You Have Permission: Elizabeth-Jane Burnett on Creating Space for Experimental Writing

Through my career of teaching and sharing writing, the response I have heard most is “I didn’t know you could do that.” Too often, even without realising it, we restrict ourselves into categories, genres, forms, sometimes even thoughts, that were not of our own making. We have shrunk our writing even before picking up a pen or starting to type.

It’s an internal shrinkage that’s somewhat different to imposter syndrome, where we may know what we’re striving for but aren’t sure we have the right tools or accomplishments to achieve it. It is a diminishing that comes from not realising that alternative options even exist. If imposter syndrome is a hesitation to move forwards, then permission-giving is someone taking off the blinkers so that we can see, and move, in all directions.

One of my biggest early permission-givers was a literary scene rather than a person – in the transatlantic US and UK experimental poetry communities of the 1960s, I found a freedom in form and in the means of production that gave me a pathway – and permission – for expression that felt more fluid than more mainstream modes of writing. In the UK, a wide range of styles, including visual and sound poetries, were involved in what US poet Eric Mottram called the British Poetry Revival. A lot of this writing was distributed by way of the “mimeo revolution” that saw poets taking control of their own publishing.

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