Paper Tiger, Burning Bright

Do you worry about writer's block? When Camus had it he rushed to his then mentor, Andre Gide, who said "you mean you can stop writing yet you still complain? What's up with you Albert?"

Camus' problem was that he had decided to be a writer. He was, after all, an existentialist. Why do you write? Did you jump or were you pushed? Who do you write for? Thomas Love Peacock said that poets are wasters of their own time and robbers of that of others. Is writing by its very nature a selfish activity, a solitary sin? With the need for voluntary tutors to help illiterates, with Africa starving, with the Samaritans understaffed handling all the young poets that phone in, can locking yourself away ever be justified?

Some justify their selfishness by emphasising that their sacrifice is for the benefit of all, because they are society's antennae, the nearest to prophets and telepaths that this nihilistic age has. These starving artists in their uniforms from Oxfam charge over the top in a daring raid on reality and return with their wounds which they invite us to lick. Do they write to express, confess or merely impress us with their Angst threshold when they tell us that "lonely clouds make shadows on the wind", that "roses reek of mortality" and that "life's a sexually transmitted disease"? Others use philosophy to back themselves up. Wittgenstein thought that language and reality shared a logical form and that by exploring one mode, the other was enriched, and that man's instinct was to explore. Chant his name repeatedly next time the spouse wants to drag you away from your garret.

But let's not dismiss this latterday pretension until we've heard from the Greats. Plato, in The Republic, said that "Poetry is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth". Goethe thought that words were 'foppish' and he would have preferred to "speak like nature, altogether in drawings". Despite these warnings, so many wordsmiths carry on thinking that they will find something. Tolstoi knew a bit about finding things but he thought that the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. Is this where the path of discovery leads? Wherever it goes, Shakespeare must have got there first. We know very little about the man but we do know that at the age 46 he decided to pack it all in. Where does that leave us?

It leaves many of us sitting at writers' workshops. Hemingway in his Nobel acceptance speech said that "writing is at its best a lonely life. Organisations for writers palliate his lonliness but I doubt if they improve his writing." But we try, don't we? I wonder why. There's no hope for most of us. One friend told me that writing was her life and she didn't want to talk about it. Another pointed out that art in general makes us more observant about the world; that, for instance, people only fully appreciated sunsets after Turner had painted them. There's something in this, I think. The observation and analysis necessary for writing can bring details to our notice and add new perspective. And what holds for sunsets holds for self- portraits too, I guess.

Writing can also be a refuge from the hurly-burly, a way to distance ourselves from some unwanted episode, analyse it, make it bearable. In the jungle we would scream in terror from a tiger. With it behind bars we can admire its sleek fur, its powerful musculature. Writing provides the cage but for whom? Us or the tiger?

A survey of famous twentieth century people has shown that writers resemble each other more so than artists, politicians or any other group do. They tend to be only children who disliked school, often had a chronic childhood illness, came from unhappy homes, entered insecure marriages and were prone to suicide, drink and crashing their cars into trees. Writers, perhaps through the isolation of their working conditions are frequently misanthropic, the best of them especially so. Henry James died a virgin. Tolstoi died wishing he could become one and Marcel Proust... well we all know about him.

My friends have had less troubled lives but well over half have suggested that writing is a substitute, the imaginary playmates of childhood rationalised beyond the fantasy lovers of adolescence into almost believable characters. As Mauriac said, "A writer is essentially an inadequate man who doesn't quite resign himself to lonliness". And since so many inadequate people are attracted to writing it's no surprise that literature destroys so many of them. If you want to know why there's so much sick literature around, just look at who writes it.

But don't despair. You can of course become a critic. You lose the thrill of doing an emotional striptease but if writing is your life you can still contribute indirectly to upholding the standards of literature. Writers need all the help they can get. However, a critic has to ensure that he is more than just a back seat writer, he must at least be widely read. Only a writer can afford to have a narrow range. I talked to a critic once whose mouth broke the speed limit while his brain was stuck in reverse and soon realised that the only way to broaden his mind would be to put his head through a mangle. The casual critic can indeed palliate loneliness and if that's what you want them fair enough but if you take writing seriously then perhaps you should go the whole hog and take heed of Jean Cocteau's words. "Literature is impossible. We must get out of it. No use trying to get out of it through more literature; only love and faith allow us to get out of ourselves."

A society called EXLIT, soon to open a branch near you, exists to help you through the difficult period of withdrawal. It is too painful to endure alone. I wish you luck.

(Published in Jennings, issue 7)

Popularising poetry in the UK

"The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes", wrote William Sieghart in 2008. But despite the hype, poetry sales are low. Though sales aren't the only metric of success, they indicate something about the nature of the "interest" that poetry attracts. It seems that neither the public or other poets rush to read the latest work of established experts. In a recent Telegraph article, Philip Hensher points out that Sean O'Brien's "The Drowned Book" has (according to Nielsen BookScan) sold 2,715 copies in Britain to date. How can this type of poetry be made more popular? Before this can be answered it's worth asking why we should try to popularise it, and whether reading or writing should be prioritized. Possible responses include

• Greater booksales and more workshops will lead to poets becoming richer. Workshops and university courses are far more profitable than writing books.
• If the base of the pyramid of writers is widened, the height will be increased - we'll get better poetry.
• It's a "good thing" for culture that poetry become more popular, and good for the individuals too.

I'll look first at readership trends, then writing trends, then at various initiatives.

More readers

How big an audience should poetry hope for? In "Staying Alive", Neil Astley wrote "the wider public, whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s". There have always been poetry books that have sold fairly well (Pam Ayres in the UK for example) but haven't attracted critical acclaim. More rarely, respected books are given a PR push (in the UK Betjamin, Hughes etc).

I've heard it said that poetry used to be more popular and central in society than it is now. It's true that Byron sold in a big way. However I have my doubts about Golden Ages when poetry books sold by the cartload. Whatever the social factors that were present then, markets and social pressures are different now - middle-class pretension no longer controls the media, and people no longer have to pretend to like poetry or display poetry books on their shelves. And I think that some kinds of good poets will only ever have a small audience.

The statistics relating to sales of serious poetry books currently aren't encouraging

• "In the US there are 900 regular buyers of hardback poetry books and 2500 regular buyers of paperback poetry books" ("Everybody wants to be a poet", The NYT, Aug 29th, 1979, p.C17, M. Kakutoni).
• "A recent Arts Council study notes that only four per cent of the total sales of the best-selling 1000 poetry books in 1998-1999 were of contemporary poetry. The Arts Council study identifies Faber as responsible for 90 per cent of the sales ... and notes that collections by Seamus Heaney account for 67 per cent of these sales" (staple 54)
• "The survey found that the gender gap was most pronounced among poetry readers, with women outnumbering men by nearly three to one. This finding was confirmed by research commissioned by the Arts Council of England for National Poetry Day which discovered that the majority of poetry books are bought by women over the age of 45" (MsLexia, 2001)

Perhaps this only to be expected. The market for serious poetry may always have been vanishingly small, and text has more competition nowadays.

More writers

There are more visible writers than ever. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses. It's been suggested (by Gioia et al) that in the US the loss of poetry book sales to the public has been partially compensated for by the increase in the number of set books that creative writing students buy. Writers buy each other's books. Ron Silliman in his Blog points out that "The rise from 30 post-avant poets to 3,000 has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of readers of poetry, but not, however, in the number of readers per book". Perhaps this too can be taken as evidence that poetry-reading has reached its natural level, increasing only as the number of poetry-studiers do.

Perhaps too much poetry is being published

• Hugo Williams, judging the 147 entries for the Forward Prize, wrote in the Guardian (July 2010) that "an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really. That's too big a number of books in one year in one country to put out."
• "There's too much bad poetry being published, polluting the pool." - Robin Robertson (Jonathan Cape editor)
• There are only 30 poetry books worth publishing each year - Don Paterson (Picador editor)

Elitist? My (perhaps overly generous) take on what they mean is that given the parlous state of "serious" poetry it's even more important that the bad doesn't drive out the the good. Performance poetry - Slams and otherwise - is on the up in the UK. So is online poetry and the use of poetry in literacy courses and therapy schemes. But just as Modern Opera goers won't be consoled by the success of Beyonce, so I doubt whether those quoted above are pleased by poetry's popularity.

Initiatives

Let's for now take for granted that extra poetic activity is a good thing. How can it be achieved? There's no shortage of material describing how cults, political parties, charities, etc can increase their activities. Groups can make current members do more evangelising to attract new members. In these isles, several efforts have been made to widen poetry's appeal. Targets have been identified and poets have been funded to help expand poetry into these markets. Targets include

• Radio 3 and 4 listeners
• Newspaper supplement readers - There may not be many poetry reviews in UK newpapers, but some of them are trying to widen poetry's appeal without dumbing down much.
  • For 3 years the Independent on Sunday had a column where a modern poem (sometimes just a year or so old) was "explained" by Ruth Padel. She made a book out of these columns ("52 Ways of Looking at a Poem" - extracts are online).
  • The Guardian ran monthly online workshops.
• Women over 45
• The professions - Doctors, Lawyers, Scientists, etc - Poets in Residence have made inroads
• The mentally ill
• Music lovers - especially Dylan and rap fans. We even had a member from Radiohead on the Next Generation Poetry panel.
• Book readers - in particular library-goers
• Celebrity groupies
• Teachers of literature
• Anyone who's interested in anything! - people who like sport or religion, for example. I read that Poetry (Chicago) are thinking of providing a service to help poets place work in non-poetry mags. If you have a poem that mentions yachts they'd tell you which Yachting mags might take it.

More generally we have poetry in subway trains, National Poetry Day, and active US-style laureates.

Arts Council England has produced Thrive! poetry project: strategic development report. Here are a few extracts

• Fragmentation and points of connection - Changes within the poetry sector are such that many question the traditional primacy of publishing and the significance attached to becoming a 'published' poet and the critical and popular success of ensuing publications. At present, a poet's significance might be judged by one or more of: publication in collections, publication of individual books or CDs, invitations to perform, size of live audiences, and prizes received. Linkages across and between the different strands and niches of the sector are poorly understood and documented.
• The established order - Many believe that at present there is an 'establishment' comprising a small number of poets and organisations with close personal connections to each other, which tends to dominate funding, publishing, media coverage and prizes.
• Reaching out to audiences - The sector is quick to point out that poetry, for all its potentially wide appeal, is a relatively 'difficult' art form that rewards sustained engagement. As a consequence the sector is keen that new audiences are exposed to poetry and encouraged to build their relationship with it, in an appropriate manner. Most feel that an appropriate manner means not denying or diluting poetry's complexity, and yet not giving the impression that poetry is only suitable for highly educated and dedicated enthusiasts.

Genres

What type of poetry will attract the masses? Does it have to be dumbed down or is it just a matter of selecting just the more accessible work of the greats?

I suspect that poetry has of late become more polarised. Nowadays much of the poetry that people read doesn't get counted in the official statistics as poetry. In the UK John Hegley and John Cooper Clarke appear with non-poets. And Performance poetry is more popular than it used to be. I suspect that Forms still have a special (though perhaps no longer privileged) place in the hearts of the common reader.

Genres may adapt to suit new media. People wanting a taster in poetry are quite likely nowadays to start on the WWW. It's been suggested that there could be poetry download sites (like music downloads)

Retention

Once a new poetry reader is on board they need to be given things to do. Too often people drawn into poetry by Residencies, best-sellers etc lose interest. My feeling is that non-anthology UK poetry bestsellers don't lead readers into the poetry world. Ted Hughes' book of poems about Plath leads to biography. And it's not clear where Heaney leads anyone - his claggy surfaces are rich enough for many to look no deeper. Follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and have too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books.

I don't think poetry has anything comparable to Eco's bestseller "The Name of the Rose". "it was not expected to be anything close to a best-seller... Eco himself has admitted that the first hundred pages were deliberately opaque, a sort of semi-permeable membrane that allowed passage to only the most dedicated reader. ... The novel has since taken its place as a contemporary classic, a work that for many readers has become a stepping stone from popular fiction into the world of modern literature."

One way to lock new poetry readers into a lifestyle commitment is to turn them into writers. My introduction to the poetry world was via library books of dead poets. I presume modern poetry books were there too, but I didn't recognise any of the poet's names so I didn't borrow their books. By chance one public library was the evening venue for a writers group. This led to my discovery of poetry magazines (available only by post). It was a slow journey. The web has changed all this - subcultures are no longer hidden. There are sites that let one slide from reader to writer, and anyone can edit their own magazine. This activity is hard to compare statistically with that of previous generations. My impression is that the web is helping to increase the membership of writers groups (and reading groups) and may be helping to delay the reduction in booksales.

I think that the poetry book market is in recession and institutional publishers are retreating to their heartland - the stuff that only poetry can do. Comedy? Leave that to stand-ups - they do it better. Narrative? Flash writers do it better. You may not like "pure poetry", "specialist poetry" (call it what you will) but I can understand why funds concentrate on it. It's meant that the gap between "high" and "low" poetry has been emptied, so that there's less flow and intermixing between the extremes (to the detriment of both, perhaps).

My suggestions are that

• Poetry reading and writing can be mutually re-enforcing. Contacts between to 2 activities should be kept open.
• More attention should be paid to keeping people interested in poetry after their initial trial. The sort of poetry that people first meet when they enter the poetry world may not be the poetry that sustains their interest. They need to be led beyond tempting though fruitless competitions and vanity press. If they liked Cope, what should they read next?

Pamphlet Publication in the UK

Pamphlets are becoming increasingly popular, for several reasons

• As objects they can afford to be more innovative than books.
• Some of the traditional book publishers are fading away.
• More people nowadays make a career from teaching writing and need publications for their CV. It can take years to assemble enough poems for a book. Pamphlets can be produced more frequently.
• A pamphlet needn't be padded with fillers like so many books are.
• Some "poetry books" are little more than expensive pamphlets - books by Picador etc can cost 9 pounds and contain 39 pages.
• The book world is dominated by Heaney and co. Pamphlets inhabit an alternative world of prizes and outlets, where commercialism doesn't dominate.
• Prizes now exist for pamphlets. The PBS promote them too
• The WWW offers a way to sell pamphlets. Spineless pamphlets were never popular with bookshops.

Don't think of pamphlets as an easy option, a way to publish sub-standard poems. To take just one example, "Skylight" by Carole Bromley (Smith/Doorstep 2009) has 1st prize winners from the Bridport and Yorkshire Open competitions as well as many other acknowledgements. Increasingly, poets who've already published books with reputable publishers are entering pamphlet competitions.

So how can you get your pamphlet published? Options include

• Mentoring - Fairly recently some mentoring schemes have started up (supported by Arts Council England) that scout for talent, provide help for a period and then offer the chance of publication. Smiths Knoll used to seek candidates from people who submit to their magazine. Faber had a network of talent scouts. tall-lighthouse have their pilot project
• Competitions -
  • Pighog (deadline January)
  • Flarestack (deadline March)
  • The Poetry Business (Smith/Doorstep, deadline March)
  • Cinnamon Press (deadline 31st March)
  • Templar (deadline May - they also do quarterly Templar Portfolio Awards )
  • Prole (deadline 30th June)
  • inksweatandtears (deadline 22 Sept)
  • Rialto (deadline November)
  • Iota (Ishots, deadline November)
  amongst the organisations that run competitions.
• Publishers - There are some specialist pamphlet publishers. A few publishers print pamphlets as well as books.

What's clear from all this is that participating in the poetry scene and getting published in magazines helps significantly when you want a pamphlet published. In that respect, like many others, pamphlets are like books.

Read also

• Helena Nelson (Happenstance Press) in conversation with Lindsay Macgregor (DURA)
• Issue: An Economy of Talents by Paul Maddern for more about UK poetry pamphlets
• Carrie Etter's list of pamphlet publishers
• Should poetry pamphlets be themed? (Helena Nelson)
• What do pamphlet publishers look for (Helena Nelson)
• UK poetry-pamphlet competitions (Helena Nelson)
• Fiona Moore's article about selling her poetry pamphlet
• Roy Marshall's Putting a poetry pamphlet together
• Roy Marshall's Putting a poetry pamphlet together article in The Friday Poem
• Claire Trévien's The journey to a debut poetry collection
• Emma Lee's Reasons Poetry Manuscripts get Rejected

Poetry and Society in the UK

An attempt to list the participants in the UK poetry scene, map some of their interactions, and describe their impact on the non-poetry-loving public.

The Players and their reputations

Many parties participate in the creation of the canon. In this section I'll briefly introduce them. In the next I'll look at at their interactions. The parties are roughly classified as follows

• Media
  • Anthologisers - Traditionally they have quite a lot of power, marginalising and reviving writers.
    • General - The Motion/Morrison anthology of the 80s provoked several reactions, in particular "A Various Art". Recent anthologies assembled by non-UK people ("Oxford Guide to English literature", "Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry") have reassessed the canon presented in these older anthologies - out goes Douglas Dunn, in comes J.H.Prynne.
    • Themed - Some of these (e.g. "The Faber Book of Love Poems") are aimed at the general public. Others (e.g. "A Various Art", "Naming the Waves") attempt to publicise a new school/tendency or destablize a prevailing one.
    • Annual - Two main publications
      • New Writing - sponsored by the British Council. Poetry and Prose. Mostly commissioned or agent-driven, I think.
      • The Forward Book of Poetry - prizes for best/first collection, best poem etc. Room for a few surprises amongst the short-listed pieces.
  • Magazines - The Poetry Review is far more influential than any others. The UK has few campaigning magazines though there are some women-only ones ("Writing Women", "MsLexia"), and themed ones (Shearsman - late-modernist, "Parataxis" - experimental). In the USA there are more single-school magazines - e.g. "The Formalist".
  • Book Publishers - Fewer nowadays. Does that make the remaining ones more important? Or have books in general become less influential? Smaller presses are making something of a come-back. A few publishers (Chatto, Oxford) produce(d) showcase books with about 6 new poets presented. "Forward Press" (founded in 1989, based in Peterborough) claimed to be the largest publisher of new poetry in the world. It went into creditors' voluntary liquidation on 29 November 2010. Forward Poetry now exists. They publish many anthologies (often themed) under various imprints.
  • Reviewers - Do they affect people's buying choices? Newspapers and publications like the Times Literary Supplement have few poetry reviews nowadays, and poetry magazines have an increasing rarefied audience. Even if reviews do affect sales, do book sales matter very much?
  • Newspapers - A few have weekly or even daily poems. Ruth Padel's column had an influence during her period on The Independent.
  • Radio - Programs like BBC radio 4's 'Poetry Please' reflect rather than influence public tastes.
  • TV - Negligible impact. Tony Harrison's V appeared on channel 4 and was much discussed - for the bad language as much as anything else.
  • Film - Negligible impact. My impression is that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" had a greater impact than "Sylvia".
  • Celebrities - Hughes, Heaney, John Hegley, Zephaniah and Poet Laureates attract column inches. They can be quite important, championing other poets.
• Education
  • Academics - Little impact: a life-support system keeping poets' work alive long enough for others to notice.
  • Curriculum designers - These have quite a long-lasting effect. Current trends ("creativity" vs "cultural studies" vs "national heritage") will influence the choice of poets represented and thus the set-books.
  • Creative Writing/Workshops - in the US this is a self-sustaining subculture. The UK isn't yet at that stage.
• Performance
  • Performance Poets - An increasingly popular scene and a useful springboard, though not as big as in the days of Horowitz's Albert Hall show (1965).
  • Singer/songwriters - Not a factor in the UK but elsewhere the size of their audience is significant
  • Poetry festival directors - They network as well as decide who to invite to their festivals
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • Arvon writing tutors - Their recommendations have influence with publishers, editors, etc.
  • Initiatives - National Poetry Day (promoting populist poetry?) Poems on the Underground (promoting short poetry?)
  • Competition Organisers - The Whitbread awards (and to a lesser extent the National Poetry Competition and Peterloo competition) are covered in the press. The organisers pick committees of judges who'll preserve the status quo. If big competitions are judged by (say) McGough, some types of poems will be denied the chance of publicity. The Poetry Business competition winners have a book published - such competitions are much more common in the USA.
  • Local poetry groups (word of mouth) - negligible influence.
  • Poetry Society - Involved with many national initiatives, so its stance matters. It also publishes the "Poetry Review".
  • The Poetry Book Society - sells discounted books by post and recommends certain books. In 2004 they had a 100k ACE grant and about 2,300 members.
  • Grant-giving organisations - NESTA (who sometimes give 6 figure sums to poets), the Society of Authors, the British Council (who have an agenda).
  • Regional Arts - The Arts Council feeds money to regional offices. They are in control of grants and residencies, and can have quite an impact on the type of poetry encouraged in a region. Sometimes they support magazines and wider participation, sometimes they focus funds on individual writers. Here are some rough figures from the list of regularly funded organisations in 2008, to give you an idea of scale - Arvon £320k, Poetry Society £260k, New Writing Partnership £200k, Carcanet £110k, The Poetry School, £100k, Bloodaxe £90k, Anvil £90k.
• Movements - Based on common race, ethnic background, gender, style, etc - feminists, experimentalist, Welsh-speaking. These used to be loose agglomerations of friends who lived in the same region, though nowadays organisations like the "Long Poetry group" survive with a scattered membership. Improved communications (e.g. using the WWW) have made distance less of an issue.

Several of these agents are also importers.

The Action

If one wants to influence events or make progress it helps to know how these groups interact, and how one thing leads to another. Some of the bodies mentioned above have little power or influence but can act as a useful bridge between other bodies, formalising the "Old Boys Networks" of the past. Relations between these various power bases aren't always cordial - links are fluid and alliances temporary.

In the UK a small group of friends can be in control of various groups (publishers, judging committees), and from time to time people suspect a poetry mafia. The Poetry Society plays a central role in national events, as a transmitter at least. To take a hypothetical example, suppose a famous poet reveals in a Sunday newspaper supplement's interview to having suffered years of mental health problems. This opportunity could be exploited by poetry-as-therapy groups, who'll have a chance to write follow-up articles, appear on the radio, and have a more sympathetic reaction to grant-applications. An association with the "Poetry Society" would strengthen their hand, with the possibility of longer term National Lottery or National Health Service support. A "Poetry Review" feature would put the poets on the map. There'd be more workshop tutoring openings for sympathetic poets who in turn will be able to write more, and sell more. They may champion the cause of certain neglected poets from the past, or be asked to put together a themed anthology. The participating poets become better known and more influential, being asked to judge competitions. Before long there could be a small but perceptible shift in the poetry climate - even a shift towards a pre-existing pigeon-hole like confessional poetry.

A few examples serve to illustrate the diversity and transience of associations (some of which are one-way)

• Media
  • Magazines are read by contributors and other editors. Nowadays book publishers are unlikely to look there for talent. With major publishers less interested in the poetry market, new ventures have appeared linking poets to publication
    • Magazines are beginning to publish books again - "Rialto" and "Acumen" for example.
    • Creative Writing courses (UEA, Sheffield) are producing anthologies of work, magazines or even single-author books.
    • High-quality books are being published online - the Shearsman Gallery series for example.
• Education
  • Academia and creative writing are no longer in opposition - creative writing is now finding its way onto university syllabuses and MA courses. According to the Higher (Aug 6th, 2004, p.22) there are 40 creative writing post-graduate degrees in the UK (the US have about 300), and over 11,000 adult education courses.The established centres (Norwich, Machester, etc) act as magnets for writers, conferences and publications.
  • The UK usually lags behind the USA in curriculum development. Currently the trend is away from creative writing (and before that heritage preservation) towards cultural studies (Carol Ann Duffy, etc).
• Performance
  • The ability to perform is becoming more necessary for published poets in the UK, which has helped traffic in the other direction. Several semi-regular venues exist, even outside London. A mix of performance specialists and book-based writers read. Other outlets are festivals, schools and events run by libraries/councils. Poetry Slams are on the increase, the UK championships being televised by BBC3 in 2004.

    Recordings of modern poetry are uncommon though in Poetry Review V94.1 (Spring 2004) there was a CD featuring Lavinia Greenlaw, Tom Raworth, Keston Sutherland, etc.

  • With music as vehicle, poetry can reach bigger audiences. North America has a tradition of Poet/Songwriter links. Dylan, Cohen, etc produce lyrics which work on the page, and in the USA some performance poets use music and sell CDs. The performance circuit in the USA is sympathetic to musical support (percussion and bass guitar if nothing else). Joy Harjo speaks poetry over a musical/jazz backdrop (John Betjeman in the UK did it with a Cello, I seem to recall). And there are Performance Artists who use if not poetry then at least words - e.g. Laurie Anderson of "O Superman" fame.
    France (at least until the early 70s) had strong lyricist links too (Greco sang Prévert and Apollinaire, Jean Ferrat sang Aragon) and also there were singers who were considerable poets - Brel, Aznavour, Trenet, Barbara, Brassens.
    In the UK I think only the Beatles have gained any respect as lyricists.
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • The New Generation Poets campaign (mid 90s) made an impact and is still discussed a decade later - "A new wave of poets has been scooping the prizes", it was claimed. The Poetry Society administered it (when Peter Forbes was Poetry Review editor). Most of the choices were very safe bets - all the poets had been published by major companies. 20 poets (under 40 years old or having had their first book published in the previous 5 years) were promoted in bookshops, in a series of readings and in the media. Support came from BBC Radio 1 (a pop music channel), the Arts Council, the British Council, various smaller charities, Waterstones (booksellers), and the publishers of the poets. Not all the poets were enthusiastic about the venture. I suspect it boosted the career of some marginal figures (Sue Wicks, Sarah Maguire).
    The Next Generation Poets were announced in June 2004 - 20 poets who'd had their first book published in the previous 10 years. 7 judges: 3 poets (Motion, Armitage, Evaristo), a short-story writer, a member from Radiohead, someone from the PBS and a radio journalist. The 5 page article in the Guardian included no poetry but had a 2-page photo-spread.
  • National Poetry Day has become established. It's a chance for organisations to combine forces, keeping poetry in the public eye.
  • The slant of the Poetry Review editorship affects the UK poetry climate. During Eric Mottram's reign (1972-1977) experimentalists had a look-in. Currently one of the editors reviews for the Guardian and is sympathetic to the so-called avant-garde, re-opening that channel of communication. But such shifts can foment rebellion amongst the mainstream membership.
• Movements - Movements can have tie-ins with Anthologies, Magazines, Presses and Festivals. In some other countries (Italy for example) movements are self-defining and manifesto-driven (an early example being the Futurists). UK movements are less strident, more of a journalistic convenience. Indeed, the unity of such groups ("The Movement", "The Lakeside Poets", "The Martian Poets") is sometimes an illusion created by posterity or the press. Take for example "the Cambridge School". Nobody belongs it. By day they teach Keats to younger generations but under cover of darkness they experiment in their labs, producing small-circulation leaflets or books published by Salt, maintaining international contacts, and meeting yearly at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. Movements are amongst the most vulnerable components of the poetry community. Their survival depends on how well they exploit networking, but the marketing benefit of self-branding can cause internal tension -
  • Solidarity and individuality can be in conflict. In the UK black feminists found themselves fighting on several fronts - should they align with white feminists? with black males? or against black males, striving for representation within the black movement? In the USA, feminist writing had a more experimental edge than it did here (Emily Dickinson may have been the cause. Rich helped). In the UK Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley (and from the less experimental tradition Carol Rumens) were quiet at first then criticised the regressive poetic styles of feminist anthologies.
  • Forms are considered old-fashioned in some countries but in others they're used by the avant-garde. In the UK modernism never took hold and forms remain in the mainstream.
  • The mainstream-experimental divide waxes and wanes. Every so often like a lightning bolt a name crosses the chasm and tension lessens. Just as often each side remain invisible to the other. J.H.Prynne's a case in point. He's unmentioned in most general anthologies, though his collected poems were nominated for a New Yorker book prize. In China, a translation of "Pearls That Were" (only 500 copies of which were produced in England) has sold more than 50,000 copies. Edward Larrissey (author of 'William Blake' etc) wrote that Prynne's poems are as "rich, complex and powerfully original as any poetry written in the English-speaking world in this century". Andrew Duncan views J.H. Prynne's 'The White Stones' as being 'probably the most significant single volume of the 1960's.' Duncan, like many putative avant-garde sympathisers, reads widely. Though keen on Ted Hughes he thinks that "Larkin never managed to write a good poem,... The one moment which saves him from complete vileness is the phrase 'accoutred frowsty barn'". As Peter Middleton writes (in Poetry Review V94.1, p.53-54), "The avant-garde and voice-based poets don't share values, poetics or literary theories"

Career Paths

The traditional career path (publication in reputable magazines leading to pamphlet then book publication, then inclusion in anthologies) is still viable for some mainstream poets, but there are other ways in, exploiting the routes described above. Flexibility and risk-taking are required to exploit these options. Such an approach is hard to combine with a conventional 9-5 job or parenthood. Describing the US situation, Sam Hamill wrote that "A typical poet in North America finds it necessary to relocate every year for the first few years after college, and every several years for a couple of decades after that. ... The typical poet teaches". The UK isn't like that yet, but the signs are there. Unless one commits oneself to poetry wholeheartedly, one might be restricted to the traditional paths thus having one's progress delayed.

Winning the National Poetry competition will make a poet momentarily more famous, and may result in book publication, but this will not lead to climatic change unless another factor is present. Such a factor could be the unlikeliness of the person winning (by virtue of age, education, etc). It's unlikely that the winning poem will be innovative - the judges are mainstream and besides, they're in a committee. So the poet might need to follow the links listed above to amplify their influence. Fellow poets, the public and anthologisers will use different criteria to evaluate success. To be a successful published poet nowadays it's useful to be a performer and to be able to run workshops, but as we'll see later, there's a limit to how many groups one can join - some are mutually exclusive.

• The USA's Associated Writing Programs offer a different way to fame in a literary world - master-classes, guest readings, etc. I read recently that at Brigham Young University "3 poems equals one research paper published in a peer reviewed journal".
• John Hegley, Ian McMillan, etc have made the transition from stage to page.
• The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets became known by being the subject of critical discussion by scholars, being included in specialist magazines and invited to international conventions. Cambridge School poets follow a similar path.
• In the UK the range of options for career development has widened.
  • Lavinia Greenlaw is successful in publishing (with Faber) and major competitions. Her CV reads like a career guidance manual - 1990: Eric Gregory Award; 1995: Science Museum residency. Arts Council Writers Award, and British Council Fellow; 1997: Wingate Scholarship; 2000: three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also reader-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall; 2003: Cholmondeley Award. Jobs include arts administrator, freelance writer, reviewer and radio broadcaster, teaching on a Creative Writing MA Programme and working on the Tate and Hayward Gallery education programmes.
  • Mario Petrucci (Ph.D in physics) took a more performance/workshop-based approach with Blue Nose poets and ShadoWork. He's a qualified secondary school teacher and "a leading exponent for site-specific poetry and has devised a number of successful residencies involving public art", including a Year-of-the-Artist scheme which led to the schools Poetry Study Pack in Essex and Havering. He's a regular Arvon tutor and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. He's had a residency at the War Museum, London.
  Both these poets have tapped into many of the power-bases listed earlier. Neither align themselves to any particular movement (though each have specialisations: Greenlaw science, and Petrucci war). Both have written successful prose. Only by being active on many fronts do they have any hope of earning a living by writing.

Another route is to take advantage of Consultancy and Mentoring.

The Public

My suspicion is that very few poets are known to adults beyond the poetry world. Exceptions are: Motion (poet laureate who writes articles on Dylan, soccer chants, etc), Heaney, Paulin (known by arty types because he appears on a TV review show), Hegley, McGough and Zephaniah. I suspect more people have heard of Attila the Stockbroker and John Cooper-Clark than Simon Armitage, though Armitage (and Sophie Hannah) has recently become better known though his prose.

My guess is that while Arts-minded people might feel obliged to see particular films and plays, or read certain novels, they don't feel the same pressure to keep up-to-date with poetry. As Rupert Loydell said at Warwick University's "Poetry in Crisis" debate, "poetry as an art form does not seem to be part of our culture".

In the "Rhyme and Reason" survey, family, education and media were the 3 influences most cited as reasons for being interested in poetry. Much of the poetry world is isolated from the general public, though there are a few points of contact. Again, I'll group according to broad categories

• Media - The greatest outbursts of poetry tend to be after events like the death of princess Diana. Regular events like the Whitbread prize-giving and Poetry Day events still receive coverage. Whenever the poet laureate publishes a poem (most recently on England's rugby success) the media cover it. But the event that gained the most attention of late was probably when a writer was given £2,000 by Northern Arts in 2002. Words were painted on sheep's backs to create a new form of "random" literature. According to the poet "I decided to explore randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep."
  • Magazines - The general public rarely sees specialist poetry magazines - some are on sale in the Borders bookshop chain, but that's about the limit of their visibility.
  • Newspapers - Ruth Padel's column in the Independent tried to explain modern poems to the lay-reader. The columns were collected in a book - "52 ways of looking at a poem".
  • Radio - The people who listen get what they expect
  • Books - Only Heaney amongst living poets sells in worthwhile quantities. Themed anthologies dominate the poetry book sales, especially around Christmas.
  • Films - sometimes spark interest
  • Celebrities - people like Viggo Mortenson attract attention. The current poet laureate (Andrew Motion) does a good job of keeping poetry in the news. Benjamin Zephaniah writes for kids as well as adults, and got publicity when he was candidate for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
• Education
  • Traditionally, teachers of English who have been introduced to poetry through their work acquire an interest in contemporary poetry.
  • There are many more "creative writing" evening classes nowadays
• Performance - Hegley does slots in mainstream variety shows as a poet/stand-up-comic.
• Organisations/Initiatives
  • The annual Poetry Day, and in particular "Poetry on the Underground" give people the chance to meet poetry and poets.
  • Residencies (in museums, take-aways, department stores, etc) offer a way for non-poets to engage in poetry. Attempts have been made to target particular professions (scientists, etc) and Arts (poetry as "the New Rock'n'Roll").

Most of these brief encounters lead to nothing. Not infrequently follow-ups can be disappointing to the prospective poet who has too little experience to see beyond well-publicised Vanity Press organisations, and has too little experience of studying poetry to cope with many poetry books. The "Poetry on the Underground" scheme spawned a book which has sold well, and once someone buys a poetry book there's a chance that they'll buy another, though poetry books are thin and expensive compared to epic novels.

The WWW has become the first place to look for those with an emerging interest in poetry. This interest can easily spread to non-WWW activities - many writers groups have grown since the advent of the WWW, and poetry books are often bought online.

The Future

The WWW provides a hitherto unavailable direct link from the public to contemporary poetry material and dedicated poetry groups. This bypassing for traditional media/organisations might have several consequences

• The situation is likely to grow more dynamic as institutions (in the form of paper magazines) lose their influence and more international links develop. General anthologies will be treated with more suspicion. With groupings being WWW-mediated, it will be easier to belong to contrasting groups.
• WWW-books and magazines may gain more respect as paper magazines fade away. Arts Council England's 2007-2011 vision statement said "While not disregarding the benefits of traditional production and distribution methods, we want to see these presses and magazines take a lead in developing new methods of distribution and explore new uses of technology for both publishing and distribution", which may signal further pressure on paper magazines.
  As more people use MP3 players, audio poetry/magazines will grow in popularity.
• Major publishers are publishing even fewer books by new poets. In March 2007, George Szirtes in "The StAnza Lecture" said "Bloodaxe's noble act of redress in favouring women poets means that very talented young male poets have really only had Michael Schmidt's Carcanet to go to, before applying to less influential publishers, since houses such as Faber, Cape and Picador take on very few new poets of either gender". Small presses show signs of filling the gap - the recent Forward Prizes had more small press representation than even before.
• Poetry organisations will tend to prefer the general media to literary channels when advertising events.

In the UK the increase in creative writing Higher Education courses will open new, more stable, job opportunities and lead to more flexible career plans.

Once the links between organisations are better understood perhaps money can be more effectively spent on networking rather than on organisations or magazines. The rift between intellectuals (not just scientists) and poetry has led to poetry being starved of useful input and audience. Also the career difficulties of those forced to follow traditional routes is detrimental to the development of poetry. It may even prove useful to constrict the flow along certain links. An "anyone-can-write" initiative, broadening the base of the pyramid, is one way to bring new money to poets who are prepared to be tutors, but it may not help the poets' writing.

Postscript (June 2013)

Salt's decision in May 2013 to no longer publish new single-author poetry books was covered by The Guardian where they say that "Official figures from Nielsen BookScan show a sharp decline in the overall poetry market in the last year. There was growth of around 13% in 2009, when the market was worth £8.4m, followed by small declines in 2010 and 2011, and then a major drop of 18.5% volume and 15.9% value in 2012, when the overall value of the market fell to £6.7m. … Over the past two years, according to BookScan, the three bestselling poetry titles have all been by Duffy". Later The Guardian published Poetry is not drowning, but swimming into new territory, part of a wider discussion that the Salt news has precipitated. Here are some articles that are worth a read

• So. Farewell then / Salt poetry books ... ("A free-market capitalist system is no less bizarre, in its dealings with literature, than any old-style communist regime that favoured socialist realism and sent other forms underground" - Charles Boyle)
• The Health of Poetry ("We seem to be moving towards a model where people are kept ‘emerging’ for as long as possible – preserved in a kind of hopeful limbo, where they can gain lots of encouragement and support, but also spend lots of money on mentors and Arvon courses and MAs and competition fees and retreats" - Clare Pollard).
  ("When Arts Council England made its last round of funding decisions, support for writer development was massively increased at the same time that presses like Arc, Enitharmon and Flambard were told their annual funding was to be scrapped … Print on demand isn’t compatible with promoting poetry to a wider readership" - Neil Astley)
• Ripples on a smooth sea, or storm in a teacup? (Adrian Slatcher)

See Also

• "Poetic Culture", Christopher Beach, Northwest University Press, 1999
• Rhyme and Reason: Developing Contemporary Poetry
• "The Oxford English Literary History, vol 12, 1960-2000: The Last of England", OUP, 2004
• "Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry", A. Motion and B. Morrison (eds), 1982
• "Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry", Keith Tuma (ed), Oxford University Press, 2001
• "The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry", Andrew Duncan, Salt, 2004
• "A Various Art", Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (eds), Carcanet, 1987
• "52 ways of looking at a poem", Ruth Padel, Chatto & Windus, 2002

Breaking into print

Contents

• What's the point?
• Inhibitions and how to overcome them
• Planning
• Sending off - Where and How (and electronic submission)
• Keeping records
• Rejection
• Acceptance
• Marketing
• No Reply
• Shortcuts
• Conclusions
• References

So, you have some poems, or short stories or maybe even a novel. You all know about the Writers and Artists Yearbook, you've all seen stories and articles that you could have written yourselves, so why don't you send things off? Today we'll try to identify what's holding you back.

I'll talk first about general issues, then deal with the details about sending off, then what to do after. I'm not going to deal with blockbusters - I'm going to assume you're happy to start at the shallow end. If it all sounds like too much work, don't worry - I'll offer some shortcuts at the end.

What's the point?

I suppose firstly we should look at the incentives to sending things away.

• Money - Unless you regularly write articles, you won't get much, but it's nice to get paid for something you enjoy doing (especially if you get paid £20 for a haiku). I still treasure the £1 cheque I once got from the BBC.
  
• Fame - It's easy to be a big fish in the little pool of poetry or short stories
• Participation - Ever read something and thought "I could have done that"? Going from being a reader to a writer is a big leap, one you've already made. The next step is to become part of the writing community. It's a big step, like progressing from taking music lessons to becoming a public "performer". By going to workshops and sharing your work you're already well on the way to being a public performer. Now it's time to take the next step and get published.
• Improving your writing - Even if you're just writing for your own enjoyment, getting published can help. Writing without publishing is a bit like talking to yourself.
  • Angela Carter thought the writing process incomplete until the piece was published.
  • Poet Don Paterson wrote that "the poem begins with inspiration and ends in publication, not just completion"
  • Jane Holland (poet and editor) wrote in April 2008 that "people learn most about writing poetry from actually seeing their work in print. ... Contrary to popular belief, new writers don't learn as much from sitting in workshops ... To see a new poem in print is the best way to learn, because you are far more likely to spot your mistakes once a poem is set against others in a public context, and suddenly realise how to fix them"
• Because if you don't, others worse than you will!

To me nowadays publication is an integral part of the writing process. The only unpublishable pieces are those that aren't good enough - though some are harder to publish than others

Inhibitions and how to overcome them

• Fear of boasting - I've published 137 poems, 16 stories, 14 articles, 2 reviews, 1 academic paper, and 1 computer game, as well as various WWW stuff. How do you react to me saying that?
  • Am I showing off? - Modesty (false modesty especially) is something you'll need to overcome. It helps neither you or your audience
  • Is it all true? Even if it is, what hasn't been said? How important are the magazines? Why haven't I published a book? - You don't need to make your CV into a confession! If you've won 3rd prize in a local writers' group competition that makes you a "prizewinning author"!
• Fear of failure - Don't worry: only you will know. All the same, it can be a "character-building" experience. Writing is used in therapy and self-esteem courses, and the success of the writing can be confused with the success of the person. If you have low self-esteem you might have some dark periods on your way to success. One way round this might be to have systems, mechanisms and schedules in place so that you don't have to repeatedly motivate yourself to send things off - it becomes an automatic reflex.
  Try to remember that successful people fail more often than other people - the difference is that they keep trying!
• Dislike of marketing - In a "Paris Review" interview Kurt Vonnegut said that "In a creative writing class of twenty people ... six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by". When asked what distinguishes those two he said "They will probably be hustlers".
  Marketing doesn't come naturally to all of us. To be your own agent you may have to take a drink or two. But you'll get used to it. Or you go into "P.A." mode or Civil-Servant-mode, depending on your experience. Don't let it drain your creative juices. You could keep your submissions folder separate from your writing folder.
  The excuse of wishing to keep your art pure, untainted by commercialism, is no excuse at all.
• Fear of embarrassment once published - Use a pen name if you're worried that workmates or family might find out
• Fear of the expense - Well, mountaineering, horse riding or supporting Chelsea isn't cheap either. Publication shouldn't be costly but you may need to invest initially. It's recommended that you study a magazine before sending to it. Buying the magazines becomes expensive, but you can browse at Borders, Heffers, the University Library, or the Poetry Library at London. You may also be able to browse online. Postal costs shouldn't be an issue unless you're sending to the States. And there's always e-mail
• Fear that your work/ideas will be stolen - It happens, though rarely. It's one way to become famous.
• Fear that when your work's published it will be adversely reviewed - if your work's ever reviewed, just be grateful!
• Fear that you're too old - you don't need to be young and beautiful to embark upon a writing career. You can be 35 and still win "Young Novelist" competitions. You can be over 40 and make a splash. Venessa Gebbie (from zero to story-collection in 4 years) and Helena Nelson (poetry) burst onto the scene later in life and rapidly had many successes. They had more money, more time, more common sense and much more to write about than youngsters had. Blinking Eye Publishing promotes the work of writers over the age of 50.
• Fear of too much work - Don't know where to start? The Writers and Artists yearbook lists hundreds if not thousands of addresses. It's hard to know where to begin. Keep listening ...

I stopped being a passive reader and realised I could be part of "the printed world". I read actively, asking myself "could I do better than this?". After that, I conquered my other inhibitions without too much trouble.

Planning

I mostly do literary stuff. Every few months I plan ahead. I look

• at forthcoming competition deadlines (they're inflexible, so I consider those first)
• for magazines that I've not sent to for 9 months
• for my pieces that deserve to be published

It helps to know whether magazines will reply in days or months. I've a group of magazines that I regularly sent to, so I know what to expect. Every so often I try a new one.

For articles, poetry and prose, look out for themed issues of general magazines. Sometimes the only way to find out about these is to read the magazines, though often the magazine's web pages help. Also check for forthcoming anniversaries, especially when you can tie them with some contemporary event. Remember that magazines often plan months ahead.

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Sending off - Where and How

Good publishers are never short of authors, so don't bother replying to adverts in the press. The details about sending off vary a lot depending on the genre. An SAE is usually obligatory if you're not using the web or e-mail. There's no excuse - when Masefield was poet laureate he sent his official poems to the Times, even he included a stamped return envelope in case of rejection.

Poems and stories

There's is big split between literary and general outlets.

• Literary - The UK literary world is tiny. Don't think about sending a book off until you've had many pieces accepted. Remember, you're in competition with students from hundreds of Creative Writing courses whose homework includes having to submit work to magazines, so you can't afford to be amateurish.
  • Where? - don't aim too high or too low. League tables aren't easily obtained. For US magazines there's Jeff Bahr's US poetry magazine ratings which gives information like the following
    
    For literary outlets Duotrope lets you search markets by genre, word-length, etc. Or you can try Word Hustler. In the UK see
    • Magazines publishing short stories
    • Poetry Library archive
    The lists might look long, but many of the magazines come and go. Focus on the long-standing magazines, or magazines that you like. A UK list of worthwhile, feasible outlets for stories in print might have 5 mags. Tania Hershman keeps a list of UK literary story outlets (111 mags at the moment). For poems, 10-15 is a more reasonable number. See the Happenstance list of reputable publications for ideas.
    I wouldn't bother sending to competitions until you have a fair idea of what's likely to succeed.
  • How? - see submission guidelines. Some magazines are fussier than others, especially regarding multiple submissions, but you can't go too far wrong if you send a story or 3 poems along with a biographical note and SAE.
  • What? - read magazines and judge's reports. One of the most common reasons for a piece being rejected is that it's inappropriate. Some editors have pet dislikes and quirks (yet another poem about Paintings, yet another story about Alzheimer's, etc). Remember that editors like to provide variety, so throw in the odd joker. Larkin said that the poem he included in a submission "to make the others look good" was often the one that was accepted.
  • "Bio" and covering letter - I don't include a covering letter unless the guidelines say so or I'm sending to a magazine for the first time. Ditto with biographical notes. I keep them simple (town, family status, profession, recent publications) unless they specify otherwise. I keep a lit CV online.
    If you write a cover letter -
    • Try to name the person you're sending to (don't use "Dear Sir")
    • Say what's in the submission
    • Say why you chose to send it to that particular place
    • Give a brief bio and summary of past writing experiences
    • If it's appropriate, say how you might promote the resulting publication
    It's worth spending time on your bio because it might be published and it can affect the likelihood of your work being accepted. E.g.
    • The guidelines for "Anti-" magazine says - "Include a cover letter with your name, contact information, a contributor-note biography of 50 words or less, and a statement of 50 words or less on what you're against in poetry. This statement can be general or specific to your submitted poems, serious or tongue in cheek, broad or ridiculously minute."
    • The guidelines for the recent "Woman and Home" Short Story competition (the theme was PASSION) asked for a story of max 2500 words, a recent photo, and 200 words about yourself.
    • "Horizon Review"'s submissions guidelines say that You must include a 75 word biographical note
  • The 1st ten seconds - many pieces are rapidly rejected. Make sure your work doesn't fail at the first hurdle. Think speed-dating.
  • Avoid vanity press!
  If an editor's giving a talk it's useful to attend. You'll get a better idea of how they sift submissions and how ruthless they have to be. Here's what one UK small-press publisher wrote in 2013 about book submissions - "I know within a few sentences or lines whether I want to read on. If I don’t, I try to delay my reply for at least a few days, so that the sender can preserve the illusion that I’ve read the whole book, on which they may have laboured for years".
• Non-literary - Suppose you've written a humorous poem about Allergies. If stuck-up literary magazines reject it, look for non-literary opportunities. You might get published in Readers Digest, New Scientist, Men's Health, Supermarket magazines, etc. There's a literary magazine that's designed for doctors' waiting rooms. Letters columns are a useful way in to magazine publication.

Novels

Different rules apply! Get an agent! See a list of literary agents. Alternatively enter a competition where the winner has their book published.

Some magazines print chapters nowadays.

Preditors & Editors is "a guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers". It has examples of cover letters, legal advice and much else besides.

Articles

A huge market, one we should take more advantage of. Maybe the easiest thing to do is to idle in a newsagents for a while and browse through the magazines that interest you. Again, it's a matter of getting into the right mindset and becoming an active participant in the print-world. The money's often good, and you may not need to work too hard - exploit what you know rather than research. Use your past as a library.

Years ago I was asked to write an article about 'Children and Allotments' for a proposed local leaflet. It didn't take long to write. The leaflet wasn't produced in the end, so I put the article online. Where could I have sent it instead? Since then

• A Sheffield organisation found it and asked if they could use it.
• "Home and country" magazine found it and asked if they could use it.
• 2 TV companies have been in touch (Look East visited!)
• I've seen articles in Sunday supplements, food magazines. When Harrods publicised their roof garden, several spin-off articles appeared. 'Bricks and Mortar' (Times) had 2 pages about allotments, showing how they save money now that food prices are rising. No doubt Saga magazine, parenting magazines, and health magazines regularly deal with the topic, etc.
• The new towns in our area have brought community garden and allotments into the news. 2 of the 4 candidates in the local Trumpington elections mentioned their allotments in their literature!
• The Dept of Architecture and a Cambridge Art Gallery both had exhibitions about allotment buildings

The opportunities are there. It's all up to you! I think it's easiest if you're already a specialist in something - it's easier to adapt what you know than learn something new - but there are many outlets for common topics too. Many magazines have Travel sections (gone for a walk recently?), food sections and book sections. Or you coud just string together some things you like and call the article "50 reasons to be cheerful" or "5 best things to do" (both of these appeared in a recent issue of "Good Housekeeping"). Several magazines don't accept freelancers though - read the guidelines or "Writers and Artists".

As Jane Wilson-Howarth's pointed out, a headline-grabbing title's very useful.

Don't neglect foreign markets - your knowledge of UK small literary magazines, or Cambridge, or pubs, may not be exceptional but some people in Canada for example may be interested.

And don't forget that you can use ideas more than once - if for example you get lost on holiday, you can use the episode in a travel article, a story, or a letter.

Exercise: List some skills or life-events that could be made into an article. Done anything strange? Anything you learnt something from? Any dinner party anecdotes you could write up? If your partner's trying to impress some new acquaintances, what do they say about you? What did your parents say to humiliate you when you brought a new friend home? How do your children describe you to their friends? What will be written on your gravestone?

Reviews

There are shortages of reviewers sometimes - magazines (especially small literary ones) sometimes advertise for them. Rattle magazine (in the US) have an online list of book that they'd like reviewed. If you ask for one they'll send it to you as long as you send them back a review.

Send off samples (preferably previously published ones) in the first instance.

Some people say that it's relatively easy to get reviews accepted, and that they lead to other opportunities.

Electronic submissions and the Web

Electronic submission to paper-based magazines is cheap and fast, but you still need to do your homework. Don't be sloppy! Many American magazines offer an online submission facility where you need to register first - you'll need to fill in a form but but it's nearly always free, and offers benefits. For example, you'll be able to track the progress of your submission and perhaps look at your record of previous submissions. On the right you'll see my attempts to be published in "Quick Fiction".

The web offers new writing opportunities, a foot in the door on the way to paper-based publication. Web-only publications are increasingly respectable (selections from online magazines are now regularly included in the Best American Series of annual anthologies; online editors can nominate their contributors for the Pushcart Prize; the National Endowment for the Arts permits up to half of one's qualifying publishing credits to be from online journals). Even if you self-publish on the web it can lead to recognition - for example, the BBC have interviews with people whose only qualification appears to be that they publish a blog.

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Keeping records

Don't send to the same place too often (Iota magazine said that one year a poet sent them 68 poems!). Don't send the same piece to the same mag (editors have excellent memories!). I keep

• a spreadsheet of who's rejected what
• A list of when I've last sent to each magazine
• A list of what's in the post

See my list of what's in the post (messy, but it does the job). I guess I average about 10 pieces in the post at any moment. Sometimes I have 30 pieces in the post.

To help me analyse my progress I make graphs of my results.

For literary outlets you could use an online database like Duotrope.

Not only will this help you track your submissions, but the response time, etc, is added to a database so that all Duotrope users can get an impression of how long they might need to wait.

Rejection

So you've read the magazines, prepared your manuscript, sent it off, filled in your spreadsheet. After a few weeks you notice an SAE on the doormat ...

The odds are rarely much better than 1 in 50 even in literary backwaters, so brace yourself. Of course, editors can have legitimate reasons for rejecting good work - they really might be full; maybe they really do have another piece dealing with exactly the same topic - but it's depressing all the same. There are many instances of classics (e.g. the first Harry Potter book) being rejected many times, so it's worth being stubborn. Less well advertised (and far more common) are the self-styled "neglected geniuses" who waste time and money bashing their heads against brick walls. I once had a poem accepted on the 15th attempt ...

If a piece repeatedly fails, maybe you should think about sending it to a different kind of outlet altogether. If the BBC turns your play down you could perhaps make it into a school play or a Whodunnit evening. Your failed novel for adults might be a blistering success with Young Adults.

People who send off material with autobiographical elements have particular trouble with accepting that it's not their soul being rejected, just their piece of writing. Even battle-hardened writers get hurt by rejections. E.g.

• I don't like receiving 2 rejections in a day. It happens.
• With e-submissions, e-rejections can arrive any when, even Sundays.
• I once got an acceptance from a mag with a note asking me to send more on straight away. The editor later replied saying something like "thanks, I'll stick with the first one"
• Some rejections make me wonder what else I could do - "This is a great read - it's extremely entertaining and very witty. I don't think it's quite right for ..."

In the US there are agencies who will do the submitting for you. There's also

• the Rejection Collection site
• Literary Rejection on display
• Rejectionwiki (to see whether you have a standard, tiered or personalized rejection)
• "A Writer's Guide to Overcoming Rejection" by Edward Baker (Summersdale Publishers, 1998)

Anything other than a standard printed rejection slip (as from the New Yorker below) is progress. I once received a rejection letter which was 2 packed A4 pages long, from Interzone

Below is a more recent (2008) rejection I received. It softened the blow
Thank you for sending us three of your poems for consideration for Magma 42. I have now been able to read and re-read them a number of times and I've enjoyed much in them. They respond very interestingly to the issue's theme of engagement with feeling and I've held on to them till now in the hope of being able to take "Believing in myself".
However, I'm afraid this isn't going to be possible. The response for Magma 42 has been enormous, greater than usual, and we've received well over 2500 poems. With the pressure on space, it won't be possible to take one of your poems, but I thought you might like to know it was a near miss.

It's worth holding on to rejection slips - the editors might become famous. Here are 4 of the rejection slips I got from David Almond ("Skellig", etc).

Occasionally one gets rejections like this -
Remember Goethe's advice to the misanthropic young Schopenhauer ... if you wish to enjoy (your) life, then you must ascribe value to (love) this world (as it is). Somehow you need to get out of yourself, your intellectual self.

Some online mags offer detailed rejection slips. Here's one I received

 
Editor 1 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 1 Comments:    I feel like I'm on a tour run by the Ghost of Christmas past.

Editor 2 Vote:        No
Ed. 2 Comments:    Too much distance from the subject

Editor 3 Vote:        Yes
Ed. 3 Comments:    Pulls its strands together nicely.

Editor 4 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 4 Comments:    Intriguing.

Editor 5 Vote:        Yes
Ed. 5 Comments:    Great sense of style and voice.

Editor 6 Vote:        Maybe
Ed. 6 Comments:    I like the writing, but I'm not sure I understand what's going on.

Here are some tricks I've used to lessen the pain

• As part of your planning, assume a piece will be rejected and have a place ready to send it to next - bounce it straight out again without brooding
• Use personal and embarrassing material in your work so that you'll be secretly relieved when it's rejected
• Have someone else open the envelopes.

Acceptance

• Rejoice! One acceptance can make up for handfuls of rejections
• Success breeds success - you become more confident; editors recognise your name; and you can add more to covering letters. Once you've published your novel you can write articles about how you did it!

You'll be expected to write a bio if you've not already done so. Here are some examples

• Catherine Smith's The New Bride was shortlisted for last year's Forward First Collection. Very drunk on her own hen night she sang her way down Streatham High Road. She is still married (Rialto)
• Sarah Oswald writes fiction inspired by places. She grew up in Canada, lived as a traveller, spent many years in Wales and now lives in Devon. It's her ambition to write something as beautiful and disturbing as walking on Dartmoor in the rain with no map and a podful of ISIS ... (Riptide)
• Erik Campbell: "One afternoon in the summer of 1994 I was driving to work and I heard Garrison Keillor read Stephen Dunn's poem "Tenderness" on The Writer's Almanac. After he finished the poem I pulled my car over and sat for some time. I had to. That is why I write poems. I want to make somebody else late for work." (a sample from Rattle's submissions page)

Exercise: Write a bio. It can be straight or wacky. Max 75 words. Say what sort of magazine/publisher it's for.

Marketing

If you have a book accepted, don't expect book-shops (even independent bookshops) to stock it, though you're welcome to try. Organise a local launch (in a bookshop perhaps) and organise some readings. You could organise for several blogs to feature you as part of a "tour". For poetry at least, don't expect adverts and reviews to help. Here's what the Shearsman editor wrote in 2010 - "I used to advertise, but found that it had no impact on sales. In fact, when I cut advertising completely, sales went up by 25%. This suggests that the only kind of marketing that works is the targeted variety. Reviews generate very little sales, although a generous notice in the TLS will have an impact that is immediately noticeable. The same holds for Ron Silliman's blog."

No Reply

When should you start chasing up? I never have. Some literary magazines take several months to reply anyway. Check first that you've read the guidelines - some magazines warn that if you send at the wrong time of year, or if you include insufficient postage, you won't get a reply. Others (especially if you submit by e-mail) say that if you don't get a reply within a month, you've been rejected.

If you don't get paid, well, eventually there's the Small Claims Court.

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Shortcuts

Sounds too much like hard work? Here are some alternatives

• Become a celeb first, then publish later - see Viggo Mortenson
• Apply for all the grants/awards you hear of. The Society of Authors and Regional Arts Boards can help. If you're young enough, try for a Gregory award.
• Try to get into any book you can. Some Regional Arts Boards fund anthologies. Find out what themed anthologies publishers are planning.
• Going to Arvon courses helps to meet the right people.
• Go to conferences. Mingle at coffee breaks.
• Put aside money to regularly enter the main annual competitions - Bridport (Poetry and Prose), National Poetry Competition, Peterloo Poetry Competition. Unknowns can win these.
• Consider WWW publications, local radio.
• Establish yourself in a niche market (SF, short-story reviewing, U3A workshops, etc) then "go transcendental"
• Find a gimmick. If you can sell 100 or so copies on the strength of radio interviews, press releases, you're viable. So corner the market on football poetry, allotment poetry, stories about twins.

Conclusions

Looking back, the mistakes I made were mostly to do with investing too little, too late. I should have more quickly subscribed to magazines (I didn't know they existed until my mid-twenties), went to a residential workshop run by a magazine editor, and entered competitions with more dedication.

(At the end, ask each person what they're going to do - pieces they're going to write/adapt, research they're going to do.)

References

• "Making Money from Writing", Carole Baldock (1998, but still useful)
• The Bookseller - a weekly magazine containing industry news and analysis (in public libraries)
• Roy Marshall's Where can I send my poems? Part 2

Organising a story collection

Ok, so you've had a few stories published, maybe even won a prize or two. Perhaps it's time you thought about a publishing a book. Though we're not in a golden age of story collections, the situation's not quite as bad as some people claim: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut short story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies", won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Short Review lists 96 short story collections published in February in the UK alone, so there's hope yet! Moreover, UK publisher Salt has started The Scott Prize (deadline 31st Oct - 45k words, 18 pounds entry fee) which will lead to publication of up to four more collections. Why not have a go!

But how should you organise your collection? Should you just chuck your best stories together? Probably not. The ordering of the stories needs consideration for a start, but you might want to (or need to) do more than that.

People mention several reasons for the popularity of linked story collections.

• Writers like them - some authors want to produce unified harmonious work
• Critics like them - Ra Page noted that "when you get a collection or - even worse - an anthology - all the [critics are] left with is either the anthology's theme, if they're interested, or just to list what's available in this collection, and pick out a couple of highlights."
• Readers like them - if they're used to anthologies (readers of ghost and Sci-Fi stories in particular are) then they'll be used to the pacing of disconnected stories, but for mainstream readers used to multi-volume series and doorstep best-sellers, by the time they've got to know the characters and location of a story, it's ended, and they have to start all over again. Or at least, that's what the marketing droids lead us to believe.

These pressures can lead to several reactions -

• A book might be planned from the start as a unified collection - almost an episodic novel. "Pavane" by Keith Roberts, "London" by Edward Rutherfurd or "Accordion Crimes" by E.Annie Proulx might be viewed that way. David Mitchell's interwoven "Ghostwritten" began as 3 separate stories but we worked them into a collection.
• Pieces may be adapted to fit together better, or keynote stories written to integrate existing pieces. When Hemingway was putting together "In our Time", he read Joyce's "Dubliners" and noted how "The Dead" helped integrate the other works, so he wrote his story "Big Two-hearted river" to do the same for his own collection.
• Better pieces might not be selected in favour of pieces that fit the collection better. Additionally, the collection can be given a misleading title, with "short stories" not mentioned on the cover.

One would expect a bunch of stories written by the same author over a year or 2 to have things in common. However, if an author doesn't write much the collection might contain decades of experiences and artistic phases. Venessa Gebbie (another author published by Salt) wrote her 1st collection's stories in 3 years - she wrote 200-250 stories in that time though, which may explain the variety of her book.

I think that were Dubliners written today, it would be sold by a major publisher as a novel - we're more tolerant of baggy novels nowadays.

But maybe this trend towards linked stories is on the wane.

Salt author Tania Hershman knows as much about collections as anyone. Not only does her book "The White Road and Other Stories" ("... an author dripping with talent, this is as good as modern reading gets" - New Scientist Christmas Books Special: Best of 2008) bring together a wide range of stories (from 100 words to thousands) but she also runs The Short Review, an excellent (maybe unique?) review site for short story books. Here are her views

Did you feel the need to have a theme for your book?
When I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing in the UK in 2003, I was under great pressure to not write short stories ("they don't sell" blah blah) and if I was going to insist on a short story collection "at least they should have a theme"! I had always wanted to do some kind of science-linked fiction, which isn't science fiction but what I would rather call "science-inspired fiction", so this is what I did: all the stories I wrote for my MA final manuscript were inspired by articles from New Scientist magazine. However, I didn't have quite enough for a book, and I also wanted to include a number of flash stories, very very short stories I have been writing a great deal of since the MA. When Salt accepted my collection, they didn't care at all about a theme or anything, which was very refreshing. Thank goodness for small presses who just love short stories!

What affected the choice of pieces and their order?
I decided to alternate between longer stories and flash stories, I thought it might work like a sort of sorbet, something intense and small, in between courses. There are mixed opinions about this depending on the reader and whether they like flash stories or not. The collection contained all but one of the science-inspired stories I had written, because of space, and pretty much all the flash stories; I am not a writer who produces vast quantities, so didn't have any choice but to include almost everything.
When it came to order, I just couldn't do it myself, I could "see" the stories anymore, couldn't see how a reader might read them all, so I printed them all out and my partner James laid them on the dining table and shuffled them around. There are various themes that emerge when you see them all together, and he ordered them so stories that might be considered similar weren't next to each other, for variety. I wanted the title story to be the first story, and the last story was picked because it echoes some of the themes from the first story, as the ending of a short story should have some resonances of the beginning, I think.

Did you reject some stories merely because they didn't fit?
Nope!

In the collections you read, do you see a trend towards linked stories?
Nope! I read a short story collection a month, at least, to review in The Short Review, and I don't believe I have read any linked collections since we started, a year and a half ago, and it's not that I deliberately avoid them. There are a few on the site under the category "novel in stories", but very few. Most short story collection these days are published by the wonderful small presses, and they don't buy into the myth that if you pretend a short story collection is a novel, people will buy it. They are happy to proudly shout about short story collections, thank goodness!
To give you an idea, here are how some of the authors we've interviewed on The Short Review answered the question "How did you choose which stories to include and in what order?"

• Warren Adler (New York Echoes) "I tried to put the stories in some rhythmic order that was purely subjective, trying to place them by judging dark to light, serious to lighter, less irony to heavy irony."
• Allison Amend (Things that Pass for Love) "There were some practical considerations: start strong and middle strong and end strong. Don't put all the really short ones next to each other. Separate the 'golf stories.' And then [my editor] Gina organized them to her own particular logic. I didn't even ask her for an explanation."
• Elizabeth Baines (Balancing on the Edge of the World) "I think people rarely read collections from cover to cover like novels - I don't anyway - but I still think order is important: an overall impression is created, and the opening and closing stories, which I think people are most likely to read first, will be taken as pointers to the whole book. Since irony is on the whole my stock-in-trade, I decided to begin with two of the more comic stories, while beginning and ending with two stories which best summed up a main preoccupation of the collection: that of the unacknowledged or surprising viewpoint. It was interesting to see the different ways in which my stories 'talked' to each other according to the order in which I placed the rest of them - creating different rhythms of mood or style or situation. In the end I found a journey through situations and subject matter - stories about adults to stories about childhood and back again via stories about parenting - which also to some extent followed developments of mood and style."
• Richard Bardsley (Body Parts) "The order was dictated to a certain degree by the structure of body parts I'd chosen, which ran from head to toe, the opposite of the old song, Dem Bones, though I obviously didn't include every single minute part of the body. As for deciding which stories to include, the collection was written at random rather than consecutively, and since I wanted the styles, voices and tone of each one to vary, I went back a few times, had a cull and started again from scratch if successive stories became too repetitive. It all sounds rather calculated but it actually happened quite harmoniously."
• Nona Caspers (Heavier than Air) "The final book order came from a brilliant friend of mine, Maria Healey. She's also a writer. I didn't know how to order the final stories once the book had been accepted for publication, and she read the manuscript and said - here, try this. I think order is partly intuitive and partly world building and juxtaposition of texture and tone."
• David Gaffney (Aromabingo) "Me and my editor Jen of Salt press went through everything I had, and selected from there. Jen at Salt is very good at working out the running order - I sometimes wonder whether with very short fiction people dip in and out randomly. It is possible to organise my short fiction much more - I have several stories set in offices, and several in shops, several about relationships, and these could have been put together, but ... .I'm not sure this structuring would add anything."
• Peter Hobbs (I could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train) "Due to the variety of styles I'd been writing in, it did look like it would be a problematic process. More of a mess than a collection. But there were underlying themes that recurred in many of the stories - some of which I was completely unaware of as I wrote - and after we (my editor Lee Brackstone and I) looked at what I had, it became clear we were pretty much agreed on which pieces worked, and the collection itself came together. Once they were collected it began to look almost organic, as though they'd always been designed that way. Ordering them was entertaining - it's an odd art, and was mostly done by instinct."
• Roy Kesey (All Over) "Somewhere along the line - two or three years ago, I guess - I realized that I was closing in on having enough material for not one collection but two. I went through all of the stories, trying to sort out a way to split them up more or less evenly. None of the usual suspects (time, place, character, theme) stepped forward, so I went back to the matter of form, and ended up splitting the mass down the middle, with the more structurally playful work to one side and the less-so to the other side. The stories in All Over are all from the more-so half. Once that was done, I wanted the book itself to share the same conceit, so after discarding a few stories that no longer seemed quite strong enough to pull their weight, I did what I could to arrange the rest such that no two stories in a row have too much in common in terms of length, form, character, or point of view. That turned out to be a not-quite-possible puzzle, but it was fun work all the same."
• Paddy O'Reilly (The End of the World) "I decided early to put only first person narrative stories into the book, told by wildly different narrators in wildly different styles. Not just as an indication of my split personality (!) but because one of the joys of writing stories is the freedom to be anyone. I hoped readers would feel that freedom too. As for order, that was a case of looking carefully at how the stories held each other up. Kind of like a string of different objects all tied together and trying to float."

Even experts can have second thoughts. When her book "The Beggar Maid" was at first page-proof stage, Alice Munro withdrew the book at her own expense and substantially rewrote it.

See Also

• "Oceans of Stories: Collections, Sequences and the Short Story" (a conference run in 2008)
• Short Story Collection Contests, Part I: The Reading and Judging Process (Laura Maylene Walter)
• Short Story Collection Contests, Part II: Submission Pitfalls and Tips (Laura Maylene Walter)

Discussion points

• Have you ever been impressed by a collection's organisation?
• Have you read a "novel" that was really a collection of short stories? Janice D.Soderling replied mentioning "The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan which, though it is called a novel, is actually an intricate weave of short stories from the perspectives of eight women. Each story can be enjoyed completely separate from its mates, but together they give more. Tan even has a kind of index to help the reader keep track of who is who - until we learn to know them.". She also mentioned Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".
• Do collections require organising? Don't readers just dip in nowadays, making their own play-lists?
• I've not seen an author produce a book of stories and poems, though several (Updike, Lasdun, etc) could have. Why is that? And would the reasons apply also to mixing Flash Fiction with longer stories?