What Not to Make of Eric Mottram: Questions & Remarks on Contemporary British & American Poetry

Abstract

The following remarks were delivered at first Eric Mottram Conference in Poetics and Cultural Studies at The University of London's Centre for English Studies on September 19, 1997. I have largely left them in their somewhat fragmentary talk-form. Eric Mottram (1924-1995) was author of over a hundred and sixty articles and twenty critical works, including many essays on poetry and poetics and first book-length study of William Burroughs; author of twenty collections of poetry; first teacher of American Studies in University of London; and editor of Poetry Review between 1972 and 1977, publishing there a wide range of British, American, and European avant-garde poets. The conference, organized by William Rowe, Robert Hampson, Yasmin Skelt, and Peterjon Skelt, was designed (in words of its program) explore and extend field in which Eric Mottram was working. Other speakers included Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, Jeff Nuttall, Lisa Raphals, Dale Carter, Allen Fisher, and Bill Griffiths. For me, as for others in Britain and United States, one of Eric Mottram's most important roles was enabling transatlantic discourse among writers and scholars. Thus I suppose that I might begin by asking to what extent conditions and circumstances, local and international, which Mottram confronted in his efforts to act as such a conduit still obtain today. Now I suspect that Mottram's greater successes involve what he helped bring to British attention rather than what he carried from England to United States. If his work as critic and as editor of Poetry Review were more widely known in United States, if his range of interests were as well-known as, say, Donald Davie's efforts to sustain national identities in poetry with arguments about syntax and diction, we might very well have a less reductive view of British poetry in United today, a different reading list in those few sites where American readers might decide or be obliged to read recent British poetries. I doubt it, though, as that reductive view - those caricatures of a poetry altogether dominated by anti-modernism, all more powerful when as is often case they are left unvoiced, have been too valuable for all parties contesting American turf. A declining engagement with British poetries except insofar as they can be absorbed into half-baked critical rhetorics designed to prop up one or another American practice is result of factors too numerous to list, but none is more important than fact that, after World War II, tremendous effort was put into constructing and administering an Atlanticist culture. Atlanticism was an American invention and bore an American signature. The Great Books were to be made primers in American history; we were to take over euromuseum and - this crucial part - set it up way we wanted. We are by no means through with all this yet, despite new multicultural paradigms, as any examination of disciplinary structures organizing literary and cultural education in United will attest. Canons have changed, multicultural has come in, but multicultural stops at borders of nation and sign of nation still reigns supreme, just as it did in Atlanticist paradigm. A glance at sad state of Comparative Literature as a discipline in U.S.A. should indicate that much. Globalization remains a murmur in excited fantasies about internet or paranoid ones about purportedly homogenizing force of international capital. In writing of the specifically American character of postmodernism, critic Andreas Huyssen noted some time ago not only history of that term as it first accrued its emphatic connotations in United States but also extent to which forms of postmodernist or neo-avantgardiste practice in United positioned themselves not against European models of high culture, which had already been weakened by historical avant-gardes in Europe, but against a simulacrum of such a culture in United States, as represented for instance by modernism of New Critics and others. …