WHY SMALL PRESSES?
List of Small Presses
Little magazines, small presses, pamphlets, chapbooks - in naming they define themselves. From makeshift efforts in flimsy covers with duplicating ink showing through both sides of the page (except where it has failed to print at all) to carefully hand-printed limited editions on parchment, this is where poetry begins and ends, at once its pinnacle and its dustbin.
In 1970 I pulled out the (truly terrible) poems I had been hiding in an old digestive biscuit box and bunged them off in an envelope (knowing enough to enclose an SAE) to Elaine Randell, then editing a long-dead mag named "Amazing Grace", and suddenly I was a published poet.
"Surely you can't just say you're a poet?" my dad says on the way to the pub. I was back from Stevenage for the weekend; probably to borrow some money. "Don't you have to get a degree in it or something?" No, what you have to do is get published.
Most small presses exist to bring the work of new and scarcely known writers to some kind of a public (somewhere between 100 and 500 readers if you're lucky); in doing this, they generally set it alongside the most recent output of more established writers, who use small press publications as a means of testing out their work and maintaining a regular turnover. I don't know how Gazza started, but I guess it was kicking a ball up against the wall in some side street or the door of his dad's garage; aspiring poets get started in the pages of The Wide Skirt, Joe Soap's Canoe, Poetry Nottingham, The Echo Room or (if you're lucky!) Slow Dancer. After that, it's the twelve page pamphlet, then the fifty six page softback, then...
Case in point: Simon Armitage, probation officer, poet. Simon's early work was nurtured in the Huddersfield small press scene, there were pamphlets from Smith/Doorstop, Wide Skirt, Slow Dancer. His first full-length collection from Bloodaxe was a Poetry Society Choice. Ted Hughes (well, John Ashbery really) move over!
Little magazines are generally run by people who are writers themselves; nearly all of us spend more time wishing we could give it up than have to carry on, ploughing through the bundles of unsolicited manuscripts (25 - 50 poems a week in our case, that's without the short stories); forever readying the next issue for press; mailing out orders, catalogues, fliers, begging letters; filling in application forms for next year's grant. Unless the bailiffs come calling (or those fabled little men in white coats) you can't stop. It becomes as addictive as apricot jam and Philadelphia cheese sandwiches, as Dusty singing "You don't Have to Say You Love Me" - a taste it's sometimes hard to explain to even your best friends.
So you want to be a poet? Get a list of available small magazines (from the Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London SE1), pick out the titles you fancy and send some money for sample issues. Alternatively, go down to the Poetry Library for half a day and browse through their excellent stock. When you have found a few magazines within whose overall style your own work seems to fit (this is MOST essential and avoids much wasting of time and expense, to say nothing of frustration on both sides) type up your best half dozen poems and send them with patience and a stamped addressed envelope. If you hear nothing inside - what? two months? - drop the editor a polite reminder. Most people will get back in touch sooner than that; most (inevitably, given the proportion of pages to work) will reject you; give yourself twenty four hours to calm down, retype the pages if they are now scruffy (or smeared with apricot jam) and send them to the next magazine on your list.
Keep writing, keep trying, importantly, keep reading!
If writers of poetry don't read it, who does? If those of us who are interested in poetry fail to support it, who will? How many small press publications did you buy last year? If it's less than two or three, maybe you should be slipping into your shoes and hotfooting it down to Mushroom or Fagins or Waterstones or wherever even now. How many small magazines do you subscribe to? How many?
John Harvey
Editor and Publisher of Slow Dancer Magazine
and Slow Dancer Press.
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