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Rich seam of counter-cultural treasures

Anarchists, Beats and Dadaists

by Jim Burns

(Penniless Press Publications, £10.99)

THIS seventh collection of essays and reviews by poet and editor Jim Burns reinforces his reputation as a curator of neglected culture, an archivist of unremembered events and an advocate of overlooked artists.

It includes pieces on unjustly ignored poets, forgotten jazz musicians, the secret state and the short-lived but influential “little magazines” of the post-war era. 

The vitality and influence of these independent publications, informed by a spirit of instinctive — and sometimes a formally political — anarchism is a recurring motif.

For Burns, they were a crucible of literary experimentation, risk and opposition to the cultural mainstream. 

They are a factor in leading  him to passionately reject the idea that the 1950s were a decade of dismal conformity.

Burns explores similar territory to Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades, but shuns the linguistic pyrotechnics of these better-known critics in favour of accessibility and clarity in linking art to its sociopolitical context.

So, in addition to careful and detailed reassessments of genuinely idiosyncratic writers such as Brion Gysin, Joan Gilbert and Alan Ansen, there are pieces on corporate and governmental anti-trade union violence, MI5 surveillance of British writers and the role of the Alger Hiss trial in the genesis of McCarthyism. 

Art and society collide most explicitly in extended reviews of books on Dada and the art provocateur Tristan Tzara. 

Burns exhibits a genuine relish for the inspirational, independent and iconoclastic creativity of Dadaism but is under no illusions about its lack of a coherent programme and the mediocre and derivative work it went on to influence, as evidenced in the commercial excesses of Britart. 

Burns’s infectious passion is moderated by his critical rigour.

His celebration of Gysin’s range and achievements is tempered by a critique of the cuteness of tone and inability to sustain narrative drive in the latter’s novel The Last Museum. 

The collection also includes fresh and informative pieces on Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Woody Guthrie, as well as critiques of jazz music that are accessible even to those with only a basic knowledge of it. 

These essays and reviews are lively and engaging and a key factor in their success is the deeply personal nature of Burns’s criticism. 

The collection closes with a series of recollections. One focuses on be-bop jazz and the tragic early death of a friend who played trumpet.

Another concerns the national mood in 1945 and the eventually abandoned dreams of a group of young men, “solid socialists all.” 

It ends with Burns lamenting: “We sold out, comrades, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it.” 

Review by Andy Hedgecock

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