When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong

Miller, Wayne. "When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong," LItHub.com,  february 8, 2021. https://lithub.com/when-talking-about-poetry-online-goes-very-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR3szGGqqwbNcxj2B8nGEbv0oa4tJ9GNp0KQ3C2FZFMXmgRIsjORjin0NVw

For three years of college I organized my schedule so that each day after lunch I could go to the library for an hour and read one new book of poetry pulled more or less at random off the poetry section shelf. The world I entered there (and never really left) was a “small back room” inside the library, inside the university, inside the town, inside the country. It was occupied by me and a bunch of poets—some famous—that no one really knew about, and it hummed for me with invisible promise.

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Nowadays, Miller edits the poetry journal "Copper Nickel."   The article is a defense of poetry journals over self-publication on social media platforms.  The essence of his argument is, a publication with a small, self-selected niche audience is a better place for writers to experiment than the sometimes vicious  public platform of the Internet. Here's how Miller describes the role of literary journals:

I’ve been editing literary magazines for twenty years, and something that strikes me when I’m reading through submissions is how often really good poets submit work that’s not (or not yet) successful. All poets treat submitting to literary journals with different levels of provisionality, but it’s consistently true that as a magazine editor I get to read failing poems by excellent poets—poems that will never make their way into the poets’ books. Some poems published in magazines—even high-profile ones—don’t make their ways into poets’ books; or if the poems do, they appear in significantly revised versions.

My point is that the work of literary magazines is simultaneously appreciative, critical, collaborative, and provisional. When a new issue of a magazine is out in the world, we often say: “Did you see what So-and-So is working on? I can’t wait to see the book!”