‘This is radical, this is a moment of change.’

We have all the poets of the post-colonial writing years, [from] more than half a century ago. Many interesting names entered English publishing then. There were men and women from former colonies in the Caribbean, Grace Nichols and Martin Carter (1927-1997) from Guyana, or Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and many others from West Africa. It was an injection of new writing into the old Metropolis.

“The new trends soaked up change, but poetry has a resistance to politics and the economy. Poets do not have much money. Hence, the form that poetry takes in politics is greatly different to other writing. And yet poetry is such a quick form that when there is a downturn in the economy, in social circumstances, poets are quick to react with language adjusted to affect the most affected in society.

“There was a lot of new work in the 1980s in the English language, especially in experimental forms often overlooked. It came in on the back of the modernism of the 1960s — one case is the big US poet Charles Olson (1910-1960), who asked if we weren’t going to a global meltdown. Poets in the UK were influenced by people like Olson, politically, experimentally. You can trawl through that work and find response in the 1980s to events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, in November, 1989. The challenge for this poetry is to be noticed. It has to surface to have some effect.

“We are in a very interesting time now in English poetry: the last three Forward Prize winners are poets with a Caribbean background — two from Jamaica (one, Sarah Howe, of Chinese origin via Jamaica) and this year’s winner is originally Trinidadian, Vahni Capildeo. That is an interesting move that shows how we have moved from a post-colonial positioning of writers of colour. She is writing as someone who sees herself as somebody without a home or a country. She sees primarily language as her home. We are asked to meet these poets on their terms, rather than meeting them as poets who represent a territory or a country.

“Many of the new generation of poets are changing the landscape. When the National Poetry Library was set up in 1953, it was mainly white male poets who were being published, representing their time. Now you have a massive experience in poetry, with all the changing forms. I would begin to look at what digitals gave to all this.

“Poets are making careers and names without having ever gone to print. Poets who are meeting their readers on that level and are doing extremely well. And when their first book comes out, they will sell thousands of copies because they are known on the Internet. This is radical, this is a moment of change.”