Poetry Economics — Supply Exceeds Demand
Traditional publishers can deal with the fact that the supply of poetry greatly exceeds the demand by refusing to accept unsolicited manuscripts, and most of them are doing just that, making contests the only probable avenue for first book publication. The contest boom is further fed by the growing number of MFAs who need a book award if they are to have a shot at landing a position in a creative writing department. Since poetry book contest bottom lines depend upon entry fees, more and more wannabes are encouraged to put books together for entry in more and more contests every year.
Fifty years ago (around the time traditional publishers were introducing readers to Bly, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hall, Justice, Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass, Snyder, et. al.) the Yale Younger Poet Series, begun in 1919, was still the only poetry book contest. Today, a short search of the Web turns up over 300 chapbook and full-collection competitions sponsored by colleges, universities, foundations, literary journals, publishers large and small, and by a variety of local and national poetry booster organizations.
Even if contests merely continue to escalate at the rate of five or six extra competitions per year, an astounding minimum of 50,000 poetry books will be published as distinguished award-winners by the end of this century!
Remember Ionesco’s The Chairs? The universe of exceptionally talented poets being finite, there’s an almost theater-of-the-absurd irony in this “new math.” It’s not that most or, indeed, any of the prize-winning manuscripts are bad. Each has been chosen, after all, from hundreds of entries. All are well written, many quite readable. The trouble is, as Alan Williamson pointed out to a roomful of poets in Berkeley some years back, “The good poetry drives out the best.”
There Are Just Too Many Award Winners
As the number of contests, entries, and awards burgeons, the standard of excellence declines until even once prestigious contests like the Yale and Whitman trail wispier (and whispier) clouds of glory. Not even the most zealous poetry lover can purchase and read more than a fraction of the 300 (soon to be 500? 1000?) prize-winning books published each year. Pity the 22nd century English professor who will have to read 50,000-plus prize-winning books, each claiming to deserve careful attention by anyone hoping to be an expert on 21st century poetry!
Ezra Pound would be horrified to learn how little pruning is going on these days in the Garden of the Muses. Poetry book contests transform editors and publishers into bureaucratic bean counters. Instead of proactively working to discover great poetry they spend their time writing and placing ads, logging entries, depositing checks, and distributing batches of poems to screeners and finalists to the judge. Like Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, most contest operators “like to watch,” but take no active role in the selection process.
Nor should we assume that the poet judge is passionate about his or her choice. He has been hired not to discover a great book (that word is frowned upon in professional circles) but merely to choose the best of those presented by screeners who are often inexperienced MFA candidates. Trapped like a spider in a web, not of his own spinning, the judge is a relativist when it comes to taste. He must be satisfied with the juiciest fly that wanders in. Once he’s rendered his verdict and written his blurb, the judge’s commitment to the book, for all practical purposes, ends.
In many cases the judge could pick up the phone and get a better book from a friend, colleague, student, spouse, or lover. Paradoxically, contest ethics rule that out. Were contestants to learn that a judge had strayed outside his web of official entries to procure superior poetry he would be whipped down the slopes of Parnassus by Foetry-maddened bloggers furiously crying, “Shame!”
