Twenty Years on Reality Street

There's been an unaccustomed flurry of orders in the past week. The small press I run has had one of its latest titles -  Philip Terry's novel tapestry -  reviewed as paperback of the week by Nicholas Lezard in Saturday's edition of the Guardian. In the 20 years of Reality Street's existence, national media coverage has been predictably sparse -  the kind of left-field poetry and prose the press is associated with is normally assumed not to exist by those who set the British Culture agenda -  and when it has come, this has probably been due to the author, or someone close to the author, pulling strings or calling in favours that I have no knowledge of. But this one has arrived out of the blue. It's unnerving.



The decades go by dismayingly quickly. In 1987, I remember I met Wendy Mulford, alongside my old friends Allen Fisher and Paige Mitchell, on board a ferry plying between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire. Our mutual destination was a poetry festival at the Winding Stair bookshop in Dublin, organised by the inestimable Maurice Scully. I got talking to Wendy, who ran Street Editions, publishing some of her Cambridge poet-peers: Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Denise Riley, J.H. Prynne, John James, Andrew Crozier, Tom Raworth. We talked about collaborating.

At that time, my London-based publishing outlet was Reality Studios, a poetry magazine I had started ten years earlier. It took its name from Burroughs' Nova Express, in which Inspector J. Lee pledges that 'With your help we ...