Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Poetry Technology (Page 4 of 8)

Adventures in the Difficult

May 26, 2017 / / 0 Comments

SsE Poetry & Fiction

I’ve continued with explorations of digital poetry as I'm still interested in how readers process narratives, multi-sensory experiences and the playful and participatory. I'm also getting my mind blown by the frame busting.

I’ve just started to read the textbook, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Morris. It's  just as nerdy as you would expect but I'm really lovin it.

I also recently tried to introduce a digital novel into my Difficult Book Club (more on that below). Before I mistakenly chose the books we read, I tried to contact a few members of the Electronic Literature Org to find out what they might recommend for introducing to book-bound club to electronic literature. But I consistently received no response so we picked a PDF novel with a image archive and the group choked on it. They hated it. Granted the execution of the narrative wasn’t very good, but they weren’t even interested in the concept of it or the opportunities for escaping the limitations of their chosen media.

Since then, I’ve received a copy of the digital novel Wallpaper (now touring in art installations in Europe) but I haven’t been able to run it yet, finding too many technical limitations from one computer to another. You can see some online “short stories” from the story's creator at Dreaming Methods. Click 'Portfolio' in the top menu.

Monsieur Big Bang and I are also going to tackle House of Leaves shortly after we finish the Gormanghast novels. I know this sounds more like The Masochist’s Book Club than just The Difficult Book Club but you can peruse our evolving reading list.

I’ve also been reading more about poet Stephanie Strickland. Here is a good example of her work: “Sea and Spar Between”

About the poem.
The Poem

The poem is based on Emily Dickinson poem “each second is the last” below:

Each Second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance –
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance’s list
Before the Perishing!

Unlike Emily Dickinson poems, this one is 225 trillion stanzas long (yeah, you heard that right), impossible to read fully which is part of the point. It’s still fun to “skim across the surface” of it and experience the responsiveness of your computer mouse as the poem’s stanzas flutter away. You can use your A and Z keys to zoom in and out.

Here is Strickland’s essay from the Poetry Foundation website, “Born Digital,” where she lists 11 ways to identify and conceptualize digital poetry.

I’ve also come across The Iowa Review Web that seems worth exploring, an online journal of digital pieces from 2000-2008. Browse the archive: http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/judymalloy.php

More Difficult Books

These three recent reads also classify as difficult if you're feeling adventurous.

PdA Poetical Dictionary by Loren Green (Amazon)

When I first started to read this, I gave up. I wasn’t in the mood to read something that slowly. It’s all timing with these difficult books. A year or two later, I started again. This is a short book and well worth the effort of going slow with but its only 42 words long. Fascinating if you’re in any way into etymology (or the study of words). Word nerds, dictionary nerds.

Don’t skip the preface, it’s full of prose poetry. Beautifully printed, pronunciation tips that are pure poetry, historical word history followed by lyrical explorations of the chosen words. A sprinkling of dictionary abbreviations I had to look up…I’m no dictionary snob. So observant.  We should all do this exercise with our favorite words.

Don’t miss the charts at the end! Never have I found charts so moving.

GmtGraphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti (Amazon)

I read this book and then lost it in my book-stuffed house (which makes me a hoarder). Google Books explains this book well,

"The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' ("Guardian") reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. …For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres – the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed…”

Not everybody's chosen literary vantage point but it is well-suited for a data-obsessed culture. And there are some surprising trends you can see when you look at data from outside the matrix (and contemporary lit criticism is nothing if not a matrix). This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s a data set story and my eyes glazed over more than once. That said, it’s a revolutionary look at how the novel has evolved…using real data. A new story emerges.

Some examples. Click to enlarge.

Linechart Politics Space

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MwlvMetaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson 1980 (Amazon)

A common theme in the American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2013) with a few of the language poets represented were comments around the failures of metaphor in language and the capricious pursuit of newly minted metaphor.

Lakoff and Johnson’s book is lots of theory but the book dissects how metaphor is absolutely ingrained not only in our language but in the very way we conceive of abstract ideas, even simple ones. The authors categorize orientation metaphors (happy is up, sad is down), motion metaphors, war metaphors.

Metaphor construction is a “fundamental mechanism of the mind” and one that language poets like to toy with. Could we communicate without them?

Yesterday I even came across the 2012 Lexicon Valley podcast on the same topic, episode #23, "Good Is Up." One listener to the show commented that "much of language is fossilized metaphor.” A very metaphorical response. The podcast covers Lakoff and Johnson book and also interviews James Geary who has probably a much easier read on the topic, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. (How the paperback is more expensive than the kindle version, we'll never understand.) But Geary says every 1-25 words. The differentiate between literary metaphors, intentional metaphors and unintentional so ancient and subconscious metaphors. During the podcast, the hosts quote from three poets. In trying to describe metaphors of time, Bob Garfield, (who you may recognize as the host of NPR's national show "All Things Considered") found this quote from Ralph Hodgson poem "Time, You Old Gipsy Man"

Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?

Mike Vuolo found this quote:"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" from Pink Floyd’s lyrics to “Time” to which Bob replied, “Okay you win; I am a nerd loser.”

The culture positioning between songwriters and poets is constantly happening.

Later Mike Vuolo quoted Virgil: "But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail," (I could not find a good source for that translation). to explain the metaphors of time as movement, where time moves forward (for humans who walk forward) and from left to right on line graphs, which takes us back to Graphs Maps and Trees!

Cher and Poetry

May 26, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Cher Cher made news last week after she turned 71, winning Billboard's exclusive Icon award and performing for other musicians who were born at a time when Cher was already in her 40s and singing a newly minted "We All Sleep Alone."

As I’ve said before on my other blog, I love it when my two nerdy blog projects overlap. Over on that other one I’ve been writing about enjoying the Cher and Sonny & Cher TV shows from the 1970s re-airing on GetTV. I recently came across Cher reciting a poem on a Cher show episode from 1975, Cher reciting “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

SergioIf you're old enough to remember The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1971-1974), you might remember that show's popular John Wilson cartoons. Later, the Cher show provided visuals to this segment, illustrations by Mexican cartoonist Sergio Aragonés whom you might recognize from 1970s MAD magazines and books.

It's interesting to note that Cher, like everybody else, can’t help but recite in the plodding “poem voice.” There are some prophetic moments in the cartoon and poem, including bits about narcissism and political corruption.

But don’t worry, I’m not pushing for Cher to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for her rewrite of Seals & Crofts “Ruby Jean and Billy Lee” (although it’s not too bad).

I’ve also recently had a chance to write about the Armenian poets over on that blog, poets from Carolyn Forche’s anthology Against Forgetting, 20th Century Poetry of Witness (Cher’s half Armenian).

Forche’s anthology starts with the Armenian poets who mark, for Forche, the first instance of modern genocide.  Find links and excerpts of the poems of Siamanto and Vahan Tekeyan over at I Found Some Blog.

  

NaPoWriMo Strikes Again

May 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

April was National Poetry Writing Month, which I started doing back in 2013 back when I was sitting in the Faculty Admin office of IAIA in Santa Fe. During the first three years I did my own projects. Then I tried in 2016 to do the official prompts; but I gave up after two weeks when I got sick in Los Angeles. This year I committed to try the prompts again. It’s a mental and physical gauntlet, this challenge!

The Experience

Overall, there was much less camaraderie over at Hello Poetry this year. Some possible reasons for this:

  • I lost touch with my Hello Poetry friends. I blame myself for this. I never log in unless it’s the month of April. And this year I didn’t have time to read other poems and make comments. I had barely enough time to write and post my own poems. But I do hope to go back and read through some poems in May. There’s also a political element hanging over poems this year. My old pals might be Trump supporters and I was writing poems with undertones they found offensive. I really don’t know them very well.
  • Also, I did the prompts from the official site (http://napowrimo.net/) and found out later that Hello Poetry was providing their own prompts. So not everybody was on the same page with prompts. This was kind of a bummer because part of the prompt-following fun is seeing what everyone else is doing with the challenges.
  • Also, the Hello Poetry site went through a major overhaul right smack in the middle of National Poetry Month! What timing. So there were glitches with making posts and making edits and times when the site was fully down. I noticed that none of my poems trended after the switch-over. Either I was writing more and more pitiful poems, (not an impossibility), or the algorithm of popularity changed.

In any case, it was kinda lonely over there. Next year I’m going to continue with my own themes and then I’ll come back in a few years to do the prompts again.

The Poems

Here are this year’s poems.

  1. 22 Skinny Lions – Write a Kay Ryan poem (which included an animal) and I wrote a political poem based on the idea of 22 skinny liars.
  2. Melts-in-Your-Mouth Marrow Pot – another political poem based on the challenge of writing a recipe.
  3. Horses – the challenge was to write an elegy based on a phrase you remember a loved one using. I wrote about my Grandfather and our inability to communicate with each other due to his Parkinson’s.
  4. The Turning of the Ducks – the challenge was to write an enigma poem about someone or something famous. Only one person has figured it out.
  5. The Juniper Besides – to write a Mary Oliver nature poem.
  6. 13 Ways of Looking at John B. McLemore (Literally) – Write a “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” poem. I was right in the middle of the sublime Shittown podcast.
  7. The Thing About Luck – Write a luck poem.
  8. The Tempest – Another political poem based on Alice Oswald’s “Evening Poem” when the challenge was to write an incantation.
  9. Magic 9 Form – a 9 line form influenced by the phrase abracadabra. Plus, I love to sing “Bibbidi-bobbidy-boo” a lot from Disney’s Cinderella.
  10. The Fairy Godmother’s Son – love poem, challenge was to write a portrait poem. Also influenced by Cinderella.
  11. No Money, No Metaphors – Based on a speech given by the President of CNM and issues occurring with New Mexico’s governor Martinez. The form is a Bop refrain.
  12. Book Bound – Based on an experience with my Difficult Book group, the challenge to write alliteration and assonance.
  13. Ode to Ovaries (Actually a Ghazal) – a day at the gynecologist produced this ode/ghazal.
  14. A Clerihew – clerihew’s are fun short spoofs on celebrates. Harder than they look. Many failed attempts.
  15. In the Fields of America – Another political one (surprise) based on the idea of being in the middle of something.
  16. Dear Adult Face – Write a correspondence poem. I have no idea how this idea got up in my face like it did.
  17. Midnight in Winslow – Write a nocturne. Poems 15, 16 and 17 were written at or about La Posada, the amazing Harvey House, in Winslow, Arizona.
  18. The Bathabout – write a poem of neologisms or made-up-words.
  19. A Creation Story – Write a creation myth. Irreverence was not part of the challenge. Supplied for free.
  20. Curveballs Tangled in a Fence – Write a poem using the jargon of the game.
  21. Overhearing a Business Meeting – Write a poem based on something overheard. True story that happened that very day.
  22. A Georgic on Growing Pickles – True family story: my Father's cousin wins the state fair every year with her mother’s pickle recipe. Slightly political take on the pickles. The extended family doesn’t agree on politics. Hard to write about.
  23. Stacks – A “double elevenie" form” that I wrote about my home office but realized later the lines also had an unintended layer of marijuana. Totally unintentional. You can watch me compose the poem on the screen capture and see how and why I chose each word. Ask Mark Twain and he’ll tell you the river is not a symbol for freedom (it is). Sub-context works in mysterious ways.  (YouTube version)
  24. Snickering Marginalia – Write an ekphrasis poem based on marginalia of medieval manuscripts. There were an amazing amount of naughty ones.
  25. Poem Spaces – Explore a small defined space. I wrote about the spaces where I've written.
  26. Stage-poemTen Relics of Very Tiny Religions – Write a poem about archaeologists in the future making sense of our culture. In my poem, archaeologists find my garage full of Cher memorabilia.
  27. Ode to Salsa – Write a poem exploring sense of taste.
  28. Modern Manners – Write a Skeltonic. Political.
  29. Serenade – Write a poem based on a word from one of your favorite poems. I picked the poem “Serenade” by Billy Collins which led to learning all about the history of Europeans discovering the Bougainvillia plant. Turned into a major girls-rock story.
  30. Ideologies – Write about something that happens again and again. Sadly political.  (YouTube version)

HypertexteditThe Electronic Literature Piece

In my Difficult Book group, we started reading the elit book The Imaginary 21st Century  by Norman Klein and Margo Bistis. While researching it, we found this video called a Hypertextedit by its creator Tim Tsang.

Although we couldn’t really determine what that video was doing, I surmised it was following the thought process of Tsang as he worked online, how his online travelings might reveal his thought processes. I thought that was a pretty cool idea so I did two similar videos while I was composing the poems “Stacks”  and “Ideologies.”

TommypicoOther Poets

One of the great things about NaPoWriMo.net is that they post interviews every day. I didn’t have nearly enough time to read all of them but I did find a poet I’m looking forward to exploring: Tommy Pico. Some links to his stuff:

Interview on Lit Hub

Article from The New Yorker

Poems in Bomb Magazine

Poet Movies: Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson

May 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Bishop-writingI’ve been in the mood for some movies about writers so I checked out this one from Amazon, the only way I know how to rent movies anymore since Netflix isn't in the movie business anymore: Reaching for the Moon, the 2013 film about Elizabeth Bishop and her lover Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares.

It was very long but I enjoyed it. Glória Pires was charming as Lota and Miranda Otto was suitably dowdy as Elizabeth Bishop. In fact, Bishop is portrayed much less coldly than I imagined she would be. And I must say, I always assumed Carlota died of cancer; I didn’t realize what actually happened (no spoiler alert here).

Treat Williams, whom I had a crush on when the movie Hair came out, played Robert Lowell in two small scenes involving the poem “One Art.” Two love poems are also featured: “The Shampoo”  and “Close, Close All Night."  Here’s the scene with from the movie with the later poem.  “Insomnia” is also featured as the relationship starts to falter.  There are many scenes with Bishop struggling to write or work out issues in poems, primarily in her Brazilian studio designed by Lota, who was a famous architect in Brazil. It was during this period that Bishop’s book North and South was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.  The setting and performances are top notch.

New York Times Review

The New Yorker about the poem “The Art of Losing”

Dickinson-movieThere’s also a new movie in theaters now about Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion. It is me or do both of these movies have dull titles? I haven’t seen this one because I live where independent movies are slow to reach. But the reviews sound great.

Here’s the trailer.

Vox Review

The New Yorker Review

NPR Review

The New York Times Review says this movie is about “the mind of someone who lived completely in her time.” They also say the film “refuses the obvious,” is “visually gorgeous” with lyrical camera work that reflects Dickinson's poems. I also like that Cynthia Nixon recites stanzas of Dickinson’s poems instead of doing voice-over narration.  This is another 2-hour epic. Telling the lives of poets takes a while.

Online Poetry (Books v. Bytes)

October 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

EpoetrySo I finally finished my year-long dive into open online poetry classes.

The HarvardX Poetry in America classes were an amazing survey of U.S. poetry history. The series was so generous is scope: a variety of videos, talks and locations, ways to read difficult poems, links to the poems and they even tried to build a tool that allowed you to do explication exercises online. Unfortunately this tool never worked with an iPad. And who wants to watch poetry videos sitting upright? Not me.

The Poetry of Early New England class was about the Puritan poets mostly. I worried, from my college lit experiences, that this would be a very dry experience. But I really enjoyed Elisa New's perspectives on this group, their biases and challenges.

Nature and Nation, 1700-1850 covers poets before and after the Revolutionary War, nation building and identity forming, including Emerson and other transcendentalists, the fireside poets and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Walt Whitman class was the first one I took on the EdX platform. While I was commuting to ICANN in Los Angeles back in 1999 I had already taken the CD class from Modern Scholar on Whitman and this really helped me break into his poems for the first time. But the HarvardX class approached the subject from different angles.

I followed that with the Emily Dickinson class. The only other ED instruction I've ever had was from the ModPo MOOC that got me started on this whole crazy, online poetry journey. I thought Elisa New's instruction was a bit more accessible than Al Filreis. It seems like a personality issue. Filreis' classes are very exciting but I learned more from the straight-shooting Professor New.

The Civil War and Its Aftermath. I was never able to take this class. It's been consistently closed.

Most of the classes were around 4 or 5 weeks, but the Modernism class was 7 weeks! Brutal! And this is the only class that competes directly with Al Filreis' ModPo MOOC but I would actually recommend taking them both. Filreis and New both choose different material to study and have different tactics for helping you get through some difficult stuff. Also, Harvard's class stops short of anything contemporary.

Click on some of those links and you'll see some of these classes are archived but closed. I could never figure out why some courses were closed even though they were archived already and some were open. Access seems hit and miss with the HarvardX classes.

After I finished the HarvardX stuff, I took the 6 week Davidson College class on Electronic Literature. And this class blew my freaking mind. I had to slow down the experience because my mind was smoking too much. I got headaches trying to wrap my head around this stuff. And before taking this class I had never considered having done any E-Lit myself; but then I remembered some of the pieces we did for Ape Culture, specifically our Choose Your Own Celebrity Adventures (1998-2002) and the Michael Jackson Fan Hatemail Generator we created in 2002.

The E-Lit class asks you to explore the idea of what a book or poem really is and how writers have always been design reading experiences. And what exactly happens when you change your reading platform. I collected some amazing links from Professor Mark Sample and this class. But it's no substitute for actually taking it, which I encourage you to do because it's currently open enrollment.

E-Lit Databases and Anthologies

Recommended Authors

I'm still working my way through some of these. Many require pesky plugins.

Poetry

Interactive Stories

  • The Baron, by Victor Gijsbers (2006) – we did a walk-through of this story in class and it was alarming in its effectiveness to take you somewhere you'd never thought you'd go. It's helpful to take the walk-throughs in the class to learn how to interact with these stories.

We also learned about Lit Bots

and Twines

Around this time I found a good related article from my marketing life, "User Memory Design: How To Design For Experiences That Last" and I keep wondering, should reading experiences be designed? Should memory be manipulated?

Are Books Dead?

Don't believe it. One of the most awesome aspects of the E-Lit course were the first few lectures on the technology of physical books. Some more book talk:

English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Students Into Learning

Why Do Teens Prefer Printed Books to eBooks?

The PEW demographic study of book readers.

Happy studying!

Thinking About Starting a Poetry Podcast?

August 4, 2016 / / 0 Comments

PodcastIt seems so tempting, right?

Every time I encounter a cool do-it-yourself project someone else has done, I feel an almost irresistible urge to want to do my own version of that project. Take for example the board game Monsieur Big Bang game me for my birthday last week, The Collector Game. It was created by a hobby board-game maker using the tool BoardGameDesign.com. More fun than the actual game is the idea of designing my own game! All my trivial hobbies could be brought to bear on the designs for various board games!

Total nerd-out!

I’m also taking an online Electronic Literature class and every example sparks the same bubble-cluster of ideas for programmed lit pieces. The list of things I want to try has gotten a bit overwhelming, frankly, especially for potentially time-consuming projects.

Podcast envy is yet another consuming type of endeavor that always sounds so appealing. Like, wouldn't it be lots of fun to start a restaurant?

For the last few years I’ve been dipping my toes into the podcast subscription world and I have a library of political podcasts, poetry podcasts, the Serial podcast was infamous last year and I too was engrossed in that first crime solving season. Lexicon Valley is also a favorite word-nerd podcast that has been very educational and entertaining.

I even finished a brief how-to-podcast class this summer from Treehouse and I learned Podcasts are not impossibly hard to produce. Theoretically anyone can do it. Technically I could do it. But the big challenge about producing a podcast isn’t the technological barriers, it’s the mental ones. It's hugely taxing and overwhelming to produce the content week after week, month after month. Planning, editing and promoting podcasts takes more time than you’d imagine, which is why the majority of podcasts don’t last longer than three months!

But here are some tips from the class if you'd still like to try launching a poetry podcast:

  1. Plan out your topics and guests three to six months (maybe even a year if this is feasible) in advance.
  2. Invest in affordable yet professional equipment. You don’t have to be a corporate entertainment company to sound great. And a great sounding conversation is addictive. Note how deliciously good NPR shows sound.
  3. Learn how to edit audio files. A lot of mistakes can be corrected with editing.
  4. Assign mandatory podcast work hours for each week so you don't fall behind and give up.
  5. Test your recording with your guest at the start of each session: check sound levels, check for background noises. Listeners will bail out of a podcast that has low or difficult sound.

I was trying to access The Missouri Review's Soundbooth podcast a few weeks ago. All the latest episodes are not dowloading to my iphone for some reason and when I opened an older episode from 2015, the sound of the guest was so low and hard to hear I gave up in less than two minutes.

Most people listen to podcasts while they're multitasking: driving, walking, cooking, getting ready in the morning. A good, loud sound recording is the bare minimum.

You can then promote your podcasts on your website, iTunes or SoundCloud.

Lifehacker can tell you step-by-step how to start your own Podcast show.  

How to Submit Poems to Journals

June 30, 2016 / / 0 Comments

HopeHow exciting it is to be sending out poems! No matter how often you receive rejections, keep focusing on the fun of researching, organizing and sending poems out into the universe.

Here are some step-by-step guidelines for you.

 

Step 1: Take a look at your poems and classify them by:

  • Writing style: are they rhymed or rhymed, are they traditional meter (if so what kind of meter) or free verse, are they conventional in language and tone or are they experimental?
  • Content: what are your poems about, what’s the subject matter?

Different poetry journals cater to a variety of these possibilities.

Step 2: Research poetry journals to find ones that match these poetry styles. There are two ways to go about this:

The best way is to visit the periodical section of your local libraries or bookstores (if you have any) and read some of their poetry journals. If you don’t see any that match your work, don’t worry about it. Your poems might fit a niche journal the library doesn’t carry. But this will give you a good idea about current popular poetry journals, the top tier to aim for someday.

You can also search some very good databases online to find journals and what they publish:

http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines
https://duotrope.com/

The old school way was to buy a copy of Poet’s Market but you’ll have to do this every year or two to get current listings (things change fast out there in poetry land). I found this was not a feasible option for me long term. Plus, what to do with all the old issues? Your library might have an up-to-date copy.

Create a list of possible journals from this research.

Step 3: Create your cover letter. You can list previous publications here or note that this would be your first publication. Different journals aim for different kinds of writers. Some want established writers and some want to find the next new discovery.

Some guidance on cover letters.

Everyone has differing ideas on the details needed in a cover letter. Feel free to experiment but keep this in mind: journals have seen it all. Literally, they’ve already read thousands upon thousands of “creative” cover letters. Don’t pour all your creativity into this. It’s a functional document.

Step 5:  Submit

When you find journals to submit to, peruse their websites for submission information. Sometimes I search Google for “[journal name] + submissions” to get a link directly to the submission information page (because some journals hide the stinker pretty far into their site).

Pay special attention to how they want submissions submitted. They’re all different. Determine what format they want the submission to be sent: printed and mailed, attached as a word or PDF or Word doc, or included in the body of an email. And note the maximum number of poems they will accept.

Many journals these days only take submissions through an online service called Submittable (http://www.submittable.com/) so go ahead and sign up for an account there. It’s free and the site helps you keep track of every place you’ve submitted poems and what the result was so you don’t have to create an XLS Spreadsheet or other document to keep all that straight, although maybe you should create a spreadsheet or notebook anyway for the few email and mailed submissions you might also send out.

More information on submissions:

6 Submission Shortcuts You Should Be Using (And 3 You Shouldn’t)

10 Rules for Submitting to Lit Mags

Empty Mirror’s Complete Guide

Publishing and the Poetry eBook Controversy

October 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Poetry_foundation_iphone_app2The photo to the right is from the Poetry Foundation and their depiction of their mobile site. Preparing content for devices matters. A lot. Google is now ranking websites by their responsive design.

Jane Friedman just published the "State of Publishing in 5 Charts."  She asks us to note that "the decline in nonfiction print book sales pre-dates ebooks. Meaning: The Internet has slowly been eating away at the market for information delivered through the print book, particularly reference and travel."

She goes on to say:

"Ebooks have affected the print sales market for all fiction categories. The genres most severely affected: fantasy, general fiction, mystery/detective.

However, Nowell took time to point out that—across three of the biggest bestselling authors from 2008–2014—ebook sales have increased their overall sales, rather than cannibalizing sales."

This serves to remind us it's not all about the eReader. And if you simply must hate some technology, hate the iPhone (which aint goin anywhere, by the way). This Wall Street Journal articles talks about "The Rise of Phone Reading: It’s not the e-reader that will be driving future books sales, it’s the phone; how publishers are rethinking books for the small screen."

My latest frustration is trying to track down ebooks of poetry, the latest being Valerie Bandura's book "Freak Show". Black Lawrence Press has not released an ebook version. This is sadly typical.

I was inspired to buy her book based on excerpts from APR. And this is what usually happens: I read poetry in a journal that I like; I grab my Kindle and I search for the ebook.

There have been great strides made in formatting poetry for ebooks (Billy Collins' statements notwithstanding). Indents and special layouts can be accommodated. Also, an ebook is basically an HTML document. It's so easy, I've done one. I'm a customer ready to buy. I'm a customer that doesn't want piles of poetry books crowding up my house. I'm a poet willing to take many more chances with unknown poets at a lower price point. But 90% of the time, poetry publishers don't issue ebooks. I started a LinkedIn group discussion on this topic. Here were the results:

One publisher said, “I know that our press will never release eBooks. They are a pain to format, and we like print.”

Sylvia said, “I don't know anything about ebook publishing, but I prefer them now because I've no more room in my house for bookshelves, or nightstands, or plastic bins filled with books. However, if I really want the book, I will buy it if it's only available in print.”

Kevin said, “Formatting is indeed a pain. Granted, I don't code, but getting an intended line/stanza to render properly is practically impossible.”

To that, I responded that I’ve loved and have published printed books as well. I’m practically living like a book hoarder. I’ve also paid movers many times to move my books from house to house. A printed book is a work of art at its best and, for this reason, they aren’t going anywhere.

But…I've also formatted indented lines and stanzas for ebook publications. There are books out there now about how to format more complicated poems in simple HTML. Two good examples of existing poetry ebooks: Patricia Smith’s award-winning book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah works with various formatting that comes across flawlessly in the ebook version and Kenneth Koch’s New Addresses. Copper Canyon is now issuing their back catalog in ebook editions.

You can also find technical help at a similar price to web design (if you don’t like working in markup code). Shortly someone will probably develop WSYWG software just for laying out ebooks. But as publishers, we seem more willing to pay for web page design, (the same HTML work), than for similar assistance with our ebooks, and realistically our books are our most valuable commodity.

When the business of selling poetry seems to be in decline, (due to lack of mainstream interest and poets themselves buying more anthologies, used Amazon copies, or just borrowing library copies), how many people like me are out there willing to buy new poetry books? I agree with Sylvia, if I really, really want it, I’ll buy the printed book. But I’d be willing to buy so many more new books of poetry (that I kinda want but don’t really need) if there were ebook versions.

It takes effort to frustrate a willing customer. Publishing is more than about doing what you love. Like selling any product or service, it’s a negotiation between what you love and what your customers love and need.

Then Richard said, “Well, it may be convenient when on a trip or vacation to have a reader. But, to me, nothing like a book in hand. Have more often than not been highly unhappy with ebook formatting, changing lines around if they don't fit their format page. Even was included in an anthology by the Kansas Writers Association and about had a fit when ALL the poems were screwed in some way or another; nobody could bother to "edit" it correctly, or question each poet with "proofs" before being published, just to be sure. Nice to have the publishing credit, but then you never want to refer people to the book, if it ends up NOT what you wrote in the first place…"

I replied to Richard that it does take knowledge of HTML to format ebooks. It's not simply a dump-it-in and publish affair, which unfortunately some publishers try to get away with. You wouldn't want to buy a printed book that was simply a photocopy of someone's handwritten novel. Different formats need different tasks to be applied. But plenty of poetry houses are doing it: Copper Canyon, Coffeehouse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It's just a matter of the publisher committing itself to learning how to do it.

Here's a New York Times article on the issue from 2014, "Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly."

Luke said, “Mary I understand your frustration. I too, wish there were more poetry offered in an e format. I'm old fashioned (no smart phone, etc) but have grown fond of the kindle. I'm a believer. I just read a great article about how the kindle and the tablet has encouraged reading and as a result more people are keen to try out things like poetry. Poetry sales are up as a result, bettering publishing houses and authors!"

Marie said, “Two presses that release ebooks simultaneously with print versions:

And yet it seems there are many publishers who just aren’t interested in listening to their customers. Imagine if Apple or your local restaurant felt this way. Experts estimate that about 80 percent of new products fail upon introduction and another 10 percent disappear within five years.  See “Organization Theory and Design” by Richard Daft (a book available in eBook, by the way) and this article from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/09/12/five-reasons-8-out-of-10-businesses-fail/ !

Writers need to come to terms with a few things: one, that they are not their work and two, that their writing is not necessarily its format. Also, they need to come to terms with a new generation and their very different needs. Although I don’t agree with newness for it’s own sake, I like this comment by Seth Godin, a marketing and business guru:

"Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us. Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start. It's also the only place to start. It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thought-straps. But it's urgent."

Another great quote:

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." William James

If you think outside the box, if you use poetry as research, if you read poetry explanatorily and don’t purchase every book of poems as collectibles, eBooks are the clear choice for format.

More Conversation

Here is a great conversation explaining why Amazon may not be the predictor of doom.

In a Jane Friendman's interview with Bo Sacks, he says, “print used to be the least expensive, easiest way to reach a mass audience. It was easy to print, and many people did. And there was lots of junk printed.”

Jane asks, "There’s all this conversation about print versus digital in publishing. How much is that a distraction?" He responds, "It’s a terrible distraction. Everything is as it was; only the substrate has changed. And I believe the substrate is irrelevant to the message. We as publishers are agnostic or should be agnostic to the substrate. We just want to sell you good words. I’m indifferent to how you choose to read those words. And that’s what’s happening, despite our fears and worries. Reading is not going to go away. And we should be respectful of the individual’s right to read on whatever substrate she wants."

Bo Sacks says we’re in the “Information Distribution Industry" (formerly known as "Publishing").

In other related news, here is an article on Self publishing scams: http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/self-publishing-scams-2/

And peaking of Amazon, strangely I see many questionable copies of my book for sale on Amazon from independent sellers, possibly more books than I’ve actually sold or given out. And one seller from Arizona claims that the dust cover is missing. The only problem being my book didn’t have one.

Which reminds me that my two Goodreads giveaways (resulting in 10 books given away) produced  zero reviews so I wouldn’t recommend bothering with those. I think they end up on Amazon! 🙂

  

Are EdX Harvard Poetry Classes Impersonating MOOCs

September 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Harvard I went to enroll in the three other Harvard poetry online classes (because I've become like an online class hoarder). To say Harvard's poetry Moocs  are classes is overstating, however, because they’re just archived materials from past MOOCs.

I was highly perturbed to have their site ask me for a five dollar donation for each course. I was annoyed for these reasons:

 - The class represents itself as a free MOOC, (“HarvardX—Free Courses from Harvard University” and “edX/Free online courses from the world’s best universities”), and this gesture feels like trying to have it both ways.

– The Walt Whitman class was good, but not as good as the ModPo MOOC from the University of Pennsylvania which, to date, has never asked me for any money. If anybody should get my measly five dollars, ModPo deserves the money for the blood and sweat put into those gargantuan efforts.

– None of the features that would actually cost them anything are available anymore: they're not reviewing your work, the annotation tool is turned off and there are no active forums to maintain or contribute to. It's just readings and videos. Again, ModPo is so much more active and so much more free.

– I’m not opposed to donating cash to worthy causes but Harvard–you have a bigger endowment than God. Please refrain from asking the pleebs for change. At least the robber barons gave us free libraries. Jeesh.

  

Walt Whitman & His Online Harvard Course

September 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

WhitmanWhitman, The Musical!

Check out the one-man musical on Walt Whitman! (OC Register)

Whitman, The Online Class!

I've almost finished the free Harvard EdX online Walt Whitman class found at: https://www.edx.org/course/poetry-america-whitman-harvardx-ampox-3

It's part of their archived Poetry in America series which includes poetry of Early New England and Nature and Nation (all Northeastern obsessed poetries; hopefully more to come that’s less regional).

The course is set out over four weeks. The reading load gets harder as you go. The online experience focuses on learning to annotate poems and the site has a special program for that. Either it doesn’t work in my iPad or it’s turned off in the archived experience. I'm using my Collected Works book anyway. There is not much over reading (essays, other similar poets) but there is plenty of interesting video hours you can spend on poem group commentary, readings and a tour of New York which shows mostly a woman pointing at buildings.

I am finding that the class is helping me with aspects of the novel I'm working on. I have to say, like other women over 40 (who make up a large part of the Harvard class cast), I'm enjoying Whitman much more now.

In fact, these two quotes from "Song of Myself seemed appropriate to point out, this one due to living in the Internet-age:

“I speak the pass-word primeval.”

And this one in regards to discussions here around mindfulness, sympathy and empathy:

“And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” 

Over the last few weeks, I've mentioned online classes and Mp3 lectures from The Great Courses company. I wanted to mention I’ve also used Udemy. And here's an important tip I left out earlier: don’t freak out when you sign up and see courses prices at $150. Just wait for the email sale–it comes every day or so–and inevitably courses come down to anywhere from $19 to $40! It’s some kind of masochistic sticker-shock marketing they seem to be doing.

Also check out Slideshare on LinkedIn as another resource for poetry learners and teachers that's free!

  

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