Worrying news from Salt Publishing today. The blog post linked describes the state of things pretty succinctly, but to paraphrase even more: Salt is in the hole, and dangerously close to not being able to get out of it. It looks like bad timing of a couple of events–the end of their Arts Council funding is coming precisely at a point, economy-wise, when a publisher could really use it. Anyway, so they’ve launched an appeal to buy Just One Book. Or three, or five!
As coinkydink would have it, I’ve been on a recent book-buying spree for Ph.D. purposes, and just ordered Josephine Balmer’s new book, The Word for Sorrow. Her previous work has been amazing, so I’m looking forward to it arriving for my own selfish reasons as well. But in for a penny, in for twenty pounds or so, so I picked up a few new random books this evening as long as I had the webpage open.
I can’t express how much I want Salt to make it. Hearing they’re in trouble is quite scary, because…well, they’re not Faber, but they’re not a publishing house I think of as particularly on the edge, either. Although I suppose at the moment especially, almost any publisher could qualify as on the edge, or at least within a stone’s-throw of it.
This also illustrates something that I guess is a longstanding problem of poetry: far, far, FAR more people want to be poets than actually buy books of poetry. I guess collections of poems don’t feel cost-effective, although I would argue they’re often more worth for money than a lot of fiction–compared to the average pulp novel, which I power through in an evening or two, a book of poetry that I read slowly and come back to is more than worth its price. But besides that, I just don’t feel like one can write good poetry unless one is also reading good poetry. As it is, my default “I need to write but I don’t have any good ideas stored up” plan of attack is to sit down with a poet I don’t know very well and read quite a bit of him/her in one sitting. Either a particular poem or poem subject will catch my eye (Dear Tobias Hill, regarding “Zoo.” Please see “At the Chaffee Zoo,” by me. Thanks for all the fish.), or I’ll absolutely hate the way something was handled and want to try it myself, or I’ll become intrigued with something a poet does that I don’t (short lines, urban poems, multi-part pieces) and have a go. Bloodeaxe’s submission guidelines on their website includes a delightfully grumpy mention of this, by the by:
If you do not read much contemporary poetry, or if you write poetry ‘as a hobby’, we’re unlikely to be interested in your work. You may disagree, but we believe that no one can write poetry of quality unless they read other poets and are in touch with the literary culture.
–consider this blog post a cane-clutching fist raised in agreement.
We’ll see if Salt makes it–judging by the speed at which the appeal is whipping around Facebook and the blog-o-sphere, there may be some hope. In the meantime, I shall have my fingers very tightly crossed.
