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.

Of course, there are no guarantees. John Lennon once quipped that life is what happens to you while making other plans. There have been many great writers who never won the most coveted awards despite their best efforts. There are other winners who had no intention of being a writer, but life led in that direction. Many writers end up on their deathbeds with a hundred books of mediocre skill wearing their name on the cover while others write one great work of art and nothing else. How does “greatness” arrive?

How Literary Greatness Arrives

First, we must recognize that greatness is a perceived value, not an actual one. One man likes Charles Dickens and another man doesn’t. Can you measure “greatness” by aggregation? If 200,000 book readers agree that Great Expectations is a world class novel, is it? Or can we measure greatness by some objective, quantifiable data?

While measures of worth are to a large degree subjective, I do believe there are some objective measurements that we can look at to determine literary worth. Prizes and awards are simply a judgment in the minds of those who award the prizes. But the time value of greatness is at least as valuable as the time value of money. As any accountant knows, invest your money in a solid vehicle with above-average earnings during the course of your lifetime and you can retire with a comfortable nest egg. But is there a “greatness” nest egg resting somewhere?

Literary value comes as a subjective lens with a nonmovable handle and frame. Using a magnifying glass as metaphor, what you see through the glass is what you possess in your own soul. The hardware of the experience, however, is built into the instrument by generally accepted artistic principles (GAAP). Accountants, once again, are familiar with GAAP, which stands for something completely different for the numbers guys. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are the widely recognized unwritten rules that govern how business bookkeeping is done so that money is handled properly and commercial paper is used to turn more profit.

Literary greatness comes as a result of similar principles. The study of those who have succeeded, and failed. Hard work, grit and sweat, over one’s own work. A dash of patience. And the smile of the greatness gods. It all adds up to a fanciful synchronicity.

Why You Should Read Greatly If You Expect To Write Great Things

Authors and other literary artists would do themselves well to read. Reading what others have written, both the good and the bad, trains us to see our own weaknesses. If you cannot judge good literature from bad then it is likely that you will not produce good literature. Likely, not impossible. The first “great” literary artist had no mentors so there is a level of flexibility in the principles.

Still, reading is as much an avocation of writing and the writer who doesn’t read and read widely is likely as not to produce words fit for naught but the refrigerator door. And while reading the winners of coveted prizes doesn’t guarantee a blue ribbon in return, it never hurts.

In summary, Jerry Seinfeld’s formula for success is so simple. It boils down to these three points:

• Bust Your Ass
• Be Attentive
• Fall In Love

I like this list. Now here’s my interpretation as it relates to writing and publishing poetry:

• BYA – Work hard. Every day. Improve. Don’t be satisfied until you outdo yourself.
• Be Attentive – Pay attention to what others are doing. Emulate those you like, learn from those you don’t, and pave your own path among the trees in the forest. Simplification: Borrow what you like, toss what you don’t. Read a lot.
• Fall In Love - Learn to the see the good in life. Bask in the glory of your situation, even when it sucks. Turn it into poetry.

Thanks Jerry Seinfeld!

I’ve thought about this a lot lately. I said a while back that I was about ready to retire Rumsfeld’s Sandbox and start on something new. Of course, this is a book of poems, but the principle should hold for projects as well as individual poems. When it’s time to quit, it’s time. But when?

I’m not ready to give up on Rumsfeld’s Sandbox just yet. Emotionally, I’m ready for it to end, but there are still things left unsaid. Or perhaps it says too much. I feel that certain poems need more work, but I also feel that I’m missing a couple of poems and the hole that is left by their absence is gnawing at my intestines like a bad cancer. I can’t get it out.

I know, though, that some of the poems are “done.” They are complete. I know this because I can’t take anything else out of them and still improve them. What is there belongs. Nothing else belongs because to add to them would be like trying to pour a glass of water down the Niagara Falls. If that sounds absurd then I’ve made my point.

That’s when I know that an individual poem is finished: If I can look at it and not feel impelled to change it in any way then I’m ready to move on. But what about a book of poems?

I suspect that a book length project is the same. It isn’t finished until I can read through the collection and make no more additions, changes, or deletions and improve it. That’s quite a statement because if a collection is missing just one poem that belongs there then it isn’t finished. But what if that poem isn’t written yet? What if it is written, but I just don’t know it. What if it’s buried deep in my “come back to later” file and has been stored there for years? How will I find it?

I think finishing is a much more frightening experience than beginning. Because to finish a poem means that I’ve lived through it. Like a close call with death. As it happens you don’t notice, but after you’ve felt the tingling brush it becomes so noticeable you can’t get anything else out of your mind. And I’ve done this with poems. I have gone back and read and re-read a poem that I’ve written and finished and not changed it at all just to solidify in my mind that it’s done. And after about 50 times of that I am ready to share it with the world. Shards and all.

Meet Rowan Williams the poet.

Meet Satan’s mistress, the best poet in the U.S.

I have to say this about Sharon Olds. She was the first contemporary influence upon me. While taking my first poetry workshop as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Dallas one of our required readings was Satan Says, her first book. The year was 1989. I immediately found a poetic soul mate.

Like Olds, I grew up in a religious hellfire and brimstone environment with some serious familial dysfunctions. Unlike her (as she states in the interview), I was a good student; I’ve always excelled academically. But I took out Satan Says and read it before we actually had to in the class. On the title alone I started reading and was struck by the imagery and straightforward verses. I wrote my first poem for the workshop and was rejected by half the class. Sheryl St. Germain, the instructor of the class, said she had received numerous phone calls from other students, some of whom wanted to drop out of the class. I felt powerful. I felt wicked. I felt alive. I was in control and loved it.

I never made a vow to Satan as Sharon Olds says she did. Years later, I had a Damascus Road experience and converted to Christianity, almost against my will. I remember C.S. Lewis said it happened to him that way too. I burned all my poems, including the one that I had written on that day. It’s probably the best poem I’ve ever written; it was certainly the most honest and most passionate. It just spewed forth like volcanic lava. But as I try to write, even today, very often I find myself slipping back into that mode, that natural kick-everyone-I-see-in-the-nuts kind of writing and it feels good. I don’t know why that style appeals to me. I think it’s the brimstone looking for the fire. And it’s the same kind of poetry I find when I read Sharon Olds. Somewhere, Baudelaire is smiling his face off.

Here’s a gem of a thought from Exoskeleton on the poetics of overdeterminacy:

I think the concept of “indeterminacy” has been very bad for poetry; in many ways a kind of recuperation of avant-garde energies as updated versions of Empson’s new critical “ambiguity”.

Seems like the concept of “indeterminacy” plays into Max’s caricature of the avant-garde as writing that willfully merely “breaks the rules” without offering anything of its own. If this was true we wouldn’t still be all be obsessed with ideas and techniques from the 1910s and 20s.

If I understand indeterminacy correctly, this is the act of making a text – be it a line, a sentence, a word, or even a space – purposefully contrary to anything within its vicinity for no reason at all. The effect is un-understanding. I’m trying to choose my words carefully. We can’t say misunderstanding because a misunderstanding is based on an intent to communicate. And we can’t call it non-understanding because the prefix “non” affirms a negation. A non-understanding would be a lack of understanding, which presupposes an attempt to communicate. But “un” is a prefix that refers to a contrary notion. An un-understanding would be a lack of understanding based on an attempt not to communicate. That’s a fine distinction.

Indeterminacy then is the act of communicating by not communicating. It is un-communicative in the sense that the poet is purposely attempting to not communicate something just because. In other words, they’re just speaking gibberish.

In a certain sense, this gibberish is bad. There is no communication and of course no communication means no understanding. Most people have no interest in an art form that purposely attempts to obscure communication. What’s the point?

But upon more careful examination, one can see that there is sometimes a point. I have read – and have heard read – some poems that musically and rhythmically are very attractive. They may not say anything meaningful or important, or attempt to communicate at all, but they do produce an effect. And that has value if, and this is a big if, it is done with a meaningful purpose. By “purpose” I do not mean an afterthought. We do not speak gibberish and then when asked, “Why did you do it that way,” we fabricate a reason as a way of explaining ourselves. That would be dishonest and, well, capricious. But a purpose is an intentional obscuration that has a point. And I can see some room for that, but I’m not sure that I would call that indeterminacy.

An example of purposeful gibberish would be Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” The poem, of course, is a “nonsense” poem. That is, it makes no sense, and rightly so. But there is a purpose to it. It’s simply to entertain, but even then on a deeper level, there is some serious wordplay, which is itself a form of entertainment for the literate. And within the larger context of the novel in which it first appeared there is an even greater point, though it would take far too much time than I have now and would supersede the scope of this blog post.

Poets should be encouraged to experiment. Even to experiment wildly. But to experiment only to produce work that has no meaning and serves no purpose is to engage in a playful nuisance. It is much like a 10-year-old who takes up smoking because it annoys all the adults in his world or a teenager who drives his automobile off a cliff just to see what happens. It’s self-destructive. And poets who engage in this kind of behavior have no excuse when everyone writes them off as a quack. Such is the train wreck that much of the avant-garde has led us to.

My first blog post was published on September 10, 2007. Since then I’ve only missed a few days, but I’ve made up for those losses by posting multiple posts on other days. My second post, made on September 12, 2007 is still, to this day, the fourth most popular blog post I’ve written and still gets a respectable amount of traffic from time to time.

By way of trivia, my three most popular blog posts are:

• Poetics: The 7 Essential Elements Of Poetry
• How To Market Your Poetry Online
• Ushering In Black History Month With Poetry By Langston Hughes

The common element in all of these blog posts is that they in some way discuss poetics in the rawest sense. That’s good. It happens to be a passion of mine and something I enjoy writing about. Judging by the popularity of these posts, and some comments I’ve received over the months, that seems to be what my readers are interested in. Therefore, the new tag line fits.

The two most commented on posts during the past nine months have been:

• How Pretentious Can Poetry Be?
• Are You A Member Of The School Of Quietude?

Again, both address issues and problems of poetics in some way. Special thanks to Ron Silliman who has been an inspiration and his influence in the blogosphere has been a big help. His periodic links to this blog result in traffic spikes that increase my overall visitor count and lead to great discussions as is evidenced by the post on the school of quietude. Ron’s link to that post on June 23, 2008 resulted in the second highest traffic day since I started this blog.

I’d Like To Thank The Academy
I’d also like to thank my regular readers and commentators for keeping things active. You all have kept me going and inspire me to keep going. As of this writing my monthly visitor count hovers around 3,000, where it has been for a few months now.

I love comments. I like to read the comments posted by my readers and am privileged in being the first to read them. To facilitate more comments and to reward those brave souls who make their way to the World Class Poetry Blog, I’ve made two changes that I believe will foster more community here at the WCP blog. Those two additions are:

• The installation of the CommentLuv plugin
• The implementation of do-follow links

These are important developments. The CommentLuv plugin adds a link to commentators’ last blog post. If you write a blog and you post here on my blog then a link to your last blog post will appear directly after your comments. That’s a huge benefit to you and I hope you get additional traffic to your blog as a result of it.

The do-follow attribute on the links is good for search ranking reasons. WordPress automatically makes all links no-follow, which tells search engine robots not to crawl those links and give credit to webmasters for those inbound links. Readers who are aware of SEO tactics will know that inbound links count as points with the search engines. I’ve decided to reward my commentators with those points. For a deeper treatment of that subject you can read my comment policy, which I encourage everyone to read anyway.

There may be more changes forthcoming, but I hope you’ll take the time to read through some of my archives and leave a comment or two. Make some friends and join the discussion.

All I can say is, it can’t be bad. I personally think that writing poetry will strengthen one’s writing in anything else you do. Whether you write fiction, creative nonfiction, prose nonfiction, business writing, or recipes, poetry has a tendency to hone your skills. Among the benefits that other genre writers can gain from writing poetry are:

• An ear for the music of language
• An eye for linguistic detail
• More sensitivity to word choices
• Brevity
• Patience

To be sure, there are major differences between writing poetry and prose. But poetry can make your prose better. Writing prose, however, rarely improves your poetry – so be careful!

Even if you don’t write poetry with a serious mind to publish, you can use poetry as writing exercises to get the juices flowing, help you focus your thoughts before you begin writing, and increase your sensitivity to the nuance of language.

Some of the best prose writers that I’ve read honed their writing skills writing poetry. Poetry teaches you how to say a lot in just a few words. And if you can master the art of poetry, I’m convinced that you can master the art of any writing. Poetry truly is the king of literary arts.

What happens less often is a public uproar over the shaky ethics of the business community. A man can be guilty of a questionable business deal and continue in his position because his actions weren’t technically illegal. But if a poet or a novelist publishes a work of imagination where a character uses profanity then his entire character is maligned by a Puritan mob. Or if an airline stewardess exposes a thigh then, OMG, she must be a loose woman!

When will people begin to see the arts as a profession – one that reflects life and, as a reflection, must be truthful about that which it reflects? I have this recurring fear that I will some day be in a position again to have to look for a job (I am currently self employed) and I will be unable to find anyone to hire me because I used the F word in a poem or in a blog post. Never mind that my talents can increase the profitability of any company I choose to work for. Never mind that my character and work ethic are among the highest of my generation. Those qualities pale in comparison to how well one can fake morality. It pisses me off.

When I was in Iraq, a company first sergeant sent an e-mail to my battalion commander accusing my wife of spreading rumors and making waves on a family readiness forum. Of course, military commanders have no jurisdiction over family support websites, but that didn’t matter. My battalion commander called me into his office and asked me about what my wife was doing. I confessed that I had no idea because I hadn’t heard about it, but I’d check into it. And I did. The things my wife had been accused of were actually being done by someone else. I promptly sent an e-mail to my commander and essentially told him he was full of shit because he didn’t have his facts straight and that he should have researched the matter before ever talking to me about the situation instead of just chasing rumors. He accused me of being unprofessional.

That’s the mentality of the upright and moral in our country. They get something wrong and you’re unprofessional if you bring it to their attention. That’s also, unfortunately, the attitude of many people in the religious community when it comes to the arts. They will go see a movie with bloodshed, violence, sex scenes, crime, profanity, and gratuitous sacrilege, but let an artist in their own community show a reflection of their own dirty deeds and he’s an infidel. I am dreading the day that I will have to talk to members of my church about the subject matter of some of my poems. Such is my cross to bear.

A love poem by Frank O’Hara.

Rilke’s “The Swan”.

Doctrine of Signatures.

The National Book Critics Circle recommends ….

A “Bard Double-Dactyled (in Sioux City) and Other Odd Pieces” (including one on Humpty Dumpty).

Lebanese art and poetry that unites.

A poem for Heath Ledger.

Recombinant Poetics.

The Library of Congress Blog is nominated.

Why poets should blog.

Can you write 30 poems in 30 days?

The wisest words ever written:

So the message of this post (I really should try to have a message, shouldn’t I?) is that you shouldn’t get caught up in wondering what’s going to happen to your poetry after you write it; you should just write it.