Todd Swift talks to Adham Smart
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
Todd Swift is a Canadian writer based in London, widely considered to be one of the English-speaking world’s best-known poetry activists of the 21st century, having organised successful literary events and reading series in Montreal, Budapest, Paris, and London. He is also a champion of the use of the internet and e-publishing to bring poetry to a wider audience, thus endearing himself to people like us, who see the internet not as the successor to the printed or spoken word, but as a supplement to it. I started by asking Todd what his views on publishers and the youth were:
Are publishers biased against younger writers?
Publishers are biased against writers whose work they can’t imagine marketing – unless we’re talking about smaller presses, where poetry is really a labour of love. Young writers are sometimes more easily publishable – especially if they have awards already, or are recommended by a respected older poet. Publishers in the UK seem to like to discover and nurture talent from the ground up. In general, I’d say publishers are often caught in their own traditions of reading – their poetics – so you may have editors who just don’t get work that may be more “American” in style, for instance.
How do you go about getting noticed in the crazy world of poetry?
Why does one want to get noticed? Okay, I know why – but the truth is, being noticed isn’t always the best way forward. I’m noticed – no book out in the UK (yet). The best way forward for a young poet is to read poetry, and write poetry, as much of the time as possible. To believe in the art, before the hype and the bigger career/scene thing. That being said, if you want to go public, these days, blogs are one way – as is editing a little magazine, or running a reading series. I believe poets should give back to other poets as much as they take out – so support poets by attending their events, reviewing and buying their books, and blogging about them.
Is it a good thing to be published young?
It is a good thing to be published, period – so long as the work is ready (and even if it isn’t, the deep water is the place to swim). I began to publish my poems in good Canadian magazines by the age of 18, and have been published steadily since. One thing that can happen though, is a crisis of expectation develops – because it feels good to be recognized, read, reviewed. Poets can feed on acclaim. The need is to move beyond that, to a quieter place, later on.
Where does the internet leave print magazines?
As I’ve said elsewhere, the internet is threatening the comfortable British poetry establishments – the mainstream and experimental ones both – who are basically groups of friends who admire each other’s works (for perfectly noble reasons, probably) – and doing so because British literary circles thrive on precisely the opposite of what the internet brings. In short, the internet disrupts closed coteries, and back-slapping self-regard – because it opens up the world to readers, who can begin to read and see the alternatives, at home and abroad. Mavericks and outsiders begin to look less marginal. Also, there is a tendency to think poetry must have a sublime plain-spoken lyric core – whereas often poems on the internet are far more flamboyant, or rowdy, or artificial – have different styles. A lot of the tussle in British poetry is over the modernism/anti-modernism debate. That one is stale, and Ashbery and others in the States move beyond those divides. So, print magazines that are open will also thrive, but more and more, the net will feature the best younger poets.
Are e-zines somehow inferior to print magazines?
Inferior only if not archived properly. I am poetry editor of Nthposition.com and it is being archived by The British Library for posterity. Print has paper, and paper is lovely to hold. But e-zines have an efficacy, and immediacy, that can be very powerful – as during the 100 Poets Against The War e-books of five years ago.
How does being away from your homeland affect your writing?
Well, I miss Canada. Canada’s poetry scene is thriving, and it is a much more diverse and open world over there – much less dominated by older poets set in their ways. There are maybe 30-40 very cool poets now writing and publishing, between the ages of 20 and 45, who most British readers don’t know about, but who are amazingly gifted, and fun to read. I tried to present this in the recent London Magazine section I edited, featuring nine new poets from Canada. Canada doesn’t have a Heaney, or Paterson figure, and is less centered around prizes, and marketing hype. As for being away, being an ex-pat sharpens my writer’s sense of isolation. It also makes me aware of the myths of national pride and voice so often presented in poetry – and makes me want to seek international diction and style, if you will – work that straddles borders. But I am a “glocal” poet – sometimes I write to my people back home, in words meant for them. I am, meanwhile, privileged to be able to learn so much from meeting many major UK literary figures, like Denise Riley, Andrew Motion, Wendy Cope, Mark Ford, etc. – I love British poetry, especially from the period 1920-1960 (Eliot, Auden, Thomas, Larkin, what a line-up) and studying it for my PhD allows me to develop my own writing. Unlike many Canadian poets, I do not shy away from High Modernism’s high styles.
How does poetry publishing in the UK compare with publishing in Canada?
In one very important way. In Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts supports many, many small press poetry publishers, who each publish 8 or more books a year. Young Canadian poets of any talent will have a book out by the time they are 30, no question. I have had four books out, by 40. This allows for a very generous development of generations – there must be over 100 good poets publishing in Canada, under the age of 50. What this means is that the poet-editor at the publishing houses wield much less influence over whose work gets out there. In Canada, the critics decide, not the publishers. In Britain, I have read Don Paterson say that there shouldn’t be more than 30 poets published a year. I think that’s nonsense. Lets get the work out there, let’s all see it, and then we can decide for ourselves. That happens in Canada.
To the future! Who should we be looking out for?
I think British poetry is becoming exciting again. A lot of this new and next generation stuff was marketing hype that somehow strangled the truth. Okay, it was good, in its way, but only 20 poets a generation? It was too restrictive. That has been the British way, as I said – try to drive forwards with narrow coteries. My vision is different – open the floodgates. People think poetry is dying – no, it’s being damned at the source. There is a great mass of talent just now rising to attention – Tall-Lighthouse poets among them. I can’t name everyone, but I think Luke Kennard, Alex McRae, Emily Berry, Helen Mort, Daljit Nagra, Ben Borek, Ben Wilkinson, James Byrne, Jen Hadfield and Sally Read, to name ten, are all very exciting – and there are more. Magazines like The Wolf, Succour, Mimesis, Trespass, are increasingly the places to locate the best new writing. It may be a renaissance.
Your desert island poetry book! As well as the bible, complete works of Shakespeare, and flock of sound-effect seagulls, which poetry book (not anthology) would you take with you to while away your sandy days?
Well, that’s tough – especially as I love anthologies. But there can be only book (not a selected or collected) that is truly stunning from start to finish – Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens. It seems to be the richest poetry book ever written – so self-focused and generous, at once. And, Stevens would have loved the idea of someone on a desert island reading his lush work while pacing by the sea.
Todd Swift’s poems have appeared in The Guardian, Jacket, Magma, The Manhattan Review, Orbis, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Wolf, and elsewhere. He writes poetry reviews for Books In Canada, The Globe and Mail, and Poetry Review, among others. He is the editor of many international poetry anthologies, including 100 Poets Against The War, Short Fuse, and Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam, the best-selling British poetry CD. His poems have appeared in four collections from DC Books, Montreal, and in several major anthologies of contemporary Canadian poetry, such as Open Field and The New Canon. He is co-editor, with Jason Camlot, of Language Acts, a book of essays on Anglo-Quebec poets. He is poetry editor of Nthposition.com. He teaches Creative Writing and English at Kingston University, and Birkbeck. He is a contributing editor to Mimesis, and co-founder of the Facebook Poetry group. His site is www.toddswift.com and his widely-read blog is Eyewear. Significant poet-critic Al Alvarez has said of his latest book, Winter Tennis (2007) that it is “an impressive collection”.
Adham Smart
Adham Smart is the Pomegranate Publicity Officer. He comes from Egypt by way of South London (Adham wants us to say South EAST London, apparently it’s life or death – Ed) and we’re reliably informed that he’s well hard. He’s the baby of the team at seventeen and is finally in his last year of sixth form (eek!). He was an FYP in 2006, 2008 and 2009. He collects foreign languages like planets collect satellites, and is often found writing invisible kanji on his hand.