Relax, Trekkies. To you, it might conjure up an image of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and crew zipping through space at warp factor 5, but the Next Generation I’m referring to are far more terrestrial. They’re poets! Twenty of them, to be precise. Their mission - to boldly take poetry to far-flung corners of the universe or, failing that, to give readings at festivals and events throughout the country, advertising the merits of contemporary British poetry and hopefully shifting a few units into the bargain. They’re all poets who have published their first individual collections during the past 10 years; 20 of the best new poets working in Britain today. If there can be a poetic equivalent of Granta’s Best Of Young British Novelists, this is it.
This mission has a history. A decade ago, 20 other poets, myself included, were lined up under the banner of the New Generation. Poetry had gone off in a different direction, it was said. We’d had the Movement, we’d had the Group. We’d even had the Martians. Now, a new clutch was ready to hatch, but this time with the sort of glitz, glamour and hyperbole normally reserved for film premieres or party conferences. Poetry, apparently, was about to replace stand-up comedy as the new rock’n’roll. Poetry was Britpop. Poetry was New Labour. Poetry was outselling hardback fiction. Poetry was sexy, and suddenly there we were, the 20 newest, poppiest, wittiest, most saleable and sexiest of them all. Like a tankful of lobsters, we writhed together in the front window of the supernaturally narrow premises of the Poetry Society in Covent Garden for the amusement of the national press. It wasn’t easy. The shy and light-sensitive ones among us recoiled from the flashbulbs. After fleeting handshakes, the hands of bitter rivals and sworn enemies shot back into sleeves like eels into pipes. Even the most verbose and garrulous visibly gagged when asked leading questions by journalists from newspapers not famous for their interest in literature.
If that snap was the album cover, the inner sleeve would have been a photograph taken in an East End warehouse, when for reasons that are now unclear to me several of us were asked to dress up like cartoon cat-burglars before being assaulted with a bucket of water. I have a firm memory of telling the man behind the lens to fuck off, but when delivered from a poet standing in a skin-tight polo-neck, Lycra ski-pants and pop socks, I guess the insult doesn’t carry much weight. I don’t have a lot of advice for the poets of the Next Generation (they’re the competition, for God’s sake), but here’s one tip: when the stuck-for-ideas photographer lifts up the fire extinguisher - duck.
The New Generation was underpinned by literary and philosophical ideas. Allegedly. Under 40 and streetwise, we were all poets who had grown up in a media age, conscious of the need to communicate. We’d lived through Thatcher; we weren’t trying to whip up a revolutionary frenzy, but when big-spending city types were swanking about and mouthing off in the wine bars of Docklands, why should we be content to write small, dusty and innocuous poems for an audience of nobody? Alert to shifts in the language, appalled by elitism, empowered by a free education and not at all embarrassed or apologetic about our lack of literary pedigree, we were a School. We had things to say, we were good at saying them, and we wanted to be heard. That, if I remember rightly, was how the argument ran.
The Next Generation promotion doesn’t make such claims about its delegates. As I understand things, it’s more of a celebration. It’s saying there are loads of good poets out there, here is a selection, why don’t you try their books. It will not be without its critics. Detractors have already whispered that several of the current crop are, in fact, clones; that the “Pod Poets” of the New Generation have spawned their diminutive replicas in the shape of the Next Generation. And the Next Gens can expect a rough ride from the postmodernist hardliners and avant garde-ists ready to sneer at any poet naive enough to use a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a full stop at the end. (Tip number two: buy a stab-proof vest and make sure it covers your back.)
True, there’s no evidence of a radical shift in style, but there is evolution. As performers of their work, for example, this lot are more polished than we were. And in print as well, they’ve taken up the challenge that has faced just about every generation of poets since Chaucer - that of keeping poetry relevant, appreciated and alive. Within the Next Generation are poets who don’t scoff at the common reader, who don’t ignore or patronise the public, and who are able to practise their art without dumbing down or squandering poetry’s aptitude for tackling complex subjects in challenging ways. In reading the work of Paul Farley, Gwyneth Lewis, Maurice Riordan or Jane Draycott, I’m conscious of poets who are full of intellectual integrity but don’t want to see their art form reduced to a private language spoken only by ... well, poets. Some of the poets here have learned their trade and often earn their living within the creative writing departments of academic institutions, but their ambitions and their audience extend beyond those sites. They want to be in the thick of it. They want contact with the wider world, the world they observe and so brilliantly describe, and I applaud them for it.
As with every list, there will be the usual discussions about who’s on it and who ain’t. And the process by which this list of names was arrived at will be questioned - who has the right to make these kind of decisions? There were seven judges. Three poets (the chair, Andrew Motion, Bernardine Evaristo and myself), one novelist (AL Kennedy, who I suspect also writes poems) and three civilians. I sat between the softly spoken and thoughtful Colin Greenwood of Radiohead (Colin, where are those bootlegs you were going to send me?) and the virtual, telephone-voting James Naughtie of Radio 4’s Today programme. But the most welcome civilian of all was Marie Robertson, a member of the Poetry Book Society and its most valuable customer. A genuine poetry reader who doesn’t write the stuff - an almost legendary, mythical species, if reports of poetry as a participation-only activity are to be believed. Fellow versifiers, if you ever want to thank the person who bought your book, I have her address.
As for the outcome, like all committee work, no one member will ever be completely satisfied. Obviously, my taste is flawless (“I’ve got a layman’s ear. If it sounds rubbish to me, it’s rubbish” - Mark E Smith), but there were at least two poets who to my mind should have been on the list, and I couldn’t crowbar them in no matter how much I levered. In the end, I’m consoled by the idea that the list is representative rather than definitive. I hope that the several important and well-established writers who didn’t make it won’t begrudge the inclusion of relative newcomers such as Jacob Polley, Leontia Flynn or Catherine Smith, who’ll benefit enormously from the coverage. I hope I won’t need to have a police constable stationed outside my door for the foreseeable future or to be on the lookout for suspiciously squidgy Jiffy bags coming through the letterbox.
All debate took place in camera, but one conversation I don’t mind leaking concerned the lack of black and Asian poets to choose from. At the beginning of the 21st century, how can this be the case? That question has to be put to the editors of poetry lists, because I can’t believe that such writers aren’t submitting manuscripts to established poetry publishers. Editors need to recalibrate. They need to widen their aesthetic tastes. By the time it gets to our bit - the reading and judging of a shedload of books by predominantly white poets - it’s too late.
I hope the Next Generation are up for it. They’ll grumble cynically and get all self-conscious. Poets do that. We certainly did. But I suspect there’ll be a certain amount of private excitement. In my mind’s eye, I keep imagining the moment when they were given the news, 20 poetic Veruca Salts and Augustus Gloops tearing open their Wonka Bars and waving their golden tickets in the air. Poets of the Next Generation, don’t let us down. The gates of the Chocolate Factory are wide open and waiting for you
Poets: the Next Generation
Tobias Hill, born in 1970, has published three books of poetry - Year Of The Dog (1995), Midnight In The City Of Clocks (1996) and Zoo (1998) - as well as a collection of short stories and three novels. Zoo won a Poetry Book Society special commendation.
He dislikes the notion of poetry as the new rock ‘n’ roll, though concedes there are parallels. ‘I think of poetry as the cutting edge of language, the point of keenest change. Very few other art forms change to reflect their time and place as poetry does. The poem and the rock song have in common this reflectiveness of their time.’
Hill’s favourite word is ‘dog’. While Latin has its own uses (‘“Canine” is a beautiful word, fit for a medieval greyhound in a tapestry’), Hill likes ‘the spareness of the Anglo-Saxon in English ‘.
Catherine Smith was born in 1962, and describes her work as ‘exploring the ordinary in the odd, and the odd in the ordinary’. She has published two books of poetry, The New Bride (2001) and The Butcher’s Hands (2003), and wrote her first poem aged seven: ‘My teacher sent it to Teachers’ World magazine. It opened with the line “A hundred thousand diamonds ...”’
As well as teaching creative writing at Sussex University and running poetry workshops for children, Smith says the best thing about being a poet is the constant stimulation of the imagination. ‘It’s a great excuse to stare at people on buses and in pubs.’
Her favourite poets include WB Yeats, Norman MacCaig, Liz Lochhead, Mandy Coe and Carole Satyamurti. Her favourite word is ‘hemp’.
Jean Sprackland‘s first collection, - Tattoos For Mothers Day (1997), was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize, while her second, Hard Water (2003), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book awards 2004.
When asked what she does, Sprackland is rarely forthcoming: ‘I try to pretend I didn’t hear the question, or I’m so evasive people probably think I’m a tax inspector or a traffic warden. For a long time, many of my friends didn’t know my secret, but the Whitbread shortlisting got into the papers and my cover was blown. I met one of my neighbours coming out of Kwik Save, and she said, ‘Ooh, you’ll be too posh to talk to us now.’
Sprackland was born in 1962 and lives on Merseyside.
Amanda Dalton was 10 when she wrote and illustrated her first collection in an exercise book. She’s still got it somewhere. ‘I also wrote song lyrics and composed the music to go with them. My masterworks of the time were Wake Up Wake Up, That House Is Flooded (quite a dramatic piece) and The Royal Show, a touching poem about cattle, horses and sheep, and the politics of keeping and displaying farm animals.’
These days, Dalton,who was born in 1957, combines writing poetry - How To Disappear (1999) was her first collection - with her work at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where she is education director. ‘The idea of poetry seems to impress, but also slightly scares people. I don’t think poets have a duty to write “easy” poems, but I do think poems are about communicating, so it’s a shame that so many people seem scared of poetry and that that translates into not reading or buying it.’
Matthew Francis, who was born in 1956, says it’s taken him a long time to be up-and-coming. ‘I’m not one of the more fashionable names on the list, and can think of several more successful poets who’ve been left out. That’s for the pundits to argue about. For me, this is a fantastic opportunity. It’ll be a chance to reach a new audience.’
Francis, whose publications include Blizzard (1996) and Dragons (2001), often gets out of bed in the middle of the night to write. He says the best thing about being a poet is ‘the feeling that you can write as much or as little as you like, that your only responsibility is to what you want to say’. Among his favourite words are ‘curdle’ and anything with a double z in it.
Pascale Petit, who was a sculptor before becoming a poet, describes her work as ‘fierce, highly charged, intense, rich, magical and exotic’. Her most recent book, The Zoo Father (2001), ‘uses Amazonian imagery to transmute an abusive father into art’.
Born in Paris in 1953, she wrote her first poem at 15 and says the best thing about being a poet is ‘being able to remake the world’. As to whether, as Thomas Babington MacAulay argued, ‘Perhaps no person can be a poet or can even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind’, Petit says, ‘It feels healthy, when I’m writing, to do some Rimbaudesque disordering of the senses, to get into a trance. That’s not mad, that’s being super-sane in an insane world. Being creative is tapping into the life-force.’
Petit thinks British poetry is ‘too polite and genteel’ and considers Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, CK Williams and Ciaran Carson among her favourite contemporary poets.
Leontia Flynn is ‘terrified’ at being tipped as one of the Next Generation. ‘Then, I forget for a little ... I’m not sure what I’ll do now, though I never really am.’ Flynn wrote her first poem when she was eight or nine (‘My mother still has it, I think’) and has just got her PhD (‘Literally, more or less - I’ve had it a week’). It was on the strength of These Days, her only publication, that she was included in the 20.
Born in 1974, Flynn says her favourite poets include Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bishop, Medbh McGuckian and Philip Larkin (‘Sorry, can’t help it, and Idotry’). ‘More usually, there’ll be a particular poem that I just read over and over again. Shantung, by Denise Riley, is one, but there are too many to mention.’
Flynn suspects that poets are rather less rock ‘n’ roll than people give them credit for. ‘I’m pretty rock ‘n’ roll though.’
Sophie Hannah, who was born in 1971, says the best thing about being a poet is ‘being able to get a relatively civilised revenge on anyone who treats you really nastily - and plenty of people do! - by writing something cutting about them that you will still like long after you’ve forgotten about the horrible person’. She has published four collections, the latest being First Of The Last Chances (2003), and three novels. Hannah lives in West Yorkshire and says poets are like everyone else: ‘Some are into cornflakes, others are into cocaine.’ She includes Wendy Cope, George Herbert, Edna St Vincent Millay and Robert Frost among her favourites.
Gwyneth Lewis says ‘a certain amount of neuroses and being offbeat seems to be part of the job description for being a poet. I’ve written a whole book about depression, from which I suffer, though I’m not a down sort of person. A major lesson I learned was that alcohol doesn’t help you write; if it did, half the drunks in the world would be great poets, and they’re not. Being Welsh, the figure of Dylan Thomas looms large, but he didn’t write when he was drunk. Poets, I’d say, have much more of an affinity for the gutter than for the drawing room. These days, though, I stick to tea.’
Lewis was born in 1959 and her work includes Keeping Mum (2003), Zero Gravity (1998) and Parables & Faxes (1995). She writes in English and in Welsh.
Owen Sheers chooses not to describe his work in a sentence or two. ‘Trust the poem, not the poet,’ he maintains. Born in Fiji in 1974, he was brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales, and has been an assistant producer on The Big Breakfast and a presenter for BBC Wales. The Blue Book (2000), Sheers’ first collection of poetry, was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year and is now in its fifth imprint. When people ask him what he does, he usually says he’s a writer. ‘I only feel like a poet when I’m actually writing a poem.’ Sheers includes ‘all three Thomases - Edward, Dylan and RS’ - among his favourite poets. He also knows a rhyme for ‘orange’: ‘Blorenge: the name of a hill that overlooks Abergavenny.’
Patience Agbabi describes her work as ‘performance meets form: page meets stage. It’s about transformation, the body, love, sex and death.’ She has published two collections, RAW (1995) and Transformatrix (2000), and a third is in the offing. She has performed her work all over the world, on Channel 4, and in a north London tattoo and piercing studio, where she was doing a poetry placement. Agbabi says poets are more rock ‘n’ roll than they’re given credit for: ‘Add sex and drugs and you get a clearer picture. The public may not be slashing cinema seats at their favourite poetry film, but [playwright] Joelle Taylor has one of my poems tattooed on her arm.’
Born in 1965, her favourite poets include Chaucer, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. Her favourite word is ‘onomatopoeia’: ‘Great aloud, hell to spell.’
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published two highly acclaimed collections of poetry - The Boy From The Chemist Is Here To See You (1998) won a Forward prize and the Somerset Maugham award; The Ice Age received the 2002 Whitbread poetry award. A former Sunday Times young writer of the year, he works as a teacher and broadcaster. He lives in Lancashire.
Nick Drake, born in 1961, says the worst thing about being a poet is ‘doing readings at posh home counties schools to 11-year-olds slowly chewing gum with that “Oh yeah?” look on their faces’. His own personal poetic nadir was being in such a situation and, ‘as I droned my way down and down into a hole in the ground, my mobile went off in the middle of it. And I answered it.’
Drake’s first collection, The Man In The White Suit, won plaudits and accolades, and he is currently working on a new collection of poems provisionally titled On Not Being Nick Drake. ‘The number of times I’ve been mistaken for the wonderful, late lamented singer-songwriter ...’
Robert Graves is, he thinks, the most underestimated poet of the 20th century; his favourite contemporary poet is Dave Stagg. ‘Unaccountably, he is so far largely unpublished, which is a terrible injustice, because his work is so exceptional.’
Once, Drake went to Elton John’s house in Nice for dinner.
Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle in 1975, where he still lives and works. His first book, The Brink (2003), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and he won the Arts Council of England/BBC Radio 4 First Lines competition. He has also co-written a short film, Flickerman And The Ivory-Skinned Woman, the story of an agoraphobic, an unusual bargain, an exotic plant and Super-8 film. Polley says he’s very keen that people read his poems: ‘They’re not that long ...’
Henry Shukman hopes his work will be enjoyed ‘by readers who like Hardy and Frost more than Eliot and Pound; Frank O’Hara more than John Ashbery.’ Born in 1962, he wrote his first poem when he was 13,’while watching night fall from my bedroom window when I should have been doing my homework’. His publications include In Doctor No’s Garden (2002), Darien Dogs (2004), a short novel and four stories, and he has lived in America, Colombia and Trinidad. When he tells people what he does, ‘Generally, a cloud passes over the face. Just occasionally there’s a twinkle in the eye.’
As for being tipped as one of the Next Big Things, Shukman is philosophical: ‘A sprig of bay every 50 years, as Dryden said - let’s hope this net did catch the big one.’ He lives in Oxford.
Jane Draycott says that, as a writer you live with a kind of supersensitive microphone running in your inner ear all the time.’ The more you listen to the music of phrases in your head, the more you hear it everywhere around you - not just the spoken word, but in everything, even so-called silence. The world is simply a more musical place to me since I started writing. The other aspect I relish is that with no cash in your bank account, you can sit at the kitchen table and travel. As Michael Donaghy said so memorably, “I’m in it for the discovery”.’
Draycott’s publications include No Theatre (1996), Prince Rupert’s Drop (1999) and The Night Tree (2004). Born in 1954, she teaches on the creative writing programmes at the universities of Oxford and Reading.
Alice Oswald‘s first collection, The Thing In The Gap-Stone Stile (1996), was met with great acclaim; her second, Dart (2002), won the TS Eliot prize for poetry. Inspired by the River Dart in Devon, and written after Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people who live and work on the river, it was described as having ‘orchestral scope’ and being ‘so sensual, it makes you swoon’. Michael Longley, one of the prize’s judges, said that, ‘Dart is a brilliant hybrid with a palpable coherence and individual signature. Its intermingling of poetry and prose feels natural, rhythmically inevitable. [Oswald ] brings in many voices and yet maintains a personal melody. This is a capacious, ambitious piece of work.’
Jeanette Winterson describes Oswald as ‘making a new kind of poetry ... a Nature poet, a spiritual poet, with the wildness of Hughes or John Clare, or Traherne’. Oswald lives in Devon.
Deryn Rees-Jones, who was born in Liverpool in 1968, read English in Wales before doing doctoral research on women poets at Birkbeck College, London. Her work, including her first collection, The Memory Tray (1994), and Signs Around A Dead Body (1998), has been garlanded with awards and accolades. Quiver, a murder mystery in verse, has just been published. ‘I’m interested in gender, memory and identity - how we “become”. These themes run through all my books.’ Rees-Jones, who wrote her first poem at 18 about the death of her grandmother, is the author of a monograph on the work of Carol Ann Duffy (1999) and teaches at the University of Liverpool. She is co-editor of Contemporary Women’s Poetry (2000).
Maurice Riordan was born in Lisgoold, County Cork, Ireland, in 1953. Educated at University College Cork, where he later taught, and at McMaster University in Canada, he now lives and works in London. Riordan has published two books of poems, A Word From The Loki (1995) and Floods (2000), and co-edited an anthology of poems about science, A Quark For Mister Mark (2001). A Word From The Loki was nominated for the TS Eliot prize, while Floods was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize.
Robin Robertson‘s work has been described as ‘invigorating and changing the nature of the English-language poem with compaction, linguistic play and etymological precision’. From the north-east of Scotland, his first volume of poetry, A Painted Field (1997), won the Forward prize for best first collection, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival prize and the Saltire Society Scottish first book of the year award. Slow Air (2002) was greeted with similar acclaim. This year, he was awarded the EM Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Formerly James Kelman’s editor, as deputy publishing director of Cape, Robertson, now 49, was also responsible for the breakthrough of many of the ‘newwave’ of Scottish writers who assailed the literary scene in the 1990s - the likes of Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner.
Interviews by Gareth McLean
· Selected Next Generation poets will read tomorrow at 11.30am at the Guardian Hay Festival; 0870 9901299 for details. Visit poetrybooks.co.uk for more about the Next Generation poets.
