne Stevenson etc at Westminster Abbey in 1980 and giving Attila and Swells a slot at the Young Vic in 1981, which Attila acknowledges fulsomely in his autobiography.
I’m also a little baffled by the reference in the article to Pam Ayres being an influence on John Cooper Clarke in the 60s, since she only rose to fame in 1975. More influential on JCC surely were wartime songs like Bloody Orkney, which he satirises brilliantly in Evidently Chicken Town.
To skip from Kerouac to Pam Ayres as major influences on the punk and ranting scene without once mentioning the great flowering of on the road UK performance poetry brought about by people like my father, Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell, Pete Brown, Christopher Logue, Jeff Nuttall et al from 1959 onwards, in reaction to the very closed, hermetic university-bound approach to poetry that the Movement etc were part of, is to miss a great tranche of poetry’s history in this country.
These were the people first cross-pollinating poetry with rock music, comedy, theatre, performance art, and the punks and ranters - many of them reacting against the hippie ethos of the 60s flowering of poetic counter-culture for sure - were informed by, and indebted to, what they were reacting against.
I know that poetry likes to split itself into scenes, that human beings often like things to be contained in neat, self-referential packages, but the history of poetry - in performance or otherwise - is an utterly entangled web, in which the 1965 sell out poetry gig at the Albert Hall is of as much cultural significance on today’s spoken word scene as Langston Hughes, medieval bards, griots, ancient Greek lyric poets, Pam Ayres, John Cooper Clarke, the Poetry Olympics, the Mersey Poets, Walt Whitman, punk, jazz, balladeers and so much more besides.
One of the great joys of growing up going surrounded by the multiple strands of the creative world that were drawn into my father’s Poetry Olympics gigs was seeing how the arts could (and should) work together without splitting off into factions.
And yes, I know this is a utopian attitude, but surely this whole writing poetry lark is a utopian approach to life anyway, whether you are writing about street-level daily realities or mad metaphysical dreamscapes?
Perhaps it’s even more utopian to hope that a history of poetry will be written that ties together all the influences of high culture, counter-culture and everything and everyone in between without judgement or disparagement or too much vetting at the gate. That, though, is the only history of poetry I would really like to read…
