For the literary world 2019 was a slow year, with the exception of the growth of new literary journals/magazines. In that category, there was a boom.
I see Amazon scamming every nickel and dime it can from writers of all genres. But, it seems to go after poets and their poetry with great delight. Poetry is played down, never emphasized or featured. Poetry is listed in the category of non-fiction. On Amazon, poetry is not its own genre. It should be a separate category. The effectiveness of the team of Amazon and Twitter used as dual promotion for your work has been greatly diminished. Rather than new styles, the old saw academic, bucolic style used by the first Poet Laureate of the United States seems to have tiptoed back into the grasses and flowered covered fields of academia. This preference for the old styles masks the new styles wrapped in a new era--this time in history. This old maneuver is boring, predictable. New York still wishes for its thumb on publishing with academia's thumb right behind them. Theirs is the oldest kind of maneuver, it assists censors in their stomping to death of real, current, opinion and emotion.
So where do ambitious writers go? They go to new book sells sites that actually promote their work and pay them royalties, or they organize a site that might help their, and others, endeavors. Literary groups not involved in the slow deterioration of Western literature can contribute with their new websites. Answers have to be found. Unless you want a controlled literature with writing that contains every thought about the world but yours.
Independents from every corner of the arts should be welcomed at the dinner party, but they're not.
This fall we can start challenging this obvious shut down of anything new by developing the innovative, the up-to-date. Bring your ideas forward.
-- e. smith sleigh, author and poet
" embrace the future and make it yours" -- ess
Below: A Quantum World