dumbfoundry

The terms of the discussion were confrontational: issues of populism, selling out, the publishing and reviewing of women and ethnic minorities, and the value of thematic anthologies as therapy or literature among other things. I have not checked the facts Neil Astley produced for the original StAnza lecture, but my impression is that they are generally correct, that women and ethnic minorities do get much less reviewing space than certain white male poets, an issue that certainly ought to be addressed, though I can assure him that there are many white male poets that don’t get reviewed either. In fact they don’t even get published. Bloodaxe’s noble act of redress in favouring women poets means that very talented young male poets have really only had Michael Schmidt’s Carcanet to go to, before applying to less influential publishers, since houses such as Faber, Cape and Picador take on very few new poets of either gender.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 4:37 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.