Poetry market

Calling Dan Green! Neil Astley's lecture--or would that be a howl?--about poetry and the British literary market is the sort of thing that sends Dan's blood pumping, not mine, although it certainly resonates with some of the novels I've been reading lately (Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake and, currently, Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy). Astley's rant against the "poetry police," while entertaining (from an outsider's perspective, at least), does conflate two different issues: editorial choices--what is to be reviewed, anthologized, and printed--and critical evaluation. He's much more convincing on the former than the latter, especially since most of his complaints about how poets X or Y have been reviewed don't come accompanied with convincing counter-arguments. (Via Monty Cristo.)