Turning a Page: The State of Poetry Criticism 2011-18

[NB: This report was first published in the Brixton Review of Books (No. 6, Summer 2019). It is reprinted with kind permission of the BRB editors Michael Caines, Tess Davidson, and Alice Wadsworth. I’m a big fan of the magazine, it publishes excellent people, and you can subscribe on the BRB website.]

In the six years between 2011 and 2016, British and Irish poetry magazines and newspapers published critical work by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) critics 130 times. That was just 3.7 per cent of the total number of such critical pieces for those years. In the two years since the launch of the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics scheme in 2017, BAME critics have appeared in the same publications 115 times, 8.3 per cent of the total. The Ledbury scheme has desmonstrably spearheaded this rapid, vital change; but these successes must be taken in context as part of a fight for an inclusive poetry culture dating back many years.

In 2005, Bernardine Evaristo prompted Arts Council England to investigate the lack of BAME poets publishing in these islands. With the additional support of other British arts councils and the London writer development agency Spread the Word, the subsequently published report, Free Verse, discovered that under than 1 per cent of books published by major presses were by BAME poets. The Complete Works programme mentored its first ten BAME poets in 2010, and eight years later, that figure stands above 16 per cent; even Faber has begun to redress its institutional whiteness, publishing Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons in 2017, Zaffar Kunial’s Us in 2018, and Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche this year. As Evaristo argues, however, poetry in this country in the 1980s and 90s was far more receptive to BAME poets, as the prominence of John Agard, Grace Nichols, Valerie Bloom, Benjamin Zephaniah, E. A. Markham and Linton Kwesi Johnson demonstrated.[1] What Evaristo identified was not just a contemporary failure but a significant recession.

Besides the poets, what about the people who write about poetry? In my initial study, “The State of Poetry Criticism”[2], I found that between April 2015 and May 2017, only 4.4 per cent of reviews across seven major poetry platforms were written by BAME critics. Yet there are some signs of change. In 2015, for example, only ten articles by BAME critics were published, 1.3 per cent of the year’s total; the corresponding figure for 2018 was sixty-two, 8.5 per cent of the year’s total.

There have also been negative responses to what, in historical terms, might feel like a sudden change. In the past year, Michael Schmidt, publisher of Carcanet Poetry, editor of PN Review and mentor in The Complete Works, has written a series of editorials in PN Review in which he decries “identity politics”, describes a recent willingness to hold prominent white male artists responsible for their actions as “censorship”[3], and relates his own feeling of being “silenced” and “anathematised” for being “a white male in the vale of years with what used to be regarded as a good education”.[4] Like Peter Riley before him[5], Schmidt argues that a prescriptiveness imposed on work by BAME poets by publishers and critics is a manner of “censorship”. Both Riley and Schmidt omit the fact that publishers and critics remain overwhelmingly white, and that their decision to police the borders of BAME poets’ work maintains the centrality and cultural influence of white poets, critics, publishers and editors, not to mention the curators of “good educations”. In both cases, senior white figures instrumentalize their ostensible concern for BAME poets’ wellbeing to defend their own positions of power. Riley condemned Claudia Rankine for “parading the wound” in Citizen: An American lyric (Rankine won the Forward Prize for which Riley was shortlisted); Schmidt swiftly proceeds to defend the work of Woody Allen and James Levine against “censors”, elevating two (alleged) sexual abusers to the ranks of D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov.

As many have noted, to those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, and as a series of studies have shown, we remain far from equal. Programmes like The Complete Works and the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics have made tangible inroads for a still relatively small number of BAME poets and critics, but even this slight shift represents significant change.

*

Resuming the work of my survey published online in 2017, I had two main questions: whose poetry is reviewed? and whose reviews are commissioned and published? The set on critical writing now includes data from twenty-eight magazines dating from January 2011 to December 2018, a total of 4,866 articles reviewing 7,711 books. Those magazines are: Acumen, Antiphon Poetry, Bare Fiction, The Compass, The Guardian, Gutter, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, London Grip, the London Review of Books, Magma, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, The North, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Poetry School, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Wales, Sabotage Reviews, Southwords, The Stinging Fly, Stride, the Times Literary Supplement and The Wolf.

There are obvious limitations on the data I have collected. The figures do not cover other important intersections of cultural exclusion such as class, disability, education or sexuality, and on race and gender they are unsophisticated. Regarding race, my terms are unsatisfactorily binary; this is, in part, due to greater accuracy often being impossible without self-reporting. As many writers have noted[6], neither BAME nor Person of Colour are ideal terms; both involve significant erasure of cultural, racial and national experiences and traditions. I hope that the outcomes of this study justify the employment of reductive terminology. The 2011 census reported that people self-identifying as Black, Asian or minority ethnicity comprised 12.9 per cent of the total UK population, 4.9 per cent in Ireland. While I do not believe in the imposition of arbitrary quotas, it is, at the very least, useful to have such a basic demographic benchmark in mind when trying to determine what representative inclusion might look like on a purely statistical level.[7]

Of 4,866 articles published between January 2011 and December 2018, 245 were written by BAME critics, 5.03 per cent of the total. Of the twenty-six magazines and newspapers in the study still regularly publishing, only five surpassed this basic figure: Poetry Review (14.5 per cent), Poetry London (18.3 per cent), Oxford Poetry (18.5 per cent), The Poetry School (20.4 per cent) and Modern Poetry in Translation (21.4 per cent). Nine magazines published 1 per cent or fewer BAME critics.

Particular attention is due to the London Review of Books. The LRB has published seventy articles by thirty-three critics covering eighty-six books since January 2011. Every one of their critics is white, 83 per cent are men, and every one of the books reviewed is by a white poet. The magazine publishes poems with greater regularity: six of the 388 poems published since January 2011 are by BAME poets (1.5 per cent). 70.6 per cent of all  poems published are by men, including twenty-eight by August Kleinzahler, twenty-seven by John Burnside, twenty-two by David Harsent and nineteen by Frederick Seidel; these four poets account for 24.7 per cent of all poems published in the magazine during those eight years.

The country’s other major literary journal, the Times Literary Supplement, has a similar record. Though one of only five platforms to publish more than twenty articles by BAME critics, this constitutes 3.6 per cent of its total. Contrary to trends observed elsewhere in the data, most of these articles were published before 2016: nineteen before and five after. Much like the LRB, the TLS published just seven poems by BAME poets (1.3 per cent), and 72.2 per cent by men. Before December 2018, the last BAME poet to publish in the TLS was Imtiaz Dharker, on February 5, 2016.

Much like the TLS, PN Review’s publication of BAME reviewers has also regressed sharply. The magazine published thirteen articles by BAME critics between January 2011 and October 2013; there then follows a period of three years and four months, or twenty consecutive issues, without a single review by a BAME critic. Since March 2017, there have been just three articles published by BAME critics, and an excellent regular column by Vahni Capildeo does not cover for the magazine’s failures elsewhere. Despite this, PN Review has been a consistent publisher of BAME poets throughout the data set: 206 of their 2,100 published poems between 2011 and 2018 are by BAME poets (9.8 per cent, well above the national average of 8.3 per cent).

More encouraging examples do exist. In Poetry London, for example, twenty-one articles by BAME critics were published between 2011 and 2016, 11.9 per cent of the total for those years. In 2017–18, the magazine has published nineteen articles by BAME critics, 29.7 per cent of their total. An even more remarkable change has happened at Poetry Review: between 2011 and 2016, the magazine published fourteen articles by BAME critics (6.1 per cent); between 2017 and 2018, that number has more than doubled to thirty, a full 40 per cent of its total in the past two years. These increases are consistent with the magazines’ publication of poems: Poetry London’s publication of BAME poets rose from 7 per cent in 2011–16 to 16.2 per cent in 2017–8; Poetry Review’s publication of BAME poets rose from 16.1 per cent to 28.2 per cent over the same periods.

The Complete Works and the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics programmes have played a huge role in recent changes. Similar to The Complete Works’ mentorship of poets, the Ledbury scheme aims to provide BAME critics with training and opportunities to develop their craft. Of the 245 articles by BAME critics in the data set, 117 were written by fellows of one or both programmes, 47.8 per cent of the total. This increase has, perhaps unsurprisingly, coincided with an increase in critical attention toward BAME poets, and with BAME poets publishing in higher numbers. In total, 627 of the 7,711 books reviewed in the data set were written by BAME poets (8.13 per cent). The figure fluctuated around 6 per cent between 2011 and 2016, with a peak in 2016 (7.7 per cent) and a trough in 2013 (4.9 per cent). In the past two years, this figure has doubled, to 12.9 per cent in 2017 and 13.1 per cent in 2018. Though I do not have exact figures, it seems that more books by BAME poets are being published year on year, particularly by small presses such as Nine Arches (in 2019 the press will have published collections by Theresa Lola, Ian Humphreys, Roy McFarlane and Tom Sastry) and Penned in the Margins (Anthony Anaxagorou, Raymond Antrobus). Veteran publishers such as Carcanet (Jane Yeh, Vahni Capildeo and Kei Miller) and Bloodaxe (Chen Chen, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Legna Rodriguez Iglesias), meanwhile, continue their good work with more established poets. There is a close relationship between BAME poets’ access to major publishers and BAME critics’ access to major journals: one enables, requires, demands the other.

While there have been significant advances in the reception of BAME poets and critics in recent years, it remains the case that these small steps are supported by a small number of institutions and individuals, and the possibility of backlash and regression is significant. For instance, the publication of poems by BAME poets reached record highs of 10.8 per cent in 2016 and 10.9% in 2017 but fell to 8.4 per cent in 2018. There have also been numerous instances of high-profile white journalists responding to work by BAME poets with ignorance (for example, Kate Kellaway’s description of “oriental poise”[8] in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade) or outright hostility, as in the September 2018 issue of Acumen, whose front cover asked, “Has poetry been hijacked?”[9] The author of the essay in question, Paul Gittins, refers to “a Guardian journalist” before quoting a piece by the poet and academic Sandeep Parmar.[10] Gittins refers to Parmar using male pronouns, before condemning attempts to decolonize literary culture as “threatening the very identity of poetry”. Gittins conflates the “identity” of poetry as a medium with that of white poets, and frames this country’s white critics (95 per cent of the total), white poets (92 per cent) and white prizewinners (88 per cent) as an embattled minority. He also follows Riley and Schmidt in claiming that his concerns are primarily for the welfare of BAME poets, describing Parmar’s article as “condescending” for suggesting “they apparently need a favourable quota system to enter the prize lists”. Parmar’s article makes no such proposal, and Gittins’s memory seems short: no BAME poet had ever won the Forward Prize for Best Collection prior to 2014, and the T. S. Eliot Prize only once before 2015; almost two-thirds of all BAME shortlistings have been in the past five years. White authors repeatedly position ourselves as central, unmarked, natural occupants of cultural space, even as concerned guardians of BAME poets, however much our supposed advocacy rejects even the slightest structural change. It is possible, indeed vital, for white critics to spend time and energy questioning our biases, educating ourselves about our colonial histories and how we continue to benefit from them, and listening at least as carefully to work by BAME poets as we do to white poets, showing respect to the literary canons and traditions in which they situate themselves. Part of this work, however, must include raising up BAME voices ahead of our own: the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics programme has demonstrated an abundance of extraordinarily capable candidates.

[1] Evaristo, Free Verse Report, 2007, 3.

[2] Dave Coates, “The State of Poetry Criticism”, DavePoems (May 29, 2017). https://davepoems.wordpress.com/2017/05/29/the-state-of-poetry-criticism/

[3] Editorial, PN Review 242 (July–Aug 2019), https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10244

[4] Editorial, PN Review 245 (Jan–Feb 2019), https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10385

[5] Peter Riley, “Vahni Capildeo”, Fortnightly Review, April 12, 2016, http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/vahni-capildeo/

[6] See, for example, Courttia Newland, Nikesh Shukla et al, “Beyond PoC and BAME: The terminology we use to define ourselves”, Media Diversified, July 16, 2016, https://mediadiversified.org/2016/07/16/past-poc-and-bame-the-terminology-we-use-to-define-ourselves/

[7] Office of National Statistics, https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2011census

[8] Kate Kellaway, “The Best Poetry Books of 2015”, Observer, December 8 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/08/best-poetry-books-2015-clive-james-claudia-rankine

[9] Paul Gittins, “Hijacking Poetry”, Acumen 92 (September 2018). The use of the highly loaded term “hijacking” in reference to BAME people should not be overlooked.

[10] Sandeep Parmar, “Why the TS Eliot prize shortlist hails a return to the status quo”, The Guardian, 20 Oct 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/oct/20/why-the-ts-eliot-prize-shortlist-hails-a-return-to-the-status-quo

[Data Resource] The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism in the UK and Ireland, Jan 2012 – Mar 2018

Editorial staff from some of the outlets included in the most recent iteration of this study have requested more detailed data than was analysed in the report published by the Centre for New and International Writing, so I’ve made that available in full here.

For clarity: the data for ‘Poetry Criticism’ concerns reviews of individual books, and not critical essays, cultural criticism, features, interviews or other works of critical prose. I hope to study these in the future under their own category.

NB: The data collected here is accurate up to March 2018; as the data for 2018 is incomplete, it should not be taken as indicative of any ongoing trends. In this iteration, my data for The White Review has significant gaps, due to incomplete archives in the library where I was researching.

The limitations of the terms used in this study have been outlined in previous publications, and still apply here. Clicking on the tables will open a larger version in a separate tab on your browser, or you can download them as .xlsx files using the links below.

Poetry criticism:

Download as Excel Spreadsheet

Poetry:

Download as Excel Spreadsheet

The State of Poetry Criticism – July 2017 Update

[NB: These stats will be updated, along with new data for poetry as well as poetry criticism, on May 17, 2018.]

Disclosure: Many thanks to Órla Ní Mhuirí for her advice regarding the ethical questions involved in publishing the data collected here. Thanks to the Association of Internet Researchers for their extremely useful resources, to Muireann Crowley for edits, and to Charles Whalley for advice about data and spreadsheets.

Report: This is a relatively brief update to the data I presented two months ago. As before, this is a purely statistical study, solely of poetry criticism. The data’s limitations, outlined in the previous article, still apply.

In the interests of transparency, I am making the raw data from which these numbers are drawn public. You can view the dataset here, please feel free to share the link.

Some preliminary notes: The names of reviewers have been anonymised. The goal of this project is to illuminate editorial practices, and providing a list of critics’ names felt like a distraction. The problems this project explores are connected to structural matters like editorial practices and the commissioning of critics, not with the individual critics themselves. Although their names are, ultimately, already public, the ethical questions asked by the Association of Internet Researchers advised caution.

The names of poets and their books have been provided, however. As poets are, in theory, a step removed from the editorial process, I felt that they are sufficiently safely removed from the structures under critique in this study. At worst, I think, the data exposes an ongoing fascination with the minor works of Paul Muldoon.

I may have made mistakes, either by accident or ignorance. This is a more or less solo project, and typos, accidental data entries and plain screw-ups are far from impossible. Regarding the gender and race of the poets included here, my resources are contributors’ biographies and search engines. If you notice inaccuracies in the data, please let me know in the comments.

If you would like to use the data collected here, please feel free, just cite the source. If you’re feeling very generous you could link to my Patreon. That would be cool of you.

Updates: The data set now covers eight platforms, adding Modern Poetry in Translation, and expands all records to January 2013. This has more than doubled the size of the data set, and hopefully provides a more robust picture of contemporary mainstream poetry criticism. If you can think of any notable omissions, please let me know in the comments. Criteria for potential additions: the publication must i) regularly publish a significant number of reviews of poetry, ii) either be a poetry-only publication, or have a clearly defined poetry section, iii) have existed since 2013, either online or in print or both. I have so far not included the LRB and TLS, as they are covered by the VIDA Count, but given those numbers are themselves two years old, they are prime candidates.

The project now covers January 2013 – July 2017, covering 110 issues of seven magazines, and four years’ worth of reviews from The Guardian. All told, 1025 articles have been recorded, reviewing a total of 1943 books. It has revealed the following:

• Only 4.3% of all articles are written by people of colour, a total of 44. Breaking these down by year: 7 articles by critics of colour were published in 2013; 8 in 2014; 5 in 2015; 9 in 2016; 15 so far in 2017. Of those 15 so far this year, 12 have been published in Poetry London 87, Poetry Review 107:1 and Poetry Review 107:2. Three issues of two magazines account for a third of all reviews by critics of colour published since January 2013.
• The proportion of books by poets of colour reviewed drops from 9.6% (47 books) to 8.1% (156 books) in the extended data set. Again, breaking this number down by year: 24 books by poets of colour were reviewed in 2013; 28 in 2014; 31 in 2015; 38 in 2016; 35 so far in 2017.
• The proportion of female critics also drops significantly in the extended data set, from 44.8% to 41.5%. Poetry Ireland Review (31.3% female critics) and PN Review (25.7%) show the greatest disparity.
• Likewise, the proportion of books by female poets reviewed falls from 45.9% to 38.6%. In this case, The Guardian (29.9% of books reviewed are by women), PN Review (28.7%) and Modern Poetry in Translation (20.8%) show the greatest disparity.
• While female critics review men (427 books) and women (475 books) almost evenly, male critics overwhelmingly review other men (660 books to 270 by women).
• Men review significantly fewer books per article (1.69) than women (2.16), consistent across almost all platforms.
• Bloodaxe books have been reviewed 217 times, Faber books 178 times, Carcanet 175, Cape 84, Seren 82, Shearsman 80 and Picador 73. 51 of The Guardian‘s 194 reviews (26.2%) were of Faber books.

Adding only two further years’ worth of data makes a marked difference to the data. On one hand, this indicates rapid change between 2015-17, mostly in positive, inclusive directions; on the other, it should remind us of just how homogeneous this community has been, and how recently.

The tables below show these statistics in full. Note that the second table, in which percentages do not add up to 100, does not include data for anthologies or books with multiple authors.

If you found this useful or informative and would like to help me keep doing it, please have a look at my Patreon. You can pledge as little as $1/month, every pledge is massively helpful. Thanks for reading.

The State of Poetry Criticism

Disclosure: These numbers have been presented in earlier forms at a panel at The Business, organised by Sam Riviere at the University of Edinburgh, and at Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000, a symposium at the University of Oxford. All my thanks to Muireann Crowley for being a sounding board and strengthening this article’s argumentative structure; to the Scottish Poetry Library for keeping a well-stocked and accessible magazine archive; to all folks at the symposium for their questions and inquiries about the project.

The figures cover a period of 24 months from April/Spring 2015 to May 2017 – while they do not account for every poetry review published in these islands, it certainly accounts for some of the most prestigious publishers of criticism, over a substantial period of time. Please note that these numbers do not refer to interviews, features, reports or other prose works, only what each magazine refers to in its contents as reviews.

Edit: Regarding the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, I somehow overlooked Tishani Doshi and Daljit Nagra’s wins in 2006 & 2007 respectively. Sincere apologies to Tishani, Daljit and the Forwards for this error.

Click the images below for a larger version of the data collected for this article.

Data:

Essay: In the past few years, it seems like poetry culture in these islands has been making small positive steps towards greater inclusivity – women of colour won both Forward Prizes in 2015 and 2016, and the 2014 anthology of new black, Asian and minority ethnic poets, Ten: The New Wave, edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf, has proven a successful springboard for its poets, eight out of ten of whom have since published pamphlets or full collections. Literary journals and magazines have been less encouraging, if not downright antagonistic: Vahni Capildeo’s Forward Prize win was met with evidence-free claims of nepotism from Private Eye; TS Eliot Prize winner Sarah Howe was described by her Sunday Times interviewer as having ‘sixth-formy emphasis on her own intelligence’ before admitting he just didn’t understand the work; Oxford professor emeritus Craig Raine accused Claudia Rankine of ‘moral narcissism’ in her Forward Prize-winning book Citizen. Prize culture, at least in the past few years, seems somewhat more advanced in its discourse around work by poets of colour than the critical culture surrounding it.

From this starting point I wanted to investigate a possible disconnect between prize culture and literary review culture. While not all critical responses have been as hostile as those above, the most common response to work by poets of colour has been total silence.

I decided to conduct a basic survey of poetry criticism and prize culture. I identified seven magazines which most regularly print a substantial amount of poetry criticism, and started counting. The questions this research asks are simple: whose poetry is reviewed? and who is commissioned to review it? Those publications are: The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review and Magma. In each case I studied issues dating from April/Spring 2015 to the present day (May 29 2017).

There are obvious limitations on the data I have collected. These figures cover gender and racial/ethnic distribution. They do not cover other intersections of cultural exclusion like class, disability, access to education, or sexuality, and on race and gender they are unsophisticated. For instance, unless a poet or critic identified as non-binary gender in their bio, I could not collect that data.

The racial categories I have used are also unsatisfactorily binary: ‘white’ and ‘people of colour’. The decision to assign a particular category to an individual was based on available biographical information and the individual’s self-description. This reductive binary is also a matter of expedience: so few poets and critics of colour are published that by grouping them together the overwhelming whiteness of British and Irish poetry criticism becomes impossible to ignore.

Finally, one additional side note on terminology: ‘articles’ refers to a full piece by a critic, which may criticise more than one book. “Critic Z reviews Poet A, Poet B and Poet C”, for example, is one article by one critic covering three books by three poets. You may also notice that in the final columns some of the percentages don’t add up to a hundred – this was when anthologies were being reviewed.

Let’s start by looking at race. The 2011 census reported that people self-identifying as black, Asian or minority ethnicity comprised 12.9% of the total UK population, 5.7% in Ireland. While I do not believe that simply meeting this arbitrary quota will necessarily produce radical change within poetry culture, it is, at the very least, a useful, basic benchmark for what representative inclusion might look like on a purely statistical level.

Of all seven magazines, only Poetry London and The Poetry Review meet this most basic figure. In this data set, only twenty articles were written by just twelve critics of colour. For comparison, 18 articles were written by white critics named David, and 39 articles were written by white women named Katherine. It’s worth noting, however, that women aren’t being adequately represented either.

The Guardian: until the past few weeks, in which Kate Kellaway reviewed Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Ben Wilkinson reviewed Daljit Nagra’s British Museum, The Guardian had not published a review of a poet of colour in four hundred and forty six days, when Sandeep Parmar reviewed Vahni Capildeo’s Forward Prize-winning Measures of Expatriation on February 19 2016. Incidentally, Parmar’s article was also the last time The Guardian published a review by a critic of colour, a run which is currently ongoing at four hundred and sixty-five days. It is also the first time The Guardian has reviewed a poet of colour who has not won a national prize since Kellaway covered Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds on November 23 2014. You’ll remember Woolf as the editor of Ten: The New Wave. For reference, the last time this happened for a white poet was two weeks ago, when Nicholas Lezard reviewed Bethany W Pope.

PN Review’s poor showing of just ten reviews of books by poets of colour is somewhat misleading. Of these ten, five were pamphlets covered in Alison Brackenbury’s round-up articles, in which each book is lucky to receive more than a few sentences of critical attention. Of the five full collections, only one was given its own solo review, Alex Wong’s Poems Without Irony, published by Carcanet, where PN Review editor Michael Schmidt works as Publisher. In two years’ worth of criticism – 138 articles totalling around 140,000 words, at a conservative estimate – PN Review dedicated roughly 2,500 words to poets of colour, about 1.5% of its review space.

The Poetry Review boasts some relatively positive statistics. A major factor in these unusually high numbers is Kayo Chingonyi. Chingonyi is a British-Zambian poet and critic who co-edited the Autumn 2016 issue of The Poetry Review, commissioning 2 of its seven total critics of colour, and 7 of its 23 reviews of poets of colour; in the following issue, Chingonyi himself reviewed two more poets of colour. Across the board, Chingonyi wrote or comissioned 30% of all articles by people of colour in the UK and Ireland in the past two years. This is an unreasonable burden to place on one individual.

Poetry London’s positive statistics are also a result of a temporary change in editorship. The Summer 2017 issue, published last week, was edited by Martha Kapos and Sam Buchan-Watts, and featured five reviews by critics of colour, and reviews of nine books by poets of colour; this single issue accounts for 38% of Poetry London‘s reviews by critics of colour in the past two years, and 36% of its reviews of poets of colour.

It’s also worth noting that the twelve critics of colour who did achieve publication are exceptionally qualified: these writers have a disproportionately high number of literary prizes, lectureships, editorships, academic and artistic residencies behind them for their career stage. Dzifa Benson’s background offers a small variation on this trend: her residencies at Tate Britain, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Institute of Contemporary Arts were for performance theatre, not poetry. Again, she was commissioned by Kayo Chingonyi. It is an observable fact that white editors do not open doors for critics of colour unless they have already been institutionally verified several times over.

This is what I mean when I say just hitting quotas is not enough. A quota will not tell you when poets of colour are included as an afterthought or a token gesture. It will not ensure that the attention given to poets of colour is in any way a sustained, committed endeavour. If people of colour are not included at vital, decision-making positions, the systematic exclusion of people of colour in poetry criticism will not change, not least because white critics and editors are not sharing the burden of responsibility.

On gender, things are relatively encouraging. Aside from the PN Review and Poetry Ireland Review, most publications are approaching a basic level of gender parity, with Poetry Wales, Poetry Review and The Guardian leaning marginally in favour of female critics. All three are edited by women, and the Poetry Review‘s editorial practice has changed markedly since Emily Berry’s tenure began last year. In almost every case, however, female critics review more books per article than their male counterparts, and men disproportionately review other men.

As a poetry critic, being given space to review a single book is a chance to make a significant contribution to a critical conversation. These reviews are overwhelmingly commissioned to men, a total of 157 compared to just 72 by women across all platforms. Even more intriguingly, while women review male and female poets about equally (33 women to 34 men, with 5 anthologies), men almost exclusively review other men, by 128 to 22. Simply put, male critics and poets alike are routinely given more space and prestige than their female colleagues.

This is most starkly illustrated by Alison Brackenbury’s role as resident pamphlet reviewer at PN Review, where she accounts for ten of the thirty-five total articles by women and seventy of the one hundred books reviewed by a female critic. There is a gendered labour gap at work at the magazine which aptly matches its apathy towards poets of colour. PN Review is by white men, for white men.

At the outset of this paper I mentioned how recent victories for poets of colour might be seen as a sign of positive change. It is, however, vital to put these results into historical context. I studied four major poetry prizes: The Forward Prize (established 1992); The TS Eliot Prize (established 1993); The Costa Prize (formerly the Whitbread Prize, which has been running a poetry award since 1985); and the Ted Hughes Prize (established 2009). To give an idea of the resources awarded by each: the TS Eliot awards £20,000 to its winner; The Forward Prize £10,000 for Best Collection and £5,000 for Best First Collection; the Costa Prize awards £5,000 with a possible £30,000 if the book also wins Book of the Year; the Ted Hughes Prize awards £5,000.

The questions this data set asked were also very simple: who is shortlisted for these prizes, and who wins them?

Only the newly created Ted Hughes Prize has awarded more women than men, by 6 to 2, and no poet of colour has ever won.

Between 1985 and 2000, the Costa Prize was won only once by a woman, Carol Ann Duffy in 1993. Jane Yeh was the first poet of colour whose work featured on the shortlist in 2005, its twenty-first year. In its thirty-one year history, no poet of colour has ever won the Costa Prize.

In its twenty-four years, the TS Eliot Prize has been won only twice by poets of colour, and only seven times by female poets. Its first eight winners were white men, and Derek Walcott was the first poet of colour to win, in the 18^th year of the prize’s operation.

In a similar vein, only three of the first twenty Forward Prize winners were women, and only in 2014, its twenty-third year, was the prize awarded to a poet of colour, Kei Miller. The Forward Prize for Best First Collection is slightly different, in that Kwame Dawes won in 1994. Between 1995 and 2004, the First Collection Prize had all-white shortlists until Jane Yeh was shortlisted in 2005.

It may also be worth noting that of the ten poets of colour to have won one of these five prizes, only three self-define as British: Daljit Nagra, Mona Arshi and Sarah Howe, both of whom won their prizes in 2015.

Since 1985, thirty poets of colour have been shortlisted for awards a total of forty-one times, with ten wins. To put this into context, in the same time period six white male poets – namely, Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Robin Robertson and David Harsent – account for fifty-three shortlistings and twenty-one wins. Poets of colour were also disproportionately awarded the Forward Best First Collection, twelve out of the total of forty-one shortlistings and five of ten wins.

If encouragement can be taken anywhere, it is in the fact that of these forty-one shortlistings, twenty-two of them came in the past four years; while that does indeed mean that in the twenty-seven years from 1985 to 2012 only nineteen poets of colour were shortlisted for anything, it does suggest things are changing. If we take data from only the years 2013-2016, the percentage of poets of colour shortlisted rises to 18.6, and a remarkable 30% of all winners; likewise, the gender proportion is flipped, with 54.2% of female shortlistees and 55% of winners.

The idea that poetry prizes might be awarded to women is a relatively new one; that people of colour might also be rewarded for their work is newer still, and it is too early to say whether these changes mark a meaningful departure from the dominance of white male poets. Without a concordant commitment to the hiring of critics of colour and the reviewing of poets of colour, these islands lack the diverse critical culture necessary to understand in complex or nuanced terms the work of poets of colour. I fear that after these few positive years we – white critics and scholars – may consider the job done and turn a blind eye to the 100% white editors commissioning 96% white critics to write about 91% white poets. Prizes are a proven, if limited, antidote: of the eighty-five books by poets of colour reviewed in the featured data set, twenty-one were by prizewinners; indeed in The Guardian’s case, this is all but the only guarantee of critical attention.

As Sandeep Parmar notes in her seminal essay ‘Not A British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK’: ‘Mechanisms in place systematically reward poets of color who conform to particular modes of self-foreignizing, leaving the white voice of mainstream and avant-garde poetries in the United Kingdom intact and untroubled by the difficult responsibilities attached to both racism and nationalism.’ Kate Kellaway’s review of Ocean Vuong, for example, invokes troubling cultural and racial clichés and stereotypes by introducing the poet as ‘born on a rice farm’ in her first sentence, and indebted to a white male mentor, Ben Lerner, in her second. This impulse to deliberately other poets of colour is precisely why the dire lack of critics of colour is such an urgent issue.

Earlier I mentioned the backlash against poets of colour in the literary press; when white male poet Jacob Polley won the TS Eliot prize this year, not only was there a distinct lack of outrage, The Guardian reviewed his collection, featured ‘Every Creeping Thing’ as Poem of the Day, and commissioned him three times to talk about his life and work, with such softball questions as ‘One review described what Polley does as a calling, “a kind of secular transubstantiation”. Would he agree?’ Where poets of colour like Vuong and Sarah Howe have orientalising narratives imposed upon them, white poets are commissioned to write their own stories on national platforms.

The scholar Sara Ahmed notes in the conclusion of her book On Being Included: ‘When a category allows us to pass into the world, we might not notice that we inhabit that category. When we are stopped or held up by how we inhabit what we inhabit, then the terms of habitation are revealed to us.’ As white poets, critics and scholars, we must acknowledge how centralising and normalising whiteness makes our creative communities exclusive by design. We must demand not just token inclusion of poets and critics of colour but that they be given equal space, resources and agency to direct critical and creative discourses. In short, writers of colour should not be compelled to spend their careers talking about nothing but race.

The work of a poetry book is only partly within its covers; the conversation, argument or statement it proposes is maintained or denied by the attendant critical community. In malicious hands, a book may be mocked or dismissed or simply ignored if that book does not behave itself as the reader demands, if it does not reinforce a given critic’s prejudices. It doesn’t take much searching to find reviews that misread or misrepresent a book’s intentions, intentionally or otherwise, coercing it into a state of palatability, or silence.

Even a preliminary study of British and Irish poetry magazines and prizes shows how ingrained is the culture of structural racism and misogyny. I hope these figures may be useful, and that knowing the true nature of our community is the first step toward changing it. Thank you for reading.

PS: At the time of writing, the figures I am working from are in a somewhat scrappy form; I am working to make this project into a fully searchable database using Google spreadsheets; this process is turning up small discrepancies in the raw data (mostly regarding anthologies and pamphlets), and once I have complete statistics I will update this article. I also plan on keeping these facts regularly updated, and investigating up to five years’ worth of material for a clearer view of poetry criticism’s recent history in these islands, perhaps expanding the number of featured platforms.

If you enjoyed this and would like to help me keep doing it, please have a look at my Patreon. You can pledge as little as $1/month, every pledge is massively helpful. Thanks for reading.

On Warsan Shire, Peter Riley and Poetry Criticism

Last week, Beyoncé released Lemonade, an hour-long multi-genre piece made by leading artists in film, music and poetry. London Young Laureate Warsan Shire’s poems “For Women Who Are Difficult To Love”, “The unbearable weight of staying (the end of the relationship)” and “Nail Technician as Palm Reader” are all adapted as interludes between songs. On the back of this peerless good news, Inua Ellams spoke about Shire’s permanent relocation to the United States, finding poetry culture in Britain hostile to her and her work (Pascale Petit, Shire’s mentor in The Complete Works, mentioned on Facebook how Shire had become frustrated with with the ‘struggle against the (white) grain’). Ellams spoke on Twitter (the whole thread is vital reading) about her epochal collaboration in Lemonade:

“My homegirl Warsan Shire just did a thing with Beyonce. An incredible thing and the only thing I am surprised about is myself response:

For not seeing it coming. It was inevitable. It only happened because Warsan left these shores.

She moved to where her voice would be included, taken for what it is, for the brilliance it is and shared exponentially.

If you disagree, consider this: even Beyonce could not have existed in Britain. The Music industry would not have supported her talent.

To the poets of colour reading this… follow Warsan’s lead. I’m not saying leave Britain…

… but find environments that are welcoming to the poetry you create, to what you write and the way you write them.

Most of us come from oral traditions. We tend to write accordingly. Most of our concerns are “real shit”.

Most of our shit references other real shit. Most of the shit we reference is found in “World literature” dusty sections of book shops…

…so when we pack our real shit with our deep shit, that nuance and intertextuality, the weight of its importance… isn’t even recognised.

Try and find spaces that welcome your poetry. And those spaces might not be in the poetry world.”

Shire is an incredible talent and we weren’t good enough to accept her. We couldn’t read her work the way it deserved to be read and she was compelled to find a place that would.

Poetry in these islands is not a billion dollar industry. The culture of entitlement and resentment towards positive change, however, does not reflect poetry’s reputation or self-image as unique, progressive, liberal, free-thinking. After a winter in which Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade and Mona Arshi’s Small Hands had the quality of their work recognised and rewarded (Rankine and Howe being the first women of colour to win their respective prizes), there was a backlash from upset, barely rational white men clutching at their degrees and lamenting the state of the union. Those complaints rested, predictably, on extra-literary matters of appearance, education, publishing ‘fads’, a disappointing narrow-mindedness about what ‘poetry’ might mean, anything but the work. A few weeks ago, Peter Riley began his review of Vahni Capildeo’s excellent Measures of Expatriation by venting spleen about “identity politics” (scare quotes his), how having an ‘identity’:

“seems to mean that any possibilities a poem might have of contacting existential realities is disallowed; the poem must arise directly from personal experience (standard practice in modern poetry anyway) and stay there.”

Riley very likely means well. He begins this part of his essay by quoting Capildeo’s own frustrations about feeling the expectation to perform her otherness by an extremely white publishing industry:

“I found that marketing and identity politics were combining to crush, like in the Star Wars trash compactor, the voice, the voice on the page, the body, the history… You had to choose, you had to be a sort of documentary witness wheeled around and exposing your wounds in the market place.”

But in trying to defend Capildeo from harmful stereotypes, he throws digs at poets for whom personal experience (their own or their peers’) is the urgent, beating heart of their work. His praise for Capildeo noticeably centres around not making too conspicuous a fuss about one’s suffering or marginalisation, while condemning unnamed others for drawing attention to it. Riley’s complaint that, ‘the poem must arise directly from personal experience’, is immediately reneged, arguing that ‘its admissibility depends not on experience itself, but on participation in a group and thereby involved in cultural conflict’. Riley does not specify who is performing the admission, which poet, group or conflict is being indecently referenced, or what the consequences are for poets who refuse to conform to these standards. His argument is a rorschach blot, empty of substance and ready for the reader to insert the ‘identity’ whose visibility in contemporary poetry they most resent.

In “In AnOther’s Pocket: The Address of the “Pocket Epic” in Postmodern Black British Poetry”, Romana Huk writes:

“in current poetic projects, there is little reckoning of how the identificatory self is still at work, often with a nationalistic sub-project powering epic desire; the “other” still gets othered, if at the hands of more and more sophisticated theories of reading.”

Huk and Capildeo are, I think, talking about similar processes. Writing by poets of colour can no longer be entirely ignored by white readers; what can be done, by a culture still deeply uncomfortable with writing that does not recognise canon-endorsed standards of quality control, is corralling it into the kind of self-othering box that Capildeo denounces. Inclusion with strings attached is exclusion by another name, and Riley is not wrong to highlight the problem. The failure is in his sudden pivot to declare that actually, it’s about ethics in poetry prize judging:

“A glance at the big prize-winning results this season shows immediately how these ethics have been taken on wholesale by the establishment and now dominate popular perception of poetry’s function — a pre-existing function defined and formulated outside poetry to which it is now expected to conform. The basis of judgement shifted from aesthetic to moral very quickly.”

Poetry has few ‘big prizes’ and few winners. He is subtweeting Rankine, who beat Riley to the Forward Prize with a book that is both aesthetically unique and morally challenging; I wrote about it a while back if you’re curious, and if you’re even more curious you could read what black critics like Shaelyn Smith and Holly Bass thought about it. Riley’s objection is that judgement has shifted from the ‘aesthetic’ to the ‘moral’; these terms are difficult to define and deserve far more careful unpacking than Riley offers. A cynical reader might guess he means the lyric poetry supported by the canon and reified by generations of elite readers has, for once, been deemed second best to an experimental form written by a poet for whom the canon has little time. As Ellams notes, black poets engage deeply with poetic traditions, just not those valued by the British critical mainstream; refusing to acknowledge the value of alternative routes to poetic achievement is a powerful means of excluding black writing from positions of cultural influence. To put it bluntly, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t make it bad; it’s your job as a critic to learn.

Back in Riley’s essay, put-upon aesthetic poets are ‘now expected to conform’ to these moral standards; a strange concern for a poet who very clearly expresses contemporary moral concerns in his work. Riley employs wounded tones more commonly modelled by Piers Morgan, confusing criticism of his opinions with a threat to his freedom of expression; like Oliver Thring’s inability to acknowledge intelligence that does not come in his own image; like Craig Raine’s abysmal, Oxford-don-knows-best reading of Citizen, which he memorably dismissed as ‘moral narcissism’. It is an insult to Rankine’s achievement to dismiss it as ‘parad[ing] the wound’, which Riley praises Capildeo for refusing. His commendation of Capildeo’s work is deeply compromised by first deploying it as a weapon against other poets whose own work has been marginalised by aggressively careless white readers.

Poetry in the UK is making tiny, positive steps towards a more complex vocabulary with which to discuss race, sexuality, gender, mental health, income and other inequalities, but at a price. The backlash in poetry is not (as with video games’ harassment campaigns) from trollish men on 4chan with free time and a grudge against those whose inclusion and success they cannot abide, but from well-read men in well-regarded periodicals with notably similar grudges. Even framed as a battle for poetry’s heart, Riley’s critique is hamstrung by his refusal to acknowledge the racial inequalities that force poetry-as-witness, poetry-as-‘moral’ to be a function of survival; Citizen explicitly frames itself as a response to external threats to the wellbeing of black people in America. In an interview with Africa in Words, Shire’s approach to memory and witness is explicitly one of preservation, both of the self and the ‘history or the global ranges of perception’ Riley claims are under threat in British poetry:

“it’s being able to tell the stories of those people, especially refugees and immigrants, that otherwise wouldn’t be told, or they’ll be told really inaccurately. And I don’t want to write victims, or martyrs, or vacuous stereotypes. […] my family are really amazing – they’ll tell me, ‘I have a new story for you’, and I’ll get my Dictaphone and record it, so I can stay as true as possible to the story before I make it into a poem.”

To labour the point, well-respected literary white men don’t need recording equipment to keep their stories alive. Suggesting that such poetry sacrifices its aesthetic-ness is a deeply conservative gesture, both artistically and politically, one that figures the white male poet as the normal, central, rightful inheritor and the black woman poet as interloper, over-promoted, aesthetically invalid.

I’m acutely aware that while making these criticisms, my whiteness etc more or less means that my place in this community is safe come what may. I’m also aware that in all my previous encounters with radical thinking in other forms of art, it’s not cishetero white men leading the way. If we want art that leads us to better ways of thinking about each other, if we believe that poetry does make something happen (more than awards, tenure and hardback Collecteds), that it is a function of the heart and soul (whatever that means) as well as meter and rhyme, we must listen to those who are most vulnerable to the violence our culture has been designed to carry out, and from which we benefit so richly. That means changing how we read, how we write, questioning how much space and praise we assume to be our birthright. It will take a lot of work, and a lot of what will look like giving away what is ours to take, but if we can make a culture in which the next Warsan Shire can feel at home, welcomed, valued, in charge, it’ll be worth it.

Further Reading: Inua Ellams on Twitter

Shaelyn Smith on Citizen at TheRumpus

Holly Bass on Citizen in The New York Times

Interview with Warsan Shire at Africa in Words

Profile on Warsan Shire in The New Yorker

‘Decolonise, not Diversify’ by Khavita Bhanot at Media Diversified

‘Responses to a Tantric Poetics’ by Nisha Ramayya at datableed