Making For Planet Alice

"This is edited by Maura Dooley, who’s a wonderful poet and also a good friend. I like this book because it introduced me to lots of poets I hadn’t heard of, so that was exciting. I first came across Alice Oswald in this book. Yes, definitely. There are certain poets that get a lot of attention all the time. People will know Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage but there are a lot of poets that seem to exist just outside people’s radar, yet they’ve been doing good work for a number of years. I think it’s just because of our slightly obsessed media culture. We tend to point single lights at people rather than at groups. I think that within the poetry world, everybody has heard of everybody else. But that world is quite specific and it takes quite a lot to break out of that. Most of the people reading poems are other poets (of the kind of poets that I’m talking about). It would just be nice to see those poets break out into a more general readership. Well, I think some things have been happening. There are lots of poetry readings and literature festivals all over the place. There are poems on the underground and poems on the radio, and all these things make poetry more accessible to a wider audience. But our problem is still in whose poetry becomes accessible, so that’s what needs to be changed. Another book I’m going to talk about is Red: Contemporary Black British Poets , which has 80 black British poets in the anthology. If you ask the average person in the street how many black British poets they know, they might say four or five, but they wouldn’t necessarily come up with 80. Yes, I think there is sexism in the poetry world. There’s this idea that men write better poems than women and I think that still definitely exists. There are a few women poets that they make exceptions, that they change into one of the boys, as it were. It’s a strong collection of very different voices. I think Lavinia Greenlaw is great, particularly ‘The Shape of Things’ and ‘Iron Lung’, and Sinéad Morrissey is fantastic. It was published in 1997 and it’s still exciting. The selection of the poems is pretty strong. Alice Oswald is unique and has a very natural and different voice. She’s wonderful at writing about nature and she takes huge risks. Her mountains poem is very good. Sarah Maguire is a poet that’s amazing and doesn’t get enough attention. She wrote ‘Spilt Milk’."