A Small Northern Town

Tony Trehy on measuring the Bury Text Festival's 'relevance':

The root of this is the cancer of State-control and audit validation of art. Public money is spent so art must be accountable (primarily in the financial meaning of the word); as the bureaucracy can’t actually compute ‘art’, it has to count the audience. As often mentioned here, the Government Performance Indicators for the arts are all audience counters. In this context, poetry is a form that is doomed. Poetry has either a solitary audience (the reader) or tiny audiences (the reading). Almost by definition then, Poetry is irrelevant (although the Text isn’t just poetry). The logic of relevance is that poetry shouldn’t be programmed.

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