The 1970s saw the emergence of a remarkable body of late-modernist poetry in London. For the first part of the decade, as Peter Barry has recounted in Poetry Wars, the Poetry Society provided a base for this activity. In CLASP, Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards have curated an act of collective remembering of a decade of innovative poetic practices, showing its roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s. Who were these poets? How did poets find each other in a time before digital media? What were the other sites for this activity? To launch CLASP, Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards will be in conversation with Gary McKeone.

Biographies

Ken Edwards’ books include the poetry collections Good Science (1992), eight + six (2003), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-95 (2006), Bird Migration in the 21st Century (2006), Songbook (2009), the prose works Bardo(2011) and Down With Beauty (2013), and the novels Futures (1998) and Country Life (2015).  Due from Shearsman Books in late 2016 is a book with no name. He has been editor/publisher of the small press Reality Street since 1993. He lives in Hastings, on the south coast of England, where he plays bass guitar and sings with The Moors and Afrit Nebula, bands he co-founded with Elaine Edwards.

Professor Robert Hampson FEA, FRSA has been Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 2000. Professor Hampson has an international reputation as a Conrad scholar and critic. His books on Conrad include Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000) and Conrad’s Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). Cross-Cultural Encounters was described in The Year’s Work in English Studies (2002) as ‘the outstanding contribution to Conrad scholarship this year’, while Conrad’s Secrets was described, in The Year’s Work in English Studies (2013), as ‘arguably the most striking and inventive contribution to Conrad scholarship in 2012’ and, by the Times Literary Supplement, as ‘an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike’. He has also edited various works by Conrad (‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim and Victory) and was the editor of The Conradian. He has also co-edited two collections of essays on Ford Madox Ford – Ford Madox Ford: A Re Assessment (Rodopi, 2002) and Ford Madox Ford and Modernity (Rodopi, 2003) – and works by Kipling and Rider Haggard. In January 2015, he was elected Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK).