WEBVTT

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And that leads to
the next topic.

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I'd like to talk about
borders, cultural borders,

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political borders,
linguistic borders, borders

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and genre and form.

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In some ways, it seems
borders are less relevant

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today than ever.

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And in some ways, they're
increasingly hardened.

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And I'm just curious
how important

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are these concerns to you
and in making your decisions

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about what to publish.

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Well for us, they
are pretty important

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still because we're
doing print in this sort

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of a different thing.

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I mean, we have to get
our books in bookstores,

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and there are
borders in bookstores

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in that, there's poetry,
there's memoir, there's fiction,

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and so you have to
publish in those areas.

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And when we have a book
that's a hybrid, like I just

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worked on a lyric essay
that's very much a memoir,

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but it's very much poetry.

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And marketing had a hard time.

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Where's it going to
go in the bookstore?

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So there's these
tangible things that we

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have to consider in
print publications

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that I can imagine wouldn't be
as much of a concern online.

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So in print, yes,
we are still driven

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by those kinds of borders.

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I mean, even though
we're online,

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I mean, we do read
in genre and we

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ask people to identify a genre.

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We also have an
unidentified genre

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that they can choose if they
don't want to make the call.

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And if you choose a poetry,
it goes to the poetry people.

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And if you choose fiction, it
goes to the fiction people.

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And admittedly, pretty much
all of our poetry people

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also write fiction
and some nonfiction.

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And so I mean there's
multiple expertise,

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but there's still--
and though we

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don't identify like, in diagram
when we publish a work as

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to what it is.

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Because it always kind of
bothers me when people do that,

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and I don't know why.

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I mean, it shouldn't be.

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I mean, it's
perfectly reasonable.

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I mean, there are
commercial reasons

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why you want to identify in
a genre, or in a sub-genre,

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or self-identify a fly
one flag or another.

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So I do think that there are
still practical decisions.

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And I think if I
may as a writer,

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when I started first sending
out nonfiction, at the time,

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there were very few
nonfiction editors

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of literary and
literary journals,

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so I would send it to
the literary journal,

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and my nonfiction would
just go to the editor.

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And which meant it
got read a lot faster,

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it would get decided on
by one person as opposed

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to a panel of readers, who
all had some ax to grind.

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And I just found myself having
like very good luck publishing

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nonfiction, which probably
maybe had something

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to do with my nonfiction.

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But also just the way
that literary journals

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were set up in the first place.

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And then that's changed
to some extent now,

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but it's still an
important decision,

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and that lyric essay
is a great example

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of this, which lyric essay for
those who don't know or you can

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argue about it I suppose, is
an essay with a piece of art

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with the stuff of essay,
sort of inquiry, fact, world,

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research, but the operates
with the logic of poetry,

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association, linguistic
moves, beauty.

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And to some extent, like
the idea of a lyric essay

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is a brand that has allowed
poets to now write something

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besides poetry if they want to.

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I mean, or you can
self-identify as a poet,

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but I think it's become,
it's a very genius move.

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Or in the world of
academia in particular,

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where if you want
a teaching job,

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you sort of have to
teach two things.

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Well now, you know, I teach
poetry and the lyric essay,

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and there's a
difference between them.

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Certainly, and it's the thing
that does straddle this border

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and makes a lot of people
uncomfortable, even me.

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I'm reading it, I'm
like, well, what is it?

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And it's not how it doesn't
how does the thing act?

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What does it do?

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And you know, certainly
I mean, like a poem

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move can happen in a story,
it can happen in an essay.

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And I really try to
keep open to that.

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But then there are
practical considerations

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that it's hard to live in the
sense of total suspension.

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Well in my case, I have
published just poetry,

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so I don't publish
fiction or non-fiction.

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I think there have been a few
occasions, in some cases, where

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maybe it's blurred the boundary
towards memoir or perhaps

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in collaborations.

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It's veered towards prose,
but from the beginning,

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I wanted to focus primarily
on publishing poetry.

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And that's because that's
where my interest lies,

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but it's also because
in terms of publishing,

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really poets are the beggers
of the publishing world.

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It's much easier to publish
nonfiction and fiction

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and some more serious venues.

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There's still that
situation that I

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had a friend in graduate school,
who started out as a poet,

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and then she found herself
drawn to nonfiction.

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And she since won the National
Book Award for her nonfiction,

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so she's some very good
non-fiction writer.

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But she talked about how she
does felt this kind of despair

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as a poet in graduate school.

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And then in writing
nonfiction, she

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felt that she could
actually have readers

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that she would have more
opportunity for publication.

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I mean, if you look
at the publishing

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world for young poets coming
out of their MFA programs,

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or just working on their own,
the way they get published is

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they enter all of these
innumerable book price things,

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pay their fees until they
go broke for a couple

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3, 4, sometimes years.

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And it's very
difficult to just find

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the publisher who will just
publish poetry for nothing.

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In other words, without
the fee, without the whole

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price systems.

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So for me from the
beginning, it was

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important to create
this space for poetry.

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It's all sort of
this gratis space.

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I wish I could pay
the contributors.

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But on the other hand, they
never have to pay a fee

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or I've never taken
the advertising.

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So and it's very much part
of this gift economy in terms

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of poetry, but
it's also something

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that I think poets need this
kind of International Space.

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I do know most of the poets
that we've published have since

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been published in print,
so they've had success

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on that vineyard later on.

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But I just felt that it
was important to create

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this space for poets.

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I'll say one more short
thing about this idea.

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I mean, sometimes
the act of sort

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of being a genre rebel or
whatever you want to call it

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can be a sort of story.

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I think of Jenny Boulis,
a friend of mine,

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and a great poet and essayist.

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And when her most
recent book came out,

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she got a write up in poets and
writers of Publishers Weekly,

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or something like this.

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Like, I mean, they essentially
placed a press release

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because she is
someone who is known

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as defying genre expectations.

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I mean, while that can be
its own sort of useless

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pose for many of us, it's
also a way of you do stand out

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sometimes by doing that.

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Sometimes it's in
a negative way,

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sometimes it's in
a positive way.

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And her publisher, who also
published my book, first book

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of fiction, they use
it as a kind of PR move

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and it worked very well.

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We have about 10 minutes.

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Why don't--