Also somewhat apropos, but rather veering off the edge:
http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/11851/
a dire warning
On 18 April 2010 01:36, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>
--
David Bircumshaw
"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
You say are poems" - DMeltzer
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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