Raymond Crump’s Chords (SSEA, 2020) gathers together poems old and new in blue typesetting, a gorgeous risograph collaboration between Ian Heames’s Face Press and SSEA Press under the editorship of Boris Jardine. The cover bears a striking pen and graphite drawing made by Crump in 2018 entitled “Suspended Chord,” the arrows pointing inward toward a moment of composed grace, a gesture to allure the eye and prepare the ear for the sequence of resounding lyrical suspensions within. This selection is presented in two parts with an afterword by Peter Riley and a bibliographical note from the editor. Looking back in “The Tinder Box – Sparks of Poetry,” a reflective cut of autobiographical prose published ten years ago by the Cambridge Literary Review, Crump recounts a childhood spent in post-war Notting Hill, “house-fronts hung with peeling paint like ragged lace.”[1] After attending art school for a time the poet moved to Canterbury in the late 1960s where he matriculated and was ultimately expelled from the University of Kent. Jardine relates in his tailpiece to Chords that while the poems of Part I were composed around this time, fifteen of which appeared in Crump’s first and only other book, Green Barrel Poems (Eedin Press, 1970), the nineteen pieces which make up Part II were written after 2010.
This return to poetry might tentatively be attributed at least in part to the support of the Cambridge Literary Review, which printed a number of Crump’s poems across several issues alongside the aforementioned memoir and other articles, commentaries, and recollections about the man and his work. But it was through The English Intelligencer that Crump first circulated his earliest poems, the now near-legendary worksheet founded by Andrew Crozier which ran for 36 issues between 1966 and 1968 and drew contributions from poets across the UK. Recently expressing regret at not keeping in touch with the Intelligencer crowd in the main, Crump eulogized Crozier as “one of the most charming and friendly poet souls I ever met.”[2] For decades little was really known about Crump among those writers who corresponded with him in the sixties. Despite the fact, his lyrics won the admiration of some of the most remarkable English poets writing in the late twentieth century, including Riley, J. H. Prynne, and Crozier himself. To Keith Wells, the publisher with Peter Mann of Green Barrel Poems, Crump has been “a poet so unknown and obscure as to be considered a mere pseudonym by some,” often living hand-to-mouth.[3] This welcome collection of his poems follows several years of renewed, if not popular, interest in a number of those poets committed to the Intelligencer project, with the New York Review of Books’ reissue of Prynne’s The White Stones in 2016, the release of Barry MacSweeney’s Desire Lines and Riley’s collected poems in two volumes by Shearsman in 2018, and the 2015 publication of Alex Latter’s illuminating history of the magazine and its contributors, Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer. Writing to a new audience in 2010, Crump described himself as “a ghost of yesteryear with my own small body of work. I have been traced and hooked, almost by accident.”[4] It is important to salute such fortuities.
Some of the short lyrics which open this volume are as exquisite as anything that appeared among the mimeographed pages of the Intelligencer. Here, in full, are the twelve lines of “Hitch-hiker”:
Rain threads me to a
clover sea. All roads out
are signed in shining
arrows. In the cab, in the
roaring night, a silver bell. Out
of the shadows with sweet
grass she called the
horses came, pulping fallen
apples. Cold on the motorway, bridges
of bone. Tailing lights are
lips or buds of spring but
cold and vanishing.[5]
In his afterword, Riley argues that the “characteristic mode of [Crump’s] poetry is a unique combination of fragmentation and compaction.”[6] Those poems that comprise the first half of Chords are especially compressed, rhyme and half-rhyme gently leading on through often enigmatic sequences of images. Rain binds the hitchhiking poet to a gnomic “clover sea,” the green waves where all roads lead promising the fragile possibility of good fortune, before the poem’s direction cuts through a “roaring night” of traffic to culminate in the isolated sound of “a silver bell.” It could almost be Georg Trakl. When this poem was reprinted in the Cambridge Literary Review, Riley justifiably described its figuration as “so radical as to push metaphor towards extinction,” and such difficulty is inseparable from the poem’s genuinely beguiling quality.[7] In Chords, it is a visual metaphor Riley chooses to distinguish Crump’s lyrics: “The small poem becomes something like a glyph.”[8] While this is a valuable descriptor, it is vital also to emphasize how sound organizes and undergirds so much of what makes these poems tick, singing through obscurity. Here, the “silver bell” might also offer a telling figure for Crump’s style, shining for the eye and ringing in the ear. At the heart of “Hitch-hiker,” the word “bell” activates a sequence of half-rhymes, shooting into the consonance of “called,” “fallen,” “cold,” and “tailing,” delicate sound play threading through the pulping of fallen apples as spring vanishes like the transitory flashes of headlights on the motorway. Insistent rhymed music characterizes this entire selection from the sometimes-inscrutable pastoral condensery of Part I to the marginally less compacted observational pieces of the last decade.
While the Lorine Niedecker of New Goose therefore might make for an instructive transatlantic antecedent, of his British contemporaries, Crump’s poems share some techniques in common with the briefer lyrics of Wendy Mulford, though the very real beauties of Mulford’s writing are more frequently offset by punkier disruptions, snips, and snags than we find here. Overt political commitment and commentary are instead largely absent from Crump’s poems, save the notable exception of the cold and smoky image of people “waiting / for money” in the neo-imagist lyric “Dole Office.” However, in the late 1960s, Prynne was in fact able to make a kind of political claim for this writing. It is compelling to speculate whether reading and responding to Crump’s poetry in The English Intelligencer prompted Prynne in the composition of two of his slenderest and most gracefully rhymed early song sequences, 1968’s Day Light Songs and Voll Verdienst.[9] Typical accounts rightly tend to emphasize Prynne’s influential prominence among the Intelligencer nexus as his work of the period ambitiously infused a dazzling rejoinder to Charles Olson and Ezra Pound with a deep understanding of Wordsworth and other English and German romantic poets. However, such histories can obscure the fact that the worksheet strove for a model of horizontal exchange and non-hierarchical reciprocation set outside deadening institutional officialese and commodified circulation. Alongside the various productive and unproductive antagonisms of its contributors, the magazine also therefore encouraged a great deal of exhilarating cross-pollination among poets, even between especially active members like Prynne and relative unknowns like Crump. Whatever the case, and almost like snippets from folk songs, particular rhymes in Prynne’s 1968 sequences, such as “is not less than true oh / love I tell you so” and “I had a key upon a ring / it was a pretty / thing,” do seem to offer moving affirmations of Crump’s style.[10]
Moreover, Crump was actually the recipient of a revealing open letter from Prynne that appeared in series three of the Intelligencer, dated March 14, 1968.[11] In this crucial, albeit succinct, document on his poetics of the time, Prynne praised rhyme as the “chief interest, & pleasure” of Crump’s lyrics, full of sprezzatura.[12] For Prynne, the best of Crump’s poetry makes a virtue of the eschewal of conventional syntax, each word “in its apt and truthful place,” and he celebrates “a pivot of great beauty[,] brought lightly off before our open faces.”[13]
Memorably, Crump’s writing leads Prynne to argue that
sound in its due place is as much true as knowledge (and all that mere claptrap about information & learning). Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion [page] and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe.[14]
The rhymes and half-rhymes that redound and loop throughout Crump’s poems are therefore conceived by Prynne as forces of linguistic counter-enclosure, a latent commons resting on the tongue and in the ear. With elegance the chimes and recurrences of “The Praise of Death” build against mortality’s closing door in centrifugal sociality:
The praise of death falls
light as
light on flowers. We are
comfortable, warm
and certain as the night
of cause and plan. The hand
that trembles
trembles like a fan, the bones
wake out of it. All of this
breaks. She shuts the door the
flowers die. It all so
lightly shakes.
Prynne’s claim better prepares us to listen out for moments of quiet refusal against alienation such as we find in “Work+Play,” the poet relinquished from the misery of labor to loaf by a pond, “My one free day.”[15] And, following William Carlos Williams with a twist, a poem is figured by Crump as a “mystic machine,” sound’s truth “Balancing silence without / And within” in “A motion of / The heart.”[16] Although “melancholy piping Pan” is never out of sight of the shepherds and swains which speak or loiter on the periphery of so many of Crump’s poems,[17] a calmness shorn of complacency defines Chords: flowers, hills, and the will of nightingales keeping panic lightly at bay.
Goat’s head hole
in the woodshed. Horn
scrape blink and tail
to twitch, remembering
the rose munch.[18]
The last sentence of “Castaway,” a late poem from Part II, might serve as a kind of précis of Crump’s particular gift, its echoes of Defoe and Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us” chorusing the ineluctably social:
Timeless
the moment’s ineffable gleam, echoic
choirs of endless ocean calling Triton.[19]
“Poetry lives in the heart before it is found on the page” wrote Crump in 2010, and his poems persuade us that this must be true.[20] Read now, these Chords and their heart music ring back out of the book, “high to the sun, in singing.”[21]
Notes:
[1] Raymond Crump, “The Tinder Box – Sparks of Poetry,” Cambridge Literary Review, issue 2 (2010), p. 142.
[2] Ibid., p. 144.
[3] Keith Wells, “Ray Crump,” Cambridge Literary Review, issue 2 (2010), p. 136.
[4] Raymond Crump, “The Tinder Box – Sparks of Poetry,” Cambridge Literary Review, issue 2 (2010), p. 144.
[5] Raymond Crump, Chords: New and Selected Poems (London: SSEA Press and Face Press, 2020), p. 5.
[6] Peter Riley, “Afterword” to Chords: New and Selected Poems (London: SSEA Press and Face Press, 2020), p. 57.
[7] Peter Riley, “Afterword,” Cambridge Literary Review, issue 1 (2009), p. 140.
[8] Ibid., p. 57.
[9] J.H. Prynne, Poems (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2015), pp. 25-36.
[10] Ibid., p. 29 and p. 35.
[11] J.H. Prynne, “Letter to Ray Crump”, Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer (eds. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Luke Roberts. Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012), p. 183-5.
[12] Ibid., p. 183.
[13] Ibid., p.185
[14] Ibid., p. 185.
[15] Raymond Crump, Chords: New and Selected Poems (London: SSEA Press and Face Press, 2020), p. 14.
[16] Ibid., p. 26.
[17] Ibid., p. 54.
[18] Ibid., p. 17.
[19] Ibid., p.45
[20] Raymond Crump, “The Tinder Box – Sparks of Poetry,” Cambridge Literary Review, issue 2 (2010), p. 142.
[21] Raymond Crump, Chords: New and Selected Poems (London: SSEA Press and Face Press, 2020), p. 12.