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.

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.

But this year, as I opened the envelope that held the guide, I was running a long mail-merge on my computer, and didn’t have anything better to do, so for the first time I looked at it closely.  And holy crap — they list circulations and paid staffs!

Let me backtrack.  As anyone who’s read this blog for a while knows, I’m mad for numbers and competitive as hell.   I don’t know what made me this way, but it’s the way I am.  I keep stats in my recreation softball league.  My favorite sports website is Fangraphs.  I read science literature for the charts.  In school, everyone loved multiple-choice tests because they were easier.  I loved them because they produced hard data, and I could use that data to measure myself objectively against everyone else.

Of course, I apply these same tendencies to my career.  But numbers, when it comes to poetry magazines, are pretty sparse.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve googled “poetry magazine circulations” hoping to find a list.  I found a few in a Poets & Writers article a few years ago, and that was nice.  I’ve had a general idea since then — Poetry is at the top by 10-fold, and the other major literary magazines hover around 3,000 – 5,000, and after those the down-slope is steep.  But that’s only a general idea, and I’ve never found good information on staff-sizes, particularly who gets paid.  Should I feel guilty for our paid staff of two; is it a luxury?  I really don’t know.

Until looking at the CLMP Guide.  It’s all right there, and apparently always has been.  Oops.

When I looked at the numbers, I was shocked to see how much room there was for pride.  But before I get into gloating, a few caveats.  First of all, I have no idea how accurate these numbers are — they’re self-reported, and maybe be very out-of-date.  Rattle’s own listing is several years old*, and there’s no way to know if that’s the norm, of if we’re outliers.

Also, there seems to be little agreement about what the phrases “total circulation” and “paid circulation” mean.  My understanding is that “paid circulation” means a subscription that was paid for at the time of printing.  That’s the reliable subscriber base.  “Total circulation,” then, is that number, plus direct single-copy sales and copies sent to bookstores — bookstore copies don’t have to sell to count as circulation, because people can read them while they’re sitting on the shelves, without actually buying them.  So just being on a shelf, unsold, still creates a tangible audience.  This is what advertisers consider circulation, and I think we can assume their dollars signify logical justification.  But the ratio of paid to total circulation in these listings varies pretty wildly, so it seems like different editors are using different definitions.

That said, here’s the relevant info for Rattle:

RATTLE
Print Run:  4,700
Total Circulation:  4,100
Paid Circulation:  2,700
Paid Staff:  2
Unpaid Staff:  2

Other major long-form literary magazines:

AGNI
Print Run:  3,200
Total Circulation:  4,000
Paid Circulation:  1,400
Paid Staff:  7
Unpaid Staff:  8

ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW
Print Run:  2,800
Total Circulation:  2,500
Paid Circulation:  160 (typo?)
Paid Staff:  1
Unpaid Staff:  6

ARTS & LETTERS
Print Run:  N/A
Total Circulation:  1,200
Paid Circulation:  900
Paid Staff:  18
Unpaid Staff:  0

BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW
Print Run:  2,500
Total Circulation:  2,200
Paid Circulation:  700
Paid Staff:  8
Unpaid Staff:  40

GEORGIA REVIEW
Print Run:  4,000
Total Circulation:  4,000
Paid Circulation:  3,500
Paid Staff:  7
Unpaid Staff:  1

HAYDEN’S FERRY REVIEW
Print Run:  1,300
Total Circulation:  1,200
Paid Circulation:  400
Paid Staff:  6
Unpaid Staff:  20

INDIANA REVIEW
Print Run:  5,000
Total Circulation:  3,000
Paid Circulation:  2,000
Paid Staff:  4
Unpaid Staff:  15

IOWA REVIEW
Print Run:  3,500
Total Circulation:  2,500
Paid Circulation:  1,000
Paid Staff:  4
Unpaid Staff:  12

KENYON REVIEW
Print Run:  6,000
Total Circulation:  5,700
Paid Circulation:  3,380
Paid Staff:  6
Unpaid Staff:  18

PLOUGHSHARES
Print Run:  7,500
Total Circulation:  6,000
Paid Circulation:  4,600
Paid Staff:  4
Unpaid Staff:  20

PRAIRIE SCHOONER
Print Run:  N/A
Total Circulation:  2,000
Paid Circulation:  1,000
Paid Staff:  2
Unpaid Staff:  13

QUARTERLY WEST
Print Run:  N/A
Total Circulation:  1,400
Paid Circulation:  500
Paid Staff:  7
Unpaid Staff:  22

Okay, that’s more than enough — and of course there are still dozens of others I could have listed.   The really shocking thing is how large the staffs are, relative to the circulations.  Even if these self-reported figures are out-of-date, those numbers were still valid at one time, and the ratios are real.  Despite being only 15 years old and having a tiny staff, Rattle competes with, and usually out-performs larger, more established journals.  What’s more, as one of the few that only publishes poetry, we have one hand tied behind our backs — no one’s reading our magazine for the fiction.

As far as I can tell, the magazines who still clearly beat us are:  Poetry, APR, Paris Review, Tinhouse, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares and A Public Space. It’s hard to compete with them, because of their budgets and formats.  The former two publish much more frequently than us, and they all have much much larger budgets.  And the reality is they’re just gorgeous, admirable contributions to literature.  If you just look at their websites, you can see how they’re professionally designed, not cobbled together by the editor who has no training and no idea what he’s doing.  But even those magazines are within reach, most of them with just another thousand or so subscribers, and this underdog is nipping at their heels.

__________

*UPDATE:  I figured out why Rattle’s information isn’t up-to-date — when I took over as editor in 2006, I never switched the email address in the automated updating program, so never received any email reminders to update, and never knew how.  Entirely my fault for not looking into it, so most of the numbers for other magazines are probably current — but with editorial turnover so rapid, I’m sure this happens fairly often.

They’re pages and not posts, so they won’t appear in the blog as they’re updated. The archive page is here (I’ll add some bells and whistles later), and so far we’ve got five shows. Mine and Peggy’s you’ve seen, William O’Daly is the best translator of Neruda into English, and I highly recommend giving his a listen. Mariano Zaro is a Spanish-American poet who writes and reads beautifully. I actually haven’t gotten a chance to listen to Annie Reiner’s yet, but I noticed she’s a psychoanalyst, so I’m hoping she’ll send us something for the upcoming tribute to mental health professionals issue.

Anyway, it’s a cool show, full of poetry, and Lois is a really good interviewer. So check them out.

That must be my main problem with the way academia treats literature.  I don’t understand what the point is.  If I make an argument about what a book means, I can’t be wrong.  I can’t be right either.  Books mean different things to different people at different times; experience is subjective, cultural ideologies are transient.  If there is any truth value whatsoever to a literary argument, it has to fall back to authorial intent — and in that case, we’d be studying history, digging through crumbling letters and analyzing informative childhood experiences, focusing on surrounding events and social memes.

Sometimes literature does that…but if it did that as often as it should, it would be part of the history department.  More often than not, literature is an argument for the sake of argument, an exercise that hones the skill of argumentation, and nothing more.  It’s a great skill to have — rational analysis and persuasive communication.  If that’s your argument for the validity of an English major, I can’t complain.  But if your argument that “Reality as Retrospective Hypothesis: The Role of Time and Memory in the Work of Samuel Beckett” (that was my senior thesis) has any value at all, good luck.

To this day, I don’t know why I decided to switch my major to English.  As well as it’s worked out for me, it seems like nothing more than laziness — a low tolerance for the tediousness of lab work.

After I graduated, I worked as an overnight counselor at a group home, and it was my most productive writing period to date.  Most of the other creative writers in my undergraduate program headed off to MFAs, and I just rolled my eyes.  What a waste of resources.  I’d never stoop so low.

Then I fell ass-backward into this job at Rattle, which it turns out seems made for me.  Even more than the poetry — it’s true — I love the challenge of all these diverse tasks and responsibilities that fall into my lap.  Designing ads, balancing budgets, building websites, lugging boxes of books, interviewing poets, writing blogs, designing covers, selecting content, proofreading, mail-merging, corresponding…

The whole time I’ve still been worried about “stooping so low.”  I didn’t want to get an MFA.  I didn’t want to become an insider, who knows all the other editors and all the poets and all the judges.  I guess I was worrying about catching the plague of pointlessness — the virus that values the artist over art.  The writing is what matters — the way you feel after reading or writing a good poem.   The way a great book can change your life.  It’s not the analytical essay or the Pulitzer Prize or the minor celebrity.  It’s not publishing 187 poems and 8 books.  I’ve always been worried about becoming an industry insider, and losing perspective.

Moreover, the magazine I edit aims to be the exact opposite of all that.  Rattle is supposed to be bringing poetry back to the people who simply love reading and writing it.  We had a tagline in an ad series a while ago that we still use: “It doesn’t take a scholar to be moved by the written word.”  And that’s what Rattle has to always strive to embody.  But how do you manage that with an editor who is forced to spend 50+ hours each week working in the poetry industry, who spends all day every day thinking about little else?  It was a legitimate concern.  Reading so much poetry, would we start publishing the obscure and inaccessible — or even worse, the trendy?  Would you lose the wonderful feeling a normal person gets reading a great poem?

I felt like I had to shut myself away from the poetry world as much as possible.  I don’t go to many events that aren’t my own, I don’t mingle at conferences or sit on many panels.  I don’t try to correspond with other editors, or any of the famous poets we publish.  I tried — maybe not hard — but I tried, to stay ignorant.

What I never imagined was that ignorance doesn’t take any effort at all.

As Rattle has grown, my day has become so full of submissions to read, orders to fill, updates to log, artists to query, letters to answer, and on and on, that I really have no time to be an insider.  I don’t know how anyone does.  I read far more literature when I worked at the group home.  I only subscribed to a few lit mags, but I read them cover to cover, and read many more online.  I went to the library once a week and brought home a stack of books.  I constantly consumed literature, and people always read what I wrote — there was an online community that I participated in, so I always had feedback and a small audience.

Now when I write, if I do, it just stays in a file on my computer.  I just counted up the number of poetry collections I read last year — a clean dozen.  That’s probably more than the average reader of books, but less than the average reader of poetry.  And I haven’t read a single issue of a literary magazine.  We receive dozens of them on exchange, and all I do is flip through each of them, looking at layouts and who they’re publishing, and a bunch of editorial minutia that few probably notice — but I don’t read a thing.  And those are the same magazines we’ve always been getting.  I don’t know what the best magazines in print are these days, let alone what great things have come up online.  I’m utterly clueless.

We’re receiving 50 submissions a day at this point.  That’s over 200 poems a day.  Then there are essays, reviews, columns for the e-issues, interviews.  And emails emails emails.  There’s just so much to read for work, when am I ever going to read for pleasure?

So I came to the realization last night that there’s really no need to worry.  My ignorance will always be an asset.  Many of you poets will always be better-read and more knowledgeable about what’s going on in the poetry world than I am.   And that’s good for Rattle.  I don’t know Dick from Harry (isn’t that an expression?), so when I read your work, all it’s being judged against is the other work we’ve been getting.  The poems we publish will always be accessible to most.

That’s all I read, that’s all I know.  The end.

I did a reading a few weeks ago, that the host filmed and put up on YouTube.  My mom still has dial-up, so couldn’t watch it at home, and when she tried to watch it at her office, she realized her computer didn’t have any speakers.  So, like any loving mother, she watched the whole poetry reading with no sound.  For 30 minutes.   Needless to say, I now have a full list of all my nervous ticks and poor postures.  So if you see me putting my free hand in a pocket or oddly leaning to one side, smack me with a ruler or something.

Did you just laugh out loud?   The 40 or so people in the audience did.  It’s definitely an amusing story, worthy of a affectionate smile at least, but I bet very few people reading this let out a soft snort, let alone a chuckle loud enough that an office-mate had to look up over the cubicle wall.   And it’s not like the 40-or-so people at Village Books on Monday were freaks with a hair-trigger funnybone.  Laughter is infectious — it’s evolutionarily encoded, a still-useful tribal bonding mechanism from the caveman days.

A few years ago Megan and I went to see Mary Oliver in Santa Barbara.  Aside from the National Poetry Slam, it’s still the largest literary audience I’ve ever been a part of — almost 1,000 in attendance.  Mary read her poems of simple nature and grace, and in between each one, no matter what she said, the audience would laugh.   It got to the point where she seemed to be testing how low the comedic bar could go, how little it would take, until finally she gave up and said, “For some reason everything I say is funny.”   The audience laughed.

A poetry reading might be the easiest place in the world to become  a comedian.  Mary wasn’t even trying to be funny, in fact, she seemed slightly horrified.  There’s something unique, I think, that happens at a poetry reading, a perfect storm of haha.  Poetry is the most empathetic of all mediums — a poet speaks and manipulates your own inner voice; she uses you as the canvas.  I think when we encounter a poet on stage, we relate so much that the experience becomes slightly uncomfortable — and for many that translates into a nervous giggle, which then spreads through the crowd like an instantaneous meme.

Moreover, poems themselves are fundamentally funny — in one of my favorite essays on poetry, Kay Ryan points out that “Ha!” and “Ah!” are really manifestations of the same thing.  They’re both spontaneous reactions to emotional/psychological surprise — an “impossible pang,” as she puts it.  As poets, we’re often hoping for those quiet awe-struck gasps, a trickle of soft “Ahs” at a the end or in the middle of a poem.  But I think that reaction is so close to it’s sibling that we just as often get the “Ha!” instead.  The audience doesn’t really know what to do, but we know we feel something strange bubbling up from our gut.  And so we laugh.

The effect is like a hurricane forming — an empathetic unease in relation to the poet depresses the room; all that moisture swirls and condenses around the kernel of surprise that’s fundamental to poetry, and then rapidly expands over the warm waters of an infectious laugh track.  Is that analogy ridiculous enough to be funny?

Anyway, a poet walks on stage to a comic’s dream — the audience is primed to laugh, almost desperate to release that communal, emotional energy.

And I haven’t even gotten to the fact yet that most of comedy is in the timing, and all those non-verbal cues that can’t be expressed on paper.  My story above was probably more funny for the look on my face, and the pause before the slightly deadpan semi-punch line, “For 30 minutes.”  On paper you don’t get the pause, unless I add some white space, but white space would also take the attention away from the scene and remind you that you’re reading something on paper.  And even then you’d miss the goofy look on my face.

My favorite comedian is probably George Carlin.  I love his bit on religion, about the invisible man in the sky who has a special place for you full of fire and misery where you’ll scream ceaselessly for all eternity — “but he loves you!”  I can fall out of my chair laughing at that on his HBO special.  Even reading the transcript makes me chuckle now, and I can hear it in his voice, with his well-timed, pious, one-legged bow.

But here’s the transcript of a bit I’m not familiar with — similar topic, but to me just words on a page (don’t watch the YouTube clip at that link until after you read some of the text:

Here is my problem with the ten commandments — why exactly are there 10?

You simply do not need ten. The list of ten commandments was artificially and deliberately inflated to get it up to ten. Here’s what happened:

About 5,000 years ago a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to try to figure out how to control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so they announced that God had given them some commandments, up on a mountain, when no one was around.

Well let me ask you this — when they were making this shit up, why did they pick 10? Why not 9 or 11? I’ll tell you why — because 10 sound official. Ten sounds important! Ten is the basis for the decimal system, it’s a decade, it’s a psychologically satisfying number (the top ten, the ten most wanted, the ten best dressed). So having ten commandments was really a marketing decision!

Read that to yourself, without doing an internal George Carlin impersonation, and it’s kind of funny — more funny than my anecdote above — but I’m not laughing out loud.  Not even close.

The point here is obvious, and you knew it before you started reading this post:  Being funny on paper is a hell of a lot harder than being funny on stage.  Let alone being funny on stage at a poetry venue that’s primed for laughter.

In fact, being funny on paper might be the hardest thing a poet can ever try to do.

And to make matters worse, poets are tricked into a false sense of their own comedic ability by an always-encouraging audience.

The summer issue of Rattle is going to feature a tribute to humor, and so far this seems to be the most difficult tribute yet.  Three weeks before the deadline we have 14 poems slated to appear, with our target somewhere in the 20s.  I think we’ll make it, but only because of an unprecedented volume of humor-related submissions.  Recent tributes have all been fairly restrictive — you had to be an African American, or a sonneteer, or a rancher, and so on.  This is the first special section we’ve had in years that’s actually open to anybody — any poet in the world can take a shot at being funny.  And thank god for that, because we really need the volume, with such a low success rate.

So how do funny poems actually work?  Well, the same way serious poems work — there’s just, I think, less room for error:

1. An authentic voice, with a nuanced sense of rhythm and diction, lets a reader hear the “George Carlin” in their head.
2. Using line breaks to manipulate pacing and provide a sense of timing.
3. A strong narrative to make the scene engrossing.
4. Startling images, surprising juxtapositions and turns of phrase — that’s what a punch line really is, and on paper you have to get it perfect.

That’s the problem with humor on the page — every element has to be perfect.  Because, the opposite of what hapepns on stage, the situation is working entirely against the poet.  We read alone, in the comfort of our own chair, with the expectation that the work should be compelling.  There’s no nervous laughter and no echo-chamber to amplify it.  No voice, no timing, no exaggerated facial expressions or pantomimes.

It’s just words on a page, and the poet’s ability to manipulate the way you experience them.  Which makes me really appreciate the poets who manage to consistently pull it off, the Parkers and Collinses of the world.

If you’d like to try your hand at being funny on the page, the deadline for submissions is February 1st.  Go here for more info.

I could not help but be perplexed by an editor rejecting my work for their magazine and then pleading with me to take a subscription. It has happened more times that [sic] you might imagine. I am sure that the absurdity is not lost on you. Despite that, I wish you success with Rattle.

Often they include curses, ill-wishes, or even threats of violence, but that’s not what I’m interested in here, so I’ve chosen one of the more considerate ones.  This is from a guy named Dan, who was kind the whole time, and began our exchange with a fun note:

Thanks so much for your recent request that I purchase a subscription to Rattle. Be assured that the poet has given your request careful consideration, but he regrets to inform you that Rattle just does not suit his present literary needs. He wishes you the best of luck in finding subscribers elsewhere.

Well done, sir.

But light-hearted or mean-spirited, these responses share a common kernel that’s somewhat rational — why would I subcribe to a poetry magazine that doesn’t like my poetry?

My response is always the same — I become utterly perplexed myself.  Think of what Dan’s proposal implies — if the only people subscribing to Rattle were poets we’ve published, why would anyone want to be published in Rattle?  The only way to increase our readership would be to publish more poems, and then expand each issue to thousands of pages.  With so much paper and ink, we’d have to raise our cover price to $40 to cover the cost.  We’d be a vanity press at worst (a de facto replacement for the finally defunct Poetry.com scam), or a poetry collective at best.

While I think a collective magazine is an interesting idea, I don’t think we’d be getting very many submissions, or publishing quality content with any consistency.  People want to be published in Rattle because they want thousands of other people to read their poems — they don’t want to be one poet among thousands.  What are they thinking?  What do they expect us to do?

I’ve explained this situation countless times over the last five years, and I always assumed it was just sour grapes — “My poems are me, and if you don’t like them, you don’t like me, so I’m not going to like you either!”  It only just occurred to me that there might be more to the story.  That there might be a fundamental disconnect between the way I see reality and the way they see reality.

Think of any other non-literary magazine.  Or even a partial literary magazine, like The New Yorker.  I’m not going to look up their circulations numbers, but it’s something like 50,000 readers, plus a high-traffic website.  All those readers, and in any given year they might have 200 contributors.  And if I make the weak assumption that their submission base has the same ratio of Duotrope.com members as Rattle, I can do the math and say that less than 5,000 writers send them work every year.  So, using these extremely rough numbers, it’s likely that more 90% of New Yorker readers have not submitted their own work to The New Yorker in the last year, and the vast majority of them never have.  Most people who read The New Yorker aren’t writers.  They’re not reading the fiction hoping to write like Sherman Alexie, and they’re not reading about geopolitics hoping to become an investigative reporter like Seymour Hersh.  They want to be informed and entertained, and that’s it.

This is the disconnect.  Virtually all readers of poetry are writers of poetry themselves.  Poetry isn’t a passive interest, it’s an active passion.  Rattle keeps a large database of everyone we’ve ever had contact with.  There are tens of thousands of entries in the database, and 80% of them also have the label “rejected.”  We have 3,000 subscribers, and almost every one of them has submitted their work at one time or another.  When I find a reader of poetry — any poetry, not just Rattle – who doesn’t try to write it themselves, I want to run up and shake their hand, then reach in and examine their psyche.  It’s a rare species.

As I’ve said so many times, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the entire world of poetry being exclusively participatory.  I think both reading and writing it can enrich your life, so the more that get involved the merrier.  But a lot of people still want to pretend this isn’t the case, and even more, I think, just don’t realize that it is.  If you think of a literary magazine as if it were The Nation or Vanity Fair , of course you’d be offended, as a frequent submitter being asked to subscribe — there’s a whole market of readers to solicit without having to solicit the writers who want their work published with you.

That’s just not true, though.  Poetry is a niche, and if you’re writing it, you’re one of the only ones to reading it.  Everyone is participating in this big mutual exchange of creativity — and there’s nothing wrong with that, so let’s just embrace it.

Two weeks ago I stubbed my toe really bad, and the nail finally fell off today.  Later that afternoon, I did a poetry reading at the Baines’ house, in Azusa, CA.  Los Angeles has a ridiculous number of venues that feature poetry (and I mean ridiculous).  As with all things, I blame Bukowski — the one unique aspect about the LA poetry scene, I think, is that it’s cool to be underground, to be a creature of the night in your little corner of this big conglomerate rock of a city.  And that actually is cool.  If you really love poetry, you could hear it performed here twice a day at least, nearly  365 days a year.

But with all the venues, all the low-brow open-mics and high-brow stuffy-types, nothing tops the Baines’ house.  There it sits, unassuming, at 10 o’clock on the cul de sac.  Could be any house, any of the hundred thousand you pass on the way, and that’s what’s so great about it.  Anyone could clear out their living room, set out chairs, tape up flyers.  Anyone could open their doors to friends and neighbors once a month, invite artists to come and share their work.  Anyone could do it — but Joanne and Ed Baines actually do.

They call it the PondWater Society, named for the swimming pool out back, long ago filled with fishes and flora in favor of chlorine.  The series only started in October, but they’re already booked through June.  Much of LA’s new literary guard, many of them on the Red Hen label (you can read the list yourself) are on the schedule.

My reading took place in the middle of a rare SoCal downpour, but the room was still full, and there was plenty of merry mingling beforehand.  I got to talk to sister Terri about her stained glass, and mother Jeanette marrying a sailor.  Neighbor John brought a handmade floral arrangement for the raffle, and two newcomers from down the block brought each other — Teresa and Spencer, an engineer who builds custom car accessories in his garage…I wish I could find his website to link to.

It’s just such an eclectic mix of people, such a contrast to the regular poetry crowd, their interest so casual and genuine.  It gave me hope for the future of literature, which, like the future of all things, is going to be found in the unique niche, in the personal and quirky and selfless and free.

Last night I saw some commercial for Sears that mentioned at the end their Twitter page, and I wondered, “Who the hell would want to follow Sears?”  So I went there, and sure enough, 3,000 tweets, but less than 2,000 followers, despite the kind of massive exposure and brand-recognition that a blogger can’t imagine.  The show I was watching wasn’t even primetime, and still, at least a half-million people saw that commercial.  And no one cares about their corporate Twitter.  What is Sears going to say that might be interesting?  “Check out the lucky winners of the Sears shopping spree with Selena Gomez!”

I looked up other retailers, car companies, product lines — none of them can compete with the grassroots of personality.  The “dlisted” twitter account has half the followers of Sears, without ever posting anything, just because it uses the handle of the popular blogger, and people mistakenly think it might be him.  And if Michael K really did have a Twitter, it would be hilarious, and genuine, and the opposite of everything that a big corporation is.

In the new world, it’s going to be the PondWater that thrives — the small presses and open sources, the regular people doing good for the sake of good, just having fun for the hell of it.  When I need to look something up, I use Wikipedia.  When I need computer virus protection, I use AVG-Free.  I type this up on Open Office, and paste it into WordPress.  All these things are PondWater.  Real people doing stuff for the reward of stuff itself.  Life for its own sake — that’s PondWater.

And Rattle is PondWater — Alan Fox founded Rattle 16 years ago because he thought, why the hell not?  Why should I go somewhere else to read poetry, when I can do it just as well myself, and make it the way I want it to be?  That’s the PondWater spirit, and that’s what matters to me.  Other editors, tied to universities, have ten times the budget to work with that I do.  Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Agni.  Great magazines, and I could never really get a job there — but I wouldn’t want to even if I could.  Give me grassroots, not Goliath.  Give me the Baines’ house, not the Geffen theater.  I’ll always work for PondWater.