A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
anthology I coedited with Michael Hulse and David Morley originally had the working title of Eighties/Nineties but ended up borrowing Alvarez's title to justify its argument for significant change. The introduction was a naively pluralist, pro‐postmodernist, anti‐Thatcher polemic that offered rather overdetermined arguments about the extent to which the poetry it collected challenged the age. One other notable feature of these anthologies is the contracting or expanding movement they enact: Conquest (9 poets), Alvarez (28 poets), Morrison/Motion (20 poets), Hulse/Kennedy/Morley (55 poets). It is clear that the Conquest and Morrison/Motion anthologies reflect periods of cultural and political isolationism, conservatism, and cynicism about or exhaustion with ideas of community and the collective. Alvarez's anthology is very much of the 1960s while the Hulse/Kennedy/Morley New Poetry's celebration of diversity was a rejection of Thatcherism's antisociety, a celebration that, with hindsight, looks increasingly like a cover for the impossibility of drawing any meaningful sketch of the contemporary scene. Indeed, where Conquest and Alvarez were able to construct reasonably coherent arguments about the poetry they anthologized, Morrison and Motion and Hulse/Kennedy/Morley seemed to struggle to accommodate the diversity of the contemporary scene. For example, the inclusion of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney by Morrison and Motion spoke to an important trend in postwar British poetry in which the marginal starts to become central. However, such poetry is at a considerable distance from, say, the sophisticated fabulism of James Fenton, and Fenton, in turn, seems equally distant from the exuberant “Martianism” of Craig Raine, which now reads like the ultimate in a post‐postwar consensus poetics.
This is the cultural history into which the 2009 anthology Voice Recognition sought to write itself. Such writing into history was quite self‐conscious, as James Byrne and Clare Pollard invoke Alvarez's anthology to argue that “Technique is not enough. Talent must be fuelled by the experience of a life outside of the poems” (13). Poetry that is the “mere recounting of anecdotes or minor stagings of epiphany” (13) must make way for poetry that registers “the creative stimuli that can be found through travel, translation or through a broad appreciation of visual art” (13) and “a wide appreciation of the ‘confessional’ American poets” (14). Previous anthologies have often found themselves arguing for shifts that are already over. This was true of Morrison/Motion and the Bloodaxe New Poetry. Voice Recognition described a recognizable contemporary scene. Unlike its predecessors, Voice Recognition did not have a title that refers to poetry. This was reflected in the poetry world that the introduction sketched, a world that was predominantly performance‐driven. It was also reflected in a sentence that would have been impossible a few years before: Jay Bernard “is a DJ for the Poetry Society and podcasts regularly” (19).
Voice Recognition thanks “faculty from many universities who provided recommendations.” This acknowledgment reflects the fact that none of the poets had published a full‐length collection and many of them had undertaken some form of graduate studies. At the same time, the editors could not decide what they thought about creative writing and the academy. They tell us that “Almost every university going seems to have a poetry course, which is frequently backed by renowned faculty” (11). The sentence starts by sounding a note of exhaustion that seems to promise disapproval and yet suddenly swerves into a kind of awkward reverence.
Byrne and Pollard continue to tell us that MAs in Creative Writing “can encourage conformities of style” and “many of the same‐sounding, low‐stake, well‐mannered (but going nowhere) poems we read whilst putting together this anthology were from poets who had recently come along the MA conveyor‐belt” (12). The idea that British MA programs are collectively teaching a latter‐day version of the well‐made poem is bizarre. One suspects that this was Voice Recognition's own version of attacking the recent past as many MAs are overseen or taught by poets who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. As David Cameron remarked to Tony Blair in his first House of Commons speech as Tory leader (07.12.05), “you were the future once.”
Blair and Cameron are not as remote from this anthology as one might think. A group of poets whose reference points are from an anthology that is nearly 50 years old, Rilke, Pound, and American confessional poets, and whose work represents (incredibly) “after years of other regions being prominent […] a real shift back to the capital” (11), has an odd sense of poetry, history, politics, and just about everything else. What they have, in fact, is a gap, and it is a gap they share despite Voice Recognition's representing three distinct generations: b.1988–1991, b.1984–1986, and b.1977–1982. This gap is the result of having grown up through the Blair era. Thatcher's infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families” was rewritten by New Labour in a variety of ways. One version might be, say, “there is no such thing as ideology, only things that work and things that don't.” But to deny society or ideology or nation is to remove any way of defining the self and the result is that your only reference point is yourself and your convictions. This explains the feeling throughout the introduction of the editors struggling to define their poets against anything. Indeed, the “recognition” in the anthology's title is highly significant because previous mainstream anthologies clearly had been matters of definition. The cultural moment that James Byrne and Clare Pollard describe was, in contrast, dehistoricized and depoliticized. Or, as Ahren Warner puts it in “Epistle,” “there are no signs of our times” (161). The present is unreadable without a sense of the very recent past.
What is most surprising in the context of a generation‐defining anthology is the number of voices that seem to lack confidence or seem to revel in an inability to communicate. The speaker of Heather Phillipson's “Crossing the Col d'Aubisque” finds that “The Smiths are in synch / with what I don't express” (128). The speaker of Jay Bernard's “109” tells us “I don't know if I can talk” (25) and the mother in Emily Berry's “The Mother's Tale” “won't share a drop of emotion” (31). All this has the curious effect of suggesting that the mainstay of mainstream poetry, the personal lyric, is largely inoperative.
By contrast, the few poets who seem genuinely interested in doing something with form, language, and voice—Siddartha Bose, Mark Leech, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Sophie Robinson, and Ahren Warner—catch the reader's attention with an often quite pronounced sense of provisionality and unpredictability. The opening of Sophie Robinson's “unspeakable” is a good example: “Your name swallows my lips & / the backward downward rage of all / girls knocking through me” (142). These poets have visibly and audibly thought about what is involved in the act of reading and how different types of text produce different reading styles. Their poems repay re‐reading because there is much less sense of their colluding with the usual readers of poetry. Crucially, the work of these poets converges with what the mainstream dismisses as avant‐garde or experimental poetry.
The poetry collected in Voice Recognition seems largely unaware of and unconcerned with what has dominated British mainstream poetry since about 1950: anxieties about class, region, gender, and race. Byrne and Pollard are the first anthology editors to show no interest in poetry as a mirror of the nation. In this, of course, they only reflect the attitudes of their chosen poets. But it makes Voice Recognition an early monument to a postnational poetry. The editors and their poets have removed one of poetry's principle claims for recognition: its ability to offer unique insights into the relationships between private and public and between self and nation that define us all.
Anthologies, then, tell us particular types of story about poetry and its relationship to the world. As is apparent from the discussion in the preceding text, the story has often little to do with the poetry itself. Chris Jones has written that Alvarez's “essay, ‘The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle,’ has focused people's minds on what anthologies are for: what is each anthology's brief and purpose? Anthologists return again and again to its arguments, assimilating and reacting against its abiding concerns, and from it create new narratives of contemporary literature” (Jones 2014, 2). With the exception of Voice Recognition, the anthologies discussed so far can be said to perform what Robert Hewison has identified in postwar British culture as “negative feedback” with the recent past (1987, 300).
The idea of negative feedback provides a story arc in