There is, for example, an ongoing art project called Opening Sources that allows the public to edit an “open source poem.”

http://openingsources.com

I won’t go into the whys of that here, though.

Good find in that SB comment. I think she must’ve sensed where your true interest lay.

palinode – Thanks for weighing in. It’s always bothered me that poets, who are supposed to excel in works of imagination, are so unimaginative when it comes to their ambitions for their work, so often focusing on prizes and publications invisible to the vast majority of the general reading public. But in their defense, a truly dedicated poet should be spending most of her free time writing, which leaves little time to discover what might be on the internet, for example, beyond a bunch of literary magazines that are striving for recognition by imitating their print counterparts as much as possible. Also, poets are bound to books because their very role is culturally conservative in some ways, and they see themselves as the guardians of attentive, absorptive reading and the literature that feeds it. Books are still the superior technology for that, however much the internet might supplement it.

Incidentally, I would never publish in the New Yorker because they acquire lifetime rights. Authors have to ask for permission to reprint their own works. Fuck that shit.

I don’t know what Poetry Thursday is going to evolve into — but maybe it will be something along these lines.”

I just saw this comment from Watermark. Isn’t that prophetic, since RWP is basically PT with a foundation in collaboration.

It’s going pretty well for me, and it’s freed me up in ways to innumerable to, well, enumerate.

Why do we always think in terms of less? In terms of mine? In terms of get your goddamn paws off it? When did author usurp what is authored in terms of what is paramount. You reference collaborations in Japan and China, but we’ve seen many collaborations since. (I hate to keep chiming this same bell, but here I go: Coleridge and Wordsworth. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The Beat writers. My friend Matthew Rohrer and his friend Joshua Beckman. All the poets included in the book “Saints of Hysteria: a Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry.” And more. More, more, more.)

If we truly believe our writing can change the world, that it is charged with the task of changing the world, isn’t *the change* what matters, rather than who trips the switch, making it possible for that change to occur?

And! I would argue that it will never be a who anyway. Not in any singular sense of the word. That would be like calling a stream a drop of water: What flows through us does so with a rush, with a clear force, that is beyond the bounds of self.

2. Steve Jobs was stupid to sell the windows technology to Bill. Dumb, dumb move. So Steve deserves what he gets. I’m not saying we could live without Gates and his empire. (Lord knows, he’s more relevant to our lives than our President.) I am just saying we can still hate him. Can’t we?

3. I got the new license. Take a look if you want and tell me if it’s the right one.

4. I don’t recall your being wrong about the clearwinged moth! Do you agree with me?

5. Above, where I said “experiments/experiential,” I meant experimental/experiential. Would you be a love and edit that comment to reflect my intention? I won’t sue you for altering my work. Promise.

2. Yeah, I do give Gates credit for his foundation work. And I must admit I use Windows on a PC – in part because I dislike Steve Jobs even more than Bill Gates, and in part because I’m too chickenshit to go Linux.

3. Well, if you do decide to go that route, I think the share alike, i.e. copyleft, provision is important, too. Contrary to what a couple of the commenters in this thread have suggested, that doesn’t mean you can never publish your poems in a conventionally copyrighted book, because at the end of the day you still hold the copyright and can do what you want. All the CC licensing does is say that folks can use your works in the manner you specify without having to worry about prosecution. And the Share Alike bit means that they can’t copyright a derivitive work without contacting you first.

4. I was wrong about the clearwinged moth, as you’ll recall.

Thanks for commenting.

1. Traditional publishing, why the obsession? If the point of art is to have people see/hear/experience it, then why would you limit yourself to a book of poetry that might sell 1,000 copies at best, at least if you are not Mary Oliver. If you can get your work out there, not only through traditional publishing, but other means as well, why wouldn’t you?

It’s so weird to me that people want to be stingy with their work, to purposefully limit their audience, to be selective about who reads and engages with their pieces.

(I know that’s sort of tangential to what you are saying, but I think the stronghold traditional publishing has on us is in large part what drives the paranoia about work being published in any nontraditional way and shared in an experimental/experiential way with others.)

2. This topic runs deep for me. As a poet married to a computer programmer, and having worked with many engineering types over the course of my career, I have strong feelings on this issue, both from the writing angle and the coding angle. And I’d like to take this opportunity to flip Microsoft the bird. I should go egg Gates’ house. He lives a stone’s throw away from me. But I won’t do that because he started the Gates Foundation, which as far as I can tell, is doing nothing but good things for the world and its inhabitants.

3. I have the no derivatives license on my site, and now I am wondering if I should take that off and go only for the attribution part with an explanation about why I am going that route just below the Creative Commons logo.

4. As usual, you are right.