Best-Selling Poetry and other Oxymorons
Bronwyn Lea has
recently put up a post on the above topic …
http://theconversation.edu.au/poetry-bestsellers-and-other-oxymorons-8164?But first what is an oxymoron … see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron
… basically a contradiction in terms … FUN run immediately comes to mind
But I was
interested to see what poetry was most popular in Oz (based on sales) … the
following text was taken from Bronwyn’s Post…
Neilsen
BookScan, which records book sales in Australia since 2002, reveals
twentieth-century Lebanese poet, Khalil Gibran, as the clear favourite.
Born in 1883 in
Bsharii in modern-day northern Lebanon, Gibran died of liver failure at the age
of 48 in New York. The Prophet, his first book, was published in 1923.
Its fame spread by word of mouth. By 1931 it had been translated into 20
languages, and in the 60s it was a hit with American youth culture. It’s been
popular ever since.
In the fictional
set up for The Prophet, Almustafa has lived for 12 years in the foreign
city of Orphalese and is heading home when a group of people stop him. He
offers to share his wisdom on an array of issues pertaining to life and the
human condition: love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work,
joy and sorrow, houses, crime and punishment, beauty, death and so on. The
chapter on marriage is perhaps the best known, as it’s a regular in wedding
ceremonies. A testament to love (and an argument against co-dependence), it
concludes:
Give your
hearts but not into each other’s keeping.
And stand
together yet not too near together: For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
For the
pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak
tree and they cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Thinking about
bestselling poetry, there’s one more quality worth mentioning.
Laughter - in terms of sales for an individual poetry title, the second ranked poetry title in Australia is Michael Leunig’s Poems (Viking 2004).
Which goes to
show that while Australian readers like thinking about god, they have retained
a sense of humour.
My comment …
My copy of ‘The Prophet’ contains illustrations … and Michael
Leunig books rely on illustrations for effect … perhaps another important
consideration for success is to consider multi-medium work.
… and in that regard I have just come to
understand a new term –
ekphrasis … a verbal or written description of
a visual presentation … see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis
No comments:
Post a Comment