PN Review editor Michael Schmidt showed the Guardian some of the many supportive responses to Watts’s essay the journal had received. The essay in PN Review has split the poetry establishment, with some praising it as “stonking stuff” and “brilliant”. Having a huge audience does not align with quality, argues Watts, whose own first collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published in 2016: “Like the new president, the new poets are products of a cult of personality, which demands from its heroes only that they be ‘honest’ and ‘accessible’, where honesty is defined as the constant expression of what one feels, and accessibility means the complete rejection of complexity, subtlety, eloquence and the aspiration to do anything well … If we are to foster the kind of intelligent critical culture required to combat the effects of populism in politics, we must stop celebrating amateurism and ignorance in our poetry.” The reader is dead: long live consumer-driven content and the ‘instant gratification’ this affords.” Some seem to think poetry is primarily an excuse for having rather mean-spirited conversations about poetry Don Paterson, poet However, she finds, “in the redefinition of poetry as ‘short-form communication’ the floodgates have been opened. Both McNish and Tempest have won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry.Ĭiting lines such as Kaur’s “you should see me / when my heart is broken / i don’t grieve / i shatter”, Watts writes that “of all the literary forms, we might have predicted that poetry had the best chance of escaping social media’s dumbing effect its project, after all, has typically been to rid language of cliche”. According to Nielsen data, these three poets have sold more than 275,000 books in the UK, with Kaur alone responsible for half of that figure.
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