Saturday, June 03, 2006
What if I cared?
Today Erica received a small package from an online literary magazine, containing a CD of the current issue, her complimentary copy, and a note thanking her for her submission. The problem is that we sent the poems to the journal over three years ago and had never heard a thing from them.
This kind of thing happened a lot when I was sending out machine-aided poetry to little magazines and literary journals. Some editors took months and months to respond. A surprising number never responded at all (and Erica was obsessive about including the standard SASE).
One editor wanted to publish a piece, but asked for some changes first. We made the changes (what did we care?--all we wanted was the publication credit) and sent it back, with a copy of their note. Back it came to us with the standard rejection slip. So we sent it back, with one of our clever letters asking what had happened. Finally, back came an apology and an acceptance.
Another editor accepted two pieces and warned about a 12- to 15- month delay before they would appear in his magazine. It's been three years and nothing.
Early on in the project, I wrote a few sonnets as a way of learning about the process of building up a form, necessary to conceptualizing a design for poetic text generation, which is only form. On a whim, I sent a couple to a new-formalist publication and got back a rather snippy little rejection slip informing me that they only accepted traditional forms and that I should try someplace else that published open forms. They hadn't even read the pieces (which really did scan and rhyme).
Now, I have only been interested in finding out if machine-written and machine-aided poems could find spots "out there," and enough of them did to answer the question. (It's a numbers game, really. I learned that, on average, Erica would be accepted every eighth submission. And since she has hundreds of poems, it actually was fairly easy to achieve that kind of submission rate--it was just a question of getting the process right and that's what we teach at Wharton.)
But what if I cared? What if I were a young writer trying to establish a foothold in the literary world and emotionally invested in the work and its reception? How disheartening such treatment must be! How many talented young folks just give up?
Hey editors! If you are going to start a literary magazine, don't do it Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney style--to save the orphanage or the college or the world. Do it because you think there's a need and an audience for your editorial practices. And for Pete's sake, if you solicit open submissions, show your writers some courtesy and respect--without them, all you've got are books of blank pages.
# posted by Jim @ 6:17 PM 
