Ric has sought comment on his and Peter Quartermain's introduction to their
forthcoming anthology of "Other British Poetry" to be published by Wesleyan.
There's already a brief discussion going on the Buffalo Poetics channel, so
I'm posting the following to both chat rooms.
I wouldn't want to be nationalist about poetry (not even about poor little
Scotland, which gets short shrift here), but as far as an international
readership is concerned, Britain has been a difficult place to write from in
recent years. That itself is a poetic topic of great importance for its
writers.
The introduction makes full allowance for the many "Englishes" which now
create a multi-cultural, multi-national sense of "British poetry". So thank
god for this remarkable piece of entrepreneurship which, at last, will give
the US some idea of what's been going on. Until recently, I've found most of
my many American friends almost entirely ignorant about the British scene.
I'm delighted if Billy Little responds so enthusiastically, for example.
Mostly, the introduction is excellent, although it will be cut down for the
actual edition. However, there's hardly ever such a thing as a true overview
written from within a situation: perhaps the point about the Donald Allen
anthology, which always gets cited as the example, is that Allen wasn't caught
up in the tensions he so ably categorised: he was just friendly with everyone.
Here, a slight North of England/London bias cannot be avoided in some of the
weightings: thus, both Ric and Peter Quartermain come forward from the Basil
Bunting direction and place great emphasis upon the London figures Eric
Mottram and Allen Fisher (as prime exemplars of new poetics), and Bob Cobbing
(as key figure in sound/performance based moves). I don't object to editorial
bias -- don't see how it can be avoided. As for unstated reasons they can't
include J.H. Prynne's work in the anthology itself, their generous attempt to
acknowledge the influence of Cambridge lacks some depth, not least because
their list of honourable exclusions includes many younger Prynne disciples.
(Prynne's increasingly difficult work can be read in the new "collected" due
out this summer.)
The introduction sees British poetry as an arena of gladiatorial battles, the
mainstream versus "The Other". A key event, therefore, was the avant-garde's
seizure of control of the stuffy Poetry Society in the 1970s, before a
counter-coup returned the society and its centrist Poetry Review safely to the
mainstream. This was a London event in which Cambridge took a much lesser
role: "If we're all struggling against officialising centrism, why are we
trying to get control of the official centre?" -- that was sometimes a
Cambridge thing to say. But fair enough: Bob Cobbing and Eric Mottram led a
heroic tussle for a few years. Let it be acknowledged.
When it comes to such battles the names of women disappear. For such a
concentration tends to exclude from discussion those who are cagey about the
power relationships involved in all group movements and banner waving; that
includes not just many women but many writers from other ethnicities -- and, I
must say, myself (I'm rather anarchist about poetic movements) though my work
features in the collection, sure enough. I am hopeful that the anthology will
actually prove sufficiently multi-cultural and have a proper gender balance,
for that is a different kind of battle not fully won in Britain yet.
For me, much of the talk about the Rothenberg/Joris assemblage missed the
point. The point with anthologies is that someone has to get the whole
business started: Jerry and Pierre have done this for world literature; now
Ric and Peter Quartermain have done it for recent British poetry as
anthologised in the US.
Salutations to all you out there who are genuinely waiting for the news!
Doug Oliver
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