Fence Magazine’s In Rainbows

Thought some people in class would be interested in taking a look at this offer by Fence Magazine:

“Some of you may have received an email last Thursday introducing this our latest brainstorm: we have embarked on a month-long mission toward intricacy. You see, we realize that each reader has a different capacity for monetary devotion to Fence, and we want to make our pages available to anyone who sets their devotion at one dollar or more. Just like Radiohead.

So, if you follow this link www.fenceportal.org/support and click on the word “donate”, you can become a subscriber to Fence for one year, for whatever your increment may be. Payments are processed by PayPal (it’s free and easy to set up an account if you don’t already have one: www.paypal.com). Any gracious and lucky soul who chooses to pay $300 or more will become a lifetime subscriber, and will receive a receipt for your tax-deductible donation.

Fine print: This offer only good until the end of April, 2008. The new issue of Fence will hit your mailbox in early May, so jump on it!”

The Chapbook Aesthetic

 

 

In preparation for making my own chapbook-length collection of poems, I have been reading chapbooks online and in print. Chapbooks are a rather provocative receptacle for poetry: they have a more DIY (read: indie) look to them and are often innovative in design: some fold out, some are tucked into neat little envelopes, the binding can be hand-sown, they are often small enough to fit in your pocket. You can trade them with friends like Pokémon, and you can feel cool for having the most powerful collection. The most relevant idea behind the chapbook, I think, is their relative ease in terms of publication. In our hypothetical world of economic recession, the chapbook might be a formidable way for emerging poets to reach a very small but better-than-nothing audience.

After all, the resurgence of the chapbook as we know them now found its “new life in the burgeoning world of modern poetry, in which pamphlets from the international Dada movement and beautifully designed works of Russian avant-garde poets set a new standard,” according to Noah Eli Gordon. The chapbook is capable of making a revolution in modern poetics learn to walk, although the implicit argument is that anyone who had enough money and drive to staple a sheaf of paper together could “publish” their poetry (think back to Mere’s concerns about Scribd and internet self-publishing).

But the cool thing about the chapbook, especially if we still consider what it might do if all big industries were to strangle the printing of contemporary poetry while smaller presses like Ugly Duckling go under, is that they are small and provocative enough to get passed around if they appeal to a wide variety of people. It is a form of networking, I think, which is more tender an act than Scribd or Cafepress, especially if the artist is willing to charge only what it costs him to make it. The idea here is to keep poetry in circulation. It takes more thought and care to hand-make a bunch of chapbooks then it does to upload your poetry onto a blog or a self-publishing site, and that is motivation for people to give more care in reading or preserving the form.

Is the MFA a crock of poo?

In response to several publications slandering the MFA and the “intellectual ghetto” it supposedly creates: What poor, bedraggled, gin-loving, stubble-sporting writer would not balk at the professionalization of their precious creative endeavor? You may read here, here, and here that MFAs are a big waste of time and money because teaching creative writing is “impossible,” or that confining any poetry-related activity to the academia suffocates its ability to reach mainstream culture. The MFA program, spun the right way, looks like another one of America’s ways of capitalizing on a cultural outlet, especially if a student is paying nearly $30000 a year to attend a program. The defense? Don’t attend a program that asks you to shell that much money out.

“The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem,” Donald Hall wrote in an article called Poetry and Ambition, and what an eloquent way to say that the MFA produces bland, “cookie-cutter” writers. But visual artists have been apprenticing or attending art schools to refine their habits and process for hundreds of years. Must not all artists learn the foundations of their craft before they can manipulate it? Reeking of the Kindle, writers have an intrinsic disgust for things new in concept. Dana Gioia’s thesis in “Can Poetry Matter?” is that the academia is turning poetry into a subculture that is only appreciated and produced for itself (“the intellectual ghetto”)–he believes that the role of the poet should not be educator but critic and insists that poets must find jobs outside of the academia in order to breathe poetry into the life of mainstream culture.

But the poetry academia, in many ways, can be a positive symbiotic organization. The student provides the teacher with a job and the teacher provides the student with as much knowledge about the process and routine of writing as he or she can, usually (and most beneficially) with enough financial support to hold the writer’s head above water. The academia, in many ways, is catalyst for good poetry, or at least good close readers. Without it, how many people would be desirous to sit down and read Eliot’s Wasteland or Pound’s Cantos? Is it even feasible that any linguistically complex poetry could be read for widespread entertainment? I doubt it, although I do like Gioia’s suggestion of coupling poetry with other artistic mediums, like visual art and music, in order to make it more accessible. For me, the problem with the MFA isn’t the idea that it might turn out writers that are clones of its teachers, or that it is a money pit, or that MFAs don’t actually teach students how to write. It is whether writers, above all artists and citizens, deserve to have fellowships and free graduate school handed to them so that they can sit on their flat butts and write.