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PBS to "challenge" ACE decision
05.04.11 | Charlotte Williams
The Poetry Book Society (PBS) is planning to "challenge" the claim by Arts Council England (ACE) that its reach was not as wide as other portfolio funding applicants'.
In a letter published in today's Times, George Szirtes, PBS president, and Mary Tapissier, PBS chair, said: "We must challenge the claim by the Arts Council that the Poetry Book Society's reach and distribution was not as wide or as effective as other applicants'. Selection by the PBS can increase sales of a collection by up to 1,700 copies."
They added: "The PBS has also been successful in having the work of the shortlisted poets for the T S Eliot Prize read on the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme and in attracting the largest audience by far for any recent poetry event in Britain".
This is the third in a series of letters published between the PBS and ACE since the arts body announced its portfolio funding decisions on 30th March.
In a letter by ACE director of literature strategy Antonia Byatt, published yesterday, she said the PBS' "reach and distribution was not as wide or effective as other applicants".
PBS representatives met with ACE yesterday (6th April) to discuss the decision to drop the funding. Campaigner and vice-chair of the PBS Desmond Clarke described the meeting as being "pretty tough". He added: "We had to make it clear to them that as it is at the moment, we are seeking professional advice, but we may have no option but to wind down the PBS and all the related activities, including the T S Eliot Prize".
Clarke said that a letter signed by 100 poets protesting against the funding cuts was being sent to Byatt today, and that the petition on the PBS website was approaching 1,000 signatories.
The Society will lose its regular ACE funding from April 2012, as part of the implementation of its new portfolio funding for the arts which followed the Government's cuts in its spending review of October 2010. It is receiving £111,299 from the Arts Council in its final year of funding for the 2011/12 financial year.
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The debate should be honest on the future of the Poetry Book Society. It actually subsidises individual members at around £55 each at the taxpayers' expense, if widely published membership figures are accurate.
The Choice each quarter guarantees a foregrounding and likely sale which benefits specific publishers, and foregrounds a very narrow range of writers whose names occur regularly on both Choice and the Recommendations issued by the 'Selectos' each quarter. It is a highly regulated market which does not inform readers or potential poetry readers of what is really available.
These people are clearly out of touch or not interested in the reality, vigour and growing diversity of contemporary poetry. The Arts Council should stick with their decision, which will ultimately free up poetry to flourish in a fair and competitive way which allows independent readers to make theirr own judgement. Maybe this is actually what they fear...
The reason why I have been a member of the PBS for the last twenty or so years is because I like someone else to select a good book of poems for me to read; I wouldn't have come across or read a lot of the books they have sent me over the years, and for this service alone - to poets, publishers and to poetry-readers - I am indebted to them. They have certainly introduced me to new poets and collections I wouldn't have otherwise read.
Anonymous makes some excellent points. If I were head honcho at the Arts Council England, I would award a hundred grand a year to the four leading independent poetry publishers:- Bloodaxe, Carcanet, Anvil and Salt. Wealthy commercial publishers like Cape and Faber wouldn't get a bean. I would also insist that each publisher has to publish at least a dozen new British (not Irish or American!) poets per year or lose all their funding. This would quadruple the number of new British poets within a matter of months.(Publishers like Carcanet clearly prefer publishing dead American Modernists to living breathing British poets.) Everyone who knows anything at all about the British poetry scene knows that British poetry editors have been getting away with lavishly state-subsidised murder for decades.
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