Responses
Dear Acumen,
I suppose congratulations are in order on your fiftieth issue. But,
honestly, I don’t know why you bother in the face of an Establishment bent on stupid and divisive marketing strategies. I mean, there might be some merit in trying to create a premier league of superstar contemporary poems but, first the New Generation of poets, and now the Next Generation, does nothing to create a wider genuine readership for poetry. Even if all poetry publishers could have afforded to participate in the scheme to find this Next Generation of poets (which they could not – anymore than they can meet the onerous terms for entering various awards like the Whitbread, the T.S. Eliot or the PBS choices) it would do little to diminish the ill-advisedness of such marketing exercises – marketing which, so far, has produced few column inches in any national newspaper.
Every time an anthology of poetry gets published there are complaints about the inclusions and exclusions; but at least the ignored poems can’t have ill feelings. But by corraling a few poets, division and badwill are what really get promoted. It is almost impossible to promote the good. Only the bad can be easily elevated because it lends itself naturally to sensationalism as any journalist like myself knows.
Joe Wilkinson
West London
Page(s) 128
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