Event Title
"Self-publishing and the radical impulse in American poetry"
Event Type
Panel
Is this event on- or off-campus?
On Campus
Location
Michael Schwartz Library, RT 401
Start Date
25-10-2014 3:40 PM
End Date
25-10-2014 4:40 PM
Abstract
On July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman designed and self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, containing a dozen poems. He then engaged in a ruthless campaign of marketing and promotion, subverting the rules of book publishing by anonymously writing reviews in praise of his own book, noting the break-through nature of his "transcendent new work." Whitman’s youthful and vigorous insurgency, seizing the means of production and bending the established rules to get his message to the public, was a precedent for the democratization of publishing that has served poets ever since – from small press movements to the mimeograph revolution, and from desktop publishing to the digital age. While the technologies may change, the instinct remains the same – to subvert the power of the publishing elite, and liberate the poet’s voice from capitalist marketing imperatives.
Event Location
"Self-publishing and the radical impulse in American poetry"
Michael Schwartz Library, RT 401
On July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman designed and self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, containing a dozen poems. He then engaged in a ruthless campaign of marketing and promotion, subverting the rules of book publishing by anonymously writing reviews in praise of his own book, noting the break-through nature of his "transcendent new work." Whitman’s youthful and vigorous insurgency, seizing the means of production and bending the established rules to get his message to the public, was a precedent for the democratization of publishing that has served poets ever since – from small press movements to the mimeograph revolution, and from desktop publishing to the digital age. While the technologies may change, the instinct remains the same – to subvert the power of the publishing elite, and liberate the poet’s voice from capitalist marketing imperatives.
