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Already Poor, Poets Don't Much Mind The Recession

by Chana Joffe-Walt

Morning Edition, May 29, 2009 · This weekend, the world's book publishers will gather in New York for the 2009 BookExpo America. Organizers say this year the focus is on quality, not quantity. Large publishers have been hit hard by the recession, so they're trimming back the number of booths they'll staff at the expo.

But one corner of the publishing world has its own strange economy. Poets and those who publish them are used to earning next to nothing for their work. They call the cycle of rejections, teaching and issuing small books the "pobiz," short for "poetry business." And maybe the pobiz isn't so bad, if you look at it a certain way.

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