'The boys appear not to be happy': UK Literary Press Give Sarah Howe #derangedpoetess

Sarah Howe, who surprised many by winning the £20,000 T. S. Eliot Prize for her first book Loop of Jade, has a trending hashtag attributed to her success, #derangedpoetess. In a report at The Guardian, it's noted that "the boys appear not to be happy." "[L]iterary press is making clear its views on poets who are a) women, b) young, c) well-educated, and d) not fully white. Howe ticks all boxes: she is 32, a Cambridge-educated academic currently at Harvard, and is half Chinese. Born in Hong Kong, she came to the UK when she was nine; Loop of Jade deals with her dual cultural heritage and her mother’s difficult family history. She also happens to be – it shouldn’t matter, but apparently it does – rather beautiful."

The hashtag, writes Katy Evans-Bush, was "sparked by a Twitter storm about Oliver Thring’s interview with Howe in the Sunday Times last week."

Posted on social media, it immediately attracted comment for its derisive terms of faint praise: “Howe’s thin new volume... took her ten years to write...” Thring says, describing speaking to “...this Cambridge English don whose PhD, she says, was on ‘visual imagination and visual vividness in language’ is to undergo a tutorial sprinkled with wordy phrases...” She “barks a nervous laugh”; her verse “pummels the reader with allusion, scholarship, and a brusque, sixth-formy emphasis on her own intelligence.” It is entirely dismissive.

Thring may not be much of a poetry reader – of course he wants to talk about her husband and the furnishings. But facts are easy to check: Howe really is a Renaissance scholar, and her PhD really was on this subject – it doesn’t need quotation marks. And if hyperreality and interleavings are a wordy “pummeling”, one hopes for Mr Thring’s sake that Sir Geoffrey Hill or Jeremy Prynne never wins a big prize.

The author’s claim not to be sexist wasn’t exactly helped by his tweet: “This gentle interview with a leading young poet has led various deranged poetesses to call me thick, sexist etc”. Here’s the thing: people who don’t belittle women also don’t use the term ‘poetesses’.

Read it all here.

Let this news not obscure Howe's win. Catch her reading in Boston and New York in February. Photo of Sarah Howe by Marc Lixenberg.