Inexpensive, pocket-size poetry books hit the bookshops before I was a teenager, opening doors that our English teachers hadn’t yet reached for. Penguin Books produced a first series of slim Penguin Modern Poets books that did much to colour the cultural landscape of Britain. Decorated initially in bold monochrome hues that depicted dried flowers, feathers and grasses, the covers of volumes 8-11 burst into solarized colour to coincide with 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Their best seller-became volume 10, whose trippy acid colours could barely contain the Liverpudlian fun of Henri, McGough and Patten. As the series ran on, the cover art peered through microscopes, displayed sliced geodes, lichens and - oddly - a windmill against a dazzling blue sky for Beeching, Guest and Mead in volume 16.
Series 1 ran from 1962-1979. I came late to the party but remained faithful without a break until volume 19 in 1971, picking up volumes 23 and 24 late in the day. The covers shown below are therefore not quite a full set. Looking at the spines on the shelf, the most handled look to be:
- volume 5 (Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg)
- volume 8 (Edwin Brock, Geoffrey Hill, Stevie Smith)
- volume 9 (Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams)
- the towering volume 10 of the Liverpool Beat Poets (Adrien Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten)
- volume 11 (D.M. Black, Peter Redgrove, D.M. Thomas)
- volume 12 (Alan Jackson, Jeff Nuttall, William Wantling)
- volume 13 (Charles Bukowski, Philip Lamantia, Harold Norse)
- volume 14 (Alan Brownjohn, Michael Hamburger, Charles Tomlinson)
- volume 17 (David Gascoyne, W.S. Graham, Kathleen Raine)
- volume 19 (John Ashberry, Lee Hardwood, Tom Raworth)
The selection of the work of the ‘Beat poets’ (volume 5) proved that punctuation could be optional, that sex was not, that sanity may for some be liminal and that, in Ferlinghetti’s memorial phrasing, poetry is “still the underwear of the soul”. If I knew that when I sat exams, I didn’t let on. Ginsberg’s exhortation to America to “Go fuck yourself with your atom bombs” has never lost its crisp directness. That these voices were smuggled in behind an ethereal jacket illustration of leaf tracery (or is it a river delta?) was smart. Unsuspecting readers, instead of tasting a modern pastoral, received an altogether different payload. Never judge a book by …
Only four page in to volume 8, with its solarized red mushroom cover, Alan Brock’s 5 Ways to Kill a Man gave English teachers material for a perfect lesson. After crucifixion, chivalric combat, trench warfare with gas and aerial bombardment, who would have expected plain old ennui? An alternative lesson was available with his Song of a Battery Hen. Geoffrey Hill’s The Distant Fury of Battle offered a complex meditation in a graveyard where, “Named, anonymous; who test | Alike the endurance of yews | Laurels, moonshine, stone, all tissues”. Stevie Smith’s work places the light frivolity of My Cats next to Not Waving but Drowning. Such is the role of an anthology’s editor.
My copy of volume 9 with its red and black (are they?) twigs is the most dog-eared and well-thumbed of the lot. Denise Levertov placed me “under a modest orange tree” in the company of “infinitesimal flowers” and in Lonely Man in “An open world” raising dust, “baffled in the stillness”. The elusive nature of meaning, delivered in spare lines, never seemed more vital. Kenneth Rexroth’s Dative Haruspices began as as exercise in vocabulary broadening before settling - with Inversely, as the Square of their Distances Apart that followed - as a pair of slow meaning fixers in the faster quotidian flow. There was special meaning too in Rexroth writing a letter to William Carlos Williams (“I think you are like St Francis”) and, fifty pages later, the latter himself writing to Ford Maddox Ford. (Two writers sharing a name pattern.) Was Williams the reason I went on to read Ford’s The Good Soldier? Perhaps not, but I still know by heart Williams’ haiku poem The Term, have it marked to show where I thought breathes should be taken, and still see that sheet of brown paper … rolling with the wind. If it is beaten by any other poem, it is by his own The Red Wheelbarrow upon which “so much depends”. If I were to see a red wheelbarrow today, I would be looking for the white chickens.
Page 108 of volume 11 gave me D.M. Thomas’ concrete Mercury with its perihelion/aphelion rotation around the sun, a mad eye encircled with a poem that could rotate in ither direction. How many sheets of paper did I waste in imitation of this? His Symbiosis offered six small rectangles spread across two pages. As Haiku-like stanzas, would they have been any the less outside a brutalist rendition?
In volume 12 William Wantling offered the very definition of poetry as a struggle to “get | down on paper the real or the true | which we call life” which in Poetry memorably exploded in violence in a prison’s lower exercise yards. I read it aloud to all and sundry as an example of ‘shock poetry’. In more daring moods, I followed up with his All the fucking time, although today its day seems to have passed.
By 1969 (perhaps my 1972?) volume 13 with its sliced mineral specimen jacket cover from Northampton, William Carlos Williams is again being invoked, here by Harold Norse, who asks in William Carlos Williams “what heaven | do you experiment in now?” When poets quote other poets, you learn to follow the trail.
My volume 14 (Alan Brownjohn, Michael Hamburger, Charles Tomlinson) looks as if it has survived a flood - perhaps appropriately as my near-namesake’s memorable Sea Change caught my attention. First, its vocabulary (‘quicunx’, ‘sardonyx’, ‘carnelian’ and ‘chalcedony’) left its mark; then its closing echo of T.S. Eliot with “static instance, therefore untrue”. Sea Poem with “a fault in the atmosphere” showing sea to have ceaseless movement “to one end - | the grinding | a whiter bone” gives it shelter under Eliot’s The Dry Salvages.
These slim volumes were the pre-internet smartphones of the day. Small enough to keep in a pocket, engrossing enough to read while avoiding lamp posts, they could accompany our waking hours - and then be swapped for the latest model that hit the shelves. Then cost between a pre-decimal two shillings and six pence in 1962 to a whopping 45p in 1974, but broadened the mind and fed the soul in ways that were priceless and invaluable. Their now yellowing pages still retain their original power.
Penguin have since released series 2 (1995 - 1998) and series 3 (2016 - 2018) of these books, which collectively takes in much of contemporary British poetry. Missing, of course, were other titans like Auden, Berryman, Cummings, Douglas Dunn, Eliot, Heaney, Hughes, Gunn, Larkin, Lowell, MacNeice, Muldoon, Pound and Spender, perhaps all excluded by a Faber factor (whose pricier volumes have retained their paper white pages) but findable there by those of us who by this stage were hooked. And before long, Penguin soon dealt us addicts a different offering in the form of the Penguin Modern European Poets series, which is another story altogether.