Publishing a poetry chapbook

Nobody c'n issue a valid poet's license, though the stuffier
academic institutions and quite a few cults of mutual admiration
THINK they can and do issue something and back it up with heavy
critical guns in publications they fight among themselves over. My
personal knowledge of poets on the streets who walk up to coffee
house tables where tourists held down chairs goes back into the
sixties on Telegraph avenue in Berkeley where we had our bubble lady.
Julia Vinograd. Small with a black dress and yellow kid's cap and a
kid's bubble-blower, walking the avenue, up around Sather Gate (UCB),
blowing bubbles. An old super-market turned coffee house had a huge
Berkeley mural on an outside wall (on Haste) and she was at the lower
center, the focal point of the vortex. Hell, she'd been through the
Iowa Workshop (don't tell her I told), and she lived selling her
books and she wrote, still writes, I'd guess, a stack of them. She
wasn't, then, later or, probably, now the only one. But people who've
never been on this continent knew and probably know about her. She
could probably issue a valid license, but would not. She'd likely
tell you that you've got to rip your license out of Universe ...with
your teeth.

But I want to take up your second worry here because there's a
great cloud of evil, a dark, twisting force-cloud, hovering over all
the six-billion people who ought to be generating live poetry.... Uh,
huh, it's human to make poems, and that gets twisted down into
writing poems, of course, and even writing poems is, pretty much,
just writing and shaping the writing up into poem-shapes. I'm not
going to get off into that lecture.

The twisting force manifests in SUBMITTING poems (to teachers,
editors, group members) and hoping for ACCEPTANCE rather than
REJECTION. So, you send along poems to this "distributed" editor -
the group. An editor, of course, is SUPER-AUDIENCE. You have to
get past him, her or it to get to the rest of the audience. Critics
are EXEMPLAR-AUDIENCE. They've a wider, but less deep
influence than editors. Finally, there's only one critic or editor
you can get anything useful from and that's you. That's a harsh
reality and of course you can't live that way. Among other things
making or writing poems is social.

And sometimes a poem you write can actually mean something in
somebody's life. I read and talked in a friend's community college
class before I had printed copies of anything and a girl asked me
where she could get a poem, asked, then, if she could copy it. I
figured it mattered and gave her the typescript. I had a carbon at
home. I read Vivisection at the Blue Unicorn and a guy came up to
talk afterward. He'd walked in ready to hang up his parole but,
hearing the innards there, he figured he could make it a little
farther down the road. For almost half a century I've lived on those
hours. It's food.

How did I have those poems? A gift? Talent? Not in the sense that's
meant. My subtitle for WAKING is Acquiring the deep seated crafts
usually called "talents". So, training, education? I didn't have any
of either other than what we all have, or at least have access to. We
start learning shortly after, maybe shortly before, birth. We're
dealing with the outside world even before that first slap on the
butt reverses the breathing and we begin the cycling inspiration and
expiration.

I don't have room to fill in any better than that, but here's what I
was setting up to pass along to you. You have to sit down with your
poems close at hand. All of them. spread out around you. Forget
choosing, the book. It's you and the poems. What you're looking for
is a poem in which you brought up something *you* wanted to "get
across" (we call that communication, but forget communication). When
you're looking for that, you'll find it. And if it's not very strong,
you c'n rework the poem, right there on the floor. Make it stronger.
Not "better". Your education forces that word into your head. That's
the great cloud of evil. Your education is valuable, useful. But not
as a FRAMEWORK in which you make poems. Don't let this new thing
you're looking for become an editor's rule. Stay light. It's only a
chapbook. It's only your FIRST chapbook. And don't get hung up on
reworking, either. Settle for poems that you kind of like and know
why you like them. Chances are others will, too. Not "approval" like.
Just "That's kind of fun" "...or funny" or "Yeah, that's a thought"
or '...' ...well, you get the idea.

By-pass an editor. Even a "distributed" editor. It's just you and
whoever you walk up to at a cafe table and try to "sell" it to. If
somebody asks, "Why should I buy this?", you answer, "Well, I c'n
tell you a few reasons why you might *read* it, and you've got to buy
it to do that. 'Course, your friend here can read it too, and you can
pass it on to somebody else, so that's a lot of reading for one buck
which I use to print the next one." You're not likely to be as cute
as Julia, and may not be the poet she was, though you c'n be the
poet you are, ...but this a start. Did I, the dispenser of all this
wisdom, ever do this? I've put together some books, but I've never
walked up to anybody and asked him or her to buy a copy. I'd watch
Julia and shake my head in envy.

Whether you ever sell a copy or not, this CAN change how you and
your poems get along in the same head. To sum up, be a poet making
his book, not an editor or publisher building a book. Look out for
that great cloud, too. It'll come as voices: I'm not good enough, I'm
not ready enough, it's all just shit, actually,,,,. Put cotton in
your mind's ears. Or, better, hear yourself reading the poem to
somebody you will try to sell the book to ...as you read the poem
to yourself for possible inclusion.

To lighten the mood. A poem I wrote looking at Julia across the
table, in the Mediterraneum, where she wasn't always hawking
books.... She sometimes toyed with cards, placed them on the table,
which heightened other things on the table...,

TARO
        for Julia V.

Place them on the table
for reading designs in time.
Taken, each, from my deck.
The first card -
this cup of dark stained waters.
The second -
this squared, curl-fingered hand.
The third -
crossings in this live realm.
And more cards
to be laid out in woven array,
with each
only to be found,
its place in the deck
its last mystery.
And in this laying out
of Universe's momentary chips
there is no tarrying,
only the turning, in wild
rhythm, of rota-
ting, humming, reddened wheel.
And one thing
more - the reading in array,
the finding of what I've found.

Well, end of lecture. I've an old belief, something I find to scream
out at the great cloud, Bennet's Moloch, "Making a book is as
personal as making a poem, it's the same.... If it's going to mean
something to somebody else, it's got to mean something to you."

Gene

Gene Fowler
(April of ret. @ddress is m' wyf)
acorioso@earthlink.net
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