Facebook has informed me that its five years since my Salt Modern Voices chapbook "Playing Solitaire for Money" came out. Wow, where did the time go? And what happened next?
A bit of background. Despite having always written poetry, having co-edited a successful poetry/fiction magazine Lamport Court, and having poems in a number of reasonably illustrious places (The Rialto, the Reactions 3 anthology), I wasn't in any way part of the poetry scene, except locally. I would enter competitions, send off manuscripts, but not get that much interest, though a book of 4 long experimental poems, "Extracts from Levona" came out a few months before the Salt collection. Although Salt was renowned for supporting new poetry, the overheads - for both poet and publisher - of the slim volume were making it more and more difficult for early career poets to get beyond the magazines. I'd entered their annual prize, but didn't get anywhere, when, out of the blue, Chris Hamilton Emery contacted me with their new idea - a series of uniform chapbooks called Salt Modern Voices, which he'd like me to be part of.
Over the next few months a number of these came out - and I think in total Salt must have published nearly 20 of them. Some were for specific projects that might suit the format, a couple were prose, but most were like mine - poets who were doing something interesting, had some kind of profile, but hadn't got a book out. Of the poems in "PSFM" with a couple of exceptions I'd stand by it. If I'd had more room I'd have probably put a few more experimental, less lyrical verses in, but as a chapbook I'm still proud of it.
Because there were a number of poets in the series the idea of readings quickly emerged. Turned out there was an American poet in Manchester. J.T. Welsch who was also in the series, and me and him met and had a joint launch, and would become friends. A number of others in that first batch, Clare Trévien, Emily Hasler, Angela Topping, Shaun Belcher included went on a little "tour" with 3 or 4 poets from the series reading in Manchester, London, Nottingham, Oxford and at Warwick University - and I read at a couple of these.
The series continued for a while - including interesting one off projects as well as mini-collections by emerging poets - and the books were longer, and looked better than the Faber new poets series that came out around the same time. What was nice, as well, was though there were some younger poets involved, older writers such as myself were included.
Since then, outside of anthologies, Salt has stopped its poetry list, so as far as I know none of the SMV poets made it to a full length collection with them - though a number of the poets have had successful books published elsewhere by other presses, including Nine Arches Press, who have just launched a similar but different scheme called Primers, which is essentially 3 pamphlets in one book.
I don't think anyone made any money on Salt Modern Voices, but it was a valuable opportunity for me, but also having picked up alot of the others in the series, I found the format and the size perfect in many ways - a good introduction to a poet, or a self-contained project, without some of the longeurs you occasionally find in a full length collection. The pamphlet, like the anthology or magazine poem, provides a useful forum for poets - and indeed some pamphlets are virtually as long as the classic "slim volume" which these days tend to be not so slim at all. For a poet like myself who writes in different styles and for different purposes over time, I think it acted as a good forum - and I certainly got to do a lot more readings through having a book to promote.
So, five years on, thanks to Salt and to Chris, and I hope if you come across one of these little gems online or secondhand you investigate
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