We spoke briefly by email about the struggle for working-class writers and artists to be seen as writers and artists first and foremost. Do you think that mainstream publishing seems to favour or to fetishise particular kinds of working-class testimony, often at the expense of foregrounding what is skilful or interesting in the text itself?
‘Working-class’ has become something of a line in a bio – something you put on the front cover of your book. While I think people should be proud of their class – I find it uncomfortable and disingenuous the way it has become a kind of marketing strategy. If you’re trading in your life experience only, then you run out of material. And then that material becomes like a form of capital, mined and sold and then gone and that’s your LIFE!! It’s not healthy to wear an identity like a suit, and you are rarely the one making the quids out of it. When mainstream publishers print working-class books there’s some process of alienation that that work goes through, and to be honest whether you are w/c or not the mainstream publishing industry is pretty alienating full-stop. But because I don’t think we have a big reading audience who is working class most w/c poetry goes through this packaging process to make it attractive to more middle – upper class audiences because they are the ones with the money to buy the books. To me it’s just as important who is reading the work – I have had a lot of kind words from people who ‘don’t like poetry’ but who relate to some of their themes in my work, and that’s the most satisfying feedback for me. You wanna talk to people don’t you, have a conversation, not merely an audience. As far as I see it anyway, and I think a lot of working-class people can smell the alienation of stuff that’s been through the Penguin wringer.
