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Carol Ann Duffy's excellent, funny but coruscating poem (A Cut Back, Review, 9 April) went a long way towards expressing widely held views on the cuts to arts funding and the implications for both artists and communities.
I was the director of the Lancaster LitFest 1981, 30 years ago. Alan Sillitoe, Willy Russell, Arnold Wesker, Laurie Lee, John McVicar, John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson were among the featured writers, as well as writers for schools, theatre and film programmes and a national poetry competition judged by the relatively unknown UA Fanthorpe and Andrew Motion. It cost the Arts Council a pittance and was supported by local arts organisations, the university and by local businesses and publishers. It has richly developed over the years and I am disappointed by the Arts Council's decision not to fund it after 2012.
Thirty years of inspired development has benefited numerous writers, and contributed to the range of artistic activity that helps define Lancaster as a culturally vibrant destination. We are told cuts are necessary but, as Carol Ann Duffy identifies, why so punishing to literature?
Jo Beddoe
Chair, Crescent Arts
• Yes, arts cuts are stupid and we should make a noise about them, but I've run a little magazine (The Penniless Press, recently relaunched as Mistress Quickly's Bed) for 15 years, published hundreds of poems, stories, articles and reviews, and never had a penny of funding. What the state giveth, the state can taketh away. Still, better to start something, even if it is a labour of love.
Alan Dent
Preston
• We are writing to express our dismay at the savagery of the cuts and to draw attention to some of the less obvious collateral damage. As contributors to one of the organisations defunded last week, we are in a position to appreciate the important role of Mute Publishing since the mid-90s, a vital forum for intellectual debate in the field of art and culture.
Mute has engaged a veritable bank of issues ahead of other far better resourced producers, publishing germinal texts on education, the knowledge economy, regeneration, intellectual property, web 2.0, immaterial labour, music, film and urbanism. It is therefore with real sadness that we learn of the blow it has been dealt.
Anustup Basu, Amita Baviskar, Iain Boal, Peter Linebaugh, Geert Lovink, Angela Mitropoulos, Richard Pithouse, Tiziana Terranova Mute
