The Outerview Series: Part XX - The Egoless Experiment

The Egoless Motto

     The Egoless experiment began in 2004 and was open for the better part of a year.  Its purpose was to create a critical environment that would evaluate poems and critiques and, thus, poets and critics.  What did we discover?

"So how did it work?"

     Membership was free but involved a few questions (e.g. "Is Blake's 'Tyger' iambic or trochaic?") to separate neophytes from the experienced.  Novices would begin life on Egolite and work their way up to Egoless. 

     Everything was posted anonymously.  Not with pseudonyms, mind you, but without any identification whatsoever.  

     The site attracted some of the best critics of the time.  Posters would present their text.  Other members would read it and evaluate it numerically, from 1 to 10.  Many would add critiques (again, with no indentification), which would also be judged numerically, from 1 to 10.  Thus, over time, every member would have a poet ranking (i.e. the average rating of their poems) and a critic ranking (i.e. the average rating of their critiques).  Members would see these updated results when they logged in.

     Members with Poet and Critic ratings below 5 out of 10 would find themselves on Egolite.
   
"What if we wanted to follow a poet, critic, or conversation?"

     Members could click on any poem (or critique) and see all of the other poems (or critiques) posted by that contributor without knowing their name, nom de plume, or username.  (There were no usernames.)   What we would call an Original Poster today would be identified as #1 in that thread.  The first responder would be #2, the second would be #3, et cetera.  Each would have their poet ranking (for the Original Poster) or critic rating (for respondents) listed under "Rank".  Thus, clicking on a poem title might reveal something like this:

CO# Rank Poem Title         Evals  Avrg   Crits  Avrg

 #1 7.31 Death of Sam McGee    13  7.26       2  5.83
 #2 6.24
 #3 5.42

The Real Life Death of Sam McGee

He'd died so many deaths by then
    as all could plainly see
in grade school rhymers written when
    he'd dreamt of Tennessee.

Sam fixed the widow's car that night
    (of course, a Model-T)
then trudged into the blizzard's might
    and dreamt of Tennessee.

Across the narrow bridge he walked
    the tenspot would soon be
misspent in hotels as he talked
    and dreamt of Tennessee.

Sam did not hear the coming car
    (that very Model-T)
and never made it to the bar
    to dream of Tennessee. 


     Under this we'd see a spot for evaluating the poem and a larger text box for posting a critique.  Two decades later such a site might accommodate slide shows and video performances.

"How did you find out who the poets and critics are?"

     You didn't.  However, by knowing your own ratings you could see where one stood in relation to the other members.  Only if and when a version of a poem was published (in which case the author would have the Egoless posting deleted) would you discover who wrote it.

     For what it's worth, the site reported on the highest regarded poets from a survey of the other serious critical forums (i.e. Poetry Free-For-All, Eratosphere, Gazebo, and Poets dot org, the latter two of which are now defunct).  Of course, Maz topped the list...and this was before she wrote "Studying Savonarola"!  With the benefit of hindsight, these names should be higher on the list:

A.E. Stallings
Robert J. Maughan
Claudia Grinnell
Michael Cantor
Richard Epstein
Jennifer Reeser 
Frank Matagrano
Andrew Kei Miller
Marek Lugowski
Colin Will
Charles Cornner
Janet Dowd
Kim Hodges

"What about trolls?"

     Not a problem.  Trolls would fail the entrance test miserably, be bozoed, and never climb out of Egolite.

"Bozoed"?

     What we would call a "soft banning" nowadays.  That member would be the only one to see their postings.

"So what happened?  What did people learn from the Egoless experiment?"

     Above all, we learned that knowledgeable critiquers are worth their weight in platinum:

Peter J. Ross
Hannah Craig
Bob Schechter
John Boddie
Harry Rutherford
Rob Evans
Gary Gamble

     We saw how much can be learned from getting and giving serious critique.  We also learned that Earl Gray's 44th Law cannot be ignored:

      Indeed, many of Earl Gray's Laws of Poetry came from the Egoless experience.

      The Egoless approach was not meant to be restricted to poetry.  It can work in any critical environment:  prose, legal, scientific, artistic, business planning--anything that benefits from frank feedback.

The Difference an Audience Makes - Part II

Poetry's Revival

    In "The Difference an Audience Makes - Part I" we discussed how, without an audience, criticism inevitably comes to mean its opposite, blurbing.  That is but one of hundreds of effects, almost all of them deleterious, of not having an audience. 

    Just yesterday, July 15th, 2012, in "On the Power of Positive Poetry-Reviewing", one of my poetry heroes (a word I don't use lightly), Seth Abramson, asked this astonishing question:  "You might well tell such a person, 'Look, telling me not to purchase a Ford Flex or a Honda CRV still leaves me with 69,998 car models I know nothing about, and I need and want to buy a car now, so how is this helping me?' And you might well add to that admonishment, 'Can't anyone out there help me figure out which cars I should buy?'"

    The problem is that, if we've ever read a back cover, we know that we can always find someone to blurb anything.  If all 70,000 different brands are being praised--and they will be--how is that remotely helpful?  Might as well just leave such "evaluations" to advertisers, no?  Or cheerleaders.  Why do you suppose a Consumers Guide is a blend of positive and negative?

    The very last thing we need is more blurbers.  At a macrocosmic level, until and unless objective authorities stand up and say "Hell, no!" lazy producers and publishers will continue to crank out unspeakable shite, all of which will be "given unqualified praise."

    If everything is "mahvelous" then nothing is "mahvelous".

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Obscurity Equals Failure

    When we are in the entertainment business, which includes but is not limited to art, comedy, film, music, fiction and, lest we forget, poetry, the unknown is the unsuccessful.  Why that obscurity occurs (e.g. our lack of energy, commitment, talent or luck, a heartless public, an unfair system, the numbers game, etc.) matters far less than some may think.  All of us know some very talented artists who, by any practical measure, have failed.

    All of this is equally true at the global level.  Poetry has failed to capture an audience for more than half a century.  The questions are many:  Will it regain its place in the public consciousness?  If so, how and when?  How will we know if it has?  By book and magazine sales?

Lest we have forgotten

    Consider these seemingly unrelated points:

1. Poetry existed for eons before the written word.



2. Poets used to be "rock stars", appearing in public theatres and in private gatherings organized by wealthy hosts.



3. In the seven years since its launch Youtube has resulted in more people viewing contemporary poems than reading them in books, magazines and webzines.



4. Most cell phone, video camera or webcam owners know how to make and upload videos and/or slide shows.



5. More than 98% of lyrics searched online are of songs the user has already heard.



6. More than 90% of scripts purchased are for productions the buyer has attended.

   performance:  Noun

• the act of performing  a ceremony, play, piece of music, etc.



• ...the efficiency with which something...fulfills its intended purpose.

    With prose, performance (if it happens at all) usually follows reading, as in a movie based on a novel.  With film, theatre, music, and poetry, performance precedes reading.  Shakespeare's plays were published years after they were staged, and only because the productions were as successful as they were.  Today, the poetry reading tries to encourage poetry reading but fails because it is--you guessed it!--a poetry reading.  As opposed to a performance.  Imagine the prospects of an unknown rock band whose idea of "performing" is limited to reading lyrics aloud onstage.

    Without performance, poetry remains as obscure as sheet music or theatre/film scripts would be without performances.

The good news

    Not only is the sorry state of poetry criticism, publication and acceptance changing but the speed of that metamorphosis is increasing geometrically.  Evolution is occurring at speeds previously associated with revolution.  By the time we formulate predictions they are already the status quo.  We need to "predict" in the present progressive tense.

    So, what grand transitional event is happening?  I am betting that before 2020--perhaps today--poetry produces something for the first time in half a century:  iconic words.  That's right.  By 2020 we will no longer be able to say that the average person is unable to cite a single line of poetry written since 1970.  All it takes is one poem going viral.  How long will this take?  Personally, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already!

    Let's break the sequence of events down.  Almost all print venues have a web version and almost all of those feature videos:  interviews, readings/performances, and slide shows.  With this in mind, submitters are beginning to include URLs of their poems on video to permit the editor and no one else to view the performance.  (Currently, the easiest way to do so is to upload it to YouTube and mark it as "Private".) 

    In a choice between texts of equal caliber a video could be the deciding factor.  Even if it isn't up to the publisher's professional standards the video helps the editor envision the motif.

    The next hurdle is the publishing world's fixation on first serial rights.  In due course, some practical editors--assuming that isn't an oxymoron in the poetry world--will realize what an opportunity they are squandering.  They will go from demanding YouTube videos be Private to insisting that they be Public.  By doing so editors can see how many viewers it attracts and what their opinion of it is.  In both senses of the term, editors can see how the poem performs.  Think test marketing here.  If and when the piece is accepted its author will be asked to change the YouTube title to include the periodical's name before the poem's (e.g. Pat's Poetry Review:  "Proof Rocks") and include a link to the webzine.  In this way, every work published becomes an advertisement on one of the highest trafficked sites in the world.  Now that there's a link to something with broader appeal than text we can add social media into the mix.  Poetry could go from being dead to being a centerpiece of our culture in the space of 24 hours. 

    Magazines and webzines are by no means the only ones that benefit from the web's multimedia options.  Individual books have pages on publishers' and booksellers' sites.  These will accommodate videos or links to them as they are created.  Inevitably, people will purchase poetry collections for the same reason they bought music CDs:  because they already love one or more of the pieces included.  Let's not forget the effect of participation.  Having acquired the book or e-book, readers might become video producers of other poems from it, creating an upward spiral of success. 

    A new paradigm is being born.

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• The Difference an Audience Makes - Part I



• The Difference an Audience Makes - Part II

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The Difference an Audience Makes - Part I

A Public Safety Officer sees a blind woman walking toward an open manhole. Should the PSO warn her?  Or say nothing?

You might expect that, barring a psychopath or two, everyone would say "Yes, warn her!" even if it were not the PSO's job. What ethical person would remain silent there?

Jan Zwicky

This is what reviewers do. They buoy works, boosting the profiles of great novels such as "Stone Diaries" while placing markers over "Howard the Duck" so we'll avoid it. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a full review; a rating on a "Best of..." list might suffice for the impatient web surfer. For this service we are all grateful.

Thus, when some ignore my advice to the contrary and read "The Ethics of the Negative Review" by Jan Zwicky they are gobsmacked. It's not merely the sloppy editing; much of the verbiage is an argument against bringing up various tangents in the first place. We can only guess Ms. Zwicky's DELete key is broken. No, what amazes many is the central thesis that reviewers, not to be confused with blurbers, are meanies. In addition to all of the objections raised by Michael Lista in "On Poetry: The good in bad reviews", there is the painfully obvious point that the "ethics" of bad reviews is the very same as the "ethics" of good ones: "Ya calls 'em as ya sees 'em."

End of story, right?

Michael Lista

People from outside the poetry worlds would certainly think so. Of what use would Rex Reed or Siskel and Hebert have been if they didn't pan clunkers? Ditto fiction critics.

Online poets certainly don't have a problem with negative feedback. (Feel free to test this with your own discussion thread:  blog, Facebook, newslist, etc.  Ask:  "How do you feel about negative reviews in poetry?"). By definition, online workshoppers regularly engage in constructive critique, based as it is on a negative premise: this poem isn't perfect yet. That is their focus:  poems, not poets.  As a group they discuss technique and originality, always with a view toward the existing poetry audience.

The problem with "the existing poetry audience" is that it doesn't actually exist, which makes any question about reviews--or poetry itself--all the more existential. If there is no audience--and there isn't--then there is no blind woman striding toward an open sewer. Indeed, there are no residents at all. What does it matter if there is a pitfall in a ghost town?  What purpose is served by pointing out this carelessness beyond gratuitously embarrassing the worker who forgot to replace the manhole cover?  Someone's job could be on the line here.

We need another analogy.

By definition, those in the careerist world endeavor to create an attractive CV and acquire a job teaching poetry. Get a book or two published in a local/university press and a few poems in high profile literary magazines, none of which are targeted beyond their academic contributors. Virtually any wan, allusive, intellectualized prose will suffice. Get a few well known friends to blurb it and you're good to go.

Seen in this light, negative reviewers become unwelcome interlopers. It is as if they are barging into a job interview to tell the prospector employer that the applicant is a poo-head.

Meanies.

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• The Difference an Audience Makes - Part I



• The Difference an Audience Makes - Part II

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