Poetry Sales and The Point

There are moments in a poet’s life - few and usually far between - that begin to take on a surreal quality, when a poem you wrote seems to grow legs independently of you and gallops off into the distance. That must be true for writers like Jenny Joseph and Sheenagh Pugh when poems they wrote became incredibly famous and popular – not necessarily their best poems, but poems that struck a chord not with traditional poetry readers but with the general public. It must be a weird feeling, especially when people don’t flock to buy everything else you’ve written – all the better stuff you’ve written! – the way they might do with a novelist. It seems that poems come as individuals.

I had a very minor taste of this over the weekend when a poem I wrote, a pantoum called ‘The Point’, was featured in the Guardian newspaper as its Saturday Poem. It’s a political satire, and isn’t ever going to have the same level of appeal as a poem about growing old and wearing purple, but (at the time of writing) it has been shared on Facebook 115 times (most of them not FB friends of mine) and retweeted 16 times. Not a lot really. I’m sure an article on Jessie J would get that many shares inside a few seconds but I am also sure that ‘The Point’ has now been read by more people than any poem I have ever written. It shows the power of The Guardian and the Saturday Poem brand. Just think how popular poetry could be and would be seen to be, if more high profile newspapers and media (TV, film, Amazon etc) published or presented poems in ways designed to extend their readership. The audience would grow rapidly, I'm sure of that.

Has the publication of ‘The Point’ sold a single copy of The Good News, the collection it comes from? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it hadn’t. People will read a single poem in a newspaper or newspaper website quite happily and may even really enjoy it, but only few people, most of them seasoned poetry readers, will read a poetry collection for fun. That’s not a problem unless you’re a poetry publisher trying to make a living or, indeed, unless you’re a poet who believes that collections are a good thing. I am one of these and would prefer a world in which more people read Dante than Dan Brown. That said, I did note that Clare Pollard’s ‘Ovid’s Heroines’ was the number 10 best seller last week at the Guardian bookshop (presumably the result of a favourable review in the Guardian not long before) in a list dominated by novels and popular non-fiction. It was good to see a poetry collection in there, a little chink of hope.

Jessie J, Price Tag and Poetry

Here are a few statistics. Two years and four months ago, I made a video of myself reading a poem. It wasn’t a professional job, just my stepson holding a video camera and me standing in a blizzard reading ‘White Noise’. I guess there is a certain humour about it as the snow beats down on me and the book (which I had to cover in clingflim to save it from disintegration), but there is no other concession to the entertainment industry. I uploaded the video to YouTube where it has received 421 views. Not bad for poetry – that’s about one view every day and half.

Contrast this with a video uploaded one year and four months ago of Jessie J’s Price Tag, the official video of the international smash hit single. The video helpfully reminds us that the money doesn’t matter – just as well for me, although I suspect its budget would have been just slightly more than mine. Even a vertical strip torn from one of Jessie’s outfits would have cost more than my video camera. In case anyone thinks I’m being cynical about her, I’m not. She’s obviously a highly talented songwriter and singer (unlike some of her contemporaries) and Price Tag is an extremely catchy song. I’m not surprised it was a massive hit. And the viewing figures? Well, I measured them over the last four days:

Today - 208,692,483
Friday - 208,405,142
Thursday - 208,250,000
Wednesday - 208,133,000

Basically, the views are rising at a rate of anything between about 120,000 and 300,000 a day! By the time you read this, they will have risen significantly again (edit: 16,000 people have watched it in the 1 hour and 20 minutes since I posted this article). At the time of writing, nearly 209 million (209 million!!) people have watched this video and that’s only the official video. It doesn’t count the hundreds of live and acoustic versions of the song, some of them very high quality recordings.

So there you have it: 209,000,000 versus 421. In fact, if you add another year’s viewing to Price Tag to catch up with me, it would be more like 421,000,000 to my 421. A Jessie J song is officially one million times more popular than one of my poems!

Clearly, there are tie-ups between poetry and music – lyrics are obviously a close relation, and good poems are built on rhythm, sound, music etc, but none of that seems to have entered popular consciousness. Poetry suffers from complete lack of exposure. Most people wouldn’t know where to start. And most of them wouldn’t want to start. The latter is fine by me – I wouldn’t want to start doing all kinds of activities that other people find fascinating e.g. playing computer games, watching basketball, cricket etc. I am also resigned to the fact that poetry is a minority and non-commercial activity, and that brings its own creative freedom from commercial pressure, for which I’m grateful. There is also no point in competing for space with genuinely popular art forms like pop music – there is simply no competition, as the figures above demonstrate.

But somehow, I still believe that good poetry is important and that a society is diminished when it loses sight of it. Good poetry is not entirely invisible yet, even if it is about 99.9% of the time, but I do think that the 0.1% is vital to build on. I don’t think poets should pander to the commercial side of things – poetry is more akin to an obscure Scandinavian trio, with a cult following, playing weird music in 5/4 time with terse Norwegian lyrics, than to a new Lady Gaga single with accompanying superficial ‘shock’ banalities. But I’d bet the Scandinavians would still succeed in reaching a bigger audience than an average Faber poet (let alone everyone else). I also believe there is no reason for that to be the case.

Lachlan Mackinnon on Geoffrey Hill's Clavics

There’s been a fair bit of talk concerning Lachlan Mackinnon’s review of Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics in The Independent. Obviously, people disagree over whether his dismissal of the work is justified or not but discussions have focused more on the nature of reviewing itself.

It is true that most broadsheet critical reviews over the past year or two have seemed, well, rather uncritical. Uncritical to the extent that I have wondered what has been going on. This review is the complete opposite of that anodyne tendency, but I disagree with those who suggest it represents a much-needed kick against one of the big establishment names. Hill is absolutely not establishment. He belongs to no school except his own and has pretty much nothing in common with most of the big names in British poetry at the moment.

Nor do I really accept the idea that, just because someone is a big name, they deserve to be taken down a peg or two and given a good trashing every so often. That’s only true if they write a bad book but, sometimes, I get the impression that disgruntled reviewers make a decision to write a negative review before they’ve read a word of the book at hand – either due to peer rivalry/enmity or because they want to draw attention to themselves.

I’m not suggesting that’s true in the case of Mackinnon on Clavics, incidentally. I think it’s a fair review in that he makes his points and backs them up with evidence from the text, and I doubt there’s any underlying personal agenda. There is of course an agenda in the battle for Hill’s reputation. Hill has a massive Collected Poems coming out in the next year or two. It’s what he will be judged on – the early stuff nearly everyone (however grudgingly) agrees is significant and perhaps great, and the later stuff which has so divided critics and readers. Many believe Hill to be the greatest living poet. Others, even those who loved his earlier work, have been driven to distraction by the obscurity (note, I don’t use the words ‘difficulty’ or ‘density’ which could also apply to his earlier work) of the later material. There’s little middle ground in this debate. Hill’s later work is either “the sheerest twaddle” (Mackinnon) or further evidence that he is the “greatest living English poet” (Michael Dirda). In this connection, I’m intrigued by Liam Guilar’s question:

...Can a poet reach a point of eminence where what they write is no longer important because there are enough people ready to find value in whatever they write?

I think the second half of that sentence rings true in many cases, but I haven’t yet read Clavics to know whether the whole question ought to be asked of Hill’s admirers.

I doubt the review marks any real change in the way the broadsheets deal with poetry. They tend to review well known names from the major trade presses and use other well known names from the same major trade presses (often good friends of the writers under review, which is ridiculous!) to write the reviews. The way reviews are conducted in those venues certainly helps with the marketing of books more than the advance of genuine and rigorous critical discourse in this country, and it disappoints me (at times, it enrages me) that reviews have become an arm of the big publishing houses' publicity machines rather than independent evaluations.

The First Poetry Collection

Here’s a really brilliant reflection on first collections, part of a review written by W. N. Herbert, originally published in the autumn 2010 issue of Poetry London.

“There are two ways for a poet to be professional which first collections tend to throw into relief. The first is the orthodox career, in which, having acquired the necessary awards (and, increasingly, degree), then having wooed the correct mentor, residency and publisher, a debut volume appears — its voice already assured, its technique established, its unique subject matter clearly delineated. None of these are easily come by, especially at an appropriate level to make it worth acquiring them in the first place.

But the second involves a still-harder apprenticeship, following the obstinate, labyrinthine path that learning craft takes through such markers of esteem and our individual experience. Along this route concepts like ‘voice’ or ‘muse’ fall under perpetual critique and suffer challenging reform. Here the poem itself often has to be sufficient reward, one glimpse of theme must function as sustenance for years, and publication may be no more than an interim report, rather than a career-defining goal.

Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second. On the one hand the triumphant first steps of Eliot or Auden; on the other the initial sketches of Pound or Morgan. Publishers, in the business of second-guessing posterity, prefer the former; the media, too, is always drawn to the simpler narratives. “ (W.N. Herbert)

That sentence, “Our society encourages new writers towards the first challenge, while their instincts tend them toward the second,” is spot on, isn’t it? Or is ‘encourages’ too mild a word?

Finding New Poets

Interesting article by Don Paterson in the Guardian on ‘Finding the Best New Poets’. I’ve read enough hopeful Facebook updates from people “seeking publisher for my new manuscript” to know that seeking publishers isn’t the way it works for poets. A good few years ago, someone said to me, “Don’t look for a publisher. Let the publishers look for you,” which seemed more than slightly optimistic, but the title of the Guardian article bears that out.

The background here is the Picador poetry prize, won in its inaugural year by Richard Meier. It’s partly a matter of what style of poems you like, of course, but Meier looks like a worthy winner. A prize is only one way for publishers to find their poets. While Don P exaggerates just a bit in suggesting that a new talent will find themselves linked into poetry networks from only “one casual appearance at the most obscure local workshop,” he’s right that “you really have to work at being a recluse of a rare and dedicated variety to avoid being on the radar.”

Probably, poets fret too much about publicising themselves. There are thousands of poets all competing for the tiny poetry market, and the tendency is to feel you have to shout pretty loud to be heard. Increasingly, I’m not so sure about that. Strong work, activity in support of a book (readings, interviews etc), a little word of mouth from other people, and a growing sense that there’s something distinctive about you is mostly sufficient. Some books sell far more than others – not always the best books (Wallace Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, sold terribly when first published, for example) – but the hope is that, in time, at least some of the best books will keep selling while the others fade away.

Interesting that Don P picks out blogs and Facebook as ways of “helping enormously” in maintaining good networks. I was at a reading he gave not so long ago when he said (tongue-in-cheek, of course), “What is Facebook anyway?” Nice that he picks out Baroque in Hackney as an example of good poetry blogging (it certainly is). As for “many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys' gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people,” I suppose the advantage of blogging is that the only farts you can actually smell are your own. The others are all scentless cyber farts. I would like to see the list of the right people to hate too, so that I can send them all a special Surroundings Valentine card. Anyone on that list is a friend here.

Three From Shearsman

I’ve been looking through the Shearsman Press 2010 online catalogue recently and have been impressed with the variety there. Three books in particular caught my eye.

The first illustrates the power of an interesting review. On the Governing of Empires by Alasdair Paterson is billed as a poetic document for the “imperially and post-imperially inclined,” and you’ll see from the .pdf sampler how that looks in practice. I’d read James Sutherland-Smith’s review of the book about a week before and had reckoned that anyone who thought John Ash’s collection was terrific had to be worth listening to. The review didn't make me buy the book on its own, but it did lead me to investigate further and now I am going to buy the book.

Incidentally, speaking of reviews, The Opposite of Cabbage could really do with a few Amazon reviews. I’ve been told it really helps with sales and it’s languished without any Amazon reviews for its entire existence. If any of you who enjoyed the book would like to write a review at Amazon, I’d be very grateful. An Amazon review doesn’t need to be long or detailed. A sentence or two is fine, along with as many stars as you can bring yourself to give, of course. In fact, good examples can be found at the Amazon page of On the Governing of Empires – three short, pithy five-star reviews!


Anyway, back to Shearsman. The second title which drew my attention was A Curious Shipwreck by Steve Spence. Now, again, this illustrates the power of title recognition. If a book seems familiar somehow, if it’s been ‘talked about’, then even relatively marketing-resistant readers like myself will notice it before others, and this book had been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. So I clicked to read more. At that point, when I read about the book and read the .pdf sampler, the prize begins to mean sod all. I either like it or I don’t. In the case of this book, I felt naturally well disposed towards it. The first lines grabbed me and I liked the tone. I wasn’t quite sure always what was going on, but I still wanted to keep reading. The pirate theme was intriguing and, when I read Steve Spence’s interview at Stride magazine on the parallels he was trying to draw with contemporary culture, that got me more interested still.

The third book was Alan Wall’s Doctor Placebo. Why did I click on that? Was it something to do with the title, the cover, the blurb? I’m not sure, but I did click on it and found poems which made me think immediately of Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Mr Cogito’ (not the first time I’ve thought of Cogito when confronted with a new collection) – the searching character, the philosophical enquiry, the barbed sense of humour, the pointed ironies. I’m not sure whether this book has been published yet (due ‘October 2010’), but it looks exactly my kind of thing.

New Writing Scotland

Well, there’s so much doom and gloom around whenever anyone mentions poetry that anything upbeat doesn’t have to fight for my attention, and I was pleased to read a positive comment on contemporary Scottish poetry from prose and theatre writer Alan Bissett in this year’s intro to New Writing Scotland, 28. Alan writes:

“What was most noticeable to the editors this year was the higher quality of poetry than of prose. Many of the poems sang, while relatively few of the stories did. Perhaps mass-market imperatives and the lack of opportunity for prose writers have led to an inevitable blunting of short fiction.”

So, I suppose we have to balance up the positive opportunities for poetry with the negative effect of marketing imperatives on prose. And yet, for poetry publishing houses to survive and thrive, they need to carve out a larger share of the market – without sacrificing quality. Quite a dilemma.

As a footnote, here are the submission guidelines for next year’s NWS (deadline 30 September 2010). I noticed one dramatic change:

“You should provide a covering letter, clearly marked with your name and address. Please also put your name on the individual works.”

Now, I’m sure no names have previously been allowed on individual works. Everything was anonymous, but that’s no longer the case. There are positive and negative aspects to reading ‘blind’ just as there are for reading with a name attached. It will be interesting to see whether it has any effect on next year’s issue and whether the editors prefer this new system over the old.

A Poet's Friends

To be successful depends on who you know, that’s what I keep hearing. Louis MacNeice would agree and his list of people to know is worth cultivating for any poet, although they may not feature highly on the game-plan lists of poetry careerists and in-crowd luvvies. However, they are vital for anyone who actually wants to write good poems:

.............................................(...)Let money brag,
The poet will not be bought, he has powerful friends
Who are his own inventions – the one-eyed hag

Whose one is an evil eye, the maiden goddess who sends
Her silver javelin straight, the Knave of Fools
Who cocks his snook and blows his dividends,

The soldier with the nosebag who breaks the rules
Wide open, the mountain-moving oaf, the cook
Whose pies are singing birds, whose soups are schools

Of gambolling porpoises, the endearing crook
Who says his name is Norman, the talking fox,
The ropetrick man, the baldhead with the book

That is all question marks, the Jack-in-the Box,
The Will o’ the Wisp, the mermaid, the Man in the Moon,
And old Nobodaddy himself, high god of Paradox.

Such are our friends; we need them late and soon
To fight our false friends for us, we feel no shame
To sham dead while they do it; trombone, bassoon,

Ram’s horn and ocarina pour out flame
To force the walls of Jericho and crown
One local conflagration with a name.

- Louis MacNeice (from Autumn Sequel, 1953)

Poetry And The Future

I was reading Don Share’s new blog article, The Future of American Poetry on how the relationship between poet and audience has changed and is still in the process of changing, mainly due to technological advance. Of course, it’s not only American poetry at stake. The “chapbook publisher with a Blogspot page and PayPal account can sell directly to readers worldwide,” as Ron Silliman mentions, from just about anywhere.

Any poet can develop an international readership, which would have been unthinkable only 15 years ago for all except for the most lauded writers with international reputations, who were very few. That’s the theory and, for some, it works. However, it’s more complicated than that.

A decade or two ago, most poets writing now would have had no audience at all other than friends and family (if that). Some others may have become known in a local scene, but not beyond. Only a handful would have entered the public consciousness (or, at least, the poetry-reading public consciousness). These days, millions of poets compete for readerships through the Internet and there is no quality-control. Poetry boards abound where people ‘share’ their poetry, and many of those people will never read poetry books. They read only their ‘sharing’ peers online, partly because they expect their community to reciprocate. I suspect they don't really constitute a significant potential base of readers (perhaps I'm wrong about that?). Some poets who would never have got a publishing contract from a traditional page publisher are getting read on the Net and are selling a decent amount of their pamphlets and books. These include poets who write 'traditional' verse and those who lean towards experimental work. Because there are so many, however, those with a gift for marketing themselves with an online presence are most likely to succeed in gaining an Internet audience. The rest will fail.

I’ve noticed that most of the bigger UK independent presses like Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Salt, Seren etc are all developing a significant Web presence and are embracing new media such as e-books, video, audio etc. The same isn’t true of the trade presses like Faber, Picador and Cape. They perhaps feel that their books will set the agenda for future anthologies, that posterity will belong to them, and that the deafening racket from today’s Internet won’t cement any reputations. They may be right. I know their books sell well (for poetry books), but they must be losing out on a vast potential audience by not engaging with Net readers. At the moment, they are fine and get plenty of publicity on the Web through newspapers (the traditional outlets online), prize shortlists, and the sense among UK readers (it still exists, I think) that a new Faber book is an important event. They are trading off their reputations, which is a fair enough strategy. But is it adequate to ensure a readership for poetry in the future? It’s hard to believe it is. As Ron Silliman says, “everything is up for grabs.”

Press Release: Cabbage Under Attack

Prichard Hakkins, well known author of The Cod Infusion, or Why Poetry Makes No Difference to the Likes of You and I, has attacked an article that appeared on the Internet yesterday titled Why The Opposite of Cabbage Makes an Excellent Therapeutic Christmas Gift. Mr Hakkins poured scorn on the redemptive qualities of the book. “It’s just a collection of bloody poems,” he said, speaking from his million-dollar mansion, which may soon be featured on The Grauniad’s weekly ‘writer's living-rooms-with-a-sea-view’ feature planned for 2010 (rumour has it). “There’s too much poetry slipping into our lives,” Hakkins continued. “I read one of the so-called poems in this book and NOTHING HAPPENED. It’s all just a con from some massive multinational conglomerate to steal your money, and what do you get in return? A discounted hardback book, postage-free throughout December, that’s what! With poems in it! And they’re not even that funny!”

The communications division of the aforementioned massive multinational conglomerate, known (somewhat sinisterly) as the S.A.L.T. Consumer Council, released this statement, “We believe in the redemptive powers of all our books, including the Cabbage-less one. The fact that poems are involved is nothing to do with us. However, we take no legal responsibility for the failure of readers to make progress with their neuroses after reading our publications. With some people, it takes more than Just One Book™ to have the desired effect. We recommend that Mr Hakkins takes our full Scottish Course and reads The Opposite of Cabbage along with The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (a combination officially recommended by amazon.co.uk), Scales Dog by Alexander Hutchison, Dear Alice by Tom Pow, Stations of the Heart by Raymond Friel, and The Searching Glance by Linda Cracknell, in quick succession."

The author, Rob A. Mackenzie, was unavailable for comment, but his spokesperson informed us that a new organisation, OPOC, had been set up for all readers who require counselling after Mr Hakkins’s comments.

Email From Amazon

I just received one of those promotional emails from Amazon where they recommend books to you on the basis (presumably) of books you've previously bought. This time they've told me that I might well be interested in buying The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob A. Mackenzie. Seriously...

Transparent Poems

Billy Collins claims that people don’t read poetry because most of it is so bad.

"One of the reasons people don't read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets," he said. "It's not the public's fault. There's an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I'd say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn't worth reading."

On Facebook, the obvious jokes have already been made e.g. “87%? I didn’t realise Billy Collins had written that much!” Given that only 2% of Collins’s poems are any good (he paints by numbers far, far too often), he’s doing far worse than the national average. It is also true that 13% seems a high figure for poetry worth reading, given how much poetry is out there, but the figure is arbitrary, or perhaps ironic (given the associations of the number 13), so no point in quibbling. But now we know – it’s not the public’s fault that they desire celebrity kiss-and-tells rather than the latest young poetry thing. The fault isn’t with money, power, advertising, distribution and the manufacturing of taste either, it’s all down to those useless poets who aren’t doing their jobs properly! What comes next is the interesting part:

It's the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he lives for. "Poetry should be transparent. Transparent poems tend to teach themselves."

Two points here. Transparency? I guess he must mean lack of opacity and mystery. Poetry must be clear and obvious. If that were the case, the argument goes, people would read it in far greater numbers. The argument, by extension, also suggests that if all literary novels were written with the style of a Dan Brown, more people would read them too, and that if all short stories were written in the mode of a Jeffrey Archer, popularity for the form would explode. Nonsense, of course, and undesirable. I’d even argue that poems which are too transparent and lack all sense of mystery are part of the problem, not a solution.

The second point comes from this phrase, “Transparent poems tend to teach themselves.” Is poetry about teaching? Perhaps transparent poems are. What else can they do? There’s a clear message to impart, and that’s it. Readers can all go home now and watch TV. No point in buying that collection either, as the teaching has been done. We are now moral citizens for having read this wonderful transparent poem! But surely good poems invite readers into an experience, which may be intensified on subsequent visits because all those things that weren’t immediately transparent begin to rise to the surface?

Of course, there are many terrible poems out there. There are also many terrible novels, but that doesn’t seem to stop people reading. There are many terrible movies too and people flock to the cinemas and DVD stores. There are many terrible albums, but people haven’t given up on searching out the good stuff. Poetry’s relative lack of popularity isn’t anything to do with either lack of quality or transparency, it’s because there isn’t much money at stake. If there were, we’d all have to slim to size-zero, wear implants in the relevant places, and write poems to be edited by committee. Laughs would have to come every thirty seconds and every poem would require a happy ending. Hollywood would make movies of poems with Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens taking the lead roles. Posters of Geoffrey Hill would adorn millions of teenage walls, although the surgery would make him look more like Brad Pitt.

Buying Poetry At Magma

I’ve posted a new article at the Magma blog called What makes you buy a poetry collection?, which picks up on comments made at the tail-end of the discussion there on reviews.

There are already 19 comments. There main change in buying habits over the last decade has been fuelled by the Internet – no doubt about that – but what works there and what doesn’t so much is intriguing. Also, it seems that bookshops still play an important role for many people. The thread is like free market research for publishers.

Author Photos Revisited

Further to my post of a couple of days ago on author photos, here’s Chris Hamilton-Emery with Salt guidelines, official or otherwise, on 10 Ways to Take a Bad Author Photo.

These tips are invaluable for anyone wanting to have a bad author photo. Such gems as:

If the passport photos are unavailable, wedding photos make great author photos, especially where you feature in the background in a crowd of revellers dancing the conga. Or shots at an office party, where Gwen had her jacquard tights on and you have your arm around her thighs.

But there are plenty more vital, inspirational nuggets of wisdom at the link.

(I should add that the image of me in this post is NOT a photo I submitted to Salt! But I think it's a useful illustration for some sections of the advice.)

Author Photos

What makes a good author photo? Or a bad one? That, I guess, is what Salt authors are currently asking themselves after comments from Salt that perhaps more guidance was needed for some people (without specifying anyone in particular!).

I submitted my photos a while back. They were taken by Gerry Cambridge. We spent hours taking hundreds of shots over two afternoons, from which we extracted six photos. I liked them a lot, but today I came across this, also from Salt:

"Our guidance specifies landscape format shots, as in wider than tall, some interpret this as photo in a landscape and head out to their nearest leafy landmark!"

Damn, I hadn’t picked that up at all but, to my relief, four out the six are in landscape format. They are all in black & white. One of them is of me crouching in a huge bed of dead leaves. Behind me is a stained wall. To my left, also in the leaves, there’s a large cracked urn toppled on its side (very Keatsian). I am reading a book called Dawkins’ God. It was Gerry’s concept and it’s a poem-as-photograph in itself. Whether it qualifies as a “leafy landmark,” I’m not sure. It’s in a church graveyard, which is, I suppose, a landmark of sorts, but the leaves are all dead and brown.

I don’t like being photographed. In fact, I am the world’s worst person to take for a photo shoot. I can remember my parents hiring a photographer to take pics of me as a child and he got only one forced smile out of me in the entire hour. Gerry did a great job in that regard. I do actually smile in a couple of the six.

One of the photos, the only close-up, makes me look as solemn and intense as Geoffrey Hill’s author pic (well, almost). I actually quite like it because of that. It’s humorous in its po-faced stare. One of the others has me grinning beneath a stone skull. So a range of moods. The idea was to go for an edgy, alternative vibe with a touch of black humour, but in a place of depth and tradition (hence the churchyard).

My Salt author page isn’t up yet, but when it is I’ll let you know. You can always gaze at Andrew Philip there in the meantime. Looks like a leafy landmark to me! Our books both launch on March 1st.

Like Sheep, But With A Shepherd

On a discussion board the other day, a well known small publisher related how, at a meeting of a major book publisher, the board categorised members of the public as different kinds of sheep.

It sounds rather contemptuous, but it's as well knowing how they think. You can imagine the categories – those who’ll come immediately and rush to the front, those who follow but keep veering off the path, those too stupid to follow who require extra attention, those who seem different but aren’t really, those who need to be chopped into cutlets… well, maybe not.

Is everyone a sheep? Is it possible to escape sheepdom? I fear that might not be an option. They will have a category to fit everyone somewhere.

Poetry and Good Looks

If you’re a poet, does it also help to be fantastically good-looking?

Clearly, it doesn’t count so much as in the rock, television or movie industry where so much depends on looks. The best poets vary greatly in their aesthetic appeal. People buy their books for their words and don’t care what the poets look like.

Or is that entirely true? In these days of live literature, YouTube, poetry on DVD, and increasing pressure to form an image around one’s work to provide a selling-point, would it help if you looked like the young Brad Pitt or Michelle Pfeiffer (photo)? Do people pick up books and pay more attention to them if the author photo appeals to them?

Kylie Minogue, Poetry and Purity

Following the Kylie Minogue post below, I had a vision this morning and immediately felt shocked by my own thoughts, tainted as they were by the celebrity-fuelled commercialism I claim to despise (although I somehow seem to know far more about the lives of celebrities than I ought to).

This was the vision – a poetry collection (with my name on it, as author, I suspect) called I Should Be So Lucky with a big picture of a smiling Kylie on the front. How would that affect sales? Would it fly off the shelves, or would people throw it down in disgust when they realised it contained poems? Would habitual poetry fans warm to the whole idea of selling poetry by this method, or would they organise book-burning parties (no, these poets wouldn't go to 'parties' - book-burning rallies then), enraged at such a crass marketing ploy? Such a book would certainly stand out a mile on the poetry shelves.

Of course, I realise that it couldn’t happen. Kylie (or, more likely, Kylie’s agent) wouldn’t allow it, certainly not without far more cash changing hands than any poetry press is worth. But in any case, I then felt appalled at myself for even thinking it. This is poetry, not some cheap hairspray a celebrity wouldn’t dream of using, other than during the TV ad.

But, on the other hand, if Kylie offered her photo free for a front cover, would (or should) a poetry press refuse it – if it puts poetry books in the hands of people who would normally never think of reading any? Or are other considerations more important?



with grateful thanks to Dick Jones for directing me to this excellent video clip.

The Audience for Poetry

It’s easy to say that I would like people who don’t normally read much poetry to pick up my stuff and enjoy reading it. I guess most poets would like to reach beyond the traditional poetry audience.

But how to go about that? It’s got nothing to do with any “difficulty vs. accessibility” debate, nothing to do with the poetry itself (with the proviso that the poetry is good quality). It must be to do with getting one’s poetry in the public eye, getting it noticed by those other than habitual poetry fans. It must be to do with marketing, attracting new audiences, a touch of evangelism. As I’ve observed before, people who don’t read poetry sometimes find they like it when they do.

Practically, how can poets draw readers who would rarely think of opening a poetry book or going to a reading?

Gatekeeping

I’ve been really busy over the last few days, mainly with work, but also with one or two poetry-related things. Oddly, despite me not posting anything, the number of visitors to this site has reached an all-time high. I’ve no idea why. Maybe I should stop posting more often!

Anyway, I was thinking about the so-called “gatekeepers” of poetry, those who decide who gets published and who doesn’t. Thanks to James, Andrew, Roddy, Steven and Jane for getting me thinking on the issue by commenting on a previous post. Some people feel that the most prestigious poetry publishers (by which they mean Faber & Faber, Cape, Picador etc) have a very limited view on what constitutes good poetry and make it impossible for anyone who writes anything ‘different’ to be published.

For example, Todd Swift, in an article in the Oxford Forum refers to:

“…the new generation that emerged in the 90s and was a hugely successful promotional campaign claiming ‘poetry was the new rock and roll’. This attempt to brand poets created a new landscape for poetry and poetry marketing in the UK…

House styles emerged, as the poets became ever more branded. Where once there had been “the movement” or “the group”, there were now “publishers’ poets”. Investing in these few, carefully-groomed authors, the poets who were selected to be promoted and published, needed to be seen to be not simply exemplary of the best of their generation, but rare.”

However, in a comments box on this blog, Roddy L. said that the reasons publishers give for rejecting manuscripts are

“that they are not good enough, that the poets have failed or negated to establish themselves in any way, that the work is adequate but unoriginal.”

So on the one hand is a vision of a marketing ploy, a few poets flying the flag for a publisher’s style. On the other hand is a vision of publishers opening their doors wide to original and brilliant work.

It seems to me though that if someone wants to be published ,and if their work is good enough (“if” being the key word), he/she will find a way. Personally, I like several of the poets on Cape and Picador and don’t find them all part of a uniform brand – John Burnside, James Sheard and Robert Crawford are all on Cape, for instance, but they are all completely different. And if you add in Anvil, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Salt, and plenty of other publishers (bluechrome, Shearsman, Arrowhead, Enitharmon, Seren and others), there are certainly opportunities in the UK for good writers of many different styles to be published.

It’s not easy. There are many more good writers than publishing slots and some excellent writers are bound to be passed over. Mistakes are made. Great poets are ignored in their lifetime. Trends come and go. But that’s the case in every country and in every generation. Don Paterson says that there are too many poetry books being publsihed in the UK, inferring that there simply can't be as many poets of sufficient quality out there. In fifty years time, I'm sure we'll see the truth of that. The only problem is that in the here and now, it's hard to identify the unworthy publications with any great certainty, and although we might think we know how future readers and critics are going to view things, none of us will be right all the time. So I support the excess even if it does turn out to be an excess.

It’s possible I will feel differently about this if I send my MS out and it gets rejected by every editor in the UK. Maybe I’ll take up crochet or stamp-collecting. There are worse ways of spending one’s time.