A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
the entertainment industry” (Finch 1997, 108). To support his argument, Finch refers to the survey Public Attitudes to Poetry (1995), commissioned by the Arts Council England: the majority of the population has a problem with poetry's image (“out‐of‐touch, gloomy, irrelevant, effeminate, high‐brow and elitist”; Finch 1997, 108), there are not enough readers, and those who read do not read enough.
At the turn of the millennium, the situation of the poetry publishing industry changed completely. Despite Oxford University Press's abandoning its poetry list, two and half thousand volumes of verse were published in 1999 (Finch 2000, 112). The list of poetry presses supplementing Finch's essay only comprises 106 entries, which means that within 4 years more than 200 publishers stopped operations. They range from commercial publishers such as Faber & Faber, Cape, Chatto & Windus to “specialists,” headed by Carcanet and Bloodaxe, and small presses, Finch's third category, such as Rockingham Press, Redbeck, and Words Worth. Despite these figures, Finch's résumé of the situation is, very surprisingly if compared to 4 years ago, almost enthusiastic: “Never before have new poets been faced with so many publishing opportunities. And if there is any criticism then this is it. Too many books jamming the market” (Finch 2000, 123).
Seven years later, in 2007, the list of UK and Irish publishers showed an impressive figure of 200 entries, while by 2009 the number of poetry presses had decreased enormously to only 122 operators, a decline that continued in 2010 (116 presses), and more or less stopped when The Writers' Handbook 2011 listed 112 businesses. The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 should only be mentioned in passing, as it is perfectly unreliable. Its listings seem to have been produced with the intention of entertaining: the publishers‐of‐poetry list comprises only 37 presses, including one—Hippopotamus Press—which has not published a single collection since 2002, the year Roland John launched David Clarke's Touching on Love. In his essay, Neil Astley only refers to 27 poetry presses, rather like a list of friends collected from his mobile phone that are invited to his very exclusive party (Astley 2018, 366).
In contrast to these figures, the British and Irish poetry scene is populated by poetry presses, which publish an impressive number of single‐author collections, single‐poet pamphlets, and anthologies. Today's situation is similar to the one in the mid‐1990s as Finch described it: poets producing work of a certain quality will almost always find their way into print. Not every poet will perhaps find a home at the headquarters of “The Big Six”—Bloodaxe Books, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet, Chatto & Windus, Faber & Faber, and Picador (Astley 2018, 366)—but many small presses and their staff are prepared to offer high‐quality support during the production process and often better and more personal mentoring with regard to publicity, distribution, and royalties. As Matthew Sperling has argued, “most new small‐press volumes are now only a Paypal transaction away. Poetry readings are no longer the preserve of the locals and regulars in obscure pub back rooms, but are advertised, digested, and sometimes broadcast on blogs, newsfeeds, and other social networking technologies” (Sperling 2013, 196–197).
When studying the poetry presses in operation since 1960, one may consider the question of whether, compared to trade publishers in other fields, there are, on the British and Irish poetry scene, publishers who may be regarded as “big.” In this context, it is of paramount importance to analyze the financial situation of the presses, in particular how taxpayers' money has been distributed among them. Starting in the mid‐1990s—according to the published lists, the heyday of British and Irish poetry presses—one among many reasons why six publishers felt, and still feel, they are “biggish” when compared to fellow competitors could perhaps be found in The Arts Council of England Annual Report 1994–1995. It records the following grants and guarantees for the time period April 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995: Anvil Press Poetry received £61,600 and Carcanet £67,800 with an additional grant, for PN Review, of £17,580. The sense of conscious bigness is self‐explanatory when one compares these figures with grants allocated under the headings “Small Presses”: Enitharmon Press £200, Peterloo Poets £325, Dangeroo Press £350. Under the heading “Translations,” Dedalus received £11,915, and Bloodaxe Books £2,290.
A decade later, in the year 2006, an Arts Council initiative involving a new client hit the headlines of newspapers and trade journals: Salt Publishing was awarded £185,000 of investment spread over the next 3 years. According to Salt's press release, also posted on the BRITISH‐IRISH‐POETS discussion list, three ACE senior managers—John Hampson, Senior Strategy Officer, David Gilbert, former Managing Director of Waterstone's, and Gary McKeone, outgoing Director of Literature—had struck a deal with Chris and Jennifer Hamilton‐Emery. In the official phrasing of the report: they “consulted with Salt to help build a business plan which will see the company become one of the largest independent poetry and short story publishers in the UK” (Hamilton‐Emery 2006). This sounded like—and was, indeed, no less than—a bid for a takeover of the UK poetry scene. Until then, Salt could offer only a rather modest list of successes, among them a shortlisting for the 2005 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. However, they had launched four international series: in 2000 Salt Modern Poets followed by Salt Companions to Poetry (2001), Salt Modern Poets in Translation (2004), and Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry (2003): all of which constituted a very ambitious program codesigned by John Kinsella, located in Perth and editor of the biannual magazine Salt (14 issues, 1990–2004), and Chris Hamilton‐Emery, who at the time had published two collections with Barque (2000) and Arc (2002), having also been Press Production Director at Cambridge University Press for 8 years until 2002. The two poet‐editors were joined in the undertaking by Hamilton‐Emery's wife Jennifer, a senior manager in the National Health Service, Linda Bennett, a former director of Waterstone's, and John Skelton, former Managing Director of Open University Press. This line‐up of expertise, the international outlook of the publishing program, and the well‐structured approach of four series must have been very persuasive. In 2005, Chris Hamilton‐Emery offered a résumé of the first 6 years: “This year we began stocking up our new distributors in Australia and selling ebooks, and from those first four titles in 2000, we now publish around forty books a year across three continents and have grown from £8,000 to an £80,000 business” (Hamilton‐Emery 2005, 166–167). However, the ambition of developing “an international profile as a highly‐innovative publisher of a broad poetry and literature list” (Hamilton‐Emery 2006) was never fulfilled. The adjective broad is in sharp contrast to Hamilton‐Emery's “alternative vision” set out in his contribution to PN Review, which was to
give everyone in the UK the chance of accessing a poetry which is intellectually ambitious, which transcends national boundaries and pastoral, which takes risks in reinventing the world, rather than describing it. A poetry interested in diversity, theory, and life as it can be lived, rather than life as we have it. I want a literature of aspiration and innovation.
(Hamilton‐Emery 2005, 9)
This “vision” gives the impression that the selection of writers, published by Salt from 2007 to 2013, and the poetics they represent(ed) was far too narrow to attract enough reviews, readers, and sales. Salt published 80 titles per year during the period of the 3‐year grant. Together with Shearsman—Tony Frazer received an ACE grant of £17,500 over a 3‐year period (2005–2007) and published 39 books in 2007, 63 titles in 2009, and another 54 books in 2010—they flooded the poetry scene and gave the impression that the great majority of poetry books came from one or other of the two presses from 2007 to 2010. After their “Just One Book” campaign launched in May 2009, when they asked people to involve themselves in the project by buying just one book, Hamilton‐Emery declared in August 2009: “The flaw in the programme was that we based it on title count. We scaled up our publishing operations and when the funding stopped we were actually left in a very exposed position. […] With the benefit of hindsight if we'd really thought it through we would have managed the cash differently – we'd have been less expansive and had a look at building our cash reserves” (Flood, 2009). Barely 4 years later, Salt dropped their single‐author collections, as their sales had declined by a quarter in 2012 and total sales halved in the years 2008–2012. “It's simply not viable to continue doing them unfunded,” Hamilton‐Emery admitted, “we have tried to commit to single‐author