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.
Why racist? Because most are black?
ReplyDeleteI 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.