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National P try Month Celebrates Fifth Birthday
Calvin Reid -- 3/20/00

It's been five years since the Academy of American P ts designated April National P try Month, and this year's month-long literary celebration and marketing frenzy will feature more promotions, readings and bookstore events than ever. Movieg rs in 1,800 L ws Cineplex theaters will see an NPM promotion; American Airlines will help distribute 100,000 volumes of p try; and the academy's P try Book Club is ready to launch on the Web after a year of test marketing.

"Each year, there's something new," said Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the academy. "National P try Month has become part of the general culture. More p try books are being published. More readings are taking place. It provides an opportunity for Americans of all ages to learn more about the vitality and variety of our contemporary p try."

Indeed, Wadsworth pointed to "an explosion of p try on the Internet," happily citing a recent poll of the 50 most popular topics on Lycos.com, the Web search engine portal; p try, Wadsworth proudly told PW, came in eighth--behind Pamela Anderson and wrestling but ahead of marijuana and the Bible. Web portal Yahoo! will provide ad banners for NPM for the month that will link to the academy's Web site (www.p ts.org), which Wadsworth said gets four million hits a month.

Naturally, Andrew Carroll, director of the American P try and Literacy Project--the whimsical but effective nonprofit organization cofounded by Carroll and the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky to make p try easily available--has negotiated another deal to give away thousands of volumes of p try. In the past, the project has given away untold volumes of p try using cars, trains and naval ships. This year, Carroll's using airplanes. He has convinced American Airlines to put 100,000 copies of Songs for the Open Road: P ms of Travel and Adventure (Dover) in the seat pockets of selected international flights. "We're thrilled. This is something Joseph and I talked about years ago," said Carroll. The books are published by Dover with support from corporate benefactors and provided to the airline to distribute. Carroll told PW that this deal brings the total number of p try books given away by the APLP to more than 750,000 books. "We never thought we'd get this big this fast," he added.

The academy is also a clearinghouse for events. According to Charles Flowers, the academy's director of marketing and promotion, "Things are bigger and better. More teachers and librarians want posters and tips on events." The academy will distribute 175,000 NPM posters this year. Flowers is also very enthusiastic about the academy's P try Book Club; launched in a test phase a year ago, the club has registered 3,500 new members since January for a total of 5,500. Members receive a catalogue every two months featuring 35 books from which to choose. The club will also launch a Web site (www.p trybookclub.org) in June, said Flowers, with interactive forums, chat rooms, message boards and a variety of p tic content.

Flowers pointed to a series of readings and discussions around the much-anticipated publication of the first two volumes of the Library of America's comprehensive anthology, American P try: The Twentieth Century. The academy will co-sponsor discussions and readings around the books' publication in several cities, including Kansas City, Mo. (Apr. 1), Seattle (Apr. 3), Los Angeles (Apr. 6) and New York City (Apr. 13 and 26). More information about these events are available at the Library of America's Web site (www.loa.org).

And there's more. The academy will sponsor a two-day festival of readings in Washington, D.C., April 3--4, featuring p ts Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, Robert Hass and others. The academy will co-sponsor a daylong symposium on April 9 called "Speech and Silence: P try and the Holocaust" at Washington's Holocaust Museum. In addition, on April 20 in New York City, the academy and Cave Canem, a workshop/organization of African-American p ts, will co-sponsor a reading at the New School University featuring Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, Honoree Jeffers and others. There's also the second annual Young People's P try Week (April 10-16) sponsored by the Children's Book Council (www.cbcbooks.org). (See also Children's Books. p. 31).

P try Showcase

P ts House, the SoHo-based nonprofit resource center for p try, is gearing up for its annual P try Showcase and working to organize the next People's P try Gathering, a biennial festival of folk p tic traditions launched last year. Lee Briccetti, executive director of PH, was enthusiastic about NPM and about the PPG's inaugural festival last year, which drew more than 6,000 people to a variety of locations in downtown Manhattan to hear cowboy p ts, spoken-word and erotic p ts, in addition to such well-known writers as Ntozake Shange and Robert Pinsky.

Briccetti called NPM "a crafty marketing tool. It's shown there's no ceiling to p try's audience. We're in a golden age of p try production." The P try Showcase is the organization's crown jewel. Described as a "museum of p try," the P try Showcase is a monthlong series of readings, events and panels at PH, organized around the display of every p try title ("as far we can tell," said Briccetti) published in the previous year. The showcase also features the release of PH's annual P try Directory, a listing of each of those p try titles along with bibliographic information. Last year's directory featured more than 1,200 titles published by more than 450 publishers. Briccetti also noted the relaunch of the PH Web site (www.p tshouse.org), which has been completely redesigned and features the P try Directory in a fully searchable online database.

Describing the major trends in p try, Briccetti said that only 10%-13% of titles come from large commercial publishers. She cited the university presses and the growing numbers of newly launched, small and independent nonprofit presses as examples of the current "publishing biodiversity. Computers and technology have democratized the publishing of p try," she told PW.

New Titles

It should be no surprise that April is a popular month to release p try titles. Here is a very limited sampling of titles, most of which will be published in April.

The aforementioned American P try: The Twentieth Century (LOA) is considered a landmark effort documenting American p try from the turn of the century until 1913 in the first two volumes. The later 20th century will be covered in two subsequent volumes over the next few years. The p ms were chosen by an advisory board that featured Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey and Marjorie Perloff.

Although p try lovers tend to criticize the large houses for not publishing enough p try, there are more than a few volumes on the lists of several big publishers. Penguin is publishing Marriage: A Sentence, a collection of p tic insights into marriages of all kinds, by the legendary p t Anne Waldman. Harcourt's Harvest Books imprint will publish the paperback edition of the bestselling How to Read a P m: And Fall in Love with P try, a worldwide examination of the love of p try, by Edward Hirsch, a p t and MacArthur "genius" grant winner. Harcourt is also publishing new books by Israeli p t Yehuda Amichai (Open Closed Open: P ms), Richard Wilbur (Mayflies: New P ms and Translations) and Nicholas Christopher (Atomic Field: Two P ms).

W.W. Norton is the publisher of American's Favorite P ms, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, director of the favorite p m project. The project asked Americans to name their favorite p ms; 200 p ms (and commentary from their readers) were chosen from the thousands of responses. Norton is also publishing American Book Award- winner Martín Espada's sixth collection of verse, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen, and the anthology The Body Electric: 25 Years of America's Best P try from the American P try Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

In February, Random House released Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman, a new collection pairing her p ms with the paintings of Paul Gauguin. In April, Random House will publish Living on Fire, new p ms on love, blindness and mortality by Virginia Hamilton Adair; Knopf will publish a new collection of autobiographical p ms by Kenneth Koch entitled New Addresses.

Houghton Mifflin is featuring new collections from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Galway Kinnell (A New Selected P ms), who will be appearing at Carnegie Hall on April 27; and from Michael Collier (The Ledge) and Mary Oliver (Winter Hours). The house is also offering a series of P try Postcards promoting all three p ts. Each card features the book jacket on one side and a p m on the other.

In May St. Martin's Press is releasing Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology, which collects work by young spoken-word performers such as Maggie Estep and Edwin Torres, fixtures on the downtown spoken-word scene, as is the volume's editor, p t Todd Colby. SMP will also publish In the Bear's House by Pulitzer Prize fiction winner N. Scott Momaday, a p tic meditation on the nature of that animal illustrated by 40 original paintings.

And for the more mystically inclined, Riverhead is publishing Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, the first English translations of the visionary p ms of Nagarjuna, a second-century philosopher monk, by Stephen Batchelor, a former Tibetan and Zen monk and Buddhist author.

Among several other p try titles, well-known Minnesota indie publishers Coffee House Press and Graywolf Press are releasing, respectively, The Annotated "Here," a collection of challenging p ms by the distinguished New York p t and art critic Marjorie Welish, and By Herself: Women Reclaim P try, essays by a diverse collection of women p ts that examine the work of women p ts, edited by Molly McQuade.

Thomas Lavoie, associate publisher of Dufour Editions, which distributes the work of European p try houses, told PW that "foreign p ts have benefited from National P try Month as well as American p ts," pointing to such houses as Bloodaxe, Gallery Press, Anvil Press P try and Dedalus. Coming in the spring are translations of The Iron-Blue Vault (Bloodaxe) from the Hungarian p t Attila Jozsef; New Blood (Bloodaxe), an anthology of 38 young p ts edited by Neil Astley; and Weather Permitting (Anvil Press) by Irishman Dennis O'Driscoll, the only non-American winner in the 1999 Lannan Foundation p try awards.

Yale University Press publicist Alison Pratt told PW that David McCoombs, a park ranger as well as a p t, has been chosen to join YUP's younger p t series. His book, Ultima Thule, a collection of p ms about the south-central Kentucky area that he patrols, was chosen by the distinguished p t W.S. Merwin, this year's judge. Also, Craig Arnold, picked to join the series last year, will be on tour at colleges campuses for his book Shells, which won the Great Lakes Colleges 1999 New writers award.

The University of California Press will release books by p ts Fanny Howe (Selected P ms) and Mark Levine (Enola Gay). From the micro-indies there are books from Seattle-based Van West & Co. (By a Thread by Molly Tenenbaum) and from Brooklyn-based Cool Grove Press (Guru Punk by Louise Landes Levi).
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