I am an expert
That is the idea that a blog should be sending. I’d say that Seth Godin is right: when we have options, we will choose the best, the expert. The Jack-of-all-trades is only useful if it’s all we’ve got.
There has been some discussion about Read Write Poem via email amongst it’s contributorial staff about possibly adding something in. I don’t mean to say much about it as I don’t know that the final determination will be and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. As a site, we have (mostly they have) put together a really fantastic resource on the art of poetry and of being a poet. The arts of poetry and poeming (if that isn’t a word, it is now). It may take nearly a dozen of us, but we’re an expert over there. The challenge is to be an expert in what you can be an expert in, and not spread yourself into too many areas and becoming a generalist.
Most blogs suffer from the generalist problem (even mine). It’s a difficult line to straddle between focus and interest. Most of us blog about whatever we want: what’s going on in our lives, the experiences we have and think the rest of you should know about, ideas and insanities, the minutia of life. The reason we can do this is that we are not a wikipedia article. We are people and while our relationship may be very one-sided, this medium is still two people connecting. People are not singular, expert entities, with only one topic. We are like ogres, we have layers*. People who are that focused, sure we head their way when we have a question, but we don’t hang about with them and converse. They are useful to us and otherwise ignored.
So how do we weigh that against Seth’s comment? Be an expert in the one area you cannot be contradicted in: the art of being you.
*I’ve only seen the first Shrek, and that is the only thing I remember from the movie. But it’s a funny thought-ogres.
I suppose this means I’m a “self-published” poet
During a conversation with a friend the other day (who, sadly, is not a blogger - no link-love) my desire to teach poetry was briefly discussed. Due to my desire to avoid interaction with children, this absolutely means I must have a PhD and teach at the collegiate level and I remarked that I would prefer to teach at the graduate level because that means I would be working with people who might actually care. She suggested this would require me to be a published poet and I should get to work on that. I don’t mean to go into a discussion of whether I am, in fact, good enough to do any of those things, but rather, focus on the culture of poetry, they “why” of poetry.
As I imagine most of you do, I read daily- many, many books of poetry as well as many fine blogs showcasing poetry. In addition to the purely enjoyable experience of language, it is the conversation of ideas that I truly love. I’m not just a poet, but also a philosopher. I voraciously consume information in this media-rich world: science, culture, news, law, technology… all of it is interesting. Again, not just the simple experience, but the interplay of ideas driving the ephemera of expression. I would say that I have a love of ideas and most especially the ideas of poetry. The relation of images, narrative, language- the evocative and illustrative nature of a communication that transcends prose; the attempts to discuss experientially. The act of poetry reminds of a scene near the end of “Pushing Tin,” where Billy Bob Thornton takes John Cusack to be blown like dolls in the wake of a landing jet to experience something that words cannot convey. This, to me, is the essence of what poetry does with words.
I write to participate in that conversation of ideas. I grant that I don’t write things that will drastically change the world and, honestly, if I can touch just one person and bring something of interest to their day (as cliche as that may sound), then I consider that a success, perhaps a small one, but a success nonetheless. This is why I want to teach poetry to people who care about it, to bring this conversation to more people, to people that may not have realized it’s out here to be a part of. And to do that, I must be published.
I’ve never seriously considered seeking publication. Among other reasons, I’ve never been at all certain that my work is good enough, not necessarily just to published somewhere, but in terms of my own satisfaction with the permanence of a poem, with having something fixed, immutable, and out of my control. Faced now with this notion that publication is required, I have a bit of a dilemma. In order to publish (admittedly, this is a bit of a simplification) I have to treat poems as commodities, keeping them secret, set aside, portioning them out to people in the hopes of seeing them in print. I don’t have the freedom to put the poems out there, out here, and let the ideas freely spread. Most publications would consider poems posted here to be published. I disagree with the rational behind that sort of viewpoint.
The argument that people would not buy journals if they could read poems for free isn’t a very good argument. It is an extreme minority of poets that make a living as poets and not as teachers, performers, or vice presidents of insurance companies. Couple that to the fact that most journals pay poorly, if at all, and the journals, the magazines, are clearly the ones trying to get benefit for nothing. Authors are getting nothing but “publication credit” and two contributor copies. But what, it might be asked, about name recognition. Surely putting your name in front of the audience counts for something? Historically, yes. There would have been no other way to get to the audience but through periodicals. And yet media has come a long way from that point. Communication is not limited to the print / mail paradigm, yet that is the paradigm that the poetry journal is based on. Along with the many other benefits the internet provides, it allows communities to be built as if place had no effect. In both providing universally (or nearly so) available content and content that is available asynchronously, the entirety of communication, the entirety of marketing, has been changed to reflect this new method of interaction. “Publication credit,” it seems, has not. By their count, I would have self-published 97* poems or poem-groups in 2007 on this blog. I somehow doubt that would carry much weight on a CV.
Some journals, many of which are online, do not consider a personal blog to be “publishing.” I consider this a much more reasonable viewpoint: a greater acceptance of the shift in community from the face-to-face interactions to what I might flippantly call facebook-to-facebook interactions. In the same manner someone printing broadsheets for friends or a workshop would not be considered publishing, neither should personal blogs because they serve the same function-a direct communication with peers, friends and colleagues. And, much as the poet gets marketing value from being published, so too are journals getting marketing value from poets talking about journals. Marketing gurus Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod spend a lot of their time talking about how traditional marketing, the producer telling the story, has fallen in the face of the internet. It has been replaced, in much the same way content production has been, by conversations between people. As Seth Godin would say, something being “remarkable” enough to talk about; something becoming a “social object,” in Hugh Macleod’s lingo. There is something to be said for the cachet of the elite garnered from the poetry journal but what is it effective for? Is it effective for the poet? I would suggest no, econonomically or in the realm of ideas. Readership of poetry is abysmally low in any form of print, most journals don’t even market to a general audience, but only through other journals. At my local Borders, they carry Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Columbia Review. The last two, I’m certain, because they are relatively local. My local Barnes & Noble does not carry any. Any poem I hypothetically had printed in something like the Beloit Poetry Journal or AGNI would be read by the bare handful of people living in my area that happened to have subscriptions, or to the bare handful of people who read this blog that may happen to have subscriptions to poetry journals. It would not realistically get my name out there very well; there would be no “social” to the “object.”
Meanwhile, slaving away with no desire but to communicate, I’ve had about 3000 page views since this blog opened at the end of July (not counting the nearly 500 just searching for the quote from “Across the Universe”). Not many views. It’s probably a much smaller number that had any real interest. It’s probably a drastically smaller number that care or read more than once. But unlike print, it isn’t just about how many people subscribe, it’s how many people fit into that “social” sphere.** While print journal subscriptions generally shrink, all I have to do to get more, and more involved, readers is to be more remarkable. Provide a better product for the people who are looking for it. More and better poems, more and better commentary, more and better involvement. More and better ideas in the conversation. I cannot help but think this is the better view. Don’t misunderstand, I read a few journals myself and I hardly ever read anything of length online; there is something to be said for the tactile involvement of a book, the texture of the paper under the texture of the poem. That is a level of involvement that I think will keep print around for a very long time.
The dilemma is not just whether I should be published or not. It is a fundamental question of how I should treat poetry, how I should be involved in Poetry, and, by extension, how we should all be involved with Poetry and it with us. There is no simple answer and I don’t know which way I’ll end up going: selling out for the CV or not. For the time being, I’ll be holding off on posting much poetry here, my own anyway.
* Yes, I had to count.
** For more on this thought, I suggest reading Hugh MacLeod’s how big is your audience? [revisited]
Silly PostScript: This was about three hours in the writing and there may be typos or poorly worded sections that I missed. If you see any of them, let me know.
Just shameful
I don’t think I am alive: Taslima
Monday, 31 December , 2007, 17:27Kolkata: Confined to a ’safe house’ somewhere in New Delhi and shut out from the world except for phone calls and emails, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen will ring in 2008 in a no man’s land of fading hope, despair and crushing loneliness.“I am only breathing. I don’t think I am alive like you are. Can anybody live like this? It was beyond my imagination that in a secular democracy this can happen to a writer,” Nasreen told IANS from her room in an undisclosed New Delhi destination on New Year’s Eve.
Nasreen, who has been living under state protection since November 2007 when she was removed from Kolkata after street riots over her “anti-Islam” writings, has been virtually told by Indian officials that that she could either continue to stay in the national capital confined in a room or leave the country.
This reinforces my belief that there is no secular country. They all seem to be full of rabid religious nutsos bent on world domination.
(via Poetry Hut)
Paper is the enemy of words.
Over at …eats bugs. there is a post about a speech Larry Lessig gave at TED. Go there, watch the video. He says please, I will issue imperatives. But open it in a new window, I’m not done here. So then I went over to www.TED.com where there are so many videos on such an amazing array of topics, I don’ think I can begin to pull it all in. It is awe-inspiring. It puts me in mind of how Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulu begins:
…Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality… the we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
It’s rather refreshing to think there are enoughs others out there, enough for this conference to exist, who find the madness exciting. Along with Larry Lessig’s talk about copyright, Malcolm Gladwell talks about pasta sauce, Steven Pinker talks about veiled threats, and Erin McKean talks about the nature of the dictionary and the English Language. On the one hand, she gave an eminently quotable talk but on the other she seemed so excited about her topic (not an entirely bad thing) it didn’t seem reality could keep up with her. But you have to give mad props to anyone who uses the word “synecdochically.” The title of this post is a quote from her speech which I’ve embedded below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY]
For the scholarly inclined
(via World of Psychology)
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.
So I went to this thing…
And it was billed as a Poetry Slam. It was a bit overbilled: no twinkies for the prize, no raucous drunk crowd of judges, no whooping or hollering or booing or snapping or feminine hissing or masculine grunting, or, in fact, much of anything at all. Four poets mumbling: cliches of Minnesota, religion, bipolar disorder, and sexual assault (that rhymed) and one poet rocking the house with an amusing piece about ice cream. Doesn’t everyone love ice cream? I wonder, as I read more poetry, if I am a poetry snob. That I know about such poets as Cristin O’keefe Aptowitz, Taylor Mali, Patricia Smith, etc, am I ruined for truly amateur regional poetry? Am I just too familiar with the best of the spoken poetry world or am I too judgmental, too critical, too… me.
As a note, I did not compete. But, judging from that crowds response, it would not likely have been well-received had I.
Robert Hass on the Gift Economy
Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.
Video: The Gift Economy of Poetry
by Robert Hass
From the inaugural Poets Forum, presented by the Academy of American Poets on October 20, 2007, at Marymount College in New York City. On the second panel of the day, Robert Hass, Galway Kinnell, Nathaniel Mackey, and Ellen Bryant Voigt answered questions about “Aesthetic Lineage and Originality” from critic and founding editor of Parnassus, Herbert Leibowitz.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbUbEA-nWRM]
The list grows long.
Sometimes, hypocrisy would be comfortable. The downside to supporting freedom as a political ideal, is that it has to apply to everyone. Even when you have to support the right of sick, deluded, bigots to spout their hateful nonsense. That utterly objectionable Phelps female should be set free and then publicly reviled by everyone.
Shirley Phelps-Roper, you are a demented fuckwit.
(Courtesy of Eugene Volokh)
Viscera / Ephemera
Early morning thoughts on death
I have no idea why, on this morning made earlier by the time change, I was thinking about death. Specifically mine. I have no reason to believe it’ll be happening soon, but whatever. Now, get ready to look at me as if I’m nuts. I want to live forever. Not in the crazy Highlander sort of way, but really. I would love to see how humanity changes as time goes, how our cultures and societies change to survive themselves. How people view choice, consequences, responsibilities when their next ten-thousand years is on the line. These ideas fascinate me and I would love to see the answers unfold. That being said, I realize it is unlikely. Science, at the moment, isn’t capable of making this happen, so, in however many years it will be, I will die. I don’t really fear death. As an atheist (more or less) I think it’s just the end, done, over, blah. I imagine dieing may be unpleasant. The only tragedy there is that I will not be able to use the experience in my writing. Then there’s this corpse sitting around. I don’t like the idea of having my body hermetically sealed away and rotting. I don’t really like the idea of being turned to ash, either. I heard once about some Scandinavian country (I think) turning bodies into fertilizer and planting trees in ‘em. I like that one, and it prompted this poem (still a tad rough):
Viscera / Ephemera
The perfect blossom is a rare thing,
you could spend your life looking for one
and it would not be a wasted life.
The Last Samurai
Such silly flesh
for such luminous minds:
white steel of the skeleton,
red cords of the muscle.
We are all born of star matter,
conceived in heat and passion.
A fusion explosion kept
by a web of neuron and synapse
contained and focused.
Like a lantern,
I shine light in these pages.
These bits on the screen
like shadows in Hiroshima.
After the slow burn,
when I am carbon, salt,
and assorted heavy elements,
take and make of me a cherry tree:
blossoms beautiful and ephemeral.
“They are all perfect.”
NaBloPoMo Quickie
To sum up a worldview in six words is a challenge, but here we go:
Truth by Science, honour by art.
-courtesy a t-shirt by Express
In what is, likely, a vain attempt to start a meme-like propagation of the question, what t-shirt best conveys your philosophy, oh you few readers? Comments space available for slogans or permalinks. Tune in next time, where I may discuss how boring Robert Frost is, or when I have time to write the post.
