Poetry Book Society

What is quality in poetry? Why do we need poetry? Perhaps such questions are facile or futile. But every editor asks the first question, every reader the second, and answers to either may not be so certain or so obvious.

To take the second first: many people simply don't, apparently, need it - or think they don't. Many literate, book-reading people simply don't give poetry much of a try. They will buy occasional anthologies but they won't regularly follow particular poets. I don't find this surprising or even regrettable. It's not because of the reputation poetry has, or had, for difficulty but because it's perceived by many people as inessential - not so much in itself, since lip-service is often paid to its importance, but inessential for themselves personally. What nourishes the mind or the spirit? It could, in different ways, be music or art or fiction as easily as poetry.

So much poetry is now published that it must be genuinely difficult to know where to start. (Hence the continuing importance of the Poetry Book Society's role.) Forty years ago when I started Anvil Press much less was published: not that, in my view at the time, that was a good thing - it seemed to me that some good poets were not getting a look in, and that was my motivation to begin in a very small way in 1968, with two books and a group of pamphlets. It was a logical continuation of a magazine New Measure which I had published as a student. I had no sort of a business plan, but there were a few poets whom I wanted to see published and, although I had no idea where it would lead, I was dogged enough to stick with it.

No publisher would be doing their job if they did not think they were upholding and promulgating quality in the poetry they publish. Quality, however, in all its multifarious forms, is not such a simple thing to define or to recognize. I know that in my time as an editor I have failed to recognize the virtues of a number of collections of poetry which have come Anvil's way, and conversely I have perhaps mistakenly, with hindsight, seen things in some books that Anvil has published.

It is not so easy. Not easy to stay alert, not easy to retain the freshness of mind necessary when encountering the genuinely new or the very different. The closest I've come to discussing and trying to define Anvil's project is in the Afterword to the anthology The Spaces of Hope, published to celebrate 30 years of Anvil in 1998. In truth I have never taken a systematic or programmatic approach to what Anvil publishes. Anvil is known for its translations, and I certainly take a special interest in them - in poets, whether classic or contemporary, translated by poets. It seems to me sometimes that the qualities I most value in poetry are very hard to trace in much contemporary English-language poetry, but abundantly evident in the work of poets like Ivan V. Lalic or George Seferis. Even in translation. Or rather, not even in translation: in the particular translations Anvil has published.

Anvil is small: two people. I manage the editorial and production side of things. We try to produce individually designed, carefully edited editions of a select number of new titles and reprints: not too many, so that quantity does not compromise standards. Our prior commitment is to the poets we have previously published, since continuity of publication seems to me very much the point. The longer a publisher has been going, the harder it becomes to make room for new poets. But it happens! We also keep books in print rather longer than makes economic sense (which may be another way of saying that our print-runs have been over-optimistic.)

A few months ago I was going to write, somewhat along the lines of the above, about Anvil's history for the PBS website. Instead I found myself writing about the Arts Council's cuts which had just been announced. You will know that the Poetry Book Society's grant to the PBS had been terminated, along with Enitharmon Press and other good small publishers - Arc and Flambard. Anvil's subsidy has been cut by about 40% over the coming three year period.

It raises hard questions for us. We have to re-evaluate our role and our methods. In an effort to save costs, do we go down the route of digital and on-demand printing; do we enter the e-book market, even if we have no idea how many poetry readers want to read poetry on devices like the Kindle?

We are not too badly placed for these things, since the digital revolution has already benefited Anvil since the mid-1990s in several ways. Firstly, the streamlining of much of our record-keeping, planning and administration using programs like Excel: the VLOOKUP function is my friend. Secondly, producing our own typesetting, which began with a Mac, Quark XPress and a bundle of Monotype fonts in about 1998. That brought the editorial and the production processes more closely together, giving us control over our page design and the ability to experiment with layouts at no cost.

Meanwhile, we have proper ink-on-paper books in print going back many years: our website acts partly as an online catalogue or showcase. Please use it!

Founded in 1968 by Peter Jay and now based in Greenwich, south-east London, Anvil Press is England's longest-standing independent poetry publisher. We specialise in contemporary English poets - with a leavening of Irish and American - and in a range of translated poetry, from ancient classics to modern and contemporary poets. www.anvilpresspoetry.com