A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
and America, edited by prominent American poets Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, was first published in 1957, but continued to be reprinted in America long after 1960. Beyond the familiar names of Amis, Davie, Gunn, and Hill were poets Charles Causley (1917–2003), Michael Hamburger (1924–2007)—whose work as a translator from German was much widely recognized in America than was his own poetry—John Heath‐Stubbs (1918–2006), John Holloway (1920–1999), Jon Manchip White (1924–2013), and a lone female representative, Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001). Meanwhile, an important conduit for Irish poets was The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Faber & Faber 1986), edited by Paul Muldoon. Still available in both hard and paperback, this anthology starts with the death of Yeats in 1939 and offers such additional Irish voices as poet and prose writer Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967), Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), John Montague (1929–2016), Paul Durcan (born 1944), Tom Paulin (born 1949), and, again, a lone female representative within the group, Medbh McGuckian (born 1950).
In this same period, publishing houses such as Bloodaxe Books were also extremely important as transatlantic bridges, known for printing the work of American poets in Great Britain as well as bringing British poetry to American readers. One example is The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets: Eleven British Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 1985), which along with the more familiar work of Sylvia Plath and Denise Levertov also offered such women poets as Stevie Smith (1902–1971), Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), Elaine Feinstein (1930–2019), Ruth Fainlight (born 1931), Jenny Joseph (1932–2018), Anne Stevenson, Fleur Adcock (born 1934), and Jeni Couzyn (born 1942), who also edited the anthology. Couzyn—as was the case with Stevenson and Nichols—is not just “English.” Born in South Africa, she moved to Great Britain in her twenties. Ruth Fainlight, too, was born in the United States, but has made England as well as Spain and France her home.
Certainly, British and Irish poets made their mark on the pages of American literary journals as well. Indeed, it is no surprise that given the centrality of literary magazines in creating the richness and diversity of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century American literature—as William Carlos Williams attested, “Without it, I myself would have been early silenced” (Williams 1951, 266)—the field is so vast and multivaried that a separate essay would be needed for a discussion of the appearance of British and Irish poets in the many scores of literary journals being published throughout the United States from 1960 to 2010, with poets both widely known and relatively obscure showing up in particular literary journals. But there are at least two examples of special issues on British literature worth mentioning. One would be the Great Britain special issue of Atlanta Review 4.2 (Spring/Summer 1988), a 90‐page section guest‐edited by N. S. Thompson. Two years earlier, New Orleans Review also published a British issue (22.2, 1996). Moreover, starting publication in 1966 in England under the editorship of George Cairncross, the journal Bogg (whose esthetic seemed much more inclined to the “raw” than the “cooked” side of Lowell's poetic divide) continued to espouse a special interest in British writing even after it moved with its subsequent, American‐born editor John Elsberg to the United States in 1980, where it continued publishing until Elsberg's death in 2012 (Darlington 2014). It is also interesting to note that one year earlier, in 2011, an online literary journal, Antiphon, started publication, characterized itself as “providing a showcase for the best in contemporary British and international poetry.” Edited in England, it is nonetheless present to American readers, appearing in the Poets & Writers (pw.org) database of literary magazines, and showing evidence of a continued transatlantic conversation still being conducted within literary journals in online and in hard‐copy incarnations. It should be noted, though, that no American literary journal in terms of poetry has ever come close to matching the presence on both sides of the Pond of Granta, which, devoting itself to the genres of fiction and nonfiction, at the height of its popularity in the mid‐1990s could count its U.S. circulation at 47,000, though with a figure slumping to around 12,000 by 2007 (Garfield 2007).
But back to anthologies, the 976‐page edition of Anthology of Twentieth‐Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001), edited by American literary critic Keith Tuma, offers several new poets to American readers. Even such an expansive treatment does not prevent esthetic blind spots, however. Kevin Clark notes that, in terms of current poets, Tuma's selections “highlighting contemporary practitioners of more experimental work” point in a completely different direction than the formalist choices made by Don Paterson and Charles Simic in Graywolf Press's New British Poetry (2004), and that “[e]ach anthologist could have borrowed happily from the other's esthetic” (Clark 2005, 407). At the same time, Clark not only identifies a number of newer voices in New British Poetry, but also discusses why their work might connect with American readers, regardless of the presence of fixed or more open form. The poets he discusses range from the more familiar—Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, John Burnside, Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, and former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion—to other less well‐known figures, such as Mark Ford, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jo Shapcott, W. N. Herbert, Alan Jenkins, John Wilkinson, Robert Sheppard, Glyn Maxwell, Robin Robertson, Ruth Padel, and Fred D'Aguiar.
In fact, the reader could do worse in embarking on a look at the issue of British poetry in America than by reading Clark's incisive review of New British Poetry. Although I am not so inclined as Clark to bemoan the influence of James Wright (408) on recent American poetry (which of course might be more of an in‐house American debate than an issue germane to a comparative regard of American as opposed to British or Irish poetry), Clark usefully offers some specific comparison points between practitioners of both sides of the “divide,” noting, for example, some degree of formal eclecticism: “While [co‐editor] Paterson's Brits are clearly much more concerned with form, some of his contributors arrange free verse in elaborate stanzas completely familiar to readers of contemporary American poetry. [Some poets even] alternate between formal poems and free verse: reminiscent of [Galway] Kinnell” (408–409). Clark also articulates several commonalities involving both poetic conventions as well as concerns, especially the challenge of navigating one's place between the old and the new:
Like American poets, our British counterparts seem at home with the first person singular. Some are as concerned with consciousness and conscience as we are. Like many of our poets, some of these Brits wish to reorder imagination so that they may apprehend the changing world. Still, too many seem trapped by the expectations of a critical heritage that is uncomfortable with the new.
(409)
The problem with this comment, though, is that it might also describe a number of other national poetries as well. Again, what is most fascinating here is that with British and American poetry it is the ongoing discussion of possible poetic divergence that seems more significant than any particular difference per se.
Ultimately, I imagine that this difference will be connected with the growing importance of a poetry of identity within American literature, something that involves sexual identity as much as ethnic or national identity. Many are the vectors that bring a poet to the page, and I imagine that not so much sorting out poets according to these avenues, but employing an increased awareness of the dynamics between poet, poem, and community (however defined) in illuminating our reading will continue to hold sway. Not so much taxonomy, but cultural terroir. Moreover, these categories will continue to be increasingly complicated. How to differentiate between American and British poetry when it is harder to homogenize one poetic tradition or the other into one current, one flavor? Within America, many poets and readers of poetry might be much more concerned with the dynamics between American poetry written in Spanish and Hispanic American poets writing in English. A striking example of such a confluence occurs with the poet Juan Felipe Herrera (born 1948), U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, who has published his work in both English and Spanish, often in bilingual editions. We indeed have not just bilingual poets, but poems, as in the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes (born 1954), whose linguistic hybridity involves a reclamation of her lingual‐cultural heritage, since speaking Spanish was forbidden to her during her childhood (Ramazani et al. 2003, 1010).
This is not to say that British or Irish poetry will be reduced in significance,