I deeply relate to everything
says in todays offering. But that’s not why I’m posting it.I have had many of the same thoughts my self, reached many of the same conclusions and wrestled with the same dilemmas. But that’s not why I’m posting it.
The reason why I am posting this essay- other than the fact that it deserves to be read and shared and contemplated- is because it offers a perspective and some hard won wisdom which I think is vital in what I think is one of the few conversations worth having online in 2024, especially here on Substack. And that is ‘What are we doing here and what do we want the future of creativity on the internet to look like?’ I have written about this before and the STSC is my (or rather our) attempt to grapple with this and come towards some sort of answer.
Because I can’t help feel that this *gestures towards the internet as it is today* is nowhere near as exciting, inspiring for audiences and as supporting and encouraging for artists as it could be. Not by a long shot. The
are the vanguard, the leaders, the canaries down the coal mine.It’s worth taking their opinions seriously and studying the moves they make and the reasoning they give for it. Or at least I think so, anyway.
Enjoy.
TJB.
PREFACE
I have been working on this piece for two weeks, and haven’t found a solid hook. I have, however, drawn some conclusions from the title, the most important of which is to announce that after three years writing a sonnet series on Substack, I will be closing that series.
I want to talk about that decision, but I want to talk about more than that. I want to reflect on the stakes of self-publishing in the twenty-first century, and lay out the manifesto for those stakes.
THE FIRST : OUTPUT
As I have explained elsewhere, I self-published my own sonnet series as a matter of output. Before my Substack series, my poetry was written into a vacuum : I could not collate the drafts of poems I had into a manuscript with a single purpose, nor did I take time to polish the poems up to bundle into the hands of literary journals. Without that outlet, getting up early to write became more difficult, until I lost that time and began to twitch in odd ways. The idea to write a sonnet series, publishing one sonnet every Monday, was a release. It forced me to create a product that was immediately public, which I could call my own in a public place, defend or admit defeat on. It allowed a mirror to reflect back onto the writing table and get me to that table to write.
There is a strange contrast between the mirror which got me to the table and the solitary act of writing. Art itself is one of the loneliest endeavours, for once you start to work on your craft, look around you — anyone there? It’s you, solitary, your mind and your creative spirit, and then the hope that when you show it to the world, the world doesn’t crush it.
It is vital that I produce and offer my production to an audience. For that, the siren-call of self-publishing is a matter of immediacy, the commentious feedback preferred over of the slog and tedium of submitting poetry to journals, the dopamine of a “like” a quicker high than the less common thrill of acceptance. But in this immediacy there are snares. I’m drawn dangerously close to a solipsism that is detrimental to the task at hand — improving my Art. Because next to that self-publishing platform is the social media train, the Feed of Content, that serves up our dopamine, that fixes us in our satisfaction, that is a yearning different than what good writing can produce, it is (* gasp! *) the Call of the Influencer.
But more on that later.
THE SECOND : CONTENT VERSUS ART
I read a godawful post on one of those social feeds, that left me burning. The post went:
Art is having something to say,
Content is having to say something.
This ate at me, because I reject dichotomies and loathe duality. I’ve never found the world explained for me at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box; and in any case, I hate pithy syntax switcheroos. Of course, the note received its viral applause and plenty of commentious Hear-Hears, however wrong the sentiment. I take umbrage against the need to draw a line between the two, I take issue calling out the imperative that all writers feel to produce, I find it rude to correct in a space of Content the dopamine drive of writers everywhere.
I’d like to amend the note above with a sentence written by George Orwell:1
All art is content, but not all content is art.
Of the imperatives of self-publishing, the need to produce and respond to productions is part of the call. This means that in the dumpster fire that is a million acres of servers sending off their bytes at the speed of their processors, we must be firing off our content. This post is published at an instance when a million others posts are published. The Content is fed into the trough of the internet, and within it, yes, there is Art. And there are artists striving for that art. And that art is part of the great Content.
( As a side note, there’s nothing new here, not since the printing press. It’s just the scale and speed of it that’s changed. )
If you don’t want art to be Content, then we must talk about moving away from the space of self-publication. We must talk about Curation. And for that, I bring up my last branch —
THE THIRD : THERE ARE NO GATEKEEPERS
The impetus for this piece was to talk about a quality of self-publishing that rejects the idea of publishers and journals because of the Gatekeeping they do, by definition to keep artists out of the space. I want to say here that there are no such gatekeepers.
There are certainly those egos that would like to fence off Art from the rabble that tries to muddle in. One of my favorite pastimes is to read the arguments of old reviews when a new poetry was making a splash, and hear the curmudgeons try to fight off the young blood. Go ahead and look up reviews of “A Catholic Anthology”, published in 1917 and featuring many modernist poets2. It’s hilarious. The problem with those egos is they won’t keep anyone “out”, there isn’t a boundary to art, the work will find its way in. Your work will find its way in.
You don’t have Gatekeepers, you have CURATORS.
And here we must think seriously of what that difference is, between the self-publishing work going on and the work of literary journals and publishing presses. The actors are different. 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. 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.
An anecdote, a very short one. In 1915, Harriet Monroe was the editor for Poetry Magazine, an upstart journal at the time, pulling in new modernist poetry from America and Europe and pissing off the old guard who wanted a little less sincerity and a little more of the sublime. Ezra Pound was off on the “European desk”, finding all the young blood in England and France to bring to Monroe, and he came upon a young Missouri student by the name of Thomas Stearns Eliot who had written a dramatic monologue called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which Pound wanted Monroe to publish.
Monroe, however, didn’t like the piece. She had issues with the ending, and she hated the scansion of opening. She’s not wrong — that third line is hard to find ground in, it feels wrong. The letters back and forth between Monroe and Pound — Pound arguing his case and Monroe pushing back — are the subject of another essay, but Pound with all his tornado vorticism got his way. “Prufrock” was published in June of 1915 and has been canonized as one of the best twentieth century American poems.
( Reviewers hated it, by the way. )
Now imagine if Eliot, as young and unknown as he was, had been able to self-publish the piece. Perhaps a little press his friend had let him push off a couple of pamphlets to scatter around England. It is likely that genius has done just that for centuries and we have missed out for centuries, and we’re missing out now. How many Prufrocks have slipped by our feed without our noticing them?
My point is, the curators matter. Pound and Monroe’s argument wasn’t a matter of Eliot’s future as a poet but about Art in total. It transcended content, because in this case it was about risking the case for Art over content. And that is the power of curation.
My point is, 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.3
But that brings me to my addenda —
ADDENDUM : CURATORS OF THE WORLD, OPEN YOUR ARMS!
The difference between 1915 and today is that the world of journals and publishers is a very impersonal world. No one is looking to make friends, and when a poem is accepted there isn’t likely a group of people out to stand behind the work and continue to publish you. The process is too industrial, too much The Workshop mentality, in a space of academics and has lost its focus on individual writers.
The Curator needs to do more than just work through the fluff of submissions, and begin to adopt their artist and work to groom them. Help them see more light, more readers, and help your readership by investing your time in another’s work. Else, the literary journal becomes another avenue of Content, and less read, since there neither artist nor reader ever has a stake in it.
ADDENDUM : OR JUST BE AN INFLUENCER
As I noted above. The siren call of self-publishing leads to the dopamine of the feed which leads to branding and the Influencer. I believe that is an art of its own, led by Content and backed by capitalists everywhere. If you hate Rupi Kapur (?? sp ??)4 then that’s on you, she’s laughing all the way to the bank. Yes, it ain’t art, but that’s not necessarily what it was supposed to be, and at this point it doesn’t matter.
The choice between it all — writing or feeding — is personal. I do not like the pull of the feed when I’m interested only in writing, and improving my Poetry. There are others who can manage the balance, and then there are others who should work toward that Influencer status. Again, the internet is democratic enough to make the decisions, I’m just advocating a personal choice.
CONCLUSION
And I’ve made my choice. In the upcoming months I’m going back to an interior that will keep me less on the internet, no longer posting and looking more into that publishing space of editors and curators. I’m hoping that I can leave this post here as a thought-piece of what this space is, and what it means to be a writer here. It’s possible I’ll come back to it, just not in the form of the sonneteer, as before. Until then, thanks for reading, and be well.
From Orwell’s essay “Charles Dickens”, published 11 March, 1940: “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art”.
I’ll help. Here’s a great link that just lists out the fight, mostly with Ezra Pound in the ring: https://drc.usask.ca/projects//prufrock/recept1.htm
It has been pointed out I shouldn’t just preach. The world of literary journals is a difficult one to navigate, especially for writers with very niche work. I have found great success with duotrope.com, because their search engine is extensive and narrows down to the journals I think will be interested in my work. I recommend it, wholly.
I find it more worth my time writing this note than googling her to get the spelling right, sorry-not-sorry. I also had to make sure that “Stearns” was correct, so you can chew on that hypocrisy.
I want to push back on a part of this, the idea that self-publishing _means_ ignoring reach, distribution, and quality editorial vision.
Yes, if you wrap your work up in the equivalent of a pamphlet and leave it in those clear plastic holders in storefronts, you'll languish.
But that's not at all what's going on. Self-publishing, today, using the internet for one thing it's actually good for, can produce both quality and reach on par with publishing houses. I'm not convinced that framing self-publishing as opposite of "real" publishing is the most helpful way to think about it.
While I concur with your thesis, the hard reality is that if a writer isn't already a recognizable name, the likelihood of any publisher/editor/agent even opening the submission is nil.