Author's Foreword
Why publish an online poetry book? Is it respectable? So much has been said and written about the superiority of poetry published in print to poetry published on the Web, as though it is a simple matter of medium and the political cum cultural authority involved.
After all, what really consists this political authority? Without wanting to raise my own position in this, allow me however to just tackle the nature of access and consequent numbers. The more poets there are given access to a medium of publication would not necessarily mean a decline in the standard of poetry in that medium, would it? It is not after all the medium that dictates substance, but the material, a fact everyone supposedly knows but continues to ignore in this matter of online literature. Conversely speaking, that there are but a few poets given access to the printed medium does not guarantee superiority or even a quality standard in every material produced in that medium. This again without meaning to denigrate any particular product. I leave it to each reader to experience books in any mode of publication and measure for him/herself the respective values of the works therein.
So much tradition has also informed on the supposedly self-critical literary art, particularly in the area of its behavior as a sort of industry. For instance, awards bodies---here and abroad---through the years have automatically disqualified self-published printed books from their roster of candidates, making us question the real objectives behind these awards. To solidify a certain hegemony? If we are to consider how tremendous the politics involved are in getting one's works considered by a publisher or a Reader for a publisher, we could say that actions an author takes within that politics is a form of self-publication. That is not yet considering the fact that publishers have also traditionally entertained the concept of "co-publication", wherein an author invests financially on the publication of his book under the name of the publisher, which by all means is also a form of self-publication. By these alone, it is already easy to assume that the continuing disgust expressed by critics of self-promoting cliques-removed "self-publishers", especially online self-publishers, is nothing more than the unease of people who are one with their agents and friends in a confederacy of hypocrites led by their lying to band together for a hypocritical convention.
Certainly the opinion of pre-publication critics called Readers could save publishing businesses a lot of money and possible embarrassment, but yet that this tradition might subliminally raise hacks against so-called "self-publishers" and their works, inclusive of self-promoted works on the Internet, should make us question whether we should really deny post-publication critical valuations.upon these self-published products (and those "publisher-published" ones).
But I do not by this, my own venture, expect the attention of awards bodies nor the acknowledgment of hacks intent on following their teachers' dictate on the superiority of "edited" works over the self-published. After all, I am not intent on pretending to increase my book's sales through an endorsement by either an "award" body or a befriended literary authority. Not so, because I am not selling my book, it is merely here and for everyone to see/read and judge! You see, in a country like the Philippines where literary works (long-regarded as non-saleable and audience-less), even those in Tagalog and other local languages, are virtually given away (even bought) by their authors as gifts to friends, providing in turn business to the publishers by either profit from meager exportation or otherwise via those "co-publication" arrangements, one might ask in a timely fashion whether the Boris Pasternak plea that an artist need not sell his works shouldn't also here apply.
And considering the economic (and politico-economic) aspect of this reality, such less expensive formats as this online book publication might then be a more viable medium for distributing one's FREE works. Otherwise, might we be ready now to acknowledge that literary writing as an art in this country has become more a medium for the rich than painting, the latter previously thought to be the high-investment art activity that's increasingly proving not to be so? If so, then so be it. The printed form, then, for the bourgeois authors and their cliques, otherwise also for the leftist hegemony with their connections in the universities. :-)
Online poetry books? I say it's the real classless venue. Or almost. And as to the quality of the works, it's an open field for critics of all shapes and sizes, the conservatives and the liberals. But I'm giving away no payola, this book's already for free.
---VISV, 2004
Copyright � 1999, 2004 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved.