A Various Art: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Denise Riley

Abstract

Even within the mainstream, contemporary British poetry is torn into factions, some of them comprising one person with an acrimonious internal debate. Outside it, though, there is one group which has achieved more cohesion than most, perhaps largely because of the way it has articulated its own outsider status. I am referring to the poets anthologised in A Various Art¹ and in the section of the new british poetry² headed “A Treacherous Assault On British Poetry” — most prominently J.H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Douglas Oliver, and Iain Sinclair. Their most important shared background is in what Crozier calls “an interest in a particular aspect of postwar American poetry, and the tradition that lay behind it — not that of Pound and Eliot but that of Pound and Williams” (Various, 12). It is clear that part of the impulse behind this is in an impatience with Englishness itself — to opt for Williams is to opt for a poet whose major concern was to cast off what he felt as the dead weight of English tradition and to invent for poetry a native American idiom, especially in matters of rhythm. To some extent it is unsurprising, then, that Eric Mottram raised hackles when he promoted this kind of poetry when he was editor of Poetry Review from 1971 to 1977.