“‘E-books make the Gutenberg system, which still characterizes the industry after 500 years, absolutely obsolete,’ insists Jacob Epstein, the veteran publisher who invented trade paperbacks and founded the New York Review of Books.” “E-publishing radically decentralizes the marketplace,” Jacob Epstein.

The decentralizing of  post-Gutenberg publishing is something that I can speak about with intimate knowledge and ties in with my book of poems Into the Ruins and other books. In the mid nineties I became disgusted with the conventional avenues of cultural and literary publishing, both books, journals, and magazines. I had more than a decade of rejection slips from ignoramuses who demonstrated not the slightest understanding or familiarity with the manuscripts I sent them, along with a number from highly respected editors at major publishers, one, for instance, telling me he thought my book The Grove of the Eumenides should receive a hearing but did nothing to make it happen. I came to think very little of nepotism, especially in publishing. Other editors, publishing their post-modern drivel, enjoyed indulging themselves at my expense, they apparently thought. I quite consciously walked away from the whole conventional publishing scene, and the university in 1996, and began seeking ways to go around the stranglehold of both, directly to the reader.

I first thought the way to go around the decadent post-modern establishment and open a new path for literature, seeking to revive and renew its deepest humanistic traditions, was the time-honored route of typical self-publishing and brought out Into the Ruins through the printer McNaughton Gunn in 1999 under my own independent publishing company, Earthrise Press. While I sold some books through Borders and Barnes & Noble, through Baker & Taylor, I found them all to be opposed to an independent voice. A selection from the approximately twenty Reviews from that time are on my website. Despite a few insightful reviews, no one really understood what I was fully attempting with Into the Ruins. Thus far, the same has proven to be the case with The Bower of Nil in 2002 and The Grove of the Eumenides in 2007.

Along the way, I evolved into using POD (Print on Demand) technology through Lightning Source and thought the way around the stultifying post-modern status quo would lie in that direction, which nevertheless opened up the way to the global reach of the Internet booksellers to an amazing degree, shocking me that I could sell books around the world. Very early I recognized the value of Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine, though it’s yet to fulfill its potential.

Along in there, too, ebooks increasingly became a possibility, and I published all of my books into ebooks, available worldwide and going around all of the conventional gatekeepers. The record of much of the evolution of my thinking is in my Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age
http://www.fglaysher.com/Post_Gutenberg_Publishing.html

Like everyone else, I’ve evolved along the way with a website since 1998 and a blog, eventually Web 2.0 social networking… Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Through all that, I continued to study and work towards my epic poem, the earliest notes for which are from 1982, recently finishing the fifth draft in March of 2012. It’s not only the methods of publishing that I’m talking about, but how the identification and promotion of disparate views and visions of life, in literary terms and otherwise, evolve and reach the broader culture. I have not devoted over thirty years of my life writing an epic poem to allow a corrupt, conventional corporate publisher ever to touch it. Everything I’ve written is about the freedom of the individual soul, and the poem must be published in such a way as to affirm it.

Frederick Glaysher

Frederick Glaysher, Albany Word Fest, April 21, 2012

http://youtu.be/CJ_xbSXbN7k

Frederick Glaysher

Also, I found reading from Book III in Buffalo, and preparing for it, that I revised passages and lines more in terms of oral and colloquial impact, though I had usually or often read the poem out loud to myself when writing the previous drafts. I think now that this is what I must do for the sixth draft. Read it as much as possible to a live audience and think and hear it, reflected back to me, really, in that way. I’ve always remembered hearing that Dickens would often try out different versions on audiences during his readings, revising accordingly. Something like that…

I’ve been astonished that I felt like the figure on the Rhapsode Amphora, lifted to that realm of transcendent song. I can not imagine ever having too much of that experience.

I’ll be reading from The Parliament of Poets at Austin International Poetry Festival in September, but two to four times a month between now and then would really help. If you know of any place willing to listen, let me know… use Contact under About.

Frederick Glaysher

I’ll be reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets at the 2012 Albany Word Fest, Saturday, April 21, 2012, 1:15 pm, in Albany, New York, at the Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12210. Main Library Large Auditorium. You’re invited!
http://www.albanypoets.com/wordfest/

For a previous excerpt, see my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Buffalo, New York, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

YouTube: http://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4

Rabindranath Tagore

“The Poet’s Religion of Rabindranath Tagore.”  Just published in Rupkatha Journal Volume 3, Number 4, 2011 (400—416). Rupkatha.com (Kolkata, India).

I cannot write about Tagore without writing about what he has meant to me as a poet during the course of more than forty years of reading him. In the early 1970s he became for me a model and mentor, an example of the poet’s life, one which resonated deeply with my own experience, especially in spiritual terms, which I eventually learned was taboo even to mention in the learned halls of American universities, where God was and is usually dead, and no one desiring intellectual respectability had better utter the slightest syllable otherwise….

Frederick Glaysher

See my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

YouTube:  http://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4

Frederick Glaysher reading from the fifth draft of his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012.

FROM Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.

Frederick Glaysher, Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III.

Reading from The Parliament of Poets, Book III, “Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab, / My escort and midwife of my dreams.”

Frederick Glaysher

Rodin's The Thinker, The Gates of Hell, from Dante

Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, Cantor Art Center, Stanford University, July 1, 2011.

III
The Thinker

Staring into the portal I see humankind
stretched out on the rack of this century,
gassed in the trenches of Europe,
vivisected in the meat shops of Germany,
forced to kowtow in China and India,
in Africa and the archipelagoes,
by the British, the French, the Japanese,
by all those intent on empire,
intent on the worship of themselves.

Staring into the portal I see ourselves
revealed in the terror of what we are,
of what we cannot face, cannot bear,
try always to ignore,
while the cost grows greater and greater,
while like Ugolino we grope over the dead,
the victims of our rapacity,
our devouring lust.
“O Master, the sense is hard.”

Copyright (c) 1999 Frederick Glaysher. My Rodin sequence has a I & II…
http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html 

Rodin, Gates of Hell, Paolo and Francesca

Rodin’s Paolo and Francesca… “our devouring lust.” They’re writhing in Hell. Dante saw them there on his visit… wrought them in immortal song, Rodin in immortal bronze. White’s translation:

“There is no greater grief
Than to recall a bygone happiness
In present misery….

While the first spirit told her tale, the other
Wept with a passionate grief that mastered me;
I felt a faintness, as it were of death,
And like a corpse fell headlong to the ground.”

Apparently, Dante must have had cause to faint…

Rodin, Gates of Hell, Ugolino, devouring his children...

“…while like Ugolino we grope over the dead,
the victims of our rapacity,
our devouring lust.
‘O Master, the sense is hard.’”

Copyright (c) 1999 Frederick Glaysher
http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html

Rodin, Gates of Hell, Cantor Arts Center

Bronze, of course… The Thinker pondering Hell below… perhaps the greatest art work of the 20th Century. Guernica next comes to mind…

Rodin, The Gates of Hell, Cantor Art Center

One of only two or three full exhibitions, worldwide, of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell.  ‎…awe-inspiring for me. I first saw it in a special exhibition in Detroit in the early 1980s. I wrote a series of poems about it, in my book Into the Ruins, if interested, “Rodin’s Gates of Hell”: http://fglaysher.com/into_the_ruins.html

Rodin, The Thinker, MET

…A creative mounting of Rodin’s The Thinker, five or six feet off the floor, from The Gates of Hell. New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 11, 2012.

Rhapsode Amphora, Berlin Painter

Photo of the rhapsode amphora that I took on a recent visit in February, 2012, to the New York Metropolitan Museum.

A personal indiscretion… if a fifty-foot tsunami hits New York, forget everything but save this amphora… The artistry of the rhapsode is so  exquisite that none of the pictures I have ever seen or taken do it justice, including what the MET has available on the Internet at the link below.

Rhapsode. “A rhapsode (Greek: ῥαψῳδός, rhapsōdos) or, in modern usage, rhapsodist, refers to a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.”

Terracotta amphora (jar). Attributed to the Berlin Painter.
Period: Late Archaic Date: ca. 490 B.C. Culture: Greek, Attic ; Gallery 157, New York Metropolitan Museum.

“This work is a masterpiece of Greek vase-painting because it brings together many features of Athenian culture in an artistic expression of the highest quality. The shape itself is central to the effect. Through the symmetry, scale, and luminously glossy glaze on the obverse, it offers a carefully composed three-dimensional surface that endows the subject with volume. The identity of the singer is given by his instrument, the kithara, which was a type of lyre used in public performances, including recitations of epic poetry. The figure on the reverse is identified by his garb and wand. While the situation is probably a competition, the subject is the music itself. It transports the performer, determines his pose, and causes the cloth below the instrument to sway gently.”

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130015398?rpp=20&pg=1&ft=56.171.38&pos=1

Frederick Glaysher

I’ll be reading from the fifth draft of my epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, from 2:30 to 2:45pm.

My other books will be available at the Earthrise Press table from 12-6pm.

I’d be delighted to sign a copy for you. Hope to meet you there!

Author appearance, Saturday, March 24, 2012, 12:00PM — 6:00PM
Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Porter Hall, 453 Porter Avenue in Buffalo, NY 14201 USA
http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/

Frederick Glaysher