It is like I am holding a living, breathing, panting puppy in my arms while it struggles to break free and scamper enthusiastically across the room and then someone telling me this puppy is dead...
Having just published my first book of poetry and am bursting with still more poetry all the time it is incredible to me that after a couple of days at the Book Expo America they tell me, poetry is dead. It seems that very few publishers and literary agents even look at poetry submissions these days, and yet in sharing my book with the apparent 'crème de la crème' of the book world, many revealed a secret soft spot for poetry.
This comforted me a little because, if truth be told, I did not set out to become a poet. In fact it was quite the contrary. It felt as if wholeheartedly, the poetry picked me. I was naively living my life, rather happily in fact, oblivious to the swooping poems that were gathering and jabbering around my head and heart waiting to land. One day I finally heard them and started to write and very soon, almost per their direction, I started performing too, and this is when they really started to take on a life of their own. Soon after came the inevitable question from my audience members, "Where's The Book?" Yikes! Furtively I obliged, and am now entering the hallowed literary world, with my living breathing poems in a little book called Beyond Words.
Being an entrepreneurial artist and learning a little about book market trends and knowing how to create a financially viable business, I know that poetry logically is not really the way to go. Especially taking into account that the $400 Billion Book business considers poetry as dead...But I do have poems and I guess I am more poet than entrepreneur therefore I do not consider that I have much choice.
Also, and this may sound lofty, I see part my responsibility of being a poet is to bring poetry back into the blanket of literary merit, and not just in high brow literary magazines, but into the hearts and hands of the amazon.com buyers world wide. I want to find a way for people who have been 'burned' by reading 'difficult' circumstantially 'meaningless' poetry at school, and who vowed never to return to that experience, to be introduced to the brilliance and mastery of modern day poets and be ignited by the art form in its simplicity and accessibility. In this bite-size fast-paced world where we want it quick and succinct, for those who don't have time for a novel, perhaps a short poem could be the answer.
So as long as the poems keep circling I will keep my hand in it. It may be dead to others but the poetry inside me is alive and kicking.
poet by tamsin rothschild
i could never be a poet
i don't live on Walden Pond
and I like shopping
i am inspired by McDonald's straws
and plastic bags floating in the wind
see American Beauty i am not even original
and yet this is a poem
therefore I am a poet