John Green talks to Andy Croft about the achievements of Smokestack Books, in an article from the Morning Star

Poetry is the most democratic form of literary expression — it only takes a pencil, a scrap of paper and/or a voice to create a poem of a few lines or stanzas. It won’t necessarily be good poetry but that is another issue. Unfortunately, many people in Britain still today dismiss and ignore poetry. As socialist poet Adrian Mitchell memorably encapsulated it: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”

Smokestack Books has spent two intensive decades trying to disprove this assertion. Its models were Curbstone Press based in the US and the French Le Temps des Cerises, publishers of “la poesie d’utilite publique” — poetry in the public interest. It has been emitting a steady stream of progressive poetry into the rarified atmosphere of Britain’s literary world since 2004, when poet and former Morning Star poetry editor Andy Croft set it up. Tragically, Smokestack’s poetic furnaces will, at the end of this year, be extinguished, even though the back-list will still be available to order.

I asked Croft why he decided to establish Smokestack Books in the first place.

“I wanted to publish poets far from the centres of cultural authority,” he says, “especially oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets. Smokestack has now published 237 titles and sold over 65,000, including volumes by John Berger, Michael Rosen, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vernon Scannell, Linda France and Kate Fox. I also envisaged Smokestack as a protest at the terminal dullness of so much of the contemporary UK poetry scene, its self-importance, excitability, lack of seriousness and self-imposed isolation from the rest of society.”

One of Smokestack’s special contributions was that it gave a platform not just to British poets, but brought readers into contact with a whole number of leading foreign poets not easily encountered elsewhere, several in bilingual editions, including Victor Jara, Louis Aragon, Bertolt Brecht, Nikola Vaptsarov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yiannis Ritsos, Olga Berggolts, Francis Combes, Volker Braun, Gustavo Pereira, Alexandr Tvardovsky and anthologies of poetry from Cuba, Greece, Kurdistan, France, Russia, Algeria and Palestine.

Despite its achievements, Croft remains pessimistic about the role of poetry in the present political and economic climate.

“During the last two decades,” he says, “large sections of British economic life have been moved out of common ownership into private hands, rationed by price or simply closed down. The democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business. The result is an atomised, unwelcoming and unfriendly poetry scene whose inaccessibility is hardly disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion. Conversations about poetry have been replaced by conversations about poets, discussions of tradition by accusations of plagiarism, and the language of literary criticism by the hyperbolic language of press-releases promoting corporate prizes and celebrity book-festivals.”

The result, for Croft, is that people are wary of contemporary poetry, which too often seems remote and invariably associated with resentful feelings of elitism. It was the great Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams who pointed out that the use of the word “intellectual” in English has historically been associated with an aloof elite. While it would be hard to write a history of, say, France or Russia without attending to the positive role of the literary intelligentsia, their dynamic and changing relationship to power and to society, here in Britain. It would be much easier to write a history of anti-intellectual resentments.

“At a time of deepening structural inequalities in British life,” he asserts, “poets are hidden behind university walls, competing for prizes and commissions, protected by agents, copyright lawyers and exaggerated claims for the importance of poetry. According to the Guardian, during the Covid pandemic ‘almost everyone’ found themselves ‘turning to poetry.’

“The gate-keepers who control access to the world of poetry — the broadsheets, the Arts Council, the BBC, book-festivals, prize-giving foundations, the Poetry Society — also isolate it from the world and inoculate it against controversy.”

As Croft explains: “It always felt as though Smokestack titles were published in silence, in secret, samizdat. After 20 years our titles still struggled to make themselves heard above the victory march of the Next Big Thing. No Smokestack title was ever reviewed in the Guardian. Only three titles were reviewed in Poetry Review. Only one was ever featured on BBC’s The Verb. It always felt as though no-one was listening.”

Many Smokestack titles were intended as specific interventions, contributions to the public conversation around particular issues — the rise of neofascism and anti-semitism in Europe, Brexit, the Greek economic crisis, femicide, the refugee crisis, Covid, climate emergency, the wars in Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza. Others were published to mark historical anniversaries — the Great War, Dada, 1917, the Spanish civil war, 1945, the Nakba, the Pinochet coup, the UCS work-in, the miners’ strike.

For instance, Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison were joint editors of Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry, published only three months after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, to raise money for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Ilhan Comak’s Separated from the Sun was published to raise public awareness about its author, who has been in a Turkish prison since 1994 for the crime of Kurdish “separatism.”

Despite everything, Smokestack has been a success story on several levels, putting into print poets who might otherwise not have been published, as well as introducing to British readers those poets from other countries whose work was hitherto unavailable in English. It will remain as a marker of resistance to both the elite literary canon and the poetry Establishment as well as a vital historical witness to poetry as an expression of working people’s lives.

There will be a celebration of Smokestack’s publishing achievement at The Cockpit Theatre on December 8 at the Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH - see flyer above. Everyone is welcome.