Etiquette: Not just for Dinner Parties

-A Short and Subjective Behavioral Guide to Literary Reading Etiquette and Success -

For Readers:

The Front Range area of Colorado has a wonderful program called the 4x4 reading series which I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to both read in and experience as an audience member. The idea is that one student from each of the four writing programs in the Front Range (CU, DU, CSU, and Naropa) read for fifteen minutes each. The first 4x4 of the year was held last night at Naropa and two new MFA students in the University of Colorado's creative writing program asked how long I thought the reading would take. I laughed and said about two hours. Their rough reaction: Ok let's back up here Erin, that sounds like faulty math. I thought you said that four students are each reading for fifteen minutes. That equals one hour, not two. I chuckle at their naiveté and tell them never to underestimate the ego of the writer. Ever.

Sure enough, one of the readers last night read an admittedly entertaining story that lasted 45 minutes. Two additional readers could have been added to the program in the time this took up. The problem I am trying to correct is this: someone told him prior to the reading that this would be fine. It is not fine, and this enabling pattern is a disturbing one, violating simple rules of etiquette. One of his equally misguided peers perhaps told him, yeah no one cares if you read over the time limit. The reality is, yes we do care. We do not care if you read five minutes over but ten flirts with rudeness and thirty minutes over is just plain out of line.

So yes, tripling your allotted reading time is rude to the audience, but who lost the most? The reader that had to follow him. Richard Froude is a brilliant writer who I had luckily heard read before, but after nearly two hours of a break-less reading I and most of the others in the audience had understandably already hit their physical attention span breaking point. I could not give Froude the attention he deserved because of the rudeness of the reader that preceded him. This happens at AWP at the mega press readings constantly. Readers are given five minutes to read and read for twenty. When there are nine people reading that time adds up fast. It is unacceptable, inconsiderate, and it undermines your wonderful work. I understand this is difficult for fiction writers to do, but you have to. Create an abbreviated reading version, or write some flash fiction. You should only read for forty five minutes if forty five minutes was the time allotted for you at the reading. This is about respecting your audience, your fellow readers, and your own work.

For the Audience:

The audience should act like they are at a church service that has the potential to switch to an opera/ballet/play/comedy club at any moment. Be respectfully engaged and ready for whatever might happen during the reading. Even if the reader rule above is broken, you cannot leave in the middle of the reading. You cannot leave between readers. You must clap, and you must not fall asleep (students). If you are annoyed by a reader breaking the rule above or for any other reason, hold your frustration until after and wait for that sweet validation you get when you realize everyone else felt the same way. Put yourself in the place of the reader and realize how difficult it is to get up and read work that you care deeply about to strangers . Turn your cell phones off.

I Love Readings

I love literary readings and I hate leaving upset like I did last night. I like to feel inspired not like I had been held against my will for two hours. Publishers, reading series coordinators, and readers: tell your readers that the time limit is strict, tell your audience to silence their cell phones and to not leave (or leave quietly if they have to) before the reading is over. Your reading will be a more successful event and most importantly, consistency in etiquette will help build an maintain a more solid literary community.

The Joys of Publishing

This is an email that the editors of SpringGun just received- it was clearly mass emailed. I guess donating a significant amount of your time to publish work you believe in is not enough for some people. I wish he could have been at the Boulder Small Press Festival. Finally, who is this guy? :)

Hello:

Do you pay for accepted works or have you become a paying market? It would be nice to tell readers this in your guides area for submissions. There is really no excuse for being evasive about your guidelines regarding pay. These are basic things that need to be in your guidelines. Why do half you editors out there have to be admonished to put basic stuff in your guides like pay and rights issues? Where are these things at your website? They should be in conspicuous places. You are more concerned with putting fluff instead of terms for writers to access up front.

And if I've asked before, well...i don't memorize guidelines, so it would help to just be communicative to writers and save extra emailing back and forth. Though since so many editors choose not to let the writers know if they pay or not, I'm creating a NO PAY journals in my email account so I don't have to keep asking.

If you don't pay, please don't give me that tired cliche-ridden lecture that small presses don't pay like I've gotten from a number of small press eds...I could give you list that's very long of presses that are small and pay something.

Some pubs. that do pay something don't state it in their guidelines, too.

Also, some eds. who don't state their full guides make me feel like I'm the only writer to ask these questions. Yet any writer who submits work to you or another publication without knowing the pay, rights, and reprint & simultaneous sub. issues, is very naive, indeed, and is not looking out for their interests.

Why is it so hard for some of you editors to be upfront with writers about pay issues?

Thanks, Roy

In Bit, Out of Print

When I first read Stephanie Strickland's Zone Zero in 2008, I wrote a brief paper on it for my "Poetry and its Others" graduate poetry course. Stephanie actually visited our classroom and I remember reading a part of my paper aloud to her. Julie Carr said that the part I read sounded like it could be one of the blurbs for the book. I have been trying to find that paper desperately because I think I understood and appreciated the project better two years ago. The project never actually excited me all that much back then, but at least I felt like I had a way to talk about it. Now that I have seen/watched the digital version of Zone Zero countless times including a presentation by the author herself, I am somehow even less excited about it. V however, is much more exciting to me.

I had seen vniverse before this week, during the 2008 presentation by Strickland that I referenced above- but I don't remember her mentioning that there was a book portion to the project. As poetry, and that's what it is, I think the book is quite beautiful. There is some of the same cerebral poetry for cerebral poetry's sake that plagues Zone Zero, but in V it is nicely balanced with touching political and philosophical insight like "for all human beings, our vocation/ in the world is to restore the sense/ of a rightful self to those deprived of it. To all, (Strickland 21). Besides the title's unforeseeable association with V the TV series (for Visitors) or the drug derived from vampire blood in True Blood, I enjoyed this book. It begs the question, why is this book out of print and Zone Zero is not? Penguin is likely more worried about the bottom line than Ahsahta for starts, but I guess a possible (though unprecedented :) ) reason is that I'm wrong about this and Zone Zero is incredible. Someone convince me.

When I first saw the digital version of Slipping Glimpse I was confused. I remember that CD was making my crappy HP laptop hot and bothered, making mufflerless car sounds and then I realized that it was 2008 and this poem had to be online somewhere-and of course it was. So why Ahsahta and Stephanie, is there a CD in your book when this can be found online? That was my first and less interesting point of confusion that was easily answered with a simple, the internet changes response from one of my classmates at the time. Under my breath I said something about 8-tracks, VHS, Beta (omg remember Beta!?), cassetes and so on. All technology changes, a CD is technology and it changes, it has changed. My netbook has no CD-ROM, why would I need it with USB 2.0 and the internet?

Anyway, so this was the first digital poem I had encountered besides DeCampos' Hearthead
which is much different than Slipping Glimpse. The first thing I noticed about this poem was that it was not readable, at all. Then I found that you can scroll the text, but if you have to scroll the text to read it, why put it in there to begin with? Nothing about the poem was even aesthetically pleasing.

Then I got to The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot which won the Boston Review's poetry award in 1999. While discussing the print version in class, we were mostly silent (awkwardly so) while Strickland explained her reading of this poem. A love story between sand and soot built through associations and there were more details that I can't remember. Ok what? So here is a room full of people who read poetry (usually difficult poetry) for a living and we struggled to follow the connections she was making about this poem. We smelled a stretch. Maybe we missed the point but as I read it again, I'm still in that room awkwardly looking at Stephanie Strickland defending the poem. I thought that the digital portion of this would help but sighed when I saw it was hypertext. Which we all forgave for it being done in 1999, but still. For me it didn't add to the poem at all for me, but I do understand that over a decade ago it would maybe. Basically I felt like it was an opaque, sterile and impenetrable poem put into hypertext (sorry) and I still do.

But back to the good stuff. During that same presentation, Strickland showed Vniverse. I remember thinking, now this is more like it. Although it is a little antiquated feeling now, it is still a beautiful digital poem. I love the idea of navigation in the universe juxtaposed with navigating the universe that now exists digitally on the web. After reading the book, reading the words on the digital vniverse was quite pleasant and the writing didn't feel so lost and isolated as it often does in digital poems like Slipping Glimpse. Vniverse.com exists within the book and within the web, creating an interesting constellation itself which joins the digital with the material (for lack of a better word). For the most part I can close read the poems in V, and I can close read vniverse which is a relief after Zone Zero. Not to say that a poem is bad if it can't be close read-Fanny Howe's work usually defies close reading and I find it to be incredibly rich and emotionally accessible.

I guess this week's blog was kind of a reaction piece. I do think we should all write to Janet Holmes and tell her to call Penguin, get the rights to V and start printing that rather than Zone Zero. Or she can do both, but I see V as a much closer attempt to truly combine literature and new media. V is the two way bridge we need between the book and the screen and that bridge has been knocked down.

Procedural Writing is Kinky

Since I read Tom's post before writing my own, I now seem to be thinking about my response to him and about a question he raised whether he meant to or not. How is procedural writing like Oulipo, workshop writing exercises, detournement, appropriation, remix, collage, metagraphs (Debord''s word for poem-collage), erasures and other human made restraints placed upon writing different from computer generated procedural writing? What makes this murky for me is that computers are a type of person too because we made them and we program them.

Hartman says that the real question is, how can a computer and a human collaborate to create interesting writing? Although I think he has a fair point, I think it's a cute way to avoid the question and in the context of his project(s), that response makes sense. In "Sentences" (which could easily be renamed, "Making Computer Generated Poetry: A Love Story") Hartman takes us through a writing procedure much more difficult to explain than something like Perec's lipogram La disparition or Queneau's Exercises in Style (one of my favorites I might add). Yet the idea is the same: what fun things can happen when you put writing in handcuffs? Enter my gimmicky title to this post. Obviously those handcuffs are made of different materials, shapes and secured to different objects but the general outline is the same.

There was a lovely panel on procedural writing at the Boulder Small Press Festival a few weeks ago in which author Gillian Conoley discussed her experience with using the plot genie to write a book with the same name. The plot genie is a device that I took to be a wheel that the writer spins in order to put together different elements of a story. From the blurb on Omnidawn:

"The inspiration for this book is a plot-generating device created in the 1930s by an ex silent screenwriter, Wycliffe A. Hill. The original "Plot Genie"--used widely by Hollywood writers until the late 1950's--relied on a numerical game of chance, including a cardboard spinning wheel used to divine character traits and plot points."

Plot Genie is not a computer, it's a piece of carboard and yet we should note that the blurb calls the genie a "plot-generating device." A plot generating device sounds a lot like a computer but the genie is made from cardboard, not silicon. Someone did however, have to build it and program it with plot elements in order for it to function and create writing. This sounds exactly like computer generated poetry but had Hartman been there showcasing his computer generated work as procedural writing, I have no doubt it would have been more questioned that Conoley's. I think I would have, I think I do. So what's my/our problem with computers that we made and we programmed being used as restraints for writing? The answer is probably ignorance and code-awe (I made that term up). My mind can manage the mysteries of a cardboard wheel much easier than of a computer program. I am more interesting and more impressed by Janet Holme's "The Ms of my kin" which is an erasure of the already condensed poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Labor has to be a factor as I learned from last week's post. My classmate's were more impressed by my conceptual writing of alphabetizing the intro to UBU's Conceptual Writing anthology when they thought I had done it "by hand" when in reality I put it into a free online alphabetizing program. We are trained to be impressed with hard work, even if it's as tedious and dull as alphabetizing a set of words.

Finally, I think the question of why we choose to write within constraints is important. My students love workshop writing exercises and using constraints to force the artist into exciting and new directions is the aim of such exercises. My own teacher, Julie Carr is having me write a series of poems in ballad verse to force my language into something more rich and grounded. Oulipo functioned/functions in pretty much the same way.

So, why do we want to write computer generated, computer restrained poetry? Hartman says, "The brute-force effort to make a machine into a human poet seems doomed to death by boredom"(Hartman 4). But he does advocate as I have already mentioned, for the potential interest of poetry derived through human/computer collaboration. While going through a writing exercise like write the 100th version of the story in Exercises in Style, we learn something through writing through that restraint. We learn more about what we want from writing, our own creative process, about language itself and ultimately how to write a better poem/story. After reading "Sentences" there is no doubt in my mind that although his process is dressed a little differently, Hartman also learns these things. If that were true then computer generated writing is not alone, but living under the same umbrella of procedural writing as the plot genie, Oulipo and erasure; and the direct end results from such exercises whether computer or human generated are as Hartman points out, just as varied.

Guilt, Risk and Conceptual Art

"Ordinary language does not use itself to reflect upon itself"

"Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional sense - one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work"

- Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms

I sat down to write my blog then stopped. Then I started again, then stopped. It occurred to me that according to the needs of the conceptual, a written response that provokes the reader "to think" could just as easily be a conceptual art piece as a sensical analysis. Isn't that part of the point? Or even the whole point?

Also, I am a poet and a person who learns by doing. So by creating conceptual writing, I was able to better understand it. My idea is not original, alphabetizing existing texts has been done by Kim Stefans, Cristobal Mendoza (I published it, see Every Word I Saved on springgunpress.com) and I'm sure many others. The concept of my piece however, is different from The Dream Life of Letters and Every Word I Saved, mostly because my piece was framed as a blog entry assignment for a graduate course. I subverted "the man" (or woman-Lori) by attempting to achieve the same level of thinking and communication of a concept rich scholarly essay on conceptual art, by creating/participating in conceptual writing. My source material is of course that of the intro to the Conceptual Writing Anthology on UBUWEB which adds another conceptual layer to the writing. It draws attention to the absurdity of having an introduction like this on conceptual writing, or having any scholarly writing on what is already self-conceptual and unconcerned with its outcome.

Now to get to my title. I immediately felt guilty after subverting my graduate student duty to complete this assignment on time and as an accountable member of the classroom community. It was so easy to alphabetize source text while my classmates typed away some serious and thoughtful analysis on conceptual writing and how it relates to digital poetry. I should mention I think the connection to digital poetry and conceptual writing is an obvious one and won't discuss that here. Back to my guilt. Hard work is rewarded in the world I live in. I feel good about myself when I work hard and make something meaningful. The nonproductive, easy act of alphabetizing this text gave me the opposite feeling. It was not hard work, and I felt like I was disappointing my classmates and Lori. I wondered if the inherent low-energy work and cleverness that goes into conceptual writing always feels this way, and this brings me to the risk part.

Participating in conceptual writing is risky because there is nothing but the concept and because of our social pact that hard work is a positive thing, peers may view the work as lazy, or easy. At least these were my fears. Like I said, I am a poet and when you think back to the workshop, you might hear things like, "I am not following the concept of your poem but lyric quality of the fourth and sixth lines are beautiful. The way your poem moves, feels like taking a shower while drinking lavender soda." Ok so that was a stretch but the point is, other writing has something else, or a lot of something elses and is therefore less risky. You have more to fall back on if the concept doesn't pan out.

Finally, there is yet another quote in Fitterman's Notes on on Conceptualisms that quotes Sol LeWitt: "If the artist changes his mind halfway through the execution of his piece, he compromises the result and repeats past results." Now it appears, I have done just this, but for the day when I was behind my decision to keep that post up there with no explanation (it is the explanation!) I had this quote in mind.

and Anthology by Conceptual Craig Douglas Dworkin edited introduced the UBUWEB Writing

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"Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome." -Kenny Goldsmith

Stream of Concrete

Tom asks in his blog post, how is concrete poetry different from comics and I wonder how concrete poetry is different from visual arts. Would a poet working in the concrete be better suited in an English department or an art department? Shouldn't they should have access to screen printing equipment, paint, wood etc ?

Using text as visual material is the obvious connection between digital poetry and concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is meant to be self contained, but it also knows that when it uses words like "heart" and "head" (DeCampos) or typographical symbols, that the material it's using is a flexible and endlessly meaningful one. What is the grammar of pictures of eyeballs stacked upon each other or letters and symbols torn from context and floating on a page? I just read Gertrude Stein's "Poetry and Grammar" again recently and I couldn't help make a connection between her curiosities with disrupting grammar in order to free up the noun, and concrete poetry. Perhaps stripping language of its grammar, by depending heavily on its typographical semantics rather than its denotation and connotation, is another way of freeing language. What are the implications of a language free from meaning? I don't mean socio-political,though there are certainly implications there. What I mean is what is interesting about a language free from meaning? Besides my skepticism as to whether this is even possible I think one answer is an idea dada might have been after: if we free language we can start over building meaning.

One thing that concrete poetry and digital poetry do very well is point out the arbitrariness of language and of meaning making systems in general. That is at least one of the reasons why many of us poets and scholars of literature tend to cringe at the pieces that reduce language to a pyramid of eyeballs. We know that language is more than that, concrete poets and digital poets must also know that so in essence, artists working in the concrete (whether its digital or print) are pushing up against meaning making as an idea and even destroying it. How frustrating for us who spend our lives as artists trying to find and express meaning. What this conflict tells me is that (enter Stein again) our world is what we call it so why aren't we calling it something else? However, like most things, it is much easier to destroy something (especially meaning) than it is to create it. For example, I can create a concrete poem on the concrete poem generator with one click and a drag. Do you know how many freaking hours a five minute video art piece (that I want to mean something) takes me? Hundreds of hours.

But this goes back to my skepticism. Even my one-second concrete poem has meaning. Even the eyeball pyramid is playing with what our idea of language is and with what makes meaningful symbols. The concrete poem I just made consists of a huge letter K, and a little @ sign that evoked plenty of meaning to me. I thought of K, slang for the drug Ketamine, then K-hole (the state of mind), then K - Hole (the coco rosie song), then my friend Derrick who likes/ed Ketamine and Coco Rosie and whose name ends with a K. The associations, the meaningful associations that my mind created were there in that one symbol. This brings me back however to how similar this is to visual art and painting. We see a picture of an oak tree and we get associations like we do with that K, but not like we're reading Dickinson.