David Bircumshaw writes:
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I live 100 miles from London. An hour and a bit on the train. Therefore I am
a 'provincial'. The disproportionality of resources available in London in
relation to the rest of the country is of the nature of an extreme case, as
is the accompanying distortion of the country's cultural-psychological map.
But, this is a big 'but', many parts of London itself are just as distant
from the Grand Centre as say Rotherham is.
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I'm not so sure about this, at least as far as poetry is concerned. It is
certainly true of the wider publishing and media scene (and of course most
other aspects of British culture). The big publishers are in London, but
poetry is too commercially insignificant for most of them these days. I
would have thought the majority of poetry books published in the UK are from
provincial firms: Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Seren etc. For magazines, it's Poetry
London, London Magazine, Agenda, Poetry Review against PN Review, Stand, The
Rialto, Poetry Wales etc - again, London does well but the provinces don't
seem to be neglected. Certainly there are plenty of poetry events in London,
but what would you expect? There's plenty of everything - it's a big city.
I've always found enough going on in Cardiff and the south of England. I
remember writing to Flambard and being told they couldn't publish me because
I wasn't from the north-east (a condition of their funding was that a
certain percentage of their poets had to be local). I don't think poets from
more prosperous parts of the country can take advantage of this kind of
handicapping. I speak as a non-Londoner, though I too am near enough to take
a daytrip there from time to time. Shame Roddy Lumsden, who does live in
London, isn't on this list any more. He's always touchy about any suggestion
that he belongs to a metropolitan establishment (see his argument on Martin
Blyth's website http://martinblyth.co.uk), and I always used to enjoy the
resultant rhetoric.
Best wishes,
Matthew Francis
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