It was a sad moment for many poets - including me - when David Cooke announced he was calling it a day after 10 years of editing the quarterly online poetry magazine The High Window. During that time the magazine’s press has also published a number of poetry collections. In the following interview David, a Gregory award winner who has also seen a number of his own collections published over the years - he has also posted some of his poems on Write Out Loud - looks back at the evolution of the magazine, his poetry ‘likes and dislikes’, and his plans for the future. (Spoiler: his plan to repost from the magazine’s archives means that it’s not quite the end, after all).  

 

When you began The High Window with Anthony Costello over 10 years ago, what was your motivation for doing so? What was the aim of the magazine?

I suppose like a lot of things in life I drifted into it. In 2008 after a 20-year hiatus I had started writing poems again. I had won a Gregory award in 1977 and published my first collection in 1984.  I had also been sitting on another unpublished collection which had come together fairly quickly in the second half of the 1980s. Anyway, when I quit my job as a teacher I must have gradually recharged my batteries and got back in touch with my creativity. I discovered also that in the intervening years technology had moved on and had opened up new possibilities. Self-publishing was now a relatively simple process so I decided, purely for my own satisfaction, to revise and republish all my back catalogue. Then, as I was discovering the possibilities of self-publishing, I noticed that everyone seemed to be writing blogs. Out of curiosity, I set up a WordPress site. Again, it was a pretty easy thing to do. I knew that there was no way that I was ever going to write a regular blog, especially if there wasn’t much chance that anyone else would read it! However, it did occur to me that I could use it to create a magazine. So I had that at the back of my mind for quite a few weeks until my son, Jim, introduced me to Anthony Costello who was a member of his running club in Hebden Bridge. Jim said that Anthony organised poetry readings and that we should meet up. So we did and the rest is history. We ran the journal together for three years, but when I eventually moved to Swindon the geographical divide became unmanageable and I decided to go it on my own. Somewhere along the way, I also decided that The High Window Press would have more credibility if I started publishing other people. Looking back, I really don’t know how, but I ended up publishing over 40 books.

 

This may be an impossible question to answer, but I will ask it, anyway. What has been the kind of poetry that you liked to see in The High Window? Or, to put it another way, what sort of poetry were you less keen on?

I don’t tend to overthink my attitude to poetry. My response tends to be instinctive, visceral. It either works for me or it doesn’t. I got hooked on poetry as a teenager long before the explosion of creative writing courses, so that my tastes and whatever talent I have were nurtured by my own reading. Back then you discovered your own poets, read them obsessively, absorbed them and, if you were lucky, found your own voice. However, I do have certain very basic principles. I tend to go for poetry that is carefully crafted and musical. There has to be respect for basic syntax and no straining for effect. I also think poetry needs to be rooted in real experience. However, one of my earliest heroes was WH Auden, so I am also drawn to poetry that plays with ideas. Even if poetry is ‘intellectual’ it can still be informed by experience. As far as The High Window is concerned, both the books and the journal, I was determined to promote the work of poets who were not currently fashionable, had been neglected or had simply never had their due.  To be blunt, I don’t like poetry that is overblown, fuzzy around the edges, pretentious. That doesn’t mean that my interests aren’t wide-ranging or I won’t go ‘off-piste’. Over the years, for example, I have published quite a lot of poetry from eastern Europe, which can be pretty surreal, but the language is frequently razor sharp. 

Many poetry editors have rejection stories, of poets’ unexpected replies to being told that you don’t have room for their poetry in the magazine. Have you any of those?

It seems to me that fairly soon a recognisable community grew up around The High Window. Presumably this consisted of poets who felt at home with the type of work they found there. This has meant that the quality of work has tended to be pretty good. I had presumed before I actually got going that I would get swamped by thousands of submissions that were fairly hopeless. In fact this was not the case at all. The number of submissions has always tended to be manageable and, as the journal got better known, I received very little work without some merit. Inevitably, I’ve had the odd person kicking off because they think they have an automatic right to be published, but most poets know that a choice has to be made and that there’s nothing personal about it. 

You have said, with regret, that the amount of time working on The High Window has become “unsustainable”. In a typical week, how many hours have you devoted to it?

It’s very hard to answer this. The main problem is not just the number of hours you spend reading submissions, typesetting them and communicating with people, it’s the fact that you just can’t get away from it. You are always ‘between issues’, planning ahead, setting up new features, chasing people up. Over the years, I have constantly tried to get ahead by typesetting as much of the next couple of issues as I could, but I always seemed to be behind the curve. When I was publishing books as well, it was total madness. Discontinuing that side of things was a big step in the right direction. I’m glad I did it, but it simply couldn’t go on! 

 

When saying farewell, you have mentioned an archive project for the magazine. Can you give some more details about that?

I am looking forward to this, although I am not quite sure how I am going to do it. The High Window has always published a very wide range of work between poetry, translations, reviews, essays, artwork. So I now need to think about how frequently I should repost from the archives. Too often and people won’t keep up. Too infrequently and the momentum will be gone. I will play it by ear. It will obviously be a lot less intensive than managing the constant flow of new work and will, I hope, give me more time to update some of the links within each category so that each reposting will give access to further material, which readers can browse at their leisure.  

Over these 10 years, what have been the highlights, your proudest moments, while editing The High Window?

While I have actually been doing the work I have barely had time to think about this and it may take time for the dust to settle. However, the first thing that occurs to me is how overwhelming the response has been since I announced the final issue. It is obvious that the journal has been appreciated by so many people and that it has left its mark. If the archive continues to generate interest, that will be the cream on the cake.

 

Thank you for fielding these questions, David, and for generously giving so much of your time and energy to the poetry community.