From NEIL ASTLEY, editor & managing director, Bloodaxe Books Ltd
I wish to protest at the utterly crazy decision to deprive Arc of its Arts Council funding, coming as it does at the same time as the axing of Enitharmon and Flambard, the cutting of Anvil Press's funding by a third, and the reductions of funding to "luckier" presses like Bloodaxe.
At a stroke the Arts Council has succeeded in crippling independent poetry publishing in Britain, depriving numerous poets and translators of both publication and livelihood as well as depriving readers of the work of an essential publishing house and its lively and varied list of authors. While more funding has gone to areas such as literature development, there will be no development in literature without the work of the publishers who produce the books and nurture new talent. Arc in particular has been run for decades on a shoestring by Tony Ward, Angela Jarman and their hardworking helpers, and as well as supporting British poetry at grassroots level they have been one of the few presses to have published numerous books of poetry in translation. The amount of funding they need to continue that essential work is peanuts in terms of the overall Arts Council budget. The £40,000 allocated to Faber's New Poets scheme which benefits four poets per year who receive pamphlet publication, mentoring and touring would have been far better spent in supporting Arc, whose work reaches far more readers and is far more significant both nationally and internationally. Viewed as a whole, ACE's funding decisions on poetry publishing for 2012-15 take little account of the recent poetry strategy work (summarised in "Mapping contemporary poetry") carried out by the independent presses which clearly showed the central role of poetry publishers in writer and readership development.