The Psychology of Self-Publishing

Bill Knott, Henry Gould and Jessica Smith on the couch, below the fold.

Three distinct self-publishers have been on my mind lately. I just reviewed Bill Knott, Jessica Smith's work (and her self-publishing) has been under the microscope at Ron's blog, and Henry Gould sent me a lulu.com edition of his book that I reviewed a while ago. I'll add, in the interests of full disclosure, that I myself have self-published — self-nanopublished, really — an aleatory work, SWAN just over a year ago, which I also released for free as a .pdf (see the left column.)

There are two red herrings that surface over and over again in discussions of self-publishing that I want to dump immediately.

The first is the idea that self-publishing in the twenty-first century is in any way comparable to the self-publishing of the nineteenth or early-twentieth century. This, to me, seems to be a move made by defenders of self-publishers — and we as a bunch are notorious for having them — to link the act to some kind of legitimizing tradition. Yet whatever history will have to say about Organic Furniture Cellar, the fact remains that the contemporary act of self-publication is a fundamentally delegitimizing move. By incorporating OFC into a larger venture, the Outside Voices press, Smith (ironically, given the title) attaches her project to something more legitimate: the publishing of friends and colleagues and strangers, but I want to treat Smith as one limit point in the continuum of self-publication, and not as someone simply "testing" the mechanics of a larger project.

The second is the idea that self-publishing has any relation to the work itself. Knott, for example, has ascended to the poetry stratosphere by appearing under the FSG imprint and is now essentially self-republishing — the exact opposite to Gould's case. A case can be made — and she makes the case herself — that the unusual nature of Smith's work required a greater attention to the printing process than a publisher could provide. Tom Phillips' A Humument I think belies the idea that commerical publishing is incapable of printing visual poetry with care and attention. Indeed, in the post-Gutenberg era, printing visual poetry is no more or less taxing than printing type, and could be taken on by any of the usual journals, web or zine or perfect-bound.

What I mean, in other words, is something that I think we all take for granted: the poetry-writing self is distinct from the publishing self. The poetry-writing self (PWS) is a second, parasitic beast that emerges to write poetry, and then disappears: its ephemeral nature, here now, gone now, is the reason much of our best works seems alien, anonymous and disconnected from the rather middle-management types we are day-to-day.

The distinctness of the PWS, by the way, is controversial. Commerically successful poets, those who ascend to the mainstream publishers and appear in hardback, like, let's say, Louise Glück, have publishers who like to sometimes elide the selves, pretending that all their poet has is a PWS and that she spends her time dreamily floating on word currents through life. If foetry.com taught us anything, it's how ridiculous that notion is, a ridiculousness that has long been apparent to those more on the "inside", watching poets make photocopies in the English department copy room. (Related to this is something I've written on Jorie Graham's battle with the PWS.) Emerson, writing back to Whitman: "I greet [your second, poetry writing self] at the beginning of [your first self's] great career."

But the real importance for the discussion here is the rather simple observation that the fact of a poem's self-publication has zilch to do with the poem, and everything to do with the middle-management publishing self. Which brings us to the question: what is this self's psychology?

To me, the essential aspect of self-publishing is the demand to always be the subject in both the technical and colloquial sense. The person who self-publishes publishes poetry as a by-product, almost, of something dearer: the need to project itself in the air, like a kind of chapbook bat-sign. Looking back over my own writings while I was working on the mechanics of SWAN, and thinking back to that time, what I enjoyed most about the act of self-publishing — and it is an absolutely thrilling experience — was the feeling of placing my self, Chaplin-like, inside the gears of the printing machine.

This is in great contrast to the self-erasure that comes about when you send work off to editors and publishing houses: in this case, with the stamp of an envelope or a click on your e-mail client, your quotidian self is disappeared. Indeed, what you mail off is the PWS itself, the pure creator; left behind, forlorn, is that tired, middle-management fellow that stands empty-handed at the door.

Knott, whose character has been up for discussion recently on lucipo, seems to be the extreme case of the publishing self coming to eclipse, at least in his own mind, the poetry-writing self. Franz Wright seems to be another case where the publishing self wants more and more, and becomes a more vivid presence than anything that might be writing his poetry. Smith's publishing self has gone so far as to actually publish its own poems, a remarkable feat accomplished by putting her "juvenalia" for sale on lulu.com; this kind of twisted battle of the selves is decidedly odd: Smith both tells us it sells while mocking the contents.

And, of course, there is me and my fantasising, publishing self, pushing wedding invitations through the manual feed of my laser printer. I don't know what to make of my own adventure into the ground of self-publishing, except to decide that I don't want to do it again (the opposite conclusion I came to just after mailing the final copies.) Perhaps it's because my publishing self really is middle management; I spend the bulk of my time not hanging out with artists or indeed in any kind of artistic endeavour, but rather in hard, physical science. In other words, my publishing self is hardly developed, being ensconced, as happens to mathematics and physics talents if they're lucky, in a maturity-retarding bubble since my early teenage years.