The Economy of Making It (to Sell)

I guess there is a DVD market for sequels to popular films that really need no sequel. Films produced purely for the market. Films that are simply tied to the labor that produces them and representing nothing else. When you're in a corner store and there are shelves of items placed beneath and around the cash register: products for you to purchase, relatively cheap, that you are meant to consume or throw away. These straight to DVD sequel-films are like that 5th Avenue bar that catches your eye. You know what it tastes like. You're not really interested in it. But you pick it up and eat in while walking to the bus and throw the wrapper in the trash next to your stop and then you forget about it.


For example, we have War Games 2: The Dead Code.

Candy. Fluff. Made to make you fat, happy, dumb, and numb.

Now, you want to sell poetry and prose in a market that is almost impossible to break into in an intellectual, scholarly, artistic, dedicated, thoughtful, and meaningful manner. You could write contract novels, you could ghost write, you could become a consultant and write technical manuals. You could do all this and write you're earnest text on the sly, out of the market, on the side, so to speak.

But let's say all you really want to do is make some bread. Well. Make a sequel. And find somebody to place it on a shelf where people can see it as they browse for their mass market fare. Sure, some serious text can be gleaned in the mass shelves of shit that sell thousands. But you want that shopper as well as the mainstream shopper who reads simply to pass the time. You want everybody to buy your book. Make it a sequel.

Maybe you could create a market for poetry. Finally. After all these years. You have been a student of Whitman. And Ginsberg. And now your poetry, your lines, have the flavor of the great wanderer but you are firmly planted in the contemporary. And people simply won't take the time to read what you have seen and observed and pointed to and nobody is engaged by what has been revealed to you, nobody knows what you behold.

Well, sequel-ize it. Leaves of Grass 2: Sidewalks and Cul-de-Sacs Or Howl 2: Gotta Walk Against the Flow of Traffic.

Or, maybe you're like me and trying to learn how to write a great American novel that is both thoughtful and provacative. Maybe you want people to read your terse prose verse. Your working with Williams, Creeley, Olson, Stein, and Pound: your working these poets and critics into your prose and attempt to bring poetics into play as a philosophy of fiction. But maybe nobody cares.

Well, that's ok. You can write that great book. Put all your effort into it. And simply make it a sequel. You'll call it Moby Dick 2: The Ishmael Papers or Huckleberry Finn 2: The Meth Years.

Oh you'd sell some books.