Anthology ‘review’ reveals thinly veiled snobberies

Published: 27 January, 2011

• JOHN Horder’s traducing of Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State (Review, January 20) is littered with uncorroborated presumptions regarding the nature and conception of the anthology:

1. Emergency Verse is primarily a protest anthology, against the Emergency Budget, hence its riposting title, which is self-explanatorily not a reference to Faber’s Emergency Kit (2004) as John presumes. There would have been no relevance in my mentioning said anthology in my foreword: the anthologies I cite are those with which EV shares a socialist ideology. It is at any rate disingenuous to draw an analogy – and on such flimsy pretext – with a book produced by a prestigious publishing house: EV is a non-profit-making, donation-funded, limited print-run protest anthology, edited and designed by a team of one, and published speedily to keep pace with political momentum.

2. Due to the theme, EV’s selection process was weighted towards inclusiveness. As a verse petition, quantity of contributors was an important though not overriding consideration; all submissions were literarily regulated as far as seemed appropriate to the purpose. EV includes valuable contributions from academic, theatrical and healthcare profes­sionals, as well as from established poets. 

3. Mr Horder has misunderstood the selection criteria, which was to publish poems written in response to the Emergency Budget. Had the late Adrian Mitchell still been alive, I’m sure I would have asked him to contribute. 

4. If, in Mr Horder’s opinion, EV lacks enough “tried” names, I can only conclude that such an openly political book seemed too toxic for some quarters of the literati. So far most high profile poets who have spoken out against this government have done so strictly in relation to arts cuts. 

But EV is more fundamental: poets – of all kinds – speaking out against the dismantling of our welfare state and social democracy. 

Mr Horder’s demarking of some EV poets as “untried” is unreasonably prejudicial, against the book’s egalitarian spirit, and, in any case, critically myopic. His implication that the “literariness” of a poem stands or falls on the “name” attached to it – an unconvincing argument at the best of times, given our un-meritocratic culture which suppresses as much talent as it liberates – is unworthy of him. Far from throwing light on faults in the book it purports to “review”, this piece serves more to throw up its own thinly veiled snobberies.

Unfortunately, Mr Horder was not included in the anthology, because he did not respond to my invitation to contribute until long after the deadline. However, I went out of my way to accommodate him at the Poetry Library launch alongside a packed roster of 28 other poets, and – to my unforeseen detriment – furnish him with a complimentary copy. 

ALAN MORRISON
Editor, Emergency Verse, Founder, Poets in Defence of the Welfare State
www.therecusant.org.uk