EDITORIAL

THE PROBLEMS OF PUBLICATION 

This issue is bookended by two contributions inspecting the plight of the isolated artist. Jim Burns reviews Mary Ann Caws’ book Creative Gatherings while Jim Greenhalf analyses the state of poetry in the UK and the seemingly random, malign(?) effects of celebrity. Little presses and magazines figure in both pieces.  

Elsewhere - breaking news - Alan Dent tells me that Andy Croft’s publishing operation Smokestack is about to pack it in and Wigan poet Peter Street reports that John Lucas’s Shoestring is also heading for the exit. In another part of the forest Aubrey Malone (one of our most successful authors) thinks you’ll get nowhere without an agent and that publishers are rapacious bloodsuckers who do bugger all and suggest, far from energetically marketing your great work, that you “harvest” your own reviews. Aubrey is a very competent negotiator of these minefields and has published in many genres but even he has trouble launching his 600 page wrist-bending novels. Tanner, does have an agent and has managed (pace Aubrey) to get nowhere nevertheless. 

Conventional publishing does sound an expensive, time consuming business and must be full of risk. “No M. Proust we’d be mad to publish Swann’s Way” (this from NRF reader Andre Gide) likewise Sam Beckett’s first novel got rejected 74 times and even Nabokov had to resort to pornographer Maurice Gerodias to get Lolita into print: it was touch and go – he was ready to chuck it on the fire. 

So whaddyagonnado? There’s always the vanity press (Proust, a millionaire, went down this route and paid for the first edition of Swann’s Way). But they’re even more bloodsucking than the mainstream. At least the conventional publisher takes a punt and risks his investment (think of the poor sod who recommended an advance to Rees-Mogg). Vanity presses take no risks – they want the whole cost (plus profit) up front. They may even insist you buy a few hundred too. Poetry anthologies try a variant of this. A hundred poets stump up a tenner each to get in the collection. The publisher is already a thousand up and stays ahead even if he generously gives the poet a “freebie”. But if you want a couple for your granny – that’ll be another twenty quid thanks 

Little mags are another distressed area. Even TS Eliot had to resort to the begging bowl for Criterion. The best rarely last more than ten years. The Crazy Oik however (if this comparison isn’t too bathetic) is now in its eleventh year and our parallel publishing venture Penniless Press Publications has been going since 2011. It has produced over 80 titles – three of which have been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. A revolution? Well sort of. Take a bow Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. (who’s that hissing at the back?) Print on demand technology means you can knock out a 250 page paperback book for about a fiver (yes there’s a learning curve but it isn’t a brain-burster) You’ll be listed on a global distribution system, including Amazon and Borders, and get your book lodged for ever in a Deposit Library. Not celebrity I admit; just immortality.  

Caws celebrates the enthusiasm and synergy of creative groups. Money and fame don’t come into it – in fact they are snares which technology looks like releasing us from. Perhaps the trajectory of the Oik reveals something. Being a modest, self-effacing kind of bloke (he bragged) it was only around issue 35 that I registered it with an ISSN. This meant the British Library got every issue. Of course I didn’t have spares of the earlier ones and thought their request for a complete set was merely a bureaucratic reflex. But no. They persisted, politely, and I managed to cobble up an almost complete set. They thanked me for this and it dawned: Christ! These people are really interested! Later, on a visit to little mag polymath Jim Burns’ he produced a fat, handsome reference work British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: a history and bibliography of ‘little magazines’ by Richard Price. It wasn’t quite stout Cortez on the peak in Darien - but close

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ALEXIS LYKIARD

September 1st, 2019 

It's eighty years since Auden's poem appeared –
No ordinary draught of gloom, reflective premonition
That lonely barflies or convivial fellows shared,
But timeless verses on the world's parlous condition.

***

I'm sitting in a bar on Fore Street,
Sitting  ̶  old-style, of course  ̶  not sat...
Thus Autumn opens in this ancient
Ruined-by-developers, run-down city. 

Elsewhere scheming politicians are at
Some petty archaic tricks behind the scenes,
Maintaining their own jobs and perks by arcane means,
While the jaded electorate sniffs out deceit. 

Now the living's uneasy, still good if not pretty,
Enabling a tired, near-octogenarian flâneur
To muse on times present and past, till things fade,
Prompting ill-suppressed despair or a crise de coeur... . 

Hapless Exonians have endured a low and dishonest decade:
What's new? runs the song, like the poet's cliché, ‘love or die'.
But why dwell on those biblical motes and beams?
Drink up, old boy, here's mud in your half-closed eye!

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