Introduction by Philip Terry
A tall man stands atop a ladder. His hand reaches out and moves over the shelves of a bookcase, hovering over the poems of Kingsley Amis, brushing past several slim volumes by W. H. Auden, before alighting on a book by a relatively unknown poet, Tony Baker. The hand belongs to Harry Gilonis, who is working at the Poetry Society bookshop in Earl’s Court. Here, at the end of each financial year, depreciation of stock had to be entered as an element of the accounts, so Gilonis found himself inspecting books for wear and tear from the top of a ladder. He started at ‘A’, and quickly found himself caught up short by his first acquaintance with Tony B-for-Baker and Richard C-for-Caddel, and many others (ending with Louis Zukofsky’s “A”). As he climbed down the ladder to put aside more books to buy, he was discovering, not through peers or teachers but through impure serendipity, that interesting poetry wasn’t just written by dead Americans. There was not only the post-Poundian, but the Objectivist and post-Objectivist, as well as the many English and Irish followers in that tradition, and it was a vibrant and living tradition at that.
Gilonis’s interest in poetry began as a reader, not a writer, when, as it were, he went to school (like others before him including Basil Bunting) with Ezra Pound – the Ezuversity as it has sometimes been called. He spent a year reading the Cantos on the dole – an apprenticeship no longer available – using a university library ticket to access source books, from Provençal and Chinese dictionaries to books on art and architecture. After that he took the job at the Poetry Society bookshop. When, some time later, he began writing his own poetry, even collaborating with Tony Baker on some works, he began to produce poems that stand out in the sometimes insular English tradition as rich and strange. Here was a poetry that is radically open to other traditions and other poets across continents and across time, from William Carlos Williams to Li Shang-yin, from Trakl to Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker and
11
