OUT THERE (PUBLISHING)

Yesterday I was happy to receive an envelope of treasures (books) from Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius, located in the city-of-my-heart, Baltimore, Maryland. The magazine Poets & Writers recently released a nice article about one of Adam’s many projects: Is Reads, a journal that is not, physically, like other journals. The pages are hung up around Baltimore City (it also operates in Nashville) in various public places. I have seen other public poetry ideas like this implemented, but I don’t know of any that are run as a journal—which is crucial, because organizing the project like a journal makes the path of transmission of it public to public, as opposed to private to public, the typical path of transmission for poetry, whether printed in a book, or posted on a website and/or telephone pole. (That public, of course, is made up an aggregate of individual privates, on both ends of the transmission.) The community of the journal becomes literally (literarily?) embedded within the public space that the larger community occupies, and when the poems get noticed, they may for second, help to draw attention, simultaneously, both to the poem and to that public space. I think Adam put it best: "...for the ten seconds people stand in front of it, I hope they just kind of wonder about poetry again."