Know Your Sudden Book Well: A Postscript to Toad Church

Robin [Blaser] once said, in talking about a serial poem, that it's as if you go into a room, a dark room. A light is turned on for a minute. Then it's turned off again and you go into a different room where a light is turned on and turned off. --Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lecture 2 Barry MacSweeney began writing Toad Church in May 1972 while working at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. In the shadow of the Royal Observatory, site of the prime meridian and zero longitude, and across the river from the docks where workers that July took part in national strikes leading to a state of emergency, MacSweeney's joy in the museum marked a period of intense and refreshed creativity. His job, which lasted a little over a year, involved restoring paintings by mostly forgotten naval artists, like John Everett and John Wilson Carmichael. In the basement of the museum, as he would later tell Eric Mottram, MacSweeney built frames and worked with oils all day under fluorescent lights. In Toad Church this work is rendered as alchemical activity: with flaked ore and crystals and mercurial cinnabar overpowering the senses, the field of vision is filled and spills over into buried puns and misheard phrases until light pours out of the ears and into the porch of mirrors. The fumes gave MacSweeney headaches; the lighting harmed his eyesight. Over the first half of the 1970s, MacSweeney wrote a series of serial poems, beginning with Just 22 and I Don't Mind Dying in 1971. In each book the task of navigation and orientation is central. In Starry Messenger, a serial poem written in 1975, a careful movement is completed in the final lines: guide / yourself / into the / lucid charts. But Toad Church is more truly dedicated to straying and wandering, appropriately enough for a lost sequence, published here in full for the first time. Straying, wandering, getting lost: it's not a question of false scents, exactly--more like a trail of crumbs being thrown ahead and immediately kicked aside. Born in Newcastle in 1948, MacSweeney left school at age sixteen to become a journalist, sharing an office at the Evening Chronicle with Basil Bunting. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he attended readings at the Morden Tower, a small unheated room built into the city walls and often lit by candlelight, which Tom and Connie Pickard had turned into a countercultural hub for live poetry and music. At the same time, he formed important relationships in correspondence and in person with the poets around The English Intelligencer worksheet--J. H. Prynne, John James, Peter Riley, Andrew Crozier, and others--with whom he argued and enthused about the possibilities of a poetry informed by the New Left, popular culture, and an insatiable range of literary influences. Then in 1968, his book The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother appeared with the commercial press Hutchinson and promptly sold eleven thousand copies. Marketed as a young proletarian troubadour and nominated (apparently via a well-placed bribe) for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, MacSweeney was briefly the most famous poet in Britain. The experience was disastrous. He was humiliated in newspaper interviews, and his work was satirized in establishment magazines. For many writers, this experience might have spelled the end. But MacSweeney persisted, mainly publishing short lyrics in magazines, which he later collected in books issued through his own Blacksuede Boot Press. He was interested in reestablishing control over his poetry: how and when it appeared, whom it was intended for, and whom he would appear alongside. His last volume of discrete poems before his experiments in serial form, Flames on the Beach at Viareggio (1970), features a cover drawn by his brother Paul. The selection was chosen and arranged by Barry's then-girlfriend Vivienne. Across MacSweeney's whole writing life there would be periods like this, where his confidence was re-established through the interventions of his partners, family, and friends. …

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