Thursday, May 28, 2009
Salt's Innovative Campaign
Save Poetry Now! Well, that's the tenor of the campaign that Salt publishing are running at the moment. Having come to the end of a three year stint of development funding that would have seen Salt upping it's game and raising it's profile, the deepening recession came along and knocked the stuffing out of their previously healthy sales.
Just One Book, was Salt's response. If everyone who was into poetry, went along to their website and bought just one of their many titles, enough cash-flow could be raised to smooth them through a bumpy few months and stabilise their publishing list for 2009.
So, if you've been reading about their poets or writers, and wondering what that particular book was like, now is the time to act on that impulse. Only one book - that's all it will take to show support and keep the business viable.
If you're in the UK, or if you're here in Ireland and have access to BBC2, you might watch Newsnight Review this Friday, to see Chris Hamilton-Emery elaborate on Salt's predicament and the Just One Book campaign. Look out for the Manchester Evening News too.
I've put my money where my mouth is, and invested (yes, that's what I call it) in some Salt books that I've wanted for a while. Go on, you know you want to!
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16 comments:
Nice one Barbara! SOS- save our salt-buy a book tout le monde and PRONTO!
Great, B. Their books are gorgeous as well as good reads.
I've not been let down in the past: Chris Agee's collection, Next to Nothing was so well executed and a heart-breaker to boot, and Katy Evans Bush's book Me and the Dead was such an assured debut... now, just waiting for my newby collections to arrive... *drums fingers*
Dear Barbara, once I exchanged a long email dialogue with an editor of Salt about his discouraging talk in his submission guidelines...maybe it was a different editor or a different Salt, it was very vast and well organized website which reminded me of very big, and dismissive!, publishers like Bloodaxe who never answers to submissions...
Anyway buying a book to save it is a great idea...
I have written a post on editors who have worked with me on changes in my poems...
If you had similar or different experiences on the matter it would be engaging to listen to yours...
What did you order Barbara?
i ordered four, 56 quid in Waterstons, be here within two weeks.
by the looks of it, this could boost his turnover more than the subsidies, because everyone is rallying round, poets helping their colleagues on the love bus, a wave of goodwill..happy days
I ordered Rob Mac's Opposite of Cabbage, Andy Philips The Ambulance Box, and Jane Holland's Camper Van Blues, all books that I was looking to get in the last few months, so why not now :)
Yes it is happy days, as Sheila, says, dare to fail, fail to dare... sharing your troubles and being honest - people do care!
Bollox, I've gotten all twisted in that last one, it should be 'dare to fail not fail to dare'!
Off to their website, coppers in hand!
Cheers barbara.
Those seven words are btter than Becketts fail maxin.
dare to fail not fail to dare.
That's the second this week. the other one was Alison Croggon with her take on the difference between print and online criticism.
one is the assertion of an opinion to a mute audience and the other a curation of public conversation.
I got Poetry Wars - Peter Barry
Sills (link to pdf sampler at salt) by Michael O'Brien
Under Albany - Ron Silliman, which is a prose memoir of his life in writing and a Polish translation of poet Adam Czerniawski - The Invention of Poetry - by Iain Higgins.
Upstairs at Chapters is great for books, i got the first and final (fourth) volume of O'Caseys letters for 15 quid each, and he is a great read for inspiring the late-to-writing types like myself, as if you only had Wilde, Yeats, Heaney as a model, you would be thinking you had to start at 15, and not be a bruiser, but O'Casey loved a row and the British literature pages hated him because he didn't spare the satire and his porse fizzes with the comedic flame and you can tell he's enjoying himself when he gets stuck in and starts up a new campaign.
He has a great line about the (now long forgotten) VIP english literature Critics of his era -
"So many have been conscripted for the battle of the books, each equally armed and afraid of each other, that the business - for it is a business - has become a hollow game of you touch me gently and I'll do the same...Many critics have a tendency, if one ventures to reply to them, of falling down in a dead faint, evidently thinking that their criticisms are written not on desks or tables, but on the tops of holy altars."
I bought Rob's book recently. When "budgetary control" is looking the other way I'll try and sneak in another one.
Shame all the Beeb poetry attention isn't translating into sales.
"Letters..." by writers are such a good read sometimes, DW. I've been working through Ted Hughes for a while now, dipping in and out, in and out. I find it fascinating what's been left in (as they're edited). I must look in Chapters the next time I'm up - I do be up there quite a bit for readings for 7 Towers, although I'm not up until after the summer. I did most of my Xmas shopping in there for the kids, and upstairs I have to censor myself on, otherwise I'd need a suitcase to bring the stuff home & my bookshelves are already groaning as it is (not to mention my 'budgetary controls' as A puts it.
Still, shine on for the moment, eh?
eh ha eh ah ha ha ha
barabra
you crazy diamond
caught in the crossfire of some mad
collision, singing and bringing
pink floyd to the mission
of being a rocker whose shoes
are a shocker,
selling blather and waffle
a lie a lie oh
no, look who it isn't the joker and batman high on some spirit
of long long ago
long long ago
in chapters with the towers
sarah oh ho.
only freestyling, not as good as God, (a poet called mike) who is a rap-poet in dublin, so called because of his (now shorn) long flowing golden locks, long flowing golden beard and pointy hat, when he first pitched up the Write and Recite open mic, saying
give me a woard(for he wuz a Dub)
And you give him a word and he just starts rapping totally and genuinely what in the old days was actually a part of the practice, called tenm laida (chanting from the heads) extemporised composition.
i had never seen owt like it and it was very interesting to witness because if i hadn't i would never have known it was possible, to do what God does.
oops, i knew i forgot.
sarah i spoke to for the first time in any real sense on wednesday, asking if she fancied hosting the Leinster heat of the third annual All Ireland Live Poetry Championships, whose final is at John Walsh's North Beach on Monday October 26th.
Casey in Cork is having the Munster heat on September 21, the Connacht heat's on Monday 27'th at North Beach and the Ulster and Leinster heats are in the process of being fixed, and when they are, well, that's a package to gas some outrageously wind-upable copy one's many jealous hating rivals will seethe in misanthropic fizz about overseas and on these shores, because i will be able to bore even more po-faced and earnest, giggling behind the mask of the very important biz at hand, of the third consecutive All Ireland, radio four only on their second, PI a year behind, the rising tide that lifts all boats and is going to make me very very rich, having sold the rights to ABC for 1 million dollars.
ha ha ha ha ha ha
Well, I'll look out for that happening: Sarah is always trying to promote the spoken word, & so far has done a great job through Cassidy's & Chapters.
As for God-Mike, it's a gift to be able to just riff from a given 'woard.' I wonder if he's still on the go...
Just got three of the books barbara, and have started tucking into poetry wars.
god is still riffing, when he's not plumbing, any night in Dorans at the back you will find him, ryhmin and timin.
Good to know, DS, I don't get to Dublin much, but when I do next, I'll look out for him. Enjoy the readin'.
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