New Middlesbrough publisher Smokestack Books has just launched its first two titles. Founder Andy Croft tells LIterature North East about his plans for the new press.

Why did you decide to start a new press?
Ten years ago I helped to set up Mudfog Press, which only publishes writers with a TS or DL post-mark. This was - and continues to be - an important way of encouraging and promoting Teesside writers for whom London is a long way away - and Newcastle even further. Yeats once said that Ireland was the glove he wore when he wanted to touch the world; Teesside was my glove, I suppose - but it was a tatty, ex-industrial glove covered in toxic waste. Not many people seemed to want to shake hands! After ten years with Mudfog I wanted to publish books whose claims were not geographically specific and which could make an intervention on a wider stage (Smokestack Books are distributed nationally by Central Books). At the same time I felt that there is a need for poetry which can respond to what Brecht famously called the 'dark times':

'In the dark times
Will there also be singing ?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.'

I want to hear more people singing about the dark times, and I hope that Smokestack can help to get people listening.

What are you going to be doing that no one else is?
Smokestack is interested in publishing poets who are unconventional, unfashionable, old-fashioned, radical or left-field, who are interested in the world as well as the word, who do not think `difficulty' in poetry is a virtue and who believe that poetry is a part of and not apart from society. There is a great line by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra which sums up Smokestack's thinking - `In poetry everything is permitted./ With only this condition, of course:/ You have to improve on the blank page.' Smokestack will not, on the whole, consider work by new writers. It is relatively easy at the moment to place a first book; much harder to find a home for a second or third collection. In other words, Smokestack is for unpublishable, sad, middle-aged lefties. But then every publisher publishes in their own image, don't they?

Is there a lot of 'political' poetry which is not being picked up by publishers?
I don't know what poetry is not being published, but if you gave a Martian a representative selection of the poetry books that have been published in the UK over the last few years, they would have a pretty odd sense of what it is like to be human. But I am not looking only to publish `political poetry' in the obvious or narrow sense - certainly not in the sense of party politics! Anyway, how do you write political poetry in a society absent of politics?

You mentioned you were interested in publishing poets for whom 'difficulty' in poetry is not a virtue. Would it be fair to say that you're hoping to reach new readers who might perhaps be put off by traditional 'difficult' poetry? If so, how are you intending to reach them?
I am not especially trying to create new readers for poetry. There are plenty of people who enjoy reading poetry. You can't measure the readership for poetry by the number of new books of poetry sold in large book-shop chains. Look at the narrow and lifeless choice of poetry books in most chains - it's hardly surprising that they sell so few. Every time someone impatiently puts down a poem because they do not feel included in the conversation, poetry becomes a little bit less necessary and a bit more of a pointless luxury. Readers usually blame themselves if they can't understand a poem, rather than the writer; I think we should all be less patient with willful difficulty in art. For me the use of poetic tradition is an antidote to 'difficulty'. The common, shared music of poetry (rhythm, rhyme, echo, sound) invites readers to share in the ownership and the enjoyment of a poem, to join in the conversation. Poetry is a part of, and not apart from society; its significance derives from its audience; without an audience, writing poetry is like talking to yourself.

Tell us about your first two books
The first two Smokestack titles are by two of the region's most distinctive poets - Dunstanburgh by Katrina Porteous and Imagined Corners by Keith Armstrong. Dunstanburgh was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 - it's a stunning radio-poem about Dunstanburgh Castle, evoking the natural music and the terrible stories of the castle. It's a poem about history and memory, building and ruin, war and the elements. Imagined Corners is Keith's first collection for fifteen years. It is partly about the round world's imagined corners - in many of which Keith has read in recent years, partly about the North East, its sometimes heroic past and its post-industrial discontents. It was important for me that Smokestack's first two books should be by North East poets; I wanted to establish Smokestack's geographical loyalties from the start. But it is not a specifically North East project; in fact, of Smokestack's next eight titles, only one is by a North East poet.

And what can you tell us about the next eight?
This February Smokestack is publishing a dynamic new translation by John Goodby of Heine's Germany: A Winter's Tale. It is one of the most political poems in European history. It was admired by Marx, quoted by August Bebel in the Reichstag, published by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of the Spartakist uprising, banned by the Nazis, re-written by Wolf Biermann. Its subjects - exile, war and revolution, art and propaganda, political repression and cultural identity, the threat of hyper-power hegemony - are as relevant today as they were one hundred and sixty years ago. Next year also sees the publication of Town, a verse-novel by Alan Dent; Alison Fell's Light Year, a stunning twelve month calendar sequence accompanied by Ivan Coleman's photographs; Tough by Teesside poet Andy Willoughby; The Erotics of God, meditations on the theology of desire by Sebastian Barker; and a splendid collection about entering old-age, David Craig's The Fourth Quarter. Lined up for 2006 is a new collection by Arnold Rattenbury, now in his eighty-third year; and New Poetry from Siberia edited by Yana Glembotskaya and Sergei Samoilenko, an anthology of post-perestroika, post-Soviet, post-Putin poetry from Novosibirsk.

How about your own work? What are you working on right now?
Cynthia Fuller and I are currently editing an anthology of poetry from the North East, which Iron are publishing in 2005. I am also trying to write several series of poems - one based on four years working as writer-in-residence at HMP Holme House, one about John Bunyan in the twenty-first century, one drawing on visits to Bulgaria and Siberia earlier this year. Meanwhile, I have to write the libretto for a kids' opera/musical about the history of Hartlepool over the next few weeks.

Dunstanburgh by Katrina Porteous and Imagined Corners are both available to buy online from Independent Northern Publishers.