A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
Hamilton‐Emery started to commission single‐author collections once again, also inviting unsolicited British submissions: “Identity in publishing is important, perhaps critical in building your business, you can't understand Salt without its poetry, the building blocks of its success.” When defining his aims for the list, Hamilton‐Emery seems to have learnt his lesson. Although he wants “to provide opportunities for debuts [… and] take risks,” his focus is now “on the individual talents rather than any given poetics” (Hamilton‐Emery 2018). However, The Bookseller's recent article on “High Returns and Slow Sales Hit Salt with £15,000 Shortfall,” and Jennifer Hamilton‐Emery's announcement that they “need to recapitalise the business,” followed by the already (in)famous appeal to “our loyal readers to buy a book and help us climb out of the hole” (Chandler 2019) make the situation sound like Groundhog Day.
Let us now compare Salt's approach and dealings with Andy Croft's Smokestack Books imprint, which was modeled on the American Curbstone Press, the French publisher Le Temps des Cerises, and Fore Publications in the UK. It was launched in 2004, helped by an initial ACE grant of £20,480, with a clearly defined aim: “I wanted to make an intervention on a larger stage and on a more professional scale, combining poets of local, regional, national, and international reputation” (Croft 2019a). Although this policy statement sounds rather broad in its scope, the term intervention carries definitely political connotations, implying for Croft “contributions to a conversation about a particular issue” by “oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets” (Croft 2019b, 33). The list of titles, meant as specific interventions, is long and impressive: Mayakovsky's epic poem Lenin (the centenary of 1917), Crisis, an anthology edited by Dinos Siotis (the Greek economic and political crisis), A Rose Loupt Oot, edited by David Betteridge (the fortieth anniversary of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders [UCS] work‐in), and Amir Darwish's Dear Refugee and Don't Forget the Couscous (the Syrian refugee crisis). Tom Wintringham's We're Going On! marks the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and David Cain's Truth Street the thirtieth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. New Boots and Pantisocracies, edited by W. N. Herbert and Andy Jackson, relates to the first 100,days of the Cameron government, while two sequences occupy themselves with Brexit—John Gohorry's Squeak, Budgie! and Martin Rowson's Pastrami Faced Racist. In response to the rise of neo‐Fascism and anti‐Semitism in Europe, Croft published András Mezei's Christmas in Auschwitz and Guus Luijters's Song of Stars, as well as the anthology Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust, edited by Thomas Ország‐Land. Finally, a percentage of the sales of A Blade of Grass: New Palestinian Poetry, edited by Naomi Foyle, is donated by Croft to help finance the legal fees of Ashraf Fayadh and Dareen Tatour, Palestinian poets imprisoned in Saudi Arabia and in Israel on charges relating to their poetry (Croft 2019a, b, 33). Croft wants to “keep open a space for what is left of the socialist and communist poetic traditions in the twenty‐first century,” which also means “publishing books that otherwise would be unlikely to appear in print,” and, when referring to the press's international focus, “putting into English poets whose work is either unavailable or unknown in the UK” (Croft 2019b, 33).
Although Smokestack only received another five ACE grants (2006/7: £26,125; 2008/9: £17,891; 2010: £6,200; 2011: £8,300; 2012: £6,200; Croft 2019c), Croft has managed to publish more than 160 books since 2004. The lack of continuous financial support meant that Croft could no longer pay his authors a nominal fee of £500 after the final ACE grant in 2011. However, he also felt “a kind of liberation. I suddenly had much greater control over the budget, which was no longer dependent on funding decisions made elsewhere. And I don't have to justify my editorial decisions to anyone” (Croft 2019a). In 2018, Croft published 15 titles and the press, as Croft admits, “is pretty well self‐financing […]. So, as long as I never pay myself anything for running Smokestack it breaks even” (Croft 2019a). This situation may change because of very recent developments. Much to Croft's own surprise, one of his interventions—David Cain's Truth Street—was shortlisted in the 2019 Forward Best First Collection category and featured by The Guardian, a first for a Smokestack title (Croft 2019a,b, 33, Flood 2019). Croft was not overwhelmed, roundly declaring: “Of course the only reason that The Guardian are interested in Truth Street is that it has been shortlisted for one of the little Forward prizes. They rang me up to ask for a review copy when the shortlist was published, despite the fact that I had sent them a review copy several months earlier when the book came out” (Croft 2019d). As for the shortlisting itself, one of the reasons for it may have been the jury's sensitivity to the political dimension of things. Andrew McMillan, one of the jurors, declared that “a lot of these collections, especially from newer poets, are really getting down in the mud and wrestling with the intricacies and difficulties of our new political situation” (Flood 2019). McMillan's observation coincides with a trend that Donna Ferguson had, almost rhapsodically, described in The Guardian as a “passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, [that] is fueling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry” (Ferguson 2019). Under these new circumstances, Croft may reconsider his plans to close Smokestack in 2021.
British and Irish Poetry Prizes
In a way, it is unfortunate that we have to have a prize culture at all. But we do have to have it. Because we do, unfortunately, have to make a fuss to draw people's attention to the better work that's being produced.
(Burnside 2016, 17)
Prizes have become a normal part of any moderately successful literary career. When a poet makes a submission of new poems these days, it has, accordingly, become part of the procedure to give the covering letter or email the character of a bio/bibliographical note. In it, quite understandably, the poet points out that he or she has won a poetry prize, even if it is a prize too obscure to have been heard of. In fact, many poets, almost like accountants, keep lists of even every shortlisting in poetry competitions or awards. The entries in the “Notes on Contributors” sections of any poetry magazine are quite illuminating in this respect. In the “Some Contributors” section of PN Review 221 (2015), Kathleen Bell, a poet from the East Midlands, draws attention to the shortlisting of her chapbook at the memory exchange (Oystercatcher Press) for the 2014 Saboteur Awards. The Italian poet Pierluigi Cappello needs to inform readers of the magazine that “[a]mong his awards are a Montale Europa Prize (2004), the Bagutta Opera Prima Prize (2007), and the prestigious [sic!] Viareggio‐Rèpaci Prize (2010)” (87). The American poet Marilyn Hacker received the “PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2009, the PEN / Voelcker Award for her own work in 2010, and the Prix Argana from the Beit‐as‐Sh'ir / House of Poetry (Morocco) in 2011” (87). Mimi Khalvati, we are told, received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Maitreyabandhu, a poet from Henley‐in‐Arden, Warwickshire, who was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990, “has won the Keats‐Shelley Prize, the Basil Bunting Award, and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize,” and his first collection is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. And, finally, the poet and critic Neil Powell published Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, which was Biography of the Year at the 2013 East Anglian Book Awards. One is reminded of James F. English's book The Economy of Prestige subtitled Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, published in 2005. The opening chapter is called “Prize Frenzy” and takes for its epigraph the verdict of the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” The British literary world—its poetry scene in particular—seems to operate on the same principle.
As early as 1989, Margaret Drabble had reflected on the literary prize system and the steady increase in the number of prizes, arguing that “poets more than any other category of writer need prizes and bursaries to keep aloft” (Drabble 1989, 251). Kathryn Gray in 2015 admits that prizes can be regarded as “a welcome opportunity to financially reward the purveyors of an art form who typically went largely unremunerated for their efforts” (Gray 2015, 8), but reminds “the children of prize culture” (Gray 2015, 8), whom she defines, appropriately, as “those of us in the mainstream,” that “the pragmatism of consensus” among the judging panels “limits individual