Click here to listen to So Here We Are on MiPOradio. SoHereWeAre In my last talk I mentioned that Andrew Crozier shared some affinities with the poet, John Riley, an early contributor to The English Intelligencer. This is particularly noticeable in Crozier’s poem, ‘The Veil Poem’, where he employs a probing lyrical self to see beneath cognitive perception to unveil the shifts of light and dark. Moreover, Crozier repeatedly refers to light, mirrors, windows and glass in his poetry to indicate a concern with the processes of perception. Thus in the first stanza of ‘Light In The Air’ we read ‘Light floods the retina / then vanishes along the / optic nerve to reappear / as what we see/’ and in ‘The Veil Poem’, Crozier seems to be concerned with probing and enacting the processes by which the self articulates the shifts not only between the shades of light and dark, waking and sleeping but also between partial and impartial knowledge. The poem effectively shows how the self is ‘drawn’ as vessel and vehicle, hemmed and pressed in by a wall of both light, darkness and disputed colour. There are echoes of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, John Dee in its reference to ‘the repeated tracery of magic in / cardinal numbers’, John Donne in its metaphysics of incompleteness and John Riley in his probing of how to respond to light and the world. Although Riley might well have wished to move beyond the concept of ‘the hermetic / correspondence of forms hidden beneath appearance’ into a more commonplace understanding. I would like to contextualise John Riley’s poetry and give some idea of its field and integrity. Far from Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s contemptuous assertion in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry page 11) that ‘very little seemed to be happening’ in the Sixties, the scope of Riley’s work and that of other English Intelligencer contributors would indicate otherwise. When I first encountered Riley’s poetry in the mid-Seventies in the various pamphlets and poetry magazines that I found in Compendium Bookshop, it was like a revelation to find an English poet that was speaking in the present and yet out of time and in the visionary tradition. This was a poet quite distinct from the official poets and seemingly in touch with a wider European humanism that allowed for difference and the idea of a melting pot and also with post-Poundian American poetry. John Riley (1937-1978) was born and went to school in Leeds, Yorkshire. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, which he spent in Germany and during which time he learned Russian, he read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1958 to 1961. He was thus an exact contemporary of Tim Longville and the satirist, Peter Cook also studying English at Pembroke, and near contemporary of J.H. Prynne and R.F. Langley who studied English at Jesus College. Bill Oddie, who followed Cook into writing and performing radio comedy, began studying English at Pembroke College in Riley’s final year. Cook was a precocious undergraduate figure at Pembroke creating a legend even greater than that of Ted Hughes in the early Fifties. Whereas Cook left Pembroke for Soho, after graduating Riley worked in various schools around Cambridge and became acquainted with other Cambridge based poets. In 1966 he took up a teaching post at Bicester near Oxford. It was during this period that Andrew Crozier invited him to contribute to The English Intelligencer and he began to write his distinctive poems. He founded the Grosseteste Press and Grosseteste Review, with Tim Longville, and published his first book, Ancient And Modern in 1967. Here in its title we have possible notions that the author advocates both the old and new or that the new comes out of the old and are mutually held together. Riley’s poetry is precise and attentive to detail. It has a tremendous clarity and that probably stems from an admiration for the techniques of George Oppen, Charles Olson, to whom he wrote a memorial poem ‘i