It seems increasingly vast this Web of ours, so when does usage become infringement and when does it fit as “for educational purposes” or for “editorial purposes” and how do we make it work so that we escape the across the board reactions to piracy and misuse? There have been fears that legislation could allow certain powers that be to redirect our traffic and block our rights to finding information which would serve other purposes and limit the freedom that the Web has had for some time. Keep an eye out for take action groups and their Web sites as one way to make your voice heard and sign petitions or by sending letters to representatives.

How-Writers-Can-Use-LinkedIn

http://www.pw.org/content/poets_writers_guide_mfa_programs

http://www.pw.org/toolsforwriters

For now I’ll just post this link to another blog who has the word on what’s happening in Woodstock. Oh, did I mention one of the poets reading is the incredible Djelloul Marbrook. His book Brushstrokes and glances is available from Deerbrook Editions.

Go here for the news from Woodstock.

http://willnixon.com/blog

a beautiful collection of poetry

Selected by Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught; Lautus Press  ISBN 978 0956826503
to order copies go to: http://www.lautuspress.co.uk

When I received a request to use a poem by Carl Little (A Reminder Great Cranberry Island; Ocean Drinker, New and Selected Poems; Deerbrook Editions 2006) for an anthology about laundry I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t think of expectations but perhaps that it could be good for Carl and for the press to have it out there. I was very pleased when some months later I received a package in the mail from the UK containing two copies of Washing Lines with a nice note from the editors. It is the kind of book package that changes my frame of mind, that makes all the menial tasks and questions of purpose get whisked away and a sudden truth be known that this is what makes being a small art press completely worthwhile.

The notion of a collection of poetry with the thread (no pun intended, but a preference not to use “a theme” since there are at least a few creative reasons for this book) of laundry on lines, becomes, for me, a matter of imagery. Helping with the hanging of laundry out in the yard. There are fifteen artist images in the collection, all prints or drawings reproduced in black ink. The entire book, a trade paper binding with those turn-in flaps that echo dust jackets, a cover illustration on a field of lavender, is a pleasing blend of private press and chapbook though there are seventy seven pages making it more than a chapbook per se. It is not pretending to be a trade book, no gloss and no bar code. Therefore its presence has the soft appeal of another realm, one that whispers literature and art, a presence that reminds me something of a tradition and a handling of the utmost care. Paper, after all, was once all cotton and linen.

The work inside this 5 7/8 x 8 1/2 in. treasure is no shabby laundry list. The work includes Jane Kenyon, Seamus Heaney, Louise Gluck, Richard Wilbur, Yehuda Amichai, Louisa May Alcott, Pablo Neruda, and Homer, to name a few. The creative sensitivity for a domestic yet universal corner of life has to touch every reader as the hearth is to Hestia, and in some villages a very close association where water may still be heated by a wood stove. Most of us can remember mother, or even helping mother, hanging clothes on a line.

Something of a purpose in this book of words and images conjures an image of peace. But there are other ideas the image of a person hanging clothes on a line can stimulate. There are, according to Alexander Lee, some places that have outlawed clothes lines. Though my image of clothes lines is contained in back yards, certainly city streets or alleys could be another. Clothes lines span different yards, different countries, and different ages. I’m sure that clothes lines have been used in film as a kind of metaphor open to interpretation, depending on the genre, but somehow films set in or around war comes to my mind. A woman at a clothes line becoming symbolic of the harsh contrast to violence, of feminine vulnerability. In another resonance the image is one of strength and courage.

from: Wood on cloth on cord, by Amy Benedict

If I’m to be caught in a wave of terror
My whole sky life, wiped out
Blown to a tiny, dirt speck end
Vaporized into my next life
Without the long goodbye
The eye to eye pull kiss ending

Then catch me hanging sheets out in the sun

Out in the yards with the worms in the dark
Beneath the green, beneath my feet . . .

I don’t know about anyone but me, this collection has all that tugs at my natural heart.

So forget any notion of non literary nonsensical dabblers, for there are true geniuses at work here with the reverence and beauty that only a poet can well up from our inner self at the reading. Emotion, pain and sentiment that ask us to believe that the world of humans is not quickly altogether losing the kindness gene or the sensible gene. By the time the reader gets to the afterword by Alexander Lee, who brings us a bit of the current energy issue, beginning with a quote by Dr. Helen Caldicott who spoke to a Middlebury College peace symposium saying, “If we all did things like hang out our clothes, we could shut down the nuclear industry.” Project Laundry List http://www.laundrylist.org  became a Website and “green movement” with a Web page “gallery of art and poetry which is a creative way of promoting the message that line drying could save more than 10% of the electricity consumed domestically in the United States. ” This was the coda of all codas for me, establishing great admiration for the work of these editors and the writers chosen for this book.

Washing lines is an example of art and poetry bringing together things close to the heart. It speaks the softly shouting revolution that the arts are by their nature giving us every time we let them in to our busy and sometimes confusing lives. So I am grateful to Washing lines for its imagination and for reminding me of how hanging out the wash means moments shared with loved ones and with nature, and then much, much more.

Good things have happened for Deerbrook Editions this year. We are a member of an arts organization, Fractured Atlas (see help bring new books into the world : side bar)as Fiscal Sponsor, that enables us to raise money like a non-profit. We are getting more submissions all the time and have several books in line for design and publication if the fund-raising goes well. I have to hope that part is due to the press getting more exposure and that my trying to keep up with sites and blogs and making Facebook ads helps.  Other reasons are with respect to what the authors do. Whenever an author does an event or gets a review, writes an article or is actively networking, the press and all its authors get a little bit more exposure.

One such writer that is just so passionate about writing and, well, the internet as a means of sharing information and the wide range of things he cares about is Djelloul Marbrook. I am posting one of his recent News Blaze articles here.

Djelloul is a remarkable writer that works all the time and has convictions about art and human rights. He is on the right next to Gerard Melanga  in this picture below.

At SUNY Orange

Thanks to those who have visited this blog in these dryer times, wandering these rough paths we seem to find ourselves on. Remain positive since I think life is what we make it.

Publishing can be interesting and even fun, sometimes rewarding, sometimes frustrating. With the state of things online and the World Wide Web publishing has taken on something of a new shape. Perhaps it is still morphing. The big sites like Facebook are frequently adding new interactivity. When any of these giants experiences a glitch it makes me wonder if all the interconnectedness doesn’t allow for more cracking and disruption to occur. Just since the start of the holiday weekend I have noticed more glitches. Facebook recently added Branchout and WordPress now has also connected with LinkedIn. Perhaps since some recent surveys showed LinkedIn was the most effective media for finding work and other professionals.

With the economic downturn everyone is experiencing some difficulty financially. This means buyers are more selective and with good reason. Fuel prices effect all markets. The United States Post Office has been losing money and changing the way it functions and I would venture to guess fuel costs are one of the largest factors. And shipping is one of publishing’s biggest expenses. Especially for small presses. When things are good for a book, places like amazon stock books in quantity so it is less so. But single title orders are not cost effective. A book that sells at discount like a poetry book, the publisher gets something like $7.50 for the sale, but then there is the shipping which theoretically gets subtracted from the income, for media mail of one book is around $2.38. Do the math, barely a profit when you consider production costs, marketing, promotion etc.

So when things like social media sites are down I contemplate various pictures. How does a literary press find its customers? There are good books on publishing and marketing in the new age. How do small presses find ways to make marketing on the Web work. It used to be that author readings and signings were the best way to sell books. It was true for Deerbrook Editions, especially when most of the authors were in state or right next door.

Today I decided to investigate poetry blogs. My first page turned up some interesting sites. Something for everybody goes without saying. What I found on top was a site accreditedonlinecolleges.com with 100 best blogs. It offers more than that. I was not sure what to make of the art section which had encouraging heads but only illustrations on a page with mostly unrelated possibilities. On the Blog 30 Thriving Careers Your Children Should Consider, number 13 – Art, lead to my question.

There are an amazing number of blogs. Diane Lockward has a site that is probably the example of how to promote. She listed a lot of writers where I found Dawn Potter  and Michael Meyerhofer included in the list. People I am familiar with. Interestingly enough I didn’t easily find any poems, but Diane’s books were there and the coverage of readings and signings .

I found Thethe poetry site with lots of elaborate motion and videos and content including writing. Another everypoet for people to join and post work. This idea I had been mulling over, an interactive writing blog as a way to get more exposure and social capital for Deerbrook Editions. But there is not much that has not been done, and there are multiples of everything.

So the world of writing has gotten even bigger just as publishing has gotten new realms. It has been said that computers encourage people to over-write. There is a lot of uninteresting work / content  out there, but the Web is a good way to find decent content and connect with interesting authors of all forms of art and literature. It helps to have some experience and judgment when going around and leaving information.

Here are some of the links I found, beginning with the first search page and then some of the ones I looked up.

search page

http://www.google.com/search?q=poetry

100 best poetry blogs ?
http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2010/100-best-poetry-blogs/

Art  ?
http://io9.com/5562433/20-careers-

Diane Lockward site, the way to launch
http://dianelockward.blogspot.com/

Thethe   elaborate

http://www.thethepoetry.com/

everypoet ?  idea?

http://www.everypoet.net/poetry/

50 impressive writers

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/50-impressive-literary-figures

careers

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/30-thriving-careers-

The cover states: “a richly textured collection of poems defining the incongruent regions of the heart—new life breathed into each of them by the music of imagination. ” I am not sure what to do with “new life breathed into them” (did they have another life?) but I would emphasize imagination. Sometimes descriptions are pedantic, while being encouraging, don’t have so much to do with the work contained in the book. It seems a rather unique yet almost misleading way of saying that the author, through the language of these poems, shares what she knows of the heart and what we can put it through. This is not to say they are about pain only. The poems are unique and “accessible.” I would say these poems are about familiar human conditions without being cynical but sometimes sad. From a perspective she builds over time, Martina asks that we look at the edge which is all around each one of us, and for all the emotions we must move through, to find that we have the ability to make the choice for redeeming the moment we have spun. She does not create this beauty directly but with what I call implied metaphor, by the relationship of her words. What is direct is the unfortunate aspect that we as people have trouble forgiving, we resent and carry grudges, our own anger and worries can keep us from living with any sense of what is sacred and precious. Martina reminds us that the heart is subject to things real and imagined, it is vulnerable and often illusive.

From Habit Unresisted

Does the nuclear-blast luster of our sins blind God?
We look straight into the sun without fear,

But can’t look into the faces of neighbors.

ending with

The world is breaking down, and we sleep,
dreaming of salt water, and the sweet scripture of lust.

These poems bring us to the threshold of spirituality simply by serving up just enough reality without being truly gritty.

From Our Drive Through the Projects in Praga Pólnoc
(based on my mothers journal during her trip to Poland)

Understanding, like some gypsy man,
dances through the curdled concrete

of the blown out projects,
stares, stares longer and listens . . .

later

. . . What trees there are
have leaves heavy as cement.

They do not blow in the wind. It is on these streets
and in the alleys behind the streets that Understanding

Sees the girls’ short skirts and dresses pulled up
around their bellies for easier rape,

From Smoke Rising

All night, the sirens warn of some new disaster and,
in our throats, our breathing catches. We hear the sound of
our eyelashes scraping the pillowcase and the
sirens’ last whines fly by our street. . . .

If it is not by incongruity, it is by inconsistency and silence that we find our bits of personal wisdom, and these poems whisper and shout like a zen master who slaps us to awaken us and then opens our understanding to the beauties and perils of life. Through the authors sagacity we essentially hold our own heart and through our own opening we rediscover experience. It is remarkable. I have not been able to put my finger on it until now because it is so simple. Once I attempted to describe what it was I found in reading these poems, like so many fine collections of poetry, comes the sense of transmission. Not that things happen for a reason but how turmoil tells us of peace, how injury can motivate goodness.

From Rain
for my son

I lived in an uneasy solitude before you were born. I said “Hello”
and “Goodbye” to each day and spent long hours brooding

over all my wrong decisions. I thought about loss of self
and loss of friends and loss of air, of breath.

later

Well, I am no fool and explaining my life to you seems
important even though you have no need to hear it. I insist

on shouting my love and pride, though it gives you some slight
embarrassment. As if it matters, son of mine, I keep asking

the same questions. Because it matters, you give me the same
answers. It’s not the weather’s fault, but it rained so hard today, I

was tricked into writing these things, bamboozled into
writing what is almost too much to write.

So often great poems transform, leave us with a question, or they reaffirm a preponderance. There is an honesty in Martina’s poems that reminds us that the world consumes itself, that being human is to avoid madness at almost any cost, and looking back, wonder why we stayed in a place of unrest for so long.

The cover is the best part of the design of the book featuring a quilt design by Do Palma, titled “There Is a Crack in Everything” from a song by Leonard Cohen. I wish that the typography for the content had what went into the cover. It almost takes away from the poetry with its seeming thoughtless use of bold san serif caps for titles and what seems like an almost condensed san serif for the verse, which is not done well enough to seem futurist but rather systematic and without proportion or sensitivity to the complexity of the poems. Nonetheless they should be commended for publishing this author.

Jeffrey Haste, June 2011

What we Can’t Forgive
Infinity Publishing
68 pages $9.95
ISBNS: 0-7414-6524-8;  978-0-7414-6524-5

Martina Reisz Newberry has several books, been published in magazines, and was awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi Colony, and Anderson Center for the Arts, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry.

The familiar hard or soft cover book is or can be made from natural sustainable resources for its paper, paperboard, cloth, glue and ink, and these resources can be agriculturally produced. Many plants do not have to be destroyed as trees do in order to harvest large amounts of their fiber. Milkweed, for example, grows even after it has been cut down.  This means that not only can farmers in the U.S. maintain this kind of agriculture, but also farmers in tropical climates could do very well with fiber agriculture from plants that regenerate at rapid rates in those climates.

I’ve read discussions on Facebook about the either/or questions and concerns people have regarding the debate on the book versus electronic devices for reading, and about the corporate holdings of so many industries including the media promoting advertising and influencing markets like the book industry. And this has rekindled (no pun intended) my passion to speak about what I think are important factors for people to consider: primarily, that books are sustainable and there is an alternative fiber movement that could be rejuvenated.

The book as object is user-friendly. It is completely accessible in terms of searching and referencing and it is also recyclable because it is made from natural products from several sources which are not necessarily only cotton or tree fibers.  Now the question of digital devices versus books seems fairly simple to me. We live in the tech industry; we love all our gadgets, computers, laptops, tablets and screens. But there are issues that we do not hear very much about any more. Plastic, in most cases, is made from oil and while much has been done to recycle it, there are still large waste dumps of computer parts and dangerous outcomes from burning it improperly. There are rare and precious metals and substances that go into computers and cell phones that are often harvested by third world people from the rain forests of the world, for instance, to get the black substance that is used in cell phones.

Like so many things, economics has much to do with what happens. Work has been done in certain states over the years to address the issues of growing sustainable materials like hemp for fiber and in investigating the use of alternative fibers in general. At one time, alternative fibers were considered competition for paper recycling in its early stages. Hemp is an old source for strong long-length fibers and has legal issues, but the applications for its fibers are numerous. It can be used to make clothing as well as paper. Some states have attempted to make it possible for farmers to be licensed to grow hemp as a fiber source. Wouldn’t it be nice if forests did not have to be cut and re-cut because we utilized more fibers like hemp or linen.

There will be arguments by industrialists for their products and practices, and by conservationists for making changes until funding can be found to start a healthy industry for alternative fiber and this is already happening. My point is that all the resources of the world, especially the rare and precious ones, ought to be considered or reconsidered in the light of new world markets and the energy crises we face today.  Sustainability needs to be foremost in peoples’ minds.

Alternative fiber links

http://www.tree.org/c1.htm

http://www.secret-life.org/paper/alternative_fibers.php

http://www.rfu.org/cp/fibres.html

http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/10820?mode=full

http://cool.conservation-us.org/byorg/abbey/ap/ap08/ap08-4/ap08-405.html

http://www.serconline.org/fibers.html

The Sun Journal runs an article on the performance