for mplsfish: why i don’t publish much

Here’s the thing: I have a longstanding stubborn resistance to publishing.

Reasons:

1. I figure the effort involved in submission doesn’t always equal the reward.

2. I publish my own chapbooks, sell them at gigs. In the spirit of punk/DIY, a large part of me likes it that way. I like the control, the direct contact, the idea that it’s my hands (and the hands of my far more capable publisher, thisrabbit ) that are on the work that people get from me.

3. Money doesn’t motivate me that much.

4. Regarding #3: Good thing, I’m a poet.

5. I don’t feel like I need the validation of publication to make me feel good about my work.

6. I post most of my work here, and on the gotpoetry.com forums. I bet more people have seen my work here there than would have if I’d reserved it for publication. Poets want to be read. I’m no exception: I just suspect this gets my work more efficiently to an audience that appreciates it.

7. Regarding copyright: I don’t really care all that much about it. I figure, someone steals one of my poems (and stealing seems so silly a word for it to me), karma’s a bitch. Anyway, I can always write another one.

8. Regarding #7: My own cynical opinion is that most of the people who get freaked about people stealing their poems are the ones whose poems are least likely to be stolen.

9. If someone’s gonna steal something, copyright ain’t gonna stop them.

10. I do publish on occasion, mostly in e-zines (The Furnace Review and The November Third Club being recent examples) whose sensibility interests me. I have some work in anthologies out there, and I’m interested in putting my old columns from gotpoetry.com into a coherent manuscript for submission.

All that said, I am starting to work my way into a state of mind for more submissions to hardcopy journals, for one reason and one reason only: I am preparing a manuscript of poems for publication, I am not sure I want to self publish it based on sheer size, and regrettably, publishers generally want to see publication credits before they’ll consider a manuscript. I consider this a form of selling out — for me. But we all do it at some point.

*Please everyone: don’t think of this as a condemnation of publication in general; it’s just a reflection of one ex-punk’s insane control freak mentality. I read journals, cheer on my friends and pray for them to get what they want. It’s just never been for me.

Hey, you asked…