Press Release (June 2009)

  Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

  ISSN 1758-2733 (Print)

Subscriptions have opened for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, edited by Robert Sheppard (Edge Hill University) and Scott Thurston (University of Salford). Annual print subscriptions placed before 31 December 2009 will include the first issue (September, 2009) and the two subsequent issues (March and September, 2010). After which each annual subscription will include the two issues published within the calendar year of payment. For further details see http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

The journal will centre on the poetic writings that have appeared in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s under various categorizations: for example avant-garde, underground, linguistically innovative, second-wave Modernist, non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, neo-modernist and experimental, while also including the Cambridge School, the London School, concrete poetry, and performance writing. All of these terms have been variously adopted and contested by anthologies such as Chilen of Albion (1969), A Various Art (1987), The New British Poetry (1988), Floating Capital (1991), Conductors of Chaos (1996), Out of Everywhere (1996), Foil (2000), Anthology of British and Irish Poetry (2001) and Vanishing Points (2004).

The first issues of the journal are set to contain articles by Mandy Bloomfield, Ian Davidson, G.S. Farmer, Matt Ffytche, Christine and David Kennedy, and Alex Latter. On the poetry of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Jeremy Prynne among others. They will also contain reviews of the latest academic works published in the area of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

In recent years there have been a number of academic conferences dedicated to 'innovative poetry' and its variants, including the Birkbeck conferences on poetics over the last 10 years, and several at the University of Plymouth including the successful Poetry and Public Language, which resulted in a volume of the same title (2007). The equivalent North American work is well-represented in academic work, but researchers on British and Irish poetry have no dedicated refereed journal, although a number of important books have been published lately, including Anthony Mellors's Late Modernist Poetry (2005), Robert Sheppard's The Poetry of Saying (2005), Ian Davidson's Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (2006), Tony Lopez's Meaning Performance (2007) and John Wilkinson's The Lyric Touch (2007), as well as the expanding Salt Companion series, for which the two editors have edited a volume each. And, because one of the growing academic contexts for the development of debate about this contemporary writing is within creative writing teaching, learning and research, the journal is proposing to carry critical writing that derives from practice-led research and poetics. It is also proposing to occasionally consider questions of the pedagogy of teaching both the reading and writing of innovative poetry.

  Editorial Board

Peter Barry (University of Wales at Aberystwyth)
Caroline Bergvall (University of Southampton)
Charles Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania)
Anea Brady (Queen Mary College, University of London)
Ian Davidson (University of Wales at Bangor)
Alex Davis (University College Cork)
Allen Fisher (Manchester Metropolitan University)
John Hall (University College Falmouth, incorporating Dartington College of Arts)
Robert Hampson (Royal Bedford and Holloway College, University of London)
Romana Huk (University of Notre Dame)
Elizabeth James (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Tony Lopez (University of Plymouth)
Anthony Mellors (Birmingham City University)
Peter Middleton (University of Southampton)
Ian Patterson (Queens' College, University of Cambridge)
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)
William Rowe (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Keith Tuma (Miami University, Ohio)
Tim Woods (University of Wales at Aberystwyth)

  Reviews Editor

Stephen Mooney (Birkbeck, University of London)

The journal will be published by Gylphi Limited, an academic arts and humanities publisher focused exclusively on the twentieth century and beyond. http://www.gylphi.co.uk