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Tue, 26 Aug 2008 Looking at the sidebar of this blog, I see I've listed this purpose for it: "Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits." True enough. However, if you read this blog with any regularity, or just scroll through the first page, you'll see that there's not a great amount of topical stuff, about poetry or anything else. Instead, what you see are mostly quick mini-reviews of various books of poetry. Full dislosure: These are books that my press has published. I'm a voracious reader, but I'm not reviewing books at random: I'm offering my own readerly take on the books my press has chosen to publish. What did I like about these books that prompted my press to want to publish them? I'm not aware of another poetry editor who writes about his or her editorial decisions in this fashion. When I started this blog, I thought I would write about books more or less randomly, but after writing a couple of short comments about the books my own press has published, I got hooked. So please understand: these reviews are not objective. In fact, they are anything but. You won't see a negative review here. I'm writing about why I liked these books so much that I wanted my press to bring them to the world. We here at WordTech Communications do take pride in offering an alternative to the mainstream contest system in publishing poetry: one that relies on alternative distribution methods and an alternative business model. Since we rely on book sales, we don't have to charge reading fees to poets when we consider their work. However, we won't be reading this year. We're taking a one-year break to get the titles we currently have under contract into production. We're fully committed through the end of 2010, and it seems a good time to take a breather. We plan to begin reading again in the fall of 2009. Any interested poet can check our website at that time for guidelines. Are poets getting more and more fed up with poetry contests as the means to publish their books? It would seem so. There's a lot of chatter this week on poetry blogs about various poetry contests. I won't comment on the specifics of any one contest--the facts in these cases aren't always clear, or complete--but Reb Livingston's blog has an excellent take on the flaws of the poetry contest system. Her suggestions about what steps poets can take to improve the situations are well-taken. (Not so well taken are Bill Knott's comments calling for poets to "rise up in rebellion and demand their due" from commerical publishers, "willing to risk arrest martyrdom in the name of upheaval and disturbance...") |
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