Sherry Chandler

Here’s a conversation I’m a week or two behind on.

Wendy Cope in The Guardian, “You like my poems? So pay for them”:

A few years ago one of my step-sisters asked me about Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning - the one that begins: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.” My step-sister spends a lot of time in the USA and had heard about the Red Hat Society, a women’s organisation inspired by Jenny’s poem. As Warning is included in an anthology I edited, I offered to send her a copy. “No,” she said. “Don’t bother. I’ll get it off the internet.” That was when it dawned on me that nowadays, if you want a copy of a particular poem, you don’t have to buy a book.

My poems are all over the internet. I’ve managed to get them removed from one or two sites that were major offenders, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of sites displaying poems without permission. If I Google the title of one of my poems, it is almost always there somewhere, and I can download it and print it out. I’m sure that this must affect sales of my books.

A. E. Stallings, blogging at Harriet, Feeling Guilty:

I was of two minds after reading this article in the Guardian (”You like my poems? Pay for them”) by Wendy Cope–on the one hand, I can completely understand her annoyance at people quoting her poems without permission.

…

But… I also disagreed with some of the logic behind the article. I am sure she is legally correct. But at the same time an internet chat board or blog or list serv is not an anthology out to make money. It is a conversation. Is not dialogue impoverished without recourse to quotation? Without being well-versed? Does not such quotation, when properly credited as to its source, constitute fair use? (though I imagine that is a legal concept that varies from country to country…) Imagine what it would do to poetry dialogue on the web if we hesitated to use real life examples.

…

I guess I would agree with Frost that the ambition is to “lodge some poems where they are not easily got rid of”–

I am not one of those so unfortunate (ahem) as to have my poems widely, or even narrowly, copied on the web. Nor am I one, like Wendy Cope, who makes a living from poetry. I try to be careful here to ask permission to quote any full poem that is currently in copyright. But I have pulled quotes for little reviews and discussions.

I am a little disturbed to find my work quoted when I haven’t given permission, but I don’t think I will increase sales of my books by keeping poems off the internet or by keeping people from sharing copies. Like Stallings, I tend to think people will be more likely to buy my books, the more of my poetry they read and appreciate.

In this, I think poetry may be different from fiction.

Perhaps we should look to the music industry, which is now trying to say it’s illegal just to have songs uploaded onto your computer for your own personal use. But CD sales continue to tank.

Read both of these articles in full, both are lively, short, and make valid points, then tell me what you think.

We get another view of the cultural divide in this “literant” from Shelley Ettinger, guest-editing at Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers:

A few years ago when THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW hired a new editor, Sam Tanenhaus, to much acclaim, I knew things were going to go from bad to worse. The guy’s resumé had highlights like service at the NATIONAL REVIEW, the ultra-reactionary magazine founded by William F. Buckley. And sure enough, he hasn’t disappointed. In fact, last week he made it explicit; in an interview, he spoke of his vision of the NYBTR as a “conservative” literary voice.

You can see it partly in their choice of reviewers, who regularly include right-wing commentators chosen to skewer progressive books, but mostly in their choice of which books they review. The particular trend that I find most interesting is which fiction writers from other countries, in particular the Third World, they champion. With few exceptions, it’s those whose work tells stories that highlight government corruption, inter-group violence, patriarchal excess and so on, without putting these stories in the context of the European colonialism and U.S./European neocolonialism that, as Walter Rodney so memorably phrased it, “underdeveloped” Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Or it’s anticommunist fiction that tells tales of the supposed horrors of People’s China or the USSR or revolutionary Cuba. The irony here, of course, is that it is gospel in the U.S. that good literature cannot be political, when in fact the books that the NYBTR and other such organs champion are for the most part extremely political; it’s just that their politics jibe with those of the U.S. bourgeois class. No surprise there. As Marx long ago pointed out, the culture of any country is determined by its ruling class. In this country, they do their darnedest to mask this, and probably many commentators and critics don’t even realize how thoroughly imbued with bourgeois ideology their work is, but there is a thoroughgoing chokehold in force here perhaps more than anywhere else.