publishing literature into the public domain

hello friends. i have called myself a poet, but my main goal is to make things i like and share them with other people. whenever the standard practice of poets and that goal are in conflict, i try to acknowledge my own goal rather than the usual way of poets

i am publishing a chapbook next week. some people will judge me for self-publishing, or they will assume my chapbook wasn’t good enough to find a publisher. but my decision to self-publish is connected to a decision i made more than a year ago to publish all my writing and art into the public domain

if a person’s main goal is to share their art with other people, i feel copyright may be counterproductive. if taken seriously it actually restricts others from sharing your work, making it illegal to publicly share poems and images

there are bloggers and computer programmers who have published without copyright for a while. the vegan video i finished this summer was explicitly uncopyrighted, as well as l.o.v.e.’s vegan blog. but i haven’t heard about many literary writers, even radical/anarchist poets, doing this

maybe an explicit ‘uncopyright’ has seemed unnecessary because poetry doesn’t sell a lot anyway. but i think it makes a difference. most of my favorite contemporary poetry is not available for free online. i had to pay money to find and read most of my favorite contemporary poetry

for me, requiring people to pay money to access my poetry and art is against my goals and values. if i fall into that practice of withholding my writing, then i am letting the usual way of poets and our economy interfere with what i really want to do

there are some other options i have read about like creative commons and copyleft, but i have thought about it for a long time, and i believe in the public domain. i don’t want to protect my art work from anything; i just want to share it

i plan on publishing full-length print books in the future, probably with a publisher, but i will always put the full text online for free or optional donation, and it will always be in the public domain. this also applies to my blog

i want to encourage you to use my writing and art however you want. it is just here for you to enjoy it. you can post my poems on your blog and upload my art to your facebook. you can print or republish my writing wherever you like, with or without credit. you can modify it, then publish it. you can sell it under your own name

i love you

thank you very much


related posts /

+ selling art: commodification of art + donation-based income from art
+ self-publishing a poetry chapbook and distributing it for free
+ doctrine on internet poetry
+ internet poetry and self-publishing