Queenie + Percy's Top 10 Heroes of all time - Number 8

Neil Astley, MD of Bloodaxe Books and recent attacker of elitist, male poetry critics, or Poetry High Command as he called them.

Phew! Queenie + Percy were beginning to think the world was running out of heroes, then our attention was drawn to this speech, made at a poetry festival called StAnza, which takes place in Scotland, we think, in which Mr. Astley has a right go at elitism in poetry.

Queenie hates snooty poetry reviewers, particularly the ones in the Irish Times Saturday review section. Particularly that twat she had to share poetry tutorials with in university. Who ruined TS Eliot for her for a good long while. Himself and the boiled goldfish. Queenie thinks she might print this speech out and send it to him, oh yesssssss.

April is the cruellest month, after all!

In general, having a right go at elitism in any artistic endeavour is a very brave and heroic thing to do, as Queenie will testify. In 1996, Queenie single-handedly destroyed her potential career in the arts by making a speech in which she had a right go at the people listening to her, namely Artistic High Command in Ireland. The wrath heaped on her head afterwards was so overwhelming that, in retrospect, she reckons she must have hit a nerve. However, it would have been better if it had been intentional, rather than the idiotic ramblings of an innocent on her first trip to the podium.

Here is are some excerpts from Mr. Astley's speech, the link to it is under the title of the blog entry.

If someone is drawn to reading poetry because of personal anxieties, or depression, or alienation, or bereavement what's wrong with that? Anyone can surely read poetry for emotional reasons as well as for intellectual stimulation, or they may want to broaden their minds or to experience the joys of an ancient cultural art form for its own sake. Once poems are written and published, they belong to the readers, not to Poetry High Command, and they can read them any way they like.

Potts (nasty elitist Guardian critic - Queenie) confuses aesthetics with ethics, his own reading being somehow morally superior to that of anyone who has not had his privileged education. Thus anyone who enjoys reading poetry without his level of intellectual discrimination is a 'casual reader' who lacks 'cultivated taste'.

Even a love poems anthology is suspect in Potts's analysis: people in love aren't reading Shakespeare's sonnets for the right reason. He conveniently forgets why and how poetry is written. The original impulse of a poem involves an emotional response, whether to love or bereavement, anxiety or alienation... or whatever human experience is evoked.

And here's a bit where he talks about one of our favourite poets, Michael Longley:

Another example of the tone deaf approach came in a high-handed mauling given to Michael Longley on Peter McDonald's Tower Poetry website (August 2004): 'Snow Water,' the anonymous Oxford reviewer declared, 'is all significance, sentimentality and self-concern... Longley is enjoying himself too much here although there is a comedy in place names - as Edwin Morgan, an altogether lesser poet, recognised long ago - which tells against the poem.' One poem is even written off as 'camp', but 'not all the poems in Snow Water are failures, and Longley half-knows he is being silly.'

The cheek of them! Here's another excerpt:

I hadn't realised quite how narrow the Guardian's coverage had been until I went through a pile of over 70 Reviews collected over a two-year period from 2003 up to last weekend. Even I found the statistics shocking. ... I counted full-length reviews of 66 other new poetry books, but only 10 of those were by women writers.

Those 66 books were reviewed by 38 different critics, but only four of those were women, and they reviewed only five books between them, including an anthology of modern Scottish women poets and two Russian titles covered by a specialist. Not a single one of the poetry books reviewed was by a non-white poet.

Very shocking, but bleedin' obvious when you think about it.

Well done Neil! You come in at No. 8 for having balls of steel.