State of Poetry
Happy #nationalpoetrymonth and happy #napowrimo2018
What an incredible month of poems! Great to see a lot of poets commit to producing a lot more work this month.
And the titles that have come out this month from major and indie press? Don’t get me started on it.
The lit mags are pumping out gold at the rate poetry lovers cannot consume. And that is an awesome thing to behold!
This poetry month we can be proud as ever that the health of poetry and poetry book sales is STELLAR. Note the quote below from this excellent THE BOOKSELLER piece.
According to Andre Breedt, m.d. of Nielsen BookScan, poetry book sales have seen a 66% increase in the past five years, which saw over a million poetry books sold at a value of £11.1m.
Significantly, poetry, along with books on politics, law, governance and current affairs, is among the few non-fiction sectors to have benefitted directly from the current climate of uncertainty, Breedt said. “Non-fiction, where poetry sits for Nielsen BookScan purposes, was flat last year with some interesting exceptions, particularly politics/current affairs and poetry. My theory is that in times of political uncertainty people turn to poetry to understand the world in which they live, while political books provide the facts and context,” he added.
This growth in poetry sales coincides with evidence that poets are changing too: 3.1% of the adult population of England wrote poetry in the year 2015–16 according to the Taking Part survey. This translates into 1.4 million adults directly engaged with the genre, the same proportion of people who say they attended contemporary dance, and just a fraction below the total number of opera-goers.
Demographic analysis of England’s 1.4 million poets suggests they are as a group significantly more diverse than the audiences/participants for other cultural forms, including theatre, opera, ballet and contemporary art. Poetry writers are younger and more diverse than the typical population sample, with a high proportion of women and of individuals defining themselves as LGBTQ.
Reflecting on this data, Oliver Mantell, director of consultancy at The Audience Agency, suggested that these diverse writers, who consume poetry in many forms as well as creating it, are driving innovation: “It’s clear that there’s not one poetry audience, but several poetry audiences. What we now need to know is who each of those audiences are and how they are inter-related,” he said.
The growth in sales of books and tickets — at events and festivals — is just one aspect of the new mass appetite for verse: the artform’s online and social-media popularity is growing too. The #nationalpoetryday hashtag trended globally in 2017, with visitors to the NPD website doubling year-on-year.
Did you note that last paragraph?
Hope my work is contributing in a small way to this resurgence.
This was also the month where I experimented with new-media content, inspired by the work of the Visible Poetry Project featuring my voice. Poetry films to be precise. I produced three, and frankly I was a bit nervous about them, but the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
The National Poetry Month adventure is not over yet. There are a few more gems that I need to perform before we say goodbye to April. Here’s part 1 for your listening, and your viewing pleasure.
