pointing to east and west 1972;^36 JohnAsh relocating to New York in the early 1980s, an Ashbery disciple
gnomically trashing British culture. Heading east: Edwin Morgan with his trips to
Russia and Eastern Europe, his wonderful translation work;^37 Duncan Bush, who
shuttled between Wales and Europe, and wrote the prose-verse novelThe Genre
of Silence(1988) about the disappearance of the Soviet poet Victor Bal in Stalin’s
purges. Victor Bal is fictional, but it is an indication of the depth of identification
of poets such as Bush with their dissident counterparts that the ‘imitation’ of Bal’s
poetry is so uncannily realistic. Bal perishes in the terrible purges of writers after
1937, and leaves manuscripts of poems addressed to fellow victims (Mandelstam,
Babel), to the poisonous and self-destructive Writers’ Union (‘sheep|milling for the
microphone|like wolves’^38 ), and, most pertinent to the Cold War, addressed to all
writers caught up in the imagining of totalitarian forces: ‘We lie awake at night and
dream|the knocking at the door through which|we’ll disappear for ever.’^39 What
Bush captures so deftly is the constant hum of paranoia within all minds composing
poetry during the Cold War, a fantasy of persecution (‘the times’|skulduggery
and paranoia’) generated by sympathy for poets to the east with theirsamizdat
poems—‘self-seeding,||perennial, unkillable as thistle’.^40
Still, the overwhelming influence was from America, boosted by the special
relationship’s occult and hypnotic sway even and inevitably over movements set
up in opposition to Cold War militarization. In Cold War Britain, as the New
Left rose to prominence in the wake of anti-nuclear protests in the late 1950s,
a very special relationship developed between British poets opposed to the arms
race and their seniors in the Beat (particularly Ginsberg and Burroughs) and Black
Mountain schools (Olson above all, alongside Creeley and Duncan). The British
Poetry Revival in particular was largely shaped by the example of the resistance of
American poets and writers to the nuclear warfare state. Gael Turnbull’s Migrant
Press bridged the UK and US, linking poets with the American avant-garde. Stuart
Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press brought the voices of Snyder, Zukovsky, and Duncan
into relationship with the resuscitated English modernism being practised by Roy
Fisher and Basil Bunting. Significantly, Fisher ended up teaching on an American
Studies programme, as did Eric Mottram.^41 And many of the Revival poets joined
(^36) In Cold War terms, see also Ken Smith’s documentaryBerlin: Coming in from the Cold
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). His poem ‘Secret Police’ imagines them singing praises to the God
of Paranoia.
(^37) See Edwin Morgan,Collected Translations(Manchester: Carcanet, 1996). This includes Maya-
kovsky done into Scots, translations of Voznesensky, Pasternak, and Vinokurov.
(^38) Duncan Bush, ‘Night, Day’, inThe Genre of Silence(Ogmore-by-Sea: Poetry Wales Press,
1988), 38. 39
40 Bush, ‘Writers’ Union Building, Moscow, 1937’, ibid. 31.
Bush, ‘The Age of Rust’, ibid. 37.
(^41) Indeed, it was the fact that Mottram printed too many Americans in thePoetry Review, which he
edited during the 1970s, which led to his dismissal by the Poetry Society, a sacking which still resonates
today in the split between mainstream and so-called Linguistically Innovative Poetry.