Over at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, slightly panicky discussions have been taking place as to who should be Britain's next poet laureate. The government usually banks on going through this only once a generation; this time, Andrew Motion has decided that 10 years' toadying for a measly £5,000 a year is quite enough of a career boost. He leaves on 1 May.
The trouble is that, like a teacher looking for volunteers to do a maths problem on the board, the Department for Culture is finding gazes politely averted wherever it offers the pen. Sean O'Brien announces piously that the pen should go to a girl; Wendy Cope shakes her head, saying that the pen should probably be put in the bin. Only a handful of neglected pupils at the back look like they're keen to be involved in anything at all. But then, they are writing on the walls. And singing.
Black and minority ethnic poets don't always behave in the expected way for poets; that is, they don't always sit down and write in standard English about Greek myths. Perhaps that's why they struggle to get into print. In 2004, writer-critic Bernardine Evaristo discovered that fewer than 1% of those published by mainstream poetry presses were non-white. In response, the Arts Council England commissioned the Free Verse report to assess industry prejudice. A mentoring programme was concocted. Five years on, however, little has changed besides a smattering of token anthologies. Those in the know whisper that the whole Free Verse initiative was nothing but a PR exercise for the Arts Council.
While British fiction freewheels into multicultural heaven, British poetry remains firmly grounded in native soil. But why? It seems pointless to mention "institutionalised racism" when, in 80 years, Faber has only ever given the nod to three non-white poets (the most recent was Daljit Nagra last year). The Free Verse report discovered that mainstream poetry presses – run overwhelmingly by white men – would routinely reject writers on the basis that they already had one poet to represent "the Asian voice", "the Black voice", etc. One ex-editor scrawled "This is a racist survey" across the front of her questionnaire. "If you conducted this survey on behalf of white British poets you'd be taken to court."
The British media doesn't always help redress this imbalance. Last year, the Guardian's Great Poets of the Twentieth Century were almost all British and male – Sylvia Plath was the odd one out on both occasions. They were all, without exception, white. No Langston Hughes, no Rabindranath Tagore. Derek Walcott's rich, moving work was enough to win the Nobel in 1992, but not enough to oust the narky jingles of Siegfried Sassoon from the list. It's as if poetry, by transcending the quotidian in search of "big" themes (yawn), had transcended the mundane social need for inclusion, representation and equality.
For guidance in this, as in many other race-related issues, we could start by looking to the US. In 1993, African-American Maya Angelou became the first poet since the 1960s to read at a presidential inauguration. America's first black poet laureate was Gwendolyn Brooks – all the way back in 1985 (a statistic helped by the fact that the US laureateship changes hands every few years). The US laureateship attracts a larger sum of $35,000 a year and has few requirements beside a bit of poetry promotion and an annual lecture. No paeans to Bush or Obama, no songs of war. But each laureate brings their own shaping influence, and enjoys the status in the poetry world that, according to incumbent Kay Ryan, is the position's greatest benefit.
Can we imagine Patience Agbabi reading at the accession of a new British government? Probably not – but I think it will happen, soon. Motion has shown that the laureate need no longer be a stooge, by writing chiefly on non-royal subjects such as the Paddington rail disaster and Jacqui Smith's crusade against liberty. As he said recently about the role, "the royal aspect of it should be played right down, and the doing and the national aspect of it should be played right up". The first new laureate of this millennium will be expected to act primarily as a director and populariser of the form – as Motion did, helping to drag poetry into the multimedia age through the creation of the wonderful Poetry Archive.
If we already know the direction in which poetry in this country needs to move – outwards – then we should appoint a poet laureate who will help effect this shift. Britain's black and minority ethnic poets don't need workshops or mentoring programmes. They need visibility. A non-white laureate would act both as a role model and a deterrent for British publishing's powerful protectionistas. A handful of household names could take up the position tomorrow – from Lemn Sissay to Moniza Alvi to Jackie Kay to John Agard (check out his Alternative Anthem here). Perhaps, if they do away with the royal poems altogether, even Benjamin Zephaniah might be willing give it a crack. Then again, he was quite rude about the OBE offer.
