Experiment in Practice and Speculation in Poetics

Like many teachers of creative writing I was a practising writer before I was a pedagogue of the subject, although I was a teacher of English in Further Education for many years. During this time my literary work developed outside of most academic contexts, but within the groupings of poets sometimes called the British Poetry Revival or Linguistically Innovative Poetry. As a critic I had some responsibility for the propagation of the second cumbersome term, and also some responsibility for the polarising of these groups of writers against a mainstream which I dubbed the Movement Orthodoxy. By this I meant not just the kinds of poetic conservatism associated with Philip Larkin, but the default style of British poetry as it had developed into an unexamined and largely unconscious regulatory poetic mode.1 Since beginning to work in higher education as a lecturer in creative writing in 1996, I have always expected the associated ‘poetry wars’ to break out, to experience the equivalent of the hostility from conservative quarters towards writing that is formally innovative that I have experienced as a poet and critic, but beyond the odd distant gunshot, I have heard nothing. A plurality of approaches to teaching writing practice seems available and acceptable and while I am doubtful about claims for a rainbow alliance in contemporary poetry — the notion that there is now a charmingly plural pantheon where an apparently radical poet like Denise Riley is enthroned alongside the more orthodox Andrew Motion with equal status, for example — something like love seems to have broken out in the creative writing world, as writers of very different kinds, from professional writers such as journalists, through to ‘mainstream’ poets traditionally antagonistic to the poetics of an extended modernist tradition have become close colleagues.