"Earthquake Collage," Blue Moon Review, Santa Cruz downtown, 1989

For more:
http://www.thebluemoon.com/quake/

Blue Moon Review editor Doug Lawson and his family here for Sunday visit, Feb. 3. I think of Blue Moon as the first quality literary magazine to appear on the Internet, but I may have a slight prejudice. Following the Oct. 17, 1989 *Loma Prieta / Santa Cruz earthquake, I went downtown (70% destroyed in the quake) and took 40 or 50 photos, some of which (see above) found their way into a 2o-page electronic chapbook, which Doug generously edited and designed. The "finished" work appeared in 1995, a year or so after **Blue Moon came into existence.

Following the quake, I started writing in form and contributed some not very good villanelles, etc., plus excerpts from my "earthquake" journals combined with stuff gleaned from newspapers and magazines... the best of the writing is from my students, who reported on their experiences... I obtained their permission to reprint... what stands out in my mind is how we were all, 5:04 PM, Oct. 17, 1989, experiencing the same thing at the same time... I was in the bathroom taking a pee, readying myself to go off to Foothill / DeAnza College to teach a class.

Later, a local college (not one of the above) agreed to host the complete (20 or so pages) chapbook online, but then dropped it when I retired... dropped it without telling me they were dropping it. And for years, up until yesterday, in fact, I had thought the thing no longer existed... other than a few fragments, scattered photos... I tried, but wasn't able to find it in Blue Moon's archive.

So I feel re-born... and plan, with Doug's permission, to host it also on my website. In fact, that's what I plan to do right now, ask permission.
---

* Sometimes called the San Francisco Earthquake. Loma Prieta, in honor of a remote peak near the quake's epicenter. It's a Spanish name. Loma Prieta, the Earthquake of the Dark Hill.

** For the record, Doug Lawson's Blue Moon Review was preceded by Blue Penny Quarterly (BPQ), which first appeared in 1994. Having worked as a technical writer for the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) in 1988-89, I was primed... ready to go when BPQ, Zero City and the others came online. See below for more:

http://www.thebluemoon.com/quake/

--

Why I Publish In E-Zines: One Writer's View of Online Publishing
--by Robert Sward – (Originally published in 1996)

Computer-phobic writers, fellow freelancers and fans of olde style lit-mags ask why I have chosen to publish in e-zines like Web del Sol / Perihelion; Alsop Review; Blue Moon Review; X-Connect; eSCENE; Gruene Street; Realpoetik; Recursive Angel; Transmog; and Zero City, to name a few.

1. I publish on the Net and World Wide Web because it's cheap: email after all is free.
2. It's more efficient: no SASEs, no International Reply Coupons; fewer trips to the office supply store.
3. It saves time: I don't have to wait 18 months to hear back and the rejections, when they come, are less annoying because a) I've invested less in the submission process and b) it's easy enough to send the work somewhere else.
4. It gives me the opportunity to improve on what I write and make changes even after publication. Zen Buddhists say First thought, best thought. I say, Think again.
5. It allows for interaction: timely feedback from fellow writers, editors, publishers, agents, and students.

I recently (remember, this is 1996) sent a poem to Realpoetik ("rpoetik, the little magazine of the Internet, a moderated listserv..."), got an email acceptance message and saw the poem published, all within 24 hours. Editor Robert Salasin claims he has approximately 3,000 subscribers. All I know is that over the next few days I got more responses ("fine work...," "wish you continued success in Cyberspace...," "would like to use excerpts from A Much-Married Man...") from that single appearance than I got from 30 years of publishing in magazines like The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Transatlantic Review, etc.

Yes, it's a form of instant gratification. Just what the world needs, right? In my opinion, instant gratification has gotten a bad rap. Or maybe I'm late to the game and am just beginning to catch on. Anyway, I write for myself and always have, but I still agree with Whitman: it doesn't hurt to have an audience.

I still use pen and pencil to write and revise and turn to my Olympia portable to type envelopes. I'm still doing what I did in my 20s: writing, revising and sending the best work I have to the editors of the journals I admire.

Writing is re-writing and I spend just as much time revising now as I ever did. To this day I send poems and stories to traditional print journals and, when the publication appears, sometimes long to remove a line or two or correct a typo or printers error. A while back the then London-based Transatlantic Review published Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee and destroyed the poem, made it meaningless with a record thirteen typographical errors. They never sent me page proofs and, once the poem was printed, there was nothing I could do except rage at the editor, the inattentive, lackadaisical schmuck.

Now, when I submit work to an e-journal there is no typographer involved because there is no type to set. And if an error occurs or I change my mind, voila! I can e-mail corrections and see the fix made promptly and at no expense. I like that.

Apart from an increasingly large, responsive audience, what's the payoff? Payment used to be in contributor copies. Now with magazines appearing in electronic print, there are no contributor copies to send. Still, a few mainline lit-mags and e-journals do make an effort to pay. In all the years I've been writing, I haven't come close--not one year have I come close--to covering the cost of postage. How much is poetry worth? In 1958, in an effort to determine the dollar value, if any, of my poetry, I engaged in an experiment. A student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, I sent half a dozen poems to the local phone company as a way of paying my bill. Not only did Ma Bell send them back, but she disconnected my phone. So be it.

*

I'm doing multi-media stuff now combining poetry, fiction and non- fiction with photographs, paintings, movies and--soon--music and the human voice. I'm collaborating with visual artists, computer scientists and other writers. If you're interested, check out Earthquake Collage and Highway 17 on my home page.

My first computer was an Apple IIe and my first word processing program was Magic Window. Today I use Microsoft Word and Photoshop on a Mac G-4, supercharged by my son. How does it all work? I have no idea. I just switch on my modem, gaze into cyberspace and type away. It's still Magic Window to me.

"So what's the point?" my partner wants to know. "Isn't this just one big ego trip? Who really reads those e-journals? Do you actually think you're going to sell copies of your books on the Net? And what about copyright? How do you know someone isn't going to rip off that new book of poems of yours?"

Of course she's right, but I have all those virtual magazines and editors on the Net waiting for me to check in.

"Gee, honey, I don't know," I say. "I'm just gonna go upstairs for a moment and check my mail."

Copyright (c) 1996, 2001, 2007, Robert Sward

Getting Published 2

Getting Published 2 - The New Math of Poetry, courtesy my friend, poet and publisher David Alpaugh, whose essays on The Professionalization of Poetry appeared in Poets & Writers.
[Note: David's New Math article is still being researched and does not factor in the many hundreds of "Single Poem" contests.]

1) A cursory investigation on the Internet turns up 158 full collection poetry book contests and 172 poetry chapbook contests. That's 330 contests a year--and though just an approximate figure, it's a conservative one.

2) If the figure holds at the current level there will be 3,300 poetry book contest prize awards each decade--33,000 by the end of this century.

3) Everything leads me to believe that the figure will not hold--that the current trend and history of exponential growth will continue and that the figure will double, triple, quadruple, perhaps even ten-tuple as technology proceeds.

4) We could easily be looking at over 100,000 poetry book awards by the end of the century! Each book chosen from hundreds, in some cases thousands, of entries by "distinguished" poet/judges--and published by supposedly selective, credible presses, trying earnestly to bring the best poetry available to the reading public.

5) How could a 22nd century English professor be confident that he had a handle on the best 21st century without carefully reading these 33, 000 to 100,000 "prize-winning" books? And how about the tens of thousands of books that didn't win prizes? How about the tens of thousands of self-published ones? Shakespeare self-published his Sonnets. Blake self-published Songs of Innocence and Experience. Whitman Leaves of Grass. Would scholars have to specialize, say, in the first three days of June, 2042, to make certain that they weren't missing a "great" poet?

6) As for individual poems, we have two popular internet zines that publish a daily poem: Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. And we have Garrison Keillor reading at least one poem daily on The Writer's Almanac. There is little duplication, if any, between these three daily reads. 365 x 3 gives me 1095 poems a year. Let's round it off to 1000. That's ten thousand poems per decade and 100,000 by the end of the century (assuming that someone picks up the ball for Garrison when he leaves us for that great anthology in the sky).

7) Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Writer's Almanac are all highly "selective." They are choosing poems from respected publishers, and literary journals. Each of those collections, journals, anthologies is full of poems presumably just as good that don't make it onto the net or radio. Assuming that the publications they draw from average 60 pages of poetry each and we have 6 MILLION poems to add to our 21st Century "new math" total! Of course that figure is high because although the 3 entities almost never duplicate poems they do draw on many of the same publications, presses, journals, etc. So let's be conservative and cut it in half. (But, remember, there are at least as many fine anthologies, journals, and collections that never get the nod from VD, PD, or GK and would need to be added in).

8) And keep in mind that so far we have only talked about hard-copy publications! For Poetry Daily and Verse Daily only select from print, never from the internet where hundreds of journals are now up and running with more coming on line almost every day!

9) Certainly it is conservative to estimate the number of poems to be published during the 21st century as exceeding 10 million. It will probably be many times that!