Category: publishing

On March 5, Poets Against The War presented Congress with 13,000 poems protesting the drive to war on Iraq. “To say that this was an unprecedented publishing event is putting it mildly. It may have been the beginning of a sea change—not only in the way that poems are published and circulated, but in the way that they are thought of in terms of their cultural role. The presentation capped off the most visible organized poetic protest against war with Iraq.”

The Pope has published another book of poetry. So how is it? Dan Chiasson is impressed: “It’s hard to get a sense of the pope’s poetics, in the broadest sense, but I can say that he seems to favor end-stopped vers libre—surprising, given his investment elsewhere in order and hierarchy. There are biblical cadences, to be sure, but mostly the poems strike the secular-didactic tone of self-help literature. Very little hellfire; what we get instead is mostly ‘Chicken Soup for the Aging Pontiff’s Soul.’ Still, what I’ve read of ‘Roman Triptych’ is rather good, in the way most celebrity poetry is rather good.”

So Oprah’s back in the business of choosing books, a year after getting peeved at Jonathan Franzen’s snub of her book club. Only this time she’s recommending classics. “Choosing classics is a good way to avoid the heat from literary snobs like Franzen. Who would dare accuse Faulkner and Fitzgerald of pandering to the masses? Still, the whole thing gives me a chuckle. Is Oprah really improving things by turning to the classics? One of the main complaints Oprah suffered from the last book club, Franzen’s barbs notwithstanding, was that her book choices were too depressing, that they were nothing more than soap-opera sagas filled with family dysfunction and unrelenting sorrow. So are the classics a laugh riot?”

Writer John Marr says that Australian writers have become stuck in mediocrity in their “exaltation of the average” and need to develop sharper voices. Marr says what is needed it to “start focusing on what is happening in this country, looking Australia in the face, not flinching, coming to grips with the fact that we have been on a long loop through time that has brought us back almost – but not quite – to where we were.” Marr suggested that political and business elites had “inverted that term and directed it towards mostly poor and marginal artists. In response, literary novelists had retreated from the sharp edge of public debate.”

How do Britons read? And what? A survey asks the questions. “Those who study the bestseller lists with bewilderment each week can take comfort from the fact that the sales of new books don’t necessarily reflect what the nation is reading. Seventy-three per cent of people buy new books, but 41 per cent borrow library books, 42 per cent borrow books from friends and family, and 41 per cent buy from secondhand shops.”

The three nominees for the Griffin Prize’s Canadian short list and the four nominees in its international competition were announced yesterday in Toronto by the prize’s founder, Scott Griffin. The $40,000 prize – the richest in poetry – attracted 320 entries…

“New York University has just begun an ambitious project to digitize all the books printed in Afghanistan from 1871 to 1930, the earliest period of publishing there, and to catalog them and make them available electronically. The effort to preserve and widely disseminate the rare Afghan books is a counterpoint to decades of destruction of the country’s art, books and monuments. In the early 1990’s alone, tens of thousands of books in both the Kabul Public Library and the Kabul University Library were destroyed under Taliban rule.”

So the organizers of the new $10,000 Trillium Prize for a first book of poetry by an Ontario resident couldn’t find enough entrants to even mount a shortlist. Can we really be surprised? wonders Alex Good. How many good new debut poetry books by an Ontario resident are there in a given year. Who are the people running this award? A check of the group’s website reveals an intimidating corporate “mission statement”: “Our focus is to build capacity and competitiveness of Ontario’s cultural media industry, individually and across the sectors and to provide opportunities that encourage business alliances across the cultural industries.”

“There is a natural symbiosis between long-distance truckers and the audio book business. Just about anyone who has taken a road trip knows the boredom of the long empty stretches. For truckers who have the interstate system memorized, a story well told can make miles go by faster. Truck drivers have a critical underground that passes judgment mercilessly on recorded books. They swap tapes and book advice at freight terminals and at truck stops, where taped books are often available to rent. Reviews of audio books are a feature of trucking magazines and Web sites. Drivers tend to disdain abridged versions.”

Publishers rushing to promote war-relevant books, are abandoning other books as TV promotion concentrates on the war on Iraq. “Books, perhaps even more than movies or music, depend on the news media for publicity. And for now, TV news is all war, all the time. That means some authors are being unceremoniously bumped, while others who had trouble attracting publishers a few years ago suddenly are welcomed as experts.”