Their Numerous Cancellations

  The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019) brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for Slattern in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology. She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences Some Kids I Taught came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.

  So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points. 

  What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the criticisms, while some of the accusers (including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.

  It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.

    It's informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spectrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar treatment of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

   Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in Mrs Dalloway (which I re-read with great pleasure over the summer) through the character of Septimus Warren Smith, as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself. 

    It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read. 

*As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms

Poetry Gender Audit

  The gender audit on the five main poetry-publishing houses done recently by Fiona Moore on her Displacement blog makes for essential reading, as does the comment-thread its provoked, with Neil Astley of Bloodaxe and Roddie Lumsden on behalf of Salt (among others) contributing their thoughts:

http://displacement-poetry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/big-five-poetry-publishers-in-uk-gender.html

After the Storm: Identity Parade

 Now the dust has settled a little on what journalists call the "storm of controversy" its publication was met with, perhaps a more measured appraisal of Roddie Lumsden's recent anthology Identity Parade can be attempted. Unfortunately it seemed that most of the book's assailants had personal axes to grind: Todd Swift's online spat with Lumsden in his blog Eyewear- initially a valid discussion about issues of inclusion - soon turned remarkably ugly and vitriolic in a way that did favours to neither party. However, the fact that a generational anthology of this kind managed to provoke such fervent debate (don't recall Andy Motion getting into any cussing-matches over his notoriously dull 80s anthology) attests to both its importance and to the feather-ruffling boldness of Lumsden's editorship.
   Having spent years concentrating on older and overseas poetry and harbouring a vaguely-founded assumption that the majority of contemporary UK stuff was chatty, middlebrow, anecdotal and twee, I've been consistently impressed at the overall quality and range of the work Lumsden includes in Identity Parade, alerting me to how many really interesting poets are writing here now and what a diversity of styles and registers they encompass. With 85 poets on show, the anthology covers a lot of ground and inevitably one likes some poets more and some less - with each permitted only about 5 poems apiece, however, there is seldom a really tedious stretch and one's interest is always re-piqued by newness.

    I'm forced to revise my former prejudices, although in retrospect, based on the contemporary scenes of 15 or 20 years ago (when I first started getting into current poetry) I don't think they were unjustified. Looking back to the last overview-type anthology of this kind, 1993's The New Poetry (ed. Hulse, Kennedy and Morley), we find another varied, lively compilation of poems with a sense of positive ferment about it, but the development between that book and Identity Parade seems to me dramatic. The promise evinced by the earlier Bloodaxe selection feels like it has come to fruition in the new one and the general standard is considerably higher, born out of the healthier and more vibrant poetry-culture we are lucky enough to find ourselves in today.
    A further difference is in how the editors of The New Poetry, in their lengthy introduction, attempted to make elaborate intellectual and political claims for their generation of poets as a whole, whereas I think Lumsden is right to consciously avoid this approach and merely emphasise the "plurality" of the various individuals he has chosen. A major strength of Identity Parade is indeed its inclusiveness in giving latitude to voices beyond the traditional white/middle-class/male bastions of poetry: it is certainly the first anthology of this kind to feature a higher proportion of females to males, and with no sense whatsoever of mere "positive discrimination".
    A student from Porlock is forcing me to truncate this but I will continue it later.