If you are familiar with Twitter, kudos to you. If not, allow me to introduce you to the 21st century version of mass communication.

Twitter is an opt-in service that allows you to set up an account and a profile and instant message multiple people who have agreed to receive your messages. The messages, however, have a 140-character limit. Because of this limit, Twitter has been dubbed “microblogging”. It’s a way of sharing information in short snippets. I like Twitter for a number of reasons, one of which is because it forces me to think concisely. Brevity is key to good writing and Twitter forces you to be brief.

What Is A Twitter Poem?
So what is a Twitter poem? In a word, a Twitter poem is a poem that you write for Twitter and publish on Twitter. I have seen Twitter haikus and other poets have used Twitter to write short poems. I’ve even seen people Twitter an entire book.

As I see it, there are two ways you can use Twitter to write a poem. You can write a single poem within one “tweet” – the word for a message on Twitter. Or you can use each message to write a line in a poem. In the latter’s case, your poem can be as long as you want it to be as long as each line is no more than 140 characters. That’s not quite as challenging as writing a 140-character poem.

Keep in mind, we are talking about 140 characters, not words.

My Twitter Poem Experiment
Starting April 1, I will tweet one poem a day for 30 days. Each poem will consist of 140 characters or less. Each poem will exist within one tweet. No more. I will tweet each poem three times and every day throughout April I will publish a new poem. I’d welcome you to follow me, if you have an interest in seeing how this little experiment goes.

All you have to do to follow me is open a Twitter account and look for me at http://twitter.com/Allen_Taylor. My username on Twitter is Allen_Taylor. When you find me just click the Follow button and that’s all there is to it.

If you want to write your own Twitter poems in response I’d like to read them.

How To Write A Twitter Poem
Here are the guidelines that I’ll be using for my Twitter poems. You can write a poem on Twitter any way you like. But I’m using this method as a means of efficiency and so that there is consistency throughout the month. Whenever you see a Twitter poem it will look like this:

• Every line will end with /
• Stanzas will end with a double / – just like this //
• Poems will appear as one line with the above symbols to represent line and stanza breaks
• At the end of each poem you’ll see #twitpoem

That’s about it. Pretty simple. The #twitpoem is called a hashtag. If you go to http://search.twitter.com and type in the hashtag you’ll find all of the poems on one page.

Remember, the Twitter Poem Experiment starts on April 1. I will write one poem per day for 30 days. Each day I will tweet the poem three times. To read, you’ll have to follow me on Twitter. I hope to see you there.

Unfortunately, most of what is published online in the way of poetry, just as in print, is poetry rather than commentary on poetics, or essays. That is one of the reasons why I spend so much time on World Class Poetry Blog discussing poetics. There just isn’t enough of it and that’s a problem.

What there is plenty of instead is the publishing of poetry. It might seem strange for a poet, and someone who enjoys reading poetry, to say that free and accessible poetry is a problem. But it is. The reason I say that is because much of what is published online, just as in print, is rubbish and ought not to be read at all.

Why Single Out Online Publishing?
The first and obvious question I know I’ll get from readers about making this statement is, “If most poetry published in print and online is bad poetry then why single out online poetry as a problem?” That’s a good question and one well worth asking.

The reason I single out online publishing is because there are fewer barriers to entry for the self publisher (and the bulk of the problem is with self publishing).

Print publishing always bears an expense. Even a small chapbook costs the self publisher something. Online, however, self publishers can open up an account at Blogger or WordPress – and many have – which is free, and publish their full portfolio of poetic works for the world to see. No expense. No barrier to entry. The learning curve for using Blogger and WordPress is nil. A basic ability to read and comprehend a keyboard is all that is necessary.

So there are really two basic barriers to entry for self publishers that make it easier to publish online than in print:

1. Financial
2. Technological

Then there are two more barriers to entry that I would call indirect barriers to entry to publication in the broader sense:

1. Market Demand
2. Built-In Gatekeepers

Poetry is deemed a low-value item by most people in our culture. For a print publisher, even an independent press or self publisher, that is itself an indirect barrier to entry. In many respects, this is a larger barrier to entry for independent presses because there are always more expenses than the mere cost of printing (marketing, delivery, payroll, etc). But the publisher must always recoup expenses in order to continue publishing, and for the self publisher with no name recognition or reputable publishing house behind him, that can be an issue.

Which brings me to my next point. In order to get published by a reputable publisher, a poet must go through at least one gatekeeper. If one seeks publication through a journal, there is an editor (and even small journals have at least one). At larger publications there may be an additional gatekeeper who is a reader and whose job it is to read through a slush pile and recommend the best picks to the editor or publisher, who then selects from the best of those. Other publications use a “checks and balances” system that require multiple decision makers, co-editors usually, to give their input. Even book publishers have a system that requires one or more people to read manuscripts and approve them, so for a poet that has no name recognition and few publication credits this is another barrier to entry to the world of publication itself.

To get over the hurdles of these barriers to entry, many poets have succumbed to the temptation of online self publishing and that’s the reason for this discussion.

Why Online Self Publishing Is A Form Of Vanity
Vanity publishing has traditionally involved an independent publishing house providing a service for authors who pay to be published. In essence, the author pays for the manufacturing costs of getting published then they are faced with the ardent task of recouping their investment through marketing and sales of their product. Most do not recoup their investment. But they feel good about being published and have bragging rights.

Some vanity publishers exist in the form of a contest where the poet sends in a submission along with an entry fee. This is a more subtle form of vanity because it acts under the veneer of respectability. If the poet “wins” the contest, she is “honored” with publication. Most of these vanity schemes, however, publish all contest entrants so there isn’t really much of an honor other than the warm, fuzzy feeling the poet gets in the pit of his stomach for being suckered.

Thanks to Blogger and WordPress, a poet can get that warm and fuzzy without an entry fee or paying for publication costs. The poet may not have any more readers than before, but she gets all of the same benefits, including bragging rights, with none of the expenses or drawbacks to other forms of vanity.

One can refer to online self publishing as “independent publishing” or anything else for that matter, but I consider it vanity publishing because, with a few exceptions, most poets publishing themselves online would probably not be able to get into print through traditional means of publication. Unless they paid the entry fee or the manufacturing costs, many of those poets would simply send in poem after poem after poem and get nothing back but rejection letters, if that. That hardly classifies someone as a member of the esteemed literati.

Now I’m not saying that self publishing is itself a vain pursuit. Many fine poets and writers were self publishers – Dickens, Whitman, Poe, and I could spend days going through the list – but there is something about the nature of vanity publishing in general that tends to take away from the value of and credibility of being a published author or poet. But what is that exactly?

How Vanity Destroys Value
Vanity destroys value in a number of ways. First, by masquerading as something of value it pretends to be the thing that it imitates. That’s always destructive. Just ask any Christian who considers the arch-nemesis of Jesus, Satan, to be a faux “angel of light”.

Secondly, vanity destroys because it really doesn’t bother with the task of self improvement. This is a bigger issue because art always retains its value by being something that is in possession of admirable qualities. Those qualities vary from work to work, but in general they consist of

• Uniqueness – Any work of art, be it poetry, photography, sculpture, dance, et. al. must bear a mark of individual originality. People who see value in any art form see an intrinsic value in the uniqueness of the work itself. No one wants to see a copy of something else. Everyone values originality.
• Connectivity – A work must also connect to some audience. It may not connect with the entire human race. It may hold some value only for a particular subset of humans based on race, religion, nationality, gender, or some other identification class. But a work of value must connect with some audience.
• Experiential Compensation – Finally, a work of art must provide an experience that acts as a form of reward for the audience. This is the subjective element of art. One person’s experience may be entirely different than another person’s experience, but the value in literature comes from this experience. Whether it makes one laugh, instills fear, or creates catharsis in some other way, a positive or negative reaction can be valuable enough in and of itself to prove a work of art as something worthy to be recognized.

So when we apply these three general values to poetry we can easily see the problem with vanity publishing. These three values may exist in great abundance but generally speaking exist only for the author, or primarily for the author and self publisher, but generally not for anyone else. The vanity publication is valuable to the publisher because the publisher believes that these three values exist and that others will recognize them; unfortunately, that rarely happens.

Fixing The Problem Of Vanity
There is only one way that I’m aware of to fix the problem of vanity. The vain must achieve an element of self awareness as it applies to that vanity. Calling oneself an independent publisher when no one else sees you that way does not make you an independent publisher any more than a man walking into a room and announcing himself a bag of raw fish makes him a bag of raw fish. A thing is what it is, not what it claims to be.

The value in a publication comes from what the reader, or the audience, of that publication walks away with. That may never be spoken or shared. But it’s there nonetheless.

Vanity self publishers should seek publication through other means prior to publishing their own works. Validation of one’s ability as a poet is important, not for the sake of ego but for the sake of value in poetry in general. When one poet improves his craft, the entire pantheon of poetic expression improves along with it. The tide rises all ships. This is the mystery of the value of literature. One man’s improved essence is the improved essence of all men.

The problem with vanity is that it seeks value in itself for itself. But poetic expression was not meant for that kind of valueless value. Poetic expression was meant to provide value by connecting with others through a unique mode of expression for the purpose of delivering a personal experience to the reader by way of the writer. When that happens, vanity vanishes and the poet’s audience will grow.

Poets who wish to be recognized as poets should first learn the many tools that poets use in the craft. They should practice them. They should then, after crafting a poem in which they have some pride, share it with others who are in a position to reject them. That does not mean your cat or the mailman. Although you may include the mailman by asking him to deliver your poem to a journal editor. You should put yourself in a position that promises you gain or delivers you pain. Publishing your own poetry on a blog may provide that if you are willing to accept honest feedback and accept when you get it. But the real essence of this type of gamble is in asking a gatekeeper to review your work and provide feedback or to submit it for publication and risk rejection. Then, when rejected, immediately look for ways to improve and go through the process again.

Why? Because print papers are dying. Meanwhile, online distribution is growing. What’s 2+2?

Well, literature is pretty much moving in the same direction, only slower.

I don’t think paper literature will ever die. There will still be newspapers in print. There are still radio programs that deliver the news, right? Old systems don’t just die off. They find their niche and hold on. So too do I think print editions of poetry will stick around even as the masses move to online delivery of a dying lit.

It’s already happening. How many poetry blogs are there? They’ve become sort of a cliche, a bit like family memoirs. The only people who care enough to read them are distant cousins. But the good ones really stand out. And it’s just a matter of time before a real literary “blockbuster” takes off in the digital world. There have been a few successes, but nothing yet really stands out as a true blockbuster in the NYT best seller sense. But I see it coming.

What do you see as the future of publishing for poetry and literature? Is there a new Gutenberg on the horizon?

While all literature is in a certain sense targeted toward a particular market – try writing science fiction toward a general market or a romantic thriller aimed at whoever chooses to pick it up and read it – I’m not talking about smart demand-side marketing. I’m talking about creative juices flowing down the open vein. In other words, the creative muse doesn’t consult the aggregated public or take opinion polls.

I’m a firm believer in supply-side literature. This is lit that the artist writes without concern for what the market wants. I’ll leave that business to the large publishing houses, who have all virtually quit publishing poetry because “there is no market for it”. In actuality, there is, but it isn’t a profitable market. And profit is king. Isn’t it?

When it comes to truly lasting literature, the market is a white ghost. As faithful as Guinevere.

Markets by definition are transient and fleeting. Therefore, the literary artist who attempts to write for the market will produce literature that is transient and fleeting. It may sell today, but will anyone be able to give it away for free when the copyright expires? Likely not.

Writing For The Market – Good Enough For Will, Good Enough For …

I don’t mean to denigrate writers who write for money. I do that. It’s called ghostwriting. Or copywriting if you don’t believe in ghosts.

Digressions aside, though, the literary artist – as opposed to the ghostwriter, copywriter, and technical writer set – must decide if he is motivated by credits and residual income or by lasting value. Do you want your creations to stand the test of time or to test the standards of the time? You can’t have both (except by brutal accident).

I’m pretty certain William Shakespeare wrote for the market. It just so happened that his market was timeless. Is yours? Unless you are George Lucas, no.

The Only Kind Of Lit That Matters

This is not a rant against commercial markets or commercial literature. I have nothing against John Grisham or Nora Roberts. Billy Collins may have found his audience, but such success cases are rare (and getting rarer). The real issue is, What kind of literature do you want to produce? Are you interested in the temporal kind or name value eternal?

Of course, even aiming at the stars could end you in the gutter. Just because you write for lasting value doesn’t mean you’ll achieve it. You could still go down in history as a skill-less hack. But I still prefer to take my chances by writing the poetry that is within me rather than studying what might be “the next great thing”. When you write the type of literature I am talking about, the supply-side kind, then you stand a chance of being just as timeless as Shakespeare, but you are paving your own path. Good literature may ride on coattails, but great literature never does.

When Augusten Burroughs put Running With Scissors to quill and scroll, he wasn’t aiming for world-class marketing status. When Hunter S. Thompson shocked the world with his marvelous ride, he wasn’t shooting for most popular of the year. He was writing the story within. The only literature that really matters in the long run is supply-side lit. All else is here today, gone tomorrow. I’ll leave the markets for the birds without a perch.

And with that, Merry Christmas from the Supply Side!

First, if you aren’t familiar with Facebook, you should get familiar with it. It’s what is called a social networking tool and it allows you to network with other people who have similar interests no matter where they live. There is quite a community of poets already using Facebook and every day I bump into more. The tools available to poets for promoting their books, chapbooks, individual publishing successes, blogs, newsletters and e-zines, poetry journals, etc. are fabulous and expanding every day.

I’d like to highlight a few people who I believe have done very well at using Facebook to promote themselves and other poets. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are observations based on my own use of Facebook and the networking that I’ve been able to do. I’m only sorry that I haven’t done more through Facebook until now or I’d have more to share. You can bet that I’ll be using it more in the future.

Belinda Subraman on Facebook

Belinda Subraman is the host of a podcast that promotes poetry and independent music artists. Her show is called Belinda Subraman Presents / Gypsy Art Show. She frequently sends out calls for interview subjects and poetry MP3s, which she then plays on her show. I responded to one of those calls and Belinda interviewed me. After her weekly show, Belinda then sends out a Facebook notice to all of her fans and friends to let them know the latest podcast is ready for listening. It’s very effective and I’m sure that Belinda Subraman’s weekly poetry podcast is very popular. I know I like it.

You can connect with Belinda Subraman on Facebook here.

Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Writer’s Market. He also writes the daily blog Poetic Asides. Robert is one of the many poets on Facebook who use the feed feature of Facebook to promote their blogs. Robert’s feed is very effective because he writes to his blog every day and every time he updates his blog an automatic notice is sent to all of his friends and fans to let them know they can read the latest update on Poetic Asides. I like this feature of Facebook because it means that I don’t have to subscribe to every RSS feed in the world to read great writing. I can be notified through Facebook that a blog is updated and click a link to read the posts that I want to read.

Connect with Robert Lee Brewer on Facebook here.

Didi Menendez

The real test to how effective you are at networking is how much you can get other people to do your promoting for you. Didi Menendez needs no help in promoting herself, but she has it. As the publisher of Oranges & Sardines and MIPOesias Magazine, Didi is well known in the world of poetics. But that doesn’t stop Grace Cavalieri from promoting O & S through a Facebook page.

I believe Facebook pages are one of the best ways to promote yourself online, and Grace’s page promoting Didi’s journal is a great example of a Facebook page.

Connect with Didi Menendez on Facebook here.

Connect with Grace Cavalieri on Facebook here.

What You Can Do With Facebook Pages

As stated earlier, this is not an exhaustive list of poets on Facebook doing great things. But I like what these people are doing. Facebook pages are powerful promotional tools because they are so flexible and much more accessible than Facebook profiles. A Facebook user can hide their private information so that others can’t see it without permission – even if the profile comes up on a Google search. But the information provided in a Facebook page can be viewed by anyone without permission and the pages can be found through search just like a normal web page. That makes a Facebook page a very accessible marketing tool for any creative person from poet to movie star.

There are many other great things you can do with a Facebook page, however. You can upload photos and videos, aggregate blog RSS feeds, promote events, publications, and upcoming readings and book signings. Virtually anything you can promote through a website can be promoted through a Facebook page – and you don’t have to have a lot of technical skill to be able to use it effectively.

And Facebook pages have the same interactive features that Facebook profiles have – that is, people can become fans, leave comments on your wall, start and enter discussions, and even upload their own photos and videos. That’s one powerful interactive marketing tool.

The World Class Poetry Toolbar Facebook Page

I’m always looking for new ways to promote the things that I believe in. That’s why I decided to write a Facebook page for the World Class Poetry Toolbar. Just one day after adding that page and promoting it to my Facebook friends I had a few more downloads. Of course, I get a few downloads every month, but to receive the number of downloads that I received the day after writing the page is pretty good. I’ll definitely be writing more Facebook pages and improving this one as well.

If you haven’t downloaded the WCP Toolbar, I’d encourage you to do so. You’ll have access to more than 30 poetry blogs,  nearly as many online poetry journals, poetry podcasts and radio shows, including Belinda Subraman Presents / Gypsy Art Show. And that’s just the beginning.

If you are a Facebook user and you haven’t connected with me yet then I invite you to add me as your friend. I’m looking forward to doing more networking through Facebook.

Install Twitter Tools into your blog if you are using WordPress. There may be a Blogger equivalent, but since I have a standalone blog domain name and use WordPress as my software, there is a Twitter plugin. You can tweet right from your blog and you can set the settings of Twitter Tools to post to Twitter every time you write a new blog post. It happens automatically so that you don’t have to manually type your blog post tweet.

But since No. 8 on Tracy’s list is to tweet the links to specific blog posts on your blog, I’ll add one more thing that you can do with Twitter Tools: Set your settings so that at midnight each night your blog posts all of your tweets for the day as an individual blog post. It’s a great way to attract additional followers on Twitter.

The second thing I’ll add to Tracy’s list is a Twitter app for Facebook. Use the Twitter Facebook app and every time you tweet you’ll also be updating your Facebook status. I’ve found that since I’ve been using this app my Facebook status is updated more often and I get more Facebook friends. Two more powerful uses of Twitter.

Do you Twitter? Follow me.

• What exactly is a publicist and what does she do?
• Why does a poet need a publicist and how does a poet work with a publicist?
• What is the going rate for a publicist and how is she paid?
• What recommendations would you give for helping poets interview and select a publicist they’d feel comfortable working with?
• When should a poet start looking for a publicist?

I’m surprised by the depth of Teresa’s answers. They are not short. She gives detailed value in every answer and I’d encourage you to read it. Do you need a publicist? Read the interview in the latest issue of Hyperbole e-zine.

If you’re not a subscriber, take the time to subscribe. Receive the e-zine by e-mail weekly.

Poetry is, above all things, about value. The value of words. The value of experience. The value of economy. The value of value. So, too, is capitalism about value and when I say that I mean more than simply the value of money.

To be a good capitalist one must be able to judge value. Intrinsic value. Extrinsic value. Potential value. Future value. It is said that investors who buy real estate to resell, stocks and bonds to hold, or businesses to flip make their money when they buy in – as opposed to when they sell. There is wisdom in this notion. After all, pay too much and the market will be cruel. Pay less than the true value of something then sell it for what it’s worth and you profit. This is the nature of the capitalist mind. Buy low, sell high.

Poetry is set upon the same principle. A poem, like a successful business, is built from nothing. Like the giant spark in God’s mind when he created the universe. Or, if you prefer, the cosmic bang at the beginning of time that unleashed the red shift.

There is no value in nothing. But add something and you have potential value. A word, a phrase, a verse … every act of creation is an act of adding value. Some elements hold more than others, but every poetic element holds some kind of intrinsic value. The extrinsic value comes in the response of the reader and time of the work remaining extant plus other noteworthy attributes such as originality and condition. An item is always worth what one person is willing to pay for it on the open market. The value is what the market will bear.

How Poets Devalue Their Own Work
Every item has value. Poets who claim that capitalism is evil do not understand the nature of value. They are essentially saying their own creativity is valueless. By insisting in equality of condition economically they are denying their own right to receive the fruits of their labor. The creation of poetry is a business. Its publishing is a business. It involves expenses, costs, investment – in time and resources. The return on the investment is directly related to how well the product is marketed and positioned within the poetry marketplace and how capable the product is of building value for itself.

I am amazed at how many “socialist” poets will give an open reading of their work then turn around and sell it to their audiences, thus engaging in acts of capitalism. I once enticed such a poet to trade chapbooks – like kind for like kind, equal value for equal value. He obliged and in doing so betrayed his own philosophy. I chuckled about it later with another poet friend of mine who was well aware of the man’s socialist views. Visit Ron Silliman’s blog, an outspoken socialist, and he offers his own poetic works for sell (and some of them are rather pricey). Do they not believe in their own philosophies?

I rather like to believe that even the socialists see the inherent value in the products of their minds. They know they are creating value with every word, with every phrase, with every execution of thought. Despite this knowledge, they devalue their work by nodding toward the philosophies of men who tear down the rights to ownership with economic heresies.

If poets don’t devalue their own work intellectually then they devalue it practically by “giving away” what can be sold. Imagine a real estate agent just letting people move into homes they are selling and staying indefinitely. When poets post their valuable works of creativity on their blogs for all to see then they are essentially devaluing the work. When poets give away chapbooks without receiving something of value in return they are devaluing their own work and the products of their imaginations. I see this every day.

One more way poets devalue their work is to publish it before it is time. By not honing their craft and patiently waiting for the work to mature, poets ensure that they squeeze out any potential value of their work before it reaches its full potential. This is reputation suicide. Do not end a poem before it reaches the pinnacle of its worth. Otherwise, you destroy any future value it can build extrinsically.

How Poets Can Save Themselves
From Value Oblivion
Invest in yourself.

The surest way to ensure that your poetry builds value is to invest in your education and your craft-building skills. Enhance your knowledge of craft, the history of poetic movements, and the styles and traditions of the past and present. More than that, however, never give away your work. Only trade value for value.

This is not a creed to establish wealth. You do not have to hype up your sales pitch to make yourself seem valuable. You just have to be genuine, unique, and creative. You must study the markets, read other poets to know what the popular trends are (so that you can follow them or rebuff them according to your own theory of poetics), and write to perfection, not satisfaction. Become a nitpicking ass over every poetic minutiae in your work. Guard every breath, every comma, every space.

Sending work out for publication is not giving it away. It is building value. When you are published – every time you are published – you are building your reputation as a poet. Future publishers see past publication credits as a testament to your worth. Future readers see a list of publication credits as value. Often, poets who publish in journals end up with book publishing contracts and those lead to further publication credits. Every new publishing credit is a new reputation- and value-building transaction. Taking this lightly is an act of devaluation in the currency of poetic economy.

The following list of principles are designed to provide a measure of economy with regard to building value – value in reputation and value in poetic execution. They are not rules, but thoughts to ponder:

1. Only send work to publications that have published poets you admire and whose poetic styles and philosophies match, or closely resemble, your own.
2. Don’t send out your poems to every contest that promises publication and a big prize
3. Read at least three times as much as you write.
4. Spend at least twice of much time revising as writing.
5. Do not give away your poems without receiving something of value in return.
6. Get your work published in a few journals before you decide to publish a book.
7. If you self-publish, edit your work violently; become a hack and slash terrorist with your own work.
8. Develop your poetic philosophy and stay true to it.
9. Understand the value of the elements of poetry and know which ones are appropriate for the circumstances.
10. Don’t get in a hurry; true value builds naturally. You can’t fake it.

People who learn to judge value make good poets and good capitalists. No need to apologize for being adept.

Dear Allen,

We’re passing on these, Allen. But not without praise. We very much enjoyed reading your work, will always welcome it here, whenever you take a notion to send it. The rejection has more to do with the huge number of quality submissions we’re receiving than anything else.

That last line is perhaps one of the most common reasons for rejection if a poem is on the mark. It tells me that I submitted the right poems to the right place. It also tells me that those poems are worthy of publication and that I should send them out to another journal immediately, which I will do.

I hope the journals that I receive rejection notices from don’t mind me publishing them. Technically, they own the copyrights to their rejections and I should ask for permission before publishing them. I don’t because I don’t really want to wait a week or two, or longer, to get a “yes”. By then, the spirit of the moment will have passed and it won’t be the same, so I make an assumption. Also, If I do get a “yes” I’d almost feel obligated to print the editor’s name or the name of the journal and I think that would be bad form and possibly open doors for future embarrassment. I wouldn’t want to do that to an editor and possibly burn a bridge, but I do believe that publishing rejection notices can be an encouragement to others and that’s why I like to do it. It says that near success is possible, and if near success is possible then full success is equally possible. It’s just another step up the ladder.

Rejection is something I don’t get enough of. That is because I don’t send out enough submissions. I tend to spend a lot of time writing and revising, honing the craft. The few submissions that I do send out tend to be after a lot of living with and sleeping with the words that I birth. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

At any rate, it’s been a hell of a day. We celebrated my youngest grandson’s birthday. It was a lot of fun, yet, somehow, I feel like shedding tears. Not because of the rejections. Just because.

Aside from technology, however, there will be other significant factors influencing how poetry is published (as well as other forms of literature) and that will affect the nature of the epic. Some of those influences are outlined below.

If you’ll pardon another digression, this post marks the first anniversary of the World Class Poetry Blog and is the 367th post for this blog. That means, despite the days that I’ve missed posting over the course of the past year, I’ve made enough multiple posts in a single day to have averaged more than one post per day since last September. How fitting it is, I believe, to be discussing the future now.

The Future Of Poetics Through The Past
I think I’ve made it clear by now that the future is dependent upon the past. We’ve discussed the pre-literates briefly, the literate age of poetry not quite enough, and the future of technology. What I didn’t discuss enough in the last post was the future of the epic, but it was necessary to lay the groundwork by discussing the technology that will be integral to the lifestyle of poetics.

If technology is useful in creating and marketing poetry then it seems logical that technologies of the future will change the way in which poetry is written, especially if those technologies are drastically different than the technologies of the past. The question is, how will poetry change? In particular, how will the epic change?

I believe epic poetry of the future will be starkly different from epic poetry of past, but it will not be disconnected from the past. Future epics will use the technology of the future to deliver a creation that will stand on the foundations of poetic traditions yet still stand on its own, somewhat like the way young adults carry on the traditions of their lineage while making those traditions new for themselves and their children.

One important way that future epics will survive the traditions of the past is to get back to the basics of good, honest storytelling. I’m talking about the type of storytelling that the pre-literates enjoyed – heroic tales with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The novel has been able to maintain that basic structure even while re-inventing itself, but poetry has largely gone off on its own like a wayward son. When poets do tell stories it is done mostly through short forms and long narratives, but not epics. The few real epics we’ve seen in recent years have, with few exceptions, been esoteric tales or they’ve been deviations from basic storytelling.

That isn’t to say, however, that the avant-garde strain of poetry that was dominant for much of the 20th century will die. It will live on, but it will live as a flavoring option rather than as a dynamic on its own. While epic poems will strive to return to the roots of basic storytelling, poets will still employ the avant-garde elements that have caught on as a result of the Imagist and Realist schools, the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, Postmodernism, Language Poetry, and various other 20th century movements. But those elements won’t be the dominant themes.

I’ve mentioned the splintering within 20th century poetics, which has led to a convoluted cross-pollination between the avant-garde strain and the mainstream strain of poetics and their various offspring. We’ve arrived at a place today where the two strains have fed off of each other and as their divergences have widened, the convergences have strengthened. This marriage between leaving the nest and keeping it within the family will continue to be the dominant movement for the next century, but it will largely be played out in digital media with some print implications.

How Might Digital Epics Look?
We have yet to tap into the new technologies and make the best use of them. The human imagination has not yet caught up with the technology that has emerged from scientific tinkering. But we are getting there.

One of the ways in which the Language School has been influential is in the co-creation process. Language School poetics insists on the reader being a co-creator with the poet, but the Language School poets have also been great collaborators. This has largely been due to the fusion of political socialism into the form itself. Language School innovators are all collectivists and believe that the act of creation itself is a communal action. In print, that co-creation and collaboration process doesn’t match up with the philosophy, but in hypertext and cyberspace it does so much more perfectly.

Not only can individuals from different backgrounds easily work together online, but they can do so in ways that it is impossible to do with print technology. One example of how individuals can work together is through wiki technology. Wikipedia is the most prominent example. Through one simple technology, poets from competing backgrounds can partner under one creation, changing each other’s additions, adding to the creation as a whole, deleting previous entries, and participate in co-creation in real time.

If you can imagine an epic poem written in wiki by a collaboration of different people from various backgrounds (even cross-culturally) then you are following me as you should. But would it work? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see. If it did work, the collaborators could then convert the digital experiment to print and market the creation by traditional means.

One thing you can do with digital technology that you cannot do in print is create multimedia incorporating audio and video with traditional storytelling techniques. This could work for prose as well as poetry, but in the epic category you could have a hypertext poem, a long narrative story with the basic structure – beginning, middle, and end – and include throughout, at various places, an audio file or short video presentation to show the action being depicted by the text. I can easily envision a several thousand page HTML document that is written like a traditional narrative and on each page a video clip of the action on that page then at the end of the document a full video where all the clips are combined into a complete movie presentation. Instead of creating a movie based on a full-length prose or poetry manuscript, or vice-versa, the creators can go for simultaneous production and charge admission to the website.

This elevates poetry to the realm of entertainment, which is where it belongs anyway. Before the 20th century, poetry was considered an entertainment form. There was no TV or radio so the forms of entertainment were limited. One of the ways that people sought to entertain themselves was to read and in many families there was at least one person who could read that would entertain the rest by gathering everyone together around a campfire or in the barn getting lost in their favorite stories. Often, this was done with a book of verse.

When the 20th century came around with its modern technologies and scatter-brained diversions, people got away from reading and spent more time driving, flying, watching movies, and engaging themselves in other activities that did not require books. As a result, we have a society of people who have gone their entire lives without reading a single book through to the end. The 21st century doesn’t look promising to bring that to an end.

But people are reading more as a result of the Internet. They may not be reading books, but they are reading text. E-mail, web pages, blogs, and other digital media have become common reading material even for people who would never pick up a book. Still, there are many people who would rather watch a video or listen to an audio recording than to read the text, and that’s why poetry in the 21st century has the potential to reach many more people than the poetry of the 20th century.

Poetry As Entertainment, Not Merely A Possibility
The popular poetries of the past have almost all been seen as a form of entertainment. Shakespeare wrote great plays, both tragic and comic, but they were written as poetry. Edgar Allan Poe gained a popular following overseas as well as in his native America, primarily because audiences found his poems eerie and entertaining. “The Raven”, in particular, was very popular during his lifetime. Robert Service in the 20th century made millions of dollars entertaining audiences with his poetry in a time when readership of poetry was in decline and when the poetry that was being written was flying off the obscurity scale into poetic oblivion at the speed of light. When poetry did aspire to entertainment it was largely because poets were entertaining themselves as they wrote by injecting silliness or obscure references into the poetry in a masturbatory fashion. Not many others got much out of it. That kind of poetry is like having sex with yourself while others watch through a peephole.

21st century poetry will have to get back to being reader-centric and one of the ways that it will do that is through visual presentation. Even when it borrows from the obscure it will do so in such a way that it serves as an enhancement to the simple and easy-to-digest. But always, the chief aim will be to provide entertainment to the audience.

The Types Of Epics That Will Emerge In The 21st Century
As stated before, the epic poetry of the future will stay connected to the epic poetry of the past. Therefore, the traditional epic structures will not disappear. But new epic structures will emerge and I think we’ll see a blending of the types of epics as well. Here is an incomplete list of epic forms and their possibilities:

• Heroic Epic – People still love heroes. The story of a larger-than-life hero with a great story to tell will never die. Not even in poetry.
• The Epic Adventure – Sometimes it isn’t the hero that provides the story. It is the event. Man against beast, man against nature, man against himself – all the classic story lines will continue even as new structures develop.
• Epic Of Place – Yes, even the 21st century will have its Paterson’s.
• Epic of Time – An epic of time, like an epic of place, is an epic concerned with one particular culture during a specific period of time. It could be a future time, a time in the past, or the present, but the time period must be an integral part to the story. It could even involve some element of time travel, which would make the epic a science fiction or speculative fiction poem, or it could involve flashbacks; any element or device that can be found in poetry or fiction is allowed as long as time is central to the epic story.
• Epic of Form – Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an epic of form is an epic whose form is a principal part of the work.
• National Epic – An epic that seeks to tell the story of a particular nation and its ideals through the characters and events.
• The Personal Epic – A personal epic is an epic poem whose chief character is the author himself and can be written in several different styles. It can be reflective as in the case of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait In A Complex Mirror or it can double as an epic of place or epic of time. A personal epic could have characteristics of other types of stories as well such as the confessional poem made popular by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.
• Science Epic – A science epic is a story whose primary theme deals with scientific concepts. Frederick Turner’s Genesis is a good example of what I’d call a science epic. You could just as well break it down into a sub-genre of ecological epic.
• Cross-Cultural Epic – Surpassing the national epic, I believe there is plenty of room for individuals from different cultural backgrounds, even cultures that are traditionally antagonistic toward each other – collaborating on a story whose chief themes deal with intercultural issues. This could also refer to a single-author epic poem dealing with a similar theme.
• Language Epic – An epic poem whose primary theme is to deal with the uses and complexities of language.
• Visual Epic – An epic whose principal characteristics are visual elements – could be textual or video-based.

There are virtually no limitations on epic form, but epic structures are not as free. There are general trends, as noted in my discussion on the literate age, regarding the development of the epic structure over time. While I see more experimentation in this area for future epics, I do think that there will still be recognizable trends. I doubt that we’ll see a resurgence of iambic pentameter for a complete epic, but I do see some potential for new metrical structures as well as a mashing up metrical structures for the epics of the future. We’ll likely see a return to rhyme and meter, but it won’t look like 17th century rhyme and meter. It will look like 21st century meter and it’s entirely possible that epics will play around with metrical elements in such a way that different characters speak with different meters and pitches and story pacing can be controlled in similar ways. Whatever the case, I think meter will be one area where the epics of the future will do a lot of experimenting.

Conclusion
I hope this clarifies my thoughts from the last blog post on this subject. I know this is very sketchy in detail, but I think most readers will understand the challenges of covering such a broad topic on a blog such as this. There is much I could have said and didn’t. There is much more I might have said and probably should have. I have merely tried to offer a sketch of the possibilities. The rest – the imaginary part – is up to you.