Against Community

I’m categorising this post under the label, Shit that might get me cancelled or would have gotten me cancelled circa 2020 when everyone seemed to wilfully end careers as a hobby. That I’m writing it now is indicative of my claim: the poetry community needs to be frankly, and maturely, critiqued because it doesn’t really exist. There’s barely anyone left to perform a bad faith reading, to gaslight me and my readers, and the ones that are want to sweep their historical actions under the rug lest they get called out.

When lockdowns rolled out across the globe, it’s like we were in a pressure cooker. This caused individuals to explore the urge to write poetry they’ve always had. They didn’t have anything else to do. They submitted to online journals which, in turn, inspired more online journals (my own Babel Tower Notice Board included).

This coincided with a minor revolution in indie publishing. The UK’s moribund poetry scene - so dominated by Faber, Bloodaxe, Picador and Carcanet - and its adjacent prize culture was affronted by the rise in popularity of small presses publishing books that expanded the range of contemporary writing on offer. Indie presses always existed in the UK, but the lockdown saw them galvanise.

This was when the C word, community, started to get thrown about. I didn’t know I’d be writing this post four years ago, so you will forgive me not providing screenshots. Anyone who was there will confirm the messaging was explicit: If you want to support community, you need to buy books from indie presses and support their authors… I would add, …and if you don’t, you disagree with our left-identified politics, which must necessarily mean you disagree with all our politics, which means you support the oppression of all marginalised people without exception. I believe this latter, unspoken, formulation generates the vitriol so common in online discourse.

That Left as a signifier is treated as a commodity fetish is telling. There was, and is, very little conversation about labour rights in poetry discourse, but an abundance of commentary on identity politics. Left became a catch-all that, like social media, was unable to reflect on history. Here, consider why Foucault left the Communist Party: they were homophobic and anti-semitic. Left as a status symbol now needs to be radically haunted, as do the people who see it as aspirational. This is the belief (or non-belief?) that the online poetry world was predicated on. What it ultimately produces is groups who fetishise identity in order to pave over the stark truth: we want people to read our poems and buy our books.

The problem is the lockdowns ended. Most people went back to their jobs, their dating scenes and friendship groups. What remained of the UK’s poetry scene was a party no one attended, the cake and plastic cups just sitting there. We were brutally confronted with what all that talk of community amounted to.

I’ve been thinking about who this article is aimed at, if I’m pointing fingers at individual people or presses. There is blame to be apportioned here, and it needs to go to all of us. If we didn’t use our positions to attack and shame others, many of whom still deserve a public apology, we unquestionably took on a model of pseudo-community that corrupted us.

In private correspondence with an editor, they mentioned that community is implied in online discourse as something totalising but few take decisive steps towards friendship and mutual care. The next step, therefore, might be to move towards a hyperlocal model, where we move away from the online world (what I’m provocatively calling against community). I’m further reminded of Derek Beaulieu’s provocation to me, concluding my podcast interview with him. Maybe we need to dispense of economic models and return to joy.

Whichever road the scene chooses, I don’t think it’s controversial to say the reason why poetry communities aren’t working is because we don’t actually want them. Or at least not on the scale social media implies. We never wanted literary heroes or enfants terribles. Rather, we might have truly desired quiet, rhizomatic networks that are rarely, if at all, heard of. Then we could have taken care of each other and our creative writing.