Hey Man,

You think you’re smart. I’m gonna cut you up, Bud. I’ll spread this everywhere you jackass. You don’t know nothing. You publish shit. I think I’ll die of boredom. I think everyone in Canada would love to know about you. You don’t understand nothing. You fake. You’re just fake, a total fake. Faker. Fake ass. I’ll write to everyone you publish on Facebook and let them know what you’re like. You’re totally dead. I’ll give you one chance right just read this poem and you’ll get it or I will do this, man. I mean it.

Eat me, Bruce

“And each morning I’d take the window
back to the glass man”

Man is man

O man, I get up in your shitty shit
we’re in it, baby, let me tell you now how it is
I can’t take your goddamn face, you are a window on the dirt
I look out of the 4th floor up East 25th and see the dirty sun
I see the pimps and I know I eat you
I eat you and fly with my bellyful over the dirt
Even the dirt is dirt, I eat you, I eat women
The dirty women downstairs, the dirty women upstairs
I eat the dirt and I know while the music played
We loved it, loved it out into the middle of the dirt
That’s it, you said, that’s where it happens, there, and you point
and I look out at the old Lincolns sliding past Izzy and his shoes
sliding past Evo’s and Cazelli’s
I see the dirt and I eat it and the music kept playing
O yeah out into the dirt the dirt the dirt


> Yo Albert,
>
> I didn’t realise who you were, man! Wow, wow, wow. I publish as well. Check
> out my blog there’s stacks of writers on there. Would you be interested in my
> manuscript? I just can’t stop wrigint. I’m part of a movement called Canadian
> Scag Beats. I read at open mics everywhere when I’m sober.
>
> Love you, Bruce
>
> “And each morning I’d take the window
> back to the glass man”


>> Hey Albert
>>
>> Wanna see more of my work? Checkout my Facebook profile and gimme some
>> feedback. Love to know whatya reckon to it.
>>
>> http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1361857524&ref=ts
>
> Get me, Bruce
>
> “And each morning I’d take the window
> back to the glass man”

16 January 2007

Dear Bruce,

Is it 1969 already? Thank you so much for contacting me again on Facebook, it’s so convenient isn’t it? I’m sorry to have been unable to give you more positive feedback on your poems, if I may describe them as such. I do admire Bukowski, though you might want to consider reading beyond him, or even reading him a little more closely, though not quite so obsessively, given this has clearly led to several visits to Saskatchewan Penitentiary. Reading anything, in fact, other than Bukowski would be a good thing for you right now. Why not try The Four Horsemen? I’m sure this would have a profound effect on your grasp of poetry and may possibly help with your view of women who are frequently not dirty or indeed especially edible. I’m sure I cannot persuade you to desist in writing to all my authors on Facebook, many of whom have dropped me a line here to congratulate me on discovering you. Some of them believed you were extinct and were happy to see the unkind years rolled back to a time more innocent and depraved. I’m attaching a drink here using Booze Mail. Please spare Canada.

With fond memories

Albert D Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell

Dear Albie,

Thanks for yours. I had to suffer another squad of dullards at Maniac More, a week of rain and midges between bouts of mutton stew. It pissed down so much I got mould, especially from having to smoke outside. Everyone seems to have the physical appearance of a skip up here. Thank god Duncan was drinking again. I think he shagged his way through the lot. Are you really cutting back on The List again? I thought old Wiggy was keen on scraping a few more centimes out of it all. Another anthology beckons, what will it be this time? I hope it’s Poems Against the Boor or Draining My Life or one of those bloody awful Forward Press anthologies on thunder or Yule-tide. I’ve just sorted the last sequence for my new snort at fame, I’ll have it ready for you in Juneish. I’m prepared for you and Wiggy to take until the 22nd century to let me have the yeas or nays. Was that your top brass on the box the other night? I’ve just had some pieces taken in Ireland but Cruella rejected everything I sent explaining I was a little too sui generis. I’m teaching at Pikey’s place in the summer. Hope you can escape from Wiggy’s clutches and come up for a few barrels.

Yours Ollie

8 February 2006

Dear Pooch,

Yes, that was The Gob avec black turtle neck on the Culture Show, I think he’s been buffing up on Beckett again, I’m sure he’s doing another OU degree between bouts of squash at Hilliard’s; all he ever blags about is the “Centre Ground of Literature” as if it was a kind of field sport. If I hear another polo joke I think I’ll vom.

We’re having our fifteenth bloody restructure here, Lucian is insufferable given non-fiction has risen 80%, but that’s due to Loveable Fat Bloke doing loads of celebrity knob gags as he oozes his way through another incontinent biography; it’s bound to sell squazillions though. As long as I keep my mahogany desk, and my lovely Japanese prints of Pomes Penyeach, I’ll be happy.

Wiggy is away working on the New Strategy which will no doubt be like the old strategy of robbing every bugger who quotes a syllable of Old Squeaky. There’s no let up. Not sure where The List is heading, I keep writing postcards saying No to the limpets but it’s never ending. Don’t they realise it’s all sewn up? Speaking of which has Juicy been on about anything worth publishing up north? I think we’ll take something new on this year as long as it’s young, pretty and Welsh.

Groan in Finance has been complaining about the ROI which I thought was a character from a Cocteau libretto. Anyway there’s going to be a big push, the Pubic Hares in Marketing have come up with something like a national quiz on love poems with the PBS, I think I’ll do Le bleu du ciel and have done with it.

Am I still guest of horror at Lumb Bank next month? I’ll see you there. Keep me a cadaver.

Yours, Albie

Hi Albert,

It was super to see you the Eliot awards, sorry for dragging you away from your chat with William Sieghart (thanks for introducing me)! I was talking to Paul and Ron and they mentioned you were looking to expand your list. I had a lovely note from Frank about my new piece in the TLS and he was also saying what marvellous things you’re doing. After your talk in Chichester you know that I moved to do a Masters at Warwick, isn’t that your home town? Lucy was so impressed with your list when I last saw her (she read in Rugby recently). I’ve just been lucky enough to win a prize with my poem “The Storm Council” and I came second (boo hoo) in the Bridport with a little poem call “The Undue Lesson”. Hermione is working with me on a revised manuscript that George has seen, they both think it’s nearly there, we’re just working on the sweeps and tangents, it’s called A Readymade Bed. Would you be interested a teensy bit in seeing this? I know when I was talking with Rupert that everyone thinks I would fit the list and Claire has said I should just contact you. I’ve taken the liberty of putting five pieces in here, one was published in The Review last month (yippee). I hope you like the work and whatever you think I look forward to seeing you at Sheila’s party!

Yours as ever
Lionel x
Sudbury-on-Thames

15 May 2002

Dear Lionel (if I may)

Thank you for your informative, highly-connected, if rather opaque note. Have we actually ever met? I think I’m vaguely aware of half the names you drop here like horse shoes in a steel bucket. I suspect I publish several of those listed, though they’re clanging around so much in my head (or is it my heaving stomach) I can barely register any interest in your polished or is that highly-processed work. You can write though it’s all the “Alistair McGowan school of impressions”. I think the forty-seven Arvon courses you have attended may well be having a peculiarly negative effect on your talent. It’s all Polyfilla and no content.

The poems are simply a triumph of emulation and mimicry, yet they smack of professional banality. My god, Lionel, you must have workshopped them to death.

If these poems had a soundtrack, Lionel, it would be Enya on Mogadon. If they were food they would be lard butties. They're stodgy. They're inert. I must confess I’ve read 150 submissions today and have written 96 postcards to The Unworthy to pass a few hours before squandering my bonus in the Colony Club, I've certainly earnt my crust from The Boss reading your shite and I deserve a bloody flight of wine this evening — I would rather stick forks in my eyes than read another line. There’s not a word out of place, it's just that place is Hades: they all deserve to be in The Review, the happy home of Dr Death and the Zombies.

If memory serves, you spilled that decent Burgundy on my linen suit at the Eliots? I feel sure you’d find a happy home elsewhere, Lionel, perhaps with Almada up in Northallerton. We’re not taking work from creepy stalkers just at the moment.

Not quite ingratiated

Albert D Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell

Dear Mr Enderby,

Please find enclowsed 30 poems from my new manerscript entitled “Local Teas, Yes! and Judge my Super Biscuits”. I am willing to offer you non-exclusive UK rights to this work as long as you agree to pay me an advance and royalties on the full UK & Europe retail selling price of £9.99. I have calculated these for you over the next three years in the attached sheet entitled “My Payment”.

My work has been published in Somerset Lives, the Dulverton Gazette and Porlock Weir Herald, I have also apeered and over 50 Forward anthologies and am a member of my local Stanza group of the Poetry Socierty of England, where I am very active. I have over six thousand poems ready for collections now. Last year I received a Writer’s Grant from ACE South West to work on more poems about social services, wiring and tires.

Peterloo has promised to publish this collection but are having some diffaculties with the Rejional Art Council and have asked me to consider a date in 2018. I am not happy with all the editors refusing to consider my work without a propar and sensible attitude at all. I am impatient with poems which do not rhyme and avoid a correct metre, these are wrong and is one reason why modern poetry is just unread and rubbish. My work is not a crossword puzzle! It is self evident that I chose proper subjects for my writing as in life. I shall ring in two days time to accept your offer.

As I write in my poem “All of which I have now understood”

Here I see the horses eating out their hours in good even light
And remember all the lovely things I did with Mabel even though she lost her sight
Out among the all to much established sunny vales
With loyal cows which still contain their fresh unbutchered entrails

Now I see my job as poet upon this weedy bench is exceptionally right
And can be profitable even if I scan my sentences with abandon and not spite
Now I can lurn of horses in their soft grasses upon the hill, Yes!
This is a Lord’s great wonder and you can become it before the hearses

Take you up into the zenith of old sailors and their happy shining crews
With God’s great navy of the skies. See them the Angel’s with a loose
Grip on the foc’sle waving to us all. These are my brother’s keepers
And I watch them here whilst drinking cocoa in my slippers.

Yours sincerely
Gilbert Ludge Esq
North Petherton

2 October 2006

Dear Gilbert (if I may),

Thank you for your recent submission which I read with a sense of major organ failure. The derivative and banal phrasing was only lifted by the misspelt and misjudged letter asking our previous editor (who sadly passed away in 1983) to acquire UK rights in your bleating drivel of a work. Thank you for assuring me that you have lots and lots more to send should this selection not prove suitable. I’m sure the other six thousand poems are equally enervating. Please don’t spend any more precious, or even merely available, time trying to become a poet. You might consider becoming a Literature Officer. Even with such a tremendous surfeit of ego and the profound lack of intelligence to support it, I doubt you will make it as a writer, even if you lurnt howe too spel. Even in these troubled times the market still bears enough residual judgment to recognise morbid incoherence. However, if you continue to find financial support from ACE, I am sure that many in the field will be happy to educate you to such a point where you may realise your talent is a ready source of income to university creative writing departments. Lord help us.

Yours etc.

Albert D Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell

Dear Albert D. Sump,

I have just completed my PhD on Adorno’s cultural creativism and Kobayashi Yoshinori’s new arrogantist manifestos and have been writing a large scale work on intermittence which uses aspects of Zukovsky’s ideas of planetary passage. I currently teach cultural isotonics at Haff Park College of the Arts. My work has been published in pseudocream, slice=maneuver, neutral baffoons and Print Grunt. I am close friends with several poets on your list and they recommended that I approach you. I would love to become part of what I see as a major publishing program, shaking up the cold and trapped world of post-avant tribalism and introducing a much needed wake up call for the liberal sonic triviality of workshop dogma and the neo-formalist grottoes.

I am much in admiration of what you have achieved and congratulate you on publishing Bob Steng, I’ve always found his work stimulating, especially the “Gnaw Rule Sonnets”, I recently came across a manuscript of “Gnaw Rule IV” in South Kent University while researching a new piece I’m writing on “The Damnation of Virgules” for Red Caesar Press.

In accordance with your submission policy I have attached six poems each in forty two pieces called “Worm Derridas” and a longer text installation called “Local Prosecution Drip” which uses an algorithm to calculate passages through Dissemination, arranged in spatial counterpoint according to Penk’s “ordinary savage” theories.

Please find enclosed a list of my published papers and a full academic CV.

Yours in friendship

Steve Hymas
Room #5334
PO Box 98334
Department of Culture & Media
Haff Park College
Lesion Heights NC 27244
ordinaire_propres@hotmail.com

12 March 2005

Dear Steve (if I may),

Thanks for your email and submission as well as the enthusiasm for our list. There’s much to admire here, and there’s certainly much of it, but I’m afraid I cannot make you an offer of publication.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find readers for new experimental writing, indeed SPD only managed to sell 11 copies of Bob’s “Gnaw Rule Sonnets” even at 72% discount! We’ve been left with over 1,200 copies in stock at SPD, and not one review over the past eight years! The second title in the trilogy did even worse. Of course, Bob refuses to take part in any form of publicity which he sees as the worst form of “simpering bourgeois idiocy,” one of the reasons he refused to have any descriptions on the book. Or a title. Or any images. Or a barcode.

As a word of advice, it would be difficult to publish this full colour manuscript with CD audio and interactive Web site, especially given you have used ledger-size paper. Is that wallpaper in the “Drip” sequence? As you know our books are all demy octavo format, designed for bookshops, really.

You might expect there to be a ready readership for your exciting new piece and I very much enjoyed your earlier interactive work up at SUNY on Carlisle’s poetics of eco-horror and thanotos versic formulae. It may be that the best place for new experimentation is on the Web where you can find thousands, or at least tens of people a week who may be surfing similar important online installations. The bookshops aren’t interested at all. What they do take comes back in a few days.

I do also wonder if this piece might not be a little too strident in its ambition? Have you had much interest when performing the “Drip” sequence? I really do get what you’re doing with only using one scored-out adjective per page but at 1,400 pages it’s quite a work to get through. I love its insistence though. I read PiEtr VEncKl’s review of it from the Scarring Derrida Conference at Miami. Seventy-six hours straight and with a xylophone! It’s serious stuff alright.

P.S. Try Umpahta Press.

Good luck with finding a publisher and my best wishes
Albert D. Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell Inc.

To who it may consern,

Will you publish me? I am ingrateful to a wide range of the MUSE. It would be of the most audacious voice that I can get 1000000s of poems working to your satisfaction. My work is pubished in hundreds of mags. I can convince you of this. I have read your guideline and am certain that I will sell. My poetry does not deal in tricks or ideas, but is awlys of LOVE. LOVE is everything to a poor inveterate man. I am always in LOVE. This is what peoples buy everyday. You must aceept my invitation to have this moment in your life. It will CHANGE YOU. I promise this of course.

Please pass this message on if you are not the right person. All poems enclosed are MY COPYRIGHT, DO NOT DISPOSE OF THEM. I want EVERYTHING back or I WILL prosecute you with LAW. If this is the wrong person, please send it to the right one even if this is in an other business entirely. Let me know how much I will have to pay in bahts. I will have the fund.

Yours in TRUTH
DR HAROLD MITCHUM “The Poem Doctor”
THAILAND

Enc. “O Beuty, this is LOVE I have it;” “LOVE you are all my ham;” “LOVE because you are ETERNALLY everyhere;” “I have IDEALS by LOVE is US”

13 June 2004

Dear Dr Mitchum,

Thank you for your kind note threatening me with litigation and an endowment. I believe this is the eleventh time you have submitted to me this month. I am delighted you are so much in love, I hope it doesn’t impinge on your daily duties in the surgery, which I’m sure must be quite demanding.

I have incorporated your poems into our corporate database so that I can use them under several other names and make a fortune in breach of your copyright. Just kidding. I don’t work for Bertelsmann and their Dark Hordes. I am not aware of any business which would consider stealing your verses. I would avoid using a magic marker to apply the copyright symbol as this tends to bleed through on to your handwritten verses. I use the word verses rather loosely here.

I’m afraid I cannot make you an offer of publication. As I have previously explained, we do not accept submissions, nor would I normally reply to them but for the fact that you have discovered where my children go to school. We cannot return your manuscripts, or the mystic mandalas you also enclosed with what you have previously explained was “FIBRIC ASH”. I shall recycle these.

The decorated photocopies of the poems were a little obscured by some unusual stains which look suspiciously like semen, please do not strain yourself at my expense. As I wrote in response on 25th January, whilst I understand you will cause great harm if I do not publish you I really do advise that you actually begin reading. This will almost certainly help with your drug regime if not your poetry as in both cases dosage is extremely important, and it is unlikely that writing a thousand poems a week can lead to literary success.

Reading some poetry rather than performing surgery upon it will give you a better grasp of the current poetry scene. However, imagining your poetry surgery did leave me singing, basso profondo, “The iamb’s connected to the dactyl, the dactyl’s connected to the trochee”. Good luck with your writing and I wish you success.

P.S. Try Bloodaxe.

With best wishes
Albert D. Sump
Deputy Poetry Editor
Castell & Castell Inc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-r5AGVbMVg

I don't know what it is about flu, which is often ridiculed in men, I've had it maybe four or five times and unlike a heavy cold has such overbearing psychological impact that I've grown to dread it. It's the rollover lottery of depression and leaves you spiralling down in that heady mix of wallowing self failure and an inability to actually enjoy anything. I mean anything, an you ache and cough and your skin hurts. But there are some rewards in the hallucinatory shivery bed clothes. Firstly, I've lost nearly a stone in weight. That should be packaged up for folks. Buy your flu here, double strength, max strength flu with combined emaciation. Secondly, it always causes a kind of degraded life assessment, the kind when you think everything's gone wrong, everything is awful and you need to take up a new career, like highwayman or corporate drone in some faceless cash-ridden, advance-spewing trade publisher. Yeah, I could really go that. Let someone else pay the goddamn bills for once. So there I was down my lowest ebb, in fact less an ebb more a kind of stagnant low puddle, a smelly one loaded with dead memories, and I started thinking about the po biz and writing and the silly factions and nepotistic back scratching, the prize fixing, the militiaristic lauding of some talent, like old farts playing their pawns on the literary chess-scape. And for a moment I thought, well, that's it, I've really had my fill, someone else can try breaking new talent, broadening the art, I'll go back to being a writer and see if I can find a way to ride the gravy train. But this self-hating phase has now passed, so the damn virus must be leaving my worn out bod, and I feel refreshed enough to remember that we just have to keep going, that there's no giving up. That we will win through because we will just never stop. If that sounds vaguely combative, I guess it is. What so often helps indie publishers to succeed is sheer bloody-minded tenacity. As the fug of flu recedes, I can see that more clearly. All I have to do now is find time to get a private life back and write and write and write.

The whole family has been wiped out with flu this week, and losing a week means losing momentum on another two books, given we publish on average around two a week. Like buses, they actually tend to come in convoys. So amid the phlegm and spittle and medieaval bile of the week in bed, we were rather pleased to receive notice that we've been shortlisted for an Independent Publishing Award for the second year running!

 

Me and Jen in bed this week

I can't tell you how thrilled I am by this. Salt is very much nose to grindstone for most of the year and last year was one of the toughest times of my life, but it paid off. The business has doubled in size and trade sales tripled. Neither Jen or I think it'll get any easier, but being recognised for our innovative, risk-taking work is absolutely terrific. Here's what the judges said:

NIELSEN INNOVATION OF THE YEAR

Salt Publishing made the shortlist for finding new ways to increase sales of its poetry and short stories despite tough market conditions,through online marketing, partnerships and brand development. "Salt is bucking the trend in poetry by growing its sales. Its innovation in lots of small ways adds up to a major achievement."

This week saw the arrival of Sandra Tappenden's Speed and its reminder to make haste in preparing for the Salt party this coming Thursday at Foyles in Charing Cross Road, London. However, turning 44, as I have (images of precipices, split ropes, wild ice), can have a relaxing and ruminative effect on one's constitution and all sense of urgency. Now, although I am prone to a little bit of lassitude, I'm more of your common or garden workaholic. Anyway, we're not talking about languishing, or even lolling, but certainly lying about considering poems and poetry, history and departures – all fittingly self-indulgent for middle aged men, even slightly corrupted ones. Over the past five years, since ditching corporate life, there have been plenty of gains and losses: the gains can be mainly measured in the 56 pounds I've put on (a rather horrid side effect of working from home, like seeing the refrigerator as an extension of my gob), and the losses have been mainly my poems and my time. As I lie on sagging sofa or our dog-chewed bed I am perplexed by this consideration that there may well be some perverse relationship between time, weight and writing. Still, I'm suitably encouraged for this week's publishing bonanza, as we expect of our latest anthology, A Room To Live In, edited by Tamar Yoseloff, to arrive on Thursday just before we head off to London to coordinate the evening's readings and hopefully have some fun. Fun has been in short measure this year, it's all been about dull Jack and his labours, and here we are at the end of November 80 titles in to things and feeling, well, quite exhausted really. The sales growth looks good, and heaven knows I spend enough time checking the figures every hour of every day; but, even with the fillip of improving sales and profits, nothing quite takes the sting out of not writing. No one will take much comfort in remembering my lifetime's contribution to ecommerce, or ONIX bibliographic messaging, still less for XML workflows or document type definitions. I spent my thirties having several splendid mid-life crises, quiet English ones of course, but now I'm in my forties it seems ludicrously repetitive to go through such endearing pursuits again. Where next, and how? I like the idea of some louche departure except I keep getting professionalized by my peers, drawn into being all grown up and adult about writing, when most of the impulses are actually transgressive and dissenting. It is, after all, best to be naughty in life. I've missed my last four birthdays, so I'm extending this one for a few days, and I shall return to feeling guilty about late books and launches, new publicity initiatives and dawn 'til dusk marketing on Monday. Or Tuesday, perhaps.