TONY FRAZER: IN NON-STANDARD TERRITORY
(A sort of Editorial)
by Richard Berengarten
Tony Frazer is not just a one-man band but a one-man orchestra. Since 1980, when he first co-edited a poetry magazine, he has gradually and progressively become one of the most exciting and respected poetry publishers in the English-speaking world. This Festschrift, published exclusively on the Web in November 2015 for Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday, salutes and honours his achievement as editor and publisher of Shearsman magazine and Shearsman Books since 1981: a period of thirty-four years. In this time Tony Frazer has single-handedly brought out more than six hundred books: a tireless, steady productivity. The core of his publishing activity has always been poetry, which he has surrounded, consolidated and embellished with literary essays, criticism, interviews and fiction.
Tony may appear very English but his leanings are thoroughly cosmopolitan. In addition to poets from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, he has published translations from around twenty-five languages. There have also been several bilingual editions, for example from Croatian, Greek and Spanish. He speaks French, Spanish and German and reads Portuguese and Russian. He has spent periods living and working, in various capacities, in Germany, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Chile and Mexico, and has frequently visited the USA. He now runs Shearsman Books from Bristol, having moved there in 2011 from Exeter, where he had lived for ten years. Always in search of the new and the good, Tony often takes risks. He has been tireless both in unwavering advocacy of poets on his list who have been writing for many years and in his encouragement of poets presenting early collections.
***
The Festschrift consists of around two hundred and forty contributions by poets, artists and designers whose work has been published by Shearsman, as well as by friends and family members. It includes unpublished and published poems, translations, artwork, photographs, video and audio recordings, personal tributes, documentary accounts, reminiscences and anecdotes. Many of these have been composed specially for this website. With publication arranged to coincide with Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday on 2 November 2015, the Festschrift has taken more than two years to compile. During this period, it has been a well-kept literary secret. Not one of the contributors has breathed a word about the anthology to Tony before its delivery.
I write this in September 2015, just after the submissions deadline and just before publication. The Festschrift is to be presented to Tony at a surprise party on 7 November 2015 at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury, London: venue for many Shearsman readings and book launches. On this occasion, there will be no poetry readings but, we hope, the largest gathering of Shearsman authors and their friends ever.
***
Interviews with Tony clarify that he has always been interested in innovative writing, in poetry ‘with an edge’, but that he doesn’t accept or forgive avant-gardist tendentiousness or clichés. He is untrustworthy of schools and groups, suspicious of preconceptions, steers his way unerringly around literary labels and libels, avoids bandwagons, and is prepared to find quality in areas where others might not. His interview with Colette Sensier in Poetry News (Spring 2012) is expressive and illuminating:
Similarly, in an (undated) interview with Tim Allen in The Argotist Online, Tony describes his editorial policy for Shearsman magazine:
Tony’s editorial criteria, then, consist of reliance on his own personal taste and judgement, a dislike of “sloppiness” (pulp and pap) and a preference for “rigour” (craft, discipline, artistic technique). His approach is eclectic, measured, inclusive and cosmopolitan: it combines a non-doctrinaire openness with a keen appetite for “good writing”. What is more, by deploying the word “exploratory” here, rather than “innovative” or “experimental”, he deftly avoids the naiveties and clichés of polemic. With impeccable tact, he establishes a tenable position and a valid vantage point not only for a self-supporting small press but for an entire poetics.
***
The notion of editing a Festschrift for Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday articulated itself in my mind suddenly and in crystal definition. It was one of those ideas that occasionally descends with lightning-bolt clarity out of apparent nowhere and refuses to go away. This happened in the late afternoon of 29th June 2013, which had turned out to be one of those golden summer days when the English weather actually tunes in on call instead of following its usual habit of doing precisely the opposite of what’s wanted. I was sitting chatting with Tony, Lynda Waters and various other good friends on the lawn at a party at the Møller Centre in Churchill College, Cambridge.
I quickly realised that a good deal of work would be involved in editing; and in the following months, I started talking about it to several other Shearsmen and Shearswomen, especially Aidan Semmens, Kelvin Corcoran, Lucy Hamilton, Martin Anderson – and, of course, Lynda Waters. Aidan was already editing Molly Bloom, which he had resuscitated as a poetry webzine in April 2013, and Lucy was co-editing Long Poem Magazine, a commitment since its inception in 2008; but all were keen to be involved, so we quickly formed an editorial team. At first, we meant to bring out the Festschrift as a book and, over the next year, Kelvin and I approached various poetry publishers. Several expressed interest, even enthusiasm; and two in succession agreed to take on the project, but after over-long delays, they both withdrew. One could hardly blame them: an anthology is never easy to produce, and the presentation of a free copy to each contributor means a large initial outlay for any small publisher. Without sponsorship, disproportionate expenses can build up, making it impossible to break even, let alone make any profit. The larger poetry presses I approached had their own agendas. If only I could ask Tony to bring it out, I kept thinking, we would put it together in no time. But he of course was the one person who could not be asked. I then thought of inviting each contributor to pay something towards publication as well as submitting a poem or other offering. But this idea seemed unappealingly close to vanity publishing and we soon dropped it as impractical and unsuitable. So the idea lay dormant for nearly a year.
Then Aidan Semmens took matters forward. In an email to the editorial team on 14 October 2014, he suggested an online project and offered to build and design the website himself. Suddenly we were on course again. The moment Aidan mentioned his idea, the rest of us wondered why none of us had thought of it before. Without his shearsman-like slicing through our difficulties, our project would have come to nothing.
***
The earliest online Festschrift that I’ve so far discovered was built in 2003 in Buenos Aires for the seventieth birthday of the Russian archaeologist Boris Ilich Marshak. Paola E. Raffetta’s ‘Introduction to the Electronic Version’ of what she called the Webfestschrift Marshak presents the advantages of the digital format very clearly. The term Webfestschrift is her coinage. Apart from this precursor, I’ve found no others, which means that even though we can’t claim to have invented a new publishing genre, it seems likely that Aidan’s innovation has enabled us to deliver the first ever full-scale literary Webfestschrift.
Online technology, therefore, was crucial for the making of the Festschrift. It enabled the entire project, and its role was central at several later stages too. The next steps were to work out how all six editors could view material and discuss and report on it to one another simultaneously. Dropbox was an obvious solution to collecting material and enabling all of us all to see it easily. For discussion of material, I then set up a simple Excel spreadsheet, which we started emailing to one another: a rather cumbersome and ineffective procedure, liable to result in delays and duplications. But Martin Anderson quickly came up with a solution: he posted the spreadsheet on Excel Online. Our problems were solved: we had a communal record that each one of us could edit at any time – a small but brilliant innovation that simplified communication considerably. Once both the Dropbox file and the online Excel spreadsheet became accessible in this way, we were able to handle more than ninety percent of our editorial work online. We also corresponded with one another, and with all but a very few of our contributors, by email.
New technologies make new art forms possible, but tend to be assimilated with such speed by intermingling with older forms that they become normative. They are evident for a while but, after a short time, usually mesh so seamlessly with previous practice that they fade unnoticed into the background. As editors, we have wanted to avoid the kind of naively consumerist utilitarianism that all too easily develops when technologies are taken for granted, and have aimed to be as alert as possible to the complex ways in which medium and message entwine.
***
Compiling an anthology of this kind with over two hundred contributors began as a challenge. It developed into a journey of discovery and ended in a sense of pleasure and achievement. In putting the Festschrift together, we six co-editors started by dividing between us the task of sending out invitations to Shearsman authors. Since then, we have been surprised and delighted many times and in many ways. Here, I explore four interlinked aspects of our editorial experience, many of which say a good deal about Tony Frazer himself, both obliquely and reflectively.
First, the speed, warmth and enthusiasm of the preliminary responses immediately suggested that our idea had located and touched a communal nexus of thoughts and feelings. As more and more responses came in, the universally positive tone of the correspondence and the content of contributions confirmed this initial impression. Gradually, an increasingly detailed picture emerged: primarily, of our correspondents’ respect for Tony Frazer’s literary judgement and their confidence in all aspects of his approach to editing and publishing. There were repeated iterations, too, of appreciation of his professional qualities: his approachability, the entire absence of any pretentiousness in him, his matter-of-factness and speed in dealing with editorial issues, his pragmatism and clear business sense, and his efficiency and fairness. Along with these kinds of comment, there was evident admiration for his detailed and encyclopaedic knowledge of modern and contemporary poetry, not only in English, but also in several other languages and cultures, especially German and Hispanic. Even more interestingly, our emails sparked off a large number of spontaneous expressions of personal affection and gratitude, suggesting rarer qualities. Above all, what came across was a sense of Tony’s modesty and magnanimity. A comment by Robert Sheppard sums this up perfectly: “We must honour this extraordinary and extraordinarily generous man.” Some of the spontaneous comments that we received in emails and letters have been gathered into a miscellany of tributes to be found here.
Tony Frazer is not just a one-man band but a one-man orchestra. Since 1980, when he first co-edited a poetry magazine, he has gradually and progressively become one of the most exciting and respected poetry publishers in the English-speaking world. This Festschrift, published exclusively on the Web in November 2015 for Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday, salutes and honours his achievement as editor and publisher of Shearsman magazine and Shearsman Books since 1981: a period of thirty-four years. In this time Tony Frazer has single-handedly brought out more than six hundred books: a tireless, steady productivity. The core of his publishing activity has always been poetry, which he has surrounded, consolidated and embellished with literary essays, criticism, interviews and fiction.
Tony may appear very English but his leanings are thoroughly cosmopolitan. In addition to poets from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, he has published translations from around twenty-five languages. There have also been several bilingual editions, for example from Croatian, Greek and Spanish. He speaks French, Spanish and German and reads Portuguese and Russian. He has spent periods living and working, in various capacities, in Germany, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Chile and Mexico, and has frequently visited the USA. He now runs Shearsman Books from Bristol, having moved there in 2011 from Exeter, where he had lived for ten years. Always in search of the new and the good, Tony often takes risks. He has been tireless both in unwavering advocacy of poets on his list who have been writing for many years and in his encouragement of poets presenting early collections.
***
The Festschrift consists of around two hundred and forty contributions by poets, artists and designers whose work has been published by Shearsman, as well as by friends and family members. It includes unpublished and published poems, translations, artwork, photographs, video and audio recordings, personal tributes, documentary accounts, reminiscences and anecdotes. Many of these have been composed specially for this website. With publication arranged to coincide with Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday on 2 November 2015, the Festschrift has taken more than two years to compile. During this period, it has been a well-kept literary secret. Not one of the contributors has breathed a word about the anthology to Tony before its delivery.
I write this in September 2015, just after the submissions deadline and just before publication. The Festschrift is to be presented to Tony at a surprise party on 7 November 2015 at the Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury, London: venue for many Shearsman readings and book launches. On this occasion, there will be no poetry readings but, we hope, the largest gathering of Shearsman authors and their friends ever.
***
Interviews with Tony clarify that he has always been interested in innovative writing, in poetry ‘with an edge’, but that he doesn’t accept or forgive avant-gardist tendentiousness or clichés. He is untrustworthy of schools and groups, suspicious of preconceptions, steers his way unerringly around literary labels and libels, avoids bandwagons, and is prepared to find quality in areas where others might not. His interview with Colette Sensier in Poetry News (Spring 2012) is expressive and illuminating:
- When Tony refers to himself as a “very awkward cuss”, it isn’t because he believes his tastes are partial, rather that they aren’t straightforward. He publishes too much poetry considered “mainstream” to be categorised as a “hardcore post-Avant", he says, while maintaining that “mainstream” is an “uncomfortable grab-bag definition” often misapplied to innovative poets […] merely because they’re published by big London houses. He deplores “blinkeredness” as a regular pitfall for experimental poets and editors, and he likes to stay out of the literary politics that divide literary camps.
And there’s no reason to challenge a model that has clearly has been very successfully managed. Tony’s eclecticism has led to decades of success. […] Shearsman receives no public or charitable funding and Tony, its only employee, works for free. He describes Shearsman as a “small press driven by one individual’s sensibility”, directly marketing minimal stock to interested audiences in direct contrast to “publishers trying to make it in the big bad world without any particular emotional investment”. The latter make money by selling what's popular in large quantities, whereas Tony asserts: “I’m not going to publish anything I don’t like.”
Similarly, in an (undated) interview with Tim Allen in The Argotist Online, Tony describes his editorial policy for Shearsman magazine:
- [T]here is a clear inclination towards the more exploratory end of the current spectrum. Notwithstanding this, however, quality work of a more conservative kind will always be considered seriously, provided that the work is well-written. What I do not like at all is sloppy writing of any kind; I always look for some rigour in the work, although I will be more forgiving of failure in this regard if the writer is trying to push out the boundaries. I tend to like mixing work from both ends of the spectrum in the magazine, and firmly believe that good writing can, and should, cohabit with other forms of good writing, regardless of the aesthetic that drives it, and regardless of whether the practitioners are happy about such cohabitation.
Tony’s editorial criteria, then, consist of reliance on his own personal taste and judgement, a dislike of “sloppiness” (pulp and pap) and a preference for “rigour” (craft, discipline, artistic technique). His approach is eclectic, measured, inclusive and cosmopolitan: it combines a non-doctrinaire openness with a keen appetite for “good writing”. What is more, by deploying the word “exploratory” here, rather than “innovative” or “experimental”, he deftly avoids the naiveties and clichés of polemic. With impeccable tact, he establishes a tenable position and a valid vantage point not only for a self-supporting small press but for an entire poetics.
***
The notion of editing a Festschrift for Tony’s sixty-fourth birthday articulated itself in my mind suddenly and in crystal definition. It was one of those ideas that occasionally descends with lightning-bolt clarity out of apparent nowhere and refuses to go away. This happened in the late afternoon of 29th June 2013, which had turned out to be one of those golden summer days when the English weather actually tunes in on call instead of following its usual habit of doing precisely the opposite of what’s wanted. I was sitting chatting with Tony, Lynda Waters and various other good friends on the lawn at a party at the Møller Centre in Churchill College, Cambridge.
I quickly realised that a good deal of work would be involved in editing; and in the following months, I started talking about it to several other Shearsmen and Shearswomen, especially Aidan Semmens, Kelvin Corcoran, Lucy Hamilton, Martin Anderson – and, of course, Lynda Waters. Aidan was already editing Molly Bloom, which he had resuscitated as a poetry webzine in April 2013, and Lucy was co-editing Long Poem Magazine, a commitment since its inception in 2008; but all were keen to be involved, so we quickly formed an editorial team. At first, we meant to bring out the Festschrift as a book and, over the next year, Kelvin and I approached various poetry publishers. Several expressed interest, even enthusiasm; and two in succession agreed to take on the project, but after over-long delays, they both withdrew. One could hardly blame them: an anthology is never easy to produce, and the presentation of a free copy to each contributor means a large initial outlay for any small publisher. Without sponsorship, disproportionate expenses can build up, making it impossible to break even, let alone make any profit. The larger poetry presses I approached had their own agendas. If only I could ask Tony to bring it out, I kept thinking, we would put it together in no time. But he of course was the one person who could not be asked. I then thought of inviting each contributor to pay something towards publication as well as submitting a poem or other offering. But this idea seemed unappealingly close to vanity publishing and we soon dropped it as impractical and unsuitable. So the idea lay dormant for nearly a year.
Then Aidan Semmens took matters forward. In an email to the editorial team on 14 October 2014, he suggested an online project and offered to build and design the website himself. Suddenly we were on course again. The moment Aidan mentioned his idea, the rest of us wondered why none of us had thought of it before. Without his shearsman-like slicing through our difficulties, our project would have come to nothing.
***
The earliest online Festschrift that I’ve so far discovered was built in 2003 in Buenos Aires for the seventieth birthday of the Russian archaeologist Boris Ilich Marshak. Paola E. Raffetta’s ‘Introduction to the Electronic Version’ of what she called the Webfestschrift Marshak presents the advantages of the digital format very clearly. The term Webfestschrift is her coinage. Apart from this precursor, I’ve found no others, which means that even though we can’t claim to have invented a new publishing genre, it seems likely that Aidan’s innovation has enabled us to deliver the first ever full-scale literary Webfestschrift.
Online technology, therefore, was crucial for the making of the Festschrift. It enabled the entire project, and its role was central at several later stages too. The next steps were to work out how all six editors could view material and discuss and report on it to one another simultaneously. Dropbox was an obvious solution to collecting material and enabling all of us all to see it easily. For discussion of material, I then set up a simple Excel spreadsheet, which we started emailing to one another: a rather cumbersome and ineffective procedure, liable to result in delays and duplications. But Martin Anderson quickly came up with a solution: he posted the spreadsheet on Excel Online. Our problems were solved: we had a communal record that each one of us could edit at any time – a small but brilliant innovation that simplified communication considerably. Once both the Dropbox file and the online Excel spreadsheet became accessible in this way, we were able to handle more than ninety percent of our editorial work online. We also corresponded with one another, and with all but a very few of our contributors, by email.
New technologies make new art forms possible, but tend to be assimilated with such speed by intermingling with older forms that they become normative. They are evident for a while but, after a short time, usually mesh so seamlessly with previous practice that they fade unnoticed into the background. As editors, we have wanted to avoid the kind of naively consumerist utilitarianism that all too easily develops when technologies are taken for granted, and have aimed to be as alert as possible to the complex ways in which medium and message entwine.
***
Compiling an anthology of this kind with over two hundred contributors began as a challenge. It developed into a journey of discovery and ended in a sense of pleasure and achievement. In putting the Festschrift together, we six co-editors started by dividing between us the task of sending out invitations to Shearsman authors. Since then, we have been surprised and delighted many times and in many ways. Here, I explore four interlinked aspects of our editorial experience, many of which say a good deal about Tony Frazer himself, both obliquely and reflectively.
First, the speed, warmth and enthusiasm of the preliminary responses immediately suggested that our idea had located and touched a communal nexus of thoughts and feelings. As more and more responses came in, the universally positive tone of the correspondence and the content of contributions confirmed this initial impression. Gradually, an increasingly detailed picture emerged: primarily, of our correspondents’ respect for Tony Frazer’s literary judgement and their confidence in all aspects of his approach to editing and publishing. There were repeated iterations, too, of appreciation of his professional qualities: his approachability, the entire absence of any pretentiousness in him, his matter-of-factness and speed in dealing with editorial issues, his pragmatism and clear business sense, and his efficiency and fairness. Along with these kinds of comment, there was evident admiration for his detailed and encyclopaedic knowledge of modern and contemporary poetry, not only in English, but also in several other languages and cultures, especially German and Hispanic. Even more interestingly, our emails sparked off a large number of spontaneous expressions of personal affection and gratitude, suggesting rarer qualities. Above all, what came across was a sense of Tony’s modesty and magnanimity. A comment by Robert Sheppard sums this up perfectly: “We must honour this extraordinary and extraordinarily generous man.” Some of the spontaneous comments that we received in emails and letters have been gathered into a miscellany of tributes to be found here.
Second, the huge variety of contributions that flew in – always individualistic, and varying from the wittily ironic to the gently sincere – was itself rewarding. We received many fine pieces, among which we discovered the idiosyncratic, the quirky, the offbeat, the trenchant, and the wholly unexpected. International contributions from all over the English-speaking world, plus translations from many other languages, indicated a transcultural breadth: an openness. And the richness of mixed media offerings, for example, visual poetry, and of contributions in non-verbal genres, opened conventional boundaries. Taken together, then, the rich range of individual expressions was evidence to us of the wealth of linguistic artefacts and constructs (modes, styles, forms, patterns) practised as poetry, in poetry, through poetry, today.
Third, the variety and quality of this material gave the clearest possible indication of the vision of poetry that Tony has assiduously applied in practice. Since our main field for selection has been Tony’s own list of Shearsman poets, it often seemed to us as editors that we were following so closely in his footsteps that we were able to intuit and even read his mind. In responding to so many pieces by authors already published by him, we inevitably found ourselves tracking his editorial choices and shadowing his editorial predilections. Added to this, offerings of prose narratives, sketches and mini-memoirs have added to the historical and archival depth of the website by documenting aspects of the Shearsman story. If I have any regret as the instigator of this Festschrift, it is only that so few contributors grasped the chance to explore the possibilities of video and audio. In retrospect, I wish we had thought of suggesting these kinds of contributions in our letters of invitation.
Fourth, as a result of all these factors, we six co-editors have accumulated a sense of keen enjoyment in working as a team, modulated through our individual perspectives and filtered through our different tastes and experiences. Through our work together, we have gradually found ourselves re-enacting at least something of the breadth and depth of Tony’s own editorial vision and, in that process, we have experienced increasing excitement and ongoing discovery. Now that the Festschrift is complete, considered as an assemblage I think it comes across as a richly variegated one that inevitably reflects the keenness of Tony’s editorial eyes and the attentiveness of his editorial care. What is more, seen through Tony Frazer’s eyes, the map of contemporary poetry opens richer grounds for pleasure, and space and time for hope.
***
In his interview with Tim Allen in The Argotist Online (mentioned above), Tony says that even if he hadn’t studied at Essex University in the 1970s, he believes that he would still have ended up “in non-standard territory”.
Given the kind of capitalist culture that we can’t avoid living and working in and through, I believe that this entire Festschrift carves out space for itself in precisely the kind of “non-standard territory” that Tony says he inhabits, which is also where his work for poetry necessarily resides and belongs. I think this anthology is the richer – and the more alert and alive – precisely for not claiming or aiming at ‘incorporation’ through any of the typically superlative (and typically strident) value-markers that our culture produces: for example, ‘greatness’, ‘strength’, ‘importance’, ‘centrality’, ‘excellence’, and so on. As far as the editors are concerned, and (I believe) the contributors too, no part, facet or aspect of this Festschrift is intended to imply attainment of accession or ascension to literary canonisation, in whatever form or mould. And still less is this Festschrift meant to suggest senior status, or closure, completion or finality, whether for Tony or for Shearsman, or, for that matter, any of the rest of us.
Why not? Because non-standard territory is a place of edges, borders and margins where fame turns out to be more or less irrelevant, accolades are likely to be suspicious if not ironic, and life goes on, insistent, persistent, trivial, mundane – and constantly replete with common miracles.
***
Wallace Stevens’s “shearsman of sorts” is a blue guitarist playing against a green day:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
Layerings of meaning and association in this dialogue between the guitar player and the “they” (the others, les autres, nous autres) not only account for the origins of Tony Frazer’s Shearsman but gently hint at some of the intricacies that underlie his poetics. The name Tony chose for his press and magazine isn’t accidental. Here I think it’s worth pursuing a few of its intricate potential resonances a little further, in the context of Stevens’ poem.
For a start, the idea that a guitarist might be a shearsman of any sort involves a leap in the reader’s mind and an adjustment to a correlation that is far from obvious and needs working out and through. The implication of the narratorial voice in the opening couplet is that for player and audience alike, once the guitar begins to be played, the movement (voyage) into song will involve a cutting, a slicing. This implication is initially held in abeyance, as a kind of open promise that is to be returned to later, recursively, for its fuller resonances to begin to become apparent.
The next steps in the poem follow as a sequential dialogue. When the shearsman-guitarist is mildly berated for not playing “things as they are”, his reply is that “things as they are” are changed when played on the blue guitar. That is to say: they are changed in and by the playing itself, by the act and process of being played. Music, song and poetry, then, not only reveal reality, but in and by revealing it, transform it and so, arguably, renew it. Then, having heard his response, the interlocutors (his listeners) say that what they want the guitarist to do is play them a tune that is at once “beyond us, yet ourselves”. Here, apparently contradictory demands combine in implicit paradox. And the listeners add, as if it were a sufficient explanation, that such a tune (actually and also) is “a tune … of things exactly as they are”. Here is it suggested, then, that the guitarist’s listeners believe (are fully aware) of several things: first, that being and becoming are irreducibly part of each other; second, that the imaginary, yearned-for (and perhaps beautiful) world of art, song, music and poetry is, ineluctably, an ingredient of overall reality; and, third, that the usual distinction proffered according to conventional thinking, namely that there is an exclusive opposition between actual or empirical reality and the world of the imagination, is implicitly dismissed and contravened. In its place, through the playing of the shearsman-guitarist, a new perspective opens for both player and audience in which the overall oneness of all-encompassing reality is made up of both the singular isness of what is and the areness of pluralised things, combined with the “beyond” that both isness and areness may become (generate) in future.
These steps necessarily bring us back to the initial gulf and leap towards associative identification that the narratorial voice has proposed between guitar player and shearsman. For in the act of playing his blue guitar, the fact that the player is also “a shearsman of sorts” must mean that, as we have already suggested, in and by playing, he cuts (and cuts through and/or into) something with his shears. The first question to be asked, then, surely is: what material is it that the Shearsman-guitarist cuts into or through?
At this point, inevitably, all possible connotations and collocations for the word shears are capable of being brought legitimately into play. Here are a few of them. Grass? The green grass that grows all around, all around, in our folk songs? The flesh that is grass, whose goodliness is as the flower of the field? Or the grass that will grows over our graves? Hay? The hay that is made while the sun shines? Stuff? The stuff that accompanies nonsense? The stuff of reality? Or such stuff / as dreams are made on? Veils? The veils of illusions or seeming? The three veils of unknowing? Veils of morning mist? Cloths? The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / of night and light and the half light? Wool? The wool that has been pulled over eyes? Fabric? The baseless fabric of this vision?
Could it be that what the shearsman-guitarist plays (and plays on and against) is surfaces within surfaces: layers, planes, conceptions, misconceptions, dreams and realities, all of which fold and unfold in, through and around – and “beyond” – one another? At any rate, even if his song may be found anywhere and anywhen, the only zone in which the shearsman with the blue guitar can ever play or be heard playing is in non-standard territory. That is: right here and now.
***
I started off this editorial by saying that Tony Frazer is one of the most exciting and respected poetry publishers in the English-speaking world. To be exciting and respected in the world of poetry publishing is no easy matter and, under present conditions in the UK, may seem contradictory, implausible, even impossible. But in Tony Frazer’s case, I think the double attribution is apt. For one thing, his mind is extraordinarily quick and alert. For another, he is genuinely tolerant and modest, often gently ironic, and mercifully unaffected by pretension. These qualities give him considerable strengths: they appear as both cause and effect of his integrity and originality. Which is to say: his strengths and qualities reinforce each other. To those who know him it is evident that Tony is able to think logically, laterally and diagonally at the same time. Astuteness of analysis blends with canny foresight and uncanny intuition. In conversation, he engages, stimulates and often sparkles with bons mots and heuristic leaps, while always wearing his encyclopaedic knowledge of poetry unassumingly and lightly. In all aspects of his work, he is attentive both to the minute particulars and to the panoramic picture, while not ceasing to be constantly wary of those traps for the unsuspecting that lurk in so many nooks and wrinkles between them. The picture that emerges, then, is of a man at once realistically and radically grounded in the knockabout world of publishing but also idealistic and determined enough to pursue a vision of his own.
The politics of the contemporary poetry world are complex and not particularly enticing. How, then, should a small press poetry publisher operate effectively in it and maintain integrity of purpose and vision? From the finesse of Tony Frazer’s practice over the last thirty-four years, the implicit answer, it would seem, goes something like this: publish work that you like, respect and love; follow your own hunches and tastes, and trust your sense of what is intrinsically good and worthwhile, however modest; don’t look over your shoulder to see who might be watching or taking notice; be courteous to those with clout and power, but never kow-tow to them; at all times avoid the specious, vain and corrupt; and, above all, be master in your own house and fight for, maintain and treasure independence.
Third, the variety and quality of this material gave the clearest possible indication of the vision of poetry that Tony has assiduously applied in practice. Since our main field for selection has been Tony’s own list of Shearsman poets, it often seemed to us as editors that we were following so closely in his footsteps that we were able to intuit and even read his mind. In responding to so many pieces by authors already published by him, we inevitably found ourselves tracking his editorial choices and shadowing his editorial predilections. Added to this, offerings of prose narratives, sketches and mini-memoirs have added to the historical and archival depth of the website by documenting aspects of the Shearsman story. If I have any regret as the instigator of this Festschrift, it is only that so few contributors grasped the chance to explore the possibilities of video and audio. In retrospect, I wish we had thought of suggesting these kinds of contributions in our letters of invitation.
Fourth, as a result of all these factors, we six co-editors have accumulated a sense of keen enjoyment in working as a team, modulated through our individual perspectives and filtered through our different tastes and experiences. Through our work together, we have gradually found ourselves re-enacting at least something of the breadth and depth of Tony’s own editorial vision and, in that process, we have experienced increasing excitement and ongoing discovery. Now that the Festschrift is complete, considered as an assemblage I think it comes across as a richly variegated one that inevitably reflects the keenness of Tony’s editorial eyes and the attentiveness of his editorial care. What is more, seen through Tony Frazer’s eyes, the map of contemporary poetry opens richer grounds for pleasure, and space and time for hope.
***
In his interview with Tim Allen in The Argotist Online (mentioned above), Tony says that even if he hadn’t studied at Essex University in the 1970s, he believes that he would still have ended up “in non-standard territory”.
Given the kind of capitalist culture that we can’t avoid living and working in and through, I believe that this entire Festschrift carves out space for itself in precisely the kind of “non-standard territory” that Tony says he inhabits, which is also where his work for poetry necessarily resides and belongs. I think this anthology is the richer – and the more alert and alive – precisely for not claiming or aiming at ‘incorporation’ through any of the typically superlative (and typically strident) value-markers that our culture produces: for example, ‘greatness’, ‘strength’, ‘importance’, ‘centrality’, ‘excellence’, and so on. As far as the editors are concerned, and (I believe) the contributors too, no part, facet or aspect of this Festschrift is intended to imply attainment of accession or ascension to literary canonisation, in whatever form or mould. And still less is this Festschrift meant to suggest senior status, or closure, completion or finality, whether for Tony or for Shearsman, or, for that matter, any of the rest of us.
Why not? Because non-standard territory is a place of edges, borders and margins where fame turns out to be more or less irrelevant, accolades are likely to be suspicious if not ironic, and life goes on, insistent, persistent, trivial, mundane – and constantly replete with common miracles.
***
Wallace Stevens’s “shearsman of sorts” is a blue guitarist playing against a green day:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
Layerings of meaning and association in this dialogue between the guitar player and the “they” (the others, les autres, nous autres) not only account for the origins of Tony Frazer’s Shearsman but gently hint at some of the intricacies that underlie his poetics. The name Tony chose for his press and magazine isn’t accidental. Here I think it’s worth pursuing a few of its intricate potential resonances a little further, in the context of Stevens’ poem.
For a start, the idea that a guitarist might be a shearsman of any sort involves a leap in the reader’s mind and an adjustment to a correlation that is far from obvious and needs working out and through. The implication of the narratorial voice in the opening couplet is that for player and audience alike, once the guitar begins to be played, the movement (voyage) into song will involve a cutting, a slicing. This implication is initially held in abeyance, as a kind of open promise that is to be returned to later, recursively, for its fuller resonances to begin to become apparent.
The next steps in the poem follow as a sequential dialogue. When the shearsman-guitarist is mildly berated for not playing “things as they are”, his reply is that “things as they are” are changed when played on the blue guitar. That is to say: they are changed in and by the playing itself, by the act and process of being played. Music, song and poetry, then, not only reveal reality, but in and by revealing it, transform it and so, arguably, renew it. Then, having heard his response, the interlocutors (his listeners) say that what they want the guitarist to do is play them a tune that is at once “beyond us, yet ourselves”. Here, apparently contradictory demands combine in implicit paradox. And the listeners add, as if it were a sufficient explanation, that such a tune (actually and also) is “a tune … of things exactly as they are”. Here is it suggested, then, that the guitarist’s listeners believe (are fully aware) of several things: first, that being and becoming are irreducibly part of each other; second, that the imaginary, yearned-for (and perhaps beautiful) world of art, song, music and poetry is, ineluctably, an ingredient of overall reality; and, third, that the usual distinction proffered according to conventional thinking, namely that there is an exclusive opposition between actual or empirical reality and the world of the imagination, is implicitly dismissed and contravened. In its place, through the playing of the shearsman-guitarist, a new perspective opens for both player and audience in which the overall oneness of all-encompassing reality is made up of both the singular isness of what is and the areness of pluralised things, combined with the “beyond” that both isness and areness may become (generate) in future.
These steps necessarily bring us back to the initial gulf and leap towards associative identification that the narratorial voice has proposed between guitar player and shearsman. For in the act of playing his blue guitar, the fact that the player is also “a shearsman of sorts” must mean that, as we have already suggested, in and by playing, he cuts (and cuts through and/or into) something with his shears. The first question to be asked, then, surely is: what material is it that the Shearsman-guitarist cuts into or through?
At this point, inevitably, all possible connotations and collocations for the word shears are capable of being brought legitimately into play. Here are a few of them. Grass? The green grass that grows all around, all around, in our folk songs? The flesh that is grass, whose goodliness is as the flower of the field? Or the grass that will grows over our graves? Hay? The hay that is made while the sun shines? Stuff? The stuff that accompanies nonsense? The stuff of reality? Or such stuff / as dreams are made on? Veils? The veils of illusions or seeming? The three veils of unknowing? Veils of morning mist? Cloths? The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / of night and light and the half light? Wool? The wool that has been pulled over eyes? Fabric? The baseless fabric of this vision?
Could it be that what the shearsman-guitarist plays (and plays on and against) is surfaces within surfaces: layers, planes, conceptions, misconceptions, dreams and realities, all of which fold and unfold in, through and around – and “beyond” – one another? At any rate, even if his song may be found anywhere and anywhen, the only zone in which the shearsman with the blue guitar can ever play or be heard playing is in non-standard territory. That is: right here and now.
***
I started off this editorial by saying that Tony Frazer is one of the most exciting and respected poetry publishers in the English-speaking world. To be exciting and respected in the world of poetry publishing is no easy matter and, under present conditions in the UK, may seem contradictory, implausible, even impossible. But in Tony Frazer’s case, I think the double attribution is apt. For one thing, his mind is extraordinarily quick and alert. For another, he is genuinely tolerant and modest, often gently ironic, and mercifully unaffected by pretension. These qualities give him considerable strengths: they appear as both cause and effect of his integrity and originality. Which is to say: his strengths and qualities reinforce each other. To those who know him it is evident that Tony is able to think logically, laterally and diagonally at the same time. Astuteness of analysis blends with canny foresight and uncanny intuition. In conversation, he engages, stimulates and often sparkles with bons mots and heuristic leaps, while always wearing his encyclopaedic knowledge of poetry unassumingly and lightly. In all aspects of his work, he is attentive both to the minute particulars and to the panoramic picture, while not ceasing to be constantly wary of those traps for the unsuspecting that lurk in so many nooks and wrinkles between them. The picture that emerges, then, is of a man at once realistically and radically grounded in the knockabout world of publishing but also idealistic and determined enough to pursue a vision of his own.
The politics of the contemporary poetry world are complex and not particularly enticing. How, then, should a small press poetry publisher operate effectively in it and maintain integrity of purpose and vision? From the finesse of Tony Frazer’s practice over the last thirty-four years, the implicit answer, it would seem, goes something like this: publish work that you like, respect and love; follow your own hunches and tastes, and trust your sense of what is intrinsically good and worthwhile, however modest; don’t look over your shoulder to see who might be watching or taking notice; be courteous to those with clout and power, but never kow-tow to them; at all times avoid the specious, vain and corrupt; and, above all, be master in your own house and fight for, maintain and treasure independence.