Online poetry submission fee kerfuffle

C. Dale Young, the poetry editor of New England Review, announced on his blog last Friday that the literary journal would begin charging $2 for online submissions. Similarly, Ploughshares is now charging $3. Like many literary journals, NER and Ploughshares are on the verge of extinction because of university funding cuts, the economy and a nosedive in subscriptions, which were never enough to keep the lights on anyway. 

C. Dale had alluded to NER charging earlier in the summer when he posted a poll on his blog asking what readers would be willing to pay for online submissions. The majority said they would not pay. I was one of them. Since then, I've had a change of heart. Here's why.

I consider the post office one of the seventh circles of hell. Even getting in the parking lot to buy stamps at a machine in the lobby, which may or may not be working, is nightmarish. I hate the post office so much that I set up an account at a small business center up the street from my apartment to handle all my mailing with no fuss or muss. The couple of extra cents they add to stamps or extra dollar or two they add to box up my packages -- especially when I was doing the publicity for Conquering Venus -- is money well-spent. It's not only saved timed, but my sanity.

So, I was thinking about this yesterday when I was taking my old word processor disks over to the business center for them to package and mail. I had emailed the address and packing instructions earlier, so all I had to do was walk in and hand the disks to the person at the counter. If I'm willing to pay for this service, why should I blanch at paying $2 to submit some poems to a magazine? Paying for paper, printer ink, envelopes and stamps surely adds up to more than $2. The convenience of submitting online from the comfort of my own home is most definitely worth $2. Poet Stacey Lynn Brown said we should consider it "e-postage." I like that. 

The thing is that both NER and Ploughshares still accept snail mail submissions absolutely free, so some of the folks freaking out about this affront to the literary world seem to be overreacting. Steve Fellner described this new practice as "creepy," which seems more like a headline grabber than an honest critique of the situation. Fellner argues that graduate students will suffer the most from the $2 or $3 online charge, but since we're talking about a handful of journals, it seems like an overinflated argument. Those poor graduate students will be schlepping over to the post office to buy stamps, which ranges from $4.40 for a book of 10 to $8.80 for a book of 20. You can do the math on this, and be sure to add the stamp that must be affixed to the SASE. 

What I found even more interesting were some of the comments under Steve's post. One commenter says that the argument about the cost of stamps is irrelevant, because the journals are essentially charging a "reading fee" and that postage is just assuring delivery. I made a comment that I'd rather pay $2 on a submission to a good journal than pay $25 to enter the contest lottery and that more and more poets were turning to self-publishing and online journals. Some anonymous commenter said my logic was skewed and that online journals were second-rate venues with bad editing and bad poets seeking "instant gratification and self-justification." This anonymous person also said they would never lower themselves to publishing online. It's a well-known print journal or nothing. With that attitude, I sincerely hope it's nothing for this moron. Sadly, this  elitist snobbery is still widely prevalent in the poetry world. Somehow, the poetry just isn't good enough if it isn't in ink on a printed page.

For shits and giggles, let's pretend that American Poetry Review, Paris Review and Kenyon Review announced they were going online because a print journal was too costly to produce. Would those journals suddenly become second-tier? What if they charged an online subscription fee and/or a $2 submission fee to keep their editorial staff intact? Would you still submit? In the very near future, you may not have a choice.

The fact is that the next generation has very little use for physical books or magazines -- and that goes double for poetry journals. They want their books online, on their iPhone or their Kindle. Just last month, Amazon reported that the purchase of ebooks surged past those of traditional hardbacks. If that trend continues, books, magazines, journals and newspapers will be online only. And if that doesn't work for you, anonymous poet, where are you going to publish?

The fact is that there are many fantastic online literary magazines. A few that instantly come to mind are Boxcar Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, MiPOesias, Hobble Creek Review, The Pedestal, The Cortland Review, 2River, LOCUSPOINT, Barn Owl Review and Blue Fifth Review. They don't accept every poem that comes over the transom and the work they are publishing is usually better than what's appearing in the "important" print journals. Slagging these journals off because they don't meet your prestige-o-meter is ignorant and incredibly shortsighted. Poets getting their panties in a wad over $2 online submission fees to the print journals they uphold as the last bastions of "real poetry" are hypocrites.

Poets, get your heads out of the sand. The times they are a-changin'...

Remembering Katrina

St. Louis Cemetery #1 (New Orleans)

Let tall grass grow where your heart used to beat.
Wind and water is other world, immaterial
in alabaster mansions, souls just out of reach.
Heat never dries the ground here, just bones.
We reconstitute at night as saints and haints,
loosed from our bags of flesh and out over the ramparts.
Storms come and go, along with disease,
they lined us along the levees in fever years.
City of despairing angels, this storm will pass,
give us your sons and daughters, keep your guns
and watches, we all lay back in darkness.
We laugh at dirt and damp, trying to reach up
and claim its prize.

Past and future writing

The photo at left is my 20-year-old Brother word processor. I've been carting this heavy thing from apartment to apartment since 1991 and I decided it was time to take it to an upcoming e-recycling event. But first I wanted to go through all the floppy disks (remember those?!) and see what was salvageable. Although the word processor used regular floppy disks, it formatted the documents using a proprietary system incompatible with modern computers.

I had a box full of disks filled with early drafts of poems, ideas for screenplays, short stories, early versions of my plays Porcelain and The Dark Horse, and the very first draft of the screenplay that became Conquering Venus. I also found 50 pages of a stage adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady I'd started back in the mid-90s, and it's actually pretty damn good. I don't know if Henry James' work has become public domain, but I'm going to check it out. I haven't written anything for the stage in more than 15 years, so this might be a way to slip back into it. I had also started a quasi-memoir and was stunned to find I'd written nearly 150 pages before I abandoned it.

I spent two evenings going through all the disks. Most of them I destroyed, but I consolidated documents on to three floppies and I'm sending them off this weekend to a company called Pivar that will convert the the disks' contents into Word documents. Pivar is one of the few companies in the world that still does this kind of conversion and it ain't cheap: $40 per disk. It would take months (or years) to transcribe it all and the printer part of the word processor uses  ink tape cartridges that are no longer made, so it's worth the cash.

I want to keep some of the writing from these disks for my archives, but the memoir, short stories and Portrait of a Lady adaptation are projects I would like to turn my attention back to once I finish the Venus trilogy. Speaking of Venus, I've posted an update on the second book and a synopsis on the Conquering Venus Blog. Check it out!

Thanks again to all the folks who commented on the "A larger place at the poetry table" post. Great conversation and ideas.

More than this: A larger place at the poetry table

The suicide of Virginia Quarterly Review's managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, is very disturbing, especially after reading the coverage at The Hook, HTMLGIANT and on Alan Cordle's blog. There are all sorts of allegations flying about, but what's clear is that VQR lost the plot a couple of years ago when editor Ted Genoways allowed belittling, offensive comments to be posted on the journal's blog about submissions they received. It was unprofessional and full of contempt for the audience, which is other poets. Depending on whose figures you believe, VQR's quarterly circulation is between 2,400 and 7,000 copies. A drop in the larger literary bucket. The blog post generated enough controversy that  Genoways published a back-handed apology, where he complained that he and the editors were fed up with passionless writing. I read plenty of poetry that is passionless and inert, but I don't use my blog to humiliate other poets. It tarnished VQR's reputation, but with a $600,000 yearly budget, I guess the journal could afford to squander some of its literary cache.

Reading the VQR coverage, Anis Shavani's laughable "critique" of America's "overrated" poets and writers in the Huffington Post, and Justin Evans' blog post about how he received nasty comments from a grant panelist about a poem, which was accepted the next day for publication and showered with praise by an editor, once again raises the question of how you determine "good" and "bad" poetry. I've made the assertion before on my blog, and still believe it to be true, that it's impossible to lump poetry into nebulous, subjective words as simple as "good" and "bad." Some shitty sympathy card verse might make you back away in horror, while it brings others to tears. You can't invalidate someone else's emotions, even if you think -- and I know some of you do -- that average readers don't know the difference between "good" and "bad" because they are part of the uneducated masses. And if that's the case, doesn't that mean "serious" poetry -- the kind published in journals like VQR, The Paris Review and Poetry -- is just being written by academics for academics?

So, I have questions for all of you who read this blog: How we can get back to the pleasure of the art rather than the jockeying for position, awards and writing personal attacks masquerading as "literary criticism?" How do we set a larger place at the poetry table for those working outside the academy? How do we make the art of poetry interesting and compelling to the next generation that doesn't want an MFA or teaching gig? How do we take the insular and make it open?

As a postscript, I received the latest issue of The Writer's Chronicle yesterday. It fell open to the center spread with details about the 2011 AWP Conference and there were the same old faces being trotted out as the literary stars of the conference. The same ones that get trotted out year after year, and while I actually like a few of them, I'd like to see AWP champion some new stars. Why isn't Oliver de la Paz's photo there? Or Steven Reigns? Or C. Dale Young? Or Barbara Jane Reyes? Or Dan Vera? Or Jackie Sheeler? Or Karen Head? Or Reb Livingston? Or Denise Duhamel? Or Cecilia Woloch? Or Sarah Maclay? Or Charles Jensen? Why isn't David Groff and Philip Clark's Persistent Voices anthology of poets lost to AIDS being touted as a headline event? Why isn't the Saint Paul slam team, which won this year's National Poetry Slam, giving the keynote address? In my head I was screaming like Hawkeye Pierce in that episode of MASH where he become so fed up with the food in the mess hall that he climbs up on a table beating a spoon against a metal tray: We want something else! We want something else! You have nothing to lose but your cookies! 

Hot! Hot! Hot! Poetry

Here's the group photo from last night's Hot! Hot! Hot! Poetry Reading at Bound to Be Read Books in East Atlanta Village. There was a standing room only crowd! A great evening of poetry!

Poetry Bits & Bobs

The great poet and editor Sam Rasnake has a new chapbook, Inside A Broken Clock, coming from Finishing Line Press. You can pre-order it now until October 15. Speaking of Finishing Line, I'm hosting a reading by Atlanta poets who have been published by the press on Thursday, Sept. 30, 7:15 p.m. at the Georgia Center for the Book auditorium in the Decatur Library. This is part of the Poetry Atlanta series and will feature JC Reilly, Eve Hoffman, Bob Wood, Ann Lynn and Jenny Sadre-Orafai. It's free, so mark your calendars.

Congrats to poet Ed Madden, whose poem "Jubilate" won the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival broadside contest. You can read the poem at this link. The limited edition broadside will be on sale during the Oct. 13-16 festival and Ed will be on hand to read his winning poem. C. Dale Young was the judge for the contest.

Tomorrow night (Aug. 21) I'm going to read some new poems at the Hot! Hot! Hot! Poetry Reading at Bound to Be Read Books in East Atlanta Village. The evening begins at 7:30 p.m. and features Marissa McNamara, Rupert Fike, JC Reilly, Cleo Creech, Alison Ross, Jeff McCord, Michelle Newcome, Jef Blocker, Alice Teeter, Timothy Wright, Maudelle Driskoll, Don Perryman, Donovan Perry, Libby Ware, Mose Hardin and Franklin Abbott. Should be a fab evening from an eclectic bunch of local poets.

Mid-Week Music: Don't Walk Away - Toni Childs

This post is for Jessica Handler, who tweeted tonight that she's been rediscovering the brilliant Toni Childs. In one of those synchronicity moments, I've been listening to her debut masterpiece, Union, for about a week now. I discovered Toni back in 1988 and have loved her ever since. I interviewed her in the early 90s and saw her twice in concert. Toni's voice is like no other, so raw and powerful. House of Hope (another brilliant album), The Woman's Boat and Keep the Faith are her other albums and most definitely worth a listen.