Nicky Marsh from University of Southampton presented last night at the
Talks series convened by Robert Hampson, at Birkbeck College, London.
She gave a great paper, with some very nice examples, on American
'zines -- not 'poetry magazines' -- in the 1980s, focusing on poetry
published in them by women. This is part of a wider project about the
relationship of different types of poetry to 'the public'. The context
is countercultural movements both social and, um, cultural, especially
feminist ones, like the Riot Grrls, but also e.g. mail art and then
types of visual poetics and collage that link back to more established
modernist art traditions. There were zines in which Language poets
appeared alongside these very working- (or out-of-working-) -class,
non-'literary' poets. What Marsh finds among other things is a
fluctuating range of degrees of freedom from and incorporation by the
types of patriarchal or commercial forces against which this work and
those writers seemingly ranged themselves. But there was some very
striking and enjoyable work. This work depends on the existence of the
poetry archive at the University of Buffalo, which preserves a quantity
of these very ephemeral publications. Is such a corpus extant in the UK?
Was poetry a significant part of working class counter-culture here in
the late 20th century?
EAT EAT EAT
LOVE LOVE LOVE
FAT = HAPPY no no no nono
Origin of the not-is
(Maria Gitin, from 'CoLingua', no. 1)
Talks are at 7 p.m. on some Wednesay evenings in the Council Room,
Birkbeck College, Malet St., open to all interested.
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