Tag: rejection

Three editors on rejection and persistence

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I finished choosing Shenandoah poems a couple of weeks ago. It’s such a pleasure to accept work, but there was so much strong poetry that I had to turn down, I could have built another good issue out of what I rejected. Honestly, I agonized so much I wondered if I’m cut out for this. Trying to shake it off, I figured I’d use my decision-sharpened mind to start submitting my own poems again–I’ve been delinquent–but I spent most of this week in a spiral of uncertainty (although family worries also contributed to that). I did finally get poems under consideration in a few places. It took me a ton of revision and reading through old folders, as well as research into markets, to make it happen. I’m freshly aware of the odds against making the cut, so I did a lot of hard thinking about the stakes of each poem, trying to delete or change iffy passages as ruthlessly as I could. And now I won’t know how well I managed it for months! 

The Zoom conversation I recently had with Celia Lisset Alvarez and Jen Karetnick therefore felt timely. See here for a recording of “She Persists: Rebounding from Rejection” that includes readings and lots of frank talk about our personal stats. Below are some bonus tracks consisting of their answers to my follow-up questions, plus their bios so you can find out about their many projects. I bolded a few bits that strike me as especially useful and inspiriting. At the very end, look for a few footnotes from me, too.

  1. Having work declined can be pretty dispiriting. What’s your best advice about coping with and rebounding from a no?

JK: There’s no denying that rejections sting. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about them for a moment. After all, we’re poets and writers. We feel; that’s what we do. But then you just have to shake it off and get back to work. If that sounds a little too positive like a Taylor Swift lyric, well, so be it. Dwelling on what hasn’t happened can really keep you from moving forward. My best advice is to allow yourself to be disappointed, then turn around and resubmit elsewhere. A lot of elsewheres. Simultaneously submit widely. I shudder when I read a cover letter that tells us they’re only sending these poems to SWWIM Every Day. Why? We allow simultaneous submissions, and we may not get back to you for 1-2 months. Send them elsewhere, too! There are hundreds of journals waiting for your work. You just need to find the one who wants it. It’s like dating – the right editor is out there, waiting to accept the love that you’re offering.

CLA: It’s important to really believe that at least half the time a rejection has nothing to do with the quality of your work, or you’ll become so discouraged you’ll stop writing, since rejections are way more common than acceptances. When you get a rejection, you need to see it as a task. You must find a better home for whatever has been rejected, understanding that it may take many attempts before you find the right place. Never ever change a piece you feel is good to reflect an editor’s comment or what you might perceive as a comment from a rejection. You have to both be confident in your own skill and open to suggestion. If a piece is getting rejected more than you feel is normal, take another look at it. If you still feel it’s good, don’t change a word. There is always the odd chance, however, that there is some kind of flaw you haven’t seen before. If you catch it, then certainly revise. But that is a pretty rare situation; once you’ve sent something out, it’s usually because you’re sure it’s “done.” Unless, of course, you’re sending sub-par work out, which, as an editor, I know happens. Many of the poems or stories I reject needed just one more sweep before being wonderful. The work happens, or should happen, before you submit, not after.

  1. What have you learned about rejection from working as an editor?

CLA: The most salient lesson is that writers are not doing their homework.* They don’t know a thing about the journal they’re submitting to, and they don’t even follow the submission guidelines. That is the number one reason for rejections. I’ve also realized just how hard it is to find a good piece; the myth of the gigantic “slush pile” full of gold going unnoticed is just that, a myth. Most often I am still in need of some good pieces at the end of the reading period. What that means to the writer half of me is that I shouldn’t be intimidated by the idea of sending work to a prestigious journal. Good work will stand out. It’s what the editor is looking for, what she dreams of finding. Finally, I’ve realized how formulaic writing has become, how many people want to be Walt Whitman or e.e. cummings. Writers need to think more about voice and less about style. A piece has to have weight to it; it can’t be some facile observation about the life/death cycle of nature.**

JK: I’ve learned that our work might be polished, accomplished, even wonderfully written. But it might not be as unique as it needs to be. Because being human is something we all share, there are only so many plots and themes. Every experience you’ve been through, someone else has been through — even the awful ones. Every idea you have, someone else has had — even the greatest ones. The way that you stand out is through your voice. Take a good hard look at your diction and syntax. Are they as original as they can be? Are your images fresh and striking? I can’t even count how many poems we get, even from very well-published poets, that still use adjectives like “beautiful” and “soft” and “sweet.” Too many poets and writers rely on easy abstractions when we’re supposed to be the ones making the world a more specifically observed and fascinating place.

  1. I appreciated this conversation and sensed it could have gone on much longer. Is there anything else you wish you had time to say?

CLA: There was a point where someone asked about sending out collections rather than single pieces. I wish I would have said something of what I learned writing my latest collection, Multiverses. What editors seem to want from collections now more than anything is cohesion, not of style but of content. If you can put together a collection that has a narrative arc to it, you are much more likely to get it published.*** I’ve been shopping around another collection for near twenty years that I still feel is chockfull of wonderful poems, but they don’t build upon one another. On the other hand, Multiverses got picked up the day after I sent it out for the first time. If what you want to publish is a collection, in other words, I think it’s important not just to write good poems, but good stories. Find the architecture of your writing and write the gaps if you can. You are much more likely to be able to publish a collection that way.

JK:

Don’t waste time explaining the meanings of your poems in your cover letters unless you’re using a specific form that’s not obvious or it’s pertinent to how the editor will read the work. Don’t offer random details about your life, about how you live on an isolated island in the Caribbean island drinking freshly roasted coffee while you write every morning from 8-10 after a refreshing swim. It’s just not relevant. 

Do take time to read the journal’s mission and guidelines, and don’t send if you don’t agree with them. For instance, SWWIM Every Day publishes women, and we have men submitting to us, even men who are aware of our mission statement but say things like “I think you should consider my work anyway.” No. That’s ten minutes of free labor I wasted.**** 

Also, it’s not personal. If your work is declined, it’s about the work, not you. If it’s accidentally declined twice, it’s because the Internet stuttered and it looked like it didn’t go through, so someone hit the button again. If you get a ghost rejection, well, sometimes Submittable glitches and sometimes a human glitches (there is a way you can decline without sending an email). But more likely it is because responses frequently go to your spam, where they sit for a month and then get erased. If it’s taking too long in your opinion to get an answer, it’s usually because circumstances have intervened; we all have jobs, families, partners, personal lives. Sometimes editors just have too many submissions on their plates and can’t get back to you as promptly as they would like–although I admit that I, too, get angry when a year (or more!) goes by and then I simply get a form rejection or the journal just disappears. 

If you’re querying or withdrawing a poem, be sure that you’re using the most direct method. One thing I’ve learned about using the forms on websites is that unless the journal specifically asks that you use them, a lot of journals don’t check those messages. They also tend to stack up on each other in bunches so you can’t see them as individual messages. And no, the “Note” function on Submittable does not send emails to editors! It’s for your personal use. Use the “Messages” function to send a message – that generates an email to the editors. If the “Messages” function isn’t activated, as it sometimes is not, or the journal uses a different system, send an email to the journal.

Finally, as the person responsible for sending out declines (and acceptances), I can tell you it is something I find truly difficult to do, whether or not I know the poet or have published them before. I’m also on the receiving end of declines, so I understand how it feels. Still, that’s all part of being in the literary community and we need to extend each other grace and kindness whenever possible.*****

About Celia and Jen:

Celia Lisset Alvarez is the editor of Prospectus: A Literary Offering. She has three collections of poetry: Shapeshifting (Spire Press 2006), winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award, The Stones (Finishing Line Press 2006), and Multiverses (Finishing Line Press 2021). Her poems have been anthologized in How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens (Upper Rubber Boot Books 2015), Obsession: Sestinas for the 21st Century (Dartmouth UP 2014), and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana Press 2014). She has work forthcoming in the anthologies Poetry Inspired by Cinema (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing 2021) and How to Write a Form Poem (T.S. Poetry Press 2021), and in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts. She lives in Miami, Florida. You can find her online at celialissetalvarez.com.

Jen Karetnick’s fourth full-length book is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020). She is also the author of Hunger Until It’s Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023) in addition to eight other collections. Karetnick has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among others, and has been an Artist in Residence in the Everglades, a Deering Estate Artist in Residence, and a Maryland Purple Line Transit grant recipient. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has work appearing recently in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Based in Miami, Jen works as a lifestyle journalist and is also the author of four cookbooks, four guidebooks, and more. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.

*This is true for me too, even though it’s also true at Shenandoah that we can ultimately accept only a percentage of the good stuff. Not following the guidelines or understanding what the journal publishes gets you rejected fast. The vast majority of editors do the work as unpaid extra labor on top of day jobs–I do–and as a submitter, I want to convey respect for that. I’d rather an editor feel friendly and read my work carefully before rejecting me. At least, then, my work has found one reader!

**Among a pool of well-crafted poems, what makes a piece stand out for me is often risk. But every editor will have a slightly different answer, I suspect, about what makes them fall in love with a piece.

***How I would put it: the collection might not have a narrative arc, or a slim one, but there’s a story or a web of connected experiences behind all of its poems. Can you say what the book is about in a sentence or two, insufficient as that sentence might be for the nuances the poems deliver? I had Celia’s experience: my first collection, Heathen, was basically all the best poems I’d written to date, and I still think it’s a good book, but I submitted it for 5-6 years before it was taken. My second book, Heterotopia, was about my mother’s childhood in Liverpool during World War II. I submitted it for just a few months before it won a prize.

****Wow, those men are jerks. See *.

*****Amen.

Not helping

The present and future of pandemic poetry

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Like a sad dragon, I’m currently sitting on a diminishing hoard of potential poems for future issues of Shenandoah—Fall ’21 and Spring ’22, presuming we get there–knowing I can’t keep ALL the gold. I’m already rejecting good poems, trying to get down to 20-ish from more than 700 batches. The last couple of weeks have been largely a sifting process: holding each poem against the light, seeing how pieces might fit together.

One issue I’ve been pondering, in part triggered by a tweet from Kelli Russell Agodon: how are the poems I’m reading manifesting the extraordinary pressures of a global pandemic? The answer I gave Kelli is that the poetic worlds seem a notch smaller: I’m getting more poems about the flora and fauna close to hand, fewer about conversation and art and the randomness of being a human walking around in the built world. That’s not a bad thing, but it can make the submission pile less various. I’m certainly coming across references to Covid-19, too, as well as elegies and poems about anxiety, depression, and isolation, but not as many as I expected. This may be because poetry has such a slow burn that we won’t really see the literary results of any crisis for a few years. It may also be because a lot of people just can’t write lately–their lives are busier and their brains can’t rev down enough for reflection. I’m interested to see how things shake out in the literary world and otherwise.

“Haunted and Weird Futures” was actually the title of the final session of the poetry master class I just finished teaching at Randolph College. The assignment:

To read for class: Juliana Spahr, excerpts from “Will There Be Singing”; Jeannine Hall Gailey, “The Last Love Poem,” “Calamity,” “The End of the Future,” “Introduction to Writer’s Block”; Natasha Trethewey, “Theories of Time and Space”; January Gill O’Neil, “Hoodie”

Prompt: Write a poem that looks toward the future. Some part of it should use the future tense.

It went well, although I was glad I’d lightened the reading for the last session, because the students are tired and stressed. One poem we discussed intensively was Gailey’s “Introduction to Writer’s Block”, because another group of students at Randolph, in a BFA program discussion group, asked me how I keep writing in a difficult time. I talked about switching things up–trying a different genre when one isn’t working–but also just forgiving yourself and spending time on activities that nourish what is depleted in you (whatever it is–a craft, exercise, reading, watching TV, games and puzzles, talking to friends, taking a bath). I love Jeannine’s persistence in the face of pre-pandemic calamity, her declaration that “If you wait long enough, something inside you will ignite.” She writes plenty of poems considering the possible failure of poetry, but they tend to nurture some wit and spark and hope, whatever the trampling Godzilla of the moment is. And I think she’s right: if you keep showing up to the page, cultivating whatever openness you can however you can, the words eventually come.

Because discouragement is also epidemic this year, I am joining in on an event organized by Celia Lisset Alvarez and including Jen Karetnick, both of them poets and editors extraordinaire. We’re going to talk about rejection in the context of our own recent books, and how we work to overcome it. It’s called She Persists and it’s happening at 7pm on Monday March 8th. Sign up here and I promise I’ll try to cheer you on and cheer you up!

On first looking into Shenandoah’s submissions

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Turns out there’s some good news about rejection I never really grasped before. I’m reading poetry for Shenandoah in earnest now and realizing rejected poems DO reach sympathetic readers, at least if you send them to well-edited magazines: the editors and staff readers themselves.

I am moved, entertained, impressed, and intrigued by far more work than Shenandoah can accept. I’m sure some journal readers are burnt-out or ego-tripping, but I’m inclined to guess magazine editors are often a good audience–smart about the field and in love with the art. You’d think I would know this by now. I’ve definitely felt that connection with certain editors who reject my work with personal notes like “admired these” or “came close.” But being on the other side makes it more vivid, and it cheers me.

My earlier forays into editing were less heartening. When I was newer at W&L–hired as a scholar, but writing poetry always–I once picked up a batch of poems to screen for Shenandoah‘s previous editor, R. T. Smith. Everything was paper then, and I remember sifting submissions at home by lamplight. It was clear that certain cliche-ridden lines centered on the page in flowery purple ink were not contenders, but much of the work was good. As an aspiring poet, this horrified me–how could I ever shine in these realms of gold? I suspect my competitive reaction made me a bad reader, but I was also, in those days, much less sure of my own taste and likely to be overly-influenced by the biases of other poets and critics (not unlike other young screeners at some journals now, maybe). Also a problem: I was solidly well-read in early-to-mid-20th century verse, but my knowledge of contemporary verse was spotty. At any rate, Rod never asked me to read general submissions for him again, and I was busy enough never to seek another chance.

Later, working with a couple of undergraduate interns, I edited a portfolio of poems from New Zealand for Shenandoah. That was more fun, but I also learned hard lessons. First: personal feedback in rejection letters is often returned by expletives and other hostilities, and is rarely worth it. Second: I didn’t have a strong enough network to solicit a seriously diverse portfolio, especially since Rod suggested not paying contributors, given the difficulties of international paperwork without a managing editor (I wish I’d pushed back on that point).

What’s changed: I’ve been reading new poetry heavily for years now, so while nobody knows all the names and scenes within even just U.S. verse, I know a lot more. I’ve also become a better poet myself and a better creative writing teacher, more adept at literary diagnosis.

Plus, the new editor, Beth Staples, is fabulous, and she’s framed the gig in a way I love. She reads everything that comes in and assigns many of the poems to me via Submittable. I vote yes-no-maybe on each batch with a brief explanation, and she makes the final call. We agree most of the time but not always, which strikes me as a great thing–two thoughtful people willing to challenge each other’s reactions probably make better choices.

I had feared that reading so much poetry as a teacher might drain my potential well of editorial energy, but even though I will run out of hours when the term intensifies (I’m on the verge!), I find the tasks of responding to student writers and evaluating a submission pile quite different. Basically, the Shenandoah part of the job involves delivering educated gut reactions to Beth bluntly–I am far briefer and more straightforward than I would be with an undergraduate because I’m describing a judgment rather than cultivating promise (for the most part). I’ll note that a poem moved me but the lineation doesn’t make sense, or I was dazzled by the voice but there’s one clunky clause that bothers my ear. Beth has a lot of experience about the tipping points: when might slight changes be acceptable to an author if you frame the response the right way? When is it too much to ask, too interfering?

For anyone who submitted poems to her several weeks back and hasn’t received a response yet: you might be in our growing “maybe” pile, which means at least one of us really liked your submission and we need to come back to it and make some hard calls. We are receiving a high volume of poetry subs and they’re impressive–it’s a much more diverse stack than I expected, too, both in terms of aesthetics and in the identities and experiences of the submitters. This is AWESOME but it does make poetry an especially competitive genre at Shenandoah. 

For anyone who has received a rejection: I am sorry, and please don’t send me hate mail for saying so. Many submissions are powerful without quite making it into the must-have pile; some nag at my memory already and make me wish I had a spare hour to talk with the writer. Bringing urgent material together with strong craft is HARD. Yes, there are batches by people who clearly don’t read contemporary writing, as well as sexist tripe and other obnoxiousness. But most authors are working hard and are worthy of a reader’s respect.

Also know that I look forward to reading submissions and wish I had more time to spend with them, even after long, tiring September work-days. Hang in there, keep ruthlessly revising your poems until the power beams out of them, and do hit send, and send, and send.

poe books
Poe with books I really want to read, but subs are calling me…

In which the perverse poet is chuffed about rejection

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yawnDespite the frigid temperatures, my winter so far has been poetically electric. My long-awaited chapbook arrived in early December, then several journals containing a poem or two of mine suddenly went live or hit print (here’s one), PLUS Poetry Daily honored me with a New Year’s Day feature, PLUS Amy Lemmon and Sarah Freligh at the CDC Poetry Project accepted and published my pissed-off ghazal almost as fast as a president can tweet self-serving lies.

The writing life is deeply weird this way. What the flurry of publications means is I was on fire and writing lots of poems a year or two ago, and diligent about sending them out 6-12 months ago. I actually produced very little new poetry in the last few months, “Hibernaculum” aside, although the words are coming back now. I was overworked, trying not to feel discouraged, and spending my limited writing time on a couple of prose projects with impending deadlines. I revised lots, however, and strove to give older writing its due by focusing on submissions. I sent 230 poems to magazines in 2017! Those were in batches of 5, often to 3-4 magazines at once, but still, that’s a crazy amount of Submittable action (and that’s not even counting book mss, essays, and other work I’m trying to keep under consideration). Nor are my stats brilliant. Most of those submissions were rejected, a few with encouraging notes from editors; 18 of those were accepted, plus a few more I’d sent out in 2016; other verdicts are still pending.* I’m kind of shocked, but sheer numbers mitigate the chagrin I’ve been feeling as I post social media thanks and humble-brags. If brute effort counts, I earned those publication credits.

I hope my appalling math gives somebody heart, because here we go again, trying to keep our little fires burning in another year’s chilly climate. The numbers are NOT what matters. I’ll write poems my whole life, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t shock me if one day I decide not to work so hard at finding readers, and if you’ve already made that call, I respect your sensibleness. But for the moment, I have the heart and chutzpah to keep trying, mostly failing, and very occasionally succeeding. I’m ready for 2018 to reject the hell out of me.

I’m much more glad, however, that I’m writing poems again. I’d missed it. The great collections I’ve been catching up on are replenishing the well–I’ll post on my 2017 and early 2018 reading soon. In the meantime, thanks to Donna Vorreyer, and her co-conspirator Kelli Russell Agodon, for a poke in the ribs and some publicity, too, for poetry bloggers committing to 2018 liveliness, including me. Check out her terrific list of participants here.

I won’t keep up with them: my three-prep term starts Monday, to be spiced up by tons of committee work and event planning and lord knows what ordinary-life calamities. But I feel game to try.

*As I wheedled my cat into a photo shoot that clearly bored him, Poetry Northwest just emailed asking to publish 2 poems from one of those 2017 batches. If it has this kind of cosmic influence, I may just blog about rejection all year.

 

Reasons to be cheerful, part 4

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We’re supposed to be cheery in late December, right? Ho ho ho.

I’ve been having a rough time, for reasons I can’t write about at the moment. But like H.D., when times are bad, I eat my way through it. This can be literally true: hello, Christmas pudding! But I also mean that I chew through piles of work. Writing and reading are never more important to me than when I’m feeling down and powerless. I can’t always work on the stuff I’m supposed to–my focus is more fragile–and I can hardly talk to other people, sometimes, even the kind people who don’t run in the opposite direction after a glimpse of me glowering. (Most people run, the cowards.) But I do hunker down, and this slow desperate doggedness adds up, and eventually some work bears fruit. A reference letter helps someone win a fellowship. An essay builds, paragraph by paragraph.

There are worse ways to cope than hypergraphia, I guess, even when it means isolated days of typing in pajamas.

Out of heaps of fermenting crap, small good things grow. And here I sit in that stinky paradox, feeling lucky and, alternately, choked by fumes. Ho ho cough cough.

The most surprising small good thing this December: my poetry chapbook Propagation, a fable in which a middle-aged woman in crisis enters the woods and weirdness ensues, was just accepted by Dancing Girl Press for publication in October 2017. I first drafted it in April 2014, writing a poem per day for thirty days, using Vladimir Propp’s 31 functions of the folk tale as prompts (I dropped one function and I’m not sorry). It took me a while to revise, obviously–long poems are complicated creatures. But now my protagonist gets a genuinely happy ending.

Other mss I completed last year are still gestating, but I’m receiving supportive notes and friendly feedback. This is rare, and lucky.

Additional amazements: for all the rejections I’ve received this year, and there have been a boatload, an oil tanker load, a number of generous editors have helped deliver my work to the world. Since summer, poems have appeared in Fjords, National Poetry Review, Thrush (that’s the first poem from Propagation), Tahoma Literary Review, and Queen of Cups. I’m also delighted to have a poem in the outstanding anthology edited by Jane Satterfield and Laurie Kruk, Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland. Next year will bring an essay in Crab Orchard Review and more poems in journals. Again, I labored hard to make those pieces and keep them in circulation–I’m not saying I didn’t earn a few laurel leaves. But I am also lucky.

I’ll post sometime around the new year about some terrific books I’ve been reading. The good company of dead or distant writers sustains me always. But it also feels urgently necessary to express gratitude for the friends and family near and far who keep checking in on me and cheering me on. Their persistence is the primary reason to be cheerful. Bless them, and bless leftover Christmas pudding, and bless Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and bless the antisocial hours I can spend revising mss over pots of tea.

And, finally, thanks to anyone whose reads this far. I hope, most sincerely, that whatever kind of holiday you’re laboring to create for yourself and loved ones, it bears surprising fruit, and it doesn’t stink.

 

 

Fighting about poems: Shenandoah NZ Diary, Part II

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Received by Email While Guest-Editing

I reject your rejection. You are not qualified
to cast me off. I’m a luminary: let me direct
your attention to an interstellar anthology.
You, sir or madam, have provoked a righteous
snit. A catastrophic reversion of my recent
surgery. You institutionalized me. My well-
being’s been battered by bad form letters.
Really, you made me very sad. And angry.
Sad, angry, sad, like stop-motion photography,
the sun rising, flaming, cooling, doused
with all my fondest hopes. You sack of dolts.
I thought we were friends. What a joke
your life is, what a waste of gravity. I project thee
into orbit now, thick-pate lightweight. Respectfully.

So, I wanted a new experience—creative, professional, pedagogical—and I got it, with a vengeance (although I’m hoping I haven’t inspired acts of vengeance). In May I sent out a call for work for a special Shenandoah poetry portfolio to appear in February 2013. By the September 1 deadline we had 103 packets, mostly 5 poems per author, from writers all over New Zealand and a few Aotearoans in exile. When I say “all over,” I really mean a high number from the Wellington area and a smattering from each of the other regions; my network is Wellington-based and I was only partially successful getting the word out more widely. Still, that’s a lot of poetry, and Rod Smith, Shenandoah’s Editor-in-Chief, told us we can publish a maximum of twenty-five.

The intermittent “we” in the above paragraph includes my co-editors Drew Martin and Max Chapnick. Both are senior undergraduates—although I have been suspicious for years about graduate student gatekeepers at other magazines filtering out unfashionable poems, poems that allude to sources beyond their own reading, and poems about aging bodies and other transformations born of getting older. In fact, I did like the submissions about parenthood and middle-aged chagrin more than Drew and Max did, and they liked poems of youthful urgency more than I tended to. I wanted to work with them, though, partly because of these differences. They’re different from each other, too—Drew, a musician, is drawn to oral energy and Max to allusive, intellectual stuff—but they’re both talented, opinionated, and forthright. I thought it would be clarifying to fight over poems, defending what we loved and finding ways to articulate our disappointments.

It turned out that we agreed on almost nothing. Through late August and the first week of September we read all the packets individually, marking them yes, no, and maybe. Max was the soft-hearted maybe-man while Drew and I had larger “yes” and “no” piles. Unfortunately, they weren’t the same piles. In in our first meeting, we discovered that only three authors had inspired unanimous yeses, and in those packets we were drawn to different poems. We then met twice a week for four or five weeks to wrangle each other into aesthetic submission. We came to agreement on seventeen-ish and the rest was bargaining: “you can have this, if I can have that.” Sometimes a weak line was a sticking point and we agreed to accept the poem while encouraging revision of the trouble-spot. I’ve gratefully received suggestions on my own poems from generous editors at Poet Lore, Poetry, Agni and other mags; it always seems like a sign of good editing to me and I wanted to imitate it. I’m thankful even when a rejection comes with a suggestion. Editors have overwhelming jobs, usually on top of other, paying jobs. When they show that much interest in your work, it’s flattering.

I feel good about our issue-in-progress, but for better or worse, this isn’t the issue I would have assembled by myself. I have some regrets over rejected poems. I liked a number of pieces whose virtues I never managed to articulate convincingly enough to my co-editors. One effect of the process, though, that’s probably good: my co-editors were much less cowed by big names, and not having met the submitters, were more impartial than I. (I had several crises—“Right, right, the poem has problems but we can’t reject HER/HIM!”—and they just shot me skeptical looks and waited for me to stop hyperventilating). They talked me into accepting a few poems they love but I merely respect; this is a collaboration so everyone has to win and lose sometimes. They also showed me the power in a few pieces I wouldn’t have read twice.  The result: some good work will be left out of the issue because no one fell in love with it. Every poem that willappear had a fervent champion.

Other side-effects: at least for the moment, I’m smarter about revising my own poems, because it’s easier to see what’s reject-able about them. I understand better than ever that good isn’t good enough: you have to provoke delight, passion. And, reading responses to our rejections—notes that are variously chagrined, gracious, and indignant—I can see I might not have the stomach to edit full-time. It’s hard to turn good poems away, especially when the respondents are gracious. It’s even harder to shrug off the angry replies, knowing how often I’ve swallowed the same frustration. Too much fighting! The poem up top was easy to write, not because I feel superior to my irate respondents, but because I identify with them utterly.