This chapter considers what kind of utopian articulations can be glimpsed in contemporary British experimental poetry. Three experimental poets writing in the 2010s are analysed in detail: Sean Bonney, Verity Spott, and Callie Gardner. The chapter situates these poets within the British experimental poetry scene, tracing an ecosystem of small-scale independent publishing. DIY poetry magazines such as Zarf (produced in Cardiff, Leeds, and Glasgow) and presses such as the87press, Aquifer, DATABLEED, Sad Press, and many others operated outside of formalised spheres of paid labour. In the 2010s, communities of British poets, publishers, audiences, and readers sustained themselves through a non-commercial ethos of gift exchange. This ethos was explicitly utopian in its attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism through non-alienated economic and social structures. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s utopian theorisation of the 1960s counterculture feels relevant to this moment in the British experimental poetry scene, the chapter explores how many of these poets expressed scepticism about the form’s inherent political potential. For them, politics, rather than aesthetics, contained the germs of utopian possibility. Their experimental works offer precursors to a futurity that is not yet here, but the arrival of which is necessary for the survival of progressive politics.

This chapter reopens the case of Shelley’s ‘Defence’, both his famous manifesto and the question of defending (or critiquing) Shelley. The essay addresses Shelley’s vision of the poet; its salience for twenty-first-century readers, critics, and poets; the relation of lyric to law (marked in the famous phrase ‘unacknowledged legislators’); and the status of ‘Man’ as ‘an instrument’ (Shelley’s ‘Aeolianism’). Shelley emerges via philosopher Giorgio Agamben as a vector of ‘the contemporary’. Poet Sean Bonney offers one critique of Shelleyan poetics, theorist Barbara Johnson another. The essay turns to poet and essayist Anne Boyer to explore Shelleyan negation and reckonings with ‘the world’, and turns next to poets Ariana Reines and Christopher Nealon as offering latter-day Shelleyan Aeolianisms – proposing the poet as a medium of imagination and of historical processes. The essay concludes with a poem by the author (McLane), ‘Mz N Triumph of Life’.