One of the difficulties in this discussion is what is meant by 'mainstream' with different contributions using the term in different ways.
I was thinking about the metaphor of a stream ... and then thinking of the tradition of 'English poetry' (whatever that means) in those terms: if the mainstream in that sense for the nineteenth-century runs through Wordsworth and Coleridge (and other Romantics) through to Browning and Tennyson and Yeats, and if the successors are then seen to be the poets of high modernism (Pound, Eliot, HD, Loy ...), then the successors of that tradition are the late modernists (in London, Cambridge and elsewhere) rather than the commercial poetry. (note the 'ifs' in all this.)
I think commercial poetry means 'having a large audience', but even this is problematic. Some years ago, it was shown that the print-run for Reality Street books (say) was larger than the print-run for poetry books from commercial publishers. But, in the UK, it was the latter group who get reviewed in the newspapers, who get the commissions from Radio 3 and Radio 4, who win the prizes. So, for me, there are commercial publishers and a range of small-press publishers; and there is a literary establishment which remains powerful.
I don't think the binary works for the Liverpool Poets. The reading series they set up in Liverpool (which included a Ginsberg reading) was part of the 1960s counter-culture - and that included poets (like Lee Harwood) who were later seen as part of the British Poetry Revival. The 'avant-garde of the late 60s and 70s had some of its roots in the alternative network of readings, events and bookshops which tried to bypass an entrenched literary establishment. McGough's orientation was towards a tradition of light verse and the poetics of Auden and Larkin... Henri was linked to the art-school culture(which at that time was the initial environment for various musicians) and, in Liverpool, through the Sandon Studios, had a long-established tradition of artistic experimentation and radical politics.
I think it is a matter of specificities in relation to particular moments - rather than an abstract discussion of 'mainstream' / 'avant garde'.
Robert
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From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Lace
Sent: 19 January 2018 13:21
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Subject: Re: The Liverpool Poets
Robert, are you really saying that the avantgarde is mainstream? That’s novel.
To me mainstream means having a large audience of all social groups and educational levels (someone like Prynne, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket) and avantgarde means (among other things) seeing language as non-transparent (Henri, Patten and McGough, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket).
Henri being ignored in later life doesn’t mean he is not mainstream, unless being ignored is now considered as being avantgarde.
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Robert Hampson wrote:
I think Henri’s position complicates any simple opposition of avant-garde / ‘mainstream’. Apart from the argument that the ‘avant-garde’ is, in fact, the ‘mainstream’ … from Browning through Pound and onwards …, the sociology of poetry is more complicated than a binary. Many years ago Wolfgang Gortschacher organized a symposium in Salzburg, which brought together various groups of English(indeed, British) poets that his researches had engaged with: London ‘innovative’ poets; Cambridge poets; the Stand group; northern working-class poets; Durham university poets …
Patten ran an interesting little magazine, Underdog, which published ‘beat’ poetry from the US and UK – as a counter-cultural publication. Pattern, Henri, McGough were initially part of the counter-cultural poetry reading movement – and this came in from a lot of flak from ‘mainstream’ page-based poets. The Penguin volume was a smart / opportunistic move on Penguin’s part, but Henri’s later works If my memory is right) were back with the small presses. It is hard to over-estimate the amount of resistance Henri met from the literary establishment.
Robert
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