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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  1998

BRITISH-IRISH-POETS 1998

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Subject:

BC

From:

[log in to unmask] (Peter Riley)

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask] (Peter Riley)

Date:

Wed, 28 Oct 1998 13:04:55 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (51 lines)

The British Council isn't a quango by the way, I shouldn't have titled it
thus, it's simply an institution

I don't think it's to do with kinds of poetry, and certainly not a
them-and-us.   It's to do with commerce, it's state manipulation of the
market.  It's like taking some national industry, say refrigerators, and
picking on some small producer in Stevenage called Freezo,  and heaping
public money on that business, promoting its products all over the world,
paying its transport costs, wining and dining its directors...  and saying
to the world, "Freezo is the British refrigerator scene." In real commerce
it would be unthinkable, it would be a national scandal.  I don't know any
reason why poets should be treated any differently from refrigerators,
myself.

It is not the modernists who are disadvantaged by BC's policy in poetry,
it's almost everybody who's engaged in poetry, including a lot of people
who write very much along the lines of what they do promote but for some
reason never get the windfall.  As Doug says, the process is more or less
haphazard --in a typically British way authorities are set up who have no
training in the subject and/or  no real interest in it and their remit is
to promote it using public funds. It's parallel to the booming management
field generally and its history relates to administrative complications
which have been the cause of a lot of the historical injustices in other
parts of the world we have been talking about recently (rather than
"Britain" and least of all "The British" being held respsonsible.) It's our
standard anti-democracy.  (But democracy, isn't, on the whole, what the
poetical radicals want either).

Naturally these promoters take the easiest route and follow a set agenda
based on the repute of formerly creative poetry publishers such as Faber,
forming a self-perpetuating injustice machine.

But such things can change. The Arts Council used to be much more like this
than it now is, in fact some of the Regional Arts Boards are now behaving
in a completely different way and are striving to assist in ways which
actually are helpful right across the board.  I don't know what pressures
affected that change, that's why I raised the whole subject really -- I
feel that pressures effectively can be brought to bear, but I don't know
how or whence.  I happen also to know that there are in fact people within
the BC literature department who know a lot about modern poetry and are
sympathetic to a wide variety of possibilities within it, which just makes
it all the more mysterious.


/PR




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