Guest Column: The Promise of Poetry in a Digital Age
The problems of poetry are many. It can be difficult to discover. It can be difficult to read and interpret. Are you reading it right? Are you interpreting it right? Are you sure? And for the poet and the publisher, it can be difficult to market and sell.
More than a decade ago, I was working on what would become The New York Times’ best-selling history book, “We Interrupt This Broadcast,” and realized that the mixed-media packaging that we’d created for that title (book plus audio CDs) might be part of the solution to one of the problems of poetry. And so, a few years later, when Sourcebooks published what would be the first of our poetry series, “Poetry Speaks,” it came with three audio CDs, where you could hear great poets (for example, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath) read their own works. And it was remarkably successful.