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

Shoestring Press began in autumn 1994. 2004 was therefore its tenth
anniversary, and from early days I’d promised myself that, if I got so far, not only would my hundredth publication be an anthology of poems about jazz, two of the great loves of my life, but that I’d reach the hundred mark in my tenth year. As it happened Paging Doctor Jazz came in at number 106, but I held onto the hundredth ISBN for it.

But why start yet another press? Well, in 1993 I had a three-months
Writer’s Fellowship in Tasmania, courtesy of Arts Tasmania, and on my way to the Apple Island I stopped off in Sydney for a few days with my friend, the Anglo-Australian novelist, short-story writer (Australia’s finest, in my opionion) and academic, Michael Wilding. Michael is a veteran of the small press world, who for years formed half of Wild and Woolley, a Sydney-based press responsible for getting into print many Australian writers who went on to achieve fame and, more rarely, fortune, as well as others of real distinction. One afternoon, lulled by wine, sun, and the view from the deck of Michael’s house on Scotland Island over a bay towards the mouth of the Hawksbury River, I happened to mention that poets often produced their finest work in sequences that went unnoticed or
under-regarded because they were surrounded by work of a lesser
accomplishment. “It’s as though even in poetry there’s a publishers’
assumption that one size fits all. 68 pages. OK for some, but it doesn’t do any favours to the idea of a sequence.” As it happened, I was thinking of a sequence Arnold Rattenbury had not long since shown me. 20 poems on “frigger makers”, that is, on the use to which craftsmen put their skills when they weren’t working to purely commercial ends. Wonderously absurd glass hats fashioned by Sheffield glass-blowers, for instance, or slate fans elaborately cut and shaped by slate miners in North Wales, or whalers’ scrimshaw. The poems ought not be huddled into a larger collection, they
deserved to be seen on their own, and, if possible with illustration. But who would nowadays undertake that kind of publishing? “Start your own press”, Michael said. I brooded on his advice - or was it a command? - and when I got back to England decided I’d do as he ordered.

Not simply to put Arnold’s poetry into print, though the existence of those poems was good enough reason on its own.There was another. Earlier in 1993 my wife and I had spent some time, as we regularly did, on the Greek island of Aegina, where on this occasion we’d met the American poet, Philip Ramp. Philip had been living on the island for twenty-odd years, scraping a living as a translator by day, and using all other hours to work at his own poetry. He showed me some. I was especially taken by a sequence called Jonz, short poems that brooded over, barked, grieved and laughed at the world and its ways. This runs the risk of making Philip’s protagonist sound like Berryman’s Henry, but the two are poles apart, because Jonz is much more attuned to the world out there, and only rarely inspects the state of his own consciousness. If I was going to bring out
Arnold’s The Frigger Makers, why not couple it with Jonz? I put the question to Philip. Yes, he said, delighted. And that’s how Shoestring Press was born.

My connections with Greece and Australia explain, I imagine, why I
publish work from both nations From time to time the Greek Ministry of Culture offers money, though as yet no promise, however insistent and spelt out on no matter how highly-embossed paper, has turned into gold. But mostly the publications are of UK writers, and for these I get an Arts Council grant that helps me survive. The young, the old, the well-known, the beginners: my only criterion is aesthetic worth, and that extends to the quality of production. Being married to an artist helps. Many of the best covers have been suggested and in some cases designed by Pauline Lucas.
There used to be a saying, perhaps it still survives, “neither use nor
ornament”, which was aimed at individuals in whom their family or
community could find nothing to recommend. I assume it comes from
William Morris’s exhortation to “contain nothing in your house which you do not know to be of use or do not believe to be beautiful.” Put that beside Wallace Stevens’s insistence in “Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction” that poetry “must give pleasure”, and you more or less have the credo of Shoestring Press.