We are creatures of action and reaction. We have little choice but to react to our constraints even if we don’t know what they are consciously. It’s like responding to tone or body language. There’s an intuitive response.
We learn to use what we have to work with. If conversationally we know we may be able to slide in a uh-huh through the unending speech (that miraculously by some science unknown to me does not cause hyperventilation on the part of the speaker). We don’t form long replies. If we learn how to speak 1-2 minute presentations in a second language then are told to do a 15 minute talk, we aren’t practiced and trained for it any more than writing haiku trains us to be the next great hope novelist.
Ron Silliman (May 9) was talking about how the internet pressures us back to left justification since HTML can’t do any fancy fontwork. After a decade of typing the format becomes ingrained, second-nature, cognitively structured almost.
I had had to forego the machine for maybe three weeks back in 1968 when it was in the shop – a key broke off – and I tried to handwrite my poems on legal tablets. Later, when I typed up these manuscripts, they were almost all exactly one typewritten page long.
I have seen myself doing something similar in page. In diaries, somewhere between conscious and unnconsciously scanning the page, the clockface and figuring out how to maximize a chunk of thought in the space existing, forming the narrative by my constraints.
What if we took off the constrainsts or changed them? Would we change what is produced? Or shock ourselves into numb silence? For a while we would be stunted, just like our productivity may dip as we take on a new job, new role. Then do we exceed our previous box’s level? Can’t know until your try.
Also from Ron Silliman:
According to a survey by the Book Industry Study in 2005, Under the Radar, there are some 63,000 small presses generating $14.2 billion in sales. By comparison, as a result of industry consolidation there are about six large publishers today. And according to the Association of American Publishers, based in New York City, overall book sales hit $23.7 billion last year, up a slim 1.3%.
$14.2 billion out a total volume of $23.7 billion. That’s more than half. Isn’t it thus time that a majority of book coverage – and book reviews – concentrates on small and independent presses rather than the big six?
Poetry can be business but it’s also a buyer’s market
Joseph Bednarik in The Law of Diminishing Readership said
In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many “good poems” were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems—not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.
It’s interesting how the tools shape the work. Silliman’s point about left justification is well taken. Years ago (back through mists of times) when I started writing poetry on my macplus I quickly adopted the idea that a pause was going to be indicated by a tab, or a line break, or (in the case of a significant pause) a tab indented line break. Almost all my poetry has since been written on computer and I find now that even when I write on paper I adopt the same clipped tabbed fragment style.
This really struck home these last couple of weeks when I decided I was going to rewrite a poem entirely in my head. Originally my poem Hylas was written and performed at the last Dusty Owl but I was so impressed by some of the other performances that night that I thought I’d try taking some of my own poems off the page. For two weeks I wrote out loud. Muttering it to myself on my walks to and from various bus stops. Reciting and revising in the shower. It wasn’t until I came to write it out that I realized how arbitrary the line breaks and tabs seemed. Made me wonder just how much of my poetry has been shaped by the keyboard.