This is a very balanced and sane schematic overview of the entire "poetry world" and its ecology in, I think, England, rather than the UK. Tim Love is a Cambridge computing engineer, with an extraordinarily useful website for information on contemporary literature.
This essay was published in a different form in Angelaki 5.1: Poets on the Verge, ed Anthony Mellors and Robert Smith (2000). Ken Edwards, poet and publisher, deals very clearly and cogently with the situation in the United Kingdom, with the conservative aesthetic that has dominated poetry since the 1950s, an aesthetic so all-pervasive that it is no longer perceived as a specific paradigm but is simply the way poetry is, at least to the critical and educational establishments, and the continuing attempts to produce a different poetry. There is a little general historical background, and, extremely usefully and clearly, a very well argued and perceptive comparison between texts by Matthew Sweeney (a competition winner!) and Allen Fisher, coming off a rash connection made by competition judge Michael Hoffman between the Sweeney poem and the work of Joseph Beuys:
The poetics involved in poetry of the type Allen Fisher writes, requiring as it does continuous creative input of the reader to constellate its energy, driven by the material rush of its language, seems to have more in common with nonequilibrium structures. While remaining stable, it appears to shimmer with new possibilities at each reading. By contrast, the Sweeney type of poem, with its pared-down language, lacking intrinsic interest as material and therefore only functioning as the bearer of a single, semantic meaning, seems to tend to wind down into a low-energy equilibrium state. The compensations the poet makes for the lack of overdetermination involve balancing symmetries of meaning: in this case, the death of the whale against the death of the mouse, days against nights, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean. But these are not dynamic complexes of meaning; one could easily sort all the elements of the poem into two discrete piles, just as the poem itself divides neatly into its two symmetrical stanzas.
There are also excellent discussions of the difficulties in finding an acceptable name for the poetry this site deals with, where Edwards prefers the term "parallel tradition", and of its relationship to American Language poetry. The text here published is part of an academic project, but is quite self-contained as an introduction, and is well referenced.
.A well-balanced, and therefore, given the state of things, slightly sad, essay by an academic and poet about the range of poetry over the last thirty years, and the failure of any attempts to see this as a whole, picking up on the power of popular emotion and sentiment, but also suggesting their weakness.
One feature of the division has been to caricature the poetry of the main commercial presses as "accessible" and the avant-garde as incomprehensible, yet this polarisation hides much of what is most valuable about the poetry. A poem by Fred D'Aguiar, Sarah Maguire, Polly Clark, or Andrew Motion may seem to offer direct authorial self-representation, but the very openness of admission diverts attention from questions about the use of details of personal history and memory, the handling of the time of the consciousness that speaks the poem, or the claim to representativeness of a wider community. As long as we don't ask these questions we are missing much of what is most powerful in the writing. The surfaces of a poem by Maggie O'Sullivan, Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, can be puzzling because they use unfamiliar formal and verbal techniques. Failing to notice them altogether, as appears to happen quite often, or to have little sense of how they can be heard so that they produce the equivalent of several different instruments of meaning playing together, leads to incomprehension and the deadly prejudice that the work has no literary merit. It is as if a reader were listening for violins only, and the orchestra was relying on woodwind and percussion to carry the depth of the music.
including contributions from Andrea Brady, Geraldine Monk and Jow Lindsay, explores the embarassing problem, which I am sure you have picked up on, that the UK Experimental/Avant-Garde Poetry Communit appears a very male-oriented game, and the issues this raises, the reasons for it, and any ways forward.
Taken from an article from the American Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Literature which was published in 2003, the Anglo-Welsh poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur Finch tries to be extremely even-handed in his broad survey. He may be a little too kind to the risibly feeble and vacuously populist attempts at a moderate post-modernism promnulgated by some of the hipper exponents of the mainstream
By the turn of the millennium poetry in Britain had reached a multi-faceted stand-off. Despite the work of editors like Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford (1959-) who have made brave attempts at uniting post-modern, post-Christian, post-war, post-Hiroshima, post-structuralist, post-devolution poetries under one pluralistic banner the many gleaming and disparate parts of British poetry do not like making a coherent whole. In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales the literatures no longer find themselves overshadowed by an English big brother. The sound coming in from the centre can and is increasingly ignored. The argument between form and content remains as strong as ever. It has been raging for a hundred years and there are no winners yet. The counter-culture may have changed name and altered its emphasis (from lifestyle to free-form experiment and back) but it remains as strong and has as many adherents as ever. They may is no British L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry but there are plenty of fellow travellers. The line which runs up from Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), through D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930), Philip Larkin, Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984), Douglas Dunn, Andrew Motion, and Simon Armitage continues, although is no longer quite a central as it once was. Minority writing (ethnic, genre, sexual orientation) has as many proponents and fans as pop writing did in the seventies. Twenty-first century British poetry is no longer precisely English. Like the world literature with which it is now firmly allied it has as many facets as the eye of a fly. Saying exactly what it is remains the problem of the moment.
The poet Peter Riley begins the task of explaining the situation of English poetry for the benefit of a Greek interlocutor:
But I can't view of this dichotomy as a matter of balance, that a middle position between the two options would be a poetical norm. I don't think it would. Dylan Thomas was important because he re-established something which had been lost in 1930s rationalism, and which concerns the entire nature of poetry. He made the poem into something which, like a painting or a sculpture, uses the materials of the world to create an entity which stands independently of the world, and which rather than a commentary on, or reflection of it, is, as W.S. Graham put it, "an addition to the world". In the populist view of poetry, and still to the majority of academics involved in contemporary poetry, the poem is an event of the person, innately autobiographical, and can be understood by reconstructing the author and his opinions from the poem, with societal and historical contextualising. But to people like Thomas the poem was an event of the world, a raising of language to a pitch beyond the realm of "expression". Of course it does still describe and comment on the world, but in the manner of a theatre. It erects a stronger, richer or more revealing world, whose language cannot exactly be our language; it sets itself apart by formality or by figuration.
I think one result of the sweeping success of "establishment" poetry in a dichotomised history is that the alternatives become fragmented and discontinuous. The academic attack on Thomas was pervasive and influenced poets and critics inclined to Modernism as well as conservatives, and it insisted not only that Thomas's poetry was worthless but also that it was a dead-end. It specifically ignored the development of Thomas's later poetry and others', such as W.S. Graham, into a more accessible voice which retained richness of figuration (or it represented this as a reversal and a capitulation). I think that poets such as J.H.Prynne in the 1960s, through a study of modernism and of much older poetry, arrived at ways of writing which sometimes resembled the textuality of Thomas and Graham but without direct influence. It was as if the current went underground and surfaced twenty years later without anyone specifically digging for it. Some younger poets are now busily engaged in research to locate "lost precursors" - forgotten British modernist or experimentalist poets of the 1930s-1950s, of which there are not many, but they do exist.
Matthias, an American poet and critic with good knowledge of British poetry, presents a very lengthy and detailed survey of British poetry at the turn of the Millennium, centring it on the range of anthologies then published (or about to be in the case of the Keith Tuma Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry), and trying to make sense of the mainstream avant-garde split. There are some very interesting long quotations and analyses. It's densely argued, but perceptive. He longs to bang heads together — come on, chaps, there's no need to carry on this quarrel! Matthias talks very interestingly about figures he feels bridge/transcend these splits, especially Geoffrey Hill (probably admired greatly by many on both sides), Roy Fisher (one of us at heart!), and Peter Reading (wonderfully maverick and inventive, but not I think greatly followed in Cambridge etc), though not on James Fenton (totally caught up in mainstream literary policing operations, despite his actual poetic practice). The most relevant sections to avant-garde poetry are:
I: Penguins, Conductors, and Others – setting the scene
IV: Adjuncts to the Muses' Diadem? – discussing the "Cambridge" and "London" groupings
V: Unfinished Business, Current Events – where he eagerly and optimistically awaits the Keith Tuma Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (OUP [NY], 2001) (whose selections of poets enraged mainstream poets and commentators in the UK!)
The poet and publisher (West House Books) (and formerly bookseller) makes a comment on the state of British poetry, for P O R E S: An Avant-Gardist Journal of Poetics Research — trenchant and forceful:
In English-language poetry the 20th century 'mainstream' surely derives from Pound, Eliot, Williams et al — all of whom in various ways saw themselves as continuing an older tradition. But in England 'mainstream' has come to denote a poetry diverted in the 1950s into a backwater which would be seen to reinstate 'traditional' poetic practices in place of the modernist, a claim which bears little examination: we find in it a limited concept of the lyric coupled with easy irony and uncritical notions of description and narrative, with barely a hint of the adventurous spirit of English verse displayed in any historical anthology. In the face of this it is all too easy to strand oneself on a little island called 'the English avant-garde', as if forgetting that the work of Prynne, Griffiths, Corcoran, Monk & many another does belong to the 'mainstream' by any rightful name
There is of course a notable difference between our situation in England and that of our contemporaries in North America. In the early 80s there was clearly a family resemblance between the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group and writing published in London and Cambridge; but whereas a decade or so later the North Americans had established themselves within the overall discourse of contemporary poetry and poetics our English work for the most part stayed remorselessly 'underground'. I do think this was partly to do with economics and the means of production: cheaper offset printing meant that by the mid-80s the North Americans were producing smart paperbacks while in England most such work appeared in stapled mimeo or modest pamphlet: perceptions of specific forms of the book as normative cultural object are hugely influential, and for the same reason internet publishing seems unlikely to replace the book as primary source. At least equally significant, I suppose, has been the enthusiasm of many 'language' poets for theoretical writing and the merging of theory and practice in cross-genre 'interdisciplinary' texts which can ostensibly be placed in the framework of a (broadly speaking) post-structuralist critique; engagement with the same areas of theory is evident in much English work but few poets here have been tempted into similarly intergeneric writing which does in any case find no ready welcome in the native nomansland between literature and philosophy departments. In the longer term the North Americans have been able to establish themselves in Creative Writing Programs within official Academe and teach 'radical' notions of writing and reading to the next generation
An interesting and fairly dispassionate brief summary of the splits in each country and the differences between US and UK situations
Part of the poet/critic Andrew Duncan's constant anatomisation of British poetry, here dealing with aspects of mainstream poetry: Oxford poetry and what he calls the Unsophisticated Postmodernism of Paul Muldoon, James Fenton, and Andrew Motion. Of "Oxford poetry":
a geographically located fantasy of tinkly, theatrical, narcissistic, clever, artexed, showbiz poetry swanning around in seventeenth-century rhetorics, and this gobbles up young talents and spits out their bones. After all it suits the British book-buying public very well: in fact, part of its emptiness is its eagerness to please. In 1960, just about the last time you could be au fait with the poetry world without reading the little magazines, Betjeman sold 100,000 copies of Summoned by Bells (imitated by 1000 poets writing about their childhood and parents, the basic model for Motion, Tony Harrison, and Hugo Williams). Comforting, witty, nostalgic, anti-modern narrative without introspection.
There are several more pieces by Andrew Duncan listed here — and many more available on the Web and in print. Andrew has read it all — and made sense it! I am in almost constant agreement with his evaluation of poets, and am profoundly impressed by his ability to contextualise, both intellectually and socially, their writing and milieus. I have limited his representation in this list to prevent his voice becoming too dominant, so others can be heard also.
