BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Hearts and flowers, that's how some people dismiss poetry, suggesting that's all there is to it, just a bunch of sappy poets weeping over love and beauty. Well, poetry is lots more than that. At times it's a means of honoring the simple things about us. To illustrate the care with which one poet observes a flower, here's Frank Steele, of Kentucky, paying such close attention to a sunflower that he almost gets inside it.

Sunflower

You're expected to see
only the top, where sky
scrambles bloom, and not
the spindly leg, hairy, fending off
tall, green darkness beneath.
Like every flower, she has a little
theory, and what she thinks
is up. I imagine the long
climb out of the dark
beyond morning glories, day lilies, four o'clocks
up there to the dream she keeps
lifting, where it's noon all day.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2001 by Frank Steele. Reprinted from "Singing into That Fresh Light," co-authored with Peggy Steele, ed., Robert Bly, Blue Sofa Press, 2001, by permission of Frank Steele. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

–by Charles A. Taormina
Copyright © 2008 by Charles A. Taormina

Recently, in a casual talk with Rager Media’s editor, Christopher White, I broached the question of writer’s acceptance, all writers or one writer, new or old. We considered an article by novelist and instructor, David Hollander, a Poets & Writers columnist, who questioned why so many authors in the classroom were put through writers’ or readers’ group sessions, especially via MFA writing programs. It begs the question of integrity, about each writer doing his or her personal creativity. Hollander, also a guitarist, wrote: “At no time does a musician sit in a circle of fifteen strangers from disparate musical backgrounds, play his song, and then allow them to ‘offer feedback’ on it.” (Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2006)

Inspired by that comment, I took it a step further in asking would a painter, sculptor, or other artist ever do that? Do you think Van Gogh or Rodin or Picasso would’ve ever turned from his outdoor paint box or marble or easel, to stop in the midst of an unfinished stone or canvas, to ask a passerby which was a better shade of pastel, or which cut was more responsive, which Cubist eye more astute for Picasso? Yet a writer works away as an individual artist, then amidst a crew of well-intentioned listeners, attempts to change his or her art, with a hundred and one possibly boorish or bad suggestions. It’s a corporate/university mindset, the “team member” concept, a good ole’ boy sports scene, rule by conformist Groupthink . . . Even Hollywood puts nearly finished films through the rigors of “focus groups,” where final endings are tested for popularity amongst unwary twelve-year-olds (How to ruin a film: “Fatal Attraction” was turned from complex adult cinema with an original ending that displayed Glenn Close’s character’s feelings of self-destruction, to the actual finale of a goofy, shower stall knife attack). My point is that acceptance needs to be a consideration of our publishing process, what it means and what it should or could mean, for serious writers and readers, for the individual. One person writes for one person at a time to read. Acceptance needs to expand if our culture is to prevail.

Perhaps, for those not so familiar with contemporary publishing these days, especially the sort who write online, use POD (Print On Demand), broadside or independent printing, and to a certain extent for the smaller presses, this effort is all held at bay. “Print On Demand” refers to setting up a one-time computer file process for a printable book (complete with page layout, cover design, all finished editorial processes) and then being able to print one book at a time from that file, on order, or twenty books or as many as desired. The process can be expensive, moderately priced ($500/book), or free. The process is open to individuals, not only university or corporate conglomerates. It suddenly allows for new authors or controversial writers to print books, or even publishers wanting to keep an out-of-print book available for instant order (without having to invest in overprinting and warehousing thousands of volumes). It thus eliminates three pitfalls of traditional publishing: publication scarcity, warehousing of volumes, and bookstore return of unsold books. (www.paraview.com)

Also, we must consider direct online publishing with the massive increase in web logs, or blogging. Some years ago in an e-mail comment to Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual and prodigious organizer, lecturer, and consultant for the self-publishing industry, I commented on his statement about how “the Internet has become our library.” My reply was how the Internet also has become our new printing press. Today, we might add, it’s become our primary distribution channel (and with the proliferation and easy transmission of entirely electronic books, or e-books, we might suggest that the Internet’s our complete process for library storage, printing, and distribution). The number of blogs now is estimated at over 112 million, with 175,000 starting new each day (www.technorati.com). Renaissance? To explore creatively, we have to look for sites or ways to navigate all that, which of course is why there are new services: Technorati, BlogScope, and Bloglines.

Getting attention for POD books or other electronic offerings, as well as for others by independent or small publishers however, continues to be difficult. Some critics label POD volumes in disparaging terms reminiscent of Soviet ideological times, as “non-books,” or decry problems such as missing extra design or team editorial benefits usual with mainstream commercial publishing . . . there are errors or needy editorial changes evident with many humbly published tomes. These critics however, especially in the last ten or so years, fail to face one fact: In American publishing today it’s often the worst books, the basest, foolish, most sensational (or as with business or utilitarian nonfiction or text books, the most ordinary), which are the actual books that do get professional editing. Again, with POD publishers, the authors do most of the work themselves, with an occasional outside editor contracted privately.

The mainstream press in America generally has stopped publishing new literary authors—unless the writer is well-connected (it is astonishing that quality novelists such as E.L. Doctorow and Toni Morrison started their careers as editors for established New York publishing houses), or the author is from abroad. We must remember from the last discussion (“Our Rebirth of Writing”) that a prime strategy of Censorship is avoidance, generally boycotting or completely refusing to publish certain works, topics, or authors.

Collusion with other media can be illustrated with a personal example of mine. I attended a public support forum for authors, in Pittsburgh, PA a few years ago; it was for Salman Rushdie, upon the uproar with publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses. I didn’t particularly care for the author or book, but was invited by my literary agent at that time to attend the event that she personally sponsored. My agent also arranged for me to speak with a visiting journalist from a Pittsburgh daily. I mentioned to the reporter that I had a novel and other books represented by the agent, that I had in fact written my first book after visiting Morocco (my novel Abbas & Merdan was set in an Islamic nation), and that one had to wonder how Rushdie ever got his book published at all. I suggested that if he had written a title promoting Socialism—this during the Cold War—that it never would’ve seen publication in the West. Yet for “secular publishers” his tome was fine. Imagine instead, if his book were titled, “The Communist Poetry of Karl Marx.” Later, I was surprised to read the female journalist’s coverage—the only mention made of any writers there was an innocuous remark from a real estate agent who was a “weekend novelist,” promoting his sci-fi novel. Thus, the journalist avoided or censored entirely a legitimate literary author making a comment that didn’t fit the newspaper’s agenda. She vanished the event. Similarly, my “Letter to the Editor” for Newsweek in 2006, which voiced distress about the drift and errors of an article supporting “The Da Vinci Code,” was ignored; I expressed how if that novel had been about slandering Mohammed or Moses, the book never would’ve been published. We must understand what forces exactly are in control of the presses to defuse any irony, confusion, irrationality. Of course, that’s exactly how our censorship continues.

I’ve made a similar case for mainstream media’s avoidance of recognizing an Arts Movement in the late 1970’s in Virginia. The primary authors published in Virginia at that time were mostly university professors, instead of an active group of poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, editors, painters, photographers, and cinematographers that I worked with as an independent author, journalist, and magazine editor—mentioned in the preface to my novel, Gratuity. Probably there have been other literary movements in America that also have been squelched by the mainstream press: San Francisco, Washington, DC, and New York? If the public ever questions why there’s nothing akin to the arts movements of the New England Renaissance of 1850’s or the 1920’s in Paris with “The Lost Generation,” it’s not because they haven’t taken place, it’s because America’s Art Movements have yet to be documented and publicized.

The question of whether or not to even read literary novelists from outside of America may sound xenophobic. But often the non-American author on our bestseller lists is there precisely because he or she is published outside of America, from India, Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan or elsewhere. I guess that’s because those countries (or the U.K.) still publish the individual literary artist, whose work then gets read for world readership and eventually gets accepted elsewhere, even in the USA. It’s difficult for me to get excited at all, however, about a twenty-something Pakistani author now in America, when so many thousands of my own fellow citizens, serious literary men and women, are unable to get their works accepted by a publisher or circulated in any fashion in our own nation.

(My estimates are conservative if we take my last article’s figures of there now being 135,000 new titles printed each year in the U.S. mostly with POD and independent publishers. We might suggest that even with an improbable 3 books/writer, the number of unpublished authors in America was in the range of over 40,000, actually the size a small city. Artsville?)

Does the populace here actually think that nobody in the United States is producing deep, serious, or complex work nowadays? Or that the awful or trite nonsense put out by the mainstream is any indication of what serious writers in this country believe, live by, or produce on their own? Or that all serious writers teach in universities and publish obscure books only for tenure résumés (a publishing phenomena I labeled some years ago as “Teacher Lit”)? The populace must misunderstand how their culture is not only assaulted, violated, corrupted—but in fact, diminished into almost minimal sustenance these days, if we may speak here at all of high culture.

I feel that it’s important to look point-blank at the publishing scene, to understand it in an historical context, to know what’s really going on today. We need to see the vanguard of real writing, where it is or will be, and to accept that vanguard for its advance position in this moment at the forefront of literary art: that is, a real position of the oft-touted phrase, “avant-garde.” So, first, is history.

Publishing, not as we know it, but as we accept the technical innovation of it, began in Europe mostly in 1455 with Johann Gutenberg (in an industrial publishing sense); his was the production of one of the first printed books, The Bible (we might note his own bankruptcy later, taken over most “ironically” by a man named Johann Fust, whom some claim to be the origin of the Faust legend so popularized by Marlowe and Goethe). Gutenberg used a screw printing press modified from a common wine press, with an efficient printing process unsurpassed until the 19th Century. (www.ink.news.com.au) China is said to have originated the first printing in 593 AD, first printed newspaper in Beijing in 700AD, first woodblock printed book in 868 AD. It is thought that missionaries back from the Orient introduced block printing to Europeans before 1300 AD (used commonly for fabric designs). Gutenberg’s book innovation included movable metal type, with standardized text and uniform pages of print on paper using an oil-based ink, and professionally bound editions. (www.Wikipedia.com)

Contemporaneously in 1455 there were still “scriptoria,” writing rooms or cells or workshops, active in monasteries (the salvation of most surviving editions of ancient source manuscripts in Europe). Ecclesiastics such as Pope Nicholas V and wealthy humanists like Federigo of Montefeltro or Cosimo de’ Medici also had book copyists in continuous employ, whose sole duty was to hand copy or rewrite page after page of text. One man could produce one new book in 2-5 months (a Bible similar to Gutenberg’s might require one scribe a year or more to hand copy). For one project, Cosimo had 45 writers deliver 200 volumes in 22 months. (“Civilization of the Renaissance In Italy” by Jacob Burckhardt) A duke or other nobleman, within a few years and millions of ducats, might boast of a modest library of only fifty to a few hundred new volumes; collected sources might push that number to 600-800. Also, as pointed out in Roderick Cave’s “Private Press,” the total “was almost certainly dwarfed by the number of manuscripts which scholars copied out for their own use, as Petrarch, Chaucer . . .”

Suddenly, mechanical production was introduced to the world, so that by 1500 AD some 9 million printed books were in circulation. (www.ink.news.com.au).

The earliest history of printing or books might be attributed however, to Mesopotamia, around 3100 BC, with a cylinder seal, a porcelain or clay or pottery actual small cylinder, with raised pictures (and later cuneiform glyphs), that could roll a uniform “picture story” onto clay tablets or cloth or, later, parchment. Some claim that signet stones, seals, and stamps or signet rings, were the earliest forms of printing. The earliest book, though, might be the Babylonian clay tablets, letters impressed with a stylus. From Egypt came papyrus (and from china something closer to paper), with scrolls attached one to another to make lengthy “books,” which might be stored rolled onto two spindles, as one often sees in historical pictures of the Hebrew Talmud. Such scrolls without the spindles could be stored in libraries (first public library in Rome was the Libertas Temple in 39 BC) in something appearing to us as vertical wine racks, where the scrolls might be inserted and kept dry and accessible. (As obscure as such historical notes might appear, it is significant that even today our most technologically advanced still “scroll” their computer screens.) In Ancient Rome commercial publishers issued editions of as many as 5000 copies of classical authors, produced by literate slaves. Scribes in ancient Athens, Alexandria, and Rome made those cities the centers of book production and exporters to the known world. (www.Encarta.msn.com) Also, the ancient Greek and Romans had smaller hand-held wooden tablets (called a “pugillare”) covered with wax, that one could use a metal stylus upon, to write notes, accounts, letters for servants to transcribe, or for teaching children writing (the wax could be wiped over to erase the inscription and start over again). Several of the pugillares tied together were called “codices,” an early form of our modern multi-chapter, bound-book concept, codex. (www.Wikipedia.org) (www.RandyAsplund.com) Today, of course, we have evolved to completely electronic files, or “e-books.”

However, the common publishing process for centuries, until Gutenberg’s major innovation in Europe, was that an author took his copy of the original scroll or codex, handed it to a friend to read, and if the friend liked the book, he or his servants handwrote 2-3 copies, and voilà, publication.

More scrolls were passed hand-to-hand, hand-written, saved, circulated and eventually in later years collated into flat editions with bound bulk pages or a crude early book; pages were fastened on one side and also called a “codex.” All of this, however, was a handicraft then, by artisans individual and private yet obsessive enough to save valued text and pass it along for study and enjoyment and erudition among contemporaries, and eventually posterity. But complete publishing, with control by gatekeepers (either with motives financial or ethical/religious/political/artistic) as today, was unknown.

What preceded 1455 for year after year, century upon millennia into the past was different. Roderick Cave explains common publishing, “When he [the author] published his completed book, he did so by permitting his friends to read the [handwritten] manuscript he had written.” (“The Private Press”)

I had to laugh some years ago when the “John Adams” biography by David McCullough was popular in book form (the TV series is currently in vogue). I was reading of Jefferson’s trip to Paris and McCullough’s mention of publication for Thomas Jefferson (as American ambassador and father of American Revolution, not yet president), for Jefferson’s recently completed book, “The Notes on the State of Virginia.” His “peer review” and acceptance by a publisher, editorial rework, meeting with a marketing team, confronting a “bottom-line” accounting department, etc. evidently consisted of this: Upon finishing his manuscript, Jefferson took some money and his manuscript to a local French printer; he ordered the printing of 200 copies within an agreed upon time. Thomas Jefferson later picked up his books and handed them out to friends. Again, voilà!

Never did authors need to jump through the hoops, academic, commercial, actual or conceptual, with the nonsense of current commercial or mainstream American publishing. That didn’t exist. Authors never expected much remuneration from their work (early on) and the writing itself brought other benefits: Jefferson with reputation, political appointments, and a smoother relationship with the French, who had asked about his home state of Virginia; Franklin with civic success and scientific notoriety and financial independence, Thomas Paine with revolution (patron and instigator of the new American Experiment with Democracy, though he died in obscurity, penniless). The work was printed and circulated and it did connect with many readers and political systems over generations, fortunately. Earlier, however, the Dutch Humanist scholar, Erasmus (1466-1536), was one of the first authors to live independently from his publications.

Modern times have provided more diverse publishing processes; we need only to look to such repressive regimes as the old Soviet Union. The Soviet author’s option was to take an original typed manuscript, make Xerox or hand-typed copies of each book and circulate the privately produced volumes in secret among friends and other discerning readers. With the underground system readers made further copies and continued covert circulation. (The Columbia Encyclopedia) The Russian poet Nikolai Glazkov dubbed the process Samizdat (“self-published”). It worked well enough to keep modern Russian literature alive with the writings of Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, and others like Alexander Ginzburg in prison or repressed for the effort of literary production and publishing within Soviet borders (or popularized Czech playwright and later President, Václev Havel). (www.Wikipedia.org) Some of Solzhenitsyn’s work was published by official media in the U.S.S.R., but much had to be smuggled to the West, such as his “Gulag” and the novels, “First Circle” and “Cancer Ward.” (“The Solzhenitsyn Reader,” edited by Ericson and Mahoney)

But to whom, exactly, are we to smuggle out our book manuscripts? To the new Russia? To Canada or France or England (which had staunch censorship laws on the books until 1968, at least for theatre)? Lest this seem extreme or an essayist’s rhetorical effect, it should be noted that for ten years there was a dynamic small press magazine begun in USA and later continued in Canada, which dubbed itself, “Samisdat.” I know because the editor there, an outspoken literary publisher, Merritt Clifton, sent friendly advice as I was starting my own U.S. literary magazine, The Blue Ridge Review. He later reprinted my short story, “The Butcher” (Collected into my volume, Moments). That short story had been rejected by magazine editors here; however, once published in The Blue Ridge Review, I discovered that Virginia students at the nearby university were stopping graduate literature classes to discuss the story. Later, editor Clifton re-published “The Butcher” in Canada and commented, “This is the best short story to appear in the American Small Press all year.” That is offered not as self-advertisement, rather as one factual incident showing the incompetence of America’s publishing process and again, the failure of vision upon the editorial staff here. If the reader refuses to believe, simply look at the dross of conventional publishing these days.

Writers who have done just this, however — that is, sending their manuscripts abroad or going outside of the United States (or their native countries) and getting published are numerous. Consider novelist and National Book Award winner, Mary Lee Settle (went to England), political dissenter and linguist Noam Chomsky (Canada), author and painter Henry Miller (France), author and art collector Gertrude Stein (France), D. H. Lawrence (published in Italy), Joyce (published in France), and Boris Pasternak (published in Italy). My own story, “The Butcher,” again was reprinted in Canada and my literary magazine, The Blue Ridge Review, was exhibited in Poland (before the U.S.S.R. ended). I also marketed abroad chapters of nonfiction works rejected here, finally publishing part of my book manuscript, “Infinity,” with a journal in India (pacifist Chapter 14, “WAR/Peace-Peace\WAR”).

I’m going on here, though, to present concerns of where writer and reader could move from, and when or how it might go in the future. The current disparaging of POD and self-published works (or some independent publishers) is a contradiction . . . there are so many well-established, accepted geniuses of literature who all started with, or resorted to, self-published work. Self-Publishing is the primary way to do it — that is, to start a writing career! In fact, many general readers would be shocked to learn the “publishing history” of even the common literary canon of their earlier school years—we might suggest that if left up to “conventional publishers,” there would be few authors of the classics for anyone to read.

Most salient of the self-published are: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and the novel considered first among world reading lists, James Joyce’s Ulysses (published by a friend).

That’s for starters. But consider even one’s older high school list and the authors so touted. Thoreau published Walden himself (most of the first edition collected dust in Emerson’s attic). Walt Whitman is almost a cliché with his continual printing and reprinting of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass (to be fair it was an ever-growing work-in-progress, annotated and added to throughout his life); Whitman even had to write his first published book review himself (pilfering without permission a kind response from Emerson, “a blurb.”). The originator of “America’s conversational writing style,” that singular master, Mark Twain, was of course discovered by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (his true name) with a self-published first volume of short stories. Twain later published further editions of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and continued a publishing effort by printing the work of a famous general and president, the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which became a bestseller. In Great Britain we might consider the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published posthumously by two actor friends. The great Virginia Woolf, beloved feminist authors and classified among the top English Modernists, was printed primarily by the publisher she and her husband created, Hogarth Press. In fact, the trio of masters of the Modernist British novel, Woolf, Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence, all did private publishing.

John Milton defended self-publishing freedoms in 1644 by publishing Areopagitica. Upton Sinclair printed his own work; early Hemingway was self-published, as was the experimental author Gertrude Stein, early George Bernard Shaw, Ginsburg’s famous mimeographed poem, “Howl,” and the first book by a favorite poet of mine e.e. cummings “No Thanks” (on its early pages are 13 publishers who had rejected him). Our list includes classical authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Alexandre Dumas, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, Hans Christian Andersen, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Anais Nin, plus the likes of Ben Franklin (able to retire at age 42 from self-publishing efforts of newspapers and his perennial bestseller, Poor Richard’s Almanack,), Zane Grey, Lord Byron, William Morris, the modern poets Nikki Giovanni, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, T.S. Eliot, Robert Bly, and older masters Percy Shelley, Melville’s poetry, Oscar Wilde, Tennyson, William Blake, such modern notables as Dave Eggers, Julia Cameron, Stewart Brand, R. Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager, Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence, William Strunk’s Elements of Style, John Bartlett (3 editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations), Noah Webster’s early Blue-Backed Speller, before he complied the first American Dictionary. Stephen King in 2000 self-published online an e-book, The Plant. Other book favorites should be noted, for without self-publishing we’d never have the children’s staples by Beatrix Potter or Theodor Seuss Geisel, “Dr. Seuss,” or the oversized, hand-painted ornithological classic by John James Audubon, The Birds of America. (See John Kremer’s www.SelfpublishingHallofFame.com and e-book of same title, also Dan Poynter’s “Self-Published Books,” Doc. #155, www.ParaPublishing.com.)

Again, we must understand that our literary culture would be missing the names of its most illustrious, if each author finally had not believed in him or herself, to continue where mainstream rejection ruled. If writers note even three references cited earlier: Bartlett’s “Quotations,” Strunk’s Elements of Style, and America’s creator of the “Dictionary,” you might even wonder how we’d continue at all! One might suggest we would have no print culture whatsoever, without each author’s individual effort. So such self-publishing is the opposite of how mainstream media reports about it (or reasons POD volumes and e-books are often avoided in reviews). That is the primary focus: it is essential for the media to embrace, applaud, support, and watch for the next burgeoning literary talent, societal commentator, conceptual revolutionary, insightful author of spiritual tomes.

And when we think of critics decrying some of the inevitable errors of self-publisher or small publishers, especially with the difficulty of proofreading properly, we might remember the efforts of English author, D.H. Lawrence, where his publisher refused publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence simply went out to a nearby printer (he happened to be living in Italy) and had his novel typeset and printed in English, by Italians who had no knowledge of the English language whatsoever. Lawrence probably had more typos per page than most POD publishers find in an entire volume!

Here then, is where we must take a stand for the individual literary artist and understand how his or her work might appear for the publishing and reading public now—and make plans to promote such new works, as the necessary writing of the 21st Century. Once that’s accepted we must consider how to connect with some sort of network: how do the new readers and the new writers find each other? How do you pass along the good news of finding a new author’s works these days? Writers must be nurtured.

Publishing periodicals or journals is one way, as is seen with Rager Media, and with many online or “ezines.” There are unique offerings: Clarkesworld Magazine, Storyglossia, The Big Ugly Review, The Wild River Review, Terrain.org (from Utne Reader, www.utne.com). There’s a dynamic “Top 50 Literary Magazines and Metazines” list at www.webdelsol.com and a more complete list of online and print lit mags at www.newpages.com. Established print journals include: The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train Stories, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, The New Renaissance. Study many authors and you’ll see literary creators similar to the earlier list who also self-published periodicals: Dostoevsky had to start three journals, Time, Epoch, and Writer’s Diary to showcase his work and keep active; Dickens did the same with the journal All The Year Round, Pound with Blast, and others. Also, I produced a literary magazine, The Blue Ridge Review and later a global renaissance print newsletter called, Virtù. These are vehicles for writers and artists to reach out to an audience and create an active readership. We might consider how other artists created publications with Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and Le Corbusier’s architecture journal, L’Espirit Nouveau. Note also that in the 1990’s the majority of comic book titles were self-published, as were many rock musicians, and also upcoming new cinematographers with “Indie Films.” (www.Wikipedia.org) What else can be done?

With a final acceptance of the individual it might be offered that for all intents and purposes, I believe America’s Freedom of Press only became truly free with a new commercial venue, an innovation early in the year 2000. That was when POD publisher, Xlibris (in conjunction with partner Random House), chose to boost their new site and POD core services. Xlibris offered for a time, totally free, the set-up for any author of his or her manuscript, to convert it to POD book publication. As far as I know, this was the first time ever that our Freedom of the Press was backed up economically with a truly free-of-charge press offering, including no gatekeepers, for new or established writers. We still don’t have Freedom of Communication (distribution to active readers), though surely that one event finally established our Freedom of the Press. The free offer has changed with Xlibris; yet that was a worthy innovation—it’s important to note that there are other commercial publishers online currently offering similar free services today.

I truly believe that this sort of press option, free POD book publishing (and for e-books), should be offered by our Federal Government, so as to ensure Freedom of the Press for any U.S. citizen interested in publishing his or her books. It would guarantee a cultural future for all Americans. One might even suggest a “sin tax” similar to that placed on cigarettes for more conventional or pulp book publishing (for “syntax” dangerous to your health), to help defray costs for authors with a free American Literary Press. Individual creativity! Without that we are left with private patrons, previous censorship discussions, and the harsh assessment by journalist and critic A. J. Liebling: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

Some Ways to Stay Active With Publishing (Publishing Resources)

1. POD sites:
www.LuLu.com, www.Xlibris.com,
www.InfinityPublishing.com,
www.BookSurge.com,
www.BookstandPublishing.com,
www.AuthorHouse.com.

2. Books & sites for self-publishing:
“The Self-Publishing Manual” by Dan Poynter, www.ParaPublishing.com,
“The Complete Guide To Self-Publishing” by Tom & Marilyn Ross, www.SpanNet.org,
“1001 Ways To Market Your Book,” by John Kremer, www.Bookmarket.com. (These three references are master guides to self-publishing in America, must reads! Each site also offers extensive online resources and free e-mail newsletters.)

3. Resources about history of printing:
www.printinghistory.org/index.html,
www.ink.news.com.au/mercury/print_museum/print_history.htm,
www.inventors.about.com.

4. Online digital libraries:
Project Gutenberg, www.ProjectGutenberg.org and
Google Books, www.Books.Google.com. (Microsoft’s digital book efforts have ended.)

5. Books on Censorship:
“Manufacturing Consent” by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, “Censored 2007” by Peter Phillips & Project Censored, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” by Robert W. McChesney.

6. E-books:
Resources, www.ebookcrossroads.com,
E-book reading devices, www.myebizreviews.com, and
E-publishing, www.writerswrite.com/epublishing/resources.htm.

7. Other Self-publishing sites:
www.writerswrite.com/selfpublishing,
www.selfpublishing.com,
www.writing-world.com.

8. Len Fulton’s Dustbooks:
www.dustbooks.com, with Small Press Review, “International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses,” and “Directory of Poetry Publishers.” Since 1965 Fulton was one of first and continual organizers of independent or alternative literary press offerings in America, an unsung hero. He is also a playwright and novelist.

9. Publishing Industry:
www.bookwire.com,
www.publishersweekly.com,
www.bookbusinessmag.com.

10. Publishing Organizations:
Small Publishers Association of North American (SPAN), www.SpanNet.org,
Publishers Marketing Association (PMA), www.PMA-online.org,
Small Publishers, Artists & Writers Network (SPAWN), www.Spawn.org,
Center for Independent Publishing, www.nycip.org,
Association of American Publishers, www.publishers.org.

Contributor’s Notes

Charles A. Taormina’s most recent novel, Gratuity, and a book of short stories, Shared Lives, are available at www.LuLu.com and his e-book of short fiction, Moments, at www.AuthorHouse.com. He lives in Akron, Ohio, where he is marketing his novels and finishing a book of novellas, a collection of short fiction, and a screenplay. As a periodical and free-lance book editor he has been a member of COSMEP and Small Publishers Association of North America. He is listed with “Who’s Who In The World.” Currently, Taormina is in search of a Medici.

And yet Pound's critical writings are essential reading for anyone who calls himself a creative writer in the 21st Century. I am skeptical of poets who call themselves professionals, and yet haven't read the major critical works of Pound. To me, this is something like a composer for the keyboard being unfamiliar with the piano sonatas of Beethoven (The New Testament of piano literature) and Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier (The Old Testament of piano literature. Incidentally: A klavier, or clavier, is a generic term for any hammer-based keyboard instrument, including the piano or the harpsichord).

Among Pound's most important achievements, I believe, are that he encapsulated and propounded some the most important aesthetic principles of his day and ours. He was not always the originator of the ideas–though he had no shortage of original ideas–but he was the one who most effectively brought them into focus for generations of English-speaking poets and writers. At his best, he was able to elucidate the most profound aesthetic insights in bursts of brilliant, spasmodic passages. The most impressive quality, to my mind, of Pound's best prose, is its ability to state that which is immediately obvious once considered, even if that obvious thing was not apparent before having it pointed out. In one of his cockiest moments, Pound makes such a series of observations, followed by the statement "and all of these things are very obvious." This, to me, is almost as cocky as Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself." I believe that Pound derived some of his critical powers from the fact that he wrote such prose grudgingly, and out of perceived necessity, resentful of the fact that one would still need to write such rudimentary things about art as lately as The 20th Century. He would rather be writing poems himself, not writing essays in defense of basic principles which he thought ought to be assumed and widespread by then. And yet his words (the essays, not the poems–the poems aren't necessary for a contemporary poet to read, by and large) continue to be essential to anyone who aspires to be a writer of note.

Certainly Pound must have been irritated to think that one would need to insist upon the freedom of verse from rhymed forms several hundred years after Milton's introduction to "Paradise Lost" should have put the whole matter to rest forever. And yet, despite Milton, Whitman, and a handful of other notable practitioners, it was Pound that put the bullet between the eyes of the tyranny of rhymed forms forever. It's characteristic of Pound that he began to turn against his own original support for Vers Libre, or Free Verse, not long after he began to champion it, because he was horrified to see how sloppy free verse had already become in his day. For Pound, the notion of freeing oneself from rhyme only increases the poet's responsibility to master the prosody more intensively. For instance, without rhyme, one has no excuse not to pay much closer attention to word choice, or diction. Without a metronomic line, a poet must suddenly pay closer attention to the principle of line break, which now becomes an aesthetic decision which is completely independent of the meter. As Pound put it, poetry is not "bad prose broken into arbitrary line lengths." Well, not poetry that serious critics will ever respect, anyway.

Even though Pound is known for his obsessions with poetic traditions of the past, he was also the Archmodernist, and even in the cases when he attempted to rouse the dead with his incantations from defunct idioms, he also understood the need to "make it new." In other words, though one may resurrect that which has fallen out of use, it will never return in exactly its original form, nor should it. I think of the gawd-awful resurgence of clothing fashion from the 1980's that we're seeing now–it may be throwback gear, but these are updated versions of those looks.

But Ezra Pound also understood the importance of always knowing what's being written by one's contemporaries. In other words: if you're not reading poetry that's less than twenty years old, then how can you possibly discern what's on the cutting edge, and what's not? So the idea here is to maintain an ongoing relationship with the spirit of the past, but not at the expense of the relevancy and vibrancy of what's brewing around you in the present zeitgeist.

This is why I think that William Carlos Williams gets way too much play. He's freakin' dead for crying out loud. Why does he need to be read so extensively, and yet someone like, say, T.R. Hummer, a contemporary practitioner who makes Williams look like an awkward amateur by comparison, labors in relative obscurity? Donald Hall, I grudgingly admit, has written some spectacular poems. But he also writes a bunch of very boring and forgettable poems, and after all of his awards and acclaim, does his work really need to take up space where the work of a lesser-known, but equally or more accomplished poet could use some ink?

So to me it's about making way for the talented, though underexposed young, and talented-but-overlooked old. The appointment of Ted Kooser as U.S. Poet Laureate is one such cause celebre. In the person of Kooser, we've got a poet who has operated on the perimeter of poetic culture, constantly risking obscurity. He didn't go the common route of creative writing at a university. Like Wallace Stevens (insurance exec) William Carlos Williams (physician), and T.S. Eliot (bank teller), Kooser joins the ranks of great American poets whose day jobs are decidedly unpoetic. Much has been said about Kooser being a poet of "the great plains" region, which has irritated me to no end, as it implies that he's some kind of podunk eccentric prairie sage, and such assessments run the risk of minimizing his accomplishments, and "ghettoizing" his work as some having some kind of limited and hyperlocal appeal; when, in fact, it is nothing of the sort. Personally, if the reason he was named U.S. Poet Laureate has anything to do with the fact that he lives in prairie land, therefore making the selection of Poet Laureate more geographically representative, then fine, whatever. I just hope that people will see past the political considerations to know that Kooser does, very much, deserve the title of Poet Laureate. The appointment of Kooser and Charles Simic to that post has done more for my faith in the future of poetry than anything else I can think of in recent times. Now it's time for Akron's own (but New Orleans-born) Elton Glaser to be named U.S. Poet Laureate. If Glaser is not named Poet Laureate within the next five years, I will be surprised. If he's not named Poet Laureate within the next TEN years, I will be downright shocked, and extremely disappointed in the poetic establishment.

Legendary journalist and Pulitzer Prize co-winner Abe Zaidan near Akron, in November, 2007. Photo by Christopher D. White.

Notable Manuscripts in Circulation:
Abe Zaidan's history of the Civic Theatre, and his first foray into fiction.

Abe Zaidan is a legend: not just in Akron, having been a veteran reporter and editor/columnist for The Akron Beacon Journal for many years, or in Cleveland, where he worked for The Plain Dealer for years–but nationally, too. Zaidan has written hundreds of articles for The Washington Post and most of our nation's other major daily newspapers. His collected political writings, introduced by the esteemed Dr. John C. Green of the Bliss Institute, was recently published by The University of Akron Press. Many people also don't know that he shares a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Kent State shootings.

Zaidan now has two worthy book projects in search of a publisher. One is primarily of local interest, because it's a history of The Civic Theatre, and it features a lot of stories about The Civic's quirky history as a venue that has always been on the edge of impending demise. It also features previously unpublished photos that would be of great interest to a lot of Akronites and former Akronites, regardless of the fact that its appeal is likely to be limited to those who would take an interest in things that are decidedly Akrocentric. But as many of us know, there is a rather significant market for Akrocentrica. Even though there are less than a quarter of a million people residing inside the city limits of Akron, our metro area is at least twice that number, depending on whose estimates you pay attention to, and our country is peopled with pockets of Akron expats who had to leave their beloved Motherland to seek a more gainful future. But Akronites tend maintain a high level of attachment to Rubber City, for one reason or another, even when they're forced to leave — or even when that attachment is of the dysfunctional love-hate variety, because they've been hurt by a town that tends to piss on its best products, and/or piss them off.

The Clevelandcentric publisher Gray and Co. apparently passed on The Civic Theatre history because it was too Akrocentric. I find that to be remarkable, considering how many books from Gray and Co. one will find in Akron, and I think that Gray and Co., of all places, ought to know the value of a book like this, if only in this area.

The other Zaidan book is a novel called Moose, about a newspaper editor by the name of Frank Moosey (A.K.A Moose), who thoroughly enjoys the life of a newspaper man — until the paper is run into the ground by corporate outsiders with no knowledge of the newspaper business and a ruthless obsession with the bottom line.

For all of the accolades that he has received over the years, Zaidan says that he feels more strongly about this novel than anything he's ever written up to this point. This is a very personal piece; he has put his heart into it, and it shows. Those who know Zaidan as the veteran journalist will see an interesting new side to him.

What will be fascinating to average readers is the insider's look into what the newsroom is really like (well, maybe not so much nowadays); but any notion that one might have about reporters being angelic and upstanding do-gooders may be a little shocked to read about the sort of shenanigans and tomfoolery that transpire behind the news-print curtain. The level and frequency of banal and childish behavior that goes on makes it a fun and fascinating read. There's also quite a bit of profanity and tasteless humor, which is refreshing to read about in our overly sanitized age. I can't be the only one who wants to puke when I think that school children nowadays are routinely expected to bring hand sanitizer with them as part of their school supplies (no offense to GOJO — who no doubt sheds no tears over this clean-hands policy). This is a fascinating novel that ought to be picked up by an agent for representation to publishers, because there's no doubt that a lot of people would love to get an insider's view into the newsroom. There's no shortage of, say, "Inside So-and-so State Prison" documentaries and "real stories" from emergency rooms and crime labs, but not much about what it's like to work in mass media.

Click here for information about becoming a member of "The Marquee Club" and helping to support the "Jewel on Main Street." This site also has more information about Civic Theatre, which was built in 1929, and which underwent a major renovation in 2002.

Click here for more about Abe Zaidan's book PORTRAITS OF POWER: OHIO AND NATIONAL POLITICS, 1964-1994. This book is part of the University of Akron Press's Series on Ohio Politics. Though the University of Akron Press does publish quite a few titles of local interest, quite a few of its offerings are of national interest, including the Akron Series in Poetry, which is a well known national poetry book series.

In early June I went to the West Chester Poetry Conference for the first time. It was probably the last time, too, but that's not the fault of the conference. The problem is that most of the readers and speakers underplayed their points in the academic fashion, dropping their voices at punchlines rather than raising them like night-show hosts. I got tired of saying, "Of his what?" or, "The whale said what?" to whatever younger person was sitting next to me at a reading and laughing heartily at what had been said, along with everyone else in the audience except me.

The person next to me always was a younger one, and that may be an encouraging sign for the future of traditional poetry. True, the person could hardly help being younger. At seventy-eight, I was, I imagine, the second oldest participant in the conference, not including Richard Wilbur, who gave the keynote address, and I didn't happen to sit next to my one likely senior, a tall, somewhat stooped man with hat, coat, tie, and sculptured beard whom I kept seeing in the halls. But when I looked around the audience I didn't notice the domination of gray that I see in the congregation when I go to church at home. Though this isn't saying a lot, formal poetry may have a brighter future than formal religion.

This gathering, held for four days at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, does attract mainly writers, readers, and critics of formal poetry, meaning poetry that has meter and sometimes rhyme. It tends to attract them powerfully. The conference has been going on since 1995, and on the van that shuttled some of us between the Holiday Inn and the campus I talked with a young Tennessee poet, Wilmer Mills, who attended the first one and has missed only a couple since then. One of this year's faculty members, Catherine Tufariello, told me she had attended the last ten conferences, generally as a student. It was she who, after I had written her a fan letter about her poems a few months ago, suggested that I go to the conference. I hadn't known it existed, and I tried to prepare myself for it by imagining the qualities that could have kept attracting her, one of America's finest poets, year after year as a mere student.

From what I saw, the main quality, aside from the emphasis on traditional poetic forms, is the crackle of knowledge, ability, and, surprisingly, enthusiasm that fills the rooms and halls. These people, and I mean the students as well as the faculty members, are the kind who catch passing references to Auden's "Musée des beaux arts" or Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"; who can give you the name for a kind of sonnet that has a six-line extension; who talk casually about dactyls, feminine endings, and caesuras; and who yet, at a reading of Ogden Nash's popular verse, laugh so hard they practically slap their thighs. I think most of the students and faculty members were academics, but only because they couldn't make a living as poets. (I also met, though, an investor in property, a retired actuary, and two public relations people.) So the tone, thank God, was enthusiastic first, analytical second.

This conference was to poetry as a convention of Libertarians is to politics. It gave members of a largely disregarded minority the chance to assert their convictions, with confidence and a hint of defiance, to a sympathetic audience. Much of what the poets at the conference write is not only formal but intelligible, and, in fact, the subject of this year's conference was "Exploring Form and Narrative." How many serious poems published in literary magazines these days exhibit form or tell a clear story? "We try to avoid rhyme altogether," says one editor's entry in Poet's Market. "No rhyming, pornography, violent language, 'Hallmark' verse, political poems, or overtly religious poetry," says another. Pity the Shakespeare or Donne or, hell, the Yeats trying to get published today. But rejections breed solidarity, even though I heard no outright bitterness on that subject at the conference.

The first agenda item after I arrived was one that, it seemed to me, influenced everything that happened afterward. Richard Wilbur, eighty-seven and still turning out exemplary poems for The New Yorker, gave the keynote address after being introduced by Dana Gioia, co-founder of these conferences, as the greatest living American poet, a poet of joy, love, hope, and reconciliation. I had never seen Wilbur, and when he walked onstage, I thought for a moment that this man must be a second introducer. His face was big and composed, like that of a small-town family doctor of seventy, and his hair was still brown. He dressed, stood, and talked as if he did not know he was the dean of American poets. He was wearing an orange sweater that negotiated the fairly sharp outthrust of his middle with fabric to spare and also had room for the considerable width of his shoulders. He moved a little stiffly, but nothing else suggested his age.

In a strong but quiet baritone, sounding final r's as if he lived in Iowa instead of Massachusetts, Wilbur told about Robert Frost's complimenting him on his poem "The Puritans." When Wilbur, in reply, started to say something about the meaning of the poem, Frost told him, "If you're going to explain it, I won't like it as well." Wilbur read (but did not explain) that poem to the West Chester audience, and he also read several of his translations of Latin riddles—read each of them twice, in fact, giving the answer after the first time through and then reading the riddle again. He read "A Measuring Worm," published recently in The New Yorker, in which he sees the worm's humps as omegas that warn us of the ends of things. The poem observes that the worm gets into that shape because he doesn't have real legs. That's something Wilbur said he checked out.

"I do think," he said, "that when we write poems we ought to get the science right."

About another poem he read, he said the original title was just "Blackberries," with the words "For Amelia"—his granddaughter—inserted below the title. But somebody at The New Yorker called him and said sorry, the magazine didn't use dedications. Wilbur had the solution to that problem: just move the dedication up into the title. That was how the poem came to be known as "Blackberries for Amelia."

When, in his readings, Wilbur botched a word or two, he always went back to the beginning rather than bulling ahead, and I noticed later that other poets on the various programs did the same thing—whether emulating the master or just displaying a similar zeal for formal integrity, I don't know.

It didn't seem like age but only like a poet's absentmindedness when, sometimes, Wilbur lost his place in the stack of papers he was reading from. Once, after much shuffling of pages failed to produce what he wanted, he opened his book and said, "I'm going to be stubborn and look it up in the index." He couldn't find it there, either. "Damnation," he said, and read something else instead. He talked and read for about an hour to an audience of probably 350, a nearly full house, in the Swope Music Building. The public was admitted to the reading, and I saw a fair number of chests not identified with the name tags that the 280 participants in the conference were given.

To a question, Wilbur said he avoids getting personal in his translations. "I feel that I have failed if there is too much of a presence of me," he said. To another question, about his position among poets of his time, he said it wasn't for him to say. But he said he would give a high position to the late Elizabeth Bishop.

After his reading, Lori Laitman, a composer-pianist, and Randall Scarlata, a baritone, performed the premiere of Laitman's song "A Wild Sostenuto," a setting of Wilbur's poem "For C." The ideas in this poem are not the simplest Wilbur ever expressed, and though the singer pronounced the words clearly, I doubt that anyone unfamiliar with the poem could have followed it by ear alone, much less understood its subtleties. But at the end, when Wilbur was sitting in the audience and the singer bowed in his direction, Wilbur raised a hand in appreciation of what he had heard.

I supposed that Wilbur, like any other famous guest speaker his age, would fly home the morning after his reading. No; he stayed the whole four days, attending readings and sitting unobtrusively at a lunch table of friends and strangers in the dining hall where the conference provided chicken wraps and pasta salad. I happened to sit a few rows behind him at the last night of readings, and I watched his responses. He applauded four of the five poetry readings, but not the one that included poems with the words "sh*#," "di&%," and "f&*#%@%." At each occurrence of those words, about half the audience laughed, female voices predominating. That was one of the few times I was disappointed in the people attending the conference—not, I think, because I'm a prude but because the words were pretty clearly used for shock value alone. Maybe the laughter was the nervous kind. Wilbur did not laugh, though, and at the end of that poet's reading his big hands stayed on his knees for the only time that evening.

The conference filled our days from 8:15 in the morning till 10 at night with panels, workshops, and readings. When we had a few minutes between events, some of us browsed through the poetry collections that speakers and students had on display in the campus bookstore. I was glad to find a mini-chapbook of Rhina P. Espaillat's wonderfully warm poems to add to the book of hers I had at home, and I got her to sign it for me. Though she didn't read poems at this conference, her perceptive remarks in a panel on Wilbur were for me one of the high points of the conference.

At a panel on "Ekfrasis," which to poets these days means not just any formal description but specifically a work of art in one medium commenting on or imitating a work in another medium—and which, I would have liked to tell the panelists, is usually spelled ecphrasis and is accented on the first syllable rather than the second—Meredith Bergmann illustrated the specialized definition by showing slides of her sculpture of the poet Countee Cullen. She also showed, to laughter but maybe not as an example of ecphrasis, a sculpture she had done for this conference: a wastebasket with hands crumpling poems into it.

Humor did keep cropping up. A panel on doggerel included remarks on Ogden Nash by Marilyn Taylor, who read samples of his verse and said she had a name for the rambling form of his poems: "shaggy doggerel." Remarking that it was his prosody that made Nash distinctive, she said his poems therefore "deserve to be analyzed."

"Will that spoil the fun?" she asked. "Sure. But that's what literary scholarship is all about." That brought the loudest burst of applause and laughter I heard during the conference.

Another laugh, decidedly sympathetic, came at a morning session of notable readings by five women poets, sponsored by the online journal "Mezzo Cammin," when Jehanne Dubrow looked around at the other readers and remarked how characteristic it was that all five, not being men, had their watches out on the table, making sure they didn't cut into another reader's time. At a session in which he introduced Lewis Turco, winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Award for books on prosody, Thomas Cable mentioned an unusual form—a sonnet followed by a line of trimeter, a heroic couplet, a second trimeter rhyming with the first, and another heroic couplet. Anybody know what it's called? he asked in the tone of one hoping to impart a secret . "A caudate sonnet," a voice from the back of the auditorium replied. "Damn!" said Cable (The answerer was R. S. Gwynn.)

Each night, five faculty members read from their own work. These were businesslike sessions. Michael Peich, the conference director, would barely more than name the first reader in his overall introduction. The first reader would stride onstage as Peich strode off, and at the end of each fifteen-minute segment the reader would say "And our next reader is So- and-So" and, striding offstage, would meet that reader striding on. The emphasis was on what the poets read, not on who they were.

The poets read in a variety of styles. Dick Allen barked into the microphone, making the speakers—and my hearing aids—reverberate. Dana Gioia gave an old-time oratorical performance, gesturing, changing tempo, dropping and raising his voice. Catherine Tufariello smiled a little as she quietly read some of the most moving poems of the conference. Robert Shaw looked down at his text the whole time he was reading. A.E. Stallings, doing a not unfriendly send-up of Edna St. Vincent Millay, got in character by wrapping what looked to me like a fox fur around her neck and, at the end, giving an exaggeratedly cute curtsy to the audience.

There were so many highlights to the conference that I, never having attended even a creative-writing course, much less one in which most of the "students" were accomplished poets, continually felt awed, humbled, or even intimidated. But the most warming and informative event of all, for me, was the continuing master class I took under Dick Davis, a Yorkshireman who heads the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. His translations of medieval Persian poems, when he read from them during the last reading of the conference, drew probably the loudest and most sustained applause of that session. (Wilbur was among the hearty applauders, I noticed.) In the master class, which was like a graduate seminar in that the seven students sat at a table while the "professor" held forth at the head, Davis passed out photocopied selections from six centuries of poems in English, all of them designed to show the twists and turns of "Meter and Rhythm," "Shapes and Meanings," or "Discourse and Diction." His insights, tossed off in a modest mumble that I didn't always understand (though the other, much younger students did), amounted to an intensive three-day education in sensibility, but to me, the most delightful and valuable product of the sessions was Davis's enthusiasm. Here was a man in his sixties, a revered poet, translator, and scholar, who kept saying about this poem or that poet, from Elizabethan times to Frost and beyond, "It is such a fantastic poem," "He's a terrific poet," "He's one of my, I think, top five [about Edwin Muir]," "A marvelous poet," "Beautiful poems." I never heard that kind of editorializing in graduate school, and I think many of my professors would have looked askance at it, but to me, it is what literary scholarship is all about: conveying love of literature and showing what it is about a work that makes it deserving of love.

At the end of the conference, I sought out Catherine Tufariello so I could thank her for having recommended it to me. "This was the literary experience of a lifetime," I told her, and I don't think, looking back, that I was gushing or speaking merely from the wide-eyed perspective of one who until then had been insulated from such electric events. After all, look at all the others who go back year after year for a metrical recharge. I'd like to go back, too, if only the West Chester people would start using closed captions.

Like most of those at West Chester, I write poetry sometimes, and I think that the conference, whether or not it will prove to have made me a better writer, has made me a more relaxed one. I get probably forty or fifty rejection slips for every acceptance. They frustrate me and make me bitter at editors who turn down what I have sweated over. But the poems my fellow students read during Davis's workshop were so fine that I look upon rejection in a better spirit. A hundred or more other students from the conference may be writing poems of the same quality as those I heard. I almost feel sorry for editors, having to choose.

I appreciate the following poem, by Donald Mace Williams, of Canyon Texas, who has a worthy full-length collection of poems circulating among publishers called The Tree of Getting There. It's technically a sonnet, being fourteen lines; not all sonnets conform to a rhyme scheme, but being fourteen lines is the defining feature of this form. But this poem pays attention to sound ("piecing out the auspices"), and plays with meaning, which I appreciate in a poem. The the worldplay is clever, yet subtle: "Unlabored word that puts down cant." I appreciate the juxtapositions of tone and implied sitiuation.

This poem was originally published in The Amherst Review in 2004. Donald Mace Williams can be contacted by e-mail at donaldmacewms@gmail.com.

Lilacs and Salt

I can imagine her as a first-rate oracle,
Though calm-voiced, but she never could have stood
Cave living. Hers is a wisdom that craves air.
Consult her in the kitchen, where she can watch
A marsh hawk skim the pasture, can trim broccoli
While piecing out the auspices. Outside,
Lilacs grow. The odor weaves in her hair,
Her voice exhales it. Now if she will reach,
Mid-prophecy, for salt, and, talking, shake
That out, you'll have caught the flavors, the paired hows
Of her delphic what: the fragrance and the wry,
Unlabored word that puts down cant. You seek
An answer; she gives it over her shoulder. Now
Go pondering bloom and mineral on your way.

Poem copyright by Donald Mace Williams. All rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

This striking ink-on-Bristol drawing of Barack Obama, by Ohio native John Sokol, is made entirely out of words by Barack Obama. T-shirts with this image are available for sale. Click here for more about this portrait.

Ted Kooser chose a poem about marbles for his American Life in Poetry Column, which seems timely because I just learned, (thanks to Michael Cohill and Brian Graham, of Akron's own American Toy Marble Museum) as some other Akronites just learned for the first time, that Akron is the birthplace of the modern toy industry, and that the first toy marbles, as we know them today, were produced here in Rubber City.

–Christopher D. White

American Life in Poetry: Column 163

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I have always enjoyed poems that celebrate the small pleasures of life. Here Max Mendelsohn, age 12, of Weston, Massachusetts, tells us of the joy he finds in playing with marbles.

Ode to Marbles

I love the sound of marbles
scattered on the worn wooden floor,
like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek.
I love the sight of white marbles,
blue marbles,
green marbles, black,
new marbles, old marbles,
iridescent marbles,
with glass-ribboned swirls,
dancing round and round.
I love the feel of marbles,
cool, smooth,
rolling freely in my palm,
like smooth-sided stars
that light up the worn world.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2004 by The Children's Art Foundation. Reprinted from "Stone Soup", May/June, 2004, by permission of the publisher, www.stonesoup.com. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

OUR REBIRTH OF WRITING

–by Charles A. Taormina
Copyright © 2008 by Charles A. Taormina

Writers should wake up, if our arts are going to survive and renew the culture. Recently, an uninformed commentator lauded America’s Freedom of Press, touting that there are now over 195,000 books published each year in America. The commentator made no mention, however, that just a few years ago this amount was regularly around 60,000 books per year (1999).

The complete story is thornier. In those years 400,000 professional manuscripts were submitted annually to our publishing industry, while only some 60,000 books were printed (less than 15% !). That’s not Freedom of Press, that’s a restricted funnel for those with elite credentials or riches or media connections (labeled now by marketers as authors with national “platforms”). Today’s figures do not display a widening of editorial access; instead the difference is due mostly to one technological innovation: POD, Print-on-Demand publishing. The remaining 135,000 books are self-published or printed by new, smaller independent publishers—the heroes of today’s art world. (“78% of titles are brought out from a small press or self-publisher,” according to www.selfpublishingresources.com). I understand that because for decades I’ve been writing essays, book chapters, theater pieces, and lecturing in Washington, DC, to such as The World Future Society, that all of this is an indirect form of censorship. In one lecture, I mentioned “Those who control what gets published, also very directly control what is allowed to be known.”

Finally, I had to define the freedom further; for we now have Freedom of Press (with our First Amendment); what we don’t have is the Freedom of Communication, that is, the ability to connect that printed form to the mind of a reader, or in the case of working authors, to a wide, regular readership. Freedom of Communication is dangerous; it implies after all, Freedom of Thought. In a highly controlled society such as ours, true thinking is curtailed or “shaped.” Noam Chomsky calls it “Manufacturing Consent,” from a book and film of the same title, though the term was coined by Walter Lippmann. (If you think our media lacks censorship watch any local TV newscast, then compare with a BBC News sequence—the BBC’s like Radio Free Europe must’ve been for countries behind the Iron Curtain.) The method is simple, not so much by curtailing or altering news, rather skipping or avoiding certain news stories, truthful insights, and avoiding the printing and circulation of many authors’ books. Eliminate the vision. It’s a game of what’s missing here: variety, depth, certain issues, many voices, you!

My point, however, with the publishing statistics, these massive, wonderful, extraordinary numbers of 195,000 books per year—that’s 534 books per day!—(and with the size and grandeur of USA, why not?) is that we are in a verifiable arts renaissance in America. Specifically, this is a renaissance with book authoring and book publishing by a wide expanse of Americans at all levels. The focus, though, is again communication. How do we connect with the reader, or more importantly, with many active, sophisticated, regular readers? How?

It seems odd that within the midst of this expansion of book publishing, that at exactly the same time, many newspapers all over America are eliminating the book review sections. (“Book review column inches in newspapers have dropped by 20-50%,” www.selfpublishingresources.com.) More censorship? Some are so streamlined, that only national bestsellers or syndicated reviews appear (and really, does Stephen King need another book review ever?). This “irony” is such, I feel, that if any other American activity displayed such an upsurge, say sandlot baseball, neighborhood barbeques, hand sewing of clothing, even hip-hop festivals, the papers would be full of articles, reviews, columnists, and lists of resources to stay in touch. But books, no; they’re too dangerous. Let’s reduce the media pages (or as New York reviewers recently admitted vacantly, still publish book reviews, but few if any about “literary” tomes), dumb down the content and perhaps cut off at the source all this incessant scribbling! (To be fair, our own Akron Beacon Journal carries a regular Sunday Section of Books—same page amount as the other arts—plus weekly comments about local authors’ publications, even notes about author readings.)

Other sinister news is that even the likes of a stalwart reference publisher that one might think immune from publishing woes, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, is suggesting that there may be no actual hard copy or physical books printed of the multi-volume encyclopedia in 2009, the first year ever (online references will continue) (The Writer’s Chronicle, May/Summer, 2008).

Part of these goings on, however, takes in larger media issues which will surprise no one: that is the steady decline of newspaper circulation and print readership, especially over the last few years (Recent article in The New Yorker, March 31, 2008, “Out of Print” by Eric Alterman). Many of our citizens obtain their news and references online, and newspapers feature additions or special blogs like this that tie-in with local or specific subject coverage. Or there are newsy semi-professional blogs, such as The Huffington Post at www.huffingtonpost.com, as suggested by Alterman. And surely, there is less censorship of any kind online. But this is a hard circular tale. It is from those same brick-and-mortar newspapers, from their paid professional staffs, who research, interview, think, analyze, write and professionally edit all of their content on a full-time basis—our actual news—that we are provided with the actual source, most of the news stories, which appear online. Do we think Yahoo or other Huffington Posts are going to hire and maintain independent staffs when The New York Times goes defunct? (Most media including TV, radio, newsletters, and magazines only copy news from a syndicated service, from the AP or Reuters, who in turn obtain the original news from member newspapers.) Much of the ballyhooed “internet connectivity” often strikes one as sensational, similar to supermarket tabloids, only digital, complete with tawdry film clips. And if Yahoo (or the new Microsoft version) or others do put the staffs together, will there ever be that integrity and depth of seasoned journalism as from the greats of newspapers? (I assure you from two years as a contributing editor for a community newspaper that often one more phone call, to an additional story source, can completely reverse a story’s slant. Will the instant Internet check that one other source?) It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s comment in 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

In 2005, I was stopped in my driveway, with engine off and radio blaring, continuing an in-depth NPR program. Robert W. McChesney, communications professor at the University of Illinois and author of “Rich Media, Poor Democracy,” commented on news control. His shocking summary was how corporate culture suggests that “we should shut up, be happy, and shop.” McChesney cofounded Free Press, www.freepress.net, to reform the media, and is considered a leading media critic. Another guardian, Peter Phillips, echoes similar sentiments, “. . . this monolithic news structure creates intellectual celibacy, inaction and fear. The result is a docile population, whose principal function within society is simply to shut up and go shopping.” (www.thewell.com, 7/11/06). (Phillips is a Sonoma State University professor and director of Project Censored, www.projectcensored.org.) Phillips’s university group publishes a yearly book gathering of censored stories, “Censored 2007 (for whatever year),” and even refers to a category of empty news as, “Junk Food News.” The volume is an excellent resource.

Not long after that radio program, a bumper sticker caught my attention: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

Some will defend the lack of traditional book reviews by mentioning that it’s an age of specialization. Check out Bookmarks print magazine or the New York Review of Books; or go online where one can start with a list of reviewing sites at www.complete-review.com, or many online review sites, www.reviewsofbooks.com, www.bookwire.com, www.newpages.com, or www.bookpage.com or others. These are valid, incisive, and wide-ranging—but who except bibliophiles are paying attention? With the lack of intensive and extensive book reviews in more general interest or general circulation publications, in front of everyone everyday, a wider audience is eliminated.

More to the point about our lack of reviews in the midst of our authorial renaissance, is that if we authors don’t become more active, the arts will fail. We need an infusion of inspiration into society at large with our own passion and enthusiasm for literature, for books, and right now. I believe that literature passes along the spiritual legacy of a culture—not film, not Internet’s short-lived sites, not pop music’s fashions, not video games, not sports—but that books transmit our culture over time, distance, nations, even language. Books. Nothing else has been able to do that in quite the same way, at least not since Egyptian Papyri were buried with Pharaohs over three millennia ago. Books, “biblos,” the Greek word for papyrus.

Recently, print magazines The Writer’s Chronicle (Feb., 2008) and Poets & Writers (March/April, 2008) noted the November, 2007 National Endowment for the Arts study about our decline of reading, and cited tragic statistics: Between the ages of 15-24, Americans watch television over 2 hours per day, but only read for 7-10 minutes. NEA’s study was titled “To Read or Not to Read” (www.nea.gov/research/toread.pdf). In Ohio we can point to community tutoring programs such as AkronReads or Akron’s annual reading celebrations This City Reads! (fifth annual reading day, February 13, 2008) as laudatory, but is all that enough? I feel that this age is at a crossroads for reading, in that if we don’t become more active, there will be a major decline of reading (and writing too), and not only the loss of a mass or even elite audience, but that the entire culture will fail. Poets & Writers followed-up the NEA study with its informal reader’s poll: “37 percent believe writers have a responsibility to try to reverse the decline in reading by writing for a wider audience.”

One of the difficulties with the loss is that reading is a reflective activity, or it’s one step removed from action (or television), so that it more closely approximates the experience of inner thought. Reading stimulates the deeper mind. With reading, one builds a culture more likely to respond in an internal or introspective fashion first, instead of acting out initial and often foolish or dangerous impulses. I believe that is important to civilization, the maintenance of our nation (against the erosion or entropy of culture), and for the propagation of an exciting, civilized future of deeply educated women and men (Original essay, “Psychology & Economics,” collected in my book, “Quintessence, Five Essays From Today’s Renaissance”).

In my own creative work of twenty books, I’ve written a novel about literacy issues, a long play about publishing concerns, many essays, speeches, and segments of nonfiction books trying to promote reading and a wider access for authors to reach a reading public (not just access to a press). One reason comes from my play:

“You know magazines and books are strange. Sometimes, fifty thousand books are printed and distributed and read all over the world, just for one man or woman’s thoughts to reach one other man or woman. Life carries on that way, truly it does.
“Fifty years after the death of an author, some new person on another continent picks up those inspired words and changes the earth. Funny, this thing about communicating . . . .” “Freedom One,” Act I, Scene 1

The opposite effect, though, is perhaps so subtle that we’ll never see it coming. There’ll be no need for book burnings in a culture that has lost all verifiable interest in reading books. Who will care? (I am reminded of trying to make a similar point to a youngster years ago, with Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” The irony though, even then, was I had to show a film!) Soon, you’ll be able to print anything you like, as often as you like, and nobody will pay any attention whatsoever. Or is that today? We’ll be too busy with ___________ (fill in the blank). We don’t understand that whatever that future activity is, it will be one less defined, less sophisticated, and less profound by missing access to a book or print culture. Slowly, we will think less often, less deeply, and gradually we’ll move ever more upon the surface of societal forms—and that movement will be one that we’ll never control or even have a participatory vote within some democratic style of rule. Oligarchy! Who needs censorship, when pop culture, mass vulgarity, easy media are all the norm? When mediocrity becomes de rigueur, a national or extra-national strategy, then anything goes. And soon, everyone will “go,” except the controllers.

We need to make writing and the written arts as exciting, necessary, significant, earthshaking as they’ve always been. We need to guarantee that future generations will be able to accelerate their mental processes, as we have been able to, as all those of every profound period in history have, from the ferments of Enlightened Europe or Ancient Greece, to those fanatical book readers and writers of our Founding Fathers (Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton). Once we’re so aware, we’ll know it is from obsessive poet scholars such as the Italian, Francis Petrarch (“Canzoniere”), that even great periods like The Renaissance are seeded, nurtured, allowed to flower—all with the reading and writing and studying of books. It was Petrarch in the 1300’s, as Poet Laureate, who looked into the past and forward to our future with an astonishing goal: “To read what the first men have written, to write what the last men may read.”

We must pray that the last of humankind is far into the future, and that we might steward our planet for greater ages. What can we do? Should we work more intensively online, is it effective to activate more festivals and book clubs (with contemporary authors, not only the classics), should we mimic the massive, single-handed book popularizing of Oprah Winfrey maybe with local cable access? Should we give away our books to schools, libraries, or knock on doors; can we write more letters about creativity, or randomly leave treasured tomes for others? What can we write this moment, to make and continue to create that awareness? Whatever we choose, we need to start today and continue tomorrow; we need to write more today, read more today, bring our writers together now, so that we might build a more worthy future.

Small Ways We Might Assist Our Renaissance

1. Publish cheaper paperbacks, in artsy “garret editions,” to get more works by diverse, original authors in front of the public. Promote e-books.

2. Follow breakthrough street marketing of young musicians, who first publish a CD, then hand out thousands free throughout urban neighborhoods—until radio stations are deluged with requests to play the music on air & record companies finally offer commercial contracts.

3. Carry books with one everywhere.

4. Mention book insights and book titles more in everyday conversations.

5. Purchase books as gifts often. Participate in www.bookcrossing.com where you can “release” a book on a park bench, bus seat, or coffee shop for others to pick up and start reading (site has way of tracking the travel of books).

6. Support literary magazines and small press or independent publishers.

7. Become a patron yourself if possible (support an author), if not become a mentor.

8. Use themes of literature, writing, and contemporary publishing within current creative work, poetry, novels, stories, plays, films.

9. Comment on censorship in your published books with interior stories or plots or poems, plus in prefaces and book introductions.

10. Study the publishing scene and learn more about rapid, constant changes.

11. Consider sites for censorship and direct media presentations: www.serendipity.li/cda.html and www.mediachannel.org.

12. Don’t assume that we’re free; work to ensure our continuing freedoms.

13. Start book discussions at office water coolers or lounges.

14. Keep notebooks and pass along notations about media, art insights, creativity.

15. Subscribe or mark book sites online: Internet Public Library, www.ipl.org, www.bookspot.com, www.bookreporter.com, www.publishersweekly.com, www.delmio.com.

16. Research & visit “101 Best Websites for Writers,” Writer’s Digest, June, 2008.

17. Keep studying your art, improve and produce great literature. Your time will come.

18. Work with like-minded groups to build synergy, local writers’ clubs, local literary presses such as Rager Media, reading groups, or start your own creative meetings. Remember the salons of Europe, especially in Paris, famous for nurturing exceptional creators including Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Hemingway. Stein had her own salon where many expatriates met; or consider the weekly dinners of Zola, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers. Regular artistic gatherings can be lots of fun, provide emotional sustenance so artists can survive. Recall the Medici Gardens of Florence.

19. Frequent coffee shops, the traditional haunts of writers and artists; always carry along a book. Shop at bookstores often and suggest titles.

20. Study past renaissance periods and help create our own expansion now, remember advice from Giorgio Vasari of Italy’s 1500’s (author of “Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”): “It is not by sleeping but by waking and studying continuously that progress is made.”

Contributor’s Notes

Charles Taormina has been interviewed and later had a novel reviewed positively in The Akron Beacon Journal. Charles A. Taormina’s most recent novel, “Gratuity,” and a book of short stories, “Shared Lives,” are available at www.LuLu.com, and his e-book of short fiction, “Moments,” is at www.AuthorHouse.com. He lives in Akron, Ohio, where he is marketing his novels, finishing a book of three novellas, a fourth collection of short fiction, and his second screenplay. His writing has been published overseas and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is listed with “Who’s Who In The World.” Currently, Taormina is in search of a Medici.

Of course we all know that Akron is the birthplace of the rubber industry. But did you know that Akron is also the birthplace of the modern toy industry?

Help save this national treasure: click here to sign the online petition to save America's oldest toy factory.

–by Michael C. Cohill

The company compound of The M.F. Christensen & Son Company (1903-1922) is the oldest still- standing toy company in the USA. It was “the first and original glass toy marble factory in America.” These marbles created an entire industry and are today the most popular toy in the world. The building stands in the birthplace of the modern toy industry. It was one of 32 local toy marble companies and one of over 150 local toy companies. The five buildings making up the compound are still in near original condition.

Christensen’s marbles were sold on six of the world’s seven continents and dominated the toy industry from the moment of their appearance in the market in 1903 until 1917 when they stopped manufacturing. His marbles put out of business all American glass marble shops and almost wiped out glass marble production in Germany. He later licensed his 1905 patent for glass marbles to the German’s thereby saving their 60 year old industry and they continued their production until 1936.

The method of manufacturing glass marbles that Christensen invented in 1910 is still in use today. Outside of hand-made ‘art spheres’ Christensen’s invention is the only method used to make marbles, for play, for floral and decorative uses and for industrial purposes.

The first mass-produced toy was made by Samuel C. Dyke in 1884 at his Akron Toy Company (later incorporated as The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company,) now the site of Lock 3 Park in Akron, Ohio.

There were 32 toy marble companies located in the greater Akron area between 1884 and 1951.

The mass-production of toys changed the lives of all children world-wide. The price of mass-produced toys dropped so low that for the first time in human history almost all children could afford a toy. For a penny, a child could buy a handful of Dyke’s American Agates marbles.

These Akron area marble factories proved so successful, other Akronites looking for new uses for rubber witness the creation of the children’s product market and turned out the 1st mass-produced balloons, rubber balls, rubber dollies, rubber duckies and rubber baby buggy bumpers. Others made bicycles, tricycles, peddle cars, anything that used a rubber tire. A wide rang of other toys were made here too, from cast iron and tin toys to tops and children’s books. By 1929 there were over 120 toy companies in the greater Akron area.

Local toy company owners helped form the Toy Manufacturers Association of America, served on their board of directors and were presidents of the organization for many years.

Other local toy making inventions, like Mathew Lang’s injection molding of clay marbles in 1890s and Derrick Rempel’s blow molding from the 1940s, are still exceptionally valuable and widely used manufacturing techniques in the rubber and plastic industries world-wide.

There are still major toy companies operating in the greater Akron area, like Little Tykes, Step Two, Maple City Rubber, National Latex, Eagle Rubber, Balloon Accessories, Inc, etc.

Click here to visit the website of the American Toy Marble Museum in Akron, Ohio

American Life in Poetry: Column 159

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives.

The Inevitable

To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is "All the Lavish in Common," U. of Mass. Pr., 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from "The Chattahoochee Review," Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Photo: Grave of John R. Buchtel, founder of The University of Akron at Glendale Cemetery, downtown Akron. Courtesy of Andrzej Starczewski, Rager Media