David Plante's Diary and British Poetry
There is more, I discovered after my last post, on the visit of Royston Ellis to Ye Cracke pub in 1960 in the catalogue to Stuart Sutcliffe, I’m reminding myself here. Ye Cracke, as I write, is shut for a considerable refurb, after having fallen into decrepitude. I have been talking to the acting manager who wants to commemorate more than just the Beatles, i.e., the poets and artists as well. There is a very fine photo of a young Sutcliffe in the pub itself that would go well on the wall. People could be made to guess who it was! I digress, because I want to move on to another approach to the British Poetry Revival.
At UEA as an undergraduate, I made some contact with the writers in residence, or the Henfield Fellows, in my second year with the young novelist David Plante. I admired his distanciating novels such as The Ghost of Henry James and – out in Penguin, and I still have a copy, The Darkness of the Body. He also organised a symposium on the poets of the 1930s, about which I wish to write elsewhere. Like Plante himself, I am a diary-keeper, and sometimes my accounts are as fulsome (though not as elegant) as his. Unfortunately, his diary Becoming a Londoner: A Diary (London, Bloomsbury, 2013) does not mention this event (neither does the Empson biography I quoted from in a previous post) but it is full of his meetings with remarkable and not so remarkable people: in the latter category, Stephen Spender (although Plante offers a very human and sympathetic view of him). Anyway, that’s not my current point.
Plante’s partner was Nikos Stangos (bottom right image above). As poetry editor at Penguin I’m thinking he’s responsible for the Penguin Modern Poets series, possibly for Children of Albion, and almost certainly for Edward Lucie-Smith’s British Poetry since 1945 (in its first edition a beautifully comprehensive account of the range of British poetry). Lucie-Smith appears in the diaries (unflatteringly), and while I’m at it: did you know that a photo by Lucie-Smith of Lee Harwood is in the National Portrait Gallery?). In the early 1970s Stangos moved to Thames and Hudson, and I like to think he was responsible for some of their art books (perhaps the Adrian Henri Performance Art that is currently reprinting!).
I vaguely remember that Lee mentioned him now and again. Plante’s diary is (deliberately) undated, but there is one, isolated, entry that I have transcribed because it is another view (this time, from an American, and one more drawn to fiction than poetry) of the British Poetry Revival. This reads:
As poetry editor, Nikos has many poets wanting his attention, poets who send him or arrange to meet him to give him the kinds of publications that originated in America, the mimeographed typed text stapled together. One is The New British Poetry. Nikos and I are archivists, and I suppose we do think that whatever is of interest now will be of even more interest in the future, including the names of the New British Poets: Allen Barry, Don Bodie, Alan Brownjohn, Jim Burns, Dave Cunliffe, Paul Evans, Roy Fisher, S A Gooch, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, LM Henrickson, Douglas Hill, Pete Hoida, Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Alan Jackson, Peter Jay, David Kerrison, Adrian Mitchell, Tina Morris, Neil Oram, Ignu Ramus, Jeremy Robson, Michael Shayer, Steve Sneyd, Chris Torrance, Gael Turnbull, Ian Vine, Michael Wilkin, WE Wyatt.
Some of these poets Nikos has published: Alan Brownjohn, Harry Guest, Anselm Hollo, Michael Horovitz, Adrian Mitchell, and a poet he especially admires, Lee Harwood, whose love poetry has great tenderness, and who earns his money, Nikos said, as a bus conductor collecting fares in Brighton. (85)
That last remark dates the otherwise undated entry. I need to check the chronology in Lee’s prose. Oh yes, by the way, Kelvin Corcoran and I are editing Lee’s prose for Shearsman. You’re one of the first to read that here!
This is a fascinating entry. It names the poetry The New British Poetry (a term used in Poetmeat, which I shall get round to, later, and in the 1988 anthology of that very name). Therefore, the poets are The New British Poets: the capitals suggest that Plante and presumably Stangos (who was also a translator of poetry) recognised it, as they say these days, ‘as a thing’. His remark that ‘Nikos and I are archivists, and I suppose we do think that whatever is of interest now will be of even more interest in the future,’ is, I think, prophetic. It also suggests the physical amassing of material. (Where is this archive? one might well ask.) Then we have the two lists of names, those published, in Penguin (and elsewhere?), and those who were simply donors to the archive (actually, they were probably hoping that Stangos would publish them). The list is an odd one. There are names I would recognise, and one (Brownjohn) who I think of as a more mainstream writer, and I’ll leave to one side. The list falls into two groups, those I recognise as poets of the period, others I don’t. Remember, Plante remembers them not as bibliographic entries, but as visitors. So, without Googling or raking through old anthologies, those I recognise, (and I offer an off-the-cuff thumbnail for each) are:
Jim Burns (the Preston scene) Dave Cunliffe (Poetmeat editor) Paul Evans (Brighton ‘school’), Roy Fisher (did my PhD on him!), Harry Guest (fine poet, always liked meeting him), Lee Harwood (did my PhD on him, and currently literary executor and editor of, rest of the Brighton ‘school’), Pete Hoida (Patricia and I saw an exhibition of his paintings recently: I remembered he was a ‘Child of Albion’), Anselm Hollo (actually Finnish, and moved to the US, but active at this time), Michael Horovitz (of course!), Alan Jackson (in Penguin Modern Poets), Peter Jay (I think he ran Anvil Press) David Kerrison (in Children of Albion I think), Adrian Mitchell (our protest poet), Tina Morris (co-editor of Poetmeat, one of the poets I really enjoyed in Children of Albion, and latterly a correspondent!) Neil Oram (poet and manager of Sam Widges, author of the world’s longest play, The Warp), Jeremy Robson (editor, also his name rings a bell in terms of jazz and poetry performances), Michael Shayer (editor of Migrant Press, famous editor of Fisher’s City,) Steve Sneyd (a small press regular, but also SF poet: I met him at a SF conference in Liverpool), Chris Torrance (then a London poet, soon to become the focus of a South Walean Revival), Gael Turnbull (the earliest man on the scene, Migrant again), Ian Vine (the only name I associate with the ‘Cambridge School, you know: the school that doesn’t exist, and about which nobody has yet dared write a book!), WE Wyatt (more usually, Bill Wyatt, friend of Torrance and something suggests haiku poet, certainly Zen).
The names Allen Barry, Don Bodie, S A Gooch, LM Henrickson, Douglas Hill, Ignu Ramus, and Michael Wilkin mean nothing to me, though Hill is ringing a bell so muted I can’t entertain it.
I wonder how Plante compiled the list: from pamphlets piled in a corner? From memories of meeting the poets? All such lists are inherently unstable, but at least this was compiled in the thick of it, during Lee’s bus conducting years. And like all such lists, there is this kind of excess, the names that don’t mean anything (as well as the obvious missing names). I know now this could be for any number of reasons. People leave the scene, change art form (like Hoida), change name (who was Ignu Ramus? He would have fitted in at Sam Widges!). On reflection, though, most of the names are still recognisable and arguably a ‘group’. Plante’s hit rate is pretty high and, of course, those who were published, particularly in the Penguin Modern Poets series were given a particular leg up. Harwood is very clear in his long autobiographical prose that being published alongside John Ashbery and Tom Raworth in the series (my copy is dated 1974) was a huge lift to a new audience he could not have reached, even through being published by Fulcrum (itself another organisation of conferment of status).
Of course, I’m not pretending Plante’s list is canonical or comprehensive, nor was it intended to be. But it is interesting to note his sense of archival responsibility and his sense that this was a scene to watch for futurity. I.e., now – and now that I am reconsidering it.
26 August 2025
PS Next day: Interestingly, nearly all of the names that I didn’t identify yesterday in David Plante’s list were contributors to Dave Cunliffe's and Tina Morris' Poetmeat. Douglas Hill was a Canadian poet.
This is the third of a series of posts on the British Poetry Revival, which begins here: : Pages: How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat See the new hub here for other recent posts.
An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival from some years
ago is sampled here: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two.
