202

Claire Booker

Poetry – a time of change in the UK

Poetry faces many challenges in the UK. Where once it was read by the majority of educated people, it is now largely read by poets and their friends. There are even serious plans to make poetry an optional element in the GCSE English Literature exam. School is where many of us started reading (and writing) poetry. How many children will continue to do so in the future if poetry is seen as an option, not an essential of education? Poetry is the deepest, innermost expression of the spirit. It has the power to change the course of the world, not least of all, by changing us as individuals. It is, and should be, available to all. As George Sand said in 1851 – “He who draws noble delights from poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.”

About 3% of the adult population of England currently writes poetry, according to a 2016 survey. That equates to about the same number of people who attend contemporary dance, and a little fewer than those who go to the Opera. Contemporary poetry is very much a minority interest within an already limited poetry-reading public. A recent poll revealed Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ to be the most popular poem in England. How very different, it seems, to Bangladesh. When I visited in 2019, at the invitation of the International Poets Summit, I was

struck by how passionate so many people were about poetry. Bangla created a nation; Rabindranath Tagor is a hero known by all. It was so refreshing to be part of something that clearly truly mattered to people in all walks of life. In the UK, print-runs for poetry publications and literary magazines are measured in the hundreds, not thousands. Independent bookshops have been slowly going out of business, which means fewer places for poetry to be displayed and sold. Most poetry publishers are relieved if they break even. But all is not lost. The restrictions imposed by Covid-19, have brought about some interesting changes in perspective. Many people have been forced to live a more contemplative life, and poetry is being noticed again – within the pages of books, on-line and on television and radio.

There is a relatively healthy spoken word scene in the UK (currently largely on-line because of Covid restrictions). Such fantastic poets as Kate Tempest and Benjamin Zephaniah have a significant fan base, and can fill large venues. Poetry has also started occasionally appear in TV adverts, with a well-known building society using the poet Jo Bell and her words on prime time TV. Performance poetry (which tends to use easier syntax and feature repetition) goes hand in hand with a culture of stand-up comedy, which now dominates important events such as The Edinburgh Festival. Many song lyrics, of course, can be thought of as poetry, although usually they’re more limited in their scale and scope. For many people, the words of a pop song, are their primary, and often, only experience of poetry. There are interesting developments too, in who is writing poetry. The 2016 Taking Part survey revealed that in England poets tended to be disproportionately young, female or from the gay community. A significant number of successful British poets have parents who weren’t born in the UK – Imtiaz Dharker, Dalit Nagra, John Agard, Richard Scott and Zaffar Kunial to name but a few.

Magma (an important UK Poetry magazine) recently dedicated a whole issue to publishing poetry by, or about, deaf people, and has earmarked an issue for 2022, which will exclusively showcase work by members of the black and ethnic minority communities. It has been a very tough time for literary magazines which rely on funding from The Arts Council of England to survive. The pandemic has certainly not helped. The Government does not priorities the arts. Many theatres have closed probably permanently, and the Arts Council is woefully short of funding, and so must spread itself too thinly across all the arts. However, paper and books are not the only way for poetry to exist and thrive. Its online and social media popularity is growing. Visitors to the National Poetry Day’s website have doubled, year on year. Instagram alone featured 19 million posts (in 2019) using the hashtag #poetry. Insta-poets such as Nikita Gill are using social media intelligently, bringing poetry to a broader audience. You can now study creative writing at increasing numbers of British universities. Many of my poetry colleagues hold Masters degrees in Creative Writing, some even hold Doctorates. Gone are the days when a poet like Dylan Thomas left school at 16 with no qualifications except English, not to mention William Shakespeare who left school even younger! The trend towards making poetry-writing an academic subject has been around since 1970 when the University of East Anglia first offered a Masters Degree in Creative Writing. In 1987, it offered the first Doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing. These academic courses have greatly increased the number of people writing and submitting poetry for publication. At the same time, the creative writing courses have helped make available paid work for poets, who can now become Professors, on proper salaries. Other poets can make a living running workshops (sometimes over several days or weeks) teaching aspiring poets their craft.

Of course there are dangers, as well as benefits, to poetry becoming closely tied in with universities. There can be pressure to conform to a certain kind of poetry writing, perhaps one that is unnecessarily complex or pretentious, and hard for anyone to enjoy except another poet with a doctorate. There are fads in poetry, and it can be interesting to watch a particular word do the rounds of the literary world, only to disappear when the word becomes unfashionable. ‘Petrichor’ is currently in the ascendency, ‘thrum’ and ‘oubliette’ slowly becoming cliché. Professional poets (even the most successful) cannot make a living in the way that novelists and film/television writers can. Even the Poet Laureate (currently Simon Armitage) only gets paid a stipend of £6,000 a year. A few years ago, he went on a spontaneous tour of England, using only the money he could raise from impromptu recitals in pubs and small venues to pay for his food and accommodation. He survived (just!) and some excellent poems came out of it.

Books continue to be big business in Britain. In 2014, UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour. Which means Britain published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world (that year). According to a new report from the International Publishers Association (IPA), UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles that year. But of those, fewer than a thousand were poetry collections. You can probably triple that, if you count self-published poetry collections. These days, self-publishing is extremely easy and inexpensive, and people sell their own poetry collections via Amazon and other outlets.

Another trend that has developed in Britain more recently, is the growth of poetry competitions. There are annually more than 12,000 entries for the National Poetry Competition – as well as small local competitions where perhaps only 200 people enter. Competitions are increasingly being used by literary magazines and literary organisations to boost their funds. Because English is a first language to millions of non-UK residents, and a highly proficient second language to hundreds of millions more – UK

Poetry competitions draw in talent from around the world. It is quite common to see American and Indian poets among the winners of major UK competition. UK based international festivals such as StanZa in St Andrews, Scotland, welcomes international poets to a great four days of poetry in March each year, where vital poetic exchanges occur between poets of different countries and traditions. Smaller UK publishers are coming into their own, in a democratisation of poetry publishing which means more poets are able to be published. These small publishers have marvellous names, such as ‘Penned in the Margins’, ‘HappenStance’, ‘Nine Arches press’, ‘Bad Betty Press’. My own current publisher is ‘Indigo Dreams Publishing’, who publish around 20 books each year. It is so important, I feel, for the life and aspirations of a country to make poetry attractive and available to people. As Percy Byshe Shelley so perfectly stated: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Being alive to this is surely what makes poets write? And hopefully, they in turn, speak something valuable and lasting to their readers, so everyone can share in a common humanity. December 2020

Claire Booker has won three Arts Council Members' Poem competitions, and a Kathak International Literary Award. Her latest poetry pamphlet is The Bone That Sang. www.bookerplays.co.uk