Pinks #27: A Noise Like a Publisher
When poets write blurbs
This week, the publisher Simon & Schuster announced that its authors will no longer be expected to obtain blurbs from fellow authors for a new book. Sean Manning, writing in Publishers’ Weekly, traced the decision back to his realisation that
many of the biggest-selling, prize-winning and most artistically revered titles in the flagship’s history did not use blurbs for their first printings: Psycho, Catch-22, All the President’s Men…
Manning now believes that there is an “excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach” — which, if nothing else, is a memorably new combination of words.
Blurb outreach has certainly increased in British poetry in recent years. I’m always happy to say something positive about a new book if I can, especially if it’s from a small press and/or a debut author. But I inevitably then wrangle too long with the job, as though it were a “real” piece of writing, rather than a nice cheerful signpost. That’s a mistake: to adapt what Gertrude Stein said about remarks, blurbs are not literature. But I can think of some poetry blurbs that are at least interesting footnotes to the life and work of those who wrote them, and the poets they were written for.
In this post from last year I noted how T.S. Eliot noted — 99 years ago — that “blurb” was a piece of American slang “pretty certain to be adopted in this country”:
Eliot’s definition of blurb, though, was a “publisher’s notice on the wrapper or jacket of a book” (Gelett Burgess, the American humourist who coined the word, defined it as “a noise like a publisher”). So the current meaning of “advance praise from a well-known name” seems to be a later development. The OED only traces usage as far as 1955, when the blurb is still talked about as something written by the publisher. The invaluable online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, however, comes to the rescue: in a letter from 1957, Jack Kerouac says: “I wrote a jacket-blurb for Gregory Corso’s new book”. The book was Gasoline, published by City Lights, with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac appears on the back cover, calling Ginsberg and Corso “the best two poets in America”. Were the Beat Generation also the first Blurb Generation?
Wikipedia suggests that the earliest instance of the inter-authorial blurb was when Walt Whitman took a phrase from a fan letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career”) and had it embossed in gold on the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856). Technically, of course, this wasn’t “blurb outreach”. But it seems reasonable to suspect that hyperbolic high-fiving between writers began in the US, and only later took hold in the UK. For decades, London publisher Faber and Faber followed the in-house example set by its first poetry editor, T.S. Eliot, whose downbeat blurb writing often put the “dust” into dustjacket. Compare, for example, his first sentence for Lynnette Roberts’ Poems (1944) —
Miss Roberts’s name has become familiar, in the last three years, to readers of poetry magazines and anthologies: this is the first selection of her poems to appear.
— with the opening of the Faber blurb for Paul Muldoon’s debut, New Weather (1973), years after Eliot had left the building:
A selection of Paul Muldoon’s poems was published in Poetry Introduction 2 in 1972, and was singled out for special praise by a number of reviewers.
The warmth of tone has increased over three decades, but only by a degree or two (none of the reviewers’ praise is actually quoted).
By the end of the century, however, even Faber were beginning to big up their big names: the back of Miroslav Holub’s Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) quotes the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (“one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere”) and speculates, hopefully, that Holub “is a potential winner of the Nobel prize”. But privately at least someone at Faber seems still to have felt that over-excited blurbs were a bit déclassé. In 1985, a selection of Wendy Cope’s poetic parodies from her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was circulated as a limited edition promotional pamphlet. The back cover blurb was a parody too:
In his later years, John Ashbery was, among other things, the casual king of the American poetry blurb. Someone should — and one day, I assume, will — collect all his paragraphs of wry generosity together. One of my favourites is the rambling anecdote he tells on the back of Clark Coolidge’s Selected Poems 1962—1985:
Many years ago I was taking a train from New York City to go upstate and grabbed the first book that presented itself as I was leaving the apartment, which happened to be Clark’s recently published Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric. I sat across the aisle from an Italian family who had apparently just arrived in New York and were also headed upstate. One of the men asked if he could borrow the book I was reading, so I let him look at Clark’s integrated opus. After glancing at it for a while, he turned to his companion and said, “Mai io non capisco veramente niente!” I wanted to tell him not to feel bad, because most of the Americans in the railway car would have had the same trouble. And yet, I thought, if one merely lies open to it, Coolidge’s arresting words will sink in and provide a seldom experienced refreshment.
What’s particularly charming about this, I think, is that Ashbery — who as a poet could be as strange and arresting as Coolidge — decides not to compete, and instead to be homely and plain, as though the readers of his blurb were the Italians on the train, not realising that they are about to encounter lines like
car ice in bring bong bone flat tints
Another magnificently baffling poet, J.H. Prynne, has also been known to break cover into normal human prose for the purposes of blurbing. Ten years ago, I edited the Complete Poems of R.F. Langley, who died in 2011. Prynne kindly agreed to provide some words for the back cover — and in the end sent so many that it changed the format of the book. In order to accommodate Prynne’s two paragraphs of fond tribute to his late friend, the publisher, Carcanet, decided to add “French flaps” to the paperback design — that is, an extra leaf of card which folds back in like a dustjacket. It gives the book a lovely touch of luxury, with Prynne’s words tucked like a private letter inside the front cover, inviting us into Langley’s world:
Syllables and small insects, like birds on the wing, shadows on the wall, alerted his understanding. To read well, here, is to open the mind and peruse thoughtfully, alert to inner sounds and imagined recall of scenes and the exacting delicate behaviour of words.
And since the point of a blurb is to lead you to read on, here is one of my favourite pages from Langley’s Complete Poems: the opening stanza of “Blues for Titania”, a cartoon-like fantasia about the adventures of a beetle and a wasp.
The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
His memory ripples emeralds. The wasp
takes it easy. She unpicks her fabric of
yellow and black, which slips from her fingers to
land in the past, loop-holed, lacy, tossed off on
the wing. The beetle is needled right through on
one string. He peels a strip as he packs a shelf.
He is thrilling the grass, and whatever it
means, it is radiantly green like himself. Thus
he will invest again and again in that
same flashy suit. The wasp has forgotten her
costume, but proves herself wise to the ways of
the sun, which are pat on her back. She drops a
curtsy, blows a kiss, and somersaults over
the beetle’s attack. Lost moments swill round in
the shallows, until they can stick there and stack.
You can read the whole poem here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n14/r.f.-langley/blues-for-titania.
To end on a self-blurb of a sort, I’m pleased to say that, to mark the tenth anniversary of Langley’s Complete Poems in 2025, I’m going to be writing about individual poems for
, where many first appeared. It will be an unmissable literary event.
Love the Wendy Cope blurb. I describe the publisher's back cover summary as the blurb, other writers' comments as endorsements. In that sense, I have blurbed many times as a poetry editor, but never endorsed. I was asked for an endorsement only once, but given a 48 hours deadline, so refused. I have been chasing my own blurbs/endorsements for my forthcoming book, and am aware how much work goes into those few sentences. My publisher tells me some endorsers don't read the whole book. Judging by the names that recur on several back covers, I can believe it.
I know one well-known poet who has an alter-ego whose only existence is in writing promotional blurbs for the poet’s own work. I’m not sure anyone has yet guessed, and the poet may not be on their own in this delightfully subversive habit.