British Avant Garde

The article introduces the paper archive of Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) at the British Library, and contextualizes his influential contribution to British poetry – as an avant-garde performance poet, printer and publisher – over the course of more than fifty years. The archive evidences the continuity between Cobbing’s formative experience as a youth leader in the Wesley Guild, his work in the 1950s as a teacher and organizer of local community arts programmes in the London boroughs of Hendon and Finchley, and his subsequent participation in the counter-culture of the 1960s. The origins of Cobbing’s radical practice are discussed, from the sonorous rhythms of Vachel Lindsay and American Beat poetry to the aesthetics of Futurism and Dada. Uniting personal material with documentation of Cobbing’s publishing, performance and promotional activities, the archive is a rich and coherent record of a strand of British poetry that has not always been generally visible but continues to flourish.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many young male and female poets attended “Ezuversity,” that is, Ezra Pound’s programme through which he educated them on the art of reading and writing. This study focuses on the case of Iris Barry (1895-1969), the English poet, novelist, film critic and forgotten modernist pioneer, to whom Pound sent a series of letters at the beginning of the twentieth century encouraging her to emancipate herself and avoid marriage. It also analyses “The Ezra Pound Period,” a text written by Barry and published in the Bookman in 1931, which serves as a response to the poet’s letters and instruction. The aim of this article is to contribute to feminist modernist studies by rescuing Barry from oblivion and by highlighting Pound’s promotion and support of many women writers who would later play a significant role in literary modernism.

Three years after working on their first film Panthesilea: Queen of the Amazons in 1974, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen decided to join forces once again and film what is now know as one of the most significant examples of British avant-garde cinema, Riddles of the Sphinx.