Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Library of Congress has made fifty recordings from its Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature available online for the first time. The archive includes two thousand readings and lectures from poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the 2015 Jackson Poetry Prize–winner X. J. Kennedy. Going forward, five recordings will be added on a monthly basis over the next several years. (Hyperallergic)
At NPR, poet Gary Snyder, who is now eighty-four and has published more than twenty books over the course of his career, talks about his newest collection, This Present Moment, and how it feels to write now that many of his contemporaries—including beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—have passed away. “So you try to bring some little bit of quality to your choices and…stop and appreciate things maybe a little more than you did when you were trying to…match a big steady schedule.”
Romantic poet William Wordsworth achieved lasting fame, but few have heard of his contemporary Barry Cornwall. At the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman examines the complicated formula for achieving literary fame.
How should we respond to the current abundance of reading material available to us? At the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks considers the relationship between “the quantity of books available to us, the ease with which they can be written and published, and our reading experience.”
A recent report from the University of London reveals a significant inequality in the earnings of authors in the United Kingdom. In 2013, the top 1 percent of authors who made £450,000 took in 22.7 percent of earnings, and the bottom 50 percent, who made less than £10,500, accounted for just 7 percent of all author earnings. (Guardian)
Meanwhile, Forbes reports on the rare case of a self-published author who earns $450,000 a year. Mark Dawson has sold over 300,000 copies of his Soho Noir crime-thriller series, which he published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform.
Musician Nick Cave, who has previously published two novels, released his first poetry collection, The Sick Bag Song, last week. In lieu of making the book available in bookstores or on Amazon, Cave is testing a new direct fan marketing approach: The book is only available for purchase through the website thesickbagsong.com. (GalleyCat)
Beginning next week, in conjunction with Catapult Publishing, Electric Literature will host a series of affordable fiction writing workshops in its New York City offices. Author James Hannaham will lead the first master class on April 27.
