It’s important to remember that the total process of writing, from learning to read, through being influenced, on to being published and then possibly read, is a social one at every stage other than the “siege in the room” (Samuel Beckett’s phrase) during which writing, usually, still takes place. You really do need to know other writers — if you don’t, you probably aren’t one yet. I started writing poems seriously when I was sixteen, under the influence of a Brompton cocktail of T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and e. e. cummings. I did have people to read and respond to my writing—the first were a brilliant pair of English teachers, Dave and Olwen Fairweather, at my secondary school, and then there were friends at university — but not knowing any published writers was a real problem. Publication became an obsession. I knew nothing of the range of experimental work being published by small presses in the UK, and kept repeat-submitting obviously inappropriate work to the same small list of Scottish magazines, with a doggedness that may actually have frightened the editors. The work kept coming back, and somehow the work kept getting worse, as if I needed the confirmation of rejection. I once translated the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood” into octosyllabic rhyming couplets, and I didn’t do it well. Not much survives from this period of my life, but I’m not sure it was entirely wasted. I retain a fairly basic willingness to go off at a tangent, to do what even I least expect and to do it with manic commitment until I get stuck, go silent, and eventually follow another tangent. I suspect I wouldn’t be like that if I had made more writer friends early on: I would have been embarrassed out of it. I often wish I wasn’t like that, as it’s an exhausting and frustrating way for an adult to function, but it lends my work an occasionally psychotic variousness and openness to change that (in retrospect) I wouldn’t swap for anything.
Every writer needs to demystify the idea of publication, and the best way to do that is to become a publisher yourself. In my case, that happened in 1994, when Robin Purves and I began publishing Object Permanence magazine. We had become fascinated by what little we’d been able to find out about British and North American experimental writing. In those (for us) pre-internet days, such work was remarkably hard to find if you weren’t already connected with the UK small-press networks centred in London and Cambridge. My brother Derek bought me my first PC and inkjet printer in 1993, and my first sight of 14-point Times New Roman made a magazine suddenly look possible. We knew nothing, and we knew nobody. The first issue was produced after an intense campaign of soliciting work from poets whose addresses we found in a shelf of writers’ directories in the University of Glasgow Library. The result was a poorly photocopied, untrimmed 64-page magazine (we switched to offset litho with Issue 2), whose contents ranged from the Glasgow poets Edwin Morgan and David Kinloch, through British experimentalists like Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher, and Peter Finch, to Americans like Clark Coolidge, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Fanny Howe. The original idea was to bring this work into print for a Scottish audience; this audience never really happened, but the magazine made a strong, immediate connection with the London experimental scene and carried me with it. The magazine was suddenly one among dozens of other near-samizdat productions by British poet-editors, and many of these publications would come to us, by exchange or for review. There was an extraordinary combination of adventurousness and matter-of-factness about these presses. The work needed to get out, so you published it. It’s just what you did. I got published too, in Writers Forum pamphlets, issued with incredible rapidity and great flair from the photocopier in Bob Cobbing’s basement. The pressure went off, and the work got better. And somewhere along the line I started having to reject rhymed translations of “The Dream of the Rood,” and I finally figured out why.
The web, ebooks, PayPal and print-on-demand have changed the world of experimental poetry in ways that I couldn’t have imagined in 1994. So much work, and so much information about it, is freely available online, that it would be hard now to replicate my long apprenticeship of ignorance and arrogance (though I bet I could manage it). Webzines and PDFs offer unlimited space at essentially no cost to the tyro editor, but I still think it’s a useful discipline to learn how to kick at (and with) the physical limits of a paper publication. It concentrates the mind and helps crystallize the sensibility, and decades later (as Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of his own early folly, the fashion magazine La Dernière Mode), “still serves, when I divest it of its dust, to make me dream at length.”