Plymouth Language Club & the ‘local scene.’

 

The Plymouth Language Club was a voluntary organisation which ran between 2000 and 2024 and was preceded throughout the 1990’s by The Poetry Exchange. The Language Club was mainly involved in organising live poetry events/readings and also ran a successful discussion group for ten years.

During the 1990’s and preceded by Norman Jope’s pioneering magazine Memes, edited from Birmingham/Swindon/Plymouth (ten issues) the magazine Terrible Work ran for ten issues from its home in Mannamead where it was edited by Tim Allen with help from Alexis Kirk and myself. This magazine included material from locally-based poets but also had a national and international outlook and published work from writers worldwide. There were masses of reviews and T.W. as it was affectionately known, established a reputation among poets far beyond the city’s boundaries. Kenny Knight’s Tremblestone, which ran for five issues into the 2000’s completed the project while T.W. continued for a while as an online zine.

Anyone with a genuine interest in following the development of a poetry scene in Plymouth is directed towards two seminal publications. Cusp, edited by Geraldine Monk (Shearsman,2012) is made from a series of interviews and essays with poets involved in writing groups throughout the country between the end of WW2 and the start of the worldwide web. The interview with Tim Allen (The Difference is Still the Same) covers the key period of the Language Club and its relation to the scene and is the most forward-looking piece in the book. In the Presence of Sharks (edited by Norman Jope and Ian Robinson, Phlebas,2006) is an anthology of poetry by twelve writers, some of whom are still active on the scene, and remains to date the most impressive gisting of what’s been going on here, though it could obviously do with ‘an update.’ There is a copy in the ‘local’ section of the public library.


Here is a select list of guest readers from the many poets The Language Club has invited to take part since 2000 and in fact during much of the 1990’s as The Poetry Exchange:

Barry MacSweeney, Jeremy Hilton, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Geraldine Monk, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Helen MacDonald, Damian Furniss, Chris McCabe, Philip Terry, Chris Torrance, Lloyd Robson, Andrew Duncan, Penelope Shuttle, Daljit Nagra, Iain Sinclair, Giles Goodland, John Hartley Williams, Vahni Capildeo, Maggie O’Sullivan, Gavin Selerie, John James, John Hall, Tilla Brading, Frances Presley, Simon Jenner, Carrie Etter, Richard Berengarten, Jay Ramsay, Niall McDevitt, Peter Hughes, Robert Sheppard, Ken Edwards, Bertel Martin, Selena Godden and Joolz Denbigh.

This indicates the quality and diversity of readers invited from outside Plymouth to read alongside, at times an open mic, and also, more recently, a curated list of locally-based poets.

Here is a selective list of the most interesting poets currently engaged in the Plymouth poetry scene. Most of these writers have published at least one collection/chapbook and many have published several:

Norman Jope, Melisande Fitzsimons, Kenny Knight, Matt Carbery, Andrew Martin, Phil Smith, Spencer Shute, Anthony Caleshu, Hannah Linden, Mark Leahy, Ed Tapper, Benjamin Brake, Rachel Gippetti, Sarah Cave, Dan Hartigan, Brian Herdman, Lesley Curwen, Thom Boulton, Laurie Page and Rosemarie Corlett.

A brief survey of current trends in poetry which is obviously related to what’s been going on in Plymouth: since the near economic collapse in 2008, followed by the later covid pandemic and consequent lockdown there appears to have been a phenomenal increase in what I’m going to call ‘confessional poetry’, probably heightened by the internet and online conversational groups. There seems to be an aspect of a revitalised ‘new age’ element to this tendency, which probably relates to a need for optimism in an increasingly darkening world and is also apparently linked to identity politics, gender issues and a sense of opposition(s) to the prevailing world governance. Such fractured narratives are hard to respond to at times though the term ‘confessional poetry’ seems a dominant trope but it’s worth pointing out that there are other interesting developments which arguably produce stronger material.

Here in Plymouth, for example, we have a psycho-geographic element, headlined by relative newcomer, academic/dramatist Phil Smith whose debut tome, The Common (2024) deals in part with the matter of Plymouth and puts the place ‘on the map’ in a manner analogous to the London based writer Iain Sinclair. Other key writers who have also included Plymouth as part of their subject matter are Norman Jope and Kenny Knight, both long-term contributors to the scene with a number of books to their credit. Other relative newcomers in terms of poetry are the artist/writer Ed Tapper and the poet Brian Herdman but both have something of what I’m going to tentatively call a ‘Plymouth school’ about their work, which relates to style and engagement with the city. Experimental poets such as Mark Leahy and Matt Carbery have also contributed to the overall scene.

The Plymouth Language Club seems to have run its course and while a future resurgence of something similar is not beyond the bounds of possibility the current organisers feel that it’s time to call it a day. Hopefully there has been inspiration as well as occasional vexation in the process and I’d hazard a guess that much of the varied poetical activity currently ongoing in the city wouldn’t have happened without a process and engagement dating back to the early 1990’s when a small group of enthusiasts found common ground at an event at Plymouth Arts Centre around the centenary of Rimbaud’s death organised by the late art centre director Bernard Samuels. We pay tribute to him and look forward to further developments.

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Steve Spence

 

 

 

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