A poet friend shared this Substack article on facebook and I think it is very good at analysing something which is going on at Poetry Review without taking sides and also from a female perspective.
What is a poetry magazine for?
Poetry Review has always been prone to appointing so-called ‘scene-changers’ but like a backdrop at the theatre it is mostly just that. There are some interesting notes on core business and I’d suggest that beyond PR subscribers I doubt there are 500 people who purchase it as suggested..
I know a little about the new scene changer editor. He had written a poem about his mother which won him PR prize but frankly was as good as any PR NPC winner i.e. not very good at all but he caught a mood in the PR board’s eyes.
Prior to this ‘discovery’ he was already being touted pretty heavily at Academic conferences where thoroughly middle-class people wrung their hands about the lack of working-class writers. They then rode that better than any surfer on a wave of changing of the guard sentiment.
What he is as usual is a gameplayer and roleplayer depending on wind shifting so right now he is ‘enabling’ and ’empowering’ you name it the Bad Betty/Broken Sleep generation in much the same way Peter Forbes enabled his mates then Stephen Smith soon after. Hence you get Amy Acre’s book reviewed as best thing since Sylvia Plath which of course utter bollocks (Co owner Bad Betty FYI) .
Bigging up your mates been going on since Pindar and Horace but what more worrying is the shift away from anything resembling poetry not just in PR but across the board as the Tik Tok generation with smarts realise prose sells more.
Look at female poets who cross over to prose as fast as they can..Lowe, Tempest et al….
This is all a part of the Cult of Wellbeing the Arts Council has been bankrolling for years ironically as actual wellbeing has plummetted and the NHS collapsed. In terms of funding it has shrunken year on year and the mantra at ACE now is sustainable in long term unless too large (Bloodaxe/Carcanet/English Opera etc) to fail.
I was amazed to see that the grant circa £350K was equivalent to a one-off arts council grant to academic nonsense back in 2000 (TrAce NTu if interested was nonsense of course) showing how fast the cake has been eroded under successive governments.
A poet friend nailed this as a time of fake compassion and insular care as social institutions for real care collapse on all sides. No matter your grandmother has nowhere to go try writing a poem about it.
The point that ‘reviews’ no longer allowed to be reviews but are ‘enabling, empowering’ too is a good one……so one wonders how long it be called Poetry Review
new name suggestions below
mine
Poetry Clinic
