POETICS Podcast: Who Gets to Be a Poet: Beating the Gatekeeping Horse to Death

We love to celebrate literary rebels like John Keats and Emily Dickinson, but here's the thing—when they were actually being rebellious, critics hated them. Keats got trashed for being a working-class 'cockney poet' while the aristocrats got all the praise, and Dickinson's wild punctuation and syntax? Her first editors basically sanitized all the weirdness out of it to make it 'acceptable.' Turns out we're pretty good at loving rebels—as long as we get to smooth out all the rough edges first. Sound familiar? Welcome to the dead horse we keep beating: gatekeeping. Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe