ON THE STATE OF THE (POETRY) BOOK - Jay MillAr

I’ll start with a nod to Frank O’Hara, who said in his own manifesto Personism that after he realized that he could either write a poem for someone or call that person on the telephone, he’d rather see the poem positioned between two people rather than between two pages of a book. I take that to mean that if one writes strictly for the page rather than to an audience, one will find that their work will end up in a closed book on a shelf somewhere, in a bookstore or a library or an archive, rather than in the living world of people.

Pound suggested somewhere that the best literature in the world should be free and the worst be printed on gold leaf. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is that literature has it’s own economy that should not be hindered by the economy we live in. I take this to mean that if we have to spend money to get to the text, we likely won’t spend it. Because, like O’Hara said, one can use that money to go to the movies. One might say that the economy we live in (like the movies, a medium that separates people who sit quietly in the dark watching) keeps the poem from living more fully in the space between people.

If, as McLuhan suggests, the medium is the message, poetry’s historical beginnings were as an information storage mechanism – the formal aspects of the poem came into existence through the use of a spoken mnemonic “recording device” that was used to pass information through time by inhabiting the living spaces between people and culture. Printing and the book disrupted such intent. The invention of printing and the book rendered poetry’s original use purposeless-less. It held the text to its words and authorship and made a speaker irrelevant.

Books were originally elitist. One had to learn to read. One had to be able to afford to read. Etc. Books and the literature they contained separated people. The original digital divide: those who could afford books and those who could not. Nietche suggested that if you teach everyone to read the quality of literature would go down. That’s a fairly subjective argument, but more recent developments in communication technology may have proved him right: just look at the inane chatter that has spread across the world via the Internet.

What amazes me is how textual culture at large has become, recently, now, with digital media at our fingertips, qwerty dominates our lives through the Internet or any communication technology. Text me. It is so easy to “publish” something using these technologies, and immediately make a text accessible to others who own the tools of communication. Cheaper communication technologies seem like the answer to O’Hara and Pound. And in some ways, text has become talking. But so far it is nothing more than the inane chatter of the masses that Mallarme spoke of, what he wanted to dispense with through aesthetics. To me, his approach to the text and the book still applies: the book is art rather than chatter. It is art because it continues to hold something to its word – whatever that may be. I do not trust digital media because it is flexible, unfixed, and impermanent.

What I mean is that culture at large (the big picture, which includes everything from poetry to sporting events) now wants (consciously or unconsciously) actual culture (look at yourselves) to erase itself. They want us to think digital publishing is the answer. As digital media becomes more and more an accepted method of publication and dissemination of information, culture might make itself more accessible in the short run to those who download self-help books onto their iphones, but unless computers are used to make artifacts, our culture will simply erase itself. Bring back the elitism of the book and place that between people. Shakespeare’s first folio, published in 1623, still exists. Most things archived on ten-year old technology do not. Publishing our most innovative new writing digitally is a waste of time. Poets who publish on digital media will vanish into history. The moment anyone closes the book and moves onto the next thing, which is probably on another computer screen, the book, being frail but durable, will wait.

To end, a poem written in the 1940s by the now nearly forgotten poet Raymond Souster that I found in a book on a library shelf, but could not find on the internet:

THE ENEMIES, THE HATED

What do they care for a book,
would they ever read a chapter through or a verse
without yawning, do you ever think they could stand

before a painting and really enjoy it
without something lewd to catch their eye
or something not understood right away to be laughed at,
do you think they give a damn how you eat your heart out,
kill yourself quickly or slowly, how you finally go mad?

You are not of their world, you are strangers,
the enemies, the hated,
because you have dared to laugh at their money,
the hollow cheapness of their lives,

because they cannot laugh off, cannot pay off,
the epitaph you have written.