A curious case. The compulsion to publish so much; everything seemingly. Long ago, as an editor of a litmag, facing the onslaught of those submissions...the overstuffed envelopes would show up even as one had just rejected the last batch. There were some gems therein. But it was also absurd: Was there some warehouse, full of long tables and typewriters, where low-paid workers typed poems in the style of Lyn Lifshin? The sheaves gathered every 30 minutes, wheeled on a cart into the folding department, then on to the envelope lickers, tongues hanging out, in the sealing department. A mail bag full of envelopes left on the loading dock, addressed to dozens of far-flung little magazines.
In another era would she have made her fame as one of the Instapoets?
2 comments:
At first, I thought: Ah yes, remembering my own experience as an MFA student at the University of British Columbia, where I served as a first reader of poetry submitted to PRISM International. A poet named André Amprimoz was then submitting almost as frequently and in similar quantities as Lyn Lifshin was then doing in the U.S. A fellow student reader remarked, "This guy must shit words." Yes, we were young and smug. And I guess it's the smugness of this Lifshin post that bothers me.
What if we were talking, instead, about some wildly prolific novelist? The work will of necessity be uneven, yes? Think Simenon, or (within the Canon) Balzac. Of course, the output is prodigious and somehow comic, and maybe novelists like this end up producing only half a dozen books, a fraction of their output, that are very much worth reading. Why do we attack poets for being prolific but not novelists? Why are we not simply grateful for the few lasting books they write? It's as if poets are uniquely insulting when they write too much or, heaven forefend, publish a bad book. I'm old enough to remember the snotty viciousness of some reviewers when assailing James Wright for publishing Two Citizens; as I recall, maybe in one of his letters to Leslie Marmon Silko, Wright's bewilderment, as if publishing a bad book were some kind of sin, when honestly it may well be a mark of progress in the poet's work. Truth is, I'd rather read a "bad" poem by James Wright, or to pick a genuinely prolific poet, William Stafford, then the best work of many poets one finds on all those "best of" lists people seem to be so fond of these days.
Anyway, thanks for the spur to thought and reminiscence!
Canada and the US being two different worlds, I never heard the name André Amprimoz. Novels and poems are two worlds, too. A novel, in terms of word count, is a several thousand fold a poem. A novel is not something a little magazine can publish except serialized. I don't think we can draw any parallel between novelists who have churned out multiple thick novels and Lifshin's poetry publishing compulsion.
I think she's special. She seemed to think getting published everywhere and often would get her somewhere. She did achieve a kind of low-level fame.
Since Stafford and Wright were both alive when I was a little mag editor, I know they never sent poems. They certainly didn't send envelope after envelope to a publication that had maybe 50 subscribers.
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