Hi Jeff, and thanks - I can see this is meant sympathetically.
Though it's possible I don't deserve the sympathy.

& I'm not sure about the 'defensiveness': I don't believe I was feeling 
defensive, but perhaps you're right about the 'frustrated tone'! I think the 
frustration, though, has a different source.

My other slight confusion with this is that I wasn't aware we were talking 
about the (now aged) New Generation at all. Well, I wasn't; maybe Tim was.

It's not something I think much about one way or the other.
If we are talking about it, I have some mixed feelings. To be brief, and 
candid, I have a high regard for quite a few of the poets who were included 
(and for quite a few who weren't). And a number have gone on with work that 
interests me more now.
We didn't choose our company, if you see what I mean: it was chosen for us. 
So it was a kind of baggy assemblage - some of the poets were already 
closely associated, most not. But you're quite right that we were often 
regarded as 'homogenous in style', and maybe that still persists. It's not 
really for me to say, but I consider the grouping to be fairly arbitrary, 
and far from homogenous. From a different perspective, like Ian Sinclair's, 
we were as alike and unsavoury as peas in a pod, or at least we were 'pod 
people' if I'm remembering right.
   And some of us, sadly, weren't that young...though from where I am now we 
seem like kids.
   The 'marketing' element may be the thing many find distasteful. At the 
time it struck me as dissonant to what any of us were doing, and it still 
does. The only one of us who protested at all publicly, and more or less 
withdrew, was Carol Ann Duffy, who thought that there should be more black 
poets on the list, and that the absence of any Welsh poets made it 
unrepresentative. At the time I thought the judges (one of the three was 
black) should just choose the books they liked best, but anyway in 
retrospect her protest still looks principled. But still, all the marketing 
amounted was a few readings in various places, a publication in Poetry 
Review, a bit of news coverage - mainly a silly photo in the papers, an 
article in Vogue, a long dismissive piece in the Guardian by someone who 
hadn't bothered to read any of the poets but had a friend who had - and a 
pack of one poem per poet (but chosen by someone else) that was widely 
distributed in schools. More exposure than most of us would ever have again 
but not exactly a butt of Malmsey or a sponsorship by Shell...

   Jamie


-----Original Message----- 
From: Jeffrey Side
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 5:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde" by Cathy Park Hong

Tim, I largely agree with what you say here. It chimes with my memories of 
and observations about 1990s empiricist and anecdotal UK poetry, principally 
fostered by Poetry Review, and other supporting magazines and publishers.

I appreciate Jamie’s defensiveness, though, as his association with the New 
Generation Poets of that era must be irksome for him, hence his frustrated 
tone, as I see it, in his responses to you. I sense that he now sees the New 
Gen Poets project as merely an awkward attempt by The Poetry Society to 
raise the profile of mainstream poetry by making it seem youthful and 
relevant. It is unfortunate that in the process, the poets involved took the 
flak for this rash marketing decision, whilst also, perhaps, becoming 
classified by many as homogenous in style and approach with each other. I 
would be annoyed too, if that had happened to me.

The problem, as I see it, in discussions about the mainstream and 
non-mainstream, is that (as we all know) it can become an endless debate, 
opening up old wounds and needlessly causing upset on both sides. The way I 
see it, is that it shouldn’t really matter which group is in dominance, for 
each one has its devoted followers.

Perhaps, naively, I have come to the view that as long as one has readers 
why complain? Surely it is the readership that matters? Or else what is the 
point of all the agonising? Why can’t each side be content with that? Are 
they so insecure as to need to be constantly asserting their poetic 
legitimacy? What does poetry matter anyway in such a context? It’s not like 
it can award anyone (group or individual) meaningful posterity anymore. That 
concept has shifted to other artistic mediums—if not become defunct 
altogether, in this age of information overload.







Tim wrote:


Jamie, I've had this conversation here before with people whose memories are 
selective (don't mean you - if you were looking in a different direction 
then fair enough) and have forgotten just how ubiquitous the domestic thing 
was through the 90's in the Brit poetry scene. The phrase thrown around at 
the time was, 'the domestic is political', which of course they got 
initially from feminism. It was related to other movements in the poetry 
scene at the time, Peter Forbes and the so-called 'new-poetic', the 
influence of the poetry workshops which had shifted from their earlier 
openness to a narrow conformity of do's and don'ts, and most important of 
all the Northern School, which wasn't just about a shift in the poetry 
publishing dynamic to Newcastle and Yorkshire but a very focused set of 
ideas about what new poetry should be doing. A host of poetry magazines, 
nearly all of them coming from north of Derby and east of Manchester 
(roughly - and don't ask me why this was the geography - I might be able to 
offer an explanation if pushed but not with any confidence) were 
instrumental in propagating this poetry in their selections, editorials and 
reviewing. Simon Armitage came fully-formed out of that. They wanted a 
poetry that was rooted in the real everyday lives of 'ordinary' people where 
the various issues (social, political, cultural) that formed the background 
to those lives cold be revealed and explored and, importantly, would 
communicate to readers in a way that truly engaged them. There I think I've 
said it rather better than they did themselves.

It was never that pure though, not in practise, but it doesn't take a genius 
to see how a certain type of poetry would find itself welcome in that milieu 
while other sorts would not. I got poems into some of those mags even at the 
same time as I was engaging in intense editorial arguments with them - 
indeed my own magazine, especially the earlier issues, was publishing some 
of the same poets - I wrote somewhere, when talking about the various 
strands of poetry that Terrible Work was open to, that it was interested in 
"some of what the Northern School were up to" - these things tended to be 
the more politically overt and existentially angry etc. In main the Northern 
School was leftish, but not hard left, more Labour Party. Some of its main 
players, editors and poets, were upper working class (or at least lower 
middle class) graduates suddenly released into the world while having young 
families and having to make a living etc. Sociologically I shared quite a 
bit with them so knew where they were coming from - but I think that was a 
big part of why my polemic against them was intense. Most of the small-press 
poetry world, especially what I used to call the non-traditional mainstream 
(as opposed to the more up-tight lot still stuck in the 50's) readily 
accommodated this movement, it contained nothing to really disturb and was 
fresh with new talents. This is why some people who were not paying that 
much attention didn't really notice any big difference in what they were 
getting in their poetry fix. There were also some more left-field editors 
and readers who had no problem with it either, after all it did inject new 
energy and was reasonably 'arty'. The others, the more left-field, probably 
didn't even notice, it had nothing to do with them so they ignored it (yes, 
talking about the good old linguistically innovators here, who back then 
were almost invisible Britside). So people didn't understand where I was 
coming from, not at first anyhow, and some still don't of course.

The other magazines that shared Terrible Work's spiky engagement with the 
Northern School were Andrew Jordan's '10th Muse' (Southampton) and Kerry 
Sowerby's 'Ramraid Extraordinaire' (Leeds) - I've no idea what happened to 
Kerry. The only other person I can think of who had a handle on what was 
going on was Andrew Duncan, whose 'Angel Exhaust' was at least touched by 
things that were going on away from Floating London and Cambridge. It was 
Andrew who first coined the phrase 'poetry telling us what we already know', 
which still gets aired. Some of the attitudes and general drift of the 
Northern School lads has been likened to the rise of New Labour (my Plymouth 
friend Norman Jope wrote about this in detail) but I tended to see both 
phenomena as just sharing in the same malaise. What was significant with 
regards to poetry was the movements' distrust of both literary and political 
extremes, it's reliance on a form of realism and its emphasis on 
accessibility, so it is no surprise that it melded so seamlessly into 
mainstream acceptance where its aesthetic methodology would grow in 
influence while its political edge would be smoothed out of existence. And 
that is of course why I was attacking it.

As I said in my previous post, it is difficult to recall exactly when those 
hundreds of watered-down Northern School style poems began to fill up the 
Nation's small-press magazines and take-on the attributes that some people 
still see as typical of a type of mainstream poem.  Pick up any copy of The 
Rialto (one of the best and most consistent vehicles) from any time over the 
last 20 years, and you can see them dotted here and there. Ditto in the 
'poems of the year' things and poetry comp winners. I know I said that 
Keston's take on it was a kind of hyperbolic satire and, yes I agree, a 
caricature, but it's a caricature with a history behind it. I've probably 
said far too much now even though this only scratches the surface.

Cheers

Tim