I've slept on it.
The book the world needs, now, is a big fat selection of Peter Riley -
Collected, if that's possible, substantial Selected if not. The Peter
Riley Reader, covering his key works through the years as far as possible,
giving an overview of his considerable achievement to date. It's a book
which should be sellable, since PR is eminently readable and worth
reading, and if we give up working on that premise we might as well give
up the whole idea. In presenting Peter's achievement to a wider audience
in this way a publishing concern would be doing good for Peter (I hope he
agrees) good for BritPo (because Peter's success is something we should
all feel good about) and good for poetry audiences because it'd be so
refreshing to have something intelligent and human like that pushed at
them. Peter should be involved all the way down in the process, paid a
proper advance, and it's got to be
well financed
well edited
well typeset
well designed
well produced
well marketed and
well distributed.
Anyone (old publisher, new publisher, group of publishers) comes up with
workable plan for this which gets Peter's support, and I'll invest in it,
work, time and cash.
By the way, some perfectly nice long-term lurkers on this list have just
up and left during this thread, giving no reason. I'd hate it to be
imagined that anyone *had* to contribute to these madcap schemes and just
want to make it plain that all donations or subscriptions would be purely
voluntary.
RC
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