Poetry and Sexism in the Guardian Review, 2013/14

This has become an annual exercise, or rather a 13-monthly one.  New readers, please see last year’s audit, and also the latest VIDA audit, for the background and reasons for doing this.

2013/14 results:

*  Over a third (37%) of books reviewed are by female poets.  This is the highest percentage yet, and only two points lower than the percentage of women’s books published by the big five poetry publishers.

*  Just over a third (34%) of reviews are written by women. 

*  Middle-sized and small poetry publishers get only 4 books reviewed.  It’s all about the big five.

*  The Guardian is capable of breaking its own glass ceiling: the Saturday Poem has gone gender neutral!

*  Black and Asian poets are very poorly represented in all categories, apparently not at all as reviewers or in the Saturday Poem.

*  The Guardian is reviewing less poetry.

Conclusion:

*  Incremental improvement.  To achieve a Saturday Poem-style breakthrough, the Guardian might have to start reviewing a range of books more representative of the good poetry that’s being published today.       

Figures for May 2013 to early June 2014 are in purple.  Figures for mid March 2012 to end April 2013 are in red.  Figures* for mid February 2011 to early March 2012 are in green.  Figures* from January 2010 - early February 2011 are in blue.  You can access the Guardian’s archive of reviews here.

A.  Books reviewed in the Guardian’s Saturday Review

24 books by men, 14 books by women.  That’s 63% and 37%.

36 books by men, 12 books by women.  That’s 75% and 25%.  

30 books by men, 16 books by women.  That’s 65% and 35%.

27 books by men, 11 books by women.  That’s 71% and 29%. 

Best yet, and a big improvement on last year’s terrible figures.  The split is getting close to the M:F ratio of books published by the big five poetry publishers, which from 2010 to April 2013 was 61:39, see here for the figures on that. 

I think that only 2 books by black and Asian poets were reviewed, the same as last year.  This time the poets were Derek Walcott and Grace Nicholls.  The figure appears disproportionately low.  However, at 5% it’s possible that it might not be far off the percentage for the big five.  It would be good to audit the ethnic origin of poets published by the big five, but this would be much harder than last year’s gender audit.   

See section C below for more on publishers. 

The Guardian Review is reviewing less poetry: see this year’s decline in the number of reviews.  The first two years’ figures above don’t include the short reviews* the Guardian used to do.      

B.  Reviewers

25 men, 13 women.  That’s 66% and 34%.

31 men, 17 women.  That’s 65% and 35%. 

32 men, 14 women.  That’s 70% and 30%.

28 men, 10 women.  That’s 74% and 26%.

The figures consolidate an upward trend, just about.

Female reviewers get given women’s and men’s books to review in roughly equal proportions.  The male reviewers mostly get given books written by men. 

No black or Asian reviewers, I think.  Why not?  

 

C.  Publishers

In this category the figures are even worse than last year.  4 out of 38 books were published by smaller publishers; last year the number was 8.

Again it’s the big five (Bloodaxe Cape, Carcanet, Faber, Picador) who predominate.  There are a few books from larger, non-poetry specialist publishers.  Nothing at all by medium sized, high quality poetry publishers Seren or Salt; there wasn’t last year, either.  The only smaller publishers represented, at one book each, are Shearsman, CB Editions, Polygon and Eggbox Publishing.  Eggbox got in because they published a pamphlet by Faber author and last year’s Forward 1^st Collection Prize winner, Sam Riviere. 

British poetry culture has got more diverse, with a range of excellent smaller publishers flourishing and capturing attention.  And there’s the rise of poetry pamphlets; it’s nice that the author of the Eggbox review, David Wheatley, talks a bit about poetry pamphlet culture generally.  But that’s the only concession to these wider changes in the whole year’s Guardian output.     

The Guardian Review’s glass ceiling for smaller publishers is firmly in place. 

D.  Saturday Poem

19 by men and 19 by women.  That’s… 50% and 50%.  Hooray!

23 by men and 13 by women.  That’s 64% and 36%

33 by men and 18 by women.  That’s 65% and 35%.

[I didn’t work this out for 2010.] 

The Guardian can do it!!  Many of the poems chosen are from new collections.  A shame that all the poets are white, at least I think so.    But it’s a start.  Come on, Guardian Saturday Review – make these annual audits unnecessary!  Do this blog out of a job!  First step: start handing out a wider range of review copies.  Then the numbers will improve. 

E.  Audits – what next

The emphasis of this audit is shifing slightly, from the VIDA-inspired gender-only audit that inspired it in the first place to a broader consideration of what lies behind the Guardian Review’s figures. 

The main exercise I want to do, once my inner geek recovers from this one, is an audit of the Poetry Book Society choices and recommendations.  If people have any other ideas, please say.  And do check out the Sidekick Books blog, where Jon Stone has just started a series on how to fix contemporary poetry culture. 

___

* In the first two years, the Guardian also ran short reviews and I counted these separately (they improved the M:F ratio).  There are still occasionally a few short reviews on the paperbacks page, but these don’t appear when one searches the Guardian’s online poetry reviews.  All the figures given in this audit are for long reviews only.  I always include Nicholas Lezard’s paperback review, if this is of a poetry book.

***   ***   ***

Thank you very much to readers of this blog who voted for me in the Saboteur Awards, Best Reviewer category.  The result can be seen at the top right-hand corner of this blog.  Your votes mattered! 

Alternative poetry awards - Saboteur

When I wrote in January about the closed system of the big UK poetry prizes, a couple of people commented: shame there isn’t an award for small publishers, since the two main prizes both virtually ignore them.  So then Claire Trévien, editor of the online magazine Sabotage Reviews, pointed out that there is an award that covers them: the Saboteur Awards, which she’s been running for the last four years.

The Saboteur Awards “reward work that has… really made us and/or our readers sit up and take notice – especially work that has done so on a tight budget with a small-scale distribution. Sabotage Reviews focuses on the indie side of literature and performance, and our awards celebrate the best of that”.  There aren’t any tangible prizes, at least not until a sponsor comes forward, but there’s kudos.

The awards have a dozen categories, ranging from Best Spoken Word Performer and Best Collaborative Work to Most Innovative Publisher, Best Poetry Pamphlet, Best Anthology and Best Magazine.  So plenty of chance to reward the hard work of small publishers.  Fiction as well as poetry.  Nominations have closed and the shortlists are now being voted for.  People vote online; each shortlist is made up of the top five nominees.  If you have a look you’ll see that there are some really good nominations.

I was very surprised when… I was nominated in the Best Reviewer category.  That came out of nowhere; I guess it was for this blog as much as anything, so thank you very much to any readers of this blog who voted for me!  I’ve also done reviews for various other publications, mostly online and a couple in magazines.  See top right of this blog, above the photo: if you click on Poetry reviews etc, there’s a list of my reviews with links.  I think some people have been checking that page out before they vote, because it’s had a lot of views in the last few weeks. 

Anyway, do please vote… for me, if you like the reviews on this blog!   And in as many categories as you feel you can – the more votes the small poetry publishers get, the more our recognition will count against their under-recognition by the big prizes.  And the more Claire Trévien’s own hard work in organising the awards will be rewarded. 

Thank you.  Here’s the link. 

Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday 25 May.  There’s an award ceremony in Oxford next Saturday, 31 May, plus a book fair and readings; you can book tickets here. 

Hearing poems in the head. Hannah Silva’s Forms of Protest

I’m going to start with stating something that I haven't fully worked out for myself before, and may be obvious to everyone else.  I feel slightly embarrassed about doing this.  How people hear poems while reading them on the page must be a subject of enquiry, from academic research to blog posts. 

When I begin to read a poem silently, an inner voice starts up in my head.  Usually the voice is a disembodied version of my own.  The music of the poem runs alongside the voice; not exactly an accompaniment, rather something deeper, less conscious.  If the poem is by someone whose voice I know from readings or recordings, or by a friend/contemporary, then I hear it in the poet’s voice: Seamus Heaney or Sharon Olds; Patience Agbabi, Hannah Lowe, Stephen Watts.  The more distinctive the voice, the stronger this phenomenon is.  Going back: Dylan Thomas (Fern Hill!), Elizabeth Bishop.  My own inner voice still runs alongside, but subdued.  

Paul Celan

At least, I think this is what happens.  It’s difficult to analyse.  Maybe a different analysis would change my mind.  I would love to be able to read Keats with his voice, or Shakespeare.  Or Catullus, or Sappho.  Or Paul Celan… writing that, it suddenly occurred to me that this might be possible.  Here he is reading ‘Psalm’, and here ‘Todesfuge’.  Now I am going to try to go on writing this despite feeling moved and disturbed by those readings. 

The fact that I hadn’t looked for recordings of Celan before, despite occasional intensive phases of reading his work, shows how much of a page reader I am.  But poetry readings are a means of acquiring poets’ voices, to take back home into their books.  I’m looking forward to this happening at Niall Campbell’s London launch of ‘Moontide’ this week. 

Researching contemporary political poems for a workshop recently, I discovered Hannah Silva.  That too is embarrassing – to be so far behind.  I’d liked her sestina very much in the anthology Adventures in Form, but hadn’t listened to her performing.  Here she is reading/performing ‘Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi’, a poem that comes in waves of sound, a child’s word-game in a prison-like, soundproof location, that also sounds like the chanting of a crowd:

Gaddafi a room with strong walls

Gaddafi strong floors and strong ceiling

Gaddafi and choose a word Gaddafi not any word

One of the ways the poem works is that the syntax of the text, concealed by the repetitions of “gaddafi”, is tightly controlled and very clear – all the more so when it overhauls itself by repeating phrases and other words.  In Silva’s reading, the poem comes across as very cogent.  Finally the meaning of the dictator’s name is lost and the name itself gallops away:

gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi we chant our way through this

loss of meaning until we become a gaddafi of horses

galloping: gaddafi gaddafi gaddafi.

The ending reminds me of a nursery rhyme which my ear still hears as if it doesn’t yet understand the words… ending, gallopa gallopa gallopa.

After listening to ‘Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi’ I bought Silva’s book, Forms of Protest.  That sestina, ‘Hello My Friend’, is there.  The sestina may be today’s most despised poem-form, but it offers great potential for playing around with text.  Silva makes full use of that, her starting-point being disjointed phrases from email scams: 

I am contacting you with something urgent,

you have always been a good friend

The poem reaches far beyond this into the realms of social media and instant news culture.  Silva captures well the slightly off-true syntax of spam.  The repetitiveness of the form adds to the insistent tone and the confusion around the interconnectivity of things: 

Sometimes I wonder if we really need to be connected

to an idea, a chink in history that only now is urgent.

I wonder why I feel the need for a friend

when friendship has become a meaningless subject.

One of the two things I like best about Silva’s poems is that they address political subjects, often head-on, usually by using experimental techniques as a way to get beyond familiar types of political discourse.  Secondly, they combine such techniques (eg collage, homophonic translation, concrete poetry, texting) with lyric poetry, in varying proportions. 

‘Opposition’ rubbishes politician-speak by breaking it down into its components, from the insincerity of stock phrases:

It’s great to be here in Liverpool

we’re happy about that.

I’ve been in Downing Street

it’s great to be here in Liverpool

We’re happy about Downing Street

it’s great to be here in Liverpool

To a crazed obsession with cuts:

And yes cutting the

And yes cutting the nat

And yes cutting the national

And yes cutting the cutting the cutting cutting…

cuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcctctctctctct…

The word ‘cutting’ is itself cut up, leaving only its onomatopoeic consonants.  This is a good example of a poem that must be great when performed, but also works very well on the page.  Nearly everything does work.  One exception is ‘Insults’, which might be effective in performance but its 23 lines come across as a lucky dip on the page, despite the lively language:

You are a surreal pandemic

You are an uber wacky

You are a poor man’s metaphor

You are an immortal waste of space

There is a suitably surreal, both funny and sinister “adaptation” of Kafka’s The Trial, one of several poems sustained over several pages and (like ‘Opposition’) in several parts with widely varying form and rhythm. 

Perhaps a deferment would suit you better?

Would you like me to explain what deferment is about?

Leave the carpet alone and listen to what the lawyer is saying!

Silva addresses gender politics, in very different environments.  Sometimes all you can do is laugh in the face of despair... ‘Tory Party Sonnet’ starts:

There are no women left, can’t win

carpeted halls, a place that smelt, women left

exhausted sandwiches spoke only to themselves.

It reads like, and is, a collage.  The last two lines are brilliant.. get the book!  ‘River Bank’ is also disjointed but graphically frightening instead of comic:

What do you do with a slut?

Reach for the ketchup bottle.

I could easily quote from another dozen or so poems, to cover more of the variety of form and subject matter.  There’s a good review on John Field’s blog, which covers both similar and different ground.  Reading the book, my inner voice goes all over the place, turning into Silva's for 'Gaddafi Gaddafi Gaddafi' and a couple of others I've listened to, and extrapolating from her voice to varying degrees for the rest.  

To end, here is the last verse from the lyrically weird last poem, ‘Sharing Faces’:

 

 it is a lonely place

     the body stretched out across the river

                      walk on it  I dare you

 

Forms of Protest is published by Penned in the Margins.  

First Poem

People keep mentioning ‘Tarantella’ – it seems to be having a Moment.  My mental map for childhood memories can locate where I was when I first heard it, aged 7: in a classroom with walls the colour of the less lurid kind of mushy peas.  On one wall was a grid with our names down the side and x2, x3, x4 etc along the top.  Whenever one of us mastered a new times table, the relevant square in the grid was filled with a coloured star.  Or were the stars all gold?  The room faced south and I’m seeing the sun lighting up our stars, which made an interesting pattern, though one very unlike real stars. 

It didn’t matter who this man with a strange name was.  I don’t think I associated him with the Cautionary Tales.  The poem’s rhythms, rhyme, speed and descriptive power took root.  The pattern of the sounds went in and out like the dance.  I could see most of the poem though had trouble with “the wine that tasted of the tar”; how could this adult drink taste of the sticky stuff that melted on roads in the summer?  I can still see what I saw – the courtyard of an old, white-painted inn with several floors of wooden-railinged galleries, red flowers/leaves and everyone looking Spanish.  There wasn’t a picture, I’d never been abroad and we didn’t have a television at home.

Attachment to the romantic sublime in landscapes must start early… re-reading the poem brings back my visualisation of the second verse too.  I relished the abrupt change of mood to doom and gloom – all those long vowels, “more.. hoar.. falls”, etc, and the feet tramping in the dead sound of the words ending in d, “sound.. tread.. ground.. sound”.  Not knowing what had happened only drew me deeper in.  Probably not understanding all the words (muleteer, tedding, hoar) did too.  So, I think, did the idea of remembering something that couldn’t be retrieved from the past but  could be recreated on the page.      

Of course some of the above may be false memories, as dubious as the goldness of the stick-on stars.  But at least some of it’s valid; and above all I can remember the feeling of the experience – my first ever grown-up poem, and the first time I got what poetry could do.  Anyway, here’s ‘Tarantella’.  You can listen to Hilaire Belloc himself half-reading, half-singing it on the Poetry Archive.  There’s an interesting piece about him on the same page.    

Tarantella       by Hilaire Belloc

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

And the tedding and the spreading

Of the straw for a bedding,

And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,

And the wine that tasted of the tar?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,

Do you remember an Inn?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

Who hadn't got a penny,

And who weren't paying any,

And the hammer at the doors and the din?

And the hip! hop! hap!

Of the clap

Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl

Of the girl gone chancing,

Glancing,

Dancing,

Backing and advancing,

Snapping of a clapper to the spin

Out and in –

And the ting, tong, tang, of the guitar.

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;

Miranda,

Never more.

Only the high peaks hoar:

And Aragon a torrent at the door.

No sound

In the walls of the halls where falls

The tread

Of the feet of the dead to the ground

No sound:

But the boom

Of the far waterfall like doom.