[Janice D. Soderling]

One can’t expect poetry to be other than a business when it is a set up as a business from day one when the student pays his/her university fee with some kind of expectation of preparing for a career. The teachers are salaried, seek tenure, are rewarded (or not) from their teaching abilities, the university wants success from both professors and alumini so they can get more students. All this results in a market situation. Publish or perish, to use an old saw. Or as one of the speakers in this article says, "Carve out a niche and become a brand name."

It is a scam market too, because the distribution channels totally flood the market. The supply to the showcasing venues is far greater than the demand from the showcasing venues. I don't mean that the wonderful, admirable, excellent editors are scamming anyone, I mean the situation is "mission impossible" Of course it is impossible for everyone who has completed a university education in poetry to earn a living at it. Even the available teaching slots must be glutted by now when even the tiniest community college offers a course in creative writing. It is a pyramid scheme.

Sometimes I grow dizzy at the thought of how many get an BA in creative writing each year, and how many get an MFA, and how many former students and professors are sending off their stuff to the same journals.

And though there are more journals of all kinds than you can shake a stick at (just look at the duotrope listings) there are far more submitters than slots. So everybody and his brother starts yet another journal and the upshot is that the market (it is a market even though it doesn't pay) is so flooded with poor and mediocre writing that no one notices who is published except the writer him-herself. When supply exceeds demand, the very idea of paying becomes laughable.

Not only do they not pay, now the trend is becoming to charge for even submitting. I'm not talking about the fees that correspond to postal costs the submitter would have anyway, I am taking about the idea that a submitter should pay a reading fee for being read and judged. The contest fees are in many cases prohibitive.

And this is not a complaint to any labor-of-love editor. I know what the costs are for you in time and money and strain on your good humor and I am humbly grateful. Often the "little magazines" contain more gems than the "biggies". I am talking about the upper echolons of the system where the air is rarified.

The few university-funded journals or high-brow commercial magazines who do pay may take in an occasional outsider on recommendation of a friend or someone may discover a prodigy in the slushpile, but the same names make the rounds of the exclusive places and often the work presented isn't that different, one from the other. How could it be otherwise when students across the nation, perhaps across the world, are being taught the same rules and tricks from the same cirricula.

But we all know that, so why would anyone ask the question “Is American Poetry at a Dead-end?” unless it is to give a PR platform to some of those seeking to become a brand name, a household word. Note, I don’t begrudge them the platform. Not at all.

This is not sour grapes, because I have always had a good reception from the little magazines even back in the days when editors had time to write friendly notes on rejection slips. But I am not so foolish as to imagine a career or that it would make me rich and/or a celebrity. There are some awesomely good poets writing today, true craftswomen and craftsmen but they are fewer than one would think from the hype on, say, Amazon.

My point is: How can it not be a business when education of poets is a business. And when it is a business with a glutted market how can it be other than a dead-end.

(The apalling idea that education is a business rather than a right that a nation must provide for its citizens for the nation's own survival has spread to the EU, and free education will soon be a thing of the past, but that is another soapbox.)