 Good evening and welcome to the last of the Royal Society of Literatures' summer events with the British Library and our first in collaboration with Libre poetry critics, the national programme to encourage diversity and poetry reviewing culture aimed at new critical voices. I'm Molly Rosenberg I'm director of the Royal Society of Literature, and tonight we'll be discussing the language of poetry criticism and how review culture shapes global poetics. Since the Libre Poetry Critics programme was founded in 2017, the percentage of poetry criticism by reviewers of colour in the UK press has more than doubled. We're joined this evening by Libre Poetry Critics co-founders and ourself fellows Sandy, Palmer and Sarah Howe to lead reflections, discussions and readings from Kwame Dawes, Anthony and Axogoro, Paisley Wreckdall and the poetry collective for brown girls who write. You'll have a chance to ask all our speakers questions at the end of their conversation so please send those in through throughout the event using the chat function which should be just at the bottom of the page that you're watching on. Our chairs this evening are Sandy Palmer and Sarah Howe. Sandy is professor of English literature at the University of Liverpool and a BBC new generation thinker. Her books include reading mean alloys autobiographies myth of the modern, and two books of our own poetry, the marble orchard and Edelon. Sarah Howe is a poet, academic and editor and lecturer in poetry at Kings College London. Her debut collection Loop of Jade won the TS Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Before I hand over to Sarah and Sandy, I'd like to welcome RSL honorary fellow Kwame Dawes to open this evening. Kwame is the author of 20 books of poetry and numerous works of fiction, criticism and essays. He is Glenna Lushai, editor of the Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and was a faculty member of Calvay Carnham. Kwame, over to you. Yeah, thanks. It's interesting discussion I think we're going to have, you know, the first thing that struck me was in the, in our sort of opening statement, the question statement was made that, you know, critics of color in British newspapers has doubled, but we don't know what it doubled from so it's a dubious claim but I'm sure it's a very good thing. But it does beg the question that I've always wondered about, which is, what is the place of, you know, poetry criticism in today's market, which is heavily driven by by social media. What is the question about what the function of this criticism would be and how it works in the current blurb culture publishers have increasingly seeded the responsibility of reaching out to people to blurb their work, which, which in itself in the United States is a it's a ritual to get people to say good things about the word because absolutely no blurb is bad so you couldn't sort of safely call that criticism but I bring it up because in much of the work that I do as an editor, a tremendous number of the reviews that come in can be traced directly to the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed, usually a friendship. And that friendship drives the activity. And the other thing that characterizes it is that poets tend to be the ones doing reviews of other poets, which means that independent sort of individual critics, critics who are critics, do not necessarily exist in in in in the numbers that we might imagine at least in the ways in which we want to see reviews happen. But reviews are absolutely essential. You know, my work with art and poets, my work with Caribbean poets as an as an editor and as a publisher has led me to this conclusion that one of the big mistakes that we've made in terms of our approach to criticism, at least approach to publication is that we spent so much time catching up with the, with the culture of publishing writers of color writers from different regions that have long been been overlooked, particularly in poetry, and so much of the energy goes into that getting works in print and so on and so little of the time is spent in the criticism of that work. And in many ways, the reception of that work, the longevity of that work, the perception and understanding of that work is left to to the vicissitudes of social media of likes and dislikes and so on so forth and no effective system to make sure that this work continues to be to be resonant. But it is the nature of the game because what happens is that unless unless writers are reviewing other writers, that activity doesn't take place. So it strikes me that giving specific and clear attention to as we we are doing in this discussion to the role of the critic and to the function of the critic becomes usually important. But of course, what we are trying to work against this criticism that comes out of the place of ignorance that that is people criticizing works for which they have no knowledge of, and no understanding of the literary context from which that work is coming from, have known, not necessarily any kind of understanding of the allusions, the sort of socio political context in which the work is being written there. And consequently, we end up with reviews that are reflective of one culture sort of being imposed on another culture. So the conundrum then is how do we ensure that even when we do find reviews taking place they do come out of a position of understanding, a position of a sort of a knowledge of the field that knowledge of the, the lines that have given birth to the writers that are being reviewed and given birth to the portrait that is being reviewed and being examined. And I think the only way that that we can do that is to really, you know, attach as much attention to the idea of acquiring books acquire manuscripts workshops and all those kinds of things. But we place the same amount of attention and value to the critics to the role of the critics to the role of those people who are thinking about that work. So I do think it's important that that at the very least, the critics who are engaged to write reviews and the critics who are engaged in venues that are sort of the, the standard venues, the venues that are highly valued, be people who have an understanding of the, of the. The sort of literary context for which that work is, is being reviewed. And for many of us, certainly including me, I've read reviews by reviewers who clearly have no knowledge of any of the illusions that I've made and simply write really nonsense reviews in very big places. And so it leaves you wondering what can be done and of course when the, when you complain and they say well can you suggest a reviewer and we're back into the same kind of quandary and conundrum. So the last thing I'll say, and I'll wrap up this sort of what we are calling a provocation is the proposition that that that has held sway for a very long time, beginning with folks like, like Ezra Pound and company is the idea that the universality of poetry being that if poetry is good in whatever culture it will be it will be the same good it will be the same value it will be the same, anybody can understand it if they understand anything about poetry and I want to sort of disabuse us of that notion and to say that an understanding of the poetic tradition, within which a work emerges is critical to an understanding of the work itself, and to realize that poets are writing out of traditions that are multiple and that are varied, and that critics have to develop those skills. And I think editors who employ reviewers should pay attention to what what what is evident in the skills, the knowledge in the background of these reviewers because without doing that I think what we end up with is a culture in which reviews tend to be unhelpful and can be also quite problematic. So those are a couple of thoughts that I would say I say the review is still necessary I say the literary review and the literary critic the critic who writes books on on literature is necessary, especially for writers of color but there's a tremendous amount of work left to be done so I'll stop there. Lovely, thank you so much Kwame for all of those thoughts and on all the points you raise really are. We hope ones that we will discuss throughout this event, particularly the relationship between reviewing and the market and blurbs etc and and really just to reinstate I think that the importance of critical culture as a rejoinder to to all the other noise that happens around publishing. But also the point you raise about being knowledgeable about traditions from which poets emerge is a really key thing I'm sure that we will discuss as well. So thank you very much for your for your publication for your thoughts. Thank you also to Molly and to the RSL as Molly said this event is a collaboration between the RSL and the Ledbury poetry critics program. And ledbury poetry critics is primarily a mentorship scheme for poetry reviewers of color. As Molly also mentioned we began in 2017 Sarah how and I co founded the program really off the back of some statistics that were compiled by Dave coats that showed the poetry reviewing in the UK was predominantly white. So back then it was about, it was a fact that about 3% of all reviews were written by critics of color and 3% of courses, really, really low. I think that number through statistical research and analysis that Dave has done for the past three years. It shows that over a 10 year period we're looking really now at that number raising to about 10%. So, so in fact reviews by critics of color have tripled tripled not just in newspapers but also in poetry magazines etc. This year ledbury has been generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to expand our thinking to move beyond just quantitative measures and trying to increase the numbers of critics of color, which is of course important. But now I think we're trying or hoping to consider how poetry and its critical culture might be more meaningfully interrogated and changed with regards to race and a kind of more qualitative sense. It is for this reason that we are considering today what the language critics use when evaluating poetry by poets of color is important and really just trying to have a conversation today about what those aims and hopes are for the future of poetry reviewing specifically with regards to race. I'll hand over now to Sarah to introduce our other two panellists for this evening. Thank you so much Sandeep and Kwame for your wonderful provocation and Molly and the RSL too from me. It's my pleasure now to welcome our two remaining panellists for the evening. Paisley Rectle and Anthony and Exogoro, who are both wonderful poets in their own rights and also excellent thinkers about poems. Anthony and Exogoro is a British born separate poet published in all sorts of illustrious magazines, ranging from poetry to the new statesman and grantor and so on. His latest collection after the formalities was shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot Prize and was also a telegraph and guardian book of the year. His lovely book on the craft of writing, which I've been recommending copiously to all my creative writing students this year, is called How to Write It, and it came out from murky books in 2020. Paisley Rectle is the author of six books of poetry, including Animal Eye, which won the UNT Rilker Prize, Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tough Prize, and her most recent collection Nightingale. She is also the author of several wonderful books of nonfiction and hybrid works, including the Book of Essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, which was the first book of hers that I read several years ago and immediately sought out the rest of her. The one that speaks most urgently to our conversation today is her latest book of nonfiction called Punningly Appropriate or Appropriate, depending on which way you look at it, A Provocation, which came out from Norton earlier this year. And now I'll hand over to first Paisley and then Anthony, who will each speak for a few minutes, carrying on this thread of thinking about reviewing and its language. Thanks. Sarah, thank you Sandeep and Kwame and Anthony and everyone at the British Library for this and the Royal Society of Literature. So everything that you brought up Kwame is exactly what I want to talk about because it is, it is central to this problem of not just how we get poetry in the hands of readers but how poetry itself survives. It is not automatically discount because they are nothing more than the sort of please buy this so it's not critical literature so we can immediately sort of ignore that to a certain extent. But reviewing and criticism is absolutely central to the dissemination of work but also the critical survival of work overall. Our ability to teach poetry in schools is absolutely central to that question. I want to separate that work of reviewing out from criticism, which Kwame also was suggesting we do as well. And I want to also talk about the double bind that critics of color experience around this. I want to lay out a few things as we were talking just now about some of the things that I think are pitfalls for and what reasons why I think there are fewer, more readers or reviewers of color now, why we still have so few of them when we're thinking of the field as a whole and one is I think just because one is of the racial or ethnic background of the book that is being reviewed is not also automatically meant that that person is going to be a good reviewer of the tradition that that person is writing in I think that that in itself can be a problematic assumption that even white editors would make even as it's meant to be quite well meaning. But you know I can imagine I teach Asian American literature I've spent my life reading in that field. And I've also taught younger Asian American writers who do not know about that field have not read as widely in that tradition. I'm saying because you are Asian you are going to be able to respond more authentically or critically or usefully to this work may also send people in a slightly different direction there's training within these fields as well. The other thing I would like to say is that social media is disastrous I think in terms of the field of reviewer. One of the things that goes to the double bind of the critic of color is because there are just now a larger number of writers of color getting published, and just now more critics of color starting to show up I think that the implicit desire that social media keeps pushing on us is then that everything is good. Everything is brilliant. Everything is great. And criticism does not actually, you know, good criticism does not simply reside in the this is all wonderful and good criticism is able to contextualize the conversation that the book is already within the field itself has been engaged in. So that we're not simply speaking to the last books of the last five years we're talking about the last books last 50 or 100 years that this book is engaged in. And that's, that's really important in order to sort of say, can we also look at work that is both good and bad. Can we say that some of the, the writing of younger writers of color is both amazing and wonderful but also maybe derivative in some ways that other readers will not be aware of and there's a real desire not to be critical, because social media will come after you. And I think that's a terrible situation to be in I think it it muzzles us a little bit. But I want to think about it from the other side to which is, I myself recently. I'm writing a book on the poetry of war and thinking about the war poem, as it's changed post, you know, 1975 Vietnam and thinking about the different voices that have come to think about war in this sort of way. But I was really struck. And so I've been writing those sort of critical essays, but I started writing more critical work around and reviewing work around writers of color, especially after a review showed up by William Logan, which took to task Ocean Vong's book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. And what I found very interesting was that Logan didn't like the book. And he kept trying to shove the book into two different types of tropes. One was the immigrant trope, which should be as an Asian American immigrant, which is not what Vong's background was. It should be displaying the sort of assimilative desires that say would have shown up and work from the 1980s in certain Asian American literature, and also this very kind of undercurrent of why aren't more grateful to be here, which is a very, you know, shows up around a lot of the stuff around refugees. Logan seemed not able to place vong in any kind of tradition and also misread the particular kind of identity that book that vong himself actually possessed. So I've went in and talked about what are the critical dangers of doing that, which is that even though Logan is trying to read the poems as the poems. Logan does not, did not include not for whatever reason situate the historical political context from which we had to engage with that work, let alone some of the other literary works that I think that vong was actually working in. Also going back to something else that Kwami brought up, which is this idea that somehow, and I think certain people want to have that outside, which is that a poem is a poem is a poem. And I think a lot of us in this panel would sort of say no. The ability to enjoy a poem may change quite deeply based on the knowledge one can have when bring coming forward towards towards that poem. What is the conversation that you've already been engaged with, or not engaged with this poem. That is not to say that's not to say that you couldn't have any kind of aesthetic relationship with the poem, but it's going to deepen if you know more about it. That's why it is of course crucial that people who are not only coming from these backgrounds but are also trained to read within these literary traditions themselves have more of a say and have more of a voice but this, I do want to say one last thing before I hand this off to Anthony which is, I think we also have to push back against, I think some of the worst elements of a kind of social media culture that insists on a kind of policing almost from within, which says everyone better like the results of the reviewing and the criticism. It's difficult to have good honest reviewing and good honest criticism we also have to be able to say when we actually think someone is is producing work that is excellent and when we might think some of the work is not as excellent and I don't feel right now that we're in a place that has given to readers and critics of color actually the space to do it because of the pressures of a still a very white dominated publishing system and a white reviewing system, and also the pressures that I think other readers of color and just, you know, social media users are able to sort of tow a kind of critical line and I don't I so I'm very curious I don't know how that's going to play out. My own desire is that I think that will tip when we get more and more editors more and more reviewers of color. Thank you Paisley, thank you for that. Hi everyone, good to see you. Yeah, I think it is. It's super interesting to see the role of the critic in this and the reviewer in this in this day and age what one thing that I've realized is that critic now has become quite a dirty word. You tell people that you kind of you're interested in kind of literary criticism they see you as a kind of gatekeeper straight away implies power influence and taste maker essentially. So, for my kind of experience over the last five to six years. That from what Kwame was saying and from what Paisley was saying is that we've kind of jettisoned expertise for opinion. And I think that's quite an important thing to realize and to accept. Maybe that speaks into this age of anti intellectualism. The way that it's very difficult to be rigorous and be critical of something because you're just constantly or you're instantly seen as like a bad person and the way that social media dictate likes and and I think click baiting as well. It kind of creates a very particular kind of aesthetic within review culture. And then I think about the platforms where reviews take place on the one hand in the UK you've got poetry review poetry London. And then on the other hand you've got the Guardian, and they have different readers and they have different functions and the way that those reviews and those pieces work. And there's a different intention behind each ones as Kwame was saying you have poets reviewing other poets. And if you look at the Venn diagram of those poets as well. But they're in the same WhatsApp groups, and it becomes difficult to kind of gauge anything objectively when it becomes clear that somebody's writing a puff piece, because they're friends with the poet. And then you start to read the work and you realize hang on a minute, you're not actually critiquing or engaged with the text. You're just saying that the person's great. And that becomes like a different kind of review and I think that this is maybe what we've slipped into. And I've spoken to people who write criticism, and it's tenuous ground, it's difficult to talk about work objectively, because of the fact that people will just come for you. Both online and I guess within the sector is if you look at if you're seen as being unfair or you're just maybe you don't like this book and you have good enough reason to say why this book isn't holding its own. I think we should be allowed to do that there should be space in the sector for that to happen. I think the other thing that from what Kwame was saying with blurbs and things like this is that we have this kind of like market orthodoxy that drives the way in which review culture and criticism play out. And I don't necessarily think it's a healthy thing. I think it's very superficial in the way that poets of color have to racialize themselves in order to feel that they have a place within the conversation. And it's something that privately people feel away about, you know, it's not nice having to mine your life and your experiences for things that have hurt you for things that have made you suffer in order to appease a white middle class readership. And I think this is another huge part of the issue and it's this plays in both the UK and the US as well, is that you get a publishing deal because of the fact that you're your race first, your work comes second, whereas the white writer doesn't have that predicament. You get on because their work is supposedly brilliant and the race is default or it's kind of, you know, nullified because of the fact that work speaks. And I think that there is a discrepancy between the way in which those works are thought of that you have a white, you have not white writers being reviewed by white writers who as Kwame was saying, lack the expertise and the knowledge to be able to fully gauge the nuances and the references those cult references of the work and show the work should be able to speak in a kind of multifarious way that's part of arts function. But then to have a reviewer who understands those nuances is also very very important. Otherwise so much gets lost in that mix as well, and then that comes back to authenticity. And the idea of being authentic within a piece of writing. I've had a review myself of my work where a reviewer said that I was inauthentic. It wasn't sanctimonious, but it was more to do with like virtue signalling. And these are these are words that we associate to the freedom of speech kind of debate and the kind of the right wing, I would say. And so it's like, where do you draw the line and where do you create these kind of discourses that allow work to be seen and thought of without these these big kind of I guess they're marketing. They're marketing tools that get put on top of the work that is driven by market populism and what people think the readers want to see. And I'm not I don't like the term tragedy porn. I don't like you know these kind of these these they're very crude, and they're very reductive. But then I think at the same time, there's something that we haven't quite worked out yet as a culture in how we can think about writers in their totality. I think that's the key and how you can critique work in its totality without needing to kind of latch on to a blurb, which a lot of the time, or even reviews that sometimes they don't really feel. They've been well thought out I've read reviews that they feel like the press release. You know that's not a blur that's not a crit that's not a, that's not a rigorous write up. And so I, yeah, I kind of feel that all those factors taken into consideration have created the malaise that I think a lot of people now feel, and I'm not too sure where we at with how we kind of restructure rebalance the conversation. I don't think I think drastically has to happen. And I think the last thing that I'll say is that the people who are exceptionally good at reviewing work in that objective kind of expertise way get paid hardly anything to do it. You have to think about the idea of how money incentivises these kind of ambitions, and if you're not paying people properly, you know the amount of time it takes to read a collection, formulate some ideas and some thoughts and then give them 100 pounds for it that's taken over a month to do it's no one's going to want to do it. And so that then you end up with this thing where you get maybe more pedestrian critics who don't know how to think about things in this kind of complex and nuanced way, writing pieces that are half baked. And then everyone gets upset because they end up missing so much of what the works are doing. Can I just jump in here and say, I just love all of the things you brought up there Anthony, and especially the monetary thing because you know, reviewing is just no money in it. And when people are up against I have limited time to want to work on my book versus somebody else's work and then all I'm going to get is just bitterness and rage. And of course no one's going to actually jump on that bandwagon, but I also want to hit on two terms. I mean I think objective and objective objectivity and authenticity. I mean I think one of the things that goes back to this issue around race and reviewing is this ridiculous assumption that somehow it is the writer of colors responsibility to somehow present authenticity. And that is not a question that again I think I'm just echoing something that Anthony brought up here but you know that's not a question for the white writer for whom the imagination is supposedly limitless, whereas they're supposed to be an almost seamless interchange between the person and the product when you're a writer of color. And I think that's why people get so upset around the issue of cultural appropriation or appropriation literature in general which is that of course it disrupts entirely that idea that there's that authenticity that the writer of color constantly perform, whereas the white writer can somehow dip in and out of these things whereas all of us could actually potentially be doing that. And all of us are equally inauthentic. But that that that pushed authenticity, I think also creates tremendous pressures on younger writers of color who then feel as if there's a particular kind of subject matter that they either have to perform and write in order to be taken either by reviewer or as you're saying by an editor to be, you know, bought at all, or, you know, even in workshop spaces to this idea that somehow the writing has to be coded in certain ways for certain readers or then they have to go to elaborate links to say I'm not writing for a white middle class audience, but at all times, the anxiety of the audience is placed very much on the writer of color, as well as the reviewer of color which is, you know, am I piercing this wall of authenticity? Am I just reifying it in some sort of way? The last thing I'll say is, I, you know, I think the desire is that somehow the critic is objective, but I actually myself feel like we should probably just do away with that and sort of say like, you know, I was taken by something that I haven't said a long time ago is, you know, there are just books that you're going to like more than others, there are literary traditions are going to like more than others, and you're going to be a better reader and reviewer of those traditions. And so perhaps you should, you know, at least choose within that tradition so you can do an honest job there, but I don't think that objectivity is something that we can really give to reviewers, nor is it something that we need to necessarily stand from. I mean, I think we can be honest and we can be respectful, but I don't think we're ever going to be truly objective, because we're still working within parameters of history and context in our reading. And so I think, but again, this idea of what is the what is the review supposed to do, is it going to be objective or is it going to be just purely laudatory. And in somewhere right around here we're sort of swerving in and out of these desires. Yeah, that's that's exactly what I was, what I was driving at is that sometimes you feel that that no one's, the reviewer hasn't actually engaged with the text at all. They're just talking about the poet and all about the book subject, which isn't engaging with the text, it's talking about the book subject. So, and that's kind of why I feel, again, I know objectivity is a very loose. But I think I can't think of another way to kind of try and look at something from above, you know, rather than try and take or from place of neutrality, if it's possible, it's probably not. It's trying to, you know, distinguish those parameters and think about the work in that way. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, you know, I feel terrible sort of calling it out, but I mean, I would say, I routinely horrified by the reviews that show up in the New York Times review. I'm just like what, what is this, this is not reviewing. This is an extended blurb or just like you said this is an extent this is something that somebody got, you know, off of the publisher I'm just like this is not reviewing this is a fifth grade book report, if we're lucky. I feel like that all the time. I've almost never bought a book of poetry that shows up in the New York Times review because I'm just like, this is, this is ridiculous this barely rises to the occasion. And yet the fetishization around that particular review and it drives me crazy. You know, and that but some of the best going back to another question we haven't even talked about is like where are the best reviews showing up. And some of these big places right you know they're showing up in some of these smaller literary journals where they've given giving the space or poetry magazine release they can pay you know real money for this where you can have something extended and a little bit more meditative on these subjects. Thank you so much, Paisley and Anthony. This is is like the dream panel to chair and as much as it's very much sharing itself. Those, those thoughts set us so far along the path of thinking about the questions we want to talk through today. But if the audience won't mind me interrupting. I need to introduce a poetic interlude from four brown girls who write and we'll pick up this fabulous conversation after after some poems. So for brown girls who write is a collective who is radical polyphonic style showcases the daring of their individual writing. The four, four girls are Roshni Goryartey, Sharon Hunjan, Sheena Patel and Sunna Khan. And their acclaimed joint collection was published in 2020 by Rough Trade Books. Hi everyone we are all brown girls who write it's me, Roshni, Sharon, Sunna and Sheena. And we're going to read a few poems for you today. I don't know how to forgive you when you make more apology when it's haunting and read my title poem. You pretend to be half dead. You drag your mother's dreams to the bottom of the ocean. You drag your mother to the bottom of the ocean by her hair. You leave her there. You yawn at the weight of things. Stretch to find yourself floating on a sea of your own laughter. You do not drown. Drowning is for the willing. Drowning is for those that keep swimming in search of their horizon. I was the daughter of a ghost. I know what it is to kiss the shadow in the room on both cheeks. Watch him peel like wallpaper. Poppills paste the street. Weep more than he slept. But you are not a shadow or a ghost. You pretend to be half dead. You go limp at the thought of living as if living was an ugly storm. Your laugh is a shallow shore. It mocks the men who cast their hungry nets. I forget the last time I saw your eyes, anchored firmly in your face. Oh, it's me. Hi, I'm Sheena. I'm reading from my pamphlet. This is what love is. Priti Patel, Manera Merza, Rishi Sunak, Sadra Javids, Nyman to an outwardly racist, neoliberalist, libertarian, conservative government, hell bent on a no deal Brexit, echos an entrenched belief system in some parts of the British South Asian community. These four waste men of the apocalypse do not see any shared issues with their immigrant brethren and do the utmost to disown themselves of any allegiance to anything other than their own careers. They draw the bridge up after them, providing zero allyship with the black and Muslim communities, as demonstrated by the Islamophobia rampant within the Tory party. When Johnson won the leadership, Muhammad Amin resigned as chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, citing Johnson's Islamic phobic slurs as a reason for his moral bankruptcy, Priti Patel threw herself at Johnson's defence. Their initial silence around the Windrush scandal, Patel's endorsement of a points led immigration system, and the gaslighting of 30 black and brown Labour MPs amongst them, Dawn Butler, Diane Abbott and Chulit Sadiq during a discussion about racism in Parliament instigated by the Black Lives Matter upsurge after George Floyd was murdered. Anytime I read Patel in the papers, my stomach clenches like I've been personally attacked. My name's Sharon. I'm reading from my pamphlet called Hatch. This one's called My Mother Wears a Uniform. My mother wears a uniform every day and I don't. My mother has had many uniforms, thick, white with red, tiny polka dots, navy trousers, skirts and checked shirts, checked like prison doors. My mother wasn't allowed to go to college, but she'd love to type fast long nails, tap, tap, tap, click, click, clicking on the typewriter. Every morning she does her makeup, bright, fuchsia, lippy, blow-dried hair she puts on her uniform, customers are rude to her. She stands all day, her feet ache. They take words from your mouth and you stand silent when they yell at you because every little helps and the customers always write, write. She puts on her uniform, she stands all day, her feet ache. Now I realise it's your navy check, tiny red polka dots that have fed me. They take words from your mouth but not from mine. I'm reading from my pamphlet Shadow Work and the poem I'm going to read is called Methi and Me. It creeps in, unnoticed, gorilla fennigreek. Later, I ask mum, did you put Methi? She pretends she's sorry that it slipped in by accident, but we all know what tastes better. Methi by the fistful. Pajas, baklis, dibras, buris. It's just that three days later when I'm at a music festival, not having washed in over a hundred hours. It's the fennigreek, that curry-smelling bitch who pushes through the crowds and says her jesu krishnas. Thanks so much for having us. We are four brown girls who write. Our pamphlet collection is available as a set with rough trade books. Please do you go out and buy it and support us. Thank you so much. Just to jump back into the conversation and to bring us back to some of the brilliant things that were being said there by everyone. I want to pick up on the theme of the discussion we're having, which is about the language of reviewing. Partly, I think that the discomfort certainly around white reviewers predominantly reading poets of colour has been the use of certain kinds of language. Anthony mentioned authenticity there as being a term that is often deployed when discussing writers of colour specifically. But also this kind of reliance on the blurb, the blurb which tends to exoticise poets of colour tends to rely on their biographies. Tends to imply perhaps that the work is really worth being read solely on the basis of the life experience that it conveys as opposed to the poetic tradition within which it sits. And so I wonder if I could just ask all of you about this question about language. What are the real problems here to do with language more so than perhaps the term authenticity, that's a really good one. In your view, what could be done to improve some of that critical language that we use in thinking about poets of colour specifically, but also perhaps poetry generally? I have a couple of quick things that some of this conversation has brought to me. First, I'd like to make a distinction between the editorial blurb, which is one idea of how a work is introduced, and the solicited blurb, which is the blurb that you're told to go and find friends to write nice things about you. But I think you're right that many of the critics sort of draw, are guided by these constructions, these framings, and then proceed to do the work around it. I can actually bluntly that a lot of the sort of so-called expected criticism or the standard revered critics are lazy. They are fundamentally lazy. They rest on certain kind of presumed ideas and then stick to that, and if things don't fit into it, they just don't do the work. They are fundamentally lazy, and some of them are fundamentally stupid. They just don't understand stuff. And I think that's just true, and that happens too often, and one has absolutely no patience with that. But I'll say this, though, that the suggestion that white poets are somehow allowed a certain kind of leeway. Let's just take the UK, for instance. The fact is that being white is actually one of the criteria for getting published. I mean, we talk about exclusion, but what has happened is the inclusion. I mean, look at Faber, look at all the big presses. How hard is it for them to consider publishing a writer of colour, and what a hoopla we make when Faber finally publishes a writer of colour. Being white is the criteria. And then, speaking of language and speaking of context, writing a certain kind of poetry, a poetry that is this bland sort of cold, ironic language is what we like. We think it's the right thing. So amongst the writers who are picked up, many of the white writers have no variance. They are sort of flat and straightforward and using a certain kind of insight, language and so on. So I don't want us to make the mistake of presuming that the white writer who is seeking to get play is free to do whatever they want. They have to play white. They have to write white. And they have to do so. And because the critics affirm that whiteness and the practice of white, which comes from a particular kind of tradition that is revered and understood. So you combine that with ignorance and you've got a problem. I have no problem saying to a critic, many of the names that we've talked about and others that look, I know what you know, and I know more than you do. I've read everything you've read, plus I've read other things. I've read Africans. I've read Caribbean writers. I've read writers from all over the world. So I am better off. I'm better able to engage this work sensibly than you are. And when ignorance becomes your protection, it becomes the basis. If you don't understand something, you dismiss it as not good. When that becomes the basis of your so-called criticism, then that's just nonsense and that's just stupid. And there's a lot of stupidity around and there's a lot of stupidity that's enshrined in where the work is published. Having said all of that, despite all we say about New York Times and all of these places, who doesn't want to get a review in that place? Because of course you get a blurb taken completely out of context on your book and everybody thinks, well, this was great. So I have to say that part of my impatience is that there are people who, and I've had arguments with people like Bloom or Wendler and all of these people, because a lot of what they say and what their judgment is is predicated on ignorance. And ignorance is something you can actually track. And when arrogance and ignorance makes you get pure nonsense, and that's a lot of what is happening. I wanted to say that really upfront and we can sort of do whatever we want to do. So consequently language is affected by it. So consequently hackneyed notions of culture are created by it. Racism is perpetuated by that kind of nonsense. What happened with William Logan and Ocean Walk is fundamentally racist and I think we can call it that. And it's racist that is predicated on complete ignorance. Thanks so much, Kwame. I'm sure that Anthony and Paisley would like to come in on that as well. Do you want to go first, Paisley, or should I? You go first. Yeah, I mean, I fully endorse, no pun intended, everything that Kwame said there. I think that one of my major frustrations with the language of criticism is the fact that a lot of the time the white critic, the white reviewer fails or is unwilling to meet the collection or the poems on its own terms. And this is like a huge issue for me is that what they're essentially pining for is another kind of poetic another book. And what they do is they go into these projects or these endeavors with an assumed idea of what living as African American as a South Asian Brit, like what these things mean. They render the experiences, the sensibilities and the poetics through a very narrow lens that ends up a lot of the time not aligning because that lens is created around stereotypes and all kinds of tropes and things like this. I see it in the review is that it's a basically saying I thought you were like this, but you're actually like that so I'm going to try and push you back into being how I thought you were. And that's what creates a lot of those tensions and when you read these kind of reviews you end up realizing actually you have no clue what you're talking about, you have no cultural reference. I don't really need people to be from the same place as me to be able to get what I'm writing around that's not their job my job is to make that world three dimensional. But what I do need is for somebody to understand some of those suggestions that are happening within within the piece and it doesn't work the other way. That's what's really frustrating. It's a one way kind of street is you don't get the poet of color, looking at the white writer with that same kind of like very orientalist kind of gauge and thinking why aren't you performing yourself in the way that I think that you should. And that's kind of how I felt over the years reading reviews of what I've written about colonial Cyprus or I've written about the British Empire, not from a kind of, I guess adversarial way, more from a critical way and and seeing the way that those things have been taken. So, I mean, I would agree so to for paisley chips in that I think what we're probably both saying here is that there's a kind of failure, not just on the part of the critic and ignorance that is not sought to kind of redress itself but also a failure of, I think editorial control as well and that in fact. It isn't just the critic who needs to educate themselves it's also editors that need to demand and readers who need to demand better criticism, because if you were reviewing a white writer and you had absolutely no sense of the work that they had produced previously or you were reading their poetry or whatever any of those, any of those ignorances were inflicted on a white poet, that perhaps it wouldn't make it through the editorial in a way that a review that reduces a code of color to its biography is very likely to be published without a blink of an eye, possibly, so that there are failures on different levels. It's not just the critics responsibility there it their responsibilities of readers their responsibilities of editors as well. I think before paisley comes in, let's be clear what I'm saying here because look, the context that is shaped around publishers, you know, books published by white poets in America and in the UK are predicated on a long tradition that many of us had to be trained in so so so when you when you review. Simon Armitage of course you know that he's coming out of a particular tradition you don't have to read wall issuing because you don't have to read Walker to read Simon Armitage right and so so that's the problem so this is why a writer of color can say look I can write about Armitage I can write about these because I read their line. These are fairly superficial ideas but when it comes down to recognizing that they are whole complex sophisticated traditions that many poets are engaged in that are relevant to understanding it in something simple like an illusion part of the game is that oh I caught your illusion and I feel so bright and I'm going to say this is wonderful and if you miss the illusion then that fun doesn't happen, but often you miss the illusion because you're ignorant. Right, and you just haven't done the work. And if you don't do the work you write nonsense, but the nonsense carries weight because of who you are. And I can't and listen what our writers are doing and getting writers from Nigeria thinking okay let me quote everybody pound and all of these people so that those white reviewers will say what a bright native boy, and that is what they're doing in response to it. So, so that's the mess we are in and until we start seeing more sensible and intelligent reviews, and thinking about it and I agree with you that if the editors don't have that that criteria of course what white edit reviews will say is, I'm not touching that because of social media. I won't touch it so then we have the same kind of problem. What the problem is really is not because of the erase is because they just ignorant and didn't do the work. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm probably going to go in a slightly different direction because one of the things I was thinking about is, I guess another kind of failure and where, where we train people to be good readers and where we train people to be good critics. Finally is in a kind of classroom setting, and one of the things that I find interesting and frustrating increasingly as I teach a lot of creative writing classes is people's hesitancy to talk about every kind of aspect of prosody and form. And this is not to say that you'd have to come out as an excellent formalist to be able to talk about poetry well in criticism. But it seems to me that it creates an additional desire on the reviewer and the workshop participant and every editor's position to sort of say, what is he just saying what is she just saying. And not the question which I think poetry believes about is not what are you saying but how are you saying it. And so it puts that that, you know, puts people back on that wheel of authenticity, which is, unless you're saying something that I recognize that shares the tropes that I've seen in a Vietnam War film or, you know, something else like I just can't recognize it and I won't do the work, and this goes to another kind of laziness. I won't do the work of reading the formal considerations that are going into shaping how they're saying it. I'm thinking about some of the poets that I really love, never get any kind of reviewing because I think their writing is just classified as too difficult and you see this really happening to a lot of writers of color who fall in an avant garde tradition. I mean, no one in the New York Times, you know, they're going to never going to review that sort of work, but they're not getting reviewed in other places to which would be far more sympathetic to, you would imagine avant garde poetics and part of it is because people are just like well I don't know how to read it formally and I don't know what they're saying. Because it doesn't sound like anything else I've seen before and those poets really get screwed, I think, because no one is picking up on them and so Myung Mi Kim will go year after year producing beautiful books and people like I just don't know how to read her. And I think that that's another thing that I, you know, just going to outside the review like why, why this continues to happen until we start getting better about teaching people craft based issues that allow people to be able to say, okay, how can I start to approach work that does not, you know, immediately, you know, trigger all of the ways in which I've been trained as a poet to, you know, recognize this as a poem. You're going to have people being increasingly stupid about this. They'll just say this is just words on a page or I just don't understand why these choices are getting made. And it freaks them out and they won't they won't spend any time to sort of ask more fundamental interesting questions which is okay well how is it that we already know what the immigrant experience say in this direction supposed to look like with these troops in this very conventional way of writing about it. How is it that the limits of meaning are getting pushed by making different formal choices as a way of a kind of useful critical resistance from within. And, you know, that's some exciting stuff that you can talk about and it's just not going to get reviewed it's just not going to get talked about, because again, we can't talk about the poet's biography, except in these oblique ways, or it doesn't perform its notion about a biography in the ways that are cathartic and are expected. I was really interested in the way that social media came up in various of the comments that came up today. And I wanted to ask a question of my own around the role of the internet in all of this. I think it's time as space for poetry reviewing for reviewing in general decreases in traditional media outlets that there's ever fewer column inches devoted to poetry reviews in broadsheet newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. It is often said to be the sort of solution to this as a new frontier. But I think it's time to move on to audience questions, but we have had an excellent question in from from the audience from from Jay, one of our listeners today, who asks something that I think dovetails with this rather brilliantly. What do you think are some ways in which we can review in non traditional ways. It feels to me that reviews of poetry might especially lend themselves to review writing that takes risks and experiments that transgress formal and disciplinary norms. What might such reviews look like and who would publish them. I'd love to say something about this website this that this unfortunately disappeared years ago right right right around the time the internet really started kicking off there was a wonderful collective of poets that created something called the constant critic. We had about six people who were brilliant, really brilliant, you know writers, and also thinkers about poetry unfortunately they were all white but they were also really really smart about a lot of a wide variety of work. And they recognized that a lot of the work that they loved the most was not getting reviewed and so they treated as a collective where they turned in really smart reviews. Once a month, you know they would also turn in a review or once every couple of months and I found myself going and reading, you know some of the work of Ray McDaniel because he really spent time with the books, and he really just, you know, I was a brilliant writer about things and you know this is where you're thinking about. Is there a possibility out there of course we're back to the problem of monetization it's not fair to ask people to do this work for free. So if there's a way that we could all chip in like a kind of Patreon thing and get really good criticism from a collective of critics that were actually out there and so like we're going to just turn this in. Once a month and give you the kind of reviews that are not going to be your fifth grade book report that somehow got in the Guardian or something like that it would be nice it would be wonderful and I think that that would be a good way of harnessing both those things and in fact it's it's better. That's one positive of the Internet is you can share these things widely. But I will say one last thing about the problems of social media is that, and it goes back to something Anthony was talking about which is that it. It feeds also into the notion that anyone can be an expert and that sort of satisfies one democratic urge but you know all you have to do is spend five minutes with Goodreads and realize like that democratic urge. Is not born out necessarily by by a wealth of brilliance you know it's not it's actually not worth having 1000 people sort of you know, you know saying what they think about a text if 1000 people don't know how to read a text, you just got 1000 people, yammering to themselves. But we would rather have those people yammering than not. I mean so, I mean here's I think we must make a distinction between reviewing, which is one kind of thing, and criticism, which is another kind of thing sometimes they overlap but they have to be understood in different ways and in different functions that they play. I think I think reviewing is is is a mechanism which we used to be regarded as a way to draw attention to a work and to say this work is important, and you should publish it the whole publishing, you should read it the whole publishing enterprise devoted itself to a relationship between themselves and reviewers to ensure that certain books will be published, which would be reviewed, which is why the new you know if you look at the publishers who are reviewed, rather than the authors. There is a kind of homogenized box of people that of places that get reviewed it's a gatekeeping mechanism has nothing to do with the writers has to do with who's the publisher and what relationships are created. But we have to think that this is this is valuable I think I think that I do not believe that the that I believe a review is an exercise in in seeing and engaging a work and saying that having engaged this work. I've seen these things happen in this work it could be negative or positive but it's a way of seeing it and a review says, therefore, you might want to look at this work right which and criticism can be in books it can be in other places. Where there's a more extended engagement with it, I think all of it is important. But at the end of the day, I mean we're talking about race here and we're talking about the way that intersects with it. At the end of the day, you know, if we could just get a review that would be great, like if if if if there was a kind of willingness to constantly and to pay attention to the work of writers of color that in itself would be a wonderful thing. I remember for about five years I must have written about 200 reviews for world literature today or 100 100 reviews for world literature today just reading and writing review, reading and writing reviews. And for me that whole time was spent sort of learning about writing from all over the world and trying to think through what is going on in that space. I remember that what the writers who wrote to me and said thank you for the review we're saying is thanks for seeing it. Thanks for seeing it and telling people about it. I think that's important, which is something that social media can't necessarily social media. I'm not talking about the internet which is which is which is quite different because the internet platforms and so on so forth do different things websites, but social media will reference the review will reference the review and may get some attention there. But but but but I do think that that that we should make a distinction because I think I think that the impact of the different things is quite different, and I think both things are needed. Anthony, would you like to come in on on the question of the non traditional review and what that might look like how, how can we encourage review writing that takes risks and experiments with the with the form. I mean, I think that again like what Kwame was saying the internet is very difficult place is a very caffeinated place and what that means is that it ends up becoming very difficult for people to slow down and read something with patients and so you end up having these pieces that feel very surface and and a lot of the time they're just kind of telling you what you already know about something or they obsess on the subject matter of the book. But there's one thing that I've always wondered with poetry and you know in up when you look at theatre reviews, for instance, you get like these five star out of you know like they give you three stars four stars where it might be, whereas with poetry, you don't get that and I wonder if we were to adopt a star process, what that would actually do to the nature if you had like three and a half stars at the top, and then you wrote the review afterwards with that kind of take. I guess the kind of edge off the fact that you're going to go in a little bit hard on why this book didn't work. And I don't know this little thing because we don't have that we kind of just have your either going to be really nice about the book, but you're not going to say anything, which I don't think actually helps people. And then I think that there's a difference in the fact that you can review a book or think about a book on its technical achievement, which I think people that are into poetry and the right poetry will be invested in. And then you have the kind of more outward kind of discovery or questions that the book is asking that maybe more casual readers will be interested in. And so I guess you have different kinds of like focuses and lenses that you can put the book on and bring the two together somehow in a very kind of, I think Clive James used to do some interesting stuff. I mean, he was like very Eurocentric and just obsessed with dead white guys. But when he actually, you know, turned it on, he was he was good. Like I felt that he had a very kind of animated quirky style, but it was also quite rigorous and he had like a technical understanding of how poems work. So I don't know. I think it's just trying to find that middle ground, you know. Paisley, unless you want to come in on that. I think we're running out of time. I wanted to ask one final question really to all of you because you've raised so many brilliant points. What would I think for you, each of you really be a couple or maybe one concrete idea or thought or changeable aspect of language reviewing or reviewing that you would like to see put in place. Something for us to kind of perhaps think about. Yeah, really practically moving forward what that might be. I'm actually going to say that what we what you know with African poetry and the word that we're doing the African poetry book from one of the goals is to develop a roster of reviewers and critics and to find ways to help place their reviews and place their work and yes it's going to fall into the category of for the most part of of critics who have an interest in that field reviewing in that field, but I think we are at that basis. We have that stage we do not have the luxury to say well anybody can just do it because they don't do it. So I do think that it is a deliberate action that says we will build it we are going to build our thing we are going to build a critical framework for this broad field of literature called African literature and African poetry. And we're going to do it in the face of the preference among publishers and other places for fiction and nonfiction and the absolute disinterest in sort of poetry. And we're going to do it and build a whole body of work and believe that that is going to work in five or six years we've published about 100 African poets, because we decided to do it ourselves, not that by creating the mechanism to do that and to see this work being published because it just wasn't being published. I think that's the kind of work that, at this stage anyway, is going to have to happen. And I think the more when that happens I think things will change gradually because of course intelligence and sense and sensible writing and thinking will eventually win out. Brilliant, well there will certainly be some lead break critics who are watching who will be keen to follow that as well. There's one thing that really strikes me as we've been talking is that there's a certain way in which obviously there's a segregation that occurs for writers of color in terms of the material they are imaginatively sort of editorially given on the space they're allowed to quote unquote work within. And the ways of course they obviously subvert that, but there's also a way in which critics of color I think also gets segregated into you will only now review people that we think you know you represent at some point. And while I recognize and I support the fact that they should be asked to do that, there's a way in which I think there's, you know, a lot of writers of color who review have complained about why aren't you giving me this novel or why aren't you giving me that kind of opportunity to. So I would sort of say like if you want to create a culture where we can imagine a kind of objectivity and a kind of shared literary tradition then allow reviewers to to actually have a wide access to the field and not just simply send them the book that's like. Oh, well I think you should like this because you're also brown. Yeah, that that reminds me of a line that Nezarene Malik writes in, we need new stories and she she says that the people of color have experiences and white people have ideas. And it's that you know it sums it up so well for me like the idea that the apparatus that we use to talk about review culture and to write and think about literature is, it needs to be taken down and rebuild, I think it's a structural thing that goes beyond the individual and into something far more older and I think kind of nefarious at the same time. Yeah, it's I think I've spoken to so many people who just say like oh you know you write about colonialism, could you review this or you know you write about empire could you review that. And that's not to say that your expertise is so narrow, because if you think about what we've been talking about today. The white dude from Shropshire will review someone who's writing a book about the British Raj, you know, where do they come in like at what point do they align, so they don't need any credentials you just the white dude from Shropshire and that's what I was saying, they just get it all wrong, change, that's what has to change drastically. Brilliant thank you so much. Oh and I prefer to read. I mean if you if you give me the job I've read all of them and I don't know I'm far more interested in the ports from from brown people. The portrait from brown people right now I find the other stuff. Absolutely. Thank you so much to all of you. What a brilliant discussion we could go on for a very long time. I'm very happily I'm sure that we have to to and I have to hand back to Molly. Thank you. Thank you Sandy Sarah Kwame paisley and Anthony and thank you to to rush me sunna Sheena and Sharon from for brown girls who write. If you want more from all of today's speakers and how could you not after this. You can buy all of their books through the RSL on bookshop.org and support independent bookshops. The link to that is on the bookshop button that I think should be on your screens now. We'll be back with more events in the autumn and before then we'll be announcing our new fellows and honorary fellows for 2021, as well as a new program on Tuesday next week. So that's the sixth of July. Please follow us on Twitter at RS literature and on Instagram at Royal Society of Literature to see all of that news next week. I wish with a very big thank you from me to everyone involved behind the scenes to make this evening happen, including everyone at Lebris poetry critics, especially especially Alicia Pyrd Mohamed, our live captioner Kimberley turnage, the British Library, our wonderful partners, especially be Rowlett, our producers John and Becky at unique media and all of my colleagues at the Royal Society of Literature. Thank you everyone watching for joining us for this discussion and until next time. Good night.