So the travails of the Asian "tiger economies" have brought down the Oxford University Press poetry list? I think not. I think that a muscular assertion of new priorities has brought down the list and that this is deplorable. I have friends among both the victorious Philistines and the smarting Israelites. May I speak up for the Israelites?
There are very few mainstream, unsubsidised publishers who run a poetry list. The leading name is Faber which publishes between five and ten new titles a year. Oxford was the second, averaging eight new titles. Cape, Picador, Penguin and Chatto are maintaining a commitment to the poets they publish, without having any plans to extend their lists further.
You see how alarming the situation is for an Israelite. I expect the mainstream publishers to bring out, next year, about 25 new titles. The full Oxford list contains 42 names, of which some are dead and some have moved elsewhere. But there are 26 axed Israelites looking for new houses. They have only four London firms to turn to, before looking to the subsidised stalwarts of the North, Carcanet and Bloodaxe.
The situation is odd, considering that there is nothing easier to produce than a book of poems. For my part, I have enjoyed being published in every kind of way (except the fancy vellum-bound edition). I have published on two garage presses. I have published myself from abroad and sent packages out from home. And I've been on mainstream lists. The beauty of the small presses is that, for a comparatively small amount, you can design and produce a nice-looking volume. Nor is it really hard to sell the first few hundred of an edition - particularly if, as our modern poets so doggedly do, you carry around a few copies to take to readings.
The small presses rely entirely on enthusiasm and fantasy, but they are liable to exhaust themselves. One is selling, as it were, at the farm gate; one would not expect to receive bulk orders from chainstores. There is a powerful feeling in the publishing of poetry that one is casting one's bread upon the waters. And I can tell you that there is a thrill in sending off a copy to the British Library or the Bodleian, knowing that, whatever happens, the utterance has been made. The curious reader will be able to retrieve it. For the serious poet, the achievement of a huge audience is not a great consideration. Of course it is exciting, and flattering, to break through from the few hundred to the thousands. But that is not one's purpose in writing poetry. I don't think Auden's first book, which made his reputation, sold more than a thousand copies for a matter of years, and I am sure Auden didn't care two hoots.
What is frustrating is to find that there are people who would like to read your work, or to track down something they heard on the radio, but they can't find it. There is no substitute for a mainstream publisher prepared to take the long view. It is hard for the small presses to achieve what Penguin has, for instance, achieved for Tony Harrison's Selected Poems, which was first published in 1984 and has sold around 50,000 copies and still sells at a solid rate of 2,500 a year. A similar volume by Roger McGough has sold 30,000 since 1990, while Carol Ann Duffy has sold 17,000 of her recent Selected Poems, but the annual sales are rising. This year her volume will sell about 3,000.
Penguin's list differs from the Oxford list in that it is made up of poets who tend to have made their reputations elsewhere. It includes some plausible-sounding properties. However, in the hands of an accountant even these figures can be made to seem rather less satisfactory by the following ruse. If a conglomerate publisher decides that every book on its list must be conceived as bearing an equal load of the expenses of the firm, then what once looked like a modestly profitable little number suddenly turns into a disgraceful little slacker. If my slim volume must do its part in sending a hundred boozy publishers to Frankfurt, or commissioning a coffin-shaped table for the boardroom, then I am at a serious disadvantage.
The problem was not that the Oxford list was not making money. It just wasn't making a humungous sum. One of the Oxford poets reported to me the following desperate exchange. Defender of the list: "But the back-list brings in £10,000 a year in permissions." The Philistine: "That's nothing: Vaughan-Williams brings in £240,000 a year." You can see what the Israelites are up against. Were up against, for no one believes this decision can be reversed. The Oxford poetry list has not been around as long as the press itself. It was put together by the poet Jon Stallworthy in the 1960s and 1970s, and was nearly closed in the 1980s after another muscular assertion of new priorities.
Just as the poetry list has not always been with us, so the alternative methods of production have expanded in recent years. Each century's approach to publishing has been different, and we are going to have to find new methods in the next. This is something which, as poets, we are going to have to do for ourselves. Someone will come along and crack that problem for a while. And that is something to look forward to. But it is always sad to see decades of effort thrown away. The Philistines are upon thee, Oxford. The Philistines are upon thee.