1. The Twitter poem experiment for National Poetry Month went very well. While I wasn’t much impressed with some of the poems I wrote for Twitter distribution, it seems my audience liked them. I appreciate those of you who are now following me as a result of the experiment. You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to keep it running through May. Twice daily – at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST you can catch my Twitter poems by following me on Twitter.
2. If you haven’t seen the free chapbook, Hardwood, based on the full-length poetry book of the same name by Gary B. Fitzgerald then I encourage you to download it for free along with the Poetry Toolbar. A second chapbook titled Softwood, also by Gary B. Fitzgerald, will soon join it. Download the toolbar for free and get both chapbooks and many other literary goodies.
3. Recent purchases include American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms.

I will write more on this topic in the near future, and I know I still owe you one on vanity publishing, but I just wanted to remark that American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, appears to be the book that confirms what I’ve been saying on this blog for the last year-and-a-half. The anthology consists of poems that, according to the editors, flow from the preceding poetic traditions of traditional verse and avant-garde poetry, fusing the two into one poetic style that many times is exhibited within the same poem.

While Swensen and St. John call this type of poem a hybrid, I have taken the liberty of calling the movement itself the Millennial School without ascribing a name to the type of poem. I essentially meant the same thing that Swensen says in her introduction, which I’ll quote a piece of in a moment.

When I started this blog in September 2007 I did so with the intent of putting a voice to this direction in poetry, a philosophy I have adhered to since I started writing poetry in the late 1980s when the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics, New Formalism and Language Poetry, respectively, were pounding faces in competition for the Golden Glove. I rejected that neither should prevail and still do. It seems I am not the only one.

My Hybrid Confession
I have not spent much time over the years conversing with other poets about poetics. I am not much of a social being and prefer to keep to myself. Not quite a recluse, but just enough asocial to not be antisocial. I guess, somewhere in between. My point in saying that is that my poetic philosophy has mostly been developed by my own preferences and some observations that I’ve made in the direction of published poetry in the popular journals over the last 20 years. So I am delighted that others have seen the same developments.

Until I started writing this blog I’d never heard anyone speak of the fusion between the traditional and the avant-garde. Ron Silliman speaks of the third wave of poetics and the “post-avant”, but I sense that his meaning is much more constrained than mine. The late Reginald Shepherd, author of Lyric Postmodernisms, defended the same idea on his blog and is one of the poets in Swensen’s and St. John’s anthology.

Here is what Swensen says in her introduction to American Hybrid:

The hybrid poem has selectively inherited traits from both of the principal paths outlined above (traditional and avant-garde). It shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed “third wave poetics” and with what is increasingly known as “post-avant” work, though its range is broader, particularly at the more conservative end of its continuum…. Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villannelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions.

This is precisely what the Millennial School of Poetics, and the philosophy behind this blog, is based upon. The idea is to learn new techniques from any corner of poetics and employ them into one’s own without prejudice as to form or substance.

Swensen continues:

…hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.

I am currently muddling my way through an epic narrative poem written precisely with these tenets in mind. Titled “The Sandbox”, it is based on my own experience as a soldier-participant in the Iraq War though the setting is post-experience.

I just wanted to share an initial impression of this book after having read the first introduction. I will leave you with these thoughts and return to them later.

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.

What I didn’t know then was there was already an organized effort to write a poem a day and post it on Twitter. If you’re a Twitterer and you’re interested in following what’s going on with poetry there, here are three hashtags you can follow:

1. #twitpoem (my poetry experiment)
2. #poetrymonth
3. #poetry

There’s a lot going on at Twitter for National Poetry Month. I hope you’ll follow me.

Epics have always been thought of as tales of heroic deeds, but that is really a narrow view. Not all epics are heroic in nature. You can also have epics of time, epics of place, and other types of epics as well. But most epics are long narratives. Even if the poetry is lyrical in nature as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” there is still a narrative strain throughout the poem. It is an essential characteristic of an epic in my mind. The narrative is meant to tell a story.

An epic poem, however, need not be long. Homer’s Iliad and Oddyssey, of course, are epics. The Aeneid and The Divine Comedy are epics, but so is Kubla Khan. And as far as epics go, Kubla Khan isn’t very long.

But just because a poem is long and narrative in nature, that doesn’t make it an epic. An epic must also possess some significant cultural myth. I don’t mean myth in a “non-true” sense. A myth may very well contain some truth, but it is a story of a culture’s core beliefs. And an epic tries to tap into that in some way. The culture can be a local culture or it may very well be a global culture, but whatever is the common myth of that culture, that is the backbone of the epic story for that culture. An epic poem plays into that whereas a narrative poem may just seek to provide an anecdote or to give readers a glimpse into a slice of life or a person’s character. Or it may be an essay on the human condition.

Epics do not generally content themselves with being narrative myths. They tend to explore what is spectacular about the common myth and may be take a myth and “blow it up” so that it can be seen with great glory or scrutiny. The narrative poem only wants to be good at sharing a tale.

Many modern narrative poems are not epics. They may be very good long narratives, but they aren’t epics. And this is not to say that an epic need be in some traditional form or structure. An epic may very well be experimental in nature, or contain experimental elements. Of course, this can also be a prominent feature of a long narrative poem except that the epic contains the elements of the common myth, which the long narrative may not strive for.

Whether a poem is an epic or a long narrative non-epic poem, it must be judged within the school or movement to which its author subscribes as well as be treated as an individual poem in its own right. For this reason, a poem may be considered an epic if it follows the traditions of one school and not an epic if it falls into another movement. That is, if, say, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” were rewritten as a New Formalist poem then it wouldn’t be considered an epic at all, but as a Postmodern reflection of art it could very well be classified as an epic of self, or an epic ekphrastic poem.

To be sure, there is some crossover between the two forms. An epic by definition is a long narrative. Many long narratives are epics. But the classification of each may be disputed among poets from various schools and traditions. I am a firm believer that a strong epic is the highest achievement that a poet of any culture can create. A successful epic is a blessing to its audience.

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.

The Epic Is Not Dead (Thanks Walt Whitman!)
Epics are not dead. But over time there have been changes in form or mode of expression. We’ve talked about some of those changes. If my discussion of the literate age seemed more sketchy than the first post in this series, that’s because there is much more ground to cover for that age. I tried to stick with the highlights and the major divergences. These divergences are important if we are to make predictions.

There are two primary points that I was making with the last discussion, namely, that there have not been too many sweeping changes in the forms and structures of epic poetry over time and, secondly, most of those changes that have occurred took place in the last 100 years. But even those changes were made possible by the one shining example of American epic that came before: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I purposely left Whitman out of that last discussion because I wanted to backtrack just a little to lay the groundwork for what I’m about to unleash.

Whitman, with Leaves of Grass, borrowed from the past to propel poetry forward into the future. More than any other poet before or since, his innovations were extraordinary and sweeping. You can call him a Romantic and that would be true, but it’s just as true to say he was a Realist. His epic poem is not one long poem as most epics are; rather, it is an epic of multitudinous proportions. Parts of it could be called an epic within an epic.

Unlike many of the epics that followed, Leaves of Grass is not an epic of place and unlike many epics that preceded it, we cannot really call it a heroic epic. It deals with the traditional subject matter of epics, but it also deals with subject matter not typically associated with epics. Later epics of place such as Williams’ Patterson and Olson’s The Maximus Poems owe a debt to Whitman for, essentially, inventing the American epic form.

I would prefer to call Leaves of Grass an epic of form because, while it does cast Whitman himself as a sort of larger-than-life literary hero, and while it does give voice to a brand new American national literature, it also establishes a new mode of expression and invents a new poetic form, what has come to be called “free verse”. While Leaves can be called a national epic, a personal epic, an epic of place and time, a new twist on the heroic epic (with the self as hero) or given any other distinctions that could be true, by calling it an epic of form we can give it due honor as all of the above.

But what is an epic of form? Well, an epic of form is an epic work that relies mostly upon its form and structure for effect. In other words, the form itself is intrinsic in the telling of the story. If we study other epics before and since, there is really no other epic anywhere whose form is intrinsic to the story. Whitman’s Leave of Grass is the only one. Take Homer and change the structure but keep the story line and you still have a good story that can be told in any form. Take Milton and change the blank verse to iambic pentameter without touching the story line and you still have a fantastic tale. Take Paterson or The Maximus Poems and change the form – you still have the same story. I’m not arguing whether the story would be just as good or not, merely that the stories’ basic elements wouldn’t change. But if you take Leaves of Grass and change the form and you don’t have Leaves of Grass any more. It would be fundamentally different.

Imagine “Drum Taps” written as a sonnet, or “I Sing The Body Electric” in trochees. Much of Leaves of Grass relies upon Whitman’s sense of urgency, his wild and frantic paces and pitches. Take that away and you simply have a dead lawn.

The Epic’s Future Through The Soul Of A
19th Century Wild Man
Why is this excursion into Whitman important? Because I believe that, going forward, the epic will be much more experimental than it ever has been before. In all of the experimental verse of the 20th century, and there has been a lot of experimenting, the future of poetics has some exciting possibilities. The epic, in particular, can stretch out in ways that it never has. All we need is our modern-day Whitman, ready and willing to take poetry where it’s never gone before.

One of the chief ways in which poetry in the third millennium will advance experimentally is in form. Not just the epic, but poetry in general. Contemporary poets do not care to be painted into holes. Younger poets today would prefer to create and to do away with the lines in the sand. One day, the poet may write a sonnet and the next day she may write a free verse confessional. There is no clear commitment to any one form or structure.

Still, there will be more to inform the poetics of the 21st century than simply personal preferences. That has always been a part of the poetic experience, but there have been other influences as well. And so shall it be in the future.

The Birth Of Gutenberg’s Grandchild
The last time communication media has seen a serious revolution was in the 15th century when Gutenberg printed an edition of The Bible with moving type. Before that, poets and other communicators in written form worked by hand exclusively. Gutenberg’s press allowed, for the first time in history, for mass communication. People in the 20th century were huge beneficiaries of this technology as the proliferation of newspapers and magazines all over the world – but particularly in the West – grew by larger percentages than ever before.

Much of the growth of printing in the 20th century came as a result of widespread use of computers. Much of that growth occurred in the latter half of the century after IBM became a huge force in the industry. Many people contributed to the rise of the computer as a work tool, but another development, which occurred in 1969, led to what will become as big a revolution as Gutenberg’s printing press. The ARPAnet was born.

By the mid-1970s, home computers were beginning to hit the retail stores. Then, the 1980s came, the decade that I would come of age. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started their competition for dominance in the home computer market. By 1990, it was pretty clear that Gates had won. Then, in that same year, Tim Berners-Lee (with Al Gore’s help) created a hypertext language, which led to the start of the Internet. Yahoo went online in 1994 and by 1995 speculators were throwing money at www dot coms faster than a Las Vegas hooker makes a sales pitch (I’m assuming that’s pretty fast). Suffice it to say, the revolution had begun.

How The Internet Has Changed Poetry
While Gutenberg’s press was a powerful invention, it was still only available to a few people at a time. There has always been an economic hurdle for certain classes of people to jump over before they could acquire the same technology as the privileged. The personal computer made it possible for people on the lower end of the social strata to be creators, but even as late as the 1990s there were economic hurdles for the lower class even if the middle class had knocked down its own barriers. The Internet, however, has eliminated almost all of the barriers – even for the poor.

Poets have always been resourceful self-publishers. Alexander Pope was an 18th century self-published author. Lord Byron published himself. Edgar Allan Poe published his first work himself. Walt Whitman was a self publisher. African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar published his own work in 1893. But perhaps the most famous self-published author in history – though not often thought of as a poet, he did write some hymns – Martin Luther, as early as 1517, not long after Gutenberg stunned the world with movable type, published 95 theses and nailed them to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

But the Internet Revolution is a bit different than the Gutenberg Revolution. The first person to profit from the latter profited from religious texts and the revolution was expanded and hastened by religious innovators like the aforementioned Luther. The early adopters in using the Internet for commercial publishers have largely been pornographers and technology geeks with no particular religious bent. The Internet Revolution is largely an agnostic revolution, agnostic in the sense that a belief in God doesn’t matter. (Pardon the diversion.)

Pornography and technology aside, poetry has been very prevalent online. There has probably been more self-published poetry online in the last 10 years than in print throughout the 20th century. The chief reason for this is because of the breakdown of the economic barriers mentioned earlier. The Internet is accessible like Gutenberg’s press was not. It is accessible to more people, to a wider selection of people from different backgrounds, and it’s accessibility is growing.

Much of the poetry you read online, like a lot of the self-published books on the market today, isn’t worth reading. But that doesn’t stop poets from writing and publishing. They have the ability and the technology is available and accessible, therefore they use it.

Despite the negatives, however, there is still a lot of good poetry online. Many traditional poetry publishers, journals, and publications have their own websites and some of them are publishing material from their print editions. The Kenyon Review is just one example. There are many others.

Many other journals have online versions but no print journals – and the list is long and getting longer. New forms have been invented that can only be produced on the Internet – Flarf and Hypertext poetry are two examples. I expect this to continue and grow.

Not only is the Internet a powerful medium for publishing poetry, but it’s also a powerful medium for marketing it. Resources like Duotrope’s Digest allow poets to research markets online and find publishers to send their work out to. And it’s free (though they’d accept a donation). Many poets online are very capable of marketing themselves through digital delivery systems like e-books, podcasts, and videos.

As an aside, I am not particularly fond of the poetry by Billy Collins, but I do admire the video productions based on his poems. The animated interpretations of his poems are very appropriate for his voice and style. They are complimentary and do not take over, which is how a good poetry video should work. The poem is the original entity. It is the script. The visuals that go with it should enhance, not control. Collins’ videos are some of the best poetry videos that I’ve seen simply because they are not simply a poet standing at a lectern reading from a page. They possess interpretive images that compliment the poetry.

Billy Collins is not the only poet to produce solid poetry videos online, but he is the most prominent poet to have done so with any skill. That is very significant.

Will These Changes Affect How Epics
Are Produced?
Poets have always been innovators. From Homer to the late 20th century Language poets and New Formalists, poetry’s advancement has relied upon innovation and experimentation. You may hate the innovators, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t done their jobs. They have. And if that sparks enmity then that’s as it should be. Poetry is about catharsis and scorn is as legitimate a cathartic reaction as anything else.

Looking back at the 20th century again, the epic stories that have captured the imaginations of audiences in wide numbers have mostly been on film. The Star Wars trilogy sparked a whole new genre of epic science fiction movie-making that has led to some great movies. Prior to Star Wars, other epics captured the popular imagination on film – Spartacus, Ben Hur, The Godfather, just to name a few.

21st century citizens are highly visual. Visual poetry has not captured the popular imagination, but it is one innovation within poetics that has stuck around. In fact, in the Internet age, it has exploded. Online visual poetry is all over the place – in hypertext and in video.

Digital books have not caught on too well. Except for the Kindle, which Amazon introduced last year, e-books have not sold real well. The ones that have sold have primarily been informational in nature, not as entertainment. Videos, however, are very popular online as is evidenced by the success of YouTube and the value that Google has placed on it. While no one has yet figured out exactly how to make money from the production of online video – aside for advertising purposes – it is still a powerful medium for communication.

The success of video soaps like lonelygirl15 proves that there is a market for video entertainment. It’s just a matter of time before someone learns from these early successes and produces something truly magnificent.

Poets who write the epics of the future will have these online tools at their disposal and will be able to rely on the technology of the day without the huge barriers of the past. A little skill and some creativity coupled with the willingness and drive to learn will allow poets of the future to take visual poetics to new levels. I can envision a Shakespearean production on the scale of Hamlet or Macbeth in video form, incorporating elements of poetry, stage production, and 20th century film making – all on a shoestring budget.

Does That Mean Print Will Go Out Of Fashion?
No. Quite frankly, there will always be an element of print production. We still listen to radio, don’t we?

While print production will continue, the best innovation will occur online. There is no reason why the traditional strain of poetry carried over from the 20th century cannot learn from the avant-garde strain – the parent as well as its growing number of children – and use the Internet for production and marketing. Many traditional poets have already started using social networks like Facebook for marketing purposes. But most are still using the traditional tools for writing and creating. I can see vast potential for this to change.

Poets of the future will continue to borrow from the past. The 20th century forms and the many strains that have splintered from Pound’s Modernist mind will continue to splinter and divide, but the best of each strain will be able to reach more people in more places than ever before. The capillaries of poetic thoughts will influence each other, both online and off line. While the near future will favor the short forms, the long future will look to the past – the pre-literate past, the literate distant past, the late 20th century past of film and print production, and the near future past – and take poetry to places that the ancients could never have imagined.

Every strain of poetry has potential with online delivery systems. I can envision an epic collection of sonnets in video, or a New Formalist poem written as hypertext. I can see epics of form, epics of place, traditional heroic epics, personal-narrative epics, ekphrastic epics, hypertext epics, and epochal epics, or fill in the blank, existing in various forms online as well as cross-pollinating into print and when all is said and done we owe a huge debt of gratitude to a few of our poetic forebears for their pioneering spirit.

Thank you Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, Whitman, Pound, Williams, Ashbery, Notley, and many, many others for their ingenuity and their creative imaginations. Let’s carry it forward. The epic is not dead. She is only sleeping.

Did you miss the previous two posts in this series? Don’t fret. You can go back and read them here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Reprise

I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language – the confabulated “I” – was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.

In case you are grammatically challenged, I’d like to explain what an appositive is. It’s really a negative, but some people see it as a positive (pardon the intentional pun). I was reminded of this game when reading a chapter in The Poet’s Companion, which I’ve been reading through the last few days. I was really excited that the poets – Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio – included a chapter on grammar because most poetry books don’t touch on it and after reading this one I concluded that maybe they should have left out at least part of it as well.

Now, overall, I like The Poet’s Companion. I really do. It’s been a good book. I took issue with the first chapter, but I haven’t had much to say about it since then – until now. Most of the chapter deals with the inclusion of appositives in poetry, which the authors encourage, and verbals. Otherwise, it wasn’t really much of a discussion on grammar and my disappointment comes in when I consider that there are so many ways that they could have taken that chapter and they chose to focus on appositives.

So, now the definition. Addinizio and Laux say this about appositives:

“Apposition” simply means that one thing is put beside another; an appositive is a word or group of words which explains the original in a little more detail. If you write “My grandmother, Stella,” you have created a noun appositive for “my grandmother,” since “Stella” is also a noun. Now we have a little more information; we know her name, at least. But you may want to tell us more, to use a group of words to describe her: “My grandmother, a tiny woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel.” Now you’ve used a noun phrase appositive.

The problem with this advice is that they are actually encouraging poets to add words to their text when conventional wisdom says you should be cutting things out, like a vasectomy. Most poetry is tragically overwritten, not in a dramatic sense, but in a grammatical sense. And this is the reason why. Teachers are encouraging the use of appositives.

I hate appositives. In poetry. I love them in prose. A good appositive in expository writing can turn a dull sentence into a Pulitzer Prize winner. In poetry, it more likely will just turn a bad line into a nuclear detonation.

Laux’s and Addinizio’s advice pretty much just kicks Strunk & White in the balls. E.B. White is the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. But he is best known by writers as half of the authorship of The Elements of Style, but he really did the bulk of the editing. In chapter 13 of his 1918 edition, Strunk wrote

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

I can’t think of anywhere that this advice is more apt than in poetry. The point is not to make every sentence or line short and terse, but to make sure that every word has something meaningful to say. More often than not, appositives are just fluffy and full of information that doesn’t add anything of necessity for a reader’s understanding of a poem. Do I really need to know that your grandmother’s name is Stella? Unless that fact is a necessary component to the poem then it is unnecessary information, therefore a useless appositive, and that’s what most appositives in poetry are. Just plain useless. The poet’s mantra should be this: Cut, cut, cut.

So repeat after me: Appositives are negatives.

Got that? Good. Write it down.

Now, I’m not saying that appositives are never helpful. Sometimes they are. But I think encouraging beginning poets to use appositives is like teaching teenagers to hunt deer with claymore mines. Even if they manage to kill one they will likely do a lot more damage to the trees and if they can’t make nouns and verbs alone sing like a Gatling gun then there’s no sense in giving them things so they can hurt themselves.

What do you say? Ready to play?

Of course, innovation can mean different things. But one thing that it does mean in particular is that poetry is taken to new places, new things are done with it, and new ways or modes of expression are experienced.

The range of innovation in poetry is tremendous. To say that the post-avant poets are more innovative than the New Formalist poets is not really true. Their innovation is different, but not necessarily better. Of course, the reverse is just as true.

The following is to identify ways, or modes, of innovation among poets. It might not be exhaustive. It is simply based on observation and some personal experience. But the main thing in poetic innovation is that poets seek and find new ways to be innovative. Here are some ways poets of the past have achieved that goal:

• Language – Poetry has always been intricately involved in word play. Using language in new ways is one way that poets can achieve a level of innovation;
• Form – Naturally, poets love forms, or loathe them. Nevertheless, form is a method of innovation and involves taking traditional forms and modifying them, inventing new forms, and adapting new expressions for accepted forms, just to name a few;
• Structure – Structure is another way poets have achieved innovation, but structure is not a reference to form. It is, or can be, intricately connected with form, but they are not the same thing. For instance, in free verse forms, structure is varied among poets with some poets using long lines and no strophes to some poets writing in short lines and multiple strophes. Innovation can also be made within traditional forms as Gerard Manley Hopkins proves;
• Word Usage – Different from language, word usage innovation involves using words in new ways to invent new definitions. This includes onomatopoeia, but isn’t limited to that device;
• Visual aesthetics – Many poets have achieved innovation through visual devices. Whether concrete poetry or minimalism, poets have gone to great lengths to make poetry visual;
• Performance – Not necessarily limited to performance poetry, this aspect of innovation can take poetry to new places simply by creating time and space effects for poets to work within. To borrow a phrase from Amiri Baraka, poets are like playwrights. Performance is an aspect of creativity and a way to be innovative;
• Point of View – There is likely another way to express this, but point of view comes to mind. The Language Poets have been very innovative in attempting to rid the subjective I from the poem. There is still a lot more room here for innovation. Novelists have played around with POV long enough that there have been great innovation and success in various modes of POV within the novel form. Poets have not done as much innovation in this regard, but what little innovation there has been beyond the I involves second and third person narratives. Most of that is still done through the poet’s own voice. Poets must get to the point to where we create personas and use POV more effectively;
• Music – Poetry and music are inexplicably connected. But when I speak of innovation in music I am talking mostly about prosody + rhythm. It involves metrical units, but it doesn’t need to. The Modernists were very innovative when they decided that a poem should consist of rhythm and that a poem’s music should consist of natural rhythmic units broken up by the line. That was superbly innovative for their time. It isn’t so much so today. Nevertheless, poets can achieve a level of innovation in musical rhythm and prosody such that new poetic expressions occur. I believe there is still tremendous strides to be made in the area of prosody, which has all but fallen out of use.
• Technology – Naturally, technology is a way for poets to be innovative. Today we see poets expressing themselves through video and audio recordings shared online, but that itself is a limitation. There is a lot of potential for innovation with technology, probably more so now than at any other time in history. Hypertext poetry and Google Sculpting are two new innovative ideas within poetry that are growing in popularity and achieving a level of respect online.

When it comes to innovation there are two types of poetic innovation within each of these modes. There is the prime innovator, or originator of the innovation – the person who spawned the idea and began playing with it. Then there are the secondary innovators or re-innovators. Those are the people who come behind the prime innovator and use the same ideas, but use them with their own voices and maybe even expand upon them. Some groups, like the Language Poets, may not have a prime innovator and may consider all its practitioners to be prime innovators or co-innovators. But there will still usually be a second-wave of innovation, a younger group of poets who take the ideas of the group and expand upon them or begin to use them to great effect.

Do you have any innovative ideas for your own poetry? What are you doing that no one else has ever done?

A poem on moving into a new house.

Poetry journals.

The essence of conceptual poetry.

Nonconceptualism.

Poetry and religion.

T.S. Eliot.

The hyperabundance of poetry.

Journals that accept e-mail and simultaneous submissions.