Time for a new Creative Partnership

ROBERT DAVIDSON is a published writer and an editor who draws on his experience on both sides of the fence in this survey of how to get your poetry published. The paper was originally delivered at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews.

IT’S SIMPLE ENOUGH, on the surface of it.  First, as in Mrs Beaton’s recipe for Hare Soup, you must catch your hare.  That is to say, you first write your poems.  Do bear in mind though; a freshly caught hare is more easily recognised than a freshly caught poem.

Satisfied that you have a few – say, six – you might look into the various magazines that publish poetry in Scotland to see which, if any, might be in your field.  Then send them off with a covering letter and a stamped addressed envelope for reply and, probably, return.  Most poems are returned so brace your battered psyche for what is usually described as ‘rejection’.

This word, ‘rejection’, is one of the great hindering words in the Arts, in some ways almost as bad as ‘Classic’.  It has very little reference to quality, which is fairly subjective anyway, and much to do with space and the editor’s ideas of balance across the magazine.

Rhoda Michael, the Poetry Editor of Northwords, receives submissions from approximately 80 poets for each issue (at least 2/3 of them men), and carefully reads and rereads about 400 poems.  Beyond our Featured Poet, which is commissioned work, we publish only seven pages of poems and we try to give them all breathing space on the page.  Prepare yourself also for a long wait.  Northwords appears only three times a year.  That is a four-month pulse and a very long wait for a disappointment.

Writers should not be discouraged by rejections.  In addition to the problem of being audible in the echo chamber they may simply mean the right editor and magazine haven’t been found yet.  Eventually, through a combination of talent, persistence and luck, the poet might establish quite a large body of published work and some kind of reputation.

So far, so straightforward but now what?  Having them collected in a perfectly bound book by a reputable publisher would appear to be a step forward.  This is the point where another kind of reality begins to bite.

At any time in Scotland there are a number of people writing poetry with varying degrees of commitment and to different purposes.  Therapeutic writing and group support is an important resource for many troubled or searching people.  For many of those neither wide reading nor publication is particularly relevant.  Within the small community of writers it is only a still smaller number who actually buy and read the magazines.  This means that, even at this stage, the poet is still speaking to a fairly restricted number of people.  Most of them are writers themselves and share the same ambitions.

The people who might have been impressed by your poems are likely to be a fraction of these few (within a few) along with the editors and those members of the Arts Development Industry who take to do with the allocation of Writers’s Bursaries and Residencies and the like.  This number is not sufficient to sustain either a healthy poetry publishing economy or a healthy poetry culture, that is to say a culture of critical detachment.  The scene can be incestuous and jealous.  There is a circle the writer must break out of if he or she is to engage with a broader Scottish public that has long since lost interest and faith in what is current.

This is one of the principal reasons that Northwords has been developed into a broadly based arts magazine.  By doing this we have taken poetry out to readers interested in music and the visual arts.  By placing sale copies in gallery shops and in concert halls we have reached, with limited but real success, people who are like minded but different.  We have endeavoured to take poetry out of the ghetto.

The subject today is ‘how to get your poetry published’ and I’ll try to stick to that.  Already you will have seen a pattern.  First you write your poems and then you get them published in magazines.  Then you look towards book publication.  Okay, let’s say you are successful and now have your book.  If published in Scotland the great likelihood is that it has been subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council, possibly by the Gaelic Book Council.  This is good.  I am in favour of this.  Without it we would have very little collected poetry published in Scotland at all.  Justifiably pleased with yourself, you might ponder what criteria make your book a success or a failure.

You might look to peer appreciation but, if you are wise, you will remember the size of the scene and its incest and jealousy and take both the black eyes and the feathers-in-the-cap philosophically.  If sales are low, as is likely, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that posterity is a durable arbiter and that posterity reserves its judgement.

If you are trying to reach out to that wider public and the development of a readership that might be specific to you, before it is to the concept of poetry, you might look to sales.  Are people buying your book?  If so, it’s a good indicator that they do actually want to read your work.  Do you care about this?  Your work being read, I mean.  Will you accept that being read, quoted, discussed is your real target?  There is more to publishing than print.  You want your book out there working.

Think about money.  This might not be so easy in a country so deeply ensconced in the Left.  Words like ‘profit’ and ‘product’ and ‘sales’ are frowned on.  Poetry is looked on in some ways like the Health Service.  It should be free at the point of need.  Naturally I agree with this.  There should be more poetry in Libraries.  Lets have their poetry buying budgets raised through the roof.  However, there is a task of advancement to be tackled on behalf of the art form and its practitioners and I want to use the word ‘marketing’.

In this area we are talking about, marketing means promotion and distribution.  Both of these require investment.  The larger publishing houses can afford to assign money across from more financially successful products.  They have development budgets.  They can afford to take risk.

Let’s grasp another nettle.  When I say the ‘larger’ companies I am tacitly implying English companies.  The small companies in Scotland who specialise in the Scottish voice(s), the heart and soul of what we are, do well to distribute from a back shop.  Some distribute from their living room floor.  These are heroes.  They know what it is to be discouraged and what it is to be poor, and they continue.  Their principal means of promotion and sales are poets’ readings to other poets and personal supporters.  Experience, surely by now, tells us this is hopeless.  These means continually driving us back into the circle.

Over many years the Scottish Arts Council and others have made great efforts to encourage and develop writing in this country.  Their means have been Writers’ Residencies, Writers’ Centres, creative writing courses, etc.  I acknowledge this with gratitude.  I am a beneficiary.  I believe though, that thought must now be given to the development of readerships.  That is development both in numbers and in breadth of reading.  An effort similar to that put into writer development over many years must be put into the development of ‘adult literacy’ in the broadest sense of the term.

In addition, people must be convinced that spending as much as ten pounds on a book of poems by a Scottish writer is not an insane gesture.  To achieve this the product, I mean the physical object, must be as superb as those created by Carcanet and Faber and, my own particular favourite, Gallery in Ireland.  To escape the circle I have described funding and organisation must allow not only for continued writer support but also greatly increased production values, promotion and distribution.  Otherwise all that fine writing, that sustained thought and tender feeling, is mostly going to remain in boxes.

We have choice in this.  We should either embark on this campaign of outreach by marrying the best qualities of the public and private sectors or return entirely to the honourable tradition of kitchen publishing.  That is publishing with photocopiers and hand presses and enthusiasm.  Much wonderful, often subversive, work has been released this way and I for one believe it will always happen and always have its place.

At Sandstone we have participated in the movement with the Grit series, edited by Jim Paterson.  However, if we wish to truly engage with the Scottish public, if we want our voices to be listened to abroad as we take pride in listening to the voices of others, if we wish to generate profit and create jobs and have the sort of outreach our most important poets should rightly demand; if we want these things here in Scotland, we need a new kind of creative partnership between the writers, the funding bodies and the publishing industry.

Robert Davidson is currently preparing his final issue as editor of Northwords. This paper was originally delivered at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, and is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

© Robert Davidson, 2004