Defining Uncurated in Publishing

I came upon an article on Substack, "Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art" by Timothy Green. Tim has worked as editor of Rattle magazine since 2004. He's the author of American Fractal (Red Hen Press, 2008) and occasionally mints poems as NFTs.

I know what "curation" means, but if a publisher asks for "previously uncurated work," what do they mean? It's a new term that means that your work has not appeared in a literary magazine, journal, or anthology. 

Why do we need a new term? Green says that, "We haven’t thought of a word to replace 'publication,” now that publication is irrelevant...Imagine how literature would thrive if we could share our art with our friends in the medium of the era."

If you use Substack, you can read the entire post, but here are a few excerpts as summary.

...Your friend shares a poem they wrote last night on Twitter. You read and enjoy it; they feel the joy of your enjoyment. Months or years later, you see the poem in a literary magazine. What do you think? Are you disappointed that you already read it? Of course not! Quite the opposite, you’re thrilled that you remember having that early peek, thrilled you’re friends with a good writer. You might even buy a copy of the magazine just because you have a friend in that issue. And most readers will have no idea that an early version was posted last year on Twitter, and that they could have sifted through billions of tweets to find it. They wouldn’t care if they knew. The curator discovered its value—that was the job of the curator, and that’s what readers are thankful for...
There’s no reason left on earth for publishers to continue blocking this scenario. And as soon as we get out of the way by making this simple change, all of literature will be better for it.
For most of my time as Editor of Rattle, our guidelines have said that we do not accept previously published poems, but don’t consider posting work to blogs or social media as publication. That’s the rule I wanted to practice, but the twisting of language always bothered me. Posting work online is publication. A public tweet is public. But now we have the word to solve that problem."

Green concludes:

"If you’re a publisher reading this, I hope you’ll adopt uncurated as a new term of art along with me, and help it to grow. If you’re a writer, I hope you’ll encourage others to switch by using curated in your bios. “My poems and stories have been curated by X, Y, Z.” Focus on the curation that matters, rather than the publication that doesn’t. It will only take a simple find-and-replace to catch us up to the current era and make the literary world a better place."

Are you seeing this term in places where you submit? Is it a useful term?

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