beautiful feelings (count of)

(Continuing series of posts on a book, not quite finished, on poetry in the 2st century)
I trawled poetry titles from the British Library catalogue to get a count of books published by an individual author in a given year. I did this for three sample years: 2000, 2010, and 2019. The result was a list of 3181 poets who published a book in one of those three years. The overlap of names for 2000 and 2010 was 8% and the overlap for 2010 and 2020 was 5.8%.

I was interested in the complete count of poets over 20 years. If we decide that 1000 authors were added in each year the total would be 20,000 for 20 years. But evidently as you add more and more years you find the same names coming up and the yield of “new” authors falling off steeply. So that figure must be far too high. But then we have 3000 actual names for the three years we sampled. It sounds as if 8000 (the figure I developed in an earlier project for the period 1960-97) is too low. That holds, also, because the count of titles in each year has risen steeply since 1990.
I wish I had the energy to trawl up more years. But I don’t. It is tiring work and the checks are tiring.

So it looks like 8000 is too low and 20,000 is far too high. I am suggesting 10,000 as a possible total for the authors who published one or more books of poetry in this 20-year period.

This number may have its uses. It does not allow us to measure the frustration of people who were stuck outside the door and didn’t manage to become one of the 10,000. It does suggest that the business is eager to produce books and that the doors are open, or rather the walls have been knocked down and you don’t need a door.
I had another list of books published in 2019 and a cross-check showed that 40% of that list were not recovered in the BL trawl I had done. This is interesting. Maybe there are deep problems with the completeness of any recovery I have access to. The gap is probably partly to do with publishers forgetting to send copies of books to the BL and partly with the BL cataloguer not adding a label to show that they are poetry. A third problem is possible but I have no idea what it would be.
It is apparent that most of these 10,000 poets (if that is the true figure!) don’t get much attention. But it is also apparent that there are quite a few people who don’t get published and who show up as readers at Open Mike events. Stannard and I have been discussing this phenomenon recently. They may not have enough poems for a book, in fact, but it is safe to say that they experience a certain frustration and that they might write more if they got more attention and kudos.
A guess might say that most of the people who read modern poetry regularly want to be poets themselves. This is democratic and suggests a scene open to talent. But there is also a certain admixture of frustration to admiration in the process of being a successful competitor. Poetry has a magnetic attraction which quite a few thousand people feel; not all those people reach the position on stage, the role in the cast, which they would ideally like to have. I am not saying this is unstable, or that the people who compose the scene want to subvert it.
I became interested in these themes while reviewing Fiona Sampson’s book Beyond the Lyric, which must have been in around 2009. Sampson says that about 200 books of poetry were being published each year. If we take that to mean books by individual authors, the true figure was around 7 times that much. Sampson had a vision of a small intimate community, where a few figures had Expertise and were able to nurture the talented (and confused?). This is a powerful vision but what emerges from looking at the true figures is a large scene without intimacy, where most people are invisible and feel excluded, and the possibility of “expertise” is greatly in question. This is a more depressing vision. Raising the curtain on larger numbers of Outsiders may be honest but it also brings a problem to our attention. Sampson as editor of Poetry Review was probably reading more poetry submissions than any other editor, at the time, and I am sure that she wanted to nurture people – this is what shows up in the book. But as the reader for PR she must have seen that there were thousands of poets hoping to get in and that the door was not open for all of them.

This is a point where we can talk about "gatekeepers". It is literally true that one person can prevent you from publishing in Poetry Review and from reaching the audience which you think is your right. But there are 200 poetry magazines and you can try any of them. If you don't like the magazines, you can publish on the internet. So the idea of one single gate is vacuous. Actually, if 200 people turn your poem down, it may be a bad poem. Result - a gatekeeper is actually someone who spends much of their time reading bad poems. This is not a privileged and enviable condition.

It sounds perverse if you have thousands of people who want to be on the inside of a group and they are all left on the outside. I think rather that those people constitute the thing which has an inside and also that they are all on the inside. The intimacy is created by poems and it is empathy which places you on the inside of it. If you can’t deliver that then you are going to be stuck.
This is getting to be personal opinion here, but my guess is that if you don’t enjoy the whole process it is your fault. The more empathetic you are, the more you enjoy other people's feelings, including those of success, the happier you will be inside the poems. If you define it as a contest which you want to win, it will not be enjoyable and you will not understand the real point. Furthermore, another guess is that deep empathy with the rest of the scene is the basis for writing effective poems, and that if you are competitive and frustrated then you will be unable to write poems that other people like. My impression is that the aggression is all concentrated in the outsiders and unsuccessful. They (or some of them) see it as a struggle for territory whereas the people engaged in editing see the space as collective, belonging to everybody. Just that empathy is the central value and the aggressive interfere with that.

This may be the moment to expose my wish for ten different writers to produce a book on modern poetry from ten different standpoints. This would certainly relieve the invisible pressure on me to be universal in my coverage, which I cannot bring about. Sampson’s book baffled me because it hardly ever overlapped with my own feelings. I finally concluded that the reason for this is that what happens to her inside a volume of poems is quite different from what happens to me, in the same book, with the same sequence of words. That answer is satisfying but it just leaves us with the suspicion that what I write does not expose, or predict, to people what they will feel in the poem. So the goal of criticism cannot be attained. All the same if you take Sampson's book and mine that leaves only another eight mutually incompatible (and reinforcing?) works to go.