I read with great interest Collin Kelly’s post More than this: A larger place at the poetry table and tried to leave this as a comment, but I am guessing it was too long because I kept getting an error message, so I am posting it here. The part of the post I wanted to respond to was this:
So, I have questions for all of you who read this blog: How we can get back to the pleasure of the art rather than the jockeying for position, awards and writing personal attacks masquerading as “literary criticism?” How do we set a larger place at the poetry table for those working outside the academy? How do we make the art of poetry interesting and compelling to the next generation that doesn’t want an MFA or teaching gig? How do we take the insular and make it open?
Eventually, I think I need to turn this into a larger post, but for now I will just leave the comment as I originally wrote it:
As an academic – I teach at a large community college in NYC, where I coördinate our Creative Writing Project, in which capacity I have attended AWP for the last couple of years – and a poet with a book (three, if you count my translations), but without an MFA, and as someone involved with a local poetry group, I confess I find the table metaphor problematic. Not because I think it is inaccurate per se, but because I think the notion that there is only one table that needs somehow to be enlarged is itself part of the problem. I think it actually allows what someone upthread didn’t quite call the “professionalization” of the poet that is one result of the proliferation of MFA programs to frame the problem rather than creating a frame through which to critique “professionalization.” (And I guess I want to be clear that I mean “professionalization” as a descriptive and not a critical term.)
There is no way around the fact that, as MFA programs have proliferated, that proliferation has created a community of poets that needs to perpetuate itself, through publication, through jobs, through getting reviewed and so on; and there is also no way around the fact that, if you are not a part of this community, it can be very hard to get for your work the kind of attention that people within the community are able to get for theirs – independently of the work’s quality. Moreover, I think the degree to which this proliferation has been national, to the degree that there is a national organization that embodies this proliferation – by which I do not mean to deny at all that AWP has made serious efforts to reach out to non-MFA, non-academically affiliated, etc. writers – to the degree, in other words, that the job of a poet as defined by this community (as opposed to simply being a poet, about which more in a moment) has become one with a national stage, I think the dynamic Collin points to is inevitable. Of course there will be a hierarchy within the community of poets playing on this stage; of course there will be politics and turf battles. Why should the profession of poet be different than any other profession?
I do not mean by this to bash MFA programs or MFA graduates; I think the people who say that the landscape of poetry in the United States has, overall, been enormously enriched by them are speaking the truth – though I know there are ways to qualify that statement; but when I was in my twenties and just beginning to think seriously that I might be a poet, I read a quote by Robert Bly (I think it was, and I know I am paraphrasing) who said that no poet should be published before the age of 30 or so. At the time, impatient to publish as I was, I thought this was utter crap, but when I look back on my life as a writer, I am in a way very grateful that I didn’t publish my first book until I was 44. It’s not just that my poetry was, by that time, truly ready for publication, for a public, in the deepest and most literal sense of that word, but I myself was also ready for that public in a way I could not have been 20 or even 10 years earlier. I remember the moment I wrote in my journal – I was 21 or 22 – the words “I am a poet.” It was one of the scariest moments in my life, because I felt like I was committing myself to a way of life, of seeing and being in the world, not a job.
Again, let me be clear about something: I am not characterizing in one broad stroke all the people who have MFAs as career-oriented writer drones. My point is less about the individuals who get MFAs – who will or will not be “good” poets, whatever the hell that means – than about what the professionalization of the poet does culturally to what people think it means to be a poet. That is one of the conversations we need to have in order, I think, to get back to the pleasures of the art.
Working on the “Fragments of Evolving Manhood” series has pretty much convinced me that I want to give the book on manhood and masculinity that I started writing in the 1980s another try. It will be, obviously, a very different book than the one I was working on back then, if only because I am twenty years older and so my view of the overall subject and of the material I already have written will be correspondingly different; but the idea of the book itself, a series of personal, literary essays that explore, from a feminist perspective, in intimate detail, a man’s experience of manhood, remains compelling to me. As far as I know, there was no book like it on the market twenty years ago; and, as far as I know, there is no book like it on the market now; and I think we need such a book. (Whether or not the book I want to write will ultimately prove to be that book is a question that is not for me to answer; I just know that I want to try.)
I have also decided that, just like I did the first time around, I want to try to find an agent to help me sell the book. In preparation for going through that process again, I recently read through all the correspondence I have saved from the agents and editors who read my proposal during the six years that I or my agent – because I did have one for a brief time – were trying to sell the manuscript. It’s been an instructive experience, both encouraging, because of all the seriously supportive things people had to say about my work, and discouraging, because with very rare exceptions everyone’s bottom line response expressed, more or less, the same sentiment expressed in the title of this post.
I don’t remember what I felt receiving these responses back then, but reading them now, it’s hard for me not to feel that all the people who wrote to me or my agent had gone to the same committee meeting, where they’d all been given the same instructions for how to respond to proposals like mine. My point is not that any of these agents or editors were being dishonest or insincere. Rather, the consistency of their responses suggests to me that the state of the market was indeed as they described it, though I did find one agent who was willing take a chance on me. Hers was the second response I received in 1994, when I first started sending the proposal out. The first one, though, turned out to be the prophetic one:
This is a good piece of work you’ve sent me and one that well deserves to find its way into publication. But unfortunately I am already involved with one men’s issues book which I will admit to having trouble with so rather than take on something else which is a bit competitive I think I’d best concentrate my efforts and wish you the best of luck in your pursuits.
I don’t have anymore the acceptance letter I received from the woman who became my agent, but I do have some of the responses she received from editors. The first was from Pocket Books:
It’s a powerful, unrestrained, philosophically intriguing and potentially controversial examination of the issues of male socialization and sexuality. As intriguing as it is, however, it doesn’t quite have the huge commercial potential that would make it right for Pocket Hardcover.
The second response was from Putnam. “The book is strong stuff. Ether you like it or you don’t, and although I am interested in the ideas, there is no chance that this would succeed at Putnam.” The letter did not say specifically why, but in context, it was clear that the reason was the editor’s lack of confidence in the book’s commercial potential. Basic Books had a similar response, “I read portions of the material with great interest. Newman is a good writer and this is an interesting subject. However, I am skeptical about the commercial prospects of such a work.” Finally, after a year without success, without even so much as a nibble, my agent gave up. She, after all, had a business to run. This is what she wrote me:
The men’s books I’ve worked on this year have been met with nothing but resistance and “there is not market” and “all the men’s books, even Bly [Iron John] and Keane [Fire in the Belly] did not do well.” I think it is therefore wise for me to stick with what publishers know me for, that is books about and for and by women.
To hear over and over again how compelling the sample chapters were and how timely the topic was only to be told, Sorry, no. We just don’t think the book will sell, was not only frustrating; it was also confusing. I was perfectly willing, within limits, to revise the book to make it more commercially viable, but no one seemed interested in even asking me to try. So, to give myself some distance and the opportunity to look at it again with fresh eyes, I put the proposal away for about six months and devoted my time to working on other projects. Then I revised it, developed a new list of agents and editors to try and started sending the proposal out again. The answers I received were tellingly similar to those I’d received during the previous year.
One agent who responded positively asked me to make some changes, which I did, but even after revising the sample chapter in the way I was asked to, this is the response I received:
Reading over the revised proposal that was sent to our office, which was careful and respectful of our comments, I was quite impressed. However, upon a second reading, it became clearer to me that we are not the right agency to represent a book like yours. One of the aspects of your chapters that I admire the most, the intelligent linking of pivotal autobiographical moments to major currents of thought and important thinkers, is what makes them inaccessible to the kind of audience that publishers we normally work with cater to.
I appreciated this agent’s honesty, of course, and I appreciated as well the way in which the changes he asked for improved the proposal overall, but I still did not have a publisher and his comments about audience depressed me, since I began to wonder if all of the publishers the proposal had been sent to catered to the same kind of audience. Another agent confirmed this for me when she wrote, “It is a rich blend of personal, philosophical, and political elements, but I ultimately came away from it deciding it didn’t work for me. As others have told you…the blend of elements I’ve just mentioned also makes it more analytical and academic than what most larger publishers are looking for.” She then went on to suggest that I try smaller presses or university presses, where I could submit an unagented manuscript without a problem.
I had decided after my agent dropped me that I would be perfectly happy to publish with such a press, and I had a list of potential publishers ready to go. So, in 1998, I gave up searching for an agent and started sending the proposal to small and university presses. The first response I received was from Indiana University Press. “Although the project looks very interesting and exciting, I do not feel that your…book fits in with our current list. You might want to try a commercial publisher.”
The small presses to which I sent the proposal were either otherwise committed or not interested in the book because they didn’t think it fit their list. Then, with a referral by someone with some influence, I submitted the proposal to Temple University Press, and the editor liked the proposal enough that he sent it out for anonymous review. This is how university presses vet the projects that are sent to them. Academics in the field read the proposal and make recommendations to the press about whether they think the manuscript ought to be published. There were either two or three reviews of my proposal, I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that, in addition to the very positive one of which I still have a copy, there was a completely negative one that I wish I had saved.
The man who wrote the negative review rejected completely the entire premise of the project, since I was not calling for the end of manhood, the end of gender. The man who wrote the positive review, on the other hand, not only had some wonderful critiques and suggestions for how to make the manuscript better; he also completely got what I was trying to do:
This is an attempt to harness the current memoir craze to politically correct effect – that is to write the memoirs of a profeminist man. To my knowledge this is a first. I think that the market is ready for a male confessional that specifies the ways in which “typical” male socialization involves coercion, brutality, and a significant amount of pain – without ever losing sight of the larger issues of privilege and patriarchy.
Unfortunately, because the reviews of my project were so mixed, Temple’s editor did not feel he would be able to persuade his board to publish the book and that, near the end of 1999, turned out to be the last straw. I just did not have the strength to go back into the material one more time to figure out how to revise the sample chapter and the proposal, and so I decided the market was simply closed against me. I put everything into a folder and turned my attention to writing poetry, where, as it turned out, I had a good deal more luck getting published. The Silence of Men, which deals in verse with a lot of the same ideas I was writing about in Evolving Manhood, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2004, and I became as well a translator of classical Persian poetry. So far, I have published two books of my own and one as a co-translator.
It has been more than ten years since I set Evolving Manhood aside, and, as I said above, I am ready to try again to publish it. My own sense is that the book will sell, but that it is more likely to sell by word of mouth than anything else, which would seem to make it a perfect fit for a small press, and I will try small presses again. I want first, however, to try one more time to find an agent. Obviously, there are advantages to me as a writer, financial and otherwise, if I do and he or she can sell the book; but I also like the way the process of finding an agent forces me to be at the top of my game in terms of the sample chapter(s) I submit and in the way I articulate what I have to say in the book proposal. It is a lot of work, and, frankly, the possibility for a greater financial return that exists with an agent helps to make all that work worthwhile, even if, in the end, I don’t get an agent and the press that publishes the book is too small to be worth an agent’s while.
In any event, wish me luck!
Jackson Heights Poetry Festival Workshop
Writing the Scary Stuff
Free Event (Part of June in Jackson Heights)
Leader: Richard Jeffrey Newman
All writers face the problem of writing about what scares them. It might be frightening because it is embarrassing or shameful, because it feels too personal, because it might offend loved ones. It might be frightening because it violates religious or other moral/ethical taboos, because it humanizes or makes comprehensible that which many believe should remain beyond comprehension, because it gives voice to people or ideas that have been silenced. Whatever the source of the fear, we should not allow it to dictate what we can and cannot write. In this workshop, we will practice some strategies for dealing with material that frightens us.
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When
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Sat Jun 19 3pm – 6pm |
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Where
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The Renaissance Charter School , 35 – 59 81st St., Jackson Heights, NY 11372 — map |
The Blooming Wildflowers Project, which I would not normally have read except that I found what I thought might be an interesting link on SeededBuzz, talks about the need for a blogging mission statement. I have one, sort of, and it’s on my home page:
Finally, this website contains my blog, It’s All Connected, where you can read what I have to say about, in no particular order, literature and social justice; poetry and sex; translation and masculinity; Jewish identity and teaching; gender and Iran; writing and feminism; and whatever else moves me to write — because it really is, all of it, connected.
I am now beginning to think, though, that I ought to hone it more. That certainly would be the advice I’d give to someone who asked me for it. “Explore more what you mean by connected,” I’d most probably say, and it’s good advice, but these days I am just too tired, too stressed, too busy, too too, to do it. At least The Blooming Wildflowers Project has gotten me thinking about it, though. For now, I’ll have to be satisfied with that.