This was a comment, but is too long to dangle.

And my comment service is still acting up. So I moved it up from here, where Jordan and I have been picking each others' brains.

I don't understand that last comment [that the model of the last 70 years might not work the same as it did the last 70 years if it's online.] Are you saying things are no different for poetry publishers and individual poets than they were 70 yrs ago? That can't be what you're saying. And you're saying the Sunday book review sections are part of the solution, not part of the problem?

The industry of crapmaking that passes for trade publishing is a lot grosser and more dominant than it used to be, and the book retail business is too. It's all profit margins and volume discounts. It's not about art. You wanna make a place for poetry in that sphere? Knock yrselves out, peoples, & best of luck. I think the entire book industry, reviewing, media & chain retail outlets included, best supports commercially viable mass-market crappola. Its ultimate goal for the publisher is money. Its pinnacle for the authors is money, plus a very shallow idea of celebrity with a pseudointellectual gloss. None of the businesses involved are interested in literature as art (though individual editors and writers within that system may be--are. Many are.) The businesses are interested in literature as product. Oops. Most poets I know don't write product. This big-business media clusterfuck is what the last 70 or 150 years did for books. I don't think it's very realistic to continue to pretend poetry (or literary fiction) can make an impact on the same scale or reach readers in the same way as these other books.

I don't think there is anything tragically flawed about the small/micropress way as it currently stands, in theory. The focus on writing's cultural importance, the assertion that poetry is art, that's the right idea, right? (That's a timeless concept, if you ask me.) It's the execution that seems to get stymied. I think there are new, better ways, evolving ways to get books made & offer them to readers. The new ways may look a lot like the old ways, but they are faster, and less expensive, and more available to anybody who has an interest in making poetry, their own or others.

There's a great deal of difference, for instance, between the mimeographed stapled mag of the 70s that was sold by hand or on consignment through bookstores and a well designed digital short-run perfect-bound book that's distributed via a website. It's not a difference in spirit: both are made in the same (exuberant, hopeful, awesome) spirit. The difference is potential reach. Books (chapbooks, e-books, etc.) like these have a much better chance of finding readers than they did in the mimeograph & staple days. Even if you're into old-school production (which I am; my letterpress class is next month) you can get all new fangled with a website and PayPal. For about the same investment of time, and probably even less money, anybody who wants to publish a book of their own work can do that. Anybody who wants to publish other people's work in book form can do so. Ditto for magazine-style publishing (go read Tony Tost), which can now be done for next to nothing online by a single person, without having to be attached to a university (like the old-school lit journals) or selling advertising to come up with the funds to print it. And the landscape is different for readers too: any reader with internet access can find whatever she's looking for in a short sequence of clicks. These are improvements.

And since I'm typing & repeating myself ad nauseum (my own nausea), when's the last time you went into a bookstore, browsed the poetry section, found exactly what you wanted, and beyond that were introduced to something fantastic you didn't know you needed? I guess it still happens, but is rarer now than it used to be. Most stores are not staffed in such a way to make this happen. And they're not shopped in such a way to make it feasible, even if they did have a poetry enthusiast on the staff. This is the book industry's own fault. They hobbled themselves with rules about retail pricing (can't sell a new book for more than the suggested retail, unlike every other product in the universe) and volume discounts that give a ginormous advantage to chains. Blah blah blah. I get sick of hearing myself talk about it. But the upshot is: the bookstore doesn't function like it used to either. Shelf browsing's out.

Except it's not. The internet's got everything.

Turning back to the Sunday Book Review: who's that aimed at? Legions of bright but clueless readers? Might they all take to poetry like fish to water if some newspaper would just tell them which book to pick up first? I don't know. I guess they might. Maybe they like a major paper or glossy magazine or Oprah or an award committee or a brand name publishing house telling them what they should read, or at least what they should buy. I don't find those kind of recommendations (when they are even endorsements, and more often than not they're tepid or worse) helpful or exciting. And what if the old gray ladies did review small press poetry books? The distribution and retail networks don't work well for them, so the books aren't already sitting in the stores to catch the wave, and we're back to the mythical beast, the potential reader we've got to cajole and beg.

What's really useful to me is what other readers like me think. Check it: I can go online and find out. That's new, ain't it? The crusty old windbags with advertisers to placate can keep telling us all that most contemporary poetry isn't worth reading, and they can keep reviewing books by our deceased forebears, and they can keep pretending they're doing us all a favor with their high-minded guidance, if they want to. I don't particularly care what they think, especially in the "open with a provocative hook, summarize the plot, and add at least one positive/negative point in the second-to-last-paragraph to balance the review on a deadline and here's a coupla bucks and your byline" format.

Unfortunately, I'm not even sure what we're talking about anymore. The Sunday Book Review is probably not in my future, however.

OK, see you back here tomorrow, and I don't have to sell any ads or check with any editors. And you don't have to believe a word that comes outta my mouth because I'm no kind of authority whatsoever.