David,

Matthew is pretty clearly using "provincial" in the ordinary sense of
province-related, as opposed to your earlier "I live 100 miles from London,"
ergo "I am 'provincial'," but your mention of Carcanet gives me a
serendipitous opening to answer Jill's earlier query about who I talked to
in Australia and how tanked up they were when the subject of homey poetries
came up. Without being too indiscreet, let me recall that this was the
spring of 1999, just after Oxford had announced the shutdown of its
poetry-publishing enterprise, which had included Chris Wallace-Crabbe, whom
I overheard telling someone--soberly, in both senses of the term, and with
evident relief--that Carcanet had just "picked [him] up." (This was in
Melbourne, where--not incidentally--Collected Works was being evicted from
its former space, and when I met its owner, Kris Hemensley, he still hadn't
located new premises for this illustrious poetry venue.) Earlier that week
in Hobart, I'd met some of the poets affiliated with Island, which was then
between editors and feared to be about to go under for lack of funding--so
another sober session there. These were very dire times for poetry in both
those Australian locales, in other words, and such straitened circumstances
rarely bring out the charitable side in anyone.

Whether that's a factor in some of the anger that's erupted in this
discussion of (mainly) the Sydney poetry scene, as reported by JK, I don't
know. (Jill: no, my sidetrip to Sinny got cancelled, alas!) What I can tell
you, though, is that a pair interesting list-threads to do with JK's article
developed on two different lists today and spawned parallel discussions
among some of the same people (namely, Jill and Debbie, here and
there--"there" being Cassie Lewis's PoetryEspresso list.) Since this was
where I picked up the link to JK's article myself, having accepted Cassie's
posted invitation to check out the archives and discovered yesterday that
Deb had posted the SMH link (without comment then), I went back to
PoetryEspresso tonight out of curiosity to see if anything like our own
"Caution" thread had emerged there in the meantime. Nor was I disappointed!

As you'll see if you care to peruse the PetryEspresso archives for today (or
yesterday, rather, by now), it was THE thread of the day, and mention was
made of checking out our own archives in turn, so here's the URL again, for
anyone who'd like to do some comparison shopping:

http://www.topica.com/lists/PoetryEspresso

Just click on "read this list" in the top right-hand corner when the list
info. pops up, and it will open up to the (dated) messages (Deb's original
posting of 2/4 and then the resulting thread of 2/5). Ah, list life--they
oughta make a movie of it ("It's a Wonderful Link"?)--

Candice




David Bircumshaw wrote:

> I wasn't only thinking of that narrow river 'poetry', Matthew, but I do
> notice that word 'provincial' re-appears in your message. Now Bloodaxe and
> Carcanet might be physically based in the 'provinces' (those places where
> the Emperor might visit if there's danger of a rebellion) but in terms of
> cultural space they're not, likewise, it would be misleading to consider the
> magazines you mention that are based outside London as being 'regional' ,
> other than I guess Poetry Wales, which is not a criticism of those
> publications.



Matthew Francis wrote:

>> I'm not so sure about this, at least as far as poetry is concerned. It is
>> certainly true of the wider publishing and media scene (and of course most
>> other aspects of British culture). The big publishers are in London, but
>> poetry is too commercially insignificant for most of them these days. I
>> would have thought the majority of poetry books published in the UK are
> from
>> provincial firms: Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Seren etc. For magazines, it's
> Poetry
>> London, London Magazine, Agenda, Poetry Review against PN Review, Stand,
> The
>> Rialto, Poetry Wales etc - again, London does well but the provinces don't
>> seem to be neglected.