are poets professional writers?

The time zone I'm now in is midway, morally at least, between London and Los Angeles. I know many of us are following the American scriptwriters' strike with keen eyes, waiting to see how soon they'll have to get better writers in for most Hollywood movies. What I hadn't realised, as I battled with the elements up there above the Atlantic yesterday,* was that the UK's poets have come out on strike in support. Read more at NewsBiscuit...

But seriously, folks!

It so happens that the poets of the UK are in process of organising themselves. In my Academi newsletter last week there was an item about the digitalisation of the magazine archives at the Welsh National Library. Newsletter recipients were invited to put their names on a list of writers refusing to authorise the use of their work in the project, as no provision had been made to pay the authors for this "new use" of copyrighted work. I think the protest is being mobilised by the poet Oliver Reynolds; the following letter from the Western Mail seems to be written by him, though I'm lifting it from the Academi newsletter:

"The National Library of Wales is currently digitising 90 Welsh periodicals and magazines. This project, Welsh Journals Online, aims to provide “free, online, searchable access” to complete runs of such titles as Barddas and Poetry Wales.

Set up by librarians and academics, the project does not seem to have consulted creative and professional writers or the bodies that represent them.

The project is receiving more than £840,000 in public funding. The Library, though, has not allocated any money for the people who wrote the articles, reviews, stories and poems that make up the magazines. Instead, it hopes that rights holders will allow their material to be used for free.

Writing is work. Professional writers are paid both for their work and for its re-use. In not making provision for the payment of copyright holders, the project is seriously flawed. Until this matter is addressed, writers who want to keep Welsh writing on a professional basis will not allow the National Library of Wales to digitise their work."

I wrote to Oliver mentioning the British Library's archiving programme, and of course the work the Poetry Library at the South Bank is doing with digital periodical archives. He wrote back to me thus:

"I have had a chat with Chris McCabe at the P Lib - and their scheme was far more mindful of the implications of what they were doing than NLW. On a list of FAQ about the NLW project on their site it says that material can be downloaded and printed. I would have thought that does "constitute new use of the material".

Now. Am I missing something? I'm happy to support the rights of writers. I really am. But there are a couple of strands here that I think may need unpicking before I'm convinced I really support this protest. One is whether poets can really benefit from this "fair pay for a fair day's work" organised labour mentality. And the other strand is the question raised by the whole digitisation issue, the availiability of original work by artists to be downloaded; we're familiar with this in connection with musicians. It's not going to go away, so it does behoove writers to develop a stance on it, I suppose.

But are poets "professional" in that strictly financial sense, which translates ownership of copyright automatically into shekels? I can't see it. I can remember telling my parents, one day when I was little, that I wanted to be a poet. I think. And they told me that all those poets you read in the books, the dead white males, they all had other jobs - they had to earn their living doing other things. I got my head round it and lo! here I am. Am I wrong, missing a trick? Most of the "professional poets" I know make their money from teaching, doing residencies, writing other things, or - as it happens - are supported at least in part by their partners. It certainly isn't something a single, sole-bill-paying parent could reasonably aspire to. They don't make their money from writing poetry. And even were they do protect with the fierceness of a mother lioness the copyright on all their published works, they still never would. Whcih is not to say they shouldn't, but merely that it is a point of principle, not a pecuniary one.

Given that even the specialist poetry press barely pays for the stuff in the first place - given that it is virtually without, or is even beyond, monetary value, I think this withdrawing of services pending remuneration makes no sense. It's a sideways thing. Nobody ever really said they wanted those services in the first place. Poetry is the dead cat of writing.

As to the intellectual property element, the fact of downloadability, well, the library is archiving magazines, not republishing individual works by individual authors. The fact is that anything, whether it says it's downloadable or not, is downloadable, if only in the form of a screen grab, and that's that. Once the eords exist in the order you've put them in, they simply exist: they could be copied with a pencil into a copybook, typed out and xeroxed, photographed and reproduced. Are these writers saying they don't want their words to be visible on a screen? Why?

In any case I just can't see that re-paying writers for work which is being reproduced within its original context - and for which they have already been either paid either once or, critically, not at all - is an idea that's going to go far. If anything, you'd think the library should pay the magazines for permissions, and the magazines would then pay the authors. But even that seems untenable.

Note that I'm not being paid for writing this blog. It's mine, I just write it. Even were I to write it for Comment is Free (say), I'd be getting paid less than writers who write for the paper Guardian. I have heard, incidentally, of commissioned articles ("commissioned" being, I think, crucial) by "professional" writers getting "spiked" onto CiF, whereupon their authors then become eligible only for the CiF fee - which is, at an hourly rate, about enough to cover a first draft. (Interesting question: which is smaller? The CiF fee or the kill fee they'd have been paid if the piece hadn't been used at all? Now this is worth looking into.)

The issue of whether writing as an activity has an intrinsic market value is an important one and isn't going to go away. To this extent, writers are right to protest (although, on that basis, I should not be blogging). But can this apply to purely creative writing? Only, I think, once that writing, the body of work, has a clearly established market value. Even a novel, once it's published, has that. But a single poem lodged, otherwise out-of-print and never intended to be anything but, in a back issue of a magazine?

And is it different if it's a review? Really?

Are these poets protesting against a real abuse of their position in the marketplace, or are they protesting against a state of affairs they think is unfair? I'm not sure what I think. There is a big part of me that thinks, Chidiock Tichborne asked to be paid for his Elegy; but then maybe I'm just inured to the evil system. It certainly would be nice to just write a poem and then be able to fire it off somewhere with the aim of paying the Virgin Media bill. Maybe the poets are right to protest.

Ideas, anyone?


* and it was no joke; the worst element I encountered was a nasty little glass of Virgin wine that got knocked over by an empty plastic food container as I struggled to eat my "meal" in six inches of space, and saturated the entire left leg of my only jeans with its redness, wineyness and general nastiness. I realise this may only sound as bad as "Islington poet drops virgin olive oil on toe whilst wearing sandals," but let me assure you it was not pleasant.