Cost and Rewards

“Cost benefit analysis” seems a cold ill-fitted term to apply to reading and writing and yet, under scrutiny all must fall.

Why read, publish, review, workshop, jury, buy, write? Why are you in a circle of books? Why not just hole up in the hills with whatever struck your fancy from 1956 and only reread that in a loop?

Is it costing more than it yields, all this effort? Are you doing it because of habit, because it is what you do? Is it connective or isolating? You are allowed to vacation away from

what you love. Is your love a shack or a shackle? I hope it is rocking you in the best ways.

If you can stop, and feel freer rather than more pent, you might want to stop. Or double down until you wriggle in deep and meaningfully.

Recently Kathryn Mockler on Substack [google it] warned of “literary transactional citizenship” that is, giving in order to get, in literary circles. One can detect fakers who flatter with the idea that there is hierarchy.

Social ladder climbing in a field where most volunteer and lose money is kinda absurd, but I suppose as in the 24th century, wealth is in skills and respect is a value, not cash in the bank. It’s the process, the context, the play, not any end goal that appeals.

In Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt 9, 2024) Cameron Anstee ponders the relationship between sales, connection, the gift economy and capitalism. ( Only 80 copies printed. Get it if you can.)

It raises valuable questions. What is a cut off for what “counts” as meaningful? Who decides? Is it a numbers game or a long game among peers in a historical chain? Is poetry to disrupt mainstream default easy thought? Is it to participate in something less bound and directed than product placement, clichéd shorthand relationships, closed narrative arc with commercial breaks?

I used to publish in seasonal cycles as if were a press with staff & interns, marketers and pitch sessions with book selling chains. A few titles each spring and fall on a commercial model, even if take home is lucky to break even on material costs, the printers and Canada Post the only clear economic winners. Now if there’s something I can’t not do, sporadically I will publish.  But it’s still either way about connective tissues of ideas, of ligaments of community. Not a bestseller or award winner. An exploration. Of sharing what delights or tickles as a ping to see if there is an answering ping of me too.

The usefulness of published words isn’t A + B or an A to B route. It’s more: Here’s some thing niche people might find welcoming to read under the flap of their freak flag. Or wow, this person is ahead of my curve or has been on my curve and now I get something that eluded, or don’t feel so alone. All reading is one person to one person.

In this model what is the sense of awards season and ward’s culture or best of the year lists? Best for what purpose of whom? Isn’t that inherently a capitalist frame for a chaos factor of poetry?

It doesn’t matter if you celebrate crass consumerism of Christmas. Everyone can buy into Santa, atheist, Muslim, Hindu or Catholic. It’s the time of the year when “best” lists start floating along with  inescapable Aulde Lang Syne and assessing how the year went.

I’ve already done one 2024 list myself. Which I plan to revise and add to.

It’s helpful, right? I want to encourage people who are doing fabulous exciting work, and offer routes of wow fit likeminded people.

But if poetry, or writing in general, is medicine, how can we share prescriptions that are transferable? To our neurokin circle only? Is each list a flare for rescue from being alone one-in-one with celebrating a title?

It aggregates. Each person and each local circle maps local and then each wider geography collects best of best until some universal appeal becomes visible as Alice in Wonderland or whatever Canada Reads yields.

To consume and not make, cuts off the roots of creativity feeding everyone. To write and listen to the makers is part of building the society we want to make on a granular level. Consider the words of David Hurn, “record it because it may not happen in 50 years so record it as accurately and as honestly as you can”. He was speaking on factual photography  as evidence for the future but it applies as well to writing your inner and outer world. [around an hour in, vid link, apparently embedded]

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Not being listed isn’t significant. To not create is significant. There are so many ways to be great. The read you need is at an exact time may not resonate at another time. If you know the author personally it may land differently. Some books are smooth, dazzlingly skilled, but pat and expected. And yet does the work it needs to, Some make magic combined in a head with what was coincidentally read or lived from another time & place. Some are dazzling but the substructure confused, frenetic and ultimately surfacy. Some may be many pages but one phrase or concept, insight or metaphor, makes life unhitch and move forward. Some give a release of aha.

Then addiction to ideas resumes its hold and the panning for gold in all the random places reinvigorates, yes? A bookstore or book fair is a casino for literary hope.

On that note, share your thoughts, recommended reads, and, if I don’t write to you again before new years, merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah and a valuable enjoyable new year hour by hour triangulating in on your sweet spots of bliss.