"The Best British Poetry 2011"
 

"The Best British Poetry 2011", recently published by Salt, copies the US version conceptually and visually, with nearly 40 pages of notes. It's edited by Roddy Lumsden who's been in Poetry quite a lot of late. He picks solely from magazines (both paper and online - "Shadowtrain", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "Horizon Review", etc), taking 8 poems from Poetry London and 5 each from Iota, Magma and Rialto. Agenda did well too (so Maryann, it might be worth persevering). No poems from the TLS (nothing took his fancy) or LRB (not many UK poets). Having glanced through it I think it gives a fair impression of what's happening in the UK, and may help you decide where to send your poems. Yes, several poems rhyme. I think it's now available in the US at Amazon

Sorry, Tim, but it really saddened me to read that a book entitled "The Best British Poetry 2011" had the caveat in your post:

Yes, several poems rhyme.

The fact that it even needed to be pointed out speaks volumes.
And only several of the poems?

How can it possibly be the best British poetry if I am not in it? I ask you.

Yes, how can it? :confused:

You might suppose that I am simply paranoiac, but though I have been published in America in the last few years and get lots of stuff into Quadrant (good old Les Murray), my successes in the good old Uk have been limited to The Spectator, the TLS and splendid Rory Waterman. And winning competitions of course. But Poetry London, Poetry Review et-bloody-cetera, no chance.

The truth is the Poetry scene here is dominated by Beeboids. I mean soft-left, Guardian-toting liberals who like flabby free verse (why does it go together with flabby politics?).

Anyway, that's what I say, paranoiac right-wing nutter that I am. Why, I even support the Coalition. Brrrrr!

I forgive you for all that, John. You write damned good poetry, doncha know. (Should I insert smiley here? No. You know I'm smiling a friendly smile, doncha now?)

Yes, there aren't that many places in the UK for good rhyming poems, John, the likes of which thee (and me, sometimes) write, apart from The Oldie, Spectator and Literary Review comps.

Plenty of outlets for free verse. "Oh, but rhyming poetry is coming back into fashion" I hear a lot of people say. :rolleyes:

Ah, Jayne, thee and me and Ann and good old Kit Wright, who I met only last week, will ride off into the sunset. There's always the divine Wendy of curse, but she doesn't depend on Poetry Magazines.

FYI, the poems in this antho that use at least fairly regular end-rhyme come from Magma, Poetry London, Envoi, Northwards Now, Warwick Review and PN Review.

Tim, thanks for this good information.

I've done my share of lamenting the dearth of form in this sort of anthology. But I think we benefit from paying attention to the full range of work that gets published and not sounding as though we don't like anything that doesn't mete and rhyme.

If Nick Friedman's formal work can get into PN Review, and AE Stallings appears in Warwick Review, then I should think John and Jayne could get into those places.

I can respect this call for moderation, Maryann, but I find myself strongly disagreeing with you. Our protests at the domination of FV will perhaps be seen by some as merely self-serving, but that should not make us hesitate to protest. Dim anthologies like this one are a insert-a-particularly-foul-swearword-here outrage! I like a lot of FV, but as a staple diet it gets very, very dull. We're not doing FV any favours by tolerating its unjustified predominance.

We've recently seen a fair bit of campaigning for women being fairly represented in the poetry world. Surely it's soon time for us to crawl out from our bunkers and assert the rights of metricists and rhymists!

Duncan

I suspect that barriers to rhyme and meter in some journals are only half the story. Even with metrical poetry, there is an enormous range of styles, and not all of them are welcome everywhere. So a journal that publishes Nick and Alicia will not necessarily be open to John and Jayne. It doesn't necessarily have to do with quality, but with style.

Susan

I applaud what Duncan said.

The worst thing about this book, IMO (but that's without having read it) is its title.
It should have been called, perhaps, "The Best British Poetry 2011 according to Roddy Lumsden".

If I counted correctly, there are 71 contributors; I've come across about half a dozen of the names. Lumsden says "There is an interesting mix of well-known, less-known ones and emerging poets", and almost a quarter of them are under 30, which he thinks is great because it represents "a coming generation which I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry."

Here's a link to the first poem in the anthology, called in her kitchen

Jayne and Duncan, I can understand and sympathize with a desire to argue about the quality of poems chosen for a "best" anthology. I often think that's the purpose of the American BAP--to stir up curiosity and argument, because that probably gets more people to buy the book!

I understand that the objection is to the imbalance, the preponderance of free verse and the paucity of meter and rhyme. But that really wasn't what I was getting at. What I'm talking about is each person's willingness to appreciate more kinds of poems.

Tim is a poet who writes a great deal of free verse (when he isn't writing fiction) and who has contributed quite a bit of critique to the Nonmet board. He's gone out of his way to give us useful information about the state of publishing in the UK. To me it feels a little less than collegial to use this thread as a place to lament the hegemony of free verse, as if none of our colleagues wrote free verse.

But that's enough out of me.

What Maryann said. And Susan.
Quit whining.

Nemo

At least you can dance to delphinium.

But the pleasures of whining cannot be overrated. That's part of what this particular thread is for. So quit whining about Brits whining.

Hmmmm. What happened to the stiff upper lip? Has it suddenly gone slack? ;)

Jokes aside, I'm pretty sure someone put out a book with a title like "The Very Best and Most Beloved British Poetry of 1906." Imagine flipping through that volume today! Quelle rigolade! ;)

Thanks,

Bill

How about 1895.

Edmund Gosse had some thoughts about the situation in 1894.

In his intro Lumsden says "Now let's deal with the B word. We have decided to go with the familiar branding in other countries of such books. ... Someone else would have made a different selection and next year another editor will do so."

I've heard of about half of them, but I don't read (let alone subscribe to) many of these mags. As he says in the intro, younger poets might be more likely to send to mags, especially online ones. There seems to be a more general feeling that the current crop of twentysomethings is better than usual - see my Recent UK poetry anthologies round-up.

I didn't get that poem, even after reading the poet's comments. It comes from Poetry Review, whose editor, Fiona Sampson, extols many traditional virtues in her Poetry Writing: The expert guide book (see the link for quotes). I find it hard to understand how someone who likes (say) Beethoven can also like Bach and Boulez, but Sampson and Lumsden might have correspondingly wide spectra of poetry appreciation.

I think the US poets here should note the online[-submission] mags that are gaining status, and welcome the chance to see what's happening in the UK now beyond the slow-moving world of books. I think budding UK poets should be heartened to know that "More than a third of the poets are yet to publish a collection" (one of the poets was in my local writers group last year!). UK Formalists can note that the door's open, but you won't be in the antho unless you send to the mags. About 10% of what I get published in UK mags is in a Form, though maybe not in mags that Lumsden reads (he sent out messages last year, asking which mags he should read. Maybe he's still open to suggestions). UK poets in general might want to submit/subscribe to more magazines - they're still a good way of getting noticed.

I think it's a very good anthology. There is a fair amount of free verse, as you'd expect given how much of it is around, but little of it is "flabby". I've written a review of it on my blog - http://robmack.blogspot.com/2011/09/...etry-2011.html. the book covers a wide range of styles from the very traditional to the highly experimental and no one could possibly like everything, but it is a fair reflection of what's good in British poetry at the moment.

There's no point in anyone asking why he/she isn't in it. I know many good poets who aren't in it. There are only so many pages possible and it has to cover the full range of styles. I'd recommend people buy a copy and read it before forming judgements.

Also, on the question of not having heard of many of the poets - what would you prefer? An anthology full of the usual boring suspects who often fill such books, or poetry which genuinely interested the anthologist, irrespective of whether it was written by a big name? I'd prefer the latter every time.

I had heard of many of those featured, aalthough I was pleased to see several often-overlooked writers being included.

Oh Nemo,

"Quit whining" is rather a cutting remark to make, unless it's obviously said in jest; this is a 'conversation' here on "General Talk" and if we were all in a room together it wouldn't be very nice to say that to someone's face ;)

Tim has put this thread here for information. He rightly says, "Having glanced through it I think it gives a fair impression of what's happening in the UK".
It's simply that some of us don't happen to like what's happening in the UK very much, that's all!

Maryann,
I do understand what you're getting at. No one is 'knocking' Tim or anyone else for writing free verse!! I'm more than willing to appreciate all kinds of poems. But it's a matter of fact that poems published in the UK are biased towards FV.

One of my favourite poems of all-time is 'Naming of Parts', which doesn't rhyme, but I just think it would be nice if "The best" in all magazines catered for both camps. Why not have separate categories then? It's all POETRY, after all.

Hi Winter,

You make some good points and I wouldn't argue with all of them, though I'm not sure who 'the usual boring suspects' are. How did the 'big names' get to be big? By writing excellent poems.

"The Best British Poetry 2011" is just too big a claim to make, IMO.

"Quit whining" is rather a cutting remark to make, unless it's obviously said in jest; this is a 'conversation' here on "General Talk" and if we were all in a room together it wouldn't be very nice to say that to someone's face.

I would not hesitate to say it to anyone's face. And have on numerous occasions. Boorish American and all that.

Nemo

Well, two good thing to have come out of all this are Andrew Frisardi's two links. Most entertaining and illuminating. Thanks.

Nemo

Did you also say "Quit whining" when people were discussing the ratio of women to men in poetry mags?

Duncan

I believe I said nothing at all in that discussion.
Which is what I should have said in this one.

Were this face-to-face mode you would now see me get up and leave the room.

Nemo

Well, we can protest all we want, Duncan, but if people don't like formal verse,... they don't like it. They will publish/read/buy free verse. But formal verse clearly has a solid foothold in the open market, and that's more than we can demand. The most we can do is to do our thing. The bastards will take it or leave it in the end.

Live happy!

Rick

True, Rick, true.
But how can people not like formal verse at all? Some of it, yes, but although I write in rhyme I would never make such a sweeping statement as "I don't like free verse."

"Live happy!" is good advice - I always do. (It beats being petulant :rolleyes:)

Anyway, the thought has just occurred to me, bringing the talk back to the original premise - i.e. this book - isn't it a bit early to name it like this? There's still a quarter of 2011 left yet!!!

There will be some brilliant poems written in the next three months, I'm sure. ;)

Interesting question. How would people who feel this way answer?

I think they would say something like "So *much* of it is really quite terrible. Imagine if you grew up liking strawberries. Ate them all the time. But then, farming methods changed, so that 95% of strawberries were bland at best, and often even wormy? You'd stop eating strawberries." ;)

It's a reasonable position. But very, very few people hold it. All this stuff about there being a divide between free verse and formalism is an invention in the heads of the formalists. They use it as an excuse, a strawman to blame, a scapegoat to torment and drive out of the village.

But life is tough all over. People who write rhetorical narrative blame other things, people who write symbolist lyrics still others, even the language poets have people they blame when no-one takes their work. It's like a bizarre round robin, a kind of circular firing squad. :eek:

Maybe there is a divide, but if there is, it's not what we think. Maybe it's the chasm between writing well and writing badly. Maybe Auden was right about all this after all... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Stiff upper lip? I cry very easily and anyway I went to the wrong sort of school. I don't think English poetry is remarkable for its stiff upper lip. Larkin and Housman and that's about it. Shakespeare? Keats? Hopkins? Though he's welsh.

In answer to Jayne's question, I think we might look at how one was not allowed to paint representational or figurative paintings in art schools in the '70s. The latter half of the 20th century was marked by reactionary mayhem. But there has been a natural renaissance of form in both arenas (painting and poetry). The abstract and the formal will coexist...optimally within the same frame.

Fear not, citizens!

RM

You're having us on, John. Hopkins was a Londoner and English. He studied theology in Wales (having first had his doubts at Belmont near Hereford not far away) and learnt some Welsh, but that's about it.

Hopkins was a Catholic, which in late Victorian England was synonymous with being an outsider.

Duncan

There are plenty of people writing excellent poems who are not big names. There are also big names who have never written an excellent poem in their lives. That's the way it goes.

Jerome, I always thought the chap was Welsh. Well, there's another Englishman. And I might add Tennyson.

My daughter paints representational paintings. So did Lucian Freud. So does the great David Hockney. And lots of people my daughter has shown me.
So things are much better now. I expect Literature lags behind Art. It always did. Our time will come.

Hi Tim, winter, John et al.

Thank you all for the thoughts about The Best British Poetry 2011 edited by Roddy Lumsden and also about the current British poetry scene. I am leaving for the UK tomorrow for two weeks and will seek out a copy while I am in Blighty. :D

Isn't the title of the book and the timing of its appearance a publisher's marketing decision? Sorry to bring up financial issues here among us artistes/craftsmen/aesthetes/bohemians but the publisher knows a book dated "2011" will probably sell well this year but might not do as well in 2012 when it might appear dated with last year's date on the cover. Silly I know, but. . . .

More correctly, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a convert to Catholicism. Maybe as a writer and a priest he liked being an outsider.

Cheers

Chris http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3553/...f7f5973d_o.gif