Tim, I largely agree with what you say here. It chimes with my memories of and observations about 1990s empiricist and anecdotal UK poetry, principally fostered by Poetry Review, and other supporting magazines and publishers. 

I appreciate Jamie’s defensiveness, though, as his association with the New Generation Poets of that era must be irksome for him, hence his frustrated tone, as I see it, in his responses to you. I sense that he now sees the New Gen Poets project as merely an awkward attempt by The Poetry Society to raise the profile of mainstream poetry by making it seem youthful and relevant. It is unfortunate that in the process, the poets involved took the flak for this rash marketing decision, whilst also, perhaps, becoming classified by many as homogenous in style and approach with each other. I would be annoyed too, if that had happened to me. 

The problem, as I see it, in discussions about the mainstream and non-mainstream, is that (as we all know) it can become an endless debate, opening up old wounds and needlessly causing upset on both sides. The way I see it, is that it shouldn’t really matter which group is in dominance, for each one has its devoted followers. 

Perhaps, naively, I have come to the view that as long as one has readers why complain? Surely it is the readership that matters? Or else what is the point of all the agonising? Why can’t each side be content with that? Are they so insecure as to need to be constantly asserting their poetic legitimacy? What does poetry matter anyway in such a context? It’s not like it can award anyone (group or individual) meaningful posterity anymore. That concept has shifted to other artistic mediums—if not become defunct altogether, in this age of information overload. 







Tim wrote:


Jamie, I've had this conversation here before with people whose memories are selective (don't mean you - if you were looking in a different direction then fair enough) and have forgotten just how ubiquitous the domestic thing was through the 90's in the Brit poetry scene. The phrase thrown around at the time was, 'the domestic is political', which of course they got initially from feminism. It was related to other movements in the poetry scene at the time, Peter Forbes and the so-called 'new-poetic', the influence of the poetry workshops which had shifted from their earlier openness to a narrow conformity of do's and don'ts, and most important of all the Northern School, which wasn't just about a shift in the poetry publishing dynamic to Newcastle and Yorkshire but a very focused set of ideas about what new poetry should be doing. A host of poetry magazines, nearly all of them coming from north of Derby and east of Manchester (roughly - and don't ask me why this was the geography - I might be able to offer an explanation if pushed but not with any confidence) were instrumental in propagating this poetry in their selections, editorials and reviewing. Simon Armitage came fully-formed out of that. They wanted a poetry that was rooted in the real everyday lives of 'ordinary' people where the various issues (social, political, cultural) that formed the background to those lives cold be revealed and explored and, importantly, would communicate to readers in a way that truly engaged them. There I think I've said it rather better than they did themselves.

It was never that pure though, not in practise, but it doesn't take a genius to see how a certain type of poetry would find itself welcome in that milieu while other sorts would not. I got poems into some of those mags even at the same time as I was engaging in intense editorial arguments with them - indeed my own magazine, especially the earlier issues, was publishing some of the same poets - I wrote somewhere, when talking about the various strands of poetry that Terrible Work was open to, that it was interested in "some of what the Northern School were up to" - these things tended to be the more politically overt and existentially angry etc. In main the Northern School was leftish, but not hard left, more Labour Party. Some of its main players, editors and poets, were upper working class (or at least lower middle class) graduates suddenly released into the world while having young families and having to make a living etc. Sociologically I shared quite a bit with them so knew where they were coming from - but I think that was a big part of why my polemic against them was intense. Most of the small-press poetry world, especially what I used to call the non-traditional mainstream (as opposed to the more up-tight lot still stuck in the 50's) readily accommodated this movement, it contained nothing to really disturb and was fresh with new talents. This is why some people who were not paying that much attention didn't really notice any big difference in what they were getting in their poetry fix. There were also some more left-field editors and readers who had no problem with it either, after all it did inject new energy and was reasonably 'arty'. The others, the more left-field, probably didn't even notice, it had nothing to do with them so they ignored it (yes, talking about the good old linguistically innovators here, who back then were almost invisible Britside). So people didn't understand where I was coming from, not at first anyhow, and some still don't of course.

The other magazines that shared Terrible Work's spiky engagement with the Northern School were Andrew Jordan's '10th Muse' (Southampton) and Kerry Sowerby's 'Ramraid Extraordinaire' (Leeds) - I've no idea what happened to Kerry. The only other person I can think of who had a handle on what was going on was Andrew Duncan, whose 'Angel Exhaust' was at least touched by things that were going on away from Floating London and Cambridge. It was Andrew who first coined the phrase 'poetry telling us what we already know', which still gets aired. Some of the attitudes and general drift of the Northern School lads has been likened to the rise of New Labour (my Plymouth friend Norman Jope wrote about this in detail) but I tended to see both phenomena as just sharing in the same malaise. What was significant with regards to poetry was the movements' distrust of both literary and political extremes, it's reliance on a form of realism and its emphasis on accessibility, so it is no surprise that it melded so seamlessly into mainstream acceptance where its aesthetic methodology would grow in influence while its political edge would be smoothed out of existence. And that is of course why I was attacking it.

As I said in my previous post, it is difficult to recall exactly when those hundreds of watered-down Northern School style poems began to fill up the Nation's small-press magazines and take-on the attributes that some people still see as typical of a type of mainstream poem.  Pick up any copy of The Rialto (one of the best and most consistent vehicles) from any time over the last 20 years, and you can see them dotted here and there. Ditto in the 'poems of the year' things and poetry comp winners. I know I said that Keston's take on it was a kind of hyperbolic satire and, yes I agree, a caricature, but it's a caricature with a history behind it. I've probably said far too much now even though this only scratches the surface.

Cheers

Tim