Completing the questionnaire sent by the Poetry Foundation.

3. How can the delivery of poems from writers to readers be improved?

The relationship between poetry and books never really has been 1:1. Even if we set aside for a moment the role played by all of the many oral traditions that feed into and enrich poetry, we can find instances of poetry – Emily Dickinson is the poster child – with only accidental relationships to print. And the role of the self-published book, the commercial object with perhaps the least prestige of all, has been important to poetry in the U.S. from Whitman to the web editions of today. But try to get Ingram to distribute your little chapbook. The book industry is exactly that, and its relationship to poetry is counter-intuitive at best. The days when major publishers brought out poetry as a “loss leader” (or because some poet might turn into a profitable novelist) are almost entirely behind us. The number of trade publishers who even touch poetry are so few, and their collective aesthetics so very narrow, that they have largely relegated themselves to irrelevance. And book sellers are under profound pressure from the rise of alternate channels of retail distribution, including big box retailers and the web. Each week in America two new bookstores open, but five others shut down. With less than 2500 independent bookstores remaining, that trend is ominous. The same social forces that are creating pressures on the book industry are having an impact on society at large – they register as as rising demands upon time and the decline of literacy overall. What a curious moment in history to have more poets than ever before. And more good poets at that. One sometimes imagines that we will soon become a nation of poets, but simultaneously a nation without readers.

We need, I think, to acknowledge that there is no particular “natural” relationship between poetry & print – the best poets are not those most likely to be picked up and promoted by the trade presses, important writers are allowed to go out of print, chapbooks and print-on-demand volumes don’t fit the distribution model of trade books, etc. Some cities are well-served by an independent bookstore – such as Milwaukee by Woodland Pattern or Washington by Bridge Street Books – while larger metro areas like Phoenix go entirely without. It’s an irrational, accidental system and it impacts everyone, readers & writers alike.

I would love to see some of the money that is currently being misused by the National Endowment of the Arts to promote dead British playwrights redirected to ensure that each major metropolitan area has at least one decent retail outlet for poetry. What I envision is a program that would be open only to independent bookstores. The Endowment would offer annual grants to not more than one independent in each major metropolitan area that does not already have a bookstore with a substantial poetry section. By substantial I mean a minimum of 1,000 titles, not more than 25 percent of which are published by trade presses nor more than 25 percent by university presses, with at least five percent of the stock being chapbooks. The purpose of these grants would be to ensure that stores experience decent revenue per square foot for their poetry sections, and that each major metro develops at least one quality poetry outlet. This would also reward stores who have at least one buyer actively interested in the genre. Stores would have to apply for the grants and there would have to be a mechanism for ensuring that no current store in the area already met these criteria – I believe that neither Grolier’s in Boston nor Open Books in Seattle do, since both focus largely on trade & academic presses. I would start with the metro areas that don’t have such stores to begin with, and only once those had functioning outlets would I direct these funds back to areas like San Francisco and Milwaukee. There are an almost infinite number of variations on this one could imagine. Strengthening independent bookstores in a way that increases the distribution of poetry would have benefits at all points along the supply chain of verse.

A separate mechanism that might be created even by the Poetry Foundation itself would be a mechanism for the sale and distribution of chapbooks and print-on-demand volumes, perhaps coordinated by Booksense, but with a common front end on the web so that readers could turn to a single source for finding these difficult-to-obtain items.

Both programs would work to strengthen not just the distribution of poetry, but also independent bookstores. Any additional programs should likewise attempt to accomplish both things at once.

4. What hinders the discover, circulation, and celebration of poems in our culture?

The misteaching of reading, especially in the K12 curriculum, which causes so many students to think of language as instrumental and transparent, something to be skimmed rather than read. Whether you are a new formalist or a slam poet, a visual poet or a language writer, the absolute materiality of the signifier, the physicality of sound and of the graphic letter, is the one secret shared by all poets to which nonreaders of poetry seem literally clueless. It is “the news” that William Carlos Williams wrote about in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” for lack of which “men die miserably every day.” This is a larger problem than just one for poetry – it is one consequence among many of the larger issues confronting our schools in general. Dropping a few poets-in-the-schools into programs like a Marine strike force is hardly going to undercut the message students get continually, day after day, that language is to be mined for “information” that can be later regurgitated in test formats. It is more, even, than just the goal of developing critical thinkers, tho it is one important aspect of this. Until such time as our schools are given the resources they need in order to really address the whole child, not just managing to standardized tests, we haven’t a chance.

5. In what ways are poetry and the poetry community vital and thriving?

See my answer to number 1. There are more poets, and more good poets, now than ever. Tools like the web make possible modes of publication that didn’t exist even 25 years ago. Many of the “problems” of poetry really are the consequences of the abundance of writing and the needs of both artists and institutions to accommodate this new reality.

6. Other thoughts

It is worth noting how dramatically broader (and richer) the Poetry Foundation website has become since it began. It reflects the democratic vision that Poetry’s great editor, Henry Rago, had for the journal, and for the art, toward the end of his life. The journal itself is still playing catch-up in this regard, tho it too has shown encouraging signs of moving in this same direction. But the website itself is rapidly becoming one of the gems of the new world of poetry.

The Poetry Foundation has sent me a questionnaire. It is part of a joint project on the part of the foundation and the Aspen Institute, and is intended to “inform discussion and debate at a Poetry Foundation-Aspen Institute conference” sometime in the future. It is very straightforward with six open-ended questions. No multiple choice or yes/no queries in which all the alternatives are atrocious (cf. elections, national, US 2008). So I’m inclined to respond. Herewith are my answers:

1. What is your connection with poetry (read, write, teach, buy books, publish, etc.)?

I write poetry and write critically about poetry as well as write a weblog on contemporary poetry and poetics. Sometimes I teach it, but rather rarely – I’ve turned down the majority of offers I’ve had to teach writing at the college level, including two tenure-track positions. Through my various interactions with poetry, I get something in the range of 1,000 books of poetry each year these days. I have edited small magazines and anthologies, as well as larger trade journals not directly related to poetry.

2. What are the most pressing needs of poetry and the poetry community?

The relationship between poetry and its possible audience(s) has changed dramatically in recent years, yet the institutions that package and process poetry – and especially the expectations both of poet and reader alike – have not kept pace.

There are presently at least 10,000 publishing English-language poets. There may in fact be twice that number – it really depends on what percentage of publishing poets you think have active weblogs dedicated to the subject (if it’s ten percent, then the number is 10,000, but if you think the percentage is lower – as I believe – then the actual census of publishing poets would be greater). There are over 400 creative writing programs turning out new graduates each year. The annual AWP convention sells out at a maximum figure of 7,000 attendees. These consist almost exclusively of poets in academic programs – a tiny fraction of the number of poets – their counterparts in the other genres of creative writing, and employees of the programs and presses that have sufficient critical mass to afford to attend an event like the AWP. If even a quarter of attendees are active in writing poetry, this would suggest that the actual numbers are much higher than we might imagine.

In the 1950s, there were at most a few hundred poets publishing in English. In 40 years, I have never even read one estimate that put that figure above 100. While I think that those estimates were almost all low – Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery suggests that a larger population of publishing poets existed who were not critically taken seriously even between the first and second World Wars – I doubt that the real number could have been much above 500. One of the poetry trade groups – I forget if it was Poets House or the Poetry Society of America – received over 4,000 different books of poetry in one year recently. The thousand I get really are just the tip of an iceberg.

The population in the US has doubled since the late 1940s, but the number of book titles of all kinds published each year has increased from 8,000 per year in the immediate postwar years to just under 200,000 per year today. What that means in practice is that there was one title for every 18,750 Americans when I was a toddler, while there is one title for every 1,500 Americans today. Considering what percentage of the populace actually reads for pleasure, and of that the tiny fraction that reads poetry, we find ourselves in the century of niche markets. And poetry is not one niche market, but many.

The consequence is that there are more active poets now than ever, but that the total addressable market for any given book of poems is likely to be much smaller. The trade presses have acknowledged this by largely abandoning the publication of poetry altogether, because for most the economics are not there to support the infrastructure required for a major trade publication.

A handful of poets have had the opportunity to break through and obtain generally large audiences, but the Billy Collins and Ted Koosers of today may well experience the same problems sustaining their audiences after they have gone that their predecessors, Ogden Nash and Edgar Guest, have had. From this, I do not conclude that we should think of such popularity as “dissing” Collins or Kooser, but rather suggesting that we might want to pay more attention to the fate and heritage of the likes of Nash and Guest. For those who are not a Collins, Kooser, Angelou or Giovanni, the experience of being a poet can be quite a bit different. Not only are there not enough colleges to absorb all of the new poets coming out of MFA programs with teaching jobs, there are not even enough college reading series for each of them to get one on-campus reading per year. Poets who may have published an early book with a trade press may well find themselves no longer able to do so, and may experience this as downward aesthetic mobility, like a terrific actress who turns 40 and discovers suddenly that nobody is interested in her skills going forward. Poets who publish with university presses often experience a parallel fate, finding themselves “reduced” to small or independent presses, moving from book publication to chapbooks. Poets who publish one or two small press volumes, may find it harder, or impossible, to find publishers at all. I know several poets who now self-publish small run chapbooks of their work that they simply give away to friends. Others are doing what is functionally the same thing over the web, using PDF files instead of print. Some of these poets experience this new potlatch culture as “failure,” even tho they are producing excellent writing, even when their audiences are completely appreciative of their efforts.

To speak in this social context of “the decline of poetry” strikes me as completely missing the mark. It is possible that fewer people are reading certain types of poetry and/or certain types of poets, but there has never been so much poetry being written in the United States. I suspect, but can’t prove, that there has never been so much poetry being read in the U.S. as well, only that it is in a far more decentralized and fragmented fashion than before. We do not have a single national poetry audience, but rather hundreds if not thousands of smaller audiences, some of which overlap with one another, but many of which do not.

This I think changes many of the expectations that we have had about what a life in poetry might mean. I also think that it changes the roles and responsibilities that the institutions of poetry have.

I do think it is the responsibility of individual poets to become much more widely read than has been typically the case. My own sense is that they need to read more on more subjects, from science to linguistics to politics to literature to sociology to art history to you name it, but they also need to read much more poetry, and more kinds of poetry, than generally they have. I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each. This would lead to far fewer students coming out of these programs with only barebones knowledge of what is being done today, far fewer students having to reinvent the wheel, and a much richer sense of what is actually possible in contemporary poetry, from slams to the new formalism, from flarf to narrative, from the prose poem to visual poetics. In both cases, before and after, I would only permit applicants and students to use trade books for one-quarter of the requirement. And I would expect their teachers to be at least as well read.

More tomorrow