Stanzas in the Stacks - Part One

One area of the library's stack collection which is particularly extensive and richly varied is its poetry selection (the 821s for English poetry, Dewey fans). There are thousands of volumes down there, containing millions of verses. They come in all shapes and sizes, from large and sumptuously illustrated editions to tiny pocket books. A miniscule collection of aphoristic Chinese verse titled Fragments of Jade may be one of the smallest books we have; its old yellow record card is actually greater in area than the cover of the book and rather spoils the otherwise exquisite aesthetic appeal of this perfectly formed object. 

Elsewhere there are self-published pamphlets, limited edition small-press publications, agit-prop broadsheets, Victorian collections with beautiful colour plates revealed beneath diaphonous sheets of tissue paper, and early collections by poets who would go on to great renown, sometimes in other literary forms. I recently hauled a trolley-load of these treasures up from the shadowy depths, bringing them into the light for a display in the lobby. There are undeniably some personal favourites there (Mervyn Peake, Poe and William Blake) but I've tried to be representative and also to include some of the more unusual, even bizarre artefacts which I have come across in my stack mining excursions. Here, then, are just a few of the volumes to be found down below. But there are more awaiting your discovery. Many, many more.   

William Blake is one of the most singular poets and artists to have emerged from England; an intense visionary who combined words and images to create a vivid, self-forged mythology which both reflected and transcended his times. We have a number of books which reproduce his extraordinary illuminated works, including this 1932 facsimile copy of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Appropriately enough, it was printed by the Temple Press in Letchworth, the Hertfordshire town which was the site for the first planned garden city. The idealistic garden city movement was an early 20th century attempt to plan a more integrated and human-scale community which combined elements of urban and rural living - an attempt at building the foundations for the new Jerusalem which Blake envisioned. There is an introduction to this copy of Visions of the Daughters of Albion by John Middleton Murry, a literary bigshot of the interwar years who, in a reversal of the usual historical trend in spousal recognition, is better known today as having been the other half of the now far more renowned writer Katherine Mansfield. Murry was the father of John Middleton Murry Jr, who adopted the pen-name of Richard Cowper for a series of science fiction novels published in the 60s and 70s and into the early years of the 80s. Notable amongst these are the White Bird of Kinship trilogy, beginning with the short story Piper At The Gates of Dawn (a nod to Kenneth Grahame and Pink Floyd) and its follow up novel The Road to Corlay. These are set in a future England which has been transformed into a series of islands after a drastic rises in the sea level. In a post-technological society, an oppressive theocracy exercises tyrannical power. The White Bird of Kinship is a new religious movement based around direct mystical communion which offers hope for a more spiritually liberated, utopian future. Cowper's vision bears some affinity with Blake's spiritually non-conformist radicalism, a 70s science-fictional variant of his visionary epics. 

Given the masterful integration of text and illustration through which Blake illuminated his work, it would be a bold move to provide your own pictorial accompaniment to his poems. But this is precisely what Paul Peter Piech did in a series of pamphlets produced in the late 60s which featured individual Blake poems from the Songs of Innocence and Experience. Piech was born in Brooklyn to Ukrainian immigrant parents, but whilst doing overseas wartime service in Cardiff he fell in love with a Welsh nurse called Irene Tomkins. After the war was over he moved to Britain to marry her and used his GI grant to study printing at the Chelsea School of Art. In the 50s he established himself as a top graphic artists in the advertising world, often combining text and imagery in a way which drew on his love of Blake. Always an idealist with a desire to see positive change in the world, he later became known for his political posters and designs, printed using the bold lino-cut outlines which he developed into a distinctive signature style. These designs again integrated image and text (using words by the likes of Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy and Gandhi) but now in the service of a political, social and spiritual radicalism more in alignment with Blake's non-conformist worldview. You can get some idea of what they looked like from a book he produced for his Taurus Press imprint which celebrated the hope Americans and people around the world found in the speeches of John F Kennedy. It's one of a number of Taurus Press books and pamplets we have down in the stacks.

The choice of Blake's poems were a natural choice for him to apply his lino-cut printing style to, then, and he produced these limited edition runs of single poem pamphlets through his own publishing imprint, The Taurus Press, which he set up in 1959. We have the complete set (as well as a number of other Taurus Press booklets). Piech returned to Wales in 1986, living out the final decade of his life in Porthcawl on the south coast. The National Library of Wales honoured this Brooklynite who adopted their nation as the country of his heart with a major exhibition which ran until January 2021. Hopefully this is a sign that his work may now receive greater recognition. We shall return to Piech for some of our later selections. 

                                                   

One publishing company particularly associated with 20th century poetry is Faber and Faber. The second Faber was actually redundant since there was only owner Geoffrey Faber lending his name to the firm. He added a second for larks. Faber's association with poetry is perhaps unsurprising given that one of the founding directors was TS Eliot, who remained with the firm from its inception in 1929 (and indeed during the 4 years of its earlier incarnation as Faber and Gwyer) until the 1960s. Faber published Eliot himself, WH Auden, Ezra Pound, Louis Macniece, Marianne Moore, Walter de la Mare (his son Richard was also a director) and later Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin. 

                                        

Faber editions are liberally distributed throughout the poetry section and immediately stand out on account of their highly distinctive graphic style. This is largely down to the design genius of Berthold Wolpe, a Jewish artist who escaped his native Germany in 1935 and joined Faber as resident cover designer in 1941. By this time he'd already given the yellow-jacketed Gollancz books their signature look. For Faber he employed the Albertus typeface with spare elegance and visual grace. It became so intrinsically associated with the publisher that it was often referred to as the Faber font. Wolpe's English wife Margaret Smith was also an artist and contributed a number of Faber jacket designs herself. You can see these and innumerable examples of Wolpe's work in the book Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design, available in the art section on the main floor of Exeter Library. 

With Pete Brown and Henry Graham we get into the realms of pop art, of the Liverpool poets (whom we'll return to later) and of the confluence of poetry and the underground scene (musical and otherwise) of the 60s and 70s. The citation of Kafka in the titles also shows how much the Czech writer had become a pop icon, not just in terms of his absurdist fiction, but literally so. He wasn't on the Sgt Pepper cover created by Peter Blake (more of him later) but he might as well have been. His owlish eyes certainly make it to the cover of the Henry Graham cover here. Graham was one of the lesser known Liverpool poets, and a visual artist (and art teacher) as well. Kafka obviously continued to be a personal touchstone throughout his life, since his last collection, published posthumously in 2002, was called Kafka in Liverpool. Though not a Scouser (he was born in Surrey and thus about as far away from Scouse as you can get), Pete Brown first became known as a poet on the thriving Liverpool scene of the early 60s. A scene which, not coincidentally, arose alongside the beat boom which culminated in the cultural explosion of Beatlemania. Brown himself became a part of that boom, teaming up with the supergroup Cream and co-writing a number of their hits with bassist and singer Jack Bruce - songs such as Sunshine of Your Love, I Feel Free and White Room. He continued his songwriting partnership with Bruce after Cream disintegrated in a chaos of ego-collision, and also formed his own bands Pete Brown and the Battered Ornaments and Piblokto! (the exclamation mark a part of the name, which derived from an Inuit term for a bad case of the winter blues). Brown's albums of the late 60s and early 70s were all graced by covers designed by the artist Mal Dean, who also provides the cover for Let 'Em Roll Kafka, the 1969 Pete Brown collection we have here (we also have his first collection, Few Poems, published in 1966, down in the stack). Dean was also a musician, playing trumpet on the 60s London jazz scene, sometimes venturing to the wildest shores of 60s and 70s free jazz. 

He produced the cover art for a 1972 duet album by the doyen of the free improv scene, guitarist Derek Bailey, and playful Dutch percussionist Han Bennink. David Toop writes about this cover as somehow summing up both the intense and sometimes combative interactions and the absurdist aspects of the free improv scene in his book about such music Into the Maelstrom: Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom, which is available in the library. Mal Dean is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to New Worlds magazine which, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock in the 60s and 70s became the flagship for the new wave of science fiction in Britain. Moorcock published the likes of JG Ballard, Thomas Disch, John Sladek, M.John Harrison, as well as his own fiction and criticism. He also published poetry by the like of DM Thomas, George Butterworth, Thomas Disch and George MacBeth, which we shall come to anon. Mal Dean provided some fantastic graphic illustrations for the magazine, notably depicting the amorphous anti-hero Jerry Cornelius, a chameleonic character who embodied the times he made his haphazard and chronologically unanchored way through. Dean's representation of Cornelius, which included several comic strip stories, gave perfect visual form to the surreal and satirical burlesque modern mythology which Moorcock and the other writers he encouraged to use the Cornelius cast created. Sadly, he died young from cancer in 1974. In a tribute issue of New Worlds Quarterly (no.8) Michael Moorcock concluded 'his personality lives on in the memories of his many friends. His talent, his generosity, his wit, are preserved forever in his work. This issue also contains three poems by Libby Houston, to whom Dean was married. He provided illustrations for her collections A Stained Glass Raree Show (1967) and Plain Clothes (1971), both of which we have in the stack. So you can see some of that work yourself. 

Ivor Cutler is one of a long line of treasured British eccentrics, a softly spoken Scotsman whose mild if sometimes spiky demeanour disguised a wilfully whimsical worldview which sometimes strayed into the realms of the gleefully grotesque. It's difficult to pin down exactly what kind of artist, or indeed what kind of person Ivor was. 'Humorist' is the vague catch-all description usually applied to him. Many Flies Have Feathers was his first collection of poetry, published in 1973. By this time he was already known for his appearances on the BBC, wireless and telly alike, and he had achieved fame of sorts through his portrayal of the lugubriously lovelorn coach tour guide Buster Bloodvessel in The Beatles' TV special Magical Mystery Tour. Enduring cult renown was assured when, from 1969 onwards, he became a regular guest on John Peel's radio shows, often wrangling his aged harmonium into wheezing life. He released a good number of LPs over the years containing songs, poems and skits. We have a few amongst our CD collections down in the stacks, including the hilarious saga (not that it really ever goes anywhere) Life In A Scottish Sitting Room Vol.2 (nb. there was no Vol.1). 

Ivor connected with the underground music scene, partly via his Peel appearances, and was good friends with Robert Wyatt and his partner Alfie Benge (he sings on Wyatt's classic LP Rock Bottom, which we have on CD down in the stacks). Christopher Logue connected with an earlier musical generation, collaborating with a number of British jazz musicians in the late 50s and early 60s. His poem Be Not Too Hard was set to music by Donovan and included in the Ken Loach film Poor Cow (which we have on DVD, both individually and as part of a Ken Loach box set). He was also a playwright, screenwriter and occasional actor. His screenplay about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, Savage Messiah, was filmed by Ken Russell and he also made an appearance in Russell's notorious shocker (but based on an Aldous Huxley books, so that's ok) The Devils. We've got that one on DVD - watch if you dare. Logue's ABC is a lighthearted work which occasionally makes serious points. It's a doggerel biographical alphabet of verse portraits, a set of poetic icons which refuses to take its lofty subjects seriously. Most impressively, he manages to find someone to fill the tricky X spot.  

Ray Bradbury was always one of the most lyrical of the science fiction authors writing in the genre's  'golden age' (loosely from around the late 30s to the mid-50s), so it's no surprise that he turned his poetic prose style to actual poetry. We have three of his collections downstairs: The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (shown above), Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Around in Robot Town, and When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Some of the poems have an element of the fantastic to them, but the nod to Whitman in the last title hints at Bradbury's perennial themes - a nostalgic and rhapsodic hymning of an America which has already become a dream of the past, and perhaps never truly existed anyway. Holding Your Eight Hands is a 1969 anthology of science fiction poetry edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, better known for his art criticism. Although originally published in the US (this is a 1970 UK reprint) there is a distinctly British bias to the authors included, along with American writers resident on these shores at the time. These include many of the authors and poets included in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine, mentioned above; the likes of DM Thomas, George Macbeth, Thomas M Disch, John Sladek  and Brian Aldiss. Also present are two of the Liverpool poets, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, for whom science fiction was a part of their pop art portfolio. Henri's poems Galactic Lovepoem and Universes, included here, were recorded with accompanying musical effects for one of the records he made with The Liverpool Scene, another group which saw the worlds of poetry and the pop and rock underground coming together in fruitful union. We have a 2CD compilation of The Liverpool Scene's recordings (basically everything they did) down in the stack. 

Well, that's enough for now I think. But remember, all these books (and CDs) are available to borrow from Exeter Library; if you see something you like on the display, why not take it out? Or you can reserve them and get them sent to your local Devon library. There's more to be revealed, so much more. We will delve down below shortly and bring more stanzas from the stacks up to the light.