During a conversation with a friend the other day (who, sadly, is not a blogger – no link-love) my desire to teach poetry was briefly discussed. Due to my desire to avoid interaction with children, this absolutely means I must have a PhD and teach at the collegiate level and I remarked that I would prefer to teach at the graduate level because that means I would be working with people who might actually care. She suggested this would require me to be a published poet and I should get to work on that. I don’t mean to go into a discussion of whether I am, in fact, good enough to do any of those things, but rather, focus on the culture of poetry, they “why” of poetry.
As I imagine most of you do, I read daily- many, many books of poetry as well as many fine blogs showcasing poetry. In addition to the purely enjoyable experience of language, it is the conversation of ideas that I truly love. I’m not just a poet, but also a philosopher. I voraciously consume information in this media-rich world: science, culture, news, law, technology… all of it is interesting. Again, not just the simple experience, but the interplay of ideas driving the ephemera of expression. I would say that I have a love of ideas and most especially the ideas of poetry. The relation of images, narrative, language- the evocative and illustrative nature of a communication that transcends prose; the attempts to discuss experientially. The act of poetry reminds of a scene near the end of “Pushing Tin,” where Billy Bob Thornton takes John Cusack to be blown like dolls in the wake of a landing jet to experience something that words cannot convey. This, to me, is the essence of what poetry does with words.
I write to participate in that conversation of ideas. I grant that I don’t write things that will drastically change the world and, honestly, if I can touch just one person and bring something of interest to their day (as cliche as that may sound), then I consider that a success, perhaps a small one, but a success nonetheless. This is why I want to teach poetry to people who care about it, to bring this conversation to more people, to people that may not have realized it’s out here to be a part of. And to do that, I must be published.
I’ve never seriously considered seeking publication. Among other reasons, I’ve never been at all certain that my work is good enough, not necessarily just to published somewhere, but in terms of my own satisfaction with the permanence of a poem, with having something fixed, immutable, and out of my control. Faced now with this notion that publication is required, I have a bit of a dilemma. In order to publish (admittedly, this is a bit of a simplification) I have to treat poems as commodities, keeping them secret, set aside, portioning them out to people in the hopes of seeing them in print. I don’t have the freedom to put the poems out there, out here, and let the ideas freely spread. Most publications would consider poems posted here to be published. I disagree with the rational behind that sort of viewpoint.
The argument that people would not buy journals if they could read poems for free isn’t a very good argument. It is an extreme minority of poets that make a living as poets and not as teachers, performers, or vice presidents of insurance companies. Couple that to the fact that most journals pay poorly, if at all, and the journals, the magazines, are clearly the ones trying to get benefit for nothing. Authors are getting nothing but “publication credit” and two contributor copies. But what, it might be asked, about name recognition. Surely putting your name in front of the audience counts for something? Historically, yes. There would have been no other way to get to the audience but through periodicals. And yet media has come a long way from that point. Communication is not limited to the print / mail paradigm, yet that is the paradigm that the poetry journal is based on. Along with the many other benefits the internet provides, it allows communities to be built as if place had no effect. In both providing universally (or nearly so) available content and content that is available asynchronously, the entirety of communication, the entirety of marketing, has been changed to reflect this new method of interaction. “Publication credit,” it seems, has not. By their count, I would have self-published 97* poems or poem-groups in 2007 on this blog. I somehow doubt that would carry much weight on a CV.
Some journals, many of which are online, do not consider a personal blog to be “publishing.” I consider this a much more reasonable viewpoint: a greater acceptance of the shift in community from the face-to-face interactions to what I might flippantly call facebook-to-facebook interactions. In the same manner someone printing broadsheets for friends or a workshop would not be considered publishing, neither should personal blogs because they serve the same function-a direct communication with peers, friends and colleagues. And, much as the poet gets marketing value from being published, so too are journals getting marketing value from poets talking about journals. Marketing gurus Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod spend a lot of their time talking about how traditional marketing, the producer telling the story, has fallen in the face of the internet. It has been replaced, in much the same way content production has been, by conversations between people. As Seth Godin would say, something being “remarkable” enough to talk about; something becoming a “social object,” in Hugh Macleod’s lingo. There is something to be said for the cachet of the elite garnered from the poetry journal but what is it effective for? Is it effective for the poet? I would suggest no, econonomically or in the realm of ideas. Readership of poetry is abysmally low in any form of print, most journals don’t even market to a general audience, but only through other journals. At my local Borders, they carry Poetry, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Columbia Review. The last two, I’m certain, because they are relatively local. My local Barnes & Noble does not carry any. Any poem I hypothetically had printed in something like the Beloit Poetry Journal or AGNI would be read by the bare handful of people living in my area that happened to have subscriptions, or to the bare handful of people who read this blog that may happen to have subscriptions to poetry journals. It would not realistically get my name out there very well; there would be no “social” to the “object.”
Meanwhile, slaving away with no desire but to communicate, I’ve had about 3000 page views since this blog opened at the end of July (not counting the nearly 500 just searching for the quote from “Across the Universe”). Not many views. It’s probably a much smaller number that had any real interest. It’s probably a drastically smaller number that care or read more than once. But unlike print, it isn’t just about how many people subscribe, it’s how many people fit into that “social” sphere.** While print journal subscriptions generally shrink, all I have to do to get more, and more involved, readers is to be more remarkable. Provide a better product for the people who are looking for it. More and better poems, more and better commentary, more and better involvement. More and better ideas in the conversation. I cannot help but think this is the better view. Don’t misunderstand, I read a few journals myself and I hardly ever read anything of length online; there is something to be said for the tactile involvement of a book, the texture of the paper under the texture of the poem. That is a level of involvement that I think will keep print around for a very long time.
The dilemma is not just whether I should be published or not. It is a fundamental question of how I should treat poetry, how I should be involved in Poetry, and, by extension, how we should all be involved with Poetry and it with us. There is no simple answer and I don’t know which way I’ll end up going: selling out for the CV or not. For the time being, I’ll be holding off on posting much poetry here, my own anyway.
* Yes, I had to count.
** For more on this thought, I suggest reading Hugh MacLeod’s how big is your audience? [revisited]
Silly PostScript: This was about three hours in the writing and there may be typos or poorly worded sections that I missed. If you see any of them, let me know.
