I want to go there right now.
April is National Poetry Month, but frankly, you should already have known that. Certainly, you should be thinking of how you will be supporting poetry in your community.
I took advantage of my local Borders closing to purchase Robert Hass’ collection Time and Materials. I figured that I would bring it when he reads on May 21. Things are a little tight, so this may be my sole poetry purchase for the month (or maybe not – I’ve got some Barnes & Noble gift cards I haven’t tapped out yet, plus store credit at my favorite local used bookstore, Capitol Hill Books).
Naomi Shihab Nye is reading at the Folger in a week and I don’t like to miss those – especially during National Poetry Month. The next day, Language Poet Kit Robinson is reading at Bridge Street Books. To be quite honest, if it’s a choice between the two, I would probably prioritize Kit Robinson.
Maybe I’ll use my B&N gift card to pick up something by Nye (since Robinson is reading at Bridge Street Books, it seems downright shameful to show up with a book purchased at a chain bookstore). While it won’t help me support either of these poets, I could check the nifty poetry room at Capitol Hill Books and trade in my credit for something poetic.
The April edition of Poetry contained an essay in the form of two reviews about public poetry by the New York Times‘ David Orr. Similarly, Julia Baird questioned the proper role of a public poet in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Both authors primarily view the public poet as being, in effect, a public intellectual and activist. Baird criticizes W.S. Merwin’s stewardship of the U.S. Poet Laureateship on the grounds that the elderly and physically retiring Merwin (who does not often leave his Hawaiian estate) would not bring what Baird sees as a necessary activism. She similarly suggests that his predecessor, Kay Ryan, was too emotionally retiring to be effective.
Orr reviewed four collections that he believes correspond or attempt to correspond with his view of public poetry. The thread connecting these books is political engagement.
Baird also sees the type of engagement called for by our poet laureates as political. He singles out the Russian expatriate who become the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joseph Brodsky, as the ideal – and specifically references how Brodsky called himself a “poet activist.” The other laureates he mentions, he notes the particular socio-politico issue they tackled.
Absent from this list is Robert Pinsky, who did more than poet laureate I remember to evangelize poetry.
Neither of these two see a public poet as one who necessarily tries to expand the reach of poetry among the reading public, but rather, as I said earlier, as being simply a public intellectual who happened to earn their public perch through poetry.
While I love the idea of the public intellectual, surely we can have a view of the public poet as different from a Cornel West-like figure who happens to write poetry?
Basically, the issue is that poetry is a massive failure in e-book formats because ePub and other e-book software have no respect for line breaks. This is not such a big deal when you’re talking about prose, but it’s death for poetry.
As e-books become a larger and larger segment of the book market, the failure of poetry to be included will become more and more of a problem for poetry in America.
Right now, about the only solution out there consist of using PDFs, rather than than “traditional” (what is the best word to use here? I don’t know) e-books. Bookmobile’s Ampersand is an example of this.
The Allen Foundation did recently give Copper Canyon Press a $100,000 grant to search for a solution to this problem. While I have somewhat mixed feelings about Copper Canyon – they are the most prominent publisher of poetry in America, but they are also amazingly conservative in the poets they choose to publish – there is no doubt that, of all publishers of poetry, they have the commitment and profile to actually get this done.
The other day the mail man (and it is man) delivered package from my father. Actually, I’m not sure when it arrived. My father claims that he sent it something like a month ago, but I’m not sure if it’s true. We have two apartments and one of them is mainly used by my partner for her business. Things get lost there.
This particular package contained a lit mag called Harbor Stories, so named after the town Palm Harbor (a few miles north of where I grew up). A writing group called the Palm Harbor Society for the Novel put it out. The mag was perfect bound with a picture of the harbor as the cover (not a great looking picture; I suspect the resolution wasn’t high enough for print). My loving father was featured twice, once for his short story Tienes Fosforo and once for one of his stories about a lawyer in small town Arkansas (the fictional town of Eclectic). The first story won first prize in the group’s short story.
Being me, after reading my father’s pieces, I went to the poetry. Nothing special, to be quite honest. I would surmise that most of the poets do not read much contemporary poetry.
This is not intended as a plug for contemporary poetry. One doesn’t have to like it. One could prefer Byron or Marvell or Whitman. But it is important to read it, to be aware of contemporary currents and strategies and I’m not sure these particularly poets are.
Someone did a(n imperfect) analysis of the states and their consumption of e-books. They compiled Smashwords e-book sales data from Barnes & Noble from December 2010 through March 2011. This is, of course, a limited and limiting sample, using a single e-book publisher and only looking at sales on one e-book device (of course, that’s my device – the Nook), presumably because the Kindle doesn’t support Smashwords books.
They put together two charts. The first is basically useless. It measures what percentage of total e-book sales take place in each state. Unsurprisingly, the four states with the greatest percentage are… the four states with the largest population (Texas, California, New York, and Florida).
The second chart puts together a list of per capita e-book consumption, which could actually tell us something. The first four states are among the most rural and sparsely populated in America (Alaska, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming). States where visits to a bookstore could become problematic.
My own “state” of Washington, DC is actually dead last in the per capita sale of Smashwords e-books. Again, despite my own ownership of a Nook, I can understand this. DC is just chock full of bookstores – Politics & Prose, Busboys & Poets, at least two Barnes & Nobles (and we used to have two Borders), Second Story Books, Capitol Hill Books, Bridgestreet Books, Kramerbooks & Afterwords… In other words, there’s no lack of access to bookstores in this town.
Oddly (or not – the state does have some great independent bookstores), California, the home of Silicon Valley and much of nation’s tech industry, ranked next to last.
the coffee philosopher 