I’m sure “A” has some literary value, but in large part it is a mad rambling. Zukofsky has the ability to make me think, in one moment, that he is a genius, and in the next, a self-consumed cogitator. These may be qualities that endear me to him.

Chapter 12 drones on for 135 pages. Zukofsky’s poetics is difficult to comprehend, though on a fundamental level it is quite simple. He is able to take a visual and incorporate it into the text, adding an element to the art of poetry that so few other poets ever aspire to let alone succeed at. Then he’ll go on and on page after page in a prosaic style over the most mundane details. Parts of it read like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for eggheads. Other parts are like reading Gertrude Stein through a kaleidoscope. It would be fair to say that “A” can be described as a multi-textual composition – never stagnant, always moving, but not always engaging.

In my mind, Objectivist poetics, in which Zukofsky was a key and central player, is evidence of the downside of Ezra Pound’s influence. It could be the beginning of the disintegration of poetry as poetry. Though, truthfully, I think that disintegration began with the Imagists.

But the road forks and Pound’s positive influence can be traced through other channels (T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore).

When Zukofsky is good I find him to be real good, but when he slips off into intellectual perdition, which is often, he just blathers like a bad Language poet. No small wonder, the latter consider him a hero.

Nevertheless, I do find Zukofsky to have some admirable qualities. No. 1, his attention to the small words is commendable. So few poets today really understand the value of the small words (a, the, etc.). Just take them out of your text and see if you notice.

Another thing I admire about Zukofsky is his emphasis on form. While his prosaic style has a tendency to grate on my nerves, I am still always conscious that he is writing in form. His poetic structure is important and can’t go unnoticed. Varied, but important.

I think it is these two qualities that have given Zukofsky the moniker of “the poet’s poet’s poet”. He may be a bore on the page, but poets would do good to study him for an enhancement of their own sensibilities to language and form, the nuts and bolts of all poetic expression.

I suspect that many readers do not take the time to understand a particular poet’s poetic, or weltanschauung, before delving into a reading experience. But I think in many cases, they should.

I recently had a copy of Louis Zukofsky’s “A” sent to my local library from a university library within my state. This will be my first reading of the poem. Understanding a few things about Zukofsky in general and his worldview in particular helps me to better understand the purposes for which he wrote and what he was trying to accomplish. I suspect this could be true for many other poets as well.

Zukofsky begins his poem thus:

    Round of fiddles playing Bach.
        Come, ye daughters, share my anguish -
    Bare arms, black dresses,
        See Him! Whom?
    Bediamond the passion of our Lord,
        See Him! How?
His legs blue, tendons bleeding,
        O Lamb of God most holy!
Black full dress of the audience.

Note: The bold lines appear italicized in the original; all other lines appear without
typographical enhancements.

I find this to be a brilliant sequence and Bach plays a very significant part in the poem throughout. But what I’d really like to focus on is Zukovsky’s devout Marxism.

There are passages in the first 7 parts of “A” that deal with politics – a strong theme throughout – and which would be completely misunderstood without some understanding of Zukofsky’s political background.

Ex. 1:

And on one side street near an elevated,
Lamenting,
Foreheads wrinkled with injunctions:
"The Pennsylvania miners were again on the lockout,
We must send relief to the wives and children -
What's your next editorial about, Carat,
We need propaganda, the thing's
                              becoming a mass movement."

From Part I. Zukofsky had attended a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall and upon his leaving, or after the performance as he stood near the exit, he lit a “Camel” and observed a tramp – a lowly person – walk by. From there he hears tidbits of conversation including a remark on “Poor Thomas Hardy” who admired “our recessional architecture”, patrons of poetry and business devotees of arts and letters discussing the “lyric weather” and the above quote about the Pennsylvania miners.

What’s the deal?

Zukofsky, who grew up in a poor Jewish family, the only American-born child of his family, would have been very familiar with the laissez faire economy of pre-World War II. He was also a committed Marxist in 1928 when the first part of “A” was written. The Pennsylvania miners is referencing the Rossiter coal miners strike under progress concurrent with Zukofsky’s writing of this section of his poem. Carat is a reference to the pen name or a nickname of a writer of the period who was decidedly pro-Soviet.

In many ways, the Great Divide of American politics today was born here in Zukofsky’s time. Henry Ford and a few other well known capitalists of the day were supporters of Hitler and the Third Reich. Many artists and writers, Zukofsky and Charlie Chaplin among them, of the period were strong supporters of Communism. Interestingly, Zukofsky’s literary hero Ezra Pound was a Nazi supporter.

I find these kinds of passages helpful because they illumine the worldview of the poet a great deal. Is the poet sympathetic to the Pennsylvania miners? He seems to be, but why? Nothing in the text at this point tells us why the miners or Thomas Hardy are so important. They’re simply glimpses into a particular time in the narrator’s life. But they add an element of character to “A” that would not be there if Zukofsky simply stuck to impressions of Bach’s music.

Ex. 2:

"Many people are too busy to be unemployed," says
                                              Henry.

A reference to Henry Ford.

(Especially those who have their own factories
                                              to take care of).
"If communism ever gets into a country
And raises Ned with it,
It's because that country needs it."

And he continues to quote Ford with a short editorial note interjected:

If goods don't sell,
It's because they're no good
Or are too high priced."
(Disposed of: the short change of labor.)
As for labor,
"There are more people
Who won't try to do anything."
Says Henry,
"Than there are who don't know what to do,
I am in the business of making automobiles
Because I believe I can do more good that way
Than any other ...."

The interjected parenthetical “disposed of the short change of labor” is a direct attack on Henry Ford’s brand of capitalism.

Ex. 3:

The star, Venus, bathed
In the sunsets
                       of elegant, imperial islands -
Mr. - 'we own your, this government
benefits by our protection...' -
And in Haiti
Mars
Bloody
Tinkered with the other
Stars.

I don’t know who said “this government benefits by our protection” but it could have been any Republican of Zukofsky’s day as of our own. A typical jingoist sentiment. And the reference to Haiti is a reference to the Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Mars, of course, is the Roman god of war.

“A” is full of literary and historical allusion. Sometimes Zukofsky breaks from one allusion to run right into another, jamming them together in quick-running sequences that move past like a flash of light.

I don’t know much about Bach’s political views, but I wonder how much of Zukofsky’s “A” is directed at it. Many of the allusions I’ve come across so far bear some significance to the life and music of Bach. Even when he quotes Einstein he relates it to Bach as in:

Asked Albert who introduced relativity -
"And what is the formula for success?"
"X=work, y=play, Z=keep your mouth
                                    shut."
"What about Johann Sebastian? The same
                                    formula."

The story goes that Einstein was asked how best to enjoy Bach and he said something similar to the quote about work, play and “keep your mouth shut.”

These are the kind of details that might make “A” seem too obscure to bother with for many, but if you can somehow pull them out of a cloud and make them earthbound then Zukofsky makes more sense.

Reading Zukofsky, Ron Silliman (and several of the other Language poets) makes more sense. I still get irritated reading the rehearsed disjunction, but I can understand better why they do what they do. The Language poets in a sense put into practice the views of Zukofsky and Communism on the page with collaborative efforts, which is itself a political statement. Understanding this makes the reading much more enjoyable than just trying to figure it out by reading the plain text.

When you read poetry, do you look for background notes or commentary to help you read difficult passages or do you just go it alone?

Some notes for this blog post have been enlightened by Z-site. Hat tip to Jeff Twitchell-Waas.

I recently took the opportunity to comment on the poem “Ode On A Favourite Cat (Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes)” by Thomas Gray at Poemhunter. Don’t be put off by the title– I said it there and I’ll say it again– this is one of the jewels of English poetry. It is a poem meant to be enjoyed, not analyzed.

From its mock heroic opening lines:

Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow…

to the witty:

Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Salima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

At once, we know we are in the presence of a master of irony. The tone is what’s important here– the poet has placed himself at a proper distance from his work. There will be little of misguided sentiment in this poem.

Rigorously constructed, a tribute to the neo-classicism of its age, the work bespeaks what can be done in a limited formal style. Would that the New Formalists of the 20th century (pax, Richard Wilbur) could have learned something from this poem!

Unfortunately, these verses are not well known and seldom read by students and pundits. In fact, they are not included in most anthologies – almost never mentioned even in the classroom. And all this neglect is probably the fault of William Wordsworth and Samuel Johnson, both of whom sullied Gray’s reputation.

But then, we must remember that Dr. Johnson was a man who could not tolerate music of any kind: “– A fart from the guts of some great instrument!– “, indicating something lacking in his aesthetic moral fiber.

In public – that is, in his writings – Johnson could say of Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard”, giving faint praise, “The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

But in literary company, the good doctor sneered, dismissing the poem, saying to Boswell that Gray was “a dull fellow – dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.”

Now, I have the greatest respect for Johnson, but posterity will have its revenge.

He was damning a poem which was at once a hit and is today one of the most beloved and frequently quoted poems in the English language. Nearly three-quarters of its 128 lines appear in the Oxford Book of Quotations.

And when was the last time you read any of Johnson’s poetry?

As for Wordsworth, when we speak of dullness in poetry, I must admit – I immediately think of the old Fraud of the Lake Country. Yes, yes, I know – generations have venerated him, or pretended to anyway. A poet I admire highly, Thomas Hardy, supposedly found inspiration in his verses. I doubt that. Hardy is much too clever to have gotten anything from a prig like William.

In my own humble opinion, if ever there was anybody in the English language who was always dull, it was Wordsworth.

About Gray, he wrote, “Gray failed as a poet, not because he took too much pains, and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with.”

Fiery quality– from Wordsworth? Am I the only one who finds that incredible?

I herewith challenge anyone – policeman, pundit, pedant, or serial killer, anyone – to find two lines in all of Wordsworth which have the wit and clarity of two lines from the The Ode.

As an aside, this was a poet who dismissed his friend Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” thusly: “–the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on…. I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.”

Wordsworth included the poem in Lyrical Ballads, despite Coleridge’s objections, and criticized:

“The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects… the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being… he does not act, but is continually acted upon… the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other… the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated.”
Perhaps a man that far off the mark is more to be pitied than chastised.

However, some of the fault for Johnson’s charges of dullness against Gray may lie with the man himself – a shy retiring, scholarly sort, an English academic, in the worst sense of the word. Most of the rest of his work is not to the modern taste – nothing droll, and very dry.

He was so self-critical and fearful of failure that he only published 13 poems during his lifetime – and he once wrote that he feared his collected works would be “mistaken for the works of a flea.” His contemporary, Horace Walpole (to whom the cat belonged), commented, “He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour.”

In his defense, Gray was writing during the neoclassic period and, excepting Dryden and Pope, well, there wasn’t a lot of chuckle in English poetry during those decades.

Today, specialists read this stuff, not many of the rest of us – and having commented so, I wish I could take it back. Alas, it is true. Students are exposed to this kind of verse in school and never approach it again. Then again, maybe it’s the fault of the messenger.

There must be exceptions, of course. But in all the days of my life, I never encountered a single person who found Wordsworth exciting. Or fiery. However, I have run into many people who find the Elegy rich and memorable.

Getting back to the particular poem, let us consider – these verses in The Ode are about death. Indeed, not merely death, but the death of a family pet – a subject fraught with peril for any poet.

The tale is simple – a pampered kitty sees the goldfish in the pond and fishes for them – a fatal move:

(Malignant Fate sat by and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Yet the poetry is charming and altogether wonderful. A triumph.

Think of what a maudlin mess another poet – the aforementioned Wordsworth, for instance, or Felicia Dorothea Hemens – would have made of this material!
It is not a long poem, by any standards – the lines sprightly, not weighty – springing up to meet the reader. Rather than quoting from the poem, I recommend it to you.

Enjoy!

I was so impressed with Gene’s poetry I wrote this in the introduction of the chapbook:

Gene Myers’ gift is the gift of seeing. His sharp wit and delicate sensitivity to the sound of words married to their visual appeal within the white space of the line is a testament to his poetic ability.

These poems are not edgy like my own. They are smooth. And cool. You’ll like them.

But if that isn’t enough, I’ve also added a widget to the toolbar that allows users to access their own Twitter accounts through the toolbar. If you are a Twittering poet then you can post tweets from the toolbar and read the tweets in your Twitter stream – right from the World Class Poetry Toolbar!

Some publications will not publish negative reviews. I, however, believe that negative reviews serve a worthwhile purpose. For one thing, an insightful poet can read the review and learn a thing or two – not necessarily the poet being reviewed, but any poet reading the review. If anything, a good negative review (I’m not saying my reviews are any good) can cast some light on the subject of poetics and lead readers to a deeper understanding of the issues that poets have to deal with when crafting their poems. And if that leads to better poetry being written overall then I say bring on the negative reviews in droves.

Still, I’d much rather write positive reviews. Even middle-of-the-road reviews.

Why I Offer To Write Book Reviews
I initially offered to write poetry book reviews because I wanted to share insights into poetic philosophy with my readers. I believe there isn’t enough honest discussion about poetics, particularly among independent poets who publish their own work. I thought, when I started reviewing books, that most of my reviews would end up being of independently published authors, and I was right. I was hoping they’d end up being better poets. But one doesn’t always get what one asks for.

Occasionally, however, I do find that rare gem of a poetry book that I love to tell people about. And that’s why I write reviews.

For instance, Jeff Rath’s The Waiting Room at the End of the World is one such book, though it isn’t a book of sonnets nor is it self published. Patrick Carrington’s Thirst is another book (actually, a chapbook) of non-sonnets I can recommend.

As for books of sonnets, The Poets Don’t Write Sonnets Anymore by Robin Ridington is an excellent book I don’t mind recommending, not so much for the poetry, but for the commentary that goes along with it.

I wouldn’t exactly call Ridington’s sonnets “sucky”. But they don’t make me kick my heels together either. Nevertheless, I loved reading the commentary/memoir mixed with thoughts on a myriad of topics important to Ridington that encompassed the poems. I think Ridington did well in putting together his book of sonnets and prose lead-ins. It’s a great book if not great poetry.

One Sonneteer I’d Recommend For The Poems
Truth be told, the sonnet is not exactly my favorite form. I’ve never been really good at writing them myself. That may be because I just haven’t taken the time to honestly practice the form. There are other forms I’ve done well with because of the practice. But the sonnet isn’t one of them.

Still, I love reading a good sonnet when I find one. And one person who writes sonnets that I think are just golden is a poet by the name of Barry Ballard.

Barry Ballard’s Green Tombs To Jupiter is an amazing collection of Petrarchan sonnets written in blank verse. They cover a wide range of topics, but they remind me of the metaphysical poets, only they deal with subject matter from the late 20th century, subjects that John Donne would not have imagined.

I used to read with Barry in Fort Worth, Texas when I lived down there. His delivery is as astounding as his pen and that’s another reason I’d recommend his poetry. I don’t know why his book sells for $173.91 at Amazon. That must be a typo, but it is definitely worth a read if you can get it for less.

If you’re going to write sonnets, it helps to read a few from classical and contemporary poets who write them well. Barry Ballard should be on your reading list.

Reading Gary B. Fitzgerald’s poems are like going back in time and pulling William Blake up from the annals of Romantic obscurity to join us here in the 21st century. While the poetic flavor may be in the same spiritual, mystical tone of many of Blake’s finest poems, the subject matter is much more contemporary in nature, a very nice blend.

A self avowed “Taoist nature poet”, Gary B. Fitzgerald provides a number of literary strengths, among them a versatility of perspective. He looks at life, nature, science, philosophy, and all things human from a myriad of angles while remaining true to his personal aesthetic. And the poems are a good read through and through – insightful, humorous, sensitive, and organic. All digital.

Download Gary B. Fitzgerald’s two chapbooks – Hardwood and Softwood – with the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Gary B. Fitzgerald has commented on some of the blog posts here at World Class Poetry Blog and has been a faithful reader now for about a year, I guess. Last year he published two full-length poetry books under the imprint of AuthorHouse. While these two books are self-published, the quality of the contents would not suggest it.

Gary has agreed to allow me to publish a selection of the poems from his two books, titled Hardwood and Softwood, as a chapbook. We’re talking about a total of 155 poems between the two books. Our digital chapbook will feature less than 20 poems from each book, but those poems will showcase Gary’s poetry in the best possible light, a task that proved to be quite easy considering the high quality of his verses.

Nature poetry does not get much respect in our modern technological era, much less does it when approached from an Eastern philosophical bent. But Gary B. Fitzgerald’s Taoist nature poetry is must reading for anyone interested in simplicity without simple-mindedness and humanity without vituperation.

The Three Phase Publication Schedule
The publication of these two chapbooks will come in three phases. The first phase will be the publishing of Hardwood as a standalone chapbook. The second phase will be the introduction of Softwood as a standalone chapbook. Phase III will be the combining of the two chapbooks into one dual chapbook.

Why three phases? Honestly, for practical reasons. Rather than wait on the publication of both chapbooks, I’ve decided to offer the completed chapbook while the other is in production mode, but only to WCP Toolbar users. When Softwood is finished, it too will be made available to our toolbar users. The final chapbook, with selections from both Hardwood and Softwood, will be made available as a .pdf document to anyone who wants to download it.

Hardwood will be made available in the next day or so. If interested in the 15 poems that make up Hardwood then I encourage you to download the World Class Poetry Toolbar so that you’ll have access to the chapbook when it is made available. The toolbar is free to use and also includes access to Internet radio, some of the most popular poetry blogs online, and almost 30 online poetry journals.

If you have a full-length book you’d like to promote and would like to get it in front of the 15,000+ and growing unique visitors every month that World Class Poetry properties has to offer then sign up for our chapbook update list and you’ll be notified of when you can submit work for publication as a chapbook.

Until then, I hope you enjoy Hardwood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Financial
2. Technological

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

1. Market Demand
2. Built-In Gatekeepers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember watching Barfly back in the late 1980s. It gave me a whole new dimension to Bukowski that simply reading his poems couldn’t do. In the same manner, watching a video of Bukowski reading his poems brings something new to his voice. Even hearing him talk about his life. The interviews. All of it pulls so much in that a single poem or collection can’t do on its own. I’m beginning to like him again.

One thing that strikes me about Charles Bukowksi is that he doesn’t fit in anywhere. He’s been called a Beat, but that doesn’t fit. He has some things in common with the New York poets, but he lived in L.A.

Over the years there have been a spate of imitations and none of them are ever as good as the original. That may have something to do with my feelings about him. I like originals. I hate imitations. Even good ones, though I’ve never seen or heard a good imitation of Bukowksi.

I loved reading his fiction as much as I did his poetry, maybe even more. Post Office was a good read and it gave me a new perspective on Buk the poet as well as the man. But the following video is perhaps one of the best presentations I’ve seen of Bukowski in a long while. It is diverse. I can’t speak to the quality of the footage, but the production is well done. And the inclusion of Bono reading one of his poems makes it even better.

I hope you’ll enjoy this nearly 10-minute video on Bukowski, his life, and his poems:

I don’t have any Bukowkski videos up yet, but you can catch more poetry videos at World Class Poetry.