PUBLISHING CONUNDRUMS – Page 2 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

Blogging about Snagging

How long does it take to snag a poem?

Or even just read one. I read an awful lot of them, in book, fast. But that’s not reading properly.

But during the reading window (which is now shut and bolted, though various envelopes are still hurtling themselves against it) I read properly, and I snag as I go.

Ok – in any set, I admit I start with the shortest. I look at the shape on the page, and sometimes at the shapes of the rest in the group. Already there’s a personal aesthetic. I like the look of some better than others. Some look easy to read. Some look like hard work. I have never much liked long and thin, and I worry about centred.

But I try not to let personal taste get in the way – even though it can’t be denied. I read slowly, from beginning to end. This is the snagging stage. The poet has built the poem – often in neat chunks and short lines. I am moving slowly through to see whether there’s a clear run; to see whether I can make my way from start to finish without falling over an obstruction.

Often I do meet obstructions. It’s usually something like a noun that could be a verb – such as the words ‘shock’ or ‘fall’, for example. And the line break may create uncertainty what the word’s function could be. The poet knows, of course, where the sentence is going, but the reader doesn’t.

And there’s the business of punctuation. If it’s present, and it’s working correctly, you shouldn’t even notice it. If you start to notice it – if I start to put pencil rings round the semi-colons – it’s a snag.

Using line-breaks to substitute for commas can be an issue. If you have a lot of enjambment – lines where the sense runs smoothly right over the line end and into the next – you rely on the reader sensing that easily. But if you mix those lovely enjambed lines with lines where the line end represents a pause (but you miss out the comma), you create confusion.

Some people miss all the punctuation out. If you do this, your structure on the page – line breaks and indents and gaps, or whatever you do to organise the sense – has to work smoothly. And it can. But it doesn’t always.

Sometimes a snag – for me – is a word I don’t know – though I count this as a Good Snag. ‘Parkour’ was a new word I learned in July. So I stop reading and go online to Merriam Webster. It’s the same with references to paintings, music, or famous people. I have to look them up, and usually I do, unless it’s the fifth reference in an hour, in which case I just note what I don’t know.

I get tied up with imagery too. Decades of reading poetry has made me into a literalist. So I get the metaphorical application pretty well, but at the same time I log it literally. If you tell me love is like riding a bicycle, I’m ok, I can see you rolling merrily down the street. But if I find you, on the next line, washed up on the shores of a stormy river, I’m wondering what happened to the bike.

I am adjective-averse, and it’s getting worse. Sometimes there are a lot. Sometimes every single noun has an adjective (or two) to help it on its way. But – trust me – they start to cancel each other out.

It’s the poet’s job to sort out the snags, but often we can’t see our own. It takes another reader. So that’s all I am really. A snagging expert. Or that’s what I am at first.

If the snags are serious, I limit my feedback to snags alone. Because until they’re sorted out, the real work of the poem can’t begin.

If there are no snags, I read the poem two or three times more. I decide what I’m picking up at a literal and intuitive level. And then I write a response. Sometimes I just think it works. Some poems do what they set out to do. A pleasure to read – and it doesn’t always have to be deep stuff. It can be small. It can be ephemeral.

But I read poetry in a peculiar way. I can only describe it as like swimming breast-stroke while wearing goggles, where I’m seeing both above and below the water as I progress. The above and below views don’t quite match but that’s as it should be. I’m picking up on stuff. Trying to get the feel, and the tone, and the possible symbols. Whether it’s personal or theoretical, funny or tragic.

Some poems are strong writing. You know it when you hit it. You don’t even have to like it. You just know you’ve read something that works on its own terms. Often these poems will have a detail that you remember for the rest of the day. A reflection in a polished plate. A view of three ships through a window.

Most poems are a mixture: good bits, best bits, weak bits, straggly bits. An awful lot of poems have a poem inside them trying to get out.

How long does it take to read a poem? It takes me at least five minutes for a short one, and up to 15 if it’s more complicated. I probably average 8-10 minutes per poem when I’m giving some feedback, and then I write each person a note too – and some of the notes are long.

In July I read around 1000 poems. It took a long time. If I include the notes and finding of envelopes for those who forgot them, I reckon around 130 hours. I like doing it, and I think it’s important. For me, it isn’t about looking for new poets to publish. It’s about being part of this thing we do, whatever it is, this poetry writing thing.

By the end of the month, I was tired. It’s like the opposite of PoWriMo – what I do is PoReadMo, twice a year.

But after July ended, envelopes kept arriving. Another one yesterday. Please don’t send any more!

I have moved over to a different kind of work now. It’s upstairs, not downstairs like the window weeks, and it involves writing and typesetting and publicity for books (watch this space). So there’s no time for reading more poems, except the ones I’m putting in books – which takes even longer.

The next window opens in December. Brrrrrrr.

Opening the Windows

Remember the joke about windows?

It’s the one with four experts in a car that breaks down in the middle of the desert, and they all try different methods to get it started – a physicist and a geologist, I seem to remember. and even a priest (no prizes for guessing his solution). All of their fixes fail. But the last one is a Microsoft engineer who suggests they close all the windows, turn the engine off, wait a couple of minutes, and then start it again. Which obviously works.

But that’s a kind of Windows I’m not thinking about. I’m thinking about submissions windows. I have no idea who invented this term. Still I picked it up and have used it ever since. It seemed to make sense at the time, though it was the idea of closing the windows that attracted me. Accepting submissions all year doesn’t mix with actually producing publications – not when there’s only one of you – so if you open a window and let everything in, you have to close it again before it gets out of hand. So I do.

Sending poems between July 4 and July 26 is best.

Sending them on July 30^th is not good, and you know what happened to Peter Pan when the window was shut.

For me, the reading months are also a matter of upstairs and downstairs. Upstairs, the literal and metaphorical window is usually closed (though the door is open). I sit at this desk and batter away at a keyboard and pore over a screen that increasingly drives me demented because there is so MUCH to do up here and so many emails flying hither and thither in the middle of everything else, and so many CAUSES and BLOGs and private messages and THUNDERCLAPs and things to buy and see and do and read and change on the website, and write and amend and proofread and typeset and complain about and fix and PAY for. And I have to get people to BUY the CURRENT set of books, let alone produce more. I am prone to headaches. The upstairs world is not good for headaches.

It’s better downstairs if I can just get there. That’s where the pile of books and pamphlets on the sofa is getting higher and higher (like the clothes in the ironing basket). I read some of them, or bits of them, in the late evening, and intend, next day, to write some OPOI upstairs, though latterly this hasn’t happened because of the maelstrom. (But please note there are two new Alan Buckley OPOIs, written by other people, which may be of interest to those of you who have read The Long Haul, or are thinking about it.)

It makes me happy to get downstairs during the reading windows. That’s one of the very good things about those times of year. I start the day on the sofa, or at the dining table, or sometimes even in the garden, and I read all morning, and usually some of the afternoon as well. I have to do it this way, because the noise of messages flying in at me off of the internet upstairs is not good for reading poems. It’s another reason why I prefer poetry on paper to poetry on a screen. Paper is quieter. I get fewer headaches with paper.

Anyway, I’m getting ready to go downstairs. The reading window opens at the start of July, though I shan’t actually start doing anything until July 5th, because I am away for a couple of days before that. This is not a call for pamphlet submissions, though if you’re burning to suggest one, you can. Remember (you will know this if you’ve read my book) that publishers have too many publications waiting to be tackled all the time. They are really looking for reasons to say NO to getting any more. Until something so tempting arrives that – sometimes against their better judgement – they commit.

So is how it will work at HappenStance from next Friday for approximately four weeks.

If you want to send an idea for a pamphlet publication (like you might with other publishers), then send up to four poems by snail with SAE, an outline of the idea for the whole publication and a bit of information about yourself and your background. A pitch. I’ll let you know if I want to see more poems. Mainly I deal in first pamphlets.

Alternatively, you may not be thinking about a whole publication. You might want to send four poems just to get some feedback. This is mainly what my reading windows are for. I like to read and respond to individual poems and individual poets. I get interested in many of them. Over time, if those poets keep sending stuff, I get to know them better. Sometimes I end up publishing a set of poems by one of those poets. Mainly I don’t.

If you’re a HappenStance subscriber, you get a slightly better deal. You can send up to six poems by snail or three by electronic means. I prefer snail, but I understand completely that for those subscribers outside the UK, email is the logical medium (I will come upstairs to read those poems) and nell at happenstancepress.com, formatted in the usual way, will find me. Remind me that you are a subscriber, please.

Before sending anything, please check out the guidelines for formatting and so on. If you generally fit in with my preferences, it will mean I read your work in a much calmer and nicer window-frame of mind. You know it makes sense. There are fuller details about everything on the submissions page.

Right. I have one hand on the latch and I’m looking at the stairs. Five . . . days . . . to . . . go.

Hot topic: Age and Aging

As a writing topic, age is in. Age has always been in.

Sarah Catherine’s ‘a classical blog’ quotes Sappho on the topic. And Mimnermus. And Alcman. And Anacreon. The Chinese ancients had it nailed too – all over the place.

Last night I was reading the 2015 Emma Press’s Anthology of Age, edited and illustrated by two relatively young (age is a matter of perpective) people. It’s a lovely set of poems about age and aging – and many of them are heartening.

Meanwhile, the Saltire Society brought out Second Wind last year, a pamphlet by older poets Diana Hendry, Vicki Feaver and Douglas Dunn tackling the aging process with the energy of youth.

And the Scottish Poetry Library, in conjunction with Polygon, is planning an anthology of ‘Scottish poems for growing older’, due later this year.

Even I myself am currently working on a new publication from Alan Hill, a sequence of short poems titled Gerontion. (You may be able to guess its central concern.)

We human beings brood about age a lot. It seems to trouble other animals less, but then other animals don’t look in mirrors.

On her later birthdays (88, 89, 90 and finally 91), I used to ask my mother how she felt about having achieved that particular age.

‘What age?’ she would say.

‘Well, 90 is pretty old, isn’t it? How does it feel to be so old?’

She would shake her head. ‘I feel just the same as I always have,’ she would always say, never one for a fuss. But latterly she looked in the mirror less – much less – which is perhaps why her cardigans were frequently done up wrong, or the patch of melted chocolate on her blouse failed to bother her.

Mum was ill with Alzheimer’s Disease, which confers both bother and blessing, and it was the reason why we were jointly compiling her memoirs. She felt extremely well most of the time. On one of the birthdays, I told her how old she was and she was astonished. ‘Am I really so old?’ she said.

‘You certainly are,’ said I.

‘Well, how old are you?’ she asked me.

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘About 25?’

I laughed, of course. ‘Mum, I am 60.’

She looked at me properly then, and with horror. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That’s AWFUL! It was like being in a science fiction film, where the main characters are suddenly spirited into a future fifty years ahead, chatting happily, until catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, and a horrible reality dawns.

But my mother soon forgot this and went back to being her young self with me cast as a somewhat younger friend. In fact, I thought she was feeling younger and younger in the later years. Quite often she was a child whose parents were just about to arrive.

I think most of us continue to feel much the same inside, throughout our adult years, until some aspect of physical decay strikes us. So poems about age and aging are really about some form of loss, loss being (to my mind) the central and abiding theme of poetry.

Young poets are supposed to write about love. Unsurprisingly, we fall in love with youth which (apart from Jane Eyre) is associated with health and beauty. We do not fall in love with age (the stereotype stoops from street crossing signs).

But even love poetry is really about loss.

WORKING WITH THE WORLD’S WORST AUTHOR

The yellow book has gone to print. I’m not sure how it got there and I want to get it back.

The yellow book is, of course, How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published, the book that has obsessed nearly every waking hour between Christmas and now. There’s a chapter of ‘What ifs’, and here’s one of them:

What if you’ve enraged your publisher by trying to change aspects of the collection, including rewriting some of the poems, sixteen times between first offer and printing?

Try not to do this. Relationships are important, and there is a time to let go. If you want to rewrite poems at the last minute, do it later and make a feature of it. Publish a volume titled The B side: rewrites of A. Better still, write some new ones.

What good advice. I shouldn’t have written ‘Try not to do this’, though. I should have written: ‘DO NOT DO THIS!’ Few things are more difficult for a publisher or editor than a writer who keeps rewriting the text. But what if that writer is yourself?

Which it was. Every time I re-proofed that book for the tiny slips of this and that, finding new ones each time, I would see a sentence that could be expressed better, or a chapter heading that felt wrong, or a bit where I was repeating myself (there may still be some of those) or – worst of all – the very morning I was due to send the book to print I decided , at 7.00 a.m., to re-design some of the pages.

These are things you should never ever do. The more changes you make at the last minute, the more likely you are to incorporate errors.

It wasn’t even me but my brother-in-law who observed the mistake on the spine of the book. It read ‘How (Not) To Get Your Oetry Published’. My daughter thought it was a deliberate joke. Beware you poets out there! The HappenStance editor generates Oetry without even trying. One day that oetry could be part of your oevre.

When you yourself are author and editor, and you can make changes, the temptation is overwhelming. I talk quite a bit in How (Not) to about self-publishing but nowhere do I mention this awful downside: the business of letting go. How do you let go of a book you’re producing yourself? How are you sure it’s good enough, finished enough, comprehensive enough, accurate enough, yellow enough?

I wish I didn’t mind making mistakes. I really wanted to get another bound proof. But if I had, I would have had to read the whole book word by word again, and I didn’t think I could bear it. I’ve read it backwards. I’ve read it forwards several times. I’ve read it inside out. At one point I was pleased with it. Now I really don’t know what I think of it any more (this is not what it will say in the publicity blurb which claims it is ‘frank and funny’ and ‘tells you all you need to know about getting your oetry published’).

I know I did one formatting thing in a stupid way. But I realised too late. It came to me in the middle of the night (when I was not sleeping because I was thinking about the yellow book again) what I should have done. I hope I got away with the wrong method. I hope people like this book.

I can always do a revised edition.

And a new and revised edition.

And a second new and revised edition.

Let the book go, Nell. Let the book go.

READING WINDOW: WHAT ON EARTH IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Why do I do it?

In the last month I read well over 700 poems, and gave detailed feedback on at least 500. By December 31^st, I felt as though I’d trudged through several miles of snow and ice. Poetried out? Absolutely.

It doesn’t make sense, in that month of parcels, cards and reindeer, to invite all these poems in. But when was I ever truly sensible? And what month would be better?

I am aware of giving out mixed messages about submissions. I both welcome poems and, at the same time, suggest I’m hardly likely to offer to publish any of the work that arrives. This is true. I am hoping to read the poems, take an interest, find or rediscover some interesting people, and also not offer to publish any of it.

Why? Because I permanently have too many publications on the go. Because I’d really like to write some poems myself.

But obviously I do continue to publish pamphlets, and a small number of books. I continue to take an interest in what does get published, and by whom. I continue to want HappenStance publications to be the best.

So I when reading the poems, I have half an eye on a possible future prospect, at the same time as thinking: no, no, you have too much already!

I hate the whole business of Many are Called but Few are Chosen. I hate the idea of poetry as a gigantic competition. I hate that people get up their hopes, tick all my boxes, and still I don’t say Yes, I love your work, let’s do it.

I’m far more likely to say, I think you’re using too many semi-colons or Why are so many of your poems in two-line stanzas? I don’t even like being the sort of person who says these sorts of things.

I am a people-person. I comfort myself in various ways. One of these is to read the poems properly, or try to. I give feedback, in pencil, on the work. Sometimes, I know, such feedback is useful. Sometimes, over time, people who have valued such responses have gone on either to win pamphlet competitions or to be published by other worthy imprints.

At other times, people feel rejected whatever I do. And there are people whose work I would never publish, although I rarely say that explicitly. But one of the privileges of any publisher is to choose whom and what they publish. I need to feel strongly interested both in the work and the person behind it. I need to feel I can get on well with them, that the relationship would be mutually enjoyable and educative. Why else would one publish poetry at all?

So I read covering letters carefully too, and if someone sends poems to me over two or three years, I start to have a sense of that individual in a context. I keep brief notes. And sometimes I can offer some suggestions about how a set of poems might get published (assuming I don’t offer to do this myself) or even some ideas about new ways the author might write or structure a set of poems. I’d like to think it’s not so much about ‘yes/no’ as about multiple possibilities of each person arriving at what’s best for them. If the work is good, ultimately it will be published somewhere. It’s a matter of persistence, compromise and intelligence.

When it comes to offering to publish, I have a subscriber base, too, to consider. Most (but not all) of the people who send me poems are HappenStance subscribers, so they will already know the key role of the subscribers in terms of decisions and preferences. When I do choose to publish, I want the work to be something I can warmly recommend to those subscriber-readers who regularly send feedback about my publications. The HappenStance subscribers are a human network based on a relationship, not just people to sell things to. They are almost all poets. They send me letters and emails and cards and jokes. They are discriminating, good readers and I want to keep them. In order to do that, I need to publish work they’ll find compelling and worthy of respect. They’re far more important to me than the Forward Prize selectors.

Unofficially, I am studying the state of contemporary UK poetry, and the poetry publishing business. I’m studying it through its participants. Mainly I study participants at the relatively early stages of the game. Such people will tell me what they’ve already tried, how and why. So those people who send me poems are unwitting contributors to my research. I like to know about them. I like to know what they write, how they write, and why (especially why); where they think it’s taking them; why they approached me in the first place. I’ve been doing this for ten years now. I want to work out what’s going on. No, I have no aspirations to undertake a PhD in poetic practice. I’m simply trying to understand a public situation which often seems to make little sense.

Cynicism is something to contend with, yes. More often than you might think, however, I meet a poem that lights up this whole room. For a moment I glimpse what it’s all about, for all of us.

Then January takes over, the lights dim, and it’s time to tackle the accounts.

A LAMENT FOR RHYME

On the absence of rhyme during the reading window

Page after page I read, and then
    another page I turn
and lovely things are popping up
    but I confess I yearn
for rhymes sustained and intricate
    and not just at the end
but in between and profligate
    and bursting to transcend
the free-ish verse and couplets
    (which can be very nice
but there are such a lot of them)
    and rhyme’s a sort of spice
that’s still employed by lyricists –
    they put it in their songs
and people seem to like it
    as if it still belongs.
I don’t want rhyme in every text
    but I’d like to see it more
and when Professors, sorely vexed,
    say English is ‘rhyme poor’,
that’s why we don’t write well with it,
    that’s why it’s out of use,
I hereby say To hell with it –
    that’s merely an excuse!

[This post is in honour of George Simmers
who has now been running Snakeskin webzine
for no fewer than twenty years, and is himself
a rhymester sans pareil.]

DOWN WITH LIST POEMS!

On my desktop I have a file titled To Do List AUGUST.

That’s because I belong to a species of human beings known as listmakers. It’s not a bad species. They are never ever listless.

The list on the desktop varies in length. Just now it comprises 24 items. It will never become a list poem. (I espouse lists, not list poems.)

I add and remove things to this list daily. In fact, just now I added eight things just because I started to think about what I needed to do today in addition to what was already on the list.

However, seven items of the 24 have been on the list all summer. Two involve having cups of coffee with friends, or writing reviews, or whole publications.

An interesting (to me) aspect of lists is how all the items look the same size. But individually some are much bigger than others. A great advantage of a list, though, is that deleting a quick item (like ‘make dentist appointment’), removes a significant proportion of the string. It shortens the list just as much as, say, ‘write autobiography’.

Five items on my current list are connected with the Blame Montezuma! anthology (there were eight yesterday, which is cheering). But I have photographed the chocolate fish and added them to the webpage. I have designed and ordered the badges. I have ordered and received the chocolate tasting buttons for the event at the Conway Hall on September 6^th. I have sent out the copies already requested (though not the sample copies to shops.) Have I mentioned how the first 25 website orders will get free fish? But they won’t go out till Wednesday because I don’t pick up the fish till Wednesday (it’s on my list).

Only one item on the August list has to do with the garden. It looks small. ‘Do garden.’ But it is big.

When August ends, I will save the list to the ‘To Do’ list folder (2014) and rename it To Do List SEPTEMBER and save back to the desktop. There is a system to all this.

I shouldn’t have started thinking about the list. The act of thinking has caused me to add two more items. No, three.

Also I’ve just realised that writing this blog isn’t even on the list. That means I need to add that too so I can have the pleasure of deleting it later. Oh – I’ve just thought of another thing. Posting the mail. That’s 28.

Item 28 involves a car and filling several postboxes. The photographs with this blog are what’s going into the postboxes.

Inside the envelopes, there are flyers and postcards and a newsletter. For every publication, I make a flyer. Four of those flyers were on the list last week, but I removed them when they went to Robert at Dolphin press. I hope the flyers are nice things in and of themselves: they try to be. They have a sample poem on them and order details – because we are also desperate to sell poetry here. (It’s not edible and you can’t sit on it.)

You could think of all this HappenStance activity as an admirable occupation. Or you could think of it as crazy. Why the hive of industry? Why the flying flyers? Why the persistent communication with four hundred subscriber/readers?

Poetry. That stuff. Once I just wrote it. Now I write it, and write about it, and print it, and publish it. And finally, the most difficult bit of all, peddle it. I am not a member of the salesperson species. I am, in fact, a fully-trained understater (as well as a listmaker). And I have never ever been good at making money, though I can make a number of other things, lists being only one.

You don’t need to know any of this. But if you’re one of the 400 subscribers, an envelope will reach you on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. All you need to do is open it, read the contents, and buy something.

Then enough money may arrive here to print the next publication. Which would be good. Or not; depending on whether all this is admirable or crazy. It could be both.

Oh! A semi-colon got in there. I must be weakening. Time to cross ‘write blog’ off list.

SHOULD POETRY PAMPHLETS BE THEMED?

A good question . . .

It certainly works for Candlestick Press, which has two titles in the top ten poetry sales in the UK listed in the current Bookseller. Everything at Candlestick is themed: Five Poems about Teachers, Ten Poems about Gardens, Thirteen Poems of Revenge. These are adorable little publications. They reach the parts other poetry doesn’t penetrate.

But nearly all the Candlestick Press publications are anthologies. That is to say, the contents are poems by several poets. Not all of them are famous or classic or dead, but some certainly are. And the editors tend to have kudos (notably Carol Ann Duffy with the Christmas pamphlets).

Themes certainly seem to boost anthology penetration. The Emma Press (keep an eye on this new imprint) first did an anthology of “Mildly Erotic Verse” (great title), has since done one on Motherhood and there’s one on Dance in the making. Send your poems now and join the Emma Press Club (another neat marketing idea).

Second Light did Parents, as well as embracing ‘Women’ as a general theme. Grey Hen has done anthologies about the sea; the bee; the Brontes, birds; trying circumstances; and “aging older women”. Bloodaxe has cats, and Irish Poets. Faber & Faber has trains.

Does the theme sell the publications? It certainly makes them stand out. Themed books lend themselves to gift purchase too, presumably. Poems about golf for a golfer. Poems about dance for dancers, motherhood for mothers.

What about single author collections? Diana Gittins’ HappenStance pamphlet Bork!, which is a sequence of poems about chickens, has certainly sold a good number of copies either to poets who keep hens, or to people with friends with hens. Many purchasers have sent for two or three copies, not one, which suggests gifts are in the offing.

I’m willing to bet Kate Clanchy’s Newborn has sold more widely than her other books, though of course I don’t know. Slattern won more prizes but I bet Newborn sold more copies. it makes a great gift for a new mum. The cover picture of the baby is a winner – I bought it myself when my daughter had her baby. And doesn’t Picador have The Book of Birth Poems edited by no other than . . . K. Clanchy.

I conclude: themes are Good Things.

This is not why I’m about to publish two pamphlets with themes. Sometimes themes just happen. The first, and most imminent themed item, is Rosemary Hector’s Knowing Grapes. The central idea is (you guessed it) fruit. The next is Helen Clare’s Entomology. Theme: insects. Will Knowing Grapes sell to fruit lovers? Will Entomology sell to . . . insect lovers? Are there any insect lovers?

Okay – the theme helps with distinguishing one pamphlet from another. But so does the picture on the cover and the name of the author and a whean of other things. The theme can also be a smokescreen. Rosemary Hector’s fruit poems, for example, are not really about fruit. Or not just fruit. This is even more true for Entomology, which may be about love.

Alas, there’s only one way to find out what these new pamphlets (and they aren’t even in the shop yet) are really about. You have to read them. You can’t read them yet though because they’re not published yet. Sometimes new publications are described as “eagerly awaited”. It’s spring. Please start cultivating your eagerness now.

In the meantime, Richard Osmond’s Variant Air, which is in the HappenStance shop, has a sort of theme. But the lynchpin is more of a style than a theme – and it belongs to Gerard Manley Hopkins. If you’re a Hopkins afficionado I think you’ll find this publication particularly compelling. But don’t take my word for it. There are better words inside the pamphlet.

PUBLISHING DEAD POETS

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Shakespeare Sonnet 65

One of the reasons poets want their poems published is so they’ll live on, after their death —the poems, I mean — though there’s a sense in which we want to believe a bit of the author is preserved along with them. If a UK book or pamphlet has an ISB number, copies will nestle in the copyright libraries forever. Or not. There are six mandatory receiving libraries in the UK. (In Poland there are 19).

There is a cost to this for publishers, of course, and also for the libraries. Cambridge University Library has been a legal deposit library since 1710. It currently houses its print contents over 100 miles of shelving, expanding at the rate of two miles per year.

Still it’s a comfort to know that once a book is positioned securely somewhere in those 100 miles, it’s safe. The words between the covers are protected from ‘the wrackful siege of battering days’ for a good while.

But publishing dead poets is problematic – unless the authors have already achieved school textbook status and outlasted copyright restrictions. Poets like Keats and Shakespeare sell well (in the context of a genre whose sales stats sink the heart). Other poets sell poorly at the best of times, and if they’re no longer around to help promote . . .

Because increasingly living poets have a dynamic role as marketers and promoters of their own books. They announce publication in social networks; some of them blog online; they work hard to get online reviews and offline readings. They ask all their friends to write to Poetry Please and request them. Publishers mainly don’t do this any more, if they ever did.

Living poets are placed between two stools. On the one hand, many of them are modest, bookish people. On the other, they are producing their own promotional text, with varying degrees of unease. Some of them turn out to be amazingly good at it. Others are frankly terrible.

Dead poets are spared this. With luck, some of their friends will continue to promote their book(s). But with the best will in the world, enthusiasm vacillates and wavers over time.

And other factors come into play. The work of dead poets is hard to get reviewed, even if the publisher is sending out myriad copies. Many publications don’t review the work of dead poets as standard policy. There are too many books every year from living poets clamouring for attention.

Dead poets can’t apply for grants or residencies. Dead poets can’t take on commissions. Dead poets can’t answer letters. Dead poets can’t network or blog. Dead poets can’t appear at festivals. Dead poets can’t write new topical poems. Dead poets can’t upload recordings on YouTube or SoundCloud.

And books of dead poets are usually ineligible for prizes and awards. The Forward Prize, for example, stipulates that ‘work submitted on behalf of an author who is deceased at the date of publication of the work is not eligible.’ What does a dead poet need with a cash prize? But it’s not the cash. It’s the attention that both the dead and the living most need. That’s what brings readers to poems.

If the poet is not there demanding attention, who is doing it for them?

The original idea was that the poems would continue doing the job. ‘Time’s best jewel’ would ‘still shine bright’ in ‘black ink’. People would read the printed poems and share them. That phenomenon known as ‘word of mouth’ would do the business.

Theoretically ‘word of mouth’ is more powerful than ever before. Publishers are keen to exploit the possibility that any text could go viral. It worked for J K Rowling. So far as I know, it has never (yet) worked for poetry.

Where am I going with this? HappenStance has just published a book of poetry by a dead poet. The Years, by Tom Duddy, will not be promoted or circulated by Tom Duddy, though his friends and family will do their best. It will not be entered for any prizes. It will gradually find its way to a number of very good readers: at least I hope it will. It is a beautiful book with the highest production quality we could get. There are times when an absolute belief in the work must override all other considerations. This is one of those times.

Meanwhile, a living HappenStance poet, C J Driver, will be taking part in a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Westminster Abbey at noon on March 3^rd. Among other words, Jonty will be upholding the faith by sharing a bit of Shakespeare, undying proof that some poetry really does endure.

THE SALINE COMMUNITY

In Merriam Webster it’s the seventh meaning. But it’s everywhere.

I refer to the definition of ‘community’ g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community>.

Frequently it’s the gay community. Or the deaf community. I am pleased to number myself a member of the left handed community. Naturally I feature in the female community, though this worries me somewhat, since I had thought this use of ‘community’ was inclined to define itself by exception, like the German Shepherd Dog community or the beard community.

It’s an odd word, ‘community’. Over-used and yet clinging desperately to its connotations of closeness, humanity and support.

Which brings me to last Friday and the ripples caused by Salt’s decision to cease (though not quite yet) publishing single author poetry collections. From The Guardian online we learn that this “hit online poetry community hard” (they probably meant the online poetry community).

I must be a member of the online poetry community, I guess. I interact a lot online and most of my interaction is about poetry. So I ought to be ‘hit hard’, though not half as hard as the Salt dispossessed poets community, one of which (Robert Peake) says as much in the Huffington Post.

But I’m also a member of the poetry publishing community – not that I would normally, as a junior member, have put it that way. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel hit hard at all. Just particularly interested, especially in some of the thought-provoking comment the news has generated.

There’s Charles Boyle, for example, at sonofabook, with some context; Clare Pollard on ‘The Health of Poetry’; Matthew Stewart on Salt’s exit; Christie Williamson on Salt’s “ability to spark debate and comment”; Anthony Wilson on disappearing poets; and the remarkable Jon Stone on, among other aspects, poetry’s half-life.

I feel concern for the human beings involved in Salt’s decision, of course, concern for both publishers and publishees. But most of all I’m interested in the context. Things change all the time, most of them faster than ever before.

Poetry – whatever it may be – will survive. It doesn’t need business models. It thrives on opposition. It doesn’t need to be useful or justified. It’s a parasite. It will live off whatever opportunities present themselves, mercilessly and with ingenuity. And the individual parasite (among whose community I number myself) is important only to herself. As Stevie Smith said, “The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.”