Trumpeter Paul Shearsmith passed away a few days ago in Stuttgart, aged 78. One of those many presences on the UK free improvisation scene known to—and as—one of the faithful—his German Wikipedia page is extensive, his English Wikipedia page non-existent. So is cultural memory.
Shearsmith grew up in Tadcaster, Yorkshire, where his father was the local blacksmith. Influenced, in his words, by the BBC Sound Effects library, on leaving the Leeds School of Architecture and moving to London, he attended jazz gigs by Stan Tracey. Here, as he tells it, he would stage a weekly heckle. On the basis of this, he was invited by drummer John Stevens to attend his workshops, playing a battered pocket trumpet he’d bought second hand with Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and with the London Musicians Collective at the Little Theatre Club in the West End and at the ICA back in the 1970s.
In the early ’80s, he travelled to Indonesia, where he came back with a ‘trompet’, a children’s instrument made from film canisters, a plastic tube, and a reed made from a balloon. Adapting this with a garden hose pipe as the ‘baliphone’, he met instrument-builder David Sawyer and through him joined the collaborative group Echo City with Guy Evans, Giles Leaman, Julia Farrington, Rob Mills, and Giles Perring. Starting in 1983 with a playground in Weaver’s Field in the East End, dubbed by the NME an ‘urban gamelan’, the group built what they called ‘sonic playgrounds,’ inventing tuned percussion instruments, made from old piping and other industrial and storage implements, including ‘batphones’, ‘fibrephones’ and ‘barrel drums’, and running workshops across the UK, Europe, East Asia and North America, including a collaboration with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra on the beach in the Isle of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. In Echo City’s work, music becomes sculpture, part of a public place and a participatory aesthetic. This is not about gigs or records, though they are a part of it, but about a more ongoing and more genuinely collective process. As Shearsmith put it: “I believe music belongs to everybody and can be made by anyone. Don’t let technique get in the way”.
Album art from Echo City’s second album, The Sound of Music (Some Bizarre, 1992)
These kind of public projects have always been a key part of UK improv, and, whether in Echo City or elsewhere, it was the spirit of collective playing that informed Shearsmith’s work, from his early work with Stevens to Maggie Nicols’s The Gathering, playing in the groups the Funking Poets and APE with the likes of saxophonist Big Mike Walter and poet Grassy Noel (for the latter, Shearsmith added fire extinguishers to his instrumental arsenal), or in the duo The Fujii with Japanese singer-guitarist, Koichi ‘Fuji’ Fujishima, who he met while the latter was busing in York, and latterly, with Ben Watson’s freewheeling AMM all stars.
Over the years, Shearsmith worked in an architecture firm, practiced photography, turned his car into a work of sculpture, played trombone, tubing, “tuned gas main”, and the baliphone in addition to his trusty pocket trumpet. Back in the day, I played in private a few times with Paul and the other members of KMAT, his trio with guitarist Keisuke Matsui and bassist Graham Makeachan, indefatigable host at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, where Shearsmith was a regular. It was soon after the election that saw Boris Johnson elected mayor of London: Shearsmith, he reported, had been playing in Ken Livingstone’s “battle bus”, blasting out socialist classics like ‘The Red Flag’. Around that time I remember anti-austerity protests, the student movement, the carnivalesque energies around the Hundred Years and its constellations, a warehouse near King’s Cross with a variant on Henry Threadgill’s Hubkaphone made out of old storage canisters for reels of film, a parade with bells through the streets of Hoxton organized by Mary Lemley in memory of Gabriel Hardisty-Miller, running into Grassy Noel going the other way up the street on a protest where, suddenly, everyone was going joyfully in every direction at once, and the street briefly reconfigured itself, as on protests it does, lines of poems, lines of music that refused to line up or be counted, out of time. And Paul Shearsmith’s pocket trumpet, piquant and strong in the wake of Don Cherry, blowing out little blasts of light.
Free improvisation in the UK and elsewhere developed as a social music and in this often unheralded way it continues, in venues like Hundred Years, the late lamented Iklectik, or the slightly more publicly-visible scene around Cafe Oto. It’s a music that's often politically connected to the traditions of left wing politics that have for decades been under steady attack from both the Right and the Labour party in its Blairite or Starmerite configurations: as well as the Livingstone Battle Bus, Shearsmith recorded an Iraq war protest song, and the Hundred Years Gallery has recently been raising money for the people of Gaza. Heard by small audiences, the music is not ‘popular’ by record industry terms—or the kinds of ‘focus groups’ by which Starmerite lurches to the right are justified—but it is more fundamentally than that a people’s music, one that, because it does not make money and is barely tied to market demands, aims at exploring only itself and its world, that draws, in spirit and sometimes in letter, on the traditions of protest in folk musics of various kinds, in free jazz, in experimental theatre or film and in the various experimental incarnations grouped under the headings of prog-rock or (post-)punk (Guy Evans of Van der Graaf Generator and Susie Honeyman of the Mekons both played in Echo City). The music stages a counter-history and a different way of being to all the various lies and erasures of memory surrounding it.
That was the world Paul Shearsmith believed in. That was the music that Paul Shearsmith made.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so just some reports on some of the latest books to have made their way from the letterbox onto my table, where the shelves have run out of space and the piles continue to pile up. First up, a package in the mail from Michael Klausman and Patrick Tiller’s Colorado-based wry press, continuing their acts of unexpected and pleasing acts of careful recovery and shepherding into print.
The Cobra King is a small, posthumous book of poems by Oswell Blakeston, whose pseudonym contracts the two names of Osbert Sitwell, or reads, alternatively, as “o swell”. A former drinking buddy of Dylan Thomas (“mouse” to Thomas’s “rat”, so the preface tells us), Blakeston was very much part of the British modernist scene from the 1920s on, though he remains under the radar: among other things he made what is reportedly the first abstract film, watched by Buñuel, wrote prolifically for the important film magazine Close-Up, and was a key part of the circle around Bryher; as well as his involvement in film, he was a painter, a writer of cookbooks, travel books (one of which saw him banned from Salazar’s Portugal), mystery novels and poems. Ian Young’s introduction—which recalls meeting Blakeston in a London pub while editing his gay poetry anthology The Male Muse in the early seventies, and recalls among other things Blakeston’s outré anecdotes of the German dancer, performer and actor Valeska Gert—suggests that there were as many as one hundred books and chapbooks over the years. The Cobra King comes from typescript in the Harry Ransom archives in Austin: described by Blakeston as his “beefcake poems”, they’re short and pithy with a wicked streak, memories of queer love or lust, come-ons, put-downs, alternately melancholic and joyful. The pick of the bunch a free-verse couplet half-way down a poem: “Make love until / we have no faces”.
If the Blakestone book is petite, pocket size, Paolo Lionni’s Headlines is widescreen, the page stretching out to extend the long lines of Lionni’s mixed prose texts and poems, largely emerging from London’s countercultural milieux, and lovingly assembled by Klausman from various underground magazines and from the 1962 manuscript which gives the book its title, found in the papers of yet another neglected poet, Philip Lamantia. More links with the film underground around the likes of Piero Heliczer, including a prose text originally written as the script for an unrealized surrealist film set on an Italian train. As the title suggest, newspapers form an important source, in found text re- or de-contextualized or satirically paraphrased, along with more gnomic addresses to poets like Corso and Ginsberg. As the biographical note suggests, these were mainly the product of Lionni’s itinerant twenties, bursting with energy, and culminating in a kind of ecstatic manifesto, ‘To The Queen’ first published on the front page of the International Times in 1966 after a copy—collectively signed by, among others, Rosemary Tonks, Michael X, Harry Fainlight and Brian Patten—was sent to Buckingham Palace. In such work, as with Blakestone, poetry is perhaps one of many modes, not just of art, but of living: the scattered fragments of a life lived on the move, the very incompleteness and sometimes disjointed energies of the work are a part of its spirit, which tugs at the corners of the pages as if yearning to jump onto the street or road or boat once more.
Not an archival project, but recent poems: Ken Bluford’s Skip Tracing is the first full-length collection, following the collaboration with Tom Weatherly, Climate/Stream. Bluford was part of the scene around Middle Earth Books in Philadelphia, including Bockris-Wylie, hung out at the Poetry Project and Slug’s Saloon, and is, the bio note informs us, the brother of Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut in outer space. The 145 pages of poems here were largely first published as facebook posts, antidotes to the ever-shortening streams and screeds of today’s social media platforms and their intersections with the mendacities of US national (and international politics). Bluford instead offers wry, ironic or tender, measured reflection on a variety of subjects: here, for instance, the noirish Robert Mitchum western Blood on the Moon might make an appearance alongside Al Green or Charlie Patton. Bluford’s (non-exclusive) preference is for four-line stanzas, often capped off with an incisive couplet that introduces a new resolution or note of ambiguity, plentiful enjambment constantly moving the twists and turns of poetic thought against the interrupter or continuation of the line-break. The bio notes the way the poems combine the responsive nature of improvisation with the careful workings of form, elements that true students of improvisation knows are in no way incompatible—the paramount example, perhaps, Coltrane’s warp-speed working-through of patterns in ‘Giant Steps’, a track Bluford recalls from a street a few blocks away from where he lived and workshopped and woodshedded, as the “revolving drums” of a concrete mixer merge with a drumset, a Coltrane mural whose blues suggests waves of water or sound, across the stanza, a poem about keeping the memory alive as the mural fades--as one of the tasks of poetry is to keep a cultural memory that fades into nothing even in the very guise of being re-branded, re-marketed and sold on any number of online platforms. Poetry knows a history in the crevices, in the metaphorical association, the quick flash, that the poem taps into with a patient speed: not so much, perhaps, the famous breakneck up-tempo of the famous recording in which Coltrane suddenly calls double, triple, quadruple, quantum time, but one of the slower, earlier takes heard on the Heavyweight Champion boxset. (Not that ‘slower’ means slow.)
(The group’s conversation on the first alternate take, transcribed by Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman. Coltrane opines “I don’t think I’m gonna improv this—I ain’t goin be sayin nothin, tryin just, makin the changes, I ain’t goin’ be tellin’ no story...Like, tellin them black stories.” “Shoot. Really, you make the changes, that’ll tell em a story.” “You think the changes are the story!” “Right, that’ll change all the stories”. “I don’t want to tell no lies!” “Changes themselves is some kind of story”. The melody, the chords, what rides both to twist away from it.)
One of the sharpest of the political poems, ‘Self-Defense Poem’, avoids the mode of elegy that many of the better-known poems emerging from Black Lives Matter and the Floyd Rebellion have adopted, instead deploying a mordant and incisive irony against the white-right-ring militias and their hysterical fears of antifa and black life, and the rewriting of cops as potential victims of assault who must shoot first, ask questions at the inquest. Imagining that they’ve shot a cop in pre-emptive ‘self-defense’, the poem concludes: “And if I was photographed having a drink or two // With fellas from Antifa with time to kill / Who’s to say this poem isn’t aimed at you”. The tone of world-weary—yet not resigned—wisdom, chastened compassion, or a quick and cutting take-down of the lies that justify continuing anti-black violence, calls to mind the later work, say, of Lorenzo Thomas, in Dancing on Main Street: sometimes in the pacing and tonality too I hear echoes of Bluford’s friend—and Thomas’s literary executor—Aldon Nielsen, who’s thanked in the acknowledgments, and who is himself on a streak of fine poetry books of late—the Selected Poemsedited by JP Marcoux from Blazevox a couple of years back, and most recently, the recent book-length interview-cum-autobiography Memewarswith E. Ethelbert Miller. Either way, Bluford’s is a very fine first full-length—at the age of 75!—and deserves the expanded set of readers I hope this publication will land it.
Following the trail, also from Blazevox and in the mail, is Edric Mesmer’s Tides that Don’t Perturb. As librarian at the University at Buffalo—he was an excellent host when I did archive research there in 2022—Mesmer has excellent knowledge of Buffalo’s literary and artistic lore, and a fine line in bibliographic research with the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series. Buffalo provides some of the referential landscape of these poems, including my favourite in the book, a tribute to Cornelius Cardew, who worked on the manuscript for Treatise while on a fellowship in the town in the sixties—the original version of the score published by Gallery Upstairs Press, who put out the chapbook Pressed Wafer by another temporary Buffalo resident, John Wieners, the same year. On that archive visit, my train out of town towards Massachusetts was delayed for over an hour, I think because of snow: at the station I met a couple who told me stories of the campus in the sixties, the architectural history of the town, a wealth of connections and cross-connections and a generous encounter that stayed with me, but I could never remember the names—until Edric identified them as Max Wickert and Katka Hammond just this past week. (A poem is dedicated to them in the book.) It’s connections like that, coincidences or dots joined up, that the poems specialize in, but that’s not their motivating method, more a part of their texture. The poems have something of the crossword puzzle to them, the pleasure of teasing out their careful and multiple allusions, often framed through classical mythology, but they also have the pleasurable spark of language that doesn’t need to be deciphered to be richly enjoyable, as the sound and play propel forward across Dickinsonian dashes—“trying to capture the cadence of thoughts, and ruptures”, as Edric puts it, in a time when thinking has become fragmentary and disjointed, to make the connections or leave them hanging there. During one of several memorial panels for Tyrone Williams at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture this past February, JP Marcoux talked about Tyrone’s use of the em-dash in relation to Fred Moten’s notion of the break, to the picket lines of a sanitation strike, as a pause or a connector which might reach across from life to death and back, an image I just can’t get out of my head: in Edric’s poems, I’m thinking of the em-dash as a bridge, a rope one perhaps, over the yawning abysses or tides that open up under us as we teeter forward into this bad new year. Like stumbling by chance into a talk on St Francis, staring at an aquarium, counting the syllables, moving ahead into the light.
Finally: from the other side of the Atlantic, Tom Crompton and Dom Hale, two thirds of the Poets Hardship Fund, have put together a beautiful petite chapbook from Tom and Alex Marsh’s Gong Farm called Mud Ramps. It’s a prose text of less than a dozen pages—eight to be precise, in fourteen paragraphs—and calling it a prose poem risks putting it too safely in a generic box, but it is in prose and it is fundamentally and committedly about poetry. Perhaps it’s more like an essay, but then, really, it’s a poem, or an essay, or both, in prose, but really, in language. It’s a petite book, with a lovely cover image by Amy Todman, printed at the Leeds Footprint Workers Co-Op, and that size, the modesty of scale speaks to its humility of ambition. It’s not small because it’s seeking to be a collector’s item but because that smallness of scale is where we can widen our view, slip it into our pocket or a letterbox, a carrier pigeon coming in off January winds to bring us a message for the turning of the year. The pamphlet has a polemical edge too—the text feels like a manifesto for our time—but the polemic has a generous edge, and it builds itself, not by defining an in- or out-group in the classic mode of the manifesto. This isn’t about building a movement or a group, but a manual for anyone to use. Like a poem it’s sometimes obscure in the best ways, and it’s in the obscurity that the clarity, really, is to be found: you feel it wandering on the edge, shaded by the landscapes of the north of England or elsewhere, their vocabulary—kerb, cairn, calyx moorsense, borage, scrim—echoing the work of Barry MacSweeney and Maggie O’Sullivan it’s informed by. (O’Sullivan, along with Stephen Rodefer, provides one of the epigraphs, opening up a world in just four words: “Poetry finds my life”.) A few years ago, in an interview broadcast, of all places, on Instagram, the late Jean-Luc Godard said that the Americans invaded Iraq in order to capture the birthplace of writing. I remembered it as him saying they wanted to invade Iraq in order to destroy language from its source. Either way, he’s being proved right as the swirl of banalized language in this era of Global English swallows itself up under the sign of Trump and Musk—what the opening page of Mud Ramps has this down pat in identifying as “the virtual extraction void”, “bot-language” the “devouring machines”. AI is no longer an early millennium sci-fi flop by Stephen Spielberg but the consuming future of warfare, our lives, as Europe rearms and the US inclines itself more and more to domestic neo-fascism. Once you start reading it’s tempting to quote every other line: the best thing, though is to read it yourself. Paraphrase dilutes the mellifluous fluency of its phrasing. But here’s a run-through, some tunes from amidst the overall flow of the song: plotting counter-landscapes, “inventing scales to measure”: the image of the tuning fork in the traffic, “remaking languages is always the first and last principle”, “it’s not freedom but discloses it”, the dissonance of collective life, Dorothy Wordsworth “hallucinating drills and airstrikes” and calling Tom Raworth on the phone to reflect on the making or destruction of landscape. And: the momentary and stupid beauty of the poem that becomes history, down crumbling lanes of the heart, “the ancient and futural horizons of poetry that emulsify all living writing with the brilliant dead”, and the penultimate sentence, what is at the text’s core—“so that who we are is really unimportant in the language”—as what a poet offers is an air that remains beyond the life or name that gave it breath. And so this text, its collective resonance, reverberation, something for the road, for the year ahead. I’m very grateful to have this and I recommend it highly!
~~
So ends the round-up. More to come on various things, including Theodore Harris and Amiri Baraka’s Our Flesh of Flames, out in expanded full colour reissue. Still wanting, too, to write on Elaine Mitchener’s stupendous record Solo Throat from last year, to finish off other manuscripts, other projects, tidying, collecting, sifting. More, in time, to be revealed, whatever the rest of March and beyond chooses to bring.
Pleased to finally be able to put back into print a number of out-of-print titles from Materials, among them a re-typeset and re-designed second printing of D.S. Marriott’s Duppies, previously published by Materials in 2017 and in a US edition with Commune the following year, and out of print for a few years now. I’ve wanted to put this back into circulation for some time, especially since the folding of Commune Editions also put the US edition out of print. (I’d also highly recommend D.S. Marriott's subsequent books of poetry, Before Whiteness from City Lights and the forthcoming Letters from the Black Ark from Omnidawn.) Here’s the cover (Clarence Major’s painting At the Turning Point opens up the book inside.)
Back at the start of 2022, I posted some kind of new year’s resolutions list on this blog. Technically, it was more an expanded to-do list, which I suppose is the ambiguity of the form itself--an internalized work-discipline where ‘character-building’, personal fulfilment, achievement of goals, etc, etc, all merge together: pseudo-movement, changing and continuing, like Mike Kelley’s Banana Man, surrounded by a crowd of people who declare themselves all to be moving but who seem to be standing still, lying in a crater in the earth flapping arms and legs and pretending to be an angel, dressed as a stagnant pond that recirculates but doesn’t move. So too, the resolution form, stuck between a series of goals, achievements, work tasks, and something more numinous that doesn’t just turn life into a series of targets and believes in some actual possibility of change.
But who thinks about lists for so long? So here, a few years later, another list, a placeholder for myself as much as anything: an accumulating pile of projects, some of them already initiated back in 2022, others more recent, all of them overlapping so that nothing is ever truly finished--a way of not ending, somewhere between useful motivation and pathology.
Working collectively, collaboratively, is one way to see writing as part of something that reaches beyond itself, beyond selves, as something with a future. And working together this past year, in person and virtually, with Candace Hill on a poetry-and-art book called Abstractive has been a joy--the manuscript now done and in search of a publisher. It’s been a pleasure, too, to open up an ‘infinitive conversation’ document with Nhã Thuyên, in lieu of conversations in person and on foot round the city, and a real honour in the summer to publish Don’t Hide the Madness, a chapbook excerpt of the longer manuscript Taste of Water, in Kaitlin Rees’s expert and fastidious translation. Don’t Hide the Madness and a of Askia Touré’s Songhai! were last year’s Materials titles: in the works next year are Howard Slater’s translation of Abdellatif Laâbi, some other new titles to be announced, and newly typeset-reprint of D.S. Marriott’s Duppies, and fresh runs of temporarily out-of-print titles by Anne Boyer, Lisa Jeschke, James Goodwin, and Tongo Eisen-Martin.
Since 2020 editing work with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux on the two-volume anthology The Umbra Galaxy has been a constant presence. Four years on, the books are moving ever closer to the finish line, and after years of online meetings, it was a thrill to discuss it in person and in public with Tonya and Jean-Philippe at the Furious Flower conference in September, the next iteration at the Louisville conference on literature and culture this coming February.
Outside collective work, there a number of manuscripts in some sort of progress: there’s the makings of a critical manuscript on contemporary poetry, maybe called Working Notes, still to be hashed out; a book on free jazz, Survival Music, continues to be researched and slowly written, as does another planned book on music, Ensembles, accumulating and expanding before (hopefully) to condense a little; there’s an in-progress poetry manuscript, On Musical Objects (a bit of it here), and along the way I may have accidentally ended up writing a book of daily/political essays, though that’s perhaps best left to brew a little. And outside writing--and back to collective working--continued music-making in duo with Tansy Spinks (so far, largely in a studio on a hill overlooking West Norwood, occasionally in other places like Cafe Oto), and in trio with GUE, as well as in another duo with Unk in a bunker near, if not quite beneath, a heath; ‘expanded improvisation’ workshops with Mattin, and a related project on freedom and improvisation.
But enough of lists! All these enumerations of projects tends toward the logic of the CV, the accumulation of writing or writing about writing experienced on substack or social media or whatever other data-harvesting curated venue tend towards the personal brand competing for attention, rather than as part of the collective (fractured, fragmented, sometimes cohesive) struggle within language that one would hope writing would strive towards. As European right-wing social democracy continues to destroy itself, the ‘centrist’ media narrative continues to cling to ‘liberal hope’, the Macrons and von der Leyens and Ampels and Harrises of this world seen as a bulwark against the rise of fascist and neo-fascist parties. But, as a friend put it to me the other day, this imagined centre is, in fact, the centre of the right-wing, as the political climate lurches (is pushed) towards the anti-migrant, anti-woke manufacturing of culture wars with quite material effects, the fusion of nationalist rhetoric and international capital, the accelerated race to hell. For over a year now genocide has gone on unchecked in Gaza, murder on murder on murder, and still the weapons flow, the US has elected a president who promises some unforeseen fusion of old and new right in alliance with tech billionaires, who in turn contribute funding and support to the fascism that rears its head in France, in Germany, in right-wing riots in the UK, the rhetoric of the border on the one hand, the flow of capital, the flow of weapons on the other. Increasingly, we’re going to be writing our way into fascism, however directly it affects us, some insulated, some on the front lines. Our writing, our music, our art, our action, is going to have to rise to this. Our ‘our’.
Today, for once, the sun is shining, though snow is forecast; a squirrel is running around outside gathering or burying its food; plants, still half-way between life and death, lean out towards the window and towards the light.
