Unpacking Myths Around Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology and Zimbabwean Writing: Toward a Poet's Vocation.
For the past week I have been called to explain issues around Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology in several Zimbabwean writing groups, mostly on WhatsApp. I have also been contacted by individual poets asking about what they have heard or read about the anthology in the Medias. I believe a lot of poets still have a lot of misconception about the anthology and I have decided to tackle some of the issues I have heard about it, and the writing scene in Zimbabwe, and also what it means to be a poet.
After the Herald’s article of March 14, 2017, entitled Where is the “Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology” the myths were born. Because somehow the Herald made it appear as if the book disappeared completely, and they were trying to find where it was. Yet the book is available in most online book shops. One can buy both ecopies and hard copies from these sites. The article presupposes that if a book is published by a Zimbabwean author(s) it has to be found in bookshops in Zimbabwe. Without which, it has failed. The Herald didn’t waste its time in investigating why it wasn’t in the bookshops in Zimbabwe, was it viable to stock it in bookshops in Zimbabwe. Somehow. us the editors, we were to blame for its no availability in Zimbabwean bookshops. A simple check with us would have informed the Herald perspective on why it is not available in bookshops in Zimbabwe.
I have tried to have my books stocked in bookshops in Harare before. The sad fact is it is unworkable and expensive to get books into bookshops in Zimbabwe. When I visited the bookshops they felt books have to be as cheap as $10 for them to be able to sell them. The anthology costs $15 in the USA where it was published, automatically it wouldn’t make any business sense to get it to Zimbabwean bookshops. And the bookshops would tell you, the author has to make his books available in the bookshop, theirs is to just sell. For me, as the author of the book, I would have to pay $15 per copy to buy it, plus $2 per copy duty charge that the postal agency is Zimbabwe charges on packages, plus post from the United States and not to forget transfer bank charges such that it might come to about $25-30 per copy, and the bookshops in Zimbabwe would put their mark ups, it would sell for $30-35, which is too expensive. We felt it was better for those who wanted to buy copies to buy them online, at least they will cut the middleman.
So why did we publish it in the USA rather than Zimbabwe. Why are we still publishing it in foreign lands? It is very clear that publishers in Zimbabwe DON’T care about poetry anymore because if they did we would see anthologies of this type coming out regularly in the country. We are not genius. Its crystal clear such anthologies are necessary, and the fact that they are not there in Zimbabwe, tells you the whole story. Poetry is dead! But it can be resurrected. This is what we are attempting to do. Approach any trade publisher in Zimbabwe today, and they are very few, they either will tell you to finance your own project (one of these would demand a print run of 200 copies, and each copy costs $10 per copy and that would mean you have to plough in $2000. Where and to who would you sell those 200 copies to in Zimbabwe, where in larger markets like South Africa, if you sell 200 copies your book, it is certified a bestseller, especially poetry books. Zimbabwe is a much smaller poor market at that!), or they will charge you for reading your manuscript, some charge as much as $100 to read it (that doesn’t mean their reader will give a nod at your manuscript, no), and some will force you to buy one of their books (I bought a copy sometime in 2010, never got my report of the manuscript I submitted). It is futile to think you can be a serious writer and focus on Zimbabwean publishing industry, so we decided, an international publisher is better to work with. We are not asked to pay for our book to be read, we are not asked to buy copies. We are not asked to finance ourselves. The publisher takes all expenses of publishing.
The other issue the Herald distorted was on royalties or author copies. In the call we made it clear we won’t give copies to contributors, but we will share the royalties equally among the contributors. Which we later tabled to the contributors. We asked them how we were going to distribute the royalties and they agreed they want copies instead. So we agreed when we get royalties we will purchase copies until every contributor has a copy, which we are still committed to. It is wishful thinking to think that a poetry book that has a year on the market would have amassed enough royalties to buy copies of 33 contributors. It will take time to achieve on that.
The question is why being a poet when it seems all that they might get from this endevour is publicity, what publicity. Do the poets eat publicity? This is the question I kept hearing from these platforms I was invited to address issues to do with Zimbolicious poetry. I felt it was a stupid question as it is publicity that makes you sell copies as a poet, without which NO PUBLISHER would publish you. I learned about this a long time ago when I exhausted all publishers in the English speaking world. They will tell you, even if you might have great talent, we can’t publish you without track record. It’s as simple as that. A poet has to create publishing track record in order to have their poetry collection considered by any publisher these days. I got my first poetry book published in 2010 by Lapwing Poetry, Ireland when I had amassed close to 70 journals and anthologies publications, without which I would still be unpublished. Very few of these magazines/anthologies pays the author. Just have a simple Google check now, “paying markets for poets”, or “magazines that pays more than$50 for poems”. You will find they are at most 50 such places in the whole English speaking world. Just know you will be competing with millions of writers to get into such places, most likely you won’t make it. A handful of journals and magazines pays with contributor copies, but the majority don’t pay, and there is also a handful that asks for payment from the author for their work to be published. I made a decision some years ago that I won’t pay a publisher anymore to be read or to publish my work, so these are out. A serious writer faced with such reality would have to balance between places that pay and those that don’t pay. The whole idea about being a poet is to write, publish and be read. Money or contributor copies are bonuses. If you are a writer and you think you are entitled to these, then I advise you to stop writing and focus on something else. Being a poet is extremely difficult these days. You have to learn to give and give, and just hope it will find its way back to you. Publish your work, whether you get a copy or not, as long as you don’t pay for it. I have done that. I still do that. Of the over 400 places my work have been published, in over 27 countries (Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mexico, Vietnam, Slovakia, Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, India, Romania, Cyprus etc) I received not more than 70 copies, I was paid in not more than 10 places, and the rest were for free. I can tell you that I have published in the same places with great American poets like Rita Dove, Nikki Giovaninni, Yosef Komunyakaa, A.D Winans etc…where the best we got was a copy. I have published with great British poets like Douglas Dunn, John Burnside, Charles Bennet etc where the best we got were copies. I have published with great South African poets like Stephen Watson, Anjie Krog, Ken Barris, Gail Dendy, Gus Ferguson etc where the best we got was a copy. I have published with some of these where we never got a copy. Poets should write to be read, to create culture, to change language, ideas, society. These are the vocations for a serious poet. And you can do that by regularly publishing in literary places, rubbing shoulders with experienced poets, learning from them. The mere fact of getting published in the same places with these experienced poets gives you satisfaction and confidence in your voice. You know you are just as good, even though not as popular. It is this done, regularly, over several years that builds a poet. When you are popular, when you have created a name then you can make demands. The sad fact is I have realized it is always inexperienced, beginning poets who make demands in these anthologies like Zimbolicious. Older poets know what we are dealing with because they have been in the same road for years and have no hallucinatory dreams about the industry.
I have made it clear we are starting this anthology from the scratch, that we don’t have funding, grants etc. and you hear some foolish writer telling you. “Don’t do it until you have funding for copies or royalties”. The question I have asked them is what if we never get funding. We are not the first to try to attempt doing this. Some have tried before and failed to get funding and they shelved the idea. What it means we will have so many people who call themselves “poets” because they write something but they don’t find their work into print. Because we are all waiting for grants. This is the sad fact of Zimbabwe, not just the poetry scene. Everything is driven by donor grants, without which nothing happens, and we are losing talents, the industry is dying, it is a bleak future. We want to change this. We are committed to change, but they have to be sacrifices both sides. We have decided to wean ourselves off this donar syndrome that permeates Zimbabwean writing. With willpower we believe we can change it.
These anthologies create a platform for writers to continuously develop, build literary friendships etc. I can safely say, Rhodes University New English Literary Museum has 6 of my books because of the involvement I had with their publication New Coin, 4 times between 2008-2011. This is where they discovered my talent, thus when I produced books of my own they had no compunction whatsoever about collecting them in their museum. Just last week they got in touch with me on the new Zimbolicious anthology. They said once it’s out I should sent them a link to buy a copy. They collected last year’s Zimbolicious and they want to continue collecting my work. The same thing happened before Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology was out this year. 4 different British libraries got in touch with me asking where they could buy the new anthology.
There is an editor who once told me that if a website, blog, litmag, journal can be read by at least a person, and if they don’t demand publishing payment, sent your work. That one reader will become your first brick to your building. As I noted its about creating culture, it’s a brick by brick process until the building stands. Send out your work to these litmags and anthologies. And there is other fact I have realized in most of the litmags or anthologies. Their editors are editors in publishing houses. When they know your work they would give you a chance with a full collection, suppose you were to pitch a full length book. And most librarians are writers as well. They are most likely to know about your work if you publish in these litmags. University administrators, professors, teachers, journal in these magazines too, and it is these that influence librarians on which books to collect in libraries. Every part of the publishing industry shares professionals, has inter-linkages, thus participation in these is extremely beneficial for a poet.
The other biggest problem with Zimbabwean poetry scene is it is run by war lords of some sort. It’s broken into groups. And each group has its gatekeepers and these will fight anyone who tries to change it, or anyone who seems to be doing something that usurps on their vested powers and interests. They would rather nothing happens or if it happens, they have to be the ones doing it. I am not interested in these groupings beyond the fact that they have failed miserably to deliver on what they attested to stand for, that is, developing the poet, the writer, making the industry grow. They control the whole system left in Zimbabwe. They have control of the media, the publishers, the distribution, grants givers etc such that anything threatening to this is deemed dangerous and the gatekeepers go on a rampage trying to destroy it.
The media is Zimbabwe leaves a lot to be desired. Please check the aforementioned Herald article and ask yourself whether that is a review or it’s the said gatekeepers trying to fight a turf war. The hurtful thing is we gave this reader that ecopy to do a review but he decided to focus on speculations, myths, and unfounded lies ( for example that lie of us accepting some poet’s work on the radio, and later when the poet questioned us about it, that we didn’t include that poet’s work in the final anthology, to my best knowledge, is pure fabrication. We don’t accept work until we finish reading unless you are an experienced poet we have invited as a guest poet in the anthology. When we finish reading we will send a single email to all the poets we have accepted, and every poet would know who else has work in the anthology. For those that we accepted last year, are the ones we published, no poet we had accepted had has his work withdrawn). I think reviews should focus three quarters of the review on the actual work inside the book, explore the poems, bring them out to the readers, analyse the writing, the language, the culture, and the selections. Of the remaining twenty five percent, two thirds of it should be focused on the general idea about the book and industry, and the last third on the world around the anthology (speculations mentioned above), but if you read the Herald article there is no in-depth explorations of the poems in the Zimbolicious. No one knows what Mungoshi, Eppel, Hartman, Chirasha etc were writing about in their poems. It’s just speculations taking 90percent of the review, maybe 10percentage is the general idea about the anthology. This doesn’t help the poets in it, the readers, the editors. I think Zimbabwean writing lacks real reviewers. I have sent my books before to the media, and nothing came out of it. I did send a hard copy of, Keys in the River to The Daily News, somewhere in 2012, never got the review. I did send a hard copy of Zimbabwe: The Blame Game to Panorama magazine and never got the review. I did send a couple of books to South African Medias too, and another to a Zimbabwean editor based in Namibia, never got the reviews. This is bad for a writer. These hard copies are expensive and the best a reviewer should do is to write the review or return back the copies if they can’t write a review. I have send several ecopies to several medias in Zimbabwe, including The Daily News, News Day etc and no review has been forthcoming. But for all the hard copies I have sent to International Medias, a review was done. This is another problem a poet faces in Zimbabwe or Africa
I would have liked continuing writing about all these myths in Zimbabwean writing but I feel I have highlighted on some of the most important issues I have had to deal with as we develop the new Zimbolicious anthology, so I will end this article by encouraging all serious poets to consider sending us their work. As we promised we will do our best to promote them, to get their work out there, to have their work read, to help them create publishing track record, to share with them any royalties that would result in this endevour, to grow together with them, to change the literary landscape in Zimbabwe, to develop a deep appreciation of their work, to help them develop a poet’s vocation.
For the past week I have been called to explain issues around Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology in several Zimbabwean writing groups, mostly on WhatsApp. I have also been contacted by individual poets asking about what they have heard or read about the anthology in the Medias. I believe a lot of poets still have a lot of misconception about the anthology and I have decided to tackle some of the issues I have heard about it, and the writing scene in Zimbabwe, and also what it means to be a poet.
After the Herald’s article of March 14, 2017, entitled Where is the “Zimbolicious Poetry Anthology” the myths were born. Because somehow the Herald made it appear as if the book disappeared completely, and they were trying to find where it was. Yet the book is available in most online book shops. One can buy both ecopies and hard copies from these sites. The article presupposes that if a book is published by a Zimbabwean author(s) it has to be found in bookshops in Zimbabwe. Without which, it has failed. The Herald didn’t waste its time in investigating why it wasn’t in the bookshops in Zimbabwe, was it viable to stock it in bookshops in Zimbabwe. Somehow. us the editors, we were to blame for its no availability in Zimbabwean bookshops. A simple check with us would have informed the Herald perspective on why it is not available in bookshops in Zimbabwe.
I have tried to have my books stocked in bookshops in Harare before. The sad fact is it is unworkable and expensive to get books into bookshops in Zimbabwe. When I visited the bookshops they felt books have to be as cheap as $10 for them to be able to sell them. The anthology costs $15 in the USA where it was published, automatically it wouldn’t make any business sense to get it to Zimbabwean bookshops. And the bookshops would tell you, the author has to make his books available in the bookshop, theirs is to just sell. For me, as the author of the book, I would have to pay $15 per copy to buy it, plus $2 per copy duty charge that the postal agency is Zimbabwe charges on packages, plus post from the United States and not to forget transfer bank charges such that it might come to about $25-30 per copy, and the bookshops in Zimbabwe would put their mark ups, it would sell for $30-35, which is too expensive. We felt it was better for those who wanted to buy copies to buy them online, at least they will cut the middleman.
So why did we publish it in the USA rather than Zimbabwe. Why are we still publishing it in foreign lands? It is very clear that publishers in Zimbabwe DON’T care about poetry anymore because if they did we would see anthologies of this type coming out regularly in the country. We are not genius. Its crystal clear such anthologies are necessary, and the fact that they are not there in Zimbabwe, tells you the whole story. Poetry is dead! But it can be resurrected. This is what we are attempting to do. Approach any trade publisher in Zimbabwe today, and they are very few, they either will tell you to finance your own project (one of these would demand a print run of 200 copies, and each copy costs $10 per copy and that would mean you have to plough in $2000. Where and to who would you sell those 200 copies to in Zimbabwe, where in larger markets like South Africa, if you sell 200 copies your book, it is certified a bestseller, especially poetry books. Zimbabwe is a much smaller poor market at that!), or they will charge you for reading your manuscript, some charge as much as $100 to read it (that doesn’t mean their reader will give a nod at your manuscript, no), and some will force you to buy one of their books (I bought a copy sometime in 2010, never got my report of the manuscript I submitted). It is futile to think you can be a serious writer and focus on Zimbabwean publishing industry, so we decided, an international publisher is better to work with. We are not asked to pay for our book to be read, we are not asked to buy copies. We are not asked to finance ourselves. The publisher takes all expenses of publishing.
The other issue the Herald distorted was on royalties or author copies. In the call we made it clear we won’t give copies to contributors, but we will share the royalties equally among the contributors. Which we later tabled to the contributors. We asked them how we were going to distribute the royalties and they agreed they want copies instead. So we agreed when we get royalties we will purchase copies until every contributor has a copy, which we are still committed to. It is wishful thinking to think that a poetry book that has a year on the market would have amassed enough royalties to buy copies of 33 contributors. It will take time to achieve on that.
The question is why being a poet when it seems all that they might get from this endevour is publicity, what publicity. Do the poets eat publicity? This is the question I kept hearing from these platforms I was invited to address issues to do with Zimbolicious poetry. I felt it was a stupid question as it is publicity that makes you sell copies as a poet, without which NO PUBLISHER would publish you. I learned about this a long time ago when I exhausted all publishers in the English speaking world. They will tell you, even if you might have great talent, we can’t publish you without track record. It’s as simple as that. A poet has to create publishing track record in order to have their poetry collection considered by any publisher these days. I got my first poetry book published in 2010 by Lapwing Poetry, Ireland when I had amassed close to 70 journals and anthologies publications, without which I would still be unpublished. Very few of these magazines/anthologies pays the author. Just have a simple Google check now, “paying markets for poets”, or “magazines that pays more than$50 for poems”. You will find they are at most 50 such places in the whole English speaking world. Just know you will be competing with millions of writers to get into such places, most likely you won’t make it. A handful of journals and magazines pays with contributor copies, but the majority don’t pay, and there is also a handful that asks for payment from the author for their work to be published. I made a decision some years ago that I won’t pay a publisher anymore to be read or to publish my work, so these are out. A serious writer faced with such reality would have to balance between places that pay and those that don’t pay. The whole idea about being a poet is to write, publish and be read. Money or contributor copies are bonuses. If you are a writer and you think you are entitled to these, then I advise you to stop writing and focus on something else. Being a poet is extremely difficult these days. You have to learn to give and give, and just hope it will find its way back to you. Publish your work, whether you get a copy or not, as long as you don’t pay for it. I have done that. I still do that. Of the over 400 places my work have been published, in over 27 countries (Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mexico, Vietnam, Slovakia, Spain, France, Italy, Argentina, India, Romania, Cyprus etc) I received not more than 70 copies, I was paid in not more than 10 places, and the rest were for free. I can tell you that I have published in the same places with great American poets like Rita Dove, Nikki Giovaninni, Yosef Komunyakaa, A.D Winans etc…where the best we got was a copy. I have published with great British poets like Douglas Dunn, John Burnside, Charles Bennet etc where the best we got were copies. I have published with great South African poets like Stephen Watson, Anjie Krog, Ken Barris, Gail Dendy, Gus Ferguson etc where the best we got was a copy. I have published with some of these where we never got a copy. Poets should write to be read, to create culture, to change language, ideas, society. These are the vocations for a serious poet. And you can do that by regularly publishing in literary places, rubbing shoulders with experienced poets, learning from them. The mere fact of getting published in the same places with these experienced poets gives you satisfaction and confidence in your voice. You know you are just as good, even though not as popular. It is this done, regularly, over several years that builds a poet. When you are popular, when you have created a name then you can make demands. The sad fact is I have realized it is always inexperienced, beginning poets who make demands in these anthologies like Zimbolicious. Older poets know what we are dealing with because they have been in the same road for years and have no hallucinatory dreams about the industry.
I have made it clear we are starting this anthology from the scratch, that we don’t have funding, grants etc. and you hear some foolish writer telling you. “Don’t do it until you have funding for copies or royalties”. The question I have asked them is what if we never get funding. We are not the first to try to attempt doing this. Some have tried before and failed to get funding and they shelved the idea. What it means we will have so many people who call themselves “poets” because they write something but they don’t find their work into print. Because we are all waiting for grants. This is the sad fact of Zimbabwe, not just the poetry scene. Everything is driven by donor grants, without which nothing happens, and we are losing talents, the industry is dying, it is a bleak future. We want to change this. We are committed to change, but they have to be sacrifices both sides. We have decided to wean ourselves off this donar syndrome that permeates Zimbabwean writing. With willpower we believe we can change it.
These anthologies create a platform for writers to continuously develop, build literary friendships etc. I can safely say, Rhodes University New English Literary Museum has 6 of my books because of the involvement I had with their publication New Coin, 4 times between 2008-2011. This is where they discovered my talent, thus when I produced books of my own they had no compunction whatsoever about collecting them in their museum. Just last week they got in touch with me on the new Zimbolicious anthology. They said once it’s out I should sent them a link to buy a copy. They collected last year’s Zimbolicious and they want to continue collecting my work. The same thing happened before Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology was out this year. 4 different British libraries got in touch with me asking where they could buy the new anthology.
There is an editor who once told me that if a website, blog, litmag, journal can be read by at least a person, and if they don’t demand publishing payment, sent your work. That one reader will become your first brick to your building. As I noted its about creating culture, it’s a brick by brick process until the building stands. Send out your work to these litmags and anthologies. And there is other fact I have realized in most of the litmags or anthologies. Their editors are editors in publishing houses. When they know your work they would give you a chance with a full collection, suppose you were to pitch a full length book. And most librarians are writers as well. They are most likely to know about your work if you publish in these litmags. University administrators, professors, teachers, journal in these magazines too, and it is these that influence librarians on which books to collect in libraries. Every part of the publishing industry shares professionals, has inter-linkages, thus participation in these is extremely beneficial for a poet.
The other biggest problem with Zimbabwean poetry scene is it is run by war lords of some sort. It’s broken into groups. And each group has its gatekeepers and these will fight anyone who tries to change it, or anyone who seems to be doing something that usurps on their vested powers and interests. They would rather nothing happens or if it happens, they have to be the ones doing it. I am not interested in these groupings beyond the fact that they have failed miserably to deliver on what they attested to stand for, that is, developing the poet, the writer, making the industry grow. They control the whole system left in Zimbabwe. They have control of the media, the publishers, the distribution, grants givers etc such that anything threatening to this is deemed dangerous and the gatekeepers go on a rampage trying to destroy it.
The media is Zimbabwe leaves a lot to be desired. Please check the aforementioned Herald article and ask yourself whether that is a review or it’s the said gatekeepers trying to fight a turf war. The hurtful thing is we gave this reader that ecopy to do a review but he decided to focus on speculations, myths, and unfounded lies ( for example that lie of us accepting some poet’s work on the radio, and later when the poet questioned us about it, that we didn’t include that poet’s work in the final anthology, to my best knowledge, is pure fabrication. We don’t accept work until we finish reading unless you are an experienced poet we have invited as a guest poet in the anthology. When we finish reading we will send a single email to all the poets we have accepted, and every poet would know who else has work in the anthology. For those that we accepted last year, are the ones we published, no poet we had accepted had has his work withdrawn). I think reviews should focus three quarters of the review on the actual work inside the book, explore the poems, bring them out to the readers, analyse the writing, the language, the culture, and the selections. Of the remaining twenty five percent, two thirds of it should be focused on the general idea about the book and industry, and the last third on the world around the anthology (speculations mentioned above), but if you read the Herald article there is no in-depth explorations of the poems in the Zimbolicious. No one knows what Mungoshi, Eppel, Hartman, Chirasha etc were writing about in their poems. It’s just speculations taking 90percent of the review, maybe 10percentage is the general idea about the anthology. This doesn’t help the poets in it, the readers, the editors. I think Zimbabwean writing lacks real reviewers. I have sent my books before to the media, and nothing came out of it. I did send a hard copy of, Keys in the River to The Daily News, somewhere in 2012, never got the review. I did send a hard copy of Zimbabwe: The Blame Game to Panorama magazine and never got the review. I did send a couple of books to South African Medias too, and another to a Zimbabwean editor based in Namibia, never got the reviews. This is bad for a writer. These hard copies are expensive and the best a reviewer should do is to write the review or return back the copies if they can’t write a review. I have send several ecopies to several medias in Zimbabwe, including The Daily News, News Day etc and no review has been forthcoming. But for all the hard copies I have sent to International Medias, a review was done. This is another problem a poet faces in Zimbabwe or Africa
I would have liked continuing writing about all these myths in Zimbabwean writing but I feel I have highlighted on some of the most important issues I have had to deal with as we develop the new Zimbolicious anthology, so I will end this article by encouraging all serious poets to consider sending us their work. As we promised we will do our best to promote them, to get their work out there, to have their work read, to help them create publishing track record, to share with them any royalties that would result in this endevour, to grow together with them, to change the literary landscape in Zimbabwe, to develop a deep appreciation of their work, to help them develop a poet’s vocation.
