Comments on: Feeling Guilty

By: Michael Wells

Michael Wells — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:25:12 +0000

It seems to me the economics of poetry is irrelevant to the debate. There are two principals involved here. One is the law as it applies to creative property rights, the other is simply respect for author/owner of creative property.If you are an artist, poet or otherwise, I would think that you should have the courtesy to show respect for the efforts and craft of their trade.
I think many poets will usually consent if someone wants to post their work under most circumstances, but it is disrespectful to the individual and the greater community of artists as a whole to simply ignore an owner’s right to make that call themselves and make it for them.

By: karren alenier

karren alenier — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:11:38 +0000

I publish other poet’s poetry on my scene4 magazine blog The Dressing at scene4.com. I ask permission and so far no one has said no. One poet asked for a copyright symbol. I also am invovled with pubic poetry programs and publishing. Making poets known is how I help fellow poet’s. When a person buys poetry, the poet most likely has made a personal connection to the buyer. The Internet helps build a poet’s readership.

By: Robin Kemp

Robin Kemp — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:41:30 +0000

Thanks, Alicia, for the link to Bauerlein’s blog entry (been reading all the Chronicle blogs on and off lately). Far be it from me to price valuable scholarly work out of reach of libraries–and the idiotic e-mail bureaucracy pseudo-conversation he describes is perhaps the most irritating experience possible for any person of both letters and common sense. How do we define what “reasonable” means, though? What is “reasonable” for Harcourt (or any publisher) may not be “reasonable” for the author. Writing is work that producers, publishers, and marketers value–but only AFTER they get control of it. (Consider the ongoing WGA strike.) Writers are consistently asked to give away our product for free or next to nothing by those who parlay said product into big profits. Think of it this way: who’s going to notice a poem (or a penny) here or there? Hardly anyone. Bundle together lots and lots of poems (or pennies), and the person doing the bundling gets rich. Add compound interest and, well… poets and most writers are being robbed today in much the same way that early blues/R&B/jazz musicians were ripped off by recording companies/distributors for most of the previous century. We have to educate ourselves about how our work is valued beyond the occasional royalty statement.
I don’t work for magazine editors who don’t pay the going rate. I have a lot fewer headaches as a result. Any author, regardless of genre, must know what “reasonable” is before signing the contract. Poetry may never make one rich–but whatever one’s creative work is worth, the person who did the work of creating it should get the lion’s share–no matter how small the literary lion. (And a dead author has difficulty managing his or her literary estate, which should put “getting a will done” on the procrastinating poet’s to-do list.)

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 06:39:14 +0000

Bill, I agree about the Puritan streak in American letters… It goes quite deep–surely it is one of the reasons that flat tropeless language is associated with sincerity and authenticity (take seven out of ten poems read on Writer’s Almanac for an example of what I mean) and “artifice” (a source of pleasure) is suspect (rhyme most of all), and shunted to the edges–be it avant or derriere garde.
I am a huge fan of the New British Poetry and delighted Poetry is actively promoting it.
Robin and Steve, you might check out this article on the subject of permissions and the responsibility of presses to make important works available at reasonable rates:
“What We Owe the New Critics” from the Chronicle of Higher Education. (I’m addicted to Arts & Letters Daily.) The meat of the matter is halfway through the article.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:32:33 +0000

Fans of British poetry might like to know that in the last few months alone, Poetry has published, you guessed it, Wendy Cope… along with poems and translations by Roddy Lumsden, Anne Stevenson, Fiona Sampson, Siobhan Campbell, Robin Robertson, George Szirtes, Don Paterson, Kathleen Jamie, Michael Hofmann, Clive Wilmer, Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald … and in 2004, we devoted a double issue to contemporary British poetry featuring again some of the aforementioned, along with Christopher Logue, Maura Dooley, Jo Shapcott, Miachael Donaghy, Gillian Allnutt, Philip Gross, Robert Crawford, John Glenday, Anne Rouse, and Helen Dunmore. Cojuld we have done more, excuse the pun? Perhaps. But we, at least, do not undervalue our colleagues from the UK.

By: bill knott

bill knott — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:07:11 +0000

continuing my previous comment:
despite ostensible differences
the one thing that most factions of USA poetry
seem to have in common
is their puritanism . . .
hence the prevailing impatience with
and disdain for
(and as I see it, the fear of)
Brit poets like Cope who
actually seek to provide immediate pleasures
for their readers . . .
maybe one reason British poets are so ill-read
and undervalued in this country
is our ongoing Colonial sense
of belatedness and inferiority . . .

By: bill knott

bill knott — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:25:19 +0000

. . . but why is that Cope has not been published in this country?
Wake Forest Press loads the shelves with every second-rate Irish droog they can find, while great British poets go begging for an outlet here . . .
why can’t some USA publisher do a Selected Craig Raine, a Selected Carol Ann Duffy, a Collected Cope?
yes, I can and do order their books from Amazon.UK.com . . . but!
why won’t that wine travel?
I read Roger McGough with more pleasure than most of his USA contemporaries—
Oh, yes: pleasure. The one sin most USA poets are afraid to reckon—
To me sometimes it seems as if our country’s poetry is still Colonial . . . or still Romantic. Back in 1985, Poetry (Chicago) published a very interesting piece by John Bayley, in which he states that the difference between contemporary British and USA poetry is that the former is Post-Romantic, and the latter isn’t . . .
I agreed with him then, and don’t see that anything has changed since.
. . . I wish Cope well in her effort to Webwipe her work,
but I must say that one virtue of reading poems online is that I can increase the font size—
for geezers like me much bookprint is Squintsville . . . this morning I’m trying to read Oxford Press “A Century of Sonnets” with eyestrain for my pains . . . the Sonnet Central site is friendlier than Oxford to readers my age.

By: Robin Kemp

Robin Kemp — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:32:47 +0000

Emily,
Should anyone see fit to do so, he or she may purchase a letter to the editor that I wrote to Poetry for $5.95 from amazon.com . (Actually, it may be for letters that I and others wrote that particular issue.)
Do I see one cent of this? No. (Has anyone bought it? Dunno.) Does Poetry? Likely not, but it’d be interesting to find out.
How did this happen?
I’m guessing that whichever electronic publishing megacorp–in this case, Thompson Gale– indexes Poetry sold those rights to amazon.com .
While I doubt that anyone would ever pay $5.95 for said letter, readily available for free in local libraries, I do wonder whether poets whose individual poems are sold thusly get a cut, get a say, had their rights hijacked, or what.
Now does writing a letter to the editor–or even this blog?–indicate all rights given over to the magazine? How might that stifle the free exchange of ideas? Should letter-writers be compensated if published now? The whole thing is quite problematic.
Here ’tis, the evidence:
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Thomson Gale on March 1, 2006. The length of the article is 2372 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Letters to the editor.(COMMENT)(Letter to the editor)
Author: Robin Kemp
Publication: Poetry (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 187 Issue: 6 Page: 532(7)
Article Type: Letter to the editor
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dear Editor,
Frequently those who feel wronged politically, as in having been underrepresented in a canonical anthology…[excerpt snipped here]

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:03:14 +0000

I was making a joke, Rose, but to make a point. Poetry is used and valued by our culture, but that value remains largely unacknowledged both monetarily (in terms of book sales and paychecks) and culturally (in terms of rank or visibility). The new technology of the Internet is, as Cope, Alicia, Schwab, KateBB point out, disrupting that situation by blending traditional means of production, distribution and consumption of poetry. The Internet is creating more monetary and social value for poetry in two ways–through blogging and advertising.
As a place of unmediated “self-expression” (quotation marks are for Ange’s benefit), new blogs, MySpace, and Facebook pages arrive and fade away every day. All those “writers” need a way to express themselves; they often GOOGLE poems and arrive at our site, poets.org, poetry.com, poemhunter.com, or other major archives of legal and illegal poetry. Then they post a link, or cut and paste to their blog. I watch and trace these tributaries everyday and it’s fascinating. We pay for the right to use a poem on our site, and depending on the publisher, estate, or rightsholder, some of that money makes its way back to the poet. (As Robin Kemp notes, poets don’t generally know the percentage of copyright payments that end up in publishers’ vs. poets’ pockets.)
The two most popular poetry sites on the Internet—poetry.com and poemhunter.com—have high traffic because they deliver what thousands of people want–to be published poets and to socially network with like-minded people. You can pretty much upload any poem you want to these sites and instantly become a published poet. Because people also upload classic poems, many teachers link from their syllabi to poems on these sites. Both sites, I’m guessing, turn a profit by selling advertising and through prizes/publication that “recognize” the people who’ve submitted their poems. They didn’t create the demand for writerly fame, or for selling advertising. They’re just capitalizing on it.
While these are the two most prominent sites, there are literally millions of other sites, pages, blogs, that aggregate content so that the Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL can sell advertising, generally keyword advertising. Here’s my favorite this week: http://www.poetrysite.com/.
We’ve had to pull articles off of our site because SPAM and advertising aggregators find them, sending thousands of hits and SPAM our way. The hits are most likely generated by web robots and spiders. (Ironically, the aggregators always seem to find Kenneth Goldsmith’s articles, proving his point that we’re word processors rather than writers.) If we don’t take this content down, we have to spend hours clearing SPAM and have no way of knowing which poems and articles people are reading. Someone is making money off this content, but it’s not the poets; most likely it’s Google, et al.
So while I agree that poetry’s value cannot be measured in or by the marketplace, it is increasingly being measured and garnered there. And, bloggers who post poems to express themselves and connect with others are valuing it as social currency. While that might be a simplistic use of poetry to some poets, millions of people use it in that way. And using it in that way means more people are reading it, rather than working at their jobs, or watching videos on YouTube of Mentos being dropped into Coke (or is that Pepsi) bottles to create backyard geysers.
If we all went on strike and pulled it off the Internet stage, would the culture start to value it differently?
(It is illegal, by the way Katebb, to post poems for educational purposes. Even if you’re a non-profit that exists for educational purposes, you still have to acquire the right to use it in that way from a rightsholder)
Emily

By: Diane Arnson Svarlien

Diane Arnson Svarlien — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:39:01 +0000

I’m surprised at the backlash against Wendy Cope in this venue (and glad to see some support for the points she makes). She is a creative artist trying to make a living, and there are laws protecting her interests–laws that include “fair use” provisions. People who enjoy poetry should respect these laws; it’s a small price to pay for what poets and other creative artists contribute to society. Certainly if a poetry reading is charging money for admission, the organizers should have permission, and pay permission fees if necessary, for all the material included. All of the arts endure some piracy, and yes, I frequent libraries and used book stores, but at least someone at some point paid for that book. For a convincing demonstration that poets are not really over-rewarded in our society, see Cope’s poem, “Engineer’s Corner” in _Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis_. If you can’t afford the book, please ask your local library to order it!