Going back to my original thoughts about these pamphlets as vanity projects for eager poets I wondered a bit about the background, availability and origins of some of the works. I was quite shocked to discover that these pamphlets are sold, according to Mulfran’s website and Amazon, for £4 each. I feel I am sounding common and uncultured to exclaim ‘£4, Are you taking the piss?’ but I can’t think how else to respond to that. These are A6 size pamphlets, so roughly passport sized. They are ’16 pages’ according to Mulfran, but I make that figure only if you include the inner cover, the acknowledgments page and a blank page at the back. Factor in that half the pages are illustrations, and you are only actually reading 6 pages of poems. The poems themselves would only make 2 sides of A4 paper. These cost £4? I thought perhaps they would have cost £1.50, or some such price, like Penguin’s ‘60s’ series. £4 seems a bit much.


If you are unsure about how expensive these pamphlets seem, bear in mind that this magazine is five


times the size of these pamphlets and cheaper. James Methven’s Purple Moose-winning pamphlet is £5, but that’s 40 pages. Smith/Doorstop sells pamphlets at around £3, again much larger in volume. Pamphlets are problematic already when there are so many magazines around struggling to get the attention of audiences, already publishing significant work by poets and with wider content than just poetry. Mulfran’s pamphlet’s either need to be much larger in size, significantly cheaper, or somehow more enticing. As they are, they don’t really work.


It should be mentioned that not all of the poems included in Mulfran’s pamphlets are published in these solely – some have already appeared in full collections. Saunders’ and Jivani’s poems are both extracts from larger Mulfran collections. That makes me wonder why, if I were to find this in a shop, would I pay £4 for this tiny pamphlet that resembles a hymn book when I could pay slightly more for a full collection? Pamphlets have a limited appeal in their plain paper covers next to the glossy spined and bound books they’re surrounded by. I never have much money, so when I buy stuff I have to think about whether or not it’s worth it. If I, as another local poet with already a vested interest in these things, couldn’t be persuaded to buy that, I’m not sure why anyone else would. If I had £4 to spend, I’d possibly go down to Oxfam and buy some classic, or I’d save up my pennies and wait for the whole collection. Sure, I might spend more money than that on a drink, but I know that the expensive cocktails I sometimes have are made with lychee liqueur, rose water and served in a cold stemmed martini glass. It’s an indulgent luxury, a superficial one, but it looks worth the money, and makes me feel briefly rich and beautiful. Really, everything in our consumer-driven mess of a world has to appear worth the money for at least long enough to make you part with your cash.


Poetry is the poor cousin of literary arts, yet pamphlets can be a way to make poetry cheaper and more available. For poetry pamphlets not to be vanity projects for established authors, or portfolios for emerging talents, they need to be used in a different way. The pamphlet should be a distinct piece of art in itself and a unique form for poetry, giving sequences room to breathe on their own, as Roy Morgan’s sequence did. They need to be striking, they need to be recognisable, but crucially, they also need to be worth paying for. It strikes me that Mulfran’s pamphlets could only be for the vanity of the poets, since they make no economic sense as publications by themselves, and only marketable to a specific, elite group of people, and contrary to what pamphlets ought to do, and in opposition to how other publishers are using pamphlets.


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