Declan Ryan in conversation with Rory Waterman
PN Review 289, May - June 2026
Rory Waterman: How do you think the poetry publishing landscape has changed in Britain over the past, say, fifteen years?
Declan Ryan: There’s been a noticeable turn towards the presentation of books as projects, books as commodities, books as ‘what’s this about’ rather than poems being allowed to be first and foremost poems, both in terms of how they’re sold but also how they’re received and reviewed, or at least written about. The ‘memorable speech’ idea, the mixed bag, the not necessarily linked other than because they’re all by the same person book. I think a lot of that is to do with the general creep, or overflow, of the language of marketing in general, across everything: the idea that things must be neatly packaged, consumable, summarisable. I’m less interested in subject matter in poetry than in linguistic facility, in the poem as a poem, in seeing something done that I can’t necessarily easily explain. I can’t speak to the commercial or other pressures that certain publishing requires, and the decisions that are made as a result; cut to me in three years, standing vocally behind The Selected Poems of the Chuckle Brothers. But my opinion is that the responsibility of a poetry editor is, above all, to act in good faith, based on their own best understanding of what is the highest quality work they are presented with, and to find ways of creating a link between that poet and the reader, which is a contract of trust.
RW: What are the risks, and what intervention can you make?
DR: The biggest risk with any approach led by second-guessing a market, or thinking about one in a conscious way, is that that sort of system, like all systems, becomes quite easy to game and you end up with a situation that pushes writers further to the side who aren’t go-getting achievers, or plugged in and linked up and in the know. And – in general but particularly in something like poetry – it would be fair to say there is often an inverse relationship between people who are being business savvy – who’ve worked out how to get to the top of the modish ladders, whatever they are at any given time – and people whose poetry you might want to read. Of course that’s a generalisation, and there are exceptions. But one wants to find and make room for one-offs, originals, outliers. Like all small eco-systems, there are complex and genuine and enormously positive aspects of coteries or friendship groups, and these can – as literary history has shown – lead to great efflorescences of talent. But they can also be self-perpetuating or exclusionary, especially if you end up with something which means writers at the margins, in various ways, stand little chance of getting a hearing, or of breaking through into the realms of the published, by dint of not knowing how to, rather than anything to do with what’s on the page. One thing that feels to me to have changed in the last fifteen years – at least from the distance at which I stand to a lot of it – is how difficult and unapproachable a lot of publishers would now seem to someone starting out who isn’t embedded in certain ways in the literary scene as it is already. That’s something I’d like to change where possible.
RW: How?
DR: I like the idea of those introduction-style books, open calls. Whether that’s realistic or possible, I don’t yet know. But more can and needs to be done to seek out people who aren’t connected in literary circles, who are writing well but look to what amounts to a ‘poetry scene’ and are put off by it, either temperamentally or aesthetically. I know we’ve spoken before, in human life, about the idea that many writers who aren’t in London, say, often feel alienated by the idea of approaching the more prestigious publishing houses, or that their chances of success seem negligible.
RW: So, you think much of the British ‘poetry scene’ is increasingly a self-serving clique?
DR: I think it can certainly, and at times fairly, seem like that to someone looking in from the outside, trying to get going or find an entry point amid all the clatter and clamour. I’ve not been on any social media for a good while now because I found it all deeply immiserating. It’s crucial, I think, always to remember that visibility and ubiquity is never the same as talent, and equally that no one style, grouping or aesthetic is able to speak for poetry as a whole. And of course I include my ‘own’ in that. It’s easy at times – and I’ve certainly done this – to begin to conflate the things (or frankly the people) you find most off-putting in some way with poetry, but it isn’t, and they aren’t. Poetry goes on anyway, quietly, beyond and above and to one side of whatever little internecine spat or imagined slight one might be simmering away with. And it’s that which you want, and do your best to fight for, in whatever small sense. The rest is just low-level sociology experiments and ulcer causation.
RW: How important is the bottom line? Sales and ‘buzz’ also matter, surely.
DR: It matters that you’re publishing work that can attract a readership, certainly. But I think – and again I say this in a slightly innocent state – that’ll be as much my job as it is the poets’. I would hate to think of someone sitting at their desk trying to write poems they thought would sell. Then you’re in the copywriting business, not the poetry one. That said, you hope poets are writing in a way that invites a readership, and not in some private language only intended for their mates.
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This interview by Declan Ryan and Rory Waterman is taken from PN Review 289, May - June 2026.
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