I traveled to Atlanta this weekend for the AWP conference & book fair. My chapbook of poems, That Year, was published by Etherdome Press this week. Chapbooks are kind of like zines in that they are small-run independent publishing efforts that are more acts of devotion than cash cows. Chapbooks are an especially common way to publish poetry since there tends to be a niche rather than mainstream audience for these texts. It is a relief for me to release these poems to the reader with such a nice silkscreened cover and as part of the Etherdome series that I like so much.
CCA MFA in Writing poets Brian Teare (co-editor of Woodland Editions) and Joseph Lease (with a new book from Coffee House Press) and fictionista Tom Barbash were also in the mix.
One panel I particularly relished was called "In Defense of Difficulty" hosted by several Bay Area poets who rebutted the pronouncement by John Barr, former Wall Street executive and president of the Poetry Foundation, that contemporary poetry is in "a bad mood" and should be more "entertaining." Maxine Chernoff, who teaches at SF State and co-edits New American Writing, called Barr's agenda to popularize poetry for the general reader as a "another version of homeland security" and argued that behind the fear of difficulty lies a "powerful social elite who wishes to win back poetry as a tool for its own social agenda" in opposition to the movements of the 20th century that made "such vigorous use of poetry" for progressive and innovative ends. You can read more about this controversy in The New Yorker Feburary 19 & 26 article "The Moneyed Muse."
Best promotional schwag: Black Warrior Review flyswatter; Etherdome business card with tagline "Poetry Germinates Here" made of paper with seeds embedded: you can plant the card and it will grow (cards designed by Elizabeth Robinson, pictured below holding flyswatter).
1 comment:
I think the whole idea of art as entertainment is interesting and problematic. As an artist, I would like to believe that on some level what I do is more than entertainment... that it is also a translation, a search, a question... something that can alter the way we see the world or think about it. Can entertainment do this? yes. But is that the point of entertainment? no.
Art on the other hand has the potential to be more than a pretty object or a nice little collection of words. It is supposed to be a window onto a new world. How easy are we as artists supposed to make this whole process for the audience? And in order for something to be entertaining does it also have to be easy? Isn't there reward in working for something, in figuring it out?
I don't think it is our job to spoon feed ideas to an audience. Where's the fun in that? There are enough outlets doing just that and how does that lead to any sort of change in culture?
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