Informationist poetry
Informationist poetry was a literary movement of the 1990s in Scotland. The poets usually associated with this movement are: Richard Price – 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, 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 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.