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poems as products
"To become a commodity a product must specifically be created with the purpose of exchange within a market. All books and magazines are commodities, but not all poems, a fact which complicates literature, creating numerous levels of bastard cases."
—Ron Silliman, "Of Theory, To Practice" (from The New Sentence, 1987)
I'd imagine that the number of bastard cases is even higher now, in 2004, particularly since the Internet (and specifically the PDF file) has made it possible to publish books or keep books in circulation without needing to resort to commercial markets. For instance, check out the UBU Editions website (thanks to lime tree for the heads-up). Last fall, the UBU site began to offer free PDF chapbooks by contemporary poets such as Kevin Davies (author of the great "Lateral Argument") and Silliman himself (of the three Silliman texts available through UBU Editions, my favorite is Sunset Debris, a tour-de-force of sorts).
The long-term ramifications of having a viable non-commercial system for textual circulation remain to be puzzled out—as do the questions of what consitutes "viable" and whether the Internet qualifies as legitimately "non-commercial". But my gut feeling is to think that anything that separates the world of publishing from the world of commerce can only be a good thing... part of the overall process of mass amateurization of everything?
Of course, there remains the issue of how to make a living as a cultural producer once cultural production is fully "amateurized"... a post for another day, perhaps. |
Friday, May 07, 2004
11:18 PM
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