Poetry, Sold Out

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This piece by Hugo Williams originally appeared in the August 1965 edition of The London Magazine, as part of a special issue dedicated to theatre and performance. Williams reviewed the Poetry Incarnation that was put on at the Royal Albert Hall earlier that summer, featuring readings by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and more.

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In a quite unexcited way, thousands of people were meeting outside the Albert Hall as if they had been meeting there regularly for years. These were people in t-shirts and tail-coats, suede shoes and flowery ties; girls in string vests, gym shoes, flowered dresses; boys in spotted shirts, punjabi jackets, windbreakers; gentlemen in pin-stripes. The Albert Hall was like a Maypole. There was to be a poetry reading. The largest ever held in this country.

On June 11, 7,000 people paid 5s. or 10s. to hear about twenty poets reading from their work. If 200 of them had bought their favourite poet’s latest book, that would have made up an average total sale for a book of poetry in this country. But when you buy a book, you know what you are paying for; 7,000 people bought tickets for this poetry reading because they wondered what it was all about.

‘Poets of the World… Poets of Our Time’, they had read, ‘an historic gathering of many of the world’s great poets’. For all they knew, it might have been the truth. Even so, it would not have drawn 7,000. To really pack them in, something more had to be hinted at. So ‘Final Poet’s Communiqué’ was advertised. This was more like it. Something desperate was going to happen. It might be the last chance they would have to… One could hardly afford to miss a ‘Spontaneous planet-chant… Hot peace-shower… Poesie Insemination… Global Synthesis’. The poets had turned their pens to a little innocent Public Relations. Who better than they to do so, and why should they not? It was the PRO’s dream: a rare commodity, a unique occasion. Poetry on the grand scale, poetry in the raw, poetry on the attack, but best of all, Beat Poetry in the Albert Hall. Allen Ginsberg, Moses of the Beatniks, was taking over the hallowed home of Sir Malcolm Sargent and Mahalia Jackson. This would have to be seen to be believed.

There is apparently something quite innocuous about Ginsberg in the nude, just as there is something faintly absurd about a grizzly in a suit.

And so the idea snowballed, until it possessed the drawing power of a cinema-scope extravaganza. It even had the necessary quota of husky, but hollow, Californians. Allen Ginsberg was all on his own: The Story of Esau. I believe if it had not been for him, the history would have gone out of the occasion and there would have been only half the attendance.

While he was in England, he inevitably met the Beatles at a party, and was so moved at the sight of them that he took off all his clothes and made a dive for John Lennon. For once John’s comment is not recorded, but it was too much for his wife: ‘Come on John,’ she said, ‘we’re going home,’ and they stalked out, leaving the party to sink or swim without them. Some people thought they were wrong to leave. There is apparently something quite innocuous about Ginsberg in the nude, just as there is something faintly absurd about a grizzly in a suit.

I don’t know how many people went to the Poetry Incarnation hoping, even expecting to see the first naked human to walk the revered boards of the Albert Hall. I am sure that 7,000 didn’t turn up to hear poetry read, and they were not disappointed. If good modern poetry had been read to that many people they wouldn’t have stayed four hours, even with Bruce Lacey as light relief. What we had was never boring, but seldom poetry. I’m not complaining.

Inside the doors, girls were handing out flowers to everyone. Irises, gentians, lupins, marigolds, scrounged from Covent Garden on the direction of Dan Richter, one of the spontaneous creators of the occasion. ‘Come with Flowers’, the invitations had read, ‘Come in Fancy Dress… Come’.

I went inside and found a seat in the front of the stalls. Beside me a man was trying to open a bottle of Merry-down cider with a penknife. Down in the arena the poets wandered about or sat back in cane chairs, drinking and smoking. Flowers and suitcases were scattered about and there was a small dais with cushions round it on the floor. On one of these a dark-spectacled priest was sitting. Nothing happened for half an hour. Then suddenly the hall was filled with a deep moaning. Allen Ginsberg, banging finger cymbals, had begun to chant a Tibetan mantra, two words repeated over and over to relax the voices of the poets and cast a spell. The sound died away and Alexander Trocchi, cigarette burning, said to the 7,000 that he was as surprised to see them as they were no doubt surprised to see him and his friends. He then introduced the bearded Laurence Ferlinghetti. ‘I’m waiting for my case to come up,’ said Ferlinghetti, ‘and I am waiting for the age of anxiety to drop dead… and I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American… and I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and TV rights sold in advance to the natives… and I am waiting happily for things to get much worse.’ ‘Poems like the one I read at the Albert Hall,’ he said later, ‘are built to make it with a large audience. They have a lot of what I call “public surface” – but that isn’t the only kind of poetry I write.’ Ferlinghetti thinks Allen Ginsberg is the greatest poet since Walt Whitman and that Bob Dylan is better than most of the Beats. His photograph appeared in The Times the next day, mis-captioned as Simon Vinkenoog, ‘the grand old young man of Dutch letters’. Vinkenoog was next to be introduced, and he strode round the arena, mouthing dumbly until Trocchi placed the microphone over his head like an order of merit, kissing him lightly on both cheeks. Unfortunately there was nothing much to hear and only his final word of ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes’, mounting up and fading away, captured the huge audience, who were soon repeating it after him like a baby with its mother. On the whole, the baby was pretty well trained, for whenever Alabama, Vietnam or a four-letter word was mentioned they cried out with pleasure, asking for more and invariably getting it.

It was very like a session at Speakers’ Corner. No matter what the cause, there are always one or two phrases which are bound to succeed. Down with the upper classes. Hurrah. Down with unmarried mothers. Hurrah. What about the workers? Hurrah. The trouble is that causes very often spill over into neighbouring ones, until you find listeners to a Freedom Marcher cheering on an Empire Loyalist. It was much the same at the Albert Hall, causes included. He who speaks the codeword loudest gets the loudest shout.

The best things about the evening were its jokes.

The Russian poet Vosnesensky was in the audience, but he refused to read. He probably realised that his delicate, finely rehearsed delivery would be totally lost on the audience. Ginsberg pleaded with him, but he remained where he was and it was this which upset Ginsberg and made him exaggerate the obscenity of the poems he later read. ‘Come and arse-fuck me,’ he yelled. ‘Give us some poetry,’ came a lone response. The poems he read were long, Beat confessionals, unrelieved by any of Ferlinghetti’s ‘public surface’. It was hard to understand his fame.

The best things about the evening were its jokes. But it is hard to remember now whether one laughed because of the overall seriousness of the occasion, as at school, or because the lines were genuinely funny. For instance, is Ernst Jandl, Pete Brown and Mike Horovitz imitating a prolonged, broken up ‘Atichoo’ called ‘Sneeze Furore’ and written by Jandl, genuinely funny, or only a form of laughing gas because it is called a poem? And is Anselm Hollo ending a poem with ‘Ready, get set, fuck’ a joke or a challenge?

One thing is certain: nobody there was likely to take up the challenge. The audience was blatantly on the side of any old iron. They had a kind of clapping cat-call which they dealt out whenever anything came to their notice. ‘This next poem was written in gaol’, said John Esam – loud applause. As Trocchi said when he introduced the voice of Willam Burroughs: ‘But I’m not going to apologise for him this time. I know I’m among friends here tonight.’ Allen Ginsberg happened to be wearing the microphone while the recording was on and his voice was superimposed on that of Burroughs, like the cancelling echo in a cathedral.

After the interval, in which the Maypole turned once in the growing darkness, Harry Fainlight came on, very thin in a faded red t-shirt. He read a long and haunting poem about a vision he had had about a spider crawling up the wall of his room. ‘I just thought some people should know that these drugs aren’t all sweetness and light,’ he said in a mid-Atlantic accent common to many of the poets who read. It was an extraordinary poem, but other people’s nightmares have a loneliness which usually carries them on, after everyone has ceased to relate. At the best of times, other people’s dreams never really bring back one’s own. Harry Fainlight was more recognisably a poet than most of the English who read, but the crowd took exception to his poor delivery and yelled at him to get down. Trocchi also approached him and whispered something in his ear. But Fainlight only gestured towards the audience and said audibly, ‘she’s just getting warm’. Then he finished reading and collapsed into the arms of his old friend Allen Ginsberg, who was now cross-legged at his feet.

I had changed my seat, and it was at this point that I noticed the man with the Merrydown cider busily presenting the people in the poet’s enclosure with branches of lilac.

At one point a rather pathetic SOS was put out for the poet Pablo Neruda who was supposed to have read. ‘Is Neruda in the audience? Pablo Neruda.’ But Neruda, a fine poet who read at the Kerwin Gallery a few nights later, had stayed away from the bear garden. His absence was significant.

The Americans were apparently disappointed and disillusioned when finally confronted with the British Beat effort. This was not surprising, since they were looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. Pete Brown and Mike Horovitz seemed badly provincial beside the whole-hearted, wholly committed Americans, even if they are committed to ‘the new-nippled generations’, ‘the fruits of transcopulation’ and other urbane ideas which no one in this outlying province could ever really put his faith in. Perhaps we are provincial nowadays. Adrian Mitchell spoke of Alabama and Vietnam, but he is not in America, he is not in Vietnam, he is here in the sub-hip city of London.

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Hugo Williams is an English poet. He worked at The London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and won the T. S. Eliot prize in 1999.

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