The Traditional Japanese Book

My partner & I made these yesterday at an all-day bookbinding workshop on The Traditional Japanese Book. Fun! Click on the photo to get a closer look.

The Psychology of Self-Publishing

Thanks, everyone, for your comments to the post below.
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To regular readers of Simon DeDeo, this discussion of the psychology of self publishing, posted last August, is old hat, but I found it worthwhile rereading again. Speaking of those who refer back to self-publishing luminaries like Blake and Whitman, he writes (parenthesised phrase mine):

(One red herring that surfaces over and over again in discussions on the subject...) is the idea that self-publishing in the twenty-first century is in any way comparable to the self-publishing of the nineteenth or early-twentieth century. This, to me, seems to be a move made by defenders of self-publishers — and we as a bunch are notorious for having them — to link the act to some kind of legitimizing tradition. Yet whatever history will have to say about Organic Furniture Cellar, the fact remains that the contemporary act of self-publication is a fundamentally delegitimizing move.

He has extenuating things to say about people like Bill Knott, etc.
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For reasons I won't go into here, I took down yesterday's post.

CHAPBOXES

Got a fun letter from my friend and former editor Allen Sutterfield, otherwise known as Adze. For a man who's 60 + some, he sure manages to keep his vision fresh. It seems he's come up with a new publication format: TEA READING BOXES (ed. note: now he calls them CHAPBOXES, a much catchier term for 'em). For those who operate in the underground zine and chapbook realm, this should resonate. Read on:

Hi Brian,

It rained the whole day Saturday seriously dampening turnout for the book fair. I did sell $79 worth of "goods" (GUATEMALA was prominently displayed but alas, no sales), minus many little expenses. I was exhausted by the end of it though and even this week have just come from rehearsing with Wayne for a performance two nights from now at a new Coffeeehouse venus Nik Beat is starting. Am having a chili party on June 24, my one party of the summer. Wish you could be here for that! Montreal is most unlikely for me, I now realize--I always want to do too many things! Can't be helped! Anyway stay in touch and I'll keep tabs on any sales--I'm thinking of selling books on Janet's front porch on Saturday mornings! Yours will be out there for sure! Also I recommend you always carry one or two with you when you go out anywhere, you never know when a sale can manifest and at least that way it's a part of every context. I'm practicing that speaking tonight with a couple of my chapbooks along for the Art Bar!

The biggest hit Saturday was my "TEA READING BOXES"--you know those wooden tea boxes you buy in Dollar Stores, with 20 teabags inside? I took the tea out and put 20 texts in instead! Added one teabag, a table of contents and packing note. It's ADZBOX 1 and so forth--I made 24 so far, sold six that day. So for ten bucks one can buy my little chapbook AND a teabox! And one person did. I was only selling them for six bucks. It was fun. Feedback has been good. Keep me posted on what's happening with you this summer, even if it is similar to past summers in large ways. It never is in SMALL ways which then become large in turn! A.

COPYWRITE COPY MIGHT....

My friend & fellow poet Daniel Laxer wrote me and Aimee Davidson to say,

I was just skimming your respective blogs, and I couldn't help but wonder, do you not worry that the work you put up on your blogs will get stolen? I mean, there's some good stuff there. And I'd thought about putting my poems up on the net. But I don't want to see them published elsewhere under someone else's name. Doesn't that thought worry you?

My reply:

Hi Dan,

The complete poems I post on my blog (on Sky of Ink, Jonah) have already been published elsewhere. Of course, these poems can now be easily lifted and/or altered in some way and republished under someone else's name, but the same thing could also be done to poems published in any of a number of online journals... so they are about as protected as that.

I don't put unpublished poems on my blog, but only a little due to the concern you mention. The main reason is that once they're on the blog they're eminently Googlable, and any review considering publishing one of them could simply type in a few words from the poem, and quickly find it. Most literary reviews, for all their limited readership & distribution, want to be THE FIRST IN THE UNIVERSE to publish any given poem. Since I still seek the validation of being published by said reviews, I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.

At the same time I sometimes wonder about my self-imposed gag order. Especially when tempted to put up a recent poem, talk about the writing of it, etc. How many readers, after all, does my blog get? (From what I see, the hit total is impressive, but the readership, a worthy few...) Does printing here constitute publishing? Do harried review editors even have the time to BOTHER googling to find a poem in a blog? All open questions. I see people like Aimee putting drafts of poems for feedback and the immediate pleasure of reaching out to someone out there in the cosmos, and I can't help feeling, what the hell? Why not?

Someday, who knows, I may change my tack.

Poetry in this culture remains an exercise in obscurity. It will never generate the glitz or $$$ that make copyright infringement sexy. That obscurity, I'd say, is its greatest protection.