Professor Will May (University of Southampton) reflects on the stories that poets tell about the people who make them poets. Will’s AHRC Fellowship, Invisible Mentors, explored the role, practice, and history of mentoring in UK poetry since 1960. This blog explores what a co-operative view of poetry might look like.
Image 1: ‘The Poetry Ambassadors anthology, published by Broken Sleep Books, showcased the work of mentored poets April Egan, Kaycee Hill, and Eve Wright’
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‘What can be gained by a co-operative view of poems?’ asked Julian Symons in a sceptical review of A Group Anthology in 1963, the first poetry anthology in the UK to make a case for its existence not through a common poetic theme but because of how the poems included had been composed: through monthly peer mentoring sessions. My current research has been exploring this question, uncovering the hidden story (and communities) of mentoring in UK poetry over the last sixty years.
The solitary poet figure has always been an authorial myth as much as a method – that lonely wanderer William Wordsworth was actually taking a walk with his sister Dorothy when he saw those daffodils (she described them that day in her diary). Yet cultural and political changes in postwar Britain created a climate where collaborative creative practice was both more possible and more necessary. Compulsory secondary education and the subsequent increase in university provision was remaking Britain’s social and cultural landscape. Changes to immigration policy had seen an increase in diasporic communities working, living, and making homes in the UK. Both of these changes transformed what poetry could do, the sorts of communities poets would go on to form, and the kinds of support poets would need to be published, reviewed, and recognised.
Literary archives have been important in tracing mentoring’s history during this research project, following its story from feminist reading groups to community centres, from art colleges to Cambridge colleges. Yet mentoring, whatever its structure, is a practice that tends towards confidentiality rather than disclosure. Whether it takes the form of a one-to-one meeting or a weekly gathering of friends, it rarely documents its process. A particularly joyful and necessary aspect of the research has been the opportunity to learn from contemporary practitioners, supplementing what the archives had hinted at. I interviewed ten poet-mentors for a new podcast series Verse Mentors, including Mimi Khlavati and Pascale Petit, co-founders of The Poetry School, and poets who had experienced both formal and informal mentoring, from Nik Makoha to Andrew McMillan and Malika Booker. I also co-founded a new regional poetry mentoring scheme Poetry Ambassadors with Winchester Poetry Festival and Artful Scribe, supporting new poets by offering them a 12-month online mentoring programme. Both the poets and mentors shared their perspectives throughout the process, allowing us to better understand what Caleb Parkin has called ‘that mixture of practicality and magic’ that allows us to get our best words into the best places.
What can the poetic communities who have developed mentoring practice teach us? The research has implications for how we define poetry and poetic practice, the way we fund and support it, and – – most significantly – the people we attach to its making. Understanding that poetry is a plural, collaborative process is also a way of reaffirming its inclusivity.
