Poetry: the most dismissed "genre"

I agree gay themes are a harder sell. Luckily in YA books there are a number of coming of age lesbian and gay narratives that do really well. Maybe librarians are just more open to ordering literature that will appeal to the diversity of teens that I see combing the shelves in our local library. From Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan, this niche within the healthy YA market is doing well and could use more authors... Ever consider this Bill? Boy Meets Boy presents a high-school that currently doesn't exist, where straight, bi, gay or lesbian is just an accepted part of things and the real drama is the choices the protagonists make as they struggle to grow up. Intersting. Sort of like The Cosby Show in the mid-80s presenting an upper-middle class black family where issues of race were covered but the Huxtable family wasn't victimized or trapped in a ghetto because of it. The show made a leap forward.

But don't get me started on how much poetry is dismissed as too small an audience or unprofitable. I called a bunch of old friends in the publishing world today. Editors I've met over the years and it being January I figured it was time to have lunch with as many of them as can spare me the time. Networking, gossip, the state of the publishing world, dogs and kids and what have you loved doing lately... Over and over in our brief chats they mentioned that this is a hard time to publish because nobody cares any more about awards and great reviews. All that counts is sales. Period. And if this applies to novels, there's no hope for the lowest on the heap, poetry. Sigh.

But wait, the really small presses are somehow keeping quality alive. They know it is about love of the content and the book as object. Maybe as publishers contract, fire people, close down, court more celebrity "written" novels and publish more sin-offs of movies, TV, and comics... maybe the small publishers will start to find more markets for the good things they print. Here's hoping. I just started doing design work for Benu Press, their inauguaral season, and they are publishing a book of poems about the civil rights movement in Milwaukee and a funny coming of age memoir by a gay author. So there ya go.