Contest Culture and Poetic Community

In a recent post, Silliman surveys the current publishing landscape, pitting small/micro press publishing against the contest model. While less prestigious, Silliman sees small/micro presses as being a more effective way to reach the right audience for your poems:

"A book by somebody I’ve never heard of before from one of these presses [he lists a bunch of his apparent faves] comes to me with a context that may help me to understand what the writer is trying to do. In marketing, this gets called brand equity, but in the low-level economics around poetry it really has to do with the degree that any well-run press is itself a concrete manifestation of an aesthetic community...Just coming from one of these presses directs a book toward a community of readers, a range of sympathies and expectations. As a poet, you can’t ask any more of a press."

I'd even go one step further to say that the opposite can occur as well--an aesthetic community can spring up as a result of a press or journal, or more likely a group of presses and journals. And I take "aesthetic community" to mean something more then a group of people who value the same type of poetry, who identify with a similar branding of art, but people who share similar values, ethics, world views, etc....are these not the things that shape our aesthetics? Certainly a majority of my friendships are based on a shared, albeit fairly general, poetics. But it seems intuitive to assume that the richness of these friendships owes itself less to the fact that we like similar poets and more to the reasons WHY we like the poets we do. As shallow as it may sound, we often wonder aloud to each other, "Would I like you if I hated your poems?" I guess my point is, such a question isn't shallow at all, but essential. In any case, the contest culture takes none of this into account.

"Contests, however," according to Silliman, "tend to do rather the opposite...Judges are cycled through too quickly, there’s no aesthetic focus, the resulting book series has little if any connection to an audience."

And it seems to me, if the books aren't connecting with an audience, then an audience certainly isn't connecting over the books. While I usually place a little more of the blame for this phenomenon on the aesthetic choices of the judge/press than Silliman does in this post, I think the issue of context/community is a vitally important one.

According to Silliman, the contest culture is based on there not being a context, or rather, on MFA programs not connecting themselves or their students to a contemporary poetry community:

"...I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again."

I couldn't agree more. And the two things that especially jumped out for me were "judge" and "money." It's my guess that the judges would be appalled to find out what DIDN'T get to them. Who, exactly, wittles the slush pile into a manageable finalist pool? I've done it as a student intern, just barely into a graduate program. It's this odd model of allowing, theoretically, the least qualified of those involved (the intern) choose the work that gets to the, theoretically, most qualified of those involved (the judge). The chances I, as a student intern 10 years ago, passed along the 10 best manuscripts, if given the chance to go back and review my choices, are slim to none. My guess is that a lot of sophistication and subtlety is lost on many a preliminary judge, as it was on me. This leads me to believe that much of what gets through is either gimmicky and loud or numbingly quiet--those that are undeniably under the umbrella of Poetry.

And this is simply a numbers problem. There are too many submissions for presses/journals to operate any other way. According to Silliman, "If there were only a few hundred publishing poets in the 1950s, by 1970 that total had swollen to some number over 1,000, but not so dramatically over it that it was difficult for a new poet to get heard...Today, however, there are at least ten thousand publishing poets working in the English language in & around North America. Unless all the MFA factories shut down at once, that number can be expected to double in the next decade. And there are more books of poetry published – roughly 4,000 a year."

The PoBiz, like suburban sprawl, has grown up too quickly and there just aren't enough resources to go around...namely book buyers. So the *money* has to come from somehwere. This may be shooting fish in a barrel here, but when contests, like MFA programs themselves, become cash cows, something is inevitably is lost. As someone who has spent an extra month's rent on contests each year for the past few years, my advice to you is the same as Silliman's:

"...get together with [your] friends and publish one another, [you'll make] enormous headway much more quickly. And [your] books [will reach] the right audiences."

The catch is, if you actually want to teach for a living, I'm not sure being on your friend's press is going to get you a job. Believe me, I wish I didn't want to teach. And I mean actually teach...not just enjoy the, ahem, "lifestyle." I envy my friends who are satisfied with their non-teaching jobs; their art is free from becoming a commodity. They don't have to use their poems to get to where they want to be. But tomorrow many of us will be sending another batch of mannies and their accompanying $20 checks to beat the 4/30 postmark date. I assume the Biz is well aware of this and is pleased.