Creative Antiquities, Part II

I did go and read my old verse, "Dream-mare," in that on-line zine named Surprising Stories (as you may do here: http://surprisingstories.dcwi.com/Dream.htm).

It is a piece of verse I remember feeling quite satisfied with -- and somewhat dissatisfied with. On the one hand, it is, to my mind, a good example of a particular type of verse ... you might call it short dramatic verse, since the dramatic element takes precedence over other aspects. This sort of verse suited some areas of the small press, being the staple especially of the dark fantasy and horror-emphasizing zines.

Back in the 1980s I felt I excelled in writing short poems in which some single element loomed over others, within the confines of rhymed, sometimes idiosyncratically metered verse. Oftentimes the verse in these zines took the form of stilted balladry, in which the sentence structures and the line structures were, for all practical purposes, one and the same. In mine I usually held to a pattern of straight rhymes or slant rhymes, while making every effort to de-emphasize the pattern by means of phrasing. I avoided having the sentences align with the metrical line wherever possible -- which is a practice that allows you to instill a strong sense of closure within the final line of the verse.

That last line is the one place in a verse where the end of the sentence and the end of the line can only fall together.

I remember one editor, in writing to me and accepting a poem or two, saying that he finally understood what I was doing in my poetry. He had just discovered that if he read my poems as if they were spoken colloquially, or conversationally, they suddenly "worked," or "made sense." Previously he had been in the habit, apparently, of pausing at the end of each line. The editor's exact words, of course, escape memory. Yet I do recall the surprise I felt, that this should have represented a leap, for him or her. (As I recall it was a him.)

This Surprising Stories, by the way, seems attractive. I was happy to see the index page -- for it is very much the sort of cover you might have encountered, a quarter-century ago, when you opened a large manila envelope sent by one of the many intrepid editor-publishers of those times. The presentation of the poem is quite nice, too -- with an effective illustration by La Joillette.

Cheers ...

Creative Antiquities Dusted Off for Display

Thursday morning I read an e-mail from Fairwood Press's Patrick Swenson. He wondered if I had any thoughts about which of my various Talebones stories should go into the Best of Talebones collection he is editing.

A nice question to ponder.

Later, in the afternoon, I read a penned note from John Thiel, forwarded to me from Beloit. The Magazine of Speculative Poetry still uses the Post Office box I used for many years; and once in a rare aeon it receives mail for me, sent out of the misty pages of the past.

Thiel edited a small-press magazine named Pablo Lennis back in the 1980s -- an affair of wild, every-inch-used mimeography, as I recall it. I sent him a few poems. His note of yesterday reads, "We have your poem 'Dream-mare,' which I published in Pablo Lennis, up on the Net in Surprising Stories, found at http://surprisingstories.dcwi.com."

To receive a note about a poem being published ... handwritten on a tiny slip of paper measuring only 3 by 4-3/4 inches ... takes me back to the 1980s. I was no Lyn Lifshin in those days ... (Lifshin published in every nook and cranny of the small press, and was remarkably good at producing short free verse, employing lines of only a few feet) ... yet all the same I sent out scads of verse of varying qualities. I felt the call to do so; I regarded it as my writerly duty to press my talents to the utmost, and to pursue opportunities in any mimeographed literary extravaganza that came along -- which included quite a lot of miscellaneous science fiction and horror-oriented zines, besides the general litzines. The scene was a lively one, helped along by Len Fulton at Small Press Review and Janet Fox at Scavenger's Newsletter, among others. Some poems I felt great confidence in; others I doubted.

I am unsure about "Dream-mare," right at the moment. My opinion must await my viewing the relevant pixels.

An interesting aspect is that I am being informed of publication after the fact. I am, I should say, glad to be informed at all. Since the prevailing attitude in electronic presses remains a bit free-wheeling, I applaud any instance of editorial courtesy. At least one earlier Internet publication of mine is a poem republished without notification: some litzine editors of a bygone decade had decided to perpetuate -- or to perpetrate -- their publication online. To find my poem republished in an Internet publication without my say-so displeased me to a degree less than, or equal to, the degree it pleased me. As an advocate of small-press effort, I do understand when a certain fluidity plays into matters of print and reprint rights ... or I do understand, at least, when it happens only on a rare Thursday. In the case of these poems, I feel it to be nice (or at least I hope it is nice) that they have a chance to rise out of their printed obscurity -- even if the method employed in their raising is that of submerging them into a second sort of obscurity.

Cheers ...

Small Press, Internet, Letter

I was writing here the other day about the small press -- which spurred other thoughts.

The Internet offers a picture similar to the commercial press vs. small press model -- with differences, it seems to me. I have no idea how many ambitious, "professional" attempts at electronic, web-based publishing have come and gone. What seems to be the case is that they have come and gone. Whether any have lingered in memory I have no idea. I tend to think content must suit the medium; and the medium of the Internet seems akin to the mimeograph and offset-press productions of earlier decades, the small-press and micro-press and personal-press efforts that resulted in tiny-circulation magazines and fanzines and personalzines that had impact upon their readers all out of proportion to their importance in the "larger" economic sphere. The Internet enables the souls who feel drawn to the kind of expression the small press allows. Commercial literary endeavors on the Internet seem to fail out of the necessity of thinking in large terms -- in trying to be of significance, economically. They need "numbers."

The model of the small press, I sometimes think, is the letter. One person writes the letter; the other reads it, and is changed by it. The letter's ability to change the reader -- even if it is no more than the change of learning one is in another' person's thoughts, in the all-purpose wish-you-were-here postcard -- measures its success. The letter may have one reader, or may appear in a newspaper and be read by thousands: but the overriding goal in either case is not to win a living wage, but to be read.

Cheers ...

Toward Oblivion

Dedication to the small press is, I think, admirable. If you are a writer, there is little or no pay for the writing you do, true enough. Yet even in professional publications there is little pay for what you do.

It was more the failure to realize much financial reward from professional magazines that nearly drove me out of science fiction, after writing quite a bit for those magazines in the early to middle 1990s. The low payment of the small press helped not at all -- but hardly worsened the situation. The small press never offered much promise, in terms of payment. I had been involved in the small press since the 1970s and knew what it was to write "for the love of it" -- for the testing of the spirit that it represented, for the challenge, and of course for the reward ... the reward, that is, of accomplishment.

In some ways small-press accomplishment is lasting in a way professional-press accomplishment often is not. It has a life that is sustained, oddly enough, by its very inconsequence; by its being positioned somewhat askew to the hustle-bustle currents of the mass-production marketplace; by its outsider status. Commercial books are pulped by the thousands -- perhaps by the tens and hundreds of thousands -- and if not pulped then are forgotten by the millions, if not by the tens and hundreds of millions. Commercial books rush headlong into the oblivion toward which small-press books creep with patient fortitude -- with a motion that often seems no motion at all, it is so slow.

The strange conundrum is that small-press books advance toward those double mystery doors of Success and Impact (even if they might be doors leading to Scant Success and Vanishingly Small Impact) so slowly that total oblivion has trouble overtaking them.

Cheers ...

Spectrum Circus

I heard from Heidi Lampietti, of RedJack Books, the other day. She had news of a website she is helping launch, which is dedicated to guiding readers toward works of interest in the realm of independent-press publishing. She is out front with her situation of also being a publisher.

What she has done there at Spectrum Circus, too, is to offer a review of my collection of stories Across the Sky, published by Fairwood Press. Again she is out front with the information that she, who writes the review, is a friend of mine -- also another of my publishers ... and how like the small press that is: for however large this country of letters is that we inhabit, the small press seems always a small world. We become friends easily with one another. And since so few of us are around to read one another's books, we end up commenting on the works of people we may like already as people ... although it is almost impossible, given that the small press is what it is, that the reading and writing aspects of a personality would not make up a large part of our idea of someone. If we know anything about someone's writing, it affects how we see her or him; and likewise the other way around.

And how like the small press, too, this new effort is: hopeful, idealistic, small-scale. One must do one's small part. That seems a core belief that helps spur us forward. Those of us involved in the small press, that is.

The web address of this new review is:
http://www.spectrumcircus.com/books/?bookid=8&action=choose

Cheers ...