[David Mason]

Like many others, I feel rather strange using the word "career" in relation to poetry. Frost's uniting of avocation with vocation says it better. In any case, Tim suggested I be available to discuss career issues and I thought I'd begin with one tiny suggestion here.

Editors will often say that they are swamped with poetry, but what they really need are book reviews. I think there are several good reasons why poets might write reviews:

1. To test their own ideas in progress about the art.
2. To contribute to the larger discussion of the art.
3. To advance the careers (or increase the visibility) of poets they admire and raise questions about poet they do not admire, who have perhaps been overpraised in the past.
4. To establish some sort of personal connection with editors who might later be willing to look at poems and associate them with a name rather than the anonymity of the slush pile.

The most virtuous editors are always combing the slush pile, of course, hoping to make a discovery. But even the best of them can't see or read everything that comes along, depending on the magazine, and must rely on readers who are also fallible. So some hint of name recognition achieved by reviewing books might just help.

How to get into the reviewing biz. For my own part, I just started small and kept challenging myself to try better magazines. I reviewed many books for a xeroxed newsletter for poets who lived in Upstate New York. This was edited by Judith Kitchen, a writer who has been a steady reviewer for the Georgia Review over the years. When friends told me about tiny magazines looking for reviews, I tried them. In the early days of Nebo, edited by Paul Lake, I contributed several reviews, as well as fiction and poetry. Probably nothing I'd cherish now, but Paul was kind enough to give me a start. I also reviewed for a little magazine called Abraxas in Minnesota. I wrote a couple of restaurant reviews and even wrote the "headnotes," as it were, for my father-in-law's restaurant menu (this in a now-defunct marriage, so I can't make many promises). Eventually I inquired with George Core at the Sewanee Review whether he would consider a review on spec of two poetry books (I might by then have had clippings from the Seattle Times and other papers to show him). I reviewed Lake and McDowell. That review was seen by Fred Morgan at Hudson, who wrote me a nice note. I wrote him back immediately saying I wanted to review for him. He later called, offering me the Fagles translation of the Iliad. I said I had good Modern Greek but no Ancient, and Fred said I could just compare the new translation to others of that book. So I did. I worked my butt off on that review, revising it nine times as a mini-essay, and it was accepted. For years I reviewed anything Hudson would send my way: fiction, poetry, criticism, etc., and never missed a deadline.

Anyway, all of that is a long-winded synopsis of how one set of relationships with editors was established, and I'd suggest to anyone else out there that you might try reviewing on spec for newsletters and very small magazines, reaching higher when you feel you've got the confidence to do so.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 30, 2004).]

[Richard Wakefield]

David:
I agree that reviewing is a good way to enter the poetry community, as it were, or to find out whether you're likely to feel at home there. In addition to your points in its favor, consider that as a reviewer you're involved with poetry even when you don't feel much like writing your own stuff. You're obliged to study verse rather carefully, think hard about your opinions, try to substantiate them (all of this in a perfect world, of course: I'm assuming that you want to be conscientious about it). Like (good) teaching, reviewing can make you a better writer, better poet, because at its best it helps you get past the superficiality to which most of us are slaves most of the time just because of our native laziness.
My career hasn't blossomed as your has, David, but I have worked steadily these twenty years, with several hundred reviews in the Seattle Times and many dozens in Light, Sewanee Review, and American Literature, among others (and far from all of them poetry reviews). I don't doubt that many editors have given my poetry an extra moment of consideration because they recognised my name. It doesn't take long until you feel you're part of a big conversation about literature, sometimes as creator and sometimes as commentator. It's a pretty good feeling, if you care deeply about literature in the first place.
RPW

[David Mason]

Richard,
You have to fail as often as I have before you can talk about not blossoming. You've got a ways to go.
Dave

[Michael Juster]

Dave: I adamantly agree with reasons 1-3 for doing reviews, but I'd suggest an asterisk beside number 4. I've done at least a half a dozen reviews in the past five years, but always at the request of editors with whom I'd already had a strong relationship. I believed that reason 4 was true for many years, but when I wrote to journals that I wanted to get closer to with very polite and professional queries, I never once got a positive response, and even got two fairly nasty ones, including one from an editor at one of the magazines mentioned above.

It feels to me that there is a clubby aspect to all of this--and, mind you, I know I obviously benefit from being an associate member of sorts of the formalista club--but I'm not at all persuaded that a nonacademic off the street can send samples of good work and a polite query to an editor of a major journal and get "admitted." You can for a few of the most desperate and obscure journals, but they tend to go out of business shortly thereafter without your review seeing the light of day.

I'm probably guilty of being whiny, self-centered and immodest by raising this point, but a similar argument seems to go also to whether your books get reviewed too.

Sorry for being difficult.

[David Mason]

No umbrage taken. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that the editors I had luck with are the ones others should try, or that editors can't get cranky now and again. Wouldn't you? Look further afield, but keep trying.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 30, 2004).]

[Tim Murphy]

I've never written, let alone published a book review, but Alan has. George Core took his big essay on Wilbur, and had no idea who Alan was. Tom Fleming at Chronicles took his essay on Hope and his review of Wilbur's Mayflies. Now, Tom had published Sullivan's poetry. But it proves that over-the-transom submissions can work if your criticism is as good as is that of the EfH.

I just send poems, and now I have a stable of sympathetic editors. But that wasn't the case eight years ago. Then it was what we salesfolk call cold calling. Again, I met with a good deal more acceptance than rejection. Sure, I had some friends like Dave and Dana who might have helped me with a couple of venues, but the verse pretty much had to stand on its own most places it went. I try to repay those early favors by putting in a good word with editors on behalf of a great many Spherians.

Which takes us to networking. Something we do here. But there is no better place in the world to network than the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative. Go there.

[David Mason]

Oh yes--the poems must be good. I wish I could take back a lot of poems I've published. No sense rushing that. Publishing for publishing's sake is not the goal, but rather, hopefully, to lodge the really good poems out there somewhere.

I agree with Tim that West Chester's the best networking place I've ever seen, but that doesn't help some of our far-flung friends. I've seen lots of postings about sharing resources with fellow poets (magazines, etc) and think that would be a great idea.

[Tom Jardine]

Originally posted by Michael Juster:

It feels to me that there is a clubby aspect to all of this--and, mind you, I know I obviously benefit from being an associate member of sorts of the formalista club--but I'm not at all persuaded that a nonacademic off the street can send samples of good work and a polite query to an editor of a major journal and get "admitted." You can for a few of the most desperate and obscure journals, but they tend to go out of business shortly thereafter without your review seeing the light of day.

I'm probably guilty of being whiny, self-centered and immodest by raising this point, but a similar argument seems to go also to whether your books get reviewed too.

Sorry for being difficult.

Michael,

I want to add to this, the clubby aspect. For years I have thought about it, and it is the way it ought to be. They must be clubby! They don't have a choice. When people jump up onto a a chair and crow, they don't want to get off the chair, they can't help it. The power to choose is addictive. Nothing makes any difference but to write poems people can't refuse. Few people can see beyond arms length, which holds their own poetry and their own ideas. Networking leads to ego. The battlefield board game is set, play the game with fantastic poetry and the little men will come to your side.

Paint beautiful paintings and they will sell; a simple thesis but true.

Also; "Editors will often say that they are swamped with poetry, but what they really need are book reviews."

They are swamped with <u>bad</u> poetry. But I think they need more book reviews too.

TJ

[Michael Juster]

I'm just questioning how open most editors are on reviews--I think most of them are reaching out to poets they already know for their volunteer workforce. I do agree with Tim, however, that few people are writing thoughtful, readable essays on major poets, and in particular writing on poets who tend to be admired here. Not only is that a potential opportunity for someone willing to work a little harder, it would be good for the cause if people did what Alan Sullivan has done so well and were writing essays on topics like the dark side of Dana Gioia, or comparisons of Dave Mason's narratives with Andrew Hudgins', or for that matter the fine piece on Fairchild I referenced above that connects Pete's poetry with his jazz training. I think even left-leaning editors are tired of 28 year olds writing incomprehensible pieces on the transgressive postmodern techniques of Anne Lauterbach viewed in the light of Foucault and similar dreck.
Rising tides...

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Originally posted by David Mason:
Like many others, I feel rather strange using the word "career" in relation to poetry.

Perhaps that's due to the verb form of the word. Many poets don't go at full speed, but spend decades moving forward, like Whitman: as Emerson said, Whitman must have had a long ascent, though he appeared out of nowhere. Or like ED. Or even like Frost, who didn't begin to write until later in his life.

We now have poets, though, who begin at 18 and expect quick results. Millay did it, but...