Penguin Modern Poets Strikes Back!

Guardian reports that the Penguin Modern Poets Series, the UK's publisher of such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Stevie Smith, is relaunching in order to highlight a new "golden age" of contemporary writers. This reboot pairs Sharon Olds beside Warsan Shire and more.

Penguin’s iconic Modern Poets series, which was first launched in the early 1960s with the writings of authors from Lawrence Durrell to Stevie Smith, is being revived this summer to introduce a new generation of poets.

Home to anthologies including 1967’s The Mersey Sound, which featured the work of the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri and sold more than half a million copies, the Penguin Modern Poets series aimed to “introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader”. There were 27 volumes in the first incarnation, each containing “representative work” by three modern poets, with the selection made “so as to illustrate the poets’ characteristics in style and form”.

The series ran from 1962 until 1979, placing Smith alongside Geoffrey Hill and Edwin Brock, and Allen Ginsberg next to Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was revived in the 1990s for a three-year run during which Penguin teamed up writers including Simon Armitage, Sean O’Brien and Tony Harrison, and Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver and Eavan Boland.

Penguin poetry editor Donald Futers, who is relaunching the series in July with If I’m Scared We Can’t Win, featuring the work of Anne Carson, Sophie Collins and Emily Berry, said that he felt the time was right to bring it back.

“There’s a strong case for our finding ourselves right now in a golden age for poetry. Between creative writing programmes, an abundance of new publications, the ever-growing popularity of spoken word and performance poetry – think of Kate Tempest, or Warsan Shire – and a new generation made unprecedentedly available to one another across national boundaries by the internet, exciting poetry … is being written on a staggering scale,” said Futers. “The time is ripe for this revival of the Penguin Modern Poets.”

Continue reading at the Guardian.