A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
with anthologies of writing from the parallel tradition of experimental poetries. The period under discussion in this companion has seen a number of significant anthologies of such writing. The New British Poetry 1968–1988 (1988) embraces the diversity of contemporary poetry. It has four editors who managed a section each: women's poetry, Black British poetry, poetry of the British Poetry Revival, and some younger poets. It collects 85 poets and includes poets as disparate as Eavan Boland and Linton Kwesi Johnson. By contrast, Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1999) emphasizes the outsider and underground nature of experimental poetries and portrays a scene of “remote, alienated, fractured” work written by “apes from the attic” (xvii). It collects 36 poets and seeks to rehabilitate five older poets: J. F. Hendry, W. S. Graham, David Jones, David Gascoyne, and Nicholas Moore.
Other notable anthologies include: Paul Green's Ten British Poets (1993); John Matthias's Twenty Three Modern British Poets (1971); A Various Art by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (1987), which gathers J. H. Prynne and 16 other poets associated with Grosseteste Review and Ferry Press; Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (1999) by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain; and Nicholas Johnson's Foil: Defining Poetry 1985–2000 (2000). For the most part, such anthologies have defined themselves against the dominant mainstream poetic. Sinclair mocks the Poetry Society's “New Generation Poets” promotion of the mid‐1990s. Crozier and Longville assert that “the poets who altered taste in the 1950s did so by means of a common rhetoric that foreclosed the possibilities of poetic language within its own devices” (12). Similarly, Caddel and Quartermain write that “One purpose of this anthology is […] to uncover what the forces surrounding The Movement and its successors have helped to bury” (xxii).
The most recent anthology of experimental writing, Nathan Hamilton's Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (2013), departs from this model. It registers important changes in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. The book is notable for its methods of selection and composition. An initial group of poets chosen by the editor were then asked to make their own selection. The second group then repeated the process. The result is an anthology of 74 poets and the effect is something like a collage. Much of the work in Dear World is interested in formal experiment. The introduction comprises small episodes of prose. The tone of these appears more or less random and entirely personal to the editor until two and a half pages in when a formal proposition is made about poetics, discussing “product” and “process,” and then dismissed in the final sentence of that section.
Hamilton values the poets in Dear World … for two reasons. First, because they construct a linguistic stance against the world. Second, because they seem to be politically angry. There is a struggle going on somewhere and they feel obliged to comment on it. This makes the anthology reminiscent of Conductors of Chaos (1999). Hamilton's introduction, like Sinclair's, writes back to the poets. His style is deliberately disorientating and it soon becomes apparent that he is attempting a history of views of poetry in the contemporary period.
Hamilton's concern is that public discussion of contemporary poetry is increasingly difficult. He is very astute in his connection of experimental poetry with the aims and methods of conceptual art while recognizing that the experimental poem is less commodifiable than the material products of fine art. It is here that the problem of public visibility, media relevance, inclusiveness, or lack of representation may lie. Of course, a significant part of the project of experimental poetry is to be resistant to easy commodification. Such concern with the public profile of poetry can be traced through other experimental anthologies of the period.
The introduction to Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 expresses an anxiety about the dominance of a monolithic, centralized culture, which has enabled mainstream poetry to be both highly assertive in its public profile and suppressive of alternatives. What concerns the editors of Other and similar anthologies is the ease with which mainstream poetry has turned itself into a national narrative. The question of what national narrative experimental poetry tells remains moot. Editors of experimental poetry anthologies are also concerned about the way that the mainstream poem remains so closely identified with the Movement poem and its alleged gentility. A national poetry narrative that is largely founded upon genteel anecdote might be expected to be enfeebled and vulnerable, but, in fact, it turns out to be a surprisingly flexible instrument that continues to find an audience. By contrast, experimental poetry with its concern with serious issues and with reinventing poetic language remains largely ignored.
The anthologizing of innovative work remains, then, largely a question of placing such work against the mainstream. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (1996), edited by Maggie O'Sullivan, collects 30 poets with clearly constituted author identities and distinctive poetics. The introduction states that the title of the collection refers specifically to the exclusion of these poets and their writings from the places of cultural reception, and it argues that this is a matter of gender politics. This implies that experimental poetry by women is doubly devalued.
The editor of Sixty Women Poets (1993) describes her poets as having been constrained for too long. Anthologies in the period under discussion in this Companion have been involved in a cultural power struggle, so much so that a review of the Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry (1993) was entitled “Jihad.” Anthologies express wider sets of cultural tensions, which involve negative feedback with the recent past. They are moves in a continuing struggle, markers that are thrown down as challenges to a sometimes barely visible enemy. It is also worth noting that there is a real danger of anthologies misrepresenting the poets they collect. The work of anthologies becomes a matter of distorted history.
A desire to correct the exclusions of distorted histories underwrites the large number of women's poetry anthologies that have appeared since 1960. The earliest of these are passionately feminist: Cutlasses and Earrings (1977) by Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor, Licking the Bed Clean (1978) by Alison Fell et al., and Lilian Mohin's One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979 (1979), which contain mainstream and experimental poetries. Mohin's anthology collects 55 poets born between 1929 and 1955. Mohin identifies “the primary quality” of the poems as “one of redefinition [and] contributions to the long task of renaming the world and our place in it” (Mohin 1979, 5). Other notable postwar anthologies include: Carol Rumens's Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post‐Feminist Poetry 1964–1984 (1985) and New Women Poets (1990); Fleur Adcock's The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry (1987); Linda France's Sixty Women Poets (1993); Maura Dooley's Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997); Jeni Couzyn's The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Writers (1998); Deryn Rees‐Jones's Modern Women Poets (2005); and Carrie Etter's Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (2010), which concentrates on experimental poetry.
The feminism of the late 1970s proved hard to sustain—Rumens's 1985 subtitle is a telling one—and Vicki Bertram notes Adcock's antipathy to feminist poetry (see Bertram 1996, 269–273). In place of explicit feminism, new vocabularies of valuation have emerged. For Linda France, women's poetry “often has a wild quality” (1993, 17), while for Jeni Couzyn it reflects “the depth and range of female consciousness” and is “angry, powerful, hurt, tender, and defiant” (1998, 16, 18). Carol Rumens asserts that “any amassing of women's voices will necessarily amount to a fairly radical critique of current society.” The poetry in her 1990 anthology is “funny, sexy, witty, rebellious and, perhaps, heartfelt” (1990, 12), uses “eclectic” (1990, 13) forms, and is written by poets who “are behaving more like novelists these days” (1990, 15). Deryn Rees‐Jones, surveying a century of women's poetry, notes tendencies toward “the monologue, the surreal, the use of myth and fairytale” (2005, 20) and “a poetics of witness” (2005, 21) and identifies a desire to avoid “excessive femininity” (2005, 22).
Finally, we should not forget anthologies such as E. A. Markham's Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (1989), Donny O'Rourke's Dream State: The New Scottish Poets (2001), and The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) by Menna Elfyn and John Rowlands.