The reason I haven’t posted much in recent months is that I’ve been quite busy working on two projects, one of which is the publication of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox, my collection of poetry based on my experiences in the Iraq War. But let me qualify that statement.

I don’t consider myself a war poet. I am a poet. It’s true that I’ve been lunged onto a battlefield. But I didn’t go there willingly and I refuse to glorify a war effort with which I disagree. It is my firm position that the Iraq War – its conception and initiation – is unjust. So Rumsfeld’s Sandbox could be aptly called “unjust war poetry”.

Why I Chose To Publish Online

When you’ve been living with a group of poems for as long as I have, you are ready to unleash them. There is as much power in the unleashing as in the writing.

It’s been four years since I’ve returned from Iraq, five years since writing my first poem related to it. Some of the poems in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox had first drafts composed in the desert. Others didn’t make it to life until my return. But I have spent the last five years of my life living with these poems – sleeping with them, eating them, regurgitating them, playing with them, fighting with them, loving them and hating them.

I seriously considered seeking an established publisher. I’m confident I would have found one. But I’d have spent a lot of time looking. Honestly, I’m ready to give up the ghost.

I am fully confident the poems in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox are excellent work. But, of course, one cannot judge one’s own literary value. That judgment must come from the marketplace – the readers, who often can be more honest critics than the reviewers. Nevertheless, I chose to self-publish for a few good reason.

1. No. 1, as noted, I was ready to get them out there. Expediency was a value that I held and still do. I didn’t want to spend an additional year looking for a publisher.
2. More than that, I wanted to take a calculated risk, but I didn’t want to give my work away. Much of the poetry that is published online is published as a blog, with each blog post entered as an individual poem. Much of it is also quite maudlin.
3. And finally, I am comfortable in certain formats and like to experiment in the age of the digital presentation. I thought I’d publish Rumsfeld’s Sandbox in a format that I have become familiar with but that would also afford me an opportunity to pave a new path for publishers. I found that in a blogging software I am familiar with called WordPress.

Once I decided to self publish, I thought I’d offer readers a chance to preview my poetry before committing a full $12-$15, which is the going price for a published book of poems these days. So Rumsfeld’s Sandbox is currently being offered as a paid subscription blog with the subscription price being attributed to the price of the print book when I make it available later this summer.

How Much Does Rumsfeld’s Sandbox Cost?

I wanted to make the digital version of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox affordable. After all, why offer a preview if it is too costly? The point is to provide an affordable alternative so that readers who do not want to purchase the entire book upon publication do not invest more than they are willing to part with. So I’ve decided to place the price for the online version of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox at $1.99. Again, for readers who will go on and purchase the book in print later, that will be attributed to the price of the print version so the blog is efectively free for them.

More Than Just A Blog

I am proud of the work I’ve done on Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. But it is more than just a group of poems on the Internet. It is a multimedia presentation. Subscribers will receive:

• Downloadable PDF broadsides
• Audio versions of the poems on the same page as the written poem (and you can also download these to distribute to your friends for free).
• Videos of me reading the poems (not all of these have been uploaded yet, but this is a benefit you don’t typically get from a poetry blog)
• Essays on Just War doctrine (again, not uploaded yet but these will shed light on Just War theory for those not familiar with it)
• The ability to respond to the poems with comments as you would any other blog. You can even enter into discussions with other subscribers.

I have gone to great extent to include as much value in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox as I could. I want subscribers to get all the benefit with little of the expense and I am so confident that you will like the poems that you will be interested in the book when it appears in print.

Why Now?

The official launch of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox was Friday, March 19, 2010. That was the seventh anniversary of the bombing of the presidential palace in Iraq. The full invasion took place one day later. So this was the perfect time to launch a book as a stand against unjust war.

I hope you’ll accept my invitation to subscribe to Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. If not, at least do me a favor and pass the word to your friends. Join. Discuss. Meditate on them.

Go to http://www.rumsfeldssandbox.com now.

From Henry Miller and John Steinbeck to Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy, the bestseller’s have moved from high-brow to, at best, mid-brow. But in most cases, I’d say it’s low-brow.

I have two observations, one of them is in common with Esposito himself. The shift correlates to some degree to the decline in moral values of American culture. But not just moral values, educational and intellectual levels as well.

The second observation is this, while poetry is not mentioned in the article, I’d bet that this shift in reading has correlated as well with interest in poetry as literature. In the 1950s, people read poetry on a generally broader scale than the U.S. population does now. That’s not to say that more poetry books were sold (probably not), but it speaks to who was reading poetry. As a percentage, I think more non-poets had an interest in reading poetry in 1950 than now.

I’m not inclined to go and do the research on this, at least not right now, but you can measure this by looking at how many poetry books were sold in 1950 versus how many were sold last year and by looking at where those books were sold. What percentage of poetry books sold were done so by university presses and bookstores? I’d conjecture that a fair amount of sales of poetry books in the 1990s were driven by the growing popularity of MFA programs, many of which didn’t exist in the 1950s. That’s a guess, but I’d say a pretty good guess.

I’d be interesting in hearing what insight you might have about this.

“The Heart Of A Sailor” is a collection of 26 tanka poems by gay poet M. Kei, a volunteer skipjack crewman in the Chesapeake Bay area.

I think you’ll find these poems to be truly engaging in a pastoral as well as in a linguistic sort of way. M. Kei has a great way of conjuring an image that provokes an emotion in just five lines.

The Micropoetry Chapbook series from World Class Poetry was started to help poets who publish through Twitter and other microblogging services expand their audience. All chapbooks are published through the World Class Poetry Toolbar and remain there indefinitely.

The first such chapbook was “Twitter Poems”, written by yours truly. “Twitter Poems” was followed up by “Twitpoems” and most recently by “Irreverent Twits” featuring a photo on the cover by professional photographer Tyson Crosbie.

Micropoetry is flourishing on Twitter, with more new poets joining the ranks every day. Some poets prefer to publish their poems through aggregated Twitter streams such as @twihaiku while others publish through their own Twitter streams.

Download the World Class Poetry Toolbar and enjoy these chapbooks from some of Twitter’s best short form poets, the latest being “The Heart Of A Sailor” by M. Kei.

After completely reading through all 508 pages, I went back and re-read the introductions to see if I had missed something. Swensen, in her introduduction to the work, gives a clear and concise definition of what she calls hybrid poetry with these words:

Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry – thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself – while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience. (emphasis mine)

This is what I believe ties most of the poems in American Hybrid together, though that’s not what I would consider a hybrid poem.

What Is A Hybrid Poem, Exactly?
To be sure, whoever defines the terms controls the conversation. The way that Swensen and St. John have defined hybrid, it could almost apply to any poet who has ever written a poem in any century except that the term and concept of avant-garde didn’t exist prior to the 19th century. Here’s what St. John says in his introduction:

Although I have always distrusted writers who run in packs, I welcome all literary partisanship as a gesture toward what I would call a “values clarification” in poetry. However, let’s be frank. We are at a time in our poetry when the notion of the “poetic school” is an anachronism, an archaic critical artifact of times long gone by.

In other words, since poetic schools are no longer necessary and you are a poet writing today you can borrow elements from two or more schools and that makes you a hybrid. I don’t think so. I believe the concept of hybridization in poetry deserves a more critical look than that.

While Swensen starts out discussing the historic divide between the avant-garde and everyone else, she quickly moves on to other waters in an attempt to get to the heart of the American hybrid. In the end, it all boils down to whether or not a poet is true to one school or flirts with another.

Personally, I think the delineations between avant-garde and traditional poetry are still necessary and helpful. The emergence of both the Language poets and New Formalists at right about the same time is evidence of this. While I would not adhere to, or encourage others to adhere to, either extreme entirely, I do think that poetic purity is a positive in a volatile world.

Is The Avant-Garde Truly The Vanguard?
The avant-garde philosophy has been around in some form through most of written history. However, it is recognized that the art movement began in the early 19th century with a French utopian socialist by the name of Henri de Saint-Simon.

It is important to note that Saint-Simon was a Christian Humanist who had a vision to reorganize society into a group of elites made up of philosophers, scientists, engineers and other intellectuals. His philosophy was instrumental in the development of many ideologies that are now considered mainstream and a part of the hierarchical structure of society that he tried to tear down. Among them are sociology and economics. His disciples include Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology as a science, renown utilitarian economist John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, who needs no introduction.

In essence, avant-gardeism started out as a political movement, but it was the artists, most notably in France and Italy, who picked up on it and started communicating the ideas of the movement through their works. The poetic forerunners of the avant-garde include Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, ensuring that French surrealism would take a high position within the movement.

Avant-garde artists of all media have historically considered themselves to be the progenitors of greatness while their traditional counterparts were mired in unthinking mediocrity. While some of that may be true, it is largely a posturing move to make avant-gardeists feel better about themselves for being shunned by the power structure that mocks them. Art and poetry have long been a violent political battlefield.

But politics aside, the real matter is whether avant-garde poetry is any good or not and whether it is, as their most vocal apologist’s maintain, the vanguard of letters. While I maintain that poets writing today can learn from any poet or movement of poetry and incorporate synergistic elements into their own work, I also am baffled at some of the techniques that poets use in their attempts to communicate. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. And just because it is done doesn’t make it great. Furthermore, just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t suddenly make it a genius moment for those who do it. Replace any innovation with the word “it” as you will.

Those are postulates, not absolutes. By the same token, just because the mainstream doesn’t like it or appreciate it doesn’t mean it isn’t great, shouldn’t be done, or not profitably worthwhile when it is done. Everything must be judged on its own merit.

Introduction To The Post-Avant Malaise
I write in many forms and styles. I try not to restrict myself, though I recognize that certain techniques are more useful than others. Some are just plain ridiculous.

We all have our preferences and many of us have our prejudices. With regard to the latter, I try to keep an open mind and attempt to understand what a poet is trying to do. But that is sometimes hard.

In order to get to the bottom of what precisely is considered “post avant”, it is necessary to understand what is avant-garde, the genesis of the post. At the heart of it, the avant-garde consists of the following attributes:

• Experimental
• Rejection of traditional values
• Esoteric
• Bohemian
• Anti-structural

To what degree then is post-avant poetics opposed to these values? The answer is: None. The post-avant poet is firmly rooted in all of these avant-garde values, rejecting none.

However, the post-avant is just as likely to use traditional elements as avant-garde elements in their poetry. See the contradiction?

Good. Because it’s a planned and conscious contradiction.

The difference between the avant-garde and the post-avant is that the latter has no political overtones. It seeks to borrow literary elements from wherever it may find them and incorporate them into a singular poem without regard for the social or political implications. That obviously leaves some schools out of the running for post-avant status.

The Problem With The Avant-Garde
I will say right at the outset that I am not a formalist, either new or old. While I have a deep and abiding respect for all the forms and reserve the right to use them, or modify them, they are not the defining attribute of poetics. By the same token, they shouldn’t be rejected outright because they are traditional. I see both extremes as irrational prejudice.

Another idea I reject is the notion that poetry is inherently an aural art. It isn’t. The reason primitive cultures chose to communicate their poetry through oral presentation is because they couldn’t communicate in writing. When they did undertake written communication it was done in the way of visual images first. Later, language was developed. As societies and cultures grew and developed new technologies, poetry evolved into visual and concrete forms and structures. It was a natural development.

Poetry is communication. Plain and simple. That means that poets can use any medium at their disposal. It also means that there are a rich diversity of structures, forms, and techniques available, both oral and written. Nevertheless, any virtue can be taken to extreme.

The avant-garde is possible because of the visual nature of modern poetry. Aural poetry could never develop an avant-garde movement because there’d be no way for it to communicate apart from sound. So it’s no coincidence that the avant-garde didn’t come along until the 19th century. But there is one thing that bothers me about the style of avant-gardeists and that one thing is evident in many of the poems to be found in American Hybrid.

The problem with the avant-garde is its emphasis on the disjunctive over the logical in language. I’ll use a poem from American Hybrid to illustrate my meaning:

Lucent road, first letter.                      Evening spooked with light.
Quarter moon road                     with the darkness inside it, and full
moon
sky with the tree inside it.                    Curved road in the gloaming.
Oak trunk, a vector of force          punched upward. held in place

The above lines are taken from a poem titled “Road And Tree” by Forrest Gander, who the editors describe as “Lyrically rooted and visually adventuresome”. That’s not quite how I’d put it.

To start with, we’re not given an instruction manual on how to read this poem. Do we read down first or across first? We’re left to figure it out. I found that it reads better when read across first. But if it reads so well that way then why do we need the fissure down the middle of the poem? You’d think that maybe the subject matter is a clue, but it’s not. This is a device that Gander uses throughout several poems, always with the same disjunctive feel. There seems to be a constant flow of thought across the spaces, but not necessarily.

For instance, in the second line, is the quarter moon road dark inside and full or are we supposed to see these two clauses as independent as evidenced by the crack between them? We’re not told. And there aren’t any clues. Nor, does the poet (or the editors, for that matter) feel the need to clue us in. We’re just supposed to accept it the way it is.

This is the kind of disjunctive language that epitomizes much of the avant-garde, particularly schools like the Language school. It’s one of the most irritating things I’ve seen in late-school poetics.

On the other hand, there are poets, like Brenda Hillman and Martin Corless-Smith, who use this double-line form to great effect and I understand those poems. While it isn’t a technique I’m particularly married to, it is something I can live with if the lines appear controlled by the poet and not vice-versa.

In summary, the problem with a pure avant-garde philosophy is that if you are anti-traditional and experimental for the sake of the same then it’s a lot like spending $200 on a paid escort for the night and masturbating while she waits outside your dorm room fully clothed.

Is It Hybrid, Post-Avant Or Millennial?
Call it what you want, but poetry written today is nothing like poetry that was written 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago. And that’s the point behind Swensen’s and St. John’s American Hybrid. To them, a hybrid poem can consist of a poem borrowing elements from the Language School and Surrealism, both avant-garde traditions. To me, that’s not really a hybrid poem. But a definition is only as good as the theoretical foundation upon which it stands.

Some of the poets in American Hybrid are purely married to the avant-garde. Who can deny that John Ashbery hasn’t been one of the most experimental poets of the 20th century? I like his work, but I’d be hard pressed to find anything traditional in it. So should he be considered a hybrid poet simply because he achieved a certain level of mainstream notoriety?

What about Rae Armantrout, a founding member of the Language School who has gone on to better things, albeit mostly in the avant-garde tradition? Or Barbara Guest, who is the “quintessential hybrid poet” according to Swensen? She started out identifying with the New York School and later moved into the Language camp. But the former is a forerunner to the latter so how is that “hybrid”, exactly?

I hope you can see my dilemma. To me, it isn’t hybrid if you borrow elements from two or more avant-garde schools. Nor would I particularly consider that post-avant, to use Ron Silliman’s phrase.

When I think of post-avant, I think of poets like Reginald Shepherd, Paul Hoover, or Brenda Hillman, all of whom are represented in American Hybrid. Their work truly exemplifies elements from the avant-garde tradition as well as the formal traditions.

I appreciate the work that Swensen and St. John put into American Hybrid. There are truly some fabulous poems, and great poets, included. But I think they have broadened the definition of hybrid too far. I agree with St. John when he says “Our poetry should be as various as the natural world, as rich and peculiar in its potential articulations”. I was glad to see Swensen discussing poets using the Internet to market and publish their poems and reach new audiences (a hot button for me). But my definition of hybrid differs from theirs.

To revisit some posts that I wrote last year, I offer the following principles as a 10-pillar base for a new school of poetics, what I call The Millennial School. But it makes no difference if you call it The Millennial School, Post Avant, or hybrid poetry, it all points back to the idea that 21st century poetics is on the move, not tied down by traditions or tainted with political baggage. Poets today care about one thing: Writing great lines fused with great images that communicate great things.

Millennial Poetics Revisited

• Craft is of utmost importance
• There is no room for prejudice
• Form is just another element of craft
• Creativity and craft go hand in hand
• No topic is taboo
• Language is the fundamental tool of the craft
• All poems are individuals
• There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
• All convention should be shunned
• Technology may be used to enhance the poetry experience.

I’ll leave the elaboration for another post, or you can revisit my series on this topic from last year.

Meanwhile, pick up your copy of American Hybrid and make your own judgments.

Here’s my first 50-word entry:

Sony Reader is like the Franklin stove. Multimedia will rule in 100 years. Hyped up hypertext coded in a now unknown language with three-dimensional video and audio. Readers will have a Library of Congress size multimedia platform in the palm of their hands. With a kung fu grip.

Beat that. Be a hero. Win a Sony Reader.

• Contemporary antiquities
• Elevated valley
• Stupid genius
• Utopian nihilist

That last one is a real-world example. I can’t think of any that I’d have thought of at 21, but “utopian nihilist” is the type of phrase that I’d have enjoyed coming up with. I didn’t conjure this one, however. Milo Martin did.

Milo Martin is a West Coast slam poet who has traveled extensively in Europe as a touring poet. He is also the founder of the Utopian Nihilist poetry movement. Their principles are intriguing and exist as a list of 26 proclamations, to be found in the back of Martin’s debut book of poems, Poems For The Utopian Nihilist.

Here are a few hand selected verses from the Utopian Nihilist Manifesto:

• We are born Utopians; it is through the scarring of socialization that some of us become Nihilists.
• The Utopian sees the wine glass as half-full whereas the Nihilist sees it as half-empty. The Utopian Nihilist sees a libation suitable for consumption and ponders the history of the grape.
• Eclipse the obstacles. That which is undeniable cannot be denied.
• Do not consternate so much about the creation of art; make it the way that your pristine genesis mind initially bloomed it. Judge not self, lest thee be judged. Employ disregard.
• Vehement resistance to common ideas and swimming against the stream is our moral obligation.
• Democracy is dead, once a beautiful ideology.
• Hierarchies are illusory man-made constructs.
• Happiness is temporal and should be treated as such, knowing that there is also much pain and consternation to be experienced in balance. We are the supersonic Samsara sponge. This is our job as cheerful proletarians. As Utopian Nihilists. To soak up the paradox; to snort up the salt and pepper of things.

As you can see, there’s nothing original there, only the repackaging of things already said. So is Martin’s poetry. You can read the full review of Poems For The Utopian Nihilist here.

I was so impressed with Gene’s poetry I wrote this in the introduction of the chapbook:

Gene Myers’ gift is the gift of seeing. His sharp wit and delicate sensitivity to the sound of words married to their visual appeal within the white space of the line is a testament to his poetic ability.

These poems are not edgy like my own. They are smooth. And cool. You’ll like them.

But if that isn’t enough, I’ve also added a widget to the toolbar that allows users to access their own Twitter accounts through the toolbar. If you are a Twittering poet then you can post tweets from the toolbar and read the tweets in your Twitter stream – right from the World Class Poetry Toolbar!

For starters, I bought a new laptop, an Acer AspireOne. It’s a tiny little Ferrari of a laptop, but it really is a cool toy. But of course, Microsoft and Acer have teamed up to force me to purchase Microsoft Office or be relegated to using it the complimentary X number of times and be without. I downloaded OpenOffice instead, the committed cheap ass bastard that I am.

I spent three days trying to figure out how to convert from OpenOffice to .pdf. I couldn’t do it. My .pdf converter doesn’t recognize OpenOffice files and won’t convert text files properly. Nor would it work correctly with Microsoft Word 2007, which is the format I was saving my OpenOffice files in. I finally had to save it in MS Word 2003 then go to my desktop computer, which I gave to my six year old so he could play his games on, and open the document in Word to convert it to .pdf.

I thought that had solved all my problems. I didn’t.

It took me another two days to figure out why the .pdf converter was melding every document I’ve converted to date into one file. At first I didn’t recognize that was what was happening. The front cover of the .pdf document was the cover of HardSoftwood.

After scratching my head for a couple of days it finally dawned on me that I had used the combine documents feature of my .pdf converter on the HardSoftwood project and never turned it off. Duh! So besides being a cheap ass bastard I am now a dumb ass bastard. Two for one.

At any rate, long story short, I fixed that issue and now am ready to present to you the 13-page chapbook titled Twitpoems. You can download it for free with the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Honestly, I agree with Leaves of Grass (though I might put that one in the top 3) and Lyrical Ballads. But those are just my preferences. Again, we’ve got a list that makes proclamations without any defense whatsoever.

It is really difficult to make a list like this because what’s the criteria? Who’s to judge? I’m sure we’d all have our favorites but there should be some kind of across-the-board criteria for disqualifying certain works on an objective basis. Bear in mind that I’m using the word ‘objective’ rather loosely. There is no true objective in judging a creative work.

For instance, if we said we were going to only pick poets who were not living then we’d disqualify Seamus Heaney. His work is fine (I like his poetry), but he can’t be included because his work hasn’t met the time standard. He may eventually be as canonized as Shakespeare or Pope, but until several generations have passed he is merely a hopeful and therefore should be left out of the running.

Another way to judge could be to leave out any work that is not yet in the public domain. That would disqualify Philip Larkin. Fine poet. But should he have anything listed in the top 10 of all time? Possibly. But who’s to say?

I’m merely making suggestions. The criteria could be something else entirely. One could say by judging from the list that the person making the call on this one has already made exclusions, but we haven’t been told why. This particular list is exclusive of any Eastern poets. Where’s Basho? Rumi? Tagore? Were they considered?

How about the avant-gardeists? They don’t appear to be represented either. It seems the author of this list has an unspoken rule about them as well. Perhaps we’re only talking about poets of the English canon and their descendants.

We don’t know. All we have is a list with no defense. No criteria, either subjective or objective. Just a proclamation. And that’s the problem with most lists of this nature.

My question to you is this: How would you judge such a list? What criteria would you impose on a list that promised to name the top 10 (50, 100, ?) poetry books in history? Would you draw a line somewhere? Where?