Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
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.
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist tradition in English. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud: he was an accomplished reader of his own work.
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.
Richard Caddel was a poet, publisher and editor who was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.
Roy Fisher was an English poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, whilst remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his long career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, and Sean O’Brien.
Fulcrum Press was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery and his wife Deirdre. Montgomery later became an eminent psychiatrist and expert in depression. Earning a reputation as the premier small press of the late 1960s to early '70s, Fulcrum published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper. The Fulcrum Press made a significant contribution to the British Poetry Revival and was one of the best known little presses of the period, recognized for publishing the works of Modernist poets including Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg and Roy Fisher.
Tom Pickard is a poet, and documentary film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival.
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".
Barry MacSweeney was an English poet and journalist. His organizing work contributed to the British Poetry Revival.
Anne Stevenson was an American-British poet and writer and recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Peter Ronald Brown was an English performance poet, lyricist, and singer best known for his collaborations with Cream and Jack Bruce. Brown formed the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments and Pete Brown & Piblokto! and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also wrote film scripts and formed a film production company.
August Kleinzahler is an American poet.
Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1966. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography". The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of Brigflatts Meeting House, a Quaker Friends meeting house near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England. Bunting visited Brigflatts as a schoolboy when the family of one of his schoolfriends lived there, and it was at this time that he developed a strong attachment to his friend's sister, Peggy Greenbank, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was first read in public on 22 December 1965 in the medieval Morden Tower, part of Newcastle town wall, and published in 1966 by Fulcrum Press. Bunting also wrote another poem with "Briggflatts" in its title, the short work "At Briggflatts meetinghouse" (1975).
Brigflatts Meeting House or Briggflatts Meeting House is a Friends Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), near Sedbergh, Cumbria, in north-western England. Built in 1675, it is the second oldest Friends Meeting House in England. It has been listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England since March 1954. It is the subject of a twelve-line poem titled "At Briggflatts meetinghouse" by British modernist poet Basil Bunting. Bunting's poem was written in 1975 for the 300th anniversary of the meeting house's construction.
Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.
Allen Ginsberg Live in London is a DVD film of Allen Ginsberg reading his poetry, singing songs and performing a Tibetan meditation live on stage in London on Thursday 19 October 1995, at Megatripolis club-night at Heaven nightclub, London.
Michael Blackburn is a British poet and author. He has been associated with several literary ventures since the 1970s, as an editor, founder and publisher.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Linda France is a British poet, writer and editor. She has published eight full-length poetry collections, a number of pamphlets, and was editor of the influential anthology, Sixty Women Poets. France is the author of The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club, a verse biography of the eighteenth-century traveler and social rebel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the National Poetry Competition in 2013 and the Laurel Prize in 2022.
