October 27, 2000

Editor
Poets & Writers Magazine
72 Spring St.
New York, NY 10012

To the Editor:

In her essay "Warning, Witness, Presence" (P&W, Nov./Dec. 2000, pp. 54-55), Eavan Boland laments what she calls "the Disappearance of the First Book," which she describes as "an ominous change" that she claims to have observed "in the space of the last 10 to 15 years."

"It works like this," she explains: "Young poets now hardly ever have the opportunity they need to publish their first book when they finish that book. Instead, they must begin an arduous process of submission to publishers and entries to competitions," with the resulting delays allowing time for revision of the original contents -- changes in the poems, even replacement of some of them by newer work -- so that, if and when that typescript does find published form, it "is not truly a first book at all."

Boland asserts further that "The consequences of this widespread practice -- forced on gifted young poets by intolerable circumstances that have been freely tolerated -- is that one of the most precious registers of a poetic era is being overwritten: The first book . . . is dying like some beautiful, overlooked creature whose habitat has been thoughtlessly destroyed."

Call her Camille -- and spare me the histrionics. Boland's hyperbolic "Disappearance" and "now" imply a heyday in some presumed idyllic "then." I haven't kept up with the research in the field since I completed my graduate studies in English literature and creative writing in the mid-'60s, but at that time we'd unearthed no record of a Golden Age anywhere in which "gifted young poets" automatically got their first books published as soon as they were finished and exactly as written. There may not have been as many contests around a half-century or a century ago, but getting books of poetry published, especially first books, has never come easily. The tales of major works that had made the rounds of dozens of publishing houses before finally finding an outlet, or that their authors had self-published as a final recourse, already abounded, starting with Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Moreover -- and here I've neither done the research myself nor examined the literature in this regard -- I'm willing to wager that many of the books that we (including Boland) think of as the "first books" of noted poets in fact went through exactly that process of prolonged revision Boland laments, and instead fit her definition of the "ominous" result: "a second book [that] may even have elements of a third in it." Think Whitman again.

Here's a fact: Today we have many more publishers of poetry books than ever before, including small alternative presses. Only a small percentage of these require entering your work into contests -- and, from my standpoint, anyone who pays money so that his or her poetry can compete with other people's poetry deserves no sympathy for the inevitable resultant delays. We also have more options for rapid, inexpensive self-publishing than ever before -- ranging from print-on-demand systems like 1stBooks to low-cost chapbook printers to CD-ROM, floppy diskette, and World Wide Web options. These enable anyone who wants to create for the record a permanent, distributable version of an unrevised, just-written "first book" to do so affordably. "Intolerable circumstances?" Nonsense.

Undeniably, in any case, with or without contests we have more (and more diverse) books of new poetry published annually than ever before, as confirmed by all reports, including those that appear regularly in P&W. Which means that, statistically, we undoubtedly have more "first books" that meet Boland's definition than ever before. If at any time we lived in a Golden Age of first books of poetry, therefore, this is it.

I suggest that Boland find a way to put aside her Miniver Cheevy-like whining, let go of her fantasy of some better time for young poets, and get real.

Yours,
/s/A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, NY

P.S. Though quite possibly not "gifted," and by some standards not "young" (I'm turning 57), I've just published my first book of poetry and prose poetry -- spine, a collaboration with the Finnish photographer Nina Sederholm (minipress, Borgå, Finland, 2000). It has come out from a small foreign publisher, exactly as written, shortly after it was written, without ever undergoing submission to a contest. A CD-ROM version of it will appear shortly.

In slightly shortened and edited form, this letter appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, Vol. 29, no. 1 (January-February 2001), p. 7. © Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.)