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

The venerable poetry publisher Faber is directly responsible for the
formation of Five Leaves Publiciations, which will have its tenth birthday this year. Not, as you might first guess, because of something to do with poetry, but with allotments. Faber, whose publishing history in gardening and country issues is also significant, had published the standard work on allotments in hardback only. Too mean to buy the hardback, I waited for years for the paperback edition. It never appeared so - naively - I bought the paperback rights for £200 and became a publisher.

I use the word naive because although I’d worked in bookselling for many years, and had dabbled in publishing political pamphlets, I had little idea how the world of publishing worked. Despite my politics, I had naively believed that publishing lived outside the cut and thrust of the market place. Then the number of independent bookshops shrunk; the net book agreement collapsed (which meant that all bookshops would henceforth compete to see how little they can sell bestsellers for, rather than investing in stockholding); the major chains cut back on small publishers; the number of slower selling poetry books on the shelves of chains shrunk; the chains wanted ever more money for selling less books... This created a difficult arena for small publishers, and a catastrophe for poetry publishers.
OUP scrapped its poetry list (though to be fair, it had never promoted the list in the first place), most others cut back. Bloodaxe reduced its programme because Waterstone’s was reluctant to stock new poetry, but discovered that exciting marketing techniques could sell the blockbusting anthology (Staying Alive, Being Alive). This is the backdrop to the life of any small publisher. Many, the excellent Blackwater poetry press for example, could not manage in this economic climate and vanished.

Five Leaves’ second book was Jewish poetry for adults by Michael Rosen. This took Five Leaves into a niche of publishing Jewish secular material. Describing the two books mentioned gives an idea what a small press cando... The allotment book has sold several thousands. Its continued existence has aided the allotment movement in its struggles to hold on against rapacious developers by giving allotment holders a sense of their history. The Rosen book - a commission - brought him into the world of adult poetry and he has gone on to significant success with Penguin.

Not long afterwards I found myself reading poetry by a number of Jewish women. I tried to find an anthology to see who else was out there, failed, and published one. Like all good anthologies this brought together the well known - such as Elaine Feinstein and Ruth Fainlight, and the unknown, breaking into print for the first time. Several of these newcomers - Ruth Farhi, Nadine Brummer, Lynette Craig for example - have gone on to publish full collections elsewhere. This particular book, The Dybbuk of Delight (now out of print) went on to sell 1,350 copies. This success pointed out another role of the small press - to find, and break, new writers. This is hardly new - writers as diverse as Primo Levi and Simon Armitage made their debut in the small press world - but satisfying when it
happens.

Perhaps our major success - no, delete the perhaps - was with Richard Zimler. Richard, then unknown, contributed the title story to a collection of Jewish fiction - The Slow Mirror and other stories. I loved his story, asked him what else he had done and read his unpublished novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. He asked if I would publish it, having failed to find any interest from big publishers. It was too good for me - I’d have published 700 copies, sold half that and had few reviews - but I was able to persuade an American publisher to look at it. They took it, published it, sold the UK
rights to Arcadia and his book became an international trade best-seller. Not so much the fish that got away, but was sent away. The Slow Mirror also included new work by Zvi Jaggendorf - I would not publish the full manuscript - and he too found success, getting on to the Booker long list with the same manuscript, Wolfie and the Strudelbakers.

Ten years down the line Five Leaves has a turnover of £40,000 per annum, though I could not say how much of that is poetry sales. The press still can’t pay for staff - we made about £700 profit last year - and could notsurvive without an Arts Council subsidy. Our most recent bestseller was Red Sky at Night - a large anthology of socialist poetry, 2000 copies of which were sold to one book chain in the USA (at 65% discount!). The USA obviously needs all the socialist poetry it can get, but I do worry that they are sitting in a Texas warehouse... Though we publish a few poetry pamphlets (which the authors only really sell at readings) selling full individual collections into shops has been a nightmare. Large anthologies
work better. We will be celebrating our tenth birthday with a collection by ten Nottingham poets, and plan further steady expansion in our strong areas of Jewish culture and social history. 
Increasingly we are being offered books of quality, but prefer to commission material.

Increasingly we have to look for less traditional outlets for our books rather than through bookshops. Future plans inlcude a bilingual collection by the Yiddish poet Avrom Stencl and big poetry anthologies on sport, and on bats (of the non-sporting variety).

And this year we will be again reprinting our allotment book. My advice to any poetry publisher, if you want to stay afloat, is to find one book that will be a “banker”. And take up allotmenting.