the word hoard

I don’t think The Word Hoard as a group of poets ever had a single or unifiying philosophy, though we shared a great deal in the way we thought about and practised poetry (and prose for that matter). Each of us ran our workshops in our own way, but we found we liked each other’s approaches and found them helpful, so perhaps one of the most significant aspects of any philosophy I might try to identify retrospectively was the need for collaboration and mutuality, that writing works best inside a community of some description, where the individual has complete freedom to go their own way, but seeks an appraisal of and response to their choices from others. This creates a supportive and nurturing context but not one without challenge: the way you can lay your work open to those you trust is I think irreplaceable and can help you make enormous leaps in your thinking, but also the presence of others as part of your writing world creates a continuous sense of context and connection that sustains you through times when the enormous leaps don’t seem to want to happen. We had, and occasionally still have I think, a sense of purpose that our collaboration and connection created and sustained, and perhaps any sense of a lack of purpose I may have suffered over the last few years has been in direct relation to the waning of The Word Hoard as an active community (but that’s another story).

I think this sense of seeking and/or creating context is also a class matter when it comes to The Word Hoard. Essentially, though not exclusively, we were and are working class writers who found trust in each other partly because the literary contexts in which we had to work were not, in our view, trustworthy or sensitive to the needs of working class people. This is a truism about the arts that I think many still disregard. So our community often created around itself a not necessarily positive sense of exclusion and opposition, but mixed in with that was also a good, very necessary opposition to the ignorance we perceived, and still perceive, in a literary ’infrastructure’ administered in England by and large by a class of people we did not find responsive to art that expressed ideas outside their hegemony. How would I interpret that now? I think by saying that purposeless writing is purposeless writing, that writers who avoid political, moral or ethical issues in order merely to cultivate whatever career they think they deserve are ultimately not writers as we in The Word Hoard would understand the term. This applies regardless of class. I think The Word Hoard was a forum in which we could test political ideas as much as aesthetic ones, and these were as much refined by that sense of community as anything else. We did not see ourselves as lone voices, even though we never entirely agreed on anything politically, although, once again, our ideas were very close.

A further extension of these ideas I would say was that we sought to express through our approach the need to connect with your community in a larger sense, with where you lived and who you lived beside, though not in a passive or blandly tolerant way. All these ideas revolve around the idea of the writer as a necessary and natural part of society, and though they aren’t specifically technical I do think they influenced the form of our writing along with the content, that the ideas themselves presented a kind of challenge to our writing which coloured and shaped it, like fulfilling a commitment or a duty. This didn’t result in a kind of literary Stalinism or conformism in our work as writers, and over the years we have gone off on divergent paths into our own very particular aesthetics. But our romantic view of the writer as a kind of activist did have an effect on us, so I would say another thing I could identify retrospectively as part of our philosophy was a sense of aspiration as a necessary part of the writer’s life, and that merely material aspirations of the personal kind were not the proper foundation for that life.

To switch from ideological issues to other ideas, what struck me this morning walking back from my daughter’s school in the cold was what I learned from Robert Duncan of the poem as a field in which the poet searches and researches, of the work as ground in which the poet digs and mines. The key aspect of this I think is the starting point that the poet does not know from the outset what she or he is writing, that while the poet carries ideas, intentions, wishes, dreams, ambitions and inheritances into the field, it is a territory that must be travelled, not a preconceived or predefined thing. The Word Hoard interpreted this practically by developing an approach in which the work is discovered and defined through the process of composition, and often through the process of collaboration. This last is an important corollorary I think, in that it is (or should be) impossible to know what the outcome of a true collaboration will be before it begins, that by entering into each other’s practices, we relinquish control to the extent that the outcome becomes unpredictable, a consensual process, not a predesigned form.

Other ways in which I think we took on Duncan’s ideas were in the way we allowed what I can only call variousness into our collaborations, that nothing was disallowed or proscribed, but anything that arose was judged on its merits, what you might call its utility as part of the emerging work. Of course this begs a million questions about how we arrive at our judgements of utility, necessity and so on, but I think and hope that whatever conclusions we arrived at were themselves subject to further erosion, further fertilisation as part of what could be found in the field of the work. Another aspect of this field writing that I personally have always found inspiring is that it removes the necessity for a purely linear sense of the work, that a concept of direction that is spatial, 360 degrees, encourages the writer to think digressively, tangentially, in parallels, and can create depths and linked currents that are more humane than the typically English way of working to a learnt form within a restricted aesthetic. For Duncan this meant being able to associate all kinds of material, mythic, meteorological, personal, historical, topical, astrological, and to make instinctive rather than explanatory connections between this variety, or, importantly, not to attempt or need to acknowledge a neat connection at all between factors or events that can be found in the field of the work: they are connected merely by their contiguity, in the way events in the world on any given day are connected by happening in the world.

So Duncan’s ideas helped us to create forms that vary and swerve, that feel no need to follow a single consistent thread in a single consistent style. The result is a constantly challenging work process, in that I think it’s easier to write a poor sonnet than it is to write a poor open field poem: the challenges in Duncan’s approach are huge and rounded, they are challenges to us as people not simply as writers, and there are no formal devices that can disguise any thin ideas or ineffective technique. Each attempt is (or should be) anew.

For me, this has fed into and relates very closely to my experience as a musician who improvises, and my work as a poet, and as a facilitator of poetry workshops, is about trying always to improvise, to find the statement rather than to prepare it. I believe writing is listening. Of course this means common sense paying attention to the world and to other writers, but more important for me it implies a sense of writing as a mediumistic process, or shamanistic if you like: that we have to learn to listen in a particular, subconscious, powerful, open way to write well. So ideas of instinct and intuition are bound closely together in all this for me, and discovering and trying to use Duncans’ terms gave me a way to articulate and describe this instinctive process. We dream our way into the work.

So as I write this I’m beginning to see the connection between The Word Hoard as a co-operative and collective, and the dreaming of poetry into completion, in that the social structures of our relationship, the consciously ethical and political attempt in the form of our assocation, sort of trained and grounded us in some profound human necessities, so that when we dreamed we did so kindly, we dreamed into a field where, as in Duncan’s work, we remained passionately aware of issues around human rights and social equality, but we exposed these ideas from the conscious mind to mysteries and instincts that gave them (in their best moments) the profound and timeless sense of connection we look for as readers of poetry. Of course, times when this didn’t work outnumbered (and continue to outnumber) a thousandfold times when it worked, nevertheless that beginning point I think has kept us whole.

I see I am circling around the idea of a life rather than of a poem, or that they are the same thing. What we do we see as a vocation, and we have tried to ground that sense of vocation humanely and generously, but also in a way that liberates us. In this area the work of many Americans has helped us, starting with William Carlos Williams and Pound (or for that matter Whitman) but including the Objectivists and of course Duncan, Olson and others like Gary Snyder. The key aspects of their work that have come into ours are two I think. One is the commitment to some form of social awareness and commentary as part of the work, and that this be seen as perfectly normal and as a right and duty of the poet. The Americans have interpreted this in so many ways that they helped us to avoid doctrinaire approaches. If you think of the contrast between Reznikoff’s early work about New York City as compared to Olson’s or Ginsberg’s very overt and very different attempts to generalise about their society, you can see that this idea isn’t restricting, and encourages us to look with more than our eyes. Which brings me to the second major influence on our work, as in Williams’ famous dictum, to begin with things, no ideas but in things, to look at society as a place not solely as an idea, to work towards conceptions through perceptions. An experiential poetry that tests itself in the world, the absolute opposite of a librarian sitting in Hull expressing a miserable and depressed sense of disconnection. This disconnection I would say is one danger of taking writing into the academy, that it codifies writing and separates it from its community in a town-versus-gown sort of scenario, it endangers writing with a falsely disconnected sense of its intellectuality (I think it also endangers it with conformism, but that’s another matter).

Yet as I write about all this Americana I find myself remembering Lorca and Neruda, and how their work has fed into this instinctive, improvisatory approach to composition. Also, I think in terms of any ideas of a Word Hoard philosophy, a big part of whatever evolved came from the Americans, and some Canadians, who actually visited and worked with us. This would mean, in a practical sense, that we have always sought new ideas through contact, seen our relationships as part of the work. For me personally, a number of writer friends have been hugely influential on how I work, yet they are not in the least alike: Duncan Bush, Peter Plate, John Harvey, Roland Flint who I studied under at Georgetown University, one of my lecturers at Warwick University Paul Merchant, Tom Pickard, and so on. Only their kindness and generosity connects them: peers, allies and mentors are necessary to us. Lately Catherine Davidson has been a huge help to me, and I miss terribly the day-to-day contact with other writers and artists that The Word Hoard in its prime facilitated. Only connect and all that…..

And now I’m thinking about the role of the self in poetry, where the poet is in the poem. One thing the self-consciously political aspect of The Word Hoard’s practice did I think was make us consider the value and utility of what we did, and the value of art in general. Our leftwing position by its nature led us to notions of the self versus selflessness, in that commonality is central to left politics of many kinds, and The Word Hoard’s practice reflected in part its attempt to be useful to more than its members. Also, again by its nature, trying to be a co-operative brings up notions of the individual in the collective, how is the individual served and fulfilled by collective and collaborative action? How does the individual ‘find’ his or her voice in a collective process? The answer is the experience itself, it’s not possible to know the answers without practical action. So I think all of us who have been involved with The Word Hoard have to a greater or lesser degree experienced moments of self-abnegation, of letting go, as a result of these conscious choices made over and over. The process is not always successful, but it can never be entirely unsuccessful either, in my experience at least.

What I think this has come to mean for me is something about not needing the self. Williams says somewhere in his writings on art and poetry something like the artist is always and forever painting a self-portrait, meaning I think that the self is unavoidable, and need not be the subject. If I look out of the window now and try to describe the landscape, and do nothing else, what is to say my poem will not be as useful as any poem I write attempting to express my, ahem, great and profound opinions on the state of the world, or even my slyly witty refusal to have opinions etc etc, or whatever version of things in which I am my own subject disguised as language.

It seems to me a worthwhile enterprise to refuse all consciously self-referential utterances, whether my own or other people’s. I want to piece poetry together, to piece significance together, from the colours, shapes, sounds and movements I can see from this window. Any pain or joy I feel can be expressed as easily that way, in fact better expressed than if I am fixed in my own mouth, my own obstacle forever.

And now looking out of the window again it occurs to me to think about how ideas from Chinese and Japanese poetry have filtered into our work via Americans such as Pound, Snyder, Rextroth: that sense of landscape and terrain, of detail encountered through the senses that can lead to an emotional complex of ideas……..