Yes, I’ve also noticed that Salt seems to have a lot of university creative writing tutors on its poets list. Salt must see a good prospective customer base amongst the students of the various creative writing tutors it publishes. Does Salt publish textbooks, as well, I wonder? That market would be even bigger.
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From what I've seen of Chris Hamilton-Emery's pronouncements of late it seems there at least two distinct lines of 'attack': one is that avant-garde poetry is or has become largely a product of the university circuit and thus the child of a sealed world while the other seems to be a broader rhetoric in which he distinguishes his own commercial concerns as a publisher as being somehow more serious and empirically real than whoever it is can perceive. With the latter comes the looming shadow of the M-word (you all know what that is) and an uneasy sense of shuffling offstage shadows, and while though the former has an egalitarian appeal it is rather hard to be unaware that the universities main focus is one promoting the creative writing industry, as it has commercial value to them, and that Salt seems very anxious to appeal to that very institutional m-word .
So there we are. I look forward to the Salt Compendium on Irony.
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