[New-Poetry] Re: Recommending Poetry Presses?

[David Baratier]

A few things to mention on this thread--
   
  At Iowa they have agents that come in and sign up the poets. 
  I have heard from an unreliable source that they have started this at Houston also; that they do this for fiction is accurately confirmed tho. 
   
  I can think of many whose "literary reputation" was established by contests. Anyone who wins the Whitman Award or the James Laughlin Award has 5,000 books given away to Academy of American poets members. Like Tony Hoagland. The National Poetry Series contest places at least one book a year on Penguin. That has helped out various friends I can think of, probably Terrance Hayes is the best recent example.
   
  The traditional route that Bob mentions of publishing poems in journals then sending to publishers still works. We have had a few titles sell over 1,000 copies which makes them best sellers in the poetry world. For us our Simon Perchik collected, the Will Alexander book, Tony Gloeggler (a first book), a few others, all were chosen from appearing in our journal first. 
   
  Outside of our first book contest, we primarily publish first books, with some collected or selected (but some of the selected poems have been first books also). 
   
  For an author, I find the disadvantage of a publisher who uses POD is a lack of interest in marketing the books. They do not have a garage full of them they wish to empty out. For Pavement Saw, it has been a good year; I can park my car this winter. I've had one or more reviews appear in the last year for six titles that were published from 1998 to 2003. I do not see POD publishers as having a vested interest in pushing their mid- or back-title lists.
   
  Larger publishers remainder their stock for .50 cents to $1 a copy to Half-Price books and other chains to inflict their titles on an uninterested public. For them, poetry only has value if it sells within nine months, otherwise it is immediately excised from print.
   
  As for publishing yourself, I can see it for chapbooks, the expense is not there. For books, the book of poems "exists," but only if bought, if they are never printed then the audience is theoretical also. In nearly all instances self publishing a physical full length collection seems an ego inflating measure of being able to quip "I have a book" rather than a serious attempt to connect with an entirely unknown readership that your work would be important to. 
   
  I cannot think of any self published books of poems composed of words (not PDF's, or e-books or so on), that have made substantial impact in the last 10 years. Some vispo collections (maybe those are smaller potential fields to begin with) but not poetry. Maybe I have missed that boat, are there any that come to mind for you'all?
   
    
   
   

Be well

David Baratier, Editor

Pavement Saw Press
321 Empire Street
Montpelier OH 43543
http://pavementsaw.org

Subscribe to our e-mail listserv at
http://pavementsaw.org/list/?p=subscribe&id=1
       
---------------------------------
Never miss a thing.   Make Yahoo your homepage.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20080118/af9ccc9c/attachment.html