Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

When the Next Gen poets were announced on a hot weekend in June, a friend and I decided to gather as many of them as we could from our shelves (the only collections we couldn’t muster between us were Leontia Flynn’s and Catherine Smith’s) and head off for a picnic with 18 of ‘the best new poets working in Britain today’. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, the poems we read that day could be considered perfect picnic fare; no sudden storms, sand in the sandwiches or ants in the pants. We stayed, that day, well within our comfort zone.

As well as being disappointed by the safeness of the majority of the poems, we were struck by the fact that the books we had with us were nearly all from mainstream publishers; only Catherine Smith (Smith/Doorstop) and Owen Sheers (Seren) could be considered outside the publishing mainstream. Simon Armitage suggested that the selection of poets was representative, rather than definitive (The Guardian, 5.6.04). Anyone familiar with the range and diversity of small press poetry publishing, however, would take issue with the claim that the Next Gen poets were ‘representative’. If one of the aims of the promotion was to identify poets who would represent the state of contemporary poetry to the British public, surely there were vital missing voices? Was the lack of small press poets in this selection on grounds of merit, we wondered, or something else?

Staple magazine, some readers will remember, used to publish first
collections under the Staple First Editions imprint and we had therefore been invited to take part in the Next Gen promotion. The submission guidelines, however, turned out to be problematic. The previous editors of Staple had published two collections during the specified period, one of which was my own book (published in 1998 before I became involved with the magazine in an editorial capacity). As one of the Next Gen rules was that you couldn’t nominate yourself, however, this appeared to rule my book (and single-author imprints) out of court. Besides, the amount of stock required if our books were to be selected meant that, with only a handful of copies of each left, we would need additional print runs. The greatest deterrent, however, was the financial commitment required from
winning publishers; £600 for the first book, with a sliding scale for
publishers nominating more than one winning collection. Given the tight budgets that small presses operate within – their poetry lists subsidised by non-poetry publications and/or by Arts Council of England grants – this surely excluded a number of small presses from the Next Gen competition?

Our Alt-Gen initiative grew out of the belief that there were significant voices in contemporary British poetry that had been overlooked, and which we wanted to showcase; we had a sense that interesting and exciting collections had been published by the small presses in the last decade, and that these poets deserved a wider audience. We were also conscious that the small presses are hugely diverse, in terms of style and ethos, and we wanted to celebrate the publishers of these poets as well. In July 2004, a month after the Next Gen poets were announced, we wrote to 100 small press editors describing our initiative and inviting them to nominate up to
two full-length poetry collections by writers published in the period 1994-2004. Our intention was to mirror the Next Gen initiative as far as possible but to adapt it for the small presses and make the process more inclusive and transparent.

The presses who we invited to nominate collections for the Alt-Gen
promotion are listed on page 156. Because the promotion was focused on book-length publications we omitted presses which specialised in pamphlets. We aimed to be as inclusive as possible and compiled information from a variety of sources. However, the task was not straightforward. What did we mean by a ‘small press’? Independently funded or with an Arts Council of England grant, perhaps? A press which specialised primarily in poetry? Or perhaps the key factor was distribution – to include those presses whose collections do not make it into the high street bookshops? Using inclusive criteria such as these resulted in a diverse list of publishers, ranging from Enitharmon and Anvil to single author imprints such as Sea Cow Press.

We were aware that the small presses in Ireland make a significant
contribution to the publication of contemporary poetry and another
decision we faced was whether or not to extend the Alt-Gen initiative to Ireland (we decided to do so). This raised the question of Seren (one of whose collections had been selected for the Next Gen poets) and whether or not we should invite them to participate. Seren could be considered the national poetry press of Wales – it publishes Welsh poets and its size is thus related directly to its publishing agenda. We decided that this was a rather different ‘smallness’ to the one which we were interested in promoting and did not include them in our list. We did, however, invite
Smith/Doorstop (who were also selected for the Next Gen Promotion) to take part. We are aware that some of our readers will take issue with these decisions.

One of the presses we contacted (Anvil) declined to participate and a few contacted us to say that they either did not have any eligible collections, or did not have any which they wished to nominate. Some of the presses on our list, though active during the last decade, have now folded. No doubt there are presses which we omitted, and we apologise to their editors for this.

We did not ask for financial contributions from the presses - editors were only required to provide three copies of the nominated collections. Poets were also allowed to self-nominate. We received a warm and enthusiastic response to our initiative from the small press editors who nominated collections and from others who wrote to us. Correspondents welcomed our ‘more democratic’ initiative (barque press), and described it as ‘timely and much-needed’ (Arrowhead Press) and ‘a breath of fresh air’(Collective
Press). Peter Lewis, at Flambard, expressed: “hope that your scheme will redress the balance in favour of small presses”.

Some of the concerns which had led us to initiate the Alt-Gen promotion were echoed in our postbag, with a number of editors referring to the financial commitment required by the Next Gen promotion. Tony Frazer, at Shearsman Books, wrote: “one of the reasons why no small presses were involved in NextGen, despite their being invited, was that they would have had to contribute £600 per poet promoted, with a slight discount for 3 authors at £1,500. In my case I would have had to generate 150-170 extra book sales just to pay for this, something which I suspect would not have
happened”. Andrea Brady, at barque press, referred to the: “outrageous reading fees charged by the PBS committee” and Mary Michaels, from the single-author imprint, Sea Cow, wrote: “one reality of poetry publishing is that only the commercial houses who do it as a sideline or independent presses in receipt of good grants from public funds can commit themselves to expenditure of this kind, (risible though such sums of money may be for Cape and Picador).” Even Janet Fisher, at Smith/Doorstop (who nominated one of the selected collections, Catherine Smith’s The Butcher’s Hands) referred to the financial commitment required: “Maybe few small presses submitted in the first place because we had to commit to paying £600 for the promotion! I sort of assumed we wouldn’t be chosen, so submitted quite happily. What a shock. We won’t recover £600 in sales.” There was concern, too, about the demand for 7 copies of each title, and for the paperwork involved in nominating collections: Peter Lewis, at Flambard, commented: “the amount of information required by the PBS represented no problem to large publishers with big publicity departments but for small publishers it was a daunting obstacle”.

Another theme that recurred in letters received from small press editors concerned the nature of the Next Gen selections. Peter Lewis (Flambard) wrote: “We agree with you that the list of poets selected was hardly representative of poetry today in this country” while Tony Frazer (Shearsman) suggested: “all the selected poets, with the possible exception of Alice Oswald, are resolutely middle-of-the-road and unlikely to frighten any passing horses. I suspect my list would have frightened all of the judges, and perhaps even your own”. Andrea Brady (barque press), meanwhile, was concerned about the process of selection as well as the poets selected: “Many of us were antagonised by the Next Generation poets anthology, not only because of the nepotism apparent in the relationships between several of the poets and the judges (Andrew Motion particularly), but also because of the unrepresentative and pedestrian selections they made.”

The Next Gen poets were selected by committee decision and, it is
rumoured, some members of the panel were unhappy with the
‘comfortable’ selection of poets such a committee decision produced. We decided that rather than attempt a committee-based decision, we would allow our selectors to make independent selections. We asked our ‘judges’, poets Maggie Hannan and Matthew Clegg, to select up to 12 collections each from those submitted; their brief was to choose the small press publications which they thought were particularly interesting and which helped illustrate the quality and diversity of poetry publishing in the UK.
In this issue of the magazine, we feature the work of the chosen poets as well as articles by Maggie and Matt which explain the reasons for their selections. Although the collections they chose overlapped almost entirely, their approach to the task and their views on the role of the small press differ, as the articles make clear. Maggie Hannan chose fewer titles than Matthew Clegg and found less to celebrate in the submissions to Alt-Gen, suggesting that much of the small press output seemed ‘predictable’. What value, she asks, does the small press offer to readers and to writers, which
the mainstream press do not? Matthew Clegg, meanwhile, concludes his article with the observation that the small presses: ‘serve a crucial role in injecting a vital element of risk into the culture, publishing work that has little chance of exposure within an increasingly conservative mainstream’.

Press coverage of the Next Gen poets was notable for the lack of
opportunities presented to read work by the poets. While it was possible, in the Guardian’s feature, to discover what the poets’ favourite words were, and when they wrote their first poems, actually sampling their work was not on the agenda. In the following pages we present work from the collections selected for our Alt-Gen promotion. The poems were chosen by the readers who selected the collections; two poems are presented in cases where the collections were chosen by both Matthew and Maggie. We offered the Alt-Gen poets, and their editors, the opportunity to say what they wanted to about themselves. Details of each collection and of how to acquire the books are provided. Marketing and distribution pose perennial
challenges for all small press publishers; lack of resources, lack of review coverage, and lack of access to the high street bookshops all reduce the visibility of small press publications and reduce potential sales. We hope that by giving you the opportunity to read the work of the Alt-Gen poets we will help to promote sales of these, and other, small press collections.

Finally, we would like to stress that we do not intend to imply that the collections featured here may be considered ‘the best’ of those that were received, nor that there is not interesting work in those not selected for the promotion. Our intention was to draw attention to the quality and diversity of the small presses and the poets who they publish. We believe the poets selected for our Alt-Gen initiative not only illustrate the range of contemporary British poetry, but that their work is fresh and exciting; these poems take risks and they challenge us out of the comfort zone. We hope you enjoy them.