Award-winning writer and poet Andrew Oldham discusses trying to get writing published in the modern world of publishing. 
I have just had my first poetry collection published, Ghosts of a Low Moon (Lapwing, Belfast 2010). The journey of getting it published started nearly three years ago. It took me some time to get a collection together, for over eight years I have been published in magazines, anthologies and online zines. I am not a prolific poet. My poetry output sits side by side with my fiction writing. I do not call myself a poet as I write around fifty poems a year; most never get out of my notebook because when I rewrite they do not get through my editorial process. That is my choice. I am a writer who writes poetry. I am not idle though. I am actively involved in the publishing world. I am a writer. I am a reader. I love books. I promote reading. I have been a publisher. I have been an editor. I have seen the grass on the other side of the fence. I have run my fair share of workshops across the UK and there is one question that always comes up. How do you get published?
I have answered this at festivals, events and in libraries across the UK. Fifteen years ago there was a straight-ish answer; submit your work to an editor and take your chances like everyone else. It is no longer that straight-ish. An explosion of multimedia platforms including the web means it has become a minefield. There are hardcopy publication rights, e-publication rights, region first rights and copyright. What is law in the UK may not be a law in the States or India. This makes getting published outside of the UK liberating, it widens your audience by a few hundred or a few thousand. The web though does not deal in hundreds and thousands, it deals in millions.
The web has no walls, no distribution problems, no lost books in transit and in a few cases, no qualms about breaking UK copyright laws. It does not care that an entire industry devoted to the world of poetry, short fiction and fiction needs these laws in place. The industry is not just publishers; it is promoters, printers, editors, writers, poets, designers and most importantly, readers. The web has liberated the reader and I applaud that. It has yet to liberate those who want to write poetry. We have an imbalance between those who write poetry and those who are willing to pay to read it.
There are many wannabe poets, I use this term for any poet who has never been published or who has never read a poetry collection. They often write secretly at work, on the bus, in a traffic jam, in their new bathroom, new kitchen and newly decorated study, they wait for the all empowering muse. They inevitably write about cats. They always attack the poem with a chainsaw, hammer or crowbar, wedging in the obvious rhyme, the tired metaphor, the bucket load of derivatives. Poetry is not alone in this, fiction gets it too, except poetry is always seen as more easy, less time, quicker to churn out because it rhymes. In my UK workshops, on UK discussions panels I have heard people declare thus proudly. Last year in a festival audience, a man stood up said this and then boasted that he could write a collection in one afternoon, in his shed (I don’t know what the relevance of the shed was and it still haunts me). He went on to tell five hundred people in the audience that poetry did not take much thinking about. He did not want a publisher because no one reads and instead he posted his magnum opus (his words) to his Facebook profile. His family loved his poetry, especially his cat (again this image haunts me and I have been tempted to phone the RSPCA about the abuse of cats with bad poetry). This event was cut through by a fire engine klaxon in the distance; a fire had taken hold in a boarded up old bookshop in town.
Why does poetry get this? What is the reason? Are these the times in which we will see actual reading become niche?
I grew up with people wondering why I read, it was a common question at bus stops, in class and one time, in a library. The answer is simple because I wanted to write. I did not know that then but Blake, Herbert and Hughes did me a favour, the act of reading widened my horizon.
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