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Apropos of discussion: some of you might be interested in this blog post of Chris Goode's, where he talks about Salt's marketing strategies, which was posted elsewhere. xA ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Lace <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 7:54 AM Subject: Blog post critical of Salt's marketing method's To: [log in to unmask] Found the following blog post criticising Salt's marketing methods: http://beescope.blogspot.com/2007/04/johnnys-so-long-at-fair.html The blog post is very long and deals with lots of things other than Salt. So I've taken the section about Salt and pastd it below. If you want to read it on the blog then scroll down the blog post till you get to paragraph 15: A depressing thing worth mentioning in passing: I think I have to confess I've finally reached my elastic limit with Salt. If you don't know Salt, it's been for the past few years an incredibly busy independent press, based in Cambridge, mostly producing poetry, about half of which I suppose falls within the ambit of my particular interests (in late modernist work and its close allies). They've harnessed print-on-demand technology to enable them to be more active and in some respects more daring than any publisher in this area has ever been before. Their list is huge and growing and, when they finally get The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk out, I'll be (in a very small way) on it. The books themselves are not that robust as objects, but more and more attention is obviously being lavished on the cosmetics and that's probably not a bad thing. Perhaps the most contentious aspect to Salt's operations is that Chris Emery, who's the prime mover behind the press -- and, whatever I'm about to say, is an excellent bloke doing what he takes to be the right thing -- has from the get-go been boldly pragmatic about trying to get the work to new audiences by borrowing techniques, particularly around marketing and merchandising, from other (bigger) players and sectors, and allowing Salt to conform as far as possible to those pressures and assumptions that shape the literary publishing industry. So a few days ago I get their newest print catalogue and at this point, with the best will, I have to hold up my hands and say I no longer recognize my own aspirations and commitments in this material. This really is the ugliest motherhugging brochure I've ever seen for poetry, possibly for anything. Salt is describing itself as "the UK's hottest independent literary press", as if any meaningful reconciliation could ever be made between the words 'literary' and 'hottest'; a block of text on both covers insist that I should "HURRY!" to claim an online discount -- in other words, I should HURRY to concede that poetry is a kind of material that need not be categorically distinguished from, say, cut-price carpets. Across two dozen pages, huge photos loom of these indescribably unprepossessing poets' faces -- I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen (and three ladies) in question, some of whom are friends, I'm just wondering at what point we decided to agree that promoting poetry on the basis of what its authors look like was a decent or honourable trade-off with a personality-obsessed literary culture. Substantial but entirely uncontextualised samples from each text are dumped on every page in a wretchedly outmoded and barely legible grunge typewriter font. Seeing writers of the stature and integrity of John Wilkinson and Alan Halsey peering out of this mess like nervous animals in a deregulated Russian zoo is, honestly, painful. It's like that moment a few years ago when J.H. Prynne was suddenly the object of a media spasm due to some survey of British literary activity being published which suggested that he was, you know, a good poet: and suddenly Iain Sinclair's popping up on the Today porgramme with one brilliant pre-worked line (that trying to settle the precedency between Prynne and Philip Larkin was "like comparing electricity to nougat") and a lot of mischievous and strenuously disingenuous playing-down of the difficulties by which a novice reader is confronted in reading Prynne for the first time. As a dissenting friend wrote to me then: "It's good that people are talking about him, but there's no point pretending he's Patience Strong." I'm sorry to say I think (on this evidence) Salt has now reached a place in its development where it is quite cynically and grossly misrepresenting some of the work on its list. To place Wilkinson's work, or D.S. Marriott's, under a banner that says 'sensational' and 'hot' is to distort that work and the kinds of relations it's interested in establishing with readers. I'm the first to agree that seeking a wider readership for difficult poetry in these modes is a necessity. I also think the breadth of Salt's list may help with that task. (I can imagine, for example, a reader taking a chance on Anthony Joseph's genuinely sensational -- and very finely made -- The African Origins of UFOs, and taking the leap from there to Marriott or to Bruce Andrews even, and all of that being OK.) But in its promotions and some of the language it uses to talk about the work it represents, it is plainly and quite actively aping a broader culture that seeks to soothe or airbrush or neutralize difficulty as if it were an embarrassing but remediable fault in self-presentation rather than an index of certain deep engagements that are integral to the original positioning of the work, not a reducible feature of its surfaces. There is no clue anywhere here that the work is not simply challenging but actually demanding -- it requires a kind of bravery and attentiveness on the part of the reader (I think attentiveness is becoming a kind of bravery in itself, actually) without which the standard contracts simply fall into a sort of disconsoled nullity. And this is the urgent problem with Salt's strategy: it is making promises that the work cannot, must not, endorse or hope to honour, and the result of this, downstream, is bruised and disenchanted readers who will not be able to understand -- and why should they? -- why it is that non-mainstream poetry has let them down in a way that the dull gestures of the mainstream never have. The odd thing is that I'm pretty sure Chris Emery would say all the same things about the poetry that I'm concerned about here. Perhaps he'd say it's just a matter of degree -- presumably there are some lines he wouldn't cross because they'd seem disrespectful to the work and to its audiences, and he and I just draw the lines in a different place. But I'm not sure about that. Last week I did a reading gig for the literary society at my old school in Bristol and had a fascinating discussion afterwards with an extremely bright young woman who's working on Kafka and who rejected, pretty much out of hand, my 'two streams' account of recent mainstream vs. modernist poetic practice: she was insisting (not without strong argument) that the differences in approach to language-use and, for example, pictorialism were simply matters of degree. What I didn't quite manage to articulate at the time was that, in so far as she's correct, nonetheless such matters of degree are determined in part by the priorities that individuals and groups of writers establish for themselves, and these priorities may exert quite absolutely contrary pressures on writing activity that may in some other respects seem broadly continuous across the spectrum. On this newest evidence, Salt's foremost priority is selling books, not supporting and promoting poetry. Perhaps that's fair enough -- "supporting and promoting" is the kind of phrase that normally crops up in the mission statements of charitable organizations, and that's not what Salt is. I'd be interested to know, though -- in the week, incidentally, when the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts scheme is cut back by 35% (as part of the current push to ensure that in 2013 this country has absolutely nothing going on of any artistic or cultural merit or importance whatsoever) -- how much the significant recent ACE award to Salt has had a bearing on, or was from the outset dependent on this kind of lurid promotional crap. Or whether, as has recently been the case with a project of mine, it's simply a case of putting out the advert that generates the largest number of sales, with no particular regard for the sensitive management of the audience's expectations or a scrupulous fidelity to the ambitions of the artwork at -- or perhaps no longer quite at -- the centre of the activity. -- Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com