Sherry Chandler

Trends in Poetry “Use”

This post isn’t really about trends in poetry use, except obliquely. I am just a bit bemused by the notion of poetry users. Sounds like something we might have to cross over into Mexico to do legally.

Ron Silliman has an interesting, if somewhat wonky, series of lenghthy posts comparing a recent survey by the Poetry Foundation (Poetry in America) with a superficially similar survey done by Simmons B. Buntin at Terrain. The Buntin survey was queried poets, was much smaller, and was self-selected; the Poetry survey supposedly targeted 1,000 randomly-selected consumers of poetry. As Silliman points out

Perhaps the starkest contrast between the two groups is that over 90 percent of Buntin’s respondents read poetry at least once each week, a majority of them doing so daily, whereas less than 17 percent of the Poetry Foundations “users” do likewise.

The items are posted here, here, here, and here (so far), with bar graphs and pie charts. These kinds of dense posts are not things I read well on a computer screen. Blame it on cataracts (I hope – because they can be fixed) so I’m working my way through them slowly. But I did want to pass on this passage, which may be of interest to those of my readers who submit poetry for publication:

Respondents were asked – and the wording here is important – if there was a “difference in the quality of poetry appearing in online journals and print journals.” The majority (55%) responded that they did not see a difference in the quality of poetry. Asked to identify how poetry differed online and in print, respondents gave a wide range of answers that Buntin subsequently grouped whenever possible. The most common response, accounting for nearly a quarter of the answers given, was that “online poetry is more experimental, more avant-garde, more engaging, more innovative and fresher.” The next two most widely cited answers, however, clashed with the optimism of this conclusion. The more common one was simply that the “quality of poetry in print journals is higher.” This was followed by a response not about the poetry, but the presentation, the idea that “print journals look and feel better.” This was closely followed by two other propositions that tended toward optimism toward online poetry, but in a more qualified fashion. The first, as worded by Buntin, is the proposition that “online journals tend to feature younger poets whose work may be less well-crafted or may be really good, just no quid pro quo.” This response was tied with: “There is a broader spectrum in the quality of poetry online: some of the poetry in online journals is quite good, but some is awful.”

…

There are a lot of different ways to consider these questions, but it is worth noting some trends. One is that the (current) inexpensiveness of setting up an online journal is not particularly a major factor here. Others that seem to be more important are speed-to-publication, appropriateness for the text, distribution and prestige. It is absolutely true that certain authors, especially among writers of my own generation – I’ll be 60 in August – still show a generational allergy towards the internet. Since writers who have been active for 30 or 40 years tend, almost by definition, to be better known, the bias against the web shows up as a perception that some writers are above the web. This is the contemporary equivalent of some buggy riders being above the motor car, but it has interesting consequences. One is that the absence of these older poets is taken as an index of quality. In fact, print journals show pretty much the same range as do online journals. Some, like Jacket and How2, are as well edited as anything in print. And if you see as many print publications as I do – I get about 20 per week – one thing you cannot miss is that some print publications, journal, book or chapbook, can be every bit as ill-conceived or poorly executed as anything on the web.

If you are interested in these questions at all, the Silliman posts are worth reading in their entirety.

You can also read some of Simmons B. Buntin’s poetry here at Terrain. In fact, you might want to stay there and look around a bit. It’s a fascinating looking magazine. There is, for example, an essay by Fleda Brown, who is one of Dave Cazden’s favorite poets (and who could resist a volume entitled The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives.)

Also worth noting that readers of Poetisphere have elected Silliman “Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere” for 2006.

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