Contemporary poetry is in trouble. An indication of the depth of the malaise was given by Oxford University Press's attempt to cancel its poetry list at the end of 1998, on the grounds of its insufficient profitability. Another symptom, which will be familiar to those who teach contemporary poetry at university, is the comparatively low take-up of degree-level poetry courses whenever they are optional. The symptoms, then, are obvious enough, but what are the causes? A major one, I believe, is that poetry lacks street-cred, or to be more specific, street-cred. In other words, the experience that is explored in contemporary poetry is too seldom that of a city-dweller. Poetry still has plenty of country-lane-cred and farm-and-meadow-cred, thanks to writers like Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes – poets undoubtedly distinguished in talent, but relatively narrow in range. The latter's career presented us with a procession of animals that went on for over 30 years. His last book, Birthday Letters (1998), won all the available prizes, but the unique circumstances of its publication and the sensational nature of its subject matter mean that poetry in general can draw no comfort from this fact. Unless we can re-associate poetry with the urban experience, we may have to accept its demise or its dearth, if not, just yet, its death. The present essay is part of an ongoing project that attempts to re-establish the connection between poetry and the city, and it focuses on work associated with one particular city that has already featured prominently in the history of contemporary poetry – albeit mostly as a kind of ‘pop’ annex to the mainstream.

Following the ‘Liverpool scene’ of the 1960s, the city's poetry hardly registered nationally as a distinct entity until the late 1990s, when newer poets associated with the city produced a considerable body of work. The variety of this new work contrasts strikingly with what was seen as the tonal homogeneity of the 1960s generation: but I want to argue, first, that the homogeneity of that earlier work is often exaggerated, and that the linguistic register of the earlier generation was often both extremely fluid and shifting within individual poems, and markedly varied from poet to poet. Secondly, I want to suggest that the newer poets, while differing just as much from one another, operate on a larger stage.