The trigger for this piece of writing was a pseudo-personal public
update published in the social-media phasebuke echo-chamber of Florida
Bradenton's Bethany Pope.
An academic poetry doctor, Faulkner-Wisdom
Awards finalist, and author of A Radiance, and a forthcoming collection,
Persephone in
the Underworld. Resident in Swindon, England, she wrote, 'Oh sweet,
suffering Jesus'; telling the public she was unable to get a refund from
Amazon after downloading a kindle book that was full of 'the most
asinine and idiotic' 'notes written by Oprah', that she couldn't turn
off: 'When I saw this sentence I was compelled
to carry on'. Dear sweet Lord Jesus, Merciful Buddha, Tender Vishnu,
SOMEBODY save me from this horror before I throw my kindle clear across
the room.'
The conversation below
it consists of very short single-line comments that range from, what
seems, or could be contextualized without much real effort to seem, as
asinine as the Oprah note Pope evinced as proof of another writer's
idiocy.
The first comment to strike this reader's ear as sounding, in a purely literary sense, somewhat asinine on the page, is: 'Try asking Oprah for compensations for a laugh.'
The humour here can be read either way. It could mocking Pope, or be
genuinely trying to cheer her up over the money, that, at this point,
before receiving a refund (the subject of a further public update), Pope
believed she'd lost.
The
conversation then quickly took a negative turn when the contributor
that made the joke about asking Oprah for a refund, wrote:
'I would put a review up saying how terrible these notes are. Might warn others.'
I
didn't forensically analyse the forty-two comment stream there, but
quickly grasped, scrolling and skim-reading the one line aphoristic
comments; that after a few one-line notes performed in a tone of
annoyed disapproval, the bulk of the exchange turns into a series of one lines
condescendingly mocking as supremely distasteful those that claim not to read much poetry
themselves, but who write and read their own in public. An innocuous and mundane
conversation consisting of comedic comments and tones of displeasure,
irritation and complaint; that became a trigger for one's own writing
and response to it published here. ...
'In
the past two decades the publishing model has been utterly inverted.
We've gone, historically speaking, very briefly from one extreme to the
other. Twenty years ago if one wanted to become a published poet it took
a lot of extremely hard work and dedication. Writing writing writing
until eventually one is writing so much a voice readers recognise
emerges. And though the odds were more than a one in a thousand chance of a fairy
god-editor plucking from a slush pile the first manuscript you sent out,
when you plugged away one eventually connected with a coterie of like-minded
poetry lovers and writers, producing, when compared with today, a tiny
amount of store-quality publications.
The whole
business of getting a manuscript into printed book form was far more
expensive and time-consuming than now. Someone wanting to publish their
own books twenty years ago would spend years learning the many different
roles needed to go from a hand or type-written fistful of poems, to a
shiny new attractive publication. And the vast majority of poetry books
that were published, unless it was by a corporate press, had very
little-to-nothing in the way of advertising and getting the word out
even regionally about their poems for sale.
It was a very
socially lonely time for most poets, unlike today; with
no way - unless one
had millions of pounds to buy air time and pay for commercials - of
reaching in print the millions of book-buying people all
over the globe we take for granted are the audience and customers we can
instantly connect with today. And all
the things that were then in the hands of a very few globally powerful
editors, are now at the fingertips of everyone. We are, finally, all on a
level
playing field, professionally, in relation to the publishing and
business side of selling poems; because anyone with an internet
connection can decide we are
an independent po-biz editor, and within hours be publishing and selling
books worldwide. We can create in a week what previously took
years of dedicated learning, continual slog, rejection, learning and
experience; not to mention many thousands of
pounds, and tens of thousands of hours of writing. And the powerful
attraction to that profoundly playful source of our own writing, which
we're blessed to be born with in the digital age
There has been a revolution throughout the
world, in publishing, and culturally, in the way we communicate, and in
how one can present ourself in public as someone whose language the
Reader can trust the words of when it comes to English poetry.
If
one is English it helps, when speaking, virtually, in America, to drop
the reserve, one finds, and get stuck in trolling and trash-talking with
fellow Americans in that uniquely global capitalist poetic culture we
share online. When one restricts one's vision to the purely domestic
realms, the free back and forth conversational flow rarely reaches the
anything-goes post-avant level of linguistic exchange and open craic one
experiences when in the thick of debate with fellow N. Americans.
I
think this is because we English are very much a product of our birth
status in a multi-tiered Class and Honour System, that can be very
spiritually challenging and difficult to get our head round when we are
one of the
99% of English people born outside it. A child of immigrants, without a
title, only with what can be subtly contextualised as that most
culturally distasteful
of things by posh-sounding
snobs performing in letters little more than a disapproving one-line
note and tone of
voice; the openly working-class English voice speaking from the
English Republic of Letters; in which everyone is welcome and free to
write whatever the heck ye goddam wanna. Issuing not the short and
snarky superior literate ejections that reveal an entire
intellectual apparatus built of falsehood, fear and envy; but an honest
voice.
Cheers ears.
May your hair grow golden and your heart be filled with joy
May your eyes always see and your ears detect duende
May your mouth sing from the soles of the feet up highest
May your hand and head together make the greatest poetry.
Post a Comment