Free Verse, 2014

I keep meaning to chat to Matt Merritt but circumstances intercede. I heard him perform out in the square in front of the cafe. Later I chatted to Stephen Payne, Jon Stone, my eds, etc.

I went to a discussion involving anthology editors Tom Chivers (Adventures in Form), Mark Ford (Best British Poetry) and Karen McCarthy Woolf (Ten: The New Wave). Their anthologies were constructed in different ways - Chivers' was by invitation, McCarthy Woolf's was the result of mentoring, Ford trawled through all he could find. Chivers was hoping for a weakening of the canon, and felt that the current publishing system didn't capture the variety of the poetry produced. Ford thought that there much randomness in the selecting of poems. Some anthologies are forward-looking, trying to identify or influence trends. Others are more archival, but the tastes of the selector can't/shouldn't be neglected.

If (as seems likely to me) many poets who've not published a book have written poems that are easily better than the worst poems in poets' books, is the current system "fair"? If the system includes magazines, then there's hope for the lesser names provided that the world of magazines is a meritocracy. But in a fragmented, non-hierarchical world where each niche is a self-sustaining system and niche-transcendence isn't considered a worthwhile aim, what hope has the occasional reader of poetry?

I bought more than I meant to - "Cairn" (Richie McCaffery, Nine Arches Press), "sequences and pathogens" (Litmus), "Common Ground" (D.A. Price, HappenStance), "Ways to build a roadblock" (Josh Ekroy, Nine Arches Press), "Incense" (Claire Crowther, Flarestack), "Tree Language" (Marion McCready, Eyewear), "England Underwater" (Christopher James, Templar), "Identity Theft" (Alec Taylor, Acumen), "The Midlands" (Tony Williams, Nine Arches Press)