It’s Time for a General Strike In Publishing
hi. this is chi. yesterday facebook reminded me of a thread i posted in 2021, of my (on brand) ranting about the publishing industry. reading through it, i thought it would be useful to collect the thread into this blog post.
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SO, A THREAD — when i first started speaking/reading to college classes, i used to tell them the publishing industry was NOT worth saving, not the publishers, not the bookstores, none of it. that it was an old old old system built by white men to EXCLUDE voices, to manufacture scarcity and establish styles/aesthetics that prop up the Blancos and their interests. and it’s done this with various tactics that appeal to your sense of superiority (LITERATURE MAKES THE WORLD BETTER!) and nostalgia (OHMAIGOD WE MUST SAVE THIS CUTE BOOKSTORE!). lol. literature CAN make the world better. bookstores CAN take care of its neighborhood. doesn’t mean they do either of those things that often.
i’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few years while listening/reading POETS (writers overall, but let’s stick with poets cuz, well, we are a particular breed) throwing around leftist or anarchist or anti-capitalist or Marxist statements….while not doing shit about what’s going on in their own backyards. we are still playing this game of propping up publishers and editors (the ELITE CLASS) to gain their favor, to advance our own careers, to make more money, to then get our turn to EXCLUDE voices, people.
like the sheer amount of poets who stayed silent and made literally thousands and thousands of dollars off POETRY FOUNDATION funding by staying silent about a racist ass white editor, only to try to distance themselves only after the shit hit the fan…how different are you from, say, William Barr who said jack shit until weeks before his job was over to say “OOPS PREZ YOU’RE WRONG LOL”?
we tell each other to boycott something like WalMart or Amazon cuz of mistreatment of people or too much wealth. yet—how many poets would turn down money from the Poetry Foundation or a contract from Simon & Schuster or an acceptance and $$$ from RATTLE? raise your hands.
right before THE YELLOW HOUSE came out, an editor at LITHUB asked me to send him work to publish, offered me $150. i said no. i said no because i didn’t trust him as a human being. IF i had needed that $150 to feed myself or a loved one at the moment, i would have taken it. but without that desperation (not that i had money; i just wasn’t starving at the moment), i was able to think it over and make a decision based on what aligned with my core beliefs.
anyway, the Publishing Industry is a business of EXCLUSION. and like any business of exclusion, guess who is at the front of the excluded line? how can we in good conscience support this and publicly refer to yourself as an ANARCHIST or SOCIALIST or whatever the fuck we call ourselves without any fucking irony? we are so hellbent on maintaining the status quo of this stupid ass industry in hopes of what? a teaching gig? a starred review from Publishers Weekly? we write poems and publish poems so we are somehow excluded from the very system we’re criticizing?
going back a little, one of the main reasons we started Writ Large Press is so we could trigger or contribute to the COLLAPSE of publishing, not to succeed in the existing system. that’s why MOST of our events and projects have not been about books. books have merely been details to something more important: people. people gathering. people speaking and listening and laughing and drinking and dancing and just being people.
LET ME STOP HERE TO SAY: what triggered these, um, rants over the past few days is that i’m watching season 2 of the amazing DICKINSON on apple tv and the editor/publisher who thinks he’s discovering Emily Dickinson is the slimiest creepiest dickhead. you know, like in real life. anyway….
aahhhhhhh i love this show. i miss it so much…anyway!
so having said all this, here are some things to consider:
1) stop submitting your poems to publications and contests. just completely. if we all just stopped, what would happen? i know editors are busy, but so are poets. we all have other jobs (if we’re lucky) or are busy trying to find work. why do the poets have to do all this work? isn’t it time editors (of which i am one) go out and FIND poets to publish. if our taste and our eyes for good work is so impeccable, we should have no trouble finding poets out there and asking them to allow you to publish them. and what would contests and publications do if there were no submissions? oh maybe find a different model than charging people to submit their work.
2) when a filmmaker, say Robert Rodriguez, writes, directs, edits, funds his movie all on his own, we APPLAUD IT. “You, sir, are a true artist! a true independent!!” when a musician writes, performs, records, and releases their own music, like say…Ani DiFranco (who thinks we should have empathy toward white supremacists but that’s a different story…), we APPLAUD IT! “you, ma’am, are a true artist! a true independent!!” when a writer writes, publishes, and distributes their own work…well, the bookstores won’t carry our books, the critics won’t review our work, the contests won’t accept our work. “yeah, no that’s not a real book because you self published it.” like fuck you.
3) it is the year of our lord 2021 (it's 2024 now) and there is a pandemic and cops are STILL murdering Black and Brown people and we still somehow think self published books aren’t real publications? the fuck?
4) what if ALL (or a big chunk) of poets gathered (i imagine there are millions and millions of poets around the world) together and started an online publication, where each day many many poems went up and all the poets made a pledge to visit the site, read the works, whether we hate the poems or love them, share posts from it, and pledged to NOT read any other online literary publication? what would happen? it would become BY FAR the most read and visited poetry/literature website in the world. what would happen to its value? what would happen to the industry? how much attention would the Publishing Industry have to pay to it and CHANGE to accommodate it, to compete with it?
5) this would mean we would get rid of editors as we know them and instead have moderators to root out trash writing (meaning hateful hurtful shit, you know what i mean).
6) what if all the poets just said NO YOU CAN’T HAVE OUR WORK?
7) TL;DR fuck publishing.
