Hi - I don't suppose anyone wants to go through all this again but watching the programme about the Liverpool Poets on BBC 4 the other night (which wasn't too bad) brought back to me all those issues to do with the sociology of Brit poetry that I have been grappling with since I seriously started to think about them back in 1993 when I started Terrible Work - the high/low culture thing, the class thing, the generous and open thing against the closed and mean thing, the street/academia thing, the Brit/American thing and heaven help us all - the mainstream/avant thing through which all the other things twist and knot.
I loved the Liverpool Poets, yes, they were an eye-opener, in just the way the programme talked about, especially for those such as myself, young working class interested in poetry. I especially loved Adrian Henri. So what happened? How did such generosity of spirit and openness to excitement and experience turn upside-down? At what point did their legacy split into two such opposed camps. One lot (of which I was definitely one) saw what they did as a starting point, not an end in itself, took notice of Henri's 'If you weren't you who would you like to be' and went out to find poetry in all its different colours. The other lot did the opposite, clung to the limitations and negatives by turning the healthy anti-establishment stance into a distrust and finally a hatred of anything that broke the boundaries of the immediately accessible - a path that led them within a handful of years straight to the door the actual establishment and their middle class workshop circuit.
Also putting this out on facebook.
Cheers
Tim
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