Excerpt from RED

From the “Introduction”

...But this still does not explain why “Red”. I pulled it out of the proverbial hat. I decided that a colour would be good, though blue would lead to too many poems about the blues, black would lead to too many poems about blackness, and yellow just seemed wrong. Green would trigger some other agenda, and so on. So red. I thought, well, red will connect with passion in that clichéd sense, but it would also allow poets to try to go beyond the cliché. As should be clear, my rationalisation was not extremely profound. I took solace in the idea that red had a lot of possibilities and I wanted to allow for possibilities more than anything else. There is a peculiar irony in the choice of such a theme. One might imagine that having a theme would be restrictive for contributors. But I calculated that for active poets, making a decision about what poems to send for an anthology, when no defining rubric is offered, can be quite daunting. I feared that the first instinct of most poets facing a call for Black British poetry would be to send work that they imagined justified their inclusion in such an anthology. I also imagined that some poets might spend time trying to second guess what kind of work I might be interested in. They might consider my tendency towards the narrative and lyric poem and presume that such work would be more likely to make it into the anthology. And even those poets who consciously resisted such considerations, who were comfortable with sending their “best” work, would still be faced with the dilemma of deciding what to send. I reasoned that an open ended theme like “red” would signal that I was looking first for interesting poems, and that I was not looking for any explicit indication of Black British identity save what might be obvious by their self-identification as such. Thankfully, my calculations were correct.