Autonomy's Compromise and the Professionalization of the Small Press

In the text below, as well as in my other posts for this four-part series, I rely on existing sources, quoting and paraphrasing from articles and books, as well as on my own subjective observations of the last two decades of working in the small press field. I would also like to clarify that my personal views do not necessarily reflect those of my fellow collective members at Ugly Duckling Presse.

The previous post in this series paints only a partial picture of the predicament-riddled landscape of the historic small press movement and the contemporary small press. It is flawed to the extent that it depicts the agency of small press and little magazine practitioners in their choice of politics and aesthetics as independent of the institutional forces and wider political trends at play. In this week's post as well as in the following, I hope to trace some of the underlying institutional structures and cultural paradigms that have brought small press to its current double bind. In this part, after discussing several ways autonomy has been historically both mobilized and compromised and what's left of it as an operative idea, and briefly noting the connections between power and populism, I turn in particular to a lesser-known institutional history, that of the Community (née Council) of Literary Magazines and Presses, in an attempt to show how changes in its mission and activities have been shaped by outside forces, and how it in turn has played a complex role in shaping small press culture and its present challenges.

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Can Autonomy Matter?

The generation that would participate in the Fence debates, the same that saw the dawn of the gentrification of the literary landscape, was formed in a time when literature's relevance to political life and in higher education was under threat of severe marginalization. In his Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, Alan Goldstone describes how, in the US, English departments fought for relevance within the academy by posing Literary Theory (of the de Man and Derrida stripe) as competitive with the discipline of Philosophy, and as necessary as the sciences to the culture at large precisely because of its reading of literature as an autonomous field of production. As Goldstone is keen to point out, Theory, post-modernist as it might be—and as much as it deconstructs claims to autonomy and authenticity—has its roots in the Modernist movement, in what Pierre Bourdieu called the "autonomization" of art in France beginning with the Impressionists' Salon de Refusés (1863), an exhibition of "rejects," followed by the post-Impressionist Salon des Indépendants (1884). In short, Modernist aesthetics of autonomy and its claims for literature's independence—from national or political communities, from labor and commerce, from personality and self, from signification and reference—are, as Goldstone argues, inextricable from social relations and political realities.

Likewise, the creation of autonomous artistic sub-fields and their strategies for (self-) legitimization in opposition to elite institutions and commercial markets is a persistent subtext of the story of small press and little magazines in the US from before the mimeo-revolution to the NEA cuts of the 1980s and '90s, and beyond. It's a history steeped in social and class struggles, when independent intellectuals and avant-gardists tangled with everything from conservative academies, publishing industries, and bourgeois publics, to suburban norms, and even government spies. Studies like Juliana Spahr's Du Bois's Telegram (see last week's post), among others, show that the struggles staged by autonomous literary producers were at many points substantive enough for federal agencies to get involved, monitoring and funding (or de-funding) this or that magazine, press, association, MFA program, or community workshop.

Cooptation of such sub-fields as the modernist literary magazine is not a new thing, either. It is made possible by the very mythology of autonomy from which cultural influence is derived. In his book, Finks, How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers, Joel Whitney details the international magazine meddling of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950 in West Berlin, active in as many as 35 countries at its height. The many "little" magazines of the late 1950s and 60s the CCF supported (and kept tabs on) were tasked with gaining intellectual allies for American liberalism abroad. Contemporary with its nefarious activities in subverting democratic processes and socialist-oriented governments around the world, the CIA supported the efforts of the CCF and sometimes the little magazines themselves directly through its various funding conduits, which, as Whintey reports, included corporate magnates like Julius Fleischmann, "a certain affluent Yeast man" as he was commonly referred to by CIA men at the CCF and by the editors in their network. (One of the Paris Review's co-founders, Peter Matthiessen, wrote to Fleischmann for seed money in 1953.)

These not-so-vaguely CIA-connected magazines loudly pronounced their autonomy and some even promised—as the Paris Review's first issue announced explicitly (in William Styron's editorial)—to "leave out the political" in favor of "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders." An implicit dismissal of "axe-grinders" and "drumbeaters" in favor of "good writers" is likewise evident in the rhetorics of the turn-of-the-century indy magazines (Verse/Wave editor Matthew Zapruder's "what is good") that I discussed in my first post.

Quality aside, the "little" magazines of the 1950s benefitted (in financial support and enhanced distribution) from fulfilling political demands. They posed as autonomous outfits precisely because the image of autonomy was necessary to gain the confidence of those who might otherwise be swayed by Communist rhetoric into anti-American positions. (At stake was the US's strategic containment of Soviet influence as well as the security of its growing foreign assets and military positions in previously colonial areas.) Acting as fronts for Cold War agendas, these little magazines were not as "little" nor as autonomous as they liked to seem, and their frequent disavowal of politics was as self-serving as it was disingenuous. While advised (or directed) by the CCF to cut or "kill" critiques of US domestic issues—particularly Jim Crow, racism, and poverty—these magazines touted "American values" of individualism and independence, railed against Soviet repressions of writers (Pasternak, etc.), and proclaimed "cultural freedom" as the right of all in the "Free World." Those who stand to gain cultural capital for an appearance of autonomy while toeing a party line are the last to admit their complicity. Magazines in the CCF network clung to the fiction of their autonomy for dear life; some of the editors of those little magazines would go on to deny knowledge of the CIA origins of the financing they received and to dissemble on any compromises they'd made to keep the support.

Autonomy, though, is always compromised. Where it exists, if it is not entirely ignored, it is under threat of being infiltrated by interest groups or coopted by the dangled carrot of funding and "reach" for the purposes of state or institutional agendas. Where no trustworthy autonomous source exists to support such agendas, one can be fabricated. A totally uncensored and completely autonomous circulation of ideas is hard to imagine. Perhaps it only exists in the limit case: outside publishing. For example, working outside the system, samizdat communities in the Soviet Union undermined censorship by simply avoiding state approval for publication which would have censored the materials they circulated. Samizdat was constituted by the threat to its autonomy; when it was found out by policing organs it was confiscated and its distributors were reprimanded or punished, sometimes severely. Yet the content of this material and its author(s) could not, technically, be "censored," as they did not seek "publication."

Whatever the legacies of Modernist ideas of the autonomy of literature, claims to complete independence from the academy, the state, or the marketplace, are, for good reason, suspect, if not absurd. Yet, this notion of autonomy, surviving Modernism itself, persists in structuring our definitions of literature and literary production, our actions and our allegiances, and our valuation of authenticity, at least for now. In fact, the fictions of autonomy that we construct about our literary communities and of literary works themselves have mobilized (our hopeful imagination of) literature's power to enact change: Diane di Prima's "Power to the people's mimeo machines," Amiri Baraka's "Accuse and Attack," as well as Steve Evans's call to hold institutions accountable are impossible without these fictions. What is perhaps most dangerous—in that it is disempowering—is a different illusion: the fiction of autonomy's irrelevance, of the inevitability of institutionalization, and the enjoyment of the professional or financial fruits of compromise with the institution or the state.

The Business of Poetry to the People

Writing in 2005 on the rise of populist rhetorics around poetry's accessibility and market-potential, Evans identified the political agenda implied in the "deregulation" of the poetry economy in an essay titled "Free (Market) Verse." In 2004, the newly-formed Poetry Foundation, seeded by an unexpected donation of $100 million from the Ruth Lilly Foundation (a pharmaceutical fortune) to Poetry magazine, had chosen as it first director John Barr, an investment banker working primarily with energy companies and notorious for his role (as chairman of the board of trustees) in the abrupt abolishment of tenure and extensive faculty cuts at Bennington College in 1994. Barr envisioned the Poetry Foundation's mission as follows: “by growing the universe of readers who will buy books of poetry, the Foundation hopes to bring economic as well as artistic life to the business of writing poetry.” This business rhetoric, as American as apple pie, should have dispelled hopes voiced in the small press poetry community that some of the Lilly money would "trickle down" to them in the form of micro-grants, which of course it never did.

The Poetry Foundation could have quite feasibly taken up the slack of post-Clinton arts funding and disbursed some of its dividends to the small presses supporting the "artistic life" of poetry. Instead, the Poetry Foundation, in addition to bankrolling Poetry magazine and a new website, put its dollars into populist programs like Poetry Out Loud (a high school poetry recitation contest), and American Life in Poetry, edited by poet laureate and former insurance underwriter Ted Kooser. Kooser's choices of poems to feed to 40,000 newspapers across the country fell in line with Barr's desire for a resurgence of "the poetry of the rational or the didactic," a poetry you can "parse," a poetry that Spahr has called anti-modernist, xenophobic, and nationalist. Barr's anti-intellectual aesthetic, under cover of anti-elitism, is based as much on personal taste as it is on market concerns and a populist mentality of broad reach, one shared by Dana Gioia—formerly vice-president of marketing at General Foods, author of Can Poetry Matter?, and chairman of the NEA from 2003 to 2009—who preferred to write poems "for my old fellow workers [white-collar management] ... than for the literati."

Evans is right to suggest that the George W. Bush presidency, the rise of Republican control in Congress, the post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the passing of the Homeland Security Act all serve as an ominous background to the appointment of the "businessmen poets" (Kooser, Gioia, Barr, and others) to posts of cultural influence and purse-string power. In some key ways, the programs imagined and implemented by such cultural players, with ties to government and to corporations, echo the strategies of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its affiliated magazines of the 1950s and 60s. The removal of poetry's ties to radical social movements and the concomitant severing of small press from its anti-institutional roots were, in Evans's analysis, one of the key missions of the "businessmen poets." According to Evans, were the deregulators' fever-dream of a new poetry audience—the non-elite, the non-academic, the Midwestern, and rural—to come to fruition,

[f]orgotten would be the advent first of mimeograph magazines, then xerox ones, then web-based ones, which have irrevocably decentralized the world of poetry by taking the power of publication out of the hands of a few authoritative editors and presses and giving it directly to poets themselves, who often choose gift economies over profit-driven ones as they weave together strands of an alternative—and sometimes quite radicalized—form of communication in sharp contrast to the uncritical monopoly media.

Barr apparently had no sense of the "artistic life" of poetry that had been and was still fueled by poet-publishers "in the margins," and if he did, he didn't like its politics. The NYPL's lionization of mimeo-revolution practices just a few years earlier wouldn't have impressed him; that poetry was neither very "rational" nor "didactic." With no faith in the tried and true alternative systems of distribution, Barr and Kooser fed "the people" poetry through local newspapers, where "the people" weren't looking for it. Considering research brought to bear in Spahr's book (see my previous post), the number of adult poetry readers was not substantially increased by these efforts, suggesting that the program squandered substantial private funding and tax-payer money (provided by the Library of Congress) which may have been put to good use by the hundreds of small presses and little magazine badly in need of financial resources to bolster existing literary communities.

The Professionalization of the Small Press: The Story of CLMP

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts used tax-payer money to support a broad and diverse field of authorship in the US. The casting of a wide net of support for little magazines and small presses was made possible, in part, by government grants to organizations like Small Press Distribution (founded in 1968, growing its distribution of small presses in the 1970s and 1980s) and to the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), the predecessor organization of the modern-day Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). According to its first annual report, CCLM was "the first organization in the history of America set up solely to aid the noncommercial literary magazines in the country." It sprang into existence in 1967 with a $50,000 grant from the newly-founded NEA, a grant which required matching funds which were secured with the help of Carolyn Kizer (NEA's Director of Literary Programs) herself and CCLM's cofounder Reed Whittemore, a key figure in its predecessor organization, Association of Literary Magazines of America (ALMA). In its charter documents, one of CCLM's key missions was to "give awards, scholarships, fellowships, grants, and other forms of aid and encouragement to literary magazines, artists, and writers."

Its more radical, grass-roots counterpart, COSMEP, the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (the term "small" should be understood as a modifier for both the magazines and the book publishers), was founded the very next year in response to the growth of the small press movement and was focused almost exclusively on the thorough indexing of, and networking between, its members, and advocacy on their behalf for better media coverage and library acquisitions. It included many political, counter-culture, and special interest publishers as well as literary ones. Its 1974 publication, The Whole COSMEP Catalog (inspired, of course, by The Whole Earth Catalog) was reviewed in the New York Times and featured a page each from close to 300 members, one of which used their page to print only the words "Impeach Richard Nixon." By 1978, COSMEP had 1,200 members and had convened 10 annual conferences; it operated (according to one member's recollections) as a "cooperative for information and services," with "a series of booklets to help new publishers" and "a newsletter that allowed for lively discussion of issues facing publishers."

In contrast to COSMEP's ground-up model, political feistiness, and democratic governance, CCLM was a top-down organization, the brainchild of well-meaning publishing professionals lifting the literary arts by providing financial assistance, tied to already established periodicals. (CCLM's board included editors of the Partisan Review and the Paris Review, beneficiaries of—and at times beholden to—CIA-affiliated sponsorship.) NEA-funded from its inception, CCLM was, in a sense, tasked with re-granting federal monies, and in that capacity it served as a mostly autonomous arm of the NEA. Despite its ties to the state, CCLM provided quick reach and wide disbursement to the literary community in a way that (as Kizer must have known) would have been a difficult if not insurmountable administrative hurdle for the newly-born federal entity.

In its first year of operation, with a budget of approximately $125,000, CCLM gave grants "ranging from $250 to $3,000 to thirty-eight magazines"; in 1971 "a total of 291 grants were made, ranging from $50 to $8,575." ($50 in 1971 would be worth about $300 today; multiply $8,575 by 6 and you get $51,450, enough to fund a year of decent editorial salary.) Even if some of these nearly 300 grants went to individual writers, no less than half must have gone to literary magazines, whereas, of the 104 NEA organizational grants in the field of literature awarded in 2019, only 24 are magazines, and only a handful of those are what might be called "little" magazines. Compared to CCLM's yearly re-grants to magazines in its heyday, the sponsorship of 24 magazines by the NEA in 2019 is, at best, laughable. 

Because the board and advisory councils of CCLM included magazine editors and writers associated with small press (Anne Waldman, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed were among them in the '70s), their knowledge of the field made it more likely that "low-end" (to use Charles Bernstein's term) magazines were funded as much as the larger, more traditional quarterlies, and that the money reached all corners of the US, geographically and demographically. It was just one year after its founding that CCLM established an Ad Hoc Committee on Black Literary Projects to oversee funding for African-American magazines and writers, chaired by A.B. Spellman, David Henderson (editor of Umbra), and Michael Thelwell. Despite the Nixon presidency, CCLM funded many magazines that were politically left and related to "minority" interests such as the feminist journal Aphra, the LGBT-themed Gay Sunshine, and magazines like Nkombo related to the Black Arts and Black Power movements.

Overall, between 1967 and 1984, CCLM awarded about $3.5 million to more than 1500 different magazines. By 1980, CCLM would receive a half a million dollars a year to dole out. At the same time, the NEA was also giving grants to other service-oriented organizations, like Small Press Distribution (seeded by a federal grant in 1976), and, one must imagine, to many literary presenters and literacy programs. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get more precise figures for those time periods, as the NEA's searchable online grant records only go back to 1990, and, as of 2002, according to Pauline Uchmanowicz, "CLMP staff has whittled the archive containing its organizational history down to half a filing cabinet drawer, letting the trail run cold at 1990."

However, the wide and democratic funding of small press was dealt an irreparable blow in the 1980s, when, under Reagan's new order, the NEA "block funding" of CCLM was pulled out. One member recalls that in 1983 "NEA funding went from $490,000 to virtually nothing with the NEA funding literary publishers directly instead of going through CCLM." The organization began to step back from its original mission—in 1986 only 18 magazines were directly supported to the tune of $150,000 (about $350,000 in today's money); assuming equal distribution, that would mean more than $8,000 per recipient, an immense sum at the time. Were that amount split between its 200 or so member organizations, each would have had roughly $750 in their pockets—with little-to-no bureaucratic strings attached—and for many of these magazines, that might have meant the printing of an issue, if not two. With less impressive coffers, the CCLM moved toward the consolidation of resources to fewer and, one must imagine, larger magazines.

In 1990, after changing its name and mission to include small presses, CLMP announced its "five part overall plan of providing technical assistance, awards, service, research & development, and advocacy" with a "new emphasis on working with booksellers," creating opportunities for "co-op advertising [and] small press writers tours," according to CCLM/CLMP member and editor of Laughing Bear Tom Person's report. The organization's re-orientation toward funding from "philanthropic corporations" would create "a virtual necessity [for small presses] to have 501c3 (nonprofit) status to get a piece of the pie. For smaller small presses, that's a process that's usually more trouble than it's worth." Ron Sukenick (a founding member of Fiction Collective, and then editor of American Book Review),

expressed concern that if grants go to more business-minded presses publishing less controversial work, there would be a loss of outlets for alternative writing. Sitter [CLMP's new director] suggested addressing this through nonprofit status and a professional attitude toward fundraising, if the press wants to make it.

Person summarized his feelings about the briefing as follows: "I had a hard time seeing the advantage of CCLM membership to a small, small press. I'm not sure things will be too much different with CLMP."

I cite these programmatic changes in the history of CCLM/CLMP to emphasize how the burden of professionalization (e.g. the attainment of nonprofit status by member publishers) was shifting to the shoulders of the small presses and literary magazines it was designed to support. When, in 1995, the Clinton administration cut the NEA budget in half—to less than half of the Defense Department's allocation for military bands—the nature of CLMP and its membership had to change further in this direction. Andy Horwitz makes the case in The Atlantic that the Clinton cuts

disproportionately affect[ed] minority and disadvantaged communities that couldn’t turn to individual mega-donors or corporate foundations to fill the gap. As a result, arts funding became more dependent on private dollars than ever before. ... It should come as no surprise that people in minority, disenfranchised, and rural communities don’t usually have access to millionaires and billionaires who they can cultivate as donors. Nor should it shock that these organizations will suffer if the public-funding system that was helping them build capacity, gain cultural legitimacy, and become sustainable is decimated.

As Person intuited, when government funding dwindled CLMP felt pressure to show quantifiable marketplace results and rallied its membership to professionalize. Cloaked in boot-strap rhetoric, the new strategy would shift the burden of quantifiable success to small presses whose cultural capital was previously tied to its adamant stance of marginality and close relationship with small communities of the like-minded. The result would be a consolidation of wealth among proven or "successful" organizations, a documented trend in government funding as well as corporate and individual giving to the arts.

Today, 396 presses and magazines are members of CLMP, incidentally close to the number of publishers carried by SPD, with quite a bit of overlap. (If we take the findings of Dustbook's International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses, which compiled information on 3,800 such publishers in 2018, CLMP's membership amounts to about 10% of the field.) A few years ago, it changed the first part of its name from Council to Community. It is still a "service to the field" organization, whose membership includes nonprofits and for-profits, small presses, micro-presses, tiny magazines, and reputable independents, as long as their primary mission, self-defined as it might be, is literary publishing. CLMP's literary publisher membership varies widely, ranging from Alaska Women Speak to Zyzzyva, and is split about even between book and magazine publishers; 17 members identify as chapbook or zine publishers. More than one quarter is based in New York State; more than half (213) are tax-exempt nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status from the IRS; more than two-thirds of its members (316) have annual operating budgets of less than $50,000; 18 have budgets of $350,000 or greater.

Ugly Duckling Presse joined CLMP almost 20 years ago. Since then, CLMP's membership has grown by about 100 presses. In 2001, the count was 283 organizations and more than two thirds were magazines. Approximately one sixth of them were based in the state of New York; 208 members (more than two thirds) had 501(c)(3) status. Just as today, more than two-thirds of its members (220) had budgets below $50,000 (worth about $72,500 today), and almost half of the members had annual budgets of under $10,000; only 18 members had budgets over $200,000, 12 of them over $350,000.

In those days, in addition to community-based support networks for their members (primarily through listservs) and a memorable "LitMag" fair, CLMP began to organize workshops led by representatives from the literary imprints of "bigger houses" who could teach the smaller publishers publicity tactics, strategies for promotion, methods of mobilizing their authors' "platforms" (asking member-publishers to push their authors to build personal website), connections in the media, and so forth. They also created mentorship opportunities, pairing smaller publishers with leaders in the industry (agents, editors, publicists) or specialists in particular fields (nonprofit arts development, for example). The primary goal of CLMP was to offer tools for smaller publishers to become more professional, and thereby, it was hoped, more successful by industry standards.

Of course, many of the resources available to the mentors (marketing teams, underlings, corporate structures, or wealthy boards and patrons, not to mention full-time salaries for themselves in their positions) were not available—nor, in some cases, desirable—for the representatives of smaller literary publishing who were to receive and implement their knowledge and advice. For publishers with budgets of under $50,000 a year (an overwhelming majority of CLMP members) there could be little question of a paid staff to do the work implied by the instructors. It would be frivolous to give further examples of the strategic suggestions given at these workshops; anyone reading this can probably imagine the difference between the marketing office at a Random House imprint and the desk or closet space carved out for the home-office of a small press publisher (which usually doubles as the writing desk), not to mention the discrepancy of available time. Even the originator of many of these programs, the now-former director of CLMP, Jeffrey Lependorf, told Publishers Weekly that "those working at many small presses in the U.S. essentially 'donate their labor' and hope to cover costs 'without dipping too far into their own finances.'"

In the early 2000s, CLMP began a partnership with Associated Writing Programs (AWP)—the largest national professional organization for the growing number of Creative Writing programs—to host mini-conferences for their members at the annual AWP conventions. Ostensibly this would allow CLMP member organizations outside of New York City access to some of the programming CLMP hosts in their NYC office—provided, of course, that they attended the costly convention. This partnership also served to bring the marginal publishers closer to the limelight of a professionalized world of MFA programs and the celebrated writers and successful publishers attending AWP. These mini-conferences consisted of panels with professionals giving advice to the younger, newer, or simply smaller publishers and literary magazines. The goal, whether or not it was spoken, was to professionalize the smaller publishers, to get them thinking like the bigger for-profit houses, or more successful independents and nonprofits (Graywolf, Coffee House, Copper Canyon, etc.) with more widely appealing catalogs and the resources to offer advances to more visible—and profitable—authors.

After meeting with Lependorf in July 2002 for her Massachusetts Review article on the history of CLMM/CLMP, Pauline Uchmanowicz characterized "the organization's current mission" as "delivering literature to mass audiences." "Our goal is to get writing to readers," Lependorf told her. From their conversation, Uchmanowicz understood CLMP's program to be changing in relation to what she knew of its past:

The indie-publishing world, historically viewed as "alternative" when compared to negative-connoting "commercials," should now work in partnership with the economies of conventional publishing to engage new, worldwide audiences. "We now see this as an eco-system between large publishing and small," the executive director [Lependorf] said. "It makes sense to go back and forth between the worlds. We're trying to broker more relationships, making this mutually beneficial. Some people are 'farmed out' to the big presses from the indie-media. It makes sense for people to have more books to read."

To achieve the goals he had set for the organization and to make it more appealing to crucial arts funders, Lependorf envisioned an alignment between the big guys and the "littles." This cooperative model would be very different from the kind imagined by independent publishing activists of the 1970s, such as Bill Henderson (founder of the Pushcart Book Press) who, in 1975, hypothesized the economic good sense for the larger commercial houses to "back a principal source of their wealth: the talent nurtured and the books produced in the small presses." Henderson mused:

On a cold cash basis alone, tax deductible funding of literary publications makes sense. As an initial step toward the formation of a true literary community and as an indication that commercial houses care about more than just making money—most editors say they care, even if their accountants do not—contributions to CCLM or a similar independent body, either by individual houses or through AAP [Association of American Publishers], would be helpful.

In 1979, Dick Higgins, publisher of the legendary Something Else Press, came to a similar conclusion, suggesting—in a history of his publishing project for New Lazarus Review—that small presses should be supported by the trade publishers to do "research and development" for the industry. "We," Higgins wrote, "can provide them with paradigms and models to imitate."

Lependorf's outline of CLMP's mission reflects a still prevalent equation of successful publishing with broad reach. It's not hard to see a relation of this progressive optimism about reaching readers and diversifying the market with "more books to read"—an agenda CLMP uncomfortably shared with businessmen poets like Barr—to that which is frequently rolled out by opponents of government arts funding, especially in regard to publishing, when they suggest that the market will determine whether a work is necessary or valid. The comments section of online articles and social media posts expressing distress at the Trump administration's announcement of likely cuts to the NEA and NEH are regularly trolled by "regular" citizens enraged by the idea of tax-payer support for art that doesn't sell and books that "nobody reads."

In short, market rhetoric in the arts had consolidated power by the early 2000s, affecting both service organizations and grant-makers. Alongside it arose the phantom of a desire among small presses and little magazines to master emerging technologies and marketing strategies by learning from commercial publishers, instead of the other way around, as Higgins and other small publishers might have hoped. The common wisdom of the day suggested the necessity for small presses to "compete" for readership with the "Big Ten" (the conglomerates now consolidated to the "Big Five").

This projection might be the result of a confluence of larger cultural factors and new norms emerging in and from the late-1990s: the monetezation of DIY cultures (the often-mentioned "success" of independent record labels, etc.), the effects of gentrification, the rise of the bubble-prone tech start-up, the false-idol of the internet and its supposed evening out of the "playing field" (i.e. the market), a new-age recasting of individualism as altruism, an omnipresent finance-capitalism philosophy of growth, etc. In the context of this cultural background it made sense for small press support organizations to imagine their constituency's desire for broader readership, organizational growth, and institutionalization. Projected from above, these notions had real consequences for small press culture, which had previously been content with—and even adamant about—its marginality and underground status. With this new ideology in place, it is not surprising that little of CLMP's programming in these times recognized—much less encouraged—the desire of the small press to stay small.

By the early 2000s, under the directorship of Lependorf, though some small re-granting programs continued, like the administration of certain New York State Technical Assistance Programs, this financial support no longer had national reach, and the focus of the organization shifted further toward providing technical assistance with the appropriate new motivation of "delivering literature to mass audiences," or simply getting "writing to readers."

In all of its well-meaning activity on behalf of its members, CLMP has consistently assumed the needs of their members to be growth, expansion, popular reach, and other quantifiable, professional standards of improvement.  These assumptions are shared widely by CLMP's funders (increasingly obsessed with quantifiable data), as well as its partners and the magnanimous professionals who volunteer their expertise. Since the early 2000s, the culture has been calling for the small press and little magazines to "grow up" without considering what might be lost in those growing pains.

The rise of reader-oriented rhetorics like Lependorf's and Barr's can easily jive, in Gioia's hands for instance, with anti-academic (or flatly anti-intellectual) sentiments. The fact that both rise to prominence during Republican and Liberal administrations with deregulatory politics seems no accident, nor is their persistence in the current political atmosphere. Market-oriented programing in service-to-the-field organizations, the consolidation of higher individual giving, corporate investment, and government grants to nonprofit publishers with the largest audiences and promise of financial growth, and the importance given by arts-grantors to quantifiable data pertaining to public services, are part and parcel of the same political moment.

In this context, it is hard to see any alternative to a professionalize-or-perish culture. CLMP has, unwittingly or not, portrayed mainstream publishing, marketing, and distribution practices as the only path for small presses and magazines toward making literary history. Did CLMP's membership desire to abandon its anti-institutional beginnings and enter the market to compete on the terms laid out by institutions, or was this the only "alternative" offered? Could CLMP have done anything differently from 2000 to now? Could it have advocated against the imposition of market values on behalf of its constituency, made up predominantly of organizations with less than $50,000 budgets?

Ultimately, CLMP's future, its relevance, and its impact, will depend on the guidance of a new director hired in late 2019, and the demands of its membership. Considering the fact that despite the growth of CLMP over the last 20 years, its membership has not significantly professionalized—the
number of 501(c)(3) presses is nearly the same as in 2001, and the majority has not seen significant increase in their annual budgets—CLMP may start looking for an alternative strategy, if its hands are not tied by the system that drives and funds it.

Meanwhile, literary publishing has seen increased disparity of wealth through the unequal distribution of sparse resources. After 17 years and more than 300 titles since its date of official incorporation, UDP could be numbered among the resource-guzzlers, even if at their bottom tier. After all, UDP is one of the few editor-run presses that regularly (if intermittently) receives support from the NEA, in addition to grants from state and city arts councils. But, where an organization like UDP might receive $10,000 or $15,000 from the NEA in a given year, several nonprofit publishers that occupy a large swath of the poetry "market" will be awarded around six times as much. In 2019, for instance, Coffee House received $55,000; Graywolf and Copper Canyon received $70,000 each.

Yet, this doesn't mean that Coffee House or Graywolf publish six times more books than UDP, redistributing the resources to help a larger number of authors, but rather that they have more cash to put toward each book, thereby concentrating resources on making visible a small group of already vetted authors or new authors with realizable platforms. With this advantage, they can offer advances and royalties to lure authors that the smaller presses can't afford. They have ad budgets and publicists, and, therefore, a good chance of placing reviews, winning awards, getting radio and public engagements for their authors, guaranteeing sales that justify the initial spending. Whether or not the book "does well," at the very least it will bring prestige to the press, which translates to higher donor participation and financial stability. 

The level of resources available to the top tier of nonprofit presses, which are plausibly mission-driven and credibly literary, if at times middle-brow, make possible a kind of commercial viability that must inevitably affect their choice of publications. Though they might win awards meant for "small presses," one cannot call them "editor-run publishers" (a notion I'll address in the final post of this series), because the editors are hired professionals responsible to their boards which fuel the organization by charitable donations enhanced by well-reviewed, course-adopted, and award-winning titles.

The effect of this agglomeration of resources is not, of course, the democratization of the "small press movement," but leads exactly the opposite way, toward a gentrification of the literary city, the narrowing of literary culture to a handful of celebrity authors, and toward an ever-narrower canon-formation as much as, if not more than, the market-driven paradigm of the commercial publishing world. The result is that cultural literacy in "literature" (outside the best seller lists) revolves around a few authors which rise to the top of the small press heap alongside a given year's MacArthur recipients, National Book Award nominees, and various other prize winners (Whiting, Firecracker, Academy, Poetry Society, etc.), who may be more or less fleeting.

The majority of literary books nominated for national awards are published by the larger publishers; those same books occupy the page-space (or screen-space) allotted to literary reviewing in the most visible media; these are the same books that are financially backed with the larger part of resources doled out in public funding or the financial support available from private foundations and charitable individuals. As government bodies and private foundations increasingly require financial reporting that quantifies public engagement in tandem with a growth of sales (a subject I'll explore in more detail in next week's post), fewer publishers are eligible for support regardless of literary merit. Establishing the professionalism of the applicant trumps the cultural significance of their proposal, the urgency of their need, and the direct engagement with literature they make possible for their communities where they are valued precisely for their autonomy, their amateur spirit, and their refusal to professionalize.

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Continue with this series for Part 1 "'Power to the people's mimeo machines!' or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics," Part 3 "The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press," and Part 4 "'Fervent and Utopian': Small Press at a Crossroads."

 

 

[Editor’s Note: The editors of Harriet endeavor to provide space for individual poets to explore and experiment with writing which informs, influences, and furthers the art of poetry and its institutions. Writing on Harriet does not go through the same fact-checking process in which our weekly articles are submitted. The views stated here do not reflect those of the Poetry Foundation but are the sole perspective of the author.]