Saturday, November 17, 2007

numbers-watching

I'll have more to say about recent movements on the happily reappeared Say Something Wonderful & my own comments box, but for the nonce, I'm watching the numbers as the days count down to the release of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. I have little idea what those "sales ranking" numbers on amazon.com actually mean – I recall someone saying that if you buy a single copy, you can get your book to jump a few thousand spaces – but it's worth noting that Poem of a Life has made its category's bestsellers list. Here's what the top few books in the sub-sub-sub-sub-category "Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > United States > Poetry" look like as of about 10.45 this morning:
1) Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

2) Garrison Keillor, Good Poems

3) Robert Hass, Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000 [another Shoemaker & Hoard book, mark you]

4) Mary Karr, The Liar's Club: A Memoir

5) TS Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition

6) Louise Glück, Averno: Poems

7) Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

8) Yr humble blogger, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky
That's what I call a pleasant Saturday morning surprise.

3 comments:

Amy said...

That's a good-lookin' list!

NEG said...

just ordered my copy...yr numbers should be jumpin' again...

William Keckler said...

That's great, Mark! The book is going to be huge...I have no doubts. Now that your subject is generally conceded to be THE REAL PROGENITOR of langpo, you have a built-in army ready to put feet to the book. No army can stop a Progenitor whose time has come. I think Hugo said something like that...eh without the word "progenitor" however...but he just forgot...how do you get all your word verifications to be dirty words like this...this is some sort of sick fetish of yours innit? alright, i'll type it though the images flashing through my head right now are felonious in several southern states and many Islamic countries...