Up on literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog there’s a discussion raging over what the optimum rate of production is for contemporary writers. One book a year? Two? A book a decade? One good book a generation?
Bransford’s debate centers on fiction, but it’s quite applicable to poetry as well. The terms, though, seem quite different.
On the one hand, you have poets with long-standing relationships with publishers and editors, poets who have been putting out new books regularly for decades (I’m thinking of poets like Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver, Charles Simic, etc.). They seem to be on a pretty steady schedule of one book every two years or so, and everyone seems happy enough about it.
On the other hand, you’ve got free-agent poets—some younger and unknown, others mid-career and well regarded–shopping multiple manuscripts around to contests and small publishers, often for years, plugging away at an oeuvre in relative obscurity. The poems pile up, the rejection letters too, until the lucky day comes and then he or she has multiple books coming out in a relatively short amount of time (I’m thinking of a few poets whose work I admire—Eleni Sikelianos, who had four books come out in as many years, and Graham Foust who had his first two books appear the same season).
This creates feast or famine schedules, with some poets putting out books at a rate that would put the prolific William Carlos Williams to shame, and others disappearing for years (Laura Jensen? David Berman?) On top of all of this, if you add the pressure to publish in academia (which I only know of through hearsay), and a marketplace that is lukewarm at best to new products, then the picture becomes quite complicated.
It’s a good question, though, for writers, readers, and publishers: how much is enough?
A few years of silence didn’t hurt Oppen, Rilke, Larkin, among others… If writing every day were good for you it’d be like, well, jogging – and those who wrote most would write best, which we know isn’t true. Hard to believe in these days of “would you like to supersize that?”
Posted By: Doodle on June 26, 2008 at 12:36 pmReport this comment
Doesn’t the picture chosen to illustrate this post say it all? Only post-Industrial Revolution could a phrase like “rate of production” even be conceived of as appropriate for describing literary writing–to say nothing of terms like “shopping around” and “marketplace.”
Posted By: unreliable narrator on June 26, 2008 at 4:52 pmI’m grateful that I’m bent over a keyboard in my office rather than hunched along a factory line; and feel no need to be commodified into higher productivity. Of course I say this from my lowly status as 1) a mere magazine-published poet with half-a-dozen completed, unplaced book manuscripts, and 2) an adjunct laborer in the mines of academia, where student consumers demand value for money from knowledge providers in the information economy.
Do we really want to think about writing oeuvres using unexamined capitalistic terminology? And where the heck is Max Weber when you really need him?
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Do you mean production or distribution? Kenneth Koch said that he worked on poems every day in order to have written (maybe!) a poem every year. As for the rate of publication and distribution, it depends on the work, doesn’t it. David Shapiro, quoting Kenneth again: If it’s beautiful, publish it.
Posted By: Jordan on June 27, 2008 at 10:01 amReport this comment
I mean the relationships between production and distribution for both writers and readers. It may be as simple as if it’s beautiful, publish it, and the corollary, if it’s beautiful, read it, but I wonder.
Posted By: Travis Nichols on June 27, 2008 at 12:02 pmWe live in the late-capitalist world, and most people access poetry (unexamined language alert!) through the marketplace, so it’s interesting to me to examine the machinery without overly mystifying it. I also think it’s advantageous for poets to have a sense of how all this works and not to simply sit back and hum the Beach Boys’ “Hang on to Your Ego.”
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I’m gonna agree with Travis here. It’s important to avoid mystifying the production and distribution of poetry by understanding that it’s not outside the marketplace or commodification. I think Travis’s use of language was not only not unexamined, but necessary. As for “If it’s beautiful, publish it” – that’s a very nice phrase, but it doesn’t, uh, mean a whole lot.
Posted By: SteveZ on June 29, 2008 at 12:10 pmBut I think there are other interesting mystifications, too. One is the strange idea that poetry much be labored at intensely and then distilled down to its finest essence, the individual poem. This nonsense of course pops up in Jordan’s post above, (which is strange because Jordan’s whole MO seems to be about doing away with quality control – BTW, a great MO, I think!) but also the same exact idea is expressed in William Logan’s review of Frank O’Hara that ran in yesterday’s NYT. It’s a matter of conceiving of poetry as craft, as a fine and dainty labor that one masters in ponderous hours.
Another good mystification surrounds just those authors mentioned about – Oppen, Rilke, Larkin – over these dudes hangs the aura of austere labor – the long, careful silence and eventual purity of the poem. My question is: is this concept really generative for contemporary poetry? Or does it confuse silence with profundity? Does it make our (male) poets into wise old sages?
Obviously, individual’s rates of production vary – but I say, work. Musicians practice every day, artists go to their studios, etc etc. If we’re making art then let’s make it and let’s not cloak our slow and lazy production with the aura of silence, by pretending that poems come out slowly because they are careful and crafted, when really – we have day jobs.
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“As for ‘If it’s beautiful, publish it’ – that’s a very nice phrase, but it doesn’t, uh, mean a whole lot.”
Posted By: Matt on June 29, 2008 at 1:09 pmUh, why doesn’t it, uh, mean a whole lot? And, uh, why does it have to uh, mean a “whole lot”? Uh, why can’t it, uh, just mean, uh, what it says, uh?
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In which she parses the parsing.
Posted By: unreliable narrator on June 29, 2008 at 3:12 pmFortunately for my flagging amour propre, I never meant that Travis was exercising an exclusive claim to the epidemic language-game of describing artistic creation in terms of wage-labor-for-capital(for if anyone’s to blame for it, maybe it’s Dana Gioia); I but harrumphed in the general direction of: oh my goodness gracious would you look at us. And happily maintain that there is benefit (if not profit) in thusly looking—a benefit which in fact Steve enjoys when able to observe how intractably located art is within commerce, having been able to distinguish between them first.
(Possibly they evolved in parallel, art and commerce, like domesticated animals and agrarian culture. [Which would be which? Yes.] And perhaps Stephen Jay Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria would be a useful construct for discussing two human endeavors which, like faith and science, will never really work and play well together. Or Lakoff and Johnson’s orientational metaphors, e.g. GOOD IS UP and TIME IS MONEY.)
Fortunately for logical empiricism, it is in fact an act of demystification to dislocate, even temporarily, that which it pleases us to call “reality” from its common metaphors. All the better to see you with, my dear. There can be no demystifying without the mystifying. To dust off our hands briskly with: “IT IS ITSELF! Well, my work is done.”—would of course be tautological.
Alors, speaking of “work”—another intriguingly culturally mystified word (thanks to Steve for bringing it to the party). Why is work good? Of course Puritanically-inflected America urges its unqualified habitual practice; yet to what extent and depth need writers voluntarily join that particular game? What about Eliot’s (much-abused) “necessary laziness”? What about nothing to do, nowhere to go, as those hard-working Zen guys like to say?
I wholeheartedly applaud Steve’s dry conclusion. Not only do most of us have poetry-sucking day jobs, but even in our off-hours we roil in a mass-market-media cacophony the likes of which Marcuse never foresaw—an experience pretty much the exact opposite of recollecting anything in tranquility—to say nothing of TEH INTERWEBS; and thus few of us stand more than a slim chance of ever being Chaucer.
(Though as my teacher once said to me, impatiently: Never mind that‚—do you even know who you are? I didn’t, and don’t; only that I nestle comfortably in the cleft between Doodle’s less-can-be-more and Steve’s more-would-be-nice.)
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Who’s confusing silence with profundity? I just find it hard to believe a contemporary poet would be capable of silence. Nothing mystifying about not buying into the quantity = quantity choice. Nor is self-restraint to be confused with laziness. Churning out work because it’s supposed to be a form of productivity is no pretense. Folks might like to try it.
Posted By: Doodle on June 29, 2008 at 3:19 pmReport this comment
From Elaine Scarry’s 1985 The Body in Pain:
What I love most about Scarry’s definition (work being the repetitious, consuming movements which permanently alter the worker’s body) is that like Philip Levine’s, it allows for more than one kind of work—a more spacious definition than those usually foisted upon us by that monotonous vocabulary of manufacture, commodity, and exchange. Hmm.
Posted By: unreliable narrator on June 29, 2008 at 3:55 pmReport this comment
To answer the question, my saying this is already too much.
Posted By: Mgushuedc on June 29, 2008 at 6:34 pmReport this comment
Wm. Blake, Printer & Engraver:
Posted By: unreliable narrator on June 30, 2008 at 2:50 pm“Enough! —Or too much.”
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“- the long, careful silence and eventual purity of the poem. My question is: is this concept really generative for contemporary poetry? ”
Posted By: Annie Finch on July 4, 2008 at 4:42 amPerhaps the word poetry should be plural here. Clearly for some poetries it is not generative, since they thrive on fluid spontaneity. For others it is richly generative; probably it is usually the case that it is generative for contemporary poetry in meter. With meter (meaning not only iambic pentameter, but any counted shape), there is a mercilessly intensifying frame inside which each syllable resonates and so there is a lot of motivation for a poet to make sure you have each syllable resonating right, the energy intensified to its height, before releasing it to the world.
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