Recuperated

AWP is gone and past and am finally caught back up with the rest of life. It was a delight to see everyone Zoland-related and otherwise in NYC. More than a dozen authors from each of books 1 and 2 stopped by to say hello, and festivities were topped off with a group reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, along with readers from New Directions, Zephyr Press, and Ugly Duckling. Audio from the reading will be posted on the Zoland website in early March.

Copies of Zoland Poetry No. 2 should be appearing on store shelves over the next couple weeks.

Besides the post-AWP haze, this blog's relative silence of late has been at the hands of my own boredom in terms of what there is to say about the shrinking amount of poetry in English translation--on store shelves and in publishers' catalogues.

The simple equation is [sparse funding + slim margins = little interest in publishing poetry in translation]. Focusing on fiction at least affords a press the chance of "discovering" the next Bolano, Svevo, or Pessoa. Not so with poetry.

So this is a reality, with a more important reality being the people that continue to translate and publish despite the margins. There is still vital and fascinating translation work being made available by a handful of small and independent presses simply because the work allows editors to shut their eyes to finances and hear only/mostly the words (financial murmuring never fades completely).

Outfits like Tinfish, Action Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Achiote, the journal Circumference, Nightboat, Archipelago and a scant few others are now responsible for keeping contemporary poetry interesting. Those are not bad hands to be in.