I had prepared myself to write one of my philosophical posts on a topic related to writing today, but as I sat down to write, I’d forgotten the topic I was to write on. It was important earlier in the day when I thought of it, but as is the case sometimes, I got so busy with events that I didn’t have the time to stop and write down the idea. And I didn’t have a pen and notepad with me either. Dawg!

But while I did manage to let my mind slip, I also managed to get a little bit of writing done elsewhere. I kicked off the morning with this op-ed post at a new gig I thought I’d try. This afternoon I updated a few pages on the World Class Poetry site, and I also managed to add a new feature to the WCP Toolbar, namely, the addition of the PennSound PoemTalk, a daily podcast with Al Filreis. So I have had a fairly productive day.

Ordinarily, I’d have the grand kids today, but that didn’t happen so I took advantage of the solitude and got some work done. I also wrote a book review that will be published in the next couple of days. I love days like that.

My hope is that I’ll sleep well and remember tomorrow what it was I wanted to write about and be in a position to write it down or start the post. I don’t like being without my tools for very long.

Introduction to sci-fi poetry.

The Wergle Flomp winner.

PoemTalk (John Ashbery)

Should you enroll in an MFA program?

Google Books Saved My Soul
I love Google. Most people are entirely unaware of Google’s super powers, among them the ability to locate a book anywhere in the world and help you get it sent to you at your local library. Here’s how I did it (and how you can do it too). NOTE: You have to be a member of your local library. It’s free.

1. Go to Google Books.
2. Search for the book you want by title or keyword. You can do this in one of two ways. You can type the title or keyword into the search box and click the search button or you can click a genre link in the left sidebar and search that way. Example: I clicked on the Poetry link and typed in “Komunyakaa”. Google showed me two links asking me if I wanted books by or about Komunyakaa. I clicked “by”. A list of book covers appeared. I clicked on the “Cien Cai Dau” cover.
3. This is where it gets incredible. Google Books has a sampling of the contents of the book that I can read through, but it doesn’t give me access to the entire book. There are links in the right sidebar that allow me to learn more about the book, search the table of contents, write a review, or add it to my personal library. I’ll add the book to my library. I can also search the book, buy the book from one of the bookstore links just below the search box on the right, or find it in a library.
4. Click the “Find this book in a library” link.
5. You will now be transported to another website: www.worldcat.org. You should be looking at what appears to be a digital version of a card catalog. That’s precisely what it is. You should see the name of the book, the author’s name, publisher’s information, ISBN, and some other information. Below that, you’ll see a search box asking for your location. Type in your city, state, or country, and click “Go”. You’ll get a list of libraries that carry the book.
6. Being that I’m in Adams County, Pa., the book I’m looking for is located in Carlisle, one county over, so it’s fairly close. Click the link to the library that you are interested in getting the book from. You’ll be transported to another page within WorldCat to show whether or not your book is available. If it isn’t available, hit the Back button on your browser and click another library. Repeat that step until you find the book available.
7. Good, my book is available at Dickinson College. I’ve ordered books from Penn State this way. It works like a charm. Now, this is where the ordering process will vary depending on your local library system. In Adams County, Pa., we have a county-wide system. In DFW, Texas the library system is set up as a city-wide system. If I’m ordering a book from within Adams or York County then I have a localized way of performing an interlibrary loan, but if I go outside of these two counties then I have to use the statewide system. It looks like that’s what I’ll have to do. You need to find out what the interlibrary loan policy is at your local library and what the process is for ordering books that way. Some libraries may let you do it yourself from their website. Others may require you to make a phone call or to visit the library in person. Either way, you need a library card. Once you find out what your library’s process is for making an interlibrary loan you’ll have to provide them with the information to get the book you want. Here’s what you should have at hand:
   • The name of the book
   • The author’s name
   • Publisher
   • Card catalog number
   • ISBN
   • Where you found the book, as in which specific library

   The more information you have about the book you want to order, the easier it will be on the librarian, or the electronic system, to help you find it.

8. And that’s about it. Now you wait.

It will probably take 2-6 weeks for you to get your book, depending on how far it has to travel to get back to you. It will be clearly marked as an interlibrary loan and you’ll have to keep the paper marker that comes with the book and the book together. That way, when you return the book to your local library they will be able to get it back to its home library much easier.

See, isn’t Google Books wonderful?

P.S. OK, you got me. You can just search WorldCat directly and bypass Google Books, but I figured I’d take you the scenic route.

Here’s a contest for East Texas poets.

Here’s how to promote your poetry.

Verse changes its format.

Darwish draws a crowd.

Journals that read in the summer.

New online lit mag: Cella’s Round Trip.

William Stafford on revision.

A win-win for poets and editors?

In case you missed it.

Enter the Haiku of the Future Contest.

William gets a little dirty.

First, I like the name of this journal. It says something. This is a brand that can’t be matched. The Mad Hatter, of course, is an allusion to the character in Alice In Wonderland by that name.

What I like about this online journal is that they fuse different media into one package. I usually surf the Net with my laptop’s sound on mute because I don’t like landing on a website and having someone else’s favorite music blaring at me. Even if I like the kind of music that is playing, I just want to hear it unless I click a button that says “play.” Mad Hatters’ Review is the first website I’ve ever visited that has made autoplay easy on the ears. You’ll definitely want to un-mute your speakers when you land on this journal’s website.

Issue #9 is currently live, but you can also look through the archives of the previous eight issues. It is an online journal after all. Being an online journal, there is no subscription fee; it’s all free. That’s nice because, while I believe that artists and creators should receive something for their work I also know that with all the journals out there no one can subscribe to them all without breaking the pocketbook. Economics aside, however, the journal is a fresh gust of multimedia wind.

No. 9 is broken up into the following sections:

• Poetry
• Fiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• Whatnots
• Wit & Whimsy
• Audio Features
• Audio Text Collages
• Featured Film
• Book Reviews
• Foreign Feature
• Columns
• Comics, ‘Toons, & Parodies
• Contests
• Galleries

That’s a lot of offerings, and let me say that it is not a let down in the least. While I didn’t find every selection something that I could sink my literary teeth into, I did at least find it to be literary. The journal’s tagline, “Edgy and Enlightened Literature, Art and Music in the Age of Dementia,” was right on.

If you click on any of the poetry selections in No. 9 you’ll be immediately transported to a visual landing page – that’s precisely what I’d call it. It’s a landing page for that particular poet’s work and you’ll see a visual image that is often created by someone other than the poet. Each poet’s landing page has links to several poems. Click on a poem’s link and you’ll be taken to the page where that poem is printed and an audio file will automatically play with some background music so that you can read the poem to a backdrop of music. Don’t want the music? Just click the pause or stop button and it goes away.

The same is true of the fiction and creative nonfiction categories, a visual landing page followed by your selections of prose accompanied by visual art and music. The fiction is all flash fiction, no long stories to read, page after page. They’re all fit for consumption in a single reading. Even the creative nonfiction. But it’s all accompanied by visual art and music, each medium created by a separate artist.

I’m not sure what a “whatnot” is, but I’m pretty sure you want to experience it. This is prose of some sort, though some of them border on illuminations, after the order of Verlaine or Rimbaud. Still, visual art and music to go with your reading and beverage of choice (bring your own).

The Wit & Whimsy section is humor, literary humor. Not Monty Python. But more like a carnival (the music) and Reader’s Digest with some high brow social verities. The Audio Features are just what they sound like – no text, just audio. You land on the page and an autoplay audio recording begins. Pure enjoyment.

The Audio Text Collage and Featured Film are the only two features that I found which required some action before you got to enjoy what was being offered (other than the galleries, which are presented as slide shows). I presume this is because of the nature of the media used for those productions. Done in QuickTime, the user has to press play before you can see, or hear them. I found them both to be quite interesting. The featured film, though it is prose, is what I think of when I think of a video poem, as opposed to a poetry video, which would merely be someone reading a poem on video. A video poem would be a poem voiced over interpretive moving images, which the featured film is, except that it is an excerpt from a prose work. Nicely done, though.

The Audio Text Collage is an audio recording with a visual. Another prose production, the audio recording is set to a visual of an old television, reminds me of the old RCA black & whites in the 70s, with the VHF and UHF turn dials. If you are 25 years old or younger you might not remember these. The screen is full of snow and the production, again, is a nice production titled “Jesus Epidemic.”

In all, Mad Hatters’ Review No. 9 is an excellent composition. The creators use the Millennial Poetics 10th column to great effect.

The publisher of Mad Hatters’ Review is Carol Novack. She was interviewed by Belinda Subraman on the latter’s Gypsy Art Show, a poetry and indie music podcast that I enjoy listening to. You can hear Belinda interview Carol by downloading the World Class Poetry Toolbar, and you can also access Mad Hatters’ Review from the toolbar as well as other online poetry journals and magazines. Look out, the future of poetics is about to get better. We’re on the edge of a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, a review of Sam Hamill’s Measured By Stone.

Speaking of which, what do Rattle reviews, Belinda Subraman, WGLT Poetry Radio, American Blues Network, Ron Silliman, Chekhov’s Mistress, Virginia Quarterly Review Blog, Dark Matter, Poetry Hound, The Kenyon Review Online, The Truth About Lies, and Slate Magazine have in common?

The answer: They can all be accessed from the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are 26 blogs, 20 radio stations, and 6 podcasts (5 of them are poetry podcasts) that can be accessed through the toolbar, which is free to all. And we are adding new features all the time.

If you have a blog, an online journal, or a poetry or literary podcast that you’d like to have included in the WCP toolbar then send me a message through my contact form or download the toolbar and send a message through the message feature.

There’s a reason I want to call them columns. In architecture, a column has a specific purpose; really, it is a dual purpose. On the one hand, they are decorative. On the other hand, they offer support to a building’s roof. But the distance between the foundation and the roof can depend on the length of the column, the style of architecture, and various other factors. In certain historic cultures, a column could also bear a certain mythological significance. It could serve as an archetype as much as anything else. I think when you are building a magnificent structure for which there is no duplicate you must consider its structural support, its design, and its cultural (or mythological) significance. Such is the case with Millennial Poetics.

To review, the previous 9 pillars, or columns, of this school of poetics are:

1. Craft is of utmost importance
2. There is no room for prejudice
3. Form is just another element of craft
4. Creativity and craft go hand in hand
5. No topic is taboo
6. There is no such thing as language that is too archaic
7. All poems are individuals
8. There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
9. All convention should be shunned

I won’t elaborate on them here. You can read about each column, previously referred to as principles, by revisiting my blog series on that subject here. What I’d like to do now is discuss the 10th column, which is, namely: Technology may be used to enhance the poetry experience.

Technology May Be Used To Enhance
The Poetry Experience
With A Brief History Of The Internet
New technologies always advance old art forms. Gutenberg’s press took the art of writing in all media to a new level of mass communication. The advent of the computer allowed artists and writers, creators of all sorts, a new kind of ability. The personal computer made accessible to the average man and woman what before was available to only those who could afford a computer. The PC was affordable to all.

The Internet is really not that new. It’s been around for a half century, but was very primitive in its natural, or original, state, and was only available to researchers and military personnel. In fact, the ARPANET was created specifically to allow researchers the ability to communicate with each other in ways that before were unheard of. For nearly 40 years, the ARPA community grew into a vast network of researchers, government agencies, and military personnel, who were able to share information across long distances without having to use unsecure phone lines or pay large amounts of money on communication systems.

People have been able to communicate by e-mail by as early as 1971. FTP, File Transfer Protocol, has been available since 1973. In the 1970s, the ARPANET flourished and communications between computers across long distances became even more prevalent. In order to participate in the network, a station had to have a node, a special way to connect to the Net. Otherwise, access was not possible. In 1983, the U.S. military took part of that ARPANET and created the MILNET.

Also during this time, several independent networks developed that allowed their users to communicate with each, but they were more limited than the ARPANET or MILNET. Someone came up with the brilliant idea to connect these networks and that led to the development of The Internet in the 1980s. When commercial interests began to find applications for this new mode of information delivery, widespread use picked up speed and by the mid-1990s, almost everyone in the U.S. had heard of the the Internet and many of them were connected at least by e-mail.

What’s Poetry Got To Do With It?
So what does any of this have to do with poetry? Well, we’re talking about new media, correct? Specifically, this discussion is of the Internet and Internet-delivery systems. There is technology available to the average man and woman today that was not available even 10 years ago. I remember when Yahoo! was a simple directory. In 1995, you could go online and search Yahoo! for poetry websites. There were a ton of them.

It was around that time when serious-minded businessmen started figuring out ways to market themselves online. By the time Google got its start in the late 1990s, there were people making serious money online. And they had no idea about search engine optimization back then.

Since that time, new technologies like Flash, web-delivered video, podcasts, and e-books have emerged. These are all great delivery systems for poetry and all have been used to a degree of success by online poets. We have yet to tap into their full potential. I believe the future looks bright for poetry online and new technologies that have not yet been imagined can take poetry into unheard of directions. Already, online poets are experimenting with hypertext poems, Flash video poetry, and poetry radio through podcasts. Some of these are very creative endeavors.

Poets in the 21st century have available to them resources that the majority of humanity prior to 1950 would never have imagined. If Gutenberg could see what we are tinkering with today he’d go ape over it. Many great thinkers of the past could have extended their influence way beyond what they were capable of if they’d had access to these same tools. Poets today are blessed. I see further specialization and nichefication among poets occurring as a result of technology. That’s not a bad thing. It means that poetry is on the rise and new media means new modes of delivery. It also means new ways to be creative. Technology and poetry go hand in hand; the question is, How will we make the best use of them?

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Every video features a poet reading his or her own poems, and you can catch it weekly. There is even an RSS feed, which means you can subscribe so that you don’t miss any videos. And there is quite a list of poets already archived in video at Poetryvlog.com.

Of course, I’ll make it easy for you. Stay up to date with poetry videos by downloading the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Now you have two reasons to get the toolbar – and, remember, it’s free.

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