Jean-Paul L. Garnier interviews Michael Butterworth

In the following excerpt, Butterworth reflects on his experience publishing with large commercial publishers and small presses, and describes his primary orientation as a poet:

JPG – You’ve worked with both traditional publishers and many small presses and magazines around the world, what do you find to be the strengths of each, and which kinds of outlets do you prefer for your work?

MB – It’s important for a writer to get work published, so both have their strengths, traditional publishers, obviously, for their potential audience-reach, and the small press for writers who aren’t readily taken up by the mainstream publishers. I was lucky to have my first published piece of work taken by New Worlds, a newsstand magazine, and when I became a regular contributor, to have been anthologised widely by mainstream publishers like Hutchinson in London and Doubleday in the US. But there was a problem, in that, even though, in Ballard’s terms, I needed to be more prolific, New Worlds, with a firm sale of 6,000, only took so much of my work. The next rung down, for a magazine with a similar profile, was Ambit, with a sale below 2,000; the editor there didn’t like anything that was Beat inflected, which ruled me out… and so even smaller presses, with sales in the hundreds, became a second home for me, especially for my poetry. After the New Worlds period, for a couple of years when my children were very young, to be able to look after them at home I went freelance and was with much larger houses like Wyndham Publications and Times Warner. Since then, it has been a mixture.

JPG – Your latest book, Complete Poems 1965-2020, features many works that first appeared in small press magazines, it covers a lot of ground and ultimately won you the Laureate Award for Best SF poet, and led to an exhibition of your works in Joshua Tree’s Art Queen Gallery.S omeone known mostly as a publisher and author of fiction what has this meant to you? 

MB – I have always known that I am primarily a poet, who often expresses himself in prose, but I have always written poetry as poetry, and in fact one of my first non-classroom pieces of work at school was a poem, which started my writing. When I assembled Complete Poems, I was surprised to find that they have become something more than their parts. I had always viewed them as being fragmentary. Yet over the years they have been in the background of my life, quietly telling their own story. I was surprised to find the book won an award, and for it to be the focus of an exhibition. I suppose what it means to me is that it has confirmed what I knew, but also that it has unexpectedly provided another slant on my work, which I didn’t expect.

Click HERE for the review in its entirety. 

Click HERE to view the Amazon description