Poetry Police

After the secret police, the poetry police? At the St Andrews Poetry Festival recently publisher Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books gave a lecture entitled “Bile, Guile and Dangerous to Poetry” attacking the current poetry scene in the UK, which he believes is dominated by a narrow coterie of male, Anglocentric academics and critics:

The reason why I feel I must 'speak my mind' on this subject - as the StAnza programme puts it - is that as a poetry editor with 30 years' experience in the field, and as a publisher with a close understanding of poetry publishing, distribution and readership, I see at first hand the damage being inflicted by the poetry police as well as by others in the poetry establishment. I travel the country talking to all kinds of readers at festivals and regular poetry venues. I have access to publishing and bookselling statistics. I know what bookshops are selling, what readers and buying and what kinds of poetry people want to read.

And I don't blame bookshops for not stocking those books which very few people actually want to read. When Robert Potts laments in the Guardian (6 December 2003) that 'sadly, major bookshops are not stocking poetry in adequate quantities', he seems to me to be blaming booksellers for a situation which he and his fellow elitists have helped bring about. What does 'adequate quantities' mean for the bookseller? Presumably filling the shelves with books recommended by Potts, many of which, in my opinion, most poetry readers won't want to buy (or won't be able to afford). The poets and their publishers have been outraged by the recent reductions made by the bookshops to their poetry stocks: their high art was being spurned by the philistines. But in effect the people doing the spurning were not the bookshops - they were just the middle men - it was the readers who had lost interest. The only way to reverse that process is to promote many different kinds of poetry to as wide a readership as possible.

What I try to do as an editor and publisher is to be responsive both to writers and to readers, and then work with my colleagues to try to help bookshops serve the poetry readership. Unlike the poetry police, I don't shoot my mouth off with a partial or non-existent knowledge of the facts; I don't distort the facts to fit my opinions; and I don't make statements which are outright lies.

You can read the whole lecture here