It's nice when people take notice.

This email comes from a Blake Walmsley.

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Hi Chad,

Cool blog. I agree with you that published poetry is ephemeral, but I think you may have it backwards.

A small magazine prints (let’s say) 4 to 5 thousand copies of an issue; these issues disperse across the land, make their way into readers’ mailboxes, live on their bookshelves for a few years (maybe), until they fall victim to a spring cleaning or another move to yet another apartment. And are inevitably lost. 15-20 years ago I was digging print magazines like Beatniks from Space, Planet Detroit, The Quarterly, Pudding, Between C & D, briX & others. Where are they now?

Yes, literary web magazines die all the time, but based on what I’ve witnessed, their life expectancy isn’t really shorter than print magazines. The best a print magazine can hope for is to get big enough to where libraries begin collecting them and they are safely collected and categorized and moved into basement stacks where they can gather dust. A website, in theory, can run indefinitely—and also, all the back issues are linked right there. Just my 2 cents.

Blake

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Interesting points, Blake. Hope you don't mind me reprinting the letter. I do it out of gratitude for feedback. Give me a link to your blog if you have one, and I'll put a link here (and If I've met you, please let me know. I'm a little forgetful of names sometimes, but I almost never forget a blog).

Anyway, interesting points to refute me with. Almost in line with my own points, though I didn't emphasize it well enough (if I can be said to even have a point when I ramble).

Both web and print journals do have short life spans, and yes, the library scenario you depict is so fucking spot on. A spring cleaning at one library is how I got what seems to be a first edition American hardcover of Lolita for just fifty cents--a fact that saddened me more than it drove me to excitement, and I'm a hard cover junkie!

Still, say I (big stretch) got my chapbook put in the poetry section of the public library in my home town, and there was a spring sale. My copy, which never got checked out (not so big a stretch), falls into the "For Sale" pile. Some lady picks it up. I would consider that a victory. That lady, most likely a non-writer (or at least a writer with no aspirations to publish) would never find the work in any of the web journals I submit to.

Yes, I'm bringing up books with a single author's work in each one, when you, more appropiately, stuck to anthology-like print journals to make your point. I've also never seen journals in a library. Not like any of the ones I've read (Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review), or, I suspect, any of the ones you mentioned (I swear I read of Pudding fairly recently, the rest are a mystery to me). Where do these anthologies go? They must go somewhere, hmm? Better chance of falling in someone's hands than the websites that just seem to exist for other poets.

Now, there's nothing wrong with sites geared for poets. But where are the new readers, nowadays, the people who go to poetry readings that are not aspiring writers? We have to drag them there, and usually only when it's our readings do we have a prayer of getting them to come and sit. Poets' web sites seem to only preach to the converted. Print journals are no better, but being printed books, they can be opened and read. Some sites seem to fight against this. (see the recent comments on the "secretive" can we have our ball back? here. Keep in mind I love the ball back site and am honored to be included in several issues. But I can see where it could annoy others who don't get it and aren't lucky enough to know the editor. Is that right?

As poets, I think we're up to our ears in sites geared for us. Why not at least try to produce something for someone else besides the published poets and their writer friends to read? Well, this seems futile web-wise, as no one who is a non-poet/non-writer uses the web for literary reasons. Porn. Cartoons and games for the kids. Items for sale on Target.

Yes, I know there are reasons for this that go far into American culture and take more explaning than I think we have patience for right now. Still, the fact is this: If you're not a poet, you're not looking for poetry online. As a poet, I never looked on line for outlets until I was drawn to the website of a print journal I started appearing in. Books? Well, we still have a chance. Small. But still a chance. Again, I blame American culture for my lack of hope.

This brings me to the (somewhat off topic) point that most of the submissions I send to print journals nowadays are going to be put online anyway, nine times out of ten. As a self-publisher, I've been making an effort to keep my publications offline because I want people to buy the collection most of the poems will eventually appear in after they get accepted in ball back? or Shampoo. I made too much of an effort in my first book to have people just shrug and say they can get most of it online whenever they want.

I'm an anomaly in the poetry world, I guess. While I'm not harboring any illusions that I can make a living just off of writing poetry, I'd like to get to a point where I'm not throwing money out year after year to do it. Poets seem to shrug at this, now more than ever with the proliferation of websites. This baffles me a little bit, given the contraversy of the internet and how people couldn't support themselves post-dot.com just by putting their material out on the web for free.

Certain cartoonists I read who offer their work for free to struggling sites (like Salon) in order to get a readership that's willing to pay for their work would be tearing out their hair to hear how poets just want to throw out poems to the world at a moment's notice. Here we are with the least overhead of any artist or writer (I'd think it more impressive if someone wanted to put free novels out). And we're determined to be as much a starving artist as any other! Why? I don't know! How can we change this and try to get people into poetry outside of Def Jam and slams? I don't know! I've never even given it thought! No one seems to! And we seem to like it this way! Free poetry for all that no one will read!

Equally frustrating is that all we're doing with this free poetry attitude--given the set up of poets and web sites--is giving this poetry to other poets. Thanks, but it's too close to workshopping for me.

Maybe this is chiming the end of the journal and the game of passing your name out to enough in hopes of a book deal. Probably not, but when you see ball back? listed as a valid publication in books like Franz Wright's The Beforelife, it's clear that the stigma electronic journals carry is close to gone. Now, how do get anyone to read them?

Thanks again for the email, Blake. It made me smile and got me thinking. Again I offer no real argument, just frustrations I'll share with anyone who'll read them.