Archive
Notes & manifestos
A note on
'psychogeography'
Compiled in October 2016.
Entity Poetics
Written in November 2015, this ad hoc manifesto was posted as a comment
on Peter Riley's Fortnightly Review piece (a set of four
book reviews) on Poets,
Angry.
A
nonist Manifesto
Created in September 1996 and published in Angel Exhaust
15 (Bizarre Crimes of the Future, Autumn 1997), A
Nonist Manifesto created a
conceptual maze within which to bewilder the opposition. Many of them have
still not found their way out.
The Listening Voice
The Poetry Field Club organises field trips, mainly into the countryside around Southampton, Portsmouth and Winchester (UK) where we walk about a bit. The field trips are advertised in The Listening Voice or in other leaflets.
The Listening Voice is a four page A4 newsletter. The newsletters sometimes don't come out very often.
See the events page for more or less up to date information.
The Listening Voice newsletter
The Listening Voice 1 : 120kb PDF file : Summer 1996
The Listening Voice 2 : 256kb PDF file : September 1996
The Listening Voice 3 : 248kb PDF file : October 1997
The Listening Voice
4 : 308kb PDF file : October 1999
St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester
The Listening Voice
5 : 256kb PDF file : October 2000
Danebury Ring, Hampshire
The Listening Voice
6 : 300kb PDF file : July 2005
The Hampshire Bowman, Dundridge, Hampshire
The Listening Voice
7 : 880kb PDF file : January 2007
Ha Ha book launch at The Richmond Inn, Southampton
The Listening Voice
8 : 324kb PDF file : December 2007
Re-enacting Edward Young at Lower Upham, Hampshire
The Listening Voice
9 : 320kb PDF file : June 2009
Josian in Ermonie launch at The Richmond Inn, Southampton
The Listening Voice
10 : 348kb PDF file : November 2012
Portsdown Hill, Hampshire
The Listening Voice
11 : 264kb PDF file : June 2013
Portsdown Hill, Hampshire
Other Field Trip leaflets
Eggardon Hill A4 poster : 32kb PDF file : April 1996
St Catherine's Hill A4 leaflet : 48kb PDF file : September 1997
Old Wardour Castle A5 leaflet : 132kb PDF file : May 1998
Bokerley Ditch A5 leaflet : 96kb PDF file : July 1998
Smash IBM! A5 leaflet : 108kb PDF file : October 1998
Breamore Miz Maze A5 leaflet : 276kb PDF file : August 1999
Return to Old Wardour Castle A5 leaflet : 84kb PDF file : September 1999
Other Field Club downloads
Hampshire Chronicle preview of the field trip on 24 November 2012 (1.1mb PDF file). Published on 15th November 2012
Hampshire Chronicle review of the field trip on 24 November 2012 (1.1mb PDF file). The review is by Emily Trig and was published on 6th December 2012 (The unedited text of Emily's review is here.)
Other Nonist leaflets
Southern Poet's Counselling
Service : Persistent Failure Fatigue
28kb PDF file : A5 leaflet, Summer/Autumn 1995
A bewildered Ian McMillan broadcast a big chunk of this on Radio One.
It was on a Monday evening, during the Mark and Lard Show.
The SPCS helped Mr Weedy (Wessex Regional Poetic) & the Fatman (The South Movement) to maintain stability for many years and the therapy provided assisted the Fatman in particular, enabling him to resign from poetry (his public relapse in a 'review' of Jeremy Hooker's The Cut of the Light in Tears in the Fence, issue 44 - issue undated but probably March 2007 - was regrettable but not unexpected).
Colossus
Redivivus : The giant form of Southern Poetry
24kb PDF file : A5 leaflet, Autumn 1995
nb. Mr Caddy and his good friend Dr Hinton are still looking for their
poetry penis. If you find anything that you think might be a poetry penis
please alert the hapless duo via Tears in the Fence magazine. Please mark
your envelope ‘Penis Envy’.
"Now the Dark Council rides forth, both the Weedy and the Fat, into the North, to seek the Lost Penis of the South . . . If you know the where-a-bouts of the Southern Poetry Penis, please inform the Dark Council."
Southern Poet's
Counselling Service : Dr Mintern's Xmas Poetry Reading
100kb PDF file : A5 leaflet, November 1995
A fundraiser - Dr Mintern here focuses on Southern Regional Poetic Syndrome.
He was particularly interested in how this syndrome interacted with a disordered
personality. Through this ground breaking work he got close to the core complex,
that which motivates Hinton and Caddy, and was preparing his work for publication
when he disappeared.
"Come and listen to Dr Mintern’s fabulous landscape poems! Be amazed at the hinged valleys, fields on stilts and scenic absurdities you’ll encounter as this masterly poet explodes the myths of place with ease! Sit back in your chair and roar with laughter at the landscape, social hypocrisy and ridiculous culture of the south of England! Feel smug that it’s for charity too!"
Penis Envy?
No Thanks! : Building a campaign against Wessex/The South
Movement
100kb PDF file : A5 leaflet, Spring 1996
Featuring the Great Goddess/Cerne Abbas Giant in her original gynophallic body form. This was the deity as she was encountered at dogging sites around twenty thousand years ago. Nocturnal therianthropes humping shamanic prospects at sites later developed into what we call henges and lay-bys. Weregurles, swingers, trannies and hairy panty wearers enact similar rituals at the same locations today. This is the energy we tapped into in our fight against the Fatman's incontinent rage and Mr Weedy's anal retentiveness. (If you were wondering why they still haven't recovered, that would explain it.)
An open address
to the Men of Wessex : Distributed with 10th Muse issue 7
28 kb PDF file : A4 leaflet, Summer 1996
Amongst other things we demanded, "The cessation of Tears in the Fence as a vanity press magazine and its transformation from enclosure into an open field". Mr Weedy was never going to respond positively to that, but who would have thought that the reactionary impulse would eventually lead to the enclosure, by others, as a brand, of 'Radical Landscape Poetry'. By this stage the process begun in 'Wessex', that of the gentrification of an idea, had come to reflect and feed the rapacious demands of companies operating in the higher education sector. 'Value added' is now the aim of market oriented academics who, using hip politics as a cover, privatise and exploit the commons of radical politics and poetics and still expect to be seen as groovy.
The farmyard
fascist & his insular arse licker : Distributed with
TLV issue 2
140 kb PDF file : A4 leaflet, Autumn 1996
"You will note that things got nasty after the Equi-Phallic Alliance and Poetry Field Club published issue one of The Listening Voice newsletter. Although the nonists had no idea what had gone on behind the scenes, the publication of the newsletter provoked a jittery Fatman to reveal what he had done. Hinton grassed himself up to Jeremy Hooker, who it turned out had never seen the review of his book in the form in which it was published."
The full text of Brian Hinton's review of Jeremy Hooker's
Their Silence A Language (Enitharmon, 1993) can be found here.
124 kb PDF file : A5 page
This review was originally published in Tears in the Fence 14
The full text of Brian Hinton's review of Jeremy Hooker's
The Cut Of The Light - Poems 1965-2005 (Enitharmon, 2006) can be found here.
120 kb PDF file : A5 page
This review was originally published in Tears in the Fence 44
On Poetry Found: The Undertaker
and I
My encounter with some inspirational 'Northerners' on Twyford Down (and how
this played out in the psyche of the febrile fat bloke from the Isle of Wight)
Proles for Modernism
Proles for Modernism was active between 1995 and 2003. The group was formed to do magico-Marxist direct actions and psychic interventions to prevent the demolition of the Tricorn shopping centre in Portsmouth.
The following two paragraphs are from Oooh, you
are brutal
. . . but for some reason people like you by Jonathan Glancey,
The Guardian (G2), 21 July 1997
I was looking forward to Saturday's Freeart Collective Festival at Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre. Normally, the name alone would have been enough to put me off: it sounds a little too dippy-trippy for me, smacking of seventies street theatre and frizzy-haired adults dressed in denim dungarees. As the events of the day were to include circus performers, kite-making and craft workshops, I felt justified in my smug and sweeping judgement.
But when an invitation to the event thumped onto my desk signed Proles for Modernism, how could I refuse? After all, the card bore a striking picture of the Tricorn Centre, one of the most brutal of all Britain's concrete buildings. Opened in 1964 and now awaiting demolition, the Tricorn has often been called Britain's ugliest building; Prince Charles described it as "a mildewed lump of elephant droppings". But I gathered from Proles for Modernism that it has no shortage of fans among Portsmouth's young hipsters.
The whole of the article can be found here.
Much of the material produced by PfM was of a temporary or insubstantial nature. Thought forms, transferred emotions, stories. All that now remains are the Tricornia web site (see below) and two leaflets. Jonathan Glancey was reacting to the first of these:
Tricorn 1997 :
288kb PDF file : 19th July 1997
Save Our Tricorn!
Tricorn 2000 :
192kb PDF file : 23rd April 2000
St George's Day Working
Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism (2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), Uncommon (2011) and A New Kind of Bleak (2012) also responded to material produced by PfM.
Eros House, the Tricorn and Trinity Square were cranky,
strange things, doomed to commercial failure because of their architectural
caprices. The Tricorn never had enough retail space to entice an "anchor",
was not sufficiently freeze-dried and air-conditioned. Proles for Modernism,
a mysterious south-coast group who picketed the Tricorn's redevelopers, praised
it for exactly this reason.
Gateshead
car park: in praise of Brutalism by Owen Hatherley
The Guardian, 27 July 2010
None of the large companies that were intended to occupy
the shopping space would do so, meaning that it helped bankrupt the developer
and took on a life far more strange and intriguing than it would have had
were it a success – something noted by the wonderfully named Proles
for Modernism, who issued a communique claiming that “a spectre is haunting
Europe … the spectre of the Tricorn – a symbol of demotic resistance
that contradicts the role it was assigned. The concept of ‘functionality’
is negated in it”, instead providing a series of walks, vistas and enclaves.
The
Tricorn by Owen Hatherley
Icon Magazine, issue 76, October 2009
Not everyone is so well informed though and, as one might
expect, since the Tricorn was demolished its image has attracted those who
are drawn toward disembodied glamour. One such is Peter James Field who posted
an entry in his blog on 13th April 2011 entitled The
Ugliest Building in Britain.
In his text Field speaks with apparent authority but the info has been skimmed
from articles published on the internet. Field confuses Proles for Modernism
with the FreeArt Collective and misattributes a quote from the Tricornia
web site. The confusion between Proles for Modernism and the FreeArt Collective
began with Jonathan Glancey (in his Oooh,
you are brutal article, see above), it has been copied by various people
since. For instance, it appears in the otherwise commendable Tricorn:
Life and Death of the Sixties Icon (Tricorn Books 2009) by Celia Clark
and Robert Cook.
Another of Field's sources was a blog called Necronomania. The entry for 24th May 2010 is called Portsmouth’s Carbuncle: The Tricorn Tragedy. There is more honest journalism in this, the article has content, but the author, known as 'Mikey_C', repeats errors from elsewhere about the failed 'FreeArt Festival'.
This is what happened: the Tricorn festival was a FreeArt initiative, PfM included information about it in our Save Our Tricorn! leaflet (see above). There was no PfM input into the proposed festival. The festival didn't fail because of anything PfM did or said. The festival failed because the FreeArt Collective went to the developer and asked for their permission to put on the event. Had they just got on with it the festival would have happened and nobody would have been prosecuted. FAC didn't understand that direct action is an expression of power. They turned it into a kind of hip self-subjugation.
The idea of an arts festival was a good one, but FAC were too scared to do it. Alerted to the festival, Taylor Woodrow dithered and then took out an injunction banning it. The individual who had identified themselves to the developers as the organiser of the festival then received a 5am visit from the police who woke her up to warn her that if the festival happened she would be arrested. The festival, due to take place later that day, was imediately cancelled. Unknown to FAC the festival was embodied by Stewart Home who walked unmolested in the derelict Tricorn and did readings from his works to some passing skateboarders.
All the uninformed comment on the internet about the festival is taken from Glancey's 1997 article or the repetition of the errors it contains in Celia Clark's and Robert Cook's history, though none of those who quote them acknowledge their sources (they all want to seem like they know what they are talking about).
In a 21st January 2004 article in things magazine about "Portsmouth's most radical building" (and its impending demolition) the author happily states:
Proles for Modernism have a point: [the Tricorn is] a bold utopian statement, the likes of which are nearly impossible to replicate at a time when shopping centres are systems-built, empty vessels given character and life only by the brands which inhabit them. PforM aim 'to undermine the aesthetics of consumption by consuming aesthetics', suggesting that the public realm needs a certain degree of challenging abstraction. Their argument, fringed with mythological and pagan beliefs, is that the building is a 'machine for revolution' in that it 'negates bourgeois culture. It puts people off shopping' (my italics).
That's how easy it is to get things right (although I do not think brands give anything away, they rent their own form of emptiness to an already empty space. It is this 'vacuum within a vacuum' that produces the sense of hermetic terror sometimes sensed in places like West Quay).
It is my intention to one day reactivate Proles for Modernism. They currently sleep in a concrete bunker somewhere under the Tricornia web site. Should the need arise they will awaken and issue forth mouthing slogans and inspiring a fetish for Brutalist architecture amongst the twee and the well spoken. 'I don't think that is very likely', you say? Well, if you know of any concrete maidens in distress please contact this web site and I will give the sleepers a poke. 'Young hipsters' indeed . . .
Whilst PfM was on the case the Tricorn stood. Within a year of us being dismayed by genteel preservationists the concrete crunchers had moved in. Wealthy and well organised they might have been, effective they were not.
Tricornia
Although it is in ruins, the Tricornia web site can be found
here.
Tricornia went online sometime
in the late 1990s.
It was added to the nonist archive in July 2010.
10th Muse
10th Muse poetry magazine ran from 1994 to 2014. It was an occasional publication. There were 18 issues in 20 years. It started off twee and pretentious and, at least as far as the UK poetry scene was concerned, it went downhill after that. Increasingly, as time passed, the editorial commentary said unthinkable things about the poetry scene. When all around was making a mockery of itself, 10th Muse took the piss.
The aura of virtue that shimmered over this business came from the fact that no money changed hands. It was amateur. This signalled virtues because there were also unashamed 'vanity publishers' who advertised in the small ads sections of national newspapers and people paid to be published by them and that was vulgar. But the differences were superficial. Each procedure was as corrupt and vain as the other. If anything, the vanity presses were less immoral because they were more blatant.
These days editors of print magazines and websites still do that sort of thing, but the world of vanity has colonised the entire cultural sphere and made everything more accessible. Old notions, such as service to the tradition, have been replaced. I can think of almost no critic or cultural gatekeeper who is not, in one way or another, dispensing favours. If they are not seeking money or advancement, they want access to sex or reassurance that they are what they are not. Such people commodify themselves.
Entry level nonentities get to convincingly pretend to be a poet by paying money to a university. So long as you pay the bill, you receive the qualification and then no-one can laugh when you claim to be a poet. This is cheaper than buying a degree or MA off the internet because those companies will blackmail you afterwards and you can end up paying them for the rest of your life. If you want to pretend to be a poet, buy your certificate from a university, its cheaper.
Paying money to a university gets the job done quickly and each individual also meets those with whom they will form an incestuous cohort. This helps with becoming a critic or cultural gatekeeper in the future and it reassures everyone that you are reliably conformist. In the cultural sphere of now, in which everything is faked, conformity is of the essence. If you want people to think you are a poet you must exhibit no unpleasant tendencies, such independence of mind, critical faculty or creativity. Talent is taboo.
The spirit of the old fashioned vanity press crooks lives on in those who offer 'services to writers'. This is much nastier than the old way of doing it because it is personal. No longer is it a matter of 'send me twenty quid and I'll publish your poem and say it's good', nowadays it involves abusive interpersonal relationships. Those who do this call it 'mentoring'.
Often, these acts are committed by those who teach university 'creative writing' courses or organise 'writers' conferences' or other events at universities. The abuser, taking advantage of the context, grooms their victim in the institutional setting and then offers to accept them as a private client when they leave. They tell the victim they are talented but need to develop and then they give them pointless things to do in exchange for money.
These faux therapeutic relationships can last for years, sometimes until one of those involved dies. I have seen this, though I can’t say who did it because the victim is still alive. Having retired from university, the player continued to exploit their mark. Regular meetings for a hefty fee. Vanities indulged. After the abuser died of cancer, lots of people said how lovely she was, but she was not lovely at all.
So, as you can see, taking the piss is a moral act. It was back then and it still is. 10th Muse eventually got a bad reputation. I was being slagged off all over the place and the magazine received few poems and even fewer subscriptions. Given the alternative, that was a good outcome. 10th Muse could have ended up like Tears in the Fence.
This archive will include a few of the editorials and some sample reviews. I doubt I will include much of the poetry. I don't have permission to publish it online and it would be tedious to track down those whose work, for whatever reason, tickled my fancy back then and, frankly, there were times when I wasn't that fussy.
The index of issues with links to some of he content is here.
nb. If anyone who had a poem in 10th Muse reads this and, despite what I have said, wants their work to be included in the archive, please contact me and I will see what I can do.
