It was a foggy night on Teesside and a warm if slightly melancholy evening for the final farewell of Smokestack Books, which publisher Andy Croft closed for new titles last Christmas after 20 years. Poets that he has published gathered to pay tribute and to say thanks to an imprint that has gained a reputation for its international, bi-lingual collections, and for standing for something different in poetry while being, as Andy Croft put it, “so far from the centres of cultural authority”.  

He explains more about that in his recently published collection of essays, The Privatisation of Poetry, in which he describes an “atomised, unwelcome and unfriendly poetry scene whose inaccessibility is hardly disguised by ritual declarations about diversity and inclusion … the doors still need kicking down.” It’s a message that he has repeatedly expressed for a number of years. 

Bob Beagrie, pictured left, the last poet to read at The Waiting Room in Eaglescliffe, Stockton, on Sunday night, who has published four books with Smokestack, described it as a “vitally important antidote” that has had a “massive cultural impact”. He listed Andy Croft’s other work over the years, including projects in schools and prisons, organising writing and poetry festivals, and helping to run community publishers Mudfog Press before Smokestack.  

Andy Croft began the evening by reading poems by Gordon Hodgeon, who following a series of unsuccessful spinal operations, was confined to bed and wheelchair, unable to move his arms and legs, or breathe without a ventilator. He nevertheless produced a new book of poems, some of them dictated to visiting friends and to staff in a rehabilitation unit, and others typed using voice-recognition software.

The evening’s underlying atmosphere of sadness was perhaps captured in SJ (Jackie) Litherland’s poem ‘Gone in the Morning’, a lament for the former Durham coalfield: “What stays open is the wound, a flaying of the North East”.

Mark Robinson read an intriguing yet recognisable mirror poem, ‘Moving the Books’; Jo Colley observed while reading from her collection Sleeper that poets and writers could bee seen as spies, living “in plain sight”; George Jowett’s amusing ‘The Magician’s Wife’ is from the perspective of the first spouse – pre-Debbie McGee - of Middlesbrough millionaire Paul Daniels; Julie Egdell, pictured left, read from her collection Alice in Winterland, written after moving to St Petersburg: “These poems have taken on a new meaning, with what’s happening at the moment.” There were also readings from Annie Wright, Pauline Plummer, and on behalf of Marilyn Longstaff.

If there was an elephant in the room, it can only have been a plagiarism row which caused intense bitterness among north-east poets and beyond 10 years ago – and still does in some quarters today. Andy Croft maintains in The Privatisation of Poetry that the reaction of the accusers of Sheree Mack was “hysterical and disproportionate”. He published a second collection by the same poet last year, as one of his last Smokestack titles.  

Smokestack’s bi-lingual collections have included in recent years an anthology of 100 anti-war poems by Russian poets after the invasion of Ukraine, and Out of Gaza, an anthology that includes two poets killed by Israeli bombings.

Andy Croft wound up Sunday night’s event by observing wryly that it felt like “sitting at my own funeral”. But he added that those questions about poetry’s “cultural authorities” that he has posed “are still here … so keep on asking those questions”.

What are his future plans? He told Write Out Loud: “At the moment I am trying to finish a new verse-novel in Pushkin sonnets, the third (and last!) in a trilogy … Almost done. Just 51 lines to go.” A suitably eclectic response, some might say, from a publisher you could never accuse of being predictable.  

 

 

 

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