The poets included an older generation—Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Tom Raworth, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, the Finnish poet Anselm Hollo, Andrew Crozier, the Canadian poet Lionel Kearns, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair—and a younger generation: Paul Buck, Bill Griffiths, John Hall, John James, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Ken Edwards, Robert Gavin Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard Paul Evans, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, Cris Cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
They included Roy Fisher, Gael Turnbull, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall, Tom Raworth, Michael Horovitz, Eric Mottram, Peter Finch, Edwin Morgan, Jim Burns, Elaine Feinstein, Lee Harwood, and Christopher Logue.
Many of these poets joined Allen Ginsberg and an audience of 7,000 people at the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation on 11 June 1965 to create what has often been claimed as the first British happening.
Thanks in no small part to Cobbing's Writers Forum and its associated writers' workshop, London was a hub for many young poets, including Bill Griffiths, Paula Claire, Allen Fisher, Iain Sinclair, Gilbert Adair, Lawrence Upton, Peter Finch, Ulli Freer, Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke, Clive Fencott, Maggie O'Sullivan, cris cheek, Tony Lopez and Denise Riley.
[6] Griffiths writes a poetry of dazzling surface and deep political commitment that incorporates such matter as his professional knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and his years as a Hells Angel.
Many of these writers also participated enthusiastically in performance poetry events, both individually or in groups like Cobbing's Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle.
Poets who attended there (a number of them also students taught by Mottram) included Gilbert Adair, Peter Barry, Sean Bonney, Hannah Bramness, Clive Bush, Ken Edwards, Bill Griffiths, Robert Gavin Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Will Rowe, and Lawrence Upton.
Specifically, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker were to become important models for Caddel and Simms in their writing about the Northumbrian environment, while John Seed picked up on George Oppen.
[10] This has often been presented as a pivotal event in the British Poetry Revival, bringing together poets who were separated geographically and in terms of poetic influences and encouraging them to support and publish each other's work.
Paul Buck and Glenda George for many years edited Curtains, a magazine instrumental in disseminating contemporary French poetry and philosophical/theoretical writing.
Geraldine Monk's edited collection of reminiscences by various Northern poets (including Jim Burns, Paul Buck, Glenda George, and John Seed, CUSP, mentioned above, provides a rich account of innovative poetry outside the metropolis.
In the 60s and early 70s Peter Finch, an associate of Bob Cobbing, ran the No Walls Poetry readings and the ground breaking inclusive magazine, second aeon.
For some account of this period, see the reminiscences of Chris Torrance and Peter Finch in Geraldine Monk's CUSP: recollections of poetry in transition (Shearsman, 2012).
In Scotland, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard emerged as key individual poets during this time, each interested in, among other forms, sound and visual poetry.
In a similar vein, in 1972-4 John Schofield, then a post-graduate student, organised three annual poetry festivals in various halls at Edinburgh University, called POEM 72, POEM73 and POEM74.
Poets reading their work at the first included Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Tom Buchan, Robert Garioch and Liz Lochhead.
For POEM73, the attendance was over 1300 people, hearing Hugh MacDiarmid, George Macbeth, Adrian Mitchell, Jon Silkin and Iain Crichton Smith.
The final festival, POEM74, included readings by Adrian Henri, Libby Houston, Jeff Nuttall, Rose McGuire, Frances Horovitz, Ruth Fainlight and Sorley Maclean.
Over the next six years, he edited twenty issues that featured most, if not all, of the key Revival poets and carried listings of books and magazines from the wide range of small presses that had sprung up to publish them.
An account of this 'battle' from the other side is provided by James Sutherland Smith, where his comparison of the brief takeover of the Poetry Society to an attempt "by the Militant Tendency to take over the Rotary Club" suggests some of the political and class issues around [14] At around the same time, the Arts Council also set up a top-down inquiry that overturned the result of the Society's elections that had once more brought in a council dominated by those sympathetic to the Poetry Revival.
In the Midlands, Tony Baker's Figs magazine focused more on the Objectivist and Bunting-inspired poetry of the Northumbrian school while introducing a number of new poets.
In 1994 W. N. Herbert and Richard Price co-edited the anthology of Scottish Informationist poetry Contraflow on the SuperHighway (Gairfish and Southfields Press).
Into the 1990s and beyond poets including Johan de Wit, Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson and Piers Hugill have surfaced after direct involvement in the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop.
New writings have arisen from the involvement of cris cheek, Bridgid Mcleer and Alaric Sumner, under the direction of Caroline Bergvall and John Hall through the Performance Writing programme at Dartington College of Arts including Kirsten Lavers, Andy Smith, and Chris Paul; from the involvement of Redell Olsen in the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, including Becky Cremin, Frances Kruk, Ryan Ormond, Sophie Robinson, John Sparrow and Stephen Willey; and through Keith Jebb at University of Bedfordshire's Creative Writing programme, including Alyson Torns and Allison Boast.