The Privatisation of Poetry, 
Andy Croft, Broken Sleep Books, £13.99

IN this book Andy Croft brings together 21 essays and reviews first published in the Morning Star and a wide range of literary and online magazines between 1994-2024, including the New Statesman, London Magazine, PN Review, Scratch and Thumbscrew — several at the heart of the “art” poetry establishment he criticises.

Collectively these pieces underscore the theme articulated by his friend and collaborator, the legendary popular performance poet Adrian Mitchell: “Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”

With Croft, Mitchell co-edited the ground-breaking left movement anthology Red Sky At Night, 2003, which reached back to Blake and the Chartists and forward to the contemporary, and which included Poet Laureates and Scottish Makars writing art poetry, certainly, but from the left.

Croft’s essays, articles and interviews do the heavy lifting required to explain Mitchell’s simple proposition tested through his own lifetime’s work as poet and cultural-activist-worker in schools, prisons, adult education and community projects and as poetry editor for the Morning Star from 2004-22 plus a decade of publishing readers’ poems for the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette.

Combined with his other books Croft has effectively recovered the literary-cultural history of the Communist Party from the 1930s-60s – from the forgotten novels of Red Letter Days; the essays gathered from literary critics in A Weapon in the Struggle (1998) on the all but forgotten Scots popular communist novelist James Barke and poet and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner; the Mass Spectacles put on by the Popular Front for Spain; the Graphic Art and Classical Music of British Communism; Marxist Literary Criticism; Progressive Song; Fore Publications; Jazz; Hamish Henderson and the Edinburgh Fringe; Film in the 1950s; and the Progressive song movement. Croft retrieves them from the cultural amnesia that left movements focused on the political tend to suffer from.

Croft draws sustenance from this cultural inheritance and offers it to the current left movement. He brings its heft to his obituary of Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) in The North no 43, Summer 2009, which glows with Mitchell’s chutzpah, humanity and ridicule of the pomp and class insincerity effortlessly exposed whenever he sent up royalty, militarism and the shams of lost empire, his favourite sport:

“Of course, Mitchell would have been the first to dismiss the shabby world of literary prize-giving. After all, he liked to describe himself as ‘a socialist-anarchist-pacifist-Blakeist-revolutionary’. As the broadsheets and the bookies contemplate the choice of the poet laureate, it is worth remembering Adrian Mitchell’s description of the laureate, ‘as this:/ A long, thin streak of yellow piss.’ He once said he would consider the job only if he was allowed to ‘tap-dance on the coffin at every royal funeral’.”

Croft demonstrates that chutzpah in his essays, enhanced further by his heroic role in establishing Smokestack Books in 2004 with the intent of publishing “oppositional, unfashionable and radical poets... to keep open a space for what is left of the socialist and communist poetic traditions in the 21st century, publishing books that otherwise would be unlikely to appear in print.” 

In 2021 he published Smokestack Lightening, an anthology of poems from each of the 199 poetry books Smokestack had published from Algeria through the whole alphabet to Venezuela. Typically he comments: “Like any good anthology it’s a noisy collection, baggy and bulging and contradictory, pulling in different directions. These poems were never intended to be inside the same covers.”

Here I disagree because the collection works as a treasure trove of contemporary left movement writing which demonstrates its breadth and ambition. Indeed, the same might be said of Croft’s The Privatisation of Poetry – “baggy, bulging and contradictory, and pulling in different directions” — but only through its act of reaching out for the not yet possible, the not yet imagined or attempted.

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I found his 10-page essay written for an anthology of essays Contemporary Political Poetry In Britain And Ireland, 2013, titled Dreadfully Old-Fashioned, the best argued, while his long interview with Robert Farrell for The Argotist Online, 2016, on Plagiarism In Poetry, reveals his core cultural belief system: “I am not interested in calculating how many words a poet may borrow from another writer without being accused of ‘theft’”, before quoting the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra: “In poetry everything is permitted./ With only this condition of course,/ You have to improve the blank page.”

The question of “copyright” brings forth Croft’s heart-felt critique of the “poetry business,” on how “celebrity culture” has replaced conversations about poetry with conversations about poets, literary criticism with hyperbolic press releases and the corporate promotion of prizes and book festivals. His decades-long honed response to the privatisation of poetry is clear, unambiguous and informed by his everyday practise as a poet, editor and independent publisher: “Poetry is not a marketplace and a poem is not a commodity to be bought and sold. In the UK a chain of opticians is currently claiming legal ownership over the word ‘should’ve’, while a Danish brewery apparently owns the copyright to the word ‘probably’. This is ludicrous. Poets should have nothing to do with this kind of thinking.” 

This small volume packs a mighty punch, like a good poem, and is delivered straight from one of the contemporary cultural left’s most respected speakers and activists, who has both earned and lived his opinions.