Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century
If you publish a book about contemporary poetry people expect you to identify the style distinctive for a decade or a generation - the Sound of Now. Of course, doing that would instantly define all the other poets as being non-central. My thesis is instead that since the cultural mechanism which authorises central styles broke down in the 1990s there are a dozen valid styles and even conformist poets have a great range to choose from. People may be converging all the time but they are convergent on a dozen different patterns. We can hope to recover the history of localised subsets of the total production. These histories will always seem partial.

I do have a feeling about the Now and it is roughly that the problems which wrecked most British poets thirty years ago, the absurd fantasies and inhibitions, have been resolved and that there is a whole world of poets who have just walked out of that conservative and repressed situation. Roughly 86% of the poets I trawled up began publishing after 2000. Legacy positions do not seem relevant, because so many new poets and readers have been arriving that the old landscape has been simply buried under several new ones. My legacy position was shared boredom with the mainstream and its satraps. At one level, that abolishes my stock in trade - the critique which we, collectively, voiced in the 1990s is now accepted. That mainstream has been effectively swept away. (Andrew Dundan)

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Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century
If you publish a book about contemporary poetry people expect you to identify the style distinctive for a decade or a generation - the Sound of Now. Of course, doing that would instantly define all the other poets as being non-central. My thesis is instead that since the cultural mechanism which authorises central styles broke down in the 1990s there are a dozen valid styles and even conformist poets have a great range to choose from. People may be converging all the time but they are convergent on a dozen different patterns. We can hope to recover the history of localised subsets of the total production. These histories will always seem partial.

I do have a feeling about the Now and it is roughly that the problems which wrecked most British poets thirty years ago, the absurd fantasies and inhibitions, have been resolved and that there is a whole world of poets who have just walked out of that conservative and repressed situation. Roughly 86% of the poets I trawled up began publishing after 2000. Legacy positions do not seem relevant, because so many new poets and readers have been arriving that the old landscape has been simply buried under several new ones. My legacy position was shared boredom with the mainstream and its satraps. At one level, that abolishes my stock in trade - the critique which we, collectively, voiced in the 1990s is now accepted. That mainstream has been effectively swept away. (Andrew Dundan)

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Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century

Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century

by Andrew Duncan
Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century

Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen grabs of British Poetry in the 21st century

by Andrew Duncan

Overview

If you publish a book about contemporary poetry people expect you to identify the style distinctive for a decade or a generation - the Sound of Now. Of course, doing that would instantly define all the other poets as being non-central. My thesis is instead that since the cultural mechanism which authorises central styles broke down in the 1990s there are a dozen valid styles and even conformist poets have a great range to choose from. People may be converging all the time but they are convergent on a dozen different patterns. We can hope to recover the history of localised subsets of the total production. These histories will always seem partial.

I do have a feeling about the Now and it is roughly that the problems which wrecked most British poets thirty years ago, the absurd fantasies and inhibitions, have been resolved and that there is a whole world of poets who have just walked out of that conservative and repressed situation. Roughly 86% of the poets I trawled up began publishing after 2000. Legacy positions do not seem relevant, because so many new poets and readers have been arriving that the old landscape has been simply buried under several new ones. My legacy position was shared boredom with the mainstream and its satraps. At one level, that abolishes my stock in trade - the critique which we, collectively, voiced in the 1990s is now accepted. That mainstream has been effectively swept away. (Andrew Dundan)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781848619418
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Publication date: 09/13/2024
Pages: 344
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Andrew Duncan was born in 1956 and brought up in the Midlands. He worked as a labourer in England and Germany after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecoms manufacturer (1978-87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988-91). He has been publishing poetry since his Cambridge days in the late 70s, including Threads of Iron, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures, Savage Survivals and, in 2018, a selected poems titled On the Margins of Great Empires. A new collection, With Feathers on Glass, appeared in 2023. He is one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated a lot of modern German poetry. Over the past sixteen years he has also published a substantial amount of literary criticism: The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (2006, rev. ed. 2016); Origins of the Underground: The Occlusion of British Poetry, 1932-77, Centre and Periphery (2005, rev. ed. 2016), The Council of Heresy (2009), The Long 1950s (2012), A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 (2015), Fulfilling the Silent Rules (2018) and Nothing is being suppressed (2022).
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