Legends of Warring Clans
I
have now put a revised edition of my book (of roughly 1999?) Legends
of Warring Clans, subtitle “the poetry scene in
the nineties” on scribd.com . The first edition was released on a
website, alt.pinko, in 2003. It is mainly a collection of reviews,
written at the time.
Poets
discussed are
Philip Toynbee, Geoffrey
Hill, Isobel
Thrilling, DS Marriott, Simon Smith, Andrew
Lawson, David Rushmer, Nicholas Johnson,
David Greenslade, Tim Atkins, Tim Allen, Andy Brown, Helen Macdonald,
Rob MacKenzie, Norman
Jope, Peter Finch, Tony Lopez, Kelvin Corcoran, Elisabeth Bartlett,
David Barnett, RF Langley, Michael Haslam, Vittoria Vaughan, Peter
Riley, Steve Sneyd, Kerry Sowerby, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Barry
MacSweeney, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher,
Robert Sheppard,
Nic Laight, NS
Macias, Niall Quinn.
Also
discussed are the
anthologies Out
of Everywhere,
Purple and Green,
and Conductors of Chaos.
I
think I did much better
with the time before 1990, so (in this series) from 1960 on. I
didn’t understand the decade as I was
living it, but the book represents me running around the landscape
describing dozens of separate parts of it. At the time, I was editing
a little magazine, reading lots of little magazines, and involved
with new poetry every day. This lifestyle had to come to an end (when
I found a job, indeed), but it was pretty intense for a few years.
There were too many parts for it to resolve into a binding pattern
until years later. Actually, the scene was evolving in several
different directions, and this was the key. The book covers about 30
poets, but the time involved maybe 80 people producing excellent
poetry, so the whole picture is intractably complex. I just feel that
this volume is a step towards understanding.
