Kenneth Goldsmith has launched a bold, full-throttle investigation into the nature of unpublishability over at Ubu. Introducing Publishing the Unpublishable, Goldsmith asks, “What constitutes an unpublishable work?” Authors sent in works that otherwise would have remained untouched, festering at the bottom of some slush pile. Goldsmith will press onwards until the 100th manuscript is published, and I’ve been keeping my eye on the roll out. There is a 1018-page manuscript (too long!), there are some high school love poems (oh, too juvenile!), and there are several really impressive pieces (the image to the right is from Jeremy Sigler’s Math, a click-through explosion of primary colors). What I really like about Publishing the Unpublishable is that it’s more than an analysis of the wheat&chaff phenomenon:

“The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.”

Item 40, Issue 1, the 3,785-page PDF edited by Stephen McLauglin, Vladimir Zykov and Gregory Laynor, James Carpenter, stirred some strong sentiments back in early November, but I was glad to see it added to Goldsmith’s Publishing the Unpublishable. Definitely testing the limits of unpublishability, the massive PDF contained charming computer-generated poetry, boasted a lengthy list of “poets,” and made several individuals unexpected authors, including one member of if:book. Other interesting unpublishables include Craig Dworkin’s Maps, Mairead Byne’s Example as Figure, and Elizabeth S. Clark’s Between Words. I look forward to seeing what manuscript gets pulled out next.

Beginning November 10th, seven women will begin a public conversation in the margins of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The text of the novel and the readers’ conversation will be in a nifty new format designed by Apt Studios in London, similar to, but much more elegant than CommentPress. We’ll put up a preview sometime in October. In the meantime here is a brief bio of the seven readers:

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in nine languages; it was read on BBC radio’s Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones’ 25 Writers for the Future. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City and in 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin’s online We Tell Stories project.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a freelance writer originally from New York City. She is a political and cultural critic who writes about sex, women, youth culture, and music for numerous publications including The Nation, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, VenusZine, and Salon.com. She currently co-writes a blog called GIRLdrive, the content of which will be in an upcoming book of the same name. GIRLdrive is based on a road trip taken across the United States in order to find out what young women think and feel about feminism, and will be published by Seal Press in Fall 2009. She lives in Chicago.

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and theorist whose most recent books are Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (both from Pantheon); her essays have appeared in Slate, Harper’s, Playboy, the Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages; she’s received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo; and she teaches in the Radio-TV-Film Department at Northwestern University (she is a former video artist). Her next book is called How To Become a Scandal.

Philippa Levine grew up in an upwardly-mobile, left-wing, working-class family in London. She received her doctorate in history during the Thatcher era when academic jobs were thin on the ground so after a brief stint teaching at the University of East Anglia, she took a post-doctoral fellowship in women’s studies in Australia where she combined academic work with radio broadcasting. In 1987 she moved to the US where she has lived since. Her publications include The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset (2007), Gender and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (2004) Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2003). Her current projects include a study of colonial nakedness, and of evolution, eugenics and empire.

Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning “culturally hyphenated pomosexual poet,” playwright and performance artist. She writes jazz-infused, politically-charged performance texts about Haitian-American culture and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality. Moïse blogs regularly for Showtime’s OurChart.com. At 20, she co-wrote the screenplay for a Rodrigo Bellot film, Sexual Dependency, which has been screened at dozens of international festivals. Moïse received an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College. Moïse regularly performs her autobiographical one-woman show Womb-Words Thirsting at colleges across the United States and her newest musical Expatriate was produced Off-Broadway at the Culture Project in July 2008 and met with critical acclaim.

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and raised in London. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl, is about a young girl and her imaginary friend. Her second novel, The Opposite House, is a nominee for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third novel, White is for Witching, will be published in 2009.

Harriet Rubin is best known as the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, a little bullet of a book on power that is now in its twelfth paperback printing. The book has been published in 27 languages and has been a bestseller in several of them. Rubin currently writes for The NY Times and other publications. She was the founder and publisher of Currency Books/Doubleday, which changed the science and soul of economic thinking. In late Fall 2008, she is launching an on-line publishing program devoted to business, power and leadership.

I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings.” After glimpsing into BBC’s giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums:

Why are so many of these priceless documents out of print? Because the market for spoken-word recordings is too small for them to be worth reissuing on CD. So why don’t the BBC, HarperCollins and Sony BMG (which now owns the Columbia Masterworks and RCA catalogs) make their spoken-word archives available for digital downloading via iTunes? Imagine being able to click a few keys on your laptop and listen to, say, Truman Capote reading excerpts from “In Cold Blood” or Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Jessica Tandy and David Wayne performing Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie.” Wouldn’t you pay 10 bucks for that privilege? I sure would.

But what about poets.org and Penn Sound? Both websites host catalogs of sound clips and boast thousands of mp3s, for free nonetheless. In fact, archived audio exists across the internet, in fabulous–even if sometimes hidden–pockets. Over at Slate, all weekly poems are accompanied by author readings. On Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb, you can listen to Ezra Pound reading at the Harvard Vocarium, experience Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and even enjoy a rare 1929 recording of James Joyce.

Earlier in the summer, I raided Penn Sound’s archives for Robert Creeley audio files. I adore Creeley’s readings – ?how he ascended each stanza, how he stumbled through an enjambed line. In his voice, you can hear when his poetry is downright mean, irresistibly tender, and forever hesitant. Having listened repeatedly to Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” I was disappointed in Teachout’s treatment of what author readings tell the audience. Tsk, Teachout writes to all literary critics that picked up that popular “unfortunate habit” of using “voice” when they mean “style.” Teachout’s lead forgets that poetry began as an oral/aural tradition, a tradition which PennSound is looking to revive. Director Al Filreis hopes that the project “has already had an impact on the way poets, critics, teachers, and students talk about the sound of poetry, which is, after all, its most fundamental quality.”
Is there scholarship on how poets read their work? The space between how a reader interprets the text and how an audience hears the words is often vast – ?a canyon of blank page and intentional pauses. Shouldn’t we consider the poet’s performance? When I listen to Creeley read, the way he forfeited line breaks and rushed toward conclusions frequently changes my sense of the poem. On poets.org, John Berryman starts The Dream Songs, introducing his Huffy Henry, grumbling and gruff. Berryman takes a sharp breath, and his voice goes staccato, “It was the thought that they thought/they could do it.” Then, there is a pause and he proceeds, “made Henry wicked & away.” In Berryman’s vocal staggering, you can almost hear the departure from when the world was once like a woolen lover…
How can we use our listening experiences with our readings of texts? Or, maybe the more practical question: what should these hybrids look like? In the end, I do agree with Teachout; I want more. After hearing “Dream Songs 1,” I am greedy to hear Berryman tackle “Dream Songs 4.”

Emily Dickinson’s poems weren’t published during her lifetime- it was only after her death that her sister found Emily’s manuscripts, tucked at the bottom of a trunk, and decided to publish them. In the translation from manuscript to printed page, many aspects of her poems were lost. In editor’s notes, scholars admit to getting snagged on her unusual punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks. The biggest stumbling block comes with Dickinson’s endnotes. For many poems in her manuscripts, Dickinson provided alternate lines. Sometimes only an adjective changed but at other times entire stanzas morphed. In “How the Old Mountains drip with Sunset” (291), Dickinson couldn’t decide upon a single preposition, so there became six ways that one could be in relation to Solitude.

I’ve been building a Sophie book, which pulls Dickinson’s alternate lines into the body of the poem. I’ve been trying to make the lines no longer seem like potential-yet-never-permanent afterthoughts. When the line is presented within the text of the poem, I find it receives more consideration (if not equal weight, at least more screen time). Plus, in most publications, editors make the decision which lines to incorporate and which ones to discard. With this version, the reader gets pulled into that discussion, closer to Dickinson’s original work. When there is an alternate line, the reader can press on a black button and scroll through Dickinson’s suggested changes:

Now, when reading “When we stand on the tops of Things” (242), the reader can see what effect it has when “they bear their dauntless/fearful/tranquil heads.” In the book, the reader begins to encounter questions that surface frequently in literary translation, the question of “what is best in context of the poem.” However, I think that another type of issue is happening here with Dickinson’s work. In “Many a phrase has the English Language” (276), Dickinson waits, tucked in her bedroom in Amherst, for a phrase to arrive with its thundering prospective. The line can read: a) till I grope, and weep; b) till I stir, and weep; or c) till I start, and weep. Each single phrase is fine. But I prefer to think of Emily Dickinson thrashing in her sleigh bed, groping, stirring, and starting all at once. A certain open playfulness becomes built into the framework of the poem once you can let all the possibilities toggle by in one reading experience.
In terms of timing, it pleased me to see Judith Thurman’s recent New Yorker article “Her Own Society.” Thurman describes Dickinson’s dashes as moments in which she “evaded the necessity of putting a period to their mystery—or to her own.” And, earlier this summer, Dan gave me Susan Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson” to read. At one point, Howe argues that Dickinson built a new poetic form grounded in hesitation. I liked that idea of hesitation, circling back and reconsidering what you might say, what you could possibly. For “I prayed at first, a little Girl” (576), Dickinson gives two final stanzas. The two aren’t that unlike. However, looping back, you notice that they accomplish markedly unique things.

Till I could take the Balance
That tips so frequent now,
It takes me all the while to poise —
And then — it does’nt stay —

Till I could catch my Balance
That slips so easy, now,
It takes me all the while to poise —
It isn’t steady tho’.

At this point in the project, I’m afraid I’ve sunken too deep into semi-obsessive adoration to begin to see how this Sophie book could be useful. With this blog post, I’d like to open up the concept for discussion. How do you think a collection like this could be used? Is it ultimately helpful?
Download it here
Right click to download the file. Unzip the file to open the folder. Open “ED Ten” in Sophie Reader.