Why poetry needs Arts Council cash

When the Arts Council announced its new National Portfolio regular funding programme in the autumn, none of the poetry organisations and publishers which have been cut had any idea what was about to happen.

At the Poetry Book Society (PBS) we were worrying about whether we’d get the full amount we’d asked for, a not-excessive £135,000 (our 2010-11 funding was just under £120,000).

We were probably over-confident because the PBS has been supported by Arts Council England (ACE) since it was involved in its instigation, when we were set up by T S Eliot and friends in 1953. ACE had also funded two new websites just last year.

Our funding application was full of ambitious plans to use the websites to develop an online audience for poetry, to sell books and memberships and promote poetry and poets both nationally and internationally. So to lose our funding suddenly and completely was a devastating blow and one which it is going to be hard for the PBS to survive.

To lose our funding suddenly and completely was a devastating blow and one which it is going to be hard for the PBS to survive.

But why, you may ask, does poetry need funding at all? It’s not like art, where artists require studios and exhibition space, or the theatre and music, where the need for people and premises means much bigger overheads.

That’s why poetry receives just 0.58 per cent of the Arts Council’s regular funding spend. But that tiny amount of public money has an essential part to play in the ecology of what has been called our national artform. And shouldn’t poetry be just as much a recipient of state funding as music or art – who’s to say it’s less important?

For poetry does not pay. It does not pay poets enough to live on – which is why they support themselves in other ways – and it does not pay publishers enough to make it worth their while to publish it – unless, that is, you are talking about Faber, with its prestigious gold-plated backlist.

Commercial publishers such as Random House and Macmillan finance the Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus and Picador lists, but they do this because they feel they should support poetry, not to make money. Bloodaxe and Carcanet – the two big funded publishers – are funded by ACE and so are a number of small publishers, some of which have now lost their funding: Enitharmon, Arc and Flambard. For them it is going to be very difficult to survive.

If you want to sustain poetry you have to support poets and publishers by helping them to get their work published and out to an audience.

And that’s where the Poetry Book Society comes in. What it has always done is to work to get poetry to readers through its quarterly selections of the best new poetry, chosen by its poet selectors, and to promote poetry widely through the UK’s top poetry prize: the T S Eliot Prize. The extensive plans to use the websites to take poetry to a much wider audience, like everything else, are endangered by the loss of funding.

The PBS has mounted a highly effective media campaign to get its funding restored and Friday evening’s “Poetry Cuts” benefit, set up by the Poet Laureate, has shown what enormous support there is for the organisation – and what real affection and respect it engenders from poets, publishers and poetry readers.

That won’t be enough to save it, which will take hard cash, but it has been fantastic to find out how many people feel very strongly that the Poetry Book Society must be saved.

Chris Holifield is the Director of the Poetry Book Society and co-founder of www.writersservices.com, the website for writers.