Okay, the Slate video was cute the way it compared newspaper reporters to starving children in Africa, but it reminded me of something the poet Jake Adam York suggested on Facebook a few months ago–that with the large number of both university and independent journals seeing their funding drying up due to the bad economy, everyone who submits to journals ought to subscribe to one new journal a month.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve already got a stack of books that you haven’t gotten to yet, and the idea of adding to the pile might not be all that appetizing a prospect. Subscribe anyway.
I’m not going to suggest, as the Slate video jokes, that you ought to use your copies of The Threepenny Review to wrap fish, or that you should pull apart the latest Southern Review (one of the biggest facing the budget axe) to line a birdcage. You could read them, or donate them to a local library (or even a homeless person).
The two I’ve linked to are the first two I’ve subscribed to under this initiative. If you have suggestions for journals I or anyone who wants to join me on this ought to consider, leave a link in the comments or drop me a line at poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.
One response
Similar to the local library suggestion — your local book bank. Not communities have them, but maybe yours does. Here’s an example: http://www.newhavenreads.org/programs/bookbank.html. The advantage is that the books come in, the books go on the shelves. There’s not a lot of rigmarole about cataloging.
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