Notes

As It Stands: Innovation, the Post-Avant, and Current Publishing Practices

 

Contemporary ‘innovative’ poetry spurs a continual, and perhaps futile, debate surrounding its definition. Often it is conceived as the ‘other’, defined against ‘mainstream’ poetry – a term usually associated, in Britain at least, with poetry which is more commercially successful, more often the choice of national poetry prizes, and more often covered in the review sections of the national papers. However, the term ‘mainstream’ is problematic and unhelpful; not only does it deny those poetries which follow more traditional tendencies their richness in subcategories and differentiations, but also ignores the fact that no poetry today is ‘mainstream’, that all poetry is to some extent marginalised. Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore the arguments that mainstream or ‘popular’ poetry is a competitive world of ‘agenda-based and cliché-ridden rallying positions,’ (O’Sullivan, 1996, 9), and that, in the words of the long-established Language poet Adrian Clarke:

. . . if [“mainstream”] applies to most of what is received enthusiastically in the Guardian Saturday Review and the like, then the mainstream is so dire as poetry and so naïve and ignorant in its preconceptions that if there is no “binary opposition” between it and our output I see little point in persevering.  (Clarke, 2008)

Accusations of agenda-based competitiveness are given legs in light of the recent media furore over the race for Oxford Professorship of poetry, when Derek Walcott withdrew his candidacy as a result a so-called ‘smear campaign’ against him. Ruth Padel, who won the professorship, resigned from the post amid accusations of involvement in the smear campaign. ‘How dirty tricks dossier forced Oxford’s female poetry professor to quit’, ran one headline in the Independent (24^th May 2009). Whether mainstream poetry is as ‘naïve and ignorant’ as Clarke implies is another debate, but evidentially, the poetry in the publishing spotlight has historically tended to be poetry rooted in an arguably narrow set of poetic traditions:

views of “modern poetry” established by mid-century have largely continued to the present and, as they entered the standard anthologies and literary histories, have tended to play down the more revolutionary aspects of modernism in favour of the recognition of a handful of “major” figures, many of whom are celebrated precisely for their antiexperimental and antirevolutionary positions or for their adherence to a relatively conventional view of poetic traditions and formal possibilities. (Rothenberg, Joris, 1995, 11)

The names of specific publishing houses that might be guilty of promoting and packaging a poetry of such limited aesthetic principles according to a capitalist agenda are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Criticism in the vein of the above comments is directed at an entire system – one where a narrow-minded adherence to conventions has resulted in  ‘standard anthologies’, in ‘naïve and ignorant’ poetry, and, in the words of poet and publisher Jane Sprague, in ‘texts which publishers can bank on to sell’ (Sprague, forum on Small Press Publishing, 2006) . And if the Nation’s Favourite Poems series and the bestselling collections of, for example, Pam Ayres and Carol Ann Duffy are examples of this excessively conventional literary system, then their publishers, BBC Books, Picador, and Random House are all at least partly to blame for their role in perpetuating such agendas.

A defining feature of this more traditional school of poetics has been put forward by the poet Ron Silliman, well-known among avant-garde poetry communities not only for his experiments in Language writing [1] but for his widely-read blog. Silliman proposes the term ‘The School of Quietude’, which, ‘as I’ve noted before, is simply a placeholder for that other poetry tradition which tries so very hard to be the unmarked case. I won’t call it Mainstream, because it is not.’ (Silliman, 2009). Silliman argues that The School of Quietude, comprised of more traditional and formalist modes of poetry, is consistently recognisable through its refusal to name itself. Secondly, he argues that this is a characteristic which is detrimental to more formal schools of poetry since it discourages any rigorous critical analysis of their traditions, roots, and praxes. Finally, he argues that the denial of self-identification is a power move: ‘it remains foggy precisely because it refuses to name itself. That refusal is a power move – nothing more, nothing less.(You might say that my naming it is likewise, and you would be right).’ Silliman does not clarify what he means by the term ‘power move’, but it would not be unreasonable – given his affiliation with specifically anti-conventional Language poets – to build upon these comments to suggest that more formal poetries, by refusing to explore their own territories, simultaneously marginalise (post)modernist and avant-garde schools of poetry as ‘oddities’, or even deny the existence of these approaches.

If these considerations help us understand perceptions of what contemporary innovative poetry is not, it is another task to define what it is in order to examine the ways in which this particular literature’s nature affects the way it is published. The term ‘avant-garde’, literally meaning ‘advance guard’ (which refers to the vanguard of an army) is often used to describe experimental or innovative poetry. However, perhaps as a result of the term’s association with modernism – as distinct from postmodernism – and with earlier poets of the 1920s and 30s such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, many contemporary poets are reluctant to use ‘avant-garde’ in reference to their own work. It may also be that, since what used to be deliberately transgressive ‘avant-garde’ poetry is now accepted and encouraged by academic and funding institutions, some writers need to situate themselves as working past that realisation. Certainly, the argument that linguistically innovative or experimental poetry is becoming a product of the academy is well-known. Poet and publisher Ken Edwards explains this concern in its simplest but most fundamental terms:

It’s encouraging that there are live reading scenes, such as Openned in London, where younger poets can experiment and fall flat on their faces and learn and get better. But I worry about what happens to a young poet who doesn’t take the teaching path – will they become divorced from the action? Will we ever again see a major poet whose day job is in the Post Office or the railways, as Lee Harwood’s was? And if they do go into higher education teaching, will their particular innovations get buried there? (Edwards, 2009)

A poetry community that is ‘avant-garde’ – to use what now seems an anachronistic term or even a misnomer – has at the heart of its existence a dialogue about the conventions of writing and the politics of language, and the literary output of such a community usually emerges in contrast to the dominant conventions of the social and literary mainstream. But dominant conventions are not the only conventions to carry authority, and rejecting the authority of particular literary- or socio-historical conventions does not set a poetry community outside of the boundaries of conventionality.[2] The risk here is that innovative poetry will cease to be innovative and become an analysed, historicised, theorised subject rather than existing for its own sake and for the sake of a poetry community. The ultimate risk is that the art will disappear into the academy.

Silliman’s moves to provide labels in poetry do not stop at delineating types of traditional, ‘anti-modernist’ writing from types of avant-garde or linguistically innovative writing. More controversially, he uses labels both to categorise and engage with linguistically innovative poetic theory and poetry. Recently, the most definitive and hotly-debated term to emerge from Silliman’s blog into wider (often online) discussions on poetry and poetic theory is the label ‘post-avant’. Silliman uses the term to corral a wide variety of innovative poetic approaches taken by groups of individuals that have grown out of, separated from, or simply occurred at a later point in time in relation to avant-garde poetries. In his blog Silliman emphasises the post-avant’s diversity of practices and synchronic poetic approach, before explaining, ‘with the arrival of the New American poetries of the 1950s (and with it the common usage of the phrase “the Pound-Williams tradition”) the shift from avant to post-avant was complete.’ (Silliman, 2009). One example of the ‘post-avant’, according to Silliman, is conceptual poetics – a movement concerned principally with unhinging language from its referentiality, which can arguably be traced back to the avant-garde, modernist 1930s writings of Gertrude Stein:

I would characterise conceptual poetics as just one mode of post avant, which I see as a much broader, more inclusive category. I would add – just for starters – flarf, slow poetics, language, vispo, the new narrative, the jazz poetics of Umbra, all the generations of the New York School, ditto the multiple versions of Beat poetics, the new minimalism (Joseph Massey, Graham Foust, etc.), the Canadian sound/performance poetics of the 1980s, Actualism, the women’s writing movement that grew up around Judy Grahn and other separatists of the 1970s as well as the women’s writing movement that grew up around the journal HOW(ever) plus any lingering manifestations of Black Mountain and New Western / Zen Cowboy poetics as other discernible types of post-avant poetics. (Silliman, 2009)

What Silliman’s labels actually signify calls for protracted discussion, but to provide some specifics, these diverse types of ‘post-avant’ poetics may or may not include: disrupted syntax, linguistic borrowings, heteroglossia, discontinuous texts, types of spatial arrangement, subversion of lyric, eschewal of linearity in favour of disjunctive forms and/or content. For the purposes of this study, it seems reasonable to begin with the premise that innovative poetry – as it shall usually be termed from now on – is any poetry that diverges from or challenges conventional poetic aesthetics and praxes, and that as a category, comprises a multitude of poetic techniques and dialogues.

But many innovative poets are innovative in different ways and for different reasons; many do not feel at all aligned with each other. Many object to Silliman’s application of the term ‘post-avant’, and his grouping of the categorisations above into a general ‘post-avant’ mode is certainly problematic: the act of categorising, in this instance, is at odds with the synchronic nature of much of the work itself. Most ostensibly, his assertion that poets began to think of themselves as post-avant when they realised that ‘avant-gardism is a fundamentally synchronic move within the arts and tradition is fundamentally diachronic, rendering “avant-garde tradition” an oxymoron of practice’ (Silliman, 2008), is flimsy if not self-contradicting. The employment of the term ‘post-avant’ and the placing of various groupings under it is, for Silliman, a means of conceptualising a constellation of synchronic practices. But the moniker, which signals the obsolescence of the avant-garde, implies a diachronic order, particularly in its use of the prefix, ‘post-’. Furthermore, as the poet and critic Christian Bok has argued in the Poetry Foundation blog, the radical newness that the term implies has not yet arrived:

The overuse of the prefix “post-” in a lot of postmodern commentary never actually indicates the foreclosure of a particular, historical paradigm, so much as the prefix indicates our impatience that such a persistent, conceptual heritage has not yet been transcended—and thus we preemptively do so, long before we have yet constructed a much more innovative radicalism to replace it. (Bok, 2008)

In this case, ‘post-avant’ cannot function to signify any more than ‘avant-garde’ (minus the suffix ‘tradition’) already does.

Despite this ambiguous and contradictory term, Silliman’s list is still useful: while highlighting the extensive variety of experimental or innovative poetics, it also emphasises an historically movement-centred poetics. The poet Reginald Shepherd was prepared to propose a tentative definition of the ‘post-avant’, and his re-negotiation of the term allows for a more flexible application, as well as providing a more accurate description of contemporary poetic thinking which is useful when considering how publishing set-ups may have changed in accordance with this:

‘Post-avant’ (as in, ‘post-avant-garde’ – insider groups love shorthand) poets can be described as writers who, at their best, have imbibed the lessons of the modernists and their successors in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poets [ . . . ] without feeling the need (as so many other poetic formations have) to pledge allegiance to a particular group identity (the poetry world is full of fence-building and turf wars) or a particular mode of proceeding artistically [ . . .] These poets don’t form a movement, let alone a school, but something more like a set of tendencies. . . (Shepherd, 2008)

As is clear from the ‘mimeo revolution’ of the 1950s and 1960s, publishing operations can form part of poetic movements, and when this happens the publishing process is often influenced by poetic aesthetics. But in the case where poets no longer feel such a need to ‘pledge alliegance’ to a particular group, how is the organisation of publishing operations affected? And what do the individual poets that make up a poetry press’s list, or the back issues of a magazine publication, then have in common? An overview of the various types of publishers producing and distributing innovative poetry, with brief descriptions of the better-known presses, can help to answer these questions and draw up a picture of the publishing landscape. The next section looks at a representative selection of poetry book and magazine presses based in the UK, along with a selection of international online publications that are, arguably, equally influential within the innovative poetry community in this country.

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The Poetry Library at Southbank Centre in London is the major UK library for modern and contemporary poetry. It is funded by Arts Council England and stocks every poetry title published in the UK since 1912, making it a comprehensive site from which to glean an overview of the structure of the current UK marketplace for poetry. The brief guidance notes on book publishers, provided by the poetry library for poets looking to publish their work, categorises poetry book publishers into three groups: major publishers, small presses which publish less than 6 full-length books per year, and e-book publishers. While the list of e-book publishers is limited to five (of which only one, Shearsman, publishes innovative poetry), the division made between major publishers and small presses is interesting. The website states that its list of publishers is not intended to be exhaustive; but it shows that Salt Publishing Ltd., placed in the list of major publishers, is today comparable to some other more longstanding poetry publishers, who, while relatively small in economic terms when placed in the larger context of literary publishing (which itself constitutes only a small portion of the publishing industry), are well-known in the world of poetry. Media coverage indicates that Salt is in fact usually seen as an ‘up-and-coming’ publisher – approaching the ranks of Carcanet and Faber & Faber, it is already the UK’s largest independent poetry press, and ‘the home of poets including the rising UK star Luke Kennard and award-winning Australian poet John Tranter’ (Guardian, 20^th June 2009).

Of all the major publishers’ lists, it is Shearsman’s that is most aligned with that of Salt’s in terms of the presence of linguistically innovative poets. Several poets, including Andrew Duncan, Robert Sheppard, and David Chaloner, have publications from both presses. But Shearsman’s classification as a major publisher applies solely in terms of the number of titles published – Shearsman makes only a small profit and is managed completely by its director, Tony Frazer.

Carcanet’s list also includes some linguistically innovative or avant-garde poets. As well as publishing John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Tom Raworth – all by now ‘establishment figures’ of innovative poetry – Carcanet is the distributor of some unusual audio CDs commissioned by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck College, including recordings of the poetry of Iain Sinclair, Jerome Rothenberg, and Robert Creeley. Carcanet might also be seen as an ‘alternative’ or even subversive press for its anti-commercial stance. Its website underlines an aversion to the ‘demons’ profit and political imperatives rather dramatically:

In an age teased by post-Modern relativism and post-millennial uncertainty, where literary value sometimes plays second fiddle to the demon profit and that other demon of ephemeral political imperatives, Carcanet takes its bearing from Modernism. It bases its activities on the best practice of the last century, during which great lists were forged – some of which did not survive as independents into the changing twenty-first century. (Carcanet website, 2009)

But this statement also reveals a slightly pessimistic attitude to contemporary poetry publishing: while it associates ‘post-modern relativism’ with the ‘demons’ of profit and political imperatives (as if these were something new), it also romanticises the twentieth century as a time when ‘great lists were forged’ – with the overall implication that this is no longer possible, and the assumption also that ‘great lists’, rather than a more varied multiplicity of publishing outlets, should be desired. It is very likely that poets such as Ashbery and Raworth would disagree with this view. Moreover, it is clear that poets such as Ashbery and Raworth appear on the Carcanet list because they are so well-established and distinguished today, and in this way Carcanet is very different from Salt, whose list includes many first collections of poetry.

In the main, new, innovative poetry and poetic theory is to be found in the publications of smaller presses – many of whom also continue to publish work by poets who have long associations with avant-garde poetry movements and pioneering writing techniques. These publications include books, chapbooks, pamphlets, print and online magazines and academic journals, as well as downloadable PDFs and ebooks. Two well-known UK presses in the British and American innovative poetry communities are Reality Street and Barque Press. Reality Street was formed through the amalgamation of two existing presses run by poets Ken Edwards and Wendy Mulford. This happened when:

The two presses recognised a common interest in publishing the poetry of what Ken termed the ‘parallel tradition’: its various formations in the UK being the British Poetry Revival (Eric Mottram’s term), the Cambridge diaspora, and what has sometimes been called ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry – all overlapping categories. (‘About Us’, Reality Street, 2009)

Reality Street publishes only four books per year. However, the press occupies an important position in the (transatlantic) innovative poetry community because it publishes specifically for it. As well as publishing the aforementioned poets Robert Sheppard and Maggie O’Sullivan, Reality Street also publishes London-based poets such as Peter Jaeger and Redell Olsen, who teach Creative Writing at Roehampton University and the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway University respectively. Most of Reality Street’s authors are recognisable names within this community; most are UK-based (the press itself being based in Sussex), but others are US-based writers with a common interest in Language Writing and related North American fields. It is notable that a high proportion of Reality Street’s authors teach within academic settings: Fanny Howe at the University of California, Jeff Hilson at the University of Roehampton, Denise Riley at the University of East Anglia, to name a few.

Barque Press was founded in 1995 by poets Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady, both well-known for their own poetry. Originally based in Cambridge, Barque Press moved to London when Sutherland and Brady moved to lecturing positions in London and Brighton. The press has published over 40 chapbooks (including one by Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt) and six perfect bound books, three of which were produced with grant aid from Arts Council England. Barque is known for its ‘anti-commercial ethos’ (Bonney, 2009) and exhibits a mixture of leftist politics and playful irreverence in its publishing practice. Barque’s anthology 100 Days, for example, is an anthology of responses in poetry, prose, photographs and drawings to the Bush administration, and forms a dialogue of critical dissent from right-wing politics. The anthology includes pieces from a long list of innovative poets, and is itself a good example of a contemporary global community of poets. Barque also takes a blunt stance on submissions:

If you ARE interested in submitting your poems to a press or a magazine for review, can we also suggest that you familiarise yourself with the kind of work that press or magazine usually publishes, and only submit to those whose aesthetic principles, scope, interests, etc. are shared by your work? This will help those people who, for example, brag that they’ve won the approval of Don Paterson not to waste their hard-earned postage pennies sending poems to us. (Barque, 2008)

Aside from the tongue-in-cheek reference to Don Paterson – who is seen by more experimental poets as ‘playful, but hardly revolutionary’ (Love, 2005) – the guidelines show that, like Reality Street, Barque publishes a fairly specific type of poetry. And their audiences are closely aligned, if not one and the same: two poets, Allen Fisher and John Wilkinson, have published with both presses, and both Barque and Reality Street nearly always appear on lists of alternative poetry publishers such as those appearing on the Openned and Modern Poetry websites. Unlike Reality Street, Barque does not provide a definition of innovative poetry or explain its publishing agenda. Perhaps the act is seen as too unfashionably ‘user-friendly’; perhaps too prescriptive or simply unnecessary. In any case, Reality Street is one of very few presses publishing innovative poetry to offer a short explanation of the nature of this work.

There are a good many small UK presses publishing innovative poetry, and a representative sample might also include Veer Books, Landfill Press, yt communication and Bad Press. Veer Books is a publishing operation that forms part of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck College. The press is run by five poets, only two of whom teach in universities, which can seem surprising given its academic base. Veer Books states simply that it ‘aims to publish a range of unconforming writing in poetry and poetics, including some texts that other publishers might view as experimental’. (‘Veer Books’, CPRC, 2009) Veer’s wording can appear vague and noncommittal, but perhaps, along with Barque, the press is reluctant to categorise the poems and authors of their various publications, which arguably have little in common other than a commitment to innovative writing. Veer’s publication list is further evidence of the compactness of this community; a sample of its authors includes Steve McCaffrey, Adrian Clarke, Maggie O’Sullivan, Alice Notley, and Sean Bonney, whose work is also published variously by Reality Street, Barque Press, Salt Publishing, as well as the (in)famous publishing project, Writers Forum.[3]

Landfill Press, yt communication, and Bad Press are examples of even smaller-scale publishing operations which, while lacking in professional gloss, are far from amateur in their content. Landfill Press, run by the poet and academic Jeremy Noel-Tod, publishes pocket-sized poem sequences in small chapbooks. The press seems to come out of nowhere: its authors, who include Richard Price, Linh Dinh, Daniel Kane and Andrew Zurcher, write out of disparate poetic discourses – Price was a founder of the Scottish Informationist poetry movement, while Dinh’s Vietnamese-American heritage is prevalent in his writing – and no editorial or press information is provided on the website, not even Noel-Tod’s name. However, the lack of information surrounding the chapbooks, rather than seeming unprofessional, actually serves to foreground the literature itself. No advertising, biographical notes on poets, or website ‘hit count’ generators are needed: but a simple preview of the first page of each chapbook is provided. yt communication, the joint project of poets Sean Bonney and Frances Kruk, operates on a similar basis. The press’s website is a ‘Google Blogger’ blog filled with posts about chapbook publications, readings, and Bonney and Kruk’s travels visiting poetry presses and giving readings in North America and Canada. yt communication (which takes its name from an early poem by Kruchenykh, a Russian Futurist) is almost proudly unprofessional, communicating through its blog that:

… we offer you the newly-produced selection of w.rowe’s translations of c.vallejo. now, before you get excited, please note that the edition is coming to be in a nice, slow pace as befits the recent interruption of yt activities by that thing known as ‘life’, one by one the rusty yt machine releases its little hatchings. they will soon be available for order and for immediate consumption at uk poetry readings. (yt communication, 27^th February 2008)

The lax, but curiously personal and anti-establishment tone of the blog is appealing. It provides a few links to other presses and websites, but no list of publications, and no route for actually buying books. While this may be offputting to a general poetry reader, or anyone who is not actually acquainted with Bonney and Kruk, it seems not have such an effect on other poets within the specific community they publish for. The blog posts announcing new publications attract responses from readers asking for prices and means to buy the books – a few of these from other poets who clearly know the publishers personally. Furthermore, it is not inconceivable that the lack of ready availability of yt publications actually makes the chapbooks more desirable, or even collectable. But what is crucial to note here is that yt publications are important books in that they present the work of new poets beginning to make an impact in the community alongside the work of leading innovative poets. One publication, for example, is a translation of the work of Cesar Vallejo – a Peruvian poet considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20^th century – by Will Rowe, a poet-critic and translator whose work has been widely published in the UK and US. In such characteristics as yt communication’s mix of an unashamedly lax editorial style and intellectually challenging poetry, we can again see the juxtaposition of rough production and high-art content that also characterised the American poetry magazines of the mimeo revolution and is epitomised in ‘Fuck You / a magazine of the arts’.

As a final sample of a very small press, Bad Press illustrates an even more playful and irreverent attitude to publishing. The headline of the website, ‘Bad Press: all your poems are belong to us’, is typical of the humour with which the rest of the press’s communications are permeated. The co-ordinators explain, ‘Bad Press is organised by Jow Lindsay, Marianne Morris, and Jonathan Stevenson. We have no fixed publication schedule and no very good record, either. Sorry if we never got back to you or completely ripped you off or whatever’. (home page, Bad Press). This tiny press earns its name in one sense, as it only has two chapbooks actually for sale. But its poets are serious; one of those chapbooks is by Emily Critchley, winner of the Tracey Ryan-John Kinsella poetry prize at the University of Cambridge, is in her third year of a PhD in contemporary American women’s avant-garde poetry there. Whether prizes and PhDs necessarily mean good poetry is of course debatable, but a dedication to poetry is shared by other Bad Press authors, who include Justin Katko, John Wilkinson, and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, all for whom poetry is a main occupation and the basis of an academic career.

It is not surprising that none of these small presses have offices. They are run from the homes of poets, and in the case of Landfill, yt communication and Bad Press, their visibility in a social sphere that extends beyond the publishers’ acquaintances has only come as a result of the internet and web technology making it possible for anyone to set up a website. Despite this, however, a significant degree of insularity has prevailed. In the case of Bad Press, for example, Critchley, Katko, and Wilkinson all teach at Cambridge University, where publishers Jow Lindsay and Marianne Morris also studied. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that the fundamental activity of these types of publishers has changed very little from their predecessors who might have used mimeograph, gestetner machines or photocopiers to produce stapled chapbooks. While the internet makes them visible worldwide, and payment set-ups such as PayPal, which usually take payment in sterling or dollars, make their publications available to a transatlantic readership, these small publishing operations often continue to form the locus of geographically-contained groupings of poets. Moreover, their publications take the form of stapled or rough-hewn chapbooks that are hardly different from the output of the ‘mimeo revolution’. In practical terms, a photocopier and a stapler provide a cheap means of production for such work, although there is no doubt some degree of romantic appeal involved for readers, authors and publishers in this form of chapbook publication. Arguably, the act of producing of a physical book when it would be even more economical to create an e-book of poetry suggests a conventional nod towards a publishing tradition, which, in the context of innovative poetry practices, can seem surprising. Also present is a sentiment that is prevalent across the much wider publishing industry: a preference for the printed book over e-publications.

The importance of such small presses should not be understated though: the work of new (and often, even established) innovative poets usually has no commercial value, and without the existence of these presses would not even find its way to publication. It is also worth noting that many influential poets were published, first, by similar operations.  The work of Tom Raworth, the prolific poet and key figure of the British Poetry Revival now published mainly by Carcanet, first appeared through the very small Goliard Press, run by himself and the poet Barry Hall.

Most magazine publications presenting innovative work, unlike small book presses, are intended for online reading. They also tend to issue from a wider international network. Journals such as the Swiss-based Dusie are published in the form of downloadable PDFs, with an on-screen appearance that resembles a print publication. Dusie makes a point of asking readers to consider the environment before they print a copy, however, most online magazines and journals have no need to do so. They are designed to be presented on the internet, and usually employ some level of creativity in their navigational tools. The UK online magazines Onedit and Past Simple showcase a number of poets (usually between ten and twenty) in each issue, and both are run by extremely small editorial teams – Onedit by Salt author Tim Atkins and his wife Chiaki  Matsubayashi, Past Simple by Marcus Slease and Jim Goar (the latter of whom is soon to be published by Reality Street). Although Onedit and Past Simple appear in online format, both magazines are technologically very simple and their components do not differ greatly from print magazines. Onedit’s headwords and contents page lettering even appears in inky typewriter style reminiscent of the mimeos.

Innovative poetry magazines continue to be published in print, although the move is more and more towards online publication. The poetry journal HOW(ever), for example, was first published by poet Kathleen Frazer in 1983 as a vehicle for experimental feminist poetry. It published 16 issues until, in 1992, it transferred to an online format, simultaneously changing its name to HOW2. Remaining influential print magazines of innovative poetry include Quid, the magazine component of Barque Press, which is produced by Keston Sutherland and is available in both PDF and print format, and Angel Exhaust, known as ‘the alternative British poetry magazine’ (Crawford, 2002, 89), and produced by the poet-critic Andrew Duncan. Presently though, the overwhelming majority of reasonably-sized (that is, larger than an A4 or A5 stapled booklet) printed poetry magazines contain work of a more conventional and antiexperimental poetic aesthetic: Poetry Review, Magma and Stand magazines are all examples.

It is interesting that in a community where poets often describe themselves as avant-garde or post-avant for various reasons (perhaps to indicate a general aesthetic, to signal an attitude towards particular institutions, to identify an artistic heritage or claim affiliation with other writers), their publishers are unlikely to state any such leanings explicitly, even in the ‘About’ pages of websites where comments on publishing agendas usually appear. However, contemporary usage of the term ‘avant-garde’ at best offers a kind of shorthand indication of the type of writing a reader can expect, and also offers a form of advertising, since the (sometimes) fashionable phrase implies a sense of urgency about the values its bearers wish to be associated with. With this considered, it is unsurprising that in a field of poetry where language is often the subject of interrogation and is so specifically used, publishers are disinclined to apply such a label to an entire list of poets.

The issue of ‘labels’ and the politics surrounding it is a relatively unexplored area of discussion, even across the wide range of poetry-related communication on the internet. More general websites, online magazines and projects based around innovative poetry are the sites of much debate on poetry and poetic theory, and in addition they can function as news sources. However, while the news and informal discussion elements of the mimeo publications of Lower East Side New York are obviously influential in these online publications, the way the poetry community presents itself on the internet is in some ways fundamentally different. The Openned poetry project, based in London, consists of a website frequently updated with news of the poetry community, publication announcements, links to other websites and relevant articles, and starter points for online discussions. In these respects, Openned performs the same social functions as the mimeo. But in terms of functionality, it outdoes the mimeo in several ways. Openned improves upon the mimeo’s ‘speedy, cheap reproduction’, since the publication of the website is instant, and with the exception of the editors’ time, costs nothing to maintain. The website itself, as well as providing a forum for discussions on poetry and poetics, also acts as an aggregator of hyperlinks leading to a multitude of individual blogs on poetry, as well as poetry magazines, journals of poetic theory, other poetry projects, and a large number of poetry book publishers. In addition, Openned runs its own very popular reading series in East London, and as if this wasn’t enough, regularly publishes a (free-to-download) online poetry anthology.

Another poetry project to mix an online forum with publications and actual reading events is PennSound. Based at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, PennSound produces new audio recordings and preserves existing audio archives of innovative poetry. The work of PennSound is of much cultural importance. MP3 technology has enabled the digitisation and preservation of sound files that are often at risk of deteriorating if not converted or copied, and the internet has enabled their global distribution. Ranging from ‘great’ poets including William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, to the most contemporary writers such as Rae Armantrout and Amy King, the database collates recordings of poetry readings as well as PoemTalks (recorded audiovisual discussions between poets and academics that focus on a specific poem), and statements of poetics, where authors provide an oral critique of their own work. Of the many online poetry publications now available, PennSound illustrates most effectively how technological advancements can aid understandings of poetry, and particularly those of linguistically innovative writing. A web user can hear a poet reading their work alongside a seminar-like discussion of the same work, and in the case of many featured poets, an author’s self-critique.

The technology available today makes a huge difference in terms of the way content is conveyed within the global innovative poetry community: video recordings of readings, audio readings and discussions, and forums in which it is possible to take part from almost anywhere on the globe can provoke debate and enhance understandings of poetry from different parts of the world. But there is also a marked difference in the professional manner in which so many of these online project-style publications are presented. Where magazines such as The Floating Bear, Umbra, and Fuck You exhibited a carnivalesque – and not to mention, entertaining – rough and ready aesthetic, projects such as Openned and PennSound, with their clear, professional-looking and easy-to-use websites, do not feature the same anti-establishment characteristics. On the contrary, PennSound is part of the University of Pennsylvania, and its website includes responsible information on the parties involved and the pedagogical implications of the project. In a similarly conscientious vein, Openned has recently developed a useful ‘Where to Start’ section to its website, which aims to provide newcomers to contemporary poetics with some guidance on the best online resources.

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[1] Tjanting, Silliman’s seminal work of formally radical express-line writing, has been extremely influential in the Language community and in the many groupings informed by the movement.

[2] Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, pp.218-228, discusses authority and conventionality as historical constructions, and the scope and limitations of poetry in questioning these.

[3] Writers Forum is a small publisher, workshop and writers’ network established by the late Bob Cobbing. It played an integral part in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, when experimental poets created the first British ‘happening’, a resurgence of modernist models that had effectively been written out of official histories of 20th century poetry, and a lively community in London based largely around Writers Forum’s countless pamphlet and book publications. The press is now co-ordinated by poets Lawrence Upton and Adrian Clarke.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Charles. (1992) A Poetics. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Bok, Christian. (2008) Late Past the Post. Article on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. Accessed 12 August 2009.

Bonney, Sean. (2009) Email to Amy De’Ath, July 2009.

Clarke, Adrian. (2008) Blog post on Robert Sheppard’s blog. Accessed 31st July 2009.

Crawford, Robert. (2005) Essay in The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000. Ed. Robert Sheppard. Liverpool University Press.

Edwards, Ken. (2009) Is it Academic? Post on Ken Edward’s Blog. Accessed 29th August 2009.

Love, Tim. (2005) Article on LitRefs. Accessed 31st July 2009.

O’Sullivan, Maggie. (2006) Foreward in Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK. Reality Street: Hastings.

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Joris, Pierre. (1998) Poems for the Millienium. University of California Press.

Shepherd, Reginald. (2009) Who You Callin’ “Post-Avant”? Article on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. Accessed 12 August 2009.

Silliman, Ron. (2009) April 22 2009. Silliman’s Blog. Accessed 31st July 2009.

Sprague, Jane. (2006) Notes from Forum on Small Press Publishing. How2 Journal. Accessed 15th July 2009.