dumbfoundry

Abroad, publishers would rather do novels and magazine editors would rather put out short fiction, reflecting the tastes of the reading public. In the Philippines the opposite is the case—no one writes novels because the public won’t read them, and out of the dozens of magazines that resulted from the publishing boom of the 1990s, only one or two consistently devote space to short fiction. However, there is always room for poetry, because it’s short, and won’t gobble up the kind of editorial space publishers would rather sell to advertisers. There’s a perception that a poem will always do as a space-filler in a pinch, and so, reinforced by the constant if rather haphazard appearance of verses in local publications, Filipino would-be poets crank ’em out by the dozen.

This entry was posted by Ivy on Wednesday, June 01, 2005 at 4:52 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.