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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by the Guerilla Poetics Project
Origins Of The Guerilla Poetics Project
or How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love The
Corrupt Publishing Conglomerate, Academia, The
Failing Small Press, & The Bomb
Art is a struggle against compromise—the compromise of time, of
career, of future, &, if we aren’t careful, our hearts. Making
commerce of art is a further compromise—for the real artist, the
true artist isn’t interested in hustling his wares like some shyster
snake-oil merchant up & down the dusty avenues of forever. The
true artist wants only to write, paint, sculpt, make music, sing—
not work some job to be able to afford to do all the things they’d
rather be doing. The true artist does what they do to save
themselves—whatever happens to their work after the fact is
positively inconsequential. The true artist prefers, of course, for
the work to connect in some meaningful way with a world that
begs the same connection—that’s what matters most. The
aftermath, good or bad, is gravy.
The world, of course, is not built that way. The world is a
festering den of middle-men, all itching for their slice & while we
hesitate to say that the original goal of the publishing industry
was to insulate, isolate, play favorites or exclude—to a large
extent that is precisely what has happened—in particular when
publishing poetry. Those charged with shepherding the torch of
the written word through this pitch-black age have, instead, built
an industry devoted almost entirely to fail-safe economics. But
this isn’t the place to rant & rave about it. No need to scream
ugly murder about the impotent & sackless lip-service paid the
small press by the ivory towers of academia. Nor is this the place
to either indict or defend the small press’ listless march of
compromise & dying magazines—be them yawping beasts of
poetic insight or another back-slapping editor pawning off his
friends’ tripe on a paying & an unsuspecting readership. This is
the rusted cage. Ours is to simply escape it. What we must do, if
we are to truly innovate, is map the structure (righteous or
corrupt), pin-point the cracks & turn the whole shebang on a
bloody ear.
Crack#1: The Publishing Conglomerate, Academia, & even the
small press are equal parts compromise & economics.
Crack#2: America (& soon the rest of the world) cares more
about Paris Hilton than it does about poetry & we can do
precious little to change that.
These are sad truths that must be considered—hell, relied on—&
worked around.
Crack#3: (& this is the good news) We don’t need them.
If what we actually have is a war for legitimacy (& we aren’t sure
it is) against a corrupt publishing conglomerate that refuses to
even consider the viability of the small press; if the point of this
so-called war is to control who & what is written, bound,
distributed & read…then, guess what folks, we are laughably
outgunned—they hold every advantage. But the good news is we
don’t need them to make OUR books…we simply need them to
keep making the books they already make. In fact, the biggest
failure of the small press to date is using the much larger press as
its blueprint & business model. The small press can never be the
larger press—it doesn’t have the juice, the financial prowess, nor
the reach. & that is actually a very good thing. We can traffic in
realms the large press might call insane. Tactically speaking, our
only shot at winning this war is to use what they already do best
against them in ways they could never imagine. Enter the
Guerilla Poetics Project.
The GPP, for those unfamiliar, is an innovative way to bring the
small press to the big world—a subversive yet bold bloodying of
that ear before knocking all these aforementioned structures ass-
over-tea-kettle. We are not reliant on sales. We are not reliant on
any distribution companies. We are not scratching & begging at
the door of the publishing conglomerate for acceptance. We don’t
need academia to officially endorse what we do. We are not
interested in prizes or awards. We are reliant on one thing & one
thing only: each other. By setting aside our fragile egos &
working as a collective, our ever-growing army of operatives put
exquisite letterpress broadsides of solid, contemporary small
press gems into the hands of the people who just might appreciate
them most—& do it at no cost (& hence no risk) to the
unsuspecting reader. We serve the idea here at the GPP, that &
the written word—poetry. We strive to be a nameless, faceless
army and we would love your help. We here at the GPP are
constantly searching for people who believe in poetry, believe it
can matter again, & are willing to kick in a few bucks & help us
spread the words. The GPP is an abject refusal to play by their
rules, to get in line & do what we’re told. The GPP is a refusal to
compromise—as so many small press ventures are made to do. It
is a pure art, as pure as painting cave walls as a history & a
record of triumphs & failures, as shining examples of lives being
lived for art. We’d wager that this not-for-profit venture is unlike
anything you’ve seen in the small press and while there is a $25
subscription fee for a 1 year membership, check us out—you’ll
see you’re getting a lot of beautiful letterpress-collectible bang
for your buck. & no matter what happens to the GPP—succeed
or fail—what we do will ROT WITH A SMILING &
UNMANIPULATED INTEGRITY.
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For all the info you need please check us out at:
www.guerillapoetics.org
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