Every now and then, a British broadsheet newspaper takes a look at what this poetry business is all about. This is, of course, to be welcomed. Poetry here tends to get fewer column inches than… I don’t know, let’s say sumo wrestling. Or beekeeping. Or glass blowing. Unfortunately, the resultant coverage tends to focus on poetry’s perceived shortcomings: it’s a marginal activity, no-one reads it any more, there’s nothing of interest happening and so on and so on. Well, that rather depends on where you’re looking. You can’t judge the garden by what’s in your window box. The British poetry scene, if you do look properly, is rich and diverse, sustained by people doing fantastic, eccentric, unfeasible things on little or no money, simply because they believe in poetry and its value. That’s certainly how it is in Manchester.
I’ve lived here for more than two decades now. I was writing and running a magazine before that, but it’s in Manchester that I really found my identity as a poet, publisher and sometime organiser on what you might call the more experimental side of things. I’ve benefited so much from the people I’ve met, the work I’ve encountered and the conversations I’ve had in rainy smoking areas with wonky plastic chairs and tiny rooms above pubs. My own direct involvement has ebbed and flowed over the years according to family commitments, work etc. At the height of my powers, I was co-running The Other Room reading series with my friends James Davies and Scott Thurston and running my magazine, Parameter, then my small press, zimzalla, as well as taking part in readings and other events whenever I could. I still run zimzalla and I still read when I get the opportunity. The Other Room ran for 10 years at a few different venues, finishing up at the Castle Hotel in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. We had some great nights, bringing together writers and performers locally, nationally and internationally. Some standout memories are the late and much missed Leanne Bridgewater performing poetry to an audience of root vegetables, sound artist Helmut Lemke drawing on a giant plastic tube over his head whilst listening to radio commentary on a European Championship football match between Poland and Russia and going upstairs after one reading to find the room occupied by the philosophy society. People still tell us how important the Other Room was for them in discovering different writers outside the mainstream and finding alternative ways of thinking and creating. This pleases me more than anything, that we added something, however small. A new tile in the mosaic, another weird plant on the coral reef. James’ press if p then q is of great importance to me personally as the place that published four of my books, including my very first. It’s a press I’m enormously proud to be one with an incredible list of writers.
Like the rest of Britain, Manchester is changing. The local, contingent and specific is being dissolved in favour of the corporate and homogenous: spectral, half-empty skyscrapers lining Victorian waterways, humming in the wind, vampire’s castles. As glass and steel push out red brick and slate, it becomes more difficult to find the free or low-cost spaces in which a poetry scene thrives, the places where people can try things out, put their voice into the evening air and see how it sounds. Thankfully, there are still a few bubbles of oxygen, such as the Saul Hay Gallery in Castlefield, Impiety Hour, in what is emerging as the new ragged northern fringe of Manchester city centre, AATMA, where Lauren McLean runs her literature and experimental music alchemical mash-up night Say Hello, Wave Goodbye and the Carlton Club in Whalley Range, home of Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, the golden thread of the experimental poetry scene, long running, important and always interesting. These venues, at least, understand that when Benjamin Franklin said that nothing could be said to be certain except death and taxes, he should also have mentioned that if you put on a poetry night, you will make money at the bar.
My press, zimzalla, is less locally anchored in terms of what I put out. Since starting the press in 2009. I’ve published writers from Australia, the USA, Canada, Japan and Portugal, as well as many from across the UK. The ethos of the press is what I call avant objects, alternative forms for literature such as board games, stacks of divination cards, handmade Oulipian text machines, bunting and badges. The process by which these objects assume their final form is varied. Sometimes, the writer will arrived with a fully realised idea and my task is simply to make it happen. Others, they’ll have a vague notion and my role will be more involved. My favourite version of the process is in between those two, a dialogue where the outcome is less certain and more evolutionary, co-creation through conversation. That conversation extends informally to the people I know in Manchester, niche discussions about baroque aspects of stationery, where to buy paper screws, where to go to get things done. With zimzalla, I tend to work locally where I can and when I find somewhere I trust, I stick with them. I get all my printing done at Phoenix Press near where I live in Sale, a magical theatre kind of place behind a blue door in an alleyway down the side of Boots the chemist. With zimzalla, quality and fidelity to artistic vision is of paramount importance and with Phoenix, I can go and talk to Tony about card stock, GSM and colours, knowing he will give me good advice and help me get the project done to the highest standards. I make text art posters as well as writing poetry and I get all those made there too. Some of those are on sale at another place I should mention, the Portico Library, nineteenth century reading rooms in the heart of Manchester with an exhibition space, curated by staff who are interested and open to all kinds of possibilities.
I must confess I started off writing this feeling quite gloomy. It can sometimes be gruelling just keeping going, operating in a cultural context that isn’t so much hostile as seemingly indifferent. You need a certain dogged, barnacle-like tenacity and obduracy, if a barnacle can be obdurate. However, thinking through all of this and adopting an appreciative rather than a deficit mindset has cheered me up. Paradoxically, for an artform that is essentially solitary in its production, poetry thrives as a social enterprise, an example of what Georges Bataille called the general economy, characterised by exchange and plurality rather than purchase and scarcity. Now I’m mentioning French cultural theorists it’s probably time to stop, before I start talking about post-structuralism or dialectical materialism. I don’t think anybody wants that, apart from maybe the philosophy society.
photos of Tom Jenks, Lydia Unsworth and David Gaffney reading at a recent above/ground press event in Manchester. supplied by the author. see a write-up on the event here.
Tom Jenks' latest publication is Chimneys (above/ground press, 2025), a collection of short and shorter prose. Other books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions, 2024) and Rhubarb (Beir Bua Press, 2022). He lives in Manchester, UK and edits zimzalla, a small press specialising in literary objects.
