What does one do with an essay like the one David Alpaugh penned for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the current state of poetry publication? As an editor who publishes about 50 poems a year here on The Rumpus (all directly solicited), I feel like I have to respond, since I’m contributing to the noise that seems to bother Alpaugh so.
Others have already responded. John Gallaher says of Alpaugh’s claim that he doesn’t know who the best poets writing today are, “In the face of all of this raging against the blur of numbers, he gets his big chance to assist, to cull some of the chaff, and what he says is “I have no idea”? Nope. That just won’t cut it.”
Mark Scroggins replies to Alpaugh’s claim that the potential loss of a contemporary Blake or Dickinson would be the “most devastating result of the new math of poetry. The loss would be incalculable” this way:
That, not to put it politely, is bullshit. (My own answer to the pro-life folks who ask, “What if Beethoven’s mother had aborted him?”: We wouldn’t have missed him, would we?) Yes, the loss would be incalculable, precisely because it wouldn’t be a loss. We only consider Blake & Dickinson essential elements of our culture because we have Blake & Dickinson; if we didn’t have them, we’d be living in a different culture. It’s an effing time-machine game, Mr. Alpaugh – stop playing Star Trek and start reading, writing, & promoting as best you can the poetry you value. That’s the way critical approval, fame, canonization & the rest have always worked.
My problem, though, is with Alpaugh’s math. Let me start by conceding that the arenas for publication have exploded in number in the last ten years with the rise and mainstream acceptance of online publication. But I’m not sure Alpaugh is comparing apples to apples in his construction. First of all, he gets his numbers from different sources.
Len Fulton, editor of Dustbooks, which publishes the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, estimates the total number of literary journals publishing poetry 50 years ago as 300 to 400. Today the online writers’ resource Duotrope’s Digest lists more than 2,000 “current markets that accept poetry,” with the number growing at a rate of more than one new journal per day in the past six months.
Hold on a second–“literary journals” doesn’t necessarily equal “markets that accept poetry.” For example, Thrasher Magazine fits into the latter, but not the former category today, and I have my doubts as to whether Fulton included independent ‘zines (the equivalent, in a way, of online journals today) and magazines that published poetry as an afterthought in his count of literary journals.
Alpaugh also fails to take population growth into account. In 1959, there were about 177.8 million people living in the US. Today, that number is closer to 309 million, and the last decade showed a larger raw number increase than any of the last five. More people=more writers=a larger potential audience, it seems to me.
And finally, growth rates are rarely, if ever static. Alpaugh doesn’t take into account either the number of journals, online or otherwise, which cease publication (yes, it even happens online) or the possibility that the growth in publications will slow over time, perhaps due to their replacement by a new venue for poetry.
There are other problems with this essay, but I’ll leave those to other writers (and I’ll probably link to them as I see them). That the math doesn’t work is enough for me to dismiss it.
3 responses
I’m currently the managing editor of two literary magazines. One, Fourteen Hills, is exclusively print. The other, La Petite Zine, is exclusively online. I think so many people get caught up in the debate over whether too much is or is not being published. Not enough people are debating what publishing really means.
In the past, publishing was much more exclusive. A press, a mag, an editor, their jobs were to choose work they wanted to champion and publish it. This publication usually meant it would get noticed in some way. That’s no longer the case, publication typically means little to nothing. Tomorrow, if the “po-biz” gets their shit together, publication will mean something else. A press, a mag, an editor, and a publicist (emphasis here) will choose work they want to champion and push that writer’s work into the world. This is going much further than laying a book out and sending it to the printer and hosting a wonderful release party where all the poet’s friends buys her or his book or the journal the work appears in.
The discussion should really turn to the ethics of po-biz. Is it ethical to publish so much poetry? Only if, as a press or magazine, you’re committed to publicizing that publication. I’m very unconvinced that the poetry world is interested in this.
I think it’s human nature to want to turn back the clock to a time when you know what’s what — to go back to 1990s and put stock in dot-coms (then fast-forward and cash out just in time), to go to Vegas in 1971 and bet on the Dolphins having a perfect season, etc. But the past only looks stable in retrospect, because it’s decided, dead, and done. Scroggins is right: this is the world we live in; it’s what we do with it that matters, and grousing about hypothetical losses of hypothetical poets (supported by “math” that, yes, would make a 9th-grade Algebra student blush) is NOT the best thing to do. It might’ve done more for poetry if he’d published his opinion as a limerick sequence, or taken the opportunity to promote a few good writers or journals, or maybe even (gasp) link to a poem?
Both complaints are valid here. On the one hand, literature has never looked as different as it does right now. I edit FictionDaily.org, a site that promotes and aggregates fiction online, and part of this work includes looking for new journals that have fiction and listing them on my blogroll. I’ve been doing this for a month going from blogroll to blogroll and authorbio to authorbio, and I’d say I find two new journals every day, on average. (Some days I find one, others I find six.) Mathematically, as Alpaugh mentions, this is a new kind of literature. Not only in bulk (relative to population, MFA degrees awarded, quality of life) but in access (if you want to publish something, just click three times on wordpress or blogspot and get your own blog.) What’s happening here is change, and change is scary. What if the poetry I used to love isn’t poetry anymore? For poets, this may be terrifying.
On the other hand, Amy’s got it. We can choose to be scared of change or we can embrace it and make the best of it and, maybe, improve what we had before. Let’s champion this new poetry. Let’s re-examine what it means to be a poet and a reader of poetry. Let’s find voices we love and cherish and share them. Let’s put pieces of language in our pockets again, and give them as gifts to our friends and relatives. The new math of poetry (and lit in general) makes this possible. (I know Verse Daily exists for the poetry world, for example, that does the kind of publicity that D.W. proposes.)
I forget where I heard it, the movie “Waking Life” I think, but this phrase comes to mind: “There’s no more exciting time to be alive than this moment.”
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