Literary Cleveland's Inkubator Conference Kicks off This Week!

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Cleveland poets Kevin Latimer and Brendan Joyce launch Grieveland

Read Local poets launch indie publishing company Grieveland by Annie Nickoloff at cleveland.com.

Follow them on Twitter at @grieve_land and on Instagram at grieve_land.

Check out their books at https://www.grieveland.com/books.

Machine Gun Poets

In a recent article, Main Street Rag Editor M. Scott Douglas defends a new policy of his press to put, in their book contracts, a stipulation that the author will not publish with another publisher for at least nine months after publishing with Main Street Rag. His reasons for this can be found here.

It's always interesting to get a publisher's point of view, especially if that publisher is a poet themselves, on the business end of poetry and poetry sales. Also, I think Douglas makes some good points--trying to get a manuscript or book published everywhere as quickly as possible, especially when it comes to independent presses, not only hurts the poet, but also hurts the presses themselves. Douglas explains this more thoroughly than I can, so check out his article.

However, I think there are some things that publishers can do on their end as well. I remember speaking with a former teacher of mine who had been offered a contract by Knopf, and was debating leaving Greywolf. His issue was that he would get lost in the shuffle at Knopf, and while the money was there, the investment in the poet wasn't. I think independent publishers have this same issue, and it's pretty clear that for many publishers, there's a "here's your book, no go read and sell it" mentality, with little concern for how to advance the poet, the book, the readership, etc. Even something as basic as sending out press releases to local newspapers or information to bookstores seems to be lost on a lot of publishers, much to the detriment of the poets and the press itself.

An alternative to this is limited runs, but this brings up a different set of issues. How does a limited run affect the poet on the long term? Once they churn through that initial batch of 25, 50, 100, etc.--an easily accomplished task with tools like Facebook and PayPal these days, what happens? Is there a second release? Do they call it quits on that book until a "New and Selected" comes out? Do they collect three or four chapbooks and try to cobble them into a manuscript? Do limited edition chapbooks encourage machine gunning more than long term investment in a poet and their work?

As many readers of this blog are published poets, I'm curious to know how their publishers went about promoting their books, and the sort of relationship built up between publishers and poets. What do you think could be done to increase book sales? What do you think poets need to start doing? What do publishers need to start doing? What do the two of them need to start doing TOGETHER to change the game itself?

Rubbertop Review accepting submissions

Rubbertop Review – volume one contributors - 2009 Sandra Bannister Kate Birdsall Tara Broeckel Ooten Colleen Clayton-Dippolito Alex Cox Grant William Currier Susan Grimm Amy Kesegich Kaitlynn Lane Matthew Meduri Robert Miltner Ramona Paul Katrina Phillips Katherine Schweitzer James Winter Julia Wise Joshua M. Young Featuring interviews with David Giffels A. Van Jordan Imad Rahman For details about obtaining copies, please e-mail Professor Eric Wasserman, Rubbertop's faculty advisor: EW22@uakron.edu __________________________________________ Calling All Ohio Writers! Rubbertop Review: An Annual Journal of The University of Akron and Greater Ohio blends tradition with innovation and is looking for excellent craftsmanship in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Each issue of Rubbertop will feature 1/4 of its content from undergraduate and graduate students at The University of Akron. The remainder of the journal will feature the very best of work by writers living in Ohio. We will consider submissions from any Ohio resident. No university affiliation is required; we solely consider the quality of writing and the passion for the craft. Submissions are accepted September 1 – February 1. When submitting please keep to the following guidelines: – 3-5 poems only – Short fiction or creative nonfiction should not exceed 4,000 words – No attachments, please. Paste your submission directly into the text of your e-mail. If your work is accepted we will ask for an electronic file. – Include a brief description of you and your work before your submitted piece – Electronic submissions only. Please e-mail the appropriate editor and in the subject line put your name and genre (i.e., Fiction – Jane Smith). Akron students should make their affiliation clear in the subject line (i.e., UA Poetry – John Smith). As we are a small journal, please respect our ability to only give payment of one (1) contributor’s copy for accepted pieces. All authors included in each issue will be invited to read their work at our annual release party in the spring. We look forward to reading your work. Rubbertop Staff Editor-in-Chief: Tara Kaloz Editor.Rubbertop@gmail.com Fiction Editors: Shurice Gross & Cody Rush-Ossenbeck Fiction.Rubbertop@gmail.com Poetry Editors: Joel Lee & Ramona Paul Poetry.Rubbertop@gmail.com Creative Nonfiction Editor: Marissa Marangoni Nonfiction.Rubbertop@gmail.com Rubbertop Advisor Eric Wasserman Rubbertop Review holds an annual essay contest for undergraduate students at The University of Akron. The contest is always judged by an accomplished Ohio writer. Information on the contest for volume two of the journal will be forthcoming in September, 2009. Any questions about the contest may be sent to Rubbertop Editor-in-Chief Tara Kaloz at Editor.Rubbertop@gmail.com, or Rubbertop Faculty Advisor Eric Wasserman at EW22@uakron.edu.

Where do you publish?

Midge Raymond says, it's September, and the literary magazines that slumbered all summer are coming awake; it's submission time.

So, where do you publish?

Where are the current markets? Who wants what? What's hot, who's not?
Lit magazines? Small press? Your church newsletter?

Let's hear it!

And how about internet journals: electronic ephemera? Or the wave of today?

Opinions?

Marketplace

WERGLE FLOMP HUMOR
POETRY CONTEST - LAST CALL!
(no fee)

8th annual free contest with a special twist. Fifteen cash prizes totaling $3,336.40.
Top prize $1,359.

Submit one poem by April 1 deadline. No entry fee. Winning entries published online.
Judge: Jendi Reiter.

Sponsored by Winning Writers.
Winning Writers is proud to be one of "101 Best Websites for Writers" (Writer's Digest, 2005-2008).

Guidelines and online submission at
http://www.winningwriters.com/wergle

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3rd Annual Buffalo Small Press Book Fair,
March 21, 2009 - Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum,
453 Porter Avenue,
Buffalo, NY.

Event is free and open to the public and brings authors, booksellers, small presses, poets, etc. together.

http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/about/

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<<>>
http://www.altruisticword.com/the_ALTRUIST/Welcome.html

New publication accepting poetry, short fiction subs, etc. Payment is publication. Submit via email as a .doc (Microsoft Word) attachment. Submit up to 6 poems per submission.
Do not submit a new submission until hearing about your original sub. Sim subs okay with notification. No previously published works accepted. Takes FNASR. Author holds rights and copyright after works are published. Include genre of work submitted and short bio with submission. Also indicate if your sub is a sim sub. No reading fee.

Email submissions to:
thealtruisticword@gmail.com

***********************************************************************

FUNDSFORWRITERS. COM

If there's a grant out there to enable a writer, FundsforWriters knows where it is. Subscribe to the four newsletters and jump start your writing career.

Writer's Digest labeled FundsforWriters one of its 101 Best Websites for Writers
for the past eight years. 20,000 readers can't be wrong.

Contests, grants, markets and publishing opportunities await you at
http://www.fundsforwriters.com/

****************************************************************************

Robert Frost International Poetry Contest,
Adult Poetry Contest 1st prize = $150, 2nd Prize = $75, 3rd Prize = $50, 2 honorable mentions. Entry fee = $10 per poem.
Submit previously unpublished work.

Any style or theme. 40 lines max. Submit typed poems. Submit 2 copies of each poem with name and contact info on only 1 copy of the poem. Make checks payable to Key West Robert Frost Poetry Festival.
Mail entries to: Robert Frost Poetry
Festival, Heritage House Museum,
410 Caroline St., Key West FL 33040.

http://www.robertfrostpoetryfestival.com/contest. htm

Deadline: March 23, 2009

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes" Mark Twain

The publishing world
is in scale down mode, near to lockdown. Editors and production people are loosing their jobs and major players are not accepting any manuscripts. I suspect this means manuscripts by lesser known authors than say Stephen King, which leaves 99% of authors in a funk.

It's important to remember that before there were big publishing houses with armies of skinny, young editors (all dressed in black mini skirts, black tights and black eyeliner), writers still got their words into the hands of readers. Mark Twain, among many others, sold his books in advance by subscription, eschewing the elite Eastern literati, who after snubbing him still are amazingly enough in control of the market today, almost two hundred years later. These gatekeepers are instructed with formulas for publishing success -- formulas that grant people like Sarah Palin $7Million advances. Any entity that publishes a book ghost written and published inside of six weeks by a guy called Joe the Plumber who is neither named Joe or a plumber doesn't really care about books or even trees for that matter and as far as I'm concerned, deserves to go out of business.

Hugh McQuire in his recent blog: What if the book business collapses points out that maybe the implosion the pubishing industry is experiencing is not all bad. I tend to agree with him. The whole trend toward mega publishers and mega bookstores that allot precious little space for experimental or quirky is scary. Not only does it make my teeth itch, it is bad business since us word consumers have spent the last decade getting all finicky about our entertainment tastes. It's hard to even remember those pre-remote control days when 90% of TV sets were tuned in on Monday nights to the same I Love Lucy episode -- we've diversified as consumers just as the burdens of big publishing sought to support itself on a narrowing field of blockbusters.

Facebook tells me what my relatives are up to and I care a whole lot more about them than celebrity news. Blogs keep me up-to-date on my friends' opinions, which are more important to me than ANYthing Andy Rooney ever focused a biased eye on. I read the news outlets I want to read blissfully ignoring what's on Fox. I download only the songs I want instead of buying an entire album and Amazon tells me what books I'll like based on what I've ordered in the past -- kind of like those old-fashioned, user friendly bookstore owners who found themselves displaced by Clay Akins and expresso machines in the nineties.

If I really like something -- I subscribe to it online, a system that kind of rhymes with Mark Twain.

My work is not my work

I will be very interested

to get your opinions on this one. It was recently brought to my attention that one of "my poems" appeared in a new anthology called Issue 1, a 3,785-page magnum opus of versification put out by forgodot.com. I found that interesting, since I didn't submit to the project. So I looked online and found a downloadable pdf of the book. Sure enough, on page 3,011 (they buried me in the back, the bastards) there is a poem called "Of intoxication," a title I kind of like, since it seems to fit me. The poem is attributed to "mark s kuhar" (all lower-case, just like i like it.) The poem reads like this . . .


A late sun
The unheard spaces
A lark

problem is, it t'ain't my poem. I never wrote it. In doing some more digging, there are comments all over the internet from people complaining that this book contains poems they never wrote. I have not been able to digest the entire list of more than 3,000 poets, but there are famous names, such as Terry Southern, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan and Franz Kafka, and at least two other names I know: Jill Riga, who is local, and Andrew Lundwall, a poet from Wisconsin whom I have published on deep cleveland press.

Apparently, when asked, the anthology's editors are saying that it must be a different (insert name here) that we dealt with in putting together the anthology. I think you get the idea. The anthology is one part literary experiment, one part lark, all organized and executed on the backs and reputations of poets from all over the country and world. Having said that, some of the poems aren't bad. Much of it reads like randomly generated computer sentences, but it could be worse. So, what do you think. Is it cool? Is it unacceptable? Subversive? Criminal? Let me hear your thoughts.

Images of Peace Celebrated in New Book

“Come Together: Imagine Peace”

is the title and theme of this new anthology from over 100 poets beginning with Sappho, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. The collection includes such modern poets as Denise Levertov, William Stafford, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, and a broad spectrum of contemporary voices ranging from Carolyn Forché, Jim Daniels, and Jane Hirshfield to Daniel Berrigan, Sam Hamill, and Diane di Prima. Co-editor, Larry Smith, has stated, “This was such a gifted project from the start, to render a poetic tradition of peace poetry and see it manifested in today’s writings.” Smith is the founder and director of Bottom Dog Press and professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University’s Firelands College.

The book’s editors Ann Smith, Larry Smith, and Philip Metres provide the prefaces and introduction to the 208 page collection. Metres’s introduction concludes:

“The work of peace-making, and the work of peace poetry, is at least in part to give voice to those small victories—where no blood was spilled, but lives were changed, justice was won, and peace was forged, achieved, or found. And words bring us there, to the brink of something new. Peace poetry is larger than a moral injunction against war; it is an articulation of the expanse, the horizon where we might come together.”

Metres is an associate professor of English at John Carroll University who authored Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007).

Come Together: Imagine Peace is the Ohio press’s sixth anthology in their Harmony Series. Others include the award winning O Taste and See: Food Poems; Family Matters: Poems of Our Families; Evensong: Poets on Spirituality; America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, and Working Hard for the Money: America’s Working Poor. Ann Smith explains, “From the thousand poems that were submitted we were able to select and group them into: Poems of Witness and Elegy, Exhortation and Action, Reconciliation, Shared Humanity, Wildness and Home, Ritual and Vigil, Meditation and Prayer. It’s an affirmation of peace and hope.” Ann Smith is professor emeritus in nursing education at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Adult Mental Health, and previous co-editor of the Family Matters book.

Sixteen Ohio poets are represented in the collection, including Alice Cone, Maj Ragain and David Hassler (Kent), Tom Kryss (Ravenna), Robert Miltner (Canton), Jack McGuane (Lakewood), Mary E. Weems, Geoffrey Landis, and Philip Metres (Cleveland), Michael Salinger (Mentor), Larry Smith (Huron), Steve Haven (Ashland), Richard Hague (Cincinnati), Jeff Gundy (Bluffton), Angie Estes (Worthington), and Jeanne Bryner (Newton Falls).

Publication of this book by is supported in part through a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and by John Carroll University and Mr. William C. Wright.

A series of group readings are planned for around the country in Seattle and Bellingham, Washington; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. In Ohio initial fall readings include: November 23 at 4 pm at The Thurber House for Writers’ Ink organization in Columbus, and December 7 at 2 pm at Mr. Smith’s Coffeehouse in Sandusky. The book may be purchased at on-line bookstores or by sending $18 to Bottom Dog Press, PO Box 425, Huron, Ohio 44839.

New book on peace from Bottom Dog Press

New book by Bottom Dog Press....to be out in early December

I know I'm getting a little ahead of myself here as editor-publisher of Bottom Dog Press, but with all the bad news going around lately, it's good to know some relief is on the way. Phil Metres has joined Ann and me as editors of this fine collection of poems that bring us together to envision a way of peace. If we lose the ability to imagine peace for us and our children, we are lost. This book says no. Poets have always brought us sanity and hope...they are the namers and sayers of courage and beauty.

Phil has an excellent introduction....Relief is on the way.

Come Together: Imagine Peace
Edited by Ann Smith, Larry Smith, and Philip Metres
With an Introduction by Philip Metres

“Peace poetry is larger than a moral injunction against war; it is an articulation of the expanse, the horizon where we are one. To adapt a line by the Sufi poet Rumi: beyond the realm of good and evil, there is a field.” -from the Introduction by Philip Metres

Precedents: Sappho, Whitman, Dickinson, Cavafy, Millay, Patchen, Rexroth, Shapiro, Lowell, Creeley, Rukeyser, Ginsberg, Levertov, Lorde, Stafford, Jordan, Amichai, Darwish;
Contemporaries: Ali, Bass, Berry, Bauer, Bly, Bodhrán, Bradley, Brazaitis, Bright, Bryner, Budbill, Cervine, Charara, Cording, Cone, Crooker, Daniels, di Prima, Davis, Dougherty, Ellis, Espada, Estes, Ferlinghetti, Forché, Frost, Gibson, Gundy, Gilberg, Habra, Hague, Hamill, Harter, Hassler, Haven, Heyen, Hirshfield, Hughes, Joudah, Jenson, Karmin, Kendig, Kornunhakaa, Kovacik, Kryss, Krysl, LaFemina, Landis, Leslie, Lifshin, Loden, Lovin, Lucas, McCallum, McGuane, Machan, McQuaid, Meek, Miltner, Montgomery, Norman, Nye, Pankey, Pendarvis, Pinsky, Porterfield, Prevost, Ragain, Rosen, Rashid, Rich, Roffman, Rosen, Ross, Rusk, Salinger, Sanders, Seltzer, Schneider, Shabtai, Shannon, Sheffield, Shipley, Shomer, Silano, Sklar, Smith, Snyder, Spahr, Sydlik, Szymborska, Trommer, Twichell, Volkmer, Walker, Waters, Weems, Wilson, Zale ...

Larry