Going Dutch

So it seems that the capitalist system is failing small press publishing in America.

Though I'm no economist, the economics of this look pretty straightforward to me. The literary economy is saturated with presses and journals. The consumers in this economy are consuming what they reasonably can. But the revenue is spread so thin that, in general, no press or journal can survive without external cash injections from grants or credit cards.

In the wake of BlazeVOX-gate, lots is coming out about small press publishing. For the first day or so I think I really did read almost every comment, because I'm really interested in what good can come out of this discussion, for writers and publishers alike. I've admittedly fallen behind on my reading but have a bazillion tabs open in Firefox.

The following list is a generalized distillation of some of what's rising to the surface (at least of what I've seen so far):

• A general consensus that we (writers and publishers) value transparency where (at least) money is involved (and I think we may be starting to admit that money is always involved, even if it's in an "intangible" form like doing one's own book promotion)
• Professionalism is a pretty good default to stand by
• A general consensus that there are not enough consumers for the number of presses and journals (or that the level of consumption itself is too low)
• There are people who believe that the right of publication should be free, and people who believe in shared economic models (for lack of a better term)
• There are people who believe art and money cannot or should not coexist, and people who believe that they can (or at least have to)
• Many publishers are experimenting with new business models, or considering them
• We all at least seem to agree that we wish things were different, or easier, or both

A few months ago I asked on this very blog how we, writers, could improve our participation in the literary economy. I am a writer and an editor, so I include myself in this question. I have thought about this a lot over the past few months; the BlazeVOX discussion has, if anything, helped my vocabulary along so I can grapple with it better.

In a nutshell, answering this question starts with me just being me. In other words, what do I do and what more can I do? (Now I feel like Johannes and the hippie.)

I asked myself what my consumption is in the literary economy (what I take out of it, so to speak. I'll leave out what I put in to the economy for now). In brief, it is, in no particular order:
- Supporting KickStarter campaigns of presses and journals I like
- Subscribing to my favorite literary mags
- Subscribing to one or two "seasons" of presses I love
- Buying a literary journal I haven't seen before but want to submit to
- Buying extra copies of journals in which my work is published
- Registering for AWP
- Buying about a suitcase full of small press books at AWP
- Purchasing gifts for friends and family from small presses and online bookstores like Powell's
- Writing checks for contest fees (which isn't easy, because I really do forget how to write a check)

So let's say all of us are doing roundabout the above. But that's clearly not enough to sustain all those presses and journals out there that we love. What else can we do?

When I saw that 1913 a journal of forms was actually open for submissions, I rushed over to its website. I freakin' love 1913. I saw it has a small reading fee. I didn't hesitate. If anything, I thought, hell, there's no chance my poetry is going to be accepted by 1913 but I'll throw this journal $3 so other people will be and can be and so that 1913 can be a journal.

And that's when it hit me.

I'M A SOCIALIST.

Blame it on Holland. Blame it on my hippie parents or my Montessori preschool. Blame it on my feminism or big Catholic family or the fact that I'm short. Or gay.

I believe in the basic tenants of socialism because I believe in sharing. And I'm starting to see the literary economy like I see my healthcare coverage in Holland:

I pay €135 a month for premium healthcare coverage. On top of that I pay (highish) taxes for healthcare based on my income each year, and a max €175 co-pay (for the whole year). I don't see additional bills once I've hit the yearly co-pay max. And here's the kickers: I have a chronic illness. I take medication daily and see doctors and have blood tests regularly. I also go to a physical therapist once a month for preventative care so that I don't injure myself climbing. Massages are covered. Dentist trips are covered. Hell, until recently, vitamins were covered. Oh yeah, EVERYONE IN HOLLAND IS COVERED.

It ain't perfect, but I don't pay out of pocket for an emergency ambulance ride either.

Imagine we all took a socialist attitude towards publishing, but one of course that didn't rely on "outside" government support. What if we said to ourselves, sure, I'll pay this $3 reading fee or this $20 contest fee or I'll share the costs of my book's publication so that not only I can continue to enjoy the privilege of print but others can as well.

I don't mean to demean the seriousness of our human right to healthcare, but it serves as a good example of where my head's going. It's going away from the economic model I was taught growing up (me! me! me!) to the one I've learned to love in my adopted home (all! all! all!). Johannes Goransson brought up the problematized "Author" in his post and I'd like to take that a step further and complicate the MY WORK IS GREAT AND YOU ARE PRIVILEGED IF YOU GET TO PUBLISH IT idea as being the major contribution any of us make to the world of literature.

Clearly I'm simplifying things. But I hope I'm at least making my point. If we all agree we're committed to seeing writing in print, esp. non-mainstream writing that is not part of the normal capitalist Amazon economy, then does it not follow that we all join in the economics to make that happen? And thus change our minds a bit on what that looks like? The world has changed drastically since I was taught to detest submission fees and vanity presses. Can we not change as well?

I also just want to point out one more thing. In my final post about the help Versal got from some €3000/day strategy consultants, I mentioned that one of the first ideas the consultants had was to charge a fee for submissions. Keep in mind these guys have no idea what's going on over there in the American literary world. They purposefully didn't come into the meeting with much background because we all wanted to see what would come out of the brainstorm if we had a blank page. And the idea came up almost immediately, because they felt that the fee would be a good "channel" to increase writers' participation in the literary economics.

How very socialist of them.

"My comment is bigger than your comment"

I love it when poetic boxing matches erupt. It speaks to my argumentative bones. Which is why I admire Rebecca Wolff, even if I don't always agree with her (do any of us ever always agree with anyone? I'm getting a vague flashback to a Star Trek episode). Since I first started reading FENCE, I've enjoyed most her editorials that take on some element of some current discussion of poetics -- and I admit I have an underdeveloped fantasy that she and I were born under similar star formations.

When these boxing matches erupt, the poetic blogosphere becomes much more interesting. Comment sections are where the real shit happens (I read recently on Harriet's blog yet another call-out of Silliman's blog's too-often overly aggressive comment battles, which Spahr & Young also knocked in their 2007 Numbers Trouble...and yes there's a sense of irony in mentioning the latter, read below). Remember Foetry? That was awesome. It was like my own personalized gossip column. I wonder what it was like before the internet (I was born in '79, so...). Probably similar, just slower, and hell people still start journals and presses out of some irreverent response to some fault they find in whatever came before it/them. Letter presses flying about, essays in the mail, I'm sure it was an exciting time then too for the poetry-gawker. Did any fights erupt at AWP Denver? That was an expensive transatlantic plane ticket for me to have missed witnessing a poetry boxing match in person. But if something did occur of that ilk, I missed it; I was either drunk at the Mercury or asleep at the Robert Haas reading.

So the latest (or, not really, I'm coming at this one a bit late) is the clash between Rebecca Wolff and the folks of the 95 Cent Skool, specifically Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr but presumably with rhetorical guns fired by others if I'm reading the signatures right (refer to Silliman parenthetical above).

Oh, don't worry, I'm not weighing in on this one really. I see positives and negatives on both "sides". I am saddened by but recognize the hopelessness implicit in the Skool's manifesto (which goes something like, "there's not a damn thing we can write that will get through to the world, so we're going to hang out together"), but I also feel that, like most manifestos, this one kind of implodes on itself, as Wolff points out. And reading the Skool's blog reminds me slightly of the Table X "barricade" in Denver and, well, I'm not old (is 31 old now? I can't really tell) but I never was really that cool, and I still believe in non-violence as a tool so I cringe at words like "barricade". Anyway, Versal was super far away from Table X, as the AWP Bookfair landscape goes. And just like in high school I wanted to eat on their side of the cafeteria but I also felt somewhat appalled. I however did visit Table X and, next to buying about $100 worth of books, had a nice chat with Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, which reminded me that most of this stuff is a) for show and b) we're all just trying to sell poetry without becoming capitalist jackasses. Which means sometimes, as in the case of the 95 Cent Skool now, we come across a little more militant and exclusionary for our own good.

My point is: I would have loved to see Wolff's expletives flying through the air at the Rethinking Poetics conference. I hereby vow to find the live version(s) of heated poetics discourse at AWP D.C. Since I don't live in the States and am not, nor have been, in a program there, I don't know who likes who or who has slept with who or who hates who or who's in what "school" or has been kicked out of what "school", so my focus remains on finding, simply, great work for Versal and knowing at least where the epicenters of the discourse are so that if I ever move back to the States I can carry on a conversation with one of those "who's" and make new friends. And here, I suppose, is the crux of my interest: knowing what you're talking about over there makes me feel, for whatever split second, a little less foreign to/in my homeland.