I'm probably echoing what others have said but I think the problem is
removed if you inform both parties. I think the financial aspect is
relevant. If an online publication has paid for a poem, rare as that is,
you're more obliged to make this effort. I've had the experience of a print
magazine turning down a poem they had accepted because it had been published
online. That seems fine to me if that's their policy, but maybe mistaken in
the assumption that there's such an overlap of readership.
A question I have is about the unauthorised posting of poems on the net.
It's a practice by now very widespread, and usually done out of enthusiasm
so it would seem very ungrateful to object, as long as the thing is
correctly printed. But I think posters should at least signal the book, if
it's in one, and I've noticed that doesn't happen very often. This question
is presently being discussed in the music industry with some vehemence.
Perhaps there where the financial losses are considerable, it's a more
relevant topic.
David's image of vigorously interred poems (VIP) is entertaining, but I'm
not convinced by his example of the Penguin Modern Poets representing a lost
moment of poetry's entry into the culture. I don't have any knowledge of the
sales but I've a feeling only The Mersey Beat trio was a kind of
best-seller, and that reflected their huge popularity at the time. Unlike
the Modern European Poets, which made poetry available through translation,
I never cared much for that series. If there was a good poet in the three,
he or she was often mismatched with a couple of duds, and even if the poets
were all fine they didn't much profit from being bundled together. I don't
mean to knock the venture, nor even the updated second run, but the only one
I own from either series is the Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth book and even
that I don't think shows the poets to best advantage.
And is poetry in Britain really so 'furiously' uncirculated? My
impression is that, small as they may be, the average sales of individual
volumes here would compare very favourably with those in, say, Italy or
Spain. Maybe even good against the US...? I'm neither sanguine nor resigned
about this, merely unconvinced the situation is that 'woeful'.
Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: jim andrews
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2013 12:07 AM
Well said, David. I agree entirely.
Editors who concern themselves with such issues must be considered a bit
obtuse, or at least not to have come to grips with these issues. Whether
work is on the web or not does not affect my decision to buy books or
magazines. Web and print publications do not seem to be in competition with
one another. In the best cases, a publication has both a web and a print
version or endevour (not versions of one another) and the print and web
projects are quite distinct.
ja
On 2013-11-24, at 2:04 PM, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> I think it rather woeful that magazines with circulations comparable to
> the attendances at Scottish Third Division football matches claim
> exclusive rights on work which will be thereby read by hardly anyone. It
> is part of the ever-assured circle of non-circulation of poetry (EACNCP)
> that poets almost all complain of. ALMOST ALL POETRY IS READ BY ALMOST
> NOBODY and poets, editors, magazines, the (ugh) scene et al all furiously
> work away at ensuring the situation continues. I know poetry can be
> elusive, shadowy, ambiguous, difficult to trace but please no not a
> captive in the petite-bourgeois shackles of single publication little
> magazines. After all, wasn't it once those Penguin Modern Poets and
> anthologies which for a time made it seem poetry was coming back into
> somewhere like the language? I would certainly not regard web publication
> as relevant to print appearances.
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