”Britain Needs a Black Poet Laureate,” Peter Beech’s opinion piece for The Guardian (London), tackles what he sees as racism in Britain’s poetry-publishing environment and counsels the appointment by the Queen of a Black Poet Laureate, now that the position is once again vacant. There is the question of whether any of the writers he proposes as possibilities (Derek Walcott included) would welcome a position that requires such bizarre duties as writing odes to the Queen (oh, dear!).
Here’s an excerpt from the essay (the link to the full essay follows):
While British fiction freewheels into multicultural heaven, British poetry remains firmly grounded in native soil. But why? It seems pointless to mention “institutionalised racism” when, in 80 years, Faber has only ever given the nod to three non-white poets (the most recent was Daljit Nagra last year). The Free Verse report discovered that mainstream poetry presses – run overwhelmingly by white men – would routinely reject writers on the basis that they already had one poet to represent “the Asian voice”, “the Black voice”, etc. One ex-editor scrawled “This is a racist survey” across the front of her questionnaire. “If you conducted this survey on behalf of white British poets you’d be taken to court.”
The British media doesn’t always help redress this imbalance. Last year, the Guardian’s Great Poets of the Twentieth Century were almost all British and male – Sylvia Plath was the odd one out on both occasions. They were all, without exception, white. No Langston Hughes, no Rabindranath Tagore. Derek Walcott’s rich, moving work was enough to win the Nobel in 1992, but not enough to oust the narky jingles of Siegfried Sassoon from the list. It’s as if poetry, by transcending the quotidian in search of “big” themes (yawn), had transcended the mundane social need for inclusion, representation and equality.
For the complete essay go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/22/black-poet-laureate
