In this article for the Our Culture series, we look at the state of contemporary British poetry. It is a world laced with creative potential, yet continuously colonised by the rules of the market, the social media spectacle, and as ever metropolitan gatekeeping.
Andy Croft, poet, author and publisher of Smokestack books, reflects on the effects of decades of cultural privatisation, from the closure of libraries and local arts programmes to their centralisation in London-based institutions. He looks at how the poetry scene has been transformed into an individualistic, prize-driven competition, thus leaving small presses, and once thriving local networks struggling to survive.
Later, in conversation with Alan McGuire, Croft explores what it means to sustain alternative spaces for poetry, the possibilities of resistance, and how poetry might reclaim its social and counter-hegemonic role in British life. This interview is both a critique of contemporary cultural structures and a call to rebuild local, democratic, and collectively-minded poetic networks.
During the last forty years, as large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down, British cultural life has been increasingly colonised by the values of big business and show business. The UK poetry scene is a diminishing, inaccessible and commodified space, dominated by London corporate publishers and the idea of poetry as a spectacle.
Library closures, local authority cuts, the academisation of schools, centralisation by Arts Council England, bookshop closures, the culling of small magazines, independent poetry publishers and long-term projects like the Writers in Prison Network, have made poetry increasingly remote from readers and would-be writers.
Local poetry festivals have been swallowed by corporate book festivals. Poets who used to work in community writing residencies have disappeared onto university campuses. In place of the critical culture of small magazines and independent poetry presses, we have lifestyle profiles of poets in the weeklies. Adult education writing workshops have been replaced by HE Creative Writing degree programmes. A once-thriving poetry-reading circuit has collapsed into a culture of competitive slams and open mics.
The metropolitan gatekeepers who control access to the world of poetry – the broadsheets, the Arts Council, the BBC, book-festivals, prize-giving foundations, the Poetry Society – isolate it from the world and inoculate it against controversy. Published poets compete for prizes and commissions, protected by agents, copyright lawyers and exaggerated claims for the importance of poetry.
Conversations about poetry have been replaced by conversations about poets, discussions of tradition by accusations of plagiarism, and the language of literary criticism by the language of press-releases promoting corporate prizes and celebrity book-festivals. The result is an atomised, unwelcoming and unfriendly poetry scene whose inaccessibility is hardly disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion.
AM: Having run Smokestack Books through these times of cultural privatisation, what lessons did you learn about building an alternative space for poetry?
AC: Poetry is already an ‘alternative’ space in contemporary British culture – uneconomic, unfunded, unglamorous and irrelevant. British poets are politically silent, easily bought and quickly marginalised. The poetry scene is atomised and isolated from British society. And yet what Ernst Fischer called ‘the necessity of art’ means that poetry and its inherently social character can never be entirely disarmed.
AM: The privatisation of poetry is clear to see, yet small presses and networks still exist in various forms. Are there any growing signs of resistance today that give you hope?
AC: I don’t see any significant developments or tendencies in the contemporary poetry scene strong enough to resist or challenge the structural and cultural conditions described above. On the other hand, poetry is primarily a mass and amateur activity located outside the ideological and metropolitan apparatus of the state. Poetry can mobilise popular feeling, bear witness, express dissent, educate desire, organise opposition and isolate the enemy. Having no culture of its own, the enemy does not understand – and is therefore afraid of – the democratic potential of any art. Poetry especially.
AM: You trace poetry’s decline to wider structural changes such as library closures, Arts Council centralisation, and a cultural change towards the spectacle of poetry. If a left-wing government came to power, what specific policies or cultural changes do you think could help re-democratise poetry and rebuild those local scenes?
AC: Devolve the powers of the Arts Council back to the regions. Restructure, democratise, fund and expand local and regional cultural institutions – local newspapers, local radio, regional television, local theatres, poetry festivals. Re-invent university liberal adult education. Put money into regional publishers and local bookshops. Rebuild the public library system. Create a national programme of poets working in the community – schools, prisons, workplaces etc.
AM: You say that metropolitan gatekeepers and the prize culture have turned poetry into a spectacle, which to me sounds like a reflection of our individualistic LOOK AT ME times. Do you think there’s a way to recover poetry’s critical, collective, and countercultural edge?
AC: There are, of course, many contemporary poets, several independent presses, some venues and a few radical bookshops who might be described as critical and countercultural. But they are not organised. Finding a way to bring them together (a festival? a conference? a magazine?) could help to promote, expand and embolden their work as a counter-hegemonic presence in British life.
If you want to read more on this then check out Andy’s book The Privatisation of Poetry available from Broken Sleep Books here.
Read the rest of the editions from the Our Culture series:
Culture as Class Struggle: An Interview with Jenny Farrell
Our Culture: RIP British Working-Class Cinema (1935 – 2025) by Brett Gregory
Our Culture: The Uncomfortable Truth About Public Libraries
Our Culture: Breaking through the Class ceiling with bread and roses
Our Culture: Games and Class Struggle – with Scott Alsworth
