Mentoring in the contemporary UK poetry ecology

Abstract

Mentoring is an increasingly common way that UK-based page poets develop their writing practice. Yet academic discourse has largely centred on university, US, and prose-based contexts for writing education. This study addresses this gap by elucidating contemporary UK poetry mentoring (1990-2025). Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology that includes empirical insights from mentors and mentees, it asks: What do poets and scholars define as poetry mentorship? How have certain shapes of poetry mentoring become dominant and what other models and approaches exist? What is the significance of poetry mentoring?
This study reveals that scholars’ and poets’ understandings of poetry mentorship tend to be dyadic and conceptual, listing a series of processes or stages occurring between a single mentor and mentee. These conceptualisations collude with the tendency of literary criticism to see authors, reductively, as individual, secluded agents. They also collude with notions of individualism and isolationism, which pervade contemporary UK poetry, and lead to poetry’s formal and textual elements being prioritised above interdisciplinary factors in poetry writing and mentoring.
Instead, this thesis proposes that poetry mentoring can also take place non-dyadically, encompass more than formal aspects, and —rather than a practice happening in isolation— is deeply connected to the wider ecology. To broaden conceptualisations of mentorship in this way, the research uses ecological theory as a framework to challenge collusions with individualism and isolationism, advocate interconnectedness and multiplicity, and situate mentoring within the poetry ecology. It implements more dynamic, fluid models that attend to non-dyadic mentoring and wider social and cultural contexts. It explores many approaches to poetry mentorship —like writing for wellbeing or politically-engaged practice— and posits that multiple approaches occur simultaneously. Ultimately, it provides a language to more accurately articulate poetry mentoring.
Revaluating poetry mentoring practice contributes to cultural debate around how to support poets, particularly in light of the proliferation of formalised mentorship programmes in the twenty-first century and new challenges posed by the pandemic and post-lockdown eras. Accordingly, this research considers where characteristics of mentoring may support or fail to support particular types of poetry practice or poets themselves and their circumstances. The reorienting of poetry mentorship towards multiplicity and interconnection thus proposes a way of increasing its supportive potential.

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ORCID for Joanna Nissel: orcid.org/0000-0002-6468-4910

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