240 titles? are you kidding?

Notes on PBS exercise

The Poetry Book Society has a quarterly page of Suggested books and when I captured the lists from 4 quarters (so a whole year), for 2021 and 2022, I acquired a set of 237 poets active in that year. That is a lot of books, isn’t it.
I combined this with a previous set of 255 names derived from a cluster of 8 anthologies which came out around 2010, and which all dealt with new poets (a shifting term, of course). The extent of overlap could give us a vague view of what the total number of significant poets might be, who were working in that ten or fifteen year period.

So that overlap is the first question. The next is how on earth I can assimilate this bulk of product.

The total number of poets from that earlier exercise who appear in the Suggestions for 2021-22 is 17. So the other 238 did not re-appear in the new list of suggestions. What happened to the 238? Are we seeing a huge turnover and short-lived careers? an obsession with youth? This is good news for the bored consumer – the flow of quite unfamiliar products is rapid. This connects with a theme of my writing in the Nineties – namely tedium with the mainstream, which was excessively conservative, banal, and unambitious. That mainstream has been effectively swept away. I would argue that this justifies my editorial stance at the time. But, the issue has lost all urgency with time– which is what you hope for when you see something going wrong. Am I now someone without an issue?

Obviously, I am only looking at one year, so if you took a five-year run then more of the names from 2010 would surface. The data do not say whether most of those 250 names have simply left the business. But the lack of overlap leaves me nonplussed. So the total from the two lists is (255 + 238 less 17) = 476. This might be a “catchment area” for the whole period, 2010 to 2022, but a glance at the way we collected the names suggests that the real catchment area is probably double that and perhaps quite a lot more.

The total of names from 2021 who do not show up in my set of earlier lists is 222.

In the Suggestions, I counted 23 poets from an older era. This is subjective because it depends on my memory. But it is a very low number, so what we seem to be looking at is a frantic rate of replacement – the PBS selectors are keen on younger poets and there is a torrent of talented new poets rushing towards their observation post. Fantastic! How can you criticise this?

The figures suggest that there is a verdict on the poetry of the past, so of the period say 1970 to 2000, which is utterly favourable – people have an image of Being a Poet and they want to go and inhabit that image. It is a Yes vote. Maybe all those struggles were not in vain. But, that wish to be a poet does not necessarily mean you have much interest in the work of other poets (and certainly does not mean that you have a deep interest in the poets who were doing it between 1970 and 2000).

The Suggestions are on a website which is, obviously, a commercial facility. The PBS has a stock of books and is selling them through their website. That indicates that they flag up books which they expect people to buy. But more likely the publishers propose books which they think are saleable and the limiting factor is the fee which the publishers have to pay. There is a process whereby the PBS selects books for their subscription programme (you pay an annual fee and get four free books), but probably the selectors do not read 300 books to do that. And many other publishers did not want to pay the fee.

My project on British poetry started at 1960 and ran until 1997. So I am pondering the interval between 1997 and now. Can it really be 240 books a year for 20 years? OMG. All the same that is a plausible figure if you wanted to describe that era. To me it seems an intractable problem. I am reviewing two or three books a year.
It seems extremely difficult for a critic to develop an overview of the scene, because the numbers are as I have described. Already the 250 poets in that 2011 exercise were too many for me to deal with except by helpless hand-waving. A generational anthology seems almost too difficult to compile. In this context, the annual anthologies (Best Poetry Of 2011, and so forth) and in fact the PBS lists, are vital resources, even if not ideal as surveys. And the PBS website is a very convenient place to buy books. A luxury store.

I am uneasy about operating with these figures, because obviously that is reducing poets to parts of a featureless quantity and they all want to be unique, and to stress their uniqueness.
A lot of the discourse around poetry at the moment relates to exclusion and diversity. But, if you have a list of 237 significant books during a year, you are going to miss out on most of them, even 90% of them. Being left out is basic because it is anchored in the volume of publications. I am doubtful of its force as a theme of debate. It seems to me that if fifty poets swim within view of the camera then fifty more are drifting off camera and into invisibility. It is hard to process this in terms of guilt and neglect.

I asked “what happened to the 238?” and this would be a line of research. Is there a pattern whereby people peak with their first book, after years of endeavour, and then drop out rather than write a second book? I could spend a few days on the internet searching for this pattern, but frankly I am not willing to invest the time. Another question would be if the dropping-out is actually a decision of their audience; so that readers are identifying quite intensely with poets of exactly their age, and as they become culturally less active there is less of a market for the “date-stamped” poets. This would be a result of ever more rapid cultural change, so that the market is chronologically segmented, and there are generations of maybe five years who feel very distinct from older people, and in turn seem tired to people younger than them. This is a bit speculative – all the same it is curious how the promising poets of 2010 seem not to be on the map in 2022. So the pattern may be a huge number of poets with a very brief phase of attention for each one. But this is probably just one pattern among many.

I should point out that the count was actually 320 titles, but I did a crawl-through and removed Irish and American poets, etc. This was because I wanted a clearer, narrower, image. In reality the market is reading those poets, obviously. The starting-point has to be that all those titles are excellent - investigation might impair that theory, but we must start from a blank point where we know nothing and, yes, all 320 titles are bursting with great poetry.
Saturation could be a problem. I am wondering if there is a syndrome of saturation, frustration, and declining response levels. Maybe this abundance gives rise to radical resistance - and so to mechanisms of defence. So if someone refuses to read conventional poetry, that may be a response to overload. Conservatism is another clearly defensive line - a moment where distinctive features of "personal taste" also have a neurotic component. I don't want to overload my input channels - reviewing 3 books a year seems quite feasible. I am hoping for the next two to be delivered this morning. **