A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
Some 50 years ago, the American critic Randall Jarrell wrote that he was living in the age of anthologies. His comment seems even more pertinent today. For while the era of anthologies that define a cultural moment is probably passing away, recent years have seen the rise of commercial anthologies such as The Nation's Favourite Poems or Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With). There are anthologies to help with bereavement and even with depression. Robert Potts, a former editor of Poetry Review, calls these “the poetry anthology as lifestyle accessory” (Potts 2003). This does not bode well for the anthology as portal to the exciting and mysterious unknown.
References
1 Adcock, Fleur (ed.) (1987). The Faber Book of Twentieth‐Century Women's Poetry. London: Faber.
2 Allnutt, Gillian, D'Aguiar, Fred, Edwards, Ken, and Mottram, Eric (eds.) (1988). The New British Poetry 1968–88. London: Paladin.
3 Alvarez, Al (ed.) (1962). The New Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4 Bertram, Vicki (1996). “Postfeminist Poetry?: ‘One More Word for Balls’.” In: Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (eds. James Acheson and Romana Huk), 269–292. Albany: State University of New York Press.
5 Byrne, James and Pollard, Clare (eds.) (2009). Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books.
6 Caddel, Richard and Quartermain, Peter (eds.) (1999). Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.
7 Conquest, Robert (ed.) (1956). New Lines. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
8 Couzyn, Jeni (ed.) (1998). The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Writers. Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne: Bloodaxe.
9 Crozier, Andrew and Longville, Tim (eds.) (1987). A Various Art. Manchester: Carcanet.
10 Dooley, Maura (ed.) (1997). Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets. Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne: Bloodaxe.
11 Elfyn, Menna and Rowlands, John (eds.) (2003). The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe.
12 Etter, Carrie (ed.) (2010). Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. Exeter: Shearsman Books.
13 Fell, Alison, Pixner, Stef, Reid, Tina et al. (eds.) (1978). Licking the Bed Clean: Five Feminist Poets. London: Teeth Imprints.
14 France, Linda (ed.) (1993). Sixty Women Poets. Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne: Bloodaxe.
15 Green, Paul (ed.) (1993). Ten British Poets. Cambridge: Spectacular Diseases.
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17 Hewison, Robert (1987). Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960–75. London: Methuen.
18 Hulse, Michael, Kennedy, David, and Morley, David (eds.) (1993). The New Poetry. Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne: Bloodaxe.
19 Johnson, Nicholas (ed.) (2000). Foil: Defining Poetry 1985–2000. Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books.
20 Jones, Chris (2014). “The New, New, New Poetry: A Consumer's Guide”. Paper presented at ‘Anthologies Symposium’, Sheffield.
21 Markham, E.A. (ed.) (1989). Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain. Tarset: Bloodaxe.
22 Matthias, John (ed.) (1971). Twenty‐Three British Poets. Athens: Ohio University Press.
23 Mohin, Lilian (ed.) (1979). One Foot on the Mountain: An Anthology of British Feminist Poetry 1969–1979. London: Onlywomen Press.
24 Morrison, Blake and Motion, Andrew (eds.) (1982). The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
25 O'Rourke, Donny (ed.) (2001). Dream State: The New Scottish Poets. Edinburgh: Polygon.
26 O'Sullivan, Maggie (ed.) (1996). Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. London: Reality Street.
27 Potts, Robert (2003). “Death by a Thousand Anthologies”. The Guardian (6 December). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/dec/06/featuresreviews.guardianreview13 (accessed 14 August 2016).
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29 Roberts, Michèle and Wandor, Michelene (eds.) (1977). Cutlasses and Earrings. London: Playbooks.
30 Rumens, Carol (ed.) (1985). Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post‐Feminist Poetry 1964–1984. London: Chatto and Windus.
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32 Sinclair, Iain (ed.) (1999). Conductors of Chaos. London: Picador.
2a.3 Minding the Trench: The Reception of British and Irish Poetry in America, 1960–2015
Daniel Bourne
Perhaps not everyone remembers the old adage (at times attributed to George Bernard Shaw from the eastern side of the Atlantic, and at others to H. L. Mencken from the western) that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” It is an observation that lingers, however, not just in the minds of those bemused by differences in American and British idioms, but also those who consider the existence of some sort of Mid‐Atlantic trench between the poetry written on the American shore as opposed to the British.
In his essay, “Poetic Modernism and the Oceanic Divide,”1 a review of the 2004 anthology New British Poetry edited by British poet Don Paterson and Serbian‐born American poet Charles Simic, American poet Kevin Clark again raises the question of the existence of such a divide, though noticing the distortions involved in using such a broad categorical brush stroke: “Like cartoons masquerading as reality, the stereotypes are obvious: Contemporary British poets remain rhyming automatons and Americans are still bellowing their free verse yawps” (Clark 2004, 1). He reports that there has been a tendency for American practitioners as well as critics of poetry to claim “that British verse was long ago marked by its staid traditions of form and voice and that American verse has been characterized by its compulsions toward a roughhewn originality” (2). More convincing to Clark appears to be the differing historical dynamics of the two traditions—that is, the way that the two poetries might have different thematic concerns and different ways of wrestling with these concerns. In this regard, Clark finds himself for the most part in agreement “with those who think that British writers have been molded in good part by considerations of class and American writers by ideals that favor the Emersonian individual” (2).
Of course, the perception of this supposed divide dovetails with the chronic spat within American poetry circles themselves, involving what Robert Lowell during his acceptance speech for the 1960 National Book Award for his collection Life Studies famously characterized as the divide between “a cooked and a raw” (Lowell 1960), crystallizing the sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred boundaries between poets (and readers of poetry) who expected new American verse to be wrought in the fixed forms of the past and those who proclaimed this new poetry should be “free” to do whatever it wanted. In this schema, the bards and blokes writing in fixed verse in England are very much the cooked, while the poets of America have thrown off the yoke of imperial form and are now the proud pioneers of a wild and wide‐open poetry befitting a wild, wide‐open land.
Again, the supposed spat is imbued with stereotype; yet, it would also be amiss not to recognize the presence of this sometimes unsettled sea of mistrust and misreading, of controversies over differing conventions and intentions. Above all, there continues to exist a discussion about this barrier, and one that has broken down only rarely (and notably) in the examples of just a few poets. At the same time, however, the main