Yes, those were the days - another huge impact on my young brain at
the time. I remember that Wantling Jackson Nuttall volume too and
always wondered what happened to Wantling and Jackson. I was
fascinated by D.M. Black's poetry - must go back to have a look.
The overall feeling of the Penguin series at the time was inclusivity
openness and adventure - part of a wider scene of course - it didn't
take long for things to close up again.
Tim A.
On 31 Aug 2010, at 00:08, Robin Hamilton wrote:
> Subject: Re: Found Wantling
>
>> Back in the Sixties, Wantling's prison and Vietnam (or Korea?)
>> based work got the usa small press attention of folks/readers
>> (primarily male) who were responsive to poems from the 'real world'
>> at the margines - scarred, radiating a 'blue' sense of down & out
>> loss and anger combined with a hard edge lyricism. Cold war stuff -
>> a parallel would be work by Bukowski, and Etheridge Knight. I
>> don't really know Nuttal's work, but he was big in in England
>> against the Bomb, a live wire, counter-cultural resistance to upper
>> stratta English culture. (This is probably all on Wikipedia).
>>
>> Stephen V
>> http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
> The third of them in that particular volume, Alan Jackson, was of
> course Scottish (though he had the misfortune to hail from Edinburgh
> rather than Glasgow) and so is naturally enough the one which the
> Birk ignores.
>
> The entire first series of Penguin Modern Poets was more than
> interesting, and I think the initiative of one particular person who
> worked at Penguin at the time. It got reincarnated in a later
> series which was more USAmerican oriented (and incidentally if I
> remember correctly included inter alia Bukowski), but that never had
> quite the same impact.
>
> More than a few under-recognised writers -- D.M.Black is the most
> notable -- *almost* achieved fame by being published in it, but not
> quite.
>
> They did neat linking in the volumes too, each of which featured
> three poets, which suggested that whoever was responsible had more
> than a few braincells to rub together. The Liverpool Poets (as it
> was later renamed) with Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten
> might seem obvious now, but Penguin got there early. They also
> neatly brought together McCaig, Mackay Brown, and Ian Crichton
> Smith. (Edwin Morgan significantly featured in another volume!)
>
> I have to agree with dave, those were the days, my friend.
>
> I've got most of that original series still, having bought them as
> they first appeared.
>
> Robin
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