Skip to main content

Salt Tears

No one who cares about British poetry would have been happy to read the news, widely facebooked about yesterday, that Salt was announcing a cessation of single-author poetry collection publishing.  This is big news, because Salt had been publishing 30+ such volumes a year of late, under the editorship of Roddy Lumsden, a Scottish Bloodaxe poet with claim to being the formally inventive master of these isles; along the way, Salt championed many debuts of brilliant poets, including two major figures, Jon Stone and Luke Kennard.  In all, they'd published around 400 such titles.  Last year Salt was shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize for prose, which is also big news, and changed their fortunes.

Salt saw that the prose world was more open to their brand of indie brashness than the poetry world, which had rather noticeably not prized the Salt list as much as might have been expected, given its talent-rich offerings.  Of course, the immediate reaction was a little ugly - poets angered, feeling let down.  Laundry got aired that wasn't lily white.  Okay, but hold on.  Salt did a lot, and paid a price.  I am glad to be a director of a publishing house because now I know a terrible truth that keeps me up at night, like some Lone Gunman from the X-Files.

The truth: poetry books don't sell at all well, unless they win or are shortlisted for a big prize; or are by a famous poet that is often on the BBC.  You can tweet, and hype, and pop up, and bang tambourines, but you'll likely sell 200 copies or less of most debut poetry collections.  As Keats did.  The universe has a few rules, and that is one of them.  Poetry sells 200 units if you are unknown.  The world is cruel, but given most people have more than 200 friends and family members these days, it is also fickle and lacking money.  Salt would still be selling poetry collections and publishing them if YOU were buying them.  So, while you can, consider ordering a poetry book today, by a British indie press.  Eyewear will do.  And cut Salt some slack.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".