| Summary: | This article aims to create a set of critical and theoretical frameworks for reading race and contemporary UK poetry. By mapping histories of 'innovative' poetry from the twentieth century onwards against aesthetic and political questions of form, content and subjectivity, I argue that race and the racialised subject in poetry are informed by market forces as well as longstanding assumptions about authenticity and otherness. Lyric violence, lyric dread and whiteness inform a reading of the lyric as universally exclusive of non-white poets and any responsibility to the social functions of poetry. Ultimately, in line with the essays in this special issue, the article argues for an expansion of the definition of innovative or avant-garde to account for challenges to the expressive and individual lyric mode posed by poets of colour.
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