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In addition to David Marriot, you might add some younger poets – but this would also depend on the definition of ‘blackness’ and its expansion to include Asian and other minorities : Karen Sandhu, Nisha Rammayya, Nat Raha, Aimee Le, for example, would come into this broader definition. Robert From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tony Frazer Sent: 24 August 2015 17:38 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" by Cathy Park Hong Carla Harryman, Harryette Mullen, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, erica lewis, M. Nourbese Philip, Claudia Rankine; those are the Black authors that come to (my) mind. If you want to stretch to Asian-Americans, Latino Americans, and others, the list would be longer. The people on those various lists might very well not recognise themselves as being in an avant-garde, or might not wish to be so classified. In the UK we have very few ethnic minority poets who seem (to me) to be avant-garde. On the other hand, this may be a problem of terminology: some writing by Black poets that doesn’t look like familiar avant-garde writing may very well be that exactly because it appears unfamiliar. Names over here tend to run out after D.S. (David) Marriott, who anyway lives in the US, and Sascha Aurora Akhtar, who is of course Pakistani-British, rather than Black British. Someone like Kei Miller, Jamaican-British and published by Carcanet, strikes me as, at the very least, a non-mainstream poet, but again, the problem lies with terminology. I’ve seen a lot of performance poetry by Black authors, however, and they seem to receive a welcome in that community which perhaps has been missing in A-G circles here. I’m not suggesting that this arises from deliberate exclusion, but one can presumably feel unwelcome in an all-white room, so to speak. This collection of articles might be of some general interest (links are at the foot of this introductory piece and include David Marriott: http://bostonreview.net/blog/boston-review-race-and-poetic-avant-garde Tony On 24 Aug 2015, at 17:03, David Lace <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Can you name any black US poets in the “avant-garde”? Forget about Goldsmith etc. I’m assuming that you accept that the term “avant-garde” has some meaning—otherwise this will be a very vague discussion. -----Original Message----- I don';t know enough about the UK scene to comment. I also don't know what her motives is--it might just be ignorance. If she's talking about the Kenny Goldsmith/Vanessa Place end of things, there are very few poets of any description in it.