Bawds of Euphony: Shady Shit at BlazeVOX

Dark publishing gossip: BlazeVOX has apparently been pulling a shitty, shady, abusive pay-to-publish scam for at least the last couple years.

I'm not a huge fan of the press; they throw a lot of parties -- they're local to Buffalo -- but they publish a number of books by people I think are terrible poets and worse human beings, so I haven't paid much attention to their catalog. I have, however, generally heard that Geoff Gatza, who heads it up, is a nice guy. I can't speak to that personally as I've lived here six years and never met him, which shows you just what a misanthropic, antisocial curmudgeon I am, but that is what I hear. I think he Facebooked me at some point and I think I hid him at some later point, although I can't now recall if there was a reason beyond seeming boring. Such is the never-ending global cocktail party of 21st c. poetry. However, today this post at The Bark by Brett Ortler came across my radar, and suddenly BlazeVOX gets some of my attention.

Ortler reproduces correspondence with Gatza where the latter offers to publish his book, but only if he pays $250. Ortler presses him to find out how common this practice is, whether it's hitting all his potential authors or if he's only asking some to pay, and what exactly the numbers are. Gatza's responses are appallingly unprofessional, in part obvious copy-and-paste and the rest slapdash, full of typos and syntax/homophone errors ("as opposed to having authors pay have the cover prince"; "I did send this letter to a 30 folk"; tons of run-ons and fragments) -- and he never answers Ortler's questions directly. He whines about a major donor having supposedly fallen through due to an unelaborated "scandal"; he chirps about pay-for-publishing, which is what it is, being "in the spirit of a co-op"; he hews to "this crisis," again not specified, and phrased as though it were some very temporary situation, in which case the prudent, respectful thing to do would be to pull in one's operations until the "crisis" were mitigated. He sounds hurried and spastic throughout, and when Ortler pins him to the question of whether he'd consider publishing the book sans $250 forcible donation, finally does say, "No, of course not." Of course not. Why would you think a silly thing like that?

I have just shy of zero sympathy with the rhetoric of crisis when it comes to the arts and humanities. There's never been money. NEVER. Time was, we had some Rockefellers and Carnegies, and before that King Jameses and Queen Elizabeths, and before that de Medicis. . . but none of these folks were funding "the arts" at large; they paid artists to shore up their empires. It's not as though a 16th century peasant could crawl out of her plague-ridden hut in the northern peat bogs, hike down to London and make it big at court as an outsider artist painting portraits on birch bark of angry sheep with tirades against the aristocracy scrawled across their comic/frightening ovine faces. The patronage writers and visual artists enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century was unprecedented, and even that was still a guarded system to which the vast majority of people had no access. In America even more than in the rest the Anglophone world, the arts and humanities have been in an unending state of "crisis" since before the Industrial Revolution, which is to say, at least as long as we've had people with enough money to potentially fund the arts. It's not a crisis when it goes on that long; it just sucks. And no one will argue that the position of poetry in this culture is about as marginalized as any human activity could be, but it's been that way. No poet here ever had the popular adoration Pushkin still enjoys in Russia (and that's attenuated dramatically, from what I understand, compared to what it was a century ago). We did have some known personalities in Millay and Pound who got attention beyond the circles of poetry itself; some of the Beats, in some parts of the country; Maya Angelou, who's a miserable excuse for a writer. How many people do you suppose wrote books of poetry in the past century and never published them? How many published books and got no notoriety, no money, no very meaningful interest from anyone beyond their own friends and students? Tens of thousands; hundreds of thousands; I couldn't guess beyond "a lot." But: a lot. Poetry has always been a highly specialized cultural mode, and I'll argue, vociferously, that that's crucial to its value as art -- it can explore, innovate, precisely to the degree that it's marginalized. I'd like it better if we could be somewhat more cared-about and still get to play, but forced into the choice I'll pick protective obscurity. So do not moan at me about crisis. If you want America to take care of you, get out of the arts.

However -- Gatza turns out to have been sending these same form letters to poets for at least the past two years. A situation that persists for two years is very definitely not a crisis. People stopped calling the problems in Darfur a crisis long before two years had elapsed. It became a civil conflict, a war, a tragedy; it ceased to be a crisis. Even if you don't buy my defense of poetry's marginalization, whatever you think the financial climate is like or ought to be like for the arts, you can't claim that you're dealing with a "crisis" and that you'll "be back up and together in the future," as Gatza does, for two solid years. At best, you're conducting business in a way that perpetuates inadequate funding for years running; at worst, you're lying and using the rhetoric of crisis to try to shill money out of poets. Poets. Especially young, first- and second-book poets who are desperate to publish, who may not quite realize how shady the setup is, who themselves are living on adjunct wages and cramming poetry time in at either end of grading 80-odd freshman comp essays at a go. In at least two years, he hasn't managed to get his funding and production lined up well enough that he can help these people and their art without squeezing them for sizable chunks of cash.

To make it nastier, apparently, Gatza's publishing some books in a perfectly ordinary way, without asking for a "donation" from their authors. Then there's a tier of second-class books, whose authors get publication dangled in front of them, pending this $250 fee. So he's got books he believes in, and others he doesn't even think will do well, and he's publishing the latter only if their authors will send over a pound of flesh. As some of the post's commenters point out, the figure he quotes repeatedly of $2000/book doesn't hold; BlaxeVOX does print-on-demand, so his up-front costs to publish ought to be light. Moreover, if he's got $1750/book on hand, to make up the rest of that amount, he ought to publish fewer books, so he could carry on within the means to which he has access. The $2000 figure sounds like he pulled it out of the air to make the $250 sound small by comparison: classic door-in-the-face sales tactics, leveled only at those he thinks won't be in a position to resist.

For Ortler, the sticking point is the lack of transparency. If BlazeVOX made it clear on their site that they're following a pay-to-publish scheme, that they've become a publishing co-op, that would be one thing; presenting themselves as publishing work based on quality alone, but then hitting prospective authors with this $250 fee is starkly dishonest. Doing so only to part of their prospective catalog is flat-out skeezy. (My very pejorative phrasing, not his.) I agree that if they're going to do this, they ought to be even-handed and up-front about the practice, but I don't think that would legitimize it, and in fact, it'd almost certainly sign the death warrant on the press's reputation. It's hard to convince poetry that you take quality seriously when you've brought pay-to-publish into the picture, even if it's only paying part of the costs of publication. We're already a nepotistic, aesthetically-inbred bunch; we know how arbitrary publishing is, even at its best. If you make it public that you're only publishing people's books if they write you a fat check, you're done for -- which, I'm sure, is why the website makes no mention of the policy and why the "donation/offer of publication" page where you can accept this devil's deal isn't linked anywhere from their pages.

Worse for me, though, is the potential damage this kind of arrangement could do for someone who accepted it. One author commented on Ortler's post that she'd taken the $250 deal and was happy with the production and promotion she'd gotten -- and if so, that's good for what it is, but if BlazeVOX starts to look like a vanity press -- and if this blows up, it very well may -- she's fucked. Publishing is changing and all the old rules are up for question, sure, but to hiring committees, granting agencies, and so on, a vanity-press book is worse than no book at all. It makes you look shady, yourself, casts doubt on your work's quality, and suggests very strongly that you don't know what you're doing professionally. This had to come out eventually, and I think now that it is, the press's reputation is going to dive. People who got the better deal, book publication without paying the entry fee, will suffer by association, too. (And they just had a book launch here, with books by three poets I know, one of whom I really like, so that's depressing even for my incredibly small circle.) I have my dissatisfactions with TSUP, but I can definitely count on the integrity of their reputation til I die and afterward, and that was precisely why I took their offer instead of dicking around with Tupelo, whose editor, Jeffrey Levine, got smacked for a similar fee-for-service scam right around the time mmcn got picked up. BlazeVOX has been around long enough to have made a name for itself, and to have attracted poets who care about that reputation. Those are the people who'll get the worst, least fair blowback from Gatza's decisions. He may yet be a really nice guy; again, I can't speak to it personally. But this practice itself is incredibly stupid at best and abusive at worst. Poets don't need more abuse. We do that to ourselves and to each other perfectly well without publishers getting in on it, too.

It sounds like the Foetry folks may get on this, and I'd like to see that. They did go after a couple institutions that I think were putting out good poetry, albeit in less-than-optimal ways, but for the most part I think they're a major force for good. Precisely because our resources are terribly limited, I think presses have to be very damn above-board to hold a place in the landscape. I don't read nearly as much new poetry per year as I'd like to, and even if I had nothing to do but buy poetry books and magazines, I wouldn't get to all of it, and out of that mass, I'm happier spending my money -- and my time and attention -- on books and presses whose values, ethical as well as aesthetic, line up with mine. I hurt for anyone whose career may suffer from this, but, without lessening that sympathy and anger on their behalf, I'd rather see the business of poetry kept honest.