Been reading this discussion with interest. I wonder if the problem is less
one of funding bodies dealing in crude identity politics than an
overemphasis on print publication. Asking *publishers* to find poets to
fill particular gaps (whether these are age-, gender-, race- or class-based)
seems to me to be beginning at the wrong end of things, and likely to
compound the problem of stereotyping in that publishers pressured to publish
poets on the grounds of identity are bound, at least sometimes, to reach for
the nearest available Identikit to fulfil a target -- especially if the
publisher concerned is ill-informed about the particular poetic demographic
he or she's supposed to be promoting. (An analogy with a university
access-widening programme that I was involved with as a student suggests
itself: the programme was itself misconceived, in that it set out to widen
access by "challenging" potential students' "misconceptions" about the
institution. In fact, those "misconceptions" by exasperated comprehensive
school pupils and their teachers were often pretty accurate: the university
could be (was not always) bloody racist and sexist and snobbish.) At the
same time, from my experience, which is all I can really speak from,
interest in non-print forms of poetic expression (the term "performance
poetry" seems to need a lot of definition which I'm not sure I'm qualified
to do, but I'm talking about hip-hop poetry, other kinds of collaborations
with musicians, poetry whose medium is the CD or DVD rather than the book,
poetry that "doesn't work on the page", highly politicised poetry, poetry
which requires an audience to be present, heckling maybe, rather than
privately and quietly reading, amongst other things) seems to be higher
among non-white poets and non-white audiences than among their white
counterparts. That's not to say there are no black Bernsteins out there or
that print and non-print poetries are ever mutually exclusive, it's just
that the emphasis of this discussion seems to be on print as a desiderata,
the idea that a printed collection is the sign of a poet having made it.
What I was wondering, really, is whether that is just a feature of this
discussion because it grew out of a publisher's tussle with a funding body,
or whether arts funding as it applies to poetry is generally too
print-focused. Or, more precisely, maybe, it pays a lot of lip-service to
performance, but implicitly privileges print?
Best,
Kit
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