E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear Man plotting to make billions It is true, Eyewear Publishing has adopted some elements of the "American model" that uses Submittable more than other small presses have done in the past in the UK - though Submittable is becoming increasingly respected, in the UK and the USA.   Competing with so many digital platforms now means we have to try our best in a very robust climate. The agents and poets who work with us, and other authors, are usually impressed and comforted to know they get three things with an Eyewear contract a) business nous; b) unimpeachable editorial and aesthetic intelligence and sensitivity; and c) a commitment based on genuine love of literature. Eyewear is about the opposite of money - it is about culture surviving, even thriving, despite financial pressures - and about working within the system to bring the best looking books possible, with the best writing in them, to the widest audience, across the world.   However, so l...

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO BREAK AN EGG AT EASTER Several major religions are observing solemn, important festivals this month - holy days, holy weeks. Eyewear's team will be taking some time off, to be with their families and friends, and reflect, in their various ways, on this time of returning light. Meanwhile, we have seen, in the past few days, inhumanity at the heart of our capitalist system (where it has been, hidden, for too long) - the decision to drag a doctor, bloodied and beaten, from a United Airlines plane he had lawfully bought a ticket for is yet another instance of the total decline in compassion and empathy rooting itself in a business-led model that ignores the value of life beneath the numbers. Publishing, too, is not immune. Too often, authors, agents, and publishers, seek to profit from relationships that would be better off pursued for higher aims, of art, solidarity and creativity. Sharing is not much part of this dog-eat-dog Darwinian world, that pushes...

SHE IS A SUBMISSIVE READER OF EL JAMES In today's Sunday Times Culture section, there is a dismissive review of the latest E.L. James novel, Grey , which as you already know follows the 125 million-selling paperback trilogy about S&M, naïve virgins, haunted billionaires, and contractual sexual punishments and rewards. Rather wittily following on from Freud , it implies that what women "really want" is very badly written prose. On the same page, there is a review of the "traditional" light-verse popular British poet and crime novelist (she did the new Agatha Christie and an anthology of Sex poetry) Sophie Hannah , and it is of course a slim volume of selected and new poems that here is offered, from Carcanet. One of these books has sold a million copies or so already, the other, in all likelihood (and even given the charm, talent and fame of the poet as prose writer), will sell a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand.  If one believes, as I do, that int...

There is a furore in the air because the Faber 50th anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath 's classic novel The Bell Jar , about a young woman in the 1950s America of Eisenhower who suffers mental health issues (to put it mildly), features a cover designed for the Mad Men set: stylish, retro and also, quite light.  The sense is, the design betrays the content, and cheapens lit by making it chick lit instead.  Ill-lit, it should be, not bright and sassy.  The Faber people claim the design is designed to reach young readers who might not know who Plath is, or have read her poetry - which seems a little unlikely as a sales aim - a bit like marketing Orwell to people who don't know much about Nineteen Eighty-Four with a cover of some slim sexy women in latex catsuits. However, some argue, what does it matter if the book finds new readers?  I guess the book and its cover issue raises a question - is there ever a cover not apt for an author?  Would we ever see a...

Any reader in Britain, of serious literature, might be disheartened to learn that sales of the recently short-listed Booker novels are, for the most part, in the low thousands (one of them has sold around two thousand copies); meanwhile, most poetry collections sell less than a thousand copies.  However - and this is the funny part - memoirs by comedians sell tens of thousands, making millions of pounds.  Apparently, this year's Christmas season, which began in publishing on September 29, features a number of comedy books, which sellers hope will hit the jackpot.  This may be fun on Christmas Day.  It is not good for culture, however popular.  The truth is, poetry has a particularly hard-sell in a culture, like Britain's, where the default setting is a guffaw, or chortle.  Poetry can never compete with stand-up, for even when it is light and witty, it is not Comedy; nor is poetry sex, drugs or rock and roll - the other obsessions of the marketers who peddle...

I am very honoured to appear in the debut edition of  the new international literary E-zine: azul .   azul will be published twice a year and is available for free from the dynamic international  Azul Press , in Holland.

Dan Brown's new book, launched at midnight, has sold more books in its first seconds than all the poetry books in the world will sell this month. Or than all the Booker books will sell this year. This is a fact - combined with his relatively artless prose - used to demonise Mr. Brown in certain quarters. But as a film buff and creative writing teacher, I have thought about this. What Brown does is eventing. That's right, a new genre title: eventing. That is, it isn't just writing, or entertainment, but creating an event. It's not just event publishing - the event is the sort of book it is. The use of plot, the style, is pre-cinematic, or post-cinematic, or maybe supra-cinematic - the book-as-movie-as-shared-experience. The popular interest means there is no use in saying it shouldn't be popular - it is popular. We can analyse why and how. But perhaps it is not a bad thing that it happens. I don't think it adds to literacy - people are not reading bu...

The relationship between friendship and poetry is rarely openly remarked upon, or studied, and yet, it is perhaps the single strongest force acting upon the development, and distribution, of published works of poetry, since 1800. Without small groups of friends, often acting in sympathetic concert, as mentors, co-editors, sponsors, and allies, both Romanticism and Modernism would not have generated the works they did (one thinks of Wordsworth - Coleridge , or Eliot-Pound ). The friendship between Thomas and Frost was seminal for them both. Again, in the 30s, there was Auden , and his group. Or, in the 50s, and beyond, The New York School. Or, Lowell and Bishop . Or, in the 60s and 70s, Heaney and Mahon and Longley . Or, the current friendships among the Language poets. Still, such friendships are something of a taboo subject. It was therefore surprising to read the recent article by Chris Hamilton-Emery , poet and publisher, in the latest (2009) version of The Writer's Handboo...

Good news - Tightrope Books has started a new series, to celebrate the best poems written by Canadians and published in a magazine - based on the hugely succesful long-running Best American Poetry series. The first incarnation will appear this October, as The Best of Canadian Poetry in English, 2008 . The guest editor this time around is Stephanie Bolster , and series editor is Molly Peacock . The editors have gone through all the leading Canadian magazines, and selected 50 poems. I'm very pleased to say that one of them is mine, "Gentlemen of Nerve", which first appeared in Vallum . I hope that readers of Eyewear , interested in new developments in Canadian poetry, will buy a copy, and support this significant new publishing initiative. Canadian poetry, on the North American continent, is often starved in the shadow of the USA, but has its own histories, communities, and trajectories, worth celebrating, and reading.

Truth lies between. Between extremes, that is. Poetry is not dead - and when the media says it is, they are turning over sod on an old grave. However, irrational exuberance does no one any good, in the marketplace (even of ideas), either. There's a consensus building among some quarters in British poetry that Poetry Is Truly Popular! The argument then goes something like this: if We Only Knew How To Connect With Poetry's Hungry, Tech-Literate Masses, We Could Sell Oodles Of Poetry Items. As my grandfather Ian Hume used to say - come off the roof! The truth is, there is a groundswell of optimism, and a sense of new possibilities, as a new generation of younger poets takes hold of the various means of production and distribution that the new media afford them - much as the photocopying and lithograph moment of the 60s and 70s allowed for the British Poetry Revival (duly crushed by the big publishers and mainstream critics, so the story goes). However, this undeniably thrilling r...

An interesting post from Curiosa Hamiltona on Salt's Brave New World pronouncements . A lot of Salt's blog post sounds like the sort of thing I (and many other poetry activists) have been saying (and fighting for) for the last ten or more years (i.e., open up a space for more poets, more readers, and use the net do so). My six-year-old essay for Vallum , above, for instance, suggests the idea of a fragmented, diverse, and lifestyle-based audience for poets. This poetry activisim, on my part, was never done to make money - maybe even to lose money - (I am not a "salesman"). I have shown conviction, by sticking to a long-time policy of supporting various kinds of poetries and poetics (Fusion Poetry), and encouraging free or easy access to poetry, via new media. However, when I say this, some radical critics call me a capitalist or worse (though I advocate mainly free distribution via the Internet) - but when Salt puts it into practice, they are somehow suddenly above ...

As the Guardian observes, today, in its review (by British poet Frances Leviston ), Bloodaxe has released (yet another) anthology, this time to mark its 30th anniversary, combining word with sight and sound: rather than including a CD with the book it's offering a DVD of poets, to complement the text (as Rattapallax was among the first to do, in 2002, with its anthology, which I co-edited, Short Fuse; now it does DVD/magazines). Despite what Graves and Riding might have said, in their famous critique, anthologies helpfully situate poets, communities, and moments, especially for readers who cannot keep pace with the baffling shifts and turns of the poetry world in all its momentum. The review also (I was glad to note) mentions the Oxfam Life Lines CDs. Oxfam did a limited poetry DVD for the first Life Lines CD , in 2006, but it only featured 12 or so poets; it was made available on YouTube , too. There is nothing all that "new" about the Bloodaxe book/DVD initiative....

Stephen Page , publisher and chief Executive of Faber and Faber, has begun to see the digital light - or at least, some of its glow. While his brief article in The Guardian is hardly evangelical, it does seem to represent a conversion, for mainstream British publishing, away from a model that ignores social networking on the Internet, to one which seeks to grab hold of that platform, and haul bricks and mortar publishing, paper and all, into the 21st century. Eyewear has been arguing, in these unpapered but lettered pages, for just such a decision, for some time now, and welcomes Page's moves, to an extent. However, if one reads closely, one will see that what is being proposed is not precisely an e-celebration. Rather, Faber is proposing to basically do what Salt Publishing already does - the "build it and they will come" approach, where a site offers cool things, around the books for sale (podcasts, and so on). This is not new; nor is the print-on-demand idea - many o...