John Wang is editor of Juked, which does not accept blog- or workshop-posted poems for publication.
John writes:
No, Juked does not accept for publication poems previously posted to personal blogs or online workshops. This is because we don’t accept previously unpublished work, and unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the situation/perspective) in the world of Internet publishing, if it’s readily available to be viewed by anyone, it is considered published. This includes personal blogs and any site, really, that people can click to. Online workshops is a gray area, but, as Eric Melbye pointed out, it takes too much time to discern on a case-by-case basis whether something has had a large enough audience, so to make things easier, we (editors of journals large and small) would rather just play it safe and say no.
I think Eric [editor of Segue] has already provided a clear and thoughtful response on the subject. Speaking as the editor of a smaller, independent journal, I would just say that we too have the pressure to publish only previously unavailable material. True, we don’t have a board to answer to, and we don’t have a school’s reputation hanging about our necks to look after, but smaller journals are under tremendous pressure to measure up. We have massive chips on our shoulders—we’re not the big guys, but we want to be as good, if not better, and we have to convince people to read us instead of the familiar names, so we’re always looking for ways to A) raise our overall reputation and B) carve out our own niche, make a space for our own identity. Both of which would require us to publish only fresh new work. Looking quickly around, I don’t see any serious independent journals publishing work that has already appeared elsewhere. Pindeldyboz doesn’t. Hobart doesn’t. Smokelong doesn’t.
Ultimately, I think the question comes down to: Why should somebody read us? Why would you go pick up a copy of Post Road or Tin House? Or why would you click over to any of the gazillion independent journals online? I suspect it’s because A) you think it’ll be good reading and B) you can’t find it elsewhere. If we published work that’s already widely available on the Internet, then we’re no longer bringing you something fresh and new, and we’re only as good as the next blogger who posts links to favorite reads.
The problem with anything online is: it’s there. Anyone can read it. And for all we know, a thousand, ten thousand might have already. It’s another matter when you write a poem on a piece of paper and show it to ten, twenty, two hundred people. But if it’s on the Internet, the editor will have to assume it’s been read by half the human population and well published.
Now, if a publication has a section where they link off to pages they think are interesting (analogous to the “Readings” section in an issue of Harper’s), rather than trying to present something as original work, then I can see it being done, albeit under a different context.
And, having just looked at what “Harry” wrote [in the comments section of Eric's post], I want to say that I think poetry is especially well-suited for the Internet. The Internet is all about short pieces—part of the reason why we see so much “flash fiction” and “micro fiction” now, particularly online. Poetry, in general, consists of short works (though not always, but usually), and it seems to me one can readily find better poetry online than fiction. This is also due to the fact that fiction writers have a tendency to save up their stories for print journals, while poets may be more willing to part with their poems for online journals. And there are many other reasons for that, but I’ll stop here for fear of rambling on for too long.
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Many thanks, John. Would you consider editing Juked’s submissions guidelines to clarify this point?
More on the blog-posted poem issue here.
Reb said,
June 1, 2007 at 6:57 am
I find the notion of scarcity = value for the readers to be self-defeating for everyone involved. There’s a gazillion poems already on the Internet in hundreds of magazines and thousands of blogs, newsgroups. . . There will not be very many people who will both read a poem on a personal blog and later come across it at a magazine. And in the few cases where a reader does remember reading it before — why would that make a reader less likely to read your magazine? What if that reader found the poem in another (“non-published) way, heard it at a reading, participated in a workshop with that poet, received it in an e-mail? Is reading a poem twice really such an awful thing? Is it really possible that these few rare readers who came across that poem before somehow via the poet are going to be incensed or turned off towards your publication?
Readers will come to your magazine because they like the work — and while I too don’t want my magazine to have the same work as another magazine — I’m not in competition with the poets I’m publishing. Denying poets the right to promote and share THEIR OWN work is bad for everyone. And most poetry publishing agreements revert the rights back to the author upon publication — so the day your magazine goes live, what’s stopping the author from posting the poem on her own blog or personal website? The poem is then available in two places — what do you do, pull the poem off your magazine? What if the poem is reprinted in an online anthology — like “Best of the Net” — it’s available in more than one place.
If you read every single poem in NTM could you tell me (without googling) which poems appeared on blogs? I read like a 100 blogs a day and I likely couldn’t tell you. Could you tell me which poem appeared in an online journal two years earlier to its NTM publication? That one slipped past me — and I discovered it only by accident over a year later — and I read lots of online journals too. (And to be clear, I am certainly not happy about that instance — although I doubt anyone other than the poet and I realize it).
NTM has no funds to pay the poets and it’s unlikely a publication there would impress the older, more traditional faculty in most college English departments — so we’re not much of a stepping stone for a teaching career. Yet we have no trouble getting good work from good poets because we treat the poets and the poems with respect. We send pre-pub galleys, we present the work in a way that draws attention to it, and we don’t try to impose limitation on a poet’s ability to present and control her own work. That’s how small independent publications can compete with the “big boys.” That’s how we can expose their irrelevancy. No need for any shoulder chips or jealousy. Small publications are intrinsically better for poets. Stand tall!
Best,
Reb
Dave Clapper said,
June 2, 2007 at 5:51 am
While it’s true that we don’t accept previously published work at SmokeLong(except in special cases, like Almond and Dybek for an anniversary issue a while back), we don’t consider works posted on blogs or personal websites to be previously published. I know other publications differ on this. My reasoning is this–our rule isn’t in place so much for prestige reasons as it is to give as many authors as possible the shot to get that groovy feeling that comes with having their work accepted for publication. That feeling just isn’t so great (or hasn’t been for me in my writing anyway) the second time a piece is published as the first. We put the rule in place when we were complete newbies at this whole publishing thang, and that was our logic then. It still seems reasonable now.
'SmokeLong' editor on blog-posted poems « Very Like A Whale said,
June 2, 2007 at 7:00 am
[...] June 2nd, 2007 at 6:59 am (blogged poems, publication) Dave Clapper, founding editor of SmokeLong, comments below. [...]