In case you’ve not heard, Border’s is having financial woes. You may not care since they turned into a big-box store, but I always had a soft spot for the place since it started out as an indie shop in Ann Arbor oh-so-long ago.

A few of the reasons they are having trouble: Costco, Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon. Just the other day, I perused the book area at Target and was surprised to find Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. His writing jumped into the mainstream Main Street rather quickly. I ended up buying The Glass Castle, which I’ll be returning. I read part of it, and thought maybe I am done with memoirs if I have to read another I-grew-up-with-a-hard-life-and-we-did-wacky-things-with-thanksgiving-turkeys stories. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is my favorite memoir, because she writes in a low-key way about some of the worst life experiences possible.

But, I digress.

Costco becoming a bookseller shocked me only a bit. However, Ken Burns and Bill Clinton having book signings at Costco surprised me.

Naturally, I wonder how all of this affects poets. We already have a snowball’s chance to appear in large bookstores. I really can’t imagine a poetry book being sold in Costco unless it’s by Maya Angelou, Jimmy Carter, or Mattie Stepanek.

Of course, that thinking leads me back to thinking about poetry distribution. Maybe we poets need to do a better job of writing with an audience in mind?

Do you write poems with a specific audience in mind?