Released 31st December, 2024 // 128 pages // 978-1-916938-67-0 // RRP: £13.99
In the last forty years large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down. The democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business.
In The Privatisation of Poetry, Andy Croft argues that the poetry scene is an atomised, unwelcoming and unfriendly place whose inaccessibility is hardly disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion. Croft suggests that conversations about poetry are replaced by conversations about poets, discussions of tradition by accusations of plagiarism, and the language of literary criticism by the language of hyperbolic press-releases promoting corporate prizes and celebrity book-festivals.
The Privatisation of Poetry brings together essays and reviews first published in books and magazines including The London Magazine, The Morning Star, The New Statesman, The North, PN Review, Scratch, and Thumbscrew.
ABOUT Andy Croft:
Andy Croft’s books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, After the Party, Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing, Bare Freedom and The Years of Anger. His plays include two Edinburgh Festival Fringe productions, Smoke! (2004) and Horty Porty (2005). Writing Residencies include the Great North Run, the Hartlepool Headland, Middlesbrough Town Hall, the Southwell Poetry Festival, the Combe Down Stone Mines Project, the Teesside Transporter Bridge, HMP Holme House and HMP Moorland.
