There’s a few models of propagating in nature: have and nourish a few offspring or create many but don’t nourish any, spread by rhizomes, binary fission, etc.
The mammalian model of few offspring, nurtured intensely, is comparable to poets who narrowcast their book marketing. i.e They place poems only with prestigious, higher circulation paying markets and solicit higher profile readings to get maximum exposure for the energy spent. This may be with small press or large press. They may write (or release) fewer poems but they carefully place the poems and their books into a few select hands of connectors, and hope for the tipping point effect.
Then there’s the insect or spore model which makes a huge amount of poems which are broadcast widely and less discriminately, seeds to fertile or rocky ground. The same energy may be spent as they other model. Poems are sent to any market going, paid or unpaid, net or print. The goal is to get as many ears and readings as possible to maximize the chance of finding a fresh niche. The failure of spores to find suitable ground is higher in this method, but poetry drifts into places it wouldn’t have in a more planned and protected, proprietary marketing model.
Each strategy has an advantage in continuing genes so why not also be equally effective as memes? Does it matter what the content is as far as being compatible with a strategy?
If you are going to brood over a poem and fuss for years or decades and put much of your energies into its successful survival, do you make a different poem than if you value the need for quantity? If you make many, are you making near cloned variants? If you take a mammalian model, that doesn’t ensure each offspring is a radical development and departure. You work with what is within you and what you can pull from the outside in either case.
When we read, are we ant eaters or bear hunters?
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A poem is a mix of how it reflects psychology, society, the values around the poet and within, the skill it is rendered with, the perceived value and the value it gets by how it is perceived by an individual and the cash value if sold.
What’s the value of your poem? How do you decide on a market/reproducing strategy?
Give your poems away for free and our commercially trained mind may assume the poems have less value than those who are targeted to paying markets (which have a 1% of less acceptance rate and a turnaround time for accepting of poems of 6-18 months).
What is the aim when we share a poem? To communicate in a community or build a CV? The dichotomy is not that simple nor are they mutually exclusive.
Which community does one want to communicate in? If you have hundreds of publications worldwide but no one has heard of any of them, and no one community recognizes them, then what is the gain? If you have select publications of the little that leaves the houses, but they pay well but only happen once a decade or every few years it may take a die-hard fan to follow the rare blips along a longitudinal career. It’s a different rhythm of communicating. Again, your work isn’t a widely recognized currency.
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People seem to think there’s more validity and prestige with the mammal model whether one writes better or weaker poetry. In a consumer culture, availability, price and marketing for access are assumed to be filters of merit.
If one wants to reach ears that can hear and don’t care how many ears, either method can reach the ideal audience who the poem hadn’t met before.
Poems exist in economic systems and inside social systems and inside languages of form or shape or culture. Words or ideas can be said in “Standard English” or in jargon or in dialect or be extremely culturally embedded. To share a poem is to reach ears that can hear. If many can resonate with the subject, putting it in a place where many see makes sense. If it is a meaning that is targeted to resonsate with few, then niche marketing, hand-to-hand, face-to-face exchange makes sense. This would mean there are poems built for bear-hunters and poems built for ant-eaters.
The aesthetic/ideology of what you consume informs your appetite and your community. But then, do we not need a rounded diet? Are we not all opportunist omnivores? Or only if we have trained our digestion to be adaptable and change and mix diet gradually or else we give ourselves cramps?
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Is there a difference in value, pretending for a moment that intrinsic exists?
Value can be had in different ways — game changer ideas that are large and shift culture on a wide scale and economic value. Economic value can come thru different routes.
A) A gatekeeper who lets few things through acts as a filter and people would rather back that person’s view than invest in searching the Klondike for their own nuggets.
B) Controlled access so forcing demand to be greater than supply. Keep distribution small, the access is small therefore the perceived prestige of the product of poems is higher. That may backfire if there is not enough awareness that the product exists so the demand peters out.
If you give access to your poems thru a collaborative model of projects, that may change the filter of the prestige/value factor. Instead of being affiliated with copyright culture, you’re more left. The social model of copyleft and collaborating on projects is a different economic and social model. It isn’t about valuing hierarchies who will filter for you, nor is it relying on the trust-system of word-of-mouth, but brokering in cooperative in a different way. It is more anti-commerce, sharing ideas, potentially releasing them for free, or for trades. As ideal as it sounds, to cut out middlemen and market, it is just another method of reproduction of ideas. Biologically would it be hermaphrodite?
Words are a special breed in that their method of reproduction can vary. Rhizomes or spores, hermaphrodite shifts or live birth, different poems may fit different means of reproduction.
A poet doesn’t have to intrinsically map to only one way. Collaboration and copyleft, or “top-tier” markets or small press. We all might think of ourselves as one “natural” fit but much of fit is habit of behavior. The choice for specialization and typecasting is open.

The events run from 2 pm to 9 p.m. on Saturday with everything from improv shows and jesters, crafts for kids to art shows, children’s bands to classical guitar, and earth and political poetry and haiku.
Some of the readers include: Alastair Larwill, LM Rochefort, Mike Buckthought, Nathanael Larochette, Stephen Brockwell, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Pearl Pirie, Carol A. Stephen, and erika n. white (of Montreal and Twigs & Leaves and Poets in the Griffintown Cultural Corridor. With R de Smit, she runs Broken Rules Press). There will be an open mic sign up as well.
Earth day is every day but at the Museum of Nature there’s a 3-day ecological film fest April 5-8th with nearly a dozen films and 4 guest speakers.
Come April 14th, OIWF has a speaker on A Natural History of Our Planet.
Relatedly too, April 23-24 at the RA Centre, 2451 Riverside Srive from 10 am – 4 pm is Eco Expo with a focus on green, local and healthy.

The Ottawa International Writers Fest has a blog post on Etgar Keret reading. Sorry to have missed that event but with a new book launch in town every 3 days and much of life to balance, can’t get to everything. I was glad to get a bit about it vicariously. Lots more events coming up over the next month.
Amanda Earl has a list of unsung poetry titles from 2010, including mine (Aww. Cozy heart cockles) and a bunch more, most of which I’ve read and enjoyed as well. [R’s Boat and Rhapsodomancy I still haven’t seen.]
And over at the Public Lending Right’s Commission they have poetry podcasts for National Poetry Month including one of mine, ones by Ariel Gordon, Cornelia Hoogland, Rhea Tregebov, Elizabeth Woods and David Fraser. Woo.
And Laurie Toby Edison points out Sisters in Crime’s Review Monitoring Project which does a gender head count so we have a baseline of hard numbers to work with.

The Lampert and Lowther shortlists.

Gustave Morin‘s talk on concrete, typewriter and visual poems at the AB Series was absorbing. The 2 hours until break was 20 years of retrospective on career. It passed like 10 minutes. I think the whole thing clocked in at over 3 hours. One of the best literary things I’ve seen in years. It got into depth of history, influences, life which ran concurrently with directions in art, a view of his work from an artist-as-audience-across-time-distance perspective. Lots to learn and absorb and find out more about.
His slides included original images of poems such as this one above from his Insomiac Press book A Penny Dreadful. my only legitimate book because it has a spine and you can buy it at Chapters and he waved off getting down into that long-standing debate.
The painstaking work and the time he spends composing makes visual poems and concrete poems now make more sense to me. Compositional tools at their base are not words but concepts. There doesn’t need to be such a divide between image and word and shape and space and part of a letter. One can compose poetically with light and shadow and shape. It may be the symbol coding of the language you speak, or using characters of another or a “made up” alphabet. I’ve seen collage done, even well, as by Jeffrey Meyer or text as composition as Eric Zboya but this amount of scope of concrete poetry seems to have clicked my head into understanding that it can be done seriously and give the same sort of visceral top of head blown off as any word-poem. It is a different way of listening, a different yet comparable clustering of meaning and non-meaning.
This was his first book, published before he entered university. Who he was reading at that time included bpNichol, jwcurry, david uu, daniel f bradley, greg evason and bill bissett’s dirty concrete poems.
Morin was coming late to the mimeo revolution that started in the 60s, but it is still going on. The idea of cheap means of production and human-scaled distribution was a shift in who decided what was worth publishing. That call was in the hands of who had access to photocopies. It meant the possibility of a parallel system to the complexities of a publishing behemoth.
It was/is a route of self-determination in a world where the Comics Code Authority would self-elect what is safe or fit to print. The alternatives of small scale printing, photocopies, underground letterpress and lithograph, stamping and handmade books that were photocopied open up the access to who can publish and what they publish. (And now, blogs, and POD such as Lulu, offer a relatively cheap glossy aesthetic as well.)

Host/Organizer Max Middle took a picture of some of publications for sale.
Morin explores “obsolete tools” of letraset, typewriters, overheads and cannabalizes his own old texts and appropriates printed matter from the 1930s onwards, ads and comics and illustrations to pull into collages.
The sandbox that he plays in is not new and yet somehow 150 years in, after such a length of historical precedents, seems radical, at least if one were giving a talk at the local mall to shoppers.
He takes as forebears dadaists whose passive protests resisted conventional reading and thinking. The idea of poetry fodder of boy meets girl, pining ensues, doesn’t have an appeal. Haiku appeals – the concision of text, the well-tuned concision of language.
He has collages that he calls haiku — sparse type and two images strike me as having more of the spirit of haiku, with economy and elegance of concepts shifting, than most verbal promoted as such which stay within the some chosen parameters of words, subject, syllables and form.
For a while he made images that mimicked the form of poems on the page, the shape of maxims and duties of what poetry should look like on a page. He made collage images that fit together from different sources without changing the scale of the image as we would digitally. For example, he traffics in found text and found images without alteration of the material of components. He appropriates an image of a window from a Hitchcock movie and eventually found another image of a view that suited the shape and in it was a sign of text that naturally filled the gap with different content than before.
What does any image “mean”? He interrogates his unconscious and can be speculative interpretive audience but he doesn’t want to be the authority on his own work. He doesn’t want the work to be an authority. I admire that. He says, I’ve been doing this over 20 years. I’m 38 and I can convince myself that I haven’t done anything yet.. Having gone thru provocation of punk and meditation of buddhism, it makes sense that beginner mind would be well-seated. Books are dangerous things, he said. They never tell you that in the beginning. I’m virtually unemployable. I couldn’t even work at Mac’s Milk. (Many chuckled in recognition at that.)
Where does one place text art that follows Nerval taking his lobster for a walk? Morin said, There’s something about the small that’s monumental as he shows a slide of a giant slug going up the arc of a roller coaster.
He occasionally has bonfired his previous work or cannabalized it for other projects. I admire that prioritizing growth over keeping old things static and precious. Though his presentation he showed various tributes. It is so nourishing to see someone who isn’t half-assed about the art and someone who reads and absorbs to understand and extend, rather than read in order to rip off or riff off. There’s an intellectual rigour at play. I was immensely impressed by the elegant compression and consideration he’d put into work.
He’s studying language and concepts not just at the scale of book, or poem or line but using individual letters or shapes of parts of letters as material. He has 14 typewriters, each with particular letter shapes, kerning and other characteristics. One is Hebrew-Aramaic. Two are custom which he has taken a dremel to to cut the letters on the typebars to make characters that exist in no language. He then uses all the collective potential of all the typewriters to make texts. The poster (below) included one of his recent typewriter poems which has the symmetry and clean look of concrete poems.

A digital-made image or text can perpetuate and be hyperplastic. A collage poem may be forgiving. A dirty concrete poem has a certain anarchy in it and a process of mishmash but a typewriter poem is unforgiving. It may take 16 hours to type a page and a mistake on a character part way down and need to begin again.

He showed on transparencies typewriter poems. It aims to be above all of the cultural fray, inside the meaning of letters and characters. Some has the political creeping in on it, like this one that John W MacDonald pointed out.
He incorporates many influences into his literary creations. For example tthe gidouille, the name for the swirled symbol of pataphysics, and the name of the absurdist film: Ubu and the Great Gidouille by Jan Lenic. Lenic’s films of the 1950s “led an aesthetic revolution in Poland that sent reverberations all over the Eastern European animation scene.” All this interesting things have been happening over the last century. It seems a pity what so many poets are bringing forward as a legacy is their immediate experiences and some legends of ancient times.
Some of his work is surrealist, absurdism out of dadaism. Some of his work is like Adbusters, satirizing companies and their objectives, coming out of the thought-lineage of Goya’s Caprichos of the 1700s.
Some falls into prankster art, performance are. He has made “left poems”, i.e. the opposite of found poems. “Left poems” are released to the public for strangers to sort out and apply what meaning to them that they will, such as replacing a Toronto Sun in the window of its newspaper box with one from the 1930s.
His upcoming book is seeking its own title but is 58 pages in to what will be a 111 page book.