Publishers Celebrate NaPoMo

By Jason Boog 

npm-2005-black.jpgAs National Poetry Month enters its third week, publisher websites have held steady with the poetic content. Knopf-Doubleday’s revamped site has New York Times writer-at-large Charles McGrath reading a John Updike’s poem, “Half Moon, Small Cloud.”

The FSG poetry blog interviewed Don Selby, co-founder of Poetry Daily. The editor recalled an “unexpected onslaught of angry notes when we features Ron Padgett’s ‘Nothing in That Drawer‘ (from his book with Godine, New & Selected Poems)—-a sonnet that repeats the title for 14 lines; offensively, it seems, to a great many devotee’s of the form.”

Finally, Norton interviewed their executive editor and poet, Jill Bialosky. Bialosky discussed her day job and her poetry-writing: “I found comfort in a few models–T. S. Eliot for one, who as you know was a publisher, and also Wallace Stevens, who worked in the insurance business and managed to write some of the most exquisite and internal poems in the language.”