Giving a fresh meaning to the notion of a poetry slam, the august poetry journal PN Review has published a stinging critique of the “rise of a cohort of young female poets” led by the likes of Kate Tempest, Hollie McNish and Rupi Kaur, describing their work as characterised by “the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft”.

Poet Rebecca Watts took to the pages of PN Review to lay out her disdain for “the cult of the noble amateur”, and her despair at the effect of social media on poetry. Highlighting the work of poets such as Kaur (whose debut collection Milk and Honey has sold more than 1m copies worldwide), Tempest and, in particular, McNish, Watts attacks the “cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’”.

Poets and readers have been divided on the rise of performance poets in print. Younger poets using social media to gain an audience – Tempest and McNish on YouTube, and Kaur on Instagram, where she has more than two million followers – have been dismissed as populist, while their often extremely autobiographical poetry has been variously praised as brave, or criticised as simple and solipsistic.

According to Nielsen data, these three poets have sold more than 275,000 books in the UK, with Kaur alone responsible for half of that figure. Both McNish and Tempest have won the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry.

Citing lines such as Kaur’s “you should see me / when my heart is broken / i don’t grieve / i shatter”, Watts writes that “of all the literary forms, we might have predicted that poetry had the best chance of escaping social media’s dumbing effect; its project, after all, has typically been to rid language of cliche”.

However, she finds, “in the redefinition of poetry as ‘short-form communication’ the floodgates have been opened. The reader is dead: long live consumer-driven content and the ‘instant gratification’ this affords.”

Some seem to think poetry is primarily an excuse for having rather mean-spirited conversations about poetry Don Paterson, poet

Having a huge audience does not align with quality, argues Watts, whose own first collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published in 2016: “Like the new president, the new poets are products of a cult of personality, which demands from its heroes only that they be ‘honest’ and ‘accessible’, where honesty is defined as the constant expression of what one feels, and accessibility means the complete rejection of complexity, subtlety, eloquence and the aspiration to do anything well … If we are to foster the kind of intelligent critical culture required to combat the effects of populism in politics, we must stop celebrating amateurism and ignorance in our poetry.”

The essay in PN Review has split the poetry establishment, with some praising it as “stonking stuff” and “brilliant”. PN Review editor Michael Schmidt showed the Guardian some of the many supportive responses to Watts’s essay the journal had received. “Many of our readers seem relieved that literary criticism is at last being applied to writing that has, hitherto, been welcomed with open arms by journalists because it is easy to read, contains few challenges … to insist that it can stand on a sure footing beside poetry in what I have now too often seen described as ‘dusty old books’,” Schmidt said.

Poet Hollie McNish. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Other responses to Watts’s essay have been scathing; including from McNish herself, who hit back on her website on Monday: “A clever retort using high-register vocabulary is fine, but really it is simply saying that the author thinks I’m a shit poet and fucking stupid, too, and that Picador should not be publishing shite like mine. So why not just bite the bullet and say that.”



TS Eliot prize-winning poet Don Paterson, who publishes McNish and Tempest at Picador, said: “If you’ve ever seen Hollie perform, the suggestion that she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing is pretty funny. You don’t have to like what people do, but I think you measure it against its own ambitions. Otherwise it’s like saying TS Eliot was a terrible hip-hop artist. True, but so what.”

Paterson said he felt that the essay was “evidence of something that divides folk across all sectional allegiances, whether avant garde, mainstream or spoken word: there are some of us who think that poetry is a way of cleaning the lies out of language, and lending our lives some meaning; and there are others who – despite their protestations to the contrary – seem to think poetry is primarily an excuse for having rather mean-spirited conversations about poetry.”

Poet Lemn Sissay said: “There is a new horizon in poetry. Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest are it. Some people are cowering in the dark from this horizon. They seem to panic over the size and brightness of it. There’s room for all forms of poetry. And whichever side you’re on, it’s foolish to say there isn’t.”

I’ll tell you the point I stopped reading, when Rebecca Watts compared Kate & Hollie’s popularity to Trump. When trying to rip two esteemed poets who write for the greater good apart, don’t use Trump as your analogy. Any nobel amateur could tell you that. Love to @holliepoetry. https://t.co/nzogtbkwny — Anthony Anaxagorou (@Anthony1983) January 22, 2018

Watts wrote her excoriating essay after being asked to review McNish’s Plum for PN Review: she declined, because “to do so for a poetry journal would imply that it deserves to be taken seriously as poetry”. But in the essay she does dissect McNish’s autobiographical collection, describing it as “such stuff as madmen tongue, and brain not”, and a “slapdash assembly of words” that “celebrates the complete stagnation of the poet’s mind”.

She told the Guardian she only intended to use McNish’s book “as a case study in order to examine the intricacies of a wider cultural phenomenon. The fact I wrote the article demonstrates my belief that literary criticism is a valid and worthwhile pursuit; this seems to be the main thing people are objecting to.”