e-Publishing Makes Us Itchy

I seem to have raised an uncomfortable topic with many people: the future of publishing. Well, of course. I feel itchy thinking about it too, wondering if books will still exist in, oh, five years. But as I debated on a poetry listserv with people who mostly find e-Books offputting and a less than satisfactory reading experience, it came to me that it's not an either-or proposition. Why should e-publishing displace print for poetry?

A key issue for me is mobility: carrying my entire library in my purse. I would give away the feel of paper for that in a hot minute. But fortunately, I don't have to. I prize the esthetic appeal of holding and reading a bound paper book. I love fonts! And their history. Have you rented the movie "Helvetica"? If you write, you should know about type.

But mobility and maneuverability have become far more important to my writing process lately than esthetics of print. For example, yesterday I delved into a long and fascinating essay on Emily Dickinson's fascicles, paired with a detailed medical definition of fascicle as muscle tissue, skipping over to the poems themselves, and made notes about further investigation -- on my iPhone. I also carry a paper notebook in my purse -- still write first drafts by hand -- along with at least one poetry book.

But without the ability to surf the Net on my phone, yesterday's couple of hours in waiting rooms would have been creatively unproductive. Sure, I might have read a book. But I couldn't have pursued all the wily ideas that book (What We Carry by Dorianne Laux) engendered. One of her poems led me to Emily D., and then the idea of the fascicles. I was, after all, stuck in medical offices! So the connection between her bundles of poetry and muscle sinews was resonant.

I don't see why one technology need be jettisoned because another arrives. Here we are discussing books on a listserv! Which is a pretty old technology in Internet history. The future of publishing may just be choices, enriching and broadening the audience for poetry.

Now, can someone please invent an iTunes-like mechanism for downloading a reading of a single poem? Or do I have to do everything?

Poetry presses, getting published & the delightful ampersand

I've been in a lively discussion of poetry book contest publishing, the economics of the field, how to best support poetry, new paradigms of eBook publishing and more. It sparked my interest in the topic again, and I've updated my list of resources for poets seeking to publish without going the contest route:

Non-Contest Poetry Book Publishers - updated list

How much we have to spend to support a career in poetry! And why can't publishers of poetry books publish books a wider audience will want to buy? So often there's a lot of whining about low sales -- this is true everywhere in publishing but especially in poetry -- so why not look at what you're offering and make it fit the market better? Just a thought to consider.

Elsewhere, lively discussion of the ampersand (&) over at Dave Bonta's Via Negativa. I just love it when someone mentions the sensuality of a punctuation mark.

May your poetry day include lots of sensual punctuation.

New poem up at qarrtsiluni

My poem "Penny" can be read and heard -- at quarrtsiluni, their new ECONOMY issue. No, that doesn't mean short poems, though I guess it can. Editors Dave Bonta and Beth Adams came up with a theme that resonates on many levels, goes in lots of directions.A good theme, I think -- being a person who's thrifty, time-conscious, and even occasionally concise.

PLUS -- a recording! This new thing in zines is what makes Internet publishing superior to print, in my view. A poet reading adds textural dimensions of breath, persona and pacing to what's on the page. I'm with Camille Paglia that it's a tragedy that we have lost the enrichment of context in poetry critcism.

I work on my readings. Could use one of those cool Snowball microphones, however. The built-in mic in MacBook will not do. Ambient noise abounds.

In case you wondered, the word qarrtsiluni is an an Iñupiaq word that means "sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst."

News that stays with you

A couple of things about the revolution in Iran that struck me are today:

Good summary of the current situation and the possibilities for the coming week by blogger Black Hat Journalist. I'll be following this blog.

And a new Wikipedia entry for Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman gunned down Saturday, June 20 in Tehran, allegedly by a Basij gunman. Lighting a candle tonight in her memory.

Women of Iran - "lioness" is a Farsi word that comes to mind when I see the images of protesting women and read about Zahra Rahnavard, Moussavi's wife, taking a leadership role.

Someone on my poetry listserv posed the question of the emotional content in poetry and its equation to "importance" of a poem, citing a craze for emotionalism with linebreaks that's become a trend among teenagers. While I like to think that anything is fair game to interest youth in our lovely art form, that kind of verbal emoting may so far debase any art form that it defeats the purpose. This has been an emotional week for me, watching singular events unfold in a country I haven't till now thought much about. The only poetry I have dared to work on is far, far from these themes.

I thought of Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and this statement that connects poetry to our common humanity:

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally directs his attention.

And at the same time, I thought of this, also from the Preface:

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Spontaneous, yes. Overflow, certainly. The wisdom is in recollecting it from tranquillity.

A candle for Neda, Iran

Seldom do you get to watch history unfold so rapidly -- unless you live in times such as ours. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. I think curses are meant to be transformed into blessings of insight through hard work, endurance and love. In Iran this weekend, they are doing very hard work, deciding what they want to be as a country, and standing up, one by one, for their own individual answers.

One young girl in Tehran yesterday was standing up for her answer when a Basij sniper peered down at her from a balcony. For some reason, he decided to aim straight at her heart and he was a good shot. She died in her father's arms while an amateur videographer captured the tragic event on film and uploaded that video to the Internet. The film rocketed around the world via a new use of technology whose power we are just discovering as Iranians discover their use of it to get out word of these events.

The girl's name -- I've read that she was only 16 -- is Neda, which means voice or call in Farsi. It has in 24 hours become a rallying cry for the cause of freedom. How remarkable an event this is, helped to unfold by people like us, fingers poised over our keyboards, alone in our offices and rooms, expressing our thoughts and feelings about such events in often brief but moving posts. Here's one I just grabbed from Twitter. It touched me deeply:

Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it. --Mahatma Gandhi #neda#IranElection

Hafiz says

I've been following events in Tehran via Twitter and learning a lot about that networking site in the process. One of the people in Iran getting clear, consistent and insightful tweets out is a woman using the name oxfordgirl. Obviously a born leader, her tweets are a combination of advice to those on the streets and in Iran and reports to those outside. For those of you who don't use Twitter, a post is limited to 140 characters, so the messages are by definition brief.

The picture emerging from her messages and those of others is of massive police force meeting the planned protest at 4 pm, scattering protesters into side streets where fighting has occurred with rock-throwing, and protesters being badly beaten. Police have used water cannons, tear gas and something acidic sprayed from helicopters. Shots have been fired and at least one body was carried away. Moussavi has addressed the crowd saying he is prepared for martyrdom.

An estimated 2,000 people had been arrested before today. It seems this crackdown is sparking a heightened, emboldened resistance. Why am I reminded of being in Berkeley during the anti-Vietnam War protests? Excessive police force is always a poor response to protest. As Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

Opened the Divan of Hafiz again today - this is a tradition well-known in Iran, seeking advice from Hafiz - and this is what I first read:

Tis the ambush-place: and very swiftly thou goest. Be sensible: do not go swiftly lest from the broad king's highway, should ascend the dust of thee.

Be brave but be safe.

Green

I'm green on Twitter and glued to the screen. Someone just said, "If Iran sleeps tonight, it will sleep forever." But it doesn't appear that is the case, with cries of "God is great" echoing through Tehran. I wonder what is happening in other Iranian cities, and how many months it will be before we know what is the import of all of this. I have a friend who contends the demonstrations are incited by the U.S., but it's hard to view all the videos of hundreds of thousands and imagine that so many people could have been made so passionate by espionage manipulations.

I think of the Persian poet Hafiz and his Divan, so I opened it at random and saw this:

If the Sultan's justic asketh not the state of the oppressed ones of love,
For those corner-sitting, it is necessary to sever the love of ease.
(Wilberforce-Clarke translation)

Hey, don't blame me -- I didn't make this up. Blame Hafiz, who as a friend recently said, nails it again.

Duende & Saudade in American Poetry

Edward Hirsch's excellent Poet's Choice column yesterday has me thinking about these neglected dimensions in discussions of contemporary poetry, what I think of as the question of a poem's emotive undertones. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson's reply to Thomas Higginson as to how she defined poetry: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Duende is of course Lorca's term for the experience of the reader being seized by "dark" qualities in the work, by which I understand him to mean mysterious, indefinable qualities. Saudade is a Portuguese term that is sometimes (poorly) translated into English as "the blues." And yet a Brazilian bossa nova song can have plenty of saudade, though it makes you want to get up and move.

Interesting, thought-provoking article.

Outrageously wired

We are all so addicted to our devices, and naturally poetry, like every other form of communication, seems to have taken a quantum leap into the virtual. I mean, you can now tweet a poem.

As I perused the thinnest Sunday newspaper I have ever received, then read a report on publishing trends and how magazine sales are triumphantly less down than the rest of the retail sector, I get the feeling that everyone's showing up here. At the same instant.

Is poetry gridlock possible? Has anyone counted the number of new zines that appeared this year to date? No one's clocking the trends on free content. And here's a personal gripe: my CD, A God You Can Dance, somehow went viral and is listed on all these indie music sites. Now that's all well and good, but with downloadable tracks for 99 cents on almost all of them, not a single penny has come to me. It could well be that nobody's listening. Or ... am I slow to get this? Music is less and less sold and more and more ripped. Somehow.

The publishing of poetry has already gone down the path of willing-to-be-ripped. And now that you can read so much for nothing, are all the authors and poets and musicians going to be artists in their spare time? Puzzling. Enlighten me as to where this all goes.

Poems getting out there

I'm so pleased to have my poem "A Walk After Reading Dante's Paradiso" online this week at Susan Culver's eminently readable Poetry Friends. Susan's a good editor and so I enjoy reading the weekly poems. Plus it has an elegantly simple submission system, which means it's likely to be around for awhile. Good! I know how hard it can be to keep a zine going.

Also was pleased to have word that two of my poems will appear in a print anthology of Yareah Magazine, a bilingual English-Spanish publication edited by Martin Cid and Ysabel Del Rio.

Facebook for Writers

I want to propose something you may find radical: that spending time on Facebook is not only not a waste, but a good influence on your writing. I hear you thinking of the fifty ways it is bad for your writing: the many varieties of distraction, the dumbing-down of social intercourse, invitations to sleaze and prurience, absurd brevity of newsfeed posts (who actually "reads more"), and the five-second-attention-span atmosphere, when your considered comment scrolls into "older post" oblivion.

But consider this: FB offers some of the best writing prompts you will ever read. Especially if you remember to select that "older posts" link and keep reading. Also, if you read selectively and hide friends selectively, the way you unsubscribe when a magazine starts piling up.

I've made poems from comments on FB, read fascinating articles via links posted by my well-read, scholarly friends -- articles that have introduced me to new poets or reintroduced me to favorite ones -- and of course, connected with editors who have published my work, possibly more readily because I am a known (friend) quantity. FB has given me insights into the process of editing and rejections, provided a place to discuss theoretical issues, and even a workshop area in which to write collaborative science fiction satire. (You know who you are!)

Forget about FB's annoyances and distractions. Or enjoy them, But also think about FB as a writer's dream tool. Using it selectively and with discipline can take you in a breathtaking short time on a stimulating journey from wit to snark to edification to meditation to composition to publication. FB reading can be a vital part of your daily writing process. Just be careful, thoughtful and generous in your friending (is that a word now?) and -- as in all human interactions -- give more than you get and you will get what you need.