Poetry Hut Blog

Salt Publishing in England is a press I like a lot (I have a couple of the books in their Native American poetry series.) So when fellow poetry blogger Katy Evans-Bush asked me if I would participate in her virtual book tour for her new book Me and the Dead (ISBN: 9781844714216, Salt Modern Poets, 2008) I said hell yes. Her blog is always really smart so I genuinely wanted to read her replies to a few questions I pulled out of my . . . sleeve. Plus I think Salt has a really good marketing idea here & I’m glad to help. If you have a book/chapbook coming out or recently published I’d be happy to ask you some questions here. This blog is boring the crap out of me and I keep going back and forth about quitting.

Disclosure stuff: Katy offered to send me a copy of her book but I had already bought a copy. Salt did link here as part of their promo stuff. Anyway, away we go:

How did your book come to be published by Salt?

I’d had my eye on Salt for a few years, even though they originally published primarily “innovative” poetry. I knew I wasn’t right for their list, but I just liked what they were doing. When Chris and Jen (Hamilton-Emery) took over, and then when the list started really expanding outwards – or is it inwards – to accommodate more mainstream writing, I kept a close eye on developments.

Chris had already nailed his colours to the mast with his now-famous submission guidelines; he then published his book, 101 Ways to Make Poetry Sell, which gave me an even clearer idea what sort of writers he was looking to work with. I love what Salt is doing – dragging poetry publishing into the 21st century, selling poetry as if it’s something people want. Which it is, in fact. I firmly believe that. These Cyclone book tours are one example of how Salt is using innovative means to get books into the hands of readers.

So when the time was right, when the pot was boiling, when the iron was hot, I sent Salt a bundle of poems, maybe ten. A few weeks later Chris rang me and asked for a manuscript. He knew who I was, of course; we both contribute to the same poetry message board, and possibly he knew of me from other quarters. I think in the small pond of poetry publishing in the UK, you wouldn’t get very far submitting to someone who was likely never to have heard of you . . . I had prepared the ground!

Salt is also the only publisher I’ve ever submitted a manuscript to. I just liked them, and I was lucky. I think it’s a very exciting list to be part of, and I really admire what they’re doing.

What was it like working with your publisher?

The process was a bit mystifying! Salt’s energy goes largely into selling. Chris cheerfully admits that where other publishers might put 80% of their time into editing and 20% into selling, Salt is the other way round. This means that the onus is on the writer to iron out the book as much as possible, because Salt won’t make any sweeping changes.

Actually, in the context of UK publishing, this is very refreshing. There are a couple of the major houses – I say “major,” I mean venerable old houses that publish a few books of poetry a year – where every book that comes out bears the unmistakable house style, the imprint of the editor. Salt lets each writer be him- or herself, which is great, though it does mean you have to take full responsibility for every comma. Fortunately I am happy with that! And I do copy-editing in my day job so I’m obsessed with consistency and accuracy and punctuation. And when it came to the final cut, I was the one obsessing about page order, and two-page poems going on facing pages. They were very patient with me, which is nice! Especially since I believe Chris is now in the throes of developing some kind of space-age print-on-demand database, reducing books to elements, i.e., poems and even stanzas.

Then the cover – I had quite a lot of input into it, but Chris made all the actual decisions. I sent him a load of photographs and he made the cover. It’s good to have another eye on things – and he is a trained designer and typographer. The books look beautiful – Chris is on record as saying he loves making gorgeous things – so I trusted him with my mother’s old family photos!

You’re an ex-pat. What do you think are the major differences between the US and UK poetry worlds right now?

The main difference is size! To anyone outside the USA it just looks unmanageably huge. Another difference is the complete prevalence of the university system. I think in the UK poets do all sorts of jobs. There are increasing number of “career poets,” who teach creative writing and do jobbing poetry things, but it seems to me more of an option than the proof of credibility it is in the States. The whole university thing seems a bit arid to me.

Another difference is the factionalism in the States: language poetry, neo-formalism, post-modernist this and that. Flarf. What the hell is that stuff? I mean, by all means . . . but there seems to be a much more never-the-twain-shall-meet attitude over there. I used to be a big contributor – indeed, I was a moderator for a while – to the formalist board, Eratosphere. But the attitudes towards poetry you encounter there are so straitjacketed. I can’t understand why the word “formal” should only apply to one kind of form. And by the same token, why poetry that uses rhyme should be perceived as bad by others, or poetry that makes a linear statement.

The thing that makes a writer’s work suspect, it seems to me, is when they only use one set of tools, one technique or one type of effect. In the UK he best poets are more magpie-like than that; they’ll write prose poetry, and free verse – different kinds of free verse. They’ll use rhyme, write sonnets and villanelles, but they’ll be loose forms. Ballads. James Fenton and Ian Duhig, for example, to say nothing of Tony Harrison, are all famous for writing in metre and rhyme but they are all left in their politics. I notice that the New Formalists love Richard Wilbur – say – a lot more than they love James Merrill, although to my mind Merrill’s use of metre and rhyme is superior to almost everything. And what about Wallace Stevens? These people should not be read in a silo! If you’re sitting reading in a silo it does show an unfortunate lack of seriousness, I think.

I think it all boils down to the sixties, and the Beats. Of course Ginsberg and his crew used to read Blake, and the Metaphysicals. But the Beat sensibility took over in a very big way over there which it just didn’t here. It was just a fashion, which became an orthodoxy, part of the whole counterculture rejection of everything old. English poetry of the sixties and seventies is completely different. I was a bit thrown by it when I came over here. It uses – well – even the innovative stuff, it uses rhyme and traditional prosodic tools. The poems have square or rectangular stanzas. I think if you remain within the practice you can to MORE innovative stuff. Look at John Ash, Ian Duhig, Basil Bunting, Christopher Logue (War Music, his Homer version, is incredibly exciting – it is really important work). Having said which, I do love Lorine Neidecker! She’s so clever and meticulous.

Well, enough of that. A poet friend in New York was amused one time to find Merrill in my bag next to the Collected Neidecker. He said it would be pretty rare to find an American poet with both those books. I’ve been enjoying Ernest Hibert’s cheeky sonnets lately, and also the more left-field, AIDS-related poetry of DA Powell.

But having said that, it’s not like America Bad England Good. There is a slightly tiresome parochialism over here, a slightness of ambition, an anecdotalism that can be dispiritingly plodding. I do benefit, hugely, from having equal access to both streams, and I also read a lot of poetry by Russians, often living in the USA. I read more American poetry than many people over here, and because I’m here I have an overview – I don’t have to get down on the ground and get dirty in the fight. God knows it’s rare enough in ANY art to find something you feel really excited by. I prefer not to cut off any avenues!

You know who I really admire in the USA – for breaking down all these barriers, and just being completely serious and committed without recourse to factionalism – Katia Kapovich and Philip Nicolayev, who run the annual magazine Fulcrum, in Boston. They are genuinely innovative and eclectic and very high-minded. We need more of that.

Poetry is. . .

The best thing you can do with words. A way of saying what can’t be said any other way. A way to allow language to carry the freight of non-literal meanings. A necessary synthesis of sound and literal meaning. Similar to singing in the responses it sets up in the brain, even if you’re reading it silently. Patterned language. A woven object. A tool for finding out what’s inside you. A magnifying glass for looking at the world. Nursery rhymes and road signs. A joke with its good trousers on. The ineffable. The oldest art form. Hardwired into the human brain.

Writing poetry is. . .

. . .what I do when I have to. It’s fun! The hours speed by, and you are aware of nothing. When I’m writing – I mean in the very act of it or just in the general mode, thinking about poems on the bus – I’m happier than at other times. It’s hard work, it is discipline. You have to discipline your brain to focus, focus, cut out the extraneous stuff, always put the poem first ahead of what you think you want to say. This is why poetry is not (ugh) self-expression. (This is where people like Maya Angelou, etc, fall down. But that’s another conversation. There’s no one like them in the UK.) But I love that focus, it takes everything else and puts it out of the way.

It’s much more satisfying than writing prose; I find it easier. I have written prose. I have part of a novel, and the terrible truth is that that novel is a large part of my project for 2009 – the other large part being my next poetry collection – and now I’ve taken it out it’s all coming back to me, how hard it was. I’m not sure why. I’d write a page and then I’d have to lie down and have a sleep. Still, I’ve got some great characters and a good idea – or half of one – so off I go.

Writing poetry is easy. I stayed up till 2.30am last night, writing a poem that just came like honey out of my fingertips. It started out being a bagatelle about Henry James and Virginia Woolf, and the next thing I knew I was quoting Auden and writing about Oscar Wilde and playing word games and Wilde was dying in Paris, and here was an atmosphere and a tone that carried it all through. I didn’t have to justify anything. You can just grab the reader’s sleeve and take them with you. I was happy.