AWP Reflection + Diatribe

I'm back! It was my first AWP and I did not leave empty-handed. I bought about 12 different books from various small presses, attended countless readings, but probably the biggest thing I've taken away from the experience is a greater awareness of The Book. I was really impressed by all the small presses I found--I'm talking about the really small ones, the ones who put out, like, a title or two per year just to do it, just to be the ones who gave the world this thing that it otherwise would not have. I could be wrong, but my sense is that their reasons for doing it don't even have that much to do with literature, so much as with the book itself. The book as event. The book as collaborative artistic effort. But most importantly, the book as subversion.

One thing I am learning--and this part is influenced both by my AWP experience, as well as my recent reading of Ronald Sukenick's "In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction"--but the literary market is NOT a bottleneck for quality. Say what you want about the free market as a general economic system, but the fact remains that, in the arts, its role is more complicated. The market does not favor the individual experience. After all, how is one to advertise to the individual? How is one to mass-produce for the individual? The one thing Capitalism and the free market cannot anticipate is the depth of individual experience, and for that reason it is its enemy. Because particularity is not in the market's interest, it seeks to destroy particularity via 'buzz'; via advertising campaigns that celebrate the collective, the 'new thing', the idea of belonging to this or to that 'class' of people who appreciate this or that 'type' of thing. Then, when someone tries to say something different, tries to create something that does not look like what we are used to, something the forces us to question what we are used to and to examine the reasons why, we dismiss it as pretentious, arrogant, or, horror of horrors, as academic.

A lot of times, I will admit, a work may be all of these things. And when it is, people are right to dismiss it. But one thing the market has conditioned us to do is dismiss anything that is strange, or that makes us feel uncomfortable, because when we are uncomfortable it means we are on the verge of change, and when we change, the market must then play catch up.

It's easy to take this kind of idea to political extremes and to start drawing up manifestos and declarations about what art should do. That's what Sukenick does. But I'm not interested in that--at least, not now. I only mention it as a way of congratulating all those small presses I ran into in Washington. Whether or not they are publishing the 'best' literature available today, they are wrenching some of that power away from the market, away from the big presses. They are providing the individual a platform from which to speak, and the public a way of accessing voices that promote more than just what is familiar, what fits into mathematical market strategies. As an artist myself, I find that hugely liberating: that there is more than just the market and the tastes of corporate executives behind what gets published. We should all find that liberating.