NEW READERS START HERE!
Or: An Introduction to Contemporary Innovative British Poetry – with a note on naming

Poetry has a poor public presence in contemporary Britain, even though it plays a role in many people's lives. Where it is accessible, it is often in the guise of therapy or entertainment, or comfortable nostalgia. There is a range of poetries in contemporary Britain which encounters the complicated state of our lives and consciousnesses in the third millenium (as one expects art or theatr or cinema or music to). This poetry is largely ignored by the dominant cultural progagandists and pedlars. It can be labelled avant-garde – or innovative, or linguistically innovative, or post avant-garde, or language-centred, or reflexive, or postmodernist, or even plain old modernist or late modernist poetry. There isn't a handy identifier (a part of the problem maybe!). These terms all refer to slightly different concepts, but with a lot of common factors, in terms of practices and social/cultural networks. This poetry is a major cultural activity that remains not yet picked up by fashion, finance or administrators – still at least in touch with genuine avant-garde impulses, though now with some academic bases.

This poetic culture is a broad tradition that has existed since the mid-to-late 1960s. The impetus of 1950s and 1960s American poetry was what largely set it in motion (though with ancestors identified, to some extent after the event, in some British poets of the 1930s-1950s). There is in Britain a hegemonic or "mainstream" poetry published by the larger commercial and heavily subsidised presses. This is given the bulk of what little publicity and distribution there is for poetry in Britain. Many of the British poets published on Great Works would regard this mainstream as largely unsatisfactory or inadequate for a poetry written at this time. This negative valuation is often reciprocated even more strongly by critics and poets within that mainstream.

If you are from outside Britain, you would be astonished at the anti-modernist and anti-innovative bias within British literary culture, and especially this mainstream poetic culture. To phrase it aggresssively, the cults of deliberately narrow-minded provincial pettiness (Philip Larkin), felt-in-the-bones organicism and nature-worship (Ted Hughes) and populist triviality and accessibility (so many! – say Simon Armitage) have all imbedded themselves deep within the dominant British poetic tradition in the period since 1950. In many ways this has now become a bizarre situation given the way the visual arts establishment has increasingly opened itself completely to the post-conceptual movement labelled BritArt, and the genuine popular success of contemporary art institutions like Tate Modern.

This poetic culture began in the Sixties, with primarily American influences from Fifties and Sixties US poetry – initially the Beats, and the Black Mountain and New York Schools. This was a reaction to the vast limitations of the dominant poetry of the British Fifties, "The Movement", which embraced and exalted all the most conformist, xenophobic and anti-intellectual strains that infect the English soul.

There were a number of centres where the "British Poetry Revival" took off. The most long-lasting were London (always central to British culture, it almost goes without saying), and Cambridge, where a remarkable succession of avant-garde generations has maintained itself, giving a continuous critical mass of poets living and often teaching there. There were differences in approach between these two poetic subcultures, now to some extent blurred.

There are a number of disasters that have set back the British poetic avant-garde, and encouraged their sense of being a beleaguered minority. Their sudden removal from the national but London-based Poetry Society, whose running they had taken over, remains the most notorious. As a result of such setbacks there is a suspicion of the poetic mainstream, often reciprocated even more strongly by that mainstream. Quarrels get more intense the sparser the resources you are fighting over. Poetic practices may not on occasion be that different between the two sides, you may decide; who reviews or publishes whom may well reflect social networks, and poets' sense of identity.

But what does exist in avant-garde British poetry is one of the last uncelebrated contemporary artistic movements, genuinely based on the demands of the art rather than of the market (or of funding institutions). The main common factors within this poetry are these, I would say:

• a focus on or acute awareness of poetry as concerned with the process of perception/consciousness/putting into language, rather than on what is perceived or experienced – hence phrases like language-centred or reflective, and hence too accusations of "difficulty" or "elitism"


• various forms of estrangement effect to enable focus on language and process, and enforce awareness of the language of the poem itself, eg montage, use of found language, or of vocabulary chosen from a specific (non-poetic) discourse, use of complex syntax that fails to resolve itself – modernism


• a sense of self or voice which is fractured, decentred or otherwise not engaged in the old cons of authenticity – postmodernism


• formal creativity and experimentation rather than following traditional forms and patterns – hence linguistically innovative, or avant-garde


• there may be aspects of following set procedures in the formal composition of the writing – paralleling art practice since the 1960s


• there may be aspects of performance/improvisation in both the writing and the delivery of the texts, springing from:


• links between avant-garde poetry throughout the period since the late 60s and improvised music;
• an inheritance in performing (any!) textual material, coming from the neo-dada roots of the London-based avant-garde ("sound poetry");
• the establishment more recently of the academic study of performance writing (eg at Dartington).
• But note there is a separate entertainment-based Performance Poetry world of poetry slams, open mikes and stand-up routines, which has little overlap with linguistically innovative poetry


• dissemination through small scale institutions, establishing their own traditions, genealogies and alliances. You will find these listed on Great Works' Links page, or on Websites Useful for Understanding Avant-Garde British Poetry. Typically:


• publication (largely) by specific small presses, often using print-on-demand digital technology, or specialising in high level book design, or on the other hand maintaining a punkish lo-tech aesthetic;
• the importance of readings, both as a means of dissemination, and for peer interaction;
• including a number of more or less annual small-scale festivals or conferences;
• and support now within a small but not insubstantial number of University Departments (including creative writing programmes) – making it with this incipient institutionalisation a post avant-garde.

Probably no texts demonstrate all these factors, but they are widespread across most of the British poetry published on Great Works. Check this out for yourself!

Somewhere in his copious and delightful writings on contemporary British poetry, Andrew Duncan uses a Science Fiction extended metaphor to explain the recent situation of British poetry. At a certain point, the various "traditions" (or lineages, or whatever) set off into separate areas of the expanding Turn of the Millenium cultural space, like intergalactic expeditions from Home Planet Earth. New worlds are being colonised in the ever-expanding sectors being explored; but the expeditions have necessarily parted company from eachother and can no longer communicate. Implicit, I find in this metaphor, is that contingent initial differences become the basis of particular group and self-identifications (like present day British youth gangs rallying to postcodes and the colours of dustbins). Also that in similar environments, parallel ecologies and adaptations will emerge, through convergent evolution. We just won't be able to mate successfully any longer.

And where is this ever-widening Universe are we all headed to? The mainstream, of course, straight to Uranus. And us? Oh, the Pleiades at least. See you there!

A final note on naming. I follow present-day usage in referring to British poetry. The situation in Scotland is, though, very different, with less of this historic mainstream/avant-garde split. Ireland has complexities and cross-currents of its own, with some Irish poets, especially those from Ulster/Northern Ireland often taken effectively as part of the British mainstream. There is, though, a parallel Irish avant-garde, which has some connections with the British avant-garde. Some material on or linked to this site relates to this writing. (See Keith Tuma, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry [Oxford UP NY, 2001] for coverage of the whole field.) As for Welsh poetry: I can say nothing of what is written in Welsh; but for Anglo-Welsh poetry (ie written in English in Wales), you need the magazine Poetry Wales.

The actual name or for the poetry itself is also very variable, as discussed above. I probably use words like "avant-garde" or "innovative" most – most precisely, though, I am bound to say "post avant-garde", though barbarous jargon, is horribly accurate.