I think this is probably contestable, as a position, that commercially
successful "powertry" [must trademark that] is of the insulated present.
Heaney's work it seems to me is firmly about a vanished world and a
negotiation with the values and securities of this vanished world and
maintains a sense of bereavement, as Larkin's poetry does, as if the poet is
in exile from a past which has been eradicated. I'd have thought that
nostalgia is an important factor in much contemporary poetry. I'd also have
contested that much political poetry within the avant-garde suffers,
naturally enough, from its proximity to the political event, whether this be
(inexhaustable) Bush-bashing, or Iraq. Inevitably this will date poetry, as
those works on the Faulklands or Greenham Common now seem quaint, despite
the enormity of the concerns and losses at the time. Much of the avant-garde
is inextricably a poetry of the now. All we have, of course, is the tyranny
of the present to live in.
I think we have to look more clearly at the breadth of officially endorsed
verse to see what's going on, and also be very clear that officially
endorsed verse isn't necessarily commercially successful. Hill and Prynne
both sell well, to give two examples. It would be wrong to link commercial
success with content, I think this has more to do with who is selling the
poetry than what's in it. The proclamations of what constitutes main stream
is really a question of dominant practices, rather than commercial success.
In my limited experience, experimental works sell as well as mainstream -
the key is to actually sell them, rather than allow books to languish in the
cellars and garages of the righteous.
To add to Peter's note, I think there's also mileage to look away from the
typically world's of BritPo and UKPoetry at alternative avant-gardes, the
growing Black surrealist/sci fi literatures emerging, the performative
Persian-influenced literatures of young Muslim writers, or even the work of
women writers in the North, often dealing with persona and commodification,
like Jo Colley and Angela Readman, and subverting mainstream practices.
Too often we are dealing with a received wisdom about what constitutes the
British avant-garde, which amongst younger practitioners is a largely male
world, and often a privileged world in Britain. The literary landscape is
far more sophisticated than the binary opposition of mainsteam versus
avant-garde, of epiphanic "me now" poems versus politically anxious "who
controls us now" conspiracy theory. I fear that the contractions of this
kind of debate serve to exclude a far more expansive world of British poetry
and that the old listservs are rapidly becoming selfservs.
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