To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Running scared of popular poets
TIM WELLS takes issue with a bilious attack on ‘working-class’ artists in a high-end literary magazine
Kate Tempest
[Martin Schummann/Creative Commons]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
THE JANUARY issue of PN Review contains a hatchet job by Rebecca Watts that has got British poets taking sides.
Nothing unusual there, what is the poetry world without splits and divides? It’s worse than the left. PN Review was described by Simon Armitage as “the political wing of Carcanet Press” and, as much as the hip young poets like social meeja, Professor Plum loves the dagger in the library.
Watts went to both Oxford and Cambridge and those Marks & Spencer ready meals don’t pay for themselves. She takes umbrage at “amateur” poetry, in particular Hollie McNish, Kate Tempest and Rupi Kaur. Hers is basically an attack on “populism,” as she would have it, or access, as many a poet would have it.
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