Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer

by Neil Pattison (editor), Reitha Pattison (editor), Luke Roberts (editor)

This book brings together a selection of prose works from the legendary poetry circular The English Intelligencer (1966–68), one of the definitive documents of later twentieth-century British poetry. Its shifting cast of contributors included such major figures in modernist poetry as Andrew Crozier, John James, Barry MacSweeney, J.H. Prynne, and Peter Riley. The correspondence and essays published here for the first time represent the discourse of an extraordinary group of young poets struggling collectively and independently to articulate the terms of a radical poetics.

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

The English Intelligencer was a sheet circulated among thirty to forty writers and readers in the early to mid-60s, three of whom were women; it reacted against the limited ambitions of the Movement in proposing a wider scope of interests as the material that could inform, or be excavated in, current poetry, including the prehistory of Britain and anthropology and sociology of shamanism. J. H. Prynne, always a contributor and correspondent, and editor of one of the later numbers, wanted the circular to forge a collaborative ethic in which a 'fluency of trust' developed between writers, so that the people, in a loosely Maoist sense, figured as the form of an 'insistence'. Briefly and potently this 'community of risk', in Prynne's sense, the project foundered after about four years, yet was influential in introducing Olson, Creeley, Dorn and Black Mountain poetics to Britain, and in shaping the shared early precoccupations of Prynne, Peter Riley, Denise Riley, Tom Pickard, Barry McSweeney and more loosely affiliated 'British Poetry Revival' figures.