John Paul Davis

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

In Blog 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?

Impermanence & the Social Nature of Poems

In Blog on 17 March 2010

This fabulous blog posting over at the Ploughshares site is a must-read. Although Alicia Jo Rabins, the author, doesn’t mention performed poetry or the slam at all, I think the article applies perfectly to performed poetry and highlights two aspect of performance that I think are part of what makes it essential for to my writing process:

enacting writing community as a team sport–another performative act which is by nature imperfect, lived out in time and through bodies, more analogous to writing a poem than to having written one. Some poets retain a vivid sense of live performance even on the page; Allen Ginsberg is among them. Perhaps partly because he structured his line-lengths in “Howl” according to the length of his breaths, you can feel the physicality in the poem; you can feel the poem breathing on the page. It doesn’t feel like an artifact.

This is something I’ve been stressing to a lot of the “page” poets I know — that imperfection is what marks really interesting and powerful writing. I read an interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead in The Believer recently in which Yorke describes Jonny Greenwood’s role in the band, which includes encouraging the band to “add some wrong notes” to the music. One of the analogies I like to use is of a cubic zirconia — being synthetic, a cubic zirconia is flawless, and it’s this lack of flaw that makes one distinguishable from a diamond to the naked eye.

Then there’s this:

Witnessing the real risk of process is one reason why artistic community (the workshop, the residency, the collaboration) is so important. We celebrate each other’s successes, but we also observe the fruitful disasters, the failures that inherently attend real risk-taking. Through thoughtful critique, we help each other to consider those failures without attachment–simply to compost them and harvest the richness they contain, to deepen the process, and refine the work.

The “risk of process” is something I think slams especially bring to poetry. Of course it doesn’t always work, and of course, people who are there to win instead of the have fun and learn will miss out on this and end up making poems that game the system more than they do any of the things I find most interesting and useful about poems, but for myself, I find that putting a poem in front of an audience to be judged by non-experts often highlights that risk. There are other kinds of risk. I’d never substitute a slam for an actual critique from a trusted critic or for a good workshop. But it becomes another, very gritty arena in which to take risks with my poems, and it becomes a location for the community. There are other arenas, of course. Shows like The Encyclopedia Show emphasize the communal aspect of creation. The show’s curators prescribe topics and give writers a month to compose their poems. This simple restriction requires the writer to step outside her usual subject matter, often resulting in really powerful, interesting writing.

The whole thing is really quite insightful, and there’s a great video interview with Allen Ginsberg posted in the article. Go check it out.