Jeffrey Levine, Editor of Tupelo Press
Jendi Reiter conducted this exclusive email interview with Jeffrey Levine, founder and editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press in Dorset, Vermont. The press offers three poetry manuscript prizes: the Snowbound Series Poetry Chapbook Competition, the Tupelo Press Poetry Contest for a first full-length book, and the Dorset Prize, a full-length book contest open to all poets regardless of publication history. Mr. Levine won the 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press for his book Mortal, Everlasting. Other prestigious awards on his resume include the Larry Levis Poetry Prize from the Missouri Review and the Mississippi Review Prize.
Q: Tell me the story of Tupelo Press in a nutshell. Why was it founded?
A: Thanksgiving 1999, the ink was still wet on my MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and I had this idea that with the right people and the right approach, a new literary press could reshape American letters, take it in a direction that was bolder, edgier, more fully contemporary, while paying a devotional sort of respect to what the press put out into the world with an utterly beautiful presentation—exceptional design ideas and the highest production values.
We started in a little room above the post office in Walpole, New Hampshire, but very quickly (and luckily) I teamed up with an outfit called Manchester Advertising in Dorset, Vermont. In that one place (another small space) I found an astonishing pool of talent, including Bill Kuch, the best book designer in the land, and Margaret Donovan (who quickly became my Managing Editor), a woman who knows production, publicity, advertising, and Classical Greek.
That move was crucial, especially the classics part, because the gods smiled on our first list, giving us five extraordinary books of poetry. This initial group won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, the ForeWord Magazine best poetry book of the year award (and two runners-up), the Peace Corps Writers Prize for the best poetry book of the year, and a total of five Pushcart nominations. With those awards came a lot of attention, and with the attention came Consortium, the preeminent distributor for independent presses. With Consortium's vote of confidence in us, some terrific and dedicated board members began to appear out of nowhere.
Q: What is your editorial mission?
A: Here's what all of our literature says: The mission of Tupelo Press is to publish thrilling, visually and emotionally stimulating books of the highest quality inside and out. We want to bring to life poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction written by the most exciting emerging and established poets in the English-speaking world, while branding the extraordinary look and feel of our books.
Q: How does your previous career as a lawyer affect your own poetic language or subject matter?
A: Oh, I'm not really sure that any of those years spent lawyering has much to do with my subject matter, and except for the street sounds I picked up in the early years as a criminal defense lawyer, not much to do with my poetic language, either. Before, during, and after practicing law I played clarinet in opera and symphony orchestras and jazz guitar with friends and in clubs, I worked with modern dance companies and composed music for dance and theater. I even learned to play the tabla a little, those drums that figure so importantly in the classical music and dance of India. Now those experiences do inform my poetic language and subject matter, as does having lived and traveled in exotic parts of the world: Greece, Israel, West Africa and inner Brooklyn.
Q: Tupelo Press has established its reputation in the poetry world within a relatively short time (founded in 1999). What were the most important things you did to make a name for your authors and your press?
A: We found some exceptional authors, people who write like nobody else: Jennifer Michael Hecht, Anna Rabinowitz, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Natasha Sajé, Ilya Kaminsky—but really, all of our authors.
The first thing a good distributor wants to tell its sales reps is who else your authors will remind buyers of. I drive them crazy. Who else sounds like Mary Koncel or Amy England or David Hernandez? I couldn't begin to guess.
What we did was to put these books into radiant packages, rich, sybaritic paper, evocative covers. We used a fine printer. In publishing, you get what you pay for. It costs us two to three times more than even some of the finest publishers in the land to make a book. We think it's worth it, as do our readers. Nobody out there—not Knopf, not Farrar, Straus & Giroux—nobody is crazy enough to match our production standards. So, we take these wonderful writers and their beautiful books, and we book a lot of readings and we buy a lot of advertising space in places like New York Review of Books and APR.
Q: What is it about a poetry manuscript that ignites your sense of mission, your feeling that you need to share this book with the world?
A: We're in abstract terrain here. What I look for is a blend of urgency of language, imagination, distinctiveness, and craft. But those are more the idea of the thing than the thing itself. When I find a book I cannot put down, one that makes me shudder with revelation and expectation, one that must be published, then my sense of mission lights up. The skies are all aurora borealis, and you want everybody to share in the astonishment of this discovery.
Q: What guiding principles would you suggest for a poet who's trying to assemble some of her best work into a manuscript?
A: First of all, make sure the work is ready. Even previously published poems must be thought about, read and reread, sometimes revised. Next, make sure that that work in the manuscript is, in fact, her very best work. She must trust herself, though. Not the editors of this or that national magazine or journal who have kissed a poem, but the poet must be satisfied that the poem deserves to enter her book on her terms. So many poets are in love with the acknowledgments page. I suggest that she find the poems that work, and work together. I suggest that she not substitute some editor's aesthetics for her own. Finally, she must see to it that the poems talk to each other, that they form a book. There's a lot of communing with the unconscious there, but it's not all voodoo. Listen to the poems. They'll tell you what.
Q: Who initially screens your contest entries? What editorial guidelines do you give them?
A: We use only established, award-winning poets to screen contest entries—poets whose aesthetic I trust and whose appetite is large enough to accommodate a wide variety of styles and approaches. We never, ever use interns or students to screen contest entries. Never. As for editorial guidelines, I ask readers to go slowly, to speak a few poems out loud, to read the rest, to make notations, and to let me know when they have something that moves them. Readers and judges alike are instructed to flag any work that shouldn't be in their hands: work of friends, current or former students, sons and daughters. We have invested tremendously and, I believe, wisely in our good name, and we will not compromise our ethics for any reason or any person. Everything is read anonymously. Even the acknowledgments page is detached before the manuscript is read.
Q: When you've narrowed the entrants down to a short-list, what factors do you weight most heavily? E.g. stylistic innovation, beautiful images, pleasing cadence, meaningful subject matter, thematic wholeness of the manuscript. I know that all these factors are important, but sometimes, as a contest judge faced with entries that are all strong and weak in different areas, I have to decide which factor is most important.
A: If you look at—or better, read—the books in our catalogue, you'll see that we publish a lavishly wide spectrum of poetry books. The approaches run the gamut from formal to experimental. Beyond freshness, urgency, and un-put-downability, I want poems that get inside of me and stay there. If there are weaknesses, then the book's strengths must subdue them. That said, I tend to like poems that look outward while admitting the world, that are personal but not private. Also, I favor poets who let the language do the work of language, who get out of their own way and do not push beauty for beauty's sake, but are yet in some manner restless—even the quiet ones.
Q: What are some mistakes that poets make when choosing a publisher? What background information would be most useful in deciding whether to send one's manuscript to a particular contest or press? (E.g. marketing effort, design, previous authors' sales?)
A: To be fair, nobody (or very, very few), ever get to choose a publisher. Especially in the realm of first or second books, publishers choose poets, and my advice to most if not all poets is very simple: if a publisher is willing to send your book out into the world, rejoice. Thousands upon thousands of books (you know this) will never be published. That said, some publishers will do better marketing, some better design, some will be kinder, some more remote. All things equal, if you do have the luxury of choice, choose a publisher with a distributor, or one that is relentless at self-distribution (there are several).
Contests? In truth, this is the door that opens, and about the only one. It's easy to say one's work might be better suited to this or that judge, but you simply don't know what a judge will do. Judges amaze me. As for sales, no matter how well distributed a particular book of poetry, most sales come as a result of readings. So really, the biggest mistake poets make when it comes to publishing their books is to assume that publishers can overcome a poet who has trouble getting out there. Work with your publisher. Emblazon that on everything you own.
Q: Why is poetry publishing so unprofitable despite great popular interest in poetry (judging from the volume of contest entries and the thousands of poetry sites on the Web)?
A: Well, this is pretty easy. It's a numbers thing. Several thousand books of poetry are published each year. How many books can each of us buy? Fact is, a book of poetry does exceptionally well to sell 1,000 copies. Think about it. Break-even (the amount of books a publisher needs to sell in order to recoup its publishing costs) for most publishers number somewhere in the low thousands of copies. Distributors take a large chunk of the net sales, books are deeply discounted to bookstores, and here's the real kicker: bookstores can and will return books at any time, in any condition. Meanwhile, for most independent publishers (like Tupelo Press), editors make little or nothing. It's not really a viable business unless you produce—and sell—fifty to a hundred thousand volumes of something. Despite the groundswell of interest in poetry, those fifty to a hundred thousand buyers are buying something else. Cookbooks and diet books, mainly. Stephen King's laundry list.
Q: Why do so many people want to be poets?
A: I believe that so many people want to be poets because the artist's need sleeps—sometimes wakes—in all of us. We want to express ourselves—our loves, our losses—it's a need as basic as any other. We are normally pretty good at knowing whether or not we can paint or draw or dance or sing or play the cello. Mostly we can't. But writing? Hell, we've been doing that forever, haven't we? The rudiments are accessible, and it feels good to express.
Q: Where do they get their idea of what poetry is?
A: Don't get me started. Well, except to say that if you're not reading widely, if you're not going to readings, if you're not testing what's inside you against what you read and hear, then really, what else is there?
Q: Many people who write poetry, even if they've been writing for years, seem unaware of the vast gap between their own work and the quality of work that gets published in respected journals. Telling them to read more poetry is only the beginning, if they don't know what indicia of quality to look for. How can poets develop a better understanding of their own level of craftsmanship, assuming they can't go back to school for formal training?
A: Then create the formal training in an informal atmosphere. Mentors. Workshops with good teachers. Peer group feedback. Find a good reader. Read books on poetics and learn the vocabulary and theory of craft. Learn to read poems for the way craft is used, and for the way craft makes meaning. Read a poem with one element of craft in mind (voice, line breaks, meter, image, whatever) and read only for that one element. Watch carefully how it works. Write about it (that's called an annotation). Write a few annotations every week. Show THEM to your mentor. Enroll in a low residency MFA program. I mean, do people ask, "How can I get to become a concert violinist without formal training?" Often in our dreams we miraculously find ourselves able to do the amazing: restring a harp, solve Fermat's Theorem, make the VCR clock stop blinking 12 12 12 12. Then we wake up and, to borrow the words of poet Thomas Lux, we go to work.
Q: Though melodramatic rhyming poets like Longfellow and Edwin Arlington Robinson are venerated as classics and taught in schools, their work would probably never get published in today's major journals or win prestigious prizes. In your view, are these shifts in taste subjective and reversible, or do you believe that poetry is more unidirectional, like science—there's no going back to old styles that have been "superseded"?
A: Hard to say where poetry is going, except that it's not, has never been, unidirectional. New formalists and experimental poets abound. People are writing sonnets and sestinas, people are fragmenting and fracturing the language and others are writing free verse lyrics about the snow and narratives about their bad blind dates. Meanwhile, neither Longfellow nor E. A. Robinson are going out of print any time soon. I love that about poetry.
Winter 2003-2004
