Literature and the Creative Economy by Brouillette Sarah;

Author:Brouillette, Sarah; [Brouillette, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 1. Cover of Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover!, first printing, Faber and Faber, 2007.

FIGURE 2. Cover of Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover!, second printing, Faber and Faber, 2007.

The effect is remarkable. We encounter a package for a book that revels in acknowledging how important it is to the book’s marketing. It simultaneously packages the product and draws attention to itself as a mediated, deliberately constructed package for what is, at least in part, yet another commodity now available to potential customers: brand Daljit Nagra. We are asked to imagine the poet’s work as a kind of quintessential second-generation South Asian commodity, whether it overshadows, displaces, or merely supplements the sorts of fungibles that are factory-produced in Taiwan and sold at the stereotypical corner shop.

First collections by contemporary poets, even those published by Faber and Faber, are rarely reprinted. Achieving the sales figures that warrant a second run is just one of the ways that Nagra’s emerging career has been exceptional. From the moment it was released, Look We Have Coming To Dover! was uniformly heralded as important work by a bold new writer. Critics agreed that he was rejuvenating English literature by mashing it up with voices drawn from his Punjabi family and from the suburban milieu to which they continue to belong. In light of the author’s instant acclaim, what the packaging of the collection’s second printing does is highlight his—and his co-producing publishers’ and marketers’—humorous appraisal of such instant celebrification. “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” shouts the exclamatory voice of a Punjabi speaker, as the book itself declares “Look I Have Coming to Market!” Already a minor star, the author is presented to us here as a playful, fantastic, colorful character ready to enliven and diversify English verse and also as a cultural creator knowingly jockeying for position within a market glutted by more voices than can secure room in our reading lives or occupy niche positions cleared for them on bookstore shelves.

The final touch is the nature of the endorsement blurb offered by the Guardian’s Sarah Crown, in which she challenges us all “not to come away from this volume feeling gladdened, afflicted, revitalised.” That her words are contained within the shape of a sheriff’s badge is surely a sly play on the name of the Guardian newspaper: the gatekeepers of elite culture in the UK have policed the scene and have offered Nagra their badge of approval. This is unsurprising, since before they appeared in the book, some of the pieces, including Nagra’s first widely circulated poem, which was to become the collection’s title, were printed in the same paper’s arts pages. With its title—“Look We Have Coming to Dover!”—and its first lines—“Stowed in the sea to invade / the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze”14—it demands that its audience “Look” at the “We” arriving at England’s shores—the shores docked by immigrants “Stowed in the sea to invade,” but also the borders crossed by the coming of a second-generation Punjabi writer to the region of English verse.

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