Poetry in Britain is growing in popularity. 2018 saw a record 12 million in sales of poetry books. The poems read are increasingly the work of living poets, and their poetry isn’t only on the page, or at an open mic - it’s on the radio, with whole collections of programming dedicated to it (BBC); it’s on the television, winning BAFTA awards (Life & Rhymes, Sky TV); it’s public art, adorning billboards (National Poetry Day, 2021) and buildings (Arnolfini, Bristol; Lemn Sissay’s ‘Landmark Poems’). And poets of colour are front and centre.
But there is still work to be done. The Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics 2018 report, ‘The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism in the UK and Ireland’, asked a simple question: whose poetry is being reviewed and by who? The report found that between 2011 and 2018, 8.6% of books reviewed were by poets of colour, and of those doing the reviewing, only 4% were critics of colour. This dearth of poetry criticism should not be shied away from: literary criticism is essential to the life and longevity of a work of literature; if there is little critical engagement with the work of British poets of colour, then they will not be seen as part of wider literary traditions, as aesthetic innovators - they and the poets that come after them will be consigned to the realm of the ‘contemporary’, the ‘new’, forgotten when the next generation of poets comes, rather than placed as contributors to an ever-growing literary history.
But there is still work to be done. The Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics 2018 report, ‘The State of Poetry and Poetry Criticism in the UK and Ireland’, asked a simple question: whose poetry is being reviewed and by who? The report found that between 2011 and 2018, 8.6% of books reviewed were by poets of colour, and of those doing the reviewing, only 4% were critics of colour. This dearth of poetry criticism should not be shied away from: literary criticism is essential to the life and longevity of a work of literature; if there is little critical engagement with the work of British poets of colour, then they will not be seen as part of wider literary traditions, as aesthetic innovators - they and the poets that come after them will be consigned to the realm of the ‘contemporary’, the ‘new’, forgotten when the next generation of poets comes, rather than placed as contributors to an ever-growing literary history.
And it is ever-growing. The Booker Prize, the T.S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the International Dylan Thomas Prize and more are being won by books that blur the line between prose and poetry. Poems, as they did in centuries past, have become rallying cries and cathartic words that people hold to in times of crisis: Warsan Shire’s ‘Home’ in the ongoing global refugee crisis; Tony Walsh’s ‘This is The Place’ after the Manchester bombing; Ben Okri’s ‘Grenfell Tower’. Readers of poetry are getting younger - two-thirds of buyers in 2018’s record sale were younger than 34 - and there are a host of organisations and poetry nights that are committed to the development of poets, particularly poets of colour, to ensure Britain’s poetry scene continues to thrive.