A relative newcomer both to London and to the world of William Blake, I was fortunate to come across a pre-eminent guide through both territories at the start of my PhD in 2019. In the Autumn of that year, I attended a series of five ‘Blake Walks’ across London, led by self-styled ‘poetopographer’ and ‘urban shaman’ Niall McDevitt. McDevitt’s walks helped me, in many senses, to find my feet. Born in Dublin but long based in London, McDevitt began leading his Blake Walks after a particularly memorable encounter with a Blakean site. In a recent interview with me (see below), he explained how it all began, when he wound up at St James’ Piccadilly, the site of Blake’s baptism in 1757, during a poetry event in 1996. Among other poetry readings, McDevitt recalls performing Blake’s poem ‘London’ in acapella ‘to a tune of my own’—a manoeuvre that amply attests to the kind of intuitive, experimental ‘poetopography’ in which he continues to excel and revel.

After that experience, McDevitt recalls, ‘I sought out more Blake sites.’ His research coalesced into the ever-evolving Blake Walks that he has been leading for over 15 years, with recent instalments organised by the London-based indie publisher New River Press. McDevitt’s connections to the small-press, radical, and countercultural publishing scenes are extensive. His work has been published by imprints such as International Times, New River Press, Entropy Press, and Ragged Lion Press. Over the years, McDevitt has worked closely with a host of chameleonic poets, artists, and musicians, including Jeremy Reed, Aidan Andrew Dun, John Crow, Michael Horovitz, Heathcote Williams, Mike Lesser, Chris McCabe, Stephen Micalef, Max Reeves, and countless more. In the interview, it is with a mixture of awe and fondness that McDevitt describes his remarkable encounters with these and other Blakean-minded people. Above all, he delights in the radical potentialities of Blake’s work, which becomes for him the medium for thinking through sociopolitical ills of our day, and for seeking out alternative modes of thought and of cultural production.

McDevitt himself is a consummate chameleon. Selected guises have included: night porter at the legendary Columbia Hotel (1988), twice a busker around Europe with his brother Roddy (1994-5, 1997-8), actor in Neil Oram’s 24-hour play The Warp, John Peels’ Saturday show Home Truth, and John Crow’s The Southwark Mysteries (late 90s); editor of International Times (2012), organiser of poetry readings and art exhibitions at Freedom Press in Whitechapel (2012), and author with collections published by Waterloo Press (b/w, 2010), International Times (Porterloo, 2013), New River Press (Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage, 2016), and numerous poems and articles appearing regularly in (for example) MU, The Idler, History Today and Ragged Lion Journal. On the Blake front, on the occasion of Blake’s 250^th birthday anniversary in 2007, McDevitt was involved with the Blake Society, Blake’s Lambeth Mosaics Project, a Radio 4 programme The Poet of Albion, and Clear Spots on Resonance FM. He was also involved from 2008-9 in the collective called Blakespeare, who produced various musical settings of Blake’s poetry by artists such as AJ Dehany, Astrid Steehouder, David Russell, Yo Zushi, and the William Blake Klezmatrix Band. In 2020, he was one of a number of poets commissioned to contribute to The Bard exhibition at Flat Time House, responding to Blake’s designs for Thomas Gray’s Celtic revival poem The Bard. McDevitt’s contribution was a sonnet entitled ‘Edward I,’ named after the warrior king featuring in Gray’s poem, and whose corpse Blake is believed to have seen and sketched at Westminster Abbey in 1774 (the attribution of the extant drawings to Blake is still disputed).

This brief jaunt through McDevitt’s work is very far from complete, but hopefully it has captured some sense of the ways in which his practices bring together many strands of the ‘golden string’ of Blake’s legacy: urban pedestrianism and psychogeography, independent publishing, oppositionality, political activism. There is in his work a Blakean sense of tireless and urgent creativity that literalises, among other things, the imperative issued to the ‘Golden Builders’ of Golgonooza in Jerusalem:

Go on, Builders in hope: tho Jerusalem wanders far away,

Without the gate of Los: among the dark Satanic wheels (J 12: 43-44).

There is, one senses, a great deal more to come. Indeed, in our interview, McDevitt offers a foretaste of some future Blake Walks: ‘More Blake walks are in the offing. They will include a ‘Blake and Swedenborg Walk’ and a ‘William Blake and Tom Paine Walk.’ Those interested: keep an eye out for updates on McDevitt’s blog and the New River Press events page.

As an addendum to the interview, McDevitt has offered the following Blakean poem, which we hope will be of interest to the readers of Zoamorphosis. Inspired by living in Hammersmith with a view of Charing Cross Hospital from the window, the poem is from McDevitt’s first book, b/w (Waterloo Press: 2010), but it is easy to see its renewed resonance in recent pandemic times.

 

THE GOLD HOSPITAL

 

in the soma hour of the gold hospital

tuning into the transfiguration

I’d claim a plateau bed

 

nothing to be in an ordinary room

without kidney-machine or catheter

then

 

then wounds are dragon agents

under lasers

and curable

 

the intoxications the drugging drips

flooding in as if

first experiences

 

the killing of pain

I recognise the doctors, I think…

Drs. Blake Gold and Poppy

 

the zenith is a most unfriendly diamond mine

hailing

shitting its disposable jewels

 

told not to told to told of the – more – confusions

the gossiping rains

and super-atomisations

 

as if science was the new mysticism was the new rock and roll

and touchings of strings

the only reckoning the only evidence the only ever

 

the hospital is Byzantine and I am not in

it

now mushroomed in my mud-hours

 

nor warred nor scarred

nor with alcohol gel

rubbing into my lifeline

 

radio intelligencers

and the various lw mw and fm voxes

motor-mouthing to the dusk

 

index of the pilgrims as in their gold rooms

sounds took on momentum

horsed on morphine clouds

 

illnesses asked for magic

shone through

the flesh the technology

 

Niall McDevitt

 

 

Links

 

Niall McDevitt’s blog: https://poetopography.wordpress.com/

b/w, McDevitt’s first published collection: b/w (2010) – Waterloo Press

Blakefest: https://blakefest.co.uk/

Blake’s Lambeth Mosaics Project: https://www.lsomosaic.com/projects-1/2019/4/8/blakes-lambeth-2005-2015

Julie Goldsmith’s website: http://juliegoldsmith.co.uk/

International Times: http://internationaltimes.it/

New River Press: http://www.thenewriverpress.com/

Entropy Press: https://www.entropypress.co.uk/

Ragged Lion Press: https://www.raggedlionpress.co.uk/

The Bard, past exhibition at Flat Time House: http://flattimeho.org.uk/exhibitions/bard/

 

The Interview

 

Caroline Ritchie: How would you describe your creative practice?

Niall McDevitt: In a word, poet. But also essayist, psychogeographer, activist. Some night call me a tour guide, others a walking artist. The other activities are poetic extensions and expansions. I do walking lectures about poets and poetry in the streets of London, the capital of poetry. It’s a bargain extra-curricular education. Instead of £10,000 a term, it’s a few tenners and a few pale ales a term. I think of London as an outdoor university, more Socratic than Platonic. It has advantages over the campus. If you’re telling people about Blake’s Songs of Innocence and you’re right there in the street where he wrote it, it can be more mindblowing. If you’re telling people about the death of Blake and you’re very close to where it happened – by what is now the staff entrance to the Savoy Hotel – it’s very moving for some people. You can go round the corner to Savoy Steps where Bob Dylan filmed the video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ with Allen Ginsberg, DA Pennebaker, Bob Neuwirth, talk about the bardic/orphic/personal-political approach to poetry, and everyone is gobsmacked at recognising this alleyway which they all thought was in New York. It’s cool that Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan finally namechecked Blake on his last album.

I sing the songs of experience like William Blake

I have no apologies to make

Everything’s flowing all at the same time

I live on the boulevard of crime

The humble literary walk is a kind of artform. It’s a medium for edutainment, dissemination of radical ideas, sociability, and for encountering the unexpected. One Christopher Marlowe walk began with his line ’Birds of the air will tell of murders past’, and ended with an avian reconstruction of Marlowe’s murder. Three crows attacked and all but killed a magpie just as we arrived at the scene of the crime in Deptford Strand. It was like watching Poley/Skeres/Friser stab Marlowe in the eye. (I think Max Reeves may have photoed it.) Situationist ideologues say a walk should be purposeless, but I find having a focus makes me notice the other things better. I like participating in walks too. I’ve been on walks with WUSC, Mythogeography, Laura Oldfield Ford, Walkative, John Crow, and many others. The first time walking the Fleet from source to Thames was mindboggling. I’m less into the methodologies, more into the hermeneutical highs. I’m boycotting the Karl Marx walk until the bourgeoisie are charged £99 and the proletariat £1.

Some polysyllabic terms I have found helpful: 1) psychogeography; 2) urban shamanism; 3) colportage; 4) metareality. My preferred description for the first term is something I found in Philip Marlowe – that Chandler composite of Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe – who calls his own gumshoe modus operandi ‘leg art’. This is a perfect monosyllabic definition of psychogeography. The second term literally describes new age healers in modern cities, but I have co-opted the phrase to apply to certain types of metropolitan poets and their approach to poetry. The third term is from Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish. It compares the street distribution of religious pamphlets to a visionary sense of seeing everything that ever happened in a specific place simultaneously. (I wrote a book of poems in Jerusalem called Firing Slits Jerusalem Colportage.)

The fourth term is from the philosopher Roy Bhaskar – one of whose lectures I attended – and describes the final phase of his critical realist approach which he called ‘the spiritual turn’. Poetry seems akin to metareality. Blake sums it up: ‘My Streets are My, Ideas of Imagination’.

CR: When, how and why did you start to take an interest in William Blake?

NM: As a secondary schoolboy I performed the accustomed hop, skip and jump from The Doors to Aldous Huxley to William Blake. Irish Catholicism didn’t stand a chance. Illustrated editions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were addenda to the popular music curriculum and its ‘break on through to the other side’ aesthetic. Blake was nothing to do with school or exams. His poem ‘The Schoolboy’ took its place alongside Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and The Smiths’ ‘The Headmaster Ritual’. I didn’t know then Blake was home-educated but now hold him up as a great advertisement for not going to school. My own school was Belvedere College Dublin. James Joyce attended it. It features in the middle sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I learned early to circumnavigate Joyce’s Dublin. Most kids I knew went to school in the suburbs, but everyday from the age of ten I was travelling into the city centre. That was an education.

A friend’s father, John Ryan, author of Remembering How We Stood, had organised the first Bloomsday on June 16, 1954, tracing the novel’s route on foot and horse-drawn carriage with Flann O’Brien, Antony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce (a relative). Finding out this history was extra-curricular manna. It showed how a literary walk could become a national holiday. There’s hilarious footage of it on youtube. Instead of Bloom masturbating on the beach, you get Kavanagh urinating.

Though I didn’t know it, I was rehearsing for Blakean London. At University College Dublin, studying English, I had a shoplifted copy of the Penguin Classic William Blake The Complete Poems edited by Alicia Ostriker. At a Blake tutorial, the tutor confessed he knew nothing about Blake. Even though I had not advanced much from my immature Blakean days, I found myself interpreting the poems spontaneously for a grateful tutor and startled fellow students. I spoke non-stop for the whole hour. The tutor commented at the end: ‘Niall must know a lot about Blake as he has the complete poetry.’ But I knew little. Something unaccountable had happened. It was a foretaste of what I do today, spouting exegesis in the streets of London – Blakean ‘midrash’ – for curious crowds and passing Londoners to hear.

CR: What’s the origin story behind your Blake walks?

NM: I had an early poem accepted for a Poems on the Buses project organised by Transport for London and Friends of the Earth. The theme was ‘London – The Living City’. My poem ‘Off-Duty’ described a drunk, injured man clinging to a lamppost. It was displayed on the 38 and 73 bus routes for a year. Apparently there were 7 million passenger journeys in that period, so I could lay claim to a vast readership. At the end of the year the poets gathered at the London Transport Museum to be presented with laminated poems, and then taken on a mystery tour by bus. The destination was St James’ Piccadilly. Poets stood at the Grinling Gibbons baptismal font where Blake had been baptised on Dec 11, 1757. We recited our poems, and I did a bonus acapella ‘London’ to a tune of my own. Though I doubt I’ll be working with TfL again, I’m grateful. Going to such a powerful site, it was like I’d been introduced to William Blake the human being. So I sought out more Blake sites with the help of Paddy Kitchen’s Poets’ London, then Ackroyd’s biography of Blake. Another Londonist, the busy chronicler Ed Glinert, had once done a Blake walk, but I only found out about it later. So I decided to do my own.

I invented my own route and routines, and did it every Sunday. For a couple of years just before and after William Blake’s 250th anniversary in 2007, it became a well-known fixture. It was written about by journalist and author Nigel Richardson in ‘Great British Walks’, featured in a Radio 4 programme ‘The Poet of Albion’, and was the subject of a film, slideshow and article for BBC London. For the short film, myself and a crew got access to the room where Blake had spent sixteen years writing Jerusalem. Counter-intuitively, and slightly hungover, I looked around the room in wonder and turned to the camera saying: ‘This is Mecca for Blakeans.’ Now, because of an allusion from the first book of Jerusalem, ‘Who in mysterious Sinai’s awful cave / To man the wondrous art of writing gave’, I think of the 17 South Molton Street site as ‘Sinai’s Cave’.

CR: How do you go about planning the Blake walks? Who do you think they appeal to?

NM: Well that first walk – which I called ‘The William Blake Walk’ – is now what I think of as a central London Blake walk. The more I studied Blake’s writings and the more I looked at successive Blake biographies, the more walks I could see. Still can. My inner ollaves were whispering about the four directions. I am haunted by the Blake phrase ‘ever expanding in the bosom of God’. In 2012, I was hired by the American author Rich Shapero to take him to all known Blake sites, including Sussex. How I wish he’d been into Arthur Rimbaud. We spent the whole weekend doing it. We were able to take taxis to difficult areas and dine in fancy restaurants situated on Blake sites inc. Masala Zone, the Savoy, and the amazing Fox Inn in Felpham. Rich is a distinguished looking guy. Whenever we turned up anywhere, his ‘man on a mission’ aura electrified everyone. It was a lucky gig in the austerity economy, but Rich Shapero got lucky too. That same weekend poet Chris McCabe had invited me to read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown at the Southbank. Rich and I took a couple of hours off Blake and went to the reading. Not only did he get to meet my fellow poets inc. Iain Sinclair, but – amazingly – Yoko Ono popped her head in before the reading to wish us well. She actually values poets and had insisted on a poetry/activism event. The Liverpool poet Sarah Crewe was particularly blown away. Next thing Rich and I were in a taxi to Peckham. Then Battersea. Then Primrose Hill. And so on. That single job helped intensify my researches.

In 2016, I was campaigning to protect the nonconformist cemetery in Bunhill Fields from having towerblocks go up all around it, and the University of Liverpool got involved – they have a department at Finsbury Circus – and organised a brilliant event called Voices of Radical London. I was commissioned to do a walk by poet Sandeep Parmar, so I thought of starting where the earlier Blake walk ended i.e. at the site of his death and then going east to where he was buried. En route we took in the Newgate site of the Gordon Riots and the Smithfield site of the Peasants’ Revolt. To expand operations ‘south’, I created a joint ‘Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake’ walk. It started in Rimbaud’s Victorian Waterloo and ended in Blake’s Georgian Lambeth.

For ‘west’, the meeting point was Tyburn, where I proposed an exact site for the ‘Gate of Los’ by imagining Marble Arch rotated to overhang the beginning of Oxford Street, roughly where the Tyburn turnpike had once stood. Finally I devised a north walk exploring Blake’s Hampstead. The final destination is an astonishing cottage at the remote North End of the heath. It was home to artist John Linnell but Blake visited so regularly his name also appears on the blue plaque. Lots of other people have subsequently associated with it inc. Peter Kropotkin. A Blake/Kropotkin cottage has tardis potential.

In 2020, I did a Peckham Blake walk with Chris McCabe. From John Latham’s amazing Flat Time House to Peckham Rye and Nunhead Cemetery. For several years I have been one of many participants in the annual Blakefest gatherings in Felpham and Bognor Regis. They are amazing weekend-long festivals of talks, exhibitions, concerts, walks. One of my contributions was a walk from Bognor to Felpham taking in the presences of James Joyce and Dante Gabriel Rossetti en route, both highly distinguished Blakeans.

More Blake walks are in the offing. They will include a ‘Blake and Swedenborg Walk’ and a ‘William Blake and Tom Paine Walk’. My clients are usually fellow poets and artists from all mediums, Blake scholars and students from all over the world, windcheater-and-waterbottle psychogeographers, and occasional religious groups such as Sahaja yogis and Danish pastors. Lots of eccentrics, also an education. We learn from eachother. One shaven headed man handed me his card solemnly. It read: ‘Zen Master’. Another chap put his hand into a velvet bag at every site and took out wooden squares like Scrabble pieces, emblazoned with Saxon runes. He’d scatter them in the street and then fall down on his knees to make a reading. Another time, a blind man with dark glasses and a stick asked for a complimentary ticket, which of course I granted. Later he gratefully told me his highlight was seeing the Thomas Phillips portrait of Blake. One sunny afternoon I had an unexpectedly right-wing group. As we approached the statue of William Pitt in Hanover Square, I noticed a sprinkler in the garden was causing prisms of colour to refract just behind the sculpture. ‘A sight for Tory eyes!’ I exclaimed. ‘Rainbows shining out of Pitt the Younger’s arse!’ I’ve met lots of fascinating people on my own excursions. On the last one before the pandemic, I got to meet the brilliant countercultural scribe John Higgs, author of William Blake Now and the forthcoming William Blake Vs The World.

CR: How do think about the Blake walks in relation to the other walks that you lead?

NM: I am very much a Blakean but I like to think of the term ‘Blakean’ as an alternative to autistic or aspergic or AHDH. Blakeans aren’t neurotypicals, I assure you! But yes I do other walks. My personal kabbala is Shakespeare/Blake/Rimbaud/Yeats. The problem with doing just the Blake walk was that I came perilously close to expertise. Expertise is terrifying. You realise how ignorant you are about everything else. So I quickly retreated from expertise. I began doing Shakespeare walks, taking ‘bardolotry’ away from Bankside and exploring the sites north of the Thames. As I was doing it, the remains of the Theatre and Curtain were unearthed in Shoreditch by the Museum of London. I saw the digs. This developed into a fascination with more and more Elizabethan/Jacobean poets including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd and Emilia Lanyer. (The writer, director and actors of the Shakespeare’s Globe play Emilia all came on my Emilia walk.) I’m aware that Blake himself was hugely influenced by Shakespeare and Jonson, particularly in his ‘songs’. As Blake was a Romantic, I began trespassing on the sites of others, so I can always enliven a Blake walk with cameos from Coleridge, Shelley, De Quincey, Byron etc. depending on the whereabouts. Arthur Rimbaud was in London intermittently from 1872-74. He is akin to Blake, a world poet of rebellion. To use the Norman Cohn terminology, they are mystical anarchists. I have a surmise about how Rimbaud was turned onto Blake by meeting Algernon Swinburne, and I like to compare ‘The Marriage of Heaven Hell’ and ‘A Season in Hell’ as apocalyptic prose poems. It feels vital to find out everything about Rimbaud’s London. Stephen Micalef jokes about Blakeans ‘honouring the great man’s dental appointments’.

Doing Yeats walks in London is powerful. The ‘national poet of Ireland’ shapeshifts into ‘Demon Est Deus Inversus’. His traces are omnipresent, but particularly west and central. If the most important site in London is the birthplace of William Blake, the site of the Isis-Urania Temple (where the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used to meet for rituals) is for me a close second, now a greasy spoon café in Hammersmith. In lockdown, I made a film with the Irish director Sé Merry Doyle called The Battle of Blythe Road. Yeats I regard as the greatest of all Blakeans. He spent four years working with occultist Edwin Ellis editing the complete writings of Blake. Yeats had sufficient magical nous to discern Blake’s prophetic books were not the works of a madman, and thus paved the way for the 20^thcentury reception of Blake. I also do walks on other modernists who had intense relationships with Blake inc. Joyce, Pound, Eliot. (The Irish modernists appreciate him most.) So I find myself time-travelling through recurring eras. Yeats’ epigram ‘Three Movements’ springs to mind:

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

My personal kabbala of Shakespeare/Blake/Rimbaud/Yeats is really about honouring revolutionary poets from the humanist period, the romantic period, the symbolist period and the modernist period. (Yeats was an Irish nationalist who was inspired by Blake’s anti-imperial poems to write politicised verse for page and stage). They really are four of the very greatest poets who ever lived. To use Blakean terminology, they are a ‘Spiritual Fourfold’ poet.

CR: You’ve been immersed in the London countercultural and poetry scenes for decades. Who have been some of your main influences and interlocutors during this time?

NM: In London when I first took to a garret, I thought I was the last of the bohemians. Such is an immigrant’s lot. You don’t know anything or anyone. I was an aesthetic migrant, not an economic migrant. In my Dublin, it didn’t feel there was a bona fide underground or counterculture. I mean apart from the Virgin Prunes. In London, the underground was as vast as Hades. In Ireland I had seen many of the poets, but did not think it possible to join their ranks. They seemed too robed, too druidic.

In late 1995, Allen Ginsberg came to London. I saw him read thrice in one week: The Royal Albert Hall, Waterstones Hampstead, Megatripolis. Even with terminal illness, he was a whirlwind, promoting three different books, chanting poems, singing with a harmonium, answering questions. He made poetry possible. It was heroic to witness him in action and hang out in his milieu, all poets themselves such as Tom Pickard.

The next magical poet I encountered was Jeremy Reed. In Dublin – where he was a scandalous import in the early 90s – I had shoplifted his books regularly. In London I saw him do readings and eventually began doing readings with him. This is one of the best ways to hang out with other poets: poetry readings. Direct transmission. I have learned immeasurably from Reed’s presence and example. He’s the psychic offspring of David Gascoyne’s Los and Kathleen Raine’s Enitharmon. And ferociously, hilariously anti-establishment. In his quintessential poem ‘West End Dilemma’ he imagines William Blake leading two lions on a leash through Soho. His ‘Elegy for Kathleen Raine’ homages the poetess as ‘Blake’s secretary’. Once I opened for one of his readings by chanting some William Blake poems with guitar. He sent me a cheque for £30 written in purple ink. I wanted to frame it, but was too broke. We did a wonderful joint reading at William Morris’s Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, right on the river. Even the birds enjoyed it. We have since co-created On Blake’s Steps, a never-ending series of open forum readings at the site of Blake’s birth. They are outdoor, in Soho streets.  The last one we did was Mar 29, 2019, now known in newspaper headlines as THE BREXIT DAY THAT WASN’T. Poets gathered with topical poems and we finished with a group reading of Europe a Prophecy.

Another poet I saw at Albert Hall, Aidan Andrew Dun, also became a friend. His long poem Vale Royal portrays Chatterton/Blake/Rimbaud as incarnations of the ‘Sunchild’. We did many readings together and also collaborated on saving the Rimbaud/Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent from being turned into maisonettes. We literally halted illegal work, during a random visit to the site. The owner was a Nigerian businessman called Mr. Ogun. We knew we were up against a Yoruba thunder god. That’s why poets make good campaigners. We know interesting shit. One of my fondest memories is Aidan and I doing our ‘Rimbaud Jam’ at Shakespeare and co, and then spending a few days visiting all known Rimbaud sites in Paris.

After visiting the site of the Club des Hashischins, I’d eaten a ball of Nepalese black and there was no shower at my cheap hotel. Going back through French customs at Calais on a hot sweaty afternoon, the sniffer dog went ballistic as soon as it saw me. I denied having anything illegal in my possession. The customs man uttered the immortal line: ‘I know my dog’.  I said I’d just had breakfast and there were crumbs on me. He moved the dog away and put a sandwich in front of its snout. The dog didn’t blink. Then he led it back towards me and it went mad again. I warned them they were wasting their time, but they took me into the back of a lorry for a thorough search. Convinced I was about to undergo that most Rimbaudian of humiliations, the anal examination, I was strangely relaxed. What could they do? You can’t be jailed for a possession of an aroma. As it happened, they let me go after finding nothing in my bag but a few bottles of St Emilion.

Through my brother the actor-musician-cartoonist-poet Roddy McDevitt, I got involved with the 24-hour play The Warp. It was written by poet Neil Oram, and directed by Ken Campbell and Daisy Campbell. Again, I did a few readings with Neil, author of Beauty’s Shit and many other books of poems. His poetry and plays are highly subversive. He dramatizes the English counterculture from 1956-79. And beyond. One role I performed was ‘Marty Mission’. He is based on the real poet Harry Fainlight, another countercultural figure of importance, for whom I have organised several tributes. I worked very closely with Ken Campbell on his next project Pidgin Macbeth, a transposition of Shakespeare into the Bislama language of the Republic of Vanuatu. Being a poet I found I was able to master the language and so – though I wasn’t Ken’s best actor – I became the pidgin guru. I translated Yeats into pidgin. We did theatre shows all over the country and gave workshops, teaching the language in two days. We even spent two weeks in Newfoundland performing at the International Sound Symposium in the capital St Johns. As anyone who worked with Ken Campbell will tell you, it was an otherworldly experience. On the day he died, London was a vale of tears. Check out my elegy for him ‘Mauve Baudelaire (23 Quatrains)’.

Through this astounding milieu, I began working with John Crow, poet and playwright, author of The Southwark Mysteries. As well as being in the ‘Warp Company’ and the ‘Pidgin Players’, I was now an initiate of ‘The Liberty Crew’. John Crow is a masterclass in psychogeography, transgressive theatre, paganism, shamanism. As Southwark was known as ‘The Liberty’ you always felt a bit freer when you were entering the borough for a gig or rehearsal. He hails neighbouring Lambeth as ‘Blake’s Garden in Eternity’. Thanks to John I now count myself as a poet in the ‘goddess’ tradition of Graves, Hughes, Redgrove et al. Mr Crow has contributed something unique to that school. All of these activities meant that I had a ridiculously enjoyable millennium, which I homage in one of my rare happy poems ‘The Drum’.

When 9/11 happened, it ruined everything. Jihad, credit crunch, austerity, Brexit. War on terror, war on drugs, class war encore. I’ve since worked with the influential Michael Horovitz, who wrote about this change in reality in his The New Waste Land. Quite rightly inspired by Ginsberg’s 1960s sojourns in London and England, Michael seemed to singlehandedly open a door into Albion though his poetry/jazz concerts, anthologies and New Departures magazines. It’s like he stepped out of Blake’s painting ‘Glad Day’. He invited me on several occasions to his Poetry Olympics at the 100 Club, Oxford Street. Wonderful gigs. Onstage, I speculated that 100 Club was the intersection point of Oxford Street and Jerusalem that Blake foresaw. The venue takes its name from its own address, literally 100 Oxford Street. Symbolically, Blake’s epic Jerusalem is made up of one hundred copper plates. Here was one of the birthplaces of English popular music, a short walk from Poland Street where Blake wrote Songs of Innocence. (The opening poem ‘An Introduction’ is about songwriting.)

As well as Michael, I found myself fortuitiously bumping into other 1960s luminaries including filmmaker Peter Whitehead, impresario Fraser Clark, mystical author John Michell and the amazing poet-anarchist Heathcote Williams. I feel extraordinarily connected to the Cockaigne-like moment of 1960s London, not from watching documentaries, but from knowing these and many other characters… Hoppy, Su Rose, Dave Tomlin, Miles. Their utopian auras are still intact. My biggest regret is not getting to meet – or see in the flesh – David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine. It was just possible, but didn’t quite happen.

Thanks to the visionary artistic director of the Irish Cultural Centre, Rosalind Scanlon, I was empowered to run a poetry reading series over several years at Blacks Road, Hammersmith. Irish and international poets to visit included Trevor Joyce, Maggie O’Sullivan, Sean Bonney, Dimitry Prigov, Geraldine Monk, James Byrne, John James, Michael Donaghy, Tom Raworth, Fergal Gaynor and many others.  Perhaps the most illustrious bardic poet to appear was Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. Another, Christopher Twigg, is a supremely talented poet/painter/musician with whom I have shared many magico-religious adventures. He hails London in a couplet:

I have seen embroidery finer than lilies

and walked the city of Blake, Keats and Coleridge.

My closest interlocutor now is my partner Julie Goldsmith who is a highly magical painter and sculptor. We collaborate naturally. It just happens, it’s not forced. Some of the characters she paints are from walks inc. Thomas De Quincey and ‘Ann of Oxford Street’.  Her painting ‘Ghost of Marlowe’ made the front cover of The London Magazine. Her ‘Wildflower Song’ is a lovely floral portrait based on a notebook lyric of Blake’s.

CR: In your view, what is the nature of Blake’s legacy among poets and independent publishers in London?

NM: I think the self-published Blake has had an immeasurable influence on independent publishing everywhere. Blake’s little-known, small-selling, neglected and/or derided books have proven more influential and enduring than most of the publications of his time. He is a bestseller in eternity. An ever-present influencer. Let me cite one example, not from London but America. The countercultural American poet John Wieners edited an outstanding mid-20^thcentury poetry magazine called Measure. The seemingly straightforward title, almost mainstream, was actually prompted by one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: ‘Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth’. Blake had recycled it from the Bible: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN is one of the most regime-changing phrases in the Old Testament meaning ‘numbered numbered weighed divided’. It is, of course, better known as ‘the writing on the wall’ from the Book of Daniel. In naming his magazine after Blake, Wieners was literally bringing out measure. Yet it establishes a lineage from the mid-20^thcentury American writers, to an 18^thcentury Blakean illuminated book, and then to a 2^ndcentury BCE biblical apocalypse. Beats, Romantics, Prophets on the same team. Independent publishing can take on the visionary role of a Daniel in the lions’ den, while mainstream publishing too often looks like Belshazzar’s feast. This 1950s American poetry movement had an immediate influence on the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, both lit with a Blakean aureole.

The 1960s countercultural magazine International Times is perhaps a good example of London independent publishing with a Blakean sensibility. Its way of combining text and image in a libertarian, subversive, DIY style was, I’d say, somewhat informed by the omnipresent Blake. Illuminated newspapers. In the ‘noughties’, I worked closely with the anarchist Mike Lesser on his project to archive I.T. online, but also to relaunch the magazine as a blog. Mike called the aesthetic ‘anarcho-surrealism’. Mike was one of the original Committee of 100 and the Spies for Peace. His mates busted George Blake out of Wormwood Scrubs. There’s a ‘Blake’ connection! Mike’s girlfriend Eve Grace played Krishnamurti in The Warp. By being in the right place at the right time, I was appointed the first editor of the online I.T. It is still going strong now edited by artist Nick Victor, and is very poetry-friendly. The fun thing about it is that every contributor has the front page. Every contribution appears under the beautiful International Times banner and Theda Bara icon. Every poem is an illuminated poem. Two books were published under the I.T. aegis. Royal Babylon by Heathcote Williams is an investigative poem into the British monarchy. I reviewed it in I.T. as Williams’ best long poem since Whale Nation. The next book was my second collection of poetry Porterloo about Tories retuning to power. As Ginsberg’s Howl had a preface by William Carlos Williams, I thought the thing to do was to get a Williams preface. So I asked Heathcote and he very graciously supplied one! Mike Lesser did the cover art, a magnificent Lady Porter with eagle wings and golden toilet-seat halo.

Other independent publishing outlets I’ve been involved with include Max Reeves’ Papakura Post Office zine. It mixes photography of London and international sites with poetry, prose, quotes etc. Max is now publishing beautiful photo-textual books under the Entropy imprint. The poet Stephen Micalef and artist Helen Elwes commemorated Blake’s 250^thanniversary by releasing The William Blake Birthday Book. It featured 61 poets/artists, each supplying a page of illuminated text. Adrian Mitchell, Brian Catling, Christopher Twigg, Andrea McLean, among others. A collector’s item. The poet James Byrne brought out a game-changing poetry magazine The Wolf for a decade. It featured international poets and each edition had a guest artist. I supplied some Blakean content, an essay ‘Blake as Urban Shaman’, a review of Patti Smith’s poetry collection Auguries of Innocence – which she charmingly claimed was the best thing ever written about her – and a poem ‘The Gold Hospital’. Tina Richardson edits Steps for which I wrote a blueprint of Yeatsian London.

But the most important thing for a poet is that first book. Who will publish it? I was very lucky that the English-of-Irish-descent writer John O’Donoghue – poet and author of the highly regarded memoir Sectioned – initiated me into the fold of an outstanding independent poetry publisher, Waterloo Press. They’re based in Brighton. The poets Simon Jenner and Naomi Foyle head it up. They published b/w my first collection. We launched it at Notre Dame de France, the famous French Catholic Church with the Rosicrucian mural by Jean Cocteau. Jeremy Reed was my guest reader. The church’s  structure is dome-shaped and used to be the site of the London Panorama where 360 degree images were exhibited for a paying public. By synchronicity the two most famous displays were of the Battle of Waterloo and the Holy City of Jerusalem.

More recently, a fellow contributor to International Times, the poet and artist Robert Montgomery, set up a poetry press with his partner Greta Bellamacina. Robert is famed for his billboard poems including the brilliant ‘William Blake Poem’. (Now that Tom Leonard is dead, Robert is my favourite Scottish poet along with MacGillivray and Peter Manson.) Greta Bellamacina is arguably more inspired by Leonard Cohen but has made a film called Blake’s Wife and has a fabulous poem called ‘Blake’. Anyway Rob and Greta set up New River Press named after the Jacobean artificial waterway that flows into London from Hertfordshire. Started in Fitzrovia, New River Press uses the image of the Post Office Tower. This is the ithyphallic site of Rimbaud and Verlaine’s first London slum on Howland Street. They published my third collection of poems Firing Slits Jerusalem Colportage among their first batch of releases.

2016 was a year of ferment. Heathcote Williams also published a collection The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying so we got to hang out with him a lot. There was a photoshoot with Fabio Paleari, director of a new documentary about Allen Ginsberg in Italy. Perhaps the best night was the New River Press launch at Albion Beatnik in Oxford. Heathcote gave a very rare public reading. When he turned down an offer to read at the Babylon Festival in Iraq in 2016, he recommended me instead. I was able to explore the ultimate psychogeographical site of Babylon. Its most emblematic street, the Processional Way, is still there.

Alas, Heathcote passed away in 2017. Albion Beatnik is also gone. New River Press is now run with Heathcote Ruthven and has since published some groundbreaking anthologies as well as the rediscovered U.S. poet Robert Lundquist.

For an example of how literary walking can immediately furnish material for original writing… I did some investigatory Marlowe walks with Simon King of Walkative, a walking group who are based at Royal College of Art. That ended in a commission to write a sequence of prose poems Espials for an anthology Parallel Urbanisms published by Intellect Books.

The multi-media exhibition and poetry reading series The Bard was the last thing that happened before lockdown. It was like living in Golgonooza. One of its many flowerings is a fine cream-paged pamphlet called The Bard featuring fellow Blakean poets such as Tamar Yoseloff.

A couple of other spectacular countercultural publishers are Cold Lips created by poet-novelist Kirsty Allison and Ragged Lion Press created by writer-filmmaker E.A.D. Sellors. His Free Poetry Series and Ragged Lion Journals have really upped the ante. Lisa Marie Jarlborn’s magazine LoveLove unconsciously revives the innocent I.T. spirit but with a European/British/American wingspan. Also, the poet David Erdos – author of ‘Blakesong’ – is literary editor of a very stylish new magazine called MU, deputy-edited by Youth of Killing Joke fame. This has arisen from South London Arts Lab (SLAB) who are notorious Surreyside Blakeans. Blake’s own original books were printed sometimes in full colour, other times in black and white. There are colour Jerusalems and b/w Jerusalems. Ragged Lion Journal is b/w. MU is seriously full colour.

CR: You’ve often referred to Blake as an ‘urban shaman’. What does this mean?

NM: I wrote about this for The Wolf and BBC London about fifteen years ago. I had a poet friend who used found material. He recited a longish poem once and I told him the best line was ‘London is awash with deregulated shamans’. Later I found out the line was by Iain Sinclair. Another Sinclair phrase ‘shamanism of intent’ was applied to Brian Catling. If we think of the ‘Classicist v Romantic’ idea that Blake himself was  implicated in, we might agree Romantics were closer to a shamanistic modus operandi than Classicists. But of course Blake wasn’t a shaman per se. ‘Urban shaman’ modernises the analogy.

When you’re dealing with Blake, he’s not a normal poet. Such is his level of magic and healing I think of him as the first urban shaman of the first industrial city, now the self-styled ‘World City’. When you consider how in his late 40s and early 50s he got through two major traumas – the sedition trial and the Examiner art review calling him ‘an unfortunate lunatic’ – by embarking on Jerusalem, you can observe like a junior doctor how he cauterised and sutured his own wound. The Los/Spectre passages in the first book chart this in poetry and graphics. It’s Jungian therapy cum Alan Moore novel in advance. Blake devises a personal fourfold system for trying to live as a whole being – intellectually, emotionally, intuitively, and sensationally. They say it’s difficult, but hey it’s easier than kabbala. Instead of the highly complicated Ten Sephiroth, you’ve only got to look after Four Zoas. This was deeply serious for the mature Blake. I have always maintained that the reason he didn’t publish The Four Zoas was because he had mistakenly structured it as a sequence of nine nights. It was therefore numerologically botched. How can you teach a fourfold system using a ninefold structure? Jerusalem teaches a fourfold system in a fourfold structure. Blake set aside years of work and started again, a bit like Joyce abandoning Stephen Hero and starting again with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Blake’s major opus took sixteen years. That’s how important it was. That’s how much he cared. For me, it’s the greatest single poem in English. But it’s more than a poem. It’s one of the most beautifully structured works of art I have ever seen. It was published in 1820. Last year, its 200^thanniversary passed unnoticed.

I think that the urban shamanistic types of poet and artist are not quite of the mainstream. Neurodiversity is the key factor. One of Blake’s most prominent adjectives is ‘Mental’, usually spelt with an upper case ‘M’. Terence McKenna has a great counterintuitive line: ‘Only the shaman knows culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic.’ Though attractive, I don’t fully agree. This seems Warholian rather than Beuysian. I feel Blake differed from his contemporaries by not playing the game and by taking culture more seriously. Blake is often called a ‘gnostic’. He does seem to have some of the oddball attitudes to ‘matter’ we’d associate with that philosophy. Asked at a Blakefest conference what Blake’s ideas on ecology might be, I jokily explained how he had once dismissed Wordsworth by saying ‘Nature is the work of the devil’. Thus, logically, he would have to view environmentalists as Satanists. More seriously, gnostics are those writers and poets who were left out of the official anthology. I see leftfield, independent, countercultural writing as gnostic in that sense.

CR: What do you see as the significance of Blake’s geographical imagery in a present day context?

NM: I wrote a poem called ‘Tyburn’ which invokes the site of the public gallows but also limns the present day building site. It’s being turned into a luxury citadel called The Bryanston. Proximity to Hyde Park is a selling point. Another poem of mine ‘The Shoppers of Oxford Street’ imagines present day shoppers going back in time to become the mob at a Tyburn public execution. Blake transforms your London so that you can walk in different Londons simultaneously. One doesn’t need Blake to access Tyburn, of course, it’s in the history. But his poetic mediation helps. When you have politicians like Priti Patel talking about capital punishment, one remembers Tyburn, and one remembers Blake’s impassioned advocacy against ‘human sacrifice’. This was the biggest issue of his final period, probably because he felt he might have been a victim of capital punishment if found guilty at his trial. In early 1804 he used to gibe sardonically from his South Molton Street flat pointing toward the already disused site of Tyburn: ‘They are preparing a gallows for me!’ It’s a fun site too. I remember reciting John Cooper Clarke’s hilarious poem ‘Suspended Sentence’ there: ‘Swingin Britain don’t put me on / They brought back the rope for everyone’. Other times when walking the length of the River Tyburn, our WUSC group placed wreaths of flowers there. I mean on the traffic island at the beginning of Edgware Road. The William Blake Congregation erected a mock gallows. I’ve tried writing to the developers of The Bryanston to ask how they are going to commemorate the site. But of course they don’t want their millionaire customers to know about the history of the place. As it is, The Bryanston promises to be the most haunted house in human history! They haven’t answered. So it’ll be something for our art-anarchist wing BLAKE BLOC to look into. Before 1783, the prisoners used to process from Newgate to Tyburn for the grim spectacle.

If I go to the site of Newgate today, I’m aware that Christopher Marlowe was a prisoner there, still spying for Walsingham while inside. There’s plenty to think about. But the most visionary association is the storming of Newgate prison in 1780. This was during the Gordon Riots, but it was a surprisingly beautiful and revolutionary gesture, avant la Bastille. And Blake was right at the front of the crowd. The scholar Peter Linebaugh uses the word ‘excarceration’ i.e. the opposite of incarceration. A liberatory concept. A little over a decade after seeing prisoners exit a burning Newgate, he wrote Orc’s aria from America a Prophecy:

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;

The grace is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappèd up;

The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry’d

Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awakening,

Spring like redeemèd captives, when their bonds and bars are burst,

Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,

Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;

Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,

Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,

Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;

And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.

They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,

Singing: “The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,

And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;

For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.

Though I can be hypnotised by the Londons of Shakespeare and Marlowe, of Rimbaud and Verlaine, of Yeats and Pound etc. it is Blake’s London that offers the most pleasurable discombobulation. Blake opened the door into the whole thing. I saw Iain Sinclair’s talk at Swedenborg House, now a booklet Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime. (They even transcribed my rambling question about Harry Fainlight.) I think the phrase ‘topographic sublime’ hits the nail on the head. I think of Blake’s earliest line to twin England with the Bible: ‘Each field seems Eden’. The Blakean terrain is extra-special, and is still being decoded and debriefed. It offers the most possibilities for excarceration. Blake is like the philosopher in the ‘Parable of the Cave’. He lifts the lid on London.

Ostensibly, Blake is just one of many writers who write their own London into a literary oeuvre. The anonymous poet of ‘London Lickpenny’, Isabella Whitney, Ben Jonson, all offer unique early modern Londons. Samuel Johnson offers a rhyming rational London. Charles Dickens offers a comprehensive compassionate London. Yeats offers a negative noumenal London. Yeats’s ‘Golden Dawn’ associate Arthur Machen offers an occult gentlemanly London. Oscar Wilde offers a louche aristocratic London. Ezra Pound – a protege of Yeats and peer of Joyce – offers a lettered eccentric London. Blake is entirely different. His London is not a rational backdrop. It is organism, a gnostic conurbation. When Yeats perused the original manuscript of The Four Zoas, he saw London open up as ‘visionary territory’. Blake himself wrote to a patron Thomas Butts: ‘I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London.’ Charles Dickens is a wonderfully imaginative writer, but his London is based on a remarkable gift for perception. He knew the city inside out like a black cab driver. He projects his imagination onto a memorised cityscape. Machen tries to make his weird narratives as credible as possible, and thus his art presents a realistic street-by-street London. Blake’s London is symbolic. London is a symbol. It’s four-dimensional: London, Babylon, Jerusalem, Golgonooza. It is the child leading the old man in his illustration, whom I see as youthful Blake and elderly Swedenborg.

The four quatrains of his song ‘London’ are a city lament of pauperisation, industrialism, pollution, immiseration, child labour, censorship, incarceration, militarism, theocracy, monarchism, human sacrifice, prostitution, STDs, mass graves. The ‘dirty’ streets of the first draft become the ‘charter’d streets’ of the final draft. Likewise, the ‘German forged links’ become ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. Only with Blake are we keen to know earlier drafts. The four quatrains present a fourfold structure, four verses of four lines each. The third quatrain contains a four-letter acrostic: HEAR. This Blakean imperative echoes the first word of the first poem in Songs of Experience ‘Hear the voice of the bard’. This is a microcosmic London, but it will be the ‘fairy’ to the later ‘giant’ Jerusalem. It’s clairvoyant, clairaudient perception. The bloody palace looks forward to the organic London of Jerusalem. ‘My Houses are Thoughts’. We see London though a membrane, an intellectual-emotional-intuitive-sensational streetview. When he writes

The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street languishes

To Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn: all is distress and woe.

he is lamenting his own youthful London addresses. The streets themselves emote. Three of his long septenary lines were scratched out of the final manuscript right at that point. The Londonist cries ‘Not there Blake!’ He is writing in South Molton Street during the Napoleonic Wars 1803-15. We know he is writing there because he tells us so: ‘I write in South Molton Street what I both see and hear / In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets’. That site is very important, the first floor room. As mentioned, I call it ‘Sinai’s Cave’. Michael Horovitz calls it ‘The Jerusalem Room’. It needs to be reclaimed for the nation, the whole house if financially viable.

As a Londonist, I riff off Sinclair’s Lud Heat, Rimbaud’s Leun’deun and Shakespeare’s Lud’s Town to seek the Celtic origin of the place-name London itself. ‘Lugh Dun’ is an Irish way of looking at it: ‘Stronghold of Lugh’. Lugh is like an Irish ‘Los’, a Celtic solar deity. I wrote an essay on this subject for The London Magazine called ‘London’s Etymology’. Before the Roman conquest, London was one of dozens of Celtic settlements throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe named after this god, Lugh/Lleu/Lud/Lugus. Cities such as Carlisle (Caer Lleu), Lyons (Lugdunum), Leyden etc. (even Luton for Chrissakes!) are all named after him.  London was not then the exceptional city it is today, nor was it the English capital. This is my way to go beyond Blake and further into the mythology of the city. As London was originally a Celtic civilisation, I feel more at home here than a Jack-waving nativist. That said, trying to persuade Londoners that their beloved megalopolis is named after an Irish god called ‘Lugh of the Long Arm’ is, er, a little too much like hard work.

When she turned 50, artist and Londoner Louisa Amelia Albani left her job as a marketing designer in the London office of Yale University Press. Her next step: to set up her own small press, Night Bird Press N2, and create pamphlets inspired by the work of literary figures such as Virginia Woolf and William Blake. Both Woolf and Blake are themselves remembered today as celebrated practitioners of self-publishing: Virginia set up Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917; over a century earlier, William and Catherine Blake had begun printing the illuminated books from their home in Lambeth during the 1790s.

Albani’s first self-published project was a visual-verbal production: an anthology of illustrated poems and short stories entitled ‘What we Heard from the Sea’ (2014). In 2018, she published a pamphlet inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Letters from Norway,’ which was the beginning of her fascination for 18^th-century writers. She then turned to William Blake. In her 2019 pamphlet entitled William Blake’s Mystic Map of London, Albani reanimated especially the spirit of Blakean self-publishing, multimedial creativity, and creative partnership, inviting written contributions from Hackney-based writer and walker Simon Cole to accompany her artworks.

Albani’s Mystic Map is also a meditation on Blake’s topography of London in his illuminated books, mediated by Albani’s personal sense of the ever-changing city. In our recent interview, she explained:

Like Blake, I have lived in London all my life and therefore feel a deep affinity to some areas that are part of my own lived history. I have also experienced that need to find sanctuary or to protect and preserve parts of the city that resonate with my past, as well as that imaginative urge to shape its future. To create, if you like, my own ‘mystic’ map of a city that I also feel emotionally, psychically and physically connected to. Ideas around the theme of spirit of place fascinate me, therefore being able to literally walk in Blake’s footsteps was an important part of the project.

‘To walk in Blake’s footsteps’: Albani’s hope has been shared by many local artists, poets, and publishers in London for decades. Her Mystic Map harnesses the enormous visionary energies of William Blake into a remarkably warm and personal mapping of London’s streets, one that is also alive to the social ills, the frictions and fractures, that contradict and crack open the smooth surfaces of ‘official’ maps.

For Albani, Blake’s cartography is a cartography of feeling; her own aim:

To map Blake’s interior world of memory and imagination onto a grimy, urbanised London of social and political unrest. For Blake, the city feels all the pain and anguish of these changes, streets ‘weep’ and ‘lament.’ London becomes a pulsating city, a ‘being’ in itself, driving all these energies through its streets.

In the Mystic Map and in our interview, Albani is eager to assert the role played by Catherine Blake in the laborious process of illuminated printing and hand-colouring. The notion of collaboration is also foregrounded in Albani’s recent artworks, created for a forthcoming issue of VALA, the Blake Society’s online journal (scheduled to appear in autumn 2021), one of which shows Catherine colouring in the foreground, while William operates a star-wheel rolling press in the background.

In her work, Albani recuperates the importance of female labour in artistic production and especially in the historically male-dominated, power-laden domain of cartography. Her artworks perpetuate Blake’s legacy as both a champion of autonomous artistic production and a subversive cartographer of London’s ‘opening streets,’ both of which continue to inspire small-press practitioners today.

Links

Night Bird Press website: https://www.nightbirdpress.com/louisa-albani-art-works

William Blake’s Mystic Map of London: https://www.nightbirdpress.com/blake

Jason Whittaker’s review of the Mystic Map on Zoamorphosis: https://zoamorphosis.com/2019/07/review-william-blakes-mystic-map-of-london/

VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society: https://www.blakesociety.org/vala

Michael Phillips demonstrates the Blakes’ illuminated printing process, using the star-wheel rolling press: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/william-blake-printing-process

 

The Interview

 

CR: What is the history behind your creative practice?

LA: I graduated from Central St Martin’s with a design degree in the late 1980s, then did a second degree in art history in the late 1990s. I slowly built my artistic practice, combined with bringing up my daughter and working as a marketing designer in the London office of Yale University Press. When I turned 50, I left Yale and started my own small press, researching projects inspired by literary figures and then creating artworks, designing and producing the pamphlets and selling them directly to booksellers.

CR: How did you come to be familiar with Blake’s work?

LA: My first experience of Blake was through his Songs of Innocence and Experience via my English Literature A’ Level course. I still have the text book, a slim, small booklet with no illustrations, the pages creased and stained, with my comments crammed in the margins in tiny writing. This was my first introduction to his poem ‘London.’ All my notes in the margins are written in smudged pencil, except at the top of this poem I have written in blue ink ‘appearance and reality: seeing through the hypocrisy façade to the essence.’

CR: What does Blake mean to your creative practice?

LA: The creative process requires artists and writers to dig deep, to commit to a kind of excavation process in order to unearth what is hidden inside the psyche. It takes immense self-belief to bring this ‘vision’ into the real world, especially if you are working alone and without financial back-up. For me, Blake is one of the finest examples of a truly unique visionary. He used his poetry and art to envisage a more spiritually infused world, one that would be better than the reality he experienced in his present day. New realities begin life as dreamscapes—we should never forget this. Visionaries like Blake have the capacity to imagine a new reality for the future, in a way that rational thinking may not yet be able to comprehend in the given present. The pandemic has forced us to question the permanence of a reality we once knew. Poets/artists like Blake can teach us much about the power of the imagination in relation to repairing our psychic and emotional connection to a sense of place.

CR: How do you see the relationship between Blake and independent publishing?

LA: For me, Blake was a visionary not just in an imaginative sense, but also in a very real, visceral and physically demanding sense, because he found a way to be involved in every aspect of the publishing process, from creating the poetry and art, to designing, engraving and printing, thus retaining complete control over the finished product. In this way, he was able to practically manifest his visionary talent into a reality. The fact he was able to do this in the late 18^th Century is an extraordinary achievement. At this time, two workshops were needed to print books: one specialising in letterpress, the other in the illustrations. In his home in Lambeth, with his star wheel press, Blake (and assisted by Catherine) would do it all. His achievements paved the way for others to follow in his footsteps, enabling the dissemination of free ideas and philosophies and thought to be made available to society without censorship or corporate goals overriding artistic and literary freedom. Blake’s own venture encapsulates the importance of and valuable contribution that independent publishing has on culture. It is an inspiration to others to follow their own vision and see it through to its publication.

CR: What kind of contact have you had with other Blakean organisations or individuals? How did you meet them? How did you stay in contact?

LA: I had no contact with Blake organisations prior to publishing my Mystic Map of London pamphlet. When I first began researching the project I felt that it needed to include a written contribution from a contemporary psycho-geographer, revisiting Blake’s landmarks and offering a 21^st Century commentary. I had met Hackney tour guide Simon Cole through our mutual work on Mary Wollstonecraft and so we began to meet, sitting on a bench by Blake’s gravestone in Bunhill Fields, and talking about how we could make his contributions work. I have since been contacted by the Blake Society, who have asked me to contribute to their online journal, focusing on Catherine Blake and her considerable involvement with Blake’s printing press process.

CR: How have your encounters with other Blakean practitioners and projects affected your work?

LA: I was influenced and inspired by two writers, Iain Sinclair and Niall McDevitt, both opening up new ways of thinking for me in relation to Blake and London.

CR: What are the key similarities and differences between your work and other Blake-influenced projects that you have come across?

LA: A key difference, I would say, is that I used visual storytelling and imagined maps of Blake’s London to tell his story. My art project was not a critique of his work but rather to take an imagined journey that reflected his psychic, emotional and creative state, as he wandered down London streets. Perhaps another difference is that I wanted to replicate, in a sense, Blake’s own independenet publishing process by being involved in the whole process, from researching the project, creating the art and designing the pamphlet itself.

CR: How do you see the relationship between Blake and London?

LA: I was initially inspired by Henry Eliot’s ‘tour,’ in which he discusses the way London, for Blake, represents a continuous process of destruction and regeneration. Blake’s imaginative and original way of repairing aspects of the city takes the form of a golden srting that threads through the streets and portals of the city. This way of looking at Blake’s London began to shape my own vision of how I could put together a pamphlet, inspired itself by the format of 18^th-century publications, using visual storytelling to develop and engage with these ideas. To find a way to visually map Blake’s visionary ideas of transforming London through a kind of poetical alchemy into his ‘golden city,’ of renewing the city after what he saw as the apocalyptic threat of industrialisation. Cartography provided a tool for mapping both what were collective anxieties as well as locating that ‘vein of gold,’ as Iain Sinclair puts it, Blake’s spiritual belief system. To map Blake’s interior world of memory and imagination onto a grimy, urbanised London of social and political unrest. For Blake, the city feels all the pain and anguish of these changes, streets ‘weep’ and ‘lament.’ London becomes a pulsating city, a ‘being’ in itself, driving all these energies through its streets.

CR: Has your own geographical location affected your engagement with Blake?

LA: Like Blake, I have lived in London all my life and therefore feel a deep affinity to some areas that are part of my own lived history. I have also experienced that need to find sanctuary or to protect and preserve parts of the city that resonate with my past, as well as that imaginative urge to shape its future. To create, if you like, my own ‘mystic’ map of a city that I also feel emotionally, psychically and physically connected to. Ideas around the theme of spirit of place fascinate me, therefore being able to literally walk in Blake’s footsteps was an important part of the project.

CR: What do you see as the significance of Blake’s local and/or global geographical imagery in a present-day context?

LA: In the first verse of ‘London’ Blake writes:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In 18th century London, ‘permission’ is required to walk the city streets. We can find a comparison in 21^st-century London – surveillance cameras in our present-day city—constantly watching and monitoring us. Governments are able to track, trace and control our day-to-day existence. Blake tunes into the collective anxieties of his day in a very intuitive way, as there is an underlying sense of unease in his writing. Homelessness, gentrification of previously communal spaces, division between rich and poor: all this still exists now. Perhaps we can learn from Blake and his imaginative rebuilding of a post-apocalyptic city, in relation to how we can repair our own fragmented and fractured vision of our own cities that we have experienced during the current pandemic.

In a 2007 lecture delivered at Swedenborg House, later published as Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime (2018), Iain Sinclair concluded,

The golden chain goes on and on, and the words of guidance, the maps we need to follow, are all to be found in the works of the archetypal London writer, William Blake of Lambeth (p. 46).

The comment reprises the imagery from a well-known lyric in Blake’s Jerusalem plate 77:

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball:

It will lead you in at Heavens gate,

Built in Jerusalems wall.

Sinclair has taken up the end of Blake’s golden string in myriad, multimedial ways (indeed he scarcely needs an introduction on a blog dedicated to Blake’s afterlives). So when I began researching Blake’s legacy in self- and independent publishing ventures in London, it was, naturally, from Sinclair that I took up the initial thread. In January this year, we met for an interview over Zoom. You can read the transcript of our discussion below.

Sinclair’s Albion Village Press (1970-1979) is probably the best-known instance of a London small press with Blakean redolences. Primarily, these redolences are apparent in the content of Albion Village publications, for instance Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979). The name ‘Albion Village Press’ sounds Blakean indeed, though in our interview, Sinclair clarified that this name was ‘an accident of location,’ siezed upon because he was living on Albion Drive in Hackney. ‘[W]hen you put yourself in the right mindset,’ he mused, ‘the world confirms you in your folly.’ Around the same time as he set up the press, Sinclair had put on an exhibition alongside his friends Renchi Bicknell and Brian Catling, a show that the Whitechapel Gallery, rather reluctantly, agreed to host, called Albion Island Vortex (1974). In our interview, Sinclair characterised the show as ‘an attempted reflection of Blakean pilgrimage and significant topography. The room was divided into walls dedicated to East, North, South, West, with stones and crows and the usual Blakean trappings.’ The spirit of the original show was re-exposed in a recent iteration at Gallery 46, also in Whitechapel, close to the Royal London Hospital. This show was called House of the Last London. It included a sketch-map of various London landmarks, including Nicolas Hawksmoor churches and sites associated with Blake, criss-crossed by so-called ‘lines of influence / the invisible rods of force active in this city,’ roughed out by Sinclair and drawn by Catling, to illustrate Sinclair’s Lud Heat.

Alan Moore, creator of the gothic graphic novel From Hell, has identified Lud Heat and this sketch map as major influences on his work.

Sinclair has since been widely published by mainstream publishing houses such as Granta, Hamish Hamilton, and Jonathan Cape. There is a tension in his career between his beginnings as a self-publishing poet in the countercultural hive of the 1970s and his rise to the status of ‘national treasure’ published by Penguin and the like. Yet Sinclair has also continued to participate in smaller-scale projects, such as the Flat Time House collaboration The Bard (30 January – 8 March 2020), an exhibition combining Blake pictures and contributions by contemporary poets in the sculptural former home of artist John Latham. For the occasion, Sinclair composed a poem entitled ‘Mental Travailers: or, The Battle of the Books,’ which placed Blake and Latham in ‘subtle congress,’ the title riffing off Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’ from the Pickering Manuscript. Sinclair also described his involvement in a Blakean event at South Bank Centre in 2000, entitled ‘The Tygers of Wrath,’ in which he participated in an audiovisual reading of ‘The Mental Traveller’ alongside poet Vahni Capildeo and artist Brian Catling.

In recent years transcripts of Sinclair’s lectures, such as The Topographic Sublime, have also been published by the Swedenborg Society, edited by Stephen McNeilly, who has shown a particular interest in invigorating the Swedenborg Society’s engagement with Blake as well as its publishing activity. Speaking about these independently published projects, Sinclair said, ‘I’ve always been open to them. If anybody offers an opportunity for obscurity, I’ll probably do it, for whatever is on the table, or nothing, just because I want to do it.’

The transcript below reproduces our conversation, which wove together many threads of Sinclair’s and Blake’s worlds. As well as describing the projects outlined above, Sinclair spoke about how it all started, for him, in the streets of London’s East End, and how his work continues to be fired up by the ‘tidal’ force of William Blake to this day.

Links:

Sinclair’s ‘official unofficial’ website: http://www.iainsinclair.org.uk/.

The Bard exhibition at Flat Time House: http://flattimeho.org.uk/exhibitions/bard/.

The Swedenborg Society: https://www.swedenborg.org.uk/.

 

The Interview

 

Caroline Ritchie: Where are you in the world at the moment?

Iain Sinclair: I’m between worlds… But the place I’m in is Hackney, where I’ve lived since 1968/69. Still in the same Blakean cave. I’ve never shown much imagination.

CR: Which part of Hackney are you in?

IS: It’s Albion Drive—of course it had to be! I guess that must’ve registered subconsciously when we found this place. We’ve been in the same small terraced house for more than fifty years… It’s unusual. The location has gone up in the world. I’m not sure that we have kept up with it.

CR: It is unusual, I think. Especially for one who has made a career out of moving around, being on your feet.

IS: I’ve moved about, but you can only move about if you have somewhere to which you can return. A base. A desk. A few books. There’s some sense of a heartspace in which to sit down quietly, to absorb and finesse materials scavenged from the wider world.

CR: A home base. So this is where you set up the press [Albion Village Press], from your home?

IS: Yes.

CR: I’m interested to know more about the press particularly. What drove you to set up your own press and did you have a sense that there were other ‘Blakean’ independent publishers at the time?

IS: It’s a long and complicated history. To summarise: in 1967 I made a documentary film with Allen Ginsberg, when he was in London for this great meeting of the tribes called The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. Ginsberg manifested. He took it upon himself to be a shamanistic prophet-politician, after the fashion, as he saw it, of William Blake. He moved through worlds, as cultural tourist, performer, witness and keeper of journals. He actively sought out the relevant voices of the period as he recognised them – including Ezra Pound, who he met at the Spoleto Festival. Despite Pound’s wartime history, those broadcasts, Ginsberg was eager to put himself at the master poet’s feet in Venice. Ginsberg stayed, for years, on a perpetual world tour. He arrived in London for the Congress, explaining that the source of his inspiration was the hallucination of Blake’s voice in a cold-water flat in Harlem, where he was living alone at that time. All his friends – Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs – had dispersed and he heard the ‘grave’ voice of Blake, which seemed to confirm him in his identity as a poet.

The conversations that went on at and around the Dialectics event, with the anti-psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, with the anarchist teacher and writer Paul Goodman, with the Black Power orator Stokeley Carmichael, all of these experiences had a somewhat prophetic/apocalyptic Blakean context. They fired concepts of an active countercultural community that needed, not only to hold on to the memory of these dialogues, but also to discover fresh ways of producing work. So the Hackney ‘diary’ filming, and writing that had been undertaken in a spasmodic underground way, began to come into focus in the early 1970s.

When we originally moved into Hackney, we lived in a communal house with a bunch of other drifters, mainly from Dublin, where I’d been at university. We launched ourselves on a documentary project of filming and keeping a record of activities, in various media; a record of the area in which we were now living. You could see the influence of all the usual Sixties’ chatter: Situationism, psychogeography, Black Mountain College, the encounter with Ginsberg, Charles Olson. And of course reading Blake.

I decided at that point that we would create an independent, survivalist press because I didn’t want to waste any more time banging my head against the commissioning process and the inexorable rise of the arts bureaucrat. We’d all been working in film – as editors, writers, documentarists, whatever was going – and we decided not to indulge in any more meetings: just go out and do it. You have an 8mm camera, you’re on the street recording. I took the same spirit into the publishing. I’d edited and contributed to fugitive magazines, so this was a fairly natural step but it was an important one and it was definitely made under the inspiration of Blake. The Ginsberg film was actually called Ah! Sunflower, after Blake, because that was a poem of his awakening. So there we were: these activities, running alongside whatever labours were undertaken to secure a wage, were consciously a Blakean project. He became the gloriously misread patron spirit of small printers and publishers taking responsibility for their own work and putting it out —distributing, designing, writing, the whole thing. That’s where it started. The ‘Albion’ part was an accident of location – with, I felt even then, some dubious connotations. You can see the same spirit expressed in a different way, across the river, with the activities of Allen Fisher. Mentored by Eric Mottram.

CR: A happy coincidence, that Albion arrival.

IS: Very happy. But it happens, you know, when you put yourself in the right mindset, the world confirms you in your folly.

CR: Do you have a sense that the countercultural current lives on? Or how has that changed in your contact with other small-press and independently published activities? There are two parts to the question I suppose because I wonder how much the ideas behind those organisations have evolved. I know it’s difficult to think about it monolithically. The second part of that is whether you’ve noticed a kind of resurgence of Blake in that context. I’ve only been in London a short time, only about two and a half years, and I’ve noticed a profusion of things—little pamphlets and exhibitions—in the time that I’ve been here, but obviously that goes back to Albion Village Press and other things. But it’s a bit hard to get a sense of what’s happened in between because not everything survives—owing to its nature.

IS: It’s tidal. It comes and goes. The era of Albion Village Press was the residue of the previous era when these things were latent. All those aspects were very much discussed as part of the way society was, and it went from that to a kind of violent moment in ‘68/‘69 when the thing went to the streets and it was all torn up, there was heaven and hell, and the reminder that Blake was also wearing the red cap of liberty at the burning of Newgate Prison and all that. The underlying mood switched from the hippy-ish ecstatic side of it, which was chanting Blake’s songs with Ginsberg’s squeezebox and the rest of it, to this other side, the darkness and the fire.

And then I think, in the ‘70s when the independent presses were most active and evident, it was an idea of actually realising the work that had been latent or superficial in the previous period. So through the ‘70s I think there was a sense of community among the small-press poets and publishers—people like Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher, both of whom drew a lot on Blake, were substantial London poets who were churning out numerous free-form publications under their own steam in all sorts of ways and distributing them through the network of bookshops like Compendium in Camden Town. Then that moment died, at the end of the ‘70s when the Thatcherite spectre, godmother to Punk, appeared over the horizon. Everything went very hard. The small amounts of public funding that had gone into some of this activity, the small amounts that poets were being paid to give readings, just flatlined, it disappeared. So then the counterculture really went underground and this was a sort of anti-Blakean crisis.

Subsequent to that, I think Blake has re-emerged as a presence, an acknowledged tendency, like the things that you mention—the idea that there are now barely noticed manifestations, little publications, blogs, walks, films and so on, and a lot of people have started to draw on him again. I think he’s come full circle back into active engagement, a tension, but there is also a sense of the brand being approved and sponsored. You always have to take care when your pitch is waved through by the money men. You have a new gravestone set up in Bunhill Fields, there are little groups, we’ve lost the bite of radicalism, although there are certainly individuals out there who are extremely radical and extremely inspired by the most difficult aspects of Blake’s character and life. I think you could look closely at the work of J.H. Prynne. And someone I’ve collaborated with from the beginning was the writer, poet, and sculptor Brian Catling. His huge fantasy-cycle The Vorrh, the second novel of which, The Erstwhile, begins with a vision of Blake—the first chapter is a manifestation of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar appearing as a reality and establishing the image and presence as a dominant motif. Shirley Collins, I know, was blown away by this prose. The idea of Blake as both painter and poet, a working craftsman, and a maker of beautiful books and illustrations, has consequence. All of that has come back for sure, and that spirit is abroad, in a different way.

CR: Do you have or have you had much to do with the Blake Society? Do you see them as a hub for this sort of thinking?

IS: I’ve been involved with a few events, but I do have a slightly uncomfortable sense that a ‘Blake Society’ is a mirror image of something that doesn’t quite work. Or that it is not essential, to the real business of reading closely. I mean, Blake is outside society—he connects up with the Ancients and Samuel Palmer, but he’s never a significant part of any grouping or movement. He’s an elective solitary, along with his wife. He’s a non-belonger. He draws what he needs from wherever he finds it. He’s greedy for his own interests and he draws on Swedenborg and he draws on Böhme, and he ransacks myth systems and weird beliefs. But he would never takes out membership. If he was invited to join the Blake Society, he would take a very Groucho Marx position on it, I think.

CR: It’s perhaps a similar irony to the one that somebody pointed out about the notion that Blake wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to the Tate show of his own work.

IS: Yes. The one exhibition that he ever had, nobody really came to it. They recreated that in the Tate show, which is the world we live in now, it’s xerox of a xerox of a xerox, reproduced endlessly, until we lose touch entirely with the original dangerous impulse. So the spirit of Blake is just so far away from what the realities of the present world are. But yet people are drawn to him.

CR: It was something I was going to ask you about, this common characterisation of Blake as being, at least in his self-image, a kind of isolated genius and I think the way he presents himself in that way has kind of stuck more than anything else—Blake as existing kind of outside of time and space.

IS: He’s not so isolated. I mean, society is a smaller thing back then. He’s going to the Royal Academy schools, he comes across some of the major players. They know who he is. He’s thought to be a little strange, but his extraordinary talents are recognised, but he just isn’t a joiner, he’s not a mainstream figure. And he’s a working man, a jobbing artist, he has to undertake projects that he wouldn’t choose to do—labours. And he only really leaves London that one time.

CR: Do you think that Blake is a ‘singular’ character? What do you think might be ‘singular’ about him?

IS: I don’t think he’s singular – as an accusation or medical condition. He’s plural, male and female, in the sense that it’s quite a double act with Catherine. It’s this melding. And her role is probably underplayed—perhaps not underplayed at the moment, because there must be a feminist reading to assert that she was doing most of the work, as well as her domestic duties and the support she offered. We know that her spirit was alongside him, they were Adam and Eve in the garden: a joint entity of which he is the fountain and the driven form. But he is quite on his own, in the end, because he is possessed by his prophetic role, he’s arguing with enormous realities—geographical, theological, psycho-political, cosmological. He reads a lot; he’s not an innocent, he has his library and a honed methodology for disputing with the sources that he draws on. He’s in constant debate—he thinks he’s in debate—with Milton, he’s psychically possessed by the genetic exchange with Milton’s spirit, the fallen star that strikes his heel when he’s hibernating in Felpham. He can rewrite Milton and correct his errors. He’s always a contemporary, and not just of people who are still alive. He has a Swedenborgian belief in continuing access to the wisdom of the true seers. His community is living, undead, and future. And yet he’s actually living a very ordinary, very mundane everyday life within the harshness of London as it was then. He experiences and endures the industries around him and the impoverishment and cruelty, the prostitution and the degradation. He’s angry and tender, and he never falls away from his task of producing these monumental texts. Nobody in their right mind, with any kind of notion of ‘career,’ would have laboured, over years, to produced these phenomenal, seething, prophetic epic things. It drains your lifeblood to produce them. And to live with them as caretaker for eternity.

CR: And to read them.

IS: It would take every hour of your life if you wanted to seriously read them and annotate them.

CR: Especially reading from the plates themselves, they’re so crowded, so dense. It’s really quite dizzying.

IS: Well, the most exciting thing about it is that when any other person subsequently, within the same city, starts to think in a very small way about engaging with these kind of things, you very soon find yourself coming back towards Blake and thinking, this is a demonstration of somebody who was dedicated to doing the things we talked about at the beginning: the idea that you are responsible for your own labours, you do it, and it doesn’t really matter what happens beyond that. That’s your only responsibility: to do it.

CR: You’ve written a few times about that walk that Blake describes that Los does around East London. Could you talk a bit about what interested you about that passage?

IS: It felt like a special recognition, a set of instructions to be followed: lines of intention and desire. Or a confirmation that I was living in the right part of London. A district, at that time, very much on its uppers. It was struggling and my immediate surroundings were run-down, still in a post-war slump. When I look at the footage that we were shooting, parts of London were neglected, here was a blitzed city, and even a Victorian city, that’s the sense I got. And then I started to read this battered old red-covered collected edition of Blake—I see in the front that I bought it in April 1971—I started to plough through it and then stumbled on those lines from Jerusalem about ‘Till he came to old Stratford, and thence to Stepney and the Isle of Leutha’s Dogs, thence thro’ the narrows of the River’s side,’ etcetera etcetera. On one level we have a set of topographic instructions for a day’s walk, and beyond that the nudge that changes your life. Of course I immediately had to march out of the door and head off. This was particularly relevant because I was working at Chobham Farm in pre-Olympic, very much pre-Olympic, Stratford. I was loading and unloading containers of sheepskins from Australia. And reading Blake and Dante and Kerouac at the same time, and I thought those lines in Jerusalem were a timeless coding of the energies of London. They fired up everything I attempted. Suicide Bridge, which I was working on, concurrently with Lud Heat, was adapted into a sort of Blakean commentary—a xerox of a Blakean sketch—in which his characters from Jerusalem were manifested in the myths of the contemporary city.

CR: There are two things there, because this wonderful passage is Blake’s writing of the city and his imaginative geographies, while also being literally an actual, recognisable place. And then meanwhile I wonder how important the places where Blake himself lived and worked have been to you. Have you felt compelled to visit all of them and look around? And how has that fed into your work?

IS: Strangely, yes, I did go round all the London addresses associated with Blake. They did not mean that much to me. Essentially, these were now dead places. You go through parts of Soho and down to Lambeth and on to Felpham, even to the cottage. I walked down there with Brian Catling and somebody rushes into the garden and tells us to bugger off—they don’t want anybody sniffing around for Blakean traces. So the actual places themselves meant very little to me. I paid my respects to them; I hoped, especially in Lambeth, Hercules Road, to get some charge, but no. Quite the reverse: from what was written, from reading Jerusalem, all the instruction, all that energy, everything I needed was in the poem, and it didn’t have to be too literally interpreted, but it would fire my own way of reading the city, in terms of Hawksmoor churches, autopsies and the rest of it. All of this emanates from the conviction that London is a living, organic entity with lines of light and force pouring out in every direction. And from that, I moved on, becoming interested in Swedenborgian concepts that Blake and his family had been associated with as part of their inheritance. And then it was more literally a topography of sacred places in East London: Wellclose Square, the Swedish church, and the ground where Swedenborg came to shore. They fed into a plural, layered version of a contemporary London made from all of these other strands of past and future that are still active and still accessible.

CR: It’s interesting to build up a map in part incorporating some of the things that Blake himself recorded. I wonder if you think what Blake is doing is mapping? Or what do you think that he can tell us about that kind of activity, and the epistemology of mapping, that, say, ‘scientific’ maps from the period might not tell us or might not invite?

IS: It’s a very interesting question. I think his mapping is richer than any scientific mapping of the time because it takes the terminology of the map and turns it into some post-biblical, post-apocalyptic wonder in which places like Stratford, merely by being named, become part of a pilgrim’s progress. I was always interested in this relation of Blake re-working Bunyan and being connected with Bunyan and then discovering Bunhill Fields, the old plague-pit, and finding Blake and Defoe and Bunyan in a posrthumous triangulation, talking to each other. That small burial ground of non-conformity then became the launching spot for most of my walks, and for a mythic sense of the whole island of Britain, through Defoe’s strategic journeying and through Bunyan’s belief that the physical experience of a working guy selling pots and pans can lift into a divine progress towards the shining city on the hill. Those urgent and inchoate visions fed, by way of Blake, into any writing that I attempted to do.

CR: I read in your lecture on Blake’s ‘topographic sublime’ that the cover of Lud Heat had one of Blake’s designs to the Pilgrim’s Progress on the frontispiece. Is that right, that this connection between Blake and Bunyan was there in your work right from this early stage?

IS: Hang on one second, I’ll show you. [Iain went to fetch the book]. That’s the book, and here’s the image that was the frontispiece. It’s this disturbing image of a burdened figure with this huge knapsack on his back holding a book, bent over… absolutely everything I wanted (and feared)! Alongside a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress. So that’s where it started.

CR: You were also talking in the Topographic Sublime about your friend Renchi Bicknell, who has also been interested in Blake and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Have you worked together on that area?

IS: Endlessly, endlessly. First off, Renchi Bicknell, the painter, was one of the group living in the communal house in Hackney. He was involved in those early projects and illustrated my first books, things like Back Garden Poems. But in the early ‘70s, with Brian Catling also, we just walked into the Whitechapel Gallery one afternoon and said ‘We’re local, we’re producing books and paintings, we want an exhibition.’ And they said ‘OK’. So there was this exhibition called Albion Island Vortex, in an annex of the Whitechapel Gallery. (I wrote about it in a chapter of my little Welsh book, Black Apples of Gower.) The show was an attempted reflection of Blakean pilgrimage and significant topography. The room was divided into walls dedicated to East, North, South, West, with stones and crows and the usual Blakean trappings. Renchi launched a series of major, cross-Britain walks, recorded in paintings. And later in self-produced chapbooks. I had photographs that I’d taken on my travels and a number of paintings. Brian showed needle-fine drawings, places like Avebury and the limestone caves of Gower.

I think it was March and April 1974. The Whitechapel Gallery have a record. They’ve got the relevant documentation in their little library section upstairs there, including a primitive catalogue that we produced. More recently, we recreated the Whitechapel episode, just a year or so back, in a show called The House of the Last London, which was at Gallery 46, in a terrace right behind the Royal London Hospital.

The same people, confirmed in their folly, doing the same things! Renchi in particular has produced his own small-scale Blakean books, including a very nice book about Blake’s engagement with Bunyan. He’d just taught himself etching so he was using difficulty as part of his conversation with Blake and Bunyan, alongside journal sketches from his own epic pilgrimages. It was a totally Blakean contemporary project produced in a chapbook that very few people ever saw. The book was called A Pilgrim’s Progress & Further Relations. It appeared in 2008. And I imagine it’s still available from Renchi (see www.flyingdragon.co.uk).

CR: I haven’t seen it yet! I wonder if I can track it down, I imagine that it won’t have made its way into the British Library or anything like that.

IS: I can show you a copy, if that’s any use. [Iain went to find his copy of the book]. So you get the Blake, you see the interaction with Bunyan and his own pilgrimage texts. Each page is produced as a large-scale etching. He’s never exhibited them, I believe. I was talking about trying to set something up at Swedenborg House, but Renchi hasn’t yet made contact. This is, substantially, a Blakean project, inspired by Gerda S. Norvig’s 1993 book, Dark Figures in the Desired Country (Blake’s Illiustrations to The Pilgrim’s Progress). So anyway, my point is that those connections from way back in the ‘60s are still accessible, through expeditions, walks, discussions and debates. Invisible books are being produced. If you google ‘Renchi Vimeo,’ you’ll find a series of films he’s made of walks, journeys, quests, starling flights, in an updating of a Blakean sketchbook. These are graphic seizures made in motion, on the hoof.

CR: Have you had much to do with Swedenborg House? I know you’ve done a few lectures there and there are a few books that have come from that.

IS: Yeah, I have. I was sort of surprised. The former set-up was long-established and rather hidebound, protective of their traditions. There tended to be a lot of older folk around, and then Stephen [McNeilly] came along there, a much younger guy, who, along with James Wilson, opened things up. There were respectful of Swedenborgian origins and scholarship, but were open to other outcomes. They started to invite people like me to engage with their books and objects, even when they were not themselves members of the Church. I did a few things there, performances with Catling, book launches, screenings. I find it a good venue. Swedenborg House have been supportive, and the they produce these really neat little books, for something modest like five quid. They turn them out them at virtually cost price. And I think they’re good, very much part of the spirit you were talking about. The past in the present.

CR: Did they tend to reach out to you? To invite you to do things?

IS: Yes, they approached me initially, because they have a close geographical relationship to the London Review of Books shop. I was doing a reading at the LRB and someone from Swedenborg House came in and said ‘you’ve mentioned Swedenborg in one of your books, in Radon Daughters, would you like to come along and talk?’ Later, I was able to suggest events and they would generously agree to curate them. I did a series of performances and talks after that.

CR: I just remembered that you’d sent me that piece of writing you did for the Flat Time House show as well, which was really terrific, it was a great read. I enjoyed the title [‘Mental Travailers’] especially. Could you tell me a bit about that project and how it came to be?

IS: In the end, that particular project had less connection with Blake than I would’ve liked, but the invitation came about because they knew I was interested in Blake. The guiding spirit was the heritage of artist/philosopher John Latham. I knew John Latham a little, enough to appreciate how wonderfully eccentric and strange he was. His house was up on Peckham Rye and I thought OK.

I visited Flat Time House and gallery and that in itself was enough of a provocation to dominate my approach to the particular project, and the fact that Latham’s own books were still stashed there. You examine these books and appreciate that he operated in that same intense, self-sufficient conviction of the value of his own message to the world, outside present time, that Blake had. That was the spark for me. Latham had undertaken a Blakean commission, but I didn’t find any real strength in that connection—it wasn’t important to him. What I liked about the project was the ultimate gathering in the Flat Time House, when all those involved did their own thing. The poem I’d contrived then disappeared, it wasn’t there. I think about four lines went up on the wall in the gallery, but it didn’t register. Up to now that poem has never been seen. But, with luck, Face Press will be bringing out a very handsome edition of Mental Travailers: or, The Battle of the Books (Blake & Latham in Subtle Congress on Peckham Rye) very soon, in a limited edition.

CR: I went to see the exhibition and saw the extract from ‘Mental Travailers.’ I was working on Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’ at the time and thought, that’s got to be absolute gold, but then I couldn’t find it anywhere.

IS: ‘The Mental Traveller’ was my start with Blake, as a schoolboy. I just thought that poem was so haunting, so extraordinary. You reminded me that probably the most interesting Blakean performative event that I was involved in was ‘The Mental Traveller.’ There was an evening of Blake celebration, ‘The Tygers of Wrath’, at the South Bank. Jah Wobble was involved. Billy Bragg, all kinds of people. For my part, I picked ‘The Mental Traveller’, and along with Catling, we made a film in which Vahni Capildeo, a young poet at that time, voiced by lip-sync an elderly woman. Intimations of David Lynch! Then the older woman gave her voice to Vahni, voices were exchanged. The old woman becoming the young woman, and all those sexually ambiguous cycles of ‘The Mental Traveller’ were performed. It was quite something. I thought it was one of the best things we’d ever done in terms of Blake. I have a poster for it somewhere, maybe I can dig that out. And somewhere there is a VHS. It may surface one day.

CR: That’s where I started with Blake as well, with that poem. Initially being quite frustrated with it and having no idea what it meant… but it just kind of stayed with me.

IS: I think it was the one I really carried away as a schoolboy. I had no idea what it meant but the theatre of it was just mesmerising. It was a long journey to come back to that poem and then make it the centrepiece of this production that we did.

CR: What do you make of that phrase ‘mental travel’? I think I’ve seen it come up in your writing.

IS: I use it a lot. I use it with the John Latham. ‘Travel’ sounds like ‘travail,’ where travelling has an element of the treadmill about it. Van Gogh on the road to Tarascon.

CR: Yes, a sense of ‘Mental Fight’ and striving that is very much in Blake, but somehow not just ‘mental.’

IS: The presentation of his whole psycho-sexual cosmology is very, very weird, and primal. It’s a savage fairy story, it’s a parable, fierce as the Old Testament, but it’s also got such heat in it.

CR: To circle back to Bunhill Fields—have you gone back there regularly?

IS: About once a month, all the time. I don’t live that far away. In the lockdown it’s very convenient because we can’t really walk very far beyond the city at the moment. Bunhill Fields is a legitimate distance. I like to go there, and sit down under the fig tree. Things have changed with Blake’s ‘correct’ memorial being carried away from Defoe and Bunyan, exposed on the grass. I always knew the old stone wasn’t the right place, but it felt right. It’s slightly less haunted now. I just feel the approval of this group of Blake Society enthusiasts singing and imagining a historic mistake being revised. But I miss the immediate dialogue with Bunyan’s moss-covered, recumbent form. That memorial has its own relief version of the stooped and burdened pilgrim.

CR: Did you go to the unveiling of the new tombstone for Blake and Catherine?

IS: No, I didn’t. I was sympathetic to the ideas behind it, but I just didn’t really want to take part in the ceremony.

CR: You spoke earlier about how back in the ‘60s and ‘70s you felt a very strong sense of their being a kind of Blakean community working with a spirit of independence and wanting to disseminate ideas. Do you think that there is such a thing now?

IS: It’s quite difficult to think of spiky ‘independence’ in terms of a ‘community.’ The terms don’t quite work. It’s a bit like another of my obsessions, John Clare. And especially his ‘Journey out of Essex.’ There’s an active John Clare Society, genuine enthusiasts working to maintain his reputation, yet some of their actions go against his own cunning and husbanded privacy. You have to be sympathetic to the people who want to share a group response, publications, fresh scholarship, but I’m perverse, I feel that I want to stay out of it and leave these peculiar and possessed individuals in their own self-inflicted singularity.

CR: What else are you working on at the moment?

IS: I’ve just finished a big book called The Gold Machine which is set in Peru. I’m wondering about where the germ of this neurosis of writing came from. My great-grandfather, who went to Peru in 1891 and undertook a kind of survey on behalf of the Peruvian Corporation of London, published a book about it in 1895. The same year that Joseph Conrad published his first novel. I’m in an intrigued but argumentative dialogue with my great-grandfather’s book and its consequences. I went on a journey (just before this lockdown moment) with my daughter, an attempt to follow my great-grandfather’s footsteps. My daughter was also fascinated by the whole Peruvian thing, but she wanted to spend some time living with the indigenous people who had to suffer the consequences of the original survey that led to the foundation of coffee plantations. I didn’t glean much of the backstory from reading the original book, but my daughter’s research opened up a big can of worms. I suppose in spirit, in some way, because we were in dialogue with the dead, the undead, and the animistic belief systems of the people we were talking to, that this was another Blakean adventure. So anyway the writing is done and I’m fretting over the maps and illustrations now.

It’s a mainstream publication—you can only have little black-and-white reproductions. It’s not mine, in the sense that an Albion Village Press book could be. With the attendant advantages (payment, distribution) and disadvantages (handing over editorial control and design). I mean, it is my book in the sense that I’ve written it, but it’s also a somewhat involuntary collaboration with business people who think they can exploit this as an item. Apart from that, I do a lot of tiny things, like with Renchi Bicknell, as I’ve just showed you, I always do those because you do them on your own terms.

CR: Have you consistently sought out those kind of projects where you have more say?

IS: I’ve always been open to them. If anybody offers an opportunity for obscurity, I’ll probably do it, for whatever is on the table, or nothing, just because I want to do it.

What would it be like to have a conversation with William Blake? In his recent pamphlet entitled A Conversation with Wm. Blake (Uppingham: Goldmark, 2019), artist David Suff takes this question as his theme. Suff’s imagined dialogue with Blake unfurls in a series of visual and verbal evocations, beginning with the front-cover design (above), in which Suff places his own self-portrait directly opposite a portrait of William Blake. The two artists, centuries apart, are pictured in a single pictorial plane, conversing across a small coffee-table.

Suff is represented by Goldmark Gallery, an idiosyncratic cultural institution in Uppingham, founded by Mike Goldmark. Goldmark has also published literary works by Iain Sinclair (White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 1987 and Objects of Obscure Desire, 2013). The artworks that Suff made for A Conversation with Wm. Blake were recently displayed at Goldmark Gallery (March 23 – April 13 2019) in the show Journeys Beyond Appearance, which also featured Suff’s 30-foot long autobiographical pen drawing called ‘River of Life.’

I recently interviewed Suff about his engagement with Blake over the course of his long artistic career (see the full interview below). What emerged was a sense that Suff’s ‘conversation’ with Blake has been a lifelong process. As a maker of verbal-visual books, an enthusiast of and participant in 20^th-century counterculture, and a lover of literal and figurative journeys, Suff has brought Blake to many aspects of his creative practice. His work offers one vista into Blake’s legacy among contemporary artistic practitioners and particularly among makers of small-press books. In our interview, Suff recalls the beginnings of his fascination for Blake:

I think it began with the imagery, and the fact that so many of his most well-known images were taken in the 1960s and were used as emblems of the counterculture, there are lots of little small presses that all use Blakean words for names of their printing houses, and some of the psychedelic music of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Blake. I think my beginnings would have started with all of that, and then fitting that to living in London, loving walking around, looking, thinking about people who would have walked there before: all of those things kind of get crystallised in Blake for me.

Suff is particularly interested in a kind of Blakean re-enchantment of London’s topography. In our interview, he describes a quasi-epiphanic moment of inspiration that he experienced at Bunhill Fields, the site of Blake and Catherine’s burial. In A Conversation with Wm. Blake, which was directly inspired by this experience at Bunhill, Suff offers what he calls ‘a partial portrait of a man who is always near.’ In the poetry he meditates repeatedly upon a sense of Blake’s continued presence within London:

Non-conformist, free-thinker

     the time will come for you to

blow through this city

 

[…]

 

a suitcase of visions         carved from the darkness

     following the golden string

listening for mermaids,

                                           reading faces and

… tracing feather paths through the air

                                                endlessly whispers through the centuries

In picking up the ‘golden string’ that Blake lays down in Jerusalem, Suff positions himself as actively thinking with Blake, both thematically and formally, in the space of his minutely detailed visual-verbal book. There are many differences between Blake’s illuminated books and the practices of self- and independent publishers today—not least owing to the advent of digital printing—but Suff’s A Conversation is one work that keeps resolutely alive Blake’s legacy as a maker of books and a maker of worlds.

 

Links:

David Suff’s website: https://www.davidsuff.com/

Goldmark Gallery: https://www.goldmarkart.com/

Documentary about Suff’s Journeys Beyond Appearances, produced by Goldmark gallery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1-JG4Z4ZD0

More information about the exhibition: https://www.goldmarkart.com/exhibitions-and-events/all/114-david-suff-journey-beyond-appearance-upcoming

 

The Interview

 

We began the conversation talking about Journeys Beyond Appearances, Goldmark’s documentary about Suff’s artwork River.

DS: Goldmark Gallery is a very, very strange institution. It’s a commercial gallery, but it behaves more like an arts centre: they publish books, they put on poetry readings and music events, they have a huge activity with ceramics, with pottery-makers from around the world, they deal in contemporary art and historical art, all sorts of things. When I first moved here to Rutland eighteen or so years back, it was a bookshop—a secondhand bookshop with the gallery on the side. Now it’s this huge building with lots of rooms and lots of things going on. They keep a resident film-maker. It’s common practice that if they’ve got an exhibition of pots or paintings or something, they tend to make a supporting film.

What I didn’t say in the finished version of that documentary, but probably said in one of the conversations that went towards it, was that I often don’t sleep very well, I’ll wake up a lot in the night. It got to be my habit, if I was staying in London overnight for some reason, I would probably stay somewhere near the Barbican or Old Street, and if I woke up in the middle of the night I’d go for a walk and I’d probably go and sit in Bunhill Fields. The grave marker that’s been there for quite a long time, apparently marking William Blake’s burial spot, says ‘nearby lie.’ That ‘nearby’ has always seemed such a powerful thing. It’s not a very twentieth-century kind of phrase, but it’s such a powerful kind of statement: here’s this person who’s so embedded into our culture in all sorts of ways—principally ‘Jerusalem,’ but also the imagery and the poetry and the idea of the Romantic radical and all of these things—and yet we don’t actually know exactly where he’s buried. And it’s a graveyard for Nonconformists—Daniel Defoe has a beautiful stone memorial there and the Wesleys, but Blake is somewhere here, he’s somewhere round about.

CR: It’s funny though that he has been given a sort of pride of place in its own way—it’s a humble sort of thing but it’s kind of hard to miss as well.

DS: Absolutely, and it turns out that the actual burial is around thirty feet away. Some people have researched the exact point and they know who’s buried in the shared grave and all of that. But it just seemed to me that over your shoulder is the City of London, this enormous capitalist powerhouse, with tentacles of influence and power all over the globe, and here’s Blake: someone who was not afraid to comment on that, to confront it, to talk about the inequalities within society, and he’s buried so close, just on the periphery of it, and nobody actually bothered to note precisely where he is. There’s something there that always fascinated me and intrigued me, I think.

CR: From living in London and living near Bunhill Fields—is that how you came to know Blake or came to know him in a particular way that was very closely related to place and geography?

DS: My father was a Cockney. He was born in London. He was orphaned and grew up in children’s homes and I kind of feel as though I’m a Londoner in my sinews, in my heart, and we lived in London for a long time. And there’s something about London that draws me back imaginatively, constantly. The River Thames is a huge thing in my thinking—the idea that Roman legionnaires crossed it on bridges, the idea that Joseph Conrad sat in a boat out in the estuary and wrote Heart of Darkness. And Blake’s one of those London figures. If you’ve got a Romantic notion of the city and its place in history and generation after generation walking the same streets, then he’s one of those figures that you would naturally be drawn to. But I don’t think that’s where it began. I think it began with the imagery, and the fact that so many of his most well-known images were taken in the 1960s and were used as emblems of the counterculture, there are lots of little small presses that all use Blakean words for names of their printing houses, and some of the psychedelic music of the 1960s was heavily influenced by Blake. I think my beginnings would have started with all of that, and then fitting that to living in London, loving walking around, looking, thinking about people who would have walked there before: all of those things kind of get crystallised in Blake for me.

CR: Did you have a sense at the time that there were other artists or hubs that were interested in Blake in London? For instance, you seem to have crossed paths with Iain Sinclair through Goldmark, is that right?

DS: Sinclair I knew from his self-published books in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, I suppose around the early ‘70s. I have copies of his Albion Village work, the things that he published himself, and I’ve followed his career through all of the publications since. And he very kindly agreed to speak a little bit in that documentary [Journeys Beyond Appearances]. So Iain was one thing, and I think that there was a kind of psychedelic folk music centred around the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention and some Irish musicians—Dr Strangely Strange—that were Iain’s friends and so we both had some similar interests in that kind of music. I was aware of the William Blake Society and went to a few of their exhibitions and talks. I spent a lot of time in the Tate looking around, when all the Blake pictures were in that strange rotunda room. I would go there quite often.

CR: It would be great to hear a bit more about what Blake’s work means to your work, especially in light of the metaphors you’re interested in—the river and the garden and so on. By the way, there is a Blake painting at Tate entitled The River of Life, and I was wondering as a side note whether you’d had that in mind as well?

DS: Yes—I think I thought about that after I’d pretty much finished the river thing. But I’ll just go back to amplifying the piece that’s in the documentary. On one of these early mornings, I was sitting in Bunhill fields with the fig tree behind me—there’s a little bench there—and there were goldfinches. There were goldfinches flittering around and chattering away, and I suddenly felt not the presence of Blake—not somebody speaking to me from the past or something—but I suddenly felt that that kind of commentary on the inequalities of society is a pretty continuous thread and it was almost like these tiny, tiny coloured birds twittering away, the sun breaking through at dawn, and these enormous tower blocks of power and authority and wealth behind—they seemed like some kind of almost Blakean metaphor, some kind of image of the natural world. The grass is going to pop up beneath all of the paving slabs—if we leave it long enough, the city disappears, the tended garden returns to the wild. And that’s something that’s probably always been in my work. And out of listening to those goldfinches, I made a few drawings, which became four largeish black-and-white drawings and that little pamphlet of some of the thoughts and words [A Conversation with William Blake].

There were feathers falling out of the sky because a couple of birds had had a dispute, or maybe there was a predatory bird attacking a smaller bird or something. But I’m sitting there, in the dawn light, listening to the goldfinches, and there are these feathers dropping down, and somehow it all seemed like I was kind of in the presence of at the very least a Blakean way of looking at the world. I’m not claiming that there was a ghost speaking to me from the past, it wasn’t that kind of experience, but it was something very powerful and it fed into a lot of work. I would have been working on that river drawing at that time and thinking more about my own life and the experiences of moving around and passions, and fundamentally thinking about ‘what is this thing that I’m drawn to do?’ One of the most common questions that I’ve ever been asked as an artist is ‘when did you decide to do that?’ And I don’t think I did. That’s what I was chosen to do, that was the thing that I was set up to do, really.

CR: I love the image of that unfolding notebook that you used for River and that seemed to me to resonate with the kind of journeys that we find in Blake as well, this idea of the golden string metaphor, that there might be some kind of goal in the future but that the way to get there is step by step, it unfolds along the way. Back in Bunhill Fields, John Bunyan is also buried nearby in that big tomb and I was wondering if there was a theme of pilgrimage in Bunyan’s sense informing your metaphor of the journey, or if Bunyan has been an interest of yours as he was for Blake as well?

DS: When I’m there, I’m aware that those other people are buried there, but it’s Blake that draws me there. My father didn’t know his grandparents. Probably the grandfather would’ve been a seaman from Northern Germany or Denmark or something, and so the East of London has always been very interesting to me. The idea that life is a journey, the idea that it’s not clearly mapped out, and that it’s not necessarily a straight line—all of those things make perfect sense to me. I always say to people that I think I’ve led a charmed life really, it just unfolded and it was interesting. It was scary, it was miserable at times, it was sometimes hard to pay the bills, and all of those things, but they’re just kind of common threads in any life, in a life. Most of us are sort of given over to wondering ‘what’s the point of all of this? What am I here for?’

CR: The River artwork isn’t annotated, is it? It’s pictorial, is that right?

DS: Absolutely right. I’ve shown it a few times to roomfulls of people and I usually say very little to introduce it other than ‘here’s sixty years of a life—my life—in fifteen minutes.’ That’s kind of all the clues I want to provide really because there are symbolic images embedded in it, some of which I’ve spoken about and spoken of in that documentary, but there are other things that I don’t want to talk about. There was a long period of miserable, depressive life—more than a decade really of not very pleasant times. I think if you look at the thing, it gets incredibly dark at one point and it’s not like other bits of it that are well-lit and everything. But that’s kind of all you need to know because it’s not intended to be a drawing of this life only. I want it to be a drawing of a life that you’ll find your own resonances in. I don’t think I’ve lived an unusual life, it’s been fairly ordinary in most respects, but obviously the sequence of things or how things affect your equilibrium will be different for different viewers or different interpreters.

CR: Different threads to be picked up… You’ve also written some beautiful words—poems—in this pamphlet [A Conversation with William Blake], and I was fascinated by this combination of words and images, it seemed very reminiscent of the illuminated books.

DS: It’s straight out of Blake! I think that I’ve been fascinated by the conjunction of word and image and always been drawn to illustrate children’s books and graphic novels (to some extent, but less so). In my drawings, in the exhibitable pieces, I would like to embed words into them more, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way of doing that, partly I think because our culture tends to give more weight to words than to images, and if you put words in it might solidify possible interpretations in ways that I don’t really want. Over the years there have been a few pieces of work where it’s fed into a little pamphlet or something which you’ve very kindly called poetry…I’m uncertain and don’t want to make any great claims for that. But all of those words which are in the sketchbooks and on scraps of paper, they somehow seem very important and part of the making—in this case—four largeish drawings and maybe twenty or so smaller pieces. I don’t know if the booklet really stands alone as a separate thing, but it felt important to do that and working with Goldmark gave me a very good opportunity to make that.

CR: Were your other pamphlets also published by Goldmark?

DS: No… At the end of 1982 or something at the Royal College of Art, I made a very large drawing about the Green Man and there’s a substantial booklet that went with that, which was published at the Royal College as part of the final degree piece of work. And some of them were just one-offs, just handmade little sewn chapbooks.

CR: Are you working on something in particular at the moment?

DS: At the beginning of 2020, about a year ago, I went for a walk locally from this house—a three- or four-mile circular walk. And in one of the hedgerows I found a huge Ash tree that had been blown over a long time ago, a hundred or more years ago, and it’s growing laterally to the ground, and it’s incorporated in the hedge, and it’s maybe eighteen feet long, with the roots at one end and all the saplings grow up as it goes along. I decided this thing was called ‘tree hedge,’ and I would begin making drawings of it. A few weeks later, we were all supposed to stay at home and only go out for an hour a day, so I began doing this walk every day, listening to the birds, taking some photographs on my phone maybe, and making drawings. Today was day 302 of making this same walk.

Once a week, on a Monday, I gather all of the things I’ve seen together into a little email and attach this week’s drawing, and I sent it originally to friends who I knew to be bird-watchers or interested in the natural world. And it now goes around the world—I send it to about fifty people. Some of them send it on to their mums and dads in their nineties who haven’t been able to go out of the house since last March. I get these extraordinary messages back from around the world. Somebody sends me a photograph of the Cherry Blossom in Osaka, somebody else tells me about the street demonstrations in Portland, outside the Capitol building… I’m right at the point now of turning the first six months of that walking into a book. I’m laying out the pages, and that’s forced me to make additional pictures, so I’ve made some landscape drawings where the weekly picture had been a couple of birds in the hedgerow or something. I call this thing ‘Walking on Skylark Ridge’—I made up the name ‘Skylark Ridge’ because there were invariably skylarks singing when I went out walking for 125 days continuously, there was a skylark singing for sure. And then there’s been a big gap, and yesterday and today there were skylarks singing again, so we’re nearly back to a full year. Now I’ll start to see the repetition of the natural world. I know what date I saw the first swallow last year, will I see one at the same time this year, or will I see one later, will the daffodils come up at the same time… It’s this strange kind of nature diary that’s grown by accident, really. It’s been an extraordinary, gentle way of connecting with the world around about and keeping contact with friends all over the globe.

CR: To come back to Blake, do you attach particular significance to specific Blakean places? I know you’ve mentioned Bunhill Fields and I wondered if you’re interested in the kind of obsessive cataloguing of the places that Blake mentions in his work, or where he lived in London, which is something many Blakean writers and artists have taken up? Is that something that you feel drawn to, or that you’ve brought to your own work?

DS: It’s something that I’m definitely aware of in Blake. I’m very aware of the specificity of places in his work. But I’m more generally aware of the biography of his life than the specific bits of London…that hasn’t been a major part of my work. In the past there have been drawings of Callanish up in the Scottish Isles and drawings of Venice and gardens in France and things. But I suppose there’ve been two strands in my work, one of which has been images of recognisable, known places—if I make a drawing of Stonehenge, you could go and compare it with Stonehenge—but the larger pieces have generally been an imaginative place, they’ve not been a real place. So I might take the form of a bush from here, a piece of pyramid topiary from there, and a bird from here, and invent a garden because I think the idea of the garden has run through most of my work for thirty or more years.

CR: Are you thinking of the garden in opposition to something like the city or built environments?

DS: No, I think I’m thinking of the garden more in that kind of Islamic tradition of heaven on earth, a place for contemplation, a place for quiet: the running water, the flowers. I’m not thinking of the garden in opposition to the built environment of the city as though they’re opposites. I’m thinking of the garden more as an imaginative space, a space where spiritual contemplation might be possible. I think I’m very interested in spirituality and thinking about why and how, but I don’t go to a church or follow a particular church or follow a particular belief system. But in a way the garden is a little bit like a sacred space, a place of worship. In a way—I wouldn’t want to make that point too strongly.

CR: I don’t know if there is an answer to this, but why do you think that Blake has this status in independent publishing specifically, but also some kind of special status as a guide-figure in art, poetry for a lot of people?

DS: I think you’re right when you say that you’re not sure if there could be an answer to the question. It’s very complicated, but there are bits of answers to it. I think that Blake does seem to be very, very singular. It’s very, very hard looking back through British culture to think of anybody who had such facility with words and with images. It’s very hard to think of any other kind of free-thinker or radical commentator who could make such powerful images. And yet, at the same time, he seems to be both didactic and not at the same time, so it’s possible for you to invest in Blake almost any kind of meaning that you want. I’m very comfortable in saying that Blake was unafraid to “speak truth to power”, or one of those modern phrases that we all think we understand and we quite like people who can do those things. He feeds in a way into that very kind of middle-class, European idea that the genius has thin soup, dried bread, lives in a garret, and yet is so extraordinarily creative and wonderful. That’s sort of true about Blake to a point, except he was quite well supported, and when he did earn money, he earned more money than an awful lot of ordinary working people in his community would have earned. He had some kind of way of being able to talk to more wealthy, more powerful, more socially distanced people. One of the things about the artist sometimes—not always—is that they can float free of the restraints of stratified society, so they can be in the working man’s pub in the East End playing darts and drinking beer, and they can also attend a soiree at lady somebody-or-other’s house the next day. They never quite belong in either place but they are sort of tolerated and don’t not belong in either place. I think Blake is kind of quintessentially that. He’s not afraid to criticise things, he’s got ideas on social order, he talks all the radical language, he’s sort of an outsider, and yet maybe he wasn’t. Certainly there was a community later in his life of younger artists who were very aware and held him in high esteem and tried to support him, he had patrons who found work for him—perhaps not the work he wanted, but something.

When you get to the publishing houses, well he was one of the first self-publishers. Financial necessity made sure that he had to invent techniques, and he had a lot that he wanted to say, he had a lot to do. It’s not hard to see how if you set up your own publishing operation in the twentieth century, or even perhaps in the nineteenth century, why you would have taken Blake as some kind of role model or exemplar, he’s perfect for it, but they miss the bit where he wasn’t actually very successful in disseminating the things he published.

In a way, of course, he told us so little about his reality, and people might have had their own reasons and their own agenda to over-romanticise him. This idea that somebody sings on their deathbed is a pretty powerful image—all of us would like to die gently and with a smile on our faces (if that could be arranged, please)—but we don’t know for sure that that’s what happened, we don’t know that he didn’t die in agony and discomfort.

And again, it’s the same point really, that he’s an extraordinarily colourful and interesting creative figure, but the biography and the detail and what he was exactly trying to say in particular pieces of work is vague enough, it’s almost blank, you can almost put what you want onto Blake and it’ll sort of fit.

CR: It’s posssibly something that could be said of many if not any text—that you can bring your own interpretation to it—but Blake seems to make this idea a theme.

Since I’ve been in London I’ve noticed quite a number of publications and exhibitions relating to Blake, and a series of small presses with this Blakean undercurrent, and I’m wondering if that is to your mind something that has had a bit of a resurgence again recently, or whether it’s been there throughout?

DS: I think it’s kind of cyclical. I think in the little book [A Conversation with William Blake], I say something about Blake always being there. But I think that fashion, or the zeitgiest or something…periodically it seems to come back. You only need Damon Albarn from Blur or someone to speak about Blake and there seems to be a new flurry of activity. He’s a bit like a kind of creative Che Guevara in a way—you can sort of put William Blake on your t-shirt and you’re telling the world something about who you think you are, and what your interests and passions are. I don’t think there’s very many British artists that you could do that with—you couldn’t do that with Turner. If you put Turner’s image on your t-shirt, or one of his paintings, a much smaller number of people would get the reference and know what you’re doing. Blake has always been, I think, bigged-up, especially in the literary community, but also by people who see themselves as radical, who see themselves as iconoclasts or outsiders in some way, and so he’s become this kind of poster boy. He fits so many other people’s views of what it is to be a poet or a painter.

As part of my research into Blake’s legacy in the realm of independent and self-publishing, I recently spoke to photographer, publisher, and activist Max Reeves. Reeves is the founder of a small press called Entropy Press, a not-for-profit collective which was initially set up in the basement of a faculty building at Auckland University in 1987.

The project was re-launched in London in 2009, when Reeves began printing a series of zines called Papakura Post Office: A Spazmodical Zine and Raven’s Revenge. The Papakura zines collate Reeves’ own psychogeographical photography with poetry and art by those in his entourage including Niall McDevitt, Stephen Micalef, and Aidan Dun, to name a few especially Blakean contributors. Based in London’s East End, Reeves continues to publish experimental work of many kinds. Entropy creations fuse poetry, photography, and other artworks in multimedia books and zines that flicker with wide-eyed visions of a sometimes menacing, sometimes miraculous metropolis.

Reeves is also involved in a group called the Blake Bloc, an activist collective who march under a Blakean banner. The banner was designed by Matthew Couper and features imagery drawn from Blake’s illuminations, a portrait of Blake, and the slogan ‘Opposition is true friendship,’ excerpted from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Adopting Blake as a poster-boy for radical protest in the spirit of ‘60s counterculture, the Blake Bloc have participated in anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations, and in recent demonstrations at Tate Britain over staff cuts.

The group also overlaps with the William Blake Congregation, recently joining in celebrations on Blake’s ‘death day’ on 12 August 2020 to commemorate the occasion. The gathering at Bunhill Fields, the site of Blake and Catherine’s burial, doubled as the first World Anti Fascism Poetry Day, marking the events of 12 August 1952 (The Night of the Murdered Poets), when thirteen Soviet Jewish poets were executed in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow under false charges of espionage and treason against the Soviet Union.

In the interview, which you can read in full below, Reeves took us on a jaunt through his fascinating experiences with independent and ‘underground’ publishing. From student agit prop in ‘80s Auckland to poetry and photography zines in digital-age London, Reeves’ stories are alive with the spirit of Blake and with the radical zeal of so many independent publishing ventures to this day.

Highlights from the interview include Reeves’ stories about running photocopiers to the ground to churn out copies of Situationist Times issues during his student days, and ironing out crumpled poems from the pockets of his friend, the prolific poet Stephen Micalef. Reeves also spoke of the ‘resonance’ of William Blake in a present-day context:

People really personalise Blake, and people tend to be very very passionate about Blake, and kind of overly protective. And he is like Mr Archetypal Counterculture, so you can trace him through all sorts of movements—obviously Allen Ginsberg, and I think he’s on Sargeant Pepper, and all sorts of things… So he’s a really resonant figure. He’s almost like an icon to latch onto, especially these days when neoliberalism has sort of flattened everything and monetised everything. To have this sort of beacon to reach out to, I think, is incredibly inspirational. I think it’s something that people can form around in all sorts of different ways.

In Reeves’ work, Blake is there as an ‘icon’ of many things—self-publishing, experimentalism, protest, anarchism—and his comments push out into the wider ways in which Blake has been fragmented and reworked throughout an afterlife far more illustrious than his actual life.

 

Links

More about Max: https://maxreeves.com/.

To find out more about Entropy Press, visit their website: https://www.entropypress.co.uk/.

Other things mentioned in the interview:

See Niall McDevitt’s blog: https://poetopography.wordpress.com/author/niallmcdevitt/. Niall’s work is frequently published by New River Press: http://www.thenewriverpress.com/.

For Stephen Micalef, Helen Elwes, and The William Blake Congregation, see https://williamblakecongregation.wordpress.com/the-william-blake-congregation/.

 

The Interview

 

Launching straight in, we started off talking about the 2019/20 Blake show at Tate, for which the tagline was ‘Rebel Radical Revolutionary.’

Max Reeves: I was sort of saying to the curator, you know, what’s so ‘radical,’ ‘revolutionary’ about it—it doesn’t bear any particular relation to the exhibition, it’s just branding. That’s the thing about Blake: why are the establishment so keen to colonise Blake? He is the archetypal countercultural figure, he’s the archetypal outsider. These are the kind of people who hated Blake, but there you go, therein lies the rub, I guess.

Caroline Ritchie: I came to Blake’s ‘birthday party’ celebration at Tate Britain in 2019—I think you were involved in that?

MR: Stephen Micalef and Helen Elwes, they run the William Blake Congregation, which is for living Blake people. They live the life, they don’t just quote the quote. They’ve been doing that for twenty odd years, every time, every Blake birthday, which again ties into psychogeography and all that. In the Blake room at Tate Britain, they’ll have a sort of live performance celebration, and it’s kind of been more or less tolerated by Tate. Actually at the last one, which happened during the exhibition, so we couldn’t actually go into the room—well, there wasn’t any Blake in the room—I managed to basically get the Tate to agree to have an after-hours walk-through for the Congregation or whoever wanted to come. It was a two-hour walk through the exhibition. It’s kind of become semi-official now, it’s part of the agenda of Tate now, which is quite nice, and interesting as well. We didn’t put it on Facebook, it was sort of word-of-mouth.

CR: I’d also like to know a bit more about Entropy Press. Could you tell me about how that came to be?

MR: Basically, I went to university in Auckland—Auckland University—where I became involved in this anarchist group called the Pleasure Party that used to put on gigs—there was a big underground music scene at the time. We used to put on gigs for all our friends who were all in bands at the university venue. The guy that ran it—this guy called Simon Coffey (aka Saint Simon) —he also made a magazine called Catalyst. I was doing a literary magazine thing called Catacomb with one of my friends called Joanna Larkin. In those days everything was xeroxed. So you’d cut and paste and glue things and then go back to the xerox machine and reduce it by 5% to fit it in and all that.

CR: Very old school.

MR: Yeah, so then through this network, and one of my friends who was in my little group—a guy called Ian Collins. Basically there was this guy who wasn’t a student, but you know back in the ‘80s, back in those days it was free to go to university, so university was like a place for people to hang out, you had these people who were ‘professional students,’ some guys that had been enrolling in the same courses for twenty years just to hang out and do stuff and join the clubs and all that, it was much more of a cultural thing. There was this guy who was about twenty years older than us called Bruce Grenville, and he ran a printing press—he had a Heidelberg electric pattern press, so we’re talking all linotype and type and ink… We kind of got to know him and he had this table-top press called an Adana, it’s about A4 sized, and you’d print each page individually. So me and this guy Ian, basically we bought one of those. He had a room in the basement of I think it was the Human Sciences building or something. We used to go there and do all sorts of stuff, you know, print stickers for all our friends who were in bands, sticker the city with bands. I remember there was this really annoying group called Youth for Christ who were just everywhere trying to convert people and pushing a very conservative social agenda, so we made a false Satanic group called Youth for Antichrist and printed these Satanic tracts and just plastered them all over town, which of course was just me and Ian, but they freaked out and spent lots of money on a counter campaign. So it was sort of a little bit agit prop, a little bit doing things for our mates—you know, printing letterhead. But also we used to make books and bootleg books. So the Situationist Times—I don’t know if you ever encountered that, by Larry Law—these little A6 books. We’d print covers and we’d xerox the insides.

In those days you had photocopier salespeople: they’d give you a photocopier on trial and you’d pretend you were interested, so Bruce would get a photocopier dropped off like on Friday afternoon at someone’s flat and then just run it to the ground—we’d have a solid 24-hour Friday to Monday morning kind of party where people would have shifts, and whatever anyone needed photocopying, they’d photocopy. So we’d buy tons and tons of paper and toner. And the poor salesman would show up on Monday morning and the thing would just be having a nervous breakdown and falling to pieces. So we’d photocopy the inside of the books and guillotine them to size, and then we’d print the covers. So we did all the Situationist books—bear in mind this was the ‘80s and New Zealand was way out alone in the middle of the Pacific and overseas books were not that easy to get.

CR: Did you then distribute them around the university mainly?

MR: Yeah, we’d give them to our friends or we’d put posters up. We had PO boxes. Also we were sort of illegally living in the inner city in office spaces and things like that, because in those days the inner city was kind of empty. So we’d set up sort of temporary galleries and all sorts of stuff. I remember Ian printed Principia Discordia as well, things like that, underground things that are sort of ten-a-penny now but were in those days actually quite difficult to get. Bruce Grenville, besides being an anarchist and a printer, was also an Egyptologist and philatelist, so he actually invented his own country and managed to get UN recognition by Belgium and some American company gave him thousands of dollars for exclusive rights to print the stamps, so he made a sort of strange empire. There was all sorts of weird stuff going on like that, so printing stamps and just whatever took our fancy. I remember making a book called ‘The Proverbs of Amenemope,’ who was an Egyptian prophet. There’s a book in the Bible—‘Proverbs’—kind of ripped off this Egyptian so we printed the original as another swipe at Youth for Christ. Challenging the hegemony so to speak. So we were sort of doing that, and we had our little hand press, which we could carry around easily, because we’d move from flat to flat or whatever. I ended up getting a Victorian treadle press which I gave to a friend of mine. So that was that—that was all in Auckland.

The other thing was that in New Zealand—you know ISBN numbers?—in Auckland you just wrote off to the central library and they just posted you, for free pages and pages and pages of ISBN numbers. So everything was ‘official’ because we could chuck an ISBN number on it and it would go to the archive and stuff. And it got logged in perpetuity in the National Library. We used to print badges as well, used to get a bit of money by printing badges. We were sort of existing on nothing—we were all really poor students eating Hari Krishna food and stuff. I remember Tuesdays were Art Openings Day and in those days most of the gallerys laid on food at openings so we’d had a nice art dinner. We had a sideline in homebrew as well, which we’d sell to all the underage punk rockers. So we’d print the beer labels and just stuff like that. So anyway, I left Auckland in 1990, and kind of left everything behind, and basically moved to London. I’ve stayed here ever since.

CR: What brought you to London?

MR: Oh, just Auckland—especially in those days—seemed super authoritarian. Very conservative and seemed tiny. I thought it was really boring. In hindsight, with our little counterculture movement going on, it was pretty exciting, but at the time it just seemed like the arse-end of the planet… which it kind of is—and authoritarian, which kind of ties in with Blake. It was a very different world back then. People who dressed diferently, thought differently, were not just expressing their individuality but seemed to be challenging society itself. Which I guess many of us were. Classic small town stuff. You’d almost risk getting beaten up for not wearing an All Blacks jersey, (well not really but you know what I mean) if you walked into a bank or somewhere like that some people would just look at you like you were just not welcome… not that there were any pubs, but you wouldn’t get let into any pubs because you were looking too scruffy and all this. It just seemed like a sort of authoritarian nightmare. And of course, you just want to see the world. And everything seemed to be happening in London.

Basically, then I just started doing other stuff, photography and dark room sort of stuff. Then everything was kind of on a hiatus, I guess. And then I went from black-and-white analog to digital, photography-wise. So then I found myself with digital photos. I still very much like printed matter, I don’t particularly like websites as a platform to present photography and that, they’re okay obviously, but there’s nothing quite like a thing in your hand, a book. Then I was in this housing co-op called Phoenix and we had the idea to make a little annual zine thing. Obviously I used to do a zine at university about literature and poetry and whatever. And then I thought yeah, let’s do a zine. And it just so happened that one of the guys in the co-op worked at a bank—a socialist guy. He basically did his own projects on the side. And then I thought, oh I’ve got these ISBNs, even though it’s a different country, chuck an ISBN on it I got enough of them why not? So we did this one-off zine for the housing co-op and I met the printer and to cut a long story short I thought, I’ll do another zine, why not. It was very cheap printing, I just used to chuck him twenty quid or so for beer. And so then I started the Papakura Post Office, which was supposed to be a collaboration of all my different friends, doing things, and ended up being mostly my photography, because it’s a pain to chase people all the time, and if you can just do it yourself, you just do it. The idea was to have this outlet for our London-based bunch of people.

CR: Where does that name come from—Papakura Post Office?

MR: The city where I’m from, which has now actually been swallowed up by greater Auckland, was called Papakura, in the south. And there was some graffiti we saw when we were teenagers during the punk era. There was one band called Papakura Post Office and I don’t even know if they existed as a band but they just spray painted—they had a graffiti campaign which I really enjoyed. And of course when you’re sort of isolated in a cultural outpost, post office—tying into this philately thing and fictitious states, there’s a network of fictitious states. So for example I used to correspond with this Native American guy who has his own state on a houseboat in Seattle. His name was Dogfish and his girlfriend was Dragonfly—we used to send them stamps, and they used to send us stamps, and so the post office was a way of reaching out and communicating and keeping a sort of underground network. It just seemed like a funny name and it sort of alliterated, so…

CR: So some of the work was contributed by other people who you were friends with?

MR: I had all these networks from various places. There was a network of poets from this pub—there’s an old bank turned into a pub venue—called the Foundry in Shoreditch, and there was this open microphone poetry evening called Wormworld, which is where I met Niall McDevitt. And then Phoenix, and there was this magazine called Mute, which had this cultural milieu and scene around it. And just the squatting scene and Tony’s Café and Broadway Market when that was a squatted concern and all those things. And New Zealand connections—lots of New Zealanders came over and squatted in Peckham in the 90s and, some I knew from Uni and Ilam (Auckland’s Art School) you know, just people that you pick up, I guess a sort of underground network or something, sort of non-mainstream.

CR: I noticed that there are a few of those pamphlets—the Papakura Post Office ones—that have Blake stuff in them. Was that when you started getting into Blake, or had that been there earlier?

MR: I grew up in the suburbs. I used to go to the local library and peruse the Encyclopaedia Britannica and later my parents bought an old set of World Books Encyclopaedia, I think it was called. I wanted to educate myself, so I think probably I knew of Van Gogh or something, so you’d go to Van Gogh and then read that, and then in the footnotes would be ‘see Byron’ or something, so you’d go to Byron, and eventually everything seemed to lead to Blake. So it was in my consciousness. Also, I lived in the East End and my kids went to a school just off the Barbican, so basically I’d end up going through Bunhill Fields to drop them off and pick them up. For the best part of twenty years I’d be walking past Blake’s grave, strangely. So Blake’s always been there even if he seemed difficult and strange, and meeting people that I got on with, people like Micalef and Niall… Most of what I know about Blake I get filtered through these proper experts who live and breathe Blake. Niall’s walks, endless nights in the pub… Me and Niall and Anthony from Mute started this thing called the Wetherspoons Underground Sykogeosophy club. We’d do a series of walks.

CR: Did you say psychogeosophy? Or psychogeography? What do you mean by this term?

MR: Sykogeosophy. My son Marlowe, when he was about three or four, invented this thing called SykoGeosofy, and then forgot what it was. I like to keep it as a vague, slightly brainy sounding thing. So we’d follow the underground rivers and Niall would come on the walks and different people would come on the walks, like my friend Glen, who was in Class War, for example, he’d know a lot of political stuff, and he’s also a gardener, so he’s bring a lot of facts about the flora on the way, following the underground rivers. Niall, likewise, was a poetry expert, so that the walks took on a very poetic aspect. And Niall’s actually got his own thing going on called ‘Poetopography’.

CR: Are Niall McDevitt and Steve Micalef your main Blakean comrades?

MR: Yeah, I guess so. They’re both poets who live and breathe the spirit of Blake. There’s another friend of mine, Robin, who is peripheral to the Blake Society as well, I think he’s still a member, but kind of an outside member. He used to be the caretaker, I think, of Bunhill Fields. He’s very much a Blakean and he was looking after that, and he used to run events at Shoreditch Church—a lot of theatre, but I remember they’ve done things like a reading from beginning to end of Jerusalem, which I think was like nine hours long. There were about twenty people there all taking different parts and reading it out loud.

CR: Have you had much to do with the Blake Society? Have you joined in their events and such, or not so much?

MR: No, I’m not particularly interested. You know about Blake’s birthday at Tate Britain; every Deathday the Congregation have done an event on his grave—have a picnic—and poetry readings and stuff. And last year—or whenever it was, the year before—it coincided with the unveiling of this plaque, so it was this weird truce between the Blake Society and the Congregation and we had started this thing called Blake Bloc, which is supposed to be like a pretend paramilitary wing of the Congregation. So we had our banner up and the Society were there, and it was a perfect example of what Blake’s about—you had this awful public school choir doing the worst version of Jerusalem I ever heard, and then you had this sort of right-wing nationalist ‘comic’ doing some spiel, on the other hand you had Micalef talking about punk and Blake… and then you had Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, who’s a complete Blakean as well. He did a fantastic story about when he was a rockstar in some hotel crawling about on his hands and knees with his hair all down, naked, and then looking in the mirror and having a vision of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar. So that kind of illuminated the contradictions that Blake is. I guess what I’m about, and sort of what we’re all about, is sort of claiming Blake—although I mean who knows what Blake would’ve thought, we can’t speak for him—but claiming him for the counterculture, for what he was, which was a political radical, a religious visionary, a proto-anarchist actually. In fact, I’ve got a book in front of me by Peter Marshall [Max showed Marshall’s William Blake: Visionary Anarchist]. I think the nadir for me was Tracy Emin coupling herself with Blake at Tate Liverpool… Who the hell allowed that! That’s very un-okay.

CR: Are you still making books at the moment?

MR: Yeah, so I did the Papakura Post Office books—I think there’s about eight of them—the last two just ended up being showcases for my photography, so I thought it was getting boring. I was still using the New Zealand ISBN. This is kind of personal, but for me, for my photography, I’ve always wanted to make books, to make kind of coherent statements. But it’s always been impossible to get published unless, you know, whatever—I’ve always found it difficult. So basically, the price of online printing used to be very astronomical through things like Blurb, and then it kind of came down into a vaguely affordable realm. So then I thought, okay, I’ve got this press, I may as well start making my own photo books, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. So then I thought, okay, I’d better get some UK ISBNs, only to find out that instead of being like millions for free, they’re like 80 quid each, or 150 quid for ten. So I bit the bullet and bought ten of them, and started slowly experimenting and trying to figure out how to make photo books.

And then Steve Micalef, he’s really really interesting. He’s very much from a punk rock background—DIY—in fact, if you ever meet him, he’s got pockets full of poems. Which is a nightmare—me and Helen are kind of ironing out his poems so we can scan them. So yeah, apart from my photo books, I thought, god, Micalef’s never been published, this is insane. So with this online thing that’s super cheap, you can print it. Because he’s always essentially broke himself—he’s never had a job other than being a poet—i.e. he’s never been monetised as such. So we found a really cheap way of printing his poetry, so we’ve done two now. He was the editor of this really seminal punk zine called Sniffin’ Glue—he was one of the editors for a while. So we did a book on his punk years. He interviewed all the punk bands—was probably the first person to interview tons of these people. We did a book of his poems on that, and then we did a book of his poems on Felpham. We’re currently supposed to be doing one on Soho. I’d like to publish tons and tons of his books, because he’s really worthwhile. So that’s how it is now. I think we’ve made five or six of my photography books, then two of Micalef’s. I’m using the lockdown to try to make more…

People really personalise Blake, and people tend to be very very passionate about Blake, and kind of overly protective. And he is like Mr Archetypal Counterculture, so you can trace him through all sorts of movements—obviously Allen Ginsberg, and I think he’s on Sargeant Pepper, and all sorts of things… So he’s a really resonant figure. He’s almost like an icon to latch onto, especially these days when neoliberalism has sort of flattened everything and monetised everything. To have this sort of beacon to reach out to I think is incredibly inspirational, I think it’s something that people can form around in all sorts of different ways.

CR: Do you get the feeling that that’s been sort of reawakened more recently, or has it always been there while you’ve been working?

MR: I think it’s always been there. It’s just maybe harder to see. I don’t know how old you are, but obviously we’ve gone from a very dichotomised world where there’s been the establishment, the mainstream, and the underground, whereas now everything’s been so… This is kind of irrelevant, but South of Auckland, somewhere near Huntley, there was this Dutch guy that made a little cheese home factory thing, next to the Waikato River. It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from Papakura, so I used to go on these drives down to buy some Gouda. The last time I went, which was ten years ago, I couldn’t find the place. They’d built this entire motorway system. It’s actually funny, they wanted to steamroll through things but the local Maori claimed that there was a Taniwha in the water that needed protecting—I think it’s the first time that a river’s been protected from a mythological creature. It’s a fantastic story. Anyway, I was driving ‘round, thinking, god, it’s gone, after all these years. I think I went online and phoned them up and they said, no no, we’re here. So I found them eventually and I said, I’m sure you guys were over there—have you just moved? And they said, no no, we’ve always been here, everything else has been landscaped around us. So they’ve always been here doing their thing, making cheese, it’s just the entire environment has changed. And I think that’s kind of the same: it’s easy to overlook, and you have to look for it, but it’s never left.