How Have Mentoring Practices in the UK Shaped the Contemporary Poetry Ecology?

What are the dominant mentoring practices and pedagogies in the UK poetry ecology (1970-2021)? What effect do these have on contemporary poets? What are the consequences for the poetry ecology today? Drilling down, what are the gaps in provision? How have the gaps, pedagogies, and practices shaped how we think about ourselves as writers? How has our concept of our own writing identities shaped the poetry ecology? How do mentoring approaches for career-poets and poetry as a wellbeing practice intersect? Do they have a symbiotic relationship? These are the fundamental questions my research seeks to answer.
Answering these questions -and making the findings freely accessible- will demystify the poetry ecology. Poets can currently take decades to discover the modes of mentoring that suit their needs and ambitions best, since they begin with little awareness of their options, or indeed, how the poetry world operates. Poets with existing connections and the resources to explore many types of mentoring will inevitably navigate the ecology more easily because they will, effectively, be given a map to get them started. This research aims to provide a map that can be given to all poets, so that more people can engage with poetry. It hopes to allow poets to choose which mentoring methodologies to utilise. The research aims to allow us to better understand how our current ecology has come to exist, and how certain expectations, limitations, and assumptions are still shaping the ecology. It seeks to provide a language to describe mentoring practices and pedagogies, which in tum can be used by facilitators to hone their mentoring. Funders may use this insight to shape their future calls or guidance and policy.
I define mentorship as: one-off or long-term support both within and outside of universities and regional development organisations, designed to equip the poet with technical craft skills and techniques, awareness of different practices and literary movements, and with knowledge of the poetry ecology. I define the poetry ecology as: networks of writers, educators, publishers, writing organisations, as well as wider culture and traditions.