Skip to content

literary journals

Spreading the Word

For more than a year now I’ve been dipping into Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry which was one of last year’s great finds at the AWP conference in Vancouver. It’s a collection of essays by poetry editors of American literary journals published back in 2001. Though not many of the titles will be familiar to Canadian readers, it is enduring and enlightening reading for anyone submitting poems to literary journals anywhere. The big message that comes through here is the amazing volume of submissions the American editors must plough through to find gold. I’d be interested to know how Canadian submission figures compare: anyone out there know?

For example: the then editor of the (somewhat presumptuously named) North American Review, poet Peter Cooley, said he received about twelve thousand poems a year, all of which he read, before choosing the fifty (yes 50) he could publish per year. And that was at least five years ago, so I’d guess the numbers have been elevating since then. Think on them numbers, folks, while you are gazing bleakly upon yet another photocopied rejection slip, and try to feel a little sympathy for the editors and readers at these publications.

On the editor’s side, he comments bleakly

“…writing the cover letter appears the major creative act for a poet. Yes, life is tough, we know that. But to hear of the author’s abusive parent, recovery through therapy, botched career, tedious job, demanding children, broken dishwasher or car or toilet, dying parent, dead kitten, impotent husband, rat-infested bar, or frigid wife is not to claim my attention…”

Geez. Obviously I have been needlessly terse in my cover letters if this is what other poets have been sending in.

The other thing I’ve enjoyed about reading this collection is the sample poems each editor chooses to illustrate points of taste; none of the poets included is familiar to me, but the poems, which the editors in some cases discuss in light of their selection process, are enlightening and often dazzling.

There’s also mention of editorial meetings where each shortlisted poem is presented and discussed and argued over before being selected. Certainly I had never given much thought to the passion that the selection process can inspire in editorial staff: neither do the rather businesslike form letters that announce most acceptances give us much insight into that realm of things. Anyway, it makes me feel almost privileged to be kept waiting by a journal if I can imagine that the delay is due to my poems being read so closely and passionately (and not just lost in a pile of unread stuff somewhere on someone’s desk).

Most of the editors say that they can tell on first reading if there’s anything there for them, so a swift rejection is much worse in some ways than a long-postponed one, though it’s all the more clear from all the editors that their tastes are subjective, so we still have that to cling to.

For the prose writers out there, there’s a fiction version available too: The Whole Story: Editors on Fiction.

On a rather different note, Mary shared this strange Japanese video the other day, which shows you how to peel a potato, and I think it deserves a wider viewing public. I confess to being rather disturbed, however, by the image of mashing what must be a pretty cold spud after its polar dip.

Pick-up sticks & nationalism in poetry

Phew, so much everything to get back to after Austin. My millions of things to do are scattered twig-like all over the floor of my life. Much thinking involved, very tiring.

One meantime item is news from my UK correspondent about a fine poet friend, Stephen Watts, who has secured a dandy position as an Embedded Poet in Inverness. Who could imagine having so many new roles to aspire to in one’s lifetime?

Been thinking a lot about AWP, and the nationalistic tendencies of poetry that I certainly grew up with. AWP opens up a whole world of American poetry to me that has been completely out of the sphere of my experience both in Canada and England. My experience of the UK poetry scene opened up another such world to me in the nineties. And now I find I know, for example, the name of Mimi Khalvati as fluently as that of Lorna Crozier as fluently as that of Maxine Kumin, and yet (with a few exceptions of course) none of these names evokes the smallest flinch of recognition if uttered to well-read poetry readers outside the countries in which those poets are stars.

There are issues around publishing and distribution of course. Canada is understandably protectionist in its cultural business: a choice between keeping a culture alive or being swamped by the giant next door. So we focus as best we can on supporting our local cultural icons and building a natural literature. Not all that our writers address in their work is going to be of interest or relevance to those outside our borders, though more of it could be than manages to disperse itself. The internet is offering that much at least.

But I suspect it could be also as simple a barrier as time? Who has time to keep up with world poetry? I am awash in books I’ll never manage to read in my lifetime and feel I will hardly be able to absorb more. I’m having enough trouble catching up on what happened in Canadian poetry the 13 years I was away, staying up to date with British poetry, let alone approaching the poetry of other nations. But I’ll keep trying.

What was interesting at AWP were the amero-centralist attitudes you encountered everywhere. AWP I think aspires to present itself as an international body but doesn’t seem to me to really acknowledge its position as a predominantly American institution whose issues will be unknown elsewhere. People I’d never heard of were repeatedly described by panel moderators as “needing no introduction”. The poetry competition scandals and passionate debates about anthologies I heard reported are about American poetry competitions and American anthologies. Those scandals and debates mean zip to poets outside the US, because the competitions, anthologies and participants are unknown outside that country.

A number of the individuals staffing book fair stands of major US literary magazines asked me what the perception of their magazine was in Canada. Nil, I had to reply: nobody I know knows who you are. Survey a room of writers in Canada and you’d barely get a flicker if you mentioned journal names like Ploughshares, or Kenyon Review or even Poetry Magazine. Just as I have no doubt you’d get blank looks if you surveyed outside Canada the titles Malahat Review, Descant and Fiddlehead. I only encountered the US titles by reading the lists in the back of The Best American Poetry anthology series, to which I am hopelessly addicted. And my addiction is purely rooted in the contributor comments that mostly follow their bios: those contextual offerings are the next best thing to a poetry reading.