Showing posts with label First Amendment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Amendment. Show all posts

Friday, June 13, 2008

Florida Florida Florida: Tim Russert 1950-2008


Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Tim Russert, political commentator and host of NBC's Meet the Press, collapsed and died earlier today while working on this week's broadcast.

Tom Brokaw, former anchor of NBC's Nightly News, announced, in a broken voice, the news earlier today.

According to current NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Russert was a huge proponent of the First Amendment and was instrumental in assuring that the first amendment greet visitors to the newly constructed Newseum, which opened April 18, 1997, in Rosslyn, Virginia, and then reopened in Washington, D.C, April 11, 2008.


Most of us remember Russert's famous "whiteboard analysis," especially in 2000 when he emphasized Florida's major role in the presidential election. On a simple whiteboard, he wrote,

Florida


Florida


Florida
Russert's whiteboard analysis had continued throughout the 2008 primary season as he numerically showed how Hillary Clinton's candidacy was no longer viable.

His cutting analyses on Meet the Press and his strong journalistic voice will be missed.

Survivors include Russert’s wife, Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair Magazine, and their son, Luke.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Thread: What is Libel and Slander? What is the Difference Between the Two Terms?

In a forum that imposes few boundaries, these are important questions, and, certainly, the answers are not cut and dried.

We would like to hear what you think about libel and slander, so feel free to post in the comment section, which is wide open.

I would like to elevate TWO well-written comments to post status, preferably someone who has NOT yet had an elevated post in this forum.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Thread: ACommoner Responds to "Rotten Grapes"

(Corrected entry)

Evidently, freedom of expression at Poets & Writers is afforded to some poets and writers and not extended to others, taking literally the Orwellian notion that "All pigs are created equal, but some pigs are more equal than others."

Poets & Writers pretends to represent its subscribers and membership, but, in fact, it represents only the politically sanctioned viewpoints of the the power structure: those who hand out prizes and keepers of the status quo.

Dissenting viewpoints not welcome.

Christpher Woodman, a.k.a. ACommoner, a
Poets & Writer reader, wished to respond to the following Joan Houlihan letter to the editor, which appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine Nov/Dec 2007):

A STUDY IN DENIAL

ROTTEN GRAPES?

Craig Morgan Teicher's profile of Bin Ramke ("Noble Rider," September/October 2007) referred to the now-defunct Foetry.com as a "poetry watchdog," with a legitimate point of view in a "squabble." But thanks to that "watchdog," one of the best poetry series in America has been dismantled (the Contemporary Poetry Series), an independent press was smeared (Tupelo Press), and Ramke, one of poetry's most dedicated editors, chose to retire. Any influence that Foetry wielded came about through its bullying tactics and sensationalist accusations, which were far more serious than what Teicher calls "sour grapes." They were the product of a willful misunderstanding of the process of editing and publishing poetry.

So on November 2, 2007, Mr. Woodman wrote directly to P & W editor Kevin Larimer:

Dear Editors,

I couldn't believe my eyes when I came upon Joan Houlihan's letter "ROTTEN GRAPES" in your current issue. I've admired her too, a lot. So how could she be so blind as to defend the extinct Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series against the very fair and detailed accusations leveled against its editor, Bin Ramke, NOT against the Series? After all Bin Ramke never dared to defend himself--which he could have done so easily by revealing the records voluntarily. When those records did get into the public domain everything Foetry had said about his bias proved to be 100% correct, and he resigned, he didn't "retire!"

Of course there were fine books published in the Series--but the question has to be what even finer and more original, grass-root or autodidact, books were never even looked at? And how sad such a distinguished series should have had to be closed down too--I submitted no less than TWELVE m.s. to Bin Ramke over the years, and would have continued to do so had it not been for his self-serving sleights-of-hand and cronyism. Bin Ramke took something away from me when he fell too--he deprived me of something so valuable in my life. Bin Ramke did that to me, let's be clear about that, not the Series!

I've been reading P & W for years--sometimes I subscribe but at the moment my postal service is so erratic I don't receive it if I do. I've also written to you a number of times, including twice before about Jeffrey Levine. Now you've published this letter of Joan Houlihan--surely you've got to let me be heard at this point too. Because I really am the real thing--the poet unattached, unfettered, uncompromised. Indeed you can check me out at my wife Homprang's website, www.homprang.com (is my e-mail address p.c. or is it p.c?).

I wish I could have made the following shorter--I've tried for days and days and just can't say what needs to be said any more succinctly. If you can prune it more do feel free to do so--but be sure it continues to say what it says. Foetry did wonders for me--and I suspect it has changed things for all of us more than we can possibly see at the moment.

With many thanks too for your good work--you can't imagine what a wonderful resource P & W is for isolated writers like myself!

And one last point, dear P & W Editors--do you hear any sour grapes in my voice--or my verse?

All the best, Christopher Woodman


ACommoner added an ATTACHED LETTER TO THE EDITOR, November 2nd, 2007

WILLFUL MISUNDERSTANDING!

Your grapes are truly rotten, Joan Houlihan. As a start, Bin Ramke didn’t retire, he resigned—under relentless pressure from the public and from the University of Georgia Press. Secondly, the dispute wasn’t about the Contemporary Poetry Series but about the selection process. In top-flight poetry book contests all the finalists are the very best, and for that reason it’s even more important they all get an equal hearing. If a judge favors a friend or someone connected to an institution he likes, then another equally gifted but different finalist doesn’t get recognition—and when that happens over and over again for years it’s destructive to the whole poetry environment. If only one species of poetry is propagated the art ends up as dead as any other ill-adapted species, a dinosaur, a haemophiliac crown prince, or an emperor with inadequate clothing!

The third of Houlihan’s distortions is the worst--to suggest the whistle-blower is a “bully” and the message just “sensationalist accusations.” No, the “willful misunderstanding of the process of editing and publishing poetry” was not on the part of the watchdog but on the part of the editor/publisher with the secret agenda. It was Bin Ramke who destroyed the Series, not Foetry--and the proof is it’s coming back so quickly without him!

Like a teacher, a priest or an elected representative, an editor has an almost sacred responsibility to the public, especially in the high art of poetry. Bin Ramke was in a position to help American poetry to evolve honestly and naturally, not to foist on it his own claustrophobic hothouse variety!

And Jeffrey Levine? If the Watchdog was rabid then so was P &W, because all the facts were repeated in the magazine too and nobody challenged them. Levine was also given the space to refute the charges, and his excuse was not that Foetry was wrong but that the mess was all due to pressure and fumbling, and he just wished the whistles would stop blowing! Perhaps they will, but not if you try to bully them with your rotten gripes, Joan Houlihan. That will just make them shriller and more frenzied, and suspect that you too have your interests!

Christopher Woodman
Chiang Mai, Thailand


These letters were never published in the print or the online versions of P & W, effectively silencing Mr. Woodman. On March 17, 2008, Mr. Woodman, posting as ACommoner, brought his plight to poets.org, and started a lively 2-page thread called "The First Amendment & Forums." There he posted the above unpublished letters. He also posted the following (among other entries):

I was very struck by a letter which appeared a few months ago in Poets & Writers Magazine (ROTTEN GRAPES, P & W Magazine Nov/Dec 2007) in which a well known critic and poet defended the conduct of two equally well-known editors and publishers who had been caught red-handed abusing the trust of those who had placed their work in their hands. One of the editors had systematically undermined the integrity of a well-known poetry series for 20+ years, bestowing the bi-annual awards on his friends and cronies and sometimes not even bothering to read the other manuscripts, including 12 of my own along the way. The other editor sent xeroxed "personal reviews" to 100s of hopeful poets, including myself, all of whom had entrusted him with their best and most precious work. Even worse, the editor in question suggested to us all that he might be able to lift us “up a level” (his exact phrase) if we sent him an additional $295.00, checks made out to him personally. “But will we get published this time?” I'm sure we all asked ourselves.

“I don’t rule out the possibility in some cases…” went the classic come-on spiel.

What upset me more than anything about the ROTTEN GRAPES defense of the two compromised editors was that it accused the whistle blowers, myself among them, of a “willful misunderstanding of the whole process of editing and publishing poetry.” We were all “losers,” the letter suggested, clueless incompetents who had nothing better to do than to “smear” their betters, and even if some mistakes had been made by the two editors, what we had done was far worse!

So I want to know what the process of editing and publishing poetry entails that we didn’t understand? The answer seems to go like this—I’ve heard it hundreds of times. If a publisher’s “lists” are “good,” that’s all that really matters. The taste with which the “lists” get drawn up is what the process is about, not who is left unread or whose feelings get hurt, which is inevitable. If the “lists” are "good," it doesn’t matter what fees are collected, for example, or who knows the judge or is just about to marry her or is baby sitting for her right now on the campus where the decision is being made. Great editors and publishers are above such venal concerns. They devote themselves to such a high art in such a selfless way and for so very, very little money, why trouble them with your small-minded obsessions?


On March 25, 2008, poets.org site administrator chissiekl posted:

Christopher (ACommoner),

If you wish to continue to debate this topic, you are free to create your own blog or website to do so. If you wish to discuss poetry, poems, the po-biz in a non-defamatory manner, you are free to start a new thread in this section. Any more defamatory content will be locked and further warnings will be issued. Thank you for your cooperation.


"The First Amendment & Forums" thread was locked, and, for a time, ACommoner was banned from the forum. He was later reinstated with a warning.

An interesting side note: both
Poets & Writers and poets.org feed at the government trough. Perhaps shutting down an exchange of free ideas and factual information might give those who dole out free money for the arts pause in awarding future grants.

In any case, ACommoner's thread has been reopened here.

Bring it on!

Jennifer

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Register.com Responds to The Public Forum Doctrine Thread


Wendy from Register.com emailed the following message:

You can be sure that Register.com regards the privacy and security of our customers as a top priority. We do not monitor the content of our customer’s websites but in some cases, questionable content has been brought to our attention. Our policy in such instances is to respect our customer’s freedom of expression; we will only take action against websites where we believe the site violates US law, promotes acts that violate US law or creates an imminent danger to person or property. Even though there may be times when our customers promote messages with which we disagree, it is our policy not to censor customers based on differing points of view.

I hope that helps clarify how Register.com approaches your right to register an available domain name of your choice and use that domain to communicate freely.


____________________________

(Posted with permission)

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

EMPLOYER BLOCKS POETRY WEB SITE, WORKERS DEMAND ROBERT FROST, OTHER VERSES

Found in my email this morning from poets.org:

For Immediate Release

Launch of Mobile Poetry Archive Leads to "April Madness"

April 1, 2008—When the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of a mobile version of their poetry archive in March, no one could have predicted that poetry would become the concern of Fortune 500 companies across the nation. But this is just what is happening, says Rich Richardson, CEO of Tercet, a Duluth-based import export firm.

"It started in a very benign way with an all-company email," Richardson says. "Our comptroller forwarded 'Birches' by Robert Frost. This poem touched many of our employees, leading several to spend their work hours looking for poems on Poets.org."

But this was only the beginning, says Richardson. "Once they had a taste for lines like 'They click upon themselves/As the breeze rises,' there was no stopping them."

Richardson says he began using SmartFilter, a tool for blocking websites, to combat his employees' Poets.org usage. "Unfortunately, this did not keep them from getting their poetry fix on their mobile devices," says Richardson. Poets.org's archive of 2,500 poems, biographies of poets, and essays about poetry became accessible on handheld devices including the iPhone last March.

Tercet's CFO, Abby Abramson, says the widespread internet searches for poems during business hours will not be tolerated beyond April, otherwise known as National Poetry Month. "Despite the obvious personal benefits of reading poetry, we can't condone something that decreases productivity," Abramson says. Abramson estimates that employee interest in poetry could cost the company $2.2 million in lost revenue by the end of the fiscal year, a significant financial blow for Tercet.

"Printing out Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Moose' and posting it in the cafeteria is fine. Reciting 'The Moose' to your spouse on the phone during work hours then using Poets.org to find more poems about animals is an abuse of our employee policy," says Abramson.

Abramson declined to comment if this use of Elizabeth Bishop's poem had actually occurred.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, sympathizes with the concerns of Tercet's management, but her empathy lies with the poetry readers at the company. "We believe that poetry expands the possibilities of daily life, as imagination alters reality,” says Swenson. "If that possibility is blocked, you may have a revolution on your hands," she says.

That revolution may come during National Poetry Month, when the Academy of Amercian Poets launches the first national celebration of Poem In Your Pocket Day.

"Poetry readers across the country will be carrying a poem in their pocket and sharing it with co-workers on April 17," says Swenson. "I would hate to hear that Tercet's workers were being penalized for acknowledging those 'unacknowledged legislators of the world,' our poets," Swenson says.

Happy April Fool's Day.


________________________

Obviously a spoof press release, but what if this were true? What if you were really blocked from reading your favorite poets on your iPhone or iPod during work hours?

What if your poetry and prose were consistently ignored by the literary community?

What if you were banned from writing and poetry forums because your viewpoints did not mesh with that of the establish literary community?

Oh.

I forgot.

That last bit is all too true.

Another thing: if consumers were enthralled with poetry as much as they adore Britney, Paris, and Lindsay scandals and sporting events, you had better believe your employer would have a policy in place regarding downloading your favorite poets during working hours.

Isn't it a good thing that most people feel that modern poetry totally sucks?

Happy April Fool's Day!

Monday, March 31, 2008

Forum Thread: Silencing Writers in the Corporate Nation (Anca Vlasopolos)

(The following article has been reposted--with permission from its author--from Post Foetry.

In this article, the author discusses the systemic silencing of writers by corporate America.

As writers, both published and unpublished, think about the ways you and your works have been silenced by corporate America and academic presses.

Feel free to post your comments.)
__________________________

I come by my interest in silence and silencing honestly—I grew up in Communist Romania, where the price for speaking out, as my father found out, was imprisonment without the right of habeas corpus. In fact, I know specifically where the U. S. sent the "extreme rendition" prisoners when it sent them to Romania. But that’s not the silencing I will be discussing. For a long time during my academic career I pondered the meaning of silence and silencing in women’s writing, not just in the case working-class writers or writers of color, where the problem was exacerbated by class and race, but in women’s writing precisely because that silencing cut across color and class lines, and the most aristocratic women were in many instances as definitively silenced as the milkmaids walking up the path of the estate. But since stellar scholars and writers, whom we in our general cultural amnesia now neglect, such as Joanna Russ (How to Suppress Women’s Writing) and Tillie Olsen (Silences), have brilliantly examined the subject, I will not be discussing that either.

The subject of my essay is the corporation-owned publishing media and the non-free-market economy that govern the present silencing of writers. I also want to address how academia, itself increasingly a corporate mimic, furthers the aims of the manacled and gagged market place. This paper is not a social-science analysis. I do not profess to practice social science without having been trained in its disciplines. But I am a writer and continue to be a voracious and eclectic reader, so I hope to entertain while edifying you, in the ancient manner, with lots of anecdotes and observations.

The most effective way of silencing a writer is not giving him or her an outlet. I’m not talking about the necessary winnowing that goes on constantly in a culture in which many more people write and submit their writing for publication than read and have any appreciation for literature. I’m talking about people who are experienced, published writers, for whom each new book presents the same dilemmas, problems, and humiliations as the first, each time without the hope that one still clings to in one’s writerly youth. We know that publishers commit colossal mistakes; this is not a recent phenomenon. We need only mention James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was rejected multiple times before it rose to become a classic. Proust’s first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu was rejected so many times that he ended up publishing it himself. And I could go on to myriad examples.

What I’m addressing here is the systematic, systemic silencing that goes on in what has become the ultra-capitalist business of publishing. About ten years ago, The Nation magazine did a feature on the remaining handful of independent presses in the country, small presses that were not subsidiaries of the petroleum industry or the Disney or Warner entertainment empires. Of those presses, fewer remain today. Picador has been swallowed. Dalkey Press has bit the dust. Coffee House, Milkweed, and Graywolf still limp on, they too trying so hard to find the best seller that they rarely publish the distinguished books that used to make their fame—if not their fortune, and there’s the rub. In the days of independent presses, when the Penguin "group," for instance, didn’t stand for a huge multi-national conglomerate, presses expected to make 8% profits on successful publications. Today, anything less than 25% is considered a marketing failure, and the writer whose book doesn’t see those profits can kiss his/her next advance goodbye and can go back to the starting line in terms of getting a publisher for the next manuscript.

The dominant presses, themselves subsidiaries of larger global corporations, control the market in various other ways that make it difficult for all but the most persistent and informed readers to be exposed to any books but those the publicity departments of these presses want them to see. The presses control the display at your local Borders, Barnes and Noble, and even independent bookstores. They pay for shelf space, so that their books will occupy prime space near the entrance to the bookstore, in the most eye-catching location, and that their books be placed with the cover rather than the spine in the shelves facing the browser. These presses control signings and readings. The pressure has become so great that even independent bookstores are reluctant to set up signings and readings for any but the major presses, even for such presses as Archipelago, with its high-quality and well-regarded international list. So, basically, unless you walk into your local bookstore determined to order the book you want even if it’s not on the shelf, you’re going to buy something on display that catches your eye. Even when you order a book, as I’ve done many times, the bookstore personnel forget to notify you that the book has arrived. They send it back to the publisher, who then charges the author for returned books against royalties, so that through creative accounting, such as that practiced by one of my presses—Columbia University Press, a writer is always in deficit; this despite my memoir having been kept in print for the last seven years (thus clearly making money for CUP).

In addition to the raw rapacity of the multi-corporate presses that dominate the market, the process of publishing with the multis as well as with the independents who fashion themselves in the image of the multis, such the venerable Knopf and Farrar Strauss (the latter no longer an independent), silences writers. No major, and a good deal of minor, presses will look at unagented manuscripts. This barrier between writers and presses sets up yet another profit-making enterprise that depends on the generation of capital, not on literary excellence and lasting power. Agents become agents to make money. They will represent writers who write what’s been written, published, and proved successful. They do not seek fresh, original voices and authors who may create a "market" for their work over time. Agents look for works that fit present, proven, money-making niches. So, apart from the rapaciousness of the corporate publishers, writers have to deal with the cupidity of agents, some of whom moreover have the arrogance to regard themselves as literary critics and to force writers to make major changes in order to make a sale. I had an agent tell me that the political content of my detective novel was too disturbing and that I should make it into a screenplay, which he offered to represent, because he felt the political content would be muted in such a treatment. A famous agent told me that my most recently published book, The New Bedford Samurai (from the small, independent press Twilight Times Books), which she received in manuscript, was a "deliberately noncommercial" production and that I should bide my time and wait for her to read it when she had time because, she said, she was in the business to make money. On one occasion, when my colleague Christopher Leland and I participated as invited speakers at a writers’ conference at Oakland University, we sat at the same table for lunch as other invited speakers, among them two agents from New York. While it’s indisputable that at my age young people look very young, these two were, by their own admission, in their early and mid-twenties. Chris and I asked them what they were looking for when they shopped for manuscripts, and they said: "Edgy young fiction." The publishing industry, like others, depends on the wisdom of people who have hardly lived long enough to have read the literary masterpieces and the discovered treasures that make up expanding canons. They are the gatekeepers.

In the same crass and often ignorant way in which agents manipulate writers toward commercial success, editors at presses regard themselves as great stylists in the mode of Ezra Pound and Toni Morrison, to name but two illustrious editors. With a handful of exceptions, they are not. They’re people whose jobs and renewals in those jobs depend on their finding, the same as the agents, works that fit an already fabricated and commercially developed niche into which they snugly fit, without disturbing readers or upsetting reviewers or making trouble for the bookstores. The phenomenon of Harry Potter, a series that is at least well written and imaginative, nevertheless is exemplary of a book piggybacking on many equally inventive and well-written fantasy novels that made the niche for Harry and were not even mentioned as predecessors by reviewers largely ignorant of a genre they generally treat with contempt.

Which brings me to the reviewers: It is as rare to have a major newspaper review a book by an independent press as it is to spot a wild orchid in Michigan. Local papers will review books by writers who live in the area, thereby bringing the book to the attention of at best 5,000 readers, and major metropolitan newspapers like The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News no longer even have local reviewers—they pay for syndicated reviews from national sources, like the Associated Press. A half a page advertisement in The New York Times Book Review section costs over $22,000 for a single time, so no independent press can afford to advertise the books it publishes in venues where the reviews make or unmake a book. A review in The NY Times Book Review does in fact make or break a book in terms of the agent’s interest and the next publishing contract. The definitive biography of the poet Rilke, for instance, published by Farrar Strauss, had a lukewarm review in the Times Book Review, and although it received a glowing review in The Nation, neither publisher nor agent accepted the writer’s next project, original fiction. This despite translation rights FS sold to Germany, France, and China. In Germany, the book became a best seller, and the writer was invited (travel and honorarium) to present in Europe, repeatedly, for this book as well as for his critical work and translations of Hesse; clearly, the European market is still more inclined toward writing of substance than the American, but our multi-corporate practices are beginning to take hold overseas as well. Shopping for a new agent and publisher in one’s late seventies had effectively silenced this writer for several years.

As for me, I engaged in an email exchange that got increasingly more acrimonious with the book editor of the Seattle Times. I had a limited number of review copies that my publisher expected me to send out—she dutifully sent out her copies to the biggies—and I sent queries as to whether papers such as the Seattle Times or The Providence Journal would be interested in seeing the book because of its Pacific- and Atlantic-rim subject matter. The Seattle Times editor objected to my calling my book a nonfiction novel. I told him that the genre had been so dubbed by Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, and that, if anything, my book as even more of a hybrid than Capote’s. He then riposted that he knew about Capote, which I doubt, but that it was the kiss of death to call a book a nonfiction novel because it would confuse readers as to whether it was fiction or not. I explained to him that parts of my book were fiction and others were research and meditative essays based on science, cultural anthropology, and the most recent ecological data about the Pacific Rim. He, however, got to have the last word. My book has not been reviewed by the Seattle Times. It has a snowball’s chance of being reviewed by any of the well-known newspapers in the U. S., even though it got a great review in the Cape Cod Chronicle and in the Grosse Pointe News.

So, writers battle demographics ("edgy young fiction"), genre (call it something we can easily place on a labeled shelf), agents, who nowadays regard themselves as literary critics, editors at presses who do the same with generally few qualifications other than an M.A. in English, to the corporate structure whose whole interest in literature is to make its 25% or more, to the bookstores that are being owned by the corporate structures in the way that they display, advertise, and order books. In addition to all these modes of silencing, writers must confront academia.

I’ll begin this section of this "j’accuse" by quoting Flannery O’Connor, who, when asked if academia silenced creative writers, responded, "not enough of them." It may seem paradoxical that a writer delineating modes of silencing would side with the need to silence others. However, the problem with creative writing in the academy is two-fold: creative writers who have jobs in universities and colleges become the "wives" of the publishing world, that is, they put out without having to be paid. Forgive the vulgar analogy, but I’m following Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s examination of wives versus prostitutes in her Women and Economics, where she states that wives cheapen and undermine the labor of the sex workers, who at least have the freedom to choose and to be paid piecemeal, so to speak, as opposed to the wives who have been sold or have sold themselves to a single master. So, to some extent, the writers in academia, only in the sense that they have a master—the university, which exacts publications for tenure, promotion, contract renewal, and salary raises. The writers, in turn, can offer their wares for free to the market and generally do. If anyone here takes offence, do please remember that I number myself in this category. The condemnation includes me. I have published over two hundred poems and short stories, two chapbooks of poetry, a collection of poems, a detective novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction novel. The only advance I ever received was so small that I was barely able to cover the upgrade to a newer computer.

If I added up my income from my writing, I’d have made perhaps $5,000 over a lifetime of writing. I’m not counting, of course, the salary increases and the promotion, which are vastly greater than the direct earnings. But what does this practice do? It offers yet another subsidy to the corporate publishing world. Excellent work for free—can anyone get a better deal?

To go back to O’Connor’s quotation: while writers in the academy cheapen the labor of writers who should be able to support themselves through their writing, academics also depend on attracting and retaining students and on getting good evaluations from them. Consequently, professors of creative writing encourage students to submit for publication even when these students have not lived enough to have much to say, have not had time to think enough to have anything worth saying, and have not read enough to have developed skills that outshine or at least rival their predecessors. Thus the market is flooded with free work by a huge amount of scribblers whose white noise drowns out the few genuine talents and the occasional genius. Add to that the fly-by-night or fly-by-screen journals run by equally unformed and uninformed "editors," and the possibility of true talent to be heard becomes more and more remote.

Unlike the corporate publishing world, however, which pays no mind to where a person has published, only to how much, academia worships addresses. Not content, not style, not the felicitous merging of the two, but merely addresses, and this form of worship applies to scholarly as well as to creative endeavors, but I am convinced that the system of peer review that to some extent justifies, though only in part, address worship for scholarship has no counterpart in the world of creative writing. It’s not other fine writers who judge a dossier of a novelist or a poet to say how s/he is doing—it’s the address, and the prize. We know from scandals such as the one that led to the foetry.com website that contests in creative writing harbor outrageous examples of corruption and nepotism. Grant giving at the NIH, while subject to fads in science, has never approached the utter cynicism of the giving of prizes in creative writing.

The corporate market silences creative writers by looking, always, not at plot, characterization, formal structure, etc., but at the bottom line, which rhymes only with excessive profit. It surrounds itself with safeguards for the production of successful sameness, with agents at one end and influence buying at the distribution end. Independent presses mirror the corporate publishers because the weak desire to emulate the strong. Academia provides shelter for writers who in turn through their own labor and their unwise encouragement of fetal writing from students flood the market with free labor, thereby exacerbating the economic difficulties of any writer of genuine power to be able to count on his/her literary talent to make a living. The result, ladies, gentlemen, and scholars, is the dross we find on the tables of our local branches of the Exxon Mobil bookstore and the mute inglorious Miltons and Jane Austens who write deliberately noncommercial books that remain forever silenced in some hard disk or flash drive or, even in our day, yellowing somewhere in an attic trunk. The system should be a public scandal, but for that to happen we would have to have non-corporate, independent press and media in this great country of ours.

__________________
-
This essay has been posted here with the writer's permission.
-
Copyright 2007 by Anca Vlasopolos.
-
__________________
-
Guest writer Anca Vlasopolos was born in 1948 in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is married to Anthony Ambrogio, a writer and editor; they have a biological daughter, Olivia (a graduate of Oberlin College and a PhD candidate at Tufts University), and an adopted daughter, Beatriz, who came to them from Guatemala in 2000, when she was 10.
-
Her publications include Missing Members (1991), a police procedural; No Return Address (2000), memoir; Penguins in a Warming World (2007), poetry; The New Bedford Samurai (2007), non-fiction novel.
-
Professor Vlasopolos presented this essay at a symposium on Silence and Silencing at her university.
________________

Forum Thread: First Amendment Issues and Forums

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment limits the U.S. Government's power to stifle the voice of its citizens; it's a powerful statement that has served us well for almost 217 years (ratified on December 15, 1791).

An in-depth discussion on The First Amendment

Of course, private forums are not bound by the First Amendment and can ban and stifle speech as they see fit. Poets.net is a private forum, and I, the owner, do not intend to apply for government grants. I'm on my own. Theoretically, I could ban anyone I want.

But what is the rule for non-profit organizations that accept government grants? Are they obligated to follow the First Amendment?

Poets.org, whose forum banned ACommoner and locked his First Amendment thread, does take government money: Number 7 in its FAQ says,

"The Academy is supported by the financial contributions of nearly 8,000 individuals (our members) nationwide. We also receive funding from private foundations, corporations, and government sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs." [Bold and burnt red letters my emphasis]

If Poets.org is accepting government money, should the administrators and moderators be banning the interchange of free speech, no matter how unpopular and "offensive" to other members?

This case is especially ironic, given that the threads in question have to do with freedom of speech issues.

In any case, the code of silence in the literary field is mostly imposed by those in power and thrust upon the rank and file. Often, those trying to work their way up often buy into the power structure, perhaps because they believe that speaking out will hurt them professionally--and they are probably right.

When Foetry closed in May 2007, ACommoner, the banned poster, and others like him, lost an important conduit for expressing important and controversial ideas--and, yes, snark and smackdown as well.

ACommoner's poets.org banning was a turning point, the primary reason why I purchased the Poets.net domain, a likely money pit for me personally.

I wanted an easily accessible forum (with a one-word dead-on GENERIC term) that would be available to everyone, especially the struggling silenced and disenfranchised poets and writers.

They are why Poets.net exists.

It was simply serendipity that the domain went on the aftermarket at the precise moment I needed it.

It is my hope that this forum becomes a place for lively and heated discussion.

"Forum decorum" can be highly overrated--simply a euphemism for stifling ideas and opinions that those in power deem not worthy.

What do you think?

Jennifer

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

ACommoner's Deleted Poll Question...

Has been recreated and posted here:

"Should ACommoner have been locked out of "The First Amendment and Forums" thread (on Poets.org)?

The question refers to a thread on another forum:

poets.org First Amendment Thread

Technically, forums (unless they are established by the government) are not really bound by the First Amendment.

However, it seems to me that dissenters ought to have at least one place to raise unpopular issues and engage in "impolite" conversation.

In fact, on the surface, poetry is just too darn polite (never mind the backstabbing and deals made behind the scenes). Give me a noisy poetry slam any day.

Nothing that ACommoner has said has raised any legal red flags; it seems he has some questions that no one seems to want to answer.

The Admin of the aforementioned forum said, "If you wish to continue to debate this topic, you are free to create your own blog or website to do so."

So true, and one reason why THIS admin has decided to start up this forum (which is not yet in forum format).

Vote in our poll (see left panel).

We are Indies




If you are an Indie writer,

please consider joining



on Facebook.