Thanks to Katherine E. Young for sharing her thoughts about online publishing.
Katherine
E. Young's poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review,
Shenandoah, and many others. She has published two chapbooks and was a finalist
for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize (U.S.).
Her translation of Russian poet Inna Kabysh won a share of the 2011
Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender Prize.
The Secret Life of
Poems
Publishing these days almost always
means that your work will end up online; even the most persnickety poetry
journals generally publish a digital version.
Readership for poetry is limited at the best of times, so who wouldn’t want
to find his or her work bouncing around the net, “liked,” tumbled, blogged
about?
Having had all those things happen
to my poems, I’m not so sure I’m pleased with the results. For one thing, while it’s great that people
are sharing the work, nobody ever seems to remember to let me know they’re
doing it. A few years back I picked up a
neat little “best of the net” award for a poem, but didn’t find out about it
until I happened to google myself – it would have been nice of them to let me
know. I’ve also had a poem savaged by a
blogger somewhere out there – the poem was not very good and deserved what it
got, but still. It would have been
kinder if he’d let me know, better yet, let me respond. It’s a lot easier to trash someone while
hiding behind an online persona. Who are
you, Language Hat?
The
most interesting experience I’ve had online, though, is with a poem I wrote
some time ago about the collapse of the Soviet Union, where I lived off and on
for years. The poem is fairly bleak (it
includes a suicide attempt) and ends with the line “I’ll become a fish: bones like these.” The poem – sometimes just its final line – has
somehow made its way into the community of folks who converse online about
eating disorders; I’ve found it on multiple sites that have to do with
anorexia. My poem is not about anorexia; I’m a bit unnerved
by what others seem to be reading into it.
It’s as if the poem has developed a persona all its own, like Gogol’s
nose, and is gallivanting about the net without me. I expect to meet it one day at the symphony, whippet-thin
and wearing a nicer dress than mine.
Back
before the net existed, I found my fifteen minutes of fame in the Soviet
Union. It was a rather frightening
experience, actually, that included autograph seekers and even a stalker –
nothing to do with poetry (although Russians like poetry better than Americans
do). So I’m grateful that American
poets, even the finest ones, get to live in relative obscurity (I’m not sure
our most eminent poets share my gratitude for that, but I digress). I have to ask, though: isn’t my poem still my poem, even if I’m an
obscure poet living in greater suburbia?
Meaning: why don’t people ask
permission to use my work? At the very
least, why don’t they let me know when they use it? I’ve got another question, too: what if, god
forbid, people are reading my poem as an invitation to starve themselves? Don’t I get a say in how my words are
interpreted? What’s a writer’s
responsibility in this case? Even if I
have some responsibility, can I possibly exercise it on the net?
Of
course not. No one can control what
happens to work once it’s out there, whether in print or online: that’s my point. In my non-poetry life, I teach first-year
college students how to write better papers. Every semester, one or two students choose to
write about the internet and recording artists, which requires them to look at
things like illegal file sharing. Almost
all of my students eventually decide, based on the evidence and the opinions of
marketing experts, that letting the music flow freely online is ultimately a
smart move for recording artists because it grows their audience. Hm.
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong.
After all, any audience is better than no audience, right?
Move
over, Kanye and Jay-Z. We misunderstood
artists need to stick together.
