Hi David, firstly I think Tony's exchange's with you have said most of what I would have said re names and contexts, both in UK and US. Robert's post, although it extends the issue into Asian poets, kind of indicates that things are changing a bit. I really hope they change more and faster - this issue has always invited some toxic, and to my mind quite unfair, criticism. But it has also rarely, as far as I know, been explored objectively in any depth. If there are such explorations out there I would love to read them.

You first question below is easy to answer (and Tony and Robert have answered it) - there are black poets operating in the 'avant/innovative sphere', but not many, as pointed out. The other question is really impossible to answer because when it comes down to it I don't really know, not on the level of the individual poet anyway. My explanation has always been this broad cultural one connected with issues of identity. If the moving force behind your poetry is connected with a desire to search out, reclaim, engage with the specifics of identity etc then it is no surprise that your poetry is going to look and sound radically different to that of people who (for whatever reason) are almost doing the opposite. Of course it is not the case that all of avant/innovative poetry is about exploding or sidestepping identity, but it is an aspect of much of it. So these different prompts are going to employ very different approaches to language itself. 

The problem comes when we start to put value judgements on these different approaches, which we do of course, from both sides. Then the problem gets compounded by touching on far more important issues than literature. Long long ago in a poetry group meeting a man called me a racist because I said negative things about the poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah and not too long ago on this list I (among many others) was accused of being misogynist because I said something negative about the poetry of Kate Tempest. When the level of debate gets that stupid it is very difficult to think straight but at base there does remain the problem of literary judgement. I do envy those folk who can profess not to be interested in quality judgements, who believe it's all post-modernly relative etc - but I've never been able to do that, not in any final analysis anyhow. Below you ask, "We are all humans after all, and why shouldn’t black poets (like white ones) be interested in the avant/innovative?", and yes, of course, we are all human, but there are millions of people who are not interested in avant/innovative work and most of those people are as likely to be white as black etc.

The issue of 'patronisation' is a strange one which I tend to turn on its head. I've always found the well educated middle classes' espousal of poor poetry to be deeply patronising to the working class. The issue is connected.

Cheers

Tim A.
          
On 24 Aug 2015, at 17:20, David Lace wrote:

> Tim, this looks like you are saying that there are no black poets that you know of who are operating in the avant/innovative sphere, and that post-colonial poetry seems to be the domain of black poets. If this is true, does this mean, do you think, that black poets are not interested in writing poetry that could be accepted in the avant/innovative sphere, but would rather (for some social or cultural reason) prefer to operate solely within the identity politics of post-colonial poetry. If the latter, that would mean an acute lack of interest in anything avant/innovative, which I find hard to believe. We are all humans after all, and why shouldn’t black poets (like white ones) be interested in the avant/innovative? For us to say they aren’t, is bordering on the patronising. I’m not accusing you of this, mind you, just mentioning the dangers.
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> -----Original Message-----
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> I think the part class plays in this is definitely there but becomes dwarfed when contrasted with the more visible identity politics of post-colonial poetry. This was all pretty clear as far back as 1988 when Paladin's The New British Poetry was published. It was split into four sections comprising two heavily slanted identity selections (Black British Poetry and Quote Feminist Unquote Poetry) followed by the two very similar avant/innovative ones (just older and younger personages but otherwise very similar). This was, to my knowledge, the last time these works shared such a platform. They were going in different directions. I don't personally see how anyone can make any moral value judgements regarding this.
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> I might have been interested in what the black and feminist sections were saying but I was not very interested in how they were doing it, whereas with the other two sections I was into both.
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> Tim