Pushcart Prize

A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

Pushcart Prize
The following essay was written by the editor of The American Dissident and needs to be compared with the type of essay published by Poets & Writers, Inc., periodical of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex, the establishment dispensing the bulk of grants, prizes and publishing contracts, as well as English professor positions. Read the P&W essay on the Pushcart Prize first. Unfortunately the nation's MFA programs, professors and English instructors do not encourage students to question and challenge, question and challenge... the MFA programs, professors and English instructors themselves. Instead, they teach team playing, groupthink, networking, self-esteem building, and general sycophancy.

I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them of the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.
—Sinclair Lewis, “Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee” (The Man from Main Street)

I have never been nominated. But I have had the priviliage [sic] and honor to be in magazines that have won Pushcarts and I have seen my writing alongside some of the winners. I would very much like to get a nomination someday and I would very much like to win the prize. And there aren't many other prizes I covet. I bring this all to your attention, because Katrina, my girlfriend, my wonderful other, has just yesterday received her second nomination, this time from the Melic Review. The wonderful and talented Katrina has shrugged off this accomplishment, perhaps not wanting to rub it in my face that she has been nominated twice and I have heretofore not been nominated at all. But there is no danger of me feeling jealous. I am elated for her, and also for myself. I always wanted to date a celebrated poet. Maybe someday someone will nominate me. I have no idea. It's not the kind of thing you can shoot for. If it happens, it happens. Katrina Grace Craig, multiple Pushcart nominee. It has a nice ring, doesn't it? Job well done, Katja. Job well done.
—Jim Valvis, from an Internet pronouncement by self-proclaimed boyfriend of a multiple Pushcart nominee

Unlike the uncritical/blurb essay published in Poets & Writers magazine (Jan/Feb 2001), “Pushcart Rolls Into 25th Year,” this essay seeks to raise a few questions. Indeed, an un-indoctrinated and inquisitive poet/writer must ask him/herself several questions about literary prizes. First, who are the judges sitting on the prize panels as literary censors? Second, how are they chosen? In other words, who were the judges who chose the panel judges? Third, who or what kind of work tends to be chosen for the prizes and, conversely, not? Fourth, how does the prize fit into the schema of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex? It is of course quite unfortunate that MFA programs and Academe in general probably do not teach, nor encourage, students to raise such questions, indubitably because such questions ineluctably would lead to similar questions regarding those very programs and Academe itself. Evidently, this essay will not be published by the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex, which tends to abhor any criticism of it by outsiders. Indeed, experience dictates I’d be wasting time sending this essay to an academic or quasi-academic literary journal.

In any case, the answers to those key questions-key, because they’ll inevitably reveal the degree of intrinsic objectivity or subjectivity-are not often announced by literary prize-awarding organizations. Pushcart Press, that is, its founder/president Bill Henderson does not maintain a website where such information might be easily made known. After a good half hour of research on Yahoo, wading through the mass of items listed under “pushcart prize,” I stumbled into the Pushcart Prize announcement and address in an old issue of Poets & Writers.

“Publication in The Pushcart Prize XXIII: Best of the Small Presses for literary works published by small presses in 1997. Works of poetry, short fiction, essays, or self-contained portions of books or chapbooks are eligible. Submissions are accepted from editors only, who may nominate up to six works. Submit tear sheets or photocopies; work to be published this year after the December 1 deadline may be submitted in manuscript form. Write or call for complete guidelines. Pushcart Press, Pushcart Prize Nominations, P.O. Box 380, Wainscott, NY 11975. (516) 324-9300.”

After locating the address, it all becomes quite simple indeed. Any independent thinker, as opposed to an MFA academic indoctrinee, will immediately comprehend that being nominated for the Pushcart Prize is absolutely meaningless. How easy for me to nominate a friend and vice versa. Is that done? Of course! Widespread? Perhaps! Has the Pushcart become a vast pool of meaningless nominations of friends by friends? A vicious circle of pushers and self-advocators lacking all respect for objectivity? It is amazing to note how many vaunt on the Internet, academics and non-academics alike, being nominated for the Pushcart. College and university PR managers, many of them, and small magazines boast about and list their Pushcart winners (and nominees!) on the web, advertising their respective institution or publication. A glance at Yahoo or Altavista leads one to surmise that the bulk of recipients being advocated or self-advocating on the web are in fact English professors. Never is there any questioning or challenging by them of the Prize. Thus has become the sad state of academe and the literary world. Indubitably, they need somebody to force them to read Sinclair Lewis’ wonderful “Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee.”

The Pushcart and its supporters, in turn, vaunt the Prize as the “Best of the Small Presses.” Of course, such a designation must be subjective, despite appearances to the contrary. How many small presses never submit nominations? Perhaps the majority? If so, how can the Pushcart represent the “Best”? Is that question ever posed? Certainly not by academics and other Pushcart proponents. Interestingly, one must wonder if the poetry in the annual resultant Pushcart Prize anthology is better than that in The Best American Poetry, another annual anthology. Poet Laureate Library of Congress (and Academic) Rita Dove edited the latter for Year 2000. The following lines by poet Gary Soto published in the Dove collection ought make a thinking poet/writer wonder what “Best” has come to mean. “[…]Her legs spread just enough to stir / The lint of my eyelashes, / Just enough to think of a porpoise / Smacking me with sea-scented kisses […]”

Well, what is the Pushcart? Editors, that is those who can locate the Pushcart address and are aware of that particular “literary institution,” in the words of The New York Times, nominate works from their journals in the fall, which are then reviewed by judges through spring. The winners get to have their work appear in a “Best of” anthology distributed by W.W. Norton & Company. Would the judges choose an essay or poetry critical of Norton and the publishing industry? Would they choose this very essay?

Past winners of the Pushcart read like a who’s who of the Academic/Industrial Literary Complex, including English professors, ex or otherwise, Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Carver, André Dubus, Margaret Atwood, and Richard Ford. Updike is also a winner, but for some reason never became a professor. Interestingly, some of the “distinguished contributing editors,” who help the Pushcart Press “staff judges” choose the winners, have included Prize winners themselves such as Dubus and Oates, and perhaps many others. Might there have been conflicts of interest?

The comments listed, regarding the anthology, are of course excessively flattering with the goal of sell, sell, sell that book... the very direction of literature, thanks to the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex. “Fascinating,” wrote Time,” an exceptionally strong sampling,” added New Republic, “invaluable,” declared LA Reader, “a generous and stimulatingly eclectic selection,” stated Publishers Weekly, “of all the anthologies, Pushcart's is the most rewarding,” underscored Chicago Tribune. Considering the number of highly boring literary anthologies being published by Norton and others (there’s a hell of a lot of money in college textbooks!), it is difficult to pay heed to the blurbs listed. Besides, a thinking poet/writer must always wonder what kind of connection exists between the blurbers and the object blurbed.

Booklist seems to sum up the Pushcart best as “new writers follow in the footsteps of established voices.” Indeed, what does that sentence mean? Doesn’t it mean anyone NOT following in the footsteps of the established is likely not going to get the Prize? Well, the judges will no doubt, to avoid being labeled un-objective and academic, make sure to award the prize to a token of nonconformist poet/writers. Kirkus Review (Amazon.com) presents a good idea of the type of subjects selected, including the theological-activist career of a father, cases of obsessive collectors, testimony of a grandfather's bookcase, a survey of love in San Francisco, Wild West phantasmagoria, and a drug-addict teacher and her pusher students. Evidently, no critical essays vis-à-vis the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex or its subsidiaries were chosen. Perhaps the New York Times Book Review blurb for the Pushcart does tell it like it is: "The single best measure of the state of affairs in American literature today." That state of affairs, of course, has evidently become pervasive disengaged writing that must surely have Orwell, Ibsen, Emerson, Baudelaire, Jeffers and others turning in their graves.