Reading the comments stream to my note on Wednesday has been interesting & instructive, in a slightly lurid fashion. It is interesting to see how many respondents don't distinguish between awards & contests – the latter involves submission, in every sense of that word, & typically involves an entry fee. Taylor Brady's comments describe the Small Press Traffic process with considerably more detail than I could. If the overall process is less formal than, say, the Whiting Awards, it has the advantage of being considerably more open – you can see who the judges were & imagine what their motives might have been. Whatever entanglements one might imagine between myself & the SPT board¹, it takes an act of faith to presume that the anonymous judges of the Whiting Awards don't have the same general relationships. Consider that five of its ten recipients this year were writers who published their first book with Graywolf, Ecco/HarperCollins, Copper Canyon & Harcourt. That is arguably less diverse than the SPT list – the difference (beyond the money & an awards dinner) is that its judges remain masked, away from the prying eyes of Foetry et al.
All of this struck me as doubly ironic, since right before I'd received notice of the award from Kevin Killian, I'd read Kevin Larimer's “That Glittering Possibility: Eighteen Debut Poets Who Made Their Mark in 2005” in the November-December issue of Poets & Writers. Anyone who has met Larimer will, I presume, see that he is as non-sectarian & straightforward as it is humanly possible to be in the world of contemporary poetry. So I was intrigued to see this small sampling of “first book” authors – more than one of whom I own “pre-first” books by – and their correlation to such things as prizes, degrees, jobs & the sort. When I say small sampling, I mean that. Larimer mentions in his cover piece that Poets House in New York recently displayed 2,100 books published in 2004, and that “approximately 20 to 30 percent of these – over six hundred – were debut titles.” Think about the implications of these numbers for a moment. They suggest that, under the best of circumstances, the “average” poetry career currently consists of a total of five books – that's the only way you get 20 percent first volumes.
Five volumes is hardly a career or, if the word “career” gives you a rash, a lifetime of writing, unless one is either very slow, very sporadic in one's writing, or stops fairly early. What an average of five volumes suggests is that a lot of people produce a few books, then stop. There are probably as many reasons why, if you look at each closely, as there are poets. But the general trend suggests that the experience of publishing is that it gets harder over time for a lot of poets, not easier.²
Larimer profiles just eighteen of these poets: 12 women, 6 men; just four are ethnic minorities. I suspect the ratio of female to male may not be that out of whack in terms of representing the whole of publishing, tho I also suspect (hope) that the under-representation of people of color here is what statisticians would call a problem of sample size, not representative. Of the 18, 14 have MFAs, three have no degrees, one has an MA, and one has a second degree, a Ph.D. Exactly half of the MFAs have teaching jobs. The other poets range from a waiter and a trail crew supervisor to a senior editor at the New Yorker. All but one of the 18 list their ages – the exception identifies herself as being “Older than a prodigy, younger than Stanley Kunitz” – which averages 37 years. Just three are in their 20s, six are in their 40s, with the remainder in between. Two of the three with no degrees are in their twenties.
Of the 18 books, six were published by university presses, ten by independents and two by major trade houses, Norton & Penguin. Aesthetically, the independents range all the way from School o' Quietude (Graywolf, APR) to reasonably post-avant (Edge, Coffee House). The university presses range from UC Press to Texas Tech to Notre Dame.
While 14 of the 18 have gone & gotten MFAs, only nine of the poets here concede to being contest submitters. Larimer is savvy enough to ask just how many times they've participated in contests. On average, those who submit admit to participating in 49 contests. As appalling as that number might sound, eight of the nine contest junkies had their books published as the result of winning prizes, ranging from the National Poetry Series to the Walt McDonald First Book prize. Looking at the blurbmeisters associated with the prize volumes, it is evident that the writers do not all come from a conservative poetic position: included among the jacket note authors are John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, Amiri Baraka & Lydia Davis. Henri Cole & Eavan Boland show up twice, each time on a jacket to which both have contributed blurbs. One is a prize-winner from Louisiana State Press, the other is the volume from Norton.
The two first books from trades are worth noting. The Norton volume was written by Dana Goodyear, the senior editor at the New Yorker, who at 29 is either a wunderkind or else just very well positioned to become the next Deborah Garrison. The Penguin volume, by Corinne Lee, is a National Poetry Series winner – of the submitters, Lee has done it the least often, scoring with just her fourth submission to a contest. She also appears to have spent the least time writing her book – while the 18 as a group averaged over 6 years work per book & nobody else claimed to have spent less than three years, Lee lists her volume Pyx as having taken three weeks.
All of this suggests that my simple dismissal of contests is perhaps a little too glib, or that the world of contests itself is changing. And for what it is worth, I've written positively here about two of the eighteen poets before, both of them prize winners. And I've appeared with a third, Thomas Sayers Ellis. While his book was not published as the result of a contest, he is one of this year's Whiting Award winners.
If you click on the link to Larimer's feature in the second paragraph (the text itself is not online), you will find a miniature anthology of the 18 poets. It's worth a look.
¹ Susan Gevirtz was a member of my graduate writing seminar at SF State in 1982 that served as my “focus group” (aka “guinea pigs”) for the first draft of what became In the American Tree). That's the one formal connection. But it is true that I have met seven of the board's nine members, tho actually mostly over the web. Four of the board's members are well-known bloggers.
² No doubt it is even worse for novelists. Trade houses have little use for the fictioneer whose first books have not demonstrated an ability to reap a return on the press' investment.
