Robert Sheppard: Poetics 2

Poetics through and after Modernism: Some TextsGiven the range of forms and functions, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of post-1900 world poetics (even limiting itself to poetry), but such a survey might include some of the following documents (arranged here mostly in chronological order and excluding those from the North Atlantic Anglophone world, to be touched on in the next posting on this subject). They are drawn from four representative anthologies containing poetics amongst other kinds of writing; I attempt to describe the form as well as the function of each. (footnote 1) (I mostly limit myself to one item per writer for the sake of economy and they may not be the most famous examples of his or her poetics. For example, the letters of Rilke referred to next do not come from Rilke’s celebrated Letters to a Young Poet (written 1903-08) but from disparate sources.)

The high modernist period offers a rich range of poetics. Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Three Letters’ (1903, 1907, 1925) meditate on lessons he learnt from Rodin, the role of imagery in his verse, and on his particular modernity. (Cook 2004: 35-40) On the other hand, with manifestic ferocity, Filippo Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) offers a vectoral and energised poetics adequate to the coming century of total war. (Cook 2004: 56-60) Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’ (1917) similarly bristles with confidence for a modernity that would embrace technology. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Tristan Tzara’s ‘Note on Poetry’ (1919) mimes, in its non-rational style, in its jumps from polemic to poetry, the irrational poetics that is gestured towards in the ‘note’ itself, in favour of unbridled, non-academic creative imaginative force. (Cook 2004: 91-3) Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Toward Explaining Heteronymy’ (1915-1935) is a composite text of manuscript fragments and an abandoned ‘preface’, which explains not only his use of heteronyms – a word he coined to account for his invention of authors – but his sense of essential selflessness that enabled him to single-handedly concoct a modernist Portuguese literature. (Gibbons 1989: 5-15)

In Russia, Velimir Klebnikov’s ‘On Poetry’ and ‘On Contemporary Poetry’ (1919, 1920) offer accounts of the symbolic sonic qualities possible in non-semantic poetry (Cook 2004: 94-6), while Vladimir Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) sketches the poetics of the industrialised post-Revolutionary free verse poetry that he was exploring. (Cook 2004: 144-151) Against this, Osip Mandelstam, in ‘The Word & Culture’ (1921), specifically rejects the ‘invention’ of a poetics, recognising instead the radicality of classical and Christian tradition, while paradoxically taking the unlikely model of Verlaine as the modern synthetic poet. (Gibbons 2004: 16-22) Boris Pasternak’s blandly entitled ‘Some Statements’ (1922) is a collection of seven autonomous vignettes, ranging from reflections on art as an absorptive sponge not as an effusive fountain, through to thoughts on the miraculous trans-historical transference of experience effected via literary translation. (Gibbons: 23-27) Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’ (1935) compares lyric poets who evolve and those who do not. (Cook 2004: 215-222)

Away from its famous ‘loud’ manifestos - manifestos may contain poetics but there are not in themselves poetics - Surrealism’s poets were still vocal about their practice. Paul Éluard’s ‘Poetry’s Evidence’ (1932) argues for Surrealist imagery as evidence of an irrational imagination; André Breton’s ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933) is more polemical and attempts to define the central Surrealist technique of automatic writing. (Cook 2004: 182-191) Federico García Lorca’s ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ (1933) is his famous account of the indefinable quality and performative attitude found in spirited flamenco song and dance which is not one of technique but of primal creativity, not to be feigned or counterfeited, taught or learned. (Cook 2004: 201-7) Antonio Machado’s ‘Notes on Poetry’, is an assemblage of notes, probably made in 1924, to which he appends an introduction that confirms their conjectural and tentative nature, before he considers issues such as his distrust of the use of metaphor and the deceptions and illuminations of ‘images’ in poetry to define a poet’s inner state, as well as arguments for the abolition of the anecdotal in favour of the necessary inter-subjectivity of lyric. (Gibbons 1989: 161-9) Luis Cernuda’s public pronouncement, ‘Words Before a Reading’ (1935) sees poetry as fixing the ephemerality of beauty but this does not preclude the exercise of the daemonic, the very power that called Lorca called ‘duende’. (Gibbons 1989: 42-7)

Paul Valéry, late in his career, was elected a Professor of Poetics; his misleadingly entitled ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939) actually contrasts poetic language and ordinary language, the pedestrian qualities of prose, the Terpsichorean qualities of verse. (Cook 2004: 237-243) Fellow Frenchman, René Char’s ‘The Formal Share’ (1943-4) is a series of elliptical numbered paragraphs that it is not possible to paraphrase, since they (deliberately) approach the condition of poetry, perhaps even reach the condition of prose poetry, although it is clear that writing is an anxious activity that nevertheless causes joy. (Gibbons 1989: 59-64)

Post war stirrings in the Francophone West Indies produced not only Aimé Césaire’s ‘Poetry and Knowledge’ (1945), which exceeded his earlier apologia for the poetry of ‘negritude’, and argues for poetry as a particular form of knowledge in contrast to scientific knowledge, but whose vocabulary is still tinged with the vocabulary of surrealism (Cook 2004: 275-287), but also Edouard Glissant’s ‘Earth’ (late 1950s), which argues for an oppositional post-negritude poetry. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 416-17) However, Derek Walcott’s ‘The Muse of History’ (1974) rejects the oppositional stance of earlier Caribbean writers, in favour of using the literary resources of the great traditions of the colonisers. (Cook 2004: 420-436)

Eugenio Montale’s ‘Intentions’ (1946) is an ‘Imaginary Interview’, a form that risks insincerity, but is actually a free-ranging enquiry into the development of this Italian poet, which he sees as an escape from a ‘bell-jar’ into a poetry of contingency, with a restrained, even inelegant, diction, a quest precisely to find what the subject of poetry might be. (Gibbons 1989: 65-70) Written in the shadow of the Second World War, as was Montale’s piece, the Greek poet George Seferis’ ‘A Poet’s Journal’, written in 1946 and 47, traces his resurgence, after long wartime silence, to re-engage the contract between the human body and nature. In part a recounting of the writing of his poem ‘Thrush’, he emphasises what he calls leaving the poem to dry, a strategy to avoid over-editing. (Gibbons 1989: 71-81) Paul Celan’s ‘The Meridian Speech’ (1960) considers the spectral human presence that there might be in a difficult Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, i.e., Celan’s own, as a lonely turning of the breath of utterance towards otherness and newness, as Celan effected within his adopted language German. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 408-9; Celan 1999: 37-55) Nicanor Parra’s ‘Test’ (c.1964-66) considers the anti-poem written by the revolutionary anti-poet. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 423-24)

French poet Henri Chopin’s ‘Poésie Sonore’ (1969) is an appropriately slender statement about sound poetry, predicting the triumph of a non-semantic poetry of pure sound, (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427), while Denis Roche’s ‘Le Mécrit’ (1972) articulates the experimentalism of the Tel Quel group in an obscene contention of the world of convention. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 429-430)

The East German poet Günter Kunert wrote a short piece ‘Why Write’ (1972) which answered its own question (although the title lacks a question mark): ‘to bear the world as it steadily crumbles into nothingness’. (Gibbons 1989: 136-8; 138) West German Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Modest Proposal for the Protection of Young People from the Products of Poetry’ (1976) is a Swiftian attack upon the standardised school and university curricula that teach correct interpretations of poetry to the young. (Cook 2004: 447-455) Czeslaw Milosz’ ‘On Hope’ (1983) builds out of an apocalyptic literary history an unfashionable theory about the possibility of poetry as part of a developing positive human consciousness. (Cook 2004: 494-502)

Recent non-European perspectives are evinced in Jeremy Cronin’s ‘“Even under the Rine of Terror…”: Insurgent South African Poetry’ (1988) which is a study of oral poetics under South African apartied. (Cook 2004: 523-532) Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Search for My Tongue’ (1988) is a bilingual poem about inter-linguistic identity. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 443-446) On the other hand, Adonis’ ‘Preface’ (1992) expounds his sense of exile within his own language, Arabic, but nevertheless argues for an Arabic modernism. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 441-443) If these examples are supplemented by the fin-de-siècle statements collected in 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium, a special issue of Boundary 2, edited by Charles Bernstein, which features poets domiciled variously at locations ranging from Martinique to China, Finland to Argentina, Croatia to Morocco, one can acquire a general sense of the international impact of poetics since modernism. It includes one of the documents of Pierre Joris’ millennial ‘nomadic’ poetics.

However, the prolific Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘Almost a Dialogue with Lyn Hejinian: Quotations and Phantom Limbs…’ (2000), while drawn from another source, serves as a reminder of the limitations even of inclusive but straightforward multi-nationalism and of the advantages of a trans-nationalist approach, which is to be expected of a poet who divides his time between Australia, Britain and the USA (a nomadic poetics in its own right). This hybrid prose document quotes a poem he sent to American poet Lyn Hejinian which he describes as ‘a kind of poetics’ itself, a re-membering of Hejinian’s account of her visit to an autopsy. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 204) Kinsella’s obsession with the corporeal and the psychosomatic is textual (‘I know that the field of the page is the map of my body, of our bodies’) but the lasting impression is of his commitment to dialogic hybridity, exemplified by the ‘almost dialogue’ of his title, his various ‘quotations’ throughout, his excerpts from email discussion lists and statements, and of his instigating and collecting collaborative post-national creative writing over the world wide web: a perspective that leads from body to world, but by-passes the boundaries of both genre and geo-political territories. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 206) This recent example of deterritorialised transnational cyberpoetics demonstrates how poetics as a mode of speculative thought is moving into new kinds of territory in the twenty-first century. Kinsella’s fascinating MUP volume of 2007, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism is a book-length collection of Kinsella’s poetics.




1. The anthologies used for this post are: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’ Poems from the Millennium, Volume Two: Post-War to Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, which contains a short section called ‘The Art of the Manifesto’; Jon Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; Reginald Gibbons’ The Poet’s Work. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, a useful book of writerly descriptions of poetics and process, and I'd like to thank my colleague Daniele Pantano for introducing it to me (and to our students), and W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis’ Strong Words. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, which is also one of my core books for my third poetics posting. The emphasis upon representative anthologies necessarily means the exclusion of important works of poetics, such as Vicente Huidobro’s collection of statements and essays, Manifesto Manifest. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999, or Jacques Roubaud’s playful Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006, but I felt it important to concentrate not only on readily-available volumes, but upon volumes which collect a range of poetics and demonstrate thereby its many forms in one collegiate publication.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 1: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

Poetics and Proto-Poetics from Aristophanes to Yeats
The habit of reading the discourses of the past in the light of present practices and pressures is perhaps a part of identifying a discourse in the first place. The use of a term like ‘classical literary criticism’ for certain ancient texts is an anachronism that D.A. Russell, for one, regards as both ‘convenient’ and ‘inaccurate’ (Russell 1981: 169). The simple re-definition of many of these – and later – historical documents as ‘poetics’ risks the danger of the same ambivalent construction, in whatever way the perspectival constellation is assembled. However, poetics’ very impulse, the need to discuss how writing is (to be) made, may be found articulated intermittently among some of the same past ‘literary critical’ documents, and others. Therefore it is necessary to read them differently, with a different focus, and the emphasis is at times entirely at variance with what a survey of literary criticism would find of interest in their strictures. To sketch a loose adventure for what I am proposing cautiously to call proto-poetics is worth attempting, to show the historical continuity of its impulse, along with the discontinuity of its self-awareness as a discourse, although I have no claims to be comprehensive in this account. I am not attempting to develop universals by my selective paraphrasing of the often lesser-read parts of these great treatises and texts. I limit myself to the poetics of poetry, though in the earliest examples current divisions of literary genre do not apply, and my sense of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse - in my work as a teacher of creative writing, for example - extends to all genres and sub-genres.

In the ancient world, Aristotle, though the author of the first text called ‘Poetics’, was neither the founder of a discourse upon writing nor the first person to discuss how writing is made. For example, the plays of Aristophanes (c.450-385 B.C.), bristle with asides on the art of Euripides, and in the fragment Poetry, Aristophanes emphasises the difficulties of writing both tragedy and epic. (1981: 10.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) wrote his Poetics to define the role of mimesis more thoroughly, and to offer to posterity influential concepts on the evocation of fear and pity in tragic writing, but it is worth stressing that the text is addressed to those wishing to write creatively. (It is not clear that Aristotle was a creative writer, thus making him a possible exception to my rule about writerly poetics.) (Aristotle et al. 1965: 31-75) Certainly, a poet such as Philodemus (110-30 B.C.) wrote his treatise On Poetry from experience, and promulgated a surprisingly formalist doctrine arguing the indivisibility of good content from good form. (Russell 1981: 43). Horace (65-8 B.C.) wrote Ars Poetica as a verse-epistle (poem-essay we might say) to a young Roman writer, offering practical advice (recommending iambics as the best metre for a dramatic poet to make sure his words are heard over a noisy crowd) but promising much toil, as well as offering his better-known exhortation to instruct through delight. (Aristotle et al. 1965: 79-95) (A non-Western viewpoint may be found in the Chinese ‘rhyming prose’ of Lui Chi (261-303), whose ‘On Literature’ gives a vivid account of creative struggle, wisely contrasting occasional serendipitous spontaneity with the wilful forcing of effect. (Birch 1967: 221-232))

For a glimpse of the medieval world shaking off classical models established by Aristotle and Horace, amongst others, Dante (1265-1321), in La Vita Nuova, offers paraphrases between arrangements of his early poems, descriptions of their novel forms (like the sonnet), along with a plea for the vernacular as an appropriate vehicle for amatory verse. (Dante 1969) This is one (late) version of the razo, a form invented by the Troubadours, a series of widely read prose expositions of their verses.

Turning to the proto-poetics of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but limiting ourselves to English-speaking poetics, the contrast between the two earliest volumes we find is instructive of alternative foci. George Puttenham’s digressive The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is addressed to the decorous writer (and courtier) and concentrates on formal descriptions of figures of speech and upon varieties of poetic form, including one of the earliest considerations of visual poetics (for which he is often derided). (Puttenham 1936) On the other hand, the more focussed essay of Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), is a defence of fiction as a mode of knowledge, even of poetry as an autonomous discourse, against the claims of history and philosophy. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 3-49)

Poet and composer Thomas Campion’s comprehensively entitled Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein it is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English toong will receive eight severall kinds of numbers, proper to it selfe, which are all in this booke set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted (1602) argues for the use of classical quantitative metres and for the abandonment of rhyme in English. (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-43, first numbering) The title of Samuel Daniel’s reply indicates that he took the opposite view. It advanced A Defence of Rhyme: Against a Pamphlet entitled: Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein is demonstratively proved, that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language. (1603) (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-45, second numbering). Robert Lloyd’s poem ‘On Rhyme’ (1762) reminds us that this was a still a live issue in the following century. (Hopkins 1990: 46-7) Amid the pages of Ben Jonson’s Timber: or, Discoveries (1641), one finds a practitioner’s notebook reflections upon his writing, ranging from his insistence upon ‘right imitation’ of classical models to his cutting criticisms of Shakespeare’s prolixity and unintentional comic passages. (extracts in Mahl 1968: 113-130; Hopkins 1990: 26-7).

Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare himself did not commit an act of poetics, formally speaking, beyond the sense that his body of creative work is an inimitable model (or series of models) for itself. At once both a pragmatic man of the theatre (in which he acted and which he part owned) and an enigmatic poet possessed of protean ‘negative capability’, he seems not to have had time to publicly reflect on his practice. In the plays there are numerous references to writers and writing – the love-struck inept rhetorical sonneteers of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the two hapless and ineffectual poets of Julius Caesar, the sycophantic bard of Timon of Athens - but these present deliberately negative views of the craft. Pistol’s satirical spouting of quotations from earlier, out of date plays, as well as Shakespeare’s own intertextual debt to both his sources and his rivals, like Marlowe, hardly amount to poetics; neither does the meta-poetry of the Sonnets.

John Milton’s ‘The Verse’, the preface to Paradise Lost (1668), justifies his use of blank verse, its avoidance of ‘the jingling sound of like endings’ suitable for a poem of ‘ancient liberty’, liberated itself ‘from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ as both following classical precedent and (near) contemporary dramatic blank verse. (Milton 1969: 211) John Dryden was a prolific critic, produced a body of theory that nonetheless derives from practice, as when he justifies his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in his ‘Account’ (1667), particularly of his choice of quatrains at the dawn of the age of the heroic couplet. (Dryden 1970: 7-15) His ‘Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay’ (1668) derives from his experience as the foremost writer for the stage, and is a fictional symposium focussed upon historical and contemporary drama, including a positive discussion of rhyme in dramatic verse. (Dryden 1970: 16-76; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 50-110) When his modern editor, George Parfitt, notes, ‘Dryden is a critic in the tradition of Horace, a figure whose energies and interests are balanced between creation and criticism, not a critic like Arnold who became more critic than creator, or like Leavis whose creation is his criticism’, he is situating Dryden as one of the first poet-critics, and acknowledging a pre-figuration of the future divergence of writerly poetics and professional criticism. (Dryden 1970: xiv)

A number of feminist proto-poetics are to be found in the writings of women around this time. Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Prologue’ (1652?) argues – in verse – for the specificity of women’s writing, and her own. (Pritchard 1990: 51-3) Anne Killigrew’s ‘Upon the saying that my verses were made by another’ (1686) (Pritchard 1990: 97-8) and the similarly entitled ‘To one who persuades me to leave the Muses’ (1739?) by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, argue against, firstly, the common incredulity at women’s poetry, and then against attempts to stop women writing altogether. (Pritchard 1990: 116-117) There is an invocation to the Muses in Mary Collier’s harsh The Womans Labour: an epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck, in answer to his late poem, called ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (1739), which passionately pleads for the work and poetry of female labourers to be acknowledged. (Pritchard 1990: 129-136) At the other end of the social scale, certain of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) offer a charming account of a child’s education, which includes lessons on the writing of Latin and English verse, and the encouragement of sensitivity towards poetic artifice. (Stanhope 1774:134-167)

Alexander Pope’s ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711) offers a full-blown Augustan poetics of satire, including brilliant couplets on versification that mime the effects of the writing described. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 111-130; Pope 1970: 45-67; excerpts on versification in Hopkins 1990: 38-9) Written in 1733, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace’, that is, to Pope himself, posit a cruel antithesis to Pope’s poise, and attempt to define literary qualities not found in its addressee. (Fairer and Gerrard 1999: 188-191) Samuel Johnson describes the poet’s task in his novel Rasselas (1759) as being to dwell not on particular details but on generalities. The poet should be equal to this task by acquiring knowledge and judgement, but also by ‘incessant practice’, to become a subtle and adaptable stylist. (Hopkins 1990: 42-3). George Crabbe, in a passage of The Village (1783), that David Hopkins calls ‘Crabbe’s dissatisfaction with pastoral’, recognises the socio-poetical revolution of Duck (and possibly Collier) in the invention of an ‘authentic’ mode of realism that he could use, in contrast to the prevailing and increasingly hackneyed artifice of eighteenth century poetics. (Hopkins 2000: 204)

The poetics of the Romantic and Victorian periods continue that dissatisfaction, of course, and we enter a period when many of the documents, although still primarily thought of as works of literary criticism, are read as kinds of poetics, to the limited extent that they are recognised as manifestic position-statements by poets, but are perhaps not read with enough sensitivity towards the exploratory, conjectural and provocative nature of the discourse in its developing forms. What perhaps masks this aspect, is the growth of the role of the critic, so that, although Coleridge and Arnold are both poets, their criticism extends well beyond the literary, or even merely the cultural, into the social and political realms, and while the scope of their speculations ambitiously expand (for good or ill), the possibility of thinking of their work – a part of it – as proto-poetics or poetics becomes difficult, or looks like a mean reduction of their catholic thought. The separation of critic and poet (particularly without the development of anything like a Coleridgean clerisy to hold these professions together within a purposeful national structure) also accelerated the development of literary criticism as an autonomous discourse, out of the bodies of philology and philosophy, that has in turn tended to mute the conjectural and mercurial tones of poetics that still can be detected in these great works.

William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) offers revolutionary reflections upon his experiments in poetic diction and form, as well as a commitment to the faculty of imagination. (Wordsworth 1969: 734-743, with ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815). 743-751. Enright and De Chickera 1962: 162-186.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s suggestively unsystematic Biographia Literaria (1817) opens a whole poet’s writerly life to inspection; reflections arising out of Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ rub shoulders with scraps of autobiography and accounts of publishing ventures, advice to young writers and considerations of poetic metre. Most influential have proved his theorising of, and discrimination between, the shaping faculty of the imagination and the lesser faculty of fancy, which also domesticated advanced continental aesthetics. (Coleridge 2000: 155-482; Chapters XIV, XVII and part of XVIII (on Wordsworth and metre) in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 190-224.)

By contrast, John Keats, in passages of certain letters written between 1817-1820, defines a poet’s ‘negative capability’ against Coleridge’s synthetic philosophising, preferring an image of the poet as essentially selfless and disinterested in his reception of the world. (excerpts in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 256-259; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 61 and 114.) William Blake likewise was not given to extended prose, but his ‘Of the measure in which the following poem is written’, which is a preface to Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1818-20?), is an argument for further loosening of the Miltonic blank verse line, one which promulgates a politics of poetic form: ‘Poetry fetter’d fetters the human race.’ (Blake 1971: 629; Allen and Tallman 1973: vii) No less political is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry (1821), which concludes hyperbolically that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but also saw poetry as effecting a defamiliarisation of ordinary perception. His analogy for the mind in the creative act, as a rapidly fading coal, balances the philosophical with his intimate knowledge of creative process. (Shelley 1970: 164-197; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 225-255; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 56-60.)

The creative coals were long faded when Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) since it offers an unconvincing retrospective account of the writing of his poem ‘The Raven’. While I use his essay’s authoritative title as a synonym for poetics, the essay itself is best thought of as one more exemplar to demonstrate that writers cannot ‘read’ (in the sense of ‘explaining’) their own work. The fragmentary ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850) is more successful, conjecturally questioning Poe’s poetic practice, and speculating, for example, that all long poems break down into smaller ones. (Poe 1967: 480-492 and 499-513) Walt Whitman’s ‘To Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (1856), with which he opened the first edition of Leaves of Grass, is an impassioned credo for his free verse American epic. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 3-12. Murphy 1969: 46-55.) Gerard Manley Hopkins was another writer, like Whitman, who felt the need to outline his perceptual and metrical experiments. In his Journal for December 12, 1870 he defined the qualities of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, God’s presence in nature imprinted on the observant human (poetic) mind (Hopkins 1953: 129); in his ‘Author’s Preface’, he details the flexible but complex metrical principles of sprung rhythm. (Hopkins 1953: 7-11; Scully 1966: 75-79) Due to the conservatism of Robert Bridges, Hopkins’ executor, these innovations and their poetics remained a guarded secret until the twentieth century. Equally neglected until this century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse Aurora Leigh (1857) contains many passages where its author speculates about the role of the (woman) poet. (Browning 1978). (Particularly excerpts in Pritchard 1990: 202 and Hopkins 2000: 63)

Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Austerity of Poetry’ (1867) paves the way for his critical pronouncements. In the poem, poetic artifice is seen as deceptively beguiling; the Muse is figured as outwardly gaudy but secretly wearing the hair shirt of moral penitence. In famously calling poetry ‘a criticism of life’ in his essay ‘Wordsworth’ (1879), he may not just be wearing the hair shirt of anti-aestheticism, but inflating the function of criticism so that it is ripe to tear itself free of creative writing. (Hopkins 2000: 65-66) ‘Austerity of Poetry’ is concerned with moral judgement in relation to text; it is difficult to see either Arnold’s poetry or prose as poetics; it is literary criticism. By the early twentieth century, literary criticism became a confident autonomous discourse, aiming at scientific exactitude in the hands of I.A. Richards and at a moralistic anti-Technologico-Benthamitism in the work of F.R. Leavis. Ironically, poetics would be free, not only of criticism, which was increasingly becoming the legitimate discourse of literary discussion, but also dissociated from possible institutions to ground and define it as a discourse, in contradiction to literary criticism, which found a home in the early twentieth century academy of the new English schools at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere.

At the turn of the century, W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900) tries to wed past and present, by aligning his traditional Irish mysticism with the progressive continental school of Symbolism. (Cook 2004: 29-34) To borrow a term of Mary Ann Caws, Yeats’ synthesis indicates that the ‘century of Isms’ had dawned.


A bibliography of books used to compile this list

Bibliography for this instalment and the next (on Poetics After Modernism)

Aristotle, (trans. Else, G.F.), 1970, Poetics: Michigan: The University of Michigan.
Aristotle, Horace, Longinus. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. Classical Literary Criticism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Bate, Jonathan. 1997. The Genius of Shakespeare. London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador.
Birch, Cyril. Ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Blake, William. The Complete Poems. London and New York: Longman and Norton, 1971.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: The Women’s Press, 1978.
Caws, Many Ann. Ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001
Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet, 1999.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Cook, Jon. Ed. Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Daniel, Samuel, and Campion, Thomas. A Defence of Rhyme and Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
Dante. La Vita Nuova. Trans. Reynolds, Barbara, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Dryden, John. Selected Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Dudley, D.R., and Lang, D.M. The Penguin Companion to Literature 4: Classical and Byzantine, Oriental and African Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Eliot, T.S., 1975, Selected Prose, London: Faber and Faber.
Enright, D.J., and De Chickera, E. Eds. English Critical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Fairer, David, and Gerrard, Christine. Eds. Eighteenth Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. A Selection of his Poems and Prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
Hopkins. David. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets. London: Routledge, 1990.
MacGann, J, 1983, The Romantic Ideology, Chicago:University of Chicago Press
Mahl, Mary R. Ed. Seventeenth Century Prose. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1968.
Milton, John. Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Murphy, Francis. Ed. Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Plato, The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Airmount Classic, 1968.
Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry. New York: Signet Classic, 1970.
Pritchard, R.E. Ed. Poetry by English Women. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Russell, D.A. Criticism in Antiquity. London, Duckworth, 1981.
Scully, James. Ed. Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Political Writings. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.
Stanhope, Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. Letters Written by …to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1774.
Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html

Bill Griffiths at Edge Hill

Bill Griffiths read at Edge Hill about six months before he died. Here, in Andrew Taylor's photograph, you can see Robert Sheppard introducing Bill before his reading at the Rose Theatre, to entertain us with tales of faregrounds and travels to Hungary. He read a couple of times at Edge Hill and was a favourite with members of the group. Member Alice Lenkiewicz organised a reading for him and her magazine Neon Highway contains an interview with him (read here). He is missed. (Remember his uncollected 'Ghost Strories' are serialised in earlier postings of 'Pages', one a month, from October 2005 onwards.)

Cliff Yates: The Poetry of Saying

Cliff Yates recording his contribution to the PPRG CD: Points of Reference (photo: Andrew Taylor)

Above I posted a review of my Poetry of Saying by David Kennedy. Here is another by Poetry and Poetics Research Group founder member Cliff Yates. I thought it would make a good transition from the last series to this. It was previously published in The North, 38, 2006.

Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000, £50. Liverpool University Press, 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU

The Poetry of Saying traces the history and social development of the British Poetry Revival 1960 -1978, which first became widely available in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969), and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-2000. Sheppard, active as a poet and editor in this area since the 1970s, discusses the work of over twenty poets including Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Bob Cobbing, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, J. H. Prynne, and Barry MacSweeney. The work is discussed with reference to a ‘poetry of saying’, an ethical poetics developed from the work of Levinas and Bakhtin, which avoids closure and makes use of ‘discontinuity and indeterminacy’ in order to keep the work open to interpretation, thereby necessitating a radically different relationship to the reader compared with other work. A strength of the book is in the way in which Sheppard discusses the poems, relating them to the writers’ own influences, sources and preoccupations, as well as to the poetry of saying, in such a way as to do justice to the openness of the work and to the book’s central concept. For Lee Harwood, for instance, a poem is ‘an object made by the writer, that he gives to the reader’, not an ideal reader, but, Sheppard says, ‘the multiplicity of readers who actually do read and use these texts’. He quotes from ‘Linen’:

touching you like the
and soft as
like the scent of flowers and
like an approaching festival
whose promise is failed through carelessness

According to Sheppard: ‘The open work is not simply what anyone reads into it…The gaps are not actually for filling (I have been reading this text for a quarter of a century and have never felt implored to utter an extemporized response or scribble on the text). What the reader actually acknowledges is a textual act of respect…on the part of the author to the inevitable authoring of the reader….[Harwood] imposes a reciprocal responsibility on the reader, to maintain an openness of reading to match his gesture of hospitality.’

In discussing Tom Raworth’s later work (specifically ‘Eternal Sections’), Sheppard refers to the letter published in Joe Soap’s Canoe 14 in which Raworth explains his method of producing a particular poem by narrating his flâneur-like wanderings around Marseilles, accumulating jottings which he later assembled:

sitting there watching
air decay
between the levels
of white tiles
he saw
tangles of wire
a polished petrol tank
hoardings jutted out
by the side of numbers
to hold on to
far away breathing
ejected from the real
gloved fingers meshing
toppling her to the ground

(in memoriam Patrizia Vicinelli)

Comparing this poem with the letter that accompanies it, it is clear that Raworth’s intention is not to reconstruct an experience. The poem’s indeterminacy characterises a poetry of saying. Sheppard says of Raworth’s later work: ‘The poems cohere more by a reading of their formal means than by attempting to chart the semantics of a supposed context, even as readers are drawn into dialogue. The discourses are powerfully questioned and defamiliarized; indeed, the poems may never read the same way twice…They are both empty and full. They turn content into form and turn form into the content that is read… They do not have designs on us. We must make designs with them.’

Sheppard contrasts a poetry of saying with that of the ‘Movement Orthodoxy’, a poetry of the ‘said’: ‘of closure, narrative coherence and grammatical and syntactic cohesion…an empirical lyricism of discrete moments of experience’. He locates Larkin’s heritage in anthologies including New Lines (1956), Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1966), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry (1982) and The New Poetry (1993). It’s a provocative account, illuminating the neglect of alternative poetry in influential anthologies and at the same time questioning the assumptions of ‘mainstream’ poetry from Larkin to Armitage. The Poetry of Saying is an important book. As well as the individual chapters on Raworth and Harwood, the chapter on Roy Fisher (an earlier version of which appeared in L.U.P.’s The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies), taking in the experimental work including The Cut Pages, is particularly good.


Visit Cliff's website here.

Introduction to Fifth Series The Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group

Andrew Taylor and Angela Keaton reading at Edge Hill (photo: Andrew Taylor)

This fifth series of Pages is dedicated to ‘poetry and the difficult thinking that surrounds poetry’ (Badiou) that comes from a group I coordinate at Edge Hill University: the Poetry and Poetics Research Group. We first met on 21 October 1999 and have been meeting, growing, contracting, branching out, ever since.

Our aim has been to discuss both our work and our poetics, sometimes connected with specific projects (several PhDs, finished and currently underway), and sometimes not. Several members have not been officially affiliated to the University, so we don’t see ourselves as an exclusively academic group. We have given readings together at the Rose Theatre at Edge Hill, at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and at the Tate Gallery (the last two being under the auspices of member Alice Lenkiewicz’ Neon Highway imprint. We have published alongside one another (chiefly in Emergency Rations, an A4 pamphlet from Peggy’s Blue Skylight). We have recorded a CD (Points of Reference, copies still available £4). Many of us published in the People’s Poet special Edge Hill edition. As individuals, of course, the group has been active in many fields and I will leave it to members to introduce themselves in the subsequent Pages. They are, Cliff Yates, Andrew Taylor, Alice Lenkiewicz, Scott Thurston, Neil Addison, Dee McMahon (Click onto February 2005 for some of her work), Matt Fallaize, Daniele Pantano, Steve Van Hagen, Michael Egan, Colin Harris, Patricia Farrell, Angela Keaton, Tony Cullen and myself.

Apart from our monthly meetings I have been also coordinating the Open meetings, at which I have invited poets to speak about their poets; speakers to date in clued: Ian Davidson (on his ‘Riga Poems’), Allen Fisher on his poetics ‘imperfect fit’, (Click onto Feb 2005 for his work), Cath Nichols on her poetry film Tales of Boy Nancy, John Seed (Click onto Feb 2005 for his work) on his use of Mayhew’s work, Matthew Welton’s post-Oulipean processes in The Book of Matthew, and Jeff Hilson on Stretchers, Bird Bird and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. (Click onto Sept 2005 for his work).

I notice John Seed wrote the following on his page for Shearsman: ‘In 1983 he moved to London and has taught History at Roehampton University since. Here for several years he was lucky enough to have Allen Fisher as a colleague. He was also lucky enough to find in the mid-80s, moving through the shabby upstairs rooms of various West End London pubs, the Subvoicive readings—and to be part of a discussion group which met for several years at the Tooting house of Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell.’ That discussion group was actually the blueprint for the current Edge Hill group, but this has developed into a different form.

GOING PUBLIC
This year is the tenth anniversary of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group. There are plans for a series of events to mark this occasion during autumn 2009.

There are three founder members still active in the group – Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor. Cliff has a book forthcoming from Salt, Frank Freeman’s Dancing School, which will be launched at the Rose Theatre on Wednesday 11th November. The support will come from other members of the Poedtry and Poetics Research Group.

There will be a series of ‘open meetings’ where members of the group will discuss their poetics. A former member of the group, Scott Thurston, will also hold an open meeting.

Pages will be featuring work from members past and present. There will also be a special edition of erbacce (eds. Alan Corkish and Andrew Taylor) featuring members and former members, alongside an interview with Robert Sheppard in his capacity as chairman of the group.

There will also be an event to mark the publication of Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt) which features poetics by Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates, Scott Thurston and Andrew Taylor alongside others such as Jackson Mac Low, Sheila E. Murphy, Ira Lightman and Geoff Stevens.

To anticipate and accompany these events we will be posting work by the group and its associates between now and the end of the year.

We can be seen (some of us) in a group photograph taken by Peter Griffiths, while he was producing our CD:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3031/2625339652_99e1cb7f57_b.jpg

Robert Sheppard: End of Fourth Series and a Note on Copyright

I have been asked by the British Library to allow them to archive Pages. As I think this little enterprise seems to reach a few more people than I originally imagined, and I think – having just written a piece looking back as ‘under-reported poetries’ of the 1980s - I am very pleased that this should happen on the grounds of making something temporary visible in years to come.


However this blogzine carries material that remains the copyright of those who appear on its pages. I am proposed therefore that this should be the case:

a. For work already posted on the blogzine before the date of this posting; unless I hear otherwise I will assume consent to the work being both here and archived after, but I will remove any work if requested by the author(s) and/or copyright holders.

b. For work to be posted on this blogzine after the date of this posting: I am assuming consent to the work being used here (as is already the case, stated in my first posting) and also archived by the British Library after. See

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/28180544/source/search

I have been amused by the visibility of Pages online and indeed would like to record that an interview with myself, partly about Pages, ‘Literary Netscapes: Web Poetry and Blogging’, conducted by Graeme Harper, is about to appear in the book Authors at Work: the Creative Environment (Melton: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). Most people think I’m a technophobe, but obviously not. Check the book out here; I guess I'm the 'poet blogger' not the 'Poet Laureate' mentioned in the list of contributors, but you never know. My sister in law voted for me online, apparently.

The second series of Pages has been digitalised HERE. 

David Kennedy: Open and Shut

ROBERT SHEPPARD, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000 (Liverpool University Press) £50.00


Readers of Robert Sheppard’s previous critical book Far Language will know how well he can communicate a reader’s excitement about challenging poetries. His new book will also bring those poetries new readers. It is structured around a confident juxtaposition of ‘Movement orthodoxy’ and a linguistically innovative poetry of saying. The poetry of saying, derived largely from Emmanuel Levinas, is more useful than the usual ‘builders’ yards are more fun to live in than finished houses’ critical approach to experimental poetry. Levinas’s ‘Language as saying’ assumes ‘an ethical openness to the other’. So the poetry that Sheppard arranges into a parallel history is open because its authors regard poems that, in Larkin’s words, ‘preserve [the poet’s experience] by setting it off in other people’ as ethically irresponsible. Sheppard gives a convincing outline of this parallel history in two chapters: ‘The British Poetry Revival 1960-1978’ and ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-2000’. There also are good accounts of J. H. Prynne, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob Cobbing.

The problem is that while the book promises an overview, Sheppard rarely strays from his specific interests and therefore takes limited, often prejudiced, views. For example, London publishers have set the bar for orthodox poetry lower and lower each year recently but this doesn’t mean that all poems that nod towards regular metre, fixed forms and closure necessarily have less to say than those that don’t. The Movement has had much less influence and longevity than Sheppard thinks but insisting on Movement influence avoids having to admit that the so-called orthodoxy is actually much more diverse and that some of it might be worth reading. It means he can dismiss Hughes and avoid discussing hard to fit figures like Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, and Thom Gunn altogether. It leads him astray about Plath whose late work is much closer to his poetry of saying than he can bear to admit. In fact, he takes little account of how women poets—orthodox or not—have generally shown little interest in dominant orthodoxies throughout his period. Similarly, a harder look at the Sixties would reveal that differences between orthodox and open were much less distinct. Sheppard is acute on Heaney but claims not to believe what he terms the concluding irony of ‘the disconnected number I still call’ in Tony Harrison’s ‘Long Distance II’ and ‘wonders what the motivation for such a discourse is’. It’s not irony, it’s the work of mourning. Motivation? 500 years of English elegy. One can only assume Sheppard is being satirical.

Sheppard can be equally unfair to the poetry he values. He quickly discusses a huge range of activity in terms of anthologies and under the headings ‘Cambridge’, ‘Crusty Revenants & Uppity Newcomers’ and ‘Being a Woman Poet’. In terms of the poetry of saying’s internal politics, he clearly favours what might be termed London innovators. Combined with his ‘ethical openness’ / ‘paraphrasable closure’ binary, this means that he privileges political and social critique and poets with one recognisable practice. This misses one of the fascinations and pleasures of innovative poets: in contrast to many of their orthodox contemporaries, one never knows what they’re going to do next. Sheppard’s preference means that a lot of the poetry he quotes looks just as inconsequential as most orthodox poems. Yes, once you’ve decoded Craig Raine’s Martian metaphors you’re not left with very much but the same is true once you know Barry MacSweeney is quoting the 16-year-old William Hague. This makes innovative poets seem more tied to the moment and more disposable than orthodox ones. What’s the point of reading Tom Raworth’s ‘West Wind’ now that ‘a handbag’—Margaret Thatcher—is no longer Prime Minister? This may seem harsh but Sheppard often locates the value of such poems more in their politics than in the inexhaustible originality of their procedures.

Sheppard pre-empts criticism: his book is ‘only a beginning’ and his ‘omissions are testimony’ to a ‘multifarious and complex’ poetry. Leaving aside the mystery of why only poetry critics keep complaining their subject is too much for them, taking his omissions with his inclusions seems to reveal a lack of generosity and sympathy. For all that, I would still recommend Sheppard’s book before Andrew Duncan’s highly eccentric coverage of the same period in The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. But a book that wants to ‘feed…poetry’s histories and its futures’ needs a much greater willingness to engage with the inconvenient and dirty actualities of post war British poetry. To adapt Heaney’s comment about the English lyric, this means making poetry’s history eat stuff it has never eaten before. The violently polarized reception of Barry MacSweeny’s posthumous Wolf Tongue shows both how difficult this is and how badly needed. It’s a filthy job and somebody really has got to do it.


AUTHOR’S NOTE

The review above was written in December 2005 and published in P. N. Review 168 (Volume 32 Number 4) March-April 2006.

Aidan Semmens: a reponse to the Fourth Series

Chris Hamilton-Emery writes: "A great deal of innovative writing that comes my way is using tools and techniques which are actually rather hackneyed. Disrupted syntax, linguistic borrowings, indeterminacy, hypo-contextualising, hyper-contextualising, heteroglossia, discontinuous texts, types of spatial arrangement." Well, stone me. What does this prove except that a great deal of people who submit to Salt bother to look at what kind of thing they are likely to publish? If he were an editor for Faber or Hallmark Cards he'd presumably get a very different impression of what people are writing. To suggest that the 'innovative' - or pseudo-innovative - is actually now the 'mainstream' is to overlook everything that passes for 'poetry' in the world beyond our particular cloister, our scriptorium. Roy Fisher might just have made it over the wall into the high street, Denise Riley perhaps - but who else? Is there even one worthwhile poet who makes a living at it in Britain, except by teaching? Even one worthwhile contemporary poem to be found in your local Waterstone's or WH Smith's? {editor's note: of course a large number of Salt collections can be found in Waterstones, many of them quite demanding, Peter Jaeger's book, for instance, and I, for one, am pleased it's there. My own Twentieth Century Blues among them. For me the issue is whether they stay there, i.e., whether they are bought. Sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted.}

Having said that, the techniques and stylistic tics Chris lists have now been around long enough and copied enough for ‘hackneyed’ to seem right, which indeed begs the question whether ‘innovative’ is any longer an appropriate description. It happens to be the stylistic water you and I were brought up in, which makes it a more comfortable and rewarding place (for us) to swim than, say, leftover Augustan, Romantic or Metaphysical pools (and I cannot imagine why anyone would choose to immerse themselves in the stagnant bilge of the Movement, which is still, incredibly and scandalously, the dominant ooze of the high street gutter, malgré Chris Hamilton-Emery). But there is surely little innovative left to do within our kind of poetry (what the hell do you call it? Chris is right about the historical nature of ‘avant-garde’ and to me ‘post-avant’ just sounds silly), which brings the whole business down to where it surely should be – to whit, what is said and how well, not the manner of the saying. I dare say most of the submissions to Salt (or any publisher, in whatever mode of writing) are pure kitsch, merely imitating a manner – part of the challenge for any writer must be to avoid either producing or seeming to produce such empty stuff.

Afterword to Fourth Series

This series of Pages has been slightly disappointing in terms of the volume of traffic in answer to my deliberately naïve question concerning recent poetries. But I haven’t been disappointed by the individual responses I’ve had so far. (I will post more, if there are more, of course, and Scott Thurston promised one last night.)

Clark Allison’s ‘Plural Locutions’ (Feb 27 2008) is probably the best place to start reading because he presents the background and history of the poetries discussed. His final sentence, hailing the plural culture that is potentially coming into being, attempts the rallying-tone of the manifesto, but knows that the era is not receptive to that tone. Chris Hamilton-Emery (Oct 29 2007) poses some heretical questions: is linguistic innovation so innovative? Is it now a mainstream? Is Cambridge poetry dead? Do we now have Allison’s multiplicity of approaches, with perhaps our perspective developing a more European dimension than a trans-Atlantic one? Adrian Clarke (March 1 2008) agrees about the demise of the old ‘schools’ in recent years, recognises the recent growth of compromised centres within Higher Education (Birkbeck, Southampton, and you could add the Universities of Plymouth, Falmouth and Bedfordshire and Royal Holloway and – I’d like to think - Edge Hill). He rejects entirely the output of the ‘mainstream’ and denies the value of bothering with any oppositional stance towards it. He is baffled by Hamilton-Emery’s variable sense of innovation (perhaps there are only innovations). He too looks towards European poetry (as do I, incidentally; it’s a large part of my self-instruction in World Poetry these days). His final assertion that ‘here and now it’s the practice of outside’ points both to the oppositional stance that Clarke values and to the sense of neglect shown towards the most vital poetries in this country. We have to ask: can you have the former without the latter? David Kennedy also wonders whether the innovative is not the new mainstream, an assertion that Clarke’s calls to ‘outsideness’ remind us should be tempered, as they are by Kennedy’s surprise that minor irruptions of innovation still unsettle the mainstream disproportionately. (After all, in the post-democracy of the millennial anthologies that claimed the end of the poetry divisions it is precisely the practices of a writer like Adrian Clarke that are not admitted to the supposedly inclusive consensus.) But Kennedy steps back and, assisted by Ziarek’s analysis, which I recommend (and have used elsewhere), he is astonished by the performative aspects of recent ‘alternative’ poetries, by poetic eventness made flesh. Todd Swift (Oct 15 2008) agrees with Clarke that the practices of innovation and those of the experiential poem are divergent still, and that the former is distrusted, particularly by editors who evince an ignorance of the actual history of this radicalism (send them off to read Allison’s piece and its links). As one who practices the ‘outside’ – though maybe not in Clarke’s terms, exactly – Swift mistrusts careerism that envelopes both Faber, the traditional enemy, and the newcomer Salt (Hamilton-Emery’s press), and the numerous self-regarding small cliques. Tom Jenks (June 26 2008) is a young writer – I saw a great little blue pamphlet of his in Scott Thurston’s office one day – associated with the Openned Poets and The Other Room, based between London and Manchester, a radical groupiscule that raises the spirits and is not at all one of Swift’s small cliques. Although he publishes the magazine Parameter on paper (including the silver paper it is wrapped in; it’s difficult to know whether to read it or put it in the micro-wave!) his piece is mainly a hymn of praise to the internet as the global technology of local activity (such as his own; check out www.otherroom.org).


Personally, I am still uneasy about new technologies, and there is encoded in this project a certain resistance to its very medium. I am most amused to find that this blogzine and my part in it forms the whole of an interview with myself conducted by Graeme Harper to be published as the chapter on ‘literary blogging’ in a book about 'creative environments' (more of that when it appears). Pages was also listed – against my wishes – as part of Edge Hill’s Research Academic Exercise for ‘English’. I hope the assessors found the discussion about recent poetries to their liking. To that we shall return.

David Kennedy raises the question of overview. I’m sorry that he finds my own endeavours as a critic too ‘insider’, for I have tried to document this poetry faithfully, and to facilitate discussion of this poetry. What I am less interested in doing these days is to write about the poetry I don’t admire (though I am open to admiring ‘mainstream’ poetry when I encounter its positive aspects). Indeed, what is ringing in my ears as I churn these terms over again are the words of Michael Palmer, from his recent Active Boundaries. Of Oppen, Celan and Aygi, he writes: ‘What has been little noted critically, is that in each instance, such poetic thought involves stepping away from vanguardist experiment per se… In all three poets, listening and attending take primacy over systematized artistic construction. However resistant it may appear, and may be, poetry becomes a form of encounter, or conversation, a way of being with others.’ Perhaps innovation, taken up as a rallying cry, is not the issue (but perhaps it is simply a label for certain practices). And perhapsd it's about what Badiou says about Mandleshtam, his concern for 'poetry and the very subtle thinking that surrounds poetry', which would include, but is not limited to, poetics. But it is clear that while such language may invigorate someone like me, such a way of conceiving lyric and non-lyric poetry is way beyond the pencil-chewing editors in Swift’s cross-hairs.

I thought contributors would name (new) names. Between them they have turned up Sascha Akhtar, Ronnie McGrath, Trevor Joyce, Elena Rivera, Frances Kruk, Emily Critchley, Keston Sutherland, and Sean Bonney. I noted with interest that the Wikipedia entry on The British Poetry Revival ends with an account of recent years (though not very recent years). It’s worth a look (and perhaps somebody could get in there and spell ‘Sheppard’ correctly) and because it can be altered, I’d like to reproduce it as it stands at the moment and to suggest its named names as a provisional syllabus of the now. (If we can have the excellent Archive of the Now, we can surely have that.)

The current entry on the 'British Poetry Revival' on Wikipedia (I have copied it because it could be modified any time), ends with a concentrated account on the last 19 years, and also gives a link to Piers Hugill’s more capacious account on www.fucine.com which contains some of the same names, though both accounts are perhaps too London based and miss the activities in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield at least. It reads:

‘Into the 1990s and beyond poets such as Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson, and Piers Hugill have surfaced after direct involvement in the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop. An interesting sub-development of the workshop was the instigation of the Foro De Escritores workshop, in Santiago Chile, run on similar aesthetic principles. This workshop has contributed to the development of Martin Gubbins, Andreas Aandwandter, and Martin Bakero, to name but few. Those associated with the Barque Press (most obviously Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland), and more recently Bad Press (in particular, Marianne Morris and Jow Lindsay), have made a similarly important impact via the Cambridge scene. From Scotland, Peter Manson, who had co-edited the magazine Object Permanence in the mid-1990s, Drew Milne, editor of Parataxis, David Kinloch and Richard Price (previously editors of Verse and Southfields) also emerged more fully as poets in their own right. New writings have arisen from the involvement of cris cheek, Bridgid Mcleer, and Alaric Sumner, under the direction of Caroline Bergvall and John Hall through the Performance Writing programme at Dartington College of Arts including Kirsten Lavers, Andy Smith, and Chris Paul; and Keith Jebb at University of Bedfordshire's Creative Writing programme, including Alyson Torns, Kevin Doran, Allison Boast. Redell Olsen's Poetic Practice programme at Royal Holloway, University of London (which includes Frances Kruk, Sophie Robinson, John Sparrow and Stephen Willey) continue to offer a fresh and vigorous challenge to the confessional mainstream.’

Talking of PiersHugil, I’d like to alert you to the academic journal he, Scott Thurston and I are editing.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

editors: Professor Robert Sheppard (shepparr@edgehill.ac.uk Edge Hill University)
Dr. Scott Thurston (S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk University of Salford)

Reviews editor: Piers Hugill (phugill@soton.ac.uk University of Southampton)

Publisher: Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher (www.gylphi.co.uk)


We are currently looking for both academic articles and reviews for our first issue and beyond.
The journal is focused upon the poetic writings that have been written in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s that appear under various names. Peter Middleton, writing on ‘Poetry Since 1970’ for the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, writes, ‘These poets … have difficulty naming themselves. Are they “avant-garde” (an adjective not much liked by anyone), or “underground” (even more disliked), “linguistically innovative” or “second-wave Modernist”?’ he asks. Other names have included: non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, Neo-modernist or experimental poetry. Particular areas of the field have been known as the Cambridge School, the London School, concrete poetry, and performance writing.

While the equivalent North American work is well-represented in academic work, researchers on this British and Irish poetry have no dedicated referred journal, although a number of important books have been published lately.

The Journal aims to answer a lack in the academic market, by proposing to provide a home for critical articles on the history, context, close reading and poetics of this work, generally of 5,000-8,000 but with a maximum 10,000 words, and to carry short reviews (up to 2,000 words) of the stream of monographs and edited volumes in the area. It is intended to appear twice a year.



Meanwhile, the Fifth Series of Pages is going to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group on October 21st 2009. Watch this space leading up, and away from, that date.

Todd Swift

I disagree with the observation that, since disrupted syntax, shifts in levels of discourse, and other apparently innovative techniques are more common (in submissions, even so, to Salt), they may be designated as mainstream. While stylistic divisions between the so-called mainstream and the innovative schools may be shifting (as styles and aims merge or adapt) in the UK - and I think that, among younger (under-35) poets, they are - there remain actual differences in the poetics behind the choices that lead to, for instance, a disrupted lyric, versus an empirical, first-person, traditional British poem (for instance, that Nick Laird might write). There remains, in Britain, profound mistrust of opaque, excessive, or abstract usage of language, in relation to poetry, which, for most people, is still ultimately a vehicle for expressing something - for saying something - about the self and experience. Or rather, not about the problematic nature of an apparent self apparently trying to say something - but, instead, an easily accepted self easily and transparently conveying truths. Moreover, poems continue to be, on the whole, validated in terms of "making" that Pound, or Orwell would have approved (terms better used for for prose): clarity, hardness, and so on. These are scientific values that work well for language mainly built to control, or sell, things, including sentiments and ideas. In a paradox that I think has not yet fully dawned on British poets, modernism's no-nonsense tenets propelled the sort of Protestant work ethic of the Movement style, and its purities of diction - Davie, after all,
admired Pound.

My chief concern is with the idea of the "good poem" - so cherished by entrepreneurs in the poetry-editing business - since most often, when one examines the sort of criteria even so-called innovative editors swear by, they end up being rather traditional, and usually trite. The idea that poets have something to say, or that form and content are finding an organic match, are hardly cutting edge observations, and could easily sum up the New Lines view of the Movement era. Poetry publishing cannot be everything to everyone, or it stops being the art of publishing, and instead becomes the entertainment of publishing. Recent trends, in poetry, do seem to be moving from theory (as in the English departments) - how much is Eagleton to blame for this? Likely, not much. More seriously, few younger poets read, or understand, Poetic Artifice, and how that work inspired Charles Bernstein in America. There is a very real feedback loop, between 1976 era British Poetry, and Language poetry in the US - just as an earlier British generation found Allen's The New American Poetry foundational. But, in the mainstream, such a loop seems weaker - few American poets read or recognise, for instance, Don Paterson - and fewer British mainstream poets seem to get their bearings from North Americans (other than, say, Billy Collins, and even that seems unlikely).

The most important American poet, in terms of influence, remains O'Hara, who does seem to create a strange brotherhood of followers. The main ongoing tragedy in British poetry, to my mind, remains the unquestioned connection between publishing and poetry, in some minds. Too many young poets seek a career (sadly, or laughably) from the mainstream, one that seems afforded by the capital which publication - vindication - by Salt, or Faber, seems to accord. The main thing should be the composition of the poem. Poems should be read, and appreciated, regardless of, and indeed, apart from, their publisher. Instead, house styles, and publishing cliques no better than small closed clubs, predominate in the UK, whose poetry communities seem, from an outsider's perspective (and I have been kept an outsider), mostly incurious, and certainly, anti-internationalist, except in mainly avant-garde, circumstances.

David Kennedy: Drifting Hungers and Accessory Rage

In ‘Saws’, Trevor Joyce writes of ‘Drifting hungers and accessory rage’. Eléna Rivera writes in ‘See’, ‘The limit of reproduction and replica, / of “you” as reflection, of “you” as reaction’. Edmond Jabès has Yukel say in ‘The Time of the Lovers’, ‘A blank page swarms with steps on the point of finding their own tracks. An existence is a scrutiny of signs.’ Trying to answer Robert’s question inevitably raises others: is alternative doing the same thing? Has it changed? I have some sympathy with Chris Hamilton-Emery’s argument that innovative practices are now so commonplace they’re the new mainstream. But I’d want to add that I’m constantly astonished by how alternative elements don’t have to be very big in order to make a poetry that seems completely divergent from what comes from, say, Cape or Bloodaxe. But the poetry that’s excited and interested me the most in recent years seems to have enacted a testing of the whole idea of the alternative, a testing in the same way that Krzysztof Ziarek’s attempted a way past the so-called theory death of the avant-garde with his concept of the ‘forcework’. The alternative work of art is not an object but an event that unmakes and remakes the forces of power that circulate around it and through it. Ziarek’s wrong and right at the same time. He’s wrong because Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ is as much as a forcework as one of Bill Viola’s video installations. But he’s also right because it seems to me that the poetry I’ve found most valuable in the last 8 years is only fully activated off the page, in the air, in bookfair and conference moshpits, and in the upstairs rooms of performance. And that also connects with the fact that the most arresting voices occupying places and spaces have been women’s. Confronted with the work of younger poets—and you really are confronted—like Frances Kruk and Emily Critchley I want to yell something like ‘holy paratactic bad girl word salad Batman’ except it’s there in the work of older poets like Frances Presley and Geraldine Monk too. The voice is thrown out into environments—political, historical, sexual—to see what it catches and catches on. And you have to be there to hear it. I don’t see/hear this is the work of many male poets except Keston Sutherland and Sean Bonney. But then it’s hard to do the overview thing because, as earlier respondents have pointed out, you can’t put poets into boxes marked ‘London’ or ‘Cambridge’ anymore. (Could you ever do that with women poets?) And the actual socialities underwriting alternative poetry are much more interesting and surprising anyway. Overview brings me on to another thing I want to mention which is something that hasn’t happened in the last 8 years. We still don’t have the body of criticism to match the work we love. I’m talking big books not articles. Andrew Duncan and our host here have both made bold stabs but they both seemed to leave a lot out. Or perhaps Duncan was just too eccentric (outside) and Sheppard was just too concentric (inside). I’ve been sceptical about such a project elsewhere but I still think it’s worth an attempt. A final thing that comes to mind is Peter Riley’s appreciation of Andrew Crozier in PN Review 182. Riley mentions Crozier’s seminal essay ‘Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism’ and its famous summary of Larkin: ‘we are asked to trust the poet, not the poem’. Re-reading that, I know what Crozier means and I’m thankful for alternative poetry because I’m not interested in poets’ lives exponentially smoothed into consumer goods. I want to know that the poets I read and hear can be as confused, angry, sceptical, hysterical or perverted as I can. I want the work to jolt me. But at the same time I want to say ‘yes’ because if we can’t trust our alternative poets to do right by us in language in these dismal times then who? And when? And that’s why we need the criticism I was talking about. We (those who write and read alternative poetry) need to tell our own story. ‘The comic book version destroyed all / possibility for heroic action’, writes Eléna Rivera in ‘Painting our evidence’. Put an ‘almost’ and a date in there somewhere—you choose where and when—and you’ll get closer to what I mean.


Eléna Rivera’s poems are in Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006). A useful introduction to Edmond Jabès is From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). Trevor Joyce’s poem is in What’s in Store – Poems 2000-2007 (New Writers’ Press/The Gig, 2007).

Tom Jenks

Amongst the many interesting things on the Great Works website is Peter Philpott’s explanation of why he publishes on the internet. In it, he states that those who remain “emotionally involved with words on paper…have as much future as trained scribes post-Gutenberg.” I agree with his overarching assertion that the internet is changing the way we access poetry and talk to one another about it. After all, you are almost certainly reading this on a screen, which is where I am writing it. I don’t agree, however, that the printed page is doomed. Rather, I think information technology can reinvigorate it, both in the way that it is created and the way it is distributed. I also think that this applies particularly to experimental and innovative poetry.

I am just about young enough to say that I grew up with computers. I can certainly say that they have been around for all of my adult life. Yet I still, to use Philpott’s phrase, remain “emotionally involved” with the book as artefact, with the physical rather than the virtual text. So too do the people I know in and around Manchester who are engaged with contemporary poetry - editors and small press publishers who all, whilst using the internet, still see the printed page in general and the book in particular as valid. What information technology has done, however, is to give us the keys to the citadel. I was reading recently about the upheavals in the Poetry Society in the 1970s, when Eric Mottram et al somehow sailed their Black Pearl through the reefs and under the radar, boarded the ship of state and seized the wheel. One of the most radical things they did was to make the presses, the physical machinery for producing texts, available to anyone with the ideas and inclination to use it. Such an act now seems impossibly romantic and oddly archaic, like a sit in or a march to Aldermaston. Yet we are now in the very situation Mottram was trying to engineer. Anyone with ideas and inclination can produce a book and, more importantly, thanks to the evolution of print on demand, they can produce the book they want when they want it. By chance, I happened to appear on a Radio 4 programme about the small press scene a while ago. One of the other participants was Michael Schmidt, who declared himself of the opinion that the proliferation of publications facilitated by technological change is a bad thing. His argument seems to be that there should be an elite, a crack team of cultural arbiters who decide what to blast and bless, who know where the ladders are and know when to lower them and when to pull them up – gatekeepers, keymasters, curators, custodians. On one hand, you can see his point. Print on demand and the vanity press are, if not exactly bedfellows, certainly roommates. On the other, why should writers always have to seek approval, to be supplicants holding out bowls for a ladleful of gruel? Visionaries and innovators are, by definition, out of synch with their times. They are not the sort of people who find their way into Waterstones or onto the library shelf amongst the Armitages, Duffys, Copes and 100 Poems To Clean Your Teeth To. I am not saying that such people have not had an outlet before – far from it. But technology has made it easier than ever to produce high quality texts which can be the stuff from which alternative worlds are constructed, the currency of local scenes with their own phenomena and epiphenomena, their own flora and fauna.

In addition to changing the way that the printed page is distributed, technology can also radicalise the way that is created. Philpott’s reference to scribes is oddly apt, for in some ways that is what technology has made us . I grew up around the corner from the site of St. Peter’s monastery on the banks of the Wear where Bede spent his formative years and I’m beginning to think all those childhood trips to Durham cathedral to stand next to what may or may not be his bones did something to me. After years of seeing the page as simply a place to put words, my increasing familiarity with computers has gradually transformed my practice to the extent that I now view myself as a producer of illuminated manuscripts, incorporating images and non-verbal figures to work in a way that is as much about the eye as the ear and the voice. The screen, far from being a stifling, standardising influence, can be liberating, making the page a playground and a palette. Technology can make new forms. It can also make the old forms new.

Adrian Clarke

A Response to Chris Hamilton-Emery
Though his approach modestly takes account of the limitations his need as a publisher to identify a “commercially viable project” impose, Chris Hamilton- Emery’s posting on changes since 2000 from the British Poets list prompts a response to some of its provocations.

I too recognise the declining significance of location and social identity. The schools of Mottram and Prynne are no more and some of their survivors have been evidencing a more generous spirit. Along with the rooms upstairs, poetic activity in pubs has become more elusive, while its nature has become a little more inclusive – with an attendant risk of a certain anonymity; and, yes, “institutional locations” offer a problematic alternative. I myself have been publishing with the Birkbeck-based Veer Books, and in my experience of the ambitious activities of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, if it has an institutionally academic agenda it is well disguised. But London and Cambridge Colleges, the University of Southampton, etc. are far from the old dream of an anti-university; they are subject to the administrative imposition of restrictive political agendas, and the kind of ambience they can offer is, rightly or wrongly, unlikely to be perceived generally as one that can foster or disseminate uninhibited creativity.

Provocation comes with the suggestion that “a great deal of innovative writing … is using tools and techniques that are actually rather hackneyed” – particularly when three paragraphs later Hamilton-Emery observes that “new Muslim writing seems to have been branded as identity writing as if this were somehow old hat and not worth investigating”. Innovation would appear to have a variable contextual value; the explanation is that it is, in fact, a red herring, because “what’s being said is suddenly more vital than how it is being said”. - Back to a – once more respectable? – form/content split and the ascendancy of Meaning with its faithful accomplice me-meaning in tow. Nevertheless, irrespective of their hackneyed disrupted syntax and indeterminacy, because of their “huge take up” he considers “it might be more accurate to regard these (innovative) practices as mainstream”. He doesn’t define the term, but if it applies to most of what is received enthusiastically in the Guardian Saturday Review and the like, then the mainstream is so dire as poetry and so naïve and ignorant in its preconceptions that if there is no “binary opposition” between it and our output I see little point in persevering. It is, I think, fair to ask if Marjorie Perloff's account of an emergent materialist poetic with its seeds in early modernism mounting a growing challenge to the credibility of mainstream lyric poetry, year in and year out obedient to the "commands of sense" or "the path of least resistance", may not offer a more pertinent interpretation of what continues to be at issue.
Hamilton-Emery’s eagerness to “see what new European migration brings to the mix” seems distinctly more useful. There is a receptivity to radical poetries in most of Western Europe that shames us, and the decline in the commercial publishing of established contemporary poets from those countries in translation - and now the withdrawal of funding from small presses willing to fill the gap - is a depressing indicator of the health of our literary culture. Eastern Europe approaches from a very different cultural direction, but it is hard to believe its emigrants will readily acclimatize themselves to more or less genteel neuroses, facetious rhymes and the cosy verse essay.

Returning to that “binary opposition of avant-garde (now surely a historical term) and the mainstream”, Hamilton-Emery is certainly right that “there are no power structures that make sense within such a framework”. The operative structures are clearly external. I see no escape from the continuing relevance of Lyotard’s wry observation: “Administrative procedures should make individuals ‘want’ what the system needs in order to perform well.” If the system is “terrorist” it is so by “eliminating or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him”. Our justification is that we are calculatedly not what the system needs, while the “consumption” of our work and that in other genres and media with similar aspirations may offer an index of that system’s efficiency. Look elsewhere enviously we may; here and now it’s the practice of outside alright.

Clark Allison: Plural Locutions

Clark Allison

Clark Allison has published the prose poem 'Six Paragraphs' as well as reviews of George Oppen and Barbara Guest at Stride magazine website(http://stridemagazine.co.uk/archive.htm) and well as on Pages.


Plural Locutions: Remarks on recent developments in British and Irish poetry


(Momentary glimpses of the personal amid the plural:)


A poem felt like this:An entirely new way to beginWalking itself first thing in the morning…
It can’t quite help itself.A stranger to being in words
-- John Welch ‘Personal Poem’ in ‘fragmente’ 9, 2007



The historical moment being what it is change in social and aesthetic consciousness can take time to filter through, though there are generally also inescapable fads and fluctuations that happen quicklywithout necessarily at first securing a convincing hold. There may be age stational latency prior to assimilation and the most obvious indication of this now is probably the uptake of digital and electronic poetry, often of a mixed and fluid, fluent nature characteristic of new media (there are now also it must be added a great many interesting and relevant literary blogs on the Web, the British and Irish Poetries mailing list continues as does the British Electronic Poetry Centre . Sometimes exchangeable formats to circulate this kind of work can’t readily be secured so it exists more in its tentative and now centred way as a species of performance fixed to the localities capable of presenting it, not unlike a gallery presentation or a custom, view only type of website, amenable to housing the tangible synchrony of physical and technical specifities needed to display it, poetry being reconceived as new media exhibit or performance. This sort of approach will surely evolve, but looks highly gallery or event space dependent in a way that the traditional,venerable book unequivocally isn’t.

There looks to be a need then to differentiate long term from short term literary/poetic movements and trends, not least because when short-termism does realise assimilation it can, in doing so, be radically reconceived. Among more recent observations and instancings, looking abroad for incoming modern - Modernism incontrovertibly an omnivorous phenomenon that traversed national boundaries - and postmodern inspiration, it is doubtless significant that American avant-gardes likethe New American poetry, which included versions of projective verse, jazz inspired free improvisation and painterly conscious species of abstract figuration, moving onto the dis-locutions and textural disruptions, if not irrepressible postmodern posturings and provocationsof Language poetry (‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ magazine, ed. Andrews,Bernstein 1978-81, archived in gif format at http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/LANGUAGEn1 is the classic locus), never could credit more than a minor efflorescence here amongsympathetic British readers and respondents. Tricks and torts have been lifted, stolen or tweaked but the full blown package of ideological practice obstinately resisted. Similarly the strong blast of Continental stylistic and theoretical agenda making that proposed an aesthetics of intrinsic, perhaps universalisable structure even along mythic lines of a kind uncovered by Levi-Strauss, only to deconstruct these into the aporias of quirks, uncertainties and shadowwork leaving on dust clearing little other than the dubieties of Lacan’s ever disruptive Symbolic, created a flurry of ripples in Anglophone readers until succumbing to not much more than an unconvincedly resistant scepticism, still attuned to the supposed immoveability of traditional, perennial verities. Oulipo plied much of this radically reformed systematic elaboration (eg in Perec, Queneau) as well as foretasting its irresistible dissolution, not unexpectedly positing a recuperation, if not also a blurring, of past aesthetic spaces along the way.

If British poetic preoccupations have seemed a mite insular, there are numerous signs that pluralism is increasingly making an impact. Pluralism has differing predominant loci of effect, bespeaking aplurality within, an increasing differentiation and heterogeneity, are cognition of multiplying constituencies, as well as an increase in borrowing from without, be it America, the Continent or elsewhere. The plural is ‘Other’, to borrow the title of the Caddel/Quartermain’98 anthology, and is concerned with addressing questions of social and political identity. The notable alternative anthology “The NewBritish Poetry” (ed. Allnutt/D’Aguiar/Mottram/Edwards, Paladin 1988) bundled its contributors into separable categories, feminist, black, younger and British Poetry Revival-inspired, signalling some obstacles to integration as well as locating the '70s BPR experience as a peculiarly potent and aligning event, one that is still discussed, pro and con (see Peter Barry “Poetry Wars” Salt 2006), where the prolonged delay in arriving at detailed documentation looks significant.The Poetry Society and its organ ‘Poetry Review’ wages on, exuding its air of crusty, uncomplicated conservatism, prompting attitudes,variably, to engage or disregard. The most persuasive and reliable recent compendium is Tuma’s “Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry” (Oxford, New York 2001), which has people in it as varied as John Wilkinson, Catherine Walsh, Carol Ann Duffy and Benjamin Zephaniah but lamentably no Prynne or Andrew Duncan. The categorisations of the classic Paladin anthology, however, are far from arbitrary, and as we find the BPR even now being reassessed there is unlikely to be much confirmation that we have moved as far as we might towards integrating or resolving them, as Chris Hamilton-Emery observed in his pointed commentary earlier, “Innovative poetries in the Black andAsian communities have largely been excluded from recent surveys…and new Muslim writing seems to have been branded as identity writing”. The situation with feminist (or just women’s) writing is perhaps not quite as bleak or intransigent, though the air has stilled a little, perhaps,since the 1996 Gilbert/Gubar ‘Norton Women’ anthology and the Maggie O’Sullivan edited “Out of Everywhere” of the same year. The sheer profusion of graspable cultural identity categories is perhaps so wide that geographical locus or instead the marshalling of more specifically identified ‘issues’, such as environmentalism or cyberpoetry or personal development or obscurities of aesthetic taste (difficult, complex, authentic, transparent etc) or just as consumers what to wear and buy (“no real framework…outside of consumption” Hamilton-Emery), across geographic boundaries, is rather claiming the agenda.

Peter Finch in a persuasively encompassing retrospective survey of the broader developments in British poetry in 2003 thought he could still discern what he called a neo-Georgian line in British poetic development ‘which runs up from Hardy, through D.H.Lawrence, Philip Larkin, Betjeman,’ encompassing the Movement, to in the present day ‘Douglas Dunn, Motion, and Armitage,’ “although is no longer quite as central as it once was” (see www.peterfinch.co.uk/enc.htm). This delineates the mainstream current, the centre, against which the marginal and experimental articulate and contest. We may actually have now, or bemoving toward, a plural “multi-hued, post-modern, culturalenvironment, available to all” (Finch) but the wheels of change are slowly turning.