Don Paterson Deems Rebecca Watts 'Brave' in Response to PN Review Piece

An op-ed at The Guardian joins the conversation around Rebecca Watts's controversial PN Review article, which works through issues of accessibility in the work of Rupi Kaur and similarly popular U.K. poets. Author Don Paterson (who is mentioned in the original piece) is sympathetic toward Watts, he says. "I hope Watts can parlay her brief notoriety into some attention for her own poetry, which is plainly excellent." He goes on:

The spoken-word crowd can smell the inauthentic at a thousand paces. I wish the “page” poetry scene would show the same critical discrimination when they encounter poems that do little more than tick off this week’s fashionable signifiers, and that the poet clearly doesn’t mean a word of.

And just because Tempest, McNish and Kaur (whom few poets consider a poet at all) are all “accessible”, and Watts can’t stand them, doesn’t make them a genuine grouping. She might as well have added Ed Sheeran and kale, for all they’re alike.

Elsewhere, we’re in agreement. Watts says “technical and intellectual accomplishments are as nothing compared with the ‘achievement’ of being considered representative of a group identity that the establishment can fetishise”. I think that’s overstated, but it’s a brave thing to say these days.

I would add that we do young, first-book poets no favours through such rapid promotion, which can make them fatally self-conscious. You can’t yet say their work is game-changing, because that’s not how the game works. We might remember that the first published efforts of Keats and Auden met with as much bewilderment as praise, as the truly ground-breaking invariably does.

 

Low stakes and high blood pressure often go together, and poetry is not always the lovely supportive community some claim – especially on Twitter, which can strain the pure venom out of mild demurral. My own admiration of Tempest and McNish, I can assure her, is genuine; but Watts is also bang on when she says: “The middle-aged, middle-class reviewing sector […] is terrified of being seen to criticise the output of anyone it imagines is speaking on behalf of a group traditionally under-represented in the arts.”

Read on at The Guardian.