Don’t Bitterness! Be Happy–You Sellout! Now with Banjo, Accordion, Wallet Chain, & Jack Spicer
[Jeremy Schmall, by way of reply/addendum/rejoinder to Jim Behrle’s essay about how to become a famous poet overnight that Ken linked yesterday, sent me the following – JT]
(1) To ease the bitter bitter cynicism: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEMGe9JkRqU
(2) This power quote from Jack Spicer seems especially resonant now:
“But the point is that most people will exploit poets. They’ll exploit the older ones for the knowledge they have, and they’ll exploit the younger ones for the promise they have, which somehow or other gives the people some kind of thing that maybe they have promise too, which they don’t.
“Essentially, what I mean is, stay loose. Stay absolutely loose, and don’t accept any offers whatsoever.
“But you’re not just a poet. You’re also a human being who wants to be recognized and everything else. One of the best things that I heard on that was last night on KCBS where some guy–his name was Anderson–was talking about peach farmers, and he said the peach farmers didn’t know a good goddamn thing about the number of peaches that were needed in the market. In other words, they would send in peaches, and peaches would go down to one cent a peach, or whatever it was, and that this had a great deal to do with farm labor.
“What I’m saying is that you’re going to sell out eventually. You have to, just for economic reasons. But when you sell out, know exactly what your peaches cost. Know exactly how many peaches there are on the market. Know exactly what is the price you can sell out for.”
– from Lecture 4, “Poetry and Politics,” July 14th, 1965 (page 154)
The Presentation
“The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dais. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais.” — Walter Benjamin, “What Is Epic Theater?”
Natalie Lyalin Week: CONTESTS!
This week, there are all these ways you can win a copy of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat by Natalie Lyalin and more things along with it.
In two ways you might win the whole Coconut books catalog:
1. By commenting at fellow Coconut poet Gina Meyer’s blog.
2. By commenting at fellow Coconut poet Reb Livingston’s blog.
And in one way you can win a copy of P&HPH plus a badass t-shirt.
1. By commenting at A Mystery in Common
The Future Is A Stream
25. From which we learn that (a) making correct predictions about the technology future is easy, and (b) writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it’s easy to say they were right.
25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it’s natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen.
26. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it’s a topic like education. It’s that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don’t go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don’t go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.
Q & A #5
If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at roxanegay dot com and we will find you some answers.
Most places I am interested in submitting to ask for ‘no previously published material.’ But what constitutes previously published material? I understand why editors wouldn’t want a poem or story that is already available somewhere online or in a widely circulated journal. But what if your piece just shows up in your friend’s ‘zine, which he has only made 50 copies of and gives away for free? What if he has made 500 copies? What if he is selling them? What if they are only circulated in a single city? Ultimately my question is, where is the line drawn for previously published material? When is something considered published?
Nick Antosca
If it’s been in your friend’s zine and he only published 50 copies, feel free to submit it, unless you think there’s a realistic chance that one of those 50 copies got to the editor of that magazine. There probably isn’t. The line is arbitrary.
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March 9th, 2010 / 5:02 pm
March 9th, 2010 / 5:02 pm
Blake Butler—
Please help us welcome two new fantastic GIANTs to the fold: Evelyn Hampton, editor of Dewclaw and author of We Were Eternal and Gigantic forthcoming from Magic Helicopter Press, and Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, forthcoming from Starcherone Books. Put on your party hats!
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Power Quote: “The Man”
People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn themselves into beasts; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves.
— Montaigne, Essays (1580)
I smiled when I read “the man,” because it was written so long ago. Seems like “the man” has been bringing us down since the 16th century, the most current manifestation being Comcast (host of my internet, cable, and landline) without whom I would only exist in vivo, and how lame is that?
FUNDRAISING Alert: Help Send Ariana Reines on a UN Mission to Haiti
So listen to this. Ariana Reines–poet, playwright, translator, publisher and frequent target of this blog’s affection–has been invited to join a UN Mission to Haiti which leaves on Thursday. She will spend March 12-19 traveling with a group of trauma clinicians, serving as the team’s only French-English interpreter. Ariana writes,
the group will be working primarily with traumatized doctors, nurses, and other medical workers, as well as children, orphans in particular. I know you have plenty of places to put your $: into the mouths of your children for example. i must raise $2500 in order to cover airfare, travel insurance, immunizations, malaria medication, mosquito netting, art supplies (for the children we will work with), and feminine hygeine + contraceptive items (for the grown people)
$2500 is an imminently crowd-sourceable figure, and with such a firm sense of this mission’s purpose and time-table, the impact of your giving can hardly risk being lost in the general abstraction of “charity.” So what do you say, team? I say let’s send Ariana Reines to Haiti. (UPDATE: NOW WITH LINK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS.) Whatever you can give will help. I’m going to go kick down twenty bucks as soon as I finish writing this post.
Frequent HTMLGIANT Anonymous Commenter Revealed, Brought On Board
Look for her new feature column coming soon.