pointing to east and west However much Spender and company might deny knowledge of the Congress
slushfund, the very fact that the CIA had been so ready to fund the so-called
non-Marxist Left in the cause of anti-communism was enough for the Revivalists
to veer sharply to extremes. The Cold War, in other words, polarized British poetry
along ideological lines, mainstream versus underground, however non-committal
or even non-aligned the poet might explicitly be. The nasty turf wars of the 1970s
and 1980s in Reaganite/Thatcherite Britain were more than typical Grub Street
scuffles, but militant mimicry of the conflicts occurring in the broader spectrum
of nuclear politics. The splits and fissures in the poetry world were a Cold War
in miniature, coded, secretive, vicious, the mainstream seemingly in hock to Cold
War funding, be it CCF or British Council, the underground fascinated by power
and systems and technologies of death, issuing obscure chapbooks and broadsides
like secret service memos and directives to a tiny counter-intelligence network.
The truth of the matter is not so dark—many poets functioned perfectly well
in polite ignorance of the superpolitical world. More interestingly, significant
groupings of poets operated in the twilight zone between East and West, a
non-aligned space neither in truck to the nuclear sublime nor in paranoid counter-
cultural reverse imitation of its power structures. Poets like Peter Robinson,
associated with the Cambridge school as editor ofPerfect Bound, moved into the
‘third space between’ after conflicts with the school over politics. His measured,
reflective poetry ponders Britain’s role as Cold War player and target, setting against
the control towers of its surveillance of culture the intimate bonds and allegiances
of lovers. In an early poem, ‘Finding the Range’, Robinson compares poetry’s art
of peace with the world of the military running the landscapes of Europe. Cycling
inadvertently near a NATO shooting range on ‘dutch brakeless bikes’, two lovers
fall asleep after picnicking in a copse offering ‘cover’, whilst listening to the ‘crackle
of automatic rifle fire’, glimpsing ‘the men|with twigs stuck in their hats’. The
poet watches the clouds pass by in the sky above the Army Corps, ‘the forest
and the plain|and us’, and quips: ‘watching them|I might be counting sheep’.^51
The joke has its own reserve and caution, but resonates with crackling energy
nevertheless. The clouds as sheep judge the anti-pastoral forces playing soldiers on
the plain below. NATO has taken over the landscapes of poetry, turning copses into
‘cover’, forests of pine into ‘salient feature’, stripping the land of the grazing sheep,
banishing them to the realm of the puffy ideal. The Armed Forces stretch from
the ‘shallow horizon’ of England over the sea to the front lines in Germany: ‘an
army corps|practises combat deployment|36 hours from its allotted front line.’
Yet the pastoral art of peace which poetry deploys, with its own front lines and
range, can offer a comic rebuff of its own to the heartless military appropriations
(^51) Peter Robinson, ‘Finding the Range’, inOverdrawn Account(London: The Many Press, 1980),
- See also Robinson’s extraordinary 1980s poem collocating domestic argument with imminent
nuclear apocalypse, ‘Pressure Cooker Noise’, inSelected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 25.