Here Comes Nobody

Hate to take pleasure in another person's misery, but I couldn't help but get a small kick out of this notice regarding the failed Here Comes Everybody anthology. Already mentioned my annoyance with the massive amounts of poet interviews online and in little magazines in last year's Top Ten Poetry Pet Peeves (which is already dated, jeez the cars in PoetryLand move fast these days), but this is too much: poets willing to give these interviews online, where anyone can search and find them, but balking at them being set down in print? What are they afraid of? Was the interview just an online fling not substantial enough for the page? Or's it that these interviews aren't sanitized the way many are before they're printed? (Recently at work we typeset a book with a long Noam Chomsky "interview" in which it seemed half of the answers were completely rewritten at second pass—why not stop calling it an interview at that point and make it another essay? Because it "allows" for a relatively more casual tone? Academics make me nauseous even when geniuses are involved.) Are these poets afraid to see their scrappy little interviews "legitimized" in print? Isn't this all just part of the continuing privileging of "the book" prevalent in Academia, further evidence that PoetryLand is primarily a lonesome, self-important, and hence pathetic, division of the big A? You're never a real poet until you publish a real book. It doesn't matter if the book's published by a friend, or on the suggestion of a former professor or mentor, or if you had to pay someone to read your manuscript—that's somehow more legitimate than doing the work yourself. Whatever.

HERE COMES NOBODY

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
Uh, probably "The Celebration of the Lizard." Uh, in eighth grade my friend Pat gave me an extra copy he had of The Doors, Absolutely Live. Uh, that was on it. Uh, that counts, right? "Lions in the street and roaming / Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming / A beast caged in the heart of a city. / The body of his mother rotting in the summer ground / He fled the town. / He went down south and crossed the border / Left the chaos and disorder / Back there, over his shoulder. " Uh, how can you not love that when you're a thirteen-year-old boy? Plus, years later, I discovered it was still pretty good if you recited it in the voice of Mickey Mouse (my Donald Duck's OK, too, but of limited vocabulary).

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?
Excuse me, but I'm peerless. Anyway, I read Time and Money and Consumer Reports and The New Yorker.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?
Really? Why?

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Tu Fu. Li Po. That's it. I once had a dream, like when I was nineteen and just started reading poetry and shit (you know, like Schoppenhaur and Nietzsche—the shit people start of with when they realize their life's empty and they better get a "move on"), and it was me and Li Po drinking wine and tumbling down a hillside. There was a moon involved, and possibly a pond. Maybe it was the ocean.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
White-meat only.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Sarcasm, bitch.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?
Not as much as I used to. We're on a low budget since the second kid came along. I owe almost my entire output of the last thirteen years to the poets whose work has moved or bothered me in all the right ways.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
No one's assuming anything about what I have or haven't read. Which is good, because I haven't read most of it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?
Well, I've explained it to Vaughn (my three year old) as merely the artistic use of words, and I used the old dance analogy: poetry is to speaking, as dance is to walking. Here's one of her poems:

Vaughn writes on the blue sky
and the blue sky writes
on Daddy
and the blue sky writes on Vaughn.

She's a genius, no?

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
"The Poet?" Oh, poo. I guess the answer is no.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon—lime

Chiseled—face

I—You

Of—about

Form—free

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?
Hmm, I often have this hollow feeling about my chest. That might explain the hollowness of my poems, which, in any event, are made more than written.

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.

Top 10 Poetry Pet Peeves

10. Nevermind, this post is a waste of time. But railing against poet blogs is like railing against reality TV: Neither have much to do with people's actual lives and you can always surf to something else, or turn it off.
  9. The professionalization, which is basically the academicization, of "creative writing." It has fostered a neglect (if not fear) of heights, of lightness and of depth, in favor of that which ripples outward along the surface. Ultimately, though, this can't be too big a deal because it can't affect the "real work," only the reception of it.
  8. Attacks against the professionalization and academicization by neo-con poemeisters, which too easily tie in with the larger cultural disdain for intelligence and art and especially the two together, and might make any distaste for professionalization and academicization seem purely reactionary and rear garde.
  7. The sociology of poet communities as a topic of concern and aggressive posturing. See academic (about the eighth definition or so).
  6. The John Doe Award for Poetry. The Jane Doe Award for Poetry. The Tweedledee Prize in Poetry. The Tweedledum Prize in Poetry. The What-a-Year-It-Was Award in Poetry. The Etc. Prize in Etc. Poetry Etc.
  5. Prose poems as a specialty—write short stories or something—and, more generally, calls for genre bending works that transgress verse/prose/fiction/essay distinctions and waft across Borders and settle in formal blind spots. Also, calls for moratoriums on certain subjects or forms.
  4. Continual flogging of dead-horse confessionalism, esp. combined with über-avant anti-lyric-eye gouging.
  3. Interviews—more now than you can shake the side of a barn with. Wait, that doesn't work. Whatever, from now on I shall (heh, shall) refer to interviews as killer tomatoes.
  2. Chapbooks—possibly more than you can wallpaper the side of every barn in the country with. At least electronic chpbks that suck don't waste paper.
  1. I keep trying to hit the bull's eye, when I'm lucky if I even nick the target. Meanwhile, kids cry for attention or something like food, dishes wait to be washed, dirty clothes get worn over and over, and wife fumes waiting for responses to questions never heard. . . . Also, giving up as a reoccurring theme.

Sketches Comment

With Book of Sketches, Kerouac's main problem is being saddled with Penguin as the publisher, which is no longer in the habit of producing fine books. The best example of their decline in quality is the cheap paper on which they choose to print most of their Penguin Poets titles. They didn't really give Sketches much design attention, basically using a template: the typical Penguin Classics these days is set in Sabon 10.25/12.25; Sketches is set in Sabon 10/12.5. It's clear that, for Penguin, poetry is primarily seen as a money loser and hence something not to be taken seriously. From what I could tell, the attitude is not just shared by the higher ups, but by the design and production staff as well. The result is a kind of shabbiness, a McBook not much removed, as an object, from a mass market romance novel, but with a nicer cover (though the kerning has been adjusted nicely throughout Sketches which wouldn't happen with a mass market).

That said, matching the spacing and indentations to the manuscript present a moderate typesetting challenge which has been carried through about as well as it could within the constraints of Penguin's requirements. I don't have the book on hand, but as I recall there are at least a handful of instances where space breaks occur mid sentence. They belong there. It's too bad Penguin didn't elect to scan and include, say, at least a half dozen pages of the manuscript, so that readers could get a feel for the source document and judge for themselves whether the translation is successful.

An insightful introduction by someone like Clark Coolidge, or any number of other contemporary poets (Tom Clark or Dale Smith spring to mind), would have been a fine improvement, but the important thing is that the work, in all of its unevenness, is at least available.

There Is A "Best Thing" About Poetry Daily?

New York Times Book Review article on "The Widening Web of Digital Lit"