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Poetry: more written than read?

The continuing rumours of poetry’s demise are pretty much on the money, according to an article by James Adams in Monday’s Globe and Mail. The problem, according to Adams, is that while the stuff still gets written and published in relatively large amounts, very few of the books sell more than 100 copies — a number that corresponds roughly to the demographic known as “friends and family.” While big-money awards help, they can only do so much.

Poets, poetry publishers and readers like to believe that the G-G generates “a bit of media fanfare for [the] genre,” as Barbara Carey, a Toronto poet, wrote recently on CBC.ca. But mostly that fanfare resonates within a decidedly itty-bitty world. Even the six-year-old Griffin Poetry Prize, which each spring splits a whopping $100,000 between a Canadian poet and an international poet, has yet to discover a vast reservoir of unplumbed readerly demand. And the Griffin Prize, in the words of one Toronto publisher, “is definitely bigger than the G-Gs.”

A possible clue for why this may be can be found in the words of one of the GG-nominated poets, who is quoted in the article describing veteran poets as “artisans of the oblique trajectory.” Sad though it may be, oblique trajectories just don’t get people as excited as they used to.

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Read the article in The Globe and Mail.

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