The concept is fascinating: each island is drawn in exquisite detail in black, white, and orange (for cities and roads) and stranded on an expanse of pale blue. The layout evokes the isolation, the constant threat of the ocean. On the facing page is a small bit of factual information about the island: size, population, name, language, latitude & longitude, distances from three nearest land masses, and a timeline of its discovery. Below that is the text of the book, a single paragraph telling the story of a single aspect of the island. It is brief, clipped almost, and highly poetic prose that sometimes borders on cliché (“feathered tribe” for example) and I wonder about the translator striking that balance between accessibly poetic and trite. Though the language can get saccharine  (an unusual problem in my experience of translations from German, so something I definitely wondered about) the facts are exquisitely chosen.

In some cases she focuses on the people, or a person: a horrifying historical event (hundreds of babies dying of tetanus), or something so surreal as to be unbelievable (Marc Liblin learning Rapa in his dreams as a six year old living in France). Sometimes its an environmental disaster, or surprising geographical feature. Very few are unremarkable – like most books intended for a mass market audience the pieces are dense with sensationalism disguised as fact. And some of these stories are easily verified by internet searching (the tetanus epidemic), and the sensationalism of the telling becomes quickly justified. But others, like the Marc Liblin story, is more or less unverifiable.

As a proponent of lying in creative non-fiction it doesn’t trouble me too much. The idea is the more important thing, and stories can have an emotional truth without having a journalistic truth. She asserts as much in the introduction:

“That’s why the question whether these stories are ‘true’ is misleading. All text in the book is based on extensive research and every detail stems from factual sources. I have not invented anything. However I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.” (20)

Of course the Marc Liblin story takes place in the 1960s, so sources would not have been in “ancient and rare books,” and yet the only hits from a google search are other reviews of this book. So what. The story has all the resonance of a Borges story, and for that reason I accept it as an imaginative truth if nothing else.

The book is immensely pleasurable, and engages also in a cultural and environmental critique. Focusing on the cruelty of humans to one another, the extremes of cruelty made possible or exaggerated by the extreme isolation of their setting, she asks us to consider the legacy of exploration, of scientific discovery, and of conquest. Used to thinking of discovery as exclusively positive, and essentially neutral (gathering knowledge for all of humanity!) its startling to be so flatly confronted with the consequences of these acts. Driving species to extinction, or even merely “collecting” specimens by killing adult birds, capturing young and unborn birds, polluting entire self-contained ecosystems, and irradiating entire islands through weapons testing. The human consequences are equally devastating: displacing entire native populations, rape and murder abound. This is the legacy of exploration. As her introduction declares: “Paradise is an island. So is hell.”

Mother: How comfortable are you being out with a black child?
Nanny: Excuse me?
Mother: How comfortable are you being out with a black…
Nanny: Oh, very comfortable. I’m really into the whole culture, and I’m sad that you even have to ask that…
Mother: It’s just that…
Nanny: Oh, I know, I understand, I’m white, obviously, and… But I’m really very comfortable. I babysit for a little boy who’s father is Cape Verdean and his mother is Puerto Rican and [indistinguishable] so y’know…
Mother: Do you have a car?

[the conversation moves on]

——–
Many, if not all, emerging literary writers get their start by publishing with literary journals and small presses. This is especially true for poets, of which I am one, so forgive the bias towards poetry. Though fiction writers (some of them) can hope for lucrative book deals, along with agency representation and even, sometimes, royalties, only the very smallest number of poets can ever hope for that. So if your plan is to make a living writing and publishing poetry (or fiction, of the literary sort, for the most part) now is a good time to reconsider.

According to a Chronicle of Higher Ed. article published in 2010—three years ago, now—there were tens of thousands of people in the U.S. taking poetry workshops and therefore writing poetry. Expand that to the number of people writing poetry without any kind of academic infrastructure and the number is surely in the hundreds of thousands. This is a new world for poetry, a kind of popularity that is really astonishing, especially given how many people in the institutions of poetry claim that the audience is constantly diminishing. And it’s almost as easy to publish now as it is to write.

According to the same article, there were over 2000 literary journals publishing poetry in the Duotrope database. Duotrope is a popular, now-paid, service for writers to find “markets” (as publishing venues are referred to on their site) to which they can submit their work. It used to be free, and now charges a monthly subscription to all those tens and hundreds of thousands of writers hoping to be published.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) which is an organization that provides services to independent and small literary journals and presses has hundreds of member-presses (my own press, Anomalous, is one), and publishes a directory of literary publishing venues that in its last printing was over 400 pages long.

And that’s not even considering the ever-increasing self-publication options: personal blogs and websites; print on demand services like Lulu and Amazon’s Createspace; real “meat-space” print on demand Espresso machine services like the Paige M. Gutenberg at the Harvard Bookstore; and self-publishing ebooks for Kindle or through free services like Smashwords.

Technology is a radically democratizing force that is making literary writing and publishing possible for far greater numbers of people than ever before. And of course this is deeply troubling for a lot of the institutions of traditional literary culture. In a conversation on The Boston Review’s website, spurred by an article by the renowned literary critic Marjorie Perloff on this very phenomena, two poets discuss the consequences of such rapid and radical change. It’s a great conversation, well worth reading.

But more practically this is pretty good news for anyone who wants to be a published writer. It’s not that hard to get published. What’s hard is to get published where you might want to get published. And that’s really the question I think it’s most valuable to consider as a beginning writer, or even as an experienced writer. Where do I want to be published, and (especially) why.

You might, if you’re a poet, really want to be published in Poetry Magazine (the hundred-plus-year-old bastion of Official Verse Culture) because of the prestige associated with that publication. Or you might, if you’re a fiction writer, really want to be published by The New Yorker for the same reasons. Or the Paris Review. You might want to be published by a journal that focuses on a particular demographic (veterans, gender queer, feminist, hispanic, black, asian, native american, really any racial minority, mothers, fathers, writers in their teens, writers over 50, writers in the mid-west, the north-east, the south, Brooklyn, it goes on and on and on). You might want to be published in a journal that publishes writing on a particular theme (love, death, science fiction, war, again, you name it and it’s out there). The abundance of writers and venues out there means that there’s a place for just about any kind of writing, if you can find it.

Which of course doesn’t mean that everyone can (or should try to) publish everything they write (unless of course you’re self-publishing, then, really, go for it). But say you had unlimited time and resources, you could probably try to get every. single. thing. you write published. It would be an interesting experiment. No, for most writers, time is a very limited resource, so we practice a good amount of self-exclusion. We only send out the work we most want to see published, because it is the work we think of as our best. And I’m at my best only about 1% of the time.

And submitting to literary journals takes work (first you have to find the journals you want to submit to, then you have to follow all their guidelines if you want your work to be actually considered, and trust me, many journals will immediately reject work that doesn’t follow their submission guidelines, but more on that in a bit). Submitting doesn’t just take practical, logistical work, it takes emotional work too. You find the perfect place, and you get very excited about it, and then you start doubting yourself, you talk yourself out of submitting at all, but then because it’s so perfect and you love the stuff they publish so much, you talk yourself back into it. You get all your work together, conform to their guidelines, write a good cover letter (tip: short is good), and mail or upload it all. Then there’s the waiting (sometimes as short a time as a few days, more often a few weeks or even months—one journal I really admire takes at least 6 months to get back to their submitters!). So it’s an investment of time and emotional (and sometimes financial, if there’s a submission fee) resources.

And then, the inevitable rejections. You’ve gone through all of that, and you still get rejected most of the time. Most writers do. My journal, Anomalous, receives a relatively small number of submissions compared to other journals – about 200 a month. And we accept less than 2% of the work submitted to us. So you see, it’s not just a matter of numbers, but of really finding the journal (or small press) that fits your work, and your needs as a writer.

Anomalous, the online literary journal I founded in 2010, has a very specific mission. We seek to publish and support emerging writers who are working in ways that push the limits of writing. Essentially, though we don’t use this phrasing on our website, we want to support emerging experimental or innovative writers. Which of course doesn’t mean that the only writing I like is experimental (and if you don’t really know what I mean by experimental, Marjorie Perlof’s article “Poetry on the Brink” offers a great comparison between traditional and innovative literary works). And it doesn’t mean that I don’t like or even want to publish the work of more established, famous writers. But when I set out to start a journal, I wanted to serve a population of writers that needs my services, not the justly-famous writers that have no trouble placing most of their work (those lucky few I mentioned before). My goal was not to use my famous-writer connections to build a reputation for myself as a publisher, but to use my experience publishing to help writers build their own reputations.

Other journals, of course, have different and legitimate goals. There’s room in the pool for everyone, especially when the pool is made up of so many hundreds of thousands.

Publishing has changed a lot in the past decade or two because of the technology that makes it cheaper and easier to publish books, and because of digital publishing platforms. Of course. I couldn’t find the exact numbers, but there used to be many “large” publishers, like Norton, Penguin, and Random House, and now there are five. As large publishers have gotten larger in an attempt to save themselves in the face of new technology and shifting markets, they have opened up a lot of room for independent publishers, which range from big and for-profit (New Directions), big and non-profit (University Presses, for example), to tiny (my own press, for example). Each kind of publisher serves writers in different ways, just like journals. And just like journals some publishers have defined demographics they wish to serve. But the more important differences between publishers (as opposed to journals) are production, distribution and marketing.

I’d actually much rather answer questions and have a conversation about publishing than continue to talk about it (since I already know what I think). But let me say that I’m incredibly excited about the move towards radical accessibility in publishing. I’m excited to think that a new market approach might be to make most if not all of the books available digitally for free, and to seek revenues in new ways. Especially since, as I said at the beginning, very few writers make their living writing. I’m excited by the explosion of platforms for ebook and app-based publishing. I love audiobooks, and firmly believe that all books (especially poetry books) should be available in that format. I’m also a book designer, and maker of hand-made letterpress editions, and so I’m especially interested in how the book as an object can retain its value (and have that value increase, even) in a digital world. And to prove it, the chapbooks that Anomalous Press publishes are all made in a variety of formats: ebook, audiobook, paperback, and some in a handmade artist book edition.

So as emerging writers yourselves, what is it you want to talk about when it comes to publishing?

But I have to say the best investment I’ve ever made into my own productivity and sense of ability to keep working at what matters to me, no matter the state of our living arrangements, was made two weeks ago for my birthday.

I had saved up for and got for myself a cellular data-enabled iPad mini, with Logitech keyboard case, and a very nice pair of Bose collapsable headphones. The whole set-up weighs less than 3 lbs and fits easily into my small army-navy standby bag.

It’s not a desktop replacement. It’s not a laptop replacement. I can’t do photo editing or book design and layout on it. I can’t edit the pages of my online literary journal on it. I can’t even really edit spreadsheets on it to keep track of my freelance billable hours. But I can do just about everything I want to do when I’m commuting, traveling, or sitting at a cafe (with or without wireless).

For example, I did all of my class prep this week on it (it helps that my class is using a blog as its primary means of turning in work, and its no accident that it’s a wordpress.com blog, because their iPad app is pretty awesome). And because a water main burst yesterday in Boston and all the classroom buildings were closed for the first 2 hours of my 3 hour class, I relied entirely on the iPad and its cellular data to run our digital-driven class. It was because I had my iPad we were able to take our class outside and follow the rough outline and notes I’d scheduled for us.

And not just for teaching and class prep. This week I’ve done my daily research and writing using the iPad, because while I write by hand on paper, I still need to have access to some of my favorite writing tools: google books and the OED.

Having the headphones means that I’ve been working happily (reading for class) in a relatively busy coffee shop that’s playing music I normally couldn’t tune out well enough to focus on my reading. The Bose aren’t noise-cancelling, but they’re such good headphones that they really do reduce enough of the background noise to focus on what I’m listening to. Which in my case is Max Richter’s Memoryhouse, one of my favorite albums to do just about anything to.

I’m not sharing all of this to brag, but to encourage anyone on the fence about investing in good headphones, and perhaps an iPad or iPad mini, to do so. Especially if, like me, you find yourself moving around a lot, not always sure when or where you’ll have a chance to get some work done, but you want to be ready to grab those moments when they come.

Anyway, it’s usually an ok state of things, a precarious balancing act, dependent entirely on timing and organization. But this week it’s been especially out of control. I started teaching a class at UMass Boston yesterday, The Art of Stealing (which has its own blog, and hashtag: #stealart ). I’m finishing work in the Brown letterpress studio Friday. I’ve just concluded two different layout projects. And we’re moving in two weeks. The timing couldn’t be worse.

But something really marvelous has been happening. A collapse of time. This week for The Art of Stealing we’re covering the early twentieth century avant-garde movements focusing specifically on collage. And my own perception of my life has fragmented, accelerated, one thing juxtaposing against another and creating an altogether new experience. My experience of time and content this week has a chaotic frenzy about it – everything I’m reading piling up so that I can’t quite discern the edges. This may not make me the most organized lecturer, but it’s been an incredibly powerful kinesthetic rendering of these texts I’m pouring into myself.

And something else: why has no one made a web edition of Benjamin’s Arcades Project? I can imagine it, but am without the tools to build it.

The book’s focus is unsurprisingly on the UK, with only a handful of the most known artists outside of the UK included. But I like the way the book was organized, by style/subject rather than chronologically. And the reproductions are really stunning.

Vanessa Place’s section was much more engaging. But there was less engagement with the idea of conceptualism, more joy in the act of writing a kind of manifesto but less to say perhaps.

Still, for anyone interested in conceptual writing this is a great little text to read over.

The first proposition of the manifesto is that conceptual writing is allegorical writing. This relies really heavily on Benjamin’s idea of allegory, though that’s never expressly explored (or even alluded to). Since that is the premise, and it’s not explicitly stated or explained, the development of that idea might leave some wondering. This idea is actually not all that new, Benjamin Buchloh develops it and I suspect that’s where Fitterman is getting his start, because he directly references Buchloh’s essay later on.

The essential idea is that allegorical writing is writing that depends on the existence of other texts (pre- and post-) for its reading. Texts here in the broadest sense of “things that can be read” which of course includes images, media, advertisement, political rhetoric, etc. Fitterman doesn’t argue this, but I might, that all writing is allegorical writing, which leaves the idea of conceptualist writing un-usefully vague. This comes from my background as a translator, in which one of the first things I think about is the violence that is done when extracting a text from its cultural/linguistic context and placing it in a foreign one. Every text, no matter how “original” depends on the entirety of its cultural context for its rendering and it’s reading.

So the question really seems to be how conceptual writing, as allegorical writing, engages with the pre- and post- texts that it invokes and relies upon. Here Fitterman interestingly engages with the idea of failure: “Failure is the goal of conceptual writing” (22). Again, it’s thrown down like a lovely little nugget without any exploration or development, or even showing of what pre-texts he’s relying on in formulating that statement. Which is a little frustrating, because I’m intrigued by the idea but not willing to swallow it wholesale.

Again, I think of translation. There are some theories of translation that posit all translation is essentially a work of failure. Because the wholeness of the text can never be transferred (see, for a great example of this idea, Borges’ “Pierre Menard Author of The Quixote”) all translations are fundamentally failures. If this is the inevitable condition of a translation, then I might also assume the inverse. All translations are successes, as conceptual projects at least. I’d like to explore this more, but the Fitterman is so lacking in any in-depth engagement.

He does develop two interesting ideas of open and closed conceptual texts. An open text is, in his formulation, one that can be read horizontally – multiple readings but not multiple meanings/levels of reading. A closed text is one that can be read vertically, multiple levels of reading, but not necessarily multiple readings. These are things that translators have to consider at every step – what kinds of readings the text is open to, and how to re-create that openness (or another kind of openness) in the new language. An easy example is pun – that is a level of reading that does not necessarily create a new reading, but is a place to enact the existent reading of the text.

He briefly engages in the ethics of appropriation, deciding that ethics are essentially constructed by communities, and that it is “enacted in the question of editing.” A very interesting idea I wish had been developed or explored, again. Ethics leads to the question of faithfulness, another translation mainstay, in which he posits some perhaps-radical to those outside of translation questions like “faithfulness to what?” Again, no exploration.

In the end he talks briefly about the attention of conceptual projects to language of mass media and popular culture (the internet, etc.) as a recourse for poetic discourse that is already weak in terms of its own cultural capital. Though I assume he finds poetry (and by extension “progressive” writing, and perhaps by extension “progressive” artwork in any medium) lacking in cultural capital based on the ideas of Bourdieu, he doesn’t make his underlying assumptions clear. Too bad, because I think the way conceptual and progressive writing engages with mass media and digital culture is perhaps the most interesting part of this idea.

So yes, some really interesting propositions, with no engagement, exploration, or even enough revealing of his thinking to build upon, or even really use, in my own thinking. I can only hope that he’ll someday, somewhere, in some form, expand on some of the more interesting ideas here.

This book is a selection of the complete poems of Ronald Johnson, a poet I hadn’t heard of before this book. It starts collecting some of his early work, which I actually rather enjoyed against all odds. Influenced by the Black Mountain poets, it is a kind of American bucolic, but without the romanticization of a lost wilderness, etc. And in quite interesting language, peppered with quotations in a collaging gesture that I like a lot.

Then I sort of lose interest for a while – the concrete stuff is interesting, and in general I like exploring the possibilities of concrete poetry, but I’ve been spoiled by the successes of the Portuguese- and Spanish-language traditions of concrete poetry and so found this a little wanting. I loved the idea of an ekphrastic poem for a piece of music (an idea I’ve been contemplating in recent weeks) but didn’t think the concrete form was the best for the idea.

Then, into ARK, the “big” poem, selections of which take up about 1/3 of the collection. It was….fine. I loved BEAM 30, ‘The Garden’ from which the title of the collection is taken. But BEAM 21, 22, 23 which includes a kind of acrostic of the Psalms, grew tedious. And the ARK poems didn’t hold my attention either. The nearly randomly juxtaposed lines didn’t open to possibility in the way I’d hoped for. There was something almost arbitrary about them.

Anyways, I’ll be discussing this book with some friends later today so perhaps my understanding of it will change based on their insights. I loved a couple of poems in the collection: The Unfoldings, and BEAM 30. I found some absolutely stunning phrases and ideas peppered throughout. But as a whole I felt something ineffable was lacking.

Anyway, it’s been a lot of fun putting together the syllabus for this course, and it’s alerted me to a number of areas of interest and overlap in new media. Because this time, I’m co-teaching the course with my husband, Matt, who also did his BA at UMB. It’s where we met. And returning there to teach, even adjunct, feels again like a kind of really special homecoming. Last time, the students were every bit as incredible as I remembered them being when I was there, and even though it was the summer, a lot of my faculty mentors were around. Catching up with them, being back on campus, it was absolutely joyous  And last time I was teaching a course on literary translation (the experimental kind, no less!). Which made me slightly less nervous, I think, because it’s what my first MFA is in, and I can just talk and talk and talk about it.

With the Art of Stealing we’re broaching some new territory for me. This is the kind of class I wish I could have taken as an undergrad, or even a grad student, but was never offered. It’s a hybrid class, looking at creative appropriation in artistic production across mediums and genres, high art and pop culture, and most importantly, digital culture. I’ve never formally studied these things, per se, but I’ve been deeply fascinated with appropriation as a translator (which might not make sense at first, but trust me, it comes up, especially as you get more and more experimental with translating methods).

So it’s very exciting to put this syllabus together, but I keep wondering how much convincing I’ll be doing. The question I keep coming back to is will the students need to be persuaded that appropriation is a legitimate method of artistic production (and some might and do argue that in our time the only legitimate method of artistic production)? Or will they have been so convinced by the Romantic/capitalist view that is dominant in most discussions on art that they are completely beholden to the notion of “originality” as the only method of articulating “genius”? I wonder, not merely idly, but because it could really change how fast and how far we go in the course.

Has anyone else taught a course like this? Any insights, as I’m finalizing my syllabus?

We’ve found ourselves back on the east coast, where we are both from. And one of the things I’ve always wanted to do is go up to see the Bay of Fundy. I’ve been to Toronto and Montreal, but I’ve always been more of a city-destination person and it’s only been since meeting Matt that nature has started to play a bigger role in our choosing destinations. So I think this summer we’re going to take a road trip – up to Nova Scotia. Which is great because it will be lower-stress than some of the bigger trips we’ve taken in the past few years, and I still get the joy of planning a trip.

Here’s the real thing: I love buying and having guide books. I keep them for places I want to go (hello, Egypt) and places I’ve been. I read them for pleasure, discovering all the amazing things in the world that I hope to someday see myself. But I’ve never found a favorite “brand.” My dad swears by the Fodors. For years I was a Lonely Planet girl, but last summer in Peru it seemed a bit low-end (i.e. gross) and not as interesting as it had been in other countries. I once used a Moon guide, and liked it, but didn’t have strong feelings about it. I often get two or three. I’ve done Eyewitness in combination with Fodors, Lonely Planet in combination with Rough Guide. Frommers on top of Moon. And I still don’t feel like one “brand” has consistently met my interests and needs.

I’ve used Fodors and Lonely Planet the most, but I have reservations. Sometimes the Lonely Planet people seem too snarky and “cool” to delight in the (perhaps popular, but for a reason) tourist-destination things; sometimes the Fodors seems too afraid to dip their toes into the local scene. So, has anyone out there found a consistent favorite among the travel guides? Or is it just a matter of each brand has different strengths, and to round them out you need a few?