Category: magazines

WICKERLAND: poetry as middle class lifestyle choice

The Sunday Times Colour Supplement heralds Poetwee..

WICKERLAND? It’s like MOTHERLAND but without the humour..more AMANDA writes poetry…..god help us all. The above states

chance to talk about real things like connection, love ,loss, creativity, purpose….

thats so nice not fake things like Iran, Gaza, Ukraine…
at least it makes Class War seem so less futile..

IF THIS IS POETRY then POETRY IS OVER….dead, a Norwegian Blue, nailed to its Class based perch. I embarrassed to use the word any more in fact I hate POETRY and POETS as presently configured in the UK.


You know those so-called poetry geniuses clogging up the presses with their creative writing group white middle class drivel…..

There are hundreds if not thousands of people out there now calling themselves poets and entering endless stupid competitions and helping each other feel ‘better’. It is internet driven creating delusional poets and a lot of spurious nepotism disguised as networking. Poetry in the UK is a fraud.

In my honest opinion at best this is simply therapy not poetry ( typical career paths include ex hypnotherapists/ acupuncture/wellbeing/physiotherapyetc oh and made a pile in the City bankers and wives of bankers loom large) so they really have time on hands..none ever seem to have been in anything but comfortable white middle class environments.

This stuff makes me want to burn their publications if not actually the poets (don’t push me on that it negotiable) slowly in a bonfire of their own self-regarding writing..maybe a giant Wicker Poet..that would do nicely.

The present queen of this post millenium touchy-feely drivel is the recent winner of the National Poetry Competition which a flag-bearer for more of the same. Although what Nation’s flag she flys under dubious..Offshore banking maybe.

A poem about missing an affluent middle-class son who has a top job in Australia ( the author has a background in working at the Bank of England).
In a world where reality is increasingly bloody and desperate we get this genre-defining slice of interiority that avoids all aspects of reality apart from those impinging on the author’s sensitive soul. This is what poetry post millenium is all about. She is not the worst she can at least write but it not the work that the problem its the vested interests making this happen.

She represents the triumph of the establishment. The establishment Poetry Society doing its avowed job of rewarding somebody who so establishment it painful. Don’t expect comments on Gaza or the homeless it just isn’t fit for purpose darling in the poetry and book clubs across the shires they want world view views which shore up their sense of security not question it.

Her friends placed her BS book in front of Philip Larkin in Waterstones and shared on X that bastion of liberal views. A stunning example of posh lady Boadiceas ( there actually a luxury perfume called that seriously one cannot make it up) challenging the patriarchal norms as they trod carefully around the homeless on the way out of the bookshop….reverse the situation and imagine the shitstorm a male poet doing that to a female poet would engender. Sadly no male poet called Plath around to test the water maybe there a Moore, Dickinson or Shapcott though…it a sign of the arrogance and untouchability of a certain strata of post-feminist affluent women that they do this.

Larkin is not unusual at all in fact a certain level of financial stability is essential to their dominance. NO poor female or male poets make the grade these days as you need time (lots of it) and money (lots of that too).

A feted poet from Oxford lives in a million pound house travels to at least three Spa/Writing retreats a year and wins awards for ‘interviewing’ dementia patients whilst underpaid staff clear up the urine. Nice one must need the sea air after that tortuous supplement to your high end earners lifestyle.

Finally and not least Kit De Waal a warrior queen of new feminist poetry and a shining example of Working Class made good (genuine hard back story) but after marrying the barrister brother of Booker prize winner Edmund De Waal it all got a tad easier. That’s the reality of modern British Publishing it CLASS based and increasingly devoid of talent and genuine innovation.

Bookseller campaigns to increase visibility of Working Class writers are just that a tokenism to obscure the increasingly Class based control of publishing. Ironically Kit De Waal offering a Bridport Prize in Bookseller for older poets. etc more tokenism of course.

Bookseller tokenism classic is the Working Class Nature Writers award..

Lets not unpack that for what it is..oh ok then it is total bullshit simply take two boxes combine and tick. PR department inventions to boost sales of fairly mediocre talents and get kudos for defending the poor and disadvantaged.

The Bookseller is a driver of all that face-on shit you see in Waterstones you know the umpteenth copy of the plot and sleeve art of The Essex Serpent – they marketeers of dross. They know how to shift shit printed in China like nobody else…Rowling is their Queen. Nobody can invent new income streams quite like her.

LEGACY: death of innovation and a lost generation

There are now few new kids from working class backgrounds in the media, theatre, music world becuase it ring-fenced by the ability (TIME IS MONEY)
to do it.

Mercury Prize Nominees – ALL public school last year.

Two of our finest female new poets

Hollie McNish – feigns humble ordinary gal did Classics at Cambridge father owns a Reading IT company is director.

Kae Tempest – father one of world’s top music lawyers…must have made the transformation from mediocre poet to music artist that much harder..

Two Poetry Review fave new poets have a background in PR…along with the wellbeing route this high on poets transforming their careers list. Editing others poetry a money-spinner alongside a nous built in years massaging social media accounts for Google and Nike..you go find the poets it not hard.

This list isn’t gender specific nor sexist it is CLASS specific. I sure there are male equivalents it just hard to find them although a few spring to mind. It is predominantly female because they have the lions share of success recently. This is because of the glass ceiling being not just shattered but then turned round and armour-plated. If you can add some diversity points or a tragic back story you in the money.

It harder to track male stories maybe because they not so keen to share their privileged upbringings whilst female poets appear to feel protected by their gender and generally share more.

This is the end of poetry as I knew it which in the late 1970s was predominantly male almost overwhelmingly so. The pendulum has swung very hard the other way now.and the birth of poetry as lifestyle choice is connected to this it is as simple as that.

A nice award bauble to add to Chanel perfume on dresser and a Tesla in the drive. Oh darling you won a competition most poets cannot afford to enter how marvellous. Lets have a dinner party soon.

As Nick Moss writes..

Their poetry is rooted in an attempt to maintain as essential to poetry that sensibility of interiority which is the core of the novel in its original form. Croft describes this as “the commodification of poetry, the privatisation of feeling.” Not every poem needs to be about a fucking geranium. Not when some people don’t have patios to decorate, because they don’t have homes at all…

https://www.culturematters.org.uk/no-them-only-us-review-of-the-privatisation-of-poetry-by-andy-croft-broken-sleep-books-2024/

None of it addresses the personal through oblique and politicised analysis but always through personalised tear-stained-contact lenses..

The latest fad write it and read it off your phone after all it is throw-away…social media led drivel..it doesn’t matter.

Have an issue lets talk about it, workshop it, send it to a press/ magazine that likes it and bingo..on we go…a carousel of poetry that makes Sylvia Plath look hard-edged rational…bring back the Confessional Poets at least they had some other things to say.

Here my guide to getting published today:

Write about YOURSELF.
Write about yourself in relation to an issue you may not have been directly affected by say suicide or alcoholism and write about it in relation to yourself.

Write about NATURE not ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Not actual nature as in commercial factory farming more how you like walking around a lake and looking at trees.This category sells well especially if decorated with pretty illustrations. Rabbits and cats best.

SUBMIT TO MAGAZINES RUN BY FRIENDS
Never ever stray away from your support networks it takes time to build up a web of equally vapid boosters who attend your monthly meetings and swoon over every syllable. They quickly become publishers as they move up the greasy pole of Brit Lit. Pay for high end agents they worth their weight in promotional uptick.

PAY TO PLAY
Go top end in Creative Writing Course choice that way you connect higher up the ladder. PAY out money in subscriptions and competition entries. NEVER express a unsuitable opinion especially about politics unless gender related and vague to show you on right side of history. Spend big on small presses and magazines and competitions INVEST in your future.

SELF-PUBLISHING
Never self-publish that s for commoners and such-like. Self-Publishing is akin to total failure. Poetry only really exists through approved channels. Get a Faber abd Faber or Cape badge and you in the green room of poetry and your every missive will be poored over in The Guardian and Times. Eat my shorts darlinks..or drink them in hospitality.

MAGAZINES THE REALITY
Most magazines are almost certainly dominated by the white middle class and may even be edited from a chateaux in France..most are post Oxbridge white middle class really affluent. Keeping control of the message all important not quality. The occaisional brown face helps tick boxes and helps establish a veneer of faux diversity.

BRIT LIT SICK NO CURE?

IF BRITISH POETRY has become a therapy circle for the white middle class is it virtually redundant now? Male female or trans no matter the lack of substantial content outside the domestic is in my honest opinion a total failure of modern poetry.

Whilst the hogweed of self chokes the landscape things like Smokestack folding show how bleak the future really is ….the ‘terroir’ of poetry is increasingly ring-fenced by the poetry of self..they want to erect barriers to reality.

I am against this stuff…give me a match we need new growth.

In the olden days my grandfather would set a match to a straw field after harvest…

The personal is political – poetry used to be political

before politics became dangerous ask Kneecap

Burn Baby Burn

Radiohead – met at Radley Public School….there you go…

The Impossibility of Producing a Print Literary Magazine.

A link to this article was shared onine by by Martin Malone former editor of Interpreter’s House which pre Martin I helped survive as a paper edition by creating a basic website.
The price of progress is that the magazine now now exists only online.
https://theinterpretershouse.org/

The article by Wendy Pratt of SPELT magazine
https://speltmagazine.com/

available to read here:
https://wendypratt.substack.com/p/notes-from-spelt-magazine-the-impossibility

My response in comments as follows:

I agree totally with your comments above although I have seen a lot of poor quality work riding on the coat-tails of the ‘so-called’ working class writing revolution which more a Bookseller PR stunt than actuality. The print medium died the day Oxford University Press tipped its lead type into the Thames or is that urban myth based on link below? (there is an eco-poem if ever there was one perhaps I should write it).

https://hyperallergic.com/181625/a-century-after-being-cast-into-the-river-thames-a-celebrated-typeface-reemerges/


It ended in early 1990s when a press I represented by actually hand set a poem of mine (I will find and share on my blog) in lead type. They had one of the last machines for creating type and a man came to mend it He was the last of the generation that had knowledge to mend them. The knowledge died with them.

A decade later I helped Oxford University convert ALL paper based Science publishing acquisition to computers and then a whole College’s library. Digital hit hard around the Millennium and since then a younger generation have developed entirely new habits of consumption, dissemination and interaction. Paper unless sold as anachronistic fetish object ( works for Vinyl records) is to all intents and purpose dead as a piece of type in muddy water. So forgetting the argument that internet is green (it is not the servers and electric generation to fuel it alone cost a few rain forests). Where do we go now?

Substack a good choice. I suggest you read the Jazz critic Ted Gioia (brother of poet Dana Gioia) he very cutting edge on where we are now and it isn’t good news.

https://www.honest-broker.com/

Your magazine looks great but it also looks like something I would have shelved at Poetry Library in 1990 (I been around that long). As for getting your messages across I returned to ‘the poetry world’ or rather the blizzard of new ‘worlds’ each tightly regimented and screened online (or paper) come to that. This is not because all magazines now are nepotistic (though a good few are or class interest based) but simply because the numbers now are frightening. Like music anybody with a phone and half a brain can be a poet if they want to (before AI made it even easier to simulate poetry) .

I grew up in an era of clearly defined gatekeepers ( Faber, Cape, Bloodaxe etc) which on the whole male dominated yes but because numbers far lower and generally standards higher it was easier to at least work out one’s place in the (singular) poetry world. Post world-wide web that no longer possible one has to find a nest that suits and defend your interests whatever your politics from that lonely tower as global capitalism basically runs riot below.

As a white (working class whatever that means these days and frankly in some cases not much) male aged 65 trying to re-enter the worlds (plural) I on a hiding to nothing and add fact that I been writing about the environment for nigh on 40 years it appears I am now almost unpublishable going by feedback I had so far. The reasons for that are generational (ageism) political (sexism) and demographic as I do not read or wish to engage with certain class ridden circles or even some younger circles of interest any more than they do me.

So Substack is a potential rabbit hole to another wonderland. It does work but if you enter this domain be prepared to post daily to make it work and engage followers and also to engage directly with thorny issues of political activism if talking Green we are no longer in village fete friends of earth stage we are in defined as eco-terrorism (pace Edward Abbey) territory now. Truly engage and it may be that Spelt finds a new niche.. paper is not dead its just not printed on any more..

Out of frustration I took a new tack towards ECO and Poetry on my substack is a long job but it seems to engage people far more than straight poetry offering. You may find of interest.

We are in for stormy weather 

https://darkweather.substack.com/ 

My old style words on a screen and very occasionally a page although less so in the last 20 years than before here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=141

A lot self-published because I an early adopter and specialist in multimedia. I find the fetishism apparent in the ‘self-publishing’ wrong attitude symptomatic of those who should know better slamming the stable door shut after the horse not only bolted but also shot dead…..

It generally white middle class that promulgate that attitude of ‘I don’t want my poems online’ because they dream of standing in a bookshop with that object in their hand feeling pleased with themselves along with the other 5000 recently cheaply published (thanks to digitisation of the production line) authors feeling the same ..
It is complete nonsense.

I look forward to the podcast…..they are hard work….I ran a music one for a year.

A BAD MAP OF THE POETRY WORLD

Having dipped my toe in Poetry World UK again I starting to get my bearings.

Here a online statistics crib that may tell some of the story:

Poetry book sales in the UK

  • In the UK, poetry book sales generate over 12 million GBP in a year as of 2018.
  • During the same year, over 1.3 million poetry books were sold.
  • Poetry book revenue in the UK increased by 15% in 2018 over 2017, which was already 13% bigger compared to 2016.
  • The average poetry book in the UK costs around 9.46 GBP as of 2018.
  • 66.7% of poetry buyers are under the age of 34.
  • 41% of poetry readers in the UK are girls and women aged between 13 and 22.

Source: https://wordsrated.com/poetry-book-sales-statistics/

It not great. The biggest news to me as a 65 year old male is that the demographics of actual purchasing are heavily slanted at under 34 and female (I knew female make up 75% of all book sales as Neil Astley (Bloodaxe) kindly filled me in about that in 1993 at a Norwich book fair as he handed me back my poems and it fair to say that he has produced more books with female authors than just about anybody in the UK ( pays the mortgage I guess). To be fair he also used that income to generate a list with some decent poetry and especially translations. Ditto Carcanet which although terribly embedded in selling to academic library shelves and students ( count the number of mid range OK academic authors on its list and you pretty much in 80% territory). In fact you probably not get an academic job in poetry in UK these days without a Carcanet/ PNR seal of approval. Like a snake eating itself academic authors then ensure academic students on the PHD production line get published its a revolving door.

SO what world do you live in?

There are several overlapping poetry worlds to deal with which roughly speaking are:

  1. Traditional male-dominated publishers
    These have been around since the first time I wrote poetry in 1980s. Despite the advances in equality I am guessing they still fed and maintained by pretty much the same Oxbridge educated elite that runs everything else apart from a few shitty art centres. To pretend otherwise is absurd. The in brackets are who actually run them.
    Faber  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), Cape(Penguin), Carcanet (ACE) Bloodaxe(ACE)

    2. Performance/Slam/Therapy
    Heavily dependent on ACE funding and Academic support just about every niche genre catered for from Peformance to Black Lives Matter to Goth to Trans and anything betwixt and between. A very healthy scene at present fuelled by the democratisation of the internet and phones. Spawned some well-funded (for now) new kids on block like Bad Betty and Broken Sleep who have instigated some breaths of fresh air into the scene amid a lot of bullshit and posturing but have affected a genuine diversification of both reader and audience.
    Better that than the next bunch.

    3. White Middle Class Hobbyists
    This is a huge new area of what I can only describe as life-writing disguised as poetry. Heavily dependent on feelings and self analysis ( motherhood, death, mid-life crises,) basically all the First World trials of people who have very secure post employment or rich partner incomes. When I worked in academia I jokingly called the M.A. students Cash Cows as they provided a nice earner for the art college. That applies to anybody over 25 (under that they were grant funded now everybody no matter how rich can scoop a student grant). They are now flooding creative writing courses UK which advertise themselves as the moonshot to the stars as long as you pay their fees (which now around £12K a year as student loans siphoned off by the universities).

    That in itself not the problem life-long learning should always be supported BUT these usually articulate and narcissisitic well-heeled baby-boomers (lets be fair most poets are to some degree) are very good at creating ring-fenced cosy little worlds of poetic certitude where they publish each other create promo blurbs for each other and generally ignore most decent poetry and anything but themselves.
    In my research I found one hilarious bunch mutually publishing and boosting each other and sharing blurbs with each other all the way from the Creative Writing course on. Fabulous …poetic quality and depth forget it..

    TWITTER/X CIRCLES
    There an app online called twitter circle just run some of these people through it you will se how nepotistic and chrony based their precious little scenes are..it is fabulous:-) X starts a review- reviews Y – Y starts a press publishes X then X and Y start a academic funded conference lets call it ‘Call of The Wild’ and then they meet other small circles of self-boosting people like them and hey presto an anthology published by Z (who actually was at college with X and Y) happens.

    It beautiful and it is utter crap…..mostly.

    Oh and the richer they are the whiter they become and the further right their views. Generally speaking they mix with Oxbridge circle people not your performance and slam riff raff.

    https://twittercircle.com/

    I would post mine but I so shit at networking it just sad…some poets I am surprised manage to write anything such is their dedication to posting their breakfast and any other trivia to raise an audience.


    GLOBAL SCENE
    Apart from being turned down smartly by one particular magazine I not really had time to investigate but the statistics above drawn from USA suggest hard times ahead as they generally ahead in their brand of poetic capitalism. Reading stats are down and the switch from paper to digital far advanced stateside probably because demographics increasingly younger and phone based.

So where do I pitch old-fashioned slightly adventurous but well-crafted white male verse at these days?

Well it not a total disaster as amidst the floods of drivel there are some solid slightly dull places for solid slightly dull poetry which may actually be about something other than feelings and or Dolphins. Larkin would approve types.

Also not all academics are CV boosting narcissists and a few can actually write and probably would rather not be checking their Google Scholar ratings every day.
Academia is a bit like an open prison plenty of trips out if a good academic but break the rules you in solitary or worse assigned to a failing course and made to promote it.

I not given up entirely but I do feel low when wading through the poetry worlds out there now.

To make things better I would suggest banning all people over 30 from creative writing courses that would help. By then they probably never get any better and they could do something else useful to society instead of sitting in coffee shops discovering Joyce and Wolf.


Staple Magazine: Three poems

Three poems published in latest Staple Magazine

Rivers I have Visited
The Drifting Village
The Weaver’s Lament

 

NEW ISSUE OUT SOON! EAST MIDLANDS SPECIAL!

staple

Featuring stories by Clare Brown,  Michael Pinchbeck, Roberta Dewa, Marilyn Ricci, Karen Jardine, Peter de Ville, James K Walker, Georgina Lock, Pascale Quiviger, Anthony Cropper,  Jonathan Taylor, poems by Martin Stannard, Rosie Garner, Derek Buttress, D.A. Prince, Alan Baker, Sheila Smith, Deborah Tyler Bennett, Shaun Belcher, Sue Dymoke, Robert Hamberger,  Robin Maunsell and Pat Marum, texts and photographs by Graham Lester George, documentary film-maker Jeanie Finlay’s ’Goth Till I Die’, John Lucas translating Baudelaire, a history of Nottingham Writers’ Studio, reviews, comments and much more. Catching the spirit of the East Midlands in a handy anthology with a picture of a man sitting on a duck on the front…

 

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