Behind a table on the second floor of September\u2019s New York Art Book Fair, four pink posters with big block letters announced the presence of the newest entrant to the city\u2019s independent
publishing community: \u201cPOETRY CORP.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poetry Corp. was at the fair, which is run annually by the nonprofit bookstore, publisher, and distributor Printed Matter and features more than 250 exhibitors, to make its official debut. Calling itself an \u201cinformal mutual-aid publishing cooperative,\u201d Poetry Corp. comprises five New York City small presses\u2014Belladonna* Collaborative, Futurepoem, Litmus Press, Winter Editions, and World Poetry\u2014and sees its mission as \u201cinvesting in the future of experimental publishing.\u201d (All but Winter Editions are also incorporated as nonprofits.)<\/p>\n
Miriam Atkin, an editor at Litmus as well as its main grant writer, says she hopes that the resource sharing enabled by the collaboration\u2014from joint press lists to shared staff to streamlined printing\u2014can sustain the presses for the long run. \u201cThese more underground markets can\u2019t survive unless the different purveyors of this work are doing it all together, side by side,\u201d Atkin says.<\/p>\n
On this count, Poetry Corp. reflects the prevailing ethos, and practices, of its corner of the publishing world. In the open-plan studio in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where they share a single book-lined space, boundaries between the presses are thin.<\/p>\n
The impulse to collaborate is strong in the studio, says E. Tracy Grinnell, cofounder and publisher of Litmus, whose list includes avant-garde heavyweights Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian. This spirit manifests in day-to-day cooperation and in more concrete ways: Litmus and Belladonna*, for instance, have a history of copublication. Some of Poetry Corp.\u2019s presses also share a staffer, Theadora Walsh, as well as an intern.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re taking cues from how labor is already functioning in this space,\u201d says James Loop, publicity director at World Poetry and a Belladonna* alum, who came up with the name Poetry Corp. as a tongue-in-cheek joke.<\/p>\n
As the presses develop a collective identity in the public eye\u2014what World Poetry and Winter Editions publisher Matvei Yankelevich describes as \u201can extended family of publications\u201d\u2014Poetry Corp. hopes to open up more possibilities for small and nonprofit publishing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much overlap in terms of authors and editors and translators, and there\u2019s so much we can do working together,\u201d Grinnell says. \u201cWe\u2019re not in competition with each other\u2014we need each other, actually.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poetry Corp. joins a growing cadre of cooperatives, including the recently formed Stable Book Group, that are looking to share resources and leverage buying power at a challenging time for indie presses, which are still reeling from the abrupt closure, last spring, of Small Press Distribution. What\u2019s more, the cooperation comes at a moment of anxiety for nonprofit presses, when funds from the National Endowment for the Arts have dried up and the future of state and city arts councils, which provide many such presses with the bulk of their funding, is in doubt. So it made sense, Atkin says, to think about alternative models of sustaining the literature that has a tight-knit community surrounding it but little market power: poetry, translation, and experimental works.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn\u2019t a very strong philanthropy culture around small press publishing and poetry publishing,\u201d Yankelevich adds. \u201cWith family foundations, it\u2019s very difficult for small presses to break in.\u201d He hopes Poetry Corp.\u2019s \u201cconsortium\u201d model\u2014which gives donors the option \u201cto support a whole ecosystem\u201d\u2014can help them tap into new wells of support.<\/p>\n
Loop locates Poetry Corp.\u2019s conceptual origins in the free-spirited poetry scene of New York in the 1960s and \u201970s, when what\u2019s known as the mimeograph revolution allowed for an profusion of small-scale, noncommercial publishing. \u201cI hope Poetry Corp. can reconnect with that anarchic, improvisatory spirit,\u201d he says. \u201cMy hope would be that the strange and slightly ramshackle world of poetry publishing can be part of the appeal of poetry. The labor of poetry, in a sense, is poetic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t A version of this article appeared in the 11\/24\/2025 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: poetic justice\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Behind a table on the second floor of September\u2019s New York Art Book Fair, four pink posters with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[586,1508,2879,2868,2878,2871,2869,2870,2872,2877,2880,9,56,63,65,64,2874,2881,2873,2875,2876],"class_list":["post-48397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-amazon","tag-amazon-com","tag-book","tag-book-publishing","tag-books","tag-digital-books","tag-e-books","tag-ebooks","tag-financial-reporting","tag-houghton-mifflin-harcourt","tag-kindle","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-penguin","tag-publishers-weekly","tag-random-house","tag-simon-schuster","tag-simon-and-schuster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}