Bertolt Brecht on the new sentence?

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Nothing like the Sunday book review sections to put you in mind of the politics of literary distribution. The New York Times reviews the latest book by Louise Glück from FSG. The Washington Post runs Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s Choice” column, which features work from Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, from Houghton Mifflin. Not to be outdone, The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s out-takes, edited by Alice (The New Yorker) Quinn & published by FSG. The Los Angeles Times does likewise. Even The Guardian in the U.K. gives us a piece on Bishop, albeit from a new book of essays by Anne Stevenson, published by Bloodaxe. It leavens this at least with a second piece by Edna O’Brien on “Sam the Man” Beckett. This leaves it up to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Frank Wilson to focus on a volume from a small press, which he does by writing about new formalist George Witte’s The Apparitioners from Three Rail Press. Now I like Elizabeth Bishop & have said so here, but the degree to which the media ignore 98 percent of poetry while lavishing attention on the other two percent continues to be a burr in my side. At least the excerpts from George Witte’s poetry are so broadly awful that Wilson’s piece is fun to read: “If you read only one book of poems this year, make it this one.” Yeah. Right.