He had recently had a heart attack, and his wife was recovering from cancer. They came into the restaurant and sat down with their daughter. At a certain point Pablo Neruda came up. The daughter said, “Dad, tell Michael what you did,” and he said, “Oh, no,” and went into that shy space that people get around poetry. Finally, the story came out. A few months earlier for Christmas he had gotten out his best fountain pen and he wrote out Neruda’s sonnet that says, essentially, when I die I want you to go on living; I want you to be my eyes, to be my ears, so all the world can know “the reason for my song.” This man of considerable means chooses this, of all things, to give to his ill wife.
I realized that we have something people want. Even though we can sometimes devalue poetry and see it as not being vital, this is what people want. This man came to events for years before he died. He showed up in a wheelchair to hear the Dickman brothers read two days after he had a heart attack.
When we got this Neruda book, I saw that it has the capacity to move people, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with this man’s widow. This book is also going to make it possible for us to do other books that may be more difficult to sell. That was part of our planning. We plotted it out: If we do this, we can do that. I hope I’m not wrong!
I was going to ask what keeps you up at night, but I think I know.
This and so many other things. After we did all of this with Neruda, I just got a new manuscript from W. S. Merwin. I thought we might never see another manuscript from him, because of his age and health. He’s lost his eyesight and his writing has trickled to the point where he composes poems in his head and dictates them to his wife. When I got his new manuscript, I thought: “Yes! No! I’ve got these two big projects—and this is another that I need to go to the board and ask for help.” It’s a good thing, and once again our board agreed that we had to do it. If you bring everybody into the larger understanding, it becomes a group decision in that way. I can’t do this alone.
Now that you brought up Merwin, can I ask you about a letter you wrote in his defense in the wake of a bad review of his Migration?
Oh no.
You defended him, but I was most interested in what you said about the economics of poetry. We’ve talked about the economics of running the press, but not about the economic life of the poets whose work you publish.
Right—and there is no economic life for poets. At least that’s true relative to the books. Poets are not making money off the books. The way that Merwin has is because he’s written a number of them, so at this point he gets royalties from several books, and in the past he used to benefit from reading and speaking gigs. He was able to cobble together a living without having to teach, but that’s not going to happen for the majority of poets.
Let’s get beyond this fucking whack-a-mole game in poetry where if anybody gets any sort of attention, we bang it down. There’s a reason that people have to teach in order to continue this art. It’s one of the few ways that you can get insurance for your kids or make a livable wage, but it reinforces the notion that poetry is something of the ivory tower. In order to survive as a poet you’ve got to get a job and the most likely ones are in universities. With the rise of adjuncting, even that’s not what it used to be.
I’ve not always been the smartest of businessmen, but in the past I would front-load advances as much as possible. We’ve got a number of unpaid advances on the books that we’ve had to write off. Part of that is just recognizing that a poet may have worked on a book for ten years, and we’ve offered a two-thousand-dollar advance. Just calculate the hourly wage.
I’d love to come up with a strategy that recognizes poets but also allows us to survive as a publisher. A way that’s appreciative of the economics all around: for the publisher, for the poet. Right now I do think that having a book is going to help a poet land a job or reading gig or whatever, so it’s not just about the royalties. But the economics for the poet are terrible.
Do you see something happening to the audience for poetry?
I would guess that audiences are becoming more tribalized, and moving into smaller but more concentrated groups. But I want a vibrant, inclusive art that is expanding to larger audiences. I hope for more books like Richard Siken’s Crush, which has increased in sales every year since it was published. That was ten years ago, and it keeps going up. It’s touching people. I don’t think it got great reviews out of the gate, but it has kept growing by word of mouth. And Richard is somebody who’s largely outside of academia.
One of my concerns is that poets will only read their own work. They’ll read their friends, they’ll read their colleagues, they’ll read the next hot poet. I was just at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference with a group of fellows, and I asked them who they thought was doing really well right now. I went back and looked at Bookscan and saw that those people had sold only five hundred books—but the perception is that those poets were rock stars. Then you do a comparison and the people you may look down upon may sell much more. That’s not an aesthetic judgment but just what our perceptions are.
What kind of legacy do you hope to leave behind?
To train some great editors. To be publishing books that last twenty years, fifty years, books that are meaningful into the future. I would love to see all our books sell long into the future. I would love for this place to keep thriving and continue to be irreducible. I would love to see more translations.
I would love to see two or three poets who are to their generation what Merwin is to ours. Look at the past couple of years. We’re losing a great generation of poets. Levine, Kinnell, Strand. There are a lot of really good poets writing today, but we don’t have a coherent “wow” generation. I would love to see something like that coming from our books.
To stake out new territory?
And to change how poetry is being written. Take Merwin and writing without punctuation. That was a revolutionary, groundbreaking tactic. This may be me being an old fuddy-duddy, but you see a lot of poets writing like that today, and I don’t think they’re necessarily doing it with a full understanding of his reasoning. But I would love to see these books giving rise to a great moment in American poetry.
It seems that two priorities for you are originality and justice. Is that so?
On one hand, I don’t directly subscribe to a poetry that “does” something—but at the same time I believe in its power to do something. I don’t think that art or poetry needs to set out to change the world but I think that it can change the world and make us more compassionate, more just, more aware. Those are but a few of the things that poetry can enable in us, and I want to engage poetry because I do want to make change in how we view ourselves, how I view myself.
I think you do that by being original. You do that by changing the point of reference a little bit, by giving another view of the blackbird. Our mission says that we believe that poetry is vital to language and living. I want us to inhabit that mission for years to come. Poets have the capacity to expand and propel the conversation.
What are you chasing?
It’s probably the notion of that larger, enlightened readership. Maybe it’s not the sort of thing that I can create, but I want it. I want it to happen. That may have to come from the poets themselves rather than my thinking that through publishing we can make a great readership. I hope I can contribute by providing poets with beautiful books that will make people want to read and share their work.
You’ve worked at independent bookstores and independent presses. What is the relationship between them?
In both cases, individuals share a love of the sacred space of reading a book. Both are propelled by faith in the word. That sounds quasi-religious, but I think that words put in the right order can propel and enlighten and enliven us, and do positive things. They can make us angry as hell, too.
I think that independent bookstores are also at their root a missionary sort of endeavor. It’s hard to make money in them; that’s why so many have gone under. But they allow for independent, individual voices to emerge. I remember sitting down years ago with the poetry book buyer for our certain unnamed chain. She typed in the name of a poet and said, “We’ve sold ten copies of this person’s book,” and the conversation was over—whereas I could go to an independent bookstore and have a real conversation and get somebody excited. That independent bookseller might sell more in that single store than the chain sells in the entire country.
Do you sometimes suffer from overload? What’s your response to it?
First of all, some self-compassion. I have this desire to engage all these things and realize that I can’t but still keep trying. If I can get out into the woods, up into the Olympics, that’s when I’m my best self. When I go out to a writers conference and I’m sitting around talking about poetry—not the difficulties of publishing it—that gets me excited and brings back learning to this place. I practice yoga. That doesn’t help me with the reading, but if I’m walking alone in the Olympics and following my heartbeat and my breath, that gets me thinking about poems. The beats of our hearts, the rhythms of our breath, all of these provide a form in the world. That’s what art is doing also, trying to make sense of the world.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.
