I have a bunch of strands that may or may not connect here, as they've been sitting in limbo as a bunch of notes or things I bookmarked. So I'll start where I started. First, I'm interested in Caterina Fake's post of Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's "crafter's manifesto" and how it might relate to the running thread I've started here regarding reading/accessibility/marketing/etc. Here's the manifesto:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.

2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.

3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.

4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.

5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.

6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.

Fake goes on to note the decline of the face-to-face marketplace as well as mention DIY, an idea that is still circulating but not exactly under that name and not with the same pull it had in the early '90s with riot grrl and zine-making and everything. Better technology has broadened what can be done with do-it-yourself-ness, and so people can produce more "professional" products, which not surprisingly means for the loss of some of the charming messiness that came out of early DIY work. Now, I'm not really interested in getting nostalgic here, as I don't see the availability of better technology as necessarily killing creativity (as in sloppy = better and/or more punk rock) or broader Internet-based distribution as necessarily resulting in the further atomization of us all. Because I think that while we can definitely see that tendency, we also see the opposite; people are making interesting books and putting poems on the web and erasing geographical distances with blogs pretty readily even as they're maintaining local connections. But what I'm really interested in here the fact that this manifesto casts craft culture as something that's trans-medium, as a philosophy that can lie beneath whatever work one happens to be doing. That was certainly the case with segments of DIY culture--I mean, riot grrl was something in music but also something in zines but also something in performance and film (hello Miranda July). There was a broad network of diverse social spaces one could enter--physically enter--where a similar philosophy was in the air regardless of the art form or activity that was going on. And with that came a sense that things frequently seen as "art" could now be democratized into "craft," into something that anyone could do, sometimes as a real "career," sometimes not. Instead of the "dumbness" that it tends to imply--and instead of implying a particular kind of content--"craft" becomes a mindset with which to approach your activity, instead of the forbidding "art," which frequently carries the silent "(high) art" along with it. Now, I feel like the innovative poetry world (or worlds) might need to take a page out of this book and ask itself, as it's engaging in its own DIY-type practices, where similar, receptive social spaces might be. (Or even take a page out of its own history--witness the Second Generation of the New York School and its alignment with the literary wing of punk rock.) Who else is doing stuff like this? How might we find common ground and learn from each other and expand (for the "better") the ways that we (and maybe our broader cultures) think and perceive? In some ways this might be more easily accomplished outside of places like New York (I mean, riot grrl started where I come from, people), as the communities are smaller and sometimes more apt to come in contact and also because of the much more solid (rigid?) artistic establishments that inhabit NYC due, obviously, to the fact that it's one of the world's artistic centers. But I think that with some effort there's still the possibility of creating, in NYC and other centers, a broader and more open artistic culture that can welcome more people into its social spaces and knowledges/discourses, people who wouldn't necessarily call themselves artists or conventional consumers of art. Maybe I'm getting idealistic again, but I'm talking about things in big strokes here; the nitty-gritty would invariably far more partial and less utopian. But I think the steps that need to be taken involve poets moving, well, out.

So how can this kind of thing happen? What's involved? I've run across a few partial ideas on some blogs recently. First, from Pamela Lu a couple of days ago. Just after outlining what she sees as the traits of the target readers of "New Poetry Boosters" of Ted Kooser-esque work, she writes that

I realize that a lot of this is assumption, and just more rehashing of the "what's wrong with readers" sort of lament that indiepress writers/critics are apt fall into from time to time, but I do think it matches at least in part what the Boosters have in mind for their projects, market-wise and morale-wise. I think it's helpful to try to define their target readership, if only as a mode of anti-definition toward clarifying what I myself require as a reader. And toward a way of speaking to potential readers like myself who are looking for a way to get to the art, literature, and culture that satisfies their need. If, say, a rookie poetry reader feels alienated by Ted Kooser, what migration paths can they follow (through music, film, the web, etc.) to get to what they need? And how can these migration paths be made more visible to the ones who need them the most? Maybe this is a form of counter-Boosterism for the "counter-tradition" that we hear about on Silliman's Blog, which itself seems to have captured a good bit of the "market share" of younger readers. I much prefer this model of accessibility where it is the pathway network that draws the readers in to make their own choices, rather than the poem-product being carefully packaged and dangled before the consumer as good medicine.

I'm interested in particular in the last part of what Lu says here--not to be too self-congratulatory of bloggers, but I think that she's correct when she says that a few blogs by established figures have been a way of getting information out to potentially interested parties, providing them with a "pathway" into a variety of work that might be interesting to them and allowing them to actively discuss such work. But as she also says, music, film and other art forms can provide similar pathways into such work. Sticking to blogs for a second, though, I think it becomes important for poetry bloggers to actively assist in the creation of these pathways by getting in touch with or being visible to bloggers and readers who are dealing with other art forms or engaging in political discussions in ways that might be closely related to the types of concerns (with language or what have you) that we have as poets. I know that there are close connections already--the Jordan Davis-to-Sasha Frere-Jones-to-a-load -of-music (etc.)-blogs sequence, for example (okay, so he doesn't link to Jon Caramanica, but you know what I mean)--but the pathways aren't really being created as much as they should be and the dialogue isn't quite happening. I mean, Davis writes about SFJ's posts, but I don't see the reverse happening so much, which is not so much an accusation as just a fact, as far as I can see (please correct me if I'm wrong). Maybe it's time for more poets to make active cuts across the aether and get a bit more in touch. (Now if only I could do that more often myself...)

And then maybe another way of opening the field comes from Steve Benson's comment to Silliman's blog. Benson writes in reference to his book the ball (30 times in 2 days), which follows the procedure that on "Saturday and Sunday, April 23 and 24, 2005, every hour on the hour, when my wristwatch alarm sounded, I wrote five minutes in a brown book Lyn gave me several years ago, as well as I could. This is the transcript, completed two weeks later." He says, in reference to this explanatory note, which is included in the book, that

There is an addition intention, however, to documenting by a note how a piece was written. That is to make it available more widely—which does indeed mean to temper its potential elitism. Others can try the same method, or one that it leads them to consider, if they so choose. And people can consider its implications in their reading, in the way that and to the degree that they find it given to them. There is not ‘right reading’ of an author’s note, any more than of a poem. I’d like to stand by that!

Here we've got that sense of foregrounding the procedure used in writing a poem in order to open the reader to the possibility that they too could write a work like this. This isn't a new idea (John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, etc., albeit in a different context), and has its good and questionable points; the portion about considering the implication of the author's note in one's reading is to me, however, more interesting. Because here Benson suggests a way of providing a context for the work, an avenue into reading it that doesn't so much determine the meaning one might gain from it but rather angle the reader's attention in a different and, especially in the case of readers newer to this kind of work, more fruitful way. One is given a context, a short guide to a first reading, that doesn't disallow wild reading so much as ground it. I'm not suggesting that every poem be provided with some kind of context or back story, but in the case of newer readers, sometimes knowing the procedure surrounding a work, knowing a guiding principle, having the concept behind this conceptual art, can allow one to appreciate the idea first and then enter one's reading in such a way that one has something to hold on to in the midst of a possibly disorienting or difficult reading experience. This forwards the poem as object, as "craftwork," much more than language poetry's supposed Brechtian distancing effects, and I think that we end up much further down the "active reading" road than we would be otherwise. The things suggested by both Lu and Benson's posts would help make a few steps, I think, in creating a culture of reading much closer to the ones that poets have been hoping for, one that makes connections with other cultural forms and finds greater grounding within people's lives and allows art to perform the shifty functions that it does at its best.

Now, I've got a quotation from Robert Gluck on working class form from How2 that I want to explore a bit too, but I think it's moving on to another topic and so I'm going to end things for now.