Oxley, William
OXLEY, William
Nationality: British. Born: Manchester, Lancashire, 29 April 1939. Education: College of Commerce, Manchester; qualified as Chartered Accountant. Family: Married Patricia Holmes in 1963; two daughters. Career: Office boy, Salford, Lancashire, 1955–57; articled clerk, Manchester, 1957–64; chartered accountant, Deloitte and Company, London, 1964–68, and Lazard Brothers, London, 1968–76. Since 1976 freelance writer; editor or co-editor, New Headland, 1969–74, Laissez Faire, 1971–75, Orbis, 1972–74, Littack, 1972–76, Village Review, 1973–74, Poetry Newsletter, 1976–78, Littack Supplement, 1976–80, and Lapis Lazuli, 1977–78; assistant editor, Acumen, 1984–94; founder, Long Poem Group. Member: Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1982–83, General Council of Poetry Society of Great Britain, 1990–92. Address: 6 The Mount, Furzeham, Brixham, South Devon TQ5 8QY, England.
Publications
Poetry
The Dark Structures. London, Mitre Press, 1967.
New Workings. Privately printed, 1969.
Passages from Time: Poems from a Life. Epping, Essex, Ember Press, 1971.
The Icon Poems. Epping, Essex, Ember Press, 1972.
Opera Vetera. Privately printed, 1973.
Mirrors of the Sea. London, Quarto Press, 1973.
Fightings (as Jason Hardy). Epping, Essex, Ember Press, 1974.
Eve Free. Knotting, Bedforshire, Sceptre Press, 1975.
The Mundane Shell. Egglescliffe, Cleveland, Uldale House, 1975.
Superficies. Breakish, Isle of Skye, Aquila, 1976.
Wind. Leicester, Cog Press, 1976.
The Exile. Egglescliffe, Cleveland, Uldale House, 1979.
The Notebook of Hephaestus and Other Poems. Kinross, Lomond Press, 1981.
The Vitalist Reader: A Selection of the Poetry of Anthony L. Johnson, William Oxley, and Peter Russell, edited by James Hogg. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1982.
A Map of Time. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1984.
The Triviad and Other Satires. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1984.
The Mansands Trilogy. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1988.
Mad Tom on Tower Hill. Exeter, Stride, 1989.
Forest Sequence. Bath, Mammon Press, 1991.
The Patient Reconstruction of Paradise. Brixham, Devon, Acumen Publications, 1991.
The Playboy. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1992.
In the Drift of Words. Ware, Rockingham Press, 1992.
Cardboard Troy. Exeter, Stride, 1993.
The Hallsands' Tragedy. Plymouth, Westwords, 1993.
Collected Longer Poems. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1994.
The Green Crayon Man. Ware, Rockingham Press, 1997.
Other
Sixteen Days in Autumn (travel). Privately printed, 1972.
Three in Campagna. Privately printed, 1973.
Synopthegms of a Prophet. Brixham, Devon, Ember Press, 1981.
The Idea and Its Imminence. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1982.
Of Human Consciousness. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1982.
The Cauldron of Inspiration. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1983.
The Inner Tapestry. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1985.
On Poets and Poetry: Letters Between a Father and Son, with Harry Oxley, edited by Patricia Oxley. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1988.
Distinguishing Poetry, edited by Glyn Pursglove. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1989.
Three Plays. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1996.
No Accounting for Paradise. Ware, Rockingham Press, 1997.
Editor, Completing the Picture: Exiles, Outsiders & Independents. Exeter, Devon, Stride, 1995.
Translator, Poems of a Black Orpheus, by Léopold S. Senghor. London, Menard Press, 1981.
Translator, Ndesse, by Léopold S. Senghor. London, Menard Press, 1981.
Translator, She Chases Me Relentlessly, by Léopold S. Senghor. London, Menard Press, 1986.
*Bibliography: William Oxley: A Bibliography by James Hogg, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1984; William Oxley: A Bibliography by Wolfgang Görtschacher, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1992.
Critical Studies: "Poet in Profile: William Oxley" by Mike Shields, in The Writer (Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire), April 1975; "Littack: On the Attack" by Derek Stanford, in The Statesman (Karachi), 12 and 19 April 1975; "Through Littack to Vitalism" by V. Fenech, in Bulletin and Times of Malta, 1976; William Oxley: A Survey of His Poetry and Philosophy by P.H., Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1984; The Vitalist Seminar, and Vitalism and Celebration, both edited by James Hogg, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1984, 1987; "William Oxley: Retrospective," in Poets Voice (Bath), 3(3), 1987; The Role of Nature in William Oxley's Poetry by Eva Mörwald, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1989; Outsiders: William Oxley, II edited by James Hogg and Holger Klein, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1992; A Glass of New Made Wine: Testschrift for Willim Oxley edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Glyn Pursglove, Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1999.
William Oxley comments:
Toward the end of the 1960s I began to take an active interest in contemporary poetry. I found it a time of great confusion and in retrospect can see that much of that confusion rubbed off on me. I was most pained not just by the apparent absence of standards but also by the very real attack on all standards that was everywhere being made. Against this I reacted strongly while, at the same time, endeavoring a rational analysis of the situation as far as it affected the current poetry scene. Naturally, in such chaotic circumstances my reaction, insofar as it took printed form, tended to be something of an overreaction as well as philosophically confusing in itself.
For some time, as a consequence of my analysis of the then poetry scene, I had one basic aim, which was to contribute something toward bringing about a change in the prevailing climate of poetry and poetics in the United Kingdom: a movement away from what I considered to be the dry academic poetry on offer in certain more conservative quarters and away from the formless morass of undisciplined experimentalism and gimmickry on offer in more populist and radical quarters. Toward this end the magazine Littack was founded in 1972 with the aim of working out in open forum a new poetics. A more vital poetry was sought by a number of poets who have since become loosely known at the vitalist poets.
In 1976 Littack was replaced by the Littack Supplement, which endeavored to concentrate upon widening the definition of a vitalist poetry through a less polemical and more thoughtful series of editorials as well as by the careful reviewing of a wide range of poetry books and pamphlets. Also, to emphasize the importance of freeing poetry from its chains of prose literalness and formlessness, I sought to encourage in the Littack Supplement the printing of poems that inclined toward imaginative and symbolic values couched in lyrical, or at least rhythmical, forms, rather than either the purely literal and superficial descriptions of experience or the pseudoinnovatory poetry that, by and large, still predominated.
Even with the passing of the Littack Supplement in 1980, my hope remains the same: to see the revitalization of the true tradition of poetry, which works through a multidimensional and analogical use of language rather than by a one-dimensional prose discourse, giving a poetry of sufficient breadth of concern as to be variously described as "a poetry of the whole mind" and "a poetry of cosmic concern." It is a hope that I have observed slowly but surely being realized in several quarters over the last few years.
One question, however, continues to rear its head, despite the half decade that has elapsed since the cessation of the whole Littack venture, and that is as to the exact nature of a vitalist poem. Most of all has this arisen because of the mistaken assumption made by several critics that a vitalist poem must always be characterized by aggressivity and strong language. This is not so. For while it is true to say that the inner integrity of any poem depends upon its possessing a certain vitality, like an electric circuit, and while some poems, like some human beings, may be said to possess more vitality than others, the tone and voice of the poet, even his verbal gestures, do not determine that vitality. What determines the vitality of a poem is the particular conjunction of feeling and thought. If feeling and thought are successfully married in a given verbal pattern, which pattern they largely determine, then the whole will possess a certain vitality, a vitality that, in turn, reflects the natural vitality of whatever is the poem's particular subject. But neither an active disposition, nor a reflective disposition, nor a strong nor a weak personality on the part of the poet guarantees vitality to any particular poem. For as Keats rightly observed, the "negative capability" of the poet is the most crucial factor of all in poetic creativity. It is the life-giving or life-imparting gift of the poet. It does not matter whether a poem be classified as personal or public, epic or sonnet, cooked or raw—or any way other described—a poem must develop a life of its own, generate its own vitality, in order to live. So any good poem—no matter what its tone, mood, or subject—is a vitalist poem. Finally, it is my own view that a certain philosophical blood transfusion is needed from time to time for good poetry to be written, and for this reason I hold that a truly vitalist poem says something of significance about the human condition.
(1995) Although, as I have suggested, there is a greater awareness now than twenty years ago of the forces inimical to the creation of the sort of genuine poetry fit to take its place in the traditional canon, the state of the art remains highly problematic. With the advance of technology and its implicit belief that anything can be made and any skill taught, through creative writing programs in the United States and the proliferation of writing workshops in the United Kingdom there is now the additional complication of the plethora of poetry "experts" and the creation of the "designer poet." So that, while the willful obscurantism and meaningless experimentalism of the sixties avant-gardism has been largely marginalized in English poetry, it has now been replaced by a technically correct product of trivial import whose prose like, streetwise tone and message, characterized by academic cleverness, dominates the marketplace. As a result, real poetry of feeling and intelligence is all too often obscured, a situation that, in addition, has led to critical appreciation becoming, in Britain at least, more and more media led. In essence, today in poetry there is an ever increasing tendency for cleverness and glitter to replace seriousness.
* * *William Oxley has been publishing poetry since 1967 and began writing seriously some three years before that. His earliest poems, with a few exceptions, are heavily influenced by early modernism, by the example of Eliot and Pound. Yet Oxley never appears fully at home in this idiom, for all the undoubted competence of a number of the poems. His own sense of this is apparent in the "Apologia" to his Opera Vetera, a selection of poems written between 1964 and 1969. There he writes that "during the latter half of 1972 I called a halt deliberately to what has since 1964/65 been a very prolific period of versifying. In short, I vowed poetic celibacy. I did this because I felt I was simply not developing poetically in any consistent way; indeed, I wasn't even sure if I was developing at all." The period of "celibacy" was the beginning of a conscious redirecting of his poetical activity, the beginning of a new kind of commitment.
This commitment has found expression in a number of ways. Oxley has produced some prose works remarkable for their independence and honest thoroughness of thought and for what they betoken of a determination to analyze the very bases of creative activity as perceived and experienced by the poet himself. Of Human Consciousness and The Idea and Its Imminence are philosophical works that are, in the best and highest sense, the work of an amateur; they are, that is to say, the product of love, and they are free of the debilitations of fashionable philosophical jargon. In the same way The Cauldron of Inspiration, though it has unmistakable weaknesses, constitutes an exciting and perceptive account of poetry and its importance that would be well beyond most academic critics. This far-reaching reflection upon the fundamentals of his thought and his craft was accompanied by his campaigning editorship of Littack. There he elucidated his concept of "vitalist" poetry, gave an analysis of the limitations of much contemporary verse, and attempted to indicate some possible ways forward.
In terms of Oxley's own poetry, all of this activity has borne fruit in a quantity of work radically different from, and superior to, his earlier writing. He has, with some courage, pursued the creation of an appropriate idiom for a kind of philosophical and discursive poetry that has long been out of fashion. A series of long poems—e.g., TheExile, The Mundane Shell, "The Rose on the Tree of Time," A Map of Time—have tackled very large ideas in forms and manners of great interest and individuality. The best of these are gathered together, in whole or selection, in the Collected Longer Poems. Many of them are works of intelligence and beauty, and they deserve to be better known. Given the prevailing poetic climate, they might be termed experimental poems, and, like most experiments, they have their moments of failure. Taken as a whole, however, they constitute a valuable extension and development of the tradition represented by the longer poems of MacDiarmid and Russell in their fusion of lyrical, narrative, and discursive idioms.
A Map of Time is the most sustained of these poems, approaching the epic in both length and aspiration. It is a subjective epic, its focus the developing consciousness of the poet, its patterns of conflict and discovery centered upon the attempt to trace the contours of an inner world. The loss of paradise and the possibility of its being regained are at the heart of the poem's complex structure of variation and allusion. Within, and part of, that structure of argument are passages of considerable beauty, nowhere more so than in "Hymn," in praise to the sea, which begins as follows:
But in hymn of waters I now praise
The high blue spirit here at turn of tide:
Among the shakeless shiftless rocks of red
The sun downpours upon this secret shapéd bay.
O what essential glimpsed fragments!
In torn and twisted beauty of the waves
That roll forever countless into me...
The streaks of subtle rust on sable stone
The stakes of leathered weathered wood
The pleached grief of almost human shape
Or girl-smooth cheek of powdered slate
And the burnt and withered necklaces of weed
That lie among the fireworks of the spray.
The apprehension of sensual beauty and the note of veneration are both very much in character. Elsewhere, The Playboy, with overtones of the political thriller, is nearer to a verse novel than to an epic. Its exploration of materialism's implications, its witty dialogue, and its perceptive sketches of character make it as readable as it is thought provoking.
At their best Oxley's shorter poems display a powerful visionary lyricism. This is vividly the case in his love lyrics (e.g., the series "To Lily," "Lily Inviolate," and "My Lily") and in his intense poems of place and landscape (e.g., "The Lane," "Green Lanes," "Wheat," "Paradise," and The Mansands Trilogy), which make articulate the poet's intimations of eternity. Consider, for example, "That Other Land" from The Mansands Trilogy:
The dandelion clock clouds
of a different heaven
seas of which this sea
is but a small mercurial lake
and trees of which these tree
are but sullen gauzy tufts
on windswept hills
of all-too-shadowy seasons,
are what we seek
through all our dismayed lives.
Nature in all its grandeur
and minute, insect-threaded marvel,
is but a broad hint
of what's beyond:
hinterland of the mind
and paradise where all souls dwell.
Oxley's apprehension of the paradisal is located within a highly specific sense of the "mean temporality" of much that is most characteristic of modern society and a similarly keen sense of human mortality. The collection of short poems In the Drift of Words contains a number of works set in graveyards and others that contemplate the deaths of specific individuals. All, however, find in the trappings of death a paradoxically vivid affirmation of life. The infectious fun of other poems (e.g., "Poem Written at Dannie Abse's Desk" and "To Elizabeth") testifies to an exhilarating engagement with the world.
An occasional stridency of tone has sometimes marred Oxley's writing, most often in his satirical poems, both in epigram and in mock-heroic (e.g., The Triviad), distracting attention from the precise judgment and acute intelligence at work. In the best of his poems (e.g., "Lucy & Her Colonel", first published in Encounter in January 1989 and collected in In the Drift of Words) there is a striking balance of passion and stillness expressed in language of impressive composure. Oxley's range of style and subject is very wide, and his best work is marked by poetic intelligence and metaphysical understanding.
—Glyn Pursglove