It’s a little-known fact that Ezra Pound once proposed that some of the greats of American Literature compete in a boxing tournament. OK, that’s not true, but if such a tournament had been held, here’s what would have happened.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

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The poetry world has a paranoid side. If you ask Anis Shivani or certain folks in the avant-garde crowd, American poetry is a shell game. It’s rigged. And in certain circles, it’s clear that there is an us, and there is a them.

For instance, after a recent controversy in poetry land, there was this comment:

The entire official world of poetry publishing is corrupt from the top down to the smallest little contest – and the NEA is a facilitator of that. It is a world of mutual back scratching MFA grads with middle names like “Lavender” who elevate the word “vanity” to heights never before seen. Geoffrey Gatza (yes, I published with BlazeVox and donate to them) is one of the handful of honest, innovative publishers who are trying to deal with the real issues facing real poets and their readers – hence the hatred heaped on him by the officials patrolling the boundaries of verse culture.

This made me think of something from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The notion of resentment is central to the book. In it, he makes a distinction between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” He writes:

…Slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” … In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself.

Or as the philosophy department at Lander University puts it,

For Nietzsche, vanity is the hallmark of the meek and powerless…Vanity is a consequence of inferiority.

So when certain crowds get riled up, you see comments like this:

Two of the best considerations on this matter…were published last fall by…one of the central figures on the Buffalo poetry scene.

There’s a profound sense of self-importance—and yes, vanity—in that statement. It almost sounds like a perverse version of John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill,” as if Buffalo were a beacon, preventing wayward poets from entering perdition.

Needless to say, the very notion of a “scene” speaks to a dichotomous, us. vs. them approach; “scenes” are defined entirely by them, by the Hegelian “Other” (which Nietzsche was damn familiar with).

And does Buffalo’s “scene” merit that much importance to begin with? While I admire a number of Buffalo poets and presses, I have to say that Buffalo’s crowning achievement is its hot sauce. (Frank, of Frank’s hot sauce fame, is surely what Hegel would call a world-historical individual.)

That’s the thing: I’m far less interested in a scene—I’m far more interested in good writing wherever I can find it. Needless to say, there are numerous great poets scattered across the country, and many of them aren’t any part of a “scene.” Case in point: One of my favorite poets works at car service on the West Coast.

Moreover, the folks in favor of a “scene” always seem to attack the opposition, as Nietzsche puts it, “in effigy.” In other words, it’s one big straw man argument. Even though that’s a logical fallacy, it doesn’t mean it’s not convincing; folks use fallacies for a reason: they work.

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You may have seen that the NEA/Blazevox controversy was recently mentioned in the Huffington Post.  In a post that hit the web yesterday, Geoffrey Gatza was interviewed by Anis Shivani.

After reading the interview, I wanted to address one portion of the interview.

About halfway through, Mr. Gatza says:

I would like to make it known that in our offer to publish books with a co-operative donation, if the author did not want to participate in this we also made an offer to publish their work as an ebook in Kindle and EPUB and PDF format and have it available on Amazon.com and iBooks. And if that was still not acceptable, we could wait until our financial outlook was stable and we would then publish their book without a donation. I think that this is a fair arrangement, as do many writers. I think that this is a very successful program and we were able to promote good writers. (Note: Emphasis is mine)

The problem is, he’s not telling the truth.

In my correspondence with him, I specifically asked him if my book would be published if I did not contribute. After I got Gatza’s initial acceptance, I emailed a few pals and they said that they had been given the “offer” and declined, and Mr. Gatza had published their book later, sans donation. I was hoping that this would be the case. (I would have been fine waiting.)

Instead, when I asked him if my work would be published if I did not donate, his response was “No of course not.”

I point this out, not as an accusation, but as a matter of fact. On this matter, Mr. Gatza is simply not telling the truth. I feel obliged to correct him, not because it speaks to his veracity, but my own.

Many in the poetry community seem to view Mr. Gatza as something like a saint. Given his substantial contributions, that may be justified, but even saints are capable of lying.

The season opener is here, and when I think of baseball, I think of poetry. That might seem an odd combination, but baseball and poetry have more in common than you think.

First, baseball is literally pastoral. Baseball is played in a big goddamn field. Throw in an occasional sheep, get a shepherd’s crook and you’re a veritable shepherd. After a long winter, the green grass looks nothing short of heaven. (Unless your team plays in a dome, in which case it’s probably purgatory.)

While the view’s a treat, I go for the music of the game. Poetic meter is essentially music, and music is largely math; baseball is almost all math and therefore replete with a music of its own.

But we’re not talking calculus and you certainly don’t need to be a statistician to enjoy it. The math’s simple, intuitive. If you can count to four you’ve got it made. (This is perhaps why children latch onto the game at a young age.)

Like the writing life, baseball is a game defined by failure. In both, if you manage to succeed 25 percent of the time, you’re halfway decent.  Get on base 30 percent of the time and you’re a star. If you hit .400, you’re either Ted Williams or Shakespeare.

Baseball’s music is more than just math, though. John Cage has nothing on the ambient noise of a ballgame. At a game, the first thing you hear are the barkers, and the simple iambic of pro-grams pro-grams and cold beer, cold beer, booming out from the stadium and onto the concourse.

Then there’s the graceful physics. For example: The pitcher’s mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate.

In 2011, the average MLB pitcher had a fastball of about 92 mph.

According to our good friends at Google: (60 feet six inches) / (92 mph) = 0.448369565 seconds.

That means you’ve got four-tenths of a second to see the ball, decide to swing, swing, and actually make contact.

When the pitches get faster, you’ve got even less time.

 (60 feet six inches) / (96 mph) = 0.4296875 seconds

(60 feet six inches) / (100 mph) = 0.4125 seconds

(60 feet six inches) / (105 mph) = 0.392857143 seconds (only one person, Arlodis Chapman, has thrown about this fast)

But the thing is, hitting a fastball is relatively easy. Believe it or not, most people, if they practiced, could probably hit a 90 mph heater. It’s all about the timing.

That’s the thing, though, once a good pitcher gets in a rhythm he knows exactly what to do. He lulls you to sleep with fastball, fastball, fastball, then there’s a sudden curve, your desperate swing and the walk back to the dugout.

And while you might think I’m simply being metaphorical when I say that baseball and poetry overlap, I mean it literally. Despite its age, baseball makes it new: The bases are drunk instead of loaded, the pitcher throws Uncle Charlie (the curveball) or The Lady Godiva Pitch (the pitch with nothing on it), a fly ball is a dying quail or a can of corn, and a player in the majors is up for a cup of coffee. Then there the innumerable nicknames for each player or manager. A manager who takes his pitchers out at the first sight of trouble is Captain Hook. Then there’s ex-Minnesota Twin Doug Mientkiewicz, who was simply known as “Eye Chart.”

This wordplay goes on and on, and many of these terms come from the players themselves, who certainly aren’t trained writers. After all this is a game full of hayseeds and toughs, kids from Oklahoma or California or Chicago or from the slums of the Dominican Republic or Venezuela.

But as Josef Beuys said, “Jeder Mensch ein Künstler (everyone’s an artist) and perhaps nowhere is that more true than on the ballfield.

OK, so this note is going to be rather short, as I’m on my lunch break at work. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been rather interested in the Occupy Wall Street protests, and they’ve got me somewhat optimistic for the first time in a few years.

One question that’s been bandied about is a pretty basic one: Why the protests? And to be sure, the protests are hardly homogenous; there’s all sorts of different viewpoints and myriad causes being supported by protesters across the country.

But at its most basic, I think it’s quite clear that people are angry, and at one group of people in particular: The Scrooge McDucks among us.

No, really, Scrooge McDuck. You may remember the Duck Tales, which featured Scrooge McDuck, a very wealthy Duck who made a habit of taking a morning swim through his vault of money.

Now most of the folks that I’d label Scrooges aren’t actually individual people. They are banks that got bailed out. Well, I was thinking about the bank bailouts, and after (hastily) doing the math, I realized that the bank bailouts had not only given the banks, we’d given them enough to actually make the opening scene of the Duck Tales possible, and then some.

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If This World Falls Apart, Lou Lipsitz

For all the banter and bluster of the avant-garde crowd, plain speaking can be a virtue for a poet. The literary merits of the language of everyday life—let’s call it dinner table diction—haven’t been exhausted and won’t be anytime soon. Winner of the 2010 Lynx House Prize, Lou Liptsitz’s If This World Falls Apart is a fine reminder of this.

The poems are sometimes striking in their simplicity—some seem to start out almost as simple accounts of events—but they quickly become much more, as Lipsitz’ work often does what good work should—it conveys experience, puts you there, with each piece revealing something close to truth. And Lipsitz does so while dabbling in some pretty serious—and personal—subject matter: lost love, regret, family scandals, and he somehow avoids lapsing into the great sin of solipsism. That’s a difficult dance, and something to be commended. Read more »

I don’t want Blazevox to go under, as this is the worst possible outcome. Hopefully, however, the pledge to end Blazevox is reversible. Let me reiterate once again, I admire the books and work Mr. Gatza has produced. And as strange as it may sound, I’d like to try to help him devise ways to stay afloat.

I recently emailed Mr. Gatza twice to let him know this.

The simplest way would for him to simply to announce the existing policy with clarifications to assuage the fears that were clearly expressed in the comments of the earlier Bark piece. This might take effort, but perhaps it could keep the press running in the short term.

In addition, according to Mr. Gatza, he has little to no support for the press; there has to be a way to mobilize financial support for Blazevox, right? A Kickstarter campaign might be in order, or even an old-school donation drive. I’d be happy to help in that regard (and they can raise a significant amount of cash). Needless to say, there are options.

Can we somehow convince him of that?

UPDATE | UPDATE | UPDATE |

So for those of you following the Blazevox scandal (see the earlier post for a primer) it looks like I/we didn’t have to wait too long for a response. I’ve been checking Blazevox’s blog every few hours to see if he’d respond, and he just did in a blog post, where he rescinded the program.

Well, while I was writing about that post and asking questions (I’d just finished it and posted it), I just found out that his press will close at the end of the year.

I’m not happy about this. I didn’t want his press to close; I admired the work he does/did. That’s why I sent my manuscript there; I trusted him to turn it into a book.

But he violated that trust (and that of many others), and to rectify that, I simply wanted him to do the right thing and let writers know about his policy in advance. Transparency was what I was after.

Unfortunately, that transparency came far too late.

UPDATE | UPDATE | UPDATE |

So for those of you following the Blazevox scandal (see the earlier post for a primer) it looks like I/we didn’t have to wait too long for a response. I’ve checking Blazevox’s blog every few hours to see if he’d respond, and he just did in a blog post, the full text of which reads:

We will rescind this program immediately and I am sorry for the troubles it has caused.

Needless to say, the response has been overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who commented/read the article, as well as those who helped popularize it, especially Bark’s editor-in-chief Sam Ligon, Matt Bell and Jeremy Halinen on Facebook, and Christopher Higgs via our pals at HTMLGIANT.Thanks are also in order to all my poetry pals for their comments in Facebook messages, emails, and the like. I didn’t get my manuscript published, but I feel like I gained a bunch of good friends. So, now that the Oscar speech part is over, now what?

Well, let’s start with his response.

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The other day I got some good news, or so I thought. My poetry manuscript, which I’ve been shaping ever since I graduated from Eastern Washington’s MFA program in 2007, was accepted by BlazeVOX Books. Nevertheless, as I delved into the long letter, it became apparent that the publication offer was contingent on a monetary donation ($250, to be exact). This took me by complete surprise; over the course of the next day and a half (and a handful of emails), my initial elation turned to discontent, and then to near despair. Here’s what happened.
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