We’ve All Got an Inner Being: Poetic Labour in an Unequal Field

This chapter draws on conversations with a small number of mostly unpublished or self-published poets. Reflecting on the stories of those writers, and on their own critical accounts, it considers the politics of poetic labour and the classed exclusions which delimit access to the sources of wider symbolic recognition. It describes, moreover, some of the ways in which the writers sought to navigate and respond to the structured inequalities of the literary field. At the same time, however, the chapter emphasises the extent to which these writers found, in their own writing, forms of self-articulation and creative possibility which continued to matter to them, despite their lived experience of those inequalities. In that sense, it is argued, a disenchanted and reflexive understanding of the politics of the literary field can co-exist with a profound commitment to, and love of, the substantive affordances of poetic writing in itself.