Proof of Blog: The Best Deal

Woke up this morning to find my poem "Problems with the Dictionary," from the latest issue of the Southwest Review, featured on Verse Daily. Talk about a great Christmas present--I've had Verse Daily as my home page for about four years and have always admired their taste, their mission, and their simplicity. The poem comes from my manuscript-in-progress, and risks (near) rhyming couplets.

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More and more, though, the national perception of poetic loci is shifting; that is, the concept of real versus imagined and desired location is blurring due to the Internet; geography loses significance. When you can access poems, biographies, interviews, critiques, photographs and even, via video, "live appearances"with just a few keystrokes, a lyric poet from Anchorage becomes as immediate as the narrative wit from Philadelphia.

-a compelling conversation between Rita Dove and Jericho Brown, from the BAP Blog

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When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

via The Nation

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“There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace,” she wrote me. “I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

Op-Ed by Richard Russo in NYT

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Best-selling poetry books of 2011

Horoscopes for the Dead / Billy Collins
Copies sold: 18,406
*Author’s est. earnings: $44, 177