Reason for the Delay

Sorry for the delay in getting the End of Winter 2009 issue out the door and posted online. At the last minute, I discovered that two of the poems I had accepted had been previously published online elsewhere. This is a violation of the permissions release that I have all contributors agree to before publishing an issue.

Needless to say, out of respect to the writers and other journals, I'm not going to name names. However, this discovery necessitated a flurry of polite emails between me and the two poets involved, and resulted in the removal of the poems in question from the issue under production. Thus, I had to rethink the ebb and flow of the order of works, and ended up rearranging a significant portion of the journal.

I'll be doing a last proofreading of the issue over the weekend, and hope to have it online before the end of next week.

That said, I want to explain why I took this course of action, rather than just go ahead with posting the issue.

The only way to establish the rights of both the author and publisher is to state what the publisher gets and what the author gets out of the publishing relationship. The permissions release I use specifically grants Poetry Midwest first North American Serial Rights and First Electronic Rights, along with Archival Rights to keep the issues online in perpetuity. This essentially means I ask that the work appear in a finalized published format for the first time in print or online within the pages of the journal. The other rights I request are the right to keep the journal archived online for future access, and the right to reprint the work in a future print version of the original issue or in an anthology of work from the journal. Asking for these reprint rights at the outset saves me the headache of trying to track down someone who has moved or switched email addresses, and also makes it easier for me to reproduce issues of the journal in a new format--for example, one day turning the PDF issue into a Flash formatted presentation on issuu.com.

Asking for these rights in exchange for publication is common practice for online journals, and yes, it is asking a lot for no financial remuneration. So, what does the author gain from relinquishing these rights? A publisher who gives a damn about protecting the integrity of the journal and wants to protect the author's trust in the journal as a reputable publication that takes its mission seriously. Thus my vigilance regarding what appears in the journal, how the journal is internally organized, and the entire "literary experience" of reading the journal. Yes, that is not much. But all I can offer is a symbiotic relationship wherein the author enhances Poetry Midwest's reputation, and Poetry Midwest enhance the author's reputation. It's a relationship that thus far has worked, as various poems which originally appeared in the journal have later appeared in books and have been selected to teach in university and college courses.

Given all this, I feel that I have to maintain a high level of professional standards to protect the reputation of the journal. The reason I prefer to publish new work is because it is highly difficult to arrange for and clear republishing rights unless I can be certain that the author has control of these rights--and all I can do in most of those cases is trust writers who say they own those rights. So, to skirt this issue in its entirety, I only look for exciting and engaging new work.

I have been burnt twice before--in the first year of the journal I published two poems by an author that I later found out had been published elsewhere online months before. After that discovery, I made an internal decision to never accept work from that writer again, as he presented himself as untrustworthy by agreeing to publication when the rights I was asking for were not his to grant, seeing as how the work was being republished in Poetry Midwest without my knowledge of previous publication.

Since that early editorial misstep, I attempt to thoroughly vet material before acceptance. In the early days of the journal, I mailed out permission letters via snail mail, and required a signature on a permissions agreement before publishing, which meant I had to plan out issues far in advance and account for the turnaround time for permissions to be returned. In the years since the DMCA, and owing to increased mailing costs, I've moved to using emailed permissions to serve as digital signatures, which has significantly sped up my production process, as I can accept a poem at the last minute and get permissions taken care of in less than two or three hours. Of course, this instantaneous decision making can lead to me getting a bet lazy in getting issues completed on schedule (ahem).

And so now thanks to these two writers, I am wondering if I need to revert to the slower and pricey snail mail process so that shit like this latest delay no longer occurs. And that pisses me off, because it makes the entire publisher/author relationship a bit more dysfunctional than it already is.