Continental Drift: Charles Olson and The English Intelligencer

Worksheet Aesthetic

Though little-known in North America, The English Intelligencer was an important site for exploring the possibilities of Olson-inspired poetry in 1960s Britain. In circulation from 1966 to 1968 and formally described as a “worksheet,” the Intelligencer was a forum to foster collaborative exploration of modernist poetic practices. Although the periodical only existed for two years, it has since taken on the aura of legend, regarded today as a kind of “avant-garde incunabula” among experimental poets and scholars in Britain (Pattison et al., Introduction i). Its founding editor, Andrew Crozier, studied first with J. H. Prynne at Cambridge University before going on to work with Olson at SUNY Buffalo during the 1964–65 academic year (v). Shortly after his return to Britain, he began work on the Intelligencer’s first series, handing over editorial duties to Peter Riley for the second series, before returning to edit the worksheet’s third and final series in 1968. At the time of its founding, Crozier had firsthand experience (with Tom Clark) of editing a more formal magazine, The Wivenhoe Park Review, which featured work by Olson, Prynne, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, and John Wieners, among others. The magazine was based at the newly founded Wivenhoe Park campus of the University of Essex, where Crozier had taken up a teaching post. As the title and contents indicate, Crozier was determined to produce something comparable to Olson and Robert Creeley’s work on the Black Mountain Review. Distinct from this, Crozier conceived of the Intelligencer as an organ that would act, at least in its early stages, less as a showcase for a new countermovement and more as a forum for exploring the various ways the modernism exhibited by Black Mountain College could be adapted by a younger generation of British poets. The design of the worksheet was sparse compared with a traditional literary journal. For instance, the paper used was similar to cardstock, with no glossy covers, illustrations, or photographs. Strip advertising was eschewed in favor of occasional small ads for recently published books and magazines authored and edited by fellow participants. The contents were both handwritten and typed by Crozier and then copied using a mimeograph before being sent to a relatively small group of fellow contributors. Indeed, Crozier understood his role in the production of the worksheet as less of a traditional editor and more of a convener or co-contributor: I was trying to create an occasion to which I would be a contributor on no grander scale than anyone else invited to it. The scheme began simply with the accessibility of a duplicating machine and mailing system, facts to which I was a casual bystander, and it seemed valuable to preserve that condition. At the beginning then I regarded myself as just executive. You might argue that from the first the scope conferred upon the Intelligencer implied an editorial interest at work, but I did feel that we were held in the germ at least of something common, i.e. the choices seemed dictated, and open to further dictation from the looked- to participants. . . . The Intelligencer is hardly a magazine, and I’ve never regarded what has circulated in it as published.(Crozier, Letter to Peter Riley 32–33)¹

It is essential to note that in attempting to create such a forum, Crozier did not view the worksheet as a formal publication in any way. In preparing to take over the editorial—or executive—duties from Crozier, Riley expressed a similar intention: Why I’m particularly alarmed over the TEI [The English Intelligencer] crisis, is that only such an organ can perform this function [that is, the function of fostering a poetic community]. A magazine is by its printed nature more or less precluded from such an activity. By its permanence. The work in these sheets should be what’s in progress now, gestures in the right direction, not any arrived complacency.(Riley, Letter to Andrew Crozier 36)

When comparing this with previous Little Magazines, whether they became relatively conservative like The Hound & Horn, or remained largely experimental, like Others or Contact, it is clear that The English Intelligencer marks a transition to a different kind of work. Unlike these magazines, whose editors had a clear sense of what kind of poetry they wanted to promote, the Intelligencer aimed simply to become a forum for the development of an avant-garde poetic that, in the minds of its editors, was yet to be realized in postwar Britain. In this way, it functioned more like a blog or online poetry discussion list than a professional journal. In fact, Riley concludes the letter cited above with a look forward toward our current modes of provisional communication: “TEI is a move towards a print-free method of distributing information, something which you and I may, with luck, see universally in our lifetimes” (Riley, Letter to Andrew Crozier 38). Of course, given the date, he couldn’t have contemplated digital communication as it exists today; even so, the remark is prescient, inviting contemporary readers to further consider the work-sheet’s intended ephemerality in relation to the current distribution of “print-free” information. That said, this sense of the worksheet as a means of sharing works in progress is not necessarily distinct from the aims of other magazines. As David Bennett has argued, the transition from periodical to book for many poets marks a shift from open-ended procedure to finished product: “[w]hat was read in the magazine as production (work in progress, a provisional and open-ended act of construction) can now be read as an autonomous product with immanent, unifying intent” (482). This understanding of journal publications as “works in progress” would be taken a step further, though, in the editors’ decision to refer to the Intelligencer as a “worksheet,” consciously avoiding any sense of finish at the level of content or design, focusing instead on process over product.

These intentions can be seen not only in the design of the work-sheet but in Crozier and Riley’s contributions. In the winter of 1967, they produced two poems on Romney Marsh, an area of drained wetlands extending along the coast of southeastern England, that in many ways exhibit their larger aims for the Intelligencer. Though Romney Marsh properly denotes the preserved land near New Romney in Sussex, the wetlands between the present coast and former coastal towns like Rye and Winchelsea to the south are frequently referred to as Romney Marsh as well. The area is historically infamous as a haven for outlaws, pirates, bootleggers, and novelists. Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and even Stephen Crane spent significant time there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, by the early 1960s the marsh had become associated with the marginal and marginalized, both geographically and culturally.

The first piece, “On Romney Marsh,” was likely written by Crozier in 1964, when he was a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo. Olson seems to have known of the poem, as a 1965 letter to Crozier suggests. After addressing the “large ‘scrip / scribal / ‘map’ (a Maximus poem occupying several pages” that he offered for inclusion in the newly founded Wivenhoe Park Review, Olson encouraged Crozier to solicit “newer” work from local writers, even archaeological writing like the work of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Olson, Selected Letters 337). The connection between Olson’s fieldwork and Hawkes’s research should be relatively clear to those familiar with his program of “Projective Verse.” The encouragement to Crozier, however, is concerned less with Maximus’s Gloucester and more with translating his perspective to England by adapting the same archaeological strategies to the island, thus permitting it to be seen, like Gloucester, as a site whose layers reveal relationships that branch and fork across oceans and continents. As Latter has shown, a similar interest recurs throughout Olson’s correspondence at this time with Prynne and focuses particularly on geological discussions of continental drift (Latter 60–84). From November 1965 through January 1966— the month in which the Intelligencer’s first issue was printed—their correspondence frequently returns to the subject, with Olson considering Alfred Wegener’s map of a possible Pangaea as a potential cover image for Maximus IV, V, VI (Olson and Prynne 137, 150–53, 159–60). Indeed, Prynne and Ed Dorn, then living in England, purchased a bound edition of the Royal Society’s symposium on continental drift and sent it to Olson with accompanying poems (Latter 67–68; Olson and Prynne 162). As Latter demonstrates, the symposium’s findings, especially the maps depicting the broken but once unified supercontinent, served as an inspiration for the transatlantic relationship between Olson and Intelligencer poets (Latter 83). In line with these conversations, earlier in 1965 Crozier had prepared the first issue of the Wivenhoe Park Review bound in a reproduction of the Vinland Map (Latter 63). In addition to this, Olson’s “The Vinland Map Review,” sent to Crozier for inclusion in the same issue of the Wivenhoe Park Review, is discussed in the sequence of November 1965 letters to Prynne where his first interest in Wegener’s map becomes apparent: “I have this dream, to have the cover of the new Maximus volume [IV, V, VI] be the Wegener Map of the Earth in his theory where the continents were once all Hers—and She in her turn was surrounded by Ocean” (Olson and Prynne 137). Although the Vinland Map’s authenticity has since become the subject of controversy, its conjunction with the Wegener map and the concurrent enthusiasm over continental drift (particularly its positing of a world in constant movement, along with the likelihood that North America, Britain, and Eurasia were previously united), became for these writers a scientific vindication of Olson’s poetic and the subsequent revolution in British poetry they sought. The Wegener map, in fact, became the cover for the second volume of Maximus, whose initial publication was with Cape Goliard in Britain, facilitated by Prynne via the typescript he made from Olson’s manuscript (Butterick 638–42). In trying to shift the site of poetic activity from conventional to open forms, geological and cartographical metaphors—Olson’s own “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” and its extension into “logography”—became essential not only to Prynne and Dorn but to Crozier and Riley as well (Olson, “Projective Verse” 239).

This sense of renewing modernist practice by restoring the fragmented terrain of transatlantic or transnational poetics is clear in Olson’s letter to Crozier. As he goes on to explain, the purpose of seeking distinctively British poetry or even archaeological writing, as opposed to becoming merely a British organ for Olson and other Americans associated with Black Mountain, is that in this way “even the EDUCATED get A SENSE how WE ARE RESTORING ISLANDS AND MARS’ES FIELD (end of even gerund not to speak of end of METONOMY) ALL OVER THE NEW—AND OLD” (Olson, Selected Letters 337). Here, the process of restoration, of returning to an active perception of place as a field of poetic force, takes prominence. Consequently, Olson recalls a theme from “Human Universe” that Crozier would have known well. Rather than allow abstract “[i]dealisms” to “intervene at just the moment they become more than the means they are,” he calls for an active and direct perception of the field of composition (Olson, “Human Universe” 157). A similar concern appears in the advice to bring an “end of even the gerund not to speak of end of METONOMY,” in other words, an end to halting the action of verbs by making them nouns and to the abstraction of figurative language, even in its most embodied form, metonymy. The result would be presumably kinetic and particular, an active perception of the “islands” and “mars’es” of Great Britain and no other. In fact, the transnational in Olson’s poetic is broached through such particularities: by digging into the surface and avoiding abstraction, the local details of a prenational, Mesolithic Pangaea can be restored through the work of an imagined community of like-minded poets. As detailed above, these concerns were at the forefront of Olson’s mind at this period in his correspondence with Crozier and Prynne. As a result, his missive to Crozier is clear: he must reimagine the relationship between ancient and modern, between old and new in light of such poetic archaeology. Of course, as Olson knew from his own experiences, pursuing this would not be easy, as “mars’es” suggests. With its elision of “marshes,” Olson’s punctuation marks the perception of linguistic warfare, folding the name of the Roman God of war, Mars, into the phrase. For Crozier, this would hearken back to his interest in England’s archaeological history, as a field occupied not only by Romans but also at various times by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celts, and Vikings, and which concerned the graduate seminar paper that he wrote for Olson (see Olson, Selected Letters 336). As Olson noted approvingly, “No trouble actually allowing you an A on this: let’s do more Sumerian-Gothic next round” (qtd. in Selected Letters 336). Here, in applauding Crozier’s efforts, the emphasis is once again on further exploration of pre-Roman Britain, of the world of the Vinland Map. In this context, the marshland of Crozier’s poem takes on added significance. As a wetland on the southwestern coast of England, it occupies a liminal space between the channel and the mainland and can serve as a site from which to consider both the island’s isolation and its former union with the Continent. In these ways, the poem can be seen as participating in the same set of concerns that inspired Prynne and Olson and led to the founding of The English Intelligencer.

Though Crozier did not then contribute “On Romney Marsh” to the Wivenhoe Park Review, Olson’s concerns in the letter stayed with him during his time editing and contributing to The English Intelligencer. Indeed, the poem was eventually printed in the Intelligencer as a way of responding to correspondence concerning the worksheet’s lack of direction, as I detail below. After sharing draft versions of the poem, Riley wrote to Crozier in January 1967 to encourage him to print it in the Intelligencer, where he offered to contribute a companion piece as a kind of response: “If you put it in the Intelligencer I’ll write a reply to it, or rather a work on the same subject following from yours. I didn’t take a copy of it, but remember something of it, and I’d like to see it again” (Riley, qtd. in Crozier, Crozier Reader 23). The result was Riley’s “From Romney Marsh,” and the two were published together in the Intelligencer in March 1967. They were republished as a pamphlet by Crozier’s Ferry Press in May 1967, with a cover designed by his mother, Kathleen, who was a working artist. As the very name of his press suggests, Crozier sought for his work to function as a kind of “ferry” or means of facilitating movement between younger British poets and Americans associated with Black Mountain and with Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology, published in 1960, which featured such writers alongside San Francisco, Beat, and New York School poets. Indeed, as nascent publisher and editor, Crozier printed a foolscap anthology of new British poetry titled SUM while at Buffalo, determined, as Ian Brinton notes, “that the innovative poetry, far distant from the world of New Lines 2, that was being written in England should be presented to his American hosts” (Crozier, Crozier Reader 18). As Brinton notes, the timing of Crozier’s anthology, situated in response to the publication of The Movement anthology New Lines 2, sets a clear context for his efforts as editor in this period. As a closer look shows, it also creates a context for the poetry he and Riley would contribute.

For Crozier and Riley, the dominant poetry of the early 1960s in Britain was epitomized by the work of Philip Larkin and the other poets associated with The Movement. Just as Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry formally announced the presence of an avant-garde movement in the United States, Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines, published in 1956, has been seen as announcing a movement that had been forming at roughly the same time in response to the perceived excesses of the 1930s political poets and 1940s surrealists. Blake Morrison summarizes the perspective well in noting that the poets associated with The Movement, especially in its early years, repeatedly deplored “political reportage (‘1930s poetry’), on one hand, and metaphorical lavishness (‘1940s poetry’), on the other” (34–35). In opposition, they sought to reaffirm the centrality of conventional verse forms. Morrison cites Donald Davie and John Wain, whose work appeared alongside that of Larkin in Conquest’s anthology, at length to demonstrate their agreement on the centrality of rational order in their understanding of poetic form: That the Movement were able in the late 1940s and early 1950s to discover an increasing number of poets whose “conscious craftsmanship” lent support to their own aesthetic would seem to indicate a growing sureness of purpose. . . . [Donald] Davie even managed to include Eliot in his design, arguing, in another manifesto-like essay, that Eliot’s turning away from Corbière and revaluation of Milton signified a conviction that contemporary poetry must “be re-organized, by an emphasis not upon wealth and experiment, but upon order, severity, and correctness.”(37)

The Movement poets’ enthusiasm for “order, severity, and correctness” stands in direct contrast to the aims of Olson and those American poets gathered in the Allen anthology. Their poetics did not disregard these qualities altogether, but it did manifest them in diametrically opposed ways. Whereas The Movement poets typically saw a return to traditional poetic forms as a realization of their aesthetic, the movement in North America sought to extend modernist experiments through a development of the severely ordered innovations of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists, and others. Of course, such neat divisions are often clearer in retrospect. Olson famously called Allen’s grouping of poets under the heading of “Black Mountain” “a lot of bullshit” (Olson, Muthologos 280). Moreover, there were divisions and rivalries among the poets associated with Black Mountain, San Francisco, and New York gathered under the same title. Similarly, the poets gathered in Conquest’s anthology disagreed to a greater or lesser extent with the notion that they constituted a definable literary movement, with Donald Davie, The Movement poet associated most closely with the poets of the Intelligencer, standing at the margin. Even after taking these internal divisions into consideration, it is nonetheless true that subsequent scholars (and younger poets like Crozier and Riley), certainly saw these poets as grouped in these ways, with The Movement’s poetics as dominant and the Olson-derived poetics of The New American Poetry as insurgent in 1960s Britain. Indeed, decades later, Crozier reflected on his 1983 assessment of British poetry, noting that the consensus of an official “canon of contemporary poetry,” with Larkin at its head, “was hardly contentious then, nor is it now” (Crozier, Crozier Reader 248). In the same piece, he characterized The Movement poets and Conquest in particular as recoiling from a modernist poetic that they saw as “essentially foreign,” in favor of native tradition (249). Similarly, Riley, in an interview with Keith Tuma published in 2000, took aim at The Movement’s dominant poetics and implicit nativism in considering what the Intelligencer poets were turning against: But what we were ditching wasn’t a real “English line” at all, it was really a very rebellious impulse, an anti-poetry. Those guys of the “Movement” were self-consciously in rebellion against high culture and artiness, they were flag-waving pioneers, manifesto makers, manipulators of history. . . . The success and massive official promotion of their legacy, which I see as a shallow affair, hasn’t stopped it from being always a cult of newness, of which they are their own victims. Ten years later most names are forgotten.(Riley, Interview 18)

Thus, for both Crozier and Riley, the poets associated with The Movement were without doubt the dominant form of poetry in postwar Britain, and their descendants continued to be its primary exemplars even into the new century. That they found their work superficial and nativist only lends credence to the reading of their engagement with Olson’s archaeological poetic as an attempt to get to firmer ground and found their work on the principles of international modernism, principles that seemed to have support from contemporary scientific investigation. As Riley notes in the same interview, “England isn’t a line it’s a place, and that’s all you’re entitled to love really, a sense of settlement, which could be anywhere” (19). Crozier and Riley’s later reflections on The Movement are certainly supported by literary activity leading up to the first series of the Intelligencer. In fact, the publication of New Lines 2 in 1963, and the appearance in 1964 of Larkin’s most popular collection, The Whitsun Weddings, would have served as further confirmation of The Movement’s poetic dominance at this time.

In this light, the early sense of crisis apparent in the Intelligencer’s debates concerning what exactly constitutes the “Englishness” of a British poetry inspired by Olson becomes clearer. As the work-sheet’s opening “PROPOSITION” has it, “the Intelligencer is for the island and its language, to circulate as quickly as needs be” (Pattison et al., Certain Prose 3). Elaine Feinstein’s initial response clarifies this ambition, sympathizing with the “need to assert some independence of the prevailing American culture” while also avoiding the “nationalism” of a “fictional ‘Englishness’” (“Correspondence” 3). The Intelligencer poets thus sought to employ and further the innovative strategies evident in The New American Poetry, strategies that were rooted in an international modernism. As the subsequent correspondence shows, many were confused by this. An early letter from Gael Turnbull exemplifies the attitudes that Crozier and Riley felt they were struggling against: I just don’t see the point of such near parody’s of Olson . . . surely, somehow, there are ways of being “for the island and its language” without merely parroting what certain Americans have done . . . at least it should be possible to avoid the more obvious sorts of “I, minimus, of West Hartleypool etc.”—or the nervous jerks of Creeleyesque . . . my only sense is of this individual or that individual, with his or her own voice, discrete and each themselves—I look to a Robert Garioch, or a Jonathan Williams, or a Tom Pickard—each speaks his own tongue, and makes his own poems as best he can . . . I must confess that I admire many of Philip Larkin’s poems.(Turnbull 4–5)

Turnbull’s response exhibits some of the concerns that Crozier and Riley sought to address in subsequent issues—chief among them, Turnbull’s sense of poetry as personal, not communal, and his wide range of exemplary poets, yoking together writers associated with The New American Poetry, the British Poetry Revival, and The Movement. In fact, Turnbull moved easily between American and British poetry scenes in the 1950s, often appearing as the lone British contributor in Cid Corman’s Origin and Olson and Creeley’s Black Mountain Review. Along with Prynne, his experience may have played a part in his criticism here. Rather than mere parodies of Olson and Creeley, he seems to be encouraging the younger poets involved in the Intelligencer to search more widely for models to discover some more credible authenticity. For Crozier and Riley, though, to confess admiration for Larkin, whose formalism seemed the antithesis of Olson’s projectivist poetics, blurred the lines of any clear counter-movement and caused confusion where community was sought. However derivative Turnbull found the poetry published in the Intelligencer, his response—and others like it—distracted from the work that Crozier and Riley sought to undertake.

Their correspondence, printed just before their poems on Romney Marsh appeared at the end of the Intelligencer’s first series, addresses this. Decrying the lack of “discussion and exchange,” Crozier laments the many commonalities that were lost in the battle over Englishness the worksheet appeared to be hosting: Am I wrong in thinking that, poets, we share a common lot? You and I, Peter, think we do, yet the bent of our work remains different. We know there are conditions local to this island, even of government and finance, which if they effect us affect poets. And the language is common, of the island, if you do talk with the accents of Stockport and I, of London, to our endless amusement maybe. These are most tentative statements of what we can’t help but be writing about.(Crozier, Letter to Peter Riley 33)

Crozier’s focus here is on their shared communal grounds for writing. The writing itself, “the bent of our work,” may appear different, but it has a common basis, grounded more firmly in geography than any supposed “English line” or poetics derived from it. As such, the editors found that the disregard for this communal basis in favor of debate over the value of recent poetic developments in North America brought the worksheet to a crisis near the end of its first series. In his response to Crozier’s letter, Riley agrees that common ground is necessary if other poets are going to join in developing the interests they share: “for an exchange like that there has to be a measure of agreement before you can start” (Riley, Letter to Andrew Crozier 35). He identifies the source of disagreement, shortly after, in criticisms of Olson’s poetic: But there’s more to be agreed on than that (and this’s only an example) the works of Charles Olson are worthy of our attention. There’s more than that implicit in the whole project, which is why all these letters about why do the poets mimic Olson’s mannerisms are completely off the point. To talk in any case, with such a writer as Olson, of his “style” or of the “surface features” of his poetry is surely to betray an utter lack of comprehension of his work and that of others here or in America who find his example something not to be ignored.

Here Riley’s concern is that the worksheet be a forum specifically for pursuing an Olson-derived poetic in England. After all, the poetic was an extension of international modernism, not something unique to America. Consequently, debates over whether Olson’s poetry is worthy of their attention seemed to Riley a mere distraction. As he put it earlier in the letter, he shared Crozier’s ambition to pursue a correspondence with fellow poets of sufficient agreement, so as “to make a pro/anti Olson debate irrelevant.” To make the point clear, he specifically singles out Turnbull’s letter: For TEI to be a success there has to be a common faith among all those taking part in the possibility of poetry as to whatever extent a communal activity. There needs to be among them the exact opposite to the view Gael Turnbull put on p. 26a—that of a poet occupying his own private world of language and experience.

Thus, for Riley, Turnbull’s disregard for the poetry of community was antithetical to the aims of The English Intelligencer. Given this context, the editors’ emphasis on community should be clear. As opposed to the poetics associated with The Movement, Crozier and Riley sought to create a forum for developing the modernist strategies developed by Olson and his peers as a counter to their dominance in 1960s Britain. In this way, they sought a worksheet, rather than a formal publication, one where the conversation would make a debate over Olson irrelevant. A consideration of their interest in Olson, then, and especially of Crozier’s dedication to his example, will help sketch out this background more fully.

The English Olson

Given the influence of Olson in particular and Black Mountain in general on Crozier and Riley, the Romney Marsh poems can be understood as an attempt to present a distinctively English version of the “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” promulgated by Olson in “Projective Verse” (239). In an interview conducted by Peter Ryan titled “From Missile Crisis to English Intelligencer,” Crozier makes plain this influence while insisting that his work in the 1960s was in no way imitative: I read the essay “Human Universe” probably a month or so after my turnaround following the Cuban crisis, and it made a very immediate kind of sense to my rather political mental set, which at the same time was depoliticized because it was not preoccupied with action or political involvement in any way. I’m not attempting to say why I might now suggest that Olson is important if I were talking about him to one of my students. I’m talking about the rather occluded sense of myself in the world that I feel I was equipped with in the early Sixties, within which reading Olson occurred as some kind of light, because it was associated both with the failure or the cessation of one series of life interests, life experiences, and the possible burgeoning of another.(Crozier, “Andrew Crozier Interviewed” 104–5)

This description of his initial encounter with Olson and its importance manages to avoid talking directly about his poetry, while making clear that no similar inspiration could be found in England: “Why American rather than English models? Because the kinds of meaning necessary to me were supplied by American . . . because the history of techniques which enable the existence of such meaning had been more availably carried forward in America than in England” (105). Instead, Crozier seems to have found in Olson’s work both a model for how to live as a contemporary poet and a point of departure that allowed one to do so without the burden of influence. As he claims later in the interview, “Olson, and the other poets whom I saw as ancillaries of Olson’s, provided examples not of things which could be imitated but of a disposition towards writing” (106). As I explore below, Crozier’s poetry in this period does exhibit evidence of this “disposition towards writing,” particularly in how he and Riley composed. Though their verse bears witness to Olson’s influence, it is not imitative, to be fair. A closer look at “Human Universe” and some of the key tenets of “Projective Verse” should make this clearer.

As Crozier suggested, the perception of such a disposition is in keeping with Olson’s clear intent in “Human Universe” to lead readers out of the abstraction of inherited forms and into the flesh of the actual, into a poetry that would be responsive to the multiple planes of experience he perceives in each moment. In the essay, Olson insists on a similar form of materialism: there, if readers are to discover the “human,” they must first turn away from the classical logic that has shaped much of Western thought. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the subsequent writers that they have influenced all amount to little more than a system of classification for Olson (Olson, “Human Universe” 155–57). As such, he finds that their thought halts at the moment it should seek to discover: Idealisms of any sort, like logic and like classification, intervene at just the moment they become more than the means they are, are allowed to become ways as end instead of ways to end, END, which is never more than this instant, than you on this instant, than you, figuring it out, and acting, so.(157)

In place of seeking what ought to be the “end” and aim, namely, “this instant,” they instead turn “means” into “ends.” In other words, they interfere with the process of discovery that Olson seeks. In the essay, such exercises falsify experience by presenting a one-dimensional abstraction in place of the three-dimensional reality: What makes most acts—of living and of writing—unsatisfactory, is that the person and/or the writer satisfy themselves that they can only make a form (what they say or do, or a story, a poem, whatever) by selecting from the full content some face of it, or plane, some part. . . . It comes out a demonstration, a separating out, an act of classification, and so, a stopping, and all that I know is, it is not there, it has turned false. For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare.

Here the abstraction of “form” occludes any perception of the multitudinous. Like the “logic” of the classical philosophers, Olson sees form as a retreat into the “discursive,” one that takes away from the “full content” of daily experience. As opposed to this, he goes on to propose a poetics of the instant, of action in the moment of discovery.

In the second section of “Human Universe,” Olson turns to the material, to the touch of experience, as a primary means of understanding the lived moment. In particular, he is interested in flesh as a possible grounding for linguistic discovery: For this metaphor of the senses—of the literal speed of light by which a man absorbs, instant on instant, all that phenomenon presents to him— is a fair image as well, my experience tells me, of the ways of his inner energy, of the ways of those other things which are usually, for some reason, separated from the external pick-ups—his dreams, for example, his thoughts (to speak as the predecessors spoke), his desires, sins, hopes, fears, faiths, loves.(161)

Rather than separate, Olson seeks to reunite internal with external human experience through the “metaphor of the senses,” that is, through a renewed focus on the body’s role in writing and what has been called “thought.” His image for this is telling: the flesh, the fingertips of experience, appears here as “the external pick-ups” of photo-electric cells, devices that convert light into electricity. In a similar way, the body converts the local atmosphere into an “inner energy.” For Olson, perceiving this necessitates a new aesthetic, one that makes up the kinetic of experience: There is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only twin life has—its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact. And if man is once more to possess intent in his life, and to take up the responsibility implicit in his life, he has to comprehend his own process as intact, from outside, by way of his skin, in, and by his own powers of conversion, out again.(162)

The “universe” here is the “Human Universe” of the title, rendered in its kinetic actuality. Doing so, Olson believes, opens rather than closes the door to discovery. It also returns man to “his life,” which is precisely what Crozier valued in the essay. By calling readers to become “hot for the world” as it is, Olson’s essay inspired Crozier to discover the kinetic of his own experience (Olson, “Human Universe” 166).

In writing this discovery, as I suggested above, the Romney Marsh poems seek to “re-enact” the “open” field of the marsh according to principles outlined by Olson in “Projective Verse.” In fact, in departing from the traditional, closed forms of The Movement and The Group, the Romney Marsh poems can be said to present an English version of Olson’s poetics. This is perhaps clearest in their enactment of “Field Composition,” with its attendant principles of kinetics, principle, and process (Olson, “Projective Verse” 240). Early in the essay, Olson explains kinetics in terms of energy: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” The kinetics of composition, then, grounds a poem in its affective resonance, in its relationship to an immediate community of readers, rather than the abstract notions of canon or tradition. This principle would have been crucial to Crozier in founding The English Intelligencer, having already been inspired by Olson to engage with the “Human Universe” of his own world in political and literary terms. In addition to this, though, the now famous principle of Creeley’s that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” also proved important (Olson, “Projective Verse” 240). The Romney Marsh poems—indeed, nearly all of the Intelligencer’s poetry—appears to follow this precept in avoiding the formalism of Larkin and his followers by pursuing whatever shape the language insists on during the act of composition. Of course, this focus on the act of composition leads naturally to Olson’s insistence on process, that is, that “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (Olson, “Projective Verse” 240). In eschewing linear narrative and conventional notions of self-expression, these poems instead pursue a series of perceptions regarding Romney Marsh.

“MARS’ES FIELD”

These principles would have resonated with Crozier, Riley, and the Intelligencer poets generally for their opposition to the formal verse then popular in Britain. In fact, by positioning the Romney Marsh poems in the last issue of the first series—the last issue edited by Crozier before handing over these duties to Riley—the poems serve as an extension of the editorial intervention formed by Crozier and Riley’s printed correspondence in the debate about the “Englishness” of the Intelligencer’s contributors. In this way, Olson’s remarks on the need to extend the revolutionary poetics established by Pound, Williams, and Cummings can be read not only in the context of Black Mountain but also as an instigation to the Intelligencer poets. Olson catalogs the conventions established by such pioneers of open field composition in regard to their alacrity in using the typewriter’s invitation to key extra space between words, to hold a word or syllable by breaking lines in unexpected places, to augment punctuation by providing a plethora of symbols for pausing and affecting rhythm, and to shift the margins of a text at any point on the page (Olson, “Projective Verse” 245–46). Consequently, he argues that such stylistic revolutions are urgently needed to confront the reactionary response to the experiments of modernism: There is more to be said in order that this convention be recognized, especially in order that the revolution out of which it came may be so forwarded that work will get published to offset the reaction now afoot to return verse to inherited forms of cadence and rime.(246)

Although Olson probably had in mind the formalism of, say, John Crowe Ransom and the Kenyon Review, Crozier and Riley could apply the same passage to their struggle with the formal conservativism of Larkin and his followers. While there are many aspects of the Romney Marsh poems that demonstrate this struggle, perhaps the clearest exposition of Olson’s influence can be seen in the line breaks and shifting margins that make up the cartography of each composition.

Fittingly for poems on marshes, the line breaks and the shifting margins draw attention to the mutability of place, to its changing identity. As a wetland, of course, marshes naturally occupy a liminal space, being neither a body of water nor a solid land mass. Only through human intervention can they be drained and used for pasturage or habitation. Viewed in this way, Romney Marsh has a special significance: its drainage extended the English coastline and altered the island’s natural (and national) border. As a result, through the lens of Olson’s archaeological poetic, it can suggest the instability of place names and borders and so offer an intervention in the debate over the “Englishness” of The English Intelligencer.

A closer look at Crozier’s line breaks and shifting margins in “On Romney Marsh” will make this clearer. The first significant line break occurs almost simultaneously with the first margin shift: or at least since the salt was drained and the landbecome pasturage     cut through with dykes(Crozier, “On Romney Marsh” 11. 3–5)

Breaking the syntax in this way alters the timing of the opening lines, with their meditation on the arrival of sheep on the marsh. Subject, “the land,” is separated from verb, “become,” and the tense seems confused. The grammar of the passage only makes sense if it is elliptical for the pluperfect, that is, “the land had become pasturage.” The distinction emphasizes the primacy of pasturage, cultivating the land through human means for agricultural purposes. In other words, it is not assumed that the sheep simply wandered onto the marsh of their own accord and were later domesticated; instead, it draws attention to the crucial role of human intervention in creating the marsh and, by extension, the field of the poem. The marginal shift that follows expands on this. The dykes create the marsh itself, reclaiming it from the sea and transforming the coastline. Their appearance is rendered violently, however. They “cut” the marsh, just as the line break and accompanying marginal shift cut across the page. The abrupt movement here “re-enacts” (in the sense Olson intended) the process of draining the marsh. Read in this way, the dykes represent the attempt to claim and define the island, in opposition to the natural flux of the sea. Fittingly, in Crozier’s poem such lines become confused, leading the reader into a box, “a series of right angles,” that appears as a labyrinthine detour from the predictable course: seeking the plank bridges, you might goa long way from your way(11. 8–9)

Here, going out of your way equates with getting lost in the marsh; the “plank bridges” serving as a reminder of the site’s tenuous existence and prior position as harbor for the port towns of New Romney, Appledore, Rye, and Winchelsea, as well as the island of Lydd. The threads connecting this history with the marsh in Crozier’s time are plainly economic and political: port cities then, as agriculture later, were major sources of revenue and trade, while doubling as a first line of defense from potential invasions. The middle section of the poem explores this further.

Crozier breaks from the passage above by shifting the margin to the center of the page and returning to the sheep. They are, the speaker notes, “a known breed, and remain / the use of their wool” (Crozier, “On Romney Marsh” 11. 12–13). The line break plays with the sense of “remain.” The sheep have grazed the marsh long enough to be an established breed, and “remain” at first appears to reinforce their permanence as a fixture of the landscape. However, the pivot into the next line reveals that their economic value, “the use of their wool”—or, as the following line has it, their use as “mutton”—keeps them there, penned under the metaphorical gaze of “the Queen’s Head at Icklesham” (11. 14–15). The association with political power is developed more explicitly over the next six lines, where the military importance of the former ports and current marsh is explored: as you look over the marsh to the humpson which stand Rye and Winchelsea, fortifiedagainst Frenchpirates who brought their boats up where the sea rannow inland, Land Gate and Water Gate, names recordthe old topography, a strategic importance.(11. 16–21)

In this passage, the margin, like the sea, is returned to its original position on the left. The line breaks, meanwhile, bring into focus the historical “importance” of the former port towns. The comma in line 17 conveys not merely a pause but “meaning,” as Olson notes it should in the above cited passage from “Projective Verse” (246). The effect is to “fortify” the town names on the page, engaging the reader visually, as Olson’s poetry so often does. The breaks at lines 17 and 18 reinforce this, separating the English towns from, at first, the French generally, and then subsequently, by augmenting the awkward phrasing of line 18 with line 19, “French / pirates.” This movement causes the reader to, as Olson suggests it should, “suspend[ ] a word . . . at the end of a line,” dwelling on its possible implications in the larger context of the passage (“Projective Verse” 245). In this case, the pause on “fortified,” followed immediately by “French,” focuses the reader’s attention on the “strategic importance” of “Land Gate and Water Gate,” as well as “Rye and Winchelsea,” not to mention “the marsh” itself. They are literally defenses against foreigners in general and “pirates” in particular, and as such set a boundary. Their position, in the “old topography” and the new, marks “the contour” (as Crozier will call it) of southeastern England against pirates, foreigners, the sea, and all that is not English. Such a rendering, offered in the context of debates concerning the lack of Englishness in the work of the poets engaged in the Intelligencer, marks a significant intervention in that project, as a look at two more passages from Crozier’s poem will help show.

The first occurs in lines 22 to 25. The margin once again shifts to the right, this time to the furthest point right it will go, to document the draining of the sea revisited in the previous passage and consider its effects on nearby villages: further, as the sea drew backalong the Rother’s course, did it thenturn inland westward, to drown seven parishesof nine at Hastings.

The first word of the passage works like “cut” earlier, pushing the sea and the reader “further . . . back” into the visual field of the poem. The lines recall how the creation of the marsh parallels the rerouting of the River Rother. An unfortunate by-product of this rerouting would have been the destruction of “seven parishes / of nine at Hastings.” The position of “did,” at the head of the clause in line 22, suggests a question; but the line break reveals the river’s new course to be an assertion, albeit one with dire consequences for the inhabitants of seven communities. The assertion therefore reveals the literal fluidity of borders, the impermanence of topographical markers. In this way, it exhibits the process-oriented concerns of Olson, for whom poetry and place were in a constant state of movement.

The second passage pivots on this understanding. Returning the margin to the left, the speaker moves decisively, “plotting a course” alone, “sheltering me as I walked” (Crozier, “On Romney Marsh” 11. 26, 29). The shifting identity of the place bears a corresponding response in him. Following the marsh’s “contour to enter Rye,” following it from Dungeness or Lydd and back inland to Rye, along the water’s edge, the speaker enters the city, “across the sluice / from the other side” (11. 30–32). Here he moves “across” the new fortifications, above the gates that control and maintain the marsh, entering the former port from the direction of what was the sea, with the suggestion that his movement reenacts that of previous visitors “from the other side,” that he is thus like the French pirates of old. The line breaks emphasize the importance of his course’s direction, rendering each as prepositional phrases. The larger implication, then, appears to be that although the margin has been restored, the perspective has changed. The border of England, like the margin or, for that matter, the status of Rye, is now understood as permeable and fluctuating. Along with it, of course, is the very Englishness that was debated in the pages of the Intelligencer. The speaker, by the end of the poem, aligns himself with the perspective of “the other side,” of the French side of the channel. By focusing on a site that embodies such topographical and national change, Crozier situates his work within Olson’s poetics of process and its almost mythical extension in theories of continental drift—theories that seemed to him to vindicate his larger ambitions in the sections of The Maximus Poems then being prepared for publication in Britain, thanks largely to Crozier’s collaborator and former teacher, Prynne. In the spirit of community voiced above, Riley’s poem does much the same.

“From Romney Marsh” begins with a response to the “I” that closes Crozier’s poem, emphasizing their shared perspective: as I have, several times, stood at Dungeness point, my backto the sea, for that further reach . . .(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 1–2)

The lowercase opening, coupled with the mention of Dungeness point, the furthest point at which the land stretches into the sea, effect Riley’s “further reach.” It is another instance of the affective relationship highlighted by Olson’s insistence on the kinetics of the writer–reader dynamic, here figured in such a way that the reader becomes a fellow writer. In this way, the poem encourages the reader to continue the process of meaning that began with the first line of Crozier’s piece. In doing so, the mention of Dungeness point is significant. In addition to lighthouses, Dungeness is home to two nuclear power plants, the first of which was built in 1965, just two years before the composition of Riley’s poem. In suggesting anxieties over the potential for England’s future destruction—a potential made very real by the Cuban missile crisis, an event Crozier recalled in conjunction with Olson and with his first stirrings as a poet—the poem begins by voicing a shared sense of anxiety dealt with by subsequent poetic and political commitment (Crozier, “Andrew Crozier Interviewed” 104–5). Indeed, in both poems, England is threatened not by foreigners but by itself—by its own insularity. As with Crozier’s poem, Riley’s uses line breaks and an important marginal shift to render this.

Like its companion piece, “From Romney Marsh” offers an Olsonian meditation on place. The first significant line break, in line 3, begins with a punctuation device used frequently in The Maximus Poems—the open or unclosed parenthesis: of my own migration southwards (notthat I haven’t been further south even within the island, but the waythe marshes point themselves outwards into the channel, themselves,so recently, undersea—that they push forth from thatcurve of hillocks, the former coastline.(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 3–7)

The unusual punctuation functions here as it does in Olson’s and Robert Creeley’s work, to suggest an incomplete thought or ongoing process. The sense of line 3 is doubled by the line break on the negative, “not”: Dungeness is not the furthest south the speaker has traveled in England; however, it is the furthest south he has gone in terms of the sea level, of low-lying land. This play on the marsh’s status as wetland leads directly to an exploration of the current and “former” coastlines. The comma in line 6 adds to this and creates meaning, in the way Olson notes commas should (“Projective Verse” 246). The “marshes” of line 5 pushed out into the sea “so recently,” while also having been relatively “recently” “undersea.” This duplicity emphasizes the marsh’s liminal status, and at the liminality, therefore, of the coastline. In this regard, “recently” is notable. The marshes date back to the high Middle Ages and are not historically recent. In terms of Earth’s history, of continental drift, several hundred years certainly is recent.

Subsequent lines document the speaker’s burgeoning realization of space as open and of England as being in a constant state of flux, despite the best efforts to fix and contain it. In terms similar to Riley’s “Working Notes on British Prehistory” (47–73), the speaker here chides his earlier, “misplaced” pursuit of “that motive of centre” (Riley, “From Romney Marsh” l. 16). In the essay, the establishment of “Town” as “centre” is cataloged under the list of Neolithic developments that mark the “first of our difficulties” (Riley, “Working Notes” 49–51). Thus mistaking London as such a center—indeed, after dismissing the logic of centers and peripheries altogether—the speaker pivots into a recognition of the fluidity of place as embodied by Romney Marsh: . . . I was moving more in a landas it could be or might have been, and in that voyaginghave built of myself what for centrality I can—only in thatpush further, beyond the initial intent, only at this extremelinked with a whole land, and beyond it, to feel its placein a greater mass. . . .(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 17–22)

The marsh’s push out into the sea points the speaker toward a recognition of the land’s extension, in terms of what “could be” or “might have been” and in terms of its reach across the map and connection to places “beyond.” The recognition circles back around to the “you” of the poem, the speaker of “On Romney Marsh”: . . . So it is that you, feel for this placemainly its traces of resistance: the coastal haltagainst invasion now ridiculed by the sea’s own backstep toa puny succession of dykes, dead straight, guarding aflat nonsense of sheep and placenames: the possibilityof a direct tidal sweep of your own home—(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 22–27)

Once again, the poem reaches beyond the margin of its own border to connect with Crozier’s. Like him, Riley sees a history of the former coastline’s stout “resistance” now “ridiculed” by “the sea’s own backstep,” as though it were dancing around the new coastline, ready to step back toward it at any moment. The marsh itself is devoid of meaning, of sense and identity, “a / flat nonsense of sheep and placenames.” The break at line 25 emphasizes this, forcing the reader to dwell first on the indefinite article “a” without any accompanying noun, to consider that the “dykes” are “guarding” nothing, an empty space, before moving into the “flat nonsense” apparent in the following line. That the “placenames” are “nonsense,” that “the possibility / of a direct tidal sweep of your own home” remains apparent, refers back to the coastline’s instability. Indeed, it reinforces the perspective broached earlier in the poem (and shared by Crozier’s) that the topography of the place is changeable, that the border is permeable, and that only in viewing it so can it begin to make sense.

In contrast to such “nonsense,” the following section drives inland, following the “contour” noted in Crozier’s poem (Crozier, “On Romney Marsh” l. 30; Riley, “From Romney Marsh” l. 42). Riley’s speaker follows this out to its extreme: I can’t stop—that curve, where’s itsother end, it goes further back, where?to Ireland, beyond? Did I pull my own tailin Spain on a school trip in 1956?(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 43–46)

The movement here is circular, its questions searching and rhetorical. The first line break separates the possessive “its” from “other end,” mimicking the experience of searching and yet finding further to go. This, of course, is precisely the point. For the “curve” to go to “Ireland” and ultimately “Spain” is to read the map archaeologically, in terms of the migration of peoples—the Celts, and so on— and geologically, in terms of the shifting of continents over large expanses of time, as the theory of continental drift would have indicated. As Riley put it his “Working Notes on British Prehistory,” the island’s break with the supercontinent, when the “North Sea and Channel filled up,” was, “the first of our difficulties” (49).

Following this realization, the subsequent passage of the poem, the only marginal shift in Riley’s piece, asserts a more dynamic sense of place: The place, is this time, as I think I’ve told youthat old Beatles tunes are for me places when I wasnomadic in London; a cafe in Kentish Town, a flatnear Marble Arch, others, those discs limited as theyare to a few months each, the place where Icaught each one at itsmost intense, sticks.(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 47–53)

Here place spins off of, while remaining etched onto, the map. Similar to the music of “old Beatles” records, which is impressed on vinyl discs and carried in the memory of each listener, Riley’s place is portable; in fact, it is “nomadic,” like the Mesolithic Britons living, according to the poet, before “the first of our difficulties” (Riley, “Working Notes” 49). That this uprooting of place should appear in the one section of the poem that plays with margins is not coincidental. Riley’s marginal shift evokes the shifting border of land and sea at Romney Marsh. The significance of those shifts is apparent in the archaeological perspective they provide, in other words, in their ability to destabilize place by revealing earlier layers of human history, and thus posit a future beyond the “nonsense” of “placenames” and seemingly fixed identities. In this way, such names and borders are associated with “Beatles’ tunes,” ephemeral as the “discs” spinning “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” or “Hard Day’s Night”—or, at least, as they may have seemed in 1967. The commas in the first line of the passage reinforce this. At first, “is” would seem to be the main verb of the passage, with a comma separating it from its subject, “place.” In fact, the main verb is delayed; it is “sticks,” in the final line. The parenthetical “is this time” is an assertion of the Olsonian moment, of the time of writing in “Projective Verse.” As such, it is manifold. This sense of place—on the page, in the memory, on the discs—shifts with the nomadic wanderings of the reader/listener, branching out in time and space as it is read or heard, while also remaining imprinted on this particular piece of paper. In the following, concluding section of the poem, the realization of this Mesolithic sense of place provides the speaker with an escape from his earlier, Paleolithic search for a center: And at Romney, looking back now,I caught thisway out.(Riley, “From Romney Marsh” 11. 54–56)

In contrast to Crozier, whose poem ends with the speaker entering a former coastal town, Riley’s conclusion focuses on exiting. Both understand Romney Marsh as offering, not as symbol but in its very topography, a kind of archaeological evidence that brings a fresh perspective to their Intelligencer debates. While Crozier’s speaker brings it with him inland, presumably to share in conversation with other poets receiving and contributing to the Intelligencer debate, Riley’s speaker conversely takes it as an invitation to move outward, as an escape from “nonsense.” Both movements in this case are complementary, as they work to reconfigure the map and reimagine Englishness as a dynamic experience of place. In this way, the poems work as interventions into the Intelligencer’s debates over Olson and American influence by reaching back to an earlier ground of being. In fact, Riley’s attention to the distinctions between Mesolithic and Neolithic, Crozier’s graduate school interest in Norse, and Olson and Prynne’s enthusiasm for theories of continental drift share a desire to explore an international poetic rooted in prenationalist experience. Seen in this way, their concerns are not merely Anglo-American but transnational. At once rooted in the particulars of 1960s America and Britain, their writing branches out from Gloucester and Romney to uncover a borderless Pangaea in the archaeology of history and the imagined future of poetry. As Riley has it, to remain fixed on such place names is ultimately “nonsense.”

Together these poems embody the kind of responsiveness that Crozier and Riley intended for The English Intelligencer. Indeed, conceived as a “worksheet” rather than a “magazine,” the periodical was meant to function in just this way. As a forum for disaffected poets, the editors hoped to create a space for an emerging English avant-garde to chart its own trajectory. In doing so, Crozier’s and Riley’s pieces on Romney Marsh invite the reader to become a fellow writer, to enter the imagined community that was the Intelligencer’s circulation list through the act of distanciation performed by these poems. In their attention to margins and marginalization, they can be said to “re-enact,” to use Olson’s term, the kinetic of the marsh, which is representative of the larger aims and intentions of the worksheet. As a consideration of the poems in light of “Human Universe” and “Projective Verse” shows, they and the worksheet in which they were first printed are indebted to Olson’s example. As Crozier and Riley admitted, Olson’s extension of modernist practices was the starting point for their own poetic careers and for the Intelligencer. Together, they sought a poetic that avoided abstraction in favor of the actual and eschewed narrative and the conventions of lyric in favor of the challenge of “COMPOSITION BY FIELD.” In this way, they strove to restore a transnational modernism implicit in Olson and Prynne’s enthusiasm for discussions of continental drift, and, extending the metaphor, with the larger implications for a transnational poetry of flux, of constant motion, akin to that proscribed by Olson in his essays.

As I have tried to show throughout, then, in attempting to accomplish this goal, Olson’s influence was essential. In terms of his poetic and his example of how to be a poet in the contemporary world, Olson inspired Crozier, Riley, and their collaborators to extend the work of Black Mountain poets by creating an English avant-garde that would be responsive to the need for a transatlantic and, indeed, transnational renewal of modernist poetic practice. The English Intelligencer was central to this effort. Indeed, the title alone reflects the editors’ desire to foster a comparable poetic community in 1960s England, one that would break with the apparent nativism of The Movement by extending the modernist practice evident in Olson’s work, and in so doing help advance an international avant-garde through the worksheet’s dissemination among like-minded poets and readers. As the opening “PROPOSITION” of the worksheet has it, “the Intelligencer is for the island and its language, to circulate as quickly as needs be” (Pattison et al., Certain Prose 3).