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.

I am very pleased that my poem, “Not Silenced, But Need­ing,” is in the new issue of diode. It’s a really good look­ing issue and it’s the first poem I have pub­lished that is not a trans­la­tion in a long time. I am hop­ing it’s the begin­ning of a trend, since one of my sum­mer projects is to work on the poems I have in my files and start sub­mit­ting them. I have enough poems to make a book; I just don’t know if the poems I have make a book, if you know what I mean.

The Bloom­ing Wild­flow­ers Project, which I would not nor­mally have read except that I found what I thought might be an inter­est­ing link on Seed­ed­Buzz¹, 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.

If you’re an Asian Amer­i­can poet, you should con­sider apply­ing for this retreat. Kundi­man does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help men­tor the next gen­er­a­tion of Asian-American poets, Kundi­man is spon­sor­ing an annual Poetry Retreat at Ford­ham Uni­ver­sity. Dur­ing the Retreat, nation­ally renowned Asian Amer­i­can poets will con­duct work­shops with fel­lows. Read­ings, writ­ing cir­cles and infor­mal social gath­er­ings will also be sched­uled. Through this Retreat, Kundi­man hopes to pro­vide a safe and instruc­tive envi­ron­ment that iden­ti­fies and addresses the unique chal­lenges faced by emerg­ing Asian Amer­i­can poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tues­day to Sun­day. Work­shops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.