The Sunday Times give us an interview with Top Ten ebook best-selling author, John Locke, who has sold a million ebooks and made himself almost a cool half-million US bucks in the process. Locke, no relation to any philosopher, claims to be working on this third fortune, to be married to a woman with great legs, and to write for bored businessmen and 75% women; his ultra-violent, sexually-prehistoric hitman character apparently appeals to all levels of nitwit slash reader. The key thing is, he has bypassed agents, publishers and all that nonsense from London, like the snobbery and wine in bookshops, to simply sell books he churns out like some people push toothpaste onto their bristles, for 62p a pop. This is the future of publishing. I teach creative writing and have seen many brilliant novels get rejected by the old p-system (publishing system). This is going to empower a lot of people. Sadly, as my Oxfam bookshop manager friend Martin Penny tells me, most people want to read crime novels - and never tire of sexual sadism and brutal killing. If writers want to offer poetry or something a little less red in tooth and claw, they might have to charge 32p.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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I have attempted to do the same thing. All my poetry is now available on Amazon Kindle for only £1.50 per volume. At long last the despotic old gatekeepers are slowly but surely being swept into the dustbin of history.
Best wishes from Simon