I contain multitudes’ B.Dylan
The multiverse is according to wikipedia the hypothetical collection of all possible universes, which together contain everything that exists.
The Multiverse is also a good nomenclature for the state of British poetry now.
It is a poetry world increasingly ring-fenced and siloed by vested interests,
multiple cliques and what are basically book-reading groups disguised as movements.
Every University town with a good demographic of literate readers has one
The function of literate interest groups has been sustained and created by the Creative Writing Industry (I.e. Academia UK).
There are academic careers wholly sustained by it, bookshops dependent on it. The overall demographic is the white post university comfortably off middle-class they have time and money simple as that. The diversity targetting and liberal hand-wringing doesn’t disguise this at all.
Like fine art and English and humanities in general the working class of every creed and colour are generally excluded because they now never make it to university in the first place.
The multiverse is a good place to be if one has made one’s money in government, IT, NHS or banking. One’s savings carry one through whatever Creative Writing course on offer and bingo if one doesn’t cash in a academic post (usually short-term) or get offered a prize one can simply set up a journal or publishing outlet to create a publishing history for oneself and one’s well-to-do friends. This isn’t bitter old poet whining I have concrete proof.
The Multiverse is kind to people who do this. It is sustained by new blood and cash rich clients. It likes to help the poor working-class and diverse as far as is practical which means not very far at all. (Pace The Bookseller).
Even Cambridge has realised it a cash cow and now flogging a spurious Creative Writing M.A. because it makes money. So-called arts council funded vested interests and a scholarship mentality give it a sheen of patrician benevolence but the target is the rich.
The Mulltiverse creates Multitudes and multitudes is the huge slush pile of CW course trained barely competent and downright dull reams of poetry sloshing around the system. Older poets who came through the period of scarcity of poets circa 1950-1990 are excluded not for being bad but for simply existing before internet fueled nepotism and glad-handing started.
Is it even feasible to be a poet now or at least to expect a normal poetry career without a special-interest pressure group around one. I would say no.
In the Poets Scarcity years the whip-hand was the big presses whose influence has waned in the face of many and various special interest groups outlets. These range from gender politics to national prerequisites for funding to more ridiculous and esoteric ones like Goth/ Uncanny and eco-outlets.
Is this a bad thing? Well no lots of people enjoying a brief day in the sun and some attention before realising their investment in academia UK has not given them that Faber deal in itself is no different to Battle of the Bands events in the music business.
What is bad is with the original gate-keepers pretty much redundant they have taken the role record companies traditionally took with independent music I.e. wait and see if it sells then buy it.
The traditional testing and proving period is rapidly diminished and we get fully formed 5th or 6th books of tosh from internet driven poets (allegedly) like Hollie McNish before their agents drive them like sheep to a slaughter house into more profitable avenues like music or novels.
We live in an era of increasing wealth and increasing over-production of so-called poets, writers and artists of all kinds. There is no (as yet) Spotify of poetry which a shame as a actual read count defined analysis of what poets are actually read rather than shared as images on friends Instagram feeds to show how cultured one is ( Fiona Larkin) may undercut almost all our current assumptions of what actually communicates and cuts through to a audience beyond the middle-class book clubs bottle of rioja, vegan bites and oh yes..books.
Such a platform which will exist one day I posit should be called Multiverse.
On Multiverse Pam Ayres would score significantly higher than Fiona Larkin. As for the majority of these CW Course invented poets I hazard a guess that they wouldn’t feature at all because outside of their own support groups they don’t exist at all.
It is a fantasy football league all their own where they can pretend to be Pele when really they are not even capable of basic passes.
Is it viable to call oneself a Poet or write Poetry any more in this cimate I suggest NO.
A recent initiative here in Nottingham claimed to have reversed about 35 years of publishing trends and to have resuscitated a once dead literary journal in paper form.
This is amusing if not so inherently stupid. It is of course a PR stunt led by the local literary infrastructure and basically driven by a need to keep two local creative writing courses afloat. It looks nice but it isn’t real and this is why…it is vanity publishing.
A Elle Griffin report from 2 years ago reported on major publishing traits none of it good…’nobody buys books’ …
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books?
Before long nobody will even print them especially in poetry.
For the paper poetry magazine the writing has been on the wall for a while.
Only subscriber based paper editions like The Poetry Review (UK) stand up due to being part of a subscription-model which was mentioned in Victoria Maul’s Poetry Review critique’ on Substack
https://vamoul.substack.com/p/what-is-a-poetry-magazine-for
As for actually producing any books read on…
https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/what-does-a-book-cost
Add all of this together and it not a very good prognosis in fact as Galley Beggar Books state…
This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.
In light of that and faced with a seeming mountain of online magazines being inundated by a million would be poets is there even any point in continuing down the old paper based path?
I read through the Galley Beggar stuff BEFORE looking at their list and I was struck how London-centric white middle-class it was. Not much diversity there more ‘who you know’ London journalists who romantically dream of being the next Saul Bellow. Fair enough but in that case would it really matter if they only published online or as digital ebooks. The answer is NO and here we come to the political point of all this. Far from being beggars these people are comfortable middle class from a background that allows them to live a dream that probably never existed. (This is what Creative Writing courses that never existed before the Ohio USA model gained traction about 50 years ago are set up to do i.e. make money for academia by selling a false hope of literary genius).
I am sure that some are Guardian picks (mates of mates etc) and I sure some write like angels BUT it is a diversion from reality not reality in the present political climate.
So oh dear Galley Press never mind there hundreds literally of presses and people like you but it does not matter in the rather prissy way you boost your list. Nobody on there is Saul Bellow and it nice you manage to knock a few books out every year but that’s it.
What is not touched on in the Galley Beggar description is a wider awareness of the fundamental shifts occurring in terms of phone driven distribution, reading etc. In a matter of a decade the very premise for the Galley beggar romantic Left bank writer dream will have evaporated. The technical dissolution of the ‘literary’ scene is happening now and it will disappear before our very eyes.
I am old enough to have missed the literary dream first time around. That ship sailed without me when it did float. Now it sinking faster than Hugh Kenner’s original island.
The future is bright, non nationalistic (even Parisian) based and always on always morphing. Today’s Samuel Beckett or Hemingway is on tik tok right now we just can’t see them yet.
The original nobody buys books article was mind boggling but one line from Galley Beggers Press sums it all up so that big name author reading down at Waterstones with the nice clothes and the air of superiority their fabulous avant-garde novel winning book of week in The Guardian or LRB……nobody cares really apart from people like them that want to carry on the delusional times….meanwhile Waterstones is owned by a hedge fund.
the median sell-through for literary fiction (in the first year of publication) is 241 copies (Publishers Association stats).
Just think about that Creative Writing students it not in your glossy online prospectus is it?
Galley Beggar Press does not deal in anything but Fiction as it the only sales left and it failing……
Poetry has been a financial loss leader apart from a few better selling female poets for decades already.
Fake businesses stagger on maintaining the literary super-structure like a wasps nest with no wasps…paper thin.. crumbling…
soon to be gone…like the books below
The new paper journal will be found in all good charity shops by next Xmas for a few quid and the rest will sit in boxes. Some people will feel better for seeing their work in print the rest will sell a few copies to friends.
Some will end up pulped for sure….
Diagram above code FBS = Full on Bullshit