******OUR POETRY ARCHIVE******: NILAVRONILL SHOOVRO

FROM THE EDITOR

Nobody can survive if one wishes to take up poetry as a profession. There is no money or earnings in publishing poetry either in printed form or on over the internet in digital format. Actually, there is no demand for poetry in our society. People seldom spends money to buy poetry books. Even if we buy, the volume of total annual purchase is so small that it will never turn into adequate profit for the publishers. So, publishers are not in a position where they can pay poets adequately enough to meet up with the living standards of the writers. Such an unfortunate story for the entire civil society. A creative brilliance like poetry has little importance in our society. Even the educated circle of the elite social class has little or no interest for poetry. These are the ground realities of publication poetry books. All successful poets are associated with various professions. According to the economic standards of their professions they maintain the living standards. And most of the time those professions are not related with anything about literary creativities at all. Even in this twenty-first century the situation has worsened much further. Earlier there were always few publishers who dared to invest capital into publishing poetry books. But in this new millennium situation has changed drastically. If you want to see your poetry published in printed books, you have to finance the entire cost on your own. Moreover, it has become the order of the day to entice poets to invest in publishing their own books. The publisher has nothing to lose out of the venture. Only to gain a handsome margin out of poet’s investment. So, one can find numerous publishers who’ll offer different lucrative schemes for self-financing. Ironically too many poets are more than willingly fall into this trap of self-publishing.

Yes, self-publishing is a trap for any poet. One can hardly recover the investment out of it. Moreover, any product requires successful marketing. It can never be the job of a poet. It requires great professional skills. The publisher will not entertain the sales. So, instead of working on poetry, now a self-financer poet will have to work on sales of his or her own book. This should never be an ideal condition for any literary creativity. Most unfortunately, we have stepped into this vicious circle of self-financing and publishing of poetry books. And if we do not want to fall into this trap, we can never publish our own poetry books. So, there is no alternative choice in between this trap of self-financing and not publishing poetry books.

Basically we, even the educated section of the society is very much reluctant about spending much on poetry. The common herds of the people will remain unwilling to spend on poetry books. This cumulative attitude is the main obstacle and the prime cause for lack of demands for poetry books. People will even stand in queues in front of liquor shops for hours rather than to purchase any poetry book. Wine is not at all an essential consumable product especially in tropical countries. Yet production and sales of wine never declines. So basically, it is a choice of common people whether or not to spend at all on purchasing poetry books. And until and unless the common interest for poetry grows, we can never come out of this trap of self-publishing. It’ll never lead us to anywhere at all.

Self-publishing will remain as the consolation prize of a poet, if the poet can afford the cost of investment which will never bring any profit at all. We can only post on our social media’s walls about our ventures. We’ll even send copies of our own books to the virtual friends around the world. Few people will recognize our literary skills and will go through the poetry books. Sometimes invitations to participate in world poetry festivals will also come to us. All these can happen if we go on venturing in self-publishing. Yet it can never help anyone as a profession for living hood. Actually, nobody bothers about writing poetry as a profession. Everybody remains pleased only to be recognized socially as a poet. We can only seek this consolation from our literary creativities.

Now how many of us have ever considered this fact that this wish to be recognized as a poet in our social acclaim will never actually lead us to anywhere beyond establishing a temporary personal identity as a creative being. Yes, few people around us will recognize us as a poet. Even without ever reading a single line of our poems they can acclaim us as poets. This mere recognition as a poet will never serve literature of the world. People will forget us beyond our wall posts on the social medias. So those self-financed books wouldn’t save our literary creativity beyond our lifetime. Isn’t it just useless if ever we consider literature as the highest creative brilliance of human mind and wisdom?

In this millennium and with this age of information and technology we can establish only a personal identity of being a poet. This way we can never serve the cause of literature as our predecessors have served during the last five centuries. I think at least few of us should start considering these facts honestly. Otherwise the standard of world literature will continue to decline rapidly in near future. The next generations will be born in a void. Literature will become a mere tool of getting recognized personally in the society. If we for once stepped into this colossal abyss, I’m afraid we would lose the essence of humanity becoming only the rearguards of information and technology. A resurrection is need to save our literature and social humanity. Otherwise we’ll never come out off this trap.

We at Our Poetry Archive are working relentlessly to popularize poetry among common people around the world. We hope our work will pave the way to consolidate this kind of endeavors among others. Which will in turn bring the much-needed resurrection to save literature and social humanity.

With this edition of OPA, we are glad enough to introduce poet NATASHA XHELILI of Albania as the poet of the month. She has finished her studies for Albanian language and literacy in the University of Eqrem Cabej, in the city Gjirokaster. She wrote her first poem at the young age of 10, but her first anthology was published in the year 2000. She writes proses, poems and expresses her critical opinion on different matters, and a variety of publications from this time period. She has participated in a few literature anthologies. Natasha has poems published in Albanian, English, Italian, and Macedonian. Let’s hope our readers will enjoy both her interview with poet Aprila Zank of Germany and her poems along with the whole issue consisting of more than hundreds of poems of the poets all over the world.

From The Editorial Desk

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