Modernist legacies: trends and faultlines in British poetry today

Abstract

Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today. Edited by Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 263pp. $99.00The book sets out, therefore, to address some of the power imbalances at work within experimental circles, which remain overwhelmingly well-educated and white, if arguably less male-dominated than in previous generations. In this sense it is in line with current critical tendencies: Andrea Brady's essay for Conversation, The White Privilege of British Poetry Is Getting Worse (October 2015); Sandeep Parmar's essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the (December 2015); and the Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) symposium in London (February 2016) all attest to a desire to assess and begin to reverse this longprevailing wind. argument that an anticolonial politics of dialect and accent is especially pertinent and localized within the British Isles, where class and the politics of voice are hopelessly striated and inextricable, is an important one, made obliquely or explicitly by several essays in this collection.Part of the justification for using the genetic language of inheritance is that such a tradition is not self-evident or-at least not yet-self-reinforcing. In comparison with the North American experience, Lang and Nowell Smith write, assembling such a legacy is not straightforward; the dots cannot be easily j oined between dozens of strong poets and movements as in the US. Instead, the connections are those forged between fugitive outriders such as Basil Bunting, W S. Graham, and David Jones and the poets of the 1960s and 70s whose brief stints in charge of the mainstream organs that govern taste-the Poetry Society and Poetry Review-ended in a messy coup and decades of subsequent obsolescence. first section of Modernist Legacies goes over this contested ground. Allen Fisher and Robert Hampson return to the transatlantic connection that catalyzed much experimental poetic practice in Britain from the early 1960s. Romana Huk, meanwhile, sees lying behind British poetry's continual worrying at lyric's political complicities and efficacies a need to let messy materiality into the form. That impulse, she suggests, comes at an often uncontrollable cost to subjective coherence, so that the lyric I is revealed as a fiction constituted all along by those material forces.Of course, part of the vibrant, samizdat feel of British innovative or Revival work since the 1960s is owed to its pelagic presence, gliding below mainstream currents that, by and large, regarded as an historical aberration, thankfully now defunct. In recent years, however, it has been breaking the surface: key figures from the British Poetry Revival, such as J. H. Prynne, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth, and Barry MacSweeney, been published in collected formats by larger presses, and the academy-as this book and the conference that generated it attest-has been catching up. One of the main virtues of Modernist Legacies is that it widens the circle considerably beyond those more familiar names, with work (among others) on Jeff Hilson, Caroline Bergvall, Wendy Mulford, Geraldine Monk, Anthony Barnett, Sean Bonney, Peter Manson, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Tom Leonard. It also shines light on such projects as the cassette series Balsam Flex, which Will Montgomery retrieves from the obscurity of archiving procedures that have never been on a par with those for small press books and little magazines.In his own contribution Nowell Smith groups Monk, from Lancashire and now based in Sheffield, and the Glaswegian poet Leonard along with Anglophone Caribbean and black vernacular poetry from the UK. This is a powerful intersectional move that brings together the exclusions of class, geography, and race where they meet, in accent and the voice. Nowell Smith asks how modernism can be a useful term for thinking about traditions excluded from or peripheral to its central practices. …