Next Generation poets (2004)

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The Next Generation poets are a list of young and middle-aged figures from British poetry, mostly British, compiled by a panel for the Poetry Book Society in 2004. This is a promotional exercise, and a sequel to the New Generation poets (1994). The "Next Generation" was followed by Staple magazine's "Alternative Generation" (2005), [1] which selected a group of poets from the UK's small-press output. The Next Generation 2004 list comprises:

British poetry is the field of British literature encompassing poetry from anywhere in the British world. The term is rarely used, as almost all such poets are clearly identified with one of the various nations or regions within those areas.

The Poetry Book Society (PBS) was founded in 1953 by T. S. Eliot and friends, including Sir Basil Blackwell, "to propagate the art of poetry". Eric Walter White was secretary from December 1953 until 1971, and was subsequently the society's chairman. The PBS was chaired by Philip Larkin in the 1980s. Each quarter the Society selects one newly published collection of poetry as its "Choice" title for its members and makes four "Recommendations" for optional purchase. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal, the PBS Bulletin, and until 2016 administered the annual T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Following the Poetry Society's instigation of its New Generation Poets promotion in 1994, the Poetry Book Society organised two subsequent "Next Generation Poets" promotions in 2004 and 2014. In 2016 the former Poetry Book Society charity which had managed the book club from 1953 had to be wound up, with its director Chris Holifield appointed as the new director of the T.S. Eliot Prize, and with its book club and company name taken over by book sales agency Inpress Ltd in Newcastle.

The New Generation Poets is a group of 1994 British poets whose work was featured in a month-long nationwide festival, many of the writers going on to considerable popular success. The 20 poets were chosen by a panel of judges comprising Melvyn Bragg, poets Michael Longley and Vicki Feaver, literary critic James Wood, Margaret Busby and John Osborne.

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Patience Agbabi British poet

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a British poet and performer who gives particular emphasis to the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of strong formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as both "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature prominently in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Nick Drake is a British poet.

Jane Draycott is a British poet. She is Senior Course Tutor on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster.

See also

Next Generation poets (2014) are a list of poets named in 2014 by a panel for the Poetry Book Society, which once every ten years selects 20 poets "expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade". The accolade highlights emerging poets in the UK and Ireland who published a first collection of poetry within the previous decade.

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George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He has served as Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.

Paul Muldoon Irish poet

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Rae Armantrout American poet

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American poetry

American poetry is poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.

"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth,Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, Andrew Crozier, Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.

Don Paterson poet

Donald Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.

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".

Michael Palmer (poet) poet

Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.

Michael Longley poet

Michael Longley, is a poet from Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Kwame Dawes American academic

Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine. New York-based Poets & Writers named Dawes as a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, which recognises writers who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community.

John Agard is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry. Bloodaxe has published British, Irish, American, European and Commonwealth of Nations writers.

Michael Donaghy was a New York City poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.

W. N. Herbert Scottish Poet

W. N. Herbert, also known as Bill Herbert is a poet from Dundee, Scotland. He writes in both English and Scots. He and Richard Price founded the poetry magazine Gairfish. He currently teaches at Newcastle University.

Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and a book of essays about landscape and nature.

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE FRSL FRSA, FEA, is the award-winning author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction. Her other writing includes short fiction, drama, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and projects for stage and radio. Two of her books have been adapted into BBC Radio 4 dramas. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and Vice-Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

References

  1. ↑ "An Alternative Generation", Staple 62: Ten Years of Small Press Poets, 12 July 2005.
<i>The Guardian</i> British national daily newspaper

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.


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