Blog-posted poems: do they rate for publication?

Interesting discussion at ‘Poetics’ at present, on a question for the ‘poetry magazine editors out there’. Question: does your publication accept for publication poems previously posted to personal blogs and to online workshops? If so, why, and if not, why not?

One response suggested bias against previously poems is as ridiculous as a ‘theater-owner’s refusing to show movies that have been shown in other theaters’.

Another welcomed blog publication by pointing out that blogs offer dissemination to the widest possible audince, still another adjudged that acceptance for publication is peer-review acceptance, whether that be in a journal or on a blog. Another response questioned how a blog could be anything but publication. ‘To maintain that it is not is merely to unjustly devalue your blog.’

Murat Nemet-Nejat’s response is reposted with permission:

Murat Nemet-Nejat:
“At least in poetry and poetics, it seems that what appears in certain blogs
or lists will be read by more people than what appears in print journals or
books. On the other hand, print has more prestige; it is like owning the
hard cover or paper back version of a book. Finally, who cares.

“A more fruitful comparison would be to broadsides. Lists particularly can
function as poetic, thought broadsides. Charles Bernstein just quoted a
section of his talk on scholarship on this list. My guess is that the speech
will be published in a book form somewhere. But his announcement here has a
certain freshness, excitement, urgency -maybe also a touch of advertizing-
that the same in book form will not. The book does imply a certain
hierarchy, settling, regardless of how satisfactory it may be to the
published person. I wonder in fifty years how much our daily ephemera in
lists, etc., will be available to any one interested? Here also, will there
be those which will survive and those which will not, or are they/we all
doomed to the same oblivion, in this democracy of death?

“Since almost never has anyone paid for it, it seems poems -and ideas
emerging in the ebb of flow of things, which are also poems- belong to their
creators. Therefore, they can be disseminated any place the poets wish
-ideally, aren’t poems/ideas seeds, generating other ones? Therefore,
dissemination -to use an antiquarian teleological phrase- is of their
essence. If an editor is tight-assed enough -I hope I am not flaming anyone
by these words- not to disseminate, he or she can say so.”