Like quilting, archiving employs the obsessive stitching together of many small found pieces into a larger vision, a personal attempt at ordering a chaotic world. It’s not such a far leap from the quiltmaker to the stamp collector or book collector. Walter Benjamin, an obsessive collector himself, wrote about the close connection between collecting and making in his essay “Unpacking My Library”: “Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals — the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.” In Benjaminan terms, all of these impulses — making, collecting & archiving — can be construed as folk practices.

Let’s add to that the organizing of digital materials. The advent of digital culture has turned each one of us into an unwitting archivist. From the moment we used the “save as” command when composing electronic documents, our archival impulses began. “Save as” is a command that implies replication; and replication requires more complex archival considerations: where do I store the copy? Where is the original saved? What is the relationship between the two? Do I archive them both or do I delete the original?

When our machines become networked, it gets more complicated. When we take that document and email it to a friend or professor, our email program automatically archives a copy of both the email we sent as well as duplicating our attachment and saving it into a “sent items” folder. If that same document is sent to a listserv, then that identical archival process is happening on dozens — perhaps even thousands — of machines, this time archived as a “received item” on each of those email systems. When we, as members of that listserv, open that attachment, we need to decide if — and then where — to save it.

I could go on, but you get the point. Writing on an electronic platform is not only writing, but also doubles as archiving; the two processes are inseparable.

Or take the “simple” act of listening to music. If we look closer at that which we automatically do every day without thinking, we’ll find it’s not so simple. Let’s say I want to play a CD on my computer. The moment I insert it into my drive, a database is called up (Gracenote) and it begins peppering my disc with ID3 tags, useful when I decide to rip the disc to MP3s. The archiving process has begun. Unlike an LP, where all that was required was to slap the platter on a turntable and listen to the music, the MP3 process requires me to become a librarian. The ID3 tags make it possible for me to quickly locate my artifact within my MP3 archive. If Gracenote can’t find it, I must insert those fields — artist, album, track, etc. — myself.

iTunes automatically stores these MP3s into my “iTunes Music” directory, creating two new folders — the first being the artists’ name and the second, the album’s name. Within the album folder, I find that these tracks have been assigned numbers and names, as well as bearing its ID3 tags. If I move these MP3s into the iTunes program to play them, iTunes automatically creates yet another database of all this information, seeking as well to acquire album artwork and so forth. And yet, I might decide that I don’t want my files archived according to the iTunes scheme and stored on my hard drive, which is quickly running out of space. Instead, I store all my MP3s on a large external hard drive, organized by a schema that makes sense to me, which involves another level of transfer and archiving. Once I want to share my playlists or MP3s with other people, I must archive on yet an entirely other level.

All of this needs to be constantly backed up, which creates yet another level of the archive. No one wants to lose their data. Since I’ve pretty much been living online for the past fifteen years, archiving my work — my documents, my correspondence, my collections, and so forth — has become just as important as the creation of new artifacts. Having lost too much information over the years, I religiously back up: some drives are backed up redundantly, two or three times.

Clearly, all of this is a far cry — and a lot of extra busy work — from the act of merely listening to music. In fact, I spend much more time acquiring, cataloging and archiving my artifacts these days than I do actually engaging with them. The ways in which culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is a inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to engage in a more profound way with the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring; we’ve come to prefer the bottles to the wine.

Our primary impulse, then, has moved from creators to collectors and archivists, proving Walter Benjamin, once more to be prophetic: “If my experience may serve as evidence, a man is more likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it. And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ ‘Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?’”

Quick answer: The body.

To write the diasporic body — the race-class body — female body… is… so horrible, I can’t even tell you.

This sentence functions as evidence. The sentence, like the body, starts to break down. How non-linearity reads as craziness, on some level. “Are you on drugs?” There’s that, and also shame: the complicated mixture of shame, vulnerability and aggression that comes with —

With what? I can’t really talk about it. Without exposing my own body to view.

This is why my solution, in one way, is to work it out in a performance setting. To strip down there. To chop meat at a table. To convert the materials of the body — “animals, sugar, blood” — into: into what? Since Friday, inspired by the installation of Hermann Nitsch’s blood/spill paintings at the MCA in Denver — to which I was directed, after a reading by Vanessa Place — (a conversation in a doorway at the reception: about rooms — the room, in her work, as filled with blood) — by Patrick Greaney, who has written a brilliant essay to accompany the show — I’ve: [I've] been thinking about how to: recirculate (redistribute?): the visceral content of my work: as sound.

Donna Haraway: “An ethics of negation.”

How to push that, I guess, as performance: until the body PARTS are [re-dreamed] [streamed] as: as what? The body. The body in a different time. (Looped.) Like a scream. The scream that comes at the beginning of life. Or  love. (Qaawaal.)

The aesthetics are intact. But then the work breaks down again: how do you recombine these “parts” — these fragments — that were disseminated under brutal conditions? How do these larger somatic or cross-cultural enquiries work for “specific bodies?” (Petra Kuppers.)

The work of the body is thus, for me, as a woman of color from a non-U.S background: the particular effort [ethics] of recombinance. The work of light touch. How the sheets of paper are passed so delicately, from one person to another, in the audience. They are nude pages. They are burnt. Touching the paper like this — just as, in a poetry community, perhaps, we pass our poems or books from person to person — is very beautiful to me. It is a form of sensuality I understand.

This is my most recent language towards the question of form, though even this, I could improve. It is indirect. It does not approach what I want to say, and also, I haven’t figured out, yet, how to write such a book. Perhaps someone else, with more courage, will do it instead. LOOP. DREAM. I think that Barbara Jane Reyes, in fact, is doing it. (This.) Jackie Wang is doing it. (This.) Mg Roberts is doing it. (This.) Lina Oh is doing it. (This.) Taking up: questions of: violence, mortality and touch: in ways that — are — are what? Explicit.

And the question breaks down again, at the thought of — what else? The consequences. The consequences of an explicit touch. Or statement. Or wish. Or text: of wishes. Barbara gestures, in her brilliant questions (above) (from her earlier post) — to the politics of shame. To a relationship with, as Barbara writes: “authority.” But that’s separate. I’ll work on that next.

Over four years, the comments for the Tuscan milk has filled up with astonishingly well-written parodies in different literary styles: romance novels, military escapades, poetry parodies. Right at the top, for example, you can find a parody of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Nevermore,” beginning like this:

“Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door –
Only this, and nothing more.’”

Even actual books (well, okay, not actual books) are getting the Tuscan Milk treatment these days.

Maybe the best one, though, is the listing for what’s obviously an erroneous Amazon listing, a book called “Hgiyiyi (hgjhjh, hjhk) [Paperback].” The author/translator is listed as “jjjj,” and the narrator is credited as “jjjjj” (). Ohhhh, baby, the people had fun with this one!

“I enjoyed ‘Hgiyiyi,’ but the pacing is a bit slow. It doesn’t compare to Jjjj’s earlier works, like ‘Kquxiuqx,’ or ‘Oooeiaiai,’ or even ‘Nyah-Nyah Ptang.’ I think her recent successes have dulled her edge.”

“When I first read ‘Hgiyiyi (hgjhjh, hjhk)’ I told myself that I was too much of a man to cry. Not to spoil anything, but the part about wwyzwthg is the saddest thing I’ve ever read in fiction or non-fiction. A must read for all fans off Jjjj or sppliyu.”

Toronto Poetry Vendors, helmed by poets Carey Toane and Elisabeth de Mariaffi and inspired by the Distriboto art vending machines in Montreal, dispenses the works of 10 Toronto-based poets per issue Spearmint, Cinnamon, Polar Ice and the traveling machine Snacks.

“The idea came out of the renaissance in handmade, DIY self-publishing in Toronto and the larger lit community, with all the beautiful hand-bound chapbooks and letter press books just begging to be handled and cracked open and enjoyed for their tactile qualities as much as for their content. I covet these things,” Toane says.

Here are some thoughts from his letter at the Colorado Independent:

I’m interested in developing a mobile conference on the teaching of poetry to support teachers and librarians throughout the state. I’m also interested in doing what I can to support existing programs like Poetry Out-Loud and River of Words.

All I need is for communities to invite me and to begin a conversation about how best I might serve their needs. I’m quite open to any suggestions you have to offer. If communities are able to help out in a small way with expenses, fine, but nobody in my position expects a lot of money—I have a full-time job, after all.

Just so you know, I’m pretty seriously booked up between now and Christmas 2010, but after that my time opens up, and I’m even hoping to be on sabbatical in the 2011-12 academic year. I have a lot of literary responsibilities around the country, but am sure I can clear away time to get to every corner of this state in 4 years.

Here’s an example of the secret poet’s cryptic work courtesy of the Charleston Sunday Gazette:

Pustules of raw emotion

Remain dulled with grammatical confinement

And benevolent features

Harden with the crux of conformity

– The Midnight Poet

Poems by the poet and former Hull University librarian have been placed inside an East Yorkshire Motor Services (EYMS) bus, which will be identified by large vinyl letters spelling out the poet’s name.

The bus, which operates on varied routes in the city, was officially named by the former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion.

(Bill Murray in Groundhog Day)

From the LA Times:

On June 14, the Poets House in New York hosts its annual benefit poetry walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. As participants cross the bridge, they’ll be treated to readings by work by Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman and others. Who’s reading? Notable poets Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux and Tina Chang — plus musician Laurie Anderson and actor Bill Murray . . .

Poetry is alive and well on the streets of St. Paul.

The Sidewalk Poetry Project, now in its third year, invites community members to submit their poetry. Those poems selected by a judging panel are then stamped into new sidewalks around the city.

This year more than 800 poems were submitted. St. Paul City Artist in Residence Marcus Young said they included “poems about the weather, baseball, memories, love of Saint Paul, squirrels and dogs, family, everything under the sun it seems, intrigued, stirred, amused, and charmed us . . . “

Jennifer Karmin makes a three hour walking poem for the city of Chicago over at How2:

I wanted to navigate a city using writing as my map. During October 2006, I sent out a call for submissions with the goal of gathering writing about walking in cities. I specified that the writing could be about any city and take any shape or form. In addition to their writing, I asked contributors to send me a number from 1 to 92, and a direction: forward, backwards, right or left. My plan was to take all the writing I received and perform Walking Poem for the 1st annual Chicago Calling Festival. The festival showcases collaborative projects between Chicago-based artists and artists living elsewhere, in the U.S. and worldwide. Founder Daniel Godston chose Pablo Picasso’s birthday, October 25th, to be the date for the inaugural festival. I chose the Chicago Picasso sculpture, located in Daley Plaza, as a starting point for my Walking Poem navigation. 50 feet high and weighing 162 tons, it was the first major public art piece in downtown Chicago. Picasso refused to accept the $100,000 fee for this work, stating that he wanted to give a gift “to the people of Chicago.”

1.  When did you start writing poetry?

Behind this question seems to be another series of questions:  How on earth did you get it in your head that writing poetry was a thing someone could do with a life?  Doctor, fireman, astronaut, poet: Who thinks such a thing?  Did your parents support this wild notion of yours?  Did you make this choice in one of those liberal, West coast schools you went to?  Could I have made a similar decision?  Will my son/daughter take it upon him/herself to make a similar decisions?  Are there markers in youth that we can look to in order to discover a child might grow up to be a poet, the way we might look for risk factors for diabetes or signs of possible mathematical intelligence?  Did you always know this was something you wanted to do, or was your road slow and rocky and full of unexpected surprises?  Is becoming a poet a thing I could possibly do one day?

2.  Your poems often seem to tell stories. Why don’t you write fiction?

This brings me to Wanda Coleman’s recent blog post about how poorly poetry is often taught in our schools.  Just yesterday in my very own undergraduate class a student expressed elated surprise when he managed to read a non-narrative catalog poem “correctly.”  And so we talked about how one of the powers of poetry, American poetry post-Whitman in particular, is that it can “contradict [itself].” That there might not be one distinct answer when we exit a poem in the same way we might expect one distinct answer when we exit a newspaper article.  And my students admitted this made them deeply uncomfortable.  And I told them their discomfort was perfectly okay.  But they don’t like it one bit.  They think there ought to be one right answer, and they think poetry is unfairly complicated because it won’t necessarily give that to them. So, when I go on the road and read poems that do fit together to tell a story, my audiences are often relieved. This isn’t what they thought poetry was about.  They “got” what I was talking about.  It made sense and was even somewhat pleasurable to listen to (even if the stories themselves are not exactly breezy tales to tell). This wasn’t like reading poetry at all, more like reading a short story or a novel, which is something they feel secure doing. My own father, who displays most of the markers of mathematical intelligence, prefers the linearity of my narrative poems to some of my other, non-narrative work. When I read poems that are not linear narratives I will often warn the audience. Just ride the wave, I say, it’s okay.   They don’t always seem to agree with me.  How about writing a novel next time, they will say.

3.  Who’s your favorite author?

This is the only question on this list that I actively dislike.  I always know it’s coming, and I should just acquiesce and compile a list.  But, really, one thing the question reveals is that the audience doesn’t quite understand that I read for a living.  Reading is what writers do.  I read more often than I write.  I read and read and read and read and read.  Then I read some more.  And, in case that weren’t enough, I published two anthologies this year. I collected the work of nearly 200 poets and presented their poems to the world as some of the most illuminating representations of African American nature poetry or some of the most exciting representations of poems that sing, rhyme, resound, syncopate, alliterate, and just plain sound great. Given the fact I devoted three years of my life to collecting and publishing these anthologies, and I am on tour partly to promote the work in these books, it should be pretty clear that I have some favorite authors.  Of course, plenty of my “favorite” writers’ work I couldn’t collect in my anthologies.  But, the question really isn’t about me. The question is about the interlocutor wanting to know what books s/he should put on his/her To-Read List. I should tackle this question like I tackle creating a syllabus and just narrow it down to a few books I think a particular audience might be able to learn the most from.

4.  Do you ever experience writer’s block?

I’m not sure if the audience wants me to say “yes” or “no.”  I think some people want to hear me talk about a certain brand of poetic suffering.  Others want to hear me say I write, I’ve always written, and I always will write.  The answer, for me, is someplace in between.  I’ve had plenty of periods of silence, but I’ve come to understand them as fallow phases, the time off soil needs in order to produce bountifully.  Then again, there are pursuits I’ve given up completely and that, when I consider their absence from my life, I do not miss.  So if one day I wake up and am no longer writing poetry, I imagine I won’t miss it very much.  This, I think, is more distressing for an audience to hear than it is for me to say.  I present myself as a passionate, diligent writer after all, and now I’m saying I might give up writing poetry one day and not miss it very much. On the other end of writer’s block is supposed to be revelation, the audiences’ discomfort suggests.  That I sometimes suggest otherwise unnerves them.

5.  Do you have a particular routine when you write, or do you just wait for inspiration to strike?

Do you need a special room?  Do you need a special pen?  Do you chant a special chant?  Do you write on napkins in the middle of dinner parties?  Do you walk a mile, read, then write?  Do you practice yoga before your writing hour?  Do you wake up early?  Do you stay up late?  Do you light a candle?  Would you write after a particularly comical date?  What’s the magic ingredient, all these questions ask, that makes a poet write a poem?  Can I catch a bolt of that lightening too? I say I write regularly, like a real runner must run nearly every day. I say I still practice, like even a veteran musician must regularly run scales. I say I sometimes go whole writing days, at my desk, writing, and produce nothing the world will ever read. I say I am a poet because I have been persistent more than because I have been passionate.  These answers often seem to bore my audiences.  Do you wear certain clothes when you sit down to write? they ask.   Do you own a beret?  Is becoming a poet a thing I could possibly do one day?

By luck, by love, by affinity Poetry magazine receives reams of poetry weekly. Earlier this year, Brian Teare of Albion Books had the (lovely) idea of sending us his latest titles, with broadsides(!). In honor of ink on paper we’ve put up scans of WREN/OMEN by Peter O’Learly and Hart Island by Stacy Szymaszek, with a few extra pics from Albion’s archives. After the jump, you’ll also learn firsthand about Albion’s process, past, and then some.

Albion Books

Founded in 2008, Albion Books is a one-man micropress specializing in limited edition poetry chapbooks, broadsides, and print ephemera as well as in hand-bound hardcover and limp-bound books. The press uses conserving natural resources and keeping production costs below $50 per project as formal constraints, while the goal remains to make as fine an object as possible within the given limits: 1) At least 80% of the paper for each project must come from “off-cuts” donated by or bought from other printers; 2) All letterpress printing is done on a shared 9” x 16” Chandler and Price platen press; and 3) All type is hand-set: no motor may be used on the press, and neither plates nor new type are made for a print run. Though each edition is kept small to enable production by one person, the final rule of the press is meant to encourage and sustain gift economy within the poetry community: at least 35% of each edition must be given away or bartered.

Basic thesis

Albion Books combines traditional fine press craft with digital publishing while also trying to reduce publishing waste; it’s also an experiment in encouraging gift and barter economies to further develop among poets and in the wider literary community.

The past

The press began almost by accident: in 2008 I wanted to make a chapbook and broadside to celebrate the publication of a book by my friend, the poet Jane Mead. I’d been taking book arts classes for  a year, so this was my first self-directed project, Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies. I enjoyed the challenge of the process so much that I decided to formalize the endeavor by planning a publishing season for the following year. In addition to ephemera to commemorate readings and publications, I put out four chapbook/broadside pairs in 2009: Psalm Project by Kerri Webster, Eirik Steinhoff’s translation of 14 sonnets by Petrarch, WREN/OMEN by Peter O’Leary, and from Hart Island by Stacy Szymaszek.

Where the chapbooks begin

Given that most publishing ventures waste as much paper as they use, I was really determined to waste as little as possible—starting with the fact that 80% of the paper I use in any edition consists of “off-cuts,” the paper left behind by the projects of other printers. Thus the design of the chapbooks is largely determined by the paper I can find, which is donated, bartered for, or bought.

I try to match a given project with the right text paper—thus I was really excited by the long sheets that I found while trying to figure out how best to set Stacy’s from Hart Island. In the best situation, typesetting, trim size, and binding style match the shape of the poem and its life on the page—and I take the author’s desires and vision for the text and its exterior presentation into account whenever possible.

It’s usually pretty easy to score the right cover weight stock, or to let whatever I’ve got on hand lead me into making a different book than I’d thought I would, as with Kerri’s Psalm Project.

However, I usually have a hard time with finding enough end sheets for an entire edition, and so that’s usually the 20% of the paper that I end up buying. Because the project has gotten some really wonderful and generous local support, I’m going to start using part of the colophon to give props to the presses that donate paper.

How the chapbook goes forward

Given that the size of the book is determined by the stock I find, the interior of the book is usually only typeset once I have the paper. This part is pretty traditional: I typeset it digitally and the galleys go through the usual back-and-forth with commentary by and suggestions from the author. Given the press’ engagement with and investment in traditional methods of bookmaking and publishing, I really to use digital scans of details from older books as part of the design element when possible and appropriate (as with the Petrarch).

Once the text and design are finalized, I go into the print shop (either the San Francisco Center for the book or at Mead Ranch in Napa, CA), where I set type for the cover and the broadside; I still don’t use photopolymer plates, both because of the waste involved and because setting in lead allows me to be a bit more improvisatory. I’ve got a stash of “nice” broadside paper set aside, so I decide what paper to use for the broadsides once I’ve set the type and figured out exactly how long the lines are when set in lead. I use a 9” x 16” Chandler & Price Platen Press (photo forthcoming) with a foot treadle, so the actual printing uses no electricity.

The final leg

I use a laser jet printer to print the interiors. I collate, fold, hand trim, and hand bind the entire edition. At the beginning, I made 35 books and broadsides per edition; now I generally make 55, and even those sell out quickly. The author receives 20 of these to distribute however they see fit. The rest sell for $15 a pair, though they can just as easily be bartered; buyers usually get in touch with me through the poets themselves, though I do also sell them at readings and to some library collections. And if I’ve produced off-cuts in the process of making the edition, I save the paper and try to use it in a future project of some kind.

The future

I’d like to make 6–8 chapbook/broadside pairs per year for the next five years. On the one hand, I think of editing the press as a very direct way to support the work of writers I admire; on the other, it’s also a statement about poetics and literary community, a way of trying to amplify already-existing conversations between, say, poetries in Chicago and New York and San Francisco, not to mention St. Louis and Tucson. Many of the chapbooks have emerged from my sitting in an audience and listening to a fantastic reading, though just as many are extensions of my being a passionate reader of the poet’s work. 2010 will see Albion Books from Laura Walker, Jane Miller, NS (Nathalie Stephens), and Lisa Fishman.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the role of the library in your life as a 21st century reader and/or writer. I taught a summer class this past June, and when I needed to mark papers or work on my notes, I often retreated from the summer sun and my always-on computer screen to the basement of Gorgas Library here on the University of Alabama campus. The basement of Gorgas approaches my Platonic ideal of librarity (or librariousness, if you prefer): cool silence, greenish tile floors, flickery yellow fluorescent lights, indestructible but much-graffiti’d wooden and green metal furniture, creaky and ticking pipes crisscrossing the low ceiling, and of course aisle upon aisle of books, many of which (e.g., a 1932 history of Catholicism in Montana) may never be read again, but all of which stand ready, patient, in case you want them. I love it down there. When my mind wandered from my students’ papers, I got to thinking about how my relationship to libraries has changed over time. I wonder how yours has, too.

Back in the day, I spent a lot of time browsing in the stacks at libraries, discovering new writers by checking out the shelves surrounding those I already knew and liked. I never do that any more. I do my browsing online now, reading web sites, blogs, reviews, seeing what people who bought what I have in my shopping cart also bought, etc., and then when I’ve compiled a list of things I think I might want to check out–in both senses–I print out a list of call numbers from my library’s catalog, and I go over there to pluck those books from the shelves. I always stop and scan the “new books” shelf near the library entrance, yes. But mostly, when I go to the library these days, it’s the last step in the search process, not the first. (Or I’m going just to sit in that basement. Even if, in x years, all texts have turned digital and accessible from anywhere, any time, there will still have to be libraries, for people to use as refuges from the madding crowd.)

This of course begs the question of text-delivery technologies. If I’m going to read a novel or a book of poems, I want to have the book in my hand–I just do–and I’m happy to trot over to the library to get it. But if I just want to check a reference, or scan something to refresh my memory of it, I’d much rather just be able to click through a digital copy of the book on Google Books without having to leave my desk. In short, if I’m seeking an aesthetic experience, I prefer my books to come in three dimensional, analog form. If I’m just seeking information, I find digital texts much more convenient.

(I am aware that I have just posited a difference between “aesthetic experience” and “information” without explicating the nature of said difference. Sorry, not going to try, have to mow the lawn.)

Much is being said and has been said about Google Books and intellectual property rights and information wanting to be free and Kindles and the death of print and so forth. (When I attended library school ten years ago, the program’s official name had recently been changed to “Information Sciences,” but we all still called it library school, and you know, I bet people still do.) You’re probably familiar with a lot of those discussions, and I’m not qualified to add much to them anyway. I am curious, though, about how other writers and readers of literature use libraries these days. And so an unscientific survey. Please feel free to answer all, some, or none of these questions, and/or to invent your own questions, and answer those instead.

Do you go to libraries? Which ones? How often? What do you do there? How has your library use changed over the last twenty years? If you could read everything online or on one of those Kindle thingies (I’ve never seen one; have you?), would you? It might be useful for our porpoises if you would state your approximate age when weighing in; I’m curious too how much the responses of twenty somethings will differ from those of sixty somethings.

April is a month of heightened awareness.  In addition to National Poetry Month, April is also Heartworm Awareness Month, National Pet First Aid Awareness Month, Mathematics Awareness Month, Sexual Assualt Awareness Month, STD Awareness Month, Alcohol Awareness Month, Autism Awareness Month, National Donate Life Month… I’m sure there’s plenty more to be aware of, but, honestly, I’m already overwhelmed by this list of worthy causes.

Against such pressing issues, what use is poetry?

With that question in mind, I’ve decided to dedicate several of this month’s posts to organizations and individuals whose work proves that poetry really can make a difference in our world.

Today, I want to talk about the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, a program “founded on the principle that all people can benefit from quality and sustained experiences in the arts and humanities.”

According to their website: “APAEP grew from one poet teaching in one prison, to a pool of more than 35 writers, artists, scholars and visiting writers teaching in twelve correctional facilities in Alabama.  Course offerings have grown from poetry and creative writing to Southern literature, photography, African-American literature, Alabama history, drawing and other art classes.”

One of the goals of the project is to develop the general libraries of the 17 Alabama prisons in which it is active. APAEP accepts donations including older edition textbooks and slightly damaged books that would not otherwise be sold.  Since 2001, over 14,000 volumes have been made accessible to the 30,000 men and women incarcerated in the state of Alabama.

According to one beneficiary of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project: “I, quite simply, have fallen in love with writing . . . The Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project has given me the opportunity of a lifetime. ”

Donors include Alice James Books, BOA Editions, Copper Canyon Press, The Feminist Press, Natural Bridge, Sarabande Books, Lotus Blooms Journal, Ausable Press, Five Points, Poets & Writers and many more.  If you or your press would like to find out more about becoming involved in this worthwhile venture, visit the APAEP website here.

The writer and activist Audre Lorde once wrote:  “…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, made first into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”  I applaud the APAEP for helping to make poetry available to 30,000 Alabamans who otherwise might not have access to this powerful and positive mode of expression and survival.

Although there are still many small presses in America, their poetry lists are ignored by almost all bookstores. In this era of media consolidation, corporate monsters like Barnes & Noble and Borders dominate the field, with independent operators going out of business left and right. It’s not all bad, however, since readers can now order books through Small Press Distribution and Amazon (another corporate beast), or directly from the publisher. Before the internet, most Americans outside major cities and college towns had almost no access to anything beyond Stephen King and Danielle Steele.
With a population of only four millions, Norway has almost no small presses, Cathinka told me, although every library is required to purchase every poetry book published in the country. What a startling concept! I’ve taught at Bard College for three years and the library there doesn’t carry any of my four volumes of poetry. “Maybe you should move to Norway,” Cathinka joked. Yes, maybe I should start learning Norwegian.
Being roughly the same age, Cathinka and I remembered with fondness the many zines that accompanied the punk scene, their wise-assed, often nihilistic humor and indifference to any slicked-up production standard. These types of rebels have mostly migrated to the internet, we agreed. I told Cathinka that when I lived in Saigon from 1999 to 2001, I would pass out home-made chapbooks, stapled-together cheapies that were obviously inspired by the zines I had seen in the States during my college days. Check out these recent Vietnamese chapbooks by poets Ly Doi, Bui Chat and Khuc Duy, with the chopped dog drawing done by yours truly:

[I'm in Paris at the moment, typing on a French keyboard that's driving me nuts. Where the A should be, there's a Q, etc, so I must cut this post a little short...]