‘A whole new audience is about to join the iPod generation, next week, when free downloads of contemporary, strictly “non-mainstream” poetry will be available online’ – was how Brunel University launched the Archive of the Now in November 2006. The archive's director, Andrea Brady, called it ‘a snapshot of the innovative work being done today’ that would ‘bring “the late Modernist tradition” to a wider audience’ and ‘provide access to so-called “difficult poetry”’ where ‘use of language, politics and performance might not fit what is traditionally recognised as poetry’. The press release's brief biography of Brady included the information that she ‘runs the avante [sic] garde Barque Press’ with Keston Sutherland (accessed 8 November 2006). A posting by Brady on the Buffalo POETICS listserv stated that the Archive of the Now ‘focuses on what we can for brevity and controversy's sake call “experimental” or “late modernist” writing’ and ‘will expand to include as many poets working within this tradition as possible’ (accessed 8 November 2006).

Non-mainstream, innovative, late modernist, difficult, avant-garde, experimental – there is a huge range of terms for the type of poetry that is the subject of this book and, as Brady notes, controversy surrounding the use of them. Carrie Etter's introduction to Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (2010) calls ‘avant garde’ and ‘experimental’ ‘exhausted categories’ and demands a reconception of British poetry as a ‘rich array’ and ‘a spectrum holding infinite points of difference’. At the same time, she cannot ignore how ‘in Britain, poetry's cultural capital remains squarely with the Mainstream, or the most commonly written poetries’ (Etter, 2010, 11, 9). ‘Postmodern’ is another term that has been used by both supporters and opponents. Peter Brooker (1991) has applied the term positively to Tom Raworth's poetry, while Don Paterson has attacked the poetry of contemporary British ‘postmoderns’ for ‘monotone angst, an effete and etiolated aestheticism, and […] joyless wordplay’ (Brady, 2004, 396). No wonder John Freeman simply called a selection of his reviews of, inter alia, Thomas A. Clark, Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Chris Torrance The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets (2000).

A press release that refers to ‘strictly “non-mainstream” poetry’ is clearly aiming for a neutral term, even though it cannot avoid internalising its own Other or Others.