Tony, that sounds ok in theory but in practice how would it work? Would the poets you don’t take seriously
(“Ms McNish and Ms Kaur are doing something not very serious as far as I can see.”) like to be classified as “non-serious poets” etc. I think all this talk of branding and classification is a bit silly.





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Tony Frazer wrote:

No, David. I think you misconstrued my original point:

As in fiction, with Dan Brown not being on the Literary Fiction shelf (or indeed SF, or chick-lit, or crime), so it could be argued that there are different kinds of poetry, some of which are literary, or “serious" (whether avant, or mainstream, or whatever labels we’re using), and some of which are plainly not. Ms McNish and Ms Kaur are doing something not very serious as far as I can see. In case you’re wondering, I picked up a Kaur volume in a bookshop and read a few a pages here and there; the McNish volume from Picador is visible though Amazon’s peak-inside mechanism for a few pages. I assume this selection does not misrepresent her. I’m deliberately not including Kate Tempest amongst the targets, as she seems to me to be a different kind of writer. I think she writes very poor stuff for the page, but it seems to work “live”. I’m not at all sure one should be measuring her work on the same spectrum, but that’s beside the point, especially when she gets printed and published on big-press poetry lists. I even found her in German translation at amazon.de when I was looking for something else.

SO, perhaps flogging a dead horse here, I’m saying there’s serious poetry and unserious poetry. And perhaps we shouldn’t be comparing, or shelving, the latter with the former, even when Picador slaps a Picador Poetry label on Hollie McNish’s Plum volume.

Perhaps we should encourage Waterstone’s to have a poetry shelf, and a shit-poetry shelf. One could have great fun going in and moving books from one shelf to the other.

Tony