John Paul Davis - 100 Poems, 100 Days

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What is the point, other than for the fun of it, to getting published in literary journals?

In Ars Poetica on 2 September 2010

Since I just started Bestiary Magazine a few months ago, a project into which I pour a considerable amount of my time, it might seem strange that I’m asking this question, but I think it’s an interesting one. Writers try to get into these journals for a multitude of reasons; some believe its a necessary part of creating or maintaining a writing career for themselves, some do it because they’ve been told by someone else (a teacher, a writer they admire, friends) that it’s a necessary part of being a writer, and some do it because they see that other writers do.
Very few, I imagine, do it for fun, which seems backward to me. Literary journals in general, and poetry journals in specific have incredibly small circulations. Poetry Magazine, for example, which is one of the most popular and well-funded poetry journals, has a circulation of 30,000. That’s about one tenth of one percent of the population of the United States. By comparison, The New Yorker’s circulation is almost 1.1 million — that’s 36 times the circulation of Poetry.
This is where the whole “art for art’s sake” argument will usually get brought to the table, and my response to that philosophy is to counter with one of my own: art for fun’s sake. I have a lot of complex overlapping reasons for reading and writing poetry, but the best summary of them all is that I read and write poetry because I enjoy doing so. It’s fun.
That, incidentally, is also why I participate in the social activities surrounding poetry reading and writing – activities like poetry readings, workshops, poetry slams, and trying to get published – because I enjoy all of those things. I enjoy meeting new poets, encountering new poems, and seeing where my poems fit in to all of that. The one thing I am not trying to do is make a career, or make money out of the venture, which, I know sounds like I’m advocating “art for art’s sake,” but I’m insistent that I’m not: I don’t have anything close to the high-minded ideals of people who do things because they’re artists. I imagine that if I liked golf or fishing or scrapbooking or the stock market I’d do those things with just as much passion and interest as I do reading and writing.
If the game of getting poems published in literary journals were not fun for me, I wouldn’t do it. And there’s no real compelling reason other than fun that I can think of to do it. One rarely, if ever, reaches new readers via such a medium; most of the people who buy and read literary magazines are other practicioners. If my own experience working for the several literary publications I’ve been a part of holds true across all literary journals, the number one demographic of buyers for a given issue is the people who were published in that issue and their loved ones. The second-highest demographic is people hoping to get published or who already have been published.
The best method for getting published frequently is to do what my friend James called “carpet-bombing” — to literally constantly send out poems to any and all journals until someone picks your poem up. That’s a full-time job with a pretty low rate of return.
That is why a great many of the poets I know who started in the poetry slams are uninterested in getting published: why do all that work for pretty much no reward other than being able to add another title to one’s bio?
Fun is the only satisfactory answer I can come up with. So here’s my unanswered question: why don’t more literary journals try to make the whole process more fun for the poets?