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The Argotist Online |
A.
C. Evans Interview
A. C. Evans
was born in Hampton Court in 1949, and lived in South London until 1963 when he moved to Essex and co-founded the semi-legendary Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group in 1966. Moving back to London in 1973, he currently lives in Mortlake, near Richmond. Working in the tradition of the bizarre and the grotesque, he also considers himself a Realist. Influenced by everything on the dark-side, he is also inspired by the iconoclasm of Dada, revolutionary Surrealism and the immediacy of Pop. He regards all these as points of departure, none as a destination – we live in a post avant-garde world.
Jeffrey
Side
has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg
Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window, A
Little Poetry, Poethia, Nthposition, Eratio, Pirene’s
Fountain, Fieralingue, Moria, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket,
Textimagepoem, Apochryphaltext, 9th St.
Laboratories, P. F. S. Post, Great Works, Hutt, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay and Dusie. He has reviewed poetry for Jacket, Eyewear, The Colorado Review, New Hope International, Stride, Acumen and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000 he was the deputy editor of The Argotist magazine. His publications include, Carrier of the Seed, Distorted Reflections, Slimvol, Collected Poetry Reviews 2004-2013, Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes (with Jake Berry) and Outside Voices: An Email Correspondence (with Jake Berry), available as a free ebook here.
JS: What
are your definitions for the words “radical” and “progressive”. ACE: I
would define “radical” as pertaining to radix (root)—getting to the root
of things. I don’t think there is a direct link between radicalism and
formalism, although formal innovation might be a kind of aesthetic radicalism. I
don’t think it is useful to tie radicalism to formal innovation—not all
“radical” works of art or poems are characterised by formal experimentation.
Also the idea of “experimental” or “revolutionary” art is basically a
nineteenth century idea—you can trace the use of the term “avant-garde”
back to 1825 at least, although it was popularised by Bakunin in the late 1870s.
I find it ironic that one of the few artists who could claim to be a real
revolutionary was Jacques-Louis David—and he was a Neo-classicist! As it is
very difficult to disconnect the “voice” from a worldview (culture etc.) one
has to look closely at the worldview/cultural background of the voice—how far
does the worldview of the voice credit the transgressive implications of
freedom-to-create? If you evade this question, how “radical” can you claim
to be? To use Eliot as an example, I would define The Waste Land as a
reactionary poem, not a transgressive or “radical” poem in the progressive
sense, even though its poetic form might have caused some outrage. In any case,
none of Eliot's efforts stand comparison with the “radical” Simultanism of
say Cendrars' 'Trans Siberian' poem, or the works of Apollinaire. In
my terms “progressive” must have something to do with freedom. Freedom of
expression is closely linked to the concept of the voice—if you deny the
voice, you deny the agent of “expression”. I think that is a
“reactionary” position, not a “progressive” position because it strikes
at one of the most basic principles of freedom. There can be no freedom if there
is no free agency: the only sensible definition of a free agency is a free
individual. Frazer's Golden Bough was based on an evolutionary
schema that postulated a “progression” from Magic, via Religion to Science.
Eliot disregarded this because of his own “faith” position. I would suggest
this points to the fact that Eliot (or the poetic voice we call “Eliot")
was actually an anti-Modernist, not a Modernist or a “radical”, unless of
course you wish to think about a reactionary or conservative form of radicalism
(you can—Margaret Thatcher is often called “radical”). This example
highlights an issue concerning “modern” and “radical”. Rimbaud might be
both “modern” and “radical” but Eliot might be “anti-modern” and
“radical”. So these terms are prone to circular interpretation! This is my
observation on confusions or contradictions in general usage. Incidentally,
It is a commonly held view that “innovative poetries” in the UK originated
in the Nineteen Sixties. In this period we find the literary world separated
into two, symbiotic, warring camps: “conservatives” and “radicals”. The
conservatives are “the establishment”, usually Encounter magazine
(1953-1967), The Movement (1955), their pre-war predecessors the Georgians, or,
sometimes, the more recent Confessional Poets—the Alvarez/Plath “suicide
school”. The “radicals” composed what is now known as the BPR (British
Poetry Revival), called at the time the Underground, or the Children of Albion. Constructing
timelines can be great fun—one likes to isolate those key moments or
watersheds, those defining episodes or momentous years—here are some for the
Sixties. 1963: the Kennedy Assassination, Wilson leader of the Labour Party, The
Liverpool Scene, Writers Forum, Plath kills herself. 1966: the year of
“swinging” London (according to Time Magazine) and
the Situationists. 1968: the May Events in Paris, the death of Duchamp, Bomb
Culture. Perhaps 1969: was a significant year—did Zabriskie
Point symbolise the end of Modern architecture and the birth of
Postmodernism? Of course, in the main, the “Sixties” was—and, for popular
“folk memory”, still is—a fashion statement. It was a statement defined by
clothes (the Mary Quant mini-skirt, the Cecil Gee suit, the monokini and the
topless dress), James Bond films, Art Nouveau posters (in the style of Mucha)
and pop music—The Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, the “acid dandyism” of Jimi
Hendrix. JS: So
this was, for you, the real impact of the Sixties, not changes in literature and
poetic practice? ACE: Absolutely,
however, fashionable Sixties culture was mainly confined to large urban centres,
mainly London and Liverpool: the rest of the country, stunned by the Profumo
affair, traumatised by the death of Churchill, was still in a state of denial,
living in a drab, post-war cultural desert of Fifties kitsch. The various items
of new legislation—the abolition of theatre censorship, for example—that
helped to make the so-called “permissive society” did, of course, have
lasting, positive, long-term effects. At the outset it should be recognised that
the BPR was a sideshow for everybody except its participants: then, as now, very
few members of the general public read “innovative” poetry. If the truth be
known the most “innovative” publications of the Sixties were in the field of
prose, not poetry—for example Thomas Pynchon’s novel V (1963)
or Samuel Beckett’s collection No’s Knife 1945-1966 (1967). Perhaps,
on our imaginary timeline, the defining moment or year for the BPR sideshow was
1965. This was the year of the Cultural Revolution in China: Maoism was to
become very trendy over the next few years after Godard made La Chinoise. 1965
also saw the death of T. S. Eliot, and, coincidentally, the beginnings of an
“anti-permissive” backlash in the shape of the NVALA (National Viewers and
Listeners Association) founded by Mary Whitehouse. The International Poetry
Incarnation (at the Albert Hall), organised by the Poet’s Cooperative, was the
big literary event of the year. The abiding image of the Incarnation is
preserved in grainy film of the nudist buffoonery of Allen Ginsberg,
semi-official envoy of the American Beat Generation. ‘Albion’ was all about
the Beat Generation. According
to Kerouac, the Beats were the generation that came of age after World War II;
their aims, expressed in “spontaneous prose” and vernacular, freeform
poetry, were the “relaxation of social and sexual tensions" and the
espousal of “mystical detachment”. This “mystical detachment” seemed to
mean a fascination for Zen and, in sharp contradiction with British Pop Art,
rejection of capitalist consumerism in the cause of unworldly anti-materialism.
William Burroughs, a distinguished London resident of the time, and one of the
few writers associated with the Beats whose work has any lasting value,
dissociated himself from the mystical stuff but this went largely unnoticed. On
a technical level, Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959) far
outstripped the work of his Beat contemporaries. JS: Historically
what route do you see British poetry as having traversed to get to the point it
is at now? ACE: I
suspect there is no clear historical trajectory for British poetry in the modern
era, which I define as 1890 to the present. I would say that the most
“radical” innovations of the Eighteen Nineties (due to Symbolist influences)
were (a) the formal understanding that a poem must be short (no more epics) (b)
urban themes and subjects (c) subjects from popular entertainment (e.g. Music
Hall) (d) a problematic approach to religion and morality. I see the fin
de siecle as the defining watershed for modern British poetry. JS: I
always thought points a, b, c, and d were not a result of Symbolist or Decadent
influences. These points seem grounded in naturalism and realism, something that
Symbolist poets would not have comfortably endorsed. The Symbolists were
dedicated to pseudo-romantic notions of “truth” and the “Ideal”; they
were against plain meanings and matter-of-fact description. The points you
mention are more overtly identifiable in the work of Eliot than in Symbolism per
se. ACE: I
think this is a stereotypical, post hoc view of Symbolism—the actual poems and
practices of key Symbolists (e.g. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Laforgue) don't evade
naturalism/realism. The godfather of Symbolism, Baudelaire pioneered the
“modern” urban poem of gritty realism, alienation, fetish sex, and a number
of other things. His ‘Correspondences’ is a kind of mini ars poetica for
later writers, but I don't think his inheritors actually referred to themselves
as Symbolists at the outset. The crystallisation of Symbolism as a movement was
quite a late development (circa 1886). The Symbolist concern for “vagueness”
and the ephemeral is really an inflection of Impressionism (itself a mode of
realism concerned with the fleeting experiences and perceptions of everyday
life) and a realisation that poetry is intra-subjective experience. This concern
with interior subjectivity is very important. However, one has to realise that
terms like “Symbolism”, “Decadence”, “Impressionism” and so on were
quite fluid and not well defined at the time. Idealism (Ideism) was a
sort of Neo Platonic occult doctrine about “higher” realities, the basis for
much Abstract Art (Kandinsky, Brancusi). But I don't buy the idea that the
Symbolists were “pseudo-Romantic”. Symons’ models were Huysmans,
Whistler and Degas. Again, it’s just using “Romantic” as a pejorative,
bogey word. JS: On
the point of the short poem; surely, it was Edgar Allan Poe in his essay The
Poetic Principle (1850) who initiated the idea of the short poem as
being true poetry. Poe believed that the important thing was for the poem to
have an effect on the reader, this effect can normally only be sustained for a
short period, hence the longer the poem the less lasting the effect. Baudelaire
was influenced by Poe and translated him into French. Poe’s influence on
French poetry was, therefore, significant, so much so that you could say that
Symbolism was essentially an American invention. ACE: True!
In this respect Poe must be counted an honorary Frenchman. I don't think his
poetry was much appreciated in America! The modern American poetic “canon”
dates from Whitman, I would guess—not Poe, who is usually dismissed as a minor
curiosity and an inconsequential poet. The English Nineties poets inherited the
principle of the short form poem from Poe (partly) via the French
influences—but they could read him for themselves no doubt. Poe is definitely
a precursor of Symbolism (whatever we mean by the word) although his own poetry
was Late Romantic. It’s an overstatement to say that Symbolism was an American
invention on the strength of Poe. (Poe's poetry was translated into French by
Mallarmé, while Baudelaire was known for his earlier translations of the Tales
of Mystery and Imagination.) Also, the short poem principle was
not the only formal feature of Symbolism as a movement. Vers Libre, the Prose
Poem and Open Field were all Symbolist innovations before WWI. JS: What
do you mean exactly by “naturalism”? ACE: When
I say Naturalism I mean specifically the Naturalist Movement associated with
Zola and Huysmans, the plays of Ibsen and, in Germany, the work of Gerhart
Hauptmann. It means something quite specific involving “exposure” of
difficult social truths, not a loose real-life descriptiveness or picturesque
nature poetry (evocations of daffodils or mountain scenery). Naturalist Realism
was considered “decadent” and “degenerate” by its opponents—because it
questioned the status quo it was subversive. Decadence celebrated modernity, low
life, physical sensation and the “artificial”. In many respects quite
different from Symbolism in the narrow sense, the Decadent Movement elevated
technology over nature. What we call “Symbolism” is a loose bucket-term that
encompasses all these things: a lineage of writers and artists influenced by
Baudelaire. JS: To
the extent that your own poetry (whether you intend it or not) enables readers
to bring meaning out of the text, indicates that you have some connection with
the experimental, however tenuous. ACE: This
“reader” thing is political correctness. It's a truism isn't it? Of course
the reader brings meaning out of the text—I bet Sappho would have agreed that
her audience functioned at a level of creative engagement with her work. But
then to assert that only the reader is important, removing the
author from the picture altogether, is just ridiculous—it’s a kind of
pseudo-democracy, a populist dodge—its just “gesture politics”. So far as
my own poetry is concerned, I like to “tease rather than tell” and I think
poetry works primarily on an irrational level. I like the idea that the reader
can identify with the poem or text on a level of emotional empathy as well as on
a level of ambivalent, oblique psychic symbolism or imagery. Surreal elements of
“objective chance” enhance the shared nature of empathic engagement with the
reader, because they can derail expectations but I don’t think this engagement
is concerned with simple issues of semantic meaning. It is quite possible that a
truly “poetic” poem might be incomprehensible on the rational level. I
certainly don't think poetry (or any art) should be didactic—if you want to
deal with “issues” become a journalist. JS: How
do you define the individual voice in poetry? Surely to insist upon one is
didactic. ACE: I'm
not insisting on it, I'm saying you can't surgically remove the individual
(“voice”) from the creative process without destroying the mechanism of the
creative process itself. But to define the voice is very difficult—I would be
the first to agree. There are all sorts of pitfalls here. For instance, when
Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” in 1968, he did so on the
premise that the omnipotent author was a surrogate for God. The death of the
author was also the death of God. It was an act of liberation. I can certainly
see his point. Without going into too much detail, I would suggest that, beyond
all the textual analysis and critical theory that can be directed towards a
specific poem, the ultimate defining characteristic of the work is the unique
“signature” (strong or weak) of the writer. The essential difference between
a poem by Stevie Smith and a poem by, say, W. H. Auden, is ultimately a
difference of personality, irrespective of literary theory. I would say this is
self-evident. It is also true of poems written by poets who tell us they deny
the voice—all you hear is their voice. A poem without a voice is an
impossibility (obviously a voice can be unobtrusive, boring or inconsequential,
but that is beside the point). This becomes a complicated matter of psychology
and philosophy (masks, multiple personality, false identity, alter-egos,
selfhood and instability, automatism, fictional personalities and characters)
and not a literary question at all. “Expression”
is coming under attack every day... check out the PEN website. As Terry Eagleton
has pointed out in one of his critiques of Postmodernism, significant
transformative action—artistic creativity counts as transformative action—in
the real world requires the participation of an integrated unified, human
individual/subject. Postmodernism usually denies this possibility. Eliot, if he
were still with us, would be quite at home with all this self-denial stuff. What
would he make of all the other related fads of radical chic? These include
social constructionism, reader response theory, linguistic determinism, ethical
criticism, post-colonialism and eco-criticism—whatever intellectually
hypertrophied school of thought the current wave of “radical” poets use to
advance the next generational revolt—theory as power dressing. There is a
major issue of identity here, all bound up with a stereotyped Anti-Romanticism
(T. E. Hulme via T. S. Eliot). JS: Hulme’s
attack on the Romantics was based on his mistaken belief that they were not
writing poetry that was particular and descriptively accurate. He thought them
flowery and vague. In fact, his call for more precision in poetry was ironically
the same one that Wordsworth advocated. Both Romantic and Modernist poetry have
more in common than is often recognised. ACE: I'm
sure your description of Hulme's position is quite correct—I agree—actually
I think Modernism is a development of Romanticism. You could argue that some
aspects of aesthetic Postmodernism are a development of, or amplification of,
the idea of Romantic Irony—Byron saw a close link between Romanticism and
burlesque. However, the “modern” or most recent form of anti-Romanticism is
an authoritarian attack on the so-called “paradigm” of self-expression. Yet
this is not so contemporary as one might think—Orwell noticed a tendency to
conflate Romanticism with a negative interpretation of “individualism” in
the Thirties and Forties as well. Not much has changed since those days,
unfortunately. JS: Are
you advocating a sort of neo-Romantic poetic aesthetic? ACE: Perhaps
this use of the term neo-Romantic conforms to the dictates of the anti-Romantic
propaganda line. What is Romantic? I tend to find that anti-Romanticists don't
really know what Romanticism is/was. JS: My
understanding of what Romanticism is, is that it is about self-expression via a
stable authorial voice or ego. Keats criticised Wordsworth for his
self-obsession and coined the term “Egotistical Sublime” to describe it. In
principle I’ve nothing against an individual voice in poetry but I think that
the text is, and should be, ultimately in the control of the reader. ACE: I
think this is just far too narrow—Romanticism is or was (historically) a
diverse, widespread phenomenon—it can include everything from the Gothic novel
to science, philosophy and politics. Romanticism was a tendency or movement that
affected all parts of society and all the arts. Also, I suggest that associating
the idea of a “stable” authorial voice or “ego” with
‘self-obsession’ is unnecessarily tendentious—it sounds like a thinly
disguised moral agenda. It’s like saying Romantics are/were “bad people”,
because bad people are self-obsessed and nice people are not egotistical. This
is not the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the
political correctness of the late twentieth century. Schlegel described Romantic
poetry as ‘continually becoming, never complete and infinitely free’. I
would affirm Romanticism, or a form of Romanticism, as a movement about freedom,
revolution and transgression—the dogma against Romanticism is a dogma against
change, against the “voice”, against the individual. Where Romanticism is
for the individual, count me in! JS: But
don’t you find it ironic that the concept of the authorial voice disallows the
reader the freedom to make of the text what he/she will? Surely, the text under
such conditions becomes dictatorial. How is one to find personal significance in
a text that claims itself as being only applicable to the “voice” that wrote
it? Surely, this leads to didacticism. ACE: I
just don't agree with any of this—the mere existence of a “voice”
disallows nothing—the existence of the authorial presence in no
way implies interpretative exclusivity of signification in the way that you
say—why should it? Also, didacticism is not dependent upon the “voice” in
any way. It is a quite separate matter, I think. Propaganda is often
disembodied, anonymous and impersonal. Mind you, I guess there might be
conflicting views on the nature of the didactic. My ideal poem would always
resist clear-cut interpretations or didactic messages. Protest poets might have
a different view. What has happened since the Seventies is that theorists have
replaced the iconic (“Romantic”) personality cult of the artist with a
personality cult of academic gurus, a pantheon of celebrities drawn from the
post-Structuralist intelligentsia (e.g. Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva,
Cixous, precursors such as Levinas, and a number of others). It is in the
interests of theorists to deny the crucial role of the artist and elevate the
“reader” to a central position in the discourse, but it is their discourse—a
discourse of academic command and control using the “reader” as a propaganda
ploy. I would assert that most readers relate to the “voices” of their
chosen authors living or dead, and this intimate, one-to-one relationship is a
defining aesthetic experience for most readers most of the time. JS: Do
the US Beats and the British ‘Children of Albion’ poets confirm or deny the
idea of an authorial voice/subject in poetry?
ACE: In
my scheme of things I suggest the “denial of the voice” is a characteristic
of Postmodernism. Barthes' ‘Death of the Author’ article was first published
in 1968. The Poetry Incarnation was 1965 so the British Beats pre-date Barthes
in this regard. Barthes himself cites the prime Symbolist Mallarme as the first
to recognise that language should be the prime element of a poem. Closer to
home, I always quote Olson as the main US initiator—all that “wash out the
ego” malarkey. However, as I observed elsewhere, the Beats seem to me to
conform to the Romantic concept of the artist-poet. The decisive break was the
Language Poets (c 1971) who I see as Postmodernists: they quite specifically
attacked the “workshop aesthetic” of individual expression. 1971 is usually
quoted as the beginning of Postmodernism in literature. The historical origins
of Postmodernism in the arts generally are confused (but that is another story I
guess). JS: In
your writings you use phrases such as ‘defected to Americanism’, ‘literary
Americanism’, and ‘like their American friends’, the tone of which may
make people think that your poetic viewpoint is insular and anti-American
because of political considerations. Can you expand on exactly what you mean? ACE: I
realise the implications of using a term like “Americanism”. I'm not being
narrowly political here—in this context I would define Americanism as an
academic trend or ethos—high-level interaction between academics and others
that conforms to The Fall of Paris scenario: the idea that after WWII the centre
of cultural innovation moved from Paris to New York. The assertion that New York
in particular and the USA generally has set the pace and the agenda for
innovation in the arts since 1945. I don't deny the reality of the geopolitical
shift, but I feel that the situation is compromised by the rise of the global
mass media—this Fall of Paris idea is another highbrow propaganda ploy.
Avant-garde innovation was a nineteenth century concept. By the middle of the
twentieth century the idea of the avant-garde (and Modernism as a movement) has
been completely trashed and exhausted, mass-produced and commodified. Academia
and critical theorists have to keep these myths going—too many jobs depend on
such cultural histories. Americanism is a kind of academic Historicism. This is
only indirectly related to “hard” politics and foreign policy. In any case I
am only applying this critique to poetry. JS: Some
of the references to the ‘Children of Albion’ in your writings suggest you
see them as “selling out” on the authorial voice/subject. If they did so,
why was this? ACE: From
my frankly cynical viewpoint, I would suggest it was susceptibility to academic
trends. Even Jeff Nuttall ended up working for a University. I would say that
the Academic Left consolidated a position based on Post-Structuralism and
similar tendencies (e.g. Social Construction Epistemology) influenced by Thomas
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This
book had a tremendous impact and precipitated what is known as the “science
wars”. Key themes were denial of objectivity and the idea that the individual
is a “cultural construction” not an innate entity. I don't think this mode
of thinking really filtered into the “counter-culture” until the Seventies.
Having said that, I might also observe that there is—at a deeper cultural
level—a correlation, or a form of family resemblance, between traditional
mystical ideas of self-denial, including puritan asceticism, and the “death of
the author” mystique as interpreted by Postmodernists. Such mystical ideas did
permeate the Sixties Beat counter-culture and helped to prepare the ground…
well, kind of. Incidentally, if one looks among the poets of Albion and their successors for that absolute non-conformism (non-conformisme absolu) demanded by the first Surrealist manifesto, such a “radical” disconnection from established norms, it is present only in the form of an emotional stance. It was a mere posture or, more appropriately, one might say, a poetical imposture. And even that imposture has been vitiated by the fashionable orthodoxy of Postmodern theorists. Which is why, for many years now, English poetry has been—literally—going nowhere.
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