Are you being read?

Dear writer, are you being read? How would you know?

My brother David Lee Ingersoll scripted and drew a comic book series back in the early 90s. He writes, “I loved doing Misspent Youths. I loved the characters. Doing that book was fun and exhausting and satisfying and … unprofitable. [ellipsis in original] The publisher didn’t make any money. I certainly didn’t make any money. I did draw 160 pages of comics in about a year while working a part-time job. Brave New Words … put out more issues of Misspent Youths than any other series they printed. Cancelling the series was a mutual decision – the guy behind Brave New Words was reassessing his business plan and I wanted a break to improve my art skills.”

30 years later David got a fan letter. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been a fan of Misspent Youths for a while now–since they came out, actually, when I was a disgruntled and disaffected teenager working in a comic shop. … [T]hose comics you put out all that time ago imprinted on and have stuck with someone since they came out.” The letter writer even repurchased all five issues during our big covid year and reread them. He says the series is “just as great as I’d remembered it (and captured much of the flavour from my hometown’s punk scene in the ’90s).”

Are you being read? We look at sales figures. When I wrote to a gay historian after I’d read a volume of his memoirs, he wrote back to say the book sold three copies. … Yeah. OK. But I read it. 

We look at online stats. How many visits has many latest blog post racked up? Ooh, a few more than yesterday’s!

After the thrill of getting this fan letter David comes to this conclusion about art: “Put it out into the world. … [I]t needs to be available.”

I am publishing regularly these days. Most the feedback I get is prepublication, that is, whether the editor of the magazine or literary website likes the piece enough to publish it. After that very little. Some sites offer the opportunity to leave a comment — or a rating. And it’s nice see a smattering of likes or a share. 

I just came across a site that features a few lines from some of my poems. It’s the tumblr Bibliomancy Oracle: divination through literature by Reb Livingston. I recognize the name! Livingston ran a poetry ezine called No Tell Motel. She put out a couple No Tell anthologies, too. I suggested the library buy one (and they did). 

On the tumblr Livingston posts a line or three from a poem. “The concept is that literature contains ‘truths’ and speak to matters of great importance,” Livingston says, and she offers a link to one of these “truth[s]” chosen at random. Before clicking on the link, “Focus on your question or concern. Or for insight of a more general nature, simply clear your mind.”

“The Bibliomancy Oracle will divine a reading using a passage from literature. Consider the response you receive in terms of guidance, inspiration or fun. Consider the meaning and context this passage offers you. You may find it useful to meditate, read it aloud, handcopy the words or read the entire text where from the passage originates (Google can point you to the full text). It’s up to you to decide how to interpret and what to do with this message.”

The lines of mine the Oracle features are snipped from poems published at BlazeVOX, November 2019. 

Maybe you should focus on some question or concern and give it a go:

line beginning “give credit”

line beginning “what is fame”

line beginning “it is the unbearable”

line beginning “you will have to”

Clearly Meant presents Judy Bebelaar

On February 27, 2016 Judy Bebelaar was the second poet in the reading series. My supervisor at the library had asked me to brand it. I stared for a while at the name of our branch library, the Claremont, and it resolved into Clearly Meant. Because what else is poetry but what is clearly meant? 

I became acquainted with Judy through Katharine Harer (one of the poets with whom I worked on the Poetry & Pizza series). But the Claremont Branch is also Judy’s local library, so when she walked in the door one day to ask about some book or other, she moved up my list of possible readers. Getting local writers was a priority. I was already thinking of Clearly Meant as a neighborhood series. I knew other poets who lived nearby. A resource to take advantage of!

I ask the guest poet to provide enough poems for a chapbook, which I put together and make available free at all the Berkeley library branches for the month leading up to the reading. I prefer the poet give me poems that they can talk about during the discussion period. It’s nice to have the option of talking in depth about a poem, especially one the audience is holding in their hands. 

Judy was eager to talk about a project she’d been working on for some time, a book about the teenagers she knew in the Peoples Temple. 

And Then They Were Gone: teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown by Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral was published in 2018. Recently Judy emailed me wondering who she could talk to about a presentation at the library. I posed the question to my supervisor. My supervisor said, “This is something you’d like to do?” I hadn’t thought I was going to be doing any programs during our covid days. My poetry programs were on hiatus, both Clearly Meant and the monthly Poetry Circle. Why not? I said. Might as well do a zoom. I’ve participated in a zoom poetry reading or two from home. But I hadn’t hosted anything. 

So I got the in-house instructions for librarians on how to do remote programming, and Judy and I put her talk on the calendar. April 16, 2021. I think it went well.

Clearly Meant reading & interview series featuring Maw Shein Win

 

My supervisor at the Claremont Branch asked if I was interested in doing any library programming. I said I could do a poetry reading series. It had been a few years since Poetry & Pizza ended and I was ready to get back into the hosting business. 

Poetry & Pizza was a reading series in downtown San Francisco sponsored by Paul Geffner, owner of Escape from New York Pizza. Paul is a poet himself. But he didn’t feel like he knew the scene well enough to invite good readers, so Paul asked his friend Clive Matson and Clive recruited Katharine Harer and myself to help run it. Poetry & Pizza took place once a month and we coordinators shared out the calendar. I booked four readings a year, two poets per. It was a good scene. Money was raised for charity (all door donations went to a charity of the readers’ choice). Pizza was eaten. Poetry was thrown against the walls and windows. And some of it stuck. 

The Claremont Branch is a small library and the events room is also small, so I needed a program that would tend to be small. One poet. No open mic. The Bay Area literary scene is crazy active. There are a lot of good poets out there. But what would make this new series different? An interview and discussion with the poet. There were plenty of opportunities for poets to address an audience. But not much interaction. You had your turn and gave way to the next person. 

For the first poet I wanted someone who was ambitious and active, with a local following and happy to chat. Of course I also wanted to be a fan of their poetry. Maw Shein Win was the first person I asked and she said yes. Since the reading on October 3, 2015, Maw has gone on to being El Cerrito Poet Laureate, has published two full length poetry collections, and has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, among other things. Active and ambitious, no? 

A poet’s reward is typically a few ahs and a round of applause. But for this I was given a budget. Guest poets got paid! 

Gathering an audience for a poetry reading can be tricky. If there’s no open, poets looking for audience for their own work won’t show. Much depends on the poet. Do they have a fan base? Friends? Copious relatives? Over the course of four years our audiences ranged from a room exploding 70 to a friendly and attentive one. 

I had never conducted interviews, and I can seize up when on the spot, but I like talking about poetry and there are always a few questions I have about it so I figured I could string enough of those together to fill twenty minutes. I announce that the poet will read for 20 minutes, sit for an interview for 20 minutes, then participate in an audience discussion for the remainder of the hour. As I assure the poets, it’s not an interrogation, it’s a conversation. Occasionally the interview or the discussion can be hard. The poet needs to be talkative! But the hour usually flies by. 

At Clearly Meant the poet gets paid. The poet’s work is listened to. The poet is taken seriously as an authority. I think of Cleary Meant as a small town series, friendly, focused on locals (so far most of the readers have been actual users of the Claremont Branch library), and low key. 

A month before each reading I produce an 8-page promotional chapbook which is made available free at all Berkeley Public Library branches. So I get to be a publisher, too.

Don L. Emblen, 1918 – 2009

My English teacher from Santa Rosa Junior College died last month. “Of heart failure on April 24th, at the age of 90,” says the latest issue of The Reader’s Rejoinder, a monthly newsletter/zine Don has been putting together for about the last 20 years. He added me to the mailing list a couple years ago after he proposed doing a chapbook for me on the fine letterpress he kept in his garage-studio. I was delighted. The chapbook never happened, either because he wasn’t able to get to it, or because I was a lousy correspondent (I blame myself).

Friends are going to publish one more issue of The Rejoinder, a memorial to Don.

Visit an earlier post to see Don Emblen at Petaluma Poetry Walk 2006