Writing: On Not Being Able to Fit Into the Boxes

I have difficulty even seeing, much less respecting and obeying, what some writers and editors feel are hard-and-fast lines between poetry, prose, nonfiction, creative writing, and essay. To me those all blend together. The most interesting books I read tend to be like the Japanese ideal of zuihitsu, "following the brush," the great exemplars of which style are Essays In Idleness and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The American writers who have given us journal-books that move easily between prose, poetry, poetic prose, prose-poetry, and creative nonfiction essay, are who really stay with me. Andrew Schimmel, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn's The Journals, which I have only recently discovered, to my great delight.

I love the form of haibun, which is the form Basho's travel journal books are written, with alternating prose and haiku sections, on some pages just a single poem, on other pages a formal haibun which is a prose description of a moment or subject followed by a haiku on the same moment or subject but from yet a different direction. In not irrelevant ways, the haibun is my ideal form for writing.

I see when literary publishers offer open reading periods, during which anyone can submit a manuscript or collection, that they often create fixed categories for acceptance. You have to submit through the Poetry gate, or the Fiction gate, or the Nonfiction gate. But what if your manuscript moves between all of these? What if there is no real distinction, or boundary between them, in your writings? Where do submit them? I often feel a kind of decision paralysis in the face of such categorical requirements, and end up not submitting anything anywhere. Because inevitably I'll place my manuscript in the wrong box, and be automatically rejected.

The fact is, my best writing is All-of-the-above. The writing of mine that I like best, perhaps I should more truthfully say. The stuff that I write that excites me doesn't live within the boxes of Prose or Poetry, but tend to be Prose-AND-Poetry. I readily grant that there are lots of editors who just don't know what to do with that. I'm sure I've caused more than one headache which led to rejection. (There is also the issue that when you read a certain genre, yo bring presuppositions—one hesitates to say prejudices—to one's reading, and things that don't go along the usual trails get rejected not because they're bad but because they are not comprehended.)

Well, I don't want to make editors' jobs harder, and I'm not trying to be difficult, AND it seems to me that the rigid categories between writing genres are in fact a barrier rather than an aide. They are illusory, and often arbitrary, and even occasionally rather dismissive.

Because the one genre I don't really write in, and have no real "feel" for writing in the genre that doesn't like to be called a genre, namely, mainstream literary linear-narrative prose fiction. I have written in that non-genre-genre, an have even been published in it. It is just that it seems like an artificial construct to me, like nothing real at all. Virginia Woolf was right: life is not lived as a neatly-arranged linear prose narrative, as consciousness is both more diffuse and more Brownian (nay, distractible) than the artificial construct of linear narrative pretends it is. And not just Woolf says this, but Albert Einstein, whose spacetime theories strongly imply that everything is always happening all at once, and time itself is a constructed fiction of consciousness that we make up to be able to cope with time.

It's very likely that I will only rarely ever get published. (And thank you ever so much to those sympathetic editors who have been willing to take risks on my behalf!) I just can't seem to stay in the boxes.

Poem Published December 2012

Another poem just published: untitled.

This poem originally began as a song lyric, and might still end up getting set to music. It was inspired by a night spent in a hotel in Winnemucca, NV, when the wind was so strong and fierce that dust came in around the door cracks and the trees thrashed low to the ground. The windstorm lasted all night, making for interrupted sleep and fitful dreams. A memorable night. In the morning, there were ravens by the highway, as I drove on. 

Bolts Of Silk: beautiful poetry with something to say, is a wonderful online journal, edited by Juliet Wilson. The blog-based journal is eclectic in scope and style, with an emphasis on poetry about nature that evokes an experience in the reader. I'm pleased to be published there again. 



Enjoy!

Published Poets

There are two younger gay poets I've met online—Christopher Hennessey and Stephen Mills—who are both celebrating, in their individual ways, having their first volumes of poetry published. Congratulations to both of them for seeing their books into print. I look forward to reading both books, sooner or later.

I feel connected to both of these younger gay poets in part because they are both of Midwestern origin, as am I, no matter where we all find ourselves now. That there is a Midwestern attitude towards life, and a viewpoint that colors how we confront life and the world, I have no doubt. I have been immersed in a writing project that is based on just that premise, that the Heartlands in the middle of the country do have something unique and different to offer, culturally, spiritually, creatively. Both of these younger gay poets make sense to me, when I read their poems, in way that is unfashionably non-ironic and sincere. There is a connection based on real experience, not just imagined experience. That there is a wide difference in style and means only makes the experience given from reading their poems more genuine, more authentic. "Only connect," E.M. Forster wrote, and these two poets do connect.

So I congratulate them both, and wish them all the best—and at the same moment feel a deluge of complex emotions. A blend of pride, pleasure, and some envy. I try to keep the envy to myself, because envy is at root self-centered, and present unvarnished congratulations.

Questions arise, not regarding the quality of these poems being published, but regarding the entire paradigm of publishing. Are we still tied to the idea of A Book being somehow more important to a poet than any other form of presentation? Does being published by an Established (or New) Publishing House somehow make you more legitimate as a poet than not being published? Is it poetic merit rather than the luck of the draw that gets one a book contract? Why do some publishing careers seem to begin younger than others? Do publishing careers that begin young sustain themselves for the long haul?

None of this really has much to do with Christopher or Stephen, beyond being elicited by observing their good fortune. Emotions are like the weather, and many questions don't have definitive answers.

There has been a stigma for many years about self-publishing, about "vanity" presses. The gatekeepers of publishing taste have long insisted that publishing one's own work diminishes its worth and impact. This stigma is losing a lot of traction these days, however, as are the gatekeepers of taste (publishers, editors, critics). Self-publishing has become very easy to do, using new media and print-on-demand, and the criticisms of self-published works on the grounds that they lack quality of writing and quality of design are falling away, because so many good books have now been self-published that the usual claims by the gatekeepers have been called into question.

Walt Whitman published his own poems, in their early editions. He even typeset and printed some editions himself, since he was a pressman with the necessary skills. Whitman even wrote his own reviews, anonymously. Had he not done so, would his poems ever become known? Would Whitman the Poet ever have been known by the world, have the influence he has had, changed the face of English-language and American poetry to the extent he has? His poems were considered unpublishable by the gatekeepers of his day, which is one reason Walt went ahead and printed them himself. And it's a good thing he did.

What I'm doing right here, writing a post on my blog, is considered to be "publishing" by some, and not by others. A large number of poetry journals, both online and offline, are now insistent that poems submitted have not been previously published—which for some poetry editors means, never, anywhere, in any media. So, a poem I posted on my blog is unacceptable to them, even if it's my best current writing. Other poetry journals and editors don't care so much about this veil of invisible originality. There seems to be some anxiety in publishing around things never having been seen before, by anyone—as if, by posting a poem on your own website, your have diminished it, or at least diminished its usefulness to the poetry journal in question. How much of this is lingering stigma over "vanity" publishing, and how much of it is wanting to scoop the competition? It may seem odd to think of poets as competitive, yet many are, and so are many journals. "You saw it here first, folks!" Acquiring first publishing rights is a big deal for some editors and publishers. Poets who habitually share their poems on their websites or blogs, as I often but not always do, can run afoul of these publishing expectations.

Well, that's okay. If there's a journal I really like, that I want to submit a poem to, that only accepts previously-unpublished poems, I can just write a new poem. Some poet friends have a hard time with that, because they wait to be inspired in order to write a poem. As do I, but where we differ is that I know inspiration is endless, to be found everywhere and anywhere—the triggering moment is readily available—and that creativity itself is an endless river of life that never ebbs. I've met more than one poet who writes, as I do, from intuition, from inspiration, and who believes, as I do, that craft exists to serve the moment of inspiration, not dictate to it, who yet also believe that inspiration is a rare thing. Perhaps for them, it is. For me, I can always write another poem. Inspiration is not rare, it's everywhere.

We live in times of turbulence and change, on all fronts. There's a lot of uncertainty. People are anxious, and the old definitions and maps don't seem to apply any more. The psychology of retrenchment, which is what a lot of publishers are doing, is based on fear. The other option, of course, is to embrace change. Maybe it's still scary, but at least it's alive.

Poetry publishing is in severe fluctuation, like all publishing. I applaud the genuine, actual, physical books of poetry being produced—because, it must be said, never has more poetry been produced and published than ever before. The new media technologies make it so much easier to self-publish than in Whitman's day. They also make it easier for traditional routes towards publishing to be pursued: agent, editor, publisher, printing press, book. The gatekeepers complain that a lot of bad poetry gets published now—as though they were a new trend, and had not always been true. Most things published are crap, and always have been. What the gatekeepers want is the return of their power to influence who gets published, and who gets read. I don't have a physical book of poems in the works right now, about to be published, but I still get read. It's not a large audience, but it's an actual one. I don't think that's cause for despair, rather, it reminds me of Whitman's times, and how his fame grew slowly because his poems were good (especially in those early editions).

My two young poet acquaintances have been doing the proper work of authors who are being published: the work of self-promotion, of poetry readings, or advertising, of getting the word out. Both of them have promoted their books on their blogs and websites. That's a good thing, because that's what you have to do these days. Stephen has written about how necessary it is to participate in the business of poetry. He rightly points out that the Romantic myth of the public clamoring at your door for your works of genius just isn't going to happen. You have to get out there are participate.

I'm thinking of new projects to take on. My biggest source of anxiety remains my medical situation, surgery, recovery, surgery, recovery. I am only too aware of how life-saving it has been for me to have been writing a new music commission, the occasional poem, making art, making photographs: being engaged, every day, creatively and artistically. Making art has kept me alive, and has given me a reason to go on living. So now that I'm finished with the music commission (except for finishing touches and other post-production details, of course), I don't want to stop. I need to keep going. To keep making art.

I take a moment's pause, and look over what I've written in the past year or so, as part of this medical adventure. I realize that I've written enough poems in two or three series to assemble at least two full books of poetry. Perhaps I will edit and produce such a book. I doubt anyone will want to publish it, though, as I'm more than convinced than ever that my own poems are too "different" to be widely publishable. That must have been how Whitman felt: that he faced rejection, unless he published himself. Well, I don't compare myself to Whitman, but I think I know how he felt. And so I might take that same route, and make the book myself.

Although I'm not going to rush into it. The poem series that I've been writing don't feel "complete" to me. There are more poems to be written in each of those series, I think, because I'm not done with the part of life which spawned them. Maybe in a year or two, the series will have stopped, and I'll have moved on to something else. You never stop making art, or writing, although what you're working on changes are you do, and as your inspirations change. So I might just wait till the poem series that have been evolving feel complete. Meanwhile, nothing stops me from producing another chapbook of poems anyway. There's certainly enough in the hopper, enough accumulated material, to make that worthwhile.

I've been thinking, too, about more multimedia approaches for my work. I don't really separate visual and written work. There's a book I could assemble from my photographs of the Western lands, with accompanying poems. I would probably do it B&W, although with some color. On my next roadtrip out West, I will at least partly be focusing on making infrared photographs, some no doubt of favorite places I have photographed before. It all changes when you look through a different lens. You see things from a completely fresh viewpoint when you change your artistic methods. The familiar becomes strange and beautiful again.

So I have some options. The main thing I want to do, regardless of what it is, is start a new, long-term, all-encompassing creative project. This too is part of the business of art: Staying busy, making art. Even if you have to end up self-publishing, because only a few people care, it's important to get your art out there, get it available, make it keep happening and growing. As long as you keep growing and developing as a person, so should your art. And that's the important thing I would say to any younger artists: Keep going. Make art. Don't stop. Never give in. No matter what happens, your art is necessary to the world.

Poems Published Previously, or Not

I have spent a fair bit of time doing computer file management, these past weeks, as I am mostly housebound while I recover from surgery. It's a good opportunity to do some organizing.

I have compiled a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of all (I think) the poems I've published in print and online journals since 2001. The number of poems published, including several individual haiku, is over 50. And that's from not even trying very hard to get published. I found the number a little surprising, as I don't send out many poems to many journals very often. I have done some submissions in cyclic spurts of activity, when it interested me and I could sustain the work involved. But then I go through long periods where keeping up with the follow-ups is more than I can cope with. Well, maybe that will change, now that I will have back the energy previously stolen from me by my now-removed chronic illness.

And I've just had a couple more short poems published. This time I was asked if the poems could be reprinted, from where they had previously appeared, on this blog. It's always nice to be asked.

The concept of publishing and reprinting interests me in the wake of being asked for a couple of poems. What interests me, just now, is the assumptions behind the definitions of "publishing" and "reprinting." Essentially, these two poems were ones I posted on this blog; they were found by an editor, who asked me if they could be published in an online poetry anthology: essentially, if they could be reprinted. (Of course I said yes: it's a lovely online journal, the editor is an utterly charming individual, and my little poems will be keeping company with poems by other writers who I greatly respect.)

I've written considerably more than 50 poems since 2001. I've written, not counting haiku, at least 50 poems annually each year since 2001. I don't count or track or catalog the poems I've written beyond gathering them into an annual Microsoft Word file. Some years yield more finished poems than others; some poems are parts of extended series that might take years to compile, while others are stand-alone solitons. I don't spend a lot of time cataloging my work, as that is an effort I'm not very interested in; besides, I've always been ridiculously prolific, as a writer, visual artist, and musician. I stopped counting finished pieces years ago. Even in my youth, I thought it pretentious and egotistical to apply Opus numbers to my musical compositions; so why would I want to do something similar for my poems?

I haven't been writing many poems this past year—but then, I've been focused on writing lyrics for the new music commission, so that takes up that slack. If you count original lyrics for the new music as individual poems, add another dozen or so to this year's totals. And while I am writing lyrics, which is an entirely different kettle of fish than writing "pure" poetry, I do attempt to make these lyrics as poetic as possible, as much like good poems as I am able. They will be sung by chorus, or soloists and chorus, but that doesn't mean I will slack off from my desire to write the best words I am able, to function as part of the synergistic whole that is the words-and-music of a good song.

I do submit poems from time to time. It tends to be a cyclic activity: something I give a lot of attention to, when some journal or request for submissions ignites my interest, followed by cycles of disinterest.

There are a few poetry contests and journals I am thinking of submitting my work to at this time. I've sent off a couple of query letters this week. (Another advantage of being stuck at home post-surgery: I have time to write inquiries.) Some of these submissions are pretty straightforward. But one or two potential submissions have stumbled over the shibboleth of asking for poems that have never been published before, anywhere, at any time.

I still find it odd that a contemporary poetry journal would insist on this exceptionalism—an exceptionalism that masquerades as a request for originality. There is so much rhetoric flying about, in the postmodern Poetry World, about how originality doesn't matter any more, how "new" works can be made by recombining existing or found texts, and so forth. In other words, we live in a culture that has come to accept artistic sampling. (The ethics of sampling, versus pure originality, are rarely addressed, however.) So when an editor asks for something new, the assumptions behind the definitions of "new" and "original" become problematic.

I find it odd that a poetry journal editor would consider a poem I wrote and posted on my blog, or website, as "previously published." Not that anyone actually reads anything I post online—but the idea that posting a poem on this blog makes it unpublishable elsewhere seems rather parochial, especially in this current climate of artistic recombinant sapling.

Is the world so small that we need fight so fiercely against the corruption of unoriginality?

I know it might somewhat unfair to frame the issue this way. I know that one legitimate reason to ask for previously unpublished work is that it's easier for editors to deal with previously-unseen poems than to have to go through the permissions and copyright issues that can crop up. It just takes less effort to promote new work, in some cases, than it does to secure reprint rights and privileges.

But the assumptions behind the definitions of "new" and "original" and "previously unpublished" are not perhaps so clear-cut that they can be simply ignored. When I write and post a poem on this blog, few people will ever see it. If an editor would publish it elsewhere, chances are there would almost no overlap in audience. Logically, there doesn't seem to be any conflict. So why the bother about what poems are or are not "previously published"? It sometimes seems a bit extreme, this requirement to always be original and unique.

On the other hand, poems, even poems written by me, are not in short supply. There are always more. I cna always write a new poem, if I am inspired, to submit to a journal, on a topic that ignites my muses. So I don't need to spend any angst on the "previously published" issue. I can just write something new.

The question is, however: Should I be required to?

Robert Archambeau has an insight or two regarding poetry's popularity that I feel is correlated to this idea that poetry needs to be not-already-published in order to be published. (Stating it that way seems like a tautology; but that only points out how absurd this situation can become.) Mr. Archambeau concludes an interesting discussion of the generation of Russian poets that included Andrei Voznesensky, poets who were able to fill sports stadiums for their poetry readings, with the following comments:

. . . I think about this when I hear people say, of one or another contemporary American poet, "he deserves more readers," or "she deserves an audience." I think about it, too, when I hear suggestions about how to get more people interested in poetry (by adding music to readings, by putting little placards with stanzas on them in the subway, etc.) These are supply-side solutions to a demand-side problem. They try to make something available, in hopes that this availability will create demand.

The problem is, the demand for poetry, previously unpublished or otherwise, from the general reading public, is at a record low. Many poets seem to get quite upset about this contemporary state of affairs. The lack of a broad poetry-reading public is taken as cause for despair, and often as a "problem" to be "fixed." Which is where Mr. Archambeau's analogy from (Reagan-era voodoo) economics comes into play.

I like the analogy regarding supply-side economics. It gets at the very root, perhaps, of why attempts to enlarge poetry's readership seem doomed to fail. (I also find it interesting that supply-side economics doesn't work any better in the financial market than it does in poetry, yet the supply-side approach is steadily maintained by ideologues with agendas.) Perhaps the "previously unpublished" attitude of editors who reject poems published so obscurely that there would be no overlap in readerships is a supply-side attitude. The problem is that increasing poetry's readership is a demand-side problem, as Mr. Archambeau says, and there is no possible supply-side solution. When an editor rejects a poem published on one's own website as "previously published," they are buying into the supply-side ideology. Well, they may not know that, or frame the issue that way; some might be offended to have their requirements expressed in these terms. (One notices that it is very often possible to offend an editor's pride by questioning their publishing criteria. Perhaps this is yet one more example of how economic insecurity dominates arts publishing, how lack of an audience breeds poor self-esteem, which in turn breeds brittle egos.)

The issue is, as always: Does poetry matter? Or, if it does not matter, why not?

I am not convinced that it matters whether or not poetry matters. I am convinced, on the other hand, that making poems is wroth doing, whether or not the demand is there. I don't make poems to become popular, famous, or wealthy. I make poems because sometimes a poem is the best way to convey an experience, idea, or multiplex situation to another person. (Sometimes music or visual art are better ways to convey the same.) I make poems because that's often the best way, on a given day, for me to make art. Art is meant to connect with its audience: at its best, art connects with us on many levels, changes the way we see the world, and gives us an opportunity to open and expand our consciousness beyond its usual worn-in grooves.

Art is inherently not a supply-side commodity. Mostly, no one cares whether or not I make art. I care more than anyone else that I make art. (And I do make for more than one reason. Some days, recovering from chronic illness, surgery, or the dark night of the soul, it's the best way to cope with and overcome my immediate circumstances. Making art has more than once literally kept me alive and sane.) Supply-side thinking imagines that it is a problem to be solved that no one cares more than I do about me making art. Supply-side solutions are built on the assumption that an audience should care about the art I make. Further, that there ought to be an audience in the first place.

But there's no inherent requirement that my art have any audience. There's no natural law saying that people are supposed to care at all. That they should care about art, even a little bit. Arguments that use the word "should" invariably reduce to the opinion that you are supposed to care about my art as much as I do.

Well, I don't feel that way. I don't demand that an audience should care at all about my poems. It is very nice to be asked for a poem by an editor; and I usually say yes to such requests. It is very nice to hear that some artistic product that I made has been loved by someone—it's even more thrilling when I get feedback from someone that something artistic I produced made a difference in someone's life. I always appreciate hearing those stories—because I know I have a blind spot about how anything I do matters to anyone else in the world. My blind spot is that I usually I assume that nothing I do matters to anyone but me. That's neither angst nor loneliness, merely a recognition that I am only one small fish in a very large pond.

So, anyway, the next time I encounter a journal that requires "previously unpublished" work, I will make the choice, in that moment, of whether or not I want to spend the energy on submitting my work, or whether I will simply move on to other pastures. I do not despise any editor who requires that what I submit has never seen the light of day before—yet I still can't help but find that attitude a bit parochial, in this day and age. Publishing, self-publishing, print or online, has never been easier. It just seems like a waste of energy to require such purity tests regarding publishing, when so many no longer bother. It's a very big ocean, and it's full of fish. Requiring each little fish to come up with something never said before, ever, at any time, anywhere, just seems a bit severe.

So it's not that I would automatically refuse to submit to a journal that required work that is "previously unpublished." In truth, it's that my choice would be how much effort I wanted to expend to satisfy those requirements. I might choose to spend the effort needed to satisfy the requirement. Or I might not.

It's just too bad when an editorial requirement consistently closes doors that might deliciously be opened.

Templated Design

A lot of publishers, online self-publishing services, and POD (print on demand) services, will offer you design templates for your to-be-published book.

This is particularly likely if your book is to be part of a publisher's series, and you and they want to maintain a consistent look-and-feel throughout the series. So some choices, such as type and basic layout, may already be made for you. This is even more likely to be offered for cover designs with a book series.

Templated designs are also what you will most likely encounter when working with a POD publisher. You probably will have an option to do your own original design, if you choose, but a range of templates will most likely be where you start.

There's nothing wrong with templated design, or using an existing template if it appeals to you. But it's best to avoid just using the template as offered. At the very least, you should personalize your book cover, modify the template, make it look enough different that it looks like something new and original. After all, you are publishing your new and original writings, so having a book cover that looks like a million others rather defeats that purpose.

Series titles do need to look similar enough to each other to be recognized as a series. But what carries the look-and-feel across the series may be the master logo, the titling font, cover art placement and size, and the series title, especially if the series title includes a logo design. Other than that, the cover photo and background color, and some other elements, can be quite different. The series is linked by some key elements staying the same from cover to cover, while others vary.

Within any templated design, expect to be given only a range of choices. For a series, that's no problem. But if you want your book to stand out from the crowd, to be more attractive to and noticed by the reader, you might do well to think outside the proffered box, and either design something that is not based on a template, or hire a designer or design consultant such as myself to help you make those decisions. Really, the most important element of a template is paper size: what is your book's actually printed size going to be? With modern printing technologies, POD or otherwise, that's a blank slate that can be filled many different ways. So don't just settle for what's provided you, do something with it, make it yours. (Of course, as I've discussed before, there are writers for whom the primacy of the word is so powerful that it blinds them to all other aspects of the reading experience, including design. In which case, if all you want is a handheld container for your words, use the template as is. Just don't expect to get noticed by many readers.)

The big publishing houses to whom a writer just hands a manuscript and has no say in the design, the big publishers who maintain their own in-house design staffs and marketing teams—those publishers still exist, but their in-house one-stop paradigm is no longer the dominant paradigm, and is now only one of a wide range of options.

As a writer who is self-publishing, you will have to make at least some design decisions. Get used to it, as it's unavoidable. The more design decisions you keep you hand in, the more of a feeling of controlling your own destiny you will have. Some will dive in and view that as a creative challenge. For others design choices are too terrifying to contemplate; but you must. Yes, all this is a distraction from the actual writing: but every business-level decisions regarding your book that you must make is in the service of the writing, and is intended to support your wallet, so that you can get back to the writing as soon as possible. As a writer who is self-publishing, you must consider yourself to be a cottage industry. You can go so far as to make t-shirts to promote your book; online POD printing is not limited to books, but can include everything from fabric printing to coffee mugs to CDs. It's all available to you. Your only limits as those within your own imagination. (Okay, and stamina. This can take a lot of work to get it all done.)

Since no one else is going to take charge for you, I encourage you do yourself a favor and take charge for yourself. You might be forced to do this anyway, so I encourage you to embrace it as a writer, and do it. Use it an opportunity to learn some new skills and ideas, and as an opportunity for self-empowerment. Treat it as a positive experience, and good luck.

It's a big pond with many fish in it, and some of those fish will insist on viewing you competitively. That can't be avoided, but it also doesn't have to be confronted. Personally, I like big ponds, because I'm not an inherently competitive person; I've always felt that the pond is big enough for all of us, in all our infinite diversity. On the other hand, I'm not a doormat, and don't let people walk all over me. The point here is that you can make your own corner of the publishing world, be happy and do well, and not worry about the other guys.

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On the inside of the book, most publishers will offer only a limited range of typefaces for body copy, usually choosing a "house font" that they prefer most body copy to be set in. This can be a matter of taste. You may be asked to make these decisions; with templated design, you more than likely will.

Different publishers will choose different house fonts, to the point where an experienced designer can pick up a book by a certain publisher and know which typographic specifications are probably going to be used. This is part of how a publisher establishes an identity, the look-and-feel across all the books within a specific imprint.

One approach in typography emphasizes transparency, in which the design and type choices are meant to serve and clarify the text. There are other movements with typography theory, but this basic principle of readability is the one you are most likely to encounter with publishers who use templated design. This approach is exemplified by Beatrice Warde in her famous essay on typography The Crystal Goblet:

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

The basic idea here is that design needs to be "transparent" to content, and not draw attention to itself. The caveat is that bland design draws attention to itself as badly as does gaudy design. The proper vessel for the content is something balanced and appropriate. It can also be elegant and clear without drawing attention to itself, and away from the text.

If, for example, your book is a prose text about history or a murder mystery, one of the classic serif typefaces such as Palatino, Weiss, or Garamond will make your words look classic, orderly, and somewhat elegant. If your book is a how-to manual for computing, an elegant sans-serif font such as Optima might be a better choice, especially if your text is heavily illustrated with examples and samples. The famous serif monospace typewriter emulation font Courier looks just like a 1960s typewritten document, which is ugly for any usage but that one. Helvetica is a great typeface that is overused, misunderstood, and often poorly applied, so I'd recommend avoiding Helvetica except when you really know what you're doing and want that sleek clean Modernist look.

Another significant pole of typographic design is the opposite of what Beatrice Warde advises: when the text becomes its own illustration by pushing past the pure words on the page towards decorative, even "illegible" design. The schools of punk and/or grunge typography are examples; a lot of CD cover designs use "illegible" fonts as art-elements to set a tone of punk attitude, for example. David Carson's innovative design for music and skateboarding magazines such as Ray Gun exemplify this approach. It completely turns Warde's principles of 'invisible design" on their heads. Design like this draws attention to itself, and becomes itself part of the reading experience.

I like both these poles of design. I use what's appropriate for either. I use what I think enhances or illuminates the text, that amplifies the mood or tone or idea in the words. I set no limits on taste or what is acceptable in design, because in every case it's still in the service of the text, of the reading experience.

My idea of typographic "transparency" is therefore that the type should be treated just as illustrations are treated: in ways that enhance the meaning and tone of the text, and augment the experience for the reader. A punk type on a cover design about drug culture, skaters, and rebellious teenagers would be entirely appropriate; the same typeface would be entirely inappropriate for the cover of a jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel. Kerouac, maybe. William S. Burroughs, definitely. Herman Melville, not so much. Use your personal taste, make appropriate choices, and this will carry you a long way towards giving a good experience to your readers.

•

Once again, when you POD publish, or self-publish through other sorts of online media, the bottom line is that visual appeal of your book, the fact of its appearance will serve you well. You might have to spend some time figuring out what you really want. You might spend some time playing with the provided templates, till you achieve a good look for your book. It will be time well spent, and your readers will thank you for providing them with a more sensual reading experience than merely blank words on a dull page.

Never underestimate the power of the non-textual aspects of publishing. They can make or break a reading experience.

Don't just use what is given you in the templated design box. Think outside that box. See what you can do, given what options you have. You might have more flexibility than at first you conceived. All of this will serve you in the long run, even if it seems overwhelming at first, and improve your book's chances of being loved by giving your readers as pleasurable an experience as possible.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 15: Why I'm not submitting haiku to journals

Late night thoughts on why I'm not submitting haiku to journals lately:

• I find it hard to submit haiku to journals. It's something that seems to take a lot of effort, the submission process, for usually no reward. One could often say the same about poetry in general, of course. When it doesn't tax my patience, I do it. And it's not the most important thing in my life right now. It's not that I don't want to submit haiku, it's that it's not very high priority. My resources are curtailed right now. Writing is more important than submitting.

• I sometimes find it hard to take haiku publishing seriously. There are an awful lot of haiku journals out there. Even the best of them sometimes give you so much material that you don't have time to sit and savor each poem. You find yourself browsing among huge piles of haiku, not really getting anything more than a shallow draught of each one. It's not as if there was one great haiku journal, which would be essential reading, and a few lesser journals. There are in fact literally thousands of them. So much that no one could ever read, much less collate, them all. You could spend all your time writing haiku, submitting them, having them published, and still go completely unnoticed. The market, as it were, is seriously glutted.

• Everybody writes and writes and writes, but few actually read. It's as if the reason for living, for most poets, was self-expression, even if there's not much there to be expressed. The world of poetry often excludes the non-specialist reader nowadays, by either being too insular or hermetic, or by being too willing to lecture rather than listen. A rare encounter with a lover of poetry who isn't also a practicing poet is entirely refreshing. I remember one National Park Ranger in the Southwest who I met, on one of my photography roadtrips, who could quote long lines of poetry at me from several favorite poets; a true reader, an interested reader, an enthusiastic reader.

How many poets actually read poetry without a glimmer of competitiveness in the eye? How many haiku writers read and love haiku by total strangers, poets who are still alive, rather than the revered masters? How many haiku writers read many haiku that they didn't write themselves.

Poets give readings all the time: performance is an expectation, after all. But it's the rare poetry reading wherein a poet reads poems he or she didn't write. When it happens, it often awakens the drowsing audience, because the reading is infused with enthusiastic love. Are poetry readings meant to market poetry, or are they displays of ego, or are they moments of shared performance of things one loves?

• A lot of haiku I read lately are fairly shallow. They seem to be tossed off quickly—which is no bad thing in itself—and seem not to have been given a lot of gestation or contemplation. I am not a fan of extensive rewriting of haiku: if you can't get it right in a few tries, it's best to abandon the poem and try again from scratch. The spontaneity does matter; yet in the greatest haiku, it is the effortless effort of one-point attention that shines through. That is what makes them memorable, that spontaneity that takes much effort to master.

Shallow haiku by contrast are very forgettable. You read them once, and they evaporate. "Dew drops on a maple leaf." A haiku that could be a comment on haiku-writing. Haiku are perhaps not meant to be immortal—and they are rarely written from the pretentious expectation of immortality that suffuses much epic narrative poetry—yet there is something lacking when you forget a poem immediately. What did I just read? Even in those enormous haiku journals, you find yourself re-reading, because the poems didn't stick to your ribs.

• Topical, news-generated poems in haiku form are not actually haiku, but senryu. It's like the annoying American habit of calling flowers infused in hot water "herbal tea," when in fact there are no tea leaves whatsoever in the concoction. If what you're sipping doesn't actually have any leaves of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) in it, don't call it tea. If your poem looks like a haiku, but contains none of the traditional elements and essences of haiku, perhaps it's best to not label it as a haiku. Of course, people can and will do whatever they want. But don't give me "herbal tea" and expect me to drink it as tea.

• I don't want to contribute noise rather than signal to this already glutted environment. I make haiku all the time, most often lately in response to my own photographs. It seems natural to respond to some photographs, or sequences of photographs, with short, imagistic poems—a task for which haiku are eminently suited as a form. I practice carefully the principal of avoiding a literal description of the photograph in the poem: I want each to illuminate the other, not merely caption.

This principal of illumination rather than simply restating the contents lies at the heart of haibun, as I understand the form. I have in fact had several haibun published over the years in various rather prestigious journals devoted to the form; but again, haven't submitted anything of late. (In one case, editorial personal politics seems to be an insurmountable issue.)

Haibun can be described as sections of dense, poetic prose, followed by or interspersed with haiku. The haiku reflects upon the subject contents of the prose surrounding it, but from a fresh angle, without simply repeating what the prose has already presented. You look at the room in a new light. You comment on the historical moment just narrated. You see the night sky with new eyes, the scales removed.

When I write haiku to my photographs, my goal is make it seem as though either the image or the poem might have come first. Or that they arose at the same moment, indistinguishably. They illuminate each other, and hopefully merge into one presentation, indivisible. I don't want the poem to simply comment on the image; I don't want the image to simply illustrate the poem. I want that sideways thinking that can arise when you look at a moment, or an archetype, from several directions simultaneously. Relativity: the observer's position changes the perception of what is observed. Indeterminacy: by observing some moment from more than one angle, it becomes more nuanced, more complex, less fixed, less certain of itself.

• In the current world of poetry, in which everyone calls themselves poets who can manage to put two words together in sequence, overstimulation is the rule, rather than contemplation. I would not add more noise. I would prefer to evoke more silence.

So I am generally content to be a haiku-monk in my hermitage, making the poems I make, sharing some of them with those who might find them interesting, and presenting others to the world in general with no expectations that anyone is listening. I think of Thomas Merton in his hermitage, making pen drawings, writing poems, certain that Someone was listening, not caring otherwise, evoking a deep inner silence in everything he made. You could do far worse for a role model of having a proper attitude towards making your art.

When I encounter a genuine haiku, it seems to me to be a poem of contemplation. Not merely insight, not merely observation; rather, deep contemplation. The silence behind all great poetry rises up through the poem, like a deep crystal well of sweet spring water; to get at the water itself, all you have to do is break through the crust of ice covering it, which is the poem itself. Genuine haiku have that feeling of depth, of resonance, of life-force power.

That sense of depth is something I often miss when reading many contemporary haiku, which often seem to be just short-form versions of the usual self-regarding post-confessional lyric. Many haiku are not actually haiku, but personal observations. The goal is to make the self disappear into the poem, not be reinforced thereby. Haiku is unique in contemporary poetry in that it craves egolessness. Not more personality in the poem, but less. If you can't find the poet in the poem, except perhaps as an evaporating trace of humor as in the case of Issa, congratulations.

Contemporary poetry suffers from too much ego as it is, even in those genres which claim to remove the author from dictating meaning. The "absence of the author" in some cases serves only to reinforce authorial direction, which in some cases leaves the reader out of the loop, struggling to understand just what's going on. Paradoxically, the poem becomes even more about the author, rather than less.

Even the haiku journals suffer from this. Lots of newly-minted haiku don't get past this egotism, or transcend it, to enter that crystalline space in which pure sensation is bell ringing in an empty sky. We ought to be able to look into the mirror of haiku, and see that the mirror is empty: even this form is illusory. Form is just the ladder we climb to reach the mountaintop. Kicking the ladder away is that last act of liberation.

So I suppose, in some poets' minds, I am demanding that haiku be part of some universe of pure perception, pure appreciation, pure sensation, mindless and absolute. Like the Platonic world of pure forms. They suppose wrongly: it's not the universe of pure forms I think haiku is path towards entering, it's the emptiness of no-form, no-thing, no-self.

No-one.

• Westerners often misunderstand Buddhism in this same way, because they cannot stop getting hung up on the construction of ego, rather than its dissolution. Talk to them about neurosis, and they get it in an instant; talk to them about egolessness, and you get blank stares. You can read endless books by Americans who have converted to Buddhism and see this again and again: the rehearsal of ego, the depiction of neurosis and its concomitant rehearsal of generated suffering. Endless chapters about personal failure, all of it illusory in the end. (Why do so many American Jews convert to Buddhism? An interesting history in itself, perhaps.)

I despair sometimes of explaining this inexplicable truth, which can be experienced in silence but not easily described in words. Haiku comes closer to encapsulating it than most other poetic forms. Yet most haiku we see published in all these journals do not capture the silence at the end of practice—for poetry, as Basho said, is after all, a Way—but rather tend to rehearse the formulae of practice without capturing its essence.

If I could make that one pure haiku, in which the silence, the cool crystal waters, the egoless void, were all contained, I might still not submit it for publication, knowing full well it would be lost in the general noise. But one keeps practicing haiku as a Way, making effortless effort to achieve that pure poetry. These are drops of clean water one lets fall into into the pond, which gradually will displace and cleanse the muddy water. A few drops at a time, over a long time, will replace the muddy water from even the most turbulently clouded of ponds.

And so it is with the mind, as well as the poem.

• I am aware that my criticisms here are nothing new; if anything, they're an eternal recurrence of some of the same criticisms Basho made of poetry in his own time and place. I merely restate them in my own words, metaphors, and analogies, as both reaffirmation, and as meditation on original principals.

After all, making the haiku is a Way, while submitting the haiku to a journal may be a detour. Not an invalid detour, not a wrong road, just a detour, no more than a side-bar, a distraction if not actually a pitfall. I would never say: Do not submit your poems. (Although I would say, do not submit your uncontemplated and unfinished poems.) I would never counsel any haiku writer to keep their work to themselves: withdrawal from the fray is just another flavor of vanity, after all, and thus is as bound up with ego as is self-marketing. You cannot transcend the ego by pretending to ignore it.

I would, however, say: Use the discretion learned from practicing the Way of Poetry, or the way of haiku, to guide you through the fray. Remember the lessons of silence, of humility, and of being the one-point observer who takes it all in without need to comment or judge. Practice non-attachment from outcomes. Practice letting the poem itself arise from silence in its own way and time. Let your discipline be one of attentive listening, and let others who would be life's loudspeakers do so.

•

Earlier essays in this series:

Notes towards an egoless poetry 1: Visibility of the persona

Notes towards an egoless poetry 2: Practical matters

Notes towards an egoless poetry 3: the hermit hut

Notes towards an egoless poetry 4: the removal of the "I"

Notes towards an egoless poetry 5: the paradox of removal

Notes towards an egoless poetry 6: Showing versus telling

Notes towards an egoless poetry 7: Some quotes

Notes towards an egoless poetry 8: Art or Botany?

Notes towards an egoless poetry 9: Mental Illness & Poetry

Notes towards an egoless poetry 10: first person stranger

Notes towards an egoless poetry 11: Kenosis

Notes towards an egoless poetry 12: Changes

Notes towards an egoless poetry 13: Something Other

Notes towards an egoless poetry 14: Nondual Awareness

To Self-Publish Again or Not?

I've published circa seven poetry chapbooks over the years. Mostly these were self-published—not out of inflated vanity, but because I had the design, typesetting, and printing skills to do the job myself. I was a professional designer, with access to the necessary tools, so it was not hard to pull off. I even did bindery myself, in those cases.

In the case of those two or three chapbooks that others published, I still contributed typography and design, and/or illustrations. As an artist who does work in more than one medium, I have found that some publishers do appreciate a skillset that lets you give them something finished, which they only have to approve.



I have no problem with self-publishing, unlike some who judge it harshly. Poetry after all has a long history of poets publishing their own works—Walt Whitman is only one example, as he was a pressman and printer, too. The first 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass by contemporary standards would probably be dismissed as "vanity press." But if you have the skills, why not use them in the service of your own art, as well as in the service of others? Copper Canyon Press, which has become one of the premier American poetry publishers, began as a handset press, a cottage industry done out of love; in addition to the many handsome early editions CCP made (I have some in my library), they also contributed to the revival of the beautiful typeface Deepdene, originally designed by Frederic Goudy, which was used to set many early CCP books.

I've also made some specialty little broadsides: color laser-printed, hand-sewn little broadsheet-style diatribes on subjects political and erotic, or both. The three or four longest poems I've ever written have been explicitly sexual and homoerotic; two of these specialty books are chosen from that set of poems—and the content itself assures that some readers will treat it as political.

Mostly I've given these chapbooks and broadsides away. I've donated a few to fundraisers, raising money for causes ranging from AIDS support groups to Hospice care. I've sold a handful, no more than that.


cover illustration for chapbook

I've been talking about doing an art book that is completely handmade by the artist, myself. This past year I've set up a crafts work table and shelves in my basement. I can do all sorts of things there, and I find myself at that table often enough, even if all I'm doing is sorting photo prints. I've been thinking about this art book project more and more. I don't know yet what the contents will be. But that doesn't mean I can't make the paper now, or pre-visualize a book design. The handmade paper may need to be printed with handset type, or calligraphed, rather than printed. I anticipate the finished art book to be another multi-channel creative work, incorporating original text—probably poems—visual art—photography and/or drawings—and decorative illumination.

Hardcore word-oriented folks like some poets of record view all of this "supplementing the text," bas mere decoration, ecause to them the text is paramount, and everything else is decoration. I disagree completely. I am arguing for an equality between media, and equivalent attention paid to each. The design is not mere decoration for the text in an art book. The text might actually arrive last in the process. The beauty of a hand-made book lies in its tactile and visual pleasure at least as much as does in its textual contents. The point is that they should all work together, enhancing and complementing each other.

My question to myself at the moment, however, is: Would I ever self-publish another poetry chapbook? Would I ever bother to make another collection of poems for publication—except perhaps as part of an art book, or other multi-channel piece?



When I was at the Chicago Institute of Art last week, in the Modern section I stumbled across an entire wall full of Jospeh Cornell's little handmade puzzle boxes and curio cabinets. I've been thinking about something similar: a cigar box, perhaps, with a carving or woodburned image on it, then you open it up and find another image or carving, that might continue a narrative; or as with haiku, have two juxtaposed images that comment on each other, and give meaning. I can see some possibilities for a box that reveals both imagery and words when you open it.

Obviously I am self-publishing again: which is one of the purposes of this blog. Obviously I practice multi-channel creative self-publishing, having made at least one short film incorporating text moving across the screen, sound design, and original videography and still photography.

I am not drawn to video-blogging for the simple reason that I don't feel particularly photogenic. I am comfortable in front of the radio or podcast microphone, indeed I have many years of broadcasting experience to give me some self-confidence in my speaking voice. (A rather high-pitched and quiet one, unless I consciously focus and direct.) Rather than video blogging, I am more likely to make short multi-media films, and post those. Another project for over winter, perhaps.

My podcast contains numerous ambient recordings made on roadtrips I've made across the US. One of my favorites of these was a recording of a thunderstorm made one January while sitting on the lip of the Grand Canyon in Arizona: the storm clouds, thunder and lightning, were actually happening right across from me, in the Canyon, while snow and light freezing hail were falling on the truck: Clearing Storm, Grand Canyon Abyss. One short film I want to make will be based around this sort of winter scene, with ambient sounds, and a poem or two.

I'm not really interested in making Personal Statements. The world can fix itself, without my intervention. People label some of my art as political merely because it speaks some sort of truth that they had been avoiding up till now. Disturbing the universe is always a political act, on some level.

I view the art I make mostly as reportage: of states of mind, of places and presences encountered, of states of consciousness beyond the standard solipsistic narcissism that dominates most poetry nowadays. I'd rather convey the experience of meeting fox and ravens in the desert Southwest than talk about my personal problems. Poetry isn't always therapy, or never just therapy. I'd rather present what I've seen, and not coerce you into accepting my viewpoint, and let you make up your own mind. It's not the news of human dramas on the television; it's the "news of the universe," and therefore it often operates on the timescale of the geologic sublime, rather than on a human timescale.

I recognize of course that this is a political stance of sorts, too. But it's a branch of ecopolitics, it has values dating back to the Paleolithic, and it's shamanic. So it deals with the spirits of the land, rather than with my own life-history (except where these overlap). It's also in alliance not with the self-absorbed urban mainsprings of poetry, but with those California poets and photographers of sea and land, such as Robinson Jeffers, George Sterling, William Everson, Gary Synder, and Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

So would doing another chapbook be worth it? I suppose it might be, if I had a reason to. Perhaps a special occasion, or as a gift. For the moment, though, I think the art book project is more inherently interesting, in part because it uses more channels of creativity than the merely verbal. Meanwhile, I recognize that I've never really stopped publishing—but the tools to self-publish keep getting better, too, and more competitive in terms of quality. So who knows?

Writing & Publishing: the Fact of a Book

In an ongoing series of essays regarding publishing on her blog, Mary Scriver has been working out some ideas about how publishing of all kinds is, thanks to new media, undergoing a sea-change. It's a topic worth thinking about, for all those who write, as we're all affected by it. This essay series has prompted some thoughts on my part, which I've been circling around for a few weeks, in the context of re-evaluating my own creative process. I herewith expand on some of those thoughts. Sorry if any of this is a bit repetitious; sometimes we must circle around the same topics in order to go deeper with them.

My first response to the topic of writing and publishing is, as usual for me, a bit sideways:

To be as blunt as possible, I won't call myself a writer anymore, because it's insufficient.

I no longer consider myself a poet, or care to wear that label, although I do still commit the making of poems. I don't consider myself a writer, either. The making of texts and art from words is something I feel more rightly folds back under the sigil of Making in general—at least for me; I don't speak for others—as in, making art, making under the call or compulsion of the creative process, whatever one makes being something one can look back on as the result of one's creative process. After a long period of downtime, enforced by illness these past few months, I can say once again that I Make something almost every day; whether it's a poem, an essay, a drawing, a piece of music, a photograph, a woodcarving, or whatever else, I make something almost every day. Yet, since I won't label myself as a writer or poet anymore, feel free to disbelieve everything I say.

Too many writers live in their heads, completely. Working with words, which is what writers do, has a tendency to over-develop some writers towards being completely verbal, intellectual, and head-based. They may utterly forget the soma, eros, the feeling functions and kinesthetic aspects of life. They spend most of their time in their minds, even if their hands are connected to their minds, as transmitters of the words onto the paper.

Not all writers are like this, fortunately. I'd go so far as to say many of the best writers are not mental cases. That is: many of the most interesting writers are not head-based, not purely mental: they go out and experience things in their lives—and that is what makes their writing interesting. There is a resonance that experience gives. When you read a book that recreates a lived experience in your own soma, as you read, that allows you to empathize, understand, and inhabit events in the writing, you are expressing that resonance. To use Michael Mann's phrase, these are the harmonics of human experience; and you can feel them in yourself, when you experience art. That's what makes the particular in art also become universal, and able to connect with the audience. We feel our own lives resonate with the lives depicted in the art, the writing, the dance, the music.

Some of the most over-praised novels of the twentieth century tend to be over-praised precisely because the writers and critics who over-praise them don't get out much. (I'll cheerfully admit to my own subjective bias here, that while I can agree that many great modern writers do belong in the canon, some few who are over-praised by their disciples do not; and I would start that list with Philip Roth and Vladimir Nabokov.) Of course it's perfectly fair for a writer who lives in her head to connect with a reader who lives in his, too. But not all writing is purely intellectual, and not all the best, or the greatest. Critics tend to over-praise for two reasons: to support their own biases; and, because they accept received opinion about Great Books rather than judging for themselves. To be clear, I'm not saying over-praised books have no merit whatsoever; I'm saying they're often good, but not deserving of all the excessive praise that they receive. Let's face it: every great writer produced a few clinkers, too. That's just life.

A great novel or poem is more than just wordplay, plot, or character study; a great novel is more than the sum of its parts, it is a synergy. It is multi-sensory; a great reading experience should affect you in your body, not just your mind, leaving you wrung out and full of new memories. Novels and poems that stay only in the head, with no gut-punch, are arguably lesser novels. Of course, there are plenty of critics who would disagree with everything I say here.

Some dedicated writers will of course also object at this point: But of course writers live in their heads. They live in their imaginations. That's how they write, after all. The parallel argument is that Writing is a solitary act. The latter truism has real merit to it. Yet the first objection begins to show its limits precisely at the point where writers' imaginations fail, and the words become more important than anything else. Imagination is fed by experience. Fantasy, which is what all fiction is, even "realistic" fiction, is based on life: fantasy extrapolates from the real. This is what resonance is, after all: the sense that the writer knows what she's talking about, that he is convincing precisely because he's aptly relating a lived experience. Writing is as much a somatic art as a mental one. I would argue that it must be more so; but I freely admit that that's my own perspective, which is neither an accepted or popular one, among many writers. (I've been exiled from time to time for expressing it, even.)

So what is publishing? When we start to examine what publishing actually is all about, it's noticeable that many head-based, cerebral, intellectual writers have absolutely no idea or interest in publishing, beyond what it can do for them. Which is to spread their words around, and hopefully make some money for the writer in the process.

What I've noticed about many mental-dominant writers is that they care more about their writings than the vehicle in which those writings are transmitted. There are many writers who seem to feel that what matters is that their words are transmitted to others, to be read. It matters less to them how their words are transmitted. In which case, it's perfectly valid to consider cyber-publishing to be as real a format for publishing as print. Publishing indeed takes man new forms now, driven by the use of new media technologies. I think there's real merit in acceptaing new media forms of publishing as legitimate and worth making note of; I think it's quite acceptable to publish online as well as in print.

Getting one's words out there is what really matters to most writers. Many of these writers don't care how it gets done. Publishing is no longer limited to print on paper, and publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers of distribution. A lot of writers are now able to go directly to their audiences, avoiding the gatekeepers entirely. The jury is still out on whether or not that's a good thing; or when it might be.

Now we arrive at the cusp in which the head-bias of writers who care not about the form or medium of publishing gets into trouble.

I knew a poet, once, who was of the opinion that his poems must convey exactly the meaning he intended them to convey, or they failed as poems. I've rarely met such a literally-minded wordsmith, yet he was adamant. He believed that the poem was a means of quasi-telepathic communication between writer and reader. There was no room in any of his poems for ambiguity, mystery, or multiple layers of meaning. There was only one meaning allowed, the meaning he had intended and determined.

The limitations of this idea about poetry are obvious: There is no room for interpretation. The poet dictates the meaning in the poem. What this adamantine poet missed completely was the idea of aesthetics, which is those aspects of creative writing that are the aura around what is being communicated. His poems, in their jewel-like precision, tended to be more like prose broken into arbitrary lines; they had no style, no soma, no heart. This poet furthermore missed the point that if poetry is only communication, there is no point; you might as well read the phone book. His poems were more like essays, often about general truths and Big Ideas, than they were moments captured from life. There was no threshold of revelation in his poetry: it was all very obvious. Perhaps well-crafted, but obvious.

So, this is my criticism of the head-only, cerebral, dictatorial attitude towards writing: Even as it focuses on its strengths, the play of words, it is fundamentally weakened by its lack being embodied. I know I've said this before, but it continues to bear repeated saying as contemporary poetry continues to be dominated by head-oriented writers.

But to what really makes me question the intelligence of a writer is when they seem not to care about presentation whatsoever. I've known writers who think bad typesetting on crap paper is just as good as a fine-press edition; well, after all, it's the words that matter most, isn't it? I've known writers so extreme in this attitude that, in those days prior to the internet, they were perfectly content with smudgy mimeographed zine publishing as a means for getting their words reproduced; the issue of legibility was one I brought up on occasion, but was ignored.

Speaking as a former professional typographer, book and magazine designer, and illustrator, it seems to me that what is getting overlooked by many writers is the AESTHETIC aspect of publishing: of making a beautiful, durable object, which one enjoys touching as well as reading. Some book editions are beautiful objects in their own right, not mere content-carriers for the author's thoughts and words.

There is a flourishing movement now, which is not at all vanity-press in either origin or execution, of handmade printing done on letterpress and other older printing technology. The people involved in this movement to produce the beautiful book are writers, artists, printers, designers, and small publishers. A lot of this movement uses revived older technologies to create beautiful objects in small editions. Poetry published as broadsides is part of this movement, and is becoming more common. I recently saw an exquisite broadside of a Gary Snyder poem with an illustration by woodcut artist Tom Killion.

I have collaborated with my sister, who hand-binds books and is an accomplished print-maker, on making a handmade book of my haiku. Is that vain? Only in the strictly Puritanical sense. ("Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. . . ." —Ecclesiastes.)

What print-on-demand publishing provides is access for the writer to distribution. You can print anything you want, but if you don't tell anyone about it, it just sits under your bed in a box. I'm not even talking about the financial aspects of publishing: I'm talking about spreading the word.

I worked for 24 years in marketing/advertising as well as publishing, for book and magazine publishers. (Some more dysfunctional than others.) I've done every single job that there is publishing, beginning to end, from computer-assisted design to bindery. So again I say, there is pleasure in the book itself, not as merely a carrier for words.

Blogs are perfectly fine for distributing one's words to the world: a form of publishing. But you can't curl up with a blog in your hands, and there's no ink or paper to smell. A laptop or a Kindle can give one a virtual curl-up, but again there's no paper texture to feel under one's fingers.

Reading a beautifully-made book is a full-sensory experience.

It's not just mental gnosis—cyberspace is all about cybergnosis, as it tends to completely divorce the physical from the mental, supporting the mental while neglecting everything else. So you can argue whether or not publishing in cyberspace is actual publishing—I can argue both sides of that issue myself—but it remains a mostly mental exercise.

Of course, many writers are very good at the mental exercise of making words happen, and not so good at the physical fact of presentation. As a designer I learned not to expect writers to have a clue about publishing or presentation. It's not their training, or their expertise. But for those of us who do both, it can be a repetitive trope: it becomes deadening to be required to teach the same lessons over and over again to the same group of people.

So my bottom-line thought here, after rambling, is that most contemporary discussions of publishing still barely touch on the fact of a book. A book isn't just an idea. It's a solid object. An artistic product, if you will. We can talk about the artistic and publishing processes all we want, but it remains that the solid object has a reality that just the words on a screen can't achieve.

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Update:

I am astonished to discover that Sven Birkerts—one of our deepest and best thinkers on these topics, author The Gutenberg Elegies among other books—has anticipated and gone beyond my own thinking along these lines, in a long essay entitled Reading in a Digital Age. In this essay, he makes some of the same points about reading and publishing that I've been harping on, but also about the failures of and divisions within literary criticism that have become so problematic of late. Mr. Birkerts may purr where I sometimes rant, but if you think carefully about what he's contemplating, there is some of the most profound thinking about media going on, herein, since McLuhan.

Life Beyond the Literary Establishment

Noel Perrin, writes in A Reader's Delight in 1988, a personal and informal compendium of "Forgotten Books, Remembered Books, Honored Books, Orphaned Books":

The standing of an American book tends to derive in the short run from the judgments rendered by the New York Literary Establishment—which these days is only about four-fifths in New York. It now has branches in Washington and California. This loose congeries of critics, editors, writers, and probably even a few agents tends to be liberal in its political and social views (which I like it for), insular and cliquey (which I don't like it for), and deeply respectful of publicity (which I feel ambivalent about). Publicity conferred by itself it tends to regard as the ultimate accolade. . . .

In the long run, a book's standing is largely determined by professors. Professors not only write the learned books and encyclopedia entries that keep authors alive or kill them off, they pick the literature that gets taught in college. Any generation is apt to know two classes of books: the current ones favored by the Establishment and the classics selected by professors. . . .

Most American writers, from Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne onward, have been [romantics], and nearly all the novels in our canon are romances. This has advantages for teachers and students both. It's handy for teachers, because there is usually more to say in class about something rich in symbols and hung with cloudy portent. It is wonderful for students, because practically everyone is—and should be—a romantic at eighteen or nineteen or twenty. Clear-eyed realism comes later. Except, of course, for the considerable number of people who go directly from romanticism to disillusionment, and who thus become cynics. To them it never comes at all.

A wiser and more clear-eyed assessment of the literary game I have rarely encountered.

Of course, I expected little less, having years ago devoured with pleasure Perrin's classic study of Medieval Japanese culture, Giving up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879. That was another clear-eyed book about a profound upheaval in cultural values and traditions. Japan had gunpowder for centuries, thanks to their close ties to China: and they gave it up, for several compelling reasons. Perrin's narrative of this historical period is still required reading for any student of Japanese culture, in my opinion. Highly recommended, as is A Reader's Delight, from which I quoted above.

Perrin's assessment of the Literary Establishment remains accurate today, in general and in specific. Perhaps more now than ever, making Perrin's voice a prophetic one. The Establishment is losing their control over the gatekeeping aspect of publishing now, however, as the internet begins to rival print, or surpass it, for literary publishing and criticism. A lot of the flailing that is going on these days circles around the Establishment losing its monolithic power, and its fear of that loss. A lot of arguments I've seen that project one Literary Canon or another over others are transparent power-plays. When the times get turbulent, power-projection is a reaction against uncertainty and chaos.

Power doesn't interest me. (Especially power-over, as opposed to power-with.) Good writing does. I appreciate the fact that the gatekeepers of taste no longer have the control they once did. I appreciate the open-frontier aspect of the internet. I appreciate that the technology now allows many dedicated and smart people access to publishing that they were denied before, for no other reason than that they didn't have an agent who could connect them to someone in the Literary Establishment. You can get around all that, now. There are perils to either path, of course.

One argument the Literary Establishment uses, especially in its critical apparatus, is that without critical assessments that sort through the chaff to find the whole grains, no one can make any lasting judgments of quality. Simply put, there's ever more crap out there, and they claim to be the ones able to help you sort through it. There is some truth to this argument; but it's a limited truth. It is certainly true that, with easy access to publishing, a lot more crap is out there, which one must wade through. More bad poetry is published now than ever before. It is certainly true that it takes more effort to find the good stuff among the bad.

Where this argument fails is that it doesn't trust the average reader to make up his or her own mind, or be savvy enough to make their own critical assessments. Sure, sometimes the armchair critic will get it wrong. But the professional critics get it wrong so often, so glaringly, and they get it wrong so often for all the wrong reasons—as Perrin astutely observed—that the professional critics are often as taste-driven and wrong-headed as they claim the amateurs to be. They're wrong far more then they think they are, and far more often than they claim to be. It is shocking how many bad books get praised by Literary Establishment critics nowadays.

But that's always been the case. The gatekeepers' argument also fails because it ignores history. More bad poetry may get published now than ever before, but that's because more poetry, period, gets published now than ever before. The proportion of good to bad probably remains about the same.

Any quick analysis of the history of the arts shows that, far more often than not, many bad books get praised to the skies in the short run, by the Establishment, while good and enduring books often percolate up later. The flip side of the coin to this truth, as humorously detailed in books such as Nicholas Slonimsky's classic A Lexicon of Musical Invective, is how often critics have vilified and condemned artistic works that time has proven to be masterpieces. Beethoven often got very bad reviews; so did Mozart. Bach was unpopular in his lifetime. So was Melville.

Contrarily, I am often amused to see so many critics praise "modern masters of the novel" that I find singularly unimpressive, when set up against past masters. One often feels that critics continue to praise certain current novelists only because other critics have already done so—by force of habit rather than out of essential merit. I often wonder if reviewers have actually read the book, because they certainly seem to have read a book very different than the one I read that bore the same title. As Perrin wrote, Publicity conferred by [the Literary Establishment on] itself it tends to regard as the ultimate accolade. This is as true of Literary Establishment criticism (i.e. back-scratching publicity) now as it was in 1988; perhaps more so.

Time will tell, as always. The verdict of time is the final arbiter. Even the professors get it wrong sometimes; perhaps especially when they teach courses in contemporary literature. I applaud professors who are willing to teach contemporary literature, when they include books they assess as lesser, and are honest about saying so. Far too many contemporary literature courses are, instead, attempts at canonization. In this, the professors are trying to be Establishment critics. Since the vast majority of famous living poets nowadays are or were professors, one must often wonder about conflict of interest. One certainly feels that books that should be ignored often get over-praised simply because they're produced by the critic's friends within the poet-professor world. "You scratch my back with a good review, and I'll scratch yours."

This mutual praising happens more often than they'll admit to, of that there is little doubt. The problem is that it has a corrosive effect on criticism in general. Who can the reader trust?

I don't mind if a critic openly declares he or she likes something for a personal reason; in fact, I wish more critics would be open about their personal tastes and biases. Where Establishment critics fail, spectacularly, is when they canonize their taste (over your taste) into a rule or guideline or sweeping assessment. Thus are born literary -isms, fashions, and trends, none of them durable or very deep. In the short run, it keeps your writer friends employed; in the long run, it erodes away any trust the average reader might have once developed in Literary Establishment criticism.

Perhaps there ought to be warning signs posted at the header of every literary criticism column: Caution: All Assessments Contained Herein Are Provisional. Perhaps every review ought to require full disclosure of the reviewer's personal connections to the reviewed, revealing both back-scratching and axes to grind. Of course, you already know the Literary Establishment would reject out of hand this fantasy of a suggestion, as would most outsider reviewers who yearn to join or at least be respected by the Establishment.

So what is an unknown writer to do if you want your writings to be read beyond your small circle of friends? One can beat against the Establishment wall, pleading to be let in—occasionally that even works. One can circumvent the Establishment entirely and self-publish—traditionally considered vanity press publishing, which the Establishment will ignore or even disparage, but at least you'll be in print. One can do a complete end run and start up one's own mini-Establishment elsewhere—which has been done numerous times to eventual success, creating a local literary "scene" that eventually gets noticed by the national press and the mainstream literary establishment. And one can choose to self-publish on the internet, more or less for free, more or less at risk of never being heard or discovered. I write things here that no one in the Literary Establishment will ever hear or care about; nor am I afraid to bite (kilobyte) that hand, should it ever reach my way. It doesn't matter. Fame and power are not my motivation.

It's unwise to infer too much authority from credentials. It takes work to get a Ph.D., indeed, and one can infer that one is an expert thereafter on the topic of one's dissertation, having had to research and write in depth on that often narrowly-focused topic. But Ph.D.s are nowadays called upon by the media to opine on topics far outside their realms of expert knowledge. It seems like everyone likes to kowtow to authority, given a chance. The Literary Establishment has long relied on people kowtowing to their authority, perceived or actual. What they're complaining about most, nowadays, is that their authority is less actual, and mostly perceived. I revel in the fact that I have easy access to lots of great writing that the Establishment usually ignores or despises. I revel in the ease with which one can now participate in samizdat publishing, in stealth publishing, in below-the-radar publishing that still manages to reach your one true audience, the people who were destined to be your audience, who had only to discover your writings to be brought to light and life. Even the most obscure artist has an audience; all the work of publishing has always been about trying to make that connection.

Sure, some writers are going to abuse that power, their new-found microphones and soapboxes. That too has always been the case. Sure, it's going to take more effort to find the flowers amongst the weeds. But it is worth it. It's worth it when you discover a writer previously unknown to you who sets your mind on fire, who breathes life into yours, who awakens feelings in your soma that remind you that we're all in this together, and no one here gets out alive.

What does "published" mean?

In the not-too-distant past, being a "published author" had a cachet of importance, because the process of becoming published was lengthy and involved many intermediaries, from editors to press operators. Then came the desktop publishing revolution. Then came the internet revolution. Nowadays, therefore, what it means to be a published author has come under a great deal of scrutiny. When is your poem considered to be "previously published"? Some publishers don't accept any presentation of your work online as being a legitimate publication, while others view any appearance of your work, anywhere, no matter how ephemeral, as a publication.

The problem is not that online publishing, or self-publishing, or "vanity" publishing, is ruining the publishing world. The problem is that we are in a time of transition, when all the old rules and guidelines and standards that have served print-publication for so many years are disintegrating—because the world has moved forward, and technology has put self-determination into the hands of the independent and uninitiated as never before—and traditional publishing doesn't know how to deal with the change(s).

We are in the midst of a paradigm change. None of this is sorted out yet. It might not be in your lifetime, or mine.

Resorting to absolutism, many editors of poetry journals now consider any public appearance in print of your poem to be a publication. If you put it on your blog; if you post in on an online poetry critique or workshop board; if you post it to the comments stream to someone else's blog: all these are considered publications by some poetry editors. If they can do a search for a line from your poem, and find it, they will consider it as being a prior publication, and will reject it. It doesn't matter where, or how, or why: they will reject it.

The problem with the absolutist position lies in its simplistic and reductionist thinking. In fact, most readers of poetry magazines in print don't spend a lot of time reading through online workshops, so they're not likely to have seen the poem before, in any state of completion. Trying to enforce the absolutist position is difficult—although if it can be referenced by powerful Internet search engines such as Google, many editors will say it's already been published. But if an editor wants to put hours and hours into searching for one of my poems online, in order to reject it, I have to question their priorities: that seems like a lot of work for little gain. Some online poetry workshops now prevent Google from searching their fora, in an attempt to evade the prior-publication issue. It is probably safe to say that many readers of poetry simply don't care about any of this: they just want to read good poems. It is similarly safe to say that many readers of poetry don't care if they find it online, in a magazine, a book, or printed on a placard at a subway station. The important thing to most readers is that they encounter the poem: sometimes the novelty of where the poem is encountered can mean a great deal to them, but in my experience your average poetry reader doesn't really care about first publication rights. Most poetry, it is fair to say, is read, and always has been, in reprint: in book compilation or anthology, in classroom textbook, and in similar reprint venues. Few things are more ephemeral, in the publishing world, than poetry journals and magazines.

The aspect of all this that is most absurd is why anyone should care very much. There is a double standard: An editor may reject your poem as already published if they find it on your blog, but when you collate your poems into a book this is a publication you cannot cite as legitimate. No one actually cares, except the editor and the publisher.

People have been handing out copies of their poems to be read in classrooms and critique groups for ever; and that is never considered a publication. How is an online poetry workshop board any different? The intent and the process are identical; the major difference is the mediation of the technology used to convey the poem.

And that's an important point: technology is mediation: it stands between us, even as it enables us to communicate with each other as never before across borderlines and perviously insurmountable obstacles. Marshall McLuhan's ideas about the global village have been brought to fruition by the development of information transmission and mediation technology (the media: the media are those who mediate).

Mostly because Google's cache archive is forever, and even a poem long since removed from your website might still be found in their archive—and therefore some editor might consider it as published, if they find it—mostly because of this, there are editors who will tell you, if you ever put your poem anywhere online, they consider it as already published. It doesn't matter where. The problem here is the editor's lack of common sense and wise discrimination. The problem is absolutism: the "published is published!" attitude. It's remarkable that in such a friable and temporary medium as internet websites, in which entire journals and magazines can disappear in an instant, data itself lingers so very long, and is so very searchable. This says a great deal about Google's power: but it doesn't say anything about what deserves to survive, as good data, and what does not. It is the ultimate packrat paradigm: never throw anything away. In the long run, this may not be all that healthy for either the arts, or for the social fabric in general, of which the arts have often served the function of bellwether.

Fortunately, many editors think this is all as silly as you or I might. Some journals also don't mind prior publications: they want your poem because they want to publish it, not because they require it to be pure, original, something no one has ever seen before.

We got to this point in part because of poetry publishing's over-emphasis on originality; a problem that is shared across many of the arts nowadays, and has been since the rise of the Romantic and Modernist archetype of the individualist genius-hero-artist. Everyone wants first crack at publication—as though publishing one of my poems would make you rich and famous, or somehow give you credit or prestige. The very idea is laughable. But the truth is, publication has been about originality for well over a century now—and it's also been about novelty. But novelty can be taken to extremes, because, frankly, just because a poem (or poetics) is novel doesn't guarantee it's good. It doesn't even guarantee that it's worth publishing. Most new ideas are bad ideas; it has always been so. The ideas that have some merit, and survive to become old ideas, have always been in the minority.

Some editors of small publications insist on unpublished work because they feel the need to compete: after all, why else should anybody else bother to seek them out, unless they have scored a publishing coup and gotten some new good work? They might not state it so baldly, but that's the truth.

One problem with the previously-published attitude is that some editors apply it to drafts: which is one reason they won't accept a poem that has appeared in any version on a workshop or blog. It doesn't matter to them that the revised version you've submitted is substantially different than the version that was workshopped. Other editors do say that they will accept the final version as long as only the drafts appeared on a workshop site. (Again, one solution, which lies well within the power of most online poetry boards' administrators, is make their workshops invisible to the search engines.)

My best advice to you about this controversial prior-publication dilemma is simple: Ignore it.

Don't waste a lot of worry on it. Just do what you do. Ignore every critic who tells you that you are less than literary simply because they don't approve of the venue in which you have been published. At the same time, don't expect fame or plaudits—ever!—and don't expect to be loved simply because you're now published.

The other reason to ignore the situation lies in becoming aware of the difference between a paradigm of competitive scarcity, and a paradigm of abundance. Simply put: If you come up against this issue, write a new poem and submit that. It baffles me that any writer would buy into the idea that creativity is a scarce resource that must be jealously guarded and fiercely defended.

My own position is this:

1. If a poem has been workshopped somewhere, that's like workshopping it in the classroom, or living room, with your regular writer's group. It should not be considered a publication because, frankly, that probably isn't the poem's final version, but rather it's struggling early version(s). I don't always post a revision for further comment, if I happen to have workshopped a poem. I think that workshopped poems should not be considered as already-published, since workshopped poems in writer's groups are not: the paradigm is the same. Just because your editor can find a line from your poem via a search engine is insufficient reason alone for rejection: they must also reasonably consider the context.

2. If one of my poems appears on here on the Dragoncave, or on my website, you can assume it's a final version. Should I gather those poems later into a book collection, they might well be revised again, but such revisions would not be fundamental changes, just little tweaks. So, a poem in that state could be considered previously published by some editor. But this attitude runs directly into collision with the needs of the published book collection: If your chapbook publishers requires you to list prior publications—the places these poems appeared—in an acknowledgments page, then you do need to list the places your poems appeared. My feeling is that one ought to gratefully acknowledge the journals in which one's publications previously appeared; but whether or not you list your own blog as such a publication is up to you. Personally, I don't think it's necessary, and I am not in favor of padding one's resumé, as it were. Nonetheless, this may be something you have to talk about with your chapbook's publisher; you might want to sound them out on their policy, beforehand.

Realistically, the current paradigm shift—possibly the greatest paradigm shift in the world of information supply and demand since the development of printing itself—will take a long time to settle down. We don't know when or how things will eventually resolve. We cannot guess: not because we are not intelligent enough to guess, but because the rate of technological change and paradigmatic evolution has reached a point of such acceleration that no one person or collective can keep track of it anymore. There is literally too much information to process nowadays: including information about information. (Art, after all, is one kind of transmittable data.)