An Open Letter

An Open Letter Concerning the Evaluation by

Colleges and Universities of

Publishing by Creative Writers

The following began, quite literally, as the text of a letter, written to a former student of mine, a poet, essayist and critic, who was going through the tenure and promotion process in an American university.  Questions about where and under what editorial and commercial circumstances he was publishing his work were raised not, as you might imagine, by scientists or faculty members from the business school, but by a member of the English department.  This is pretty familiar stuff, which many of us have had to deal with in a variety of settings for years.  As a poet in a university, I was early on the subject of such questioning and its less than flattering innuendos.  Eventually, as a member of tenure and promotion committees, it became my role to explain and defend the publishing records of my younger colleagues.  In the final, most embarrassing version of this curious game, I found myself, as an outside referee in tenure and promotion cases at other universities, defending the publishing preferences of writers I thought of as distinguished enough to be beyond the reach of such questions.

At one absurdly comic point, an administrator at my own university drew up a long list of literary magazines and presses which he sent out to people he thought of as experts in the field.  He asked that they review the list and assign numerical values to each of the magazines and presses based on literary merit and stature.  His plan was to multiply the number of poems, stories, lines or words—I was never quite sure which—by the “quality rating number,” then add the results and get a number that would represent the writer’s  achievement.  The plan was never put into effect because the chosen experts, those, at least, who didn’t simply laugh and throw his letter and list in the trash, sent their letters and lists to me, either as a not-so-gentle jab at my department or with the presumably flattering suggestion that I would be the person most qualified to assign the ratings.

I certainly don’t suppose that this letter or any other will solve these problems.  My hope is that it might offer some comfort and a little armor to the writers who are threatened by them.

The publishing issues raised in English departments concerning creative writers are strange, often contradictory, and nearly always vexing.  There is a tendency in academe to defer judgments of scholarly or literary worth to different  levels of commerce.  So fiction published by a large New York trade publisher is presumably better than fiction published by a small press, a university press, or an aesthetically specialized press like Dalkey Archive or FC2.  Poetry published by Knopf or Random House is presumably better than poetry by Wesleyan, Pittsburgh, and Illinois, which is, in turn, presumably better than work published by Sarabande, Flood, Third World, Burning Deck, Blaze VOX, or Tia Chucha.  Fiction that makes its way into quality paperbacks or Penguin paperbacks can retain its commercially conferred value, while fiction that moves into mass-market paperback tends to lose value.  In this strange form of what might otherwise be called thought, some commerce is good but too much commerce is bad or at least less good. Lingering here is the notion that the more commercial something looks, the more valuable it is, unless that look is wholly commercial and thus lowbrow, all of which is more than a bit distressing since universities are supposedly places where ideas of value are hashed out independent of corporate influence.