Out There

This morning, Salt pointed me to a discussion about publishing and self-promotion on Magma poetry. They described it as "very British"; if so, one of my London friends might be right and I may have the soul of an Englishwoman, because I sympathized with the very many people talking about how self-promotion made them uncomfortable, although of course the other strain about the necessity of self-promotion wasn't any surprise. My discomfort goes deeper than, as the original post suggests, being shy, though; I have a strong commitment to preserving art's sanctity from capital. A lot of the comments at Magma talk about writing being like any other 9 to 5 job -- but it's not, in many ways, the relevant one here being that your "product" isn't a commodity. Sale alters the ideological framework in which art participates; as soon as you make a novel or a book of poems worth money, it's indebted to financial profit (or minimizing financial loss), and the degree to which art becomes beholden to anything but art depletes its being as art. I'm not talking about a mystical notion of "being," but the pragmatic possibilities an artwork has for interacting with its world. If it's worth money, people with money have authority over what it can be, how it can be presented (or if), etc.

Now -- this is a reality; people do have money, books do cost money to produce, other forms of art do cost money to make/stage/etc., and if we want art to happen, we have to negotiate the resources around by, say, getting people to spend money on our books. The situation is different in the UK than it is here, because they don't have the university press phenomenon we do, where it runs more or less as a charity; on the other hand, they have a vastly larger percentage of the population who's interested in poetry. I'm not sure how it balances out, and so my response has to be to the American situation and not to the discussion at Magma. Anyway, I don't just find promoting myself personally uncomfortable, but unethical and improper to what I want poetry to be able to do. In protecting poetry from capital, I take the term fairly broadly, to refer to exchange systems in general -- there's a level at which I honestly want to protect poetry from popularity. The whole reason I went this route, after having done a bachelor's in communications studies and thinking I'd coach debate or do research on ad campaigns or political speeches, was that when I got a little deeper into poetry, I found that its exceptional status -- the fact that just about no one reads it -- lets it do such much cooler things than popular discourse can do. It's bad for those of us trying to make careers in it, but I think the sacrifice is essential.

I didn't expect to be nearly so opposed to promoting my own work; I love poetry, I love to talk about it, and very little makes me happier than having people be interested in my poems. But when I started to have to account for money, I found hawking books miserable work. I'd rather people spend their $20 on a used copy of Millay's collected, honestly, which is about what it usually costs on Amazon. If people are going to get my book, I want it to be because they're struck by the work, not because they want me to make a buck (and I don't make even a buck; we haven't even sold enough to cover my initial honorarium). The idea of poetry being instrumental is just depressing to me -- that it has to prop up the finances of a press (because presses are always falling apart, because no one reads poetry), that it should somehow pay my electric bills. If I wanted to make money writing, I would have skipped all the poetry junk entirely and gone into tech writing. I know a girl with an MFA who did that -- wrote manuals for Navy submarines. Paid her bills, anyway.

At another level, I don't at all like the position of having to promote my work specifically. I finally put up a website that I hope is reasonably professional, and I now run a Facebook ad to the tune of about $20 a week that directs to the TSUP site. I force myself to hand out the super nice promo cards my press printed up when we have people come in to lecture on anything poetry-related; every once in a while I'll leave a little stack at a coffee place. These are things I did purely for the sake of the job, though, and that's as deep as they go. Even then, I have to fight with myself, because while I'm an advocate of poetry, I'm not much for advocating me. Like I said, you should really go buy Millay's collected (or any such book in about the same price bracket). I completely hate the poet who sets up a reading for him/herself -- I didn't even really like doing my own book launch, although that's of course an entirely common practice. If some other person, and especially if some other group of people (editors, a hiring committee) likes my work, that's cool, but pounding the pavement on my own behalf is too close to using poetry to keep my lights on. Even if in my heart I mean to promote poetry, period, the benefit to me (immediate, selling books; long-term, growing my CV) can't be excised. So it becomes very distasteful. I do it -- but I don't do it frenetically and don't enjoy it at all.

And anyway, I'm so persuaded of the value of staying small, as I was getting at in my last post here. You get to make the pieces you want to make, and their audience may be small, and they'll never pay off financially, but they'll be there to cast their small ripples out, and if what you're doing is good and if you're very lucky, the ripples won't be so small. I despair at having to care about ripple size, to harp on the image, in writing poems, though. Some of the Magma posters talked about promotion as detracting from writing time -- yes, maybe, but I think the far more pernicious threat is that it alters the trajectory of your poems. They're less aimed at poetry, and more at the poetry audience (including editors, prize commissions, tenure boards, etc.). I like poetry's audience; I'm part of it and glad we have it, but it can't be the telos for writing. That has to remain a very dark scene, beyond privacy into the unselving space of poesis.