Face Forward: The Poets House Annual Showcase of Poetry Books

For a poet, in April, in New York, there’s a lot going on!  One of the most exciting National Poetry Month events held every year is the Poets House Annual Showcase of the year’s poetry books.  It’s an astonishing event. This year, at the 17th annual showcase, 2,400 books of poetry are displayed at the Jefferson Market Library on 6th Avenue near 10th Street.

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.