Richard Price Explains Informationism

Richard Price's new collection, Small World, is published in paperback and ebook formats this month, and right now you can get 15% off the paperback at www.carcanet.co.uk. Here, he explains the thinking behind a movement within which he has innovated for decades: Informationism.

I’m in a reflective mood about ‘Informationism’. This year marks twenty years since Vennel Press, the little press I ran with the poet Leona Medlin, published two books of what I called at the time ‘Informationist poetry’: Anither Music by W.N. (Bill) Herbert  and Dustie-fute by David Kinloch. Soon after, we published one of my own early books in the Informationist mode, Sense and a Minor Fever, and one by a further poet from the grouping, Peter McCarey. Peter’s Vennel books are gathered in the Carcanet volume Collected Contraptions, and much of my work from the 1990s is brought together in Lucky Day and Greenfields, also from Carcanet. In 1994 Bill and I co-edited Contraflow on the SuperHighway, an anthology of Informationist poetry which added Alan Riach and Robert Crawford to those I’ve already mentioned.

All men, you will have noticed. Looking back, it would have been interesting to include work by the New York-based Fiona Templeton – a conceptual, performance artist from Scotland from an older generation. Informationism takes some of its cues from conceptual art, emphasising ideas rather than just observation. I wasn’t sufficiently clued in to Templeton’s work at that time – the fact that the poets corresponded with each other and appeared together in the magazines they were variously involved in was part of the sense of what made Informationism a ‘movement’ . Kathleen Jamie is the only contemporary who would have made a kind of Informationist sense but I can’t imagine Kathleen ever being part of such a group. Other (male) poets would have made more sense – Iain Bamforth, Peter Manson, and Drew Milne – but we weren’t in proper touch.

Small World is available now
in paperback and ebook

 

It’s striking how much the poetry landscape has and hasn’t changed since then: today, women are generally still under-represented by larger publishers, but the number and proportion of women today at the ‘earlier’ stage, before work, traditionally speaking, is published by larger presses, is much higher than it was then. Like the Informationists at that time there are one or two groups now who are actually trying to create new reception spaces for their work, not merely seeing their time within the small press scene as a lower rung on a conventional poetry ‘career’ ladder, but creating their own anthology, organising reading series, publishing different magazines, posters and setting up their own little presses. Women are core to these activities - I’m thinking especially of poets of the Beyond Language grouping such Mendoza/Linus Slug, Francesca Lisette, Sophie Robinson, and Amy De’ath, or the poets associated with Stop Sharpening Your Knives.

What does Informationist poetry emphasise? A classic theme is the instability of ‘authority’, including destabilising academic and avant-garde discourses which conventionally may try to evade their own aesthetics of persuasion, their own privilege. Formal engagement is not always through comedy, but there is often a dry sense of humour at play and sometimes something much more knockabout. Key to Informationism is a sense of exhilaration and apprehension in regard to the digital age – it is a poetry about the deep ambiguities of hope and doubt inherent in all the forms of information. In this way my current book, Small World, may seem to be on the small human scale of many another book of poems about family and friends but in fact it is suffused by non-poetry genres – a hospital leaflet, a small ad, the songs sung in playgrounds, a codification of the ‘Glasgow Coma Scale’ used in intensive care, all are re-occupied using Informationist techniques and these are never far from human feeling.

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In the 1990s he became a leading figure in the Informationist movement in Scottish poetry. Richard Price has published a dozen books of poetry since his début in 1993, including Lucky Day (Carcanet 2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2012 his poem ‘Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent Team GB in the Olympics project ‘The Written World’. His poems have been widely anthologised, and translated into French, Finnish, German, Hungarian and Portuguese. He is also a short story writer and novelist, a critic, and the editor of the little magazine Painted, spoken. He is Head of Content and Research Strategy at the British Library, in London. Richard Price’s website is at www.hydrohotel.net.

His new collection, Small World, is published this month by Carcanet in paperback and ebook formats. Get 15% off and free UK delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk.