the bad news, the good news, and another poem

National Poetry Day continues...

Now that we've had a chance to digest the Forward results and look around us: this result does mean that Luke Kennard, famously the youngest-ever (and possibly the tallest-ever) poet to be shortlisted for the main award (and published by my own soon-to-be publisher Salt) didn't win the prize. However, never fear! From a start like this I think it seems more than likely that he could be winning the Forward for his third time by the time he's 55 (Sean O'Brien's age). His work is so different, so very rooted in his generation, it may be the award-awarding world has to catch up a bit.

Last night, rummaging around the internet, I found this news on a Salt blog, Salt Confidential: "Salt has announced that its half year sales have increased 82% compared to the same period last year. The poetry and short story publisher has seen annual sales increase by 104%.

...“'We’re delighted with the results,' says Chris Hamilton-Emery. 'We have a strong line up in this year's Forward Prizes for Poetry, Charles Yu has just been selected as one of the US’s finest fiction writers under 35 by the National Book Foundation, and we’ve a strong line up in the Premier’s awards in Australia. It’s been an exceptional few months, really, though we're quite exhausted!'

“...'We're probably the fastest-growing poetry press in the UK just now and certainly have the largest publishing programme,” says Hamilton-Emery. “We’ve continued to push up market, and the commissioning is leading the way, quality is the driving force, but nothing sells itself and we’ve learnt a great deal from Will Atkinson at Faber. Collaboration matters, and respect for, and working closely with, the bookseller can transform a "boutique" literary publisher like us. We've had wonderful support from literary editors in the broadsheets, too. Clearly, we're finding some of the answers, but we're always learning as a business.'”

Meanwhile, a poem by Luke Kennard, from his shortlisted book:

Plethoric Air (an extract)

We all laughed at the decomposing clown,
But later shame sunk upon us
And we got smashed on the balcony.

I had lost my left shoe in the blood.
The doyen and her ten attaches
Scattered blossom on the divans.

We were charmed by a famous puppy,
A dozen gold pins in her forehead;
A tendency to speak ill of the dead.

‘The dead are so stupid,’ she said.
An attache took me by the temples and ordered,
‘Look: that advertisement on the crevasse;

Notice the inverted commas around “crazy adventures”
Grow bigger than the words themselves,
Framing the very hills and the valleys.