British Poetry Revival
Encyclopedia
The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 movement in Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, 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...

-inspired reaction to the Movement's
The Movement (literature)
The Movement was a term coined by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, in 1954 to describe a group of writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, and Robert Conquest...

 more conservative approach to British poetry.

Beginnings

If the Movement poets looked to Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

 as a poetic model, the poets associated with the British Poetry Revival were more likely to look to modernist models, such as the American poets Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 and British figures such as David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...

, Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...

 and Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...

. Although these major British poets had effectively been written out of official histories of 20th century British poetry, by the beginning of the 1960s a number of younger poets were starting to explore poetic possibilities that the older writers had opened up.

These poets included Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher
Roy Fisher is a British poet and jazz pianist. He was one of the first British writers to absorb the poetics of William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets into the British poetic tradition. Fisher was a key precursor of the British Poetry Revival.Fisher was born in Handsworth, Birmingham...

, Gael Turnbull
Gael Turnbull
Gael Turnbull was a Scottish poet who was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival.Turnbull was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the North of England and in Canada...

, Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.-Biography:Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside...

, Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing
Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival.-Early life:...

, Jeff Nuttall
Jeff Nuttall
Jeff Nuttall was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist sympathiser and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.-Life and work:Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe,...

, Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth
Tom Raworth is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.-Early life and work:Raworth...

, Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz is an English poet, artist and translator.-Life and career:Michael Horovitz was the youngest of ten children who were brought to England from Nazi Germany by their parents, both of whom were part of a network of European-rabbinical families...

, Eric Mottram
Eric Mottram
Eric Mottram was a teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival.-Early life and education:...

, Peter Finch
Peter Finch (poet)
Peter Finch is a Welsh poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff, Wales. He is Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms...

, Edwin Morgan, Jim Burns, Elaine Feinstein
Elaine Feinstein
Elaine Feinstein is a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator.-Biography:...

, Lee Harwood
Lee Harwood
Lee Harwood is a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Travers Rafe Lee Harwood was born in Leicester to maths teacher Wilfred Travers Lee-Harwood and Grace Ladkin Harwood, who were then living in Chertsey, Surrey...

 and Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue, CBE is an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He has also written for the theatre and cinema as well as acting in a number of films. His two screenplays are Savage Messiah and The End of Arthur's Marriage...

. Many of these poets joined Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 and an audience of 7,000 people at the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation
International Poetry Incarnation
The International Poetry Incarnation was an event at the Royal Albert Hall in Londonon June 11, 1965.In May, 1965, Allen Ginsberg arrived at Better Books, London, and offered to read anywhere for free....

 on 11 June 1965 to create what was, effectively, the first British happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...

.

These poets provided a wide range of modes and models of how modernism could be integrated into British poetry. Fisher, also a professional jazz pianist, applied the lessons of William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

' Paterson
Paterson (poem)
Paterson is a poem by influential modern American poet William Carlos Williams.The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book...

to his native Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

 in his long poem City. Turnbull, who spent some time in the U. S., was also influenced by Williams. His fellow Scots
Scottish literature
Scottish literature is literature written in Scotland or by Scottish writers. It includes literature written in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Brythonic, French, Latin and any other language in which a piece of literature was ever written within the boundaries of modern Scotland.The earliest...

 Morgan and Finlay both worked with found
Found poetry
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines , or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions...

, sound
Sound poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging between literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words"...

 and visual poetry
Visual poetry
Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work. It is sometimes referred to as concrete poetry, a term that predates visual poetry, and at one time was synonymous with it.Visual poetry was heavily...

. Mottram, Nuttall, Horovitz and Burns were all close to the Beat generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 writers. Mottram and Raworth were also influenced by the Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

 while Raworth and Harwood shared an interest in the poets of the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...

.

A number of publishing outlets for this new experimental poetry also began to spring up, including Turnbull's Migrant Press, Raworth's Matrix Press and Goliard Press, Horovitz's New Departures, Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press
Fulcrum Press
Fulcrum Press was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery and his wife Deidre. Montgomery later was an eminent neurologist and expert in depression. The press published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully...

, Tim Longville's Grosseteste Review, Galloping Dog Press and its Poetry Information magazine, Pig Press, Andrew Crozier
Andrew Crozier
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Crozier was educated at Dulwich College, and later Christ's College, Cambridge. His 1976 book Pleats won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, awarded jointly that year with Lee Harwood...

 and Peter Riley
Peter Riley
Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group vaguely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important epicenter of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor...

's The English Intelligencer
The English Intelligencer
The English Intelligencer was a literary magazine/newsletter founded and edited by the 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...

, Crozier's Ferry Press, and Cobbing's Writers Forum. In addition to the poets of the revival, many of these presses and magazines also published avant-garde American and European poetry. The first anthology to present a wide-ranging selection of the new movement was Horovitz's Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain
Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain
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...

(1969).

London

Thanks in no small part to Cobbing's Writers Forum and its associated writers' workshop, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 was a hub for many young poets, including Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths was a poet and Anglo-Saxon scholar associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Overview:...

, Allen Fisher
Allen Fisher
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, teacher and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival.Fisher was born in London and started writing poetry in 1962. His early long project Place was published in a series of books and pamphlets in the 1970s. He worked on a project called...

, Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL is a British writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.-Life and work:...

, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton
Lawrence Upton
Lawrence Upton is a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, currently directing Writers Forum. Upton is remarkable for the range of his genres and forms; and for the political savvy of his writing. He is a performer, continuing and expanding the performance tradition of, amongst others, Bob Cobbing...

, Peter Finch
Peter Finch (poet)
Peter Finch is a Welsh poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff, Wales. He is Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms...

, Ulli Freer, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke
Adrian Clarke (poet)
Adrian Clarke is a contemporary British poet. His collections include Skeleton Sonnets , Former Haunts , and Possession: Poems 1996-2006 ....

, Clive Fencott
Clive Fencott
Clive Fencott is a writer and sound poet, a performer associated with the British Poetry Revival, and an academic.Fencott was born in Lydney and began writing poetry in the mid-sixties while studying at art college. In 1974 he attended experimental poetry workshops at the Poetry Society organised...

, Maggie O'Sullivan
Maggie O'Sullivan
Maggie O'Sullivan is a British poet, performer and visual artist associated with the British Poetry Revival.O'Sullivan was born in Lincoln, England of Irish immigrant parents. She moved to London in 1971 and worked for the BBC until 1988. Her early work appeared in magazines such as Angel Exhaust...

, cris cheek
Cris Cheek
Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and academic currently resident at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked there until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society and the...

, Tony Lopez
Tony Lopez (poet)
Tony Lopez is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its attention to language, and for his ability to compose a coherent book, rather than a number of poems accidentally printed together...

 and Denise Riley
Denise Riley
Denise Riley is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s. Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, identity, and philosophy of language, are recognised as an...

.

Griffiths writes a poetry of dazzling surface and deep political commitment that incorporates such matter as his professional knowledge of Anglo-Saxon
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...

 and his years as a Hells Angel. Both Sinclair and Fisher share a taste for William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

 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).

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
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 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
Sean Bonney
Sean Bonney is a contemporary English poet. Bonney was born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He now lives in London.His publications include Notes on Heresy , Poisons, their antidotes , Blade Pitch Control Unit , Document: hexprogress , Baudelaire in English ,...

, Hannah Bramness, Clive Bush, Ken Edwards
Ken Edwards
Ken Edwards is a poet, editor, writer and musician who has lived in England since 1968. He is associated with The British Poetry Revival....

, Bill Griffiths, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson
Jeff Hilson
Jeff Hilson is a contemporary British poet. His works include A Grasses Primer , Stretchers , Bird Bird , and In the Assarts . He edited an anthology of modern sonnets, published in 2008...

 and Will Rowe.

Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...

 and Northern England

By the early 1950s, Basil Bunting had returned to live in Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newcastle upon Tyne is a city and metropolitan borough of Tyne and Wear, in North East England. Historically a part of Northumberland, it is situated on the north bank of the River Tyne...

 and, in 1966, Fulcrum Press published Briggflatts
Briggflatts
Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1965. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography." The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of a meetinghouse in a Quaker community near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England...

, which is widely considered to be his masterpiece. A number of younger poets began to gather around Bunting. In 1963, Connie and Tom Pickard
Tom Pickard
Tom Pickard is a poet, radio and film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival....

 started a reading series and bookshop in the Morden Tower Book Room. The first reading was by Bunting, and Ginsberg, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...

 and Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...

 all read there. They were soon joined by Richard Caddel
Richard Caddel
Richard Caddel was a poet, publisher and editor who was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.-Biography:Caddel was born in Bedford and grew up in Gillingham, Kent. He studied music at the University of Newcastle, but changed to English after meeting poets Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard...

, brought up in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

 but an honorary Northumbrian, Barry MacSweeney
Barry MacSweeney
Barry MacSweeney was an English poet and journalist.-Life and work:Barry MacSweeney was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. He worked as a professional journalist throughout most of his life...

 and Colin Simms.

Through Bunting, these younger writers became familiar with the work of the Objectivist poets
Objectivist poets
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, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

. Specifically, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

 and Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...

 were to become important models for Caddel and Simms in their writing about the Northumbrian environment. 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
Easter
Easter is the central feast in the Christian liturgical year. According to the Canonical gospels, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter Day or Easter Sunday...

, 1967 MacSweeney organised the Sparty Lea Poetry Festival. This was a ten-day session of reading, writing and discussion (and no little drinking). The participants, including the Pickards, MacSweeney, Andrew Crozier, John James
John James (poet)
John James is a British poet.- Biography :John James was born 1939 in Cardiff and was educated at Saint Illtyd’s College there. He left the college in 1957 to read Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Bristol and later undertook postgraduate studies in American Literature at the...

, John Temple
John Temple
John Temple may refer to:*John Temple , MP for Ripon *Sir John Temple Master of the Rolls in Ireland*Sir John Temple , Attorney General of Ireland...

, Pete Armstrong, Tim Longville, Peter Riley, John Hall, J. H. Prynne
J. H. Prynne
Jeremy Halvard Prynne is a British poet closely associated with the British Poetry Revival.Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His first book, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon...

 and Nick Waite, stayed in a group of four cottages in the village of Sparty Lea. This was to be 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
Geraldine Monk
Geraldine Monk is a British poet. She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1952. Since the late 1970s, she has published many collections of poetry and has recorded her poetry in collaboration with musicians...

 is very much a poet of the North of England. Like Maggie O'Sullivan
Maggie O'Sullivan
Maggie O'Sullivan is a British poet, performer and visual artist associated with the British Poetry Revival.O'Sullivan was born in Lincoln, England of Irish immigrant parents. She moved to London in 1971 and worked for the BBC until 1988. Her early work appeared in magazines such as Angel Exhaust...

, 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.

Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

The Cambridge poets were a group centred around J. H. Prynne
J. H. Prynne
Jeremy Halvard Prynne is a British poet closely associated with the British Poetry Revival.Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His first book, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon...

 and included Andrew Crozier
Andrew Crozier
Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Crozier was educated at Dulwich College, and later Christ's College, Cambridge. His 1976 book Pleats won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, awarded jointly that year with Lee Harwood...

, John James
John James (poet)
John James is a British poet.- Biography :John James was born 1939 in Cardiff and was educated at Saint Illtyd’s College there. He left the college in 1957 to read Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Bristol and later undertook postgraduate studies in American Literature at the...

, Douglas Oliver
Douglas Oliver
Douglas Dunlop Oliver was a poet, novelist, editor, and educator. The author of more than a dozen works, Oliver came into poetry not as an academic but through a career in journalism, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 1970s. He received a...

, Veronica Forrest-Thomson
Veronica Forrest-Thomson
Veronica Forrest-Thomson grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, studied at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge, and later taught at the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham. She was both a poet and a critical theorist, and her critical study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry...

, Peter Riley
Peter Riley
Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group vaguely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important epicenter of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor...

, Tim Longville and John Riley. Prynne was influenced by Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

 and Crozier was partly responsible for Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi
Carl Rakosi was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s.-Early life:...

'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 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
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 or at Anglia Polytechnic. There was also less emphasis on performance than there was among the London poets.

Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

 and Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

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
Cardiff
Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...

 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
John Freeman
John Freeman may refer to:*John Freeman , character animator for Disney, Marvel Studios and others*John Freeman , Australian politician*John Freeman , writer and literary critic...

and Chris Torrance
Chris Torrance
Chris Torrance is a poet and musician associated with the British Poetry Revival.- Biography :Born in Edinburgh, Torrance grew up in London and moved to rural Wales in 1970. He has been teaching creative writing at the Cardiff University since 1976...

. Freeman is another British poet influenced by the Objectivists, and he has written on both George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

 and Niedecker. 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.

In Scotland, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard
Tom Leonard (poet)
Tom Leonard is a Scottish poet, best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect.Tom Leonard has been part of the Scottish literary renaissance for the past forty years...

 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
CCA Glasgow
The Centre for Contemporary Arts is an art gallery, performance space, cafe, and cinema on Sauchiehall Street, in Glasgow, Scotland. CCA also houses a number of cultural tenants, and has a flat for visiting artists....

). Magazines such as Scottish International 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.

"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
Poetry Society
The Poetry Society is a membership organisation, open to all, whose stated aim is "to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry".The Society was founded in London in February 1909 as the Poetry Recital Society, becoming the Poetry Society in 1912...

 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 reviews 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
Association of Little Presses
The Association of Little Presses was an organisation dedicated to promoting small press publishing activity in Britain and Ireland.ALP was founded at a meeting held at Arlington Mill, Bibury, Gloucestershire on July 23, 1966...

 (ALP) to promote and support small press publishers and organise book fares 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 described as "a treacherous assault on British poetry". At the same time, the Arts Council set up an 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.

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
Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths was a poet and Anglo-Saxon scholar associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Overview:...

, Ulli Freer, cris cheek
Cris Cheek
Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and academic currently resident at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked there until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society and the...

, Lawrence Upton
Lawrence Upton
Lawrence Upton is a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, currently directing Writers Forum. Upton is remarkable for the range of his genres and forms; and for the political savvy of his writing. He is a performer, continuing and expanding the performance tradition of, amongst others, Bob Cobbing...

, Robert Hampson, Robert Sheppard, and Ken Edwards
Ken Edwards
Ken Edwards is a poet, editor, writer and musician who has lived in England since 1968. He is associated with The British Poetry Revival....

 were among those who were to the fore. These, and others, met regularly at Gilbert Adair
Gilbert Adair
Gilbert Adair is a Scottish author, film critic and journalist. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award in 1988 for his novel The Holy Innocents. In 1995 he won the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for his book A Void, which is a translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec...

's Subvoicive reading series. Edwards ran Reality Studios, a magazine that grew out of Alembic, the magazine he had co-edited through the 1970s. Through Reality Studios, he helped introduce the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

 to a British readership. He also ran Reality Street Editions with Cambridge-based Wendy Mulford
Wendy Mulford
Wendy Mulford is a British poet, associated with the contemporary avant garde scene, with the British Poetry Revival, and with the development of feminist poetry in 1970s. Her poetry has been viewed as "difficult to categorise" and as "multi- and non-linear"...

, which continues to be a major publisher of contemporary poetry. The London-based Angel Exhaust
Angel Exhaust
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.-Editors:...

 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
The New British Poetry
The New British Poetry 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 time frame involved was 1968-1988...

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
W. N. Herbert
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. Educated at Brasenose College he currently teaches at Newcastle University...

 and Richard Price
Richard Price
Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...

 co-edited the anthology of Scottish Informationist poetry
Informationist poetry
Informationist poetry was a literary movement of the 1990s in Scotland. The poets usually associated with this movement are: Richard Price – who coined the term in 1991 in the magazine Interference – Robert Crawford, W. N...

 Contraflow 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
David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement.-Early life and Surrealism:...

, selected by Jeremy Reed; W. S. Graham
W. S. Graham
William Sydney Graham was a Scottish poet who is often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham's poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime but, partly due to the support of Harold Pinter, his work has enjoyed a revival in recent years...

, selected by Tony Lopez; David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...

, selected by Drew Milne; J.F. Hendry, selected by Andrew Crozier and Nicholas Moore
Nicholas Moore
Nicholas Moore was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, who later dropped out of the literary world.Moore was born in Cambridge, England; his father was the philosopher G. E. 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 continues to provide an international forum for discussion and the exchange of news on experimental British 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). With Peter Quartermain Caddel also edited Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970
Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970
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...

(USA, 1999); whereas Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry is a poetry anthology edited by Keith Tuma, and published in 2001 by Oxford University Press...

(Oxford University Press, USA, 2001) incorporates this poetry into a wider retrospective of the whole century.

Into the 1990s and beyond poets such as Johan de Wit (poet)
Johan de Wit (poet)
Johan de Wit is a contemporary British poet, born in the Netherlands. He is the author of as many as twenty publications. His first collection, Rose Poems, was published by Actual Size in 1986. Up To You Munro by Veer Books appeared in 2008...

, Sean Bonney
Sean Bonney
Sean Bonney is a contemporary English poet. Bonney was born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He now lives in London.His publications include Notes on Heresy , Poisons, their antidotes , Blade Pitch Control Unit , Document: hexprogress , Baudelaire in English ,...

, Jeff Hilson
Jeff Hilson
Jeff Hilson is a contemporary British poet. His works include A Grasses Primer , Stretchers , Bird Bird , and In the Assarts . He edited an anthology of modern sonnets, published in 2008...

, 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
Barque Press
Barque Press is a London-based publisher of experimental poetry. Founded in 1995 by Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland. Barque's list includes Andrea Brady, Keston Sutherland, J. H...

 (most obviously Andrea Brady
Andrea Brady
Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary, at the University of London. Her academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and the early modern period...

 and Keston Sutherland
Keston Sutherland
Keston Sutherland is a British poet and Reader in English at the University of Sussex. He lives in Brighton, UK. He graduated with a BA from Cambridge University in 1997, was the Joseph Hodges Choate Fellow at Harvard University 1997-8, and gained his PhD, titled 'J. H. Prynne and philology', in...

), and more recently Bad Press
Bad Press
Bad Press is a London and Cambridge-based publisher of poetry, writings and essays - founded in 2003 by Marianne Morris. Its current editorial board comprises Marianne Morris, Jow Lindsay and Jonathan Stevenson....

 (in particular, Marianne Morris and Jow Lindsay
Jow Lindsay
Jow Lindsay is a contemporary poet, fiction writer, and editor of . His published work includes:* Francis Crot, The Cuntomatic * Francis Crot and Nour Mobarak, The Seven Curses...

), have made a similar impact via the Cambridge scene. From Scotland, Peter Manson
Peter Manson
Peter Manson is a contemporary Scottish poet. His books include Between Cup and Lip . For the Good of Liars , Adjunct: an Undigest , Before and After Mallarmé , Two renga Peter Manson (born 1969) is a contemporary Scottish poet. His books include Between Cup and Lip (Miami University Press,...

, who had co-edited the magazine Object Permanence in the mid-1990s, Drew Milne
Drew Milne
- Published works :Milne’s books of poetry include Sheet Mettle , Bench Marks , The Damage: new and selected poems , Mars Disarmed , and Go Figure...

, editor of Parataxis, David Kinloch and Richard Price
Richard Price
Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the...

 (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
Cris Cheek
Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and academic currently resident at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked there until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society and the...

, Bridgid Mcleer, and Alaric Sumner, under the direction of Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall is a poet of French-Norwegian nationalities who has lived in England since 1989.Bergvall has developed audio texts and collaborative performances with sound artists in Europe and North America; her critical work is largely concerned with emerging forms of writing, plurilingual...

 and John Hall
John Hall
John Hall may refer to:American government:* John Hall , U.S. Representative from New York and former member of the band Orleans...

through the Performance Writing
Performance Writing
Performance Writing was pioneered at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, UK as a radical new approach to writing. It is a multi-modal approach which explores through artistic practice how writing interacts with other art forms and practices — visual art, sound art, time-based media, installation,...

 programme at Dartington College of Arts
Dartington College of Arts
Dartington College of Arts was a specialist arts institution near Totnes, Devon, South West England, it specialized in post-dramatic theatre, music, choreography, Performance Writing and visual performance, focusing on a performative and multi-disciplinary approach to the arts. In addition to this,...

 including Kirsten Lavers, Andy Smith, and Chris Paul; from the involvement of Redell Olson 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 Keith Jebb at University of Bedfordshire's Creative Writing programme, including Alyson Torns and Allison Boast.

See also

  • Black Mountain poets
    Black Mountain poets
    The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

  • Language poetry
  • The Movement
  • Situationism

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK