In Defense of Duluth Poets
The arts and culture review website Partisan namedrops Holy Cow! Press of Duluth in an article by Harvard English Professor Stephen Burt titled “In Defence of Minor Poets,” published today. The namedrop occurs without actually mentioning Holy Cow! by name, but instead referencing Duluth with a hyperlink to Consortium Book Sales & Distribution’s page about the Duluth publishing company.
Excerpt:
The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon quipped that 90% of science fiction was crud, but only because 90% of everything was crud. He was defending science fiction, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to poetry too: 90%, or perhaps 97%, seems to me dull, or unaccomplished, or of interest to only a few (myself not among them).
But that leaves 3-10%: and given how many hundreds of millions of human beings think in English, and how many tens of thousands have recently published books of poetry, not just in Toronto, Montreal, New York, and London, but in Fairfax, Va. and Georgetown, Guyana, and Duluth, Minn., that’s a lot of poetry I might like. My best self aspires to read it all.
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