In our climb up the Mount Parnassus of Southern Experimental Writing, we stop off at a plantation house balanced over the abyss, where we’re served mint juleps by Sothern Belles and are invited into the main gallery to contemplate some of the South’s best minimal, concrete and visual poetry.

Bob Grumman is given the west wall for his “ku” series of in-between texts. Grumman is notorious for his attempts to stretch the word “haiku” into anything he darned well means it to be. Having the good fortune to live in Japan, and to count among my close personal friends Rokuya Akashi, winner of the Santoka award, and widely-respected haijin, I find this a bit off-putting, and smacking more than a little of the cultural imperialism that Westerners are blamed for. If Mr. Grumman had any idea of the real nature of the work of writing genuine haiku, or of what the real thing is like in the original language, he would search for another, more accurate definition for what he does. (May I suggest the neologism “Usoku” from Uso–meaning false, and ku, as in line or inscription. There’s also a tiny joke in this coinage for those of you who know a little Japanese.)

Be that as it may, here are two examples of Bob’s “Cryptographiku”

Cryptographiku for Wallace Stevens

spsjpi

vxqqhu

cwuvmn

winter

and yet another for our friend of a previous posting, Jim Leftwich:

Cryptographiku for Jim L5ftwich

full wish of a moon

lingering without effect

in the w i n 20 5 18 14 9 6 4 0

A longer mathemateku series dedicated to Beethoven which divides a large-font “sky” by a block of “blue” repeated in lines of nine is of much more interest, visually and conceptually, and this effort, along with another visual poem titled “Summer Rain” leaves us wishing that the work had been printed in color. No doubt they are striking in the originals.

On the east wall, positioned right next to “Racing Steamboats” by Currier and Ives are “Steelville, Missouri Rodeo” and the triangular “Zinc-Jangled Pencil of Groves” by David Thomas Roberts–both composed of interesting visual elements ranging from sheet-music to sketches of log cabins. Not bad at all.

Having taken a bit of a rest, we hit the uncertain path again. Is it our imaginations, or is the ground starting to level out?

To be continued.

In our last episode we’d stopped at the ridge of ironic narratives and considered Skip Fox and editor Bill Lavender’s work. Yet another example would have to be Christy Sheffield Sanford’s “Rachel’s Recovery (Fucking with the Angels)”, an exercise in Kathy Acker-like prose. Like Kathy Acker, there are blocks of text hewn out of original sources, twisted out of context, tricked into a jagged narrative, tricked out in CAPITAL LETTERS, fragmented, disjointed, kitsched-up, and larded with oh-so-knowing feminist critique. This is a text meant to be sung and shouted and performed with larger than life puppets, and where have we seen this all before? Sanford provides us with some helpful footnotes about Racine’s Phaedra so we can “get” what this send-up of Romanticism (the scene is set in 1849) is all about. Though I laughed myself silly over Acker’s Black Tarantula, twenty years later this type of writing leaves me wondering why Christy Sheffield Sanford wants to reinvent the wheel:

UNREPENTANT

the animated gelatinous substance “There’s nothing like the feel of hot sand beneath your soles.” Rachel loves walking barefoot on the beach. THE SCARLET FEVERS A fish gasping for breath, beached over and over by the tide. A body–with gaping mouth, heaving chest–repeatedly rescued by the waves. “I’m an actress; I know I can break their hearts I thrill them.” Her breasts are bare, her hair tied with a black ribbon…

Who was it who said “Make it new”? We get it! Christy Sheffield Sanford! We get it! Been there and done that, Christy Sheffield Sanford! (With pioneering work on the internet.) Two other names Sanford might consider before hammering the keys again are Lucie-Brock Broido and Cynthia Macdonald–poets who cover similar territory, but are fine writers–crafted writers–as well. Not only can we admire their intelligence, we can admire their sentences, and their line breaks, something that we cannot do with Sanford, even though she is the recipient of many local and regional grants–including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Poetry, as the ever-helpful notes at the back of Another South tell us.

Is this truly “experimental writing in the South” as the cover of Another South tells us, or is this an exercise in nostalgia? Thomas Holley Chivers lifts his trembling finger at a UFO.

Now we climb higher towards the lights in this anthology. What constitutes the good work? What attracts me, personally, is writing that does not reek of hubris, that shows craft and thought. In addition I am looking for writing that does indeed speak of place–of the conditions of the American South, and could not have been written any place else.

To be continued.

Since its debut on November 3, 2004 The Witness has generated quite a buzz for Ahadada Books. With 4415 views and 204 megabytes of text downloaded, the Witness has proved an invaluable resource for historians and scholars and we are committed to providing this resource for free.

Included here are a couple of articles that have appeared in traditional print publications that focus on The Witness. As always, the full text of the witness is available here. You may also download Jamie Kellie’s Advocate piece in its original form here.

Putting the byte on literature
In Maryland and the nation, public libraries are seeing growing demand by readers for e-books.
By Josh Mitchell
Sun Staff
Originally published June 2, 2005

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes up 366 pages. That’s the old way of measuring books.

Now, as an e-book, it’s 1,400 kilobytes, or about five minutes of download time for each - if you have a fast modem.

Hoping to keep pace with technology - as well as patrons’ changing habits - public libraries across Maryland now offer many titles as electronic books, a format that has been around for years but is experiencing a surge in popularity.

Fourteen library systems in the state - including in Baltimore and surrounding counties - began offering e-books within the past month. And this summer, they will launch downloadable audio books.

“Different media are available, and there’s a public demand for them,” said Jim Fish, director of the Baltimore County Public Library. “Really good libraries evolve. E-books are something librarians have been watching for years now.”

Libraries in other states are evolving, too. Nationally, more than half of all libraries serving towns of more than 100,000 people offer e-books, according to a recent survey conducted by Richard Boss, an information technology consultant in Baltimore.

Patrons visit a library’s Web site to view titles and descriptions. After a library card number is entered, available books can be accessed with a computer or a personal digital assistant - such as a Palm Pilot - using Adobe Reader software.

“The file contains two components. One is the actual book and the other is the software that allows you to access the book for a certain period of time,” said Scott Reinhart, assistant director of the Carroll County Public Library.

After three weeks, a patron’s access to the book expires, eliminating the prospect of late fees.

Cardholders in Maryland have checked out 1,118 titles. Another 352 titles are on waiting lists.

And library administrators expect usage to rise as they buy more titles from OverDrive Inc., a Cleveland company that provides the software behind the e-books.

“They’re more popular than I even expected,” Reinhart said. “I thought it would start more slowly and just build because we haven’t had any huge press release or anything.”

Reinhart recently downloaded two Sidney Sheldon novels onto his laptop computer for a trip to Western Maryland.

“The words are still the words, it’s just the delivery mechanism is a little different,” Reinhart said. “I was still able to get immersed in the language.”

The best part, he said: “You don’t have to worry about carting around 10 books that weigh a pound apiece.”

The e-book program costs a library $5,720 initially, then $3,200 annually for a system such as that at the Hartford County Public Library, which has a $13.4 million budget.

“One person can use the e-book at one time,” said Jamie Watson, assistant materials manager at the Harford library. “So it’s just like a regular library book. We buy multiple copies of things that are going to be popular.”

Some of the most popular e-books are CliffsNotes study guides and other reference publications, according to Boss.

His research showed that libraries have not seen a decline in the circulation of printed books since the introduction of e-books.

Despite the advent of the new service, area librarians are not predicting the demise of the traditional book.

“I think the paper book isn’t going away any time soon,” Watson said. “People really like the aesthetic of the paper book, turning the page, looking at the cover.”

E-book technology has been around at least since 2000, when Stephen King released “Riding the Bullet” solely online. But he abandoned the experiment because of Internet piracy - more than half of the people who subscribed to the book had not actually paid for it.

E-books have become a way for lesser-known authors to be published. When Jesse Glass wrote The Witness: Slavery in 19th-Century Carroll County, he did not want people to have to pay for the book, he said. So he offers free downloads of the book through his online publishing Web site, Ahadada Books.

“It will remain free of charge as a matter of principle,” Glass wrote in an e-mail from Japan, where he teaches. “They’re available to anyone in the world who has access to the technology to download and print them.”

Slavery Book Published
By Jamie Kelly
Advocate Staffwriter
Originally published December 8, 2004

Download the article in its original form here.

In the late 1980s, Jesse Glass took some time off from graduate school in Wisconsin and came back to his hometown of Westminster. He fell back in love with the history of the town. That research led him to publish several works, the most recent of which is an electronic book called “The Witness: Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Carroll County, Maryland.” His first book was “Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland.” He decided to put the book up for free download on his Web site.

“I’ve always been interested in new poetry and Ahadada Books, run with my co-editor and friend Dan Sendecki, allows me to do just that,’ Glass said. “In addition I can communicate my ideas on a variety of subjects using the [Web log] function. Once again, without the technology of the Internet, none of this could happen. Dan Sendecki is in Canada and I’m here in Japan.” In an interview conducted over e-mail, Glass said he decided to make the book available to the public for free because the information is valuable to anyone studying slavery. “And it’s hard ?really hard? to put a price on the results of so much pain and sadness,” he wrote.

Q: What made you pick slavery in Carroll?

A: I took a six-month hiatus from graduate school from 1984 to 1985 for personal reasons. One day, going through the library at the Historical Society of Carroll County, I came across a bound report by a high school student on the subject of Maryland slavery. It was an admirable effort, though not very informative about the subject of Carroll County slavery. In fact, it listed “Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland” as the source of information on that subject. I decided then and there to begin the project that eventually became the “Witness.” Why? There is much more to be said regarding slavery in Carroll County besides the legend of the cruel Leigh Master and his slaves, as compelling a story as it is. You see, I regard legends as the smoke that tells us of the fire. And in Carroll County, and before that, in Frederick County, and before that as early as the first African Americans being brought to the East coast of North America in the early 17th century, that fire had been blazing. You see, the story of Leigh Master is about one human being behaving monstrously to other human beings, and in Carroll County, as in most of America right up until the end of the Civil War ? and beyond ? the simple truth is that there were countless Leigh Masters. I spent most of my days combing through the newspaper holdings in the Historical Society. My brothers helped on occasion and a student interested in the project from Western Maryland College put in a small amount of effort. I might add that I was simultaneously working on two other Carroll County projects at that time: an anthology of 19th century Carroll County Newspaper poets, that eventually became my book “The Hidden Muse,” and a selection of writings from both The Carroll County Democrat and the American Sentinel that would later become “Newspaper Wars: Know Nothings, Alms House Scandals, and the Death of a Civil War Editor.”

Q: Was the experience of a slave in Carroll representative of what slaves all over Mary- land would have gone through?

A: Yes, I believe it was, and I tried to indicate this by including virtually all the reports regarding national and international slavery in the “Witness,” and thereby establishing a context for the local reports. Of course, there was an irony in Carroll County slavery, and that was the fact that Carroll County is so close to the Pennsylvania border and freedom ? that is, until the Fugitive Slave Act was passed.

Q: What are some of the dif- ficulties in researching long- distance?

A: Well, I did the bulk of my research in 1984-85, when I was a full-time resident of Carroll County. I returned to the University of Wisconsin, got married, finished my degree, then began my career in Japan as a professor of American literature, and all that time the results of my research lay in boxes. It was about 1996 when I found the opportunity and the wherewithal to begin to publish the results of my Carroll County studies. That was also the time that I discovered for myself the startling technology of the Internet. Indeed, were it not for the Internet and the information revolution it ushered in, most of what I have done would not be available to more than just a handful of people. Yet there is one abiding human element in all of this on-going research and that is my friendship with Dr. Melvin D. Palmer, Professor Emeritus of McDaniel College. He and his wife Nancy have faithfully helped and encouraged me through all these many years. We connect over the Internet and through the phone and the mail about things related to Carroll County. Del has checked facts, taken pictures, and uncovered connections that have helped me continue these projects, even though I’ve lived now in Japan for more than 12 years.

Q: How much effort did the research take?

A: A tremendous amount, as anyone who worked at the Historical Society at that time can attest. I’d come in when the place opened and would be the last to leave. I did this at the same time that I was working night jobs. Fortunately, my mother and father allowed me to stay at home for little or no rent and room and board money. I thank them for that.

Q: How long was the book in the making?

A: The database that I compiled was available to a few researchers by 1987, but the book itself did not begin to take shape until 1997. The compilation went through considerable revision and enlargement between ?97 and the summer of 2004. I decided to publish the final version of the “Witness” on the net early this month.

Q: How much information is out there on slavery?

A: Oh there’s lots. The “Witness” is only the beginning ? a start. Last year when I visited Carroll County, the researchers at the Historical Society showed me material that would make a good beginning for another volume. For instance, there’s the story of the stone carver who lived in Carroll County who bought his family out of slavery because of the artistry of his tombstones. He could not read or write apparently, but his sense of design in his lettering and carving make his tombstones real works of folk art.