Best Poetry Magazines (cont'd)
Stanford Friedman
Subject: Re: Best Poetry Magazines
Distribution: "always same ask"
References: <35222f$p...@morrow.stanford.edu> <MAVERICK.94...@beech.cs.b\
erkeley.edu> <352fit$t...@er5.rutgers.edu> <MAVERICK.94...@beech.cs.
mave...@beech.cs.berkeley.edu (Vance Maverick) writes:
>> > Writers in places like _Sulfur_ can try
>> > harder -- with results good and bad.
>> Chances are the poet who is sending his/her work to Sulfur
>> is also sending it to the New Yorker.
>Seeing this, I sent e-mail to Charles Bernstein, a widely published
>poet who has two pieces in the last Sulfur, asking him this question
>-- I'm afraid net.chutzpah is catching. He responded that he has
>never sent anything to the New Yorker. Incidentally, he referred me
>to a piece of his called "Water Images of the New Yorker", published
>in Harper's in 1989 -- has anyone read this?
> Vance
Yes, this piece was required reading when I was at Columbia U. in
'89. It has to do with the remarkable number of poems published in
the NYer that contain water imagery. The figures are startling, and
hilarious. I guess it makes sense that Bernstein never sent to the
NYer, his type of "language poetry" has rarely seen life upon this
mag's pages. And perhaps after "Water Images..." he wasn't exactly
on their most-loved list.
--
Who knows what email lurks in the heart of men?
Vance Maverick
question about submitting to the New Yorker. It's available online
(at the University of Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center,
gopher://wings.buffalo.edu/11/internet/library/e-journals/ub/rift and
thereabouts), but, with his permission, I'm posting it here, because I
think it will interest the original poster on this thread and anyone
else who wonders about poetry and the poetry establishment. If
nothing else, you may be curious about the economics of running a
small press (about halfway through the article).
(c) 1994 by Charles Bernstein. All rights reserved.
Charles Bernstein
Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation
In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.
-- Muriel Rukeyser, "In Our Time", The Speed of Darkness
Imagine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade
presses and all the university presses in the United States stopped
publishing or reviewing poetry. New poetry in the United States would
hardly feel the blow. But not because contemporary poetry is marginal
to the culture. Quite the contrary, it is these publishing
institutions that have made themselves marginal to our cultural life
in poetry. As it is, the poetry publishing and reviewing practices of
these major media institutions do a disservice to new poetry by their
sins of commission as much as omission -- that is, pretending to cover
what they actually cover up; as if you could bury poetry alive. In
consistently acknowledging only the blandest of contemporary verse
practices, these institutions provide the perfect alibi for their
evasion of poetry; for if what is published and reviewed by these
institutions is the best that poetry has to offer, then, indeed, there
would be little reason to attend to poetry, except for those looking
for a last remnant of a genteel society verse, where, for example, the
editor of The New York Times Book Review can swoon over watered-down
Dante on her way to late-night suppers with wealthy lovers of the idea
of verse, as she gushed in an article last spring. Poetry, reduced to
souvenirs of what was once supposed to be prestige goods, quickly gets
sliced for overaccessorizing, at least if the stuff actually talks
back. If poetry has largely disappeared from the national media,
nostalgia for poetry, and the lives of troubled poets, has a secure
place.
One of the cliches of the intellectual- and artist-bashing so
fashionable in our leading journals of opinion is that there are no
more "public intellectuals." The truth of the matter is that writing
of great breadth and depth, and of enormous significance for the
public, flourishes, but that the dominant media institutions --
commercial television and radio, the trade presses, and the nationally
circulated magazines (including the culturally upscale periodicals) --
have blacklisted this material. Intellectuals and artists committed
to the public interest exist in substantial numbers. Their crime is
not a lack of accessibility but a refusal to submit to marketplace
agendas: the reductive simplifications of conventional forms of
representation; the avoidance of formal and thematic complexity; and
the fashion ethos of measuring success by sales and value by
celebrity. The public sphere is constantly degraded by its conflation
with mass scale since public space is accessible principally through
particular and discrete locations.
Any of us teaching college will have ample proof of the
frightening lack of cultural information, both historical and
contemporary, of even the most searching of our new students. These
individuals have been subjected to cultural asphyxiation administered
not only by the barrage of network television or MTV, but also, more
poignantly, by the self-appointed keepers of the cultural flame, who
are unwilling to provide powerful alternative programming, prefer to
promote, as a habit and a rule, a sanitized and denatured version of
contemporary art, debunking at every turn the new and untried, the
edgy or the cutting, the odd or unnerving; --that is those works of
contemporary culture that give it life. Could I possibly be saying
that the crisis of American culture is that there is inadequate
support and distri- bution of difficult and challenging new art? Does
a tire tire without air, an elephant blow its horn in the dark, a baby
sigh when the glass door shatters its face?
The paucity of public funding for the arts has done irreparable
damage to the body politic. Arts funding is as important as funding
for public education. It's time for our federal, state and local
governments to consider linking arts funding with education budgets: a
percent for the arts! & if that seems farfetched, it goes to show how
far afield our educational priorities are. Every dollar spent on the
development and distribution of new art will save thousands of dollars
in lost cultural productivity over the next fifty years.
At the community ("free") clinic I worked for in the early 1970s we
sold T- shirts that said, "Healthcare is for people not profit." Not
that we were ahead of our time. Times are just behind where they
could be. Whenever I go into a Barnes & Ignoble Superstore or
Waldaltonsbooks (If we don't have it it must be literature!), I'm
reminded that our slogan for healthcare applies to poetry too.
Does anybody wonder anymore what the effects will be of the
consolidation of publishing and book distribution companies into large
conglomerates? Let them read cake. This month's bestseller list
contains the perfect symbol for the current state of affairs as the
two top slots are occupied, in effect, by the publicity machines
designed to promote "cultural product". What sells, in this purest
form of hype-omancy is the apparatus of publicity itself: for here we
have self-consuming artifacts par excellence -- no external referent
need apply. Meanwhile, in the upscale journals that condescend to the
truth bared by H. Stern and R. Limbaugh, no book has been more
attended to than a memoir by one of the originators of this
phenomenon, Willie Morris, formally editor of Harper's: for what
better subject for promotion than promotion?
There is a world outside this semblance of culture. In poetry, its
institutions go by the name of the small press and the reading series.
Along with small press magazines and books, poetry reading
series are the most vital site of poetic activity in North America.
Readings provide a crucial place for poets not only to read their new
work, but also to meet with each other and exchange ideas. Readings
provide an intimately local grounding for poetry and are commonly the
basis for the many regional scenes and groups and constellations that
mark the vitality of the artform.
Despite the fundamental importance of readings in the creation
of North American poetry over the past forty years, very little
attention has been given to this medium either in the press or by
scholars and critics. While reading series are more concentrated in
New York and the Bay area, many American cities have long-running
local reading series. The best source of information about readings
in New York City area is The New York City Poetry Calendar, which has
been publishing a monthly broadside of poetry events since 1977 (60
E. 4th St #21, New York, NY 10003). The calendar lists about 300
different readings each month, has a printrun of 7500 and a readership
of well over 10,000.
Poetry readings range from small bar and cafe and book store and
community center series, with audiences ranging from ten to a hundred
to poetry center readings that can draw from twenty to several hundred
people. Community reading series differ in several crucial ways from
university- sponsored series. These series often offer a forum for
new and unpublished local poets through "open mike" and scheduled
readings. The organizers of these series rarely receive any
compensation for their work -- and often can run a series for
incredibly little money: the money from the door going to the poets
plus a few hundred dollars a year for publicity. State and local arts
agencies will sometimes provide such series up to a few thousand
dollars for featured readers, which allows for some out-of-town poets
to get travel money or a small fee of fifty to a few hundred dollars.
Poets & Writers, Inc., is particularly helpful in these contexts,
providing matching money for poets's fees. A community reading series
can run a year of readings on less than many institutions spend on a
single cultural event or speaker. That effects the spirit of the
event. The atmosphere at a local reading series is often charged and
interactive. In contrast, university series often suffer from a
stifling formality. Unfortunately, English departments have been slow
to include and support local readings series in their areas -- despite
the fact that these series can often provide a lively point of entry
into poetry for students new to its forms and formats.
Despite the striking vitality of poetry readings, readings are
never reviewed in any of the nation's daily or weekly newspapers, even
though these papers routinely review theater and dance and art events
whose scale is comparable. I suspect the reason is that cultural
editors, like most literary critics and scholars, wrongly assume that
the book is the only significant site of a poet's work. Contemporary
North American poetry is realized as significantly in its performances
in live readings as it is in its printed forms. Critical response to
contemporary poems that fail to account for its performance are, for
the most part, inadequate.
For the scholar, the audio archive of poet's performance has
become as fundamental as manuscripts, publication history, and
letters; indeed, it is equal in importance only to the published text.
Yet studies of the distinctive features of the poem-in-performance
have been rare. In contrast, the drift of much literary criticism of
the past decade has been away from the auditory and performative --
and therefore material -- aspects of the poem, partly because of the
prevalent notion, commonly attributed to Saussure, that the sound
structure of language is relatively arbitrary. In contrast, cognitive
linguists such as Reuven Tsur, following Roman Jakobson, have recently
emphasized research that demonstrates the expressiveness of sound
patterns, at the same time, the "phonotext" -- or acoustic dimension
-- of the poem has begun to receive some scholarly attention. This
work, combined with the range of new work on performance theory,
suggest a crucial new direction for literary studies.
The past thirty years has been a time of enormous growth of small
press publishers. According to a Loss Pequeno Glazier's statistics in
Small Press: An Annotated Guide, the number of magazines listed in Len
Fulton's International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses
has gone from 250 mostly poetry magazines in 1965 to 700 in 1966 to
2,000 magazines in 140 categories in 1976 to 4,800 magazines in 1990,
of which about 40 percent were literary. The importance of the small
press for poetry is not restricted to any aesthetic or indeed to any
segment of poets. According to a recent study by Mary Briggs,
independent noncommercial presses are the major source of exposure for
all poets, young and old, prize winning or not.
The staple of the independent literary press is the
single-author poetry collection. Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun &
Moon Press, a high-end small press comparable to Black Sparrow, New
Directions, and Dalkey Archives, provided me with representative
publication information for a 100-page poetry collection:
Print-runs at Sun & Moon go from 1000 to 2000, depending, of
course, on likely sales. Messerli notes that print-runs of less than
1000 drive the unit cost up too high and he encourages other literary
presses to print a minimum of 1000 copies if at all possible.
Sun & Moon titles are well-produced, perfectbound, and offset
with full color covers. The printing bill for this runs from $2600 to
$4000 as you go from 1000 to 2000 copies. Messerli estimates the cost
of editing a 100-page poetry book at $300: this covers all the work
between the press receiving a manuscript and sending it to a designer
(including any copyeding and proofreading that may be necessary as
well as preparation of front and back matter and cover copy).
Typesetting is already a rarity for presses like Sun & Moon, with
authors expected to provide computer disks wherever possible.
Formatting these disks (converting them into type following
specifications of the book designer) can cost anywhere from $300 to
$1000, one of those variable labor costs typical of small press
operations. The book designer will charge about $500. The cover will
cost an additional $100 for photographic reproduction or permission
fees or both. Publicity costs must also be accounted for, even if, as
at Sun & Moon, no advertising is involved. Messerli estimates
publicity costs at $1500, which covers the cost of something like 100
free copies distributed to reviewers, postage and packing, mailings
and catalog pages, etc. The total cash outlay here, then, for 2000
copies, is around $6800. (For the sake of this discussion, overhead
costs -- rent, salaries, office equipment, phone bills, etc -- are not
included; such costs typically are estimated at about 30 percent more
than the cost of production).
If all goes well, Sun & Moon will sell out of its print run in
two years. Let's say Sun & Moon prints 2000 copies of the book and
charges $10 retail; let's also say all the books were sold. That
makes a gross of $20,000. Subtract from this a 50 percent wholesale
discount (that is, most bookstores will pay $5 for the book) and that
leaves $10,000. Subtract from this the 24 percent that Sun & Moon's
distributor takes (and remember that most small presses are too small
to secure a distributor with a professional sales force). That leaves
$7600. Now last, but not to be totally forgotten, especially since I
am a Sun & Moon author, the poet's royalty; typically no advance would
be paid and the author would receive 10 percent of this last figure,
or $760. That leaves $6840 return to the publisher on a cash cost of
about $7000.
As James Sherry noted years ago in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: a piece of
paper with nothing on it has a definite economic value. If you print
a poem on it, this value is lost. Here we have a vivid example of
what George Bataille has called general economy, an economy of loss
rather than accumulation. Poetry is a negative -- or let's just say
poetic -- economy.
But of course I've stacked the decks a bit. Many small presses
will eat a number of costs I've listed. Copyediting, proofreading and
design costs may be absorbed in the overhead if they are done by the
editor-cum-publisher, proofreader, publicity department, and shipper.
Formatting and production are commonly done on in-house computers.
But these costs cannot be absorbed away -- 600 dpi laser printers and
late-night "poofreading" can cause some serious malabsorption problems
for which your gastroenterologist has no cure. Then again, if a book
generates enough of an audience to require reprinting, modest profits
are possible, allowing the publication of other, possibly less
popular, works.
The situation for the independent literary magazines is similar
to presses, and indeed many small presses started as little magazines.
o.blek, a beautifully produced magazine edited by Peter Gizzi and
Connel McGrath, was started on borrowed money in 1987. One thousand
copies of the first 148-page issue cost $1000 for typesetting, $2700
for the printing, and $400 for postage. That cost has remained
relatively consistent, although a switch to desktop halved the
typesetting cost. That first issue, with a cover price of $5.50 (and
with the distributor taking 55 percent), sold out in a year and a
half. After one year, o.blek had about 75 subscribers; after six
years, that number is 275 (a figure that does not include libraries,
who mostly subscribe through jobbers). o.blek's most ambitious
publication (edited by Juliana Spahr and Gizzi) is just out: 1500
copies of a two-volume set, 600 pages in all, collecting poems and
statements of poetics from mostly younger poets, many of whom
participated in the Writing from the New Coast Festival held at the
University at Buffalo last spring. Compare this to Sulfur, edited by
Clayton Eshleman, who reports that there were 1,000 copies printed of
the first issue in 1981 -- "maybe 50 subscribers at the time the issue
was published, with perhaps 300 to 400 going out to stores. Now, 2000
copies per issue; around 700 subscribers, with 800 to 900 copies going
to stores."
Of course, many small presses and magazines produce more modest
publications than Sun & Moon, Sulfur or o.blek. Indeed, the heart of
the small press movement is the supercheap magazine or chapbook,
allowing just about anyone to be a publisher or editor. In this
world, marketplace values are truly turned upsidedown, since many
readers of the poetry small press feel the more modest the production,
the greater the integrity of the content. There is no question than
many of the best poetry magazines of the postwar period have been
produced by the cheapest available methods. In the 1950s, the "mimeo
revolution" showed up the stuffy pretensions of the established,
letterpress literary quarterlies, not only with their greater literary
imagination, but also with innovative designs and graphics. In 1965,
23 percent of little presses were mimeo, 31 percent offset, 46 percent
letterpress, according to Fulton's Directory. By 1973, offset had
jumped to 69 percent, with letterpress at 18 percent, and mimeo only
13 percent. As Loss Glazier notes, the mimeo in "the mimeo
revolution" is more a metaphor for inexpensive means of reproduction
than a commitment to any one technology. Indeed, poetry's use of
technology often has a wryly aversive quality. For example, as offset
began to dominate the printing industry in the early 1970s,
letterpresses became very cheap to acquire, so that presses like Lyn
Hejinian's Tuumba and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's Burning Deck could
produce books with little other cash expense than paper costs and
mailing, given the editors willingness to spend hundreds of hours to
handset every letter and often enough handfeed each page.
In the metaphoric sense, then, the mimeo revolution is very much
alive in the 1990s, with some of the best poetry magazines today --
such as Abacus, Witz, Mirage #4 (Periodical), The Impercipient,
Interruptions, lower limit speech, Letterbox, Situation, lyric& and
Object -- consisting of little more than a staple or two holding
together from 16 to 60 sheets of paper that have been xeroxed in
editions of 50 or 100 or 150. Yet the new mimeo revolution for poetry
is surely electronic. Because the critical audience of poets, mostly
unaffiliated with academic institutions, does not yet have access to
the internet, attempts to create on-line poetry magazines remain
preliminary. & technical problems abound; computers actually make
reading and writing harder than previous technologies -- but it's just
the difficulties that make for poetic interest. Still, the potential
is there and a few editors have started to propose some basic formats
for creating virtual uncommunities. In 1993, the first three
electronic poetry magazines I know about were founded -- We Magazine,
collectively edited in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area, New York City, and
Albany (c/o cf2785@albanyvms) -- which in its active periods sends out
one short poem per post to a list of subscribers; Grist, edited by
John Fowler (fow...@phantom.com), which has produced two full-length
issues so far; and Rift, edited by Ken Sherwood and Loss Glazier
(e-poetry@ubvm), which produced an ambitious array of material for its
first issue a few months ago: the main body of the magazine featuring
poems by 16 poets (the equivalent of 50 pages), plus a series of
associated files of translations, poetics, a set of variations on a
poem, and a chapbook. Also online is Luigi-Bob Drake's, and friends',
Taproot Reviews (au...@cleveland.freenet.edu), an heroic effort to
review hundreds of small magazines and chapbooks committed to
"experimental language art & poetry." Experiments with poetry and
poetics "listserve" discussion groups have also begun, with Joe
Amato's pioneering Nous Refuse (Jam...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu), but as yet
the intriguing mix of newsletter, group letter, and bulletin board has
not yet found its place. It seems certain, however, that the net will
be a crucial site for the distribution of works of poetry, especially
out-of-print works, as well as for information on obtaining books and
magazines, and, I suspect, for long-term local, national and
international exchanges of ideas and work in progress.
The new computer technology -- both desktop publishing and
electronic publishing -- has radically altered the material,
specifically visual, presentation of text. No doubt a new aesthetic
will emerge. But at this point, the absence of visual aesthetics in
the production of many desktop magazines is discouraging. Simply
having access to a laser printer does not mean an editor has any idea
how to design type. Ironically, many of the typewriter and mimeo
publications of the past thirty years were visually richer than some
of the more poorly designed desktop products. In the case of e-space,
editors have, as of now, little control over the visual appearance of
the text.
Distribution remains the most serious problem for the small press and
one of the least understood parts of the process. While larger
independent presses have distributors with sales representatives to
visit bookstores, most small presses must rely on mailing lists and
informal contacts to circulate their books and magazines.
Small Press Distribution (1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA
94702) is the most important source for alterative press titles
published in the United States. With the recent demise of over
half-a-dozen alternative press distributors, it is also the "sole
remaining noncommercial literary book distributor left in the entire
country." SPD, which must take 55 percent of the retail price of a
book (bookstores will typically take 40 percent or more of this), now
distributes about 52,000 books a year, from over 350 presses, with net
sales of $360,000. Their quarterly catalogs and annual complete
catalogs are fundamental resources.
From 1980 to 1993, Segue Distributing published an annual
catalog that offered a curated selection of small press titles that
could be ordered through a central address. Segue, unlike most
distributors, was able to articulate an aesthetic commitment with its
choices, as well as being able to include presses and magazines too
small to be handled by other distributors. In addition, Segue
included selections of small press books and magazines from the UK, as
well as New Zealand and Australia. Segue Distribution was
discontinued this year after losing its government grant support. I
suspect that in the future activities such as Segue's will best be
handled through electronic bulletin boards or similar formats.
One of Segue's most useful assets is its mailing list, which it
makes available to affiliated presses. The mailing list keeps track
of a shifting community of readers, with special attention to the
local audience who wishes to receive notices of readings as well as
the national and international audience who wishes to receive notices
of book and magazine publications. I say community because audience
is too passive a term to describe this matrix and because there is a
tendency to speak of community when referring to a small press
readership or, especially, the local "scene" for a reading series or a
magazine. But I resist the term community as well, since it is more
accurate to think of constellations of active readers interested in
exchange but not necessarily collectivity.
While much distribution of poetry takes place in the mail, we
all owe a great debt to the few remaining independent bookstores that
make an effort to keep in stock a full range of poetry titles. There
is no substitute for flipping through new books and magazines in a
bookstore, and such bookstores themselves are crucial sites of
whatever a poetry community might be.
We also owe a debt to those publications that are committed to
reviewing and discussing small press publications, since one of the
most involving aspects of the small press is the intensity of
interchange that takes place in reviews, letters, correspondence and
conversation. This is what makes The American Book Review so much
livelier than The New York Review of Books. At their best, reviews
and essays in the alternative poetry press are less concerned with
evaluation than with interaction, participation and partisanship; in
this respect, the prose of the small presses offer a refreshing
alternative to the evaluative focus of newspaper and mainstream
magazine reviews as well as the often stifling framelock of academic
discourse. Indeed, the literary small press provides a forum not just
for innovation in poetry but equally for innovation in prose, in the
process demonstrating that a free press means giving writers stylistic
freedom, not simply the freedom to express their opinions in mandated
forms.
The power of our alternative institutions of poetry is their
commitment to scales that allow for the flourishing of the artform,
not the maximizing of the audience; to production and presentation not
publicity; to exploring the known not manufacturing renown. These
institutions continue, against all odds, to find value in the local,
the particular, the partisan, the committed, the tiny, the peripheral,
the unpopular, the eccentric, the difficult, the complex, the homely;
and in the formation and reformation, dissolution and questioning, of
imaginary or virtual or partial or unavowable communities and/or
uncommunities.
Such alternative institutions benefit not just from the support
of their readers and writers, but also from contributions from
government, individuals, and foundations. Recently, such large
foundations as the Lila Wallace - Readers Digest Fund have committed
substantial funds to independent literary presses, but they have done
so in ways that are often destructive to the culture of the
institutions they propose to support. Rather than provide funds to
directly support the production of books and magazines, or, indeed,
editors or authors, such institutions insist on primarily funding
organizational expansion, for example, by providing money to hire new
staff for development, publicity, and management. While any money is
welcome, the infrastructural expansion mandated by these foundations
-- defended in the name of stabilizing designated organizations --
makes the small press increasingly dependent on ever larger infusions
of money, in the process destroying the financial flexibility that is
the alternative press's greatest resource. By pushing the presses
they fund to emulate the structures of large non-profit and for-profit
institutions to which they stand in honorable structural opposition,
these foundations reveal all too nakedly their commitment to the
administration of culture rather than to the support of poetry.
Ironically, the negative economy of poetry is one of its
greatest assets for our culture in that it provides an alternative
system of valuation to the bureaucratic professionalism of the academy
and to the commercialism of the book industry and art world, not to
mention the TV and movie industries. But the value of the alternative
institutions of poetry is not just that they do not seek, or make, a
profit. In that respect, they are no match for such mainstream
magazines as The New Yorker, which, despite a circulation that has
recently surged to 750,000, appears to be losing as much as $10
million a year (that's something like $13 per subscriber) -- an amount
that could finance a good part of the annual cost of the alternative
poetry presses and readings and magazines. The New Yorker's parent
company, S. I. Newhouse, is apparently less concerned with profit than
with cultural dominance -- legitimating the cultural product that
forms the basis of its media empire; for this exercise in hegemony,
circulation and publicity are more important than profit.
Literature is never indifferent to its institutions. A new
literature requires new institutions, and these institutions are as
much a part of its aesthetic as the literary works that they weave
into the social fabric. The resilience of the alternative
institutions of poetry in the postwar years is one of the most
powerful instances we have of the creation of value amidst its
postmodern evasions. When you touch this press, you touch a person.
In this sense, the work of our innovative poetries is fundamentally
one of social work.
Notes
Presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association on
Dec. 29, 1993, in Toronto.
1. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, "Hell Night at the 92nd Street Y," in The
New York Times Book Review, 98:31 (May 9, 1993), p. 31. "For some"
("We lucky few" is the last sentences of the article) "there was to be
a post-poetry spread laid on by Edwin Cohen (a businessman and patron
of literature) back at his apartment at the Dakota, a Danteesque menu
announced in advance: roast suckling stuffed pig stuffed with fruit,
nuts, and cheese; Tuscan salami; prosciotto and polenta, white beans
with fennel."
2. "The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, which has not
changed appreciably in the last 12 years, is smaller than the
Department of Defense's budget for its 102 military bands," according
to an article in The New York Times, 3/13/93, p. C13.
3. Rush H. Limbaugh 3d, See I Told You So (New York: Pocket Books,
1993) and Howard Stern Private Parts (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1993).
4. Loss Pequeno Glazier, Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 2-3.
5. Mary Biggs, A Gift that Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and
Publishing of Contemporary American Poetry (Wesport, CT: Greenwoood
Press, 1990); cited in Glazier, p. 38.
6. Clayton Eshleman, letter to the author, 11 January 1994.
Information on Sun & Moon Press is based on an interview with Doulgas
Messerli in November 1993; information on o.blek is based on an
interview with Peter Gizzi in December 1993.
7. Abacus, edited by Peter Ganick (181 Edgemont Avenue, Elmwood, CT
06110) is the longest running of these magazines; in February, 1984,
they published their 80th issue, Cornered Stones Split Infinites by
Rosmarie Waldrop. Witz, edited by Chritopher Reiner (P.O. Box 1059,
Penngrove, California 94951), is a newsletter feauturing poetics,
reviews, and listings of recent publications; it is published three
times a year in associaton with Avec, a magazine comparable to Sulfur
and o.blek. The other magazines mentioned feature new poetry, often
by younger or infrequently published poets: The Impercipient,
ed. Jennifer Moxley (61 East Manning Street, Providence, RI 02906);
Letterbox, ed. Scott Bentley (379 Latimer Place, Oakland, CA 94609);
Mirage #4/ Period(ical), ed. Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy (1020
Minna, San Francisco, CA 94103); Situtation, ed. Mark Wallace; object,
ed. Kim Rosenfeld and Rob Fitterman (229 Hudson Street #4, New York,
NY 10013); lyric &, ed. Avery E. D. Burns (P.O. Box 640531, San
Francisco, CA 91640-0531); lower limit speech, ed. A. L. Neilsen
(1743 Butler Avenue #2; Los Angeles, CA 90025); Interruptions (a
magazine of collaborations), ed. Tom Beckett (131 North Pearl Street,
Kent, OH 44240).
8. In Febrary 1994 Grist announced its first electronic book,
Gleanings: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties by David Ignatow,
including many poems "published here for the first time." Cost is $25
on diskette; the text is also available online.
9. Letter, dated October 22, 1993, to affiliated publishers from Lisa
Domitrovich, Executive Director, SPD.
10. During much of this period, I worked as editor of the catalog.
11. Elizabeth Kolbert, "How Tina Brown Moves Magazines," in The New
York Timnes Magazine, Dec. 5, 1993, p. 87.
12. Publishing statistics are notoriously unreliable, especially when
they concern the amount publishers are willing to lose -- less to
obtain cultural legitimacy, I would say, than to establish cultural
values. According to The New York Times (3/2/94, p. C20), Harold
M. Evans, the publisher of Random House's adult trade division, told
an audience at the PEN American Center that "the 29 books he published
that made it on to The New York Times's 1993 list of Notable Books
lost $680,000" and the eight books that "won awards from the American
Library Association lost a total of $370,000." Evans went on to say
that three of these books had advertising budgets of $71,000 to
$87,000 each and that these books lost from $60,000 to $300,000 each.
Innovative works of literature or criticism or scholarship that
challenge the dominant cultural values of institutions such as Random
House are not the most likely candidates to receive this type of
support; yet without such subventions they stand little chance of
being reviewed or recommended in The New York Times, whose reviews are
closely correlated to its advertisers. The point is not that official
"high" culture, just as alternative-press poetry, requires subsidies;
but that a system of selection and support favors certain works over
others; it is this system of selection and promotion that allows the
media conglomorates to control cultural sectors that they have written
off as largely unprofitable. Note, however, that the content of the
selections is less important for this system of dominance than the
system of selection and promotion itself, since the alternative
presses can never afford to lose as much as these corporations.
It should be no surprise that it is neither the audience nor
quality nor accessibility that creates official literary product, nor
that much of official "high" culture is a loss leader. Advertising and
promotion of targeted "loss leaders" are evidently worth the price in
influencing literary and critical taste, specifically by fostering a
cultural climate in which genuinely profitable products may thrive.
The recent "fiction" issue of The New Yorker (June 27/July 4,
1994) is a perfect example of how that magazine goes about promoting
the idea that "Only what sells has value and value is determined by
the extent of the sales." The issue included a "good cop" feature on
a struggling "serious" fiction writer that, while seeming to question
the value system of commercial publishing, actually reinforced its
claim to exclusive value. Remarkably, the piece, and indeed the whole
magazine issue, systematically avoided any reference to alternative
and independent presses so as to better foster the illusion (not to
say comic notion) that the New York trade presses are the sole
purveyors of literature. The story on the "struggling" writer
emphasized that he had been praised by the Times (which, inevitably,
is where the author of the profile had first heard about his work,
since that's where you hear about worthwhile fiction) and had five
books with HarperCollins that are neither (Si forbid!) "inaccessible
or highbrow". The problem seemed to be that he was shifting from one
New York trade press to another (a Disney affiliate) and that his
projected advance would be only $10,000 (nonetheless, considerably
more than most literary writers in this culture receive) (pp. 48-9).
The New Yorker's sell was so hard that the following "bad cop" article
got right down to business. It was devoted exclusively to promoting
the preeminent cultural value of the top ten books on the Times's best
seller list: "They have a better ear [than nonbestselling fiction] for
what we say, or try to say, or don't notice we're saying -- for the
small ways in which the mind works and stumbles" (p. 80); so eat your
Wheaties, kids! "Wonder Bread helps build bodies 12 ways" (& that
wholewheat stuff doesn't taste as good either!) I don't think "we"
can say it any better than that.