The 2009 Annual Showcase Catalog

Walking through the display, one notices a lot of excitement, a definite buzz. “I mean, you could spend weeks here!”  “I want the collected poems of Eavan Boland!” “Wow, they got a good turnout!”

Poets and Guests at the Poets House Annual Showcase

Poets House director Lee Briccetti says the event is very important to poets.  “This is the one place poets can have their books displayed face forward; that never happens in a bookstore.  Libraries come to look at the annual harvest.  There’s no other place you can see it.”  The Showcase is a unique moment, the only time that poetry books are organized by publisher without other books mixed in, as they would be at a bookfair. The catalog alone, organized by publishers and indexed by poet at the back, is a great resource (and as Lee points out, the names of the publishers alone can sound like a poem!). It goes online with annotations, on a website that Poets House says is accessed by one million people, and provides a permanent record of the year’s poetry publishing, a kind of time capsule.

Wave Books publisher Charlie Wright with Wave Books editor and poet Joshua Beckman

Staff at Poets House say that poets always ask them about the Showcase; it is something of a signature event.  Poets (among this year’s opening-day attendees are Joshua Beckman, Serge Gavronsky, Suzanne Grinnell, Hettie Jones, Chelsea Minnis, Stephen Sandy, and Stephanie Strickland) have come from as far away as Arizona, Colorado, Seattle, or Vermont to be at the opening.  Some people treat it as a reunion and meet here every year.  And it attracts poets from all aesthetic perspectives.  Lee Briccetti sums it up:  it’s “a book party for the whole field.”

This year, I’m one of the poets making the trek. I’ve seen the showcase before (it used to be on display for a month in the old Poets House; for the past few years at Jefferson Market, while a new Poets House is being built, it has lasted only a week), but this the first showcase opening reception I’ve attended. And I’m going to meet a new book of my own here, seeing it for the first time:  the Dusie Kollektiv chapbook Shadow-Bird, produced by the highly talented poet, publisher, and designer Anna Moschovakis of Ugly Duckling Presse just in time to submit for today’s event.  I’m very excited—maybe not just as excited as a first-time author, but still very excited, and I am reassured by Poets House staff that this is not unusual. According to Mike Romanos, organizer of this year’s showcase, “People take pictures in front of their books.  It’s a really big deal for them to see their books.  Even the bigger name poets, they really take pride in it!”

Stephanie Strickland

I ask Mike and Jane Preston—the person who helped Lee Briccetti get the showcase off the ground and ran it for the first five years—whether they think the popularity of the showcase reflects poets’ desire for readers, or whether there is something else at work. The answer is adamant:  “no, it’s not that they want readers. It’s that they want to be here with the others.  They always say, “I’m so glad my book is here at Poets House.”” Jane sums it up with a metaphor: “It’s about being part of the community, the fabric. It’s wonderful for us to create that fabric—to be the loom.”

Even on my expectant way over to the D shelf, I can’t help being woven into this vast loom of poetry, and I start indulging in some tentative browsing.  I expect I’ll recognize many names and I do; on the very first shelf I encounter a book by a former student, nestled next to Best Gay Poetry 2008 which is perched next to several chapbooks and a CD.  Familiar names don’t have as much impact in the spiralling chaos of juxtapositions that is one of the hallmarks of this alphabetically-arranged exhibit.  For some reason, the fact that it is publishers being alphabetized rather than poets seems to emphasize the clashes even more.  So Harry Abrams, publisher of the Academy of American Poets’ mega-seller anthology A Poem in Your Pocket, shares a shelf with Richard Herd, publisher of three broadsides of his own work, and Harvard University Press, publisher of a new edition of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy, and Hollowdeck Press, publisher of one volume by Lisa Berman.

After a dozen shelves or so, a kind of ennui sets in.  How could ANYONE ever begin to browse all these books, let alone read them?  And yet, when I look up, I suddenly notice that, everywhere, people are doing just that.  Everywhere people are sitting, standing, squatting, and crouching, completely engrossed in books of poetry:  it’s a browser’s paradise.  And many of the browsers are poets.  Soon enough, I’m approached by someone I’d seen at a reading the night before, who wants to show me her new book from Maverick Duck Press.  The title is Maarchen, which the poet, Susan Maurer, reminds me means “Fairy Tale” in German.  I look at it and admire the beautiful first line of one of the poems.  Before I know it, I am meeting more and more poets.  Patricia Carragon, who runs the monthly Brownstone Poetry Series in Brooklyn Heights and publishes the readers each year in a volume called the Brownstone Poetry Anthology.  Kurt Boone, who works as a bike messenger and tells me he has just been profiled in the New York Times in honor of his new book, On the Subway (Tasora Press).  Holly Rose Diane Shaw, who belongs to a poetry group that meets weekly right here in the Jefferson Library.  “And the heart-shaped book is mine also,” she tells me. “Those are love poems.  This one is called Beyond Blossoms.”  I ask her the name of the publisher.  “It’s self-published.  It doesn’t have a name,” she replies.  I tell her that sometimes people make up a name for their own presses:  “like, maybe, Holly Rose Press.”  “I hadn’t thought of that!  Ok, let’s do that.  We’ve invented it right here!”

Book Collector and Poets House Volunteer

At that point, I decide that this wonderful moment in the loom of poetry really needs to be recorded for posterity.  I go over to the Dusie Kollektiv display and pick up Shadow-Bird for the first time. Ugly Duckling Presse has done an astounding job. I am pleased as punch, and I take a copy and pose for a group photo with my new poet-friends, each of us with book clutched proudly, tightly, exuberantly up for the camera.  (Note: since the official photographer had gone, a friend of  self-confessed technophobe Holly Rose took this precious photo. He swore repeatedly that he would email it to me as soon as he got home, but no dice.  There are currently about eight people trying to track that photo down!  Meanwhile, I post here an official Poets House photo of me proudly clutching Shadow-Bird, with an equally and understandably proud Lee Briccetti.)

P.S.  A Note on Numbers:

The number of books on display at the 2009 Showcase, 2400 books, is double the number it was even ten years ago; one figure I’m given is that poetry publishing has increased 400% since the 1990’s. Eliot Weinberger did some research and estimated there were about 200 books of poetry published a year during the 1940s.  Poets House staff is unsure how much of the increase is due to the much greater number of books being published, and how much is due to the fact that the Showcase is also displaying a much higher percentage of the books published.  Jane Preston says that at the beginning she’d have to sell publishers on the idea, calling them and explaining the whole story.  Now, she and Mike agree that “pretty much everybody says yes.”

Standing among this richness of poetry publication, it’s practically surreal to remember the highly-publicized recent NEA survey showing a precipitous decline in poetry reading.   The staff of Poets House say they don’t find these figures reflected in their experience of the poetry world. Lee explains, “that’s not what we’ve experienced.  Our numbers are going up and up. I think there’s more poetry reading than ever before, but they’re not reading the same things. Poetry operates in a different way than other kinds of books.  It’s informal—there’s more hand to hand distribution.”

And given the remarkable mix of micro and macro publishing documented and preserved at the Poets House Showcase, it does seem clear that poetry today has a vibrant life of its own that may not be entirely detectable by standard measurements but that is, by any measure,  irrepressible, authentic, and utterly necessary.

I’m not saying that poets should compromise their integrity, such as it is. But if they feel comfortable modifying their work in such a way that they make more money in the process, why not? Painters and sculptors and damn near everybody else gets “commissioned” to do work for corporations and other wealthy entities. Maybe a number of poets get commissioned as well, but my guess is very few. So, if a poet can wangle an extra buck out of The New Yorker, why shouldn’t he?
To calculate a poem’s worth by the line is silly—are there painters who sell their paintings by the square inch?—but if that’s what the magazine’s policy is, I don’t blame a poet for trying to increase his yield by changing the shape of his lines. That might also help the magazine to fit the poem in between the real writing and the ads.
I don’t really believe it’s possible to prostitute one’s art. The fact that someone would pay X dollars per line for anything means that it has value. Every poem should have its price. For many of the poems we write, the price is loneliness, illness, existential crisis, doubt, toil, anger, love and loss. I’d much rather have the price be a dollar amount, at least then I’d know when the amount is finished being paid.
At the same time, I would love to suffer nobly for my art. I would rather have my poetry never sell, to have it sit in the bargain bin at a dusty bookstore and slowly be nibbled away by mites.
I don’t mind wrestling with the contradiction. Sometimes I want to be pure and noble. And sometimes I’d just like to have a little cash.

[I plagiarized most of the above from one of my own emails—but who hasn’t done the same?]

Although celebrity poets seem to be double-dipping in their attempts to elevate themselves from pop-icons to literary luminaries, and although their poetry at times seems vapid and artless (read Leonard Nimoy’s aka Dr. Spock’s love poem below), and although we know their books are part of a package deal contract between their lawyers, media agents, and publishers, I appreciate the visibility and import they bring to audiences of readers who might not normally buy volumes of poetry. They just might even be fighting back the trend of dwindling readerships, helping in the cause of increasing literacy among the youth.

Do their poems advance the art of poetry? Probably not, but they also do not poison the meal. Although it might be unfair to grant them admission into the country club dining room, they have as much a right to creatively express themselves as the next guy and more to share their musings between the hardcovers on love, life, and lost dogs. (Check out Jimmy Stewart reading a poem about his dog Beau on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1981.)
Some celebrities I knew first as poets, long before the bright lights, big screens. At the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, I organized an event titled “Word Up!: 3 Cities, 15 Poets, 1 Goal” which featured poets from NYC, DC, and Philly, including Ursula Rucker, Sabela Grimes, Ryva, Carl Hancock Rux, Rich Medina, Ayana Traylor, Danielle Legros-George, Bethany White, Willie Perdomo, Tish Benson, Joel Diaz Porter, Brian Gilmore, Kenneth Carroll, and a young performance poet Jill Scott. Yes, before her first recording “Who Is Jill Scott?” Jill was a Philly poet. In fact, Jill’s song “Exclusively,” I first heard as a poem before its appearance on her debut album. Venues like the Lyricist Lounge and The Time Café’s Rap Meets Poetry often blended genres and served as springboards for unsigned hip-hop artists, emcees, and poets such as Mos Def, Mums da Schemer, Jessica Care Moore, and others to display their skills in an open-mic setting.

What is a good trend in my estimation is when mega-stars put their weight behind poetry, as in the Academy of American Poets’ annual benefit that has notable cultural figures as Dan Rather, Minnie Driver, and Liam Neeson reading poems in celebration of contemporary poetry; or when esteemed aficionados of poetry such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or John Lithgow edit anthologies of their favorite poems.
What would really be hip, is if celebrity poets donated their time and talents to more literary organizations and went on tour reading their poems as a group.
I naturally give such artists their due respect and am ambivalent about guarding the gates of taste and good judgment. In that spirit, I encourage you to go out and buy these books (as if they need my advocacy) of recent and not-so-recent pop bards to fill up your bookshelf:

Ten Last Night by Viggo Mortensen
Foolish/Unfoolish: Reflections on Love by Ashanti
Who Will Cry for the Little Boy? by Antwone Fisher
Tears for Water: A Songbook of Poems and Lyrics by Alicia Keys
The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours: The Poetry of Jilt Scott by Jill Scott
Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems by Jimmy Carter
Thoughts by Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins of TLC
A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life by Leonard Nimoy
A Night Without Armour by Jewel
The Lords and the New Creatures by Jim Morrison
The Rose That Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur
Touch Me by Suzanne Sommers
Yesterday I Saw the Sun: Poems by Ally Sheedy
Blinking with Fists: Poems by Billy Corgan
The Poets’ Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book
for the Whole Family by John Lithgow
The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Meanwhile, here are two poems by Jimmy Carter and Leonard Nimoy.
Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia
The miles of rubber trees bend from the sea.
Each of the million acres cost a dime
nearly two Liberian lives ago.
Sweat, too,
has poured like sap from trees, almost free,
from men coerced to work by poverty
and leaders who had sold the people’s fields.
The plantation kiln’s pink bricks
made the homes of overseeing whites
a corporation’s pride
Walls of the same polite bricks divide
the worker’s tiny stalls
like cells in honeycombs;
no windows breach the walls,
no pipes or wires bring drink or light
to natives who can never claim this place as theirs
by digging in the ground.
No churches can be built,
no privy holes or even graves
dug in the rolling hills
for those milking Firestone’s trees, who die
from mamba and mosquito bites.
I asked the owners why.
The cost of land, they said, was high.
Jimmy Carter, Always a Reckoning, 1995
**********

I love you
not for what
I want you to be
But for what you are
I loved you then
For what you were
I love you now
for what you have become
I miss you
And not only you
I miss what I am
When you are here…
You bring out the best in me
–Leonard Nimoy

1. WALLACE STEVENS PERSONAL ART COLLECTION (Sold Only As a Group)
Bookseller: Elliot’s Books (Northford, CT, U.S.A.)
Price: $ 1,725,000
2. THE COLOSSUS. POEMS. PLATH, SYLVIA. London Heinemann (1960),
Bookseller: James S. Jaffe Rare Books, A.B.A.A. (New York, NY)
Price: $ 65,000
Inscribed by Plath to the poet Theodore Roethke on the front free endpaper: “For Theodore Roethke with much love and immense admiration, Sylvia Plath, April 13, 1961″.

3. LEAVES OF GRASS. POEMS. WHITMAN, WALT. Camden, 1889.
Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $15,500
Notes: This copy with gift inscription by Whitman’s devoted nurse on the frontispiece tissue guard: “From Warren Fritzinger. Walt Whitman’s nurse. Friday, June 19—1892. Phil Pa,” and an additional pencil inscription stating, “Walt gave it to him.”

4. SOUTH SIDE: CHICAGO (A MONTAGE). SIX POEMS BY LANGSTON HUGHES, DATED 1945.
Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $9,000
Notes: Rare typed manuscript containing early drafts of six poems by Hughes, 15 loose carbons with a title page entitled “South Side: Chicago (A Montage) that is warmly inscribed to Caribbean scholar Dr. Angel Rocabruna, “For A. Suarez Rocabruna, Sincerely, Langston Hughes, July, 1945,” featuring the poems “Summer Evening, Calumet Avenue,” “Migrant,” “Graduation,” “Third Degree,” Jitney” and “Interne at Provident.” $9000.
5. LE POETE ASSASSINÉ. PARIS, 1916. APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME. First edition, with original pictorial paper wrappers.
Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $8,500
Notes: Inscribed by Apollinaire: “A monsieur Pierre Piobb, Hommage distingué de son admirateur, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sous-lieutenant en traitement à l’hôpital du gouvernement et alien, 41 quai d’orsay, Paris.”
6. LAS UVAS Y EL VIENTO. NERUDA, PABLO. SANTIAGO, CHILE, 1954. First edition, boldly signed on the title page by Pablo Neruda in his characteristic green ink.
Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $4,000

7. POEM “TO MR. AND MRS. ******* ON THE DEATH OF THEIR INFANT SON.” WHEATLEY, Phillis. Boston, September 1784. First appearance of this important poem by the first published African-American poet, printed just three months before her death. Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $3,000
8. TYPED POEM SIGNED BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, 1900.
Bookseller: Bauman Rare Books (Philadelphia, PA)
Price: $2,600
9. POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. WHEATLEY, PHILLIS. LONDON: A. BELL, BOOKSELLER, ALDGATE; AND SOLD BY MESSRS. COX AND BERRY, KING-STREET, BOSTON, 1773.
Bookseller: Printers Row Fine and Rare Books (Chicago, IL)
Price: $35,000
10. FIRST EDITION OF THIS SELECTION OF AKHMATOVA’S POEMS, THE FIRST POST-STALINIST EDITION OF HER VERSE. AKHMATOVA, ANNA.
Bookseller: James S. Jaffe Rare Books, A.B.A.A. (New York, NY)
Price: $35,000
Notes: Inscribed by Akhmatova to Boris Pasternak on the title-page: “Boris Pasternak – Anna Akhmatova, 3 May 1959, Moscow”, and with a correction to one word (”divnoi” for “shedroi” in ink on p. 65) in Akhmatova’s hand. Pasternak was in love with Akhmatova, on more than one occasion asking her to marry him – even while he was married to another woman. Pasternak would worry over Akhmatova in the most affecting manner, and came to her aid more than once during her most difficult and persecuted years.
11. A BOY’S WILL. FROST, ROBERT. LONDON DAVID NUTT 1913, 1913.
Bookseller: James S. Jaffe Rare Books, A.B.A.A. (New York, NY)
Price: $30,000
Notes: Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to “Eleanor Farjeon from Robert Frost.”
12. THE BRIDGE. A POEM. WITH THREE PHOTOGRAPHS BY WALKER EVANS.
CRANE, HART. PARIS : THE BLACK SUN PRESS. 1930. FIRST EDITION
Bookseller: James Fenning, ABA (County Dublin, Ireland)
Price: $30,295
13. COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA NY, Knopf, `, 1972.
Bookseller: NUDEL BOOKS (New York, NY)
Price: S27,500
Notes: 3rd Edition, but INSCRIBED by Allen Ginsberg to Peter Orolovsky: “For Peter Orlovsky from Allen Ginsberg.years later.after O’hara’s gone.Feb 4, 1977..437 E. 12th St.undeneath in a different hand “N.B.Borrowed indefinitely for research puroposes by Ted Berrigan March 1979.NYC”.a book which links the three key figures in the post war New York Po scene.O’hara-Ginsberg-Berrigan.
13. COLLECTION OF 27 INCUNABULA IN ONE VOLUME (1462 ONWARDS). PETRARCA, FRANCESCO
Bookseller: Antiquarischer Lexikonhandel (Hamburg, HH, Germany)
Price: $400,784
Notes: 1st Edition. Folio. Collection of 27 incunabula in one volume. This volume probably is the first copy of Petrarca’s “Opera” in the 15th century, containing most, if not all, of Petrarca’s works in the earliest print known. Petrarca (1304-1374) is considered one of the founders of humanism and one of the greatest Italian poets.

14. HOOPS: POEMS. JACKSON, MAJOR. NEW YORK W. W. NORTON (2006)
Bookseller: Between the Covers-Rare Books, Inc. ABAA (Merchantville, NJ)
Price: S125
Notes: Uncorrected Proof. Wrappers. Very near fine. An uncommon issue of this collection of poetry. First edition.

A. E. Stallings has fomented vibrant debates in her recent remark, where she describes New Formalism as a poetic school that has no prerequisites for membership, other than a desire to write in rhyme and metre—and yet, she confesses that no one wants to join such a school for being typecast as a supporter of only one “ism.” She has aptly pointed out that the word “new” in this moniker actually enciphers the word “retro,” and the name thereby signals an upgrade in, an otherwise outdated, ideology (one that now seeks a hipper cachet). I might suggest that any renewed interest in formalism has, no doubt, arisen in response to the abuses of freer verse (whose endgame now resembles a style of prose, with a ragged margin)—and consequently, such formalists might argue that, in an effort to demonstrate the rudiments of both craft and skill, we must return to the proven merits of both rhyme and metre, doing so in order to lend some official standard of judgement to our now debased poetics.
New Formalism, in my opinion, has always resembled a kind of conservative party that complains about some other conservative party for not being conservative enough—and Stallings is probably correct when she points out that, while a poet like David Campion might write according to principles of formal rigour, such a writer does not necessarily fall under the rubric of such a formal school. New Formalism, moreover, does not seem quick to appreciate any kind of avant-garde experimentation with formal rigour—and hence the school has largely ignored, for example, the advances of Oulipo, a coterie that writes poetry according to a whole array imaginative constraints, some of which respond to obsolete, literary traditions (like the sestina or the rondeau). New Formalism seems far less concerned with making older forms “neoteric” through acts of innovation; instead, New Formalism seems more concerned with making older forms “dogmatic” through acts of renovation.
New Formalism (at its worst) thus begins to take on the character of a “conservation society,” protecting an endangered form of poetry at the brink of its extinction, thereby preserving these “styles” for posterity, like a taxidermist stuffing dead owls. Charles Bernstein has, of course, lampooned this attitude in his chapbook The Nude Formalism, which presents a suite of formal poetry, written nonsensically, like doggerel misremembered in the act of its recitation. Bernstein sets out to “denude” these poems of any content in order to showcase the aesthetic potential of such forms, once they have freed themselves from any semantic necessity. Bernstein implies that, unlike the Russian Formalists, who might have argued that poetry constitutes a revolutionary investigation of linguistic structures in society, our American Formalists seem to have abandoned such a social agenda, refusing to find novel forms of poetic rebuke, appropriate to the linguistic conditions of our modern milieu.

Three hours later, he remembers, the Spanish Civil War started. This all of course is apocryphal, laid down as fact by one of the pioneers of Gonzo journalism. “GONZO is the essence of irony. You dare not take it seriously. You have to laugh.” Not even friend and collaborator Hunter S. Thompson, he says, really knew what Gonzo is. Steadman writes, “I am the only one who does”:

GONZO makes you feel GOod rather than BAd, which is BANZO. Pursue BANZO if you must but don’t blame me or even credit me or you will make me sick. GOnzo is GOod. BAnzo is BAd. It is a simple equation.

Steadman is best known for his illustrations of Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and his ties are decidedly literary. Steadman has worked with poets Ted Hughes and Brian Patten, and illustrated editions of Alice In Wonderland, Treasure Island, Animal Farm, and, most recently, Fahrenheit 451. And he is…wait for it…a poet himself.
“Hunter always hated me to write anything and warned me that it would bring shame on my family,” Steadman says about Thompson. “Don’t write, Ralph! It’s a filthy habit…”
Nevertheless, Steadman has written Molto Gonzo story books and chapbooks and art books, including two prize-winning titles on wine (plus one on whisky), not to mention reams of editorial illustration. You can find an amazing array of information about Steadman on his website, and look at our good luck of having his work on the cover of October’s Poetry.
Cover art comes in to the office a variety of ways. Some come in a pinch and some we store for winter and some we commission and wait months for. In this case an e-mail was sent from Winterhouse Studio to Steadman’s website, on a lark. Happily, a series of three illustrations of the late Princess Diana came back.
The connection between Steadman and poetry might come as a surprise, but his admiration of verse is etched in steel in these manic portraits (images courtesy of ralphsteadman.com):

T.S. Eliot

Dylan Thomas

Ernest Hemingway

Hugh MacDiarmid

James Joyce

Robert Graves

Marcel Proust

Samuel Beckett

Oscar Wilde

Robert Burns

Thomas Hardy

William Shakespeare
Next month: Death Knells.