The Rise and Fall of Black Britain

Abstract

As if to confirm the nostrum that all things cultural and economic are transnational, poetry's stock in the U.K. has soared in the nineties, much as it has here in the U.S. Individual issues are up, and the entire portfolio is performing well: small poetry presses are thriving, Penguin has revived its once-seminal Modern Poets series with great fanfare, and poetry has even been assigned various civic tasks, from humanizing the London Underground to (literally) reporting the evening news. There as here, established page-poets are along for the ride, and the odd performance poet of an earlier generation gets paid her ritual respects. But the real catalysts of the poetry boom are younger folks-grandchildren of Albion, in the words of poetry activist Michael Horowitz-who, like their counterparts in the U.S., work in a variety of styles across the line dividing hiphop from highbrow. Often reluctant to assume the mantle of poet, they crowd -some gratefully, some sheepishlyunder spoken word, the modish umbrellalabel the press has eagerly held aloft. The term has become so hip and hyped, especially since the triumphant I994 and I995 tours of Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that nowadays you can't swing a dead metaphor without hitting a poetry slam. As with their Nuyorican counterparts, part of the cachet of the new U.K. poken-word artists is that their skins and their voices cover a delicious range of tones. After an uneasy decade in which it was merely touchy, what's now called the black-and-Asian experience in Britain is once again hot, and Albion's grandkids are understood to speak authentically to it and for it. Fred D'Aguiar, a poet and novelist of Guyanese descent who's had occasion to track such trends, calculates that there are at least sixty poets of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent currently living and working in the U.K.; many of them-including John Agard,Valerie Bloom, Jean Binta Breeze, Merle Collins, Lemn Sissay, and Benjamin Zephaniah-are primarily per-