Fulcrum Press was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery (born 1938, in Rhodesia

Rhodesia

Rhodesia , officially the Republic of Rhodesia from 1970, was an unrecognised state located in southern Africa that existed between 1965 and 1979 following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965...

) and his wife Deidre. Montgomery later was an eminent neurologist and expert in depression. The press published major American

Poetry of the United States

American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies...

 and British poets in the modernist

Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...

 and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper. The Fulcrum Press made a significant contribution to the British Poetry Revival

British Poetry Revival

The British Poetry Revival is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry.-Beginnings:...

.

Montgomery published Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting

Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...

's Loquitur (1965), First Book of Odes(1965), Ode II/2 (1965), his landmark Briggflatts: An Autobiography

Briggflatts

Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1965. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography." The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of a meetinghouse in a Quaker community near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England...

(1966) and the same poet's Collected Poems (1968). It produced about forty books by more than twenty poets, including Pete Brown

Pete Brown

Peter Ronald Brown is an English performance poet and lyricist.Best known for his collaborations with Jack Bruce, Brown also worked with The Battered Ornaments, formed his own group Pete Brown & Piblokto!, and worked with Graham Bond and Phil Ryan. Brown also writes film scores and formed a film...

, Ed Dorn

Ed Dorn

Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.-Overview:...

 (Gunslinger 1 & 2, 1970), Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

, Larry Eigner

Larry Eigner

Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School....

, Paul Evans

Paul Evans (poet)

Paul Evans was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. He is included in the anthology British Poetry since 1945 and the 1969 anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain....

, Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher is a British poet and jazz pianist. He was one of the first British writers to absorb the poetics of William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets into the British poetic tradition. Fisher was a key precursor of the British Poetry Revival.Fisher was born in Handsworth, Birmingham...

, Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.-Biography:Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas of Scottish parents. He was educated in Scotland at Dollar Academy. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to family in the countryside...

, Donald Gardner (* 1938, For the flames, 1974), Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

, Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger OBE was a noted British translator, poet, critic, memoirist, and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism...

, Lee Harwood

Lee Harwood

Lee Harwood is a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.-Life:Travers Rafe Lee Harwood was born in Leicester to maths teacher Wilfred Travers Lee-Harwood and Grace Ladkin Harwood, who were then living in Chertsey, Surrey...

, Spike Hawkins

Spike Hawkins

Spike Hawkins is a British poet, best known for his 'Three Pig Poems', included in his one book, the Fulcrum Press collection The Lost Fire-Brigade . He was part of the poetry scene in Liverpool during the 1960s and much of his output upholds the values of that group; short, modernistic, humorous...

, Alan Jackson

Alan Jackson (poet)

Alan Jackson is a Scottish poet.Born in Liverpool, of Scottish parents. Back in Edinburgh, 1940. Royal High School, Edinburgh 52-56. Edinburgh University 56-59. Began reading career on Edinburgh Festival fringe, with the London poets, Pete Brown, Mike Horovitz and Libby Houston, 1960...

, David Jones

David Jones (poet)

David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...

, Christopher Middleton

Christopher Middleton

Christopher Middleton may refer to:*Christopher Middleton , English translator and poet*Christopher Middleton , British poet*Christopher Middleton , Royal Navy officer and navigator...

, Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...

, Jeff Nuttall

Jeff Nuttall

Jeff Nuttall was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist sympathiser and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.-Life and work:Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe,...

, George Oppen

George Oppen

George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

, Tom Pickard

Tom Pickard

Tom Pickard is a poet, radio and film maker who was an important initiator of the movement known as the British Poetry Revival....

 (with a preface by Bunting), Omar S. Pound, F. T. Prince

F. T. Prince

Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for his best-known poem Soldiers Bathing, written during the Second World War in 1942, which has been frequently included in anthologies....

, Tom Raworth

Tom Raworth

Tom Raworth is a London-born poet and visual artist who has published over forty books of poetry and prose since 1966. His works has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth is a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. He lives in Brighton, England.-Early life and work:Raworth...

, Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

 and Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...

. Stuart Montgomery published two books of his own poems, Circe (1969) and Shabby Sunshine (1973), and his medical study Measures of Depression (1978).

When Fulcrum Press folded in the 1970s most of the stock was pulped.