Links and Responses: Subscriptions, Publishing, Communication thru Style

Various things have caught my eye lately of people blogging about poetry, reading or writing it. At the Guardian there was an article of a woman reflecting how she felt after she read the entire stack of books nominated for a poetry prize. After immersion in poetry she started to crave novels but when free to read anything again, she started getting an itch for more poetry. [via poetry blog hut]
Do other people know about the electronic literary organizers of online poetry. It’s a bit out of date with dead links here and there but has some fascinating things among its “2084 works, 1083 authors, and 151 publishers”. Flash-done poetry was in there somewhere.
Elsewhere, you can watch poets write a poem, like Marge Piercy, in real time or at 4x speed.
By some forgotten chain of links I found myself at the samples for American Tanka Magazine. There’s some really outstanding poems there that are much more resonant and dense than other places I usually come across.
Ira Lightman’s statements included some interesting ideas, for example, puzzle poetry, that habit of writing where there is a code-breaking, allegorical reading where one needs to delve over and over to catch the layers of symbols. It’s a good term for it. He also mentioned the idea of font or formatting as airbrushing ideas. I’m not sure that I’d agree with the notion that it is as cosmetic, or part of refinement or mood. It seems integral in some parts. But taken to a larger degree, would an idea be altered by nature of being stuffed into Times New Roman when its true nature is more Arial or handwritten. At what point would changing spacing make the poem, or it make the spirit of the poem to be in an unrecognizable disguise?
Collin Kelley is frustrated over what counts. Deborah at 32 Poems joins the debate that never dies of what counts. Here angle is Do blogged posts count as published? It seems seems similar to no simulantaneous submissions rules. The most amusing criticism I heard against that is what if you were out of work and only allowed to apply for one job at a time but had to wait to hear back about it for 6 months to a year? It’s a false analogy, there being more poems than the one person. Still it seems reasonable that if readership were overlapping that a poem shouldn’t be in both places, a blog and the print or online publication. But since the readership isn’t likely to be in both places, I wouldn’t think there is competition. It seems overly traditional to secure rights that way.
What is courteous use that makes everyone feel good seems to be the bottom line. Some people seem paranoid to never blog their poems because it will be stolen. Certainly once something is in the public sphere, it goes out of ones hands. To take an analogy, once someone paints a painting and then sells it, there’s no control over where it goes. Someone can reproduce it, paint over it, build on it, sell it on mugs, photocopy it and incorporate parts into other works. It all might be seen, by this changing, to dialogue with the art, promote it. What if the artists name is no longer attached? Does it not matter because it’s the idea or the subject or the feeling that matters not the credit. Think of When I am Old I shall wear purple poem that gets distributed with “author unknown” by times instead of being attributed to Jenny Joseph. It spawned the whole red hat society, which itself seems to be a unique snowflake with patent protection despite it being a group of free social association. But I tangent.
Giving credit to where it is due matters. Supporting the magazines that support the writers can work a good feedback loop. One would want to do mutual promotion ideally. When a poem is produced later, give a plug to who supported it first. When a publisher produces later things, give a plug to who they published earlier, in cross-promotion, relationship-building.
Relatedly to that, Joe Blades made some points on subscribing to literary magazines vs. submitting to them. He talked about the real cost of researching markets i.e. subscribing to magazines before you submit. It would run for him, $1500-$2000 a year. That’s before we consider shelf space and time for all that lot. In a way I want to subscribe to loads. At the same time what I like to read is not necessarily what I like to write and there’s only so much I can read.
I can see both sides. I’ve been an editor and seen what people give me and been dumbfounded that they didn’t even look at where there were sending it. It gives something of a low-earning salesman handshake looking straight past a person to receive a scattershot submission for the slushpile. Even a peruse of the table of contents would answer their questions of length or scope. It’s frustrating if you let it be.
On the other hand, how many thousand literary magazines are there? Anyone can set up a circle of friends, a blog or pdf, or a photocopier print run up to getting a publishing house and perfect binding and keep it going for decades of volunteer hours.
To know the entire scope of any given community and history of a magazine is basically a relationship. It would take years, and then the editor changes and you can’t use that knowledge. To fit to market, it’s a bit of research, a bit of luck, a bit of poking around and seeing what works when as a match for style, ideas and timing. A bit random what gets picked up as people were saying at Nick Bruno’s.
K Silem Mohammad’s post takes the ideas wider at lime tree. He was talking about accessibility and how poetry is culturally embedded. Without the context of what the reader brings, there is no drama or crisis or arc in the poem. The crisis is outside the poem in the sense that, although the poem may reach for a resolution, the poem doesn’t struggle hermetically inside itself. Naturally enough. How could it?
He said in part about the clash between territories of schools of thoughts of who gets to call their communication poetry, “most of them [crises in poetry] are attributable to the fact that more or less equally intelligent people disagree with each other violently on questions of value, each side presenting perfectly reasonable arguments.” This seems sound.
In comments Kent Johnson quoted James Matthew Wilson in the Contemporary Poetry Review as saying,
“This poem was intended to appear in a journal, to be glanced at by other young “poets” of certain ambition, and to reaffirm for them that poetry consists of little more than a series of ill-configured disjunctive sentences. Such a practice derives historically from the surrealists but, as we shall explore in a later chapter, has no connection with surrealism besides the historical.”
This is much harder for me to gain an entry point. All I get is some sort of railing such as one would do against jargon or a particular dialect or register as being proper and improper. Does the poem communicate something in the ballpark of what one intends to who wants to get the communication. If not, there’s something we know and can make actionable to be more a custom fit to someone else, or the people engaging coming to research one another so they can widen themselves to the worldview of the other to build a common ground and appreciate where the other is coming from, why the style or content matter, who they are referencing and what internalized norm they are reacting to.
On one last note, John Baker, a crime fiction writer in the UK, is spending the month posting responses he got to the question What phases are involved in the creation of a text?. How different people conceive of the process should be interesting to see unfold. my response is already posted.