pamphlets, chapbooks, books

Remember that your words don’t create a recycling problem until they’re physically printed.

book as handheld device

Your poetry being printed only makes it more portable, not more important.

sales quotas

One way to cut back on the superfluous poetry books being published would be to make it a rule that you have to sell 75% of the print run before you can publish another title. For print-on-demand books, the rule would be you must sell 250 copies (not counting extended family) before you can perpetrate another title.

books and such

I went into a bookstore but couldn’t recognize any of the merchandise for sale therein.

debris reader

A poet is a vagrant reader, a debris reader: Cereal boxes, fortune cookies, instruction manuals, pill bottle labels, junk mail, coupons, ticket stubs. Any scrap of printed matter, no matter how inconsequential, may yield a revelation.