The worlds of Academia and Literature

There are several parallels between the milieu of literature and those of specialist academic subjects.

• Scale - poetry print-runs might be in the low hundreds. Some academic publications would be happy to reach even those figures.
• Isolation - they both have their cliques and conferences (or festivals). They're both misunderstood by the public.
• Journals - academic paper periodicals were becoming very expensive - several hundreds of pounds a year - and were failing to perform their broadcasting function. Nowadays they're available online, but still at a cost. The periodicals still have to fund publication, archiving, and peer-reviewing. One option is Pay to Publish - to have free access to the publication, but making authors (or submitters) pay. It means a change in grant applications, but dissemination of ideas will improve (poor readers not disadvantaged) without quality control being compromised.
  Some literature magazines work a little like this - they're not free, but submission is at least in part by competition, subsidising printing costs (see Glimmer Train, short Fiction, etc)
• Peer Review - For specialistic publications, reviewers are likely to be friends or rivals of authors. Objectivity is at risk. Poetry's not so different. Anonymity doesn't always help.
• Reception - Whereas in the past reaction was slow and localised, discussion can now be global in hours, thanks to Twitter and blogs.
  In academia, the importance of papers is measured by their citation impact - where (and how many times) they're cited. Funding is affected by the results. People are now trying to extend this to cope with online mentions. Poetry could have the same mechanism were there the funding to set it up. In the States I believe something like this exists, with creative writing tutors getting points for poetry or story publication in approved magazines.
  I'm surprised how few poetry reviews are online (outside of Amazon). When I did a write-up of Don Paterson's Landing Light I found several reviews. For Carol Rumens' Blind spots I had trouble finding any, which makes comparisons difficult.
• Money - The value of publication is that it gets you a job which can earn money (workshop tutor, lecturer).

My pamphlet "Moving Parts"

"Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the HappenStance site (and Amazon).

The average poem is 11 years old and earned 9 pounds. 27 of the 28 poems have been previously published in magazines.

Comments about poetry publishing

I've recently been commenting in other blogs and on discussion boards. I thought I'd bundle my comments here in no particular order

• The market for serious poetry may always have been vanishingly small. Perhaps poetry-reading has reached its natural level, increasing only as the number of poetry-studiers do. The role of much poetry may have been taken over by prose, pop and cinema. Why buy a 9 pound poetry book with 45 sparse pages when you could watch Inception?



• Things aren't just bad in the UK. In Italy recently, Luigi Manzi suggested a moratorium on publishing modern poetry books. Fabrizio Dall'Aglio replied "frankly I think many publishers (me included) would be in favour"


• the poetry book market is in recession and institutional publishers are retreating to their heartland - the stuff that only poetry can do. Comedy? Leave that to stand-ups - they do it better. Narrative? Flash writers do it better. You may not like "pure poetry", "specialist poetry" (call it what you will) but I can understand why funds concentrate on it. It's meant that the gap between "high" and "low" poetry has been emptied, so that there's less flow and intermixing between the extremes (to the detriment of both, perhaps).
• Many publishers don't read slush piles. A row of poetry books is a slush pile one level up. Most people don't have the time to pan for gold-dust, they want help. Buying a poetry book is high-risk. At least with a ropey novel you might learn something about Tudor times, or life in Japan, or you might escape from the stresses of life for a while. A duff slim volume by a touted has-been on auto-pilot is over with in a hour. I know of prose-writers who give poetry another chance every couple of years. I know of non-poets who've tried to get their spouse a present. Choosing a book is hard for them - blurbs need de-ciphering (even those used to novel blurbs have trouble), browsing isn't easy (it's all opaque to them anyway) and reviews are too glowing. Once bitten, twice shy - for a few years anyway.
• Poetry books seem to have become more expensive and thinner while novels have become cheaper and fatter. I can imagine a first time poetry buyer getting "Gift Horses" by Simon Rae (National Poetry Competition winner in 1999, 2nd in 1996; poems in the TLS, Poetry Review) and feeling terribly ripped-off. Too few good poems (indeed - too few poems: 45 pages for 8.95). Someone who buys Prynne because the Guardian says he's England's greatest living poet might well end up thinking this modern poetry stuff's not for them.
• "What else can you get for 8 quid nowadays?" The poet's usual answer's a pint and a burger. But in fact you can get a few symphonies, a decent DVD or even a novel - White Noise. Possession, etc.
• Who defines "publishable standard"? The Academics or the Public? If the public don't want the book, maybe it's not good enough for today's more exacting standards. Suppose poetry books joined in the "cuts of 25%" craze, cutting book-lengths by 25%? I'd claim it would improve many books. If authors feel that the rest merits publication they can send to Magma, Other Poetry etc. If (as I suspect) the mags don't want it, nuff said.
• If expert poetry readers can survive without High Street bookshops or public libraries, perhaps those resources can be aimed more towards the literate poetry first-timer - the wider public "whose understanding of poets is two hundred years out of date and whose awareness of poetry is either a hundred years behind the times or else still stuck in the 1960s" (Neil Astley)
• Loads of "modern poetry" means nothing to prose readers (there are people at the local writers group who apologize for not understanding it. My wife prefers to get angry - though in her defense she only has my stuff to go on). I see too few poetry books that offer choice (or paths from the familiar) for the uninitated. I think a Don Paterson book does. Maybe a Simon Barraclough too. I think the balance is too far towards single-author (single-aesthetic) books.
• Perhaps the poetry market needs to go the computer programs way, sharing its expectations (both from a producer and consumer perspective). There are enough free games and operating systems to keep some people happy for life. That something's free doesn't mean that it's rubbish or that it didn't take years to write, or that the author doesn't become famous. Or maybe the market (as has been suggested here before) should go more the iTunes way, a single at a time.
• More bottom-up evaluation mechanisms need to emerge. I use Rotten Tomatoes for films. If more of us put reviews (not just praise - though in times of shrinking sales, that's tempting) online, something similar could be done for poetry. The tendency to commit to print only positive reviews might de-value their currency and result in unbalanced coverage. Again, it's outsiders who'll have the most trouble sussing the resulting scene.
• Every National Poetry Day we're told that poetry's never been more popular - which is probably true - "Forward Press is the largest publisher of new poetry in the world; we've published in excess of a million original poems since 1989 earning us the moniker: 'The People's Publisher'". In "The Forward book of poetry" intro for 2008 (not to be confused with Forward Press) William Sieghart wrote "The phenomenal growth of interest in poetry of all kinds since [1992] has been one of the most rewarding aspects of running the Forward Prizes". The person who runs the poetry pf site said their hit count trebles in February, on the run up to Valentine's Day. As usual it depends what you mean by poetry.
• I think "voice" is just a more cuddly version of "style", more likely to include personality features than a style is. The word "voice" sounds more natural, more an extension of something within; it's further from technique than "style" is. You'd expect it to be used more in Confessionalism times than Mannerist eras. I'm reading an Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner at the moment. Wilbur's foreward plays safe - he almost alternates style and voice: "sharp intelligence"; "good heart"; "great technical gift"; "strongly personal, in the sense that its tone and vision are distinctive and recognizable"; "a first book in which the poet's voice has been fully found".
• A new style/genre/technique can be a way to take your voice away from familiar setting and habits, into a new climate or maze. You might write something new there, you might never return, or you might bring a keepsake back to ornament your comfort zone. Or maybe nothing happens. But that's common - when scientists do blue-sky research, or songwriters dabble at a keyboard they don't know beforehand how much of their time will be "wasted"
• When US academics came to be assessed by the number of papers they published, the idea of a "minimally publishable idea" emerged - if an idea's just about good enough to justify a paper, why put more ideas in? By spreading the ideas out, more papers can be authored, and the ideas aren't wasted. I sometimes feel (especially with themed or commissioned collections) that poets have paced themselves, making the maximum number of poems from the ideas they have. The results can look like a calmer voice, "quietly assured".
• A book's a cumbersome unit, like 100 pound notes. Some books I've recently read ("Blind Spots", Carol Rumens; "A Fold in the Map", Isobel Dixon) are organised as 2 generous pamphlets. Several other books are in sections that could be separated. Maybe Bookshops are more baised towards books than readers and poets are. Now that Bookshops and visible spines matter less, perhaps collections will find their natural page-length. Magazines could publish work-in-progress.

Acceptances

I've had a disappointing dribble of acceptances recently, though to some extent quality compensates for quantity.

• "Weyfarers" has taken a four-liner
• "Interpreter's House" took a poem that I like but 6 other magazines had rejected.
• In the Ver Poets competition my poem didn't win a prize, nor was it "Highly Commended", or even "Commended", but it's been "Selected" for the anthology.
• I've 2 poems in the Templar anthology

I've been sending away Flash Fiction (creating a spreadsheet dedicated to it) - 1 acceptance and 25 rejections so far. Meanwhile I've 24 things in the post, some going back to last year.

On the plus side, the news about my poetry pamphlet has firmed up. The scanned image is from "The HappenStance story, Chapter 4".

I suspect that nearly all the poems will be re-prints from magazines. In its first year, Joyce's "Dubliners" sold 379 copies, 120 bought by Joyce. I don't think I'll do any better but we'll see. At least I'm in good hands - Happenstance has won the 2010 Michael Marks award.

A list of Flash outlets

The magazines below welcome Flash. Magazines have a more tolerant attitude nowadays, so even if a magazine doesn't explicitly welcome Flash, submission might be worthwhile even if it's a poetry magazine.

Magazine	Word limit	Guidelines	Notes
Boston Literary Magazine	=50, =100, 250	online	"Strong characters"
Paragraph Planet	=75	online
Foundling Review	100-2000	online	Pieces with a "strong emotional core"
dogzplot	200	online	Flash videos accepted
six little things	250	online	Themed
Literary Bohemian	300, 1200	online	Travel-inspired
Flash	360	online	A5 booklet
Quick fiction	500	online	Paper
Vestal review	500	online	Not Jun, Jul, Dec, Jan. Paper. Pays
Flash fiction online	500-1000	online	Pays $50
Everyday fiction	1000	online	Pays $3
Hobart	1000	online	WWW and paper versions. Pays
Eclectic Flash	1000	online
JMWW	1000	online
Word Riot	1000	online	"Edgy... experimental"
FRiGG	1000	online
Flashquake	1000	online	Not Feb, May, Aug, or Nov. Pays
Wigleaf	1000	online
Smokelong quarterly	1000	online
VerbSap	1000	online
The Pedestal Magazine	1000	online	Has reading periods. Pays
Night Train	1500	online
20x20	1500	online	Loosely themed. Rich graphics
elimae	any	online
neon	any	online	Pays
Memorious	any	online
Shadowtrain		online	A poetry magazine really

An Interview with Helena Nelson

Helena Nelson is the founder of HappenStance Press, (shortlisted for the Michael Marks pamphlet publisher award in 2009 and 2010). In August 2005 she launched a chapbook review (Sphinx) whose last paper issue appeared earlier this year. The magazine contained features about poetry publishing and interviews with small-press editors. It's time to turn the tables

You teach, write poetry, prose and reviews as well as run a press. Which of these activities most interfere with others? Do any have beneficial side-effects?
I teach in a further education college. It isn’t very academic, though it does involve teaching some literature. Most of the students I work with dislike poetry. That’s beneficial to me because it keeps the ‘arty’ stuff in perspective. Working in college also pays the bills which is more than just beneficial – it’s essential. I love writing, but I can’t write poems all the time (or even very often). In my case, poems won’t arrive to order (or commission). But at least I can choose to do prose and reviews, both of which give me aesthetic pleasure. I like syntax. I like sentences. I like manipulating words. And the reviews keep my critical faculties sharp – or at least I hope they do – and keep me in tune with what’s going on in contemporary poetry. I’ve spent most of my life wondering what on earth this poetry stuff is really about – why I write it and what it is that I myself and other poets are doing. Critical writing is another way of pursuing that investigation.

Do you still write fiction? Do you feel you've sacrificed your writing to run HappenStance?
I used to write romantic stories for women’s magazines a long time ago. It was a fun and taught me a lot but even back then it used up all my creative juice. Later I did some literary short stories but they weren’t good enough. These days my brain doesn’t work in a short-story way, though I do like non-fiction, reflective writing. I haven’t sacrificed my writing to run HappenStance, although I have given it (I don’t think of it as a ‘sacrifice’) a great deal of time. Often I think it’s good for poets not to have much opportunity to write. It prevents much self-indulgent twaddle. If a poem is a strong one, it will make time for itself.

Is your family involved with HappenStance too?
My daughter Gillian does most of the images for the chapbook covers and she also helps at launches. She’s making the cake for the HappenStance fifth birthday party in June. My son used to review for Sphinx but he’s working in Geneva which is not exactly handy.

You've met or communicated with many small-press publishers. Which do you most envy, and why?
I don’t envy any of them but I admire nearly all of them to varying degrees.

You re-discover neglected poets as well as launch new ones. Which excites you the most?
It’s hard to say. I get excited about each publication I’m working on. However, there’s something magical about working on a dead poet. I don’t mean anything necrophiliac – more a sense of being connected with literary history and seeing connections and patterns. Perhaps even influencing the immortal memory a little bit.

Do you wait for new poets to contact you or do you search for them? If so, where?
No time to search for them. They arrive, either through submissions or recommendations or I meet them or hear them somewhere. Or a name I’ve been seeing in magazines for ages suddenly turns into a person.

What have you been most proud of in your publishing work so far?

• I’m very proud of the Sphinx tripartite review scheme, as I call it. It is fascinating getting pamphlet publications reviewed (and also rated) by three different people. I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else and I’d like to think that eventually people would sit up and take notice if a publication (not necessarily one of mine) got a high rating there.
• After the first year or so, I started the HappenStance subscriber scheme. This was initially because I didn’t want to mailshot people who would put the paperwork straight in the bin. I hate the way flyers fall endlessly out of poetry magazines. For a small payment, my subscribers get a ‘free’ pamphlet, publicity material and merchandise, as well as an annual chapter of the ‘HappenStance Story’. It’s not just a way of pulling in money. It builds an informed readership. I ask people to send back comments on what they’ve read. Most do. Without readers, poets are redundant. Lots of my subscribers are poets of course. Many of them are people whose work I’ve turned down, but I hope they still feel like they belong to something that matters and to which they matter in return.

What role do the small-press poetry magazines perform nowadays? Are they becoming less important? Have you ever been tempted to edit one?
I think they reflect what’s going on at the grass roots of contemporary poetry reading and writing. The grass is teeming with interesting life. It’s full of enthusiasms and obsessions and imitations and cliques and jobbing manoevres and occasional inspirations. You see trends and patterns and sometimes attention-catching writers popping up. Magazines are art forms in themselves too - they say a lot about their editors or editorial boards. I’ve learned a lot from reading the small magazines, and that continues to be true. And yes, I have been tempted to edit one but it would take over my life.

What developments in the literary world do you consider most significant this decade. Are any beneficial?
The World Wide Web. It puts people in touch who would never normally make connections. It brings all the dynamic, changing versions of the English language together. It changes everything. It’s a grand equalizer. I love paper, but I love these connections too. I can’t see where it will go or how much difference it will make to what we call ‘literature’ but I can’t help but be excited by it.

How should public money be channeled into literature? How does Scotland differ from England?
Hell, Tim, I don’t know. I’ve never been a beneficiary of public money, except as a poet doing readings subsidised by the Scottish Book Trust. Sometimes I think all public money spent on the arts is endlessly recycled: I get paid for a poetry reading. I spend the money on either buying poetry or going to someone else’s reading or publishing the next pamphlet. And so on.

If HappenStance were given 50,000 pounds, how would you spend it - more books? more staff so you could do more writing? more publicity? e-books?
I can’t imagine being given that much money. I like the difficulties of managing within a small budget, doing the best I can with what I have available and cherishing modest aspirations. I’m not comfortable about the responsibility of huge sums unless you can first prove the business works, which in my case means covering its costs. I still haven’t got that right. But I think art thrives within constraints: in my own writing, I’m a bit of a formalist. If you happen to have that much money and half an idea to give it to me, however, ask me again. The most precious thing I have is time. £50,000 buys a lot of that.

Why do you do it?
Dedicated to the one I love. Poetry, its evasive, ornery self. And you meet some marvellous people.

The WWW and Literary Standards

In Acumen 24 (1995!) I wrote an article called Poetry, Technology and the Internet. Though the Web's growth has been explosive since then, it hasn't been matched by increased Quality Control. This article (an update from one in Acumen 63) looks at how such mechanisms might e-merge.

I hope I'm not oversimplifying the past too much by suggesting that once upon a time, hierarchies of periodicals, publishers and review placements established a scale of achievement. Further selection for school books, anthologies, awards, and interviews in non-literary media confirmed these indicators of quality. The people who made these choices generally did so as part of their job.

Several 20th century developments fractured this framework. In the US, many authors started working within academia, and with the growth of literary theory the poems to be studied were not always chosen for quality but for how usefully they illustrated a hypothesis. The avant-garde (particularly Modernism), sporadic popularity of performance poetry, and the influence of minority and international poetry popularised new aesthetics that sometimes diluted (or even disabled) mainstream opinion. This fragmentation of genres led to fragmentation in evaluation too. Meanwhile, the poetry book market contracted, so even less significance was attached to poetry's remaining mainstream practitioners and critics.

The Web accelerated and exaggerated these trends, and is increasingly becoming the predominant mode of distribution, but mechanisms of judgement are slower to make the switch. Prestigious web-sites have come into being mostly by prestige transfer - they're Web off-shoots of accredited print magazines or newspapers. Small press examples include Sphinx (Happenstance) and Envoi (Cinnamon), both of which have dozens of reviews online. Sites like www.reviewsofbooks have collected online book reviews which mostly come from sources originating from the paper world. The Web has produced native alternatives - sites like Ron Silliman's (whose authority depends on an individual) and Jacket (which has gained a reputation by the traditional virtues of quality and longevity). However, few web magazines have a reviews section (reviews tend to be in blogs) and there's no hierarchy of reviewing sites, no Web equivalent of "reviewed in the TLS".

As long as traditional paper bastions of canon-formation survive, the Web will have trouble establishing credentials. Prestige depends partly on longevity, which gives paper magazines an edge, and printed magazines because of cost are constrained by space which forces selectivity. If a paper magazines transfers to the WWW with the same editor and amount of material (Stride, for example) one might expect the quality and prestige to be unaffected, but the nature of readership and submissions is likely to change which in turn might have a detrimental effect. In practise, the online magazine is likely to be poorly funded and under new editorship (see the TriQuarterly story).

Each medium sometimes reviews works from the other, but the traffic's mostly one way; paper magazines might only be quarterly, and newspapers no longer have room for much poetry. As paper magazines disappear, the centre of gravity will shift towards the Web anyway but how can the migration of judgement mechanisms be managed and encouraged? Unless an effort is made to preserve informed opinion and debate, reviews will disappear, replaced by adverts or a poetry equivalent of "Richard and Judy". The respected arbiters of taste in the paper world could be singled out for assistance - they need to become visible and active on the Web, not just use e-mail and google. By committing themselves to the Web they'd enhance its authority. Pivotal institutions need encouragement to migrate web-wards in such a way that their influence isn't eroded, and grants could help key review-orientated publications to be put online.

However, the Web isn't a mirror image of the paper world. Some concepts won't translate well, and attitudes might have to change

• Popularism - The people who equate "popular" or "free" with "bad" in the paper world will need to adapt when they use the Web
• Quality - The whole notion of monolithic Quality Control is already an out-worn concept, and of course wasn't even true in the past. The Web is an excellent "word-of-mouth" medium, and there's no shortage of opinion on-line - each blog is a soapbox, and Amazon hosts thousands of opinions. This may not be a bad thing, some say - power will be snatched from the grip of a small clique - but how can consensus emerge?
• Changed Author/Reader relationship - The distance between authors and readers is reduced by social networking, thereby changing the nature of reviewing - it becomes more immediate and viral.
• Archiving - Who will archive? How will poets be rediscovered if by forgetting to renew their service-provider subscription their work disappears?
• Education - What will set-texts look like? How will copyright issues and loss of revenue be dealt with?
• Measuring success - Booksale figures will be replaced by download/hit-rates, and review-counts replaced by blog mentions, but what other criteria will be used?

Behind all this change is the issue of who pays the new "gatekeepers". I'll conclude by listing some possibilities

• Readers may have to pay for some Web publications. The TLS, PN Review and Contemporary Poetry Review already work this way to some extent, and many American magazines are available online to academics, at a price (Poetry is free but that's a special case).
• Perhaps the free-viewing/paying-for-submission model could be adopted - there's talk of using this in the academic world.
• Maybe editors could be bypassed, replaced by an online readers voting system (after all, the TLS poetry competition was run that way).

I think where paper has the advantage at the moment is the quality of the readership - people (often older people) in an influential position are likely to be paper-biased, but not for long.

The year's Writing and Reading

Writing

At the start of 2009 I realised that 3 lifetime publication milestones were within reach - 150 poems, 50 pieces of prose, 1000 pounds. I've been writing a while so these figures are no more than one should expect (rather less, in fact). In the end I only reached the money target. Last year I placed 4 stories, this year none, and yet I think I've written 3 good stories this year and 2 good shorts - twice my usual output. I've only written 2 publishable poems. With my kind of writing an idea can end up as a poem or a paragraph in a story, and prose has had first refusal this year. But I suppose it's early days yet - stories can take a while to get accepted.

Reading

Magazines - I subscribe (or am about to subscribe) to Acumen, Assent, Dark Horse, Iota, Other Poetry, Rialto, Smiths Knoll, Sphinx, Staple, Tears in the Fence, and Weyfarers. I read some other mags irregularly - I especially liked "All downhill from here", a story by Guy Ware in London Magazine, Aug/Sept 2009

Poetry - I read no poetry books between 20/10/08 and 8/5/09. Of the 12 I read in 2009 my favorites were "The Men from Praga", (Anne Berkeley) and "The Striped World" (Emma Jones)

Short Stories - Of the 9 collections I read I most liked "Broken Things" (Padrika Tarrant), "Assorted Fire Events" (David Means), and "Stories of your other life" (Ted Chiang).

Novels - I started reading 12, finished 10. I liked "la solitudine dei numeri primi" (Paolo Giordano), "White Noise" (Don DeLillo), and "Day" (A.L. Kennedy)