Children of Albion 1969
The New British Poetry 1988
A Various Art 1988 (or 7)
Conductors of Chaos 1996
Other 1999
If we take the above antholgies as the well-distributed national
(international) collections of a loosely defined poetry of alternatives in
this country, with its beginnings in the 1950s, we find some interesting
recurrences of names.
In all five:
Andrew Crozier, John James.
In four out of five:
Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Douglas Oliver, Peter Riley.
In three out of five:
Tom Raworth (though he refused to be in Conductors, so could be in the
above category) Iain Sinclair (he is not in Conductors, either, but could
have been), Tom Pickard, Chris Torrance, Gael urnbull, Allen Fisher, Bill
Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley, cris cheek, Kelvin Corcoran,
Andrew Duncan, Geraldine Monk, Maggie O'Sullivan
In two out of thre:
JH Prynne (but he has refused to be in severa of the above, I imagine),
David Chaloner, Paul Evans, Frances Horovitz, Carlyle Reedy (very
interesting: in Children and then Other, nothing in between), Libby
Houston, Anthony Barneett, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Ralph Hawkins,
John Riley, John Seed John Aagard, Amryl Johnson, Linton Kwesi John
son, Grace Nichols, B.Catling, Thomas A Clark, Bob Cobbing (may be
here because of difficulties of reporducing his visual work?), Ken
Edwards, Peter Fich, Ulli Freer, Elaine Randell, Gavin Selerie, Robert
Sheppard (I'm always finding myself just after Gavin in things!!), John
Wilkinson, Tom Leonard (along with some of the Black British poets here,
also in The New Poetry from Bloodaxe), Eric Mottram, Wendy Mulford,
Colin Simms, Tony Baker, (last but not least our listowner:) Ricard
Caddell.
Such a list might mean nothing, of course. Does it means success
breeds success? Does it show a certain conservative taste? The
youngest writer here was born in 1960, I think. Will, should, can, future
anthologies change this pattern?
Robert Sheppard
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