http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/08/poetry-society-poets-presses
This article is quite interesting. This forum has very properly largely ignored the ongoing furore around the Poetry soc, presumably judging that it has nothing to do with alt poetry and is not worthy of being compared (as it sometimes has been) with poetry wars of the past in which there was real cultural capital at stake. This was once "just" about mismanagement and conditions of employment. But sneaky addicts of the whole saga will know that it's gradually shifting focus , looking for new targets, new sacrifices. And then older fault-lines start to become part of the debate.
As in this article, which is kind of interesting. It promotes some sort of exploratory dynamic young fresh movement typified by various small presses and poets mentioned in the article, and this movement is supposed to be in contrast to the bastions of the establishment who dominate the mainstream publishing world and its organs of power. Rhetoric sound familiar? "They are, in fact, closer to the groups of experimental poets who, starting in the 1960s and '70s, produced a thriving poetic counter-culture and small-press scene in Britain."
But at the same time the article takes care to specifically exclude "the usual old bastions of neo-modernism": some such qualification would indeed seem necessary, given what I conceive as the quite modest and friendly popculture brashness of this groundswell. Is it a groundswell? Or are we just talking about the author's mates? Nice PR if you can get it.
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