Counting poets (again)

I was minded to work out how many poets were being published in the current century, up to 2020. I had counts for three years, based on library catalogues, and they averaged 1436 titles. That would yield 28,720 titles if you scale it up. I then looked at 157 names and did a count of how many books they had published in the period 2000-2020. The average was 4.49. Combining the two figures gives you a result of 6382 poets getting published during the period.

We can add a nuance by considering people leaving the scene, for whatever reasons. If you assume that someone has a 40-year creative career, that implies that 2.5% of the cohort leave the lists each year. You can assume, again, that 2.5% arrive each year. So the total active in any year would be roughly 4255.

We are also interested in how many poets are failing to get published. If we take a guess that this is the same number as the luckier ones who do get published, that would be 4255 again. So 4255 right now with a book ready that they can't place. I think we should imagine a higher turnover for them: say, that they stay in that waiting-hall for ten years before either achieving success or leaving the game.

I am interested in Norman Jope’s figures (in a series of posts, now running, for The Argotist’s blog). He estimates 0.1% of the adult population, so 50,000 people, actively writing publishable poetry. This involves a count of poets active in Plymouth, a scene he knows well, and scaling up to everywhere else. So the 50,000 notional poets are a projection from 250 actually counted. (I don’t think he actually counted them: it is an estimate of what is happening in obscure writing groups around the city.)

If we look away from the figures, we remember that they are just a way of approaching the history of feelings. Feelings of frustration and attraction have peaks and troughs, they follow a curve of which time is one important dimension. Further, time fulfils feelings; people resolve frustration, move into a poetic community, accept other people, over time. So trying to add time data is important. There is a collective energy, and it has visible fluctuations; the poetic emotion around the country is stronger at certain times and inspires more people. It is presumably communicated, people emit energy because they soak up energy being emitted around them. So the figures may capture those intense fluctuations, objective counts capturing subjective energies. If we are lucky.

I can see that I have no way of counting the poets who are writing eagerly but not finding a publisher. I don’t really know if it is 4,000 or 14,000. Presumably editors in the magazine world can see what is happening, although a plunge into their overflowing email boxes could not readily give us a count. Butcher’s Dog magazine report 3179 submissions for one issue, in April 2024. I don't know how you map that onto the whole field. I have never heard of this magazine. I am not clear if this is 3179 poets or 3179 poems, the way they write is ambiguous. A press release uttered by Broken Sleep head honcho Aaron Kent says “I've finished reading all 850+ submissions received for the Broken Sleep Books pamphlet window.“ (Their website currently says they have two poetry windows a year, one for ‘pamphlets’ and one for ‘collections’.) So that might be a count of poets who haven't got outlets and are knocking at the door. But is that all the frustrated poets, or 10% of them, or 1%? And, are these unpublished scripts from the last two years, roughly, or the last twenty years? when does a homeless script finally disappear?
I mentioned frustration but maybe we can also think of writing poetry as like karaoke, people capture something hugely enthusiastic for themselves, the fabulous thing is decentralised and it completes itself by doing that. Art isn’t supposed to be private property. This is where the collective thing becomes interesting. If there are 1648 books being published in a year, maybe you are part of something exciting and the fate of your own poems doesn’t matter. If you don't feel part of it... you aren't part of it. OK, that is a much bigger problem than the reactions of one editor. Why aren't you part of it? I am just saying that we shouldn't think of under-published poets as miserable.

I don’t think these are very good figures and I hope they can act as a start to a process which would give us a more robust set. As I said, the real interest is a history of feelings. And of collective identities. We can get to a good model by detailing and critiquing weak models.

The catalogue search turned up some bizarre facts. One guy had published 22 titles over a few years, apparently self-published. I have never heard of him. There is a Christian publisher in Shrewsbury, Feather, publishing very conservative verse for a specialised market. One poet had published multiple titles with Feather and with Writers Forum, the low-quality avant garde publisher, printing by photocopier. So one person straddles both? unbelievable. She had racked up 45 titles but that might be an under-count. The British Library catalogue often doesn't say if a title is poetry or prose, and you can't open up the detailed level because their service is at half-mast in the aftermath of a massive cyber attack. So, I saw 89 titles by her and I figured 45 of them might be poetry. So the figures might shift by 2 or 3% on a recount. And the total has gone down to 1644.