Poetry Hut Blog

Hi — an announcement

My first book of poetry, Trouble And Honey, is available for purchase at Lulu.com for a special recession-rate of $7.77. And if you live overseas, why not take advantage of the crappy fiat US dollar hahaha?

The book is also available as a PDF file, for free. This is an experiment. (My baseball poems free chapbook PDF has been downloaded just over 2,500 times so far, BTW. I’m sure that has everything to do with the subject matter.) The PDF of Trouble And Honey is genuinely free without any obligation. If you enjoy reading the PDF you can:

1.) buy the book version of it at Lulu.com for $7.77 USD
2.) use PayPal to send a donation for whatever $ for the PDF. I have a publicly-viewable PayPal meter with a tally of total donation amounts — if you want to eavesdrop. I don’t expect people to pay for anything on the WWW though.
3.) do nothing whatsoever, just like those 2,500 other folks have done. (I don’t have a link to PayPal or anything on that baseball poem site.)

Why am I doing this?

*I loathe the current po-biz contest system, in which poets pay $ for the minuscule chance of publishing a first book, in a possibly unfair contest. Though, as I have mentioned before, I have entered previous book-length manuscripts in contests at presses, before I wised up. (No dice. See item 3 under “what I am losing” below maybe.)

*There’s something about this blog that somehow channels my rebelliousness, ha ha.

*Thankfully, I didn’t earn an MFA in Poetry for the $ (!!!) or a chance at a job. The whole equation of

(get MFA) + (spend thou$and$ on iffy book contests) = ~possibly a book hardly anyone will read anyway & the slim chance of getting a teaching job

seems weird & not a good bet for those of us who aren’t award-winning-caliber poets. I intend no offense to any book contest winners nor book contest winners who now have teaching jobs. Some of you are my beloved friends. And if I don’t know you, then I probably know your poetry. Anyway, I’m not thinking about anyone in particular - rather, the ecosystem.

But I think that this is a very goofy way for an art form to be behaving, especially in the age of the WWW & print-on-demand — and not very organic either! Especially when no one really buys poetry books by actual real live poets in the first place. Except other poets. And it makes American poetry all Contest-Approved™ and stuff. Do you think that is good for poetry? (I’m genuinely asking.) What do you think American poetry would look like without the book-contest-publishing ouroboros?

There seems to be no lack of poets willing to be paid to judge book contests, write MFA guides/handbooks/blogs, and poets willing to pay to enter contests or fork-over $1000 for a manuscript-tweaking conference. The machine is most definitely keeping on — I just find the whole schema very very bewildering but also find that it makes me think that *I’m* the jackass. (Jillass haha) I look at current poetry culture & think, *I’m* not the jackass here. *It’s* the jackass.

Meanwhile that machine keeps rumbling along vrrrr creak vrrrr creak so then I think, well, I guess I really am, obviously, the jackass, here. Plus once I got my MFA and learned the tools of poetry I was fine with that. (Thankyouthankyou teachers.) OK now use them. Not interested in going to more workshops, though there are many poets I admire. How many workshops do you need to attend before you feel your poetry has become valid or acceptable or worthy or whatever? That also makes me feel like a jackass. I don’t know, maybe people think workshopping is fun & enjoy it. I don’t. Just sit your self in a chair and write. Repeat and repeat. Besides, who knows, maybe someday you, too, might get a weird rare disease that makes it hurt to sit around and write haha.

And all of this makes me feel like I have a deep-seated cluelessness about the poetry world, too. Yeah. Well, obviously I do.

Other reasons why I’m doing this:

*I’m a technology geek (been a webmaster for over 10 years now) and I like the WWW. And I’m curious about how this is going to turn out.

*In the depths of the early-80s recession [sic] in Detroit (no heat in the house in the winter etc.) punk rock saved my life (thanks Stephanie and Kathleen Ivanoff) and I still admire the DIY ethic.

*I’m pretty much a hermit (been sick a lot - at least I know why now) & am not part of a local poetry community. So I can’t go the poet’s collective route of publishing. And no one in the online world has ever offered. (Though I do have some spare ISBN numbers if you are interested in that.)

*I am not beholden to any 1 style of poetry, so I probably wouldn’t have much luck with a poet’s collective & a book contest anyway?

*I got a late start (I started writing, pretty much, in the summer of 2001 though I dabbled in high school and won a Detroit/Wayne County School District writing award in my senior year ha ha - 1985). So I’m 40, too, and tick tock.

*I’m already ineligible for a lot of funding opportunities, because most of my poems have been published by online lit mags. Plus that one Dana Gioia post probably wouldn’t help if I ever decided to apply for an NEA grant har har. So self-publishing isn’t going to screw up very many other opportunities for me, when it comes right down to it. Plus I live in Tennessee. (Why, in 2008, is online publishing still considered kind of a dog turd?)

*In the grand scheme of things I don’t really matter very much anyway. And probably the narrow scheme of things too. We’re all just a blip on a blap, only here for a tiny bloop.

What am I losing?

*By having the stink of self-publishing upon me I am losing the cachet of being published by a “name” publisher.

*I bet it won’t be eligible for any book awards. I bet it won’t get any reviews.

*I am quite probably contributing to a great tsunami of mediocrity - if so, I apologize in advance. Writing poetry is pleasurable and so I can’t help it. You know what I’m talking about. I try to do the best I can do, and I hope people like some of it.

*I am forfeiting the fame and riches that the majority of poets receive upon publication of their first poetry books (via traditional means).

(Yes, that last one was sarcasm.)

Thanks to Rebecca Loudon, and Major Jackson, who are poets I admire a whole lot xoxoxo, for the blurbs and their kindnesses:

“Trouble And Honey is an inventive and musical romp through Jilly Dybka’s fascination with weird, weird America. She effortlessly takes us from The Great Omni to Graceland to Ted Williams’ frozen head. Dybka is not afraid to confront the political, and dances on the edge of a clearly imagined history with references to Vietnam, forgotten diners, circuses, and a sweet lost history. Diane Arbus would feel right at home with this collection on her bookshelf.”

– Rebecca Loudon, author of Radish King and Cadaver Dogs

“Jilly Dybka hears the movement of our lives like a sculptor feels the force of shapes, and there is no arguing what she sees. So textured in sound are these poems, one has to agree Trouble And Honey returns language back to its rightful place as the source of our joy.”

– Major Jackson, author of Leaving Saturn and Hoops

And Justin Evans also offered to help with cover art, which was generous and I like his photos a lot but I decided just to do it myself in case I did the layout badly & it made his art look bad. Thanks, Justin. Carol and Jessica helped me test the PayPal stuff, since PayPal won’t let you PayPal $ to yourself - thank you.

These folks have nothing to do with the opinions on this page whatsoever.

Now that I have written a manifesto, haha, you can go to this page to download the PDF file for free and/or spy on the donations if there are any.

I just meant to post about the book being on Lulu.com / PDF being ready etc but I can’t seem to stop myself from saying what I feel about the poetry world and so I also probably offended everyone or made them mad and now I wrote a manifesto and so I feel like the Unibomber too. The Unipoet. I almost deleted this and started over, several times, but oh well.

Parenthetically yours (& thank you for reading),
xxx ooo

Jilly
ps. back to regularly-scheduled poetry news about other poets, who aren’t me, soon. My sister is visiting - at age 50 she recently graduated from Arizona State U with a B.S. degree & 4.0 GPA and so she has received the sole full scholarship in her professional field for grad school at the University of Tennessee. I’m very proud of her & we are going to Knoxville for a couple days. It’s funny that it is ending up that we both went to UT for grad school. I love Knoxville.

pps. Eavan Boland has an essay kinda about this ecosystem in Poetry magazine. I found the link Sphere: Related Content

Tags: diy, jilly dybka