Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
4 an andrew crozier reader Craig-Martin. He collaborated further, in special illustrated editions of his own poetry, with artists such as Ian Tyson, Tom Phillips, and his own brother, Philip Crozier. His criticism was important, but remains as yet scattered in periodicals and anthologies, and some of his projects were never completed. The stress was again on sweeping the board clean and examining the history afresh: what took place, what was produced and what its value might be, and this naturally resulted in reversals of received positions, and the rescuing of forgotten poets, which became almost a speciality of his. In a letter Michael Schmidt wrote to Crozier in July 2006 he emphasised the importance of this critical work: I have the highest regard possible for your critical essays. They dig far deeper and uncover far more than most of the critical writings of writers I admire in our generation. It is the carefulness with which the argument proceeds, the almost Ridingesque insistence on precision, that makes your work such a tonic (fortunately the style is much more readable than hers!). The evidence of Andrew Crozier’s commitment to the setting straight of records is to be found in the immense amount of work he left unfinished, the pulling together of which will become an interesting and important task for future scholars. A brief outline of the sort of material he was involved with was presented in the May 2006 letter to Schmidt quoted above, and some further details were given in the letter to me, in which he talks of his commitment to finishing three pieces of work: Two of these are no more than occasionalistic, but the other one, on Harry Roskolenko, raises the possibility of a unified treatment of the Objectivists and the New Apocalypse. Roskolenko isn’t an important poet, but he opens a number of issues that might otherwise seem irrelevant, in particular the connections between Objectivism and Proletarian writing, and the implications of Zukofsky’s negative, but very carefully weighed verdict on Hart Crane. Crane’s influence elsewhere, specifically on Dylan Thomas and his imitators, then becomes the antithesis of Objectivism’s occlusion/collapse during the 1930s. This is time-consuming stuff, partly because it means pecking away at the contemporary significances of such events as the
page 17
introduction 5 Reichstag fire trial, partly because Roskolenko left a massive, but dispersed archive. There are a few paragraphs to add to what I’ve already written, but my presentation of him so far is as someone who passed through different sets of circumstances, and doesn’t address the possibility of drawing them together. The purpose of this Andrew Crozier Reader is to bring back into the public eye the gifted poet and the untiring promoter of poetry’s importance, to allow readers to judge for themselves the extraordinary range of work spanning forty years. Nicholas Johnson’s term, ‘poet’s champion’, refers not only to the central importance of the anthology, A Various Art, edited by Crozier and Tim Longville in 1987, in which the exciting new world of what was happening in poetry found a decisive and attractive presentation, but also to the fact that Crozier contributed an anthology of ‘Ten English Poets’ to New Directions 32, ‘An International Anthology of Prose & Poetry’. When Andrew Crozier retired after some thirty years at Sussex he made it abundantly clear that it was in order to start new ventures: Have I mentioned that I took early retirement at the start of the academic year? The effect is of a protracted intellectual spring clean, a mixture of exhilaration and remorse. Two months later he referred to ‘the abundant reading time’ afforded to him by retirement: I am under the necessity of disposing of a lot of books, and there are cases where it becomes necessary to reread (even to read) before reaching the fateful decision. In many more cases, of course, the decisions are easy and with a sort of jubilation at no more of authors x, y, and z. What is undoubted here is the continuation of his work of discrimination and judgement, a refusal to slide along with the readily accepted, an angularity of quiet determination which is a reflection upon a lifetime’s achievement.

Page Text

View plaintext

4

an andrew crozier reader

Craig-Martin. He collaborated further, in special illustrated editions of his own poetry, with artists such as Ian Tyson, Tom Phillips, and his own brother, Philip Crozier.

His criticism was important, but remains as yet scattered in periodicals and anthologies, and some of his projects were never completed. The stress was again on sweeping the board clean and examining the history afresh: what took place, what was produced and what its value might be, and this naturally resulted in reversals of received positions, and the rescuing of forgotten poets, which became almost a speciality of his.

In a letter Michael Schmidt wrote to Crozier in July 2006 he emphasised the importance of this critical work:

I have the highest regard possible for your critical essays. They dig far deeper and uncover far more than most of the critical writings of writers I admire in our generation. It is the carefulness with which the argument proceeds, the almost Ridingesque insistence on precision, that makes your work such a tonic (fortunately the style is much more readable than hers!).

The evidence of Andrew Crozier’s commitment to the setting straight of records is to be found in the immense amount of work he left unfinished, the pulling together of which will become an interesting and important task for future scholars. A brief outline of the sort of material he was involved with was presented in the May 2006 letter to Schmidt quoted above, and some further details were given in the letter to me, in which he talks of his commitment to finishing three pieces of work:

Two of these are no more than occasionalistic, but the other one, on Harry Roskolenko, raises the possibility of a unified treatment of the Objectivists and the New Apocalypse. Roskolenko isn’t an important poet, but he opens a number of issues that might otherwise seem irrelevant, in particular the connections between Objectivism and Proletarian writing, and the implications of Zukofsky’s negative, but very carefully weighed verdict on Hart Crane. Crane’s influence elsewhere, specifically on Dylan Thomas and his imitators, then becomes the antithesis of Objectivism’s occlusion/collapse during the 1930s.

This is time-consuming stuff, partly because it means pecking away at the contemporary significances of such events as the

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content