A Place Built By Poets for Poets

 Jessica Kassiwabara. A Place Built by Poets for Poets. Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2022, p. 15-17.

In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from ope mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn't know of and weren't recieving submissions from these poets. "I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books," says Sims.  That's when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization though which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript and finding a publisher.  In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: they couldn't find poetry books at the library.  "I didn't believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section," says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. 

COMMENT

I've actually been meaning to write an article on how clueless librarians are about collecting poetry.  I'm pretty sure there are librarian poets, but whenever I want a book of poetry, the library never has it and I have to request a purchase.  What seems to baffle librarians is, poetry communities are localized, so that different places have different influential poets.  In order to get their books, you have to buy from small presses.  Instead of supporting poetry, libraries seem to have eliminated subscriptions to literary journals, or they only get a few Big Names and not the local ones that matter.  For people who like to read and write poetry, it's very, very frustrating.