Informationist poetry was a literary movement of the 1990s in

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. The poets usually associated with this movement are:

Richard Price Richard Price (23 February 1723 – 19 April 1791) was a British moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French ...

– who coined the term in 1991 in the magazine ''Interference'' – Robert Crawford, W. N. Herbert, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey and Alan Riach. The anthology ''Contraflow on the SuperHighway'' (Southfields, 1994), edited by Price and Herbert, set the parameters for the movement; Vennel Press published collections by the Informationists; and the magazines ''Verse'', ''Gairfish'' and ''Southfields'' addressed Informationist concerns. Iain Bamforth,

Kathleen Jamie Kathleen Jamie FRSL (born 13 May 1962) is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar. Life and work Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Raised in Currie, near Edinburgh, she studied philosophy at the University ...

, Alison Kermack and Don Paterson, though not included in the anthology, are referenced in Price's introduction as contemporaries with similar interests and aesthetics. One of the features of Informationist poetry is its engagement with and deliberate mixing of different linguistic registers, and the interrogation of language's power-bearing qualities in the process. Informationism can be seen as a descendant of

Oulipo Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...

for its creative use of rules-based procedures, notably in the work of Peter McCarey's monumental ''Syllabary'' project, which attempts a poem for every spoken syllable in the English language, randomising the presentation on its dedicated website. All the poets are also translators of poetry and internationalism and translation itself are arguably themes in their work. Informationism can also be fruitfully grouped with the later

flarf Flarf poetry was an ''avant-garde'' poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term ''Flarf'' was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration o ...

movement as both explore technological innovation, jargons of various kinds and the interconnectedness of the "information society" in an often irreverent and perhaps subversive mode. However, the combination of lyric and experimental aesthetics probably bears better comparison with American Hybrid poets such as Peter Gizzi and Harryette Mullen (after the anthology edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John in 2009). The twentieth-century poets

Hugh MacDiarmid Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Rena ...

and Edwin Morgan were particularly influential on the Informationists. In 2013 and 2014, Kinloch, McCarey and Price toured with Iain Bamforth as Informationists in "The Last Men on Mercury" tour, reading in Manchester, London, Geneva, Strasbourg and Glasgow.

External links

Note on origins of Informationist poetry

Poetry in the Age of IT: Informationist Poetry Since the 1990s

The Syllabary
Poetry movements Scottish literary movements British literary movements 20th-century British literature {{poetry-stub