THE AWFUL TRUTH

In December, there were 77 submissions or, in the end, 76, because one turned out to be the same one twice.

Reading and responding took all of January, between completing Chapter 7, designing new flyers and negotiating with the bank. The standard of the poetry inside the envelopes was horribly good. Horribly, because the likelihood of my offering to do a publication becomes more and more evanescent, even for good poets. I can only do so many.

Some poets make their first approach with little awareness of how it does (or doesn’t) work. It’s not their fault. A well-known poet has recommended they approach me (they will tell me who this person is) and they hope the endorsement will make a difference. It doesn't make a difference.

I read each submission carefully and write things in pencil on and around the poems. As time goes on, I get less polite. I know I’m dispensing liberal doses of disappointment. Who wants to be a professional disappointer? The awful truth is that what I really want them to do is buy the poetry I have already published, not give me more of the stuff to market and sell. (It is so hard selling poetry. They have no idea.)

And yet, I love the poetry I have published. I really do. My enthusiasm isn’t feigned. Who would not want more things to love?

So I read the poems. Do I love what’s in front of me? How much do I love it? Do I love it enough to add it to the already impossible challenge in front of me?

Probably not. It’s the same for everyone who reads poetry. For every poem you love and copy out, there are hundreds you can live without.

Even as I scribble insults about the poem’s punctuation, sentence structure, mixed metaphor and line breaks, I know my view is just one view. But it’s a very particular one. Out of all the new submissions, I may offer to do a publication for one. I can’t afford, in time or money, more than that. (I can’t even afford that.) It has to be one that’s not only strong, but also as different as possible from anything I’ve done before.

And still there are a whole set of people here with individual poems I like very much. I’m glad to read them. In response to some of them, I could write pages, although lack of time prevents that. I hope some of my responses may prove useful to these people and perhaps win them opportunities elsewhere (the pamphlet competitions are useful in developing sets of strong work, I think, irrespective of winning).

The breakdown this year was as follows:

Number of new firm offers made: 1.

Not everyone makes an approach hoping I’ll do a pamphlet (it helps to know people’s ambitions). Some just send a dozen poems for feedback, which is fine. Many of them are now wonderfully professional: they have read the submission guidelines and followed them, and the dos and don’ts, so there are no immediate barriers.

So far, I've published more men than women, and I would like to change that. However, I getmore poems from women than men. I don’t know what conclusion to draw about this.

I don't make publication offers on first submission. I might express an interest or a strong interest. Sometimes I tell poets they're so good they don’t need me: they should be winning a competition outright. Some of them go on to do just that. It helps if people know my antipathy for villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, ekphrastic poems, ‘after’ poems, and dedications.

I am presentation-sensitive. I prefer single spacing (it’s in the guidelines). I prefer a size of font similar to what I would put in a pamphlet (roughly a 12 in Word) so I can visualize the poem on a page. I like the name and address of the author on each sheet. I expect the font to be consistent: all 12 poems same font and same size. (Often poets present their work dramatically differently from page to page.)

Some poets have interestingly graphical pieces with elaborate spacing patterns and designs. Mainly they present these on an A4 sheet, forgetting that books or pamphlets work to A5 (some presses use a larger format; this one doesn’t).

Increasingly, I have submissions from poets who have just finished, or are in process of finishing, MLitts or PhDs, for which they have completed a set of poems. These have been praised and now they want to publish them. Oh dear. I would look at a set of poems differently were I assessing the achievement for that particular person than I would when considering them for publication. Getting things published is not the same as writing them well. Writing them well comes first – of course it does – but after that, there’s more. Have any of the poems appeared in good quality magazines? (I expect this.) Has the poet started to build a readership? (I don’t mean their tutors or fellow students.) Has the person thought carefully about pamphlet publications and how they work? Why does the person want to be published at all?

And so I go on to dispense various kinds of disappointment. I am increasingly nervous of the phenomenon I call ‘Contemp Po’ and so I flag it when I see it. Every age has its own Contemp Po features, tricks that seem innovative at the time but quickly become passé. We absorb these features unconsciously. (Every age also has poetry that is timeless: it could work in any age and for any reader.)

When we write poetry, we instinctively reach for something that makes it not prose, a register or a method that confirms for us: This is a Poem. Some people find it in formal conventions (rhyme and metre); others find it in a particular rhythmic vernacular (writing in Scots, or a local dialect). There are many ways.

The ‘line break’ is the major indicator of ‘poem’ for those writing free-ish verse, but line break alone is unlikely to suffice. Sensitivity to sound patterns is just as important. By this I mean assonance (vowel sounds echoing each other), and also the sound trail through vowels and consonants. I don’t want to make this technical, but in the simplest sense, the lines don’t always sound ‘right’, whatever ‘right’ is for that particular poem.

Sound is not everything. There are deaf poets who write beautifully. But they become attuned to something else, some other features that make the text ‘poem’ and not ‘prose’. And besides, deaf people hear through their feet, fingers and toes: rhythm patterns apply.

Here are the recurring Contemp Po features I notice most. I flagged these in a last time round but I have added a couple, as well as an example at the end of the How and The Way feature (new!):

Features of Contemp Po

• lots of ‘I see’ and ‘I watch’ and ‘I feel’ and, worst of all, ‘I think’
• disappearing subjects (verb with no ‘I’)
• lots of poems in couplets
• ‘arty’ layouts , space instead of punctuation
• poems based on extended metaphor (sometimes it works)
• over-mixed metaphor (over-wrought, crossed logics)
• a lot of cross-stanza enjambment
• numerous colons and semi-colons.
• poem a single sentence which gets lost in the middle
• poem based round clauses with no finite verbs
• sentences starting ‘And’ and ‘But’
• first few lines dead (no bite)
• title steals thunder of the best (last?) line or phrase
• disappearing articles (‘the’ and ‘a’)
• many ‘as’ sentences (see blog 26.05.2011)
• poems constructed round a set of imperatives
• anaphora structure (eg each line begins ‘because’)
• the last word of the last line is ‘love’
• the word ‘yet’ flags an epiphany (resist! resist!)
• the word ‘for’ meaning ‘because’
• lots of thens, followed by suddenly
• weird line breaks
• a rhyme at, or very near, the end
• line breaks on ‘significant’ word like ‘break’—see above
• no punctuation, and then some suddenly arrives
• the ‘leaning verb thing’ (see below)
• the ‘how’ and ‘the way’ clause repetition (see below)

The leaning verb thing:
There’s a tendency to write lines where two or more verb clauses are each appended to the same subject, often towards the high point. This is now as ubiquitous as scattered ampersands were in the sixties. For example:

 She reaches for her pen, scribbles a few lines,  
wonders why the world hasn’t colluded, hasn’t collapsed.

 The ‘how’ and ‘the way’ thing
Here’s another regular pattern. In fact, the pattern can be useful until it starts to look mannered. It may one day look as mannered as ‘up and spak an eldern knicht’ and ‘o’er the wall the sun doth sink’:

He saw and took note. How she touched each leaf
on the trailing vine. How she stopped a second
beside the stair. How the light on her hair
glimmered. And later the way she paused
outside the greenhouse. The way she held
the key lightly, like a talisman. The way
she turned it slowly in the lock