Poetry is not drowning, but swimming into new territory
News of plummeting sales do not, as some fear, indicate a dying art.
In fact, the genre is adapting well to a new publishing age On Wednesday
evening, a collection of poetry in support of the jailed Russian punk
rock group Pussy Riot won the award for Best Poetry Anthology in the
2013 Saboteur awards for indie poetry.
Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot features the work of 110 poets and
two dozen translators and began with a Facebook appeal by its editors
Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer for poems in support of the
women, in the run-up to their appeal hearing in October 2012. Ali Smith,
Deborah Levy, Phill Jupitus and John Kinsella are among the contributors
to the collection, which was published as an ebook in partnership with
English PEN, and is now available in print-on-demand.
It beat four other anthologies to the award: The Centrifugal Eye's
Fifth Anniversary Anthology (edited by EA Hanninen), Rhyming Thunder –
the Alternative Book of Young Poets (Burning Eye), Sculpted: Poetry of
the North West (North West Poets, edited by L Holland and A Topping) and
Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, ed. Tom Chivers).
The awards come as one of the UK's leading indies, Salt, announced
that they are abandoning the single-author collection as being
financially unsustainable. And indeed, hardly a week goes by without
someone assuring us that poetry is dying. Given the decline in sales
that they have experienced, with a 50% drop over the last five years,
half of which happened in the last 12 months, Salt's decision is
perfectly reasonable. No commercial press can possibly support those
numbers without looking to change their business model. The stark truth
is that poetry publishing is not going to be particularly commercially
viable, given that the total value of UK poetry sales has gone from
£8.4m in 2009 to £6.7m last year. Mind you, Salt seems to have been
particularly severely affected if you compare its fall of 25% last year
to the overall 15.9% drop. In one sense, it could be argued that Salt's
decision is good news for Faber, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Shearsman and all
those Saboteur shortlisted indies, since it means that there are fewer
big fish swimming round a shrinking pool.
However, it would be a serious error to equate the demise of a single
publisher with the overall state of health of poetry. Even Salt director
Chris Hamilton-Emery has noted the “massive increase in the number of
poetry publications coming out”, and he's right. Jim Bennet's extremely
useful Poetry Kit website lists more than 400 UK poetry publishers, and
while the list is broad (it includes Faber) and perhaps a bit out of
date (it also includes Salt) it shows the range of publishers around.
- The Guardian Blog
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