On April 1st of last spring, UC-San Diego’s communications office accidentally sent every single applicant — 46,337 of them — acceptance emails.  “We’re thrilled that you’ve been admitted to UC San Diego, and we’re showcasing our beautiful campus on Admit Day.”  A half an hour later they sent another email, saying, “Oops!”

Last night, I did the same thing on a slightly smaller scale.  Rattle just went live with a holiday promotion, where all new subscriptions receive a free copy of our slam issue, and all week I’ve been sending out mail-merged emails, letting everyone know of the deal.  As I set up the very last group I had to do — people who’ve contacted us for some reason but never subscribed, last names W through Z — I clicked on the wrong template, and accidentally sent them all rejection letters instead.

Oops!

And what a mess of confusion…  That group was full of people who had submitted poems in the past, sometimes years ago, sometimes last week — some of them who’d never submitted at all, and don’t even write poetry, but had purchased an individual copy of an issue in the last 10 years.  A few of them even had submissions open currently, which made it even more confusing.

Of course, I sent an apology 10 minutes later, and all I can do now is blush, and wipe the egg off my face.

But the responses reminded me that no one really knows what happens to submissions once they send them in.  I made a post a couple years ago, outlining our procedure for the Rattle Poetry Prize, but I’ve never thought to do the same thing for regular submissions — which is strange, because the vast majority of our time is spent logging and reading submissions. We receive 200 submissions every week of the year (and with 4 or 5 poems in each that’s almost 1,000 poems a week), and on busy periods we’ve received as many as 500.  Logging, reading, and replying alone amounts to a full time job.  Here’s how we do it.

Email Submissions

If you’ve ever sent an email submission, you know that 1-5 days later I reply with a slightly-personalized stock response:

Thanks for letting us consider some of your work. We’ll get back soon, typically takes about a month. Looking forward to the read.

Best,
Tim

I copy and paste in that reply, then add your name, and answer any questions you might have in your cover letter, or respond to anything interesting you might have said.  But for most people, cover letters are canned, and my replies are canned, too.

After I send the reply I read your poems right then.  Unlike with contest entries, where we’re contractually obligated to pick at least 11 winners, all we’re looking for with regular submissions are poems that interest us, and that we think might interest our readers.  So where contest reading is like fishing with a pole — pulling up every fish and examining it individually, giving it a specific rating — regular reading is like throwing out a net and pulling up anything that sticks.

What I really do here is just skim through the poems.  If a line or the content seems interesting to me, I reread the whole poem, but I don’t hesitate to move on at the first sign of trouble.  Any email with a poem I want to read again gets moved to a folder called “Possibilities.”  Most, probably 90%, are moved to a folder called “Submissions.”

Enter Megan.  Everything in the Submissions folder, she reads closely, line by line like I used to when the volume was low enough that I had time for that.  Megan is the last line of defense — you already had a chance to catch my eye, now you have a chance to catch hers.  Everything she doesn’t like is moved to the “To Be Rejected” folder.  Everything she likes joins the others in Possibilities.

About once week, Megan clears out To Be Rejected, and enters all the poets and their contact information into a group within our database.  (Yes, this is so we can contact you with promotional material in the future — as far as I’m concerned, an interest in being publish by Rattle implies an interest in reading Rattle, and if you don’t like it, don’t ask us to read your poems in the first place.)  When she’s done, I send them all form letters.  The whole process takes about a month, hence the “typically takes about a month” line.

This leaves us with the Possibilities.  Several times a month I open up that folder, which is full if poems that have already been read and bumped up to round 2 by either myself or Megan.  I read everything in that folder carefully, sometimes over and over again, sometimes days apart, and move poems I don’t want into “To Be Rejected” and print out those that I do.  Everything printed out goes to our monthly editorial meeting, where Megan, Alan, and I argue about which poems we should publish.  About half of the poems that make it to that meeting end up in the magazine.  Everything that doesn’t gets the form letter — and since you can’t add a PS or post-it note onto a mail-merged email, none of that is commented on individually.  Anything that makes it to the meeting but doesn’t get published gets a real email directly from me, saying which poem(s) came so close, and often why they just missed the mark.

Hard Copy Submissions

It’s uncanny — exactly half the submissions sent to us come through the mail.  This has always been the case, and I’m not sure why the breakdown is so even.  I keep expecting the number of email submissions to overtake the old fashioned route, but that never seems to happen.

I open up every submission that comes through the mail and check it for anything unusual — a weird request, an essay, a question, a subscription check, etc. — then everything gets thrown into a box.  When the box gets full, which usually takes less than a week, Megan stays home from the office and reads each one carefully, writing Yes, No, or Maybe on the back of the envelope, and sorting them accordingly.  When she’s done, I read the Yeses and Maybes myself, sometimes several times, often at a laundromat or in some waiting room.  Everything I like is sent to our next editorial meeting, everything I don’t is thrown back with the Nos.

Back at the office, the pile of Nos is filling up the top drawer of a filing cabinet, and about once a week Megan empties it out and adds those poems to a group in the database.  When she’d done I print out a large set of rejection letters.

You might have noticed that at this point I haven’t read anything but the slim percentage of what amounts to Possibilities.  So I spend the next day reading through all the poems as I match them up with their rejection letters, pulling out anything that catches my eye, to be re-read, and maybe taken to an editorial meeting (at which point, I’d toss out that rejection letter).  With hard copy submissions, I sign the rejection letters myself, and it’s easy to add any notes that seem worth including — sometimes detailed suggestions about a specific poem, sometimes just general encouragement, or a note about an upcoming special issue that the poet might want to keep an eye out for.  Then I stuff the letter back into its SASE, and drop a big box off at the post office.

Strangely, both forms of submitting get a unique kind of service that has nothing to do with the medium itself, and are only consequences of our reading process.  All email submissions receive an acknowledgment of receipt.  Hard copy submissions get no receipt, but may be commented on.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s fair, but then I ask what different does it make and stop worrying about it until it’s time to write a post about our procedure.

The Philosophy

If you’re still reading it this point, you’ve probably noticed that three editors are attacking these poems from three different angles:  I’m reading everything lightly, waiting for a good poem to ensnare my attention, and then reading it many times.  Megan’s reading everything closely once, and passing along what she finds worthy.  And Alan is only reading the cream of our crop, fresh from the field, one shot one kill.

Although it developed organically, over several editors and a period of 15 years, this result is no accident.  When you’re reading this many poems, the biggest problem is burnout.  Read too many poems too often, and they all start to sound the same — it’s surprisingly easy to lose even the sense of our own feelings; your taste buds become overwhelmed.  These three different layers of attentiveness, I think, allow for the most comprehensive and consistent judgments three people can make.

And the key is really Alan at the top.  Having never read over 1,000 poems a week, he’s confronting what we’ve chosen as an actual reader would — eager and untainted, ready to love or hate with impunity.  In the end, it’s his opinion that’s most important — not because he founded the magazine (nice as that is on the resume) — because he’s our tabula rasa, the voice of real people who don’t have to read so damn much and still do it for pleasure.

So that’s why we roll the way we roll.  I’m not sure why I’m posting this, but I think some might be curious, and I’m also wondering what you might think of it.  There are other ways we could do this, of course — hire interns, have more meetings, uses little card-paper rejection slips, and so on.  But there’s only the three of us, one full-time, one part-time, and one some-of-the-time, and given the amount of material we sift through, this is the best system I’ve found.

A few weeks ago I sent out my semi-annual mass email to announce the fall’s newsletter (available as a free PDF download here, if I haven’t mentioned it).  As always happens when you email 20,000 people, hundreds of them write back — most to say thanks, some to change an address, but then a fragrant few just to spread their craziness.

I was about to say that I don’t understand how people can get upset at a lowly little poetry magazine that runs at a loss for the love of the game — but I guess I do understand.  200 rejection letters a week is a lot of negativity to release in the atmosphere without expecting a little bit of blowback.  That poetry editors don’t die from bad karma is probably proof there’s no such thing as karma.

Moreover, the volume of angry emails was exacerbated this fall because in the newsletter I actually asked for letters to the editor, so I could include the most interesting in a new section next spring.  (If you have a question or comment about Rattle, write me a coherent email, and I’ll probably post it in e.8.)  So not only do I deserve it, but I’m also asking for it.  I figured the least I could do is share some of them.

I’m going in reverse-chronological order, because that’s how inboxes are arranged, and this one came in today.  I might put it in the newsletter, because there’s a serious question I’d like to respond to underneath the crazy (Ignore the typos in all of these, I’m not going to bother writing “[sic]” every time, I’m just cutting and pasting.):

Editor Type:

Let’s see. You have a circ of 4000. What does that translate too? Oh, Wow, two niggardly contributor’s copies! Gee, I can buy the world with that. Yeah, like that’s gonna put food in my mouth. Hey everyone, look at my two copies, all shiny and new. I feel soo… special. I’m in the Big Times now! I’m a famous author now. I can go on the talk show circuit – Oprah here I come!

Soon to be famous,

Chris Roberts

Every time I field a complaint like this, I’m tempted to write back saying, “Good point — we should start profit-sharing with everyone we publish.”  And then I’d send a bill for $500.  But, of course, no one we’ve actually published ever makes this complaint — for some reason it’s only the people that get rejected over and over again, and would never seen any money even if we did start paying contributors.  Funny, that.  Or maybe noble, the selfless few who stand up for the 200 poets we exploit every year, out of the goodness in their hearts?

If you Google “Chris Roberts, poet,” the first thing that comes up is an essay attacking The New Yorker on hackwriters.com.  A papertrail of patriotism.  The essay is actually well-written and the arguments are valid.  Maybe it just feels different when the criticism is aimed at you.  Or maybe the difference is between a magazine with a circulation of a million selling ad space from a high rise in Times Square, and a magazine with a circulation of 4,000 that won’t even do ad swaps with other journals from a little cubicle.  Or maybe there is no difference at all.

For the sake of balance, here’s a day-old email from one of those sad souls Chris Roberts feels the need to defend:

Dear Tim,
Forgive me as this note has been much delayed.  Thank you so very much for including my poems in RATTLE.  It’s an amazing magazine and I am so honored to be among such company.  And it’s a gorgeous production (design, paper quality–wow!).  Thanks over & over again.
Best,
Christine

For the record, I can’t think of anything that would make me happier than sending checks to contributors. If only…

Moving on:

Thanks for your e-mail announcements, but I think I’ve been rejected enough times from your journal to desist from submitting my work in general and in specific to Rattle. Your slips of paper for rejection forms are humiliating. I’m sure you get hundreds, maybe thousands of submissions, but really, you send the same form every time with nothing to offer really. Seems that is the way of poetry journals in our day and time, editors take no time to respond unless they feel it is in their best interest to reply, and they are so short-staffed that all the so many people that allegedly read the poems at Rattle, not one says anything worthwhile about the submission. In short, people that take the time to submit to your journal don’t get the benefit of a response, but that is the poetry and literary journal industry in our day. Maybe one day I will write something that would be worthwhile to publish in a journal, but I think that I don’t really care as most of the stuff I read is drivel anyways, even from the well-known journals like Poetry.

Thanks, but you probably can take me off your e-mail list at this point, as I don’t care to be informed in the future about your journal.

Yours sincerely,
Xxx Xxxxx xx Xxxxx

I redacted the name this time, because unlike Chris’s missive, this one seemed less like a comment he wanted published than a disheartened flailing of emotion.  I tried to explain to him the nature of our transaction — that we’re trading opportunity, that I’m offering him the possibility of an audience, he’s offering me the possibility of poetry that an audience might want to read.  My title may be editor, for some arcane reason, but when it comes to poetry, all I really am is a filter.  I pick out gold from the garbage so our subscribers don’t have to.  If you want editing, start a writers’ group.  I do what I can, but I can’t do much, and as much as I want to help, I don’t “owe” you anything.

Next!

This is my favorite insult yet, set in a comedic structure, almost like a knock-knock joke.  Such a casual delivery, too — it took two weeks to hear the punch line:

“Gail”: who funds your magazine?

Me: Why do you ask?

“Gail” (two weeks later): your subject matter. the pharm industry might throw you some money if you approached them.

Oh snap.  This made me laugh out loud, and I don’t even know what she was trying to say.  That we publish too many poems about illness?  Do prescription drugs appear in any poems we’ve published recently?  Maybe she just means that poets are crazy?  I can certainly vouch for that.  If you have any other ideas, let me know.

Well, there were many more where that came from, but I didn’t think to save them, and this is probably a good place to stop anyway.  But tune in next time for more adventures from the poetry mailbag!

The forthcoming winter issue will feature an interview with Molly Peacock, and I love one of the things she talks about, which I’ll preview for you here.

PEACOCK: The shimmering verge is for me the place between two states of being or two emotional states. I opened my one-woman show by asking people to imagine a paint chip and that paint chip is green, and then I asked them to imagine another paint chip and that paint chip is blue, and then I asked them to get one greenish-blue and one blueish-green and greenish-greenish-blue and blueish-blueish-green until they can’t tell the difference; they can’t tell what color the paint chip is anymore. And that is the shimmering verge, the place where one color shifts into the other and you can’t figure out exactly where. And that’s where one emotional state shifts into the other and you can’t figure out exactly where. And for me, that’s where the poem occurs. And because the poem is always about the thing we don’t have words for, that’s why the poem exists, because we didn’t have words for it before. … And it’s not that there isn’t a border, it’s that you can’t quite tell where it is, like where the side of road exactly ends and the land begins. It’s that kind of thing—where the lake ends and the shore begins.

That might be the best description of “real” poetry that I’ve ever heard.  Poetry gives words for things we don’t have words for yet — if there were words, we wouldn’t need the poem.  That’s the problem with cliches and hallmark verse, and I suppose it’s what makes real poetry too challenging for most people — not that they couldn’t understand the shimmering verge, but that they don’t understand that this experience is what they’re looking for.

The concept deserves its own post, but it’s not going to get one.  Not much of a segue, I know, but what I want to talk about is visual poetry.

Starting a couple weeks ago we’ve added Dan Waber as a contributing editor, helping us make visual poetry a more regular part of Rattle.  Whether loving it or sounding baffled, we’ve received a huge response to last summer’s Vispo issue, and I’ve been trying to think of a way to keep that fire going.  It’s explained in a bit more detail here, but what we’re going to do is this: Dan Waber will write a column on visual poetry in every e-issue, usually focusing on a specific poem, series, or artist.  We’re also encourage black and white visual poems to be considered for the open section of our print issues.

Quite incidentally, we’ve already got two concrete poems slated to appear this winter — a shaped sonnet by Patti McCarty, and a textual flame by Paul Siegell.  We’ll also have an ekphrastic sonnet, and the photo it’s written after.  I wasn’t sure if any of these should be considered visual poems — each of them are enhanced by a visual element, but that visual element isn’t really necessary to any of them; if you just read the poems out loud, they’d still be good poems.

Since we now have a resident vispo guru, I asked Dan what he thought, and he directed me to this fun page, where he turns categorization into a quiz, listing 31 gray-area pieces, and making us decide.  Of course, which category a poem falls into will always take a back seat to the experience of the poem itself, but the human brain is basically a categorizing machine, so you can’t blame us for feeling the urge.  If you’re up to the challenge, take the quiz.

Two interesting results seem to arise.  First, the general concensus of the results for each piece seems to stablize as the quiz progresses — respondents seem to agree more often later in the series.  Dan describes the quiz as an educational tool, forcing us to make a label and so exploring that label, and this suggests that the tool actually works.  Maybe we don’t always agree what to call these things, but the more often we label them, the more confident we become in our labels.

What’s more interesting, though, is that visual poetry seems to exist as another kind of “shimmering verge” — that indescribable ground between poetry and visual art.  “And it’s not that there isn’t a border, it’s that you can’t quite tell where it is…”

In the same way that, I think, the shimmering verge scares fiction readers away from poetry, I think it might be the shimmering verge that scares poetry readers away from visual poetry — if you don’t know that the shimmering verge is what you’re looking for, you don’t know what to make of it, it’s unsettling.  But if you embrace the shimmering verge, then these are the poems that become most exciting.

Rattle.com as a blog is now one year old!  I thought it’d be fun to list the top 15 most-read poems since we launched the format. The number in parentheses are unique views to the poem’s individual page.  Note that views through the RSS feeds and on the main page are not recorded, so you could add a few thousand baseline “reads” to each poem.

June 26th, 2008 – June 26th, 2009

1. “Things My Son Should Know After I’ve Died” by Brian Trimboli (69,999)
2. “Death and Tacos” by Nathaniel Whittemore (47,745)
3. “Telemarketer” by Brett Myhren (43,221)
4. “The Lesson” by Lynne Knight (17,921)
5. “Barcelona” by Albert Haley (5,239)
6. “Poet and Audience” by Erik Campbell (2,360)
7. “After the Bowling Stopped” by Thadra Sheridan (1,762)
8. “Mahler in New York” by Joseph Fasano (1,292)
9. “Things Rich and Multiple and Alone” by Bob Hicok (643)
10. “How to Write an Erotic Letter” by Anthony Farrington (530)
11. “Lovely Day” by Bob Hicok (512)
12. “The End and the Aim” by Ruth Bavetta (487)
13. “How She Described Her Ex-Husband…” by Martha Clarkson (425)
14. “What Teacher Make” by Taylor Mali (408)
15. “Narrow Openings” by Francesca Bell (345)

Notes:

Social networking is such a crazy multiplier effect; the top 3 probably have more page views than all the rest of the poems from this year combined.

“Mahler in New York” was first posted on New Years Day, as is our tradition for the Rattle Poetry Prize winner, but click that link and today for the first time you can hear Joseph read the poem as well.

Six of the poems include audio of the poet reading.

Bob Hicok is the only poet to appear twice.

Ruth Bavetta sports the only visual poem.

I’ll post a new list every few months, as appreciable changes appear in the rankings.

www.theamericandissident.org

Most literary editors, I think, know of G. Tod Slone, though I doubt very many readers do.  He’s the crated dog to our mailman — a constant but ineffectual yapping in our ears from some unknown location (is it Massachusetts?), always tilting at the same windmills with the same catch-phrases (“vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy!” “tenure track literati!”).  The general consensus — and Megan’s opinion, too — is that he’s not worth the paper it takes to reply to his emails.  And that’s mostly true.  But to me he’s a delightful foil — like a tertiary character on some sitcom, a lovable curmudgeon, inconsolable crank that he is.  To me he’s Newman (“Hello Newman!”).

We’ve had some vigorous debates in the past — he strapped a homeless man to a rickshaw, I changed the size tags on my skinny-jeans, you know the drill.  Actually, we published a review where he trashed Best American Poetry, because I wanted to show reviewers that it was okay to go negative, and I figured BAP could take it — but it included a false accusation that I had to retract, and then he took his contributor copy and wrote a negative review of that, which would have been fine, except it included more false accusations, and I decided we couldn’t trust him enough to publish him anymore.  So he got all huffy, and then we had a highly entertaining email exchange.  It’s all recreated here if you care (but why would you?).

You can read any of his articles or reviews or missives to get a sense of his argument, which never changes.  The poetry world is run by a bunch of academic/PC gatekeepers, too comfortable in their cushy jobs to be willing to rock the boat.  There’s a small kernel of truth to it, but also a strange loop involved where I’m never quite sure what boat needs to be rocked, other than the establishment itself.  But it is what it is, and he’s the love-child of Chatty-Cathy and the Energizer Bunny.

Anyway, the best part about G. Tod Slone is that, such a caricature himself, he publishes caricatures in his literary magazine (www.theamericandissident.org).  What artistic layering!  As soon as I saw this cartoon of The Pedestal Magazine’s John Amen, I knew I had to have one of my own.  How would he render my receding hairline and boyish good looks?  In what ridiculous setting would he place me?  The possibilities were endless, and that’s what gave me the energy required for the vigorous debate above.

It took him a year and a half, but yesterday he finally sent me the caricature you see in this post, and I have to say I’m very disappointed, on two fronts.  First of all, I’m not in it.  I assume that’s Thoreau on the mock-cover, and interestingly my high school English teacher used to call me Thoreau, because I sported that awful beard (couldn’t grow the mustache until senior year).  But I’m not going to give Slone the psychic or stalkerly credit to have known that.  So I’m not there.

What’s much worse: I see two ways to read the parody of Rattle, hinging on the “Courage Issue” label.  The “Courage” might be ironic — we think we’re being courageous, but really we’re publishing White American poetry along with a ghettoized sub-genre to justify patting ourselves on the back.  That would be an interesting critique — I don’t think it’s true, but it’s something that I worry about, and try hard not to do.

Unfortunately, that’s not the point Slone is trying to make.  I asked him.  Instead, he’s trying to say that this is what a Courage Issue would really look like:  an article about reverse-racism, a tribute to White Americans, a posthumous interview with Thoreau — and no lesbian sestinas!  Yikes.  Here’s Slone in his own words:

Yes, I thought, how unoriginal can one get with the Tribute to Afro-Amer poets and how thoroughly PC.  America seems to favor anything but raw, risky truth telling.  The scope of diversion from such truth telling is immense!  For me, it gets hackneyed to see on the front cover of every other lit mag the diversity dogma in one shape or another, as in Latina Haiku or Queer Senryu or Asian-American Poet.  So, I thought, original would be the white poet thing, knowing it just would not happen RE an est-order lit journal, which by definition would automatically be PC.  By “courage,” yes I was evidently implying that you would not have the courage to do something un-PC.  So it implies not that you SHOULD but rather that you likely NEVER WOULD.   I’m of course quite aware that the Left knee-jerk balks at the term PC and ad hominizes anyone who dares evoke it or otherwise simply suggests it exists.  And that’s sad because the left cannot grow if it does not confront its weaknesses.  PC is a real phenomenon, serving to muzzle and enforce groupthink, as opposed to individual questioning and challenging.

Rather than knee-jerk balk and ad homenize, I think I’ll just let that statement ad homenize itself.  Apparently Slone’s had this problem in the past.  As always, it looks like Megan was right — this guy isn’t even worth the LOLs he brings with him.  And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

But stick around for the comments, I’m sure Slone will show up.  Rather than reply, I’d like to direct him to the post I already made, explaining why we should feature a tribute to African American poets.  Although a more succinct answer might have just been G. Tod Slone.

This blog has been full of discussion lately, and I love it — it gives me things to think about (and thus post about).  In a comment thread from last week, “G the Art Spy” argued that we publish too much poetry these days — that a journal that published infrequently and was “extremely choosy” would be most successful.   I replied that there’s no such thing as great poetry — only good poetry, and it’s hard to get people to agree even on that.  A hyperbolic statement, and the ever-engaging Cafais called me out: “Really? The great ones are rare, but they are still out there.”

Cafais is right, of course, but I do believe it’s practically true that there’s no such thing as great poetry, at least from the standpoint of a literary magazine.  Great poems exist, but they’re so rare that it’s most effective to operate under the premise that they don’t.

Like “God,” great poems are defined by consensus.  A great poem is any poem that a vast majority of poetry readers would acknowledge to be great.  I can only think of a handful written in the last 100 years.  “Howl” and “Prufrock” certainly — probably “The Wasteland,” too, although I know several people who seem to despise it.  Plath’s “Daddy.”  Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.”  Maybe Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.”  Maybe something by Cummings, but I can’t decide which one.  The most recent I can think of are Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” and (I would argue) Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror / Terror of the Future” sequence.

It’s interesting to explore what these poems have in common — an epic harnessing of the contemporary zeitgeist, etc. — but that’s not the point.  The point is: look how few and far between.

As an editor, you can’t pretend that you’ll be able to publish one of these poems — you’d be publishing one poem every decade…and how would you find that one poem, if you’re not receiving any submissions or being active in the literary community?

While there are very few great poems, there are a great many good poems — poems with a strong voice and a resonant energy, that will connect with some in particular and, for them, rise to the level of greatness.  And that’s what you have to focus on.  Every issue of Rattle contains maybe a dozen poems that move me personally — the rest are poems that I think might move other readers, the goal being that no matter who reads, everyone will be able to find their dozen.  Poetry is subjective; that’s all you can hope for.

In the 15 years of Rattle, we’ve published one poem that I think has a strong case for being called great.  Donald Mace Williams’ “Wolfe” is a flawless epic, and in turning the legend of Beowulf into a critique of man’s encroachment on nature, it has a chance at ringing the bell of the current zeitgeist.  That’s why we took the unusual step of reprinting it as a chapbook.  Does it have the power to move enough people to call it great?  The odds are long, but only time will tell.

We’ve also published several poems that border on greatness.  Li-Young Lee’s “Seven Happy Endings.”  Lynn Shapiro’s “Sloan-Kettering.”  Sophia Rivkin’s “Conspiracy.”  Salah al Hamdani’ “Baghdad, Mon Amour.”  And there are others.  But I don’t think any of them have the  universality to be called truly great — they’re great for some readers, but merely good for others.  We all have different histories and proclivities.  And that’s what’s really great.

What I want to do, though, is ask you:  What poems do you think are great?  List as many as you can think of, and maybe we’ll make a big list.  I’d love to find some that I haven’t read yet.

The first book was written 5,000 years ago, and the first book review 4,999 years, 11 months, and 28 days.  There’s been quite the hubbub ever since, particularly when it comes to reviews of poetry.  Should we waste space writing negative reviews, when so many brilliant collections languish in the shadows?  But if they’re always positive, don’t they become as uninteresting and distrusted as blurbs?  Does critical opinion even matter?  Is any publicity good publicity?  And so on.  Here are some recent rounds of the brouhaha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  (Hey, one of those is me!)  There are plenty more where that came from — if you read any of those articles, there will be links to other articles, with links to other articles, and so on.

Most of us fondle the elephant in the room, but for some reason we stop short of naming it.  Maybe (to borrow Marlon Carey) the elephant is just so evident that addressing it can’t be revelant.  Or maybe there are just too many careers at stake.  Either way, no one seems willing to confront how fundamentally subjective art really is, or how successful art — and I mean art that has the power to transform people — is an unharnessable snowball of luck and skill and temperament and vision and time and timing.  I’ve been to the contemporary art museum.  I’ve seen Frank Stella and Blue Square #2.  Doodles my kid could draw — and I don’t even have a kid!  It’s not, as Vonnegut muses, that there are detailed frescoes buried beneath three gallons from a Sherwin Williams color swatch.  Mark Rothko couldn’t have painted the Sistine Chapel.  And yet people are moved by post-minimalism and abstract expressionism — at least enough people to fill a room if you hang a painting there.

I’ve never read art criticism in my life, but I can tell you how Red Rectangle with Yellow Stripe works.  Stripped of all referents, all sense of time and place, the viewer is forced to enter the painting — is forced to daydream, not in the direction the artist commands, but anywhere the mind desires.  With all the claptrap of meaning removed, we see art finally for what it fundamentally is:  a mental mirror.  Art is the place we go to lose ourselves in the oneness of creation, and the best way lose yourself and touch the infinite is to dive deeper within (I don’t want to get off on a tangent, so just trust me on that).  Hence the subjective nature of art.

Every reader carries their own baggage on that journey, because there’s no one there to carry it for you — it’s an entirely private experience.  Through the dual miracles of nature and nurture, we all have a hell of a lot in common, but no two people share the same history or identity or logophilia.  We have moods that can change in minutes.  All of that effects the way we encounter books (or any works of art).  And everyone knows it.

Over on the Harriet blog, Thomas Brady posited that the public’s lack of interest in poetry is due to a failure to sustain consensus of opinion: “if no façade of objective stability exist over and above that subjectivity, and the public senses no objective control, public interest is sure to wane—eventually destroying contemporary poetry’s legitimacy.”  I would argue the opposite:  If anything turns the public off of poetry, it’s the pretense of objectivity — it’s the professor in your ear telling you that Edna St. Vincent Millay is great, when you can read for yourself and see that she does nothing for you.  In the baseball metaphor we were using, you don’t need a box score to tell you that Babe Ruth just hit a home run — you’re at the game, you can use your own eyes.  And the disconnect appears when that voice in your ear doesn’t match what you’re seeing on the page.  That’s why so many people who don’t read it say “I just don’t get poetry” — they’ve been taught that poetry is something to be gotten, instead of what it really is: something to be experienced.

Critics like to pretend that an official scorer is necessary, when we’d be better off at the other end of the press box — the TV booth, where there’s as much color commentary as there is analysis.  The game is right in front of us and we can score it ourselves; we just want the experience enhanced.  Tell me where to look, not what to think.

So three days before the quincimillenial anniversary of the first book review, I’d like to propose a new kind of book review (and maybe it’s not even new for all I know).  Let’s stop pretending these are objective critiques and start writing personal narratives — don’t tell me whether or not a book is good, tell me about your experience with the book.  Tell me why you picked it up in the first place — did you know the poet, were you drawn to the cover, the title, what was it?  Where did you read it?  How long did it take?  Were you transported immediately or did you daydream?  Which poems resonated with you and why?  The speaker in the poem reminded you of your sister?  Your experience of Brazil was different?  You’re growing tired of poems about divorce?  Why?

Not only would reviews like this be more interesting to read, but they’d be more honest, more true to the real experience of reading poetry.  Because every time you respond to a book, that response has just as much to do with you as it does to the author.  Let’s finally face it.

This is an idea we’ve been kicking around since publishing Cameron Conaway’s review of Clifton’s Voices.  Conaway starts and ends the review with an anecdote about having dinner with Clifton when she visited his college — it was a strange way to write a review, and at first we were skeptical, but the more we thought about it, the more we liked it.  And I think you can go a lot farther than Conaway did.

So we’ve decided to add this note on style to our guidelines.  Getting poets to follow guidelines — or often even to read them — is like herding cats, and we have dozens of traditional reviews scheduled to be published over the next few months.  But I’d like to gradually phase in this new style — the personal narrative review.  We have hundreds of books available for review, and we’d be happy to send you a few.  Anyone willing to write yourself into the script?

Thanks, Carol, for letting me know of a lively and relevant discussion that’s going on right now at the Eratosphere.  It focuses on an article by Sandra Beasley in the latest Poets & Writers, “From Page to Pixils,” which you’d think might have been the inspiration for yesterday’s post, but I actually hadn’t seen it yet.  Beasley offers an insightful rehash of the reasons why poets shouldn’t be afraid to publish online.

Good stuff, and I want to respond to a lot of it — but I’m out of underwear, and need to spend the next couple hours reading submissions at the laundromat.  So rather than a proper follow-up post, I’m going to throw down some random thoughts, bullet style:

<< As a response to just the first sentence of Carlin’s comment:  I was hoping folks would write in and let me know about journals that are doing interesting things online that I’m not familiar with.  I’m looking forward to checking out Open Loop Press and HarperStudio, thanks for sharing that.  Also, I have to say I regret not mentioning No Tell Motel as an online magazine that does poetry right.  They publish daily, five times a week, and focus on one poet per week.  So not only do you get your daily dose of poetry, but you also get to build a mini-relationship, a little fling, with one particular author (hence the clever title).  It’s really a great setup, and Reb publishes good work, too.

<< Both Beasley and (oops) [T]he Eratosphere folks imagine an editor being unfamiliar with a poet they’re trying to decide to publish, and then Googling them to see what else they’ve written.  This idea is just baffling to me — if I’m looking at a particular poem, what do I care what other poems that poet has written?  How on earth does it matter to the experience our readers will potentially have with that poem?  Seriously, I’m asking…

<< That said, I think what comes up when you Google a poet is very important — “managing that virtual dimension,” as Beasley puts it.  When I started writing, I was writing junk.  I never worried about my reputation or a career.  Writing was a hobby, publishing poems was fun.  So I published a lot of junk.  The funny thing is, junk in print disappears — tiny magazines are read once, by a couple hundred people, and never read again.  Junk online lasts forever.  If you Google my name, you can still find poems that I wish I hadn’t published.   When I started taking poetry more seriously, I realized that I had to do a better job of putting good work online, and I made a conscious effort to send some of my best poems to the e-zines I read.  Which is why a poem like “After Hopper” appears in Pedestal Magazine.

<< I don’t know a lot about web traffic or circulation figures, so I’m always very interested to hear other editors dropping insights into how large their audience is.  Several months ago, also in Poets & Writers, I learned that Rattle’s circulation is higher than Iowa Review and Georgia Review.  I probably mention this far too often, but, quite frankly, it made my day.  The same thing just happened online.  Beasley quotes the editor of Coconut: “”A new issue of Coconut gets about ten thousand unique page views in its first two weeks.”  Rattle.com receives 10,000 unique page views on a single bad week.  When things are going good, it’s 10,000 a day.

<< While I’m harping, try this: Go to Alexa.com and see if you can find any literary magazine that has a higher traffic ranking than Rattle.com.  If you find anything, let me know.

<< Since every poem we print appears online, publishing with us means that your work will see not only one of the top 10 (at least) print circulations of any literary venue in the country, but you’ll also find more web readers than any online magazine can offer.  We don’t pay our authors in dollars, unfortunately, but that’s not a bad reward.

<< And still Rattle gets very little publicity.  Beasley lists dozens of magazines in her article, and seems to interview several editors.  I can think of one time Rattle has been mentioned in Poets & Writers, a few sentences in an article about contests.  Another year has gone by with no Pushcart Prizes or BAP reprints.  I could whine on, but I won’t.  Instead I’ll ask Beasley to take the Google challenge.  Type “Theories of Falling,” her very good debut collection, into a search engine.  What literary journals come up on the first page?  Iowa Review?  AGNI?  Anti-?  Nope.  But Rattle’s review of the book is there.

<< Okay, sorry for that tangent.  In the article, Sven Bikerts of AGNI says: “”Philosophically, I’m of two minds about this. Proliferation is what every author is after. Yet too much proliferation undermines the authority and prestige of the printed material, as the poem becomes part of a flow—a generalized cultural avalanche.” I love AGNI and I love Sven, but I have no idea what he could possibly mean here.  Authority and prestige?  Is that what poets are really after?  Not an intimate and  memorable connection between the writer and a large audience?   Not having a positive effect on social lives?  You want the ivory tower?  Huh…

<< Over on the Eratosphere, Mark Allinson says: “I don’t bother submitting to them anymore. Mainly because I am convinced that only submitting poets and their immediate families will ever read them.” I beg to differ (see above).

<< Kate Benedict of Umbrella says that she would put audio poetry onto her e-zine, but that it would cost too much time and bandwidth.  The audio mixing software I bought cost $25, adding audio to a poem takes about 5 minutes, and with a hundred of mp3s in our archive and a lot of traffic, we’ve never come close to going over bandwidth.  I think our hosting costs $112/year; it’s not like we have an extensive plan.  Kate, if you see this and want some help, shoot me an email.

Well, I’d like to add more — some interesting discussion about how to engage readers, whether or not there’s a publishing ladder, and so on — but my roll of quarters calls.

In a comment on last week’s very brief post, Cafais asks, “Why, in 2009, is a tribute to ‘African American’ poets necessary?” It’s a very important question, of course — I asked the same as part of the promotional blurb for the issue.  The main point, Cafais writes, seems to be that black poetry should be allowed to flourish — but wouldn’t we all agree that this should apply to all kinds of poetry?  Why focus on race at all?

The question is too big for a single issue of a magazine to answer, or for a single person to answer, I suspect, but I’d hoped that we could at least help cultivate an answer within the body of our audience.  The point wasn’t to provide a solution, but rather, to open up an internal dialogue on race.  But Cafais is a subscriber, who’s read the issue, and still he asks — so maybe I should attempt an answer.

The short version is simple.  I consider myself a liberal, open-minded person — I’m young, and like almost everyone in my generation, I find it difficult to even comprehend the fact the Civil Rights Act is only 45 years old (that my parents were alive during segregation!).  The idea itself is completely foreign to my sense of morality, alien to my entire world view.  It seems like we’re so far past that.

And still, I’ve learned more about my self and my country in putting this issue together than in any other project I’ve ever worked on.  If the issue can have that kind of profound effect on me, I think it can have an impact on others as well.

Another short answer: As Cafais mentions, there was a time when African American authors were segregated to the back of the book, with the implication that their poetry wasn’t real poetry.  As always, our “Tribute” is a tribute — a celebration of black poets that, rather than echo that wrong, hopes to move beyond it.

The long answer stretches the bounds of articulation.  I think the center of all poetry is empathy.  This is the only medium where your audience is the medium:  poetry is an art of ventriloquism; a poet is using your body — your breath, your heart beat, your vocal chords — to produce his voice.  Together the two of you are working symbiotically to create an acoustic and linguistic experience — every single time you read the poem.  It’s the only experience we have where you’re not just stepping into someone else’s shoes, you’re stepping into their body, their mind, their moment in time.

Unless we’re an African American in the United States in 2009, we cannot know what it’s like to be an African American in the United States in 2009.  Unless we lived as a black American through the civil rights movement, we cannot know what it was like to live as a black American through the civil rights movement.  The fundamental lesson when dealing with issues of race or gender or sexuality isn’t that we should all be treated equally (that should be self-evident), and it’s not that we all have different experiences — it’s that we can’t know those other experiences, trapped as we are, within our own private world.  If we want to try to understand other experiences — and we should — then we need help.

When I was an undergraduate I attended a lecture that tried to teach us how to visualize a multidimensional space as a way to better understand superstring theory.  We started with a three-dimensional sphere, and imagined how that collapses into an infinite series of circles in two dimensions.  Then we went back to the sphere and tried to do the opposite, blowing it out into 4-D — it looked like a kind of donut, where any point on an infinite number of spheres translated to a point on the surface of the donut.  It wasn’t easy, but after an hour of straining our minds to the brink, most of us could get at least a fleeting grasp of the image before it fell apart again.  We felt good — and then the lecturer said, “Now just do that 7 more times and you’ll have the 10-dimensional space required for M-theory.”

That’s how issues of identity work.  I can’t know the experience of being a woman, let alone the million experiences in being the woman that is my wife.  I can’t know the million experiences in being the black man that is Terrance Hayes.

But poetry, as a fundamentally empathetic medium, gets me closer than anything else.

You might then ask, why not just publish the poetry of Terrance Hayes?  Well, obviously, we do — several of the poets from this summer’s tribute section have appeared in Rattle in the past.  I can’t be sure, but I’d bet that there isn’t a single issue of Rattle that doesn’t have African American poets in its open section.  The difference is, those poets appear without a context — we read those poems without an awareness of their self-identities, and so they only speak to the topics they directly address.

In gathering together 30 African American poets, we’re providing a context where the poems can speak to each other, as well as to a broader whole.  The collective effect, I think, is exponential — the overall impact is magnitudes larger than it would have been, had the poems appeared individually, scattered throughout an issue.

Obama aside, we’re not living in a post-racial America.  There are still lessons to be learned, wounds to be healed, experiences to understand.  The very reaction like that of Cafais (and please don’t feel like I’m singling you out, you’re not alone) is evidence enough.  In the past we’ve done tributes to Native American poets, Italian poets, Vietnamese poets, Filipino poets — none of which were met with skepticism or unease.  With this issue I’ve had those doubts myself.  Race is still a sensitive subject in this country, a horrible historical fact that we haven’t finished dealing with yet.

So that’s why a tribute to African American poets is necessary in 2009.

If you haven’t noticed, the summer issue of Rattle is now available.  There are two posts I wanted to make about it, but I don’t have time right now — I’m driving up to San Francisco right now to read with Joel Tan tonight at Moe’s Books (see event list).  So for the moment I’ll just post the beautiful cover and list the contributors.  More soon.

CONVERSATIONS
Toi Derricotte
Terrance Hayes

ARTWORK
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Mark Vallen