Thanks to the efforts of my media-obsessed little sister, last week I had the opportunity to sit in the studio audience of The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s often gut-busting spoof on the conservative political pundit show. The guest: actor Sean Penn. His affront to the Reagan-looking Colbert: writing (and reading) a poem condemning President Bush for our involvement in Iraq.

What twisted the TV host’s tighty whites most of all was the actor’s metaphor for Bush’s sins: “soiled and blood-soaked underwear.” To settle the score, Colbert challenged Penn to a “Meta-Free-Phor-All” moderated by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinksy. Watching this all being filmed wasn’t nearly as exciting as its implications. Colbert & Co. looked like wooden actors from my seat, I was dying of thirst (no water allowed), hungry, and needing to use the ladies’ room.

But as I tried to point out to my screaming sibling, they were promoting poetry during National Poetry Month. Colbert actually quoted Pinksy, who even took a silly swipe at Robert Frost. This had to be good for what often seems like a dying genre, though I couldn’t find any evidence of sales spikes for Pinky’s The Inferno of Dante. LJ’s Barbara Hoffert, a great supporter and writer of poetry herself, would have been proud. For her take on the best poetry of 2006, click here—and keep poetry promotion going all year long.

I don’t know about you librarians out there, but (and publishers are going to hate me) I suffer from “why buy the cow if the milk is free” syndrome. Surrounded by books and receiving hundreds of galleys every week, I am rarely motivated to actually buy a book. (And forget about giving books as presents. My friends have finally caught on, so a lavishly illustrated art  book from me—usually pilfered from our discarded books cart—doesn’t count as a real gift.) 

So when I want to read a book and I don’t have the galley, I turn to trusty LEO, the New York Public Library’s online catalog, to see if the library has a copy of a particular title and to place a hold on it. I was so inspired by the speeches made at last week’s NBCC awards ceremony I decide to check out some of the winners. Getting a copy of Julie Philip’s James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon was a piece of cake. There were 23 copies available in the NYPL’s branch system and three copies had been put on hold. I noticed one copy was available at the Donnell Library Branch, across the street from the Modern Museum of Art, and since I was going to a screening at MOMA, I could easily pick up that copy.

The NYPL owned only six copies of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, of which two copies appeared to be lost or stolen. There were also two holds, and I added my name to the list, making for a grand total of three holds.

The NYPL must have had high circulating hopes for Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution because it had ordered 86 copies for its branches. Unfortunately, no one had rushed to place a hold (sorry, Simon) and I was not in the mood to read his history. On the other hand, the library obviously had not ordered enough copies of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost : A Search for Six of Six Million (56 copies, 125 holds) and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (101 copies, 381 (wow!) holds, thanks to the Booker Award, perhaps?)

I figured that Mendelsohn’s and Desai’s books would be out in paperback by the time my name got to the top of the holds list, so I decided to try my luck with the poetry winner, Tom Jollimore’s Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Not a single copy to be found in any branch. Oh, I thought, surely those Williamsburg hipsters and bohemians would have demanded a copy for their branch in the Brooklyn Public Library system. Nada. Or perhaps the multicultural Queens Borough Library had been bold enough to order a copy. No results found, said my query search. 

I suspect in this case the libraries didn’t order Jollimore’s book, not out of a disdain for poetry, but because it had not been widely reviewed. As far as I can tell, Library Journal never even received an advance galley for review. One hopes that the NBCC award  will encourage NYPL and other area libraries to buy at least one copy for their poetry-loving patrons. Remember April is National Poetry Month! 

In my case, I am going to buy the book. Unfortunately  my local independent bookseller doesn’t carry it, so thank goodness for Amazon, which makes the long tail possible.    

Yesterday on a bitterly cold evening, I walked from my office on East 25th Street down to the New School in Greenwich Village to hear 24 of the 30 finalists for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards read brief excerpts from their nominated works. Since my job limits my precious reading time to the categories I assign (popular and genre fiction; natural history and sciences), I was curious to hear from the authors of the nominated autobiographies, works of criticism, biographies, literary novels, poetry collections, and general nonfiction.

I was not disappointed. I felt like a kid in a Baskin-Robbins store, sampling its 31 ice cream flavors from classic vanilla to yummy pistachio almond. Each author reflected his or her own unique reading and writing style. Comics artist Alison Bechdel displayed panels from her poignant graphic novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic as she narrated the story. Flaubert biographer Frederick Brown’s mellifluous voice and perfect French accent conjured up the rainy, muddy funeral of Flaubert’s dear friend, novelist George Sand. Novelist Dave Eggers introduced the real-life hero of his heartbreaking What is the What, Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who movingly read the book’s final paragraph. And poet Daisy Fried, with two-month-old Quinn strapped to her chest (how’s that for a captive audience?) revealed her gritty, streetwise view of life in My Brother is Getting Arrested Again.  

For those who missed the reading or don’t live in New York City, all is not lost. BookTV on C-Span 2 plans to air the reading on Sunday March 11 at 7pm and Monday March 12 at 12am. For readers interested in learning more about the nominees, the NBCC blog Critical Mass is running an interesting series, “30 Books in 30 Days”, that profiles the authors and their books. The winners will be announced tonight in a ceremony at the New School.

Riding the overburdened L train into Manhattan this morning, I looked up not to find a stranger’s sweaty face jutting into mine, but a faded mass market paperback featuring a dandelion spreading its fluffy seeds on the cover. It was New Poets of England and America: An Anthology (1957 first ed., 1962 2d ed., pictured below), and it was being read by a dewy-eyed young man of 25 at the oldest.

In my subway sightings of books (which I’m going to try to make into a regular blog series), I rarely ever spy poetry, much less poetry being read by a gangly hipster. What’s even cooler is that the book in question appears to be famous in poetry circles. Not only does it garner an entry on Wikipedia, but it also comes highly recommended by the Academy of American Poets. Edited by Donald Hall and Robert Pack, it was intended to introduce a new generation of talent. And as it turns out, the writers featured—e.g., Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—became icons.

Even more interesting are the introductions. Pack addressed the American poetry culture of the late 1950s/early 1960s, saying that it was divided between “the Academics and the Beats.” Clearly, the man’s aim was to push the latter, who did not find it necessary to drink themselves into the grave or strip in public to gain an audience. Their appeal was the caliber of their work, their “tight…and…free forms.”

If I can get my hands on a copy, I just might check it out.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) has announced its long list of nominees for the 2007 SIBA Book Award.Twenty-six novels, 24 nonfiction titles, 19 children’s books, 12 cookbooks, and six volumes of poetry made it past the first round of voting; following a selection of the finalists, the winners will be announced in June. 

To be eligible for nomination, a book has to have been published in 2006 and be about the South or written by a Southerner. Hence the fiction list has an interesting mix of the usual Southern suspects (Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, Howard Bahr’s The Judas Field, Mark Childress’s One Mississippi) and some surprising picks (The Templar Legacy by South Carolina’s Steve Berry and The Collectors—well, David Baldacci is from Virginia, and the book is set in the nation’s capital, which at its core is very much a Southern city). But the novel  that should win just for the title alone is Mark Schweitzer’s comic liturgical mystery The Soprano Wore Falsettos, set in North Carolina.

On the nonfiction front, nominees included three regional reference works, The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The Encyclopedia of North Carolina and South Carolina Encyclopedia, as well as Erik Reece’s compelling Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (which was also picked as one of LJ’s Best Books of 2006), and the intriguing (to this oenophile) Thomas Jefferson on Wine by John Hailman. (Who knew the Founding Father was the Robert Parker of his day?)

For a complete listing of nominees, see Authors ‘Round the South (authorsroundthesouth.com), the SIBA-sponsored website to promote author appearances at independent bookstores in the South.

The 13th floor of 360 Park Avenue South (that is, LJ, PW, and Criticas) held our first grand free-books giveaway for other employees in our building last Wednesday. Now, before you balk and scream “Fairfax Library!” note that we’ve tried to donate them, but we’ve tried for years, in the meantime accumulating hundreds of mostly paperback and picked over books. (An editor with a Paris travel guide from 2003 in hand asked whether I thought much had changed there since then.) 

But the point is, as I was cleaning out what was left over after a day of passive weeding on our part and one of active acquisition on the part of others, I was struck by what was left: mass-market alien books and a lot of poetry.

So, with all that is ignored, what kind of poetry do people want?  A poetry best seller list that ran in the April 1, 2006 issue showed big names Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Mary Oliver; musicians/poets Patti Smith, Tupac Shakur, and Saul Williams; old classics Beowulf and The Odyssey; and, of course, a couple of anthologies edited by Garrison Keillor.

Check out Barbara Hoffert’s last best-poetry roundup—and look for the ‘06 list coming this spring—in which she encourages forming a poetry reading group. I was happy to see an overlap of poets Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Wislawa Szymborska, and Jane Kenyon on Barbara’s list of the best and on the best seller list. 

So, poets and readers, be optimistic. Even if many books of verse are off to book heaven at a young age, the “best” are diverse and thriving. And start a poetry book club to save the new poetry! (Or we could work on reviving the consumption of alien mass-market books if you prefer.)  I’d love to hear how your poetry sections fare.