Interview with
Dominique Raccah
Interview by Jenna Glatzer
Dominique
Raccah is the founder, president, and publisher of Sourcebooks, a leading
independent publisher located outside of Chicago. Today, Sourcebooks
publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Poetry Speaks is a remarkable
book-- it contains the works of 42 poets, including 3 CDs of recordings of the
poets reading their poetry, biographies, photographs, original manuscripts and
letters, and essays by contemporary poets.
There are 99 recorded poems and 210 included in the book,
featuring nineteenth and twentieth-century poets such as W.B. Yeats, Walt
Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Raccah first envisioned Poetry
Speaks in 1997 as an interactive, engaging way to experience spoken and written
poetry.
Why did you decide to start
Sourcebooks?
Books change lives. As a child, I was fascinated by stories and wanted very much
to be in this business. Like others before me, I was told the common
wisdom that no one ever got a job in publishing (not true, by the way) and as a
result took a long aside before finding a way. And in my case, rather than
first getting a job inside the industry, I started my own firm. I started
Sourcebooks originally as a financial services information provider. We
did books for bankers and brokers and other financial services professionals.
But start-up companies tend to be shaped more by your dreams than by any market
realities, so Sourcebooks kept developing books in areas that were and are
fascinating to the folks who are Sourcebooks. So, for example, we chose to
spend five years and a great deal of money developing a poetry book, after being
told repeatedly that poetry does not sell. But poetry touches us deeply.
Auden said famously that "Poetry makes nothing happen" (it's a line in
the poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats). But I think, in fact, poetry creates a
tremendous shift in the soul. It creates a sense of stillness, this place
of understanding that makes everything happen, perhaps.
In 1999, Publishers Weekly named Sourcebooks the
second-fastest-growing small publisher in the country. To what do you attribute
this success?
Book publishing is at heart a craft and while craftspeople need their essential
resources, they often don't need to be part of a huge conglomerate. In
fact, large corporate structures can get in the way of the artistic and creative
component of our craft. Strong independent publishers, like Sourcebooks,
can be more imaginative and creative; have the time, desire and need to be more
caring; and are more apt to stick with an author and to keep his/her work alive.
Sourcebooks has been successful because of our remarkable relationships with our
authors and with our customers.
Tell me what you mean by "author-centered"
publishing.
We focus on authorship and on authors' careers. We publish fewer books and
focus on creating books with strong editorial, packaging and production.
We then market very aggressively. Twenty percent of our company is marketing and
publicity, so out of 56 people we have about 11 people in those departments. We
believe that the most important thing you can do is make the book work in the
marketplace. That needs to happen for the author. Fundamentally, the job
of a publisher is to bring an author (and his/her work) to their readers.
That requires two clear centers of effort. The first is in the work.
The work has to be exemplary in its own category. So if it's a history
book, it needs to be a great history book and if it's a beauty book, it should
be a fabulous beauty book. It's much harder to create momentum for
mediocre work. That doesn't mean that good books don't fail. Sadly,
they do. But one has a better chance with a strong book. And then
the publisher and author take the book to market and frankly that's where the
action is.
Poetry Speaks must have been a huge undertaking.
How did you find the recordings and get permission to use them?
We started working on Poetry Speaks almost five years ago now. All
of the process took longer than we had expected but the most complicated part of
the work involved finding and licensing the recordings. We really wanted
to find extraordinary recordings and to create the book around the recordings.
We wanted Poetry Speaks to preserve for us an important part of our
cultural history. Our audio editor, Rebekah Presson Mosby, had experience
in this area and was integral in locating the many different sources needed to
create a work of this scope. The Library of Congress, which sponsors the
U.S. Laureate program, was also tremendously helpful and had many recordings of
poets from the 20th century. Our project editors then spent time working
on the negotiations in order to secure the rights. For almost every
recording that you hear there are at minimum three sets of permissions involved.
Why are so many of the recordings different from the
published poems?
Poets are constant revisers and may be revising their works throughout their
lives. Also sometimes these poems were recited from memory and as such,
some stanzas may have been forgotten. Another reason might be that
presenting for the ear is different than presenting on the page. So, for
example, some poets shortened, or changed sections of the work so it would sound
better when spoken. One example of this can be seen in Ogden Nash's
recording of his poem "I Do, I Will, I Have." The first stanza
of the printed work reads:
"How wise I am to have instructed the butler to instruct
the first footman to instruct the second footman to
instruct the doorman to order my carriage."
In the recording however, you hear Nash swallow two lines to compress the first
stanza to:
"How wise I am to have instructed...
the doorman to order my carriage..."
It seems to me that he's performing for the audience and he wants to get to the
punchline, make the poem as active as possible, and he's creating some momentum
in that opening stanza so it doesn't quite go on as long with the footman.
Please keep in mind that these are just theories about why so many of the
written poems differ from the readings that the poets actually give in Poetry
Speaks. But part of the fun in working with this book is comparing the performed
version of "classic" poems with their accepted printed versions.
Was it easy to verify the authenticity
of the recordings?
Absolutely. There are 99 poems recorded in Poetry Speaks but only one recording
stands in question: Walt Whitman reading a small piece of 'America.' The
question arises because the recording seems to be of high quality compared to
the other poets of his time (Tennyson and Browning), who were also recorded on
Edison's wax cylinder. Also because the recording changed hands enough
times that no documentation exists to unequivocally prove it was Whitman.
We know that Edison intended to record Whitman and that Whitman intended to be
recorded. You can reach your own conclusion when you listen to it.
How did you select which poets to include?
Thankfully, we had an outstanding Advisory Board, which, among others, consisted
of Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove, two former U.S. Poet Laureates, Dana Gioia (poet
and author of Can Poetry Matter?) and Elise Paschen, who just recently
stepped down as the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America.
With their guidance, we were able to put together a set of criteria and create a
collaborative, challenging, creative atmosphere that lent itself to finding the
forty-two poets in Poetry Speaks. The three criteria we did set up were
that first, a majority of the board had to agree on each selection, but in most
cases that was not necessary as we usually came to a unanimous agreement.
Second, the poet had to be deceased, because we wanted to examine the poet's
entire body of work. So, for example, at a very late date in this process
Gwendolyn Brooks passed away and we rushed to include her.
And last, and probably most obvious, recordings of the poet
reading their own work had to exist (which meant that we could not include Hart
Crane or Emily Dickinson for whom no recordings existed).
Do you believe there are contemporary poets whose
voices can rival these "classics?"
Although we could not include the poems of contemporary poets because we couldn't
examine the full body of their work, we certainly feel that there are many great
poets working today. For that reason, we chose to include them in Poetry
Speaks by asking them to compose original essays on each classic poet.
So, for example, you have Richard Wilbur writing about Robert Frost, or Billy
Collins writing about Ogden Nash, or Seamus Heaney writing about the qualities
of Yeats' voice. We feel that if this book does what we want it to do,
then we will bring more people to poetry, both classic and contemporary.
What is the difference between reading a poem and
hearing it read by the author?
Poets bring to their performances that unique qualification of being the creator
of the work and that changes almost everything. When you hear Frost
reading, or you hear Auden reading, you can actually watch them measuring their
work as they perform it. They're thinking about it in a different way than
you or I might. This opened whole worlds of understanding for me.
Take, for example, "An Ex-Judge at the Bar," by Melvin B. Tolson, who
reads the work with the energy and authority of a preacher, or Edna St. Vincent
Millay whose voice is so delicate, yet is able to convey the poison she feels
for her ex-love. Our reading of a poem is often stilted and
unknowledgeable. The poet brings an authority and intimacy that only the
creator can have.
What was the most exciting discovery you made while
putting this project together?
I loved rediscovering poets that I had once known (for example, Auden or
Langston Hughes). And discovering them in new ways. So, for example,
hearing Auden read Musee des Beaux Arts, one of my favorite poems, was a magical
moment. And listening to Langston Hughes' explanation of how he came to
write The Negro Speaks of Rivers when he was 18 years old on a train on
his way to visit his father in Mexico was another great joy.
But I also loved discovering new poets that I had never really
heard or read before. So Melvin Tolson, Theodore Roethke (listen to My
Papa's Waltz) or Muriel Rukeyser (I heartily recommend Waiting for Icarus if only
for the last line:)
"I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this."
In each of these poets, I rediscovered the sheer joy of poetry. And I hope
you will find poets you will love here as well.
I found it interesting that E.E. Cummings never liked
the way his name was written in lowercase. Why was it so?
The decision to use lower case letters for his name was made by his publisher as
a means of marketing Cummings' poetic style. Cummings, who seldom used
capitals in his poems, nevertheless did not write his name that way and
therefore, didn't appreciate the notoriety he gained from that signature.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Have fun with it. Poetry is a form that should be enjoyed (and not
sparingly). Whether you know nothing of poetry, but have always desired to
learn about it, or are an expert and are always looking for more information,
whatever your understanding of poetry is, our hope is that Poetry Speaks will
increase both your enjoyment and appreciation.
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THE BOOK BY CLICKING HERE.
Visit Sourcebooks online at www.sourcebooks.com.
