Poetry based on Best Selling Books

For Unconscious Words – Bestselling Edition, I created ekphrastic poems based on the top ten bestselling books between 2011 to 2021.  It sounded simple, pluck the best sellers from the shelves.  But determining what books were “bestsellers” let alone the number one best seller per year proved more difficult than anticipated.  Look on Amazon and immediately encounter top selling books like The Hungry Caterpillar and Giraffes Can’t Dance.  I eliminated the children’s books as well as non-fiction best sellers to simplify the process, that still not only resisted simplification, but clear winners.  To that end, I cobbled together the mostly ten best selling books based on the book’s appearance on multiple lists and from number of copies sold. 

 

Armed with my list of ten, I sought out copies sold through used book outlets. 

 

Books don’t always stay with their original owners.  I was interested in the life of the book. Like old film stars, where do these celebrated and envied objects end up after their first rush of fame?  They land in Goodwill re-sale stores just past women’s wear; shelved alphabetically in used books stores; randomly displayed on the street, shoved in boxes at yard sales, or stuffed into Free Little Libraries. I found my bestsellers in used book outlets in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California. (which are designated Book Towns). The hunt was part of the immersive project. Who stacks the books?  Who unpacks the donated boxes? Are the books all jumbled together under fiction?  Are they alphabetical?  Are they organized by seller?  Are there multiple copies of My Brilliant Friend because the book club members acquired the book, but didn’t feel compelled to keep it?

 

Used book outlets serve as an author’s memento mori. Sure, the book was once number one, displayed face out on an industry approved new book store.  But now the book is wedged into a shelf adjacent to a copy of Once Upon a Marigold hoping for a second chance, a second or third or fourth reading.  Secondhand books are not tracked by any lists, bestselling or not.  Like persistent ghosts, they continue on, well past numbers, much like ideas.

To create the poems, I used the same technique as I did with  Unconscious Words, the Poet as Scribe. I searched through the book recording the words that “jump out”.  I recorded about a page of words, then, using just those words, with a few helping words like a, the, an – I created about five to seven poems from each book.

 

Some of the best sellers I had read, some I had not and one I knew about because my husband watched the show (yes, Game of Thrones). The question is, do single words convey and illuminate an author’s intention, even after uncoupled from the novel itself?  You can judge, I’m just the scribe.

 

 

Mouth whispers cares

An unattractive idea:

Anything inside is sweet

 

A typewriter job

Women on deadline finished rocking

Because to yell  anything good

Is to Know the damned, a burning look

Shows up, grateful for the car

 

In the Cadillac

Everything is easy