ABSTRACT
The most promoted poets were Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, and Glyn Maxwell; not far behind came Michael Donaghy, Ian Duhig, and Don Paterson. For a time, it almost seemed that poetry had turned into the World Cup, with the newspapers gossiping about how much money individual poets could command for readings, and other such marks of public favour. In 1994, Poetry Review, allying itself with the sort of promotional tactics which hitherto in the book world had seemed the province of such successful campaigns as that which has given the annual Booker Prize for fiction a high profile, took part in 'The New Generation'. Disappearance and evasiveness are as much part of Armitage's tactics as such buttonholing techniques; and in this a continuing obsession is Weldon Kees, the American poet who vanished, a probable suicide, in San Francisco in 1955. Armitage's second book, Kid, contained several Robinson poems, which took their persona from Kees work.
