Up in smoke

Andy Croft writes: Smokestack Books is closing at the end of this year. The backlist will still be available to order, but Smokestack will no longer be publishing new books.

I set up Smokestack Books in 2004 with the aim of publishing poets a long way from the centres of cultural authority, especially oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets. Since then, Smokestack has sold over 65,000 books and published 237 titles, including books by John Berger, Victor Jara, Michael Rosen, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vernon Scannell, Linda France, Louis Aragon, Bertolt Brecht, Nikola Vaptsarov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yiannis Ritsos and anthologies of poetry from Cuba, Greece, Kurdistan, France, Russia, Algeria and Palestine.

Smokestack was also a protest at the terminal dullness of so much of the contemporary UK poetry scene, its self-importance, excitability, lack of seriousness and self-imposed isolation from the rest of society. But what was supposed to be a positive intervention soon became a line of retreat, defeated by PR and lazy arts journalism.

During the past two decades, large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down. The democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. In turn, British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business.

The result is an atomised, unwelcoming and unfriendly poetry scene whose inaccessibility is barely disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion. Conversations about poetry have been replaced by conversations about poets, discussions of tradition by accusations of plagiarism, and the language of literary criticism by the hyperbolic language of press-releases promoting corporate prizes and celebrity book-festivals.

After twenty years of running Smokestack unfunded, unpaid and single-handed, I have run out of good reasons to remain even on the margins of the uncomradely, uncongenial and frankly embarrassing world of contemporary British poetry.

Note: PN Review has invited Andy Croft to write a fuller account in a future issue of PNR of Smokestack’s history and achievements, and an extended analysis of the worlds of poetry writing and publishing, as he experienced them.


Helen Vendler ventriloquised

Michael Allen writes:As usual, I enjoyed reading your editorial from PNR 278. However, something has gone wrong with one of its quotations. Helen Vendler advised my PhD and the quotation seemed out of character for her when I read it.

When I looked it up in a scan of the New York Times, it looks like the words really came from a letter by Linda Grant, which makes more sense in context.

Michael Schmidt writes: Editorial apologies are due! When News and Notes for PN Review 149 were written in 2003, two letters had appeared in the New York Times. The first was by Helen Vendler, and to her I attributed the second, from Linda Grant. Two errors are now corrected with a single mea culpa, and history is put straight(er). With thanks to Michael Allen. This acknowledgment sadly coincides with the death of Professor Helen Vendler in April of this year at the age of ninety. The New York Times obituary was subtitled, ‘In the poetry marketplace, her praise had reputation-making power, while her disapproval could be withering.’ The word ‘marketplace’ might have stuck in her craw. The obituarist continued, ‘In an era dominated by poststructuralist and politically influenced literary criticism, Ms. Vendler, who taught at Harvard for more than 30 years, adhered to the old-fashioned method of close reading, going methodically line by line, word by word, to expose a poem’s inner workings and emotional roots.’ She would have pointed out the disconnect in this piece of journalism and have recognised the symptoms from which it proceeded.