British Poetry Revival - Wales and Scotland

Wales and Scotland

In the 60s and early 70s Peter Finch, an associate of Bob Cobbing, ran the No Walls Poetry readings and the ground breaking inclusive magazine, second aeon. He began Oriel Books in Cardiff in 1974 and the shop served as a focal point for young Welsh poets. However, some of the more experimental poets in Wales were not of Welsh origins. Two of the most important expatriate poets operating in Wales were John Freeman and Chris Torrance. Freeman is another British poet influenced by the Objectivists, and he has written on both George Oppen and Niedecker. Torrance has expressed his debt to David Jones. His ongoing Magic Door sequence is widely regarded as one of the major long poems to come out of the Revival.

In Scotland, Edwin Morgan, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Leonard emerged as key individual poets during this time, each interested in, among other forms, sound and visual poetry. The viability of a wider, deeper experimental infrastructure in poetry was helped by the gallery, performance space and bookshop at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow (later renamed the Centre for Contemporary Arts). Magazines such as Scottish International and Duncan Glen's magazine Akros maintained links with the modernist legacy of the inter-war and post-war years while publishing contemporary poets; often, however, by mixing the avant-garde with aesthetically conservative texts.