He will be eager to imitate […] seriously and in front of of a lot of people — thunder and the noise of wind and hail, of axle and pulley, the sound of trumpets, oboes and pipes and all kinds of instruments, and even the cries of dogs and sheep and birds.
Plato, Republic, Book 3, on the “imitative poet”, trans. Penelope Murray and T.S. Dorsch
This week, BBC radio repeated a documentary about 1960s British experimental writing. I pop up towards the end to talk about Bob Cobbing and Rosemary Tonks, two poets who recorded in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop around the time that the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire was using it to warp and splice the Doctor Who theme tune together.
You can listen to The Advance Guard of the Avant-garde here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tybwl
I like how the programme swirls its archive clips and interviews in homage to the Radiophonic Workshop’s spaced-out sound world. When it was first broadcast in 2018, I was trying to listen while giving my three-year-old a bath; at one point, I mistook a blast on a plastic birdsong toy for a particularly shrill special effect. I like to think that the producer — Geoff Bird — would have appreciated the confusion.
Tonks wrote about the experience of working with Derbyshire in her novel The Bloater (1968):
There’s no air in the workshop, we’re sealed in like tinned shepherd’s pie. The clock is silent but the hands go round fast with that railway station stutter. I’m late of course, and the little silver music-stand has been put out for me already. I arrange my papers; I stop being human. There’s no time to make mistakes in here, they’re too expensive. […] We know that however well we succeed, fifty “experts” (people who acquire theoretical knowledge without using it) will pour cold water on the result. And then five years later, grudgingly, and ten years later, publicly, stuff our work into the sound archives, and refer to it incessantly to intimidate future composers.
The passage is both drily funny about the thankless reality of genuine experiment — which only becomes glamorous when it succeeds — while also being depressingly prophetic of the careers and reputations of both women. Derbyshire stopped producing music in 1975 and was only credited with her work on Doctor Who posthumously in 2013. Tonks, who received patronising reviews for her 1967 collection, Iliad of Broken Sentences (“they just smash and smash my poetry”), also stopped writing in the Seventies. Her poems were not reprinted until after her death in 2014, although samizdat photocopies circulated among admiring poets in the interim.
As Tonks predicted in The Bloater — which was reprinted for the first time last year — the work of both is now admiringly preserved in university archives.
FURTHER READING
Rosemary Tonks’ poems were reprinted as Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe, 2014). One of my favourites is “Badly Chosen Lover”. You can read it here:
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/badly-chosen-lover/
You can hear Tonks reading it here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/76911/badly-chosen-lover
And you can hear a snippet of the Radiophonic Workshop remix of the poem here: