A few months ago, the editor of Poetry Review shared with members of the Poetry Society a disturbing dream in which he had found himself defending the state of contemporary poetry against a ‘National Treasure and Public Intellectual’. With his shirt buttoned up tight, his neatly combed hair and his ‘little badge of cultural influence’, this nightmarish figure seemed intent on reducing poetry to a series of cartoon museum pieces, like artefacts in glass-cabinets: ‘Keats’ death mask, the cigarette ash of Auden, the underpants of Robert Browning’.

It was an interesting way of dramatizing a supposed internal argument between poets about Ancients and Moderns. But alarming that it involved identifying contemporary poetry as being somehow in opposition to the idea of the public literary intellectual. Raymond Williams once pointed out that uses of the word ‘intellectual’ in English have historically been associated with hostile ideas about elitism. While it would be hard to write a history of, say, France or Russia without attending to the role of the literary intelligentsia, their dynamic and changing relationship to power and to society, it would be much easier to write a history of anti-intellectual resentments in Britain. But these resentments have not, hitherto, been located in the world of poetry. And poets have not always been so far removed from public discourse.

Terry Eagleton observed a few years ago that ‘for almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet... prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life’. But who are the ‘eminent’ poets of our time? Who gets to decide? (And what kind of critical term is ‘eminence’?) Eagleton needs to get out a bit more. British poets have arguably never been more concerned to interrogate the way we live than at present. But how would anyone know? Where are the places where serious readers and serious writers can meet? Where are the conversations about poetry rather than poets? And anyway, who is listening?

At a time of deepening structural inequalities in British life, 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’, while for Vanity Fair poetry enjoyed ‘a bump in cultural relevance as the world sits at home and considers its surroundings…’.)

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. When a few years ago Merryn Williams’s (ed.) Poems for Jeremy Corbyn was launched at the Labour Party conference, the broadsheets were quick to ridicule it as ‘fan poetry’ and ‘doggerel’; one Blairite MP told the Daily Telegraph that the book was ‘the only thing that had made him smile all week’. A few years ago, when I suggested that the Poetry Society might host a debate about the ‘Plagiarism’ controversies, the idea was turned down on the grounds that it was too ‘controversial’. When I recently offered Poetry News a short history of Smokestack Books it was rejected because it wasn’t ‘positive’ enough; they wanted to know how much ‘fun’ it was working with so many ‘amazing’ poets.

In the last twenty years the poetry-reading circuit has collapsed into a culture of slams and open mics. Adult education writing workshops have been replaced by higher education Creative Writing programmes. Local poetry festivals have been swallowed by corporate book festivals. Kaleidoscope by Front Row. Poets who used to work in community writing residencies have disappeared onto university campuses. Yesterday’s elitists are today’s populists. In place of the critical culture of small magazines and poetry presses, we have life-style profiles of poets in the weeklies. Although these days the Guardian reviews new poetry only sporadically, in the last ten years the paper has published over seventy reviews, features and interviews with Kate/Kae Tempest. And every poet must have a prize.

As the poet Martin Hayes has put it, the poetry world is ‘full of ugly sisters running around trying to find the glass slipper to wedge their ugly foot into so that they can then run around saying, “Look at me! Look at me! I’m the one!”’

After leaving school at fifteen, Martin Hayes worked as a leaflet distributor, accounts clerk, courier, telephonist, recruitment manager and a control room supervisor for a courier firm in London. He has also published seven books of poetry, mostly about work. This is unusual. People don’t work very much in contemporary poetry:

as we allocated out the thousands of jobs
trying to keep it safe and tidy
so that we could protect our minds and dignity
from the supervisors who would come out
every time they caught us fucking up
and try to strip it all away
by screaming and shouting at us
that we were ‘idiots’
and ‘fucking morons’
poets are writing about the shadows tulips cast in distilling light

and what help does that give us!

as we spoke to customers
whose jobs hadn’t been picked up on time
whose lives now will never be the same
trying to appease them by using our street learned charm
sweet talking them with our treacle tongues
convincing them that this was a one off
that will most certainly never happen again madam
poets are writing about their sexuality
and how hard it is coming to terms with it
and what help does that give us!
as we tried to manage the couriers’ needs
tried to convince them that we were not there
just to stitch them up
but were just trying to do our job
because we also had our rent to be paid
and our electricity bill to be paid
and our council tax to pay for
and our county court judgements to pay for
poets are writing about oak trees and how a bowl of fruit
left for a week on one of their 5-grand breakfast tables
gives off a scent that reminds them of their childhood
and what help does that give us!

Four of Hayes’s books were published by Smokestack Books, examples of Smokestack’s attempt to break out of poetry’s self-imposed isolation by bringing together serious readers and serious writers around serious issues, especially the relationship between writing and society, action and words, responsibility and complicity. To nudge the dial, as they say.

Smokestack was also 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. Smokestack’s models were Curbstone Press in the US and Le Temps des Cerises in France, publishers of ‘la poésie d’utilité publique’.

In twenty years, Smokestack sold over 65,000 books and published 237 titles. Smokestack poets included John Berger, Michael Rosen, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vernon Scannell, Linda France, Bill Herbert, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Kate Fox, Sebastian Barker, Judith Kazantzis, John Lucas, Martin Rowson, Gerda Stevenson and Steve Ely.

Smokestack’s international list included books by Victor Jara (Chile), Yiannis Ritsos and Tasos Leivaditis (Greece), Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Olga Berggolts, Konstantin Simonov and Alexandr Tvardovsky (Soviet Union), Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine and Volker Braun (Germany), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Guus Luijters (Netherlands), Louis Aragon and Francis Combes (France), Rocco Scotellaro and Laura Fusco (Italy), Nikola Vaptsarov (Bulgaria), Andras Mezei (Hungary), Justyna Bargielska (Poland), Jan Carew (Guyana), Ghassan Zaqtan and Tawfiq Zayyad (Palestine), Jack Lindsay (Australia), Martín Espada, Fred Voss, Jim Scully, Larry Beckett and Frank Reeve (USA), Amir Darwish (Syria), Goran Simić (Bosnia), Chawki Abdelamir (Iraq), Roque Dalton (El Salvador), Paul van Ostaijen (Belgium), Anna Greki (Algeria), Ilhan Comak (Turkey), and anthologies of poetry from Cuba, Siberia, the USA, Greece, Kurdistan, Hungary, the Soviet Union, France, Algeria, Kurdistan and Palestine.

Many Smokestack titles were intended as specific interventions, contributions to the public conversation around particular issues – the rise of neo-Fascism and antisemitism in Europe, Brexit, the Greek economic crisis, femicide, the refugee crisis, Covid, the climate emergency, the wars in Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza. Others were published to mark historical anniversaries – the First World War, Dada, 1917, the Spanish Civil War, 1945, the Nakba, the Pinochet coup, the UCS work-in, the Miners’ Strike.

Julia Nemirovskaya’s (ed.) Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems was the first bilingual collection of anti-war poems by Russian writers published anywhere in the world after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison’s (eds) Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry was published just 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’.

In its way, Smokestack was a small success story, putting into print poets who might otherwise not have been published and introducing to UK readers those whose work was hitherto unavailable in English. And yet, it always felt as though Smokestack titles were published in silence, in secret, samizdat. After twenty years, Smokestack 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 Smokestack titles were reviewed in Poetry Review. Only one was ever featured on The Verb. It always felt as though no-one was listening. The dial didn’t budge. The ugly sisters are still arguing about Browning’s underpants.