New York Quarterly editor Raymond Hammond, in a wide-ranging interview with Anis Shivani, makes these trenchant observations:
I have come to believe that workshops are only in part responsible for the uniform, unambitious, minor products of poetry that we see over and over again.
There are other elements, an entire paradigm that includes workshops, MFA programs, and contests that contribute to this. And the key in your question is the word minor. Although these works are uniform, unambitious and would be minor, it is the paradigm that is elevating these drab works of banality to a level of major–and this, the entire paradigm, is the problem.
The problem with the current paradigm is that it is simply based on credentials and apparently has little or nothing to do with quality of product whatsoever. When a very good, mature poet cannot get a job teaching other poets simply because they don’t possess the “club card” of an MFA degree, but a twenty-something with little or no experience is able to get that same job because they do possess an MFA, then there cannot help but be a deterioration in the quality of the writing.
Another major aspect of this contemporary paradigm is the acceptance of contests as being the only possible means by which to publish a book.
I know people who have recently been in classes in MFA programs whose teachers stated very bluntly, “you must enter contests in order to publish.” This is unacceptable and writers as a whole should not accept this as fact. If the writers did not affirm contests by entering them, then the whole problem would go away on its own accord.
Contests do nothing but two things. First, they impose a fee where there never used to be a fee, and second they force the publisher to publish a book no matter how bad it is as long as it is better than the others in the contest. No one wins in the contest model.
All of these fees, contest fees, reading fees, MFA fees, and the acceptance of these as the only paradigm in which writers may be assessed put money at the heart of the art. By putting money at the heart of the art we as a society have completely given the art over to capitalism and greed and ladder-climbing and survival of the fittest, not survival of the art.
The current paradigm is allowing money to become the arbiter of taste; those with the money to obtain the MFA and pay to submit both to magazines and to book contests will be deemed poets. Those without these means will be left behind in the dust even though much of their work is equally as good if not better.
The whole paradigm is setting itself up to discriminate along socio-economic lines, and this is something that everyone should be working against in this day and time.
Read the full interview here.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
It's always puzzled me that self-publication is such anathema in American culture. Musicians regularly produce their own albums; visual artists show their works in their own studio/galleries. The aim, of course, is to transition at some point to established record labels and galleries. But nobody <i>looks down</i> on musicians or visual artists when they are in that initial phase. Literature?
Lyle;<br /><br />just put your book into a pdf<br />put the pdf on your blog<br /><br />or<br />have one of those 2.3 MILLION ON-LINE MAGAZINES PUT YOUR PDF/BOOK in their net issue… what are they called? Zines<br /><br /><br />&<br /><br />V W A LL AH ! your published! Then Google will OOgle your pdf<br />& 4.3 more million people will read it &<br />you will have saved not
Not sure offhand how much it might cost these days, using current typesetting and printing technology etc., to self-publish a small book of poems (say, 36 pages plus cover). Talking here about actual self-publishing, not print-on-demand. Though playing with arithmetic a little –<br /><br />If I were to submit the manuscript to, say, six contexts a year, at an average contest fee of $20.00 each;
well<br /><br />I found this:<br /><br />http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/POETRY/html/pictures/001.html<br /><br />don't intend to peruse things re: BM any further ….<br /><br />I have my own dreck to deal with !
BM (no pun intended) is a second generation New York Schooler—my take only. See http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/748
who is Bernadette Mayer ? and<br />should I care enough to Google her or<br />conjugate French verbs …. plue-perfectly? <br /><br />heck<br />I stay away from reading blog-posts for week<br />&<br />I'm <br /><br />rendered
That's what I get for dredging up high school French! I meant "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."
Yikes! According to Paul Hoover's memoir of Paul Carroll (<a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/60th/pdfs/68hoover.pdf" rel="nofollow">here</a>), when Carroll rejected Bernadette Mayer for his anthology <i>The Young American Poets</i>, she "used [the rejection page] as toilet paper and returned it to him." Comme ci, comme ça….
How much do I get when I win one of these contests?<br /><br />I sent in a piece to a contest once It was in 1967.<br /><br />And, low-and-be:hold I WON! Honorable Mention<br /><br />to see my work in the anthology I had to buy a copy<br />&<br />for every 5 copies that I sold<br />I got a copy at 1/2 price!<br /><br />once I sent a poem off and they not only accepted it<br />but paid me