Marketing and Teaching Poetry and Things
One of the problems that small publishers face is distribution, distribution that is, to places that pay for copies. Juice publishes online, but more permanently on CD formats. The CD's offer an opportunity to actually sell a product that has a chance of lasting beyond the ephemeral web sites. We used to sell a fair number of our print issues of Juice to Libraries. It was a wonderful combination of distribution and necessary supplemental revenue.
I wrote an open email to members of the Juice squad (Mugsy,Gene, and Judy) asking if any of them knew how to go about soliciting libraries and other interested institutions. The following is an excerpt from the nuts and bolts exchange.
Best,
Stephen Morse
***************
"Are you looking for a list of University/College Presses that publish poetry and their email addresses?" MUGSY
GENE:
I'm not answering for Stephen, but this all came from my working on those brochures and letters in which the audio set is used as incentive to elicit contributions for Juice online and, maybe in a larger context, for purchases of the growing chain of back issues...
Not markets for poets. Markets that matter for what's published, in this instance Juice online and, more importantly, the whole future of digitally preserved poetry. I only created a context ("dream world", maybe) into which to write. I call it the future. Someday (in the future) the present will perhaps match it.
Anyway, what I described went something like this. Universities , public and private libraries, possibly even museums or other institutions focused on culture or something like that, ...
... who have collections of small press publications, "little magazines", focusing on literature, not politics or something, and keep those collections separate from the general collections and rare documents collections- though maybe with links to the latter as they'll take on "rarity" in time.
People who are in charge of such collections, even if young, will have institutional, if not personal, memory of me. On my table of books on my site, I have an incomplete section on anthologies I was in during the sixties and seventies. This is a small piece of the gather from the past that makes me confident of that institutional memory. So, we c'n use the very photogenic presentation of the 3 Disk Set to penetrate into the awareness of a person who cares for one of these collections, and, once in his or her head, we sell not just Juice online copies, but the whole extension into "on disc" publications, audio, e-zine and, the mysteriously alluring hyperzine text+ publications. We push toward wrapping the "acquisition" activities back into the familiar paper acquiring.
But, that's all my "dream world" mumbling. Still, back in the sixties and seventies there was a poet around the little magazines, a name like Simon Perchik, or Perchek, I think (I might be merging two people), but he was very proud of a collection he had built and was maintaining, at a mid-western university. I knew of him and his activity only indirectly, mostly through shared contributor's copies of magazines with bio notes. It made an impression.
So, what might be out there in that vast left field? References to, and then web presences of the institutions with such collections. Finally, maybe, ground-mail and e-mail pointers to the holder and the individual caring for ...the collection. Maybe....
Then, we c'n see about putting my reading of that 1963-1976 book they possibly have (General collections have it all over the country, and my others books in various combinations), and they likely have my letters, already, in various collections. A. D. Winans has his Second Coming Press papers at Brown University and Bukowsky was his second most prolific correspondent. Paul Foreman has his Thorp Springs collection at University of Texas and he holds (they aren't primarily in there) a three million word collection of my carbons. I've no connection with those sets of papers, no idea if that, a very different sort of thing than "collections", being archival, indicates any interest in publications or collecting them. Both Paul and A.D. seem uneasy when (as I did just out of curiosity some time back) questions come up. Places to stand in the sunlight waken competitive hopes and fears. I doubt any truly believe me when I say I'm not competing for anything.
Someday, of course, most things collected will have been published digitally rather than on paper, and other things in both simultaneously, but the digital containing lots more in various ways. An example pops into my head. You saw the post, maybe some of the letters, in which I, and then Stephen, played with doing the haiku both horizontally and vertically, and you see in the new post to Dean that ...when I went vertically, I rewrote the poem. The so-called "formatting" changes (which were really different playings) opened up different (musical?) possibilities. So, in a digital magazine the divergent end products c'n be presented as a series. Back in the notes section there c'n even be some talk about it, A reader sees multiple possibilities and gets access to the workshops, too. Then, a poet's reading of the versions c'n be tossed in, too. An editor thinks not just is the work worth "printing", but, too, "Is it worth using to show this extra activity". Everything expands.
I suggested to Stephen, remember, that in Juice, those two, at least, versions of Motorcycle to Hell be printed together, one after the other (one scroll or page, though, maybe separated by a single line: "then..."). I'm already living in 2060.
Anyway, what's worth looking for isn't likely ever to be found in a Poetry Market book, but as I suggested to Stephen, who hasn't time for "left-field" gold-detecting, a letter, publisher to publisher, about getting dustBOOKs assets focused into this very useful for everybody search to produce a salable list.
"…that’s a highly complimentary take on my “left field” thing, Gene, most people aren’t quite that nice about it." Mugsy
GENE:
Most can't be complimentary about anything that's indirect, requiring connections to be made, as it scares the s**t out of 'em.... I look for it, as a basic sign of life. The nomenclature I worked up for "Waking the Poet" explains this. I started at the base. Take the interest in "phonetics" and the assignment of phones to glyphs.... that's not very good for teaching kids, but not because the whole word idiocy is better. Actually, the two should be integrated, awareness of wholes and parts together, BUT "phonetics" should give way to "phonemics". Not just sounds, but meaningful sounds, attached to meaningful glyphs. Anyway, not to write a new volume of Waking, allow that the phonemic flow, at least for the poet, ought to be there in writing and, later, in reading. That was my ground way in. Melopoeia isn't just to do with metric and rhyming, but is right down in the sounding of the language. So, I thought to kick off from that, from playing, and feeling yourself playing, the phonemic instrument that is language. So, my next thing was to do the same with experience to get our phanopoeia. Nor figures of speech, not even images. But, well, pieces of experience", pulled out of what Milton Erickson always referred to as our "storehouse of experiential learnings". I wrote about, then, our sensemic instrument to be played....
So, as we play, phonemically and sensemically, we are filling out our language flow, with the music of speaking and with the reality of experience, but we're still short of what accounts for the potential of indirectly encompassing something well beyond the literal, logopoeia, sometimes called (with the Greeks) the auric mystery, sometimes (in human terms) intelligence.
And here lies the player, who even if in the infield, say at short stop, is aware of, and drawing on, the vast "outfield" behind him or her, behind e, that is non-Euclidean, and in our Sphere of existence, always circles back, in all directions, to encompass human apprehending and comprehending of life.
My latest post, playing with Dean's [Dean Blehert] two haiku prods in this direction.
Gene
I wrote an open email to members of the Juice squad (Mugsy,Gene, and Judy) asking if any of them knew how to go about soliciting libraries and other interested institutions. The following is an excerpt from the nuts and bolts exchange.
Best,
Stephen Morse
***************
"Are you looking for a list of University/College Presses that publish poetry and their email addresses?" MUGSY
GENE:
I'm not answering for Stephen, but this all came from my working on those brochures and letters in which the audio set is used as incentive to elicit contributions for Juice online and, maybe in a larger context, for purchases of the growing chain of back issues...
Not markets for poets. Markets that matter for what's published, in this instance Juice online and, more importantly, the whole future of digitally preserved poetry. I only created a context ("dream world", maybe) into which to write. I call it the future. Someday (in the future) the present will perhaps match it.
Anyway, what I described went something like this. Universities , public and private libraries, possibly even museums or other institutions focused on culture or something like that, ...
... who have collections of small press publications, "little magazines", focusing on literature, not politics or something, and keep those collections separate from the general collections and rare documents collections- though maybe with links to the latter as they'll take on "rarity" in time.
People who are in charge of such collections, even if young, will have institutional, if not personal, memory of me. On my table of books on my site, I have an incomplete section on anthologies I was in during the sixties and seventies. This is a small piece of the gather from the past that makes me confident of that institutional memory. So, we c'n use the very photogenic presentation of the 3 Disk Set to penetrate into the awareness of a person who cares for one of these collections, and, once in his or her head, we sell not just Juice online copies, but the whole extension into "on disc" publications, audio, e-zine and, the mysteriously alluring hyperzine text+ publications. We push toward wrapping the "acquisition" activities back into the familiar paper acquiring.
But, that's all my "dream world" mumbling. Still, back in the sixties and seventies there was a poet around the little magazines, a name like Simon Perchik, or Perchek, I think (I might be merging two people), but he was very proud of a collection he had built and was maintaining, at a mid-western university. I knew of him and his activity only indirectly, mostly through shared contributor's copies of magazines with bio notes. It made an impression.
So, what might be out there in that vast left field? References to, and then web presences of the institutions with such collections. Finally, maybe, ground-mail and e-mail pointers to the holder and the individual caring for ...the collection. Maybe....
Then, we c'n see about putting my reading of that 1963-1976 book they possibly have (General collections have it all over the country, and my others books in various combinations), and they likely have my letters, already, in various collections. A. D. Winans has his Second Coming Press papers at Brown University and Bukowsky was his second most prolific correspondent. Paul Foreman has his Thorp Springs collection at University of Texas and he holds (they aren't primarily in there) a three million word collection of my carbons. I've no connection with those sets of papers, no idea if that, a very different sort of thing than "collections", being archival, indicates any interest in publications or collecting them. Both Paul and A.D. seem uneasy when (as I did just out of curiosity some time back) questions come up. Places to stand in the sunlight waken competitive hopes and fears. I doubt any truly believe me when I say I'm not competing for anything.
Someday, of course, most things collected will have been published digitally rather than on paper, and other things in both simultaneously, but the digital containing lots more in various ways. An example pops into my head. You saw the post, maybe some of the letters, in which I, and then Stephen, played with doing the haiku both horizontally and vertically, and you see in the new post to Dean that ...when I went vertically, I rewrote the poem. The so-called "formatting" changes (which were really different playings) opened up different (musical?) possibilities. So, in a digital magazine the divergent end products c'n be presented as a series. Back in the notes section there c'n even be some talk about it, A reader sees multiple possibilities and gets access to the workshops, too. Then, a poet's reading of the versions c'n be tossed in, too. An editor thinks not just is the work worth "printing", but, too, "Is it worth using to show this extra activity". Everything expands.
I suggested to Stephen, remember, that in Juice, those two, at least, versions of Motorcycle to Hell be printed together, one after the other (one scroll or page, though, maybe separated by a single line: "then..."). I'm already living in 2060.
Anyway, what's worth looking for isn't likely ever to be found in a Poetry Market book, but as I suggested to Stephen, who hasn't time for "left-field" gold-detecting, a letter, publisher to publisher, about getting dustBOOKs assets focused into this very useful for everybody search to produce a salable list.
"…that’s a highly complimentary take on my “left field” thing, Gene, most people aren’t quite that nice about it." Mugsy
GENE:
Most can't be complimentary about anything that's indirect, requiring connections to be made, as it scares the s**t out of 'em.... I look for it, as a basic sign of life. The nomenclature I worked up for "Waking the Poet" explains this. I started at the base. Take the interest in "phonetics" and the assignment of phones to glyphs.... that's not very good for teaching kids, but not because the whole word idiocy is better. Actually, the two should be integrated, awareness of wholes and parts together, BUT "phonetics" should give way to "phonemics". Not just sounds, but meaningful sounds, attached to meaningful glyphs. Anyway, not to write a new volume of Waking, allow that the phonemic flow, at least for the poet, ought to be there in writing and, later, in reading. That was my ground way in. Melopoeia isn't just to do with metric and rhyming, but is right down in the sounding of the language. So, I thought to kick off from that, from playing, and feeling yourself playing, the phonemic instrument that is language. So, my next thing was to do the same with experience to get our phanopoeia. Nor figures of speech, not even images. But, well, pieces of experience", pulled out of what Milton Erickson always referred to as our "storehouse of experiential learnings". I wrote about, then, our sensemic instrument to be played....
So, as we play, phonemically and sensemically, we are filling out our language flow, with the music of speaking and with the reality of experience, but we're still short of what accounts for the potential of indirectly encompassing something well beyond the literal, logopoeia, sometimes called (with the Greeks) the auric mystery, sometimes (in human terms) intelligence.
And here lies the player, who even if in the infield, say at short stop, is aware of, and drawing on, the vast "outfield" behind him or her, behind e, that is non-Euclidean, and in our Sphere of existence, always circles back, in all directions, to encompass human apprehending and comprehending of life.
My latest post, playing with Dean's [Dean Blehert] two haiku prods in this direction.
Gene
posted by Stephen Morse at 1:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home