Lived history and the British Poetry Revival

Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979
Luke Roberts
Edinburgh University Press 2024, 288 pages, ISBN: 9781399519854

During the 1960s, the United Kingdom experienced a poetry boom as part of the developing counter-culture. This was evidenced by the increased popularity of poetry readings — in a large part promoted by the efforts of Michael Horovitz — and was recorded in Horovitz’s 1969 anthology, The Children of Albion.^[1] It was also evidenced by the “mimeo revolution” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which saw the publication of large numbers of poetry magazines and the establishment of a large number of small presses.^[2] One strand of this counter-cultural resurgence of interest in poetry was what Eric Mottram described as “a contemporary British poetry, viable in an innovative and developed poetics and substantial in range of materials.”^[3]

This innovative late-modernist poetry was what Mottram called “the British Poetry Revival.” It was manifested through reading series, through particular magazines and small presses, and through independent bookshops. There were hubs in London, Cambridge, Brighton, and Newcastle, but it was not restricted to these places.^[4] The British Poetry Revival was never formalised as a group and did not have a distinctive “style.” Rather it was marked by a wide range of styles (including sound and visual poetries) and was open to a wide range of experimentation. Mottram probably adopted the name (first used by Dave Cunliffe in his magazine poetmeat) in response to Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry (1960) in order to assert the comparable status of this poetry.

This late-modernist, innovative poetry (“the other tradition”) was most visible during the period 1971–77, when representatives of this new poetry took over the national Poetry Society and Mottram became editor of its magazine, Poetry Review. Unlike French surrealism, for example, it never had a leader who dictated inclusions and exclusions. In London, Mottram and Cobbing, though allies, represented quite different understandings of poetics, and neither Mottram nor Cobbing seem to have had a relationship with Prynne in Cambridge — although younger London poets like Allen Fisher did. More generally, relations between London and Cambridge were always rather fraught, despite poets as different as Roy Fisher and Tom Raworth being admired by both groups and younger poets like Andrew Duncan, David Marriott, Barry MacSweeney and Denise Riley moving between the two camps. The “mutual hostility and wilful ignorance pervading between the two scenes” was the focus of Angel Exhaust 8 (1992), edited by Andrew Duncan and Adrian Clarke, and given the somewhat melodramatic title “The Blood-soaked Royston Perimeter.”^[5] Traces of that legacy remain to the present day.^[6]     

Two new books on recent and contemporary poetry begin with a reference to the British Poetry Revival of the 1970s: Andrew Duncan’s Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21^st Century and Luke Roberts’ Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979.^[7] Roberts was one of the editors of Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer (2012) and editor of a substantial collection of Barry MacSweeney’s poetry, Desire Lines: Unselected Poems 1966–2000 (2018), which was designed to fill in some of the gaps left by Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000, published posthumously by Bloodaxe in 2003.^[8] He is also the author of Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (2017), an invaluable study of MacSweeney’s work and its political context.^[9] In addition to being a poet himself, Roberts is a careful scholar who has spent many years researching the poetry of this period. Given the invitation of Roberts’ title (Living in History), in the review that follows, I want to set Roberts’ archive-based account of the period 1945–79 against my own memories of the time.^[10] Roberts was born in 1987, and his account is necessarily an archival construction. My own engagement with poetry began in the mid-1960s, and, during the 1970s, I co-edited the magazine Alembic with Peter Barry and Ken Edwards.^[11] I bring to this review the advantages and the limitations of an observer-participant in the scene that he describes.

In the introduction to Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979, Roberts refers to a “putative opposition between the avant-garde and the mainstream” as manifested in the “poetry wars” of the 1970s.^[12] He describes this struggle at the Poetry Society, which began with the takeover of the Society by representatives of the British Poetry Revival, as a conflict between one group attached to “the inheritance of modernist aesthetic experiment” and a dominant group characterised by a commitment to “the bland conservatism of The Movement poets and the apprentice laureates of Faber & Faber” (3). Roberts does not justify his use of the word “putative,” but simply states that he has no interest in revisiting this conflict.^[13] Instead, he says that his focus is on “political commitment,” and the introduction makes clear that the writing of this book took place in the context of “a huge upsurge in socialist electoralism around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party” (2015–19), the uprisings of Black Lives Matter (9), and the countervailing toxicity of Brexit. The acknowledgements add the important experience of the solidarity of the University and College Union picket line during the recent strike action (2020–23); the first chapter notes the closure of public libraries and the marketisation of universities; and, in the final chapter, Roberts recalls his involvement in the Cambridge University student revolt of 2010 and observes that “the atmosphere of revolt continued through to the riots in London in summer 2011 and beyond” (218).

However, Roberts does a disservice to the British Poetry Revival by presenting it purely as a technical or formalist rebellion. It was, of course, engaged in an aesthetic conflict, in opposition to the hegemony of Movement poets and the promotion of the competent, small-scale, Little Englander miserabilist, Philip Larkin, as a major talent, but there was also a still under-explored class and political dimension to this conflict. (Some of Roberts’ later chapters, particularly his chapter on Bill Griffiths, take us into this area.)

As Horovitz’s anthology shows (through some of the poets included), the British Poetry Revival had its roots in the 1960s counter-culture and the upsurge of counter-cultural ideas of that period, but Roberts clings to his own “received ideas” about this large, loose grouping. In his coda, when he returns explicitly to the subject of the British Poetry Revival, Roberts notes that, in autumn 1971, after the “avant-garde” take-over of the Poetry Society, the events there included readings by Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose (co-founder of New Beacon Books), and Jim Burns (editor of the Preston-based little magazine Move, a regular contributor to the Labour Party’s newspaper Tribune, and one of those named by Mottram as part of the British Poetry Revival), as well as a presentation by the East End Communist Party organiser (and veteran of Cable Street) Jack Dash. He observes: “this was not quite the racially homogenous avant-garde I had come to expect” (240). He might also have noticed that this programme suggests something other than a purely formalist concern too.

Similarly, as Roberts notes, the Poetry Society programme for Spring 1977, when the “avant-garde” group resigned en masse in protest against Arts Council interference in the running of the Society (Barry, 96-97), included an evening of feminist poetry, a benefit reading for Gay News, readings in solidarity with Chilean workers and exiles, and a launch for James Berry’s anthology Blue Foot Traveller: Poetry by West Indians in Britain (240).^[14] He also records, in a footnote, Stephen Wiley’s discovery that James Berry attended the regular, open workshop, Writers Forum, run by Bob Cobbing (241). Nevertheless, despite this evidence, Roberts manages to conclude with the assumption with which he had started: namely that the “British Poetry Revival” was a “fundamentally exclusionary project of a nationally defined avant-garde aesthetic movement” (241), making it sound like a right-wing nationalist grouping.      

As noted above, in the introduction to his latest book, Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British poetry in the 21^st Century, Andrew Duncan conjures up the idea of “a moment of discontinuity, overthrow, of burning the rules and rebuilding” and cites the “British Poetry Revival” as the movement that came closest to doing this.^[15] However, he then back-tracks on this, by suggesting that this apparent challenge was illusory: in support of this assertion, he notes that 19 of the 36 names in Mottram’s 1974 list of participants in the British Poetry Revival were included in Edward Lucie-Smith’s “Penguin anthology of four years earlier” (17), which he describes as a “mainstream” publication.^[16] In fact, Lucie-Smith’s British Poetry Since 1945 (Penguin 1970) was a deliberate attempt by Penguin to represent the current range of British poetry, including those poets not accepted into what Mottram called “official verse culture.”

Lucie-Smith’s precursors here were two very prominent and commercially successful collections: The Mersey Sound (Penguin, 1967) and Horovitz’s anthology, Children of Albion: Poetry of the “Underground” in Britain (Penguin, 1969). As the subtitle of Horovitz’s anthology suggests, these collections were attempts on the part of Penguin to capitalise on different aspects of the counter-culture of the 1960s: the poetry boom (as manifested in the very popular poetry readings which were criticised by cultural gatekeepers for their attraction of a “non-standard” poetry audience) and the very diverse counter-cultural phenomena and practices (with their rejection of the official culture).^[17] As for Lucie-Smith: he had a visual arts background; he had published an interview with Allen Ginsberg (Turret Books, 1965), had written The Little Press Movement in England and America (Turret Books, 1968) and, perhaps more to the point, had edited Liverpool Scene: Recorded Live along the Mersey Beat (Donald Carroll, 1967).^[18] In the poetry politics of the time, this was very far from being a gatekeeper for the official verse culture. We might compare Lucie-Smith’s openness to the range of new poetries with the line taken by Charles Osborne and the Arts Council (as outlined in Barry’s Poetry Wars), and we might note that Turret Books also published Mottram’s poetry.^[19]

Duncan’s final comment on this cultural moment is memorably dismissive: he observes that “Of course, most poets of the 1970s have been forgotten” (17). Here he echoes Robert Sheppard’s description of Peter Hodgkiss’ magazine Poetry Information as the archive of “the forgotten poetics of the 1970s.”^[20] Although the poets and poetics seem to have been forgotten, clearly the “British Poetry Revival” (whatever that term covers) remains an itch that needs to be scratched.  

Living in History

Roberts begins his monograph with a consideration of “Kamau Brathwaite in England, 1950–55.” Brathwaite, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o later, attended an English university on a scholarship. He spent 1950–55 at Cambridge. Roberts discusses Brathwaite in relation to F.R. Leavis (whom he met at Cambridge) and the Caribbean Artists Movement, which he founded in 1966 along with John La Rose and Andrew Salkey.

Roberts focusses on Brathwaite’s early poem “The Day the First Snow Fell” (first published in 1953), which he productively discusses in relation to the need “to throw off imposed European models of literary expression” (25) and “a painful working through and working out of the dimensions of his alienation” (27). The chapter effectively situates Brathwaite’s work between 1950 and 1970 within a specific political trajectory that includes his experience as an education officer in Ghana in the early years of its independence, which transformed his understanding of the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean; the State of Emergency in Jamaica in 1966; and extends to the “Rodney Riots” of 1986 after the refusal by the Jamaican government to let Walter Rodney return to the country (and his post at the University of the West Indies).     

In his second chapter, Roberts discusses “the early years of J.H. Prynne’s writing life as a serious poet” (45) in the context of his friendships with Charles Olson and Ed Dorn. This story begins with another kind of funded mobility: the post-war exercise of American soft power that took Prynne to Harvard in 1960 on a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship; Prynne’s students, Andrew Crozier and John Temple, to SUNY Buffalo on Fulbright Fellowships in 1964; and Ed Dorn on a Fulbright to the University of Essex in 1965. (As part of this history, Mottram made his first visit to the United States in July–October 1961 funded by the US State Department.) Roberts makes excellent use of the Prynne/Olson correspondence to trace the unfolding of that friendship, the development of Prynne’s political position, and to suggest Prynne’s negotiation of his debt to Olson that, by the 1990s, had arrived at his coming to see Olson’s figure of Maximus (as Keston Sutherland has argued) as “coeval with American imperialism” (58).^[21] A key text in this chapter is Prynne’s letter in which he describes his feeling of being “emotionally … near-Marxist.” Roberts also shows how Prynne’s friendship with Ed Dorn (from 1965 onwards) was instrumental in the development of Prynne’s poetry and politics.

In this chapter, Roberts (as he acknowledges) follows in the footsteps of Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, and Alex Latter in showing how “transatlantic exchanges at the start of the 1960s helped to produce a vital culture of politically engaged poetry” (45) in Cambridge, Essex, and, it should be added, London as well.^[22] He suggests the limitations of Olson’s political position: the attack upon racism that neglected “the historical materials of the slave trade and its groundwork,” necessary for the critique of contemporary racial capitalism (58), and Olson’s “gift” for making everything seem “like it ought to connect” (61) that leads to “a kind of post-empire consolation” (63).

In comparison, he argues, via Dorn’s collaboration with Gordon Brotherston and the Latin American Studies Department at Essex University, Prynne’s friendship with Dorn opened up a different “path of education and transcultural exchange” (71) and an increasing political commitment. Roberts cites Terry Eagleton’s review of Prynne’s Kitchen Poems (1968), some of which were composed at Dorn’s kitchen table, which hailed it as “a new political poetry,” and he notes Prynne’s subsequent opposition to the Vietnam War, the invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003).^[23]

Roberts argues that the understandable focus on Vietnam and American imperialism blinded poets of the time to an engagement with the legacies of the British Empire. However, this ignores the impact on the British Left of Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965, the British Left’s opposition to apartheid in South Africa (including the academic boycott of South Africa that began in the late 1960s), and popular support for the Bangladesh Independence War in 1971 (as evidenced by George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh,” a late product of the counterculture) — all of which involved some engagement with the legacies of the British Empire.

In Chapter 3, “The Avant-Garde of Their Own People,” Roberts addresses the neglected field of exiled poets in post-war Britain through attention to the work of the Trinidadian communist activist Claudia Jones, the South African poets Mazisi Kunene and Arthur Nortje, and the Chilean Cecilia Vicuña. Jones arrived in London in December 1964, having been deported from the United States; Kunene and Nortje, like Braithwaite before them, came with scholarships (to SOAS and Oxford respectively); Vicuña came to study at the Slade in September 1972. Roberts sets up this discussion with a critique of the British Poetry Revival: he acknowledges this grouping represents “the emergence of a socialist modernism,” but, having defined modernism in terms of “a condition of exile,” he then asks (perhaps unfairly) “Where are the exiles?” in the ranks of the British Poetry Revival (76).

Claudia Jones died in February 1965, just over two months after her arrival; Kunene arrived in London in 1959 and set up what became the Anti-Apartheid Movement, but he left London in the early 1970s to take up a post at UCLA; Nortje arrived in Oxford in 1966, but emigrated to Canada in 1967 — he returned to London in August 1970 and died in December 1970. In the case of Jones and Nortje, there was hardly time for them to have made contact with the first generation of the British Poetry Revival. (By way of comparison, E.A. Markham’s 1976 pamphlet Lambchops was one of the small number of publications that Ken Edwards published under his first imprint, Share, and Markham was included in the “Future Events” reading series I co-organised with Mike Dobbie in the early 1970s.)

Vicuña has quite a different history. Roberts mentions that her 1973 book Saborami was “published by the Beau Geste Press, run by Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion, and David Mayor from a commune in the Devon countryside” (98) and notes that Ehrenberg and Hellion were both exiles from Mexico. Allen Fisher recalls being involved in the printing of Vicuña’s work, and how the evening meal at Cullompton often included twelve or more people (including Chris Welch, Carolee Schneemann, and Takako Saito alongside Mayor and the Ehrenbergs).^[24] And Vicuña has remained in contact with the British innovative poetry world since.

Indeed, like Essex University, the London poetry world had good connections with Latin American poets as well as United States poets. One of the larger small presses, Cape Goliard, published The Spider Hangs Too Far from the Ground by the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros in 1970; the second Polytechnic of Central London poetry conference in 1975 was on “Poetry of the Americas” (the programme included a wide-ranging essay by Eric Mottram, “Poetry, Ecology, Translation”); Poetry Review, under Mottram’s editorship, published translations of poems by the Peruvian poet Pablo Guevara and the Argentinian poet Juan L. Ortiz; and, by the end of the 1970s, Will Rowe had set up the Translation Workshop at King’s College, London, focussed on the radical tradition in Latin America, with participants including Jason Wilson, Anthony Edkin, Ken Edwards, Hugo Gola in exile from Argentina, Eugenio Montejo from Venezuela, and Thito Valanzuela in exile from Chile.

In his discussion of Jones’ experience of the institutionalised racism of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, Roberts introduces Joseph Keith’s useful term “alienage” to describe a condition which involves exclusion from “legal, social, and cultural forms of national membership.” This, of course, raises the question: what is meant by a nation? In a revealing footnote Roberts talks about “socialist modernism” reformulating “Englishness” and “Britishness” “within a hollowed out national culture” (76). “Englishness” here clearly refers to the English Intelligencer and “Britishness” to the “British Poetry Revival.” The terms, of course, are not synonymous. Even after devolution, as Boris Johnson embarrassingly revealed in his deposition to the Partygate Inquiry, the Parliament in Westminster has an imperialist attitude towards Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

Many of the poets involved in the British Poetry Revival did not identify themselves as English. In this pre-Brexit context, “British” was an inclusive term rather than exclusive — including not only Scots and Welsh, but also various hyphenated British subjects. Hugh MacDiarmid, for example, whose contribution to Writers Against Apartheid Roberts mentions, was also included in the first poetry conference at the Polytechnic of Central London (“Modern British Poetry”) in October 1974. Although the “British Poetry Revival” (in the present climate) sounds an alarmingly nationalist label, the poets involved saw themselves as involved in an internationalist and transnationalist project: as Edwards (who was born in Gibraltar and bilingual in Spanish) has said, for some of the younger poets, contemporary American poetry was a route back to European poetry. Indeed, Mottram’s editorship of Poetry Review was described by one of his critics as “a treacherous assault on British poetry.”     

Chapter 4 is addressed to “Homosexuality and The British Poetry Revival” — with the sensational sub-heading “Driven Out of the Town.” This is, in many respects, an odd chapter. First, the central focus is the mostly work of Lee Harwood, who was bisexual. Secondly, the implication is that homosexuality was suppressed, but, as Roberts’ own account makes clear, Harwood’s poetry frequently describes homosexual experiences in quite explicit non-coded ways.^[25] Thus, as Roberts notes, in his contribution to Michael Horovitz’s Children of Albion, Harwood included a poem about fellatio dedicated to the gay concrete poet d.s.h. and “As your eyes are blue …” (in which the lovers are clearly two men), alongside “Love in the Organ Loft” (dedicated to Marian) where the poet is “watching over my love” (who is clearly female). Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jonathan Williams were around the London scene and hardly concealed their sexuality, and there were younger “out” gay poets — such as Jeremy Reed and Alaric Sumner. Sumner, who edited the magazine words worth (1978–95), was (as Roberts notes) involved with both Writers Forum and the Gay Liberation Front.

As Roberts says, “an indifference to the question of sex and sexuality has lingered over the reception of the new British poetries of the 1960s and 1970s” (106).  And “indifference” is precisely the note of my memories of the time — a 1960s tolerance for “doing your own thing” rather than the malign suppression that Roberts suggests. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 had decriminalised sex between men in private, but men were still being arrested in toilets (often by decoy policemen).

I think the problem is that Roberts approaches this chapter (and this topic) with a present-day sense of identity politics. As he observes later, in relation to his own involvement in the student occupation at Cambridge in 2010, “the political vector of poetry is determined by the social moment in which it is written” (221). Outside of Jeff Nuttall’s work, sex (and sexual orientation, in particular) was not an important issue in the poetry of the British Poetry Revival. There was an awareness of Wilhelm Reich’s work on sexual energy and the orgasm (which is evident in early sections of Allen Fisher’s Place). (Dušan Makavejev’s 1971 film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, brought Reich’s ideas — and story — to a wider public.) As Roberts notes, there was also an awareness of (and support for) Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, and Black Power movements, and there was a resulting explicit critique of misogyny, homophobia, and racism.

In addition to the Vietnam War, the dominant issues in London in the 1970s were with the rise of the far-right National Front and the “troubles” in Ireland (both seen as legacies of English colonialism). These, in turn, led onto concerns with the law, policing, and surveillance. In this context, on a personal level, the sexual orientation of individual poets was, indeed, a matter of indifference. Furthermore, although Harwood was an exception here, much of the poetry was committed to a modernist conception of impersonality or, at least, in Andrew Duncan’s words, to “a rigorous detachment from the immediate purposes of the self.”^[26] Thus, although Harwood’s work frequently engages with love, desire, tenderness, as Roberts rightly observes, it “doesn’t show the same interest in constructing or exploring a set of behaviours, affects, and attitudes that could coalesce into a sexual identity” (118). Instead, Harwood presents “a view of sexuality as unfixed and polymorphous” (128).

When I first read Harwood’s poetry, I was aware of the shifting genders of the lovers, but I was drawn by the exploration of feelings and relations — and by the elusiveness of the writing (that I didn’t put down to “homotextual” “distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities, and discontinuities” (114). There was an openness, a vulnerability, a readiness to accept uncertainty — what Roberts criticises as “a deliberate withholding” (127) — that seemed attractive in the poetry. The poetry foregrounded, to use Caterina Albano’s words, “attention, awareness, and listening” as key to a being-there and a being-with.^[27] Indeed, Albano uses Harwood’s word “softness” to describe “the quality of this connectivity that for Serres has to be paired with an attitude of care towards the environment” (30). She goes on, in a manner entirely sympathetic to Harwood’s work: “Emotion and affect are part of knowledge and action” (30).

In the same vein, Roberts argues that, in Landscapes (1969) and The Sinking Colony (1970), “homosexual content is systematically displaced by a range of colonial fantasies” (124), which he presents as a form of self-suppression. I have always read the colonial narratives in Harwood’s poems not as nostalgia for the Raj, but as an ironic appropriative cosplay — in line with the wearing of Ruritarian military dress in Sergeant Pepper or the London clothing shop “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet,” which sold old-fashioned military uniforms as fashion items. I am reminded of Edward Said’s account (in Culture and Imperialism) of the European modernist response to the recognition (or, at least, suspicion) of imperial delusions in terms of “the reformulation of old, even out-dated fragments drawn self-consciously from disparate locations, sources, cultures” as part of a self-ironising practice in relation to the increasingly untenable white male subject position.^[28]       

In Chapter 5, Roberts discusses the work of Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford in the context of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The chapter includes perceptive readings of two early poems by Riley (“In 1970” and “a note on sex and the reclaiming of language”) and two early poems by Mulford (“In Praise of Women Singers” and “noise levels”).^[29] His reading of the second poem provides him with an opportunity to question the “analogy between the position of the gendered subject and the racialised, colonised one” in the poem and in contemporary feminist discourse. He notes Mary Kelly’s exploration of “the grounds for solidarity between women in imperialist nations and the liberation struggles in, for example, Palestine and Vietnam” (152), but also rightly warns how “in the painful work of finding a language to articulate women’s oppression, concrete reckoning with colonialism could easily give way to looser metaphor” (152).^[30]

Halfway through the chapter, in discussing the Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK, Roberts makes the odd statement that “the whiteness of the movement has become glaring, making the formal minutiae of experimental poetry rather less absorbing” (144). I am not sure that I follow the logic of this statement. I remember how Spare Rib was criticised, during the 1970s, for being too white, middle-class, and London-centred, and how there were arguments within Spare Rib about Black, post-colonial, and third-world feminisms — and about who qualified as “women of colour.”^[31] However, I am not sure what the dominant “whiteness” of the Women’s Liberation Movement has to do with interest (or lack of interest) in what Roberts characterises as the “formal minutiae of experimental poetry.” While the critique of the whiteness of the feminist movement was voiced at the time, this seems an odd reason to discount the value of concerns with formal experimentation in the different field of poetry. It is certainly the case that the “formal minutiae of experimental poetry” are not Roberts’ primary concern in this book.  

Later in the chapter, Roberts mentions “the almost total absence of women of colour in critical accounts of poetry by women in the 1970s” (145). He suggests two reasons for this absence: first, the whiteness of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and, secondly, that “women of colour organised autonomously and at arm’s length from what they perceived as the bourgeois and imperialist mainstream feminist movement” (147). Whether these really were the reasons for all women of colour organising autonomously, Roberts has here touched on an important feature of 1970s culture: separate groups pursuing different political and poetic trajectories, where magazines (as with the Cambridge Intelligencer earlier) were often conceived of as pursuing specific experimental poetic projects. In 1973, when I was editing Alembic 4 as an issue around poetry of place and urban poetics, I asked Linton Kwesi Johnson for work, and he replied that he had given up writing poetry.^[32] At that point, Linton Kwesi Johnson was working with Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, and Jean Ambrose as the Race Today collective, but he certainly hadn’t given up writing poetry. It is clear, however, where his energies were focussed, and the readership of an experimental poetry magazine were not a priority.

It is not just that different groups developed different trajectories — though that was the case. It is also that, after the “poetry wars,” funding possibilities and various publishing outlets were closed to experimental poetry. These were the conditions in which these poets were required to work. In 1984, my wife Sibani Raychaudhuri, who had published short stories in Spare Rib, joined the Asian Women’s Writers Group. The group had been set up by Ravi Randhawa with funding from the Greater London Council and went on to publish two anthologies of stories and poetry, Right of Way (The Women’s Press, 1988) and Flaming Spirit (Virago, 1994). The work of the Asian Women’s Writers Group was also supported by Farrukh Dhondy, who was then working for Channel 4 TV. In this same period, I organised a seminar on little magazines at the University of London’s Centre for English Studies. Among the invited speakers was Susheila Nasta, the editor of Wasafiri. She was surprised to hear from the other speakers that magazines associated with the British Poetry Revival found it impossible to gain Arts Council funding.

Towards the end of the chapter, Roberts discusses Mulford’s use of found language in her early poetry. He focusses on “an unmarked quotation from the reggae hit ‘Uptown Top Ranking’” (159) in “noise levels” and uses Mulford’s citation of Althea and Donna’s lyrics to ask whether this is an expression of solidarity or “white expropriation” (160). Through tracing another unmarked citation (“whiteness is violence”) in this poem to Edmond Jabès, he shows how the whiteness of the page in Jabès’ work acquires other resonances. By linking the reggae lyric with the post-Holocaust writing of Jabès (and other women writers) he suggests that Mulford’s verse is involved in “coalition building” (161). One of the other features of the 1970s was precisely such coalition building in the face of the rise of the National Front (which reached the height of its electoral support in the mid-1970s).

One of the elements missing from Roberts’ account is militant, non-experimental poetry by the white working-class male. Ostrich, edited by Keith Armstrong in Newcastle and then Tyne and Wear, from 1971 to 1976, combined an address to the local community with an internationalist perspective. Ostrich 12 (November 1974), for example, included poems about miners (and ex-miners) — one in dialect — with a poem about the 1974 Lions Tour of South Africa and poems from Angola and Mozambique about their independence struggle. Ostrich 13 (December 1974) was an issue of anti-fascist poetry published in association with the May 1^st Movement and the Kevin Gateley Action Committee.^[33] Launch events included a poetry reading at the Unity Theatre in Camden. Ken Edwards, E. A. Markham, and I were all published by Ostrich.  

Roberts begins Chapter 6, “Yout Rebels,” with the sacking of Chris Searle in May 1971 from his teaching post at Sir John Cass School, Stepney, for publishing an anthology of poems by his pupils. This leads to discussion of a poem by Vivian Usherwood “not yet a teenager” (165) about the resulting strike by school-pupils. In this poem, Usherwood presents his distanced view of the Sir John Cass School strike as a boy from another school (“So I started laughing for it sounded funny / Schoolboys on strike”). Roberts reads this poem as “tentative, even sceptical, about being ‘radically public’” (166). Of a later poem, written before Usherwood’s death at twenty, Roberts affirms, “One of the reasons that Usherwood’s work is important is because it articulates a complicated, ambivalent subjectivity” (167). Of a third poem “Schools” (“Everywhere you go there are schools / The teachers bother the schoolboys and girls heads in”), he observes: “it is tempting to read this back as a critique of the limits to progressive organisations, and the mystification they can sometimes enact” (168). As Roberts proceeds, it is tempting to read his interpretations back as over-interpretations driven by the needs of his own argument.

Roberts doesn’t mention that Sir John Cass was a Tory MP for the City of London and a leading figure in the Royal African Company, set up by Charles II and his brother the Duke of York, for the West African slave trade. (For obvious reasons many of the institutions named after Sir John Cass have now been renamed.) Nor does he mention the 1972 case of the Marxist lecturer David Craig at Lancaster University — the motion to dismiss him from his post was overturned using the proceeds from a benefit organised by the poet Adrian Mitchell that paid for a barrister.

The two cases, Chris Searle’s and David Craig’s, were causes célèbres, and they suggest some of the constraints on political activity in the education system of the day. Roberts’ criticism of Searle for treating his pupils as “recruits to the trades union of the imagination” rather than recognising “their independent revolutionary capacity” (169) doesn’t arise from his reading of Usherwood’s poems, but from the joint review of Searle’s 1976 Classrooms of Resistance by the Race Today Collective. Here Roberts sets Searle’s expressed desire to “protect our class, the working class,” and emphasis on trades unionism as the means of doing this, against the collective’s demand for “the autonomy and financial independence of school pupils” and a recognition of their status as “a wageless, dependent, underprivileged section of the population.” In this part of the chapter, we feel something of the granularity of contemporary radical debates about education, including attention to Bernard Coard’s report on ESN schools as the site of “the production and maintenance of racial inequality” (170). The opposition between trade unionism and more radical revolutionary action has a long history in debates on the British left.

Roberts’ promotion of the poetry of Usherwood has the unfortunate effect of undervaluing the remarkable achievement of Linton Kwesi Johnson. Johnson’s “Yout Rebels,” which gives the chapter its title, is rightly described as “a poem which emerges from a specific Marxist analysis of the Black working-class in Britain, and which furthers a specific political argument about the autonomous struggle of young people” (181). This poem enacts the Collective’s critique of Searle’s position; it is also clearly very different from the background to Usherwood’s work. Robert effectively plays down the importance of an articulated political analysis (which Sean Bonney, for example, maintained was necessary for successful revolutionary action) in his reading of Usherwood’s work. He ends the chapter by providing the contemporary context of racist murders and racially motivated police violence — and the powerful response to this violence in the work of Savitri Hensman and some Punjabi-language poets affiliated with the Indian Workers Association.^[34]   

Chapter 7 is addressed to “Anti-Carceral Poetics.” The key figure here is Bill Griffiths, whose 1970s poetry sequences Cycles and War W/Windsor Roberts describes as “some of the great achievements of the so-called British Poetry Revival” (196). Roberts acknowledges Griffiths’ work in the printshop at the National Poetry Centre during the early 1970s and his commitment to experimentation in the form of “concrete poems, collaborative sound performances, and multi-voice texts” (197), but he focusses on Griffiths’ engagement with prisoners and the conditions of British prisons.

He contextualises this work by reference to a number of other British Poetry Revival publications: Barry MacSweeney’s Jury Vet (1979–81), John James’ War (1978) and A Former Boiling (1979), Mottram’s Legal Poems (1986), Maggie O’Sullivan’s her/story: eye (1994–99), Geraldine Monk’s Interregnum (1994), and Tom Pickard’s The Ballad of Jamie Allan (2007). These projects responded to Official Secrets Act trials, internment and hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, early modern witch trials, and border outlaws. As Roberts demonstrates, the work of Pickard, James, and Griffiths shows us “how confrontational and antagonistic the poets and poetry of the 1960s and 1970s could become” (203-4), and this “militant working-class experimentation,” he notes, “sometimes crosses over with” the activist texts by Johnson and others discussed in the previous chapter (208).

This richly detailed chapter concludes with a reading of Griffiths’ Seventy-Six Days Wanno (1993) and Star Fish Jail (1993) as works which “gives character, gives names, gives voices to the cold statistics of punishment and death at the hands of the state” (215). This paves the way to the final chapter on the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn. However, this final chapter (rather than address her work in terms of “formal minutiae”) uses Mendelssohn as a way to meditate on Lisa Tickner’s “good enough history” and D. W. Winnicott’s “good enough mother.” As Roberts explains it, “good enough history” is “a way of acknowledging personal investment in the material under discussion while allowing the material a life of its own” (221). For Tickner, the “material under discussion” was the occupation of Hornsey College of Art in 1968 in which she participated; for Roberts, it is the 2010 student occupation in Cambridge; for me, it is the British Poetry Revival of the 1970s. I have drawn on Roberts’ argument in this chapter to justify to myself the approach I have taken in this review.

Roberts provides a carefully researched account of Mendelssohn’s time at Essex University and her subsequent life in radical squats in London — and also draws on his own memories of seeing Mendelssohn towards the end of her life at her desk in the Cambridge University Library. He arrives at the conclusion: “The difference between 1968 and 2010 is that we were neither offered nor won the mass support of organised labour” (232). From this, he is able to distance himself from Mendelssohn’s “scepticism of revolutionary politics” (232) and rescue the utopian view of revolution that underlies some of the judgements in earlier chapters.     

II. the new british poetries

In contrast to the simple British Poetry Revival/Movement opposition he mentions at the start, Roberts describes a more fragmented poetry world. That fragmentation was rather clumsily recognised (or, at least, registered) in the 1988 Paladin anthology, the new british poetries, edited by Gillian Allnutt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards, and Eric Mottram. Each editor was responsible for a specific section: “Black British Poetry” (D’Aguiar), “Quote Feminist Unquote Poetry” (Allnutt), “A Treacherous Assault on British Poetry” (Mottram), and “Some Younger Poets” (Edwards). The categories were not water-tight. (Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford, for example, appeared in Mottram’s section, and Allnutt refers in her introduction to poets she would have liked to have included who appear in other sections.) However, it is the case that Black poets are represented only in the first section.

One of the issues behind the whiteness and predominant maleness of the avant-garde sections edited by Mottram and Edwards is precisely the rise of identity politics during the 1970s which this volume recognises. The felt need to give a voice to Black experience and women’s experience frequently led to a privileging of the first-person. As D’Aguiar puts it in his introduction: “black identity” figures as “a primary concern” in the work of some of the poets he includes (though he also claims “a shared commitment to a notion of craft, to being engaged in an art form which cuts across race and class” [3]). Similarly, Allnutt, while she describes it as “obligatory” to “try and break up the boxes we ordinarily think in” (77), later refers to the thematic concerns of her chosen poets as including “self-definition” (in terms of sexual orientation), the “recognizably feminist” (including abortion and the sexism of husbands) and “the traditionally womanly” (including birth and childcare) (78). Interestingly, sexual orientation is not presented as an issue in the other sections (although the selection of Lee Harwood’s poetry includes “As your eyes are blue ...”).

Edwards’ section adumbrates (although he doesn’t fully address) the relationship between the “experimental” poetics of his male “younger poets” and the impossibility of the straight-white-male subject position. He mentions, for example, the “anti-militaristic, anti-patriarchal” work of Ulli Freer (268); the “ironic manipulation of multiple discourses” in the work of John Wilkinson (268); the “dismantling of male creative supremacy” by Maggie O’Sullivan and Geraldine Monk (269); and the inseparability of “politics and poetics” in the work of Kelvin Corcoran and Andrew Duncan (269). Rather than a poetics of “authenticity,” personal experience, and “personal expression,” this poetry turns to various depersonalising and distancing devices, to fragmentation and decoherence.

Some years earlier, in 1981, Edwards had addressed sexual politics, feminism, and gay liberation in an exchange with Jeff Nuttall in Edwards’ magazine Reality Studios.^[35] The exchange, which hinged on Nuttall’s representation of male sexuality in relation to aggression towards women, feminism, and homosexuality, might also be seen as a generational divide. It clearly shows how, while there was an enabling indifference about sexual orientation, the construction of “masculinity” was regarded as an issue in this community.

In a recent review in the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton refers to a 1970s’ crisis in the humanities, where the whole field was “uncertain of its identity in advanced capitalist regimes which seemed to deny it much value other than the decorative or the therapeutic.”^[36] He goes on: “Literature was the last refuge of personal experience and the individual spirit, as well as a form of creative transcendence that had long since stood in for a failed religion” (27). The threat posed by theory, he argues, was that it uncovered “psychical forces, material interests, networks of power” that undermined that privileged subjectivity, that presented the subject as “an effect of forces beyond its grasp” (27). This was certainly the context within which (and some of the ideas with which) the second generation of the British Poetry Revival worked, and that attitude towards subjectivity placed the work of this tradition at odds with the identity politics of other poetries. However, poetic differences did not mean that poets could not work together on larger political issues where they were in agreement.  

Coda:

On October 25, 2024, Veer Books held a launch event for five new books in a room above the Cock Tavern, Phoenix Street, London N1. In addition to works by Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery, the event launched new books by Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer, and new editions of work by Bob Cobbing and a collaboration between Bob Cobbing and Robert Sheppard. The evening began with a reading of a work by Cobbing by Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell. Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard for many years ran SubVoicive, the reading series set up in the 1970s by Patricia Farrell and Gilbert Adair. Clarke, Freer, Sheppard, and Cobbing were all regulars at SubVoicive — and at Writers Forum, the regular workshop run by Cobbing. The evening felt like a reunion of a section of the second generation of the British Poetry Revival. Around the walls of the room were anti-racist and pro-trades-union posters, suggesting some of the other users of this space.   

The event also reminded me of my own initiation into poetry readings: the evenings organised by Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, and Roger McGough in the basement of the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in the 1960s. This was a popular poetry that was not about self-revelation: it was artful, playful, politically radical, promoting a culture that included American comic books, the Blues, Alfred Jarry, surrealism, and modern art. A democratic poetry that was grounded in a socialist politics and open to the whole range of culture.