"a mix of online, performance and print…"

Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land
(from: Wake Forest University)

"...The stark truth is that poetry publishing is not going to be particularly commercially viable, given that the total value of UK poetry sales has gone from £8.4m in 2009 to £6.7m last year. Mind you, Salt [Publishing] seems to have been particularly severely affected if you compare its fall of 25% last year to the overall 15.9% drop. In one sense, it could be argued that Salt's decision is good news for Faber, Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Shearsman and all those Saboteur shortlisted indies, since it means that there are fewer big fish swimming round a shrinking pool.

     However, it would be a serious error to equate the demise of a single publisher with the overall state of health of poetry. Even Salt director Chris Hamilton-Emery has noted the 'massive increase in the number of poetry publications coming out,' and he's right.
     Jim Bennet's extremely useful Poetry Kit website lists more than 400 UK poetry publishers, and while the list is broad (it includes Faber) and perhaps a bit out of date (it also includes Salt) it shows the range of publishers around. As for the US, a quick look at the SPD [Small Press Distribution] site indicates that the situation there isn't much different."
— The Guardian
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"The Hogarth Press was founded by the Woolfs in 1917. In the early years it was a hand press in the dining room at Hogarth House in Richmond, England, on which Leonard and Virginia hand set and printed their own works and those of their friends and associates.
     Between 1917 and 1946, the Hogarth Press published 525 titles (34 hand-printed by the Woolfs), including works by T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Graves, H.G. Wells, and many others. Leonard Woolf later wrote that 'The publication of T.S. Eliot’s Poems must be marked as a red letter day for the Press and for us.'"
— Megan Mulder, Z. Smith Reynolds Library Blog
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From: Longbarrow Press

''Edgelands [by Matthew Clegg] is a sequence of poems adapted from the classical Japanese tanka form. On one level the sequence is about a man dealing with a painful separation by taking a series of walks into his locale – the edge of north Sheffield. On another, it is a work of what is now being called ‘psychogeography.’ How do our built environments express elements of our consciousness or unconsciousness?"
— Longbarrow Press
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Is there anybody going to listen to my story...

"Saturday is National Libraries Day [in the UK], a time when libraries will be celebrated up and down the country. But the mood in the north of England will be sombre, as Liverpool becomes the latest council to announce swinging cuts to its library service.

     With Newcastle already planning to close 10 of its 18 libraries, and the axe hanging over 14 of Sheffield's 27 community libraries, it emerged this week that Liverpool city council may have to close 10 out of 19 libraries. 'Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield seem to be the worst hit – all big inner city authorities with historic problems, and in the north as well, which does appear to be receiving disproportionate cuts,' said the award-winning Cheshire author and library campaigner Alan Gibbons, who was set to appear at an event in Newcastle to celebrate libraries and protest their closure with campaigners and other authors.
     Gibbons blamed the government's 'flawed and failing "austerity" programme' for putting 'local councils in a difficult position,' but also called on Liverpool city council 'not to become a placid conduit implementing the coalition government's drastic cuts.'
     'Communities need their libraries. Reading is the hallmark of a civilised society,' he said. 'Authors and library users will stand alongside their elected representatives in protesting against government cutbacks. We cannot support a council implementing such cuts in a way that will damage the educational, social and cultural opportunities of the people it represents.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy books by award-winning young adult fiction author Alan Gibbons here...