How have attitudes and opinions about poetry changed?
There’s been a holdover from high modernism, I think—the notion that if poetry is difficult it must be good. And if poetry is easy to read, and I’m not talking about the emotional complexity, but that if it’s easy to read, it’s not as good. And if you look at most any poetic tradition from around the world, you start to see the nonsense of that. What will the next forty years bring for the series? Despite the constant talk of gloom and doom that’s been around poetry since I was a child, we do seem to be selling more books. We have lots of books that have sold ten or twenty thousand copies. And though we will occasionally do a first book—and in some cases a second or third—that doesn’t have robust sales, it’s almost a given that any book we publish will sell two or three thousand copies, and we have a lot that have sold many more than that. It’s not nearly as good as it should be, it can be much better, but I think the direction is up. Timothy Schaffert is the author of three novels. Hi
