With soaring sales and a younger, broader audience, poetry is on a high. What is behind the boom? Plus the fresh voices to read now
Somewhere towards the end of last year, I stood up in front of 400 or so 17-year-olds to talk about poetry. The lecture was one I’d already given in various guises; a comparative reading of two poems: one canonical, the other contemporary. In the past, I’d compared WB Yeats with Sharon Olds, Helen Dunmore with Tishani Doshi, and John Donne with Tiphanie Yanique. That day, we were back with Donne again: “The Sun Rising”, one of the language’s greatest love poems, as fresh and exultant now as it was when it was written four centuries ago. But rather than scouring the work of Forward or Pulitzer prize winners to find something to read with it, this time I turned to YouTube. The poem I chose was Hollie McNish’s “Watching Miserable-Looking Couples in the Supermarket”.
A few months earlier, McNish had found herself at the centre of a whirlwind, when an argument that had been rumbling for some time behind the poetry world’s tightly closed doors abruptly burst forth in public. McNish – whose vivid, visceral poems have been watched by millions online – had won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry in 2016 for her debut collection, and subsequently secured a publishing deal for a new book, Plum, with Picador. Plum came out in 2017, was broadly well received, and rapidly became one of the year’s bestselling collections, part of a surge in poetry sales that was spearheaded by Instapoet Rupi Kaur, whose two collections had together sold in the hundreds of thousands. But it wasn’t until January 2018 that Plum made headlines. Rebecca Watts (a prize-shortlisted poet in her own right) was commissioned to review it for poetry journal PN Review, but submitted, instead, an essay in which she decried “the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ – buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft”. She declined to review Plum on the grounds that “to do so … would imply that it deserves to be taken seriously as poetry”.
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