In the second of Social History’s tributes to John Seed, Edmund Ogawa Hardy explores the intersections of John’s historical and poetical work. Full tributes to John Seed and a selection of his poetry can be found in Social History 50,4.
‘The crispness, the taut energies and clarities of Briggflatts were so splendidly different from the dreary storytelling and slack attitudinizing of what usually passed for poetry in postwar England that it is not surprising that a new generation of readers (and listeners) was dazzled,’ John Seed wrote of Basil Bunting.[1] One of the people dazzled was of course Seed himself, who pinpointed the finding of Briggflats at Ultima Thule bookshop in Newcastle in 1968 as the beginning of his interest in poetry.[2]
Seed was a student at the time, working in a bakery doing nightshifts over the summer. This labour is glimpsed in a poem called ‘NIGHTSHIFT: GRAVES BAKERY, CHESTER-LE-STREET, AUGUST 1968’.
The canteen empty before dawn huge
Windows night rain blurs
Almost vertically across the lorry park the
Patterns of light and shadow
Sheltering smoking consolation 1968
Out of the foreman’s sight [3]
The flash of the lived moment, remembered, surrounded by darkness, is the fundamental condition of Seed’s poetry. The blunt dialectics of vision transmuted into language, present here in the blank space between light and shadow, also marks the core of Seedian poetics: spaces between and within lines, which allow words and materials to speak in different ways. Lines like ‘beyond the glass the specific the vast’ (from ‘a hundred yards’) exemplify the space within;[4] the long collage poems working with reported speech and historical documents take the space of the line break as their breath and building block.
The encounter with Bunting led Seed to a series of American poets – William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Muriel Rukeyser. Oppen and Reznikoff would become mentors; Dorn was a particular favourite. Seed was looking for the answer to this question: If language is caught up in false histories, normative explanations, and is everywhere leveraging a power to coerce and narrativize, how could poetry still work? The poetics which Seed developed, beginning with the ideas of Objectivism adapted from his mentors, posited that poetry needed to break apart these elements, using language differently in order to restore its thingness, and in doing so, hone language’s ability to both shape the world in the moment of reading, and provide a glimpse of how the world is shaped.
The sense of spaces between is not just a formal poetics of space on the page. Vastness, night and dreamlessness are frequent dimensions of experience in Seed’s poems. Darkness is not just a characteristic time of day; it is also a state of being – it figures as a concept of history, the incognito surrounding every recollection, lived moment, or time-stamp, the inter-connections and causalities of materialism being speculative and arguable, not experienced and known in the moment. To light up the landscape would be to shine false light, pretend to mastery and a knowledge of totality. Alongside the dark in these poems, the poet also knows of matrices, periods, capitalist systems, but even as the lines which connect these ideas back to the moment keep breaking or remain as stanza breaks, a commitment to materialism and to Marxism insists that both remain in the poem, as real as each other. Seed’s poetics of breaks and spaces keep this duality present.
Seed found contemporary fellow travellers via a friend who told him about a lecturer who also talked about the same American poets as him. So it was that during the miners’ strike of 1972 Seed met that lecturer (and poet, editor, organiser), Andrew Crozier, who introduced him to poets and magazines which were part of a revival in experimental poetry happening in a network of micro-communities closer to home. Crozier would later include Seed in the anthology he edited with Tim Longville, A Various Art, which provides a lasting snapshot of the developing scene and gave Seed’s work its widest reach.[5]
Within this wider scene, Seed and neo-Objectivist friends such as Ric Caddel, found that their trajectory of writing was bound up with poets following different experimental paths. Some of the debates which ensued inflected and can be traced in Seed’s work. In particular, ways of writing commensurate to Adorno’s legacy in poetics, in which art interrogates its own forms and mediums, looking for an autonomy with which to oppose the near totality of capitalism. Seed focused on Adorno’s idea of the hidden ‘inmost cell’ of thought (of a dialectic, an artwork); that which is counter to and unlike the dominant movement.[6] Can poetry arrow in on this inmost cell, sift for it, or increase awareness that it might be somewhere? Part of Seed’s working out of these influences can be glimpsed in this section from the Gramsci-invoking poem ‘History teaches, but it has no pupils’.[7] This poses the problem of writing poetry when time runs on and history is fought for and fragmented:
Relation absence of relation
Imagining the real unimagined contradictions . . .
to make poetry of these streets
The antinomies here, unresolvable, waver up and down between a matrix of relations and the particular, landing around the simple desire ‘to make poetry of these streets’.
The collection title Interior in the Open Air names Seed’s poetics of history. The poem ‘After Walter Benjamin’ begins with the angel of history, but then sketches something after:[8]
There was no beginning
A room without doors
Through which the wind blows always we
Shelter in language
Tiny souls patched up for heaven
No beginning and it isn’t over, as Seed reminded me in the interview I conducted with him.[9] A new dialectic, more antinomies, more distinctions and classes.
Transit Depots marks the beginning of a new phase.[10] It is a montage text, which moves between the world wars with each segment drawing from texts written in (or in some cases about) that year. Seed’s poetics of spaces between expanded to incorporate materials sourced from documents, archives and existing histories. Seed began a new collage phase in earnest with Pictures From Mayhew and its second part, That Barrikins.[11]
Nobody can describe the misery I
walked the streets all night
falling asleep as I went along then [12]
Both work with Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, selecting, arranging, adding line breaks into the prose as published by Mayhew. By doing so, Mayhew’s frame is loosened – a linguistic energy is released. Looking for that inmost cell, the spark which could strike out across time. This is a Marxist desire to retrieve voices from the past so that they might speak again of their social conditions – but in the present, that is, in a world they cannot know. The Mayhew books were noted for their newly apparent ambition, and Iain Sinclair featured sections in his edited volume London: City of Disappearances, describing the project as ‘reverse archaeology’.[13] While akin to but unmistakeably part of a different discourse to that of conceptualism as a movement in poetry, spearheaded by Kenneth Goldsmith and much discussed at the time when the Mayhew books were published, the closer contemporary work is that of American labour organiser and poet Mark Nowak, also concerned with Objectivism, collage and labour history.
In its single-source methodology, the comparison of Pictures From Mayhew with Charles Reznikoff’s two volume collage work Testimony is unavoidable,[14] although Reznikoff used court case records as his source and thus Testimony has a judicial and state’s eye view which Mayhew (as a kind of spy among the poor) only partially has. Reznikoff’s thread is death and how it illuminates conditions of labour – something Seed approaches in his last collage poem, Melancholy Occurrence, which scans nineteenth-century newspapers and inquest reports for accounts of death which provide a piercing, illuminating detail.[15] In correspondence with Reznikoff in the 1970s,[16] Seed revealed how he was trying to locate and use Testimony in his own life – using it as a teaching text for children in Hull classrooms. Again this is indicative of how Seed was drawing on Objectivist examples, while knowing that they had to change and come back alive in a different history.
I first met John Seed just after Pictures From Mayhew came out. We conducted an interview about the book, and this led to a series of meetings in which we went for long walks around London, always ending at a pub. We took it in turns to choose the path. John’s routes always took in places where he shared a sense of historical layers built up – the waterside in Wapping; the Dissenters corner of Nunhead cemetery. I remember John railing against St Paul’s cathedral, its imposition of state religion into every view. I also particularly recall his commentary as we walked down his favourite passageway – near Barnes – which combines ivy with long brick walls and transitions forward in time. John’s photograph of the passage features on the cover of his New and Collected Poems.[17]
Seed developed multiple collage techniques to construct book length poems. From the book length poems after 2004, the example which is most multidimensional, worked as it is from multiple sources (oral histories, parliamentary records, newspapers), is Brandon Pithouse.[18] The ambition of this is no less than that of extending Benjamin’s Arcades to incorporate a County Durham coal mine. The sheer levels of pain, bodily damage and hard labour which speak in this volume are unforgettable. Instead of arcades of light and history, there are tunnels of coal and the labour of hauling tonnes of it through the dark.
We can also say that the turn to collage had always been there – but it was delayed. The 2013 publication of Manchester: August 16th and 17th 1819, which I worked on as editor and publisher of the book, was the result of a lost manuscript re-emerging. In 1973 Seed had compiled the work from books about the Manchester Peterloo conflict of 1819, only for the text to be lost by the poet and publisher Ric Caddel. A duplicate turned up via an old friend in 2012. Collage, then, was less of a later turn, more a picking up from where the postgraduate historian had left off due to apparent chance and the forgetfulness of editors. Protests, insurrections and struggles are rewritten, written out, or denigrated by capitalist culture – and Seed’s poem, drawn from eyewitness accounts in newspapers, adds a textual way back to try to understand something said beyond the assembled text – something which lies in those days in Manchester in 1819.
An analogous project from Seed the historian can be found in the book he edited with Ian Haywood, The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, a collection of essays which tries to rebegin historical debate where a lack of writing about these riots has left them hanging as a name and, for Dickens readers, a backdrop for Barnaby Rudge.[19] In the vacuum, conservative histories can place the riots unproblematically as yet another example of ‘mob rule’, a process begun by Edmund Burke’s reading that ‘[w]ild and savage insurrection quitted the woods’ in what he saw as a foretaste of the French Revolution.[20]
I was interested that Seed chose to end Marx: A Guide for the Perplexed with a chapter called ‘After Capitalism’, an area Marx deliberately only sketched out and which Seed’s work tends to only imply, by looking back to past struggles and their aftermaths. In this chapter, the distinction between alienated and non-alienated labour is explicated from a famous passage in The German Ideology on how work (specifically hunting, fishing, herding, and being a ‘critical critic’) when freed after the advent of communism would become a non-defining, non-alienated choice. Seed then gives his own example, beginning with an account of how he likes to bake bread, and delight in sharing it with family and friends.
But when I was a student I worked in a large bakery for four long summers: mostly 12-hour night shifts of hard and tedious labour. The bread produced was not mine and its production had neither interest nor pleasure for me. For several years after, my heart sank whenever I encountered the smell of bread baking.[21]
This return to the scene of his NIGHTSHIFT poem is written from the perspective of repair – although there were years in which bread baking was linked to selling labour-time, there was a future time in which Seed did enjoy bread and baking once more. A sense of what labour might be like after capitalism opened up. This kind of repair is a small glimpse, but nonetheless illuminates how Seed’s work also looks forward especially by looking back. The historical note of disenfranchisement which echoes in the early poem ‘Lindisfarne : Dole’[22] isn’t, finally, a one-way street:
In silence
Walking, dreamless for hours.
Everything
We need but forced
To leave as if we wanted to
Remembering – transforming dominant histories with counter-histories – is something Seed sought to do in this while tracing historical precedents, in poetry and history. Seed’s historical study Dissenting Histories recovers alternative accounts of the English state written in the eighteenth century. Here Seed writes about conflicts over collective memory with characteristic directness: ‘remembering is a social practice and it requires cultural resources’.[23] Seed’s poetry crosses over at this point with his work as historian. In both, Seed sought to keep alive connections to different pasts which – however faintly – work to change the present because they loosen and expand the frame in which that present is lived. Between source and a recorded trace of that source lies darkness, in Seed’s poetry, but signs still register and can change us across that void:
unknown
the
unknown
footsteps fade [24]
Edmund Ogawa Hardy is a poet and filmmaker (edmundhardy@hotmail.com).
References
[1] J. Seed, ‘Irrelevant objects: Basil Bunting’s poetry of the 1930s’, in R. B. DuPlessis and P. Quartermain (eds), The Objectivist Nexus (Tuscaloosa, 1999), 126.
[2] A biographical sketch for ‘The Archive of the Now’ website of poetry recordings hosted by Queen Mary University – see: https://www.archiveofthenow.org/
[3] J. Seed, Interior in the Open Air (London, 1993), 18.
[4] From J. Seed, Spaces In (Newcastle, 1977).
[5] A. Crozier and T. Longville (eds), A Various Art (London, 1987).
[6] See T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London, 1981).
[7] In J. Seed, History Labour Night (Newcastle, 1984).
[8] Seed, Interior in the Open Air, op. cit.
[9] ‘[I]f it is never over that isn’t because it is “the human condition” or some other metaphysical alibi for the way things are.’ See E. Hardy, ‘Interview with John Seed’, Intercapillary Space, 2006 https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-john-seed.html (last accessed 27 July 2025).
[10] Published in a combined volume: P. Farrell, J. Seed, and R. Sheppard, Transit Depots / Empty Diaries (London, 1993).
[11] Seed, Pictures From Mayhew, op. cit. and Seed, That Barrikins, op. cit.
[12] Seed, Pictures From Mayhew, op. cit., 167
[13] I. Sinclair (ed.), London: City of disappearances (London, 2006).
[14] The first volume was published as C. Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States 1885–1890 (New York, 1965).
[15] J. Seed, Melancholy Occurrence (Exeter, 2018).
[16] Mentioned in the afterword to Seed, Manchester: August 16th and 17th 1819, op. cit.
[17] J. Seed, New and Collected Poems (Exeter, 2005).
[18] J. Seed, Brandon Pithouse (Nether Silton, 2016).
[19] I. Haywood and J. Seed (eds), The Gordon Riots: Politics, culture and insurrection in late eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2012).
[20] From ‘A letter to a noble Lord’, written in 1796 and included in E. Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1920).
[21] J. Seed, Marx: A guide for the perplexed (London, 2010), 164.
[22] A reflection on a year Seed spent on Lindisfarne after graduating, living on the dole. Included in J. Seed, Spaces In (Newcastle, 1977).
[23] J. Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious division and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England (Edinburgh, 2008), 188.
[24] From ‘After Time’ in Seed, Spaces In, op. cit.