Suddenly I am a little ashamed of my ladybug poem. I just read someone else’s poems about the same, invasive species, and they are so, so moving. They came at the end of one of the more gripping books of poetry I’ve ever read — I mean, I couldn’t put it down — and now I see these utterly familiar insects in a new light. But this is what poetry does, isn’t it?
I bought the book this morning at Webster’s Bookstore Café in State College, Pennsylvania (which incidentally now stocks Odes to Tools) and it’s one of 30 poetry books I’ll be blogging about here next month, one a day, for (Inter-)National Poetry Month. Originally I thought I’d focus on chapbooks, but I’ve decided to broaden it to any poetry book, including a few that I’ve read at least once before. But probably no Collected Works, because each book will still need to be short enough to read (or re-read) in an hour or two and then review or write a creative response to.
NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month — has really caught on among online poets, and that’s great, but I’m already writing at least one poem a day, if you count my brief Morning Porch entries as poems (they’re usually pretty close). What I don’t do enough of is blog about the poetry books I read, so for me it’s going to be NaPoReMo. I’m going to try to keep the selection as varied as possible to increase the chances of including something that will appeal to almost everyone who reads here, not just fellow hardcore poetry fans. I even picked up a book of baseball poetry today.
So I’ve just finished all the book-buying I intend to do in preparation, but I do want to repeat the offer I made a few days ago on Facebook: if you’re the author of a book of poetry and you’d like me to consider it for inclusion as one of the 30, feel free to mail me a review copy. I’ll probably send a copy of Odes to Tools in exchange, so you’ll get something out of it one way or the other.
One other thing I’ll be doing for National Poetry Month is a reading and multimedia presentation in support of Odes to Tools. I’ll have more information about that in another post, but please mark your calendars: it’ll be at 3:30 pm on Saturday, April 10, at the aforementioned Webster’s Bookstore Cafe in downtown State College. Come for the books, stay for the great coffee. I like to think of it as a pilgrimage.
Ren (Katherine) Powell talks about how living in Norway and translating Norwegian poets, and also a Yemeni poet, have shaped her own growth as a writer
Every day it softens and settles; every night it sets. At a certain point in late morning, it no longer holds you up. In one week since this photo was taken, we have gone from late winter to early spring. Yesterday a bluebird began singing, and this morning at dawn the call of the Cooper’s hawk was echoing off the snowpack — as if such a skilled ventriloquist needs one more way to throw his voice.
I was out early enough to hear him only because a sea urchin woke me, spines poking my flesh as I wandered through a dream forest of kelp. For the past week I have been dithering over a poem about sea urchins, trying to capture that extreme otherness in words, and now this visit. I leaf through Rae Armantrout’s Next Life, which I am trying hard to like, and happen on a poem about those who believe they have been abducted by tentacled aliens, which she compares to Doubting Thomas and his probing of the wounds in the risen Christ. “It is from this wound/ that humans first emerged,” she says — the only lines in the poem that speak to me.
The blurb on the back from Publisher’s Weekly says, “this could be the year when more readers discover Armantrout.” Hmm. Well, readers who happen to be steeped in the self-reflexive thinking of American graduate-school programs in English, perhaps. For who else would relish poems about metaphor:
Metaphor
shifts a small weight
there and back.
My self-relection shames God
into watching
(“Remote”), sentences about sentences:
A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.
Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.
(“The Ether”), the use of quotation marks to signal irony:
It’s after us
and before us—always
trying to get “in.”
(“Continuity”) or a discourse on irony itself (“Empty”)? The book description informs us that “these poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the ‘next life’ and find it where we can.” No, they don’t. They merely bore me. The radical questioning of meaning is hardly new, and Armantrout’s poems show little evidence of familiarity with the significant philosophical works of the last hundred years.
I mean, there’s literally a poem here about — no, make that “about” — trying to write a poem, “Make It New.” Infinite recursion does not equal apophatic insight. “You’re left out,” concludes a poem called “Framing.” That’s fair to say.
I walk up into the woods to see if I can spot the Cooper’s hawk, but my eyes are drawn, as usual, to the ground. It’s still below freezing, and my boots barely crunch into the surface, but I stop to admire spiny oak leaves that have melted their way down into shallow graves. Again I think of sea urchins, painstakingly excavating nests in the seafloor’s solid rock: eyes in search of sockets. And that’s not just a metaphor. It turns out that the appendages between their spines are covered with light-sensitive molecules, and the spines help them focus on the same principle as squinting eyelids. They have no brains because they are all brain. They have no eyes because the entire surface of their body is wired for vision.
Listen, you can look forward to the next life if you want, or try to throw your voice beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but I’m telling you: there’s no way another life can be more marvellous than this one.
My videopoetry site Moving Poems has only been around since last June, doesn’t have very many incoming links, and averages around 200 page views a day, so probably the following data don’t mean too much. I introduced poets’ names into post titles two months ago in an attempt to get more traffic from people who were typing, e.g., “Emily Dickinson poem” or “Blake Tyger video” into Google. As expected, traffic jumped. What I didn’t expect was who the most popular poets would turn out to be, based on page views of individual posts.
Because I use the very minimal stats plugin from WordPress.com, I don’t have information on any of the archive pages, and so I have no idea how many people might be visiting, for example, the Emily Dickinson archive page. Dickinson might well be more popular than the great Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos.
Still, I think these results do give some indication of the relative popularity of certain kinds of poetry on the web. Of the 260 posts I’ve published there so far, 128 feature poets from the U.S., and England is the second best-represented country with 34 posts. No other country even breaks ten. This reflects, I think, where the best English-language (or English-subtitled) videos are being made. But clearly it’s not Anglo-American poetry that people are looking for.
I kind of wish I had a more sophisticated stats system now, because I would love to know how many of the people looking for videos of Dickinson and Whitman are from the U.S.; both poets have huge global followings. One way or the other, it’s good to be reminded from time to time just how popular poetry still is beyond the borders of the United States.*
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*Yes, I know that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. But Julia de Burgos is popular throughout Latin America, which is I imagine what accounts for her ranking here.
A conversation with Todd Davis about life and death, religion and poetry
Todd Davis stops by to read some poems from his latest book, The Least of These, as well as from his previous books, and to talk about public reading, what motivates him as an artist, growing up with Mennonites and how that shaped his own beliefs, nature poetry, travel poetry, deer and deer hunting, how to kill in a manner that honors the spirit of the slain, and more.
I made this thinking I might post it on Moving Poems, but I’m not sure it quite qualifies as “the best video poetry on the web.” Nevertheless, I enjoy matching poems to footage like this, and I happen to think it’s a pretty good fit, assuming I’m correct in reading a fairly light-hearted tone into the poem.
I wholeheartedly concur with the sentiment that “the world is different from what it seems to be / and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.” The closing assertion, that poems should only be written rarely and reluctantly, strikes me as a rather strong prescription: potentially life-saving for some poets and very dangerous for others. I do love the next-to-last stanza, though (in the canonical translation):
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
The great subjects of literature, they say, are love and death. But isn’t it time we added a third subject? To me, any contemporary poetry that does not in some way acknowledge extinction fails to rise above the level of a diverting parlor game. I mean the extinction of species; of ecological communities and the unique landscapes they give rise to; of unique human cultures, languages and ethnicities. Extinction: the unraveling of creation. The loss of something that can never be replaced.
Deliberate genocide and ecocide (as in so-called mountaintop removal) are of course the most terrible and extreme forms, but even the wholly unintended loss of some obscure moth due to the insatiable demands of our consumer economy is an unpardonable sin. More than that: we should be sensitive enough to the vast stretches of time and the wondrous workings of chance (or divinity — I’m not always sure of the difference) required to bring about new life forms or new languages to understand that any extinction, even one in which human over-consumption or exploitation are not implicated, represents a loss of a completely different order from the death of an individual. If we are beholden as poets to mourn ordinary death and to celebrate the wonder and beauty of human love and life, aren’t we all the more obligated to respond in some way to the horror of extinction, and to celebrate non-human life in all its strangeness and beauty?
It seems to me that as beneficiaries of an unsustainable, wasteful and destructive consumer economy, we are engaged in a Faustian bargain: our physical comfort, convenience, and stimulation in exchange for… well, eternal damnation of a sort, yes. Purely as a thought experiment, ask yourself which of the following would you be willing to consign to oblivion in order to continue at your current standard of living:
These aren’t all threatened or endangered species, just random cool creatures, each deserving at least an epic in its honor, and emblematic of the staggering diversity of life on Earth.
I’m not saying we don’t need more poems about love. (Though come to think of it…) I am simply proposing that we poets stop our silly wars about style and theory and start writing elegies, psalms, odes and lamentations for each and every species and unique community on this endangered earth. Imagine a leaderless, global collaboration of poets resulting in a multilingual mega-anthology bigger than the Mahabharata, the Talmud, and the Buddhist Tripitaka combined…
A conversation with Houston-based poet Radames Ortiz and his audio collaborator, the composer Trills (Jonathan Jindra).
Topics include: How electronic music is composed; the arts scene in Houston; composing and improvising music to accompany poems; making the transition from ambient music to electronica that demands active listening; how Radames started writing poetry and why he chose not to get an MFA; turning a poetry reading into a multimedia experience and getting the audience involved; online reading, e-book readers and the supposed death of the text; the obligation of poets and writers to master multimedia tools; making and watching videopoetry.
Rachel talks about writing poetry vs. writing liturgy, studying with David Lehman, images of motherhood and divinity, wordless prayers, and the challenges of writing while caring for an infant. Two-month-old Drew adds a few wordless prayers of his own.
As I opined in the first episode of the Woodrat Podcast, poetry is above all an oral art — to say nothing of storytelling. At the literary magazine I help run, qarrtsiluni, we started including audio recordings of the authors reading their works more than two years ago, once we figured out how easy it was to get the recordings. Starting this past September, we decided to repackage this feature as a daily podcast, which basically just meant adding an extra spoken introduction and a musical theme, and submitting the main RSS feed to iTunes.
Here’s the thing: for reasons of security against hackers and dependability of service, qarrtsiluni resides at the extremely reliable yet restrictive, hosted version of WordPress, WordPress.com. Anyone else with a WordPress.com site, given the right software and hardware, could podcast the same as we do. A lot of mystique surrounds the mechanics of podcasting, but nine tenths of the work is in making the recording. Beyond that, it’s as simple as uploading an audio file to any file storage site (which can be your own blog); adding the audio file link to a new post on your blog, along with an optional Flash player; and hitting Publish. That’s because WordPress feeds are designed to be correctly parsed by iTunes and other podcatchers. (This is equally true for Typepad, by the way. Blogger/Blogspot users have to route their feeds through Feedburner, I think.)
What is podcasting?
Let’s back up a second. What is a podcast? Basically, it’s an internet radio program, which may or may not be affiliated with any actual radio station.
Imagine getting new “radio”-style talk and music shows to listen to on your iPod or other MP3 player every day. You wake up and automatically have new shows ready to listen to while you exercise or commute to work. This is the podcast listening experience. [...]
Podcasters are creating very raw and real content and listeners are responding. Free from corporate radio and broadcast regulations, you can create whatever kind of show you can imagine.
Some podcasts are “talk show” style. Others introduce you to the latest bands and music. With podcasts you can stay current on the news, get a glimpse into someone’s life, listen to movie reviews and the list goes on.
Not only do you not need an iPod (source of the “pod” part of “podcast”), but you don’t even need a portable digital device to listen to podcasts. Many people, me included, access them through a regular computer (though good speakers or headphones are a big help). Literary podcasts are still a little thin on the ground, which is one reason why I’m writing this article. I’d especially like to hear more writers doing their own shows in the style of T.M. Camp or Joe Milford, who uses the hosted podcast platform Blog Talk Radio for live and unedited, talk-radio-style interviews with poets. It would also be fun to hear personal bloggers talk about what they’ve been reading, writing, observing and thinking.
The Wikipedia article on podcasts has a good technical definition, attributed to journalism and communications researchers at the University of Texas:
A podcast is a digital audio or video file that is episodic; downloadable; programme-driven, mainly with a host and/or theme; and convenient, usually via an automated feed with computer software.
I don’t know anything about video podcasting, so this article will focus solely on audio. As the foregoing definition suggests, you don’t really even have to make your audio stream available through iTunes to qualify as a podcast. The fact that your site generates an RSS feed that handles audio enclosures takes care of the “convenient” part, really. It’s the other stuff — the style and content of the audio files, and the regularity with which you post them — that really differentiates postcasting from just putting up audio whenever the spirit moves you. But somewhere around 70 percent of all podcast listeners on the web do use iTunes, and it’s safe to assume that a good number of them don’t know how to enter an RSS feed in the iTunes store themselves. (Those using other podcatchers, by contrast, probably do understand such things.) So let’s go through what’s involved in submitting a WordPress.com-hosted podcast to iTunes.
Main feed, category feed, or dedicated blog?
For the qarrtsiluni daily podcast, we simply submitted our main RSS feed to the iTunes store. Previously, we had had a tri-monthly podcast in which we tried to cram the contents of entire issues. It might have failed as a podcast, being too difficult both to produce and to listen to, but again, the actual distribution part worked fine. For that earlier incarnation of the qarrtsiluni podcast, we created a new category, “podcast,” and submitted the feed for just that category.* In WordPress.com, simply add “/feed/” to the end of any category URL to get the RSS feed for that category.
If you anticipate making audio posts that are not part of your podcast, you’ll definitely want to restrict the podcast to one category. You’ll need to advertise the category RSS alongside the iTunes link for the benefit of people who want to subscribe through other podcatchers or feed readers. Obviously you can still assign a given podcast episode to multiple categories, just make sure that your podcast category is one of them. If you use your main feed, as we do now at qarrtsiluni, be mindful of the fact that iTunes and other podcatchers will treat every post with an audio link as a podcast episode.
A third option is to start a new blog just for the podcast. This gives you the most control over what image, name and description show up in iTunes, but it does mean you’ll have to work a little harder to attract an audience. Episodes won’t show up in email and RSS subscriptions for those who already follow your main site unless you cross-post them. You could of course use an RSS widget to display links to the latest episodes in your main site’s sidebar.
Podcast image and metadata
The image that iTunes will use for your podcast comes from what WordPress.com calls your blavatar (your blog’s avatar, not to be confused with your own avatar as a user of WordPress.com), and is uploaded via the General Settings page of your WordPress dashboard. Be sure to upload the largest size supported there, 128×128 pixels, to avoid pixilation… while at the same time picking something simple enough to look half-decent as a tiny favicon in browser address bars. This can make for an interesting design challenge.
The title of the podcast is simply the title of your blog, and the summary below the image is the description you entered in the general settings (which in qarrtsiluni’s case is not very illuminating: “online literary magazine”). If you use a dedicated category, the title will appear in iTunes as “yourblogtitle » podcastcategoryname,” which is slightly ungainly, and the summary will still come from the blog’s description. Optional iTunes fields such as subtitle and keywords have to go unfilled when podcasting from a WordPress.com site.
You can use the Excerpt box to make manual summaries of your posts for iTunes to use as descriptions of each podcast episode (which appear in the pop-up when you click on the little “i” with the circle around it). Otherwise, iTunes will simply include the first 65 words followed by an ellipsis. Also, these descriptions are not pretty: even apostrophes, let alone ampersands and other special characters, will be in HTML code, and links will not appear. One thing to keep in mind when crafting episode summaries or writing the first few sentences of your post is that they will be used for keyword indexing, along with the post titles.
Recording and posting
As I said at the outset, most of the work of podcasting is in making the recording, and this is where you really don’t want to cut too many corners. Yes, there are any number of ways to record spoken word, and as we’ve discovered at qarrtsiluni, even a bad telephone connection recorded over Skype can be perfectly adequate for a three-minute-long poem, especially if the reading is a strong one. But for anything much longer, it does help to have a decent external microphone. That heavy layer of electronic noise you get with the internal mike in your Mac will become tiresome to listeners after more than five minutes. You’ll need to learn how to use decent audio editing software. If you plan on interviewing a lot of people over the phone, you’ll probably want to pay for phone-out privileges in Skype, and also get the premium version of one of the several recorder software applications (I use Pamela), the free versions of which tend to limit you to 15-minute calls.
My point here is that you don’t need to pay a lot of money for equipment and software, but if you are on very a tight budget, you might not want to take up podcasting. If you’re not, the $20/year that WordPress.com/Automattic charges for the lowest file storage upgrade to 5 GB, necessary to upload any audio files to your WordPress.com blog, is a really good deal in my opinion. There is apparently no limit on file size now (it used to be around 70 MB), and no limit on transfers, bandwidth, or downloads. Yes, there are free file storage sites you can use, some more reliable than others, but what you get with WordPress.com is virtually uninterrupted service and fast, cloud-based streaming. In fact, I even use it to host the audio for my podcast here at Via Negativa, an independently hosted WordPress site. My webhost is pretty good, but it is a typical cheap shared web hosting service with occasional blips in service, and I don’t want people to be cut off in the middle of a half-hour show.
The official WordPress.com support page on how to post audio is a decent summary. Many more options for the design and positioning of the audio player are detailed at the very useful, WordPress.com-focused Wordpress Tips blog.
Including a player is optional — though a very good idea — but including a link to the audio file is essential if you want podcatchers to pick up the episode. Even if you’re just posting audio and not really podcasting, including the audio file link is still a good practice to get into, since otherwise feed and email subscribers won’t have any way to listen without clicking through. Plus, not all visitors to your site will have Flash enabled, so they won’t all even see the players.
One thing to keep in mind is that iTunes and most other podcatchers will only grab the first audio file in a post, so if you produce, say, a monthly podcast in several parts, each part will need to go up in a separate post.
Submitting your feed to iTunes
First you have to post at least one episode. Then test your feed in iTunes, and if it checks out, submit it — making sure to choose the most relevant iTunes categories — and wait. As with most things Apple, the approval process is shrouded in secrecy, but I’ve done this three times now, and the longest I’ve had to wait was something like 36 hours. Once you’re approved, take the link they give you and advertise it in your sidebar and wherever else you want to promote your show.
Stats and Feedburner
At this point, Wordpress.com doesn’t give bloggers any way to track the number of downloads on a podcast or other audio file, so a lot of people recommend routing your feed (main or category, whichever you’re using) through Feedburner, and submitting that instead of your WordPress.com feed. Feedburner does provide stats, but I’m not sure how reliable they are — they tend to fluctuate wildly from day to day, in my experience. Also, I found it sometimes took up to 12 hours for Feedburner feeds to update with new content, though it’s been many months since I’ve used the wretched service — perhaps it’s improved in the interim. Feedburner’s SmartCast feature does, however, give you more control over iTunes metadata, so it might be worth using for that reason alone, though I gather that getting your podcast description to update in iTunes using Feedburner is a bit of a hassle.
Good luck, and please let me know via the comments if you start a literary podcast (or already have one) so I can follow it. I may or may not be able to answer technical queries; I’m very much still a learner here, just sharing what little I’ve been able to pick up.
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*This is also my approach here at Via Negativa with the Woodrat podcast, though being independently hosted I am able to use a plugin to get some extra control over the display both on-site and in iTunes. For other self-hosted WordPressers who might be curious, I am using the newish Blubrry Powerpress plugin, though I haven’t been using it long enough to really be able to evaluate it.
What I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing, and what’s up with all the banjos
Topics include: Why a podcast and what I hope to accomplish with it; what a woodrat is; how to keep mandatory titles from messing up haikus; poems by Howie Good, John Haines, Sarah Jane Sloat, Esther Jansma, and Vasko Popa; what I look for in poetry and why I write it; how I got started writing banjo poems; Jonah and the gourd vine; and New Year’s resolutions.
Thanks to weblogs and other modern content management systems, a poem, essay or story can now be written in the morning and published the same afternoon. Does this spell the end of polished writing? Not judging by some of the highly polished books I’ve read by active bloggers, many of them derived in whole or in part from blogged material.(1) On the contrary, I have seen people become better writers as a result of blogging, myself probably included. Writers have always done some of their best writing in a white heat of inspiration, and blogging can either aid or hinder this depending on the personality of the writer and his or her approach to blogging: it can just as easily be a tool for artistic exploration as an agent of distraction.
Many writers prefer to use blogs merely to share news of their publishing success elsewhere, and that’s fine. But I think those with a more exhibitionist streak are missing out on a great deal of fun, and poets in particular — who are almost invariably exhibitionists, let’s face it — are missing an unparalleled opportunity to connect with audiences they might never otherwise reach. But there’s a risk, too: that they will be so seduced by this new medium that they won’t want to go back to jostling for publication in snooty print magazines no one reads, and their professional reputations will suffer as a result.
Blogs began as collections of links to real material published elsewhere, and to the extent that it’s still possible to generalize about blogging as a whole, I’d say that the “Hey, look at this cool thing I just found!” approach still predominates, whether it’s a tumblelog of quotes and images from around the web, a StumbleUpon blog, or the Huffington Post with its tabloidy presentation of news stories mostly lifted from other sources. But that’s as it should be. For the internet to remain vital, I’d guess that linking of one form or another ought to constitute somewhere around 80 percent of total web publishing behavior.(2)
“Publishing” in this sense means simply the creation of something on the internet that didn’t exist before, even if it’s only a link. Obviously this kind of secondary publication depends entirely upon the publication of original work in the first place, a relationship which the less internet-savvy may be tempted to characterize as parasitic. It certainly can be, in the case of commercial spam blogs with content scraped from RSS feeds for the purpose of gaming search engines, but otherwise I think it’s actually a symbiotic relationship, since without incoming links, an online author is limited to whatever readers s/he can reach through email or handbills.(3)
The biggest difference between online publishing and print publishing is its greater ephemerality: anything that’s published online can also be unpublished, and sites that are not actively maintained will eventually disappear. The flip side of this represents a huge boon for author and editor: any online publication can easily be altered at any time after publication. The print-oriented writer’s obsession with producing the most polished work possible is a natural reaction to the immutability of the printed word. Before I began blogging, I too would typically spend days, weeks, sometimes months on a single poem, returning to it again and again like a dog returning to its vomit. Now, as soon as I get something into a half-decent form, I just post the son of a bitch. I can always go back and swap in another draft later — and sometimes I do.
Mine isn’t the only approach, though, just the one best suited to my particular, impulsive brand of slap-dash perfectionism. Other writer-bloggers might prefer to publish later drafts in new posts, linking back to the original (Dick Jones does this a lot, to good effect) or save them for a spin-off project on another site, with component parts linked in both directions. I’ve also come to admire and sometimes emulate the style of some literary bloggers who share notes on the writing process alongside the primary text. This can make many kinds of writing more approachable for a general audience, especially if the notes are informal and personable. As blog software becomes more sophisticated, I hope to see more templates with innovative approaches to the presentation of notes and commentary.
Instantaneous self-publishing gives the author more power than at any time since the invention of literacy, but it also confers a new degree of autonomy on the text. Once published online, especially on a blog with a feed, the text can be replicated endlessly. Though it’s easy enough to instruct search-engine robots not to index a website, doing so kind of misses the whole point of the internet. Authors who desire complete control over their creations should not go anywhere near the web.
Readers have more power now, too: in most cases they can log comments in a space directly adjoining the text, with a reasonable expectation that the author will read them and even respond in turn. Of course, in many cases the readers are other bloggers, a situation that should feel familiar to most poets. But in some cases they’re bloggers from very different backgrounds, specializing in other genres, with cross-communication enabled by a personal/creative blogging culture in which some blogs (like this one, I hope) elude pigeonholing and mix genres in ways that would be considered unmarketable in traditional publishing.
Becoming part of that culture means adhering to a set of mores that might seem strange to those more familiar with the posturing and flame-wars of the political blogosphere, but the rewards include the chance for new kinds and greater degrees of creative interaction. In a nutshell, I’d say the personal blogger has an obligation to be a gracious host (which includes throwing out mean-spirited or disruptive guests as quickly as possible) and the commenters should behave as if they were guests on someone’s front porch: a publically accessable, privately controlled space.
Blogging enables the mixing not just of genres but of media, too. In contrast to print publication, full-color illustrations entail very little additional expense (and may even be free, depending on one’s web hosting arrangements). The web is in many ways a visual medium, which doesn’t mean that online audiences for longer, unillustrated texts don’t exist, simply that authors have to be aware of different strategies for gaining and retaining readers. Ekphrastic writing is one very common example of the kind of creative synergy maintaining a blog can inspire in its author. Writers with digital cameras can always shift to photoblogging when they start feeling blocked, and the kind of seeing required to take good photos can feed back into their writing.
The web doesn’t have to remain a purely visual medium, though — and this is another of its great advantages over print. Online poets in particular are fools if they don’t at least occasionally take advantage of the opportunity to return listening to center-stage. While eye-catching photos might draw in easily distracted readers, a good audio recording embedded in a Flash player alongside the text can lead someone to actually pay close attention to the poem. Video is another great blogging medium, and while putting videopoems together may seem too complicated for most, anyone capable of writing a sonnet or a villanelle can certainly figure out the basics of video and audio editing. In fact, digital literacy should probably be taught in all college writing programs now.
The greatest thing about the web, for me, is that authors can reach anyone in the world with a connection to the internet, for free or close to it. There is no longer any need for a publisher as an intermediary. The personal weblog medium offers the potential to reach beyond traditional audiences for poetry, nature writing, and other genres that commercial publishers have for decades considered irrelevant. While it’s true that blogging has passed its peak of faddishness, I see that as a sign of growing maturity. And all the people who are now using Facebook and Twitter instead of blogging are still looking for cool things to link to and tweet about.
Many print and online magazines will not consider previously blogged material for publication, causing the more ambitious writers to avoid posting drafts of their work, except possibly in password-protected posts. The irony is that in many cases a poem posted to the author’s blog can reach more readers than it would receive in all but the most widely circulated magazines — even online magazines, which are all too often poorly designed, practically invisible to search engines, and lack any kind of feed.
On the other hand, self-publishing alone does not advance a literary reputation, which is essential if academic advancement is at stake. One solution is for literary bloggers to publish each other. The same tools that enable the easy publication of a personal weblog can be used for any other kind of online periodical. Authors (and readers) can organize formal or informal networks through interlinking and the use of social media tools. We can rise together rather than compete for pieces of an ever-dwindling publishing pie.
Networked bloggers can help promote not only each other’s online work, but books as well, through organized virtual book tours. Audiences built up through years of blogging can be counted upon to buy copies and in some cases to assist in viral marketing, too.
Books need not remain the holy grail of literary publishing, however. Think what writers of such titanic energies as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Pablo Neruda would’ve done had the web existed in their day. Though books are wonderful and will probably always be produced, much of what goes into a blog really can’t fit into a book, and the experience of reading a regularly updated blog as it is being written certainly can’t be reproduced in print. Balancing the immediacy of it are the opportunities for comparison and perspective provided by internal and external hyperlinks, archives, and search unequalled by any indexing a traditional book might provide.
While there is no one best way to present literary and artistic material online, the personal weblog may be the best suited for this age of the memoir. Writers concerned that a focus on personality might draw attention away from the work itself should consider applying a “copyleft” licence to their works, such as a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence, to release them for creative re-use and remixing by other writers, artists and musicians. We can also engage in networking and community building with other bloggers, as mentioned above. This includes collaborative projects of all kinds, as well as participation in blogging memes, carnivals, writing and photo prompts, NaNoWriMo, NaPoWriMo, and so on. We can provide readers with tools such as email subscriptions, easy social media sharing options, and print-this-post buttons to encourage the redistribution of works originally written as part of a journal-like blog stream. With all these possibilities for transformation, though, no longer can we think of a creative work as having a single authoritative version. Like its author, the blogged text is forever a work-in-progress. (4)
(3) During my first eleven months online, before I discovered blogging, I was publishing stuff on a Geocities site, and advertising mostly via email. I get more page views now in a single day than I did in those nine months.
(4) Where does all this leave the critic, then, if writers are reviewing each other and no longer competing for the attention of publishers? Personally, I think literary critics need to combine forces, incorporate, and open an app store. If you want to be a gatekeeper in today’s increasingly open, content-sharing, remixing media environment, you simply have to build a more attractive gate.
Written for Via Negativa’s sixth birthday. Thanks to Jessamyn Smyth and Arvind for the Facebook discussion that gave me the idea to attempt a personal blogger’s manifesto.
“Everything that appears possible/ can be turned into something impossible,” writes Sarah J. Sloat in “Curtains,” a poem from her chapbook In the Voice of a Minor Saint, published earlier this year by Tilt Press. This is an apt description of Sloat’s usual modus operandi in these poems. For example, here she is on that touchstone of modern identity, the gasoline-powered automobile:
Pity the swoon towards motion,
the yen for speed.
Pity the billow and sinew of fumes,
muscle that makes the crash spectacular.
God have pity on the whole machine
gas has to carry: lead, flesh and metals
that do not travel light.
(“God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline”)
The title poem works much mischief simply by taking a familiar phrase — “minor saint” — literally.
I came at a wee hour
into my miniature existence.
I keep my hair close cropped
that my face might fit in lockets.
My heart is small, like a love
of buttons or black pepper.
“Grassland” is another possibility that Sloat’s facility for imagistic and linguistic prestidigitation renders, if not impossible, at least highly mythic. Both the Biblical Sarah and Lot’s wife seem to be waiting in the wings:
I hold a handkerchief
over my mouth to veil the clover
and bees that tickle my throat,
but the angel
who’s due at my tent
won’t catch me laughing.
A kiss would do it.
One sprinkle of milkwhite salt
and I’ll break like bread at your table.
That was, by the way, one of three poems in this 22-page collection in which honeybees get close and personal, a leitmotif like automobiles and the smell of gasoline whose reoccurrence contributes to the book’s overall strong musicality. These poems are deeply pleasurable to read, and as I read and re-read the PDF that Sloat sent me, I often found myself chanting them out-loud. I was interested to see that the first reviewer in the Read Write Poem-sponsored “virtual book tour,” Joseph Harker, also remarked upon this quality. Another blogger, Nic Sebastian, drew attention in her review to the poems’ “elegant luminosity” and their capacity to “consistently delight the reader by asserting bold unexpected connections with complete confidence.”
Regular readers of my Smorgasblog should recognize the author’s name: Sarah Jane Sloat blogs at The Rain in My Purse, one of the most consistently rewarding reads in my blogroll. Almost everything she encounters takes on a tongue-in-cheek mythic dimension. In “The Problem With Everything,” she bemoans “Every day a dull assault of sudden loves./ Instant, lachrymose attachments,” while in “Please Remove My Name,” she describes “a man who will write/ my name on a grain of rice for 5 euros.” But wait — did I say “tongue-in-cheek”? The narrator of “Silent Treatment” imagines a far less quotidian destination for her tongue,
No more
wagging in the shallows, it’s plunged
in a tunnel to the underworld where
they stump in a strange dialect.
Eat your heart out, it might say. Eat
your pilaf, your side vegetable
and the pox upon your crops.
It might say anything, were it not
lounging around a lower hemisphere.
Laid back at some southern spa, mudbathing,
overdosing on motionlessness.
The book’s title is not entirely a tease. The voices in these poems generally betray a liturgical interest in the ruts and rhythms of the vernacular and an anchorite’s quality of attention to time and verticality. The narrator seems religious but not spiritual — much less pious — in poems like “High Heeled”:
I always want more:
more Everest, more starshine,
something in the department of vertical.
That’s why I’m up here.
It’s better than smog,
better than settling.
Since coaching myself to one-up
the utmost, my dreams
only know the amazonian.
In “3 Deep,” she talks of receiving a poem from a pen pal named Luke about cunnilingus and the hydrogen bomb, a conjunction that makes “perfect sense:/ sex and death and sleep —/ the three dear deepnesses.”
I lie down knowing Luke is dredging
atomic oceans with his bare hands;
I can sleep knowing the dark
holds its appointments dear.
The whole ruined world can lie down
and wait for it to be revealed
which strain of pillow talk
will come to smother us.
Book reviewers typically try to show their sophistication by finding at least one quibble with the book under consideration, but try as I might, I can’t find anything to criticize in this collection. Then again, I am not the most sophisticated of critics, aside from my penchant for using ten-dollar words like “quotidian” and “anchorite.” I was amused to see that the reviewer for the Rattle blog, Linebreak editor Ash Bowen, managed to take what would otherwise seem to be an unadulterated compliment — that the book was too short — and infuse it with a learned, critical air:
[T]here’s a hint of Harmonium-era Stevens in the language play of Sloat’s poems. If there is a problem with the chapbook, it is that it’s too small. Sloat’s world needs more walking around room, more opportunities to take a look down some alleys, instead of the straight walk down the street that we get. But such are the limitations of chapbooks.
Whatever, dude. I love this book. I wish I had written this book, were it not for the likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it nearly as much if I had.
I only wish I actually had this book, instead of merely the PDF, which was set up for printing and therefore presents the poems in the wrong order, starting at both ends and proceeding toward the middle. True, I could’ve printed it out, one page at a time on either side of a sheet, then folded and stapled the thing together, but I kept expecting to get a copy imminently. Apparently it’s my fault, though, since when I placed my order with Tilt Press in mid-November I was seduced by the offer at the top of their order page: all five of their 2009-2010 titles for $30. I didn’t read it carefully enough, however, and erroneously assumed that Minor Saint would be among them. When nothing had arrived by December 2, I queried the press, and received this response:
The subscription you purchased is for the 2009-2010 series, not the 2008-2009 series in which Sarah’s chapbook was released (that sale is no longer available). The reason you haven’t received anything is because we are preparing to release the first in the series within a few days.
Oops! The editor went on to offer me a free review copy of the book, however, and I hope to receive that soon. I post this in the magical hope that so doing will make it materialize in the P.O. box tomorrow morning.
UPDATE (12/16): Sure enough, the chapbook was in today’s mail! It’s a beautiful and very sturdy production, designed by Rachel Mallino with cover art by Emmanuel Polanco — well worth the $8.00 retail price.
***
Sloat’s book includes a couple of ghazals, which inspired me to try my hand at one, too. I had some idea that I would write it in the voice of Sarah J. Sloat, but in the end it just sounded like another Dave Bonta poem. Oh, well.
Ghazal of the Unreceived Book
Thirty percent post-consumer recycled bond
& saddle stitching, how I yearn for you.
I have read all your words but in the wrong order,
elegant letters that the typesetter kerned for you.
I finger teabag tags with printed witticisms,
no book’s crisp pages to turn for you.
The feral cat coughing under the floor
& last night’s jumble of dreams might adjourn for you.
The meteor shower invisible above the sleet,
No falling star could I wish upon or even discern for you.
Surely your data deserve the connective thread
of a chordate. You risk dissolution. I’m concerned for you.
The P.O. box grows heavy with seasonal wishes —
well-meant minimal books I can hardly burn for you.
What if you arrived tomorrow, & challenged everything
I thought I knew? Could I unlearn for you?
Like any artwork more than the sum of your parts,
some parts will always elude my long sojourn for you.
As a follow-up to my previous post, I was thinking I’d put together a new list: Ten Favorite Web Periodicals of 2009, until it occurred to me that my picks might not be as interesting as yours. For one thing, I’m too busy publishing my own periodicals (qarrtsiluni, Moving Poems and this beast, among others) to read as extensively as I otherwise might. Plus my list would be heavily weighted toward publications of a literary nature, such as Cordite Poetry Review, Born Magazine, The Peter Principle and Terrain.org. There’s a lot out there that I’m missing, to put it mildly.
So I’m interested in hearing what other people are reading, for possible inclusion in a new post and/or poll, depending on the response. It can be any kind of online magazine, blog, or blog carnival, covering anything from political commentary to science to the arts. My only requirements: its most recent content must be no older than June 2009, and it must have a working RSS or Atom feed. In the case of a blog carnival, it should have a coordinating site with its own feed. Oh, and please don’t nominate any of my stuff or your own stuff — let’s keep this classy. (Nominating magazines you’ve been published in is of course fine.)
UPDATE: Please let me know if your comment doesn’t appear; I don’t normally check through the spam folder before deleting it. I have temporarily increased the limit on the number of links you can leave in a comment to five. If you have more than five recommendations, feel free to leave multiple comments.
Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana
(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])
All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!
*
I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.
This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.
It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:
“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”
So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.
We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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Via Negativa’s first book-spawn!
Order from the publisher or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop" Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
Smorgasblog
the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
----
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----
everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
----
slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
----
Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----
Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
----
Timothy Green
As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality. We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other. And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.
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Musings from Aotearoa
Aw shit, if you don't get it you don't get it. If these places and just the knowledge of them being there does not move you, then nothing here will. I can't come up with any clever arguments to change minds and sway people over from the Cement Jungle. It seems too entrenched, too set, and the disconnection from anything wild too complete. If we have already compromised 87% of our land and now need to attack the remaining 13% to get at its "real" value it would seem to suggest that something is inherently wrong with the system. Yet the machine grinds on.
----
Velveteen Rabbi
the sap already rising
will feed a million tiny banners
unfurling across the hills
and this small blue pill
will banish anxiety, restore to me
the woman I only dimly remember
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