I hate blurbs, and never used to read them.  But now that I have a vested interest in the way poetry is produced and promoted, I’m always reading blurbs — not to mention scrutinizing font decisions, cover art, layout designs, marketing styles, and so on.  Just part of the job.

This week I read Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher, and Russell Edson’s See Jack — coincidentally two books of prose poetry by my two favorite presses, Pitt and BOA — and I noticed something their blurbs have in common, which all blurbs seem to have in common these days:

Itemized lists of some of the crazy shit that appears in the poems.

Here’s Matthea Harvey on Cradle Book:

Populated with account-keeping birds, wolves whose ‘bite is like a breeze,’ an invisible man, a nameless man, and children who find dust balls and ‘care for particular clumps as pets,’ Teicher’s stories are full of mystery and doubt and despair.

And Amie Bender:

Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly-behaving Gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.

For See Jack, Peter Johnson begins his review with this:

An artist who moonlights as a dentist.  A worm who’s eternal.  A farmer who milks his cow to death.  Not to mention a guy with a belly button for an eye.

If you scan the backsides of contemporary poetry collections, these kinds of lists come up again and again — any book that doesn’t have a singular narrative thread or formal conceit seems to end up with a list of anything unusual that lurks inside.

And I wonder why that is.  Do these catalogs of crazy help sell books?  Do people pick up copies at the bookstore and say, “Oh, a woman who eats soil as if it were candy, I have to buy it!!!”  Is the motivation economic, or is this just a sign of lazy reviewing?  I can see how a reviewer who really doesn’t know what to say might simply list a few vivid articles of substance from the book as a kind of compromise; at least they’re including something that may be helpful to perspective buyers.

Blurbing is not fun — hopefully if you don’t like a book you won’t review it at all, but even when you love a book, there’s a lot of pressure to find a way to capture your excitement in a way that sounds authentic.  And when your enthusiasm is only lukewarm, you have to find a way to remain honest, while focusing on the positives.  And it’s always a struggle to come up with a hundred words — with a long enough list you can knock off half of that.

Just some idle thoughts while I wait for the dryer.  For what it’s worth, I’d recommend Cradle Book.  Russell Edson is Russell Edson, and if you like his brand of surreal, you’ll enjoy the new book.  But Craig Morgan Teicher’s is especially good — the prose-fable form is something that can get old quickly, but just when you think you can guess what’s coming, each “poem” finds a new way to surprise, and there’s a real philosophical depth to each insight.  Wheres the surreal descriptions are fitting for See Jack, I think they do a disservice to Cradle Book, in which the sometimes zany situations are very much subordinate to the underlying ideas they illustrate.

On Sunday, I sat on a panel of editors talking about “How to Stand Out in a Slush Pile.”  Whenever I do these things, I can’t help feeling like an arrogant iconoclast.  Like the class show-off, asleep with his feet on the desk, because he breezed through another mid-term exam.  That was me in high school and college, though, so maybe that’s just me.

The rest of the panel was a quintessential group of editors — well-meaning, selfless, committed people — but I find myself disagreeing with almost everything they say, right down to the very nature of what a literary magazine should be.  Other editors never say they like chatty cover letters, they never recognize the importance of the internet, they revere the established literary order, rather than approach it skeptically.  There are many exceptions, of course, which is why they’re worth pointing out (praising the decisions of the Poetry Foundation, for example), but the old guard is an old guard, and for the most part, I think they’re wrong.

Rather than talk about the panel, though, I thought I’d turn back to the always-useful CLMP Directory (if you care enough about the business of poetry to be reading this blog, you really should at least flip through a copy at the library sometime).  Scattered throughout the book are interviews with editors, each asking the same dozen or so questions.  Since they didn’t ask to interview me, I’ve never answered them before;  I figure now’s as good a time as any.  Maybe I’ll get in the next issue.  What I’ll do is quote from a typical editor’s answer, and then explain how I’d disagree.

Do you have any cover letter advice?

Definitely: keep it short and to the point… You may include a brief bio note (professional, not cute — or at least in the style of the notes in that particular publication), but more than that may do more harm than good, sometimes revealing more than you intend to…
–Margaret D. Bauer, Editor, North Carolina Literary Review

Editors always say this, and it’s perplexing to me.  If I read 50 cover letters a day, and they’re all short and to the point, using the same form paragraph, I’m not going to read them — so why even include one?  For the most part, despite all the submitters’ hand-wringing and editors’ admonitions, I just don’t pay attention to cover letters whatsoever.  I skim them to see if there are any specific questions, and if they have a personality and the poet is funny or friendly or freaky or smug, I think, “Well isn’t this person funny or friendly or freaky or smug!”  But how does that have anything to do with the poems they sent?

The same thing applies to bios.  Yeah, sometimes people write whole paragraphs about their cats, and that’s sad.  Sometimes people list all 160 of their publication “credits,” and that’s obnoxious — but we publish obnoxious people all the time, why should I care?  I’m not inviting them to my house for dinner or adopting one of their arthritic cats; I’m printing their poem inside a stack of perfect-bound papers.  Most of the people we publish never meet me outside of a letter or two.  I don’t have to like you — and even if I do like you, I trust my sense of objectivity enough that it holds no sway.

To go even further, I don’t understand why it’s assumed one should include a bio in the first place.  If you read Rattle‘s guidelines, you might notice that we don’t really ask for one.  Yet they always come, because it’s standard procedure, because when typical editors tell you that your publication history doesn’t matter, it’s B.S.  There’s always a steady stream of posturing about how only the writing really matters — but if that were true, bios would only be requested after the fact.

What do you look for in a submission?

I would guess most editors would answer this question in much the same, vague way.  We look for work that is exciting, dynamic, and fresh.  We want excellent prose and images that surprise. … Finally, we look for what we’ve come to call the “pop-up factor.”  I finish reading a piece, I pop-up out of my chair, find the first person I can, and say, “Oh my god, you’ve got to read this!”
–Jeanne Lieby, Editor, The Southern Review

She’s right that this is a very difficult question to answer without being vague, but my answer is technically (at least) specific — I want a poem to be memorable.  I want to be walking through my day and spontaneously think of something I read in Rattle five years ago.  That’s no easy task, reading 50,000 poems one year, and having any of them live in your heart to the next.  But that’s the challenge.  And I don’t think the prose has to be sparkling or the images startling to achieve that — transformation can come in any register, from any poet, on any subject, in any style.  And does.

That is a vague answer, though.

How are submissions processed at your magazine?

Even though we reject 95% of what we read, we read eagerly. We are incapable of disrespecting the slush pile (even when we experience a long run of bad material) because we have learned that the slush pile, like the world at large, contains surprises.  Some of our best material came in the mail, unbidden.  Once that happens, you, as an editor, are forever altered; you will always see the possibilities of submissions, no matter how grinding that reading can sometimes be.
–Marc Smirnoff, Editor and Founder, Oxford American

Well, if we only rejected 95% of what we read, each issue would be 2,500 pages long.  And if only “some” of our best material came in the mail, unbidden, we’d be publishing an awful lot of blank pages.  For me, the slush pile doesn’t just contain surprises — the slush pile is the entire enterprise.  I’m trying to build an active community of participating poets, and that means everyone who submits is a part of the community.  There is no VIP entrance straight to the balcony.  Everyone who comes here has to knock, and it’s our job to answer the door every time.

I think this is the fundamental difference between my view and the common view.  Reading submissions is, indeed, like panning for gold (a common metaphor), but to me the stream is more important than the gold itself.  The gold is always there; it’s the water that gives you life.

Do you have a favorite unsolicited submission discovery or anecdote?

This may be contrary to popular belief, but we don’t solicit often.  Because of The Southern Review‘s history and stature (and because we pay our authors), we really don’t have to.  The daily mail contains work from some of this country’s most important writers.  On one day, I received poems from Charles Simic and Mary Oliver. But that should in no way discourage new writers. Our greatest joy is finding writers whose work has not yet reached a wide audience.
–Jeanne Lieby, Editor, The Southern Review

If you take a look at the Winter 2009 issue of The Southern Review, you’ll notice that both Charles Simic and Mary Oliver are there in the table of contents.  I’m sure those poems did come in the mail, unsolicited, as I’m sure does most of the work in the magazine — and let me say, too, that it’s a wonderful production full of fine writing, and one of the magazines I admire.  But there are two kinds of solicitations, I think — when we use that word, we’re usually referring to the active process of asking a poet directly if they have some work to share.  Most often, I assume, there’s the implication that the editor might look at the work and ultimately say no, even though it was requested.  Of course they rarely so no, but they could say no — fine.  In a typical magazine, these kind of solicitations seem to account for about 20% of the work in an issue.  Some entries in the CLMP Directory list that self-reported figure, and 20% seems to be the average.

But in addition to that, I think, is an unspoken Godfatheresque “offer-too-good-to-refuse” solicitation, wherein the editor, upon receiving poems from both Charles Simic and Mary Oliver on the same day, ends up publishing poems by Charles Simic and Mary Oliver.  Every single time.   This is just a hunch, because there’s very little evidence one way or the other — editors don’t talk about poets that they rejected; to do so would be offensive, if not unethical.

I won’t tell you who, either, but I’ve rejected my share of well-known poets, and I can guess from some of their reactions that it doesn’t happen to them often.  Some are gracious and understanding, but many of them get pissed.  They write back telling you how many awards they’ve won, and how worthless your opinion is, and then they never send you new work ever again.  They see you at a conference years later and act like it never happened, because maybe they forgot, or maybe they want to prove to you how little that interaction really meant to them.

Now, I love both Charles Simic and Mary Oliver.  In all honesty, they’re two of my favorite poets.  But when I read their books, I can’t turn off my editor’s cap, and I know that I’d only want to publish maybe 1 in 10 of their poems in Rattle.  Sometimes the poems only work in the context of the book, sometimes they’re on topics or in styles that we’re tired of, and sometimes they’re just not interesting poems.  So if both Simic and Oliver sent us poems on the same day, the odds of them both appearing in our next issue wouldn’t be very high.  (And if you two are reading this, feel free to test me!)

There’s an idea that’s pretty ubiquitous throughout the literary world, that having names like Mary Oliver and Charles Simic on your back cover helps you sell copies.  But I really don’t think people read literary magazines to see big names — I think what sells copies is a consistent and fair editorial process, and poems that are memorable.

If I were answering this question, I do have a favorite anecdote.  Again, I don’t want to reveal the poet’s name, because the story might be embarrassing for him.  But there’s one poet who sent us a submission every month for years, and had been doing so long before I joined the staff at Rattle.  He was always friendly, but eternally persistent.  And then with submission #45 — after showing us almost 200 poems — he sent one that I absolutely loved.  I really wish I could tell you which it is, because I was so happy to publish it, but I won’t even hint. Sorry.

What advice do you have for first time submitters?

For crying out loud, read the magazine you are submitting to. … Guess what?  Editors aren’t interested in pieces that falls outside of their interests and inclinations.  Luckily for freelance writers, editors are predictable beasts.  To find out all about their secret and hidden loves and hates all you need to do is scour their magazines.
–Marc Smirnoff, Founder and Editor, Oxford American

This statement is everywhere, and usually accompanied by a plea for subscriptions.  I do think it’s important to read a magazine’s guidelines, because certain rules do have important administrative implications.  For example, because of our email system, it’s really important that subject lines are unique, so we ask that people include their name, rather than just “Rattle Submission.”  I’m not the Soup Nazi — it just makes it much easier to organize 50 submissions a day.

But I couldn’t care less whether or not you read Rattle first, and the last thing I want you to do is read the magazine and send us poems that sound similar to pieces we’ve already published.  Why the hell would we want t repeat ourselves?

Contrary to Marc’s statement, I’m particularly interested in pieces that fall outside of my own personal tastes.  If you really want to be manipulative, the best way to get into Rattle is to write a cover letter that says, “I’ve read a few issues and didn’t see any of ____ kind of poetry.”  I want the magazine to be eclectic, and the quickest route to a guilt-trip is to point out my own blind spots. Getting past them, and imagining how a poem will effect a reader other than oneself is the biggest challenge for any editor.  I can use all the help I can get.

If literary magazines ever get unstuck from the mud of cultural irrelevance, editors are going to need to change the typical mindset.  Journals aren’t tabloids or glamor magazines or Sports Illustrated, and they never will be.  They’re not objects of consumption; they’re organisms of involvement.  They shouldn’t be disseminated from a mountaintop, but rather grown from the ground.  Poetry isn’t spread; it’s cultivated.  Slush isn’t slush; it’s soil.

Dear Poetry Foundation and/or Christian Wiman:

Does this count as an open letter, if I never actually send it to you?  I probably won’t, which means you’ll probably never read this — but that’s fine.  If you read this you might reply, and then I’d have to think about replying to your reply.  I’m not the corresponding type; I’m the lazy type.  But I read your editorial on remembering Ruth Lilly in the March issue of your magazine, and I was moved to say something somewhere, so it might as well be here.

What I want to say is this:  I think you’re doing a hell of a job.  You Christian, you Don, Fred, Valerie, Gina, Christina.  John Barr and the board, everyone who works on Poetryfoundation.org.

You’re rich now, so it’s not cool to say this, but I love the Poetry Foundation.  You received an unfathomably large gift 8 years ago, and have done nothing since but work tirelessly putting it to good use.  As a fellow poetry editor, I’m in awe of the outcome — you’ve taken on all the tasks I would have, given the resources, and completed them with a constant sense of elegance and enthusiasm.

Poetry Magazine is tasteful and timely, beautiful in production, and as relevant as a literary journal can be.  Somehow the mood manages to be both austere and inviting, and the discussion at the back of each issue is as interesting as the poetry itself.  I don’t always enjoy the poems you publish — in fact, I probably like less than half — but I’m always left with the sense that you do — that your motives are pure and your selections non-political.  And that’s all you can ask of a literary endeavor.  Tastes are subjective, but tastefulness isn’t, and you’re tasteful.

To top it off, you’ve made the outwardly generous, inwardly smart decision to give it all away online, for free.  In this age of advancing technology, many editors fail to embrace change, and finally render themselves irrelevant.  Your 30,000 subscribers is proof that there will always be a place for poetry as a physical object, and that digital media can enhance the experience at the same time as it expands readership.

Speaking of which, Poetryfoundation.org has become not only the best home for poetry online, but one of the best sites on the internet.  Aesthetically, it somehow manages a rich presentation, without feeling cluttered.  It’s as attractive as it is functional, and makes the most of new media.  The Harriot Blog is a perfect use of the format and the Poetry Tool is an amazing resource.

To sum, the Poetry Foundation has done everything I wish I could do, and has done it better than I could have imagined.  And I’m good.  I don’t settle for second-best, and I don’t find very much to be worthy of praise.  But I’m grateful for the Poetry Foundation, as a reader of poetry, and as an editor of a smaller journal — you provide the perfect, invincible foil for me to struggle against.  Rattle will never catch up to you in circulation or relevance, we can only hope to move closer, so I’ll always have a Sisyphian task to toil on.

So it saddens me to see that you’re still receiving these jealous criticisms, 8 years later.  When you first received the $200 million bequest, the rest of the poetry world was full of quiet — and sometimes vocal — condemnation.  I don’t talk to other editors very often, and still I can think of many occasions where some would complain about the “fairness” of Ruth Lilly’s generosity.  Couldn’t she have done better by giving $200,000 each to a thousand different poetry organizations around the country?  She could have given the money to libraries, so that every community in the U.S. would have one shelf dedicated to contemporary poetry.  Giving that much money to one small group of poets is obscene.

And that’s just what’s said over beer at the AWP.  As Christian Wiman describes in his editorial, the mainstream media — even without the envy — has been no more kind.  “Willy Nilly Lilly” is just one ugly headline.  “The Moneyed Muse” by Dana Goodyear is what stands out for me — the irony of a magazine like The New Yorker, who uses poetry as nothing more than a token badge of high-brow credibility, criticizing a foundation devoted solely to verse was astounding.

Wiman displays much of his own grace in only defending Ruth Lilly, who turned a life of solitude and depression into one of the largest philanthropic gifts in history.  But the Poetry Foundation deserves defending as well.  Ruth Lilly inherited her wealth, and spent the end of her life finding good ways to give it away.  The Poetry Foundation inherited a portion of that, and is now working hard to do the same.

What more could we ask of either of you?

Sincerely,
Tim

Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it.
–Ted Genoways in Mother Jones

I know I shouldn’t pen a post at 3am after spending the last 4 hours reading submissions, but (as much as I like VQR) this month-old quote made me throw up in my mouth just now.  It’s the continuation of a viral meme that’s been spun ad nauseam for the last two decades, and I think can be traced directly to Dana Gioia and his ubiquitous essay “Can Poetry Matter?“  In a 1991 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Gioia was just the first to break out of what must have been an academic quarantine, bemoaning the sheer volume of creative writing students produced by the university programs in public, rather than behind the closed doors of faculty parties.

If you read about poetry, instead of just reading the poetry, then you’ve heard this paranoia already:  Oh no, there are 200 graduate writing programs.  Oh no, that means there are 20,000 certified poets graduating every decade.  How will the publishing structure manage, how will I ever keep up, how will anyone ever notice me at the top of such a redundant, self-aggrandizing pile of custom-molded electric meat?  Genoways is talking about literary fiction in the quote above, but all viruses evolve — Hepatitis is up to G.

Rattle has actually published one such mutation, an essay on the supersaturation of poetry book contests by David Alpaugh in e.5 (download the PDF), and I liked that because it was well-written and provocative, and seemed to break new ground for the epidemic.  I also appreciated how kind he was to those who run the system he was criticizing — articulating very clearly their good intentions.

So obviously I don’t mind folks writing about the overwhelming volume of literary writers at work today — I like a good debate, and there’s nothing to debate if no one takes a strong position.  But I think their complaints stem entirely from a localized elitist paranoia, and a broader illusion of grandeur.  And nothing I’ve read demonstrates that better than the Genoways quote above.

When he compares the volume of submissions 80 years ago to that of today, what he’s saying is that those 500 submissions were somehow better than that 15,000 he sees now — better on average, certainly, but also in the final published product:  Fiction can’t be dying if it was never alive in the first place.  How is the product of 500 submissions better than the product of 30 times as many?  Well, those 500 submissions came from real writers, of course, not the wannabes that try to peddle their inferior wares today!  They were coming from Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Mann…

This might seem to make sense — but we have no perspective when it comes to literary history.  When considered objectively, the study of literature is akin to idol worship — we focus on the greatest works of the “great writers,” as if their careers weren’t also full of flops.  Unless they die too young for the full biopic to play itself out, they have periods of illumination and innovation, only to flounder for years trying to recapture that magic.  I won’t name names, because that would be mean, but the examples are countless.  If you’re reading an Ernest Hemingway novel, it does not necessarily follow that you’re reading a great novel — or even good novel.   (Okay, so I named one name.)

The idol fallacy appears over and over again in editing a poetry magazine.  I can’t tell you the big names of some the poets I’ve rejected, but it happens over and over again.  Big names can give you great poetry, but they can also give you pretty lousy poetry.  Knowing this, and seeing it happen time and again, the idea of 500 submissions from “real” writers outperforming 15,000 unknowns isn’t really plausible.  Unless you’re paying too much attention to what’s in a name.

What’s more, this “golden age” theory also assumes that the previous system did a good job at finding the best work — simply because we have a set of work that we call the best.  How do we know that the esteemed editors of Faber & Faber didn’t pass up a better poet to publish Phillip Larkin?  Maybe there was a better Phillip Larkin out there that went unnoticed — if there was, we’d never know about it.  So much of historical publishing has been clique and kin and strange coincidence.  If Plath or Sexton hadn’t attended Lowell’s workshop, can we be sure we’d know the names Sexton and Plath?  Would “Howl” have been as successful without the forward from William Carlos Williams, who had met the young Ginsberg when he was a boy?  Maybe.  But it’s also possible that there’s another poem on a shelf somewhere that could have been “Howl”, had the poet been more memorable in person.

As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality.  We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other.  And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.  That’s the reason why so many literary journals are so unreadable — when the poet laureate sends a poem, it’s hard not to publish that poem.  I love Kay Ryan so I’ll pick on her — when was the last time she’s had her work rejected?  Who says No to Billy Collins?  And the same applies, to an increasingly lesser extent, to every award and publishing credit ever listed.  “Well she was nominated for the Pulitzer, maybe I’m missing something…”

Think of literature, not as a ladder or a mountain, but as a dome — the higher you climb, the easier the climb becomes.

But that’s not even what upsets me about Genoways’ quote.  That’s just a truth that few acknowledge.  The second half is what has me tasting chickpea — “not everyone can be a doctor…”

There’s so much wrong with that part of the quote that I’m hesitant to even address it all.  There’s the obvious arrogance that comes with being on a board that certifies — you’re a doctor if he says you’re a doctor, if your prose is “sterling” enough that he wants to read it.  It might be possible to weasel out of that implication, but Genoways is a literary editor, speaking about literary editing.  He’s the one that has to put up with 15,000 quacks and snake oil salesmen.  He’s the decider.

But beyond the tone, Genoways is just wrong in principle.  Not everyone can be a doctor, sure, but anyone can learn CPR and then maybe — not likely, but maybe — use it to save a life.  Not everyone can be a professional athlete, but anyone can be an amateur and have an enriching experience on the field.

In another essay that just came out, “The New Math of Poetry,” David Alpaugh uses the analogy of a golfer:

[T]here’s a difference between writing and publishing. Golf, after all, has an agreed-upon scoring system that lets every player know his or her standing, stroke by stroke, game by game. Mediocre amateurs cannot deceive themselves (or be assured by pros) that they are contenders. None of the golfers who end up on the green with Tiger Woods…

It’s true that no amateur golfer will ever be able to compete with Tiger Woods.  But some amateur, somewhere in the country, hit a hole-in-one yesterday.  And Tiger Woods (if he played a round) probably didn’t.  If my goal is to find as many holes-in-one as I can, I very well might be better off looking at 15,000 amateur rounds of golf, rather than 500 pro rounds.  The only question is how much better the pros are — but no matter what that ratio is, there’s always a critical mass of amateur golfers that, taken together, will hit more perfect shots than those 500 pros.

As a literary editor, it’s my job to find as many great poems as I can.  And the definition of a great poem is really simple:  Poems that have the power to effect the lives of some of the people who read them.  Every poem we publish doesn’t have to be memorable and moving for everyone — but it has to be memorable or moving for someone, some kind of person who represents a subset of our readership.  The easy part is finding poems that move me — the hard part is imagining how a poem that I don’t care for might move someone else.

Every year we choose a winner for the Rattle Poetry Prize, and every year we get feedback — about 5 people love it for every person who hates it, but no poem pleases everyone.  We chose a lyric poem last year, and some wrote in to complain that it was too imagistic and detached.  We chose a narrative poem this year, and some people wrote in to complain that it wasn’t lyrical enough.  Seeing outside of the boundaries of personal taste is the challenge for an editor — but the task is just to create as many positive experiences as possible.

And the best way to do that is to read as many poems as possible and ignore the names at the top.  Because the names really don’t matter much, beyond name-recognition.  A poetry magazine is not a tabloid.  Their covers aren’t sprawled across the checkout stands of America.  No one buys a poetry magazine because of names on the back cover.   What really matters is brand loyalty — readers don’t come to us for any individual poet, they come to us for the collective body of poets that form an issue of Rattle.  They come because, when our editors say, “You might like this,” more often than not they do.

Or they don’t.  And then they don’t read us.  And that’s fine — it just means I need to be doing a better job thinking outside of my own personal aesthetic.

This is my main point:  Anyone who complains that too many people are writing today — whether it’s poetry or fiction or blogs — just isn’t doing their job.  Their job as an editor, or their job as a reader.  Because the more people who are writing, the more quality work gets produced.  You just have to find it.  Reading through 15,000 submissions might be a pain in the ass, but it’s your job.  If you run a magazine, that’s what you owe your subscribers — that’s the service you’re providing.

And if you’re a reader of literature, then it’s your job to find writers you like, and editors you tend to agree with.  Because they’re out there.  Out there in a greater abundance than any time in history.  And that’s always a good thing, no matter how far the hand-wringing contagion spreads.

I was thinking I should do a follow-up post to last week’s, looking at the traffic volumes for online journals, which the CLMP Directory also lists.  Because my main interest in these numbers stems from being a competitive bastard, I don’t care as much about online journals.  It’s not that we aren’t competing directly — Rattle publishes as much online content as anyone, and I care about online readers almost as much as those willing to pay for the feel of a real book in their hands.  It’s just that it’s not a fair fight, so not as fun.  Comparing an online magazine’s resources to those of Rattle is like comparing our resources to the Poetry Foundation’s.  It’s small, but we have an advertising budget — have you ever seen an ad for an online literary magazine?  A paid staff?  Ha.  We’re not the David in this competition, and when you’re Goliath it’s pretty much lose-lose.  If I beat them, I feel like a bully.  If they beat me I get depressed.

Anyway, as I was thinking about making this post, the first online journal I looked up was the Absinthe Literary Review.  I’m not sure why, but I suppose it’s because I’ve always been jealous of their absinthe bottle logo.  Here are the numbers they list:

Page Views/Month: 1,000,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 250,000

That can’t be true!  Seriously, those numbers are not even remotely plausible.  Aside from Poets.org and the Poetry Foundation, the most trafficked (real) poetry website in the world is probably Poetry Daily.  They’ve been reprinting a good contemporary poem every single day since 1996.  Their Alexa global traffic rank is 187,000.  That might sound high, but the Absinthe Literary Review‘s is over 18 million.  And how many page views does Poetry Daily see every month?  About 1,000,000 (in 2007, anyway).  Apparently Absinthe is now defunct, but I cannot believe that they used to receive the same number of visitors as Poetry Daily.

So where did those obviously false numbers come from?  It’s possible that whoever submitted the info to CLMP was lying, to make the magazine seem far bigger than it was — but more likely they just got confused about what numbers they were listing.  Early on in the internet, everyone talked about “hits.”  A hit is simply an individual request for a file from a website’s server.  Every time you pull up a file off a web-server, you’ve produced a hit.  But that includes image files and integrated web files and fetches from a database, etc. — so a very simple page, when someone loads it, might result in only a handful of hits; a complex page can result in hundreds, every single time it loads.  That’s why hits aren’t a useful measure of web traffic.

My theory is that the 1,000,000 figure listed in Absinthe‘s page views line is really just hits.  And maybe unique visitors is really page views.   That would almost make sense, assuming Absinthe was well-read until it dissolved. It’s an easy mistake to make, and as long as these figures are self-reported, people will continue to make them, and our sense of real online readership will remain murky.

So rather than simply list traffic numbers and compare them to Rattle.com, I’m going to throw in a wrinkle, and also fact-check them at Alexa to see if the traffic they claim is plausible.  The first thing we need is a control group — Alexa doesn’t list counting quantities, they only rank traffic against the rest of the internet.  But we’ve already seen that Poetry Daily’s rank of 187,000 translates to over 1 million page views per month — since the total is a couple years old, let’s call it 1.5 million.  I have two other sites with figures and ranks at my disposal, and they form a statistically useful spread:

Rattle.com
Page Veiws/Month: 240,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 32,000
Alexa Rank: 1,200,000

Timothy-Green.org
Page Veiws/Month: 78,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 9,900
Alexa Rank: 8,600,000

Rattle‘s rank fluctuates with the season, and this is a low period — in March when our next e-issue comes out we’ll shoot up to a rank of around 500,000, and then slowly drift down to where we are now.  Timothy-Green.org’s rank is fairly stable.  Taking all three, we have a high-volume site (Poetry Daily), a mid-sized (Rattle), and a low-volume site (my blog).

Now let’s see how the online journals stack up.  Because I’m not an expert in what’s out there, I’m going to use EveryWritersResource.com’s list of the best.  Some of them are not listed in the CLMP Directory, but I’ll still include Alexa rank (as of 2/18/2010), and estimate the volume of traffic based on that, in parentheses.  Others are listed in the directory, but have no Alexa rank because they’re part of a huge university website — in those cases I’ll estimate the rank.  Where both are available, I’ll comment on the veracity of the CLMP listing.

1. Narrative Magazine
Page Veiws/Month: N/A (est. 900,000)
Unique Visitors/Month: N/A (est. 175,000)
Alexa Rank: 305,000

2. Slate shouldn’t count, so I’m skipping them.

3. Exquisite Corpse
Page Veiws/Month: N/A (est. 250,000)
Unique Visitors/Month: N/A (est. 35,000)
Alexa Rank: 959,000

4. La Petite Zine
Page Veiws/Month: N/A (est. 100,000)
Unique Visitors/Month: N/A (est. 11,000)
Alexa Rank: 3,582,000

5. Mudlark
Page Veiws/Month: 75,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 5,000
Alexa Rank: N/A (est. 9,000,000)

6. Slope
Page Veiws/Month: 1,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 10,000
Alexa Rank: 3,600,000

Slope is obviously very confused in the directory.  You can’t have more unique visitors than page views.  Based on the Alexa rank, I’d say the visitors tally is probably right, but the page views should be more like 100,000 per month.

7. failbetter
Page Veiws/Month: 110,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 30,000
Alexa Rank: 556,000

Visitors and views were reported accurately, but are probably out of date — add about 20%.

8. Evergreen Review
Page Veiws/Month: N/A (est. 150,000)
Unique Visitors/Month: N/A (est. 20,000)
Alexa Rank: 1,869,000

9. CrossConnect – I’ve got no info

10. Big Bridge
Page Veiws/Month: 40,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 800
Alexa Rank: 1,836,000

They probably get 3 times as many page views, and 20 times as many visitors as they reported to CLMP.

11. Carve Magazine
Page Veiws/Month: 8,556
Unique Visitors/Month: 3,136
Alexa Rank: 3,237,000

Obviously these were precisely accurate at some point.  My first instinct was to multiply visitors and views by a factor of four to bring them up-to-date — but then I noticed that the one-month Alexa rank is over 10,000,000, so that means they probably had a spike in traffic a few months ago that got them this rank.  That shows you how variable the traffic is — yet another complication to getting a handle on true readership.

12. McSweeney’s shouldn’t count.

13. Cortland Review
Page Veiws/Month: 250,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 30,000
Alexa Rank: 2,107,000

Visitors and views were probably accurate at one time, but they haven’t been doing quite so well lately — one-month and three-month rankings are steady, so apparently they’ve been trending a bit down for a while.  But still solid numbers.

14. Mad Hatters Review
Page Veiws/Month: 14,204
Unique Visitors/Month: 4,794
Alexa Rank: 2,488,000

The directory numbers are probably outdated — multiply visitors and views by a factor of 5.

15. 2River
Page Veiws/Month: 2,500
Unique Visitors/Month: 1,800
Alexa Rank: 2,712,000

Views and visitors have been way under-reported. Should be more like 100,000 and 18,000.

Well that’s the top 15.  There are five more that EveryWritersResource didn’t list, and I think should have:

x. Blackbird
Page Veiws/Month: 400,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 40,000
Alexa Rank: N/A (est. 400,000)

x. No Tell Motel (probably my favorite online)
Page Veiws/Month: 2,500
Unique Visitors/Month: 1,800
Alexa Rank: 4,305,000
(Note: Obviously the visitors are low, based on the ranking. See Reb’s update in comments)

x. MiPo
Page Veiws/Month: 9,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 2,500
Alexa Rank: 5,116,000

x. Born Magazine
Page Veiws/Month: 300,000
Unique Visitors/Month: 35,000
Alexa Rank: 838,000

x. Shampoo Magazine
Page Veiws/Month: N/A (est. 80,000)
Unique Visitors/Month: N/A (est. 15,000)
Alexa Rank: 2,363,000

Okay, so what have we learned?  Maybe just that it’s hard to get a handle on the online lit scene — there’s so much variation.  You really have to look at the CLMP directory to get a handle on how much their is.  Most of the major lit journals seem to fall somewhere in between Rattle.com and my blog, when it comes to traffic volume.

Failbetter and Born are very impressive — I had no idea the former was so widely read, and had no idea that the latter even existed until I looked them up.  It makes me wonder what else I don’t know about.  If you have any suggestions for online magazines I should look at that I haven’t mentioned, leave a comment.

What do all these numbers mean for actual readers of online poetry?  I have no idea.  What percentage of unique visitors are actual human beings who read a whole poem while they’re there?  I have no idea.

Alexa.com also keeps track of time spent on the site and bounce percentage for each visitor (meaning what percentage of visitors only look at one page).  Average time for all of these journals is around 2 minutes, and about 75% of visitors bounce.  But you can read a poem in 2 minutes, and just because you bounced, it doesn’t mean you’re not reading the one page you looked at.  So it’s possible that the majority of these visitors are real readers.

But then the majority of them are also probably repeat visitors.  If we get 1,300 visitors to Rattle.com every day, several hundred are probably the same people over and over again.  So 38,000 visitors per month, might only be 10,000 actual people drifting in and out.  And that would still be double our print circulation.

So does that mean an online journal like Blackbird is more important than a print journal like New England Review (a gorgeous magazine with a 1,500-copy print run, but an Alexa rank over 6 million)?  Perhaps.  Readers of a print journal, most of whom paid for the pleasure of paper, are likely to read more attentively than someone clicking through a website.  So the question becomes, how significant is that difference?

But I’ve been babbling way too much today, and this is already a sloppy post.  I think these questions deserve their own followup.  This post is just some numbers.