life in the slush pile

One of poetry's great pleasures is sharing work in a congenial home, and that more often than not -- and especially for the poet emerging from solitude and a local or personal audience -- means sending out unsolicited submissions. After one issue in the absent trenches, one neophyte editor's story of the slush pile and how to escape.

Being an editor, and thus a member of the administrative class, I present this explaination in Powerpoint • bullet format.

• First is first: we received over two hundred submissions at absent, for a total of nearly a thousand poems. We took less than half a dozen of them (the bulk of our first issue was out of necessity constructed from solicited work -- I expect the number to be at least double for issue two.) I envy someone like Jessica Smith, whose outside voices anthology has much looser editoral criteria.

It's (certainly!) not that Smith lowers the bar, but rather that in constructing an issue of absent we were constrained by not only quality, but by the desire to create a coherent issue. In any case, I can say personally that I am incredibly grateful to the people who submitted to absent (except the guy who keeps spamming me with weird stuff about the Kabbalah). You should know that I spent at least ten minutes with each submission, and in many cases quite a lot more. What colleges sometimes say when they reject people is true here -- I could have assembled a group just as wonderful from the people I was forced to pass on.

• I am convinced that the best way to have your work seriously considered by a fellow poet is to send it to one of the many online magazines for poetry. If you are reading rhubarb, the chances are your tastes in contemporary poetry are very well served by the many magazines I've read and reviewed poems from over the last two (!) years. Find poems you like, that resonate with you, and track down the relevant magazines. I know little about print publications (although anonymous commentors are welcome to weigh in), but what I have heard does not inspire confidence in the editorial processes of many large and small magazines with actual offices and University switchboard phone numbers.

• If you have not read an issue of the magazine to which you are submitting, do not submit. If you read an issue and do not like it, or (which amounts to the same thing) do not grok it, save everybody's time and do not submit. There are many towns in poetryland, and you can "take a train" to "a different town" very easily. In this "different town" you may enjoy "the buildings" better, and your work is much more likely to be accepted by the "town planning comission."

• Read the guidelines before submitting. They are very short. Please read them. At first I would send polite e-mails to those who had not read them, asking them to resubmit. Later I sent curt e-mails. Finally, I gave up. Editors receive huge numbers of submissions, and we each have systems to keep things in order. Please help us not lose you in the spam. Guidelines are not oppressive tools of the ruling class, they are the only thing standing between us and Bartleby's desk of refusal.

• Cover letters. A nervous Nellie about the task of being an editor, I asked for them in the first guidlelines, but my experience let me to delete the request in our latest guidelines for issue two. I learned very little from learning where people had published, where people taught, and where people received their MFAs. The slight advantage cover letters gave me was twofold. I got to know which writers were "breaking in" -- and being a break-in myself, I had some additional sympathy and interest in this work. And, in the cases where I recognized the names of magazines poets had published in, I had some rough idea that the person submitting had some idea of what we as an editorial team were aiming at.

• Cover letters cont'd. Funny or wacky cover letters are really not fun. If we are reading your cover letter, we are reading your submission. A small minority of contributors I felt were adopting tactics from the marketing industry more suited to selling X-treme colas than actual poetry. I didn't throw anything out because of a cover letter -- I don't expect poets to know how to interact with other human beings -- but please: make our lives more pleasant by being brief and to the point. Unless I know you personally. In which case, I liked your wacky cover letter, it was cool man.

• Send us three to five. One poem is not enough; five is probably pushing it. Definitely do not simply send one good poem and four bad, or even four good and one bad, because the bad ones will overwhelm us. More interestingly, though, I -- and I believe editors in general -- are attracted to poets with sustained work that teaches us how to read. It is very hard to get excited about a single poem blasted out of context. Choose poems that spring off of each other, that generate energy from being read together. Opening your submission should be like opening a can of worms. Suddenly there are poetic worms all over my desk! Worms everywhere! I cannot get rid of them. Do not send me actual worms.

• Send us your best. Why did you become a poet? Send us the poems that convince you to continue. It is painfully apparent when someone sends their transcribed notebook jottings or failed drafts. The A-game, people. It is unpleasant to give someone's submission a careful reading only to discover halfway through that the poem is obviously in an incomplete form. Nasty thoughts cloud our judgment: is this person sending her best work to the Paris Review? Who am I? It is an intensely competitive life in poetry submissions, even to a fledgling magazine like absent, and I promise your B-game is not going to cut it. We fucking had Pierre Joris in our magazine. Pierre Joris is, like, famous.

• I suppose this is a continuation of the previous bullet point. But it bears repeating. After reading three hundred poems, I come to yours. I am familiar with all the tricks of the lazy poet at this point. I know that sometimes when poets run out of steam they insert a cliché from contemporary speech. I know that sometimes people like to load up with very expensive words, or, conversely, suddenly drop register to the demotic with very little musical motive. I know that sometimes a poet tries to write a very impersonal poem and can't keep it up and so halfway through makes it very empathetic. Or vice-versa. None of these things are good speech, let alone good writing. Don't do it. If you are wondering what your B-game is, that is your B-game.

• Submit to absent. I started the magazine because I wanted to find new voices -- even when they came from familiar mouths. If I received triple the number of submissions this time around, I would be a happy man, because I love reading the work that people send -- even if I have the unpleasant task in many cases of rejecting it.

• If you work is accepted, do your best to promote the issue. If your work is rejected, do your best to promote the issue anyway. You should in general -- the inaugural issue like ours was being an exception -- be sending work to journals that you respect and that you read anyway. When you hear that the issue is out, spread the word. If I had to emphasise one point, which is well-known to both editors and those with experience in publishing, it is that rejection of a particular submission is not a comment on your work as a whole, or god forbid, your worth as a poet. The poet whose work is turned down by a magazine has a close bond with that magazine that is not hierarchical. It is only the volume of the work we receive, in many cases, that prevents the rejected submission from being an occasion for greater collaboration, for working together.

• We're poets. We have to stick together. Rock over London. Rock on Chicago.