Golden Bear Matte Path

Latest Zoland Poetry ad out in the now-current American Poetry Review. The news -- we're reading for book 3 and submissions are flying in at various supersonic rates, so consider us and (e)mail away your submissions already. Book 2 in the series will be for sale at AWP in NYC and though Book 3 won't legally hit the streets until early 2009, the gods of marketing and databases specify that we need the majority of book 3 in hand by the end of this year, very beginning of '08.

One of the more recent legs of our '07 crazed travel schedule found Wyatt searching out good books through the University of California Berkeley campus. This particular path ended up leading past the Bear's Lair and a lyric or two floating out the poet Jean Day's office, around the Fiery Furnaces Friday campus rock show, and eventually to the T-Rex skeleton in the Life Sciences Building.

After some rejuvenation and another blast of caffeine, we gave up on the notion of calling a taxi in the East Bay and used all roads leading to the BART station and a brief walk to Small Press Distribution headquarters, where Wyatt kept Brent, Laura, Neil and Lindsey at bay while I successfully raided the warehouse shelves of books to purchase and mail back home. Besides the trips to poetry sections at SPD, Moe's and Pegasus, we were delighted to stop by East Wind Books of Berkeley on University Ave -- which further cemented in my head how much contemporary Chinese poetry in translation isn't out there, and not not out there in terms of stores not stocking books, but in terms of the number of books not being supported by publishers. Without support from Chinese cultural forces, such as contemporary Korean authors receive from the KLTI, the future is none to bright for Chinese authors in English translation. Post-Tiannmen in '89 there was the cliched rush for any number of presses to snatch up an "exile" poet. But once the furor (at least in the States) largely died down, the West lost interest -- in much the same way that the late 80s and early 90s saw a blast of interest in things Russian with the digestive rumblings of glasnost -- and then there was silence. Some middle ground or, better yet, far-left movement needs to wake presses back up -- or muzzle their numbers departments in a back room so that some other books are allowed to hit the streets. Not asking for much. If, say, we could just get one author in translation into the American canon for every 100 books of neo-confessional lyrics built on pre-pubescent issues and a poor understanding of Foucalt.