A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
rendering the reader's task into a continual process of interpretation (Sheppard 2011, 7). To some degree, such views are perhaps indebted to “the convergence of text and reader” (Iser 2008, 295) in reader‐response theory—not to mention the tenets of poststructuralist literary analysis—but similar conceptions seem frequent in contemporary criticism. Peter Middleton, for example, has developed a nuanced account of a poem's “long biography,” in which the act of reading does not fulfill the poetic text; rather, it enacts the poem's continuance in time, which can also manifest itself through publications, performances, reviews, and criticism (Middleton 2005, 23–24).
The perspectives from Adorno, Sheppard, and Middleton all involve a reconfiguration of accessibility. The poem is no longer accessible because it has limited itself to expressing a coherent, empirical situation; rather, the poem's accessibility relies upon an invitation for the reader to participate in the continued production of its meaning. This position is also explicitly present in the poetics of several modern poets. For instance, Allen Fisher sees poetry as a process of constellated possibilities and readerly interactions:
where meaning is apparent, that meaning changes in relation to the meaning another may give it, or in relation to living after the first realisation of the meaning. And the meaning may take on a multiplicity that is summated or left impossible and so forth.
(Fisher 1999, 7)
It should be noted that Fisher does not limit this process of mutable meanings to the act of reading. In fact, his subsequent theorizations also place the poet in a similar position of openness, contingency, and vulnerability. The poem is not a closed unit of autonomous meaning, but simply a “confident approach” that—despite its “lack of solutions”—offers possible proposals about the issues that it examines (Fisher 2007, 11). In other words, Fisher's poetry develops an arena in which both the poet and the reader can collaborate in the assemblage of various interpretations.
Fisher's attention to process and “confidence in lack” help to clarify the experience of reading his early tour de force Place. Toward the end of the first book of this project, Fisher includes a section that describes his visit to Dove Cottage, which ends with a peculiar aside that resembles stage directions: “(at this point a reshowing / involved with XIX)” (Fisher 2016, 107). Turning back to the poem in question, its relationship to Wordsworth's cottage seems oblique and—at first—incomprehensible. The text is simply comprised of a short archeological note:
a Neanderthal skull with a hole in its base
artificially enlarged
was found within a circle of stones on the “floor”
in Monte Circeo, Italy
(Fisher 2016, 68)
However, the poem that follows the visit to Dove Cottage features an encounter with a sheep's skull—with its flesh eaten and lower jaw missing—on top of Threlkeld Knotts. As such, the earlier aside directs the reader to regard the Neanderthal skull as a prefiguration of the sheep's remains in the subsequent poem. In effect, these two fragments integrate each other: Threlkeld Knotts merges with Monte Circeo, and the two skulls blend together. A further degree of resonance between the two poems also emerges via Fisher's archeological resources. After the skull in Monte Circeo was first discovered in 1939, anthropologists proposed that it was a relic of a ritualistic murder involving decapitation and cannibalism (Blanc 1961, 119–136).6 Thus, the consumed flesh on the sheep's skull potentially reflects a continued sense of brutality that relates to Fisher's overarching anger at London's political superstructures, which have enacted an uneven distribution of opportunity and justice since antiquity. By inviting readers to consider the parallels between these two separate fragments, Fisher encourages a re‐evaluation of their individual significations, as well as their relationship to Place as a whole.
This brief example in other words demonstrates that Fisher's poetry—which is both syntactically discontinuous and immersed with various ranges of specialist knowledge—is not invested in an inaccessible, incomprehensible obscurantism or elitist derision. Rather, it openly invites its readers to participate in the production of its social comprehensions and completions. Because it openly shows its processes and interconnections, any reader who is willing to engage with the pleasures and complexities of Fisher's work can follow and interrogate its proposals without insurmountable prerequisites of specialist knowledge.
Thus, by contesting the assumptions that underlie the dismissive claims about the inaccessibility of modern poetry, we can begin to map out a more productive understanding of who reads it. At the very least, my preceding discussions have tried to demonstrate how modern poetry might be read. But are these notions of readership ideal or actual? Do such readers actually exist?
While poetry's audiences are undeniably smaller than those of other art forms, I would also suggest that the image of decline that emerged in conjunction with Paxman's comments does not paint an accurate portrait. My own experience of attending poetry readings certainly gives some credence to the historic “golden age” depicted by Sheppard and Duncan: Xing the Line, organized by Jeff Hilson in London, and Hi Zero, organized by Joe Luna in Brighton, have on many occasions attracted audiences of around 80–100 people.7 Moreover, the sales figures I quoted at the beginning of this chapter are based on aggregated “retail sales information from […] bookshops” (Nielsen BookScan n.d.), and contemporary poetry is not often distributed through such channels. For instance, Shearsman Books, an independent publisher of poetry, consistently sold approximately 10,000 units per year between 2011 and 2014. Each year, over a third of these sales were generated through print‐on‐demand purchases—the printing technology where a copy is only printed when an order is received. In addition, a considerable number of units are also sold to the poets themselves, who would then resell these copies during readings and other public events. By way of comparison, while both of these sales categories are annually in the thousands, Shearsman's direct sales to retailers usually amount to around 200–400 copies per year (Tony Frazer, email to author, October 2, 2014).8 A similar situation applied to Ken Edwards's now‐retired Reality Street. While the press's annual output between 2011 and 2014 was fairly modest (comprising around four books per year), their sales were consistently robust. Each publication received an average sale of around 200 copies, and the press's most popular volumes tended to sell in the thousands. Moreover, through Reality Street's supporter scheme subscriptions, each book benefitted from guaranteed sales of approximately 70–120 copies. As with Shearsman, only a small fraction of these units were sold through bookshops; the majority of Reality Street's sales took place online, either directly via the publisher's website, or through Amazon (Ken Edwards, email to author, October 2, 2014).9 Furthermore, these are only two indicative examples. Publications from small presses such as The 87 Press, Distance No Object, Contraband, Materials, Oystercatcher, and Veer Books are most readily available directly from their respective websites.
If we add online platforms such as those available from Pamenar Press and DATABLEED into these considerations, the channels through which modern poetry can find its readers grow increasingly nebulous and complex. Statistics that focus solely on sales from bookshops therefore offer an incomplete representation of the readership for modern British and Irish poetry. Of course, the poets and publishers I have discussed in this chapter might be wary of conceptualizing their work in terms of retailed units—and rightly so. Such discourses would, inevitably, violate the processual emphases of their respective poetics by turning these publications into marketable products. However, I have offered these examples as my concluding remarks in order to dispel the dismissive misconceptions of an art form that has connived at its own irrelevance. Despite the figures that accompanied Paxman's comments in 2014, subsequent years have begun to tell a different story: in 2015, poetry book sales in the United Kingdom reached an all‐time high of £8.8m, and in October 2016, they were set to surpass £10m; commentators attributed this upward trend to the emergence of energetic and