New Life for Poem-Turned-Slogan
by Charlotte Abbott -- Publishers Weekly, 7/5/2004
When John Kerry began using a refrain from a 1938 Langston Hughes poem as a campaign slogan, Vintage editorial director Marty Asher pricked up his ears. "I thought it was interesting that a presidential candidate was quoting poetry. I haven't seen a lot of politicians do that recently," he said. As a steward of Hughes's backlist, Asher also saw a sales opportunity. The poem, "Let America Be America Again," will be included in a collection of nine poems by Hughes, which Vintage will publish with a foreword by Kerry.
Packaged as a 32-page booklet with French flaps and a stapled binding, the collection, called Let America Be America Again and Other Poems, will retail for $6. It's scheduled to come off press in time for the imprint to give away copies at Democratic convention on July 26, and to go on sale in early August.
Vintage took a similar approach with "On the Pulse of Morning," a poem by Maya Angelou that marked Bill Clinton's inauguration in February 1993, which sold 425,000 copies as a booklet. The imprint also netted 80,000 copies of Tell Me the Truth About Love: Ten Poems by W.H. Auden, after one of his poems was popularized by the film Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.
