News flash: an important trans-Atlantic poetry publisher put out an S.O.S. this week. Here’s yesterday’s update on the Salt Publishing situation from the U.K. bookseller Catherine Neilan:
Poetry press Salt has launched a viral marketing campaign in a bid to
stave off closure, in the wake of the publisher’s “financial
difficulties”. The publisher has asked for customers to “buy just one
Salt book”. Director Chris Hamilton-Emery said the first day of his
company’s ‘Just One Book’ campaign had “swept the web”, leading to
more than 400 orders within 24 hours.
He said: “The response has been astonishing and heart-warming. Since
June last year our family business has faced severe financial
difficulties – the recession hit us hard. We’re almost at the end, it’s
terrifically sad. Nine years of our lives has gone into developing this
literary business.”
Salt’s campaign began on Facebook and has now extended to include a
“cheeky” video based on the WWF’s ‘Adopt a Polar Bear’ advertisements
seen frequently on children’s television. “We knew there was terrific
support for Salt and our authors, but it’s all been amazing,” said
Hamilton-Emery. “These new customers, hundreds of them around the world
from Canada to Australia, Japan to the UK, are saving our business one
book at a time.”
The publisher, which was set up after Oxford University Press closed
its poetry list 10 years ago, had been funded by the Arts Council
England until the last financial year. During the last year of ACE
support, the company had increased turnover by 70%.
But, in the wake of the recession, Salt experienced “a shortfall of
￡55,000″. Hamilton-Emery said: “It’s a very big hole, and the Arts
Council, who have been terrifically supportive, can no longer help us.
They’ve done everything they can. We’re on our own now.”
Salt has a website, Facebook page, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s devoted to the campaign.
I’m giving this post a personal slant, since Salt happens to be the publisher of a book I reminisced about just last week on Harriet (”Eileen and Me (1982).” The Encyclopedia of Scotland, the “shamanic long poem in rhythmic free verse” that has received some notoriety since then on the Vowel Movers site, was completed in 1983 and not published until the adventurous Salt coaxed it out of a drawer in 2005. If anyone wants to order The Encyclopedia of Scotland as part of the Salt campaign, I’ll be happy to inscribe and send it back to you at my expense as my part of the donation. Either way, I hope you will browse their voluminous site and see what you can do to be part of this campaign.
Other presses are endangered too, and one I’d like to draw folks’ attention to is Gaspereau Press, which publishes incredible writers like Robert Bringhurst; folks can click here for a news story.
Annie,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. If looking to branch out, one could do a lot worse than “The Opposite of Cabbage” by Rob A. Mackenzie:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715138.htm
Don Share is too modest to mention his own book, “Squandermania”, so I will:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844712946.htm
-o-
Just ordered Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West in support of Salt. Thanks!
The ‘Just One Book’ campaign is a great idea, and I’m glad to see that the word is spreading. I hope that people take this opportunity seriously and aid in helping out an important publisher. I’ve bought my one book already, but think I’m also going to order a copy of the Scottish-Canadian poet Alexander Hutchison’s Scales Dog.
Thanks for highlighting this, Annie, and thanks to Colin Ward for the kind mention.
Evan mentioned Alexander Hutchison’s ‘Scales Dog’, a selected poems covering his four collections over thrity years (not someone who writes to order). It’s a really fantastic book from a poet who should be far better known than he is, as you’ll see if you check out the .pdf extract at the book’s webpage – http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844713301.htm
Salt is fantastic, but wondering if they’ve considered downsizing their list? They publish a tremendous number of books, and while they’re Print on Demand, it’s still quite a cost to do so. I received an email the other day from Tupelo Press, asking for a donation to match an in-kind $30,000 gift they had received, and I asked myself, Why? Couldn’t Tupelo simply publish fewer books each year? Am I being too simplistic?
I ordered four books and received three today:
Poetry Wars – Peter Barry.
I have been itching to read this since i first became aware of it.
An account of Eric Mottram’s “treacherous assault on British poetry” in mid 1970’s Earl Court when he wrested editorial control of Poetry Review: the poetry equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth.
Mottram brought in the near mythical 3:1 sand – cement ratio of mystic Concret Poet Bob Cobbing’s DIY ethos, who put it into practice at the heart and HQ where Her Majesty’s lyric-normal knee benders, outraged that the Concrete crew got to use the photocopier and stationary to roll off their rags – did a vast amount of straight faced deep acting with one another over wine and cheese, not realising the inherent comedy a load of Oxo shoo-ins create with naught but automatic entitlement and a common room ethos with all the professional creative sensibility and sensitivity of traffic wardens.
Sills – Michael OBrien.
I discovered him as i trawled through and intuitively knew from the first poem – this is a senior voice who will lead to lots of eloquence.
The Falls
Nerves, those fine pianos,
plaintive as the applause of palms ;
under the rain the green goes dark,
muted, difficult as desire.
The nights are white pages, the feelings accidental.
In the dream the river runs over stone
to the falls where a girl lies on her side
under the moving water. I see her clearly
through the moving water which descends the stair
to the pool below, whose floor you touch
before you let the water
bear you back to the air.
~
As Hamilton states in: Twenty things I didn’t know before becoming a poetry publisher (2010 Writer’s Handbook):
“Everything is about first lines, the first verse, the first poem. I desperately want to reject you and you have to convince me in the first piece of writing that I shouldn’t…good writing is easy to spot; it takes 4.2 seconds to discover you want to read something. You can certainly spot good writing (it’s what you buy). Anyone can do it. It has no camps, no schools, no special tools or techniques. It’s often startlingly perfect.”
~
The Invention of Poetry – Adam Czerniawski and Iain Higgins.
Polish translation. You can;t beat the central Europeans for delivering aw holly different wordic arrangement than the somewhat insular and homogenised modes of placing words next to one another we fringe Europeans are prone to self-policing and sheparding ourselves into writing.
Under Albany – Ron Silliman
I have always thought Ron(star) writes prose as only the poet can. He has an inherent comedic kernel running through it, which you are either born with or not. A natural comedian. When just being yourself makes others chuckle, in a good way of some warm human dichotomy engineered into the core of your soul and which is shot through everything you do – and from which it is impossible to escape, only embrace and use to your advantage. You do not become the most widely read online poet on the plant if you aint got the magic.
“Within a matter of weeks I am writing “novels,” though, sitting on the narrow bed in the small room I shared with my younger brother, Cliff, longhand tales scrawled into thick notebooks (”The assasination of Hitler”, “Manned rocket flies behind the moon only to disappear”). Within a year I discover I can get out of almost any unpleasant school assignment other than math or wood shop by offering to write a five- or ten- or twenty-page paper on the topic. I never seriously heed a teacher’s syllabus again.”
other presses are feeling the pinch—
LSU’s for example “will continue” according to the news this week—but will their poetry series survive the budget cuts they must make? how loyal can these university presses be to the poets on their lists?
i had some thoughts about it all a couple days ago:
http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/07/university-of-california-press-scandal.html
….
Salt is fantastic, but wondering if they’ve considered downsizing their list? They publish a tremendous number of books, and while they’re Print on Demand, it’s still quite a cost to do so.
Posted By: Robert Gallsworthy
…
what cost? i publish p-o-d books for nothing, zilch, zero . . .
yes i understand they’d want to promote their pubs, and send review copies, but they can advertise online for nothing, and how many deadtree reviewing venues are there these days?
they’re crying wolf, it seems to me—
i don’t understand . . .
Salt deserves to die.
Most of the poets they publish are what—
their books don’t sell because
nobody wants to read them.
Funny they haven’t realized that.
I don’t know hardly any of the poets Salt publishes in English, so I can’t comment, really. I see they’re publishing Juan Gelman, the greatest living Argentine poet*, in translation — a book I haven’t read, in which he takes on the heteronym of Sidney West, a fictitious North American poet. That’s a serious contribution.
*I was certain twelve years ago that the greatest living Argentine poets were Juan Gelman and Olga Orozco. Olga Orozco was an aristocratic poet who piled immensely inventive mythologies, such as about her cat Berenice, into long lines. At seventy-seven she wore bright green eye shadow, like a scarab.
Juan Gelman is a political poet who has lived for over thirty years in exile in Mexico. His son and pregnant daughter in law were disappeared in 1976 by the murderous military, and twenty-three years later, amazingly, Juan found his bright, rebellious granddaughter in Uruguay. His poems jam a universe of hurt and silence into slashes in quatrains oozing with the bittersweetness expressed in music by the tango.
When I ran into Olga Orozco in a haute bar in 1997, she and a friend said “tell Juan to call us while he’s in town. If he doesn’t call us we will cry tears. Tears of velvet.” That last is much better in Spanish: “lágrimas de terciopelo.”
I told a friend that I thought Juan and Olga were the best Argentine poets amnd she said, “¡Pero son de polos opuestos! They’re from opposite camps!” As if that matters from the poerspective of Outside.
Olga Orozco died in 1999. Leaving Juan Gelman. Which doesn’t mean that some youngster won’t show up yesterday and be greater than either.
One strong point for Salt.
Salt’s marketing plan: let’s publish a shitload of poetry books we know won’t sell, and then when they don’t sell, let’s whine and complain and try to guilt-trip everybody into buying “just one book to save a poetry press”—
(isn’t that how religious charities advertise: buy one missal and save a village!)
Maybe if they had invested more in fewer poets,
they wouldn’t be in this fix—
…