Po-Book Publ'ing

Seems that over the last generation or so there have been five main options for a poet to publish a first book: 1. enter a contest, pay a fee; 2. submit to an "open submission period," pay a fee; 3. enter a slush pile (if the pub even still allows one); 4. make the poetry scene; 5. self-publish. It's impossible to see why self-publishing should be any less legitimate than the others, except maybe the slush pile route, but the odds there aren't as good as chasing a gut-shot straight. If you're going to self-publish poems in 2007, there are really only two ways to go: 1. make the book itself an art object; 2. publish it online—not because more people will read it (not necessarily), but because you can easily make minor revisions, you won’t have to pay for postage, and you won't have to cram under your bed all of the extra copies you're not sure how to get rid of.

Mentions / Tom Clark

Some fun reads, fun digging, the past few days over at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti, if you're into Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark. He makes an interesting observation on Clark's tendency toward "new words," basically getting the artifacts of the day, into his poems. Interesting because when I think of Clark's work, my impression - quite possibly wrongheaded - is one of so-called "poetic language." Always liked that Clark wasn't afraid to use it when he had to. Maybe what I'm thinking of is along the lines of the "tenderness" Latta mentions. If nothing else it speaks to the fact that Clark isn't going out of his way to use the "new words" and force them into poetry for its own sake. It's funny how the writing programs always rush to chop off the poetic language (largely for good reason, but amputation is always a drastic measure), when in fact you look through just about any contemporary poetry review/journal/zine and that language is nowhere to be found (and hasn't been since, what, fifty years? my lit mag knowledge doesn't go back nearly far enough to really know). You would just think that "poetic" would bear closer relation to the actual "poetry" of the day published. I'm not being fair, though: it's tough when public perception is close to a hundred years behind. And I shouldn't generalize about writing programs - there have always been some good ones, and many probably have at least one good faculty dude. But I'm off track. What about Clark. He's got his hands on the reigns. Let me just put down a poem of his from earlier this decade. A poem with "pants suits" and the Nasdaq, but also a "whole cosmic choir" brought to "whispering knees."

Why Hillary Became a Goddess on the Night
of Her Acceptance Speech

Because her hair looked cool
Because some of the best alien minds are watching developments
        closely
Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the
        masculine mills
Of production, yet wearing out six black pants suits
To bring us to acculturation and consequence
Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate for change
Sweeping through the gentle bacteria that make their home in her
        tireless campaign shoes
Because the worried market takes comfort in knowing what it
        must consume
Because choosing is not an issue except to the terrified cartoon
        eyeballs
In the take-out carton, wondering whose turn is first
Because some of the best alien minds consider "us" the shrill-voiced
        uncertainty factor
That threatens to bring the whole cosmic chorus to its
        whispering knees
Because Utopia is the island in time that forgot itself as it lifted
        its utensil
At the altar of its great consuming goddess No Memory, with her
        sadclown smile strained
Because her lofty position at the social fulcrum which is the
        mercy seat
Takes a terrific toll on black pants suit bottoms
Because some of the best alien minds are surveying developments in
        numb disbelief
Because 65% of the wood lice aren't losing any sleep at all
Because retreat in the face of even greater problems,
While not a bad idea, won't solve anything
Because acceptance and consumption are just what the market needs
To shake it out of its trance-like belief in what it thinks alien minds
        are saying
Because acceptance means acculturation to the masculine mills
Because happiness is merely their invention anyway, because Dame
        Pleasure is wearied
Of Earth, has taken to the air, faded, fluttered down in a still, snow-
Like inwardness to spill, scatter and be raked up with all the sibyl's
        other fallen leaves
In this enchanted-recount self-enclosure, like a small-town autumn
Where the commoners lie down nightly with what they have made
Happen, amid the bedded reeds of the vigilant event horizon
Because in this collapse its truths are received
By their souls, because of what this means to the odd weightlessness
        they feel
Because they have no way to grace their laurels
Beyond filling up the best alien minds, intent upon those peerless
        screens
With the black pants suits of our resident historian
Who's just keeping a chair among the blond clouds warm for them.

Onedit

One of the coolest online poezines, onedit has just released its eighth issue. My favorite part of this one has to be the poems from Sean Bonney's possibly brilliant, definitely hilarious Baudelaire in English. There's also a very nice, and very different, review section, e.g. the Jackson Mac Low review.

Updates

OK, so now have three BlogBooks completely posted:
1. The Once Invisible Conclusion (1996)
2. Pickpocket Poetica (1998-2002, mostly)
3. Sappho Does Hay(na)ku (2006)

Additionaly, there's the little blog I made for Vaughn, Only Pony, as well as my other little blog where I've been posting short poems by late poets, More: short poems on parade.

Funny Ted Berrigan/Marvin Bell Story

From a comment by Michael Lally over at Silliman's Blog yesterday: "...Ted was too popular for Bell's taste and his approach to poetry too original for Bell's goals, so Bell pushed for Ted to be not asked back, and he wasn't. Then Bell had the nerve to ask Ted to read with him just before Ted was scheduled to leave. Ted knew, as many of us did, that Bell had helped push him out, but Ted accepted and then graciously offered to read first. The reading was packed, standing room only, a lot of it for Ted. He wowed the crowd as only he could do, but he didn't stop where he normally would, and instead just kept going. It seemed like he ended up reading everything he'd ever written. By the time Bell got up to read, it seemed like hours later. Ted was smiling and acting like nothing unusual had happened, as Bell took to the podium and read to a handful of his students, everyone else, long since gone."

Point

A.L. Nielsen on Jerome Rothenberg and Christine A Meilicke's Jerome Rothenberg’s Experimental Poetry and Jewish Tradition.

Here's an early Rothenberg poem I've always liked ("always" meaning since 1994 when I first came across the piece in Clayton Eshelman's great little intro for poets volume Novices):

A LITTLE BOY LOST
by Jerome Rothenberg

They took me from the white sun and they
left me in the black sun, left
me to sleep among long rows of overcoats:
I was a city boy lost in the country, a
wound in my hand was all I knew about willows
Can you understand, do you hear the wide
sound of the wind against the cow's
side, and the crickets that run down my
sleeve, crickets full of the night, with
bodies like little black suns? try as I will
there is only this cry in my heart, this cry:
They took me from the white sun, and they
left me in the black sun, and I
have no way of turning now, no door

The New Blogger

Finally ditched the old homemade template and upgraded to the new Blogger. The bugs with Safari and the layout editor are a bummer, but oh well. Time to start modifying.

Blogbooks Underway

These days' other projects: posting, in reverse order, a couple of "blogbooks" because I can. Pickpocket Poetica and Sappho Does Hay(Na)Ku. Blogging—a nice technology for someone who at twenty-one swore he would never pay anyone to read his work and hence never entered the usual first-book contests (always thought I would make an exception or two, but it hasn't happened), and otherwise never had the ambition to submit a full collection anywhere.

Upto Blogwise

Blogwise what I'm upto is posting a short poem a day at M O R E: short poems on parade, which was first subtitled "short poems that work" before being changed to "poems twice their size" and then settling for the current subtitle. It's important that I detailed this here because.

Promiscuous Materials

Jonathan Lethem doing some very cool stuff (and allowing some very cool work to be done) with his Promiscuous Materials Project.

Read Time and Understand

This week Time magazine devotes two pages to the state of contemporary American poetry. The Poetry Foundation's John Barr gets to see his call for poets to write more for people who don't like poetry pretty well summarized in an otherwise poor article. The writer does manage to mention two of Barr's many critics, which would be great if one of them (the only one with a direct quote) weren't simply "a blogger." Ten seconds of research shows the quote to be from a MFA student named Jane. Nothing against Jane, but come on, a professional journalist has to do better. The writer implies that Barr wants poets to write more epics, because if there's anything that a reading public that doesn't want to read a sixty-four page volume, much less a one-page lyric, does want to read, it's a 500-page epic. (It's unclear if this is Barr's position or just the writer's clumsiness in not choosing a more precise term appropriate to the context, like "narrative".) Finally, ignoring the fact that the pages of Poetry magazine are typically littered with the same professors and MFA graduates that Barr disparages, and that the poems published have generally been the same textureless poems for at least a generation now, the writer closes the article with a silly prescription/preposterous scenario: "What poetry really needs is a writer who can do for it what Andy Warhol did for avant-garde visual art: make it sexy and cool and accessible without making it stupid or patronizing. When that writer arrives, cultural change will come swiftly, and relatively effortlessly. And Barr will be waiting, with a check." There's a better chance of Terrell Owens being voted SI's Sportsman of the Year.

First Words 2

Since Vaughn's first word was documented here, it's only fair that I mention Dash said his first word this past Sunday. Who knows, he may look through these posts someday. Driving to Nana's, having just pulled out onto route 25 from Long Meadow, clear annunciation from the back seat "dad-da." And then again a moment later, "dad-da". Glad he repeated it, since I was too focussed on the road to fully register the first saying. He has said the word again many times since. Not always with a clear reference though. Sometimes it's my appearance in the room. Sometimes it's mommy's. Sometimes it seems the word is simply uttered because it can be, or as an expression of complete joy.

The General