Читать книгу A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 44

In 1992, Nigel Wheale defined small presses as “one, or rarely more than two individuals, who, usually in their spare time and at their own expense, write or edit poetry, print and bind it more or less competently, and circulate it, almost invariably at a loss, or at best only barely covering their costs” (Wheale 1992, 9). They usually publish collections by individual poets and are often run alongside a little magazine. According to Wheale, print‐runs range from 200 to 500 copies, rarely sell well or out, are not stocked by bookshops, and their “working life […] is normally quite short because the activity occurs at the margins of viability, and they routinely succumb to accumulated pressures of debt and/or despair in equal measures” (Wheale 1992, 9). Some of the characteristics in this definition are valid for quite a number of the small presses publishing during the British Poetry Revival between 1960 and 1975, but, I would argue, it was already outdated in the 1980s, let alone in the early 1990s. Peter Forbes, at the time editor of Poetry Review, and Jonathan Barker, Literature Officer at the British Council, argue in their joint essay “Poetry Publishing Today” that “some of the subsidized small presses […] now constitute the main outlet for poetry book publication, and match the majors in attractive production, prestige, and often in marketing flair.” The “big league,” comprising Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Peterloo, Anvil, Seren, Enitharmon, and Littlewoood Arc, “are more prolific than the majors” (Forbes/Barker 1992, 236). The essay by Forbes and Barker offers a substantial list of 52 poetry book publishers for Great Britain and Ireland (Forbes/Barker 1992, 237–238).

Half a decade later, Peter Finch described poetry as “a minority art made consumer friendly” that is “[b]right, visible, fashionable” (Finch 1996, 116), and Michael Horowitz put forward the thesis that “[h]appily, the arriviste atmosphere of ten to fifteen years ago when seven per cent or so of English poets and literary careerists controlled at least 84 per cent of the publishing, taste‐making, grant‐and‐prize and allied opportunities for poets, is on the wane across Britain” (quoted in Finch 1996, 116). Despite an astounding list of 320 poetry presses—an increase of more than 600% in 4 years—and “this undoubted success” (Finch 1996, 117), Finch warns of “cracks” that can already be seen. In particular, he detects a “quietly indecisive” attitude among the mainstream commercial publishers, reports of the small presses' concern that more unsold copies than expected had been returned by bookshops, and finally offers his feeling that “the boom if not quite bust is certainly on the point of turn” (Finch 1996, 117).

Despite a slight increase in the number of poetry presses to 326 in 1997, Finch continued his warnings that “[i]n the rush to mount the bandwagon publishers are now putting out far too many books and as a consequence reviewers are increasingly ignoring them” (Finch 1997, 108). Although Finch notices great successes such as Poems on the Underground, he raises doubts about poetry that is seen as “a kind of spectator sport” (Finch 1997, 107) and “a branch of the entertainment industry” (Finch 1997, 108). To support his argument, Finch refers to the survey Public Attitudes to Poetry (1995), commissioned by the Arts Council England: the majority of the population has a problem with poetry's image (“out‐of‐touch, gloomy, irrelevant, effeminate, high‐brow and elitist”; Finch 1997, 108), there are not enough readers, and those who read do not read enough.

At the turn of the millennium, the situation of the poetry publishing industry changed completely. Despite Oxford University Press's abandoning its poetry list, two and half thousand volumes of verse were published in 1999 (Finch 2000, 112). The list of poetry presses supplementing Finch's essay only comprises 106 entries, which means that within 4 years more than 200 publishers stopped operations. They range from commercial publishers such as Faber & Faber, Cape, Chatto & Windus to “specialists,” headed by Carcanet and Bloodaxe, and small presses, Finch's third category, such as Rockingham Press, Redbeck, and Words Worth. Despite these figures, Finch's résumé of the situation is, very surprisingly if compared to 4 years ago, almost enthusiastic: “Never before have new poets been faced with so many publishing opportunities. And if there is any criticism then this is it. Too many books jamming the market” (Finch 2000, 123).

Seven years later, in 2007, the list of UK and Irish publishers showed an impressive figure of 200 entries, while by 2009 the number of poetry presses had decreased enormously to only 122 operators, a decline that continued in 2010 (116 presses), and more or less stopped when The Writers' Handbook 2011 listed 112 businesses. The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 should only be mentioned in passing, as it is perfectly unreliable. Its listings seem to have been produced with the intention of entertaining: the publishers‐of‐poetry list comprises only 37 presses, including one—Hippopotamus Press—which has not published a single collection since 2002, the year Roland John launched David Clarke's Touching on Love. In his essay, Neil Astley only refers to 27 poetry presses, rather like a list of friends collected from his mobile phone that are invited to his very exclusive party (Astley 2018, 366).

In contrast to these figures, the British and Irish poetry scene is populated by poetry presses, which publish an impressive number of single‐author collections, single‐poet pamphlets, and anthologies. Today's situation is similar to the one in the mid‐1990s as Finch described it: poets producing work of a certain quality will almost always find their way into print. Not every poet will perhaps find a home at the headquarters of “The Big Six”—Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet, Chatto & Windus, Faber & Faber, and Picador (Astley 2018, 366)—but many small presses and their staff are prepared to offer high‐quality support during the production process and often better and more personal mentoring with regard to publicity, distribution, and royalties. As Matthew Sperling has argued, “most new small‐press volumes are now only a Paypal transaction away. Poetry readings are no longer the preserve of the locals and regulars in obscure pub back rooms, but are advertised, digested, and sometimes broadcast on blogs, newsfeeds, and other social networking technologies” (Sperling 2013, 196–197).

When studying the poetry presses in operation since 1960, one may consider the question of whether, compared to trade publishers in other fields, there are, on the British and Irish poetry scene, publishers who may be regarded as “big.” In this context, it is of paramount importance to analyze the financial situation of the presses, in particular how taxpayers' money has been distributed among them. Starting in the mid‐1990s—according to the published lists, the heyday of British and Irish poetry presses—one among many reasons why six publishers felt, and still feel, they are “biggish” when compared to fellow competitors could perhaps be found in The Arts Council of England Annual Report 1994–1995. It records the following grants and guarantees for the time period April 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995: Anvil Press Poetry received £61,600 and Carcanet £67,800 with an additional grant, for PN Review, of £17,580. The sense of conscious bigness is self‐explanatory when one compares these figures with grants allocated under the headings “Small Presses”: Enitharmon Press £200, Peterloo Poets £325, Dangeroo Press £350. Under the heading “Translations,” Dedalus received £11,915, and Bloodaxe Books £2,290.

A decade later, in the year 2006, an Arts Council initiative involving a new client hit the headlines of newspapers and trade journals: Salt Publishing was awarded £185,000 of investment spread over the next 3 years. According to Salt's press release, also posted on the BRITISH‐IRISH‐POETS discussion list, three ACE senior managers—John Hampson, Senior Strategy Officer, David Gilbert, former Managing Director of Waterstone's, and Gary McKeone, outgoing Director of Literature—had struck a deal with Chris and Jennifer Hamilton‐Emery. In the official phrasing of the report: they “consulted with Salt to help build a business plan which will see the company become one of the largest independent poetry and short story publishers in the UK” (Hamilton‐Emery 2006). This sounded like—and was, indeed, no less than—a bid for a takeover of the UK poetry scene. Until then, Salt could offer only a rather modest list of successes, among them a shortlisting for the 2005 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. However, they had launched four international series: in 2000 Salt Modern Poets followed by Salt Companions to Poetry (2001), Salt Modern Poets in Translation (2004), and Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry (2003): all of which constituted a very ambitious program codesigned by John Kinsella, located in Perth and editor of the biannual magazine Salt (14 issues, 1990–2004), and Chris Hamilton‐Emery, who at the time had published two collections with Barque (2000) and Arc (2002), having also been Press Production Director at Cambridge University Press for 8 years until 2002. The two poet‐editors were joined in the undertaking by Hamilton‐Emery's wife Jennifer, a senior manager in the National Health Service, Linda Bennett, a former director of Waterstone's, and John Skelton, former Managing Director of Open University Press. This line‐up of expertise, the international outlook of the publishing program, and the well‐structured approach of four series must have been very persuasive. In 2005, Chris Hamilton‐Emery offered a résumé of the first 6 years: “This year we began stocking up our new distributors in Australia and selling ebooks, and from those first four titles in 2000, we now publish around forty books a year across three continents and have grown from £8,000 to an £80,000 business” (Hamilton‐Emery 2005, 166–167). However, the ambition of developing “an international profile as a highly‐innovative publisher of a broad poetry and literature list” (Hamilton‐Emery 2006) was never fulfilled. The adjective broad is in sharp contrast to Hamilton‐Emery's “alternative vision” set out in his contribution to PN Review, which was to

give everyone in the UK the chance of accessing a poetry which is intellectually ambitious, which transcends national boundaries and pastoral, which takes risks in reinventing the world, rather than describing it. A poetry interested in diversity, theory, and life as it can be lived, rather than life as we have it. I want a literature of aspiration and innovation.

(Hamilton‐Emery 2005, 9)

This “vision” gives the impression that the selection of writers, published by Salt from 2007 to 2013, and the poetics they represent(ed) was far too narrow to attract enough reviews, readers, and sales. Salt published 80 titles per year during the period of the 3‐year grant. Together with Shearsman—Tony Frazer received an ACE grant of £17,500 over a 3‐year period (2005–2007) and published 39 books in 2007, 63 titles in 2009, and another 54 books in 2010—they flooded the poetry scene and gave the impression that the great majority of poetry books came from one or other of the two presses from 2007 to 2010. After their “Just One Book” campaign launched in May 2009, when they asked people to involve themselves in the project by buying just one book, Hamilton‐Emery declared in August 2009: “The flaw in the programme was that we based it on title count. We scaled up our publishing operations and when the funding stopped we were actually left in a very exposed position. […] With the benefit of hindsight if we'd really thought it through we would have managed the cash differently – we'd have been less expansive and had a look at building our cash reserves” (Flood, 2009). Barely 4 years later, Salt dropped their single‐author collections, as their sales had declined by a quarter in 2012 and total sales halved in the years 2008–2012. “It's simply not viable to continue doing them unfunded,” Hamilton‐Emery admitted, “we have tried to commit to single‐author collections by funding them ourselves, but as they have become increasingly unprofitable, we can't sustain it” (Flood 2013). In 2018, when Salt relaunched their Modern Poets list, Hamilton‐Emery started to commission single‐author collections once again, also inviting unsolicited British submissions: “Identity in publishing is important, perhaps critical in building your business, you can't understand Salt without its poetry, the building blocks of its success.” When defining his aims for the list, Hamilton‐Emery seems to have learnt his lesson. Although he wants “to provide opportunities for debuts [… and] take risks,” his focus is now “on the individual talents rather than any given poetics” (Hamilton‐Emery 2018). However, The Bookseller's recent article on “High Returns and Slow Sales Hit Salt with £15,000 Shortfall,” and Jennifer Hamilton‐Emery's announcement that they “need to recapitalise the business,” followed by the already (in)famous appeal to “our loyal readers to buy a book and help us climb out of the hole” (Chandler 2019) make the situation sound like Groundhog Day.

Let us now compare Salt's approach and dealings with Andy Croft's Smokestack Books imprint, which was modeled on the American Curbstone Press, the French publisher Le Temps des Cerises, and Fore Publications in the UK. It was launched in 2004, helped by an initial ACE grant of £20,480, with a clearly defined aim: “I wanted to make an intervention on a larger stage and on a more professional scale, combining poets of local, regional, national, and international reputation” (Croft 2019a). Although this policy statement sounds rather broad in its scope, the term intervention carries definitely political connotations, implying for Croft “contributions to a conversation about a particular issue” by “oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets” (Croft 2019b, 33). The list of titles, meant as specific interventions, is long and impressive: Mayakovsky's epic poem Lenin (the centenary of 1917), Crisis, an anthology edited by Dinos Siotis (the Greek economic and political crisis), A Rose Loupt Oot, edited by David Betteridge (the fortieth anniversary of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders [UCS] work‐in), and Amir Darwish's Dear Refugee and Don't Forget the Couscous (the Syrian refugee crisis). Tom Wintringham's We're Going On! marks the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and David Cain's Truth Street the thirtieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. New Boots and Pantisocracies, edited by W. N. Herbert and Andy Jackson, relates to the first 100,days of the Cameron government, while two sequences occupy themselves with Brexit—John Gohorry's Squeak, Budgie! and Martin Rowson's Pastrami Faced Racist. In response to the rise of neo‐Fascism and anti‐Semitism in Europe, Croft published András Mezei's Christmas in Auschwitz and Guus Luijters's Song of Stars, as well as the anthology Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust, edited by Thomas Ország‐Land. Finally, a percentage of the sales of A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, edited by Naomi Foyle, is donated by Croft to help finance the legal fees of Ashraf Fayadh and Dareen Tatour, Palestinian poets imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and in Israel on charges relating to their poetry (Croft 2019a, b, 33). Croft wants to “keep open a space for what is left of the socialist and communist poetic traditions in the twenty‐first century,” which also means “publishing books that otherwise would be unlikely to appear in print,” and, when referring to the press's international focus, “putting into English poets whose work is either unavailable or unknown in the UK” (Croft 2019b, 33).

Although Smokestack only received another five ACE grants (2006/7: £26,125; 2008/9: £17,891; 2010: £6,200; 2011: £8,300; 2012: £6,200; Croft 2019c), Croft has managed to publish more than 160 books since 2004. The lack of continuous financial support meant that Croft could no longer pay his authors a nominal fee of £500 after the final ACE grant in 2011. However, he also felt “a kind of liberation. I suddenly had much greater control over the budget, which was no longer dependent on funding decisions made elsewhere. And I don't have to justify my editorial decisions to anyone” (Croft 2019a). In 2018, Croft published 15 titles and the press, as Croft admits, “is pretty well self‐financing […]. So, as long as I never pay myself anything for running Smokestack it breaks even” (Croft 2019a). This situation may change because of very recent developments. Much to Croft's own surprise, one of his interventions—David Cain's Truth Street—was shortlisted in the 2019 Forward Best First Collection category and featured by The Guardian, a first for a Smokestack title (Croft 2019a,b, 33, Flood 2019). Croft was not overwhelmed, roundly declaring: “Of course the only reason that The Guardian are interested in Truth Street is that it has been shortlisted for one of the little Forward prizes. They rang me up to ask for a review copy when the shortlist was published, despite the fact that I had sent them a review copy several months earlier when the book came out” (Croft 2019d). As for the shortlisting itself, one of the reasons for it may have been the jury's sensitivity to the political dimension of things. Andrew McMillan, one of the jurors, declared that “a lot of these collections, especially from newer poets, are really getting down in the mud and wrestling with the intricacies and difficulties of our new political situation” (Flood 2019). McMillan's observation coincides with a trend that Donna Ferguson had, almost rhapsodically, described in The Guardian as a “passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, [that] is fueling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry” (Ferguson 2019). Under these new circumstances, Croft may reconsider his plans to close Smokestack in 2021.