My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

148 PROVI S I aNAL I NSTITUTI ONS
tacle of the band to come. While reading series are more concentrated in
New York and the Bay area, many American cities have long-running local
reading series. The best source of information about readings in New York
City area is The New York City Poetry Calendar. which has been publishing a
monthly broadside of poetry events since 1977. The calendar lists about
300 different readings each month, has a print run of 7,500 and a readership
of well over 10,000.
Poetry readings range from small bar and cafe and book store and
community center series, with audiences ranging from ten to a hundred,
to poetry center readings that can draw from twenty to several hundred
people. Community reading series differ in several crucial ways from university-sponsored
series. These series often offer a forum for new and
unpublished local poets through "open mike" and scheduled readings.
The organizers of these series rarely receive any compensation for their
work-and often can run a series for incredibly little money: the money
from the door going to the poets plus a few hundred dollars a year for
publicity. State and local arts agencies will sometimes proVide such series
up to a few thousand dollars for featured readers, which allows for some
out-of-town poets to get travel money or a small fee of fifty to a few hundred
dollars. Poets & Writers, Inc., is particularly helpful in these contexts,
providing matching money for poets' fees. A community reading
series can run a year of readings on less than many institutions spend on
a single cultural event or speaker. That affects the spirit of the event. The
atmosphere at a local reading series is often charged and interactive. In
contrast, university series often suffer from a stifling formality. Unfortunately,
English departments have been slow to include and support local
readings series in their areas-despite the fact that these series can often
provide a lively point of entry into poetry for students new to its forms
and formats.
The past thirty years has been a time of enormous growth of small press
publishers. According to Loss Pequeno Glazier's statistics in Small Press:
An Annotated Guide, the number of magazines listed in Len Fulton's International
Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses has gone from 250 mostly
poetry magazines in 1965 to 700 in 1966 to 2,000 magazines in 140 categories
in 1976 to 4,800 magazines in 1990, of which about 40 percent
were literary.4 The importance of the small press for poetry is not
restricted to any aesthetic or indeed to any segment of poets. According
4. Loss Pequeno Glazier, Small Press, An Annotated Guide (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press,
1992), pp. 2-3.