Okay, this takes a bit of chutzpah. Recently I started thinking about writing a story about someone who finds a lost Shakespeare sonnet in an inherited trunk of old papers. That was several weeks ago. I haven’t written the story yet, because first I had to have a fake Shakespeare sonnet. I’ve been writing one and researching 16th-century spelling, punctuation, and typography to make it look realistic. The font in the graphic example, “JSL Ancient,” is derived from 17th-century printings and matches closely the typography of Shakespeare’s quartos, folio, and Sonnets publications. I have the font files if you want them — regular, italic, and bold. I downloaded them for free.

I want to praise these two websites for the resources they make freely available to study this stuff:

• Shakespeare Online, which enables you to search all poems and plays for text, as well as provides full text, annotations, introductions, and well-informed commentaries
• the facsimile images of the sonnets and plays at Internet Shakespeare, a service of the University of Victoria and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Here’s the result so far. The story’s premise would be that this poem was written to fit thematically and rhetorically in between Sonnet 120 and the current 121. The sonnet would be set in 16th-century type, the page scrawled with a note from the printer to the effect that if the author decided to insert this poem it would require renumbering all the subsequent sonnets.

I give it here first in plausible 16th-century spelling, punctuation, and typography; then as a modern editor might set it up to help a reader understand the metrical features.

(Now, in modernized spelling and punctuation, and some metrical keys:)

Writers, artists, and public intellectuals are nearing some sort of precipice: Their audiences increasingly expect digital content to be free…. Related difficulties are now looming for books.
     –Sam Harris, “The Future of the Book“

Sam Harris’s essay is only partly about print publication losing ground in the market, and mainly about the erosion of “market” for writing altogether, where market means “selling” your stuff for “money.” “Jaron Lanier has written and spoken about this issue with great sagacity,” Harris writes. “You can purchase his book here, which most of you will not do, or you can watch him discuss these matters for free. The problem is thus revealed even in the act of stating it.”

No doubt Harris is right. He still sees a place for print books, but I’ve heard others predict an end to hardcopies of anything. Maybe it’s inescapable. Maybe it’s progress, the final conquest of the organic and human by the digital and infinitely reproducible. A century ago the automobile inevitably replaced the horse, fifty years ago Hamburger Helper made cooking knowledge obsolete, and ten seconds ago Itunes finished replacing live music forever.

Yesterday, however, I stepped around a large pile of horse-apples on a dirt road dented by horseshoes.

Sometimes people check out old Julia Child archives on NetFlix, get together and steam up the kitchen with vegetables, meats, and spices grown in the garden, then sit down and eat together.

Afterwards they get out instruments and jam in the living room.

I still have a wall full of books, more than enough to last the rest of my life. Maybe someone who prefers the smell and feel of paper to plastic will want them when I’m gone.

And live theater, after several thousand years, can still go off like a grenade.

I’ve often wondered whether art is really driven by profit or just the irrepressible need to express yourself. Throughout history, some of the finest art in all genres was produced by wealthy elites with time on their hands and nothing to gain but fame, or down-and-out paupers, or prisoners, or other nobodies who never got paid. Digital publication doesn’t stand in the way of their efforts, it only expedites them.

But then again, there’s Shakespeare: professional playwright, actor, and theater manager turning a buck by producing whatever the public wanted. If they wouldn’t buy it, he didn’t produce it. Thank goodness they bought it. He died rich, and left us rich.

Speaking of Shakespeare, here’s an irony: maybe professional writing will find its future tangled up with the future of professional theater: people writing drama, allowing its free distribution but retaining and enforcing public performance rights, and making a living putting on good old shows. It’s been known to work before. Live theater may be the one thing able to compete with movies and song-video mashups. Live theater has something video doesn’t: actual people in the same room with you.

There is a style of play production called “promenade”: the actors and audience share the same space, both move freely at will, and sometimes the audience participates in the action, possibly even in the dialog. I recently attended such a production, HCC’s production of “Lark Rise,” and ever since I’ve been trying to absorb the experience. It was new to all of us — the cast and the audience. It seemed to feel awkward to a few of the actors, but others thrived in it. It had its aural and visual dead spots and may have needed a better educated audience to make it work, but at times it knocked you off your feet or scared you half to death. Imagine forcible arrest or attempted rape at eye level ten feet away, or being a “fly on the wall” listening to an intense private conversation right beside you. That’s the kind of thing.

Here’s the admirable thing this production did: it went in exactly the opposite direction of the general flight from live theater. At a time when audiences are drifting to the back of live theater and out the doors, this one invited the audience forward instead, deeper into the theater, all the way up onstage to interpenetrate with the characters and the action. It’s the right instinct and maybe should be pursued.

At least it’s organic and human.

© 2011 Greg Bryant under the Creative Commons

This could be a ghost town.

I sit on a white bench before the main street store,

which is closed. No one in sight.

They’ve left the aeration fans silent

at the grain elevator, abandoning this wide street

to echoing cries of doves passing overhead.

The pale, cool midday sun throws soft shadows

of trees in Memorial Park against the warm

south wall of the Senior Center, where marigolds

huddle in sober humility, stunned

by that first frost, hunkered

for the inevitable hard freeze in a few days.

I could fall asleep on this bench.

The wind has left the street, too, except

a tentative breeze stirring in the north somewhere,

carrying nothing but a clean, dry, earthy scent

from the corn stubble out there.

Now the soft crackle of gravel popping under bike tires

arrives with a little girl on her wandering

white-wheeled bike on the sidewalk across the street.

She weaves, walking really, astride

the saddle, lazily examining the chipped and pitted

concrete just ahead of her. She may be singing.

She searches for whatever.

“No one to play with?” My voice

passes easily across the pavement.

She stops and looks up.

“No.” Her word echoes around town.

“Such a nice day, too.”

“Yes.” She moves her handlebars

and the tire twists in the crumbling concrete.

“But I like to play by myself sometimes.”

“That’s good.” I’m keeping her from her lonesome

happy thoughts. “Well, have fun.”

“Bye.” She stands on a pedal and glides away

and leaves the lovely desolate street to me.

I’m reading a book I’ve already read.

It comforts me and it clears my head

and relaxes me in this motel bed.

I’d rather be deep asleep, but instead

I’m reading this novel I’ve already read.

It’s one of the perks of the life I’ve led:

there are plenty of stories I’ve already read.

I sure don’t do it to get ahead

or establish some kind of tough-guy cred.

“You gon’ kick my ass? You gon’ stomp my head?

Fool, I read books I already read.”

When you’re reading a book you’ve already read

you’re never dismayed when the villains shed

their pleasant pretense and the dirt turns red

and the chance for a happy ending has fled,

and the ones who should suffer prosper instead,

and the best ones are all disappointed or dead.

At least you’re not tempted to read ahead

when foreshadowing wakens a feeling of dread,

when the boy is just being tucked in bed

and mommy or daddy is filling his head

with old-timey sayings his grandmother said

and the story of how his brave granddaddy bled,

for you know already he’s being misled

by the kindly assurances he’s being fed

and he’ll make crappy choices and end up dead.

If you see someone reading a book you’ve read,

you’re tempted to caution them, “Don’t be misled

by the happy beginning, he winds up dead.”

But you can’t, that’s forbidden, and so instead

you keep your mouth shut and you turn your head.

It’s the comfort of life so literately led:

there are all of these stories you’ve already read.

© 2011 Greg Bryant under the Creative Commons

…instead of giving up, I move the prose to a text editor and start working. The result usually calls for a lot more interpretive work on the reader’s part, but that’s okay too. Here’s my first one:

© 2011 Greg Bryant under the Creative Commons

I’ve been paying $15 a year to get my posts to tab in the first line of each paragraph, as books and magazines do, instead of leaving a blank between them as web pages do by default. In other words, I prefer this:

“Your G string is flat,” Ted said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your third string. It’s flat. Tune it, or I’m packing up my guitar and going home. This sounds like my third grade orchestra class. Do you want to borrow my tuner?”

“Oh—sure. Thanks.”

…instead of this:

“Your G string is flat,” Ted said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your third string. It’s flat. Tune it, or I’m packing up my guitar and going home. This sounds like my third grade orchestra class. Do you want to borrow my tuner?”

“Oh—sure. Thanks.”

Not everyone agrees with me. It’s a crotchet of mine that I was willing to spend the money to fix.

Now, however, I’ve discovered a simple way to do this in both WordPress and Blogspot, for free. If you’re interested, I’ve put the codes below and simple instructions for using them in the new-post editor.

The simplest way:

1. Start a new post. (Keep these instructions open in another tab of your browser for reference.)
2. Select the “HTML” editor (in Blogspot it’s called “Edit Html”).
3. Copy this code from here and paste it into the empty post:
   <p style="text-indent:.3in;margin:0;">
4. After the code, type a few words of your first paragraph.
5. Switch to the “Visual” editor (in Blogspot it’s called “Compose”).
6. Finish the paragraph and hit “Enter” to make a new paragraph. The editor will keep using the same style for the rest of the post, automatically duplicating the style code at the start of each paragraph.

(A slightly less simple way is to use the HTML editor all the time and paste the code in front of each paragraph. You can edit old stories, for example, and just paste the code in at the beginning of each paragraph, then save.)

That’s for the “story” paragraph style. If you’re doing a play, which uses “hanging” indent, or a poem with long lines that may wrap and you want the wrapped lines indented, the process is the same except that you use this code instead:
<p style="text-indent:-.5in;margin:0 0 0 .5in;">

Drop me a note if you have questions.

•

Shakespeare and other earlier writers used punctuation for pacing and pauses, not to distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive phrases or to point modifiers at their targets and so on. (See “Shedding Punctuation.”) Modern writers (those in the centuries since soon after Shakespeare) have been constrained by grammatical rules in their use of punctuation and must find ways to break free of those restrictions. Some modern poets just dump punctuation altogether:

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
     —e. e. cummings

Plenty of freedom for the reader to piece the syntax together there. The parentheses are syntactically gratuitous, clarifying nothing, but suggesting a shift in voice, exactly the kind of effect that was lost when the rules came in.

Dickinson seems to have used the dash, a unit of punctuation that even to this day hasn’t accumulated much syntactical significance, in the same way cummings later used parentheses. The example below won’t duplicate Dickinson’s line breaks, which are a different matter:

I heard a Fly buzz — when
I died —

That break may have been more about where the edge of the paper was than any intended pause. She had a pretty big scrawl:

But regardless of line breaks you can’t miss how she wanted her poem read because of her dashes:

I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air —
Between the Heaves of Storm —

The Eyes around — had wrung them dry —
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset — when the King
Be witnessed — in the Room —

I willed my Keepsakes — Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable — and then it was
There interposed a Fly —

With Blue — uncertain stumbling Buzz —
Between the light — and me —
And then the Windows failed — and then
I could not see to see —

     —Emily Dickinson (poets.org)

What a manifesto of independence from rules! And yet her editor, knowing best what was good for her, corrected her punctuation as below, at the same time making several happy changes in her actual wording (additions in boldface, deletions in red strikethrough):

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness in the Room round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes around beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering firm sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in the Room his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portions of me be I
Could make assignable,–and then it was
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

     —Women’s Studies reading room, U. of Maryland (umd.edu)

If you buy an edition of Dickinson be sure you don’t get that one. When I see an Emily collection on a bookshelf, I just look up “There’s a certain slant of light” in the first-lines index, and if it says “Heft” (capitalized!) at the end of line 3, it’s probably okay. If it says “weight,” it’s not Emily, it’s some tone-deaf editor. If you examine those versions you’ll also find two other boneheaded alterations, not even counting punctuation and capitalization, by someone who was not what Dickinson was: a poet.

Of course, “I heard a Fly buzz” (compare right, wrong) is a good test poem too. Both are probably in every collection you’ll see.

Final Harvest is the best short selection I know of. The poems seem like a representative group and were chosen from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, who returned the poems to their “original form, uncorrupted by editorial revision” (Amazon.com review).

© 2011 Greg Bryant under the Creative Commons

The green sweat bee hovers above my knee,

focusing my attention, and time slows down.

The bee lights and I bring the camera in

for an extreme close-up right in its face.

Now sharpening in the monitor is a startling

wilderness of precise order:

bristling mouth parts in jeweled movement,

thousand-eyed awareness,

a feisty life-force alien

to its puniness.

My single sad outsized inquisitive lens

cannot stare down

that stretching, swelling territory of iridescent

eyes between eyes between eyes forever.

The camera blinks.

The bee lifts, flies, vanishes.

It’s the same shock on a clear Kansas night

unwittingly to step out into the Milky Way Galaxy

of stars between stars between stars forever smeared

in inconceivable magnificence across the bright sky.

And I with my two dull inquisitive eyes

washed gray in that dizzy immensity

drop what is in my hands, bow backward and sway under

so many stars, so many eyes,

so narrow a slice of forever for me

to blink at it turning its back as it recedes

never to return from its expanding

rush to the end of the universe

as time slows down.

lilacs don’t care
who they bless
not pretending
to impress
they just
accidentally
step between the breeze
and me