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Experimental poetry is alive and kicking, but publishers need to give it a bigger platform.
A hundred years ago modernism was reinventing the rules of poetry with linguistic innovation and experimentation, pushing readers into a new relationship with the world via the word. Poets found fresh ways of expressing through style and form and publishers provided the engine room to connect their work with readers. So, what happened to this populism of the difficult? Today this tradition of experimentation has moved into underground channels where some of our most dynamic poets are creating incredible work, outside the earshot of major publishers.
Last year saw the centenary of The Waste Land. There were Eliot-themed events and even a festival called fragments, which took place across twenty-two City of London churches. The 1923 centenary should also be celebrated as a century ago this year was an incredible year for poetry. Wallace Stevens published Harmonium, his first collection of poetry completed at the age of 44. Stevens’ work brought a striking philosophical angle to modern poetry, demonstrating that everything that poetry could do existed in the imagination; not the world as it is, but as the mind – and language – perceives it.
The year 1923 was also the verge of the explosion of the Harlem Renaissance, with the publication of Jean Toomer’s radical hybrid book Cane. Ostensibly a novel, Cane shattered the fragile glass separating fiction and poetry through its fragmentary depiction of ‘the folk-spirit’ of African American culture in the United States, which – in Toomer’s words – "was walking in to die on the modern desert". Highly structured, imagistic and condensed in language, Cane extended what could be done in poetry and remains hugely influential today, remaining in print with Norton. Harmonium is still published by Faber and Faber.
The UK has an explosive scene of experimental poetry but why should the best kept secrets of the art form be shared by only a few hundred people?
Where, then, are the modernist-influenced poets on the lists of major publishers today? There are flashes of this, for sure, and it’s also arguable that modernism’s influence on contemporary poetry sits alongside other movements that took place before and after. But publishers should be alert to the direct dynamism that continues from 1923, the abundance of language-led poetry currently being written which experiments with sound and form to present a unique vision of the world.
Some of the most exciting poets currently writing are publishing in the grassroots of UK poetry, developing their readership among those who know where to look for the good stuff. Verity Spott is a "neo-modernist" poet who performs widely, including recently at Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room where audiences were enthralled by their on-stage presence.
Spott has been described as "the most extraordinary performer in British poetry today" (Fred Spoliar) but Spott’s work is not so easy to find in bookshops, being published in print runs of the low hundreds with dynamic underground presses such as the87press, Contraband Books, Veer Books and Face Press. Spott’s work is funny and immediate, as well as sonorous and challenging, delighting in the direct address which leaves the reader feeling singled out directly – a sign of great art: "Nor did I attempt to rupture your spaces. Nor did I shepherd my body and thoughts into a singular character." There is a Whitmanesque embracing of the multiple "I" in Spott’s work which places it in a long tradition of modern experimentation. Spott’s work fizzes with urgency for this lived moment.
D S Marriott was born in Nottingham and has long been held up as one of UK poetry’s best kept secrets. Marriott’s formally inventive poetry addresses racism, violence and post-colonial legacy in sonorous lyricism and experimentation with the empty space of the page. Marriott has also written essays which push back on some of the problematic assumptions of modernism being a movement of largely white artists (one need only look at the poets T S Eliot published as Faber editor, which tells a very different story from the Harlem Renaissance). "The avant-garde poet emerges as a figure (invariably male, invariably white)", Marriott writes, "that history and culture no longer need to put in question […] black avant-garde poetry should not be reduced to the usual modernist dilemma of aesthetics versus politics."
Marriott’s essays and poetry makes the case for a radical kind of black modernist poetry that engages with the difficulties of the world through challenging writing. Marriott now lives in the US where his work has recently been published by City Lights, perhaps the biggest poetry publisher of all. So why has it taken a major US publisher to embrace his work after Marriott previously published over a dozen books with the UK small press scene?
The UK has an explosive scene of experimental poetry, but why should the best kept secrets of the art form be shared by only a few hundred people? In these challenging times, we need challenging art and it’s time for the major presses to get behind it, simultaneously creating their own publishing legacies which will be celebrated well into the future.