4.1.2025

DO SOME VACUUMS SUCK HARDER THAN OTHERS?

Yesterday my friend

James Maynard

shuttered his three-year-old sonnet shop, having published the hundredth in a series of sonnets. The poems’ idiosyncratic diction and syntax are Maynard hallmarks; often the sonnets sound like the mutterings of a pirate crew marooned in the Chaucer Collection at the British Library. Sadly, though, the era of And Now, A Sonnet has ended. Bravo, James, and well done.

As he explains in a recent manifesto, “There Are No Gatekeepers,” James began his self-published sonnet series to counter the sense of futility occasioned by writing “into a vacuum,” an activity that included the “slog and tedium” of submitting his work to poetry journals, then waiting and waiting for a response. Writing and publishing a weekly sonnet on Substack forced him to “create a product that was immediately public” and gave him a “mirror” that kept him returning again and again to his writing desk.

Over time, however, he began to notice how the instant gratification of self-publishing, amplified by the trappings and pressure of social media, can distract a writer and trigger a choice between creating “Content” and making “Art” (initial caps in the original). And so, with his sonnet series complete, James has made his choice. He’s moving on, or back, to the slog and tedium, the traditional way of publishing poems.

Writing on Substack without the primary goal of making money or becoming an “influencer” does mean managing the tension between incubating and refining deeper creative work, on the one hand, and, on the other, giving the people what they want, as the saying goes.¹ That’s why much of James’s manifesto resonates with me. I have a few contrasting reflections, too.

“There Are No Gatekeepers”

Maybe James is saying that he’s determined not to let the renewed slog and tedium become a barrier to his writing. I hope it won’t be. He’s also saying that poetry’s gatekeepers are not really gatekeepers, but curators:²

In formal publishing there is a Curator who has their own vision of what Art is, and is looking to share that vision where they find it in another’s work.  They are looking, in fact, to draw forth the artist and make a crucial decision on what they call art.  The well-curated lit journal has moved beyond Content, it has worked to be itself a piece of Art.

I mostly agree that there are no gatekeepers in poetry, if by “gatekeepers” we mean smug mediocrities barring entry to the pantheon, the way a small-market cosmetology board caps licenses for brow technicians. But the notion of literary curation remains aspirational.

For the time being, there are indeed gatekeepers in publishing, a field that includes poetry journals and small presses.

I know this because all writers know it, but also because for many years I myself was a gatekeeper (to use that term), an editor at publishing houses with multimillion-dollar annual budgets. That’s a lot of money, but we couldn’t spend much of it on any one book, and we struggled to meet expenses for the few manuscripts we were able to publish.³ If the struggle was real in that comparatively affluent setting, why wouldn’t it be at least as difficult for a financially strapped journal or small press?

So, yes, there are gatekeepers—not to keep poets’ work out, but to keep journals and small presses alive and able to publish any poetry at all.

“Your Work Will Find Its Way In”

No, it won’t. Not all by itself.⁴

Even if, as James writes, there really are “armies of editors” out there ready to “gather up your work and present it to the world,” you and those armies may have a hard time finding each other—by 2017, this country’s MFA programs were churning out three thousand graduates every year. And the editors’ first readers, along with some of the editors themselves, may be youngish MFA students whose editorial and poetic range is aligned with generational experience and recency bias, but not much else. They may also be working uncritically inside, or hesitant to step out of, an ideological bubble imposed by a degree program’s curriculum. As for the world to which your gathered-up work will be presented, it’s melting and has a lot on its mind.

In short, I don’t believe that my poetry will find its way in, not without strategic, sustained effort on my part, along with some good luck and maybe a connection or two. Even then, the odds will be against me.

Anyway, where poetry is concerned, success brings a whole new kind of vacuum. Just scroll through X/Twitter and watch poet after successful poet announce the imminent publication of his or her new book while politely begging for the preorders that will determine the book’s print run. Does the success vacuum suck harder than the vacuum that drove James Maynard to self-publishing in the first place? I wouldn’t know.

Art versus Capital-A Art

I’ve already mentioned, in passing, James’s use of “Art,” a typographical treatment present throughout his manifesto. I call attention to it because it suggests a certain idealism with respect to the established publishing world, the establishment in this case being the minuscule universe of literary journals and small poetry presses.

For better or for worse, I no longer harbor any idealism when it comes to the publication (or curation) of poems. Speaking only of my own welfare, I think loss of idealism is for the better, in this and almost every other area of living.

The “General Reading Public”

Then there’s this:

In self-publishing, you have microblogs that allow the writer space for output with only the general reading public to respond or reject, subscribing and unsubscribing in an all-too-democratic manner.

Who has not been a member of the general reading public? And isn’t that precisely the public that many writers hope to reach? In the context, though, and in good faith, I’ll take that phrase to mean “readers who are not poets.”

But on Substack I do have readers who are poets—excellent, discerning poets. James Maynard is one of them. I could easily name a dozen more. If I want even more poets reading my poems, I can take a workshop.⁵

Among my readers who are not poets is a group that has followed my work for decades. Those readers are my crew. Almost all of them are visual artists.

And a central part of my mission here is to write good poems that other poets can enjoy, but that offer a way in to people who don’t read literary magazines, smart people who have a sophisticated appreciation of the other arts but think they don’t like poetry because so much of what they’ve read has bored them, left them cold, or made them feel stupid. I often include craft notes and links to information about poetry and poets. To me, “accessible” is not a dirty word.⁶ It gives me joy when members of the general reading public take their own time to thank me for what they’re learning here. So if people want to subscribe to Diary Poems, the door is open. If they want to unsubscribe, que vayan con Dios. None of this is excessively democratic for me.

“Nothing More Than Self-Published”

Finally, a few thoughts about this passage (its armies of editors made an earlier cameo), which seems to beg two questions: whether a writer’s digitally self-published work necessarily lacks artistry and polish, and whether the civilians who read it necessarily have lower standards than the editors and readers of literary journals:

. . . to be nothing more than self-published, and to seek nothing more than your own publication, is to cowardly shun the armies of editors and readers who will gather up your work and present it to the world. Because if it is easier to hit publish on the blog over revising the piece to make it Art, then it truly is no more than Content. Because you have your readers for the Feed, and then there are the readers who want something else—to judge if your work is good enough for their Vision. And perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. The reward is in the risk and the hard work of writing toward Art, not Feed.

I think James is talking to himself here, saying what he must to get himself back on track, as he sees it. He seems to be coming to grips with (for lack of a better term) the opportunity cost of continuing to self-publish when he feels called to challenge himself in the hypercompetitive arena of mainstream poetry publishing (“mainstream,” of course, is a laughably relative term when we’re talking about poetry). If so, good luck and Godspeed. I doubt that James means to call me or anyone else a coward for publishing on Substack.

But am I a coward for publishing on Substack?

From time to time I do send poems to the editorial armies. One battalion has been sitting on a submission for ten months; the rejection should arrive from the trenches any day by carrier pigeon. Another submission has been embedded for nine months with a unit that appears to be missing in action. I’m not shunning poetry editors, not even the ones who might deserve it. I don’t categorically reject any mode of publication for my poems.

And I lived inside the world of “legitimate” publishing long enough to know how it looks, from that perch, for me to publish my own poems on Substack. It looks lame. It looks pathetic.⁷ No real poet would consider doing it. Yet here I am, courting public ignominy—if the word “public” even applies to this tiny subdomain—and using my real name. Is that enough “risk” to rule out cowardice?

I don’t have time to worry about it. As James says, the work either is or is not good enough for readers’ “Vision.”

My readers’ vision is their business. My business is the quality of my poems, wherever they appear—a respected print journal, an upstart online mag, a broadside plastered to a wall, a handmade zine, or a Substack newsletter.

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And with that, enough said.

Many thanks to James Maynard for reading an early draft of this post, which was improved by his clarification of several points in his manifesto.

I’ll leave you with the following little poem. This one went through more than seventy drafts. It took two years and a few rejections for it to find a publisher—a quirky pair of Gen Z poets right here on Substack.⁸

WHY I WRITE POEMS

Not for the money. For the household-
name level of fame. For how
the frazzled mom of six in aisle 5
at the Valley Drive Walmart
spots me and dead-stops her cart. For how
TSA agents swarm me
and beg me to autograph copies
of my self-published volume.
For the way the flight attendants fight,
brawling in the aisle to see
who will grab the cabin’s microphone
and win the right to recite
my collected works from memory.
In the flyover desert
of Arizona, a saguaro
unseen from the stratosphere,
unwitnessed from the paved tourist road,
waits as long as thirty years
to produce a solitary bloom,
a hundred to raise one arm
to the empty sky. What a loser.

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1. “Giving the people what they want”: I have learned that I’m not the best judge of what people want. Every time I’ve hesitated to publish a poem here—because it was too emotionally revealing, too political (in general, or in an unpopular way), too personal, too traditional, too experimental, too difficult, too easy, too little, too much, too this, too that—the poem has elicited a strong positive response from readers, and they’ve let me know, usually in the comments but sometimes in private messages and emails. One reader even sent me a beautiful Jacquie Lawson ecard. I have learned to trust my readers.

2. Hat tip to Rattle editor

Timothy Green

for proposing, at Lit Mag News, the term “curation” as a replacement for the S & M–adjacent lexicon/ritual of submission and acceptance.

3. About 3 to 4 percent of submissions, a figure consistent across seasons and years.

4.

Radha Marcum

teaches that poets hoping to publish individual poems in journals, or to place their poetry manuscripts with publishers, need an understanding of their own work as well as a focused submission strategy. Her coaching is rigorous and effective, to judge by what I know and have heard about the experience of her clients.

5. That option has its pros and cons. But if I’m looking for constructive, useful feedback, I’ll get more of it from my peers in a well-run six-week workshop than from an overworked journal editor who holds on to a submission for months before emailing a generic rejection.

6. To be clear, I am not a New Formalist or any other type of reactionary. I don’t write experimental poetry, but I appreciate it and experimental art in general. I believe that the experimental and the avant-garde can peacefully coexist with the demotic. High and low culture. Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo and the Jackass movies. Leslee Smucker and Jerry Lee Lewis. Louise Labé and Harvey Pekar. You get the picture.

7. I don’t tell anyone in my family of origin, or any but a few of my closest friends, about Diary Poems. And I certainly don’t want the neighbors finding out, nor is anyone allowed to tell them. Hell to pay if that happens.

8. This is its first appearance at Diary Poems, but I linked to it last summer when it was published in the “Hot People Cause Chaos” issue of Poetry Trapper Keeper. In 2022 it was performed for the One Full Wit reading series curated by Amanda Krupman and Tishon Woolcock.

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