The Friday Poem In Conversation with Les Robinson
ignitionpress was set up in 2017 by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and is run by Managing Editor Les Robinson, Director Niall Munro and Editor Claire Cox. The Friday Poem talks to Les Robinson about finding new poets, writing blurbs, and the usefulness (or not) of poetry reviews.
TFP: ignitionpress is “a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets”. Where do you look to find your new poets?
LR: ignitionpress does not accept submissions. Editorial Board members keep their individual radars tuned and we seek recommendations from our network, as well as scanning magazines and on-line arenas. We also keep an eye on various poetry competitions, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre International Poetry Competition, obviously, plus the London Magazine Poetry Competition, and others.
I judged the London Magazine Poetry Competition and was impressed by Alycia Pirmohamed so she was approached. Recently Alycia herself recommended Zein Sa’dedin. Patrick James Errington was recommended to us by John Burnside, Belinda Zhawi was recommended by Kayo Chingoyi, and Sarah Shapiro by Mary Jean Chan.
We identify up to ten poets for our selection process, asking the poets to send ten poems each. We have a blind-reading after which we apply a rating, and then meet to agree the final poets for publication.
TFP: What do you look for, in your poets, and in their poetry?
LR: We look for original ideas and themes, stand-out images, precise use of language, and an understanding of space on the page. We like poetry that leaves the reader wanting more, and we like last lines have that ‘hmm’ factor. We evaluate a pamphlet’s overall emotional impact, and hope for something in a close-to-publishable state.
Most importantly, we are looking for something where we think we can help develop and polish the work.
On publication we want the poet to be 100% happy with the pamphlet and its contents, as it is the poet who will be out there promoting it and reading from it. A question we ask is whether the poet will still be reading from the pamphlet in two years, which is our anticipated life for the pamphlet in terms of currency / promotion.
TFP: How many pamphlets does ignitionpress publish a year?
LR: We normally publish six pamphlets a year in two publishing windows.
TFP: What makes an ignitionpress poet?
LR: We hope there is no one thing. All of our poets are different. We want to publish a range of different voices. I think the ethos of the press is to introduce new poets to the published world in the belief that they will move on to other pamphlets and full collections with larger more established presses. This is something we encourage.
TFP: What successes have you had with ignitionpress pamphlets, and have your poets gone on to further publishing success elsewhere?
LR: igntionpress have had three PBS Pamphlet Choices – A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (2018), Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed (2020) and Ripe by Isabelle Baafi (2020).
Mary Jean Chan’s debut poetry collection, Flèche (2019), was published by Faber and won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry. Hinge was short-listed for the Michael Marks Award 2020 and Pirmohamed’s collection Another Way to Split Water is due from Polygon and YesYes Books next year. She also has a pamphlet, Second Memory (2021), written in collaboration with Pratyusha, out with Guillemot Press. Isabelle Baafi won the 2021 Somerset Maugham Award. A number of our other poets have also published second pamphlets with other presses.
If you don’t buy our books how can you expect anyone to buy yours when we publish it?
TFP: What are your latest pamphlets?
LR: Our latest published pamphlets are He Said I Was a Peach by Katie Byford, Staircase by Zein Sa’dedin, and Sargam / Swargam by Fathima Zahra. These pamphlets were launched online in August.
TFP: You have also been publishing poetry with tall-lighthouse since 1999, with a brief hiatus between 2011 and 2016. How have things changed in the poetry world in that time?
LR: Sometimes I think not a lot. A lot of organisations / bookshops / people still fail to reply to correspondence. It costs little to say no.
Overall there are still the major poetry publishers, but a fair number of smaller presses have grown in stature over recent years, if you take the TS Eliot prize as an example, the list has become far more diverse in terms of poets and publishers.
And poets still don’t buy poetry. If you don’t buy our books how can you expect anyone to buy yours when we publish it? I still receive submissions from poets who have never purchased or even seen or read our work!
TFP: tall-lighthouse has a reputation for finding new talent (Helen Mort, Sarah Howe, Emily Berry) – is this one of the reasons you were brought in as Managing Editor of ignitionpress? What do you bring to the press?
LR: I was initially introduced to Oxford Brookes to talk to them about setting up a pamphlet press. After initial discussions I saw it as an exciting venture I wanted to be involved in.
What do I bring? It’s hard for me to say but I hope I bring my experience of the poetry business, my network and my editorial skills. I also bring my jaundiced view of the poetry world. My general approach is to question the norm, which in itself becomes a positive!
TFP: What do you think is the job of a poet? What’s the job of a poetry publisher?
LR: I think that with a small press – and I’m talking about both ignitionpress and tall-lighthouse – there has to be a 60/40 split on promoting the pamphlet. With the absence of live events, social media has become almost the sole outlet for small presses during Covid, as it was becoming pre-Covid, I guess. There are limited resources at both ignitionpress and tall-lighthouse so the poet does have to take on the lion’s share of the work, but at tall-lighthouse we would always support and possibly fund any specific ideas for promotion from the poet.
I’m sure that in the future live readings will make a comeback, where a good amount of sales are made, as well as other contacts, but we have learned that Zoom events facilitate increase access so will continue to create a balance of both live and Zoom events.
What do I bring? It’s hard for me to say but I hope I bring my experience of the poetry business, my network and my editorial skills. I also bring my jaundiced view of the poetry world. My general approach is to question the norm, which in itself becomes a positive!
TFP: How does ignitionpress work? Who does what in terms of selecting and working with poets, editing manuscripts etc? How hands on are you at the editing stage?
LR: Niall Munro is the engine room. Claire Cox provides business support as well as a poet’s eye, as she is still out there submitting to presses and competitions, and we all three form the board which selects the poets. Between us we share the editing, each taking a poet through the publication process. Before publication the Board also reviews each pamphlet.
TFP: Who designs your pamphlet covers?
LR: Flora Hands at Carline Creative, who also designed the new tall-lighthouse covers.
TFP: How many copies of a poetry book do you sell – what amount counts as a really good seller?
LR: It varies a lot from pamphlet to pamphlet, but on several occasions we have needed to reprint pamphlets, which indicates their success, so perhaps we might say that selling out a run of 300 is very good going! We have reprinted six pamphlets, those by Mary Jean Chan, Belinda Zhawi, Patrick James Errington, Natalie Whittaker, Alycia Pirmohamed and Kostya Tsolakis.
With tall-lighthouse we would look to sell some 200 copies of a pamphlet over its life-time and, referring back to launches / readings, we have actually sold more than 90 copies of a full collection at its launch.
TFP: Does ignitionpress receive Arts Council funding, or any other subsidy?
LR: No, we don’t get ACE funding and, as part of the Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes, we don’t receive direct funding from the University or anywhere else, though some of the money raised from the poetry competition does help to support the press’s work. We do benefit from some other aspects of the University. On a basic, practical level we can use the University’s post room, and we use Niall Munro’s office as storage space!
TFP: Are there plans to publish book-length poetry collections?
LR: Not for the foreseeable future; we see ourselves purely as a pamphlet press.
TFP: Which other publishers – large or small – are publishing really good poetry?
LR: It’s hard to answer this without upsetting a lot of presses but I have always been impressed by the sheer persistent energy of Tony Frazer at Shearsman, and how Tom Chivers and Helena Nelson have brought on Penned in the Margins and HappenStance respectively.
TFP: Just looking this morning I saw a debut collection that is “heart-stopping”, a debut pamphlet that is “sensational, searing and utterly singular”, and a “soul-drenching” collection that has “wild and devastating emotional heft”. How hard is it to write cover copy these days? And when everything is praised to the skies, how can punters discriminate?
LR: I’m not sure poetry can be “heart stopping” – any publisher would have to issue a Health and Safety warning!
For our blurbs I try to be realistic in my use of descriptors. At the end of the day the blurb is a selling tool, and after ‘doing’ 100 plus blurbs it is difficult to come up with a new approach; the thesaurus has been exaggerated to death.
My personal approach is that I always ask the poet to describe their own poetry in a word, phrase or sentence, and I use that as the basis for the blurb.
TFP: Also, many reviews are just outpourings of positivity. (Jon Stone suggested on Twitter recently that “Maybe the next, much better #SealeyChallenge could be one where you have to write a few hundred words about a book of poetry each week without praising it?”) Has this changed in the time you have been publishing poetry and putting it out for review? What sort of engagement would you like to see from reviewers approaching your (and other) pamphlets?
LR: Reviews do provide some good words for the poets next book! After 20 plus years in poetry I am really not a great fan of reviews. I understand that we poets and presses like to see our names in print and to see the reaction others have to our work, but my experience is that there is almost zero commercial benefit in terms of increased sales. Reviews are much more useful for poets for their ‘poetry CV’.
Oh dear, this may mean that no-one will now want to review our pamphlets!
TFP: You say, re reviews, “there is almost zero commercial benefit in terms of increased sales” – so what does lead to increased sales?
LR: Probably the most effective are social media postings / campaigns and, when they return, physical launches readings and other live poetry events.
TFP: What’s your view of digital publishing and the rise of webzines, self-publishing, instagram poets etc?
LR: I’m not best placed to make a comment on much of the new media – i’m still very much a ‘paper in the hand’ poetry person. Sometimes I think that there is so much out there it’s hard to know which magazine / website / facebook-instagram publisher / poet to follow without getting your in-box inundated daily. But perhaps that is no different to the many, many traditional magazines and presses that were around in the past, many of which are still surviving. When I used to visit the Poetry Library it was somehow disheartening to see so many poetry magazines and of such variable quality.
I am really not a great fan of reviews. I understand that we poets and presses like to see our names in print and to see the reaction others have to our work, but my experience is that there is almost zero commercial benefit in terms of increased sales.
Digital publishing is great for me at tall-lighthouse as my printer can reprint in very small quantities, even as few as 10. But I don’t like print on demand. I recently received a beautiful poetry book printed by Lightning Source and placed it on the table and slowly watched the cover and pages start to curl! It’s a shame, as a poetry book or pamphlet is actually an object as much as a book, more so than a novel, and it should have the feel of something special.
I have no problem with self-publishing, and it can be advantageous. I was approached at the last Poetry Book Fair by Mark Wynne, a poet who had self-published his pamphlet Frank & Stella. It was brilliant – poems around the life and work of Frank Auerbach – I was more than happy to take the poet and pamphlet on board for tall-lighthouse.
TFP: What’s the most rewarding / most annoying part of your job?
LR: Personally the most rewarding aspect is the editing process and, through that, getting to know the poets at different levels. Most annoying, as mentioned before, is the fact that people just don’t bother with the courtesy of responding to emails or messages.
TFP: What do you think is the most pressing question about poetry today?
LR: Just one question? I think, speaking as a publisher, it’s looking forward to going ‘live’ again.
