Michael Rosen reading his poems
On Sunday 9th December at the Cockpit Theatre in London, I attended the celebration and farewell of twenty years publishing by Smokestack Books, which was very ably hosted by Nick Moss. It was an emotional evening. Poets from across the world read in English, French, Italian, and Arabic. When it came to my turn to read, I said the following:
In 2016, I had been writing poetry seriously for two years. I set up Proletarian Poetry in 2014 and was a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. It was MPK’s Director Jill Abram suggested I submit some poems to Andy Croft at Smokestack Books. So I sent him twenty-five poems (which was all I was relatively happy with). Within two weeks, he replied saying,
‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I would like to publish your poetry. The bad news, I can’t do that for two years.’
I was ecstatic! Partly because it would take those twenty four months to put a whole collection together. But mainly because I was given validation, from someone who had published the likes of Michael Rosen, John Berger, Sylvia Pankhurst and a whole roster of international poets.
Smokestack’s remit is summed up in the following words:
“Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.”
On April 1st, 2018, my book ‘Precarious’ was published by Smokestack Books. Each time I write that sentence, I still get the shivers. I had written reports, articles, and workbooks from my time as a consultant for the charity the New Economics Foundation. I had written two plays about the Arab Spring performed in 2012 & 2013. But poetry became my main love. Richard Skinner’s book with Smokestack ‘The Malvern Aviator’ came out on the same day as mine, and together we toured the country reading our work from Newcastle to Bristol.
After the pandemic I began hearing sounds about Andy winding up Smokestack. But the reality didn’t hit until this year, when it was announced that the catalogue would end in 2024. Understandably, people were shocked and saddened at the news. But after twenty years, of singlehandedly publishing well over 200 books, Andy was packing it all in. A great deal of frustration on his part was evident in his look back at the way in which the mainstream poetry world had generally ignored his monumental efforts.
In a letter to PN Review he said:
“I set up Smokestack Books in 2004 with the aim of publishing poets a long way from the centres of cultural authority, especially oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets. Since then, Smokestack has sold over 65,000 books and published 237 titles… Smokestack was also a protest at the terminal dullness of so much of the contemporary UK poetry scene, its self-importance, excitability, lack of seriousness and self-imposed isolation from the rest of society. But what was supposed to be a positive intervention soon became a line of retreat, defeated by PR and lazy arts journalism.”
So what now? Some people said that this change was a part of the natural churn of poetry publishers coming and going. This was indicative of the misunderstanding of what Smokestack Books was. A place for radical, working class political poetry. It was not a natural ending; it was an ending because as Andy said:
“After twenty years of running Smokestack unfunded, unpaid and single-handed, I have run out of good reasons to remain even on the margins of the uncomradely, uncongenial and frankly embarrassing world of contemporary British poetry.”
Maybe, as authors we also missed a trick. Missed what pressure Andy was under. But of course, as stated by Andy, the main problem came from the institutions of the poetry community [The funders (e.g. the Arts Council), the poetry bodies (e.g. The Poetry School etc.), and festivals (e.g. Ledbury etc.)] and the ‘progress’ of capitalist development, which has pervaded the way poetry is enacted. In this I look forward to Andy’s book ‘The Privatisation of Poetry’, to be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2025.
There is nothing natural about the end of Smokestack Books. It is a severing from the outside; twenty years of being gnawed away at, until the sinews finally separated. If I was twenty years younger, had my full health, and had a skin thick as a rhino, maybe I could gather strength to do something. But at the moment, these thoughts are all I can muster.
Earlier this year, I did a catalogue of almost all of the poetry books published in 2023 (outside of those published by Smokestack and Culture Matters) of minor and more major collections, to see how class was represented, both in terms of the poets and the poetry. I will publish the findings in the New Year, but it doesn’t make for optimistic reading. It will come as no surprise that class is a very minor subject, and working-class writers are thinner on the ground, where identarian issues predominate.
I think it is unfair to say that the mantle now lies with Culture Matters, the socialist co-operative set up almost a decade ago, which I was proud to be an associate of, until my health deteriorated. It has published fifty books and pamphlets, including ‘The Combination’ by myself, a poetic coupling of the Communist Manifesto, available in the Books section on this website.
It has also developed and run the annual Bread and Roses Poetry Award for several years, encouraging new and emerging working-class poetry. Or the valiant efforts of the likes of Alan Morrison’s Recusant and its imprint Caparison, co-editors Mike Jenkins and Marc Jones of Red Poets, Brett Evans’ Prole (both in Cymru), or the likes of the Dark Horse in Scotland, to name but a few.
No, the mantle lies with the wider poetry community. Who will publish refugees from the heart of war zones? working class political poetry? Poetry that shakes the snow globe of complacency, a complacency that sees the changing of seasons, as more important than the lives of those living in poverty or political exile. Poetry may make nothing happen, but within Smokestack Books and the energy of Andy Croft, it has made a huge difference – it’s just that the way in which poetry is separated, many people would never know the change it has made.
Maybe if they had come to the Cockpit Theatre and heard the praise and poetry of the ‘Smokestackers’, they would understand that this end was not a natural ending, and that our poetry is part of society, not apart from society.
[NB: there will be a Smokestack Teesside farewell on January 5th 2025 at The Waiting Room in Eaglescliffe, Stockton-on-Tees.]
The final book, Smokestack has published is Martin Hayes’ Machine Poems, and ‘the definition of what’s not a machine’ is the last poem in the collection.
the definition of what’s not a machine
when the curve of her back means more to you than anything
when a tree
or a group of trees
like a wood or a forest
stand for something
when you want to kill something
like a politician or a bailiff or a traffic warden
but use reason not to
when you have a trinket or an artefact
left behind by the dead
that means something to you
immeasurably more than its appearance
when animals become your neighbours
rather than your trophies
when stars remain a mystery
rather than a solvable puzzle
when after eating beetroot
your pee comes out red
and you daydream for hours
about how everything is connected
when you can measure
evil or good
by the instinct inside your guts
rather than by calculation
when there is an urge an urgency
in the things that you do
because you know that one day you will die
