Michael Rosenthal came to visit last weekend – he is the senior member of the collective that runs Modern Times, one of the four large independent bookstores that remain in San Francisco. That’s a preciously small number, and it pushes me to think of my situation here just south of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

When I first moved here in 1995, there were three independent bookstores in the immediate region large enough to carry new volumes of poetry – 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 & Waldens 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; & 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’s the kind of store that a couple of years ago had a visible campaign (displays in the windows & in the store) for National Poetry Month in March. When I asked why not April, one of the employees said that they’d set up the displays before they’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.

Encore suffered the fate of any small chain forced to compete against megachains – 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’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’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 “find” there was an audiotape of Beowulf and other old English texts in the original, read by J.B. Besinger, Jr in the Caedmon Audio series. It’s enough to cure you of the Seamus Heaney version that reads like the sports section of your newspaper.

To the mix, however, have come a Barnes & Noble in Devon 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 a Borders, less than two miles from B&N. The new Borders is 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’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 Rod Smith’s email poetry lists from Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C.? But what if Rod didn’t exist or decided to do something else?

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 & Noble is hard enough but banks and other lenders have concluded that independent bookstores themselves are doomed investments, so they’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.

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 Ginko and rest of its stock to David Godine Press, that problem has not abated in the slightest. Godine is now responsible for the future availability of Jack Spicer, Charles Reznikoff, David Bromige, Eileen Myles & Tom Clark. It’s impossible at this point to know what that will mean a decade or two out.

Most small presses publish a few books and then disappear. Even if the press stays around for awhile, such as Geoff Young’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. The bottom line? 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.

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 “up” to a trade publisher who ensures that it both stays in print and reaches the broad distribution it deserves. Thus Bukowski to Ecco, Ginsberg to Harper (which in turn owns Ecco as it does the Caedmon Audio series and many other “imprints”). Many trade presses also often have their own house poets whose work they promote – there is a trade publishers’ 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 – Ann Lauterbach or Jorie Graham would be good examples – 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 – from Leonard Nimoy & Eugene McCarthy to Jimmy Carter & T-Boz. It is perhaps an irony that Allen Ginsberg eventually gets to have the same publisher as David St. John & James Tate, but a far greater one that all three are also part of the same publishing program that includes Jewel.

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 and 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 – as are both the Pulitzers and National Book Critics Circle Awards. Each link in this chain of concentration exacerbates the problem, narrowing the rich & vibrant gumbo of American poetry down toward a relatively thin gruel of Dead Poets’ 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’s excellent bk of (h)rs (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?