Agree or disagree: Invitational Rants and Riffs

[Marcus Bales]

A company that wanted its vendors and customers to maintain a solid
relationship would be pretty interested in making sure that both could
get in touch with it, either to place or fulfill orders.

I'm not arguing that poets ought to write to order, or that poetry editors
ought to place orders with poets for particular kinds of or pieces of
writing, though I understand that that is what often happens, even if
more or less subconsciously as "schools" of poets coalesce and
disintegrate around various notions of what poetry was, is, or ought to
be.

What I'm saying is that if you're going to start an enterprise you should
approach it with a plan and a realization of how much time it's going to
take when it succeeds. Plan for success. The notion that anyone could
run a poetry magazine part-time with their left hand seems to be an
obvious bit of planning for failure. To complain that there were too many
submissions is to complain about success, or to be woefully ignorant of
the basic facts about starting a poetry magazine.

Have you not seen the numbers? The New Yorker gets over 50,000
poems submitted each year. Fifty thousand. That's a thousand a week;
that's 182 a day; that's 22 an hour. That means that if all the New Yorker
did was open the envelope, remove the SASE, insert the poems
unopened and unread into the SASE, and put the envelope back in the
mail (while discarding unread any envelope without an SASE) that it's a
full-time job just to open the mail and send the poems back unread. If
every envelope has an average of 4 poems (3-5 is what's recommended
by most magazines) and you want to do anything like justice by reading
the poems, you've got to figure a couple minutes per poem. So that's
100,000 minutes in a year. There are 124,800 working minutes in a 40-
hour work-week year, assuming 100% worker efficiency, which no one
can do and no one assumes. Something more like 60-70% efficiency is
what you have to assume of any worker. So that means if you believe
that the New Yorker is giving every poem submitted a fair chance that
there are two or three, maybe four or five, full-time people working on
doing nothing but opening the mail and reading the poems the first time.
That doesn't count the time it takes to then send the ones that survive
the first reading to the people who do the second reading, or third, or
fourth. The New Yorker publishes two or three poems a week, or
perhaps as many as 150 poems a year, out of 50,000. The winnowing
process has to be extreme, as well as extremely time-consuming.

Now, if instead of 50,000 poems a year your magazine gets 10,000, that
means that it may be the case that to open the mail and do the first
reading is the full-time job for only one instead of for four or five people.
And that says nothing at all of all the other work an editor must do. So in
order to get the work of opening the mail and doing the first reading
down to part-time, you have to limit your submissions to 5000 or fewer in
any year -- and even then that means that editing the magazine remains
nearly a full-time job, depending on how much time the further readings,
layout, correspondence, financing, grant-writing, and the rest take, since
opening and doing the first reading for 5000 submissions is going to
take between a quarter and half a year's work. So realistically, if you
want to do a magazine part-time as a whole, you have to limit
submissions somehow to 2500 or even no more than 1000 a year, or the
thing balloons into full-time work rapidly. Even reading 1000 poems a
year seems daunting, doesn't it? especially when you realize that you're
reading 1000 poems once, then 300 a second time, then 150 a third
time, and many of them more often than that as the winnowing process
grinds on.

Who among you who have edited a poetry magazine realized the
numbers going in?

But I suppose the thing that most annoys me about the entire poetry biz
is this casual attitude toward customers and vendors on the one hand,
and the purported seriousness with which the editors claim they take
excellence.

Perhaps poetry editors can get away with not caring about their vendors
or potential vendors because there is always another one eager to take
any shit the editor happens to want to give. I've heard the same about
the music business. Musicians are routinely humiliated and taken
advantage of because there are so many musicians desperate for a
record contract that they'll do anything to get one. Perhaps it's the same
in the poetry biz: there are always poets who will do anything to get
published, take any shit the editor gives out, so editors are pretty casual
about the whole process and, in fact, come to think that they're not
giving any shit. It's just that they're so busy, that their site is being
spammed, that there are too many submissions, there's just too much
work to do, and they feel stressed about it, so they feel justified in
spreading the stress around. They don't answer their mail or their email
or their phones; they say that the process takes months or years to
review the poems submitted; they make jerky little requirements about
paper size or where the name goes or doesn't go or typeface or paper
weight or number of poems or number of pages or stapled or not or
cover page or not or letter or not or bio or not or bio and letter but no
cover page or cover page and bio but no letter or there can be no
evidence that these poems have been sent elsewhere first, or at all, or
only email submissions or no email submissions, and on it goes.

Every poetry editor says he or she wants "the best poems" but not one
of them can write the specs for "best". The best they can do is "Read my
magazine and send poems like the ones in it".

Let's examine that notion. If that isn't asking for writing to order, what is?
It's saying "Write the way I want you to, and you have a better chance of
appearing in my journal". It's saying "Write to order; here are examples
that have succeeded in writing to order in the past". Who can really
believe that anyone who says such a thing is really looking for "the best
poems"? They're not looking for the best poems -- they're looking for the
poems that most closely fit to what they like. It means that what journals
do in contemporary po-biz is insist that poets reverse-engineer their
poems: look in the journal you want to publish in, get familiar with the
kind of poems it publishes, and write like that. What else does "Read the
magazine and send poems like the ones in the magazine" mean?

[trisherina]

Who can really believe that anyone who says such a thing is really looking for "the best poems"? They're not looking for the best poems -- they're looking for the poems that most closely fit to what they like.

Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Bob Dylan

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Originally Posted by Marcus Bales

It means that what journals
do in contemporary po-biz is insist that poets reverse-engineer their
poems: look in the journal you want to publish in, get familiar with the
kind of poems it publishes, and write like that. What else does "Read the
magazine and send poems like the ones in the magazine" mean?

Why don't poets look for a journal that publishes their kind of poetry? The New Yorker caters to readers that like the kind of things that they put in the New Yorker. If your poem isn't the kind of thing they put in the New Yorker, then maybe the question is "Why do you want it in the New Yorker?"

[xfox]

Marcus, my dear, your poetry keeps me coming back here regularly. I'll admit some other clever folks visit, too, but I suppose I most adore you for the Dictionary Game. Thanks, and bravo for amusing us.

[Anna]

poetry [part-time] with your left hand sounds like a very cool name for a magazine or a book

[Marcus Bales]

Originally Posted by xfox

Marcus, my dear, your poetry keeps me coming back here regularly....

Oh, no, this will never do! Perhaps you're too young to have learned, yet, my dear xfox, that one must never encourage poets lest they quote some of it -- or worse, a lot of it. As Lord Byron reminds us

When people say, 'I've told you fifty times,
They mean to scold, and very often do;
When poets say, 'I've written fifty rhymes,'
They make you dread that they'll recite them too;
In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes;
At fifty love for love is rare, 'tis true,
But then, no doubt, it equally as true is,
A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

But unfortunately for you, I'm not strong enough to resist your blandishments, so if you value your time you'll skip right on through the next bit.

DON'T WORRY, YOU'RE NOT IN THIS POEM

Big names draw little name clusters
Like wrecks draw insurance adjusters:
The image their raw hatred musters
Is Manson or Dahmer;
The meetings and greetings and seatings
Of poets at poetry readings
Remind me of sharks at their feedings --
Except sharks are calmer.

The women compete for attention
From powerful people whose mention
May get them promotion, a pension,
Or merely a raise;
Another year fatter and older
They flirt with old flames now grown colder
Then fall for a younger one's bolder,
If less truthful, praise.

The men snort their picayune grouses
And act like low libertine louses
Betraying their principles, spouses,
And significant others,
Drinking to knock back the terror
That there's been a terrible error
And history may yet prove a fairer
Judge than their mothers.

I watch the free-versers and rhymers,
Idealists and down-in-the-slimers,
Sweet hermits and sly social climbers
All chasing careers;
Their earnestness makes me despair of them --
Each likely recombinant pair of them;
You'd think I'd have learned to beware of them,
Shielded by sneers.

But now they have organized locally,
The urban-enraged and the yokelly,
Leaving the business side jokily
Under-explored;
Did I, when asked for my attitude,
Give it? Or give them wide latitude?
No, I accepted with gratitude
A seat on the Board.

[Marcus Bales]

Originally Posted by Hyakujo's Fox

Why don't poets look for a journal that publishes their kind of poetry? The New Yorker caters to readers that like the kind of things that they put in the New Yorker. If your poem isn't the kind of thing they put in the New Yorker, then maybe the question is "Why do you want it in the New Yorker?"

Because most poets think of themselves as fine artists, not as commissioned craftsmen, and the approach of editors, "read the journal and then send poems similar to the ones you find there", is tantamount, I argue in my rant, to demanding that poets accept the worst of both worlds: they are asked to write on commission without a commission; they are asked to abandon their notions of themselves as fine artists without a corresponding guarantee of payment, even if they payment in the gift economy of the arts is no more than the bubble reputation.

I was using the New Yorker as an example of how unlikely it is that the premier places to get published as a poet actually read the unsolicited submissions they receive -- and they're a relatively prosperous publication. Imagine, I'm saying, how if the New Yorker cannot afford (as who can really believe they do afford) to read 50,000 submissions to get 150 poems, what publication _can_?

[topcat]

let me try to understand this. do you want to get paid? or do you want to get published? most people that i know it he "arts" do it for the art itself. money, fame etc. are always an after thought.

[Coffee]

It sounds to me like the difference between being an "arteest" and being a "graphic artist/designer". The first is interested in sustaining him/herself spiritualy through artistic expression, and most often works a "job" to feed the body (and only occasionally gets "discovered"/earns money from art)...the second is interested in sustaining him/herself through paying the bills via art and produces a product that the customer requests or for which a market exists.

So do you want to feed your body, or your soul?

If you want income from art, steady income, then you have to target a market willing to pay for "what they want"...not just what you have to offer, which may or may not have a market.

If you are unwilling to adjust/compromise your artistic output in order to sell to a specific market...then you are an "arteeest" and should probably stick to a regular non-art job for your income...and submit your poetry (with little of no expectation of remuneration) to publications and let it get published, or not, on its own merits as well as upon the whims of whoever gets the submissions. And let the occasional validation sustain you through all the hundreds of rejections.

Having to rely upon "publication" to validate one's art sounds like a drag to me. I have no interest personally in trying to paint what I like and then have to brown nose gallery owners to get my work hung on their white walls for the privilige of getting less than 1/2 of the selling price of the work. I'd much rather create stupid logos and t-shirt graphics for people and get a lot of small reliable checks than hinge my self esteem upon the whims of the ****ing "art crowd" in the hopes of Maybe getting a few huge checks and becoming and "ARTIST" at least until someone else captures their attention/money and I become a "has been".

[Marcus Bales]

Originally Posted by topcat

let me try to understand this. do you want to get paid? or do you want to get published? most people that i know it he "arts" do it for the art itself. money, fame etc. are always an after thought.

Well, sure, one does it for the art itself, but part of it remains that one wants to have an impact -- and one cannot have an impact as a mute, inglorious Milton scribbling away unknown in a garrett. So of course artists want their work to be on public display. It's not so much an after-thought as you might think.

But my point was editors: why they demand "the best poems" without being able to describe what "the best" poems are, and why they complain about the work involved.