Reprints
Clark's comments about canwehaveourballback led me back to the zine to take another look at some of the authors there. As Clark says, you'll find poems by famous writers. For example, this one by Charles Bukowski, reprinted with permission from Black Sparrow Press. Another example of a reprint, without permission as far as I can tell, is a poem by Wallace Stevens in issue 5.
I don't mean to swat canwehaveourballback, but online zines that reprint poems do more harm than good for online publications. The reprints give the impression that the zine is unable to collect new work to fill its online space. (I'm not sure why canwehaveourballback would add Bukowski to its long list of mostly unknown writers, unless he's there to impress readers.)
A zine could print an anthology issue, where it's obvious that the poems are reprints, but to mix reprints with original poems, especially when the permission, if there is one, is buried in a link, seems like a sleight of hand. A reader could possibly think the author has submitted to the zine. But a dead author, like Stevens? The impression still exits that the poem is new, published online for the first time.
Every online journal covets established, well know poets. Some get them. But as I have said elsewhere, the majority of poets publishing online are those who are just now knocking at the door of reputation. There's really no need, to mix my metaphor, to pretend to be the pool when the diving board is good enough.
Being the springboard to another destination is a good thing to be. Though being a legitimate pool would be nice.
Sorry, Richard, but I have to take another view. I do so recognizing that I don't edit a zine and so don't have the experiences you have. Nevertheless, I think can we have our ball back is the anti-zine in more than one sense. It reminds me of Abbie Hoffman publishing Steal This Book, and meaning it. It really is much like Adbusters, which, if you've not seen it, go and take a look. Now, I am certain that if the editors are not getting permission or giving due credit when publishing a poem, they may be violating a trust, if not a copyright law. But that seems to be a part of their (more or less) legitimate agenda which might possibly be something like "release it to the web and it belongs to everybody."
Granted, we don't all need, or necessarily want to be liberated in this way. But the pub does call in question the role of publications like itself in an ostensibly free society. Perhaps in the way underground mags once did in Hungary, Poland, etc? Not sure I'm making sense. It has been a long day!
It frightens me that I would be, sound, or think conservatively. But a "legitimate agenda" to "violate trust" or copyright? There's nothing wrong with being an anti zine, and there is much I like about canwehaveourballback, but there are enough writers out there who will knowingly publish the same poem umpteen times without telling its publication history. This isn't what canwehaveourballback is doing. But it's sort of a reversal: the zine takes possession of the poem and gives it to readers, rather than the writer giving the poem to the zine to give to readers. One of the things (I think) I dislike about the internet is the belief that someone can take anything from another medium and put it on the net and suddently the thing is free for the taking. Do things want to be free? Or do people want things to be free?