‘A Nice Noise’: <i>Briggflatts</i> and the Poetics of (In)Attention

Abstract Reading in 1964 to the ‘teenagers and [..] miscellaneous provincials’ who composed Morden Tower’s debut audiences, Basil Bunting was struck by their (in)capacity to pay attention. These youngsters, he found, ‘were not hindered by the difficulties that annoy their elders’. Instead, ‘they took poetry as poetry – a nice noise – without questions about its “meaning”’. Placing the poem into its first reception contexts – Morden Tower on 22 December 1965 – this article traces how Briggflatts forms a larger experiment with such poetic (in)attention, consciously complicating the attentional and meaning-making processes of its listening audiences.