I have decided
Hello No Teeth Poetry Readers,
I have decided to give up on this endeavor. I mean. It was a fun ride. But, now it is over. This work will be left up until June of 2010. Then, it will be taken down. Those contributors which wish their work to come down before then, please e-mail me at jessicamyers@noteethpoetry.com and I will remove your pieces. This has been coming for a long time. It's not because of the work. I like it. It's because I feel like the work isn't do anything for a larger audience AND most importantly--TO MY PUBLISHED AUTHORS.
Please read the following essay on "The New Math of Poetry" http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/
As a basic reason, I quote this passage from the essay:
"The hundreds of poets who are at this moment contemplating editing yet another poetry journal or anthology need to ask themselves if they will introduce readers to future Eliots, Bishops, Ginsbergs, or Plaths—or merely add more lineated prose to what Beckett would call "the impossible heap." "The weeder is supremely needed," Ezra Pound warns, "if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden." The new math analyzed here suggests that poetry is on Miracle-Gro and is rapidly becoming a jungle."
I have decided to give up on this endeavor. I mean. It was a fun ride. But, now it is over. This work will be left up until June of 2010. Then, it will be taken down. Those contributors which wish their work to come down before then, please e-mail me at jessicamyers@noteethpoetry.com and I will remove your pieces. This has been coming for a long time. It's not because of the work. I like it. It's because I feel like the work isn't do anything for a larger audience AND most importantly--TO MY PUBLISHED AUTHORS.
Please read the following essay on "The New Math of Poetry" http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/
As a basic reason, I quote this passage from the essay:
"The hundreds of poets who are at this moment contemplating editing yet another poetry journal or anthology need to ask themselves if they will introduce readers to future Eliots, Bishops, Ginsbergs, or Plaths—or merely add more lineated prose to what Beckett would call "the impossible heap." "The weeder is supremely needed," Ezra Pound warns, "if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden." The new math analyzed here suggests that poetry is on Miracle-Gro and is rapidly becoming a jungle."
I think that the surging amount of poetry journals and blogs reflects the growing amount of poetry that is being written, and that is a good thing. There is nothing to fear if our friends and neighbors have begun writing more, and even if they are finding their voices without our consent. If we want to believe in poetry as a form, we have to believe in it like water, air, and as food to be eaten and produced constantly, daily. On par with music and news and all the other prosaic goings-on in our society. I don't see poetry as being on Miracle-Gro, but inversely, that voices that have been stamped down since the consolidation of power in the presses and academic institutions are now free to tell the real deal. I am not afraid of a jungle, I live in one every day. In this jungle, I have found guideposts in the forms of brand-named journals and authors that suit me and invite everyone else to do the same. We can all have our own Ginsbergs, Eliots, Plaths, Bukowskis, Williams's, and Williamsons. There will be no closed-door panels which decide whom to promote as the darling of the establishment. There will be more subcultures. Diversity is fearsome for those who are used to aristocracy of taste. If we don't expose ourselves to what is out there, including that which we do not understand, we are just gullets to be force-fed "good art," and not to help define it. Thank you for your journal and your labor of love and your faith and your explanations.
ReplyDeleteI would like to wholeheartedly echo Omar's eloquently stated sentiments and add simply that the very growth of the human world is precluding the possibility of single or few towering geniuses.
ReplyDeleteWhen Homer wrote, there were perhaps 100 million souls incarnate, and today we have already nearly doubled our population since the death of the aforementioned T.S. Eliot.
Perhaps the short span of industrialized history between the development of mass media (the common era usage of paper in China? Gutenberg?) through some indeterminate (and perhaps belatedly recognized) moment in the last century (while literacy and access to sufficient resources and leisure lagged behind this growth) were the *only* times any conception of a few artistic "stars" was meaningful.
Before then, mostly, art was made by and belonged to a given community. And since then, we need only to turn off our televisions (or exit those streaming video tabs in our browsers) to pick up a pen (or paintbrush or keyboard or audio or video recording device or violin or guitar or kazoo) and create our own art that can be alive in and exchanged over any one of the multitude of communities that exist in our new hydra-headed reality.
So, if you have any energy left to persist, please do. Surely, you were engaged in some "weeding" already, and (if you'll allow me to shift metaphors) so long as your criteria were honest, there could be no harm done by either too fine or too coarse a sieve.
And in either case: Bravo, I say, to this and any other publication that burns, however briefly, amongst the many constellations in the many skies up to which dreamers tilt their heads when they dream.
hey...i found a debit card in the lake mary bank of america parking lot...and i tried googling your name to try and return it and this is all that came up. sooo if you lost a debit card. just let me know and ill return it.
ReplyDelete