I feel a big weight off my shoulders having produced the Lulu books. Sending out some review copies here & there. It's kind of amazing to me how it works. When I can afford it, I will improve the distribution channels even more.

This sort of thing is probably a big temptation to younger writers. It might be better to go through the editorial hoops for a while, the disappointments & the reality jolts. But I've been at it so long, & written so much, that I just want to shape it my own way now & put it out there.

Chapel Hill is a strange duck, a sort of semi-fictional memoir, or semi-memoirish fiction. One of the themes running through it is the idea of history as the work of a child's imagination. The contrast, the clash between historical "facts" and the beautiful & naive dreams which children make of them. A "coming-of-age" story, which circles around between history & family history, & fiction & poetry, in the mixed-up way of adolescent perception. Set in the 60s. About, among other things, two boys & their obsession with toy soldiers, & playing "war", while the older brother of one is off in Vietnam.

I started connecting this the other day with my recent reading in Vico. His way of thinking about the power of the human imagination (as it changes & develops) over cultural behavior. For Vico, according to Mazzotta anyway, "poetry is history" (& vice versa, I guess).

The seemingly innate drive people have, starting in childhood, to make sense of their experience, to recapitulate it, to turn it into story & history, to interpret it - to play with it. & the destiny of the poet & poetry : to judge the doings of individuals & nations through the prism of poetic speech. This seems like a source for both poetry's "seriousness" and its power to lighten & console.

This "historical" aspect of the poet's social role is undermined, sometimes, by so much acidic despair & scepticism, which often seems to turn contemporary poetry into intentionally vapid or superficial cadging & jokery. It's rare in poetry to find a fusion of both clear-sighted irony and hope.

In going Lulu, I was following Anny Ballardini's example (via William Allegrezza & Moria). For that I'm very grateful.

I'm trying to stay calm about my new publications.

But it's difficult, I'm having trouble working at the desk.

We are experiencing a new poetry print culture, which is a lot like the old culture (Whitman or Donne or Dickinson, passing around their homemade pamphlets) except... except... it's massively available.

I have nothing against the regular publishing structures, nothing whatsoever. Never was very successful in those venues - but I didn't try very hard, either. Not out of laziness, though!

As with many others, with me writing poetry involves a lot of specific gravity. Plus I have something of an obsessive manic depressive oblique personality. It's all or nothing.

Moreover, the minor skills I picked up editing Nedge & Edwin Honig's mss. make it easier for me to publish meself.

I'm repeating what I wrote a few years ago, when I went into the XLibris mode... my apologies, friends. But I have the feeling this Lulu loop-de-loop is going to work : is going to be a lulu, in fact.

Giddy-up Ol' Mangy. We're a-comin' to your town.

People have their opinions about blogs, lists, self-publishing, poetry communities, etc. But what is the context? Well, part of the context is obviously the revolution in technology which has transformed the publishing media.

In the 90s I labored for what seemed endless hours, trying to help Edwin Honig type, edit, proofread, print & find a publisher for his collected poems from over 50 years. Honig is not a dilettante, but an important American poet who has been involved in innumerable literary projects (translation, scholarship, teaching) along with his poetry. Nevertheless he found it impossible to find a publisher then. We arranged with someone editing an online archive of out-of-print books to include Honig's work, which, because of the sloppy way the site was managed, proved to be a big waste of time. Finally we produced a manuscript which was published by the on-demand publisher XLibris. The book turned out great, and is now easily available and archived in over 60 American libraries. So our years of effort bore some fruit after all, thanks to the new on-demand technology.

By far the most important aspect of this new technological context is the democratization of access to previously unknown or little-known writers. Of course such democratization still has a LONG way to go. Of course it means that suddenly there is a lot of shlock out there. But the real challenge is to our own initiative - the opportunity to pursue our own leads, hunches, and interests in this vast new world.