December 2017 – Page 2

Three Reading Mysteries of Life

three

Three reading mysteries of life:

Kids love to be read to and mostly love reading–until around ages 11 or 12, when interest in reading plummets for most of them. What gives? Why? Is it the “adult” poking forward, elbowing the “child” into the background? Is it the oncoming angst of adolescence? Is it their teachers who turn every poem, story, and novel into an analytical punching bag vs. a piece of writing to be enjoyed and experienced? Is it everyone’s favorite straw man (or android): technology, in all its wily, Siren-call forms? A mystery, when you consider the unique benefits of reading for enjoyment.
Kids love poetry; adults do not. For little kids, poetry comes in the form of children’s books. The good Doctor Seuss, for instance. Goodnight, Moon. The Runaway Bunny. Even, on a basic level, Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, which still enjoy deep roots in the rich earth of our memories. The New York Times poetry editor, David Orr, thinks it’s all about sound. This theory tells us that poets who are conscious of sound devices over all might be on to something. Nevertheless, a mystery, when you consider the beauty and economy of poetry, a genre that can touch truths like no other.
General readers label all poetry as inscrutable. Which brings us to the question of accessible vs. inscrutable poetry. Which type of poem is most attractive to the lay reader who has become an adolescent and given up nursery rhymes by large white waterfowl trying to stay clear of pillows? I would guess accessible. Too bad “accessible” is equated with “easy” by the Guardians of Poetry Doomed (they’re out there!). Easy poetry is often deemed lousy poetry by high school English teachers and college professors who have tortured poems and tied cement blocks to the ankles of the genre, forcing it overboard, but most readers who have moved on to novels, thank you, and “nonfiction” (if there is such a thing anymore), you’re welcome, really want no part of the inscrutable stuff that so delights the theoretical, tweed jacket crowd. A mystery, when you consider poetry is a genre worth saving, not guarding.

For Authors, Goodreads’ “Giveaway” Program Becomes a Misnomer

Goodreads Lost Sherpa of Happiness poetry The Indifferent World

Sherpa

News Flash: Four days remain for Goodreads members to sign up for a free copy of my new book, Lost Sherpa of Happiness. If you do the Goodreads thing, you can sign up for a lightning bolt’s chance here.

I’ve spoken to the GR’s Giveaway program before on these pages and have decidedly ambivalent feelings about it. For publicity purposes, I signed on three different times for my first book, The Indifferent World, and dutifully sent books out to the lucky winners.

Unlucky me, however. Not one of the winners bothered to review the book, and as the losers do not buy books once they fail to win the freebie (at least in my experience), it’s a net loss for the author–in this case, the cost of three books plus postage.

The news flash I trumpeted above will be my swan song with the Goodreads Giveaway program. As of January, they will be turning to pay-to-play, charging authors $120 to use the program. Of course, to the big publishers, this is nothing. But to small independent presses like Future Cycle Press (which accepted my first manuscript) and Kelsay Books (which accepted my second), it’s a bigger deal.

The small presses cannot afford marketing, so it’s all on the author. Can I afford $120 to play in the Amazon-owned Goodreads Giveaway program? I don’t think so. I’d have to sell an awful lot of books to justify the cost. Meantime, the rich (although that word doesn’t quite capture the dimensions of Amazon’s wealth) get richer. And Amazon adds to its growing reputation as an author-unfriendly bull in a china shop.

I argued against this move in the Goodreads Feedback group, and was somewhat amazed at the number of posters who praised the move by Goodreads. You are a business, one poster lectured in browbeat mode, as if authors from Dan Brown to Ken Craft were the same animal worthy of the same broad brush.

Uh, no. Not all authors are the same.

Nothing in life’s for free! the pro-paying posters chirped. Plus this should weed out the dreck we freebie hunters have to swim through–all those self-published books and that other stuff.

I guess I fall under the category of “other stuff,” as all published-on-demand (POD) books– even if they undergo the process of being read and accepted by small independent presses–follow the same model as self-published ones if they use a publishing outfit like Amazon’s CreateSpace. It’s all one to those who argue in favor of payment for services.

Of course, I would argue that readers who post reviews on Goodreads (many of them not only beautifully but professionally done, all of them for free) should be paid if we’re following the same logic.

After all, do these free reviews drive sales and feed Amazon’s insatiable money machine? Rhetorical question. Amazon has buttons under every book on Goodreads, each leading to the Mother Ship sales juggernaut.

Different, though, the naysayers cry. What’s good for the golden goose (Amazon) is not good for the old gray gander (every day readers’ reviewers). Meantime, ironically enough, most small presses who cannot get precious shelf space in bookstores must sell on the Mother Ship’s web site. That’s right: Amazon dot all-is-not-calm.

Anyway, to come full circle, there’s a free book if you want to enter and take your chances by December 10th, midnight eastern standard time.

After that? I hope you’ll buy a book and strike a blow for the little guy (publisher AND poet). If you like poetry or feel the call to reconnect with the genre, it’s better than Dan Brown, I think you’ll find.

But then, I’m a little biased. Just a little.

When Reputations Are Wrong

poetry reading poetry

olds

Sometimes poets get a reputation and carry it around like Jacob Marley’s chains. Consider Sharon Olds and sex. The two are closely aligned in poetry readers’ minds, but Olds is more than that. She can write about family–both her kids and her parents–in moving ways. Ways that could pass muster with the Hallmark Channel, even.

Consider “Late Poem to My Father.” It is an exercise in empathy wherein Olds uses her imagination to visit her own father’s childhood and what he might have experienced under his father. The incentive? Olds’ father apparently was an alcoholic, and like most alcoholic fathers, no joy to be around if you were his son or daughter.

“Why?” Olds must have asked. “How?” And, as is so often the case with poets, these questions drove her muse.

Olds’ poem, then, is similar to an adopted child’s search for her birth parent. The chariot is driven by the winged horses Why and How. The poem seeks answers. It wants to understand, to connect, in the worst way. Let’s take a look-see:

Late Poem to My Father
by Sharon Olds

Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.

Here time dials all the way back to Dad at age seven, when he was “helpless, smart.” Then comes the purposely vague “there were things the man / did near you, and he was your father.”

So much for hard and fast rules. Writers are instructed to forswear words like “things” and yet, sometimes, they are just the ticket. Sometimes letting the reader imagine different concrete interpretations enhances the effect.

Olds continues with her reverie: “…something was / not given to you, or something was / taken from you that you were born with.” Either might explain a path toward alcohol–one cleared with the machete of misery rooted in childhood.

The poetic part of the poem hits its stride toward the end:

I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me.

Not many are willing to look at an adult and see a child “formed in front of the fire,” or see “the tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the hear in place / snapped.”

With images rendered like that, despite his very evident flaws, the father is redeemed by a forgiving daughter who wishes she were there to help him as a child when he was most vulnerable. And now, she finds it noble that, unlike so many others, her father, addicted as he might be, refuses to carry the curse forward: “And what they did to you / you did not do to me.”

Sharon Olds’ poems with sexual themes are often frank and provocative–hardly subtle. But the story, as with most reputations, is more complicated than that. Reading a collection of her works shows that she can be sensitive and forgiving, too. She is not, in other words, a one-trick pony.

Try Non-GMO, Organic, Locavore Poetry!

poetry poetry books publishing reading poetry

gift

Recently I read a sad statistic. The average print-on-demand book (the typical publishing model for poets who do not self-publish and who do not have the name recognition of the big boppers) sells only 35-40 copies. Why? Because that number happens to match the average number of friends and family members in the POD poet’s circle.

This is why so many poets are ambitious about their readings. There are better chances at augmenting sales–however minutely–by barnstorming the reading circuit.

As any poet will tell you, reading crowds can be as small as zero (try reading to THAT) and, even when there are numbers, there are not always buyers, especially at affairs with open mics where most of the audience consists of others waiting to read their poems.

Here’s the thing, though. Many POD poets I’ve read are talented, indeed. The trouble is, POD publishers do not engage in any marketing on behalf of these writers. It is totally up to the poet, who really doesn’t have the means to reach the masses. No book editor at a major paper or magazine or e-zine is about to review their collection. No podcast by The New York Times will come within a statute mile of discussing it, either. Meanwhile, the few readers (discounting other poets) who DO read poetry are out buying the usual suspects–poets published by major publishers with an ample marketing budget.

To use a food metaphor in this era of foodies, the little companies-that-could have little chance against the giant food corporations (read: Big Food) because the grocery store is stacked in favor of… Big Food.

But wait. In recent years, Davids of the food world have successfully made inroads on the seemingly-impregnable Goliaths called Big Food. Under the banners of “non-GMO” and “organic,” they’ve charged more money for a quality product that consumers have been willing to pay for and consume.

Why does the equivalent not happen in poetry book sales, then? Most readers would argue they cannot part with the $12-$18 your typical paperback, POD collection of poetry costs–not for an unknown name who might have little talent.

The operative word? “Might.”

But what if your non-GMO, organic poet is pretty damn good? You need not roll the dice to find out by buying the book on a hope. You need only search the internet with the poet’s name. Chances are good that some of the poet’s work is published by on-line ‘zines in addition to paper ones unavailable on the web. OR, go to the poet’s web page (this much most DO have), where sample poems are almost always waiting to be sampled via links created for your convenience (think of the free food stations shoppers gobble up on Friday nights at Whole Foods).

Look. Readers are good people willing to put their money into something they believe in–the arts. All it takes for this paradigm shift, from always BIG guys to sometimes LITTLE guys, is a little research and, most importantly, a casting off of assumptions.

Meaning: You can’t assume that the only poets worth reading are familiar names published by familiar publishers. That’s like saying Nestlé, Kraft, PepsiCo, Unilever, Kellogg, and General Mills are the only food and beverage companies worth buying because they are the only ones supplying quality foods and beverages.

Readers of poetry are the only ones who can break the monopoly on readers held by Big Bopper Poetry Presses. You don’t know what you’re missing until you look into some POD poetry books that have been vetted and accepted by a small press publisher or even published by the author herself.

Bottom line: Do a little research and reading on the web. Go panning for gold. Then support some up-and-coming poets for readers on your holiday gift list. The recipients may just feel like they are on the cusp of something penny-stock big as opposed to chasing yesterday’s hot blue chipper.

Nota Bene: I considered posting links to POD poets’ books here by way of recommendations, but then I realized doing so was sure to offend someone whose book I left out. Therefore, I leave the search to poetry readers who otherwise would only buy books–as gifts or for themselves–with names like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins on them. Enjoy your samples!

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Unlike major publishing houses, small, independent publishers have no marketing budget to speak of, so they depend upon word-of-mouth enthusiasm among their readers. Help keep the word-of-mouth momentum rolling for Lost Sherpa of Happiness by visiting Amazon for a copy of this grassroots favorite today.