Borges once remarked that normal people want to be praised for what they’ve accomplished; writers want to be praised for what they will accomplish. Touché.
And yet … what is deemed « accomplished » in 21st literary production tends to measured by skewed metrics. I have several mss I keep dutifully shopping ard; gatekeeping has bec dysfunctional — the influential agents and acq editors know it, and obv writers do too.
Gatekeeping — what I term Selector Class Systems (and extend to prestigious MFA programs, prize jury selection, etc) — needs public critique. Yet this rarely happens; it’s a career risk after all. In the meantime, speaking personally, the work I do have out there (including an online chapbook of poems/authorial moviepoems (something that hasn’t been done before: formerpeople.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/baram-… ) and a historical novel abt an attempted fascist coup in the US: eclectica.org/v23n2/harvor.h…— receive no critical attention. The excuse given is they lack an ISBN.
The presupposition is that online work is somehow less worthy; somehow akin to self published work. But both these works are curated, and what’s especially galling is work that IS self published but can camouflage itself as not receives reviews and shortlisting for prizes. The issue here isn’t one of the occasionally delusional self regard of writers or the rocky process of contemporary canon formation. Instead, it’s an issue of fundamental fairness. If work is out there, shouldn’t it be judged by objective standards?
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