A Quote by Bill Alexander
Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
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All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state.
Greece, alone, is in a very vulnerable position. If the Greeks had had support from progressive left and popular forces elsewhere in Europe they might have been able to resist the demands of the Troika, but they had almost no support. Not even from Portugal, Spain, or other left forces. They were left alone.
The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.
Land Grant College Act is the jewel of Republican reform. It had not occurred to any other country to educate their farmers and workers. When the British studied the reasons for American success in 1851, the consensus was that Americans workers were well educated. So they didn't oppose progress the way British workers did.
The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.
What we learned quite early on is what was really important to early British pop that we produced-and this is where we were distinct from almost everybody else in this respect-is that it had to reflect exactly what the audience wanted us to say.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
I had very supportive parents that made the way for me, even at a time when there were very few women - no women, really; maybe two or three women - and very few, fewer than that, African-American women heading in this direction, so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.
I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.
We were young, we were wild, we were restless
Had to go, had to fly, had to get away
Took a chance on that feelin'
We were lovin' blind borderline wreckless
We were livin' for the minute we were spinnin' in
Baby we were alot of things, but we weren't crazy
The encounters I had were very few, but they were powerful. The negative encounters I've had with law enforcement were very few, but they stood out.
The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.
London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.
They were both academics, but my dad had to get a job on the railway, and my mum had to get a job in the Post Office. It was pretty hard in terms of the racism they had to endure.
The International Brigades and the British volunteers were, numerically, only a small part of the Republican forces, but nearly all had accepted the need for organization and order in civilian life.
I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.
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