I S S U E 5

Editorial

Suna Afshan & Naush Sabah

NS: I feel an instinctive distrust and disappointment when I read yet another review that is, in fact, an extended blurb. Worse still when it’s one couched in vague, vaporous language that obscures sense. Some of these reviews take the blandest, most unengaging texts and project the pseudo-profound intellectual theses of literary academics onto them. Meanwhile, general readers see the emperor’s clothes as rather ill-fitting—bare below the waist and puffed up at the sleeves. Such reviews proliferate, moving from traditional print into digital publications. No sooner are they published than marketing departments of publishers repurpose them on pretty graphics to promote their latest titles. Where does this leave readers who are looking for straightforward critical assessment, for honesty?
Joseph Brodsky wrote, ‘in twentieth-century literature the only case of an outstanding prose writer becoming a great poet is that of Thomas Hardy.’ Brodsky felt that, in a hierarchy, poetry occupies the highest position since a poet in ‘narrow circumstances’ can write a good piece of prose if she must. He believed that prose writers have more to learn from poetry than vice versa. I’d agree. But consider: there’s greater difficulty for a journal in sourcing quality prose on poetry than there is in sourcing poems. What does that tell us about the poetry being produced in abundance today? Is it any wonder that many poet-critics are writing reviews as watery and insubstantial as their poems? Last autumn, we expressed a sense of duty towards ‘robust criticism’ and we publish, here, our first attempt at discharging that duty.
As with much in poetry publishing, there’s a polite silence around the practices of commissioning and how things find their way to print. Editors and publishers simply announce title after title and issue after issue; texts appear from nothingness onto our timelines, awards lists, and shelves, with slick professionalism and sometimes pleasing aesthetics. But how? Perhaps if that was interrogated openly, we could look more critically at quality and inequality, at how the former is diluted and the latter deepened in the shadows of the status quo—of how things are just done and simply happen, as if literature is produced by magic. (And in other ways, it is, of course.)
Some of the reviews in this issue were pitched to me—Davidson, Leadbetter, Trowbridge. The first two appealed as texts about lesser-known poetry written outside of these islands. The third grew out of an event its writer chaired on women’s poetry during last year’s Birmingham Literature Festival. All of the other reviews and prose features were commissioned by me based entirely on what I wanted this issue to look like: a regionally grounded yet internationally au fait publication that makes space for, and champions, new voices in poetry criticism. This issue introduces six new critics to poetry publishing; by new I mean never published in journals of contemporary poetry before now, not simply that they haven’t reviewed for Poetry Birmingham before. Why new? I’m not one to favour the new over the old in life nor literature, but stagnant waters need refreshing and closed doors need throwing open or this journal wouldn’t exist.
What they bring to bear in this issue is variety—diversity if you will—of thought, voice, perspective, experience. We have room for Sang’s considered, scholarly style drawing out meanings and motifs in three texts, alongside Hakim’s equally astute and more forthrightly expressed critical assessment of three others, or Earle’s enthusiastic praise and straightforward criticism of yet three more. Writers from the Midlands write verse, review, and are reviewed here—in some cases, only here, and that ought to change. The issue abounds with other languages and poetries in interaction with English—Chinese, Greek, Italian, Panjabi, Russian, Tigrinya. I feel I ought to add some Mirpuri to this list: usaan ni mehnat na kamaal thako tha kuch sikho. We stay in conversation, too, with the canon and poetry of the past that continues to move us today; to that end, I take particular pleasure in presenting two poems by Robert Frost to accompany Bancroft’s piece. We give due attention also to pamphlets with Kazmi’s review, and formal-experimental writing in Sheppard’s, and we provide space for dialogue between poets and thinkers.
Our concerns aren’t new. In 1992, Dana Gioia wrote of ‘poetry-subculture publications’ having an unspoken editorial rule to ‘never surprise readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues’. More suffocating than a subculture, poetry is now a ‘community’ with all that demands of niceties and conformity and all it implies of surveillance and stifling dissent for the sake of cohesion (or to preserve tenets, values, or origin stories). No longer simply the poet-critic and her subjectivity to contend with, we now have the poet-critic-editor-publisher-academic-instructor and her many conflicts, and incestuous connections in this small niche of publishing where a three-star review by an unknown general reader on Goodreads is commiserated over at length on social media by fellow poet-critics.
Whether a reader seeks from criticism attempts at ‘disinterested perspective’, ‘correction of taste’, ‘redrawing and [. . .] expanding frameworks for reading’, or polemic that wears its subjectivities colourfully on its sleeves, none are served by demurring at anything less than feel-good publicity that’s over-protective of the feelings of poets and defensive about the state of poetry publishing. If community is what poets seek, let it be one that’s critical and resilient, that encourages them to feel grateful rather than victimised by having work read and written about seriously (even if unfavourably), and that challenges rather than defends the state of the art as it stands. Writers advocate for poets and audiences that have been underrepresented—or disregarded—and in doing so, remind certain readers that they may not like work because they are not its intended audience. We can borrow the same sentiment for the matter at hand: a book's author is not the audience for its reviews.

•

SA: ‘Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations’ is a collaborative poem of poet-couple Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne. It was commissioned in 2012 by S. J. Fowler as part of the avant-garde poetry and visual art project Camarade/Enemies; the poem was subsequently published by Oystercatcher Press in 2014 as a pamphlet of the same title plus additional work. The poem borrows text from, amongst other sources, Edward Burnett Taylor’s nineteenth-century text Primitive Culture, and lyrics from one of the earliest songs to be sung in blackface, Coal Black Rose. The aim is satire: the high register littered with depictions of torture performed upon Black slaves, verbal violence against South Asian migrants, slurs abound. In her recent conversation with Mary Jean Chan for the Poetry Society podcast, Parmar talked of the impact of Danez Smith’s Homie, just published in January 2020, saying it has ‘made us really think again about not just not using that word, but also the ways in which iterations of the word, and iterations of language to do with identity, belong to certain types of storytelling and, really, don’t belong to others.’ The word in question is the n-word. It occurs once in ‘Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations’—a direct quote from Coal Black Rose—and was spoke aloud by Parmar with a hard ‘r’ in readings of the poem in 2012. In that conversation with Chan about ‘The Nineties’ published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review, Parmar speaks of being ‘really uncomfortable’ with how to use that word; eight years on, it is censored, appears twice in quoted speech as ‘n****’, read aloud as simply ‘n’.
In a one-thousand-word addenda to a one-hundred-and-sixty-word apology from Poetry magazine’s Editor in Chief, Don Share accepted all responsibility for publishing (and then unpublishing) Michael Dickman’s ‘Scholls Ferry Road’. For those unfamiliar, it is thirty pages long and approximately twenty-two pages of white space: the Dickman apologists say this is a critique of the white gaze, passing over the face of racism like any other institutional failing masquerading in the crowd. Sure. There are instances of casual racism and [supposedly] pseudo- racist language: here Dickman employs alternatives to slurs for ‘they are always changing what they want to be called’—they are?—and every other non-white and non-Black individual as hazy as: ‘a Hawaiian’ or a ‘Japanese businessmen’. All of this is aside from the fact that the quality of the poetry itself is poor, which I have come to expect from any magazine that publishes six issues a year.
I mention the Share affair specifically because it prompted a greater vigilance in me and in my editorial practice: no one wants to publish the next ‘Scholls Ferry Road’, no matter how ardently [and irrationally] they believe it’s countering ‘the intimate lineage of racism’ as Share does/did. So, in this past submissions window when I saw we had received more than double the previous amounts of poems we had for the summer issue, I felt equal parts excitement and trepidation—the latter validated and turned fear, for in these past few months I have read some of the most existentially compromising poetry I’ve seen outside a 4Chan board.
Every cover letter, where poets effusively attempt to validate the effort, suggest that these poems serve that many-faced god: The Liberal Critique of Racism. In at least one instance, a poet has emailed us and specifically drawn our attention to their submission, and we have discovered they’ve uncritically channelled a slave trader without a modicum of Byrne-Parmar satire. Every one of those poems I’ve discovered in our submission inbox is easily criticised, easily problematised, not lyrical or musical, not interesting, not engaging any faculty of the brain bar the one that induces nausea—my tastes and moral objections aside, they fail on the level of craft. I have seen a white, ego-centric aesthetic that denies the personhood and the humanity of Black people and the global majority more generally; these bodies are [still] open for abuse, for sale, to being ‘fucked into the ground’, utterly at the whim of the white poet’s psyche, should he choose to selflessly engage in such rhetoric. This poetic reduces the Black body to the status of simile, of metaphor. This is not a liberal critique, it is racism itself: in black and white, it is realised upon the page, and relishes the acute detail; it is a reproduction of slurs, of every trauma the global majority has had to suffer.
A poetry journal run by two South Asian women is not a testing ground for base explorations of white guilt. We are not your friends, nor your mentors, your workshop buddies. We can offer nothing to these poets bar one temperate suggestion: do not send us your poetry again. Where warranted, however, we exercise empathy and suggest they seek out the opinions of their peers, reflect. Despite pleas to the contrary, we have not ‘named or shamed’ these poets: we try not to contribute to this self-righteous culture of demanding heads on a platter, barring the fallen, forsaking any hope of their betterment. Since discovering the Byrne-Parmar poem, I have thought of it often in relation to these racist poems we’ve received and our procedure in dealing with them. What sets them apart? Does anything? I ask of every one of these poems, who are you serving? Is it anyone beside yourself ? How will the human beings you are writing about receive the way you’ve reduced them to objects of pain and suffering alone? Ostensibly, every one of these poems disseminates the same language and violence; all are seemingly attempting a liberal critique of racism, and, by doing so, every poet is complicit in that violence, perpetuates it nonetheless.
To me, it appears we can afford some people time to reform their poetics and critical judgements and other poets are a dime a dozen, and we needn’t extend them our empathy. Be under no illusions: a terror beyond this page awaits for even acknowledging the existence of ‘Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations’. ‘Mutiny!’ they’ll cry. Well, mutiny implies some indiscriminating fidelity, which I offer no one nor has one been extended to me; I think it is the antithesis of a healthy critical culture. I only speak of the poem because it keenly illustrates my final point: if you think poets and critics and editors of colour and all their opinions and writings are above reproach, that, too, is racism.