Revanthi Ragunathan has reminded me how different the poetry world can
be from the world I experience in Raleigh, NC, where the best and
largest independent bookstore, one recognized as the independent
American bookseller of the year, has fewer poetry titles on its
shelves than I do at home. David Bircumshaw similarly reminded me of
the difference between the English and US situations.
I should have known better. On this issue, an excerpt from a 1993
essay by Gioia, found at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ebohemia.htm :
Arial"The fifth point is that there still
exists a huge audience for poetry in America, old and new, but it is
now so segmented, that it shares almost no common ground. There is no
longer a viable mainstream in American poetry, at least among poets
under 60. New American poetry instead is segmented by region,
aesthetic, ideology, gender, race, and genre. The academic subculture
of poetry represents only one small but highly visible part of this
large, diverse, and atomized audience. Those poets who are read and
discussed in lower Manhattan are not the same as those who are
esteemed in Palo Alto and Seattle, or argued over in San Antonio and
Charlotte. If there are half a million regular readers of poetry in
America (and I would guess that the number is at least that), it
usually seems as if no two are reading the same book."
Another quote, likely to be taken in many different spirits on this
list:
"ArialNew Formalism, for example, which is
sometimes misleadingly portrayed as an academic literary movement, is
actually of a piece with rap and cowboy poetry in recognizing the
auditory nature of poetry."
