The New Pay-to-Play Literary Modality

image by Skeeze courtesy Pixabey

Joy Lanzendorfer, in The Atlantic, articulates some of the reasons I'm so disquieted by literary journals that charge reading fees to look at submissions-- "a practice that’s bad for the writing community at every level," as she says.

"While most journals are still free, every few months, a new journal seems to announce that it’s going to start charging writers to submit their work—a trend that’s slowly threatening the inclusivity of literature when it comes to new, diverse voices.

"...To make matters worse, being poor is already the norm for writers. A recent industry survey showed that more than half of writers earn less than the federal poverty level of $11,670 a year from their work. I know what this feels like. There was a time when I made two cents per word as a writer and worked part-time as a waiter to pay the bills. I lived in a bad part of town, slept on a blow-up bed, ate on a card table, and owned a 1978 TV with a broken channel changer that I had to turn with a pair of pliers. When that was my life, these fees would have added up so quickly that I couldn’t have afforded to write fiction at all."

• Read the whole article here: "Should Literary Journals Charge Writers Just to Read Their Work?."

The Atlantic Tells us "Why Poetry Should Be More Playful"

The Atlantic sez, Why Poetry Should Be More Playful

Is it really true that "As verse becomes increasingly dry, it's getting more and more irrelevant"?

Is verse becoming increasingly dry?

Well, maybe so. Says Noah Berlatsky in the Atlantic:

"...there doesn't have to be an absolute division between serious poetry and lighter verse. And yet, in practice, the two traditions have diverged radically, as the serious, high-art poetry tradition has retreated into the halls of academia, closed the doors, and then triple-locked them. Even New York school poets like Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara, who put a premium on wit and humor not that far divorced from someone like Ogden Nash, do so in a way designed to alienate as large a public as possible."

(... on the other hand, maybe Berlatsky should go to a Lix 'n kix reading some time, or maybe check out tonight's Deep Cleveland reading, to cure him of thinking that poetry is "increasingly dry.")