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Silliman's Blog
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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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Showing posts with label <b>economics of poetry</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, October 17, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Michael Rosenthal came to
visit last weekend &#8211; he is the senior member of the collective that runs Modern
Times, one of the four large independent bookstores that remain in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">. That&#8217;s a preciously small number, and it pushes me
to think of my situation here just south of </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">Valley Forge</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">Pennsylvania</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I first moved here in
1995, there were three independent bookstores in the immediate region large
enough to carry new volumes of poetry &#8211; Genes in the King of Prussia Mall, a
reasonably large and well-stocked bookstore that took up the space normally
allotted to a sporting goods emporium in that vast mall, which also had a
couple of Daltons &amp; <span class="SpellE">Waldens</span> tucked in among its
365 shops; Forum Books, your classic overcrowded jumble in a hole-in-the-wall
bookshop in otherwise very chi-chi downtown Wayne; &amp; the West Chester Book
Company in a mall on the outskirts of that small city. The West Chester Book
Company is a sprawling emporium literally connected to a decent Cajun lunch
place and a Rainbow Records outlet. It&#8217;s the kind of store that a couple of
years ago had a visible campaign (displays in the windows &amp; in the store)
for National Poetry Month <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in March</i>.
When I asked why not April, one of the employees said that they&#8217;d set up the
displays before they&#8217;d realized their error, but then just assumed none of the
customers would recognize the difference. Unfortunately, their poetry selection
shows that same attention to detail. The only other new bookstores in the
region in 1995 were a pair of Encore Book outlets, a chain that specialized in
remainders. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Encore suffered the fate of
any small chain forced to compete against megachains &#8211; the middle market just
gets squeezed out of existence. A couple of years ago, the couple that owned
Genes decided to retire and closed their shop. The store was apparently
modestly profitable, but they were unable to find a buyer and if there was any
attempt on the part of the workers to buy the store, it wasn&#8217;t visible to the
casual consumer. Then about a year ago, the owner of Forum Books passed away.
The store continues to operate much as before right now, but those of us who
shop there are holding our breath. It&#8217;s hard to imagine Forum lasting forever
amidst that row of jewelers and expensive restaurants. Its poetry section is a
table top with books piled together into stacks that are modestly alphabetical.
John Krick tells that he discovered language poetry in that bookstore years
ago. My last &#8220;find&#8221; there was an audiotape of Beowulf and other old English
texts in the original, read by J.B. <span class="SpellE">Besinger</span>, <span class="SpellE">Jr</span> in the Caedmon Audio series. It&#8217;s enough to cure you of
the Seamus Heaney version that reads like the sports section of your newspaper.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">To the mix, however, have
come a Barnes &amp; Noble in </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Devon</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> the size of a supermarket, which also happens to be
one of the few places in the region where one can find a cappuccino or latte.
The King of Prussia Mall has recently added <span class="GramE">a Borders</span>,
less than two miles from B&amp;N. The new Borders <span class="GramE">is</span>
roughly twice the size of the old Genes. Both of these chains carry the larger
independent presses in a maddeningly inconsistent fashion. Smaller poetry
presses like Chax or micropresses like Skanky Possum are simply not to be
found. What&#8217;s particularly frustrating about this is that one cannot depend on
the independents to do much better. Like so many poets outside of the Bay Area,
I too depend a great deal on </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rod Smith</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s
email poetry lists from Bridge Street Books in </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">Washington</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">D.C.</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">? But what if Rod didn&#8217;t exist or decided to do
something else?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The biggest problem
confronting independent bookstores today, according to Rosenthal, is
succession. The ones that have survived the advent of the megachains have done
so because they focus on customer service, know their customers, and can market
to a local audience with much greater precision than some centralized buying
office. However, most of the owners of independent bookstores tend to be
boomers who are now starting to think about retiring. The question is how to do
so when your business is a bookstore. Finding people who want to compete with
Borders and Barnes &amp; Noble is hard enough but banks and other lenders have
concluded that independent bookstores themselves are doomed investments, so
they&#8217;re seldom willing to lend the necessary capital. This puts the owner into
the position of having to finance any sale of the store in order to keep it
alive. Some people will be able to do this, but many others, like the owners of
Genes, will not. What this means is that the next round of contraction for
independent bookstores will be a serious one, driven less by profitability and
more by the problem of how a retiring owner can exit the business.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If you look at the history
of many of the independent publishers of the past, the way that they got sucked
into the publishing conglomerates was basically through the same problem.
Random House was once just two guys. As we saw earlier this year when Black
Sparrow sold the rights to three of its authors to Ecco Press, a division of
HarperCollins, its Wyndham Lewis books to <span class="SpellE">Ginko</span> and
rest of its stock to David Godine Press, that problem <span class="GramE">has</span>
not abated in the slightest. Godine is now responsible for the future
availability of Jack Spicer, Charles Reznikoff, David Bromige, Eileen Myles
&amp; Tom Clark. It&#8217;s impossible at this point to know what that will mean a
decade or two out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Most small presses publish a
few books and then disappear. Even if the press stays around for awhile, such
as Geoff Young&#8217;s The Figures, individual titles are seldom kept in print once
the initial run is exhausted. Those few independents that do go on and become
substantial operations, from City Lights to Coffee House, are themselves
already exceptions to several rules. <span class="GramE">The bottom line?</span>
What is available today might not be tomorrow. For readers of poetry, that is a
law that subtly governs decisions as to which books to buy. For writers, it
creates a landscape of risks and probabilities that must be negotiated. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The market theory behind all
this of course is that the supposedly best poets may start out with small
presses, but when their work demonstrates its ability to reach a consistent and
profitable audience, it eventually moves &#8220;up&#8221; to a trade publisher who ensures
that it both stays in print and reaches the broad distribution it deserves.
Thus <span class="SpellE">Bukowski</span> to Ecco, Ginsberg to Harper (which in
turn owns Ecco as it does the Caedmon Audio series and many other &#8220;imprints&#8221;).
Many trade presses also often have their own house poets whose work they
promote &#8211; there is a trade publishers&#8217; scene that is functionally indistinguishable
from any other small press scene in the country, save for the distribution that
these writers get for their early efforts. Some of these poets can be excellent
&#8211; Ann Lauterbach or Jorie Graham would be good examples &#8211; but many more are forgettable.
However, because they are published by presses that routinely run advertising
in daily media, house poets are far more apt to be reviewed by those
publications. Add to this the poets who get published for entirely non-literary
reasons &#8211; from Leonard <span class="SpellE">Nimoy</span> &amp; Eugene McCarthy to
Jimmy Carter &amp; T-<span class="SpellE">Boz</span>. It is perhaps an irony that
Allen Ginsberg eventually gets to have the same publisher as David St. John
&amp; James Tate, but a far greater one that all three are also part of the
same publishing program that includes Jewel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ultimately, the problem with
the trade publishers is not so much whom they publish as it is whom they do
not, the degree of control they exert over the stock one sees on the shelves of
both the chains <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> the independents,
the over-concentration of reviews devoted to their books in major media based
not on quality or prominence but on advertising dollars (though, frankly,
relatively few of those dollars are ever actually spent on poetry directly),
and the various awards that are built up around this very same chain of
advertising &#8211; as are both the Pulitzers and National Book Critics Circle
Awards. Each link in this chain of concentration exacerbates the problem,
narrowing the rich &amp; vibrant gumbo of American poetry down toward a relatively
thin gruel of Dead Poets&#8217; Greatest Hits. How is a reader in this environment
ever going to find out about a book by a great new poet such as Pattie
McCarthy&#8217;s excellent <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bk</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> of (h)<span class="SpellE">rs</span></i>
(Apogee Press, 2002), even though McCarthy herself grew up in the very same
triangle one might map around Forum Books, the West Chester Book Company and
the King of Prussia Mall?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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