Last week, I wrote for Prospect magazine about the politics of the recently-released official correspondence around appointing the UK Poet Laureate half a century ago (link below). Something I didn’t get to mention — but which I’ve been trying to piece together ever since — was the attempted intervention of the “Poets Conference” in the Whitehall process. In the early Seventies, the Poets Conference aspired to be something like a trade union for British poets, with collective bargaining power and social democratic principles. It failed, but its fragmentary history is intriguing.
In May 1972, Cecil Day-Lewis — who had been Poet Laureate since 1968 — died. On 7th October 1972, Leonard Clark, a poet and retired education inspector, wrote to Sir John Hewitt, appointments secretary at 10 Downing Street. He enclosed an annotated report from a recent issue of Time Out magazine. The report describes the fifth official meeting of the Poets Conference, at which it was proposed that the new Laureate should be appointed for three to five years, rather than life, with “a realistic salary for a real job of work” (specifically, the salary of a Member of Parliament).
The resolution was sent to Downing Street by the concrete, sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing, who signed himself “Secretary to the Conveners” of the Poets Conference. This led to a meeting between Hewitt, Cobbing and the poet George MacBeth, another Conference organiser. “As a result of this meeting”, the report continues, “it was felt right to call an emergency Conference immediately”. The sixth Poets Conference took place on August 19th, when a vote on Laureate candidates was held, with the following results:
Adrian Mitchell (28)
George Macbeth (24)
Jeff Nuttall (19)
Charles Causley (18)
Basil Bunting (16)
Philip Larkin (15)
Hugh MacDiarmid (14)
John Betjeman (10)
Bob Cobbing (10)
W.H. Auden (7)
William Plomer (7)
George Barker (6)
Dom Sylvester Houédard (6)
Christopher Logue (5)
These figures were communicated to Sir John Hewitt — who, unlike the Conference, had at least considered female poets for the post — but to no avail. On 10th October it was announced that Sir John Betjeman (10 votes) would be the next Poet Laureate.
Leonard Clark acted as a confidential adviser to Hewitt throughout the Laureate appointment process. His purpose in sending the Times Out report about the Poets Conference seems to have been to alert Hewitt to the possibility of negative publicity, and also to deny any involvement (“the report has come into my possession by quite legitimate means. I am not a member of the Poets’ Conference”).
It’s all very John le Carré: the anonymous poet-informant who was Clark’s “quite legitimate” mole annotates the report with details of the vote and adds that a BBC documentary about the Conference, scheduled for mid-September, “still hasn’t gone out, and may be expected, perhaps, shortly after the announcement of the new Laureate”.
I’m not sure, though, if it was ever broadcast — the only reference to the Poets Conference in the BBC listings for 1972 is a televised reading by Adrian Mitchell in December:
Recently elected by the Poets Conference as their choice for Poet Laureate, tonight he reads a selection of his verse, including The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry.
The mole at the Poets Conference also reported the politically radical ambitions of his fellow travellers, who demanded
that available and forthcoming money be invested with a view to setting up a nationwide system of poetry centres
Specifically, the Poets Conference
deplored the plans to raise the price of Poetry Review and of subscriptions to the Poetry Society on the grounds that a National Poetry Centre and its services should be open to all and not just those who can afford high fees
1972 was — as now — a time of high inflation, with government pay freezes, mutinous unions, and rising interest rates. But the Poets Conference kept its subscription “as low as possible so that no one is excluded — it is 50p a year” [in today’s money, less than £10]. The new proposed price of Poetry Review was 75p.
What the National Archives documents reveal is that the Poets Conference was part of the Bob Cobbing’s ongoing campaign in the Seventies to reorganise and redistribute the resources of the Poetry Society and the Arts Council. Its practical demands are a salutary reminder of how things were done before the internet:
To set up a “National File of all poets”, which would cost each poet 10p to join (“The Poetry Society would be supplying the filing cabinet(s)”)
To “inaugurate a photocopying scheme whereby those at a distance from London might obtain information on poets by post”
To request Regional Arts Associations “to run a dial-a-poem service in a major city in their area”
To “consider the setting up of courses in writing poetry (run by poets) for adults who wished to write better poetry”
To threaten “bookshops, universities, etc” who were slow in paying for “books supplied or a reading given” with blacklisting
It was, in effect, a modest programme for poetic social democracy. As Clark wrote, aghast, to Hewitt in an earlier confidential briefing:
The Conference is of the opinion that anybody who says he is a poet, is a poet, and that schools should be allowed to choose anyone they like to read to them and be paid a fee of at least £10, half of which should be recovered from the Arts Council. I suspect that the Conference is political and against the Establishment […] If Cobbing’s aims were taken to their final conclusion, then about ten thousand people in the United Kingdom would be regarded as poets, both by the state, the literary world, and themselves, which is, of course, nonsense.
Will the new National Poetry Centre — which is currently scheduled to open in Leeds in 2025 — trouble the corridors of power with such radical ambitions?
Although Bob Cobbing led the charge of the Poets Conference in 1972, the movement to found it was begun by others in the Sixties. On 2nd September 1964, the Daily Telegraph reported a proposal by George MacBeth to host an official poets’ conference at Edinburgh’s McEwen Hall as part of the International Festival in 1965, noting that
some such flight of poets might have nested in the hall this year but for the unfortunate and irrelevant appearance of a nude girl at last year’s official conference of dramatists […] which led to an unsuccessful prosecution
Also involved in the Edinburgh Festival request — which promised “stunts of various kinds but no naked ladies” — was Peter Wightman, who ran an organisation called Poets in Public. He returned to the pages of the Telegraph two years later under the headline “Poet’s ‘trade union’ for Britain”, which announced the founding of a “London secretariat” to co-ordinate bookings for poetry readings in the capital, so that poets “would be relieved of the difficult business of extracting their fees from organisers”.
By 1975, however, the respectful tone of the Telegraph’s coverage of the poets’ trade union had changed. A report on a threat by the Poets Conference to take “militant action” against the Arts Council speculated that protests might take the form of “impromptu poetry read-ins at key centres of arts power”:
There was general agreement that this threat was by far the most striking weapon in the poets’ armoury
NOTES
You can read my Prospect piece on the National Archives Laureate files here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/62263/betjemen-auden-stevie-smith-the-terrible-artistic-decisions-of-administrators
Anyone interested to see the official Laureate files for themselves can explore the records within PREM 5/599, PREM 5/600, and PREM 5/601, available here: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C27945
Like the Poetry Review in 1972, I too am putting up my prices. But like the Poets Conference, I am also keeping them as low as possible: that is, £3.50 a month or £35 a year. Paid subscriptions to the weekly Some Flowers Soon essay begin this Friday, 5th August — with flowers very soon to everyone who has already “pledged” (you don’t need to leave a comment when you do, but I appreciate the encouragement from those who have — it’s a bit like getting sponsored to do laps of the school field).
If, after a few months, this experiment in criticism seems to be breaking even, I hope to explore the possibility of paying other writers for guest posts. And because I want this site to continue to have a public life, all subscribers — free and paid — will still receive Pinks posts, with poetry news, reviews and readings. If you’d like to subscribe to the full Some Flowers Soon but can’t afford to, just drop me a line (this includes students everywhere).
You can read my original post about why I’m making this my job for one day a week here: