You encounter, midflow, many lines with quotation marks around them when reading the Collected Poems and Prose of Elaine Randell (Shearsman, 2024). In an e-book they would have hyperlinks, because they hint at hinterland. They aren't selected as fine phrased flourishes on the theme nor (mostly) epigraphs; not starting point nor – for they aren't woven into a pattern of complementary consonants and vowels – a melody that started variations. I imagine them in the heavy underlined blue of a hyperlink because that would add tendentiousness to the grafting-on. Actually the word “tendentiousness” should often be “deep relationship to the other”.

Here be canons, to an extent. Randell’s tangential quotes are very often from contemporaries, but not always. I'm not sure there are any readers for whom all her quotes readily bring a full text to mind. As the last century isn’t fully digitised, and copyrights present their necessary impedance, the legwork reader is therefore stalled. The blissed reader nods them through: for example, in a recent review of this book by my admirable colleague Steven Waling:

“….the unacknowledged quote [at] the end of this sequence [Watching Women With Children] is perhaps almost a manifesto of her approach to poetry:

18.

‘The fate of the world today depends

on the common understanding by the

whole human race of what a human being

really is and on enlarging the common notion of man.’”

Well then let’s acknowledge it. It’s in fact from Nikolai Khokhlov of the KGB, who defected to the West in 1954, talking in 1966 about parapsychological research:

“ ‘In Soviet Russia considerable interest has been aroused in research in parapsychology,’ Khokhlov began. Russian character, Khokhlov told the Institute’s attentive dinner guests, made for a people ‘specifically sensitive to matters relative to the mystical side of the human psyche’ and ‘to a world beyond the sober reality of sense.’ He then lectured the group about Russian scientists who had undertaken studies of ESP dating back to the late 1800s. He told them that the Soviet government actively encouraged such study, and name-checked prominent Russians (from astrophysicists to philosophers) who supported parapsychological inquiry. He described studies in which subjects had been able to perceive images from over a distance of nearly 2,000 miles. He concluded his talk on a hopeful note, saying, ‘The fate of the world today depends on the common understanding by the whole human race of what a human being really is. Here we are, on this side of the Iron Curtain, a small group of parapsychologists, trying to enlarge the common notion of man. And there are they, men of science and spirit, who are striving for the same higher goal.’ ”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nikolai-khokhlov-kgb-paranormal

Waling (a devoted supporter of Randell for years) has not got this. I don’t know if he got the quote from J.H. Prynne in the 2nd section of this 18 part sequence, either. Here is section 2:

The day

she woke early

bright sharp dawn.

Eyes that broke the floor

with anger spilled at the child the night before.

‘The prism of mere life is unbearable,

plants and animals in their secular change,

eaten up with will power.

[Note, no closing quote mark, in any edition of Randell's poems I have; itself a Prynnean punctuation, like that of one of Prynne’s masters, Charles Olson.]

Here is the original from Prynne:

As a context for a poem about watching women with children, both these quotes wildly throw open the view. Are the mothers and children eating themselves up? Is Randell asking with Prynne “what should we/do by watching”? Is there a psychic bond that is in fact not the short distance between the figures in the poem but between a mother and someone else 2000 miles away, and the same is true for a child and someone 2000 miles away? There is a useful suggestion that the apparently domestic scene/local sociology of the poem yearns subversively to seek a whole other context for all the potentials and tragedies involved. To provide a conceptual context is to give the reader a fair shake about the true feelings of the poet. Related to this, a favourite phrase in early Randell (used, for example, as a title) is “as if”.

Waling makes a case for one kind of feeling in Randell’s work, using a friend’s word ‘melty’, but he doesn't suggest anything as contemporary to her as Prynne;

“… the kind of experimental poetry that isn’t simply objectivist description or linguistic game-playing but actually leaves a real emotional resonance in the reader, and it’s a perfect adjective for this collection. Although one can trace her influences back to the American Objectivists such as Oppen, Reznikoff and Neidecker, it’s this ‘meltiness’, this willing to write out of and into feelings, that I find most valuable about her work.”

https://www.littermagazine.com/2024/12/review-collected-poems-prose-by-elaine.html

The influence-attribution echoes Luke Roberts, writing about Barry MacSweeney, on Randell

“His marriage to Elaine Randell ended unhappily, and his treatment of her was inexcusable. Yet her influence on his poetry should not be underestimated. They ran Blacksuede Boot Press together, and collaborated on a sequence, ‘Twelve Poems and a Letter’. Her interest in the American Objectivists, particularly Charles Reznikoff, informed Black Torch, and MacSweeney held her in high esteem as a poet.”

(Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things, 2017)

Billy Mills has recently reviewed the Collected and also said Here Be Objectivists:

“The early poems show an apparent familiarity with the Objectivists, especially Oppen… Above all, they look past the surface struggle to see resilience, human strength and a measured optimism:

Life is OK.

It has a lot to recommend it.

By and large.

And that same matter-of-fact tone, along with an Objectivist-inspired attention to detail, informs poems that deal with what we might, in another context, call ‘issues’.”

(https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/collected-poems-and-prose-by-elaine-randell-a-review/)

Laurie Duggan blogged about a reading Randell took part in, as follows:

“Shearsman launched three books. Michael Heller’s Beckmann Variations, Elaine Randell’s Faulty Mothering and Robert Vas Dias’ Still · Life. It was a superb reading from all three poets of work that was meditative, precise and witty with that sharpness of form that characterises what I’d see as the Objectivist diaspora.”

(https://graveneymarsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/objectivisms-children.html?m=1)

It was Prynne’s contemporary Andrew Crozier who was heavily responsible for bringing the Objectivists back from obscurity, so to be fair the Objectivists are a kind of Randell contemporary in a way. For one, Crozier tracked down Carl Rakosi and, with a fan letter, got him writing again.

It's certainly true that Randell has a poem dedicated to Carl Rakosi, in the uncollected poems section of her Collected book. But I think it's late. The section seems chronological, and the Rakosi poem is flanked by poems from 2018 before it and poems from 2020 after it, so it seems late. In format, the poem (about lambs) to Rakosi does use some of the tab-indent techniques of several of the Objectivists, and some of the style. One of the only other poems in the book to appear to use these tab-indents like this is the early “Bitten by it we conjure by touch”, but the language tactics are different.

The primary difference here is the pauses. The poem to Rakosi is weighted, pausing, stops, draws attention to its parts and makes conclusions. There is a statespersonlike sobriety in the use of the word “unthinkable”, and the linebreak and long line is angular with a thunk, in “the/unthinkable into love”. This is distinctly like Oppen, Rakosi, Bunting, Reznikoff. The earlier poem is more headlong, breathy, with little thunk and way more pretentious adverbs (“truly… so carefully”). The adverbs if they come from group pretence aren’t Objectivist, and the notable “we” here is used sparingly by them; and sparingly by Randell herself as her career proceeds (for example, in “Both eyes closed/we hold that//just a/flash/of you walking towards the beach away from us. The blur of/sky this white grey morning”, For LH at Brighton Station, her italics). The earnest, wide expanse view with shamanistic overtones, though, is very typical, in amongst English politeness, of the “drifting tones of Anglo-Catholic we” that Denise Riley noted in the Prynne/Cambridge/Olson sixties poets – note too the excerpt above from Prynne: his use of “really” at the end chimes, in tone, with Randell's “truly” and “so carefully”; Randell though eschews Prynne's cryptic habit of covering himself with an etymological reason (to do with the theory of real and realism) for his words.

Olson was undoubtedly fascinated by etymology, and enjoyed his letters with Prynne about it. In Randell there are plenty of Olsonian ideas, and imperatives to think differently, but unlike Prynne’s her language has maintained another side of Olson, his sometimes self-indulgent and grandiose plainness. Over 500 pages of a collected Randell makes this palpable. An authenticity in bulk forces a dialectic with Olson of ideas – rather than of styles. This is why we must not lazily see her work as Objectivist. She needs to be set against Prynne and others who attempted their own dialectic, working in an Olson style but making English versions of it, finessed and with new quirks of their own academias.

I argue Randell's poetry is not Objectivist (big O or small o), and in particular Randell’s midflow quoting doesn’t belong to the Objectivists; but instead to the style and ethos of this other poetic school. After all, and perhaps enforcing my argument, none of the midflow quotes in her early work are from an Objectivist poet, while several are from contemporaries and a few from pre-20th century poems and songs. Her early tics of linebreak or typography are not found in Oppen, Reznikoff or Neidecker, Rakosi, Zukofsky or Bunting – although some of these tics have been smoothed over for the Collected.

Reminiscent form or style is a showing of provenance, and will be noticed by finesse aficionados who may police (to be kept then at whatever distance). Nevertheless, before addressing her verbatim quotations in quote marks, we need to get a feeling for what Randell's “form quotation” does to the verbatim quotation, all the while wary we may be sharpening a double-edged sword. Many won't see the “form quotation” and good on them. Some won't see past it. Yet it adds a quality.

This is what Michael Whitworth says about allusion (my thanks to Alex Latter's work for pointing me to Whitworth; see reference to Latter by Joseph Pizza further on; Whitworth is discussing Eliot quoting from the Tempest in the Waste Land). We should remind ourselves before we go more at form (some readers will want to jump past this bit).

“If we detect a disruption of the textual surface, there is a factual question to be answered – is there a source text? – and an interpretative question about what the poet is doing with the source. One way of looking for source texts is simply to commit the lines to memory, to continue reading widely, and to wait for as long as it takes…. We could, of course, use various databases and search tools, but Eliot’s world did not contain such things. It may be that we are not supposed to understand the poem instantaneously; that it is supposed to be memorable but semi-comprehensible; that it sows seeds that sprout only when disturbed many years later.”

(Michael Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry, 2010)

Randell is working outside the recognised practice of allusion, as such, with a twist on a (whose?) quoting habit. But as someone publishing now, when knowledge of the canon even of the previous hundred years is at a low (see my various sarcasms about the Niven-edited Bunting letters), she is at an advantage of creating an interesting voice, taken as an average of the voices across her large oeuvre. After all, fifty years of poems are represented in her Collected Poems & Prose. Born in 1951 and never famous, if Randell had influences and peers – an era, in fact – it means little to younger poets. So who now would notice a crisis, the radical rejection her work makes, a decade in?

For, undoubtedly, in the early 1980s, Randell’s style shifts. Her shift seriously denies the pleasures she had trained her audience into, and no readers with an ear should fail to notice – which means probably most haven’t. My hope is that, if sensitive readers exist, they will want to explore a considerable lifetime of work by first of all needing a short primer of getting to the ground of it, compositionally. There are rewards if they do so.

So here goes.

On a sociological but not formalistic level, Randell's name most often appears in discussions of Barry MacSweeney. But she was, on the evidence in her Collected, as sensitive to the music of Prynne, Crozier, and the other Olsonite poets of the English Intelligencer as was the alcoholic husband she divorced. MacSweeney appears in studies of The English Intelligencer, where there’s hardly anything about Randell's poems. Blanking on her Olsonisms misinterprets her oeuvre, damning with faint phrase (joke!). Objectivist remains a solid, fame-flattering, shallowly understood label, a shorthand for oblique line breaks and factual language. Not much remembered quotation defines and enriches it. Likewise, most who mention Randell fail to quote a whole poem. I suspect those who quote a line for its summary ethos wouldn't share all her tastes – were they to follow the links I have been following.

The English Olsonites might hate that group name (more later), and were a group of about a dozen 1970s English avant-garde poets who fondly talked up a kind of revolutionary awareness and group action informed by science and archaeology (not least challenging the assumptions of how people should function as a tribe, should live more nomadically or at least not forget that deep origin in all of us*). In practice what they did was to write about local places but notice the archaeological strata of the tribe in all these small towns of settlement. They also liked to use a particular indenting technique and a sort of stuttering punctuation that slows down quite a plain prosaic unornamented line.

Let’s start with the typography, described excellently here:

“In this way, Olson's remarks on the need to extend the revolutionary poetics established by Pound, Williams, and Cummings can be read not only in the context of Black Mountain but also as an instigation to the Intelligencer poets. Olson catalogs the conventions established by such pioneers of open field composition in regard to their alacrity in using the typewriter's invitation to key extra space between words, to hold a word or syllable by breaking lines in unexpected places, to augment punctuation by providing a plethora of symbols for pausing and affecting rhythm, and to shift the margins of a text at any point on the page.”

(Continental Drift: Charles Olson and The English Intelligencer, Joseph Pizza, 2018, Contemporary Literature, which can be read at JSTOR, using an independent researcher sign-up of 100 free articles a month).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26725227

This is a more useful summary than Olson's own, where Olson muddles his good talk of the “advantage of the typewriter… due to its rigidity and its space precisions”, with add-ons about the body and the breath, the use of spacebar and tab key to simulate bodiliness. Pizza is good because he summarises well the primary visual effect of poetry of the Olson school, ‘to shift the margins of a text at any point on the page’ and thereby to shift out, and back. The typical page has blocks of text, like William Carlos Williams lines liquidised and passed through canal locks, split levels, juts. Here are some examples:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47496/i-maximus-of-gloucester-to-you

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zrhuBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT29&dq=%22mutton+grazing+the+fields%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjhiJ_tz9KLAxWQXkEAHU_6N2EQ6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=%22mutton%20grazing%20the%20fields%22&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iRIZCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA51&dq=%22cape+and+foreland+left+by+the+axe%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZh7r-0NKLAxUGSkEAHR5UBrAQ6AF6BAgMEAM#v=onepage&q=%22cape%20and%20foreland%20left%20by%20the%20axe%22&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0WcIAQAAIAAJ&q=%22cornered+a+wren+in+a+thorn+bush%22&dq=%22cornered+a+wren+in+a+thorn+bush%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZ54To0tKLAxUfTEEAHZr5NB0Q6AF6BAgGEAM#%22cornered%20a%20wren%20in%20a%20thorn%20bush%22

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=K2EIAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA24&dq=%22blindly+onto+whatever+surface%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtyMSa1NKLAxUwZ0EAHVmzKmoQ6AF6BAgGEAM

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jnogAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA25&dq=%22down+lanes+of+beech+leaves%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwibt9H61NKLAxXVZ0EAHSOMFGMQ6AF6BAgGEAM

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/English-Intelligencer-vol-Spoof-Issue-Raworth/31706130881/bd

The effect is of a movie editor, making montage out of movement. It is shown in all these examples, all from different poets, and they are all solemn except the last; only the last is a deliberate mockery. The mockery is by Tom Raworth, and was published as the cover of a “spoof” of The English Intelligencer not created by the Intelligencer poets. The English Intelligencer was a “worksheet” distributed only among a few poets on a subscription list. It featured poems, some essayistic letters, and welcomed feedback on the poems, their drift, the overall language, bearings and avoiding of selling out – too toxic a mixed messaging for the group.

Randell does some Olsonites typography in her work, although it is much more visible in the first printing, removed altogether in some poems as she has them in this new Collected, and generally obscured by a relatively even spacing. Here, it's more like 1.5 than the single spacing of earlier books, and with standard spacing between verses compared to an earlier habit of small thinly spaced chunks and double or triple carriage return before the next stanza. This worked for the same publisher presenting Peter Riley's (excellently proofread) two volume Collected Poems, because there is something more organic about Riley's overall approach. This contrasts with the more quixotic poetic of Randell.

Here, nevertheless, is an Olsonian Randell poem, and Objectivist it is not

There was a lot of this in The English Intelligencer, from the off, and it had gang mentality, and outsiders. One of the first critical comments from a recipient of the “worksheet” was from the older poet Gael Turnbull and anticipates Raworth. It highlights features with a built-in accusation of ludicrosity to which these poets were always vulnerable; they only staved it off in a bubble. In that bubble a very interesting collection of books got written. We can now consume these books not wholesale but haphazardly, taking the one at hand and sticking with it, the wiser the poet the longer the sticking.

Turnbull was someone who encouraged, corresponded with, and published a variety of experimental poets a little older and more various than the English Olsonites, and here is a good dose of his critique:

“I just don't see the point of such near parodies of Olson as, for example, that first poem – I mean, I'm interested to see what Temple can do with his "roots" etc. – but must he swipe the means so obviously from Olson? – I can't believe this is really what Olson intended, anyway - I know, it's easy to carp, and easy to be negative, etc., but the whole thing seems to me to be an easy transcript into what is the currently fashionable American poetic idiom - OK, I agree, it's been very much alive and interesting, and it's damn hard to get past it… but at least it should be possible to avoid the more obvious sorts of "I, minimus, of West Hartlepool etc."

(Reproduced in “Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer, Cambridge: Mountain, 2012).

There are two issues here at least: the form of the text with sudden margin readjust, and the placing of the poet in heroic autobiography against a landscape observed for geographical features. The screencapped examples above often show the group interest in geographical features. These poems were all published within about eight years, and all the poets knew and corresponded with each other, some in the pages of The English Intelligencer.

But what’s with all the localism? If we go back to Pizza, we see again a good summary of some of the geographic interests of Olson carried on by these Englishmen. Olson was

“… considering Alfred Wegener's map of a possible Pangaea as a potential cover image for Maximus IV, V, VI (Olson and Prynne 137, 150-53, 159-60). Indeed, Prynne and Ed Dorn, then living in England, purchased a bound edition of the Royal Society's symposium on continental drift and sent it to Olson with accompanying poems (Latter 67-68; Olson and Prynne 162). As Latter demonstrates, the symposium's findings, especially the maps depicting the broken but once unified supercontinent, served as an inspiration for the transatlantic relationship between Olson and Intelligencer poets (Latter 83)… the concurrent enthusiasm over continental drift (particularly its positing of a world in constant movement, along with the likelihood that North America, Britain, and Eurasia were previously united), became for these writers a scientific vindication of Olson's poetic and the subsequent revolution in British poetry they sought.”

Let us pause a moment and say this baldly. It mattered to the group of poets subscribed to The English Intelligencer, although very possibly not to Gael Turnbull, that the world may have been once one continent, that the coastline of South America fits the coastline of Africa. This mattered to them more than as a nice metaphor of a land bridge to Charles Olson. It conjured for them an early state of humanity, nomadically roaming, with few borders of state and nation. Early twentieth century work on plate tectonics to account for mountains where plates meet almost leads to an Edenic flat earth.

Plate tectonics jumps up a notch in the fifties and sixties and Olson on his island state of Gloucester (itself not connected by a land bridge to its state of the US) was very excited by it all, as a confirmation of an intuitive journey. To think global and act local is not it. Rather, to see the history of migration and the archaeology remaining, in a sort of clever primitivism attractive to the bookish poet of the time. It became subject of a tussle for approach in the few years of The English Intelligencer, and was a topic to which MacSweeney and Tom Pickard contributed almost nothing formal except some self-entitlement to tantra (I shall leave others to determine if that is a singular or a plural, and of what).

In the tussle, etymology became archaeological, to dust a word carefully and then turn around and lamp someone with it. Archaeology also became archaeological and also like the branch of geography devoted to town planning. As a manifesto for the revolution, it was fun for manifesto wonks, and then for fallers-out and sulkers. As a self-reckoning and rectitude, a measure for a life, it only really for me bears fruit in the work of Peter Riley. **

So we return to Randell, a little more informed. Though her early work only rarely used a sudden shift of margin, it did focus on place with some Olsonian geographical scrutiny, playing with geographical terms while located firmly in East Kent – as Olson was in Gloucester. Randell did once have more of the stuttering and slowing unconventional punctuation of Olsonism, but for the Collected she has removed some of it. Nevertheless crucial traces remain and her oeuvre does not settle easily, either with the Olson influence or an association of Olson with her direct contemporaries and collaborators (she published them, and they occasionally published her). Nor does it simply break with Olson, nor does it metamorphose or change up organically. There is a straddling, and Olsonisms float back. Over this straddling, which we need to look at and sound, there is consistency and battle. And we mustn't avoid the straddling by swaddling.

In the Venn diagram of Randell's work and the Olsonites, let's look at when she used the word “strata”.

Both her 1986 book Beyond All Other and her Selected Poems of 2006 begin with this poem:

Poem

I look at my two hands

the complete strata.

Capable of it all

& to be

is surely without

dull clap of sound

or another rude awakening

to the bud.

And now it's already yesterday.

As if

I was nothing but the

wood to which

the bow is strung.

Flowers

are buds

turned inside out.

[Note that in the first printing there is another linebreak: this “dull clap of sound/or/another rude awakening]

And there's more:

“O clime of tree:

O strata of halo.”

(For a declaration of need).

“X

To reach the top

you've got to climb.

Soft grief.

Chime.

Stratum of tree”

(Songs of Hesperus)

To take up the tree connection here and make it part of Olsonism even more, look at this earlier short section of the same sequence:

This gets directly to Olson as he was, rather than how he is skimmed. Here is the one world island, where once there were trees growing in the terrain the North Sea inundated; and here is the desire to see and feel with archaeological metaphors, with a new way of looking at the body taken from them too. For Olson, the zone and strata are crucial terms (zone implies how far from the supposed original tribe there has been migration and settlement; strata what to look for in terms of depth of time each settlement has been in each zone; the two related, and to be compensated for) but so is his own lusty body. In the UK, their Olsonites are less full bodied than Charles, and if two in Wales take up this aspect (John James and Chris Torrance) it is to emphasise only one horn of the horniness. In Peter Riley, the body is there but mostly cuddly. In Allen Fisher, there is some interesting eros, informed by feminism. In Randell, lips and hands and suckling are important, but hands especially beckon – for in these poems she is quite often stuck at the kitchen sink.

The (few) reviews and blurbs afforded to her are usually from those with avant-garde tastes, who have a lot of time for the English Olsonites. Yet these notices tend to emphasise the themes and the realism of Randell’s later work and career in social work, troubled families and counselling, post 1980. This period draws on blunt phrases (often but not always verbatim) from working class families in trouble, and some bluntly phrased narrative around these "real-life quotes". Reviews tend to neglect the differently organised and phrased early work, thereby reducing Randellism to a generalisation that she has a poetic eye, a nice heart, and a feel for language as slippery and magical, and a specialism in social work subject matter as the dominant feel.

This needs looking into, in my opinion. She's not a realist with a nice heart. She's doing something else with allowing voices in, defining moral action, showing awareness of society and landscape, and extending the midflow literary quote-using: where in the early work she quotes poets, in the later work she block-quotes the distressed proletariat. In this, and sorry to take off the sheen, I contend she is as much like Eliot with his Lil in the Waste Land as Oppen, despite the earnest extra-textual insistence that she is not just in professional social work as a career but also a Social Work Poet. Otherwise, we lose sight of the fact she came up with a group, which she extends, not least in the areas of feminism and the rights of women and children. She directly challenges poets she loves, on their ambitions for a new society of aesthetic avant-garde language sophistication as part of the agenda of a social revolution. If we change that focus then we lose that interaction, and that critique.

The English Olsonites (unlike Pound and Eliot) liked to quote each other, not least each other’s lines. The partial implication was that only their contemporaries should be quoted, and that they were each other’s canon. When Andrew Crozier published High Zero in 1978, it made quotey parodies of poems in High Pink on Chrome by J. H. Prynne and Striking the Pavilion of Zero by John James, both published in 1975, and worked procedurally and echoically from them. Crozier when interviewed by Andrew Duncan commented later:

“Anyone reading the book at the time might quite reasonably have also been expected to have read books by Prynne and James so that although there’s no direction, other than a kind of hint in the title High Zero, to specific books, there’s a reasonable expectation that that kind of dragging one’s coat-tails, let’s say, will be picked up on…”

The implied audience is small, and terrifically intimate. Sometimes too there was discursive argument, as some were recontextualising each other's metaphors and, as it were, camera angles. There were, in other words, tussles over and perfectionism in terminology, all too academic and sometimes frontbiting yet quite dramatic and sometimes delicious. Since Olson begins the Maximus Poems publicly bringing in a fellow poet and friend to slag him off, this seems part and parcel of the ethos and very possibly an attraction underlying (or to offset) the brocialism.

Joseph Pizza’s article (free to view with a sign up) gives an excellent account of one back and forth. Since neither Olson nor Prynne was involved, this exchange tended to be more amicable, and was between Crozier and Peter Riley:

" [An]... understanding of journal publications as 'works in progress' would be taken a step further, though, in the editors' decision to refer to the Intelligencer as a 'worksheet,' consciously avoiding any sense of finish at the level of content or design, focusing instead on process over product…. These intentions can be seen not only in the design of the work-sheet but in Crozier and Riley's contributions. In the winter of 1967, they produced two poems on Romney Marsh, an area of drained wetlands extending along the coast of southeastern England, that in many ways exhibit their larger aims for the Intelligencer. Though Romney Marsh properly denotes the preserved land near New Romney in Sussex, the wetlands between the present coast and former coastal towns like Rye and Winchelsea to the south are frequently referred to as Romney Marsh as well… by the early 1960s the marsh had become associated with the marginal and marginalized, both geographically and culturally.”

Pizza continues:

“The first piece, ‘On Romney Marsh,’ was likely written by Crozier in 1964, when he was a graduate student at SUNY Buffalo. Olson seems to have known of the poem, as a 1965 letter to Crozier suggests. After addressing the 'large 'scrip / scribal / 'map' (a Maximus poem occupying several pages' that he offered for inclusion in the newly founded Wivenhoe Park Review, Olson encouraged Crozier to solicit 'newer' work from local writers, even archaeological writing like the work of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Olson, Selected Letters 337). The connection between Olson's fieldwork and Hawkes's research should be relatively clear to those familiar with his program of 'Projective Verse.' The encouragement to Crozier, however, is concerned less with Maximus's Gloucester and more with translating his perspective to England by adapting the same archaeological strategies to the island, thus permitting it to be seen, like Gloucester, as a site whose layers reveal relationships that branch and fork across oceans and continents.”

Riley asked to print Crozier's poem with his own response added, and this became a separate publication (which Riley then revised when he brought out his own book, and then discarded both from his two volume Collected). Pizza quotes plentifully from the two poems and we see some of the world of focusing on each other. It is a shame that he makes no tie in with Randell who has lived in or near Romney Marsh for decades, writing about it in a way informed by the poetics of The English Intelligencer.

In a different way, we see the impolite MacSweeney working with The English Intelligencer themes and sometimes phrases to spin poems. See the (free online) thesis by Paul Bachelor on MacSweeney here

https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/bitstream/10443/901/1/Batchelor09.pdf

Batchelor discusses MacSweeney's much admired poem, The Last Bud, and sees MacSweeney playing with Prynne's terms and language habits (Prynne's “durable fire” becomes MacSweeney's “durable fyre” and so on). But as often with MacSweeney it is simultaneously wheedling and sarcastic. A much clearer homage, much more similar to Randell's practice, is made by Chris Torrance in his Citrinas, The Magic Door Book II, 1977:

SWEET ROCKET

(for Barry & Elaine)

Good steady hitch from

Glyn Neath to M50 Gorsley

interchange which was where I

shouldnt have got off. After

all, who ever heard of

Gorsley? Walked 8 miles

heavy scents of

early summer flowers

of the South Midlands plain

Severn's arm,

the Avon at Pershore,

the abbey

a great yellow cheese

mouldering in sultry sunlight

ragwort in the cuttings

scrub reserves of South London

where sidings long since torn up

harbour colonies of birch

desert line running from

Peckham Rye & Gipsy Hill

up to Mitcham

Captain Sparrow Rules

boot end

strangled by

candle rope thicket

no bees

anywhere in London today

leaning over tombstones

to see Ground Ivy

but Sweet Rocket

was the thought

in my head

as I manoeuvred towards you

"you have such a grip upon

my frailest exultation"

my blood walks

among you

ghosts flicker

at the very edges

my heart quickens

to the events of the town

"verse is a bull of the lunatic"

…

[there are some tab-indents here that Substack can't translate but the gist is there]

I have added italics and bold to the line “Captain Sparrow Rules”, even though it is ALL CAPS in the original, to avoid it being taken as a title, and the impression of two separate poems. It does though quote from two separate poets, its dedicatees. A clue is given in the dedication but good luck to those seeking out the MacSweeney poem, as it's early and not reprinted in either of the recentish Selecteds. Unless they would care to read on here:

Here is the Elaine Randell poem that Chris Torrance is quoting:

Song For Each Man In Rain

Tread the continuously perfect

smell of wet grass - how easy

it has all become.

Always corrugated roofing.

Children inside school. Come

to believe in what we know most of.

Verse is a bull of the lunatic,

this natural rim of the kingdom.

Applaud life and birds.

Allow everything to wander

Find each still item beneath its

quiet crisis.

He walks back again past the house

kicks at damp earth.

Waste the heart out over gravel.

The clouds reassemble like orphans.

[The first printing has “He walks back again and again past the house/kicks at damp earth./Waste the heart out over gravel./The clouds reassemble like orphans.” In other words a longer line with a repeat and it's one quatrain not two couplets. The punctuation, and lack of full stops is preserved in all printings.]

When we put the Torrance next to the MacSweeney and Randell he is quoting, it amounts to little more than admiring them for a fab line and messaging about this trek to see them and back, plus thinking of the friendship, intense, etc. Torrance mentions ghosts, and indeed MacSweeney and Randell are ghosts here, flickering in and out of intensity. But there is not much sense of the erotic longing in the MacSweeney poem or of the strange sense of the shamanic children locked away and the bull resonating with them, in Randell's poem. Yeah, sure, it sounds like a hymn to nature's wildness, but that isn't the specific focus of the Randell poem, and not much of an interaction with it.

By contrast, when Randell quotes, she interacts, or rather allows the quoted material to add an implied but understated (all too likely to be ignored, or just a who cares on her part) dimension. Again, both in the poem and in the poetic we find hidden pulls as unexpected as those from 2000 miles away.

OTHER THINGS TO SAY

1) The Collected has got quite a few typos, although it also corrects some from the Selected:

“O dust brought from miles away coming

here to rest in this kitchen only to be wiped up,

moved on, taken hack.”

(“taken back” in original);

“these thistles so

fill of seed”

(“full of seed” in original);

“The patients talk behind me –

‘do you fee I better?’”

(“feel better” in the original);

“Where the trees take up &

and make tremble stop…

… The heart well before

it season.

leave some in rain”

(“the trees take up &/make tremble… The heart well before/the season;/leaves them in rain” when published in Poetry Review during “the poetry wars”).

It made me wonder when there were rushed rewrites and when perhaps some of the older work was made into an editable document by putting the original publications in an OCR scanner, as some seem mis-scans more than mis-types. I felt almost as if Randell is happy to get at least one line of an old poem right and the rest is suggested; "quoting" allu-elusively her own past work. There is a relationship with the other, a hyperlink rather than a favourite or representative quote, even with herself!

The frustration exists that one cannot always tell what is daring flourish from mess and carelessness. Why, for example, is the same poem “To see who you might be” printed twice in different places (p122, p170) with only some spacing alteration? Why is the poem “Upon watching an upright leaf” featured on the contents page as “Upon Watching an Upright Leaf”? Why do some poem titles have single quotes around them and some have double quotes? Why does one of them “The hen can hatch her eggs” have double quote marks on the poem but is ‘The hen can hatch her eggs’ on the contents page? Fetishising expression of whole body by control of punctuation and typography this book is not.

2) Pound in the Malatesta Cantos sets up the use of large scale text quoting in a poem, and Olson runs one way with it while the Objectivists run another. The field was always ripe for a later poet like Randell to take a bit from one strand and a bit from another and explore the shift from 19th century habit to Modernist habit, without engaging with Pound much at all. Olson enjoys Pound's waggling swagger, not least with name-calling, and his wholesale chunks of historical documents (albeit that in Pound they're translations the poet has made from original documents in another language); the Objectivists enjoy the neatening Pound sometimes does, and the general Whitmanesque effect one long line after another with simple syntax with plain document diction. As Crozier said, in the late 1920s, "Pound was anxious to consolidate and put on record the achievement of the previous fifteen years, and was looking for American disciples into the bargain" and encouraged many of the poets we now call Objectivist. Moreover if we look at the first appearance of the Malatesta Cantos, in 1923, among the stuffy pages of The Criterion, themselves the first Cantos that Ezra Pound had written for two years and the jumping-off point for serious infiltration of prose documents into Modernism, and then look at the Objectivist issue of Poetry Chicago in 1931, we see a clear influence and echo of form.

https://archive.org/details/criterionquarter01unse/page/382/mode/1up

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=37&issue=5&page=2

To see the Malatesta Cantos next to the literary journalism of the time is salutary. As a context, a side text, a hubbub, it shows a contemporary intellectual and literary environment just as The English Intelligencer does, and more than Poetry Chicago does. The Cantos in the Criterion shows a moment of splash AND of sea, to emulate.

3) The unacknowledged texts Randell engages with are from a wide range – Peter Levi, Sylvia Plath, John Welch, Germaine Greer, Virginia Woolf, among others. Sometimes she does make acknowledgement, but it looks more an afterthought that sometimes happens, a happenstance for some poems rather than a consistent practice of accreditation. There doesn't seem, for example, a rigorous game with intentional concealment. So, she tells us that the sequence Songs for the Sleepless takes for each poem title an italicised line from Elizabeth Smart's The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals. Then she includes 120 pages later Songs for the Faithless, which uses this opening line for every section "There is a moment in time when". Then immediately afterwards in the Collected comes Songs for the Careless, which this time uses italicised lines from Elizabeth Smart's The Assumption of Rogues and Rascals for the titles (with one mistranscription, who knows at what stage, with the Collected saying “Move across the crowded floor of the places where people met” when the original has “meet”) but doesn't say so. Then immediately after that comes Songs for the Harmless, in which each poem starts with an italicised line but I can't for the life of me track down a source.

4) If we are to treat the social work record poems and prose as part of the oeuvre, and not have them crowd out the other work, we could consider their inclusion as analogous to Pound's slog sections of the Cantos before the Pisan Cantos, or, well, quite a lot of the Maximus Poems. They are there for us to do some background reading. That men perhaps don't often do. There is, as I say above, a dialectic of ideas, rather than a competition to inherit with the most finesse and etymological prowess.

5) Let's look at one poem in Songs for the Sleepless, so that we remain alert to how different Randell's quoting is. Here is the second poem in the sequence:

The lower down quote is from Martin Seligman's 1975 Learned Helplessness Model of Depression, with its "Symptoms of Depression and Learned Helplessness... Six symptoms of learned helplessness have emerged; each of them has parallels in depression:… 1. Lowered initiation of voluntary responses–animals and men who have experienced uncontrollability show reduced initiation of voluntary responses…. 2. Negative cognitive set–helpless animals and men have difficulty learning that responses produce outcomes..." The rest of the original part of the poem seems to refer to the Olsonisms I have been setting out, the map, the idea of inundated ground (this time with tarmac and not the North Sea) feeling an inner metaphor. Here is the (misquoted) paragraph from Elizabeth Smart that gave the title:

“At the corner of the roof, two sparrows make love just outside their nest. The male cleans his beak and looks abroad after each bout. The female, though, quivers and continues to chirp a low note, looking round in fearful expectation for the next act. She is fearful in case there will be no next act, and the future suddenly cease.”

I don't know if this suggests that this part of Randell's sequence is about bereavement as much as about bereavement making such stress that the larger life patterns involved are inescapably visible. I'm not sure if an actual male is being accused of learned helplessness or a human of no specified gender, “man” as it were the neuter pronoun in the Seligman allusion.

Certainly the use of other texts is not picturesque, and we find this in other Randell “hyperlinks”.

For example, consider too this Randell poem:

[Again, screenshot needed, as browsers are destroying the spacing]

And Therefore Was Her Labour That Much More in Washing and Wringing

To worry

is to be connected with

The woman's lot is to worry

to be troubled with concerned, mixed up

Loaded windless the sky takes fear, returns it laundered ready.

Waiting for fortune to happen upon them

the men take chances wonder at the reeling birds diesel streets.

We are not simply done for

there is more to understand. The women are gathered, "not in

extravagant postures but huddled weeping, their eyes

reddened and dashed with tears."

The white daisies spring up in anticipation

they are known.

Women hem garments their hands sick with action

faces wrenched with ideas and sleepless O they are sleepless

footless, heartless hurt.

Women sweat at night

finished with swooning they know what to fear and what

cannot be avoided.

Wrecked on reality some stumble on stones, heave the giant

gems and play, toying with the needy boys.

Where are the men standing?

are they alone or in unison rowdy with lofty fear and rage?

Some become tearful expectant

stagger at a loss, tearful,

trounced others swagger on the bridge wide open and forgotten.

It's a very good poem, and even has some energy of a beat protest poem, more a Corso than a Ginsberg. But what is the quoted part doing? Where's it from? It's from “The Obstacle Race” by Germaine Greer, her book after “The Female Eunuch”. Throughout the book she looks at the sociology of women's chances at working in the visual arts, the lack of equal opportunities for women, and the loaded terminology by which women's art is judged. Quite a lot of the book is taken up with describing what happens in one painting or another and this is what is happening in the passage Randell quotes from. Here's the passage:

“On the left rises a precipice with a tortuous road leading up to the three crosses and various small figures and groups of figures. Beyond lies the shell-pink city of Jerusalem, on the right a knoll is crowned by a basilica, an ambitious landscape setting even for del Sarto. The foreground is dominated by the dead body of Christ, supported by St John. The tradition is that Suor Plautilla, in search of a model for the figure of Christ, availed herself of the corpse of a defunct sister and the other sisters jokingly used to say that 'Nelli instead of Cristo did Criste'. Clearly, Suor Plautilla's art did suffer from the enclosed nature of a nun's life, quite different in this respect from the lives led by those male Dominicans who were painters. The figure of Christ is a pewter dummy with plucked eyebrows, but the figures of the women grieving over him are, despite the tackiness of the medium that she learned from Fra Paolino di Pistoia, expressive in a dramatic but non-rhetorical fashion by now quite unusual in religious painting. In their white wimples they might as well have been sisters of her community and she painted them with complete confidence and understanding. They express their grief not in extravagant postures, but in huddled weeping, their eyes reddened and dashed with tears, the Gothic tortuousness of their simple drapery echoing this intensity of feeling. Behind them stand a bearded lady who must be Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus, a strange figure in hook-on beard and Assyrian toque. The whole work is a kind of monument to the High Renaissance, undertaken in the sincerest spirit of emulation, revealing by how much the moment for such work was past, and how far this gifted woman, instructed in the art of painting at the instance of her mother superior, Camilla de'Rucellai, was estranged from the living current of art and unable to find her own graphic language in a waste of eclecticism.”

It seems to me that the Greer passage interacts very interestingly with the Randell poem. The line that Randell quotes becomes very specific, and now almost doesn't fit, except by perhaps a 2000 mile leap. Reading the Greer passage reconfigures the whole poem for me, so that the Randell poem becomes itself a description of a painting, a haunting one. A potential bitterness and self-judgement also seems in evidence, one in keeping with the unforgiving approach Greer adopts. The conditions are unfair, yes, but there is a risk of a “waste of eclecticism” to disappoint the merely aesthetic eye. Rather as Olson preached acknowledging the strata, and seeing how trapped the nomadic ancestors might be, so too is there a sad realism about the strata of misogyny and lack of women's empowerment and rights, the stacked deck when being asked to look at questions merely aesthetically.

6) I have said little about the prose in this Collected Poems & Prose, and some may have guessed I'm not a fan. There are however two very interesting opportunities afforded to compare Randell's approach to prose with her approach to poems, and more. It looks as if she has given us the prose from which she made poem versions in both cases. In the first example, the Collected Poems & Prose prints both the poem Open Letter (p167), and the prose piece Open letter (p348)

Open Letter

My dear

I would be

as it were

caught into action of non action,

drawn as I am

to the pavements of this town

the low ploughed fields of Kent.

And missing you, as I do,

there is nothing

but space

and I walk into rooms

and study the plants again and span

the length of raw days with my palm

"and a sob comes

simply because its the coldest

thing we know."

So you leave

and the climate is holding

I long for silence

and thin air.

Often we are vague and small

at the end of a day.

Briefly encountered

who sees him as to

feel him

it is in dying,

apparent sunlight

so often we

prospect after dark.

Streetlights grow old

ghosts on my sleeve.

Autumn could find me out,

running my hand along the cut edge of

Kentish flint.

The purr of your teeth

along my lip,

tender

it haunts

and I fall in.

Youth sketches the horizon

alone in cloud.

For so long now I have spoken

of touch without fertility.

I have used up the sepia of afternoon

my hands are numb.

Wounded water, it rains

teeth within another's mouth.

Taut against circumstance

meet daily gall of human tears

that are ribbons of attempt.

Wood-sorrel. The dream is tender.

Will you flash your fears at me.

Rubbing the hand brings blood to the surface.

“The trivial rain, its sparkle on grass”

Laurel Nobilis

I would give you this

to mark the things you love.

Velvet magnolia tree.

It's that simple.

The things we admire in others we own in ourselves.

Of us all in our better moments.

Arms linked in sleep

anxious wakers that we are.

Rooks on the Marsh making their nests high

in the trees about the tiny grey churchyard.

My dear

the evening moves on. The swans flay themselves into the

telegraph wires.

Tight buds of hawthorn

I am below surface again.

Bitten by it we conjure with touch.

My dear,

you are day-worn

at the end

of demands.

You fall asleep almost instantly

male tiredness it is of such. Warm bones and young stubble.

Bells prompt

us of lives firm within this peculiar electricity

we call hope.

When stars cease to be light giving and take in all

that is around them they absorb without giving.

We must

"remain worthy of fire

like a poet growing older."

The wagtails on the green at Wookey

a late afternoon

I have befriended myself yet again.

"She was looking for reasons to unlove him"

Air so solitary it could only be likened

to the Hepworths in the park. Her heart like

a robin's egg.

The years are getting shorter

certainly they press for some

fine line within me for

I have seen the evergreen replace itself

and the pink stones by the waters edge

but my dear I am drawn to the

chalk hills of Kent and the pink orchards

will find me knee deep in autumn leaf

alone.

[Some notes comparing this with previous printings: Randell used to use an initial capital letter for fauna and flora, and fewer apostrophes; hence in the original it is Robins egg, buds of Hawthorn, the Wagtails on the green; apostrophes have been added in the Collected except for “mothers” in particular even when it is possessive. Also note that line which we saw above used as a title for a tab-indent/double column poem, “bitten by it…” but also note its variants in the book: it is in the contents page as “Bitten by it we conjure touch 117”, when on page number 117, it's written “Bitten by it we conjure by touch” and in this poem it's”bitten by it we conjure with touch” and in first printing “conjure” was spelled “conjour” on each occasion.]

Here is the prose piece

Open letter

My dear

I would be, as it were, caught into action of non-action.

Drawn as I am to the pavements of this town, the low ploughed hills of Kent and, missing you, as I do. I walk into rooms and study the plants again, span the length of raw days with my palm and a sob comes simply because it is the coldest thing we know.

So you leave and the climate is holding. I long for silence and thin air. I am as stoic and agile as can be for this time of year.

Briefly encountered, who sees him as to feel him, it is in the dying apparent sunlight that we prospect for and only after dark streetlights grow old ghosts on my sleeve.

My dear, the swans are asleep, like foam, you say, protected with muddy brown undersides from the Thames which I cannot leave. You tell me, I cried for no reason at all, and that we see nothing until we truly understand it.

Scotch pine on my desk how the cone so finely formed who could guess it blisters at the stem despite your warrior kiss.

Autumn could find me out running my hand along the cut edge of stone. The purr of your teeth along my lip, tender it haunts and I fall in as youth sketches the horizon. Alone in cloud for so long now I have spoken of touch without fertility I have used up the sepia of afternoon, my hands are quite numb, wounded water rains teeth within another's mouth.

Taut against ribbons of attempt how we battle against circumstance, meet the daily goal of human tears that demand much more than this.

My dear, the sky is now open to leafy green vineyards. The fields are blue with young stubble, the trivial rain it's sparkle on grass.

Laurus nobilis, I would give you this, to mark things, velvet magnolia tree, the afternoon so promising of touch.

It's that simple, the things we admire in others; of us in our better moments a composition of stance.

You are here again, the tired afternoon formed on your arm. How easily I can love you when nothing takes you away.

Arms linked in sleep. anxious wakers that we are, rooks on the marsh make their nests high in trees about the tiny above the tiny grey churchyard the evening moves on. Swans flay themselves at telegraph wires: loving you is the one thing I'll never regret, you say.

Flint, these round chalk hills are an early mud bath for sparrows. Today alongside me, you are small. quiet. An unruly sun as we walk along the damp stone yard with the tight buds of hawthorn over our heads. But I am below the surface again, swung by obligation, Church bells prompt lives firm within this peculiar electricity we call hope, the larger breath of all things. When stars cease to be light they take all that is around them and absorb without giving.

We must remain worthy of fire like the poet growing older.

My dear, the rose with its double centred light, the wagtails on the bowling green at Wookey, a late afternoon. She was looking for reasons to unlove him, the air so solitary she could only liken it to the Hepworth in the park and the way he'd suddenly told her of the rabbit, its head gouged out by some unknown event, perhaps a fox.

There are pink stones by the water's edge. Here children run along pavements, their bright hearts too often lost while parents swear momentarily about them in sleep.

From the kitchen I watch late couples lean against the fence then take up again, as does the thrush that lighted on the lawn and off again. I see the years are getting shorter, certainly they press for some fine line within me but I have seen the evergreen replace itself, yet still I am drawn to the low hills of Kent, the pristine orchards that find me knee deep in leaf so close by.

1977

Comparing the two, we cannot know if the “Open letter” prose dated 1977 precedes the undated poem “Open Letter”, but I don't think it harms to presume it. The words “wagtail” and “hawthorn” are lower case, so we don't know if they've been revised for this publication like the poems, or if, if Open Letter began as prose, that initial capital letters were added for flora and fauna only when linebreaks were added. We can note some of the editing, and lack of rewriting but adding judicious linebreaks, and perhaps apply this to considering how the “raw” material from social work gets made into poems over Randell's career. We can note, again unsure if this prose is extant and verbatim from the 1977 typescript, that some elements that are given italics and quote marks in the poem do not have them in the same place or at all in the prose. Is “a sob comes” part of a/the quote, as it is in the prose; and what is this quoting? Collecting both raises speculation about how the poet composes, “hearing” lines from others in the air, getting them down quickly and then noticing when adding linebreaks that they need quote marks so as not to be taken as original in her own words, and so on; with variants thereof. And the possibility that there is mess here, and just getting it ready how the mood takes, or how the pieces might best greet an easygoing occasional reader above all enjoying the daily round of observation, and processing and letting go in the present, of a 50 year diary by poem; with variants thereof.

I can track down some of the quoted matter, but not all. A line halfway is from John Welch (mispunctuated “the trivial rain it's sparkle on grass” in previous editions but finally right in the poem here), and one a little after that from Barry MacSweeney, and they’re in quote marks in the poem but not marked at all in the prose. “Laurel Nobilis” in the poem here is unitalicised Laurel Noblis in the first printing of the poem, and unitalicised Laurus Nobilis in the prose here – so neither zone nor strata are easy to establish. The line “She was looking for reasons to unlove him” is from Edna O’Brien’s short story, A Journey, but not the rest about the Hepworths in the park. Again, juxtaposing the sources, in full, gives an interesting “double column” effect alongside Randell's poem, and I rather wish I could do this with all the quoted bits. As ever with Randell's work, we can't be quite sure why some lines that are verbatim from other writers are in quote marks, some in italics, and which are quotes and which overhearings from life around her – although it is usually clear from context and dullness of phrasing when it's the latter (like “loving you is the one thing I'll never regret” perhaps).

Here is the some of the Welch and some of the MacSweeney she takes a line from. In each case there is an overall mood influence, imbibed, rejected, compared with. Randell seems to me to be deliberately misprising the MacSweeney in order to de-dramatise it. In MacSweeney the poet must be burned by poetry; in Randell the poet must have inner fire. The Welch poem is by contrast perhaps calmer, more serenely wishing for mutual sensitivity it believes possible.

Finally, to throw more light on the editing process for the Social Work aspect, two versions, focusing only on the second section, of a multi-section piece – one from Beyond All Other, Pig Press, 1986, and one from the Collected, reprinted from Gut Reaction, North and South, 1987.

From Six Pieces from the Sauna (four poems, two prose, praised by Harwood, not printed in the Collected at all)

Luck. I was born lucky – without it. She said

and laughed.

At the nurseries today a coachload of young bronze

Dutchmen came and looked round the tomato houses

and all the girls came out and flirted. A whole

coachload of men and who do I get

the female teacher comes over and talks to me about

tomatoes.

Luck. Don't talk to me about luck.

From Seven pieces from the sauna (in the Collected, all pieces prose)

“Luck. I was born lucky. Totally devoid of it,” she said. She laughed. “At the nurseries today a coachload of young bronzed Dutchmen came to look around the tomato house and all the girls came out and flirted. A whole coachload of men and who do I get – the female teacher comes and talks to me. Luck, I was born without luck, totally devoid of it.” She laughs.

To me, the poemed version is better, but then, as I said above, I also respect the effect in the Cantos of slogging through the History Cantos, and of generally slogging through Olson. I'm not quite sure why the earlier sometimes poem-converted version of the Sauna pieces has been left out. It was not only in Beyond All Other but was singled out there in the Lee Harwood afterword. Harwood also evokes an Objectivist: “In her sequences Watching women with children, Six pieces from the sauna, and Hard to place, like Charles Reznikoff’s “testimonies”, people speak for themselves and their words are respected.” I'm not so sure on either count. If we take a section of Hard to Place in the Collected (expanded from, by contrast, all prose in Beyond All Other to rather better versification – linebrokenications – and more of them), we get

IX

It has all been rather too much one way and

another. The fact that her boyfriend had

been taken away in a police car that morning,

her phone being cut off, the flat reeked of shit and damp

then the child was fretful.

She collected together her purse, pushchair

and raincoat and set off for the shopping

precinct. Once inside she felt better but

the child moaned for sweets and the piped

music mixed with the lights and her lack of

food made her dizzy

This is not like Reznikoff, who worked from documents and who found intriguing naturally occurring language that doesn't normally get onto the page as poetry, verbatim testimony. This passage above is surely from a report, and I think an imagined one not actually submitted. There is something oddly theatrical about the switch of register from “the flat reeked of shit and damp” to “the child was fretful” that doesn't sound right all assembled in a formal report, and too stuffy with the word “fretful” for a dramatic monologue or for the kind of speech captured in the pieces from the sauna. It sounds like reportage, with editorial; and in that sense very much more like Olson than Reznikoff.

CONCLUSION

Please excuse the length of this analysis. In one way, I'm producing as ever a set of (far from exhaustive) proofreader notes – I hereby volunteer for a paid position making a variorum scholarly edition – and indeed I began by trying to track down the John Welch line because I needed to prove to myself that the punctuation in Beyond All Other shouldn't have been “it's”. I would argue, hand on heart, that reading the book in various juxtaposition modes really helped me enjoy it: juxtapositions with previous Randell versions in earlier publications, and juxtapositions with some of the texts she quotes lines from. I don't have an easy answer for myself about whether it was right or wrong to “update” the punctuation and formatting, especially as I feel this is a book to recommend to new readers wanting to get a feeling for other enchantments than contemporary poetry-making commonalities. I’ll record here that whereas I like the voice in Peter Riley's work, I don't especially like the voice in Randell's work, but I like the workout and especially the dying fall into carrying on and bucking up, and I do recognise the incredible power of all the oeuvre in one place. There's inconsistency of typography, but not inconsistency of approach – in that the poems keep getting made without crust, and the confrontation with the world, opening it and hyperlinking it, done in the present at the time, is strangely rich, a much more satisfying extension of Olson than I have so far ever encountered. It doesn't give tools or easy emulation, but I admire that. And while I might ascribe the hallmark use of talking about social work issues to a sort of ego, not digested into the unusual punctuation and linebreaks of the poet at their best, I would say the same about Olson’s whole oeuvre, not to mention his often sexist sentimentality: he's not nice, he's big, and exciting after a break to return to.

PS There are two takes, one in prose and the other a poem, on finding a loved one’s Observer Book of Geology. They don't tally in details entirely but seem about the same moment, or to be quite the coincidence. A possible case of non-documentary approach, or mess, or….

PPS just to put a poem by Lee Harwood so you can put it next to the line she quotes in italics from it, in her “we” poem I partly quoted earlier. I don't mean to suggest she just draws formally from Olson, as she clearly draws from Harwood and others in her “form-quotation” too.

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-5711_PAGHAM-HARBOUR-SPRING

*we should make a distinction here from Basil Bunting, and his aesthetic (more than ethic) of “vagrancy” – Neal Alexander in Late Modernism: The Poetics of Place, 2022, says ‘Bunting’s Briggflatts has too often been misread as a poem that is elementally ‘rooted’ in the poet’s home region of Northumbria, for it is also profoundly concerned with experiences of displacement and transience, foregrounding vagrancy as a characteristically modern mode of being-in-the-world.’

**Riley’s book Tracks and Mineshafts is discussed by (Alex) Latter whom Pizza mentions, in Latter’s Late Modernism and 'The English Intelligencer': On the Poetics of Community (Bloomsbury: London, 2015). But sadly it is seen in how it illuminates study of The English Intelligencer, apparently providing metaphors as a book (and not, in reality, on a page or two of the book and kept within the strict allegory of the whole). In fact, it offers to illuminate the world, along the lines of Olsonian aspiration more than mere Olsonian practice. A similar effort is made in Riley's later book Due North, for which I can recommend his own full recital here

https://on.soundcloud.com/i7s2iMovB31QjhoV7

If any work succeeds in an ancient voice sobering to modern ideas of property and nation, this is it. It is (almost) Riley's cross.