Last July 16, I posted the following note to the blog:
Terrain.Org is conducting a comprehensive survey about the online reading & publishing habits of poets. Go here and fill out the form.
Simmons B. Buntin, who crafted the survey, kept it open until late fall – the final survey was filled out on November 29. Last week, he sent me the results with permission to post them as I see fit.
Overall, Buntin got 137 responses. It’s not a scientific survey in that he didn’t randomly select respondents from a larger list of poets, poetry readers & poetry site visitors, but rather got replies from people who actively chose to fill out some or all of his questions. Nonetheless, 137 is an excellent number of replies from which gather data and the responses are well worth considering. For the record, 81 of the responses came within one week of my posting the above note, so that readers of this blog presumably account for a majority of his replies.¹ Not every respondent filled out every question, so when I give percentages in what follows, those percentages will represent the portion of people who actually replied to the question, not the total number in the respondent pool. The exception will be those questions for which multiple responses were possible. Looking through the email addresses of respondents, I note a few Canadian, Australian and British addresses, and one from
The first question Buntin asked was where had respondents published poetry, a question for which multiple replies were possible. Most respondents indicated that they had published in print journals or anthologies (119) and that they had published in online journals or e-zines (114). Just half of all respondents had published a print chapbook – 50.4 percent – while a smaller number – 38 percent – had published a larger print book. While these numbers feel about right to me, it was interesting to note that a much smaller number had published a book of some kind on line, 18.3 percent having had an online chapbook, while 10.2 percent had published a larger online book. Just seven respondents (5.1 percent) indicated that they had never published a book.
Several things jump out from these responses. First is a confirmation that, be it in print or online, chapbook authors outnumber the poets publish larger volumes, in spite of a printed chapbook’s invisibility in bookstores and difficulty getting distributed. Second is that, in spite of online publishing’s alleged “ease of access,” respondents with print volume experience outnumber those with online book experience by more than two to one.² It would have been interesting to have followed up with a question as to how many books of each kind had each respondent had published – the numerical gap between chapbooks and “books” would really open there – and also to ask how many books one had published by trade presses, university presses and “large independents” such as Coffee House, Graywolf, Copper Canyon, Godine/Black Sparrow or New Directions.
Beyond the publication backgrounds of his respondents, Buntin’s next set of questions probes their reading habits. A majority responded that they read poetry, both in print and online, daily. This is worth noting, because it suggests that Buntin’s respondents differ significantly from the more scientifically random pool of respondents ferreted out by the Poetry Foundation in its “Poetry in America” project, the “first scientific study of American attitudes toward poetry,” which was released about two weeks ago. The Poetry Foundation conducted phone surveys with 623 “users of poetry” and 400 non-users, and frankly did a good job, at least insofar as polling methodology is concerned. Table 34 of the foundation survey found that 16.9 percent of “current poetry users,” read poetry at least once per week. In contrast, 91 percent of Buntin’s respondents read poetry in print at least once per week, 61.7 percent doing so daily; 85.8 percent read it online at least once per week, 53 percent doing so daily. For both print and online, those who read poetry daily outnumbered those who read it a few times per week by more than 2:1, while those who reported reading poetry only once per week were far fewer still. In part, these differences reflect the variation between a self-selecting group of respondents, as in Buntin’s survey, and a pool generated by randomly dialing telephone numbers, the Poetry Foundation method. In addition, Buntin’s respondents were most apt to hear of the survey either through the Terrain.Org website, an online journal that includes poetry as part of a broader environmentalist agenda, or this blog. But most importantly, the Poetry Foundation’s survey is a study of “poetry users,” readers rather than writers.³ The survey asks just three questions about that involve the actual writing of poetry: Have you written poetry as an adult? Have you performed or read your own poetry in public? How recently have you written poetry? Buntin’s survey is aimed explicitly at poets.
To clarify this difference, it’s useful to ask about poetry’s most mysterious community – non-writing readers. The question of who reads poetry or, as Mr. Gioia once put it, Can Poetry Matter? is a focal point of the Poetry Foundation survey, which found that
Thirty-six percent of all readers have written poetry as adults. Poetry users are significantly more likely to write poetry (45 percent) than are non-users, fewer than 1 percent of whom have written poetry as adults. Just over one-quarter of the adults who have written poetry (27 percent) have performed their own poetry in public.
The phrase “of all readers” is the Catch-22 here, by which the Poetry Foundation survey means “readers for pleasure.” Contrast this with a recent British study reported in The Guardian last January:
A Book Marketing/TMS survey found that last year 63 per cent of Britons aged 12-74 bought any kind of book, with 34 per cent purchasing fiction and only 1 per cent verse.
Worse yet, fiction readers in the
The respondents in Buntin’s survey are people for whom poetry is not an ornament to a literate life, but central to it.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I’ll look further into Buntin’s results, with an eye towards how poets make use of the web, both as readers & writers. Later on, I may look more closely at the Poetry in America, especially because I want to look at the questions it asks and the assumptions behind them.
¹ This obviously skews the data toward poets who are reasonable, intelligent, excellent writers and good looking.
² One possible flaw in the survey itself was the lack of a standard definition of a chapbook, especially for online publication. From my perspective, it’s always been a question of the spine, although I do myself have one volume, Xing, that has appeared both as a chapbook and perfect bound at different times.
³ “The Poetry Foundation’s primary concern is with the reading and listening audiences for poetry.” (Poetry in America: Review of the Findings, p. 13).
