The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry centres on poetic writings appearing in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s. These varied poetic practices have been described as avant-garde, underground, linguistically innovative, second-wave Modernist, neo-modernist, non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, or experimental and which have been produced in geographic clusters, such as the Cambridge School or the London School or Morden Tower. However, we are also seeking to represent uncategorised and independent voices that might fall through the cracks between different schools or clusters.

These posited movements were networked with a variety of formal and conceptual poetics, including: concrete poetry; performance writing; hybrid writing; writing that explores the interplay between orality and literacy; Black studies; diasporic approaches; translational and translingual experiments; macaronic writing and hybridisations of the English language.

The Journal recognises that these terms, and the communities of writers and readers they refer to, are always shifting, contested and sometimes controversial. As such, we are interested in a critical and expansive understanding of ‘innovative’ poetic writing, both within and extending beyond the bounds of the particular traditions outlined here.