I have an intermittent habit of submitting to contests. Usually, they offer just enough prize money that I can imagine digging out of my financial hole to somewhere that I can breathe easy again. The entrance fees are low enough that I feel like I can take the risk. Sometimes the entrance fee buys a subscription to the publication.
I am part of the problem, because the only periodicals I read are the ones I subscribed to that way. Especially with poetry, there are more people who want to be published than there are people who want the publications. As far as I know I’ve been working with respectable and legitimate contests, but without the entrance fees they wouldn’t have the funds for the prize pools, let alone for promotion, and most poetry rags are printed at a loss.
So it is, that I was sitting in the recliner, wishing I’d thought to make myself a cup of tea, and playing how-do-you-do with a new consolation-prize subscription. It got me to thinking about TV. My daughter is pushing to watch more commercial television, as a function of her age (11) and of being in public school for the first time this year (after being exclusively homeschooled.) She wants to watch what everyone else watches. If we lived in Sweden, where there is no advertising aimed at children, then this would be a non-issue. We don’t live in Sweden though, and our programs are peppered quite liberally with ads that are aggressively targeted at kids.
Which is why I’ve been giving lots of little speeches lately, about how the show is not the product the network is selling. The show is the bait that brings eager little eyeballs to the screen. We are not the customers, the advertisers are the customers. The viewers are the product that the network sells to its sponsors. The advertisers are buying us as potential consumers.
I can’t keep my children watching PBS Kids forever so I’ve tried to make them savvy, at the risk of slightly jaded. So it is, from that frame of mind, it struck me that as happy as I was to receive another glossy bundle of pretty words, associated with a college press, state grants and the NEA, that I didn’t know for sure what the product was. I hadn’t really meant to subscribe, subscriptions are just a side effect of contest submissions. I wondered if the bylines I was looking at had similarly automatic subscriptions now, too.
It’s a fine line between customer and consumer. Okay, it’s an imaginary line that I made up. In another lifetime, before I had kids, I used to work with developmentally disabled adults. We always called them clients, based on the logic that they (with funds provided by the state and/or their families) paid for the services I was providing. This term was the industry standard at the time, but it was being called into question. Likely, because it was being used not just do describe the individuals we worked with, but as a euphemism for anyone with a developmental disability. ‘Cause, you know what, “client” is a lot easier to say than, “person with developmental disabilities.” So people with fancy degrees, and no hands on experience in the field, had decided that, “client” had developed negative connotations and there was a push to change the term to, “consumer.”
I hated the term consumer then and I hate it now. A consumer is, by simplest deconstruction of the word, one who consumes. Anybody who plays Scrabble knows that adding -er to random words can create a word meaning one who… well, whatever the verb being modified is. It’s amazing how many times that trick has worked for a better score. Well, I don’t want to consume. I want to create. Any fool locust can consume, after all.
Yet, so much of what I’ve read about publishing poetry is that these little contests are so often a nobody’s only chance at a foot in the door. And I do enjoy reading the subscriptions that have come to me this way, even if I am uncertain about my role in the exchange. I’m not really upset about that transaction. Poetry is just a compulsion of mine. I’ve never viewed it as a profitable skill.
It’s just that as I contemplate my economic future, and my family’s, I wonder what profitable skills I do have. I don’t see a lot of need for me in the workforce. I mean I can see how my family could benefit from my having an income, just not what I have to offer in exchange for one. I look around where I live, and where I’m from, and talk to my kids about the history of those economies; the industries that used to be important and aren’t anymore and I start to worry. If everything we buy is being made somewhere else, have we, as consumers, become this country’s gross national product?
