The British Poetry Revival is the general name now given to a loose movement in the United Kingdom that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term was a neologism first used in 1964, postulating a New British Poetry to match the anthology The New American Poetry (1960) edited by Donald Allen.
The Revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. The poets included an older generation—Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo, Andrew Crozier, the Canadian poet Lionel Kearns, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard Paul Evans, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.Mottram, Eric (1993). The British Poetry Revival. In Robert Hampson & Peter Barry (eds). New British poetries: The scope of the possible. Manchester University Press.
Beginnings Poets associated with the British Poetry Revival generally looked to modernist models, such as the American poets Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson and British figures such as David Jones, Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid. By the beginning of the 1960s a number of younger poets were starting to explore poetic possibilities that these older writers had opened up. They included Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall, Tom Raworth, Michael Horovitz, Eric Mottram, Peter Finch, Edwin Morgan, Jim Burns, Elaine Feinstein, Lee Harwood, and Christopher Logue.
Many of these poets joined Allen Ginsberg and an audience of 7,000 people at the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation on 11 June 1965 to create what has often been claimed inaccurately as the first British happening. As Juha Virtanen observes, 'Despite being credited as a happening ... the proceedings of the Incarnation primarily consisted of individual poetry readings. Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance during the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p.33. Earlier British happenings included John Latham's event-based art and Skoob Tower ceremonies; Gustav Metzger's 1964 auto-destructive art; Adrian Henri's 1962 collage-events in Liverpool's The Cavern Club; and Jeff Nuttall's events in Better Books. They had their roots in Dada events at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich at the start of the century.Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture
Fisher, a professional jazz pianist, applied the lessons of William Carlos Williams's Paterson to his native Birmingham in his long poem City. Turnbull, who spent some time in the USA, was also influenced by Williams. His fellow Scots Morgan and Finlay both worked with found, sound and visual poetry. Mottram, Nuttall, Horovitz and Burns were all close to the Beat Generation writers. Mottram and Raworth were also influenced by the Black Mountain poets; while Raworth and Harwood shared an interest in the poets of the New York School.
Publishing outlets for this new experimental poetry included Turnbull's Migrant Press, Raworth's Matrix Press and Goliard Press, Horovitz's New Departures, Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press, Tim Longville's Grosseteste Review, Galloping Dog Press and its Poetry Information magazine, Pig Press, Andrew Crozier and Peter Riley's The English Intelligencer, Crozier's Ferry Press, and Cobbing's Writers Forum. Many of these presses and magazines also published avant-garde American and European poetry. The first representative anthology of the new movement was Horovitz's Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). A broader view of the first and second generations of the Revival is in the sections edited by Eric Mottram and Ken Edwards in The New British Poetry (1988). Robert Sheppard also provides an account of some of this activity in his chapter "The British Poetry Revival" in his book, The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool University Press, 2005)', while Juha Virtanen wrote a Revival monograph, Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
England London
Thanks in no small part to Cobbing's Writers Forum and its associated writers' workshop, London was a hub for many young poets, including Bill Griffiths, Paula Claire, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, cris cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley. Some sense of the atmosphere of this period is provided by the series of reminiscences included in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London (Shearsman, 2016), edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards,Robert Hampson & Ken Edwards (eds), CLASP: late modernist poetry in London (Shearsman, 2016) and in Ken Edwards's memoir, Wild Metrics.Ken Edwards, Wild Metrics (Grand Iota, 2019).
Griffiths writes a poetry of dazzling surface and deep political commitment that incorporates such matter as his professional knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and his years as a Hells Angel. Both Sinclair and Fisher share a taste for William Blake and an interest in exploring the meaning of place, particularly London, which can be seen in Sinclair's Suicide Bridge and Lud Heat and Fisher's Place sequence of books. O'Sullivan explores a view of the poet as shaman in her work, while Randell and Riley were among the first British women poets to combine feminist concerns with experimental poetic practice. For more on Griffiths's poetry, see William Rowe (ed.), Bill Griffiths (Salt, 2007). For more on Sinclair, see Robert Sheppard, Iain Sinclair (Northcote House, 2007) or Brian Baker, Iain Sinclair (Manchester UP, 2007). For Fisher, see Robert Hampson and cris cheek (eds), The Allen Fisher Companion (Shearsman, 2020).
Griffiths started Pirate Press to publish work by himself and others. Allen Fisher set up Spanner for similar reasons, and Sinclair's early books were published by his own Albion Village Press, which also published work by Chris Torrance and Brian Catling. Book production has always been an important part of Revival practice. Many of these writers also participated enthusiastically in performance poetry events, both individually or in groups like Cobbing's Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle.
Eric Mottram was a central figure on the London scene, both for his personal and professional knowledge of the Beat Generation writers and the US poets linked with the New American Poetry more generally, and his abilities as a promoter and poet. In large part through Mottram's presence there, King's College London was another important site for the British Poetry Revival. Poets who attended there (a number of them also students taught by Mottram) included Gilbert Adair, Peter Barry, Sean Bonney, Hannah Bramness, Clive Bush, Ken Edwards, Bill Griffiths, Robert Gavin Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Will Rowe, and Lawrence Upton.
Northern England
By the early 1950s, Basil Bunting had returned to live in Newcastle and, in 1966, Fulcrum Press published Briggflatts, which is widely considered to be his masterpiece.Carroll F. Terrell, 'Introduction', Basil Bunting: Man and Poet (Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1980), 1. A number of younger poets began to gather around Bunting. In 1963, Connie and Tom Pickard started a reading series and bookshop in the Morden Tower Book Room.Geraldine Monk (ed.), CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Bristol: Shearsman, 2012). The first reading was by Bunting, and Ginsberg. Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and the Canadian poets Gerry Gilbert and Lionel Kearns all read there. They were soon joined by Richard Caddel, brought up in Kent but an honorary Northumbrian, Barry MacSweeney and Colin Simms. For some reminiscences of this scene, see the essays by Connie Pickard, Tony Baker, and Tom Pickard in Geraldine Monk (ed.) CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Shearsman, 2012).
Through Bunting, these younger writers became familiar with the work of the Objectivist poets. Specifically, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker were to become important models for Caddel and Simms in their writing about the Northumbrian environment, while John Seed picked up on George Oppen.John Seed, 'Living the Storm: George Oppen's "Songs of Experience"' in John Freeman (ed.) Not Comforts / But Vision: Essays on the poetry of George Oppen (Interim Press, 1985), 10-25 Pickard and MacSweeney shared Bunting's interest in reviving Northumbrian vowel patterns and verbal music in poetry and all of these poets were influenced by the older poet's insistence on poetry as sounded speech rather than purely written text.
At Easter, 1967 MacSweeney organised the Sparty Lea Poetry Festival. This was a ten-day session of reading, writing and discussion. The participants, including the Pickards, MacSweeney, Andrew Crozier, John James, John Temple, Pete Armstrong, Tim Longville, Peter Riley, John Hall, J. H. Prynne and Nick Waite, stayed in a group of four cottages in the village of Sparty Lea.Luke Roberts, Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4-6. This has often been presented as a pivotal event in the British Poetry Revival, bringing together poets who were separated geographically and in terms of poetic influences and encouraging them to support and publish each other's work.
Although published by Writers Forum and Pirate Press, Geraldine Monk is very much a poet of the North of England. Like Maggie O'Sullivan, she writes for performance as much as for the page and there is an undercurrent of feminist concerns in her work. Other poets associated with the North of England included Paul Buck, Glenda George, and John Seed. Paul Buck and Glenda George for many years edited Curtains, a magazine instrumental in disseminating contemporary French poetry and philosophical/theoretical writing. John Seed had picked up on Objectivism while still in the North-East. Geraldine Monk's edited collection of reminiscences by various Northern poets (including Jim Burns, Paul Buck, Glenda George, and John Seed, CUSP, mentioned above, provides a rich account of innovative poetry outside the metropolis.Geraldine Monk, CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Shearsman, 2012).
Cambridge
The Cambridge poets were a group centred around J. H. Prynne and included Andrew Crozier, John James, Douglas Oliver, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Peter Riley, Tim Longville and John Riley. Prynne was influenced by Charles Olson and Crozier was partly responsible for Carl Rakosi's return to poetry in the 1960s. The New York school were also an important influence for many of the Cambridge poets - most obviously in the work of John James. The Grosseteste Review, which published these poets, was originally thought of as a kind of magazine of British Objectivism. The early formation of this group is evidenced in the pages of The English Intelligencer, a privately circulated worksheet published between January 1966 and April 1968. It was founded by Andrew Crozier, who edited the first and third series; the second series was edited by Peter Riley. Contributors and recipients included Peter Armstrong, Jim Burns, Elaine Feinstein, John Hall, John James, Tim Longville, Barry MacSweeney, J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, John Temple, Chris Torrance and Nick Wayte.Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Luke Roberts (eds.), Certain Prose of 'The English Intelligencer (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012)