When I was a young art student, most of our progressive ideals were fed by an understanding that we were somehow at war with the academics. I guess this was a kind of nineteenth century art lesson, one which had been fully adopted within those commercial narratives about the birth of modernism; it was the abandonment of official culture managed by dullards in mortar boards and wigs within dusty backward-looking institutions. Well, that’s how I imagined it, back then. Most of my tutors encouraged us to rebel, revolt and generally shit on the establishment in the pursuit of some eternal individuation, art was some beautiful profitless exhaust. However, when one did rebel, there was rarely jubilation in the staff room. Still, we were all left with one defining ideal, not to be middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, middleclass sell outs. Ah, the joys of art school. These days, many British poets seem hell-bent on defending the right to be middlebrow aesthetes: mainstreamers in the mythology of a poetry of the general public. Saying poetry is mainstream in British culture is like saying British manufacturing has a future. It’s funny how those who celebrate a popular approach to poetry always neglect Pam Ayres, surely the most popular poet writing in the UK. And genuinely funny. It’s the same story with the radicals, too. When there’s no real centre, it’s hard to run to the circumference. You can’t be at the vanguard of an art with a million directions and no common starting point. There’s just no linear model for poetry now. But what’s really missing in these kinds of debates (if there really is a debate) is the facts (not the idea) of an audience. For many writers, the audience is entirely absent, or rushing out of the auditorium.
Poets often talk about the General Public in a way which most marketers would find jaw-droppingly dumb. As if there was a single vast homogenous audience for a single vast homogenous product. The idea that there is a GP for poetry is like (here comes another dodgy simile) imagining popular music starts and stops with The Shadows, and the motorway service station spinners full of Easy Listening. Literature like music, will continue to dislocate, subdivide and fracture into an endless range of niche interests. This force, for differentiation, customisation, personalisaton is unstoppable within consumer society. We all want something different. This isn’t to deny that there are such things as bestsellers, or, where poetry is concerned, better sellers, but the important thing is to give up the internal debate on poetics, and refocus on audience. It’s almost as if the former were being fuelled by a lack of the latter.
Anyway, as I was saying, back in art school anything worth doing was worth doing outside of insitutions and the constricted thinking they engender, the kind of thinking which by its very nature must lag behind developments, attending to the understanding of what the trailblazers were up to, kind of like sweeping up the debris and trying to fit it into existing ideas of expression, identity, society, markets, cultural progress. The trailblazers were always ahead of the academics and, indeed, the audience. This was all a fiction.
These days, having swapped oil paint and print-making for literchur, it seems, at times, as if everyone is rushing into the academy to teach creative writing. Now, a girl’s got to earn a living, but this does give rise to some concerns about poetry’s independence. For example, as a rough guide, Creative Writing Inc in the US must be producing at least ten thousand graduates per year, and this Writing Program model is supported by campus writers, campus magazines, workshops and MFAs, staff, prize-driven first publications, even the reception of poetry is managed. All this before professional poets face the career choice of a teaching position in a sister campus in one of the suitable satellites of the AWP. For a moment, I want you to assume that this industry is intended to produce writers. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. All for us.
This system has successfully provided an exportable model for the English-speaking world. In Britain, the Creative Writing programme is a lucrative weapon in the University’s bid to improve funding. I shan’t examine the efficacy of this model today, but what I want to draw attention to is the fact that I know of no single instance, throughout the world, where any institution has developed a programme to develop poetry readerships. The non-professional kind. The not-even semi-professional kind.
It’s perversely Stalinist in intention, as if someone dictated we shall have, within our five year poetry plan, a further 30% increase in writers every year, to fuel the poetry economy. So where exactly is the demand? Who is working to develop poetry audiences. Just who is buying? There seems little doubt that the mythical General Public is in decline, well, at least the GP is avoiding bookshops where sales continue to plummet, and heavy discounting and improved stock management has led to reduced profits, returns and financial collapse for many poetry publishers. In fact, no one now expects poetry publishers to make any profit. Many trade bodies designed to support literature in the US and UK seem to make pretty sure that publishers make little or no money, punishing them with charges and whopping discounts. Best to resist. To revolt. So that the writers with no readers can regain an audience through hard selling.
So let’s have our belated revolution, not in poetry though, lets forget the poets for a moment, they’re doing their job of being unread for now; let’s have a revolution in developing poetry audiences. Let’s listen to and serve the book buyers, not the trade, not the distributors, critics, not even the academics. Without paying readers there’s no future for literature, and we’re all going nowhere fast.
