adam piette
Ginsberg in the June 1965 Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation partly inspired by the
anti-Vietnamprotest meetings occurring in the States. Underlying many of the
more arcane oppositional interests and concerns of the Revival were very powerful
and intense reflections on the nuclear sublime, a theorizing of the Cold War as
a global, militarizing, ‘closed’ system of controlling discourses.^42 Bob Cobbing’s
experiments in permutation and chance in the generation of text begin with
an acknowledgement of the ways in which culture is being driven by the Cold
War’s computerized systems of prediction, game play, and feedback. Similarly, Eric
Mottram’s interest in open field poetics came into being partly through his sense of
the alarming fit between nuclear culture in the States and modes of mind control in
provincial dependants like the UK. His 1974 Kent Journal, reflecting on May 1970
when the National Guard opened fire on Kent State University students protesting
against Cold War culture in all its ramifications, identified the enemy’s ideology of
armoured power and policed boundaries with radioactive assault on the body’s cell
walls, as Allen Fisher has argued.^43 Mottram’s 1989 collectionPeace Projects and
Brief Novelspuzzled over the deeper dynamics of Cold War paranoia: ‘according
to Darwin|only the most paranoid survive’.^44 That paranoia was based on the
fantasy construction, by the paranoid system itself, of an East–West division in
the citizen imagination: ‘history makers propelled you east|further fantasy orders’;
‘with absurd leaders hung with fantastic offeringsfrom craving to be abject in the
West’.^45
J. H. Prynne, in his ground-breaking 1969 collectionThe White Stones, inaugur-
ated an Olsonian poetics of dissent through a compromised perceptual withdrawal
from the discourses of power, figured most insistently as the splicing, radioactively
insinuative language of nuclear control. The poems interrogate the disjunctions
of the Cold War in a series of semi-occult and abstract-riddling moves which
foreground the global geopolitics of an East–West division. ‘The Western Gate’
reimagines the earth as subject to the Cold War’s ‘turning & failing metaphysic’, the
false gleam of history, the formal circuits of power, reducing the dissident poet’s
role to redundant ecology or bankrupt Eliotic custodianship of language (‘I dedicate
the results|to the fish of the sea and the purity of|language’^46 ). The line of poetry
itself is ‘taut with|strain’ under nuclear threat (‘The explosion|is for all of us’),
(^42) See e.g. Michael Horovitz, ‘Afterwords’, inidem(ed.),Children of Albion: Poetry of the
Underground in Britain(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 369: ‘We’re weaving our own several
embroideries...on the sublime nuclear bing-bang loom inherited from Corso and Voznesenky and
Kops, who blow up the bomb in the best blast blessible—outlining its look & boom in haphazard
mosaics of words which locate the explosions in their psyche, to express them—creatively.’
(^43) AllenFisher,‘ÆstheticsandEthics:AnAspectofEricMottram’s1974KentJournal’;http://www.
albany.edu/mottram/emmag1af.html
(^44) Eric Mottram, ‘Peace Project 2’, inPeaceProjectsandBriefNovels(King’s College, London: Talus
Editions, 1989), 4. 45
Mottram, ‘Peace Project 3’, ibid. 5.
(^46) J. H. Prynne, ‘The Western Gate’, inPoems(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999), 48.