52 - Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition

Summary

Anyone offering a single phrase to describe a specific period in the history of contemporary poetry risks delivering a hostage to fortune. But the 1982 Penguin anthology Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, took that risk, and has frequently been criticised for declaring that in ‘much of the 1960s and 70s … very little – in England at any rate – seemed to be happening’. Among the loudest critics of the Morrison/ Motion verdict were the poets of what is known variously as the ‘parallel’ or ‘alternative’ or ‘neo-Modernist’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘radical’ tradition, on which the present chapter concentrates. For these poets, the decade of the 1970s had been the heroic age, the high period of what came to be called the British Poetry Revival, during which, for six years, the Revivalists had taken over the National Poetry Centre and its journal Poetry Review. By contrast, the 1980s and the early 1990s, I will risk saying, was for them a period of demoralised re-grouping, when their secure oppositional identity had been undermined, when a number of publishing ventures had foundered, and when the new electronic media which revitalised the scene in the later 1990s had not yet come into being. Thus, the traditionalists, in the 1980s, seemed to have triumphed – in 1994 a ‘New Generation’ of such poets was launched by the Poetry Society and a consortium of presses with much fanfare – poetry, the publicists claimed, had become the new rock-and-roll.