Last BlazeVOX Go-Round: That Which Melts into Smoke

CATS AND KITTENS!

My netlebrity has reached an all-time high. I've had more hits here in the past 48 hours than I usually get in a month. Evidently I should do more griping about the poetry business? Not exactly: my unprecedented notoriety (which is still only a few dozen hits, so, you know, speaking very relatively) is due to the BlazeVOX posts, but specifically because one of mine got reblogged at a Tea Party website. To quote the internet: What is this I don't even.

Oh, wait, no, I do know what it is, it's the funniest, most impossible and perfect confluence of 21st-c. idiot savantism to which I've yet been party. Kent Johnson, who is sometimes an irritant in poetry, but as a rule an irritant whose shenanigans I support, pointed to this back at HTML Giant, and also to an anecdote about Sarah Palin picking on BlazeVOX as anti-American and so forth, suggesting that the latter might have stimulated the former, but it's a stretch. How Johnson happened to know Palin had railed about BlazeVOX, I can't imagine, but this is the world of rhizome informatics, and there they are right there. Anyway, even if we credit some kind of sense to the sequence of Palin > BlazeVOX > Tea Party caring about BlazeVOX, I have got just no idea whatsoever how they happened to pick my blog out of all the ones posting about it. I barely even exist to myself! I go to my day job, I write web pages and marketing/recruitment guides and I go to meetings and show my coworkers the greatest videos on the internet and then I go bury myself in 1.) dissertating or 2.) being too tired to dissertate. That's pretty much my life. My posts here generally get around a dozen hits over the first week they're up, and no more, ever again. And yet, somehow, knowing not one thing about poetry (dare I assume? yes, yes I do), some hilariously horrible right-wing site picked me out of the wilds of the internet to represent. . . well, we don't even know.  There's no framing text to suggest why they reblogged the story in the first place -- imagine that; right-wing media regurgitating language without engaging it critically. You're stunned, I'm sure. Knocked all the way back on your heels.

The most personally meaningful aspect of this mess for me has been its reminder that there is, in fact, a "you" for me to address, a "you" that includes working writers and not just the friends I have who are close enough to the arts that they get my frustrations, but who are not, themselves, artists.  I've watched Buffalo poetry people and those across the nation with strong connections to this scene spin out impassioned-to-obnoxious screeds in favor of BlazeVOX/Gatza personally, and against the rest the world, and I've watched a lot of people entirely unknown to me come out and say exactly the same things I say.  It's been nice!  A few bars hummed to the tune that I might, after all, not spend the rest of my life talking about poetry only to my cats and the dead, and that's some reassurance I've been hurting for.

Being reblogged by the Tea Party, though, while not nearly so meaningful, is definitely my pick for most entertaining bit. The TEA PARTY! These people would pull their kids from my classes. Some of them would actually shoot me dead. And yet one of them gave me at least a few seconds out of my allotted fifteen minutes of fame. It may have been because my headline and opening were so inflammatory -- after all, among my many unappealing traits, blandness doesn't often figure.  I can only speculate, though; perhaps Jesus whispered my URL in someone's ear.

The press, by the way, has come weepingly, rendingly back to the fold of the living. BlazeVOX will rise again! Frabjous day! Business by crisis, on top of business by bullshit. I'm not impressed, and I continue to be disappointed in the clamor on BlazeVOX's side. There's a lot of straw-manning going on, where instead of responding to the initial and consistently central critique that Gatza had been perpetuating a dishonest money grab, or the next-out point that his math fluctuates literally hour by hour as he reexplains what he's doing, bloggers and tweeters and Facebookers act like the issue comes down to whether poets should help fund the presses that publish us. Viz.:

If we're going to talk about ethics, I think giving a donation to a press that's publishing your book and supporting you as a writer is far more ethical than giving money to presses that likely won't read more than a few pages of your manuscript, that likely won't even forward your manuscript to the final judge(s) for consideration, that really have no interest in you or your work at all.

$250 to support a really good press that's going to support you as a writer (if we're going to be all capitalist about it, a press that is going to be give you ALOT more value than $250) or entering 10 contests where your manuscript many never once be seriously considered. If we're going to use terms like "scam" -- what's the scam here? What's not transparent? A publisher wants to publish your work, he asks for a donation--you have the choice to say yes or no.

Before I get into the argumentative fallacies, don't do this. Now I have in my imagination a stubborn, googly-eyed Alot made out of shiny diamonds and gold and crisp, newly-printed bills. He has a nametag reading "MOAR VALUE!" and also, punched through his ear, a price tag for ">$250." He will be in my head the rest the week and I'll keep wanting to hug and pet him, because the Alot is, in all forms, irresistably cute in his ugly way, but even in my imagination he'll be no fun to pet, because value isn't cuddly, however I try to imagine it. I'm trying to make myself an Alot of Squishables to take his place, but the Alot More Value is more compelling precisely in his difficulty being appealingly concretized. He's one of those stupid puzzles made out of bent nails, only the person who made this one fucked it up, so as much as I twist them around, I'll never pull them apart, and yet, I won't be able to put it back down on the bar and go back to my table.

To the topic at hand, though: no. No, no, no, no, no. Every time someone praises Gatza for "publishing your book and supporting you as a writer" in this context, they're accepting and propagating a myth, that BlazeVOX does some bang-up job on promotions. They have had a reputation for selecting good avant-garde writing, but as Mike Meginnis points out, Gatza himself/the press itself does very little to promote its authors. I see them at AWP every year, but it's turned out that at least some authors even have to pay their own SPD registration. They can buy copies cheaply, but they do the vast majority of their own legwork on reviews, paying the postage and spending the time to solicit reviews and get copies to potential magazines/reviewers. Meginnis is devastating on this point:

If I take $250 dollars from you for the privilege of uploading a PDF to CreateSpace and not refusing the money of anyone who happens to actively pursue your book, having done no work at all to promote said book, what exactly would you say I've done for you or your poetry? I've gotten the prestige associated with being a publisher, I've got your money, I've got the money from your book's sale, and you have -- at best -- the ability to tell people I published your book. A fact that will become significantly less interesting to most people when it comes out that you paid me for the privilege.

His post is very worth reading; I'd quibble with his go-get-em attitude about the possibilities of marketing poetry very widely, but only in degree, not in nature. He does a phenomenal job at picking apart a lot of the weird ideas that drive small press publishing and marketing, anyway, using the BlazeVOX blowup as an entry point and taking the scale bigger.

Four Way does a great job promoting its authors; Salt does in the UK, although my impression is that they don't do as much over here (understandable, if unfortunate for their US authors -- their Twitter stream has suggested they're strengthening their presence over here, though). They set up readings for their authors, they secure reviews, they do publicity for their authors' readings, they cross-promote via mailers and email and giveaways.  Moreover, they have their act together financially and logistically so they can pay their authors, on top of doing all this work!

BlazeVOX doesn't do any of these decidedly supportive things, and in fact, another piece of the narrative promulgated by Gatza's defenders explains why not: they remind us, again and again, that he's just one guy, doing this out of sheer love of Art, and we big pantyhose-wearing bitchez shouldn't expect any more from him than his going-it-alone resources permit, and that, further, we ought to support him precisely in his failings, because that testifies to just how DIY he is.  You cannot be both an outsider DIY one-man operation, struggling valiantly to hold up your press's beautiful world like Atlas himself, letting things slip as a matter of course, and also be a reliable, highly capable publishing outfit that supports its writers so much that on their starving wages they should send you $250 checks for the privilege of having you take on their books.

The supposedly-favorable comparison to the university press contest model? No! People are doing this all over the place but the logic just isn't there. The contest model isn't ideal, as I've said here and elsewhere, and at some -- not all -- such presses, a lot of work, indeed, doesn't get read.  At others, everything does get read, and seriously.  In either case, it is absolutely less abusive to ask $20-$40, spread evenly over your whole base of interested parties, without tying that contribution to their chances at getting a book on your imprint, than to stir up hopes in people whose books you wouldn't publish on their merits alone, and immediately, in that vulnerable moment, to ask them to pay you $250 to get published. Presented in that way, the "choice" is far from free of compulsion, and the model really is vanity publishing. Moreover, in this instance, Gatza appears to have been funding an upper tier, the authors for whom he didn't raise up the $250 paywall, with this lower tier. These people are cash cows.

As for what's not transparent: not being transparent. Carrying on this unequally-applied pay-for-publish scheme for years without once mentioning it on the press's site, other than through the hidden "donate" page to which Gatza's form-letter email directed his prospective author-cash cows. Maintaining submission guidelines throughout this period that explicitly stated there was no fee to be considered, which does imply there's also no fee to be published, the published being, logically, a subset of the considered. Only revealing this option in the emotionally-heightened moment of quasi-accepting a writer's book. Playing on manufactured sympathies by claiming to be forced to pursue this policy under pressure from a vague, unspecified financial crisis. Being somewhere on a spectrum from unwilling to unable to give people who suddenly got interested in what was going on clear, consistent numbers that would justify your unusual and publicly undisclosed funding practice. It's not like these points are particularly arguable; Gatza's supporters, in fact, for the most part aren't arguing that any of these practices are ok; they're just asserting so, quickly and passionately, without laying out reasons why. All claim, no data. (Which brings us back to the Tea Party! Sadly, they don't have a patent on bullshit discursive strategies, though.) This is the real crux of this ugly revelation, and dismissing it through a rhetorical question, as the post referenced above does, fails to address the extremely serious blowback for which BlazeVOX has put its authors at risk.

Meginnis begins where I want to end (and I believe this will be an end, because as agitated as this situation has gotten me, with its precise activation of everything that irritates me about poets and especially the poets I know here, I should get back to my largely undocumented dissertating): the exposure of this affair will mean terrible, terrible things for BlazeVOX's current catalog. Whether an author was asked to "donate" the $250 or not, his or her book will be tainted by the possibility that it was done on this pay-to-publish model, especially anything published in the past couple years. You'd have some acrobatics to go through to put anyone's mind entirely at rest. If you can't, at best -- at best! -- you look clueless. At worst, you look like a scam artist, yourself. Imagine the person going up for tenure this year who finally got her first book out a few months ago on BlazeVOX; now imagine her tenure review committee is reasonably clued in to contemporary literature, and they find out about this. Imagine someone going out on the brutally competitive job market this year with her one book, and it's on BlazeVOX. You can bet your eyeteeth the people on poetry hiring committees will know about this when they read CVs this fall, or at least the poets, those committees' opinion leaders, will, and everyone, looking at those hundreds of application packets, has a sharp eye for any reason to trim down their pile.

This isn't doing generous work for poetry. It's hanging crucial pieces of people's careers -- poet's careers -- on airy nothing, and we're all in precarious enough positions even with the solidest support imaginable from a publisher. The whole thing looks, as Meginnis points out, like it's profiting from poetry on little work, a lot of secrecy, and manipulative communicative tactics. And then it's relying for support on a community that's hotter for solidarity than for critical inquiry.