Linguistically Innovative Poetry and Small Rooms in London

During the 1990s the clumsy term Linguistically Innovative Poetry began to be used of much of the alternative British work of the era. It encompasses a poetic of increased indeterminacy and discontinuity, the use of techniques of disruption and of creative linkage, though its differences with the creative work of the British Poetry Revival do not constitute an absolute break. However, the increased willingness of emerging poets to operate theoretically, in terms of post-structuralist and other theory, to even expound poetics more coherently, was in marked contrast to an earlier lack of such discourse. Ultimately, the definition of ‘linguistically innovative’ is not to be found in the terms of its name. If anything, it is a term to constellate overlapping practices in the British alternative poetries from the 1980s onwards, which operated under less propitious conditions than its predecessors.

‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry’ had humble origins in the March 1988 issue of the magazine Pages. Using the phrase to specify work ‘for which we haven't yet a satisfactory name’, it was the way poet and critic Gilbert Adair described the kinds of British poetry he believed had been ‘operating since 1977’ in ‘fragmentation and incoherence’. The choice of date is decisive; it marks the Arts Council's takeover of the Poetry Society and the atomizing of the community of British Poetry Revival writers. Adair, possibly looking at it with a London bias and from the perspective of one who had not been a member of the British Poetry Revival, declared that there had been a ‘public invisibility of the poetry’ and ‘ditto of a theorizing discourse’.

Adair's identification of the post-1977 conditions of the poetry include ‘decreasing publishing opportunities; wide gaps in continuations of public … discussions’, and, looking towards the Movement Orthodoxy and the broader literary world, ‘a one-way “dialogue” with oppositions that largely expunge us from more public discussion, … movement in a less visible, less real poetic community’.