I've a new essay over at the North Sea Poets substack, addressing the decline of reviewing culture, the rise of the poetry prizes, artistic standards and integrity. It also recently featured in the TLS's NB column.
Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic
by Ben Wilkinson
“Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending a prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it’s all absolutely marvellous.”
So ‘Harvey Porlock’, the emboldened pseudonym of one Terence Blacker, reported on the efforts of poetry reviewers in the Sunday Times back in the mid-’90s. Granting the odd exception, you’d be hard pressed to argue otherwise, and things have only worsened since. Friendly encouragement for beginners is one thing, but once a poet is at the advanced stage of putting a book out into the world, i.e. tentatively but seriously offering their work for intelligent readers’ honest appraisals, donning the kid gloves and trumpeting the philosophy of the booster club serves no one. Poetry’s sickness, as has often been noted, is that too many of its readers are also its writers. (Even if it’s understandable that a form which prides itself on unpicking our cosy assumptions and bringing fuzzy emotion into sharp relief is never likely to achieve wide appeal without ceasing to be itself, pace Instapoetry.) But when almost all the reviewers are also poetry’s practitioners (and what’s more, practitioners in a small world full of prize panels – more on that later), you know the art is in trouble ...
Read the full essay here.