I've been sent two copies of The Atlanta Review, (Georgia USA) volume IV
No.2, the special "Great Britain" issue.  guest edited by N.S.Thompson of
Oxford.  It is advertised as "a brilliant constellation of Britain's
contemporary poets."   It contains just about all the highly promoted
young poets that the avant-garde love to hate: Armitage, Cope, Fanthorpe,
Fuller, Greenlaw, Harrison, Maxwell, Motion, Paterson, Duhig, , McDonald,
Sansom......  (Sean O'Brien and a few others are strangely absent).  Also
Kwesi Johnson and Zephaniah.
There is some very skilful and careful writing in it, some quite honest and
above all modest meditational writing, usually pretty tight-lipped.    The
proportion of poems by black writers is  6 percent, the same as that by
Scottish poets. That of poems by women is 30 percent. Of Northern Irish  3
percent I think, Welsh ditto. Of regional poets I reckon 12 or 15 percent.
It seems that in spite of all the noise to the contrary, the London-Oxford
axis is still absolutely where it's at in this market.

None of this need concern us here very much, Except that with it comes an
editorial notification saying,---- that the selection has been adjudged
***so outstanding, and so broadly representative of Britain's current
literarary scene, that the British Council will be distributing it
worldwide.***

This is the only bit that need raise any emotion aton this list, whether of
resentment or alarm or resigned melancholia or destroying the furniture or
whatever. Because the BC is a public body using public money which we all
contribute towards, and it is blatently promoting a sectional market all
over the world in defiance, as I see it, of actual public taste or even
academic recommendation. It is actually quite close to being an Old Boy
(Girl) network. One keeps thinking that this sort thing will increasingly
become a thing of the past, and indeed the activities of regional Arts
Councils in this country over recent years encourages such a prospect quite
strongly, but BC activity is of a different kind altogether.

It seems to me, though I may be wrong, that there are no channels of
protest  available, and that the BC is completely unanswerable., that there
would be no point whatsoever in writing anywhere, to the BC, the TLS, the
Queen Mother or God, no notice would be taken whatsoever if twenty thousand
people wrote daily, is my impression.  It's a complete fix. Am I right
about this? Does anybody think there is any point in doing anything but
ignore this phenomenon?

I'm not asking this for the sake of avant-gardery, crypto-poetry,
performance poetry etc.. I'm asking it also for the sake of what's
happening in poetry in Scotland, in Wales, in the North-East, in Northern
Ireland, and in black poetry and post-colonial poetry in  general -- even
Hull.  Yes, even Hull is made to feel marginalised, so concentrated is the
London-Oxford grip which the BC so ruthlessly promotes. And for the right
of anyone to feel free to enter poetry in their own lights without this
kind of prolonged institutionalised cornering hanging over their heads.
And for the sake of what the hell the rest of the world thinks of us.


Here's the ending  if Wendy Cope's poem BORING, from this collection----

        I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
        To go on and on being boring.




/PR




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