No. 141 The Trusty Servant at Cambridge, and the magazine at this time frequently published articles and poems by OWs.
But when I read the following excerpt from an interview on portobellobookblog. com, I knew I had found my man:
‘ What inspired you to start writing?
The Beat Poets and some older boys at boarding school who invited me to read rule-breaking poems at dawn with vodka and Gauloises.’
Bingo!
The next paragraph was even more extraordinary – and exciting:
‘ I first published myself in a little magazine in 1966. I got contributions from Stevie Smith, R. S. Thomas and John Betjeman … Through the magazine, and readings I organised in Winchester in the‘ 60s, I met a number of avantgarde poets.’
Enter Andrew Sclater of Hopper’ s, 1962-67, who amazingly not only answered my first tentative email – despite, as he said, having always stood for‘ Down With Skool / Society / Snobbery and“ Superiors”’ – but then regaled me with anecdotes – repeatable and unrepeatable – about his entirely unconventional time at Winchester.
It turned out that he had met Brian Patten in the house of a Winchesterbased poet, Pat Waites,‘ or through Horovitz’, he adds.‘ Many aspects of those heady years are and were deliciously hazy.’ Poetry at that time, he told me, had become a hip product; the Mersey poets were the English Beat poets, and Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown had become poetry entrepreneurs, running readings as if they were music gigs all over the country. AAS met them in Winchester, and after hearing them read at the School of Art, somehow managed to persuade the College to invite them to read in School.
As Andrew Sclater described it, normal social categories were being questioned, and replaced by a new, freer outlook on life, dictated partly by generation, but not exclusively( see Stevie Smith, later): poetry itself was both a catalyst and a product of this new atmosphere. The 60s youth poetry constituency had strong overlaps with the folk and jazz scenes, which( via the blues) then connected the young poets with progressive areas of the pop scene.
Rather intimidated by the thought of this explosion of unconventionality, I was heartened that it was an English don at the school, Gordon Pirie( CoRo, 63-84) who started AAS’ s lifelong passion for poetry: a‘ very sympathetic man’ who gave his class William Carlos Williams’ famous imagist poem‘ The Red Wheelbarrow’:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
You can see Williams’ influence in many of the poems in the 1966 Caliban, in fact, not least in Sclater’ s own‘ FLORRIE – I HAVE MUCH’, Richard
Coates’( G, 64-68) poem‘ Ode to a Victorian monument – not Papa’ and an untitled poem by the mysterious David Gleave, of whom I can find no trace in The Register( the Baronetage for Old Wykehamists), which begins:
‘ in a lonely siding
two coal wagons making love in the shadows’
The source of Brian Patten’ s poem, the famous‘ Little Johnny’ s Confession’, may have been Patten’ s undercover magazine, Underdog – No. 8, printed some time in 1966, contained the poem – but he also performed it at a poetry reading in School,( I can’ t find the exact date, alas), alongside, remarkably, Stevie Smith –‘ in canary yellow stockings’, AAS remembers.
Potent evidence( she was 64 at the time) that the new poetry was not just a young man’ s game, she frequently read on stage alongside the new generation in events organized by Horovitz, including at the Albert Hall; though was less enamoured, she told Sclater’ s mother( during an almost unimaginable Hampshire country weekend visit recounted by Sclater in Gerry Cambridge’ s magazine The Dark Horse( Late Spring / Summer 2016)) of their youthful tendency to show up overpowered by beer. She visited Winchester again, and became a‘ special friend and mentor’ to Sclater.
More apparently conventional poets of the time also responded to the unselfconscious enthusiasm of Sclater. That enthusiasm gave rise to Bollard, the magazine to which he refers in the interview above( sadly now lost to the archives – if you have a copy to spare, please contact Suzanne Foster!), which was produced in 1966 as competition
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