This article from Friday's Guardian might be slightly frothy and slanted towards fiction, but it does hint at an issue that's significant to me: the attitude contemporary U.K. poetry holds towards suburbia.
Bearing in mind that millions of us have been brought up in or live in such surroundings, why do so few British poets now write about them or set their work in them? I'm convinced suburbia is dodged through fear of negative connotations and labelling such as "banal", "unimaginative" or "Larkinesque".
Suburbia forms a key part of my poetic imagination, just as it has throughout my life. I try to unravel its intricacies and the way it's evolving. Here's to playing with those connotations and challenging them!
With many thanks to editors Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson, I have a poem
in the latest issue of Bad Lilies, my favourite online poetry journal,
among som...
I think it goes even further than that, Matthew. In all the recent debates on hunting, etc, in the UK, there's always talk of 'town' and 'country', ignoring the fact that huge swathes of the population live somewhere between the two.
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