Seen and unseen: invisible mentors in UK poetry

Nissel, Joanna and May, Will (2022) Seen and unseen: invisible mentors in UK poetry. Re-Visions: Configurations of the Visual in Literature and Culture, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. 18 - 20 Jul 2022.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Recent decades have seen new mentoring initiatives for both UK poets and reviewers, an upsurge in commercial mentoring services, and a heightened focus by national arts funders on mentoring as a means to stimulate creative and economic development across the UK. The vitality and success of these projects suggests a creative culture eager for formal mentoring, in part to offset the exclusionary potential of edited magazines, creative writing programmes, established presses, or coteries formed around educational privilege. However, mentoring's long history and practice within the literary community is rarely acknowledged or explored, leaving a gap between practice, evaluation, and theory, and limiting the effectiveness of existing schemes.

In this paper, jointly presented by Professor Will May and Joanna Nissel, a postgraduate research in the English department, we will uncover the visible and less visible traces of mentoring in contemporary poetry, from named awards and initiatives (the James Berry Poetry Prize, the Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship), to creative ecologies in universities and literature development organisations, to community workshops and reading groups. We will seek to understand how making the practice and process of mentoring more visible can transform the way we think about literary community and participation.

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