AT ANY TIME in Scotland there are a number of people writing poetry with varying degrees of commitment and to different purposes.  Therapeutic writing and group support is an important resource for many troubled or searching people.  For many of those neither wide reading nor publication is particularly relevant.  Within the small community of writers it is only a still smaller number who actually buy and read the magazines.  This means that, even at this stage, the poet is still speaking to a fairly restricted number of people.  Most of them are writers themselves and share the same ambitions.
 

The people who might have been impressed by your poems are likely to be a fraction of these few (within a few) along with the editors and those members of the Arts Development Industry who take to do with the allocation of Writers’s Bursaries and Residencies and the like.  This number is not sufficient to sustain either a healthy poetry publishing economy or a healthy poetry culture, that is to say a culture of critical detachment.  The scene can be incestuous and jealous.  There is a circle the writer must break out of if he or she is to engage with a broader Scottish public that has long since lost interest and faith in what is current.
 

This is one of the principal reasons that Northwords has been developed into a broadly based arts magazine.  By doing this we have taken poetry out to readers interested in music and the visual arts.  By placing sale copies in gallery shops and in concert halls we have reached, with limited but real success, people who are like minded but different.  We have endeavoured to take poetry out of the ghetto.
 

The subject today is ‘how to get your poetry published’ and I’ll try to stick to that.  Already you will have seen a pattern.  First you write your poems and then you get them published in magazines.  Then you look towards book publication.  Okay, let's say you are successful and now have your book.  If published in Scotland the great likelihood is that it has been subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council, possibly by the Gaelic Book Council.  This is good.  I am in favour of this.  Without it we would have very little collected poetry published in Scotland at all.  Justifiably pleased with yourself, you might ponder what criteria make your book a success or a failure.
 

  Next Page | Previous Page                  Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4