The reason The New York Times has never had a comics section is that it already has its book review. Last Sunday’s list of the “100 Most Notable Books” of the year is a case in point. Of the 42 items listed under “Fiction and Poetry,” there were just two books of poetry: Rita Dove’s American Smooth & Donald Justice’s Collected Poems. At least the two books don’t automatically resolve into an identical aesthetic, although they do, frankly, come from a single value system, that of the trade press. Dove’s volume was published by Norton, Justice’s by Knopf.

 

I don’t have a quarrel particularly with either book. I’ve always had a fondness for some of Justice’s work, tho I doubt I will ever own the Collected, tho maybe someday if I come across a good little selected in paperback in a used book store at a decent price I might be persuaded. But really, darlings, this is all that American poetry was capable of doing in 2004 that warranted being characterized as “notable” by the august NY Times? Just how pathetic is that?

 

I’ve acquired well over 250 books of poetry this year &, save for a couple of volumes in the Library of America & its companion American Poets Project series, the number I’ve bothered to get from American trade presses is exactly zero. And that is the story of American poetry in ought-four, I dare say. Not that it’s so terribly different from ’03 or hardly any other year over the past quarter century.

 

The problem that the Times book review has is the inherent conflict in its double mission as a publication. Its first mission is not to review the books of America, but rather books by its advertisers who are – surprise! – the trade presses. The second is to do it in such a way that the review conveys comprehensiveness to its readership. This latter requires not only that certain volumes appear and get “proper attention,” but also – and this may be its most important institutional mission – that the rest of the world also disappears.

 

Not that the Times is any different in this than, say, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune or San Francisco Chronicle. This is never so clear as when something like the Collected Lowell shows up and everybody, I mean everybody, has to review it. But how many of these same publications have taken notice of any volume by Graham Foust or Rae Armantrout, ever?

 

It’s enough to make you grind your teeth.

 

Now part of this problem is historical, a history that is changing right now in front of our eyes. The distribution network for poetry in America is something quite different than the distribution network for trade presses through bookstores. With the advent of the net & concomitant phenomena like PayPal, publishers of poetry are increasingly “going direct,” as we would say in the computer biz.

 

Little history lesson. In 1994, when Mosaic, the first graphical browser, was just getting wide distribution, the number one selling PC in America belonged to Compaq. Compaq had great relationships with PC stores, masterfully directly by one Ross Cooley. But Cooley also chose that year to take his options & retire. Ten years later, Compaq doesn’t even exist, save as a residual sub-brand for some HP product, & a catalog dealer that was only a nuisance to its competitors a decade ago, selling systems via catalog, magazine ads & telesales, Dell, now dominates the marketplace, having used the net to “go direct” & cut out the increasingly useless middlemen.

 

Poetry in 2004 is just now starting to “go direct” as well. Every small press with a web site represents a different experiment in how this might happen, and it’s well worth noting. Coffee House Press, for example, several of whose books deserve to be on any list of “notable 2004” volumes of verse, has been around for over 30 years and makes an effort to compete within the trade book business as well as remain relevant to the world of poetry (unlike, say, Knopf or Norton, who are concerned only with the former). When you go to the Coffee House web site & click on “Publishing Information,” it dutifully takes you to a link list of distributors, on-line resellers, and bookstores that can be counted on to carry some Coffee House product.* Yet when you click on any individual title, such as Anselm Hollo’s new selected, Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence – certainly a contender for a legit “best book” award – you will find mechanisms on the page itself to buy the volume, both in hard- & paperback, right on the site itself. That is the same sort of blended approach, using both retail & the web, that folks like HP are now taking in the computer industry. But a lot of poetry presses already just use SPD as a token means of acknowledging that once bookstores were meaningful & sell their own products via their own websites.

 

One result in this changing distribution environment is that it used to be a disaster if a distributor like SPD declined to carry your press. Today, that simply represents the most expensive & least efficient means of getting books to readers. If you can let people know of your books & get them to your web site, selling direct can be a far faster & cheaper way of moving books into the hands of the right readers, the readers who will really care about, say, new possibilities for the post-avant in the American south. Or who will understand the implications behind a category like “new brutalism.”

 

If there is a catch in all this it’s that too few presses take the web seriously enough yet. A lot of older poetry presses – Burning Deck, for example – simply give you information for SPD or Spectacular Diseases on their website. Even a new press like Qua Books makes this same mistake. A good rule of thumb is that every click that is required between the book’s own web page & the process of completing an order for the volume will reduce sales by 50 percent.

 

But over time, newer presses & micropresses & technologies like print-on-demand (the secret behind the extensive catalog already at Salt Publishing) will make the process of “going direct” & capitalizing a small press a totally different proposition than the one that exists even now.

 

A few years ago, I’d see something like the Times Book Review list, and I’d come away seething at the unfairness & disproportionate power an institution like that used to have. Today I see it differently. That list is a relic of a process that is rapidly becoming irrelevant & even now is mostly a sloppy & costly way to connect books to readers of poetry. Poets don’t need it unless, as might be true for Dove, the true audience for their work is people who mostly don’t read poetry. But if the poetry of Donald Justice holds secrets that young poets today need to discover, his Collected would be far better served by a nice review in Rain Taxi.

 

 

* Other publishers might note that this is the best list of these I’ve seen in one place, ever.