[New-Poetry] Re: American Poets Project

[Bob Grumman]

Well, Bob, I'd venture to guess that in the present case, "make a buck" is close to being literally accurate.  

  "NOT close," I assume you mean, David.


  The LOA is a nonprofit outfit, 

  "Nonprofit" = turns its profits into salaries instead of into dividends to shareholders, which for some reason makes them "noncommercial"; costs lawyers' fees to set up so helps give law firms a buck

  You hit another button of mine, David: my one-man publishing outfit, the Runaway Spoon Press, is not non-profit because I can't afford to pay to get it identified as that; nor is it, really, non-profit--it's money-losing.  I can't get government grants because, fo one thing, I have no managing director at a salary of twenty thousand or more to show that my company is serious.

  and I very much doubt anyone is getting rich (even Rich!) keeping Muriel Rukeyser's work in print, much less truly neglected oddballs like Kenneth Fearing and Samuel Menashe, who in any other context you would likely praise for their outsider status. . . .

  Keeping known dead poets in print is not as important as getting living poets into significant print.  Super-especially inasmuch as ALL poets actually are in print--because one can go to most libraries and get copies . . .  Ooops, I take that back.  There are libraries one can visit to get copies of their work.

  The Internet is also making out-of-printedness less and less unimportant.  As for making a buck, I bet everyone involved in this project has made more from it than I have as a poet in my whole life.  More, in fact, than I and any ten of the poets my press has published have made as poets in all our lives taken together.

  There's also the distribution of recognition.  Muriel Rukeyser doesn't need the favorable attention this project will give her; there are valuable poets alive who could use such attention, though.  There are valuable critics, too, who could use the attention being editors of a volume in this series would give them much more than the known critics chosen as editors.   

  That said, sure, it's good to know that someone is seriously getting good volumes of good poets into print.  The real problem is lack of balance--all kinds of funds going into projects like this, very little going into what  I consider the R&D department of American poetry.

  Hey, I think I've done a blog entry.  Not that I'm saying anything I haven't said a zillion times at my blog but nobody visits my blog, so who cares.

  --Bob




  ========================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu


  Home Page:
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  Poetry Library:
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  On Jul 27, 2007, at 7:51 AM, Bob Grumman wrote:




      I'd like to offer another rave recommendation for the wonderful American Poets Project put out by Library of America.  If you haven't seen these books, they are small hardcovers of selected poems by various dead Americans, most introduced by fellow poets.   Rukeyser is edited by Rich; Edward Hirsch does Roethke; David Lehman does Ammons, Elizabeth Alexander does Brooks, etc.  


      The retail price for each is about $20, and I gather there is some degree of subsidy from the estate of James Merrill to produce the books.   


      No project that gives living mediocrities a chance to make a buck off dead poets can be praised too highly.

      --Bob G.


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