Radical and Militant Poetry

Radical and Militant Poetry

The decade since the beginning of the financial crisis has seen a mushrooming in the production of radical and militant anglophone poetry. Much of this material has been published in limited print runs by small presses, due to a lack of interest in this seam of cultural production from established publishing houses. Often where small presses lack funds these publications also lack ISBNs and are not collected in libraries. While this poetic production has not developed out of an integrated scene, there have been moments of transient institution-building, such as the “Militant Poetics and Poetry” seminar (2012) and “Poetry and Revolution conference (2013) at Birkbeck College, a number of regular reading series across the UK, and perhaps most prominently the UK Poetry ListServ, which after a number of very active years imploded for both political and poetic reasons. In 2016 Richard Owens created an extensive bibliography of this poetic material in Sundial [Compleat] (published by Damn The Caesars). The MayDay Rooms Radical Poetry Archive offers a home to hard and digital copies of poems as well as recordings of readings, and to digitise and upload this material making out of print poetry more easily accessible. The archival collec tion is accompanied by a series of poetry readings. If you are a publisher or poet who wants to contribute materials to this archive, please get in touch!

2010's