a great post by Gary Sullivan re SELLING POETRY BOOKS is here. very lucid. let's us all kindly posit possibilities other than books lanquishing or paying SPD's exorbitant fees or waiting for some college course to choose your book. he says he sold 100 copies of his comic Elsewhere over the weekend, as a commodity, not some poetic medicine. that is, he sold to people who saw the comic as economically viable rather than whatever fizzy water the blurbs might suggest. I mean those snotty noisome intellectual blurbs that make the book in question sound implausible rather than worth buying. like, why would Ron Silliman say Jessica Grim's book begins the 21st century??? I wish I had more eloquence at the moment, for this issue really bubbles.