Subject: Re: Found Wantling
> Back in the Sixties, Wantling's prison and Vietnam (or Korea?) based work
> got the usa small press attention of folks/readers (primarily male) who
> were responsive to poems from the 'real world' at the margines - scarred,
> radiating a 'blue' sense of down & out loss and anger combined with a hard
> edge lyricism. Cold war stuff - a parallel would be work by Bukowski, and
> Etheridge Knight. I don't really know Nuttal's work, but he was big in
> in England against the Bomb, a live wire, counter-cultural resistance to
> upper stratta English culture. (This is probably all on Wikipedia).
>
> Stephen V
> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
The third of them in that particular volume, Alan Jackson, was of course
Scottish (though he had the misfortune to hail from Edinburgh rather than
Glasgow) and so is naturally enough the one which the Birk ignores.
The entire first series of Penguin Modern Poets was more than interesting,
and I think the initiative of one particular person who worked at Penguin at
the time. It got reincarnated in a later series which was more USAmerican
oriented (and incidentally if I remember correctly included inter alia
Bukowski), but that never had quite the same impact.
More than a few under-recognised writers -- D.M.Black is the most notable --
*almost* achieved fame by being published in it, but not quite.
They did neat linking in the volumes too, each of which featured three
poets, which suggested that whoever was responsible had more than a few
braincells to rub together. The Liverpool Poets (as it was later renamed)
with Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten might seem obvious now,
but Penguin got there early. They also neatly brought together McCaig,
Mackay Brown, and Ian Crichton Smith. (Edwin Morgan significantly featured
in another volume!)
I have to agree with dave, those were the days, my friend.
I've got most of that original series still, having bought them as they
first appeared.
Robin
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