Responses to Modernisms: The Case of the Pennine Poets

This paper explores something of the legacy, after-shock and assimilation of modernism in relation to a small Yorkshire magazine, the magazine of the Pennine Poets: Platform (established 1967), retitled Pennine Platform from 1973. Pennine Platform has turned, when it wishes, towards modernism, without capitulating to it. From a position of local strength, confidence and relative autonomy, the magazine has kept some critical distance from literary movements, ideologies, bandwagons and various -isms, including modernism. In taking an independent, non-conformist line, the local magazine both enters into sceptical relation with modernism and offers resistance. It curates a space in which modernism can be welcomed, reinterpreted, developed, filtered and re-made. This creates, in active terms, a space to play with, test, extend, modify, question, reapply or ignore the practices and effects of modernism.