Friday, 19 December 2008
Policing Poetry For Correctness
Not that many people will find this of interest...a short while ago I found myself in a classroom looking through a copy of the Folens GCSE English for AQA/A textbook. As a poet, I was interested to see what poems and poets were being studied. Here are the featured poets:
Grace Nichols
Imtiaz Dharker
Sujata Bhatt
John Agard
Derek Walcott
Niyi Osundari
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Denise Levertov
Tom Leonard.
Any comment I could make would be construed as racist but I do not believe that anyone can look at that list and not see an immense (and unjustifiable) imbalance. They're not all good poems, either.
Labels:
AQA,
British education,
English,
GCSE,
poems,
poetry,
political correctness
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1 comment:
Why racist? Because most are black?
I think it is one heck of a job to list poets and then poems for study. I think it depends on a number of things which may not be the same from poem-chooser to poem-chooser, and from student body to student body.
What do you think?
But then, you've said very little, like I don't know what poems they were.
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