Invisible Mentors: British Poetry in Partnership, 1960-2020

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Effective mentoring is central to growth, innovation, and leadership in the creative industries, yet there are few established means for measuring its value. Arts and humanities researchers have had little to say about its impact on creative work, despite its interdisciplinary scope, and models and methods are primarily drawn from outside the sector. This project uses 20th and 21st-century British poetry as a case study to establish an arts-specific critical language for mentoring, drawing on interviews with practitioners and hitherto-unavailable publishing archives. Recent decades have seen new mentoring initiatives for both poets and reviewers, an upsurge in commercial mentoring services, and a heightened focus by national arts funders on mentoring as a means to stimulate creative and economic development across the UK. The vitality and success of these projects suggests a creative culture eager for formal mentoring, in part to offset the exclusionary potential of edited magazines, creative writing programmes, established presses, or coteries formed around educational privilege. However, mentoring's long history and practice within the literary community is rarely acknowledged or explored, leaving a gap between practice, evaluation, and theory, and limiting the effectiveness of existing schemes. This project will uncover the history of mentoring in British poetry since 1960, chronicling its development alongside the growth of creative writing courses in HEIs, the informal networks of independent poetry presses, and schemes supported by literary festivals, publishers, and arts organisations. It will use the insights of cultural, literary and archival history to address recommendations and reports from the creative industries, and economic and structural critiques of the sector. It will contend that mentoring's hidden history has not only shaped our notions of authorship, creative practice, and the professional artist, but our expectations of the institutions and funders that support them. The project will be organised and delivered through three themed workpackages:i) Measuring Mentoring: the PI will work with a literature development agency and a national poetry festival as they develop a new 'ground-up' mentoring network for young people: the framework developed through the project will also be used to assess existing mentoring schemes. Young poets will be paired with a professional writer, and share their insights at a project symposium.ii) Shaping Forms, Techniques, Identities: the PI will deliver a monograph, developing a new language to describe mentoring and its methods, and create a podcast series on poetry and mentoring, exploring how unacknowledged mentoring cultures have shaped genres, traditions, and literary communities. iii) Transforming Cultures and Institutions: the PI will co-author a national report with project partners on best practice in mentoring in the creative industries, assessing its personal and collective benefits. The project will further our understanding of poetry as a communal, networked process, and allow the commercial, cultural and voluntary sectors the opportunity to benefit from arts-specific approaches to mentoring. In parallel, it will deepen our knowledge of mentoring as an embedded and interdisciplinary arts practice, bringing together insights from social science, cultural policy, business mentoring, and the creative industries. While the AHRC Leadership Fellow scheme supports a broad definition of leadership, management training often yokes together leadership and mentoring in uneasy collocation, eliding a human capacity with a diachronic practice. By attending to mentoring's lived history in the arts, this project has the potential to reshape how we consider both terms. More broadly, the research will demonstrate how mentoring has the power not just to inform individual practice, but drive wider artistic, social, and organisational change.