Poetry against the odds

'Poetry' magazine in Chicago rejected the poems of Ruth Lilly - yet she left it $100 million. But how do Irish poetry magazines, run on a shoestring, stay afloat? And what is the Catch-22 which can prevent them from getting Arts Council funding? Belinda McKeon reports.

By now, the editors of poetry journals the world over will have relished the wonderful irony of the story of Poetry magazine in Chicago; how - after 90 years of publishing poets from T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats to Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn and Rita Dove - the magazine's artistic wealth was finally matched in monetary terms when the heiress Ruth Lilly remembered in her will the magazine which had roundly rejected her literary efforts in the 1970s. Lilly bequeathed to Poetry $100 million, transforming the four-strong staff squeezed into a tiny office above a Chicago library into the directors of the richest poetry foundation in the world.

It's an irony appreciated by editors of Irish poetry magazines, for whom, unlike their Chicago counterparts, rejection has seldom been the source of riches. "We're thinking of adding a little note to our rejection slips," jokes Declan Meade, editor of the Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly, "saying: 'If you want to prove how well you have taken this, add us to your will . . .'. But, actually, the most we ever got in response to a rejection slip was a dead fly sellotaped to a piece of paper and beside it the words: 'Oh, where is thy sting?' That's the kind of thing we tend to get, rather than a hundred million."

Editors such as Meade are no strangers to the kind of tentative existence which has been the Chicago magazine's lot since 1912. Born of largely voluntary labours in temporary offices or on day-job computers, the strong visual and literary quality of magazines such as the Cork-produced The SHOp, the Galway-based The Burning Bush, Cyphers from Dublin, and Metre, edited from universities in Hull and Prague as well as in Dublin, belies the uncertainty of their subsistence. Such magazines are almost entirely dependent on grants from the Arts Council and from local authorities; grants which are distributed only on a year-to-year basis, and which, the editors agree, are looking increasingly uncertain in the current climate of cutbacks.

In line with the emphasis placed by the latest Arts Plan on the importance of professionalism and administrative efficiency in the arts, the Arts Council, explains literary officer Sinead Mac Aodha is clear on the sort of poetry magazine it is most interested in funding. "Journals that provide national coverage rather than regional. Journals that pay fees to the contributors. The editor should be in receipt of a salary, preferably full-time, rather than a fee. We look at how they market their magazine and develop their audience; we look at their subscription base and at how they are promoting the magazine, at how and where they are placing ads. And at how they network and make contacts with the sector." The type of journal most favoured by the Council, Mac Aodha explains, will be one which meets "a specific need of the Council to develop literary and cultural criticism", one which is produced from an office, "with a full administration".

It sounds like a laudable enterprise, this most fundable of magazines. It sounds, in fact, strangely like the sort of magazine that Poetry senior editor Stephen Young is hoping to make with his new-found millions - one run from better headquarters, with more staff, with a strengthened administration, higher production values, and generous payment rates.

And here lies another irony of the Poetry bequest for Irish magazine editors. While in Chicago, this is the type of magazine which comes about when someone bequeaths it $100 million, in Ireland, this is the type of magazine which an editor must have in place in order to request a decent amount of funding.

A decent amount of funding currently translates as about €40,000 - which is what Brendan Barrington's Dublin Review, a high quality quarterly journal combining creative and critical writing and was singled out by Mac Aodha as meeting all of the Council's criteria, received this year. The Dublin Review's grant exceeded even Poetry Ireland Review - the country's longest-running poetry journal and something of a national institution - and leaving The SHOp, Cyphers, Metre, and The Stinging Fly, far behind with their grants of €9,400, €6,340, €6,000 and €5,000 respectively.

Yet, despite increasing economic pressures and the spectre of the looming budget, the climate for poetry magazines in Ireland is relatively healthy. So much so, in fact, that Poetry Ireland director Joseph Woods has been spurred into reconsidering the state of the Poetry Ireland Review. "Seeing journals like The SHOp," he says, "you realise that as a national magazine we don't want to slip. So we are looking at giving the magazine a more modern outlook and design, more opinion, more contemporary articles, and hoping to relaunch it this time next year." Poetry Ireland is also considering a change to a full-time editor on a salary rather than a rotating one on a fee. Cynics might see an attempt to align with the Arts Council's blueprint for maximum funding, but Woods's plans to revitalise the Review are still to be welcomed.

Elsewhere, individual blueprints have been innovative and exciting. In 1999, without even looking to the Arts Council for assistance, husband and wife team John and Hilary Wakeman produced, from their "broom cupboard" of an office in Schull, Co Cork, the first issue of their magazine The SHOp, as confident in its design as in its content, featuring poems by George Szirtes and Paul Muldoon. Now on its 10th issue, the magazine is a triumph of style and substance, funded by Foras Na Gaeilge, Cork County Council and a foundation, as well as by private donors.

The Stinging Fly, whose 14th issue is due on December 11th, also combines its Arts Council grant with funding from Dublin Corporation and a patron scheme, while The Burning Bush, which receives no Arts Council funding, depends chiefly on subscriptions and sales to produce its more modest journal.

And, according to founding editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, the longevity of Cyphers, which has been running since the early 1970s, is largely down to a FÁS scheme which provides it with a much-needed administrator and a materials grant, in addition to the advantages of counting a printer and a designer among the good friends of the editor. "I would say that the climate in Ireland is quite hospitable to literary magazines," says Ní Chuilleanáin.

"I have been surprised by the warmth of some of the letters we've received. At the same time, in other countries you see these sorts of publications in bookshops and on newspaper stalls. Here, it's much harder to contact a general audience. You tend to be dealing with the converted." As Leland Bardwell, one of Ní Chuilleanáin's co-editors, observes, "it's mainly poets who read poetry".

David Wheatley, editor of the acclaimed Metre magazine, agrees that reaching a wider market is not an easy task for a poetry magazine. "Short of standing in cinema queues trying to flog the magazine," he says, there is no easy solution.

This, however, may be to overlook the opportunities presented by the Internet - the Irish online journal, Electric Acorn, set up in 1997 by former head of communications at the Arts Council, Nessa O'Mahony, secures up to 10,000 hits a day. But the fact remains that the interest of Irish bookshops in the magazines which nurture the future of Irish literature is steadily dwindling. At Waterstones, "sales history logistics" render poetry magazines unstockable (unless you have an inside contact, one magazine editor confides). And getting into Hodges Figgis, on the basis of the criteria laid down by the store manager in the Dublin branch, seems a task every bit as challenging as securing significant Arts Council funding.

Meanwhile, Eason's can't even locate a manager willing to talk about poetry magazines. However, there are exceptions: Books Upstairs in Dublin, and the Galway store Kenny's both have a policy of stocking Irish poetry magazines, feeling that they enrich the poetry and literature sections of their shops. Kenny's even keeps the back copies in stock rather than returning them to the publishers, saying that they always sell eventually. Which nicely gives the lie to David Wheatley's observation that, while "all magazines have a shelf-life, only rarely is it as long as the life expectancy of your average shelf".

That "different world" of the poetry magazine can sometimes be a difficult world, then; but it's not all financial stress and strain. Each editor talks about the joy of giving space and opportunity to new writing, of publishing complete beginners as well as old hands.

And there is a consensus, too, that poverty and poetry somehow go together. It was during the boom, says Kevin Higgins, founder of The Burning Bush, that the magazine suffered its greatest headaches, as printers stopped caring about the smaller jobs. Joseph Woods, too, remembers virtually empty poetry readings during more affluent times. "People, including poets, were just too busy for poetry."

Besides, economic hardship is a great leveller. Right now, the publishers of the unfunded Electric Acorn, paid for completely out of O'Mahony's pocket, and of Poetry Ireland Review, funded by the Arts Council to the tune of €30,000, are taking on the same challenge of finding alternative, possibly corporate, funding. Both O'Mahony and Woods point out this is a much more popular approach in the US, where universities and foundations can provide vast sums, but that the time may have come for Irish publishers to adopt it too. Poetry Ireland, in a sense, has already done so, sourcing Seacat as sponsor for the Irish National Poetry Competition, now in its third year.

"There are people out there who have an interest in the arts," says Woods, "and poetry is a great way to be remembered." He knows it. Ruth Lilly knew it. And this time, there's not a rejection slip in sight.