I’ve been a loyal reader of Bookforum for almost a decade, though my enthusiasm for it has waxed and waned and waxed again. In the late ’90s (during my favorite incarnation of it), Bookforum was full of smart and clever (but not too clever), frequently younger writers (among my favorites was Matthew DeBord; whatever happened to him? . . . I just Googled him, and he appears to write about wine these days—that’s too bad), who together formed, consciously or not, a kind of literary journalism wing of cultural studies—just the synthesis of popular(-ish) criticism and academic theory (no thank you, Lingua Franca) I sought to read and write as a recent PhD grad who didn’t apply for teaching jobs but instead moved to New York City to work as an independent scholar and critic, as well as immerse myself as a poet in the world of contemporary visual art (I don’t have many, or even any, heroes; but if I did, Baudelaire might be one of them).
Bookforum then went through what I considered a real dry spell, as it appeared to aim at being a book-review supplement to the New York Review of Books. A staid respectability set in, which I assume increased circulation figures, but led to a series of cover features on well-well modernists such as Ezra Pound, Italo Calvino, and of course the obligatory nod to Susan Sontag. But Bookforum evolved again, and while some have expressed concern about its recent editorial reshuffling and accompanying decision to allocate a percentage of its pages to current affairs (seemingly further replicating the New York Review of Books), I’m optimistic, and recent issues have been quite good (poets [and non-poets], take note of Rick Perlstein’s dexterous historiographical method in Nixonland, a part of which was excerpted in the April/May issue of Bookforum). Besides, the magazine is a rare mainstream-type venue that’s given good attention to non-mainstream poetry—thanks primarily to editor Albert Mobilio who did the same thing as a critic for the New York Times and Village Voice years ago.
Raised on deconstruction, I have trouble defining things. I’m bewildered by questions—personal or abstract—that aren’t specific. I’m downright hostile to categories of almost any sort. As a result, I’ve tended to come at poetry from other disciplines and media. All of this may be a long-winded way of saying that the current issue of Bookforum has an interesting section on “Fiction and Politics” that may in turn relate to the ongoing Harriet discussion concerning poetry and politics. In his essay “Fiction and Political Fact,” Morris Dickstein writes that “postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981) insist that the genre [i.e., political fiction] has no meaning, since ‘everything is “in the last analysis” political.’ To suggest that some works are political while others are not, Jameson says, is ‘a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life.” Dickstein then proceeds to outline a mostly standard history of the political novel (spoiler alert: he upholds E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel as a model), stopping to mention “how hard it is for novelists to relate ordinary lives to the larger movements of history” without reducing the depth and range of either or both. I think that much the same challenge faces poets.
Following Dickstein’s essay are brief yet insightful musings by a dozen writers on the relationship between fiction and politics. But perhaps the best part of the whole feature is a portfolio of socially engaged art, including a couple favorite examples of mine: one of a Philip Guston “hood” painting, and an image from the setting for Paul Chan’s recent staging of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. Artists are too cool.
Very glad you’re blogging here, Alan! A discussion of the available review journals out there for non-conventional poetry is a great topic, thanks for bringing it up. In my role at Small Press Distribution I look around for places where there’s a realistic chance to get an SPD book reviewed and naturally have a lot of affection for those that do so. There’s cases like the LA Times book review, the NY Review of Books, NY Times Book Review, etc., where once in a blue moon a small press book (usually fiction or nonfiction tho) breaks through, but those usually feel like flukes. The shortlist of well-circulated print review places truly aware of the breadth of poetry publishing would probably be a short list indeed: there’s the great trio of review journals that in some ways grew directly out of the small press world, i.e. Rain Taxi, Boston Review, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. On a larger scale, Publishers Weekly in my opinion still does a fairly respectable job periodically paying attention to small press poetry (especially given that they’re the trade journal for bookstores and mostly spend space on books that will sell thousands of copies for stores, and given they tried to abandon poetry reviews entirely a few years back), plus the Village Voice has had some good streaks here and there, plus Library Journal pays some attention to small press poetry every so often (tho almost none of the other library review publications seem to much care). After that, I really can only think of Bookforum and Bomb as places with wide circulation who still understand that “small press” and “experimental” poetry doesn’t mean it has less of a readership than any other kind of poetry, and who treat poetry in general as a form where culturally significant things could theoretically be said. I’d be interested if you know of any others that I’m not thinking of? Regardless, I think it’s vital to recognize that, behind the scenes at a Bookforum or any of these places, there’s almost assuredly a secret & heroic battle to keep poetry, and especially non-conventional poetry, in the publication at all, and we should all quietly thank whoever-it-is for their labors. Realistically, I think you have to view such people as struggling against a dominant ny-based literati class that tends to dismiss poetry out of hand for its relative lack of audience, perceived inaccessibility, and/or some other reasons which I’m really not entirely clear about but which I certainly sense.
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on June 12, 2008 at 2:21 pmyrs,
Brent
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Hi Alan,
Posted By: Brian on June 12, 2008 at 10:52 pmI too was recently browsing mid- to late-1990s issues of Bookforum, after seeing, in a 1994 TOC, that bell hooks had reviewed a book by Ice T. Glad to see you’re blogging here, happy for your optimism about the current BF, and looking forward to seeing you next week.
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Brent–
Posted By: Alan Gilbert on June 13, 2008 at 3:43 pmThanks for your comment. It’s hard to say how nefarious an agenda mainstream review publications have against poetry per se when they’re cutting back on book reviews in general, which in turn is part of the maximization of profits at all costs grinding away at every level of U.S. society. But you’re right that it’s individual effort more than almost anything that keeps poetry getting reviewed (which is why I wanted to give Albert Mobilio a shout-out). People like Joshua Clover and Stephen Burt have obviously worked hard and used their personal connections to get small press poetry reviewed in the New York Times. As someone who’s written for both large and small publications, I’d be curious to know from you how much of a difference in sales at SPD a review in the New York Times versus Rain Taxi really makes. When I look at your “poetry bestsellers” list, it seems that most of those books are bought by and within particular poetry communities, regardless of where or even if the book gets reviewed.
–Alan
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Also: as more and more poetry publishers turn Print On Demand, bookstores and distributors become reluctant to take them on, because returns aren’t possible. This is something that needs to be discussed and considered: those bestseller lists only take into account what (in this website’s case, for instance) SPD can stock.
Posted By: Don Share on June 13, 2008 at 5:08 pm(If I’m mistaken about any of this, please correct me!)
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Hey Alan,
Posted By: Brent on June 16, 2008 at 8:39 pmReviews do mean sales in most cases, but not always for the reasons you might think, i.e many imagine a review’s only purpose is to get a reader excited about a book so they buy it. But there’s lots of more invisible routes in bookselling. Libraries, for instance, especially public libraries, tend to view poetry a lot like bookstores, as kind of an afterthought since it doesn’t circulate as well as some other genres and types of material. Thus they tend to buy poetry based on reviews almost entirely, and from the distributor’s viewpoint this can seem really quite mechanical at times, and in some cases it might be rather mechanical. To keep the budget under control, a library might, for instance, purchase all the poems that won the top 10 poetry prizes (however they define that) in a given year, and every book reviewed by a major review journal (however they define that). Frequently, even if the poetry buyer has a lot of knowledge and passion, they’re not allowed to buy a book that hasn’t gotten at least one review in a widely-circulated review journal (there’s some interesting reasons for this I could bore you with, but some other time). Bookstores are similar that way: right or wrong, reviews give them confidence that there’s an audience out there, or at least gives them the impression that some kind of vetting has taken place, and perhaps more importantly saves them the time it would take to make buying decisions on some other factor.
How many copies a review helps sell depends, of course, very much on the book and the review and many other factors. If you want a chart of totally unscientific wild guesses, I’d say that for poetry Rain Taxi and Bookforum are about equivalent, worth maybe 30-80 copies, Publishers Weekly is worth maybe 60-200 copies, and something on the level of the NY Times is worth maybe 100-300. Again, this is largely pure guesswork based on some experience and a lot of talking to other poetry publishers.
But prizes are where the real triggers start to be hit, especially for library orders. I’ve heard even a nomination for a National Book Award results in maybe 2000 to 4000 copies sold.
yrs,
Brent
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