The Recent Pathology of Poetry
A message to Our Readers
We are emerging from a period when published poetry has been the well-managed art of an isolated and notoriously small elite into a more expansive and deregulated market focused outwards towards its audience. Poetry (capital P) is, thank goodness, the product of its readerships and not its producers. In the recent past the art has divorced itself from greater dialogue with its audiences, and divorced itself from other cultural outputs: fiction, film and the visual arts, music and theatre (and thus much of our social experience) and the readership has largely reflected this split, shrinking in number until most events were attended only by the performer and an entourage of two (caretaker and administrator). Maybe innovation is always communal, but the renaissance in British poetry is certainly arising from poets reengaging with their communities, other art (and culture generally), and the resulting collisions of place, time and sensibility, politics and history are rewarding new readers. Poetry is sexy once again.
Poetry readings have begun to step out from the sour function rooms of dilapidated pubs and it?s not unusual to find ticketed and promoted tours in theatres near you. What is most striking is the resurgence of young people, and especially young men, now reading poetry. 70% of my own direct poetry sales are (surprisingly) to men. Whether it be genre-busting Black surrealist sci-fi mash-ups, dubstep urban neo-ranting, pop culture commentary or hirsute political invective mixed with humour and panache, there are simply scores of new voices and poetry movements emerging in England, Scotland and Wales.
However, the explosion of new poetry has left the critical community with a problem. First, the discontinuity of new talent with the traditional management of the old has left a critical vacuum. Who is capable of reviewing and making sense of this explosion of talent and the new audiences paying for it all? Poetry is a world defined by the paucity of its resources, and much effort has admittedly gone into constraining reception and not broadening it. Most people spend time keeping poets out, not letting them in. The new under-40s audiences are adrift from the industry?s usual forms of consumer control. Deregulation is creating new space and new boundaries for practice and consumption. Second, the sheer momentum of changing readerships and taste is creating an expansion of practices (schools perhaps) each synchronously but separately flourishing, though few young critics have emerged from within each community; we need a new generation of critics and new spaces on the Web to make sense of the art in this century. Third, a great deal of the new talent is emerging as a result of two new forces, the growth of and investment in creative writing industries (both academic and publicly funded NGOs) and the growth of the Web as a tool for organizing events, collaboration, exchange, publicity and marketing.
Despite a diminished presence in bookstores and depleted interest in the book trade, poetry readerships have, like some rebel alliance, regrouped in the vast ocean of the World Wide Web. I say this with some trepidation as the Web also provides an unparalleled torrent of bad verse for readers, spewing out from the burgeoning ranks of amateurs and the seemingly endless zombie hordes of poetry’s unread. However, serious writers have found this new medium truly liberating, and when used effectively (for which read virally) it has led in part to an explosion of new readerships.
Social networking, high quality performances and tours, Webzines, bulletin boards, listservs, online publishers and publishers online, readers and writers and what can feel like an entire culture management industry, are increasingly converging through the Web and these changing circumstances offer the canny publisher and bookseller new opportunities to develop and extend markets and, of course, to sell books. So what is needed now? To make the reader central to the art.
I’d like you to take away from this blog two simple messages. Firstly, poetry belongs to you, not to the poet or the critic or merely the privileged and overeducated, not teachers or academics or editors, and there is someone out there writing for you right now, in ways which will extend your life and what it means and it’s not dull drudgery, nor is it the literary equivalent of navel fluff. It may bite, delight and provoke you. It may excite you or console you, confirm your views or collapse them. By reading more of the stuff you’ll find more poetry heads your way, into your neighbourhood, into your life and your mind. It will increase you.
Secondly, writers need to know what readers want and where their lives are at. If you can’t find stuff that speaks to you then shout out wherever you can, get the full range of choices, there are thousands of new writers. I think you deserve the best from your poets and if the stuff you’ve discovered isn’t working for you, don?t be managed or misled. The world of poetry is now as large and fragmented as the independent music scene so don’t be cheated out of any life enhancements you are due, make sure you get all your slices of pie and cake. Why choose anything less?
Chris Hamilton-Emery is a Director of Salt Publishing, winner of the Nielsen Innovation of the Year Award in the IPA Award 2008 for developing poetry sales. His latest books are Poets in View (Salt), Radio Nostalgia (Arc Publications) and 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell (Salt).
tags: poetry, publishing, pathology
