Dear David,

I wonder if you have any actual statistics about edition sizes in the world
of "big" poetry publishing?  It seems to be very difficult to get that kind
of information, and yet many statements are made on the basis of it.  You
see, I have a suspicion that the success so much proclaimed in certain
poetry zones is in fact more of a promotional success than a commercial
success, and more of an institutional success than a popular success. I
suspect that in terms of actual readership the major poetry zones might be
more-or-less on a level footing with each other, which belies claims to
"mainstream" centrality and immense popular success made in some quarters.

        I feel pretty sure for instance that if you are published by one of
the "upper middle" poetry publishers (Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Arc, Anvil,
suchlike)  which many poets feel constitutes access to "real" publishing at
last, you will be published in editions well below 1000, in the first place
at any rate. The actual figure might  be closer to 300.  The figure for a
new poet from Chatto, Faber or OUP might not be very different.

        So-called "small" presses such as Reality Street Editions, or
Invisible Books, regularly publish in editions of 1000. Where then is the
"big" and where is the "small" in this business?

        Equipage (a "desk-top" publisher) published and sold 300 copies of
Barry MacSweeney's PEARL.  What's the difference between an edition of 300
from Chatto and an edition of 300 from Equipage?

        One of them represents success, acceptance and honour in the great
traditions of British poetry; the other represents marginality and failure.
So we are made to feel.

        In fact all the figures I've mentioned up to now are peanuts in
terms of real publishing. Even if I'm wrong and Faber publish a new and
unknown poet in an edition of 20,000 it's still peanuts in terms of real
publishing. It doesn't in itself constitute any kind of commercial or
popular success except in the claustrophobic environs of poetry. Probably
only a handful of poets in this country can be said to be really published
and read in quantity: Heaney, Hughes, Harrison, Armstrong?, Duffy?... .
They are the only ones entitled statistically to represent a "mainstream"
or to occupy any kind of central enclave, except that they're all very
different from each other.

        Poetry's an extremely small-scale industry. I thought the most
valuable part of your paper was where you compared poetry to the music
industries and remarked that nobody seems to be worried that different
musics attract different audiences of different sizes without all competing
for the same throne. Of course we have to accept this pluralism it's a
plain fact of life.  But the poetry situation is not really very different
from the musical, because although you can't write across all the options
you can read across them; just as in music you can't create music across
all the options but you can listen across them. And people really should,
read across the whole field. They're not encouraged to because, as you say,
all the reviewing and punditing is done by poets and so is bound to be
sectional. I don't think your own criticism escapes that condition; as most
responses here to your paper have implied, you write from a sectional
interest dictated by your sense of where your poetry belongs.

        I've moaned at British-Poets in the past for holding on to  the
fiction of a "mainstream" centrality against which they are defined as
rebels.  I've suggested that a lot of distortions arise from that sectarian
and embattled away of thinking it. But it's not at all surprising that
people react in this way when you look at what they have to put up with.
Especially if you accept my provisional thesis on edition-sizes and
readership scales, you then want to know why so many practitioners are made
to feel failures by people who have in fact not done much better themselves
in terms of actual readership or scale of interest as against  sectional
promotion. And much as I might view the average "radical poetry" thesis as
a disaster, I'd also have to say that most of the harm (and most of the bad
feeling and a great deal of the resentment) has come from the self-elected
mainstream.

        I was invited last year to take part in a quite prestigious poetry
event in Bologna. I got there through the influence of a French poet who is
interested in my work. There was one other English poet there, the one
provided by The British Council: a young woman who had had one small book
of poems published by a 'major' publisher. Her entire reputation rested on
this book: about 30 short tight poems.  I thought the poems were all right,
and the person even nicer. But I couldn't help finding it odd that someone
who had done so little, of whatever quality, should be promoted on such a
grand scale -- Bologna was her third international engagement in two weeks;
she had been sent to Japan, she had been sent to Mexico....  Next thing I
heard she was poet in residence at a prestigious British arts festival....
I couldn't  help thinking: what is the nature of this success? what is it
produced by?  Is it produced by a large number of readers responding
positively to the little book of poems with resulting celebrity status? I
had to doubt very strongly that that was how it happened, though her
readership will of course increase as a result of the BC promotion.  What
does this kind of "success" mean, and is it really anything better than the
success of someone like Andrew Crozier who has been writing poetry for
forty years, produced a substantial body of work which is clearly serious
and expert, and can be seen to be respected by a body of readers, but who
has never once, to my knowledge, been invited to read outside UK? Certainly
not by the British Council anyway.

        He's never complained, and I don't want to complain on his behalf.
Brooding rancour and resentment are disabling in every way.  We just need
to take a cool look at what is actually going on. That instance of Official
Institutional Promotion was one of the things to persuade me that
popularity is not what success is about in those zones.

        I expect that plenty of non-mainstream, "radical" or (whatever)
poets or whatthe hell just Poets, have the right to feel perfectly
satisfied about the dissemination of their work through a comparatively
efficient small-press publishing network. Or several such. And with that,
you'd expect, the right to be considered a part of the history, but this is
strenously denied by the Centralists. If you look at the reviews CONDUCTORS
OF CHAOS  received in the respectable organs the tone was again and again
one of smug centralist disdain: "Who are these pople? Where have they come
from?" Viz Harry Smart's review in The Oxford Quarterly, which was actually
entitled "How Not to Write Poetry" Or Hugo Williams' review of the Paris
C.O.C. reading in TLS.  Neither of these contained any actual criticism at
all, neither of them attempted to confront any of the poetry; it was
entirely a matter of well, everyone KNOWS these people are nowhere, it's
not necessary even to say so, it is merely an opportunity for taking the
disdain for a walk. "Here I am in the centre doing very nicely thank you
very successful indeed, everyone says so, and look at these extraordinary
fringe people up to their antics in the margins. What wierdos they all are,
how pathetic of them to think they so much as approach the real tradition
of English poetry as understood by we who know and succeed......"   "No
wonder," Williams said, Nobody reads them."   Don't they?  How many more
readers does Hugo Williams or Harry Smart have than Iain Sinclair or JH
Prynne or Barry MacSweeney?  Twice as many? Ten times as many?  Five more?
Ten less?  Nobody knows.  Both I and Douglas Oliver wrote to the TLS
complaining about the disdainful tone of Williams' review and its
assumptive statements -- straightforward, reasonable letters, which of
course were not printed because the TLS has a policy of not printing what
they choose to think of as the Opposition.


        It's my contention that if our "mainstream" were actually a
Mainstream and actually in the central tradition of British poetry it
wouldn't need  to adopt these threatened and offensive poses against
difference. The harm done by those kinds of reviewing is not just a matter
of indiscriminate dismissal of outsiders, it is also a technique for
maintaining the fiction of acceptance, the structure of which John Corelis
speaks, which actually has as much to do with the substance of poetry
around here as has the World Cup. And the fiction of a cohering body of
work which has been successful because of inhering qualities.

        "Mainstream" poetry is as heterogeneous as anything outside it,
with Geoffrey Hill on one side and Wendy Cope on the other---of what can
they possibly both be members except sellability? And the sellability, I've
already suggested, can be arranged.  I don't know of any describable
features of the writing in this success-zone which can't be located outside
it.  There is talk of "accessibility" and yet Lee Harwood doesn't exist;
there is talk of "democracy" and Douglas Oliver doesn't exist; there's talk
of "wit" and Tom Raworth doesn't exist.... The list could go on for pages.
You either get promoted or you don't and that's likely to be a matter of
where you are in certain circles at certain times and, above all, how much
sheer effort you put into it. The mistake of the "left" was to think it
would just happen of its own accord.

        I'm basically agreeing with your thesis about decentralization but
wondering why you then want to re-establish central government almost
immediately, on the basis of commodity-value as if that were not an easily
manipulable factor. I have difficulty with your paper (and more so with the
book which preceded it) -- much as I admire the cool exactitudes--- when it
accepts a new centrality on face value without regard for the vast
promotional machinery which operates here, and elides success with standing
in a very heavily stage-managed arena.

        And anyway, what about Pam Ayres?


best wishes,


Peter Riley




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