Despite the fact that many major trade publishers have virtually ceased publishing poetry, a lot of poetry still is managing to reach print. This is thanks to a number of devoted academic and independent publishers, and to the outlets for poetry provided by the Internet.
Many poets believe that it is in fact easier to find a publisher for their poetry than it is to find a reader. For a variety of reasons, a few of which we examined briefly in our last post, the general public does not seem much interested in poetry nowadays. As appalling as this is for poetry in general, it nonetheless represents a great opportunity for those seeking to build a private library of poetry. Generally speaking, the less demand there is for an item, the less expensive that item is for the purchaser.
Our previous posts have examined a wide variety of ways to build a private library for very little money: yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales, publishers' clearance sales and so forth. Inevitably, a lot of poetry shows up in such sales. The decision for the collector is...do I buy broadly, or do I buy narrowly. Either approach makes sense from both a scholarly and a marketplace perspective.
Purchasing broadly will give you a private library that likely will be representative of a wide variety of poetic forms, poetic diction and poetic genres. Such a library might well contain everything from a fine press printing of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, to a first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (self-published!), to an academic press printing of a modern poet like Angie Estes or Gregory Fraser
Purchasing narrowly will allow you to focus on those one or two aspects of poetry that you find most appealing. If a poetic form, for example, you might focus on the...
If your focus is poetic genres, you could concentrate on...
- Dramatic poetry
- Elegies
- Epic poetry
- Lyric poetry
- Narrative poetry
- Prose poetry
- Satirical poetry
- Verse fable
If your focus is a particular poet or poets, you might focus on poets canonical...
- Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad al-Mutanabbi
- Baudelaire
- Robert Frost
- Kakinomoto no Hitomaro
- Federico Garcia Lorca
- Li Po
- Alexander Pushkin
- Shakespeare
...or you might focus on those less well-known...
- Yūsuf al-Khāl
- Shoichiro Iwakiri
- Mang Ke
- Dimitris P. Kraniotis
- Redell Olsen
- Adelia Prado
- Hannah Zeavin
Whatever your focus, you need to know who is publishing what. Tomorrow, we will take a look at some of the more important modern publishers of poetry....
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