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

Poetry and the business of poetry are very different things, but many poets seem to confuse the two. As both a poet and a business writer, I want to suggest some ways that people involved in the  business of poetry can learn from the wider business world

   The most brilliant young(ish) economist I’ve come across is MIT’s Paul Krugman. Intelligent, liberal and compassionate, he is also a talented writer. In an amusing essay he tells the story of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op, which I think could be instructive to people thinking about the future of poetry. (1)

   In a nutshell the story is this: A baby-sitting circle was established amongst young professionals living and working in DC. Each couple was given a number of tokens, which they could exchange with other members for babysitting services. All very sensible, you might think, yet within months the system had broken down. It turned out that people wanted to guarantee babysitting for those really important, twice a year events. So they were holding onto the tokens rather than using them when they simply fancied a meal out or trip to the theatre. Consequently no one could guarantee a supply of new tokens, and without that they became reluctant to let go of what they had. So they just stopped going out.

   The co-op was mostly composed of lawyers and, true to form, they tried to legislate the problem away. New rules were introduced to force members to go out at least once a month. These, of course, were widely ignored: people very reasonably assumed that the circle existed to make their social lives easier, not to dictate them.

   It was only when the economists took over that the problem was resolved. What they realised was that, in effect, the circle had suffered a currency crisis. The way to solve these in the real world is to induce inflation – print more money. So that’s what they did: they issued more tokens to each member. With more ‘money’ in hand people felt happier about spending, which meant that they also started to receive an ‘income’. The problem went away and, no doubt, the restaurateurs of DC were eternally grateful.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

So what’s my point? Essentially this: faced with an economic problem the instincts of most poets are like those of the lawyers in the story. They want to set up bodies and pass resolutions. They want someone else (the government, the arts council) to step in and sort it out with a large cash injection. I fear they will meet with no greater success.

   Eddie Wainwright addresses the problem in a recent article, ‘Quality, Quantity and Editorial Dementia’ (2). This intelligent piece forensically dissects the crisis facing British poetry. Wainwright’s wide experience shows as he carefully catalogues and analyses the causes of its current malaise. But, I’m afraid, the answers he suggests just won’t work.

   Take his first suggestion: “Responsible bodies, e.g. the relevant sections of the Arts Council, or the Poetry Society, should recognise that there is a crisis ... and call a conference with a view to setting about resolving it.” Well, realistically the underfunded Arts Council is unlikely to spend money calling a conference that will only highlight its failings. So the work would presumably have to be done by the very editors and volunteers who, he complains, have no time or money.

   But suppose it was called and came up with a reasoned list of imperatives? In March this year over 2,000 museums and galleries got together to launch ‘A Manifesto for Museums’. It raised concerns about the crisis they were facing and called on the government to inject £115 million more into the sector every year. Now, the heritage sector contributes around £3 billion pa to the economy. 85% of foreign tourists cite our museums and galleries as a major reason for visiting the country.(3) Yet the report met with a lukewarm response from government and was widely assumed in the press to be a futile gesture. What hope, then, for the poetry ‘industry’, which employs next to no one and generates negligible revenues? Would a report by poetry editors even get press coverage before it was swatted away by a junior minister?

   What about his second suggestion: “Editors should be fully-salaried Chief Editors making final decisions from contenders for publication submitted by panels of Sub-Editors of proven competence. Poetry ... needs to be subsidised and properly organised instead of just muddling on”? But where will the money come from? Not from Government. They’ve made it clear that their priorities for the foreseeable future are health and education. Besides, they know what the Daily Mail would do with the story – ‘Blair pays Poets while our Nurses Starve’.

   What a lot of people don’t realise is that the commercial press can’t make literature pay either. Despite the fact that we publish and consume more books per person than almost anywhere else in Europe (4), there are experienced commissioning editors earning around £16,000 per year – barely enough to live on in London. Yet these are often the people handling the celeb biogs and light fiction that drives poetry off the shelves. How can poetry publishers or magazines hope even to match that?

If you can’t beat them, join them

I am going to suggest that, if you can’t beat them, you should join them. This, I suspect, is going to make me unpopular. After all, isn’t art supposed to be above the concerns of the market? Isn’t it “a market forces situation in the worst Tory tradition”, as Wainwright puts it, that has brought it to its current state? I certainly used to think so. Six years ago I finished a PhD in philosophy. But, having failed to get a job in academic research, I took a research job in the City. Research was research, I naively assumed. Since then, I have become the editor of a business publication and spent more time around lawyers and bankers than can possibly be good for me. After a while you realise that, just as it’s the love of money – not money itself – that is the root of all evil, so market forces aren’t some wicked plot hatched by Thatcherites. They’re just the results of lots of free decisions in an economy that values individual choice.

   When a company suffers a drop in turnover, it can have one of two basic causes. Perhaps the public doesn’t like its particular product any more – someone else is doing it better or cheaper. So, for years Sainsburys lost out as Tesco improved its ranges and Asda produced more cost-effective versions. Alternatively, the public is losing interest in the whole sector – sales of video tapes, for example, are declining as people switch to DVDs. This is what the action of market forces means. And I’m afraid that it is the second problem that is facing poetry publishers – not enough people want their product. Given that no one is going to step in and safeguard poetry for the nation, we are going to have to look for ways of improving the situation ourselves, or else stand by as it continues to decline. And, like it or not, that means learning to understand and work with the market.

   Faced with a similar situation a commercial company would do one (or more) of three things. It could try to spot current trends and diversify into new areas, cutting back loss-making lines in the process. Or it might try to win new customers, perhaps with an advertising campaign. Or it could cut costs and make itself more competitive. In fairness the commercial presses and the bigger organisations are already putting some of this into practice. However, as Wainwright rightly deduces, for a big commercial publisher ‘cutting back lossmaking lines’ is likely to mean walking away from poetry altogether. And advertising has conspicuously failed to work. The Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation’ campaign in the early 90s, for example, earned it an enormous number of column inches in the national press. Whether it added much in poetry sales is questionable. The time has come, I think, for some more innovative suggestions.

Securing the future of poetry publishing

The first thing that’s worth noting is how much existing value is wasted in the sector every year. An economic downturn in any other industry is immediately followed by a wave of consolidation and takeovers as the weaker businesses are picked off. The more successful companies that acquire them emerge bigger and healthier. Yet failing poetry titles are simply allowed to fail. When a title like Thumbscrew or Outposts goes under it still has two valuable assets: its name and its subscription list. Both of these have been built up over years through a lot of hard work, yet both are usually just thrown away.

   When Mike Shields stepped down as editor of Orbis, there was talk of him seeking a merger with another title. Of course, it didn’t happen. But he was on the right track. Because what the poetry business needs is a wave of mergers and acquisitions. Wainwright’s laudable dream of salaried chief editors probably won’t happen. But its best chance is if the sector contracts to, say, four or five big titles and perhaps 20 second string magazines. Growing by absorption, each should end up with a larger subscription list than it now has. These extra resources would free editors from a hand to mouth existence, giving them more scope to innovate and more clout in the wider world.

   How can more people be attracted into the field? The success of anthologies, and of things like Poems on the Underground, The Nation’s Favourite Poem and National Poetry Day suggest that there is an untapped yearning for poetry amongst the general public. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about poetry. You quite enjoyed listening to Daisy Goodwin or Griff Rhys-Jones last night, so you pop into the bookshop during your lunch hour. Probably you buy an anthology – The Nation’s Favourite Love Poetry, say. You quite enjoy that, so you go back. Assuming that your bookshop stocks any serious poetry at all, what you soon discover is that it is seriously expensive.

   Discussion of the problems of modern poetry has tended to focus on the question ‘does contemporary poetry exclude people?’ And it’s a fair question. But we’re overlooking an equally important one – is modern poetry value for money? Put it this way: assuming that you hadn’t read a great deal of classic literature, would you rather buy Pride & Prejudice (Penguin: 408pp. £3.99) or Andrew Motion’s latest (Faber: 102pp. £6.99)? The Motion, by my calculations, comes out at around seven times more expensive page for page – the cost per word, of course, is much higher. Now, it’s usual to charge more for something if it’s of demonstrably higher quality or more in demand. But, great poet as I’m sure our laureate is, is he really seven times better or more popular than Austen?

   Adrian Mitchell’s oft-quoted witticism, ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ is actually false. Even if a lot of poetry is deliberately obscure and elitist there’s enough accessible poetry already in the world to last most people a lifetime. I would suggest instead ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry prices itself out of the market.’

   But presumably the presses would price poetry more cheaply if they could. The fact that they can’t suggests that a major shake-up is needed. Perhaps the bigger presses can use anthologies and other good sellers to subsidise less profitable work, but smaller presses don’t have that luxury. Instead, they are going to have to use other methods to cut costs and increase sales. This, I’d suggest, means looking to new technologies.

   ‘Oh no, not the Internet again’, you’re saying, ‘we’ve heard all this before.’ Well, no, not the Internet. Or, at least, not just the Internet. Online publishing has a lot going for it, but it will never replace the book. As Brown and Duguid argue in their masterly survey of the advantages and limitations of the web, The Social Life of Information, (5) when you buy a book you are buying more than strings of words. And it’s not just that you can read a book in the bath, make notes in the margins or give it to your auntie. The printed format also acts as a guarantee of certain minimum standards: that it’s gone through a selection procedure and been professionally edited, for example, not put together by a thirteen-year-old from his bedroom in Indiana. There are lots of other things that the Internet can’t do, by the way. Simply putting up a site advertising your products and expecting people to buy them online, for example, is usually futile, as many companies discovered to their cost in the late 90s.

   However, online publishing could replace the magazine – at least in part. I for one already subscribe to more poetry magazines than I have time to read. Unlike books, which I read cover to cover, I’ll tend to flick through these, picking the pieces that interest me. I’d rather do this on the web where the technology suits this approach. Already some good magazines have switched to an online format: Stride is one of the best. Rupert Loydell claims that moving to the web has meant much more coverage for the poets included – an issue that would have sold a few hundred in hard copy may get several thousand hits.

   The main advantage of moving to the web is that your cost base becomes far lower. This can be passed on to customers. A more successful magazine might be able to charge a couple of pounds subscription fee, especially if there were other things on offer. For example, I play online chess on a fantastic site called, eherm, redhotpawn.com. You can get onto the site and play for free. But if you want to play more than six games at once, or join in online tournaments, you have to pay a small subscription. I can imagine poetry sites that allow you to view the content for free but make a small charge for, say, joining online discussions, receiving e-mail supplements or perhaps having access to a reading service. Alternatively, the entire site could be free and the income generated by using it to sell other products – books, competitions, readings, workshops etc.

   This brings me to my final point: the joys of vertical integration. In the 80s, the conglomerate was king – you’re running a car manufacturer, why not get into oil refining and information technology? These unwieldy edifices have mostly been dismantled now and the current orthodoxy is that it is best for companies to stick to what they know. Instead, there is a trend towards buying up companies in neighbouring fields. For example, if you specialise in drilling for oil then maybe you want to acquire companies specialising in oil exploration, refining, transport and distribution so that you ‘own’ the process from beginning to end. The current bid by Comcast (entertainment content distributor) for Disney(entertainment content provider) is of this type. Why isn’t this happening in poetry? Why, for example, don’t more small presses tie up with reasonably successful magazines, with a view to producing online versions? Full subscribers would get access to the whole site plus, at least at first, the hardcopy of the magazine, while a portion of the site would be available free to anyone. This could also be used to offer a range of other services – regular competitions, readings and workshops, maybe an advice service and, of course, books from the small press.

   In fact, there’s no reason why poetry shouldn’t be published on a subscription basis. If you have a dozen good collections sitting on your desk but can only publish one, rather than picking the one you like best why not put selections of them all on the Internet and get people to say whose work they would buy? When an author hits, say, 500 genuine responses you publish their collection and you have a ready-made marketing list as well as ready-made market research into the preferences of your audience.

   In the business world this is known as ‘relationship marketing’. Rather than just producing a product and trying to sell it, you invest time in finding out what people want and adapt your product to their preferences. Again, this was something that Mike Shields was good at. Every issue of Orbis invited its readers to vote for their favourite poem in the previous issue. The winners got some extra recognition and a small cheque, and Mike himself got invaluable information on the tastes of his audience.

   But most presses still seem to be stuck in a mindset of ‘Fordian’ mass production: a few people at the centre decide what will be made and then set about convincing an increasingly unresponsive world that they want it: ‘you can have any mood so long as it’s black.’

   Does all this sound philistine? I’m sorry, but it really shouldn’t. In my defence, just let me say that poetry is a gift and a pleasure. It is indeed above the market – it exists as a living tradition and so long as anyone is still reading and writing poetry it can’t really suffer. Poetry publishing, however, is not the same as poetry. It is a business like any other – actually not like any other as it is wedded to old-fashioned methods of production, unresponsive to its dwindling market and temperamentally unsuited to attracting a new one. It reminds me of a pre-Glasnost Soviet tractor plant, measuring its success by numbers of units produced, irrespective of whether anyone wants them. Time to change or die.