*Professor John Lucas is a poet, professor of literature and the founder and publisher of the small, Nottingham-based Shoestring Press, which mainly publishes poetry. In this interview he talks about the role of Shoestring Press and the status of poetry in contemporary English life and letters.
The Perils of Publishing Poetry
Contemporary poetry in English may soon be an endangered species, since its chances of being published are diminishing at an alarming rate. Oxford University Press, for example, has ceased publishing new poetry, as such publications tend not to pay off in terms of commercial success, and many other British publishers have followed suit. It is in fact the small presses, such as the Nottingham-based Shoestring Press, which publishes mainly poetry, that are staving off the extinction of new poetry publications.
Professor Lucas is now a Research Professor at Nottingham-Trent University, a position that enables him to combine research with publishing poetry. He is the author of five collections of poetry, with a sixth due out later this year. He was invited to Athens for a year in 1984 as visiting professor of English literature at Athens University. This led to an acquaintance with the poet Andreas Angelakis, and established a network of acquaintances among Greek poets, which eventually included Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Lydia Stephanou, Tassos Denegris, and Dimitris Liacos.
-Could you tell us something about your own background and scholarly interests, and your own poetry?
As an undergraduate at Reading University many years ago, I met the poet and novelist John Wain, and Ian Fletcher, a very fine poet, though not at all known now, and they were running between them the Reading University Press, which published first collections by poets, some of whom went on to be famous... and that in a way was my introduction to the small-press world. So in a way my scholarly life and my poetic life have always run in tandem with each other... As a scholar, I suppose I'm best known for my work on 19th and 20th century writing (books on Dickens, Romanticism, and radical writing in the 19th and 20th centuries). But I've always kept going my interest in the small presses. When I went to Nottingham University in 1964, I started a small press there called the Byron Press, and that ran all the time I was at Nottingham, for 13 years. Then the Shoestring Press started in 1993, though I didn't actually publish the first collection until 1994, because when I was in Australia in 1993, Michael Wilding (writer and academic) told me to start the Shoestring Press. It being Michael, I thought I'd better do his bidding...
-And what about your own poetry?
My poetry is very strongly influenced, I suppose, by my interest in the contemporary poet as a eudemon, for example Thom Gunn... in the sense that he seems to me a formalist but at the same time someone who engages in social themes of the kind I like... I am very interested in the way he takes on the contemporary world... So most of my poetry I'd say is formal. It uses meter, rhyme, strict stanza - not all of it, of course - and at the same time it's engaged with the contemporary world.
-Presumably it was the contact with Greek poets while you were a visiting professor at Athens University that prompted you to include Greek poetry in Shoestring's list?
It was partly that and partly the feeling that I was fed up with my countrymen for knowing so little about poetry abroad. I mean, the English are famous for knowing nothing about "abroad." "Abroad' is a great mistake for the majority of the English. It's OK to go to, but as (British poet, Philip) Larkin said, "You ought to be able to come back in the same day." And so I felt irritated by that insularity.
-What kind of reception have your Greek titles had?
It varies between indifference and apathy, I'd say... except that Katerina's (Anghelaki-Rooke) collection did sell out. The others have scarcely been noticed. I mean, all English publishers will tell you that this is the great problem when you publish poetry in translation: That it's almost impossible to get it reviewed, except in very specialized journals, like "Modern Poetry in Translation," but getting into the ordinary poetry world of journals and reviews is incredibly difficult.
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The State of the Art
-How does poetry originally written in English and published in England fare in the market these days?
Well, if you believe the tale that Oxford University Press tells, extremely badly. As you know, they've stopped publishing poetry on the grounds that they were losing 15,000 pounds a year on it. I would have thought that since they're the richest publishing company in the world they could have stood that loss, but they decided they couldn't. My own belief is that small, independent publishers like my own do quite well, because we're obviously passionately interested in trying to sell what we put out.
-How do you survive, though, financially?
Handouts from the Arts Council and a lot of legwork, because you sell, not through the bookshop circuit any longer, because the independent book shops have disappeared - now it's all Waterstone's or Borders, who are not interested in poetry - so by and large, it's arranging readings, it's hawking the books around, and it's just hoping that you can bully enough of your friends, who will stay your friends, into buying what you've got to offer. But that's being a bit cynical. I would say it's not too difficult to sell 300 to 400 copies of a collection of poetry. Getting beyond that is where the quantitative leap occurs, and it sometimes happens, though more often it doesn't.
-Where would you say poetry as an art form is at now, in the English-speaking world?
I think that what is certainly true is that poetry is not encouraged as an art form in universities, except now in creative writing departments. I mean the majority of professors of English, almost as a matter of pride I think, don't know anything about poetry. It would be considered almost demeaning to know anything about poetry. They know a lot about critical theory, but don't know anything about poetry, because you're tainted with the actual, as it were, if you know about that. So one of the reasons I don't particularly like to be called a professor of English is that I might get tarred with the same brush, it might be assumed I don't know anything about poetry, and care less.
-What has brought poetry to this pass?
Right. Now this is something I feel very passionate about. I think there are various starting-points. One is undoubtedly what was a stupid idea in the 1960s. I speak as a socialist, but one of the worst things that was ever done was the belief - and this was just bad socialism - that you interfered with the child's imagination if you forced the child, let's say, into learning poetry. Learning by heart became called learning by rote - you got rid of it - and one of the immediate results of that was that no children ever learnt any poetry. And if they don't learn any poetry, they're not going to be able to know any poetry, it's quite unlikely that they'll pick it up.
Secondly, poetry, very stupidly, was identified with elitism - you know, it's something that's for the nobs - despite the fact that, after all, through history, most of the great poets have not been from the world of the elite. So it was bad history, added to bad socialism. And thirdly was, I think, an even more deleterious idea, which was that anything that called itself poetry, was. So if you had a dreadful lyric by some ghastly pop group - and I'm not including good pop groups in this - then that was as good as anything else. Well of course what that does then is destroy immediately any critical faculty for understanding that garbage which rhymes "dune" and "moon" isn't the same as Yeats.
What that results in is a whole generation of students who've got no interest in poetry at all, confronting a whole generation of academics who are only too pleased not to have to teach it, because to teach poetry means you have to be very attentive to language, and even to formal properties, when it's much easier to read a piece of garbage... and as a result pretend that you know something that no one else knows, so it gives you back an authority that would otherwise be taken away from you.
-So where do you think poetry (in English) might be going from here?
Well, I'm always an optimist. I think that the return of the repressed happens, and although poetry's been repressed for a long time by the combination of those forces I've mentioned, nevertheless it comes back. I'm fascinated by the fact that two weeks ago I organized a reading for three of my poets in Beeston library [near Nottingham.] We had about 40 people in the audience, all of whom were sufficiently motivated afterwards to want to buy copies of the books that were being read from. And I do think that if you let ordinary people come into contact with poetry, as Larkin said, someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious. And I think that's right. It's not difficult, actually, oddly enough, to allow people to feel serious about their lives. Which means in the end feeling serious about people who themselves are serious: about writers who take the art of writing seriously. The damage is done all the way in between those people. But if you can circumvent that damage or if you can limit it, then I think there is still, always, a hunger for poetry among most people. I mean, to put it very simply, when some real catastrophe happens in someone's life, or maybe something really wonderful, the automatic thing is to want to try to write a poem about it. Nearly always it's crap of course, but it doesn't actually matter, it's the yearning to make something memorable that counts, and the most memorable way of saying anything is in poetry.
This interview was originally published in Athens, in Kathimerini English Edition, 20 April 2000, under the title:
"Staving off the extinction of contemporary English poetry".