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Pictures from the Rylands Library ‘Living Stone’: Remembering Carcanet’s Corn Exchange stella halkyard Laid down in layers like strata, generation upon generation, Edwin Morgan creates a pillar of ‘living stone’ (Robert Herrick) in his verbivocalvisual poem ‘Archives’. In a year that marks both the centenary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his publisher, this particular picture from the Rylands excavates one such layer of Carcanet’s history in ‘wet Manchester’ (Morgan). Once a product of mercantile might, Manchester’s Corn Exchange had, by the time it became Carcanet’s home, relaxed into a disheveled elegance. Its subterranean caverns in the basement, deserted by day, transformed after dark into nightclubs where generations of music-loving Mancunians flocked. The Roxy Room at Pips was the place to be in 1979 and later at Konspiracy bands like 808 State cut their teeth. Up a level on the ground floor, a pearly gloom filtered down through a crown of glass into the Market Hall, which buzzed with activity. Barricaded into makeshift kiosks by trestle tables buckling under the weight of second hand vinyl, books, clothes, jewellery and junk, market traders sold their wares. The higher echelons of the building were inhabited by the office holders, which from the early 1970s included Carcanet. Visitors swept up wrought-iron staircases and along green-tiled, mahogany-lined corridors, or were carried in caged lifts, operated by ancient, liveried attendants. Originally the Press occupied a suite of three, modest interconnecting rooms on the second floor where a frosted glass panel in the door of Michael Schmidt’s office (similar to a tubercular window) proclaimed the words: PN Review! Through time Carcanet moved into the grandest of chambers on the Olympian Fourth Floor overlooking the Cathedral. Then in June 1996 a Ford Cargo truck loaded with semtex exploded in a street nearby in a terrorist attack. The Press’s offices, and the rest of the Corn Exchange, were shattered in the blast. Holes, like the missing ‘o’, ‘e’ and ‘t’s in Morgan’s poem, threatened the fabric of poetry’s universe. But the silk-woven structure of Carcanet is made of stuff sterner than steel. Within days it had set up shop elsewhere, nomadically shifting around the city until it found a semi-permanent home in Conovan Court that same year. And despite everything the poetry kept coming, as they lured ‘… words like flocks of birds/To settle bookwards, readerwards/ And oh – why not – eternitywards!’ (Morgan). But what of Carcanet’s archive? On the day of the bomb the accrual pending transfer miraculously ‘survived intact’ (Michael Schmidt) boxed-up securely in buckram. Now preserved in the Rylands it lives to tell the tale, generation upon generation. ‛Archives’ by Edwin Morgan, © Carcanet and the Morgan Estate.
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Editorial Back in 1996, Mark Doty reviewed The Wild Iris for PN Review: It is very seldom that a new book of poems enters the realm of books to be cherished, inexhaustible volumes which approach with authority the mystery at the core of our lives. Such books are perennials: they open as we reread them, yielding new meanings. The Wild Iris has the stamp of permanence, of lasting achievement. At a time when American poetry too often seems an economy of small gestures, in which limited autobiographical poems present the poet’s life in restricted terms, The Wild Iris is a bold, significant book, one which quickens us, intensifies our sense of being alive, not because of any answers it provides but because it so resolutely embodies our mortal questions. Out of elemental but daunting materials – garden flowers, the desires and gestures of the gardener, the voices of divinity – Louise Glück has built as splendid, haunted and substantive an edifice as contemporary American poetry has yet produced. A year later, Louise Glück contributed three essays to PN Review: ‘American Narcissism’, ‘Story Tellers’ and ‘Fear of Happiness’, and her books, not only those published by Carcanet, have been regularly reviewed, including Ulrike Draesner’s German translation of Averno appraised by the Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag (2008); she also contributed an illuminating conversation (with Yvonne Green) to PNR 210. She talks there about A Village Life, contrasting its composition with that of her earlier books: The book was a lot of fun to write. In the sense of its being fabulously interesting and available. Most of my recent books have been written so rapidly that there’s no sense when they’re finished of any agency or role, they simply didn’t exist and then they did exist and I can’t figure out what I did. But A Village Life took about a year and a half which was ideal because I felt that I was always engaged. I could always go to the space where those poems seemed to come from and it was waiting for me. It was quite wonderful – as working, I suppose, on a novel might be – She is clear about what she resists in the poetry of her more theory-driven contemporaries: ‘there’s also a contemporary poetry that’s built on disjunction and seemingly arbitrary connections and I think those poets feel that content is sentimental I guess […] Most of the work I see like that I think is pretty boring. It’s very hard to tell one artist from another. If investment is in disjunction how many versions of disjunction are there? They’re infinite but they have no character.’ The poets of disjunction, if we can use her phrase, were those most troubled by her receiving the Nobel Prize. They provided list after list of poets they would have preferred, some of them conformant to the emerging norms that see artistic quality as relative and other priorities as absolute, and poets whose work is, most likely, generally unread outside the circles it traces around itself. She is also clear about what she likes, noticing the work of George Oppen in particular. ‘I like poems that swerve. They seem to be going in one direction and all of a sudden they’re going in another direction. They contain a multitude of tones. That’s what I try to do in my poems, get as many tones in the air as possible.’ She is fascinated too by white spaces – between stanzas, at the ends of short lines. They have a sound, which may be silence or an intake of breath. Colm Tóibín was introduced to Glück’s work by Eavan Boland: ‘I found her

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Pictures from the Rylands Library ‘Living Stone’: Remembering Carcanet’s Corn Exchange stella halkyard

Laid down in layers like strata, generation upon generation, Edwin Morgan creates a pillar of ‘living stone’ (Robert Herrick) in his verbivocalvisual poem ‘Archives’. In a year that marks both the centenary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his publisher, this particular picture from the Rylands excavates one such layer of Carcanet’s history in ‘wet Manchester’ (Morgan).

Once a product of mercantile might, Manchester’s Corn Exchange had, by the time it became Carcanet’s home, relaxed into a disheveled elegance. Its subterranean caverns in the basement, deserted by day, transformed after dark into nightclubs where generations of music-loving Mancunians flocked. The Roxy Room at Pips was the place to be in 1979 and later at Konspiracy bands like 808 State cut their teeth. Up a level on the ground floor, a pearly gloom filtered down through a crown of glass into the Market Hall, which buzzed with activity. Barricaded into makeshift kiosks by trestle tables buckling under the weight of second hand vinyl, books, clothes, jewellery and junk, market traders sold their wares. The higher echelons of the building were inhabited by the office holders, which from the early 1970s included Carcanet.

Visitors swept up wrought-iron staircases and along green-tiled, mahogany-lined corridors, or were carried in caged lifts, operated by ancient, liveried attendants. Originally the Press occupied a suite of three, modest interconnecting rooms on the second floor where a frosted glass panel in the door of Michael Schmidt’s office (similar to a tubercular window) proclaimed the words: PN Review!

Through time Carcanet moved into the grandest of chambers on the Olympian Fourth Floor overlooking the Cathedral. Then in June 1996 a Ford Cargo truck loaded with semtex exploded in a street nearby in a terrorist attack. The Press’s offices, and the rest of the Corn Exchange, were shattered in the blast.

Holes, like the missing ‘o’, ‘e’ and ‘t’s in Morgan’s poem, threatened the fabric of poetry’s universe. But the silk-woven structure of Carcanet is made of stuff sterner than steel. Within days it had set up shop elsewhere, nomadically shifting around the city until it found a semi-permanent home in Conovan Court that same year. And despite everything the poetry kept coming, as they lured ‘… words like flocks of birds/To settle bookwards, readerwards/ And oh – why not – eternitywards!’ (Morgan).

But what of Carcanet’s archive? On the day of the bomb the accrual pending transfer miraculously ‘survived intact’ (Michael Schmidt) boxed-up securely in buckram. Now preserved in the Rylands it lives to tell the tale, generation upon generation.

‛Archives’ by Edwin Morgan, © Carcanet and the Morgan Estate.

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