No. 141 JUNE 2026
‘ lyric, love and loosened logic’: poetry at Winchester in the sixties
The Editor, Lucia Quinault( CoRo, 99-), uncovers the story of an extraordinary creative symbiosis in Sixties Winchester:
Stephen Bann( Coll, 55-60) recently lent me a cache of literary magazines from the late fifties and the sixties: The March Hare; Three Short Legs; seven copies of Ariel; three of Caliban. I’ m still trying to realise the cornucopia of evidence of life and letters that these volumes provide – the Gieves advertisements alone are worthy of a dissertation – but my attention was particularly caught by the edition of Caliban which came out in June 1966.
How on earth had a bunch of public schoolboys managed to get permission to put a Brian Patten poem in their private, insular journal, when Patten was still only nineteen, and not yet formally published?
My first impulse was to go straight to the source and ask Patten himself, but though I left a message on his website( the only way of contacting him) he very sadly died in September 2025, and my shortlived enquiry was stymied.
From Caliban, June 1966:‘ The inscription on the organ-loft of the parish church of Steinhausen in Swabia testifies to the fact that the church is the work of‘ Dominikus Zimmerman, architect: et stuccator.’ This supreme Rococo architect was both constructor and decorator, creating internal space and then setting it alive by the subtle deployment of surface detail.
The structure of this poem derives from the rigorous repetition of the letters of his name. Within the overall square, the space is enlivened by the varying textures of the letters which mass together and separate. The diagonal bands divide the two words into their components, and so provide a hidden meaning within the overall context. Zimmer / mann( room / man) represents the secular purpose of architecture. Immer / mann / domini( ever / man / of the lord) suggests the spiritual vocation of architecture.’
So I turned to the internet, and started Googling the names of the Wykehamists who had written for Caliban in the sixties, hoping to find the charismatic maverick who had made this literary connection with Liverpool despite all my imagined boundaries of geography and class.
Could it have been Philip Amphlett( Coll, 62-67) who published Thoughts of a Broken Man in 2018? Or Tim Hodgkinson( G, 62-65), experimental composer and musician? No, but I was unwittingly getting closer.
For a while I was convinced that the best candidate was John Goldsmith( H, 60-64), winner of the Queen’ s Gold Medal for English Verse, now a writer and director, whose first novel, Mrs. Mount, Ascendant, my researches told me, was sold to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press when the writer was only 21. It was undeniable that he was well out of Winchester by 1966, of course, but then Stephen Bann himself had composed and designed the cover of this edition of Caliban, despite being only a year off completing his doctorate
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