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POETRYETC  April 2010

POETRYETC April 2010

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Subject:

Fwd: Blog post critical of Salt's marketing method's

From:

Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:36:19 +1000

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (153 lines)

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

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