‘So. Farewell then / Salt poetry books / With your lovely jackets …’

(E. J. Thribb, 17½)

Salt Publishing – which has been publishing around 30 poetry collections a year for the past 13 years – will no longer be publishing individual collections (but will keep their anthologies – The Best British Poetry 2013, etc – running).

Salt redrew the map, they opened things up, and they did this with style and they had marketing savvy. And then?

It’s been suggested that Salt should have published fewer books and ‘marketed’ those better. I doubt this would have made a difference. Hindsight is always tedious, and this particular hindsight downplays the extreme difficulties of the context in which Salt was working. (And by the way, though I have heartfelt sympathy for the circa 100 poets rendered publisher-less by Salt’s decision, I’ve always thought it rash for any writer to assume that if a publisher takes on one book then they have entered into a marriage that will last for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Authors desert publishers, publishers abandon authors. Fidelity is one option among others.)

For all publishers of poetry, the numbers don’t stack up. First, reading is no longer central to the culture (I’ve quoted before Philip Roth’s prediction that within a few years the number of people who read ‘literary fiction’ will be down to the number who now read Latin). Second, even among readers and book-buyers, poetry is peripheral. In a previous post I quoted figures from Matthew Hollis’s book on Edward Thomas and Robert Frost: a century ago, within a year of its publication an anthology of unknown poets from an unknown press ‘was in its ninth printing and was on its way to 15,000 sales’; today, despite a UK population increase of around 50% since 1912, it’s rare for a poetry collection to sell 1,000, and the great majority sell way, way under that. To look at the usual figures you may need a magnifying glass.

And yet at the same time, an ever-increasing number of would-be poets are signing up, with absolute dedication and often with talent too, to the proliferating creative writing courses; and despite the internet, for many if not most of them the printed book remains – for recognition and status and self-esteem, a necessary thing – the gold standard. At the very least, there’s a supply-and-demand problem here.

A free-market capitalist system is no less bizarre, in its dealings with literature, than any old-style communist regime that favoured socialist realism and sent other forms underground. Especially a system in which basic human concerns are increasingly measured in monetary terms; in which the value/success of a book is calculated according to sales figures; and in which the Arts Council founds its own arguments for funding on ‘economic impact’ (‘if this is the language we need to use to justify the investment we represent, then we should and we will’: Alan Davey, Chief Executive, ACE, 7 May). One of many ‘morbid symptoms’ (Gramsci) this situation leads to is the expectation that poets, competing for a share in the tiny market, self-publicise – an activity requiring wholly different skills from those required to write the stuff, and that can skew both judgement and what gets written.

Meanwhile, we muddle along: alongside Waitrose and Sainsburys, a range of little shops – they come and go – selling organic local produce to niche groups of consumers. Boutique.

The Gatsby Academy

Now, prompted by the above photo on the Faber Academy site, I have a new angle: it’s a costume drama. In a stately home a primary and a secondary and a guest tutor and two guest speakers will impart wise words to 15 selected writing students. Selected on the basis of submitting 1,000 words of prose and a cover letter detailing writing experience (‘if any’), but chiefly on their ability to pay £2,000 for the two-week ‘Writer’s Summer School’ (just one writer?). ‘Accommodation not included’. I’m mildly interested in what they’ll all be wearing.

(‘40 hours of teaching’: that’s £50 per hour for each student in a class of 15. ‘25 hours of designated writing time’: but you do get a view of fields and sheep, I imagine. ‘Nearly 20 hours of feedback time’: which brings down the cost per hour, but call the total 55 hours and it’s still around £36 per hour. I could buy many books for the cost of one hour. And you still have to pay for your bed & board.)

The Faber Academy courses – the Guardian Masterclasses too, which have similar fees (£350 for a weekend course on ‘Getting your book published’, £220 for a ‘one-day workshop’ on ‘Secrets of successful self-publishing’) – are insufferably exclusive. They are a money-spinning sub-section of celebrity culture: offering personal contact with semi-famous authors and agents, they sell the promise (absolutely no guarantee) of entry into a certain social/literary network. Don’t. Especially if you’re paying to learn how to ‘craft a pitch to catch the eye of your future publisher’, don’t. For a finished book that has gone through all the hurdles, many reputable publishers pay less than the course fee, and some no advance at all.

The costume-drama comparison comes to mind partly because this week we’re being saturated with publicity for the new film of The Great Gatsby (1922). I like the book, the 1920s dresses too, and especially I like the scene in which a bunch of rich people (I’m quoting myself here, from Recessional) ‘hire a room in the Plaza Hotel – Daisy, Tom, Gatsby, Jordan and Nick – where “opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park” and they bicker about a man called Biloxi and whether Gatsby is really an Oxford man and whether Daisy ever really loved Tom, even when she married him, and then they get in their cars and drive back to Long Island, killing Tom’s mistress on the way’. But it’s not that good. Nick, the bonds-salesman narrator, is compromised and ineffective and bland to a degree that undermines the fine writing of the famous ending and this wasn’t, I think, the intention. (If there has to be another film re-make of Gatsby, transferring the basic story to a different class, a different time, might be interesting; but the backers wouldn’t be happy about losing the costumes, the music.) Compare, for example, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936).

Book-keeping as Outsider art

The above pictures are from the exhibition Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan (at the Wellcome Institute until the end of June). Here’s Brian Sewell writing on the exhibition (my italics): ‘European Outsiders of 1900 and Japanese of 2000 share certain constants, of which the most notable is the obsessive repetition of the minute to make a work of larger, and even gigantic, scale. Everything begins with, as it were, a seed, but the seed does not germinate, flower and fruit, it only produces another seed, and another, and another.’

And here are some photos of pages in the ledger (I don’t do spreadsheets) in which I attempt to keep track of CB editions:



Outsider art is produced, Sewell notes, ‘by anyone who is, at one extreme, intelligent but mildly unhinged, and at the other, either entirely lacking an IQ or raving mad’.

Talking to the Big People

The process of involving the smaller presses in the Free Verse poetry book fair is usually straightforward: we invite them, they say yes/no and if yes pay the table hire and turn up on the day. But we’d like to present the full range of poetry publications, including those of the mainstream publishers, and here the process gets difficult.

For last year’s book fair, held in September 2012, I asked Faber as early as the preceding November if they’d like to take part. And kept on asking, and kept on being told they would ‘have a meeting’ and get back to me. A few days before the event, someone phoned me and said yes, they’d like a table, but they’d have a problem with staffing it because the event was on a Saturday. Bless. Too late anyway, as there were no tables left.

Cape, regarding the same event: after many attempts, I got through to someone in sales who liked the idea of Cape participating but explained that the table hire cost would have to come out of the marketing budget, not the sales budget, and someone would get back to me. They didn’t.

Chatto, this year: an editor has promised to speak to ‘someone in sales’. I’m not expecting any rapid new development.

Faber, this year: after weeks of trying to find out who will make a decision on whether they want a table for this year’s book fair – editorial? sales? marketing? – I’m told it’s the man who runs Faber Factory Plus, the sales service that a few months ago took Carcanet and Bloodaxe under its wing and has, its website boasts, ‘a keen eye for opportunities beyond the traditional book retail trade’. So a while ago I asked FFP if they wanted a table, or maybe more than one table to display the Carcanet and Bloodaxe lists as well as the Faber list, and suggested that as more than half the tables were already taken they should let us know soon. I’m still waiting.

PS: Last night there was a book party for a CBe author and a Bloomsbury author. CBe paid for the wine. I asked Bloomsbury if they’d care to contribute. No, they said, because they didn’t have a budget for this and it wasn’t agreed in advance.

The unwritten

On a whim, I bought a book of brief essays by photographers on photographs they had not taken. Alongside some predictable pieces – the photo taken without any film in the camera, the car crash at which the photographer had to decide whether to do something useful or get his camera out – there are good ones in which the photographers appear to recognise that what they were seeking to capture simply couldn’t be done.* For a while I mused on the idea of a book of writing by writers on books (stories, poems, memoirs, novels) they had not written.

Or maybe they did start to write but gave up – because the piece fell so far short of their intentions, or because they lacked the skill or experience to carry it through, or because of something as banal as libel laws … The giving up, or the not even starting, could be accounted a failure – but because failing is what writers do most of the time, in relation to what they are seeking to achieve (at best, with luck and skill and perseverance, we fail better), that’s hardly a helpful way of looking at it. More interesting is the idea of resistance, of how a subject may not just be resistant to being written about (this happens all the time: the engagement with this resistance is why we write)** but on occasion prove wholly intractable, impossible to bring to page.

(Soldiers returning from war: it is common for them not to speak of their war experiences, even – or especially – to their families. Children who have been abused may be given crayons and paper, or soft toys, to picture or act out what they cannot put into words. And it’s not just the bad stuff that’s resistant: ‘happiness writes white’.)

Famously, some writers simply stop writing: Rimbaud, Juan Rulfo. I’d guess that many writers have unwritten books – material that continues to resist, however often they return to it. Resistance is possibly the main spur of formal experiment: if the given forms obstruct rather than facilitate what you are trying to write, you have to change them or invent new ones. (And even when a book does get written, these truisms about writing apply: that what is left out is as important as what is put in; and that though you may think you are writing about one thing, the finished work may turn out to be about something else.)

I still think this is not a bad idea for a book. I like the perverse aspect of writing about what you cannot write about. At present it remains unwritten.


* There’s an instance of not-photographing in Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter, out from CBe in September. The reporter/photographer Paul Watson is invited to attend the public stoning of a rapist in Somalia. After the man is dead, the court sheikhs are angry that he did not take out his camera: ‘Why did you not/ take pictures? Because you wanted me to./ Because this time I did not want the world/ to see.’

** It happens in translation too: the resistance of one language to being taken over into another. Anne Carson: ‘There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.’

Should writers be paid?

‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,’ said Dr Johnson, but he could be a blockhead himself at times. It happens all the time. Most writers (poets, novelists) do most of their writing for no money. Some publish for no money – allowing their stories or poems to appear in magazines or newspapers without payment (on the grounds or excuse of ‘publicity’), or their work is put into print by the growing number of publishers who offer no advances.*

This is why payment for writers is a trickier issue than payment for plumbers, sheep-shearers and bankers. I don’t need a new book in the same way I need my blocked pipe mended. Stop paying sheep-shearers and they’ll down tools; writers, on the other hand, will continue to to write whether they’re paid or not.

For secondary writing (journalism, translation) and related work (readings, teaching) the situation is different, because these activities can be more clearly defined as jobs and are within the supply-and-demand marketplace. Organisations such as the Society of Authors and the NUJ publish recommended rates for author readings, editing, leading workshops, etc. They are not enforceable.

A few things from last week seem connected. (A) A Facebook thread initiated by an author who’d been invited to give a reading but told that because the reading was organised by a charity there’d be no payment (though tickets to the reading were being sold, not offered free). (B) A talk on Friday with a poet who’d been invited to read at a festival and asked to name a fee; who was then told a sad story and so offered to read for free and pay the train fare too; who a few days before the reading was told that 20% of any money from sales of books (books bought by the author from her publisher at 30% discount) would have to go to the venue in which the reading was to take place.

(C) A talk on Saturday night with an author, published mainstream here and abroad, who argued that authors by right should receive a living, or more-than-living, income, and that this should be determined by market forces. But, I said, there are so many authors, and so few of them selling in quantity … Because of the inefficiency of publishers, she countered; and yes, too many authors, so let’s get rid of lots of them. As for CBe, if I’m not making a decent profit then not only is it a failure but I’m aiding and abetting the system that denies authors their right to make a living from their writing. She was fierce, and I liked her, but this was at a party, with distractions and interruptions and drink.

(D) Sunday, drifting on the Guardian website, I happened upon this nugget: ‘When the banking crisis happened, the notion that we could trust everything to markets seemed to have run its course. The most surprising outcome was that we wanted to try to restore the same trust as quickly as possible.’ Yes, very much so. Way back in early 2009 I wrote (and published with CBe under the name Jack Robinson) a short book titled Recessional that was fuelled equally by anger (at the bankers and the politicians) and despair (that no way forward was being presented – this was before the Occupy movement – other than tightening the regulations** on the pre-existing and still continuing financial system). I still have both feelings.***

The man behind the Guardian nugget is Michael Sanden, a political philosopher whose recent book, The Moral Limits of Markets, I haven’t read but may do (paperbacked in May). His line (soundbite alert) is that we’ve moved from a market economy into a market society – in which values are replaced by prices, in which everything (kidneys, lungs, health-care, education, policing, literature, you name it) is for sale, in which oppositional or ameliorating initiatives subscribe to the same overall climate (children being paid to read books), and that maybe we should stand back and take a hard look. The implication being that it doesn’t have to be like this.

I’ll backtrack. The authors in (A) and (B): given that they have something (talent, reputation, achieved work) that someone else is asking them to exhibit, should they do this for free (thereby aiding and abetting, etc) or should they stick out for payment? This is their choice to make, and given that in both cases if they stick out for money they’ll probably be disinvited and replaced by someone else who is willing to read for free, it’s not much of a choice: read for free or don’t read. Market forces.

For most writers, the choice is the same: write for free or don’t write. Should writers be paid? Hell yes. But for as long as we ‘trust everything to markets’, it’s unlikely that more than a few writers will be paid. Meanwhile, many countries put writers in prison; the UK doesn’t. And in its pure form writing remains (like reading, walking, loving) resistant to incorporation into the market society – which is almost an argument for writers not being paid.


* Advances, surely, were originally sums of money advanced by publishers to authors to allow them a reasonable time without other income to write commissioned books. They became bargaining chips or auction bids. Publishers now not offering them are not necessarily doing a bad thing: the original concept is outdated, and there’s no good reason for them to sign up to the new one. (For the record – what record? – CBe does pay its authors small advances, usually £200; but then CBe is an old-fashioned kind of outfit.)

** Make a rule, people find ways around it. Tighten that rule, ditto. Tax avoidance and evasion, drugs laws – one side gets ahead, the other side overtakes. This is how regulation works.

*** Episode B, above, included talk about we do with anger. Aesthetically – watch any angry person – it’s not good. It’s associated with youth: Angry Young Men. I really do not want to move straight from that category to the one of Grumpy Old Men.

Faits divers

I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing a lot this week (The Five Simple Machines ran out of stock at the warehouse; for the reprint, the printer had to order in more paper for the yellow endsheets and then got ill and then the first batch was printed with the frontispiece in black-and-white, not colour*) – mostly on the Tube, lugging a family-size suitcase with boxes of books from west to east London, and alternating my reading between the free newspapers that get left in Tube carriages and the above book.

Two short pieces from last Wednesday’s Metro:

A drink-driving nurse has been jailed for five years after she killed a teenage cyclist – and drove off with his bike stuck to the front of her car. The 67-year-old, of Knedlington, East Yorkshire, had downed wine and gin and tonic, Hull crown court heard on Monday.

Mystery surrounds the sudden appearance of 56 sheep in a village. The animals are being looked after by villagers in Chiddingly, East Sussex, after fears they were dumped.

And two from Novels in Three Lines:

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

After finding a suspect device on his doorstep, Friquet, a printer in Aubusson, filed a complaint against persons unknown.

Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was a French anarchist, art critic, War Office clerk and magazine editor (he was the first French publisher of James Joyce). His book – translated by Luc Sante, published by NYRB - includes more than a thousand items of the above type which he contributed anonymously to the newspaper Le Matin in 1906. The French call these things faits divers; ‘They cover,’ says Luc Sante in his introduction, ‘the same subjects as the rest of the paper – crime, politics, ceremony, catastophe – but their individual narratives are compressed into a single frame, like photographs.’ They are journalism; as written by Fénéon – a very conscious stylist, acutely aware of the shape of each sentence – they are also a form of modernist literature. (And very much the type of thing CB editions goes for: see Markson and Robinson.)

Roland Barthes wrote an essay on the form. Between 2011 and earlier this year, the novelist Teju Cole wrote around a thousand faits divers (re-christened ‘Small Fates’) based on material he found in newspapers in Lagos; he posted many of them on Twitter, and he writes about the form here.

* All sorted now. Please carry on buying the book. If you’d like to come to Daunt Books in Holland Park, London W11, on 9 May to hear Todd McEwen reading from the book, email me (info@cbeditions.com).