Date:   Mon, 16 Jan 1995
From:   Charles Bernstein
Subject:  Eric Mottram: In Memorium

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995
3:45pm NYC time

Eric Mottram died this morning in London.  Tom Raworth just phoned me, just
while Allen Fisher was phoning Pierre Joris, both telling us that Eric had
died four to five hours ago from multiple infections. He had been hospitalized
a day or two ago.

Eric turned 70 on this past December 29.

>From the introduction to *Alive in Parts of this Century: Eric Mottram at 70*,
just out from North and South Press:

"Eric Mottram is one of the most important figures of post-war literature
and teaching.  He was the first to teach Beat writing in Europe in the 1950s,
the first teacher of American Studies at the University of London, and a
co-founder of the Institute of United States Studies in the University of
London in 1963.  He edited Poetry Review in 1972-75, ran the King's Poetry
Series in 1967-80 and co-edited The New British Poetry (1988).  He has had
two dozen collections of poetry published since the late 1960s including
*Elegies*, *A Book of Herne* and *Selected Poems*.  [*Selected Poems (1989)
*Alive in Parts of This Century*, both from North and South, are available
from Small Press Distribution.]
     His essay collections include *The Algebra of Need*, the first essay full
study of William Burroughs, and *Blood on the Nash Ambassador*, a selection
of essays.

An indefatigable supporter of the most adventurous, inventive, and socially
engaged poetry of the UK and USA, Mottram introduced at least two generations
of poets to poetry hidden from view by the a literary establishment, on both
sides of the Atlantic that, in Mottram's words, promoted a conformist poetry
decoration and decorum.  Mottram's own uncompromising poetry demonstrated how
poetry can be political without sacrificing formal investigation.  As Pierre
Joris wrote of Eric's poetry -- this is work of "gut passion, crystal clarity
of intellect."

For *Alive in Parts of This Century*, Pierre Joris chose lines (almost all)
from Eric Mottram's work for his contribution.  (The format of the poem was
disrupted in e-conversion; it should be flush right.)


HOMAGE/COLLAGE FOR ERIC MOTTRAM @ 70


1.   ...I am searching unceasingly for my own discovery"
2.    it takes leisure to be a man is revolution
3.    granddad, why are they all whispering?
4.   this is not what I want to do, I want to know
5.    an image             an open hand with things in it
6.   the result of composed ascent
7.   concepts as modes of ordering
8.  performance as what is revealed, moving outwards
9.  the embryonic form of organisation
10.   laughter of naked bathers
11.    of transformed beings returned to the steep sea
12.    break the mesh that grips us
13.   an errand in wilderness
14.   consult a good bookseller as to whether a book is
15.   the fields of exchange
16.  back there at origins a travelling forward soul springs up
17. the waterfall     the illuminating gas
18.I hope this list will be regarded as an open
19.  do you enter space from edges               by intersecting lines
20.  you eat light your eyes carry
21.  a parenthesis of what is to be known
22.  but a gun to show that he was a faithful private
23.    in liberty    a space    of flame between us
24. Social roles, rituals, taboos, manners and conventions are
        boundaries of
25. their bark and moan               songs of the story tellers
26.  believe that in offering a candid account of himself he creates
27.   to chose insecurity
28.  gather surprise among limestone turf plants
29.  The clearest example of work which actually leapt out of the area of
30.  knows that the naturally depraved yearns to be a policeman
31. trample workers
32.  Intelligent ones should generate the excellent Bodhi-mind
33.  when creatures learn        brain nucleic acids change
34.  our nostrils move      we stride on a hill curve     air moves
35. from then on my road meets everymanUs road from the south of solitude
36. shieldless venture in adventure / we dare in the undaring sea
37. tracks laid down underwater
38. from seperate existence/this bites in my mouth your kiss
39. "Collage-design method is, as he puts it, 'transformation.' It is similar
40.  neck erect for songs at a high level space/
41.  on each cusp spandrel corbel lovers beside angels
42.    have you woken up mad with information
43.    against fluted pillars the grainy dark of news
44.    "the subversions of his own power and confidence"
45.   tokens of myself brought here up through clay and soil
46.  so a tongue breaks words it assumed memorized
47.  the balance acts refuse sacrifice the waste loneliness
48. from a man half through our wall strides towards us parts us / and
49.                          few leaves touch to live a difference of breath
50.  satori
51.  determined not to disappear
52.  living in a world more or less homicidal and desperately mercantile
53.  "gut passion, crystal clarity of intellect: two energies, two modes"
54. the work: encounter between                         and consolidation
55.   he returns me to his head
56. here rewrite the message that is you
57.shaken by the fire and darkness of his time      I lived the lives of others
58.     friends we need to believe
59.  whereby I lived, and moved, and had my being aboard the
60.   media prisons through terrors of recognition
61.  three kinds of silence and movement in the long wind-strung day
62.    "Mottram demonstrates how poetry can be political without"
63.    a liberation into power
64.  of leisure without guilt
65.  shards in winter        Night in Tunisia
66.     fertile to recognize resemblance
67.    a man goes forth stops in the sun
68.     beneath light surface      fold on fold
69.    we to whom the world is our native country
70. "figures always foreboded, awaited, and loved rise into view"