In the world of literature, everyone has differing tastes when it comes to poetry. A poem I might love, you might call worthless trash (at least I’d hope you wouldn’t be that harsh). But some poems are just so bad, so irritating – like nails sliding down a chalkboard (pardon the cliche`), that there’s little room for debate.

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Before the invention of the printing press, most literature was experienced through an oral tradition, where stories and tales were passed down from generation to generation by telling the story. Then, the printing press came along and suddenly the printed word was widely available, and changed the way people consumed literature.

Nowadays, it’s computers and other digital technology that’s changing the face of literature. In a recent article published by ScienceDaily (that’s right, a science journal published an article about poetry), gives a short chronicle of Maria Engberg who wrote her dissertation on the effects of technology on poetry:

She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance.

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NOTE: The following is a post I wrote for Brad’s Reader when I used the Blogger platform. In those days I got very little traffic, so I’m assuming most of you haven’t read this post (if you have, then I apologize). What you read here is just as the original was posted, only I cleaned up some very embarrassing mistakes.

Poets generally live in a different world than the rest of society. That is not necessarily a bad thing. However, there is also a pervasive idea among the poetry community that anything "mainstream" or "popular" is bad because it somehow cheapens a poem. This is where the problem starts to emerge.

Poetry is not as wildly popular today as it once was, that is no secret. Most poets will not make a living writing poems. If a book of poems sells over 2,000 copies, then it’s considered a success. By all signs, poetry has fallen off the radar of the general public.

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After yesterday’s extremely depressing post about the grim realities of being a writer, I thought I’d try to cheer things up by writing about ways you can create your own brand of success.

All of yesterday’s post concentrated on publishing through traditional channels – getting a contract with one of the large publishing houses and placing your faith in them that they will get your book out to the masses (and it will actually sell). But why place your faith in someone else? You wrote your book. You put your sweat and tears into it. And you’re the one who has the most invested into the book (monetary and otherwise). Why not take control and make your own success?

I’m talking about self-publishing, of course. Before I begin, however, I want to say that this term still has a negative stigma attached to it. But that stigma lies mostly in the traditional publishing world. The great thing is self-publishing doesn’t even have to involve paying a company lots of money to publish your book – it doesn’t have to be that complicated, or that expensive.

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NOTE: This post originally appeared on the "old" Brad’s Reader that was using the Blogger platform. But since I practically had no readership then, I’m pretty sure not many of you read this post. I did, however, change the post by adding a few things and editing it to make it more "reader friendly" than the original.

In recent years the Middle East is a region of the world that has been plagued by war, poverty and political unrest. With all the negative news coming out of the Middle East, it’s hard to imagine a culture where the arts can flourish – especially poetry. In the western hemisphere, poetry is seen as something that only academics and artists are concerned with, but the mainstream pretty much ignores. But one country in the Middle East is different; it’s a place where poetry is as important as any sporting event.

This article from the New Statesman about poetry in the United Arab Emirates hits closer to home for me, as I went to Dubai in 1999 while in the Navy. It’s a beautiful country with an amazing amount of culture, to say the least, so it’s no wonder that poetry flourishes there.

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Charles Simic has been named the 15th Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Along with the title, he will receive an $35,000 award, plus $5000 for travel expenses. The post, which is largely ceremonial, is meant to give the poet a chance to work on his/her craft during the year-long tenure.

You can read all about Simic and his new job at this Guardian Unlimited article:
Charles Simic named US poet laureate

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They are pesky, unwanted emails that can overflow our inboxes. They are so annoying and "invasive" that laws have been created to try and stop their spread, but to little avail. If you’ve done anything on the internet over the last decade or so, especially send and receive email, then you know what I’m talking about – spam!

Now it appears there is a new movement in poetry (probably not all that new, but this is the first I’m hearing about it) that turns those annoying, unwanted messages into works of art. It’s called "spoetry". Pretty clever, huh?

According to a blog post in the Guardian Unlimited Arts section, spoetry very could well be the next big thing in poetry:

Here is the future language of poetry: part machine, part human, all good. Just as pre-pen and ink societies produced narrative poetry, the industrial revolution gave birth to the Romantics, and the post-war American economic boom begat the Beats, so too – if the rash of blogs devoted to it over the past year or two are anything to go by – the technological age in which are living gives us spam poetry.

Computers and the internet have become so intertwined with our daily lives that I guess it’s no wonder that a phenomenon like spam will works its way into our artistic culture as well. The whole movement, at first glance, is surprising, but on a deeper level it’s one of those "ah-ha" moments when spoetry is something we should have been engaged in for a long time now. It’s that obvious.

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