A Book-length Soapbox for Poets
Canarium Books, founded by Stegner Fellow and lecturer Joshua Edwards, has a critical reputation that belies its budget.
by Max McClure
This morning the police came for me.
They brought a letter covered with signs
I could not decipher. They demanded
I register my address properly,
because they are sorely tested by time's demands
and cannot function as my delivery service.
— John Beer, The Waste Land
The standard print run for a small literary press is about 1,000 copies per book. In the grand scheme of things, this isn't much – Oprah could have given that many books away to three studio audiences. But when the book is full of experimental poetry, 1,000 units move slowly.
So when poetry press Canarium Books found itself sold out of two of its most recent titles, it was a little surprised. When those same two books recently won major literary prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Griffin Trust, Canarium's founders were ecstatic.
"It's sort of mystifying," said Joshua Edwards, Canarium founder and editor and 2009-2011 Stegner Fellow and lecturer at Stanford.
Canarium, based in Edwards' hometown of Clear Lake Shores, Texas, is a young press, and it specializes in a notoriously unmarketable genre. As defined by Edwards and his co-editors – Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow and Lynn Xu – Canarium focuses on innovative lyric poetry by emerging authors.
This year's crop of Canarium titles was no exception. John Beer's The Waste Land is the poet's first book, and Suzanne Buffam's The Irrationalist is her second. Both lace melodiously conversational poems with dense allusion and frequent humor. Neither book would be considered a conventional blockbuster.
But now, Beer has won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and has been shortlisted for The Believer magazine's Poetry Award. John Ashbery, often cited as the major American poet of the past 50 years, referred to Beer's work as "genius." Buffam made the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize – Canada's largest poetry award, previously given to figures like Anne Carson, Christian Bök and Robin Blaser.
"We don't go for sales or awards — we just try and publish the best poetry we find," said Edwards. "Still, it's a great thing for only our second season of books."
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