Kate Clanchy

The saddest story this week for me has been the Kate Clanchy controversy. I’ve followed her for a long time - always liked her poems, went on a workshop she ran years ago, and more recently I’ve followed her career as a stunningly successful teacher of poetry to Oxford schoolkids from a variety of backgrounds. Her book about that is entitled “Some kids I taught and what they taught me” , and that fairly represents her approach - positive, altruistic, willing to learn. But she’s not perfect, and critics of her book have highlighted passages where she describes individual children with whom she’s worked - sometimes in a clumsy or patronising way, sometimes borderline racist. She made things worse by reacting to initial criticisms that they were “out of context” when in fact they were accurately quoting extracts from the book. Clanchy’s supporters - including Philip Pullman - weigh in with tough ripostes, including comparing the critics with ISIS - and that’s not borderline racist. Poetry Wales, who’d run an interview with Clanchy in their previous edition, went out of their way to apologise, distancing themselves from the harm and damage she’d caused - and presumably forgetting entirely about the qualities of this book that they’d been keen to publicise. It’s a can of worms, and a brilliant illustration of how the Twittersphere exaggerates and intensifies differences of opinion. Clanchy admits that she got things wrong, and sets down to rewrite parts of the book, but that is dismissed as insufficient. Nothing will do, it seems, short of total condemnation. And this is for specific phrases which are problematic, but never amount to more than 3% of the book.