I cannot tell you how to write poetry – no one can do that. I honestly believe that all poets are self-trained – as are most other artists. Oh, someone can point out the essentials to you, but you must have the capacity in yourself to turn an inspiration into an art.

Do I believe in tabula rasa? Most certainly, genetics aside – and genetics seem to have little to do with art or poetry – human-kind is born a blank slate upon which we will write a message. We soon gain capacities within ourselves – for whatever – and by whatever prick of propinquity pains us. We are not all stirred by the same spoon, but we all stew in the same pot.

Pardon me while I get down from my exceedingly tall horse.

I don’t consider myself a poet – not in a professional sense. It is true, I have published a few poems, but to my way of thinking, poets are people who teach in universities and occupy a “chair” somewhere. They win prizes and get awards, grants and stipends. They are listened to at poetry societies and functions. They are invited to dine and somebody else pays for the meal.

I’m still waiting for that first grant. Or cash award. I’ll take either.

The only prize I’ve ever won was a door-prize necktie at a dance when I was a teenager. I was so shocked I was afraid to go up and claim it.

If I go to a gathering, I’m usually one of the people who buys the dinner. If anyone listens to me, I am pleased – and surprised. Even my wife and my dog won’t pay attention sometimes. I belong to no clubs and only one small poetry group. I have joined only one thing in my life and that was the U.S. Army – and didn’t God teach me a lesson. I pride myself on being ostracized by almost everyone.

In fact, I was turned down for even a general membership in the Poetry Society of America several years ago. I had made the error of stopping by their offices in New York and leaving a check to apply for membership. I also left a small booklet I had self-published – a terrible job, I must admit. Weeks later, at home, I received a nasty note from the PSA, signed by the director, informing me, “You are not the kind of poet the PSA wants.” Something to that effect anyway. He returned my check, but not the booklet.

This particular incident cost me several years of poetic silence. Criticism and personal slander is never easy to bear. Eventually, I got over it and went on – consider the source. I suppose that is what you must do.

I say this not to demean the PSA (they can do that for themselves) but to prepare the hopeful poet for what they can expect: Rejection. And more rejection.

The first question I’m asked by poets, young and old, is, “How do you get something published?”

I usually reply, “Well, I’ve been at this a long time – most of my life.”

Now, that may not seem like much of an answer, but what I mean by it is persistence. If publication is your goal, and I think it certainly should be, you must keep applying your best efforts.

If you have any talent at all – I’m assuming you do – listen carefully to what people tell you, but don’t stop poetizing because some dunderhead criticizes you. The libraries are full of books by poets who were taken to task by their “betters.”

As I’ve said before, Coleridge and Gray were damned by Wordsworth; Dr. Johnson considered Gray’s Elegy dull.

E.A. Robinson always had difficulty finding a publisher – as late as 1920, Macmillan Company turned down Lancelot. And, once, Robinson’s poems were left in a whorehouse by a publisher’s reader and saved only by the intervention of the madam, who had much better taste than said reader.

Harriet Monroe, at Poetry Magazine, despite what she said later, was not impressed by “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock.” She kept it for nearly a year while Ezra Pound pleaded with her to get on with the publication – and meanwhile, poor T.S. Eliot was having a nervous breakdown.

A poet today has an advantage that poets and versifiers in previous generations could only dream of – I mean the Internet. I don’t think anyone has any idea how many poetry magazines and blogs really exist. But the number must be enormous.

Now, the first thing you need to do as a poet is to examine your writings carefully. There is a great deal of difference between the private poem and the professional one. Do your poems speak to a wider audience than you and your family and friends? Is the writing itself of a nature to make someone want to read it? Be honest.

Emily Dickinson may have been writing all alone, but her poems dealt with universal matters and belonged in the world at large.

If you decide that your work speaks to a wider audience, go for it.

How To Get Published

I shall attempt to be practical.

Study your markets. You can do this by purchasing one of the books that offer poetry markets – or by going to Duotrope’s Digest. This site is one of the most valuable you will ever come across for getting a lead into publishing your work.

Pay attention. Read the guidelines for all the different magazines and listen to what they want, what they’re asking for. If they say they don’t publish rhymed poetry or free verse, don’t send ‘em any of it. An editor – despite their diminished capacities in reasoning – can usually tell within a few words whether or not you’ve performed this bit of task work.

Be forewarned: It doesn’t pay to piss off editors. They read a lot of claptrap. If you want them to read yours, do as they ask. Despite the proliferation of Internet markets, the world of poetry is still very small. A word said somewhere can help or harm you.

Before you send anything out, go to the website or try to obtain a copy of the magazine and read their material. It may give you an insight into the editor’s mindset.

Forget about the “better” markets, the ones that “matter” – i.e. Poetry Magazine, Hudson Review, New Yorker, etc., and other paying venues. The money item should not even be considered here – you’re never going to make enough on your poetry to pay for your carfare, so put that out of your mind right away. Publication is what the poet wants, not financial remuneration.

You will be tempted to go for the creme de la creme – don’t waste your time. These are wonderful magazines, of course, but … let me put it this way, Poetry Magazine receives approximately 90,000 poems a year. Out of that number they accept about 300-350. A small percentage, eh? If, say, your poem comes across their desk – and a poem by a known poet enters the mail room that month – or even one by the editor’s 2nd cousin once removed (it’s been known to happen) – which one do you think they’re going to go for? And they’ve always got a huge backlog.

Be realistic or you’ll be at the bottom of the slush pile faster than you can say rejection slip.

Oh, I know, I know – you’re a good poet. But you’re not Homer or T.S. Eliot. You just need to get published.

Try the smaller magazines and unknowns. They may not have prestige, they come and they go, and they won’t pay you a kopeck, but there are people there who will appreciate your work. This is where the real effort in the poetry world is found. These little magazines operate on a shoestring most times and they are a business of love by editors and staff who do it so they can find that one gem out there crying to be published – your poem.

Your cover letter is the next most important item. Make it brief, a few lines: “I wonder if you might be interested in the enclosed poems–,” and include a bio of no more than three or four lines. Introduce yourself, your name and your e-mail. If you have been published anywhere, mention it – but don’t try to cover everything. Don’t tell them your Aunt Minnie loved your poem. Bastards that they are, they won’t care.

If the magazine or website says they don’t accept simultaneous submissions, you can only send your efforts to that one place for the time being. I try to avoid these markets because of the time involved in turn-around. If they don’t say anything about not accepting simultaneous submissions then you can send your work to several different places at once. But you must tell them in your cover letter that your poem is a simultaneous submission and if your work should be accepted elsewhere, you are obliged to notify them at once. Very important!

A word about the difference between the print word and the Internet. I myself am an acknowledged Internet poet – I find a greater and easier market here for my particular writings.

However, don’t write off the print media. I have been published in both places.

Here’s the thing – the Net has a worldwide reach. One poem at a site brought me a note of appreciation from someone in New Zealand.

Print media has a limited reach – most little magazines print two or three hundred copies at a time. That’s not a wide audience.

But when the electricity goes out at two in the morning, you can’t read your stuff on a blank computer screen.

Always, always include a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) when going snail mail. Not to do so is the mark of a rank amateur, a no-goodnik, a sap who won’t be getting any.

Beware of self-publishing scams! Before you go sinking your money into printing your own works, you might want to see what the reaction to your poetry is elsewhere. Amazon and Lulu offer wonderful set ups, but the goal of poets – as I’ve indicated – is to find readers. If you don’t have distribution facilities, you may have a hard time getting your book reviewed or read anywhere – especially if this is your only publication of note.

If you get that dreaded rejection slip, okay, it hurts. But don’t take it personally. The editor probably doesn’t have it in for you. And Lord only knows why editors accept or reject manuscripts. I have sent poems to magazines and fulfilled every specification they had in their guidelines, the poem was perfect for them, still, the poem was rejected.

I did take it personal once. At one juncture, I sent a note back rejecting their rejection! This happened when a magazine said they wanted narrative poetry. I forwarded them a narrative poem and it came back to me. I went on to their website and reread the poems printed there. What I found was only “confessional” poetry, and not very good stuff at that.

I wrote them a note explaining the difference and suggesting they change their criteria. I do not advise this as a course of action.

I think, instead, you should reread the poem – if it still sounds good, continue to send it out.

And one more thing: If an editor accepts your work at a magazine or website, write and thank them. This also means they might be watching for more of your poetry. But don’t bombard them with submissions – string it out.

It’s hard to defend Google on this deal. Even large booksellers like Amazon are weighing in against the search monolith. Microsoft, too, have had words to say. Presumably, these companies are against the deal because it would shut them out of the competitive door, which is another reason to be against it. Anything that is counter-competitive, even if it’s a big guy vs. big guy sort of competition, is a bad deal. Consumers and authors are hurt either way.

But I believe in giving kudos where kudos are due. While Google is attempting to monopolize digital book sales, it is also opening up another door to affordable classic and antiquarian literature through print-on-demand technology.

I believe we are at a seminal and historic juncture in publishing. Call it a revolution, which is a bit of an overused word these days. Or maybe a second renaissance, which has a slightly more romantic flavor. At any rate, the world of publishing is never going to be the same – and we have Google to thank for it.

Why POD Is About To Get Better, And Worse

The Espresso Book Machine is pretty expensive. It retails in the range of $100,000, which means that some of us are cut out of the market. But that won’t always be the case. The principles of economics say that as more of the machines are sold the lower the price will fall, making the technology more available to more people. I can see a day, probably in my lifetime, when similar technology will be available to everyone for home use much the same way that laptops are today, and probably in the same price range.

If I’m right then all of us will be able to easily run a full-scale publishing business from our homes. If you think Lulu is cool, try owning your own Lulu.

But before you count your chickens, consider how good – and bad – this will be for independent publishers. First, the good:

• The provision of an affordable means of production
• More control over your own works
• Less profit sharing as you’ll be able to control more of the publishing process

And the bad:

• The provision of an affordable means of production
• More control over your own works
• Less profit sharing as you’ll be able to control more of the publishing process

How about if I restate that?

• Lessening the cost of production for independent authors will give the false impression that publishing is easy
• Since many authors will believe that POD is seemingly easy because they have such instant access to large publishing house technology, more authors will attempt to publish their own works without the necessary skills to market them properly
• More control = less profit; 100% of 0 is still 0

Marketing Is The Most Important Part Of The Publishing Process

I don’t mean to cast a pall on self publishing. For those authors who can act as writer, editor, and publisher and who know how to market their works successfully, this will be a great opportunity. Some will even make good money running their own publishing business. But most won’t. Here’s why.

The competition is stiff and consumers are demanding. Let’s face it, I like reading great literature. Don’t you?

But most of us don’t really care to read fluff. Or other bad germs. We just don’t like it. And so the challenge for all self publishers will be the same challenge that current large publishing houses have – how to market a book so that it makes money.

Marketing has always been the most important part of the publishing process. Indeed, it’s the most important part of any business. A good product won’t sell if no one knows about it. A bad product can sell millions of copies with great marketing. But a good product with good marketing can make an author rich. And there’s the hitch: You have to take the time to create a good product – not by your standards, but by consumer standards.

The problem? Most authors don’t know how to judge consumer standards of excellence in publishing. They don’t know now and they won’t 20 years from now.

This stark reality will result in a huge population of frustrated authors who own their own creative works, but who essentially own the equivalent of a city dump. And it will also result in independent authors who get filthy rich from publishing their own works of fiction and poetry. The difference will be made by a combination of two processes – editing and marketing. Those who do well at both will succeed. Those who won’t will flop.

What Print On Demand Publishing Will Look Like For The Winners

If you’re one of those authors who learn how to write great books people love to read, can edit your own work (or hire professional editors who make you look good), can print a book that looks and feels world class, and can take that book to market and sell it to hard-to-please consumers, well, you could make a good living. But what will that look like?

I can see a number of ways that independent authors can become independent publishers and make a decent living at it using technology similar to EBM by On Demand Books. Here are a few ways it could work (do your own math to subtract expenses):

• You’re a great writer and you know it. You’ve developed a solid, loyal fan base who will buy anything you put out. You’ve got a good mailing list and you know how to use it. You’ve published your book and it’s currently in digital format. You’ve spent thousands of hours writing and just as many editing. But you’ve spent no money. You write up a sales letter and e-mail it to your list of 1,000 loyal fans. Your book is priced at $9.95 and in just one week, you get a 50% response rate, earning just under $5,000 for a book that took you exactly 6 weeks to write. You take 20% of your earnings and promote your book through advertising, earning another $3,000 in sales within two weeks. Your two-month income is $8,000, but you’ve also made just over $1,000 in residual sales from previous books. This translates into a moderate, but livable income but you’ll have to adjust these numbers for future inflation.
• Instead of working toward a full-length project from beginning to end, you develop a list of readers who subscribe to a serial novel. Your commitment is to deliver a chapter every week by e-mail and you’ve designed a web page that gives readers a way to provide you feedback on what they’ve read. You’ve got 500 loyal readers who are active on your personal forum. Members pay you $20 a year for the privilege of helping you develop your novel, an ongoing income of $10,000 annually. These readers also get your printed novel at a 50% discount – another $2,500 after a 12-week publishing cycle (for a 12-chapter novel). You also have a 1,000-member list of interested readers and after your e-mail blast you sell 25% of them at full price ($9.95 X 250 = $2,487.50). An affiliate program that pays 50% of the full price offer also earns you an additional 300 sales for an income of $1,492.50. Your quarterly earnings (in today’s dollars) equal $8,980.
• In another scenario, you sell the print rights to your works by providing digital copies for download. No printing on your part. You sell digital copies of your poetry book for $100 and allow work-at-home publishers the right to print the books and sell them for whatever price they think they can get for them. With a loyal fan base of 1,000 independent publishers, you achieve an 80% success rate on every mailing. At 800 sales of the poetry book it took you 4 weeks to write, you’ve made $8,000 and no expenses.
• You belong to a writer-publisher coop. Each member contributes a work to be printed in one volume. You’ll share expenses and profits equally. The volume is a six-month project that ends with a large book containing five novels and one book of poems. It sells for $24.95 retail and $14.95 wholesale. To a combined list of 25,000 loyal readers and 10,000 book stores you sell 10,000 copies at retail and 4,000 at whole sale prices. It amounts to an income of just over $42,000 for you for that six-month period.

These are just a few scenarios off the top of my head. There is no limit to what excellence-oriented authors and self-publishers can accomplish. In your coop, you may have one author who is an outstanding editor, another who is an expert marketer-promoter, and one who is a fabulous book cover designer. Let each member contribute according to their expertise.

You may decide, as a self-publisher, that you don’t want to edit your own books so you hire an editor to do all of your editing for you. Add that to your expenses.

Or maybe you and another author-publisher agree to edit each other’s books on a quid pro quo basis. The possibilities are endless.

Are these numbers realistic? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. I suspect they are very realistic for some authors who can make their business run for them. For others, they’ll just be a pipe dream. Some of you likely could do even better. But this is the direction that I see self-publishing going. I have no crystal ball and I’m not a fortune teller. But I think it’s safe to say that someday an author may be able to walk into a coffee shop, make a pitch and sell 5 copies of her poetry book to the shop owner using her PDA and a portable printer to deliver the product on demand.

Am I a nutcase or do you see it too?

You’ll have to click the link to read the submission guidelines, but here’s a quick definition of micropoetry. Verse in 140 characters or less. This is poetry published at one of the several microblogging services such as Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, or Tumblr.

If you publish micropoetry through any of the above services, feel free to submit your verse for publication as a digital chapbook. Your micropoetry can reach a wider audience of 15,000+ (and growing) monthly visitors to World Class Poetry properties.

Read the WCP Micropoetry Chapbook Series submission guidelines.

Gary B. Fitzgerald has commented on some of the blog posts here at World Class Poetry Blog and has been a faithful reader now for about a year, I guess. Last year he published two full-length poetry books under the imprint of AuthorHouse. While these two books are self-published, the quality of the contents would not suggest it.

Gary has agreed to allow me to publish a selection of the poems from his two books, titled Hardwood and Softwood, as a chapbook. We’re talking about a total of 155 poems between the two books. Our digital chapbook will feature less than 20 poems from each book, but those poems will showcase Gary’s poetry in the best possible light, a task that proved to be quite easy considering the high quality of his verses.

Nature poetry does not get much respect in our modern technological era, much less does it when approached from an Eastern philosophical bent. But Gary B. Fitzgerald’s Taoist nature poetry is must reading for anyone interested in simplicity without simple-mindedness and humanity without vituperation.

The Three Phase Publication Schedule
The publication of these two chapbooks will come in three phases. The first phase will be the publishing of Hardwood as a standalone chapbook. The second phase will be the introduction of Softwood as a standalone chapbook. Phase III will be the combining of the two chapbooks into one dual chapbook.

Why three phases? Honestly, for practical reasons. Rather than wait on the publication of both chapbooks, I’ve decided to offer the completed chapbook while the other is in production mode, but only to WCP Toolbar users. When Softwood is finished, it too will be made available to our toolbar users. The final chapbook, with selections from both Hardwood and Softwood, will be made available as a .pdf document to anyone who wants to download it.

Hardwood will be made available in the next day or so. If interested in the 15 poems that make up Hardwood then I encourage you to download the World Class Poetry Toolbar so that you’ll have access to the chapbook when it is made available. The toolbar is free to use and also includes access to Internet radio, some of the most popular poetry blogs online, and almost 30 online poetry journals.

If you have a full-length book you’d like to promote and would like to get it in front of the 15,000+ and growing unique visitors every month that World Class Poetry properties has to offer then sign up for our chapbook update list and you’ll be notified of when you can submit work for publication as a chapbook.

Until then, I hope you enjoy Hardwood.

In summary, publishing is a business. Even if you self-publish, you’ve got to impress your editor and your publisher with a product that can sell. Do your editor and publisher have the skills to know what readers will buy?

The hard part is the marketing. If you aren’t prepared to handle the marketing part of your book, even a self-published poetry book, then you shouldn’t be publishing. It’s your money, but publishing a book without intent to earn a profit on it just because you think it’s good is sheer vanity. Throwing a blog up with all of your poems on it as a free buffet isn’t publishing. It’s giving away your rare jewels (if the poetry is any good). If it isn’t any good then you’re just giving away pebble stones.

An author thinks about creation. An editor thinks about packaging. A publisher thinks about marketing. You’d better be able to do all three or you’ll never survive.

World Class Poetry is introducing several lines of chapbooks. More than just looking for raw talent in verse, we are also looking for creative insights on the philosophy of poetics.

For more information on the World Class Poetry Chapbook Series’, head on over now and sign up to be on our non-spam poetry chapbook list.

If you are familiar with Twitter, kudos to you. If not, allow me to introduce you to the 21st century version of mass communication.

Twitter is an opt-in service that allows you to set up an account and a profile and instant message multiple people who have agreed to receive your messages. The messages, however, have a 140-character limit. Because of this limit, Twitter has been dubbed “microblogging”. It’s a way of sharing information in short snippets. I like Twitter for a number of reasons, one of which is because it forces me to think concisely. Brevity is key to good writing and Twitter forces you to be brief.

What Is A Twitter Poem?
So what is a Twitter poem? In a word, a Twitter poem is a poem that you write for Twitter and publish on Twitter. I have seen Twitter haikus and other poets have used Twitter to write short poems. I’ve even seen people Twitter an entire book.

As I see it, there are two ways you can use Twitter to write a poem. You can write a single poem within one “tweet” – the word for a message on Twitter. Or you can use each message to write a line in a poem. In the latter’s case, your poem can be as long as you want it to be as long as each line is no more than 140 characters. That’s not quite as challenging as writing a 140-character poem.

Keep in mind, we are talking about 140 characters, not words.

My Twitter Poem Experiment
Starting April 1, I will tweet one poem a day for 30 days. Each poem will consist of 140 characters or less. Each poem will exist within one tweet. No more. I will tweet each poem three times and every day throughout April I will publish a new poem. I’d welcome you to follow me, if you have an interest in seeing how this little experiment goes.

All you have to do to follow me is open a Twitter account and look for me at http://twitter.com/Allen_Taylor. My username on Twitter is Allen_Taylor. When you find me just click the Follow button and that’s all there is to it.

If you want to write your own Twitter poems in response I’d like to read them.

How To Write A Twitter Poem
Here are the guidelines that I’ll be using for my Twitter poems. You can write a poem on Twitter any way you like. But I’m using this method as a means of efficiency and so that there is consistency throughout the month. Whenever you see a Twitter poem it will look like this:

• Every line will end with /
• Stanzas will end with a double / – just like this //
• Poems will appear as one line with the above symbols to represent line and stanza breaks
• At the end of each poem you’ll see #twitpoem

That’s about it. Pretty simple. The #twitpoem is called a hashtag. If you go to http://search.twitter.com and type in the hashtag you’ll find all of the poems on one page.

Remember, the Twitter Poem Experiment starts on April 1. I will write one poem per day for 30 days. Each day I will tweet the poem three times. To read, you’ll have to follow me on Twitter. I hope to see you there.

The publisher is open to unsolicited queries for book length manuscripts of poetry, horror fiction, supernatural/weird fiction, and non-fiction until October 31st, 2009. Queries regarding books of other genres will be disregarded without reply.

Authors can send a brief query to messrs@blackmazebooks.com with biographical information and a brief note about their book as well as a sample chapter (no more than ten poems or twenty pages).

Let’s welcome Black Maze Books.

Unfortunately, most of what is published online in the way of poetry, just as in print, is poetry rather than commentary on poetics, or essays. That is one of the reasons why I spend so much time on World Class Poetry Blog discussing poetics. There just isn’t enough of it and that’s a problem.

What there is plenty of instead is the publishing of poetry. It might seem strange for a poet, and someone who enjoys reading poetry, to say that free and accessible poetry is a problem. But it is. The reason I say that is because much of what is published online, just as in print, is rubbish and ought not to be read at all.

Why Single Out Online Publishing?
The first and obvious question I know I’ll get from readers about making this statement is, “If most poetry published in print and online is bad poetry then why single out online poetry as a problem?” That’s a good question and one well worth asking.

The reason I single out online publishing is because there are fewer barriers to entry for the self publisher (and the bulk of the problem is with self publishing).

Print publishing always bears an expense. Even a small chapbook costs the self publisher something. Online, however, self publishers can open up an account at Blogger or WordPress – and many have – which is free, and publish their full portfolio of poetic works for the world to see. No expense. No barrier to entry. The learning curve for using Blogger and WordPress is nil. A basic ability to read and comprehend a keyboard is all that is necessary.

So there are really two basic barriers to entry for self publishers that make it easier to publish online than in print:

1. Financial
2. Technological

Then there are two more barriers to entry that I would call indirect barriers to entry to publication in the broader sense:

1. Market Demand
2. Built-In Gatekeepers

Poetry is deemed a low-value item by most people in our culture. For a print publisher, even an independent press or self publisher, that is itself an indirect barrier to entry. In many respects, this is a larger barrier to entry for independent presses because there are always more expenses than the mere cost of printing (marketing, delivery, payroll, etc). But the publisher must always recoup expenses in order to continue publishing, and for the self publisher with no name recognition or reputable publishing house behind him, that can be an issue.

Which brings me to my next point. In order to get published by a reputable publisher, a poet must go through at least one gatekeeper. If one seeks publication through a journal, there is an editor (and even small journals have at least one). At larger publications there may be an additional gatekeeper who is a reader and whose job it is to read through a slush pile and recommend the best picks to the editor or publisher, who then selects from the best of those. Other publications use a “checks and balances” system that require multiple decision makers, co-editors usually, to give their input. Even book publishers have a system that requires one or more people to read manuscripts and approve them, so for a poet that has no name recognition and few publication credits this is another barrier to entry to the world of publication itself.

To get over the hurdles of these barriers to entry, many poets have succumbed to the temptation of online self publishing and that’s the reason for this discussion.

Why Online Self Publishing Is A Form Of Vanity
Vanity publishing has traditionally involved an independent publishing house providing a service for authors who pay to be published. In essence, the author pays for the manufacturing costs of getting published then they are faced with the ardent task of recouping their investment through marketing and sales of their product. Most do not recoup their investment. But they feel good about being published and have bragging rights.

Some vanity publishers exist in the form of a contest where the poet sends in a submission along with an entry fee. This is a more subtle form of vanity because it acts under the veneer of respectability. If the poet “wins” the contest, she is “honored” with publication. Most of these vanity schemes, however, publish all contest entrants so there isn’t really much of an honor other than the warm, fuzzy feeling the poet gets in the pit of his stomach for being suckered.

Thanks to Blogger and WordPress, a poet can get that warm and fuzzy without an entry fee or paying for publication costs. The poet may not have any more readers than before, but she gets all of the same benefits, including bragging rights, with none of the expenses or drawbacks to other forms of vanity.

One can refer to online self publishing as “independent publishing” or anything else for that matter, but I consider it vanity publishing because, with a few exceptions, most poets publishing themselves online would probably not be able to get into print through traditional means of publication. Unless they paid the entry fee or the manufacturing costs, many of those poets would simply send in poem after poem after poem and get nothing back but rejection letters, if that. That hardly classifies someone as a member of the esteemed literati.

Now I’m not saying that self publishing is itself a vain pursuit. Many fine poets and writers were self publishers – Dickens, Whitman, Poe, and I could spend days going through the list – but there is something about the nature of vanity publishing in general that tends to take away from the value of and credibility of being a published author or poet. But what is that exactly?

How Vanity Destroys Value
Vanity destroys value in a number of ways. First, by masquerading as something of value it pretends to be the thing that it imitates. That’s always destructive. Just ask any Christian who considers the arch-nemesis of Jesus, Satan, to be a faux “angel of light”.

Secondly, vanity destroys because it really doesn’t bother with the task of self improvement. This is a bigger issue because art always retains its value by being something that is in possession of admirable qualities. Those qualities vary from work to work, but in general they consist of

• Uniqueness – Any work of art, be it poetry, photography, sculpture, dance, et. al. must bear a mark of individual originality. People who see value in any art form see an intrinsic value in the uniqueness of the work itself. No one wants to see a copy of something else. Everyone values originality.
• Connectivity – A work must also connect to some audience. It may not connect with the entire human race. It may hold some value only for a particular subset of humans based on race, religion, nationality, gender, or some other identification class. But a work of value must connect with some audience.
• Experiential Compensation – Finally, a work of art must provide an experience that acts as a form of reward for the audience. This is the subjective element of art. One person’s experience may be entirely different than another person’s experience, but the value in literature comes from this experience. Whether it makes one laugh, instills fear, or creates catharsis in some other way, a positive or negative reaction can be valuable enough in and of itself to prove a work of art as something worthy to be recognized.

So when we apply these three general values to poetry we can easily see the problem with vanity publishing. These three values may exist in great abundance but generally speaking exist only for the author, or primarily for the author and self publisher, but generally not for anyone else. The vanity publication is valuable to the publisher because the publisher believes that these three values exist and that others will recognize them; unfortunately, that rarely happens.

Fixing The Problem Of Vanity
There is only one way that I’m aware of to fix the problem of vanity. The vain must achieve an element of self awareness as it applies to that vanity. Calling oneself an independent publisher when no one else sees you that way does not make you an independent publisher any more than a man walking into a room and announcing himself a bag of raw fish makes him a bag of raw fish. A thing is what it is, not what it claims to be.

The value in a publication comes from what the reader, or the audience, of that publication walks away with. That may never be spoken or shared. But it’s there nonetheless.

Vanity self publishers should seek publication through other means prior to publishing their own works. Validation of one’s ability as a poet is important, not for the sake of ego but for the sake of value in poetry in general. When one poet improves his craft, the entire pantheon of poetic expression improves along with it. The tide rises all ships. This is the mystery of the value of literature. One man’s improved essence is the improved essence of all men.

The problem with vanity is that it seeks value in itself for itself. But poetic expression was not meant for that kind of valueless value. Poetic expression was meant to provide value by connecting with others through a unique mode of expression for the purpose of delivering a personal experience to the reader by way of the writer. When that happens, vanity vanishes and the poet’s audience will grow.

Poets who wish to be recognized as poets should first learn the many tools that poets use in the craft. They should practice them. They should then, after crafting a poem in which they have some pride, share it with others who are in a position to reject them. That does not mean your cat or the mailman. Although you may include the mailman by asking him to deliver your poem to a journal editor. You should put yourself in a position that promises you gain or delivers you pain. Publishing your own poetry on a blog may provide that if you are willing to accept honest feedback and accept when you get it. But the real essence of this type of gamble is in asking a gatekeeper to review your work and provide feedback or to submit it for publication and risk rejection. Then, when rejected, immediately look for ways to improve and go through the process again.