Some thought provoking stuff from Chris here:
"I think there is a need for a more general assessment of the poetries
emerging from the British avant-garde scene. I've published a great
deal of course, and there's certainly enough evidence for a reassesment
of what was going on Cambridge in the 90s. It's too highly coloured
with Divisionist ideology to get a clear picture from outside. It is
properly underground but has really very striking uptake with US
universities, certainly Buffalo, Miami (OH), UPenn, but much much wider
than this. But those US allegiances are misleading as I think the British
avant-garde have to be read from the peculiar social and cultural
framework of the British 60s. We never had a 1968 moment. The
political content of much 90s British avant-garde writing has its origins
in a liberation from post-War thrift and limitation, it derives its thrust
from a cultural exuberance not a political fracture or civil rights
revolution. It's politics are received. You can't of course have a politics
without a polity.
There are two aspects I find fascinating, the first is nostalgia. A great
deal of British avant-garde writing is deeply nostalgic and utopian, and
that's partly I suspect a feature that it has yet to be properly assessed,
digested, positioned, it's been locked out of cultural debate and a
history of poetics in the UK due in part to the Poetry Wars and their
legacy. It's almost as if we can imagine a poetry purgatory, not Dante's
but a kind of limbo where much of this writing has not been assimilated
into a wider history of British poetry. It's stuck but not of its own
accord.
And the second thing I find fascinating is what I call Liberation Poetics,
the idea that poetry has been enslaved in some consumerist conspiracy,
and that leads to a kind of messianic quality in some work, and, as I've
remarked before, a lot in Keston's. This kind of poetry needs to be
outside, needs to be oppressed and needs to be secret. It can't
accommodate or mediate as it relies on an extreme position and in
many respects requires converts and acolytes, neophytes and indeed
some Grand Masters. It's religious in effect. One has to believe. Though
a key feature of the dogma is to express doubt, uncertainty and
incompleteness, just as it embraces process over product, openness
over closure and radicalism over restraint. It's chief weapon is excess.
And of course it is oppositional.
All of this makes for a fascinating landscape. But it's one that can feel
like entering a sect, even for an afternoon of mysterious indoctrination.
It is however, filled with great and yes, serious, art."
http://z11.invisionfree.com/Poets_On_Fire/index.php?
showtopic=1701&st=0&
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