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... he poets to lay emphasis on feeling rather than style or technique. Many of Patten's poems deal with the themes of ageing and mortality. In Staring at the Crowd he says, 'I saw the skeleton in everyone'. He reflects that 'Grinning Jack' (the skeleton, symbolizing death) lurks inside everyone, waiting for its moment to conquer the flesh and shed its outer covering. He points out, in a mildly ironical way, that we go through life preoccupied with our mundane existences, and our plans for the future, oblivious of the fact of ever-present invisible death, Grinning Jack, threatening to put an abrupt end to everything.
But perhaps it is this characteristic of life that enables us to take an interest in the trivial aspects of daily life; otherwise we would experience the grimness of a graveyard in everything we did. In Cinders Patten laments the death of his mother, whose 'Life was never a fairy-tale', and in Armada recounts his nostalgic reminiscence of childhood days spent with her. Just as a child's paper boat was blown out of reach by a gust of wind, so too was his mother 'Blown out of reach by the smallest whisper of death'. For as on a pond a child's paper boat was blown out of reach by the smallest gust of wind, so too have you been blown out of reach by the smallest whisper of death...
As a performance poet Patten is more interested in pleasing his audience than in pleasing the critics. Wary of critics, and suspicious of intellectual analysis, in Literary Gathering he tells of his unease among the dissectors (who 'dissect to murder'), and reveals his contempt for theoreticians of verse. The poet yearns to be anonymous, to: Breathe free of obscure ambitions and the need to explain away any song. He aims to please only the true lovers of poetry, ordinary men.
He writes 'for good people, people as huge as the world'. Thus what we find is that there is a shift from the old technical constriction of the poems and the poet lays more stress on the fact that his poem should be for the readers. Another poet displaying similar feelings of enjoying poetry as an art free of the stress of technicalities is Tom Ra worth. He says I write to have something that interests me to read.
Raworths poems show a strong essence of freedom. As if he wants to feel the poetry as he does air- free and everywhere. The diverse nature of the British community ensures the presence of the voices from other cultures also forming the structure of the contemporary British scene like the Black, Asian etc. The black voices had a great influence on the British poetry with the like of Benjamin Zephaniah, John Award, Jean 'Bit' Breeze etc. All of theses poets played their role in establishing a black context in the British poetry. Notably it is not a black vice that is encroaching upon the English poetry or vice versa, rather it is as if both are complementing each other.
The black poetry is very much black indeed. But it is not without its English ness. Displaying such elements of the black poetry we had one such voice in Amryl Johnson whose poetry mapped the gap between two cultures of the Caribbean and England. Amryl Johnson, who has died at the age of 56, was an accomplished writer whose work, especially as a poet, was developing in original and distinctive ways. Her early death is a loss to both contemporary British poetry and for Caribbean writing.
Born in Trinidad, Her sense of an essential identity was formed by her Trinidad childhood, but after the move to London, where her adolescent and adult life was lived in a sometimes hostile cultural environment, she was never quite comfortable in either place. Amryl confronted that hostility to her as a black woman in Britain - and the distinctive angle on British/Caribbean history it underscored - in some plain-spoken and angry early poems which appeared in her first pamphlet collection, Shackles. This established her reputation as an original voice at a time when there were relatively few young black voices to be heard in British literature: ... I am Black And I am Angry My name is Midnight Without Pity However, her return visits to Trinidad were not always unproblematic in terms of her wish to identify with the place and its people.
The sometimes unsettling reaction of many of those people to her - her blackness there signifying less than her middle-class English accent and inevitably metropolitan attitudes - caused her some anguish. Her most recent publication, Calling, which was launched last year, also engages with myth and the associations of the female voice in poetry. There were plans to adapt and produce Gorgons as an opera or musical. Certainly Amryl came to regard performance as being an important - if not her primary - medium of communication. She had a very powerful presence on stage, but was also able to engage and enthuse an audience, to involve them in the event that was her performance.
No one who ever saw her perform what she called her poem-song, Far and High, was left unchallenged or unmoved. Another poet who has been a representative poet of her own style which involves free verse and humor is Wendy Cope. Wendy Cope was born in 1945 in the south of England. Both of her parents held management positions with British companies. Cope earned a B. A.
from Oxford (1966) and a diploma from the Westminster College of Education (1967). After teaching for several years at various junior schools in London, she became a freelance writer and columnist. Her Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) includes a number of literary jokes and parodies in the style of some of the most notable twentieth-century poets. Asked about her work, Cope asserted, "I dislike the term 'light verse' because it is used as a way of dismissing poets who allow humor into their work. I believe that a humorous poem can also be 'serious'; deeply felt and saying something that matters. " Twenty-first century British poetry is no longer precisely English as it used to be. In fact it has redefined the word English in a new manner and this is because of the fact that there are various different trends in the British poetry scene.
Like the world literature with which it is now firmly allied it has as many facets as the eye of a fly. Saying exactly what it is remains the problem of the moment. if you want to know more about me log on to web
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