An archive of his friendship with Chris Torrance

Barry MacSweeney

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Consisting of: correspondence from 1975 to 1996: 14 typed letters, 2 autograph letters, and 6 autograph cards, signed, covering MacSweeney's journalism and union activism, the state of the nation, Maggie Thatcher, Liz Hard, the function(s) of poetry, reflections on his early work, Blacksuede Boot Press, marriages, sport, music, Brecht, Clare, O'Hara, Malevich, Prynne, and his hopes for ? and disappointment with ? 'The Tempers of Hazard'; poems mostly in carbon or photocopied typescript, a couple of them signed and inscribed: 'Black Torch Sunrise' (6 single-sided sheets), 'Soft Hail' (20 single-sided sheets, the title changed by hand from 'True Station', varying at times from its first full publication in 'Desire Lines' (2018)), 'Starry Messenger' (typed and stab-stapled into an 8vo booklet of 11 single-sided sheets, the first two coloured/titled by hand), 'Viper Suck Ode' (1 single-sided sheet), and three typescripts (in total 11 single-sided sheets) making up 'Blackbird', as well as Torrance's signed and inscribed copy of the published version (Pig Press (1980), in which parts 2 and 3 are rather different from the typescripts); and Torrance's copy of 'Black Torch' (New London Pride (1978)), annotated by him, as well as a carbon typescript of his review of 'Black Torch' and 'Odes' for 'The Atlantic Review' (4 single-sided sheets), and 2 typed letters signed from MacSweeney detailing resources and background material. A small but expansive collection centred around MacSweeney's work of 'the dangerous decade' that was the 1980s. He and Torrance were close friends from the 1960s, both of them '"exiles" from the Poetry Mafia' regardless of their differences in subject matter and viewpoint. As MacSweeney writes, 'while you are out there in that lovely landscape I'm here in this stubbornly beautiful urban landscape and [our] inner landscapes are meeting somewhere in the aether'. His brilliant letters are at once forceful and funny, committed and encouraging, as when he says in 1990: 'I remember going on record somewhere as saying poetry should be banned . give us something to work against. Extreme, perhaps; yet despite a decade of outrageous affrontery, which poets have confronted it and published their findings?' The typescripts here show the process of MacSweeney's own investigation. Sound enough, allowing for Torrance's storage conditions, the earliest letter nibbled to the edges at the expense of some mostly guessable letters, a morsel of minor nibbling elsewhere, any staples often rusty or rusted away, and with areas of spotting and soiling. Seller Inventory # 008865

Bibliographic Details

Title: An archive of his friendship with Chris ...
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good
Signed: Signed by Author(s)