The British Poetry Revival is the general name now given to a loose movement in the United Kingdom that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term was a neologism first used in 1964, postulating a New British Poetry to match the anthology The New American Poetry (1960) edited by Donald Allen.[1]
Fisher, a professional jazz pianist, applied the lessons of William Carlos Williams's Paterson to his native Birmingham in his long poem City. Turnbull, who spent some time in the USA, was also influenced by Williams. His fellow Scots Morgan and Finlay both worked with found, sound and visual poetry. Mottram, Nuttall, Horovitz and Burns were all close to the Beat generation writers. Mottram and Raworth were also influenced by the Black Mountain poets; while Raworth and Harwood shared an interest in the poets of the New York School.
Publishing outlets for this new experimental poetry included Turnbull's Migrant Press, Raworth's Matrix Press and Goliard Press, Horovitz's New Departures, Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press, Tim Longville's Grosseteste Review, Galloping Dog Press and its Poetry Information magazine, Pig Press, Andrew Crozier and Peter Riley's The English Intelligencer, Crozier's Ferry Press, and Cobbing's Writers Forum. Many of these presses and magazines also published avant-garde American and European poetry. The first representative anthology of the new movement was Horovitz's Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). A broader view of the first and second generations of the Revival is in the sections edited by Eric Mottram and Ken Edwards in The New British Poetry (1988). Robert Sheppard also provides an account of some of this activity in his chapter "The British Poetry Revival" in his book, The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool University Press, 2005)', while Juha Virtanen wrote a Revival monograph, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Griffiths writes a poetry of dazzling surface and deep political commitment that incorporates such matter as his professional knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and his years as a Hells Angel. Both Sinclair and Fisher share a taste for William Blake and an interest in exploring the meaning of place, particularly London, which can be seen in Sinclair's Suicide Bridge and Lud Heat and Fisher's Place sequence of books. O'Sullivan explores a view of the poet as shaman in her work, while Randell and Riley were among the first British women poets to combine feminist concerns with experimental poetic practice. For more on Griffiths's poetry, see William Rowe (ed.), Bill Griffiths (Salt, 2007). For more on Sinclair, see Robert Sheppard, Iain Sinclair (Northcote House, 2007) or Brian Baker, Iain Sinclair (Manchester UP, 2007). For Fisher, see Robert Hampson and cris cheek (eds), The Allen Fisher Companion (Shearsman, 2020).
Griffiths started Pirate Press to publish work by himself and others. Allen Fisher set up Spanner for similar reasons, and Sinclair's early books were published by his own Albion Village Press, which also published work by Chris Torrance and Brian Catling. Book production has always been an important part of Revival practice. Many of these writers also participated enthusiastically in performance poetry events, both individually or in groups like Cobbing's Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle.
Eric Mottram was a central figure on the London scene, both for his personal and professional knowledge of the Beat generation writers and the US poets linked with the New American Poetry more generally, and his abilities as a promoter and poet. In large part through Mottram's presence there, King's College London was another important site for the British Poetry Revival. Poets who attended there (a number of them also students taught by Mottram) included Gilbert Adair, Peter Barry, Sean Bonney, Hannah Bramness, Clive Bush, Ken Edwards, Bill Griffiths, Robert Gavin Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Will Rowe, and Lawrence Upton.
Through Bunting, these younger writers became familiar with the work of the Objectivist poets. Specifically, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker were to become important models for Caddel and Simms in their writing about the Northumbrian environment, while John Seed picked up on George Oppen.[9] Pickard and MacSweeney shared Bunting's interest in reviving Northumbrian vowel patterns and verbal music in poetry and all of these poets were influenced by the older poet's insistence on poetry as sounded speech rather than purely written text.
At Easter, 1967 MacSweeney organised the Sparty Lea Poetry Festival. This was a ten-day session of reading, writing and discussion. The participants, including the Pickards, MacSweeney, Andrew Crozier, John James, John Temple, Pete Armstrong, Tim Longville, Peter Riley, John Hall, J. H. Prynne and Nick Waite, stayed in a group of four cottages in the village of Sparty Lea.[10] This has often been presented as a pivotal event in the British Poetry Revival, bringing together poets who were separated geographically and in terms of poetic influences and encouraging them to support and publish each other's work.
Although published by Writers Forum and Pirate Press, Geraldine Monk is very much a poet of the North of England. Like Maggie O'Sullivan, she writes for performance as much as for the page and there is an undercurrent of feminist concerns in her work. Other poets associated with the North of England included Paul Buck, Glenda George, and John Seed. Paul Buck and Glenda George for many years edited Curtains, a magazine instrumental in disseminating contemporary French poetry and philosophical/theoretical writing. John Seed had picked up on Objectivism while still in the North-East. Geraldine Monk's edited collection of reminiscences by various Northern poets (including Jim Burns, Paul Buck, Glenda George, and John Seed, CUSP, mentioned above, provides a rich account of innovative poetry outside the metropolis.[11]
The Cambridge poets were a group centred around J. H. Prynne and included Andrew Crozier, John James, Douglas Oliver, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Peter Riley, Tim Longville and John Riley. Prynne was influenced by Charles Olson and Crozier was partly responsible for Carl Rakosi's return to poetry in the 1960s. The New York school were also an important influence for many of the Cambridge poets - most obviously in the work of John James. The Grosseteste Review, which published these poets, was originally thought of as a kind of magazine of British Objectivism. The early formation of this group is evidenced in the pages of The English Intelligencer, a privately-circulated worksheet published between January 1966 and April 1968. It was founded by Andrew Crozier, who edited the first and third series; the second series was edited by Peter Riley. Contributors and recipients included Peter Armstrong, Jim Burns, Elaine Feinstein, John Hall, John James, Tim Longville, Barry MacSweeney, J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, John Temple, Chris Torrance and Nick Wayte'[12]
The Cambridge poets in general wrote in a cooler, more measured style than many of their London or Northumbrian peers (although Barry MacSweeney, for example, felt an affinity with them) and many taught at Cambridge University or at Anglia Polytechnic. There was also less emphasis on performance than there was among the London poets.
In the 60s and early 70s Peter Finch, an associate of Bob Cobbing, ran the No Walls Poetry readings and the ground breaking inclusive magazine, second aeon. He began Oriel Books in Cardiff in 1974 and the shop served as a focal point for young Welsh poets. However, some of the more experimental poets in Wales were not of Welsh origins. Two of the most important expatriate poets operating in Wales were John Freeman and Chris Torrance. Freeman is another British poet influenced by the Objectivists, and he has written on both George Oppen and Niedecker.In 1985, he edited Not Comforts / but Visions, essays on the poetry of George Oppen, which included work by John Seed, Jeremy Hooker, Freeman, Hampson and others.[13] Torrance has expressed his debt to David Jones. His ongoing Magic Door sequence is widely regarded as one of the major long poems to come out of the Revival. For some account of this period, see the reminiscences of Chris Torrance and Peter Finch in Geraldine Monk's CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Shearsman, 2012).
In Scotland, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard emerged as key individual poets during this time, each interested in, among other forms, sound and visual poetry. The viability of a wider, deeper experimental infrastructure in poetry was helped by the gallery, performance space and bookshop at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow (later renamed the Centre for Contemporary Arts). Magazines such as Scottish International, "Chapman", and Duncan Glen's magazine Akros maintained links with the modernist legacy of the inter-war and post-war years while publishing contemporary poets; often, however, by mixing the avant-garde with aesthetically conservative texts.
In a similar vein, in 1972-4 John Schofield, then a post-graduate student, organised three annual poetry festivals in various halls at Edinburgh University, called POEM 72, POEM73 and POEM74. Poets reading their work at the first included Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Tom Buchan, Robert Garioch and Liz Lochhead. About 700 people attended. For POEM73, the attendance was over 1300 people, hearing Hugh MacDiarmid, George Macbeth, Adrian Mitchell, Jon Silkin and Iain Crichton Smith. The final festival, POEM74, included readings by Adrian Henri, Libby Houston, Jeff Nuttall, Rose McGuire, Frances Horovitz, Ruth Fainlight and Sorley Maclean.
"A treacherous assault on British poetry"
In 1971, a large number of the poets associated with the British Poetry Revival joined the dormant, if not moribund Poetry Society and in the elections became the Poetry Society's new council. The Society had been traditionally hostile to modernist poetry, but under the new council this position was reversed. Eric Mottram was made editor of the society's magazine Poetry Review. Over the next six years, he edited twenty issues that featured most, if not all, of the key Revival poets and carried listings of books and magazines from the wide range of small presses that had sprung up to publish them.
Nuttall and MacSweeney both served as chairperson of the society during this period and Bob Cobbing used the photocopying facilities in the basement of the society's building to produce Writers Forum books. Around this time, Cobbing, Finch and others established the Association of Little Presses (ALP) to promote and support small press publishers and organise book fairs at which they could sell their productions.
In the late 1970s, in response to the number of 'foreign poets' being featured in Poetry Review, Mottram was removed as editor of the magazine; his editorial practices being seen by the Arts Council as "a treacherous assault on British poetry", according to Mottram's preface to his section of the anthology, the new british poetry. in which he outlines some of the breadth of poetic activity from which this loose grouping emerged. An archive-based, event-history approach to subsequent events is provided by Peter Barry in his book Poetry Wars: British poetry in the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt, 2006). An account of this 'battle' from the other side is provided by James Sutherland Smith, where his comparison of the brief takeover of the Poetry Society to an attempt "by the Militant Tendency to take over the Rotary Club" suggests some of the political and class issues around [14] At around the same time, the Arts Council also set up a top-down inquiry that overturned the result of the Society's elections that had once more brought in a council dominated by those sympathetic to the Poetry Revival.[15] As a result of the Arts Council setting aside the votes of the members, many of the members boycotted the Society. Robert Sheppard has provided a useful critique of Barry's account and of the tactics of the committee members: as a representative of a younger generation of poets, who had grown up through Cobbings's writers forum workshops, whose 'linguistically innovative poetry' was more akin to LANGUAGE poets than to the New American Poetry, and felt the boycott was a tactical error. [16]
The 1980s and after
A number of younger poets, many of whom who first found an outlet in Poetry Review under Mottram, began to emerge around the end of the 1970s. In London, Bill Griffiths, Ulli Freer, cris cheek, Lawrence Upton, Robert Gavin Hampson, Robert Sheppard, and Ken Edwards were among those who were to the fore. These, and others, met regularly at Gilbert Adair's Subvoicive reading series, which also regularly featured poets from North America, as well as visiting poets such as Caroline Bergvall, Paul Buck, Andrew Duncan, D. S. Marriott, Maggie O'Sullivan and Denise Riley. Edwards ran Reality Studios, a magazine that grew out of Alembic (UK poetry magazine), the magazine he had co-edited through the 1970s with Peter Barry and Robert Hampson. Through Reality Studios, he helped introduce the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to a British readership. He also ran Reality Street Editions with Cambridge-based Wendy Mulford, which continued to be a major publisher of contemporary poetry until 2018 and an important bridge between US and UK poetries. The London-based Angel Exhaust magazine brought many of the younger poets together – in particular, Adrian Clarke, Robert Sheppard and Andrew Duncan. In the Midlands, Tony Baker's Figs magazine focused more on the Objectivist and Bunting-inspired poetry of the Northumbrian school while introducing a number of new poets.
In 1988 an anthology called The New British Poetry was published. It featured a section on the Revival poets edited by Mottram and another on the younger poets edited by Edwards. In 1987, Crozier and Longville published their anthology A Various Art, which focused mainly on the Cambridge poets, and Iain Sinclair edited yet another anthology of Revival-related work Conductors of Chaos (1996). For an account of some of the work produced by these poets, see Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (eds.), The New British poetries: the scope of the possible (Manchester University Press, 1993). In 1994 W. N. Herbert and Richard Price co-edited the anthology of Scottish Informationist poetryContraflow on the SuperHighway (Gairfish and Southfields Press).
The anthology Conductors of Chaos featured another aspect of the Revival; the recovery of neglected British modernists of the generation after Bunting. Poets David Gascoyne, selected by Jeremy Reed; W. S. Graham, selected by Tony Lopez; David Jones, selected by Drew Milne; J.F. Hendry, selected by Andrew Crozier and Nicholas Moore, selected by Peter Riley were reappraised and returned to their rightful place in the history of 20th century British poetry. Another interesting development was the establishment of the British and Irish poetry discussion list by Richard Caddel. This continued, for some decades, to provide an international forum for discussion and the exchange of news on experimental British and Irish poetry. Much wider publication for Revival poetry was arranged via the USA. Caddel, together with Peter Middleton, edited a selection of new UK poetry for US readers in a special issue of Talisman (1996).[17] With Peter Quartermain Caddel also edited Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (USA, 1999); while Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, USA, 2001) incorporates this poetry into a wider retrospective of the whole century.
Into the 1990s and beyond poets including Johan de Wit, Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson and Piers Hugill have surfaced after direct involvement in the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop. A 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. 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 similar impact via the Cambridge scene. Perdika Press in North London has been instrumental in bringing to wider attention contemporary Modernist writers such as Nicholas Potamitis, Mario Petrucci, Robert Vas Dias and Peter Brennan; the press was also responsible for the first publication in Britain of Bill Berkson. 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; from the involvement of Redell Olsen in the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, including Becky Cremin, Frances Kruk, Ryan Ormond, Sophie Robinson, John Sparrow and Stephen Willey; and through Keith Jebb at University of Bedfordshire's Creative Writing programme, including Alyson Torns and Allison Boast.
↑ Mottram, Eric (1993). The British Poetry Revival. In Robert Hampson & Peter Barry (eds). New British poetries: The scope of the possible. Manchester University Press.
↑ Carroll F. Terrell, 'Introduction', Basil Bunting: Man and Poet (Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1980), 1.
↑ Geraldine Monk (ed.), CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Bristol: Shearsman, 2012).
↑ John Seed, 'Living the Storm: George Oppen's "Songs of Experience"' in John Freeman (ed.) Not Comforts / But Vision: Essays on the poetry of George Oppen (Interim Press, 1985), 10-25
↑ Luke Roberts, Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4-6.
↑ Geraldine Monk, CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Shearsman, 2012).
↑ Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Luke Roberts (eds.), Certain Prose of 'The English Intelligencer (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012)
↑ John Freeman (ed.), Not Comforts / But Vision: essays on the Poetry of George Oppen (Interim Press, 1985).
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
Richard Caddel was a poet, publisher and editor who was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.
Lee Harwood was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
The New British Poetry 1968-88 was a poetry anthology from 1988, jointly edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D'Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram, respectively concerned with feminist, Black British, younger experimental and British poetry revival poets. The book's general editor was John Muckle, founder of the Paladin Poetry Series. He attempted to challenge what many saw as a narrowly defined 'mainstream' by creating a book around different strands in radical poetry and four editors who might not otherwise have worked together: "Their differences, both in the shape they have given their selections and in their introductory remarks, make this a many-sided, exciting, unpredictable - and no doubt contentious book." The anthology's multicultural and counter-cultural stance gave it a strong anti-Thatcherite flavour. The book was widely if critically reviewed and went on to influence a number of subsequent anthologies of British poetry.
Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, an anthology of poetry, was edited by Michael Horovitz and published by Penguin Books in 1969. According to Martin Booth it was "virtually a manifesto of New Departures doctrine and dogma".
Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 is a poetry anthology edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain, and published in 1999 by Wesleyan University Press. According to the Introduction
Barry MacSweeney was an English poet and journalist. His organizing work contributed to the British Poetry Revival.
The English Intelligencer was a mid-1960s little magazine devoted to poetry and letters founded and edited by poets Andrew Crozier and Peter Riley. It played a key role in the emergence of many of the poets associated with the British Poetry Revival, and was conceived as providing a forum for exchange and building a sense of community among scattered British avant-garde poets who were in contact with and responding to the New American Poets, especially Charles Olson.
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates. The critic/poet C. H. Sisson observed in his essay Poetry and Sincerity that "Modernity has been going on for a long time. Not within living memory has there ever been a day when young writers were not coming up, in a threat of iconoclasm."
Lawrence Upton, was a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, and director of Writers Forum.
Second Aeon was a British literary periodical published from late 1966 to early 1975. It ran for 21 issues and was edited by Peter Finch. A spin-off of the magazine was Second Aeon Publications, a series of booklets, broadsheets and bound volumes that eventually reached 100 in number.
Angel Exhaust is a British poetry magazine founded by Steve Pereira and Adrian Clarke in the late 1970s. Andrew Duncan took over as editor in 1992, and by 1993 it was one of the first poetry magazines to appear regularly on the internet. The magazine is headquartered in Nottingham. It was described as an "important journal" by Simon Perril in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (2016).
Tears in the Fence is a triannual British literary journal edited by David Caddy. It has been characterized as "a forward-looking magazine that is not afraid to take risks.... [and that] represents the cutting edge of modern poetry."
Adrian Clarke is a contemporary British poet. His collections include Skeleton Sonnets, Former Haunts, Possession: Poems 1996-2006, and Eurochants.
John Muckle is a British writer who has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism.
Paladin Poetry was a series of paperback books published by Grafton Books under its Paladin imprint, intended to bring modernist and radical poetry before a wider audience. Its founding anthology The New British Poetry 1968-88 attempted to revive the fortunes of the modernist tradition, to correct the gender imbalance of previous anthologies and to bring a new generation of ‘Black British’ poets to prominence. The series was originally edited by writer John Muckle, then Grafton’s editorial copywriter (1985–88), and later by the London writer Iain Sinclair. Many of the Paladin Poetry books were paperback originals. The entire poetry series was pulped within months of the publication of its last titles. However, it did affect poetry readers and had a considerable influence on the output of other poetry publishers, such as Bloodaxe, Penguin, Carcanet and Salt.
Writers Forum is a small publisher, workshop and writers' network established by Bob Cobbing. The roots of Writers Forum were in the 1954 arts organisation Group H, and the And magazine that Cobbing edited. The writers' branch of Group H was called Writers Forum. In 1963 a press with the publishing imprint "Writers Forum" was begun and administered by Cobbing, John Rowan and Jeff Nuttall. Between 1963 and 2002 Writers' Forum published more than one thousand pamphlets and books including works by John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and P. J. O'Rourke, as well as a wide range of British Poetry Revival modernist poets, such as Eric Mottram, Bill Griffiths, Geraldine Monk, Maggie O'Sullivan, Paula Claire and Sean Bonney. While publishing was integral to the Cobbing-led workshop, it also provided an opportunity for poets to read their works in a supportive and non-critical environment.
Robert Gavin Hampson FEA FRSA is a British poet and academic. Hampson was born and raised in Liverpool, studied in London and Toronto and settled in London. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria (2018-21) and Research Fellow at the Institute for English Studies, University of London (2019-23). He is a member of the Poetics Research Centre and the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway. He is well known for his contributions to contemporary innovative poetry and the international study of Joseph Conrad.
Alembic was a poetry magazine established by Peter Barry, Ken Edwards, and Robert Gavin Hampson, which appeared eight times during the 1970s. It existed between 1973 and 1978. The magazine was based in London.
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