It’s not the easiest of times to stay upbeat about the Human Experiment, let alone the small corner of it that is Poetry. The eloquent conclusion of Sidney’s Defence of Poesie comes to mind:
If […] you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry […] thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets:—that while you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
Thus much, at least, must surely now descend on Roehampton University, where mass redundancies and course closures in the arts and humanities are being widely reported. Three weeks ago, the poet Tim Atkins — who has taught at Roehampton for many years — wrote to the Guardian about this “act of cultural and human vandalism”:
226 academics have been told their jobs no longer exist, and a huge fire-and-rehire programme has been rolled out. The dozen or so programmes being axed and the vast number being cut back are some of the best-performing in the country.
The former Roehampton chancellor Jacqueline Wilson’s most famous character, Tracey Beaker, would be a typical working-class humanities student at Roehampton, possibly studying creative writing. And yet the creative writing BA is one of many that are being closed. It’s a profitable and successful course. Where will the thousands of Tracey Beakers go now that the assault on working-class universities and the range of opportunities they provide is taking place all over the country?
Was it only 3 years ago that Roehampton was handing out a £5,000 poetry prize in celebration of “the wealth of poetic gift in the UK?” An unfortunate choice of words. Nevertheless, it reminds me of Tim’s personal generosity, which so many students will have benefited from over the years. In 2010, I went to the University of Surrey’s poetry festival, where I heard Tim read from his spectacular Petrarch sequence. Speaking with him afterwards, he pressed a copy of a gorgeously printed Crater Press broadside on me. When I asked if I could pay him for it, he said: “No, that’s what poetry’s supposed to be, isn’t it? A gift economy”.
I’ve often remembered Tim’s words, as well as the final poem from the sequence itself, which is simply a beautiful modern sonnet on love and hope:
You can buy Atkins Collected Petrarch / Petrarch Collected Atkins here: http://www.craterpress.co.uk/ And if you’d like to help defend another great London creative writing department, please consider donating to the Queen Mary UCU strike fund, in support of staff who have had 100% pay deducted indefinitely: https://qmucu.org/donations-to-our-strike-hardship-fund/. A poet who teaches there, Andrea Brady, has explained the situation: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/july/if-you-re-not-bargaining-you-re-begging