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The Pleasure of Publishing

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By Kevin Walzer

Driven out of academe by the lack of a job, I have nonetheless remained active as a scholar, publishing three books of criticism in my field (American poetry) as well as two collections of my own poetry. In an earlier column, I discussed the work I have done as a scholar since entering the business world in 1996.

What I've realized lately, though, is just how far I coasted on the momentum generated by graduate school. All of my books were begun, or built on work undertaken, in graduate school. Now, for scholarship at least, the well is dry. I have no scholarly projects in the pipeline. There is nothing left from my grad school days to build on. Does this mean that I am evolving, inexorably, away from being a scholar?

The easy answer is yes, but it's more complicated than that, because my involvement with poetry has been multifaceted -- as a poet and editor as well as a scholar. In graduate school, in addition to being a poetry scholar, I also wrote and published poetry. To publish my first book of poems, Living in Cincinnati, (1995) I worked with the Cincinnati Writers' Project, a nonprofit regional writers' group that published a literary magazine. The project served as the publisher, helping to raise money, paying vendors, and processing orders; I also solicited donations and invested some of my own money to help defray printing costs. I was responsible for managing the design and printing of the book.

In graduate school, I always felt a tension between my research as a scholar, my work as a poet, and my views on where poetry should be located in American culture. In my 1998 book, The Ghost of Tradition, (Story Line Press) I argued that contemporary poetry is too enclosed in an academic setting. Many of the poets I discussed, such as Dana Gioia, work in business or as full-time writers, and work through their writing and their organizational efforts to create venues for poetry outside the academy. Strongly influenced by Mr. Gioia's views that poetry should exit its "subculture" within the academy, I was nonetheless acutely aware of the irony of my position saying this as a doctoral student -- an academic in training. To complicate matters, though my doctoral specialty was creative writing, I was also strongly influenced by the skeptical views of the poets Donald Hall and John Haines on the value of academic creative-writing workshops to the art of poetry; I was more interested in teaching literature courses than creative-writing workshops. Accordingly, I felt a certain ambivalence about being a poet in academe.

To a degree, my lack of success on the academic job market resolved this ambivalence. I no longer worried about my work being tied to a ticking tenure clock. Moreover, The Ghost of Tradition was published by an independent literary press, not a university press, and seemed to find a readership outside the academy. (The book was panned by university-based critics, but the comments I have received from nonacademic readers were gratifying.) Still, scholarship -- and the academy -- has been an integral part of my involvement with poetry. It has become necessary for me to find a new way to engage with poetry (apart from actually writing it, which, whether I do it inside the academy or not, is a slow, laborious process).

Becoming a poetry publisher has done the trick.

My wife, Lori Jareo, and I founded Word Press, which publishes poetry and some criticism, in 2000. The goal was to expand the publishing opportunities available to poets. Although there are a large number of small presses (often connected to universities) that publish poetry collections -- usually a single book each year, chosen through a contest -- it's still extremely difficult for a poet to break into print. With Word Press, we knew we'd have to sponsor contests that required entry fees -- such fees being the standard method of raising money in the small-press industry to cover the costs of publishing poetry -- but we were also interested in seeking out good manuscripts outside the scope of the contest. In this way, we would be able to bring more collections to the reading public than most publishers did. So far, we have been successful: this past July we published Rare Space, by Leslie Anne Mcilroy, our contest winner, and have since brought out three more books. This year we plan to publish at least seven books.

Lori and I decided to approach the management of Word Press as a business. Many small presses are established as nonprofit groups and are heavily dependent on grants from state agencies and private foundations to survive. We were not interested in that kind of financial paper chase and decided to focus on stability and growth through cost controls and sales.

Our approach is that contests, at least initially, are the financial engine of our publications; book sales will provide additional revenue that will make the press self-sustaining. With this approach, I will not be able to quit my "day job" as a marketing writer; but neither will a large percentage of time be spent filing grant applications and ensuring that matching funds are in hand. We can concentrate on discovering, producing, and selling the best poetry books.

By becoming a publisher, I have found a way to replace poetry scholarship in a meaningful way. I am closely engaged with poetry, but my concerns are no longer with academic fashion. Instead, I can help to nurture the development of poetry in more immediate way than I could as a scholar.

I realized I had made a good decision in becoming a publisher when Lori and I traveled to Pittsburgh to hear Leslie Anne Mcilroy read from her work at an art gallery, accompanied by a local musician. Sitting back and simply listening to the energetic reading -- it was a real performance -- I felt a pleasure I had not enjoyed in years: the simple pleasure of hearing artful language read with power and conviction in a public setting. All through graduate school, I was so focused on the critical analysis of poetry that I forgot about what drew me to poetry in the first place: the power of artful, concentrated language to move an audience. I don't even get this pleasure when I'm writing, or reading, my own work. Based on the response of the audience in Pittsburgh, I could tell that others were having the same pleasure as I was.

So, partly by circumstance and partly by conviction, I am locating my work with poetry in precisely the place where I have always argued poetry should exist -- in the larger culture, outside of the academy. And it's a pleasure.