The poetry world is still reverberating over the news that independent publishers Salt will no longer be publishing single collections of poetry. The Norfolk-based publisher announced last week that, “after 13 years and over 400 poetry collections, many by debut authors, Salt is to concentrate its ongoing poetry publishing on its Best British Poetry anthology series”. In its statement Salt added that it was not ruling out a return to publishing some single poetry collections in the future: “Salt will continue to support and market its extensive backlist, as well as develop other poetry anthology projects.” Before the changes take effect, Salt will publish a further dozen new poetry collections, including several debuts and this year’s Crashaw prize winner, Lydia Macpherson.

In a blog earlier this week titled The Health of Poetry, Bloodaxe poet Clare Pollard  described the news from Salt as “terrible” for British poets.

She said: “Squeezed by the recession and the big buyers, the half-dozen major presses are only accepting one or two or no debuts each year. … for the last decade many have seen Salt as the best option – they seemed somewhere in the middle, with enough presence to at least have a shot at getting your book into shops and on prize-lists, and were taking on lots of new writers. The news that their poetry publishing will now be slashed to a single annual anthology is terrible for British poets.”

She added: “We seem to be moving towards a model where people are kept ‘emerging’ for as long as possible – preserved in a kind of hopeful limbo, where they can gain lots of encouragement and support, but also spend lots of money on mentors and Arvon courses and MAs and competition fees and retreats. It can take many years for the truth to emerge: that for all their talent and investment, they are unlikely to get a book published, and if they do it will probably disappear without a review or more than a handful of sales.”

In response to Pollard, Bloodaxe publisher Neil Astley said on Facebook: “When Arts Council England made its last round of funding decisions, support for writer development was massively increased at the same time that presses like Arc, Enitharmon and Flambard were told their annual funding was to be scrapped, other publishers like Bloodaxe had their three-year funding reduced (while Anvil's was reduced to a crippling level), and first-rate literary organisations which promote poetry books and readings like the Poetry Book Society and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival also lost their funding. Salt had already been told it would get no further funding.

”At the time we and others protested to ACE that there was no point in nurturing new writers if they were cutting or reducing funding to the key presses and organisations which would publish and promote the work of these new writers and all the other poets. It just doesn't add up. But ACE doesn't have a coherent literature strategy (some would say it has no literature strategy at all, let alone a coherent one!). Some of these presses and organisations have been able to keep going thanks to short-term funding from ACE's Grants for the arts scheme, but that doesn't enable them to plan their programmes for the long-term; and the Grants for the arts solution was a panic measure brought in once ACE had realised the extent of the damage being done by their funding decisions.

”But Flambard have gone. Arc's publishing has been severely restricted. Anvil are struggling. And presses like Bloodaxe and Carcanet have to maintain their current lists with reduced funding as well as being required to keep publishing first collections. Despite the shrinking of Waterstones and the downturn in sales caused by the recession, ACE-funded publishers have to increase their sales with less grant support or they face being cut or having their funding further reduced in the next round of funding decisions. So what Clare Pollard describes in her blog fits exactly with what we were telling ACE two years ago, and in the current economic climate in which literature funding has been skewed the way it has, there's no way that the surviving publishers are going to be able to pick up many of the displaced Salt poets, just as they have struggled to do much for poets who used to be with Peterloo and Flambard.” 

Write Out Loud’s reviews editor, Frances Spurrier – who, happily, has just won the Cinnamon first collection prize – recently wrote in Write Out Loud about the difficulties debut poets face in finding a publisher.