IF POETRY is the new rock'n'roll, and their own Fleur Adcock is tipped for Poet Laureate, why has Oxford University Press dropped its poetry list?
This week at the Royal Festival Hall that was the question being asked by an audience of blue-jeaned thirty-somethings as Jo Shapcott, an exponent of the "rock'n'roll school", gave a reading.
Shapcott, who puts her work somewhere between Jo Brand, the comedienne, and John Donne, the 17th-century metaphysical poet, is angry at the decision by the committee of dons which runs the press. It is the equivalent of the board of Manchester United deciding to close the football club down, she says. "All the players are so good that they would have no problem finding new clubs. But there would be a gaping hole in football, and what about the people who supported Manchester United all those years?"
She is also concerned for the loss of Jacqueline Simms, the only female poetry editor in the country. Simms was told last week, after the money men who had been calling for the list's closure finally got their way, that her services were no longer required. She took over as poetry editor at the press in 1977, at a time when poetry was overwhelmingly dominated by men. She built up the list to the point where l5 of the 40 poets on it were men. "I haven't done it consciously." says Simms. "It wasn't a feminist policy. Other publishers deliberately set out to look for women. I never did that. It's just that good poets came along and they were women."
The list includes D J Enright, regarded by many as one of Britain's greatest living poets, Fleur Adcock, a possible first female Poet Laureate, and a host of other top writers. Shapcott, author of three award-winning books, including Electroplating the Baby, is worried about the effect of the closure on emerging writers, particularly women. "Most of us on the list will be fine," she says. "We will have offers of one sort or another. But irresponsibly they've created a great hole in poetry. "There will be a terrible knock-on. It will be very much harder for new people coming into other lists. The places to be published have shrunk and there are precious few as it is. The whole system is weighted towards men. Most famous poets, the people who are usually tipped for the Poet Laureate, are all men, with very few exceptions. The people who head the poetry lists at publishers are now universally men. But further down, a lot of the younger poets are women. The best of them are all women. They will find it a lot harder to get published."
This is despite the fact that poetry, like rock'n'roll, is now recognised as an art with unlimited popular appeal. Eva Salzman, another of the new generation of poets on the Oxford list, and poet in residence at the Bromley-by-Bow community centre in east London, agrees. "The Poetry Society is putting poets into fish and chip shops, football clubs and community centres to show that this is not an elitist activity and that it is something which more people can really enjoy. OUP is making a bad mistake. Money is the bottom line for a lot of publishers now. But the poetry list has not lost money. Oxford University Press might have done, but the list itself hasn't."
A 38-year-old from Brooklyn who has lived in Britain for 15 years, Salzman resents being treated as a women poet rather than simply as a poet. "A lot of female writers, including myself, consider the things that we're writing about to be the same things men write about. It may be that our perspective is female but that doesn't mean that our subjects are that different." Sex is an example, another preoccupation poetry has in common with rock. Salzman's work is full of sexual imagery - "the weight of him is a team of horses lumbering over a wooden bridge, shoving, shoving on the advance guard".
She describes how, when she once lived with one of the new male poets, she would do the shopping, the cleaning, and even type up her boyfriend's work for him. "Mornings saw him propped up in bed, clutching pen and paper. Afternoons saw him propped up in bed, clutching pen and paper. Evenings saw him... Martin Amis said you can't be a writer and do your laundry, I think. Women a lot of the time do take on that role. They don't think about it, they just do it. I didn't think about it at the time. But what happens is that you suddenly get seen in a different way by the outside world, through your role in that couple, and you realise you haven't done yourself any favours. You just can't carry everything. It's just the juggling. You have to make certain choices and to have to carry three or four lives is very difficult."
She believes poetry remains a male-dominated world. "There was a spate of articles about young male poets, and I couldn't help notice a lot of them were written by female writers. "There was usually an attractive photograph of the poet, wearing a rakish hat or with his shirt unbuttoned, not quite medallion and hairy chest but it might as well have been."
Nevertheless, Jo Shapcott believes things will change: "It will take time to work itself through and it will be another 10 or 20 years before the system reflects the quality and talent of female poets. But it will change I'm sure. Fifteen years ago the best young poets were probably male, living in London, probably Oxbridge-educated, whereas now they have almost certainly got one foot in another culture or they're women. It's not a question of them having a chip on their shoulder. It is entirely positive. If anyone's got a chip on his shoulder now it's the white middle-class male."