Poetry Speaks

Is there a role for commerce in poetry? Ezra Pound worked his (crackpot) economic theories into his Cantos. Katy Lederer wrote a book using her hedge fund experience to spin the stuff of the money-drunk 00’s into metaphors for longing, ambition, sex, God and grief. Money is considered anathema to the dream of poetry even if (especially because?) most poets make a middling salary in gigs as college teachers. Poetry magazine’s $100 million windfall from a pharmaceutical industry heiress caused all kinds of anger and belittlements from poets (including me). Complements for the Poetry Foundation’s wide-ranging efforts since then have been grudgingly given, even though the money has not only been used to revivify the magazine, but also to support a relatively wide range of the art through mainstream outlets and through building up its own vibrant online center of blogs, links, videos and essays.

But this week a project launched that throws money and poetry in a way that can’t be dismissed as charity, or scam, or mere academic exercise: PoetrySpeaks. To even type the words “.com” after a poetry site instead of “.org” feels like I’m pimping for one of the sleazy contests that charge a bundle and deliver nothing but profit for the organizer. PoetrySpeaks is made equally out of a love of poetry and a keen business sense, and it displays the potential of both to enhance each other rather than cancel each other out. You can explore and even contribute to its resources for free. Or you can buy books, videos, or individual poems. One of the advisors to this project, Guy Le Charles Gonzalez, comes out of the Nuyorican scene from the 1990s and makes the case that this new .com site offers more dynamic possibilities than the current scene. And he’s right. While my own background is traditional, I can’t ignore the ways in which traditional readings have grown stultifying: long-winded, academic introductions, a prevalent anti-performance style (as if the material itself is so deep it needs to be flattened to be accessed), and audiences that are either half-asleep or all the way there. How have we come to this? Surely this is a total waste of our time. While my own preference is for quieter, page-based work, spoken word events are much, much more entertaining. You are much more likely to have an experience at spoken word than at a traditional reading. There’s something of a vacuum, an anti-experience, about a traditional poetry reading.

Poetry’s as relevant as the people making it. But as makers we owe our audience an experience. Otherwise we’re just keeping a diary. It doesn’t matter who your audience is--your lover, the guys on your soccer team, word-gamers, philosophers, whichever people are in the room with you right now--you owe it to the work to connect with them. One way of doing that is to create new works in new forms than the paper page: video and audio, digital and physical. MFA programs should offer classes in Flash, Illustrator and AfterEffects. These are the newest tools for working “by hand” with your words. But as Kat Meyer mentioned during a chat on Twitter with the founders of PoetrySpeaks.com, digital poetry now simply means anything that can be tagged with metadata and accessed digitally. So the old ways of working by hand can also be considered digital: the hand-stitched letter press book, the hand-built box with free-floating typewritten lines.

Poets need to break with the idea that their words deserve to be archived because simply because they’re labeled “poetry.” The work falls for its audience before the audience falls for it.

anyone who stumbles

Anyone who stumbles by here by accident or otherwise will likely know and read Maud Newton's blog. But today she quotes Thomas Mann in a way that puts me exactly where I am:

“The basic theme on which I’ve tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o’clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.” — Thomas Mann, New York Times, 1955

Top of the Pops

There's a nascent movement to start an independent conference on Contemporary Women's Poetry. This is a brilliant, necessary idea for all sorts of pedagocial, political, and situational reasons--women are currently writing some of the most charged work at the intersection of autobiography, authenticity, imagination and political reality. Another one of the reasons this seems a good idea to me is that all of the poets who shake my brain (the way it likes to be shook) are women (with a few exceptions). My top five in today's rankings: Field, Minnis, Moxley, Robertson, and Wagner.

Poetry and Authenticity

As a follow up on my previous post about poetry and authenticity, see this very interesting essay Nora Khan published in the Daily Star.

biz blogging

Most of my blogging time is going to work these days. See these posts for recent stuff. But Baudrillard's got me fired up. More to come on good ol' JB.

The Negative Ecstasy of Free

Dear Chris Anderson, "The world is free, but I am not; the space is so saturated, the pressure of all which wants to be heard so strong that I am no longer capable of knowing what I want. I plunge into the negative ecstasy of [the Web]."

Love, Jean Baudrillard

What JB was really talking about was the "negative ecstasy" of radio. Re-reading Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication 15 years after I first picked it up at Prairie Lights and nearly 25 years after it was first published, I'm amazed by how prescient Baudrillard is about terrorism, twitter, flarf and the costs of "free."

More to come.

Tag, You're It: Authenticity, Identity, and Play

I am the last person on earth to discover music sites like Pandora and Last.fm, but that's only made me more evangelical. Listening to whatever music streams on the "Animal Collective channel" or the "Freakfolk channel" or the "Ambitious ambidextrous gluttons channel," I am completely absorbed and entertained thanks to the way tags, labels and channels can play to my mood. In my day job, I create, modify and apply tags in order to get the word out about all manner of books to the right people. Both the music and reader channels suggest that tags work, but not singly, only when considered in multiple. Steve Reich is both "classical" and "avant-garde," "minimalist" and "experimental." Emily Dickinson is both "lyrical" and "experimental," "Christian" and "heretical." No single label or collection of labels works across artists or even a single musician.

We're sold the idea that bands and authors are unified stable formations--whether it's a brand like The Pussycat Dolls or James Patterson constructed with marketing in mind, or more "authentic" acts like REM and John Updike. Recent concerns about Twitter and authenticity in social media suggest that this is not just a matter for big brands but also for the new mass anxiety around "The Brand of Me." To turn the perspective around: tags make us easier to market to, but the complex of our desires and thought-patterns are both infinite and evanescent. Art, music and literature are made created from a passing weather of personalities, situations, and materials.

Musicians themselves don't worry about the marketable myth of the authentic voice too much; they understand it's just part of the business (unless they're not fully recovered from outrageous success). But if ever an artist-type is prone to become trapped in this myth, it's the "poet." This is at least part of what's so exciting about Flarf and its place in the long, proud history of Conceptualism. But it's also what's frustrating about it. There is often an attitude around self-styled oppositional poetics that it alone is "authentic" in the way it demolishes the myth of authenticity. Writers, like musicians and artists, do have a style that has developed out of habit, circumstance and good old Emersonian "Genius," but it's still changeable. You don't have to take a sledge hammer to your style to play. You can both toy with authenticity and mean it, as Jennifer Moxley does in all her books, but particularly her most recent one, "Clampdown." Not to mention most anything Lisa Robertson writes.