Ron's rages are sincere and — according to his wife — healthily cathartic. But can these splenetic outbursts loosen the grip of capitalism at its most monstrous?
Running scared of popular poets
TIM WELLS takes issue with a bilious attack on ‘working-class’ artists in a high-end literary magazine
Kate Tempest
[Martin Schummann/Creative Commons]
ANGUS REID considers the power of the podcast as a vehicle for consensus building in opposition to mainstream media narratives
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THE JANUARY issue of PN Review contains a hatchet job by Rebecca Watts that has got British poets taking sides.
Nothing unusual there, what is the poetry world without splits and divides? It’s worse than the left. PN Review was described by Simon Armitage as “the political wing of Carcanet Press” and, as much as the hip young poets like social meeja, Professor Plum loves the dagger in the library.
Watts went to both Oxford and Cambridge and those Marks & Spencer ready meals don’t pay for themselves. She takes umbrage at “amateur” poetry, in particular Hollie McNish, Kate Tempest and Rupi Kaur. Hers is basically an attack on “populism,” as she would have it, or access, as many a poet would have it.
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