Roads in America have long symbolized the ideal of freedom. Just like the pilgrims who came here to escape religious persecution, and the pioneers who wanted to homestead their own way in life, the idea of traveling down the road to get away from one place and go to elsewhere, the notion of liberty has always traveled along with the people who take to the roads to find their way.

When the roads became paved, and when you could travel down them with speed, it added the idea of velocity to the metaphor of freedom. If you could afford a car, anyway. When cars first appeared, motoring was a novelty for the wealthy. Cars also became one of the epitomes of the Faustian machine age, rearing generations of motorheads into states of enraptured ecstasy by the spell of purring engines, enervating sensitive types with the cacophonous noise of their splutter.

As the antihuman forces of front line assembly systems riveted the steel beasts into ascendance, the price dropped to the point to where they came into the purview of the middle class, but not all the middle class. First it was just the white middle class. The oil fields had been tapped and gasoline was flowing, cheap and plentiful for a time. People looked to the car as another means of escaping enforced limitations, and eventually African-American’s of the middle class could also afford cars. Yet even when African Americans could start taking to the road in combustible vehicles, the road wasn’t always a safe place to be, especially in the years of Jim Crow.

After the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow was in effect in the Southern states. It was legal for Americans to be segregated by their race and the full power of the law was behind that segregation. Rules, regulations, and systemic racism had the net effect of ensnaring Black people in nets of harassment, and much worse. Human rights were denied and access to what the rest of the country thought as basic was curtailed through severe prejudice.

Yet the road still called, it beckoned as place to roam, out of the drought of oppression and into a world of verdant green where life could be enjoyed.

A man named Victor Hugo Green helped his fellow African American’s get on the road and find hospitable places, people and businesses. Green was a New Yorker through and through, born in 1892. His parents named him after the famous French author whose work championed the outcast, the poor, and the dispossessed. He was the eldest son of William H. Green and Alice (Holmes) and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey with his two siblings. In 1913 he started working as a postman in New Jersey, but became a worldly entrepreneur, though he remained with the postal service for his entire career, even after becoming a publisher during the Harlem Renaissance where was a participant and witness the proliferation and blossoming of Black culture.

GREAT MIGRATION’S AND THE FEAR OF THE RED

The Great Migration was great because it was one of the largest movements of people finding new places to live in the recorded and remembered history of North America. Jim Crow was in effect, and it was the driver for the approximately six million Black people who left the American South for the North, the Midwest and the West. Though the boundaries of time are fuzzy, the Great Migration lasted from about 1910 until the 1970s. Even in places where segregation laws did not exist, segregation by custom was ubiquitous. Even as the laws changed during the Civil Rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legacy and aftereffects have continued to ripple through time, and the social and economic factors driving the movement of African Americans across the country continued.

Looking at it now, the Great Migration can be seen as having had two distinct phases. As with so much else in the United States and the world, the upheaval unleased by World War I and II mark the period of the two phases. The first phase happened roughly between 1910 and 1940. In this time period Black southerners made their way to Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York. A war always needs a body, and for this, able bodied men were sent off to be machine gun fodder in the trenches as the efforts to fight were escalated in 1917 and people got sent off to Europe. With industrial jobs vacant by those who’d gone off to kill and get killed, jobs opened up for African Americans to fill those spots.

Americas internal migrants had found better jobs after fleeing from a South mired under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid, but other difficulties awaited. Injustice and prejudice wasn’t confined to one part of the continent and country. It is estimated that around 2 million Blacks left the south during the first phase from World War I to World War II. The social shake up to the norms wasn’t easy for people who felt their privileges were being infringed upon. The perceived threat of Communism was another cloud hanging over the minds and livelihoods of capitalist businessmen who were fine with the way things were.

The Russian Revolution was on everyone’s mind, erupting into paranoia. Politicians, government workers, and capitalists especially feared an imminent commie uprising. African-American commies they were even more afraid of; Black people were already advocating racial equality. Throwing in labor rights made the situation feel even more threatening for those with vested interests in the same-old, same-old.
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In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” This was the opening statement of fear that exploded in yet another wave of white violence against African Americans who had relocated in the search of making a living and a better life, in the search for just a small slice of the American dream. The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots explode across the land starting in the April, from Georgia to Maine, to South Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Arizona. Four days of mob violence formed an early peak in Washington D.C. in July, followed by more mob attacks in Norfolk, Virginia on Black veterans coming home from the war.

The Chicago riots of late July into August marked another peak. Hundreds of Black homes and businesses on the South Side of the Windy City were destroyed in the riots that followed the cruel drowning of Eugene Williams, guilty only of swimming in the wrong place. More rioting happened in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the end of September and into November of the year a massacre occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, sparked by fears of socialism as sharecroppers began the work of getting organized into a union.

Charles Hillman Brough, the governor of Arkansas, appointed a Committee of Seven, made up of good old boy businessmen to investigate the business of the Sharecropper’s Union. They came to the conclusion that it was a socialist enterprise made “for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people.” Articles about this in the newspapers stoked the flames of hatred and agitation, leading directly to further violence. All of it amounted to an anti-Black pogrom with a hefty dose of anti-communist Red Scare mixed in to whip up people into an irrational frenzy of bloodlust and belligerence.

The second phase of began as World War II brought the war industry (called elsewhere the “defense industry”) into expansion. This continued on into the 1970’s when America’s loss of morale in Vietnam put a cap on the number of jobs for war related manufacturing. In this time frame African Americans continued to move North, and further west into the major cities of California and up into the big cities of the Pacific Northwest. In just twenty odd years after World War II another 3 million Black people had migrated to these and various other points in the United States.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights era had ended Jim Crow but redlining and other systemic forms of racism were still in operation, along with usual overt kind. Neighborhoods might not have been segregated by clear and visible laws, but discrimination in housing and restrictive covenants kept many disparities in place across the United States. These scars on the collective landscape continue to reveal layers of psychohistory, and the effect of this psychogeography on the people who dwell in each area continues to be felt.

It was in this time period of the Great Migration that Victor Hugo Green’s travel book offered a roadmap for navigating such a harshly stratified society.

IN THE HARLEM GREEN

Harlem was one of the hot spot destinations of choice in the early phases of the Great Migration. Alma S. Duke had come up from Richmond, Virginia as part of that movement of people. In general, people moving up from Virginia often went to Harlem and New York City, while people moving away from Mississippi often went to Chicago. People were moving away from plenty of other places in the South as well, and there was variation, but these were two of the prevalent patterns. Alma was one who had come up from Virginia.

In 1917 she married Victor Hugo Green. The happy couple moved to Harlem to be in the happening place. They settled in the Sugar Hill community. They made it just in time for the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American music, theater, painting and visual art, and of course, literature, was going through an incredible fertile period as artists took back “the Negro” from the stereotypical tropes of whites. An identity and consciousness apart from middle class bourgeois values of the white Victorian era was crafted. The Victorian reality tunnel looked out on the world through colonialist, imperialist and racist belief systems. This renaissance of artistic activity was happening in other parts of the U.S., but the main concentration of energy was in Harlem.

At the same time as Blacks were making Harlem a hotspot of American cultural life, some were also getting on the road as people entered the middle class and had the ability and opportunity to afford a set of wheels. But the road can be harsh, and even motoring along, there were many gas stations that wouldn’t fill a tank, mechanics who wouldn’t work on a Black owned car, places that wouldn’t serve African Americans a meal. This treatment wasn’t limited to the South, as the events of the Red Summer showed (and many other events afterwards). Northerners were just as cruel and racist. It made staying put in a safe place with known elements less risky than traveling the country to visit family, especially when traversing places where White Supremacist groups were active.
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Yet it wasn’t all hatred. African Americans businesses were also springing up, and gradually there were businesses where acceptance of everyone’s humanity was the key. Green had the idea that he could list such places in a book to help Black people get around the country and enjoy the freedom of traveling, the freedom of being free. The result was “The Negro Motorists Green Book.”

He first published his guide in 1936. The first edition was only ten pages and focused on New York City. The prevalence of “Whites Only” restaurants and “Sundown Towns” -places where African Americans weren’t welcome after dark- meant that going somewhere new was a dangerous business when violence and hostility could be expected. With a list of places where it was safe to go, new possibilities for real freedom opened up, and Green’s book came into high demand. He continued to publish new edition each year, expanding the range of cities and towns covered with each new version.

His job at the postal office was a key to this enterprise as he was able to use it for networking with other postmen and connect with Black business people along their mail routes. Once contact was made, he asked them if they’d like to advertise in the Green Book. These same businesses listed in the book then became venues where the book itself could be sold and bought. It was an underground or parallel system operating outside of the mainstream. With the book in hand African American citizens had another way of making and forming connections to people offering needed services, of finding dance halls, cafes, shops and other places that were safe. Places to just chill out and relax.

All of this nurtured community and the networking was one of the things that helped set a stage for growth of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in turn depended on financial independence. The Black businesses that made up the book were the foundation of success.

Of the many African Americans who used the Green Book, many did so for the purpose of earning a living. Salespeople, traveling musicians, entertainers, athletes and others who had to take to the road for work in one capacity or another were among those whose lives were made easier through the travel guide. Blacks in the middle class and above working as trained professionals in fields such as medicine, law, insurance and engineering were also looking to spend some of their income and treat their families to leisure time. Relaxation and recreation at the standard resorts was often barred from Blacks due to segregation, so as new options and opportunities became available, these got listed in the guide. Idlewild in Michigan was one of the leading resorts during the Jim Crow era and it had reached the height of its popularity by the 1960s.  

Off the back of the Green Book, Green started another enterprise in 1947. This was a Vacation Reservation Service and travel-agency, again specializing in Black owned businesses. By the end of the 1940s, his guide had gone outside the confines of the U.S., showing how to get around in places like Mexico and Bermuda. He did all this while still maintaining his day job, from which he retired in 1952. That was the same year he changed the name of his publication to the Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It wasn’t just about motoring anymore, but about experiencing life out in the world and all it had to offer.

HAVE OIL, WILL TRAVEL

Without gasoline and oil, a car is just a heap of metal and parts. These days it might just be fiberglass, metal and parts. Without a place to fill up, getting on the road means nothing. Without oil and petroleum products the American conception of roads and cars as the keys to freedom would be a dream. During the time period of the Great Migration, Shell stations had been known to refuse Black customer’s service. Not so with Esso Standard Oil, a company who became another key to the continued success of the Green Book. They had enlightened policies, and franchised gas stations to African Americans.

These days the company that was Esso is better known as ExxonMobil. The name “Esso” came from the way a person would say the letters S and O, for Standard Oil, the immediate predecessor of the company. Strange how these corporations live longer than humans, but with genealogies just as tangled.

Standard Oil was based in New Jersey and had started marketing products under the Esso brand in 1926. During those Jim Crow years, they hired Black intellectuals in a time when African Americans with higher education and training under their belt had a difficult time finding employment. In 1934 one of the people they hired was James Albert “Billboard” Jackson. He wrote a column called Jackson’s Page for Billboard, the famous music and entertainment magazine, where he wrote about Black performers in New York, Chicago, and other big cities. His column was very popular and Black newspapers in the North syndicated his work under the byline “Billboard” Jackson.

Writing about music and cultural life in the 1920s put him into direct contact with many of the greats from the Harlem Renaissance, and his work as a critic was crucial in getting their work out to a wider audience. Like Green, he was another pioneer in Black business and entrepreneurship: he was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce on that very subject between 1927 and 1933. In 1934 he was asked to come and work for Esso Standard Oil Company in the role of public relations and marketing specialist, the first African American to hold that role. He also became the first African American member of the American Marketing Association in in 1940. All in all, he had worked for Esso for twenty-one years. Jackson was very active in African American fraternal groups and business associations, and was a member of some thirty-seven different voluntary groups. He had developed quite the network of influence.

While Jackson was working at Esso in the marketing division, he convinced the company to sponsor the Green Book so their Black customers could “go further with less anxiety.” By the 1940’s a little less than half of all Esso dealers were Black making this coordination effort a natural fit. 

The 1949 edition of the Green Book included the following Esso endorsement message:

“As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign.”

Alma Green, who had worked on the Green Book as an editor at various times continued publishing the book after her husband died on October 16, 1960. She continued to serve and publish as an editor until 1966, the last year the annual book was published.

When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 it marked the end of legal racial segregation. Sundown towns may have been blocked legally, but racial profiling by local police and sheriff's departments, harassment by everyday racists, and other aggravations continued and continue. Driving while Black remains dangerous. The influence of that reality has left a deep mark on the psychology of collective America, and the memory of that is permeated across the land.
 
RE/SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin

​Overground railroad: the Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America by Candacy Taylor

Driving While Black (2015 feature film directed by Paul Sapiano)

Driving While Black (2021 Documentary directed by )

The Green Book (2018 feature film directed by Peter Farrelly)

“There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of a ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” -Henry David Thoreau

​There is a very prevalent attitude within the culture of creativity, for those that want to make it big, a person needs to leave their smaller city or small town, and go to the big city. I guess making it big has always had the underlying assumption, also super prevalent and at large in the greater culture, that bigger is better. Big cities represent places with more opportunities for expansion in whatever field of endeavor one wishes to make it big inside. There is often more there in these places: LA, Chicago, New York City, Seattle. Some of what there is definitely more of is competition. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber vying for their slice of the pie. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber working as baristas and waiters and cooks. That’s no slight against the service industry. A person has got to eat and my wife and many friends and family are veterans who have served in the trenches of the restaurant biz. I’ve assisted in numerous caterings myself and spent my share of time as a dishwasher. I’m not afraid of getting dirty and wet.

The question remains, however, of why a person would want to travel to a big city to compete not only for work in the creative industries, but also for good day jobs, when they could stay in a smaller pond where there is more potential to become a bigger fish. Yet not just the kind of big fish a fisherman would like to catch from the deep, but part of a school of fish: in other words, a community. Not just a community of elite artists presenting their work to the world in galleries, at readings, and from the stage, but a community of people and beings to be embedded within and serve.

At the end of the day, art in any medium is a service. In its debased forms, it can be a service to the artist looking to glorify themselves. I won’t pretend its ever an egoless endeavor. Yet, when that becomes the sole purpose of art, for the artiste to extol their own creative ability, something essential gets lost, the act of making things that nurture and feed the creative and spiritual part of other beings.

I say other beings, because art may not even just be for humans. If St. Francis could preach to the animals, why couldn’t an artist also make a sculpture for the enjoyment of the trees, or for the birds, snakes and turtles? Why not tell a story to a bee or sing a song to the wind and sun and stars? These too are part of our community, or rather, we are part of their community.

Yet we also do want our human connections, and to be seen for what we do and are capable of doing by our fellows. There is nothing wrong in that desire to be seen, heard, known. It’s something we’ve done since time immemorial. We aspire to be like trees and have our work be around for a long time, yet even their centuries pale to the aeons of life and light given off by the stars.
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As the 17th century English poet John Hall wrote in his poem “The Hourglass”:

How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!
With what toil we pursue them, and with what sweat!
Yet most times for our hurts, so small we seem
Like Children crying for some Mercury. …
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Desires of wealth anothers wishes hold
And yet how many have been choked with Gold?
This only hunts for honour, yet who shall
Ascend the higher, shall more wretched fall?

(The poem was set to music by David Tibet in the above harrowing Current 93 song.)

Some of the fruits of human art are more robust than others, and the seed planted from one poem into the heart of another, can turn up and grow in some other area of life. Storytelling, poetry, song are all for the community. To grow, they need their own strong roots so as to generate future seeds.

As culture returns to a preindustrial level of homeostasis and world travel becomes less common and more adventurous, the globetrotting artist will become increasingly rare. Even those writers and musicians and actors who gain larger renown, will likely live somewhere. Sure, there will always be nomadic types and people who live in different locations at different times in their lives, but the urge to grow roots and remain in place will also loom large. An artist who is devoted to the place where they live and breathe will be a boon to the local pond where they swim.

BIG TIME CITY GLITCH

Novelist and writing guru Steven Pressfield wrote a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. In one of the blogposts that became part of his book, he contended that aspiring screenwriters and people wanting to work in the movies should move to places like Los Angeles to be around the scene where much of the work of screenwriting is done.

He wrote, “Sometimes people will write to me. ‘I want to work in the movies. Do I have to move to Los Angeles?’ Or, ‘My dream job is in fashion design. Do I need to be in Manhattan?’
The answer is yes and yes.”

It sounds logical. Yet art doesn’t always work on logic. Sometimes it works best by being counter-intuitive, so I say the answer is no and no.

I like much of what Pressfield has written to help creative people in the world, so I’m not knocking him as a whole, but I want to push back on what he says about moving to the big cities. I think that is a glitch and stops people from pursuing their dreams in the soil where they were raised. When they move away, that same soil gets depleted instead of getting enriched, while overloading and putting a strain on the place they are moving.
Louisville and Lexington, Cincinnati and Columbus are just as in need of screenwriters (or likely playwrights in deindustrial times) as anywhere else. A motivated playwright is much more likely to get a work made and produced under their own gumption away from places where there is a lot of direct competition against them.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin the In the Pines Studio has set up their operations. Founded by Winter Williams and Matthew A. Brown, they bucked the traditional notion of centering their creative endeavors in film in California and instead focused on the Midwest. If more film students, producers, writers and directors got together to do things on their own, the allure of the big time wouldn’t be as strong. They could make it small time.

In an article titled “The Paradox of Skill” on Dying Breed, Brett McKay wrote about the role of luck in achieving dreams he gets into the idea of more opportunities being available when the pool is smaller.

“If you’re a talented videographer, don’t move to LA for a career. Talented videographers are a dime a dozen there. You’re going to be relying mostly on luck to get a break. Look for a smaller market where the pool of talent is shallower, and skill is the deciding factor. I know a talented videographer in OKC who has made a successful career for himself overseeing commercials, documentaries, and corporate videos in Oklahoma. Is it as glamorous as LA? Probably not. But he’s thriving in a career he enjoys. Also, OKC ain’t that bad. The cost of living can’t be beat, it’s got a World Champion NBA team, and a great onion burger restaurant to boot. You can always take a direct flight to LA from Will Rogers World Airport if you need a weekend of LA glitz and glamour.”

Such a business as the one described above could also be pivoted from making commercial work to making artistic during the downtime. The success of the one could pay for the possibility of the other.

The glitz of the big cities may just be glitches. I am an urban dude. I like to visit a big city. I live in a small city though, and the size is just right. People say that, in Cincinnati, there is only one degree of separation between folks, rather than the usual two degrees of separation you often hear people talk about. In a place where the social connections separating you from another person are less, it’s easier to develop a reputation (of any kind) and have an audience for your art or craft.

The struggle to gain confidence and build an audience in any art form is real. The person who seeks to do so on a global stage has a lot to overcome, many barriers and obstacles in their way. The person who wishes to perform for their friends, to make music on the porch, to read poetry at a café, to submit to a local zine or quarterly, has more of a chance to start putting themselves out there and working on their craft. There are still obstacles also the possibility of making connections.

The other thing, here too, is doing your art for the community. I think the whole thing of being very polished in performance or an art is what keeps people from doing things like this for the people in their life, but I think as a whole our society needs to embrace the way someone with a skill or talent, even if not “the best” can add to our experience together and inspiring each other to improve, and not just leave things to so-called professional entertainers and the like. In your own home town, you can make it small and still have an outsized impact.

Much good can be had by staying put. Tiny forces and small movements can make big waves.

A process of internal migration is already underway now, where people are migrating away from the bicoastal mindset of LA and NYC dominating the cultural life in the United States, with folks coming back home to the heartland, or moving to the former flyover country for the first time.

Much of that is economic. People are starting to realize they can have a cheaper life, work a decent job, and do their creative thing with more ease, less stress, and more success in places where the cost of living is lower but where the artistic life is just as vibrant.

​These aren’t slights against the big cities themselves. I have very much enjoyed my visits to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. If these are your local, they are your local. Then you might want to go more micro inside such big ponds and make it small in the neighborhood rather than the city at large.

​GOOD ENOUGH

Normal never was, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Going big presupposes polish. You need to have your act together and you need to make it look professional and sound professional. Again, I have nothing against being a professional. At the same time, how much potential gets stopped in its tracks, because a person witnesses the work of a virtuoso and instead of getting inspired by them, they say, “I will never be that good” instead of thinking, “if I commit to a practice, I could do that.” People feel degraded by the simulacra of big time entertainment. There is a failure to realize we can all entertain ourselves and our family and friends, same as it ever was.

I think in a large art that is because performance has become spectacle. Music was enjoyed for much of its history, socially. Sure, there were always people who were talented and reached for perfection in their art, but there were also the everyday practitioners of the art who sang for the practical enjoyment of singing and for the simple joy doing it gave them. Isn’t that good enough?

For me, this is part of the appeal of punk rock. It was focused more on the energy of the sound, and the ability for anyone with the gumption to put a band together. It is why I like the genre of vaporwave and sound collage: have the tools? Put something together with them. It doesn’t need to be perfect to be fun. It doesn’t need to be perfect for somebody else to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to help you along your own path. If you stick with it, the confidence and the greater ability to do what you envision with the medium will come.

For a long time some, friends of ours held an annual Winter Solstice potluck with performance. They usually rented out a small hall in the neighborhood. People put money in a pot to cover the cost and the food was all brought in by everyone. Homebrewed beer and wine... The amazing part was the variety show.... music, skits, jokes, poetry, tap dancing and more every year, put on by the people in the extended friends group. They were about a half generation older than my wife and I... of hippie stock and really believed in the philosophy that a community could provide its own entertainment for itself.

The same is true of so many great shows I have been to in VFW halls, community spaces, and scummy basements. Conditions do not need to be ideal. It’s better to play through a shitty PA then no PA. Working outside of ideal conditions leads to grit, resolve, and strengthening of will and courage in face of obstacles.
This essay doesn’t need to be in ideal form, either, before I share it with readers. I like to revise. Sometimes I like to revise more than I like to write the new thing. It allows me to keep fiddling. With that in mind, I am resisting endless revision here. Hence, minimal polish. Unfinished ideas. There will be time circle back to all the things I intended to write in this piece and didn’t really get to, because I went on off on some tangent. That will just be fodder for the next one.

[ Josh Datko has a great essay on the grain of soul found in art when you go on and do a thing without worrying about being totally polished.]

AS THE FIELD EXPANDS, THE SCOPE OF SUCCESS MUST BE LIMITED

Being local and staying small can also relate to finding a niche and working from the freedom of the fringe.
Working in an area that is overcrowded and overhyped, the luck needed to get work out into the world becomes greater. Where there is a lot of skill and a lot of people doing great things great with that skill, something else is needed to set one apart. Part of what is needed is a bit of luck. Part of what is needed is a unique, iconoclastic flavor.

Electronic music was in the past, a specialized field of activity, a niche area of music making. Now all kinds of people have modular setups, or are just producing music on computers at home using readily available software, or even just using programs like Suno to take the song idea from their head and make it so it can be heard. In a way, this makes that kind of production a folk art in its own right, just as collage has become since Dada and Surrealism opened that practice up to the wider public and anyone with some scissors and glue. One of the things about folk art is that there isn’t as much variation between artists. It can still be really good, and the virtuosos become known and appreciated for their skill and rise to the top of their craft. Something within their ability sets them apart from all the other people singing those same songs or making those same vaporwave beats.

The same is true of poetry. As literacy has increased, the number of writers has increased. Before, there were a few stand out poets who rose to the top in every generation. Now there are dozens. It’s much easier to get to know who the “best” poets are in a local area or scene, than it is to know the “best” in the nation, because there are so many more people writing poetry and getting it published in chapbooks, online and going to readings.

This is also why a field of creativity such as contemporary poetry and electronic music is impossible to know with the breadth that a person once could know it several decades ago.

Standing out in an overcrowded field becomes part of the game. Instead of making it big, pivoting to making it small is a way to sidestep internal creative pressure. Within the boundaries and limitations imposed by working in a smaller area and at a smaller scale, new possibilities emerge.

Another way to approach the issue is to embrace microcultures. In music, microcultures can be seen as the proliferation of genres. Your band might not be the best metal band. But they might be the best blackened sludge thrashcore. You might not be the best producer of ambient music. But you might be one of the best maker of ambient-emo, or of chiptune emo, or get known for your “hardplaza” skateboard beat productions.
In the poetry world, where free verse has flourished for decades, a poet can set themselves apart by mastering a form such as the ghazal, or as Marilyn Hacker did, the sonnet, sestina and villanelles.

Radio is another area where a person can stand apart from the podcast party. The tricky there thing is getting access to a radio station, but if you have a community station in your community, that is the place to go to build the community. With so many forgettable podcasts, it’s really something special, if you are transmitting into the aether. Plus you reach more random listeners than a focused podcast might. Some of those randos might turn in to your regular listeners.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Another reason to celebrate the local is to become a repository of local knowledge. This is what I wanted to write the most about in this essay, actually, except I went off on a rant against LA and NYC. I plan to revisit and enlarge on this theme in a separate article now that I’ve gotten some more of the bicoastal bile out of my system.

In any place, time stretches back to untold vistas, and to know even some of the history of the land and its people, and those other people, the people we call plants and animals, gives a new sense of appreciation for the land. When we stay close to the land, connected to it, do not move far away from where we are born, we begin to sense and appreciate its longer cycles within the much smaller wheels and cycles of our own lifetime.

In this way, when we listen to what the land has to say, we in turn can become speakers for the land. Our art can be embedded with materials from the place where we live, whether those materials be wood, stone, or mineral.

Those materials might be knowledge about the quarreling between two different families and the feuds that have ensued over generations. Such a tale might get turned into a novel or a ballad. The material might be a song passed on from one person working the coal barges and the riverboats of the Ohio and Mississippi, sang to another and then another. That song gets worked into a set played at a local festival or down at the bar, and in turn inspires the people who hear it to know something more of the many stories that have flowed along those rivers.

No matter where you are, it’s possible to get into a creative flow state, to make and find opportunities for a being a local artist, poet, maker.

The great philosopher Robert Anton Wilson had an experiment in one of his books. It was about perception and how we put filters on our perception and either allow information in or block it out, depending on what he called our reality tunnel, or the filters we see the world through. His experiment was to look for quarters when out and about. If the mindset of looking for quarters and finding them was adopted, the person doing the experiment tended to find more quarters than the person who didn’t bother to look at all. It can be so when we look at the place, we call our own local. From that solid ground our work as writers, poets, musicians and artists can take root and shape.

Do we see opportunities for enrichment of our art? Do we see opportunities for the way our art can enrich the community? Do we see ways we can incorporate the history and specific knowledge unique to a place into what we do, so we can become memory keepers and sharers of knowledge to those who come after us? This is just part of the work of the local artist who has made it small.

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