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Thursday 21 January 2016

Poetry Publishers Lament: Tai Grove/Chris Faiers

Following is a found poem created by Tai Grove, Hidden Brook Press publisher,  from an email I sent him. Great minds and all that  ;  )-

Tai is starting a distribution company, and if anyone on the Canuck poetry scene can accomplish this miracle successfully, it's Tai.




The Small Publisher Warehouse

Shelves loaded to the ceiling!
A common towered sight
for so many Canuck small presses.
Poets & academics want their books
published,
small presses link hopes
with authors for countless reasons
(often just to make a quota
to keep their government oiled
subsidies flowing),
with the end product,
tree book towers.
The forgotten books,
live for decades piled
piled, piled on top of each other
tipping ignominiously,
toppling towers into the gaping
iron mouths endless appetite.
Shredded, recycled into cardboard
boxes to carry our Wheaties,
the power house for obscure poets

that languor in obscurity, in
the shadows of tree book towers.







hi Chris

thanks for your email. the crux, the future, of publishing CanPo and CanLit has to be is POD. to comment on your remark about stacks of warehoused poetry books – thank goodness i only have small stacks of books, nothing that cannot fit in my office. most of my stacks are from the pre-POD era when we had to print a minimum of 200 books just to get the press to jerk forward to spit out the first book – we would sell 25 and stack the rest and admire our hard work while we feared the stack might fall on us and crush our goals of publishing yet another stack of books. now POD makes it possible to publish with few books insulating the walls – some i can’t even give away. my garbage man said to me the other day. “so, you are cleaning out the basement again are you” as i helped fling 6 cobwebbed sagging boxes into the iron monster’s jaw, feeding its endless appetite for obsolete CanPo. I was thinking that they need to make bio fuel out of old shredded fermented poetry books. the problem is that the cars that ran on the CanPo fuel would sit at the curb and contemplate the journey for too long before going anywhere. The only journey such a car would take is to the town of Obscurity, via Poverty Highway, at the intersection of Hope and Ego, in the very deep dark valley of Anonymity.

i could not help but see the poem in your email to me. i stole your words and wrote this. it is not worth the paper it is written on (no paper) but it is worth a chuckle.


 

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