Poetry is the area of the company perhaps closest to Raccah's heart--"I got into poetry in eighth grade, and it changed my life"--and Raccah (r., with poet Nikki Giovanni) talked with special enthusiasm about Sourcebooks's efforts in this area, which are, as Sean Murray said, "to make poetry bigger and better and get it out to more people in a different way and at a higher level." Part of the company's success in poetry, he continued, has come "because we want to do it and aren't just doing it on the side."
Peter Lynch added that, contrary to conventional wisdom, poetry appeals to many people. An important part of expanding the reach of poetry has been using multimedia to heighten the experience of "reading" poetry. Through enhanced books that include CDs and DVDs of poets and others reading the work, Sourcebooks has emphasized that poetry is "not just words on a page by a dead person," Lynch continued.
In the same vein, Sean Murray added, children first hear poetry when parents and teachers read it aloud to them. "They hear the language, the rhyme, the tongue twisters. Unfortunately, as they grow older, poetry becomes words on a page. Multimedia reintroduces the dynamic that made them fall in love with poetry in the first place."
Standout poetry titles include Poetry Speaks (2001), Poetry Speaks Expanded (2007), Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, edited by Nikki Giovanni (2008), Poetry Speaks to Children, edited by Elise Paschen (2005) and The Spoken Word Revolution, selected by Mark Eleveld (2008). These anthologies tend to boost the sales of other works by poets included in the books. As Todd Stocke said, "You won't love every poet in the collection, but you'll find someone you didn't know before."
Last month, the company moved a step further into new electronic territory, introducing PoetrySpeaks.com, a site that aims to serve as a social networking venue for poets and poetry lovers and a business and marketing engine for poets and poetry publishers. Using a kind of iPod model, the site will sell poems in audio, video or text digital download format, as well as books, CDs and e-books. Poets can post their poems on the site, and tickets are available for online performances, slams and readings. Marie Macaisa, head of Sourcebooks MediaFusion, noted that the site "gives people more tools to go deeper and to experience poetry and form community around it."Raccah is happy with the results so far. "Every day the site's building. Already there have been visitors from 67 countries. The first upload of poetry was made before we went live."
A recent poetry title was The Tree That Time Built: A Celebration of Nature, Science, and Imagination by children's poet laureate Mary Ann Hoberman and Linda Winston. The project was a longtime dream of Hoberman; the collection includes poems from more than 100 contributors with recordings of many of them reading their work--all of which the company turned around in 10 months. Other publishers may have viewed the book as risky: the poems celebrate "the wonders of the natural world and encourage environmental awareness" and are a response to an "educational system co-opted by an anti-evolution agenda," Raccah said.
The next big poetry book is Poetry Speaks Who I Am, a "coming-of-age anthology" that will be published in the spring and is geared to middle-grade students. The poets involved in the book chose poems that most affected them at that age--participating poets include Billy Collins, Nikki Giovanni, Brad Leithauser and Molly Peacock. The selection is unlike other collections for this age group, Raccah said: "It's like the poems I put in my notebooks at that age: gut-wrenching, visceral, dark."