Smart big awards and prize money
Is killing off black poetry
It's not censors or dictators that are cutting up our art.
The lure of meeting royalty
And touching high society
Is damping creativity and eating at our heart.
Benjamin Zephaniah tells Blair and the Queen
where to stick their offer of an OBE (Order of the British Empire): 'Zephaniah breaks with the convention that those rejecting honours should do so privately when he openly dismissed the award as a legacy of colonialism' (see the
write-up).