Rupert Loydell has a great long interview up at Stride about his twenty-six years as one of Britain’s (& the world, yes, oh go on) small press publishers. Various hands put questions to him. Here is the one Jay Ramsay gave & it is so often asked and so well answered.
Jay Ramsay: Why is important to publish poetry that most people don’t want to read? (‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ – Adrian Mitchell)
It’s important because the arts leaven society. I don’t believe they change people directly – that is punk rebel songs don’t bring governments down, but human beings need music, writing, song, dance, theatre, painting, to live balanced lives, to be truly healthy. More than ever Western capitalist society is homogenized and whilst pretending to offer more choice actually offers less. I am very optimistic that the web and small publishers means poets can work around and outside the established booktrade to find a readership. I’m quite happy for that readership to be small and spread out rather than seek (or expect) mass sales. I’ve always had to deal with the fact that my paintings find a home on someone’s wall and are gone; with poetry that doesn’t happen, one gets to keep the manuscript, or typed finished version, and sell a book with it in, post it online etc.
I like Adrian Mitchell’s work a lot, and he’s a great performer, but if you take his poem that you quote too far you end up writing rhyming doggerel, which is what most people want to hear. And in fact, you can see that most big poetry publishers facilitate this, with shaggy dog narratives if not rhyming doggerel (though sometimes it’s both). Lowest common denominator is not the answer to anything except making a lot of money in the pop charts. But as I’ve said above, even the music industry are starting to realise that music per se is not commodifiable any more, thanks to online file-sharing. One can get depressed about that (especially if you’re a musician) or take it as a positive. I’m inclined toward the latter.
