During this last week, I have been preoccupied by the threat to the arts in many directions. Amidst all the cuts, the flood of things that are being lost or put out to the mercy of the 'big society', it is too easy to loose sight of small organisations that are going under. I am on the board of the Poetry Book Society, a widely-respected and unique organisation that supports poets, poetry readers and poetry publishes and who, for what amounts to a tiny amount of money, has an influence that ripples across our culture. It administers, for example, the high-profile T S Eliot Prize for poetry which in January attracted 2,000 people, young and old, to the Royal Festival Hall to listen to the shortlisted poets reading from their work - an extraordinary and moving occasion, especially because of the large number of children and teenagers in the audience, who queued in the foyer afterwards to buy signed copies. Last Wednesday, it lost its entire funding from the Arts Council and its future is now imperilled. It's impossible to be objective about cuts like this - how can one compare them? What about shelters for women who have been domestically abused, or meals on wheels, or educational maintenance allowances for students from poor family, or tuition fees .... But poetry fares badly on the open market. it's a fragile from, and yet so precious. I keep thinking that for ten per cent of a rich man's bonus, it could flourish.
Then, on Saturday, I joined the march against the cuts to Suffolk Libraries - there are 44 of them and 29 have been marked for closure. I started using the libraries when I was a young child, and used to go every Saturday morning to take out my six books for the week. I've read in libraries, borrowed from them, studied in them, written in them, gone to readings in them, given readings in them; Sean and I have attended readers' groups in prison libraries, where books can for a time give prisoners a kind of imaginative freedom. Libraries are where books are not owned but shared; they are common spaces where everyone can go: children and old people, the poor and jobless, the lonely and the aimless. Libraries are at the heart of a community. People who feel they are outsiders, belong to a community when they step into one. It seems to me that if we could save our forests, we should also be able to save our libraries.
But the march - however sorry the reason for it - was a joy. Hundreds and hundreds of people (the children dressed in their favourite fictional characters) walking slowly through Ipswich on a sunny morning; making friends with strangers; feeling the sense of a common bond. It made me think that this is how we should always be - open and communicative and optimistic about our power to change things. Anne Lesley said on 'Any Questions' that marches don't achieve anything, they're just nice for the people who go on them. They are nice for the people who go on them, it's true, uplifiting, but I think they are also important. We should all let our voices be heard.
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