I am puzzled why you think experimental poetry is 'most exclusive'. I don't think this was the case with experimental poetry in London from the 1960s onwards. My sense is that this has been relatively open ... I have argued this with my colleagues involved in the up-coming London conference. As a magazine editor in the 1970s, I know that the magazine I co-edited had a consciously anti-sexist, anti-racist and international outlook. We tried to publish Linton Kwesi Johnson (but he turned us down), and (pre-internet) we had no sense of the ethnicity of a number if our US contributors. At the time, I was also collaborating on translating contemporary Bengali poetry into English ...
I would also like to nudge that term 'privileged white person'. I know that whiteness is systemically privileged in the UK, but there seems a blurring in this phrase of truly privileged white persons (like our current government with its cabinet of multimillionaires) and more marginalised white people (like 60s working-class kids who identified with the music of black Americans) ... All this is very tentatively suggested.
Robert
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From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: 08 January 2016 15:05
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Subject: Re: "The white privilege of British poetry is getting worse"
I'd expect those bookshelf proportions are typical of many of us here. I want to praise your honesty Tim, but to share mine I do feel a sort of uneasiness about the usefulness, or even the appropriateness, of discussing this topic within a forum that as I suppose is virtually all-white. I like to read Sandeep Parmar on the topic, but not you or me.
Your bookshelves surely reflect the history that modernism and its offshoots are in their origins the creation of an urban intelligentsia in countries with already-sophisticated literatures - I don't mean that as a value judgment, I just mean that modernism responded self-consciously to classicism, realism, romanticism etc. So it's spread from Paris and NY to Finland to Latin America to Korea and China... and it's still rippling out, and the colour of western poetry bookshelves will change. (Experimental poetry, as it seems to me, lagging a long way behind mainstream poetry or mainstream novels.)
I think it's at least comprehensible that many brilliant young writers from non-white cultures might not elect to tread a path that's both obscure and indelibly tainted with the white predation of its formative era. Why would they? The terms of polite literature itself, the way it's developed, are profoundly open to question; even a privileged white person can see that. And surely experimental poetry, for all its yearning for non-complicit wildness (I'm thinking of Philip Rahv's pretty offensive idea of "redskin" poetry), is in many eyes every bit a department of polite literature, in some ways the most entrenched (because most exclusive) of the whole lot.
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