Mythologically astute, Griffiths begins The Book of the Boat with a passage through the Blisworth Tunnel (or birth canal); a ‘ballad’ he calls it. Once boats had to be ‘legged’ through the second longest tunnel open to navigation (3,057 yards beneath Blisworth Hill). Now travestied water folk queue up to chug down the dark bore. Griffiths has fun with those who sentimentalise history, closet antiquarians who think a voyage into the past is a matter of wearing the right hat.
All folk-fakery is a bare-arsed bane, and lace & bonnets &
[waistcoats are a
shame, awful to tell as th’opening time came near, they most
[dressed up in quaint
Victorian gear.
To match these ghouls was not an easy task, we settled for
[lots of balloons &
pirate masks, soon the boat was trimmed with bobbing skulls.
Disposing of this tame carnival, the narrator goes off on a ‘Rabbit Hunt’. Stuart has the gun and is ‘speechlessly quiet: & mute of eye’. Barry is ‘a guy who knows about holes & rabbits’. What a revelation the hunt is: ‘snow set in the sky’, ‘a good deal of slow introduction’. It is late afternoon before this half-wild bunch move off into the real and actual landscape. Don’t they know about the superstitions, rabbits and boats? The hare-fields of the heart hospital? The necessary appeasement of lunar gods? Ancient gravity that will put lead in their boots?
They drink: ‘like unpacked astronauts’. It’s ‘beer, beer, beer, lovely luring beer’ as they stand in ‘a magic circle’, hallucinating rabbits who will never hop into their pot.
I stare. & I crunch, but and I weave, all around the waste-way.
after him. (I like to keep the gun in front). I’m no nearer a catch.
than is Alf: Why not the geese? (I ask).
Geese or swans, sheep, chickens, dogs, cats: anything with flesh. They must live, but the hunt is a chance to walk out in company, to drink, and know the country.
Alf walks by the Colne: I take the upper plateau still. I see one
[rabbit.
I whistle for him. I catch the boots I found on the tip. and give
[up: go home.
Nothing shot, no kill. Hare and heart safe. The voyage begins.
The reading and knowing and experiencing of Bill Griffiths’s work, over a quarter of a century, has bred a firm conviction in me, a trust: how these plural voices move and operate. The right place and the right response, reports from Whitechapel prefabs, tribal rucks. (‘The real war was Essex! One of them blasted w/- a shotgun//on Chelsea Bridge, Levi I remember and one other. They had//a caravan on the North Circular and their speaking and planning//was well OK, sunshiny.’) And then the canny recyclings of M.R. James, Christopher Smart and less-known witnesses, journal keepers and correspondents. Everything is ghost. Lurid and swift, in pulse and being. Cowley, by its secret melancholy, its sprawling mess (backing on to waste mounds and dead water) was a place worth looking at; the knowledge that Bill Griffiths had lived here for a time (before the loss of his boat in a fire) made it special.
What is shocking, if not surprising, given the tight politics of the poetry franchise, the indifference of the world at large to language and imagination, is how inadequately Bill Griffiths’s work is known. He hasn’t, it’s true, solicited attention. The trajectory of life and career from biker youth, through a period as ‘guest worker’ in Germany, to the burning boat and the decamping to County Durham, remains a private matter; the ordinary accidents, as he would have it, of a life lived. Griffiths received the support of Professor Eric Mottram and the ever-enthusiastic polemicist Jeff Nuttall, but the broadsheets were otherwise engaged, proud of their bottomless ignorance. A collection that appeared from Paladin was very soon pulped and forgotten. The hundreds of chapbooks, the leatherbound volumes, the hand-coloured variants, pass around a small band of enthusiasts. This is a craftsman, a scholar capable of reinvigorating the language; a master of the weights and units of breath.
Reading the selection of Griffiths’s poetry that Clive Bush gathered for the anthology Worlds of New Measure (1997), I began to superimpose those radical songs (‘Troops, curfews, and reason’) on to the Colne Valley, our march towards Heathrow. Thirteen Thoughts as though Woken at Dawn by 150 Policemen in Riot Gear with Helicopter and Film Back-up… Wandsworth (‘a turbulent river/an offer of valium’)… Star Fish Jail… The Hawksmoor Mausoleum.
Was it legitimate to read that decade of samizdat publication (1965–75), poetry wars, readings above pubs or in disestablished chapels, as in any way analogous to the outpourings of the Dissenters (Levellers, Diggers, Ranters) in the years after the English Civil War (1646–56)? Much of the dissenting rhetoric, a country on the cusp of republicanism, had the same primitive, biblical, improvisatory meld of speech. Paragraphs were urgent and energised. With knowledge of coming defeat? Accepted truths were interrogated. Earth magic and antinomianism argued a rationale for independence, the over-throw of a Leviathan state of priests and landowners and kings.
It was my contention, a small conceit to toy with as we moved south towards the ‘impounded’ market gardens and common land of Hounslow Heath and Harmondsworth, the lost village of Heathrow, that the group of London-based poets who read (under Mottram’s patronage), at King’s College in the Strand, represented a recrudescence of the Dissenting tradition. Griffiths, obviously, sampled the original texts and lived by their spirit. Allen Fisher (‘I am in the garden of a coming English Revolution’…’Met hunter/hungry on Sydenham Common’…‘should people of low and mean condition/cause offence by stake removal/they will be openly whipped near unto the place’) is interested in process and prophecy, the erosion of liberties and above all the corruption of language. In his ‘Letter to Eric Mottram’ (from Stane, Place Book III), Fisher is concerned about how the ‘sacred hierarchy’ dissolves into ‘stockbroker belts’. City dwellers are restless, unplaced, knowing that ‘the airport is now 60 minutes away’.
Echoes of dissent, and the promptings of unappeased voices, are always there. Barry MacSweeney, electively possessed by Shelley and Chatterton, experienced in the blather and compromise of union meetings, wrote a book called Ranter. He worked at a desk alongside Basil Bunting in a newspaper office, keeping a none-too-fastidious record of shipping on the Tyne.
Ranter. Call him Leveller, Lollard,
his various modes
Whispering sedition, libel,
love lockets of memory
coaxed from his memory box.
Bunting would be an exemplar, the dissenting poet, avoiding fuss, handing out good advice to those who came close to him: ‘Cut, cut, cut.’ His name is recorded on a plain stone in the burial ground alongside the Quaker meeting house at Brigflatts; near the place where George Fox preached on one of his journeys through the north.