One of the criticisms you’ll find of contemporary culture is that people don’t read poetry any more. This is typically spoken with derision and everyone has their own ideas as to why poetry isn’t enjoyed by the general public any more.

Some people blame the poets while others lay the burden at the feet of public education. I think the problem is one of competition.

In 1798 there were no televisions, no radios, no telephones, and certainly no Internet. The primary means of entertainment then outside of social relations was reading. Poetry had a lot of more influence in most people’s lives because it was palatable to the means of production and the mode of communication that was popular. Plus, there were fewer distractions.

All of that changed in the 20th century with the advent of modern technology. The last literary movement that enjoyed a wide following was the Victorians. After that, poetry splintered into niche movements. But the 21st century shows some promise.

Why The Internet Will Revive Poetry
I’ve written about this before. The Internet shows a lot of promise to get people back into the enjoyment of poetry. While certain poets in the 20th century have enjoyed a wide readership, most poets have not been known outside of academia or their own circle. I believe there will be some 21st century poets who will be known widely beyond their circle of friends and it is largely due to digital distribution systems that will allow that to happen. But, first, poets have to learn to use them.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about vanity publishing in the Internet age. My message was largely misunderstood or misinterpreted by readers, but I’m not interested in playing the blame game. I am working on a follow up to clarify the misunderstanding. I will say, however, that simply throwing up a blog and calling oneself a publisher won’t do.

A blog is a very good first step, or perhaps a second step for some. But there are far more resources available to the poet publishing online than a blog and a website.

For the most part, online publishing hasn’t even begun yet. We are still at the early stage of Gutenberg’s Press when only a handful of people knew how to operate it, and they quite poorly. The best of Internet publishing, and that includes independent publishing, is yet to come.

Once poets, and other publishers, learn the full scale of what can be accomplished with Internet publishing, you can expect great things that have not yet been imagined. Blogs will be mere baby toys (they almost are now). The comparison can be likened to the difference between Dolby Surround Digital and silent pictures. That’s how far we have to go, but when we get there the poet who can incorporate visual and audio elements effectively with the printed word will capture hearts and minds. The 21st century will discover its William Shakespeare.

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.

For this entry, I will focus just on the simulacra of Simulations and Simulacra in the context of the challenges and opportunities we are faced with in this era in which we live. Simulacra is defined as: copies without an original. Baudrillard cites many examples of this phenomenon in his book, but one version of this phenomenon should be quite familiar to all of us -

• An original event occurs.
• The event becomes a reference point of meaning to its contemporaries.
• Time passes (the amount of time that passes can be surprisingly short), and this event becomes an historical reference point.
• The historical reference point gains new meaning with passing time, and the original meaning is lost, distorted, or completely changed (intentionally or not).

The Politics Of Experience
Consider the recent arguments between Republicans and Democrats about how we overcame the Great Depression. As most of us alive today don’t have direct experience with what happened then, we have to rely on the meaning of the event known as the Great Depression being mediated to us. To understand the meaning of this event, we have a wide variety of places to go to get information and analysis of the event: books, newspapers, television, radio, internet, etc. In fact, even to those who still lived through the Great Depression, their understanding of the event can change based on this overwhelming amount of information available with all of the various interpretations of the information.

The process of understanding this event which has taken on a new meaning in our society becomes, in a practical way, more important than the event itself. The search for truth can be endless, and yet can create more questions and ambiguities at each turn. What can we trust? This sense of ambiguity and the mutability of meaning is what I would like to focus on here in the context of writing.

The Poet’s Responsibility
As poets, our task at all times is to tell a story. For a story to have meaning, it must have a context. And this is where understanding how the simulacra works gives us some food for thought in our writing, and in analyzing the writing of others. Here are some things to consider:

1. Even in our own lives, we are prone to creating and recreating the meaning of events. At the depths of this process, we are making many choices. When I read or write poetry, I examine carefully the reference points that are used and how they function.
2. Common reactions to simulacra are irony, rebellion, alienation, and resignation.
3. Mediation is a process that leads toward simulacra. The more steps between the original event and the last interpretation, the more room for difference. (Sidenote – Television is a deceiving form of mediation because we can feel that we are part of an event when we are getting a very distorted, removed view of it.)
4. Identity is increasingly difficult to grasp, as the context of what makes us who we are gets more complex.

Li-Young Lee: A Postmodern Poet’s Simulacra
Look at this excerpt from Immigrant Blues by Li-Young Lee:

[...]Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man.

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you?

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.[...]

Li-Young Lee is an accomplished postmodern writer, tapping into the realm of simulacra regarding his identity as an immigrant and connecting with his fragmented family past. Alienation isn’t new to literature, but what makes it uniquely postmodern in this poem is how Li-Young Lee ironically recognizes the distance and chooses to never reconcile it. The poem ends:

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace
and the Defilement of the Beloved,”

called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

Li-Young Lee recognizes that resolution isn’t possible. He knows that ending the poem with new understanding, with a concrete sense of direction isn’t as impactful as the ambiguity that is left in the void of context. This void of context is the context. Starting this section by calling it an “ancient story” but ironically from “yesterday evening” he intentionally blurs the lines. He doesn’t have a concrete connection with his family history or himself – but that lack of connection is something that we can connect to.

How Simulacra Can Be Used To Connect Us
Many postmodern poets are very adept at connecting us to these fissures in context that we have in our lives, and turning those fissures around from points of confusion to points of unity between the reader and the poet. We understand and empathize, and thus, we experience relief from the conundrums of simulacra.

The take away point here is that as a writer – more than at any time in history – recognizing the challenges in understanding anything as being definite can be very helpful in constructing a believable poem that others can connect to.

Will B. is a high school teacher and owner of the blog The Search for Health in Decadence.

It’s a good question. I’ve noticed that there seems to be prejudice against reading online. Some of the arguments are rather compelling – ie. it’s hard on the eyes (it actually is). But smoking is hard on the lungs and people still do that. Health be damned.

Other arguments against reading online are ridiculous. I won’t detail them. You’ve probably heard them all before.

Just for the record, I do almost all of my reading online now. I say almost because some things just aren’t available in digital format. And I like to read in the bathtub, which makes electronic gadgetry a bit of an edgy subject at times. But now that I’ve shared a little too much about myself, allow me to tell you why I think online reading, or digital reading, is as necessary as print reading was 100 years ago.

First, you can’t stop a moving train by throwing a rock at it. The digital era has arrived. You’re either on, trying to get on, or you’ll never be on. If you fall into that last category you’d better be prepared to lose out on a lot of the 21st century pleasures of life because the rest of us aren’t going to wait for you.

But deeper than that shallow pool, the real issue is whether online literature is as serious as print literature. The old-time elitists say “no way.” The new elitists – I among them – say that serious literature is defined by the times. At one time, we could say Kafka was king. But what if Kafka knew HTML? What if he had YouTube? Would he have still written about a cockroach?

I don’t think literature will be defined 100 years from now the same way it is defined now. Hell, the way it is defined now isn’t the way it was defined 100 years ago. That’s as it should be. Every generation is in the process of creating its own lit. Why not ours?

To be sure, the nature of literature and the boundaries that have defined one type of literature from another are changing. We now have the technology to include audio and video in the midst of moving prose. In the past, a novel was just a novel. You might see a picture here and there, but it was mostly all words – black type on a white page. That is no more.

There are plenty of reasons besides personal preference why reading online will grow in popularity. There are environmental concerns and there are economic concerns. The cost of paper is going up. The cost of oil and the natural resources used to manufacture paper are going up. That will drive up the price of the end product. But online you can produce the same piece of literature for less money much more quickly, streamline the distribution, sell fewer copies, and make more money. That sounds like one of those famous no-brainers.

But literature is, and always has been, a personal experience. It’s between the author-creator and his reader. Even public performances are personal-subjective no matter the size of the audience.

People tend to read in the format they feel most comfortable with. At one time, I preferred print. That’s what I knew and what I expected. Today, I spend almost all of my time online. My preferences have changed. And that seems to be what Kevin Kelly is saying too.

Jeremy’s experience is much closer to mine. I think literature-space is orthogonal to cyberspace and to reading-space.  You can get deep into a book online as well as in paper, and you can skip across ideas on paper as well as online.  It is true the medium is a message itself, but what we are now inhabiting is an Intermedia, the media of medias, where one medium flows into another making it hard to define boundaries. The book can be found in cyberspace and in literature space.  The book may be bigger than we think. Or smaller than we think. For sure we are in the process of redefining it.

In that grand conclusion Kelly was responding to a letter from a reader in which the reader noted:

Your ability to concentrate on a long text is not a function of the medium of delivery, but a function of your personal discipline and your aims in reading. If you sit down to read War and Peace with the aim of enjoying yourself, whether you have paper in your hands or plastic, you expect to be focused on it — joyfully focused, one hopes — for hours on end, perhaps the entire day.

That about sums it up for me. Reading is concentration and if you’ve got the discipline to read digital literature then you’ll read digital lit. If not then you won’t. And I personally don’t think the medium is the cause of anyone’s distraction. How they perceive that medium is the cause of any distraction, or excuse, they may have in not enjoying the experience.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to a lot of great digital literature. I believe it’s coming. In some ways, it’s already here.

1. The struggle is in maintaining a balance between the narrative and the poetics
2. Too much narrative and the poem becomes prosaic
3. Too much poetry and the poem will lilt into lyrical patterns that kill the narrative
4. Employment of fiction writing techniques are necessary, but they can get in the way of the poetry if you let them
5. Double risk of saying too much or leaving something out

The essence of narrative poetry is such that you have a story to tell, but the way in which you wish to tell the story is not traditional. In other words, the poem becomes a story without becoming fiction. If it were fiction then it wouldn’t be a poem, but it must contain fiction, or fictional elements, in order to achieve the narrative effect. Even lyric narratives must incorporate some element of fiction telling or the narrative is no longer narrative.

I am currently struggling through an experimental narrative poem that is causing me to think more deeply about what a poem is, how a poem should be structured, and why the narrative form is necessary. The poem is based on my experience as an Iraq War officer who was against the war on moral grounds but chose to participate rather than break the law in an act of civil disobedience as so many others have done. The story itself is fictional; the “truth” part is the emotional-philosophical basis upon which its message is communicated.

My Current Narrative Poem Struggle

Initially, I wrote the poem in three-line strophes and it felt contrived. I thought the poem was too stilted and therefore restructured it. I am now taking it into a totally different direction, using experimental techniques, backward lines, angled verses, concrete elements, and formal line units interspersed between free verse lines. It’s working much better, but I’m still not satisfied.

I have a particular style of writing that is unique. I didn’t develop it. It comes naturally. I’ve always been able to tap into this style in one way or another and draw from different parts of my being (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and intuitive) in such a way that they play nicely together. Sometimes they struggle against each and sometimes they compliment each other, but they are always all involved. What I’m trying to achieve with this poem is a message, a philosophical proclamation that doesn’t come out preachy or didactic. That’s a tough thing to do in any work.

The narrative is necessary for POV, a fictional technique embodied in my natural lyrical style. But it’s a long poem.

As it stands now, the poem is 13 full 8 1/5 X 11 pages with normative 1-inch margins all around. Some of the lines are short, some long. Some are merely one word in length. The stanzas are all different lengths and there is no set metrical pattern throughout the poem. The meter often changes and changes often. Furthermore, there is a setting as in fiction and several characters, each with their own POV and developed personalities. Then I toss in some metaphors and traditional poetic devices like rhyme, near rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition, synecdoches, etc. You get my drift.

The problem I’m having is this: Keeping the narrative moving through execution of action (both narrative action and action of language) without making it look and sound ridiculous. I suppose it’s the same struggle that many fiction writers find themselves in when they reach a chapter or a point in their story where they don’t know where to go with it any more. You know it’s not finished but you’re not quite sure what it needs. I’m at that point.

I think it may actually be that I know what it needs. I just don’t know how to give it what it needs, if that makes any sense. Like a man who knows his wife needs a hug but he is incapable of allowing himself to give into the temptation to share that emotional moment with her, be it out of pride, insecurity, or just lack of know-how. I am there and I’m not quite sure why. The poem needs an injection of something but I cannot say what kind of injection because I haven’t diagnosed the problem properly. Have you ever been there? What did you do?

The Too Much-Too Little Dichotomy

I am trying my hardest to maintain a balance between saying too much and telling the whole story. With any narrative, whether it be fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, you have an obligation to the reader to tell everything that is important. You don’t have to tell everything there is to know, but you must tell everything that is important to the story. Otherwise, the reader won’t have a good experience.

Nevertheless, you’ve got to keep it short. Brevity is key in any writing. Say what needs to be said and get out. So my struggle is there, how do I keep it as short as it needs to be and still say everything that needs to be said? In general, a story should tell itself. I’ve always believed that and still do.

I’ve had hard poems to write before. I’ve have some poems so easy to write I couldn’t believe they were actually poems. But this poem is hard. I think it’s hard because of the narrative imperative. It won’t work simply as a lyrical poem, but as narrative it works splendidly. I just wish I could get it off my chest and get on with living.

Though work is a huge part of my life. I write a handful of blogs and manage many more. If you’ve never seen my local tourism blog – The Gettysburg Blog – then you’ll want to check it out. I recently redesigned it so it has a much prettier face and it’s getting a lot of winks from passersby that once ignored it.

Then there’s my Internet marketing blog, where I share tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs on ways to market themselves online and talk a little bit about making money online for people who have yet to figure that part out. My latest project is the For Sale Blog – if it’s for sale, we’ll help you sell it. As an aside, I bet you can’t guess which of the three blogs get the most traffic.

While my personal side projects are all doing well, my real bread and butter is the business that I’ve been managing for the past two years. I am a partner and the operations manager, but I am about to take it over and become the CEO. We are now in the process of making that happen and, yes, that does take up a considerable amount of my time. What’s the business? Blog Content Provider.

In case you can’t tell, we are a ghostwriting company that specializes in writing blog content. I currently manage over 40 client blogs and write two of the company blogs. Yes, it’s a handful.

But not quite as much of a handful as the gratifying part of my life. My fiery redhead of a wife keeps me hopping from one foot to another, and when I’m not hopping for her I’m on all fours for our 15-month old grandson, who thinks that I am the only big person that exists. I am the answer to his every problem. The grandchildren live with us. All three of them.

The other two are no less demanding. The six year old must get to the bus that takes him to school every morning. I am the one who gets up before dawn to take care of some details related to work then get him up and ready for school and cart him to the bus stop. Before I can finish that mission, his younger sister and brother are awake asking for breakfast. Savannyah is five years old and has the disposition of a Barbie doll. Both of the boys have far more testosterone than I’ve ever had. So it wears on this old worn body and mind.

Nathen, the youngest, has had me up at 3:30 and 4:30 a.m. for the past two nights. He’s teething. And if I’m not working or thinking about work, I’m taking care of all their needs. Thursday nights is Cub Scout night for Dylan. He’s the oldest. I’ve had little time for poetry lately and while that may seem like it would be a life ending heart crusher – I thought it would be – it’s really not. When I can steal a few minutes, I spend it adding pages to World Class Poetry, reviewing a book, or working on Rumsfeld’s Sandbox.

I am often reminded, when I am stretched to these limits, of the scene in City Slickers where Billy Crystal’s character and Jack Palance’s are riding side by side on horseback. Palance, character name Curly, holds one finger in the air to represent the meaning of life. And says, “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.”

Billy Crystal gets this little cocky gleam in his eye, a curious gleam with a smirk, and says, “That’s great, but what’s the one thing?”

Palance smiles and in his characteristic tough guy sensitivity points at Crystal and says, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”

Well, I’m still figuring it out. At one time I could tell you what that was, but life often makes different plans. I’m not giving up on ya’ll yet. I’m still hanging around. Don’t forget about me.

The reason she asked was because she had read an article Gioia had written in which he argued that poets are the gatekeepers (my word, not his or hers) of language and that we should preserve language, not reinvent it. I told her that, while I respect that view, I don’t agree with it.

I have a huge problem, first off, with anyone telling me what I should be doing with my mode of expression. I am what I am and you can like it or not. But even more importantly, the world is in a constant state of change. As such, culture itself is always evolving. Art and literature are not only reflections of culture, but also co-creators of it. As the culture around us changes, we must be willing to change along with it, and that change manifests itself in two ways.

1. As recorders of culture and history, poets and literary artists struggle to paint the world as it is. There may be ideals communicated in the practice and pursuit of this, but even in the most fantastic of tales and verses, you can often find hints and evidence of the cultural influences that go into an artists work. This is as it should be.
2. The other way in which culture manifests itself in literature is through the personal eyes of the artist. Writers often come up with ideas before anyone else and communicate them in such a way that they leave a mark. Readers pick up a certain phrase or borrow an idea and share it with their friends. There are countless examples of writers who have coined a phrase or injected a culture with an idea that went viral.

You could easily call these two manifestations of culture in literature as impression and expression. First, the literary artist receives an impression of the surrounding culture then writes about it. The expression resulting from this can range in form from the very creative to the technical, from obscure to plain. But the expression is the writer’s way of giving back to the culture what the culture has fed him. The culture in turn rewards the artist with acceptance and approval. Sometimes, rejection can be its own reward as communicated in this quote from Normal Mailer:

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. (from Armies Of The Night)

Even rejection can be a form of approval for a writer.

My point is that language changes. As culture changes so do the modes of expression. This is natural. Once, man drew pictures on the walls of caves. Now we digitize nearly everything. Our cave is a worldwide network of machines, not far from the Borg. Someday, it will be something else.

I respect the idea that artists are in the business of preserving language because, in a certain sense, it is true. We can’t just go around willy-nilly changing the meanings of common words and expecting people to understand what we are saying. If we use words in a different way than what is normally accepted, there should be a good reason for it. Otherwise, it’s just gibberish.

I don’t know if that’s what Dana Gioia meant. I haven’t read the article that my friend mentioned (though I’m quite familiar with Gioia’s ideas).

All of this is to say that I recently discovered that Webster’s New World Dictionary has selected its word of the year as it does every year. This year’s word is a newly coined word and isn’t in the dictionary at all. “Overshare” is a word that could only be used in a culture such as ours that is infatuated with making the personal public. Here’s a video that gives a little insight into the choice of the word. It’s interesting to hear what college students are saying and how they express themselves in struggling with a definition for this word. It will be interesting to see just when “overshare” makes it into the dictionary and how many different definitions it will garner for itself by that time.

This question has been at the forefront of literary analysis for most of history. That we are still discussing it is a testament to the difficulty of an answer. All of us, to be sure, have our tastes, our preferences, even our prejudices. We know what we like and we know what we don’t.

Perhaps we can say there is some kind of Akashic record that tallies all the ‘yea’ votes in the hearts of lit lovers from eons back to eons forward and at the end of time we will know who has received the most tallies. But would that be fair to those in late-coming centuries? Perhaps we can divide those tallies by an appropriate time measure and record an aggregated average.

This all may seem silly, but it’s a complicated matter. How much should we make technical considerations a part of the calculation? How about creativity? Imagination? Passion?

Quantifying a subjective is about as simple as picking up a handful of water. It may be that these are all the wrong questions. Is Shakespeare better than Homer? Will Walt Whitman win the award for most unique voice in history, or should that go to Aesop? Comparisons such as these, in literature, make about as much sense as playing baseball in zero gravity. But that is not to say that judging the value of poetry is impossible. I believe it is. Though that value is not computed by ordinary means.

How To Judge The Value Of Literature

There will always be someone who doesn’t like a great work of art. One person detests Moby Dick; another reads it cover to cover once a year. Someone else swears by Dickens while his sister-in-law calls him a senseless hack. Jane Austen may be brilliant to one reader, but quite nuts to another. Literature is, at its most basic, a subjective experience. As such, its value is personal.

But what if a million readers like a particular story or poem? Does it then have more value than the work that is enjoyed by merely one hundred? Not necessarily. Suppose those one hundred readers are contemporary readers to the artist and all personal friends to the author whose first book was published just last week. But in the former case, the million readers are readers that span the sequence of centuries for a timeless and well-known classic. There is hardly a comparison there now is there?

And that brings me to my point: The value of literature, though it be subjective, is intrinsically wrapped up in time. This, of course, must rule out those works that never see the light of day. If it is unpublished and remains so then no one can judge. But it’s entirely feasible, and has been done many times, that an artist can go a lifetime without receive the accolades of contemporaries only to enjoy achievements beyond imagination in the afterlife. Immortality may be in the realm of God, or the gods, but it is accessible to man by reputation.

Though time may be the variable involved, it would be a mistake to consider that value is based on some aggregation of fans. A million fans over the course of one hundred centuries doesn’t afford any special favors opposed to one hundred thousand fans over the same time period, or one hundred thousand fans over the course of one thousand years is no better than two hundred thousand over the course of three times as long. Rather, the time value of literature may be judged by how long a particular work or artist may enjoy a fanbase at all beyond their lifetime.

Writers who achieve great fame during their lifetimes then fade into oblivion may be good cultural artists, but their achievements pale in comparison to, say, Homer or Sappho. Literature may be subjective, but it is not wholly so, for it also bears a cultural imprint as well as an epochal one. It takes considerably more talent to be understood and valued cross-culturally during one period than it does to be understood and valued by a single culture of that same time period, but it also takes more talent to be understood and valued by a variety of cultures across time. Readers today understand Shakespeare because we understand courage, honor, deceit, love, and the human passions about which he wrote. But if knowledge of a particular culture or artifact is necessary in order to understand a literary work then when that culture or artifact is no longer alive people will find it difficult to relate. And that’s why I say that work which touches upon the human condition beyond a mere time and place is to be preferred over any other. It has more value to more people in more places and more times. It is that time value in which we can trust.

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!

As an evangelical Christian, I feel like I exist in two worlds. In the first world, the one in which I was born as flesh and blood, there is a commitment, in my country at least, to free speech principles – at least among a good cross-section of the population. But in the other world, the spiritual world where my brothers and sisters in Christ and I join in heavenly bond, there is a natural – and sometimes adamant – recoil against certain perversions like the glorification of incest, child rape, and other sexual no-nos. I understand both worlds quite well.

Free speech, however, rarely has anything to do with what happens in the real (flesh and blood) world. Just because two characters in a novel choose to have sexual relations doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not such a thing actually takes place in the real world. If one of the characters is a 40-year-old man and the other is a 16-year-old girl going on 25 (or the other way around), the reader (and even those offended non-readers who heard about it on the nightly news) must realize that this is a work of imagination, bearing little semblance to reality.

On the other hand, art is often a depiction of real life so perhaps the author is simply describing an event that he knows is a real event and that the two people represent what he knows is all-too real. Nevertheless, the issue is often focused on the morality of the incident – whether fictional or real.

Neil Gaiman’s Defense Of The Indefensible

I tip my hat to author Neil Gaiman for his recent stand for free speech and weaving into his credo the often ambiguous and multi-faceted gray areas dealing with this issue. He really got icky with it.

Many of my Christian friends do not understand the line, “If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible.” Yet, that is my own position as well.

In full, here’s a paragraph from Neil Gaiman’s brilliant defense of free speech:

The Law is a blunt instrument. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.

Many Christians do not understand this. They believe that to defend the indefensible is to oppose God and undermine his kingdom. They will say they believe in freedom then in the very next sentence say that so-and-so should not be allowed to … (adopt children, get married, drink on Sunday, or you can fill in the blank). I take issue with these sentiments because they are not pro-freedom and if you are going to utter them then you should be aware that you do not believe in freedom and just be honest about it.

I love the law. To me, the law represents an iron fist. It should not – though it often does – discriminate between acts of intentional criminality and well-meaning acts of good intention. If it breaks a law then it should be punishable under the law, though mitigating circumstances may mean limiting a punishment to the lower end of the prescribed discipline for the offense. Of course, this digression is meant to illustrate that the issue of the Law is one not to be taken lightly and this in no way touches on what should be considered lawful in terms of human action.

The Absolute Of Non-Absolutes

Freedom of speech is not an absolute. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and you can’t falsely accuse others of a crime (in most cases) knowing full well that your accusation is false. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, freedom of speech is about as close to being an absolute as we have in the U.S.

I for one do not believe that immoral art causes people to commit acts of immorality, cruelty, or go on disorderly binges of one kind or another. Human beings are depraved creatures. All it takes for many of us to slither through a gutter of moral bilge is to wake up and breathe. Even the good among us are not entirely good. We do not need the Marquis de Sade to teach us imaginative ways to pleasure ourselves. The same imaginations that create art of that nature are capable of living lives much worse.

Free speech is that thing that allows moral people to stand up and shout that a certain act or piece of literature is immoral. Without that, we could very well live in a society that is so permissive on one hand that it quells the good from shedding light on the bad. That would not be free speech and I would not want to live in such a society.

If free speech is to continue there must be a commitment to it from all quarters. We must be, as Neil Gaiman says, willing to defend the indefensible. But we must also be willing to speak out against the inconceivable. This thing we call free speech is a double-edge sword. It cuts going in and it cuts coming out. But when you need it to defend yourself you’ll be darned glad you have it.