August 24, 2010 at 2:48 am (Adultery, Mars, Thomas Graves, Velazquez, Venus, Vulcan)
Poetry is where you tell all.
It takes no talent or skill.
Make yourself small
By telling all.
Poetry does not take learning.
It is but a fury, a burning,
A passion which makes you small
By telling all.
You enter rooms watching your back,
Your life in place, your pride intact.
But you must burn, crash and fall
By telling all.
 | noochinator on THE MOVIE YOU’RE IN |
 | Anonymous on SHE LOVES ME IN MY DREAMING… |
| noochinator on SHE LOVES ME IN MY DREAMING… |
| Anonymous on SHE LOVES ME IN MY DREAMING… |
| noochinator on WHAT DO WE DO? |
| noochinator on WHAT DO WE DO? |
| Anonymous on WHO IS CONVINCED |
 | Andrew Hidas on THE SOUL IS SO INVISIBLE |
| noochinator on WHO IS CONVINCED |
| noochinator on WHO IS CONVINCED |
| Anonymous on IT WILL NOT BE |
 | thomasbrady on IT WILL NOT BE |
| Anonymous on IT WILL NOT BE |
| Anonymous on IT WILL NOT BE |
| thomasbrady on IT WILL NOT BE |
Scarriet 
Kevin Kilmainham said,
August 24, 2010 at 5:10 am
Mabool said,
August 24, 2010 at 9:50 am
We are in a new Internet era: iPhone apps, Twitter, Facebook. In theory you can migrate, put your stuff on Facebook. In practice, at Facebook you do a TV program – Jack Benny, Liberace, Arthur Godfrey – and nobody is going to stand still for anything else. The blogs are trying to go this way, by including Youtube clips, but Facebook does it better.
How much longer the blogosphere can last is anyone’s guess. Wiki documents the catastrophic failure of Geocities.
People viewed the old Internet – the blogs, but more particularly the chatrooms going back 5 or 10 years – as places to publish or publicize or critique their stuff.
It turned out that the old chatroom was itself the voice, or the source of a voice, which voice for various reasons could not be singled out and published or even publicized on the web. It was kind of a Greek thing. The oracle of Delphi. You would go and sit around in hopes that the oracle might speak. If it did, you didn’t exactly rush into print.
Except for this one afflatus, the experiment with Internet poetry has been a waste of time.
thomasbrady said,
August 24, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Mabool,
Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are for children and adolescents. Those technologies are great, especially if you are a teenager with a sense of humor.
You cannot discuss poetry on facebook. Blogs such as this are still the best place for literature. Look at how popular and dynamic film is, and has been for decades, and yet, how does major cinema treat literature? It treats it like shit. It degrades it. I don’t know if it’s the medium, or if film producers, in order to raise the capital required to make a major film in the intellectual climate of our post-Romantic era, are simply too cynical and jaded to have any sort of sensibility at all. This is not to say that film is not a worthy medium, and that film qua film has not produced masterpieces (we could argue about how many) but in terms of literature, films are neutral, or they even hurt, that sensibility in the populace. Again, I don’t know if this is a ‘translation’ issue or an ‘artistic will’ issue, but we shouldn’t give up quite yet and say blogs are worthless because of facebook and twitter; that would be stupid. Harriet, with all their millions from the Poetry Foundation and with their self-identified mission to help poetry, actually gave this as a specific reason to close up shop as a democratic, centralized, comment-driven blog: twitter is the way to go. Huh? Harriet was scared of…well, look at Scarriet…this is what Harriet was scared of…this is what they had to stop…Thomas Brady on Harriet had to be stopped…different opinions…of literature! had to be stopped. Intelligent democracy had to be stopped.
Uh…no. It won’t be stopped.
Tom
Mabool said,
August 24, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Tom,
Editorially, you are right. But the editor will not be decisive. Economics, demographics, technology will be decisive. After all, illuminated manuscripts were better than Gutenberg, but who was the winner?
Allow me to complete my story, a portion of which I put earlier on this blog.
The story began on Alsop’s Gazebo ten years ago. A chatroom not a blog. The voice which first appeared there while vastly limited and flawed, was the real thing, and obviously the real thing. An example is in the comment stream of my blog today. Although formally this is a bad poem because there is no development, the immediacy is there. This is the only example of immediacy and originality generated by the web. This example comes from email to me and is on my blog with the author’s knowledge and permission.
My trivial blog is not the name of the game. Rather there is a paper samizdat where the presentation is entirely different ( and which cannot be published because of copyright problems. )
Her authorship left the Gazebo in disgust. Stale and predictable, unquote, and went next, as I recall to Melic/Natter although it may have been QED, and she was at her most outrageous there. By chance, I documented only the Gazebo.
This was six/eight/ten years ago, after which we began a long and disheartening decline.
thomasbrady said,
August 25, 2010 at 12:11 am
Mabool,
Do Gutenberg and Illuminated Manuscripts have to compete? Thanks to Gutenberg, more people know of Illuminated Manuscripts.
And I don’t know if Facebook/Twitter are Gutenberg. They are refinements of web blogging, not inventions of it, and they are great for crowds shouting, announcements and jokes, but literature?
Tom
Mabool said,
August 25, 2010 at 2:24 am
I think a screen is hard to read no matter what, but as I said on your blog entry of August 11, an email screen is the easiest. For one thing, the viewer has to be prepared to read, and he is most prepared to read an email screen addressed to him, perhaps somewhat prepared to read a random blog screen and not at all prepared to read a Facebook page. Facebook is TV.
For reference purposes, excerpts, quotes and so forth, the web is hard to beat. Tools like Wiki and google books.
But for literature in the round, I just don’t think the web will work, first because as I just said the viewer can’t see it, and second because the creator has to be constantly hassling the web, updating his web page, maybe moving to an entirely new platform, say from WordPress to Facebook. The poet I mentioned above never got her screens to work. The strangeness of her language was such that the screen never could work. It’s only when I started doctoring her stuff up on paper that the whole thing came together.
That was my idea, you see, to go backwards. The theory behind every blog I’ve seen was that you would write your masterpiece and then publish it, or publicize it, on web, or, if you were running a board, you would publish someone else’s stuff. So I said to myself, Self, lemme go the other way and see if there is there anything out there that I can take off the web and put on a piece of paper. I don’t know of anyone else who did this.
David Bittner said,
March 9, 2014 at 1:12 am
Would you like to see an “artist’s conception” of Johann Gutenberg? I had an essignment in high school art class to make something–anything–using “graphics” (most of us used
newspaper and magazine pages), and I made the face of Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type. I’m sure there must be someone around here at the “old folks’ home” who could do it with a scanner. I have the 45-year-old thing framed on the wall of my little studio apartment here at New Cassel Retirement Center. It’s gone with me everywhere, like my paper mosaic (from the same art class) of Malcolm X. (He was an official native Omahan, too, though he left Omaha for Detroit, I think, with his family at the age of 3 or 4.) Well, just let me know if that would be of interest, and I’ll do my best to oblige. David Bittner
thomasbrady said,
March 9, 2014 at 6:07 am
Sure that would be cool David
David Bittner said,
March 12, 2014 at 1:01 am
Tom, please go to for collage/picture of Johann Gutenberg. It will say “sent by Chris Peters.” Chris works in the business office of New Cassel Retirement Center, where I live. Let me know if it works, please! Yours, David
thomasbrady said,
August 26, 2010 at 1:26 pm
This post deserves this comment affixed, from “Susan” (Aug. 25) on the Hook comments re: the Genoways/Morrissey scandal:
“The fact that they (the staff) went to John Casteen’s office and were told “Creative people aren’t expected to be good managers; deal with it.”
And here are John Casteen’s remarks to the University community at the vigil for Yeardley Love:
“..take something away from this event. Take with you the determination that you will speak up for yourself, that you will act when you see or hear about abuse or violence in the world around you. If your relationship is unhealthy or toxic, seek help, seek support. Talk to your dean. Seek out a faculty member. Come talk to me…..Seek the support that belongs to you, because you belong to us. Demand and expect support, respect, and assistance when you do that. Speak out. Find me.”
Wow.