There
was originally a question mark at the end of this post’s title. My expectation was that there would be both
less poetry and less sexism than in previous years. Also, I wondered if an audit of poetry
reviews in the Guardian Review could still be relevant; now, having done the
count, I’m quite glad I did.
Results
and conclusion first:
*
There's no improvement over time in the gender balance, none in the range of
publishers represented and not much in the presence of black, Asian and minority
ethnic poets / reviewers.
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Under a third (31%) of the 45 collections reviewed are by women. This figure is probably lower than the
percentage of books by women published by the big poetry publishers (which was
39% from 2010-13).
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Under a third (31% again) of reviews were written by women.
*
Both these figures are worse than last time – and both represent the average across
all six years of this audit.
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Collections by (I think) three BAME* poets are reviewed: 7%. Slightly better than last time.
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Two reviews (I think) are by BAME reviewers: 4%. Last time there didn’t appear to be any, so
that’s progress.
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Publishers are unlikely to get their books reviewed unless they are one of the
big six poetry publishers or another large publisher… or, this time, Shearsman (hooray for that at least!).
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The number of poetry reviews continues to go down.
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Figures for the Saturday poem are much better than for the reviews.
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Conclusion: over the last six years, while the world of poetry changes around
it, the Guardian Review has kept its poetry reviewing coverage much the
same. It seems to be stuck in a pattern
of reviewing books by the big publishers.
This must be the biggest determinant of the results, but isn’t the only
one. It doesn’t appear to explain why
the figure for women’s books reviewed is so low. And of course it doesn’t explain at all the small
number of female and BAME reviewers.
Background
to the audit:
This
is the fifth audit I’ve done of reviews of poetry books in the Guardian Review,
as a micro supplement to the US-based VIDA review which takes an annual look at
representation of women (as both reviewers and reviewed, across all subjects)
in literary publications. I started out
just looking at male/female representation but then extended the audit to
include BAME poets / reviewers and which publishers’ books get reviewed. This count was never quite in sync with VIDA
so last year I decided to wait until now, to synchronise – VIDA’s count cameout yesterday.
I’ll
repeat the reasons for doing this, from an earlier audit:
Shouldn’t the Guardian’s Saturday Review
be challenging literary hierarchies, not strengthening them? In the case of poetry it is doing the
latter. Why do I care? Because I read it every Saturday, enjoy most
of it, but get regularly annoyed by the poetry reviews. And because the Guardian is mainstream,
reaching a far wider audience than any poetry magazine. People whose acquaintance with contemporary
poetry goes no further than skimming the Review’s reviews will have no idea of
its diversity.
This
may all be less relevant than it was when I did the first audit in 2011. The Guardian’s coverage of poetry online has
grown and is diverse. There’s Carol
Rumens’ poem of the week. Last year
there was the poem-a-day on climate change for Keep it in the Ground. A list of items for March includes a podcast
with Holly McNish and Luke Wright discussing political poetry, and a poem by
the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh who is in prison in Saudi Arabia, until
recently under sentence of death.
It’s
the coverage on paper, in the Review, that stays traditional. I still read it and enjoy much of it, so I still care.
This
audit sticks to the same four categories as the last one and covers the 21
months since June 2014. It was harder to
do this time – on the Guardian website it’s no longer possible to search for poetry
reviews. One can search for
poetry-related items, and reviews within this tend to be colour-coded
grey. But I may have both missed things
and included one or two reviews that didn’t appear in print. I’ve included a couple of pieces by writers
about their own books: by Seamus Heaney on his Aeneid VI translation, and Karen
Van Dyck on her anthology of new Greek poetry.
See
the 2014 audit, here, to compare. That
audit also lists the results from previous years.
The 2014-16 audit:
A. Books reviewed in the Guardian’s Saturday
Review
31 books by men, 14 books by women. That’s 69% and 31%.
Disappointing
because the last audit showed some improvement, with women having written 37%
of the books reviewed.
3 books by BAME poets, 2 women, 1 man. That’s 7%.
Slightly
better than last time’s figure of 5%, which represented two books. It would be interesting to be able to compare
this with the percentage of books by BAME poets published by the big six.
B. Reviewers
34 reviews written by men, 15 by women. That’s 69% and 31% again.
Disappointing
again; this reverses what appeared to be a slight but steady improvement over
time. In the last audit 34% of reviewers
were female.
2 BAME reviewers, both women. That’s 4%.
At
least better than last time, when there appeared to be no BAME reviewers.
(Discrepancies
in numbers between A and B are because I’ve counted reviewers of anthologies
but not the anthologies themselves.)
C. Publishers
Only
five books reviewed were not published by the big six poetry publishers or
another large one such as Penguin. That’s
10%. Of the smaller publishers Shearsman
(see right) had 3 books reviewed, and Gallery and Nine Arches one each. These figures fail to reflect what’s
happening in poetry publishing today… there’s a whole world out there which it
would be nice to see given some attention in the Review.
D. Saturday Poem
57
poems in total.
32 poems by men and 25 by women. That’s 56% and 44%.
6 by BAME poets, 5 of them women. That’s 10.5%.
This
one was easy to search. The gender
breakdown seems more or less within normal variation (last time it was 50/50). The
last audit showed no BAME poets at all so this audit’s figure is a very
positive change (and interesting that
the gender balance is reversed here). Just
over a quarter of the poems were out of books from small publishers.
That’s
it.
*
BAME figures are as accurate as I can make them but may not be entirely
correct.
