British Poetry Since 1970

Taking a break from Satanic Verses to read excerpts from Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, an anthology edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain (a critic and poet who is British but lives in Vancouver and one of my favorite literary critics). Although I only gave you the selections of Bob Cobbing, Eric Mottram (another one of my favorite lit critics), and Denise Riley, I really a little more broadly in the anthology and would be willing to loan it to anyone who is interested in reading more. The introduction, for example, is not only a good survey of poetry from this period, it discusses some of the major issues and challenges dealt with by these writers all in the context of the larger tradition of British Literature that we've been discussing. I recommend it.

First, I must say that these poets write the kind of poetry that I love to write, read, and study. Some might call them "experimental," "innovative," or "radical," but I just call it my style. I myself have done somethings with language-as-object like Cobbing, trying to make a sculpture on the page. I'll try to remember to bring some to class. I also share the same influences and tradition that the poets in this volume claim, which is mostly of American extraction coming after modernists like Pound, HD, Williams, Zukofsky, and Stein. The reason why this volume is titled "Other" is because the poets after these modernists, in America but especially in Britain, have been ignored because they do not fit into the conventional idea of "good" poetry. In fact, they challenge such notions as the poet having a "message" that the reader must passively decipher and consume. Instead, they ask the reader to participate in the production of meaning in the poem by bring her own experiences, biases, and imagination to bear on the poem. The "meaning" arises out of this collaboration. They also challenge the notion of the poem as perfect and complete with an ending that makes one go "hmmm" or "awwww." Instead, they rely on fragments, incompleteness, half-words, what is unsayable or unsaid, and they make us aware of language as a medium rather than simply using it as a means to an end.

Anyway, I'll talk more about this in class because I think it's important for everyone to know that an entire underground tradition of British poetry exists beyond Phillip Larkin, Ted Hughes Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heany, Dylan Thomas, and the usual suspects that you will find in the Norton anthology. Try reading the work of Brian Coffey, JH Prynne, Wendy Mulford, Grace Nichols, Fiona Templeton, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, or any of the other poets in the table of contents or mentioned on page xviii of the introduction.