The Mottram Dossier.

By JEFF HILSON and STEPHEN McGARTY.

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This article concerns the Radical Poetics seminars given by Eric Mottram at King’s College, University of London between 1990-1995, with a particular focus on the seminars delivered in the Autumn of 1994.

Eric died in January 1995 making these seminars among the last – if not the last – pedagogical engagements of his long tenure at King’s…

The rationale for concentrating on this narrow window is that we have had particular access to the content of these seminars, having recorded them on a very basic Sony mono cassette-tape recorder acquired earlier in the year to document poetry readings in London.¹ The other reason is that Eric died in January 1995, making these seminars among the last – if not the last – pedagogical engagements of his long tenure at King’s, and it seemed salutary to mark this fact by discussing them when invited to take part in the ‘Performed Poetics’ celebration of Eric and Jerome Rothenberg at King’s in March 2022. This article is an extended version of that discussion.

The seminars them­selves were held in room 314 of the Strand cam­pus, at the time the office of Will Rowe who taught for many years in the Span­ish De­part­ment, and they were at­tended most­ly by a small group of post­grad­u­ates, PhD students, visiting scholars and interested persons known to Eric or invited by the regular attendees. Historically, sessions ran weekly during term time and lasted for roughly an hour and a half. They were organised thematically, based on Eric’s current investigative impulses, which were, as to be expected, wide-ranging and eclectic. A photocopied handout² for the 1994 seminar sessions – entitled in full ‘Radical Poetics: Language, Law, Creativity, Polis/The State – “Care of Self”’,³ a drawn-out title whose terms anyone with a knowledge of Eric’s research interests would instantly recognise – sets out the agenda:

These graduate meetings continue this year with their developments. They have been convened now for the past five years or more. Their origins go back further…

Their continuation is due to the support of graduates at advanced levels of research who require radical examination of intellectual bases, and therefore to analyse language usages in contemporary and earlier societies. Therefore, the etymology – in the fullest senses – of main terms is a high prerogative towards processes of understanding and change…

In past years authors and information have included: Alfred Korzybski, Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Gaston Bachelard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, The Tantrists, the radical shortcomings of all ideologies…

Basic discussions have drawn in the particular needs of graduates working in various locations, and to offer a place to discover and collaborate, to reinforce their intellectual abilities…

– The sessions are not restricted to “literature” –

The meetings are contemporaneous in investigation and conducted with the urgency of investigation in a deteriorated society…

Much of what we will go on to discuss has its germs in this set of brief paragraphs: the importance of language use and etymology, the emphasis on process, the strong political agenda with its concomitant questioning of all political systems, and the inclusion of materials beyond the merely literary which aligned the seminars more closely with cultural studies.⁴

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Some of the authors mentioned — Korzybski and Reich in particular — will also be familiar to anyone with a knowledge of Eric’s research interests although it’s worth mentioning that his take on figures like Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault – canonical and ubiquitous in the era of high theory – was unconventional and partial and often bore little obvious resemblance to the way they were taught elsewhere in the academy.⁵

Theodor Adorno was another key figure in the seminars but not necessarily for his critique of the culture industry (Herbert Marcuse was a more likely Frankfurt School reference point because of his countercultural connections via texts such as One Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization and An Essay on Liberation). Instead, Eric’s focus was Adorno’s Minima Moralia, and in particular the ‘Theses on Occultism’ section which he singled out for its contribution to a wider discussion about magic as a system of control, with the magician as a leader-figure whose function is to hide or occlude information from the non-initiate.⁶ Clearly, as a teacher whose avowed aim was to effect ‘understanding and change’ in his students, to enable them to live an enhanced life in an ostensibly ‘deteriorated society’, transparent communication and clear transmission were paramount. It’s also worth adding that in the list of authors above, the reference to ‘The Tantrists’ is a demonstration of Eric’s interest in alternate modes of knowledge and esoteric practice that found their way into the seminars by way of a number of other Western and non-Western philosophies and methodologies.⁷

Given the context of ‘transmission’, the 1994 seminars were structured around the investigation of ‘inheritance’. Before considering this word in more detail, it’s worth remembering that Inheritance was also the title of one of Eric’s own poetry publications, Book 1 of MASKS, published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum Press, also in 1994. The link to the Radical Poetics seminars becomes clear in the dedication to Inheritance which reads: ‘For Will Rowe and the Students in “The Meetings”’. Eric’s use of the word ‘meetings’ (as in the opening paragraph of the handout above) is noteworthy as it serves, we think, to remove them from the academic context of a University seminar with a seminar leader and passive student cohort, instead mobilising the older sense of an assembly or gathering together of people for discussion.⁸

Since his days as a young Naval Officer during the Second World War, Eric had been fascinated by the role of authority figures whose various typologies his critical work insists on analysing…

It might be too much to suggest that the use of ‘meeting’ is a conscious nod to Cobbing’s Quaker roots⁹ and the nonconformist meeting house with its priesthood of all believers, though we are certain, given the primacy of the etymological in the seminars, that Eric would have been aware of the etymology of the word and its historical development. As others have recognised, ever since his days as a young Naval Officer in charge of a minesweeper in the Far East during the Second World War,¹⁰ Eric had been fascinated by the role of authority figures whose various typologies his critical work insists on analysing, from the lawman and the politician to the cult leader and the hero. In an earlier Radical Poetics seminar, he cites an article by William Lewis entitled ‘Overcoming the Leadership Stereotype’ which discusses ways of achieving non-authoritarian leadership within a group – what Eric called ‘charisma without authoritarianism’ – and which on reflection could be said to describe his pedagogical aim within the seminars.

Indeed, there’s a strong sense of pedagogy to some of the pieces in Inheritance. One of the early poems is titled ‘Learning’ where we find the lines: ‘a teacher means he who makes others/take on a face      define discover/true heart face.’¹¹ This is a typically complex and shifting image cluster where ‘take on’ can be read as confrontational, a stance Eric often took in his encounters with establishment figures — or self-appointed leaders — who might be described as anonymous ‘faces’ and who he never ceased to berate in print as well as in the seminars themselves.¹² The need to ‘define’ also promotes the kinds of language precision Eric demanded of his students and which in turn lead to the possibility of new discoveries (with ‘define discovery’ of course also operating here as a potential demand). ‘Taking on a face’ is also potentially to put on a mask (as in the title of the series to which Inheritance belongs) and therefore also to dissemble.¹³ The movement between concealment and revelation in these lines and standing up for beleaguered belief systems was something close to Mottram’s own heart in the classroom, as well of course to his dealings as editor of Poetry Review with the Poetry Society.¹⁴

In another poem from Inheritance titled ‘Discovery’ we read:

Improbable that one person can teach another
how to live sane and creative

but possible to open a door point suggest
so help another to discover uniqueness and complexity.

There’s the sense, then, in both quotations that Eric is thinking through his own role as teacher which he continued to do in the seminars (or ‘meetings’) where he emphasized on occasions his own continuing role as a student.¹⁵ It’s worth adding that his delivery in the seminars was often punctuated by phrases like ‘do you see that’ or ‘do you see’, which might be read on the one hand as a kind of uncertain ‘hedging’, but on the other as a way of making sure the point he was making had stuck, and that he had communicated it clearly.

IOne of the main ‘processual actions’ of the seminars was to pay forensic attention to language structures. This invariably involved the etymological scrutiny of a key word…

In the opening session of the 1994 seminars, Eric reminds those present of his agenda: ‘Processual action is what we’ve been into over the years’. By ‘over the years’ he doesn’t of course mean just the years of the seminars, but also over his years as a teacher where, for example, Alfred North Whitehead and Alfred Korzybski’s process philosophies had influenced a wide range of practitioner-thinkers important to Eric from Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson and Buckminster Fuller to Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs and John Cage. One of the main ‘processual actions’ of the seminars, as the seminar handout quoted above suggests, was to pay forensic attention to language structures. This invariably involved the etymological scrutiny of a key word, and the link to Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976) is probably not coincidental here (a number of the words examined by Eric are shared with Williams). ‘We’re not playing etymological games here’, states Eric at one point. ‘We need the Radical Poetics group to make an inventory of different meanings’, he continues, the action of inventory being what Marshall McLuhan had apparently told Eric was necessary when they had met in Toronto in the mid-1960s. The action or method of ‘inventory’ will be familiar to anybody who has read Eric’s essays which often proceed not so much via argument or persuasion as by the accumulation of examples, operating via what Alfred Korzybski termed etcetera, a method of additivity and extension rather than of abstraction.¹⁶ Words have a processual history which as Eric reminds us is also cultural history.

As foundational, it is unsurprising that the words ‘radical’ and ‘poetics’ are themselves subjected to initial scrutiny in the seminars, though it is worth thinking briefly about what Eric meant by ‘poetics’. The fact that the seminars are not purely literary in content meant that poetics was of course not limited to poetry,¹⁷ although certain poets did often make it into the seminars (Milton being one of the key reference points during the 1994 season). Perhaps Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry is a good starting point, describing as it does the distinction between poetry and prose as ‘a vulgar error’ and in which Shelley discusses writers of prose who he also thought of as poets, Francis Bacon being one example, and who is also a significant focus in Eric’s seminars as we shall see. Poetics was for Eric the investigation of a wide range of texts which as Michael Hrebeniak notes is an ‘opening out [of] the Aristotelian definition of poetics to include the whole inventory of knowledges that make interventions in society possible’.¹⁸ In the seminars, rather than define poetics, Eric proposes a list of forbears (another inventory): Aristotle’s Poetics which is foundational, as Hrebeniak implies, but never wholly aesthetic (being also cultural, political and religious), Horace’s Ars Poetica which Eric dismisses as ‘a document of guidance for poets to obey the state’, Pope’s Essay on Criticism, as well as Wordsworth, Arnold, Eliot and Pound (the initial figures here being mainstays of the Cambridge English Tripos which Eric would have encountered as a student at Pembroke College in the late 1940s).¹⁹

For Mottram, etymology is not about discovering an origin that explains the function of a word, or that is a key like unlocking a code. This would be far too recessive.

Rather than move straight to an unpacking of ‘radical’, Eric focuses first on the word etymology itself – as indicative of ‘fundamentals, as processes’. Etymology, then, is not about discovering an origin that explains the function of a word, or that is a key like unlocking a code. This would be far too recessive, an action he attacked via the work of Alfred Korzybski’s non-A (non-Aristotelian) thinking in Science and Sanity (1933), a text that Eric often cited in his teaching, and which was of course also significant for William S. Burroughs.²⁰ Instead, etymology is about providing multiple, and sometimes competing histories of a given word, again invoking the kind of inventory demanded by McLuhan.²¹ When Mottram does turn to the word radical (also one of Raymond Williams’ keywords), it serves to underwrite this. The root is the Latin radix, which Eric stresses is not organicist, nature analogies being for him more often than not mistrustful alibis used by figures in power to reinforce dubious claims to authority. Rather, it’s the idea of a massive structure (to use a natural analogy), like the rhizome proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. And, moreover, Eric stresses, some roots are unknowable so that there’s a significant attendant sense of the hidden at work in language. It was often this sense of the hidden, especially in the operations of the State, and in particular in the language of the State, that Eric wanted his students in the seminars to be alert to, emphasising the fact that such language ‘is always analysable’. One of the books he recommended in the 1994 seminars was The Great Arch (subtitle: State Formation, Cultural Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism) by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, one of whose central tenets was that a prime function of the State is to make statements, a fact that Mottram urged us all to recognise and pay attention to.

So, to return to the 1994 seminars, what are some of the words that Eric fixes on? Unsurprisingly, the word inheritance itself becomes a focus, with the in- prefix acting as an indicator of limit or bound, of what Eric calls ‘identifiable location’ which he further characterises as a control mechanism. The expected related words then emerge – inhere, heritage, hereditary, etc – which are all linked in a constellation of meanings. It’s important at this point to emphasise that language for Eric does not operate causally. Words have multiple, concurrent or simultaneous overlapping meanings operating as a field or spatial structure which again was something that Eric emphasised in his teaching, in part inherited from Pound’s ideogrammic method and Olson’s field poetics (as well as from Logan Pearsall Smith and William Empson), a pedagogy not of linearity or causality but of relationality. In one of the seminars, he criticises Darwin for the highly selective linear thinking of evolutionary theory (and of course because of the sacrificial structure built into it, later embraced by Social Darwinism, itself a notable disaster of inheritance).²²

In one of the seminars, he mentions (un-named) American lecturer-acquaintances from the ’60s and ’70s who rather than delivering traditional lectures would fill a blackboard containing all their notes which they would in turn photograph and distribute to students. As Eric explained, it’s about ‘a spatiality of connection rather than this dreadful business of word after word after word, as if it was narrative, which it isn’t’. He then goes on to refer to his own now-legendary Beat Generation Chart, three large folded sheets mapping the various actions of the Beat writers published in 1990 by Allen Fisher’s Spanner Editions for the Tate Gallery in London. Presented on the front page as a ‘kit…to be assembled on your lecture board…or simply taped into one for table use’, Eric himself described it in one of the seminars as ‘a diagrammatic force so that we’re all enabled to see the range of information, which is when connections start’. Arguably, the Radical Poetics seminars themselves were also organised diagrammatically, as a field structure. Although there was some narrative continuity from week to week, considered synoptically Eric would constantly project vectors to create what might be called, after the Bolivian-Swiss concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, a constellatory action whereby connections are made via the arrangement of information.

There are, however, caveats for this spatial thinking. In one of the seminars, it provokes Eric into a critique of mathematical algebra – especially as it appears in Wittgenstein’s  Tractatus²³ – and of pictorial perspective which for Eric was another control mechanism.²⁴ This is also the case with some words, whose coincident meanings are often ‘ideal for social confusion for those that want to confuse’. Eric’s aim was instead to arrive at

a grasp of the very language we’re using and no one’s going to push us with this stuff in terms of ignorance – we know what the word means and what the development of the language has been and how it’s being used now as part of process and not a fixed fact and it will change again. So, we can challenge people who want to use language as weapon and control.

For Eric, as this quotation implies, language is always located in the social, and thinking again about the word ‘inheritance’ in the context of the 1994 seminars, one of the key areas of social inheritance was the Seventeenth Century. This is a period Eric repeatedly returns to in the seminars, emphasising its significance as a time of upheaval and change. He cites Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (1961) which he states should be a primary text for all university students, precisely so that no-one be allowed to forget the origins of our contemporary polity, as well as the potential for further revolutionary action its memory could activate. The attraction of revolution was particularly relevant in the early- to mid-nineties given the seeming endlessness of Conservative governance here in the UK (in 1994 fifteen years and counting), and it’s worth remembering that Eric died two years before the end of John Major’s turgidly grey reign.²⁵

Given this context, it is unsurprising that ‘revolution’ is a key word that Eric returns to throughout the seminars, especially as it relates to the question of inheritance and the Seventeenth Century context. Indeed, this context becomes a fertile ground for the 1994 seminars, precisely because of the English Revolution and some of its key figures – John Milton, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Robert Fludd – many of whom contributed to the plurality of revolutionary actions outlined by Hill in The Century of Revolution. Eric invokes Milton not simply for his revolutionary epic Paradise Lost (described memorably in one of the seminars as ‘an enormous compendium of dramatized evidences’) with its attack on occult controls and freedom from oppression,²⁶ but also for his advocacy of free speech in the Areopagitica and elsewhere of divorce;²⁷ Bacon, in the Novum Organum, for his materialist empiricism rejecting God, deductive Aristotelian logic and the notion of the Platonic universal idea in favour of induction via experiential sense and the active mind;²⁸ Locke, who, in the Treatise on Human Government, advocated the right to revolt against tyrannical leadership that became, via Thomas Jefferson, one of the bases for the American Revolution; and Fludd for the design of memory theatres which Eric saw as great technical and technological feats, making him a pivotal figure in the move from Renaissance to new scientific thinking. Indeed, Eric calls Fludd (alongside Giordano Bruno and John Dee), Bacon and Shakespeare, examples of ‘ordering intervention’, a term he found in Marie-Louise von Franz’s Number and Time (1974)²⁹ to describe thinkers who resist entropy (which is merely disorder created by a lack of information, and an example of a too-easy move from the world of physics to human life) via what she calls ‘negentropy’ – a positive and creative oppositional force not dissimilar to the concept of the paradigm shift to be found in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), but which is revolutionary through inheritance rather than in terms of a complete cut off, like a tabula rasa. One example Eric gives is Shakespeare’s plays which he says ‘operate as memory theatres, rearranging information and knowledge placed in the Globe with the design of the memory theatre’. Thus, for Eric, the ‘Shakespearean Revolution’ is a modification of a pre-existing order rather than absolute novelty. We recall him saying on a number of occasions that if something was truly new, how would anyone recognise it?³⁰

Eric’s use of von Franz’s ‘ordering intervention’ as a creative critical tool is once again, we think, a good example of the way he could read canonical figures against the grain, locating a powerfully generative idea or insight within a text that others had ignored or overlooked, including of course, potentially, the very text itself. Another generative text for Eric in the seminars was Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, essential not just because of its exemplary scholarship, but also because of the importance of memory for Eric as another inheritance apparatus (he admired Yates also, he revealed, because she ends her chapters with questions, thus maintaining an openness and outwardness to her conclusions)³¹ ‘Memory’, then, is another word subjected by Eric to etymological enquiry (it is pre-Latin or Greek, being Indo-European in origin), and which he links to acquisition in that memory is a way of acquiring knowledge which as students and teachers we all need to examine, requiring what Eric calls a ‘technics of acquisition’, a method of knowing how our acquisition of knowledge takes place. This coupling of memory and method is itself acquired from the final chapter of Yates’ The Art of Memory, entitled ‘Art of Memory and Growth of Scientific Method’, which Eric cites by reminding us that method is still not taught in schools and that we acquire knowledge more often than not through external memory systems such as libraries and museums and more recently computers. Of course, Eric died before the ubiquity of the internet and the rise of social media whose development from external memory into a system of surveillance — the terrifying offspring of Marshall McLuhan and Jeremy Bentham — would undoubtedly have appalled him.

We’d like to conclude with a slightly more upbeat story that Eric related at the end of this seminar, also linked to memory. After making a distinction between personal and tribal memory, he goes on to relate a story about his friend, the anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, John Blacking, who Eric had met whilst teaching at the University of Malaya in the early 1950s. Blacking later worked with the Venda peoples of South Africa who used music as a marker of tribal identity from childhood onwards, and whose experiences of music he had written about in texts such as Venda Children’s Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis (1967) and How Musical is Man? (1973). Eric’s story concerns a Venda tribesperson who was visiting London as part of a delegation, and who had found himself increasingly out of sorts in the capital. Before his arrival, Blacking had suggested the delegate meet up with Eric whilst in London, which he duly did, and on visiting his house Eric played him one of Blacking’s Folkways recordings of Venda music which apparently had the effect of cheering him up no end. Eric related this little incident with some glee (the seminars were punctuated by such moments of good humour) and it wouldn’t have been the first time that a trip to see Eric – whether at his basement flat off Kensington High Street or later his house in Herne Hill – had sorted someone out. Eric completes his story about the Venda once again emphasising the significance of tribal as opposed to personal memory, but with the caveat of global homogenisation as a negative example of tribal culture. ‘I’m a horrid believer in differentiation’, he concludes, audibly laughing on the cassette recording.

Eric ends the session hoping that everyone present agrees that everything he has been talking about is ‘of our time’, in other words, that the seminars are using historical materials to address the contemporary situation (or as the handout with which we began makes clear, the meetings are to be ‘contemporaneous in investigation’). With Eric’s death, the processual nature of that investigative urge was temporarily stopped, but it has been the task of his students as well as the organisers of, and contributors to, regular commemorative events such as ‘Performed Poetics’ to keep Eric’s project alive.³² Never has the phrase ‘deteriorated society’ seemed more depressingly apt than it is under present conditions, both here in the UK and internationally, making the ‘Radical Poetics’ agenda even more urgent than it was when Eric initiated the meetings over thirty years ago.

The requirement always to question inherited language use as potential sites of hidden ideology, the prospective excitement of discovery and collaboration (or discovery through collaboration, as in the discussion that led to this article), the need to read beyond the purely literary (though not excluding literary texts) in order to open out the full capacity of the textual, the constant and restless defiance of stasis in favour of processual action (what Charles Olson called the primacy of the ‘going on’), and attending to self-care to be able to achieve any of this, these are some of the demanding but necessary inheritances Eric placed before us.

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JEFF HILSON is a poet, critic and editor with five books of poems to his name – Stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird bird (Landfill, 2009), In The Assarts (Veer Books, 2010), Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House, 2017) and Organ Music (Crater Press, 2020). He also edited the widely-acclaimed Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). He was a postgraduate at King’s College, London in the long 1990s where he attended the Radical Poetics Seminars, and until recently taught Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. He is currently between jobs.

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STEPHEN McGARTY grew up in Wigan and studied English at Kings College, London in the mid-80s where he was taught by Eric Mottram. He returned as a postgraduate in 1991 when he attended the Radical Poetics Seminars discussed here. He subsequently taught at Kings, in both the English Department and the American Studies Department, established following Mottram’s death, largely by his former students. He taught at a range of institutions in London across the nexus of English Lit, Cultural Theory, Media and Communications, but eventually left the capitol, and now lives in Harrogate with his children as an independent scholar.

NOTES.

1. For example, the readings organised by Lawrence Upton for SubVoicive and the Poets Writers readings at the East/West Gallery in Notting Hill run by Drake Stutesman and Thomas Evans. The seminars were also simultaneously taped by Will Rowe whose recordings are, we believe, the ones to be found in the Mottram Archive at King’s College, London.
2. The title of this dossier is taken from another handout from the Spring/Summer seminars of 1993, and refers to its reading list: ‘The basis is a notebook of materials made under stress, in order to hold a great deal together and prevent a stasis.’
3. Eric’s interest in the law – of whose reach he would have constantly been reminded by the proximity of the Law Courts to the King’s Strand campus – found its way into most of his projects, from The Legal Poems (1985) and his collection of essays Blood on the Nash Ambassador (the final chapter of which is entitled ‘“Laws Scribbled by Law Breakers”: Law, Confidence and Disobedience in American Culture’ which was also his inaugural Professorial lecture at King’s) to the fact that in 1967 he gave evidence as an expert witness in the Old Bailey trial of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. From November-December 1991, Eric also taught a course at King’s called ‘Law in America: Acceptances and Resistances’ consisting of four lectures: ‘In America Law is King’; ‘Lawyers and Outlaws’; ‘Blacks, Beats and Civil Rights: 1950-1970’; and ‘Comedians, Crime and Cowboys’.
4. Eric’s notion of cultural studies was very different from that advocated by figures like Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Clive Bush provides a comprehensive critique of the latter in “This Uncertain Content of an Obscure Enterprise of Form”: Eric Mottram, America and Cultural Studies’ in A Permanent Etcetera: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Postwar America, edited by A. Robert Lee (Pluto Press: 1993), pp. 145-168; 150-155.
5. See Clive Bush’s discussion of the ‘cultural studies’ take on Derrida’s seminal essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences’ in Eric’s 1975 essay ‘No Centre to Hold: A Commentary on Derrida’, also in ‘This Uncertain Content of an Obscure Enterprise of Form’, pp. 157-164.
6. Editor and theatre director Thomas Evans, who attended the Radical Poetics seminars as an undergraduate, describes being introduced to Minima Moralia by Eric as a ‘thrilling’ experience. See (or listen to) his interview on Richard Kraft’s podcast, Arts & Facts.
7. Eric’s ‘official’ reading lists never quite matched the breadth of references encountered in the seminars themselves which were a cornucopia of the expected and unexpected. Indeed, unprepared postgraduate and undergraduate students encountering the reading materials for Eric’s courses could often be confused by the mix of canonical and non-canonical materials, as established and what might then have been considered ‘pulp’ authors (Samuel B. Delany, Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft) were treated with equal seriousness.
8. In the handout, he designates himself ‘Convener and initiator of discussions.’
9. Or, for that matter, Basil Bunting’s.
10. See Eric Mottram, Live All You Can, edited by Peterjon Skelt (Solaris, 1992), p. 14.
11. Eric Mottram, Inheritance (Masks Book One): Poems 1993-1994 (Writers Forum, 1994), n.p.
12. Some of Eric’s attacks on establishment figures are very memorable, if not entirely acceptable by today’s standards (as seen in his references to ‘arsehole idiots’, ‘absolute turds’ and ‘cretin critics’, the latter for insisting that the Renaissance invented perspective, ‘obviously knowing NOTHING about anybody else’s art’).
13. ‘Masks’ are necessary to fool, dominate, protect, challenge, relieve, deceive, articulate and enlighten. To take them off means certain death as well as stripping away the veil of things. To leave them on risks a perpetual self-deception as well as providing a positive challenge to the natural order’.  See Clive Bush, ‘A Bird in Persepolis: Eric Mottram’ in Out of Dissent: A Study of Five Contemporary British Poets (Talus Editions, 1997), p. 428.
14. For further details of the Poetry Society debâcle, see of course Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt, 2006). Barry also has some useful sections on Eric as critic and teacher that are worth reading in relation to some of what we have to say in this article (see especially pp. 145-151).
15. However, Eric does refer to the others in the meetings as ‘students’, a word he used to describe himself on occasions in the seminars though not entirely ingenuously. As Peter Barry notes, ‘the notion of student-centred or discussion-based teaching provoked [in Eric] much derisive snorting’. See Barry, p. 150.
16. Peter Barry calls this method ‘annotative mapping’. See Poetry Wars, p. 145.
17. In the seminars, ‘literary’ texts were never purely aesthetic. The photocopied handout for the 1993 sessions states that ‘texts remain themselves as well as becoming a structure of open investigation – a necessity of refusing abstraction.’
18. See the ‘Intentions of Assembly/Dissembly’ section of issue one of Hrebeniak’s journal Radical Poetics (Spring 1997), n.p. Subtitled ‘Inventory of possibilities’, the journal, which ran to two issues, was named after the seminars and shared many of their ‘areas of explanation’ such as: ‘the diagnoses of language and its pathologies; in particular, current uses of information as belief structures where occult effects and unexamined vocabularies enforce obedience’, ‘inheritance and transmission of human accomplishments in arts and technology as available resources of resistance/transformation’, ‘opposing dead heritage concepts which appropriate the past into closed singularities’, ‘inquiries into the failure of all ideologies’ and ‘opposition to ‘Integrated World Capitalist media.’
19. Robert Sheppard proposes Eric as one of few British poets to have theorized a poetics in his essays, although he suggests that this is compromised by what he sees as Eric’s tendency towards polemic. However, Sheppard goes on to suggest that Eric ‘coaxed’ poetics out of many of the contributors to the pages of the magazine Poetry Information via interviews with them. See Robert Sheppard, ‘The Necessity of Poetics 4: Poetics Some Examples’.
20. In his monograph on Burroughs, The Algebra of Need (Marion Boyars, 1977), Eric cites Korzybski in relation to Burroughs’ 1971 essay, Electronic Revolution. Burroughs had attended Korzybski’s Institute of General Semantics seminar series in late-summer, 1939, by which time he had apparently already read Science and Sanity.
21. Clive Bush suggests the importance of Logan Pearsall Smith’s essay ‘Four Romantic Words’ (1925) and William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words (1951) as precursors for Eric’s thinking about language. See ‘This Uncertain Content of an Obscure Enterprise of Form’, p. 162.
22. At one point, Eric calls The Origin of Species ‘a disastrous book’ and ‘the basis of the fascism we live in now.’
23. According to Eric, Wittgenstein’s use of algebraic symbols in the Tractatus as a means of establishing first principles is problematic, not least because of the emphasis on the equals sign, a static symbol he equates with Korzybski’s ‘is of identity’ (ie making something ‘equal’ something else which closes it down experientially). Like many others, Eric valued Wittgenstein’s later Philosophic Investigations for its use of a more open Baconian investigative method.
24. As opposed to European Renaissance perspective in paintings by the likes of Brunelleschi and Piero della Francesca, Eric talked very positively of the more ‘intuitive’ spatial perspective to be found in early Japanese painting.
25. In the handout, Eric alludes to living in a ‘deteriorated society’ referring ostensibly to the mid-nineties (although the phrase might also be considered an umbrella term for any capitalist or post-capitalist culture). At the time, the ‘nineties were seen by many mainstream commentators as a kind of Golden Age following the end of the Cold War and the supposed victory of liberal Capitalism. Eric, of course, saw through this as shallow.
26. Eric quotes Milton from ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’: ‘He who wisely would restrain the reasonable soul of man within due bounds must first himself know perfectly how far the territory and dominance extends of just and honest liberty.’ As Eric stressed, liberty is not to be found in the Garden of Eden.
27. Eric again quotes from ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’, addressed to Parliament in 1643: ‘The greatest burden in the world is superstition. Not only of ceremonies in the church but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.’ Eric would have loved to ask Milton what exactly he meant by ‘scarecrow sins’!
28. Eric’s use of the word ‘investigation’ in much of his thinking (see, for instance, the subtitle of his collection of essays, Blood on the Nash Ambassador as referenced above) derives partly from Baconian induction.
29. See Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward a Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics (Ernst Klett Verlag, 1974), pp. 208-9. Eric speculates that Charles Olson might have been interested in von Franz’s book, mistakenly giving the publication date as 1960 rather than 1974 (Olson died in 1970). Von Franz was a pupil of Carl Jung who Eric distrusted (like Joseph Campbell) because of his advocacy of static archetypes. Eric’s interest in von Franz may have stemmed partly from the fact that on turning down an invitation to attend Black Mountain College, Jung sent von Franz in his place! However, the folding in of quantum physics to psychology would also have been a factor in Eric’s attraction to this particular text. It’s worth adding here that on a trip to Angkor Watt, Eric met Joseph Campbell with whom he disagreed vehemently about the imposition of overarching structural metaphors onto different cultural myth systems.
30. Eric’s thinking here of revolution via inheritance is partly informed (via Alfred North Whitehead) by Norman O. Brown’s notion of recurrence in revolution. See ‘A Reply to Herbert Marcuse’, Commentary (March 1967): ‘He [Marcuse] will not see the recurrence in revolution. Revolution is not a slate wiped clean, but a revolving cycle (Love’s Body, p. 204). Even newness is renewal’. The concept of inheritance may initially imply the unconscious adoption of pre-existing conservative systems, but Eric had an alternative take. In one of the seminars he used the phrase ‘I have only recently inherited this’ when discussing an idea he had encountered of late, suggesting that information and knowledge were potentially present and ready to be inherited by anyone who could access them.
31. Whilst this is the case with some of Yates’ books, for instance Chapter Two of The Rosicrucian Enlightenment – ‘What was the stimulus which had set in motion the movement leading to the so-called “Rosicrucian manifestos” with their strange announcements of a new age of knowledge and insight?’ – more often than not chapters end with a short concluding paragraph which is designed to propel the reader forward to the next chapter. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964) is exemplary in this respect. See also The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 57. For more recent scholarship on memory, especially as it pertains to earlier Medieval monastic culture, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of images, 400-1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1998, 2000).
32. In particular, Valerie Soar’s role in these events cannot be underestimated.