Having nothing to say (and getting paid for saying something)

London’s Southbank Centre recently published a piece promoting their Anish Kapoor exhibition, beginning with this:

"Anish Kapoor has nothing to say. Kapoor insists that he has nothing to say about his art...". 

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/anish-kapoor

At the foot of the article, we’re then given the opportunity to attend an event (Wed 8 Jul 2026, 8pm) headlined Anish Kapoor in conversation with Darian Leader. Just in case you were wondering, “the internationally celebrated artist shares rare insight into his remarkable work”.

Well I suppose that having previously been reassured that he doesn’t do anything of the sort, we are saved the trouble of paying money and going along. I hear an echo, presumably unintentional, of John Cage’s famous remark — “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”.

In the case of the Southbank Centre, the crass and desperate commercialisation of art seems relentless. And there’s another point to reflect on. I had a conversation a little while ago with a friend, regarding the chance to hear Raymond Antrobus and Ilya Kaminsky in person next month. (There are so-called ‘masterclasses’ too, if you’re interested: as if writing poetry were like carpentry). My friend was determined to be there and to defy the maxim ‘never meet your heroes’ but in the end he won’t be able to make it. I won’t be there either: I dislike hearing artists speaking in public about their work, in settings designed to attract groupies and promote sales. Such events are seldom likely to avoid accusations of saccharine sycophancy.

I’m old enough to remember very clearly, as a schoolboy, hearing Ted Hughes speaking at the time of the publication of Crow in the early 1970s. I suspect not much has changed, except maybe a poet’s display of bling. Artists discussing their work in private, or reflecting on it online, seems to me to be quite different, the purpose being less vulnerable to commercial distortion.

I read or heard recently, the observation that a successful poet can earn more from speaking about their work than from sales of their output, and perhaps that helps to explain these appearances. This means that they are being valued less for what they do, than for what they say about what they do. Being a poet may be a way of life, but that’s not the same as a way of earning a living. Should we expect society to be structured so that just writing poetry can be a way of earning a living?

Artists of all kinds tend to have to supplement their income from their work, through teaching, writing reviews or doing something unrelated. The capitalist context is unavoidable, at least for now, and artistic endeavour is subject to it. I guess it’s a question of the extent to which you succumb to it or resist it.

Thou shalt not omit commas

Here’s one of the oddest requirements for submitting to literary journals that I’ve ever come across:

‘Ensure that poems are properly and fully punctuated’.

So at a stroke this particular journal would presumably have excluded, for example, e e cummings, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Nick Laird and Ilya Kaminsky, to name just a few that come to mind.

I suppose it’s a good way of reducing the amount of submissions they have to read. But glancing through a print issue I happen to have, I note that one or two seem to have slipped past the editor’s attention.

Publications update (updated)

I have three four pieces forthcoming, as follows:

A text called ‘What I did on my holidays’ has been accepted to be published in this summer’s issue of Fahmidan Journal.

Two prose poems, ‘The sisters are neighbours but no longer on speaking terms’ and ‘Moth’ have been accepted for an anthology to be published by Writing Space Press.

'The library of empty books' is forthcoming in Coastlines Review, which looks like a really interesting endeavour exploring the concept of 'docupoetics'.

A deep delve into my hard drive confirms that the second of these ('The sisters are neighbours') was first drafted in April 2006, ie it is 20 years old, and has undergone little change since. It has been rejected at least 14 times. The last piece, 'Moth', first emerged from its chrysalis in August 2024 but in its relatively short life has been rejected six times.

'The library of empty books' was first drafted in about 2013, following an observation on a train journey when I saw a passenger apparently reading blank pages. It was previously submitted three times unsuccessfully.

I draw no conclusions from this peculiar history, but I note that these are all comparatively 'accessible' pieces, and I'm unlikely to waste my time and others' time submitting some of my 'less accessible', more experimental pieces since I've not found journals likely to take an interest in them. On we go.