Some Notes on the (White) (Poetry) Avantgarde

This memoir-essay came out of two impromptu presentations to Writers Forum New Series that looked at the legacy of pioneering sound and concrete poet Bob Cobbing who co-founded both the London Filmmaker’s Co-op and Writers Forum in the 60s, but whose constituencies were to become very different. It further investigates the resistance (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious) of poet-artists of colour to that ‘avantgarde’. The essay betrays its ad hoc development in some of its disjunctures.

For a few years during the end of the 1980s and through the 90s I had feet in both experimental poetry and the London Filmmaker’s Co-op; only decades later did I see that while I was the only experimental poet of colour I ever saw at the time, within the London Filmmaker’s Co-op I was nothing but the norm. The staff of perhaps a dozen in Camden was by the 1990s more than 60% female, was probably 70% LGBTQ (three were taking hormone shots), and while the staff had only two who were non-white, for some reason there was a sizeable cohort of young Asian experimental filmmakers using the place.

For half a century Writers Forum workshops may never have had a tran person cross its threshold, and when I attended its ‘second series’ from 2017 on my return to poetry I was often the nearest thing to a woman. The Co-op on the other hand had a significant proportion who we’d now describe as transitioning nearly 40 years ago. By the mid-90s it only had two straight men on its staff. Its users were the bright young things coming out of St Martins & Goldsmiths & Chelsea School of Art – hip Asians I was unaware of (and including the young black filmmaker Steve McQueen). It never crossed my mind to trouble a publisher with my queer performative work of the 80s.[1]

I asked cris cheek, a multi-modal poet instrumental in the early Writers Forum, about this split between the two Cobbing inspired projects – where Writers Forum got flat beer and roll-ups for the next 40 years, and the Co-op got all the polymorphous, multi-ethnic New Romantics coming out of art schools, who confidently took over the Co-op workshops, screenings, and management, and changed the whole sprockets-&-theory aesthetic of 70s hardcore filmmaking. He tells a story of when the Apples and Snakes venue (the pre-eminent platform for black poets and performers including Grace Nicholls, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard) suggested a doublebill with cris and Aaron Williamson and other black poets; the pragmatic reply from Brother Nihi was ‘Your crowd won’t come to what we do, and our crowd won’t come to what you do.’ As Fred D’Aguiar pointed out about the subjectless, narrativeless experimentation of the white avantgarde, such formalism isn’t an immediate option for those written out of history.

The young cohort of queer, gay, BAME filmmakers swept away the austere LFMC old guard with films that explored identities, diaspora, narrative lyricism – changed it as soon as they entered from the late 80s through the 90s until the Co-op closed.[2] Both LFMC and Writers Forum shared a materialist/deconstructive/DIY aesthetic through the 60s and 70s (perhaps the same anti-aesthetic that informed Language poetry). But something happens in their diverging courses.
That leads to bleached bones of mastodons
so old they give up their seats to themselves on the bus

In effect, Writers Forum continues in a high-minded asceticism, and (unlike the Co-op) a parallel influx of LGBTQ and BAME New Turks never happens.

What was it about film that said to young artists – this is where it’s at? In a way that hermetic language noodling, that played with its back to the audience, was not where it was at.

Enclosures of a thousand years of imperial English.

The 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘The Other Story’ curated by Rashid Araaen looked to reveal a suppressed narrative of Black, Caribbean and Asian modernist artists in the UK. Twenty four artists were represented, and amongst younger artist-sculptors not included Shirazeh Houshiary, Kim Lim, Veronica Ryan, Dhruva Mistry and Anish Kapoor declined to participate. Those artists already had galleries behind them and the implicit reason for their declining was a reluctance to be ‘ethnicized’. It speaks of a self-confidence in their status as internationalist-modernist artists. A poetry analogue to this exhibition would not have been possible: you couldn’t have found four modernist poets of colour in the whole country.

Thirty years later, aware of a dearth of poets of colour within the radical work of Hesterglock Press, publisher Paul Hawkins organized two events to address that – Diisonance in 2017 and Dub Plus One in 2019 – by showcasing (white) experimental poets with black poets. Out of 57 participants perhaps a dozen were poets of colour who, aside from D.S. Marriot, mainly used the accessible registers of spoken word. It sounds like a belated resurfacing of the Apples and Snakes initiative with cris cheek. It produced two books (also called Diisonance and Dub Plus One), but no lasting presence of BAME poets on Hesterglock Press. The divide seems marked: white avantgardistes on one side, black performance poets on the other. Having recently delivered poetry workshops on Trauma, Hawkins completely understands the urgency of ‘writing one’s truth’, and the privilege of formalism.

Language poet Barrett Watten is cited as the first person to look on the increasing academicization of innovative/radical poetry in the 80s & 90s (with its burgeoning creative writing courses) and see it as a positive thing. The present dominant habitus of universities brings other pressures both subtle & gross: poetries conforming to the prevailing imperatives of that habitus;
poetries of pious resistance;
poetries that work towards yr doctoral thesis

What would my 20 yr old feckless onanist have made of this?

I came back to poetry after a sleep of a hundred years and I look up a journal coming out of Buffalo SUNY and see the editorial interdiction that would become so familiar – no racism, no transphobia, no neo-liberalism, no DHSS, etc. – while also usefully indicating subjects to be encouraged: I remember the one about ‘police brutality’. How utterly antediluvian of me to want it to be my idea. It took me back to my schooldays when the class had a sudden urge to create a play, and as they divvied out parts they spotted me lurking and said ‘You can be a racist thing.’ Of course. But one of the consolations of formally innovative poetry – the kind of white poetry not leavened with ‘lived experience’ – is that I can take a break from me as ‘a racist thing’. I can take a break from ‘me’ whatever intersections it’s larded with. [3]

Publisher Richard Capener, while avowing a personal affinity to Language poetry, doesn’t align Hem Press to the ‘avantgarde’ – a term too loaded. In a wide-ranging podcast with Penteract publisher Anthony Etherin he addresses its scars that show ‘blood on the hands of both left and right’[4]. Penteract is a visual-formal-constrained poetics publisher, and perhaps closest to what Bob Cobbing was about. Unsurprisingly its authors (like its more famous Swedish counterpart Timglaset) are white European. I’m sure they would love a more diverse offering. More surprisingly in that podcast, while parsing the meanings of modernist/avantgarde/experimental, they didn’t address the emergence of BAME and LGBTQ writers at least as a shadow on that front. Their discussion of avantgarde/experimental has ‘whiteness’ as a de facto background, even when talking about the present.

In contrast is Lumin Journal, a stunningly diverse online and print review embracing a spirit of ad hoc interconnectedness, beautifully produced by Filipina-Pakistani editor Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse. In issue four, 20 out of 22 of its contributors are young BAME writer-artists and most of its hybrid poetry and visual work would sort perfectly with Writers Forum. Is there any subtle osmosis of Cobbing’s influence here?[5] Each side I suspect are wholly ignorant of each other. I note that Sadia and Beau identify firstly as artists, as do many of their contributors. It reinforces my unscientific hypothesis that many BAME innovative writers start afresh, inspired by other disciplines, and pursue resistances that often lead to the reemergence of familiar modernist stylistics.

Ghazal Mosadeq’s Pamenar Press – a multilingual initiative which navigates between Tehran, London and Toronto – is largely Persian in its team but internationalist in scope. As to what might be going on with postcolonial writers and the avantgarde, Ghazal is gloriously irreverent. “It depends what you mean by ‘experimental’. If you mean the British Poetry Revival and the like – another bunch of white men whose privileged interrogations of language is going to subvert society – then I wasn’t interested in that. It’s like video gamers finding a new hack. For Pamenar I’m interested in pushing boundaries and alternative formats, which isn’t limited to the ‘experimental’ or special groups[6]. I’m most interested to work with women, but it’s still a struggle to get a balance of male-female. The women – I have to reach out to get them; the men just submit.”

I came back to poetry and landed at a Writers Forum workshop still religiously following the service of the founding Elder – consecrated silence, purified of welcomes, introductions, discussion –
a silence that speaks to Knowers:
for to want to know, to want to be accepted
is not to know, not to be accepted

I am drawn to its marooned outsiderdom, to writers who didn’t come out of universities, O necessary gateway to preferment –
the remnants of the Revolutionary Guard not executed by the Revolution
there to make poetry out of autodidact truculence

Notes

[1] I knew that British poetry – experimental or otherwise – was not the NY art scene from which my work stemmed.

[2] Interestingly, if you look at London Filmmaker’s Co-op on Wikipedia, it gives the Cobbing history of its inception, its history of structural-materialist feminist film with a list of key filmmakers (all white) & then stops exactly there. You would never know that it continued beyond this highwater mark of abstraction into forms of lyricism. As though to fall back from this was an aberration, or decadence.

[3] The domestic personal – the signature of middle-of-the-road poetry – is made respectable when trawling the politics of gay, black, poor, queer experience.

[4] Quoted from a personal correspondence with the author. Why indeed would poets of colour be drawn to the racist roots of the literary Moderns?

[5] It should be noted that many of Lumin Journal’s contributors are not British-based

[6] It surely widens the narrative of ‘avantgarde’ when publisher-poets of colour are gatekeepers to white poets

Khaled Hakim has a background in film and linguistically innovative poetry, and has claims to being the first homegrown BAME experimental writer in the UK. He took an extended absence from 2000 becoming a Sufi student and subsequently a Sufi musician.

The early published work is collected in Letters from the Takeaway by Shearsman 2019. Book of Naseeb was published by Penned in the Margins in 2020. The early performative work is collected in The Routines: 1983-2000 (Contraband Books). His latest collection is To the Hitchhiking Dead (Shearsman 2023).

He is the editor of Weaving Light, an artist book on the work of artist-weaver Rezia Wahid MBE with contributions from poets and academics.