Robert, are you really saying that the avantgarde is mainstream? That’s novel.
To me mainstream means having a large audience of all social groups and educational levels (someone like Prynne, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket) and avantgarde means (among other things) seeing language as non-transparent (Henri, Patten and McGough, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket).
Henri being ignored in later life doesn’t mean he is not mainstream, unless being ignored is now considered as being avantgarde.
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Robert Hampson wrote:
I think Henri’s position complicates any simple opposition of avant-garde / ‘mainstream’. Apart from the argument that the ‘avant-garde’ is, in fact, the ‘mainstream’ … from Browning through Pound and onwards …, the sociology of poetry is more complicated than a binary. Many years ago Wolfgang Gortschacher organized a symposium in Salzburg, which brought together various groups of English(indeed, British) poets that his researches had engaged with: London ‘innovative’ poets; Cambridge poets; the Stand group; northern working-class poets; Durham university poets …
Patten ran an interesting little magazine, Underdog, which published ‘beat’ poetry from the US and UK – as a counter-cultural publication. Pattern, Henri, McGough were initially part of the counter-cultural poetry reading movement – and this came in from a lot of flak from ‘mainstream’ page-based poets. The Penguin volume was a smart / opportunistic move on Penguin’s part, but Henri’s later works If my memory is right) were back with the small presses. It is hard to over-estimate the amount of resistance Henri met from the literary establishment.
Robert
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