Earlier this month, I found myself by a lake in the rain in California. Maybe it was the jetlag, but I felt like a character in a Borges short story, who, after a year by a lake in the rain in England, finds himself in a world where everything is vaguely familiar but not quite the same. Looking to counteract the culture shock, I found myself heading for the poetry section of Small World Books, tucked away behind the incense sellers and panhandlers on Venice Boardwalk in Los Angeles.
Over the past decade, some of the bigger publishing houses have made it easier for an English readership to connect with major figures in American verse: Sharon Olds, August Kleinzahler and CK Williams can all be found in UK bookshops. Smaller presses, meanwhile, have been instrumental in giving less established poets a chance to be read. In 2002, Salt introduced the modernist pastoral of Andrew Grace's A Belonging Field – an important book that wouldn't necessarily have found a home with a more commercial publisher. But with creative writing courses in the US spawning many new books of poetry each year, it's hard to keep pace.
The introduction of print-on-demand technology means small presses on both sides of the Atlantic do not have to be tied to large and costly print runs. It also means large houses are able to keep titles that may only be of interest to a small audience in print. For some, this is wonderfully liberating: the means of production in literary culture are no longer owned by an exclusive group of editors. For others, it simply means a profusion of books with seemingly slick online marketing campaigns but sales in double figures (though historical precedent tells us sales figures don't bear much relation to an author's place in the literary canon).
But if some books aren't crossing the pond, the quantity and quality of poetry websites makes it easy to think the poetry world is shrinking. Poetry Daily does exactly what it says on the tin, showcasing poems from British and American poets alike, alongside rich background detail and links to writers' earlier work and print publications. The Poetry Foundation is an organisation whose aim is to "discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience" (made possible by the philanthropist Ruth Lilly, surely now the patron saint of poetry websites, who donated $100m towards the establishment of the foundation). On its website, British poets such as Roddy Lumsden and Lavina Greenlaw can be seen talking about poetry to our American cousins. There's even a category of "mid-Atlantic" poets.
But even so, no experience quite rivals standing in a US bookshop and staring up at the shelves. The real pleasure comes not just from spotting who's coming through, but from those rare finds; the kind of book you allow yourself to believe is the last copy on the shelves, the rest relegated to suburban lofts or library vaults. In LA, the pearl I dived for was a slightly damp-stained and foxed copy of Conversations with Richard Wilbur, which contains 30 years of the Pulitzer prize-winner's lucid, gentle defences of formal verse and his organic relationship with it.
I also found myself clinging on to the two most handsome books there: Nick Laird's To a Fault, with its cool US jacket, and Simon Armitage's Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid in the medieval livery the US publisher had chosen for it. There's no place like home.
