'Going back to the early British boomers who caught the modernist bug at
Essex etc - a very important catalyst for serious alternative poetries if
the anecdotes and biogs are to be believed - most of them, not all, were
middle class lads who one way or another would have been expected to go to
uni.'
I replied briefly to this backchannel to Tim but wanted to put something
front channel as well. This doesn't tie in with my experience at Essex in
the late 70s to early 8os. I came from a working class background, as did
John Muckle and Kelvin Corcoran. I don't think Ralph Hawkins came from a
particularly privileged background. I'm not going through the whole list of
people, and don't necessarily know details but i could hazard a guess that
many others didn't either.
I also always saw the 'experimental' poetry as closely aligned to a
revolutionary left wing politics (although reading back it's not necessarily
obvious why) and Essex itself was characterised by a politicised student
body, a number of whom were mature ex strade unionists and fairly random
anarchists, connecting it both to the inter/national labour movement and to
local community based politics.
None of this gives anyone any moral high ground. Nor does it mean that
everyone from Essex writes in the same way or comes from the same place. But
my expereince was of meeting people from working class backgrounds, who were
interested in poetry and in previous generations, wouldn't have gone to
University.
Ian
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