The Insider: Vehicle of literary endeavour

Mar 8 2008 Peter Finch

COULD it be that the once instant vehicle of literary endeavour, the pamphlet, is finished? When did you last pick one up? Do you even know what one is? There was a time when they were omnipresent.

Edgar Allan Poe, he of the Raven, was an inveterate pamphleteer. His first works were self-published with an early collection of poems running to just 60 copies.

He was also a congenital attention seeker. He mailed out the entire run to journalists in the hope of getting his name in lights. Inevitably not a single mention appeared anywhere. The pamphlet sank without a trace. Poe himself didn’t even have a copy. It’s now one of the rarest books in the antiquarian world.

The pamphlet was the accepted method used by new writers wanting to get access to their public. Short, often sharp, and usually cheap. They could be compiled from the work of those who hadn’t yet done much as well as from those who couldn’t wait for the longwinded big book system to bring out their stuff.

After the Second World War they enjoyed a golden age. Not only were they about the only things small publishers could afford to produce but they shone in a dark world of shortages and strain.

Bookshops hated them. They made the shelves look untidy. No one ever seemed to buy them. They only moved when the pamphlet’s authors arrived to shuffle their works onto the top of the stack. But as a conduit for sharp and single-pointed literary expression they knew no equal.

Today technology seems to have seen them off. Internet publishing is swifter. Big books are cheaper to print than ever.

None of the main publishers of Wales engage. Patrick McGuiness at Seren has threatened a revival but nothing has yet hit the shelves.

At Rack Press, in Nicholas Murray’s quality press for perfect poetry, the 12 and 16-pager knows no bounds. He’s already published 10 quality letterpress booklets from poets as diverse as John Barnie, Hazel Frew and Dai Vaughan.

His latest two are from Swansea’s Byron Beynon (Cuffs) and the much underrated Steve Griffiths (Landing). Tiny titles for tiny books. The poems sit mellow in perfect space.

Steve Griffiths’ work is mostly about the weather, placid, zen-like, full of age and acceptance. Byron Beynon is still a traveller. Blue bays, tropical balconies, creeks, crocodiles, surf, wetsuits, Langland, Dizzy Gillespie and the bracken and heather hanging on Rhossili Down above the nerve of the bay.

What do you do with these things after you’ve shelled out the £4 a time they cost?

Handle them with care, read them slowly, let their words stay with you.

That’s what poetry does best.