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Self Publishing: The Last Stretch with ebooks

October 27, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I hear a lot of older writers pooh-poohing ebooks. Poets seem to especially hate ebooks because poets tend to be nostalgic for a time before e-anything.

And I can relate. I dreaded the impending popularity of ebooks for many, many years. For one thing, I love books. I love them as physical objects. I love the way they smell. I love they way they sound when you bend back the cover. I love the character wrinkles the creases make on the spine. I love the worn look of book that has been read over and over. I love to see books stacked in every room of my house. I love leaving a book on my chair and knowing no one would ever dream of stealing it, even if it was a Harry Potter book. You can't take a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad to the beach. Well, you could but it wouldn't be very convenient if sand short-circuited your book or if someone stole your entire library!

Secondly, I'm from the book generation (1500-2007) and not the device generation (kids today). And so are my parents. They are not going to be impressed by an ebook, just as they weren't impressed by my websites or my blogs. eThings are for crazy people. My parents will not reconsider their enduring idea that I've wasted my life with this poetry stuff unless I produce something on paper.

Well, tough titties for me because ebooks are here and they're still here and get used to it. Kids today love the e-formats and ebooks are rewriting publishing history. And if we're at all adult about this situation we have to admit: we're writing for the future and not for the past. That's the cold hard fact of the matter.Poets won't start winning the culture wars with their fuddy-duddy ebook hatin'.

I felt my pain about this for many years and finally let it go and learned how to format an ebook.

Problem is–poetry is incredibly difficult to format to show correctly on all variations of ebooks. Some insist it can't be done. Just ask Billy Collins. But thankfully, html hackers have uncovered some work-arounds that helped me and my ebook struggles over the past few weeks. After years of working as a consultant on ICANN's website, I was able to use my knowledge of html to format the poems for ePub, mobi, PDF and many other formats downloaded from Smashwords and Amazon. This wasn't without drama, however. Many of my poems have indents of various sizes. The book has graphics. One particular interior graphic continues to give me and my designer a hard time. We may have to sacrifice it for Kindle edition. My draft Kindle looks great if you download it from Amazon but not if you download it from Smashwords.

But other publishers had done it so I can do it. In fact, one of the published faculty at IAIA told me last week that his book on Copper Canyon was available on ebook and so it is: Preliminary Report by Jon Davis.

I don't for a minute believe that physical books are going to disappear. But if you want to publish in the 21st century, you must make peace with ebooks. I have to admit, on the iPad poems look quite lovely.

Top 10 Poetry Forms So Oft Annoying

October 24, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

These are forms I'm oft working with, by the way. We're locked in a love-late relationship.

1. Pantoum
Four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Expertly rendered, the result is always an obsessive compulsive poem with turrets.

2. Epistle
Poems that read as letters.

Is this an angry letter to my mother, my ex-lover or the most eloquently peeved letter city parking enforcement has ever received?

3. Triolet
The first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines; the second line is repeated in the final line; and only the first two end-words are used to complete the tight rhyme scheme.

It’s pretty for a dirge. But that’s like some jerk in LA calling you New York pretty

4. Sestina
The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.

Is this a poetic form or some Byzantine bureaucracy of a rhyme scheme? It is a scheme indeed. A scheme to make me lose my mind.

5. Haiku
A three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count.

Either I’m a simpleton, a guru or a comedian.

6. Renga
Poets work in pairs or small groups, taking turns composing the alternating three-line (haiku) and two-line stanzas. Linked together, renga were often hundreds of lines long.

Group poems ruin friendships. A brilliant narrative will always be unthreaded by your former bff who punctures your ingenious plot twist with the words “Betsy awakens./Like the dawn, all before this/was just a fool’s dream.”(see #5)

7. Prose
The prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry.

Some say this is fiction-short’s wannabie. I say I worked and reworked my line breaks until line breaks became meaningless.

8. Epic
A long, often book-length, narrative in verse form that retells the heroic journey.

Does the modern reader really have the attention span for this? Not unless I can figure out a way to turn two seasons of the TV show Wilson Phillips: Still Holding On into epic verse.

9. Free verse
Formalists keep calling your poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Va-jaja” derivative, lazy and self-absorbed.

10. Sonnet
Sometimes there’s so much traffic in this poem, it’s hard to make the turn.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Acclimate to the Question

October 19, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So who hasn't had this book recommended to them about fifty times in their poetry studentship? Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke must be the most-recommended book for young poets…heck, the title implicitly begs to be read by novice bards.

I pulled off my copy (that I bought in Westchester, NY, back in the mid-1990s) from the bookshelf and opened a page randomly for some craft advise for today.

Bingo! That's how easy this is!

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

What a good focus goal: to write about one of your questions, letting go of all possible answers.

Nut Up or Shut Up

October 19, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

This week, as I was looking for bit of craft from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, I accidentally came across some good quotes for giving confidence when going out on a limb as a poet. Considering my latest projects, this was somewhat serendipitously comforting.

…rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.

…[you are] in a rough reality of being solitary and courageous.

Can I stop tormenting my husband with my doubts? This remains to be seen.

Self-Publishing: the Cover is Done!

October 17, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So now it feels like we're getting somewhere. The cover has been finalized! Whoo-hoo. Now goes the cycles of fixing the innards.

There are some benefits to having a parental publisher. We talked about this somewhat when we talked about the pros and cons in our first post about self-publishing. The publishing business is changing and DIYers are now poised to take advantage of that in a forceful way. But it is a lot of work. And if you don't put in the work, it shows.

There's a local publisher in my hometown who I met with once. They sent me a letter full of typos and I went in to talk to them. They do two kinds of publishing: what I call "parental publishing" (traditional publishing) and they are also what Mark Levine calls a subsidy publisher (you pay them to step you through POD publishing). What you get with them is basically an imprint logo to live behind…but little else. You do get copious amounts of layout calamities and typos (at least in all six books of theirs I've seen). And it was this experience meeting with them (along with a year-long market study and my own track record with DIY) that inspired me to go ahead and do-it-myself. Even though this meant I was the one filing for my own copyright. I was the one correcting round after round of proofs and solving layout problems.

In the home stretch, this included deciding how my titles would lay above my poems, where the page numbers would display, suppressing page numbers, choosing page alignments, adding back material to the book to ensure a good-looking spine. Otherwise, my book would look more like a chapbook.

I also had to proof my apostrophes and quotation marks to make sure they were displaying right, my hyphens, my paragraph justifications and indents, italicized words, where poems would break from page to page. After every change I had to redo my own Table of Contents and recheck it. I had to make sure names were spelled right and decide if this book was either the poetry of Mary McCray or poems by Mary McCray. I had to make sure our imprint logo looked swell on the cover. I had to nudge the artists to see if the artwork was getting done. I had to shell out some cash to have the book proofread.

I had to start looking at books of poetry on my bookshelf in an entirely new way.

Learning, Adopting, Appropriating, Stealing

October 9, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Another poetry blog I was reading Monday alerted me to this New York Times Bestseller: Steal Like an Artist, 10 things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon.

There's a zillion books out there on creativity but Kleon's take is brill: organize it with a simple list structure combined with the revelation of some secret, previously withheld knowledge and add overt permission to pilfer slapped like a bow on top.

Who can resist?

All the great ones steal. Just ask Meryl Streep and Michael Caine.

Monday Poetry News Roundup

October 8, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

A Book About Birds

October 7, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I've just posted a recent interview with poet Tom Crawford.

This interview talks about the importance of birds, meditation in poetry, the use of place, accentuating the ordinary and the inspirational hunch that begins a poem.

Interview with Tom Crawford, author of The Names of Birds

The Copper Canyon Catalog

October 6, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

For
the first two years in Santa Fe, I worked from home for the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that
effectively runs the Internet. I loved the job but went slightly stir
crazy working from home for two years. I decided to take a writing class
at the local community college last spring, mostly to meet people.

By
chance, I found an amazing class taught by poet Barbara Rockman.
One day she told us about one of the poems she found in the latest
Copper Canyon Catalog, “I Hate to See the Trees Leaf Out” by David
Budbill where he expresses sadness in seeing winter change to spring: “the summer glut of green” and “all that lovely, empty
bareness” gone.

I missed getting the Copper Canyon
catalog. TMI: but it was good bathroom reading not to mention brilliantly designed, showcasing
the book covers, a quote from the poet and a sample poem. It's almost its own chapbook and has led me to
purchase many books from Copper Canyon.

So
I wrote to them and asked to get back on their mailing list. They said
they’d put me there but months went by and nothing. I had to harass
them twice but it was worth it.

Some books I'm going to get:

Natalie
Diaz—When My Brother was an Aztec: Natalie is a Native American writer from the Mojave tribe, recently interviewed on PBS; and she visited the Institute of American Indian Arts on September
27 for a lunch reading and discussion with the students. I was lucky enough to attend. She talked about preserving her language and modern tribal issues. She had an interestingly breathy and confident reading voice and she read many poems I loved, including one Halloween altercation with a white kid and another poem about menstruation. She took us through some writing exercises and I turned
out a little prose piece in the style of Donald Barthelme about the
color green. I think I was subliminally influenced by my favorite short story, "The Emerald."

Marvin Bell's book Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems also looks good…and Copper Canyon always publishes good Asian poets past and present like Zen writer Cold Mountain and Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse.

At Sarah Lawrence College I had the good fortune of studying wi

th poet Jean Valentine. I'm glad to see she has a recent book called Break the Glass. She was very kind to me and I enjoy reading her enigmatic poems. The quote in the catalog calls it her "dreamlike syntax."

And Chris Abani's poetry in Santificum, Renewal really appeals to me. In his quote he says, "You are not a wise person expounding to people. You are just a person on a journey…"

They say you cannot say this in a poem.
They say you cannot say love and mean anything.
They say you cannot say soul and approach heaven.
But the sun is no fool, I tell you.
It will rise for nothing less.

There were also many poems I liked in the catalog including "Maine Seafood Company" by the Dickmans (Michael and Matthew) about a lobster boil:

Things don't feel too bad
And then they do
And then they don't

The astute description of loneliness in "Projection" by Lidija Dimkovska:

…But I know that you know how your palms itch when you're alone,
…
to have your arms not merge into the day
but be signs by the road
and to have nobody, Laurie, nobody travel
down your roads.

The heartbreaking reverse in "Mother’s Night" by David Wagoner
(related to Porter? probably not)

…She's coming back,
her arms full of the flowers I gave her once
a year in April, and she's asking me
to put them back on the stems in the greenhouses
they came from, to let them shrink away from the light.

Or of grief "In February" by Michael McGriff:

Her son's been dead

nearly a year, and yesterday
while driving to the feed store
she braked suddenly
and threw her arm
across the rib cage
of his absence.

Or another view of grief in "Hospital Parking Lot, April" by Laura Kasischke

…The rage
of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow before you died, decorated now with feathers.
and unrecognizable
with the windows unrolled
and the headlights on
and the engine still running
in the Parking Space of the Sun.

Compact wisdom in "Oyster Shell" by Sung Po-jen

neither should you give birth to pearl
they won't guard your life

The frightening poem "Scarecrow on Fire" by Dean Young:

Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.

C.D. Wright poem is perfect in its entirety:

After that, was the bowling alley integrated.
After that, it burned.
After that, we tried to integrate the lunch counter at Harmon's.
What happened.
They tore out the lunch counter.

Chase Twichell manifesto in "Solo:"

I've always been alone, and that knowledge
has been like a sheet of cold glass
between me and the world

Matthew Zapruder nonsensical but subliminally meaningful "Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices:"

Today it's completely
transparent, a vase. Inside it
flowers flower. Thus
a little death scent. I have
no master but always wonder,
what is making my master sad?
Maybe I do not know him.

The in-memoriam section give us "Green Apples" by Ruth Stone who died in 2011:

The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like the definition of love

Are You a Joiner?

September 26, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Are you a joiner? Are you a member of prestigious (or even lowbrow) organizations because you like to engage in structured social activities? Somehow I doubt it…because you're a poet. For you networking is probably painful and you stick to your small, solid cliques.

I myself tend to be somewhat of a hermit, although I have had a very love-hate relationship with thematic clubs over the years. I always want to join but then never enjoy having joined.

It all started when I was 7 years old and had consumed every bit of text on the back of my Cher album Cherished (Warner Bros., 1977). There I read about the Cher fan club. A sense of belonging…finally? The promise of a community? Nah, who needs it! I wanted the official pin, the official fan club wallet card, the official welcome letter and all the official political-esque paraphernalia involved in membersip to such an esteemed organization as Cher's friends.

I filled out the pink form and begged my mother to send in the required $5 entry fee. If she ever did, no welcome packet ever arrived. I was haunted by this over the years and eventually had to buy the original old fan club kit for $40 on eBay decades later (the very cool poster to the left came with it). No Cher fan club since has stayed in business. Their materials tend to be lame and plagued with grammatical errors.

So I switched over to the very nerdy Barry Manilow fan club in my tweens. Finally, the wallet card, the secret newsletter, the secret merchandise catalog! I wrote about my ten-year experience with this club in the webzine Ape Culture ("I Was a Teenage Barry Manilow Fan"). From the BMIFC (Barry Manilow International Fanclub) I learned that someday I wanted to grow up and attend conventions. Think tanks! Name badges! Seminars! Hotel trysts! This secret dream would lead to some frustrating experiences as a staff member of the Cher Convention (from 2000-2008) where I worked as games coordinator, registrar and sometime MC.

This year I decided to make an effort to connect with poets beyond my old Sarah Lawrence clique (we used to meet every week in Bronxville back in the 1990s). I decided to start with a subscription to Poetry Flash (the LA poetry newsletter). I paid $12 almost a year ago and have yet to receive anything. They have also ignored six emails and Facebook inquiries about my missing issues and advertising opportunities. Rip. Off.

Last week I bit the bullet and joined the two big poetry societies. Academy of American Poets costs $35 for a basic membership and all I got was a green membership card with the following May Swenson quote on the back: "Poetry is not philosophy; poetry makes things be, right now." That well-placed semi-colon is worth part of the price of membership. Someday I should also receive my two issues of American Poet and my National Poetry Month poster. I also get discounts to the online store of books and recordings and discounts to New York events and readings.

I joined the Science Fiction Poetry Association as well because my first book of poems is a tad science-fictiony. I have no idea what my $25 membership will provide in terms of swag. Fingers crossed.

But it will be hard to beat the welcome I got with Poetry Society of America. When I lived in New York City, it was the PSA outreach that I loved the best, including Poetry in Motion (poetry posters in the subway trains). I have my very own train poster. With my $45 membership I get a lot: a letter on card stock with a membership card, a bookmark, a purple pin that says "Poetry/I, too, like it," a packet of four very colorful poems on postcards and 20% off one of five poetry journals (APR, The Believer, Boston Review, Fence and Washington Square Review…I'm going to pick APR/American Poetry Review).

Let the socializing begin.

Should I keep my membership cards in my wallet? In case I get hit by a bus, people should know I support the arts, right? People should know I'm a poet and therefore somewhat of a loner and this plethora of poetry-club-memberships entitles me to immediate friendships with any poet-EMTs.

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