(Got a comfy seat? This is a long one. Skim as you see fit. Or get a cup a cocoa and hunker in. )
Part of social media is to share what is useful, whether book lists, beautiful vistas, or safety information. To connect with dispersed people of shared interest or concern. It also means people of shared propensity to hate can get isolated together as well. It’s never the tool but the use that’s the key element.
This week I start to understand the people in the 1940s impelled to conscript against the threat to Europe as a threat to all. I hope in my lifetime there remains a Canada. I selfishly hope not to be personally bombed back to the Stone Age like so many places on this wee marble. I hope within 2 years the US has resumes dignified quality of life for those in the widening deluge of abuse. Trying times for the heart.
What to do, to do more for justice? For choice, connection, informed thought? How to live a more just life of worthwhile connection and help?
Often when I was crestfallen or angry a friend would cut me off and ask, what are you going to do about it?
How to move ideas and people is a concern.
We need to change the 1% and the pollution rate, and the incarceration rate and the zero sum solutions. And to think together without state threat.
Paper is a solution. An inane podcast whose name I’m redacting reported in the US 16% of people are readers and declining. The source they ran with (picked up under clickbait headline at People magazine) showed things more complicated than that — polling 200,000 people over 20 years, people read for longer at the end than the start, and there were regional, age and race shift disparities. I don’t know where to find the analogous figure for Canada.
I am deliberately insulated from the news cycle. (Being informed vs. sanity debate.) I want to live with intention and clarity.
I saw here and there recent notice of publishers saying they will no longer ship to the US. I noticed new difficulty and time to get books from the US. And finally the rigamarole of trying to mail books there myself, and consequently, I’m thinking, I like ebooks. They have advantages. Paper is not the problem. Context is the problem.
Ebooks are easily transferable. Pay nothing or pay the same as print they are instant exchange. An unimpeded flow of ideas at a distance. Was that not the prime value of usenet and the internet and speakers corner in parks? Unlike talking their contents don’t undergo a telephone game.
It gets me thinking.
A recent poll on small press was money talk, income, a lot of key marketing lingo. The idea of art as pitch and product. The idea of conversation as paid subscription. Doesn’t feel right.
I will pay for a movie because it required hundreds of talented people, costing millions of dollars.
What is the real cost of a book? Labour per hour isn’t measured. Volunteer labour by nature. A contract gives a symbolic gratuity of $500, if that. Reading tours may give more income if the series pays, with grants requested by writer and series. On a CV of publications and awards, the real income is peripheral to writing, editing, residency, teaching. All of which prevent one’s own writing.
These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.
It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?
Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry.
Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses.
Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.
So many conundrums to solve.
Traditionally I tried to buy as much from poets as I could, spread an abundance not scarcity model. We are interdependent free-thinking equals not beholden to state, church or corporation. We need to support one another.
Yes, we all have expenses. If we are subsistence farmers we are displacing time to write, and perish the thought, market, promote, and sell.
How to get Poetry to the People, apart from Wally or Stuart standing street side handing it out to those who don’t yet know they want it.
If we as writers are low income we don’t have the disposable income to buy poetry at $25 a pop. Another conundrum.
In isolation we are in the position to reinvent the poetic wheel because we aren’t educated on that the culture has moved to jets.
A solution is the trade economy, making and swapping.
The trade economy isn’t a financial planner’s wet dream of continually arcing interest and ROI, scarcity model of hoarding driving up “value”. Some of us are habituated into understanding our value through the translating medium of money. If we give for free we are not valued or not honouring ourself with value. A trade economy is community over commerce. This is good.
Freely offered time and help is automatic human culture, and allows society to cohere or at least be aware of one another.
As much value as there is in “Pay the Artist” if you can, free is also valuable. Libraries, gifts, Little Free Libraries, trades.
We are two people here. My partner works but my biggest personal income is dividends off a life insurance my parents bought when I was a baby. And I’m in a bubble economy. My local thrift store means I buy jeans for $2, a hot cocoa package for 50 cents, a bundle of pend for 15 cents, a winter coat for $10, books for 25 cents, while out there… well, you know.
Paper books are a pleasurable gratifying thing and can travel surprising distances, but, looping back to initial concern, they are onerous and expensive to move.
I badly want a bunch of the Red Moon Press titles from the US but with shipping more than doubling costs, it hurts. $50 for an hour or two of reading. That’s not sustainable at my consumption rate. That’s an opportunity cost of a week of food. True it may feed the soul, but it also might vex the soul.
Is poetry for connection? Transformation? For the underground alternate next culture or to sell pleasantries?
Haymarket Books and AK press and Microcosm Publishing press for distributing ideas in book form rather than selling a product which is books.
A UK haiku press, Snapshot Press, sells paper books and calendars but also makes gorgeous ebooks which have inherent value because of the editor’s eye making a large slush pile.
I see a few people sharing for free:
derek beaulieu’s opened his books for taking, under the tag, #BeYourOwnPirate with downloadable pdfs. He says,
I believe that releasing my writing online for free encourages new and unexpected ways of people engaging and responding with the writing; it will encourage experimentation and reaction. I encourage authors to scan your publications & release them online as a free PDFs.
–derek beaulieu
Model Press is one you can subscribe to from Ryan Fitzpatrick. It is an online-only poetry micropress now with 39 titles.
standard ebooks offers carefully rendered, typo-free, in good design of public domain, open-source classics, like Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens.
Internet archive could let you borrow millions of texts from before the grievous takedown. I found books there that the authors and presses no longer have. They still are a portal to many libraries.
Project Gutenberg has all sorts of classics. Now that libraries supply the popular rather than archive the important. (No bitterness, much), we can access, at this point over 75,000 books in various languages. Have a 2 a.m. need for Paradise Lost? They got ya.
I have short had a list of resources, for teaching poetry, running a reading series, or laying out chapbooks. But of all titles of mine published or titles only one is listed of prompts. Most you only get to see in person.
I have long an impasse at my website of covers and prices, but not the technical know-how to give a sample poem for each.
All this leads me to a new model. What if, in time forward, I make some physical chapbooks, but made them available as free downloads for greater accessibility.
I can start with out-of-print and presses that have closed. I have boxes of inventory unsold. I can start with what I do next. We’ll see how 2026 unfolds.
As my insoles profess, “every step makes a difference.”
Leave a comment