The radical poetry publisher Smokestack Books is closing at the end of the year, its editor, Andy Croft, has revealed, in a letter to the poetry magazine PN Review, in which he criticises the “uncomradely, uncongenial and frankly embarrassing world of contemporary British poetry”. In his letter Croft says: “The backlist will still be available to order, but Smokestack will no longer be publishing new books. I set up Smokestack Books in 2004 with the aim of publishing poets a long way from the centres of cultural authority, especially oppositional, dissident, unfashionable and radical poets. Since then, Smokestack has sold over 65,000 books and published 237 titles, including books by John Berger, Victor Jara, Michael Rosen, Sylvia Pankhurst, Vernon Scannell, Linda France, Louis Aragon, Bertolt Brecht, Nikola Vaptsarov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yiannis Ritsos and anthologies of poetry from Cuba, Greece, Kurdistan, France, Russia, Algeria and Palestine.”

He added: “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. But what was supposed to be a positive intervention soon became a line of retreat, defeated by PR and lazy arts journalism.”

In his letter he says that “British cultural life is blocked by the values of big business and show business. The result is an atomised, unwelcoming and unfriendly poetry scene whose inaccessibility is barely disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion. Conversations about poetry have been replaced by conversations about poets, discussions of tradition by accusations of plagiarism, and the language of literary criticism by the hyperbolic language of press releases promoting corporate prizes and celebrity book festivals.

“After twenty years of running Smokestack unfunded, unpaid and single-handed, I have run out of good reasons to remain even on the margins of the uncomradely, uncongenial and frankly embarrassing world of contemporary British poetry.”

Croft’s reference to “accusations of plagiarism” relates to the 2015 row that resulted in him having to pulp copies of a poetry collection, Laventille, by Sheree Mack, after she was forced to apologise for “unintentionally appropriating” the work of other poets. Croft initially took a defiant attitude towards the accusations, which have left deep scars among poets in the north-east to this day. Sheree Mack’s second collection, Darkling, is due out from Smokestack at the beginning of October, the publisher said earlier this month.

Back in 2014 – a year before the plagiarism row erupted – Andy Croft, speaking at the Poetry Library in London, said that Smokestack had been set up as “a small antidote to the brain-freezing dullness” of much of contemporary British poetry.

In 2022 Smokestack published a retrospective anthology containing one poem from each of the 199 titles it had published since 2004.

In an interview with Write Out Loud’s reviews editor Frances Spurrier in 2013, Andy Croft was asked what he loved about being an editor. He replied: “Being able to put into print a book which I know no one else would ever publish, for example Steve Ely’s Oswald’s Book of Hours, which is now on the Forward shortlist for this year’s best first collection. We’re Going On! (the collected poems by Tom Wintringham, the first commander of the British battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war) and A Rose Loupt Oot (a collection of poems and songs about the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in) would not have happened without Smokestack.”