Year: 2012

Beautifully published books vanish in obscurity. Poets are lost all the time.

But what about the magic-poem phenomenon? It occurs unexpectedly and unpredictably. And when it does, publishers are bypassed completely.

So here’s a little test. Which world-famous poem was originally scribbled on a brown paper bag, the first poem the author had ever written?

Perhaps you do know. There was some publicity in 2004 when Mary Elizabeth Frye died at the age of 98. Frye is usually described as “a Baltimore housewife and florist”. In 1932 she was moved by the distress of a friend whose mother had just died. The friend was Jewish and in America. Her mother died in Germany. She couldn’t be there, she couldn’t even visit her grave.

This is what Mary Frye wrote to comfort her friend, using the nearest available scrap of paper. Though later circulated among friends, it was never officially ‘published’:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star-shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

At least, that’s the version printed in Frye’s obituary. There are others. There is even interesting controversy about whether she really wrote the poem. I like to think she did.

In any case, nobody can deny the popular appeal. It’s a remarkable piece of consolatory verse – and one of poetry’s enduring capacities is to console. Particularly interesting is the way it champions the identity of the individual spirit at the same time as blending the person, the ‘I’, into everything that exists.

Mary Elizabeth Frye didn’t need a publisher to make that poem famous. It got there all by itself, and that was before the internet. But now there’s the web, and some things travel even faster. A very different kind of poem, for example, is that silly one – the one about the ‘Spell Chequer’.

Have you read it? Probably. It’s widely disseminated in schools and colleges. Every now and again it pops up in a chain email or FaceBook ‘share’. It never has an author. It’s full of deliberate spelling errors – the kind no spell check software can identify because each word is correct in itself but incorrect in context. To drive this home, the byline reads “Sauce unknown”.

Actually the source is known. It was written by Mark Eckman in 1991, since when it has travelled the length and breadth of the globe, delighting and entertaining various people, especially teachers.  Of course, it’s ‘just’ light verse, but it’s magic. It did that thing. It went viral all by itself.

In the railway station in Kirkcaldy in Fife, there’s a large poem on the wall, imprinted into a piece of marmoleum (‘marmoleum’ is a variation on ‘linoleum’, Kirkcaldy being the home of lino). ‘The Boy in the Train’ is one of my all-time favourites. It’s by Mary Campbell Smith, who doesn’t even have an entry in Wikipedia. And yet that poem has certainly travelled! Brilliantly evocative, it recreates a small child’s journey at a time when the railway was mysterious and enchanting, most people didn’t possess motorcars and electric lights were still a novelty.

How did the poem get its deserved popularity in Scottish culture? It appeared in a school magazine. Mary Campbell Smith was not a pupil – she was the Head Teacher’s wife. Clearly she could turn her hand to a bit of verse (and probably many other things). People liked it. It was passed around, shared, handed on. It began to appear in anthologies.

Was Mary Campbell Smith known as a poet? No. Did she write more fabulous poems? If she did, nobody knows about them.

Some people, and I am one of them, hold that the highest accolade for any poet is to become Anon. By this I mean the identity of the poet is forgotten but the words live on. ‘Westron Wynde’ is the one I think about most often, especially when it’s raining. It was first found in print, as a song lyric in 1530. No-one knows precisely when it originated or who wrote it. But as long as there are people alive who speak English, surely this one will live?

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!

Death by poetry? It happens all the time.

A circular email arrives. It is addressed to several publishers, so I am one of a list – often quite an interesting list. Occasionally the list of other names is suppressed, so the email appears to be copied to its author, but I know I am one of many because the email will begin, “Dear Sir/Madam” or “Dear Publisher” or, as in one last week, “Dear Small Publishers”.

Then there is an appeal to read some poems. These will either be attached as separate documents or pasted in a long string underneath the message.

There may be elaborate claims for the brilliance of the work. There may be detailed descriptions of the author’s long-reaching literary arm.

However, the small publisher doesn’t read that far. She has already deleted the message or, as in my case, saved it in the Mad Poets file.

Sometimes, especially if I think the poet may be young, I reply with some advice, which may be a stupid thing to do. Once it involved me in a lengthy interaction, where the male poet (for some reason they are always men) bombarded me with poems. A barrage of verse. I had to block his messages in the end.

I do not read the poems. Okay—that’s not totally true. Very occasionally I read a few lines, with a sort of horrid fascination. I have never, in this situation, come across anything I liked. But even if I did, I wouldn’t like the way it had been thrown at me, and so I wouldn’t consider working with that poet, not for one moment.

Besides, the phrase ‘coals to Newcastle’ springs to mind. I am sitting in a room where two walls are lined floor to ceiling with books. Almost all these books are either collections of poetry, or books about poetry or poets. The third wall has a table, with piles of poetry books, and another bookcase full of . . . er . . . poetry books. I am sitting at the fourth wall, which has a window and so no room for a bookcase. However, on the desk in front of me, beside the Imac screen there is a pile of . . . you guessed already. Some of the work in this room is wonderful, and if I had time, I would be reading it now. I probably should be reading it now. Why would I want more? Especially of dubious provenance.

My job (because I am a humble publisher) is to sell poetry to other people, not have them hurl it at me.

Perhaps the real reason the mad poets’ emails are so frustrating is the way they caricature what I myself am doing as a purveyor of poetry. Here are some poems. You’ll love them! Best you’ve ever seen. Really—latest pamphlet, book, sampler. Unmissable.

But poetry is patently missable. We can live without it, despite the fact that some of us continue to search for the texts that feel indispensable. It is an odd search, and an odd dedication.

A little of the right sort of poetry—that’s what we want. It is never a matter of the more, the better. Too much poetry is a killer. I like pamphlets for that reason. Not too much in them, not too overwhelming, no overweening aspirations. Don’t ask me what ‘the right sort’ is. I only know for me, not you.

But I like a publication that results from an interaction, a process. I like a poet with humility and reserve. I like understatement, and I like irony, and I like playfulness.

There is a ‘right’ way to approach publishers with poems. It requires the poet to notice the publisher as a human being with personal preference and practice. These are not secret things: they’re easy to find out about. Websites are full of information. The world is littered with interviews and articles and year-books and listings. And you can write to a person—you can establish some interaction—without sending poems.

The poetry publisher is never short of Po. Although the mental (and sometimes physical) space is knee-deep in Po-matter, more and more of it arrives. He or she does not wake up one morning to say ‘Hurray! Five hundred more poems have arrived. Just what I wanted!”

However, he or she may—just possibly—say: ‘Hurray! A letter from J M B: I hope she’s included some new poems.’ It’s a relationship. It’s a context. We are human beings, not poem counters.

However, for those who continue to believe fame, fortune and the fabulous future are just around the corner if the victim publisher will just dip into the amazing poem in their email, I recommend British Writers Awards. This organization will take lots of money in return for feeding the belief that a life of influence and affluence is just about to commence. . . .