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Veronica Forrest-Thomson: ‘Love is put to the…grammatical test’ Veronica Forrest-Thomson: ‘Love is put to the…grammatical test’
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Douglas Oliver: ‘gliding with love-like content’ Douglas Oliver: ‘gliding with love-like content’
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Denise Riley: ‘cooled | to the grace of being common’ Denise Riley: ‘cooled | to the grace of being common’
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John James: ‘radio Babylon’ John James: ‘radio Babylon’
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Select Bibliography Select Bibliography
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37 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Poet
Get accessAndrea Brady is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, where she teaches both early modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), as well as several books of poetry: Mutability (Seagull, 2012), Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (Krupskaya, 2010), Embrace (Object Permanence, 2005), and Vacation of a Lifetime (Salt, 2001). She is Director of the Archive of the Now (http://www.archiveofthenow.org/), an online repository of contemporary poetry, and co-editor of the small press Barque.
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
This essay focuses on how several key late-twentieth-century avant-garde British poets overcame the trope of poetic isolation. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, and John James were working through both a Romantic inheritance that privileged the poetic expression of subjectivity, and developments in post-structuralist theory and neo-liberal politics which made undermined the validity of the authorial persona. Examining the use of ‘we’ and ‘I’ in poems by these authors from the 1970s and 1980s, this essay argues that they each confronted (and in many cases overcame) the difficulty of communicating with the reader through appeals to (personal, erotic) love. The poetic climate in which these key figures operated was one of great pessimism: patriarchy, commodity fetishism, Thatcher’s neo-liberal reforms and the collapse of the Left combined with the marginalization of poetry as a public discourse made the poetry of political resistance seem futile. And yet these poets sought out words ‘cooled to the grace of being common’, in Denise Riley’s phrase. Forging an intimacy with the reader that can compete with the alienation their poems document, these poets used love, prosody, language games, and irony to balance, or even redeem, the degraded sociality that contaminates love in turn.
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