But this isn’t all about me.

Rather, it’s all about you. Artsy living and stuff.

Someone I admire who has gone before and blazed a trail of artsy living online is a lady name Marney Makridakis. Marney is teaching a course this Thursday – a free course – titled The Complete Idealist’s Guide to Growing a Creative Business: 37 Ways to Really Make an Artsy Living. The class is this Thursday, February 26, and you can sign up for free. Just click the link below:

If you don’t already have plans this Thursday, check it out. The time is on the other side of the link. Don’t forget to click it. And did I say the class is free?

I downloaded this .pdf document from Penguin Group USA that tells poets how to do Internet marketing. Haven’t read it yet. I’ve skimmed it a little and from what I’ve seen there appears to be a basic understanding of the subject, but incomplete. It’s free and I do recommend it. I’ll try to read through it more in depthly and provide some insight into the accuracy of its contents.

Robert Lee Brewer asked whether there is a market for a book on critique groups. He’s asking for feedback. I gave mine along with several others. I encourage you to drop by his blog and leave your comments, or you can leave them here on the World Class Poetry Blog and I’ll pass them along.

A book fair is coming to Decatur, Georgia.

How famous poets came to be discovered.

The Frank O’Hara Renaissance.

Bekki is looking for poets to interview.

Enjoy the Poetry Peepshow.

What to do about content thieves. I agree. I’ve done this too. And Go Daddy – yes, Go Daddy sucks.

Introducing the winner of the “Haiku in Bloom” Poetry Contest.

The first Jack Kerouac Poetry Contest.

What poetry is and isn’t.

Coming Soon: What 21st century epic poetry will look like.

How the Pulitzers are selected.

A new addition at The New York Quarterly.

Hating poetry is a virtue.

Why some poetry matters (and some doesn’t).

Emotionally, I’m ready to move on to something else. But I don’t like turning out work that is incomplete. Some of the poems, I am confident, are worthy of publication in today’s leading literary journals. But some of them are poems that even I wince at and would turn down were they sent to me for publication. That’s the biggest testimony to me that I should keep working on them. But should I publish what I have that is finished while working on those that are not or hold on to the entire collection until they are all finished? That is my dilemma.

I’m a big fan of workshops. I believe you can get some good feedback from them. I have received incredible assistance from other poets in workshops for individual poems, but I’ve never workshopped an entire manuscript. How would you do that? To get the best criticism on a collection of poems you need to have someone look at the poems as a whole and judge them as a package – do they work together or against each other?; do you have them in the most effective order?; are there poems that do not fit in with the rest and might make sense as a part of another collection? These are all questions that are important to answer and once you’ve lived with something for two or three years it becomes more and more difficult to make those judgments yourself. That’s why it would be helpful to have other poets with a keen eye to look over a manuscript before it is sent out to publishers. Other eyes can often catch what you can’t. My problem is, I don’t know anyone that I think could give me the kind of constructive criticism I need and has the time to do it.

I think it might be helpful to have an electronic workshop, an online critique group for people in my situation who are not at a university or working toward a graduate degree and who want to work toward publication but whose financial situation won’t allow for a paid editor to go over every line with a scythe. And I’ve never been a big fan of paying someone to critique poetry anyway. I’m not sure a paid critic would do a serious manuscript that much justice.

I wonder how many others might be in a similar situation and would be interested in an online critique group or workshop.

First place in subcategory and Editors’ Choice Award, $100: Todd Boss, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy”
First runner up: Todd Boss, “Yellow Rocket”
Second runner-up: Runner up: Susan B.A. Sommers-Willett, “The Golden Lesson”
Third runner-up: Eric Torgenson, “Taking Tickets”
Fourth runner-up: Josh McDonald, “Women in Strange Trousers”

Chekhov’s Mistress Lives It Up Big
Bud Parr is salivating. It’s AWP week and Andrew Sullivan threw him some link love, which led to a pack of ants strolling through his picnic.

I’ve got to say, I’m not all that big on conferences and group activities. It sounds as though Bud is much the same way:

I’ve been to a lot of conventions and most of them are sickening to one degree or another, but there was a certain harmony of purpose at AWP and despite one table of dour interns (from a publisher we know) everyone was pretty enthusiastic about what they were doing.

So from the sound of things, AWP must be a blast. Sorry I’m missing it.

Interesting Quote Of The Day
This is an interesting quote:

“A new, non-corporate internationalism is emerging in literature, an independent web of associations and alliances at whose centre, like a brooding spider, lurks 3:AM. This collection is essential reading.” – Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder

Ron Silliman’s Brilliance
Ron Silliman and I are on the same page. He received a questionnaire from the Poetry Foundation and publishes his answers on his blog. Tidbits:

There are presently at least 10,000 publishing English-language poets. There may in fact be twice that number – it really depends on what percentage of publishing poets you think have active weblogs dedicated to the subject (if it’s ten percent, then the number is 10,000, but if you think the percentage is lower – as I believe – then the actual census of publishing poets would be greater).

And the common wisdom is that we need to promote poetry in order to get more people to read it. I don’t think that’s the problem. I think we have a lot of people who read poetry, and sadly, too many of them think they can write it.

The consequence is that there are more active poets now than ever, but that the total addressable market for any given book of poems is likely to be much smaller.

This isn’t exactly very encouraging. I think the landscape is such that if you don’t have an MFA your chances of finding a publisher for your poetry is severely diminished. Add to that the increasing nichification of poetry and the number of potential publishers that might consider publishing your poetry is even less. Throw in the economics of publishing and the situation is even bleaker.

To speak in this social context of “the decline of poetry” strikes me as completely missing the mark. It is possible that fewer people are reading certain types of poetry and/or certain types of poets, but there has never been so much poetry being written in the United States. I suspect, but can’t prove, that there has never been so much poetry being read in the U.S. as well, only that it is in a far more decentralized and fragmented fashion than before. We do not have a single national poetry audience, but rather hundreds if not thousands of smaller audiences, some of which overlap with one another, but many of which do not.

Is it any wonder then that our poet laureate doesn’t feel any obligation to promote poetry? Why should he? We’re already reading it.

And the final gem:

I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each. This would lead to far fewer students coming out of these programs with only barebones knowledge of what is being done today, far fewer students having to reinvent the wheel, and a much richer sense of what is actually possible in contemporary poetry, from slams to the new formalism, from flarf to narrative, from the prose poem to visual poetics.

And this is the part that is embarrassing for me. I’m not sure that I could meet the 100 book requirement. And I’ve been writing poetry for 20 years. But to meet this requirement, keeping in mind that I’m not enrolled in any MFA program nor do I currently have plans to enroll in one, but if I did then that would pose a slight problem for me. Off the top of my head I could probably come up with 20 titles and be able to discuss them at length, but 100? I’ve forgotten that many.

It likely wouldn’t take me but a couple of months of study time to become familiar with that many books if I needed to, but that is precisely Silliman’s point, namely, that MFA students, and graduates in particular, should have a better sense of what is going on in the field of poetry in general and in their own niche specifically than today’s graduates do. Furthermore, many of them couldn’t tell you the difference between a synecdoche and a trope either and this is what I mean when I speak of Millennialism – poets should study the craft, contemporary poets as well as the classics, and form some kind of style around the elements of form and content while trying to keep continuity with those who have come before.

Starting January 18, 2007, the conference looks like it will provide attendees with real benefit. Conference attendees will get a chance to meet and work with editors from some well-known publishing houses such as Tupelo Press, Ausable Press, and Graywolf Press. Conference faculty include Chase Twichell, co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, a book I absolutely loved reading, Jeffrey Shotts, Jeffrey Levine, Joan Houlihan, and Fred Marchant.

The conference will take place at the Brandt House in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The conference’s website describes it as perfect for anyone who has a poetry book manuscript that is finished or nearly finished. I’d attend the conference myself but the fee is $1,295 until December 21, 2007 and goes up $100 after the. The chances of a first book of poetry earning that much in return for a poet are pretty slim, so I think I’ll pass. But I’m sure this conference is right for someone.