Poetry review – ACTIONING THE NEW UNIVERSITY: Andrew Melrose endorses Oz Hardwick’s poetically-framed concerns about English universities and their future
Actioning the New University
Oz Hardwick,
Yaffle Press
ISBN 978-1-913122-96-6
38pp £8.00
Oz Hardwick, author of Actioning the New University, has a similar background to my own. We both came from working class families, went to work young and then managed to go to university as mature students. We shared a love of studying and learning and writing, which universities encouraged. Indeed we still share these but unfortunately the university system, as Actioning the New University chapbook explores, has entered a phase which really wouldn’t welcome people like us. This became clear to me when, in a university staff meeting, a member of the senior management referred to the incoming students for the new academic year as customers. That word ‘Customers’ strips away all disguise and reveals how the university has moved from knowledge-exchange and knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake to commodification and market forces.
Actioning the University is a collection of prose poems which both addresses this issue and also laments the passing of decades of learning. Hardwick is clear he doesn’t think the word ‘why’ should be missing from critical and cultural discourse, but it is also clear he thinks the university in the west is no longer looking for answers and that we should all be asking why.
I find myself agreeing, especially in an age when AI is knocking so hard on our doors, and believing the university itself as a knowledge provider is already under threat. Those who let the student become a customer are already seeing their business model at risk, unless, of course, they begin to realise, again, as Hardwick suggests, that the university could reintroduce the arts, philosophy, history and humanities which spawned it in the first place.
This small collection of twenty-eight poems is a snapshot of the current problems but also, in Hardwicj’s own words, the collection is ‘a small act of resistance’. That is the single line I found myself clinging to. It might be said that, to some extent, all poetry is a small act of resistance. As the philosopher Simon Critchley says, poetry gives us ‘ideas about the thing, not the thing itself.’ It allows us to ask questions and to try to understand why things are; to keep open the precious space of reflection (as Wallace Steven said). Hardwick is also saying the same thing. He gives us the ‘New University’ as a place which should – but doesn’t – keep this space open. His writing is full of ironic twists. Reading between the lines, analysing the lines, stepping outside the box the university is putting itself into becomes a banner for the restoration of, “An Arts Education for the Working Class” which is something both Hardwick and I received in the near past. “An Arts Education for the Working Class” is the very first poem in the collection and it is a battle cry.
Actioning the New University is in fact a collection of battle cries. The university system may be the central theme, but this collection highlights a much wider concern for knowledge itself. Even in our well-established knowledge exchange systems, Hardwick argues, we are being robbed of our precious space for reflection. Thus, everyone should read this collection, to remind themselves how the poetics of language and poetry itself allows us to reflect on the shape of the world – ‘A poem is like a cake, half sponge, half Dundee cake: a spondee cake if you will. Now hold that image…’
Actioning the New University has ingredients of displeasure, distrust, disgust, rebellion, irony, mischief, poetic mastery, and humour, which are well stirred into a palatable mix of thoughtfulness. Nevertheless, it is a twenty-first century mixture, lamenting the lost recipes of the past, with a note to say that we shouldn’t lose the flavours that made the university cake so great in the first place. As Jimmy Webb suggested in McArthur Park, we can’t leave the cake out in the rain because we may never find the recipe again.
Nov 15 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Oz Hardwick
Poetry review – ACTIONING THE NEW UNIVERSITY: Andrew Melrose endorses Oz Hardwick’s poetically-framed concerns about English universities and their future
Actioning the New University
Oz Hardwick,
Yaffle Press
ISBN 978-1-913122-96-6
38pp £8.00
Oz Hardwick, author of Actioning the New University, has a similar background to my own. We both came from working class families, went to work young and then managed to go to university as mature students. We shared a love of studying and learning and writing, which universities encouraged. Indeed we still share these but unfortunately the university system, as Actioning the New University chapbook explores, has entered a phase which really wouldn’t welcome people like us. This became clear to me when, in a university staff meeting, a member of the senior management referred to the incoming students for the new academic year as customers. That word ‘Customers’ strips away all disguise and reveals how the university has moved from knowledge-exchange and knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake to commodification and market forces.
Actioning the University is a collection of prose poems which both addresses this issue and also laments the passing of decades of learning. Hardwick is clear he doesn’t think the word ‘why’ should be missing from critical and cultural discourse, but it is also clear he thinks the university in the west is no longer looking for answers and that we should all be asking why.
I find myself agreeing, especially in an age when AI is knocking so hard on our doors, and believing the university itself as a knowledge provider is already under threat. Those who let the student become a customer are already seeing their business model at risk, unless, of course, they begin to realise, again, as Hardwick suggests, that the university could reintroduce the arts, philosophy, history and humanities which spawned it in the first place.
This small collection of twenty-eight poems is a snapshot of the current problems but also, in Hardwicj’s own words, the collection is ‘a small act of resistance’. That is the single line I found myself clinging to. It might be said that, to some extent, all poetry is a small act of resistance. As the philosopher Simon Critchley says, poetry gives us ‘ideas about the thing, not the thing itself.’ It allows us to ask questions and to try to understand why things are; to keep open the precious space of reflection (as Wallace Steven said). Hardwick is also saying the same thing. He gives us the ‘New University’ as a place which should – but doesn’t – keep this space open. His writing is full of ironic twists. Reading between the lines, analysing the lines, stepping outside the box the university is putting itself into becomes a banner for the restoration of, “An Arts Education for the Working Class” which is something both Hardwick and I received in the near past. “An Arts Education for the Working Class” is the very first poem in the collection and it is a battle cry.
Actioning the New University is in fact a collection of battle cries. The university system may be the central theme, but this collection highlights a much wider concern for knowledge itself. Even in our well-established knowledge exchange systems, Hardwick argues, we are being robbed of our precious space for reflection. Thus, everyone should read this collection, to remind themselves how the poetics of language and poetry itself allows us to reflect on the shape of the world – ‘A poem is like a cake, half sponge, half Dundee cake: a spondee cake if you will. Now hold that image…’
Actioning the New University has ingredients of displeasure, distrust, disgust, rebellion, irony, mischief, poetic mastery, and humour, which are well stirred into a palatable mix of thoughtfulness. Nevertheless, it is a twenty-first century mixture, lamenting the lost recipes of the past, with a note to say that we shouldn’t lose the flavours that made the university cake so great in the first place. As Jimmy Webb suggested in McArthur Park, we can’t leave the cake out in the rain because we may never find the recipe again.