Very Like a Whale has been sorting out all sides of the “previously published” debate for a week or two. When I stumbled across these threads this morning, I immediately blurted out my response… which, as it turns out, will probably end up on the Inch website sooner or later. Y’know, when I actually edit it.

Here’s what I said:

As an editor, I can see both sides of this, so Inch’s policy falls somewhere in the middle of the two extremes that I’ve seen show up here.

For the purposes of our print publication, we do not consider work that’s appeared in an online workshop, on a newsgroup, or on a personal blog to be previously published. We wouldn’t consider work that had been given in print form to your workshop group to be previously published, and if you left your diary lying around for your younger brother to read, we wouldn’t hold that against you.

The Internet is letting us do things today that we couldn’t do before, and there’s going to be a tense period while we re-configure our notions of public life and private life. But as long as people continue to post to their blogs with the attitude that it’s a personal space and the public just happens to be able to look in, poems there will remain akin to the poems in a print diary, at least as far as Inch is concerned.

However, if you send us work from a personal website or Internet workshop, we’ll politely ask (without requiring) that you take it down when the issue is published, and replace it with a link to our site. I think most editors do pride themselves on having the good sense to select the boldest and best new work, and we’d like to believe that we “discovered” your poem or story, y’know, for 45 minutes or so after the issue hits the stands. Let us maintain that illusion by sending your readers to our site, where we can claim to have “discovered” you and they can chuckle about how they knew you when. Hopefully, they’ll buy an issue to support you, and find something they love by someone they’ve never heard of.

And hey, we return the rights to your work, so if you put it back online, that’s cool. We thought it was good enough that we wanted people to see it when we printed our issue, and that hasn’t changed because we have a newer issue. We hope you’ll tell people how smart we were to have discovered your work before anyone else, even though all parties know that’s not entirely true.

By this logic, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to disallow previously published work from books, journals and websites that function as professional or semi-professional “publications.” Reb Livingston of No Tell Motel uses an editorial process to make this distinction, and this seems reasonable to me– they “discovered” your work before we did. However, if your work is available for sale in any arena (editor or no), that also counts as previous publication, and you probably feel the same way we do about it because you’ve put a lot of energy into convincing people your book is worth buying from that POD.

I have no illusions about how small the literary community really is, and no illusions about how much smaller Inch’s readership is. I would love to see both grow, but if I have to choose just one, I choose the former. Treating personal blogs as personal seems to allow for this growth more comfortably than the alternative. Poetry is going to end up in blogs, period; I feel little incentive to require that only the bad stuff be posted.